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Yeah Yeah Yeah. The Beatles Are On iTunes

admin — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 03:25:54 +0000

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

admin — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 02:38:39 +0000

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.

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

admin — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:01:35 +0000

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

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:29:05 +0000

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.

Girls Aloud’s “Long Hot Summer” and Beastie Boys “Body Movin’” are both arguably fairly weak on their own, but the mashup actually kind of rocks.

I enjoyed Devo’s “Whip It” in its day, but certainly never think of listening to it now. And Soulja Boy’s “Tell`em Crank That” isn’t likely to find its way on to my play list, but mash them up, and you have an altogether new experience. A sort of “gangstas smokin’ hillbilly crank” experience, to be specific.

Somehow Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” rescues Lady Gaga’s “Let’s Dance” from its feeble slapback-echo-driven 1986-ness by mixing it with some over-sequenced 1982-ness.

Reality meets reality: Kelly Clarkson’s “Walk Away” mashed with Girls Aloud’s “Love Machine” has a synergistic effect that works better than either tune on their own.

The one that EMI cease-and-desisted: Lady Gaga Vs. Nirvana (NirGaga)

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

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 04:52:35 +0000

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 make money on everything else. Here are a few interesting reads, if you’re an artist looking for some direction:

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails posted this informative piece in the NIN forums, in which he suggests using Amazon Fulfillment, TuneCore, TopSpin Media, and MySpace Music. More importantly though, he talks about giving music away to collect user info, because “music is free”, and it’s better to have the public getting it from you than from a Bittorrent.

Wired presented an interesting pair of articles a while back; in this one, David Byrne does a very thorough job of outlining six business models that range from what he calls the “360/Equity Deal” (the kind of deal Madonna makes) to the “Self-distribution Model”, including lots of real-world stats and some amusing interview streams with people like Brian Eno and Mac McCaughan from Merge Records along the way. In this one, Byrne and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke talk about the “real value of music”, and the results of Radiohead’s bold move to release In Rainbows as a “pay-what-you-will” digital download. In case you never heard the figures, roughly 40 percent of fans paid for it at an average of $6 each, netting the band nearly $3 million.

The links shared here are easy-to-find resources; in part 2 I’ll share some much more up-to-the-minute information about some of the specific approaches I’m applying to the projects I’m working on.

Microsoft & Music – A Remix We Don’t Need

admin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:55:15 +0000

You’re sitting at your computer listening to your favorite song, and suddenly your system freezes, an error box pops up saying that the “Bing Streaming Music Player” is not responding, and the music gets stuck in annoying loop. Which of course, you might not even notice, if you were playing Vanilla Ice’s ripoff of Under Pressure (we would’ve embedded those clips but ASSCAP is suing people for doing that lately). In any case, this is what I imagine happening regularly if Microsoft does in fact launch their streaming music service later this month. Remember how Microsoft’s first big media partner RealPlayer (which has actually won awards for how bad it is) used to not only try to spy on you obsessively, but would always crash while doing so? Remember the Zune launch and all its software problems? Personally, I don’t even use iTunes; I refuse to download a 72MB piece of software just so I can buy some music. I typically buy from Amazon, or if it’s an indy release, sites like CDBaby , DigStation, or Amie Street. And for streaming music, Pandora (in spite of their recent legal problems) is working just fine. Microsoft and music just don’t mix, in my opinion. Fortunately, there are plenty of other resources; here are eighteen to keep you busy. Where do you get most of your music?

Danger Mouse – Dark Night Of The Sales

admin — Sun, 17 May 2009 04:01:34 +0000

In the record industry’s bizarre ongoing pursuit of its own demise, the release of Dark Night Of The Soul (the new Danger Mouse collaboration with Sparklehorse) has been blocked by EMI. Not to worry though; for the time being NPR is streaming the whole thing, and it’s also pretty easy to find as a bittorrent. The release was originally to include photography by David Lynch, so Danger Mouse is cleverly selling the package as designed, except with a blank CD-R, and the notice “For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will“. The obvious implication being that you can download the music for free, buy the retail package, and burn it yourself. We’ll leave that up to you; the book and poster version with blank CD costs fifty bucks and they’re already taking orders prior to the May 29 release date. We’ve only given this a quick first spin, but it sounds promising. No standout singles or dance tracks; instead some well-crafted moodiness, with appearances by an eclectic variety of vocal talent including Suzanne Vega, Iggy Pop, Frank Black, Nina Persson of The Cardigans, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, and others. See the full track list below.

The songs on Dark Night of the Soul were written by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, but feature a different vocalist on each track.

Revenge (Flaming Lips)
Just War (Gruff Rhys of The Super Furry Animals)
Jaykub (Jason Lytle)
Little Girl (Julian Casablancas of The Strokes)
Angel’s Harp (Frank Black of The Pixies)
Pain (Iggy Pop)
Star Eyes (I Can’t Catch It) (David Lynch)
Everytime I’m With You (Jason Lytle)
Insane Lullaby (James Mercer of The Shins)
Daddy’s Gone (Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse and Nina Persson of The Cardigans)
The Man Who Played God (Suzanne Vega)
Grim Augury (Vic Chesnutt)
Dark Night Of The Soul (David Lynch)