https://amzn.to/34cGw2B

I loved this book until the very end.

Meaning I loved everything about it but the ending. Which I foresaw early, then thought I might be wrong about, but ultimately it turned out I was right.

But that does not mean “The Plot” is not a great read.

Genre books. I’ve given up on them.

You know, books where the genre supersedes the story, as in mystery and romance and… You know what you’re going to get, it’s only the names that change. Sure, the plots are different, but oftentimes that’s all you’ve got is plot, frequently these books are slightly dressed-up screenplays, with serviceable writing at best, it’s all about moving the story forward, but not in “The Plot.”

“The Plot” is this season’s hot book. Right now it’s just the media that is talking about it, but unless something comes along and supersedes it in the next month or two it will be the book of the summer, at least the genre book of the summer.

Two books ago I read Peter Swanson’s “Every Vow You Break,” a lauded mystery/thriller, in this case released back in March. And I loved the set-up, about a woman getting married, wondering if her choice was correct. They develop the backstory and then…it becomes ridiculous, I almost didn’t want to finish it. Truth is stranger than fiction, but you’d never find anything resembling this in real life, no way, like in too many genre novels, I swore I wouldn’t read another.

And then I got a notice from Libby that I could skip the line and get “The Plot” for seven days, so of course I clicked yes. At this point I’m not going to buy a genre novel, unless the buzz is so heavy, like with “Gone Girl,” which is the best I’ve encountered in the last decade, but the writing is at best serviceable, whereas that in “The Plot” is nearly literary.

That’s what they call highfalutin’ books, “literary fiction.” Nonfiction? It gets no respect in New York, except for its sales figures, it’s all about coming up with a story out of thin air and laying it down with highbrow language and making points about life along the way. And in truth, literary fiction is the best when it rings the bell. But too often those working in this vein are products of MFA programs, and their originality has been excised and they’re all about choosing the right words as opposed to refining the plot, and all fiction is about the plot, never forget it. A great plot can supersede bad writing, the opposite is never the case.

And that’s just the point of “The Plot.”

But I don’t want to get ahead of myself, I don’t want to reveal too much.

So Jake is a product of the MFA assembly line, and he’s had fleeting success but now he is teaching. Usually graduates don’t even have fleeting success. The goal is to get a gig teaching to feed your writing habit. So what you’ve got is unsuccessful writers teaching wannabes and if you’re scratching your head right now, you should be. Then again, one has to give author Jean Hanff Korelitz credit, she asks the question whether writing can be taught, I don’t think so. Sure, you can teach people the basics, like they do in seventh grade, how to write an essay, but to be a great writer that people want to read? You’re born with that. It’s an outlook, a desire…not so different from making music. It’s a calling, an inner tuning fork, you know instinctively how to put things together, how to do it, not that you don’t get better with experience. But the point is everybody can write a book, but not everybody can write a book that people want to read.

And Korelitz covers this too. You see there’s an entire community of MFAs, spending all their non-writing hours discussing the publishing industry, angry that someone else is having success when they aren’t. It’s no different from music. If you’re in the industry you’re in the trenches, talking about stuff that the average person doesn’t care about, even though it’s vital to you. And then there’s the secondary layer, the so-called wannabes, who are convinced the system is rigged against them. Hell, I constantly read about these acts complaining that they can’t make a living on Spotify and I’ve never heard of them. And then I check their stream counts and they’re unbelievably low. They’re no different.

But the difference is people care more about music. Books are a smaller world. But in case you don’t know, the biggest world is gaming, something baby boomers pooh-pooh, it outgrosses every other entertainment medium. And right now, music does not drive the culture, there’s a business, but music is not where you go to find out which way the wind blows. Bjorn of Abba has been complaining you can’t make any money as a songwriter if there are eight writers on a composition, doesn’t that prove the point right there? Imagine eight people writing one book! But Bjorn is right about a couple of things, first and foremost that songwriters have been screwed by streaming, but the labels are not going to cough up any of their points, even though they own the big publishers, a buck is a buck, they don’t care where it comes from as long as it doesn’t go to somebody else. But Bjorn also says that today songs are now more memorable than the artists who perform them, he commissioned a study. You can check out what he has to say here: https://nyti.ms/3vfUdda Bottom line, the reason music blew up fifty-odd years ago was because the audience believed the songs were channeled by the artists, representing their hopes, beliefs and desires, but if they’re created by committee…then it’s like a network TV show. Which is why when music is done right it’s the most powerful artistic medium, directly from the artist’s heart to yours. But it’s rarely done right today.

And Jake teaches at a third-rate college which is making its bread by teaching wannabe writers who will never be successful. Yes, Korelitz constantly comments on her industry and it’s refreshing, you rarely see anybody poking holes in the fabric where they live and make their bones, which is why almost everybody in the music business will say that today’s music is as good as that of the past, which everybody knows is untrue, and as a result credibility is sacrificed and the audience moves on. But when politicians say what you see on TV is wrong, that you can’t believe your own eyes, the public no longer trusts those selling, they think they’ll say and do anything to succeed, and unfortunately that’s true, what we can hope for at best is the growth of the power of truth-speakers throughout life, then again no matter what you say there’s someone who will come up with a website that says otherwise.

So Jake is a has-been who is barely scraping by, and then he steals the plot…

Sounds like I’m giving this away, but it’s right up front in all the hype.

So it makes it sound like it’s an inside story, but “The Plot” is not, you don’t have to be a writer to appreciate it. Yet there’s a lot of writing philosophy contained in it, which I found refreshing, because once again Korelitz doesn’t just parrot conventional wisdom.

So it becomes a hunt for information. But the information is secondary to the story, as in Korelitz sets the scene so well that what happens in certain situations is secondary to the enrichment, the satisfaction of actually reading the passages. Almost always when you’re reading these genre books the writing serves solely to move the plot forward, you find yourself frustrated, you just want to get the goods, but not in “The Plot.”

So I don’t get all those people who devour one mystery after another, almost all of them are unsatisfying. But if that’s your chosen genre, go for it. But if you’re a hesitant reader, maybe you should start with “The Plot,” it is rewarding. Then again, it does not stoop to the level of the lowest common denominator reader. What I mean is it’s not like reading a comic book, you do need a level of concentration and comprehension.

And there’s the device of the book in the book, contrasted with the factual story, you get confused, and that’s part of the experience. What really happened? You’re not always so sure.

But I was sure how it was gonna turn out.

But that was executed pretty well, yet unfortunately foreseeable.

So I finished “The Plot” in twenty four hours, I was excited to tell you about it until the last ten percent. And in a genre novel the last ten percent means a lot.

But up until then…

Trailer: https://bit.ly/3vcNhNU

1

This Netflix series is strangely satisfying…no, it’s incredibly engrossing, if you turn it on you won’t turn it off, it will instantly make you a fan of Formula 1.

I follow Formula 1 the way I follow the Tour de France. I see who wins, the standings, but I no longer watch the action.

Grow old enough and your time is precious, I really don’t want to spend four hours watching a baseball game. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I still want your tickets, it’s just that when I was a kid I watched and played a ton of baseball, the Yankees were everything, I knew all the players, read all the books and then…

Football got a huge boost when Namath called and won the Super Bowl. It pushed football ahead of baseball as the nation’s favorite.

And I played football too. Sports were different back then, they were casual. As in pickup games. You walked down to the field with your glove or whatever equipment was required and waited for enough people to show up to start a game. It was never set up by our parents. We just walked out the front door and said SEE YA LATER! Not that our parents were worried. Turns out they had no need to be, no need to today either, turns out most snatching of kids is a result of parental disputes, not independent bad actors, but after learning in therapy that their parents were the root of all their faults the boomers decided to do it differently, fathers would be regularly involved with the children, and everything would be mapped out and supervised.

And then sports became truly serious. If you didn’t focus on one sport in your single digits, there was no hope you’d become world class. And you focused on this one and only sport, playing the game for fun…that went out the window, burnout became an issue.

And then there was the conditioning. All sports are now completely different from what they used to be. Physical strength is key. Not that I could ever relate to a gym rat. I follow skiing on Apple News and I’m inundated with stories of Lindsey Vonn pumping iron. I feel sorry for her, she can no longer compete in the World Cup and is not quite sure what to do with herself so she has returned to the gym. I can think of nothing more boring than lifting weights. Then again, we used to be much more active, obesity wasn’t as big an issue, then again the food was cleaner and we were not addicted to our screens.

But World Cup skiing is a good example. It blew up in the sixties with Jean Claude Killy and Billy Kidd. Then came the dominant Stenmark years. Then Girardelli. Then Hermann Maier and Bode Miller and somewhere along the way it all blended together and to a great degree I stopped watching. Just new twentysomethings, not radically different from the generation before them. Marcel Hirscher won eight World Cups and I don’t remember watching any of his races. Well, a few, but the truth is it’s all a blur today. And with every race now available, I watch almost none. The tyranny of choice. A ski race on TV used to be a special occasion, now you can follow online, the winning runs are posted to YouTube shortly thereafter.

But in the days of scarcity, I saw all these events on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.” All of them. Which means I became familiar with Formula 1. They always showed the Monaco Grand Prix, and the breakthrough was cameras in the pavement, which always got run over and broken before the race was over.

Now if you’ve ever been to a car race you know it’s pretty boring. Either you’ve got to be a hard core devotee or going for the event, the atmosphere, the party, because you just can’t see much. I went to the Long Beach Grand Prix once and I was stunned how close I could get to the track, but it was only in one turn, who knows who was winning.

As for the Indianpolis 500, that was a thing when Andy Granatelli came out with his turbine engine cars, that piqued my interest. But then IndyCar racing split into two factions and it’s never been the same since, only its premier event gets any traction.

And the truth is NASCAR is slipping in the U.S. And means almost nothing overseas.

And Formula 1 is for the rest of the world. And once they conspired to make the cars slower, to limit their speed, I lost some interest. But it was fun to see who won, especially when Lewis Hamilton came from nowhere and then became dominant.

But still, I could not understand how one guy controlled, owned the whole damn thing, and that his daughter ended up buying Aaron Spelling’s mansion, the largest house in L.A. County, with 123 rooms, 27 bathrooms and 14 bedrooms. It’s a house for a cult, not one family, then again the wants and desires of the uber-rich are oftentimes unfathomable.

And speaking of unfathomable, now Liberty, John Malone’s company, owns the whole damn thing. How does this happen, where does this leave Formula 1?

2

The drivers are athletes, with almost no body fat, also working out in the gym ad infinitum, yes, you’ve got to be in top shape to drive a Formula 1 car. As for Nascar…Tony Stewart appears on screen and he’s beefy, you’ve got to be lean to even fit in an F1 car, never mind endure the races.

So, there are ten teams. With two drivers each. And only three can win. As a matter of fact, the first season, 2018, the only one I’ve watched so far, focuses almost entirely on the mid-pack, Lewis Hamilton gets almost no screen time. Losers do, like Williams, the perennial last place finisher.

But the drivers are just the tip of the iceberg. Each F 1 team has hundreds of members, and often spends hundreds of millions. That’s another reason why Mercedes-Benz and Ferrari dominate, the money!

So it’s interesting who wins. But it’s the human stories, the “up close and personals,” that are most intriguing.

Turns out the people who run these teams are lifers, people who’ve dedicated their entire lives to car racing, like in America people dedicate theirs to baseball, or football. But the season is even longer than baseball, nine months, with twenty one races. And each race lasts a weekend.

Friday is practice.

Saturday is qualifying.

Sunday is the race.

And when you watch them race…it appears that the only time these cars are adhered to the road completely, tires gripping, is on the straightaways, otherwise they’re constantly skidding at 200 miles an hour.

But that’s not the most interesting part.

McLaren has the best driver but hasn’t fielded a winning team in years. They’re perennial also-rans.

And Haas is an American outfit, only in it for a handful of years, fighting to move up the middle of the pack.

Renault? Meaningless in America, and in trouble in Europe. The truth is Carlos Ghosn hooked the operation up to Nissan, and then Mitsubishi, but now he’s in exile in Lebanon and the enterprise is falling apart. It’s been in the news. But Cyril, the leader of Renault’s operation, says money is no issue.

But they can’t win.

Red Bull? They’ve got nothing but money. But they’re paying their number two driver more than their number one, and number one doesn’t like this.

And the drivers…they’re all skilled, but the best way to stay in the game is to bring sponsors, i.e. money, that’s what teams want most. Otherwise, unless you’re winning, chances are you won’t find a seat next year, and that happens, you were in the show and now you’re not, your career is over. Like I said, there are only twenty seats!

So you’d think it’s a pretty insulated operation, so small.

But it travels around the world, even to places like Azerbaijan. And the truth is people follow it all over the globe in droves, it’s a really big thing, just not in America.

So you’ve got the drama of the heads of the operations, will they lose their gig? There are only ten gigs available, this is not the NFL or MLB. You’ve got to produce or…

That’s what bugs me, reminds me of sports growing up. Everybody is friendly, you’re teammates, and then you have an off-season and you’re cut. You’ve got to sleep with one eye open, you can only depend on yourself. Even your teammate driver is oftentimes the enemy.

And who knows what will happen in the future. Andy Granatelli’s turbine engine car pooped out before the finish line, then it was corralled by the rules. And there is an electric racing circuit now, but it’s absent one of racing’s main draws…there’s no noise! And when autos become self-driving, when people don’t even own them, when they call them up on demand, will people clamor to watch Formula 1? I don’t know, but it’s got to take a hit.

And the truth is F1 is dangerous, people do get killed, but it is so much safer than before, most drivers survive heinous crashes unscathed.

And then there are the independent owners. The South Asian man under investigation in India for going bankrupt and not paying people, but still pouring money into his F 1 team.

And the Canadian billionaire, whose cash delivers a seat for his son.

And the desire to move up to Ferrari…

As for the cars themselves, just take a peek at the steering wheel, it’s akin to a video game, as a matter of fact the drivers train by playing video games!

And these are not rock solid machines. They’re constantly breaking. If it’s exterior, the body, you should see them replace a broken front wing in a matter of seconds, the driver is back out on the tarmac like nothing’s happened.

But the tires wear out, the suspension is wonky, there are a million different elements and the odds of one going wrong during a race are high.

As are the odds of another driver forcing you off the road, etiquette is for golf, not Formula 1 racing.

3

So the truth is Formula 1 is much better on television. Where you can see the entire race. Even better, in this series in ten episodes you can see the entire season, the story arcs, beginning to end. And the episodes are about half an hour long, so it’s not a huge commitment.

Now the truth is I’ve been locked up in my house for over a year. To tell you that my mental state has always been positive would be lying. And streaming television does help me cope, but I’ve already seen most of the A-level shows, but then Jay & Lisa told me we had to check out “Formula1: Drive to Survive.” And we finished this show we watched on Acorn that was interesting, but not worth writing about, I don’t want to burden you with anything that’s not deserving of your time. As a matter of fact, I just finished this book “Good Neighbors,” by Sarah Langan, and about halfway through it becomes absolutely riveting, hard to put down. And the set-up is so interesting, set in the not too distant future, looking back, there are news stories and interviews and…I just can’t recommend it fully, you can check it out, but it’s no F 1 show.

So, I pulled up “Formula1: Drive to Survive” and was hooked from the very beginning. Felice too. Although we did watch that Ayrton Senna movie a few years back and she dug that…it turns out the same people made this Formula 1 series.

And we’re watching and we both have questions. Where the money goes. Rules. Yes, this series draws you further into the sport.

I will continue to read the rankings, but now I will go deeper, I will care more, because something is happening in the Formula 1 world and most people in America are unaware. Remember when George Harrison got into F 1? He was on to something. Yes, it’s a sport, it’s ultimately meaningless, but it is a reflection of the human condition, it is worth dedicating some time to it on planet earth. Every day I can’t wait for the sun to set to fire up this series, I think you’ll feel the same way too.

https://bit.ly/3oE5r8M

I’ve been thinking I was born at the wrong time.

Now I’m not so sure.

On one hand I was born at exactly the right time, I was 10 when the Beatles broke, I was there for the British Invasion, I saw the whole movie, many of my contemporaries were not, if you were born just a few years later, you missed it, you had to read about it, you watched films about it, but it was different from being there.

I love the internet. Social media causes problems, Zuckerberg is single-handedly going to turn the entire world authoritarian, but the ability to connect with people, to go down the rabbit holes of my desires, that’s priceless, that’s not how it was in 1971.

In 1971 not only did we have no internet, we had no cable TV.

But what we did have was records.

Even the youngsters believe it’s the same as it ever was, you make music, you become famous, hopefully you make a bit of coin, and that’s the music business.

But not back then.

Even back in 1971, they were still developing it, still figuring it out. This was when Peter Grant instituted the 90/10 deal. This was when you couldn’t get a ticket to almost any show, they all sold out, this is when if you wanted to know which way the wind blew, you listened to music.

We can argue, compare and contrast as they say in college, 1971 to the years that came after and the years that came before, but that’s not the point. You see the sixties were a youthquake, the oldsters were stunned, we just weren’t staying at home silently, we were revolutionizing all aspects of society, and rock stars were the most famous and influential people in the world, record albums had more power than the Bible.

Meanwhile, we went on with life as usual.

Yes, some people were hippies in Haight-Ashbury. Some moved to Canada to avoid the draft. Others took political matters into their own hands, like the Weathermen, but most of us…we continued to live our lives, we went to school, we graduated and got jobs, not that I would call them careers, economics were secondary to social issues, and the youth were all on the same side.

Chrissie Hynde has got it right about that. You couldn’t find a Republican. To be a Republican meant you rejected the music, the dope, the entire lifestyle, and very few people were entranced by that. That’s another element of the sixties that’s been overlooked, we changed our minds. It’s not like in 1965 every teenager was against the war, we were the United States, we never lost, but as the years went by and the corpses piled up we started to question what our elders, what the authorities had to say.

And if you watch the footage at the beginning of this episode, you’ll realize things were pretty bad back then, heinous. National Guardsmen shooting and killing students on a college campus? They wouldn’t do that today. But race relations…the Black man is still at the bottom of the economic ladder, but now the whites don’t hide, for some reason they feel empowered, believe Black people have had decades to get their act together, and it’s hurting the whites, affirmative action no! And now when education is expensive and the key to power, never mind success, Black people still haven’t been empowered. Whereas college in California used to be so cheap it was essentially free.

So this series starts with Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” A great album, very powerful, released fifty years ago this week, only it’s a rewrite of history to say it was all encompassing, in all households, a statement we all knew, that’s patently untrue. Sure, we listened to Motown on AM radio in the sixties, but these were not snappy ditties and in 1971 FM rock radio ruled and it played almost no black music, and although the Stones brought Ike & Tina out in 1969, if you went to rock concerts, you saw almost no people of color.

Not that Chrissie Hynde doesn’t get it right. Then again, she starts talking about us all being high and…this is untrue. Was marijuana rampant? Yes. But LSD? One can even argue that was more of a sixties drug.

As for Jimmy Iovine… He’s had great success, but now he’s acting like an elder statesman, an intellectual, analyzing what happened back then and I just don’t buy it. But they cast names in these productions so streaming outlets will buy them and people will watch them.

So what’s astounding about this episode is it starts with the politics, what was going on in society, as opposed to diving straight into the music. Because the truth is the two were intertwined. And when I watched the footage…

I could see myself. This was my time, my era. Everybody had long hair and bell bottoms and everybody lived for music and everybody was anti-war. And no one talked about how much money they had, it was about living life to the fullest, questioning authority, arguing principles with your buddies. We were all middle class, we were all in it together.

But the jaw-dropping part of this episode, the reason you must watch it, is for the footage of John Lennon. He’s dead, but in this episode he’s so alive.

I’ve never seen this footage before. Maybe it’s somewhere online, been in a documentary, but today it’s all about curation, making sense of the morass.

We see John’s house in England. We see him playing “How Do You Sleep?” to George. Yoko Ono looks anything but a pariah, she’s pretty attractive and at no time obnoxious. As for John…he’s very very smart.

There’s a  point where they show John and Yoko in bed reading the newspapers. Yes, information is king, and it’s available, but people would rather just spread their uneducated opinions.

So John’s in the studio, singing “Gimme Some Truth.” And the debate is whether to use his Eddie Cochran voice or not. Yes, the Beatles had influences. And Phil Spector says to hold off. Yes, Phil Spector, before he killed anybody, when he was still considered a wunderkind.

You watch Lennon and he’s both normal and a god. Someone who’s had some experience, but still has a long way to go. Someone willing to stick his neck out for something, to make a difference, hell, it might not work, but why not be optimistic? We don’t have that spirit here anymore. It might have died in 1969, maybe 1979, but the truth is people are downtrodden, they don’t see a way up. There are billionaires, people with more money than the proletariat can ever earn, and those with the money employ it to their benefit, to keep the rest of us corralled and in control.

Now there’s also footage of George Harrison’s “Concert for Bangladesh.” I’ve seen the movie, literally, and this footage might be in it, but it’s so impactful here. Phil Spector and Allen Klein walking together in the bowels of Madison Square Garden? And Leon Russell is young and thin, now he’s dead, George too. As for Eric Clapton…he’s doing his best to eviscerate his legend, lockdown bad, vaccine bad, if we just ignore the virus everything will be groovy!

Yes, if you’re a student of the game you’ll have fun picking out the people, Nicky Hopkins, although they eventually mention his name.

But this was our time.

They’re in a record store, looks like Tower Sunset to me, and you see the prices, and people lined up to pay…

And the people camping out for days to get tickets for the Bangladesh concert, and I remember, I did that, I lived to buy records, you had to go to the show, for a peak experience, that’s the only place you could connect.

Maybe we need John Lennon today, because I’m certainly not optimistic. By time the Republicans get through with voting laws there is no way in hell a Democrat will ever win. Never mind the rigged Supreme Court probably whittling away abortion rights.

But Nixon, who we thought was not as bad as Trump, when you see him in action, you realize he was pretty bad. And he too used and abused the FBI, and he too had contempt for his enemies, only back then…the youth were against him and the Republicans said he had to resign, whereas today Congresspeople are afraid of an ex-President, they’re ruled by an authoritarian in absentia. We watched January 6th on television, but there can be no investigation? Don’t talk to me about politicizing it, can you say “Benghazi”?

And you may have caught the anti-Israel fisticuffs at the restaurant in Los Angeles, or the incidents in the U.K. Yes, everybody says it’s just about giving the Palestinians their due, but the truth is the past twenty years of Palestinian saber-rattling by nincompoops like Roger Waters has fanned the flames of anti-Semitism. Yes, I’ll stand up to Roger Waters any day of the week, I’m not afraid, hell, I’m a child of the sixties!

Yes, it was a long time ago. Fifty years. Classic rockers are dropping like flies. The music lives, it will always live, but it’s nowhere near the hit parade, the acts don’t have the ethos, never mind the credibility, of those of yore. Then again, the joke’s on them, because they have a small fraction of the power of the acts of yore. Kanye West has visibility because we all want to watch the train-wreck, don’t confuse his antics with those of a leader, which John Lennon certainly was.

So my generation is long in the tooth. There have been so many changes, so many generations, that to most of America what happened in the sixties and seventies, never mind eighties, is ancient history. Forget not knowing the days when radio was powerful, they don’t even know the days when MTV was powerful! And also back then acts could say no, because if you wanted to be believed you couldn’t sell out to the man. One can argue quite strongly today’s acts are the man! After all they’re all whored out to corporations or corporations themselves, selling us crap.

Yes, we really thought there was a way out back then. We had hope. Yes, we were disappointed when Nixon got elected, and re-elected, but it wasn’t the end of democracy, which is what we’re arguing about right now.

Now if you go back to 1971, one of the big acts was Elton John. Actually, he got bigger as the years went by, but on his very first American album, the eponymous “Elton John,” he had a track, fittingly the last one, entitled “The King Must Die.” And Bernie Taupin’s lines in that song were:

“And sooner or later

Everybody’s kingdom must die”

Yes, America can’t even rebuild roads and bridges, never mind educate it’s populace. You’re on your own, government is the enemy, no one should pay taxes and then life will be great. Huh?

You can read the article in the “New York Times” about Paul Romer, the favorite economist of the techies who has now switched sides, he now believes in bigger government, greater control of these digital operations: https://nyti.ms/3bLmmB6 Romer changed his mind, he seems to be the only one, America has gone back millennia, it’s now positively tribal.

But if you watch “1971” you’ll be gobsmacked, you’ll see what we lost, and you’ll desire to get back to the garden, whether you lived through that era or are still wet behind the ears.

Today’s it’s different. We’ve got footage.

Sure, now everything is on camera, but back in ’71, so much was lost to the sands of time, films essentially started around the turn of the century, from the nineteenth to the twentieth, and TV essentially started a few years after World War II, in the forties. It’s not like we could go back to footage of the Civil War, it’s not like we could watch the news, gauge the public’s reaction to the assassination of Lincoln, never mind the election of Washington. But through the miracle of technology, this fifty year old footage, this information, is at our fingertips, ready to be put together to tell the narrative of what once was…

If this documentary was released twenty five years ago, like the “Beatles Anthology,” it would be a cultural event, everybody would see it.

Even worse, today’s hype machine is so busy promoting today, it can’t stop to lionize the past.

So you may not even know this series exists. Maybe if it was on Netflix it would have a fighting chance, unfortunately it’s on Apple TV+. But it’s there, waiting for you to check it out, it’s a land mine, like all those classic rock records, just waiting for you to discover them, just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s passé. There’s wisdom to be gained from back then, scoop it up, when you know the past you can march forward enlightened, ready to create a better world. 

https://fanstudy.byspotify.com

There is more information on this page and in its links than you can devour and comprehend in one sitting, but you should dive in.

All the conversation re Spotify has been about payouts. That ship has sailed, now it’s about building your audience so that it will speed up and enhance the flywheel of your career. In other words, recorded music streaming is only one income stream, please view it that way.

So the story is always about the Spotify Top 50 and the major labels who parade their wares there. But the truth is never have the major labels had less control over the music landscape, furthermore never have hit artists had less purchase in the landscape, the data shows us this, and you might want to ignore the data re your personal beliefs on political issues, but do you really want to sacrifice the insights when it comes to your own career?

If you’re an artist you need to digest this information, you must read it and know it, because now you are your own record label. Don’t dream of getting signed, chances are that’s the worst thing that can happen to your career. If you make pop or hip-hop that populates the aforementioned Spotify Top 50, go for it, try to get the big deal, but if you don’t, don’t even bother, as Fleetwood Mac sings, it’s time to go your own way.

Sure, you can hand the responsibility to a third party. But chances are they can’t deliver more than you can yourself, and they’re going to take a huge slice, for probably no results, don’t get sucked into the indie label game. But do get sucked into the indie mind-set.

Yesterday Lollapalooza revealed its lineup. There aren’t many superstars and the truth is there are other festivals that are genre specific that do extremely well. The nineties paradigm is kaput. You know, the one in which you try to get exposure to become world dominant, where you need  a deep pocket for videos and getting on MTV is everything. There is no center in music, no glue, except for maybe the streaming platforms themselves, and the truth is Spotify dominates and it skews young, it’s where careers are built and expanded. Sure, be on all of the outlets, but Apple skews old and the subscribers listen less and…Amazon is a black hole proffering little information, but don’t count it out, the pricing is just too intriguing, everybody’s got a Prime account, so music is burgeoning there.

But Spotify is a music only company (well, podcasts too…let’s just call it an audio-only company) and therefore it has to double-down and superserve. And if you follow the link above you will find out what works with your fanbase. When to release new music, how it affects catalog, what kind of merch they prefer…and how to make a canvas and how to pitch your music and the truth is if you’re complaining, you’re missing the point, this is how Soundcloud built hip-hop into the juggernaut it is. Turned out giving it away for free was good business. And now, knowing how to use the Spotify tools is good business.

Really, it’s best if the artist him or herself dives deep and comprehends all this information. Once you hand off responsibility something is lost in the process. There’s no phone help on the internet, you’ve got to figure out solutions to your problems yourself, why do you expect it to be any different in music? Sure, if you have a best friend or a manager empower them. But Spotify’s fan/artist information is the complement to Don Passman’s book. Sure, you know the law, you know how not to get screwed, but do you know how to build your career?

Don’t look at it from top down, but bottom up. Don’t compare yourself to Billie Eilish or the Weeknd, don’t get frustrated that your numbers are so low, instead focus on the build…are your numbers going up and what can you do to make them increase? And the truth is spamming everybody does not work, you’ve got to superserve the fans you’ve got, they are the best spreaders of your music, you’ve got to keep them interested, you’ve got to empower them.

Music is in the doldrums.

It was revolutionized in 1964 by the Beatles and the ensuing British Invasion.

Then in the late sixties and early seventies we had FM radio which engendered album rock.

And then in 1981 we had MTV.

And in 1999/2000, we had Napster.

Spotify is over a decade old now, we learned that those who embrace new tools win. But we haven’t yet had the artist who demands those not paying attention do.

Yes, we had the Beatles and British Invasion.

FM brought Jimi Hendrix and Cream and…

MTV brought Culture Club and Duran Duran…

We’ve yet to have the Spotify hit, the breakthrough that is completely different from what came before, which gets everybody interested.

It happens in all media.

In television, it was “The Sopranos” in 1999. A series rejected by network that was better than any movie. And thereafter we got more and more innovative cable shows, Sunday night was for HBO, and then Reed Hastings came along and took Netflix streaming and funded “House of Cards” and we truly hit the golden age of television, it’s the entertainment medium everybody wants to talk about, people will ask you what shows you’ve been watching before they’ll ask what music you’ve been listening to.

So we’re waiting for that new sound.

And you might have it. But now there are no barriers to entry. Sure, you could get lost in the morass of the 60,000 tracks added every day to Spotify, but almost all of them are marginal, made by hobbyists, maybe delusional hobbyists, but they will get no traction. The truth is almost nothing will get traction, but we are looking for the new and different and excellent and…

You can make it cheaply with digital tools.

You can promote it for free via social media.

And now Spotify is helping you build your career and track the engagement!

And the truth is it’s the least verbal artist who is questioning whether they can make it who blazes the trail, usually someone who has paid dues, been kicking around, with minefields in their past. They’ve taken time to see what works and what does not, they’ve honed their craft, and they know it’s about the individual statement.

No one will be as dominant as the Beatles, or even Madonna, ever again, can’t ever happen. But there is room for acts that have big impact, that start a movement. If you’re in it for the money, stop right away, right away, there is just not that much money in music, and odds are you’ll never make it. If you want money, work for the corporation, get a steady paycheck. If you want to go down the road less taken, if you are willing to starve, if you’re unwilling to complain, if you must do the work believing in yourself…maybe you’re what we need. But don’t delude yourself into thinking that just because you have self-confidence you can make it. No, you must look at the data, see if the trend is upward, if not, the problem is you. Yes, the truth is if you’re great there will be action, there’s so little great out there. And then you have to build on that action.

You’ve got all the tools, we’re dying for you to change our world…please change our world!