"It’s not about a master plan and it’s not about promotion."

Mark Kates
Manager, MGMT

MGMT wasn’t even a BAND!  They’d gone to Wesleyan together, but they weren’t even living in the same damn town.  No one serviced records, but KROQ found a copy and started blasting them.

It’s about the music, and luck and…not needing to be rich.

Then there’s Don Strasburg.  Not only did he sell out MGMT at Red Rocks, he’s winning with a ton of acts you’ve never heard of.  Pretty Lights?  That’s a burgeoning seller.  And remember that husband and wife team who played with the Dead, the Godchauxs?  Their kid has a hit act that I can’t even remember the name of.  And then there’s Skrillex.  I just had to Google it to find out the spelling!

These are not wannabe acts, dunning you to pay attention, they’re making money and you’ve never even heard of them and they don’t really care!

How do you make it today?

You’ve got to be good.  And then, you’ve got to be vouched for by another act with a fanbase.  People read the blogs and the Twitter feeds.  If their favorite act likes a new act, they’ll check them out.  They’ll go to the show.  And they’ll tell everybody they know!

What has this got to do with radio and television and..?

Every year I go to this conference in Aspen.  Nonbelievers think it’s an excuse for a ski vacation.  Rather it’s a time to bat around ideas and learn what’s truly going on from the people who do it and bond with them in a way not possible anywhere else.

The dude who runs Goldstar went on to say it wasn’t so much about the discount but informing people who don’t know about the show!  Amazing concept.  That’s the number one problem, making people know there’s a show.

Not that price isn’t important.

But all this b.s. about VIP tickets and scalpers and…  Is for a dying business made up of classic rock acts on their last breath and evanescent one hit wonders propped up by a dying media.

Bands are breaking like crazy.  But since the self-referential mainstream media doesn’t read about it in sister publications, conventional wisdom is the music business is dying.  No, it’s being REBORN!

What’s hot right now is deejays.  Heard of Rusko?  Just did sell out business for AEG in Denver.

And how do these deejays get a start?  Festivals.  Where the sneezers, as Seth Godin labels the tipsters who get things going, discover them and spread the word.  For the shows with electronica acts he’s never heard of that he can’t sell Strasburg hires a guy, Sheldon, who manages to fill the auditorium…  How does he do it?  He’s got a network, he’s got relationships.  This is not your father’s music business where you bring out a shotgun and hope you hit someone.

And these new acts always play cheaply.  And their songs may not be hits on the radio, but they’re hits in the culture.

I learned more listening to twenty five people argue about the business in Aspen than I ever do going to lunch or a show in L.A.  These are the believers, these are the people who need to be in music even if the pay sucks.  They’ve got their ears to the ground, they know what’s truly going on.

Sure, there are way too many shows.

Then again, when the airlines kept losing money, they reduced the inventory and now they’re profitable. And tickets are dirt cheap.  Sure, there are add-ons and the experience sucks, but people want to fly.  Do people want to go to your show?  If not, nothing you can do will get them to go.

The Rolling Stones and the Eagles and Madonna function in a sterile dying business whose problems get trumped up so we think they’re everybody’s problems. They’re not.

The music business is being reinvented right now as dramatically as it was when the Beatles invaded and the rest of the Brits followed them.  There are no shortcuts, there’s only playing because you love to and putting yourself in the marketplace.  A zillion reviews will get you nowhere near as far as a bunch of zealots who believe you’re godhead and tell everybody they know not for pay, but because it makes them feel good inside to turn friends on to great music.

The Aspen Conference is the highlight of my year.  The light attendance made me think it was fading, on its way out, but today’s conversation was better than any we’ve had in years.  Maybe because only the diehards still come and all the poseurs are gone.

I’m so excited, I just had to tell you.

Rob Stringer, Rick Rubin and the Real Story at Columbia

Can’t say I read every word, not that I disagree with Wayne’s main point, that this was a bad deal and one could see from the past that this arrangement would be a failure.  But what is truly stunning to me is the anemic sales in the chart.

The Gossip, after all that hype, all that ink, the labeling of Beth Ditto as a fashion icon, only sold 35,812 records?  Publicity doesn’t seem to sell records anymore.

Jakob Dylan’s album flew under the radar, but a major label can’t survive on sales of 126,168, not when they pay Rubin, Stringer and Barnett the big bucks.  One can ask why the executives weren’t incentivized, low salaries against results, but that’s not record business style.  In the entertainment business, the executives hold the public companies hostage, demand exorbitant salaries, whereas in Silicon Valley you’ve got to prove your mettle.

As for Pete Yorn, sales of 56,431…  I’d say never has an act gotten so much ink and sold so few records, except this has been a record biz paradigm forever, as if by getting stories everywhere, you can get people to like the music.

The Avett Brothers sold 252,936 albums and most people have no idea who they are!  This is the future! They’ve got hard core fans and earn loyalty on the road.  Sure, the band hasn’t broken through to stardom, but they’ve got a base, this is a good story, if not a phenomenal Rick Rubin breakthrough.

Whether you like Brandi Carlile or not, I’ve been worked on her forever and I’ve got to say 119,101 sales is a drop in the bucket.

And Ours only sold 13,168 albums!

The record business needs to be retooled, for today’s reality.

It’s a singles business.  If you’re spending heavily to make an album, do it for art, because the odds of making money are low.

Acts have to get small advances, record cheaply and marketing and promotion budgets must be scaled down accordingly.  It just doesn’t pay to spend for sales like this.

Used to be you could grow acts to superstardom quickly, via TV and radio.  Did you read that article where colleges are getting rid of their radio stations because no one is listening?

Waning Support for College Radio Sets Off a Debate

Susan Boyle can sell.  "X-Factor" too.  The majors are tooled up for this game.  They shouldn’t sign these work/charity cases.

They don’t seem able to do both.  Sony wants to overpay Doug Morris to try for more hits?  Close it down. Or just have a small team license event records like "Glee".  The problem isn’t the executives so much as the model.

The ink is not dry on this deal, but this is what Howard Stringer wants. Stringer personally chose Doug.

But Doug’s got time left on his Universal contract. My source says one more year, many press reports say two.

As for L.A. Reid, he will ride herd over a limited number of acts. And Barry Weiss’s role will not be creative in a hands-on A&R sense. He’ll be more of a marketing guy/traffic cop.

As for Morris going to Sony, as one source said, it’s like pouring gasoline on an already burned down house.

Can Morris break free of Universal? Conventional business wisdom would say no, then again Doug did snooker Vivendi for all those years.

Can Doug resurrect Sony?

Can you bring back Smith-Corona?  Can Gateway challenge HP?

Doug’s too old and it takes too long to build from scratch. Record labels need to be revolutionized today!

Smart move last century, dumb in 2010 (soon to be ’11).

They need someone from within, who already has relationships, who knows where the bodies are buried. But Sony Music is about destruction rather than construction.

How did Stringer let it go so long and let it get this bad?

Blame him and Rolf and Rob and…  They were asleep at the switch. Remember Andy Lack?  Mismanagement knows no bounds. It’s over. Regime change is so last century. You’ve got to be nimble and effect change today!

And Doug doesn’t know tech. A music guy is no longer enough. You need a digital visionary, not someone afraid of a keyboard. Tablets are replacing laptops and the main revenue generator for the majors is still CDs?

(Typed on my BlackBerry in an airport. Mea culpa re the mistakes)

How dysfunctional is Sony Music that they let Barry Weiss go?  If the Yankees can sign Derek Jeter, can’t Sony make a deal with Mr. Weiss?

Who do we blame?

Let’s start with Howard Stringer.  Never has a man been lauded so much when results are in the dumper.  Howard has presided over the denouement of company after company, yet his reputation remains intact.  Sure, Sony was fading before he took over, but what has he done there?  Lose TV leadership to Samsung, hand-held music player leadership to Apple, game-playing leadership to Nintendo and then Microsoft…  I own a PlayStation 3, they want me to pop for Move when Microsoft is offering Kinect?  I’m about to strip my Sony stripes, I want nothing to do with this company featuring overpriced products that perform worse than the competition.  Ultimately Sony Music falls under Howard’s purview.  

Once upon a time, CBS Records was a leader.  Now it’s an also-ran.  Run by people who still think it’s the nineties, but execute that paradigm worse than Tommy Mottola, Donnie Ienner and the rest of that team.  The whole company is running on fumes.  Epic has been decimated, Columbia is dependent on momentary hits with no legs and the only person who seems to know what’s going on is Barry Weiss and you LET HIM GO?

TO UNIVERSAL?

Never forget that Universal Music was built on Warner talent.  The long-forgotten Bob Morgado decimated the company.  MCA Records, Universal’s predecessor, was out of hits, steered by Al Teller into oblivion.  But Edgar Bronfman, Jr. bought the company and installed Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine and now Universal is king!  Warner should be king, but Morgado fucked up and no one stopped him.

Maybe we can blame Rolf Schmidt-Holtz in the same way, but I’m not sure Rolf even knows where his legs are, I don’t think he knows how to run the company.  He’s the legacy of a Bertelsmann partnership.  But Bertelsmann is gone (and rebuilding in the profitable area of music publishing), why is Rolf Schmidt-Holtz STILL THERE?

And maybe Rob Stringer is not up to the executive stripes.  Maybe he’s more of an A&R guy than a manager.  That’s cool, BUT WHY IS HE A MANAGER?  Just because someone’s a good shortstop, that doesn’t mean they can mastermind the whole team.

Barry Weiss knows how to create hits cheaply.  He learned under the man who achieved the number one financial victory in the history of the music business, Clive Calder, and Sony lets him go?  WHY?

Sure, entities endure.  But it’s talent that truly keeps them alive.  Just like DreamWorks couldn’t survive without a catalog, the old hits are keeping Sony and the other major labels alive while the idiots running them today overspend to create momentary hits that mean ever less.  Wouldn’t you double down on the guy who knows how to do it cheaply?

This ain’t someone without experience, someone who hasn’t done it for himself, hasn’t been a success as top dog. Barry Weiss is the best link Sony has to what once was.  He’s all about the music, not about the profile, and they let him walk?

Now I’m not saying Universal has all the answers.  The company is top-heavy and is a Luddite when it comes to the new world.  But a label is worthless without hits, and Barry delivers hits.

We could ask what this means re Monty and Avery and so much more.  All I’ll say is if you deliver hits, Lucian will let you stay.  If you don’t, you’re HISTORY!

The labels are fading.  They mean less than ever before.  Remember when they were the drivers?  When everything circled back to them?  Now they’re cash poor and asking for more rights to make less money…huh?

You’d be better off investing in Coran Capshaw, who won’t go on the record but has a modern day empire built on management and touring and he even owns a record label too.  That’s the future, someone who watches costs and knows that the acts deserve the glory, not the executives.

And give Coran credit for flying to seemingly every gig of every band on his roster.

And I’m not sure his ragtag operation peopled with major label castoffs is constructed properly to triumph, I’d rather see him employing more people who are winners than those who’ve lost, but the Red Light empire is better positioned for the future than Sony is.

What if someone actually owned Sony, if it wasn’t a public company…would they let Barry Weiss go?

Utterly insane.

I mean it’s tough enough to succeed if you’re a major label, but do you have to put a stake through your heart?