Trick Needs
Comments(0) 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.
