I'm not used to seeing boobies in the wild. Never mind dicks.
So we went downtown to Grand Central Market to partake of what the "New York Times" claimed might be "The Best Iced Latte In America": http://nyti.ms/1phaB8g Was it? What the hell do I know, the only coffee I consume is in yogurt. But I had a mocha, and there were little chocolate bits and the cookie we purchased was divine, with a complete layer of chocolate throughout. Remember David's? This was just as good.
And after having our coffee, Felice consumed a fish taco. I stood in line for a goat tostada, but they were out of those, so I had a pork taco and a goat taco. They were only three bucks each. And huge.
And after satisfying our stomachs, we went out for a stroll.
And downtown L.A. is weird. It's the hipsters, the homeless and the Latinos. You're not sure whether to enjoy the rare SoCal urban environment, or whether to watch your wallet.
And I implored Felice to walk to the boutique ice cream place, right up from the Nickel Diner, where we had such a memorable lunch last year, devouring the scrumptious potato chip cake. Alas, the samples were disappointing, if you're going to sell high end ice cream, taste is everything, but texture is a close second, and this was grainy. I felt guilty for not purchasing a scoop, but I am an Angeleno, and we count our calories, we forsake sweets unless they truly hit the spot.
And from there, we decided to walk a few blocks to what the signs said was the Toy District, since Felice's nephew works in the industry and keeps talking about the location. But after navigating the corner...
We were confronted with naked men, on bicycles.
Now I understand gay pride. I've seen naked guys. I figured this was just another demonstration.
And then I saw boobies.
I'm a guy, we guys can never get enough boobies.
Felice kept asking me to Google the happenings and I couldn't take my eyes off the participants.
The guys were not only topless, but bottomless. You could see their wee-wees only inches away. And being a guy, I'm icked out by the visuals, but I'm always comparing and contrasting, wondering how I measure up. And I must say, for all the limp dicks, I did see some tiny units, that would make Howard Stern feel like a man, and unlike George on "Seinfeld," on this hot nearly-summer day they couldn't claim shrinkage.
And then came the women. Like I said, at first I thought it was a gay thing, men letting their freak flags fly.
And the first women weren't topless. They had halter tops.
And then I saw breasts.
Tiny perky ones. Lumpy ones. Huge ones on skinny girls. It was a cornucopia of tits.
And being the red-blooded male I am, I surf my share of porn, I've seen pictures, it's not like the sixties and seventies, the days of stag films and adult book shops. All you've got to do is Google.
But this was different. Because these were living, breathing women. Real people. Who chose to let it all hang out.
And I'm getting the sense that Felice wants to move on. But I can't really let this opportunity pass. It's like keeping a kid from candy. I wasn't gonna cry if pulled away, but I was going to be disappointed.
And as the parade wound on, there were more and more women, it turned out the men were leading. And they had their coochie-coos on their bike seats. Didn't this hurt?
Then again, on the ride home, Felice kept saying that the men's penises must have made for an uncomfortable ride. I said this was not the case, that it was no worse than usual, that our balls...sat on the saddle. But didn't women's, er, vaginas, wasn't that painful?
Felice said nope.
And they've got to negotiate traffic. The light keeps turning red. And as they round the corner we're right there to greet them. Some had body paint, but so many women had those little barbells through their nipples. I guess it's edge-cutting risk takers who ride naked downtown.
And to tell you the truth, I'm still titillated now.
And uncomfortable talking about it with Felice.
But she keeps bringing it up.
And it reminds me of that old song, "Too Many Fish In The Sea" - "short ones, tall ones, big ones, small ones." Mostly unshaved. Swaying in the wind.
http://worldnakedbikeride-la.org
Pork and goat tacos: http://bit.ly/1loioQ1
A pic: http://bit.ly/TXo2wZ
Another pic: http://bit.ly/1qg3tJs
(As for the women...can you take a pic of naked girls while you're standing with your girlfriend? I don't think so. But zoom in and you'll see some boobies. And butts.)
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Saturday 14 June 2014
Explaining Iraq
http://www.vox.com/2014/6/13/5803712/11-things-iraq-crisis-isis
We live in a star culture. But the "New York Times" did not get the memo, they let some of their biggest stars go, from Frank Rich to David Pogue to Nate Silver.
Unfortunately, all three are languishing without the imprimatur and the distribution of the "Times," but if you read the memo, literally, the "Times" is suffering too.
Another exile is Ezra Klein, who was with the "Washington Post." Klein has a new perspective on the news. That it's being covered like a sport, with daily winners and losers, and if you're not paying attention, you're left out. Klein says he's into stories that live on the web, that have life after their initial posting, kind of like the page on the secret menu at In-N-Out, which got little traction at first, but over the years has gotten tons: http://bit.ly/1eh0nLV. (Hey, there's a music analogy there! Your record may be number one for a week, but have the shelf life of milk, listen to Beyonce's super-duper video album recently?) So Klein's new site has explanatory stories, for those who don't follow the news with a passion, like the above one on Iraq. I recommend scanning at least the headlines, because you'll finally understand what's happening.
As for Nate Silver, he was the only one who analyzed the Eric Cantor defeat by data as opposed to emotion. He called it an "earthquake" and now other commentators have employed that term. Read what he had to say here:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/eric-cantors-loss-was-like-an-earthquake/
Also on his site, Silver has a bracket wherein they're going to determine the best burrito in America, once again employing data. Analyzing to what degree Yelp is accurate.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/burrito/#brackets-view
I believe Ezra Klein's site Vox and Silver's Fivethirtyeight have a long way to go in order to rise above. My passion for their cutting edge ideas has had me checking their sites for weeks, but only now am I even being seduced.
It's very hard to break into people's consciousness today. Even if you were a star somewhere else.
Which is why a star should debate whether they really want to leave the team. And the team should pay dearly for the star. In other words, the "New York Times" is not bigger than its writers, that's last century thinking, today stars rule, in business, journalism and entertainment.
But both Klein and Silver are young. They'll outlast the baby boomers running the old media. Will they inherit the earth?
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We live in a star culture. But the "New York Times" did not get the memo, they let some of their biggest stars go, from Frank Rich to David Pogue to Nate Silver.
Unfortunately, all three are languishing without the imprimatur and the distribution of the "Times," but if you read the memo, literally, the "Times" is suffering too.
Another exile is Ezra Klein, who was with the "Washington Post." Klein has a new perspective on the news. That it's being covered like a sport, with daily winners and losers, and if you're not paying attention, you're left out. Klein says he's into stories that live on the web, that have life after their initial posting, kind of like the page on the secret menu at In-N-Out, which got little traction at first, but over the years has gotten tons: http://bit.ly/1eh0nLV. (Hey, there's a music analogy there! Your record may be number one for a week, but have the shelf life of milk, listen to Beyonce's super-duper video album recently?) So Klein's new site has explanatory stories, for those who don't follow the news with a passion, like the above one on Iraq. I recommend scanning at least the headlines, because you'll finally understand what's happening.
As for Nate Silver, he was the only one who analyzed the Eric Cantor defeat by data as opposed to emotion. He called it an "earthquake" and now other commentators have employed that term. Read what he had to say here:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/eric-cantors-loss-was-like-an-earthquake/
Also on his site, Silver has a bracket wherein they're going to determine the best burrito in America, once again employing data. Analyzing to what degree Yelp is accurate.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/burrito/#brackets-view
I believe Ezra Klein's site Vox and Silver's Fivethirtyeight have a long way to go in order to rise above. My passion for their cutting edge ideas has had me checking their sites for weeks, but only now am I even being seduced.
It's very hard to break into people's consciousness today. Even if you were a star somewhere else.
Which is why a star should debate whether they really want to leave the team. And the team should pay dearly for the star. In other words, the "New York Times" is not bigger than its writers, that's last century thinking, today stars rule, in business, journalism and entertainment.
But both Klein and Silver are young. They'll outlast the baby boomers running the old media. Will they inherit the earth?
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Friday 13 June 2014
Delusional
Why is everybody so damn delusional?
I was brought up a shithead. That's what my parents considered me to be. They weren't coddling me, telling me how great I was, that I was going to be a world-beater, rather they kept telling me the world was a scary place and it was hard to be successful and if I put my nose to the grindstone I might be lucky to find a place in this society of ours, I wouldn't end up on the street.
But throughout history, but much worse in the Internet era, is the plethora of "winners" who can't see the forest for the trees, who believe the only impediment between them and success is your approval and your helping hand.
Let me make this clear.
Not a week goes by where I don't receive multiple e-mails from people who are going to save the music business. Mostly, people who are going to redo music distribution!
I know these people have computers, because they're e-mailing me, but do they not follow the game, do they not read the news, employ these services themselves?
You're going to eradicate piracy!
That was the discussion ten years ago, piracy in the music business is a nonstarter, irrelevant, when everything can be streamed for free, why would you steal? But these people are gonna solve that problem.
Then they don't realize they need money and rights, in that order. They believe if they just show up at Universal Music, Lucian Grainge will welcome them inside and grant the rights for nothing, bowled over by how good their idea is. Kinda like if you went into McDonald's and rapped a Ronald McDonald theme they'd load you up with McNuggets. What planet do these people live on?
Now I'm not saying everybody's like this.
Well, there's the variation... You're successful, and that's not fair. You have a hit record, and I don't, as a result I've got to talk crap about you until the end of time, or until my record makes it to number one, whichever comes first. But then you listen to the work of these people and your head spins around like Regan's. Did they not play it for anybody else? Did no one else tell them that they weren't good enough? Usually, they've got crappy voices. But it's the material that blows your mind. Almost anybody can write a song, but that does not make it good.
How did this happen? Is it the end result of millennialism? With baby boomer parents so mad that they weren't encouraged by their 'rents that they're overcompensating for their progeny?
I've got a degree in music business, where's my job?
Ever notice that people are lining up to work in the entertainment industry, and your best way in is connections, and that most people don't survive? Yup, even if you get a job you're going to get fired. But these people don't only believe they're entitled to a job, but that given the chance they'll find the next Beatles, or make their personal favorite number one.
And the end result is most of these people are ignored.
I don't answer these people ever. But just yesterday, someone used a connection to get to me. You know, they know someone I know and will I look at their business proposal.
Which was INSANE!
First and foremost, if you believe a musician can solve business issues, you believe Todd Rundgren was responsible for music video and Peter Gabriel revolutionized digital distribution. Yup, that's the truth. If you're a musician, I only pay attention to your music. Because most people can do one thing well, at best. But these wunderkinds believe the world is their oyster, that every endeavor they pursue will be embraced by the lifers in the field!
But Todd did not create MTV. And Gabriel has been on the fringes of music distribution. And they both make unbelievable music, but neither has done much since they broadened their endeavors.
But now I'm attacking the truly talented. Maybe because I just want more of what they do best, good music.
But the truth is that too is up for grabs. If the masses like it, it can't be good.
Unfortunately, the masses don't read my newsletter. The masses who viewed Kiesza's video 30 million times. I know, it sucks. People are just into self-torture. Those who put it to number one in the U.K. are zombies.
And then there are the know-it-alls who excoriate me for being late to the party, even though the track has had little traction in the U.S.
But the point is today everybody has a voice. And as a result, those who've won retreat from interaction, they don't want to be dragged down into the hole of the delusional, who just want to grab your tail and whip you around and around, wearing you out in the process.
Furthermore, feedback is so instant and the haters so vocal that today you need a new characteristic to make it, a tough skin, because if you rise above, you're going to be inundated with feedback from nobodies.
That's right, nobodies.
Used to be nobodies owned their lot. Realized they were either dead-enders or their choices left them in their own locale, as consumers as opposed to creators. But now that everybody's got the tools and the connection, they're bombarding the populace ad infinitum with their delusional, wannabe efforts and we're now living in a world where it's impossible to get people's attention, for all the idiots who demand it.
And I'm not complaining. Well, maybe I am. What I'm saying is I can't feed back, can't have intellectual discussion, because if I respond just once, I'm going to be the recipient of e-mail for YEARS!
And I know so many of you are reasonable. But I want to give you the perspective from where I sit. To know that you are not alone. That we live in an incomprehensible world where the dumb reign and the smart check out.
Kind of like the Spotify debate. Spotify pays 69%+ of revenues to rights holders, I've written it dozens of times, it's all over the Web, but major musicians keep e-mailing me that Spotify is keeping all the money. Just like the hoi polloi think you need a connection to stream to your handset, not aware that there's sync.
And this process is repeated in politics. Where disinformation rules. Where people believe death panels are gonna kill grandma and everybody's new health care policy is worse.
And I'm not saying Obamacare is perfect but I am saying the right wing is responsible for the inaccuracies. Yup, there you have it, e-mail away, you who believe vitriol trumps facts.
So I just don't understand the world we live in.
But I do understand why the rich and powerful live in gated communities, fly private and want nothing to do with the unwashed masses. BECAUSE THEY JUST CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S GOING ON!
P.S. If you tell the delusional the truth, that their idea ain't gonna make it, it's just not good enough, suddenly it's your fault, you're cut to shreds as this inane e-mailer gets on his high horse and recites his thin c.v. and yells that you just don't get it, how wrong can you be, that they'll come back to laugh on your grave. What's the cliche, no good deed goes unpunished? Or, the truth is, they're just mad you're not helping them out, as if it's your duty to push them around the game board of life.
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I was brought up a shithead. That's what my parents considered me to be. They weren't coddling me, telling me how great I was, that I was going to be a world-beater, rather they kept telling me the world was a scary place and it was hard to be successful and if I put my nose to the grindstone I might be lucky to find a place in this society of ours, I wouldn't end up on the street.
But throughout history, but much worse in the Internet era, is the plethora of "winners" who can't see the forest for the trees, who believe the only impediment between them and success is your approval and your helping hand.
Let me make this clear.
Not a week goes by where I don't receive multiple e-mails from people who are going to save the music business. Mostly, people who are going to redo music distribution!
I know these people have computers, because they're e-mailing me, but do they not follow the game, do they not read the news, employ these services themselves?
You're going to eradicate piracy!
That was the discussion ten years ago, piracy in the music business is a nonstarter, irrelevant, when everything can be streamed for free, why would you steal? But these people are gonna solve that problem.
Then they don't realize they need money and rights, in that order. They believe if they just show up at Universal Music, Lucian Grainge will welcome them inside and grant the rights for nothing, bowled over by how good their idea is. Kinda like if you went into McDonald's and rapped a Ronald McDonald theme they'd load you up with McNuggets. What planet do these people live on?
Now I'm not saying everybody's like this.
Well, there's the variation... You're successful, and that's not fair. You have a hit record, and I don't, as a result I've got to talk crap about you until the end of time, or until my record makes it to number one, whichever comes first. But then you listen to the work of these people and your head spins around like Regan's. Did they not play it for anybody else? Did no one else tell them that they weren't good enough? Usually, they've got crappy voices. But it's the material that blows your mind. Almost anybody can write a song, but that does not make it good.
How did this happen? Is it the end result of millennialism? With baby boomer parents so mad that they weren't encouraged by their 'rents that they're overcompensating for their progeny?
I've got a degree in music business, where's my job?
Ever notice that people are lining up to work in the entertainment industry, and your best way in is connections, and that most people don't survive? Yup, even if you get a job you're going to get fired. But these people don't only believe they're entitled to a job, but that given the chance they'll find the next Beatles, or make their personal favorite number one.
And the end result is most of these people are ignored.
I don't answer these people ever. But just yesterday, someone used a connection to get to me. You know, they know someone I know and will I look at their business proposal.
Which was INSANE!
First and foremost, if you believe a musician can solve business issues, you believe Todd Rundgren was responsible for music video and Peter Gabriel revolutionized digital distribution. Yup, that's the truth. If you're a musician, I only pay attention to your music. Because most people can do one thing well, at best. But these wunderkinds believe the world is their oyster, that every endeavor they pursue will be embraced by the lifers in the field!
But Todd did not create MTV. And Gabriel has been on the fringes of music distribution. And they both make unbelievable music, but neither has done much since they broadened their endeavors.
But now I'm attacking the truly talented. Maybe because I just want more of what they do best, good music.
But the truth is that too is up for grabs. If the masses like it, it can't be good.
Unfortunately, the masses don't read my newsletter. The masses who viewed Kiesza's video 30 million times. I know, it sucks. People are just into self-torture. Those who put it to number one in the U.K. are zombies.
And then there are the know-it-alls who excoriate me for being late to the party, even though the track has had little traction in the U.S.
But the point is today everybody has a voice. And as a result, those who've won retreat from interaction, they don't want to be dragged down into the hole of the delusional, who just want to grab your tail and whip you around and around, wearing you out in the process.
Furthermore, feedback is so instant and the haters so vocal that today you need a new characteristic to make it, a tough skin, because if you rise above, you're going to be inundated with feedback from nobodies.
That's right, nobodies.
Used to be nobodies owned their lot. Realized they were either dead-enders or their choices left them in their own locale, as consumers as opposed to creators. But now that everybody's got the tools and the connection, they're bombarding the populace ad infinitum with their delusional, wannabe efforts and we're now living in a world where it's impossible to get people's attention, for all the idiots who demand it.
And I'm not complaining. Well, maybe I am. What I'm saying is I can't feed back, can't have intellectual discussion, because if I respond just once, I'm going to be the recipient of e-mail for YEARS!
And I know so many of you are reasonable. But I want to give you the perspective from where I sit. To know that you are not alone. That we live in an incomprehensible world where the dumb reign and the smart check out.
Kind of like the Spotify debate. Spotify pays 69%+ of revenues to rights holders, I've written it dozens of times, it's all over the Web, but major musicians keep e-mailing me that Spotify is keeping all the money. Just like the hoi polloi think you need a connection to stream to your handset, not aware that there's sync.
And this process is repeated in politics. Where disinformation rules. Where people believe death panels are gonna kill grandma and everybody's new health care policy is worse.
And I'm not saying Obamacare is perfect but I am saying the right wing is responsible for the inaccuracies. Yup, there you have it, e-mail away, you who believe vitriol trumps facts.
So I just don't understand the world we live in.
But I do understand why the rich and powerful live in gated communities, fly private and want nothing to do with the unwashed masses. BECAUSE THEY JUST CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S GOING ON!
P.S. If you tell the delusional the truth, that their idea ain't gonna make it, it's just not good enough, suddenly it's your fault, you're cut to shreds as this inane e-mailer gets on his high horse and recites his thin c.v. and yells that you just don't get it, how wrong can you be, that they'll come back to laugh on your grave. What's the cliche, no good deed goes unpunished? Or, the truth is, they're just mad you're not helping them out, as if it's your duty to push them around the game board of life.
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Hideaway
YouTube: http://bit.ly/1mrLY81
Spotify: http://spoti.fi/1qIC4gM
This is a hit!
Last night I listened to the Spotify Top 50, to be more specific, "Today's Top Hits," hand-curated for your listening pleasure.
Sunday I listened to "Top Tracks in the United States" and almost barfed. So much was imitative of everything else, like all the producers were living in an echo chamber.
But "Today's Top Hits" had this, Kiesza's "Hideaway."
Now the very first cut I heard on "Today's Top Hits" was by Imagine Dragons, entitled "Battle Cry," and I was astounded by how good it was. What came after...
You've got to understand. Baby boomers are history. Done. Gone. Kaput. As is classic rock. Sure, the acts live on, on the road, but the younger generation driving the new music business does not employ them as their frame of reference.
And all the deep niche people e-mailing me abhor the hits.
But if you're under twenty, that's the focus.
In other words, in an incomprehensible, cacophonous world, we all gravitate to reference points, that which rises to the top, that which everybody else listens to. Which is why so many of the tracks sound the same. Because it's the same producers. And what today's youngsters treasure most is fame. Money comes thereafter. And you don't become famous making music that cannot get on the radio, that most people don't want to listen to.
So we live in a pop world. And I wish people would try to expand the format, but outlets are suspicious of something new and...
We've got too many drum machines, too many beats oldsters would find less than infectious, and then you find something like Kiesza's "Hideaway."
It was the tenth song on the playlist, and it exploded into my ears, I was stopped in my tracks, WHAT IS THIS?
It's the vocal. And it turns out this is truly Kiesza, all her tracks feature this sound, which is a good thing.
And my initial point is you can hear a hit. They're rare. But they're what we're looking for. We want to uncover them. We want to listen to them. Over and over and over again.
And the weakest part of this track is the bass beats.
But Kiesza herself is an absolute KILLER!
Doing some research, I find I'm behind the curve. "Hideaway" went number one in the U.K. The video has nearly thirty million views. The only one out of the loop is me. And U.S. radio. But that won't be for long. Because "Hideaway" can't be denied, because of Kiesza herself.
Go down the rabbit hole and you discover the video was done in one take. And I discovered "Hideaway" through my ears, but I clicked through. And I was BLOWN AWAY! The clip had the offhandedness of the early Madonna work. Sure, it was choreographed, but Kiesza seemed to be having so much fun, seemed to need it so much, that I was sold.
Because this is the way it is today. Everybody's a star. At least in their own mind. And if they've got the goods, they employ all media to get their message across. 'N Sync's moves were too studied, as if a mistake would get them fired, whereas the dancing in this clip is just imperfect enough to evidence LIFE!
So I clicked through to the Haddaway cover, and found out Kiesza maintained the same magic.
And then I went to the new Soundcloud clip, and although I wasn't sure it was a hit, I did get it.
So what I'm saying here is while oldsters lament the loss of albums, while oldsters are bitching they can't get paid, youngsters don't care about any of that, they got the memo, they know it's all about the track, that you've got to hook people with that and then dribble out another single, that the album, if it comes at all, is last, just a financial cleanup effort. Youngsters are all about surfing the now.
And, once again, the now is a pop world. Even country is pop. It's where the ears are. And if you don't care about attention, if you don't care about fame, if you don't care about money, stay in your niche. But the action is in pop.
Kiesza "What Is Love": http://bit.ly/1mMgRA8
Kiesza "Giant In My Heart": http://bit.ly/1psZIAp
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Spotify: http://spoti.fi/1qIC4gM
This is a hit!
Last night I listened to the Spotify Top 50, to be more specific, "Today's Top Hits," hand-curated for your listening pleasure.
Sunday I listened to "Top Tracks in the United States" and almost barfed. So much was imitative of everything else, like all the producers were living in an echo chamber.
But "Today's Top Hits" had this, Kiesza's "Hideaway."
Now the very first cut I heard on "Today's Top Hits" was by Imagine Dragons, entitled "Battle Cry," and I was astounded by how good it was. What came after...
You've got to understand. Baby boomers are history. Done. Gone. Kaput. As is classic rock. Sure, the acts live on, on the road, but the younger generation driving the new music business does not employ them as their frame of reference.
And all the deep niche people e-mailing me abhor the hits.
But if you're under twenty, that's the focus.
In other words, in an incomprehensible, cacophonous world, we all gravitate to reference points, that which rises to the top, that which everybody else listens to. Which is why so many of the tracks sound the same. Because it's the same producers. And what today's youngsters treasure most is fame. Money comes thereafter. And you don't become famous making music that cannot get on the radio, that most people don't want to listen to.
So we live in a pop world. And I wish people would try to expand the format, but outlets are suspicious of something new and...
We've got too many drum machines, too many beats oldsters would find less than infectious, and then you find something like Kiesza's "Hideaway."
It was the tenth song on the playlist, and it exploded into my ears, I was stopped in my tracks, WHAT IS THIS?
It's the vocal. And it turns out this is truly Kiesza, all her tracks feature this sound, which is a good thing.
And my initial point is you can hear a hit. They're rare. But they're what we're looking for. We want to uncover them. We want to listen to them. Over and over and over again.
And the weakest part of this track is the bass beats.
But Kiesza herself is an absolute KILLER!
Doing some research, I find I'm behind the curve. "Hideaway" went number one in the U.K. The video has nearly thirty million views. The only one out of the loop is me. And U.S. radio. But that won't be for long. Because "Hideaway" can't be denied, because of Kiesza herself.
Go down the rabbit hole and you discover the video was done in one take. And I discovered "Hideaway" through my ears, but I clicked through. And I was BLOWN AWAY! The clip had the offhandedness of the early Madonna work. Sure, it was choreographed, but Kiesza seemed to be having so much fun, seemed to need it so much, that I was sold.
Because this is the way it is today. Everybody's a star. At least in their own mind. And if they've got the goods, they employ all media to get their message across. 'N Sync's moves were too studied, as if a mistake would get them fired, whereas the dancing in this clip is just imperfect enough to evidence LIFE!
So I clicked through to the Haddaway cover, and found out Kiesza maintained the same magic.
And then I went to the new Soundcloud clip, and although I wasn't sure it was a hit, I did get it.
So what I'm saying here is while oldsters lament the loss of albums, while oldsters are bitching they can't get paid, youngsters don't care about any of that, they got the memo, they know it's all about the track, that you've got to hook people with that and then dribble out another single, that the album, if it comes at all, is last, just a financial cleanup effort. Youngsters are all about surfing the now.
And, once again, the now is a pop world. Even country is pop. It's where the ears are. And if you don't care about attention, if you don't care about fame, if you don't care about money, stay in your niche. But the action is in pop.
Kiesza "What Is Love": http://bit.ly/1mMgRA8
Kiesza "Giant In My Heart": http://bit.ly/1psZIAp
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Rhinofy-Blondie Primer
X OFFENDER
It sounds like a modern day girl group recording...because it was produced by Richard Gottehrer, whose first number one was "My Boyfriend's Back," who had his hand in so many sixties hits with thin production that sound just like...this.
And, unless you lived in NYC, you never heard this, at least not until after "Parallel Lines."
Catchy, minor work, not a bad start.
RIP HER TO SHREDS
This got a bit more airplay elsewhere, but not much. But this is more original than "X Offender," and you fall in love with the attitude, it still puts a smile on your face today.
DENIS
The first, eponymous album, was released on Private Stock, the second came out on Chrysalis, which was spreading its wings from English art rock to...Blondie and eventually Pat Benatar and so many more. Chrysalis was built on the back of Jethro Tull, but got a second wind started by...Blondie. But this remake of the Randy & the Rainbows hit got some traction, airplay as far away as Los Angeles, but it was seen mostly as a curio, no one believed Blondie had any substance, never mind being on a trajectory to worldwide superstardom, and then...
HEART OF GLASS
Two words...MIKE CHAPMAN!
It was the same band, but a completely different sound.
The Commander was already a legend in the UK, but most of his success there didn't translate to the United States, and then came...this.
Chapman cowrote and produced with Nicky Chinn, and we'd read over here that Suzi Quatro and Smokie and Mud were huge across the pond, but you never heard them here, but you heard THIS!
Chapman parlayed his success into his own label, Dreamland, put out a few stiff records and then disappeared FOREVER!
That's right, 100% done. In addition to Blondie, he did Exile's "Kiss You All Over" and Nick Gilder's "Hot Child In The City," and I must admit we did hear the Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz" before the American tsunami truly began, but no one took Sweet seriously, but in 1979, EVERYONE took Blondie seriously, starting with this disco hit that disco-haters couldn't help but love.
Come on, it's great.
HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE
You bought the album, dropped the needle, and the record took off like a shot!
It's quintessential New York, despite being written by west coast artist Jack Lee for his band the Nerves.
It's a bundle of nervous energy from the east coast where everybody's got something to say and girls are aggressive and have attitude. Listening made you want to move to the gritty streets of New York.
This is an unexpected album opening treat akin to Alice Cooper's "Under My Wheels" from "Killer." In both cases, the albums got no airplay, you didn't hear them unless you bought them, and then when the sound came out of the speakers you were stopped in your tracks!
From the lyrics to the sound to the delivery, "Hanging On The Telephone" is a triumph.
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
A one-two punch, "One Way Or Another" followed "Hanging On The Telephone" and it's got a great riff, but it's Debbie Harry's sneer that puts it over the top.
FADE AWAY AND RADIATE
My favorite cut on "Parallel Lines," made genius by the presence of one Robert Fripp, who has just reunited a version of his King Crimson band but has faded away and is not radiating, but those who were around still know...Robert had the chops, but even more interesting was the way he tested limits.
Listen intently for his work here, it's so subtle, yet so striking, interstellar communication.
I love this.
ATOMIC
The hit from the follow-up to "Parallel Lines" known as "Eat To The Beat." There was a ton of press, that a video was made for every track. And "Eat To The Beat" was good, but not as good as "Parallel Lines," however it is fully listenable.
DREAMING
Another "Eat To The Beat" single, which I actually preferred to "Atomic," even though it wasn't as successful. It's not only the sound, but the lyric, which depicts a whole vignette, the song was penetrable, as opposed to so many of today's hits.
UNION CITY BLUE
Anthemic.
Written during Debbie Harry's ill-fated venture into acting in the flick "Union City."
THE HARDEST PART
My favorite track on "Eat To The Beat."
"In a bulletproof vest, shatterproof glass, overdrive, we're gonna pass"
This is pure magic, from the sounds to the changes to the lyrics to the delivery. It was released as a single, but did not blow up. Still, it's the one I played in my car, the one I still love to hear today.
THE TIDE IS HIGH
And just when it looked like Blondie had peaked, suddenly they were UBIQUITOUS with this white reggae cover of the old Paragons track.
It sounds kinda phony, kinda like Zeppelin's "D'yer Mak'er," but at this point most Americans had still never heard of Bob Marley, had not been to Jamaica, and this was a great entry point.
I haven't listened all the way through in decades, I'm not sure I ever did back then!
RAPTURE
The gigantic, subtle hit that made rap safe for the suburbs.
And everybody gives Blondie credit for respecting the genre and blowing it up.
One of the most important cuts in rock and roll.
This track alone is probably why the band is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
THE HUNTER
The one I didn't buy. The album that killed Blondie. Seemingly everybody got the word it was substandard, they didn't buy it, it was available for years in cut-out bins, and when it was done, so was the band.
CALL ME
Going back to 1980, at the band's peak, Giorgio Moroder reached out and Debbie Harry cowrote and sang on this monster hit, the theme song of "American Gigolo."
It sounds like movie music, it sounds like disco, but it sounds SO GOOD!
It's the way Debbie sings at the top of her lungs and range...CALL ME!
RUSH RUSH
And this Moroder/Harry composition's performance was credited to Ms. Harry. Airplay was limited, I had to buy the 12" just to hear it.
This is so infectious. It was featured in "Scarface," but most people don't know it.
You should.
So there you have it, Blondie's peaks. And high they were. They were one of the biggest bands in the universe at the turn of the decade, from the seventies to the eighties.
Debbie Harry tried to fly solo. The band eventually reunited. But it was too late to catch fire once again, they're now an oldies act. But being hip as well as mainstream, and not kitschy, they haven't gotten their one big victory lap a la Journey.
I guess that's the problem with staying alive.
If Debbie Harry had O.D.'ed, Blondie would be legends.
Harry broke ground as a female front person. She doesn't get enough credit because she was so good-looking, as if that's a crime. Furthermore, she was over thirty when the band broke through. She was a trailblazer.
And Chris Stein was the musical mastermind, and Clem Burke pounded the skins and every member was indispensable, because Blondie was a BAND!
Spotify link: http://spoti.fi/1kNCdii
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It sounds like a modern day girl group recording...because it was produced by Richard Gottehrer, whose first number one was "My Boyfriend's Back," who had his hand in so many sixties hits with thin production that sound just like...this.
And, unless you lived in NYC, you never heard this, at least not until after "Parallel Lines."
Catchy, minor work, not a bad start.
RIP HER TO SHREDS
This got a bit more airplay elsewhere, but not much. But this is more original than "X Offender," and you fall in love with the attitude, it still puts a smile on your face today.
DENIS
The first, eponymous album, was released on Private Stock, the second came out on Chrysalis, which was spreading its wings from English art rock to...Blondie and eventually Pat Benatar and so many more. Chrysalis was built on the back of Jethro Tull, but got a second wind started by...Blondie. But this remake of the Randy & the Rainbows hit got some traction, airplay as far away as Los Angeles, but it was seen mostly as a curio, no one believed Blondie had any substance, never mind being on a trajectory to worldwide superstardom, and then...
HEART OF GLASS
Two words...MIKE CHAPMAN!
It was the same band, but a completely different sound.
The Commander was already a legend in the UK, but most of his success there didn't translate to the United States, and then came...this.
Chapman cowrote and produced with Nicky Chinn, and we'd read over here that Suzi Quatro and Smokie and Mud were huge across the pond, but you never heard them here, but you heard THIS!
Chapman parlayed his success into his own label, Dreamland, put out a few stiff records and then disappeared FOREVER!
That's right, 100% done. In addition to Blondie, he did Exile's "Kiss You All Over" and Nick Gilder's "Hot Child In The City," and I must admit we did hear the Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz" before the American tsunami truly began, but no one took Sweet seriously, but in 1979, EVERYONE took Blondie seriously, starting with this disco hit that disco-haters couldn't help but love.
Come on, it's great.
HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE
You bought the album, dropped the needle, and the record took off like a shot!
It's quintessential New York, despite being written by west coast artist Jack Lee for his band the Nerves.
It's a bundle of nervous energy from the east coast where everybody's got something to say and girls are aggressive and have attitude. Listening made you want to move to the gritty streets of New York.
This is an unexpected album opening treat akin to Alice Cooper's "Under My Wheels" from "Killer." In both cases, the albums got no airplay, you didn't hear them unless you bought them, and then when the sound came out of the speakers you were stopped in your tracks!
From the lyrics to the sound to the delivery, "Hanging On The Telephone" is a triumph.
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
A one-two punch, "One Way Or Another" followed "Hanging On The Telephone" and it's got a great riff, but it's Debbie Harry's sneer that puts it over the top.
FADE AWAY AND RADIATE
My favorite cut on "Parallel Lines," made genius by the presence of one Robert Fripp, who has just reunited a version of his King Crimson band but has faded away and is not radiating, but those who were around still know...Robert had the chops, but even more interesting was the way he tested limits.
Listen intently for his work here, it's so subtle, yet so striking, interstellar communication.
I love this.
ATOMIC
The hit from the follow-up to "Parallel Lines" known as "Eat To The Beat." There was a ton of press, that a video was made for every track. And "Eat To The Beat" was good, but not as good as "Parallel Lines," however it is fully listenable.
DREAMING
Another "Eat To The Beat" single, which I actually preferred to "Atomic," even though it wasn't as successful. It's not only the sound, but the lyric, which depicts a whole vignette, the song was penetrable, as opposed to so many of today's hits.
UNION CITY BLUE
Anthemic.
Written during Debbie Harry's ill-fated venture into acting in the flick "Union City."
THE HARDEST PART
My favorite track on "Eat To The Beat."
"In a bulletproof vest, shatterproof glass, overdrive, we're gonna pass"
This is pure magic, from the sounds to the changes to the lyrics to the delivery. It was released as a single, but did not blow up. Still, it's the one I played in my car, the one I still love to hear today.
THE TIDE IS HIGH
And just when it looked like Blondie had peaked, suddenly they were UBIQUITOUS with this white reggae cover of the old Paragons track.
It sounds kinda phony, kinda like Zeppelin's "D'yer Mak'er," but at this point most Americans had still never heard of Bob Marley, had not been to Jamaica, and this was a great entry point.
I haven't listened all the way through in decades, I'm not sure I ever did back then!
RAPTURE
The gigantic, subtle hit that made rap safe for the suburbs.
And everybody gives Blondie credit for respecting the genre and blowing it up.
One of the most important cuts in rock and roll.
This track alone is probably why the band is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
THE HUNTER
The one I didn't buy. The album that killed Blondie. Seemingly everybody got the word it was substandard, they didn't buy it, it was available for years in cut-out bins, and when it was done, so was the band.
CALL ME
Going back to 1980, at the band's peak, Giorgio Moroder reached out and Debbie Harry cowrote and sang on this monster hit, the theme song of "American Gigolo."
It sounds like movie music, it sounds like disco, but it sounds SO GOOD!
It's the way Debbie sings at the top of her lungs and range...CALL ME!
RUSH RUSH
And this Moroder/Harry composition's performance was credited to Ms. Harry. Airplay was limited, I had to buy the 12" just to hear it.
This is so infectious. It was featured in "Scarface," but most people don't know it.
You should.
So there you have it, Blondie's peaks. And high they were. They were one of the biggest bands in the universe at the turn of the decade, from the seventies to the eighties.
Debbie Harry tried to fly solo. The band eventually reunited. But it was too late to catch fire once again, they're now an oldies act. But being hip as well as mainstream, and not kitschy, they haven't gotten their one big victory lap a la Journey.
I guess that's the problem with staying alive.
If Debbie Harry had O.D.'ed, Blondie would be legends.
Harry broke ground as a female front person. She doesn't get enough credit because she was so good-looking, as if that's a crime. Furthermore, she was over thirty when the band broke through. She was a trailblazer.
And Chris Stein was the musical mastermind, and Clem Burke pounded the skins and every member was indispensable, because Blondie was a BAND!
Spotify link: http://spoti.fi/1kNCdii
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Thursday 12 June 2014
Readability
How come no one can write English?
Who do we blame, the schools, wherein if they have anybody write at all, they have them do it in a way that eliminates all creativity?
We live in a world of the written word. But too many people can't write in a comprehensible way. Let me restate that, too many people can't write in a way that people want to read it! Especially business people.
I don't believe in business plans, they're a way for MBAs to feel good about themselves, a circle jerk that leaves out the hard work of true creation, having an idea and going balls to the wall. If everybody's on your team from the get-go, your idea isn't revolutionary enough. But if you can't explain your idea, no one will ever invest.
So the first criterion of writing is...READABILITY!
I'm not talking about spelling and punctuation, rather I'm referring to words that string together in a way that cuts like butter.
Schools impose structure, business people are too busy trying to impress, and the truth is most words go unread, because they're just not interesting enough.
And a lot of the highfalutin novels are just as bad. That's what I hated about "The Flame Throwers," you could tell it was rewritten a million times, to add nuggets, this is the bane of the graduate writing programs. He who says rewriting is the essence of writing should give up. If the first draft ain't really good, stop, you can't fix a track in the mix, either it's a hit or it's not. Which is why Stephen King triumphs and many people don't read the vaunted best books of the year. First and foremost, Stephen King is READABLE! Whereas so much that is hyped by the literary establishment is not. A metaphor is nice, but instead of giving endless description, give us some plot.
So let's start with e-mail and business presentations...
WRITE LIKE YOU SPEAK!
If it's not flowing real fast, start over. If it's in your head and you can't get it out, take an enema and just let it flow. Writing is not hard, it's like every other pursuit, you've just got to start, hit go and you'll learn along the way.
But you've been writing all your life, so you've got a head start.
Want to impress someone? Don't overthink it, just make it straightforward.
I just read a business proposal so incomprehensible I'm not sure what it's about.
Just like I read screenplays with tons of stage direction but crappy dialogue. A good film is all about the dialogue, ask Woody Allen!
And every rule of writing can be thrown out the window if it's interesting. And most teachers are not successful writers, so take everything they say with a grain of salt. Or, to put it another way, school is all about eviscerating your creativity, making you conform.
So, most of what's online is unreadable.
My dear friend Jason Hirschhorn puts out a daily newsletter of links entitled MediaRedefined. I suggest you sign up, just go here: http://link.mediaredefined.com/join/353/media-redefweb But the truth is so many of the articles Jason links to have great headlines, often evidencing brilliant insight, but when I click through and start to read my eyes cloud over, because the people just can't write. Which is why I gravitate to the links of the name publications, because they know first and foremost it's about writing and readability. Ideas are a dime a dozen, getting them across is the hard part.
"The New Yorker" is pompous, but it has good writing. Not the only good writing, but subscribe and become inured.
And Malcolm Gladwell is the king of business writers. Not because his ideas are better, although they sometimes are, but because he writes so coherently, he demonstrates through examples, you want to turn the page, you want to know what he has to say next.
What makes you think if you never write that some business plan you execute is gonna be any good?
Ditto on e-mail. You might have something important to say, but if I can't understand it, if it's too complicated and boring to read, I'm not gonna.
And forget the saw that it must be short and compact. We're all looking for long and great. We rarely find it, but when we do, we luxuriate in it.
So, once again, start by writing like you speak. And, if it's important, use spellcheck, it's built-in.
You can't watch all the YouTube videos and you can't read all the online posts.
Want yours to stick out? MAKE IT READABLE!
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Who do we blame, the schools, wherein if they have anybody write at all, they have them do it in a way that eliminates all creativity?
We live in a world of the written word. But too many people can't write in a comprehensible way. Let me restate that, too many people can't write in a way that people want to read it! Especially business people.
I don't believe in business plans, they're a way for MBAs to feel good about themselves, a circle jerk that leaves out the hard work of true creation, having an idea and going balls to the wall. If everybody's on your team from the get-go, your idea isn't revolutionary enough. But if you can't explain your idea, no one will ever invest.
So the first criterion of writing is...READABILITY!
I'm not talking about spelling and punctuation, rather I'm referring to words that string together in a way that cuts like butter.
Schools impose structure, business people are too busy trying to impress, and the truth is most words go unread, because they're just not interesting enough.
And a lot of the highfalutin novels are just as bad. That's what I hated about "The Flame Throwers," you could tell it was rewritten a million times, to add nuggets, this is the bane of the graduate writing programs. He who says rewriting is the essence of writing should give up. If the first draft ain't really good, stop, you can't fix a track in the mix, either it's a hit or it's not. Which is why Stephen King triumphs and many people don't read the vaunted best books of the year. First and foremost, Stephen King is READABLE! Whereas so much that is hyped by the literary establishment is not. A metaphor is nice, but instead of giving endless description, give us some plot.
So let's start with e-mail and business presentations...
WRITE LIKE YOU SPEAK!
If it's not flowing real fast, start over. If it's in your head and you can't get it out, take an enema and just let it flow. Writing is not hard, it's like every other pursuit, you've just got to start, hit go and you'll learn along the way.
But you've been writing all your life, so you've got a head start.
Want to impress someone? Don't overthink it, just make it straightforward.
I just read a business proposal so incomprehensible I'm not sure what it's about.
Just like I read screenplays with tons of stage direction but crappy dialogue. A good film is all about the dialogue, ask Woody Allen!
And every rule of writing can be thrown out the window if it's interesting. And most teachers are not successful writers, so take everything they say with a grain of salt. Or, to put it another way, school is all about eviscerating your creativity, making you conform.
So, most of what's online is unreadable.
My dear friend Jason Hirschhorn puts out a daily newsletter of links entitled MediaRedefined. I suggest you sign up, just go here: http://link.mediaredefined.com/join/353/media-redefweb But the truth is so many of the articles Jason links to have great headlines, often evidencing brilliant insight, but when I click through and start to read my eyes cloud over, because the people just can't write. Which is why I gravitate to the links of the name publications, because they know first and foremost it's about writing and readability. Ideas are a dime a dozen, getting them across is the hard part.
"The New Yorker" is pompous, but it has good writing. Not the only good writing, but subscribe and become inured.
And Malcolm Gladwell is the king of business writers. Not because his ideas are better, although they sometimes are, but because he writes so coherently, he demonstrates through examples, you want to turn the page, you want to know what he has to say next.
What makes you think if you never write that some business plan you execute is gonna be any good?
Ditto on e-mail. You might have something important to say, but if I can't understand it, if it's too complicated and boring to read, I'm not gonna.
And forget the saw that it must be short and compact. We're all looking for long and great. We rarely find it, but when we do, we luxuriate in it.
So, once again, start by writing like you speak. And, if it's important, use spellcheck, it's built-in.
You can't watch all the YouTube videos and you can't read all the online posts.
Want yours to stick out? MAKE IT READABLE!
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Amazon's Music Service
This is a step backwards.
Or to put it another way, Amazon is the new Microsoft, which releases half-baked products that it tries to improve on the fly. As opposed to Apple, which tries to get it right the first time. And what did Steve Jobs famously say, hardware is hard? The Kindle Fire is still a POS after many iterations. It's like Jeff Bezos has power, but no vision.
Give Daniel Ek credit. He launched Spotify through sheer will. And wouldn't come to America until all companies were on board. Unless you have everybody, you've got customer confusion. And that's the last thing we need right now, hell, even musicians can't figure out Spotify payments. It's quite clear, Spotify pays out 69%+ of its revenues to rights holders, almost exactly the same amount as Apple, and this fact is easily discoverable but no one seems to know it. Now we're gonna have a streaming music service without a great percentage of the music people want? How does that benefit anybody but Amazon? How do we get everybody to pay for music in the future? This is a rearguard move by a guy who's trying to dominate the world and will never realize he can't. Facebook faltered with its mobile phone. Everybody can't do everything. I can't play in the NBA and it turns out Microsoft couldn't win in mobile phones. So give Apple credit for playing only occasionally, where they think they
can win. And at least Google's crazy efforts are not located in a walled garden akin to a cult.
Yup, that's what Amazon's trying to build, a cult. Where everybody does it the Bezos way.
I'll be clear, I love buying from Amazon. Because it's friction-free. There's never a problem, I get what I order and if I don't, return is simple. There's TRUST!
But now Bezos wants me to waste time, which nobody has any of, to click around and find the music I want to hear on his service, ultimately being disappointed in a fair share of my efforts? This is not a benefit, this is a DISTRACTION! And it's not gonna get anybody to sign up for Amazon Prime, and it's not going to move the ball of streaming music forward. First and foremost, this is a service Prime customers DON'T WANT!
Kind of like the free books. How do I wrap my head around that one again? If I'm a Prime member, some Kindle books are free. What is this Easter, and I have to dig in the snow for eggs?
As for its streaming movie/TV service, Hollywood is at fault here. For not realizing we're going to a Spotify model for visuals. With everything available in one place for one price. Hollywood almost DARES its customers to steal, believing they're impenetrable, a lovable behemoth, ain't that a laugh. Furthermore, they're gonna go to day and date, windows will be gone.
But Amazon is still doing windows with this music service. You've got to retrieve your calendar to figure out whether a new release is old enough to stream. Yup, that's what I want, to wait six months for today's evanescent music which isn't even worth listening to then.
We're fighting the few hold-outs who don't go day and date on Spotify, who cling to the iTunes/download model, and now Jeff Bezos comes in and confuses us again?
But don't worry, his service won't get much traction. Because it's confusing and people don't care and why do you need it if you've got YouTube?
Me-too is a disaster. Either invent here, or take a big step forward, both of which were Apple's strengths under Steve Jobs. The MP3 player might not have been invented at Apple, but the iPod was a great leap forward. And the iPhone and iPad were pure innovations. Whereas Amazon invented downloadable books, and dominates there, but is an also-ran in MP3 downloads, streaming movies and tablets. If Bezos thinks he's winning, he truly believes he can bring back Menudo, make Rebecca Black a superstar, do what everybody in the music business knows cannot be done...MAKE A STIFF A HIT!
People subscribe to Prime for the free delivery. Bezos keeps thinking if he adds stuff on, it'll make it more desirable. That's hogwash. That's breaking Apple rule number one, which is MAKE IT SIMPLE! If you're gonna add stuff, have it work seamlessly, intuitively and easily. Using Amazon's music service will be like going to a record store with half the inventory which is scrambled in a way that you've got to pick through every album to find what you want. And if you think that's progress, you grew up in a third world country where offerings were slim.
This is not about empowering the consumer, Amazon's mantra, this is about megalomania, making Amazon the provider of EVERYTHING!
Never gonna happen.
Furthermore, with so many Apple-haters out there, what makes Bezos believe the public will go along?
Spotify now gives everything away for free, with advertising, on the mobile. It's finally getting traction, more adoption, and then you get this greedy jerk in Seattle, who doesn't know Nirvana from the Nerves, dipping his toe in the water, creating confusion.
Yup, confusion! Why should I buy Spotify if I've got Amazon Prime?
Take that musicians. Get everybody to sign up where your music is NOT! You want to be on Spotify, at least people can hear your music. And if you think payments will continue to be low, you don't know the definition of scale.
So I applaud Lucian Grainge for refusing to play ball this with this pompous nerd.
And I say we've achieved half of our goal here. We've got all the music, in one place, for everybody to hear. This is phenomenal. YouTube and Spotify have done a great job. We've just got to convince people to PAY FOR IT!
P.S. Making music an add-on devalues it. Music is not the glass you get for filling up at the gas station, it's the petrol itself, the main driver, the expensive elixir, the one thing you cannot motor without!
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Or to put it another way, Amazon is the new Microsoft, which releases half-baked products that it tries to improve on the fly. As opposed to Apple, which tries to get it right the first time. And what did Steve Jobs famously say, hardware is hard? The Kindle Fire is still a POS after many iterations. It's like Jeff Bezos has power, but no vision.
Give Daniel Ek credit. He launched Spotify through sheer will. And wouldn't come to America until all companies were on board. Unless you have everybody, you've got customer confusion. And that's the last thing we need right now, hell, even musicians can't figure out Spotify payments. It's quite clear, Spotify pays out 69%+ of its revenues to rights holders, almost exactly the same amount as Apple, and this fact is easily discoverable but no one seems to know it. Now we're gonna have a streaming music service without a great percentage of the music people want? How does that benefit anybody but Amazon? How do we get everybody to pay for music in the future? This is a rearguard move by a guy who's trying to dominate the world and will never realize he can't. Facebook faltered with its mobile phone. Everybody can't do everything. I can't play in the NBA and it turns out Microsoft couldn't win in mobile phones. So give Apple credit for playing only occasionally, where they think they
can win. And at least Google's crazy efforts are not located in a walled garden akin to a cult.
Yup, that's what Amazon's trying to build, a cult. Where everybody does it the Bezos way.
I'll be clear, I love buying from Amazon. Because it's friction-free. There's never a problem, I get what I order and if I don't, return is simple. There's TRUST!
But now Bezos wants me to waste time, which nobody has any of, to click around and find the music I want to hear on his service, ultimately being disappointed in a fair share of my efforts? This is not a benefit, this is a DISTRACTION! And it's not gonna get anybody to sign up for Amazon Prime, and it's not going to move the ball of streaming music forward. First and foremost, this is a service Prime customers DON'T WANT!
Kind of like the free books. How do I wrap my head around that one again? If I'm a Prime member, some Kindle books are free. What is this Easter, and I have to dig in the snow for eggs?
As for its streaming movie/TV service, Hollywood is at fault here. For not realizing we're going to a Spotify model for visuals. With everything available in one place for one price. Hollywood almost DARES its customers to steal, believing they're impenetrable, a lovable behemoth, ain't that a laugh. Furthermore, they're gonna go to day and date, windows will be gone.
But Amazon is still doing windows with this music service. You've got to retrieve your calendar to figure out whether a new release is old enough to stream. Yup, that's what I want, to wait six months for today's evanescent music which isn't even worth listening to then.
We're fighting the few hold-outs who don't go day and date on Spotify, who cling to the iTunes/download model, and now Jeff Bezos comes in and confuses us again?
But don't worry, his service won't get much traction. Because it's confusing and people don't care and why do you need it if you've got YouTube?
Me-too is a disaster. Either invent here, or take a big step forward, both of which were Apple's strengths under Steve Jobs. The MP3 player might not have been invented at Apple, but the iPod was a great leap forward. And the iPhone and iPad were pure innovations. Whereas Amazon invented downloadable books, and dominates there, but is an also-ran in MP3 downloads, streaming movies and tablets. If Bezos thinks he's winning, he truly believes he can bring back Menudo, make Rebecca Black a superstar, do what everybody in the music business knows cannot be done...MAKE A STIFF A HIT!
People subscribe to Prime for the free delivery. Bezos keeps thinking if he adds stuff on, it'll make it more desirable. That's hogwash. That's breaking Apple rule number one, which is MAKE IT SIMPLE! If you're gonna add stuff, have it work seamlessly, intuitively and easily. Using Amazon's music service will be like going to a record store with half the inventory which is scrambled in a way that you've got to pick through every album to find what you want. And if you think that's progress, you grew up in a third world country where offerings were slim.
This is not about empowering the consumer, Amazon's mantra, this is about megalomania, making Amazon the provider of EVERYTHING!
Never gonna happen.
Furthermore, with so many Apple-haters out there, what makes Bezos believe the public will go along?
Spotify now gives everything away for free, with advertising, on the mobile. It's finally getting traction, more adoption, and then you get this greedy jerk in Seattle, who doesn't know Nirvana from the Nerves, dipping his toe in the water, creating confusion.
Yup, confusion! Why should I buy Spotify if I've got Amazon Prime?
Take that musicians. Get everybody to sign up where your music is NOT! You want to be on Spotify, at least people can hear your music. And if you think payments will continue to be low, you don't know the definition of scale.
So I applaud Lucian Grainge for refusing to play ball this with this pompous nerd.
And I say we've achieved half of our goal here. We've got all the music, in one place, for everybody to hear. This is phenomenal. YouTube and Spotify have done a great job. We've just got to convince people to PAY FOR IT!
P.S. Making music an add-on devalues it. Music is not the glass you get for filling up at the gas station, it's the petrol itself, the main driver, the expensive elixir, the one thing you cannot motor without!
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Steve Perry At The Orpheum
It was wasted on the Eels' audience.
What kind of self-respecting KCRW listener is going to sing along with Steve? You know, NA NA NA NA NA NA!
But there's pure joy in those words.
And there was pure joy in the Orpheum tonight, when Steve Perry returned to the boards in Los Angeles and delivered an arena-sized performance.
You forget that these guys have experience. That they've played the big rooms. That they started out rusty and developed chops. And Perry exhibited all of his experience tonight!
I'll be honest, I knew he was gonna show. Otherwise why go?
I'm not saying I'm not an Eels fan, I love "Jeannie's Diary," it's just after decades of life I only want to go if I get that jolt in my arm, that injection that obliterates all my worldly concerns, that jets me right back to who I was at sixteen, sitting in my bedroom in the dark, listening to the music on headphones.
And I never went to the show to ogle the girls, to tell anybody I was there, but to connect with the music. It was the only place I felt whole. The venue was my synagogue, where high priests delivered the sermon that truly spoke to me.
I've never been one for clothes, never been one for appearances. What turns me on is something visceral. Like tonight's performance.
And I was not a Journey fan when the band ruled, but I know all the songs, they were played incessantly back in the day when the radio was your only true option in the car, sure, you played cassettes on a long trip, otherwise you wanted something new.
But that was back when music ruled the world. When it was seen as the preeminent art form. Before nitwits like Iggy Azalea ruled and a big hit song was entitled "Wiggle," back when there were two avenues, the mainstream and the underground, and the true music fans were members of the underground, forget all those pop charts, no one listened to hit radio back then, we all smoked dope, grew our hair and dedicated ourselves to the slow-talking deejays on FM.
Then Lee Abrams codified the playlists. But bands amped up their tunes. You may decry Boston and Journey, but they put out professional records which satiate even more now as a result of the dreck that dominates today's airwaves.
You know that Filipino guy in Journey is pretty good.
But he's not the real thing.
The real thing sang tonight at the Orpheum, and it was MINDBLOWING!
Forget the YouTube clips, forget the fact that his voice wasn't perfect in Minneapolis, if you were there you would have grinned from ear to ear, if his audience had been in attendance heads would have exploded, a la that SNL clip wherein Oprah gives stuff away.
And I thought of Oprah during the show. Because she does live gigs. She doesn't need the money, but she needs the hit, that feedback you get from the audience, and that's why Steve Perry did it tonight.
He sang an Eels song.
A Journey song.
And then he told a tale. Of writing a song in L.A. and being called by a band up north and rewriting it so it was localized to the city by the bay. Yes, Steve Perry sang LIGHTS!
When the lights go down in the city...
And what was most amazing was it was him. His voice, his timbre. And he could still sing when so many of his contemporaries cannot. I love Elton John, he's one of my all time favorite artists, but his voice is far from what it used to be, all that's left is huskiness, too much huskiness.
And Billy Joel sing pretty well. That's why he's getting his victory lap.
But Steve Perry's been gone for twenty years. For him to sing is like having Mickey Mantle come back from the dead, kick the dirt from his cleats, smile at the stands and then hit one over the fence.
Because that's what Mantle did.
Steve Perry did what he does tonight. He emoted, he reached out and grabbed the audience, he gave a performance. One that was based not upon dancing or set decoration, but purely the music itself.
He told stories, he sang to the heavens, he touched me.
And I'm not gonna listen to a single jaded fuck say a negative word about it.
No, not gonna happen.
I'm gonna delete the e-mail that says he can no longer sing. That laughs at me because he fronted Journey. The ones that denigrate me and Steve in order for the writer to feel better about him or herself.
That's what's wrong with America today, everybody on the sidelines saying they can do better when they can't. Unwilling to take a risk, not knowing how hard it is to not only make it, but to sustain.
I mean I'm in the audience, moving closer and closer, because I need to merge with the experience, jump inside, get further taken away to the place I once lived in and am yearning to return to.
What we all want is hope.
And I refuse to give it to the wannabes without talent.
But when someone who reached the pinnacle returns without pretense and blows me away, I can only say...
THIS IS THE SHIT!
P.S. He was an engineer. That's the dirty little secret of those who truly make it. They know they may not. They pursue alternatives, because no one knows if they're truly gonna get their shot, whether they're ever gonna break through. And he comes home and his girl's not there. And this is unusual, this is strange, he doesn't want to be uptight, but he is. So he sits by the front window and... She gets out of a Corvette. And as only Steve could put it, she and the driver LOCKED UP! And when she walked inside, she denied every little bit of it, said Steve was dreaming. And that's when Steve Perry wrote "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'."
"You make me weep and wanna die"
What do you do when you feel this way? PUT ON A RECORD! And what makes those records so damn good is the people who create them have had the same damn experience, only they've written about it. We bond with the humanity, the truth. And the truth is I've got no idea where Steve Perry goes from here. But to watch him ply the boards at the Orpheum was to see a giant amongst men, to see someone world class inhabiting the neighborhood, someone with the ability to reach out and grab my heart and sacrifice it on the altar of rock and roll.
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What kind of self-respecting KCRW listener is going to sing along with Steve? You know, NA NA NA NA NA NA!
But there's pure joy in those words.
And there was pure joy in the Orpheum tonight, when Steve Perry returned to the boards in Los Angeles and delivered an arena-sized performance.
You forget that these guys have experience. That they've played the big rooms. That they started out rusty and developed chops. And Perry exhibited all of his experience tonight!
I'll be honest, I knew he was gonna show. Otherwise why go?
I'm not saying I'm not an Eels fan, I love "Jeannie's Diary," it's just after decades of life I only want to go if I get that jolt in my arm, that injection that obliterates all my worldly concerns, that jets me right back to who I was at sixteen, sitting in my bedroom in the dark, listening to the music on headphones.
And I never went to the show to ogle the girls, to tell anybody I was there, but to connect with the music. It was the only place I felt whole. The venue was my synagogue, where high priests delivered the sermon that truly spoke to me.
I've never been one for clothes, never been one for appearances. What turns me on is something visceral. Like tonight's performance.
And I was not a Journey fan when the band ruled, but I know all the songs, they were played incessantly back in the day when the radio was your only true option in the car, sure, you played cassettes on a long trip, otherwise you wanted something new.
But that was back when music ruled the world. When it was seen as the preeminent art form. Before nitwits like Iggy Azalea ruled and a big hit song was entitled "Wiggle," back when there were two avenues, the mainstream and the underground, and the true music fans were members of the underground, forget all those pop charts, no one listened to hit radio back then, we all smoked dope, grew our hair and dedicated ourselves to the slow-talking deejays on FM.
Then Lee Abrams codified the playlists. But bands amped up their tunes. You may decry Boston and Journey, but they put out professional records which satiate even more now as a result of the dreck that dominates today's airwaves.
You know that Filipino guy in Journey is pretty good.
But he's not the real thing.
The real thing sang tonight at the Orpheum, and it was MINDBLOWING!
Forget the YouTube clips, forget the fact that his voice wasn't perfect in Minneapolis, if you were there you would have grinned from ear to ear, if his audience had been in attendance heads would have exploded, a la that SNL clip wherein Oprah gives stuff away.
And I thought of Oprah during the show. Because she does live gigs. She doesn't need the money, but she needs the hit, that feedback you get from the audience, and that's why Steve Perry did it tonight.
He sang an Eels song.
A Journey song.
And then he told a tale. Of writing a song in L.A. and being called by a band up north and rewriting it so it was localized to the city by the bay. Yes, Steve Perry sang LIGHTS!
When the lights go down in the city...
And what was most amazing was it was him. His voice, his timbre. And he could still sing when so many of his contemporaries cannot. I love Elton John, he's one of my all time favorite artists, but his voice is far from what it used to be, all that's left is huskiness, too much huskiness.
And Billy Joel sing pretty well. That's why he's getting his victory lap.
But Steve Perry's been gone for twenty years. For him to sing is like having Mickey Mantle come back from the dead, kick the dirt from his cleats, smile at the stands and then hit one over the fence.
Because that's what Mantle did.
Steve Perry did what he does tonight. He emoted, he reached out and grabbed the audience, he gave a performance. One that was based not upon dancing or set decoration, but purely the music itself.
He told stories, he sang to the heavens, he touched me.
And I'm not gonna listen to a single jaded fuck say a negative word about it.
No, not gonna happen.
I'm gonna delete the e-mail that says he can no longer sing. That laughs at me because he fronted Journey. The ones that denigrate me and Steve in order for the writer to feel better about him or herself.
That's what's wrong with America today, everybody on the sidelines saying they can do better when they can't. Unwilling to take a risk, not knowing how hard it is to not only make it, but to sustain.
I mean I'm in the audience, moving closer and closer, because I need to merge with the experience, jump inside, get further taken away to the place I once lived in and am yearning to return to.
What we all want is hope.
And I refuse to give it to the wannabes without talent.
But when someone who reached the pinnacle returns without pretense and blows me away, I can only say...
THIS IS THE SHIT!
P.S. He was an engineer. That's the dirty little secret of those who truly make it. They know they may not. They pursue alternatives, because no one knows if they're truly gonna get their shot, whether they're ever gonna break through. And he comes home and his girl's not there. And this is unusual, this is strange, he doesn't want to be uptight, but he is. So he sits by the front window and... She gets out of a Corvette. And as only Steve could put it, she and the driver LOCKED UP! And when she walked inside, she denied every little bit of it, said Steve was dreaming. And that's when Steve Perry wrote "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'."
"You make me weep and wanna die"
What do you do when you feel this way? PUT ON A RECORD! And what makes those records so damn good is the people who create them have had the same damn experience, only they've written about it. We bond with the humanity, the truth. And the truth is I've got no idea where Steve Perry goes from here. But to watch him ply the boards at the Orpheum was to see a giant amongst men, to see someone world class inhabiting the neighborhood, someone with the ability to reach out and grab my heart and sacrifice it on the altar of rock and roll.
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Wednesday 11 June 2014
Connie and Ted's
There were two good things about Howard Johnson's, the fried clams and the Swiss chocolate almond ice cream.
By time I grew up, HoJo's was already over the hill. But we drove by on a regular basis, and they'd have these ads for fried clams in the window.
Monday night was fish fry, you could eat as much as you wanted. At this point I didn't even eat fish, and my dad was a gourmand, so we rarely went, maybe once or twice. As for ice cream... It was all about Friendly's and Carvel, baby. Our house was stocked with soda and ice cream, my father owned a liquor store and he sought out locations for Friendly's. Come to my house and you could have as much as you wanted. My parents were never about limits. Assuming you got good grades.
But at one point in my youth I did eat those HoJo's fried clams. They were tasty, but nothing too special. But then I had a college roommate with a house in Wellfleet and discovered what a fried clam truly is.
We were Hyannis people. When we went. Which was mostly when I was a tyke. But Wellfleet is the lower Cape, just before Provincetown, it's not commercialized, and it was there that I had the fried clam of my dreams.
It had a belly. Something absent from the HoJo's iteration. And it was golden brown and hot to the touch and if you put me on death row, include one in my final meal.
Which is why when Jack Douglas suggested lunch at Connie and Ted's, I was all in.
Food is the rage. And so much more satisfying than music. Hell, there's even a wannabe YouTube/Food Network, check it out at Tastemade.com.
And when C&T's opened, I was aware. But at this point, traffic is so horrific that I do my best not go to east of the freeway, certainly not in the middle of the day.
So I didn't make it to Connie and Ted's until today.
Were the fried clams as good as those in Wellfleet?
Negative on that. They had bellies, although not as big as the ones experienced on Cape Cod. And the frying... Mmm, let me see, kind of a better HoJo's. Well, better than that, the breading occasionally flaked off, but as much as I loved eating them, I can't say they were a culinary dream.
But the oysters were a whole different story.
Chocolate and blood. Huh?
Neither one tastes like its moniker. Both from Baja, the blood were incredible. Kind of like an oyster with a red pepper tail, or the tamale in a lobster. Utterly scrumptious. And the chocolate had its own unique taste. As did the cornucopia of other varieties we scarfed up. I could eat oysters all day, and these were fantastic.
As was the smoked mahi-mahi. Served cold, like in a deli. Oily and stringy and only mildly fishy, it was delectable.
As were the steamers.
On the east coast they come a little bit more wet. But no biggie. The clams had long necks and big bellies and there were both broth and butter for dipping and if it didn't bring you right back to the shore, you've never been.
So it's a big thumbs up for C&T's. I've got to go back, to experience the lobster roll.
http://www.connieandteds.com
P.S. We also had the strawberry and rhubarb pie. Ruharb is another thing I wouldn't touch as a youngster that rings my bell today.
P.P.S. Jack told me about starting out, working with Roy Cicala at the Record Plant, who he said taught him everything he knew. Jimmy Iovine, aka "Jimmy Shoes," was the assistant who kept missing the punch-in, but he called the track a hit. People wanted Jimmy in the room, for his vibe, for his ability to pick singles. (Roy Cicala: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cicala)
P.P.P.S. Jack said how people have no idea how hard it was to break into the music business back then. He said what his daughter remembered most about him growing up were broken promises. That's what I remember about everybody who made it, they were always at work.
P.P.P.P.S. Jack teaches courses and says to never forget your friends. You see it's a relationship business. You may be good enough, but unless you know how to work it, you'll never make it.
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By time I grew up, HoJo's was already over the hill. But we drove by on a regular basis, and they'd have these ads for fried clams in the window.
Monday night was fish fry, you could eat as much as you wanted. At this point I didn't even eat fish, and my dad was a gourmand, so we rarely went, maybe once or twice. As for ice cream... It was all about Friendly's and Carvel, baby. Our house was stocked with soda and ice cream, my father owned a liquor store and he sought out locations for Friendly's. Come to my house and you could have as much as you wanted. My parents were never about limits. Assuming you got good grades.
But at one point in my youth I did eat those HoJo's fried clams. They were tasty, but nothing too special. But then I had a college roommate with a house in Wellfleet and discovered what a fried clam truly is.
We were Hyannis people. When we went. Which was mostly when I was a tyke. But Wellfleet is the lower Cape, just before Provincetown, it's not commercialized, and it was there that I had the fried clam of my dreams.
It had a belly. Something absent from the HoJo's iteration. And it was golden brown and hot to the touch and if you put me on death row, include one in my final meal.
Which is why when Jack Douglas suggested lunch at Connie and Ted's, I was all in.
Food is the rage. And so much more satisfying than music. Hell, there's even a wannabe YouTube/Food Network, check it out at Tastemade.com.
And when C&T's opened, I was aware. But at this point, traffic is so horrific that I do my best not go to east of the freeway, certainly not in the middle of the day.
So I didn't make it to Connie and Ted's until today.
Were the fried clams as good as those in Wellfleet?
Negative on that. They had bellies, although not as big as the ones experienced on Cape Cod. And the frying... Mmm, let me see, kind of a better HoJo's. Well, better than that, the breading occasionally flaked off, but as much as I loved eating them, I can't say they were a culinary dream.
But the oysters were a whole different story.
Chocolate and blood. Huh?
Neither one tastes like its moniker. Both from Baja, the blood were incredible. Kind of like an oyster with a red pepper tail, or the tamale in a lobster. Utterly scrumptious. And the chocolate had its own unique taste. As did the cornucopia of other varieties we scarfed up. I could eat oysters all day, and these were fantastic.
As was the smoked mahi-mahi. Served cold, like in a deli. Oily and stringy and only mildly fishy, it was delectable.
As were the steamers.
On the east coast they come a little bit more wet. But no biggie. The clams had long necks and big bellies and there were both broth and butter for dipping and if it didn't bring you right back to the shore, you've never been.
So it's a big thumbs up for C&T's. I've got to go back, to experience the lobster roll.
http://www.connieandteds.com
P.S. We also had the strawberry and rhubarb pie. Ruharb is another thing I wouldn't touch as a youngster that rings my bell today.
P.P.S. Jack told me about starting out, working with Roy Cicala at the Record Plant, who he said taught him everything he knew. Jimmy Iovine, aka "Jimmy Shoes," was the assistant who kept missing the punch-in, but he called the track a hit. People wanted Jimmy in the room, for his vibe, for his ability to pick singles. (Roy Cicala: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cicala)
P.P.P.S. Jack said how people have no idea how hard it was to break into the music business back then. He said what his daughter remembered most about him growing up were broken promises. That's what I remember about everybody who made it, they were always at work.
P.P.P.P.S. Jack teaches courses and says to never forget your friends. You see it's a relationship business. You may be good enough, but unless you know how to work it, you'll never make it.
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Tuesday 10 June 2014
More Math
Subject: Re: Re-Van Dyke Parks - am I out of date?
Hi Bob,
Van Dyke Parks says that Apple takes 50 cents out of every 99 cents on iTunes.
I thought it was 30 cents. Am I out of date?
And, I thought most of the 'hit' songs are $1.29. Not 99 cents.
When was the last time he checked?
John Parikhal
______________________________________
Subject: Re: Van Dyke Parks math
Mr. Parks also flubbed the iTunes model. Apple takes 30 cents out of 99 not 50 cents as he mentioned.
Ricky Schultz
______________________________________
"Forty years ago, co-writing a song with Ringo Starr would have provided me a house and a pool. Now, estimating 100,000 plays on Spotify,"
Parks is not even remotely close to estimating what a "hit" is in terms of Spotify streaming play numbers. Just like his incorrect citation of the Spotify royalty rate, his use of the number 100,000 streams constituting a hit is likely also off by a factor of 100.
In the early 70s, Ringo had a few songs that made the Billboard Top 10 (Ringo's Top 10 Billboard Hits: http://www.billboard.com/articles/list/5893949/ringo-starr-top-10-billboard-hits-hot-100-chart). Assuming that Ringo could still make a hit record - not to mention just one hit single - today (and there are myriad odds against that as it is), let's take a look at numbers for a contemporary album that has had roughly similar popular success - say, Lorde's Pure Heroine. While Royals has over 160,000,000 plays, even the least popular song on that album that has a play count - Bravado - has over 11,000,000 plays. So even if Parks managed to write a B-side track on a hit record from Ringo, 11,000,000 plays would net them between $66,000 and $92,400. If their song had numbers equivalent to Royals, he'd be netting $960,000 - $1,344,000.
So, the former isn't quite enough for a house and pool (maybe just a really nice pool), but with a hit, you can certainly buy a relatively swanky piece of real estate.
and PS - we're talking income solely from Spotify alone! Not to mention iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Pandora, and everything else you can think of...
-Sasha Brown
______________________________________
From: Dave at EAR/Rational Music
Subject: Re: Re-Van Dyke Parks
Hi Bob,
VDP also claims that $0.02 in 1909 amounts to $2 now. Not even close. $0.02 is about $0.53 in today's money. If you're going to make an argument based on math, get the math right, or leave it out!
(Source: http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm, which goes as far back as 1913, and http://www.westegg.com/inflation/)
Dave
______________________________________
Subject: Re: Re-Van Dyke Parks
On average we have seen Spotify payouts almost double in the last year on a per stream basis.
Going from about a sixth of a cent per stream to almost a third of a cent per stream.
The record business is now like the publishing business always was, a business of pennies.
You need to collect as many pennies from as many sources as possible.
Beat's having your property stolen.
Peter Barker
Producer A&R
Spin Move Records
______________________________________
Bob, Dale is quoting the gross rates for the recording & composition, the majority of which goes to record companies/aggregators, and Park is talking about the publishers or probably his PRO share. Almost everyone working in the digital world is tied to NDA's, and there is a huge difference in rates and splits between services, content providers, countries etc. The problem is a lack of transparency from almost all the players, at every level.
Name withheld
______________________________________
From: Jason Finn
Hi Bob,
Let's see….
Item the first: while I'm no phoenix in the math dept, Dale Cooper's version of the streaming math jibes way more than VDP's in my experience. I'm the drummer/management surrogate for the Presidents of the United States of America (our ex-guitarist/current co-rights holder Dave Dederer has written you before). We are a part-time concern now, our biggest (passive) asset being "the popular one", our first album; which sold gazillions of copies and had big hits back when that was a thing. Back when you'd lean back with a glass of Barolo and lecture younger musicians about how "publishing is so much more important than touring".
anyhoo….
our bread and butter was iTunes for years. Mostly Lump and Peaches money, to your point about singles. Thousands of people every month dl the hits, precious few get the record. It's going down, slower than I thought it would, but it's going down. Hindenburg down. BUT our streaming revenue rises ever so gently….
without mentioning actuals…..if "X" is monthly iTunes income (this used to be so large as piece of the pie that we'd look solely at it in quarterlies)
and "Y" is streaming income (again, back in the wild west days ('05?) this was teensy tiny…some company called the "orchard" or something was only a gleam, and not to be acknowledged, since we had a SWEET DEAL with IODA.
anyhoo….
X was our whole pie in '05, and Y was maybe 5% of X. In '14, Our X pie is down, but Y is about 60% of X and noticeably on the rise Q to Q. In other words, we are holding more or less steady, and are pretty handsome for a bunch of late 40's guys!
CROWD FUNDING
I could talk for hours too about how we crowd-funded our '14 album…..raised 100k in 60 days, and to date have sold 4k or so on the open market (not including the 2k who pre-bought of course), which for OLD GUYS who are interested only in OUR FANS and have NOT ENOUGH TIME to circle the globe GROWING THE BRAND is pretty good…..
BTW after all costs, including vinyl and some pub and whatnot, we cut checks to ourselves for about 5k apiece from the Pledge campaign. Small Business. Ringo Starr would be SO JEALOUS if he heard this, so don't tell him.
ps: cut any of this if it's insane, or defames BEATLES_INC_DOTCOM
______________________________________
I co-wrote a song on Ringo's 1978 'Bad Boy' album and want to know where my house and pool are.
Best
John Pidgeon
______________________________________
Below is a link to a screenshot of what I make per stream on Spotify. As you can see, it varies. But sometimes it's WELL under the .006-.008 that is stated. For these 14 streams, I made 3.3 cents. Obviously not a living, but it's still something.
My 3.3 cents,
Brian Martin, bmartinsounds
http://bit.ly/1l4QpyP
______________________________________
Bob:
Dale Cooper's comment about Van Dyke Parks' math is unfortunately off-the-mark. Dale was referencing the "artist royalty" that Van Dyke Parks would have received; while Van Dyke Parks was complaining about how low his songwriter royalties were, a totally different revenue stream with a very different calculation. Spotify pays publishing royalties in a very different way than they pay on the artist/label side. While the artist/label side is by contract between the rights owner (typically the label) and the service, the publishing is covered by a statutory license under section 115. Publishers (and songwriters) are entitled to 10.5% of Spotify's revenue (less any amounts paid to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC for public performance fees). When you sprinkle 10.5% of revenue over billions of tracks played, the per stream rate is going to be very, very low. Spotify's comments about scale are true: as they grow more premium users they will increase revenue which will generate higher "per-stream"
rates. Until that happens, musicians are in for a tough time with extremely low payouts for listens.
Best regards,
John
John L. Simson
Executive-in-Residence
Business and Entertainment Program Director
Kogod School of Business
American University
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20016
______________________________________
As you probably know, the major labels contribute to the perception that Spotify is bad for artists.
If you own lots of good masters and have built a solid following, you don't need to be Beyonce to earn impressive money. I work with artists that already benefit enormously and so far Spotify has barely scratched the surface of the marketplace. It is almost inevitable that Spotify (or some service doing a similar function) will supplant iTunes as the Indie artists' best friend.
But if your masters are controlled by major label you get paid a fraction of the streaming revenue that your music generates.
I'm afraid I need to remain anonymous in writing this. I could be much more specific but I like my job too much. But I think you have it completely right when you say Spotify is a good thing. My one small issue with your comments is that the long tail will play out differently with streaming. Unlike downloads where you had to pay to dig deep, Spotify encourages you to explore and discover new (and old) music.
______________________________________
Dear fellow Bean Counters,
I have solicited a sharpened candor from Spotify, to redress my fuzzy math. I did so via Twitter, and hope they will respond. We all want clarification on the fractional royalties being paid.
It'd also be swell to get insight into their executive wages, and a general idea about their motives.
As for Pandora? In '13, Tim Westergren self-paid a bonus of $15,658,093.00.
That same year, Pandora paid all US (ASCAP) composers an aggregate $11,801,150.
Those are exact, irrefutable figures, and speak to the endemic executive greed driving these income trends for song-writers.
I look forward to what good may come from the hearings (on copyright reform) in D.C. today, and view them as more significant in long-term impact than a mere Supreme Court decision.
Do the math, that I may be corrected on these fractions---mindful of any theory of value!
Respects,
Van Dyke
P.S.: A poet can survive anything---but a misprink.
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Hi Bob,
Van Dyke Parks says that Apple takes 50 cents out of every 99 cents on iTunes.
I thought it was 30 cents. Am I out of date?
And, I thought most of the 'hit' songs are $1.29. Not 99 cents.
When was the last time he checked?
John Parikhal
______________________________________
Subject: Re: Van Dyke Parks math
Mr. Parks also flubbed the iTunes model. Apple takes 30 cents out of 99 not 50 cents as he mentioned.
Ricky Schultz
______________________________________
"Forty years ago, co-writing a song with Ringo Starr would have provided me a house and a pool. Now, estimating 100,000 plays on Spotify,"
Parks is not even remotely close to estimating what a "hit" is in terms of Spotify streaming play numbers. Just like his incorrect citation of the Spotify royalty rate, his use of the number 100,000 streams constituting a hit is likely also off by a factor of 100.
In the early 70s, Ringo had a few songs that made the Billboard Top 10 (Ringo's Top 10 Billboard Hits: http://www.billboard.com/articles/list/5893949/ringo-starr-top-10-billboard-hits-hot-100-chart). Assuming that Ringo could still make a hit record - not to mention just one hit single - today (and there are myriad odds against that as it is), let's take a look at numbers for a contemporary album that has had roughly similar popular success - say, Lorde's Pure Heroine. While Royals has over 160,000,000 plays, even the least popular song on that album that has a play count - Bravado - has over 11,000,000 plays. So even if Parks managed to write a B-side track on a hit record from Ringo, 11,000,000 plays would net them between $66,000 and $92,400. If their song had numbers equivalent to Royals, he'd be netting $960,000 - $1,344,000.
So, the former isn't quite enough for a house and pool (maybe just a really nice pool), but with a hit, you can certainly buy a relatively swanky piece of real estate.
and PS - we're talking income solely from Spotify alone! Not to mention iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Pandora, and everything else you can think of...
-Sasha Brown
______________________________________
From: Dave at EAR/Rational Music
Subject: Re: Re-Van Dyke Parks
Hi Bob,
VDP also claims that $0.02 in 1909 amounts to $2 now. Not even close. $0.02 is about $0.53 in today's money. If you're going to make an argument based on math, get the math right, or leave it out!
(Source: http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm, which goes as far back as 1913, and http://www.westegg.com/inflation/)
Dave
______________________________________
Subject: Re: Re-Van Dyke Parks
On average we have seen Spotify payouts almost double in the last year on a per stream basis.
Going from about a sixth of a cent per stream to almost a third of a cent per stream.
The record business is now like the publishing business always was, a business of pennies.
You need to collect as many pennies from as many sources as possible.
Beat's having your property stolen.
Peter Barker
Producer A&R
Spin Move Records
______________________________________
Bob, Dale is quoting the gross rates for the recording & composition, the majority of which goes to record companies/aggregators, and Park is talking about the publishers or probably his PRO share. Almost everyone working in the digital world is tied to NDA's, and there is a huge difference in rates and splits between services, content providers, countries etc. The problem is a lack of transparency from almost all the players, at every level.
Name withheld
______________________________________
From: Jason Finn
Hi Bob,
Let's see….
Item the first: while I'm no phoenix in the math dept, Dale Cooper's version of the streaming math jibes way more than VDP's in my experience. I'm the drummer/management surrogate for the Presidents of the United States of America (our ex-guitarist/current co-rights holder Dave Dederer has written you before). We are a part-time concern now, our biggest (passive) asset being "the popular one", our first album; which sold gazillions of copies and had big hits back when that was a thing. Back when you'd lean back with a glass of Barolo and lecture younger musicians about how "publishing is so much more important than touring".
anyhoo….
our bread and butter was iTunes for years. Mostly Lump and Peaches money, to your point about singles. Thousands of people every month dl the hits, precious few get the record. It's going down, slower than I thought it would, but it's going down. Hindenburg down. BUT our streaming revenue rises ever so gently….
without mentioning actuals…..if "X" is monthly iTunes income (this used to be so large as piece of the pie that we'd look solely at it in quarterlies)
and "Y" is streaming income (again, back in the wild west days ('05?) this was teensy tiny…some company called the "orchard" or something was only a gleam, and not to be acknowledged, since we had a SWEET DEAL with IODA.
anyhoo….
X was our whole pie in '05, and Y was maybe 5% of X. In '14, Our X pie is down, but Y is about 60% of X and noticeably on the rise Q to Q. In other words, we are holding more or less steady, and are pretty handsome for a bunch of late 40's guys!
CROWD FUNDING
I could talk for hours too about how we crowd-funded our '14 album…..raised 100k in 60 days, and to date have sold 4k or so on the open market (not including the 2k who pre-bought of course), which for OLD GUYS who are interested only in OUR FANS and have NOT ENOUGH TIME to circle the globe GROWING THE BRAND is pretty good…..
BTW after all costs, including vinyl and some pub and whatnot, we cut checks to ourselves for about 5k apiece from the Pledge campaign. Small Business. Ringo Starr would be SO JEALOUS if he heard this, so don't tell him.
ps: cut any of this if it's insane, or defames BEATLES_INC_DOTCOM
______________________________________
I co-wrote a song on Ringo's 1978 'Bad Boy' album and want to know where my house and pool are.
Best
John Pidgeon
______________________________________
Below is a link to a screenshot of what I make per stream on Spotify. As you can see, it varies. But sometimes it's WELL under the .006-.008 that is stated. For these 14 streams, I made 3.3 cents. Obviously not a living, but it's still something.
My 3.3 cents,
Brian Martin, bmartinsounds
http://bit.ly/1l4QpyP
______________________________________
Bob:
Dale Cooper's comment about Van Dyke Parks' math is unfortunately off-the-mark. Dale was referencing the "artist royalty" that Van Dyke Parks would have received; while Van Dyke Parks was complaining about how low his songwriter royalties were, a totally different revenue stream with a very different calculation. Spotify pays publishing royalties in a very different way than they pay on the artist/label side. While the artist/label side is by contract between the rights owner (typically the label) and the service, the publishing is covered by a statutory license under section 115. Publishers (and songwriters) are entitled to 10.5% of Spotify's revenue (less any amounts paid to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC for public performance fees). When you sprinkle 10.5% of revenue over billions of tracks played, the per stream rate is going to be very, very low. Spotify's comments about scale are true: as they grow more premium users they will increase revenue which will generate higher "per-stream"
rates. Until that happens, musicians are in for a tough time with extremely low payouts for listens.
Best regards,
John
John L. Simson
Executive-in-Residence
Business and Entertainment Program Director
Kogod School of Business
American University
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20016
______________________________________
As you probably know, the major labels contribute to the perception that Spotify is bad for artists.
If you own lots of good masters and have built a solid following, you don't need to be Beyonce to earn impressive money. I work with artists that already benefit enormously and so far Spotify has barely scratched the surface of the marketplace. It is almost inevitable that Spotify (or some service doing a similar function) will supplant iTunes as the Indie artists' best friend.
But if your masters are controlled by major label you get paid a fraction of the streaming revenue that your music generates.
I'm afraid I need to remain anonymous in writing this. I could be much more specific but I like my job too much. But I think you have it completely right when you say Spotify is a good thing. My one small issue with your comments is that the long tail will play out differently with streaming. Unlike downloads where you had to pay to dig deep, Spotify encourages you to explore and discover new (and old) music.
______________________________________
Dear fellow Bean Counters,
I have solicited a sharpened candor from Spotify, to redress my fuzzy math. I did so via Twitter, and hope they will respond. We all want clarification on the fractional royalties being paid.
It'd also be swell to get insight into their executive wages, and a general idea about their motives.
As for Pandora? In '13, Tim Westergren self-paid a bonus of $15,658,093.00.
That same year, Pandora paid all US (ASCAP) composers an aggregate $11,801,150.
Those are exact, irrefutable figures, and speak to the endemic executive greed driving these income trends for song-writers.
I look forward to what good may come from the hearings (on copyright reform) in D.C. today, and view them as more significant in long-term impact than a mere Supreme Court decision.
Do the math, that I may be corrected on these fractions---mindful of any theory of value!
Respects,
Van Dyke
P.S.: A poet can survive anything---but a misprink.
--
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Monday 9 June 2014
Re-Van Dyke Parks
From: Dale Cooper
Subject: Parks's math is wrong big time
I am surprised nobody wrote to you about Van Dyke Parks math since it was so obviously wrong. Nobody ever said musicians were good at math, but I hope he has a good business manager to manage his own money!
Looks like he has the Spotify rate too low by a factor of 1000x. He says Spotify pays 0.00065 CENTS per stream, while Spotify's disclosed rate is $0.006 to $0.0084, which is in DOLLARS not CENTS!
http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#wait-i-thought-spotify-paid-a-per-stream-rate
So he mixed up dollars and cents, which made the rate 100x too low, and then just adds an extra zero in too for good measure. Parks' rate of 0.00065 CENTS per stream is $0.0000065 per stream, so he is 1,000x lower than the actual rate. So Spotify is saying they have paid 6/10ths of a penny per stream, Parks is saying they pay about 65/10,000ths of a penny! His 100,000 streams works out to 65 cents total!
Now, at Spotify's disclosed rate, his 100,000 streams would pay about $600-840, not bad for one afternoon's work. Many musicians I know would be thrilled to make that much for an afternoon's work. Of course, that money gets split up among rights holders, but there are also more platforms than just Spotify to stream the song too.
("Van Dyke Parks on How Songwriters Are Getting Screwed in the Digital Age": http://thebea.st/1pENnZC)
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Subject: Parks's math is wrong big time
I am surprised nobody wrote to you about Van Dyke Parks math since it was so obviously wrong. Nobody ever said musicians were good at math, but I hope he has a good business manager to manage his own money!
Looks like he has the Spotify rate too low by a factor of 1000x. He says Spotify pays 0.00065 CENTS per stream, while Spotify's disclosed rate is $0.006 to $0.0084, which is in DOLLARS not CENTS!
http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#wait-i-thought-spotify-paid-a-per-stream-rate
So he mixed up dollars and cents, which made the rate 100x too low, and then just adds an extra zero in too for good measure. Parks' rate of 0.00065 CENTS per stream is $0.0000065 per stream, so he is 1,000x lower than the actual rate. So Spotify is saying they have paid 6/10ths of a penny per stream, Parks is saying they pay about 65/10,000ths of a penny! His 100,000 streams works out to 65 cents total!
Now, at Spotify's disclosed rate, his 100,000 streams would pay about $600-840, not bad for one afternoon's work. Many musicians I know would be thrilled to make that much for an afternoon's work. Of course, that money gets split up among rights holders, but there are also more platforms than just Spotify to stream the song too.
("Van Dyke Parks on How Songwriters Are Getting Screwed in the Digital Age": http://thebea.st/1pENnZC)
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Re-David Carr's Article
From: Van Dyke Parks
To: Bob Lefsetz
Subject: Non Participant Observer
Hey Bob
I've seen more hair on a piece of bacon.
I trust it hasn't diminished yer appetite for sex (ref. to yer writ).
But seriously Bob: I hated to have a high-falootin' anthropological subject-heading, but yer screed demanded it.
It brings to mind the Pope and Birth Control--i.e.: if you don't play the game, you ought not make the rules.
Yet, I digress.
The central concerns in my Daily Beast yet ring true. They were offered up ahead of a news cycle about Copyright legislation reform in D.C. tomorrow (the issue, "streaming"). It's patently obvious my interest was in the common weal, and not just in pandering to simplistics of "free use".
Using a broad brush ("Luddite") with respect to my work compels me to invite you to test your technique in the joys of music sequencing, a requisite of film-composition, orchestration and arranging.
Such technologic savvy is adjunctive to my m.o. Have been, for decades. Music production requires survival skills beyond your imagining I suspect.
Broad brush journalism has made for easy reads well before non-Commies were painted as pinkos. So much for the tar and feather "Luddite" print.
As for making a living by providing music? I'm doing just fine thank you.
It galls me to admit I'm the highest paid arranger in town.
Punch Brothers, Jack Black, even Jack White would agree: my (by design) often anonymous work has helped me migrate my work to future generations that (I take no joy in admitting) are just simply beyond your reach in reportage.
I regret being the target of your vitriol Bob. Your assumptions about me are so entirely in error. I forgive you, but I've got your name right.
Seriously though,
Van Dyke Parks
https://www.google.com/search?site=&source=hp&ei=Dt2VU9ycFtimyAT-qIFw&q=bob+lefsetz+image&oq=&gs_l=mobile-gws-hp.1.0.41l3.0.0.0.2546.1.1.0.1.1.0.255.255.2-1.1.0....0...1c..45.mobile-gws-hp..0.1.21.3.MCBktLIIExg#facrc=_&imgrc=1MgUUIwwcuw_RM%253A%3Bundefined%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.atlasjams.com%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252F2012%252F08%252F7205978418_0056f5ce26_b_sm.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.atlasjams.com%252F2012%252F04%252Fmusic-industry-pundit-bob-lefsetz-says-i-quit%252F9867%252F%3B800%3B534
Twitter: @thevandykeparks
www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org
_________________________________________
Amen
Hugo Burnham
_________________________________________
Spot on.
Scott Cohen
_________________________________________
As you Americans say, RIGHT ON!
Paul Nash
_________________________________________
"As for Google giving you so much stuff for free. IT'S NOT FREE! You're paying by clicking on the ads, that's why Google EXISTS!"
...exactly! People paying with their most valuable asset, their time!
Marty Winsch
_________________________________________
Why so crabby?
Thomas Whitlock
_________________________________________
Hi Bob,
Thanks for being a voice of reason on Oberst's obvious lack of talent! He has almost no lyrical skill ... the meter is always off.
We look forward to avoiding his set at Newport again this year. It's too bad that Dawes continues to hitch their wagon to his horse ... I don't get it.
Jason Gollan
_________________________________________
Thank you for the Tough Love!
Evan Reidell
_________________________________________
Good stuff bob.
Cardinalmedia
_________________________________________
This is great...
Marc Gentinella
_________________________________________
Brave words Bob. Many deaf ears who want it to just be 1986, dammit!!!
Many of those complaining about "my lost music career" have a free YouTube, ReverbNation or Soundcloud page... With their free WordPress blog announcing their free Twitter feed which spreads the word on their free Instagram link.
They grab countless free audio effects plug ins, and free synthesizer apps, and free amp simulators, and record stuff on their computer which does twenty other tasks.
With their free Audacity audio recording, editing suite, and their choice of free video editors, they make videos with pristine audio. Then they send out the news from free gmail or yahoo accounts... With a link to the free Dropbox spot with the new live EP.
So with all this free stuff, which would cost about a quarter million dollars in 1984, they ask... Why don't I GET PAID like it's the 80s!!?
Andre Cholmondeley
_________________________________________
Oh, shut up all ready with your one-sided championing of sham services such as Spotify, where the new tech gets rich on the backs of shitty deals with artists. Services such as Spotify seem to feel it's their birthright to stream everything and everything, but wants the CREATORS OF THEIR CONTENT to accept a pittance while Spotify, Beats, etc gets rich. It's utter bullshit, Bob, no different than Amazon royally screwing Hachette due to it's place as "gatekeeper" allows them to do so.
Who wants to live in a crazy fucked up world where artists can't make a living, but autistic, soulless techno-geeks make billions and wind up dictating how we live and what we listen to? Fuck all that, Bob. There are benefits to being a Luddite. Buying a physical album, knowing it's always there to listen to on your own terms, without a third-party "service" -- there's really something beneficial to that. I expect to pay for music because I RESPECT WHAT THEY DO and feel they deserve to be rewarded for that. Somewhere along the line between sucking country music's dick and Spotify's dick you seem to have acquiesced on the notion of artists being fairly compensated for their work.
Daniel Myers
_________________________________________
Bravo, Bob. Tidbit from last week's Fortune 500 issue: profits up 37% for the Fortune 500 (first time profits exceeded $1 trillion) – but employment at those firms increased just 0.7%. Money's being made – jobs aren't. It does seem as if technology has finally displaced more jobs than it's creating. It is indeed a different world. Love your blogs. – Tony D'Amelio
_________________________________________
Love it Bob. Sick and tired of old farts who wringing. Thanks for saying it how it is.
A.J. Steel.
_________________________________________
Well said. You nailed it. So true about so many industries too.
Tom Hoffman, Jr.
_________________________________________
love this
Ben Carter
_________________________________________
Amen.
Dale Dubilowski
_________________________________________
I guess that science was correct all the time.........nature tends to weed out the good, the bad, and the strong. Unfortunately, in opposition to what the government tells us we are on a fast inflationary spiral of inflation. Yes, the 29 cent a pound tomatoes have risen to $2.00.
In 1959 when it was playing in Worcester, Massachusetts the tickets for the infamous Winter Dance Party featuring Buddy, Richie, Big Bopper and many many more started at $1.00 with the average at $2.00. At that time it was a pretty average price.... What the heck, I believe that a mono record album was still one dollar.
Only the strong survive... that includes telephones, clocks, computers and yes, printers.
Richard E. Jandrow
author of "What It Was Was Rockabilly"
_________________________________________
Just read this in my printerless and paperless office while listening to Nat King Cole.
In the hundreds of Facebook posts I've waded through in the past month, 2 or 3 have been about a song I should check out. I didn't click. If it's a smash like "Happy", I'll find out eventually if it's truly great.
Beyonce's music sucks.
Kevin Shaw
_________________________________________
No doubt you have to make great music that people want to hear within your genre. And the bigger the genre obviously the more money there is to be made. However as you said in one of your own articles streaming doesn't pay enough yet and the actual audio quality is poor, so there are definitely improvements that can be made that will help the artist as well as the consumer. Another issue is that the music economy mirrors the US economy, we have a serious income disparity problem. Only the 1% can really make money in music anymore, it wasn't always like this. Sure some of the people who complain have gotten old, lazy and have lost touch but that's only part of a much bigger story.
Mikael Johnston
_________________________________________
Dayum! That was awesome. Great article, Bob!
Aben Eubanks
_________________________________________
Hey Bob-
here's someone doing more than whining-
xo
Deborah Holland
http://www.sfweekly.com/2014-06-04/music/beats-apple-unsound-spotify/
_________________________________________
Re: Luddites. Great little essay from the '80s by Thomas Pynchon. It suggests that Luddites were more bothered by the fact that some men got rich without working than by modernity. I was reminded of it reading some of the comments by musicians complaining about techies.
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html
It's the oldest conflict in the modern world--those who labor versus those who can aggregate labor (or capital).
Phil Hood
_________________________________________
Wish I could shout this from the rooftops. Ha ha. Great work!
Bill Seipel
_________________________________________
Strong piece Bob!
Lavon Pagan
_________________________________________
Excellent!!
Robby Vee
_________________________________________
Hear hear!! Thank you, every time I question Conor Oberst's talent in the studio I'm shot down by calls of his genius!
Great article
Warren Huart
_________________________________________
I think you should send this email out every month. It's so true, and yet people still don't seem to get it! I spend half my life trying to explain this to people.
Harry Griffiths
_________________________________________
Rap/pop artists/producers NEVER bitch that they cannot make a buck. Just the opposite. They front that they are making a bunch of money, when oftentimes they arent.
R. Emmett McAuliffe
_________________________________________
I don't get why you keep making it seem like getting no income from songwriting won't matter. Although you do complain about the poor quality of songwriting, so it seems like incentivizing good songwriting would be good. I keep thinking about that Journey song that got 6.5 million plays on Pandora and the five songwriters had to split $126(!) among them. (Or something figures that.) Your answer to people is that they can make money in concerts and merch, but not songwriters.
Jeffrey Ainis
_________________________________________
Can I paraphrase? Everyone likes capitalism unless it's applied to them.
Don Lorimer
_________________________________________
AFuckingMen.
Scarlett Rabe
_________________________________________
"I don't hear Pharrell bitching, like Van Dyke Parks, that he can't make a buck. As for Van Dyke, have him play glockenspiel on Ringo's All Starr Band tour. Hell, the guarantee is pretty high!"
oh, snap.
Brian Ray
_________________________________________
Spot on!
Also, I'd point out that Napster was in it for the money. I was helping develop the billing client.
We offered the parasitic assholes, errrr, the record companies, 10 cents PER DOWNLOAD, 7 cents going to the "rights holders" (them) and 3 cents going to Napster. It was all going to go through Chase. (At the time that was good because they had a good deal and excellent infrastructure. Bad because it was a fucking BLACK BOX which made testing nearly impossible....) It didn't happen, but imagine if the Record Companies pulled their heads out of their asses and went with the Napster deal in the summer of 2001. Spotify probably never would have happened. WHY would anyone accept such a shit deal from Spotify? ).00007 cents per play? WTF?
Spotify exists because the companies fucked up and didn't do the napster deal, and then they were caught out - there was so much bad blood people shared music not only because people are prone to share things, but because it was a way to fuck the record companies, who were widely seen as thieves.
Any way, over time, there would have been downward pressure from users on price and greater demands from the rights holders to go from 7 to 7.5 cents, etc. So, imagine 5 cents a DL, napster gets 1, the companies get 4.
By that time, the people funding Napster would be worth BILLIONS from the eventual IPO, and so the verticalised extraction of wealth would be complete and that would mean Napster could be left to die or be bought. But: musicians and rights holders would have made STUPENDOUS amounts of money compared to the ass fucking they're getting from Spotify et al. 7 cents is literally two orders of magnitude more than the average Spotify payment...
So, yeah - Carr and Park's whining was baked into the cake back in July 2001.
HW
_________________________________________
Just a few points upon which I am qualified to address:
1) Shit Detectors: Kids are overwhelmed with content, activity, information in their lives. I am sending one off to college in the fall and just the flurry of activity associated with that process required vast levels of attention. Add schoolwork, a job, some fun—these kids are buried. They often catch whatever song or video their friends are buzzing about but they also often miss quite a bit as well. My daughter doesn't perceive her "shit detector" as any more evolved than her parents or grandparents. She says that her peers or more savvy accessing media via modern technology but no more decisive (possibly less so) in choosing favorite artists.
2) Paying $3K for flatscreen: keep in mind that China has been burying CRT tubes, batteries and all other techno-junk in landfills irresponsibly—they have been manufacturing with zero environmental restrictions (can't see the sky through the smog) and abusing the most basic labor regulations. Hence, your TVs are cheap. But it's all based on a false economy driven by Wal Mart shoppers in the US. Once the Chinese begin to clean their air, water and soil—and they already have started down that road—along with elevated shipping costs, prices of commodity items and origin of manufacture will change.
Micah Sheveloff
_________________________________________
You take what I feel is a somewhat gratuitous-and ill-informed-swipe at record stores writing, sarcastically, "While we're at it, let's bring back record stores."
Putting the stores into the dinosaur category is, I think, to consciously avoid actually going into one in 2014 to check out the dynamic therein. A lot of them have disappeared over the past two decades, and they ain't coming back. Quite a few, though, hung in there, some of them literally by the proverbial skin of their. you know. I've been working at an independent record store (Schoolkids Records, Raleigh NC - about to celebrate its 40th anniversary, in fact) for the past two years, and while no one here harbors any illusions about things returning to anything remotely resembling the Nineties Normal of the pre-download era goldrush, there is a definite sense here that everything old is becoming new again.
At our store we have tried to modernize within reason, of course. To that end we have free Wi-Fi so you can check your email, a big stuffed couch and a few chairs for lounging, a centrally-placed stage where we host live shows every early Friday and Saturday evening, and even a bar with 6 local drafts on tap (soft drinks and agua as well).
We're just trying to show people that they have an option they might not have realized has been here (at least in some cities) all along, right under their noses. A record store is - I risk sounding like the gone-native proselytizer here, but bear with me - way more than just a place to spend your money on music. If that was all a record store is, everyone would be happy just going to Best Buy. (Whoops, Best Buy has shifted all their music floor space to smartphones now. Never mind.) It's a gathering spot, a public square, a nexus of interactions and social transactions and even the occasional teenage mating dance. Some folks stick around for a couple of hours or more. Everyone is welcome, and everyone has a good time.
It's a beautiful thing Bob.
Viva le vinyl,
Fred Mills
Raleigh NC
_________________________________________
Its a good thing that at the end of the van Dyke parks article that they gave him a mini bio because otherwise I'd never have known who he is.
Peace and Love,
Dan Millen
--
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
--
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--
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-- powered by phpList, www.phplist.com --
To: Bob Lefsetz
Subject: Non Participant Observer
Hey Bob
I've seen more hair on a piece of bacon.
I trust it hasn't diminished yer appetite for sex (ref. to yer writ).
But seriously Bob: I hated to have a high-falootin' anthropological subject-heading, but yer screed demanded it.
It brings to mind the Pope and Birth Control--i.e.: if you don't play the game, you ought not make the rules.
Yet, I digress.
The central concerns in my Daily Beast yet ring true. They were offered up ahead of a news cycle about Copyright legislation reform in D.C. tomorrow (the issue, "streaming"). It's patently obvious my interest was in the common weal, and not just in pandering to simplistics of "free use".
Using a broad brush ("Luddite") with respect to my work compels me to invite you to test your technique in the joys of music sequencing, a requisite of film-composition, orchestration and arranging.
Such technologic savvy is adjunctive to my m.o. Have been, for decades. Music production requires survival skills beyond your imagining I suspect.
Broad brush journalism has made for easy reads well before non-Commies were painted as pinkos. So much for the tar and feather "Luddite" print.
As for making a living by providing music? I'm doing just fine thank you.
It galls me to admit I'm the highest paid arranger in town.
Punch Brothers, Jack Black, even Jack White would agree: my (by design) often anonymous work has helped me migrate my work to future generations that (I take no joy in admitting) are just simply beyond your reach in reportage.
I regret being the target of your vitriol Bob. Your assumptions about me are so entirely in error. I forgive you, but I've got your name right.
Seriously though,
Van Dyke Parks
https://www.google.com/search?site=&source=hp&ei=Dt2VU9ycFtimyAT-qIFw&q=bob+lefsetz+image&oq=&gs_l=mobile-gws-hp.1.0.41l3.0.0.0.2546.1.1.0.1.1.0.255.255.2-1.1.0....0...1c..45.mobile-gws-hp..0.1.21.3.MCBktLIIExg#facrc=_&imgrc=1MgUUIwwcuw_RM%253A%3Bundefined%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.atlasjams.com%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252F2012%252F08%252F7205978418_0056f5ce26_b_sm.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.atlasjams.com%252F2012%252F04%252Fmusic-industry-pundit-bob-lefsetz-says-i-quit%252F9867%252F%3B800%3B534
Twitter: @thevandykeparks
www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org
_________________________________________
Amen
Hugo Burnham
_________________________________________
Spot on.
Scott Cohen
_________________________________________
As you Americans say, RIGHT ON!
Paul Nash
_________________________________________
"As for Google giving you so much stuff for free. IT'S NOT FREE! You're paying by clicking on the ads, that's why Google EXISTS!"
...exactly! People paying with their most valuable asset, their time!
Marty Winsch
_________________________________________
Why so crabby?
Thomas Whitlock
_________________________________________
Hi Bob,
Thanks for being a voice of reason on Oberst's obvious lack of talent! He has almost no lyrical skill ... the meter is always off.
We look forward to avoiding his set at Newport again this year. It's too bad that Dawes continues to hitch their wagon to his horse ... I don't get it.
Jason Gollan
_________________________________________
Thank you for the Tough Love!
Evan Reidell
_________________________________________
Good stuff bob.
Cardinalmedia
_________________________________________
This is great...
Marc Gentinella
_________________________________________
Brave words Bob. Many deaf ears who want it to just be 1986, dammit!!!
Many of those complaining about "my lost music career" have a free YouTube, ReverbNation or Soundcloud page... With their free WordPress blog announcing their free Twitter feed which spreads the word on their free Instagram link.
They grab countless free audio effects plug ins, and free synthesizer apps, and free amp simulators, and record stuff on their computer which does twenty other tasks.
With their free Audacity audio recording, editing suite, and their choice of free video editors, they make videos with pristine audio. Then they send out the news from free gmail or yahoo accounts... With a link to the free Dropbox spot with the new live EP.
So with all this free stuff, which would cost about a quarter million dollars in 1984, they ask... Why don't I GET PAID like it's the 80s!!?
Andre Cholmondeley
_________________________________________
Oh, shut up all ready with your one-sided championing of sham services such as Spotify, where the new tech gets rich on the backs of shitty deals with artists. Services such as Spotify seem to feel it's their birthright to stream everything and everything, but wants the CREATORS OF THEIR CONTENT to accept a pittance while Spotify, Beats, etc gets rich. It's utter bullshit, Bob, no different than Amazon royally screwing Hachette due to it's place as "gatekeeper" allows them to do so.
Who wants to live in a crazy fucked up world where artists can't make a living, but autistic, soulless techno-geeks make billions and wind up dictating how we live and what we listen to? Fuck all that, Bob. There are benefits to being a Luddite. Buying a physical album, knowing it's always there to listen to on your own terms, without a third-party "service" -- there's really something beneficial to that. I expect to pay for music because I RESPECT WHAT THEY DO and feel they deserve to be rewarded for that. Somewhere along the line between sucking country music's dick and Spotify's dick you seem to have acquiesced on the notion of artists being fairly compensated for their work.
Daniel Myers
_________________________________________
Bravo, Bob. Tidbit from last week's Fortune 500 issue: profits up 37% for the Fortune 500 (first time profits exceeded $1 trillion) – but employment at those firms increased just 0.7%. Money's being made – jobs aren't. It does seem as if technology has finally displaced more jobs than it's creating. It is indeed a different world. Love your blogs. – Tony D'Amelio
_________________________________________
Love it Bob. Sick and tired of old farts who wringing. Thanks for saying it how it is.
A.J. Steel.
_________________________________________
Well said. You nailed it. So true about so many industries too.
Tom Hoffman, Jr.
_________________________________________
love this
Ben Carter
_________________________________________
Amen.
Dale Dubilowski
_________________________________________
I guess that science was correct all the time.........nature tends to weed out the good, the bad, and the strong. Unfortunately, in opposition to what the government tells us we are on a fast inflationary spiral of inflation. Yes, the 29 cent a pound tomatoes have risen to $2.00.
In 1959 when it was playing in Worcester, Massachusetts the tickets for the infamous Winter Dance Party featuring Buddy, Richie, Big Bopper and many many more started at $1.00 with the average at $2.00. At that time it was a pretty average price.... What the heck, I believe that a mono record album was still one dollar.
Only the strong survive... that includes telephones, clocks, computers and yes, printers.
Richard E. Jandrow
author of "What It Was Was Rockabilly"
_________________________________________
Just read this in my printerless and paperless office while listening to Nat King Cole.
In the hundreds of Facebook posts I've waded through in the past month, 2 or 3 have been about a song I should check out. I didn't click. If it's a smash like "Happy", I'll find out eventually if it's truly great.
Beyonce's music sucks.
Kevin Shaw
_________________________________________
No doubt you have to make great music that people want to hear within your genre. And the bigger the genre obviously the more money there is to be made. However as you said in one of your own articles streaming doesn't pay enough yet and the actual audio quality is poor, so there are definitely improvements that can be made that will help the artist as well as the consumer. Another issue is that the music economy mirrors the US economy, we have a serious income disparity problem. Only the 1% can really make money in music anymore, it wasn't always like this. Sure some of the people who complain have gotten old, lazy and have lost touch but that's only part of a much bigger story.
Mikael Johnston
_________________________________________
Dayum! That was awesome. Great article, Bob!
Aben Eubanks
_________________________________________
Hey Bob-
here's someone doing more than whining-
xo
Deborah Holland
http://www.sfweekly.com/2014-06-04/music/beats-apple-unsound-spotify/
_________________________________________
Re: Luddites. Great little essay from the '80s by Thomas Pynchon. It suggests that Luddites were more bothered by the fact that some men got rich without working than by modernity. I was reminded of it reading some of the comments by musicians complaining about techies.
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html
It's the oldest conflict in the modern world--those who labor versus those who can aggregate labor (or capital).
Phil Hood
_________________________________________
Wish I could shout this from the rooftops. Ha ha. Great work!
Bill Seipel
_________________________________________
Strong piece Bob!
Lavon Pagan
_________________________________________
Excellent!!
Robby Vee
_________________________________________
Hear hear!! Thank you, every time I question Conor Oberst's talent in the studio I'm shot down by calls of his genius!
Great article
Warren Huart
_________________________________________
I think you should send this email out every month. It's so true, and yet people still don't seem to get it! I spend half my life trying to explain this to people.
Harry Griffiths
_________________________________________
Rap/pop artists/producers NEVER bitch that they cannot make a buck. Just the opposite. They front that they are making a bunch of money, when oftentimes they arent.
R. Emmett McAuliffe
_________________________________________
I don't get why you keep making it seem like getting no income from songwriting won't matter. Although you do complain about the poor quality of songwriting, so it seems like incentivizing good songwriting would be good. I keep thinking about that Journey song that got 6.5 million plays on Pandora and the five songwriters had to split $126(!) among them. (Or something figures that.) Your answer to people is that they can make money in concerts and merch, but not songwriters.
Jeffrey Ainis
_________________________________________
Can I paraphrase? Everyone likes capitalism unless it's applied to them.
Don Lorimer
_________________________________________
AFuckingMen.
Scarlett Rabe
_________________________________________
"I don't hear Pharrell bitching, like Van Dyke Parks, that he can't make a buck. As for Van Dyke, have him play glockenspiel on Ringo's All Starr Band tour. Hell, the guarantee is pretty high!"
oh, snap.
Brian Ray
_________________________________________
Spot on!
Also, I'd point out that Napster was in it for the money. I was helping develop the billing client.
We offered the parasitic assholes, errrr, the record companies, 10 cents PER DOWNLOAD, 7 cents going to the "rights holders" (them) and 3 cents going to Napster. It was all going to go through Chase. (At the time that was good because they had a good deal and excellent infrastructure. Bad because it was a fucking BLACK BOX which made testing nearly impossible....) It didn't happen, but imagine if the Record Companies pulled their heads out of their asses and went with the Napster deal in the summer of 2001. Spotify probably never would have happened. WHY would anyone accept such a shit deal from Spotify? ).00007 cents per play? WTF?
Spotify exists because the companies fucked up and didn't do the napster deal, and then they were caught out - there was so much bad blood people shared music not only because people are prone to share things, but because it was a way to fuck the record companies, who were widely seen as thieves.
Any way, over time, there would have been downward pressure from users on price and greater demands from the rights holders to go from 7 to 7.5 cents, etc. So, imagine 5 cents a DL, napster gets 1, the companies get 4.
By that time, the people funding Napster would be worth BILLIONS from the eventual IPO, and so the verticalised extraction of wealth would be complete and that would mean Napster could be left to die or be bought. But: musicians and rights holders would have made STUPENDOUS amounts of money compared to the ass fucking they're getting from Spotify et al. 7 cents is literally two orders of magnitude more than the average Spotify payment...
So, yeah - Carr and Park's whining was baked into the cake back in July 2001.
HW
_________________________________________
Just a few points upon which I am qualified to address:
1) Shit Detectors: Kids are overwhelmed with content, activity, information in their lives. I am sending one off to college in the fall and just the flurry of activity associated with that process required vast levels of attention. Add schoolwork, a job, some fun—these kids are buried. They often catch whatever song or video their friends are buzzing about but they also often miss quite a bit as well. My daughter doesn't perceive her "shit detector" as any more evolved than her parents or grandparents. She says that her peers or more savvy accessing media via modern technology but no more decisive (possibly less so) in choosing favorite artists.
2) Paying $3K for flatscreen: keep in mind that China has been burying CRT tubes, batteries and all other techno-junk in landfills irresponsibly—they have been manufacturing with zero environmental restrictions (can't see the sky through the smog) and abusing the most basic labor regulations. Hence, your TVs are cheap. But it's all based on a false economy driven by Wal Mart shoppers in the US. Once the Chinese begin to clean their air, water and soil—and they already have started down that road—along with elevated shipping costs, prices of commodity items and origin of manufacture will change.
Micah Sheveloff
_________________________________________
You take what I feel is a somewhat gratuitous-and ill-informed-swipe at record stores writing, sarcastically, "While we're at it, let's bring back record stores."
Putting the stores into the dinosaur category is, I think, to consciously avoid actually going into one in 2014 to check out the dynamic therein. A lot of them have disappeared over the past two decades, and they ain't coming back. Quite a few, though, hung in there, some of them literally by the proverbial skin of their. you know. I've been working at an independent record store (Schoolkids Records, Raleigh NC - about to celebrate its 40th anniversary, in fact) for the past two years, and while no one here harbors any illusions about things returning to anything remotely resembling the Nineties Normal of the pre-download era goldrush, there is a definite sense here that everything old is becoming new again.
At our store we have tried to modernize within reason, of course. To that end we have free Wi-Fi so you can check your email, a big stuffed couch and a few chairs for lounging, a centrally-placed stage where we host live shows every early Friday and Saturday evening, and even a bar with 6 local drafts on tap (soft drinks and agua as well).
We're just trying to show people that they have an option they might not have realized has been here (at least in some cities) all along, right under their noses. A record store is - I risk sounding like the gone-native proselytizer here, but bear with me - way more than just a place to spend your money on music. If that was all a record store is, everyone would be happy just going to Best Buy. (Whoops, Best Buy has shifted all their music floor space to smartphones now. Never mind.) It's a gathering spot, a public square, a nexus of interactions and social transactions and even the occasional teenage mating dance. Some folks stick around for a couple of hours or more. Everyone is welcome, and everyone has a good time.
It's a beautiful thing Bob.
Viva le vinyl,
Fred Mills
Raleigh NC
_________________________________________
Its a good thing that at the end of the van Dyke parks article that they gave him a mini bio because otherwise I'd never have known who he is.
Peace and Love,
Dan Millen
--
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
--
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--
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David Carr's Article
"Free Music, at Least While It Lasts": http://nyti.ms/1rZGsMD
I'm sick of hearing the sky is falling. That the march to the future is leaving something valuable in its wake, something we will lament the passing of, as if the Internet has wiped out antibiotics and eyeglasses.
I don't hear anybody talking about the printers, the people whose business was wiped out by desktop publishing. And now, HP itself is in trouble, its cash cow printer business has stalled. Bitch all you want about overpriced cartridges, the truth is almost no one prints anymore. When last did you? Are you lamenting the loss of those jobs at the plant in Idaho? As for paper companies, they've gone upscale, they're making high end paper for personal notes, there was a whole story in the "Wall Street Journal"... But when it comes to music and books there's this fiction that the art forms will be wiped out, that something will be lost that can never be replaced in this new world.
Boofuckinghoo. So you made a ton of money writing songs in the last century. Talk to lawyers, whose business has now been farmed out to Asia, yup, that's where they do the big time legal research. As for corporations paying endless bills...no longer, they cap fees. And not only are applications down at law schools, the vaunted Thunderbird MBA program is in danger of going under.
So forget saving the whales, how about saving everybody's gig.
Funny about America, everybody hates socialism until it comes to their job. They like free enterprise when they're winning, a safety net when they're not, kinda like the banks, HA!
So we've got Van Dyke Parks lamenting in the "Daily Beast" that songwriting no longer pays. Well it didn't pay so much two hundred years ago. It may pay again in the future, maybe not. It's not like there's no way left to make bank in the music business. Everybody just bitches that someone moved their cheese.
This is the way it used to be... We listened to the radio. We bought very few albums, because we couldn't afford many. And we ended up knowing the songs by heart. So we went to hear our favorites live. And their live compensation paled in comparison to their recording income.
And now it's reversed, you've got to take out a mortgage to go to the show. But has this reduced ticket sales? NO! People keep complaining they can't get GOOD tickets! And demand is so great that StubHub build a business on reselling tickets, at greater than face price!
But Napster was supposed to kill music. Eliminate the economic incentive and no one will make it anymore. Well, the oldsters have given up, in most cases anyway, but the youngsters didn't get the memo. They keep uploading to YouTube and iTunes and Spotify, and I haven't heard ANYBODY lament that there's not enough music. As for good music, people go where the cash is, and that's pop. As for you album rock fans... Show me an album that should be heard by millions that has languished in the marketplace and I'll show you a liar, you, who are completely full of shit.
Kind of like that canard that today's youngsters have a short attention span. No, they've just got an incredible shit detector! They don't want to sit through mediocre, they don't even want to sit through good, they just want GREAT! Which is why music is now all about blockbusters... Believe you me Van Dyke Parks, write a hit and you'll be rolling in dough. Ringo not only hasn't had a hit in eons, most of his were written by somebody else. You used to make all that money because people had to buy the album to hear the one they wanted. So you lost your house and your swimming pool you said a cowrite with Ringo garner you, but the fans have been liberated! In other words, they don't want your crap, your dross, your fluff. And this is a good thing for everybody but YOU!
It's a brand new world. Things change. But there's still a demand for art. Which might be delivered differently, with different income streams. And all this bitching... I never get forwarded David Carr or Van Dyke Parks's articles by the hoi polloi, the regular people for those Greek-challenged, just the old, established acts and the wannabes. It's an endless echo chamber. The public and the outliers invent the future while the oldster/Luddites can't get over the past.
The past... When a spellchecker was an add-on you paid for, before it was integrated into Microsoft Word. Keep talking about that free economy David Carr, it's been going on forever. That's progress, more stuff for a cheaper price, welcome to the real world.
As for Google giving you so much stuff for free. IT'S NOT FREE! You're paying by clicking on the ads, that's why Google EXISTS!
But these artists live by their emotions, they can't understand economic forces. And, once again, everybody wants to win and not suffer. Van Dyke Parks... Do you want to pay 3k for your flat screen? That's what it might cost if manufactured in America. How about a couple of grand for your iPhone? No, everybody wants to reap, but no one wants to sow.
People go where the money is. Is that revolutionary?
So people have become tech developers.
But tech is more interesting than music. Yup, there I said it. Bring us a new Beatles, a new Bob Dylan, and we'll all pay attention.
Instead we had to listen for years about how great the positively mediocre Conor Oberst was. And everybody knows "Yellow Submarine," but most people don't know any Beyonce songs and play them one and they never need to hear it again. And then we've got the savant known as Pharrell, who keeps turning out hit after hit, "Happy" the latest iteration that was so successful, people got into trouble for doing a tribute video in the Middle East. I don't hear Pharrell bitching, like Van Dyke Parks, that he can't make a buck. As for Van Dyke, have him play glockenspiel on Ringo's All Starr Band tour. Hell, the guarantee is pretty high!
So what we've got here is intelligence inequality. People who didn't go to college, who don't know much about economics, never mind money, who can't stop complaining that they woke up and the world looked different.
But have people stopped eating, stopped going to the bathroom, stopped having sex?
No, the truth is more people are listening to more music than ever before. The fact that they may not be listening to yours, that you can't make enough money...did you ever think it was YOUR fault? That you refused to change, get with the new paradigm? It's like Count Basie bitching they don't play his music on Top Forty.
We don't live in a free economy. We live in a changing economy. And the winners in music are incredibly profitable, they're paid like sports stars or CEOs.
So if you look at your bank account and see a big fat zero, the problem isn't the Internet or free, it's YOU!
Get over yourself.
Enter the twenty first century.
Just because you could make it in the old one playing music, doesn't mean you're entitled to in the new. That's like saying the aforementioned printer should still have his job. And flights should only be booked by travel agents. And you have to be rich to make a record. And while we're at it, let's bring back record stores.
There are losses in every revolution. But the gains far outweigh what falls by the wayside.
Get off your high horse and talk to the audience. Or a hit act. They're both happy.
And you don't like it. You think the world should spin for your benefit.
It doesn't.
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I'm sick of hearing the sky is falling. That the march to the future is leaving something valuable in its wake, something we will lament the passing of, as if the Internet has wiped out antibiotics and eyeglasses.
I don't hear anybody talking about the printers, the people whose business was wiped out by desktop publishing. And now, HP itself is in trouble, its cash cow printer business has stalled. Bitch all you want about overpriced cartridges, the truth is almost no one prints anymore. When last did you? Are you lamenting the loss of those jobs at the plant in Idaho? As for paper companies, they've gone upscale, they're making high end paper for personal notes, there was a whole story in the "Wall Street Journal"... But when it comes to music and books there's this fiction that the art forms will be wiped out, that something will be lost that can never be replaced in this new world.
Boofuckinghoo. So you made a ton of money writing songs in the last century. Talk to lawyers, whose business has now been farmed out to Asia, yup, that's where they do the big time legal research. As for corporations paying endless bills...no longer, they cap fees. And not only are applications down at law schools, the vaunted Thunderbird MBA program is in danger of going under.
So forget saving the whales, how about saving everybody's gig.
Funny about America, everybody hates socialism until it comes to their job. They like free enterprise when they're winning, a safety net when they're not, kinda like the banks, HA!
So we've got Van Dyke Parks lamenting in the "Daily Beast" that songwriting no longer pays. Well it didn't pay so much two hundred years ago. It may pay again in the future, maybe not. It's not like there's no way left to make bank in the music business. Everybody just bitches that someone moved their cheese.
This is the way it used to be... We listened to the radio. We bought very few albums, because we couldn't afford many. And we ended up knowing the songs by heart. So we went to hear our favorites live. And their live compensation paled in comparison to their recording income.
And now it's reversed, you've got to take out a mortgage to go to the show. But has this reduced ticket sales? NO! People keep complaining they can't get GOOD tickets! And demand is so great that StubHub build a business on reselling tickets, at greater than face price!
But Napster was supposed to kill music. Eliminate the economic incentive and no one will make it anymore. Well, the oldsters have given up, in most cases anyway, but the youngsters didn't get the memo. They keep uploading to YouTube and iTunes and Spotify, and I haven't heard ANYBODY lament that there's not enough music. As for good music, people go where the cash is, and that's pop. As for you album rock fans... Show me an album that should be heard by millions that has languished in the marketplace and I'll show you a liar, you, who are completely full of shit.
Kind of like that canard that today's youngsters have a short attention span. No, they've just got an incredible shit detector! They don't want to sit through mediocre, they don't even want to sit through good, they just want GREAT! Which is why music is now all about blockbusters... Believe you me Van Dyke Parks, write a hit and you'll be rolling in dough. Ringo not only hasn't had a hit in eons, most of his were written by somebody else. You used to make all that money because people had to buy the album to hear the one they wanted. So you lost your house and your swimming pool you said a cowrite with Ringo garner you, but the fans have been liberated! In other words, they don't want your crap, your dross, your fluff. And this is a good thing for everybody but YOU!
It's a brand new world. Things change. But there's still a demand for art. Which might be delivered differently, with different income streams. And all this bitching... I never get forwarded David Carr or Van Dyke Parks's articles by the hoi polloi, the regular people for those Greek-challenged, just the old, established acts and the wannabes. It's an endless echo chamber. The public and the outliers invent the future while the oldster/Luddites can't get over the past.
The past... When a spellchecker was an add-on you paid for, before it was integrated into Microsoft Word. Keep talking about that free economy David Carr, it's been going on forever. That's progress, more stuff for a cheaper price, welcome to the real world.
As for Google giving you so much stuff for free. IT'S NOT FREE! You're paying by clicking on the ads, that's why Google EXISTS!
But these artists live by their emotions, they can't understand economic forces. And, once again, everybody wants to win and not suffer. Van Dyke Parks... Do you want to pay 3k for your flat screen? That's what it might cost if manufactured in America. How about a couple of grand for your iPhone? No, everybody wants to reap, but no one wants to sow.
People go where the money is. Is that revolutionary?
So people have become tech developers.
But tech is more interesting than music. Yup, there I said it. Bring us a new Beatles, a new Bob Dylan, and we'll all pay attention.
Instead we had to listen for years about how great the positively mediocre Conor Oberst was. And everybody knows "Yellow Submarine," but most people don't know any Beyonce songs and play them one and they never need to hear it again. And then we've got the savant known as Pharrell, who keeps turning out hit after hit, "Happy" the latest iteration that was so successful, people got into trouble for doing a tribute video in the Middle East. I don't hear Pharrell bitching, like Van Dyke Parks, that he can't make a buck. As for Van Dyke, have him play glockenspiel on Ringo's All Starr Band tour. Hell, the guarantee is pretty high!
So what we've got here is intelligence inequality. People who didn't go to college, who don't know much about economics, never mind money, who can't stop complaining that they woke up and the world looked different.
But have people stopped eating, stopped going to the bathroom, stopped having sex?
No, the truth is more people are listening to more music than ever before. The fact that they may not be listening to yours, that you can't make enough money...did you ever think it was YOUR fault? That you refused to change, get with the new paradigm? It's like Count Basie bitching they don't play his music on Top Forty.
We don't live in a free economy. We live in a changing economy. And the winners in music are incredibly profitable, they're paid like sports stars or CEOs.
So if you look at your bank account and see a big fat zero, the problem isn't the Internet or free, it's YOU!
Get over yourself.
Enter the twenty first century.
Just because you could make it in the old one playing music, doesn't mean you're entitled to in the new. That's like saying the aforementioned printer should still have his job. And flights should only be booked by travel agents. And you have to be rich to make a record. And while we're at it, let's bring back record stores.
There are losses in every revolution. But the gains far outweigh what falls by the wayside.
Get off your high horse and talk to the audience. Or a hit act. They're both happy.
And you don't like it. You think the world should spin for your benefit.
It doesn't.
--
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
--
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz
--
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1
If you do not want to receive any more LefsetzLetters, http://lefsetz.com/lists/?p=unsubscribe&uid=0eecea7b60b461717065cbde887c8e25
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