Maybe we need to let Ticketmaster and Live Nation merge to pave the way for what comes next.

What killed the major labels was radio consolidation.  With Clear Channel owning so many stations and populating them with twenty plus minutes of commercials per hour, people started tuning out.  Conventional wisdom is Bill Clinton fucked up, he never should have let these mergers take place.  But if terrestrial radio hadn’t gotten so bad, would Pandora have flourished?  In other words, is it fruitless to prop up the past? Does it only delay the coming of the future?

I hate to quote the "Wall Street Journal" editorial page, but today’s lead opinion piece, "The Antitrust Anachronism", caught my eye.

You see Peter Paterno is vehemently antitrust.  Peter’s not a right winger, but he is a free-thinker.  Most music business attorneys are not attorneys.  Oh, they can make you a deal…but understand the legal underpinnings?  Foresee what will happen in a crisis?  Peter never leaves out the law.  And has been very successful being a maverick.  (Yes, there was that stint at Hollywood Records, but unlike all other attorneys who left practice to run labels, Paterno’s been able to rebuild his legal business after the fact.)  So I pay attention to what Peter has to say.  And he’s truly gotten this dyed-in-the-wool leftie thinking…is antitrust good for the people?

The merger the WSJ is speaking about is last week’s big deal, between Microsoft and Yahoo on search. How long will it take the government to give its stamp of approval?  Or withhold it?  Months, at least.  Does government ever work at the speed of technology?  And diving into the details, the author of this piece, L. Gordon Crovitz, references Google’s triumph over AltaVista and Excite.  I still occasionally use the former, does the latter still exist?  Sure, Microsoft dominates the office apps market, but when apps move to the cloud, which is inevitable, will the Redmond company still dominate, will it even be able to charge?  Will the apps be free, but service the key?

I don’t know.  But I do know that Congress and D.C. regulatory bodies know little about tech.  And almost nothing about the concert business.

Google doesn’t search Twitter.  Bing has made an attempt.  Real-time searches make spider-crawling results look like last year’s baseball scores.  Will Google dominate in real-time search?

If Ticketmaster and Live Nation are prevented from merging will the public truly benefit?

Those challenging the merger most vehemently, Seth Hurwitz and Jerry Mickelson, are not newbies, they’ve been promoting for years.  They’re fiercely independent, cut in the cloth of their progenitor, Bill Graham, but are they truly where the innovation is coming from?  Sure, JAM promotes concerts on baseball fields, and Hurwitz does festivals, but could the revolution be coming from people much younger, with no investment in past relationships?

The concert business is not a paragon of health.  Live Nation says 40% of its tickets go unsold.  This is the summer of papering.  And few superstars are being developed.  This system is not working.

And it’s not making the public happy.  Hell, that’s why there’s such an uproar.  Ticketmaster is more hated than North Korea!  Is prevention of this merger going to solve the add-on crisis?  Azoff says that he’ll lobby for all-in ticketing when the merger takes place, and controlling both acts and promotion, he’s got a good shot.

But maybe he’ll fail.

Live Nation is burdened with debt, and has razor-thin margins.  Ticketmaster is not Apple, rolling in profits with a surging stock price.  So maybe the two companies merge and we get a disaster.  Isn’t that good? Doesn’t that pave the way for the future?

Or maybe by merging, whatever the result, new opportunities are created for upstarts.  The more the major labels merged, the more opportunities grew in the indie sphere.  The majors want to sell millions.  The indies can make money on fewer sales, having less overhead.  And now you’ve got no cred if you’re on a major, you almost can’t make it in the KCRW world unless you’re on an indie.

And maybe the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger results in the new Google.  Maybe what Irving says is true. That he’ll be able to get all the rights in the hands of the artists, that the artists will make all the money, not the labels.  Is this a bad thing?  Certainly not.  Should we stay in a past where you search in AltaVista and rarely get what you want?  Unless you know how to use Boolean logic?  So only the brilliant can get the results they need, the same way only the rich and connected can get good tickets?

Stopping this merger certainly isn’t going to make things better.

Sure, it could make them worse.

But maybe, like with radio consolidation, they’ve got to get worse to get better.

Don’t have a knee-jerk reaction here.  Concerts have become an overpriced, once a year event.  Maybe they’re imploding under their own weight, maybe the public is mad as hell and isn’t gonna take it anymore. Maybe the future is small scale shows by virtual unknowns, niches on steroids.  Will Live Nation be the king in that world?  I wouldn’t think so.  That would be like Warner telling Wall Street that it’s found the key to success, from now on the company’s only going to sign acts that sell fewer than one hundred thousand copies!

That would make Warner’s stock tank.  The Wall Street game is about tonnage.  How do we generate more more more from less less less.  Major labels aren’t signing more acts, but fewer, in a world where anybody can make music and distribute it.  Are they really going to rule the future?

Sure, concert promotion involves real estate.  But look at the failure of malls.  They raged for decades, now few want to shop there and they’re stumbling.

The past doesn’t go on forever.  Unless you use all your power to prevent the future.

The future can be bleak, but only by going through the rough times can you get to the good.

No one’s preventing a ticketing company from establishing a better service than Ticketmaster.  No one’s preventing anybody from being a concert promoter.  Sure, Ticketmaster and Live Nation look dominant now. But the Walkman was eclipsed by the iPod.  Samsung rules flat screen TVs, not Sony.  Wii is the gaming superstar, not PlayStation.  Sony’s lost its cred.  Because it took its eye off the ball.  Should we have prevented its failures?  No.
Let this merger go through.

The Antitrust Anachronism

And they wonder why no one wants to buy them.

It’s bad enough that CDs are antiquated and overpriced.  But now you want us to pay to be bombarded by advertising?  Hello??  Doesn’t anybody at Island Def Jam read?  That people, especially the younger generation that buys the beat-infused music Mariah Carey now makes, are completely off advertising?  In a world of Tivo and Facebook, where consumers/surfers/customers only consume exactly what they want, IDJ is gonna try and shove crap down people’s throats, and make them pay for the privilege to boot?

And it’s not only the physical CD booklet, you get the same crap when you buy digitally!  Which is like going to an artist’s website and being bombarded with pop-ups!  I’m surprised IDJ doesn’t require you to cough up your e-mail address so they can spam you forever.  Hey, why not make a deal with a spyware company! Every little bit of revenue helps!

It’s one thing if you’re giving this crap away.  Quite another if you want us to pay for the privilege!

But Google makes a fortune with advertising!  Yeah, which cannot only be easily ignored, off to the side of the page, but is directly targeted to the audience.  And, in case you forgot, search is free.  This plot is like having to pay a dollar for a Google search and having to click on each and every ad that appears on the side of the page to get the results!

If you’re out of work do you go rob a bank?

No, that’s illegal.  Technically, ads in CD booklets are not against the law, but they’re almost equivalent.  If you can tell me how an ad in a CD booklet enhances the listening experience, I’m all ears.  And speaking of ears, isn’t that what music is made for?  Ears, not eyes?  Have we completely forgotten this?

What world is IDJ living in?  Instead of making better music that more people want to buy, instead of trying innovative ways to get the audience to cough up more money for what it wants, they’re acting like they’re omnipotent, entitled to do whatever they want to make money, damn the customers.

I truly thought this was a joke.  Like something you read in the "Onion".  Who comes up with this shit?

The Monetization of Mimi: Mariah CD To Have Ads

The Internet is for sharing.  It’s where we go to reveal our innermost thoughts.  The new Joni Mitchell is not a musician, but a blogger, detailing his or her own truth in the hope that someone, somewhere, will read the words and the writer will not feel so alone.

I had a rough night.  One wherein you wake up every hour or two.  And then stay awake, for far too long, eyes shut, feigning sleep, until you’re swept away again.  And when I finally decided I would not try to drift off one more time, I turned on the light and reached over for my book, Daniel Mendelsohn’s "The Lost".

Actually, it was an electronic book.  Downloaded to my Kindle.  Frustrated that too much of my recent reading was substandard, ultimately ungratifying, I decided to do research.  I looked for award-winning books.  That’s how I found "The Lost".

Oftentimes, awards are given for work that is good in concept, but bad in execution.  Just look at the Grammys.  How many of those records do you want to hear in the years thereafter?  And I can tell you that "The Lost" is not the easiest read.  The author, Mr. Mendelsohn, is a classicist, with a Ph.D. from Princeton.  He sprinkles his narrative with Bible interpretations, delineated in italics, page after page.  You understand the point he’s making (after coming to know his style, reading to the end of the paragraph before trying to divine the point), but it detracts from the story.  His search for his relatives.

They’ve been lost.

But they can’t exactly be found.

You see they died in the Holocaust.

That’s more than half a century ago now.  Some people deny it ever happened.  But reading this book, all you can say is NEVER AGAIN!

I was hooked because of the informal style.  Wherein Mr. Mendelsohn speaks about his grandfather, about gatherings of old Jews, who pinched your cheeks and spoke in heavily-accented English and creeped you out more than excited you.  Actually, now I’m injecting my own world.  Mr. Mendelsohn loved most of his old relatives.  But not Joe the Barber, not all of them.  But if only he’d known who they were in the family tree before they died!  He had so much to ask them, but now it’s too late!

We grew up living to play baseball.  Believing the anti-semitism our parents spoke of had been eradicated.  We were assimilated.  But we knew six million had been killed.  There were those at the JCC with tattoos on their arms, it hadn’t even been twenty years, we could not forget, we were constantly reminded.

I come from Russian and Polish stock.  My grandfather’s family is from Russia.  A big clan. A bunch went to Palestine.  Some went to Boston.  Others stayed behind and became Communists.  Uncle Saul fought in the Russian army and ended up in the Bay Area after the war.  He fell in love with a widow.  But the group broke it up, it was too soon.  Saul ultimately married Lily.  He was always smiling.  Was he happy?

Families.  We know little of my dad’s background.  Only that his dad lost a hand in a railroad accident and left all his money to his first family in Pittsburgh when he passed away.  My father had to support his mother, he had to go to night school, the anger stayed in him almost until the day he died.  Rarely verbalized in terms of what had happened previously, but constantly evidenced in eruptions over seemingly tiny infractions.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s father’s family history is one of darkness.  I understand how this can happen.  How the bad stories can be buried.  But I can’t understand how the brothers don’t speak.  My father insisted we all get along.  No matter how much we sometimes hated each other, the lines of communication had to remain open.  I follow that principle to this day.  Life is too short.  Some people cannot give up the grudge, cannot put forth the olive branch, you must swallow your pride and reach out.

Daniel’s grandfather, a raconteur, like everyone in my mother’s family, including my mother herself, couldn’t get over the death of his brother’s family back in Poland.  Actually, it kept changing, from Austria/Hungary to Russia to Poland to Germany.  And upon his grandfather’s death, Daniel discovers letters from this deceased brother, Shmiel, begging his relatives in America to GET HIM OUT!

If not the whole family, then just one daughter.  Maybe he’ll write to Roosevelt, the President will understand.  All his brothers and sisters are in America, shouldn’t he be there too?

But we turn a blind eye.  We’re too wrapped up in our own lives.  We have little compassion.

But we’re not absent of human feeling, like the Germans and Ukrainians who eradicate Daniel Mendelsohn’s family.

The depictions of the Holocaust will both horrify and rivet you.  Man’s inhumanity to man seems to know no limit.  If I repeated what happened, you wouldn’t believe it.  Or would say it’s too gross.  But it happened.  To regular people.  Just like you and me.  To Shmiel, who’d actually immigrated to America, but had returned to Bolechower, because he preferred to be a big fish in a small pond instead of starting over.

Like I said, "The Lost" is not always an easy read.  So I’m not going to tell you to read it. I’m just going to say we’re insignificant.  If you’re working to be remembered, forget it.  At best, your relatives will carry on your memory.  It’s about living.  In the here and now.  If you have the privilege.

Hey Bob:

First of all I have to say I’m a fan of your news letter.  Terrific insights as to where the business of music is heading.  I recieved email from a couple of friends who heard about my video United Breaks Guitars  from YOUR newsletter even after I had released the news to them myself which I find kind of humorous.  As of right now the video has been hit more than 4.5 million times in 3 weeks and I’ve experienced the chaos of being thrown into a media frenzy.  To those people who suggest the web carries no ability to lift or launch a career, I simply say:  WRONG!

United Breaks Guitars is a quirky Country song that was topical, catchy and unlike most of the songs I’ve written but it has drawn hundreds of thousands of people to my site and introduced them to my other music.  My cd sales and performance fee have spiked and I’m receiving offers to work around the world.  United may have broken my guitar but YouTube broke my career!

Cheers, Dave

(Dave Carroll/Sons Of Maxwell)