Clean bathrooms.  That’s why I’m writing this.  Cleaner than my own house.  So clean I’m convinced no one used the commode prior to me.  There weren’t even any scratches, it’s like they installed a brand new toilet for each and every customer.

So Leo and I are rolling down the highway, after a few days of skiing the pow in Mammoth, and I get a hankering for some ice cream.  If you think you can get Haagen-Dazs in Lone Pine, never mind Bishop, then you’ve never cruised 395, one of the most beautiful highways in the nation, located between the highest point in the continental U.S., Mt. Whitney, and the lowest, Death Valley.  Leo suggested McDonald’s, but I wanted real ice cream, not a concoction made for the masses that looks right, but tastes wrong.

And ice cream is one category where you can demand quality without breaking the bank.  Kind of like going to In N’ Out instead of Burger King, or eating store-baked chocolate chip cookies instead of Chips Ahoy.  I’m willing to splurge on ice cream.

But I didn’t have to.  Because we went to Costco!

That wasn’t our original plan, but after failing to find an outlet for soft serve in Mojave, Leo floated the idea.  Costco was off of K Street in Lancaster, or was it J?  Leo felt he could find it.

And I was up for it, because I’d had an ice cream sundae at the Toronto Costco just the week before!

On the way to the airport, Jake told me he wanted to stop, to buy chicken breasts and dog treats, and on the way out he had a hankering for a corned beef sandwich, did I want anything?

I got a hot fudge sundae with ice cream as good as Carvel for less money than I’d have spent at any dip shop, where the mix-ins might be good, but the ‘scream is so often terrible.

Lancaster isn’t pretty, and its inhabitants aren’t either.  A mix of multiple ethnicities, I wondered what they thought of the umbrellas covering the tables inside the establishment.  They said HEBREW NATIONAL!

Speak to any Jew.  He’ll tell you these all beef hot dogs are the best.  But most people can’t argue, because they’re not willing to cough up the dough for this premium product.  But at Costco, a Hebrew National hot dog was $1.69!  And it wasn’t the chubby mini-dog you get shrink-wrapped in the frozen foods case, it was a foot long, plump and juicy in a bun that could accommodate all the condiments laid out ballpark-style by the wall.  Costco is doing more to eradicate anti-semitism than the UJA.  Start with their bellies, not their brains.  Once they see how good our dogs are, they won’t be able to hate us.

But I had to use the facilities.  We’d been on the highway for hours.  (Well, we stopped in Olancha at Gus’s for jerky, but we didn’t hit the bathrooms…)  And I remembered T.O., where Jake waited while I did my business.  The cleanliness of the rest room.  Stunning!

And it was just as clean in Lancaster.

And the ice cream was frozen yogurt, and there was no chocolate sauce, only berries, but the concoction was delicious, and so large that when one finished, you didn’t want more, you were satiated.

And I’m thinking how great this is.  How an establishment without advertising, that doesn’t bop us over the head telling us how great it is, appeals to the populace on sheer quality.  And price.  But unlike Wal-Mart, pays its employees a living wage, respects them and STILL makes money!

Did you read that essay by the Wharton professor delineating how advertising is failing on the Internet?

Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet

To spend money on slick ads all in an effort to entice customers who don’t care is a complete waste.  As this guy says, consumers do not trust advertising, they don’t want to view advertising and they don’t need advertising.  Why do you need advertising when you’ve got friends?

Your friends will give you the straight poop.  Dedicated Costco shoppers salivate when they speak of their store of choice.  They bring it up unsolicited, it’s a main topic of conversation for them, akin to computer-users testifying about their Macs.  The everlasting love makes you want to avoid Costco and Apple at first, but then you have an experience and you’re converted.

Costco cares about its customers.  It knows their needs.  And it wants to deliver the very best for the very cheapest price.  We’re all willing to pay the most for something great.  But most people don’t want to spend upwards of twenty bucks for a CD with one good track.  Nor do they want to spend fifty plus bucks to see a band with only one hit.  People are willing to risk if they believe it’s a fair business proposition.  Or if their friends can convince them.

I don’t need to buy in quantity.  I don’t want to spend the time driving to my local Costco.  But I’m finding it hard to resist.  Because I want to be a member of the club, I too want to testify about my store of choice.  And I want more of those berry sundaes…

I listened to that Zappos presentation online.  Forgetting about the record exec who toured the premises and found out his wife had spent $62,000 on shoes, what struck me is we don’t have people like Tony Hsieh in the music business.  Who in their right mind would want to go to work in the music business when their bosses will make all the money and stifle any innovative ideas?  What’s worse, the music being purveyed has been less than exciting. It would be like entering a world where the only car available was the Chevy Malibu.  Something that will get you there, but you’ll never be proud to arrive in.

This lecture took place at SXSW.  Not at the music festival, that’s about wannabe bands thinking they’re going to get noticed the same way these idiots press CDs upon tastemakers in order to make themselves feel good, like they’re doing something, furthering their careers.  Rather, Mr. Hsieh’s presentation took place at the Interactive festival.  Where a who’s who of the tech world came to exchange ideas and tweets to the point where their iPhones were unusable, overloading AT&T’s network.  That’s a true story.  It might have eluded you if you’re focusing on SoundScan and BDS, but that’s how news is today.  Just like music before MTV, certainly before AOR, tech is a cult that the mainstream oftentimes doesn’t understand, but to those involved, it’s everything!

If you want to have a fulfilling, enriched life today you don’t start a band, you start a company!  Is your desire to date Mariah Carey or have enough money to attract reasonable members of the opposite sex?  Do you want to have people tell you what to do or do you want to be in charge of your own destiny? Tech is about innovation.  What do they say, "Innovate or die"?  Whereas in the music business it’s "I don’t hear a single."

Of course it’s changing in the music business.  That’s what those in power can’t understand.  That all the innovation is taking place at the grass roots level. By people who want nothing to do with a major label and don’t care about radio, yet unfortunately have to deal with Ticketmaster and Live Nation.  Bands are doing it for themselves.  And if you don’t think this is good, you’re probably someone who wants to join the military to have someone tell you what to do. Music is art.  It’s about creativity.  It’s about testing limits.  If you don’t have the freedom to do a 180, it doesn’t work.

Some of the Tony Hsieh’s of this world tried to function in the music sphere.  But they found out the rights holders didn’t want them to, that the rights holders are bullies, beholden to the old ways.  The word is out, so these innovators deal with suppliers who want to make money, who see online as their future, as opposed to calcified twentieth century corporations married to the old ways.

Mr. Hsieh focused first on customer service.  That’s Zappos’ mantra.  They put their phone number right at the top of their site.  They want you to call, to establish a bond.  Their longest customer service call was six hours!  It’s not about immediate dollars and cents, it’s about the long haul relationship.

Which is why Zappos doesn’t list what it doesn’t have in stock, it’s too frustrating for the consumer.  Which is why Zappos will turn a customer on to product at a competitor’s site if they don’t have it in stock themselves.  Which is why they upgrade shipments to overnight delivery, for free.  Zappos wants you to feel good about the company, so you wouldn’t dare going anywhere else.

Compare this to Live Nation.  Which pisses off each and every customer.  With all these added fees.  Live Nation says it’s got its hands tied.  Bullshit. Zappos is about repeat customers, it focuses on them, builds on them.  If the average Live Nation customer goes to a show under two times a year, how can you build a business?  And believe me, that’s the reality, Rapino utters this statistic again and again.

Sure, the superstars might rape Live Nation in a deal, but how about the beginning acts?  How about all-in ticketing for beginning acts?  How about free parking?  How about discount food?

The future of Live Nation is new acts, which the company itself must develop.  The major labels aren’t gonna develop them, they’re going to turn into licensing houses for their catalog, they’re going to develop one hit wonders, who can sell tickets briefly, if at all.  Live Nation isn’t in business with Doug Morris, but the kid on the street, with the new band, that’s got a new manager, who hopefully will tell his agent to partner with the promoter, for the benefit of everybody involved.

The Eagles and the Stones are not going to tour forever.  The classic rock acts are in their sunset years.  What is Live Nation’s plan for the future?  The same one the major labels had to deal with Napster?  We can see the future coming.  Niche acts, developed online.  How does Live Nation insure it survives?

By merging with Ticketmaster, the most hated corporation on the planet.  Sure, we insiders know that Ticketmaster is just a front for the acts, but is this good for business?  Why can’t the industry get its house in order, why can’t there be all-in ticketing, doesn’t this added fee chaos hurt everybody?

Stunningly, the prices at Zappos are not cheap.  I checked a pair of Nikes with the same shoes on the manufacturer’s site.  Nike itself was selling them cheaper!  But people go to Zappos for the service.  People will pay $1000 to Bon Jovi to sit in the first row, they think it’s worth it.  But no, Jon’s got to employ subterfuge, he’s got to sell those tickets on TicketExchange, so he doesn’t look greedy.  When you go to buy a BMW, do they bait and switch you? No, BMWs are expensive!  But the customer believes that they’re worth it!  If the market value of tickets to see a star is extremely high, charge it.  If you’re worried about alienating fans, try to beat resellers with paperless ticketing, but don’t just try to capture the spread without clueing in the customer by scalping your own tickets, when the truth outs, and it always does, you’re just pissing people off!

But Mr. Hsieh said that more important than servicing the customer was company culture.  People had to want to work at Zappos, they had to enjoy coming to work.

If you think it’s fun being employed by the major label, you don’t work there.  Record companies used to be the place to work.  Hell, people lived to work at record stores!  Now the record store clerk is someone with a blue vest who’s clueless.  Come on, would a college graduate, someone who went to Wharton, anywhere other than a bullshit music business college, ever want to work in the music industry?

Let’s face facts.  Anybody with any savviness whatsoever is not looking to work at one of the usual suspect companies.  People e-mail me all the time, how can I get a job?  Why?  You’re just telling me you’ve got no gumption, you just want a paycheck, you just want to suck at the tit.  You want to work at a record company?

Instead of the best and the brightest, we’re getting the lowest of the low.  Instead of Ivy League graduates, we’re getting people who paid a fortune to hear from those without experience what happened yesterday.

Yes, it all comes down to the music.  But it’s not like yesteryear, where the music is enough.  Not when ticket prices cost as much as a week’s meals, not when selling said music is no longer enough to survive.  Our complete business must be realigned!

Record companies suing their customers, to teach them a lesson.  Concert promoters selling tickets with enough extra charges in some cases to double the price of a ducat.  Acts that are promoted that have the nutritional value of Sugar Pops, and last just as long as a bowl of that cereal.  The problem is not purely file-trading.  The music business has been driven deep into a hole by sheer greed, a sense of entitlement by not only the executives, but the acts! The old acts wanting to keep their lifestyles and the new acts wanting to replicate them.  It would be like a student today saying his desire is to work at AIG. Huh?

You can’t cut corners.  Zappos has stock pickers working constantly, as opposed to only when orders come in.

You’ve got to build a relationship with the customer.  Rather than trying to sell your product to someone who barely cares, you’ve got to satiate the fan. Especially in an era where you don’t have enough reach to get the attention of those living in the hinterlands, which can even be in the metro area today, but the denizens are too busy doing something else to care!

Sure, people will never stop making music.  Sure, there are innovators shaking things up in the underground.  But you can’t go to the gig in cyberspace, not in a meaningful way, and the buildings you play all have deals with a ticketing agency that adds extra fees.  You’re headed straight for the mines.  Not an enticing enterprise for those wanting to test limits, wanting to connect with their fans and not only get them high, on music, but make a difference.

I’d like to tell you Tony Hsieh’s a riveting speaker.  But he’s not.  Listening to his presentation isn’t quite as boring as high school math, but it gets damn close.

You can check out the podcast here:

SXSW podcast

The accompanying slide show is here:

Zappos Slideshow

But I’d recommend watching excerpts on YouTube:

SXSW 2009 – Opening Remarks: Tony Hsieh pt.1

SXSW 2009 – Opening Remarks: Tony Hsieh pt.2

But I’m not sure you’ve got watch or listen whatsoever.  You’ve just got to think about your customer and having fun.  You’ve got to trust your instincts more than your immediate bottom line.  You’ve got to have reasonable values as opposed to operating from pure greed.  You’ve got to innovate.  The key is not to do it Tony Hsieh’s way, but a new way, your way, that will be just right, that will wow us.

There’s a point in this recording where Alison Krauss yelps like she’s having the orgasm of a lifetime!  She digs down deep, into the netherworld of her pudenda, and from down below the feeling courses up her body until she vocalizes in a near-scream akin to having that girl in "Stray Cat Blues" drag her fingernails across your back, it’s more Maggie Bell than Sandy Denny.

I was cruising the music blogs, and I came across a recording of the second night of Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton’s soiree in Japan.  I clicked to hear "Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers", and as I scrolled down the set-list, I was stunned to find out Jeff covered the Henry Mancini classic, "Peter Gunn".

But that wasn’t the only show on this site.  There was a July 1970 recording of Traffic’s "John Barleycorn" tour, which I saw at the Fillmore East a month earlier, before the album came out.

And even an alternate "Bookends".

But what raised the hair on my back was Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ version of "The Battle Of Evermore" from last June at the Merriweather Post Pavilion.

"Stairway To Heaven" might be the most famous track off the fourth Led Zeppelin album, but it’s not my favorite.  For a long while, that was "Going To California", but I switched over to "The Battle Of Evermore" sometime in the nineties, after the boxed set was released, and I could hear a remastered version again and again.

"The Battle Of Evermore" is the best of rock.  Something so ethereal, so otherworldly that it would confound Top Forty programmers and the other mainstream gatekeepers.  The best music has no precedent, it cuts its own path, it leaves its mark after its release, as opposed to the cookie-cutter fare that is just a rehash of what’s already broken through.

"The Battle Of Evermore" sounds like it was cut a hundred fifty years ago, long before the advent of recording, when lords still lived in castles and fog crept forebodingly across the heath. And I never tire of the original take, but this live version from last summer has got a whole new vibrancy, with the voices upfront and personal, bringing us right back to 1971, 1871, yet startlingly fresh, positively today.

I hear the horses’ thunder down in the valley below
I’m waiting for the angels of Avalon, waiting for the eastern glow

Well one angel has just arrived, she’s trading lines with the Greek God, she’s evidencing a sexuality we never knew she possessed.  Yes, Alison Krauss has done intimacy, most famously with her take on "Baby, Now That I’ve Found You", she’ll bathe you and towel you off, but will she take off all her clothes, spread her legs and take you for the ride of your life?

These country acts are too sanitized, as if they’re afraid of being Dixie Chicked and banished from the airwaves by an establishment fearful of alienating one theoretically chaste Christian who fornicates in the privacy of his own bedroom, but refuses to admit that sex takes place in the outside world.

I know she’s got a kid, but Alison Krauss started out as a barely pubescent teenager, she’s never traded on her sexuality, but in the presence of a man who built his reputation on sexual innuendo, she locates his lemon and not only squeezes the juice till it runs down his leg, but demands he mount her and demonstrate he can not only receive, but give!

Bring it back.

Bring back the pulse of recorded music.  Rather than polish the official version, make available the live takes, warts and all.  After winning that big Grammy in the sky, Rounder should have immediately released the Zeppelin covers from the Plant/Krauss show.  Not only as an introduction to the music of the duo, but to satiate those who’ve already been converted.

Alas, awash in rights and permission issues, the public has had to take matters into its own hands, the public has seen fit to make these recordings available, not to rip off the artists and the company, but to fulfill the wishes of fans, of listeners, to enrich their lives!

No, I’m not going to tell you where to find these recordings.  Either you know how to surf the Web, or you don’t.  Why tip off the rights holders, who are too stupid to find these sites themselves. Isn’t that the problem, the old men decrying the new world are completely unfamiliar with it?

But it’s not about the Internet, not about MP3s or payment, but music.  We’re living in a heyday of music.  The recordings being pushed by the mainstream have been so sanitized, they’re so bereft of imperfections, that we can’t relate to them, we can’t connect.

Those pictures in the magazines are pure artifice, I’ve seen many of these actresses and models up close and personal, and you’d be stunned, many wouldn’t even turn a head.  Real people, like real music, breathe, they sweat, they’re not perfectly symmetrical, but it’s their unique qualities, their idiosyncrasies that draw us in.

We don’t want to fuck the girl in the magazine, we want the one who’s going to take us on that E Ticket ride, to an X-rated Disneyland where our wildest fantasies come true.

I now know Alison Krauss has been to the dark side, because on this live take of "The Battle Of Evermore", she’s taken me there.

Reading Mellencamp on the music business is like listening to Fred Silverman or another legendary network programmer lamenting the advent of cable, which decimated dominant television shows from the big three.  Mellencamp wants us all to bury our heads in the sand and jet back to 1972, or at least 1982, when he became a superstar, and live in a world of darkness, where shady characters playing a Mafia-esque game had a tight grip on music production and distribution.

Hogwash.

To criticize SoundScan is to demonize statistics.  It’s bad to know how many people pursue an activity, it’s bad to quantify behavior.  No, the problem is what people do with this information!  Which Mellencamp does detail, but his points about record companies and stock prices in the nineties?  Didn’t most record companies go corporate in the sixties and seventies?  Isn’t that when Elektra and Atlantic sold out?  And weren’t MCA and RCA and PolyGram always part of the big bad corporate machine?  As for laying off employees, that happened after Napster, not before the year 2000.  The record companies were fat in the waning days of the last century.

You’ve only got to check statistics.  Which Mellencamp has not seemed to have done here.  Just because he rewrites history in his head, that does not make it true.

And blaming BDS for bad radio is like blaming baseball statistics for bad Yankee teams.  The real crisis in radio can be traced to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed radio consolidation, and the homogenization of playlists.

We can argue about history, but what bugs me about Mellencamp’s diatribe the most is how he has a problem with the present.

Let’s look at the present.

The major label hegemony has been broken.  No longer is the musical landscape dominated by fat cat gatekeepers who get to control what America hears.  You can write and record your own music, and release it too.  Will anybody buy it?  Probably not if it’s bad, but you no longer have to get permission to play, and that’s great!

And you can get paid!  Make a deal with TuneCore, and you won’t get any lying on your statements.  I’ve never met a musician who’s audited a record label and found out he’s been overpaid.  The label recoups recording costs not based on actual dollars spent, but your record royalty, and then screws you if a profit has been made.  This is the system we’re trying to prop up?  Which was originated by the original shysters, um, legends?  We’ve entered an era of transparency, where data can tell you exactly what has transpired.  Tell me an artist has never employed SoundScan to tell the label it was owed money.  More information is good for the artists, not bad!

You can choose your own business model!  You don’t have to be beholden to the major label game of selling physical product!  If you want to give away your music online to drive concert attendance, great! Furthermore, at least you’ve got a chance of being heard, unlike in the days where you had to pay off the radio programmer to play your record.  And you can sell your own merchandise, which you can order as needed, just in time, online.

The tools available to the musician are staggering.  From the production to the exhibition of music.  Yes, you can use eventful.com and tour where people want to see you, and you can make money.

But my major complaint is Mellencamp’s misguided concept that musicians have to do it all by their lonesome, that they’ve got to be "songwriter, recording artist, record company and the P.T. Barnum, so to speak, of his own career".  Uh, John…  Isn’t this the way it’s always been, when an act was starting out?  The singer may have written the songs, but the drummer was making fliers and calling clubs and…  Hell, bands have always done almost everything themselves until they’ve broken through.  The same is true today.  The only difference is, once you’ve gotten traction, you don’t have to play by the old man’s rules, you can invent your own!

If you’ve got any traction, a plethora of people will track you down and try to make deals with you.  Labels still exist, agents are more powerful than ever and every successful act needs a manager.  Doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a record deal or they’re playing your track on the radio, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a handler, who takes care of the business for you.  Even nascent bands have managers, who sometimes stay with the acts beyond their breakthroughs.

The act has more power than ever before and this is a problem?

No, the problem for John seems to be that you can’t plug into a giant machine that will spit out a million dollar lifestyle.  The problem is not record companies or radio, but America in the twenty first century.  In today’s world, where people use Google to search for exactly what they want, where ads are targeted to their exact desires, do you truly expect everyone to listen to the same damn music?

I too lament the lack of melody on Top Forty radio, but to get pissed about that is like bitching about the quality of play at a minor league ballpark.  It’s a backwater!  Top Forty radio is not dominant because there are so many options!  Why listen to radio with umpteen commercials when you’ve got an iPod, when you’ve got satellite radio and over 100 stations?  If broadcasting were the future, network television ratings would be going up!  But they’re tanking, to the point where many people believe the network model is dead, with shows being launched on cable outlets, to the point where Starz is now airing original programming!

You’ve got to pay for Starz, it’s not even basic cable, it’s a pay channel! But it makes economic sense for the outlet to make shows to satiate its subscribers.  Just like a band you’ve never heard of can be profitable, playing to its audience.  This is a bad thing?

Sure, it’s hard to know what’s good, hard to find the good stuff.  But that’s only because a filtering system akin to MTV has not emerged online.  But be sure, when it does, it won’t be limited to forty clips, it might be limited to forty genres!  I had to listen to Louis Armstrong on WABC to get to the Beatles, sure I now know "Hello Dolly", but thank god I don’t ever have to listen to the music of Mariah Carey that Mellencamp derides, because I’ve got options!

The old systems have broken down.  Because they don’t comport with the new reality.  Are we at the final destination yet?  Not even close. But to lament the loss of the past is to miss the point.

Sure, if you want to make a lot of money overnight, you can sell out to a major corporation.  But even they don’t have that much money or reach anymore.  And playing the Super Bowl didn’t make Bruce’s new album a hit.  No, in today’s world, first and foremost you’re a musician, not a star.  Can you make a living?  Sure!  But you might struggle mightily along the way and not end up flying in a private jet.  Why should musicians be immune, when the financial industry is crumbling, when the veil has been lifted on the shenanigans of corporations?

Sure, the major labels made mistakes.  But the artists played into their hands.  By compromising, trying to make it.  Now these compromises yield limited results.  Now you’ve got to rely on the fundamentals.  And that all comes down to the music.  That’s a bad thing?

As for Mellencamp’s statement that "I’ve always found it amusing that a few people who have never made a record or written a song seem to know so much more about what an artist should be doing than the artist himself. If these pundits know so much, I’d suggest that make their own records and just leave us out of it.", I guess a football coach needs to have played on a Super Bowl team, or an auto titan needs to have won the Indianapolis 500.  Isn’t this the exact thought process that got the major labels in trouble to begin with?  That a nineteen year old college student couldn’t possibly come up with a better concept of music distribution than they could?

If you think you’ve got to be a musician or record producer to know anything about the music business, then I guess you never wanted to be managed by David Geffen or Irving Azoff, neither of whom has twirled a knob in the studio.  And Cliff Burnstein, who’s steered Metallica to the top, is first and foremost a fan, not an artist.

Hey Mellencamp!  You’re talented, you’ve written some great songs, but you’re not entitled to live your life and guide your career the same way you did twenty years ago.  There’s no longer guaranteed employment at the corporation and you have to go through career changes, just like the rest of the American population.  Why should you be different, just because you’re a musician?

Create a great track.  If it’s truly good, it will reach its audience.  But you won’t sell ten million albums, no one can!  And you probably won’t play stadiums, maybe not even arenas.  Because so many of those Mariah Carey fans hate your music, and don’t want to see you!

And that’s a good thing.  As Devo sang, "freedom of choice".

The musicians now control their own destinies.  The listeners have more music at their fingertips than ever before.  It’s a brave new world. And it’s good.  As your buddy Don Henley sang, get over it!

John Mellencamp – On My Mind: The State of the Music Business