http://www.tmz.com/

Once upon a time, Perez Hilton ruled the online gossip sphere.  He treaded where no major corporation risked playing.  Because the old farts don’t understand that today we’re interested in people more than events and we just want the facts.

If only Perez had realized this.  Amateurs make inroads, professionals dominate.  Perez thought people went to his site for him.  But they went to his site for facts.  And one guy, spread too thin, trying to become a brand, with multiple Websites, a concert tour and books, never mind personal appearances, just can’t compete with a deep pocket that comprehends the paradigm.

In other words, Harvey Levin and TMZ are obliterating Perez Hilton.  But TMZ is also triumphing over conventional media outlets. Because TMZ understands the younger generation, which wants facts immediately and analysis later.

This is why the Fox News Network is doomed.  There’s no news gathering, just talking heads.

This is why the Huffington Post is the number one rated blog.  A quick scan will inform you of all current events.  In an instant, you’re up to date.  You can go to a party and talk like you’re living in the world, as opposed to being an outsider.  Go to the "New York Times" site and try to figure out what is going on in the world in an instant.  It’s IMPOSSIBLE!

Which is why the "Times" is foundering.  The Gray Lady is not in touch with Steve Jobs’ rule number one.  Design is key to triumph. The "Times" site looks like the newspaper.  Should Websites look like newspapers?  Isn’t that like saying music must come on round discs?

Sure, TMZ pays sources.  Sure, TMZ is willing to stick its neck out prior to confirmation.  But TMZ very rarely gets it wrong.  Which is why if you want to know anything about personality news, you go to TMZ first.

TMZ posted that Michael Jackson was dead long before any other Website.

TMZ owned the Tiger Woods saga.

Sure, Frank Rich nailed the analysis.  A MONTH after the events. 

Tiger Woods, Person of the Year

But by this time, we’d all been discussing the multiple mistresses, debating whether Elin should divorce Tiger for eons!

So what have we learned here?

The individual pioneer will not win on the Web unless he doubles down, unless he raises a ton of cash and spends it.  A gossip blog was a good idea, Perez Hilton proved that.  He just didn’t know how to scale it.  So, his days are numbered.

Innovators in the online music sphere…  Wait for someone to prove the paradigm, then watch someone with deep pockets dive in and own it.  You may think this is unfair, but this is business reality, not music-centric inevitability.  The reason the major labels always stole the indie acts was because the majors had cash, which they were willing to spend.  Want to compete with a major? Get backing, spend promotional monies, pay royalties, earn success.  Then new acts will be flocking to you instead of Universal.

But Universal is just like the "New York Times".  Railing against the future, trying to find a way to jet us all back to the past.  This strategy failing, Universal is now diversifying, like Perez Hilton, doing a ton of things poorly.  This is not a recipe for success.  When you expand, you’ve got to spend money, and get it done right!

TMZ is entering sports.  Do you think they’re going to do it as lamely as Perez did with fashion?  If you think so, I’ve got to quote Judas Priest, you’ve got another thing coming.

And for all Arianna Huffington’s bloviating, I wouldn’t bet on the Huffington Post either.  They’ve got great design, but they create almost none of their own content.  Oh, don’t tell me about the celebrity and wannabe blogs, no one reads those, they don’t even read Arianna’s musings anymore.  They just want the information.

But at least the left wing knows it’s about information.  The right wing still thinks it’s about discussion/analysis on talk radio.  If you think the Web-savvy generation is listening to talk radio, you probably still think hit albums sell ten million copies.

As for Rupert Murdoch trying to pull content from Google to survive…  That’s wrong too.  You need to adjust your product for the Web.  Create sites just like TMZ and the Huffington Post, that focus on facts.  Save the analysis for somewhere else.  Diversify, don’t try to hide behind your ivory tower.

Every newspaper now has blogs.  They’re making their reporters write more to earn their pay.  Only one problem, what is the URL for Patrick Goldstein’s movie industry blog?  You go to the L.A. "Times" site and then..?  Whereas it’s easy to find Nikki Finke, and she now rules movie industry news.  Because she’s cultivated relationships and is not worried about occasionally getting it wrong.

That’s what happens in an instant culture.  You sometimes screw up.  But that shouldn’t mean you should wait forever for verification.

Do celebrities like TMZ?

No.

Because TMZ is beholden to its audience, the public, the readers, not the famous.  Too many newspapers are beholden to those they report upon, whether it be government officials or bigwig financiers.  Those people don’t pay the bills, READERS DO!  If you go on the attack and nail those who screw up, then you’ve got the readers on your side.

You don’t always have to win, you’ve just got to win a few times.

The "New York Times" is famous for getting it wrong about WMDs.  Judith Miller was a groupie for the Bush Administration.  We used to think if the "New York Times" says it’s so, it is.  No more.

TMZ is famous for getting the details on Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods first.  So now TMZ is the first click in a celeb crisis.

This is kind of like hit records.  Create something great, and we keep coming back.  Make mediocre music and do endorsement deals with those corporations we hate and you’ve got to earn our trust all over again.

It’s a whole new world.  With brand new rules.

We live in an era of immediacy.  When a news event happens, write a song about it and get it online within hours, not months or years.

The key is to interact online, to play.  Sure, no one likes to make mistakes, but we forgive them in a twenty four hour news cycle…if you make apologies and continue to try and get it right in the future.  The major labels squandered all their capital.  If they apologized, lowered prices and got in bed with their customers, they’d have a chance of surviving.  Instead, they’re driving themselves into being licensing houses for their catalogs.  It’s not the public’s fault, it’s the companies’ fault!

What used to work, works no more.

There used to be albums.  Should there be albums in the future?

Why?

With a steady stream of information online, why should we wait years for your next ten track opus?

Don’t fight the future, accept it.

And know that he who does, who does not try to protect his investment in the past, but plays by the new rules, wins.  Assuming that once he’s got traction he doubles down, he invests, he realizes, like Steve Jobs, that the world is constantly changing.  Rupert Murdoch thought MySpace would dominate forever.  Any user could see that the interface/software sucked.  Wall Street prognosticators considered the purchase a good deal.  But the public doesn’t listen to Wall Street, it listens to its friends, which are now all on Facebook.

Today’s kids know more news than you ever did.  They don’t get it by watching network broadcasts, or even cable channels, but by surfing the Web.  Those you think are ignorant are not.  Harvey Levin has tapped into this.  Can you?

Did the Beatles plan on dominating the world?

No, they just wanted to escape a life of drudgery in Liverpool.

But their music became a mania.  Suddenly, not only were they rich and famous, they had innumerable groupies beckoning.

Like Tiger Woods.

When the Beatles hit, even into the heyday of Led Zeppelin in the seventies, if you wanted to get rich, you were a rock star. Baseball’s reserve clause had not yet been broken.  The NBA did not yet have Magic and Bird, never mind Michael Jordan, it was almost a sideshow.  As for golf…  Arnie Palmer was a swinger, but he was more about endorsements than lifestyle, and at the time, nobody wanted to be icy, pudgy Jack Nicklaus.

No, you wanted to be like the English cats.  Or the players from San Francisco.  Who’d practiced for years so they could now get up at noon, do drugs and get laid seemingly whenever they wanted.

It all came down to the music.  Jimmy Page didn’t pick up the guitar with a desire to be famous.  No, music was a calling.  And after seeing the Beatles on "Ed Sullivan", boomers picked up instruments, took lessons.  They did not get plastic surgery to appear beautiful, take media training so they could expose themselves well.  It was all about the tunes.

It hasn’t been about the tunes in eons.

Sure, there were starmakers all the way back to the days of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis.  But what drew us to the stars of the classic rock era was the seeming lack of manipulation.  Playing by no rules, creating opuses sometimes an album side long, these musicians put the music first.  Unlike athletes shilling for Aqua Velva.

Things turned bad with corporate rock in the midseventies.  Too calculated, it was supplanted by disco and then in late ’79, the whole business imploded, only to be resurrected by MTV, which evidenced completely different values from the FM radio that preceded it.  Suddenly it was all about image.

And now MTV might be dead, but conventional wisdom is image triumphs.  That’s what TV wants.  That’s what the magazines want. That’s what TMZ and Perez want.  Radio was something you listened to.  All the foregoing media enter through your eyes.

So right now, Mariah Carey might be parading around Aspen, but she’s not staying there based on her new album’s sales, they stink, she’s living off the past.  Even Alicia Keys.  All these heavily-hyped artists, the Cliveisms, they’re built for stardom, but today stardom doesn’t permeate every nook and cranny, and so many are turned off by the hype, and music sales suck.  And seemingly the more popular you are on the hit parade, the fewer people want to see you live.  Dave Matthews hasn’t had a radio hit in eons, but he was the biggest tour grosser of the decade.

But, of course, Dave Matthews has been around for fifteen years, he was the beneficiary of the old game.  What about new artists?

What about new artists?

If you want to be a "rock star", be an athlete.  Or a tech entrepreneur.  That’s where the money is.  And groupies like money.

If you want to be a musician, you must flush image down the toilet, be three-dimensional, write from the heart and make yourself accessible to fans.

Yes, today’s musicians are the opposite of the titans of yore.  As opposed to being crafted with no edges, sculpted to perfection like Janet Jackson, who also can’t sell a record, they’re lumpy, with warts, they’re completely human.  And they write about their humanity.  And they make themselves available on Twitter and other social media.

I’m not talking marketing.  This isn’t so much about selling as a redefinition of what a musician is.  Sure, first and foremost you play music.  But how do you get an audience?

How do you get friends? Real friends?

It’s very difficult staying alone in your room, not interacting online.  If you want to be part of the community you must venture out, whether it be into the real world or cyberspace.  You must make yourself available.  You must be ingratiating.  You  must be open and willing to share.

Who does it right?

Taylor Swift.  Her songs couldn’t be more personal.  They’re not bland statements denuded to the point where they can be sung by and related to by everybody, rather they’re distinctly her.

John Mayer tweets his personality.  Go to http://twitter.com/jOhnCmAYer and read, you’ll end up thinking you truly know him. Furthermore, on his blog he stood up for James Cameron, who called a fan an asshole

The Anatomy of a Smear: How The Reigning King of Special Effects Got Caught in One

Mayer didn’t believe it was a fan, but an e-Bay whore.  But the point is, Mayer took a stand.  That’s how you grow your audience, by having a personality, just like them.

Will musicians ever become rock stars?

Not like the athletes.  The athletes have got all the money and all the TV time.  If you want to get rich and screw, start shooting hoops.  And isn’t that fascinating, no one thinks they can play in the NBA without a wealth of court time, but people think they can succeed in the music game without paying their dues whatsoever.

And athletes don’t succeed by revealing their inner lives, they make it via their robotic skills.  The opposite of musicians.  And did you ever think that whoring yourself out to corporations works for athletes but not musicians for this very reason?  Because it’s not about who athletes are so much as how skilled they are at their sport?

In other words, if you’re pursuing the rock stardom that’s bandied about in public today, you’re pursuing artistic and commercial death.  A "rock star" today is someone who’s winning in the commercial world, which is the opposite of art.  A true rock star is beholden to nobody.  Hell, these athletes play for a team, or their sponsors.  Which is how the major labels killed music.  Because you were playing for them instead of playing for yourself.

Sure, eventually new acts will grow and dominate.  But the ascension will be very slow.  The rocket to outer space paradigm of MTV is history.  Shit, isn’t that the point of reality TV?  Anybody can be famous for fifteen minutes?

You want to be famous for much longer than that.

Old thinkers will use the old tools.  Radio and TV.

You’re not opposed to those, but you focus on a direct connection with your fan.

Do your friends abandon you willy-nilly?

Of course not.

Then again, you think twice before you screw a friend, before you cancel plans.

So put your fans first.  Establish trust.  And practice!

Because it begins and ends with the music.

You can get a player for ninety nine bucks.

Check out Wednesday’s article in the "Wall Street Journal": "Dreaming Of a Blu Christmas" (behind a pay wall, unfortunately, but you might find it via Google, Rupert Murdoch is so concerned with making bucks that he doesn’t see he’s heading straight towards irrelevancy).

It looked like Blu-ray was gonna fail.  Because it was just too expensive and the Internet was going to deliver movies.

But just like the public refrained from buying CD players at first, waiting for digital audio tape to break through, people now realize Net delivery of movies is years off, and the disc may survive.

Actually, it’s way more complicated than that.  Many people are popping for $150 Blu-ray players, because of their Internet capabilities.  Yup, you can get Netflix via your Blu-ray player.  But not everything.

You see the movie companies are crippling Internet delivery the same way the record companies crippled DAT.  It’s just a finger in the dike, but rather than debate the flick fold, let’s look at the music possibilities.

There’s no longer a reason to buy a conventional DVD player.  Blu-ray population is going to grow exponentially. Now that laser prices have dropped, which is why Blu-ray player prices have taken a dive, it’s only a matter of time until Blu-ray enters the computer field.  Soon it’ll be de rigueur to get a laptop with Blu-ray built in.

Is the music business gonna fuck this up one more time?

I can’t get over the Tom Petty Blu-ray disc, the one in his new live compilation.  It sounds ASTOUNDINGLY good.  Truly equivalent to the master tapes.  Do you think people wouldn’t want to hear the master tapes of their favorite albums?

That was the promise of CD.  But it was a joke.

But now we’ve got a second bite at the apple.

Forget multi-channel.  It failed twice.  It’s too complicated and people don’t need it.  Just go stereo, in Blu-ray.

Of course, it’s gonna start slow.  Just like CDs and Internet delivery of music.  But it could grow.

Assuming the prices are cheap.

Yup, ten bucks for a Blu-ray disc.

Blu-ray player sales only took off when decks dropped from their $999 price upon introduction three and a half years ago to the dirt cheap prices of today.

Do I think discs are the future?

No.

But how much is it really going to cost to enter this market.  If the labels can play with vinyl, they can do this.

Forget Jimmy Iovine trying to sell files in some newfangled way via Best Buy.

We want the highest quality today.

This is how you bring back sound.  How you get people to invest in good speakers.  You get closer to the music.

I was listening to "Tangled Up In Blue" on my iPod today.  And I thought how I had an SACD at home.  But I don’t have an SACD player, almost no one does.  But I’ve got a Blu-ray player, it’s in the PS3.  And when prices drop just a bit more, I can install a Blu-ray drive in my Mac Pro.  And listen to the true master tapes via my Aux speakers.

I can’t wait.

If only Doug Morris knew how to use a computer.

I’m still reading the responses to my "Leukemia" missive.  I appreciate the good will.  But I’m reading slowly not only because the missives are all personal, directed specifically to me, but because I’m learning so much.

I heard from Steven Page, formerly of the Barenaked Ladies.  Did I know that Kevin Hearn from BNL had leukemia? Steven copied him on the e-mail.

Turns out Kevin had CML too.  Before Gleevec.  He had a bone marrow transplant, and it worked.

Fat cat copyright-holders may decry the Internet, but it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.  I can reach many more people.

And they can reach me.

And not only have I learned that so many are living with the Big C, or have relatives who are fighting it, but I’ve been educated on the person who is saving my life, Brian J. Druker, M.D.

From those who had him as a mentor to those at the T.J. Martell Foundation who funneled money to him so he could complete his research.  Hematologist number two had referenced him, said he was probably going to win a Nobel Prize for his efforts.  For now, he’s just received a Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award.

One reader sent me the press release.

Another just sent me an article from the Science "Times".  You know, that thin section at the back of Tuesday’s paper.  I read it.  But this article meant nothing to me back in November.

It means everything to me now.

Especially when Dr. Druker says:

"C.M.L. patients were always difficult to see because both of us knew that the clock was ticking and there was virtually nothing that we could do about it."

That could have been me.

But it’s not.  Because some guy who wasn’t in it for the money, who was willing to sacrifice everything for his passion, put together the pieces to come up with a breakthrough drug that allows me to live.

Kind of like Tom Scholz.

Oh, decry Boston.  But that’s one phenomenal record.  It stands the test of time.  Hell, just listen to "Foreplay/Long Time" and get back to me.  Or the sweetness of "Hitch A Ride".

Tom Scholz did not go to music business school.  Did not study engineering in some extension class.  Rather he got a traditional education at M.I.T. and then worked as an engineer at Polaroid.  Making music at night.  In his basement. For years.

Tom Scholz came from essentially nowhere to owning the largest selling debut album of all time.  Because he didn’t believe in rules, he was on his own journey.

Isn’t that why we revered the rock stars of yore?  Because they did it their way, beholden to absolutely nobody?

When you’re in bed with Coke, when you’re shilling for the Fortune 500, do you really think we can believe in you? Don’t you wonder why your career has no legs?

But the real reason I’m writing this is because the word on Gleevec was spread online.  Read the below article.  Dr. Druker gave it to patients and then went home to see what they were saying about it in chat rooms.  The Internet broke Gleevec.  Patients, more educated than physicians, demanded it!

While fat cat businessmen are creating lowest common denominator music, fans are desirous of something different, cutting edge, uncompromised, that will touch their hearts.

And if we ever hear it, we tell everybody we know.  Not because we’re being paid, but because of the sheer joy of listening and turning others on to great new music.

I about cried when I read this article in the "New York Times".  This guy, who I don’t know, saved my life.  Just like those records I used to play in my bedroom in the dark.

This business is saved by the Peter Gabriels, not the flashes in the pan.  Took Peter four albums to make it, after years in Genesis.  Now he still has fans willing to fork over cash when those much younger than him with Top Forty success must work day jobs.

Stop fighting the future.  Embrace it.

Know that the Net allows everybody to have all the music at their fingertips.  This is a good thing!  Figure out how to get people to pay for it, not how to stop them from having it!

Maybe you won’t read this story.  Maybe it just doesn’t apply to you.

But one day one of these out of the box thinkers is going to save you too.

A Conversation With Brian J. Druker, M.D.

Tom Scholz