I have no idea what possessed Guy Hands to purchase this pig in a poke, but having done so, and seen what sick shape the business is in, he is now making drastic efforts to insure its survival and future viability and for this I applaud him.

Those in the industry have been laughing at Mr. Hands for his endless missteps, put forth in writing, for everyone to see. But in hindsight, one has to admire the transparency absent from a business whose heads act like Mafia Dons. And let’s not forget when the biggest mover and shaker of all, Doug Morris, finally went on record, he stated that he didn’t know who to call…as if he was in a Harold Ramis comedy and forgot the number for "Ghostbusters".

Not only is EMI sick, the other three major label groups are too. And despite protestations, mostly that kids are stealing their wares, they’ve done nothing to prepare for a future that is already here.

Sony hired Rick Rubin, who’s known no success as a label head and can still pursue his production trade elsewhere. Mr. Rubin’s monumental moves? Moving the office and pronouncing in the "New York Times" that subscription is the future. Meanwhile, Mr. Rubin is famous for not even going to the office, and he hasn’t outlined how this subscription model will work, never mind help make it a reality.

On the other side of the Sony BMG monolith, we’ve got Clive Davis. Who’s functioning like it’s 1995, if not 1975. Sure, he’s done a phenomenal job with Alicia Keys, but the Idol franchise is wilting and a ton of money is still being spent. There’s no new thinking here.

There’s new thinking at Warner, but it constantly keeps changing. Is Steve Jobs the savior or the enemy? Is DRM good or bad? Edgar Bronfman, Jr.’s problem is he’s a songwriter with money. He’s too close to the way things used to be, and too rich to realize what dire straits his business is in.

And Universal functions like the CD is on a juggernaut. Except for bad lieutenant Jimmy Iovine, who seems to want to get out, make movies, sell headphones, go wherever the money flows more easily.

It’s been fascinating to watch these companies implode. Kicking and screaming while their sales of recorded music go down, as they ask for more rights from artists and lay off staff. If they have the answer, it must have come in a fortune cookie, for I see no innovative thinking. Doug Morris thinks the future’s a turf war, where you’ve got to bully and sue to get your due. Honesty, transparency, working together…they don’t come into the equation. We need to fear Universal. Apple’s got to genuflect. Is this any way to run a business?

Of course not.

Traditional players are scared by Mr. Hands’ renovation plan.

First and foremost, firing 2,000 employees.

Roger Ames, who Steve Jobs went to first, the driving industry force for the iTunes Store, has told me that he can run the company like one up in Silicon Valley. He can employ outsourcing to get what he needs.

I’m not sure this is possible, but I give Roger credit for having a clue, having a plan. A way to get rid of the crushing overhead.

But more interesting to me is EMI’s jettisoning of big advances and its pledge of honesty and transparency. If you’re not in partnership with the artist, the mutual distrust only hurts your bottom line.

Insiders know for that in excess of a decade, there have been no royalties. Only huge advances. A manager of superstar acts told me that he tells every artist to fire him if they ever get a royalty check, that if the company sends them more money, he’s not doing his job well. Miles Copeland famously took a larger percentage on the Police for less up front. Those who believe in their acts will do this. If they believe they will get paid.

And no one believes in an honest accounting anymore. So we’re going to march forward with this as a given? Which is what is happening at the other label groups…

Should a band be signed to the highest bidder, or the label who believes most, and can break the act?

Money has ruled this business for so long that its infrastructure, its basic principles, have rotted away.

I feel for Coldplay, Robbie Williams, who made deals in the old world, have become superstars and want everything to be the same as it ever was. Maybe Guy Hands hasn’t handled them well, maybe they should be on another label. But Mr. Hands’ goal isn’t to kiss the butt of the old guard, but to find a way to make his company prosper.

Radiohead hasn’t sold that many copies of "In Rainbows" since the CD was released after the first of the year, fewer than 200,000. But they’re making a bloody fortune, much more than a superstar act on a major label, possibly more than five bucks a record when they’re all done. Can Guy Hands compete with this? Not via the old model. The bands think they can still go five times platinum, when almost nobody does, and a band’s old track record is no longer such a good predictor of their future sales success. Hell, look at Jay-Z!

So do you pay a fortune and cross your fingers or blow the whistle and say you’re done?

I don’t want to give the guy too much credit, Mr. Hands is a financier, he wanted to borrow money, he needed to make the trains run on time. But this latest restructuring is not purely about cutting, there is some wisdom, there is some strategy. And for that I support him. Change is anathema to the old guard. But if you don’t change, you die.

Sales Force
by Sasha Frere-Jones

Back in the sixties, we’d buy greatest hits albums.  But only sporadically, when a band we hadn’t thought was a stayer turned out to be, or one we didn’t think we liked that much ultimately churned out so many hits we didn’t even know where to start, there were too many albums to buy, so we figured we’d get all the radio songs at one time.

My first Rolling Stones album was "Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass).  No one called it "Big Hits", everybody called it "High Tide", maybe "High Tide and Green Grass", and it was a killer.  Released for Christmas long before we knew that was how the music industry operated, the track I was riveted by was not the overplayed, but unable to burn out on, opener, "Satisfaction", but the follow-up, which was never an AM hit, not in my market anyway, but possessed one of the greatest guitar sounds of all time, "The Last Time".

I told myself once, I told myself twice, that I always loved "Tell Me", but I became enraptured with "Play With Fire".  Every time I take the tube in London and I see "Stepney" I’m brought right back.  Listening to this dark song during those dark days of winter I experienced the true English sound, made on damp, dreary days.  There’s a certain soul in the music of people who live in bad weather.

But the song off of "High Tide" I heard this afternoon, on my way to Beverly Hills, was "19th Nervous Breakdown".  It was playing on XM’s Top Tracks.  I heard it after pushing the button from the folk station, the Village.  Where I’d been listening to Donovan’s "Colours".

Not that I could remember what track it was.  I pulled up my iTunes library as soon as I got home, didn’t see anything that immediately jolted me, and I didn’t want to look for my copy of the two CD best of, so I just went to Amazon to look at the track listing.  And that’s where I saw it.  The album I purchased back in 1969, which is in a box of vinyl somewhere in my house, which I’d forgotten I owned, even that it existed, until I saw the album cover photo online.

I know, I know, Donovan’s the guy Dylan puts down in the movie.

Bob’s right, Donovan is no Dylan.  But he was pretty good.  He had quite a run.  I needed to own the greatest hits album because of "Sunshine Superman".

Some songs are made for the summer, they brighten your whole day, they put a bounce in your step.  That’s "Sunshine Superman".  Positively sixties, but somehow timeless.

The greatest hits album also contained "Mellow Yellow", back when "electrical banana" was seen as a marijuana reference, back before people were shooting heroin on TV…and then going to rehab, ALSO ON TV!

I must say I found "High Tide" more satisfying than Donovan’s "Greatest Hits", but I loved owning "Hurdy Gurdy Man", never mind "Catch The Wind".  But it was the secondary tracks that came alive.  When you bought albums in the sixties, when your money was dear, when you couldn’t afford that much, you played your purchases out, you became familiar with every track on the record…that’s the genesis of the term "album track"…we knew them!  So I know every lick of "Epistle To Dippy" and "Lalena".  And came to love "Jennifer Juniper" and "Wear Your Love Like Heaven".  Never mind the cut that Al Kooper turned into a classic, "Season Of The Witch".

But I couldn’t immediately place the track I heard on XM today.  So familiar, yet…  "Colours"!  Also on that album!

The Donovan track that sticks out most in my mind these days wasn’t on the original "Greatest Hits" album (although it makes the reissue).  It was the last Donovan hit I remember, when time had passed him by, when he was seen as a bit of a joke.  Did Donovan know "Atlantis" would be a single?  Who broke this track, a deejay?  I don’t know, but it was on the plane stereo system when we flew to Aspen as a family back in February 1970.  Every time we’d ride the chairlift, my sister Wendy would put on a haughty voice and say HAIL ATLANTIS!

Yes, Donovan ended his high profile career as a joke.  But listen to these tracks, they are no joke.

And as I’m driving west, listening to Little Steven’s Underground Garage on Sirius, I suddenly hear another Donovan track, "Catch The Wind".  And I think how it’s too late for baby boomer acts to come back, no one cares, too many years have gone by.  I don’t mean having radio hits, that’s impossible.  But going on a big time tour.  Donovan played clubs a while back, right?  Is he just in a time capsule, or is there any way to rejuvenate his career, get young people interested?

Maybe if they heard "Colours"…

I think every generation needs its own voices.  It’s just that being young and singing your song doesn’t make you good, doesn’t make you legendary.  Joni Mitchell is better than everybody who came thereafter, never mind Sarah McLachlan, who’s already long in the tooth.  Joni didn’t only have a great voice, she had something to say!

I don’t want to put forth the proposition that Donovan had an equal amount to say, but he possessed a mellifluous voice, listening to his exquisitely crafted music took you away, on a flying carpet above this dirty, dangerous world to a place where love permeated the atmosphere, where you could wallow in your own thoughts and feel good about it.  Try listening.

If it’s all about money, then how come Universal can’t come to an agreement to participate in Pepsi’s Amazon music giveaway?  Could it be that the Universal brass are just too prickly (or just plain pricks) and that they’re the ones holding back the future, they’re the ones who are mercurial, not Steve Jobs?

Did you read the announcement?  You get POINTS!  This is why Apple ties the entertainment industry in knots, why the Cupertino company wins and the labels are putting themselves out of business.  He wanted to make it SIMPLE for the consumer, not CONFUSE HIM!  Remember when Microsoft sold music on a points system?  What, Microsoft sells music?

Not that all those Pepsi tracks were redeemed when Apple did the deal.  But at least a cap was a track, it wasn’t hard to figure out.

And it’s not impossible to figure out how to get Amazon MP3s on your iPod, you just download additional software.  Then again, there are people fearful of adding ANYTHING to their machine that isn’t integral.

So tomorrow Steve Jobs stands on a stage in Northern California and announces a state of the art movie rental service.  Rumor has it, there’s even going to be Fairplay copies of movies on DVDs, so you can rip them to your hard drive.  The movie companies get into bed with Apple, and the record companies GET OUT?  What do you think the consumer’s take on all this will be?  That the labels are right, that Steve Jobs is a scrooge, killing their business model, and they must not purchase iPods or music at the iTunes Store?

I think sale by track is economic death.  What’s killing the record labels isn’t iTunes’ 99 cents a track, but the fact that they’re SELLING by the track.  Forcing people to buy the whole album at Amazon isn’t going to save the business, as Jobs said, the alternative is stealing.  People now know they can just GET the track, suddenly they’re going to go back to the nineties and buy complete rip-off albums?

No, the game is to give the consumer MORE!  Whereas the labels always want to charge a higher price for less.  The opposite of the digital model.  For ten bucks a month you get unlimited tracks.  Or, at least the more you spend, the more you get.  THAT’S the future, not having a DRM war with your largest retailer to settle a grudge match that if the public is even aware of, they’re on the other side.

Yup, the public is with Steve Jobs and Apple, not the record companies and idiots like Justin Timberlake who will show up in any ad where someone will pay him a dollar.  All exposure is good exposure, right?  You’re still living in the nineties if you think that.  Steve Jobs isn’t doing endorsements, not advertising any products.  He’s just  making GREAT products!  His Macworld speech tomorrow won’t be televised, but every young person will know what he said, oldsters too, and if they’re curious they can watch it ON DEMAND online!

That’s the new model.  Creating something so good the public PULLS IT!  Not holding back, but making your wares available.

Don’t tell me Steve Jobs is selling hardware and the record companies are selling software.  Stop being a crybaby.  Music is the most powerful medium in the world.  You can’t listen to a computer (unless it’s got a really loud fan!)  Instead of complaining, realize partners help spread the word.  And the more partners you’ve got, the better your business.

There’s nothing wrong with the labels licensing Amazon.  The only problem is they’re not licensing A WHOLE BUNCH of new people.  Bezos and crew will do what the labels want, sell only complete albums, have variable pricing, BUT IT WON’T FIX THEIR BOTTOM LINE!  Those aren’t the issues.  Only the labels could be so stupid.

Give Steve Jobs credit for standing up to the labels.  Eventually they’ll sell DRM-free music on his store too.  After they hold back for six months or a year, teaching him a lesson.

What lesson?  That they’ll piss off their consumers and hurt their business just to evidence they’ve got some power left?

Apple doesn’t need the iTunes Store revenue.  And people will continue to buy there out of sheer convenience anyway.  When will the labels stop worrying about what the public can’t see, and start worrying about them, THE PEOPLE?

Remember when the labels held back online distribution to protect their brick and mortar retailers?  You might ask WHAT brick and mortar retailers.  Tower Records is history.  Big boxes are shrinking floorspace.  And the labels have ignored the indies, fucking them on price even though they’re the last edifice standing.  Look where this backward-looking strategy has gotten them.  Endless decreases in sales this century.  If you think these guys have a plan, if you think they can see straight, YOU’RE ignorant.  All they know is the OLD business.  Finding acts and forcing them down people’s throats, conniving and bullying to make it all happen.  Whereas the digital mantra is transparency.

The transparency here is that everybody knows the acts get ripped off, that if they get paid for the sale of music, it’s minimal.  Want to improve their image?  Then labels should say how much they pay their acts for an online download.  And make it more than single digit pennies.  Regain the consumer’s respect.  Adequately explain their business model.  But these he-men of yore won’t do this, this isn’t their style.  Which is why the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world are inheriting the earth and acts are going elsewhere, especially since THERE’S NO ONE WORKING AT THE MAJOR LABEL ANYWAY!