SANTANA

If I get one more e-mail from some over fifty Clive-worshipper telling me Carlos Santana can have another hit, I’m gonna PUKE!

God, it’s questionable whether ROB THOMAS, composer of "Smooth", can have another hit.

In the years since "Smooth" Top Forty has tightened up and gone down the totem pole in age such that someone over SIXTY has ABSOLUTELY NO CHANCE!

Oh, you can sell some albums via TV.  But not the tonnage of "Supernatural".  Hell, NO ONE can sell the tonnage of "Supernatural", and that was JUST MY POINT!

Or let’s go over to MTV.  See anybody old on that channel?  Better yet, when you tune in are they playing ANY music?  That network helped break Santana.  As for VH1, it’s featuring celebrity weight loss, and a has-been rapper’s dating life!

So you’ve got NO chance of any BIG TIME exposure on music television, where the active buyers tune in.

And Michelle Branch, who was featured on the SECOND Santana comeback track?  Her second album stiffed and she went country.  And by today’s standards, she’s having a TON of success, with the Wreckers, who haven’t even gone gold.  Then again, the country business is HEALTHY compared to the pop landscape.

In a world where the Dixie Chicks win Record Of The Year and almost nobody has heard the track, why do these oldsters believe Santana can have any ubiquity?

That’s just the point, there’s no MAINSTREAM anymore.

When Santana came back, the mainstream and the hip were still one.  This era started with MTV, but in this new century, there’s been a bifurcation.  There’s the evanescent pop crap, and then there’s underground touring bands.  It’s like the late sixties and early seventies ALL OVER AGAIN!

Then again, the hip acts…will THEY be able to sell tonnage?  Well, almost all of them can’t cross over to Top Forty radio.  And the other formats, like Alternative and Active Rock, are ghettos that don’t get you to gold.  And Hot AC has ALWAYS been a passive format.  God, just ask some of those acts that make it to number one there and don’t cross over.  THEY never hit platinum.

Are there exceptions?  Like Groban and Buble?

Yes.

But they weren’t sold with the Santana paradigm, it wasn’t about radio play.  It was about TV!  And TOURING!  Their breaking seems positively NEW SCHOOL compared to what happened with Santana.  And name a Groban or Buble hit…  You CAN’T, because there aren’t any, because they’re selling their whole oeuvre, the album, their so-called CATALOGUE!

So you can pair has-beens up with young ‘uns all day long, and have song doctors write or massage tunes for the radio.  But you probably won’t GET on the radio, and you won’t SELL multiplatinum.

This is the new reality.  You might think it sucks.  But when you e-mail me and tell me Santana can come back, because he had hits even a few years back, you indicate to me that you’re not paying attention, that you’ve got NO idea what is truly happening, that you can’t assess the LANDSCAPE!

STEALING

I don’t want to steal, but you won’t let me PAY!

There’s no iPod without the Rio.  Which the RIAA tried to sue off the shelf.

In other words, if you don’t test limits, if you play by the rules, the future never arrives.

To try and bring the CD model online is positively nuts.  And doesn’t work anyway.  If songs purchased at the iTMS represent less than 3% of the tracks on an iPod, you KNOW there’s a problem.

The iPod.  Everybody in the file world has MUCH MORE MUSIC THAN PREVIOUS GENERATIONS EVER HAD!  I went to college with way under 100 albums and I had the most discs in my DORM!  100 albums is approximately 1,000 tracks.  Kids today have 10,000 tracks in their iTunes libraries.  That’s what the Net allows, replication and acquisition for almost free.

The replication element, what could be better?  No pressing costs!  And distribution costs are borne by the consumer.  But the RIAA won’t let people PAY for the way they get music.  They want to sue them back to disc.  And statistics say it just doesn’t work.  File-trading constantly goes UP!

Well, John Kennedy now says he’s open to authorized P2P.

And Harvard has got a plan, a company called Noank Media.

Noank’s going to China first.  Licensing universities.  For the equivalent of $8 per student per semester.  I know, a de minimis amount, but it’s better than NOTHING!

Yup, almost NO ONE’S paying in China now.  The government can’t stop physical piracy.  But it and the university system know they’ve got a problem.  So, they made a deal with this company, they’re gonna PAY!  And Noank is gonna distribute the revenue to the labels and then say…let’s go into North America, the rest of the world, charge colleges $100 per student per semester, think of the MILLIONS you’ll make!

Yup, they’ve already spoken with the University of Maryland.  You see the universities want to pay here too, because of the LIABILITY!  If they just add a file-trading fee to the overall cost, they’re OFF THE HOOK!

As for the trader, he can take as much as he wants, and he’s no longer on the hook, no longer LIABLE!

As for the rights holders…  They’re gonna make so much money they won’t GIVE a shit about the CD.  And they’ll take it…  Has Doug Morris turned down a check recently?  Hell, WALL STREET will demand he take the check.

End result, more people have more music and the labels make more money.

The problem?  Well, I can’t THINK OF ONE!

This is what happens when a mass of people who know they’re right continue in their course of action, irrelevant of what those in power have to say.  We learned it in France during THEIR revolution.  We learned it in the sixties here, with the protests against Vietnam.

Shit, we rolled over and let Bush invade Iraq without putting up much of a fuss.  THAT was a good course of action.

Yup, silence.  In the face of reality.  That equals NO change.

When I say I steal, I’m evidencing SOCIAL PROTEST!  I suggest you steal too, it’s our only hope to get the RIAA to accept the new reality.  If more people have more music EVERYBODY wins.  Not only the labels, but the whole TOURING business!

When you trade at a low per month fee, you take more, you get turned on to more.  You’d think labels would like this, when they can’t seem to get any traction with the conventional gatekeepers.

OF COURSE rights holders should be paid.  But they should be paid reflecting the NEW reality, not the old.  And until they do, I’m going to continue to steal.  You know why?  Because I think music is the number one art form, and if more people have more of it at a lower price (can you say cell phone model?) our country will be better off for it.

If you disagree, then you probably think Santana can come back on Top Forty radio.