Frequency of product, oftentimes FREE!

Whilst the oldsters were bitching about the moving of their cheese, the demise of the old paradigm, hip-hop slid in to fill the void, utilizing the new tools to exploit the new world, while the rockers and country denizens were still worrying about the radio the rappers knew it was all about online, about streaming, they realize it’s not about monetization so much as access, attention, which is why they realize it’s best to have a continuous flow of product, to be making news.

And utilizing multiple writers and a multitude of performers evidences the millennial ethos where the most important thing is belonging, being a member of the group, whereas boomers are all about the singular triumph, hoisting the trophy over your shoulder, in hip-hop it’s about the group, ever see a rap record win an award, a Grammy, there’s a group on stage having a party, enjoying the moment, because music isn’t about achievements, awards, but living, they get it.

I’m not saying it’s not about money, it’s just that they know when and where to charge.

And getting back to inclusiveness, that’s where Drake triumphed in March, with his mixtape, he placed himself in context, it wasn’t about him, but EVERYBODY.

And that includes you at home, the listener, you can follow the scene like sports, only there’s no commissioner getting in the way, there are no rules, everybody can play, and all the exhortations and denigrations are in plain sight.

And in a country that’s completely divided, the only thing the younger generation agrees on is hip-hop, they rap in country records, hip-hop is everything what came before is not. It’s no longer fighting for attention, as it did it in the MTV era, now it owns ears and eyeballs, by superseding the construct and taking advantage of new technology, no other genre comes close.

I’m looking at the half year BuzzAngle report where the rock format is #1 in both Album Sales, with 14.3%, and also #1 in Physical and Vinyl, and #2 in Digital Alum Sales and #1 in Song Sales, but when it comes to Audio Streams…it’s dwarfed by Hip-Hop/Rap, which has 24.4% to rock’s 6.9%. Even COUNTRY has a greater percentage of Audio Streams, with 7.2%, and that’s the land of Luddites, the last people to buy CDs, the last people to be influenced by terrestrial radio…not that I want to give country too much crap, because it almost equals Rock’s sales numbers, with 13.4% of Album Sales, 16.2% of Physical Sales, so if you’re a rock fan looking for all the people, I’d check out the Nashville sound.

Not that the numbers aren’t complicated. There also are Indie Rock, Metal and Punk categories, and if you add them into Rock, which they probably should be, of course the numbers go up. But then you’d have to add Pop into Hip-Hop Rap, and then it would be game over. Pop dominates Song Sales, with 19.3%, and dwarfs Rock with 12.8% of Audio Streams, and Metal is positively anemic when it comes to streams and…

I’ll stop boring you with the numbers. I’ll just say it’s a youth business, and it appears rock fans are old, the last to give up physical formats, the big vinyl collectors, they get a disproportionate amount of press, but if you want to know what’s really going on…

You look at on demand streams, which BuzzAngle reports, both Audio and Video.

Forget those inane charts in the newspaper, they’re complete hogwash, blending sales and streams in a formula so bizarre that it makes no sense. An album can go to number one based on the streaming of one song. And you supposedly get bragging rights by entering the chart high, but then you fall off and are forgotten.

So who do we blame? The artists or the audience or…

The NBA lives on Twitter, while the baseball fans abhor the service and the NFL is run like high school, controlling the behavior of athletes.

It’s a new world. If you’re talking about the sound quality of CDs, owning physical objects, you no longer matter, you’re old and out of touch, cry all you want, it makes no difference.

But if you want to make a difference, you’ve got to tell everybody you know to start streaming, to prop up the rock format before hip-hop runs away with the game. Because catching up is hard. Somehow all the youngsters found streaming, are signed up for Spotify, while the oldsters still debate the efficacy and the payouts. Meanwhile, Drake has nearly two billion Audio Streams, 1,786,913,816 to be exact, and the only rock act in the top 25, which is really pop, is Twenty One Pilots, which is #23 with only 501,885,392. But talk to either of these acts, they’re not bitching about streaming payouts, no way.

And, of course, Ed Sheeran is #4. Which shows you what melodies and songs you can sing along with produce.

It’s not rocket science folks.

The internet killed the music business.

That’s right, it wasn’t only about recording revenues, it was about UBIQUITY!

Walk into an exec’s office in the nineties and MTV was on. That’s what broke Dre big, rap too, sure Jimmy got Snoop and Dre on the cover of “Rolling Stone,” but even though that rag is a shadow of itself today, it was already over the hill back then. It had been replaced by a new boss, cable television.

You see MTV News. You see Michael Lewis’s wife Tabitha Soren and are brought back to an era when the original VJs were gone, but MTV was even more powerful, radio had rolled up and become corporate, and we all drank at the mouth of Tom Freston’s station.

At first your mind wanders, all this hogwash about Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, who cares? I’m not saying that Trent is not talented, I wish he would get back to making music, pushing boundaries, but so much of the non-rap stuff released by Interscope was ultimately forgettable trash, whereas “The Chonic”…

That was “Sgt. Pepper.”

Now this is where the series goes off the rails. Because they leave too much out. Dre was locked up in a contract with Ruthless, and we do live in a nation of laws, remember, the labels love that, they always go back to the deal, and then…

Suge Knight gets involved.

We’ve all heard the stories.

I heard it from Jerry Heller.

Let’s just say…

The story’s not in this video.

Nor is the true story of Michael Fuchs.

The real story is Doug Morris was off the rails, he gained too much power at Warner Music and abused it. Made Mo and Kras feel like second class citizens, and they didn’t like it. So that’s why Doug was pushed out. And to Doug’s credit, he learned his lesson, he stopped the publicity shenanigans, he made friends, he was more behind the scenes at MCA/Universal.

And there’s no mention of No Doubt’s label, Trauma.

As for David Geffen’s genius, his record company went out of business because it had no rap. He got rid of the Geto Boys. And I’m not saying this wasn’t the right decision morally, and David had already cashed out, but the music was turning black, before it went white with Eminem, and Geffen was left out. We’re all eventually left out. Hell, give Jimmy credit for reinventing himself, when you stop hearing it, you should go, or hire others to hear for you, even Ahmet famously said there’d be a point where you no longer got it.

And then there’s C. Delores Tucker and Warner getting rid of Interscope and there you have modern America, the corporation always triumphs, even if it’s wrong. That’s right, TW merged with AOL, spun off AOL, got rid of the cable system and now is gonna sell HBO and the rest of the TV assets, the magazines are long gone, while the music lives on. Hell, they sold the whole Warner Music Group, just for a couple of billion, they couldn’t wait until things turned around. That’s corporations for you, businessmen, they do what’s good for them in the short term, screw long term value, screw the shareholders ultimately, just do it for yourself.

Whereas Jimmy and Dre triumphed outside the corporate system, especially with Beats, that’s why their story is so genius. Nobody in music today, not in the major system, has their own money at risk, not at the label and not at the promoter, they’re all lackeys, working for the man.

Whereas revolution always comes from outside.

So, “The Chronic” changes everything. It’s everything that rock is not. Vital, of the street, new and different. The Seattle sound peters out, and rap…

Not that they don’t know their roots, when Dre quotes Stevie Wonder’s “Living For The City” when he’s walking around New York, you can only smile. There’s always a continuum, nobody comes from nowhere.

And the nineties are too recent, too pored over to rewrite history.

But by the end of the episode, even Jimmy admits he was scared. And Tupac dies. And I remember writing about it on the internet. Because ’96 was the Summer of Love online, when everybody bought a PC just to play, when AOL was the dope, when we all got turned on and dropped out, when we dedicated hours to the service, connecting.

And we haven’t disconnected since.

Took a while for everybody to catch on.

Eventually everybody got hooked up. Then came high speed connections and Napster. Still, CDs ruled, Eminem blew up, but disruptive disasters are all the same. We see them coming, we hear they’re coming, but they don’t arrive, but then, just when we’ve given up, they do. We heard digital was gonna eclipse Kodak, but it never happened, not for a decade, and then within the span of a year, it did. We heard that file-trading increased CD sales, all kinds of hogwash, but then the recorded music business cratered.

And the wise ones are using the new tools to do something different.

And the baby boomers scratch their heads and denigrate. Home recording studios? Streaming? YouTube stars? Vine stars? Live streaming?

This is where the action is, this is why Jimmy’s screwing up at Apple, he thinks he’s in charge, but he’s not, he’s bringing old precepts to a new business. Paying for music? It’s got to feel FREE! Beats 1 radio, in an on demand world? Hand-curated playlists in an era of algorithms? Secrecy in an era of transparency? No public data in a world ruled by data?

He’s hit his Waterloo.

Dre seems to have petered out, it happens to the best, they no longer feel it anymore, they don’t get hard for the old work.

And that’s when the new generation takes over.

 

P.S. I was hipped to the fact that you can stream all four episodes on demand. I’ve been watching it on my computer. So, GO FOR IT!

There were billboards on Sunset Boulevard.

It’s hard to fathom the music business, it’s hard to fathom Los Angeles, if you weren’t there in the seventies. The dream had died, Nixon was elected, Tom Wolfe named it the “Me Decade” and at the advent of the next decade Reagan legitimized greed, the boomers grew up, it was all about the money, but the sixties hung over.

Unlike today. People pay lip service to the music. But listening to Tom Petty, you know that’s all he is, an artist. Somehow he’s more charismatic than the Boss, more believable, he’s dark and somewhat removed and when he speaks it’s from a deep place, he’s the leader, you can either follow him or…

Jimmy followed him and then crossed him. And despite his mealy-mouthed excuse, Doug Morris nails it, Jimmy wants to WIN!

And this was before everybody got old, got plastic surgery, had their teeth fixed, when you see Stevie Nicks in action your jaw drops, she was the dream, and she’s even more delicious than you remember her, women wanted to be her, guys wanted to be with her, and she seems so damn normal back then, with all eyes upon her, WOW! That’s a star.

And Jimmy argues with Stevie in the studio, Richard Perry’s studio for those playing the home game, remember him? And you can see the genesis… Jimmy no longer wants to support the artist, he wants to BE THE ARTIST!

You think you just want to be in the room, but once you feel comfortable, you want to own the room.

As for Dre, he was all about excellence, in a parallel universe that gets short shrift in the mainstream media, in D.C. The FBI sends a letter about “F___ Tha Police,” utterly laughable, and then Obama has Jay Z and Beyonce to the White House and suddenly we’re jetted right back to the past, as if the last eight years didn’t even happen, and if you don’t think this is gonna cause an artistic blowback…

You’re enthralled by the techies and the bankers.

How many of them die? Get cut down before their time? Of course we lost Steve Jobs to cancer, but we’ve lost so many of our entertainers to misadventure, you see they were testing the limits so we didn’t have to.

But so many want to walk in their steps.

Music blew up marijuana.

But Oxy led to the opioid crisis all by itself, that’s the story of the twenty first century, the ruling of the corporations, and we have to pull ourselves back from that, through the arts.

But that’s the story in music too, THE MONEY! Jimmy tells Petty that letting Stevie cover “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” will buy him a house. At first with N.W.A. there was no money, but once they had big success, the act broke up over it. At least they included Jerry Heller in the episode, I’m not saying Jerry was a prince, but at least they don’t heap all the blame upon him. Eazy chose Jerry over Dre. We all need our protector.

And it was all about myth-making and promotion. It started long before Van Halen and the brown M&M’s, you see the public likes a good story, they like outrage, which is why they watch the “Housewives” and follow the gossip, but it used to all come from the musicians, now they’re just a sideshow.

But when you hear those N.W.A. songs they’re so powerful, not dated, they still hit you in the gut, they tell you what went on then, even if you were oblivious during the era.

And Dre gets his comeuppance, shooting paintballs on the freeway? Assaulting Dee Barnes? And they both talk about the impact of death, but the more you watch the fewer answers you’ve got. Jimmy was destined for success. Dre was the Beatles of hip-hop. We’re just observers. Oh, we can participate but almost no one can win, both Jimmy and Dre came from nothing, close to it, they lifted themselves up, became heroes to many, visionaries who broke the bank.

But you and me, we just remember the tunes.

And when you see Stevie and Petty sing together…

When you see Bono at the US Festival…

You’re reminded of what once was, and you ask yourself how in hell we got here.