Dear Bob,

A short note of thanks as this year comes to a close for recognizing Bettye LaVette back in your June 1 column.

You wrote everything that I know to be true of Bettye and the album, just as if you’d been walking in my shoes for the previous 18 months  — from the time I invited her on the Kennedy Center Honors in the Fall of 2008 (after seeing her on YouTube. . .  seriously, no joke), through the conceiving and recording of the album and up until its release in late May.

You completely understood her talent, her journey, and what the album meant for people who still love to buy CDs.

I must write that your acknowledgement of the album was the single biggest blessing to come her way following its release.  All of the television appearances that I arranged for her, the interviews, the profiles — they were all facilitated by your acknowledgement of her so early on.

I thank you for your curiosity and intelligence — and for boosting Bettye’s trajectory towards being recognized more widely by her peers and audiences around the country.

Sincerely and Happy New Year,

Michael Stevens
Producer
Kennedy Center Honors
Interpretations: the British Rock Songbook

1. Spotify In The States

Spotify kills piracy dead.  Isn’t this what the rightsholders want?

As for it being free on the computer…  I hate to tell you, music is already free on the computer, ever heard of YouTube?

Yes, we’re moving to streaming, and we’re moving to a mobile world.  You’ve got to pay to use Spotify on your mobile, people will do it (and for those unfamiliar with Spotify, thousands of songs live on your handheld, so even if you’re out of range, like on the top of Everest, you’ll be able to listen to music on your mobile…well, at least as long as the battery holds out.)

2. All-In Ticketing

What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where the most hated corporation in America, Live Nation/Ticketmaster, is the leader on this?

Can’t we all take the pledge?  The add-ons are only hurting overall business.

If you believe in add-ons, I hope your record deal has a discount for breakage.  Add-ons are a result of promoters’ inability to make money.  Then again, if there’s all-in ticketing, the acts want to commission that too.  You may hate Live Nation, I hate the greedy acts and agents more.

3. Lower Concert Ticket Prices

Can’t anybody in this business leave some money on the table now so they can reap rewards in the future?

Oh yeah, that’s right, the Dave Matthews Band, Phish, all those touring acts that care more about their customers than their pocketbooks.

If you’re ripping off your audience, it’s only a matter of time until people turn on you.  Just ask the record labels who discontinued singles and made you pay twenty bucks for a CD with only one good track.

4. Uniform Licensing

I want anyone with a startup to be able to get all the rights they need for a clearly stated price.  Yup, everything.  Recording rights, publishing rights, even sync rights.  I’m not saying the deals should be cheap, but they should be easy.  And upfront payments, if they exist at all, should be small. Imagine if you had to pay for all of your kids’ college expenses when they were born, even though you’re young and starting a career.  That’s what it’s like trying to license music for a startup.

5. A Uniform Music Social Network

There’s only one site online.  Competition is a pipe dream.  Every site exists side by side, just a click away.  The best one wins.  There’s only one Amazon, one iTunes, one Facebook…  Face it.  I’m not saying there won’t be competition on the way to the standard, or that standards can’t be eclipsed, as Facebook did with MySpace, I’m just saying there will only be one winner.  Get over it.

And stop focusing on the money-losing Vevo, playing to the advertisers everybody hates, and go directly to the public.  Let them come in for free, then upsell them with virtual and exclusive goods.  Look to Zynga/FarmVille for instruction.

Let’s get everybody excited about music.  Let’s get everybody playing the music game.  We don’t want an exclusive world, we want an INCLUSIVE world!

6. A Tax On Any Act That Doesn’t Release New Music Every Year

The album is an archaic financial product.  If you’re truly making a full-length statement and need sixty minutes to do so, that’s fine with me, but almost no one does.  Most acts need to make a full length to justify their existence.  Just like they need to send reporters a finished CD to feel good about themselves.  If you make music people want, they’ll climb mountains to get it.  Focus on creating incredibly desirable music.  And I hate to tell you, in this world, even ten year olds are challenged for time.  Make it easy.  Release singles.  If you’re good, people will want everything you do. And just because you make a steady stream of finished singles does not mean we don’t want your rehearsal recordings and road videos and…  The key is to put enough out there so that if you’re a fan, you can dig for hours and be satiated…  And continue to be satiated.

7. The Disbanding Of The RIAA

The record companies no longer rule.  This organization has done more harm than good.  I’m all for a music trade organization to lobby in Washington, D.C., but the RIAA is not it.

8. A Reduction In The Number of Grammy Awards

Ten tops.

Now if you can’t get nominated for a Grammy, you didn’t release a record.  If the Grammys are about rewarding excellence in all genres, an insider circle jerk, cancel the TV show and don’t publish the endless nominations.  But most of NARAS’s money comes from CBS…  Can we at least make the awards comprehensible?  And how about transparency as to who’s actually voting? Or maybe an insiders’ award.  One voted on by those who were Top Ten in music sales and touring revenue.

9. Discontinuation Of The Fallacy That There’s No Cost To Tying In With Corporations

If you want to sell out, it’s your choice.  But there’s always a cost, nothing’s free in this world.  If you don’t know that, you’re still wet behind the ears.  If you’re taking corporate money, you’re more into money than music.  You love success more than playing.  You can make it without the Fortune 500. But it’ll be slower, you’ll struggle.  But it’s this struggle that makes great art.

10. The Best Of Howard Stern on Terrestrial Radio

Cut up a daily four hour show and turn it into a best of two hour broadcast for terrestrial the very next day.  This is a win/win/win.  For Howard, Sirius XM and terrestrial radio.  If you don’t know Howard Stern is the best broadcaster in existence today, more honest than anybody else on the radio, you haven’t listened to him.  It’s pitiful that such a powerful voice has such a limited audience.

11. The Failure Of American Idol

I’ll get this one, I don’t even need to wish and hope.  "American Idol" was always about TV, not music.  Now you eliminate all the drama?

12. Lady GaGa Must Perform In Street Clothes

She’s made it, can she afford to make it about the music?

13. U2 Must Donate The Entire Proceeds Of Their Concert Tour To RED

They’re tax exiles.  Bono’s trying to save the world while he’s lining his own pockets.  Put your money where your mouth is.

14. Every Touring Act Must Do A Minimum Of Five Club Gigs

Sure, tickets will be impossible to get.  Scalpers will sell them for zillions.  But imagine the buzz!

15. Paperless Ticketing

Goes a long way towards eliminating scalping.  But demonstrates exactly what demand truly is, which oftentimes is lower than public perception.

16. The Death Of ReverbNation

And Constant Contact and all the other sites that spam consumers under the aegis of helping performers.  These are just sham organizations, ripping off wannabes and cluttering our inboxes.  Maybe there should be a fine for unwanted musical e-mail.

17. Top Forty Radio Must Be Renamed "Rhythmic" or "Beat" Or Really Play All Genres Of Music

18. The Demise Of EMI

Why are we delaying the inevitable.

Sell the publishing to Warner and the recordings to Bertelsmann, or maybe both to Bertelsmann.  Now the company is playing with both hands tied behind its back.  If you’re signing to EMI, you’re naive.  By time your record comes out, not only will the employees be gone, it’ll be owned by someone else.  That’s if your record comes out.

19. Everybody In The Music Business Gets Paid On The Upside

No big salaries, just rewards upon success.

20. Twenty Five Percent Of Every Music Corporation’s Employees Must Be Under The Age Of Twenty Five

And they must make twenty five percent of the payroll.

Kids buy the music, they know technology, why are they frozen out of the business?

21. Newspapers Must Publish The Weekly Touring Grosses Alongside The Record Sales

Touring means more.  Why don’t the papers know this?  Oh, that’s right, the papers are on the road to extinction.

22. MTV Is No Longer "Music Television", Can We Eliminate It From The Discussion?

23. If You Can’t Play, Write Or Sing, You Can’t Get A Record Deal

24. Fifty Percent Of Every Record Must Be Made By The Artist

There’s singing, playing, writing…  Just like CanCon, you must be an authentic musician or you can’t release a record.

25. Jimmy Iovine Must Decide Whether He’s A Record Exec Or An Entrepreneur

Jim Guerinot had to leave A&M when his management client Offspring was more successful than any act on the label.  How can Jimmy sell Beats and HP sound and still work at Interscope?

26. Doug Morris Can’t Work At Sony Until He Gets Interviewed By…

We want accountability.  Transparency.  Honesty.  Every exec must have a Twitter account and a published e-mail address.  How come everybody in music lives in an ivory tower, yet gets to bitch that the public is ripping them off?  You’ve got to listen to the public if you want to complain.

27. Stop Saying Google’s The Savior

It’s a one hit wonder.  They do search really well.  They bought Android.  Everything else they’ve done is a failure…Wave, TV, the list goes on and on.  We don’t hold up Vanilla Ice as the great hope for the music business, why do we put our faith in Google?

28. Cessation Of Discussion About Apple Acquiring Music Rights

In your dreams.  Why would they do this?  So they can listen to managers and acts bitch?  Apple’s a retailer.  A very good one.  One that is relying on music ever less.

29. A Great Music App

That is customizable, that allows me to track any and all of my favorite artists.

30. Cheaper Prices At The iTunes Store

They didn’t raise the prices on typewriters when the computer took hold, why have they raised the prices of tracks?  Music ownership is a declining paradigm.  Hell, if Netflix is a streaming company, what makes you believe people are gonna want to own music?

31. Cessation Of The Argument Re The Value Of Music

What’s your computer worth?  Your iPhone?  Stop telling me about your blood, sweat and tears, what your music should sell for, think of all the technology, the R&D at your fingertips.  Get a grip.

32. Elimination Of Play/Spin Buying

Why is everybody a crook?  Look, you can have a million views on YouTube and still be a stiff.

33. Recognition That Video Is Subservient To Music

So you can make a cool video.  A great track needs NO visuals, a lousy one is not improved by dazzling images.

34. Recognition That It’s About Continuity

Where’s Atomic Tom today?  Never mind the rest of the YouTube wonders.  You’re hot on YouTube for a day, maybe a week at most, then what? Music, more than ever, is about what have you done for me lately?

How did Apple become one of the most valuable companies in America?

By doubling down in a recession.

Remember the dot com crash?  Everybody in tech pulled back.  Not Apple.  The Cupertino computer company invested.  And then released a product that was supposedly overpriced and undesirable.  That product?  The iPod.

Remember when Apple was a joke?  You’re on a Mac?  They’ll be history soon.  I literally heard Al Ries, the supposed marketing guru, say this even after the iPod took hold.  You see if you listen to conventional wisdom, you’re screwed.

Conventional wisdom is the music business is in trouble.  You just can’t make any money.  But the truth is there’s a plethora of money to be made in music if you just junk the old paradigm and create the new.

Leisure travel?  It was devastated by the 2008 recession.  What did Vail Resorts do?  IT LOWERED THE PRICE!

Yes, Vail has something called the Epic Pass.  For under $600, you get unlimited ski days at all the company’s resorts, from Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone and Breckenridge in Colorado, to Heavenly and Northstar in Tahoe.

Wait a minute.  If you give more, you should charge more!

No, the key is to charge less and get everybody to play.

Been noticing the flat sales at the iTunes Store?  Think it has anything to do with the rise in price to $1.29?  What are these companies thinking?  By trying to salvage their bottom lines, they’re ruining their businesses.  Everybody knows that we’re moving to streaming.  Now is the time to blow out tracks, because they’ll soon be obsolete!

But no…

We should get everybody to pay for music.  That’s what the Epic Pass did.  Over a million people bought it.  According to an instructor, Epic stands for "Every Prick In Colorado".  If you think every prick in America is buying music and going to shows, you’re sorely mistaken.

So not only do we have a pricing problem in music, we just don’t understand that music is social.  It’s something that adds zest to a party, to love, it’s the main ingredient.  But we just think music is about selling tracks and concert tickets.

So Vail Resorts, to establish community, built EpicMix.  They didn’t piggyback on someone else’s efforts, they didn’t use Foursquare, they invested.  Because if you want a job done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.

But Live Nation won’t invest.  It’ll just cut personnel.  Worried about its stock price.  But if the company invested in its future, like Apple ten years ago, maybe its stock price might actually rise in the future!

This is the way EpicMix works:

Every one of your lift rides is tracked.  At every one of Vail’s mountains. Yes, they had to install all those sensors.  Never mind write the software.

And when you go online you find out not only your total vertical feet skied, but what lifts you took at what time.  And there’s a leaderboard, illustrating who’s skied most.

But what’s most riveting is the pins.

There’s tons of them.  In excess of a hundred.  And you don’t know what they are.  Every day you track your stats to see if you’ve earned another. I’ve now got twenty two.

I’m a member of the Mile High Club…  I earned that for being a mile from the bottom of the mountain.

I’ve got the Blue Skyrider pin, for riding every lift in Blue Sky Basin.

I’ve got the Hunting Season pin, for five runs in Game Creek Bowl.

And today I got the Great Heights pin, for covering 225,000 vertical feet so far this season.

Do you get this?  I’m engaged.  I didn’t just buy a lift ticket, I’m a club member.

And so is everybody else.  It’s all anybody can talk about, what pins they’ve earned, how many feet they’ve skied.  We check our stats and find out we were just minutes away on the lift!

And if you think this is bullshit, you never went to a gig and felt a member of the crowd.  What if that crowd could stay in contact? Wouldn’t you be motivated to go to the next show knowing that your buds from the last one were going too?  Wouldn’t you like to earn a pin for every gig you went to?  Wouldn’t you like to be atop the leaderboard, showing you went to the most shows?

Oh, individual promoters are doing something like this.  But it’s not the same.  They’re baby steps when you need big thinking.  Small thinking is a new chip in your computer, big thinking is the iPod, iPhone and iPad…delivering what people didn’t even know they wanted and having it work so well that they’re not only elated, but tell everybody about it.

We’ve got to bring the music audience together.  There’s tons of money to be made if we just stop thinking about music as tracks and tickets.

You want to ski more to get more pins, for the camaraderie.

And you buy food on the hill and spend money to play.

It’s the same way in the music business.  We’ve got elements, but they’re just not tied together in a coherent ecosystem.

They will be one day.

Behind everybody else.

Vail Resorts did not wait for permission, the CEO just said to do it.

But the CEOs in music are old school players all about the pay.  They’re not like Steve Jobs, working for a dollar a year and the upside in the stock.  They want to cash out, they don’t want to get in!

It’s all about the rights.  Music is falling behind because the rights holders are afraid of the future.

But it’s even worse than that.  It’s a cultural issue.  Music is about winning though intimidation, about power games.  Whereas in tech the guy with the best idea wins.

We don’t even let the best music win.

The major labels are beholden to ancient gatekeepers at radio.  They bleed radio, say it’s the best way to reach the most people.  That’s like saying it’s more important to penetrate the newspaper than Facebook.

Go where the people are!

The people are online.  There’s no music community online.  Apple tried with Ping, but it fucked up with a closed system that wasn’t thought through.

But someone nimble could own this sphere.

Then again, the old fogies have scared all music investment money away.

You’ve got to spend money to make money.  Isn’t that what killed MySpace?  Fox just milked it instead of investing in it.  Who wants a creaky system when Facebook just works!

What a sad world we live in.  Music used to be cutting edge, it led.  Now it’s a second-rate medium whored out to corporations into the money as opposed to changing lives.

People wouldn’t play on EpicMix if skiing didn’t titillate like it did.

Music titillates even more.  When done right.  And when people realize this titillation leads to numerous revenue streams, that there truly is money in music, the music industry will be healthy once again.

EpicMix

There’s got to be a better way to sell music.

Think about it, we’re now all connected, worldwide, if the right act were pushed, it could become gargantuan overnight.

And that brings us to our first problem…we’re pushing the wrong acts.

I just read a fascinating article about Groupon in the "Wall Street Journal".  And it occurred to me that these tech wonders, these Websites that everybody uses, are no different from great records.

Great records are phenomena.  Completely different from anything else, people just can’t get enough of them.

Like "96 Tears".  Or "Walk Away Renee".  Nothing sounded similar before and nothing has sounded the same since.  Why were they so successful?

Because they were different and good.

And isn’t it fascinating that right now all the records sound the same.  Come on, tune in Top Forty radio, if I hear one more synthetic drum I’m going to kill Roger Linn.  Or ransack the Roland Corporation.

We’ve become so lowest common denominator that we’ve missed the point.  And too many old school people believe the way to break an act is written in stone.  Work with usual suspect producers, get it on the radio and TV and then hype it to high heaven in any other media that will have you.  If this were working so well, the music business wouldn’t be in trouble.  Don’t focus on piracy, that’s missing the point.  Piracy killed the old model.  But piracy also demonstrates demand.  More people want more music than ever before.  More people own more music than ever before.  More people are listening to more music than ever before.  And to focus on success as sales of recorded music or concert tickets is completely missing the point.  Once you get all those eyeballs there are a million ways to monetize.  But how do you get everybody to pay attention?

1. These successful sites are never created by newbies.  Mark Zuckerberg was a coding savant.  Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker were dedicated to their computers.  Why in the music business do we push inexperienced talent?

You’ve got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues.

It’s Gladwell time.  We need acts that have put in 10,000 hours.  They can’t be ten.  The Beatles played a thousand gigs before most people knew who they were.  And sure, George Martin helped, but George Martin did not hit with every one of his production clients.

We’ve got to look for the experienced.  We’ve got to focus our efforts on only one or two acts, the creme de la creme, stuff so good that it’s undeniable.

2. Getting people to hear it.  This is where new techniques like Groupon come into play.  This is why the music industry is in such trouble, it’s run by oldsters who don’t understand tech and wish the Internet would go away.  Furthermore, these oldsters have not allowed the youngsters in.  They literally don’t let them work at the company and those that are employed are not empowered and those that look for rights are not licensed.  Never forget that music led.  Napster was about music.  Napster was the best thing that ever happened to music.  It allowed all that unreleased stuff to come out of the vault, it paved the way for MP3 ubiquity and now streaming.  To fight Napster with lawsuits and CDs is like fighting Facebook with the Girl Scouts.  Never overlook the network effect.  That’s what’s gonna blow up new music.  Assuming number one above is put first, that the act is truly great.

3. How do we incentivize people to hear it.  Maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it.  Maybe we make music freely available, like FarmVille, and upsell thereafter.  Maybe we need a music game that gets everybody to pay attention.  That allows them to win free concert tickets and visits from band members.  Only one site triumphs online.  There’s one Amazon, one iTunes, one Facebook and one Twitter.  There will be one online music hub.  Foster competition to create it.  Once we get everybody playing in this sphere, we can then expose people to new acts.  They’ll already  be there, they’ll already be paying attention.

4. Monetization.  Don’t think about records and concerts, think about access, think about elation, think about rewards.  Maybe you let everybody come to hear the album of the new act streamed at Staples Center for free, but they pay for pizza and beer. Think party.  Sure, you might be able to hear the album right thereafter online, but you won’t have the experience of hanging with your friends!  And never diminish virtual goods.  It’s a gold mine waiting to be tapped.

We’ve got to get the minds creating Groupon and Facebook to work in music.  It’s our only way out.  We need a complete rethink.  It would be great if we could have easy, cheap licensing, but that seems impossible.

So what’s going to happen is one of these tech savants is gonna find a band.  And is gonna use all this newfangled media to break said band.  Sure, it’s happening already, but the bands just aren’t good enough, they’re not the Beatles, one listen is not enough.

But once we’ve got acts this good…

The whole thing will feed upon itself.  A scene will develop.  Money will be made by the boatload.

It’s all about creativity.  Music and tech.  It’s about great ideas, ones that have never been seen before.  You’ve got to let these techies get ahold of great music and run with it.

Which is why you should only sign with a major label if you’re making the kind of crap that people are already listening to in ever fewer numbers on the radio.  If you’ve got something different, keep your rights, tie up with someone as creative as you are.  It’s not about Alex Luke going to work at EMI, it’s about creative techies you’ve never heard of doing it in a brand new way.

We didn’t know we wanted Groupon.  We don’t know we want music served in a whole new way.  But we do.

As for the acts…  Is it too much to ask for performers who can sing well, play their instruments and write catchy songs that you can sing?  That was the essence of the Beatles.  Replicate this and you’re on your way.

The article that inspired me:
Groupon’s $6 Billion Gambler