I came to hear “I Took A Pill In Ibiza,” but I got so much more! It was the most meaningful gig in memory, I couldn’t play the radio on the way home, I was numb, I was basking in the experience.

I didn’t expect this, when we spoke in the green room…he wasn’t completely forthcoming, he was answering my questions but hesitantly, with a smile on his face, I thought this was somewhat contemptuous, but it turns out that’s his speaking style, and when he was interviewed I was positively enraptured!

It was like those old Q&A’s in “Rolling Stone,” back when the musicians had something to say, Mike Posner has something to say, which is so strange, because so many of today’s stars are just front people for middle-aged men, but Posner not only wrote his own hits, he’s got a brain, he thought about it all, sitting there you’d be inspired to be a musician, techies build edifices for money, artists explore the mind.

Mike’s manager said Mike liked to work. He’s opening for Selena Gomez and Nick Jonas and he had a free night and…

Mike said that he takes his band to gigs so they can learn. Springsteen taught him you don’t need the trappings, the music can be enough, and Guns N’ Roses taught him about energy, he used to walk on stage slowly and build from there, now he runs on stage adrenalized, on a tear. As for maintaining the energy, he’s only got forty minutes!

So, he’s been doing it since he was eight, he’s twenty eight now. Had some hits and then the label wouldn’t put out his second record and he sold the songs to others and suddenly he was a has-been. To be on the wrong end of stardom at such a young age, it hurts, because Posner does it for the approval, he’s not proud of it, but it’s true, and one negative review eclipses twenty good ones. Yes, he checks the socials. He does a poem in his show, he loves reading how it changes attendees’ lives, but there’s always one writer who says it ruined a good evening. Huh?

Podcasts give him inspiration. Especially two Tim Ferriss episodes. One featuring a woman whose name I don’t remember, she said you can only be the best you, which means you have to pursue your own artistic vision, not someone else’s, because only you can give this gift to the world. Made sense to me, inspired me.

And when he was down and out he went to Burning Man. He debated whether to bring his guitar, ultimately decided to, but didn’t want to brag in a society based on pure identity. But one day he went off to play songs for people, it’s his gift, what he’s got to give. And people were stunned, they told him to keep at it, he had a chance, and this was already after multiple hits!

Mike laughed.

Then again, he’s not recognizable.

How did he get so smart?

Turns out he graduated from Duke, stayed in school and finished his degree after getting a record deal, a great antidote to the tech wankers who say education is irrelevant. It might be, but finishing things is not, life is about character.

And the presentation started off with Mike at the piano playing “Buried In Detroit,” from his 2016 album, “At Night, Alone.” And he said the album format was irrelevant, a construct for a dead world. You can only surpass the limits if you throw off aged constrictions.

And then came the interview segment. And, once you got used to his rhythm, the way he hesitates before he speaks, you hang on every word. He talks about his parents, his teachers, stuff he’s not proud of and stuff he is.

And then he strung on his guitar once again and with a keyboard player gave a full concert, kept adding numbers, because he was having such a good time. Two highlights were a song about Miley Cyrus and “Be As You Are.”

The Miley Cyrus song is not on the new album. It’s a war story, about going overseas and getting your legs blown off and…everyone’s either humming “Party In The U.S.A.” or singing it or it’s playing in the background and by time the protagonist gets back to Atlanta he no longer wants to hear it and no longer wants to see anybody. It was like 1962 all over again, the hootenanny era. Mike encapsulated the horror of the war in a song, more people need to hear it.

“Be As You Are” is a winner. The key is the words of wisdom from his mother:

There are moments when you fall to the ground
But you are stronger than you feel you are now
You don’t always have to speak so loud, no
Just be as you are
Life is not always a comfortable ride
Everybody’s got scars that they hide
And everybody plays the fool sometimes, yeah
Just be as you are

Mike grew up a hip-hop kid, but it’s the sing-songy melody that puts this over the top.

And the assembled multitude was singing along. The younger generation, the two hundred or so who were there in attendance, they need this music to make sense of a world that’s so confusing.

And I love listening to records, but seeing Mike Posner live is a transcendent experience, it’s authentic, it’s one human being connecting with another, that’s the magic of live performance, something that cannot be replicated, can’t be sold via VR, no, you have to be there.

And I was there, last night, at the edge of my seat.

And then Mike had us all stand, singing our parts and…

It started to dawn on me, he wasn’t gonna play it. Time was sliding by, far beyond the allotted window, he was gonna be a jerk, leaving us hungry for what we came for, I finally understood the audience perspective, a hard core fan is interested in the album cuts, but the others paying the fee, they need to hear the hit.

And just when it seemed it was over, he did, play the hit, that is.

I took a pill in Ibiza
To show Avicii I was cool

Most haven’t been to the Balearics, few know Avicii, almost no one has taken a pill in his presence, but Mike felt…the experience was universal, we can relate.

But you don’t wanna be high like me
Never really knowing why like me
You don’t wanna step off that roller coaster and be all alone

Beware of achieving your dream, you think it’ll make your life work, but it’s a good chance it’ll ruin it.

I’m just a singer who already blew his shot
I get along with old timers
‘Cause my name’s a reminder of a pop song people forgot

A has-been. You don’t think it’ll happen to you, then your notable work is in the rearview mirror.

“I Took A Pill In Ibiza” resonates because of its truth, nothing conveys the human experience more than music, when it’s done right, and Mike Posner was doing it right last night.

Brought tears to my eyes. What could be better than singing along to a song you know by heart, one that resonates, one that means so much to you.

It’s what I live for, it makes life complete.

P.S. If you’re out of the loop, and today so many are, after riding the top of the Spotify chart for so long, “I Took A Pill In Ibiza” is still number 48 on the Spotify chart, it was played 340,515 times yesterday, 583,372,214 times in its lifespan, never mind 515,179,767 views on YouTube. That’s the Seeb remix, the EDM edition. The acoustic iteration has 17,006,905 streams on Spotify, “I Took A Pill In Ibiza” just might be the song of the year, shows how far honesty and serendipity will get you.

“I Took A Pill In Ibiza” – Seeb Remix

“I Took A Pill In Ibiza” – acoustic

“Be As You Are”

Richard Griffiths ran Epic in the U.S.

Harry Magee ran A&M in the U.K.

Together they run a Modest! Management, most famous for handling One Direction.

But they also manage Five Seconds Of Summer, whose success they built on the back of 1D.

And now they’re building Hey Violet on the back of 5SOS. Jessarae too.

Hey Violet used to be known as Cherri Bomb. They were punk/power popsters signed to Hollywood Records, genius on paper, a band for fans of the same age, barely pubescent, with Disney synergy, but Cherri Bomb failed in the marketplace, the band reformed as Hey Violet and Richard and Harry took them on.

I was not impressed.

The two Lovelis sisters, the singer and the drummer, were incredibly cute. It’s just that they were a great garage band, running on enthusiasm more than quality.

But they were working it hard. All over the social networks. Doing pop-up live shows for fans. Of which there was a loyal number, after all supporting 5SOS you get recognition.

My initial exposure to Hey Violet was at Wembley Arena last June, 2015. I saw them about six months later at the Troubadour, in their hometown of Los Angeles. The fans were adoring, they knew every word, but you would not be impressed.

But neither were the brass.

It was agreed the material was not there yet, and this was a big problem.

This is why so many can’t do it alone, why there’s still a need for the major label, for the experience of those involved.

So last night I took my life in my hands and journeyed to Echo Park. Beyond the lake featured in “Chinatown” I parked by the homeless and walked by a mini-mart out of Guadalajara as opposed to the Westside and wondered…when I walked back after the gig would it be safe? You wanted to lock the doors and keep up your speed in the seventies. But now Silver Lake is so hip… I’m not sure. But the derelicts and denizens lounging around had my wits about me.

As for the gig itself…

I had to wait in line. Jessarae started to play. But the guy taking names was barely literate and everybody in front of me had a story, why they were entitled to get in. I’m getting frustrated, what am I doing here, I’m too old for this!

But when I got inside I was confronted with one guy with a guitar singing his songs, and he was GOOD! You can tell. Because few are, good, that is. It’s like porn, to paraphrase the Supreme Court, you know it when you hear it! Jessarae is American but he moved to London and got connected with Richard and Harry through Kobalt and they signed him, put him on the road with 5SOS, and… I got it.

But then it was time for Hey Violet.

Now a couple of weeks back, I got an unsolicited e-mail, from an adult, who pointed me to Hey Violet’s cut “Brand New Moves,” he said he liked it. Which is completely weird, this music is for teenyboppers and how would he have even stumbled upon them?

But I checked it out.

I was stunned. IT WAS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SOUND! It took a while to hit the change, but when it did, I said to myself…this is a hit or close to it.

Turns out the track was written with Julian Bunetta, who worked with 1D.

And I’d be lying if I told you Hey Violet nailed this track last night.

And I’m listening to their old stuff, the little girls are cheering, but then they say they’re gonna play some new stuff, stuff they’ve never played before.

Snooze, right?

But no, these were the killers! All three! They played an acoustic song written in the desert that had alienation stamped all over it, you know, the kind teenagers identify with, the kind they spin incessantly in their bedrooms.

But the songs were not the only revelation.

The other was Rena Lovelis.

She was no longer a teen running on enthusiasm, she was of age, legal, she was eighteen, and now she was slinking and slithering evidencing sexuality and…

Suddenly I realized I was watching Debbie Harry, just a bunch of decades younger.

All those gigs, all that experience, she’d BLOSSOMED! She now owned the stage, she was not playing to the audience, she was LEADING IT!

I knew this girl, not very different from your next door neighbor, albeit world-weary, but now…she was a STAR!

I was stunned.

Now I’m not saying that Hey Violet’s records will immediately light up the Top Ten. I’m not saying the music is so original you’ll be floored. I’m just saying that Richard and Harry took an unformed blob and polished it into something salable, the transition was astounding, what I thought had little chance, something that was running solely on data, socials and the rest of the internet crap, was now on the cusp of a breakthrough!

And the new music sounds nothing like what came before. Adolescents pogoing to poppy nonsense is out the window. The new tracks are denser, more ethereal, more produced. You’d wonder if the fan base would be alienated, but the truth is the fan base is so small that…they’ll come along with the new music just to say they were there first and…it’s about the mass, you can’t be so loyal to your tiny starter fans that you can’t take a left turn, that you can’t grow.

Now the best of the new tracks is “Pure.” I’ll link to it below. Put your professional hat on, listen as a business exercise, I don’t care if you like it or not but whether you can recognize its quality and its workability.

After that you can listen to “Brand New Moves.”

That acoustic song from the desert is not on Spotify.

But those old songs that didn’t register, you can check them out, to see the difference, the growth. I’ll link to their most played song on Spotify, from the previous EP, “I Can Feel It,” which is closer to Warped Tour than Bowery Ballroom.

So, Richard and Harry are leveraging their experience and their success to give a new act its best shot.

And you wonder why you can’t break through.

A few people are so talented, so fully-realized, that they don’t need any assistance. But they’re few and far between. The rest need help. There’s nothing original about Hey Violet, but they’ve got a fan base built on the back of 5SOS, they’ve got A level material, they’ve got a shot.

Without Richard and Harry they’d just be wannabes.

“Pure” – Spotify

“Brand New Moves” – Spotify

“I Can Feel It” – Spotify

“Fix” was number one on Mediabase.

But it was nowhere to be found on Spotify’s “Hot Country” playlist, which includes fifty one songs and is three hours and nine minutes long.

I’d never heard it, “Fix” that is. A cut by newcomer Chris Lane that resembles your preconception of country not a whit. It’s closer to yacht rock than twang, and I mean that in a good way. How was I supposed to know?

You see Mediabase charts what’s being played on the radio.

And Spotify… Is its own unique world.

And the loser is you and me. Because we don’t feel like we belong. I’m looking for some comprehension amidst the chaos. I want to know the temperature of the industry.

I’m never gonna listen to terrestrial radio, never ever, just too many commercials.

So, I catch my country on Sirius and Spotify, but they don’t necessarily play the same tracks either.

And this discrepancy is played out over all formats.

And then we’ve got the inane “Billboard” chart which meshes sales with streams and promotes albums to the point that Epic constructed a fake album just to chart, really:

“Epic Records Whips Up Hit Album Out of Thin Air (and Online Streams)”

Talk about manipulating the media.

The casual observer thinks what rules “Billboard” rules for real. But that’s oftentimes untrue. First and foremost, we live in an era of singles, not albums. Then again, are acts putting out long albums trying to game streaming services?:

“Albums are getting unbearably long in 2016 – and bull**** new streaming rules are to blame”

Not only do I want to feel I can detect the pulse, I want to be able to converse with my brethren in a world where we’ve got so few talking points to begin with.

Here are the new rules…

SINGLE CHARTS RULE

Forget albums, the public already did, except for hard core fans and they’re only a fraction of the business.

SEPARATE SALES FROM STREAMS

I’d say to forget sales all together, but if there are two charts for a while that’s o.k., they sold mono and stereo albums side by side for a couple of years. But the truth is it won’t be long before streaming is absolutely everything. And, you can’t get credit for an album sale by streaming only a few cuts from an LP, that’s ridiculous. Singles only, pure numbers.

METRICS

Is it airplay, streams or..?

The most played charts on streaming services are oftentimes dominated by oldies. Yet, it’s new blood that keeps the business alive. It’s a conundrum which goes unaddressed. Maybe we just need to label one playlist NEW! And if something is six months old it can’t qualify, “Billboard” used to kick aged albums off its chart… And the sooner we kick old stuff off the faster we can grow new stuff.

GENRES AND MASHUP

Yup, multiple charts for pop, country, hip-hop, rock and…
And then another for EVERYTHING! So people can see what’s truly popular.

Ironically, streaming has made the problem worse. With its endless playlists. The truth is terrestrial radio is dying, so the Mediabase chart might be supplanted by Spotify’s in time. But not yet. Can Spotify at least include the Mediabase chart in its playlists? So I can feel like I know what’s going on?

“Fix” on Spotify

“Fix” on Vevo

“Vail Resorts pays top dollar for iconic Canadian ski resort Whistler Blackcomb”

Vail Resorts is revolutionizing the ski industry by providing a better product for a lower price and they’re doing it all in plain sight!

Used to be every ski hill was unique. With an individual owner. Usually a cranky sort who was good with tools but bad with money. Then the real estate developers took hold, believing there wasn’t enough cash in the mountain and if they could just build condos and sell land…they could become profitable.

And for a while this worked, but then they ran out of land.

Les Otten decided to roll up the ski areas back in the nineties, he upgraded infrastructure and was then hit by a few bad winters, which decimated his mostly east coast based empire.

And then came Rob Katz. A Wall Streeter who left New York after 9/11 and was installed on Vail’s board. Whereupon he learned the lay of the land, became Chairman and CEO, and came up with the Epic Pass.

You see skiing was seen as expensive, so he lowered the price, dramatically. Not only was a season pass now a third the price, it worked at multiple areas. So, people lined up to purchase it in droves. Sales went from four figures to 500,000 per year and have been increasing at a fifteen percent rate per annum. Some buyers never skied at all, others did much more, and then Vail made even more money on food and retail sales, yes, the resort operator owned a lot of the establishments at the base.

This isn’t that different from Amazon. Which promised low prices for a gold-plated product and then sold two-day delivery for $79 as Prime and kept laying free perks on top of that, like music and movies and TV. And now, Amazon is so far ahead of the game not only are there no competitors, it’s decimating physical retail, it’s a better experience.

Vail is the best experience.

Hard core skiers hate this. They hate Vail, a notoriously flat mountain whose main selling point is its glorious Back Bowls, Vail is for everyman, whereas the rabble-rousers want to keep skiing for themselves. If it sounds like music, it should, forever we’ve had self-anointed experts saying mainstream taste was crap, that people should be listening to what they wanted them to. But now the public ignores them. There’s just too much noise in the marketplace to pay attention to naysayers. And pop, hated by the cognoscenti, rules.

Now Katz and Vail didn’t just lower the price, they invested in infrastructure. After the completion of the replacement of Chair 17 in SunUp Bowl this year there will be no low speed fixed grip chairlifts left on Vail Mountain, other than those servicing beginners. Wouldn’t you like to ski where the lifts run at two and a half times the speed and the slopes are groomed to perfection?

Most people would.

But lower prices and infrastructure improvements were only the beginning. Vail went on a buying spree, a strategic buying spree, purchasing ski resorts in the Midwest because…if the pass worked at your local hill, and you could ski for free out west, wouldn’t you make the trip? I went to Big Sky and Telluride the past two years and a few days of skiing cost me as much as my Epic Pass that allowed me to ski for every day for one low price all over the world.

Yes, Vail bought Perisher in Australia. So when Aussies wanted to ski during their summer, they’d come to Vail resorts, where their passes worked.

And now Vail has bought Whistler, the huge area outside of Vancouver, and the rest of the industry is stunned, they’re overwhelmed, they don’t know how to compete. Vail also owns three areas in Tahoe. And now Park City, as well as major resorts on Colorado’s Front Range.

Of course, income inequality has made it so that skiing is no longer a middle class sport, but ironically, the barrier to entry at Vail, the biggest and the baddest, is the lowest. Sure, day rates are exorbitant, but no one pays those, everybody buys a pass, or purchases tickets in advance at a discount online.

And climate change is wreaking havoc on the sport but that’s why Vail has diversified, the Pacific Northwest, Tahoe and the Rockies are three distinct weather zones, it’s rare they’ve all got a drought in the same year.

And this paradigm could be replicated, someone could step up and compete, but no one has, they’re just too stunned, set in their old ways.

It’s kind of like music. Where the oldsters didn’t see digital and complain that Spotify and streaming ate their lunch.

And rather than convince people what a good deal ten bucks a month is, they bad-mouth the site, driving people away from it!

And, of course, there is no piracy in skiing. You can climb up yourself, but very few people do this. So, there’s no free tier at Vail, but…

The Epic Pass started off under five hundred dollars a month. You broke even in less than five skiing days. Music streaming is a bargain, but no one in the artistic community wants to spread the message, for fear of being left out, since in the era of consolidation winners take all and the losers are screwed. But that’s got nothing to do with Spotify, that’s a cultural issue.

However, after improving the product and rolling up additional areas what did Vail do…IT RAISED THE PRICE! Now, an Epic Pass costs almost twice as much, after less than a decade. But Vail did raise the day price, so the break even remains the same, it’s still a bargain. And it’s still cheaper than a season pass at most standalone resorts.

Music streaming could be five bucks a month. With no free tier. And then after everybody signs up, the price could slowly be raised, like Vail.

This is not rocket science. It’s about providing a premium product at a low price, a deal, and after people are hooked raising prices.

How do you get everybody to buy a streaming music subscription?

You might tell me no one needs it, but did everybody need two day delivery with Amazon Prime?

Music streaming is here to stay, it already won.

Want to multiply the number of subscriptions? Say how good it is, not how bad. Talk about the value. Get everybody excited about music, word of mouth is king.

There’s plenty of money to be made when everybody gets on board.

But those inured to the old ways refuse to do this, they muddy the water, they trot out false economics and spread hatred and if you subscribe to Spotify you’re seen at the devil.

No, the devil is the naysayers.

Sure, Daniel Ek is rich, but so is Rob Katz! When we start denigrating those who come up with a new solution that satisfies customers we’ve truly lost the American way.

People love convenience and quality. They love cheap.

Vail has found a way to provide this.

The music industry keeps alienating its customers whilst complaining prices are too low.

Is this any way to run a business?

NO!