It doesn’t matter.

This is the kind of question that’s gummed up the works, and public perception, for the better part of two years. As if stars like Taylor Swift and Jay Z could affect human behavior, as if we don’t live in a world where the consumer is king and the rest of us float in their effluvia.

To put it simply, no YouTube and Taylor Swift is on Spotify in a heartbeat.

Tidal either morphs into something else or goes out of business. As for a sale, pennies on the dollar at best. Because exclusives are meaningless. Ask Dr. Dre about being exclusive to Apple. The greatest impact his album had was in its publicity, did you hear it?

You want to be everywhere all the time.

Unless you put money first.

And the music business is one of hustle, of uneducated men and women trying to get rich, employing subterfuge if necessary, because it’s all about the individual and nothing’s going to stay in their way. It’s as if doctors didn’t need diplomas and didn’t care about serving humanity, but making the most money.

If Adele decides not to put her album on streaming services it will only be about one thing, the money. But even her team can see the lack of wisdom in such a decision, because it would hurt her career. Then again, in music the acts are fungible and no one looks long term and mistakes are made constantly.

The only reason to not be on Spotify, et al, is because of the money. If you think any artist can fight the future that is streaming you’ve got your head up your rear end and don’t realize streaming already won. The agitation of acts over payment is a non-story that just keeps people from paying, that keeps them streaming YouTube videos, only in the music business can an industry not embrace a game-changing technology. It would be like computer companies refusing to install Wi-Fi. Microsoft not upgrading Office. Nokia saying the future is flip-phones, and they’re gonna keep on making them only.

Did you see that Microsoft wrote down $7.6 billion on its Nokia purchase? Give the company credit for seeing the light, for wiping away the past and embracing the future. And note that Steve Ballmer led them to the precipice, it was he who couldn’t see the future, not only with the Finnish phone company, but with so many other choices. After all, it was Microsoft, king of companies, right?

Wrong!

Don’t overestimate Adele’s power. If she never put out another record the business would survive. Hell, the Beatles broke up and music marched on. People died and music marched on.

But the press loves an angle, the press loves getting you to talk about something irrelevant so you’ll miss the real issues.

Same time next year there won’t be this discussion. Because sales will have faded that much more and streaming will have been embraced that much more. We’re in a transitory moment. No one puts out an album that’s not on the iTunes Store anymore, but do you remember when that was an issue? When bands wouldn’t go digital? When they didn’t want their album broken up? Hell, ask anybody under fifteen, they don’t!

Or why don’t you do an exclusive with Walmart! How many bands walked through that door? Now Walmart itself has stalled, with Amazon eating its future lunch.

Distribution comes and goes, it’s the music that remains.

Led Zeppelin was on vinyl only. And then 8-track, cassette, CD, file/MP3/AAC and now stream. Did any of these carriers affect how you felt about the band? Of course not. As for being prescient, their manager sold out their royalties believing their catalog wasn’t worth anything. Elvis’s manager did this too. No one would do such a thing today. Because those in the know realize the money is in longevity.

But Peter Grant and Colonel Tom Parker were hustlers. They got the money now. Today it’s about tomorrow.

So I’m not saying Adele won’t hold her album back from streaming services. But if she does, it’ll be for a brief window only. It’s just that you can’t point to this action and draw any conclusions that it’s about anything but the money.

It’s too much about the money in society and certainly in the music business, where the acts scalp their own tickets while pledging fealty to their fans.

But it only goes so far. Tidal was a disaster in the announcement and the aftermath. People won’t follow you over the cliff.

But that does not mean a streaming company won’t pay Adele for an exclusive window. Thinking it burnishes their image and will deliver new subscribers.

But it won’t for Tidal, we’ve already seen that.

And Apple’s market share is too small for most people to jump in based on this.

The only company which could benefit from an exclusive is Spotify, the same way XM could have benefited by making a deal with Howard Stern, it would have put a stake in Sirius’s heart.

And, of course, Stern went to Sirius, which eventually devoured XM, but Sirius had deep pockets and other programming, it took a long while for Stern to get his footing there, to increase paying subscribers. Stern’s footprint and influence were minimized. Only by going on AGT did he resuscitate his image and regain his place in the national marketplace. But Stern was on radio nearly every day. Adele puts out an album every four or five years! A mistake now would hurt her career!

But she might do it.

And if she does, laugh, heartily.

It will mean she missed the memo.

And the memo is that there’s plenty of money in music, albeit not as much as in finance and tech, yet there are a bunch of people, both old and young, yearning for the old days wherein selling a piece of plastic generated instant income, they want those days to return. But while they’re at it, why don’t they have you give up Netflix and Hulu? Meanwhile, HBO realized streaming is the future and jumped in!

And you might claim that it’s different, there’s no freemium tier.

I might say how do you expect people to pay when you keep muddying the water, vilifying streaming services, holding your music from them?

Today you’re lucky if you’ve got an audience at all. Do your best to keep it. Rappers give out free mixtapes, they got the message. Eric Church sent his album to fan club members free and unannounced. Super-serve those who care, otherwise few will care at all. And only take the short term money if you don’t care about the long term cash. And know that anything that is inaccessible is hobbled, because distribution is king and no act, no content is bigger than the pipe.

Adele, put your music on streaming services, all of them, be a beacon for hope as opposed to a rearguard operator, you can do good here.

Or don’t, I don’t care. And neither does anybody else other than a cadre of losers who believe someone stole their cheese and refuse to embrace the present, never mind the future.

Life’s gonna get really hard for them.

Keep on movin’…

Embrace change or die!

1. NO FRONT-LOADING

That’s an old game which pays few dividends in the modern world. Used to be it was about making a big first week splash so retailers would reorder, now physical retail is de minimis and nearly irrelevant. Hype should begin no more than a week out.

2. RALLY THE TROOPS

Speak to those already converted, don’t try to convert those who don’t care or don’t know right out of the box, it’s a wasted effort. It’s key to be able to contact your tribe. E-mail is best. But social media works too, albeit less efficiently. Your core fan is eager to hear new material. He or she will stream it immediately and spread the word, especially if it’s good. Never forget, the word of your fan is more persuasive than the word of the media. The media moves on to a new story tomorrow, a fan lives and breathes your work. A fan can get friends to listen, and the more someone listens to anything, the more they like it.

3. STREAMING NUMBERS ARE EVERYTHING

Ironically, it’s the major labels who know this most, that’s right, the supposed antiquated are the hippest. Majors know it’s all about metrics, they’re looking for a reaction. If there is one, they can leverage it, for television appearances and radio play. Press is trumped by cold hard numbers. No one cares what the critic has to say, but they can’t argue with facts, i.e. numbers. Forget the “Billboard” chart, it’s caught up in transition, trying to bridge the gap between sales and streams, and doing it very poorly. The metrics that mean most are Spotify and YouTube. YouTube is great for the single hit, but the Spotify numbers for more than the single are key, they show fan devotion, they illustrate that the act is not fly by night.

4. PLAYLISTS

You want to be on them. Fans discover music by driving by, via hit and run. When something jumps out of the playlist they add it to their library and play it again. I discovered Kurt Vile’s “Pretty Pimpin” this way, it was on the Songpickr playlist, it jumped right out of my phone. With almost no traction in the mainstream media, “Pretty Pimpin” has racked up 4,585,957 listens on Spotify. That’s even more than on YouTube, which shows 1,534,655. YouTube is reactive, it’s not where things are started amongst music devotees, it’s where the young and unwashed go to listen to music. The hard core is on streaming services, and despite the hoopla about freemium, the hard core eventually pays, because it wants to be able to pick and choose on mobile and music means that much to them. I was further energized about the Vile track when Keith Urban testified about it, we always want to know what our heroes are listening to, especially if it’s obscure/unknown. This is the future of breaking acts, playlists, where tracks are ultimately embraced and spread, slowly. Everything but the hit spreads slowly today.

5. LISTENS, NOT SALES

You’ve got to find a way to worm the music into the public consciousness, to get people to not only play it, but keep playing it. This is not only the way you get paid for recordings, but the way you truly make money, on the road. In today’s world, where the morning news story is forgotten by six o’clock, it’s your job to stay in the public mind, to be part of the discussion.

6. HITS GROW YOUR AUDIENCE

If you want to be bigger than you are, you have to deliver a catchy track that grabs the listener in four seconds or less that they not only want to hear again, but tell everybody about. You don’t get more time. People judge immediately. And good is not good enough. If your album doesn’t have a hit, you’re preaching to the converted, whose size probably won’t grow, but shrink, because people are drawn to that which is hot. Once again, a hit is not necessarily something that plays on the radio, but something that gets someone to jump out of bed, toss their pajamas, dress up and walk to the all night record shop to buy. That’s what Ahmet Ertegun said, the only difference today is you grab your mobile and search for it on Spotify or YouTube. The essence is the same, you’ve got to hear it again. Everybody’s overloaded with input, you can only break through with your work, no media campaign, no amount of imploring can make you a star anymore, you either have the goods or you don’t. And if you don’t, you’ll know right away and need to go back to the drawing board immediately and make new music. Don’t beat a dead horse, it’s sad and ineffective.

7. RADIO ONLY WORKS IN POP

And if you don’t make pop records ignore it. Oh sure, you can get a start on NPR, but you’ll probably hit a wall. Same deal with Active Rock radio. Niche formats mean something, but not much. Your job is to go online and find your tribe and grow it, the niche radio stations are an echo chamber. But pop radio is a behemoth. If you make pop music you must have a hit, it’s not about your cred but your CV, what you’ve done for us lately, record a bunch of hits and you can play arenas, can you say “Rihanna”? Pop artists are not in the album game, their album sales illustrate devotion, but not truth. Non-pop artists are all about the body of work, the audience wants to dig deeper. Which is why you must shorten the release interval to satiate listeners who might otherwise drift off to someone else.

8. LIVE IS YOUR FRIEND

We expect live videos on YouTube. Forget imperfections, someone who’s searching for this stuff doesn’t care about you getting it right, they just want to cement the bond of fandom and feel like an insider. Your phone comes with a camera, shoot and post video constantly. It doesn’t all have to be music, but most should be. Do your songs acoustically and do covers. Covers illustrate roots, they can demonstrate your own personal fandom, the more you illuminate your identity the more people bond to you.

9. EVERYTHING’S SLOW EXCEPT WHEN IT ISN’T

Monster pop hits can be instant, but even Lorde’s “Royals” didn’t go nuclear until it was on the radio. But there are very few “Blurred Lines” and “Wake Me Up”s. Sure, you want an instant response to show you’re on the right track, but you’re not gonna have instant stardom. Look how long it took Fetty Wap to break through! Pop radio is especially slow and those who find out this way are mostly casual fans, but they will still stream your songs and go to your show, but probably not if you don’t have another hit.

10. HIP-HOP IS ABOUT CULTURE MORE THAN HITS

Sure, there are hip-hop hits, and you can’t argue with success. But today’s hip-hop is an ongoing story, with mixtapes and a constant flow of information. The rest of music could learn a few lessons from the rappers. Best to be totally engaged, to constantly deliver something new, and know it’s less about the unicorn and more about the entire animal, your identity, your body of work.

11. BE ORIGINAL

When you tell everybody it’s your greatest work and detail all the friends you employed to make it, most people puke, it’s like reading Walter Scott’s Personality Parade. That might work for movies and TV, and I can argue it doesn’t, but not in music. Music is the most honest medium, it touches people’s hearts. And you should speak from yours. The more authentic you are, the more honest you are, the more you reveal your warts and insecurities, the greater chance you have that people will check you out and bond to you.

12. SINGLES/ALBUMS

It’s about body of work. If you’ve got something new to say, record it and drop it online. Your fans will find it. The smaller your circle, the more albums work. Because your hard core is anticipating a lot of material and will play it and digest it. If you’re a superstar, the album is nearly irrelevant, at most it’s a revenue-generating event. People just want the hit. But they want to dig deeper, which is why you must have more than one track on Spotify. And people play the tracks of a new find in descending order, from most popular on down. And if you don’t have a bunch of ear-grabbing tracks, forget it, people are gonna click on. If you want someone to listen to your music four or five times to get it, you want to be a small act. There’s nothing wrong with immediacy, it demonstrates skill. Hooks come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it’s a sound, sometimes it’s a riff. Atmosphere can be enough. Be accessible, don’t get on your high horse and say the audience must come to you. This will happen once you deliver for them and embrace them.

13. FUTURE

It won’t be about the release, but the aforementioned body of work. Career artists want to keep adding to it. Lead with your music, it’s the essence of your career. Sure, employ social media, but it’s overrated. Social media can’t make a musical star, at most it can get someone to check something out. But if they don’t like it in the initial four seconds…

This is the last old school Christmas in the music business. Never again will you see the media industrial complex rallying around the product of a superstar trying to gin up fourth quarter revenue. Because it’s no longer about sales, but streams. Did you see Jason Aldean quietly caved and put his music back on Spotify? It’s just a matter of time before the Beatles and Taylor Swift are there too, because sales are shrinking to a de minimis proportion of exposure, never mind revenue. You have to be where the action is. And now the action in the music business is in the long term, a hit is something people listen to, not that which they buy, and they’re not necessarily the same thing.

But the book business has not learned this lesson. This fall has been inundated with the release of celebrity tomes, as if we care about the lives of everybody from Cindy Crawford to Beverly Johnson to David Spade. This is the last dash for cash, when you’ve got no projects in the pipeline, when there’s a lull in your career, when you’re trying to keep yourself in the public eye. And as Leah Remini said, no one on TV will ask hard questions, because it’s sell, sell, sell all the time.

I heard her say this on Howard Stern, where I heard all of the above personages hyping their books. And it was somewhat interesting, but these hacks have no center, there’s no there there, and then I heard “You Oughta Know.”

That’s right, Alanis Morissette is on the sales trail too, it’s the twentieth anniversary of “Jagged Little Pill,” it’s her moment to illustrate she’s still relevant, when the truth is anything but. She had that album and “Uninvited” and then she was done, overwhelmed by her initial success.

And we could say that’s sad.

Yet unlike so many musicians, Alanis is intelligent. But she exudes too much touchy-feely sentiment, and then she opens her pipes and sings “You Oughta Know.”

It was different in 1995, most people had never heard of the internet, radio still ruled, you could dominate the public conversation if you were good enough, and Alanis was. Like Nirvana nearly half a decade before, Alanis went from obscurity to ubiquity in an instant, and it was all about “You Oughta Know”.

I want you to know, that I’m happy for you
I wish nothing but the best for you both

She’s being facetious, putting up a good front. Just a good girl doing the right thing. And then…

An older version of me
Is she perverted like me
Would she go down on you in a theatre

Probably the most famous lyric of the nineties. We were shocked, BJ’s were not part of public conversation. As for doing it in a public place, all of us playing the home game thought…THAT NEVER HAPPENED TO ME! Who is this chick?

You seem very well, things look peaceful
I’m not quite as well, I thought you should know

Honesty, it’s absent from the landscape. While the rabble-rousers spew hate online those with a profile love everybody and everything, they’re totally together…do you know anybody like this? No one admits fault, no one is guilty, no one is depressed, unless it’s part of their world domination program. How do you expect people to relate?

They don’t.

That’s why music is in the dumper. Oh sure, plenty of people listen, but it doesn’t resonate in quite the same way, it’s lost the je ne sais quoi that makes it the hottest artistic medium. And then you hear something like the live performance of “You Oughta Know” on yesterday’s Stern show.

Well, I’m here to remind you

That I was genius back then and I still am. That unlike the auto-tuned celebs I had the pipes and still do. In an era where even Mariah Carey struggles live we expect little from faded icons, but then Alanis Morissette hits us right between the eyes and we remember the revelation she once was.

Did you forget about me Mr. Duplicity

You needed a dictionary to make sense of the lyrics. Instead of dumbing down, Alanis was educating.

And every time you speak her name
Does she know how you told me you’d hold me
Until you died, til you died

That’s what they don’t tell you, how painful it will be when you see them with someone else, when everything you had between you is shredded. How do you make sense of all this? Does time heal all wounds? Did the original words mean that little? And will time wound all heels?

’cause the joke that you laid on the bed that was me
And I’m not gonna fade

This is not Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,” this is no joke, no crazy broad painted broadly that we can instantly dismiss, rather this is me and you, and we’re PISSED!

It’s happened to all of us. Unless you married your first date. Unless you took no risks or didn’t date at all. Things are going along swimmingly, you might even be married, but then your beloved does a one-eighty and not only dumps you but replaces you, how do you make sense of all that?

You can’t!

So you put on a record and look for the connection.

And that’s what Alanis was selling.

When you broke the shrinkwrap, you found out it wasn’t only “You Oughta Know,” the opening cut “All I Really Want” was just as intense, angry and honest. Everybody playing the home game, alone in their abode, could relate, they’d found their icon.

And what I wouldn’t give to find a soulmate
Someone else to catch this drift
And what I wouldn’t give to meet a kindred

That’s the essence of existence, the communication with like-minded people, not the dollars in your bank account. You’re open, you’re honest, but you just can’t connect, you just can’t find your tribe, never mind that special someone. You believe it’s gonna come, but then it doesn’t. Just like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow you were planning on acquiring evaporated when the 1% laughed in your face and claimed you just weren’t working hard enough. Used to be artists pushed back, back before Jay Z took Samsung’s money and thought he won. If you aren’t pushing against the corporate industrial complex your words are not worth listening to.

And as downbeat and intense as “You Oughta Know” and “All I Really Want” were, that’s how upbeat and hopeful “Hand In Pocket” was…because no matter how bad life is, there are their moments when it’s fine, fine, fine.

And Alanis told Howard that she didn’t love “Ironic” because Glen Ballard cowrote the lyrics, she had an urge to make her own statement, she wanted it to be her autobiography and just hers.

And that’s what makes “You Oughta Know” so great. There’s no committee involved, there’s there there, it became a gargantuan success because it was exactly what we were looking for, something made for its own excellence, pandering never came into the equation.

Kind of like HBO.

That’s why that outlet is so vaunted, it doesn’t meddle, it sets the artists free, something the music business did for decades, until there became too much money involved, until the execs thought they were smarter and more important than the artists.

I want you to know that when I heard Alanis Morissette sing “You Oughta Know” on Howard Stern’s Sirius XM show I was stopped in my tracks, tears came to my eyes, because this was and still is the experience I’m looking for, the truth, straight from the heart.

You oughta know.

“Alanis Morissette Performs ‘You Oughta Know’ On The Howard Stern Show”

People stopped sharing.

“34% of Facebook users updated their status, and 37% shared their own photos, down from 50% and 59%, respectively, in the same period a year earlier.”

Facebook Prods Users to Share a Bit More

Or as Michael Wolf put it in his monster WSJ slide show…

“Messaging will blow past social networks as the dominant media activity.”

Epic slide deck from former Yahoo board member lays out the future of tech and media

Turns out throwing your vitals, your hobbies, your irrelevancies, into the ether is ultimately ungratifying. At first you get caught up in the hoopla, but when you realize no one’s reacting, no one really cares, you stop.

We’ve seen it again and again in the internet sphere.

Remember when everybody was gonna have a blog?

And then there was Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat…

They’re all fads. People have a fantasy others care, but they don’t. And once you’re disabused of the notion that everybody’s waiting for your words and pics of wisdom, you stop playing.

Meaning those enterprises that are built upon the efforts of the crowd, that supply infrastructure and nothing more, are doomed. It’s all about content. And the best content is not that created by nobodies, but pros. Why do you think YouTube is challenged and starting to charge? There’s no money in everybody’s home movies!

Yes, Facebook just reported stellar numbers. Give the company credit for moving quickly to mobile and doing a good job of selling space to advertisers. But we’ve seen advertising costs plummet around the web, will they plummet on Facebook? Is amassing eyeballs upon bogus content the future of the internet?

That’s why we have linkbait, so companies can generate impressions that they can sell to advertisers. But the rates keep going down because the ads make no impression, people ignore them if they don’t block them entirely.

Which is what Apple allows you to do on iOS. Users are thrilled, outlets basing their revenues on advertising are not. And then there’s PewDiePie, the king of the aforementioned YouTube, who claims that 40% of YouTubers block all ads.

Thoughts on YouTube Red.

Making Apple once again the smartest enterprise on the planet. Knowing that there has to be a there there, and you gain advantage by establishing trust with your customers, as opposed to employing subterfuge and selling their data.

But the dropping posts on Facebook prove that everybody is not a star. That the wild west atmosphere of the internet is a phase. And as things solidify, cyberspace resembles the rest of society… There’s a very thin layer of superstars/winners, a small class who believe the low barrier to entry means they can win the lottery, while the rest have checked out and are interacting one to one and consuming when they’re not.

Same as it ever was. Passivity reigns. TV never became interactive and the websites built on this premise, that if you build it they will come and spew their data and make you rich, is flawed too.

You can’t control the customer. And what the customer has said again and again is not only will he gravitate to free, his allegiance is temporary at best. You’ve got to create a product worth paying for and continue to improve it otherwise you’ll be passed by.

So, those who create visual content professionally are still in good shape. As are the news titans. They’ve just got to wait out the chaos, as the major labels did in the music business.

Remember, the majors were gonna die. But now they’re even more powerful than before, because of their relationships. In an era of chaos, they’re the only ones who can gain traction on a product!

So Wall Street is behind the times, not as lost as the government, but clueless as to what’s coming down the pike. Anybody who used a mobile device knew that BlackBerry was toast, but Wall Street propped it up for years, and believed theoretical comebacks, even though we know it’s impossible for classic rockers to have another hit, hell, Robin Thicke may never have another hit!

The big wheel keeps on turning.

We’re a nation of grazers, not builders. We don’t want to waste too much effort constructing that which will not pay dividends.

So we talk to our friends and click through to the greats.

Facebook may end up being a primary destination, but housing the efforts of its users will yield diminishing returns. It’s all about first class content.

“Forbes” let the lunatics into the asylum, letting everyman post, and it ruined their brand, never mind their financials.

HBO skims only the biggest talent and scores big in subscribers.

Because we don’t want to waste time on nobodies, only stars.

And the truth is there are very few of them.

And you’re not one of them.