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Yeah Yeah Yeah. The Beatles Are On iTunes

[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 18, 2010 by admin in Music

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

The long and winding road to digital music sales for the Beatles began with one Apple, and ends with another.


The word is that the day before yesterday, after a decade long wait, the Beatles catalog finally became available on iTunes. Should we care? Well, Todd Martens of the LA Times has some reasons why we shouldn’t. Personally, you won’t see me rushing to download a bunch of Beatles songs for a price 30% higher than anything else on iTunes. But I’m not trying to persuade anyone one way or the other; I prefer you think for yourself. Except you may have noticed I’m playing a little game of trying to sprinkle Beatles song titles into what I’m saying, because I’ll make money if you follow the links and buy something. After a few sentences, you’d think I’d be getting better at it, but clearly I’m not. So I will stop now. But that silliness I just engaged in is an example of something you might want to ponder. Releasing this material on iTunes really means only one thing. Revenue. And for whom? Certainly not the two Beatles that many would agree were the cool ones. And certainly not Michael Jackson, who owned half of the publishing rights. No, in my opinion, this is the big lumbering thud of the money tree of the old music industry falling. It’s ironic to ponder that without the business model that devoured the Beatles’ profits as artists and fueled the decades of legal wrangling over them, the Beatles would probably not have even existed, let alone become the legend that they now are. And then, you wouldn’t be able to buy every song over and over and over in endless re-re-releases including absurdities like a $299 Apple-shaped USB stick. Which, for the record, is probably better than a $149 Box Set that doesn’t come with a box. It’s a little sad, and at the same time rather telling that the Beatles are always touted as sacred icons of popular music, and then immediately pimped out in a different (often less-than superb) format. At one point I had every one of their LP’s in my vinyl collection. That overlapped with owning cassettes of a few releases, and later various CD’s. I don’t think I’ll be buying any of these songs yet again on iTunes, but I want you to. Because then I can make money like everyone else who isn’t the original artist. And feel good knowing that the estates of three pop legends get some more loot to pay off the lawyers, and that the executives at both Apple companies can make more money. And when I make that money, I can support a new indy act that sells direct. Ironic, isn’t it?

I’m With The Brand: Musicians As Corporate Groupies

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on April 14, 2010 by admin in Music

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

You know it’s over when Iggy Pop Licenses “Lust For Life” to Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines

If you’re a working musician who understands anything at all about how the music industry works and want to earn a decent living, you’ll quit your job right now and start a record label. Oh wait. That doesn’t even work anymore. So what’s a penniless musical genius to do these days to make a living? Well, if you’re Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails – the two acts always cited when talking about making a fortune online with your music – you’re all set. But the fact is that these are pretty exceptional cases, and both acts had a major label deal before their success on line. In reality, there probably are a lot of acts out there that are happy with what they’re making if they self-produce, choose the right distribution channels, and remember that oft-forgotten secret ingredient, HAVING FANS. We’ve come a long way since the days when the typical artist/label arrangement meant the band would sell a couple million units, the label would make a mil, and the band would end up 50 grand in debt. If you think that’s an exaggeration, read this classic piece by Steve Albini (probably best known for producing Nirvana’s In Utero) that breaks it down in detail, or this quick Wikipedia entry about “recoupment”. To get an idea of how many songs an artist has to sell these days – and how – before they make US minimum wage, check out this handy infographic. So while it’s possible these days to make some kind of living as a musician, how does one make “superstar” money? Well not by being Lady Gaga selling tunes on Spotify, that’s for sure. No, much like any other art-meets-business activity, whoring yourself is probably the best solution. Devo was one of the early geniuses of this, building their brand as anti-corporate rebels while making fistfuls of money as savvy and willing team players with Warner. More recently, according to this Wall Street Journal piece, we’d have to tip the hat to Black Eyed Peas. Apparently will.i.am pitches his band-slash-brand to major sponsors like BlackBerry with PowerPoint presentations. Yes, it’s hard to tell the band from the brands these days. In fact, try this clever FastCompany quiz to see if you can tell the names of the bands from those who name the brands. Read the rest of this entry »

So It’s Canadian Pirates vs. The RIAA, eh?

[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 20, 2010 by admin in Music

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

Not content with suing dead people, old ladies who don’t own computers, and their own artists and distibution channels, the record industry is going after those archvillains of the arctic, CANADA.

In their never-ending quest for most absurd litigation to make its way into the apparently oblivious judicial system, the record industry is stepping it up a notch. No, it wasn’t enough to steal from their own artists and corrupt the legal system, or to sue a single woman for $80,000 per allegedly pirated song (oh wait, it got reduced to a mere $2,250!), or sue dead people, people who don’t even own computers, and the entire radio industry. No, now they’re taking on the country that – as we all know – is home to the most ruthless criminal networks of the Americas. You know, Canada. Who knew that aside from being a country full of pretty nice people whose greatest crime may be occasionaly finishing sentences with “eh?”, Canada is also a hotbed of profit-robbing music piracy? As far as I knew, the only threat that Canada had brought to the established music industry recently was a really awesome indy scene, but the RIAA sees things a little differently. Fortunately, this may be one of the last times that you’ll have to endure wingnuts like me ranting about this; dinosaur labels like EMI are soon likely to be laying about in massive heaps gasping for their last breaths like their metaphoric counterparts at the end of the Jurassic period, as they continue to blame their $2.7 billion losses on piracy rather than their failure to adapt to competition. I tend to get a little over-the-top when I discuss this topic; for a much more sane overview from an artist’s point of view, check out this New York Times piece by Damian Kulash Jr. of the band OK Go, in which he calmly describes how EMI’s disabling of the “embed” feature on YouTube has probably lost them exponentially more than what they made by “protecting” their property.

More Mashups: Girls Aloud Allowed, But EMI Goes GooGoo Over Gaga

[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 28, 2010 by admin in Music

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Will major labels ever figure out the equation of rights management versus free exposure?

We’ve touched on mashups before, but hadn’t realized how deeply they’d been cross-infected with mainstream pop culture, and hadn’t considered the daunting task they bring to record labels operating with a Jurassic attitude toward media distribution and rights management. First of all, let’s look at an example of how not to do a mashup, and then take a look at an example of why issuing takedowns to mashup artists is probably not all that productive. So how not to do a mashup? Fox TV’s Glee “got hip” and jumped on the mashup train by taking the Police song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and Gary Puckett’s “Young Girl”, and having one of the stars of the show sing them as a mashup. The result was predictably horrifying. The problem? The music was obviously licensed, played by studio session players, and badly dubbed over by the actor. The net result is comparable to watching your friend who majored in drama but ended up being an MBA singing “Halo” at karaoke night. If anyone should get sued in the world of mashups, it’s the producers of Glee. On the other end of the spectrum, we have situations where a label like EMI issues a takedown when the repurposing of their property would probably do them more benefit than harm. The piece just linked to explains why EMI issued a takedown for NirGaga, the Lady Gaga Vs. Nirvana mashup. What’s wrong with that scenario? For me, the mashup made me remember Nirvana, who I hadn’t thought of in ages, and exposed me to Lady Gaga, who I would otherwise not go out of my way to listen to. In either case, it’s doubtful that the free distribution of the mashup would dent EMI’s profits, and in spite of EMI’s takedown, the video and song remain “in the wild”, and fairly easy to find, as evident with the YouTube link above. Another example of reaching a new and unlikely end-user (i.e.: me) is a series of mashups of Girls Aloud, the British reality TV superstar girl band that’s made millions and that I’d bet a million that – like me – you’ve never heard of before. Below are examples of Girls Aloud and a few other mashups (Devo vs Souljaboy, Lady Gaga vs Eurythmics) that – at least to my ears – make the unlistenable fairly listenable. I doubt major media companies will ever get this property management vs exposure equation, and will continue throwing the baby out with the bath water until they’re bankrupt. If you want a quick roundup of some of last year’s best mashups, check out CultureBully’s list, or Best of Bootie 2009. Read the rest of this entry »

So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star – Part I

[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 29, 2009 by admin in Music

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

A few of the music industry’s most successful artists share how.


Are you sure you wanna
go down this road?

Music won’t leave me alone. Not that I mind; I’ve been in love with music since I was about four, when my mom managed a music store and would bring home demo models of pianos and dual-keyboard Hammonds with beatboxes built into them. As a teen, I had an Arp Axxe synthesizer before most people knew what a synthesizer was. In the early 80′s I had a good-looking but tragically Human League-like band, and in 1989 was convinced by a very savvy manager to turn down a major label deal. At that point I put music on the backburner as a career, doing occasional soundtrack drivel (well, maybe my stuff’s not that bad) through the nineties, until 2005 when I came close  to jumping into the fray of on-line music distribution by expanding my web business. Recently, I’ve been hired to research and plan some marketing for a couple of artists (including Ann Arbor’s Khalid Hanifi), and among other things, was blown away by this 2007 article (which I somehow missed at the time) in which Columbia Records’ Rick Rubin actually says out loud that the traditional music business model is toast. More interestingly though, I’ve been impressed by the wealth of information shared by artists who’ve been very successful with the new business model, much of which can be distilled down to one simple idea: forget unit sales and Read the rest of this entry »

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