I smell money!

I’ve been flying all over the world listening to an ever-decreasing number of old farts lamenting the music business ain’t what it used to be. That the kids have stolen all the music, that you just can’t get paid. And then I come to Las Vegas and find out we’re experiencing a renaissance!

Now I know these people. John Boyle of Insomniac for almost twenty years, he’s a core member of the Aspen Live group. And I had an extended dinner with Pasquale Rotella and Jason Bentley in Amsterdam, as well as an evening out into the wee hours to see Hardwell. So when they asked me to come to Vegas, I saw it as more of a bro thing. I’d show up at their two bit conference that gets absolutely no publicity, that I’ve never heard anybody talk about, to do my thing.

And lo and behold the place is PACKED!

Go to the other conferences and no one shows up at the panels. It’s all about networking, the schmooze. Everybody’s too good to learn. And nobody says anything interesting. But here there were seemingly a thousand twentysomethings listening attentively to people doing their best to illuminate what’s going on.

Not that they’re really sure.

Many are lifers. They’ve lived through the ups and downs, from Prodigy to the nadir. And all of a sudden, EDM blew up.

Oh, they’re still bitching about the acronym, as if BMW would do better if they called it Fast Car, Incorporated. Names don’t matter. Never did. Your band can be called anything. It’s always been about the music.

And this is the music of a generation, the millennial generation.

Their parents hate it.

Those in other genres say it’s only about drugs.

Meanwhile, the shows generate the greatest attendance, and the biggest gross.

Skip Paige of Golden Voice said that a questioner was correct, that Calvin Harris had the largest crowd in the history of Coachella.

But Skip said guitars are not dead.

Oh yes they are. Because all the excitement is in computers. You grow up with them, they’re tools, enablers. And anybody who believes in a rock revival is delusional.

Rock is niche.

Unless you consider country rock. Then there’s a genre. But even country is employing electronic music elements these days.

And at that panel, which included a representative of Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa as well as a man from Guggenheim Partners, the question came up…WHAT NEXT?

Boyle said everything that’s available has been bought up. Insomniac just launched an EDM portal. Is the next land grab the penumbra, merch, etc?

Skip said it was all about tickets. But I think that’s myopic. Because for the first time since hip-hop, maybe the first time since classic rock, we’ve got a culture.

Having a hit is one thing, having a belief system, a religion, is another.

Katy Perry is dependent upon hits. She stands for nothing.

Electronic music has its own values. It’s an amalgamation of the Grateful Dead and Kraftwerk all wrapped up in a Disneyland sheen wherein your access point is your mobile phone, and you want to leave home to connect.

Yes, as baby boomers nest in front of Netflix, spending their weekends binge-watching “Orange Is The New Black,” their children, their younger siblings’ children, are doing what they once did…they’re going OUT!

That’s part of the EDM culture. Events. You want to be included. And sure, the acts rise and fall, but the raw building blocks of the sound remain the same.

And if you’re interested in money, Tatiana Simonian, of Nielsen, gave a presentation that would have your head spin.

The brands want in. And all brands want impressionable people. Who are young, who still have not formed brand alliances. Well, it turns out electronic music spikes amongst millennials, and it spikes amongst not only the white males of rock, but Latinos, Native Americans… The bottom line is if you’re young, you like EDM!

For a minute there, it looked like EDM might be a fad. But then its superstars crossed over to pop, they’re the new hitmakers.

And suddenly, we’ve entered a new golden era, one with so much money that Wall Street is interested. Wall Street funded SFX. The aforementioned Yucaipa and Guggenheim are in the house. And if you think ANY of them care about music, you’re wrong, they only care about one thing…money.

And this is a good thing. Because once you involve money, once people can get rich, the best and the brightest gravitate to it. Suddenly, you graduate from the Ivy and you turn down the bank, there are opportunities in music. And the envelope keeps getting pushed further and further.

It’s kind of like “Logan’s Run.” You can count the people over fifty on one hand. The people over forty on a couple. Everybody here is young and involved and they want in, or further in.

This is not UCLA Extension, a bunch of losers groveling to be interns at dying labels. It’s like either you’re on the EDM path, or you’re headed down the road to extinction.

I wanted to call up Cliff Burnstein. All the great rock thinkers. I wanted to tell them to book a flight and get here immediately, BECAUSE THIS IS WHERE IT’S HAPPENING!

EDMBiz

A woman dropped her suitcase on my head.

You know America, where everybody’s time-challenged and cheap. They can’t check their bag because they might lose some time, and god forbid they spend extra money. Oh yeah, on Southwest bags fly FREE! But the airline is gonna lose them and you’ve got no time to waste so today the essence of travel is getting on the plane first, for the bin space. So people keep traveling with larger and larger roll-ons, and this nitwit extracted hers and it fell right on my head. And my melon still hurts. Do you think she apologized? OF COURSE NOT! Winners have no time to do this, they’re too busy WINNING!

So I’m here for EDMBiz and the Electric Daisy Carnival.

I’ll be honest with you, my attention was drawn to Amazon’s phone announcement, I was following on my phone via live blogs. And I kept thinking how this is how music used to be, how we lived and died to hear what our heroes had to say. And then I read “Rolling Stone” on the plane. You know how irrelevant the magazine is? It dedicated its entire last issue to country music and it made no ripples, there was no effect. Once upon a time, “Rolling Stone” was the heartbeat of a generation, the crier in the town square, today it’s a slick baby brother to “Us.” In today’s world, if you have no impact, you’re a sideshow silo only in it for the money. As for the profiles of the country acts… You’d just have to flip back to “Rolling Stone” thirty years ago to hear the same proclamations. We’re endlessly recycling. Which is why we’re losing the consumer’s attention. There’s no new there.

And you get off the plane and you’re confronted with slot machines. As my dear friend Kenny says, Las Vegas is a monument to losers, the whole place wouldn’t even exist if you could win. In other words, the odds are stacked against you.

But unlike the music business, Vegas has pivoted. It tried families, that was a mistake. And now it stands on the twin pillars of conventions and entertainment. It’s where you go to cut loose when no one’s watching. It’s where electronic music lives in America.

You get off the plane and you see a billboard for Calvin Harris at Hakkasan. And we can debate all day long whether that club is profitable, but the truth is despite all the press for Celine, Elton, Britney and Shania, the heart of Vegas is EDM. The younger generation has taken over. And once upon a time there were music billboards on Sunset Strip, but that was back when bands broke at the Roxy and the Whisky. Today it starts in Europe, and then it comes here.

As for the aforementioned Calvin Harris, he’s got the biggest hit of the summer, entitled “Summer,” but you don’t know this. So is it just that music is a second class citizen, or do we have a generation gap so wide that the oldsters in control of the media just can’t understand?

We live in a lifestyle culture, it’s all about experiences.

Despite the hogwash about everybody trying to get rich, the truth is so many realize they never will be, so they’re all about drinking and drugging and screwing. Having a good time. Same as it ever was. And that’s what you do at the EDM show, have a good time.

Ignore Bonnaroo. And while you’re at it, forget Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza too. Let’s zoom in on the only thing that matters at festivals today, let’s dive into the Sahara tent at Coachella. That’s the epicenter, that’s where it’s happening in music today.

No one wanted to see the Replacements. You can’t even remember the headliners. But you couldn’t get into the Sahara tent. Where deejays most people don’t know did their show.

So what have we learned?

We live in a me and you universe. No one knows this better than the millennials, who were brought up to be members of the group as opposed to individual winners. They were connected at birth and now they’re connected with their mobile devices and they want to go out and hang with their brethren, and if the old people don’t know, they don’t care.

So that’s why the Amazon phone is so important. Because it cements the power of mobile, and draws attention to ecosystem.

That’s what EDM is, an ecosystem. A triumvirate of deejays, audience and production. It’s not where you go to buy a sawdust hotdog and hear the hit, but to have the time of your life.

I want to have the time of my life, DON’T YOU?

“YouTube to block indie labels who don’t sign up to new music service”

Welcome to the winner take all economy.

Or, to put it another way, did you really think Google and Facebook were FREE?

You can’t have it both ways. Partake of the service and then bitch that you don’t like the terms when suddenly it’s your effort involved.

This is part of a bigger story. How our whole universe seems to be flowing to the 1%. That the blockbusters triumph and everybody else survives on peanuts.

But you can make another hit record. There’s a low barrier to entry. But Google owns search and Amazon owns sales and Facebook is your home away from home. No VC with any intelligence is going to fund a competitor, especially after Microsoft lost billions with Bing.

Eventually there will be competitors. Eventually these companies will be eclipsed, just like VisiCalc and WordPerfect. But for now…

It’s all about money. The rich get richer and those not already rich want to be so too.

So you can’t trust a soul. Not anybody. Sayonara.

The major labels own a part of Spotify. Managers and agents care about their wallets before their acts’ careers. And the acts themselves want everything for free until they turn the corner financially and suddenly their fans are the enemy, never mind these giant Internet services which keep taking our privacy under the guise of doing it for our own good. Really Facebook, you’ve been collecting my search history so you can serve up better ads? This is a FEATURE?

So until the public realizes there is no free lunch, and that their odds of getting rich are minuscule, expect these heinous about-faces to continue.

YouTube is laden with ads. Google is a business. What made you think otherwise?

I’m not used to seeing boobies in the wild. Never mind dicks.

So we went downtown to Grand Central Market to partake of what the “New York Times” claimed might be “The Best Iced Latte In America”. Was it? What the hell do I know, the only coffee I consume is in yogurt. But I had a mocha, and there were little chocolate bits and the cookie we purchased was divine, with a complete layer of chocolate throughout. Remember David’s? This was just as good.

And after having our coffee, Felice consumed a fish taco. I stood in line for a goat tostada, but they were out of those, so I had a pork taco and a goat taco. They were only three bucks each. And huge.

And after satisfying our stomachs, we went out for a stroll.

And downtown L.A. is weird. It’s the hipsters, the homeless and the Latinos. You’re not sure whether to enjoy the rare SoCal urban environment, or whether to watch your wallet.

And I implored Felice to walk to the boutique ice cream place, right up from the Nickel Diner, where we had such a memorable lunch last year, devouring the scrumptious potato chip cake. Alas, the samples were disappointing, if you’re going to sell high end ice cream, taste is everything, but texture is a close second, and this was grainy. I felt guilty for not purchasing a scoop, but I am an Angeleno, and we count our calories, we forsake sweets unless they truly hit the spot.

And from there, we decided to walk a few blocks to what the signs said was the Toy District, since Felice’s nephew works in the industry and keeps talking about the location. But after navigating the corner…

We were confronted with naked men, on bicycles.

Now I understand gay pride. I’ve seen naked guys. I figured this was just another demonstration.

And then I saw boobies.

I’m a guy, we guys can never get enough boobies.

Felice kept asking me to Google the happenings and I couldn’t take my eyes off the participants.

The guys were not only topless, but bottomless. You could see their wee-wees only inches away. And being a guy, I’m icked out by the visuals, but I’m always comparing and contrasting, wondering how I measure up. And I must say, for all the limp dicks, I did see some tiny units, that would make Howard Stern feel like a man, and unlike George on “Seinfeld,” on this hot nearly-summer day they couldn’t claim shrinkage.

And then came the women. Like I said, at first I thought it was a gay thing, men letting their freak flags fly.

And the first women weren’t topless. They had halter tops.

And then I saw breasts.

Tiny perky ones. Lumpy ones. Huge ones on skinny girls. It was a cornucopia of tits.

And being the red-blooded male I am, I surf my share of porn, I’ve seen pictures, it’s not like the sixties and seventies, the days of stag films and adult book shops. All you’ve got to do is Google.

But this was different. Because these were living, breathing women. Real people. Who chose to let it all hang out.

And I’m getting the sense that Felice wants to move on. But I can’t really let this opportunity pass. It’s like keeping a kid from candy. I wasn’t gonna cry if pulled away, but I was going to be disappointed.

And as the parade wound on, there were more and more women, it turned out the men were leading. And they had their coochie-coos on their bike seats. Didn’t this hurt?

Then again, on the ride home, Felice kept saying that the men’s penises must have made for an uncomfortable ride. I said this was not the case, that it was no worse than usual, that our balls…sat on the saddle. But didn’t women’s, er, vaginas, wasn’t that painful?

Felice said nope.

And they’ve got to negotiate traffic. The light keeps turning red. And as they round the corner we’re right there to greet them. Some had body paint, but so many women had those little barbells through their nipples. I guess it’s edge-cutting risk takers who ride naked downtown.

And to tell you the truth, I’m still titillated now.

And uncomfortable talking about it with Felice.

But she keeps bringing it up.

And it reminds me of that old song, “Too Many Fish In The Sea” – “short ones, tall ones, big ones, small ones.” Mostly unshaved. Swaying in the wind.

World Naked Bike Ride: Los Angeles

Pork and goat tacos

A pic

Another pic

(As for the women…can you take a pic of naked girls while you’re standing with your girlfriend? I don’t think so. But zoom in and you’ll see some boobies. And butts.)