There’s no story here. And to the degree there is one, it’s not about Swift.

Streaming won, we live in an on demand culture. Furthermore, those at the top of the streaming chart are making beaucoup bucks. And with new chart formulas, it’s the streamers who top the chart, sales are nearly irrelevant. Hell, they’re up in arms in the U.K. over Ed Sheeran’s dominance of the singles chart, he had almost all of the positions! But that’s what happens when truth outs. We need a way to break songs, but we can’t argue that those who’ve already made it dominate the majority of listening.

But not Taylor Swift.

Come on, we already had this debate over a decade ago. Remember when acts wouldn’t go on iTunes? Hell, even Kid Rock woke up, even though his hero, Bob Seger, is still living in the last century. Want to be marginalized in today’s society? Just make yourself unavailable. You need to be everywhere today, never say no, and if you’re LUCKY people will spend their time with you.

Taylor Swift will be over someday. How do I know? BECAUSE EVERYBODY IS OVER SOMEDAY! You don’t want to cripple yourself in the middle of your career. Look at Kesha. Now what? Stay in the game, play out your contract. That’s the rule of the music business, it’s not about justice, it’s about being around long enough to write your own rules. Sorry that’s unfair, but dem’s the rules.

Taylor Swift is living in a bubble. You can’t blame her, she grew up with fame, but she’s got no idea how she’s perceived. She overplayed her hand with that photographed holiday party, she got in online tangles she shouldn’t have, with other, more streetwise performers, and then she went on hiatus.

Bad move. She should have stayed on social media, people would have forgotten the faux pas. But by going silent that’s all we remember. I mean come on, letting Kim and Kanye take you down? As for Katy Perry… Just stand up and apologize, say it was somebody else’s fault, you weren’t aware. Then again, you wrote that song…

She’s got to stop dissing people. That’s a one note game.

Not that Taylor Swift’s career is gonna die tomorrow. Because the whole world is Nashville now. Meaning it’s about songwriters getting their wares on hit records. And with albums history, you’ve got to have the single, that’s what streaming has taught us. So, Taylor gets her choice of the best of the best. And if you think she’s writing these numbers independently, you probably still believe in Santa Claus.

But Swift is not stupid. Which is why she made this move. She realized the marketplace had changed. Two summers ago Apple was not gonna pay for free streaming, for the trial period, today Apple Music has 27 million paying subscribers, only dwarfed by Spotify’s more than 50. It’s where the money is. Sure, Adele triumphed without Spotify, but that was eighteen months ago, and sure, she sold albums, but the singles on “25” were not as successful as those on “21” and some of that has to do with quality, but even more has to do with availability.

You don’t want to be too early.

But you certainly don’t want to be too late.

Taylor Swift realized streaming has won. And she hasn’t even restricted her tunes to paid streaming, which Spotify now allows, she wants to continue to be the biggest star in America, and she can only do this by playing by the new rules.

She realized the game has changed.

Have you?

P.S. After writing this, but before sending it, I got an email from someone in the demo who wrote:

“But the same night, at the same hour that Perry’s new album drops? She couldn’t wait a week? That seems like a pointed shot. And super petty.”

I think that’s right. I think that’s brilliant insight. This is the kind of thing the internet was built for, the scuttlebutt that will ensue, no matter what the truth. This illustrates Swift has learned no lessons, because the truth is irrelevant, the perception will be she’s still at war with Katy Perry, which is kind of funny for someone who refused to take a stand on the election, if Taylor Swift had come out for Hillary, Clinton would have won, that’s how powerful Swift is. But she abdicated her power all in an effort to further her career, while hurting it in the process. You punch UP, not DOWN! Which is why it worked when Swift attacked Apple but it doesn’t when she attacks Perry. Swift is seen as a truthsayer who composes her own music, her body of work hangs together, Perry is all over the place. But Swift cannot accept her superiority. And when you’re fighting all comers, which seems to be Swift’s M.O., you ultimately lose.

Comey is not the story. Democrats are creaming in their jeans over today’s testimony, believing Congress is gonna bring Trump down.

But that is untrue, the public’s gonna bring Trump down. How do I know? BRITAIN!

Brexit was the first indication that the underclass was angry, left behind, that they were afraid of losing their identity and believed globalization was the cause. And these same views played out in the Presidential election, it’s just that no one wanted to believe them. Not Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who propped up Hillary, nor the reporters who loved hanging with the rich and famous as opposed to the poor and unknown, nor the pollsters, who believed data was infallible.

Now the loss of the Conservative majority is predicated on exit polls. And who knows, those could be wrong. But one thing’s for sure, Theresa May miscalculated, she shouldn’t have called an election. She thought her party had the support of the people.

It didn’t.

And neither does Trump’s.

Of course he’s President. But if you think he’s headed for imminent impeachment you don’t know the wheels of justice grind slowly and everybody’s expendable but the President. He’ll sacrifice Sessions, even his son-in-law Jared Kushner. And even if there’s an offense, getting the Republicans to evict him from office is hard to fathom, especially after they all rallied around Trump after denigrating him.

But this is not about D.C. This is about the tenor of our country, the tenor of our world.

People are dissatisfied. They’re sick of business as usual. They didn’t like Trump so much as they hated Hillary. They didn’t want four more years of Obama not because they were racist and sexist, but because their lives had become economically stagnant in the interim. Barry was so busy being cool, appealing to the insiders, that he lost touch with the outsiders, the little people, whom Bill Clinton spoke to so effectively.

But if the elites are wrong about Theresa May, WHAT ELSE ARE THEY WRONG ABOUT?

This is the takeaway, this is the story.

I too am glued to the news, watching for every Trump faux pas. But it’s entertainment, I’m powerless, but he won and he’s in office and he’s debasing our country but the only way out of this is to wait for another election.

Now the game is rigged, via gerrymandering, but the truth is Trump’s eviscerated his support. How do I know?

Let’s start with the Paris Agreement.

Turns out corporations and governors are gonna take action independently, the tone deafness of the Administration is palpable. When you play to your core, you ignore the rest, and pulling out is not gonna save jobs, it’s not even gonna save coal. Elected officials are caught up in how things look… That doesn’t matter, it’s how things ARE!

And the truth is people trust neither politicians nor corporations. Nor should they. Politics is show business for ugly people. And the elected officials just want to get rich, just like the newsies who want to hang with power. They’re detaching from the rank and file, and it’s gonna bite ’em in the ass.

How do I know?

NAPSTER!

Why did people need poor-sounding files? Why didn’t they keep on buying overpriced CDs with one good track?

Because they were sick of being ripped-off! And they were ahead of the record labels!

The people are way ahead of the politicians, the newspeople too. The people have boots on the ground everywhere, and if they can get a job it pays poorly and they can’t get ahead and everyone’s addicted to dope. Stop crapping on the rank and file, they know more than you think they do. Just like you hated on rioters burning down buildings in their own neighborhoods, when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose, when you’ve got no seat at the table, you resort to anarchy to have an effect.

That’s how Trump got elected. Don’t dive deep into fake news and Comey, that’s inside baseball. People wanted a change.

But most don’t want the change Trump is delivering.

So expect a wicked correction. And I’m not talking about one in the stock market, but that could tank too. You see most people don’t own stock and they don’t pay income taxes either, but they’re paying taxes all the while…payroll, sales…

As for institutions, they believe they’re rigged. They like health care, but they hate the insurance companies. You’ve got to be rich to get service in America, and they’re not.

Everybody believes it’s gonna be business as usual, go on the same forever. Russia is gonna be democratic, CDs are gonna rule and internal combustion engines are gonna pollute until the end of time. But change comes rapidly. Look at Kodak. We heard for ten years that digital was gonna replace film. Never happened. But then in ONE YEAR Kodak fell, the switch was just that fast.

So what does it all mean?

Don’t pay attention to the bloviators, the professional commentators. Everybody’s trying to get rich and have a better lifestyle and by time you make it on camera you’ve left most of humanity behind. Humanity without money, humanity without leaders, but humanity with a voice.

Want to succeed tomorrow? Champion the downtrodden, the underclass. That’s how Bernie Sanders went from zero to hero overnight. Want to be a credible rock star? Ensure your fans can get in for a cheap price, go build houses in Appalachia. Show that you remember where you came from, your roots.

But the problem is in the last few decades people have been born with silver spoons in their mouths, they’ve gone to Harvard and flown private and have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the world.

These are the CEOs, the nitwits turning airplanes into cattle cars.

And these are the politicians.

Ignore them. They’re on the wrong path.

And Sirius is looking to steal it.

How did this happen?

Myopia, and an unwillingness to acknowledge that the internet landscape had changed.

It was a fountain of innovation. Every month there was a new site, a new app, we were all excited, it was akin to the British Invasion, internet innovation ruled the world…

And then it stopped.

When the big money comes in, when consolidation happens, you’ve got to find a seat at the table or you’re left out.

In retrospect, the two most significant signposts were Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram. Let’s start with the latter. It was challenging Facebook’s dominance. But rather than sit by, work harder on its core product and hope for the best, Facebook purchased Instagram and took it out of the game. It tried to buy Snapchat too, but when Evan Spiegel could not read the rules of the new game, having his own Stanford-induced myopia, Zuckerberg just copied the site’s most addictive elements and injected them into his huge use base and if you think Snapchat is forever, you’re not using it. Kinda like Periscope squashed Meerkat. You can love your little engine that could, the progenitor, but it cannot defy the laws of business. And now Live.ly is outpacing Periscope! That’s the essence of the internet, you get ahead of change, or you’re ejected from the system.

As for WhatsApp… Zuckerberg knew the game better than the prognosticators, who kept saying he overpaid. But Zuck could see the future. Could anybody involved with Pandora see what’s coming down the road?

Absolutely not.

Pandora was the big kahuna in internet radio. When that was a thing, when that was a fad. It rallied its troops for lower rates. It advertised its excellence, which sophisticated users saw sucked, and if you don’t get the hard core attached to your product, if they’re not evangelizing, you’re screwed. Pandora’s core is the passive audience, and they’re not only passive listeners, they’re not big talkers, Pandora hit a wall and now listenership is going in the wrong direction, it just hit its lowest number in two years, at 76.7 million, meaning there’s a business there for someone to buy, or is there?

But we’re not through excoriating Pandora’s management.

There’s a first mover advantage. And if you’re not the first mover, you must be exponentially better. The iPod was exponentially better than previous MP3 players. Facebook was exponentially better than MySpace. Hell, GOOGLE was exponentially better than previous search engines. But Pandora’s pick and choose subscription site? Late to the market and not a great leap forward from Spotify. Which is why all the hubbub about iHeart’s product was just noise. Why Tidal can’t succeed. As for Apple Music, it capitalized on the company’s brand name, and has made headway, but it still hasn’t overtaken Spotify. Which decided to double-down and lose money to get to the goal line. All those inane music business stories about Spotify’s losses, the company going out of business, were just that, stupid. Because Amazon has taught us if you want to dominate, you’ve got to spend, spend, spend.

But the final chapter has not been written. Because Amazon still has not decided to play for real in music. Then again, it never played for real in downloads. A late product which was hard to get on your iPod. Amazon doesn’t care that much about music, but if it ever does…

It could buy Spotify.

You see Spotify is not forever not as a standalone product. It’s a data machine, and data now drives the internet. Who wants it and at what price? We’re gonna find out. Because Spotify’s margins are meager, the same thing that haunted Pandora and other music sites, this is the music business’s myopia, unless your partners are strong, you’re doomed. The best thing for the industry is a strong Spotify, as for Apple, it’s got incredibly deep pockets. And Google is the gang that can’t shoot straight, Zuckerberg shoots to kill, Google is half-hearted in too many endeavors.

But Apple has an advantage, it’s selling more than music, it’s got a whole services division.

The history of the internet is consolidation, hell, the history of COMPUTING is consolidation. How many computer manufacturers are there? How many mobile operating systems, never mind the ever-shrinking number of manufacturers. Microsoft killed all the competing word processors. And Pandora is doomed as a standalone company.

It matches Sirius pretty well, in that they’re both in the radio business.

But Malone likes to buy low and control. That’s how he ended up with Sirius to begin with. When you’re desperate, he’ll rescue you, but it’s only a matter of time before he and Maffei are behind the wheel.

As for Sirius, it dominates because its progenitors could see the future, that it was all about automobile manufacturer relationships. As for the future of Sirius, that’s what they’re trying to figure out now.

But at least they’re trying.

“Pandora Extends Deadline for KKR Deal to Explore Its Options”

It’s the new “Blurred Lines,” but the role of Emily Ratajkowski is played by Zuleya Rivera, and she keeps her clothes on!

But that does not mean you can take your eyes off her.

What am I talking about?

Yesterday’s number one track on Spotify’s Global Top 50. Only this version features Justin Bieber playing the role of Daddy Yankee on the original, but the track was a monster before Biebs got involved.

How did this happen?

Broadband. We forget that the internet fostered Napster, which started first on college campuses, because of students’ high speed connections, and then when broadband invaded homes we got YouTube, which now even streams in 4k, if you’ve got a 5k iMac you can see the difference, assuming you’ve got something close to the 200 mbps in my household. Technology begets unforeseen benefits. And we’re never going backwards, so we might as well go forwards! We need investment, we need foreign minds. And now we’ve got this foreign hit, well, Luis Fonsi was born in the now financially-challenged Puerto Rico, but he was brought up in Orlando, I learned that in the “Bloomberg Businessweek” article and if you’re a student of business, you need to subscribe, hell, the app is free on your phone, Bloomberg is the gold standard in business features, the “New York Times” is the best for breaking news, and the WSJ has forfeited its place at the pinnacle, turning itself into a general interest paper for right wingers when what I want is stories on corporations and trends and, like I just said, you now get that with “Bloomberg Businessweek.”

I was just perusing last week’s issue, arguing for inclusion in the Paris climate accord, trumpeting the success of John Schnatter, founder of Papa John’s pizza, and containing a lengthy expurgation on the success of “Despacito.”

I missed it. Until yesterday. When trying to stay current I played the Spotify US Top Fifty and immediately got it. That’s the culture we live in, the one of the one listen smash, no one’s got time for more.

And I get this remix’s success, it’s got Bieber, his audience is gonna seek out everything he does, which means if you’re not a Belieber you may be clueless, but that’s the world we now live in, where there’s so much information, so many niches, that we’ve got huge blind spots, even in our wheelhouses.

And I get it, the combo of catchiness and Biebs gives you a hit. To the tune of nearly seven million streams on Spotify PER DAY! And a cume of 350 odd million.

BUT IT WAS A HIT BEFORE ALL THIS!

Released on January 13th of this year, the YouTube clip, sans Bieber, got 5 million views in 24 hours and as of this writing has 1,815,356,185 views. THAT’S NEARLY TWO BILLION! Which puts it at number 17 on the all time chart. But when you add in the additional 275,525,473 views of the Bieber remix, that puts it at number 8 all time, AHEAD OF TAYLOR SWIFT’S BLANK SPACE!

So I decided to pull it up, the original iteration, the one with 1.8 billion views.

First I was stunned by the quality. In the heyday of MTV we did not get HD, and my computer monitor is larger than my TV of the eighties. And driving all those pixels was…

My broadband connection.

The mood is set, there’s beautiful blue water and a gorgeous landscape and island life and a smiling Fonsi and then…

She appears. For only a brief moment.

Then there’s a stunning helicopter shot of the village.

And then the song hits its stride and the former Miss Universe starts to walk and YOU GET IT IMMEDIATELY!

But that’s not all. There’s the dancing, the energy, the clip contains all the elements of the less salacious rap videos of yore, but with a lot more fun and a track not dominated by beats. And you wonder, is this a one-off, or are we at the beginning of a trend, is America ready to embrace Latin culture, don’t laugh, all those rednecks are rap fans now…

This is not a novelty like the “Macarena,” and in a world where you cannot get ahead economically the lifestyle depicted in the clips looks so APPEALING!

Credit the record company for spending to get the clip right, we are truly in a new era of video, where the only gatekeeper is the audience, you just put it up on YouTube and…

You still hit a headwind. Bieber didn’t hear the track until April, when he decided he wanted to appear on it. But still, it’s only #9 on the Mediabase Top 40 and #9 on Rhythmic and #31 on Hot AC. Proving, once again, that streaming is far ahead of radio and you know what happens when a format falls behind, it has its lunch eaten.

But still, this is a hit record, just like “Dominique,” sung in French, back in 1963, only now the world is both smaller and bigger. We live in a global village, but we’re inundated with music. But Latinos have risen in status and even if there’s not another crossover hit imminently, “Despacito” shows you’ve got to pay attention.

Listen to the Bieber version, which is almost entirely in Spanish, here:

Despacito Feat. Justin Bieber (Remix) – Spotify

Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee – Despacito (Remix Audio) ft. Justin Bieber – YouTube

I dare you not to get it. And if you don’t, that probably means you’re out of touch with today’s music business, which focuses on hooks and immediacy and skews pop.

And be sure to read the “Bloomberg Businessweek” article:

A Spanish Song at No. 1? All It Took Was Justin Bieber

And be sure to know, “Despacito” is the biggest hit in the world RIGHT NOW!

Bloomberg app