THIS IS MY HOMETOWN!

So I’m hanging with Tony D. upstairs, waiting for the Eric Church V.I.P. experience. They sell it according to the size of the room. In L.A. that’s 200 people, for $200 apiece. How can that BE?

And we’re killing time in the museum to the man. With framed letters from icons like Taylor Swift, thanking Eric for getting kicked off the Rascal Flatts tour so she could get the gig, and I’m fingering the Lucchese boots you can only buy here, with Eric’s lyrics etched into the bottom, then I hear that whoop of recognition, Eric has arrived.

Here’s the deal. The V.I.P. experience includes some food…and an acoustic appearance by the man himself.

And I’m talking to Louis Messina. I’m a jaded old coot, I’ve seen it all, and then Eric starts to strum.

He’s wearing his aviators, but no hat. He’s making small talk and then he starts to sing and I begin to tingle…THIS IS IT!

You can go see the local act play at the bar and get as close as you want to. But once they make it, once they have fans across this great country of ours, you can read about their travails in the gossip pages, but you’re never going to ever get up close and personal.

But here he was!

And everybody’s got their phone in the air, not only shooting pics, but making videos. There’s all this bullcrap about possessions, but you can’t buy a $10,000 iPhone, no, the reality is today it’s all about experiences, and the fans in attendance were peaking and freaking…AND SO WAS I!

This is the only place you can get this, the only way you can get this adoration is by playing music. And the hit is INCREDIBLE!

That’s right, you can be a legendary actor, you can be a billionaire, but you’re never going to get the response Eric Church got from the assembled multitude Friday night.

The connection between musical performer and fan. Not lip-synching, playing to hard drive, but giving you an unimpeachable, totally unique acoustic rendition of songs you know by heart.

Give me back my hometown
‘CAUSE THIS IS MY HOMETOWN!!

2

So what happens at an Eric Church show?

First and foremost it sells out, which ain’t easy at Staples, where there’s an upper deck above three tiers of skyboxes that is so high it might as well come with oxygen.

And there’s no fakery. Just a drummer and four guitars. You remember bands, don’t you? Don’t pooh-pooh country music, you haven’t given it a chance. It’s everything you yearn for. Honest, played by real musicians, singing about real life. The only difference is the accent. But if you read the “New York Times,” you know the northerners are migrating down south, that’s where everybody’s going.

So there’s this white goateed slide guitarist who’s bringing me right back to the seventies, my body is twisting and turning as he wails. I start to ponder how good he is compared to Duane Allman, but then I remember no one even does this anymore. And if you hadn’t been around back then, you’d be inspired to play. Remember that? Seeing your heroes up on stage and buying an instrument to get closer to the music yourself?

And then there’s the hard work. First time through L.A. Eric played at the Whisky, to six people. Ten years ago. When he was already 27. Tell that to the barely pubescent stars they keep telling us have something to say and will last forever. That’s right, Justin Bieber’s doing a roast because he’s a joke!

And sure, Eric plays the hits, but the set is different every night, because if it’s not fun for the people making the music, the audience can tell. Because, after all, when done right live music is a religious experience.

3

And then he played “Dancing In The Dark.”

It was the intro to his big hit “Springsteen.” Because the thread runs through rock and roll all the way from New Jersey to Nashville.

And it is about hits. They’re the tree you hang the ornaments upon.

And the best hits are songs.

You remember songs, don’t you? Those things you can sing along to in the car?

4

So what did we learn?

That country is a big tent. Dwight Yoakam held down the middle and Halestorm opened, one of the highlights came when Eric called out Lizzy Hale to shred with him. It’s powerful to see a woman with an Explorer pick.

And the audience was 50/50 boys and girls. Some come for the stories, some come for the gut-wrenching playing, but they all want to put their hands in the air and sing along.

Like me.

Because deep into the set, I heard that intro straight out of Petty’s “Love Is A Long Road” and then…

Damn, I used to love this view

Living to listen to the music. Making pilgrimages to the store to visit the records, with the elixir of life locked inside.

All the colors of my youth
The red, the green, the hope, the truth

What kind of bizarre world do we live in where we lionize the rich and the no-talents? One wherein old guys in black tell us to love records by people who can’t sing and can’t play while the pop chart is ruled by people who are faces only.

My friends try to cheer me up, get together at the Pizza Hut

And talk about the good old days. The Fillmore. The Stones. The Who. All the classic rock.

These sleepy streetlights on every sidewalk side street
Shed a light on everything that used to be

The oldsters dye their hair, get plastic surgery and put out new albums that are unlistenable, wanting us to believe it’s 1975 when that was forty years ago.

And then you stumble into an arena and find 20,000 people who are not jaded, who know every word and sing along, just like we used to, to a guy who knows history but is not imprisoned by it, who wants to carry on the tradition, but in his own vision.

And I’ve got my arm in the air, exclaiming to the rafters with all my might:

Give me back my hometown
‘CAUSE THIS IS MY HOMETOWN

It’s great to get back to where you once belonged.

I know, because I went there Friday night.

Give me back my hometown – Spotify

Give me back my hometown – YouTube

“Bob Dylan Gives Away 50,000 Copies of His New Album to AARP The Magazine Readers”

If you don’t pay for it, you don’t listen to it.

That’s the difference between yesterday and today. That’s what drove the album era. You laid down your cash and played that LP until you knew it by heart, you had an investment, and your collection was small.

But today the paradigm is completely different. We have access to everything, literally just a touch or click away. How do you convince people to listen?

What we’ve learned is a publicity campaign is not enough. Otherwise Tom Petty and U2’s new music would be ubiquitous.

Now if you’re about selling tickets, and that’s where all the money is today, it doesn’t even matter if people listen to the new music, never mind buy it. The attendant publicity will make people aware, and everybody knows if you have a new record and you’re doing publicity you’re going on the road.

Just don’t ask them to listen to the new music in concert.

Just like no one will want to hear Dylan’s covers of Sinatra at the show. Then again, everybody going to hear Dylan is either a brain dead fan, or afraid he’s gonna die and they won’t have this notch in their belt, they won’t have seen him.

Sorry for speaking the truth, but Bob can croak at best, and he rearranges his hits, go once and you never have to go again.

And there’s no better songwriter in the history of rock and roll.

And I will say this promotion may make me wince, but it’s not that stupid. His audience is retired and they still listen to CDs and this is an easy way to reach them. Furthermore, not being inured to the free music game, they’ll give the CD a spin. But don’t ask them to play it all the way through, that’s torture.

So, what we’ve learned is we’re pushing the envelope of marketing/distribution ideas. Believe me, you won’t be able to give away free CDs soon, Macs don’t even come with disk drives! Just like free downloads disappeared, killed by streams, the Wal-Mart cheap/value CD is gone now too.

But that’s the world we live in, where old rockers find it easier to come up with innovative marketing ideas than compelling music.

How do you get people to check your new music out?

Turns out being established no longer counts. Especially if you’re a boomer act.

Sure, the kids listen to the new stuff, but they rejected Gaga’s latest immediately.

That’s right, you put it out and if we even give it a chance we do it in a day and we give you five seconds, that’s enough.

The bar is so high, most people making music can’t even see it, never mind reach it.

Don’t tell people they’ve got to listen a few times.

Don’t put out any filler.

Go into the Apple Store. How many SKUs do they have? Nearly none. Steve Jobs collapsed the product line and now they sell very few extras. You can’t confuse the audience, you can’t overwhelm people and what you’re purveying must be superlative.

No one goes into the Apple Store and says a MacBook Pro isn’t good enough. They might think it’s overpriced, they might not buy it, but everyone says it’s great.

But Apple’s been at it for a long time, not quite as long as Mr. Zimmerman, but close.

Whereas the youngsters think they’re great right out of the box and the oldsters are resting on their laurels.

Used to be exposure was everything. Get on late night TV. Get a review in the newspaper.

But that’s all history. We have an endless river of hype, which everybody but hard core fans ignores. And if these bands were only interested in hard core fans they’d price the album at $200 and sell it with tchotchkes, fans will buy anything.

But they want more.

This is the story of the teens. How in a world of overwhelming choice, we gravitate to very few winners. Which must reach a standard of excellence and ubiquity.

And the oldsters, actually everybody who’s an artist, doesn’t like this.

If you’re not good enough to start for the Cavaliers, we never want to see you play ball. Oh, you can shoot hoops in your driveway, but just don’t ask us to pay attention.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

Actually it doesn’t.

Everybody’s overwhelmed, nobody has any time.

Only one movie a week makes bank, the rest usually fail.

It’s because we’ve only got so much time and we want to be a member of the group.

Bob Dylan should retire. Should have years ago. Athletes go when they can no longer run, when their skills decline. Bob can barely sing, he’s over seventy, he had a good run.

His dedicated fans will excoriate me for saying this.

But his dedicated fans are the only ones who care.

P.S. Speaking of a brain dead press living in a bygone era, I point you to a brilliant chart in the “Digital Music News,”

“What the Vinyl ‘Comeback’ Really Looks Like”

P.P.S. Re Garth Brooks’s comeback… Got an e-mail about tickets going for $6 at his Boston show tonight. Went on StubHub, tickets are way below face value, as low as $10 on the site:

StubHub – Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood

I’m not saying Boston is Garth’s strongest market, I’m not saying no one wants to see him, but I am saying don’t believe everything you read. The press ranks have been decimated and writers would rather hang with Garth than write anything negative. And despite me putting down the vinyl revolution ad infinitum, every major outlet has done a story about this inane microscopic revival. Proving the purveyors own the press, but the truth is few are paying attention.

Remember when we used to argue about Days of the New?

This was back in the mid-nineties when Geffen Records was the king of rock, just before that format imploded and so did the label. Before videos were all about the production and not the music, before rap went on a victory lap.

It’s almost like it didn’t happen. Days of the New was huge, and then they disappeared. You see the “creative genius” of the group, Travis Meeks, fired the rest of the act after the initial success. Which he could then never duplicate. Did he lose the formula, or was the effort of the rest of the band key?

We can debate that forever and come to no conclusion.

But we do know in ’97 and ’98 you could not escape the band’s music.

It started with “Touch, Peel and Stand.” Which dominated the rock radio format for a while. And continued to get play in bedrooms of teenagers long after it slipped off the chart.

And then came “The Down Town.” Which also went to number one on the rock chart. But it seemed so DERIVATIVE!

Back when rock still ruled, and nearly five minute tracks were de rigueur, when they didn’t make you write with the hitmaker du jour and you could still do it your way.

And then there was “Shelf in the Room”…

Headbanging music made for males who’d ingested so much dope or alcohol they could only sit on the couch and nod their head.

The acoustic guitar intro is so simple, anybody could write it and play it.

But nobody does anymore.

You need more.

And more comes in. There’s another guitar. And it’s so HYPNOTIC!

And then comes the change…

The key is so distant
I’ve opened doors

That VOICE! Back when our stars were dark and mysterious, before they were busy promoting themselves on social media, when Heather Locklear and Valerie Bertinelli could not resist the allure of the players, when the players were still king, before they were trumped by the mercenary Kardashians who seem to know today’s game better than the musicians.

Holding out
Never hold in
Holding out
Never hold

The repetition with the effects, you cannot help but sing along.

It’s as if Jimmy Page was reincarnated minus a couple of decades and decided to make ethereal music in the vein of Led Zeppelin, albeit a bit less inventive.

But compared to today, “Shelf in the Room” sounds positively incredible! Like a lost sea scroll!

There’s not a whole hell of a lot on the track, it’s acoustic (like “Led Zeppelin III”!) and all you know is there’s a scrim between you and the performance and you just want to cut through and get closer.

“Shelf In The Room” demands you slow down and give it your complete attention. It’s not something that plays in the background which can be completely ignored.

Who is this guy with the deep voice? Singing like there’s not a single light in the room? How did they capture lightning in a bottle?

That’s right, that which appears derivative is seen as genius a few decades removed. Not only the Carpenters, but Boston and Days of the New.

“Shelf in the Room” sounds so different from what people play today. There’s no guest rapper, no stray electronics, it’s like the band is saying “This is enough.”

AND IT IS!

Rhinofy-Shelf in the Room

(Note: These charts are not all the exact same week. The SoundScan singles and album charts are for the week ending 1/11/15, as is the global Spotify streaming chart, whereas, unfortunately, the Spotify U.S. streaming chart is for the week ending 1/18/15. I could wait until all the charts align, but I’m inspired now, and I believe the insights remain true.)

1. “Uptown Funk” Mark Ronson

This sold 340,776 singles in the U.S.

But it got 4,842,359 streams on Spotify in the U.S.

How many times did each person play the track they bought?

However, in the history of “Uptown Funk” sales, 2,097,503 tracks were moved. So, if everybody who bought one played the song 2 times, they’d match the Spotify streams.

However, in the history of the track on Spotify, “Uptown Funk” has been streamed 81,564,715 times. Alas, that’s a worldwide. number.

So let’s try to get some equivalency, which is hard to do.

Streams trump sales.

But streams pay less than sales.

But streaming only pays…when a track is streamed!

And, streaming is a worldwide phenomenon.

Furthermore, Spotify is just a percentage of streaming, there are competing streaming services and, of course, YouTube.

So…

Focus on listens. That’s where the whole game is moving. Fans are made by listens.

2. “Thinking Out Loud” Ed Sheeran

Sold 223,519 for  a cume of 1,413,677.

Streamed 3,881,860 times on Spotify in the U.S.

However, “Thinking Out Loud” is number three internationally on Spotify, it was streamed 12,446,973 times.

In the history of Spotify, “Thinking Out Loud” was streamed 165,300,622 times.

Ed Sheeran’s album “X” has been out for 29 weeks in the United States.

But the single has only been on the chart for 16 weeks.

A lot of things drive the streams of tracks. Most definitely radio.

But it appears that the labels and radio are losing control of tracks by hit artists. Because you can see what is successful from the get-go with albums. Every track is streamable upon release on Spotify.

And “X” is number two on the album chart.

But Sheeran only has three cuts in the U.S. Spotify top fifty.

Sam Smith has two tracks in the U.S. Spotify top fifty.

Meghan Trainor has two.

Ariana Grande has two.

But these multiple tracks in the top fifty are all “hits.”

If albums were everything, you’d see more tracks by an artist in the top fifty.

Now if you go to the iTunes Top Songs, you’ll learn that Fall Out Boy has seven tracks in the top 200, with two in the top fifty.

Fall Out Boy only has one track in the Spotify top fifty.

So, what we learn is the sales chart is not an accurate picture. It skews for today in a world that’s all about tomorrow. Yes, music is about careers, longevity. Even tracks are about longevity. So, Fall Out Boy gets a lot of action in week one of their album release, how about week ten, never mind a year in?

So, looking at the Spotify top fifty, we learn that we live in a hit single world. You can talk all you want about albums, but most people are listening to singles. A vast spectrum of them. Meaning there’s room for you on the chart if you make something desirable, you’re not being crowded out by the usual suspects.

(Note: Hozier’s “Take Me To Church” is number two on the worldwide Spotify chart, with 325,599 more streams.)

CALVIN HARRIS

His album “Motion” is number 39 on the sales chart. A middling performance after ten weeks, you’d think he doesn’t matter that much.

But Calvin Harris is an international superstar! He’s got two tracks in the Spotify worldwide chart, “Outside” has 7,818,475 streams and “Blame” has 6,726,978 this week.

“Blame” has 166,657,483 streams worldwide on Spotify since its release.

“Outside” has 87,436,344 historical streams.

“Blame” is number 64 after 19 weeks on the SoundScan sales chart. It sold 23,986 copies for a cume of 691,764.

“Outside” is number 117 in sales, 15,322 this week, a cume of 147,151.

“Blame” was streamed 1,439,052 times on Spotify in the U.S. this week.

“Outside” 1,417,394 in the U.S. this week.

They were the number 25 and 29 tracks on Spotify in the U.S. respectively.

So what we learn is people stream Calvin Harris more than they buy him. And he’s much more popular on streaming services.

“Firestone” Kygo

Not even on the sales chart, it’s like Kygo doesn’t exist.

But “Firestone” had 1,160,665 streams in the U.S. last week. It’s number 41.

But it’s number six worldwide, with 6,990,370 spins on Spotify.

CONCLUSION

And now I’m sure your head is spinning. You’re confused. Not only because the charts are not the exact same weeks, but because there are so many charts, so many statistics!

So what have we learned…

1. It’s a worldwide business.

Consolidation rules. Live Nation is a worldwide business, never mind BMW. He or she who sees the world as their marketplace ultimately triumphs. And now it’s easier than ever to reach the entire world. Spotify functions in a plethora of countries. You can go direct and make all the money, or…you can go with one company and demand a worldwide rate, with no deductions. That’s right, with one payer, why should you get screwed, why should you wait for your money? We’re going that way. And this is a good thing.

Furthermore, we’re going to day and date worldwide release. The public demands it. Hell, they do it in the movie business, it’s the best way to fight piracy.

2. Listens are everything.

Streams dwarf sales and you get paid on each and every one, in perpetuity, or as long as the copyright holds, which is nearly perpetuity in the United States.

Focus long term.

And know that once a track is released, it’s in the hands of the public. You can try to influence people, but they can also influence the system. Data goes both ways. When you put out an album, see what the people are streaming, those are the hits.

3. Hits are everything.

Turns out most people don’t stream the album tracks. Sure, superstars have multiple hits, but the money is in the hits, that which is streamed prodigiously.

So, you should not focus on making an album-length statement so much as putting out that which will be streamed, assuming you want to get paid, and since everybody is bitching about Spotify payments, it looks like they do, want to get paid that is.

You have instant data, an instant response. Pay attention and use it.

4. The elephant in the room.

YouTube. Which pays so much less per view/stream.

The two official Vevo Calvin Harris videos on YouTube have been streamed a combined 116,428,272 times. Imagine if everybody paid ten bucks a month to stream YouTube clips!

But they don’t. Google is trying to get them to do so, but right now they don’t.

It’s Spotify that has some people paying that amount, millions, in fact.

And Spotify is not alone.

That’s right, right now Spotify does not own the streaming market. You can listen on Rdio or Rhapsody or Deezer…

Or you can steal and no one gets paid.

So we’ve learned that streaming has won. And the goal is to get as many people as possible to pay.

5. The data.

“Billboard”/SoundScan has a new album chart.

If you think the above is incomprehensible, try checking that out.

The main statistic is “Total Activity.” A certain number of track sales equal an album sale and ditto with streams. As if buying enough bicycles gets you a car. Or buying enough toothpicks gets you a tree. And according to “Billboard”/SoundScan, “Taylor Swift” had no streaming activity during the week ending 1/11/2015. But the truth is she’s all over YouTube.

So what does the “Billboard”/Spotify chart mean?

NOTHING!

We need to go to a pure stream model.

How many times a track is streamed on all services, that’s all that counts.

We want an accurate count, not a manipulated number.

And we’re going to get there.

The good news is we’re close.

But vested interests have their thumb on the scale, they’re afraid to go to the all streaming model, that would mean they’re losing control.

But the truth is music is a business, which demands professionals. And there’s so much music out there that you may be able to get started independently, but you need pros to push you over the top. I.e. major labels, or their equivalent.

And Apple is not going to buy Universal. No tech company is going to buy a music company. The margins are not good enough and the headaches are legion.

However, to focus on the revenue from recorded music only is to be myopic. Records are the free joint that gets someone to buy an ounce.

And if you don’t understand that metaphor, you don’t know weed is legal in Colorado and gays can get married and albums are history.

Your goal is to create a body of work, that people listen to endlessly.

And at the end of the day that’s made up of tracks.

And payment for those tracks is going up, and the slot machine will pay off forever.