File trading is history. 10% of the public will never pay for music, ignore them.

Files are history. Music, like television and so much more, is on demand. As time goes by we will own less and less. As for those worried about a blackout, a breakdown of the internet, if you’ve got no power it makes no difference if you own files, and those in the know know you can sync files from streaming services like Spotify and Netflix to your device for those out of internet range excursions.

Streaming won. If you’re anti-streaming, you’re no different from the buggy whip manufacturers. Streaming is where you get paid, encourage your fans to sign up and partake.

Recorded music revenues are higher than ever for a hit, but recorded music revenue is just a sliver of your income. Of course there’s the road, but there are so many more avenues of remuneration. Instead of bitching, you should be smiling, the future continues to be so bright that you should never remove your shades.

Albums are for oldsters. Today it’s about a constant flow of product.

If you don’t know who your audience is, you’re dead in the water. Bottom up, not top down. Mainstream media publicity means less than ever before, don’t count on the label or the press to build, inform and sustain your audience, that’s your job.

There’s no such thing as too much music. Your own long tail satisfies the hard core that will not shut up about you.

Major labels have never had less power.

The goal is to get on a streaming playlist as opposed to a radio playlist. Spotify, et al, are looking for reaction. It’s not how many people listen to the playlist, but how many people listen through your entire song and save it to their library. Those which are listened to and saved are put on other playlists and can be on the road to success.

Managers are more important than ever, they’re the new record companies.

You don’t shop for a deal, agents, managers and labels find you, based on the data. Executives are combing the internet, looking at the data, 24/7, your goal is to post numbers, that is the game. And sure, the numbers can be manipulated, but it’s hard to do so across the board, in every vertical. If you’ve got high YouTube numbers but low Spotify numbers, if you’ve got streaming numbers but can’t draw a fan to a gig…then insiders know you’re a fraud.

Labels and other investors only want to know if you’ve got fans. That’s what they build from.

Hip-hop dominates and rock is dead. Rock shot itself in the foot, it didn’t embrace streaming, it focused on albums, it was based on impressing the small coterie that make up the rock infrastructure, it became an echo chamber.

Used to be the undercard at a festival was irrelevant, now it’s the way to get exposed.

The market is still manipulated, can you say “Billie Eilish”?

Play the game or don’t, decide which side you are on.

In the movie business no one knows who runs the studios, and in the music business no one knows who runs the labels. All the power is in the platforms, i.e. Netflix and Spotify.

Ignore the valuation of labels and publishing catalogs. They’re all based on the past. And investors are ignorant, can you say “Guy Hands”? It’s about monetization of past assets more than monetization of the present. Then again, money needs to be parked somewhere, and if media tells the Street that music is burgeoning, that’s where the money goes. Live Nation stock went through the roof during the pandemic when there were no shows!

Bitching gets you nowhere, now more than ever, there’s just too much news in the channel, best to hunker down and work or get out of the lane.

Repeatability is everything, when was the last time you listened to Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul”?

Don’t believe the press, it’s manipulated. If someone is constantly in the news, it means that someone with relationships is spending dollars. That does not mean the hoi polloi cares, and it’s only about the hoi polloi.

No act will ever be as big as the pre-internet acts. There are just too many options, too many desires, and there’s too much clutter to cut through to make a big noise.

Innovation is hard, but innovation is where the rewards are. We live in the era of me-too, everybody copies what someone else has done, and true creativity is ignored. Everything new starts off slowly, remember that. And it’s the music that starts the scene, not the media, you can be featured everywhere and still be dead in the water.

Never has the public had more power. The public makes the hits, not the labels or the media. And the public spreads the word. And more than ever, it’s nearly impossible to manipulate. True success is more organic than ever before. Do what you do and make it better. Chart reaction. You’re building yourself. Step by step. It’s not about one big break, but many little breaks that hopefully add up to more.

Your hardest core fans are crazy, so be wary of feeding them. There are too many Rupert Pupkins out there, and most people have no idea who Rupert Pupkin was. If it happened in the twentieth century, it’s deep history, most of it unknown.

Awards won’t keep you warm at night and they won’t increase your bank account. People don’t watch the shows and they don’t care.

It’s a sexist business. But it’s a conundrum, because so much successful music is based on sex.

Black culture rules. This is a touchy subject, but Black music has traditionally represented the underclass, which is less invested in traditional tropes and is willing to innovate and test limits because there is less to lose. Now everybody is poor, everybody is frustrated, everybody is looking for a way up, and Black culture leads the way. Unfortunately, these same Black people leading the culture are not rewarded with executive positions because the white people on Wall Street, which own these companies, are racist and scared of losing control of the store. They want to hire on criteria that no longer apply. They care more about where you went to school than whether you can get the job done. Are there exceptions, you bet! But never forget a huge percentage of Americans are threatened by the increasing population of people of color, and they are doing their best to keep their fingers in the dike. Meanwhile, their children are all rapping. How to make sense of it? You can’t!

The basics never change, it’s about the song.

If you want to have a hit write a song with melody, changes and have it sung by a great voice. Sounds simple, but very few can do this.

Voice competitions are TV shows, not music industry markets. We want to hear what you have to say more than we care about how you can sing. Write your own songs and the quality of your voice is less important, but if you’ve also got a great voice you’re closer to success.

It doesn’t have to be loud to be successful.

Spamming people doesn’t work, it only pisses them off, the road to success is an organic journey that can rarely be pumped.

Streaming and the road are oftentimes separate avenues. The road is about catalog, streaming is about of the moment. Then again, if you string together a few of the moment cuts you can sell out arenas, but don’t plan on playing the big rooms shortly thereafter.

Some of the biggest acts have no hits. Can you say Lady Gaga? Prior to “A Star is Born” she was on a long cold streak. She’s back there again. But because there are so few hit acts with her level of mindshare today, she continues to be focused on. The machine needs fodder, and there’s less A-level fodder than ever before.

Producers are creators, oftentimes more important than the act itself, can you say “Max Martin”? Proving if you’ve got the chops, if you can write a hit song, you can work forever. It’s more about the song than the sound.

Recordings service the youth. Oldster word of mouth moves much more slowly and it oftentimes focuses on live. And now millennials are oldsters.

Don’t complain concert attendees are using their phones. You’re selling an experience more than music, the music is just the enticement for a public gathering.

Documentation is everything, not only for concertgoers, but acts. Complete set lists and more documentation of each and every show, all activities of the act, are crucial to an act’s success. Don’t hire a PR person, hire a documentarian!

TikTok is about the audience, not the act. Remember this. Service the creators, not yourself. And if you don’t make youth music, you can successfully ignore TikTok all together. But don’t ignore Instagram!

Don’t make hip-hop? Go to Nashville, that’s where all the players are. Radio is losing control of country music, and therefore the country music landscape is widening. Today, country means guitars and trucks and families. You can start with the guitars and ignore the rest and still make inroads. It’s an open highway.

It’s a long way to the top if you want to make it. Bo Burnham had been doing it for fifteen years before his big Netflix breakthrough. You’ve got to pay your dues, and along the way you’ll be singing a lot of blues. If you’re fourteen and envision success…maybe you can have a hit, but you almost definitely won’t have a career.

There’s no adult version of Disney. So, Miley Cyrus and Olivia Rodrigo came up through the Disney system…Warren Haynes did not. If you’re a player, you’ve got to practice, you’ve got to find your way, it’s going to be a long journey.

Music is not an automatic road to riches, you’re lucky if you can give up your day job. The power in music is the attention, the ability to change people’s minds/viewpoints, if you want to make bank finish college and work for the Fortune 500.                                      

They were racing in France.

In 1962 I went to SAAC Camp in Westport, Connecticut. It was based at a school that no longer exists, I’ve searched for it a number of times, both in real life and online, and finally its destruction has been documented in Google Maps, I was never sure if it was a trick of the mind. Used to be, back in the nineties, the internet was new, actually, at first the hoi polloi were all on AOL, which was a walled garden. The opportunity to go on the World Wide Web…that was a thrill, the entire planet opened up to you at your fingertips. But now that’s de rigueur.

But space was the hot topic of the sixties. We were in a cold war with the Soviets, and after Yuri Gagarin blasted into the atmosphere, even orbited the earth, it was clear we were behind. President Kennedy said we were going to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and we did. Today we can’t even reach Biden’s goal of vaccinating 70% of adults by July 4th, talk about a can’t do nation.

And if you were alive back then, you know there was an emphasis on science and math. Hell, there was the new math! All this rewriting of history that America has gone soft, as if STEM studies were a revolution… No, college changed. It used to be a well-rounded education, of liberal arts, preparing you for life, which is both short and very long. Today college is a glorified finishing school, a respite of drinking, drugging and partying in  A level accommodations before you’re released into the real world where you fight to have the same level of accoutrements, and frequently fail.

Boomers were striving for excellence. The goal was to be atop the pyramid. For the Millennials it’s about fitting in, being a member of the group, and the end result is America has become tribal, and those still focused on the top have become billionaires and lorded their power over the rest of us. And it’s as hard as going from the back of the grid to the front, from P20 to P1, you can’t do it in the Haas car, and you can’t do it if you don’t have a college degree, know the right people and…don’t tell me about the exceptions, they’re like wining the lottery, they say someone emerges victorious, but I’ve never known a winner.

So on July 23, 1962 I remember sitting in front of the television, to see pictures transmitted from Europe via Telstar, starting with the Eiffel Tower, sent in real time earlier in the day. Yes, news outlets had the ability to time shift, to record and play back later, but this wasn’t even conceivable at home, we had to wait fifteen years for VCRs, and most people couldn’t afford them until the eighties.

Now back in 1962, it had been fewer than twenty years since most of our parents had come back from overseas. Europe and Asia were closer then they are today, despite Apple and its competitors constructing all their devices in China, despite the influence of Ibiza and dance music on our national culture. You could fly to London in six hours from New York and…you can still fly there in six hours, for a minute there was an SST, the Concorde, but that was ultimately sidelined and the planes got bigger, but not any faster. And if you made it to Europe you could live like a king for very little, that was the power of the dollar.

As for “Made in Japan”? That was a label for dreck. It wasn’t until Sony convinced us that their electronics were superior, and Toyota did the same thing with automobiles thereafter, that Japan was seen as a powerhouse. I still won’t buy an American car, never ever, except for maybe a Tesla, then again build quality is notoriously poor. Old habits are hard to break, especially when your Asian automobile breaks down so little.

Europe was far away. If you happened to go there, you never called home, never ever. You employed Aerograms, thin pre-stamped letters that you could fill up with writing that would reach home within the week. And there certainly were no cell phones.

So back in 1962, the concept of watching something in real time from Europe was a novelty, a breakthrough, an accomplishment that helped lead us to where we are today. Yes, the military industrial complex gave us not only Tang, but the internet. If only they’d stop building the army of yore and focus on today’s digital world, our power would be maintained. Russia is a nearly bankrupt autocracy, financially it’s a disaster, but when it comes to technology, it’s a free for all pushing the envelope. In America, dumb celebrities blame Apple for hacks when the truth is they used passwords no better than “1234” and expected privacy. Then again, most of the younger generation has sacrificed privacy, and Apple enables it and Mark Zuckerberg blows a gasket. Not only can no American ever lose their job, impeding progress, but corporate sovereignty must be preserved, even though Facebook triumphed by pushing aside MySpace.

And I’ve been thinking about the years going by. Because a lot of the signposts in my life were seen fifty years ago. And to younger generations that’s not only history, they don’t know it. Has the average Gen-Z’er, never mind Millennial, even heard of Telstar? Never mind the song with the same name?!

So I’m sitting there in front of the flat screen pissed some jerk e-mailed me the result of today’s Formula 1 race before I watched it. This isn’t the old days where you wake up in the middle of the night to watch TV shows in real time, there’s not even a Thursday or Friday or Sunday night lineup that’s must see TV, it’s all on your DVR, if it isn’t on demand nearly instantly thereafter. HBO Max may dribble out their series, but at least they put the TV shows on the service right after they’ve aired.

So I set the DVR for the French Grand Prix…and now it was ruined. I guess I can’t check my e-mail on Sunday mornings anymore, even though we all live to check our feeds.

So I pulled up the recording and they showed a bunch of buildings on a hill and it was clear, they were in France. And that titillated me. Like my old buddy Billy Gibbons says, it’s all about traveling, it inspires you. Want to be creative, want to have ideas pop into your head? Go somewhere! The more foreign the better, especially where you don’t know the language, you’ll no longer be passive, but fully alive.

And there’s a nine hour time difference. It’s already evening by time I pull up the race. There’s a whole ‘nother world over there, but now I’ve got a peek into it. Made me want to go.

As for the race…

People had told me Paul Ricard would be boring. And there were no crashes. And the truth is I didn’t watch absolutely every minute, I fast-forwarded with an eye on the leaderboard, to see if it changed.

But I knew who was gonna win. 

And this was a race based on strategy. The number of pit stops.

And the quality of the cars. Lewis Hamilton said he couldn’t pit again because he had no chance against the Red Bulls, they were faster in the straights.

So, you had the cars, the tires and ultimately sportsmanship.

And like today in America, there were people in the stands. But everybody in the pits, everybody associated with Formula 1, was wearing a mask. There’s got to be a regulation. As for vaccination…. You’re not going to be able to participate, as a crew member, never mind a driver, in the Dutch Grand Prix unless you’ve gotten the jab. As for fulfillment of this requirement… In Bahrain vaccinations were available for everybody, but the Formula 1 teams were fearful of getting negative PR for jumping the line. And some of the U.K. crew members are so young, it wasn’t their time yet in their home country. Optics matter. Choices matter. But not in the U.S., where you can be of a tribe and never encounter the truth, never mind a conflicting opinion.

So did you miss a lot if you missed today’s race? No, not unless you’re truly a fan of racing. This was not a hellzapoppin’ affair.

But if you tuned in, you got a peek into how the rest of the world lives.

And it looks pretty good.

https://amzn.to/3cTvrbt

This book is a commitment. It’s 627 pages long. But I read on the Kindle, and I go by percentage, and I read it at the rate of six percentage points per hour, which means…it took me 16 hours to finish it. Are you up for that?

And I’m not exactly sure why I read it. Something caught my eye. Maybe a review in the Sunday “New York Times,” I don’t remember. But I reserved it at the library and I got an offer to skip the line, to have “Great Circle” for seven days, and I took it.

I finished just in time. As a matter of fact, the loan ends in twenty minutes.

Now there are two narratives in the book. An old one and a new one. One set in the early days of the last century, and then one set in today, in Hollywood, in the film business, it’s completely up to date. And I preferred the modern story. But there was more of the old story. And I was chugging along, evaluating if the book was highbrow enough for my audience, after all it was a Read with Jenna pick, but then I became truly immersed in the story and I was drawn to reading it, I had to clear the deck, change my schedule just to finish it. That happened about halfway through.

Now most novels today are 240 pages. There’s some kind of rule. Occasionally you get books that are longer, but they’re rare. And I’m talking about fiction here, nonfiction is a whole different animal. And some people love “A Little Life,” which is 737 pages, a little longer, but except for the subject matter, that’s an easier read.

Now if you want family drama, mixed in with Alaska, I prefer Kristin Hannah’s “The Great Alone,” but her new book, “The Four Winds,” doesn’t hold together the same way. And Alaska is only a component of “Great Circle.” “Great Circle” is an epic. In Hollywood. In Montana. In Seattle. Vancouver. World War II London. Antarctica. It’s a journey. A full life in itself, ultimately the story of Marian, who’s infatuated with flying.

Not that I was so sure it was so focused on Marian at the beginning. There was a lot about her twin brother Jamie and…

The set-up was almost a book unto itself. How Marian and Jamie came to be.

And Jamie’s story is fascinating itself. Do you do what’s expected or what you desire?

But…I don’t want to give away the plot. Because that would ruin the book.

But let me just say at one point you’ll be reminded of Erik Larson’s “Dead Wake.”

And at another, Daniel James Brown’s “The Boys in the Boat.”

And, of course, “The Great Alone.”

There’s a boat on the high sea.

There’s activity in Seattle prior to the city’s explosion as a tech center.

And there’s bad weather and family issues, just like in “The Great Alone.”

Oh yeah, I have to reference another Larson book, “The Splendid and the Vile,” it’s hard not to read “Great Circle” and think of it, but somehow, despite being a novel, “Great Circle” is even more rich and alive.

That’s the power of fiction.

Now they talk about summer beach reads. “Great Circle” is not one. It’s not a light book you read in the sun, stain with suntan lotion. Rather it’s a book you read on summer vacation on a rainy day. The one you stay up all night reading in the rented summer cottage. The one where you skip vacation activities just to finish.

The truth is we live in a very disconcerting world. I’d delineate the issues, but you’re fully aware. Reading the news is depressing. And other than politics, everything’s a silo with much less cross-pollination than ever before. It’s easy to be discouraged, become despondent, wondering how you fit in and how you’ll go forward.

If you feel this way, “Great Circle” is for you. Because it’s about life, something we’re all living. The experiences. The choices. The blind alleys. The mistakes. Life is not linear, nor is “Great Circle.”

What I mean here is “Great Circle” creates a whole world, and you become engrossed in it, happily, it’s a respite from today, yet it’s not fantasy, you’ll relate to the experiences, you’ll wonder about your own choices, but…

You’ll have to read it. You’ll have to make the aforementioned commitment. And when you’re done, it’s not like you’ll be more educated, be able to pop off facts at a party, rather you’ll end up with something internal, an inner flame that’s part of your identity.

It’s your choice.

P.S. Not that the book is full of wisdom, it’s not written self-consciously, it’s not so highfalutin’ that the metaphors get in the way of the story, but there were passages that stuck out, I’m going to quote some here:

“Closure doesn’t really exist, though. That’s why we’re always looking for it.”

I couldn’t agree more, then again I’ve stopped looking for closure, it’s a fruitless endeavor.

“In her experience, proximity to other humans did not really diminish solitude.”

Or as Emitt Rhodes sang, “You don’t have to be alone to feel alone.” It’s one of the worst experiences, you’re there, with people, you want to connect, but there’s no entry point.

“In a new city, anonymity fostered silence.”

You’re excited about the change in venue, it’s just that you’re starting all over again. Which is why if you don’t move in your twenties, you’re probably never going to move at all. It’s hard to give up your friends and comforts, but you’ve got a chance to reinvent your life, find people more aligned with your interests, change is hard, but worth it.

“If you change one thing, you change everything.”

My shrink says this all the time. It’s important, when you see the problem as insurmountable, oftentimes it is not.

“One thing I learned is that you don’t just love a person, you love a vision of your life with that person.”

Sharing, that’s what it’s about.

“I’d only be doing it for the dopamine hit, to feel important, to create a bond.”

This is about knowing a secret and realizing if you reveal it, you’re only doing it for the status. We all want to feel important. But we deliver the info and then…the feeling fades, we were just a vessel, and now we no longer hold the secret.

“‘You know that’s probably the right response to meeting your heroes. Just run away.'”

How many times have I done this? I’m working on it…

A man who needs no introduction…

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/irving-azoff/id1316200737?i=1000525852664

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/The-Bob-Lefsetz-Podcast

https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast