"’We wanted people to be happy,’ Moss said. ‘You can’t force people to do a certain kind of music. They make their best music when they are doing what they want to do, not what we want them to do.’"

Jerry Moss

The Sweet Tune of Perfection

That’s so perfect, I’m tempted to not say another word.

But the point is, if you’ve been involved with a major label recently you know the above aphorism is completely untrue. They don’t want unique visionaries, they want malleable clones.  They want performers who are willing to do anything to make it, compromise all their values, set aside their vision in order to work with selected producers and songwriters in search of a hit.  And you wonder why mainstream music is in such bad shape.  Or, to put it another way, can you imagine a major label signing Supertramp?  Nurturing the band until it can produce a masterpiece like "Crime Of The Century" but not hit its stride commercially until three albums after that?

But there’s even more:

"Alpert watched Moss practice what they preached when Waylon Jennings came to their office one day early in his career with a problem. The legendary guitarist and producer Chet Atkins wanted to sign Jennings. The problem was that he still owed A&M a couple of albums.

‘We knew Waylon was going to be a big artist,’ Alpert said. ‘We also knew that this was the break of a lifetime for him and what we had to do. We let him out of his contract, and I knew right then that we’d be successful as long as we saw it from the artists’ point of view.’"

Seeing it from the artists’ point of view???  That hasn’t been true for decades.  Or, as Don Henley so eloquently put it, "we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969".  In the nineties and early part of this century it was all about the executive. Remember when Christopher noticed Tommy Mottola going into a club in "The Sopranos"?  Most people had no idea who Jerry Moss was, but they loved his records.  Everybody seems to know who Clive Davis is, but so many of the hits he created have been completely forgotten.

And this lack of respect for the artist is what’s killing the major labels.  Anybody with a backbone refuses to take part in the shenanigans.  But the silver lining is now you can do it for yourself.  And all the greats will.  Ultimately aided by businessmen who respect them.

Never underestimate the public.  People know mainstream music is disposable.  Shit, you can download the track and delete it just like that…why would you want to keep yesteryear’s hit?  While those alive during A&M’s heyday treasure their collection, it’s a part of them that survives not only graduation, but divorce.

This is a simple business.  It’s about great music.  All the marketing, all the promotion is subservient to the tracks.  There are very few great artists out there, but so many businessmen who want to employ them to get ahead.  So, we’ve got wannabe executives hyping wannabe musicians to ever less reaction.  But one true artist eclipses them all.

He asked me about me.

I went tonight to the Santa Monica Airport to hear Metallica.  As Marc Reiter said, how often do they play my backyard?  It was an Activision party, celebrating the launch of "Call Of Duty: Black Ops".  There were celebrities and military men, but I just went to hang with Marc and the associated Metallica tribe, Peter Paterno, their lawyer, Vickie Strate, who runs their fan club, and other associated Q Prime players.

They had chopped beef and noodles, and endless desserts, and the ability to try out the game, but the highlight was Metallica.  Who did a killer version of "Master Of Puppets" and ended with "Enter Sandman".  It was mostly a male crowd, but when the band finished with the twenty year old classic it was fascinating to see even the women sing every word.  What power that must be, to write a song that everybody knows even though you don’t know everybody.

And when the show was over, the assembled Metallica multitude journeyed to a backstage area where we caught up.  That’s the funny thing about rock and roll, we live all over the world but are part of the same family, connecting at various gigs.

And Peter Standish and Metallica’s guitar tuning tech wanted to talk about Little Feat.  Amazing how people are most passionate about bands the mainstream believes don’t count.  And after about ninety minutes, I go over to say goodbye to Paterno when Reiter buttonholes me, "Did I speak with Lars?"

I don’t want to speak with rock stars at the show.  They never remember who you are and they’re working.  And if you don’t think it’s work, you’ve never been there.  Sure, they stop playing at some point, but they’re wired on adrenaline, they can’t slow down, there’s an endless parade of fans who want to talk to them, you don’t want to enter this herd.

But I kind of know Lars.  I went with the whole band to dinner a couple of years back, just before "Death Magnetic", and we connected during the Napster era, but is he really going to remember who I am?

And he looks a little worse for wear.  Metallica’s performance is quite a physical one.  And he seems to have had a few drinks.  But Marc is leading me by the elbow and we go over and Lars calls me by name.

That’s so surprising.  Never mind that too many readers call me "shithead", I feel too much like I walk through life invisible.

And what do you say to someone you see so infrequently?  You talk about the show.  And Lars starts testifying about Activision, about making the band’s version of "Guitar Hero".  How the game made him a hero with his kids and how when they animate you they can pump up the biceps and fix all your flaws.

And we’re laughing in that backstage way, like we’re all in it together even though when the evening ends we’ll go our separate ways and maybe not see each other for years, and Lars asks me how I’m doing, what I’m up to in the blogosphere, what’s keeping me busy?

And I’m speechless.  This is the reason I started to see a shrink.  I didn’t believe anybody was listening to me, I felt that no one was paying attention. And to this day it’s a problem.  Even with people who want to meet me.  They want to tell me their story, they think they already know mine.

But they don’t.

And the more they talk the quieter I get.  I don’t want to be unfriendly, but it’s weird when your sole role is to listen.  I’ve spent too much time listening. To the point where I’m almost unable to tell my story.

And now I was on the spot.  Figuring the moment would pass, I didn’t bother responding, believing that Lars wasn’t truly that interested.

But he persisted.  And I spoke about the crazy times we live in, and the EMI decision and the Live Nation earnings call and then we discussed Metallica’s next album and I felt alive and involved, I felt human.

Now by this time, the other members of the band were long gone.  The curfew at the Santa Monica Airport had expired and they’d journeyed off to LAX for the ride home.  But Lars had stuck around.  You see Lars enjoys being a rock star.  He enjoys the camaraderie, the trappings, if not, why do it?

And rule number one of backstage talk is you don’t break confidence.  But when I got on the freeway I couldn’t stop thinking about our conversation.  No one asks me about me.  Except Lars Ulrich of Metallica?

I first heard about Bon Iver from Nigel Grainge, who’s enthusiastic and has impeccable taste.  But I didn’t quite get it until today, when Robin Millar sent me a link:

Bon Iver – Re: Stacks

It was playing in the background as I was chomping through the e-mail, reading about Ticketmaster, be sure to read Steve Knopper’s comprehensive story in "Wired":

Everyone Hates Ticketmaster — But No One Can Take It Down

And then there was that story about the "Daily Show"’s ratings:

‘Daily Show’ Beats Leno, Letterman for First Time

Ultimately, I clicked to Deadline.com, which gave a bit of a qualifier/explanation

‘Daily Show’ Tops All Late-Night Shows For First Time … Sort Of

but still, it’s fascinating how the mainstream media got it wrong.  We don’t love Leno.  Letterman did come back.  But everybody’s ratings are lousy.  Yet doing a show he inherited and made his own on basic cable, Jon Stewart is a king, years on.  Isn’t that how it used to work in the music business?

Credit Tommy Mottola with creating the modern marketing paradigm.  You get the mainstream media to sell your story for free.  It used to be acts were dependent on radio, suddenly not only was MTV important, but the "Today Show", "Oprah", anybody with ratings.  But musicians are not TV stars.  TV stars are two-dimensional vessels.  I mean Jennifer Aniston’s one of the biggest TV stars in the world, but if we got her one on one in real life, what exactly would she be like?  We’ve got no idea!

But there’s not a musician alive who doesn’t have an element of his songs inside him.  That doesn’t mean he can’t be antisocial, that he can’t be difficult, but in order to write this stuff, it has to come from somewhere.  And it’s this inside stuff that draws us in.  They call it humanity.

So I’m confronted with the news of the day, the disillusionment of the political landscape, and this Bon Iver song, "Re: Stacks", is playing in the background, it’s an antidote, it’s soothing me, it’s a warm blanket making me feel like I’m not alone, that I’ll make it through.

And Bon Iver is not new.  That initial conversation with Nigel was years ago.  But like an electrical circuit missing a few links, oftentimes the power doesn’t pass through until every connection is soldered.  Today I got Bon Iver.

And I went online and researched and learned about the connection with "Northern Exposure", the episode with the first snowfall.  I saw that!  I can’t connect to "California Gurls", never mind so many of the rap tracks, but the concept of lying on the couch watching this quirky drama…

It’s like the mainstream has got the pedal to the metal.  Powering headlong towards the cliff.  I guess the drivers are planning to eject just before the precipice, but I don’t understand why they think we want to go along for the ride.  No one likes to be a passenger, with no control in a disaster.  That’s why we hate being in the back of the plane.  We want to be in charge of our own destiny, we want to drive, we want to be in control.

And that’s what the Web is all about.  Everybody piloting their own ship, at their own speed.  Discovering music is like going to a new country, one that’s existed for years, that others may have visited, but that you’ve never been to.  Doesn’t matter when "Re: Stacks" was released, it’s new to me.

But the key element is how different "Re: Stacks" sounds from what the mainstream is purveying.  "Re: Stacks" is a tune-out on Top Forty, even Hot AC. Active Rock is too hard.  Maybe on AAA, but if you think anybody’s listening to that format, you still believe Alternative is burgeoning.

And maybe Bon Iver works on Jools Holland, but that’s the U.K., where they still believe in the power of music, as opposed to the U.S., where money is paramount.  If something sells, it’s good, if it doesn’t, it’s crap.  But is that really true?

"Re: Stacks" is music.  It touches my soul.  And isn’t that what it’s all about?

I heard about this first from Rapino.

But no one’s listening to him, they’re just hating on Live Nation.

For years Rapino’s been telling everybody that LN’s average customer goes to slightly more than one show a year.  Absolutely frightening unless you’re someone who lives in the present and believes the future’s gonna look just like the past.

Unless you missed it, and this was the hottest story online today, the target demo, the 12-24 year olds, are going to concerts less.  2.1 times per year in 2000 and .9 in 2010.

I don’t want to hear a fucking thing about the economy.  If you blame this reduction on the economy you’re someone who refuses to take blame and passes the buck, to someone like Ticketmaster.

Sure, everybody hates the TM fees.  But TM is paid to be hated.  The acts LOVE the TM fee.  It allows them to make more money while painting TM as evil.

Yes, the economy affects ticket-buying, just like it affects the consumption of so many other consumer goods. But this recession has revealed the fact that we’ve got too few desirable acts charging too much for tickets. Concerts are not like movies, something you go to on a whim, but vacations, which you plan for and experience once a year.

First and foremost you must have desirable talent.  There’s a business in staging classic rock shows, just like there’s a business in catalog movies and music.  But the lion’s share of the revenue comes from new acts. And new acts are overhyped and overpriced.

We no longer live in the twentieth century, when MTV anointed an act and everybody bought it (but isn’t it fascinating they all had such a brief shelf-life.)  Now no specific medium has a hold on audience mindshare and the public is used to things being here today and gone tomorrow.  Like the Keith Richards hype.  A tsunami last week, nonexistent this week.  And that’s fine if you’re selling a finite consumable that everybody needs on one day, like Gatorade in hundred degree heat, but if you want people to pay again the hype has to sustain.  And it isn’t exactly hype, you have to continue to be in people’s minds.  And you can only do this by creating music that people need.  This is not a momentary hit.  You’ve got to speak from the gut, you’ve got to touch souls.

Ubiquity is not coming back.  Of course, there will be rare examples when it does, but now it’s endless developing acts which will take years to have the ability to sell 5,000 tickets, never mind arenas.  How are we going to get people to see these acts?

On some level, it works already.  We’ve got Sufjan Stevens who charges $30 to see a show the mainstream is clueless about.  But it’s hard to get rich on $30 a ticket.

Everybody still wants to get rich from a business that’s being reinvented.  By overcharging for tickets, by going on the road endlessly to make up for shortfall in recorded music revenue, artists and their handlers are burning out the market.  The audience is saying NO MAS, certainly not at these prices, maybe not at any prices.

You’ve got to leave money on the table.

That’s what Taylor Swift does.  She doesn’t charge what the traffic will bear, she gives a deal!  If you’re ripping people off, they don’t come back.  Even GaGa, she toured once cheaply, then expensively.  How many people are gonna go in the future for over $100 if she has no hits?

And if you’re dependent on hits, you’re fucked.  Then you’ve got the modern record company world, where you’ve got a million hands involved massaging material that radio will play but no one wants to hear when its cycle is done.

Can acts ask for less?

They’re gonna have to, if they want to survive.  Look at the Dave Matthews Band for example.

Is Ticketmaster a problem?  Of course, that’s why we’ve got to go all in.  And don’t start talking about whether the charges are commissionable, no one outside the business understands this archaic construct, they just want to know the final price.

And the price is so high, and so many big shows are extravaganzas on hard drive, that too many people think that’s what music is.  They expect to overpay to see explosions.  Whereas when done right, music explodes in your brain at the local club, at the local theatre.  But how can people know this if they never go?

You can’t take full production to small halls, you lose too much money.  Which is maybe why you need to lose the production, which has almost nothing to do with music.

We need a giant reset.  Before the concert industry completely implodes.

I’m not saying it’s going away.  I’m just saying that when people think about what to do on a Saturday night, they don’t think of going to the gig.  They might buy tickets nine months in advance to see the one act they want to and look forward to it, but almost no one’s sitting at home, thinking about going to live music on a whim that evening.  And that’s a problem.

Music doesn’t drive the culture.  It’s a sideshow.  Facebook is hotter.

And that’s a shame.

Because there’s no medium innately hotter than music.

But that requires its purveyors to respect it.  To realize they’re in it for the long haul.  To entice customers with reasonable prices for great product so they’ll come back again.

Slide 19