“Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family”

And the music business loses out again. So worried about being ripped off, making a third party the new MTV, allowing that entity to profit, the industry requires a huge toll to innovate with its wares, as a result, most techies have abandoned the sphere.

Turns out people don’t want top-down information, they’d rather hear from their friends. Not only about what they’re doing in their life, but what music they’re listening to. And sure, they do this on Facebook, and sure, you can link your Facebook account to Spotify, you can see what your friends are listening to, but that’s way too complicated, and not emphasized, and all the community in music revolves around the hit acts, when the truth is you go to gigs with friends, you want to know what they are listening to.

Community is everything. And to the music industry community is terrestrial radio, an antiquated medium that squares not a whit with the modern paradigm. It’s limited and phony and has too many commercials and it’s not on demand. Youngsters abhor it. But right now it’s the best way to reach the most people so the industry lauds it and pays fealty to it. Like advertisers continuing to use TV when all the action is at Netflix and  YouTube and the internet.

I’ve got no idea what to listen to. I see the top hits, after that, there’s just an endless fire hose of songs, most of which I’m not into. It’d be like seeing endless posts on Facebook from people who are not your friends. You’d sign off, you wouldn’t go there.

And that is what’s happening at Facebook. The news feed was inundated with real news, which most people didn’t want, they wanted baby and vacation photos, info from their social circle, so news has been de-emphasized.

Now the news business is pretty dumb too. So busy protecting an old model, refusing to cede share to their competitors, everybody built their own site and then it turned out people didn’t want to go to a zillion sites and now a huge percentage of people are getting their news on Facebook. Facebook is way too powerful, but that’s the power of social connections.

Sure, we had Apple’s Connect, but everybody knew that network would fail, because Apple is a top-down company and Ping failed before it and you’re gonna build a social network behind a paywall? Might as well have a concert on a private jet, where you might be able to make some money if you charge enough, but almost no one can afford to go.

The music business keeps bitching about low barriers of entry, the inability or refusal to monetize, meanwhile Facebook and Google built behemoths on infrastructure that didn’t charge for eons. And now Snapchat has done the same thing!

Don’t kid yourself, we’ve got a music discovery problem. Which the industry refuses to address, because it’s so wary of change, so wary of giving profits to others. It’s great that Spotify and the streaming sites have all the songs at one low monthly price. And playlists are somewhat helpful. But they’re not addressing the core issue of humanity, that we want to belong, we want to gossip, we want to push and pull amongst our group, we want to be where everybody else is as opposed to out on an island alone.

That’s what made radio great in the old days, community.

Discover Weekly is damn good, but it’s only for me. What are other people like me listening to, my friends, what is Elton listening to and Tom Petty and can we talk about it, will they talk about it with us, can you come down off your throne and get into the pit with the rest of us?

No.

If you read only one thing on this vote/crisis, you must read Glenn Greenwald’s article on theintercept.com. Greenwald delineates the real issues at play, primarily the war between the elites and the have-nots, the contempt the former have for the latter. The educated upstarts believe they’re entitled to a pass because they weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouth, they had to fight to get ahead, so when they do things to their advantage they believe it’s just the American Way. But who’s looking out for the little guy? Unions have been decimated, jobs transferred overseas and you just can’t make it in America anymore, no wonder the underclass is mad.

This is a bigger issue than Trump spewing inaccurate inanities. This requires all the so-called “winners” of the world, especially the bleeding heart liberals, to examine their own values and behavior. It really has got less to do with right or left, Republicans or Democrats, and more to do with elites on both sides of the aisle. Elites who have advantages those on the bottom do not, elites who can’t even fathom what’s happening on the bottom. I lose my job to overseas workers and then despite a flat screen costing two hundred bucks I’ve got to work a service job that doesn’t pay the bills? What are all these displaced people gonna do for a living in the future? How are they gonna make ends meet? You can make fun of them all you want, but they’re entitled to vote too. But then you’d have to have empathy, you’d have to refrain from climbing the greased ladder to stop and lend a hand to your brother and sister, you’d have to sacrifice for the greater good.

I’ve been bothered by income inequality for a decade, frustrated that I could no longer get to the top as my brethren have. But I could not foresee this rampant unrest, the contempt for those who think they’re smarter, have all the answers and reign herd over the rest of us. When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. Bob Dylan said that fifty years ago, the last time this country was up for grabs, when being a rock star was about speaking truth as opposed to garnering corporate endorsements. Which side are you on, indeed. We lionize and criticize the billionaires when we just don’t realize the problem is us, the elites, we’re to blame, the sons and daughters of sons and daughters of immigrants, who grew up with advantages and just couldn’t get enough. The iron curtain may have fallen under Ronald Reagan, but greed was suddenly good, just ask Gordon Gekko. And I believe we live in a global village, but Clinton passed NAFTA and what exactly are those put out of work supposed to do for work? In both cases, a relatively thin layer of people profited handsomely. What about everybody else? We’re asking that question now.

Glenn Greenwald – “Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and Failure of Western Establishment Institutions”

The educated elites can’t fathom the pop stars. Built on an assembly line by multiple workers there’s nothing behind the facade and the music is formulaic.

Meanwhile, the youngsters and the uneducated flock to these performers, what gives?

The pop stars are aspirational. Their fans believe they too can become famous, can replicate the formula. You don’t have to be a member of the mostly nonexistent school band, you don’t have to practice your instrument in isolation for a decade, you’ve just got to sharpen your will, work on your countenance and promote the hell out of yourself on social media.

The performers of yore, who built careers over years, who spoke of their deep feelings and performed benefits, have not stopped complaining since the Napster era. You see they got all these tools, but their income and reach declined. They’re angry. They feel shut out.

Hip-hop is a way out of poverty.

And country is a way to give the middle finger to the elites who govern, who tell them they know better.

And everybody loves Taylor Swift, because she reaches the most people and she makes so much MONEY!

So, we’ve got a thin layer of mega-successful acts, basking in the adulation of the unformed wannabes, and…

Everybody else is left scratching his or her head.

The focus on money is both a turn-on and a turn-off. Classic acts lament they cannot make enough and fans feel closed out completely. Ticket prices are sky high and there’s no way you or me can ever make that kind of dough, meanwhile the acts keep saying they love us, their fans, but we read in the gossip columns how they party with people we’ll never know at places we’ll never get into having flown there on a private jet while we’re crammed into a plane with no overhead bin space because the airline is nickel and diming us to the point where everybody’s taking their luggage on board.

What’s going on?

Are the Kardashians winners, or the harbinger of a great divide, a great disaster, wherein everything we think we know is wrong?

How much can we venerate winners of a system that we can’t even compete in, whose spoils go to those we believe worthless?

When is change gonna come?

Turns out there’s a lot of turmoil in the entertainment business culture. We’re all at home, trying to get ahead, but the truth is we’re just data for the marketers, for the websites. They overload us with ads, pour on the cookies, and when we use adblockers they cry foul and tell us if we don’t disable them there will be no more websites.

And if we stop posting on Facebook the site will implode.

But this is all we’ve got, this low-level entertainment where we alternately burnish our image and hate on our brethren while the owners laugh all the way to the bank.

You can’t compete with Facebook, never mind Google, Apple or Amazon. The door is closed. You can write an app, but you can’t get any traction, you can’t make any money, no one will ever see it, never mind download it.

And they keep telling us YouTube is the new frontier, that anyone can make millions. But it turns out you need views in a triple digit million amount to get paid reasonably and I don’t personally know anybody who’s won this lottery, do you? We’ve got all these tools but no success, because all the spoils go to the man, but we keep plugging away at the keyboard, even though odds are as bad as the lottery.

There’s a great dissatisfaction in the country today. And the elites, the winners, don’t seem to understand. They think they deserve their spoils, that the gravy train will never end. As if we’re still listening to prog rock and hair band music, as if Rick Astley and a legion of has-beens still rule.

But they don’t.

We haven’t had a new sound in decades. Used to be the slate was wiped clean on a regular basis, but now the industry doesn’t want that, they want formula, they want insurance, they want no risk.

So, when it feels like you’re getting screwed, you are.

If you’re an act that doesn’t make Top Forty music you’re looking at a life of low-paid indentured servitude to your career.

If you’re a fan music might be cheap but tickets are expensive and so is merch and after pledging your undying fealty you’re left with nothing in the end, like being a fan of Bobby Sherman or David Cassidy way back when.

The landscape is ripe for acts that speak to this dissatisfaction, who are less about lifestyle than truth, who are not about embracing the trappings, but the music and the music only.

It’s coming. Unrest has been brewing. A vacuum needs to be filled.

And it’s gonna be.

We already had our Brexit moment in the music business, it was called Napster. The industry was coasting along on high-priced CDs and catalog replacement, with lowered-artist royalty payments to boot. But when given the option the public revolted against the one good track on an overpriced album model and stole the wares willy-nilly. What else is the public pissed about?

TICKETING

You can’t get a good seat at a fair price and all the good seats go to scalpers. In an era of transparency, all we’ve got is opaqueness. The industry thinks that it’s winning, but it’s not.

A. Availability

There must be a chart of the tiers of availability. The levels of pre-sales. The number of holdbacks. You curry favor by providing information. Once the public knows the game, it can adjust.

B. Fees

An insider’s game wherein the fees are held out of artists’ percentage yet paid by the fans which blame Ticketmaster and other ticketing companies. All-in pricing is required. The fees are part of the ticket price, without them the business would collapse.

C. Pricing

Either raise the prices or go paperless, those are the only options. Instead, the acts fall back on a position of not wanting to look greedy, but they end up pissing off their fans all the while.

EVENT SPACE

Lineups, bad food and endless advertising. The whole world has gone upscale, but the industry’s venues look and are run like third world entities. Of course there have been improvements, but so much more can be done, assuming money is spent, but no one wants to spend on the little people, the attendees, the way no one worried about the working class that lost their jobs and couldn’t make ends meet.

YOUTUBE

This happened once before, the artists appealed to the public, but it backfired, because performers were seen as rich crybabies. The public wants instant access to everything, it wants a free tier. Raise ad prices, negotiate behind the scenes, but this is one area where sunshine is doing the industry a disservice. Nobody likes a complainer.

RADIO

Twenty-odd minutes of commercials per hour??

Terrestrial radio has a disinformation campaign as good as the Koch Brothers’. It keeps saying listening numbers are sky high when seemingly no one under twenty tunes in and oldsters complain too. There are options, and radio has been hurt, despite what stations say.

POP

Only one flavor, vanilla? Baskin-Robbins would go out of business! The industry is responsible for promoting a broader spectrum of music. Don’t say people don’t want it, they do. It just has to be promoted, people have to be exposed to it. All major labels must sign long term deals with non-pop acts, invest in them… This is what Warner Brothers did in the seventies, and then it became the most credible, powerful and profitable label. Bring true artist development back, not the long term promotion of one album, but the ability for an act to find itself and grow over a number of projects.

TRANSPARENCY

Straight percentage splits with acts, which all recoup at the same rate. Get the artists on your side and they’ll not only be happy, but they’ll testify and more people will want to join in.

SPONSORED TOURS

Call it charity. Instead of a NOW collection for the already big, how about a sampler of what needs to be heard, fifteen tracks every couple of months, with a tour to follow. It’s the industry’s obligation to break acts. Used to be labels and radio worked hand in hand to do this, but labels are less profitable and radio is too codified, praying to the dollar as opposed to culture.

LEAVE SOME MONEY ON THE TABLE

The endless sponsorship deals, the endless cross-promotions, have undercut the credibility of music, which was once an outside art form that spoke truth, that drove the culture, that everybody rallied around. But now that the goal is to become a brand and sell out to a brand it’s hard to believe in acts. There’s plenty of money in the industry, and that which is seen as credible makes more, just ask Adele.

You get out ahead of your audience, you envision potential problems and work on solutions. But the music industry has been a short term, desperate operation for far too long. No wonder nobody with a brain wants to get involved, it’d be like joining the Mafia in 2016, after the government put a dent in all that.

You start off with respect. Then you move on to transparency. Then you get in bed with your customers, you make them feel involved, that they have a voice.

We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.