Mailbag
Subject: IMS Business Reports
Hi Bob,
We had a delay on making the reports free, Monday was a bank holiday and then the team took the day to re-code the website section to make it free. It now is and you can direct your readers to this link for the download http://www.internationalmusicsummit.com/ibiza/business-reports
All the best.
Kind Regards,
Domenico Ruggeri
General Manager
International Music Summit
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Subject: The Richest Electronic DJs In The World 2013
Andre Bourgeois
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Now that Spotify has a play counter on the most popular songs for each artist, you can see that Daft Punk’s new song has more streams than JT’s “Suit & Tie”. Sales are an incomplete metric for “success”.
Alex Drizos
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From: Amanda Palmer
Re: Social Media Manipulationa few months ago a friend of mine was fired from one of the top online tech/buzz magazines. he’d been busting his ass there for a year, working long hours and cranking out incredibly well-written, deeply researched content about his interests and also turning in obligatory stories about gadgets and video games and so forth. one day they called him into the office and told him that while his writing was stellar, he wasn’t generating enough page views. they’d crunched the numbers. and he was fired on the spot.
a few weeks later, a writer for the same outlet wrote a particularly bizarre piece slamming me and my kickstarter. it was so weird and the criticism so unusually off-the-wall that i instinctively reached for the retweet button, to share it and laugh about the weirdness with my fans. right after i did, my recently-fired writer friend shot me a tweet, reminding me what we’d just learned. this article was eyeball-bait. by sharing the trash they’d written, i was keeping the trash writer in the job.
so i deleted the re-tweet.
since then, i just don’t link to the trolls or the journalists who are clearly out for a fight which brings page views….i don’t take the bait from sites who hoping that people (like me) with high-number followings will feel offended/defensive enough to spread the pain around to their own base and therefore alleviate some of the ego-pain that comes being slammed in the press (and i’ve had my fair share this year…it’s very tempting to share the outside criticism with your core audience.)
i also got into a really interesting conversation about this stuff with a journalist in new york the other night, and learned something i didn’t know.
“ad views” on sites like TMZ are considered worthless compared to ad views on an outlet like…i don’t know, new york magazine, let’s say….but NOT because people don’t click on the ads.
NOBODY EVER CLICKS ON THE ADS.
the ad placement is only about impressions and associations, and nobody wants their impression to be associated with TMZ, even if they’re happy to go there to look at plastic surgery disasters.
but when you buy online real estate to splash your new cadillac/apple gadget/name-a-product across the front of new york magazine online, you’re just…..buying a more credible spot on the planet. but nobody, ever, EVER, clicks on that cadillac ad. (that’s the theory, anyway.)
rock on bob
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Re: Rhinofy-Traffic
Dear Bob,
I really enjoyed your article on Traffic. They were one of, if not my favorite group of that period, and I agree with you, the second album was the definitive one, even though “Mr Fantasy” was great.
The combination of their great songs, and Winwood, Mason and Capadi’s vocals made the few albums they made real standouts of that period. I had already been a big fan of Winwood’s voice from the Spencer Davis group, but the combination of the three of them, and the songs they wrote, made that band unique.
As it turns out, I had the honor and the pleasure of producing “Alone Together” along with Dave. I had left what at the time seemed like a promising future at A&M records, but felt like I was in a rut with the things I was producing, and needed a change, so I went with my instincts, and joined my two close friends Bob Krasnow and Don Graham and started Blue Thumb Records. I remember very distinctly when we got a call from our friend Allen Parisier, who along with his two Partners, Sid Kaiser and the brilliant photographer Barry Feinstein, who had done most of the great album covers in that period from the George Harrison “All Things Must pass” to Janice Joplin’s “Pearl”, and of course “Alone Together” with the three-fold out cover, and the tie-dye vinyl record. They had just started a management company called “Group Three, and Dave was the first artist they signed. As it turns out, at least up to that time other than the Crusaders, Dave was the most important artist we had signed.
One of the first things I wondered about was why they came to us instead of one of the majors, though it occurred to me later that the majors probably passed because they didn’t realize how talented Dave Mason was. The minute I heard traffic’s debut album, and especially the follow up with Feelin Alright, “Crying To Be Heard, “You can All Join In”, I knew that Dave was a great songwriter; in fact probably better than Winwood, though Winwood’s voice was so great and distinctive that I think everyone was drawn to him first.
In thinking back, the making of “Alone Together” was one of the highlights of my career, and was responsible for giving me my first sense of confidence regarding my production chops.
Dave and I put our heads together, and came up with a combination of what was at that time this incredible pool of musicians in the LA area. You have to remember, the Mama’s and Papa’s had sounded the call with “California Dreamin” and talent from all over the the world had set their sites on the west coast. We picked Sunset Sound where I had been recording for about five years to record the tracks, with Bruce Botnick who had done all of the things I had produced up to that time, plus had recorded all of the “The Doors” albums among other things.
Studio 1 at Sunset was a magic room to record in. it just had that vibe, and it had a fantastic room echo chamber which made things sound so great when you heard the playback, that it inspired you to forge ahead. The players we chose, Jim Gordon, Jim Keltner, along with Jim Capaldi to share the drum seat on different tracks, Leon Russell, and John Simon, (who produced “The Band” albums) to play keyboards, and Carl Radle of ” Derek and the Dominos” fame to play bass. Man, what a band! The first track we cut was “Only You Know And I Know” and I think it blew every one’s mind on how it came out. At that point Dave I believe got very excited with the result’s, and put in a call To Jim Capaldi, and asked him to fly over from England to write some material with him, and of course also play drums.
Dave was so good at coming up with musical ideas. We cut the tracks with him playing 12 string rhythm guitar, then he put all of those incredible Electric guitar parts down afterwards. Everything you hear from wa-wa to solo’s are him. What a genius! If I’m not mistaken, Dave was one of the first, if not the first of the well known band members to do a solo album, though On second thought George Harrison was doing “All Things Must Pass” around the same time. After I finished Dave’s album,(and it may have been released already) I took a trip to England with Barry Feinstein and Allen Parisier and was present at George’s home when Barry did the photo shoot for Georges album, and the night before the shoot, George played us the album, and I kept wondering why “My Sweet Lord” sounded so familiar. I realized soon enough when he was sued by the publisher of “He’s So Fine.
One last point I want to make is, it turns out because “Alone Together” took longer than we had expected, Bruce Botnick had to bow out before the mixing of the album, as he was taking Paul Rothchilds place, to produce the Doors. I was in a real fix as I couldn’t think of someone I had the same confidence in as Bruce. Then a friend of mine, the producer Joe Wissert reminded me that our close friend Al Schmitt, who had hung up his engineering shoes to get into producing everyone from Sam Cook to the Jefferson Airplane had been one of the best engineers in the late fifties and early sixties. I asked him to mix Dave’s album, and he told me he hadn’t mixed an album in at least 10 or twelve years. I said Don’t worry man, it’s like riding a bike, you never forget. Well he mixed the shit out it, and after the experience came to the conclusion that he loved recording and mixing more than producing, and went on in his career to win 19 grammy awards, more than any other engineer or mixer.
Best,
Tommy LiPuma
