The first decade of the twenty first century was about instant disruption, the second has been about delayed disruption.

Instant disruption is when a business is affected overnight. There was Napster, and before that digital photography, and then the death of newspapers and magazines. It was right in front of our very eyes, people were talking about it, and then it happened.

Whereas delayed disruption happens after the initial momentous event. Just when you think you’ve survived, OOMPH, you’re hit again and possibly devastated to the point of extinction.

Like the movies.

The problem is the audience got younger and streaming platforms got better.  Since they weathered the advent of television, conventional wisdom was that movies would continue to survive. But they haven’t, they’re heading for a huge cliff. Movies did what television did not. Now it’s the reverse. All the human stories are on TV, whether it be cable or Netflix or Hulu. The film companies have climbed to higher ground, in reality lower ground, with their Marvel movies. But despite the huge results for some of those pics, the type of pic that can succeed is very limited, and only one pic a week succeeds. You call this is a business? Of course not. On demand viewing at home is more convenient, with a better selection of product. The only reason to go to the theatre is to literally get out of the house. But the experience is lousy. The flick doesn’t start when you want it to. You waste time driving/arriving. So, the only people who still go are those accustomed to it. i.e. oldsters, who seem convinced that the Oscars matter. As for excising awards from the telecast because the show is too long…THAT DOESN’T MATTER TO THE PEOPLE WHO ARE WATCHING! Most people don’t watch to begin with. Making the show half an hour shorter makes no difference.

So you’ve got magazines like “Vanity Fair” focusing on the Oscars and driving headlong into irrelevance. The audience is limited. Glamour without gossip triumphed in the eighties and nineties, but today, who is the magazine appealing to? Only those already subscribing, new adherents are nowhere to be found. This is the story of the mainstream media in general, it is aging with its audience, and MTV proved that this is death. They fired the beloved original VJs and replaced them with younger people. “Vanity Fair” is aging to extinction. As for the WSJ, NYT and WaPo, they do nothing to entice a younger generation which they do not understand and do not report on. They thought that since they survived the great newspaper washout, they’d triumph. But they do not understand the new game, what does Gen-Z think?

It’s not even the millennials anymore. They’re making new people every day. Gen-Z does not remember an era before the internet. Google was always here. Gen-Z has taken over music, and baby boomers and Gen-X’ers just can’t fathom it. As for millennials, they’re caught between two eras, just like Gen-X’ers before them.

And then there are record labels. Which were supposedly threatened by Napster, but survived. But the truth is now they are truly threatened. Primarily because the deal is too poor in the internet era when you can do it yourself. They’re like loan sharks, giving you cash and extracting a pound of flesh, forever. The truth is most music made today will not be played on the radio, and won’t get on SNL, so why do you need a major label? The majors survived by wielding the power of their catalogs, but that’s now history. Spotify is bigger than any label. You can’t pull your catalog and survive, you need that streaming revenue. Furthermore, Spotify promises promotion if you go direct. Just when they’re getting comfortable, the labels are going to be challenged. Vivendi should sell Universal Music NOW! Sure, there’s still a little upside left, but if you’re trying to eke out every dollar, you risk getting caught on the downside, which is a very slippery slope.

It’s even happening to Facebook. While the media rails against the company, the truth is no Gen-Z’er would be caught dead on the service, they’re all on Instagram, which Zuckerberg presciently purchased. The record labels’ revenues were falling and what did they do? THEY TOOK MORE! Wanting a piece of all action. You prepare for the future by adding more value, not by taking it away.

So we’ve got a coterie of people who won’t buy magazines, won’t go to movie theatres and don’t care what the label is, they can’t see it online anyway.

And what are the enterprises doing? Exulting because they think they’ve survived. But the truth is the challenge is only beginning.

The internet made all content available. But it made every success smaller than ever. What old media thinks is known by everyone is not. All the metrics are antiquated. How do you quantify a world where everybody is listening to something different and old tracks are as popular as new ones?

Instead, we’ve got inside manipulation. Whether it be record companies including physical product and merch to make a chart only meaningful to themselves or terrestrial radio failing to innovate as it keeps boasting about its reach.

Meanwhile, the Grammy telecast was down 5% in the 18-49 demo. Oh, overall it was up just a smidge, but if you think advertisers or performers want to reach those without money or the nearly dead…you must be broke or one breath away from passing yourself.

The ball keeps moving when everybody thinks it’s stopped. They’re busy pounding their chests in triumph just before the end comes.

Kinda like BuzzFeed. Like the HuffingtonPost before it, once the shine wears off, people realize they don’t want junk news. BuzzFeed is a risk to news purveyors like your kid is a threat to the Premier League.

And a star is not what he or she used to be. But the old media keeps trumpeting faces no one knows. And keeps paying lip service to “influencers” as if they’re the future.

But today’s kids are savvy. They know the influencers are doing it for the money. Which is why the influencers burn out and fade away, there’s no there there.

But there’s plenty of there there on Netflix. And on Spotify. The new platforms that are smorgasbords of content. Meanwhile, every day I get e-mail about the “faltering finances” of these two companies…have you ever heard of AMAZON? You play to dominance and you win in the end.

Spotify is not selling some records, THEY’RE LEASING THEM ALL!

Netflix is not charging you $15 for a movie at a particular time, they’re serving more than you can watch any time you want to turn on the set!

It’s a public addicted to on demand. With the world at its fingertips.

But the surviving companies run by boomers can’t fathom this, believing they’re forever when they’re not.

Everything has a lifespan. Everything percolates on the outside before it breaks through. Who knew the public wanted long form documentaries like “Making A Murderer” and “Wild Wild Country”? Credit Netflix for taking a risk. Denigrate record companies for putting out endless me-too hip-hop records in a world where people are not restricted to hearing only them.

The truth is there is no hit parade.

When are the oldsters going to realize this?

When they lose their jobs.

Is it time to forget the baby boomers?

Linda Ronstadt got a featured piece on the holy grail of television promotion, “CBS Sunday Morning,” yet no one is listening to her album on Spotify, and it’s quite good. Only two tracks break five digits, the rest are in four. For the math-challenged, that means “Just One Look” has 29,177 plays, “Blue Bayou” has 96,901 and the rest have bupkes.

So, are oldsters not paying for Spotify or are they unaware of this album or…

Probably all. THEY’RE OLD! They lived through the classic rock era, they’ll pay to see classic rock acts, but they’re uninterested in new music by new acts or old music by classic acts.

This is important. Because oldsters control the media, giving a false impression of what’s going on.

Of course they could be subscribing to Apple Music. Which doesn’t make its stats publicly available. That would make sense, afraid of the newfangled Spotify, whose subscription numbers are accelerating faster than those of the vaunted Apple, maybe going public gave Spotify more credibility.

Or they could be calling out to Alexa for Amazon Music. But do they even know this Ronstadt LP is available?

Just because they’ve got smartphones, that doesn’t mean baby boomers know how to use them.

Baby boomers are the ones who are afraid of streaming, the ones who barely use their data plans, the ones who sit in front of their flat screens, but they own a disproportionate part of the conversation.

As for “CBS Sunday Morning”… The effect is overstated. In a world where late night means nothing, except for SNL, people glom on to the last show standing, not knowing the paradigm has shifted.

And are we pitching physical or ownership here?

Note how “Billboard” trumpeted an increase in sales after the Grammys. So anemic, that anyone could see through the so-called bounce. Or, as Billy Preston once sang, “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.”

But the “Bible” didn’t talk about streaming numbers, where the active audience is, where there was NO EFFECT! Where Ariana Grande owned almost the entire top ten. It’s bizarro world I tell you. How do you expect the political world to get the facts straight when we can’t even do it in music.

As for buying music, whether it be files or physical, someone is sending me a CD and I wondered where I’d play it. I hear this from ancient acts all the time. Baby boomers do know Bluetooth, they’ll stream in their automobiles with no CD players, my computer has no CD player, even Whole Foods stopped selling CDs, but brain-dead oldsters keep sending them, it’s like getting an AOL disc in the mail.

Of course there are baby boomer exceptions, I’m gonna hear from them all day long. But they don’t realize they’re a self-selecting tribe, that most boomers are…

Retired and over-the-hill.

They might have cash, but they watch it closely. Kids need Netflix and Spotify and all the attendant services. Baby boomers are counting their cash and saying no.

It’s not only that music is a youth business, but boomers are old, and despite dressing up like their kids and getting plastic surgery, age never sleeps, whether it’s today or fifty years ago.

What kind of crazy, fucked-up world do we live in where Michelle Obama gets the biggest ovation at the Grammys?

One in which Beto O’Rourke holds a counter-rally to the President in his hometown of El Paso and makes you believe, despite lacking charisma and a stage-ready voice.

That’s the power of identity, that’s the power of truth.

The same attributes that made Bob Dylan an international icon.

You see people hunger for truth, they hunger for someone to believe in, and the moribund music industry has forgotten this as it continues to bitch about the internet revolution and lost revenues while turning down no cash.

The world is full of misinformation. I’ve got a guy who e-mails me every day from the right wing perspective. He said the Obamas were disbarred. HUH? I’d never heard that, so I go to Snopes, I Google, and it turns out they went inactive. I WENT INACTIVE! I can practice law tomorrow, all I’ve got to do is contact the State Bar, but I went inactive because I didn’t want to keep up with the b.s. continuing education courses, just like the Obamas. If I go active, I’ve got to get the “education,” and since I’m not now practicing law and have no desire to…

Just like the Obamas.

There are experts testifying to this fact all over the web.

But the right wing websites… They continue to perpetrate the myth, even when confronted with the truth, that’s right, the Obamas turned in their law licenses before they were gonna lose them, BUT THIS IS NOT TRUE!

But it doesn’t matter.

That’s the world we live in, not only do we argue about facts, people just make them up.

And if you think there are two sides…

They’re not the ones you think they are.

It’s not corporations versus bleeding heart liberals…

It’s the left behind racists versus millennials worried about their future.

And on one hand we’ve got Trump lying, every time he opens his mouth, just pick up a paper that’s not the WSJ or stop watching Fox News, and on the other…

A group of people who have been incited by Trump, who’ve been awoken by him, and are now standing up for a different opinion.

It’s kinda like 1964 and the British Invasion. We were completely asleep, and then we found a new way of looking at things.

It’s not like the MTV revolution, which was about establishing a monoculture and monetizing, it’s about ideas and culture and…

All the things music used to represent.

I want to believe, and you do too.

But the acts refuse to take a side, refuse to lead, until it’s way too late.

No one leads the charge.

What’s worse is they don’t do it in their music.

Now this is where the faux leaders come out to protest they’ve got the hit, just like porn stars run for office. They want the attention, but they don’t have the goods.

Meanwhile, I tune in “Hannity” and it’s like a Nazi rally, USA!, USA! I wouldn’t want to be there, you don’t want to be a victim of the mob.

Not that the left is perfect, Ilhan Omar’s tweets evidence anti-Semitism that she apologized for, and this is not the first time, but at least Democrats did not rally around her racism, like Trump did in Charlottesville. It’s the ones who remain silent we have to worry about. You’ve got to take a stand, we need sunlight, but we live in a world where the President won’t agree to release the Mueller report. What, is this a game show? “Deal Or No Deal”? I’ve paid my taxes, I’m entitled to that report, unlike the fat cat corporations who got all their foreign money back and still don’t pay the rate that I do.

And that’s the story of today too, the lack of influence of corporations.

Sure, they align with Trump. But traditional Republicans want nothing to do with the man. And the truth is the rank and file who voted for Trump don’t want the corporations and their values.

Did you read Krugman’s article on Howard Schultz? Mr. Starbucks can’t win because almost no one is a financial conservative and a social liberal, they make up only 4% of the electorate, the truly rich who want us to believe they know, but they don’t.

Check it out:

“The Empty Quarters of U.S. Politics-Two missing species: libertarian voters and populist racist politicians.”

Don’t tell me you can’t because it’s in the “New York Times.” Isn’t that the first rule of engagement, KNOW THY ENEMY?

It’s a war of information, and most of it is free online. And if you can’t afford that which is behind a paywall, the joke is on you.

Americans are cheap, their priorities are screwed up, reinforced by politicians, what did Bush say after 9/11, SHOP?

You’re the one with the power, that’s the story of Trump, individuals count, and the seemingly impossible can happen.

But the counter-reaction to Trump is vicious. And what does he keep complaining about? He doesn’t get a fair shake in the media. Kinda like Ted Bundy complaining about the same thing, or R Kelly. Just because you think they’re out to get you, that doesn’t mean they’re not. But the truth is the major press is bending over backwards to be fair, but Trump is such a wackadoodle.

But this is not about the press, this is about you.

Never forget, most of the press missed Trump.

But unless you’re one of the 4% who are rich and economically conservative and socially liberal, things aren’t adding up for you these days. You feel powerless in the din.

But don’t.

We thought the tech companies were leaders, but they’re just mercenaries, with no soul.

But walking the earth these days are people like Beto and Bernie. You listen to them and they make sense, they inspire you.

There’s something happening here.

What it is ain’t exactly clear.

But after the shuttering of Pandora’s Box and the Sunset Strip riots the youth took over.

Now musicians are scalping their own tickets at the arena, pissed they’re not getting paid enough.

Wake up and realize we’re living in exciting times. We’re fighting for not only the soul of our country, but the meaning of life. Should he or she with the most toys win in the end? Is this a false concept? What is important, health care or keeping out immigrants?

You get to decide.

And people are fighting for your attention.

Some of them are inspiring, some of them are worth listening to.

They’re standing up and making a difference.

WHERE ARE YOU?

That’s right, we’re gonna start at “Good Times Bad Times” and slowly work our way through the catalog.

But unlike last week, this is an INTERACTIVE show. I want to hear your take, your history, your experience. What you think of the work, where you were when you heard it and what it means to you.

Tune in tomorrow, Tuesday February 12th, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

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

Twitter: @lefsetz @siriusxmvolume/#lefsetzlive

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