What if you can’t remove the I.D. from iTunes tracks?  What if there’s a permanent watermark that connects the track to you?

That’s what lala.com has got.  I was on the phone with John Kuch at the company this morning and I was told if you buy a track directly from them, it contains a watermark, if you give it to someone else it won’t play, unless ownership is transferred to this new individual, and then the original purchaser can’t play it.

In other words, if you killed the CD, would it solve the labels’ problem?  And are they aware of this ALREADY?

That’s the problem, the CD is completely unprotected.  And trying to add DRM to it cost Andy Lack his job.  You buy the CD, rip it, and then trade it anonymously on the Net to ANYBODY!  Or, in the alternative, burn CD copies for friends, or hard drive swap ripped files.

But what if there was no CD?

Oh, you could burn iTunes tracks to CD and re-rip them.  But that’s a pain in the ass, and the labels would say there was a loss in quality.  And if you can’t get rid of the I.D., you can’t anonymously trade them!

Or you could record/convert tracks to unprotected MP3s through the analog hole, but that’s an even BIGGER pain in the ass, and there’s the concomitant loss in quality…

Maybe the death of the CD is a GOOD THING if you’re a label.  By eliminating the leak, by making buying honest file copies the easiest thing to do, maybe piracy is stemmed.

I’m not for this.  I’m for the opposite solution.  Losing all DRM and identifying characteristics and letting the music flow freely.  The more people who own more music the greater the ultimate income, never mind the personal fulfillment of the listeners.

But the labels just want to maintain their old business model, make as much as they did in the CD era.  They want you to either buy non-transferable tracks online or rent them.  Suddenly, it looks like they can achieve their goal!

The labels are going to have to make a move sometime in the next twelve months.  CD sales are going to continue to drop precipitously and big boxes are going to reduce their inventory, which will accelerate losses.  At some point does it pay to kill the CD and move everybody into the file world, just like the labels killed vinyl, even though it still had demand, twenty five years ago and moved everybody into the CD world?

In other words, by giving up clinging to the past and jumping into the future could the labels’ problems be solved?

Are the majors just going to cut overhead, fire people and accept that most music acquisition is free?

Or, are they going to do the above, or license P2P?

Sometime in the future, not the near future, the legit way of acquiring tracks will be so much easier than stealing them that most people will pay.  But we’ve got an interim period, over five years, maybe as long as fifteen, before this becomes reality.  A plan for monetization during this period must be formulated now and enacted soon.

It’s the labels’ call.

They look like they’re going out of business, but by killing the CD would they be rejuvenated?

Paul McCartney wants us to buy his new album.

There’s only one problem, the album is dead.

Are you catching this "Memory Almost Full" hype?  It’s positively deafening.  They’re trying to get the word out, how Paul McCartney’s got a new album, that he’s not an old fart, that he’s breaking the paradigm by signing with Starbucks.

Start with "The New Yorker", the issue with Tony Soprano on the cover.  It’s exactly what you want, a peak into Paul’s life.  Yesterday and today.  Here, there and everywhere.

And then maybe move on to "The Los Angeles Times".  Wherein the theme of the hype is evidenced in its finest form.  A BEATLE goes on about how major labels are dead!

"’I was bored with the old record company’s jaded view,’ McCartney says, plopped on a sofa in the large, comfortable farmhouse that doubles as a rehearsal studio here in the rolling, tree-studded hills of rural East Sussex. Outside, there is an old windmill, and in the near distance, the hazy blue carpet of the English Channel.

‘They’re very confused, and they will admit it themselves: that this is a new world, and they’re a little bit at a loss as to what to do. So they’ve got millions of dollars and X budget … for them to come up with boring ways – because they’ve been at it for so long – to what they call "market" it. And I find that all a bit disturbing.

‘I write it, I play it, I record it, and that’s all fun. And you go to the record company, and it gets very boring. You sit around in rooms with people, and you’re almost falling asleep’ – he rolls his head down midchest – ‘and they’re almost falling asleep.

‘My record producer (David Kahne) said the major record labels these days are like dinosaurs sitting around discussing the asteroid. They know it’s going to hit. They don’t know when, they don’t know where it’s coming from. But it’s sort of hit already. With iTunes, and all of that.’"

Paul McCartney is a man on the run

Always the rebel that Paul, always cheeky.  He shows that he’s up to date, down with the kids, by dissing the old guard.  But then he fumbles by laying upon us a full disc of music that almost no one cares about.

Make no mistake, Paul McCartney’s not in it for the money.  Oh, he wants to get paid, he DESERVES to get paid, but with him it’s about recognition, anointment of his royalty status.  And he’s truly royalty, it’s just that we all stopped paying attention when "Flowers In The Dirt" was hyped as a return to form and wasn’t.  We don’t want our memories fucked with, we don’t want to see Michael Jordan play basketball anymore, we might go to see Paul live, but we only want to hear the OLDIES!

That’s what Paul’s up against, not a lame record company that doesn’t know how to get the word out.  Paul is battling the perception that he’s a has-been, that his hits are behind him, and even though he’s aligned with Starbucks, the perception remains.

I’ve got to tell you Paul, I don’t have time for a full album by ANYBODY!  If you think today’s listeners plop down their ten plus bucks and play your disc over and over again, waiting for it to reveal itself, you’re DREAMING!

No, today it’s about the track, you’ve got to be hooked by the TRACK!

And "Ever Present Past" is not that track.

Gnarls Barkley’s "Crazy" is that track.  I played the entire Gnarls Barkley album because this one fucking song was so infectious, I was just HOPING that there would be more like it, just as good, on "St. Elsewhere".  There weren’t, but that’s today’s game.  Give me just a taste, I’m not signing up for a full course meal, just serve me an appetizer SO good that I’ll LINE UP AT THE RESTAURANT FOR THE FULL MEAL!

McCartney’s obviously whacked.  He thinks that execrable 9/11 "Freedom" song is an anthem, whereas if he was my dad, I’d tell him not to let it out of the studio, that it positively SUCKS!  Couldn’t ONE of the marketers appearing in the "New Yorker" article have raised his hand and said "The rule of the Net, of today is that the music has to be GREAT!"?

The old days of getting people to lay down their money without hearing the music first are passe.  I’ll bet you can ALREADY download all of "Memory Almost Full" on the Net, if you care…  But there hasn’t been any word about the album leaking, because nobody does.

Oh, you say the target market is too stupid, they want the CD.

I hate to tell you, but even baby boomers have iPods.  Hell, they’re PROUD of the new technology, they want to be the first one on their block to get an iPhone!

Maybe that’s what Paul should have done, tied in with Apple, been the one and only track on the iPhone, that’d be better marketing than allowing people to make their own video mixes, hell, that’s so 2006, so Shakira!  And instead of being ubiquitous, that’d be a good plan for McCartney, to be EXCLUSIVE!  You can ONLY hear the song on the iPhone, which would drive people to the Web to find some way to hear it, stealing it or something.  That’s how you create mania, not by banging your lame tunes over my head at Starbucks.

Yup, everybody’s gonna hear McCartney’s tunes at Starbucks tomorrow.  Oh, they’ll sell a few CDs, but in a week or two, if that, NO ONE WILL CARE!  Because the music just isn’t that good.

Four tracks Paul, not thirteen.  Sold ONLY at iTunes.  You’ve got it right that the labels are dead, but you’ve got to jump into the future.  While you’re still in the past.

You want your track known by everybody?  Then don’t lamely try to re-create the second side of "Abbey Road", write a FOOTBALL ANTHEM!  A song that will be played in stadia around the world FOR YEARS!  A new "We Will Rock You" or "We Are The Champions".

God, why couldn’t they get the guy to focus on music first.  If he wrote a song HALF as good as "Yesterday", then people would WANT the album, to see if there were MORE!

But no, all we know about McCartney’s new album is that you can buy it at Starbucks.  Isn’t that like Apple announcing you can buy iPods at Best Buy?  Better yet, Microsoft announcing ZUNES at Best Buy?

Distribution is not the story, ART is the story.  And McCartney’s focus is all wrong.  Give me one good reason to pay attention.  And that’s one killer track.  Hell, it doesn’t have to be "Yesterday", I’ll settle for "Junior’s Farm", maybe even "Helen Wheels".

Or maybe Paul’s just lost the touch.  That’s the real story here.  Do our old rockers still have it?  If they produce something great can it be ubiquitous?

Rod Stewart played it safe.

Bob Dylan never released mainstream product.

The Rolling Stones are a joke.

Tom Petty’s "Last DJ" is mediocre enough to make Jim Ladd quit.

Say it ain’t so Paul.  Tell us you’ve got one great track left in you, that’ll make us believe.  And then we’ll want MORE!  Doesn’t matter if it’s CD or a file.  But it does matter how you serve it up.  Not WHERE you serve it up so much as how you entice us.  Do you marry the girl who gives it up on the first night?  Do the play the World Series BEFORE the season begins?  Lead us so ever gently into the land of quality.

That’s the story of the marketplace today.  There are very few good things out there.  We revel in good stuff, and tell everybody about it.  You missed the boat Paul.  We wanted something better.

Next.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

After my wife moved out, after I had an horrific operation that still haunts me, after I ran out of money, after my father died, my shrink fired me.

Actually, it didn’t go down exactly that way.  The shrink part.  The rest is true.  The shrink was getting a divorce, he declared bankruptcy, he got remarried and left town, after guaranteeing he wouldn’t.  Why did he guarantee this?  HOW THE FUCK SHOULD I KNOW?

Money’s a funny thing.  When you don’t have it, it’s all you think about, its lack is an overwhelming presence.  You can’t sleep, you’re eating the $1.19 frozen food from Ralphs, you can’t go anywhere because you don’t want to pay to park, your whole life goes ZIP, the same way Alabama 3’s "Woke Up This Morning" ends abruptly with a scratch at the beginning of every "Sopranos".  It’s not 9/11, the rest of the world marches forward like nothing’s changed, but you’re still sitting at the starting line, without your track shoes.

This screed is about last night’s "Sopranos".  There’s your heads-up, for all you fucks who e-mailed me about spoiling your lives a couple of weeks back.  Funny how people want to STEAL music in advance of its release, but will wait days, sometimes WEEKS, before they watch the latest "Sopranos" episode because they CAN, proud of their TiVos like a kid who wears his Mickey Mouse ears every day after returning from Disneyland.

When you woke up this morning everything was gone
By half past ten your head was going ding-dong
Ringing like a bell from your head down to your toes
Like a voice telling you there was something you should know
Last night you were flying but today you’re so low
Ain’t it times like these that you wonder if you’ll ever know
The meaning of things as they appear to the others
Wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers
Don’t you wish you didn’t function
Don’t you wish you didn’t think
Beyond the next paycheck and the next little drink
Well you do so make up your mind to go on, ’cause
When you woke up this morning everything you had was gone

So I’m lying on my bed thinking how it feels like I’m watching "Six Feet Under".  Which began every week with a death.  And contemplating the similarity, how both shows were on HBO, there was a HIT!  Sil strangling a member of the crew.

Took me two hours to WATCH this "Sopranos".  I kept rewinding, replaying, trying to catch every word.  That guy WAS a member of the Sopranos family, right?  There are so many characters, it’s so confusing, every line counts, miss one and you’re like the FBI, always one step behind.

Suddenly everybody was hostile to Tony.  His agent buddy wanted nothing to do with him, drawing a line in the sand between them.  But feeling guilty, catching Tony on the street, he intimated that Phil was going to make a move.  And Tony lost his appetite.  He threw the rest of his barely eaten sandwich in the garbage.

The "Sopranos" is about eating as much as killing, the mobsters never lose their appetite.  But when a crisis hits, you don’t run on food, but adrenaline.

And Peter Bogdanovich is as scummy on TV as he is in real life, putting his wife up to confronting Dr. Melfi, revealing her truth to the assembled multitude.  Dr./patient privilege?  About as valid as the attorney/client privilege that prevents all those music business barristers from disclosing who they represent and what their deals are…NOT!

You can’t kill Bobby Bacala.  We like him!

But the Leotardo family is right, he used to be Junior’s driver.  Maybe the Sopranos ARE a two-bit family.

Or is Phil still angry that his family name was changed from "Leonardo" to "Leotardo" at Ellis Island, has it colored his whole life.  A name can do this.  Like looks.

And the bungled hit.  You knew Paulie would fuck it up.  Or was he ready to turn?  Why was he so anxious?

And the random violence, the killing of the Ukrainians, innocent bystanders.

And then the blowback began.  The Soprano family suddenly went from offense to defense.  Little Steven Van Zandt is gonna HAVE to go back to Springsteen, because he’s out of this show PERMANENTLY!

And everybody piling out of the Bada Bing.  Watching the aftermath of the hit.  Like we watch Lindsay and Paris, they’re there for our amusement.

But the essence of the episode, the heart of the episode and the series itself, came shortly thereafter, when Tony sat down with A.J.

He blew off the good-looking rehab girl like my father dismissed my records, they were IRRELEVANT!  In Tony’s case, he wanted to save A.J.’s life, the FAMILY’S life.  Didn’t matter that A.J. had just come out of the hospital, he was speaking to him man to man, in a way he never does.  A.J. can only react like a child.  But Tony doesn’t want to hear it, not today, he goes into a RAGE!

You might think this is TV, but I remember when I had that horrific case of mononucleosis that would not quit, that my family couldn’t tolerate, thinking I was a lazy son of a bitch, and one day my father came into my room, shut the door and told me to can the act and stand up and fly straight, because it was ruining his MARRIAGE!

Where did this leave me?  Wasn’t he married to my mother?

I escaped to the west coast.  And I’ve never returned.

I don’t know where Carmela, Meadow and A.J. are.  But Tony’s holed up in an old house, of a vintage when his father was boss.  He’s sleeping with one eye open, with a gun in his hand, waiting for what, he doesn’t know.

I’ve slept with one eye open.  Or, more honestly, I’ve been unable to sleep, fearful of what’s coming down.

It builds. You don’t put all the pieces of the puzzle together in your brain.  You live in denial.  And then it hits.

We’ve been watching for eight years.  We considered Tony a friend.  We used some of his language.  We thought we were insiders.  We’re not insiders, we’ve got no clue.  These are not guys down the street you talk about yard care with, these are guys you AVOID!

But I couldn’t tear my eyes from the screen last night.  We were convinced there would be no resolution, that room would be left for sequels, feature films.  Oh, David Chase said otherwise, but we don’t trust the press, everybody believes in the almighty DOLLAR!

But it looks like there won’t be any more "Sopranos" episodes, not after next week.  The carnage has begun.  We saw it as a possibility, yet we were convinced it would be avoided.  That maybe the series would end with Tony in prison, but Sil wouldn’t die.  Bobby Bacala?  And Junior?  The rich mafioso is going to end up in state care?  Aren’t mobsters supposed to have endless bucks?  Stashed in the attic?

Last night our attics were robbed.  We were left feeling violated.  We were confronted with an honesty, a reality so rarely seen in modern media.  They’re going to take these people from our lives.  It’s like a death in OUR family.  We’re on the inexorable path towards mourning, as TV’s greatest dramatic series gets up its gumption and doesn’t end with a whimper, a hollow metaphor like "Seinfeld" or fake sentimentality like "Cheers", but raw, unadulterated truth.  Play with fire, and you might get burned.  Looks like fun being a gangster.  But the bullets are real.  Enjoy the laughs, because your retirement years, they’re never gonna come, you’re never gonna reach them.

From: Tom Rush

Bob,

Check the numbers on the Remember Song.  We seem to have hit a nerve here.  The interesting thing to me is that this is clearly Boomers, not kids.  So when do I get the check?

Tom

Tom Rush – Remember Song

Now I just woke up.  And having gone to bed so late, I feel like my head was run over by a truck.  So when I click on the link, and see the plays for this song…I just don’t BELIEVE THEM, they just don’t COMPUTE!  But could Tom Rush be using a bot?  None of his other videos have 1,852,789 plays.

Then I clicked on the video/song.  And I remembered hearing Tom Rush perform it a month back at McCabe’s.  And I realized these views were real, that viral attention had blown this video up.

This is how I responded to Tom:

The money comes out of you leveraging it.  Having your "manager"  contact TV shows for airplay…
Left field idea, Lifetime, women’s television…
Certainly the morning TV shows.

This is the promotion racket, just in a new sphere.  You use numbers to convince other people to take a chance.  One viewing of this video and you get it.  And anybody who wants to reach baby boomers should get it.  Will they take a chance?  I’m betting SOMEONE will.  And the resultant exposure could inject some adrenaline into Tom’s career.  More and better gigs, even PRIVATES!  This is the equivalent of a song in a commercial, but BETTER!

But Bob, aren’t you against selling out?

Well, there is no commercial here, and I wouldn’t recommend one.  But it’s not wrong to be on TV if no one knows who you are to begin with, or needs to be reminded, and it’s not calculated, if it’s not about selling tonnage.  John Mellencamp was swinging for the fences with Chevy, Tom Rush is just trying to get some awareness.  You root for the up and comer who gets a shot, you wince when the star is on a victory lap/selling out.

And you do things when you’re beginning, when you’re building, that you’d never do once you’ve made it, once you’re established.
A little TV traction and Tom could open for Jimmy Buffett.  And then Jimmy’s audience could embrace him, Tom could grow his concert business and then, like Jimmy, rarely, if ever, be seen on TV again.

The rules aren’t hard and fast, you’ve got to work them for your career.  It’s just that you should protect your credibility at every turn.  A song on "Grey’s Anatomy"?  I might not do it, but I’d tell just about everybody who wanted to to go for it.  A song in a Coke commercial?  Unless you’re an evanescent popster, decline.  An appearance on a morning TV show?  If you appeal to teens and twentysomethings and are all about credibility, don’t do it, they might not watch these shows, but that doesn’t mean they won’t hear about it, the fact that you went on to sell your wares/identity rubs them the wrong way, hell, THEY choose NOT to watch these shows!  But if you’re a journeyman baby boomer act, it’s fine to go on one of these programs to remind your public you’re still out there, and still great.  As for privates?  The oldsters who are fans of Tom would like to hire him THEMSELVES!  These ARE the people who put on the privates!  These aren’t privates so much as HOUSE CONCERTS!

Even Metallica gave it away in the beginning, that’s how you get STARTED!  As they say at Google, it’s knowing where to charge in the food chain!  YouTube plays might now be free, but you can make money down the line.

P.S. The manager part is a joke, Tom is his own manager, he never had any luck with someone doing this job.