MUSIC|MEDIA|DESIGN

Paranoia strikes deep in the heartland.  Cheap Trick’s Manager Dave Frey’s scattered post on TuneCorner slathers random fear and panic over many of the tools driving the new music market.  Some of it is an instinctive response to new fortunes built atop pure information – the nagging, subtle certainty that aggregation is deeply wrong… it’s like a built-in  social Miranda Warning: everything you say, do or write can and will be sold against you in the courts of commerce.

Whether genetic or cultural, this fear is understandable in a species evolved to cope with scarcity.  Even cultural evolution can’t adapt to a change in Initial Conditions: in the sphere of information scarcity has been obliterated.  In the sphere of physics, where matter is inherently limited, information is increasingly supplanting atoms and alleviating scarcity there too.  Yet all of our fortunes are built upon scarcity.  The essence of “wealth” is control of relatively more of some precious substance (gold, money, oil, code).  For the last 100,000 years (at least!) control of scarce resources has defined winners and losers, kings and serfs, masters and slaves, bosses and workers.  Over the past 10 years that assumption has been dismantled.  It’s not surprising that the manager of a Stadium Rock band, built to spew millions of identical units at premium prices might find these changes alarming.

Sadly, the critique is incoherent.  At best, it’s like the howling of a wounded, dying animal after a long, painful hunt.  The animal’s already dead, thus all the more dangerous, as it lashes out, thrashing to do some damage before consciousness wanes.  Mr. Frey bellows that somehow Ticketmaster’s sales data belongs to his band, as does Amazon’s.  Even All Music Guide, which publishes it’s own original editorial content (reviews, discographies, etc) about most major releases is somehow property of Cheap Trick, simply because they covered the band.  At the same time, Walmart, BestBuy and Virgin’s sales data, used for decades to bludgeon competitors, beat up suppliers, and control vast market swaths crossing all demographic and social boundaries, is just fine.

I have many of friends who think this way.  I’m pushing 50, and my fellow boomers, and even many GenXers remain deeply invested in scarcity, and terrified of openness and plenty.  We can’t imagine making a living without scarcity, but the problem goes deeper.  My grandparents and their generation measured their children’s success not in dollars earned, but by the number of underlings they controlled.  We, their kids and grandkids, measure our relative success in similar terms of control.  The more we control, the better we’re doing.

Dave Frey assumes his pocket is being picked, but in the blog post never explains how.  Listing revenue streams of info-vendors isn’t an explanation because nothing he cites is news.  Well, actually that’s not true: when his clients were lumbering from stadium to stadium in the 80s, Ticketmaster’s data was entirely unavailable to the band, label and management.  In those days they negotiated blind; only promoters, retailers and Ticketmaster knew the actual score, and used this proprietary data to screw bands like Cheap Trick, who had no real clue about the numbers underlying demand for the band, which drove bids for performance and the rates.  Think about returns: you never knew exactly how many units you sold!  Tower Records and Peaches never shared the demographic data they collected with labels, fueling accounting practices that made recouping ever more difficult, and manufacturing decisions a crapshoot.  Mr. Frey is angry that Soundscan counts his band’s sales – is he deliberately ignoring Billboard, the RIAA certifications and other historic milestones used by artists, labels and managers to promote a bands success, or is he conveniently slamming a new, more accurate approach to accounting that places his client’s work in a lower tier than they occupied in the past, diminishing his work developing their career?

Who knows what Mr. Frey’s actual problem with modernity is.  Since there’s no clear critique in his post, we can only guess.  It sounds as if he’s mostly concerned about control, but also wants a cut of someone else’s labors, because that work surrounds his industry.  Yet he works in an industry that’s built upon information.  Recordings are nothing else!  Success in our world depends upon other content creators, like magazines, newspapers and radio, embracing your product, and yes, using it to build their own salable products.  No one subscribes to Rolling Stone for the politics, the artists featured pay for that reportage.  Does Rolling Stone send Cheap Trick a check every time they get a story or cover? No?  Then why should Amazon?  Does Spin complain that they have to publish their circulation data, by law, for the world to see and even use against them?  Do TV stations hate Nielsen for measuring their audience, and charging them for the underlying data?

Grow up, Mr. Frey, and face forward.  This is the world we live in, and by any measure it’s better than the one that spawned Cheap Tricks fame and fortunes, but ironically, the kind of success they achieved is simply obsolete.  Record hippies no longer pick the music the rest of us must enjoy.  Game over.  Instead of elevating a few ubergroups to unsustainable lifestyles, we have a flatter industry with more stars working at more modest scales.  Opportunity abounds, just not the kind of opportunity hair bands and popstars have come to expect.  That’s a shame for those who grew fat and lazy, used to fawning approval, with endless lines of blow and hookers aplenty.  Today the Clive Davis’ of the world no longer select and annoint stars, fans do.  The systems Mr. Frey slams hold all artists to the same accounts: tangible, real spins and sales, visible to all, with rich data available to anyone smart enough to use it.

If there’s a truth in Dave Frey’s rant it’s this: If your management and team are incapable of using the data that’s out there, and convert it to dollars and opportunity they’re falling behind the times, and your career is in danger.  If your people can’t play nice with the new industry infrastructure, and place your business in opposition to partners your competitors effectively use, it’s time to look for better partners.  If you see the market you inhabit as scary and inherently wrong, and you can’t use the infrastructure to your advantage, you’re already doomed.  Time to move on.

Nielsen Soundscan reports that 2009 U.S. Music Purchases up 2.1% over 2008 as Music Sales Exceed 1.5 Billion for Second Consecutive Year.  This news bears repeating, in light of the music industry’s constant, deafening whine: Total music purchases have in fact increased each year since 2005!  For the record, 1.01 billion music purchases were made in 2005, 1.2 billion in 2006, 1.4 billion in 2007, and 1.5 billion last year, as noted above.  While it’s possible poorly managed large companies, willing to overspend for talent, overpay executives, and ignore market realities could lose money on growing sales, it’s impossible to feel truly sorry for them.

The report has plenty more good news, especially for small labels and savvy artists.  First digital downloads continue to grow, providing a direct path to revenue open to all.  Better yet, albums represent an increasingly large portion of those sales, versus singles, growing 16% to reach a new peak of 20% of all downloads!  These trends only accelerated in the fourth quarter of a recession year, suggesting a positive future.  Indeed, hits are happening in the digital space, at levels previously reserved for physical CDs: Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga and Flo Rida all had singles that sold to quadruple-platinum levels (more than 4 million sales each)!

While the Zeros are considered a “lost decade” in many industries, it was a rebirth for the music business.  We’ve crossed a threshold, selling nearly twice as many albums online as physical CDs.  Album sales are moving away from traditional retail, to non-traditional venues.  It’s remarkable to note given the numbers above that non-traditional music outlets represent most of that growth in albums versus singles, adding 11% over their 2008 sales, ultimately accounting for nearly 30% of total album sales in 2009.

The corner has been turned.  It’s morning in the music industry!

I’m not sure whether Berkleemusic’s course “Online Music Marketing with Topspin” is a more troubling development in the music industry or academia, but after Topspin’s major-label-like launch I have to wonder.  The biggest problem here, aside from an academic institution partnering to pimp a (fairly vaporous, deliberately obscure) corporation’s software, is in the fine print: Students are required to use the “Topspin software” to complete the course, which winds up hitching your catalog to their revenue stream.  Apparently Topspin is the new Taxi, glomming itself to every revenue online revenue stream on the strength of a lot of promises.  Check out the requirements for the course.  Take a minute.  It’s deep:

Obviously the chart above is the lede, so I won’t bury it: a 5% cut of any successful artists’ online take is a fat share, not something to be taken lightly.  Which is the second problem: Is that 5% gross, or net?  Is it on revenues only, or do they spiff expenses through their vaunted “eco-system”?  The terms (“all transactions” and “fee”) suggest the worst, but honestly, who knows?

These requirements suggest more and deeper problems with this model.  Berklee is a legitimate university, with supposedly transferrable credits.  While one can make a strong argument that a business student might deserve credit for becoming a wizard with a proven toolbox like Excel, it’s a little harder to imagine a course in Outlook or Firefox as college-level pursuits.  For now we’ll give Berklee the benefit of the doubt, and consider this akin to ProTools certification.  That opinion is subject to change if Topspin makes it clear the “software” at the heart of their system “requires” users to “enroll” in a course like this, and submit at least some of their work to Topspin’s “fees”.  That’s something else entirely.

One of the Topspin owners is surely the ideal guide, but can his partner provide objectivity in a world where reality is whatever he says it is?  It’s a closed system where Shamal Ranasinghe literally writes all the rules.  Mike King is probably a great teacher and savvy in the business, and hopefully has spent a significant part of the past year using the system with his own work.  I wonder whether his artists and projects use it, and are they subject to the same 5% fee as students?  That would enhance the credibility of the course considerably, but it’s still more than a little unusual.  Would you buy a computer that required personal training from Bill Gates?  Anyone whose ever worked with a developer knows that what creators find intuitive can often be baffling to the rest of us.

That gets to the bottom line.  What exactly is Topspin?  I see the impressive list of investors and artists they claim use the system.  But I have real trouble imagining David Byrne, Peter Gabriel and The Beastie Boys can afford to hand over 5% of their biggest revenue stream to anyone willingly.  I suppose, if that were the total load as they seem to indicate, it wouldn’t be bad.  But again, where it’s taken (net/gross) and by whom matters.  It appears Topspin is training an army of Neuvo-Recordhippies to sign artists up for all kinds of futuristic music systems, from great to faddish.  The Berklee course is part of a music management program, and Topspin appears to be positioning itself to be a new, indispensible middleman… sort of like an iTunes working the distribution and marketing sphere instead of retail.

There are a lot of other companies, offering most of these services with a wide range of terms, and Topspin’s pitch is integration.  So it’s quite possible that integration is a bargain at 5%.  But it’s opaque and fluffy roll-out makes it hard to know.  By keeping it’s workings hidden behind a $1000 sign-up fee, it may not be clear for some time. Like Tom Sawyer’s fence (or the Emporer’s New Clothes), no one wants to step up to admit they’ve been had, or don’t understand something.  Even when it’s intentionally opaque.

vertigo_1990s: Torture Garden, Scream Boody Murder, Sex Device.

Wow.  I can’t believe anyone would bring up my old band 12 years after our last show.  While we were friends with Scream Bloody Murder, Torture Garden keyboardist Dave Arps later played in Sex Device, in our 4 piece era, and co-produced a couple tracks (maybe one of the ones linked here? I’m downloading the files now!)

Sadly I have no rights to the catalog – the band was literally made for DVD (not hyperbole – we saw the medium as the natural outlet for our work, and Brand New World was conceived as a CD+V (pre DVD format).  In many respects, that band’s challenges are the root of my career.  At every stage, I had to invent tools and techniques.  Media Design was at the core of the solutions.

Forrester to Music Industry: It’s the Consumer, Stupid | Epicenter | Wired.com.

[Note: the story linked above are part of an article paraphrasing a $500 Forrester research paper, not the actual source.]

Any reader of this site knows my take on the “conclusion” or whatever the headline’s relationship is to the story… “Duh!” No news there.

But the diagram above interests me on a couple levels.  First, it’s important to note that it seems to be more of a diagram of standard features than a suggested interface.  Still, even as that, it suggests a level of interaction that may or may not be sustainable or possible for most artists (forget the initial technology investments).  This points to a gets to an underlying problem we all face, even in our daily lives: we live in a subscription world, where we die a death by a thousand features, each sold as a necessity.  Whether it’s a basic cell line, a Blackberry or an iPhone, we can be compelled by profession, employer, or necessity to subscribe to something.  Actually lots of things.

In that context, how many “bands” can any “consumer” really support?  Because that’s where this leads.  The “put-put with the stars” schemes to mono AND stereo boxed tax the ecosystem to the breaking point.  Can it really sustain a full-time always-on connection to an artist or some artist’s fan?  Do we want to?  If so, how much is that really worth?

Most people aren’t super fans.  Most are doing good to know you exist… but everyone has some favorite stars.  If those star’s existence becomes so tenuous they suck up all available dollars down-market.

I like the ideas in this report, and the basic menu of features as a starting point.  It’s certainly all supportable in iTunes LP, so it’s likely to work in the major’s competing (why?) platform as well.  But let’s not get carried away, and certainly, let’s not consider this feature set as some sort of standard.   And by no means is it an ideal: it’s really a mash-up of what exists, and kind of works, not what works best, nor is any consideration given to what works best together.  That’s a design task, not something pure research can provide.  Nonetheless, the direction is clear, and consistent with our view: Time to move forward, and use networked data to connect fans more tightly to music and artists… as a goal that’s certainly worthwhile.

Wired editor in chief and author of the controversial “The Long Tail” and “Free”, Chris Anderson responds succinctly to the much-hyped Wharton critique of his Long Tail theory in  The Long Tail blog.

I linked the sources so you can get the details from the respective horses mouths.  But I think Anderson’s ideas get a bad rap, partly because people don’t like the message, and mostly because he draws many bad conclusion in the later (more sensational) work “Free”.  In the music production journal Mix, for example, he suggests that albums today are essentially commercials for tours.  This is absurd on a number of levels, but he supports it with a variety of anecdotes and symptoms that really don’t add up (or exist in reality).  It smelled like a book tour stunt, but may have been simple ignorance, combined with an enthusiastic amateur’s perspective.  As he describes his experiences within our business, you realize it’s distorted his opinions.  Unlike those efforts, this response points out two things we dare not miss:

• The way you crunch numbers (percentage vs. actual units) matters terribly in any conclusion.  You can easily miss the forest for the trees if you pick the wrong perspective (I’m with Anderson – Wharton blew this basic metric).
• There is indeed a change in sales patterns over a lifecycle of a product.
• The implications of all Long Tail phenomenon are greater in the value-chain as you approach the consumer/fan, and diminish as you get closer to content creators.  So they have more relevance to retailers (iTunes, Blockbuster), aggregators (Amazon, Netflix) and distributors than artist.
• The Long Tail affects artists and creators mostly over time – at the end of a long, productive career, an artist will see some benefit from their work, proportional with it’s cultural impact and quality.

The Long Tail can be 100% right, even if it’s theoretician applies it incorrectly.  Critiques that misapply it dangerously miss the point.

Today in hypebot I read about a Forrester Study with a plan to save music industry.  I tried hard not to yawn because Forrester’s ideas are as important as they are obvious: the status quo is unsustainable and change is required.  The suggested changes are, at this point in time, pretty conventional:

• Staggered release schedules for maximum exposure, and rewarding “true fans” without nicking existing income.
• Overhaul products, especially the album (underway at Apple and the majors)
• Free means free: Value-added content is more than a commercial for tours and albums.
• Leverage social media and form fan communities with incentives, and facilitate richer artist-fan relationships

The hypebot piece is light on detail, but we’ve heard all this before, especially the main pitch: The 4 Cs of Digital Content (Content, Convenience, Cost, Community).  ”Digital” is a buzzword we could avoid (vinyl is a viable product with a different mix of the same four dimensions), but whatever.  We get it:  The music industry will be saved by innovative products that deliver music conveniently and affordably to a communities of fans attached to artists.

Fortunately, that is precisely why music|media|design exists!  It’s nice to see the industry coming around to our neighborhood.  It’s about time.

Digipacks vs. Jewel Case – majority decision reached.

Juggernaut Brew is a great industry blog coming from the UK, asking tough questions and working them through to solutions.  In this post, he takes on the often dissed jewel box (pictured above).

Before our launch, MusicMediaDesign and it’s parent, The All Night Party, held some focus groups on this very topic.  We were somewhat surprised to discover some bands and designers didn’t mind the old standby.  But not surprisingly, this acceptance stopped well-short of love.  The jewel box is tolerated, mostly for cost.

Juggernaut Brew makes the case that sustainability, total carbon footprint, and the long term economics combine with market forces to make the jewel box a loser.  It only seems to cost less, and only in small quantities.  It’s a perpetual stinker ecologically: made of hardened petro-byproducts, non-biodegradable and hardly recyclable.  The CD itself isn’t particularly eco-friendly, but throw in the jewel box and you’ve got a real problem in your hands.

It’s an interesting argument.  And for the record, we prefer alternatives for most projects we design.

-d-

We can’t resist noting when a local artist or band does good in the World Outside.  Spin and Rolling Stone reviews are pretty rare for Cincy bands on small labels.  But not for Wussy! 

Wussy, ‘Wussy’ (Shake It) | Spin Magazine Online.

Create Digital Music has a piece on the latest front in raging Loudness Wars, which I highly recommend: Dynamic Range Strikes Back with Campaign, Plug-in.  Campaigning against hyper-limited, over-loud CDs is nothing new, and largely a failure.  CDs, and now MP3s, just keep getting louder.  The problem is there’s no way to know what you’re missing, since virtually nothing released has any dynamic range to speak of.  So there are few positive examples of benefits.  The new development is a plug-in that displays dynamic range in a positive way.  The plug shows a simple, single number representing the average level of the program.  Human nature being what it is, bigger is better, so a bigger number suggests more of something, dynamic range in this case.

Dynamic range refers to the difference between quiet and loud parts of a song.  The greater that gap, the more impact the loud parts have, and generally, the more expressive the music can be.  In earlier generations, this expression was a precious commodity, understood by everyone.  Think of marching bands or symphonies: the loud crescendos, as the music peaks, are what defines excitement.  So it’s ironic that rock and pop music, with intrinsically greater potential for dynamics and excitement, lack this quality entirely.

Algorythmix’ plug-based meter will probably be used by few normal folks.  But we can hope artists, engineers, producers and music professionals take notice.  If they do, music will quickly start sounding much better to us fans.