And the Trumpers are saying the holiday’s been stolen.

If you look at the Spotify US Top Fifty your eyes will bug out. Nine of the top ten are Christmas songs, the only exception is #10, Post Malone’s “rockstar.”

But the next ten, that’s right, from #11-20, are all Christmas songs.

And of the next ten, #21-30, only Lil Pump’s “Gucci Gang” is non-Christmas.

There are four non-Christmas tracks in the bracket from #31-40.

And half of the last ten of the fifty are Christmas cuts.

Meanwhile, if you look at the iTunes charts, you’ll see none of this reflected.

The people want Christmas music. The move to streaming is an even bigger game changer than the move to SoundScan.

You see it’s all about consumption, that’s how you get paid. We want to know what people are listening to.

And we have no way of knowing consumption with sales. Did you buy it and file it or play it incessantly?

One thing’s for certain, the Taylor Swift juggernaut is not, which is one reason ticket sales are soft. Ms. Swift only has ONE song in Spotify’s Top 100 Tracks of 2017. And it’s in the bottom half. (Although her duet with ZAYN from “Fifty Shades Darker” is #10.)

The big winner? Ed Sheeran, with four tracks on the chart, including #1 with “Shape Of You.” Proving once again that the Grammys have their head up their behind. Come on, what’s wrong with this picture, man writes songs with changes and hooks that all can sing along to and he’s snubbed?

We’re in for a realignment, wherein all the old metrics are cast aside in favor of true consumption, streaming numbers.

The first to go is sales. It’s a de minimis part of the financial picture now anyway.

Next is radio. Yes, radio is powerful, but it’s losing said power each and every day as youngsters forgo its passive listening paradigm in favor of an active, on demand one. Radio lost touch decades ago, with phony deejays playing the same cuts. The public has rejected radio the same way they threw over CDs during the Napster era.

But what the Christmas dominated chart tells us is catalog counts. Just because you’re not in the news, not putting out new hits, it does not mean you’re forgotten. People remember, they want to hear your songs, they want to see you in concert, you’re gonna make bank forever. Think about this, used to be your income from recordings expired. No one bought new ones, if they could even find them in the store. Sure, you got publishing on radio in the U.S., but what if you didn’t write the song? This is one of the silver linings in favor of oldsters who keep bitching streaming will kill them when it’s keeping them alive, giving them another bite at the apple.

As for the Christmas chart, Mariah Carey dominates, her “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is number one, with daily plays of 2,075,827 and a cume of 311,319,704. Hell, she could be the new Trans-Siberian Orchestra, doing a Christmas tour, despite all her faux pas, the country still demands her.

Brenda Lee is number 2.

And from there on it’s a cornucopia of old and new holiday cuts.

Wham!’s “Last Christmas” is #4, and lo and behold, BURL IVES is #7 with “A Holly Jolly Christmas”! I haven’t listened to him since I was in single digits!

Jose Feliciano is a holiday star. Judy Garland too.

You need to get in on this action. Sure, cover the classics, but you’re gonna have a hard time competing with the oldsters. Your best bet is to record an original, try and write a classic. That’s right, acts have been shooting too low, with cash-in cover albums. Better to have one superhit that can sustain! Songwriters, start your engines!

And if you’ve got new product, WAIT UNTIL JANUARY!

No one wants to hear it, not now.

As for all you oldsters saying only the younger generation streams… Do they really want to hear Eartha Kitt and Perry Como?

And of course some of these numbers are high as a result of playlists.

But this ain’t Pandora, with its crappy payouts. Sure, some of Spotify’s plays are on its free tier, but so many are on the paid tier and paying more.

And sure, you can get lucky and have someone stream your cover crapola album, but…

You want the hit. The chart is an endless parade of classics.

Now if someone were smart, and the music business is not, every year they’d put out a Christmas album with today’s hitmakers, try to get in on some of that chart action. Yup, Post Malone would be better off putting out Xmas music in December, Taylor Swift too. And the barrier to entry is so damn low. You record it and post it. You get caught up in the tsunami of holiday play, publicity isn’t even that important.

We’re in a funny period. The oldsters hate the youngsters’ music yet the youngsters’ music has less dominance than ever before. Most people have never heard Post Malone. Most don’t even know the music on Swift’s new album. So the young and old are coexisting, and at this point in time some of the classic acts are getting traction on streaming, they’ve got over 100 million streams on Spotify, their fans have moved over. But before rock came country. Sam Hunt is in the Spotify Top 100 Tracks of 2017, although he does skew young. And “Body Like A Back Road” is only 2:45. Almost all the hit songs are under four minutes long. You get paid the same amount if it’s shorter. Does it pay to stretch out, should you stretch out? Once again, the medium affects the art.

So now that we know December is for Christmas music…

Is there another time of year that has a particular sound?

We’re gonna learn this and so much more.

It ain’t the baby boomers’ music business anymore.

P.S. You can get a look at the Spotify Top 200 here right now, just never forget it changes EVERY DAY, the once a week chart is ANTIQUATED!:

Spotify charts regional

I learned to buy my records in a bunch, at a discount, at E.J. Korvette or Sam Goody in the city rather than overpay at the Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury, Vermont. And one of the LPs I bought at the end of my initial Christmas vacation was Bob Dylan’s “New Morning,” and at the time I didn’t own a single LP by the man, wasn’t even that big a fan, but there was something about the reviews.

You see Dylan had released a dud only months before, “Self Portrait” was excoriated, so he blasted back with this more traditional LP and declared victory, and the press assented, so I bought it.

Dylan is an acquired taste. We used to have tons of these back when. Bands you hated and then came to love, when being unique was a badge of honor, when the audience didn’t feel superior to the acts, but vice versa.

And this was long past Dylan’s political period. He’d escaped to Woodstock and said he did not know best, but he did.

My favorite song on “New Morning” is “Sign On The Window”

Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me ‘pa’
That must be what it’s all about
That must be what it’s all about

We’re just animals, here to reproduce. If you’re lucky you’ll have kids and watch them grow up and mature, change, have identities. I’m waiting for my next lifetime for this, it’s not my greatest regret, but it is a path I did not take with rewards, as precious as any of those in the Fortune 500 or fame game.

But the song that’s been going through my head recently is “Time Passes Slowly.” I thought about it when I wrote that previous missive “Change Happens Slowly,” it’s just that the words didn’t fit, so I’m writing about it now.

Time passes slowly up here in the mountains

I used to live up there, in the mountains, before cable, never mind cell service, when people didn’t take plane trips on a whim, when you were off the grid, the city moved fast, but not the country, you had time to contemplate.

We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains

Nobody’s in a rush. You can feel yourself living. Today we’re all so busy going somewhere that we’ve lost touch with our feelings, our emotions, they scare us.

Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream

You think you know where you’re going but the amazing thing about life is you’re not in control, you can turn the steering wheel, but oftentimes it’s not connected to the chassis, life is an endless series of wake-up moments, where if you’re smart you readjust.

Time passes slowly when you’re searchin’ for love

There’s a fifteen year stretch I want back, between my ex and Felice, all the blind alleys. I don’t understand the people who jump from relationship to relationship, I think they’re just afraid of being alone. I don’t want to settle, good enough doesn’t work for me, I need someone to get me, I need someone I can connect with, but the search is endless. You’re judged by your exterior, you don’t even get a chance to come up to bat. You’re dismissed until you accumulate the chips that deliver attention. Or you just take what you think you’re entitled to, that’s the essence of this sexual harassment brouhaha, who are these people, I was never like that, never forget you cannot short circuit life without consequences.

Ain’t no reason to go anywhere

The internet put a huge dent in boredom. There are so many options. But there used to be this sense of ennui, you’d worked so hard to get ahead, put on your look, went to the bar, you just burned out and stared at the four walls, I don’t want to go back to that time but I remember it so well.

Time passes slowly and fades away

You’re not gonna get it back, that time you wasted waiting for the good times to come. Your hair turned gray, your body got creaky, you can see the sand draining out of the hourglass, you want to stop the march of time but it’s impossible.

And then you’re done and gone.

But you’ve got to experience it for yourself, you’ve got to make your own mistakes, but one day you wake up and want to go back and you can’t, you want more time but they’re not making any more of it. And this wisdom comes with age but old people are considered irrelevant. You know more than you ever did but no one wants to hear it.

So I got up to Middlebury and played my Elton John records. And this one too. Which was singular, unlike anything else, it stuck to my bones. You can hear an old song and remember when and then there are some that not only feel good upon hearing, but continue to deliver insight, that change with you even though they’ve never changed at all.

New Morning – Spotify

That’s what Obama said on WTF, when Marc Maron asked him about health care, single-payer, Barack said it would take decades to get to the destination, just like it did with gay marriage and legal pot, and I added those last two, but I never thought they’d happen in my lifetime, but they did.

One of our clearest thinkers on political matters is Frank Rich. And he can write too, what a package. Rich used to be the NYT theatre critic and the producers hated him, because he wasn’t always positive, we live in a country where if you put in the effort you believe you’re entitled to the prize, but this is not true, the public knows better, it doesn’t care that you spent a million on your record, just whether they like it, and critics used to point the way but now those who are left are have soft voices so we go to aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes to find out what the public thinks and the producers hate us for that, you see they love that steel wool in between them and us, that sausage factory that can create a turntable hit, that can manipulate results, but those days are through. And Frank Rich’s days at the NYT are done too, because he just couldn’t fit in with their restrictions. He wanted to write longer less frequently and they said no. That’s the problem with organizations, you’re just a worker bee, no matter how talented, so Rich left so he could work on “Veep” and he writes for “New York,” which I get, but has much less prominence than the NYT but when he appears Frank is still just as brilliant, as he was back in June, when he talked about the theoretical end of Trump’s presidency in this article:

“Just Wait, Watergate didn’t become Watergate overnight, either”

It took decades for the Republicans to gain control. The pushback is not gonna deliver results overnight. And spare me the vitriol, don’t give me the knee-jerk response, if you think the proletariat is gonna put up with givebacks to rich donors while their coffers are drained you’re delusional, you’ve got a short term perspective. When you push too far, you get results in the other direction.

But it takes time.

No one wants to wait. Everybody wants it now. Especially in an era of on demand entertainment. Delayed gratification is anathema.

But, as horrible as it might seem, things might work out.

How many more natural disasters will we endure before we take action on climate change? Hell, California is still burning and it’s lights out in Puerto Rico, which was part of the United States last time I checked. And I wouldn’t be surprised if California makes an effort to secede. Want to eliminate the right to write off state income taxes and we’ll prevent you from having the benefits of our products, virtual or real.

Leverage. Talk to anybody in business, that’s what it’s all about. And you get that via hearts and minds. It’s the essence of entertainment, do you have fans or not. And you can try and gang up against the masses but that didn’t work too well with Napster.

But the acts are ignorant and greedy and no change will come from them, they don’t have the mindshare of television, never mind the politicians.

So stay the course.

If you’re a Republican and you believe in no safety net and no regulations I hope you don’t get sick and become bankrupted when your apartment grows mold and collapses. You’ll be just like Puerto Rico, waiting for help that doesn’t come.

And with such a corrupt government, are your interests really protected?

And what I’m saying here is you can’t take your eyes off the front page, you can’t stop following the narrative, but we’ve got people on this. These news organizations. Why do you think Trump, et al, are so busy denigrating them? The story of the internet is consolidation, and payment, and if you think all these diverse voices spreading disinformation are gonna continue to dominate you’re delusional, if anything there are gonna be fewer choices.

Fox News may have a hold on TV, but TV is dying, as are films, which is why Murdoch sold most of his TV and movie company to Disney. Like I said, things change. Barry Diller did the undoable, building a fourth TV network a few decades back, now networks are verging on irrelevancy.

But the point is there’s a backlash. Facts are coming back. It’s just happening slowly.

So pay attention, work for change.

But know it’s coming.

I’m eating fruitcake.

I know, I know, it’s supposed to be inedible, you’re supposed to pass it on to some out of the loop friend as a gift, there are fruitcakes from the 1800s still circulating, but this one is pretty damn good, it came from Whole Foods with a gingerbread base and nothing involved speaks to my holiday memories since I’m Jewish, but I’m all up for new traditions, as long as you don’t put a Christmas tree up in the house, who knows what’s next, a cross?

So I’ve spent the last three days getting IVIG at home. Funny how the medical establishment and the insurance companies are on their game when you’re testing the health limits. They immediately called me from the pharmacy, they messengered over the supplies and the nurse phoned in that she was ready to go.

So, I’ve spent the last three days sitting in a chair for four and a half hours having fluid dripped into my arm and you steel yourself and get through it but when you’re done you’re frustrated and angry but now I’m done completely which is a relief except that the house is empty and quiet and that’s so disconcerting. I told Felice to go to Vail without me and now I’m spending the holiday alone and that’s kind of creepy. In the seventies you went to the movies. But it’s a dead time, if you’re not on vacation you’re killing time, which is why I’m writing this to you, I’ve got to communicate.

And a lot of thoughts have been going through my brain, but they all require separate e-mails to get their full point across, but then I’ll get people bitching I’m sending too much and don’t I respect the holidays and welcome to the twenty first century wherein everybody’s got an opinion and there’s no context. Used to be few were famous, there were few media outlets and we all knew what everybody else was talking about. That era is through, along with facts. Did you see Margaret Sullivan is now calling the WaPo and the NYT the “fact-based” media? Because too much of the mainstream media is biased and fake. And reading the newspapers is the highlight of my day, they appear on the doorstep every twenty four hours and even though I’ve read so many of the stories already on the app it’s good to be able to depend upon something in this era where you can’t depend on anyone or anything, we’re all on our own. Kinda like the experience I just had with the Sonos One.

Do they have tech help on Christmas? Can I bug someone at the company on Christmas?

This is the world we live in, one where you’re your own tech help.

And we create our own problems. You see I’m in one house utilizing two Alexa accounts. Let’s make it more complicated. The Sonos One hooked into Felice’s Sonos system but I used my Alexa app and my Amazon Music account so I could pull up what I wanted on demand.

And now you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about.

I use ’em all, every one but Tidal that is. Although I can still port over to it from its initial incarnation known as WIMP. So if I want to listen in CD quality, I use Deezer. And I hate to say it, but Apple Music does sound better than Spotify, Spotify’s got to dump their codec. And then there’s Amazon Music. Amazon has got the best voice controlled playlists. You can be pretty specific, I just asked Alexa to play “Rock hits from 1965” and she did. It’s pretty cool. And on the Echo Show you can see the lyrics, but…

I wanted to use MY Amazon Music account on Felice’s Sonos which I was running via MY Alexa app on my phone, since Felice has her iPhone and iPad with her in Colorado.

And oftentimes no music comes out.

Why am I doing this? Because the Amazon Music account they gave me for Felice’s house randomly crapped out, and I can’t just call out the tracks I want. And that’s a huge pain in the ass. Which is why using the free tier of Spotify is such an incentive to pay. Because it’s so FRUSTRATING! As it is using the free tier of Amazon Music on the Echo Show and the Sonos One.

And I got it all to work, except sometimes it doesn’t, and there’s nothing worse than an intermittent problem, but there’s such a sense of satisfaction when you figure things out.

And the first song I wanted to hear was Terry Stafford’s “Suspicion.” I know, I know, it was originally cut by Elvis, but Stafford had the hit. I must have heard it on Sirius the other day, because I can’t get it out of my head.

And then “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” because that’s the right song for a cold winter night. Assuming you consider forties cold, which if you live long enough in Los Angeles it is.

And I’m wondering what to do with myself. Read a book, watch TV, god forbid not leave the house.

Which is why I decided to write.

But I was worried about tonality. It is Christmas. Not my holiday, but others respect it. But now they’ve got two football games and NBA all day and sometimes I like to be light and disrespectful and sometimes heavy and damned if I know what will resonate, especially when I’m not white hot. Like I said, I’ve got a bunch of topics in my head. I actually stopped this in the middle and wrote about iPhone sales. And I realized while writing that if you don’t agree with me you hate me and that’s a problem I’ve had my whole life, I cannot tolerate misinformation and stupidity, which there’s more of than ever before. The more news we’ve got, the less truth we’ve got. People recite falsehoods like they’re commandments, and if you contradict them you’re the jerk. Wanna make it worse, just send them documentation of their mistake, they’ll hate you for all time.

And then after finishing the Apple missive I decided to write about Christmas songs, didn’t finish that one either, and normally I finish everything, but I’m gonna append it here, it’s good as far as it goes.

It’s just that… At this time of year you’re with your family and out of the maelstrom, or you’re wondering where you fit in. That’s life, there are rules in school and then you graduate and you’re on your own, you’ve got to make sense of it yourself. And the older I’ve gotten the harder this has been to do. I’m about ready to write a whole piece about the death of the influence of the baby boomers, they’re the last to know, but they’re over. That’s what hip-hop has taught us, the old rock farts are pushing seventy and they’re never gonna have another hit, and you’re not gonna start a breakthrough company and…

These are the kinda thoughts I have when I’ve got too much time and not enough to do. Oh, there’s always tons to do, but when your time is free you’re looking for that which rings your bell and…

CHRISTMAS SONGS

They play in my head. I never ever pull up a Sirius station, never mind terrestrial radio, I don’t need to get into the Christmas spirit, after all, I’m Jewish, but I do have my own private tape loop.

But before I go there, I’ve got to point you to a Steve Knopper article in today’s “New York Times.” Knopper was “Rolling Stone”‘s music business guy, and quite good at it, but everybody’s on contract at that rag these days, if they’re still there at all, and I don’t see how it can be resuscitated, some things cannot, like MySpace, anyway, Knopper’s article points out the fact that in a world of on demand streaming it makes no sense to load up your fourth quarter releases because they get squeezed out by holiday music:

“Taylor Swift’s Rivals This Holiday: Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole”

Money changes everything, but so does streaming.

You want to launch your music when you can get the most mindshare. And it’s all about longevity, not the initial pop. Makes no sense to put your tracks out during the month of clutter, especially if you’re not releasing new music on a regular basis.

But back to those holiday songs.

The one I’ve been singing to myself most this season is “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” by the Royal Guardsmen. Our society is too coarse to have novelty hits like this anymore. But during Christmas 1966 this dominated the airwaves.

Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more!

Yup, that bloody Red Baron was rolling up the score. We sang along to this story song every time it came on the AM radio we commandeered as our parents drove us around the neighborhood, up to Bromley to ski. This was when Charles Schulz was still alive, before Snoopy got so whored out he lost all credibility, when you could still love “MAD” and “Peanuts” and feel good about yourself.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Snoopy’s competition on the chart at that time, the irrepressible, indomitable, all time classic “I’m A Believer.” Yes, the Monkees were an ersatz group. Yes, the song was written by Neil Diamond, but Micky Dolenz’s vocal alone not only makes this track one of the best of all time, but deserving of ushering the entire group into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Come on, with so many lame acts in there why not the Monkees? They were bigger than any act working today and they had numerous hits of which this was the apotheosis.

But the track that goes through my head every time at this year is Laura Nyro’s “Christmas In My Soul”…

Christmas Songs – Spotify