Ben Sisario:

A Billboard No. 1 Is at Stake, So Here’s an Album With Your Taylor Swift Hoodie

Counting CD and track sales is like toting up the number of feature phone purchases. We live in an era of streaming and smartphones, why does the music industry insist on holding on to the past?

This is how hip-hop ended up victorious, by moving online, by embracing Soundcloud, by using the new tools and giving away product in the process.

But no, the music industry still sells CDs and files, even though most people no longer have a CD player, they don’t even come in cars, and Apple killed the iPod.

Actually, Apple was famous for killing old formats. Killing ADB for USB. Leaving out the floppy drive. Steve Jobs did not worry about the complainers in the background, he just soldiered on.

And now Apple is the most valuable company on the planet, or close to it, depending on the daily stock market.

Ironically, the present Apple killed the 20 pin port for Lightning, even though every hotel room had that connector built into the room radio, and even switched to USB-C on the new iPad Pro, but…for some reason, their Music app still works with both files and streams, which makes it confusing, which Jobs abhorred. It was supposed to just work, be easy, require no manual, but I still can’t figure out how to make sure my search is of streams not files, and it makes me reluctant to use the app.

Steve Jobs. Everyone says he was anti-streaming, all about sales.

Believe me, Jobs would be behind streaming today, making it even more convenient, because Jobs was willing to admit he was wrong, and change and leave the past behind. But many musicians still refuse to believe streaming has won, it’s been demonized, it can’t be sold after the show…it’s like bitching you can’t sell standard transmissions when even Formula One cars have no clutch.

And the internet/tech works on a different ethos than the traditional music business. The facts are real, and the war is even more intense. Record companies can always depend on their catalogs for revenue, in tech it’s purely what have you done for me lately, and if you haven’t done anything, soon you’re no longer a player. Can you say Blackberry and Gateway and…

Streams can be quantified. They’re harder to fake. Of course people are always trying to scam, but there are algorithms to check that too. Ah, the glory of the machine.

In other words, it’s easy to add up how many streams a track has. They’re even visible on Spotify and YouTube. And streams are raw consumption, a true judge of popularity, whereas if something is sold, you don’t know how many times a purchaser listened to it. Furthermore, with streams you get paid forever, while with sales, it’s one and done. Do you want to invest in yourself or sell out now and forget your future?

The “Billboard” charts have been manipulated from day one. Sure, SoundScan added some truthiness, but still, shenanigans were prevalent.

And “Billboard” could change its chart overnight.

Then again, what makes the “Billboard” chart worth anything anyway, their special sauce? Why do you need Nielsen to tote up what is easily seen online?

So what you’ve got is a trade magazine, servicing the trade.

So, there should be no attention paid to “Billboard”‘s numbers.

But they’re distributed by media outlets as if they mean something, when the truth is they don’t mean anything.

Sure, it’s all about the add-ons, but who was the wanker who approved this to begin with? What are we counting here, marketing efforts or music consumption, this needed to be nipped in the bud.

And “Billboard” could have done it, but NO, it was afraid to piss off the labels and the acts, who do very little advertising anyway, “Billboard” is now a consumer-facing product, why does it keep one foot in the past? Hell, why don’t you pay fealty to retailers, Best Buy doesn’t even sell CDs anymore, not that I’ve been to an outlet in years, why, when there’s Amazon.

We need to wave a wand and immediately go to streaming totals to determine popularity. Leave all sales behind. That’s how Steve Jobs would have done it!

But the truth is the labels like it this way, they kick and scream as they add tchotchkes and manipulate the chart themselves.

Hell, the government nearly eradicated the Mafia, but the music business is still run like organized crime. These are public companies, why so much subterfuge?

Tune in tomorrow, Tuesday June 11th, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

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

Twitter: @lefetz or @siriusxmvolume/#lefsetzlive

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What is Happening to Streaming’s Superstars?

My conclusions:

1. The major labels are screwed.

2. Rock isn’t as dead as we think it is.

3. When other genres adopt streaming, hip-hop’s hegemony will decline.

Tim Ingham brings to attention the fact that the top five acts on streaming platforms have lost market share.
In other words, the rich aren’t getting richer.

“Overall on-demand audio streams in the United States in 2018 grew by a very healthy 42 percent year-on-year, to 534.6 billion. Yet in the same year, the top 50 streaming tracks claimed just 0.7 percent of these plays, down from 3.9 percent in 2017.”

Now if you go to BuzzAngle’s 2018 report of consumption:

Consumption Breakdown

you’ll find that Rock is the #1 in album sales. Rock has 26.5% of that market. Pop has 26.3% and Hip-Hop/Rap only has 5.2%.

Rock also dominates digital album sales, with 25.7% to Pop’s 24.9% and Hip-Hop/Rap’s 7.6%. Pop wins the Physical album sales and CD sales, but by a tenth of a percentage over Rock in physical, and 3% in CD sales. Hip-Hop/Rap has over 20% less market share than Pop and Rock in these two categories.

Rock wins vinyl. Begging the question of whether Rock fans are old farts. They’ve got the disposable income and remember when. 41.7% of vinyl sales is Rock, 25.6% of vinyl is Pop, and Hip-Hop/Rap only has 6.6%.

However, Rock doesn’t do too well in Song Sales, with 15.1% of the market, whereas Pop dominates with 25.6% and Hip-Hop/Rap has 14.7%. It seems that Rock fans want to buy whole albums, Pop and Hip-Hop/Rap fans just want the hit. Then again, are Rock fans just old farts stuck in their old ways?

Because when it comes to total streams…

Hip-Hop/Rap dominates, with 25.4%, Pop has 18.5% and Rock only has 11.4%.

So, Hip-Hop/Rap dominates streaming. Will it continue to do so?

One thing’s for sure, the superstars aren’t that super. This is not like the old days, where there was a limited amount of product and if you couldn’t get on the radio, good luck. Everybody can play now, and it causes chaos. We want order, but we’re not getting it. People want more than the hits.

But the major labels are only signing the hits. They’re not exploring new genres, they’re just going for a larger share of an ever shrinking pie.

Furthermore, it doesn’t appear the major labels have any idea how to sell what is not pop or hip-hop, i.e. sounds you can get on the radio and get instant traction with online. Of course there are exceptions, don’t e-mail me about Billie Eilish. But Billie just illustrates the audience is more powerful than the industry. Just like “Old Town Road” on TikTok. The industry keeps chasing trends instead of getting in front of them. The same way they were behind with Napster and streaming too.

More stuff sells, you’ve got to sell more stuff, or otherwise customers will go somewhere else.

All the levers in the major label world mean less. Radio is declining in power and the big stations, as stated above, are just Hip-Hop and Pop.

TV is nearly irrelevant.

And as far as a deep pocket… The majors won’t cough up dough until you prove yourself, then why do you need them? You’ve put years into developing your base, and now you’re going to cash out for one check?

I don’t think so.

As for rock, Jason Flom could be the smartest guy in the business. Ignoring the naysayers, he’s pushed Greta Van Fleet to stardom, eclipsing not only many Pop and Hip-Hop acts, but everyone in the Adult Alternative/Non-Comm/Americana world. It seems that people want something more familiar, less edgy, less far from what they know. At least in the Rock world. And, once again, Led Zeppelin’s debut was fifty years ago. At what point is it okay to be inspired by them?

And, once again, Rock kills on the road. It’s dominated by oldies acts, for sure. But if you go to one of these shows, it’s not only oldsters in attendance, there are always youngsters there, wanting to draw from the well.

Then again, we could be seeing the last gasps of Rock. When it moves to streaming, maybe it won’t make a big dent. But something is gaining ground, i.e. market share/percentage in the streaming world, other than the superstars.

In other words, everybody may have a smartphone, but that does not mean they’ve adopted streaming. Rock fans say they want to own. They’re ignorant and don’t know tracks can live on the smartphone and are playable outside of cell range as long as the device has power. In other words, they’re late to the party, as they were to social networks.

Or maybe there’s a subculture of young Rock fans who aren’t that into streaming. Maybe because there aren’t acts as good as the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, never mind Zeppelin and Ozzy, and if someone tried to follow in their footsteps, the kids would be eager to stream them.

So Hip-Hop fans are early adopters. Hip-Hop seized the opportunities online. Rock and the rest of the genres saw the internet and streaming as the devil, to their detriment. It’s like those bitching about electric cars, self-driving cars… The truth is electric cars are gonna dominate and it won’t be long before you don’t even own one. Then again, you’ll be in the know sooner when the transition happens, because it’ll appear on the streets. When it’s online…many miss the message.

So it turns out the limited choices of the pre-internet era did not reflect the public’s true desires, they wanted more.

And generally speaking, this more is not aligned with the majors, they don’t think it will scale.

But in the aggregate, it’s bigger than the hits, way bigger than the hits.

Once again, if you want to know what’s going on, you’re probably best off looking at concert grosses. Because that’s where people pony up their bucks.

Turns out there’s tons of opportunity out there for non-hit acts. It’s cheaper than ever to make, distribute and promote and if you’re longing for the twentieth century, before the internet, when it was all different, the truth is you probably couldn’t have gotten signed by a major anyway, you’d ‘a been dead in the water. And if you made money on record sales back then, you’re now upside down, but in terms of ticket sales, you’re making more money than you ever did from record sales, check the grosses. And if you’re bitching about traveling from city to city, doing the work, you’re no different from the coal miner or auto worker whose job disappeared. You’ve got to adapt.

Hip-Hop has.

But everybody else has not.

We might ultimately find out that when it all settles Hip-Hop still dominates, that’s possible, but one thing’s for sure, a plethora of acts will have traction.

Yes, that Dean, of Jan and Dean.

Dedicated readers will know they were my first faves, before the Beach Boys. I played their album “Command Performance” until it turned grey (which is what happened when you had a heavy tonearm, before the heyday of audiophile turntables in the late sixties and seventies). I made my mother drive from store to store until I could find blue sneakers. In the days before Vans, they were a rarity. Everybody wore white, with a few holdouts still wearing black from the fifties. And I had the striped shirts too. And when we went on a family trip cross-country I insisted we go to Malibu, where I rented a board and rode the waves, even stood up. Then again, I’d had some experience in Atlantic City. And this was before the Surf Punks informed everybody that they needed to go home, because the waves were just too crowded.

Jan was an underrated genius, he has not gotten his due. He wrote and produced and recorded. With a bunch of high school buddies. Dean was one of them, and the two of them…

At first, Dean was giving short answers, believing this was the typical interview, but once I told him to go on at length, he came out with so many stories…I realized this was the definitive statement, and I let him go on as long as he needed to.

Was he a BMOC at USC? (That’s “Big Man On Campus” for those unfamiliar with the acronym.) NO! He might have had number ones, but those were in pop music, and everybody on campus was into FOLK MUSIC!

And I’ve never heard some of these Beach Boys stories before. At least not on this nuanced level.

Now at some point this generation is gonna die. And the roots of rock and roll will be sealed in amber. And sure, Jimi Hendrix never wanted to hear surf music again, and Frank Zappa pooh-poohed it, but maybe that’s because it was so endearing, because it captured the essence of SoCal life, because it was so successful. Want to know what’s a hit? Listen to those Jan and Dean records, they got you in one listen, you had to hear them again. Somehow we’ve gotten lost, maybe as a result of the free-format album era that succeeded them. Given all the tools and all the time and space, it turns out many people have nothing to say, at least not in a way that immediately grabs you. Can you write a hit single? Can you record and release a hit single? Most people can’t, but that was the essence of Jan and Dean’s success.

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