It all comes down to who you know.

Are you an entrepreneur or an employee?  If you plan on being an employee, you’re gonna have to know a lot of people and have a good rep, or you won’t be able to get a job.

There’s a fascinating story in Thursday’s "New York Times" about Eric Lefkofsky.

Who?

Turns out he’s worth $750 million.  And he’s only 40.  He’s an entrepreneur/investor. You know him best as the bankroller of Groupon.  Which started out as ThePoint.com, which was a failure because it lacked the social experience.

I know, you hate social media.  More people despise Twitter than use it.  You like Facebook, but you’re scared of its Big Brother qualities.

Well, you probably don’t understand that Twitter is the number one news source for news happening right now.  But if you can’t wrap your head around that, maybe you should look into SproutSocial, which is a Lefkofsky company that allows you to track your company in social media.  And if you don’t think social media is key to your company’s future, you’re on the road to extinction.

The problem the record business had is its audience knew too many people, who could connect with each other online.  All the labels knew were radio station employees and retailers.  That’s a fraction of the overall consumer base, and technically, they’re not even consumers, just middlemen.  Once the consumers started talking to each other not only did they spread the word about Napster, but they also let each other know which records were good and which ones were bad.  Suddenly, a label could no longer jam records down the public’s throat.  It’s bad enough when albums leak in advance and are dead on arrival due to bad word of mouth, see Lenny Kravitz for example, but even those that make it to release date intact are guaranteed a week’s worth of sales at best.  Because by the end of seven days, the target audience knows whether the album is worth owning.

And the target audience is smaller than you think it is.

And if you don’t know who your target audience is, you’re screwed.

Imagine trying to sell CDs without knowing the name of retailers.

Imagine trying to sell files, to establish an act without knowing consumers’ e-mail addresses.  Sure, e-mail may be fading, especially amongst the younger generation, but everybody’s got a presence online.  But can you penetrate their personal firewall? And behind each firewall is not one person, but many.  Everybody’s got a network. Screw one person and you screw many.  Because this one person tells everybody he knows.  Ditto in the reverse.

But the reason I’m writing this is because of the job market.

I hate to frighten you, but all your topless and drunken pictures are gonna work against you in the job market.  Inebriation is not a criterion for employment, not even at Budweiser.  You see you’re building your resume every day online.  And whether you can get a job or not is based on this resume and who you know.

People have complained for eons they couldn’t get a job in the entertainment industry because they weren’t connected.  Hate to tell you, but it just got worse!  No one’s gonna hire anyone without a history, who can’t be recommended by someone.  The days of placing a blind ad and taking on all comers is history.  That doesn’t even work well on Craigslist, and no one advertises for a good job on that site.

If you want to succeed in the future, you’ve got to know people.  Who can vouch for you. Ever get called for a reference?  You never lie if you know the caller, its you reputation on the line.   And now that we’re all networked, there’s always someone who knows you, who if they won’t say something negative, certainly won’t say something positive.

You think you’re just playing online?

That’s wrong.

Do you think I’m gonna vouchsafe for the people who e-mail me with attitude?  Think about that.  Unless you’re selling attitude, you’re screwed.  Because people constantly ask me my opinion on people.  And I talk to a lot of people.

Scary, isn’t it?

You see we all live in a social media world.

Read this article.  This guy is on the money.  Social media is not a fad.  It’s just the past on steroids.

A Business Creator Sees Big Returns From Social Media

Ringo’s a revelation!

Somehow, the Beatles coming to iTunes has become a business story, but that band was always about the music.  The mania came after.  The sheer joy of playing in a group, of living your life for music, not money, was the genesis.  Watching this film you can see right through the images all the way to the U.K., where the sons of soldiers picked up instruments to fight their way out of drudgery and boredom.  That’s the power of music.  It can make you forget your circumstances.  And if you’re really good, it can create a world you couldn’t even envision when you first started to play.

Beatles on iTunes?  No big deal.   Typical Fab Four.  Leaders in their day, followers ever since.

Except that’s not the real story.  The Beatles wanted to be on iTunes.  It was an EMI problem.  Castigate Guy Hands all you want, but by putting Roger Faxon in power, a deal could finally be made.

Is there a lot of money to be made?

Of course not.  Just like when the Beatles first formed.  They didn’t know they’d go on to be some of Britain’s richest citizens.  Hell, you can’t get that rich playing music anymore. If you’re all about the bread go to Wall Street, be a banker, or go work for the corporation, being two-faced and conniving to ascend to a platform wherein you can rape and pillage and make double digit millions.  But it won’t be fun.  And each and every one of those so-called winners would trade everything they’ve got to be up on stage with these guys.

That’s what’s wrong with the mainstream media.  They miss the story.  So busy talking about Steve Jobs and EMI and Apple they didn’t focus on this Washington, D.C. concert that’s part of the hype.  FOR FREE!

Don’t say Steve Jobs never did anything for you.

Go to iTunes.  You’re confronted with a big black box that says  "The Beatles".  And in the upper right-hand corner, you’re gonna see a little box that says "Watch The Concert".  Click on that RIGHT NOW!

Stay tuned through the voice-over.  It’s lame.  But the images are cool.

And then you get to the gig.

Security is not wearing yellow windbreakers, they don’t look like they’re on steroids and will beat you to a pulp.  It’s a positively civilized affair, with the Beatles on a low riser in the middle of the hall.

And that’s when you see them move their own equipment.  You can call it humble.  I’ll just tell you this is what a musician does.  He SCHLEPPS!  Talk to anybody who plays live for a living.  Sure, if you’re a household name you’ve got roadies, but everybody below that level is lifting amps into a van or a trailer, or if you’re just starting out, a car. And you set up your gear at the gig yourself.  And until you truly make it, you have no monitors.  You play by your wits.

The fact that these cats can get it so right, barely able to hear themselves, is amazing.

But what’s really amazing is their ability to play.  George picking out the leads.  Paul on the bass.  Our dear departed John bouncing up and down with his legs spread.  If you didn’t imitate that look, you weren’t alive, or you were blind.

McCartney shvitzing.  Music, when done right, is a workout.

And speaking of workouts…  This film should put to rest any guff about Ringo’s ability to play the drums.  He’s the anchor, he’s the powerhouse, and he’s railing and flailing and pounding that big bass drum.  You can have a lot more equipment, but you’ve only got two hands and two feet.

And when they bring the mic up to him and he sings "I Wanna Be Your Man"…

Or how about George singing "Roll Over Beethoven"?

But stay until the very end.  When Paul rips apart "Long Tall Sally" to such a degree he trumps Little Richard.  Not that either he or Richard would agree, but watch with your own two eyes.

This was the beginning.  This was the genesis.  This was where it all began.

In America.

But for the Beatles it started years before.  They had a dream.  They played shitholes. They didn’t have rich parents.  They didn’t expect to make a record a week after they formed and have it be a hit.  They just played and played and played until ability was not a question and they could focus on showmanship.

And what’s truly amazing in this movie is the audience is irrelevant.  This is a gang, having a blast.  They’re not playing for the media, they’re having a lark.  A serious one. They don’t want to mess up.  But it’s truly shocking that they’re so on at what many today would consider a secondary gig.  I mean who’s paying attention in D.C?

But we were all paying attention.  Because nothing we ever heard before came out of the speakers like "I Want To Hold Your Hand".   There was an energy and a confidence and when these guys do the "oos" and all the other initial Beatle tricks/trademarks/cliches your head will explode.  Just watch the audience…  Oprah never got this reaction.

Everybody’s sitting there, with their Brownie cameras and programs.  They’ve spun the LP at home.  They know all the words.

Not that Paul is aware of this.  He’s got no context.  He’s explaining.

But we already knew.

That our lives would never be the same.

Re-Terry Ellis

Dear Bob,

Back in the day before Chrysalis Records there was the Ellis-Wright Organization with a small office, I believe at 123 Regents St. with just Chris and Terry and their secretary Rose.  I knew them through Mike Vernon, my partner and founder of Blue Horizon Records original home to Peter Greene’s Fleetwood Mac and Chicken Shack which featured Christine Perfect (later McVie) on Piano.  Mike was also a star producer at British Decca where he produced John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, Eric Clapton, Keef Hartley, Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation, and two bands looked after by Ellis Wright: Ten Years After and also Savoy Brown Blues Band. Mike also produced David Bowie’s first album for Decca.

Back then, I always had a complex about the fact that I couldn’t play an instrument.  I was in the music business since age 14 working at Billboard while in school and later for Syd Nathan at King Records and finally for George Goldner at Redbird Records and his partners Leiber & Stoller in the Brill Building.  I was in the business, but couldn’t play.  It really bothered me.  It was in the Brill Building that I met Richard Gottehrer who was to become my partner and close friend in Sire Records.  Richard’s company FGG Productions was on the 10th Floor and Redbird was on the 9th Floor of this fabled building.  Richard was a great and gifted musician (as well as songwriter/producer/artist) When we started Sire my complex about not being a musician grew even greater.

One day in London I went with Mike Vernon and his then engineer Gus Dudgeon, (later Elton John’s producer) to the Windsor Pop and Jazz Festival where some of our Blue Horizon artists were playing.  There was this one new band managed by Chris and Terry.  They took the stage and stole the show.  I couldn’t believe how great they were. The minute their set was over I turned to Mike and said, "We ought to sign this band to Blue Horizon, you know they are looked after by Chris and Terry."  Mike turned to me and said, "Seymour, I don’t want to work with a band fronted by a flautist."   My heart sank!

I turned to Gus Dudgeon and said "Gus, please help me. Tell Mike we should try to sign this band."  Gus turned to me and said, "Seymour, obviously you don’t play a musical instrument.  If you did you would have heard all the bad notes the band hit."  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  The band was of course Jethro Tull.  Jethro Tull launched the Chrysalis label which along with Island and Virgin were the three great English Indie labels that emerged in the early 1970’s.  

I am happy that Warner Music Group played a major role in the launch of these labels in the United States.  I am also happy that about two years later when I found and signed the Dutch band Focus featuring Thijs van Leer on flute and Jan Akkermann on guitar. I took the demos to Mike Vernon and said, "I don’t care if you like flautists or not you’re producing this record."  That album "Moving Ways" was Sire’s first platinum record and helped keep our doors open ’til I discovered CBGB’s and along with it The Ramones and Talking Heads. By that time Richard Gottehrer had left Sire, but found and produced Blondie so we were both well on our way.  

Perhaps most important of all, after that incident at the Windsor Pop & Jazz Festival, I was never again bothered that I couldn’t play an instrument.  Finding and signing the artists, hearing hit songs are more than enough for me and have served me well over the years. Had I followed Gus Dudgeon’s rules I would have never signed The Ramones, the band that opened up all the doors and along with Talking Heads landed Sire the deal with Mo and Lenny at Warner’s.  

Thank you Chris, thank you Terry.

-Seymour Stein

bob;

easy letter for an old geezer who has done well to write.
music doesn’t count any more; we depleted it, we became the fool on the hill.
events… festivals …. they matter, because the stars of these events are joe & josie public.
they get out, get off, they go home…. but they no longer take us with them.
terry sez it all in para 3 " in the mid-60’s ".
going, going, gone…..
anyway, basically great acts manage themselves.
when there’s a problem, most managers leave the room.
and john lennon’s 70th birthday – a branding disgrace.
we just continue to shit on our goldmine.
the victims of too much data and too many dollars.
it’s all sergio leone from here, dear…

best, andrew loog oldham

Hi Bob

Two interesting and seemingly conflicting points in your last two emails on Amanda ghost at Epic and Terry Ellis’ wise words on independents.  But are they really conflicting?

Terry points out that he and Chris Wright realised in the sixties that they could not do a worse job than Decca; that he and Chris knew nothing about the music business but that they loved their acts.  Amanda Ghost was brought in to bring that mindset to an ailing epic.

To me the problem is likely to be that such a mindset..a passion for music, getting up late, staying up late, empathising with the artist – these just don’t hang now in a label on a major, where artists are commoditised and then forgotten, where the paradigms are short-term, market-driven and celebrity rather than sustained support for talent.

Yes Jimmy was a producer first but a producer who spent more time in the marketing dept making sure his acts were priority than he ever did in a studio. Rick Rubin by his own admission hates being in the studio and spends as little time there as he can, preferring to go around making sure the people who will have to sell it get it.

Everyone is looking for a solution. Here is mine. I can’t take all the credit for it. This thinking came from hours and days spent with the much maligned Eric Nicoli as special advisor in the year leading to the sale of EMI to Terra firma.  Eric, Like Terry Ellis and Chris Wright, was educated, had career options and no music business experience – except that he had spent 7 years on the EMI board, and everyone forgets that his brother Fabio was a fabled record sleeve designer and head of art at Atlantic, so Eric was imbued in the backstage and record company offices from his teens and early twenties.

Eric sacked Alain Levy because Alain did not understand artists or get on with them. He kept Tony Wadsworth on because he knew how much the artists loved him. As soon as Guy Hands came in, Tony went, and with him went a clutch of big name acts running for the exits.

Eric also stalled the merger with Warner because he did not think the Bronfman mindset was compatible with a music-first label.

But Eric’s real coup was selling EMI to Hands for what now must be seen as the deal of the century – $6bn in the teeth of the storm.

If this deal had not gone through Eric and I had a philosophy. Not a plan but a philosophy of where to start a new way of thinking. It chimes with Terry’s wisdom as follows:

"There is a saying in my native Ireland that when someone asks you the way from here to there, more often than not the best answer is ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here’.

You are approached in a bar by a man with two boxes. In one box he has every living contract for EMI recorded music and song publishing; in the other box is a digital archive of the entire EMI catalog.  "Fifty thousand bucks and they’re yours."

Do you accept? Hell yes! Do you then plan to set up 30 offices around the world and take on upward of 2,000 employees? Hell no! Half the product is worthless. Half the music will be downloaded for free. You have no control over distribution. Not like the old days. So what do you do?

You call the 20 smartest people you know. the youngest is 12 years old, the oldest is 80 years old. You rent a huge loft in a scruffy part of town. You get coffee and ice cream. You put the boxes on the table and say "We have ten percent of all music sold right here and some great artists. Let’s make some money people!"

Any major worth its salt needs to start again from somewhere else. Forget paying anyone a million dollars. Forget executive lifestyles. Forget market share, mergers, redundant licensing companies. Forget the stupid comments by Vivendi about puny cost cuts and ‘not affecting muscle and bone’ and sacking a few secrretaries. Start again and don’t start from here. Look at what the Erteguns, Moss & Alpert, Blackwell, Branson, Wright & Ellis and the others did. Get some great music, a studio, an office and a phone and start selling great music. You can’t lose.

Robin Millar

Fuck the contest, you’ve GOT to dial up this solo acoustic version of the Blind Faith classic by Stevie Winwood, it’s truly JAW-DROPPING! Sure, he hasn’t lost his voice, but what will truly blow your mind is the picking.  The video looks like the track sounds, him wearing that jacket sitting by the hearth.  There’s no better late night track than "Can’t Find My Way Home", I’m tingling listening to this.  Truly.  Check this out!

The Steve Winwood ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’ Contest

Winwood Responds:

I’ve been watching with some degree of amusement the correspondence back and forth regarding the shooting and the recording of the solo acoustic version of "Can’t Find my way Home" which has recently been put up on YouTube in order to encourage a competition for young musicians.  it’s interesting that this is stirred up such emotion and I’m really very flattered that people are so very concerned.

So this has now become a competition of a different sort, to decide who is right and who is wrong as to whether has been any manipulation of the recording or footage. Of course I have nothing to hide and no reason to lie as I’ve made several recordings using multi-track overdubbing and manipulation of audio, in fact "Arc of a Diver" is coming up for its 30th anniversary  and of course that was all done using multi-track multi-take overdubbing techniques, and I don’t think it is cheating or wrong, and that these are just tools in the box with which to make recorded music.

In an attempt to put this matter to rest though, I thought I’d write a message to say that this recording and footage in question was all done in one take, sung and played at the same time with two microphones and one camera.

Any additional technical information can be obtained from james towler

Acoustically yours,
Steve Winwood