You may or may not be aware of the CMA announcement yesterday.

The bottom line, streaming works fine.

Needless to say, the songwriters, the indies, are up in arms.

So, what is the CMA? It’s the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority. You remember, they held hearings. And now they say there’s not going to be a market investigation. The study that was initiated six months ago will be completed, but as for the heinous streaming payouts small labels and players themselves have been complaining about:

“There has been a huge increase in the number of artists sharing their music and a vast back catalogue made available via streaming. This, coupled with the fact that there is only a finite amount of music a consumer can listen to and a relatively fixed pot of revenue from streaming, inevitably reduces the amount that most artists can earn, even with increased royalty rates”

 

But it gets even worse for the naysayers:

“While the majors’ profits have been increasing since the lows of piracy, the current evidence does not suggest that market concentration is allowing the majors to make sustained and substantial excess profits.”

And, it puts a stake in the heart of the publishing complaint, saying revenues have gone from 8% in 2007 to 15% today, although there was a slight dip between 2017 and 2021, but this was as a result of the increase of the DSPs’ share, not that of a rights holder.

 It’s a sad, strange business out there. The U.K. government held hearings, and ultimately found…there were no major problems. Sure, the study might ultimately recommend adjustments, but a wholesale investigation into abuses by the DSPs and the major labels…the CMA believes it’s unnecessary.

This is vastly different from a hearing in the U.S. Where elected officials grandstand with no knowledge of the underlying business and nothing changes anyway.

But if you pay attention to the business, you know all of the above. It’s just like politics, you can live in a bubble, you can avoid hearing the truth, if the facts don’t align with your feelings, they must be untrue!

So, the above is mostly a footnote to insiders, but buried in the CMA statement is a chart on streaming services, now THIS is interesting:

https://bit.ly/3J8PDoK

You can see the table with surrounding analysis from MusicAlly here: https://bit.ly/3J8PIbW

If you study the table, and you should, you should click through, you’ll learn…

THE POWER OF PLAYLISTS IS WAY OVERSTATED!

Yes, all the bitching is how you can’t get on playlists.

The bottom line, on Spotify, the biggest streaming service with the most active customers, meaning they stream the most music, 50-60% of listening is done via USER CURATED PLAYLISTS! What that means…well, you know what it means, you build your own playlist and listen to it, as opposed to the ones proffered by Spotify.

And 10-20% of listening on Spotify is NON-PLAYLIST!

In other words, listening on Spotify is between 60 and 80% user-driven, user choice, user selected.

How do they find out what to listen to?

Well, it ain’t algorithm driven radio. That accounts for 0 to 5% on Spotify, YouTube Music and Apple. It’s higher on Amazon, 5-10%, but that’s mostly about calling out to Alexa and…

What about the vaunted company generated playlists. On Spotify, the most active service, with the youngest customers, it’s 5-10%. And it’s the same on YouTube Music. Apple and Amazon are both 10-20%, but are those services actually breaking acts, or is this mostly passive listening by older generations wanting background music?

Then there’s “Algotorial.”

The devil is in the details. But basically, it’s a blend of company picks with tracks delivered algorithmically based on an individual’s listening preferences.

You can read Spotify’s explanation of algotorial here:

https://bit.ly/3vkZZMC

But better to read this page:

https://bit.ly/3PWS7c2

Bottom line? Spotify does pick priorities and places them high in algatorial playlists, but the share of algatorial on Spotify is 10-20%. On YouTube Music it’s 30-40%. But on Apple and Amazon, the other two biggies, it’s only 5-10%. So compared to user-picked listening…IT’S DE MINIMIS!

But let’s dig deeper into YouTube Music, Apple and Amazon.

A much lower percentage of listens on those services is via user curated playlists. On YouTube Music it’s 10-20%, as it is on Amazon. On Apple, it’s 20-30%. What this tells us is the listeners on all three of these services are not only lower in number, but lower in effort, activity, picking and choosing their own songs. These are the people who cotton to your act LAST!

As for non-playlist listening, on YouTube Music, Apple and Amazon, it’s 40-50%

As for Autoplay… That means the service keeps delivering music after your choice is finished. It makes up 0-5% on YouTube Music, and 5-10% on Spotify, Apple and Amazon. And we all know the songs played automatically are always in the same wheelhouse of what’s been chosen previously, there is an opportunity for music discovery here but it’s very small, the services don’t want to serve up any tune-outs, because then the listener will stop the stream.

So on every service, the vast majority is user picked listening. Apple’s customers are a bit more active than YouTube Music’s and Amazon’s, but not in the league of Spotify’s.

So, to bottom line it, subscribers are not going to DSPs for music discovery, chances are they already know what they want to hear and are picking that exactly!

Because in truth, the streaming services are positively awful for music discovery. You’ve got to wade through so much crap to get to what you want.

So, you find out what you want to listen to elsewhere. And then you go to the streaming service and pick that exact music and listen to it.

Whoa, so all this b.s. about playlists, is just that, B.S!

I’m not saying playlists have no effect on music discovery. And, if you have a relationship with the streaming service you have a much better chance of getting heard by more people as one of the DSP’s priorities, but most people, the active listeners, those on Spotify…want almost nothing to do with playlists unless they’ve created them by themselves!

Have you ever tried to listen to these company or algorithm driven playlists? It’s interminable. You check out a few tracks, then you skip forward, keep skipping forward, and then you give up and go back to what you already know.

So…

Sure, radio and streaming service playlists might be the easiest way to reach the most people, but they mean LITTLE!

Analogize it to network TV. Sure, that’s where advertisers go, pay money to have their product seen, but each ad reaches just a small fraction of the number of people from the era prior to basic and pay cable. And now in the era of streaming, despite all the talk of Netflix adding an ad-supported tier, MOST PEOPLE PAY TO NOT SEE ANY COMMERCIALS!

Happens to me all the time, people say, “You know that commercial…” And I always respond, I DON’T! I’m now watching a ton of TV, but it’s all high quality fare on streaming services with no ads.

So, if a song gets traction on TikTok, fans will go to their streaming service of choice to listen to it. The listening is done on the DSP, but the DISCOVERY IS DONE ON TIKTOK!

Or some other social media platform.

And then there’s a bit of press. Conventional, the big media kahunas, and then the web only outlets.

But in truth, most of the listening is being driven by WORD OF MOUTH!

That’s how you want to get your story started, not by convincing a DSP to playlist you.

But that’s much harder. A listener has no financial investment, and has a limited amount of time. They need to hear a HIT! And a hit doesn’t mean just a three minute pop or hip-hop ditty, but something that they need to hear again and again, that they will ultimately tell their friends about.

And if you’ve got fans, you can play live, and sell merch, there are a ton of ways to monetize.

But many true music fans do not have the ability to listen to music 24/7, or choose not to, with so many other diversions, so the teen driven stuff makes up the Spotify Top 50, giving an even more skewed view of the overall picture.

Let me restate.

The streaming music platforms are terrible at music discovery. Being open to all customers, i.e. labels and individual musicians, they promote so much stuff that little gets traction, and this plethora of stuff turns off customers who don’t even bother to partake in the push of this music upon them.

You want to start small, not big. You want to build a fan base, not convince the middlemen/women. It’s slower than ever, and even if you succeed wildly, your reach is less. These are facts. Ignore the hype.

And know that although you can make bank in the music business, more than you ever could before, it doesn’t compare to what you can make at a straight job in banking or tech.

Think about it. The winners take most of the pot. In EVERY industry. And at the bottom, you have more competition than ever fighting over fewer spoils. Maybe if you can’t make ends meet, it’s not the system’s fault, there is no enemy you can point to, it’s not the DSP, it’s not the major label, it’s REALITY!

It’s harder to make it than ever before, and it’s harder to move up the food chain than ever before, and this is for EVERYBODY!

There are few short cuts and they rarely pay lasting dividends.

Best to own the truth and start there.

“The Case of the $5,000 Springsteen Tickets – Triumphant fans showed up in Ticketmaster’s queue with special codes, only to encounter its ‘dynamic pricing’ system. Was the Boss OK with that?”: https://nyti.ms/3bc5FBB

This is why people hate the mainstream media. This was FRIDAY’S story, and today is TUESDAY!

If you’re interested in breaking news, go on Twitter. Maybe, and I mean MAYBE if someone famous gets shot, or if it’s a national disaster, the TV stations and maybe even the newspapers will cover it and be up to date. But they only seem to glom on to a story after it’s made a ton of noise online.

This is a broken system.

And who is this article for?

Certainly not for the fans. How many of them actually read the “New York Times”? As far as being forwarded, forgetting issues of the soft paywall, most people have made up their mind about Springsteen tickets, they’re on to new subjects. So who are you going to trust?

The traditional outlets are the most trustworthy, despite what people say, if for no other reason that they have more at risk, make a mistake and you risk getting sued, although the bar is very high in America, at least for now, the right and the Supreme Court would like to lower it.

But we live in a fast-paced society. Four days later is TOO LATE!

And who is going to read this in the “New York Times”? PEOPLE WHO DON’T CARE! This is not where this story needs to be placed, but on Reddit, in Bruce forums, where the people who buy tickets to the show go.

So what we’ve got is hearsay for days, based on some facts and a lot of opinions, and then the Grand Poobah weighs in when nobody cares and misinformation reigns.

Want to know what is going on?

Start with Twitter, then go to Reddit. They are the best places to find things out, especially Twitter, and Reddit is a great place to take the temperature, measure and evaluate the reaction. You’d think that some traditional news outlet would figure out how to marry these elements, put all the news in one place, a la WeChat in China, but the antique newspaper people don’t stop decrying the loss of newspapers when it’s a poor business model and papers are never coming back. People need NEWS, they don’t need newspapers.

As for Jon Landau’s comment:

“‘Regardless of the commentary about a modest number of tickets costing $1,000 or more, our true average ticket price has been in the mid-$200 range,’ he continued. ‘I believe that in today’s environment, that is a fair price to see someone universally regarded as among the very greatest artists of his generation.'”

You don’t defend the indefensible.

This is not computer code, zeros and ones. This is not facts, this is emotion, this is FEEL! Don’t tell people how to feel, that’s a losing game. If you want to respond you have to have sympathy, you’ve got to make them feel warm, you’ve got to make them feel understood.

As for all those tickets that were sold for a low price, most customers complaining DIDN’T GET THEM! Never mind it’s a tiny minority that is most vocal. You’ve got to ignore these people, you can never win.

Also, everybody lies in entertainment, and they’re almost never caught. If Landau wanted to talk about the ticket prices, he should have said that Bruce was upset about the situation, he had no idea tickets would appear so expensive. He loves his fans, he has a bond with them, he would never do anything to screw them over. WHERE IS THAT?

Of course, Jon may have told the reporter all this and the writer didn’t include it. Which is why when you want to make a public statement, YOU PUBLISH IT YOURSELF! More people will see what you say on your own Instagram/Facebook/Twitter/TikTok account than they will in the “New York Times.” In an era when you can go directly to the people, why bother to go through an intermediary, that’s positively old school. Young acts, athletes, seemingly every one of today’s celebrities makes their statement on social media, not the NEWSPAPER!

And the truth does not matter. Not whatsoever. So why are you trying to convince people to think one way when their heart says something else.

And you never want to do cleanup, you want to get AHEAD of the story!

If the Boss was going to talk, he should have fallen on his sword, this was a mistake. Something akin to an apology.

But the real story is this kerfuffle was passé, in the rearview mirror. Why talk to the “New York Times” at all? You don’t talk, there’s no story. The press is there to be manipulated, to be used, not to satiate. Reporters are the worst, they’ll bleed you dry and disappear. It’s a game, feed them gossip and information that doesn’t hurt you such that when you need a favor you have some cards to play. To keep a story out of the news. Sans Landau’s comments here, this “New York Times” story has essentially nothing new, there’s no news there! It’s not worth publishing without Landau’s comments.

And in today’s world it’s all about virality. If it’s a rehash of what’s already known, “Variety” got Ticketmaster’s view two days ago, a story is dead on arrival.

Of course the author could have done some real reporting, researched dynamic pricing with other acts. But that would have been too hard, too much effort on a story he didn’t really care about anyway.

And today’s story is not Springsteen anyway, it’s Adele in Vegas.

I saw a tweet saying tickets were priced at $40,000. I did a modicum of research, saw some bad seats going for four figures, like in the very last row, all resale, but it really doesn’t matter, the truth is irrelevant in a case like this. People don’t care enough to research, so the 40k number sticks. THAT’S the story.

And is there a ton of bitching?

Is there bitching about any other act using dynamic pricing?

NO! At least not anywhere near the intensity regarding Springsteen.

There is no way in hell you can convince me this wasn’t screwed up. I got an email today saying tickets were capped at a new Springsteen on sale at $2500. True? I don’t care! But they should be. Because as Landau said in this article, almost no one was paying those insane prices.

And I keep getting e-mail from people saying they paid reasonable prices. Why pour gasoline on the fire of high prices, why not wait for all the hard core fans to get tickets and ultimately be satisfied.

If you’re willing to wait…

A few hours, a few days, right before the show… Odds are pretty good you can score.

But with all this verified fan nonsense, people’s expectations were high, and what they got was in most cases…NOTHING!

They wasted their time. This was worse than showing up at ten a.m. without being verified!

Maybe you should have a lottery. If you’re really interested in being fair. But people will still complain, everybody wants an edge.

I’ll go even further than this… In today’s money-oriented society, NO ONE CARES ABOUT SPRINGSTEEN TICKETS EXCEPT HIS FANS!

Come on, even lousy baseball tickets are expensive. All NFL seats are expensive. Concert tickets have been expensive since hell froze over and the Eagles reunited in 1994. And then Napster and the internet caused them to go nuclear. You mean there are people bitching about high ticket prices still today? Do they still use flip-phones? Are they still on dialup?

And we all know concerts are not a commodity. And everybody knows you pay more for a unique service.

But you can’t convince the squeaky wheel.

This is my favorite e-mail I got in response to all this:

“Many years ago, my record store was a Ticketmaster outlet. You have no idea how many ticket customers, when we’d show them the venue layout and what seats were available, would look us in the face and say, dead serious, ‘You don’t have any in the front row?'”

Galen”

As for the fees… THE ACTS ARE TO BLAME! But you can explain the economics over and over and the public refuses to acknowledge this. You’d think that Ticketmaster is run by the Mafia and the acts are beholden to them when just the reverse is true. As for promoter loyalty, the act will go with whoever pays them the most. And if Live Nation and AEG aren’t interested, there’s always someone who will step up for a sell-out act. And then there are the casinos that OVERPAY for acts just to bring people to the premises to gamble.

As for a monopoly…

This is where it gets dangerous, where the blowback gets severe, but the truth is Ticketmaster gets all these events BECAUSE IT CAN HANDLE THE TRAFFIC, IT DOESN’T BREAK DOWN! All these people e-mail me about their services, how they can solve all the problems. And true, they have features Ticketmaster does not, but can they handle millions of ticket requests simultaneously?

And to hammer Ticketmaster’s advantages even more… If you’re not on the service you’re immediately selling tickets with one arm behind your back. That’s where people go to buy tickets first, Ticketmaster. They see what is available there, it’s one stop shopping. Whereas if another service is employed…most people never even go there! Online, there’s one entity that dominates every sphere, Google in search, Amazon in commerce… And to dethrone them entails more than being better. It can be done, but it’s very difficult. AND TICKETMASTER IS AN E-COMMERCE COMPANY! Yes, you buy all those tickets through the INTERNET!

I’ve got no sympathy for everybody bitching about Springsteen ticket prices, grow up.

But I must say, these on sales have been mishandled from the get-go.

As for the truth…

PEOPLE DON’T CARE! 

Tune in today, July 26th, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

Starting next Tuesday, August 2nd, Lefsetz Live will be one hour earlier, 6 PM East, 3 PM West.

Phone #: 844-6-VOLUME, 844-686-5863

Twitter: @lefsetz or @siriusxmvolume/#lefsetzlive

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He was a stalwart of the counterculture.

Earlier today I read an article about Haley Kiyoko. It was in the “New York Times”: https://nyti.ms/3zray37 I realized instantly it was hype, that it only existed because a publicist had pitched a story related to Kiyoko’s new record, but it was brief and I wanted to catch up on a woman that I was not sure I’d seen live or not. Halfway through the article, I realized I was confusing Kiyoko with another “artist,” but just before I was about to stop reading I read about Haley’s perfume. It said she had her own fragrance, “Hue.” I stupidly thought that “Hue” was a commercial product that she loved, because how could a woman with so little career traction have her own perfume? I mean this album coming out on Friday is only her second! Although she’s been releasing singles since 2013, but only one charted, 2018’s “Curious,” which made it all the way to #40 on the U.S. Pop chart, but it went to #37 on the U.S. Dance chart!

Yes, Ms. Kiyoko has her own perfume. That used to be a victory lap, the perfume, the clothing line. Now it’s a feature right from the get-go.

As for Ms. Kiyoko’s life… She loves to watch “Friends,” three episodes a night. And she loves Adobe’s Premiere Pro, because she uses it to create her clips for social media. COULD SHE BE ANY EMPTIER?

Haley Kiyoko is 31. When Bob Rafelson was 32 he created the Monkees, along with Bert Schneider.

Seen as somewhat of a rip-off of the music scene, “The Monkees” was a breakthrough because it brought the younger generation to TV, in a relatively uncompromised form. Never mind that the band had hits which survive to this day, Micky Dolenz’s breathy “ahh” in “I’m a Believer,” and his pregnant vocal in the theme to the television show are magic. And Davy Jones had a good voice and Michael Nesmith actually had cred and…

This was not New Kids on the Block.

But Bob Rafelson’s death wouldn’t have hit me so hard if he was only responsible for “The Monkees.”

Ultimately, Rafelson directed the Monkees’ movie, “Head,” which you have to be stoned to watch, it was not an auspicious debut.

But “Head” was in ’68. in ’69 Rafelson and Schneider produced “Easy Rider.” Made on a tiny budget, “Easy Rider” captured both the excitement of the sixties and the ultimate ennui of the seventies. We were all searching, we were all looking, no one is testing limits in movies today. Marvel movies are the standard, and their fans bitch when they don’t win Oscars! Well, none of them are in the league of 1974’s “Hearts and Minds,” co-produced by Rafelson. I still remember when it won the Oscar. It was a surprise, it was a counterculture breakthrough, it was an acknowledgement that we got it wrong in Vietnam.

But what lasts is “Five Easy Pieces.”

That’s the movie that made Jack Nicholson a star. And Karen Black too. You couldn’t be an adult, a late teenager, without seeing this 1970 film. It was about alienation, rejection of one’s past…

Today kids don’t reject their parents’ careers, they want IN! Yes, use your connections to get me into a good college, get me a gig at the bank, I’m all about the bucks, I don’t want to risk my lifestyle.

Whereas it used to be about coming to Hollywood and making it on your wiles and your wits. A degree didn’t mean much, although Rafelson did go to Dartmouth. And it wasn’t about money so much as about thinking.

When did it all start?

Most people say “The Graduate” and “Bonnie and Clyde” in 1967.

But as great as those sixties films were, it was the seventies that are revered as the best decade for films since the thirties.

And what did the seventies start with, what got the ball rolling? “The Last Picture Show.” You left the theatre feeling…empty and numb. Take that those of you who need someone to root for, who need a happy ending. And “The Last Picture Show” was produced by BBS, the production company run by Rafelson, Schneider and Stephen Blauner.

You might say Rafelson is Zelig, but in addition to being everywhere, he took action, he was responsible, he was known, HE WAS AT THE CRUX of the counterculture in film.

Rafelson also specialized in alienation. That was a feature of the sixties and seventies, feeling alone, like you don’t fit in, and you don’t want to fit in. Today, everybody is eager to sell out, they want to buy in, to be an outsider is to be discounted and forgotten, whereas the alienated were our heroes fifty years ago. They were the leaders. They were the musicians. Their perspective was skewed, and their art told us they were on the right path and we needed to get on it.

“The King of Marvin Gardens” was not as successful as “Five Easy Pieces,” either commercially or artistically, but if you were a film buff, and we all were, you had to see it. We were fans of the creators. We appreciated their singular vision.

And when money became paramount in the film business, Rafelson did a remake of “The Postman Always Rings Twice” that was so vivid, so edgy, so SEXY, that despite being unlike the pablum it competed with, it still made it into profits.

Not that Rafelson was a warm guy. He got canned at Universal for clearing Lew Wasserman’s desk. He stood his ground. Corporate executives compromise, politicians compromise, but not artists.

Like Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs was an alienated college dropout who had a vision, and it had to be executed on his terms. Many didn’t like this, he got canned from his own company, but when he came back everyone realized he was the secret sauce, he was the heart of Apple, he was our leader, who pushed the entire world into the future. Focus groups? Why would he listen to the people, they don’t know what they want until you give it to them!

Jobs was informed by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the movies of the sixties and seventies, they carved him into who he was. If you’re being carved by today’s records and movies I have pity for you.

Rafelson was an original. Far from warm and fuzzy.

And now he’s dead.

Nobody lives forever, he was 89, that’s a pretty good ride. He smoked, he died of lung cancer. You can almost say he beat the odds.

But with Bob and his brethren go the ethos of what once was, the leaders of what once was. That’s what John Lennon represented, not Paul McCartney, and Lennon is gone too.

The artists of yore tested limits, pushed the art form further, and it was clear who were the amateurs and the professionals.

But today it’s all about getting rich. You want to be a “brand.” A conglomerate, someone like the empty Kim Kardashian. If she’s your hero…I’m laughing. At you. She has done well in business, but I’m not listening to a single word she says, she’s uneducated, not very intelligent, not very articulate, and furthermore, her look is the product of plastic surgery. Otherwise, she was just an average girl in your math class. And really, I give kudos to Kim and the Kardashians, they blazed a trail. But it’s got nothing to do with art, it’s got nothing to do with the mind.

The mind… That was everything back in the sixties and seventies. Could you parse truth, could you analyze? Talking about movies was a thing, you sat around for hours discussing films. Today’s movies you can’t even talk about for MINUTES!

And why even be a director, the dream of the boomers? The boomers wanted to forge art, not create cookie cutter dreck.

Rafelson is why we wanted to come to Hollywood, why we wanted to create, why we wanted to hang, why we wanted to be involved! We wanted the power to do the same thing. And then the positively pedestrian Stephen Spielberg came along and changed the entire paradigm. That’s why they never gave him an Oscar before “Schindler’s List,” he had craft, he could put the pieces together, but he couldn’t touch our souls, couldn’t create art, still can’t, IT’S NOT IN HIM!

But the renegades…

Jack Nicholson, a Rafelson crony, was an unknown outsider, and through sheer grit and sheer talent, he broke through and became our hero. Jack was cool, he was different, he knew something we didn’t, and we wanted to hang with him, hoping some of that fairy dust would rub off on us.

Talk about being born that way…

Lady Gaga is a poor imitation of Madonna. Oh, maybe she’s a bit better than that, but where is her string of hit records? You’d think she’s Barbra Streisand, and she’s not, AND STREISAND WAS NEVER COOL! Barbra had a great voice, could act pretty well, but if you were looking for someone who channeled the zeitgeist, you didn’t look to her.

There is no counterculture anymore. It used to be a badge of honor to be on the outside looking in, joking about those who drank the kool-aid, knowing you could topple them with your mind. A mind is still more important than bucks. One person can make all the difference, but in truth everybody’s depressed, they don’t see opportunity.

I could go on, but let me just say that I saw Bob Rafelson died and I not only thought of his creative output, I was struck that an era was gone, and its progenitors are passing.

Maybe you had to be there.