I thought Taylor Swift was taking a year off.

What has Bob Pittman ever done, other than take undeserved credit and trump up publicity to make it look like he’s a wunderkind when in reality he’s a self-satisfied huckster barely different from a used car salesman.

Do we really believe he started MTV all by his lonesome? Talk to anybody else who worked there, you’ll get a different story.

And Six Flags… What hubris, being in the commercials. Didn’t he learn that Eisner failed as the face of Disney, that it only worked with Walt?

And now Pittman’s running Clear Channel radio. A moniker that’s a pejorative. As in everybody hates it, as in everybody believes Clear Channel stands for everything wrong with the AM and FM dials.

But now Pittman’s making inroads with I Heart Radio, well, it was there before he began, and now he’s got a festival to trump the lame service which is nothing more than terrestrial radio on the Internet and a me-too Pandora service, which sucks in itself, by the way. Hell, can Pandora survive now that Spotify’s got a free app? You get more for your buck with Daniel Ek’s service. Then again, people keep e-mailing me about Pandora, actually that stopped about six months ago, the bloom is off the rose, but the point is people don’t always know what’s good for them, they don’t explore the alternatives, which may be why terrestrial radio sucks so bad yet still has listeners.

I’m talking about music radio. I understand news and talk. It’s real time, it’s engaging. But music radio, commercial music radio, is all jive deejays spewing useless information while they play the hits others have chosen. Hate Ryan Seacrest? I do. He’s the poster boy for everything that’s wrong with terrestrial radio, what’s wrong with our country. The people don’t like Ryan, the media does. But that media means less and less everyday.

But the major labels are part of old media, and they think terrestrial radio is king. When it dies, the executives will be gone, having reaped their bonuses and fulfilled their contracts. Nobody’s looking long term at the labels, because nobody owns one. Otherwise they’d be freaked out, worrying about what to do five or ten years from now. Instead, they just do what they’ve always done, in a weird combo of that old Talking Heads song and "Groundhog Day".

In other words, they’re afraid to piss off radio.

So radio says "Do my show…or else."

These radio shows are positioned as givebacks to the fans. They’re really givebacks to the stations, for playing the act’s music. And if you don’t show, suddenly the airwaves go silent, your music disappears. You think artists would have united to stop this heinous practice, but it continues to flourish. No one wants to be Curt Flood, they just want to profit themselves. Which is what wrought ticketing fees. Do you see any artists replicating Louis CK’s anti ticket fee strategy? Of course not! Because they want the Live Nation/AEG guarantees, and they want them high.

But what if all the artists refused to play these payback live shows… Would radio really play indie records? Of course not, the stations depend on hits. It’s not the stations that have the power, but the acts, but the acts are too stupid to realize this.

And the stations are penetrating the artists from the rear. Because they won’t pay royalties for recordings. They fight it in Congress, claiming poverty. Meanwhile, stations in the rest of the world pay, and even worse, Americans don’t get this money because there’s no reciprocal right.

But no individual artist is willing to raise his head and complain. Yup, you’re supposed to make it in music on your individuality, but when it comes to standing up for your rights, everybody’s a faceless member of the group, letting some suit do their bidding. You wonder why I hate today’s artists. They don’t stand for anything, other than what’s expedient.

But Scott Borchetta makes a deal with Clear Channel for his label, Big Machine, to get sound recording performance royalties. But it’s not that complicated, there’s a quid pro quo. THAT’S WHY TAYLOR SWIFT IS PLAYING THE I HEART RADIO FESTIVAL!

Scott Borchetta is part of the problem. He’s doing what’s right for himself, not everybody else. He could have fought Clear Channel, instead he broke rank for personal gain.

And what’s worse, Clear Channel owns so many stations it’s got tons of power. This is what we’re worried about in the Universal/EMI merger. A little birdie called me today. Said how in a foreign market Wal-Mart sells hit compilations with only Universal music. Yup, Lucian’s label strong-armed them. They own so much repertoire they can leave the other companies out.

Maybe if Taylor Swift herself said no. The biggest star in today’s music business.

But she can’t. She owes Borchetta. And there isn’t an artist alive who isn’t afraid it’ll all end tomorrow.

But she needs time off, to clear her brain and compose a follow-up.

Isn’t this what killed Kurt Cobain, handlers telling him he had to perform instead of taking mental health time?

But no individual act is bigger than the business.

Or is he or she?

That’s the Curt Flood point. One man or woman can change the rules.

But it’s got to be someone in the game. Someone willing to put his money where his mouth is.

Instead, the acts playing radio festivals are willing to burn out markets, take money from their kitty and give it to the stations, all for giving programming for free to same stations. Oh, there are publishing monies, then again, once upon a time exhibitors didn’t want to pay those either.

It’s time to move forward.

Bob Pittman doesn’t want to do a real music festival. No Coachella, Austin City Limits or Lollapalooza. No, he just wants to burnish his company’s image, get press, raise the stock price, get paid.

That’s what it’s come to.

Music takes a back seat. The businessmen are in control. It’s all about getting paid.

P.S. Pittman’s doing no innovation at the stations themselves. He’s not cutting commercials, wowing the customer, it’s the same as it ever was. He’s part of the problem, he’s far from the solution.

We were in New York for Daniel Glass’s daughter’s wedding.

Say that three times fast…

Anyway, it was hot as hell. And the A/C in Felice’s mother’s apartment was on the fritz. But after a scorched night we hit the pavement that inspired "Summer In The City" and walked over to the Eugene O’Neill Theater to pick up our tickets for "The Book Of Mormon". Felice is a diehard South Park fan.

And just around the corner is a Shake Shack. With a line. In the hundred degree heat.

I’d like to tell you it’s fantastic, unmissable, but I’d still rather go to In-N-Out, which is gonna lose the war because of its expansion policy, which is essentially a no-go. The shakes at Shake Shack are to die for, real ice cream. The fries are worthless, those crinkle-cut pudgy ones…. Fries either need to be shoestring and brown, maybe just golden, or steak cut and crispy-edged. These are neither. They’re forgettable at best. You can taste the Pat LaFrieda beef, but it doesn’t dominate. Which is good, but makes the burger just a bit less memorable.

Not that I told any of this to Danny Meyer. Who I ended up sitting next to at the wedding… But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Felice wanted to take a cab back to the apartment, to wait for the A/C company, ironically entitled "Arista", but that seemed too wimpy to me, so I suggested we walk back.

And that’s when we saw the line. At 53rd and 6th. But it was the middle of the day. I didn’t pay it that much attention. People need to eat lunch. But after midnight, when we returned from the play, which is so wild you don’t believe it’s on Broadway, never mind won all those Tonys, I can’t even repeat some of the lines in this family-oriented newsletter, ha!, (not because I don’t want to but because they won’t make it through the spam filters), we encountered once again…

The line at 53rd and 6th. Twenty deep. After midnight?

I had to check this out. Nothing special. Just meat on a grill.

But now I was intrigued.

The next day I spent at the Paley Center, formerly the Museum of Television & Radio. I advise you go. First and foremost, to see all the people who mean nothing to today’s younger generation. Do today’s kids know who Marlo Thomas is? Even Richard Pryor, who was the absolute best? And I watched the pilot of "Seinfeld", without Elaine, where Kramer is monikered "Kessler", but what truly intrigued me was John Lennon on Tom Snyder. Wherein he said he left the Beatles because he was bored. Not that the others weren’t good musicians, but they always played the same thing, he wanted to make music with new people. But what about the fights? He’d known these cats since he was fifteen, the fights were over long ago. What about the jealousies? Hell, people preferred Paul, the cute one, to him and the rest of the band from the very beginning, back in Liverpool in the fifties.

Whew!

And it was after that I had the halal.

That’s what they sell at the cart at 53rd and 6th. Halal. Which is meat on a grill. Beef and chicken. With white sauce, which I was afraid would give me diarrhea, hell, it was sitting out in the heat, and a red hot sauce that’s akin to Tabasco. Oh, there’s rice if you want it, but we’re all off carbs. And a few vegies and pita. And for six bucks, I got a container full.

Not that I didn’t have to wait.

The guy behind me was from Sweden… How does everybody know?

And the proprietor and his assistant couldn’t have been less interested. One was on the cell phone the whole time and the other wouldn’t even talk to me, or anyone else.

And I brought the steaming hot container back to Felice’s mother’s apartment and…

It wasn’t the highlight of my life, but it was the food highlight of the weekend. The beef was just a little crisp, almost burnt on the edges, exactly the way I like it. And it wasn’t low rent meat. And the chicken didn’t have the bland taste of the hormone birds. And the sauce made the whole concoction work. I couldn’t stop eating it. Even though we had to be at the wedding soon.

Which was at the Harvard Club, Daniel’s daughter went there. For graduate school (she hit an Ivy for undergrad too!)

And I had an intriguing conversation with a Harvard grad who mentors kids. He counsels them to find financial independence. To put that in the mix with your dream.

And Rita Houston and I bonded. After she tweeted bad things about me in Philadelphia.

And Danny Meyer was fascinating. You always wonder about talking business with successful people. I asked him whether to order the veal or the fish and he was nonresponsive. I figured that was a generic ice breaker. But after the main course came and he leaned over and said the fish was the right call, we got into it like old buddies. There are few people you can connect with, but I connected with Danny. Because he was real, without airs. He certainly talked about his restaurants, Felice swooned when he told her he owned Maialino, the food there is so good. But more interesting was hearing the family history, of going to Trinity instead of Princeton, of finding his wife and his way.

As for meeting Daniel… He responded to his complaint!

That’s what Danny does.

Imagine Doug, Lyor or Lucian responding to a customer complaint. They don’t have the time for the little people. But unless you do, you’re doomed, your business is going in the wrong direction.

And on Sunday we went to visit my mother in Connecticut. Where I had fried clams, with bellies, which were better than the faux item at Howard Johnson’s, but nowhere near as good as any roadside stand in Wellfleet.

And of course we stopped at Carvel, it’s a tradition!

And despite the heat, and the intermittent A/C, we had a wonderful time.

And one more thing… I went to MOMA. The Museum of Modern Art for the uninformed.

This income inequality is ruining the arts. Because the best and the brightest, those willing to challenge instead of fall in line, are not going into art, but banking, they need the money.

And we all need the money. But how much?

My choices are behind me.

But I fret that the younger generation has skewed values. Believing bankers are kings.

You want to know who are kings?

Those middle eastern guys at 53rd and 6th. They’ve got a line. That’s how good their product is. It’s selling itself. No advertising. No hawking.

Musicians could take a lesson from them.

But before you take the lesson, eat the food, it’s fantastic!

53rd & 6th Halal Cart (be sure to check out the pics!)

Maialino

"A Movable Feast: Danny Meyer on a Roll"

LUCIAN GRAINGE

“‘It could be in five years that the digital landscape has the same choices as the physical landscape had 25 years ago,’ Mr. Grainge said.”

Financial Times

But it won’t.

There’s one iTunes, one Google, one Facebook, one Netflix, one Amazon… Anyone who thinks the future of music retailing will resemble the brick and mortar world of old is either duplicitous or dumb.

I’m sure Mr. Grainge is duplicitous. I’m not sure if he’s dumb.

This is just boys with their toys. Men measuring their dicks against each other. Whenever they say it’s about music, you know it’s about money. Trusting what Mr. Grainge says is like trusting the pronouncements of Mitt Romney. The latter just wants to be President. Grainge just wants the Universal/EMI merger to close. Each will say whatever it takes to gain his just reward. Hell, wasn’t it Romney’s aide who said after the primaries the campaign will utilize an Etch A Sketch? Anybody who believes anything Grainge says will apply in the future is dreaming.

There’s only competition online until one definitive winner emerges. To try to go up against this dominant player is to be Bing, a search engine Microsoft trumped up that is such a colossal failure, the company just took a write-down of $6.2 billion related to it, even after paying Yahoo and RIM to be the default search engine.

KATY PERRY

Her film is a disaster. As in no one wanted to see it. At the end of the day, the distributor might make money, but what we learned here is…

Nobody cares.

You can have a number one single right up to release and you still may have few fans.

You live and die by the hit.

To build a fan base that will support you for a long time you have to have credibility and appear not to be chasing trends.

And speaking of chasing trends… Isn’t that what Ms. Perry did here? There’s nothing new about a 3-D movie for a tween star. That paradigm is just about as dead as Radiohead’s name your own price protocol.

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

20 million. That’s how many books the trilogy has sold in the U.S. Half of them digital.

20 Million Shades of Green: Racy Book Hits Milestone

On the surface of it, it appears the music business is left in the dust. Only Adele, with just under 10 million albums sold in over a year, comes close. But if you look at single sales… There are numerous tracks that sell in excess of 5 million.

That’s the new game. One of single ubiquity.

I know you hate it, I know you’re living in the dark ages, I know you want to make an album-length “statement”, but I’m telling you to wake up before you get left behind.

Album sales are sinking. They made sense as revenue events. But now labels won’t pay you that much, and the albums don’t last. The single is not about the money so much as the career. You can reach many more people with your single. But it must be so new and different or so cliched and forgettable that it gets millions to pay attention.

In other words, it must be “Somebody That I Used To Know” or “Payphone”. Gotye’s track was like nothing else on the radio yet it ended up being a monstrous smash. And if you think people are going to see him live because of his album, you’re ignorant. People want to attach themselves to the phenomenon. And if he doesn’t follow it up, he’s toast. Same deal with Maroon 5.

But the point is Gotye was true to himself, Maroon 5 sold out.

But Maroon 5 is about business, money.

Which side are you on?

Either sell out to the whores who’ll make you a track that sounds like everybody else’s or write and record something so unique it stands on its own. The latter is harder, but replicate it a few times and you’ve got a career.

As for the album, no one’s got time to listen to it.

In a world where no one’s got time to talk on the phone, where tweets are under 140 characters and texts aren’t much longer, do you think people really have time to listen to your hour plus piece of crap?

VIACOM VERSUS DIRECTTV

And AMC versus Dish, while we’re at it.

This is no different from the music business. Content companies keep wanting to make more and the purchaser is saying NO MAS!

Only in this case, DirecTV and Dish are surrogates for the consumer.

Cable TV is overpriced. The model is broken. You pay for what you don’t want. Yes, if you unbundled the channels and bought them all individually, you’d pay more…but do you really want all of them?

Distributors have become emboldened. Same deal with Vevo versus YouTube… YouTube does not need Vevo to survive. Vevo has less leverage than it thinks. Meanwhile, is Vevo making money or losing it? Doug Morris is talking about high costs, and the financial statements are always evasive. Then again, people love their music videos. But never forget, distribution is king, not content. Hell, if content was king everybody would leave Netflix in droves, which keeps losing stuff. But instead, people pay and find something to watch, however crummy it might be.

LOUIS CK

This is not about him avoiding Ticketmaster. If you want to discuss ticketing fees, let’s just say that Louis CK is willing to leave money on the table, and musical artists are not. It’s just that simple. Louis CK is willing to put in more effort and make less. Crybaby musicians won’t do that. Not anybody with a fan base (don’t email me and tell me you’ll do it, nobody wants to see you!)

This is about radio.

But it’s about more than that. It’s about challenging the system.

Everybody thinks there are rules. But really, there are very few. You can choose to do it the man’s way, but oftentimes you emerge further ahead in the game if you do it your own.

Read all of this, from an Louis CK interview in the A.V. Club:

LCK: Yeah, well, I like to try stuff. I like to try to see if something can work. It’s really satisfying to figure out, ‘What if we try it this way? What if we made it way more pleasurable and cheaper to come see me? Or to watch my show online? And if we do this right, how much benefit were we getting from the giant companies?’ The first time I ever toured in theaters – the first time I toured, really. You do comedy clubs, it’s just working clubs, but the first time I went on a tour in theaters – they were like 500-to-700-seat theaters, my agent asked me some blanket questions, like, ‘Here’s what’s going to come up,’ and he said, ‘What is your radio tolerance?’ That’s what he asked me. He said, ‘What presence are you willing to let radio people have at your shows?’ and I said, ‘Give me an example.’ And he goes, ‘Well, here’s all the things they will ask for in every city: Thing one is that the radio personality gets to come onstage and introduce the show. And the second thing they’re going to want is a van outside, broadcasting from the show. Then they’re going to want a banner onstage, with the name of the radio on it. Then they’re going to want a table out in the lobby with bumper stickers.’

He just made a list of, ‘Here’s the things that they will want.’ Another one was meet-and-greets. They get to give away tickets, and the DJ introduces you to the contest winners who won the meet-and-greets. Ten minutes with you alone in a room where you take pictures and stuff. So they said, ‘What of these things are you willing to do?’ And I said, ‘Let’s say no to all of this.’ (Laughs.) One hundred percent of it. As a professional courtesy, if a radio DJ wants free tickets, he can come to the show. He can’t come backstage. He certainly can’t come onstage. They may not have their logo on any of the shit on the stage, anywhere near it. I want people to come to the theater and feel like they’re just coming to see this; they’re not being promoted to. I don’t think there’s anything more obnoxious than when someone has paid to be somewhere, to be promoting to them. That they’re paying to be advertised to is really annoying to me.

I said to him, ‘Let’s do none of it.’ And he said, ‘Well, here’s the thing: If you let them do these things, then they talk about your show all the time. They talk about your show on the air, and you get more free promotion from radio stations. If they get to say, “I’m going to be there'” they’ll get more into it.’ And I said, ‘Well, first of all, I don’t want people at my shows that are there to see the DJ. I just don’t want them to come.’ And I said to my agent, ‘Let’s find out if this is a huge mistake. Let’s find out. I’m willing to sacrifice my first theater tour and have the places empty and identify that it’s because I wouldn’t let the radio people participate. But we also might find out that it didn’t make a difference and that I never have to do it.’ (Laughs.) Because you can’t roll that shit back once you’ve started.

Anyway, the obvious story is that it didn’t make a fucking difference. It didn’t matter.

Louis C.K. on eating pressure and providing an alternative to The Man

The little things count. There’s a price to whoring yourself out to not only radio, but Fortune 500 corporations. You take the short term money in lieu of the long. Then again, your handlers only care about the short term dough…

Hell, ask Lucian Grainge if he’d have bought EMI if it were his dough. The deal doesn’t look good on paper. But it’s the company’s money, so who gives a shit.

Do you give a shit? About your art, your career, your fans?

Then learn how to say no.

No one’s said no in the music business for a very long time. Unless it’s some faux artistic decision, insisting on something that doesn’t even matter.

It’s about time people started saying no again.

You don’t need the Fisker. You don’t need the private jet. You’re just keeping up with the Joneses.

It’s a privilege to play music for a living. Even more, it’s a privilege to have an audience. Respect that.

Only one will win. There’s one Amazon, one Facebook, one Twitter and there will be one streaming music service. Will it be MOG?

Spotify has problems. It sounds crummy and uptake amongst kids is close to nonexistent.

David Hyman will claim MOG sounds superior. That more tracks stream at 320 kbps, and the codec is better.

But I’m not sure any of that really matters. And I abhor the MOG interface. Intuitive it is not, whatever they claim.

You see most people still have no idea what Spotify is, never mind MOG or Rdio. And if they know the names, they can’t explain them. But if Jimmy Iovine goes on "Idol" and keeps talking about MOG…

Game over.

Are you following the headphone wars? If you think Beats makes the best, you can only hear the low end, you know nothing about sound. But Beats has triumphed through advertising, through marketing, through adoption/shilling by high-visibility stars. Kids want to be like Mike. Only in this case, it’s Dre. And Jimmy’s unending coterie. And in addition to its staggering market share, Beats has blown up the high end headphone market, before Beats it barely existed.

Not that Spotify’s toast. Spotify has done an incredible job of expanding upon its footprint. With apps and radio and Facebook integration and the Yahoo deal.

It comes down to a battle of old school versus new. Stars/marketing versus techies. And oftentimes in the new world, the latter has emerged victorious. Because it’s less about placating the little girls than creating foolproof pipe. And speaking of pipe, it all comes down to the mobile handset, and although I disdain MOG’s desktop usability, on the handset, both apps are very similar, MOG’s might even be better, and that’s where people pay, they have to, that’s where the money is.

In other words, Jimmy may be able to convince kids they need streaming services. In this case, MOG. Hell, his job is to convince people they need all these musical acts.

Used to be the kids were first. But they were last on smartphones and last on Twitter. How many articles did we have to read saying Twitter was toast, that little kids wanted nothing to do with it? Well now, kids inhabit Twitter like they do school. It’s where Justin Bieber started Carly Rae Jepsen. The coming fight is for the hearts and minds of the kids, who don’t know they need a streaming service, but will one day adopt one.

Yes, the game is over. We’re going to steaming. It’s going to eviscerate piracy through convenience. Ownership, like the CD, will not die overnight, hell, not everyone uses a smartphone. But streaming will eclipse ownership the same way Netflix decimated the DVD business. Hell, are you storing your favorite programs for eternity on your DVR? No, you believe what you want will be at your fingertips forever, ownership is for pussies.

Isn’t it strange that movies and TV are ahead of music. Then again, for too long music thought it could pull everybody back to the twentieth century. But not Jimmy. Sometimes you’ve got to buy to move forward. The cognoscenti know that was the story with iTunes, Steve Jobs bought SoundJam from Casady & Greene and brought its developers on board. "Not invented here" is a mantra Jimmy gave up on after past disasters. While his compatriots at the labels are fighting over market share, Jimmy’s going for the big money. Yes, the valuation of MOG, if successful, will make Universal look puny in comparison. Hell, have you checked the value of Spotify recently?

This is all good for consumers. Just like Facebook is better than MySpace, usability is ultimately improved, the more players in the streaming wars, the better the eventual victorious product.

The only question is at what point Apple enters the game and wipes everybody else out. The Cupertino company is rarely first, but almost always best. Apple’s got all the credit card numbers. It’s got the hardware, the iPhone, iPod and iPad. Then again, Ping was a disaster. Is Apple missing the boat here or just waiting for someone else to create the market?

Yes, while you’re bitching about Spotify payments, the ship has sailed. No one in business is paying attention. It’s a fight to the finish. Which just got a hell of a lot more interesting.