Keep it simple stupid.

That’s what Steve Jobs knew that nobody at “Billboard” seems to understand.

Don’t give me formulas, give me reality.

The only thing that counts is listens. Sales are irrelevant. Especially of albums.

But the whole industry is based on albums so they don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, they come up with this inane hybrid chart and then trumpet it as the answer. Once again, the music industry is a step behind, part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Streams only. They represent what people are listening to.

As for sales… They’re tanking. Keeping them alive is like continuing to install FireWire on Macs. It worked, but it’s been superseded by Thunderbolt. Then again, the people making these decisions can’t tell the difference between USB and MP3.

Can someone look to the destination? Can someone admit that streaming has already won and as a result the winners in the music derby might not be the same? Can someone wrap their heads around the fact that the majority of streaming revenues go to rightsholders, and how they divvy it up with their partners is subject to contract?

Industries that satisfy themselves and not their consumers are headed for extinction. We see it over and over again. Whether it be the greedy cab companies or the overpriced hotel industry. They didn’t see Uber and Airbnb coming. But who wants to ride in a filthy cab with a driver on the phone who jolts to a stop? Who wants to stay in a hotel only to discover that the price they were quoted resembles not a whit the final bill they’re tendered?

People haven’t listened to albums from start to finish since the advent of the CD.

Macs don’t come with disk drives. Neither do Chromebooks, which are infiltrating educational institutions, but we’ve got a whole industry based on selling disks no one wants.

Furthermore, hard drives are dying, it’s all about access, and you want me to buy files?

Just round up all the streaming services and give us a ranking. Hell, we don’t even need to know how many listens there were. Just put them in order based purely on that one statistic, with no malarkey involved. None of this crap about track equivalent albums and x number of streams equaling a sale. Huh? What is that? Do you see Netflix telling us how many views equal one DVD?

Come on.

As Jann Wenner and Bono mash the gas pedal towards the cliff of irrelevance.

In other words, how can “Rolling Stone” be so tone-deaf? This single-handedly reveals the inanity of the shenanigans behind the “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” this illustrates how baby boomers have to get out of the way to let the younger generations flourish. If you think U2’s album whose name I can no longer remember counts, if you think albums matter, if you think by continuing to polish this turd it will gain traction, you work at “Rolling Stone” or are in U2 or both.

Despite a self-congratulatory phony press, the truth is credibility reigns. With every wart exposed, it’s important you show you’re in bed with your fans, not the fat cats who run this country who are evidence of everything wrong with it. “Rolling Stone” imitated “Blender” and made all their reviews short, not knowing “Blender” lied about its numbers and was heading for extinction, but this same magazine can’t realize its place in the spectrum, can’t understand that to be relevant you’ve got to be honest?

Why don’t they just get rid of the music. Why don’t they just call it the Matt Taibbi publication. That’s right, “Rolling Stone” made Taibbi a star, he’s everything the musicians are not. While Bono keeps cozying up to heads of state Taibbi keeps revealing their bad behavior, refusing to apologize all the while.

That’s what’s wrong with America, all the damn apologizing. It would be one thing if these people really made a mistake, but the truth is they’re afraid of being excoriated by the press and public, they’re afraid to own their identities. And if they truly say something heinous they should burn in hell for it. Apologizing does not erase behavior, never. We can learn from our mistakes, but it seems like these celebrities never do.

And getting much less attention is “Rolling Stone”‘s gigantic victory last week, bringing down the Greek system at UVA. That’s right, in one well-researched report about date rape the publication threw light on the situation and caused the university to blink. These damn colleges, they’re just factories for the administration to get rich off athletes who don’t study while the rest of the students party. Once upon a time, college was about learning, about becoming a better person, now it’s all about a job. Let me tell you, you’re gonna lose that job. And if you don’t know the liberal arts you’re never going to be able to pivot, never mind come up with that great idea to begin with.

So “Rolling Stone” still has power. Why did it commit such a faux pas by naming U2’s album number one? Does the magazine believe it still lives in the pre-Internet era, where no one can comment upon its decision? Instead, the magazine is now a laughingstock, beaten up online, the younger generation who abhor Bono and his band pushing ever further away from it and refusing to read the good articles that are in the publication.

Let’s start with U2. Forget about the album. It’s done. Over. History.

You need a hit. And you’d be better off recording a new one than trying to pull one out of that turkey you foisted upon us.

If you’re really desperate, do a Christmas song. At least you’ll get spins.

And “Rolling Stone,” which once came down on the side of file-traders, can you please bury the album, know that no one listens that way anymore and to declare an overlong opus as important is ridiculous? Can you stop giving every album a three star review? Can you stop putting loyalty over the news?

That’s right, this elevation of U2’s crap smacks of nothing so much as loyalty, old school entertainment business, the same one that got U2 into this mess to begin with. At least Jimmy Iovine produced U2, what exactly is your connection to the band again Jann?

And it will make no difference. Almost no one will check out the album as a result of this endorsement. The negative will outweigh the positive by far. Music is like sports…it’s all about the achievement, the work. And U2 did not deliver. Sorry, no amount of spin will change that.

Meanwhile, the musos are trumpeting that which no one can relate to and the youngsters are listening to pop and everybody else has tuned out. “Rolling Stone” has done a disservice to the industry. Doused any flames left.

Music is more ubiquitous than ever before, but everybody involved wants to kill it by playing by the old rules.

Except in the festival world. That’s where music lives today. We need even more. Destination events where people can be exposed to music and the ethos it engenders, so they’ll partake further.

You can’t lie in a live performance. You can’t steal it either.

And no one wants to watch it on their computer.

They want to be there.

Why has our nation devolved into self-congratulatory crap when the truth is we’re caving from within? Where is Devo when you need them?

“50 Best Albums of 2014”

FURTHERMORE, TO MAKE SPRINGSTEEN NUMBER TWO IS TO MAKE ME PUKE!
The best thing Springsteen did in the past year was cover U2 yesterday. Springsteen is irrelevant to everybody but his fans. His voice is a rasp and he’s so caught up in his own echo chamber that he can no longer see reality. He’s not a saint, not in the city or New Jersey. He’s got to cut something as meaningful about the hard times in America as he did about AIDS in “Streets of Philadelphia,” he’s got to pull his head out of his ass and realize to be relevant you’ve got to make something everybody likes, not just your fans. And by making this mediocre album number two Wenner shows that he’s in cahoots with Jon Landau, running the R&RHOF as their fiefdom. Yes, Yes can’t be inducted and we have to hear again and again how Bruce is still relevant? Come on!

“A Rage on Campus: A Brutal Assault an Struggle for Justice at UVA”

This one article is better than both the U2 and Springsteen albums combined. Read it, it’ll be more fulfilling. And know that it had more impact, UVA suspended their fraternities in the wake of it.

“UVA suspends fraternities after report on gang rape allegation”

But unlike Bono and Bruce, the unheralded writer of the “Rolling Stone” piece, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was driven by a search for truth as opposed to a desire for success. You can feel her passion for the story when you read it. It’s everything music is not. Illustrating once again that a lone outsider with desire and some talent can topple the usual suspects perched atop the pedestal.

1. Focus on music not money. There’s too much talk about grosses and too much bitching about Spotify. Amazon rolls out robots and we all ooh and ahh, there’s forward motion in the music business and everybody complains. Change is inevitable, the future comes, the social landscape will be rearranged…best to acknowledge this and move forward as opposed to trying ineffectively to hold it back. Yes, people will lose their jobs because of Amazon robots, the same way recording studios closed and CD plants too. This is sad, but this has become the story of the music business, what we have lost instead of what we have gained. This sends the wrong message to the consumer. Yes, there are rabid fans embracing the work of artists. But in order for music to be healthy once again we need to reach the casual consumer, who can tell you the difference between the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus but not that between Iggy Azalea and Ariana Grande.

2. If you fail come back to the marketplace quickly. The Fire phone was a disaster. But instead of licking its wounds, Amazon is now hyping its aforementioned robots. When there’s a failure in the music business the act retires for a year or two and is oftentimes forgotten by time it returns. Create often. Failure is inevitable. One hit trumps a raft of disasters.

3. The SoundScan chart ruined music. Because there was a different number one each week. The business will burgeon when it becomes comprehensible, when the same tracks dominate for a period of time. The chart is all about satisfying the industry, not the consumer. The industry wants to divvy out number ones, wants to influence dying retail. But when a record slips off the chart it’s usually gone for good, whereas movies come and go on the chart but then they get another life on DVD, pay cable, Netflix… The film chart position pays long term dividends in terms of advertising. Music chart positions are momentary.

4. Focus on what people are listening to, not what they’re buying. Buying an album does not mean one listens to it, oftentimes people only listen to the hit. Streaming, whether it be on YouTube or Spotify, indicates what is truly popular. Note to the wannabe…not everything is popular, never was, never will be.

5. The “Voice” is good for television, it’s bad for music. Because it’s a karaoke show and the music business depends on a steady stream of new hits. We need to extol the songwriter, who is sometimes the performer, not the face. Otherwise we’re focusing on the zit, not the acne. And acne is an infection, and that’s the goal of music, to infect people.

6. Acknowledge the inability to get a song out of your head is a good thing. That’s the key to Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass.” You may go on in your holier-than-thou fashion that it sucks, but if you hear it once you can’t stop singing it to yourself. We need more of that.

7. Embrace experimentation. Today’s artists are so worried about losing traction that they just replicate what they’ve done before. Test limits.

8. Identity and edge are everything. All the tech titans have rough edges. Hell, Travis Kalanick has dominated the news cycle and Uber just gets bigger. Whereas “artists” dress up instead of down and keep paying penance to their sponsors. Who can believe in that?

9. Utilize your power. Musicians dominate social media. But they don’t use it to move music forward. Only oldsters like Bob Geldof and Bono seem to understand the power of music to open the discussion, to change things. Young artists can do this too. But they have to be educated, they have to realize the advantage, they have to understand that if you don’t stand for something, you don’t stand for anything at all.

10. The music business is the canary in the coal mine, everything happens to it first, yet everybody in it keeps complaining about this change. People run from those who whine, offer no insight and refuse to get with the program. Artists have to give hope. Hope to consumers who too are affected by the new world and are trying to navigate their way. Music needs to run shotgun with these people. Music needs to be indispensable. We’ve got to stop the warring within and acknowledge it’s nearly impossible to break through and boost those who do. The biggest story of the year was Taylor Swift’s media campaign and resulting sales. I wish she wasn’t a front for Max Martin, but everyone agreed her social media campaign was brilliant, the ancient sales construct of a million copies in a week was repeated everywhere, her disdain for Spotify made headlines. Why wasn’t there a concomitant news story when Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” became the biggest track in the history of Spotify? Why do you hate on EDM? Why do we not realize that music done right is not formula, but cutting edge variations on the bedrock basics? You’ve got to be able to sing, write and play or get out of the way. We’ve got to separate the pretenders from the winners. And your job is to dethrone said winners. Not to bitch that they’ve got your spot, but to do something better that trumps them.

How do you build a career from the ground up?

People pay lip service to this, but they want a shortcut, they want someone to help them, but just like in the rest of this Republican-defined nation you’re on your own in the music business, if you build it they may not come, but if you entice them, if you bond with them, you can build an audience and survive.

I was surprised to find people lined up two hours in advance.

I was further surprised when the auditorium filled up. Capacity is 700, there were more than 600 there, with only a few seats left in the balcony. And they paid to be part of Amanda Palmer’s book tour, $18-$23.

Think about that. Book tours used to be for free. Back when authors thought their audience was reviewers, instead of knowing that their audience was readers, and in today’s world unless you have a special, preexisting relationship with readers, you’re doomed. Publishing, like music, has little left in marketing funds. Either you can stay home or mobilize your fans. And if you haven’t started building a fan list years before, you won’t get much traction.

So the “show” began with Amanda reading. She knew the words were not enough, that it was about a PERFORMANCE! Honed during years on the road. The so-called 10,000 hours. I can read the book at home, but can I see the author enunciate slowly and emphasize the words therein? I won’t go to readings because that’s what authors believe they are. No, readings are performances. In this case with the lights low, with the audience enthralled.

And then Amanda surprised them. She performed. On the piano.

Audiences love surprises. Some rules of marketing always apply. Promise little, deliver more.

And then I interviewed her.

Wherein I learned Amanda considered her biggest mistake to be focusing on everyone instead of her core.

That’s the truth. Are you a pop artist or a niche one? Other than the Foos, all rock artists are niche, own it. Ariana Grande is pop. Taylor Swift declared herself pop. Mainstream country is equivalent to pop. Everybody else is toiling in the niches.

Have no illusions about it.

You’re never going to be a household name, certainly not for your music. In a world where it’s impossible to get everybody’s attention, only the mainstream does. So, be happy where you are. Don’t dream about world domination unless you have a direct pipeline to Max Martin, sorry.

But unlike so many of the popsters, Amanda was honest. She spoke from the heart about what others will not. About her abortion. About her decision, as of now, to not have children. We’re all confused, we all have more questions than answers, used to be our stars reflected our lives back upon us. Today they keep going on about how much better they are than us. Which is why pop comes and goes, but niche artists with fans are forever.

And Amanda’s “book doula,” Jamy Ian Swiss, performed some of his world class magic.

And then the assembled multitude asked questions.

More so, they testified. How Amanda was a beacon in their lives, how she got them through.

Now Amanda Palmer has become both a poster girl and a target for figuring out the newfangled game. She blogs, she tweets, she raises money on Kickstarter and considers her life her art. It’s all consuming. There’s no borderline between what’s on stage and what is not. Because today no one can hide behind the curtain. You must be three-dimensional, you must reveal your warts and your thoughts and…

So this is much different from those bitching about the high cost of the road, the low payments of Spotify, this is an artist who’s forging her own way, the way everybody used to do it when music drove the culture and you were addicted to your turntable and not your smartphone.

And it does not matter if you like her music, it does not matter if you become a fan, because it’s not for you…you skeptical soul who believes your chance has been stolen and therefore you must tear everyone else down.

The tools are at your disposal. Most of them can be utilized for free. But one thing necessary is inspiration, and then follow-through. Sounds simple, but they’re the core of art. Sure, you might be able to divine what’s a hit, but can you conjure one up all by your lonesome?

So, like in the rest of the world, there’s a divide between the haves and have-nots in the music world. And if you don’t have it and want it, you’ve got to play by the rules of those who do, following the pop formula above. Otherwise know that it’s now easier and cheaper to reach those who do care and monetize them than ever before.

As a result, Amanda Palmer’s book, “The Art Of Asking,” entered the “New York Times” nonfiction chart at number 7. Why did she get this deal with Hachette? Because she had 8 million views of her TED Talk and the publisher knew she would sell her book.

What are you doing to sell your music? Dunning gatekeepers who don’t care? Bitching online that the successful suck?

Look within. Make fans one by one.

Know that you too can be Amanda Palmer.

Oh no, you probably can’t. You can’t work hard enough in high school to get into Wesleyan. You can’t live without money in your bank account for most of your twenties. You can’t handle the rejection that comes along with the glimmer of adulation. You can’t get down into the pit with those who care, preferring to knock on the doors of those who don’t.

It’s simple.

But walking the steps is not.

“An Evening With Amanda Palmer: The Art of Asking Book Tour”

The Art of Asking (Signed Edition): How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help