MUSIC|MEDIA|DESIGN

Broadly speaking there are a couple conventional ways to pay for media:

1. Some individual or entity purchases time outright for presence (commercial TV or “Pay to Play”)
2. An individual or entity pays to receive programming from a source (Pay Per View)

Obviously cable TV is a hybrid, with elements of both systems.  But that mashup has never been easy or comfortable.  A decade ago terrestrial broadcasters banded together to force cable companies to pay for what had always been free, over-the-air programming.  Even over-the-air HD broadcasting has strengthened the hand of cable-carriers, since a cable subscription now locks many legacy-TV viewers into a subscription (fear is a powerful motivator).  Still, in many areas, the interests and business models of the broadcast and cable industries align.  The problem known as “the internet” has always been one of those areas.

When it became impossible to ignore Napster and the like, content owners were in an understandable panic.  They pushed for draconian rules for entertainment media on the net, in an over-reaction not unlike 9/11: Criminalizing code, ideas, and legislating uneven rates that favored the powerful, legacy industry, and punished the upstarts and innovators by design.  From this mindset came the environment we’ve inherited.

So it occurs to me that the internet is already very much a pay-t0-play model.  Success is punished asymmetrically by hidden hosting charges that force you to decide whether you can actually afford for your video to go viral.  Up and coming artists are ensnared in a rats nest of legalities, and like modern investors, engaging in markets and deals that no one really understands.  The internet was been rigged, top to bottom, to ensure the winners of the 20th Century remain players in the 21st.  To a great extent uneven control of access to public dataways (switches), and favoritism in the tolls assessed (royalties) have returned us to an almost industrial circumstance.

Ironically (or symptomatically) the same forces that limited industrial power at the dawn of the 20th century are forcing contraction in infoculture in our times.  Infoculture, like pre-ecology industry, appears to be a limitless game, bound solely by our ability to store and move electrons around the physical world (which is reliably always growing).  Back then when companies or their leaders abuse the trust of consumers, who also happened to be workers and voters, there were great crises of confidence.  The debate over the “gold standard” was roiling precisely because no one trusted bankers and politicians.  Today people no longer trust bankers or politicians because our trust has been so abused.

To the extent that the stock market is a measure of how financiers view their future prospects, things must be looking up.  The reality is the value of equities bear no tangible relationship to the relative confidence or cowardice of any group of geniuses.  This conceit is little different from that of soviet socialism – both perspectives concentrate undue weight and power in the hands of the most successful exploiters of an inherently flawed system.  When the argument that “this bad idea is better than that other bad idea” we can make some progress.  The real promise of infoculture, over industry and agriculture, is the potential for win-win.  Since we can manufacture (or at least modulate and amplify) wealth with data, there are transactions where growing your pile doesn’t shrink my pile.  Not only is this a game changer in human culture, it renders most of our notions of value, power and economy obsolete.

So we’re catching up.  And while the market is surely wrong about many companies, in the main it’s probably right about many more who will just never get it, or find their entire business model dissolved beneath them.  We vainly stamp industrial patterns onto new industries that have entirely unrelated fundamentals, and are genuinely surprised when the resulting company or model fails.  Internet access and infrastructure, including the machinations required to legally use any piece of media in any manner, are obvious victims of this failure.  Electronic media are less than 100 years old, yet we apply laws of matter to electrons, whether logic, business costs, or even free will deems it sensible.  Too often the response to new models is a Ted Steven’s  ”No!” instead of experimentation.  There’s enormous bottled-up potential for new products and ways to make money.  When we open ourselves to the new reality and circumstances, it’s a lot less scary.  We’ll be able to see that by letting go a little, and treating people fairly (as opposed to lobbying for perks or punishments) we create more value for ourselves, not less.  Partnership and community are the new exclusivity.

Lest anyone forget the most unique and inventive regional band of the 1990s, the Buddha Den has hipped us to a brand new Brainiac Live Archive Project, including a free MP3!  Assembled by a super-fan, this collection fills a big hole in the discography of Dayton’s greatest noisemakers.  Leave it to the people to rock us out.

Timeline of Year Zero Discovery – NinWiki .

I know, I know… I suspect folks think I’ve crawled up Trent Reznor’s butt and called it heaven (just wrote another piece about a Telegraph UK article  over at The All Night Party).  Nonetheless, for anyone wondering about the directions a modern record can take, there are few better sources than ninwiki, which documents each of NIN’s experiments in depth.  Year Zero was a classic response that looks smart 2 years later.  Check it!

Or rather, “someone”.  LiveNation and Ticketmaster have hired Hillary Rosen to pimp their monopoly in Congress. In case you forgot, Rosen presided over the RIAA during the Napster fiasco, spewing one absurd position after another. She left her term as RIAA President Bush-style: after being hired to lead an industry at it’s peak, she presided over a dramatic (even historic) decline, leaving the music business a smoking ruin, universally hated by it’s customers. Heckuva job, Hill!

If past results indicated future performance, this would be great news. But hiring Hillary, a proven failure, is similar to re-electing George W. Bush to fix the economy.  Unfortunately, Rosen was only unsuccessful from the perspective of share prices and industry profits.  In her role as fearmonger-in-chief, she succeeded fabulously though.  She managed to convince every major label executive that the sky was falling.  She painted the most successful new product in the history of music (iTunes and Amazon downloads) as malignant parasites, and slowed their adoption and eventual success.  An honest economic evaluation would reveal her efforts cost the industry far more than their reactionary claims of piracy losses (of course both arguments are imaginary – we cannot know how much of what was stolen would have been sold, any more than we can know how many purchases might have been made if a functioning market had been allowed to exist).

The bottom line is simple: A merger of LiveNation and Ticketmaster is not good for any independent artist.  After completed, even the biggest stars will be vassals to Hillary’s new masters.  Rates for all players will be set according to LiveNation’s needs.  Big shows will cease to be a market, and become more like major league sporting events.  Venues won’t be able to sell tickets if they dare an end-run around LiveNation’s booking.  Artists will lose control over ticket prices and venue relationships they’ve established.  There really are no upsides to this.  The appearance of Hillary Rosen smells bad.

Clear Channel is not about music.  They’ve cut music programming, and treat it as a broad, generic market, like TV networks once treated programming before cable.  It’s a move in the wrong direction. Worse, Clear Channel has used their monopolies in local radio market to influence the politics and culture in those markets.  The culture they advance is right wing, loud-mouthed and obnoxious, voiced by clowns like Bill Cunningham (an embarrassment to rationality).  It views music as a nice-to-have, and considers taste a maleable profit center.  They’ve shrunk the size of radio station staffs, while shrinking their reach and audiences.  If they do to music what they’ve done to radio, things can get much worse.

Folks, this is a tough slog.  Historically it looks like we’re going to lose.  It’s been 100 years since an administration actually blocked a deal like this!  But this is so terrible, so clearly wrong, and there are so many examples of the problems with it, there’s some hope.  Both companies are slimy, and the ideas they’re pushing have repeatedly failed or made bad situations worse.  Still, if no one hears us scream in agony over this wound, we’re all doomed.

So write your Congressman and Senator.  Write President Obama: many of his supporters are Clear Channel/Rosen cronies, so if he doesn’t hear the other side, you can bet they’ll get their way.

While researching a story, I came upon a great retrospective by my bud and sometime-boss, Mike Breen.  It’s an old CityBeat Cover Story: Foggy Memory Breakdown.  As I read down the list of past winners and ceremonies, I realized my career (not just memories) is wrapped up in this community.  The names of artists who’ve entrusted me with their work, and the progress all have made since make me proud to be a small part of it.

There are some great artists in this town!  And hard times, inequality and injustice historically drive great artists to make great music (think of the 1930s when country and pop emerged with radio, or the late 1960s when music drove civil rights and anti-war movements).  So while The Bush Gang was busy torturing, starting wars, and signing laws to hurt the poor and widen the gap between the rich and the rest of us, Cincy artists were hitting back.  From the old guard Psychodots Terminal Boulevard to The Sundresses’ Barkinghaus the voice of reality kicks down the door.

So starting today, I’m going to devote some time/space to chronicling the projects I’ve worked on that have grown up to matter.  My previous posts on Wussy’s cover story and Daniel Martin Moore’s vinyl release are just the first.  In future installments, I’ll include more editorial.  But that’s the plan…

It’s great when someone you work with makes good, you know?  You’re just doing your own thing, and one day you notice their name connected to something special.

Of course we always knew Brian Niesz was doing his thing down at WOXY’s studio’s (their relationship started when all of us were at Ultrasuede, hosting the legendary StudioX sessions).  But I hadn’t really considered the list.  So when I saw the body of work laid out I was impressed.  Especially by the sound.

Cincinnati’s Psychodots have been a fixture for nearly 2 decades.  While they’ve previously used The Bears website to display their work, they’ve recently revamped their own site, and included a video from their 2006 release Terminal Blvd.  Their friends at Flashpoint Academy in Chicago have dropped a video for the track Not a Pretty Face in the Sights and Sounds section.

I’m gonna get myself in trouble here.  From the day that Video Killed the Radio Star I’ve hated the conventional MTV music video form.  You know the drill: 4 guys jammin’ hard, intercut with the concrete images of the video directors idea of the song’s narrative.  The problem I have with this is that I rarely have the same vision of that narrative.  So first I struggle to understand the concept.  But once grokked, too often I reject the concept in favor of my own.  It’s too concrete.  And I get very little from watching my favorite bands lip sync.  In this case, the craft is great, and I didn’t struggle too much with the concept.  It’s a nice piece, and a good effort.  

Unfortunately, it doesn’t erase my own vision of that narrative.  From the moment I heard that song in the mastering session, it reminded me of an individual and time in my life, which not surprisingly was shared with Psychodots Rob Fetters.  For me, the song’s about much more than the music business, and the video isn’t funny enough to take me wherever it’s aiming.  I confess it’s great to see Bad Bob in metal garb and the costume girls are great, but it’s kind of a one liner.

But that’s just me.  It’s still cool.  But I say music video won’t mature until it can support more than one narrative vision.

It’s not too soon to start highlighting the lessons of the Bush Depression as they pertain to us.  If nothing else, we must cease advancing flawed ideas and reject gross incompetence to lessen our own pain.  So this article is part of a series exploring what’s happened and how we can use it.

The first domino to fall in the current debacle was the under-regulated mortgage market.  In a nutshell, mortgages were being wrapped up in big, mass bundles and sold as commodities via networks.  The underlying rationale: If you aggregate hundreds or thousands of individual mortgages into a single pool, the failures of any individual loan cannot sink the entire pool.   To some extent this makes sense, as a tool to mitigate risk across a large pool of common, known loans.  The problem is that the individual loans, and their securing assets (homes) were neither common nor known.  Instead these instruments spawned a “mortgage brokering” industry that shopped these products to any and all comers, without ever-fewer checks and balances.  By last year appraisers were in on the scam, over-valuing homes to sell loan instruments with far greater risks than claimed.  In the end, no one could trust that brokers and banks originating the loans were performing with due diligence.  As it became apparent that the problem was widespread, our economy collapsed.  We lost certainty in the value of real estate broadly, and lost faith in the profession responsible for it’s valuation.  Loans immediately ground to a halt, and the economy collapsed around us.

The take home message is not that networks are bad, but that transparency is essential in networks and reputations matter.  The opacity of these mortgage backed securities created the problem, and remain an obstacle to it’s resolution.  Transparency is what makes Ebay and Amazon work so well; mechanisms are built in to ensure buyers know what they’re getting beforehand, and compare it’s value to similar goods.  A sellers reputation is part of the transaction – no one buys from poorly rated sellers, and Ebay actively works to prevent bad actors from signing up under new names.  Even when they come back, there is safety in numbers: a seller with a single 5 star rating is less likely to get a bid or sale than one with thousands of 4 stars and a few rants.  Experience counts when it comes to building a reputation.

In the music industry, there’s a long history of opacity.  Some of this is a necessary evil in an entertainment business: there’s always a mythical element to stardom, and fans really don’t want to know exactly how the sausage is made.  But once the curtain drops, there’s no valid reason for labels to offer opaque contracts with overly broad and vague terms in contracts.  There’s no benefit for reviewers to call turds “tootsie rolls” when it damages their reputation.  And there’s certainly no benefit to force-feeding faux-products to any human network.  In short, the collapse of the mortgage-backed security market has many parallels to the collapse of the music industry.  

One other thing important parallel is found in the perils of complexity.  In the music business one of the biggest failures has been our ability to make it easy for people to pay us for our work.  Licensing is problematic for end-users – it’s often hard to know who to pay what!  Some rates are negotiated, others compulsory.  We’re lashed to an archaic system that evolved around mutual distrust between parties in a zero sum game. 

The music industry has taken big hits based on people’s perception of greed, based not on their direct experiences with musicians, but rather myths spun around stars and star-makers.  Not terribly different from the Wall Street crowd in that respect.  The majority of local bankers making loans at your local branch didn’t create this crisis.  It was Wall Street swingdicks bundling their solid products on the same basis as garbage loans from companies like Countrywide, and individual “mortgage brokers” (kind of like “indie promoters” in radio, eh?) who wrote loans for the closing costs and a quick buck.  The weak link becomes the broker who closes every loan with a few thousand bucks in his pocket, regardless of the buyers ability to pay it off.

More to follow!

YouTube – Frank Proto: Sketches of Gershwin for Clarinet & String Orch.

Man, what a session.  I’m totally blown away this Grammy Nominated performance from  and recording has found it’s way to the internets, courtesy of YouTube and Frank Proto’s Red Mark Records.  Even more blown away to see 22,000 views, and passionate comments!  Not far behind, is the live recording of the chamber portion of the same album, Bridges, with 19,000 views and counting.

Speaking as the engineer for both very different sessions, the Gershwin piece was the bigger challenge and biggest payoff (in terms of Eddie’s performance).  But for my money  this one’s the real treat, for the ensemble (and reall drove the Grammy nod):