“Taylor Swift Will Keep New Album From Streaming For A Week”

This is about perception. The goal is to get as big a sales number as possible and then tout this to the somnambulant media who will eat it up, printing the facts verbatim, about Taylor’s “success,” and hopefully the public will eat it up.

But will they?

We live in two worlds. The honest one of the internet, based on data, and the false one left over from the last century wherein producers and publications are in cahoots to put out pabulum, oftentimes inaccurate, in order to get you to partake.

But that’s not working anymore.

Kinda like those holiday movie issues. Nobody cares about those, they’re just promotion to sell advertising, as out of touch as the newspaper itself, which is the same length every day, irrelevant of how much news there is.

So the truth is Taylor Swift’s new album is a stiff.

Now don’t take this as me getting back at her, this is a business story, not a gossip one, one wherein the biggest pop star in the world missteps.

She had it right, being in the news every damn day, but then she got caught in a web of her own duplicity and removed herself to her detriment.

That’s right, to live outside the law you must be honest. And it’s the same deal online. Swift was called out by Kim and Kanye, the latter with more cred than her, and Taylor folded her tent. If you can’t take the blowback, get off the internet. Oftentimes when you react you’re just blowing up the story.

So Taylor goes absent while hip-hop takes over the world. This is not her fault, but she plays in the commercial sandbox. One after another, pop divas have failed. Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, their albums did not live up to expectations. But Taylor thought she was different, but you can’t break the rules of pop unless you’re pushing the envelope, but Taylor came out with retro, imitative stuff, no different from what was already on the hit parade, and was vitriolic to boot. She misread the tea leaves, her act was getting old, it was time to change it. But she kept on playing the hurt little girl even though she was 27 and rich.

But the truth was evidenced on streaming services, where success, or lack thereof, is quantifiable.

Sure, “Look What You Made Me Do” had an impact, but there was pent-up demand for new Taylor Swift music, but none of the reviews or buzz were positive. They were lukewarm at best. And then came the tsunami of marketing. The rigged system to get better concert tickets, the deal with UPS…a truck stopped by my house last week and I laughed, it would be kinda like having the side of the vehicle painted with promo for the Pet Rock. Taylor lost touch. But this is not hard to do when you’re living in the bubble.

But it gets worse. Taylor dropped a fourth single at the end of last week to fuel demand, to drive excitement. Right now “Call It What You Want” is #37 with a downward bullet on the Spotify US Top 50. The track is doing better on iTunes, it’s #6, but the days of dominance are done, Taylor’s just another artist now, not something special.

Furthermore, iTunes measures sales, not listens, and listens are everything. What’s more important, money or fans? If you focus on the former it won’t be long before the latter abandon you.

But you’ll be hearing all about sales statistics for a week after Swift’s album drops.

But there you’ve got the hype-industrial complex once again.

Streaming won, if you don’t know this, if you don’t agree with this, you’re irrelevant, you’re probably still railing at iTunes for dismembering the integrity of the album.

The country runs on hip-hop. This could change, but you win either by breaking the paradigm or getting in line. Swift did neither.

Once she broke the paradigm, being the teenage Joni Mitchell, singing about her angst to country music. But then she became just another pop diva, living and dying by the hit.

But now you’ll hear about grosses, all kinds of numbers trying to cement Swift’s place in the firmament. But she’s already peaked.

Now somehow, Gaga has broken the mold. She hasn’t had a hit in eons, but she’s still loved. But really, Gaga is a unique musical figure, and she’s toned down the antics dramatically. Gaga is embraced by mature audiences, Swift’s old fans are graduating and the young ones are not forever.

So Swift will do good business on the road. They’ll try to convince you she’s as big as ever, that she’s dominating, but she’s not.

You fight for your status every damn day in music, especially if you’re playing the hit parade game. If you’re playing to the audience, your days are numbered, it’s when you’re most outside and most honest that you resonate. And everybody peaks. But if you want to sustain, be true to yourself, and if you explore do it your way. Don’t change sounds in the middle of a career, chasing trends, trying to be bigger… The truth is the champion always changes, and being the biggest and the best won’t keep you happy for long, and those on top get the slings and arrows, which Swift has had a hard time coping with.

Beware the backlash. It begins before you notice. In an era where everybody knows everything, and can talk about it with everybody instantly, it’s best to be humble, real, not try to perch yourself above, because human nature is such that everybody wants to pull you down.

We need music. We need those who test the limits. But we need artists who are aligned with humanity, who don’t live some cotton candy life.

You’ll never forget Taylor Swift, but you’ll forget “Reputation” soon. Despite everybody telling you that you shouldn’t.

Music is funny, when done right you can’t get enough of it, you need to play an album or a track over and over again.

But when done wrong, you don’t.

And the truth is in today’s world where everything is available all the time we’re only interested in the tippity-top, the bestest of the bestest, anything less than that disappoints. Or, you can forgo this competition and live in your own domain, of which there are a number of exponents. Jason Isbell does not get country airplay, he doesn’t dominate on Spotify, but he’s the beneficiary of the best word of mouth in the business, people want to see where he goes next, it’s not based on the penumbra, but the music itself. And this formula is repeatable.

As long as you’re an original.

Originality is based on the music, once you get caught up in the trappings…

You’re done.

Coloured Rain – Spotify

The second is my favorite. Traffic album, that is.

I haven’t been able to get “Hey, Western Union Man” out of my brain, I keep singing the lyrics to myself, it’s great to be infected by a tune, and playing Al Kooper’s “I Stand Alone” album on my phone, I heard “Coloured Rain.”

The first Traffic album didn’t break through. Today everybody knows “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” no, that’s not true, the generations have turned over, the old farts have their music and most of it will be forgotten with them, time keeps passing and they keep making new music, and the Beatles will sustain, but most everything else won’t.

Ironically, what made “Dear Mr. Fantasy” most famous was Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield’s live rendition of it, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I discovered the second Traffic album at Mike Ginsberg’s house in, West Hartford, Connecticut. I met him on this summer program in New Hampshire, we took a bus up, and I remember having to get off so the vehicle could make it up the hill. This was during the ’68 Convention, the one in Chicago, I was not in front of the TV set, I only know it by legend, and that’s what’s making me crazy, all these people testifying to how it once was even though they didn’t live through it, quoting “Billboard” charts, but those were different back then, and nearly meaningless in the FM rock period from ’67 to ’80.

And one of Traffic’s flaws, if you can call it that, was that it came out too early, the initial LP was released at the end of ’67, when underground FM radio barely existed, you heard about titles by word of mouth, like this and “Are You Experienced?” But by ’68, the FM album sound was infiltrating, and it was in October of that year that the second, eponymous Traffic album was released.

Then the band broke up.

Then they got back together, and released “John Barleycorn” and “Low Spark,” and went out again on the unexpected high of “When The Eagle Flies,” but it was that album in ’68, without the band’s name on the cover, that resonates.

It’s the one with “Feelin’ Alright.”

Yes, Dave Mason was now a full-fledged member of the band. But he sings his version differently from the ultimately more famous Joe Cocker rendition, Dave’s world-weary.

Seems I’ve got to have a change of scene…

And then there’s “40,000 Headmen,” which I saw in a glorious rendition during the comeback tour at the Fillmore East.

And my personal favorite, “Cryin’ To Be Heard.”

But this is about the first LP.

Both were produced by Jimmy Miller, a man whose reputation has faded with time, even though he made the best Stones LPs, but they sound completely different, the second is relaxed, the first is edgier, looking for the group’s sound, but it does have “Dear Mr. Fantasy.”

And the English and U.S. albums are not identical, but my favorite non-“Fantasy” track is “Dealer, which is haunting, about a subject that was still taboo at the time.

And there are more songs that were covered by other acts and became huge before most people had any idea who Traffic was.

Of course there was Blood, Sweat & Tears’ rendition of “Smiling Phases,” arguably better, even though the cognoscenti may consider that heresy.

And while I’m going against the church, I’ll also say that Three Dog Night’s version of “Heaven Is In Your Mind” is superior too. I was not a huge fan, but my friend Marc Goloff bought the live Three Dog Night LP and I was enraptured by their rendition that opened the album.

And then there was “Coloured Rain.”

Feels like coloured rain
Tastes like coloured rain

The original features Steve Winwood, one of the best rock vocalists of all time, one who still has his pipes, and it’s the same song, with great keyboards, but it’s missing the drama of Kooper’s rendition, it’s a demo compared to the cake Al bakes.

First and foremost there’s the storm, Al was into production, sound effects, and then a flourish fit for a symphony or a Broadway pit orchestra and then…

Yesterday I was a young boy
Searching for my way
Not knowing that I wanted
Living life from day to day

That was us when we were young. We were searching for answers, we were experimenting.

And Al’s take is all about the chorus, and it’s not as good as his version of “Hey, Western Union Man,” yet it contains phasers and all that modern stuff and it’s a song by a legendary band you should know.

Even if you don’t.

Don’t waste your time yelling into the echo chamber, love him or hate him, your words about Trump make no difference to the other side, it’s about doing the work, the anonymous drudgery, no one likes to do the work.

Sometimes the softest voice commands the most power. We’re conditioned to yell, but Gus Fring on “Breaking Bad” rarely speaks above a whisper, but everybody listens. We’re conditioned by TV talk to believe that he who yells loudest gets his way. This is oftentimes untrue.

The higher up the food chain you are, the nicer you are. The person at the top doesn’t have to play politics, they can be congenial. You can hate them as much as you like, that just illustrates you’re an outsider. At elite levels everybody gets along, but getting into the club, now that’s a thing.

Don’t believe the entertainment press, in most cases reporters are stenographers, underpaid people who will write whatever their subject wants.

Just because they said it’s sold out doesn’t mean it is.

Just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean they don’t do it. Hell, your phone rings all day long with junk calls, even though that’s illegal.

It’s about continuity, not the one time event. What happened this morning is already forgotten by the afternoon. It’s about the continuity of mass shootings, not any individual one. Kinda like hijackings, they were de rigueur until new security protocols were enforced. So if you think your album release date is important, fuggetaboutit, that’s just the beginning, the hard work is in front of you.

#1 on the “Billboard” chart is irrelevant. It’s one week, a snapshot in time. The charts are for the industry, but they’re disseminated to the public. They’re nearly meaningless.

It’s hard to break through the clutter, which is why hit records sustain, it’s so hard to get noticed that when you do there are still people who don’t know you, it takes longer than ever for the public to burn out on a song.

The medium affects the message. FM underground radio allowed bands to stretch out, then it was codified into hit programming and disco slipped in. MTV made bands gargantuan, instantly, but they fell to earth just as fast and then it became all about how you looked and the production values of your video. Now streaming rules and how you look and the production values of your video are barely important, oftentimes lyric videos triumph, and when anybody can play only a limited number get attention, it’s hip-hop now, but there’s no barrier to entry to another genre, it just needs quality and an online culture.

You’re not waiting for the cool new app or gadget, that’s so last decade.

Virtual reality was an overhype, augmented reality is not.

It’s about getting the little stuff right. How come my iPhone doesn’t rotate back from landscape to portrait like it used to? The same reason the Watch didn’t work on cellular, not only was there not enough testing, there was no difficult guru insisting it be their way. It’s like a band, someone’s always the leader, it causes problems, but without this you’re doomed.

Just because you can make it doesn’t mean anybody cares.

Consolidation limits choice. It might be good for Wall Street, but it’s rarely good for consumers.

People are invested in their livelihoods. No one at radio will say it’s troubled, everybody working for the company will defend it. This is what’s wrong with America, we say we want change, but personally we abhor it.

Most of America has fallen out of love with going to the movies. They are not big enough events to break away from your on demand world. We expect everything to be available when we want it.

Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney, CBS…they all can’t succeed as standalone apps. Netflix is winning because they know online there’s one victor, one company with 65-70% of the market, and that you gain momentum and keep it with innovation. Starting from scratch is too difficult in a mature world. And people don’t like to be pecked to death by ducks, they don’t want to sign up for all these different services.

Food is personal in an industrial world. Which is why it triumphs. It’s an exponent of creativity, every meal is different. The twentieth century was about mass production, the twenty first century is all about artisanal individuality.

Don’t encourage and pay younger people and your business dies. This is what is happening at the major labels, there’s one overpaid majordomo and peons who are underpaid and overworked.

We expect everything to just work. Cars, computers… Used to be you knew the inner goings-on, those days are history.

You can’t hold back the future. The elimination of subsidies might kill Tesla, but it won’t kill the electric car. Furthermore, there’s no guarantee that the U.S. dominates in the future. Protect the past at your peril. Can you say FRANCE?

It’s about who you know. If you expect excellence to triumph all by its lonesome, you’re delusional.

Don’t be proud to be poor, it just leaves you out of the discussion.

You’ve got to play the game to succeed, don’t think you can win otherwise.

I finally downloaded the app (and live.ly too!) It was the article in today’s WSJ. magazine. Let me see, can you access this without a subscription?

Unfortunately you can’t, welcome to the new world of haves and have-nots, you thought information was gonna be free forever, but it’s not, you’re gonna pay if you want it, and that’s gonna boil it down to the informed and uninformed, and forget about politics, if you want to know about trends, what’s going on in business, you’ve got to pay, sorry.

That’s what content companies don’t understand. It’s an evolution. Get them hooked, then close the doors, you’re gonna make more money than ever before. But only a few companies in each vertical will sustain. And in news, it takes infrastructure, which is not easy to replicate, the HuffPo is a shadow of what it once was, even though it’s better, and BuzzFeed actually has gravitas, but in the world of social media…

It’s about innovation. For all the scuttlebutt about the power of Facebook, if it didn’t buy WhatsApp and Instagram it would be struggling now, kinda like Apple, why does everybody always look at today instead of tomorrow?

Musical.ly is looking at tomorrow, Generation Z.

This is not for you, for old farts, this is for kids with more time than you, who are still figuring out their place on the social stratum, who are unafraid of taking a risk, making fools of themselves.

So basically, you post a video of yourself to a short musical clip.

Doesn’t sound so revolutionary in concept, I’ve been tracking the story for over a year, sifting through the e-mail, because overhype is rampant and trends frequently don’t last, but when I read about John Janick getting his acts involved, and Jason Derulo, when I saw the impact of these videos, I decided to check the app out.

And it is an app. Just like an older generation never knew a world without computers, without the internet, the youngest generation never knew a world without smartphones. You parents can bitch and moan, say your kid doesn’t need one (doesn’t DESERVE ONE!) but without a smartphone you’re disconnected, not part of the firmament, never mind the discussion.

And for all the hogwash about the downside of technology, whose fires are stoked by the ancient intellectuals in the “New York Times,” most of what technology brings is good, hell, did you see that article in the “Wall Street Journal” extolling the virtues of Kindles, especially the new Oasis? The writer said he’d never go back to print, and one day the publishers will wake up and see they’ve made a mistake, after all the Luddites buying physical books disappear.

Now musical.ly is not like Snapchat, there’s very little learning curve.

And it’s not like Facebook, where you boast about what you’ve done.

Nor Instagram, where you fake it for pictures.

No, musical.ly is all about the here and now, about making a video and posting it instantly. You almost want to participate, until you realize you’ll never be that skinny, and your aged body can’t take the workout.

It’s riveting, to see what these kids come up with. And you instantly see beneath the surface, wanting to become a neighborhood (national, INTERNATIONAL!) star, the passing of information, which is so fast these days.

And then you look at the chart. And realize this could be the most important one in musicdom, even more important than the vaunted Shazam, this is what kids are listening to right now, kids who may or may not have a streaming music service, this is where hits are being BUILT!

And the categories are simple to divine. Popular, Song Chart and Leaderboard. Kids are involved, it’s a community, with stickiness.

“Sensor Tower’s data suggest that on average people spend more than three minutes in Musical.ly every time they open the app (compared with roughly two minutes on Instagram and 85 seconds on Snapchat) and that users are spending more than 15 minutes on Musical.ly each day (compared to more than 22 minutes on Facebook).”

I don’t think musical.ly stars are forever, hell, I don’t even think musical.ly is forever! This is one thing the straight media gets wrong, believing that acts can translate their success from one vertical to another, from social media to Hollywood. Sure, they’ve got fame, but so does that guy who roller skates and plays his guitar on Venice Beach, fame is not enough, especially today, when you’re lucky if it last 15 minutes, and your talent is this, making musical.ly clips, not acting, not writing scripts, not supporting television shows, you overwork yourself to make coin, and then you’re broke down and busted, sitting on the side of the street. As for musical.ly itself, what we’ve seen in the past ten years is a succession of social networks, there’s always another cool one, one that captures the fancy of children, most of them are fads, and there are so many, but musical.ly is based on music, CHECK IT OUT!

“The Social Media Platform That Has Gen Z Obsessed – Musical.ly has captured the attention of the millions of teens who post videos on the platform – and now its influence is rippling through the music industry”