5. Lady Antebellum  "Need You Now"

Sales this week: 86,616
Percentage change: +11
Weeks on: 10
Cume: 1,647,332

Could end up outselling GaGa.  Definitely could have a longer career.

In other words, tradition triumphs over fad.  Just like Nickelback plays meat and potatoes rock and sells forever, tonnage, Lady Antebellum sings songs, that you can not only sing along with, but play on the guitar.

You can quote rap.  You can wear heavy metal clothing.  But songs you can sing build outside the radio, outside home play.  Friends sing them together.  They know the lyrics.

I don’t think this act is incredible.  And although the woman is cute, the guys are dorky, so I don’t think it’s all about sex appeal.  Rather, this is a harbinger that the public is ready for melody.

If you want to chase a fad, clone this, forget the Top Forty rappers and one hit wonders.  Come on, how long a career do you really think Ke$ha is going to have?  And Justin Bieber better make his money now, before his voice changes.  He’s not even as good as the Backstreet Boys, he’s crap like New Kids On The Block.

19. Zac Brown Band "Foundation"

Sales this week: 25,451
Percentage change: +3
Weeks on: 72
Cume: 1,781,509

People are still discovering Zac.  In the last century, he would have been all over television and the public would have already rendered an opinion.  Now most people are still unaware who he is.  Upside is gargantuan, especially when you’ve got a good album and a good live act.  This is an interesting conundrum.  On one hand, it’s best not to release another album for years, until everybody knows who Zac is and this one plays out.  Because a new album will negatively impact this one and it’s going to have to be extremely good, with hits, to keep up the momentum.

43. Train "Save Me San Francisco"

Sales this week: 12,526
Percentage change: +15
Weeks on: 23
Cume: 219,471

Have a hit song and…people don’t want the album, only the track.  People only want the album if your act has an identity, it stands for something.

If there’s another hit from this album people will still only want the hit.

No one believes if there’s a hit on an album, even two or three, that the rest of the record is any good.  Except for the younger generation, really younger generation, which hasn’t realized that albums are a few good tracks at best, and filler.  So, ironically, it’s kiddie acts like Miley Cyrus who sell albums.  Or really old acts appealing to baby boomers who don’t have any hits and don’t move much product anyway.

115. White Stripes "Under Great White Northern Lights"

Sales this week: 5,431
Percentage change: -39
Weeks on: 3
Cume: 43,473

Who needs a live album when we’ve got YouTube (and BitTorrent and RapidShare).

Furthermore, with so many side projects the act is now Jack White, not the White Stripes.  His old act with Meg has lost momentum.

137. 30 Seconds To Mars "This Is War"

Sales this week: 4,275
Percentage change: +38
Weeks on: 17
Cume: 194,783

It never pays to fight with a major label.  Because you lose precious time.  They can’t let you walk, can’t set precedent, otherwise all their other acts will want this option.  So, they’ll let you ruin your career to prove a point.  30 Seconds To Mars lost momentum.  They needed to make the best of a bad situation.  Or go totally rogue.  Release the album to the Net and go on tour anyway.

161. 50 Cent "Before I Self-Destruct"

Sales this week: 3,647
Percentage change: -1
Weeks on: 20
Cume: 433,113

Needs to put out new music soon!  Before we forget about him, before the stink of this stuff stays on his career and truly destroys it.

Today, you fail in private.  Only success is public.  In order for an act of Fitty’s magnitude to succeed, he’s got to interest casual fans.  And stiffs don’t register on casual fans’ radar screens, only hits.  So, starting over is really like starting for the first time, because people missed your failure!

In an era where people just cherry-pick the hits does it matter how much material you release anyway?  We’re separating the wheat from the chaff. Fitty’s got to harvest some wheat.

170. Peter Gabriel "Scratch My Back"

Sales this week: 3,406
Percentage change: -22
Weeks on: 5
Cume: 43,012

He’s become an oldies act.  Someone you go see live, close your eyes and remember when you were thinner, had hair and were in a different relationship.

This was completely mishandled.  Peter had no visibility.  Unlike Jeff Beck, whose new album comes out tomorrow, Gabriel hasn’t been on TV, didn’t appear at the Grammys…and if an oldster wants to sell product he’s got to be visible.

Gabriel is almost completely invisible.  Enough fans will support him live, but even those fans don’t want the new album.  Because it seems like a cheap shot.  Covers?  Is that the rule, you’re over sixty and you can no longer record new material?

Gabriel should have cut one good new track and hyped it to high heaven, licensed it to ESPN, appeared as a commentator, released some new video footage, then when there was a frenzy, put out the album.

As hard as it is for new acts to break through, old acts don’t automatically get a pass.  They need to be visible, they’ve got to let their audience know they’ve got a new album.  And print isn’t enough.  Especially when Gabriel kept talking about how the reciprocal album, where the people he covered covered his tracks, never came to fruition.

182. Dave Matthews Band "Big Whiskey & the Grux Grux King"

Sales this week: 3,123
Percentage change: +1
Weeks on: 44
Cume: 1,065,976

Did anybody who isn’t a fan of Dave even hear this album?

These sales show how large Dave’s cult truly is.  Built on a live show and a couple of hit tracks when video still mattered and a band without beats could get mainstream exposure.  In other words, the new DMB will grow slower and take longer to reach critical mass.  Unless they’re really damn good and college students spread the word.  The word of mouth at colleges travels at light speed!

197. Joan Jett & the Blackhearts "Greatest Hits"

Sales this week: 2,831
Percentage change: -14
Weeks on: 4
Cume: 14,090

Who thought a Runaways movie was a good idea?  We didn’t care about the Runaways when they were together, why should we care now.  And "Cherry Bomb" has aged worse than "Afternoon Delight".

In order to get us to see anything but an action picture, the film has got to be good.  And no one said this flick was great.

Joan Jett was a middling artist with one huge track.  Neither hatable or lovable, she’s just part of the endless eighties miasma.

This album was supposed to sell after the movie hit.

Now, there might be a video aftermath.  But I wouldn’t count on it being too big.

Same thing happened in the record business.  Huh?  Distribution widened and the traditional players lost their stronghold, lost their power.  The paradigm shifted and the big money turned out to be in the niches as opposed to playing to the mainstream.  Well, not exactly.  GaGa is still wildly profitable, like "American Idol".  But losing at the mainstream game is incredibly costly.  Yup, it costs a fortune to play.  You ramp up to reach everybody and if you don’t??  Notice how fast they cancel network TV shows these days? Isn’t that a reason not to go with the major label?  If they spend all that money and don’t have quick success, they’re going to move on to another one of their expensive priorities.

Used to be there were six major labels.  And they controlled the distribution channel.  You might be able to get into the store as an indie, but getting paid was hell.  Just look at the four majors today.  They’re owed gazillions by retailers.  And there are fewer of them and they’ve got less power than ever before.  Blame digital.  An iTunes world where any punter can make a deal with Tunecore and offer their wares for sale.  And maybe nobody buys them, but enough people are buying enough niche product to depress sales of mainstream product.  In other words, network TV ratings were hammered by cable.

Does Conan O’Brien reach as many people as before?  No way.  Does he make as much money as before?  No way.  But do his fans care that he’s on TBS instead of NBC?  No way!  It’s only oldsters who feel locked to the networks at the end of the dial. Younger people see the whole cable universe as a smorgasbord, there’s no difference between channel 28 and channel 2.  And oldsters are enamored of HBO, oftentimes in HD way up the spectrum.  So, a low channel number means something, but no longer everything.  Just like price and positioning at Best Buy and Wal-Mart still mean something, but less, especially in a digital universe.

Think we’ve got chaos in the TV world?  It’s even worse in music.  There’s a limit with TV, Comcast, et al, can only beam out so many channels, in music, the universe is unlimited.

But Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are stars on cable.  To the younger generation, they are Letterman and Leno.  And who inherits the championship belt when the two L’s retire?  Mmm…  Seems like the Comedy Channel guys.

And the Comedy Channel guys win online.  They’ve got the best linkability.  That’s the problem with network, especially Leno, they play it safe.  That doesn’t work too well online, where edgy and honest rules.  Conan can use the Web to truly spread his brand.  His great pieces can get exposure online to the point where the TV is gravy.  Hell, many people don’t even watch Stewart and Colbert at their appointed times.  They catch the rerun the next day, or DVR it.  Television is a changed universe.  And so is music.

1. What is it?

2. Why is it only with HP?

3. How much better than regular sound is it?

4. Does it have a chance of becoming a standard?

5. Does it need to be in your MP3 player and mobile phone too?

6. Do you pay extra for it, or does it come included with the computer for the same price?

They say Beats headphones are successful.  I’ll just say I see them around, there’s definitely penetration.  And at those price points, money is being made.

Now Jimmy Iovine is trying to remake sound, to get people to listen to a higher quality.  I’m all for it.  But history is against us.  People have been settling for shitty sound since the nineties, when boom boxes became stereos.  Then we’ve got the lousy iPod earbuds and the crappy computer speakers and everything points against any change in the status quo.

So, can Jimmy make a difference?

Sound is different from headphones.  Headphones are an accessory, a status item, a badge of honor.  Sound is…ethereal?

Is Jimmy making all the money here?  Does the upside flow solely to him and his cronies?  Or can we enlist others, can we make it a movement, for the good of all?

7. How does it work?

8. Does it really work?

9. Why aren’t other manufacturers on board?

Dolby became a cassette standard in the seventies even though in most cases, tape hiss was not seen as a problem and people rarely used the sound processing.  But Ray Dolby got all the cassette deck manufacturers to sign up.  Then again, there was a flagship product, the Advent cassette deck, which with chrome tape and Dolby set a standard that intrigued customers and caused manufacturers to emulate it.

Is there such a thing as a desirable HP computer?  Or is HP Chevrolet, seen as a commodity.  In other words, is this battle being fought with one arm tied behind our backs?

Maybe we need a new brand.  With a special color, like the white cables on the earbuds of iPods and the red cables on Beats headphones.  So someone can evidence their membership in the club easily, someone can see the desirable product carried around.

Then again, today people carry around cell phones, not laptops.  Maybe the sound processing should be introduced in Android handsets.  Go straight to the manufacturers, Motorola and HTC.  Or get Google onboard.  Hey, Google’s fighting Apple?  Give them some ammunition.

You see it all comes down to Apple.  Apple controls music.  Apple controls sound.  If Jimmy wanted to improve sound quality, he should have gone to Steve Jobs.

But maybe Jobs wouldn’t listen.  Or maybe Jobs is greedy.  Or maybe Iovine is greedy.  But division prevents a standard.  And unless Jimmy’s scheme becomes a standard, it’s irrelevant.  Beats don’t have to be a standard, but branded sound quality does. What’s the name again?  What stars are involved again?

KFC coming out with their new Double Down sandwich. It’s bacon and cheese wrapped inside two pieces of fried chicken. In fact, today, al Qaeda said, ‘We quit. When it comes to killing Americans, we can’t keep up with you guys.’

Do you find that funny?  I find it hilarious.  And after laughing out loud at Jay Leno’s joke in the "New York Times", I had to read it to Felice.  But today, I’ve got an audience, I’m passing it on to you, and who knows, you might further spread the word, burnishing Jay Leno’s image, and lord knows it needs polishing, Tina Fey took a swipe at it last night:

"The Sarah Palin Network"

And I wouldn’t have forwarded this to you if it weren’t for the faux show Tina Fey talks about four minutes in: "Dancing With The Real Stars: America’s Small Business Owners".  That’s funny.  Unless you don’t have a sense of humor.  And if you don’t have one, Tina truly pushes your buttons in this clip, where she says Tea Partiers are so obese, they protest sitting down.  Used to be that music was right alongside comedy, testing limits, but you won’t find an artist willing to offend, not today, not a performer with any traction, because the mantra is to avoid turning off any potential customer, you need to grow your audience.  But fascinatingly, it’s those who are edgy, those who stand for something, those who offend who engender linkability.

How do you get linked?  How do you go viral?

By establishing a base.  It does no good to be on TV once, to get a single spin on a radio station.  You’ve got to establish a core that pays attention to your every move.  And, if you’re lucky, you’ll do something that one of your flock will believe is so great they’ll forward it to those outside your membership, who will spread the word.  The people putting up the links?  These are the new gatekeepers.  How do you get TMZ or the HuffPo or any trusted amalgamating resource to link to your creation?

It’s got to be really damn good.

I watched four Tina Fey clips from last night’s SNL.  I’m only gonna link to one more, her newscast:

Tina Fey SNL newscast

A diehard will be interested in the Tiger Woods commentator, which is pretty decent, and the Justin Bieber skit, which I believe is lame.  But the casual surfer is only interested in the tip-top vignette.  Linkability isn’t about everything, just one thing.

And that one thing is placed alongside links that may be of a completely different nature, could be music, could be news…hell, have you watched that video of the blowing up of Texas Stadium?  Not fantastic, don’t waste your time, but the photo got me to click through.

What’s it going to take to get people to click through?

Think about that.  It might be best to try your best and wait for the lucky accident.  But if you’re trying to accelerate your career, expand your base, you need something special.

Special usually evidences creativity.  Sure, train-wreck episodes garner eyeballs, but no loyalty, no one is endeared to you, no one comes back.  And you want people to like you, to bond to you.  It’s no longer about saying LOOK AT ME, but having people say LOOK AT THAT!

We’ve got a cornucopia of information.  And it’s at our fingertips.  But it’s overwhelming in quantity.  So we rely on our filters.  Which are these compendium sites and our friends.  We trust them before we trust you.  Approach us directly and we’ll shake you off. You’ve got to reach us through an intermediary.

Old media is stymied by this.  Newspapers can’t understand why we’d rather surf a link site than the paper itself.  It’s because the link site extracts the essence, tells us what we really want to know.  Newspapers have to realize not all their content is equal, to survive they must create link sites of their own, maybe featuring only their own content, but a place we can go for the headlines that truly interest us.

And no matter how good Tina Fey might have been on SNL, I’m not going to watch the show, not even DVR it.  Why?  When I’ve got intermediary filters who’ll distill the essence for later viewing.  Each one of these clips has ads attached.  I’d run the rates way up.  I’d charge more as the clips go viral.  That’s where the new money is.

So if your band wants to blow up, you’ve got to go viral, you’ve got to engender a plethora of links.

You can trade on sex, you can do something outrageous, but chances are it’s not going to pay long term dividends.  Which is why smart acts are just playing to their core and waiting to get lucky.  But, if you want to game the system, you need a hit.  Something that will be linked to that people will watch and end up loving you.

Having a lot of plays on YouTube shows interest, but it doesn’t demonstrate linkability, there’s no viral effect.  Unless, of course, your clip is being embedded everywhere, which is why rights holders should never restrain embeddability, that’s forgoing long term money for the short.  But the key is to make music so great that it breaks out of the YouTube ghetto.  On to other link sites.  And that’s not easy.  But doable.

In other words, there are certain people who never listen to terrestrial radio, or never listen to the station that plays you.  And there are some acts who will never get terrestrial radio play.  But instead of lamenting all that, realize everybody’s got an Internet connection (and if they don’t, the odds of them buying your music and/or a concert ticket are slim).  And everybody’s got their favorite link sites.  In order to reach people, you’ve got to penetrate these sites, you’ve got to be linked to them.  This is much more important than a few more spins on the station that’s already playing you.

And what’s truly amazing is once you’ve broken through, once you’ve established yourself as quality, like Tina Fey, link sites will be tracking your every move, looking to see if you do something great, that they can feature, because they’re built on links, that’s truly their calling card.

Furthermore, notice that I’m linking to Fey’s clips on the HuffPo.  I’d never go to NBC.com.  Why?  There’s no filter.  I start with the filter, otherwise there’s too much data to comprehend.  Which is exactly where we are in the music business.  Tons of music, few trusted sites telling us what to listen to.  Can you imagine how powerful trusted music sites, linking to what’s great, will be?  They’ll be beholden to no one, no record company, no promotion man.  Because if you’re beholden to a purveyor, it no longer works.  That’s old school.  New school is I can only feature the best or people will stop coming to my site.

So, you’ve got to make the best.

Get cracking.

And know that music filtering sites are coming.  They may not be just around the corner, but they’ll arrive.  And then we’ll have a class of winners and a ton of losers.  The losers will bitch, just like in the old days, that they can’t get traction, the gatekeepers don’t care.  But the truth is, the public now only cares about the truly spectacular. And the only ones who don’t know this are those making crap.  Which, unfortunately, is most.  In every field.  There’s a tippity-top, and everybody else.  Sure, the Long Tail means your relatives in Timbuktu have access to your home made junk, but it really means that the head of the tail is gigantic, now, more than ever.  Top Forty?  TOP FIVE!  Maybe even TOP TWO!