I ran into him at the Sonos studio.

I’d like to tell you what I learned about the company but it was all off the record. But I can tell you they want to bring hi-fi back. And I had a long conversation with Giles Martin, who’s been hired to help them achieve this. As for a silver spoon in his mouth…papa George sold out his royalties long ago, Giles has been on his own. And we had a fascinating discussion about sound, hi-res, vinyl, CDs, streaming… And Giles said every format sounds different. And he may prefer one song in one and another in something else. And that oftentimes we prefer vinyl because of its limitations. It’s all in the tweaking. And first and foremost comes enjoyment, do you like what you’re hearing?

And we’re sitting in the back room, surrounded by equipment. I can soak up knowledge from a guy like Giles all day long. What was it like having a famous father, listening to stories of mixing George Harrison’s music for Martin Scorsese, revamping “Love.”

But we reached a natural stopping point and I had to drive all the way across town and back again so I got up, went out the door, and there was Lou Adler.

Famous these days for sitting on the Lakers’ sideline, Lou is one of the engines of rock and roll, the modern music business, he was there from Jan & Dean through the Mamas & the Papas to Spirit to Carole King to the “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” And he wasn’t just the executive, he was the producer! How did this happen?

Famous people… How do you act?

If you’re a rube from out of town you gush and ask for an autograph.

Live long enough in Los Angeles and you respect their privacy, you keep your distance.

But in this case I was introduced.

Okay, how do I start.

“I’m friends with your son.”

WHICH ONE, I HAVE SEVEN!

I didn’t anticipate this, I figured the door would open wide. And after telling Lou it was Nic, he said he’d just spoken with him.

So now is where you have to prove you really know the person, that you’re just not dropping names and making it up. So I decided to reference Nic’s hospital stay as a result of overdoing it at the CrossFit studio. It’s a known syndrome, you piss a fluid that looks like Coke.

Lou acknowledged this so I figured I could start asking questions. I’ve got so many questions.

How did you hook up with Jan & Dean?

THROUGH KIM FOWLEY!

The story is true. Kim came in with a briefcase, with none of Kim’s music inside it, and told Lou about the University high school students, just after Arnie had departed (yes, it was Jan & Arnie first.)

And in telling this story, Lou referenced “Herbie,” who I knew had to be Herb Alpert. So I asked that next… How did Lou know Herbie?

They were introduced by their girlfriends!

Serendipity, it’s key to so much success.

So that’s how Lou’s Ode ended up with A&M…

Actually, it was after Lou’s contract lapsed with Epic. His old friend Herbie said they should form an alliance.

It’s personal, all business is.

And now I’m at that point where…

The story with famous people is you don’t want to ask too many questions, they start putting up their guard, they start to pull back, if you run into them again they retreat. So my thoughts are ping-ponging around my brain, how many questions can I proffer?

Every time I’ve seen Lou previously he hasn’t given me the time of day. But after referencing Nic, I told him I was friends with Andrew Loog Oldham, who I knew stayed at Lou’s house. This is when I found out Lou knew who I was, he said Andrew was a big fan of my writing.

Oh, that’s another thing when meeting famous people, never ever tell them your story, who you are. Don’t pitch. That’s anathema to them. How are they gonna respect you if they’re clueless as to who you are? There’s the conundrum, welcome to Hollywood.

And since we had a link on Andrew, I decided to go deeper, referencing Oldham’s residence in Bogota, had Lou been down there?

Talk about anything but business, be a person first.

And then we started talking about how it was back then and how it is now and Lou told me one of his sons was deep into history and I was thinking how I wanted to sit on the couch all afternoon and hear stories, soak it up from a man who was not only there, but steered!

But you can’t do this. Where’s the endpoint.

The slight body movement. The way his frame leaned to the side, the way his head tilted towards his next destination. It was time to end it.

And you can’t plead and you can’t be abrupt, you’ve got to make it like a passing thing, that you’re both on campus and will run into one another again soon.

But will we?

I don’t know, but I do know that despite the internet linking us all together, there’s nothing like living in L.A. where all these people are out and about.

It’s living history.

They witnessed it.

I want to record it.

Don’t think of corporations, the term has been bastardized to the point where it means anybody or anything that has risen above and solidified an audience. That’s who and what rules in the internet age. And it’s harder than ever to get there.

That’s the untold story of the past five internet years. How we went from a free-for-all to solidification, how barriers to entry have been established that you may not be able to codify or see, but that are there nonetheless.

The audience is overwhelmed with choice/input. Just think of TV. You’ve got the five hundred channels on cable plus Hulu, Amazon and Netflix. You can’t see everything, you can’t even try. It’s overwhelming. So we gravitate to that which everybody else does. He or she who rises above becomes ever more popular.

So a curator can be a brand. That’s what’s wrong with the playlists on Beats and Spotify. We have no idea who created them, and until we do, it’s hard to pay attention. A curator we believe in will take us places we didn’t previously choose to go, because we have faith in them. You know, a friend whose taste you trust who tells you to listen to something, which you don’t like at first, but you slog through, because they said so.

When a newspaper tells you to do something, you don’t. That’s what papers have lost, their credibility when it comes to the arts. They’re in bed with the purveyors and have blown our trust.

But now we’ve got a plethora of people trying to gain our trust online. And most are doing it for the money. Which turns us off, because so many of us are broke or challenged. We want like-minded people, in bed with us, to tell us what to do. This is the essence of the problem with the Tidal press conference, it was them versus us, no matter what they were trying to say.

Curation is a nascent field. It’s still being sorted out. In article curation, we’ve got Jason Hirschhorn, Dave Pell and the Skimm women. But Pell is a one man band, can he compete against Hirschhorn and the Skimm without investment? Just watch “Shark Tank,” there’s a tsunami of orders after you appear on the show, can you fulfill them?

And timing is everything. You used to be able to go viral. We were all hungry for info, we loved trading music online like we did jokes back in the heady days of AOL in the nineties.

But when was the last time someone e-mailed you a joke?

And no one cares when you e-mail an MP3, god forbid, or a link to YouTube or Spotify, unless you’ve previously gained their trust. We’ve got enough music, we’re overwhelmed with input.

The deejay used to be the curator in the free-form radio days. Very few got the gig, we had faith in them.

Will there be superstar curators?

Probably, let’s hope so.

But just throwing a ton of playlists at us does not solve the problem. I don’t want one for sleeping and peeing and farting and screwing… I want one that speaks to me uniquely, yet makes me feel part of humanity!

P.S. The rules are in flux! They’re constantly changing! Don’t be a politician, afraid to admit the game has changed or you’re wrong for fear of gotcha ads and rearguard constituents who can’t handle the truth. “Harlem Shake” killed the viral video. Because its success was manipulated and people found out about it. You cannot act like the landscape doesn’t change. People had to buy CDs of full albums in the nineties, now they can pick and choose the hits they want to hear and even if you create something very good on the other nine or eleven tracks on an album, most people won’t check them out. So, you’ve got to think of a new way of tackling the public.

P.P.S. You’ve also got to decide if you want to reach everyone or someone. Go for world domination or an audience that will keep you alive. Amanda Palmer has a world-dominating story, but her music is for very few. Furthermore, everything grows out of her music, so she must keep doing that and chances are her further movements in distribution and marketing won’t gain as much attention.

P.P.P.S. If Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher started ReCode five years earlier it would have had a much better chance of standalone success. So, an idea might be good for today, but terrible for tomorrow. One characteristic of a winner is someone who is constantly taking the temperature, who realizes we live on shifting sands.

P.P.P.P.S. Establish who your audience is. If you’ve got an app you want to flip… You need VC money and a corporation to buy it. Sure, you need traffic, but you’re really selling to the VC and corporation. Whereas if you’re an artist, you’re selling to the end consumer. The end consumer must be paramount in your plan.

P.P.P.P.P.S. We don’t need you or your plan. Life is an endless river that never stops flowing, the same water never passes by again. Don’t overestimate your importance, know that nothing is forever, do great work, but realize you must get in the boat and float, and that going upstream rarely pays dividends, thirteen year olds rarely want the music of septuagenarians, it’s the way of the world.

They couldn’t make it on their own.

Walt Mossberg, one of America’s two most famous tech columnists, shot himself in the foot. He left the “Wall Street Journal.” They’re finding out in news what we already know in music, you can go it alone, the internet allows you to do this, but in a chaotic world he with the established presence wins, the major record labels figured out the internet and the big news sites still rule.

What about BuzzFeed, and the “Huffington Post”?

The HuffPo is in decline. You can read about it in the “New York Review Of Books,” which no one opens except for intellectuals, but at least enough to keep the publication going. If you were gonna try and start a new printed book review today…FUHGETTABOUTIT!

But once upon a time the HuffPo was new and different. It focused on left wing news and link-bait, before link-bait littered every webpage you went to.

And BuzzFeed invented the listicle.

What did ReCode invent?

Absolutely nothing.

We don’t need me-too, we need new and different. And unless you’re gonna do new and different, stay where you are.

Ezra Klein left the “Washington Post.” He said his Vox site was gonna be different, and it is, a bit, but not significantly enough to gain traction.

Nate Silver left the “New York Times” for obscurity. The election prognosticator, our national data interpreter, put a stake in his heart and keeled right over. He started a whole website, 538, for data-driven articles, but the “Times” just doubled down with data and created the Upshot. Even worse, Silver didn’t realize if you’re starting from scratch you’ve got to have stars. And he’s the only star on his site. He’s earned my attention. But the rest of the writers on his site parsing the numbers…WHO ARE THEY?

And then you’ve got David Pogue, Mossberg’s nemesis, who left the “Times” for Yahoo and was promptly buried in the tsunami of bogus information on that site. He went from being one of the two experts to a nobody.

So what have we learned…

Just because you’re a star don’t think you’re bigger than the enterprise.

That’s what the film business has learned. They don’t pay stars as handsomely as they used to. As for these same stars funding their own movies… They have the twin hurdles of raising capital and distribution. Never mind having no ongoing catalog to keep them flush. That’s the movie studios’ greatest asset, as it is the record labels’, their historical product. It gives them guaranteed cash flow and bargaining power. That’s why the labels got favorable deals with Spotify…their copyrighted material!

As for records… George Michael sat on the sidelines and sued Sony and he never had another hit record. Trent Reznor did it his way and he got artistic freedom but fewer people cared, and he had to do so much himself other than create art that he ended up going back into the system.

When the world is wild and woolly, new and exciting, pioneers fight it out for eventual dominance. But once the landscape starts to coalesce…pick another venue! This is Tidal’s big mistake, not the press conference, but wading into a pool already filled with sharks.

The major labels control the modern music world. You can get started alone, you can even get some traction, but to break through big you’ve got to play with the established entities, they own radio and to a great degree publicity. Sure, you can do it your way, it’s just gonna be expensive and long. Are you up to that?

And it gets even tougher if you’ve got investors. They want their money back. They’ll pull the carpet out from under you when you least expect it, put heretofore unknown pressure upon you.

Bottom line… ReCode had the best tech news in the business. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher built a team of experts. But nobody cared, nobody went to the site, they thought their minions would follow them but it turned out they were aligned more with the “Wall Street Journal,” their former home, than the writers themselves. It’s kind of like when the lead singer leaves the band…good luck! Sure, there are exceptions, but… But now you can’t even find the new sites, you can’t get the word out. Furthermore, the “Journal” hired Joanna Stern, a cheeky tech writer who is not as good as Mossberg but oozes personality, and Geoffrey Fowler, who’s technically sound, albeit dry. Turns out we don’t need THE expert as much as AN expert. (And the “Times” got Farhad Manjoo, who in his own way is just as good as Pogue.)

So if you’re starting something new…by all means go for it, it’s the essence of Silicon Valley.

But if you’re an individual star, chafing under the reins of your boss, believing you can go it alone…

You probably cannot. Especially if the world you live in is solidified.

“Vox Media Adds ReCode to Its Stable of Websites” (read this for the traffic numbers)

“Digital Journalism: How Good Is It?” (The HuffPo has traffic, but is in the throes of an identity crisis that presages decline)

I could not put this book down, I turned out the lights at 3 AM two nights in a row.

Then again, that’s not much later than my usual bedtime.

So the way I discover books is by reading the reviews and then going to Amazon and checking the ratings. I’m only interested in that which gets high ratings. I’m a believer in the wisdom of the crowd. Assuming the book gets the imprimatur of the gatekeepers.

And the “New York Times” said “The Children’s Crusade” was lousy.

Hmm…

I downloaded the sample chapter. Which I did not find riveting. So I did more research. And what I was stunned to find out was the author, Ann Packer, was the sister of George Packer! When there are two famous people in a family you wonder what it was like growing up in that house, what motivated the children. And I also learned Ann’s rep was built on the book “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier,” so I decided to check that out.

Do you want to read a book about a fiancee becoming paralyzed by diving into shallow water?

OF COURSE NOT!

But the sample cut like butter, I liked it, I bought “Clausen’s Pier.”

That’s another thing. If I buy it, I finish it.

And I also pay for books. It incentivizes me to read them.

As for the authors making money, ain’t that a laugh. Because except for a few superstars, they all have other gigs, or inherited wealth. The reason I’m paying is for me!

So what do you do if you’re unsure about getting married and your significant other gets paralyzed. Do you do the right thing or jump ship?

I’m all about doing the right thing, but sometimes do you get an excuse? I’ve got no idea what goes on behind closed doors. Nor do the people surrounding the protagonist in this story. You’re engaged, you’re madly in love. But maybe this is not true.

And the descriptions of sex are so right on you’re both touched and squirming. For all the online porn, we don’t ever really talk about sex. And we’re definitely unsure what love is.

So I read “Clausen’s” and loved it. Didn’t have a big, bang-up finish, but not every book is “Anna Karenina.”

So knowing I had a long flight ahead, I bought “Children’s Crusade,” and I couldn’t get into it. Until about 40% through (that’s how you judge where you are on the Kindle, by percentage), that’s when I got hooked.

“Children’s Crusade” is about a family.

The patriarch is a doctor, and he’s all about doing the right thing. That’s so rare today. He’s willing to sacrifice for his children, he just wants them to be happy. Are there such good souls out there?

And the four children…

The second, the girl, Rebecca, is smarter than her older brother Robert, who is plenty smart. How do you handle this? When all the attention goes to your older sibling?

And the third is a boy. Ryan is sensitive, and has a knockout, almost live-in girlfriend who… Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.

And the fourth is the unwanted, unexpected, or maybe not, James. A troublemaker, a thorn in his mother’s side. The mother who…

That’s the linchpin of the story, the mother. Is she just a bad egg or did the father force her to behave this way? I wonder about this all the time. It takes two to tango. You get mad someone is not behaving in a certain way…to what degree are you responsible? Then again, I’m like that guy in the Paul Simon song, when something goes wrong, I’m the first to admit it…

And there isn’t a ton of drama.

Then again, the normal twists of fate are enough in a family.

But I saw myself in the book, and so much of the world I live in.

Which is why I keep reading.

And I’m unsure whether to recommend “The Children’s Crusade.” Because, like I said above, it doesn’t start fast. And when it gets going, it never speeds along. I’d say a third of the book could have been cut, but that’s not how the writer wanted to do it. And you should be able to do it your way. Because it’s all about total resonance with those who do care.

And I cared.

I’m still thinking about it.

“The Children’s Crusade”

“The Dive From Clausen’s Pier”