Razors Vs. Blades

I saw a very interesting post by John Mellencamp the other day in Huffington Post (of all places—who knew he was so literate).  He made some very articulate points on the music biz. To both paraphrase and use a well-worn marketing metaphor, he suggested that, back in the day, touring was the razor and ‘records’ were the blades. Musicians toured in order to support a record. That was how we talked about it. We supported the record. You didn’t worry so much about making money on the tour because the record was the thing that brought home the bacon.

However, today, he posited that this equation has become reversed; it is now it’s the music which is almost the give-away, which tries to lure customers to the  tours (and ancillary merchandising deals) where the real money is made.

Why the shift? Several reasons:

1. Money (duh). For quite some time, the artist’s share of CD revenues has been shrinking, not to mention the fact that sales of CDs themselves are falling off a cliff. Since people can and do get music for free, Free, FREE? They do, Do, DO! So artists have to get the money the only places they can… touring, merchandising, placement in TV and movies, and of course, the dreaded ‘corporate deals’. So CDs have become less relevant.

2. Also, back in the day, the record was your art product… the thing that, in the end, mattered. If you look through Rolling Stone or whatever, you’d see bands going into the studio for weeks or months to create their latest ‘work’ with the assumption that they were creating something that was their body of work. Sure the gigs were great, but it was that permanent disc that was the thing. That’s why they called it a record. The record was, for a pop band, what an Opus # was to a classical composer. Artists agonized over which songs to put on an album and the order of tunes, all to create a statement. The album was the thing for which the artist would be remembered.

3. Nowadays, because of the internet and the ipod and whatever, music has reverted back to being largely a singles-driven market. All hail the new age of the single! So now what matters is individual songs. People download songs, they buy songs, they listen to songs. This is not just a packaging shift, but also an aesthetic shift of tectonic proportion.

For dinosaurs such as meself, who were raised on Sergeant Pepper, Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, various Frank Zappa epics and so on, this is hard cheese, indeed. I’ve spent weeks working on track ordering for each record I’ve done—not just choosing from a grab bag of tracks to include, but also composing new songs, or changing existing songs to fit the theme of the album. Each album is meant to have an arc and create a beginning to end experience; not anything as unified as an opera perhaps, but there is a definite flow and balance I’ve tried to design into each. In short, I don’t see each of my albums as ‘ten songs’, but rather, like a folder of pieces by Duke or Chopin which, though each very different, all have some organic reason to be published together as a single ‘Opus’.

Pretentious? If you say so. But until recently, albums mattered. And I would suggest that it isn’t that this aesthetic has been proved false, but that the technology has changed and created the illusion that this aesthetic no longer matters. So often, it’s the technology or the dough-re-mi that fools us into artificial choices when it comes to art. Vinyl LPs were 40 minutes, so bands started making 40 minute ‘epics’. CDs came out and bands started creating 65 minutes of music because… well because that’s how much we can squeeze on there! Maybe if they’d stopped at 40 minutes, more CDs would have been worth getting! Now singles are all the rage and so 3 minute ditties are back. Whatever.

Great music will always be made in all sizes, but what concerns me is that, if we put all the focus on ‘the shows’ and make ‘the song’ or ‘the album’ only about getting butts into the auditorium, then we’re reducing music to a mere marketing tool. I love playing out, but I don’t write the songs with that goal in mind. In other words, when we make ‘the music’ the razor and ‘the show’ the blades, we may be moving further and further away from ‘the song’ as art and towards ‘the song’ as simply a marketing tool.

Mastering 101

The new record, Beautiful Sounds has now been passed off to the mastering guy Ed. (RFICD.com). Who has passed it back to me. We’re doing a lot of passing.

Mastering is an excruciating process. Even at the best of times it is completely draining.

What you do is sit in a very dark and quiet room on a very nice couch, behind a guy sitting at a desk listening to your stuff very intently. For eight hours. Over and over and over and over. Every once in a great while he may say ‘hmmmm’ or perhaps. ‘Ahhhh’. It’s like your nightmare of a visit to that inscrutable therapist who’s only words are ever, ‘I see our time is up. See you Thursday.’

What is the purpose of all this? Why to create a ‘master’! Duh!

And what is a master? Back in the day, it was an aluminum ‘record’. It was cut using a lathe that looked suspiciously like a record player and the mastering engineer (ME) ran the mixed songs through it trying to keep the signal balanced so that nothing was too strong as to make the needle fly off the record!

Nowadays, a master is basically just a CD. It’s a little nicer than an ordinary CD; it’s created a bit more carefully so that there are no errors, but the role of the ME has changed. It’s no longer simply making something from which copies can be made (we all know that copying data is no longer a problem for even nine year olds!). What makes it worth having Ed give me ‘the treatment’ all day is that mastering has become the sonic magic that binds 10 songs together into a cohesive thing we call an album. A good mastering engineer takes your songs and glues them together. When you listen to the finished product, each song seems louder and clearer. But the real ‘magic’ is that each song flows to the next and sounds like it belongs on the same album as the others.

A Mastering Engineer uses EQ and lots of ‘levelling’ equipment to achieve this, but the real secret weapon is the room itself. It’s usually the best sounding room you’ve ever been in.

Most every room you and I pass through each day is a sonic sewer; filled with various surfaces and carpets that reverberate and dampen and accentuate various frequencies resulting in a totally uneven frequency response. But the ME lives in a room that is almost perfect. No frequency is more important than any other. It’s a joy to listen to almost any sound in such a room. So when he listens to your music, he hears what really is. Nothing more and nothing less. His seemingly small tweaks are done against a totally neutral background. So when he cuts merely 1 dB from 100hz or add .5 db to 7,200hz you really hear it.

The funny thing is that these small changes are what make music translate. Listen to any really well mixed and mastered record you’ll realise that it sounds good on virtually any set of transducers.

Bigazz subwoofers
Boomboxes
Hi-fi Stereos
iPods
Two Campbell’s Soup Cans and Twine

Doesn’t matter. Really well mixed and mastered records seem to have the magical ability to fit properly into every listening system. More than anything else, It is the ME’s art to make this ‘translatability’ happen.

Will Anyone Under Forty Pay For Music?

The thing I am learning, much to my cost, is that this business we call ‘show’ is flipped on it’s head. See it used to be that one toured in order to sell content. More and more now one basically gives the content away in order to get people to either:

a) Go to shows

b) Purchase swag

c) Promote a corporate tie-in

This is a bargain with the devil for any number of reasons, which I’ll delve into another time, but for now the question is ‘how did we get here?’. And the answer is simple: we got pimped.

Remember when ATM machines first hit? They were free, Free, FREE! Not so free anymore are they? We got used to them and then, like any good dealer, the banks then started charging. Good plan.

Now Google came along and gave us something very cool and very innocuous. They got us used to searching for stuff for free. And since we could search for stuff for free, we tended to seek out free solutions. And so content providers (and that means me) started giving away stuff just for the thrill of having ‘eyeballs’. But somewhere along the way, no one figured out how to stop the ‘free sample’ part. Everyone just assumed that, at some point, someone would figure out how to ‘monetize’ all the eyeballs.

They didn’t. All they did was train y’all to expect everything on the web to be free. And it’s been going on long enough that there is now a whole generation of people that will not tolerate content unless it’s free.

The youth of America (and by that I mean anyone under 35) now have a complete philosophical argument to support their ideas. They will give you long dissertations on why content must be free (as if it were an enslaved animal that deserves to have it’s cage opened.) See? ‘Free’ and ‘free’. ‘Freedom!’ and ‘No Charge!’ have become synonymous for these middle class twerps.

Check it out! Ask people over 40 how they feel about Piracy. They will almost unanimously rail against it. Now ask people under 40. They will almost unanimously shrug their shoulders.

So, if everyone expects the content to be ‘free’, then how are artists (..er… ‘content providers’) supposed to make a living? Concerts? Swag? Corporate Tie-Ins? Government Grants? None of these options speak to me as a true capitalist. What I want is simple: to be paid for my labour. The question is, ‘How?’

Closing Pandora’s Box?

First of all, sorry, sorry, sorry for so many things recently. Where to begin?

–No the old blog posts are still not ‘back’.

–No you still can’t post. You still have to e-mail.

–Yes, I am working on all this stuff. It may seem like nothing’s happening, but really, a lot of stuff is happening.

Today’s little ditty is in regards to an episode last Friday (only 4 days behind schedule? Wow, I’m getting faster by the minute!).

A couple of you started telling me that you had noticed that your Pandora stations were no longer ‘suggesting’ my stuff in the course of playing stations starring artists that should eventually be flagged as similar to what I do… eg. Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel or perhaps Talking Heads. But… nada… nichts… bupkus. Dadai.

So I contacted Pandora and was told by one person that they could no longer find me in their database. (?!?) I informed the nice young lady that I was playing the JC Harris Station while we were talking. Now how about that? So I was transferred to someone else who said they’d get back to me.

Next day I received an e-mail from another nice person in ‘submissions’ (I bet she’s a fun date) who informed me that I had, apparently ‘fallen off their system’. I should ask my fans to send e-mails to submissions@pandora.com and kick the appropriate person into action. I had no idea what she was on about, but I shouted out to you guys and you, as always, responded. (Thanks!)

By yesterday (Monday), I got an official reply from Pandora stating that I was indeed dropped from their system. No specific reason was given but the nice person said two very interesting things:

1. They reserve the right to limit the indie artists they list by genre. IOW: if they feel they have enough of one flavour of music, they see no need to add more–regardless of quality or fan base.

2. They are definitely favouring artists which are distributed through their own indie record distribution system. IOW: if I wish to be listed on Pandora now, it would behoove me to let their sister company handle my records.

I guess I’d be outraged by this and screaming for Perry Mason or whoever (it suddenly dawns on me that any references I make to famous crusading attorney probably dates me. When was the last time you thought of -any- lawyer as being ‘heroic’?) but here’s the sad truth about Pandora… It’s a lot of fun, but it don’t make me no money. The fact is that, in the year or so I’ve been tracking referrals from Pandora, it probably drove less than $200 in sales my way… CDs or singles. So it’s really not much skin off my nose that this has happened.

To my mind, however, there is a bigger question regarding Pandora, Last.FM and all other free web radio stations… Can they make money? Can they make me money? See, the thing I keep trying to get across is that, there’s no way I can eat if I can’t monetise this business we call show. It’s all very well that one gets ‘free’ web radio, but unless I can find a way to get paid for my involvement? Well, let’s just say I already have enough expensive hobbies. There has to be something in it for me.

Pandora is in trouble. What they are finding is the same thing I found out. People listen, but don’t buy. They don’t click through to buy anybody’s records. So record companies and Amazon aren’t happy. Pandora is waking up to the idea that their whole raison d’etre may just be based on a flawed premise: namely that people will listen, then buy. Whoops. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll just listen. And then go do something else.

So they’re already moving towards more ads. In fact, they will soon be introducing audio ads between songs. Also, they need to push the sales of the records their company is distributing, even if it means pushing out guys like me. So, although I find their conduct in my case reprehensible, I understand… in desperate times people do crappy things to survive.

To me, the larger question is going to be, is there any way to incentivize y’all to pay artists like me for music? Are you so used to ‘free, Free, FREE!’ (including all you dread pirates) that it’s just not possible to find a ‘sales model’ that works?

Stay tuned!

Piracy: 9000 vs. 138 Part I

OK, this is my first post with the new blog system, so forgive any glitches in the UI… it’s a work in progress.

The Rant Du Jour concerns a couple of stats. The first is that I sold 138 copies of Home in December 2008. Not great, but OK, the economy is in the tank, the music biz is in the tank, yada, yada, yada.

Then I started hearing about the Big PirateBay Trial. And if you’re over 30 and don’t know what ‘PirateBay’ is or what it’s all about, just ‘do the google’, mate.  In 25 words or less, PirateBay is a database of bittorrent files. And if you don’t know what torrent files are then you really can’t consider yourself tech savvy–get your kids to give you an education. OK, it’s sort of like Napster and Kazaa except that can’t be shut down. File sharing made easy. Perfect for handing copies of Iron Man to like, 100,000 of your closest friends free, Free, FREE!

Moving on (one reason my rants go on, I’m told is that the setup takes foooor—ehver.)

Every day I get an e-newsletter from my performing rights organisation, ASCAP (which collects royalties for me God love ‘em.) And pretty much every day they will have one or more articles about

• The death of the music biz.
• The horrors of piracy.

I just couldn’t believe that it was as bad as all that for little guys like me. Britney Spears? Sure, she’s gonna get pirated big time. All the movies? Yep. Even ‘B’ listers, like, say The Allman Bros., OK. But I figured that all us nobodies wouldn’t be affected at all.

So, for kicks I went to The Pirate Bay (sorry, get the link on yer own–I ain’t contributing to your delinquency you’ll have to make at least 10 more clicks to get there.) and started typing in stuff.

• Rosemary Clooney
• Tony Orlando And Dawn
• Gustav Mahler
• The Buoys
• Frank Zappa
• Lothar And The Hand People

And then, just because I’m that much of a narcissist…

• JC Harris

WTF? Every one of these come up with handy links and a big fat ‘Download’ button to get instant MP3s. Oh the range of feelings. Astonishment that people actually take the time to make high quality rips of all this stuff. Mild amusement that someone took the time to rip ‘me’. And then the righteous indignation struck.

Maybe I’se bein’ ripped off, boss. But how to know?

Now, Bittorrent relies on what are called ‘trackers’. These are like ‘cookies’ in that they enable the program to figure out who has the files you are looking to <ahem> ‘share’. A number of very clever guys have figured out how to go out to the internet and determine how many times a file has been downloaded and from where. So, I donned my black hat and spent a day figuring out how to track the popularity of various downloads. I’ll cut to the chase. Someone downloaded ‘Home’ 9,073 times in December of 2008.

9073 / 138

That’s a 65 to 1 ratio of ‘share’ vs. ‘buy’. Put another way, if I got even one dollar from those ‘sharers’, it would almost equal the $$$ I got from the 138 loyal fans. But of course, I get nothing.

So, now I get why everyone is so pissed off. And I’m converted. Now I’m pissed off.

Now every business has a certain amount of loss that has to be built into the price. Business people understand this. In retail it’s generally assumed that up to 10-15% of product is going to shoplifters. In food, maybe 5% gets spoiled. OK, that you can deal with. But what business can tolerate a chronic 6,500% loss rate?