ONE DIRECTION

Biggest band in the world, even though you might have never heard their music.

Proving that not only does cute which appeals to pre-teens rule, so does social media.

One Direction is the first global social media act. It lives online. They care not a whit if you like them. The music is important, but it’s the glue that holds the enterprise together, not the sole thing. Hell, they’ve barely had any hits!

Sure, they might have gotten a boost from a TV show, but that doesn’t explain selling out stadia in far-flung territories.

Welcome to the new world.

SPOTIFY

Kills piracy dead.

That was Daniel Ek’s mission.

Turns out he was right.

Piracy sank from 20% by under 30’s to 4%.

“Music Piracy Has Been ‘Virtually Eliminated’ In Norway”

Turns out people don’t want free music as much as convenience!

This is the same mantra Steve Jobs rode to success. Keep it simple stupid, and make it easy to use and people will pay a fortune for well-designed products. Remember the people who said the iPod would fail because it was too expensive? That the iPhone was doomed?

Well, the iPod helped make Apple the world’s most valuable company.

And the iPhone just exceeded Android’s market share in America:

“Apple iOS leads US OS share for the first time since Q4 2012”

Furthermore, Apple reaps almost all the profits in smartphone sales.

Proving, once again, hardware is important but software is king. That’s right, Samsung, yesterday’s news, sank by not owning its own software. He who writes the songs wins. (Which is why reality TV stars rarely succeed, they don’t write their own songs.)

THE WHOLE ENCHILADA

Even Steely Dan goes on the road.

If you can make it just writing, or writing and recording, more power to you. We’ve just about hit bottom, recording revenues are going up.

But if you want to get excited, watch Daniel Glass in this PBS clip,

“Can the music industry survive the streaming revolution?”
He starts at 6:41.

Daniel talks about the power of Spotify, getting on their playlist and the jump in listeners.

Isn’t this what you want?

And as a result ticket sales went through the roof.

The game remains the same. It’s about exposure, and then leveraging that exposure for revenue. If you’re good, and you get on a top list…the world’s your oyster, you can make more money in music than ever before. There are more revenue streams, you’re not just limited to recordings and low-priced tickets.

Ignore what comes before in this clip. Rosanne Cash carping about payments, never mind Aloe Blacc and the guy in Black 47. Do not confuse Pandora with Spotify, a whole different service that pays a different rate.

As far as PBS goes, it’s so busy giving both sides it echoes the vaccination debate. There aren’t always two sides to every issue, but the press believes it must air both to look fair, muddying the water.

The truth is it doesn’t matter what PBS says. It doesn’t matter what the “New Yorker” says.

The music business is run by consumers. You amass them and they rain down revenue. Anybody who gets in the way of this gravy train is doing it to their detriment.

Having said all this, the truth is fewer acts are going to make more money.

Sorry if you’re in the niche. You have the ability to reach people, but the truth is you don’t, they’re overwhelmed with incoming and they don’t care.

So there you have the modern music business. Burgeoning for the top acts while everybody below keeps bitching and saying it’s bad.

You’ve got to do everything to win today. Just like a household can’t survive on a single income.

Why is it everything can change but the music business?

Then again, everybody hates change, including musicians.

RECORD OF THE YEAR

Other than “Shake It Off” and maybe “All About That Bass,” most people haven’t heard the nominees.

That’s right, just because you live for music, that does not mean everybody else does.

Music is so incomprehensible, so many mediocre acts are looking for attention, that most people ignore it.

MTV rescued the music business from the doldrums because it chose very few songs and promoted them heavily, it was action central.

Today there’s no MTV.

And never forget, MTV eclipsed radio, which was broken. Top Forty ended up playing the songs that MTV promoted. And as a result Top Forty experienced a renaissance, eclipsing classic rock.

But many acts were excluded.

We need this order from chaos today.