{"id":2094,"date":"2009-07-11T06:10:11","date_gmt":"2009-07-11T14:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/archives\/2009\/07\/11\/perezs-label-deal\/"},"modified":"2009-07-11T06:10:11","modified_gmt":"2009-07-11T14:10:11","slug":"perezs-label-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2009\/07\/11\/perezs-label-deal\/","title":{"rendered":"Perez&#8217;s Label Deal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Oh stop whining.\u00c2\u00a0 He earned it.\u00c2\u00a0 By doing everything you won&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>He used his own money to start a site made in his own vision, compromising not a whit, to the point where Warner Brothers was attracted to him.\u00c2\u00a0 Are you really creating unique music, doing it your way, making money to the point where the majors come knocking on your door?<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s an American story.\u00c2\u00a0 Guy stumbles on to business idea, perfects it and rides the glory all the way to..?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure.\u00c2\u00a0 Perez is famous.\u00c2\u00a0 He&#8217;s making money now.\u00c2\u00a0 But he&#8217;s under the illusion that people truly care about him.\u00c2\u00a0 They don&#8217;t care about him, they care about gossip.\u00c2\u00a0 And once Perez stops slewing the gossip, adding his unique brand of commentary atop it, almost no one&#8217;s going to care.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, they&#8217;re going to care even less than they do about his vaunted Madonna&#8217;s acting career!<\/p>\n<p>You see Perez Hilton is a twenty first century train-wreck.\u00c2\u00a0 Who&#8217;s hopefully intelligent enough to know his days are numbered.\u00c2\u00a0 He didn&#8217;t put 10,000 hours into perfecting anything, he just stumbled into the spotlight and wants to stay there.\u00c2\u00a0 Like that evil doctor on &quot;Big Brother&quot; and that nasty couple who won &quot;Survivor&quot;.\u00c2\u00a0 Huh?\u00c2\u00a0 Who?<\/p>\n<p>Exactly the point.\u00c2\u00a0 In order to last,\u00c2\u00a0 you&#8217;ve got to have substance.\u00c2\u00a0 Depth.\u00c2\u00a0 Something that appeals to people that they don&#8217;t think they can do themselves.\u00c2\u00a0 Kind of like Google.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody wanted a search engine that could deliver the results they wanted, they just didn&#8217;t put in the years in math class learning how to write the algorithms!\u00c2\u00a0 Perez is far from dumb.\u00c2\u00a0 But talented?<\/p>\n<p>As for his deal with Warner&#8230;\u00c2\u00a0 Do you know anything about human nature?\u00c2\u00a0 Do you really think Perez is going to trash Warner acts now that he&#8217;s in business with the company?\u00c2\u00a0 Do you really think he&#8217;s not going to hype their acts?\u00c2\u00a0 Shit, they should have done the deal earlier!\u00c2\u00a0 If nothing else,\u00c2\u00a0 Perez is going to be sitting in Warner offices, hearing what they&#8217;re hyping, and he&#8217;ll be prone to hype it too.\u00c2\u00a0 After all, we live in an attention economy.\u00c2\u00a0 And suddenly, Warner has Perez Hilton&#8217;s attention!<\/p>\n<p>As for the deal&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Come on, is that what you really want?\u00c2\u00a0 A deal with Warner Brothers?\u00c2\u00a0 Isn&#8217;t that like the aforementioned Google selling out to Microsoft?\u00c2\u00a0 If you establish a beachhead, you build upon it, expanding your own empire.\u00c2\u00a0 If you truly believe in yourself.<\/p>\n<p>Perez thinks he&#8217;s got an ear for talent.\u00c2\u00a0 Let&#8217;s just say he does.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s a small percentage of the overall pie in an act&#8217;s success.\u00c2\u00a0 Does Perez know anything else about winning in the music business?\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, supposedly his partners at Warner do.\u00c2\u00a0 But how long until he says one thing and Warner says another?\u00c2\u00a0 If he&#8217;s so confident, why doesn&#8217;t he go into business by himself?\u00c2\u00a0 Tying up with Ian Rogers at Topspin as opposed to a major label.<\/p>\n<p>But Topspin&#8217;s not going to bankroll you, it&#8217;s just an apparatus to effect your success, allowing you to do it yourself.\u00c2\u00a0 The story is not sexy, there&#8217;s no gossip column angle.\u00c2\u00a0 In other words, Perez is completely old school!\u00c2\u00a0 Yes, for a guy who claims not to care what people think about him, who thinks he&#8217;s playing by his own rules, he&#8217;s playing by twentieth century rules!<\/p>\n<p>He could use some of that $72,000 a day advertisers pay to be on his site to break his own bands.\u00c2\u00a0 And own everything.\u00c2\u00a0 Emulate another gay hero, David Geffen.\u00c2\u00a0 Do you really think if Geffen was starting out today he&#8217;d go into business with Edgar Bronfman, Jr. or Doug Morris?\u00c2\u00a0 No way.\u00c2\u00a0 Or, if he did, he&#8217;d want the lion&#8217;s share of the money.\u00c2\u00a0 But that&#8217;s one of the things Geffen does best, sidle up to you, making you think he&#8217;s your best friend and then executing a lucrative deal.\u00c2\u00a0 Perez is not famous for negotiating.\u00c2\u00a0 He&#8217;s just famous!<\/p>\n<p>I wish him no ill will.\u00c2\u00a0 But there&#8217;s a date on success like his.\u00c2\u00a0 There&#8217;s no core in what he&#8217;s selling.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s all flash and no substance.\u00c2\u00a0 And last I checked, it&#8217;s hard to profit in the music world on flash.\u00c2\u00a0 You can sell a single, not an album, and no one wants to see you live.\u00c2\u00a0 In other words, would you rather be in business with Kings Of Leon, not even ubiquitous enough to be parodied on Perez&#8217;s site, or Flo Rida?\u00c2\u00a0 Flo Rida might have a hit&#8230;but in an era where so many people don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s atop the chart and just don&#8217;t care.<\/p>\n<p>Watch the movie.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s what you&#8217;re paying for, with your eyeballs, going to his site.\u00c2\u00a0 Watch Perez navigate the entertainment industry, creating a new paradigm of fame, just like John Mayer.\u00c2\u00a0 But John Mayer took a year off from high school to study the guitar, he went to Berklee, he paid a great deal of dues.\u00c2\u00a0 Perez listened to a lot of records.\u00c2\u00a0 Welcome to the club!\u00c2\u00a0 If that&#8217;s all that was required, we&#8217;d all be rich record executives.\u00c2\u00a0 But knowing how to navigate the corridors of business, knowing everything from airplay to distribution to endorsements to&#8230;that&#8217;s how you gain money and power in the music business.<\/p>\n<p>Hell, Perez would have been better off going into business with Terry McBride, who understands the new game yet is lacking a working superstar.\u00c2\u00a0 Perez could have done it different.<\/p>\n<p>But he chose not to.\u00c2\u00a0 He chose to play the same old game.<\/p>\n<p>And you&#8217;re pissed he stole your opportunity?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m laughing at you, not him.\u00c2\u00a0 At least he built something and tried.\u00c2\u00a0 You&#8217;re just bitching the world wasn&#8217;t handed to you on a silver platter.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oh stop whining.\u00c2\u00a0 He earned it.\u00c2\u00a0 By doing everything you won&#8217;t. He used his own money to start a site made in his own vision, compromising not a whit, to the point where Warner Brothers was attracted to him.\u00c2\u00a0 Are you really creating unique music, doing it your way, making money to the point where [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-xM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}