Have brands trumped bands?

I was wondering this as I walked through Red Bull HQ today. With every seat taken, with young hipsters in front of their computer screens, it’s everything the music business was before Napster, when those coasting on CD profits, both replacement and buy one overpriced one to hear one hit track (remember Chumbawamba?) were rolling in dough and thought the good times would last forever.

But they didn’t.

Used to be the hippest store on the planet was Tower Records.

Now the retail emporium of choice is the Apple Store. They both feature a buzz, both give you the feeling you’re at the epicenter of what’s happening. But the profit margins on Apple’s gear is far superior.

But Apple is selling tools and the labels sold music. What is Red Bull selling?

Energy drinks.

That’s the difference between going to Red Bull’s offices and the record company’s, no one talks about the product. Then again, they kept telling me the consumable was just a gateway to so much cooler stuff, and they’re right.

The most impressive thing I saw today? The gaming studio. Sponsored by Nvidia, able to transmit competitions around the world. The “New York Times” has been talking about “League of Legends” for a week, Red Bull entered the space years ago. Because when it comes to popular culture, there’s always a first mover advantage. This is what the music industry lacks. We can’t even go social at the show. There’s no gamification, no points for buying tickets, the music industry is so bottom line it’s like a flophouse, with beds and nothing else.

And then there’s their television station. Or Media-something. Everything’s got a name at Red Bull, not that I can remember it.

But in this case, Red Bull is trying to take over programming. And it did a good job of this at Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits, where it streamed the performances but not only the performances, they turned it into programming, with hosts and interstitial material, knowing that raw data is neither sexy nor comprehensible, it’s what you do with it.

And it takes money to do this, and Red Bull is spending.

That’s the dirty little secret of the music business, everyone’s tight. You can’t get paid what you’re owed, never mind get help to promote. Red Bull paid for Skrillex to visualize his show in a loft downtown. Previously, it was only a two-dimensional computer image. But with the company’s help, Skrillex could build the props and see what they looked like in real life, because everything’s about experimentation, you rarely get it right on the first pass.

And Red Bull is experimenting.

It all comes down to their founder. And I could look up his name, I’ve forgotten it, but that’s just the point. In entertainment, the execs want to be stars, smart businessmen know the product rules. And once this guy noticed action sports heroes using the drink, he signed them up and capitalized on it. Red Bull was in action sports for two decades before they got into music.

That’s right, Red Bull is deep into music. They had a first class studio in the back of the building, where they give away time for free. But in return… They feature you in all their programming, in their magazine, they went on to tell me they’ve got relationships with every club in the world, because they all sell their main product, the energy drink.

And I think it tastes like horse piss. No, I haven’t consumed the urine of an equine, but I can’t imagine it’s much less satisfying. Then again, that’s the point, Red Bull is not made for me. It’s a club, of young ‘uns.

And the company is akin to a cult. The Hotel California. You can come in, but no one leaves. I was stunned that this employee had been there for nine years, another for seven years, before I’d seemingly even heard of the product.

And it makes me wonder, if you’re twenty years old today, where do you want to work, at the label or the corporation, Universal or Red Bull?

If you say the label you’re a wanker. There’s no upward mobility at the label. No risk. Old fart baby boomers have all the control. And the acts are all lower class denizens bending over to get reamed for a few shekels. It’s so sad I nearly want no part of it.

But music is the grease in so much of Red Bull’s machine. Music is important. It just doesn’t trump the brand.

Red Bull doesn’t ask for much. It only does deals that benefit both sides. It supports as opposed to dominating. There’s not endless signage and branding. It’s a twenty first century company. That’s right, one that knows consumer relationships are built on trust. And that you’re playing a long game.

But I still don’t think I could work there. Because there’s too much business and too little art. Everyone’s pedigreed, this one worked for Microsoft, they’re stars in marketing speak. But the soul is in art. But the artists have capitulated.

That’s right, I’m here to tell you Red Bull is cooler than almost all music.

Just when I’m down on the company, they load me up with movies that they financed, like the documentary on Shane McConkey, who had more charisma than anybody signed to Sony. They do put their money where their mouth is.

And they kept telling me the goal was to make all their initiatives self-sustaining. Music, gaming, television… To fiddle and fuss and get it right and then dominate. Kind of like Vice in news. But it turns out they’re already partners with Vice.

Welcome to the new world, where all the companies speak to each other. Synergy and networking rule.

But they don’t in art. Art is singular. Hell, the best work of the best artists doesn’t even sound alike. That was the magic of the Beatles, every track was different, we hung on every word. U2 spends five years to imitate themselves badly. The Dr. Luke hit factory resembles well made widgets instead of art. But art requires artists, unique people who are not eager to be members of society, who don’t do it to hang out with the tech titans but to express themselves, to speak truth to power.

But those people exited the building when it became cool to do endorsement deals.

And Red Bull’s deals are the coolest out there. They ask for little and deliver much. But you’re still hooking up with a corporation. It’s different for athletes, bodies demonstrate, artists think. You look at the athlete, you see inside the artist.

But who is Rihanna?

Who is Katy Perry?

Is Bono even a musician anymore?

No one’s satisfied with being an artist. Because they don’t believe there’s enough money in it. They don’t get that art trumps tech and Red Bull and that’s why these entities want to be involved with it.

That’s the world we live in.

Yup, about a mile from my house, in a nondescript brick building with no signage, the U.S. headquarters of the world’s biggest energy drink are housed. You see you don’t have to yell, you don’t have to promote yourself when you’re doing it right.

And Red Bull is doing it right.

“Not One Artist’s Album Has Gone Platinum In 2014”

Is it streaming, albums, the music or all three?

If you’re looking for evidence that the sales model is dead, here it is. If you’re a marginal band on the road surviving on $20 signed CDs, if you’re employing sales shenanigans as publicity to drive concert attendance, I’ve got no problem with that. But if you’re decrying the death of sales as a vast conspiracy of the military industrial complex, I feel sorry for you. Things change. Agitating for a return to the past based on the loss of some beneficial features in the future is futile in a world where we sacrifice the keyboards of our BlackBerries for apps on our Androids and iPhones. Something is always lost in the march of progress. You could lament the disappearance of vent windows in automobiles with the advent of air conditioning but you’d be fighting a losing battle because the exclusion of these small windows saved the manufacturers money and most people didn’t miss them, when was the last time you even thought of them?

Most people don’t miss owning music. They have faith in the internet. They believe access is like electricity, something you can count on. And if you still believe you need access to stream music I feel sorry for you, you’re uneducated.

So the public has spoken, people don’t need to own the product. They don’t need to show off their wares to others, but they still want to listen.

They just don’t want to listen to the album.

If we can’t force people to buy long players, if we put them online to be cherry-picked, people are going to. So the album is purely a promotional device, a way to get the antique media to trumpet your name and product and existence in this vast world of ours. But one shot promotion is a fading paradigm itself. It doesn’t pay ongoing dividends. In a world where what happened at noon is already forgotten at midnight who cares that you spent years crafting ten songs to bestow upon us. Come on, you’ve seen the story… This is my very best work, I love my producer, I’m in a good space, you need to listen…

Make me puke.

Turns out you’re not selling your brand, that’s another bunch of crap, you’re selling your music. And unless your music appeals, you’re screwed.

And here’s where the naysayers go nuclear. All this hogwash about the cost of production, the years of commitment, the odds stacked against them, the entitlement to attention. Where did they learn these untruths? It’s like a college graduate believing he’s entitled to a 500k a year job just because he graduated, delineating all the while what he studied in school. No, if you want our attention, you’ve got to earn it, the hard way, by making music we want to hear.

And some of this music is made every year. A lot of it by the usual suspects. Like Max Martin and Dr. Luke. And this makes everybody not working with them crazy. They say these pros make hackneyed tunes undeserving of the airwaves. But these complainers seem unable to construct competitive product.

So as we go forward, more than ever, it depends on the hit.

And it’s harder to have a hit than ever before. Because everybody’s listening in a different place. Which is another reason why there’s no platinum albums. Top Forty may be the dominant radio format, but most people aren’t listening to it!

And it turns out country fans have computers, they don’t need to buy the product either.

A hit opens doors. It goes viral via public comment. That’s right, the public makes the hits. Don’t believe me? Sing a song off of Beyonce’s latest album. Better yet, sing a Lorde song that’s not “Royals.” In an era of plenty, we only want the best.

And that sucks if you’re an artist who thinks they need forty minutes to make a statement, if you make music that must be listened to forty times to get it. I’ll be honest, in the seventies I came to like so much stuff because of radio repetition. I can’t all of that stuff was great. But today, no one is subjected to that level of repetition.

So, forget sales, they’re history, they’re a niche item. They’re the past, not the future.

And forget albums too. You’re creating a body of work.

But don’t think if you release one track a month that’s a good strategy. The key is to get a hard core audience that is interested in whatever you do and to feed them on a regular basis and to know this is where it ends unless you deliver something so special they make it go viral. That’s right, you’ll get more attention putting out an album and taking advantage of the media machine than throwing crap on the wall, but that promotional game is fading. Just like SoundScan numbers in publications are soon to be passe.

And know that music is hard. Those who write hits in five minutes wrote a ton of crap before that. And that writing a song is easy, but writing a great one is hard. And the fact that you like it does not mean everybody else will too.

Meanwhile, radio keeps driving down the niche road. It’s still the most powerful way to expose music, it’s just less powerful than ever before, and this is never going to change. Because radio hasn’t changed, it’s got phony personalities and too many commercials and makes you listen to what you don’t want to in order to hear what you do in an on demand culture. Just spinning records on radio is death, the same way airing videos on MTV is such.

So, so long platinum records. You were a construct of the classic rock era, when the music was so good everybody clamored to own it. Music was the iPhone of its day.

And so long diamond records, invented during the heyday of MTV when we all watched the same programming and were exposed to the same music. Today infinite choice has made that an impossibility. You either own the distribution channel, like YouTube, or you purvey quality, which attracts a crowd.

And soon, so long gold records. That’s right, not even 500,000 people will want to hear your long statement, because they don’t have time. It’d be like watching “House of Cards” and finding out there was only one good episode. Who’d want that? Furthermore, music is not episodic, order is unimportant, it’s about endlessly repeating certain tracks.

So the game just got harder. That’s right, the internet killed the CD cash cow and now even iTunes downloads, it made the history of recorded music free at your fingertips and you’re looking for some kind of justice, a way to turn back the hands of time, but that’s never gonna happen, that’d be like Commodore rereleasing the Amiga to great acclaim, knocking Apple off its perch, ain’t that a laugh.

But this really isn’t news. Everything I’ve said above has been in plain sight for nearly half a decade. So if you’re complaining, if you’ve been caught flat-footed, I feel sorry for you. You’re behind the times. In the information age you know nothing. You run your operation on your heart instead of your head.

Then again, if you put your heart in your music we might want to listen to it.

All we want is some truth. From someone who can write, sing and play.

Sounds simple, it’s not.

1. They’re making no more of it. Doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor, we all abide by the same clock.

2. Stimulation. That’s what we all want with our time. We want to be excited, we want to be titillated. We want the jones love gives us, the high of infatuation, the satisfaction of sex. Know that everything you create, that you want the time of others for, has to compete with love and sex.

3. Love. Is primarily between two people. But you can love an object or a concept, it’s all about the passion. How do we ignite this passion in others? Some try to second-guess, try to deliver what people want, and there’s satisfaction in that, but what we look for most is the unknown, the unexpected, that gets us high the same way we do when we meet new people.

4. Love is frequently at first sight, but not always. So, in order for love to grow you have to be in someone’s field of vision and/or experience on a regular basis. How do you achieve this? Well, if you like someone in school you find out their schedule and show up in the cafeteria at the same time. If you like them at work, you volunteer for the same projects, and you hang out in groups that include them when the day is done. If you’re purveying nothing necessary, neither food nor water, if you’re in the creative field, it’s a matter of being in the line of vision on a regular basis, which is why celebrities employ scorched earth publicity campaigns. But these are oftentimes brief, and we know that love is long. And we know that he who throws themselves in front of us is rarely desirable.

5. Used to be stimulation was scarce, now it’s plentiful. The information society gives us every book, movie and film at our fingertips, we’re overwhelmed, we’re constantly looking for trusted guides, filters who tell us what to partake of. The currency in this world is credibility, but credibility requires its own curation, which is anathema to those self-promoting online. So we’re overwhelmed with noise, causing us to tune out and retreat to that which has stimulated us in the past.

6. Yields to frustration. With so much to do and so little time that which is not instantly intuitive is cast aside and denigrated. We don’t want frustration on our way to usability. Interface designers are king. It doesn’t matter what it can do if we can’t access it.

7. We don’t want to feel alone on the time space continuum. So, if we can bond with you, we’ve got unlimited time for you. Whether it be lovers, friends or artists. We want to feel attached, we want to feel connected. Which is why you’re better off being yourself, with all your rough edges, than blanding yourself down for public consumption. Because it’s our rough edges that make us lovable, that hook us. That’s right, we live in a Velcro world, we’re all loops looking for hooks.

8. Instant gratification has superseded the long hard slog. It’s hard to practice your instrument alone in your bedroom because this leaves you disconnected from others. It’s easier to social network and connect, for the hit of dopamine.

9. Passion and excitement are contagious. You don’t have to implore us to partake, to follow you, all you have to do is be your bubbly self, testifying about your great life, we all want some of that, if we believe you believe, we’re gonna check it out. And this is the opposite of the phony society we live in, where everything’s fake. Some people have some time for fake, but the truth is honesty rules in today’s world. Which is why the government and network television are losing their grip upon society.

10. Going deep increases pleasure. The more time we spend with something the more time we want to spend with it. There’s a satisfaction in mastery.

She reminds me of my father.

I never watched her CNBC show, I really had no idea who she was, but Felice kept turning her on at 6 every Saturday and I’ve become hooked. Because she’s the voice of reason in an unreasonable world.

I like to think I know everything. But I was stunned last week when Suze came down on variable annuities. I have no children, I’ve got no debt, I’m not in the market for one of these financial products, but I thought they were a reasonable thing, turns out they’re not. And that’s what keeps me watching Suze, the way she counters conventional wisdom.

My father used to have a rap. Actually, we’d call it the “Morris Lefsetz Philosophy.” We’d hear it on long car drives, after a good meal, my dad would kick back and smile and tell us how we didn’t have a fancy house, we didn’t drive the latest cars, but our house was paid for, we could go on vacation, we could eat out, we had each other.

That’s right, when I was in junior high, everybody decamped for a better neighborhood. The split level we lived in shook when someone shut the front door. But to get my dad to sell that house and take on debt would be akin to asking him to cut off his left arm. He told us he could sleep at night. Now I understand.

My relationships have been riddled with financial issues. Not only how the money is spent, but how much of it there is. We all have different values, and I’ll admit it’s hard to accept those of others, but when it comes to blowing money I’m intolerant, and when you’ve got two people struggling it adds tension and it breaks you up, I know from experience.

I also know that the fantasy of loading up credit cards to pursue your dreams is just that, a fantasy. Sure, some people break through and get rich and pay the debt off, but most don’t. My experience has turned me into a depression baby just like my dad, I live on a cash only basis, I don’t believe in borrowing, because belief that life will get better is oftentimes just that, a belief, and beliefs are often wrong.

But my dad was not fake like Suze. Actually, I don’t think Suze’s like the show at all. She makes nice, talks about her life, when the truth is she’s probably tough as nails, like my dad. Who loved bestowing gifts and picking up the tab, but would tolerate no dishonesty, no b.s.

He also didn’t care what people thought of him. He kept on telling everybody he was a poor immigrant boy, when the truth is he was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, but when his dad died the family was broke, he had to take care of his mom.

But my dad fought his way out. And insisted we do so too. Come home with bad grades and not only would you be grounded, your life was in jeopardy. It was all about education, preparing yourself for the future.

As a result, I’m prepared pretty well.

But most people are not.

The biggest crime you see in Los Angeles is “Keeping up with the Joneses.” Leasing a fancy car and moving into a desirable neighborhood because everybody else is. Suze says you have no idea what goes on behind closed doors, that those who smile outside might be fighting and unable to sleep inside.

And not only must you live within your means, you must have an emergency fund, of eight months. And with so many of my baby boomer brethren out of work with their unemployment benefits having run out, eight months is not much. But people call Suze every week eager to spend.

Which America wants you to do.

And once you open your eyes to this it’s frightening. There was a story in last week’s “New York Times” delineating the different responsibilities of those selling products at the bank as opposed to certified financial planners. The latter have a fiduciary duty, the former do not. And I know the difference in responsibility, having gone to law school, but I did not know the difference between a bank’s investment brokers and licensed certified financial planners.

If only Suze were taught in school. If only everybody in America was forced to listen to her words. Sure, America runs on consumer spending, but if you want to get ahead you’ve got to manage your money wisely, you’ve got to plan, you’ve got to be realistic.

And the show is good television because it’s absent the tropes of the networks. The people call in weeping about bad decisions and after describing their problems a sponsor does not swoop in and make them whole. No, Suze dispenses truth and then they’re left to their own devices. Suze just told a cashless couple to sell their house after the husband ran up credit card debt the wife was unaware of. They balked, they cannot do it, their image can’t take the hit. But is image what it’s really about?

And then there are the people who want to buy frivolous items when they’ve still got credit card debt, at inflated interest rates. The government is never gonna crack down hard enough, the financial industry keeps legislators alive, you’ve got to help yourself.

But what makes Suze’s show so riveting is the no b.s. truthful advice that we all want to hear that we never get. It’s kind of like Simon Cowell on “American Idol.” The acts all want to be successful, their hearts are in it, the other judges are encouraging, but Simon says no way.

Ain’t that America, where it’s illegal to piss on your hopes and dreams. But the truth is life is tough. And the way you succeed is through knowledge, that you gain from authorized, approved sources, which are often pooh-poohed by the hoi polloi the same way the ignorant educated refuse to get their kids vaccinated because it makes them feel less powerful, less in control if someone else has the answers, if someone else knows more.

But someone else always knows more than you. And someone else is always looking to take advantage of you. Yup, go try to buy a car, the salesman will have you leasing something you can’t afford that you’re unsure of the price of because you don’t want to be seen driving a Toyota that’s paid for.

Kind of like the auto I drive. It gets terrible gas mileage, certainly for its size. But it’s paid for. It makes no sense to trade it in. Just like it makes no sense to lease a hybrid that doesn’t return its premium for six years.

But you want it.

But we all cannot have what we want.

My father told me this.

“Before the Advice, Check out the Adviser”

The Suze Orman Show