THE LABEL Used to be you wanted to work at the label, Warner Brothers/Sony/EMI, et al. Now you want to work at Google, Amazon, Apple or Facebook. INITIAL GIG/RETAIL It was nearly impossible to get a job at the record store. You had to know someone and know so much. Now you want to work […]

It wasn’t about Napster. Otherwise when the music industry succeeded in shutting the service down CD sales would have burgeoned and happiness would have reigned. The customers just went elsewhere. An endless game of Whac-A-Mole ensued. Suddenly there was KaZaA. And eventually BitTorrent and the Pirate Bay. Turns out consumers didn’t want Napster, they wanted […]

Van Halen honed its chops in the clubs. At the edge of Boys Town was a cavernous barn known as the Starwood. Booking no-name hard rock acts, it’s from there that Van Halen emanated. Back when you had to come to L.A. to make it, when you started out live as opposed to online, when […]

The company has lost control of the narrative. That’s what we see online more and more, entities that speak to their users in the new world, but have no presence in the old. Spotify users are not complaining, content creators are. Spotify is no different from Barack Obama, who let the media define him, to […]