The recorded music business must switch to subscription, it’s its only hope of economic survival.

The iTunes Store is killing the music business.  Sure, it provides a legal alternative to theft/copyright infringement, but the economics make no sense.  Because instead of spending $10-$20 for an album, people are now purchasing $1.29 tracks.  And it takes many $1.29 tracks to reach the equivalent of an album.  Essentially ten.  So, you’re asking the public to make ten purchases instead of one.  Get it?  Can you imagine someone saying yes ten times in a row?  Imagine buying the White Album a la carte.  How many people do you think would have purchased "Revolution 9"? But we did, as part of an album, there were no singles from the White Album, and therefore we know "Revolution 9", because oftentimes we were just too lazy to jump up and lift the needle past it, and we ended up hearing it, it’s in our DNA, like the rest of those album tracks.

But it makes no sense to complain that people should buy albums instead of singles, you’re pissing in the wind, the Internet has unbundled the album.  That doesn’t mean you can’t try to get people to buy as many of your tracks as possible, it just means that the concept of paying once for ten tracks is something that no one has to do, and almost no one wants to do.

So, inherently, we’re selling less music, and making less money.

Who do we want to blame?  Apple, the customer?  That makes no sense, as stated previously Apple is providing an alternative, and without customers you’ve got no business.  The key is to get more cash from each individual consumer, so in the aggregate, we end up with a lot of money.

The classic example is cable bundling.  You cannot buy your cable channels a la carte.  You must buy them in tiers.  Which drives you nuts.  Why am I paying for something I’m never going to watch?  But economically, it makes sense.  For if the channels were unbundled, the cable system wouldn’t be able to make enough money, so it would have to raise the price of each individual channel substantially, to the point where you’d be paying just as much.  According to this article in the "New Yorker", at most you’d be saving thirty five cents.  And you’d give up the ability to surf all those extra channels, and possibly find something interesting.

That’s what we want people to do.  Surf the music and find something interesting.  That was the old album paradigm.  Since you paid four or six or ten bucks for the LP (the price went up with inflation), you listened to it, and found out you liked cuts other than the hits, to the point you wanted to see the act live, to hear it perform all these songs, and bought the next album not worrying about a hit, because you were a fan of the band.

I hope these days can return.  But we’ve got to switch the game in the interim.  We’ve got to make people fans of music!

Yes, instead of paying ten bucks for an album, you pay ten bucks for music.  And technology allows everybody access, so instead of charging our good customers more, we charge everybody one low flat fee, kind of like cable television, the provider doesn’t care if you watch all day long or not at all, it’s the same price.

And speaking of price, we can argue whether ten bucks is appropriate, we can argue price all day long, but we can’t argue paradigm.  The key to survival is charging everybody something.  Not breaking it down by track, but providing the whole smorgasbord for a single price.

Now the Spotify trick is to get you hooked for free, then upsell you.  That’s a good concept, works in sampling across all wares.  Don’t think it’s about giving music away for free, it’s ultimately about getting a chance to convert many people.  It’s just like a retail store.  The first key is getting traffic, then, once people are in the store, you do your best to close them.  Hell, sometimes you do giveaways just to get them in!

Not that Spotify is the only solution.  But the labels must see they need to drive subscriptions, or lose the bundling war.  That site allowing you to get tracks for experiencing ads?  That’s economic death.  As is Apple’s concept of letting you stream the tracks you own via the cloud.  If either of these take hold, the odds of subscription winning go down, and you want them to go up, because the pool is so much larger.

Don’t see this as a music problem.  Don’t see this as a value problem.  See this as an economic problem.  How do we get the most money? Certainly not by selling tracks.  Definitely by selling low-priced subscriptions.

Furthermore, if the music is streamed (with thousands of tracks on your hand-held in case you’re out of range, Spotify provides this today), there’s no issue of someone stealing everything and then disconnecting.  What’s there to steal?  People believe YouTube clips will live in the cloud forever, very few people save them to disk.  We have to migrate music to this same sphere.

Please read this article about bundling.  It will make the concept clear to you.  The cable companies and content providers are tempting unbundling by fighting their silly wars in public.  We have the reverse problem in music.  Our content has been unbundled.  Only by bundling it again can the industry regain health.

Bundles of Cable

Fever Ray receives the prize for the year to dance at P3 Guld

Did you see that horseshit "New York Times" theater review of Lady GaGa’s Radio City gig?  How come no one can say all these theatrics are bullshit?  That it should be about the music, and her stage antics are so sophomoric as to be laughable.

Yes, laughable.

It  took Karen Dreijer of Fever Ray to take the piss out of GaGa.  At a Swedish awards show.  I mean come on, tiny girl with no charisma wears outfits to add mystery and catapult her career into the mainstream?  Alice Cooper getting decapitated on stage was limit-testing.  GaGa oozing blood is so tame, that the mainstream isn’t even offended.  I mean shouldn’t the establishment be pissed off at cutting edge culture?  Kind of like "Jersey Shore".  If you don’t think those kids are playing roles, then you’re probably a member of one of those organizations protesting, fanning the flames, making the ratings grow.

Can you imagine someone taking the piss out of GaGa at the VMAs?  Making fun of her?  Kanye was just a jackass, stealing the mic shows no innovation.  But how about Dave Grohl, he supposedly has a sense of humor, how come he didn’t wear a gauzy mask, how come the Foo Fighters didn’t change outfits five times?

Really.  GaGa is not without talent.  But when we trumpet crap like this without taking shots at it, the mainstream public just goes huh?  It’s like some outcast appearing in high school in four different outfits, he or she would be laughed off campus.  But no, in the bizarre world of MTV, everybody in the club is good, no one can be criticized.

You know the business is fucked when Sweden is hipper than America.

GaGa is not without talent, but she’s doing the same act Madonna did, twenty five years later.  Do we have no Internet, no YouTube, are today’s children so out of it that they’ve never seen Madge’s act?

GaGa’s not dangerous, just stupid.

This is the emperor’s new clothes.  Ridiculous.

See GaGa’s original outfit 35 seconds in here:
Lady Gaga’s Shocking MTV VMA 2009 Fashion

Forty years ago, if you worked hard and saved your pennies, you too could live the life of the rich and famous, if only for a night, or a weekend. Now the gulf between the worlds of the rich and the poor, between the haves and the have-nots, is so vast as to seem uncrossable, and the public is pissed.  Not only right wing Tea Party members, but left wing Democrats.  How did we get such a raw deal?

You need to read Frank Rich’s column in yesterday’s "New York Times".  Because he nails it.  It’s about jobs and foreclosures, stupid!  How did Obama and his minions get it so wrong?  Beholden to Wall Street, not in touch with the average man, the Administration has squandered its political capital.

Just like the music industry.

Once upon a time, it was a dream to work at a record company.  Unless you knew someone it was impossible to get a job.  Hell, it was impossible to get a job in music retail, far from the halls of Warner’s ski lodge and Black Rock.  Music was where it was happening.

But no longer.

It starts with the acts.  The acts were our beacon, pointing the way to truth, justice and the American way.  Yes, if you were really good and worked really hard you could get rich, but nowhere near as rich as today’s Wall Street fat cats, even adjusting the dollars for inflation.  Hell, you criticize the underprivileged for dreaming of playing in the NBA?  What are the odds you’re going to work hard, get into Harvard and be accepted in the white corporate world?  Not high.  You’re better off shooting for the NBA, which might only pay for a decade or two, but it’s better than dealing drugs.

And let’s not equate athletes with artists.  Athletes show their skill physically, artists radiate something intellectual, from the inside.

And suddenly, there are no artists.

Not in the mainstream.

It started thirty years ago, with the advent of MTV.  First and foremost, you had to look good.  And then you had to play the music MTV aired, because radio took its cues from the TV monolith.  Suddenly, what was acceptable musically got really narrow.  The opposite of the FM days a decade before.  You used to listen to the deejay as he took you on an aural trip around the world, from folkie to metal monsters.  The criterion was that something be good, not what genre it was made in.  We had a very big tent.

The tent got smaller and smaller.

And those inhabiting it no longer played the game of Mo Ostin, but the construct of Tommy Mottola.  Let’s homogenize it to the point where every media outlet will promote our wares for free.  Let’s sell tonnage!

Sure, a lot of people liked it for a while.  But they liked buying houses and watching them go up in value too.  In other words, both paradigms were built on nothing but air, there were no underpinnings.  Who wants the music that Clive Davis promoted in the nineties?  Who wants any music from the nineties?

Those acts that remained, ironically aged classic rockers, could no longer get airplay in this new world.   So, they toured playing oldies to great demand, raising prices all the while.  Employing shenanigans like scalping their own tickets in order to book even more revenue.  Hell, if the Wall Streeters could do it, why shouldn’t they?

And speaking of Wall Street, Robert Sillerman rolled up the independent concert promoters into what is now known as Live Nation, which just merged with Ticketmaster, and suddenly you’ve got a giant enterprise that needs to put on shows to make the whole thing work and is thus willing to overpay for talent, resulting in ever higher concert ticket prices.  Indie promoters can walk away from a bad deal.  Behemoths need to book revenue.  Just ask Detroit, which produced cars whether people wanted them or not, it was easier to keep the factories humming then reconstruct, i.e. deconstruct.  After all, it was all about market share.

But what does a fan care about market share?  Hell, a fan doesn’t care who puts on the show, as long as the talent appears and delivers.

But with prices so high, you rarely went.  And couldn’t understand how people wanted to see the evanescent pop stars at all.  Why was the media trumpeting these stiffs, especially after MTV stopped airing videos, after radio crumbled, after the Internet destroyed the monoculture and the world split into niches?

Media doesn’t want to acknowledge niches, because then it has to reevaluate its own place in the landscape.  But that’s the land we live in today, a zillion acts with their own audience.  As for having contempt for another niche, for someone else’s music, does a fan of A&E put down people who watch Discovery, or Bravo?  Railing against another’s taste makes no sense in this market, where everybody gets to listen to what they want, assuming they can find it.

But people can’t find it, can’t find the new music they want to hear.  Top Forty is too sold out, and the hipster acts too far from center.  Really, listen to the Dirty Projectors and tell me the mainstream cares.  Please note, I’m not evaluating the quality of the Dirty Projectors, if you love them, great. All I’m saying is one listen will tell you that they’re niche, most people won’t like them.  Yet, the Dirty Projectors have gotten the most media coverage of any new act, and the public that’s paying attention is throwing up its hands and saying huh?

The music industry is in deep shit.  Not because of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger, but because of the gulf between the industry and the public, which is sick of overpaying for everything, meanwhile, not wanting much.  To trumpet the success of Top Forty acts is like hyping the sales of Harley-Davidson.  Sure, there’s a market for these overpriced American bikes, but most people want a much cheaper foreign job.

But at least Harley-Davidson has cred.  Imagine if Harley-Davidson had the image of GM!

Enough with the analogies.  The point is, music has squandered all its advantages.  It no longer evidences truth, more quickly than any artistic medium.  Radio is unlistenable.  And the public has been ripped off for decades.  You can tell people they shouldn’t steal, that music is a great value, but you’re just wasting your time, because the public is pissed!

I really don’t see how the usual suspects worm their way out of this one.  Because to succeed in the future, you’ve got to develop, earn trust, give plenty and leave something on the table.  And that’s anathema in the modern music world.  Rather than argue about scalpers, make everybody show ID to get in.  But most acts don’t want this, because really, they want that extra ticket revenue themselves, ergo platinum packages and American Express pre-sales.

The public wants good and affordable.

It hasn’t been that way for eons in the music business.  It’s like we’re selling $60,000 Malibus.  And you wonder why Hyundai has made inroads, it’s cheap and it’s good!

Music can come back.  But the artists need to be about songs, not endorsements.  You’ve got to want to play music first, and get rich…way down the line.  And your handlers have to have this same philosophy.  And you’ve got to stand for something.  May sound easy, but looking at the landscape, it appears to be damn difficult.

After the Massachusetts Massacre

Bob that looked and sounded live. The mic was live.  You could hear her hand bumping it.  Her pitch was not perfect, like someone singing in a live situation where monitoring might not have been ideal.  I’m watching in my hotel room where the wi-fi isn’t zooming but my gut says Madonna showed up and sang it live.

Tommy Shaw

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OH MY GOD!  I THOUGHT I WAS CRAZY.  I KEPT MARVELING AT WHAT A PERFECT VOCAL SHE WAS DELIVERING, KEPT SAYING TO MYSELF, THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE FROM HER … BUT I JUST COULDN’T BELIEVE THEY WOULD DO IT … NOT WITH EVERYONE ELSE PERFORMING LIVE.  WHAT A FRAUD SHE IS, ALWAYS HAS BEEN.  
THANKS SO MUCH.  NOW I KNOW I’M NOT CRAZY.  MUCH LOVE.  

Kisses, Cherry Vanilla

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Bob:

I didn’t watch the live performance but based on this YouTube video, I can clearly hear the thumping during the clapping.  If this allegation is solely based on not hearing the clapping thump on the mic, then it is clearly incorrect.

Alex Lifeson

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FYI: The easiest way to tell is by observing the proximity effect.
As with all sound sources, the presence of a voice changes dramatically when the singer either moves closer or further away from the mic, AND when he/she moves off axis. In live situations the mics used are predominantly sharply focused highly unidirectional.
If a singer turns his/her head, or moves away, or looks to the side, the perceived effect is instant and clear.
That’s one reason why all the movies about rock bands feel bogus, and how it is easiest to tell when a lip sync is going on.

David Rubinson

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Bob,

Here is how that is done.

The engineer is using the mic she has in her hand to trigger a gate on the pre-recorded track.   This way the pre-recorded track only plays when she sings into the mic in her hand.  Check 2:06 into the video.  The line is, "Life is a mystery." but all we hear is "…is a mystery."  You can hear the gate pop open when she gets the mic up to her mouth.  It sounded 40% live 60% pre-recorded to me.

-Foster Hagey

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Bob,

Yes, I agree with Tommy and Alex, I saw it live and could tell she was singing. If it had been part track plus live voice you would have heard it double tracking.
I believe she was singing it live.

Peter Frampton

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Foster is absolutely correct…

(From a veteran engineer in Nashville.  Please withhold my name… clients hate us ratting them out.)

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Well… looks like Foster gave up the big secret. And he’s likely right on the money. I’ve had to mix a dozen artists the same way and it’s a shame, but you can clearly hear the gate chop of "Life" and then open for the rest of the line. Also, the Vocal should change color based on the proximity of the voice to the mic… although she is moving around quite a bit, the tonal color of the vocal part never wavers… a dead giveaway.

Matt Forsyth

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Bob,

listen carefully. The choir is live and they are singing in a slightly higher pitch at the end than Madonna is singing. The most common thing is for a live acapella choir to have their pitch move upward, downward, all together. Madonna can’t go with them because her track is locked. It is out of tune because the lead vocal is not singing

Hunter Murtaugh