Vegas, Baby

A woman dropped her suitcase on my head.

You know America, where everybody's time-challenged and cheap. They can't check their bag because they might lose some time, and god forbid they spend extra money. Oh yeah, on Southwest bags fly FREE! But the airline is gonna lose them and you've got no time to waste so today the essence of travel is getting on the plane first, for the bin space. So people keep traveling with larger and larger roll-ons, and this nitwit extracted hers and it fell right on my head. And my melon still hurts. Do you think she apologized? OF COURSE NOT! Winners have no time to do this, they're too busy WINNING!

So I'm here for EDMBiz and the Electric Daisy Carnival.

I'll be honest with you, my attention was drawn to Amazon's phone announcement, I was following on my phone via live blogs. And I kept thinking how this is how music used to be, how we lived and died to hear what our heroes had to say. And then I read "Rolling Stone" on the plane. You know how irrelevant the magazine is? It dedicated its entire last issue to country music and it made no ripples, there was no effect. Once upon a time, "Rolling Stone" was the heartbeat of a generation, the crier in the town square, today it's a slick baby brother to "Us." In today's world, if you have no impact, you're a sideshow silo only in it for the money. As for the profiles of the country acts... You'd just have to flip back to "Rolling Stone" thirty years ago to hear the same proclamations. We're endlessly recycling. Which is why we're losing the consumer's attention. There's no new there.

And you get off the plane and you're confronted with slot machines. As my dear friend Kenny says, Las Vegas is a monument to losers, the whole place wouldn't even exist if you could win. In other words, the odds are stacked against you.

But unlike the music business, Vegas has pivoted. It tried families, that was a mistake. And now it stands on the twin pillars of conventions and entertainment. It's where you go to cut loose when no one's watching. It's where electronic music lives in America.

You get off the plane and you see a billboard for Calvin Harris at Hakkasan. And we can debate all day long whether that club is profitable, but the truth is despite all the press for Celine, Elton, Britney and Shania, the heart of Vegas is EDM. The younger generation has taken over. And once upon a time there were music billboards on Sunset Strip, but that was back when bands broke at the Roxy and the Whisky. Today it starts in Europe, and then it comes here.

As for the aforementioned Calvin Harris, he's got the biggest hit of the summer, entitled "Summer," but you don't know this. So is it just that music is a second class citizen, or do we have a generation gap so wide that the oldsters in control of the media just can't understand?

We live in a lifestyle culture, it's all about experiences.

Despite the hogwash about everybody trying to get rich, the truth is so many realize they never will be, so they're all about drinking and drugging and screwing. Having a good time. Same as it ever was. And that's what you do at the EDM show, have a good time.

Ignore Bonnaroo. And while you're at it, forget Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza too. Let's zoom in on the only thing that matters at festivals today, let's dive into the Sahara tent at Coachella. That's the epicenter, that's where it's happening in music today.

No one wanted to see the Replacements. You can't even remember the headliners. But you couldn't get into the Sahara tent. Where deejays most people don't know did their show.

So what have we learned?

We live in a me and you universe. No one knows this better than the millennials, who were brought up to be members of the group as opposed to individual winners. They were connected at birth and now they're connected with their mobile devices and they want to go out and hang with their brethren, and if the old people don't know, they don't care.

So that's why the Amazon phone is so important. Because it cements the power of mobile, and draws attention to ecosystem.

That's what EDM is, an ecosystem. A triumvirate of deejays, audience and production. It's not where you go to buy a sawdust hotdog and hear the hit, but to have the time of your life.

I want to have the time of my life, DON'T YOU?


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