Frank Rich’s column in yesterday’s "New York Times"<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Because he nails it.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s about jobs and foreclosures, stupid!\u00c2\u00a0 How did Obama and his minions get it so wrong?\u00c2\u00a0 Beholden to Wall Street, not in touch with the average man, the Administration has squandered its political capital.<\/p>\nJust like the music industry.<\/p>\n
Once upon a time, it was a dream to work at a record company.\u00c2\u00a0 Unless you knew someone it was impossible to get a job.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, it was impossible to get a job in music retail, far from the halls of Warner’s ski lodge and Black Rock.\u00c2\u00a0 Music was where it was happening.<\/p>\n
But no longer.<\/p>\n
It starts with the acts.\u00c2\u00a0 The acts were our beacon, pointing the way to truth, justice and the American way.\u00c2\u00a0 Yes, if you were really good and worked really hard you could get rich, but nowhere near as rich as today’s Wall Street fat cats, even adjusting the dollars for inflation.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, you criticize the underprivileged for dreaming of playing in the NBA?\u00c2\u00a0 What are the odds you’re going to work hard, get into Harvard and be accepted in the white corporate world?\u00c2\u00a0 Not high.\u00c2\u00a0 You’re better off shooting for the NBA, which might only pay for a decade or two, but it’s better than dealing drugs.<\/p>\n
And let’s not equate athletes with artists.\u00c2\u00a0 Athletes show their skill physically, artists radiate something intellectual, from the inside.<\/p>\n
And suddenly, there are no artists.<\/p>\n
Not in the mainstream.<\/p>\n
It started thirty years ago, with the advent of MTV.\u00c2\u00a0 First and foremost, you had to look good.\u00c2\u00a0 And then you had to play the music MTV aired, because radio took its cues from the TV monolith.\u00c2\u00a0 Suddenly, what was acceptable musically got really narrow.\u00c2\u00a0 The opposite of the FM days a decade before.\u00c2\u00a0 You used to listen to the deejay as he took you on an aural trip around the world, from folkie to metal monsters.\u00c2\u00a0 The criterion was that something be good, not what genre it was made in.\u00c2\u00a0 We had a very big tent.<\/p>\n
The tent got smaller and smaller.<\/p>\n
And those inhabiting it no longer played the game of Mo Ostin, but the construct of Tommy Mottola.\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s homogenize it to the point where every media outlet will promote our wares for free.\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s sell tonnage!<\/p>\n
Sure, a lot of people liked it for a while.\u00c2\u00a0 But they liked buying houses and watching them go up in value too.\u00c2\u00a0 In other words, both paradigms were built on nothing but air, there were no underpinnings.\u00c2\u00a0 Who wants the music that Clive Davis promoted in the nineties?\u00c2\u00a0 Who wants any music from the nineties?<\/p>\n
Those acts that remained, ironically aged classic rockers, could no longer get airplay in this new world.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 So, they toured playing oldies to great demand, raising prices all the while.\u00c2\u00a0 Employing shenanigans like scalping their own tickets in order to book even more revenue.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, if the Wall Streeters could do it, why shouldn’t they?<\/p>\n
And speaking of Wall Street, Robert Sillerman rolled up the independent concert promoters into what is now known as Live Nation, which just merged with Ticketmaster, and suddenly you’ve got a giant enterprise that needs to put on shows to make the whole thing work and is thus willing to overpay for talent, resulting in ever higher concert ticket prices.\u00c2\u00a0 Indie promoters can walk away from a bad deal.\u00c2\u00a0 Behemoths need to book revenue.\u00c2\u00a0 Just ask Detroit, which produced cars whether people wanted them or not, it was easier to keep the factories humming then reconstruct, i.e. deconstruct.\u00c2\u00a0 After all, it was all about market share.<\/p>\n
But what does a fan care about market share?\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, a fan doesn’t care who puts on the show, as long as the talent appears and delivers.<\/p>\n
But with prices so high, you rarely went.\u00c2\u00a0 And couldn’t understand how people wanted to see the evanescent pop stars at all.\u00c2\u00a0 Why was the media trumpeting these stiffs, especially after MTV stopped airing videos, after radio crumbled, after the Internet destroyed the monoculture and the world split into niches?<\/p>\n
Media doesn’t want to acknowledge niches, because then it has to reevaluate its own place in the landscape.\u00c2\u00a0 But that’s the land we live in today, a zillion acts with their own audience.\u00c2\u00a0 As for having contempt for another niche, for someone else’s music, does a fan of A&E put down people who watch Discovery, or Bravo?\u00c2\u00a0 Railing against another’s taste makes no sense in this market, where everybody gets to listen to what they want, assuming they can find it.<\/p>\n
But people can’t find it, can’t find the new music they want to hear.\u00c2\u00a0 Top Forty is too sold out, and the hipster acts too far from center.\u00c2\u00a0 Really, listen to the Dirty Projectors and tell me the mainstream cares.\u00c2\u00a0 Please note, I’m not evaluating the quality of the Dirty Projectors, if you love them, great. All I’m saying is one listen will tell you that they’re niche, most people won’t like them.\u00c2\u00a0 Yet, the Dirty Projectors have gotten the most media coverage of any new act, and the public that’s paying attention is throwing up its hands and saying huh?<\/p>\n
The music industry is in deep shit.\u00c2\u00a0 Not because of the Ticketmaster\/Live Nation merger, but because of the gulf between the industry and the public, which is sick of overpaying for everything, meanwhile, not wanting much.\u00c2\u00a0 To trumpet the success of Top Forty acts is like hyping the sales of Harley-Davidson.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, there’s a market for these overpriced American bikes, but most people want a much cheaper foreign job.<\/p>\n
But at least Harley-Davidson has cred.\u00c2\u00a0 Imagine if Harley-Davidson had the image of GM!<\/p>\n
Enough with the analogies.\u00c2\u00a0 The point is, music has squandered all its advantages.\u00c2\u00a0 It no longer evidences truth, more quickly than any artistic medium.\u00c2\u00a0 Radio is unlistenable.\u00c2\u00a0 And the public has been ripped off for decades.\u00c2\u00a0 You can tell people they shouldn’t steal, that music is a great value, but you’re just wasting your time, because the public is pissed!<\/p>\n
I really don’t see how the usual suspects worm their way out of this one.\u00c2\u00a0 Because to succeed in the future, you’ve got to develop, earn trust, give plenty and leave something on the table.\u00c2\u00a0 And that’s anathema in the modern music world.\u00c2\u00a0 Rather than argue about scalpers, make everybody show ID to get in.\u00c2\u00a0 But most acts don’t want this, because really, they want that extra ticket revenue themselves, ergo platinum packages and American Express pre-sales.<\/p>\n
The public wants good and affordable.<\/p>\n
It hasn’t been that way for eons in the music business.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like we’re selling $60,000 Malibus.\u00c2\u00a0 And you wonder why Hyundai has made inroads, it’s cheap and it’s good!<\/p>\n
Music can come back.\u00c2\u00a0 But the artists need to be about songs, not endorsements.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to want to play music first, and get rich…way down the line.\u00c2\u00a0 And your handlers have to have this same philosophy.\u00c2\u00a0 And you’ve got to stand for something.\u00c2\u00a0 May sound easy, but looking at the landscape, it appears to be damn difficult.<\/p>\n
\nAfter the Massachusetts Massacre<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Forty years ago, if you worked hard and saved your pennies, you too could live the life of the rich and famous, if only for a night, or a weekend. Now the gulf between the worlds of the rich and the poor, between the haves and the have-nots, is so vast as to seem uncrossable, […]<\/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-2624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-Gk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624","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=2624"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2626,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624\/revisions\/2626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}