When I was a little boy, I was infatuated with the British Invasion. "Meet The Beatles" wasn’t the first album I bought, but when "I Want To Hold Your Hand" hit the radio in January of ’64, my listening looked to the U.K., I needed to hear the Merseybeat, emanating from my leather-clad transistor. But the jangly sound of the skinny white boys from across the pond was not the only music that poured out of the radio. There were a few novelty hits, a few holdovers from the early sixties, even some girl groups, like the Shangri-Las, and a bunch of Motown music. I won’t say I switched the station when a Berry Gordy record came over the airwaves, like I would when I heard Louis Armstrong’s "Hello Dolly", but although I was intrigued by "Where Did Our Love Go" and absolutely loved "Come See About Me", I didn’t get the same rush from soul music until I heard Aretha Franklin’s "Respect".

"Respect" didn’t come from the Motor City, but somewhere further south. It had elements of Memphis soul, there was a certain swing, a certain sexuality, not encased in the lyrics, but the music, and on top of it all was this woman singing like her story was the most important in the world! Sure, the horns made me nod my head, but when this woman suddenly started spelling the name of the song, my back straightened up and I paid attention! It was like being in school, but this was a life lesson, one I needed to pay attention to, one truly important.

Last night I went to the MusiCares dinner. You can do a year’s worth of business in one evening. You talk to old buddies, heavyweights, get introduced to rock stars. I’m shaking the hand of this guy Ted Cohen is talking to telling myself this must be Dave Stewart. And then Don Passman introduces me again, and says the musician’s name. I’m talking Mac with Roger Ames, Seymour Stein is at my table, he introduces me to the founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival. And as we’re eating our rubber chicken, the lights dim, and luminaries ranging from Reverend Al Sharpton to Quincy Jones testify to the greatness of the honoree, Aretha Franklin.

And these gigs are always the same. You listen to some famous people butcher the hits of the star. You tap your toe, go to the bathroom, speak to more business executives, the time passes. But you stay til the end, when the big kahuna finally takes the stage.

Neil Portnow read from the TelePrompter. Then he introduced Aretha. Who just couldn’t make it to the stage. I’m in the very front row, I’ve got a clear line of sight. She’s stuck at the stairs. Didn’t "Parade" or some Sunday supplement say she lost weight? Was she ill? Was she gonna make it? Then it was clear, she was stymied by her dress! Skin tight, with plumage at either end. She ultimately joked how she had trouble getting into the car at the hotel. Ah, the things we do for art, for showbiz.

Then Aretha takes the mic. And starts to talk. But this is unlike any previous speech of the evening. She’s conversational, it’s like you’re at a church meeting, planning an event, reviewing an event which already happened. She’s got no stage fright, she’s adopting no airs. She’s pointing out people in attendance, household names and those known only to her. And when she’s done telling us it took her six days to drive out here but she’s gonna fly home, she seems to start backing out of performing! And that’s the only reason I’m staying! She used her voice too much already, she’s worn out. But then she says she’s gonna give it a try.

She shuffle/hops in her dress to the center of the stage, looks back at her band, and suddenly, just moments after you hear that introduction that’s burned into your DNA, Aretha looks to the sky and sings…CHAIN CHAIN CHAIN!

I’ve seen everybody from Beatles to Stones. Flavors of the moment to legends. I’ve never had a more electric moment. This go through the motions charity event has suddenly been elevated to a religious experience. Aretha has instantly taken us to higher ground!

And the way she does it. She doesn’t boast like a modern day rapper. She just stands there and sings, winning you over with her incredible talent!

She knows how great she is. She has a hard time repressing her smile. And in the audience, it’s like Oprah’s giving away Pontiacs, heads are exploding!

I won’t go to a disco. Put on a record and I’ll sit in my chair. But I cannot help but get up and dance.

Isn’t she 68? Shouldn’t she have lost something? A step, her voice? Shouldn’t we just be applauding the legend? But no, it’s 1967 all over again, we’re right back there, when the Queen of Soul reigned over the chart.

I’m thinking she has lost weight. I’m thinking she’s not classically beautiful. But I’m in thrall to her magnetism. I’m putty in her hands. She ultimately segues into a religious number, but "Chain Of Fools" was gospel enough for me, I’m a believer!

Every chain has got a weak link. The record companies are worried about file-trading. Managers worry there are no slots on radio. Even Justin Timberlake laments there are no videos on MTV. But music, music’s doing just fine. Talent has not dried up. And when confronted with it, the public can’t get enough, people will cough up all their money. Aretha Franklin was undeniable!

Ask Vulture: Should You Watch Sunday Night’s Grammy Awards?

 1. Alicia Keys "As I Am"

Sales this week: 61,259
Percentage change: +3
Weeks on chart: 12
Cume: 2,907,459

Rumor has it that Clive Davis has no new protege to introduce at this year’s Grammy party. Could it be that you just can’t break an Alicia Keys anymore?

Alicia Keys was established at the tail end of the last era, when we were all paying attention to the mainstream, when MTV still aired videos, when men like Mr. Davis still had control. But how would you break a Ms. Keys today? Even with TV exposure, and a Super Bowl appearance, Jordin Sparks can’t sell tonnage. And what are the odds of getting an unexposed newbie to sing the national anthem? The big slots are taken up by the big players. Networks want stars for their events. If you’re already a star, fine. If not, you’re gonna go very slowly.

As for Ms. Keys herself, she’s outselling Kanye and Fitty because she’s likable. She’s not completely without edge, but she’s not offensive and she doesn’t come across as an egomaniac. You want to have dinner with her, you believe she will listen to you.

2. "Juno"

Sales this week: 54,696
Percentage change: -16
Weeks on chart: 5
Cume: 319,759

This ain’t no "Saturday Night Fever", no cultural movement. This is a small movie that people are desirous of owning the soundtrack of. A good business.

Double platinum is not in this album’s future. It’s profitable, but just a piece of the puzzle, one of the movie’s revenue streams.

3. Mars Volta "Bedlam In Goliath"

Debut
Sales this week: 53,952

Going straight down the chart. The rabid hard core fan base needed this immediately. They’ll populate the band’s concerts gigs. But you don’t need to pay attention. This is not music for the mainstream. This is a story akin to the late sixties and early seventies. A scene off the mainstream radar screen, that is real and not small and generates capital. It’s just that forty years ago, only insiders knew what was on the "Billboard" chart. Now casual viewers see the band’s name and think something’s happening, that they’re ready to explode. This isn’t true. The band will grow, if it stays together, but the Mars Volta is never going to play the Super Bowl. Maybe the X Games, but not the Super Bowl.

4. Bullet For My Valentine "Scream Aim Fire"

Debut
Sales this week: 53,223

I could lie to you and tell you I know all about this act. But I don’t know shit.

Let me look it up…

Amazon says it’s a combo of thrash, speed and punk. Basically a metal band.

Okay, I don’t have to pay attention. Everybody involved is screaming hosannas, but this is positively niche, it’s gonna sink like a stone. I don’t see a single in the iTunes chart, so I gotta figure this is what we used to call an "album act". And that’s where the money is now, in "album acts", bands that are about something more than the single. The era of the single is dead. People might want to buy tracks, but they want to believe in bands and buy many tracks, if they are good! There will be a singles business, based on Top Forty radio, but they’re both already a sideshow.

13. Sarah Brightman "Symphony"

Debut
Sales this week: 31,463

I pay attention to Sarah Brightman, not because she was married to Andrew Lloyd Webber, not because of her stage roles, but because of an album she put out on A&M entitled "Dive". With "Captain Nemo" and a cover of Procol Harum’s "Salty Dog". It was very good.

I saw this album came out, but I stopped listening when she stopped being hip and went back to playing to the old farts. I’d like to know how she reached all the old farts, this is a significant sales figure. Must be something more than the ads or reviews. Maybe she was on "Oprah" or something. That’s okay, I don’t need to know everything, no one can know everything anymore. What happens on "Oprah" is not a country-defining moment. Shit, almost no news defines the country anymore. Newspapers are tanking and we’re all surfing different sites on the Web.

17. Vampire Weekend

Debut
Sales this week: 27,501

You decide…mainstream or niche?

Vampire Weekend A-Punk

19. Alvin & the Chipmunks "Soundtrack"

Sales this week: 25,295
Percentage change: -3
Weeks on chart: 9
Cume: 274,062

This is a career act. They never sold out, all the original members are still in the band. There’s no Shemp, no Curly Joe, just Alvin, Simon and Theodore. And Simon and Theodore know who the star is. They just laugh at Alvin and pocket the bread. And if they’ve been to rehab, I’m out of the loop.

They don’t change the sound… Sure, they do contemporary material, but it still sounds like them. You’ve got to be true to who you are, you may reap some momentary rewards by following the flavor of the moment, but those new fans are casual and will abandon you, you have to play to your core, your core keeps you alive.

And they went indie too! It’s not only Radiohead and the Eagles who’ve abandoned the major labels, Alvin and his entourage have decamped to Razor & Tie, which is more nimble, which can give them more attention, can press the button on TV advertising!

Funny how the younger generation is listening to their parents’ music. But when something is great, it’s TIMELESS!

36. Robert Plant/Alison Krauss "Raising Sand"

Sales this week: 17,438
Percentage change: -15%
Weeks on chart: 15
Cume: 746,492

Holy fuck! Look at that cume!

Robert decamped from Atlantic, went to his home boy Doug Morris’ label, Universal. But couldn’t sell a record. Then he did something totally left field, on an indie, and he blows up.

If you think he’s eager to get back together with Led Zeppelin, you’ve got another thing coming. Suddenly, his career’s been REVITALIZED! And once you’ve got forward momentum, you don’t want to look back!

45. Buckcherry "15"

Sales this week: 15,752
Percentage change: +32
Weeks on chart: 94
Cume: 999,773

Metal rules! Getting fucked up and raging never go out of style, adolescents NEED this music.

This is the kind of story that used to sustain this business. Album sells for years as the good times spread from community to community. And what’s even funnier, the band had been given up for dead, they made this record by themselves!

49. Kid Rock "Rock N Roll Jesus"

Sales this week: 15,358
Percentage change: +29
Weeks on chart: 17
Cume: 731,480

From: Sue _______
Re: On Sale Dates

Amen. Always love your letters and this is so spot on! Although Kid Rock writes dumbass replies to you (that you’ve forwarded on,) at least he gets it. $30 – $45 per show, and it’s always a kickass show….and during every show he thanks fans for spending their money to see him. And, although it sounds hokey, it’s not, it’s sincere. F supporting all these jackasses – they’ve had their multiple millions, and they’ve blown them, and why should I help them rebuild their fortune? I’m living in corporate America where shit floats and too many inept folks are making the millions…not gonna help these guys reclaim their spent fortunes! (of course…..that’s until my husband finds out when ac/dc tix go on sale, etc.)

Conclusion

Sales this week were down 18.9% from the same week last year. Cumulatively, sales in 2008 are off 12% from the corresponding period in 2007.

Did Tower Records close? Was there some cataclysmic event that caused this sudden downturn? Well, maybe. More people got iPods for Christmas.

As the iPod population grows, CD sales tank. Once you’ve got the file machine, you don’t want the disk. Disks sound better than low-res MP3s, but it seems most people don’t care. Don’t forget, low quality cassettes eclipsed sales of vinyl records, which still sound better than the vaunted CD. Sound quality is not an issue, and won’t be until people start acquiring high quality sound systems. But the iPod delivers portability. How many people sit in a static place and listen to music anymore? And, good luck selling computer speakers that cost more than the computer delivering the music.

Despite Ms. Keys’ cume, this week’s sales figure is one of the lowest SoundScan chart topping totals of all time. You can debate all day long the minutiae of Warner Music’s foibles, but unless you own stock in the enterprise, you’re missing the point. The major label game, if not done, has been marginalized.

The major label was supposed to deliver tonnage for their heinous business deals. But this now appears to be impossible. Hell, as of this week, even Jay-Z’s "American Gangster" hasn’t gone platinum, and he worked at the label!

Does Mars Volta need a major label? No. I’d advise them to pull a Radiohead, and as soon as their deal is up, decamp for ATO or another indie, and take the lion’s share of their less than platinum sales. But that’s while CDs still matter. Once the CD is history, which is going to take a few more years (and it will never completely disappear, collectors will keep it alive), just license direct to the digital distributor.

The question is, what does the major label provide you?

And it’s the major labels and the publishing companies they control that are holding back the monetization of digital revenues. They say to the contrary, but do you think all those iPods are filled with legitimate music? Who else is going to refuse to monetize acquisition because it’s not done in the style they approve?

So each band is an individual entity. Maximizing revenue in all streams. Right now, recorded music is not a great profit center, but you need music to drive the enterprise. At some point in the future, music will not be free. And when that time arrives, we’re gonna have a lot of theatre acts. Only flavors of the moment will be able to sell out arenas, never mind stadia. Sure, the dinosaurs will do arena business, but that’s about nostalgia, and when the bands expire, history.

There’s a lot of money to be made in the music business. But it’s no longer Vegas, no longer about gambling, but hard work. Creating consistently good material and spreading the word from fan to fan, treating the fan as a partner as opposed to an afterthought. The nineties are gone.

I heard Daughtry on Sirius today.

There are many things wrong with Sirius.  First and foremost, the reception problem.  Secondly, the insane jive element.  With all the cliches of radio.  All the stuff Lee Abrams has excised from XM.  But I’ve come to find out that Sirius sounds better than XM.  And that Sirius plays the hits.

Let me be clear here.  The repetition could drive you crazy.  You hear an obscurity, then you hear it again the very next day.  But, if you tune in Sirius, you hear all the records you read about, that people talk about, the singles, the emphasis tracks, you feel like you belong.  I’ve been listening to XM for five years and I feel like I’m alone, in a club with my friends who work there at most.  But nowhere do I go and speak of what I hear on the stations.  And that’s creepy.

Sure, we all found cliques in our first grade class.  But the first music clique I remember was Cousin Brucie, on WABC.  Not that my radio listening began there, I started with baseball, but the announcers, although doing a good job, didn’t know we were all in it together, didn’t know that I wanted to be a member of something.  Cousin Brucie made me a member.  Hell, I was a member of WABC.

Some people listened to Murray the K.  Others to BMR, i.e. B. Mitchell Reed.  But I didn’t go to 1010 WINS, or WMCA…I parked my ears right there at WABC…  Because those guys were my friends.  And I could discuss the countdown with my school buddies on Wednesday morning.

And that’s what MTV was, a club.  Back when they used to play videos.  We even watched shit we wanted no part of, like Wham!  Because it was on our channel.

But now terrestrial radio is not programmed for humans.  The deejays speak like no one I know, and the records spun are determined by computer.  There’s no belonging.

And there’s no belonging on MTV either, certainly not VH1.  I might slow down on the freeway to look at the wreck, but I don’t want to get out and participate.  But I believe it’s human nature to get out and participate, to be part of a community, and that’s why MySpace and Facebook, all the Web 2.0 sites, are thriving.  Because humans don’t want to be alone, they want to belong, they want to be part of something!

I felt a part of Warner Brothers Records.  I even mailed away to be put on the list for "Circular", their little trade magazine.  I knew who Mo and Joe were, even Stan Cornyn.  I was interested in everything the label had to sell.  And I was turned on to acts by their twofer "Loss Leaders" series, for a grand total of a buck a record

Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders

CBS was not quite the same thing.  And MCA was the Music Cemetery of America.  Acts signed to Warner to be members of the club.  There’s no club anymore.  Except maybe Jimmy Iovine’s fan club.  But is Jimmy like Mo, living in the shadow of the artist?  Or does Jimmy want to be out front, rich, a star too?

Do you follow the younger generation?  The most important thing is to be a member of the group.  Look at their sports competitions.  It doesn’t matter who wins, just that everybody had a good time.  Baby boomers?  They need to triumph, be adored.  But rising above leaves you outside, away from the fun.

We need to bring people inside.  We need to make them feel like they belong.

The labels fucked up big time by suing their customers.  Sure, they were right, their wares were being stolen, but there were other ways to address this issue.  Like selling the music the way people wanted it, a lot for a little, the ability to taste and graze.  But this was anathema to late century label philosophy, of dictation.  We decide what you want to hear, we package it with nine other crappy tracks and make you pay a fortune for it.  And you wonder why people hate the labels.

And the concert business too.  You want to go see the act but you can’t get a ticket.  But if you’re rich, or connected, you can get a ticket.  And then you find out a high percentage of the tickets never went on sale.  Feel like you belong?  You feel like you don’t even matter, that you’ve been completely squeezed out.  You say fuck you, and you stop going to shows.

Fan clubs?  In most cases, just fees for better ticket access.  There’s no belonging involved, the extra content isn’t even worth looking at once.  But Dave Matthews gives his members worthwhile additional content and truly good seats, at reasonable prices.  How come he can do it, but other acts can’t?  Because they don’t want to.  They don’t respect the consumer, they just want to get paid.  They think they’re in business with LiveNation, but LiveNation is just a conduit, to the fan.

It’s like a hit single.  Almost no one belongs to the Rihanna posse, not in any prodigious number.  It’s about the single, there’s nothing to dig your talons into, nothing to marinate in.  We stared at the album covers because of the complete collection of tunes, what the act was saying!  And that doesn’t mean you can’t believe in an endless series of singles, that music has to be sold as albums, just that there has to be some underlying meaning, it can’t be about clothing and endorsements, because those don’t connect with the fan…  No fan has ever been offered any sponsorship.

I’m listening to more and more Sirius.  For moments like today, when I realize Daughtry really isn’t that bad.  He’s not like a typical American Idol.  I want to feel a part of the American fabric, this great country of ours.  In the future, will we have a plethora of mass appeal acts, that everybody enjoys and pays attention to?  I doubt it.  But the niches…they won’t be that tiny.  They’ll grow because people want to be a part of the scene.  That’s why all those hipsters want you to pay attention to Vampire Weekend, so you’ll realize how hip they are, so you’ll be part of their scene!  But the mainstream doesn’t want to be hipsters.  But the mainstream wants its own acts.  Which don’t have to be bland, but do have to be honest.  A fan must have the desire to meet the act, and talk to him or her, about what he or she feels.  That’s the bond.  The act must provide enough material for the fan to speak with other fans about, the songs must be deep enough that there’s something to say about them on the message board.  We want to be hooked, it’s human nature to be hooked.  No one wants to be on a desert island alone.  The Net has blown up because it made it easy for others to connect, to discuss, get a date.  Focus on building acts people can believe in, that they want to belong to.  The money will flow, that’s what dedication delivers.  Being a fan is like having a hobby, you’ll spend unlimited amounts on your hobby.  But only if you believe in it.