“‘All good inventions come from something personal,’ she said. ‘People create things because it’s personal.'”

BINGO! Can you say Napster?

Monday night I went to see Jade Bird at the Troubadour. Before that Daniel Glass held a party at the Polo Lounge. And this is where you excoriate me and him and I get it, but the truth is if you had an invite you’d go too. Because it’s fun to hang and meet people, you never know who will show up, like Jim Pitt who books music for Jimmy Kimmel, or Toby Emmerich who runs Warner Pictures. And it’s all friendly and nice and I ultimately had a long conversation with someone from Apple Music about getting indie stuff on their service and also had a long conversation with Jade herself, it’s her real name, yup, Jade BIRD, and I don’t believe in the concept of an old soul, but when this twenty year old started referencing Son House I reconsidered, and one of the great things about Jade was she had stage presence, could talk, when so many acts cannot, certainly not early in their career, but Jade went to that same music school Adele did and you wonder why we don’t have places like this in the U.S. like they do in Sweden and the U.K. but the reason I’m telling you all this is about a conversation I had with Daniel on the way back to his hotel, wherein he was telling me a story about a new Knick who was hanging with his hero, Michael Jordan, who only gave him one piece of advice, YOU’VE GOT TO LOVE THE GAME, and it got me thinking, especially after Daniel said he loved his game, the music business, and I’ve been wavering a bit recently but when I turned on the CMAs I felt left out, like I wanted to be there, when they had all those stars and Keith Urban started to wail I could see the direct line back to rock and roll, what got me started, they do play real instruments and sing real songs in country, despite too many pandering lyrics and fears of controversy, then again, Brad Paisley did walk over the line, but isn’t he a Democrat anyway, can you be a Democrat in Nashville?

I read everything Michael Lewis writes. And in the new issue of “Vanity Fair” he has a long article on the U.S.D.A., uber-glamorous, I know. And so much of VF is hateable, all the focus on ingenues and celebrities, do I really care about A-Rod and J. Lo? No, I didn’t read that, but this Michael Lewis article…

You’ve got to read it. I’ll link to it below. But I must say, my eyes glaze over when reading a long article on a computer screen, which is why I love my Kindle, it’s optimized for reading, and there’s no smoking gun in the Lewis article but every American should read it because the bottom line is the government does good. There, I said it. It’s illegal in red America. But the truth is the government supports so many of these red state citizens.

“As the U.S.D.A.’s loans were usually made through local banks, the people on the receiving end of them were often unaware of where the money was coming from. There were many stories very like the one Tom Vilsack told, about a loan they had made, in Minnesota, to a government-shade-throwing, Fox News-watching, small-town businessman. The bank held a ceremony and the guy wound up being interviewed by the local paper. ‘He’s telling the reporter how proud he is to have done it on his own,’ said Vilsack. ‘The U.S.D.A. person goes to introduce herself, and he says, “So who are you?” She says, “I’m the U.S.D.A. person.” He asks, “What are you doing here?” She says, “Well, sir, we supplied the money you are announcing.” He was white as a sheet.'”

I didn’t know what the U.S.D.A. did before I read this article, and it does much more than you think it does, like study geese at airports and…

I don’t expect the people who need to read this article most to do so. But the spin is how Trump has not peopled the U.S.D.A. and to the degree he has, it’s been late and with incompetent people. But it gets even worse…

But you’ll have to read to see.

But there’s this story of Lillian Salerno, from a family of nine in nowheresville Texas who invented a retractable needle for injections since nurses were afraid of HIV patients. She went to the hospital to visit infected friends and saw the injustice and took it into her own hands to create a solution, it’s her quote above.

That’s where the good stuff comes. When people are just in it for the money it oftentimes doesn’t work. And there’s another public servant in this article who could have switched sides and gone to work for the corporation and made much more but he wanted to do good, isn’t that what life is about?

The educated are oftentimes checking boxes. Leaving their desires in the dust as they pursue capital.

And the poor and uneducated can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps because there are no bootstraps, that made the protagonist in this article switch from Republican to Democrat, his father was an immigrant who made it, but then he went to New Orleans in the wake of the hurricane and saw people couldn’t help themselves.

You make a difference. If you focus on what makes you special, if you pursue your dream and deliver what you want to exist. I mean come on, do those people making pap music really want to hear it? Chris Stapleton seems to be making the music everybody in Nashville wants to hear, even though they’re afraid to follow in his footsteps, he keeps winning all the awards.

Think about that.

But if you’re in the creative sphere think most about what you want to see.

I read all day, I love to read, but most writing sucks. The content may be good, but the words are unreadable. Kinda like all those articles Jason links to in his newsletter. The topic is good, but unless it’s a well-known publication, you can’t read it. I believe first and foremost the writing must be readable, exciting, content comes second.

I write what I want to read.

“INSIDE TRUMP’S CRUEL CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE U.S.D.A.’S SCIENTISTS – The folks at the Department of Agriculture laid on a friendly welcome for the Trump transition team, but they soon discovered that most of his appointees were stunningly unqualified. With key U.S.D.A. programs – from food stamps to meat inspection, to grants and loans for rural development, to school lunches – under siege, the agency’s greatest problem is that even the people it helps most don’t know what it does.”

There was a female doctor and a male nurse. Oh, how far we’ve come.

It’s been eight years. I know the new standard is ten, but my internist says seven, and last year I was recovering from my shoulder surgery so I slipped a year but now it was necessary.

My internist went off insurance. He was part of the plan and bitched, now he’s the nicest guy on the planet, gives you all the time you need, is a great quarterback, and usually I go to see Wishingrad for my procedure, everybody in Santa Monica sees Wishingrad, but he was unavailable! Oh, I could get the colonoscopy in December, when I’m out of town, but I couldn’t see him beforehand and I was calling in September!

That’s what you learn, to call early. I’ve met my deductible for the year and I want to accomplish everything before January 1st.

My internist said I could wait until 2018, but I knew then it would be at least April, because I’d have to meet my $2000 deductible, and I didn’t want to let that much time slip by. Did I tell you I’m an i-dotter and t-crosser? I check every box, I do what the doctor tells me. Last Christmas I was riding the gondola with a snowboarder who had a sock for a glove. What happened? Well, he fell in the park and had to have surgery in September and I asked him if the doctor said it was okay to be out here and he said no, but he wasn’t gonna tell him. That’s not me, I want a good result. And the funny thing is my father did everything right and died at 70 and our friend Harry did everything wrong and lived to 90, so there’s no assurance, but the smoking and cholesterol will get you, and I want to keep them at bay.

So I e-mailed Irving.

I’m gonna tell you, there are two tiers of medicine, and you have to ask yourself which one you want to be on. And, of course, some people can’t afford the upper tier, and then there are those who can and don’t want to. Felice had a kidney stone and the doctor charged her 4k to blitz it. She was unhappy, I always want to pay, I don’t want anything to go wrong, I want to be up to snuff. I don’t care if I live in the best joint, drive the best car, but my body? That’s got to work seamlessly. After all, I only have one.

Irving said to see Ed. That I was gonna like him.

And Irving’s office paved the way by calling Ed to see if he could see me this year and when the answer came back in the affirmative, I made an appointment.

Now normally, the initial screening is perfunctory. Oftentimes the gastroenterologist doesn’t even sit down. They want to make sure you’re breathing, ain’t gonna die on the table. But Ed was not only friendly, he gave me an hour! I heard about his yoga, I got his background, he did research on my medications, I felt embraced, like this guy was on my team, like he was my primary doctor. And, he told me he hadn’t raised his rates since the eighties! He taught at Cedars and was now part of their network and he insisted on practicing medicine his way. Whew! He was strategizing regarding my issues, checking up on my iron and the pill I’m taking, even examined me physically! And then called me later with a recommendation. God, I’m afraid to call doctors, I believe I’m impinging, wasting their time, but not this guy! Hell, he even called me yesterday, before the procedure, and didn’t throw me off the phone!

So today I took an Uber to Beverly Hills. I know, I know, I should be taking Lyft. But when I’ve got to be somewhere on time I don’t want to take the secondary service, not when it’s important. And my driver Carlos was from Peru and loved this country, he works at a restaurant at night, why does everybody hate immigrants? Hell, if my relatives didn’t come here I probably wouldn’t even exist, they’d all have been killed in the Holocaust!

And they make you sign all these forms. Forms are ridiculous, like software licenses, you either say yes or are left out, and you want to be included.

And the nurse…

I chat up all the people, I want to know who everybody is. Turns out her sister is dating Lee Zeidman, small world.

But I had to go to the bathroom. You see you drink this stuff the day before…

But Ed said he used a European formula, that was much less offensive, and it was! And I ate some jello and sipped some broth but I was not hungry, I don’t know why, maybe because I stocked up on food just before midnight the night before.

So then they give you the hot blankets. Love those.

And take my blood pressure and insert the IV, which this nurse did well, unlike the last one, who missed three times.

And then the anesthesiologist came in. The woman. Asian. With a heavy accent. I’ll be honest, at first I thought she was the nurse. And I could have asked her where she was trained, but this is not a heavy procedure, whereas once I got a Russian guy for serious surgery and I had Reagan’s anesthesiologist when I had my shoulder done but the bottom line is I lived through the experience, I didn’t think I wouldn’t, but I did.

And the surgery nurse used to be a flight attendant, and then a salesman, and funny how time marches on, how genders are bent.

And then Ed came in and asked about the music business. I told him about Taylor’s album dropping, about that broker in Canada who got caught in the Paradise Papers web and then they wheeled me in.

And 45 minutes later, which seemed like an instant to me, I was out, drinking my juice box and eating my animal crackers, funny how we revert to children in the hospital, er, the surgery center, which just opened in December as a matter of fact.

And there were no polyps! And Ed thought he found where I’d been losing blood, but it had healed now, and he’s gonna call me next week, and the thing is when it comes to the poop chute, to the prostate, I’m good, which is great because so many other places I’m bad, we’ve all got something, we’re all fighting the grim reaper, you can check out early, which I don’t recommend, you’re gonna miss so much, or you can age and your body can start to fail and you can do everything to hang on.

I recommend you do everything to hang on. You don’t think you want to get old, but when you do you want to get older, although you don’t want to live forever, all your contemporaries are gone, no one remembers what you did, or as Warren Miller says, every hundred years, all new people.

And my plan was to go directly to In-N-Out, as a reward, but I’m not supposed to eat greasy food at first, so I didn’t, but I think I’m gonna later, and now you’re gonna criticize me, but I’ve been eating so clean and…

It’s the little things that make live worth living.

As long as you’re still living.

Sales are done. If you want to sell merch at your gig, your best item is vinyl, since it can’t be replicated digitally. People don’t need turntables to play it, many don’t play it at all. It’s a SOUVENIR! From now on think of physical items as souvenirs, not as music.

We live in an on demand world. It’s why cars replaced railroads and trolleys. You want to go where you want whenever you want. Anything that inhibits this process is to your detriment, not the customer’s. Don’t establish artificial roadblocks to sustain income, customers will just get pissed and find a way around them.

Continuity is king! (After distribution, of course, if you can’t hear it it doesn’t exist.) You want to be in the marketplace all 365 days a year. It doesn’t always have to be new music, but it has to be something. Meanwhile, when you’re on tour, playing to adoring fans, most of your fanbase is being ignored, There’s publicity about opening night, and then local press, and then you’re a non-story. Always think about keeping in touch with your net friends and keeping them satisfied.

It’s not about an album, IT’S ABOUT A BODY OF WORK! When I hear a track I like, I go to Spotify and I see what else has the most plays. That’s what I listen to next, it does not matter whether they’re from the same album or not. You want to keep on adding to your body of work via singles. An album is irrelevant online. Furthermore, you blow all your publicity in one shot. An album comes out and is over in a day. Your goal is to make your career have traction, by causing fan adoption of one track, which will lead them to more.

If one track is sustaining, don’t hold back from releasing another track. Disengage from the publicity paradigm. Forget about radio, think about fans. Fans want more, keep them interested.

Playlists are king. Spotify kept Taylor Swift’s latest track “Call It What You Want” off Friday’s new release playlists and it took days for the track to gain traction and hit the chart and still, it’s middling at best, today on the way down, at #44. The point being if even Taylor Swift can get lost in the shuffle, what are the odds for you?

The streaming companies are the new gatekeepers. Play nice, or they won’t play with you. Swift’s window of retail only will only prevent Spotify from helping her down the line. The key is to play nice with all, once again, distribution is king, DON’T EVER FORGET THAT!

Reaction is everything. If they playlist you and people don’t save your track, if listeners skip it, they’re not gonna grow it to more playlists. Data is triumphant, turntable hits are history. Don’t blow your shot. But if you do blow it, get right back into the game as soon as possible.

And the game is not simple. Are you aware of the Supr New Music Friday chart? You should be, it’s here:

Supr New Music Friday chart

the point is there are so many of these tools, the music business has completely changed, you must have someone on your team who knows where the data is buried and how to interpret it.

“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.