“Taylor Swift Pulls Her Music From Spotify”

This is about money.

Not in the album, that’s bupkes compared to the tour!

In other words, Taylor Swift is not selling a million plus albums this week to get rich on the sales, but to get rich on the penumbra. I.e. the tours, the endorsements, all the tchotchkes and change that come to the doorstep of America’s most successful pop star. It’s about the publicity, baby, and who cares if anybody streams her music on Spotify.

Spat, schmat. What we’ve learned in music is early adopters pay a price. That you’re best off waiting for others to blaze the trail and then walking through the door and getting all the money. It’s kind of like that joke about the baby bull and the papa bull and the cows down in the meadow…those who run get less.

Streaming has won, if you’re talking about how people listen to recorded music. According to the RIAA, “These streaming services contributed 27% of total industry revenues in 1H 2014, compared with 20% for 1H 2013. The growth in revenues from streaming services offset the entire decline in revenues from permanent downloads for the first half of 2014.”

(They define streaming as including not only Spotify and its ilk, but SiriusXM and Pandora and YouTube and…”Streaming music services grew 28% in the first half of 2014 to $859 million, versus $673 million for 1H 2013.”)

2014 Mid-Year RIAA Shipment and Revenue Statistics

 

So Taylor Swift cannot turn back the hands of time, but she doesn’t want to (at least not financially, as she herself has declared, her new album is retro).

So there’s no story here. Other than one that can be trumped up by the media to further burnish Taylor’s career/money-making machine. The facts don’t matter, whether she had a spat with Spotify or not. The truth is Taylor Swift owns the news cycle, and he who reaches the most people wins today.

So on one hand we’ve got Ms. Swift. Whose scorched earth publicity campaign will end up putting the weekly sales crown on her head, the only 2014 debut to sell platinum in one week. If that’s a statistic that tickles your fancy, you seem to have forgotten what ‘N Sync achieved fifteen years ago. But that was a different era. One in which MTV still mattered, however briefly thereafter, most people did not have broadband and we knew and cared who was number one, we were living in a monoculture.

But today we live in a multifarious world where we come together on so few things. Taylor Swift is a rallying point, someone we can talk about, but it’s got nothing to do with her music and everything to do with the publicity. Selling a million copies a week in a country of 300 million people is a blip on the radar screen, but owning the news cycle, even trumping the World Series, is priceless.

As for Spotify…

Acts come and go, institutions remain.

How long a career will Taylor Swift have? She can tour until she drops, as to whether people will care about her new music…

Does anybody care about Bob Seger’s new music? The Luddite finally on iTunes and not on Spotify? Absolutely not. At some point the zeitgeist passes you by.

But Taylor Swift owns the zeitgeist this week.

But Spotify owns the zeitgeist in the future.

You might think it’s Taylor Swift’s world and we only live in it, but the truth is it’s streaming music’s world and we not only live in it, we love it!

I already feel powerless enough!

That’s right, I may have the right to vote, but with gerrymandering and corporate influence it seems like a meaningless effort. Oh, don’t come down on me, I’ve never missed an election, but if you don’t think this country is screwed up in the governance department you must be ruling.

And politicians are like athletes. Only with worse bodies and better brains. It’s all a sport that we can watch but not participate in. They take it so seriously. It’s like we don’t count. I mean really, do you have to call me 15 times a day?

I’m not exaggerating. That’s how many robocalls I got yesterday. The number of messages had me thinking someone had died. No one calls anymore. Except for the backward politicos, who believe like all spammers if they’ve got the ability to reach me, they can waste my time.

And, like Guy Oseary and U2, you can tell me just to hit delete, but today my phone has been ringing off the hook, but every time I jump up I find it’s another politician begging for my vote so he or she can play in a game that excludes me.

I’m mad as hell and no one’s sticking up for me.

America’s a country where you’re truly on your own, where the rich want to eviscerate the safety net and tell us to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps, saying it’s all about self-reliance.

And they wonder why people freak out and shoot up workplaces and schools.

And peaceful protest has no impact. You know what killed the Occupy movement? The media. Yup, the media is in bed with the politicians and the powers-that-be, they laugh at the shenanigans of us regular people, they’ll cover our deaths in car accidents but they don’t want to hear what we’ve got to say, no one wants to hear what we’ve got to say.

And there’s all this hogwash about freedom. Give me freedom from robocalls, let me opt out of them.

Give me freedom from money in politics. Let the Koch brothers choke on their own pollution.

Give me freedom to speak back to corporations who don’t care about me, despite constantly paying lip service, they only care about their shareholders. If corporations are truly people, they’ve got no friends. They’re the administration you hate at school. You know, the one that never bends and ultimately outlasts you, because institutions are forever but people are not.

So who do I call?

There’s no one to call anymore. Gadgets come without instructions. Appliances cannot be repaired. You buy stuff and if you’ve got a problem with it you learn the lesson to never trust that manufacturer again. Imagine if you got killed by an exploding airbag, whose defects were hidden by car companies for years. You’re dead, it’s too late. They’re out drinking Dom Perignon with suppliers.

And these politicians take it so seriously. Why don’t they take my problems so seriously? All you rat’s asses who run Santa Monica, did you ever contemplate that by wooing industry you’d cause gridlock? They’re bombing through my alley, everybody’s looking for a shortcut, because they can’t stand being stopped anymore. I can’t leave home during rush hour, because I can’t even break traffic in my neighborhood!

Which is inundated with the autos of Santa Monica College students, even though the educational institution is twenty minutes away. They won’t park at the airport and ride the bus, why should they sacrifice when no one else will?

That’s right, why should I care about my brethren when no one cares about me. Is that how far we’ve come? Is that the Reagan legacy? It’s too hard and too expensive to have government work so we’ll just dismantle it so I can get frustrated and have my quality of life decline?

I wish my vote truly counted. Then I’d take the names of everybody robocalling me and vote against them. These self-centered pricks who give not a whit about privacy. Can I call them at home and tell them what I want them to run on? After they’re elected can I knock on their door during the Sabbath and bend their ear?

That’s right, they want a day off.

But no one gets a day off anymore, you can’t make ends meet if you take your mental car off the road.

You get bullied on the internet.

You get underpaid at your job.

You can’t afford to buy a house.

But god forbid you’ve got a telephone, then all those with faux answers will implore you to help them out, to help their friends out, when no one is helping you!

That’s right, most of these calls are from “famous” friends of the candidates. Zev Yaroslavsky, do you really care what I think?

Of course not.

No one cares what I think anymore.

And there’s nothing I can do about it.

They served us breakfast.

That might not sound weird, but it happened at 9:30 at night, an hour before we landed in Los Angeles, it’s like Air France can’t buck its own system, wherein you get fed dinner, go to sleep and then wake up at your destination rearing to go. And many people did sleep, the plane left at 7:25 PM, but before I took a nap I read a couple of articles I want to hip you to, that I think you should read.

Now I understand you’re overloaded, that you’ve got no time and you want to be judicious in your choices. Furthermore, you’re being inundated with recommendations. But I’m not selling you anything here but a good time, one that feeds your brain before your heart.

“Marc Andreesen on “Why Optimism is Safest Bet”

“The other thing you could say is that recorded music was an oligopolistic cartel. The only reason why musicians were getting paid what they were getting paid in the 1990s off CDs was because the record labels were price-fixing. CDs didn’t cost $16 because that was the floating market price. They cost $16 because the five record labels got together and fixed prices. And who ate it on that? Consumers. And why did consumers react so positively to digital music when it first came along? Because it broke the cartel. Book publishers are the same thing. Amazon broke that wide open. So would you rather live in that world or would you rather live in this world?”

I know which world you’d like to live in. My inbox is inundated with those lamenting the new model, insisting we just jet back to the old.

I’ve realized I’m a pretty optimistic guy. You keep calling me a hater, but the truth is I just want the best. I don’t want to waste time on either the mediocre or the merely good, I’m searching for excellence. And the truth is as we march forward things keep getting better and better.

You can keep thousands of songs in your pocket.

You can not only make music for nearly free, you can distribute it for nearly free and market it for free. That’s a good thing.

Baby boomers hate change.

“Let’s suppose that we’d be better off if the jobs didn’t change. We have this new magic machine that cleans hotel rooms, but we’re not going to use it because we want to keep the maids in business. Well, in the old days there used to be a job at the hotel called the guy who lights the coal fire. Should we get rid of heating systems and bring back the guy who starts the coal fire? Before refrigeration, there was an entire field of people who cut and delivered ice. Should we go back to storing food on ice that’s cut and delivered by hand? If you believe that machines are an enemy, then you should want to go back and unwind, right? If you follow that logic, you would unwind all the way back to where it all started, which was subsistence farming. We’d be better off if we were making our own clothes.”

The future is here. it’s only going to get better. Are there going to be losers along the way? Absolutely. But you cannot try and protect the past, it’s a loser’s game.

I won’t say I agree with everything Marc Andreesen has to say here. But at least he’s thinking about the issues. The problem today is no one is thinking, everybody believes money grows on trees and there’s no thought behind making money, you just throw marketing dollars at something and that’s it. But that’s wrong.

You want to read this article. Because it’ll get your brain humming. And that’s very stimulating.

“The Empire of Edge: How a doctor, a trader, and the billionaire Steven A. Cohen got entangled in a vast financial scandal.”

Now the funny thing is “New York” made me think Steve Cohen was innocent. But after reading this article in the “New Yorker” I know he is not.

You need to read this. It starts slow, but then it builds and the twists and turns are better than any movie playing at the multiplex.

What exactly do they do at the hedge fund?

Make bets. Very few of them. Make good ones and you’re handsomely compensated, make bad ones and they kick your ass out. It’s just that simple. At the hedge fund they might play with pension money, but there’s no safety net for the traders.

It’s all about edge. And that’s code for inside information.

You’ll be horrified at the illegality.

But you’ll be more horrified at the lying and cheating of Matthew Martoma. The son of immigrant parents, his father presented him with a plaque that said “Son Who Shattered His Father’s Dream” when he didn’t get into Harvard.

But his wife thinks he did.

Huh?

That’s right, Martoma was sentenced to jail but his family believes he’s innocent.

We have the fantasy that everybody rich and successful earned it. But the truth is so many have cut corners, this article will illuminate that.

“Should Airplanes Be Flying Themselves?”

This was the best article I’ve read all year. It raises the issue of whether we’ve become subservient to the machines, and whether that’s to our advantage.

What it’s really about is the Air France crash. You remember, the one in the Atlantic, the Airbus flying from Rio.

Sure, the main pilot was running on almost no sleep, having partied with his girlfriend the night before. And the second pilot was a newbie. And the third pilot was a desk jockey maintaining license.

But the truth is most pilots only fly four hours a year.

Huh?

That’s how much time they’re truly in control of the plane. The rest of the time, HAL is in control.

And I was on Air France last night. And whenever the plane did something weird, which happened a couple of times, I thought of this article.

But I made it home safely.

You should read the above three articles, in the above order.

Because I said so.

And you trust me.

I feel pressured to make it brief, to grab you before you go, but the truth is advancement and satisfaction are all about putting in the time. And if you read these three articles you will be wiser and possibly richer, time will tell.

1. Everybody has an opinion and they believe it’s entitled to be heard.

2. Everybody has an angle. Winners know this and try to ferret out the truth. The best way to get to the bottom of the story is to ask money questions. When someone says they do something that you don’t think is lucrative, or that they’re not qualified to do, the goal is to keep them talking until they reveal the true story. Which could be they’re independently wealthy, or they’re really a student, or they live with their parents, or they’re a barista.

3. Everybody believes they should have access. If they tweet the company should see it and respond to it. If they send you e-mail not only are they entitled to a response, but a reasoned one responding to their point of view, however unreasonable it might be.

4. 10% of the public is insane, you just don’t know which 10% it is.

5. People feel better about themselves by making you feel bad.

6. Gotcha is the game. That’s how we bring people who’ve flown too high back to earth. It might make us feel good, but it ends up forcing reasonable people out of the picture, either because they don’t want their dirty laundry aired or because they’ve got a few skeletons in the closet. Memo to not only the media but the online rabble rousers…we’ve all got skeletons in the closet, some even findable on Google.

7. Everybody’s an expert, even though they may know nothing. Which is funny because so much is Googlable. In a world where facts are rampant many people are ignorant, even some of those with the biggest mouths.

8. If I paid for it it’s great.

9. Brands are our heroes. We define our identity by them. Not only your clothing, but your car, your mobile phone, your jewelry… It’s a full-time job keeping up with the trends. Logos/no logos. Louis Vuitton/Burberry. You may think you can escape, but the truth is you’re being judged. People used to fight about bands, now they fight about brands.

10. Don’t advertise you’ve got something, that you’re any better than the hoi polloi, then the hoi polloi will judge you for having it. Don’t say you went to Harvard, they were the son of a single mother who couldn’t go to college. Don’t say you took a vacation, they haven’t been on one in years. Don’t say you have any money, otherwise the unwashed masses will excoriate you. Don’t confuse this with the ignorant rich who believe they’re better than everybody else. Just call it poor on poor crime, or middle class on middle class crime. People don’t want you movin’ on up, because that means they’ve got to look at their situation, and they don’t want to. The end result is those with wealth and power seal their lives off from those who don’t have these things. They live behind gates, fly private and vacation in places you’ve never heard of and they don’t talk about it. If someone is talking about their wealth, bragging about their lifestyle, you know they’re nouveau riche and not accepted by the upper class and might not have money for long.

11. Everything you’ve ever said will be held against you. Which is why you should not put information you don’t want everybody to know in print, should not post pictures and so much online. Ironically, the young people know this better than the oldsters. Which is why they’ve embraced Snapchat and have scraped data from Facebook.

12. You’ve got someone else’s gig, you just don’t know it. That’s right, there’s someone smarter and more qualified who you’re holding down and you’d better watch out, they’re working behind the scenes to bring you down, because if they can’t have the gig, you shouldn’t either.

13. People want you to be like them, have the same opinions and lifestyle. If not, you’re a chump.

14. Not only are you not good enough, neither is your significant other. Every woman is competing against supermodels and porn stars who adore schlubs and will do anything to please. The whole world is based on making you feel bad about yourself, so it can sell you what will make you feel good about yourself, theoretically anyway.

15. He who yells loudest gets attention while they do, but when they stop we turn to the next person yelling loudly. And the noise of competing yells is so loud that we hate all the yellers, if we haven’t completely given up paying attention.

16. Stats rule. People find a way to say they’re number one at something, even though in the context of the world at large, that’s nothing.

17. The only people who care about you are poor people, because all they’ve got is their compassion, everybody else is too busy getting ahead to care about you. And in a world where you can fall through the cracks, everybody’s looking for an edge. And corporations are the least trustworthy enterprises of all, they’re all about the money. But since brands rule, the corporate ethos rules. Our society is purely about money, which is why those without it complain so loudly and do their best to pull others down. Because if you can’t have something, nobody else should either. As for hard work and enterprise, most people don’t want to look at themselves and discover why they’re not moving ahead on the game board of life, they just want to tilt it and slide your piece to the bottom.

18. If it makes money it’s unimpeachable. If you criticize it you’re a hater.

19. Tribes rule. The lone wolf is passe. Everybody’s got their cabal. They stay connected via the internet. They make each other feel good, you don’t want to be their enemy.

20. Facts are irrelevant.

21. Everybody’s working the refs. You make people afraid of going against you, speaking up about you at all.

22. It’s all about the story, the narrative. If every media outlet says the Republicans are a lock for the Senate why should you bother to vote, it’s already been decided.

23. No one is there to solve your problems, even if you paid. Which is why those who do help are lionized and why so many are angry and frustrated. People are pushed to the edge. They’ve got all the modern tools, but they believe they’re the product, bought and sold, and no one is looking out for them.

24. Anything very successful has backlash. Whether it be a sports team, Apple or a music star. Enduring this is a skill unto itself. You say you’re ignoring it, but the truth is the haters are having an impact, they’re making you gun-shy, reluctant to take chances.

25. People do it for the money, not you. They stay off Spotify so they can stay rich, or so they think, they don’t care if you listen to their music, they just want you to pay for it.