Hiatus

The post title and the image says it all... Right now I just don't have time to keep with the musical Jones' and either put pen to paper or repost articles on the music industry as it happens... Bit of a shame cause I really enjoy the process.

Up until now, the blog has had over 27,000 unique visitors with most of the hits coming from South America and the USA. Most popular blog post is THIS ONE with 20,786 of the 27,000 hits. Wow, who'd a thought? Not me. Close on it's heels with over 4,000 hits is THIS ONE. No surprise there, we all want some Apple magic, even Windows users. That particular post even scored a few Google +1's

At present I'm undertaking PhD studies, along with working, doing a couple of gigs a week and trying to get my 2nd album under way. Oh, there's friends to see in there too, cars to wash, grass to mow and 2 kids to sort out as well.

You can follow the progress of my PhD by hitting the dedicated blog, or stay in touch via Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, all of which get posted to regularly. 

Be back... soon... I think.

Major Labels offer new "540" deal

Major-label madness - the reality of the music-industry in 2012.

Are you sure you still want to pursue that "major-label" recording contract?

"That" Goldman Sachs Op-Ed

A popular story at the moment is the Op-Ed of (now) former Goldman Sachs employee Greg Smith.

Posted March 14th, 2012, the footnote reads: Greg Smith is resigning today as a Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Why is Greg leaving? Well, it makes for interesting reading but Smith surmises the internal culture of Sachs is geared towards the management and not the clients. From reading Smith's expose, it appears the system is bent toward screwing the client sideways while assuring him/her that what's taking place is really for the best. 

Some interesting quotes from the article:

It might sound surprising to a sceptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organisation. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an axe murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail.

It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.

Sharp-minded musicians who've had any length of time in the industry can probably see already that Smith's disenchantment with the culture at Sachs is eerily similar to how the "big-labels" work. 

They're all about turning a profit, not at all about promoting a quality, original and innovative product. In short, the majors have lost their way and are about as relevant as a piano-accordion solo on a nu-metal album. 

On that note, Bob Lefsetz had this to say on his blog about the story:

EMI Music Publishing doesn’t pay royalties. I know this first-hand.

Let’s forget the issue of underpaying, on certain tracks they don’t account at all.

And the truth is the rest of the major label infrastructure is no different. That’s their business model. Rippling off the acts, not paying them their due. Which is why they’re fading.

Oh, they blame the public for stealing and use declining revenues to extract even more rights from clients in vaunted 360 deals.

But that’s just because their owners, their executives, want to make more money.

The Goldman executive talks about the change in culture at his firm… Let’s talk about how in the past twenty years the label executives got richer than the acts. But without the acts they’re nothing. Isn’t that topsy-turvy?

Meanwhile, not a single high profile executive has come forth to tell the truth. Because the music business is like the Mafia. Workers are afraid of getting whacked. And not being as lucrative as banking, the ranks of those who can give the middle finger and survive are few.

The labels don’t care if you’re the Eagles or a newly-signed act. They’ll still rip you off willy-nilly. The A&R and marketing people will tell you it’s not their purview, that royalties are another division.

How long can an enterprise that puts its clients last and rips them off survive? Not long.

Which is one of the main reasons the major labels are doomed.

The labels just don't care. My thoughts exactly.

-Bill

Kodak Bankruptcy Claim

 If there was ever any doubt that the old paradigm was dead in the water and breathing it's last, Kodak filing for "Bankruptcy Protection" may just be all the evidence one needs.

Birthed in 1880 by one George Eastman, by 1976 Kodak had a whopping 90% market share of photographic film sales in the US alone and epithets such as "Kodak moment" had entered the public vernacular. So what went wrong? And what does this mean? 

Well, many news articles cite Kodak's belief in "brand-loyalty" as a key element to it's downfall, the notion that the existing customer base would always be there. Here's a quote from "The College Voice" that spells this out:

The monetary illnesses for Kodak started in the late 1990s. The company failed to recognize that brand loyalty was not an everlasting feeling for its consumers. The company has been called out as the “twentieth century corporate dinosaur” by a number of commentators. It has been great at innovation but laggard at translating such ideas into enduring business ventures.

When competitor Fujifilm first entered the U.S. market, Kodak ignored the sway that their low-priced films had on the American consumer. Kodak was confident that the American consumers would stay loyal to the brand that introduced photography to them decades earlier; the feeling of confidence blinded the urge to see Fujifilm as a fair match... Kodak’s inability to deal with Fuji was the first signs of bovine business choices that the company made, knowing that Japan, at the time, was the second largest market for photo-related products after the United States.

One might assume (as I did) that Kodak bypassed the "digital revolution" altogether but that's not true either; the company actually pioneered the first digital camera in 1975. Quite an achievement but was the public and the consumer market ready for this? Err, no - not quite. Like a lot of things, timing is everything. However, by 2005, Kodak were the best selling digital camera brand in the US. Again, no small feat. So where did it all go to shit?

The talking heads all concur that Kodak failed to evolve and to move with the times, that they clung to an old business model, rested on their laurels and imagined that brand loyalty would get them through the digital age in one piece. Why didn't they branch out into software development? Mobile technology? Obviously, there were epic assumptions being made and ultimately, this has proved costly.

So what can we as musicians learn from Kodak? Here's a few things that come to mind:

1 - Don't rest on your laurels. You've got to keep aiming and shooting high. Nobody really cares what you did back in the 80's or the 90's or even 5 years ago. It's just that simple.

I've met a lot of folks who were big in the late 80's. What are they doing now? Usually nothing. What have you got to show that's current, new and NOW?

2 - The old business model really is dead. It truly is a "brave new world" out there as the old players are finding out. It's all about social interaction and staying in people's line of sight. Forget chasing that "record deal" with Universal or Sony or whoever. You don't need that, that's the old paradigm talking. Is there no market for your music? Well, invent one. Get creative. If you're good enough people will eventually take notice.  

3 - Keep producing and innovating. One of the things people love about Apple is that they're always putting out new products. Every 18 months a new version of OS-X is rolled out. A new version of the iPhone. Another iPad. This keeps people talking and as a result, Apple stays in the forefront of the public perception. Now you may not have the capital of Apple but it is easy to continually produce music these days. Put out a single, or an EP. Write an eBook. Compose an etude or a technical exercise. Revamp your website. Start a side-project. In short, put in in people's heads you're always coming up with new ideas.

4 - Don't assume your fan-base will be loyal. People are not loyal any more and why should they be? There is so much vying for their attention. If you have social media pages, then INTERACT with your fan-base. Don't spam them with links to your online store if you're not prepared to answer their questions, reply to comments and make time for them. Without the fans, you've got nothing. Treat them with respect. 

5 - Digital is here to stay. Get used to it. Embrace it. 

6 - Think ahead. Where is the market moving? While "trend following" is not necessarily a great move in and of itself, keeping your metaphorical "eyes on the horizon" is a good thing to do. Stay up with what's what, who's who and keep abreast of the happenings. Easy to do these days.

- Bill Palmer

It's free right? Musician Dilemma 101

If you're not familiar with Dave Weiner, he's a well-known guitarist who toured with Steve Vai back in the day. He's probably better known in the internet world though as the originator of a YouTube channel called "Riff of the Week." ROTW is (or rather, was) a weekly tuition video series where Dave would freely discuss and disseminate a range of guitar and music related topics via YouTube and as of right now, as I'm typing this, ROTW has 11,598 subscribers and over a million channel views. Not too bad eh? 

ROTW was totally free of course (actually, the archived videos still are), you just clicked his YouTube channel and got to woodshedding yourself away. However, after 6 years of doing this, Dave wants to change up the format and is keen to adopt a subscription service and naturally, the natives are not too happy about the change.

Now, I can perfectly see Dave's dilemma. He's been doing this for 6 freaking years! Not 6 weeks or 6 months - 6 YEARS. That's a long time to be offering a totally free service. No doubt he's paid his dues and now wants to kick the thing up a few notches and I really can't blame him.

However, I also can't see that Dave or musicians like Dave are totally blameless either. 

How so? Let me explain.
 

If you're offering a service totally free of charge with "no strings attached," you are in-fact conditioning the general public to accept that this is how it should be. It might be a gimmick to start with but once enough folks get on the bandwagon, this now becomes the "new normal." Look what's happened with music; the slobbering masses got conditioned to expect that it's a free download and now it's a shit-fight getting paid anything for your craft.

This is precisely what's happened with guitar lessons. Every man and his dog is out there offering free lessons. Hey, even I offer "TwifRIFF" to people as a away of keeping followers interested and myself in circulation. And once something like this becomes the accepted normality, it's very difficult to change. Very difficult.

There's a bunch of sites and YouTube channels like Dave's and I know why Dave and others like him did it to begin with - it's a marketing stratagem aimed at getting traffic to the primary site along with shifting CD's and other associated merchandise.
Absolutely nothing wrong with this but it seems a little out-of-touch to then  scream "bloody murder" when the public reacts to your change of heart. No - you set them up to expect somethin' for nothing, you can't then flame them if they don't embrace your new business model. Not that I'm suggesting Dave Weiner feels this way, I don't even know the guy and have never interacted with him at all. But I suspect many musicians out there are offended at the comments on Dave's video, they're pissed that Dave isn't being lovingly embraced for his change of heart.

And that's kind of the point of this post; I think we have to ask ourselves whether we're truly contributing to our success. Perhaps we as a guitar community should have collectively asked ourselves this: do we really WANT to set-up in people's minds that the mystery and beauty of the guitar is worth nothing at all?

Back in the day, you wanted to learn something, you joined a guild, which was an odd mix between a trade-union and a secret society. Not a bad idea if you ask me. What you sure as shit didn't do was to give the secrets of the guild away to win brownie points with your mates or to elevate yourself above your fellow guild members. From what I understand, a fate worse than death awaited those who did.

Yes, I know, that was then and this is now but the point remains, I think.

For me, there simply is no substitute for learning 1-1 with a competent teacher. Free lessons are great of course and you can definitely learn something but in my mind, music should always be about interaction between human beings; music is a language of connection and it requires face-to-face interaction to achieve that. I got to the level I'm at because I invested in it through private lessons and University study. Old school? Yeah sure, but if you ask me, it works. Hey, try putting "subscriber to riff of the week" on your resume and see how seriously you're taken.

I don't know what the future holds for musicians or for instrumental tuition services but I hope whatever is down the track is something a lot different to what's going on in cyber-land now. We need another "new normal," that's for sure. Let's hope we musicians get it right next time around.

 - Bill Palmer

You Can Do Anything?

By Bob Lefsetz
16th January 2012
 

Suddenly Juliette Lewis is an expert? Isn't that like Brad Pitt believing he can really manage a major league baseball team, or Lester Bangs thinking he can be a rock star?

If you want to watch one skit from last night's SNL, watch this one, "You Can Do Anything", (see  above) which may not be hysterically funny, not even good until Daniel Radcliffe appears, but it gets the essence right, that today's youngsters, based on their parents' support, believe they can do anything. Wait, you bought a Strat at Guitar Center? Then you MUST be good!

And having never known an era prior to music on television, having grown up with the self-promoting tendencies of the Internet, these same youngsters believe if they just get their moment, the world will embrace them, they'll become rich, they'll become FAMOUS!

Well, Lana Del Rey is now famous, but not in the way of Joni Mitchell, not even Marianne Faithfull, but Ashlee Simpson, who went on SNL once, lip-synched, and crashed her career overnight.

But if you really want an illustration of the paradigm, look no further than Rebecca Black. Instantly famous for an inane video and song, created by elders, Ms. Black believed she truly was a star, that people cared, so she dropped out of school to continue her career, which is like you or me dropping out of the music business to become a professional baseball player.

Now if SNL had a history of mocking those on its show, this performance might have worked, like on the Oscars, when Billy Crystal quips about a celebrity faux pas. But Lorne Michaels likes the imprimatur of tastemaker, yet he's been inside the bubble so long that he can't see that Ms. Rey (not her real name, of course, but what's strange is in the Internet era Wikipedia tells us your real name!) is a manufactured rocket of the old school type, put on the launch pad by her label hoping to cut through the clutter of the music world. Yup, Interscope believes if they make an expensive enough video, they can convince enough people to make someone a star.

But what is a star today? If you're talking fame, they're right. But Gary Clarke, Jr. will have a longer career and right now most people have no idea who he is.

Because that's the modern music game. Staying in it long enough to achieve critical mass, for the assembled multitude to embrace you based on your quality, as opposed to the hype.

SNL got caught with its pants down. The show doesn't realize that today the public bites back. And as opposed to being fawning minions, they're all critics, passing instant judgment, spreading the word on what's both great and lousy.

And that's the society we now live in. There's great and everything else. Great survives, everything else does not.

But we've got clowns to the left of us, the wannabes parodied in the SNL clip above, and jokers to the right, the major labels shoving crap down our throats, and I'm stuck here in the middle with you, overwhelmed at the plethora of music and astounded that some no-talent like Lana Del Rey got a shot on SNL.

But a shot is not what it used to be. It's not about watching the show, but the clips thereafter. Does anybody really watch SNL in real time anymore? Barely, but if something great is created, it lives on virally forever, just ask Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake, Andy got famous as a result and JT's been coasting on his appearances for years.

This is not a big story. No one really cares. It's just further evidence of the decline of the old system. Which the old players are doing their best to prop up.

So will Lana Del Rey not sell?

I didn't say that. She's had exposure, some of the records are not bad, and just like Rebecca Black, she'll have her moment in the sun.

But she won't last. Because there's nothing there.

Imagine a professional sport that allowed all comers. There'd be an endless line of people trying out. But only the best would survive, those who'd played the game every day for endless years. Sure, an occasional walk-on might break through, but that would be the rare exception. This same paradigm now exists in music. Just because you can pick up a guitar, just because you got a record deal that does not mean you're good, that we care, that you're gonna last.

Are you grist for the mill or in it for the long haul?

Publicity is easier to achieve than ever. But if you equate getting your name out there with love and affection you probably embrace those spammers filling up your inbox.

Just because you know how to reach me, that does not mean I care.

So you got on a network TV show. I'm writing about you. But anybody can see that Lana Del Rey had her lips inflated and is low on talent and has nonexistent charisma...

Who's on next week?

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Gloss is Done, Depth is In

The Blind Side By Bob Lefsetz

4th January 2012

 

Corporate rock opened the door for disco and then a deejay in Chicago blew up dance records and the whole business imploded and was saved by MTV.

Anything MTV aired sold. Didn't matter if it was ancient like Rod Stewart or brand new like Culture Club. But then Duran Duran happened and it became clear if you produced high quality clips and peopled them with good-looking humans success could be gargantuan. Suddenly, looks became paramount, video production values were more important than music and baby boomers are still not through complaining about it.

But then the wheel turned again.

You can't fight progress. Your only hope is to grab hold of change and get ahead of it. In other words, once Napster happened, it was time to jettison the CD and jump into the niches. But unlike with MTV, there was not a concentration but a decentralisation and the record labels were not prepared for this. The labels still believe we live in one big homogeneous society. Which is why their business sucks. Because we don't.

The most important person at the record label in the late twentieth century was the radio promotion person, that was why he or she was paid so well, in some cases, as much as a million dollars a year. You see without radio, you had nothing.

One would think the video executive would be as handsomely compensated. But video was so important it was controlled by the President/CEO. Walter Yetnikoff might not have called a radio station, but he didn't think twice about using his personal juice at MTV, video play was just that important.

Video built stars and radio kept them going with saturation airplay until MTV ladled a whole 'nother crop of newbies upon the outlets.

But most people on the street had no idea who Charlie Minor was. Just like they have no idea who the left tackle is. They're following the star, the ball, the hit. But the reason bands had success in the days of yore was radio play. And labels bid up the value of their promotion people.

Who is the most valuable person on the team today?

It's certainly not the record company President. He can write you a check and put his team on the case but he's haemorrhaged players and believes the best way to deal with the Internet is to eliminate it.

As for the records the labels put out, the people they pay the most are the producers. Because of their track records, because they help write the songs, because without them, you probably won't have a hit.

But outside the label world...

Right now the most important person is the agent.

You need an agent, who can book you, so you can be seen.

Maybe in the future it might be a Web operator, someone akin to Mark Zuckerberg, who creates the gateway. But right now, the rubber meets the road at the gig, and chances are you can't get a reasonable one unless you've got an agent.

Yup, stop e-mailing everybody your tracks. Start playing live, anywhere, build a buzz, and then try to get an agent to sign you. Who will slowly build your act if you're any good.

Want to know if you suck?

If you don't have an agent. Either your music's terrible or you're clueless as to how the game is played.

Now the funny thing is you can't get an agent unless you have success live and you can't have success live if you don't have an agent.

This is like the old conundrum of not being able to get the job unless you've got experience. This is where you must become innovative. This is where you've got to be creative.

The music business has completely changed. Ask anybody, recording revenue has decreased. All the money's in live. Why not start there?

But you say you need money. You need a deep pocket.

Isn't it interesting that agents only take a percentage.

This is the new world. One that's debt free. Take the money and someone owns you both creatively and financially. Build it by yourself and you can write your own ticket.

But it's slower on the road.

But it's slower overall.

If it's fast, it doesn't last. The road is littered with one hit wonders. Everyone can know who you are and you can be broke.

Or few can know who you are and you can be rich, like the deejays spinning records to tens of thousands.

If you're complaining that deejays don't play instruments you probably missed MTV and Napster too. The deejays provide an experience. Little different from the one you had at Woodstock.

Gloss is done, depth is in.

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