Who’s a bigger rock star, Bono or Obama?

I saw U2 on Letterman, and what struck me was it was Dave’s show.  It was like U2 were members of the peanut gallery, brought up on stage at the end of the telecast to perform for the children.  How the fuck did we get here?  How the fuck did rock and roll as renegade become I’m gonna do whatever the fuck it takes to try and sell my album.  And STILL it doesn’t sell!

Are you stunned that U2 is predicted to sell 450,000 copies of "No Line On The Horizon" this week?  You should be.  Because despite all the exposure, despite all the banging on people’s heads, most members of the public have shrugged their collective shoulders and moved on, they just don’t care.

U2 is BEGGING us to buy their album.  As did Bruce Springsteen a month ago.  But it’s not working.  Bruce’s album still isn’t gold. Marketing is dead.  Because people see it for what it is, a push to close you so the perpetrator can get rich.  There’s no message, no hope, no reward, just a coin in the pocket of the "artist".

Where in the Springsteen hype was the declaration that listening to his new album was gonna change your life?  U2 moves their corporation out of Ireland to save taxes and President Obama says the rich must pay their share, so that our country can get back on its feet.  Who does the rank and file support?

It ain’t Bono and the Edge, no fucking way.

Rock blew up because it existed outside the system.  It was a commentary on society.  Those who made it were not privileged, it was a way to raise yourself by your bootstraps out of the gutter you were destined to live in.  Hell, that was the essence of rap.  I may have dropped out of school, I may be a drug dealer, but if I can rhyme really well and get a deejay to lay some cool beats beneath me, the public will gobble my shit up.  AND THEY DID!

I believed in rap after the L.A. riots.  I said to myself, SHIT, EVERYTHING ICE-T SAID WAS TRUE!  What do I know about police brutality, I’m a middle class white living in the leafy suburbs.  We all want truth.

People perceive Obama is telling the truth.  Not everybody.  Not everybody loved the Beatles, to this day some people think the Liverpudlians sucked.  Same deal with the Eagles.  Owners of the best-selling record in history.  You can get tons of people to testify they suck.  So when Rush Limbaugh and Fox News castigate Obama, I laugh.  Because any denizen of popular culture will tell you it goes with the territory.  It’s not about the haters, but the believers.  The haters don’t go to the show, they save their money and stay home.  Believers go for the religious experience.

People laughed at the Obama candidacy.  HE’S BLACK!  And speaking of black, they booed Prince off the stage when he opened for the Stones.  But soon, it was all "Little Red Corvette" and "Purple Rain" and the diminutive Minnesotan was the rage, he’s still touring on those hits today.

But there was a core who perceived Prince’s greatness.  I bought "Dirty Mind" on a review, it wasn’t even the genre of music I liked, but the beats hooked me and I got hooked on "When You Were Mine".  I went to see him at Flipper’s roller disco on the night of the Academy Awards, there were maybe forty people there, Prince bounced on the bed, did the full-on arena show and those in attendance were blown away.  I became a believer.  I had to tell everybody about Prince.  Shit, I’m telling you about the show DECADES LATER!

Obama spoke at the 2004 Democratic convention.  That was his debut gig.  Most people don’t watch that shit.  But this is where he got his initial believers.  Who couldn’t stop talking about the man when he started his campaign for the Presidency.  The rest of the public laughed, or said WHO?  Conventional wisdom said it was Hillary’s time.  But not only did Obama bewitch Hillary and pull ahead, he never lost his temper, he didn’t do it the way YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO!

That’s the essence of a rock star.  Doing it your own way.  Not worrying about what everybody else tells you to do.  An "American Idol" twat listens to Clive Davis, a rock star gives the septuagenarian the middle finger.  Rock stars do it THEIR way!

I wanted Obama to go for Sarah Palin.  What a fucking idiot!  Rock stars aren’t part of the fray, THEY’RE ABOVE THE FRAY!

How about Obama telling the Republicans who chastised his stimulus package at the White House I WON!  This is like Led Zeppelin owning their Greek God identities and leaving New York City without all that Madison Square Garden money.  If you’re a rock star, you make the rules.  You don’t fight the little battles.

Furthermore, I don’t agree with everything Obama has to say.  I think the stimulus package is too light.  Clean coal?  Isn’t that an oxymoron?  The war in Afghanistan?  Didn’t the Russians prove you can’t win there?  That’s a rock star.  We don’t love everything about them, they’ve got warts.  They’re not playing to the media, they’re charting their own path.  And that’s what we respect them for.  That’s who we want to be.  Someone who listens to his own drum and follows his instincts.  Who changes course when he sees fit as opposed to putting his finger to the wind first.

If you want to make it today you’ve got to focus less on the sell and more on your essence.  Don’t be our friend, if you’re our friend how can we respect you?  You must be better than us!  We want to put you on a pedestal, assume the throne and fulfill your destiny!  Don’t go on a million TV shows trying to corral every last person into paying attention to you.  You’ve got to have an inner glow, that draws us to you!

The old ways are done.  If you want to make it today, study the English musicians of yore, or the rappers.  You’re probably better off if everybody hates you.  Know that you can’t be a star overnight.  Wasn’t Obama a community organizer?  He paid some dues AND STILL one of the big issues of the election was whether he was experienced enough.  If you’re still flogging the same debut album made with the usual suspects twenty four months down the line, hoping someone in Des Moines will finally pay attention, you’re missing the point. First and foremost you must be an artist.  More music and less hype.  Artist development is not something a record company executes, it’s something the artist himself does!  He keeps writing and playing, searching for that Holy Grail.  And when the general public finally pays attention, it finds an embarrassment of riches in the act’s catalog, that can be listened to and examined.

Pirates didn’t kill the music industry.  It’s the bands.  The bands drank the kool-aid.  That if they did what their handlers told them to, it would work.  Sell out, don’t say anything that isn’t nice, take the corporate money, do the TV show, make that endorsement, you’re a brand, you’re a corporation, look to Jack Welch for instruction.

Utter bullshit.  If this was the case, how come Leonard Cohen, a seventysomething guy who can barely sing, owns the biggest tour of the year?  Because he’s AN ARTIST!  Who’s FLAWED!  Didn’t he go to the mountaintop looking for enlightenment when Bono was trying to save the world?  Didn’t he spend years out of the spotlight?  Last I checked his music isn’t on "Grey’s Anatomy", he isn’t hawking the latest evanescent product.  No, people see Leonard Cohen as an artist and they’re drawn to him.

Some things never change.  Great artists are not part of the system, they exist outside of it.  They’re complicated, often unlovable, but their work, we hold it close to our hearts, we treasure it, because it contains a truth absent from our everyday world.  What did Mr. Cohen famously say/sing, EVERYBODY KNOWS?

Everybody knows that U2 will do anything to sell a record.

Everybody knows that Bruce Springsteen hasn’t made a great album in decades.

Everybody knows Mick Jagger can no longer sing.

Everybody knows the rappers are now more about lifestyle than truth.

Everybody knows that our country is fucked up economically.

Everybody knows that people are hurting.

But the Republicans refuse to admit this, hewing to an ancient, expired doctrine.

Does Obama have the answers?  MAYBE NOT!  But he’s TRYING!  That’s what we want, limit-testers, who are willing to change their minds, do something new, all in the service of pushing the envelope.

An artist is not afraid of taking the road less-traveled.

And the fan is willing to follow him down the path.  If he believes the artist is genuine, making his own decisions, and just isn’t another money-hungry asshole trying to make his nut.

And if you’re not willing to risk your entire career by taking experimental left turns, you’re not an artist.  Just ask Bob Dylan or Neil Young.

An artist’s career does not just go up, it follows a jagged line, sometime up, sometimes down.  As Bob Dylan so famously sang:

Took an untrodden path once, where the swift don’t win the race,_
It goes to the worthy, who can divide the word of truth.

Try to find truth, try to be worthy, don’t worry about fans, they’ll find and follow you if your journey is worthwhile.

(And check out Dylan’s "I And I" from "Slow Train Coming".  Great lyrics, great delivery, but what puts the track over the top is the mellifluous piano of Barry Beckett and the guitar stylings with the timelessness of the Bible played by Mark Knopfler.)

I had a long conversation with a promoter who told me that with regard to a show he was promoting, Ticketmaster was guaranteeing the secondary market for the act.

Let me explain this to you.  A certain number of tickets are pulled from the manifest and ultimately sold on TicketsNow.  Ticketmaster guarantees a certain gross payment to the act for these tickets, far in excess of the usual payment per ticket.  If the tickets don’t sell at the predicted high prices?  Too bad for Ticketmaster.

Blame the acts for this.  Ticketmaster Is taking the heat.

It bothers me that the traditional press and concertgoers are too stupid to see the truth here.  Irving said at the House hearing that only 80-85% of the tickets to a show are ever sold by Ticketmaster.  The question is, where do the remaining 15-20% go?

A certain percentage go to senate seat holders.  In English, people buy season passes to every gig at a venue.  Sometimes, legitimately/with good intentions.  These people go to each and every show or give or sell unwanted tickets to friends OR sell them on the secondary market, i.e. StubHub and TicketsNow.  But oftentimes the owners of senate seats are brokers/scalpers.  Sure, they may eat the tickets for dog shows (figuratively, not literally), but they live for the superstar tickets, which they scalp and make a profit on.  So, when you see tickets available on secondary sites before the show has even gone on sale at Ticketmaster, this is most often senate seat holders.  They’ve got the tickets, they’ve got the right.

Do other people/brokers/scalpers have connections at Ticketmaster and are able to buy the best seats?  One cannot totally eliminate fraud, let’s just take Ticketmaster’s word that it does the best to stamp out this process.

Does Ticketmaster pull tickets from the original on sale and sell them on TicketsNow, bypassing the traditional 10 A.M. free-for-all feeding frenzy?  I don’t know the answer to this.  But I suspect not.  Because Ticketmaster is a public company and the additional revenue would have to show up somewhere in the accounting.  In any event, I’ve got no confirmation/independent corroboration stating this occurs.

But what shocked me was a recent conversation with a manager.  Who told me that Live Nation’s offer for his act included pulling multiple hundreds of tickets to sell on the secondary market.  I did not know that Live Nation did this.  Do I believe this manager? Absolutely.  Is this a common practice?  I don’t sell shows/talent, so I don’t know.  But, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

We need a little truth here.  Where do all the tickets to a show go?  How many to senate seat holders, how many to the band, how many to insiders, how many to..?

Ticketmaster is taking all the heat, but is Ticketmaster really the culprit here?  And, if it is, is it the only one?

How about a little sunshine.  The acts are hiding behind Ticketmaster.  But if Live Nation wants this merger approved, how about a delineation of availability.  In other words, who gets the right to buy tickets?

The public is ignorant.  The public thinks if a show goes on sale, they’re entitled to pay face rate and sit in the front row.  The public doesn’t know the ticket fees are kicked back from Ticketmaster to the promoter, the act, the building…

Then again, some people aren’t ignorant.  They don’t even deal with the original on sale.  They go straight to the secondary market. They know what’s available, the price is clear and they make a reasonable decision, not influenced by the heat of the moment.

Look at it this way.  If there’s a rush to buy the latest toy every Christmas, why should someone with money think he’s entitled to just log on to Ticketmaster’s site and buy great seats?  They can’t buy a wii.

But, the game should be defined.  How many of the overall tickets being sold are available through Ticketmaster?  Are any good seats ever put on sale?

Forget the Springsteen hysteria.  That’s not the real issue here.  The point is, in a country where you can look up what someone gave to a politician on the Internet, where you can research seemingly each and every fact about individuals and companies online, why can’t there be a map showing what tickets are actually available?  Furthermore, why can’t there be an accounting of where the "missing" tickets have gone?

Don’t think shenanigans don’t take place with independent promoters.  These games are endemic to the system.  But now the government gets a say, having the right to approve or disapprove this merger.  Where do the tickets go and who has the right to buy them?  As for all the pre-sales, you need to get an American Express card and join the fan club and still you can’t get the best seats. Let’s level the playing field.  Or at least let the customer know he’s fucked from the get-go.

There’s too much music made by too many people and performers are frustrated they’re broke and listeners are completely overwhelmed.  What’s going to happen?

Hit music will survive.  Even if the definition of a hit is a shadow of its former self.  There won’t be as many sales, few people will even be aware of the track and the act will not be able to tour, or, if so, very briefly (did you catch the gross for the Jonas Brothers movie…ALREADY has-beens?)

Making it is so difficult that most "musicians" give up very early in the process.  It’s easy to write and record a song and distribute it.  Everything that was difficult yesterday is easy today.  You just fire up GarageBand, select some loops, create a track and upload the result to MySpace and you’re an "artist"!

Well, no.  You’re someone who’s recorded a track that most people don’t care about, probably because it sucks.  But what if it’s good?

It almost definitely isn’t.  But, if it were, most people STILL wouldn’t care, because they’re not aware of it. So, we’ve got two halves of the pie, quality and awareness.

Let’s start with quality.  You can be a supernova like Picasso, incredibly good from the start.  But it’s almost impossible.  Usually you’ve got to experiment, practice, go down the road to dead ends until you finally come up with something good.  And most people don’t have the patience for this process. Everybody wants instant fame.  And instant riches.  And it’s easier than ever to be instantly famous, but it doesn’t pay well.  You can be on a reality TV show and be broke and working as a waitress.  Furthermore, fame doesn’t possess the ogle value it used to.  We make fun of the famous.  As for riches…they’re almost unreachable.  Which is why most "artists" give up.

It was easier in the nineties.  The formula was simple.  If you were incredibly cute or beautiful you got a record label to sign you and put a ton of money behind you, filming an expensive video for ubiquitous airplay on MTV and paying radio stations to play your record.  The system was easy to figure out.  Even though there was a winnowing process, which frequently had little to do with musical talent.  Today?  If you can get a label interested, they want to pay less and own more and success is a fraction of what it once was.  Which is why if you want to be rich and famous you start a Website.  Unless you’re truly a musician.

A true musician HAS to play.  The money is secondary.  As is fame.  Sure, you want both, but you’ve got no choice.  And now, with the field separated so clearly between the wannabes and the true devotees, we can start to see the future of the music industry.  Those who see themselves as musicians are going to practice and play for Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours, building an audience all along the way, and eventually a great portion of the rest of the public is going to wake up and pay attention.

Mutt Lange started off doing sound-alike records.  Reg Dwight recorded demos.  So many of the stars of yore paid incredible dues.  So when they were finally foisted upon the marketplace we were stunned by their talent.  "Your Song"?  A classic still performed today.  A Jonas Brothers track?  That’s an exercise in finance, based on marketing.  Just like no one wants Hanson anymore, in a few years the Jonas Brothers will be a nostalgia item that does a fraction of their present business.  The boys have got experience in promotion, in acting, but in music?  Their musical history is very brief, they’ve got very little in the way of chops.  Rather than practicing in their basement, they’re busy performing in throwaway Disney pics.

You don’t have to be thirty to get enough experience.  Those piano lessons your parents make you take count.  As do all those rehearsals in the aforementioned basement.  And no matter how good your musical skills, performing is a separate talent completely.  Like an NBA player with enough games under his belt not to choke in the playoffs, you’ve got to perform enough to be able to hit every note and keep the audience in the palm of your hand.  So when people drag their friends to your show, they’re mesmerized.

Everything you hated is essentially gone.  Looks-based music.  Formulaic radio.  Usual suspect writers and producers.  They all still exist, but suddenly they’re the sideshow.  The real money is in the bands that play live.  But people really only want to see the dinosaurs in quantity, because they’ve been at it so long that they’ve not only got a catalog of great tunes, they’re great on stage.

Walk into the wilderness with me.  If you believe in yourself, you’re never going to give up, you’re going to play until you make it.  And believe me, if you put in all that time and no one is paying attention you will give up, that life is just too frustrating.  But if you’ve got talent, you’ll see signposts along the way, enough positive feedback to keep you going.

So, maybe we’ll have a vibrant music scene in the future.  When the old game plays down to nothing (and Terra Firma just wrote down their EMI investment), and the new music-based acts have enough hours/time/practice/performance under their belt to gain a head of steam.  Instead of being worked on a track by a street-teamer looking to get ahead, a true friend will hip you to something that blows your mind to the point where you’ll have to tell everybody else you know.

The opportunities are not only in playing, there are giant holes in infrastructure as well.  These new acts need managers.  Organizations akin to labels to run their businesses.  Even concert promoters to believe in them and showcase them live.  None of the old farts want anything to do with these developing acts, because the payday is so far away, and a trickle at first.

We could be on the verge of a renaissance.  But it could take five years to start to come clear and ten to burst into a supernova.  Practice, practice, practice.  If you’re truly good, you’ll find an audience.  But remember, it won’t happen instantly and you’ll struggle as opposed to living the high life.  You’ll be driving a rickety old van as opposed to flying first class.  But when the money starts to come in, it will POUR!

Yes, you want to get paid.  But even more, you want people who are touched by your original music, who NEED to go to the show.  Which will be cheap.  Because you’ll want a big tent, you’ll want to include everybody.  That’s the Net ethos.  The old boys are about being exclusionary, whereas today’s kids know everybody else in their entire town!

The audience is waiting.  Listeners want something great to pop up on their radar, that they can believe in.  It’s human nature.  Think of listeners, not executives or gatekeepers.  You can write the script.  We’re ready for you!

I was going to write about Saul Hansell’s article in the "New York Times" about the sale of "iPhone: The Missing Manual" at the App Store.  Mr. Hansell focused on the fact that people paid for it, but more interesting to me was that not only was this the number one computer book this year, the number one format is as an app for the iPhone.  All in a week that Prince announces a triple album set available from Target.  Unless he’s going to write a hit song and play in each and every store in the chain, this is a bad deal.  We’ve got enough Prince music.  We want two CDs and a third of a protege?  I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a life.  And Prince hasn’t put out a good album in this century.  He keeps making more and more irrelevant music, to the point I don’t even bother checking it out.  He’s lost me.  If only he’d cut one good track.  And then another.  Sure, I can understand a need to express yourself, but not at the expense of your audience.  Prince gets a check, we ignore him.  Next!

You probably think I’m making a point about CDs.  How they’re history.  But that is not the analogy that struck me reading Saul Hansell’s article.  The printed edition of "iPhone: The Missing Manual" costs $24.99.  The App Store version costs $4.99.  And when the publisher lifted the cost to $9.99, sales dropped 75%!  So they lowered it back down.

If I hear one more asshole singer, songwriter or record company executive tell me about the value of music, I’m going to puke.  A record is worth a billion dollars if listening to it keeps you from committing suicide.  It’s invaluable if you propose to your spouse when it’s playing in the background.  But that doesn’t mean it should cost a buck, that when you tote up the cost of ten tracks you reach the price of a CD.  Music needs to be much cheaper.  Actually, it’s free.  It’s just that the rights holders won’t admit it.  Or believe by suing the Pirate Bay as opposed to embracing new economic models we can all jet back to the nineties, when the labels were fat and happy.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this missive.  It’s got nothing to do with the App Store, but an article about network television in Saturday’s "New York Times".  In the 1978-9 season, "All In The Family" had a 30.5 rating, meaning almost a third of the homes with TV watched it.  In 2007-8, "Desperate Housewives" had a 10.9!!  Was "All In The Family" that much better?  Or are there just that many alternatives these days?

Let’s speak music business numbers.  Back when the music business was fat and happy, in 1998-9, "E.R." had a 17.8 rating.  So, in ten years, a popular network show lost almost HALF of its viewers.  So, if you think that the Boss or U2 or any superstar of yore is selling so poorly because of piracy, you just haven’t thought enough about the equation.  There are only 24 hours in a day, music is fighting against not only television, but video games and the Internet too.  Furthermore, every record is fighting against every other record in history.  You can only play one record at one time.  Do you want to spin the newly-hyped crap or an old classic?  If you do create a new classic, how hard is it to get the word out?

In other words, we’re seeing the death of the superstar.  Maybe one or two could emerge, kind of like "American Idol", but the ubiquitous star, known by everybody, is history.  In other words, shoot lower and try to make your profits in more ways than selling records.

No diamond albums, no stadium shows.  Probably no arena shows either.  So to hear indie promoters rail against Live Nation and Ticketmaster merging is missing the point.  The labels have bitten the bullet, become marginalized, unable to cope in this new world.  And historically, the labels have built demand for live performance.  Who is building that demand today?  And how great is it anyway?

We’ve got a clean slate.  Don’t try to reach everybody, because everybody isn’t interested.  Don’t care if the A&R man doesn’t hear a single, just worry if you’ve got an audience that wants to hear your music. Don’t focus on your SoundScan number, but your bottom line.  How many t-shirts did you sell.  How many deluxe packages.  You’ve got to get people into the gig so you can sell them other shit.  It’s no different from a supermarket putting cheap items by the cash register.  That’s where you are, that’s where you check out!

So the deafening roar of complaints by the oldsters should be completely ignored.  The glory days are never coming back, certainly not in the old way.  The major labels are marginalizing themselves, by clinging to the model of distributing hit product, when hit product is almost an oxymoron.  Unless you sell the ones and twos, unless you’re in the marginal world, you’re screwed.  It’s kind of like Google.  Imagine if they only provided a few searchable sites, and were looking for people to pay ten bucks for a direct hit. That’s the model of the music business.  Whereas Google serves everybody, exactly what they want, and makes its money on servicing a zillion niches.  Everybody doesn’t click on the same ad, you just click on what you want to.

Will someone roll up the acts to his and their advantage?  That’s Irving Azoff’s play.  That’s what the merger is about.  Is it the only way out?  Of course not.  But the alternative starts at the grass roots.  With bands that generate followings.  And finding a way to monetize those followings.  Irving’s a sexagenarian. The twentysomethings will inherit this business.  But so many would rather work in Silicon Valley, the odds of success, the number of zeros on the paycheck, are so much higher…

I don’t want you to believe in your record.  I want other people to.  And they come to music not by being hyped, not by being marketed to, but by word of mouth.  It’s a whole new paradigm.  Radio broadcasting is a dying medium, just like network TV.  Oh, there’s still a business there, but it’s not the future.

The handwriting is on the wall.  Don’t be dazzled by what’s on TMZ, most of those people don’t make any money.  Don’t look for an advance.  Just look to make music so good that when someone hears it, they need to tell others about it.

How many people are going to tell their friends about Prince’s new album?  None.  No one has hipped me to a new Prince track in fifteen years.  The release of his album is a dead end.  He’s abused our trust. When you e-mail me an unsolicited track you abuse my trust.  When you add me to your mailing list without asking first, you abuse my trust.  When you focus on marketing as opposed to music, you’ve got your head up your ass.

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