“How Volkswagen’s $50 Billion Plan to Beat Tesla Short-Circuited – Faulty software set back a bid by the world’s largest car maker for electric-vehicle dominance”: https://on.wsj.com/395tffN

Will Tesla win in the end?

Everybody said it wouldn’t, and most people still believe that the stock is overvalued, but the truth is making an electric car is much more difficult than it appears.

Volkswagen represents the bleeding edge of major company electric car development. Early mover BMW has pulled back. As for the American companies…they’re so busy getting the public to purchase overpriced, bad-handling SUVs that one wonders if they’ll ever be able to succeed on the electric tip. GM and Ford say they’re trying…

But not like Volkswagen.

After Dieselgate, VW decided to turn itself around, to redo its entire roadmap and focus on electric. And they failed.

Disruption is still happening. Twenty years later. As for those arguing about the changes wrought, trying to bring back the past via legislation, I point you to Tim Ingham’s recent article in “Music Business Worldwide”: 

“The Harsh Reality About the Music Business, and a Pantomime Led By Clueless Self-Regarders”: https://bit.ly/2LMLAW6

Ingham is angry, and it has improved his usually dry writing. Tim is sick and tired of every musician believing they’re entitled to make a living from streaming music. Disinformation rules. Kinda like yesterday’s story about Gary Numan saying he was only paid 37 pounds for a million streams. Were they self-selected streams or were they radio? Were they ad-supported? Was it for songwriting/publishing or recording?

The musicians are ignorant. Seemingly the bigger career you’ve got, the less you understand the modern music business, especially streaming. As for re-education… It really doesn’t matter, the ship has sailed. But they’re having hearings in the U.K., and Ingham addresses these. But most interesting is his figures after taking participation of the labels and Spotify, et al, out of the equation… There’s just not enough money for everybody to make a living on streaming music, just like there was never enough money for everybody to make a living in the physical era. I keep saying this, thank god someone else is. It’s kinda like the disinformation that has people still believing that Trump won the election, and I get e-mail every day saying that… The story that streaming is the devil echoes in its own impenetrable chamber and it’s a sexy story that riles people up more than the truth…that making a living in music is hard, and ultimately for the very few.

As for user-centric payments… The only study so far says that small artists get paid even less, but we can try it, fine with me, but don’t expect to get rich!

So it turns out making cars the old way is very different from making them the new. The old way, perfected over a hundred plus years, is to focus on mechanics, manufacturing, but in electrics the key is software, which can be updated over the air as your car sits in its garage.

De rigueur with Tesla, non-functioning with VW.

Yes, VW has sold electric cars that need to be brought to the dealership to be updated. These cars are stripped down, because the company just couldn’t get the software straight. They had various teams working on it, and merging it all together…nearly impossible!

As for the mental state of the employees:

“The biggest challenge, said Mr. Hilgenberg, isn’t the technology, it is the mind-set of the people – their reluctance to embrace radical change until circumstances force them to. ‘In the middle of success it’s not easy to understand why you need to change now,’ he says.”

Sound familiar? This is exactly what the dearly departed Clayton Christensen warned of two decades ago. And the question becomes will Tesla gain so big an advantage that it can never be outpaced?

Everyone said the big boys would triumph once they got in the game, they’d kill Tesla. It hasn’t happened, and the Model S has been in the marketplace since 2012, it’s not like the signs weren’t obvious.

Kinda like in the music business…

Napster got traction in 1999 and the labels ignored it, they were too busy banking the profits of overpriced CDs. Then they thought they could kill file-trading with legislation. Then they tried to compete with clunky, copyright-protected systems. And ultimately, the industry ceded distribution to third parties. First Apple, which ended up being behind the ball itself, it was superseded by Spotify, and it’s Spotify that killed piracy, with its ad-supported tier, created by a young man with no history in the music business. Is Tesla Spotify?

Spotify’s value keeps going up. As for the labels, the company went public and Warner sold all its stock, and Sony half, meanwhile the value of the doubled has doubled, talk about not believing in your own business…

As for the major labels themselves, anyone who predicted their doom forgot to realize that they owned the history of recorded music, their catalogs, which they’ve used to extract huge advances from streaming companies, and which represent a huge portion of their revenues, never mind having essentially no costs…no marketing, no manufacturing.

So, all the news today is about an Apple Car. Belief is that manufacturing will be outsourced, today the word is it will be Kia. Apple has factories in Asia make their computers and phones, could they do this with automobiles? Or do you need to make the whole thing? WE DON’T KNOW YET!

But back to the labels… All the action in the past few years has been outside their purview, the latest being TikTok. Can you say “Old Town Road”?

Now the truth is in order to insure their market share, major labels overpay for hits. If you can generate one, they dangle huge sums in front of you. Sometimes it pays to take the money and run. But if the deal is not so rich, are you better off being independent, especially since the marketing tools are at your fingertips? Furthermore, the majors’ market share is padded by the distribution of indies, their true share of revenue has actually gone down, their piece of the pie is less. And, the labels are more savvy, but they’re not very nimble…now that music is a gold mine once again, with revenue rising, expect third parties to enter the sphere, especially as most tech investments become moon shots, very few being successful.

So people have been making fun of Elon Musk for years, now he’s the world’s richest man. Remind you of anyone? Steve Jobs! Who was an exile and then came back to turn Apple, the laughingstock of computer manufacturers, especially after the introduction of Windows 95, into the most valuable company in the world!

In other words… If you’re looking for the future, don’t ask people working at the big companies. Also, the media gets it wrong time and again, if for no other reason that those on the beat are uneducated in the minutiae of the sphere. If you want to know what is going on in the niche, you’re going to end up reading relatively obscure online writers, there’s a deep expert in every category, but they don’t play the big media game, if they even care.

Which brings me back to MSN… Don’t you remember? MSN was gonna kill AOL!

But AOL was smart, at the peak of its valuation, it merged with Time Warner. Steve Case was right, he employed his leverage to move the company’s ball down the field.

Ultimately, both MSN and AOL failed. Because it turned out that portals were just an intermediate step, and that high speed access would become a commodity business sold by the cable companies and telcos and that all the money would be in search and its advertising, and Google’s sale of advertising all over the web.

As for Facebook…it conspired with Google re advertising. That’s the latest lawsuit if you’re paying attention. But the deal happened while regulators, elected officials and even big media were not paying attention.

As for Facebook, Zuckerberg saw the future. He pivoted to mobile. And he purchased WhatsApp and Instagram. As for WhatsApp, anybody who’d traveled outside the U.S. was aware of its dominance, but most Americans don’t leave its borders, and too often those who do are old and not tech-savvy.

It all happened in plain sight. Just like with Tesla. And Volkswagen.

Used to be cars were sold on how they look. Tesla realized this, and hired a hotshot designer, but the truth is that’s not what is selling Teslas, it’s their software, which most people just can’t see. Teslas just work. Kind of like Macs, but not quite. So far, no one has been able to equal Tesla’s battery efficiency… This is another rule of tech, never rest on your laurels, keep innovating or you will be left behind. Sure, patents are important, but the key is to look forward, not back.

Who knows, maybe the traditional automobile manufacturers will ultimately catch up with Tesla, but right now they’re years behind. No company ever truly competed with the iPod, and then Apple morphed it into the iPhone. A separate device to play music? That seems so quaint! As for Android…it dominates in handset sales, but profits are low and it turns out everybody with a dollar, who is willing to spend, is on iOS, its App Store kills Google Play, and its much more secure. But, Google made Android free. Is someone going to make electric car software free? I wouldn’t bet on it.

Once again, the paradigm is repeated over and over again. In one industry after another, it’s just a matter of time. Don’t lament the loss of the new, look to solutions in the future. Read yesterday’s “New York Times:

“Three News Hubs, 24-Hour Coverage: The Times’s Global Relay – From New York to Hong Kong/Seoul to London, journalists can collaborate around the clock to report on a breaking story.”: https://nyti.ms/2Mfn7Ix

News never sleeps, just like rust. There is no downtime anymore. If a story happens anywhere on the globe at any time the “New York Times” has people on the case, they have bureaus in 30 countries. How is the local newspaper supposed to compete? IT CAN’T!

 

Turns out the revenue online doesn’t come from ads, but subscriptions. And the only way to compete locally is to flip the script, forget about national and international news and go hyperlocal, in both stories and ads. The reason Fox News focuses on opinion and gets its facts from the “New York Times” is they don’t have a concomitant footprint around the world, nowhere close!

The big get bigger… Online, every store, every song is right next door, you can’t compete on price, and if you’re not the best, if you’re not dominant, you’re probably an also-ran.

How do you switch a manufacturing company into a software one? It turns out it’s very difficult. Furthermore, it’s been proven that usually software succeeds, has fewer flaws, IF FEWER PEOPLE ARE WRITING IT! Yes, you just can’t throw more programmers into the fray, it just doesn’t work.

Now VW hired a guy from BMW to pull all its software together. The aforementioned Dirk Hilgenberg was frustrated with BMW, pulling back its reins on electric, focusing on profits as opposed to the future.

And Hilgenberg created a new group at VW, known as the Artemis project, to pull it all together. Turns out that a huge chunk of VW’s electric car software was written by third parties, and it never worked together. Does this remind you of Boeing?

Forget the 737 MAX, Boeing’s got much deeper problems. It employed the Japanese system, with outsourcing and just-in-time, but it turned out third parties were not reliable, and in airplanes, reliability is key.

So maybe Elon Musk was right, unless you’re responsible for everything, doing everything in-house, you just can’t deliver a quality, working product. Volkswagen could not. Can Apple? Good question…

You must be willing to throw away the past to succeed in the future, you must not try to prop up failed efforts, you must be willing to write them off. Zuckerberg did this with mobile software… Facebook spent two years developing a mobile app based on HTML5. But it was a piece of crap! So Zuckerberg canned it and started from scratch, writing a native app for the iPhone. Meanwhile, Facebook did both of these before most established companies even had a high functioning mobile app, never mind porting their business to it. Can you imagine the state of Facebook without mobile? DEAD!

So we’re decades on, and old companies are still being toppled. And then there’s the inane book business, run by invested in the past oldsters, who do all their business on computers but then physically print the final product. How dumb can that be? Isn’t that like making vinyl records, a niche business? More and more people read everything digitally. But, the publishers were aided by an ignorant government that forced Amazon to change its sales structure despite the case being about Apple’s iBooks. In order to protect the public, the government ended up INCREASING the price of e-books. Proving, once again, that if you’re depending on the government to understand technological change, you’re sorely mistaken. So now an e-book can even cost more than a physical book. Thank god this ship has sailed in the music business, digital dominates and it’s the on demand streaming platform that generates all the revenue, that keeps on growing, that has created a recording revenue renaissance!

What did Bob Dylan say?  To lead or get out of the way? We don’t need more managers, we need more innovators! It turns out those who think outside the box, who cannot make it in the company structure, create the future and change the world. Most MBAs can read a spreadsheet, they just don’t know how to build a company, or run those that exist, keeping them alive by disrupting them constantly!

Beware of buying an expensive gasoline-powered car in the future. Turns out they’re going to crater in value just like those 35mm Canons and Nikons. Electric has already won the future. If you don’t know this, you’re the opposite of a seer. Don’t get too comfortable where you are, because change is constantly coming. And the future has positives and negatives, but many more of the former. Sure, there are no more vent windows in cars, but they all come with air conditioning. And digital music does not skip. And electric cars pollute less.

But you’re probably not a leader. The fascinating thing about the Volkswagen story is the leaders were clueless too!

A descendant of royalty, Michael Des Barres has had more record deals than seemingly anybody, from Silverhead to Detective to Chequered Past to solo, as well as acting in “MacGyver” and scores more movies and television shows. Recently a documentary of his life was released, “Michael Des Barres: Who Do You Want Me To Be?” We cover the film and so much more!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/michael-des-barres/id1316200737?i=1000506044831

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

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

https://bit.ly/2LQAAXB

Can we go back to our regular lives now?

The first inauguration I remember watching was back in 1961, with President Kennedy. We were in a cold war. The Russians were beating us in space. America was being tested. It was a battle between the old and the new. And the new had won.

In more ways than one. Kennedy refused to wear a hat, killing that business overnight. But he also looked to the future. It was bright, but it had challenges. And we all had to work together to make our country better.

“Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

That ethos started to evaporate in the seventies, and it was excised from the fabric of our nation in the eighties, when greed became good and income inequality began to accelerate. We forgot about people, souls, and focused on wealth accumulation, believing if we did not get ours, someone else would take it.

“Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

Britain exits the E.U. The U.S. exits one international organization after another. As if we can make it alone. We’re intertwined, not only economically, but as human beings inhabiting a planet in peril, where religious wars kill innocent people and those without purchase become radicalized. It is not the sixties any longer.

I watched JFK’s inauguration because it was a snow day. But it rarely snows anymore. Sure, it’s good that we have Zoom, that we can connect in spite of the weather, but winters are shorter, and our entire ecosystem is screwed-up. Try living in the west, water is precious, and oftentimes just a trickle. But maybe you live elsewhere…where hurricanes are rampant and fracking might cause an earthquake. Progress is always a balance. But the move to electric automobiles will be a great boon to this planet, for they are much more efficient than those powered by internal combustion, which dispenses so much of its energy as useless heat.

So now it’s 2021.

If you lived through the nineties, the economy was raging, the budget was balanced, but many were left behind. And in the twenty first century, technology supercharged our economy and our lifestyles, we thought our problems were over. But hatred knows no limits. And unless you lift your brother up, he’s going to be left behind.

So for forty years one side labeled government bad, taxes bad, to the point where our roads are peppered with potholes. As for a hands-off business policy, these advocates are now raging against giant tech companies, like Twitter and Facebook and Google, that have more power than the government itself. We live in a society, there must be limits.

Yes, America is challenged.

But instead of crying in our beer, pointing fingers, we must have hope.

We’re not going to get it with music, where if you make it you might be shot to death, where the dollar supersedes the message. Music has squandered its power.

As for celebrities… The internet brought them down to earth. Turns out they’re no better than the rest of us. And people tell them that every damn day online. America is a hating country, just rise above, you’ll see.

So, how strange is it that the only leader we have today is a politician?

Politicians have a bad name. Watergate killed the reputation of lawyers, and lying and cheating and duplicity killed the reputation of politicians. We’ve got no one to believe in anymore. And I certainly did not expect to believe in Joe Biden.

Maybe it’s because Biden has lived long enough to see it all, to remember what America once was. That’s how far we’ve gotten from the garden, the youth never lived through the golden era, they’ve got no idea what it was like. Not that the past was all shiny, but depression did not rule the nation’s minds, people still knew the American Dream existed. Now, it does not. You can say it does, but statistics tell us otherwise, your chances of upward mobility are better in Canada and Europe. We’ve got no facts in the U.S. anymore, just opinions. How are we going to get out of this mess?

Through leadership.

A coach does not play to lose. A coach observes the rules and then does his best to win. But this has not been the ethos of the ruling party. The fabric of our nation, its very rules, have been called into question. And chaos has been sown. Victory has eluded our hands to the point where it’s no longer even visible.

So, we’ve got a septuagenarian leader, who was given up for good, seen as aged toast, come back to lead our way out of the darkness. He wasn’t my guy, but I voted for him, knowing that when we come together, good things can happen, there’s no upside to a protest vote, 2016 taught us that.

And this septuagenarian leader, labeled as senile by his detractors, came to the pulpit today and delivered a speech hitting all the points. We’re used to speakers avoiding the hard topics. Like race, like climate, like the division in our nation. But Biden touched upon them all.

Was Biden as good a speaker as JFK? No way.

But speaking is not as important as action. And unlike his predecessor, Biden is hitting the ground running, he’s prepared, to tackle our national health crisis know as Covid-19, never mind our economic and ecological issues.

That’s how far we’ve sunk. If you’re a wonk, if you’re educated, if you’re prepared, you’re seen as a loser. Even worse, there are the privileged people who spew endless falsehoods, obscuring the path. But that’s America, where there’s no longer any truth.

It’s been pretty depressing.

And it’s depressing that Biden had to speak to very few, because of fear of disruption.

But it comes down to the man on camera, in a close-up, the words.

We live in a world where we can reach everyone, but very few are paying attention. But if you’ve got something to say, something worth paying attention to, it continues to exist online, that’s one definite improvement from the sixties, if you miss it, you can still see it, and you should see Joe Biden’s speech.

Now I can’t remember the last inauguration I watched, maybe not since JFK. I was in school. Or I was in the hinterlands. Or I was frustrated with the victor. And to tell you the truth, I didn’t get up and watch Biden either. I didn’t need to hear platitudes and false hope in a country where I believe I count less and less. But as the afternoon wore on, checking the news, reading the stories, I decided to tune in.

Usually, the highlight is the swearing in.

But in this case it was the speech itself.

Biden’s predecessor tried his best to pour water on the parade. Insisting that taxes would go up, not mentioning that under his reign, taxes went down for all those who had money, never mind the fact that many people don’t pay income taxes at all, because they just don’t make enough money. Oh, they pay sales taxes, gas taxes, payroll taxes, all kinds of taxes, and they oftentimes can’t make it on their wages.

But this predecessor is now in the rearview mirror. It’s only now that media is transitioning to a younger, more tech-savvy worker base that knows today to get your message across you’ve got to make news every day, but it’s only news if you have a pulpit, a position of power, which the old guy no longer has. He can do his best to spew his untruths, but he’s been banned by so many social media platforms that his words will have a limited spread. So attention will fade and the lazy man will play golf, rant to his friends and fade away. Come on, how many entertainers and athletes continue to be in the news after their careers peak? Almost none of them. So, in an era where it’s tough to get attention to begin with, we tend to forget the past and plow under its instigators.

You should watch Biden’s speech because…

It’s written in English. Delivered in English. There’s no base vernacular. I’ve got no problem with dirty words, but even I know there’s a time and a place. There has to be some respect for our institutions, otherwise they’re not worth saving. But democracy and the United States are worth it.

That was the focus of Biden’s speech. Democracy. How it triumphed.

And it wasn’t an easy fight and it wasn’t even a fair fight. One side didn’t even respect the rules. And it’s hard to have a game when this occurs. But somehow, the glue held, we held elections and those who won have been seated.

So now we look forward.

Blind optimism is worthless. Because unless you can see your failures, you’re hobbled by them, and everybody fails. You have to know when to give up, when to pivot, progress is hard, and it’s never in a straight line. But if you’re prepared and willing to do the work, great things can be achieved, especially when the people, the country, are behind you.

Despite hogwash to the contrary, Biden does not want to ruin the country, we’re not going to socialism overnight, as a matter of fact if he succeeds, it will be good for everybody, most definitely those who’ve been protesting. And nothing breeds contentment like success. Victory pulls people along, not only the true believers, but the questioning, those not paying attention in the first place.

We elected these officials. The tail cannot wag the dog. They need to do what is right, they must not base every decision on whether they’ll be popular or not…don’t they teach this in elementary school?

So, we’re at the beginning of a great reset. Just in time. Biden is just the leader, but in his case he’s got a full roster on his team and it is prepared. Will there be hiccups, will there be failures? Of course, there’s no advancement without them.

So breathe a sigh of relief. We’ve got an experienced pilot at the helm. Hopefully we’ll be able to stop thinking about the plane crashing, about America going off the rails, because our leader and his crew will be paying attention, doing the right thing.

Or you could say no. You could be a hater. Since it’s not you, since you didn’t win, no one else can. You can try and tear everybody down to achieve…exactly what? What is the goal, further chaos, for the sake of chaos? How does that work?

This is who we’ve got. Criticize him when he makes mistakes. But don’t get in his way when he’s trying to fix things. Once again, America must be a can-do nation, not a can-not.

Sometimes you have to get to the brink to appreciate what you might lose, to inspire people to work hard and do the right thing. Possibly the last four years will be a giant wake-up call, to restore the luster of our nation, and its worldwide respect. To help our allies and challenge our enemies.

Today Biden grabbed the reins, he’s kicking the horse, he’s getting it moving, the race has begun.

And the race for victory is for you and me.

That’s what they call society.

That’s what they call the United States of America.

From: Andrew Loog Oldham

Re: Phil Spector

As you and i have discussed i knew phil, the stones did too, before the tom wolfe casting, before the madness and the medication, before the silly old man trolled out in his viagra limousine much too late at night.

The man who brought good cheer and maracas to “not fade away” at regent sound on london’s denmark street in february of ’64 ; who, when bill and charlie were knackered and had gone back to the hotel, played bass as jack nitzsche played harpsichord to keith’s accoustic as jagger sang and made “play with fire” forever at 5am at RCA on sunset and iver.

This was before the recognition set in like a permanent wound to the soul, before the medication de- wired an already fragile system. One of the last straws was attempting to record a UK university band, Starsailor. Spector was back at the location of his earlier Harrison and Lennon triumphs, and sometimes you cannot go home again. Phil had been sober a few years, he returned to LA and Dan Tana’s, defeated and started drinking again. As any knowing alcoholic will tell you you may have stopped drinking but your body did not. Lana Clarkson was only a couple of drinks away.

You write perfectly of the Lennon collaboration.  An added ingredient to that mix was probably that Phil would have to be on his better behavior.  One of John’s gifts was that he could whack you with a word. And with Phil he did just that.

RIP Lana Clarkson and RIP Phil, who died many years before.

I saw a recent prison mugshot of Phil. He looked better than I’d seen him look in yonks. Perhaps he’d been unable to self- medicate in jail…

One 45rpm to add to your list. “Try some, Buy Some” by Ronnie Spector on the Apple label; in Bowie’s Top Ten as well.

Abrazo, ALO

____________________________________

From: Toby Mamis

Re: Phil Spector

Phil came to see Blondie at the Whisky, accompanied by Dan and David Kessel (sons of Barney), in 1977, and told me he wanted to produce them. I told him they were under contract to Richard Gottehrer and also Private Stock.  We arranged to have dinner with him and the band at Carlos N Charlies a few nights later, and at the last minute he (predictably) cancelled and offered to send his driver to bring us up to his old house (up in the hills behind the Hamburger Hamlet at the west end of the Strip). So I went with Debbie, Chris, and my former partner whose name I don’t speak or type, and it was, to say the least memorable.  His bottles of diet Manischewitz (who knew that was a thing).  He was armed, even inside his own home.  He played us rough mixes of the Leonard Cohen album at more than full volume, ear-splitting. He sat at a piano and asked Debbie to sit with with him and sing some old song I didn’t recognize (something like “I’ll Be At Your Wedding” I think) – the sheet music was on the piano.  When we were leaving, he couldn’t figure out how to unlock the door to let us out and had to call his driver to come help and also drive us back to Carlos N Charlies.  By that time, our car keys were locked up inside Carlos N Charlies til the next day.  It was WAY past closing time.  

____________________________________

From: Claris Sayadian-Dodge

Re: Phil Spector

I met Phil Spector during his recording of Celine Dion at Ocean Way studio-1 in ’95. I don’t believe anything was released from those sessions that lasted for weeks. 

Story of Mr Spector (he made sure we addressed him that way) terrorizing our parking attendant with a gun circulated quickly. Then one late afternoon, the assistant called my office and said Mr Spector wants me to visit the studio and hear his song. That sounded odd. I was just the manager booking the studio and producers seldom cared to hear my opinion! 

I hesitated at first thinking it’s got to be a joke. But, after many calls, I gathered myself and stopped by. He sat behind the Neve console and asked me to sit in the back on the couch and listen. After about an hour, I asked to be excused. I usually went home after finishing work about 7 or 8Pm. He insisted that I stay. Yes, the sound was big. Ah, it must be his wall of sound, I told to myself. 

So, after another few hours, I went to the lounge and heard from the musicians who had been held up in the studio overnight. I can’t remember, how I got out. It may have been an excuse like, taking care of my elderly mom or something. He finally let me go.

The following day, his assistant called and said Mr Spector wants to get together over a cup of coffee. I wish I could remember her name. Was it Michelle (Hal Blaine’s daughter)? Anyone remember mid 90s and these sessions? Anyhow, I never agreed, siting that it’s my policy not to mix up socially with clients.

That Christmas, I got a check for $100 from Mr Spector. I never cashed it. It now sits in a frame on my desk. I just noticed it says MS Claris. Wow, that’s cool.

During one of many requests to meet him, his assistant told me how he became a different person after his son’s death (at age 9 from leukemia). 

Mental illness, the silent killer, effects even the brightest. He admitted to being bipolar and having mental problems much later. His father had committed suicide when Phil was a young boy. As you say, he wrote his first song after the words on his Dad’s epitaph: “To Know Him Was To Love Him.”

How things could have been different. 

Perhaps, “Let It Be.” 

RIP Mr Spector (December 26, 1939 – January 16, 2021)

____________________________________

From: Dave Dederer

Subject: Re: Streaming 

Bob,

I was already thinking this after listening to some of your recent podcasts with industry insiders and now even moreso after reading today’s post: there’s still a lot of ignorance re how much money’s being made in streaming. 

The upside is far beyond even what you’re reporting:

“What we’re saying here is 200 artists made nearly half a million bucks from streaming last year. You keep nearly all the money if you’re your own label, but the new standard is closer to a fifty/fifty split of net if you’re signed to a label and if this is the case, this means that over 200 acts made in excess of $215,000 from streaming last year.” 

The Presidents own the masters to our debut album. We’ve had total control of them throughout the digital era (Sony Music’s license to them expired in 2003).  Just two tracks from the debut, “Lump” and “Peaches,” make up nearly all of our streaming.  

We’re certainly not in the top 200 most-streamed acts.  Or even close.  Yes, “Lump” was an Alternative Rock #1 and “Peaches” and a few other Presidents tracks charted high on Alternative Rock and the Hot 100, and the record sold ~5M+ copies worldwide in its first go-round, but the reality is we’re a mid-level catalog act, we’re small potatoes, nobodies.  

But the revenue numbers you’re talking about apply to us.  Generated almost entirely by just two mid-level catalog hits. 

Do you know what that means?  If you really grasp it, it will make your hair stand up on end!!!

Do the math.  If our puny little label is generating well into the six figures from just two mid-level catalog hits (and we have spent ZERO dollars on marketing in 20 years), can you imagine what the Sony, Warner and Universal catalogs are generating?  Holy crap!

It would take 10,000 words here to explain all the details and I don’t want to write that much.  In brief, we (and any other label that has an intelligently-run catalog division) run our business with a level of efficiency that would have been inconceivable in the physical media era — near-total transparency in monthly accounting, no breakage, no returns, etc.  Our monthly operating costs are a few percent, max, sometimes as low as 1-2%.  Yes, that means close to 100% margin.  And the part that gets lost is that there is more music consumption/use than during the CD or any other previous era. Volume and margin are both higher than they have ever been.

Of course, we’re talking about labels and artists who own their masters.  If you have an unfavorable deal with your label, well, that’s a whole different conversation.   

best,

dave

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From: tepnomusic

Subject: Re: Streaming

Your calculation is 100% correct, I made around 210k on streams last year, and then adding money from Soundexchange, remixes, new pub deal with Sony/Atv, Socan/Ascap and I’m now indie! Another thing I noticed is the amount of streams I got in December, probably my biggest streaming month last year. I’m saving every penny, music careers can be very short for low tier artists like me.

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From: Gordon Charlton

Subject: Re: Streaming TV

“He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches” George Bernard Shaw.

 

I’m in the twilight of a 40 year career in the music industry and I have just started teaching about the music industry to student musicians and student managers. 

 

One of the opinions you often hear quoted by my students is that streaming companies pay paltry money to artists. A prime example is this article: https://bit.ly/39Hx9dK with this weekend’s Guardian. Nadine Shah, who has 34k followers but only 110k monthly listeners blames streaming for her not being able to pay her rent. She’s won many awards over the course of her career but to most mainstream music fans, she has gone under the radar. Unfortunately, critical acclaim has never paid bills, in the old music business and in the new one this rule applies. 

 

As someone who has managed a couple of artists who have owned their own masters I’ve experienced how regular income can be made from streaming and, obviously, that income, depends upon how much people like your music, which is why I was delighted to read your piece about streaming. 

 

I’ve now posted it on my school’s Forum to help these students realise that there is still gold in them thar hills in today’s music business. 

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Subject: Re: Do Stand So Close

Bob that’s funny that you bring up Rod Stewart. I know Sting and Rod had a little heat between them. I think it started when we were on the Rod Stewart Out Of Order tour doing some stadiums in Florida. We borrowed Stings private plane and after a show at Tampa Stadium Rod asked me for a sharp knife. He then carved a friendly little note into the beautiful exotic wood table on the plane that said and I quote

“String You Miserable C*nt Where’s Your Sense Of Humor “

I don’t think Sting was too happy about that.

Stevie Salas

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Subject: Re: The Rock Camp Movie

Bob, I’m really glad you covered this.  You really hit the nail on the head with the fact that this may not be for everybody, however anyone that ever had any inspiration, even for a moment to get up on stage and perform gets it. I have been to many of the camps and have been a cheerleader for David Fishof and the Rock Camp.  My observations have been that the campers don’t just get to hang with Rock celebrities, but in putting a band together with them they are actually realizing their dreams.  As you say, David is a hustler, but also a great promoter.  I think one hook that leads to his success is they treat the campers like stars.  Sure, they pay, but they get to spend several days rehearsing for a performance with their own roadies, real backstage catering and people waiting on them hand and foot.

I always get a kick out of the fact that Fishof attributes the revival of the camp to Pollstar. As he tells it, after the first camp didn’t really make it and after a few years off he was at the Pollstar Live conference and “Who was the producer of the Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp” was offered up as a rock and roll trivia question.  I’m not sure if anyone knew the answer, but consequently some of the celebrities at the conference asked David why he wasn’t still doing it.  The rest is history!

My best, keep it up!

Gary Smith

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From: Tom Kenny

Subject: Bowie 5 years gone —January 10th

Bob.

It’s Bowies 5th anniversary on January 10th.

He disliked tributes and awards shows but loved the simple act of talking about how a song can connect you with a total stranger sitting next to you at a show or in line to buy tickets or an album.

He was the ultimate conversationalist.

So many people have great anecdotes of meeting him or something happening to them on the way or during a a show. Some of us where very fortunate to have worked or performed with him but he was equally funny and conversational with just ordinary citizen he’d meet along the way.

When we were in The Tower Theatre in Philadelphia in 2002 on the Heathens tour he asked me to ask the gentleman who was the stage manager if he’d been working there for a long time. I approached the man and he told me he’s been there since the early 70s and the last time Bowie was there he spoke to him at length as he was nervous about that show.

I went back to Bowie and he told me and the rest of the crew that he’d launched Young Americans and several other shows and had recorded a live album in that theatre and when he stepped up to the microphone for sound check on that day in 2002 some of those memories came flooding back when he saw the man in the corner as he’d seen him in exact same position all those years ago,

After that sound check Bowie went over to the old Geezer and the guy reminded him of the crane they used to load in Ziggys stardust lighting.

Let’s never forget wonderful venues , human beings and the artists that have performed there and their work that still gets us through these days 

They are hallowed ground and places of worship for us nonbelievers ,

Tom

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From: Randall Wixen

Subject: Bowie/Arnold Corns Pseudonym

Did you ever hear these versions?

 

 

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From: Eric Bazilian 

Subject: Re: Randall Wixen On Selling Your Publishing

No truer words, literally and figuratively. Maybe Dylan needs a bigger boat, but I want my songs to work for me and my descendants 70 years after I’m gone. 

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Subject: Re: The Beatles Sneak Peek

Hi Bob, yes yes yes. What a great thing to see in the time of COVID. There’s an angle that not many will catch that’s really important: NO ONE IS WEARING HEADPHONES WHILE RECORDING.

They are just playing in a room, looks like there’s some pa speakers so that voices can be heard and so those in the control room can speak with the band, but my guess is the overall sound level is moderate, only as loud as it needs to be. Everyone has an amp near them, they can hear themselves best, but the band in the room is what they are ALL hearing. There is a bit of bleed from the mics, the drum mics pick up the guitars and bass, but it’s not a big deal unless there’s a massive mistake by one of the players. The pa speakers appear to be aimed to miss the instrument mics, so even if there’s a little bleed it isn’t a problem. I have been a recording engineer for decades and this is NOT how it is generally done, nowadays everyone has headphones, they each have their own mix, and it is illuminating (or shocking) to go listen to the various headphone mixes each player set up for themselves after the session is over. The drummer has MOSTLY DRUMS and CLICK, and so on.

Headphone listening is not the same as listening in a room. The intense level of transient detail is distracting, and I think it’s dangerous to your hearing. But, we use them in virtually every session.

Of course, recording a track instrument by instrument, musician by musician, part by part is also too common now. Each sound is *perfected* and fussed over, close miked to the point that each part sounds like it’s living on a piece of glass an inch in front of your nose. The level of *control* over the sound of any instrument has gone so far as to make perfection possible. Ugh! Arghhh! Someone said that technology “raises the level of mediocrity.” Indeed.

In fact, NO CLICK is pretty important too. Playing to the click means you don’t really have to groove, you just get on the grid and lock it down, you can use the click to defend your playing. “See, I’m with the click, you’re rushing.” Without a click the whole thing changes – you live or die together as a band. And, the tracks feel completely different, they feel alive, because they are.

Back to the no headphones thing – I’m in conversations with a band that wants to record as soon as it is safe. I was speaking with the bassist today about trying the no headphones approach, just like in the Beatles clip. They have had some success over the years, they want the project to sound live, sounds like they might be willing to try it. They already don’t use a click. I can’t wait…

Best…Hank Linderman

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From: ben stauffer 

Subject: Re: WB/HBO Max

Can you imagine, ceteris paribus, if we were still in a CD era during this pandemic? Expecting that the pressing plants would all be running on-time and that we would be beholden to Amazon and the mail delivering said product to consumers all around the globe? What fortune for creators and rights holders to be able to distribute music to consumers over the wires at this time.

-b

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From: Robert Holladay

Subject: Re: WB/HBO Max

Good insights, Bob, especially about the speed of change. I’m moving to a new house in a new city and so far can’t find anyone to take my CDs (over 1,000). 

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Subject: Re: Bode Miller On Winning

Hey Bob,

Great piece on Bode.

When my concert promotions company (Concerts North) had our offices in Portsmouth, New Hampshire I gave office space to Bill Rogers who was just finishing “Bode Miller Flying Downhill The Early Years”. Bill had grown up skiing with Bode at Cannon  Mountain and I was producing concerts at Loon Mountain at the time. Bill and I then screened this film in Lake Tahoe and several ski towns around the country. Watching Bode train and his distain for sponsors and the Olympic trainers reminded me so much of great rock musicians like John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, etc who didn’t want to follow the rules – they were true originals who had a new way of doing things and wanted everyone else to get out of the way while they broke new ground.

The way Bode talks about chasing speed and just seeing the fastest way down the mountain is how Magic Johnson saw the basketball court or Pele saw the soccer pitch, just everything else melts away, not concerned with proper form or his competition just doing it his own way.

I agree Bode has been totally misunderstood, he is not only the greatest US male skier ever but is a world class athlete in several sports. He grew up with an uncle who ran a tennis camp so is an incredible tennis player, competed to play in the US Open in golf, played minor league baseball, won the 2002 ABC Sports Competition putting athletes from various sports up against each other, etc.

http://www.flyingdownhill.com

Joe

Joe Fletcher

Crescent Bay Entertainment

Carmel, CA

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From: Rick Alexander

Subject: Re: Homeland Elegies

Bob,

 

The following 12/13/20 post from the Facebook feed of Sunday Times bestselling author Simon Scarrow will no doubt resonate with you…

“Good writing in the age of the Creative Writing degree course pandemic.”

 

My wife handed me a recently published ‘literary’ novel this morning and asked me to read the opening and tell her what I thought about the writing. It’s a debut novel and the author is a graduate of the burgeoning empire of Creative Writing degree courses. The premise of the novel is very promising. So far, so good, I thought. Then I began to read, and by the time I had got through the first twenty pages I’d had enough…

 

It’s not that the writing is bad. There’s a certain mellifluous skill in the composition, and the author has done their research, but the style seems to be the only saving grace of the writing. The characters are flat and the story seems to take a distant second place in order for the author to parade their lengthy descriptions. Sometimes the effort to impress crashes to the ground with a confused thud as the wax that binds the words together loosens under the glaring scrutiny of the reader. (Sorry, couldn’t help playing the MFA game there).

 

Take this phrase, when referring to a photographer’s choice of a smaller camera for convenience – ‘the putative authenticity of spontaneity’. You can kind of see what the author is getting at, but the sense of it is lost in the clash of semantics. Aren’t authenticity and spontaneity more or less the same thing? Why would it be putative if it was authentic? It’s the kind of unnecessarily complex phrase that I am sure looks good on the page in the milieu of a Creative Writing degree course, but it only serves to obscure meaning while sounding erudite.

 

The wider effect of this approach is to constantly throw the reader out of the shimmering between the words on the page and the imaginative world they conjure up. I don’t think it is a good strategy to keep reminding readers that they are looking at print. Once in a while a polished gem of a sentence is worth the effort for the gratification of the writer and reader, but not for almost the entire duration of a novel. It only serves to aggrandise the author and diminish the creative opportunities for the reader.

 

When I read a book I want to be given the tools to create a lived experience in my head. I can live with the odd writerly flourish but I don’t want the author to constantly demand that I put down my readerly tools and admire their writerly skills. Are such authors so insecure or, worse, arrogant (and insecure) that they require such constant affirmation of their craft? It is possible to balance elegantly crafted writing with great characterisation and story-telling skills. Rosemary Sutcliff did it, as did Dodie Smith and more recently Yasmina Khadra.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I am perfectly happy for there to be plenty of Creative Writing courses out there. They serve a useful purpose in giving ‘putative’ writers the space and time to experiment and refine their craft. I felt the same way about the old PGCE courses where one third of the time was spent teaching and two-thirds of the course concerned thinking about teaching in order to define the best teaching strategies for each individual teacher. You get better teachers that way. You should also get better writers from similarly purposed Creative Writing courses.

 

And yet it feels like those who attend such courses are encouraged to look inwards, as if their writing has no relevance outside of the confines of their studies. This is reflected in much of the published output of Creative Writing course graduates, most of whom would appear to fall into the rut of ‘big words, small print, low sales’ and end up, if they are lucky, teaching the next generation of those doomed to follow the same path.

 

That’s not to say that there aren’t some hugely successful writers who emerge from Creative Writing programmes. But, from what works of theirs that I have read, I doubt that their legacy will long survive their deaths, or the deaths of their careers. For my own part, I am not interested in the posterity stakes. Nor the literary. I want to tell a story and tell it well enough that it is experienced as if a custom-made movie was playing inside the head of each individual reader. And that’s it. The old adage, trust the tale, not the teller seems to be the purpose of good writing.

 

A rewarding read, for me at least, should be about the story and the characters, not the author. The trouble with so much of the output of Creative Writing courses is that they seem to encourage the authors to leap out of the pages of their writing to such an extent that they become obstacles between the reader and the text that the reader has to fight past the author to get at. Where is the pleasure in that? What is there to admire in such a process, other than the author?

 

If I want to spend my time observing self-regarding individuals then that’s what television celebrities and politicians are for. People who care about stories and good writing are better than that. And, if they are wise, they avoid hostages to fortune like offering courses leading to the qualification of ‘Master of FA…’