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I read a "BusinessWeek" article about selling shoes at Nordstrom. Used to be if they didn’t have your size, the salesman would get on the phone and call other stores. How eighties you say! And that’s what Nordstrom realized, they were losing sales. So they put the chain’s entire inventory at the salesmen’s fingertips. And on the very first day the system was implemented, the register receipt in one store was 21 feet long, sales had surged. But in order to make this happen, power had to be removed from the merchandisers, who ran their divisions like fiefdoms, who held on to power and information with an iron fist.

Macy’s and Saks are still light years behind on this inventory system, but our next story is HP. Carly Fiorina believed success was linked to size. In order to triumph in the marketplace, HP purchased Compaq and soon had the number one market share in personal computers. The only problem was that margins were thin, and there were huge inventory problems and now the new CEO wants to spin off that enterprise. Ms. Fiorina was looking at today, not tomorrow. And she believed scale is the only thing that counts. Scale is important, dominance is not.

Which brings us to the iPhone. Trumped in market share by Android handsets, Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. Because the iPhone is uber-profitable, much more profitable than Android, and it’s part of an ecosystem, including iTunes and the iPad. Buy one and you buy the other, people are infected by greatness.

And then there’s Hyundai. A laughingstock twenty years ago and a dominant player today. They slowly got better and word of mouth turned it around, sold their cars.

And all of the foregoing is an illustration of the sea change in the music business. If you’re looking at today, you definitely won’t see tomorrow. And tomorrow will be vastly different from what has come before.

The major labels were beholden to the retailers, the merchandisers in the Nordstrom story. As long as they were tied to the past, they couldn’t enter the future.

And like HP, record companies believed market share was king, irrelevant of the cost of achieving that scale. They had a pipeline they wanted to fill. Now Jeff Price at Tunecore can do this for bupkes, their advantage has been lost.

Apple knows it’s about profit. About creating something so insanely great that people bond to it and keep giving you money. The music business is all short term thinking, like HP.

And Hyundai knows that great products are not developed overnight. It can take decades to achieve success. And great products sell themselves.

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The sea change the major labels missed out on is the power of the artist. The artist is the epicenter today, just ask a concert promoter, who gives performers the lion’s share of the gate receipts, if not all of them. To try and maintain a paradigm wherein you profit while the artist starves is to be locked into a past that no longer exists. We live in an era of transparency, your mobile handset will tell you how many minutes you’ve used but you can’t get an accurate royalty statement, never mind one that’s up to date.

And old school artists believe it’s all about finding a tit to suck on, someone to pay the bills and play daddy, someone to tell you what to do and give you an allowance. They don’t want to be free, they just want to be paid, badly. Whereas new school artists know you must do it for yourself. Scrape up the money to buy a Pro Tools rig, distribute via Tunecore or CD Baby. And sell yourself.

The majors’ distribution monopoly has been shot to hell, it’s gone.

Their stranglehold on radio and television still exists. But those media mean less than ever before. They’re only good for selling the most mainstream, bland stuff, which has the shelf life of a burrito, at best. This market-driven product is expensive to sell and is diminishing in returns. Leaving the landscape open to new entrepreneurs.

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Acts need development and marketing. That’s it. Focus on providing those two.

There will be musical experts who can inspire acts and help them grow, producers, even songwriters who will light the path.

As for marketing, it’ll be about giving the public the tools, empowering fans to spread the word. It took a decade to demolish the old CD model, to make streaming de rigueur. It might take as long for radio and TV to become completely marginalized. But they’re going, don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. As exposers of music they’re incredibly inefficient. Why wait all day for the video on the TV or the song on the radio when you can pull it up instantly online?

But the question remains, what to listen to?

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The money is in telling people what to listen to, being a filter, a trusted authority. It’s the MTV of tomorrow.

And it’s much more complicated than a Spotify playlist. There’s trust involved. And monetization. You’re creating an ecosystem as sticky as Facebook. So far, this doesn’t exist. Companies don’t realize that people don’t want everything, just the right thing. That music is human and recommendations must be so. And we’re all time-challenged, we’re immune to crap and hype.

Which brings us full circle. Those losing power today still believe that crap and hype can triumph.

Those who will win tomorrow know this is not so.

Grandpa is running Sony Music. Major labels want no young ‘uns involved. They just want to keep driving until their license is pulled.

If you’re starting out today, align yourself with talent. Make yourself invaluable. Be in it for the long haul. And know one success leads to many more, people are looking for great acts and acts are looking for great managers.

But there are few great acts to go around. Sniffing them out will be key. Signing and keeping them will be the next step. And the relationship will be about trust more than contracts.

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All of the foregoing is going to happen no matter what. Focus on the public, not the industry. The public is leading. The public stole on Napster, embraced MP3s sans copy protection years before the industry acknowledged their dominance. The public finds acts and builds them, not string-pullers. Apple would mean nothing if the products weren’t great and no matter how much advertising you do, no one wants a TouchPad or a Zune. Underlying quality is key.

But that’s the only thing that won’t change.

Quality will become even more important. Along with honesty and trust. The businessman will report to the artist, not vice versa. And the whole system will be reliant on long term bonds with the audience. Even the wii is fading. Fads have a shorter run than ever and it’s best to leave some money on the table, to invest in tomorrow. A fan who gets a good seat at a fair price is much more likely to spread the word than one who had to buy from a scalper or had to sit in the back.

Fairness rules in the new world. How come the music business doesn’t understand that?

Embrace fairness and you’re on your way to success.

It’s tougher to stay alive. Anyone can die, retire, the challenge is to keep on keepin’ on, with no compass, no rule book, knowing that everything you do thereafter could tarnish your legacy, kill your career. John Lennon, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain were great artists, but if they were alive today, we’d see them differently.

Then there are those who never make it that far. Like Andy Wood.

You might be familiar with "Chloe Dancer/Crown Of Thorns" off the "Singles" soundtrack, but watching this movie Andy suddenly becomes three-dimensional, he lives. And we can see his pure desire to be a rock star, looking more like Michael Monroe than Eddie Vedder, having more in common with Bon Scott than anybody from Seattle. He was flash, he was performance, he got close but he got derailed by drugs. The best of us are damaged, and so was Andy Wood. There was something unknowable about him, that led to his demise. And when he OD’ed, it looked like opportunity had been snatched from Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament when they could finally smell it, when they were finally ready to prove themselves.

As for Mike McCready…he went to L.A. Paid to play at the Roxy to five people on a dead December night. And after parting with the $700 fee, he turned tail and went back to Seattle and gave up.

That’s the story of all successes. Giving up. If you haven’t been ready to hang it up you haven’t been hanging it out far enough. Success does happen overnight, after so much hard work you can’t even calculate the hourly pay, it’s too low.

But when Stone called Mike and then Eddie Vedder laid lyrics atop their musings with Jeff, Kurt Cobain was the new champion. Watching him here your jaw drops. Because we forget that Kurt was intelligent, and was nobody’s fool, he thought for himself, he wasn’t media-trained, he said what he felt, which wasn’t always politically correct. He castigated Pearl Jam, to the point where they constantly checked their behavior, wondering what Kurt would think.

And they all made peace before Kurt’s suicide, but then Pearl Jam was confronted with following up monster success, gracing the cover of "Time". They were still in the game, and it was anything but clear.

You want success, you dream of success, but you can’t handle it when it happens. It’s the carrot that keeps you motivated. When you get to the destination you partake of the fruits, do the drugs and screw the groupies, then you’re confronted with a giant emptiness, everybody’s so different but you haven’t changed.

Eddie Vedder is a cold character. He’s anything but warm and fuzzy. He’s not the one you’d call up to get a beer. You feel a distance. But it’s this distance that infuses his music with its power. He’s damaged, and he’s singing about it. And that part of us which is damaged too resonates.

We hear about the duplicity his "parents" foisted upon him, so his real father died without Eddie really knowing him. And wanting to get it so right in art, leave it all on stage, he became the poster boy for a grunge movement that Pearl Jam never said they were a member of. And he’s still trying to figure it out, all of Pearl Jam is still trying to figure it out.

The backstory comes late in the film. We see Jeff in Montana, talking about needing to get out. Dying to move to Seattle where you could see an offbeat film. Cable television and the Internet have lessened the isolation, but cyberspace is no substitute for the pulse of being with like-minded people, feeling at home.

And Cameron tells how the weather was so bad in Seattle that everybody stayed inside and played records and practiced. And a scene developed when no one was watching. The last hurrah before the boy bands, before Napster obliterated the landscape.

Actually, Pearl Jam is the perfect band for the streaming era. When it’s hard to quantify your success, when it’s all about fans as opposed to CDs.

And Pearl Jam’s got fans. They’re constantly asking themselves what the fans think.

And we get a twenty year review of history.

We’ve got Pearl Jam biting the hand that feeds it, decrying MTV. Which is startling when you realize everybody successful today is in on the joke, they want to live the private jet lifestyle, they want to leave their fans behind. Sure, the wannabes pledge fealty to the fans they don’t have, but anybody can promulgate a manifesto, few can execute it, because they’re not willing to march into the wilderness. If these men were not musicians they would not be working at Goldman Sachs, they’d be faceless blue collar workers. Our best artists are willing to put it all on the line, with no fallback position. Those yelling at the top of their lungs for attention today are just looking for a safe harbor, music is a means, not the end.

And then there’s the whole Ticketmaster controversy. The footage from the hearing is priceless, where Stone refuses to be cowered, he’s anything but polite, but what stands out most is no one took their side, not another band boycotted Ticketmaster. And for that they should be ashamed. If you’re not willing to stand up for what you believe in, if you say you have to play the game, you’re grist for the mill, you’ll be forgotten, no one can believe in you.

Not that the fans applaud everything Pearl Jam does. When the band plays "Bushleaguer" at the Nassau Coliseum they’re booed, but even though they feel threatened, they soldier on.

I’m not the biggest Pearl Jam fan. But after sitting through this movie, and be sure to watch it from beginning to end, it takes many twists and turns, not only did I respect them, believe they’re entitled to their place in the firmament, I gave them credit for surviving, for not breaking up, for continuing on, like the rest of us, trying to succeed, sometimes failing miserably, but getting back on their feet and playing again anyway.

You’ll see references to MTV, it feels like you’re in a time machine, visiting the past, and Sony is barely mentioned, and that’s fitting, because what lasts after all this time is the bands, the music, not the trappings.

And there’s one great moment when they play "The Singles" party on their only day off. Eddie has a melt-down, the band makes more enemies than friends. They learned that night that sometimes you have to say no.

That’s the legacy of Pearl Jam, no.

No videos.

No Ticketmaster

No expediency.

No rules.

You might not make music that sounds like theirs, but they paved a path for you, the same way Eddie’s beloved Who provided a beacon for Pearl Jam.

Yup, the band members say they’re paying homage to the seventies. They know their roots.

And the roots never change. The music must take priority. Practice comes before success. And making it looks nothing like you thought it would. And when you finally break through, you’re disoriented, no one gets it but you, everybody thinks your world is made.

But it’s only beginning.

Pearl Jam Twenty

We own this.

I just got off the phone with Jim Guerinot, he saw Adele last night in San Diego, he needed to share.

Remember when we were a tribe, when we all went to Woodstock to hear the elixir of music and bond with one another? That era is back.

You see this is not about hype.

We can look back to "19" and see the marketing. But there’s been almost none in the case of "21". The single was released and the juggernaut began. We spread the word, the mainstream press reports sales figures, but it just can’t capture the soul.

And that’s what Adele is selling. Humanity. Fractured by love, triumphant and soldiering on in the end.

Jim said Adele said she spoke with her ex on the phone that afternoon, and now when she was singing the songs it was different. Is it different for those dancing to hard drive? Real music breathes, it’s not calcified, in amber, dead.

For far too long it’s been about the hype. Getting the word out.

That’s what makes me wince with the Jeff Bridges hype. The label and the media are complicit, but the audience is nowhere to be found. We don’t see any Jeff Bridges fans testifying, there are no YouTube clips that close you with one listen. It’s all top down, we’re supposed to buy because they told us to, we’re supposed to be caught up in the fake mania, like for those endless high concept movies every weekend which don’t even last as long as a hangnail.

You can see the training. But Adele’s not showing off. She went to school, she got it right, fame might have been a goal but it was not put in front of the cart. Fame comes after for real musical stars, unlike on reality TV. And the Mariah/Christina paradigm has been all about look at me, see how great I am! You can’t do this! It’s like watching a body-building contest, you can see perfection but you want nothing to do with it, it’s creepy.

My inbox has been filling up all week. With people who were at the shows. You won’t see these letters in the newspaper, they don’t have room. And who comments on blogs anyway, who’s got the time.

This is positively primal. It’s person to person. It’s not written down so much as passed mouth to ear, keeping the tradition alive.

It’s been so long.

It’s been all about the money. The show. The flash.

And then we’ve got the pricks pooh-poohing, telling us we just don’t get it, we’re too old, the little kids understand.

But when the show was done last night, Guerinot’s ten year old told him:

"She makes it look like Gaga is trying too hard."

Everybody’s trying too hard. Tweeting, Facebooking, marketing. As if you can learn how to have a musical career in a book, like it’s a sales job as opposed to something involving a unique talent.

And then we’ve got the naysayers, saying they deserve the acclaim.

But they can’t sing and their songs don’t have hooks and you get ’em on stage and they’re shoegazers, they’re frozen.

Sure, some of the best artists were shoegazers, but their music was so powerful, it spoke for itself. The Allman Brothers didn’t talk much, but when Duane started to wail…

We’re at a turning point. Television is driving towards a cliff. Movies have already driven over the cliff. Music is coming back.

And it’s gonna look just like it did in the golden era. The songs will be enough. All this social media hasn’t made it any easier to write a hit tune, and it hasn’t made it any easier to sing one either.

Katy Perry is one step away from Kim Kardashian. It’s about money. And we can respect that, but don’t ask us to believe in it.

Kim Kardashian will break up and move on while we’re still stuck here with imperfection, holding on. She’s playing at being fabulous, but when we get it right, we’re truly cruising, we don’t need plastic surgery and makeup to convince others, a wink is enough, because we’re just that powerful.

So there’s a gap between entertainers and the public. They’re like dolls in Barbie’s house, occasionally fun to play with, but you get tired quick and outgrow them soon.

Adele’s success is attributable to word of mouth, based on a spectacular product. If you don’t think so, you’re sour grapes. And one is irrelevant without the other. Apple products would sell with mediocre marketing but no one wanted a TouchPad no matter how many bells and whistles HP broke out, hell, they even lowered the price.

But we’ll overpay for that which is real. That’s what the scalpers depend upon.

But can you leave money on the table, knowing it’s about the bond between you and fan and the rest is irrelevant.

In the sixties the oldsters didn’t get it. Now those youngsters are in control of the world, screwing up not only the government but the media, believing we’re dumb, that we can have the wool pulled over our eyes.

But we’re smart. We cannot be controlled. We’re a force of nature. We’re not rip-off artists stealing willy-nilly, we’re knowledgeable consumers who only want to pay for what is great.

We’ve determined Adele is great. The mainstream media just can’t figure out why. She doesn’t have a famous boyfriend, she’s not skinny enough, she’s not leveraging her "brand". She’s doing it WRONG!

But she’s doing it oh-so-right.

This is a turning point. Pay attention. Revel in it.

We all remember seeing the "Sledgehammer" video for the very first time…how’d they do that! That was the essence of success in the MTV era, pushing technological limits to wow the passive end user, whether it be Michael Jackson morphing into a panther or Ric Ocasek battling an insect. But we’re no longer passive and we no longer watch videos on MTV. We’re active online, we’re in charge. And we’re constantly sharing. What makes us share?

There’s a fascinating story in the "Wall Street Journal". I’ll link to it, but unless you’re a subscriber, you won’t be able to read it. But the essence is we forward that which affects us emotionally.

The researcher, Jonah Berger, at Penn’s Wharton business school, looked at what was forwarded from nytimes.com. You’d think it would be information, alerting friends of facts they should know. But Berger found out that "the most popular stories were those that triggered the most arousing emotions, such as awe and anger. We don’t want to share facts – we want to share feelings."

Whew! This is critical in the music sphere!

Let’s start with the music itself. That which truly has lasting power, that which will be forwarded by the viral masses, has its basis in emotion. I’m not denying the power of beats to motivate you in a club, but one of the reasons those tracks tend not to last is they don’t affect us emotionally, they’re cold blue steel, like automobiles, dated as time goes on. Whereas we can listen to a recording from the 78 era and be brought to tears, not because of recording perfection, but the emotion.

I experience this on a regular basis. I go see an act live and they play a song that kills. Then they go into the studio to perfect it and drain its essence, it just doesn’t work. I wanted to tell everybody, now I want to tell nobody.

So, first and foremost, does your music have that je ne sais quoi? That makes the listener want to cry or smile, that makes them think not only of their loved ones but summer camp and the first day of school and fresh-mowed grass on a hot summer day? If not, chances are it’s going to be hard to spread the word on your tunes. You’ll have no viral effect.

As for videos…

This is the success of Pomplamoose. It’s not the technical execution, but the humanity. Nataly Dawn radiates a carefree honesty, a charisma that draws us to her, her boyfriend smiles, enraptured by her. That’s why people are giving Nataly money on Kickstarter. Not because they expect her to write hit tunes, but they want to be touched by her joie de vivre, they too want to feel alive.

The key to word spreading online, and that’s where trends are built and bands are broken, is:

"Decades of research in social psychology have shown that people often share strong emotions as a means of fostering connection and solidarity."

They call Facebook the "Social Network". That’s what Web 2.0 is all about, connecting. And we don’t do it by passing along information, but that which affects us which we believe will affect others.

"’If I’m angry, and then you get angry, we can bond over what we’re feeling,’ Mr. Berger says."

The article goes on:

"The Internet reflects this ancient social instinct. The only difference is that, when online, we often can’t express our emotions directly. (It’s not easy expressing genuine joy in a tweet.) Instead, we’re forced to spread arousal through short videos and articles, using the images and words of others as a proxy. ‘It’s difficult to communicate strong feelings when we’re not communicating face-to-face,’ Mr. Berger says. ‘But sharing content on the Web allows us to get a parallel kind of connection.’

And this is why the online world is so biased toward arousing material. Although the Internet is often described as an infinite library of information, the most popular things online typically aren’t very informative."

Voila!

Used to be a limited number of manufacturers badgered gatekeepers to expose their wares. Records gained traction via repetitive airings. If you didn’t get it at first, just hang in there, we’re gonna drill it into your head. But now when media is unlimited and we’re only interested in that which is truly great we’ve cast aside the old manufacturers and gatekeepers and are reliant upon our companions. And the way our companions reach us is via emotions, they’re aroused and they try to arouse us.

So if the song doesn’t affect you emotionally, linking me to it won’t arouse me either. Doesn’t matter how professionally executed it is, how much money was spent in the creation, unless it sets my insides free and makes my brain percolate and drift, I’m not interested. And since I’m bombarded with information, it’s got to achieve this goal very quickly. I’ll hang in there for a while because I know you, but not very long.

I’ll give you an example. I just learned in a tweet about a video wherein a climber walks a tightrope over Yosemite Falls. I was about to retweet the link and then I saw he was tied in, it wasn’t a life or death situation. I was still interested, but my heart was no longer going pitter-patter, I didn’t forward the link.

This is why OK Go has no musical traction. Its videos are cool, but they don’t sell the music, there’s no heart in them. They’re just DIY versions of what came before. If you’re selling your music, just you and a guitar should be enough. If the music is enough. And if the music is not enough, no matter what you tack on, it will not make it so.

Not that only live videos will triumph in the future, but the focus will be on pulling heartstrings, affecting us emotionally more than wowing us visually. More and more we live online. We interact. This is a sea change. Old companies employ an ancient paradigm to get ahead, polishing turds into salable products, jamming them down our throat.

But most of us have recused ourselves from that game. We’re in a new game. Drawn by emotion.

In other words, if you send me a link I won’t check it out unless you’re my very best friend. If you’re not, you’ve got to sell me, tell me why I’m gonna be affected emotionally. And if I’m not, I won’t click through to your productions again.

Way back when it was all about emotion. From the classical era to those who triumphed just before recording techniques up to the MTV age. The shiny wow of the past few visual decades was an exception. There will still be images with music, but they will no longer dominate, and it will be the underlying emotion of the music that will be both the invitation and the meal. Empty calories are passe. This is big.

"The Science Behind Charlie Bit My Finger Again: Why You Just Shared That Baby Video – The Internet shows our deep preference for emotional arousal over bare facts"