You’re not gonna pay for these and neither did I but they’re the most fantastic listening experience you’ll have all year.

For so long music has been tinny and compressed, what if there were a device that could add humanity and warmth to the sound?

Oh, don’t go all technical on me, telling me you can never do better than the original source, all I’m telling you is these headphones are a revelation.

These are not fashion accessories. Not something you parade around in to demonstrate how hip and fashionable you are. Consider them the anti-Beats. Yes, while the Iovine/Dre company is touting their new “Studio” headphones in billboards all over town, Audeze is all about word of mouth. And if you’re part of the chain, if you’re listening, it’s DEAFENING!

Do I expect you to spend a grand? When audio prices have been driven down over decades, when the component system has been replaced by the cheap all-in-one and then the iPod and phone, which many people get for free?

No.

But you should.

Look at this way. You spent multiple thousands back in the seventies, assuming you were alive and kicking back when audio quality last reigned, and the LCD2’s are just a fraction of that.

Although you should buy an amp. Which will add a couple of hundred bucks.

But it’s worth it!

Do you know what it’s like to touch someone? How that feels? That’s how these Audezes sound!

Oh, you pronounce that like “odyssey.”

And I could explain the technology, but I won’t. Needless to say, if you remember the Magneplanar speakers of yore, they’re kind of like that. Which is to say they’re not traditional. In other words, the spoils go to those who think out of the box.

I heard stuff I’ve never heard before. Even though I’ve listened to some of these tracks so many times I can sing them at the same length, a cappella.

Kind of like Dido’s “Sand In My Shoes.” It’s the story of a vacation romance. Coming home and wondering if what was temporary should be permanent.

On the road where the cars never stop going through the night

Foreshadowing this line, positively hearable, positively visible, is the traffic! Right outside Dido’s window! You really feel like you’re in her flat in London. It’s like a full screen movie, but it’s only for you.

And when you get a device like this, you go back to all your favorites, to hear what you’ve missed. And it’s less about sounds levitating from the detritus than the enriching of the sounds themselves. Suddenly you see the guitars. Sometimes even the fingers.

And then there’s Stevie Nicks’s “Secret Love.” Dave Stewart is famous for thin productions. But listening on the Audezes you wonder if that’s an incorrect perception. Because suddenly all the effects separate, instead of a wash of sound, there’s suddenly detail. It’s like you’re sitting with him and the engineer at the board, twisting knobs, you can see them add the effects.

Then there’s stuff so ancient you think nothing will be revealed. Kind of like Spirit’s “So Little Time To Fly,” off 1969’s “Clear.”

Do you see the reasons why
There’s very little time to fly

It’s the bass! You can hear it. As for Randy California’s vocal…you can see him alone in the studio, singing. You can see the mixer grinning as he adds the final touches. All the elements separate, they’re clearly defined. It’s like putting on glasses after a lifetime of presbyopia.

And the funny thing is everything gets better in tech, everything comes into focus, but in music we’ve been going in the wrong direction, Beatle records sound better than the productions of today.

I know, I know, to expect the public to pay for this sound is an impossible dream. Good enough is good enough for most people. Then again, great technology descends from the stratosphere into everyday life. If people focus on it, if there’s enough buzz.

I’d like to hear somebody say they bought Beats for the sound, I’d like to say someone purchased them and is raving about what they hear, but the truth is Beats are fashion items, no different from those women driving SUVs who never go offroad and don’t even live where it snows. Or the guys leasing hybrids… Huh? They don’t pay economic dividends for years! If Jimmy Iovine truly cared about sound he’d have ads with specs, but he doesn’t want to take that risk, he’d rather go through the backdoor, and it’s a start, but it’s so far from the finish line it’s a joke.

Then again, there’s no cash for these detailed productions. They’re expensive. And when you make all your money live do you want to waste all that cash and time perfecting that which no one will ever hear?

But if you get it right today, like in the case of Spirit above, it will last until tomorrow.

I can finally make out lyrics that heretofore have been impossible to decipher.

And I know reading about sound is like talking about pictures, it doesn’t capture the essence.

But these Audezes do!

They’re huge. With wooden earcups. Which require oiling.

And it’s not only acoustic and old stuff, I pulled up Eminem’s “Without Me” and all that stuff on the bottom, underneath Marshall, tightens up and becomes defined, it’s no longer a wash of sound. And you can hear that Marshall’s voice is doubled. And just like they paid Alicia Keys to use a BlackBerry while she was an iPhone addict and continued to use the Apple device I bet my life that if Jimmy and Dre heard these Audezes they’d discard their Beats and never ever listen to them again.

And the problem is too much of this expensive stuff is purchased by tweaks who are more into the gear than the music. They quote specs and tech and your eyes glaze over and you move on. There aren’t enough music fanatics exposed to this great stuff and spreading the word. That’s what happened with stereo in the sixties and seventies. You heard it and you bought it. Your buddy had a component rig, you wanted one too.

So I’m just making you aware of these Audezes. To let you know what the bleeding edge is about. I kept hearing how great they were, I truly didn’t believe it.

And then I heard it.

P.S. There’s even a better model, the LCD3, at 2k. It’s hard for me to believe there could be anything better than the LCD2, but they’re gonna send me a pair so I can find out.

P.P.S. This is not a commercial. These things are really that good.

P.P.P.S. They’re so good even MP3s are a revelation!

Audeze LCD2

“Life is like that. There’s always more, always a reveal.”

Cheryl Strayed

I contemplate suicide now and again. Not as much as I used to, in college, back before people knew how dangerous higher education was and a safety net/mental health infrastructure was required, and the decade thereafter, when I was trying to find myself in a world that rarely squared with my conception of it.

I’m not exactly a happy camper today, but things are going pretty good. I think it’s got partly to do with getting older, you understand the game, you realize those who think they know…don’t. I’d never want to be President. CEO of the giant corporation known as the USA? Sounds like a crappy job to me.

But every once in a while I get frustrated. Not only when I hit a metaphorical brick wall, but when I realize I haven’t changed or am encountering the same damn problem once again. It’s like an episode of “Groundhog Day,” but without the reward at the end.

But it’s quotes like these that keep me going.

Because life is truly a mystery. Better than any book or movie. You’re just bouncing along and the strangest thing happens, especially if you put yourself in play.

And you should.

“WE ARE FAMILY: When a book saturates the culture as pervasively as Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Wild’ – at No. 15 on the combined nonfiction list after 56 weeks – it can be hard to imagine there are readers left who haven’t encountered it. But when a Pennsylvania woman checked ‘Wild’ out of her local library recently, she was surprised to find far more than the travel adventure she was expecting. ‘I often get e-mails,’ Strayed wrote on Facebook last month, ‘from readers who tell me we’re connected because their lives are so very much like mine – similar childhoods, similar losses, similar struggles. This experience has been a great reminder to me how very connected we are, in spite of our differences. As I read one such e-mail recently I thought I was reading the usual until I came to the part about how the e-mailer sat bolt upright in bed as she read “Wild” because halfway into Chapter 1 she realized we have the same father. My half sister, who came upon my book by chance, who knew of my existence but not my name, found me.’ Strayed told me she had made efforts over the years to locate her half sister and brother, but online searches turned up nothing. But when her half sister started ‘Wild,’ she ‘knew just enough about me and my siblings that she put it together. She read the rest of the book and then she wrote to me. She was stunned. I was, too, and yet I always knew our paths would cross. Life is like that. There’s always more, always a reveal.'”

Inside the List – The New York Times

___________________________________

“Generosity is its own form of power.”

It’s all about the favor economy.

That’s when you know you’re in the game, when you realize this.

If you haven’t been asked for a favor, you’re not playing.

But tread lightly with your requests, the other shoe always drops.

Little gems like this are sprinkled throughout “House of Cards.” They make me bolt upright, startled with the recognition.

I know not to ask.

Because it always comes with a price, nothing is free. Ever.

No one is more generous than Irving Azoff. He might have learned it from Jerry Weintraub. Irving will jump through hoops your own siblings, never mind your parents, will not. This is where his power derives from.

You think it’s about networking, knowing everybody. And I don’t want to denigrate that, but really it’s about building good will based upon a network of favors. If you can’t do something for somebody with nothing specific expected in return, you won’t make it very far. Because when you get near the top you need your allies, people you can count on.

That’s how the world works.

David Geffen too. He’ll do anything for you. All the big power players.

Not just for anyone, but someone in their orbit, someone who might prove useful down the line.

“Useful.” It doesn’t mean being used. It means you encounter people down the line that you never expected to cross paths with. It’s good to have a prior relationship, not built on cunning or saber-rattling, but generosity. People who might not grease your way, but certainly won’t block it. People who will do the tiniest of things that others will not. Like get your e-mail read, get you time with the supposedly unreachable.

And only an amateur muscles, only an amateur squeezes the recipient to deliver. If you’re playing it like the Mafia, you’re not going to be playing for long. No, the giver asks for something. You get to decide whether to deliver or not. All you know is if you don’t, you’re done.

And a pro never asks for something untoward, something you wouldn’t be comfortable doing. That comes if you’re truly related, if you’re truly bosom buddies. They understand that you might not want to do it.

Which is why you probably shouldn’t ask. Not unless you see that those free concert tickets come with a price.

Then again, those concert tickets are currency. As are your relationships. Give ducats away on a regular basis. Do kind things for others. The dividends might not be immediately apparent, but if you’re deflated about the lack of return you haven’t waited long enough. Or you’re not skilled at the game.

And power is a game. Every bit as complicated and difficult to play as baseball and football.

And the world is all about power.

But it’s based on love.

Did you read the “New York Times” story on the avalanche?

Snow Fall – The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

Actually, you don’t read it as much as experience it. It’s not only words, but images. And it deals with the basic issues of human life…risk, camaraderie and death.

Should we do it or not? Will we jump off the cliff and have the sensation of a lifetime or will be bump into the rocks on the way down and get bruised and bloody or hit unseen items in the water below and die.

Die. That’s the opposite of life, death. It’s what we’re contemplating every damn day. If we go to college are we buying an insurance policy or are we missing out on an opportunity to be our fully realized selves? If a friend jumps off a bridge should you? My father used to posit this rhetorical question to my desire to do something seemingly every day. But this was back before they invented the bungee jump.

So the “New York Times” is fiscally challenged. Positively paralyzed. Not sure whether to stay stuck in the past or jump so far into the future they become “Newsweek,” remaking themselves into oblivion.

And the number of missteps the “Times” has taken have been staggering. Instead of focusing on its strengths, providing reporting where no one else will. But a newspaper is not only the headlines. And like an out of bounds skier himself, to truly titillate, to truly exhilarate, the paper must do something different.

You can read the avalanche story in the physical paper. But the Luddites who did this, who are self-satisfied, inured to the past, missed out. Online, you felt it, you experienced it, the eerie quiet of the mountains after a storm, never mind an avalanche, when you feel fully alive and others are…dead.

To say last December’s avalanche story was a hit would be an understatement. It won awards. It was the definitive statement on the tragedy that was covered in the mountain media, but it reached more than that core audience.

And today, the “Times” followed it up with a story on a jockey.

A jockey? I’ve only been to the races once. And this guy isn’t famous. But that’s the hook.

Will I read it?

Probably.

There are a ton of lessons here. If the avalanche story wasn’t in the “Times,” it would have gotten little traction. That’s the dirty little secret of the web, many can play, only few can win. In a world of media overload, we gravitate towards those with consistent quality who’ve enraptured us in the past. In other words, the rich get richer and the poor can’t play. And this is not a governmental policy, but the immutable law of access technology. Yes, you can post your music online, but that does not mean anybody will listen to it.

In other words, the “Times” was in the game. And when you are, you must progress, but never throw out your basic asset, that’s your core good will, what you’re known for. Kind of like the musician who won’t play his old material in concert. No matter how much he advertises this, patrons are pissed. They’re dumb, they’re uninformed, they’re coming for who you used to be, they’re not sure they want to be aligned with who you are in the future.

In other words, you’ve got to keep searching for your next hit. When the majority of your audience doesn’t want you to change. Kind of like the inane brick and mortar booksellers. They keep pointing to what their customers want as evidence for both trends and keeping the past intact. More interesting is those who don’t go into the store, what do they want?

Yup, the wildfire of the avalanche story was not spread by either the “Times” or its regular readers, lapping up political and world news. It was a small subset of those living on the edge who spread the word.

So the “Times” had a hit. And following it up is the hardest thing to do. You can cut “Call Me Maybe,” but can you then do “Blurred Lines”? In a world that’s all about today, where the label titans have no ownership equity, this seems to be impossible. One, they don’t really want the left field, and if you have a hit with something different, they don’t allow you to do what you want next, they run your song through a plethora of cowriters and producers, looking for insurance. But if you think there’s any insurance skiing in the backcountry, your outside experience is limited to video games.

So first you gain trust. Then you slowly expand horizons.

And then you listen to nothing anybody has to say.

In other words, if you want people to listen to your next album, your previous one must have no duds, be playable throughout. In the world of the Internet people have unlimited time for that which is great, they live to go down the rabbit hole, they want to have Netflix marathons of “Breaking Bad.” But they don’t want to do marathons of everything.

So we keep hearing people have a short attention span and you’ve got to make it more brief and here you have the “Times” doing just the opposite and winning.

Could you do the same thing?

Absolutely.

But you’ve got to be in business for yourself, you have to have established your bona fides, you have to provide content on a regular basis, so that people won’t forget you and will be exposed to your work and…you must have a reputation for excellence nonpareil.

Readers of the “New York Post” will not ever care about what’s in the “Times.” Ditto listeners to Limbaugh and watchers of Fox News. What’s wrong in the music business is people try to appeal to everybody. Be happy with your niche, grow it, but if you’re for world domination, you’ve got a hokey, watered-down, me-too product that will never last.

And unlike the musicians, the “Times” didn’t hype the avalanche story, nor this new jockey story. They just posted them.

In music, it’s all about the set-up. Publicity. We hate it before we even hear it. We’re dunned to death and then we ignore it. Which is kind of the story of the Jay-Z Samsung album, never mind a ton of other works that have been forgotten. In music, we boast how great we are, in print/words/writing we just do it.

The “New York Times” did not send me an e-mail telling me to post a widget on my page or tweet about this new jockey story, spreading the word. No, they let the work speak for itself.

That’s the new paradigm. How ever much you want to believe it’s about publicity, it’s not. It’s about excellent work.

And people have an unlimited time for excellence. “House of Cards” is better than any record I’ve heard all year, there’s more truth in it than “Yeezus.” It bespeaks life. I can’t stop talking about it.

And it’s thirteen hours long. And I can’t wait for the next season.

And the future is hooking people for the long term. We’re ready, can you deliver?

P.S. Googling will get you an August 9th link that no longer works which provided a trailer and an opportunity to be e-mailed when the jockey story appeared. Because the “Times” is so inept in online marketing, this had little traction. In other words, even when they tried to advertise, they couldn’t do it. But once again, despite this minor effort, it’s not about the ad, but the product. Otherwise everything on a billboard would dominate its category, and it doesn’t.

“The Jockey”

Every week the antiquated record industry trumpets its sales figures and the even more ancient media industry repeats them. And to say they’re unimpressive is to say you took the family goat to prom.

Let’s look at Imagine Dragons.

They’re a top ten act selling 25,000 records a week.

25k a week? That’s positively anemic in a country of 300 million. That’s like asking us to be impressed that you made $2.50 at the lemonade stand. In a county where movies debut in the double digit millions every week, it appears the music industry is a joke.

But it’s not.

Oh, you can point to the 1.25 million records Imagine Dragons has sold in nearly a year, but how impressive is that? When there used to be a diamond award given for ten million sales on a regular basis at the tail end of the last century…

Have people just given up listening to music?

NO! It’s just that the industry keeps pointing people to lame metrics.

On Spotify, the supposedly rip-off system with no traction, Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” has been spun 122,988,750 times. Put that number in the paper, it’ll wow people! It’s almost unfathomable, it’s got too many commas for most people to be able to interpret. And the band has another track at over 50 million and two in the 30 million play range.

These numbers are SPECTACULAR!

This is not your daddy’s record business. Only it is. Everyone’s pointing to the wrong number and the acts are complicit.

The press has declared Kanye West’s new album a stiff, but on Spotify the tracks have 2.5 to 5 million plays. Now compared to “Blurred Lines,” with 64 million, that’s not much, but it certainly indicates traction. As for the other song of the summer? The radio edit of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” has got 74,122,609 spins and the album version has got another 26,335,533.

It’s not whether someone buys it, but whether they play it. While “Billboard” keeps reformulating its chart, factoring in social media and a bunch of other crap, why not look to streaming services, which truly indicate popularity?

Same deal with YouTube, where “Radioactive” has 65 million plays. And that’s impressive, but people conflate those numbers with television, with the MTV of yore, and they just don’t register that much anymore, especially with a new viral video on a regular basis, which may have nothing to do with music.

And you don’t see Calvin Harris’s name on a regular basis in mainstream media, but he’s got numerous tracks with double digit million spins on Spotify. “I Need Your Love” has got 56,435,679, “Sweet Nothing” has got 73,831,099. Maybe some insiders are gloating over his income, wherein he was rated as the number one earning deejay in “Forbes,” but to think that’s gotten mainstream penetration is to believe “Forbes”‘s site has got the same following as TMZ. Then again, it was linkbait, they just did that report to garner virality.

But that’s all about manipulation. Right now, these Spotify numbers are real. And important. And as soon as we stop vilifying these streaming services and start trumpeting their metrics, the sooner the rest of the world will take music seriously, the sooner artists will realize that there’s a ton of money in music and it’s worth it to take the risk as opposed to play the game because you can go straight to your audience and people are hungry for something new and different.

P.S. Don’t denigrate Spotify, sign up! Get everybody you know to sign up! Then these numbers keep going up, up, up! And more money rains down on those who make the music, and isn’t that your main complaint, that you just can’t make enough cash? This is your salvation!

P.P.S. Yes, these are global play counts on Spotify, but it is a global business and the more we tear down the artificial national barriers and embrace the true reality of music dissemination, the better it will be for everybody, especially the artists.

P.P.P.S. “Radioactive” had 1,127,465 plays in the U.S. last week. You can see how many weekly U.S. plays a track had on Spotify here:

Spotify Top 50

P.P.P.P.S. You can add a Spotify Top Tracks widget to your site here:

Configure a Spotify top tracks widget

P.P.P.P.P.S. Right now Spotify is the leader, only one service will win, whether it be Spotify, Deezer or MOG/Daisy/Beats. Everyone will gravitate to one, to share. The same way BlackBerry can’t exist in a world of Android and iPhone, which are battling it out for supremacy themselves. You see you want to be where your friends are, BBM kept people on BlackBerry, iMessage is helping keep people on the iPhone and you build the platform and keep improving it, you grow or you die, that’s Amazon’s mantra, that’s what’s hobbled Apple’s stock, that’s what hurts musical acts. You think by repeating the formula you’re sustaining, but the truth is you’re dying.