VMAs Hit All-Time Ratings Low for 3rd Straight Year

The biggest winner Monday night? SEBASTIAN MANISCALCO! No one saw his tone-deaf monologue panned in every publication known to man. And the truth is, his audience agrees with him, millennials/Gen-Z are wankers.

But the millennials/Gen-Z don’t care.

Welcome to 2019, where there is no mass audience, no consensus on what’s cool, hip or great, where we’re all deep in our own silos and the only people who don’t get it are the media and the purveyors.

That’s right. If hip-hop were as big as the media says it is, it would dominate the Pollstar chart. But the truth is that’s ruled by old rockers, not even pop acts. There has never been such a disconnect between what is selling tickets and what dominates radio and recordings.

Yup, a teen might stream a track ad infinitum on Spotify, but his or her parents, his or her older siblings, his or her himself, are going to see the legends before they croak, paying high prices and purchasing merch.

And there are developing acts on the Pollstar chart too. And festivals like LOCKN’ where Trey plays with Derek, wailing on “Little Wing,” and the attendees are satiated and couldn’t care less what’s #1, even if they know what it is.

Tedeschi Trucks Band ft. Trey Anastasio – “Little Wing”

So they give a party featuring the latest and greatest Spotify wonders, mixing in some ancient hip-hop to boot, and it turns out no one cares, at least not in numbers. Oh, MTV is touting great social numbers, but they are not revealing them, which means they can’t be THAT good.

Don’t the kids want to see Taylor Swift?

NO! Her FANS want to see Taylor Swift! So far, no track off of “Lover” has been a hit, and despite reviewers lining up to praise the album, most people just don’t care. Taylor came up in a different era, when singular dominance was possible, but now it is not.

And we live in a participatory culture. People want to make videos to Lil Nas X’s music, but they’ve got no desire to see him live. And Shawn Mendes is not the star he’s made out to be, ditto Lizzo. Oh, they’re successful, but they’re just niche!

Yes, we can blame MTV for steering away from music.

Yes, we can say that millennials are on demand viewers, and appointment TV is anathema.

Yes, we can say there is awards show fatigue.

The truth is everything we based our industry on has faded away, so the old purveyors are doubling-down, trying to save themselves, when the truth is they’re just headed for the dumper.

Like theatre owners. Netflix is eating their lunch. The owners refuse to show Scorsese’s “The Irishman” because the streaming giant won’t give them a three month window.

But Netflix not only has “The Irishman,” but the new Soderbergh and Baumbach movies. In other words, Netflix has the adults of cinema, the creators and the viewers, leaving the theatre owners with superheroes and the very occasional comedy. Yup, that’s all that sells. Hell, adult/indie/foreign box office was abysmal over the summer. So the real auteurs have moved on to television, where the audience is. Meanwhile, theatre owners are like the labels during the Napster era. What is end game? You’ve got to focus on end game.

The music business has flipped. The real stars, the career artists, are made on the road. The major labels are just interested in the evanescent, overpaying for a hit du jour with traction online. Hell, they don’t even know how to develop a non-rock artist.

As for Interscope and Billie Eilish…kudos, there are always exceptions, but the truth is she’s a youth phenomenon, hell, at least even Alanis Morissette was 21 and wrote her own material with “Jagged Little Pill.”

And some of the road acts don’t even put out albums, or do so occasionally. They realize their bond is with their audience, not the middlemen, i.e. radio and streaming services.

But anybody with a gig, anybody with money, is afraid of the future, they don’t want to see their world decline. Therefore, they say Elizabeth Warren is unelectable. WHY? Because they don’t want to lose something!

And Shari Redstone reunites CBS and Viacom and Wall Street swoons! But CBS cannot succeed as a standalone streamer and Viacom is a collection of junk.

But this is the same Street that’s anti-Tesla not realizing that they’re betting against the future, that the world has already decided to go electric, and it was Musk that was pushing the envelope, and it is Tesla that has the supercharging stations and better battery technology. Hell, if they sell it/merge, there’s a pretty penny involved, but no, the Street is too focused on today’s numbers, short-termism, and the media trumpets its viewpoint.

Awards shows are dead. There are just too many and the awards are meaningless. As for tuning in to tweet…that’s passe.

We’ve learned that nothing is dominant these days, that it’s nearly impossible to get any story out, that the only people paying attention are those who were already paying attention.

Furthermore, if you grow, it will start online, not on TV or in mainstream media.

This leaves tons of questions.

Old people don’t like questions.

But the future is dark and murky, but it does come, and the spoils go to those who figure it out.

Tune in tomorrow, Tuesday August 27th, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

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

Twitter: @lefsetz or @siriusxmvolume/#lefsetzlive

Hear the episode live on SiriusXM VOLUME: HearLefsetzLive

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app: LefsetzLive

(Thanks to @JBrutonMusic for the inspiration!)

I discovered it in the “New Yorker.”

Every day I do my back exercises, takes about half an hour, and while I do them I struggle to read my iPhone, otherwise I’m bored, I don’t want to waste time.

And it’s at this time that I go through the round of my news apps. I’m especially hooked on the WaPo and the “London Times,” because I don’t get these in print. And the paper is better in print. Oh, there’s less news, and it’s late, but you find stories you missed, that round out your view of the world.

And to be honest, I’m checking the news apps all day long, I’m addicted, in a good way. It’s not FOMO, it’s just that I dig it, now you can feel like a participant, you’re always up to date, ready to play. Of course this leaves you as the information source for your friends, you end up a lecture series, which is not satisfying, but every once in a while there’s a subject I’ve got to broach.

Like the Popeyes chicken sandwich.

I’ve never eaten there. I guess I got turned off when Kentucky Fried Chicken went off the rails. When the skin came detached from the meat. You’ve got to know, once upon a time KFC was the new thing. My father would buy a bucket, along with that dynamite cole slaw, and take it to us at the beach after work. I can still taste it. KFC was a staple, there was always a bucket at the Labor Day picnic (along with ears of corn drenched in salt water and cooked over a charcoal grill).

Now when I moved to L.A., there was Pioneer Chicken, all over the place, and it was really bad. Some people still testify about the failed chain, but there are people who reminisce about Swanson’s TV Dinners too.

My local fast food chain of choice was the All American Burger. Ate tons of those. But then they went by the wayside and I got wary of all that fried food, fast food and…

Then I read an article about the Popeyes chicken sandwich.

Now for a while there, Jack In The Box had a killer chicken sandwich. And then there was Carl’s Jr.’s (why “Jr.”?, I always wondered that) barbequed chicken sandwich, which was actually a piece of chicken, but the former was fried and I lost my taste for the latter, and yes, I’ve had Gus’s, but to tell you the truth, I want to live, I’m watching my heart.

But now it’s taking everything in my power to not drive to Popeyes.

So if you’re a “New Yorker” person, a couple of years back they released a new app, “NYerToday,” that features specialized content each and every day.

Now the truth is the “New Yorker” has very little virality, it’s mostly an echo chamber. Oh, occasionally they break news, or deliver insight, a la the recent Al Franken article, that spreads, but that’s rare. I never hear anybody talking about the articles in NYerToday, and to tell you the truth, oftentimes they’re written from an intellectual spot high above the real world and are out of touch with the essence of life. But this article in NYerToday intrigued me, it was entitled:

“Popeyes Chicken Sandwich Is Here To Save America”

Now like a lot of great writing, the article starts off in left field, you don’t know how this anecdote is gonna fit in. But that gets you hooked, in a world where online writing is all about the facts, and it’s believed that no one reads past the first paragraph, if that.

And I’m wondering just how a sandwich from a low rent fast food joint could have that much impact.

But then the writer, Helen Rosner, starts to explain.

Raquelle Smith, a NYC food writer, is quoted as saying “That Popeyes sandwich had me in my feelings. That’s probably the most emotion I’ve shown all year. The chicken is perfectly fried! The breading isn’t falling off. You get crunch in every bite. (The bun is) ‘a buttery cushion,’ (the sauce) takes it over the top. Is it healthy? NO! But dammit don’t it taste good. It’s truly a gift from the heavens.”

Then Ms. Rosner herself testifies “The salt, the fat, the sharpness, the softness – together, they’re what flavor scientists might describe as ‘high amplitude,’ a combination so intense and so perfectly balanced, that they meld into one another to form a new, entirely coherent whole.”

Remind you of anything?

Jon Landau saying he’d seen the future of rock and roll, rocketing Bruce Springsteen into the public consciousness.

Yup, music criticism used to inspire. It made you buy records. It wasn’t snarky, it was enthusiastic. And it wasn’t dry analysis, the writer’s personality/enthusiasm came through, actually you got to know the writers themselves, they were not bland, replaceable personalities!

Then the article described a Twitter war, between Chick-fil-A and Popeyes. With the latter taking the high road and benefiting from it.

And we all hate Chick-fil-A, at least the “New Yorker” readers do, but everyone who’s had one, which does not include me, TESTIFIES!

But supposedly Popeyes’ was better. Could that really be true? I mean how good could a fried chicken sandwich be?

Pretty damn good.

But if you wanted one, you had to line up, they sold out, there was mania.

Oh yeah, right. This is just a humorous “New Yorker” article.

But I open the papers the following day and both the WSJ and NYT have articles, drier than the “New Yorker,”‘s but testifying to the same mania, and analyzing the business success and the social media impact and these articles would have had no sticking power if I hadn’t read the “New Yorker” article first, which was a story, with soul.

So I went from ignorant to a laughing outsider to becoming aware of the biggest fad in America right now overnight.

Last night I brought it up. I got blank stares in most cases, but then some who were in on it testified! The lines! Yet no one had actually eaten the sandwich.

So yes, there’s mania, yes, there’s virality, but at the heart of it seems to be a damn good sandwich.

Kinda like music, where we specialize in hype and the product is substandard, to the point where you no longer even have to check it out. Hell, you don’t want to waste an hour listening to crap, you’ll wait until there’s a consensus that you must tune in.

But there’s little mainstream consensus in music today. No product, no song, no record, that cuts across all lines and attracts all our attention.

And the more you read about the Popeyes chicken sandwich, it does not appear it’s just a publicity stunt. It was a new product with a little promotion that stuck. And grew because Popeyes’ competitors were anxious.

And they say Twitter is irrelevant.

Now with food, it’s not one and done, it’s not a movie, but what a record should be. Something you revisit again and again when you get the hankering for it.

But once again, now that’s food and not music.

We’re all on the outside until we’re suddenly made aware and brought to the inside. All the usual tricks no longer work. Billboards, TV ads, we’ve been trained to ignore them. But when something is news without promotion, when a story gains virality, all based on the underlying product, we cannot look away, it’s like a car wreck, we’re glued to the story.

America is glued to the Popeyes chicken sandwich.

My car radio broke. I turned it on and all I got was static.

Now my friend Jeff says it’s because I started my car with the a/c on, but I’d never had a problem previously. And then I realized I could get FM, but the tuner skipped over Sirius, and on XM I got the aforementioned static. Yes, I have both in my car, it’s a legacy from when the outlets were different. And to tell you the truth, I still used both, each tuner had pluses and minuses. So I could still listen to FM, but…

I haven’t had that spirit in my car since 2003, when I first got XM.

Oh, I tried. It was execrable. Unlistenable. Jive with too many commercials, and the inability to click to scores of music stations if I didn’t like what was playing.

And this was bad timing. I was involved in a major project, not work, but personal, and I had no time. And I start calculating when I can get the radio fixed…two weeks?

But then I decided to drive to the car stereo place anyway, just for a reading, because the fact that the tuner just skipped over Sirius was so strange.

Now you’ve got to know, car stereo places are going out of business in droves. You see cars come with much better stereos, and with most brands you can pay for an upgrade, Felice’s Lexus even has a Nakamichi system…but it’s nothing to write home about. But I figured if I purchased a new car, which’ll have to happen someday, although my goal was to keep driving this one until we got to driverless automobiles, I’d stick with the upgraded factory radio.

Now, no way.

So the place I go to, on Wilshire in Santa Monica, is now called Al & Ed’s. But the truth is Al & Ed’s is a centralized buying service, the shop is totally independent, but would my installer still be there? I’d driven by hundreds of times, the shop was still open.

And when I got into the driveway, I called out for Robert, and he was still there!

I mean it was a major installation. Took days back in 2005. And then the Audison amp blew up and had to be replaced by a JL, which costs a grand itself, but I had no choice.

But that was about five years ago.

So I explain the problem to Robert, and he says he’ll have to troubleshoot. Now it’s a game of money, do you pay to find out or just start over, with a new unit. And I’ve been down this route before, my previous Alpine head units lasted four or five years max. And if I got them fixed I was absent sound for a couple of weeks and then they broke again soon thereafter. And this Alpine had lasted 14 years. So I asked Robert, “What about a new radio?”

And he started to smile. He started talking about Alpine’s new flat screens.

But I didn’t want no stinking flat screen, I figured that was an advertisement for theft, and in one car I lost five radios and in another one one and the issue isn’t so much the radio itself, but the destruction to the dash. So, I wanted a radio with a removable faceplate. To tell you the truth, I’d done research the night before, but it was hard to figure out. The digital screen seemed to come with an amplifier, which I didn’t need. And I couldn’t figure out what the best of the traditional units was.

But Robert told me I could get a traditional one DIN radio for $249, plus $150 installation.

But the iLX-W650, the flat screen digital item, sans amp, was only $300.

And I’m still talking about theft when Robert quiets me down and says NO ONE STEALS CAR RADIOS ANYMORE, THEY’RE TOO CHEAP!

Yup, there used to be $1000 head units. You couldn’t buy anything worth owning for under $500.

And I’m questioning Robert, I mean really, no one’s gonna steal it?

And he told me it was BOLTED IN!

But if they didn’t steal radios, did they still steal airbags?

No, Robert told me it was down to catalytic converters now.

So I said yes, but they didn’t have one in stock and I had no time to get it installed that day anyway and he took down my number, and…

I didn’t hear from him.

I mean I told him Friday was good, I was gonna be in the neighborhood, I mean I was slammed every day before, but I got worried when the phone didn’t ring so I stopped by late Thursday afternoon and Richard, the proprietor, told me they were having one Ubered over from the warehouse, and it would be here soon, and Robert could install it today if he had the time.

But he didn’t. You see he was working on this Porsche.

I mean they work on high end/exotic cars there. One guy has 80k into a classic Z28 Camaro. The trunk has giant amps and two batteries, one solely for the stereo if the car is not in motion.

But Thursday was gonna be tight anyway, because I was going to Pasadena to see the Stones.

Now earlier in the week, dying without Howard and music, I streamed SiriusXM from my phone. Which really wasn’t quite loud enough. Then again, my timing was good, Howard was on vacation.

But then I rode in silence. Which is weird, but you’re not so concerned with what you’re missing. It’s an alternative universe, just you and your machine. The only audio I had was listening to WAZE.

But early Friday morning I dropped my car off, well, early by my standards, 10 AM, and then I went about my business.

I got a call from Robert that the radio was done at 12:30, but I was hung up until 3, when I finally Ubered over.

Now the iLX-W650 fits perfectly. You see, my car originally came with a double DIN radio, the factory model which I canned immediately, and the iLX-W650 is double DIN, so it looked like it was a factory installation, but in 2005 no Saab/Subarus came with screens.

And Robert’s showing me how to use it. And it’s both complicated and simple. I mean you can go down through the menus to acute audio control, multiple bands of EQ, and there are a ton of apps.

Oh, I forgot to tell you, the iLX-W650 comes with CARPLAY! (And Android Auto too, if you’re of that persuasion.) So you see your iPhone screen on the screen. Hell, Toyota just went CarPlay THIS YEAR! I’ve got all the features of a brand new car in my old one, thanks to this cheap unit (although by time I paid for installation and the SiriusXM brick and tax, it was over $600).

So I text Richie at Sirius to turn on my radio, but he says to wait 45 minutes, which is cool, because it’s already after closing time on the east coast, where he’s based.

And I pull out on to Wilshire and…

Now you’ve got to know, my car stereo is top shelf. It’s got the best Focal speakers. Two ways in the front doors and full range in the back. And in the trunk I’ve got a giant AVI subwoofer. Actually, it takes up more than a third of the trunk, or the area behind the back seat in my mini-station wagon. Now I tried to go without the subwoofer, but there was just no bottom, I popped for it, and it was another grand with installation back when.

So, Robert put a USB cable in my glovebox. So I could plug my iPhone in and get full service CarPlay. And he demonstrated it at the shop, but I didn’t have a USB to Lightning cable, so I had to stream via Bluetooth.

Oh, also Robert put in a switch, so I can address all the apps while driving, which is normally taboo, they don’t want you watching video.

So I’m stuck in traffic, barely moving, and I Bluetooth my library to the iLX-W650. WHEW!

Now you lose something streaming via Bluetooth, a direct connection is better, it certainly gives you more bottom, but I was ASTOUNDED at the sound, absolutely FLOORED!

Then I switched to Amazon Music, so I could call out tracks while driving, I tried out “Ten Years Gone” and it was…AS GOOD AS THE RECORD!

Of course the iLX-W650 has Siri too, for Apple Music, but I’ve got to read the manual to figure that out.

And all the old tracks I’m playing are new again. I just can’t believe how incredible it sounds!

Now I hear from Richie on the 405, he sends a text, which if I click will give me Sirius, and I do, and it happens instantly, much faster than on my old radios, and suddenly I’m back in action, I’ve got all my stations, my tunes, I’m ECSTATIC!

I remember when I put an aftermarket stereo in my second BMW, back in ’85. My shrink said $2600 was a luxury for most, but one of the things I lived for was driving around in my car listening to music and for me it was a NECESSITY!

And I’m in my automobile, a/c cranking, and I’m in my own private reverie, my own private Idaho, and that’s what I want to do, immediately go on a long road trip, just to listen to my stereo.

I mean I was in traffic for an hour, but I still couldn’t get out of the car when I got home! I was shuffling through songs, listening to how they sounded, you know, like when you buy a brand new home stereo.

But no one buys a brand new home stereo anymore. Tweaks gobble up hundred thousand dollar units, but they’re more into the gear than the music, and for most people a portable Sonos unit will suffice. But if you remember the days of the big rigs…

And I’m driving in my car, inside my own cocoon, it’s like wearing headphones without the earcups, and I realize the music in my car sounds better than the music in almost everybody’s listening environment. I’m hearing things I’ve never heard before.

And when I got home I insisted Felice sit inside and take a listen. She doesn’t care, but she got it.

And Richard told me they’re still upgrading cars, mostly high end models for high end people. They keep the head unit, and they change everything else, except some cars have a built-in amplifier, which you wish you didn’t have.

So I realized, if I ever get a new car, I’m gonna have to pony up again, I just can’t live with even the factory upgrade, you see the manufacturers don’t believe anybody will pay so much extra for the top shelf gear.

But I will!

iLX-W650