Kodak Bankruptcy Claim

2012-02-21T16:30:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-23T18:26:00.000-08:00

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?

2012-01-15T15:49:00.000-08:00

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?

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz

Gloss is Done, Depth is In

2012-01-03T15:56:00.000-08:00

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.

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz

Guitarist Wanted - Major Label Interest

2011-12-30T14:15:00.001-08:00

HC Confidential, Issue 148

by Jon Chappell 22nd December 2011

"Wanted: Guitarist for up-and-coming band with major label interest."

There was a time when, if you were advertising for a musician, all you had to do was print the magic phrase "major label interest," and the world would beat a path to your door—if you were foolish enough to include your home address in the ad. Once the masses arrived, you could qualify the statement with, "Well, there's no money yet, and we have to travel far distances and play long hours at obscure and under-attended venues, but we have major label interest." And to a person, the teeming throngs would cry, "Sign me up!"

Although I still see this cliché in classifieds, I'd like to think that musicians searching for opportunities and positions are a little more discerning these days, and wouldn't fall for the "major label interest" hook—at least to the exclusion of any other compensation or benefit. Why? Because there is no "major label interest." This is primarily because the majors aren't majors anymore, and the surviving recording companies simply don't have the resources to cultivate a band from obscurity to stardom the way they once did.

You'll have a better chance at winning the lottery than capturing the handful of slots available to burgeoning bands who play local clubs now but hope for a "major label" miracle to break them into the big time. More than likely, a record company will catch you halfway up the ladder of success, when an offer presents more of a dilemma than a bonanza.

So what should aspiring career musicians do in the meantime? In a phrase: Create your own reality. Bands these days should behave more like self-sufficient entrepreneurs than cogs in a machine. They should plan on doing everything themselves, from demo and master recording to press kit production to gig booking and event promotion to merch. sales and music distribution. And the good news is, now they can.

With all the tools now available for the above-listed tasks—for virtually every aspect of building a music career and distribution network—it's never been more accessible, affordable, or possible. Music technology pundits like to point out that digital recording democratized the recording process by making it possible for anyone to create master-quality recordings using the plethora of affordable gear. But that truism can be applied across the entire record business, where inexpensive and available technology exists all the way up the chain. For example, for about $1,500 you can buy a DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera that's more than capable of shooting top-quality publication-ready photos and high-resolution/high-definition videos. Programs like WordPress enable you to produce slick-looking websites with no special programming skills. And services like iTunes, CD Baby, TuneCore, and ReverbNation let you sell your music directly to the public—right alongside The Beatles, Beyonce, and Bieber. And promotion? Two words: Facebook and YouTube.

All of this means that you don't have to wait for a sugar daddy, sponsor, or benevolent A&R person to get started in your personal empire building. You can start using any of these resources yourself today, and on any level of engagement. If you're a good prose writer, take on the production of your band's press kit, and learn the desktop-publishing programs provided in Adobe Creative Suite to produce the press releases, brochures, one-sheets, and publicity photos (both prints and high-res jpegs) of your band. The musically technical folks among you can marshal a DAW, an interface, and a couple of decent microphones to create your recordings. Perhaps a friend of the band can explore the website and social networking mechanisms. Any volunteer who contributes to the cause will be getting valuable experience in the process—experience that comes in handy as the processes are scaled up as the budget affords and the needs demand.

Perhaps the best part of having a hand in all aspects of the business is that you understand how everything works, and you get to be in control. Once you can afford to outsource any aspect of the business, the knowledge accrued from your early efforts ensures that you'll always retain a basic understanding of the process. Understanding is the key to making informed decisions—even while actual technology outgrows your immediate ken.

So start getting involved in your own destiny. When making music a career, you need to touch, contribute to, and be engaged in all aspects of the business, not just with how well you play your axe. When I was much younger, I told a friend who was an intellectual property lawyer that I was only interested in the music, or the "creative" part of the business. Here's how he responded: "Aw, that's adorable. C'mon, grow up! The music takes care of itself; it is what it is. But the business part? Now, that's where things really get creative."

— Jon Chappell

Tone-Deaf Businessmen

2011-12-30T14:12:00.000-08:00

Tone-Deaf Businessmen by Bob Lefsetz
30th December 2011

In retrospect, suing P2P traders was the beginning of the end.

Don't listen to the RIAA disinformation campaign. Music is the canary in the coal mine, the first business to be transformed by the Internet and still leading. What the music industry didn't know was not only that it was being blindsided by P2P trading, it had ceded control to its customers, every company has, the rabble-rousers online are now in control of your business and if you don't realize this, you're toast.

Take Netflix for example. It was entirely reasonable on a business level to charge extra for DVDs. The only problem was that Netflix was clueless as to its customers' reaction thereto. As a result, the ensuing uproar has devastated the company, tarnished the brand name, made it so giving a gift of a Netflix subscription is taboo.

You want people to love your company. Customers and companies are no longer at arm's length, but in it together. And it's not only old wave enterprises who fail to realize this. Facebook kept changing its privacy policy, trying to make money and ultimately pissing off its users. People have no loyalty to Facebook the company, they'd jump to another service in a heartbeat, they'd love to see arrogant Mark Zuckerberg fail. You may be able to code in your teens and twenties but that does not mean you're savvy enough to know how to interact with the public.

But the music industry is the worst. Because its executives believe they're above the hoi polloi. They don't want to fly coach and they don't want to sit in the back. Whereas only by understanding the public, being one of them, can you move forward.

Don't point out the embrace of new major label acts. That's like pointing out the one still standing apartment not devastated by a citywide fire. Once upon a time one yearned to work at Warner Brothers, one looked up to the record companies, now they're a joke. You hate them.

And you hate Ticketmaster even more.

And you might think the ticketing giant is protecting you, taking all the heat so you don't, but that's like believing a wall will protect your home from a drone. Customers hate fees. Bands love them. Bands will lose. They're already losing. People go to fewer concerts because they're so expensive and the ticket-buying process is abusive. You can't get a good seat unless you employ StubHub or a scalper. The business created this problem, not the audience. And no one other than Ticketmaster is trying to solve this problem. But Ticketmaster gets flak constantly. The managers, agents and acts are no different from the record labels, they believe it'll all blow over, the audience are chumps.

Not that Live Nation is totally laudable. Explain the Groupon deal again? So you post discounts and as a result of the Web everybody knows instantly. So few want to pay full price. Sure, Adele sells out, but for most other acts the audience is trained to wait. For the deal.

And what did Steve Jobs famously say during the last recession? That Apple was going to invest, innovate its way out of the doldrums?

That resulted in the iPod.

In ten years, what has been the major label innovation?

All they've done is cut back.

Kind of like Eddie Lampert at Sears. Believing you can balance the books out of the doldrums. The record companies should have doubled-down, invested in non-Top Forty acts, built for the future. But they didn't.

And yesterday we had the Verizon fracas. Didn't they learn from Bank Of America that Americans hate inexplicable fees, that just flow to the bottom line? I'm a Verizon user, I try to get everybody to switch, the service trumps all competitors, but now I'm reluctant to do the sell because everybody's gonna tell me the company's become too big, too arrogant, and they don't want to feed the megalomania.

If you don't think the public has power check Netflix's stock numbers.

That's the story of 2011. Not only in music, but politics. That was what Occupy Wall Street was all about. Nobodies concocted a story and got traction all by their lonesome, they changed the debate. The 1% is now part of the lexicon, it's used every day, it defines the issues for the other 99%, Wall Street and the government let this happen, to their detriment.

And at first the mainstream press ignored Occupy Wall Street. And continued to try and punch holes in their argument. But that's not how you win in the twenty first century. You do so by listening, by interacting.

If you're sitting smugly in the executive suite, like that old Judas Priest song you've got another thing coming. You've got to get off your perch and interact. You've got to have an e-mail address, a Twitter account, you've got to be reachable. That doesn't mean you've got to cave on every issue. But you must explain yourself, admit when you're wrong, give the impression that you and your customers are in it together.

Developing acts know this. Which is why the public responds to them. They're the future. Not the rip-off artists raping and pillaging to leave their fans behind.

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz

TwitRIFF = LoFi 2-minute guitar video thing

2011-12-11T00:06:00.001-08:00

Hey there. Got a new thing going right now... It's called TwitRIFF. Riffs for Twits? Not exactly.

It's my way of doing a "riff of the week" thing but without the HD-1080p video resolution, massive file-upload and lastly, the 10+ minute wank-fest about why you need to learn my amazing licks.

In simple terms, they're just little snippets for you to either learn or to use as a springboard for something else. Recorded in minimal resolution with my $25 Microsoft webcam.

Except a weekly flow of these until I either A) get sick of doing it B) run out of ideas or C) become a world famous rock star.

Here's the inaugural TwitRIFF. Come get some people.

Urban Lullaby = Occupy Wall Street

2011-12-10T19:27:00.000-08:00

"Urban Lullaby" from Bill Palmer's debut album "Outlines" set to film-maker Eric Brown's footage of the Occupy Wall Street protesters, New York, September 17th 2011.

Eric says:

"...This is a group of passionate, concerned, and intelligent people. Their behaviour in the park suggested a great appreciation of democracy, and a desire to cut through the clogged media and political channels to communicate a message they feel is incredibly important. This video contains nearly five minutes of raw slow-motion clips that celebrate and document the faces and feelings of September 17..."

Used under the Creative Commons License.
Please rate, share and comment!

Visit Eric's YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/user/embrown23
Occupy Wall St on the web: www.occupywallst.org
Bill Palmer: www.billpalmer.com.au

<p>&amp;lt;br&amp;gt; &amp;lt;br&amp;gt;"Urban Lullaby" from Bill Palmer's debut album "Outlines" set to film-maker Eric Brown's footage of the Occupy Wall Street protesters, New York, September 17th 2011.&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;Eric says: "...This is a group of passionate, concerned, and intelligent people. Their behavior in the park suggested a great appreciation of democracy, and a desire to cut through the clogged media and political channels to communicate a message they feel is incredibly important. This video contains nearly five minutes of raw slow-motion clips that celebrate and document the faces and feelings of September 17..."&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;Used under the Creative Commons License.&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;Please rate, share and comment!&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;Visit Eric's YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/user/embrown23&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;Occupy Wall St on the web: www.occupywallst.org &amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;Bill Palmer: www.billpalmer.com.au</p>

Don't Buy My Music

2011-12-01T13:33:00.001-08:00

Tim Jonze
November 30, 2011

I wouldn't read this article if I were you. And if you've spent any of your own money getting hold of it, then more fool you.
Am I being a bit negative? Perhaps, but I'm just borrowing from Elvis Costello, who this week kicked off promotion for a limited edition box set of his work by slamming it as an ''elaborate hoax''.

The Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook features a Costello CD, DVD, vinyl EP, coffee-table book - and a price tag of £212 (about $328 Australian).
Advertisement: Story continues below

''The price appears to be either a misprint or a satire,'' said Costello, advising fans to buy the 10-album Louis Armstrong box set, Ambassadors of Jazz, instead. ''Frankly,'' he said, ''the music is vastly superior.''

The ''don't buy my music'' school of promotion might seem a strange tactic, but Costello's rant is not the first case of a musician committing what looks like career sabotage. Trent Reznor, Katherine Jenkins, Morrissey and even American Idol winner Adam Lambert have all, in recent years, urged fans not to buy their material.

Normally this has less to do with the exciting world of pricing strategies, and more to do with airing grievances with former record labels.

Lambert was embarrassed to see his pre-American Idol recordings being rush-released. Jenkins, meanwhile, vented fury at her old label Universal for releasing too many compilations.

''Considering that I haven't recorded 4them since 2008,'' she tweeted, ''there is NO new music & it's stuff u already have. Don't want u 2 feel conned. Pls RT #DontBuyOneFineDay.''

Jenkins was playing a simple but effective trick here, placing herself on the side of the fans and against the evil labels, who try to make money out of innocent old ladies who don't know how to buy records despite having lived through a world war and that.

It's a balancing act Morrissey, for one, hasn't mastered. Two years ago, he warned fans away from two singles box sets on the understandable, but less empathetic, grounds that he ''receives no royalty payments from EMI or any back catalogue''. His flirtation with career hara-kiri recently went a step further when he banned Morrissey fansite editor David Tseng from a show he'd flown halfway across the world to attend.

Rapper Lil Wayne had gig trouble earlier this year when he told a group of girls to stop buying his records or coming to his gigs. Their crime? Not being quiet enough during a recital of his ''poetry'', apparently.

All these artists have one thing in common: wanting to be taken more seriously, or to gain greater control.

There are other artists whose negative comments about their own work seem genuine and rather more self-destructive. The La's frontman Lee Mavers showed his gratitude for a rumoured £1 million spent on recording the band's debut LP by announcing: ''We hate the album. It never captured anything that we were about.''

The Beta Band also dismissed their debut, telling New Musical Express it was a ''crock of shit''.

Discouraging people from buying your work doesn't always have a negative effect. Many of these artists created an aura around themselves: in Mavers's case, that of a Spectoresque perfectionist who would never realise the sounds he heard in his head. The Beta Band gained cult status thanks to their Gerald Ratnerisms.

There are, of course, more productive ways to sabotage a career. When indie R&B star Frank Ocean grew frustrated with his label Def Jam earlier this year, he went to Tumblr and posted his entire Nostalgia, Ultra album online for free, along with a lengthy (and hurt) rant. The result? Blog frenzies, masses of publicity - and a high placing on a lot of critics' end-of-year lists.

Guardian News and Media
Tim Jonze is the music editor of guardian.co.uk.

You can follow him on Twitter at @timjonze

R.I.P Compact Disc = 1983 - 2012

2011-11-24T16:57:00.001-08:00

Original Article by Jon Chappell writing for HC Confidential, Issue 144

CD, we hardly knew ye. When CDs came onto the scene circa 1983, they answered a true calling, delivering noiseless, high-fidelity audio to discerning consumers in a non-linear format. A CD wouldn’t degrade simply by playing it back either, which was untrue of both vinyl and magnetic tape. Listeners went through culture shock when they sat next to a set of speakers and heard nothing—as in true, sonic silence—before the first note of music sounded. Only the terminally geeky and audiophile party-poopers groused about how “digital was sterile” or that better fidelity was actually achievable through analogue means, assuming your turntable cost more than the GDP of a small country. For everyone else, CDs, and the era of digital audio democratisation they heralded, were a godsend.

And so it seems inconceivable that the death of the CD is nigh, coming as it will in 2012, if reliable prognostications come to pass. Not even 30 years old, not even surviving its twenties into some kind of maturity. Optical storage for music consumption is now an obsolete notion, it seems. Sure, CD technology had its problems—chiefly that it was certainly never well-suited to portable use. You have to admit, seeing a yellow DiscMan in a holster and elastic strap around the arm of a jogger these days is about as likely as a Wham! or Culture Club song charting on the Top Ten. The size of the disc itself guaranteed a bulky housing so that the mechanism could play it back, and what about all those moving parts? These same limitations were also being felt in other linear-tape and disc-burning technologies too, most notably video recording. No wonder the MP3 player supplanted the CD player.

Yes, it’s true that if you considered just the mechanics, you might see how optical discs would eventually be replaced. But there were other endearing aspects of the compact disc that shouldn’t necessarily be discarded so cavalierly.

Take, for example, album art and storage. While the CD definitely compromised on album art, there still existed an almost 5'x5' area in which to attach a visual component to the audio in hand. And what about liner notes? These disappeared with the MP3 player. And having a zillion songs on a device with the form factor of a pack of sugarless gum doesn’t lend itself to the pleasures of the browsing experience, nor does it satisfy the folks who still liked to devote a good portion of their living room or bedroom as a listening sanctuary—a place where CDs lined one wall and the audio equipment lined another. There’s a certain thoughtfulness in preparing for a long car ride where you have to choose only as many CDs as you can comfortably carry in two hands. When you can always have everything you’ve ever owned on tap (literally, as in the touch of a finger), it takes the fun out of being a song programmer.

But the worst part about losing the CD is that we as a consumer audience never really replaced it with any single lightning rod of superior fidelity, even if the mechanics of the medium begged for evolution. We have never come to grips with the whole audio fidelity issue. Though CDs became commercially available in the U.S. in 1983, their audio fidelity has improved not a whit since then. Can you imagine any other digital technology—processor speed, storage capacity, recordable medium material—not advancing for 28 years? It would be unthinkable.

So when we had the chance to improve on the technology, did we do it for audio good? We did not. We made our lives easier, but compromised on the issue quality by way of that dreaded affliction called “data compression.” Devices eventually caught up and can now play files with CD fidelity—and better—but does anyone know how or really bother with doing that? Where is the hue and cry for better audio? It’s not there. Other issues, like digital rights management and cloud-based storage are a distraction from the fundamental issue of raising our standard of audio-living.

In the CD, we had a physical touchstone that had its fidelity indelibly stamped into it. The twin specs of 44.1kHz and 16-bits were inseparable from the medium, and really good for the times—better than we’d experienced before. So as the mechanics improved, we should have seen that the audio improved—at least a little bit. We didn’t see it in the CD, and we didn’t see it in portable music players, which emphasised the “portable” over the “music.” What we need now is something—a physical object, an acronym, or even a couple of initials—that will standardise the higher-resolution audio and better fidelity that we’re capable of supporting. And should demand.

— Jon Chappell

SoundCloud - Ye Cloud With Le Sound

2011-11-17T01:00:00.000-08:00

I'm on Sound-Cloud... Are you? Hop on over, make yourself known and check out some new tunes and/or pieces I've written lately. Here's a sampler from my 2007 album "Outlines."

Later...

So You Want To Be A Guitar Teacher?

2011-10-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

These days, guitar-teachers are a "dime-a-dozen" (ie: something so common it's value becomes degraded) and the market is flooded with guys and gals who claim to be guitar-teachers. It wasn't always the case though. I recall when I was a wee-lad, guitar-teachers (at least in my neck of the woods) were hard to come by. And good ones? Well, unless you knew someone who knew someone, you had no chance of getting a look in, let alone booking a spot. As a result, I spent my formative years (15-18) as a self-taught guitarist working out of a chord book and using my ears to figure stuff out.

Well, things have changed somewhat since then and the title of "guitar-teacher" seems to be one that every man and his dog who can pick the intro to "Stairway to Heaven" are tending to claim.
I have spotted adverts in street press that say something akin to "guitar-teachers wanted - no experience necessary..." Interesting!

I just did a google search for "guitar-teacher" and the search delivered 110,000,000 (that's million) results! But as with anything, there's guitar-teachers and there are guitar-teachers. So how do you spot a lemon and conversely, how do you tell if you're onto a winner? Here's some insights I'd like to share based on my own experience as a teacher and also seeing others at work:

1 - Are they in-demand?

Typically, guitar-teachers who have a fully booked roster are pretty good at what they do otherwise, they'd be out of work right? While it's not always 100% true all of the time, getting in with someone who has the experience and who can maintain a roster of committed students is a sure bet and says a lot about their abilities as a communicator and a mentor.

The other side of this coin is that some very good guitar-teachers don't do it full-time and therefore can be more picky about whom and when they teach. Word of mouth still seems to be the most verifiable and accurate way of determining the above.

An easy way of determining the level of "in-demand" can be pricing. A new-comer who has little experience will usually be on the cheaper end of the pricing spectrum while established educators can afford to be at the other end. Again, this is not a "magic rule" but a simple generalisation.

2 - Qualifications?

Most serious musicians/teachers these days have some kind of musical education behind them. While qualifications are not the "be all and end all" of musical ability, it does show other people that you're serious enough about what you do to take the time to study and earn yourself some letters after your name. Of course, there are monster musicians who've never studied music at all (Tommy Emmanuel, Satriani et al) but generally speaking, someone who has taken the time to acquire the necessary skill-set to graduate will make a good teacher.

Additionally, someone who has some formal training will be up on musical theory, notation and music as a package as opposed to just guitar.

Again, the other side of the coin is that there are dopes who get through music courses. It's true, I've personally met them; I once had a guy who wanted to work for me (when I ran a music school) who was unable to play me a C-Major scale in the open position when asked to do so in the interview. And yet, the same person had a degree in contemporary music! Now that is scary.

3 - Handouts?

A good educator will put some effort into making sure the student understands what they've covered in the lesson. I've held for a while that you can deem the quality of a teacher by the quality of the handouts they pass on. Are they clear, concise and accurate or sloppy, half-baked and hackneyed?

When you consider that a student is spending an hour at most a week with their teacher, it becomes important that during the week the student can refer to the handout and recall what was discussed and played easily. For this reason, I make sure my students understand the basics of rhythm so that in my absence they can at least get the gist of the notes I've transcribed for them. In my estimation, a serious guitar-teacher should encourage a fluency in traditional notation as it opens so many doors for a student. Tab has it's uses sure, but there comes a time when it's time to rip the band-aid off and get real. I've also known some guitar-teachers to go to the trouble of doing CD's and MP3 files for students. So long as it's legal, there's nothing wrong with this but like all things, I think at times the "handout" quotient can swing too far and it is important for the student to maintain a degree of responsibility for their own learning during the week in-between the lesson.

4 - Organised?

As with anything, organisation says a lot about someone. Is the guitar-teacher on time all the time? Or are they constantly leaving you waiting 5-10 minutes while they run overtime? Are they available week in and week out or does every 3rd lesson get cancelled because they've got a covers-band gig down at the local? Good teachers understand the importance of consistency and make the students time a priority. Serious teachers won't take phone calls during your lesson, leave you waiting and they won't jump ship on you at the last moment.

5 - Ownership

In education-speak, the term "stakeholder" is someone who has a vested interest (financial, social or otherwise) in an action or organisation. What has become the trend of late within education is to see the students as "clients" and as such, tailor the lesson to the clients wants and needs. This is generally seen as a positive move and is obviously a step away from the "my way or the highway" model of teaching that former generations have endured. Both models have their pros and their cons but importantly, the student (or client) should feel a sense of ownership about the lessons they are paying for. With that in mind, a good guitar-teacher should obviously be courteous, prompt and attentive to the needs of the student and give them a level of ownership about the direction of the lessons and the range of content covered.

Like all things, I've also seen this go so far the other way it's ridiculous. Some guitar-teachers treat their students like long lost buddies and cross the student-teacher boundary somewhat. I've even heard storied of teachers asking their students out for drinks after-the-fact. While having a joke and a laugh is good and well, they are there to learn so that should be the primary M.O from all parties concerned.

6 - Progress, progress, progress

Inevitably, the proof of a good teacher is in the pudding. Are you actually learning and are you inspired after the lesson? Many guitar-teachers are guilty of simply "punching the clock" and going through the motions with their students week in and week out.

They don't tailor the lesson to the student but instead teach by rote meaning they have a "one-size-fits-all" methodology. They never learn anything new for the student and keep the student stunted by either not challenging the student enough or not taking the lesson anywhere different. Again, I've met these teachers and they're a sad lot to be around.

In an ideal world, the student should be learning an appropriate mix of fundamentals (chords and scales), music theory (the science of the sounds they are making) and songs (provides context for the other two) but sadly, some guitar-teachers emphasise one of these above the others. For example, I've had new students come on board who have been playing for 2-3 years; I ask them to play me some very basic open-position scales or chords and they stare at me like I've just sprouted a second head. It can go the other way too, some students have been playing scales and reading from a book so long and have never had the chance to actually play a tune!

If you're looking for a new teacher, think about some of these points when you're making your decision. If you're a guitar-teacher and you're losing students faster than you can book them, think about your methodology and where you're falling short. If it's appropriate, try and seek honest feedback from your ex-students about why they moved on.

Bill Palmer

Dear Bandleader...

2011-10-03T01:21:00.000-07:00

Dear Bandleader:

We look forward to your performance at our daughter’s wedding. If you don’t mind, we would like to request a few of our favourite songs. If you could play these at some point during the reception, we’d be grateful.

Any Keith Jarrett composition from his solo series. Please have it for the full ensemble and none of the 4/4 songs please.

Mahavishnu Orchestra: “Dance of the Maya,” and please have the guitarist play John McLaughlin’s solo from the live performance Nov. 16^th 1972, at Chrysler Arena. My wife and I were at that show and we particularly enjoyed it. If you find it too difficult, you can leave out the feedback.

Any of John Coltrane’s duets with Pharaoh Sanders. I understand that their use of atonality is not everyone’s cup of tea, but all our guests love high register tenor saxes.

We thought a little Stravinsky right after the toast would be nice. We particularly like the “ Infernal Dance” or whatever it is called, from “The Rite of Spring” (second version of 1932.) If you want to use the sheet music it’s OK. We like a tempo of about a quarter note = 93 (Ozawa)

Then for the “life candle” lighting ceremony, please play Frank Zappa’s “The Grand Wazoo.” If you want to play it in the original key of Bb, that would be fine, but my cousin, Janine would like to sing the baritone sax solo. You may have to play that part in another key – she has kind of a high voice.

When my daughter throws the garter, could you play just a little of Varese’s “Ionization?” It’s such a cool piece, we think it would go over really well. Much better than “The Stripper”

And for the Bride and Groom’s first dance, please slow things down a bit by doing Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” It is so much better than “We’ve Only Just Begun” or “The Anniversary Waltz.”

When my wife and I join in the first dance, could you please segue to Thelonious Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear.” That’s in honour of my wife’s grandmother whose name was Ruby. It would mean so much to the family.

Thanks very much for all your help. We’ll certainly be happy to recommend your band to all of our friends.

By the way, the gig pays $350 for the group, and before you leave, please feel free to ask the caterer for a sandwich and a soda to take with you.

Cheers!

Dear Bands - Don't Be Dicks

2011-10-01T17:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Bands, Don't Be Dicks

By Kelly McClure - original article found here

Here is a little quiz I’d like for you to take before moving on to read the rest of this thing. Ready? Here we go:

Q: You are engaged in casual conversation with a friend or co-worker and they begin to talk about a musical artist. After listening to them go on about how great this artist’s music is, and how much of an inspiration they are, you reply with which of the following?

    a) Totally
    b) I’m happy you’re happy
    c) I know/have worked with that artist, and they’re a dick

Did you come up with an answer? Are you wondering which one is correct?
Well, truth be told that this was a trick question because all answers would be go-to replies, seeing as though on average, almost any artist you would be talking about is in fact a dick, and you would either want to politely keep that fact to yourself, as to not crush the dreams of the person you were talking to, or choose to put the artist “on blast”, as they say, and spread the knowledge far and wide. I usually opt for the blasting, but a few nights ago a friend of mine who lives in England was going on about a band she loves and how she’s seen them a bunch of times and recently bought a pricey, limited edition set of theirs and had it signed at a show. She was in the middle of telling me what one of the members inscribed and I was juuuuuust about to blurt out “I’ve met that band and know people who work with them and they’re literally the meanest cows you could ever come across” when I stopped myself. In the end I concluded that it was more valuable for her to carry around an idea she had crafted about a person, and how they are, then for me to snatch that away from her with the truth.

Being a dick has many layers, and it’s not a black and white thing by any means. Dickish behavior is often allowed, and even welcomed/expected, from creative types because it’s somehow been made the norm that “that’s just how they are”. What may take a little power out of that is the knowledge that acting like a dick is a sign of weakness, I should know, because I’m kind of a dick. Anytime I’ve ever shit all over someone, or had a meltdown, it was because I was hurt, sick, exhausted, or experiencing feelings of inadequacy or vulnerability. Trying to keep this in mind may help you cope with the next time you meet your favorite artist and they treat you like a special-ed student and dismiss you with stink face. Throwing something back at them like “I’m sorry you’re sad” is even better because it will really confuse them, give you something to laugh about later with your friends, and bother the artist so much later, because they’ll know that it’s true.

It’s really the saddest thing about being a fan of music, knowing that if you were to ever meet the person you’ve spent your time, money and thoughts on for years, that the little ember you hold in your chest for them could be snuffed out with just a few words or careless facial expressions. I’ve been hit with this so hard, even recently, that I have made a point on giving up looking forward to meeting certain people who’s work I admire, choosing to protect the “them” I’ve built in mind, rather than risk it on their reality, which most likely, isn’t nearly as fantastic.
There are albums that I can’t even THINK of listening to now, after meeting the people who made them. I can’t bear to throw them away, but I also can’t bare to fill my home and my imagination with what amounted to broken promises. Sappy as it sounds, every time an artist makes a beautiful and unique piece of music, they’re making a promise to be special, to be there for us, and with us, to guide us through our breakups, and new loves, and dead cats, and wrecked cars, and bad grades, and broken bones, and lost relatives. Some artists may never care, and may in fact be reading this right now thinking things like: “It’s not my responsibility, you’re too sensitive, I just want to make money/be well known”. Well, perk up to these two examples for why being a dick is just bad for business:

Exhibit A
In high school I was a huge NIN (Nine Inch Nails) fan. I bought all their shit (albums, patches, bootleg VHS tapes, shirts, etc). One day I made my poor Dad take the day off work to stand in line for a pair of concert tickets for my friend Yolanda and I while we were in school. I stressed out about it all day and when my Dad picked me up after school, and I asked him about the tickets, he did a fake out “well, I tried … ” causing me to almost kick the windshield out with my Doc Marten, but then told me to open the glove compartment and there were two tickets to the show. I think I screamed all the way home, and continued to do so off and on until the night of the show. During the concert, my friend and I met some random guys who told us that if we wanted to see Trent up close, that we should walk around to where the car ports were at the side of the venue, and wait for him to get into his car (I wanna say it was a Silver Porche??). If someone approached me with this now, I’d probably pepper spray them before they got to finish the sentence, but whatever, we were stupid and as soon as the house lights came up, we ran, leaving trails of clove smoke behind us, over to the car ports to see Trent. We waited there for no less than an hour, and finally we started seeing people trickle out of a side door. Trent was one of the last people to come out, and as soon as it registered that that WAS in fact him I was looking at, I called out, “TRENT!” That’s it. Nothing embarrassing. No “I love you” bullshit. Just his name. When the echo of the word faded, Trent Reznor looked up at two, beaming, adoring, teenage girls, and flipped us the bird.

I never spent one goddamn dime on NIN after that.

Exhibit B
The first concert I ever went to with friends, sans parental supervision, was the first ever KROQ Weenie Roast in Southern California. At the time I was obsessed with The Lemonheads and they were on the bill. I was there with my boyfriend (weeeeiiiiird) and my friend Matt, and we were smoking cigs (you could still smoke at shows then) and talking crap about who knows what. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a tall guy about to pass our row, and turned my head just in time to lock eyes with EVAN DANDO! I leapt straight up and said “Evan!” and then put out my hand to shake hands. He didn’t seem annoyed, so I also asked him to sign the back of my ticket stub. Twenty some odd years later, I still have that ticket stub, and will fight any man or woman who talks badly about Evan Dando. I will also spend money on any random piece of re-released whatever he puts out, and try real hard to support his solo work.

To end this, I will address bands directly by saying:

Dear Bands,

Being a dick will only add up to tipping the dick scales against your favour until one day you are playing empty Indian Casino Resorts and going home each night with the sound guy instead of hot fans. Nurturing loyalty is profitable, if nothing else. Stop cutting in line at coffee shops, stop wearing sunglasses inside, stop acting put-out during interviews, and be careful which doors you slam, because you never know who may be behind them. Mind your manners or we will gladly escort you right back to that job at the grocery store you worked at a few years ago and punch the clock for you.

Love,
Fans

This blog was first posted on Brisbane-based music website Collapse Board.

Australian Idolatry: Evangelical Christians Resurrecting the Music Industry

2011-10-01T17:19:00.000-07:00

Australian Idolatry: Evangelical Christians Resurrecting the Music Industry
By Chris Price - original article found here

As an album of Christian music outsells Beyonce and Lady Gaga down under, now seems like a good time to audio-blog my experience earlier this year discovering Australia’s fastest-growing Pentecostal mega church – Hillsong

Prime Minister Julia Gillard may be an avowed atheist, but if the Australian music-buying public is anything to go by, she's a tad out of step with her electorate. You might say she's not singing from the same hymn sheet. God Is Able, an album of contemporary Christian music released by the stratospherically successful Hillsong mega-church in Sydney, recently debuted at number three in the Australian chart ahead of Beyonce and Lady Gaga, becoming the tenth album of Christian pop to reach the top ten there since 2002. And Hillsong has broken America without so much as breaking a sweat. Last year its youth ministry house band, Hillsong United, went in at number two on the US iTunes album chart, just behind Eminem. If it's true that the music industry is in its death throes, then nobody told Hillsong.

Hillsong Music is the 'resource arm' of Hillsong Church, a Pentecostal ministry in Sydney which began in 1983 with a congregation of forty-five, and which now boasts a membership of 21,000, an annual conference attracting 28,000 faithful attendees, and a growing international footprint with churches in London, Paris, Cape Town, Stockholm and Kiev. In 2009 Hillsong London celebrated ten years of worship in the capital with a service at the O2 London Arena. More than 14,000 people attended.

Needless to say, any church funded by a 'dynamic music label', as its promotional materials describe it, is foursquare in the realms of 'non-traditional' financing models. But Hillsong is no traditional church. It is ministry with marketing strategies and corporate visions, communion by focus group, where clergy are CEOs and pastors head up 'creative teams'. Services take place in 'state-of-the-art worship centres', in which chancel is jettisoned for multimedia ministry and preaching by PowerPoint. Hillsong London's website, whose front page features a group of smiling twenty-somethings in chic winter wear, bears closer resemblance to a Gap advert than a call for cash and congregation. And possibly taking a leaf out of Scientology's book, Hillsong now looks to the power of celebrity to spread the gospel; it recently hosted an 'Evening with'-style event in which tele-survivalist Bear Grylls talked of Everest expeditions, alligator wrestling and the 'quiet strength' of his Christian faith. Jumble sales and church roof appeals it is not.

Masterminded by founders and senior pastors Brian and Bobbie Houston (no self-respecting mega-church is seen dead these days without an alliterating husband-and-wife team at the helm), Hillsong's brand of 'prosperity theology' found a hungry market in Sydney's affluent, conservative Baulkham Hills district during the 1990s. 'Health and wealth gospel', popularised in sixties America by the repellent Oral Roberts, proved to be an elixir for middle-class Christians in prosperous, suburban Australia, as the success of Brian Houston's book You Need More Money: Discovering God's Amazing Financial Plan For Your Life attests. Spiritual health and material wealth go hand in hand, says Houston; humility and sacrifice are not unimportant, but nor should the faithful be ashamed of material success.

And Brian should know. In the last year for which figures are available, Hillsong's annual earnings were in the region of $60m, roughly half of which came from its congregation. You see, record sales aren't the church's only source of revenue. Tithing - such an archaic-sounding word among all that corporate speak - is still a vital part of Hillsong's income. Houston admits to a personal package of $300,000 a year plus company car (Bobbie's salary is undisclosed), but his company Leadership Ministries Inc. - 'the entity through which Bobbie and I conduct our broader ministry' - bought two waterfront properties from the couple shortly after the company was set up in 2001.

And it's very much a family business. Joel Houston, Brian and Bobbie's son (and incidentally a spit for Westlife's Brian McFadden), leads the creative team behind Hillsong Music, the multi-million dollar hit machine that powers the operation. He is also the singer in Hillsong United, a 'next generation praise and worship' outfit which has released a new album every year since 1999, making Prince look positively idle. Churning out mostly live albums recorded at services and conferences, the Hillsong Music stable is so prolific that just as one release reaches the end of its chart life, another is waiting in the wings to take its place. Evidently the received wisdom in the music industry - that live albums don't sell - doesn't apply to Hillsong either.

They've done their homework, too. If it felt like Snow Patrol were following you around for three years from 2006, it's because radio stations and music television channels the world over were banking on audience research which decisively crowned Chasing Cars as the stickiest song of the noughties by a country mile. Hillsong, if you can imagine this without wincing, sounds like Snow Patrol singing from a prayer book. And in case you're tempted to seek out this music for yourself, be warned. For the purposes of journalistic thoroughness I've listened to more than my fair share of it the past few days; it's marginally less excruciating than chewing tinfoil.

Contemporary Christian music - CCM to its friends - is changing the market in other ways. For All You've Done, the first live worship album to debut at number one in Australia, drew widespread whingeing from disgruntled record labels, upset that almost all its sales rang through the cash registers at Hillsong's annual conference. It's hard to know which is more telling - the pointless display of sour grapes from the mainstream music industry, or the fact that sales at a religious conference can outstrip the buying power of an entire nation.

But it does raise the question of why Hillsong music is routing the secular competition so convincingly. Possibly these conference sales are more 'got the t-shirt' souvenir purchases than high-rotation repeat-players. Or perhaps it's just that piracy is less rampant in Christian circles than in the wider market. Downloading music illegally isn't proscribed by any specific commandment as far as I'm aware, but it does seem a very un-Christian thing to do. In 2007 Hillsong hit the headlines again, amid accusations of 'vote stacking' in the Australian Idol talent quest. Idol issued a formal, on-air statement refuting the allegations, although four of the eight finalists did in fact turn out to be from the Assemblies of God Pentecostal church, of which Hillsong is an affiliate. Idolatry - 1, Idol - nil.

On Christmas morning last year, finding myself with a few hours to kill before barbecued turkey and trimmings with my Sydney hosts, I went to see Hillsong for myself. I should state for the sake of transparency that I'm an atheist humanist, justifying my godless sneering on grounds of journalism (I was researching a book). But as I made my way there on the Hillsong courtesy shuttle, I felt like a freeloading interloper, a joyless gatecrasher en route to a children's party with the sole intention of stealing party bags and calling the birthday boy names. To ease my conscience I resolved I would be the perfect houseguest, making every effort to participate, in as far as I could do so without compromising my principles or seeming to take the piss. If there was singing, I would sing. If there was hugging, I would hug. I drew the line only at praying.

Arriving at the church - sorry, worship centre - I was welcomed into a cavernous modern atrium by a model-pretty hostess bearing glad tidings and armfuls of Christmas candy. Dean Martin's Winter Wonderland crooned from the speaker system. Free lattes and valet parking to all comers. Being slightly behind schedule I pressed on past the crèche and headed straight for the main room. (If 'main room' sounds a tad super-club, it's not so far off the mark.) Five enormous TV screens flanked a wide stage, upon which Hillsong stalwart Robert Fergusson was already in mid-flow, hammering home the prosperity gospel as the gifting envelopes went round. In the audio clip below he urges us to be as 'extravagant' with our money as God is with his love:

Then two very happy but slightly stoned-sounding men appeared and invited all the kids onto the stage to show and tell what they got for Christmas.

"What did Santa bring you, little fella?" beamed Happy Man number 1.
Little boy: "An iPod Touch."
"Whoooo!" clapped the audience.
"And what about you?" said Happy Man 2, turning to another little boy.
"A remote-controlled car."
More whooping.

Happy Man 1: "Well, we've got some great prezzies to give away today, for the big kids as well as well as the little kids. But first we're crossing live to our Hills campus, where our senior pastor Brian Houston is going to say a few words."

I will say this for Christmas at Hillsong: it's an ambitious and tightly choreographed technical feat they're pulling off. All this 'crossing live' felt like Live Aid - it was terrifically exciting. On the TV screens behind, another show-and-tell session was finishing up at the Hills service across town. A third happy man was talking about prezzies for big kids and little kids, and then Houston himself was striding back and forth across the stage in front of foot-high chapter and verse, a bible in his hand and a flesh-coloured Madonna-mike clamped to his cheek. Swap the bible for an iPad and he could have passed for Steve Jobs unveiling his vision for the exciting next phase of the company.

He launched into some impassioned stuff about Emmanuel, punctuated with fists in the air about his GRACE and DIVINITY, which I confess was where I started to tune out. It's not that I wasn't listening, just that a sort of glazing over took place. The same thing happens when I listen to evangelical preachers on the radio, which I do often in America, where late-night preaching is among the most compelling speech radio on the dial. It's a little like the shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4 - fantastically hypnotic, but utterly incomprehensible unless you're in on the lingo. Very often the welcome end result is blissful slumber.

So what did this godless impostor make of Christmas at Hillsong? Was it the riot of divinely sanctioned conspicuous consumption I had feared? Not quite, but it wasn't far off. Did it feel like congregation? Emphatically not - it was spectacle from start to finish. And that's what bothered me, if I was bothered by anything at all. This was a show, with high production values and a competitively priced soundtrack available in the foyer on your way out. If I was going to 'get' any kind of worship, as a music lover it should have been this. But Hillsong was more awards ceremony than gig, more exclusive media event than inclusive musical or spiritual experience. The live link ups were impressive and fabulously next generation, but in the end the action was always happening somewhere else. I needn't have worried about crashing the party, because in more senses than one I wasn't invited.

It struck me that, right now, the lavishness of Hillsong could only work in Australia, seemingly the only economy in the world these days untroubled by debt, deficit or danger of default. Anywhere else - including America, where the mega-church model seems to be crumbling - the extravagant giving, all the showing and the telling, would seem a tad inappropriate. Shuffling out of the auditorium, I made my way by courtesy shuttle to my Christmas lunch engagement, gifting a Transformer toy to my hosts' going-on-three year-old as I arrived. He was thrilled of course, but somehow I couldn't shake the feeling that, to truly enter into the Christmas spirit, I should have rocked up with an iPod Touch.

This blog was first posted on Brisbane-based music website Collapse Board.

Truth Stranger Than Fiction: The Lacey Act

2011-09-08T15:28:00.000-07:00

If you've been keeping your eye on the news lately (and I don't mean the "mainstream" news) you may have heard that Gibson Guitar Corp. have been specifically targeted by arms of the US Federal Government over what they believe are breaches of the "Lacey Act" of 1900 which was later amended in 2008.
Here is CEO of Gibson Guitar, Henry Juszkiewicz speaking with alternative media mogul, Alex Jones on his "infowars" program:

The issue has taken on a life of it's own and many are saying (and rightly so) that what we're seeing is simply the tip of the iceberg as far as a coming police state in the USA is concerned. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't. Whatever the case, it's a smart move to educate yourself about what is taking place and if you're planning a trip to the USA in the near future, you may want to think again before taking your prized piece over there too.

Harmony Central editors have also waded into the topic and have released a statement via their popular newsletter, the following of which is copied below:

Dear Musician,
We've been researching the situation regarding the raid on Gibson and feel we must speak out.

Regardless of what anyone thinks about Gibson, its guitars, its pricing, etc., this issue goes well beyond a single company to something that can potentially affect virtually all retailers, suppliers, sellers, and buyers (yes, even you) in the music industry. This industry is so small and geographically dispersed that no one in Washington seems very interested, so the only avenue for relief is in the court of public opinion—and an informed public that makes its views known to their representatives. We'll have more on that aspect later.

The heavy-handed nature of the raid on Gibson notwithstanding, if the company knowingly imported endangered wood they should be prosecuted under environmental laws. However, it seems no such laws were violated. Brian Majeski is the editor of The Music Trades magazine, which has "no dog in the fight" when it comes to manufacturing, but instead reports on industry trends, sales, and retailing. As a result, he has the interests of the industry at heart, not that of any one manufacturer. He is also someone who does his research, and some excepts from his recent editorial in The Music Trades state the situation very succinctly (emphasis ours).

"...There are no laws on the books in the U.S. prohibiting the use of Indian or Madagascar rosewood and ebony. That didn't stop the industrious John M. Rayfield, a special agent at the Fish and Wildlife service, from concluding that Gibson's use of these woods violated Indian law.

The law he cites in his affidavit, 'W.E.F. 23.08.2010 Government of India, Ministry of Commerce and Industry,' has nothing to do with overharvesting, illegal logging, or anything else related to the environment. Rather, it specifies labor content levels for wood thicker than 6 millimeters that is exported from India. In other words, Gibson stands accused of using U.S. instead of Indian labor to produce its guitars. Had the company imported a finished guitar from India, using the same rosewood and ebony, it would have been in compliance with Lacey. Importing semi-finished component parts caused the violation. In practice, the Indian authorities have a different interpretation of their law: For decades they have allowed the export of millions of fingerboard blanks without challenge.

"...There isn't a guitar manufacturer of any scale in the U.S. that doesn't use some Indian rosewood or ebony for fingerboards, and all of them, to the best of our knowledge, import the same kind of semi-finished blanks that were seized from the Gibson plant. Thus, by the logic of Rayfield's affidavit, they are all potentially in violation of Lacey. Lacey applies to sellers, buyers, intermediaries, and anyone else who comes into contact with 'illegal' wood, so retailers and consumers could be on the hook as well. If that isn't sufficiently unsettling, remember that Lacey is 'a fact-based, rather than a document-based statute.' Translation: Having the right paperwork won't save you from fines, confiscation of product, or even imprisonment, and the world of music is populated with unsuspecting felons."

In the hours after the raid, our best guess was that there was probably some kind of technicality that was violated, but that the response to it was over-the-top and an abuse of power. It seemed that the likely conclusion would be Gibson saying "Oops, sorry, we did fail to dot the i," pay a hefty fine, and go about its business.

However, while it's not up to us to judge Gibson's innocence or guilt—that's the function of the judicial process—we have yet to see any evidence related to the recent raid that Gibson violated the letter or the spirit of environmental regulations intended to protect endangered species.

Looking past Gibson's immediate issues, we can only assume that Guitar Center, Musician's Friend, Sweetwater, etc. must now be concerned that they could come to work one day and find armed Federal agents pulling guitars off walls at gunpoint, or see employees hauled off to jail for having shipped them across state lines. Respected vintage guitar dealer George Gruhn is sufficiently intimidated by the Lacey Act that he has reportedly simply given up on the 40% of his business that deals with overseas sales and purchases. Also reportedly, Willie Nelson will no longer tour with his favorite guitar due to concerns of confiscation.

Do your own research and come to your own conclusions, then make your opinions known to your representative in Congress. None of us want to see environmental regulations flouted, but we also don't want to see American music industry companies raided without clear and obvious justification, or guitars confiscated without due process—a central tenet of our judicial system. If you don't know how to contact your representative, sign up at www.congress.org, which makes it very easy to let them know what you think.

But do let them know. We have. (And now so has NAMM, which is attempting to open a dialog with Washington to clarify the Lacey Act with regard to musical instruments.)

The Editors of Harmony Central:

Craig Anderton
Jon Chappell
Phil O'Keefe
Wendy Jarrett
Chris Loeffler
Carrie Brown

Bad-Ass Bass Playing

2011-09-06T15:37:00.000-07:00

"Bad-Ass" bass playing broken down for y'all, some great tips here.
The choice is yours...

Profits Down The YouTube? Software, Apps & Industry

2011-09-05T14:48:00.000-07:00

"Software sends profits down the YouTube"

by Stuart Washington September 5, 2011

I have been showing my kids music film clips from YouTube on television. It's pretty easy. The iPad downloads the stuff over the home Wi-Fi network. Then you use a cable to hook the iPad into the back of the television.

Then you listen to the music.

And in the background, if you listen closely, you can hear the sounds of the business models coming crashing down. There goes the profit margin for the record industry. My kids are listening to this stuff for free.

And as the music plays there is another small incursion into the ad-driven profit margins of commercial free-to-air television. We're watching television all right, but we're not watching commercial television.

And, while I'm at it, all forms of traditional commercial media are suffering as my kids watch YouTube on television.

We aren't sitting around listening to the radio, watching movies or reading newspapers. Our time is being diverted by free content downloaded from the internet.

(We also aren't sitting around playing board games and enjoying more carefree pursuits, but I will leave the topic of poor parenting to another day.)

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the co-founder of pioneer internet browser Netscape, Marc Andreessen, went much further with this kind of analysis, boiling his argument down to the pithy one-liner: ''Software is eating the world.''

Andreessen spells out a collapse in the costs of providing services over the internet. Such radical reductions allow software challengers to emerge in all sorts of industries previously seen as the preserve of traditional ''real-world'' companies.

In the challenger camp - and companies Andreessen discloses he has invested in through his venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz - are online coupon business Groupon and online telco Skype.

Andreessen's argument is familiar because we have seen it happen before our eyes.

He cites the by now familiar examples of Blockbuster's video hire business knocked over by online order business Netflix, and bricks-and-mortar bookseller Borders knocked over by online bookseller Amazon.

Andreessen also gives the almost obligatory nod to Joseph Schumpeter and his much-celebrated observation about entrepreneurs and their penchant for creative destruction - old businesses making way for aggressive young start-ups.

(Funny how the entrepreneurs always focus on that remark of Schumpeter. They never seem to give much weight to some of Schumpeter's other observations, such as his prediction about the end of capitalism, because the society produced by capitalism fosters values that do not allow capitalism to be sustainable.)

John Hempton, an indefatigable blogger, fund manager with Bronte Capital and fraud buster, agrees with Andreessen's argument, and raises the notion that the world is becoming ''appified''.

I know, it's a terrible word, but it attempts to convey software doing jobs as an ''application'' that used to be done by something in the real world. For example, using the map function in an iPhone rather than leafing through the Gregory's.

In a recent post, Hempton inspects the case of hardware firm Cisco talking about 50 billion devices in the world needing to be connected to the internet - but failing to convert that astonishing figure into sales of the hardware routers it manufactures.

The reason? Because software is ''appifying'' Cisco's hardware business - software is doing the job that its routers used to do.

''If the output of your hardware is information or the manipulation of information then you are going to get eaten. If the output is something else then you are not,'' Hempton writes.

And that's also Cisco's business model you can hear crashing down in the background of the YouTube music my kids and I are listening to.

And just for the record, we were listening to Gotye's Heart's a Mess. I might buy the record from iTunes. Not all business models are collapsing.

Original Article found here

Alex Skolnick: Lies That Bands Tell

2011-08-21T02:20:00.000-07:00

I'll never forget the night my older brother burst my bubble about something I'd believed to be true. It was like finding out that there was no tooth fairy.

I was in the ninth grade and had just come home from my very first Van Halen concert. Earlier that evening, Van Halen vocalist David Lee Roth had said something from the stage that thrilled me as much as Eddie Van Halen’s supersonic guitar pyrotechnics. It was as though Dave, king of all Jewish surfer dudes, had pointed me out in the back of the arena and spoken to me directly: "Hey kid! Yeah you! Up there in the balcony! Ya see this bottle of Jack here? I’m takin’ a sip for you, buddy … L’Chaim!" I did a "play by play" recap of the concert to my older brother, an aspiring bassist who’d chosen not to attend, and waited for just the right moment to relay the big news. That's when I quoted the exact words of Mr. Roth, who’d made me and approximately 13,999 others swell with pride by saying “San Francisco—you guys are the best crowd of the whole tour!”

To which my brother responded with five words of abrupt magnitude, like a 6.5 Earthquake on the Richter Scale: "He says that every night!"

NO!!! I refused to believe it. My parade had been overtaken by a torrential downpour. I felt like Neo, a character from a film that would come out 15 years later—The Matrix-who finds out everything he’s ever believed to be true has been a lie.

But it was no joke: Diamond Dave had been two-timing us. As I’d soon hear from numerous witnesses, Roth would tell audiences night after night that they were the best crowd of the whole tour, regardless of whether or not they actually were. So while my brother’s musical ambitions would be thwarted by misjudgments (he’d soon give up playing altogether) when it came to this matter, he’d prove to be absolutely right.

I’d like to think I’ve gotten over any issues of trust violation that this experience may have created between me and the classic Van Halen line up. But I tell this story not as a disgruntled fan. Rather, it is to illustrate an interesting point about the music industry.

From Vaudeville to Van Halen, show business has traditionally been steeped in illusion. Illusion turns mere mortals into giants. Sometimes it’s stage props—can you imagine a stadium concert by U2, Pink Floyd, or The Rolling Stones with no props? Sometimes it’s make up—Kiss, Marylyn Manson and Alice Cooper are extreme, but effective examples. And very often, as I learned that night, it is something much less obvious: lies which, when told for the sake of a band’s public persona, take on the form of ‘verbal illusions.’

Van Halen’s verbal illusions weren’t limited to Dave’s stage raps. They extended to the press. In countless interviews, the band would make statements like, "We’re having the best time ever,” “With Van Halen, every night’s a Friday night," and “We don’t even consider this work!” But today, it’s no secret that the very same tours and recordings Van Halen was promoting were marred by drama—yelling, screaming, awkwardness, even an occasional fistfight. The band nearly imploded on several occasions.

I’d been a fan of Kiss, but that was different. Kiss was a band with comic book superhero persona's and a show that resembled a circus on steroids. My friends and I knew full well that Kiss was a group whose entire career had been based on illusion. But Van Halen? That was a bit of a shock. After all, it was Eddie Van Halen, who’d said this: “It’s a lot easier to have a gimmick. But if you lay your personality on the line and they don’t like you, you’re gone. So far we’ve gone the personality way, and it’s worked. And that’s how a band lasts—being real.” (Guitar Player, 1980).

Now before you think I’m singling out Van Halen, let’s look at one more example, a band that showed up a few years later who, like Van Halen, came across as one of the "real" bands with no gimmicks: Metallica.

Those of us who were youths in the Bay Area music scene all felt the presence of its most noteworthy metal band, whom we watched rise to the top like the foam in a just poured pint of Guinness. The story went like this: Metallica had never intended to "make it big." From L.A. to San Francisco, they’d play at any tiny rock club that would have them and were perfectly content to do so for the rest of their lives. They were the "people’s band." They were "just like their fans." They had no "plan" and were as surprised as anyone else as they began to rise through the ranks of the music industry. And it is with the utmost respect and admiration that I point out that this story is largely fabricated.

Looking back, it’s easy to see that Metallica’s career moves were part of a carefully orchestrated master plan, their lack of interest in "making it big" a clever bending of the truth. Their press quotes were carefully chosen. They wisely employed an exclusive photographer, Ross Halfin, and retained tight control over their image. Their fashion had an effective, uniformity even for "street clothes." Their artwork and merchandise, punk-like in its simplicity, had an Andy Warhol pop-art aesthetic, sophisticated yet highly accessible. And most of these effective creative decisions were the work of Lars Ulrich, the band’s drummer and founder and an upper class Dane with a prep school vocabulary, a knowledge of modern art, and a business savvy that rivalled his own band’s powerful management team.

Metallica’s transformation from music industry black sheep to one of the top selling acts in history was partially built on the illusion of the whole band being nothing but a bunch of average, scruffy head-bangers who didn’t really know what they were doing business-wise. Van Halen’s rise to the top was aided by the illusion of their lives being all smiles—one big, happy party, 24/7. But illusions aside, neither band’s ascent towards immortality would have been possible without something very real at its core: timeless music that touched a nerve, resonated with legions of fans, and broke a lot of rules in the process.

It is not a criticism, just an observation, to point out that illusion, verbal and otherwise, is a frequent component for the world’s biggest rock bands. The use of strategic "lies" has proven true, even amongst bands that, at one time, couldn’t have been seen as more "real" or less "gimmicky." For in the music business, the concept of a band that has "no gimmicks" is very often, in and of itself, a gimmick.

Original Link: http://www.guitarplayer.com/default.aspx?tabid=259&EntryId=549

My Fairytale Week

2011-08-11T18:29:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Ah "Fairy-Tales," there really is nothing like a rousing story of rags to riches or that of a shy maiden who is swept off her feet by an equally noble King-in-waiting. There's just something about these timeless classics that endear themselves to us from the moment we can understand another's voice.

Perhaps it's the notion of good triumphing over evil or that if we just wait long enough, something good and pure and just can and will happen.

A musician has their own version of a fairy-tale and it often involves bright lights, massive stages, uber-amounts of "street-cred" and status and of course, shit-loads of money. Did I mention the thing about money? Yeah, shit-loads of money is usually something that any musician would associate with "success."

Please note: names have been intentionally omitted due to the possible legal implications of this entire scenario.

ACT 1, Scene 1

So begins my tale... It all began with a phone call. Well no, that's actually not true at all but it does read good. It started with an email from a guy I'd been in contact with for some years called "A." Mr A dropped me a line and this is what he said:

"...I have had a bit of luck finding the management label... they are serious about ____ and see a huge potential for our music, they have told me we will definitely be in America this year, so get your passport sorted! Yes, we will definitely be over there for the long haul but there are ways to make that easier on the family which is everyone's concern. My goal is simple, world domination... nothing less than U2 status... I believe in starting small and going up from there... I'm sure we can make this work for you and your family, I am looking for people who will be part of the group long term and can call it there professional home....I have a gut feeling you are the right guy and feel very lucky to have you involved. Thanks again Bill, I'm sure we will catch up soon and talk things through over a coffee..."

Well, it sounded promising. What he was proposing was a long-term venture in the musical Mecca of the world - America. Y'know, the place where you can quite literally own a gun and shoot it too?

I was asked to submit a quotation for a small tour (8 weeks at best) and so I did that, and quite honestly, thought little more of it.

ACT 1, Scene 2

The initial email I received was in February 2011 and I heard little or as good as little till June 1st. The story and the situation had now changed considerably, here is what A was now telling me:

"...My Manager has taken a job with Geffen records in New York starting on the 1st of July, she worked there before as an intern and knows the CEO Jimmy Iovine and staff well, she is very confident of their interest in ____, the main reason why she took the job. I am talking to everyone in the band to see if it is doable from here to put the band together, what it will cost, there's a lot to think about as you can imagine... I'd like to have some idea when it gets to that point if they do ask me have I got a band that is ready to tour..."

Wow, so as you can see, things have progressed since we last spoke. For those not in the know, Geffen records is a big freaking deal. They're a part of InterScope and A&M records (ultimately owned Universal Music Group) which have artists such as U2, Lady Gaga and many others on their books. Could it get any "bigger" than this? In a word - NO.

So A is proposing that his "manager" (more on this individual later) has scored a job with arguably the biggest label in the world and she is confident of this label's interest in A's band? And I'm in the band? Apparently so. My jaw hit the floor when I read this. Suddenly I was interested, really interested. To confirm that this was not a typo, I shot another email back to A and got this reply:

"...The feeling with ____ (A's management) is very positive, she just doesn't see any other outcome other than them picking this up, and I think it makes far more sense to put a band together here with guys that know each other and have a playing history together, that's what the great bands have that you go to see, so many gigs under their belts together. I know you're the right guy for this, I just have that feeling, like you I've been around a lot of musos and I can pretty much tell when someone's full of shit and will just be hard work to be around, it always comes down to the simple stuff, personality and ability, I don't doubt for a moment that you have both..."

So now I'm feeling pretty good. He's blowing smoke up my ass from all directions and it looks like a done deal before I've even set-up the rig and blown some licks. Shit yeah! Maybe this is my time to shine after all? Still though, there was some scepticism as to whether the label would sign A as a solo artist and put his band together for him over there or go with what A was suggesting and allow him to bring his own hand-picked musicians over. Hmm...

ACT 1, Scene 3

More "back and forth" emails followed between A and I and this thing was looking serious to say the least.

"...What can I say Bill, you really are the missing piece in the ____ puzzle, I get how much you will bring to this project, I am very excited at the possibilities... Great to have your enthusiasm too Bill, this will be a very tight unit, nothing beats a great live band that has a synergy..."

OK so as you can see, in A's mind, it's already a done deal and he's got his band over there.

I'm still pumped at this stage but somewhat sceptical as to whether the label will take to the notion of carting 5 grown men over to the other side of the world and carrying the associated costs that brings. After all, despite any talk of "synergy," none of us had ever played together before. Interesting.

Fast forward a mere 48hrs and the drummer A was working with has pulled out. So I get the call, "do you know any good drummers?" Matter of fact, yes I do. So I go ahead and recommend a drummer friend of mine I've known for 3 years.

In email correspondence with said drummer, I was very quick to point out the following:

"...Let me be clear at this point - there is nothing in writing as yet. This whole thing may not happen and I suggest until air-fares are booked and the pre-tour rehearsals are happening you treat this all with the proverbial grain of salt. However, don't forget that this contact A has is an A&R rep at the New York Geffen office... Keep both points of view in the back of your mind..."

More back and forth emails follow. I do my best to reply ASAP to show my enthusiasm and my organisational savvy. However, what now starts to happen is that the "story" begins to change. Initially, management was due to start work at Geffen on the 1st of July. Now though, this date is blown out by 2 weeks:

"...Just got an email from ____, she starts officially at Geffen on the 15th July, she just received her rehire paperwork so all looking good..."

OK I figure, a small change but it looks like it's still happening. At this point I'd even begun charting the tunes and learning the specific parts. Before you ask, no - we'd still not caught up collectively to test that "synergy" alluded to before.

Another email update followed soon after:

"...To update you as to where ____ is at, I spoke to her the other night and I asked her when she will be playing them the album, she said she is going to do that on her first day, she said that's what they're paying me for, she said this is Jimmy Iovines kind of music, what he personally loves, he's a very smart operator though to have picked up the Hip Hop artists that he did such as Dr Dre, Snoop Dog, 50 cent, Eminem... it's made them a fortune.
So in about 6 weeks we should have an answer as to their interest. She said I would initially fly over there to get the contract signed and meet with everyone and get their game plan for us, she said why don't you bring the band over here as we have studios for you to use and you can rehearse it from here, to be honest Bill, we will just have to wait and see how they want us to do this and we will work in with them, either way, as long as we're over their getting paid it's all good. I still envisage us doing a weeks rehearsal here before we head over..."

Alright, 6 weeks. Cool. Still looks like it's happening eh? 6 weeks should take us roughly to the 20th of July 2011. Actually, that wasn't that long ago was it? And yet here I am and here A still is. Hmm...

ACT 1, Scene 4

In the time that followed, many more back and forth emails were sent and the longer this went on, the more convincing the rhetoric became.

It had now gone from that aforementioned "possibility" of A being signed to a matter of fact that A and the entire band would be involved. Here is the update:

"...Hey Bill, I trust all is well with you and yours mate, you're probably way ahead of me on this but I suggest you get your passport ready if you haven't already, the label will take care of Visa details etc so no stress there. Just speaking to ____, she said things have changed since she last worked in the business, her job description now includes the ability, with executive approval, to sign acts to the label, this brings us a very big step closer to getting signed, I can't imagine Jimmy Iovine not taking to the material, can you?"

Wow. Get the passport ready. I must admit, at this stage, I'm pretty excited at the prospect of all of this. It really is something that represents a "once in a lifetime" type of opportunity.

Still though, in the very dark recess of my cranium there is a nagging feeling that something is not quite "right." Perhaps the feeling is bought on because A has pretty much zero fan-base and nil established live gig history. What he does have in an "OK" sounding record from a few years ago. Ah what the hell, I push this nagging doubt even further back and start psyching up for the inevitable success of touring with an international act.

Many other inconsequential emails roll out from A and I dutifully reply. Everything is discussed from prospective pay to equipment needed for the upcoming rehearsals that will be scheduled at New York's Quad Studios - the clientele list of which reads like a "who's who" of the music industry.

The 6 weeks comes... And goes. A is still here in Australia, the information is still being drip-fed to us via A and not a single bar of music has been road-tested in this time.

By this time though it had been relayed to us that the A&R rep had personally met with

Jimmy Iovine, CEO of InterScope records. Additionally, the info passed to me was that Jimmy didn't want to hear the album but said something to the effect of "it's your job on the line, if you believe in this artist, go ahead and sign him, that's what we're paying you for..."

As you can expect, the excitement factor shot up exponentially and took on a veritable life of it's own. Being signed was now apparently a mere formality.

INTERMISSION

What to do now? A "meeting" is suggested by A where we can collectively catch up and he can fill us in on some more of the detail from the A&R rep and so that we can all meet each other in the flesh.

Myself and my drummer mate arrive for the meeting. A rocks up, looking very "rock-star" or should I add, dishevelled rock star.

The very first piece of "hot gossip" A lands on us is that his contact, the A&R rep is now like a "sister" to him and that they've "shared their lives together" over the past 8 months or so. I raise my eyebrows somewhat, nod my head and go "OK..." Next came the bombshell.

A's contact (the A&R rep @ InterScope records in NY) has stage 3 lymphatic cancer.

There it it was. Needless to say, both I and the drummer were somewhat shocked - it was a little too much to take in. A explained that if things were to slow down a bit here and there, it was only because this contact was dealing with associated medical issues that related to the cancer and treatment.

A seemed unperturbed and carried on with his dialogue about how this "shit was happening" and that his career would embark on (and I quote here) a systematic "rape and pillage" of the international music scene. When A made the rape and pillage comment, he then gestured in such a way as to be performing a sexual position commonly called "doggy style" - I'm sure you get the picture.

More bizarre comments were made at this meeting incl. a "3 album deal" in which A would retain all rights to the recorded masters. WTF? This is unheard of. In addition, "long term employment" was being written into the contracts. What??? He also reiterated "this is not a 360 deal." I said "what? really? Are you serious? I was assuming this was precisely what all of this was!" No, I was assured that A's contact had been carefully going through the books to find the ultimate deal for him and she had landed on one such deal that included all of the above. Perhaps even fries were included, who knows?

What major label is going to offer complete unknown's such a deal? The alarm bells were sounding in my head but I was doing my best to maintain my calm exterior.

The drummer asked a valid question at this point: "...we're talking about this like it's going to be a raging success, can we possibly discuss the outcome for all of us if it flops?"

A had no real definitive comeback. His reasoning was that since we were going to be plugged into the biggest label in the world and that marketing and promo were going to be taken up on his behalf, there was no chance this thing could fail. Interesting, I wonder what all the American Idol stars who'd had complete album flops after their season running success would make of that argument?

Some other strange comments were made in the meeting. Apparently, the A&R rep had played the album in the NY office (a 3-story office with 6 A&R reps, 2 to a floor - well, so we've been led to believe) and the other reps had been asking her for a copy of the album. She had apparently said "no way, he's my artist!"

There was talk of implementing social media strategies into the live show as well as me taking on live production duties. A was totally buzzing and repeatedly talked about those whom he'd had falling's out with as soon being shown up in a major way.

As a matter of fact, A requested our bank account details along with corresponding international banking codes on behalf of his A&R rep. Another eyebrow raiser right there. What legitimate A&R person directly handles banking details and pay?

The drummer soon left and then it was me and A and the other band member. We spoke a little more about matters but nothing extra or major was really added to the points I'd already raised. I put in my 2 cents about us gelling musically being that we'd never played together and quite frankly, I had some misgivings about "M," the bass player. Seemed like a nice enough guy but I didn't detect a whole lot of spunk or spark about him at all.

And yet, this was the guy that A had appointed as his "music director."

What A did iterate was that he already had the next 3 albums written and that on the road, M would demo up the tunes using Logic Pro who would then give them to us. Seemed like a back to front way of doing it but who was I to air such a thing?

The only problem was this whole proposed working schedule was that M had never used Logic Pro before. Matter of fact, the one demo M had given me sounded like absolute shit and that's putting it mildy. True story kids.

So, it looks like if this is going ahead, I'll be playing guitar, taking care of live production and coaching M on how to use a software program he's never once laid eyes on. OK, whatever. Show me the freaking contract already.

Meeting is over and I've got some real concerns about all of this. Not only are the issues of stage 3 cancer looming in my mind but also the relayed info of the 3 album deal and the long term employment that is being written into the contract.

The most pressing issue I see though is the "muppet factor" involved. By this I mean working with people who've not a clue about what's what. Who appoints a music director who knows sweet FA about the program in which they are allegedly demoing up tunes? Another muppet, that's who.

ACT 2, Scene 1

Well, little did I know that things were going to take another turn.

I get an email Thursday night that is forwarded from M regarding an "update" A has received from his A&R contact. Here it is:

"...M, I spoke at length with ____ last night and it’s looking like Monday week that I will fly out, if the paperwork goes through quicker, then it will be sooner. She is back in the office Monday and she said she will forward the paperwork she is submitting to InterScope re our gear etc so that you can all see that this is legitimate. I told her you will be acting as Music Director and I want to see that reflected in your pay, regardless, everyone will be paid very well, she said are you serious!? This a major label, of course they will be paid well! As you know the contracts will have long term employment written into them and that you will all be contracted players, no surprises, everything will be as we discussed.

Things will move very quickly from that point. Her boss of A&R loves the album and told her they need to get T-Shirts printed with ‘I Wanna Love’ on them! They reckon it will be viral, the catch phrase. She said first we break America, then move overseas, she feels that within a year we will be headlining our own shows... She is getting very excited as am I, and I really feel there is a momentum now that won’t stop from album to album, and tour to tour, the ball is definitely rolling for us! If you want to forward this to the guys that would be great..."

Wow, more news and apparently there is now some talk of hierarchy. When A first approached me, he was adamant that it was a "band" and that he didn't want "session players." Looks like A has moved the goal-post on that now. It is appearing (very obviously) to be HIS project with HIS appointed people and he is bestowing more on some than he plans to on others. Here, at this point I needed to address with A the very obvious "pay-scaling" that was apparently going to be taking place.

Before I get to my response to M, here is another copied email from M to another band-member about this opportunity:

"...Basically what we discussed was the structure of how we'd put things together. A of course would write most of the songs - I would do the initial arrangement and then work with you guys to produce the best guitar, keys and drum parts. Once we're happy with the parts then we'd give A a listen and fine tune or go ahead with it. A will use me as the Music Director which basically means I'll be the first port of call re the arrangements and sounding board musically for you guys. I'll also accompany A to liaise with the tour manager, stage manager etc... He also wants to make sure that the band get to write a couple of the album songs together for diversity and of course the opportunity for us all to collect some royalties on top of our wages.

At this stage, ____ is preparing the contract in collaboration with A and is looking at submitting it to the record company's admin dept. on Wednesday. From there they will start the process of getting things into motion i.e. organising financial details, plane flights, accommodation, website re-design, album cover design etc, etc. Once this has been done, then A will fly to New York to sign the contract and talk strategies with ____.
We'll then be sent contracts soon after by email and after having them checked, we sign and fax them back. From here it's likely that we'll need to be in NYC possibly within 10 days of signing.

A has given ____ a base figure of AUD$1,500 per week + all expenses (accom, meals, transport, equipment etc) are paid for. She is presently looking at bands to place us on tour with as support. Most likely we will arrive in NYC and be given approx 2 weeks to rehearse our act before going on tour. She is looking at the Quad Studios New York (check website) for rehearsals.

At this point we have no firm date for A's departure but she has told him that it is likely to be August 10 or slightly after - which means we could look at around August 24 thereabouts.

I would ask that you have your passport ready to go and A will need your bank details including country transfer code asap. He is endeavouring to get us at least one week pay before we leave so that we can quit work and wrap up things prior to departure. He has submitted a list of our requested equipment and this should be purchased and waiting for us upon arrival. He'll also be purchasing a portable recording workstation for writing/arranging on the road/plane etc.

My plan is to tell my boss about this once A has received his plane ticket. From there I'll likely finish work when I know a firm date for our arrival so that I can have a short break with my family before leaving. It is most likely that we will be away for months at a time, with some short breaks in between. I'd suggest you set up a Skype link so that you can talk/see your family from wherever we are..."

Note in the above the emphasis on bank account details? Eyebrows should have been scraping the ozone layer at this point.

Anyways, back to my previous issue of clarifying the pay-scale deal and trying to establish my specific role within this group. So, I do this in a discrete manner and email M some thoughts on this issue:

"...M, I just wanted to add that I do agree with A that you should be paid more if you are acting as MD and liaising with other management people. As with any professional role, with greater responsibility comes a beefier pay-check. The cleaner is paid to clean, the manager to manage.

In-line with that, I guess I would hope I fare somewhat better than say C or A (a different A to "A") if as A has indicated he wants me to sort through files and set-up live production tracks. I know you are unfamiliar with the process of that but it can be quite a time-consuming thing to undertake, especially when it comes to getting it "just right" and also given the fact that the hard-drives I have have many hundreds of audio files with ambiguous names (such as "R_Guitar2"). I indicated to A that I'd already spent a good 8+ hours on the charts which are needed to help/assist with the live production and were also I thought, helpful for C to learn the tunes. Let me know what you think? I am just being upfront and honest with you about my thoughts at this stage..."

M was quick to reply and actually agreed with me:

"...Hi Bill, Yeah definitely merit in what you're saying. I'm not familiar with the physical process of arranging the files but did go through the hard drive in detail with ex-tech guy Matt when we were setting up backing tracks, so I know how many tracks there were and how poorly organized they were. Initially when A had spoken to you about setting up the BTs he told me you'd said it should be straight forward, so I knew you hadn't seen them yet (lol).

My assumption is that you would not only set up these files, but in fact do all of the ongoing tech stuff including training me in the use of Logic etc. So I guess what I'm saying is you have a definite case for a pay disparity. Unfortunately, I'm not in the position to make that decision as I'll be a wage earner like you - however I have emailed A to argue your case as I think it is valid..."

OK I thought, good enough and I've made my point. However, I had a sneaking suspicion that A would misconstrue this somehow, especially given his increasing ego size and circumference of late.

ACT 2, Scene 2

I sent A another email just to clarify my position here and even called him the next day in the morning to touch base. The phone call (instigated by me) made it was clear that A's ego had seriously kicked in and had inflated ten-fold and more to the point, he was pissed at being questioned and what he saw as me trying to capitalise on his imminent and perpetual success.

On this phone call, A ranted about "complete creative control" and that this was "not a democracy." At this point, I had to ask, what was my role? Was I a band member or a hired gun? A made it clear: "Bill, you're my hired session guitarist." He also intimated I needed to "prove" myself to him and if I was able to do that, then a pay increase would follow.

A went out of his way to establish the pecking order and although I had misgivings about his ego and his choice of words, I bit them back and tried to placate him. We ended the call on a good note but I still had major questions in my mind about working with him long term. Who wants to work with a dictator? Not me.

What did catch me off guard though was an email sent via M later that night in which I was summarily fired from the project. Here it is:

"...Bill, I am very disappointed that instead of being happy and content with the opportunity I have given you alone, and before showing us that you can even create backing tracks for a professional tour, you have already asked for a permanent raise, this is running before you walk.

When you first mentioned doing the work Bill, you were very happy to get it done the week before you fly out, and have only changed your mind because you learned that M will be paid more for his role as Music Director, so now you want more on a full-time basis also, this shows me an inconsistency in what you are happy with and what we agreed upon, that you are very changeable, and that your motivation is money. As I told you in our meeting, M has earned that right over 14 very long hard years together, he proved himself countless times to me, his worth and value, he earned it the hard way Bill, and he never asked me, he’s such an unassuming person.

Also your presumption to suggest to me how to run my business 5 minutes into getting the gig, that “Secondly, matters such as pay scaling should be out in the open and not secretive, What do you think?” Again, you are getting ahead of yourself Bill, as I said, what each person is getting paid is none of your business, when you go to work, do you tell all your colleagues what you are being paid? no one does, so why do you think I should?

The fact that you want more so soon does not sit well with me, or suggesting how I should run my business, it flags to me a problem that we will face in the future, a problem I don’t want or need, and unfortunately I know that C and you are a package, so I am very sorry to say that we will be letting you both go..."

All I could say at this point was "WOW." My wife and I had known A for 2 and a half years and in that time had done a lot for him without even a thought for compensation or of being paid a cent. This included administration, email and website set-up and maintenance and also marketing tasks. To date, he still has an outstanding invoice for $660 that he has never once acknowledged or paid not to mention the work I had undertaken on his behalf thus far.

A reply was sent to M outlining our previous history with A to which he was totally unfamiliar. He admitted he was "sorry" the way things had gone down but that it was A's call at the days end. Seemed to me to be a spineless reply which I find out later is in keeping with M and A's long-term relationship.

INTERMISSION

Truly, it had appeared at this point I had somehow blown the biggest opportunity in my career to date. I was still reeling from it all and at this point, had discarded the notions I had previously held of suspicions. Self-loathing and pity now succeeded in molesting me in broad daylight and I wondered what good could at this point come of this situation.

My wife was furious with A, especially given how much we'd done for him in the past.

She decided to call him and lay it all out on the table. He was apparently quite unrepentant and continued to assert that after 2 and a half years of relationship, ending things via email the way he did was "the best possible solution." He offered no apology for the outstanding invoices and did his best to demonize me and to undermine my intentions.

In layman's terms, it was obvious A was a total wanker and an ego-maniac. Despite all the talk of "we've gotta get the business right," it was obvious a band-member in A's employ was not at liberty to broach such a topic.

I emailed M once more outlining my case but he didn't even do me the courtesy of replying. Wanker. Looks like M was convinced he was on the fast-track to fame and success and he wasn't about to derail his opportunity.

ACT 3, Scene 1

I received an email soon after from A's A&R rep asking me to stay out of band business and to cease any communication with them. I was told that to do so will be considered "harassment." Additionally, I was threatened with legal action on InterScope's behalf if I didn't return some personal effects of A's that up until now, had been given to me on the basis I would construct live production tracks from.

She made it clear I was now dealing with a major label and pulled no punches in outlining the possible expense of having legal battles with the company:

"...Bill, Tomorrow you will find letterhead from InterScope detailing this message and its contents along with an attorney signature at the bottom of it if this does not get resolved as soon as possible. You are now dealing with me, ____, a.k.a. ____, A&R NY Satellite Office.

As you are aware, I have all email correspondence between you and A, as well as M. To say the least, I heard nothing but great things about you up until this point. As you are also aware, you have asked for more money when you weren't even aware of what you were to be paid to begin with. M has been with A for 14 years and has not left his side even when their dreams were almost as dead as a door nail. However, you, Bill, have taken on duties you volunteered to do. I do not have proof that A has asked you to draw up charts/dictation, etc for the backing tracks. What I do have, is an email of you explaining to A that it would take you a while to get all the files as there were a ton of them.

Those hard drives no longer belong to A. They are property of InterScope since the deal is sealed. If you would like to battle this out with a major label, feel free, but I must warn you that it is going to be costly on your part to retain an attorney for what you only have is "volunteered" yourself and Ali's time to distribute the album, maintain the website, new artwork, etc and that was not done. As far as C is concerned, he does not need you to draw up charts for him as he is a musician himself.

Basically, the point here is, you can return the hard drives to A within 3 business days or you can battle this out with me and the label. If you feel you are owed money, file the proper paperwork with the courts and we will deal with it that way. In the meantime, theft is not a good look for a good musician, such as yourself.

I will state again, we can go forward without those hard drives, but if they get into the wrong hands, you will have bigger issues, dealing with things such as Title 17 under the copyright laws you will be dealing with.

Let me know how you would like to proceed. From here on out, you are to have no contact with any of the band members or it will be considered harassment. You will deal with me directly via email or regular Postal Mail..."

Maybe she was thinking this was going to scare the pants right off me from the get go? While I have my faults, I do think a lot about things and I retain factual information reasonably well. What made no sense to me was that A had emphatically stated that he was retaining all the rights to his original and forthcoming recorded masters.

That being the case, what possible claim could InterScope have to them? None.

As for contacting other people, I know of no such law that forbids contact based on someone else's directive. I had not received emails from any of the guys asking me to cease contact.

Another red light was that this email originated from a "live.com" email address. Strange. Why wouldn't she send this from a work email if she wanted to scare me?

I shot an email back and in level tones, tried to get my points across:

"...Hello there ____, thank you for the email regarding A.

Firstly, let me say that I am very sorry to hear of you battling stage 3 cancer... it is not a nice thing to have to go through, Ali and I wish you all the best where that is concerned.

Secondly, A has informed me that presently, you are sorting through InterScope's contracts to find the best possible deal for him as an artist. He informed us that if anyone in upper management was to hear about this, you could be in danger of losing your job and that it was not something an A&R representative would normally do for an artist.

He also informed me that the deal he is going to be inking with InterScope involved him retaining all of the rights to his existing sound recordings. That being the case, any talk of InterScope owning the hard-drives would be null and void. Additionally, the work undertaken on A's behalf prior to him being officially signed by InterScope would also be null and void. Under Australian law (A is an Australian citizen) he has a legal obligation to honour his debts. Everyone deserves to be paid for their time, it's very basic business practice and in professional circles, "common courtesy."

I see you have not sent this email from a work address but rather from a personal one. If you can provide evidence that the existing sound recordings are in-fact now owned by InterScope records, then I will seek legal advice and proceed accordingly.

My intention was always to be a part of a great sounding band, however being that none of the band members have ever played together before it left a lot of questions in my mind. I am currently a University lecturer... One of my work colleagues deals directly with entertainment law and I am sure, will be happy to assist me further in these matters..."

After sending this, I began to replay many of the "red flags" in my mind. Something was up, way up. It wasn't one thing itself, it was all of it combined. None of it seemed logical or in keeping with how any professional record label would operate.

However, I awaited her reply before I set about getting to the bottom of this whole drama.

ACT 3, Scene 2

The email reply did eventually come and this time, her reply was somewhat different to the initial one. Her tone had changed significantly and it appeared she was now trying to get me "on side" and work with her somehow. Strange. Real strange:

"...Bill, Firstly, thank you for your well wishes on the cancer! This is an ugly thing I have to fight... I don't wish it on my worst enemy (I don't really have any of those, though).

As far as my email being personal, it is because we use a virtual private network in the office which means I cannot access my email unless I am over their server. Being that I haven't been in the office, I have not been able to send emails out except for these and correspondence with A and the guys. I stated in my email I would follow this email up with something on letterhead via work email so that nobody is confused as to who and what is going on. So no worries there.

As far as being motivated by money, I do not judge anyone. I do not know you personally and honestly have heard nothing but great things about you and Ali, your wife. One thing you will always get from me is honesty as you know this business is fickle and scary and all I have is my word..."

OK, fair enough I guess. But I can't seem to shake a voice in my head about this woman.

I send a final email to A telling him exactly what I think of him and admitting that I now know why he has left a string of broken relationships and burnt bridges in his wake and also why he cannot maintain a committed relationship with anyone.

I told him he's an ego-maniac and that he has broken my trust and that it's unlikely he'll ever earn that back.

However, soon after, I cop another email from you-know-who. Here it is:

"...Bill, I just received your email sent to A. I asked that you not correspond with him or the band members in my first email to you and deal with me directly. I thought we had a good repoire going here?

I will be in the office tomorrow morning and will address this whole situation and once again, I ask you to stop emailing anyone regarding band business unless it is me.

As you stated yourself, I have one tough fight on my hands with this cancer, so please do me a favour and let this go as you stated you would do. You will have your release of liability letter tomorrow..."

Well one thing is for sure, I was sure looking forward to anything that showed this woman had an actual connection with the company she was purporting to.

I laid off the thing for the time being and patiently waited for this letter I was promised. After all, if she could produce it, then it changed things significantly. If she could not, my suspicions would be confirmed.

ACT 3, Scene 3

Well, the following day dawned and as expected, no letter from this woman and nothing else materialised that would confirm to me she was who she claimed to be.

I decided to do a little "detective work" and trace her IP addresses to either confirm or deny whether she lived in NY or the greater region. Well, it turns out her IP address checked out fine. It originated from the New Jersey area, around 45 minutes or so from NY. However, why the emails all from as "live.com" email? Made no sense.

The breakthrough came when I was forwarded an email from C (my drummer mate - yay for drummer mates) that was sent that morning. It appears my questions had caused her to rethink her approach:

"...Hello, please respond to this email as this is a test over the server here in the office..."

Instead of the regular "live.com" email address, she had replaced or "spoofed" with an @interscopegeffen.com domain name. Immediately, I placed www in front of the domain name to validate it's authenticity. Here is a screen-grab of what came up when I did this:

Now I had a smoking gun, that domain name is for sale for $66 via reseller "Go-Daddy."

Epic fail on her part. Epic. Fail. If she was smart, she could have purchased that domain name and set it up so that it diverted to the actual InterScope site. But it appears she's not too intelligent at all. That or she'd put me in the same class of Neanderthal as A and M.

I can only assume that to date, it hasn't occurred to A or M to check the domain name of the alleged email. No, they're too busy planning for a career that never was in the first place.

I contacted C and told him everything. He couldn't believe it. The entire thing had been one massive wind-up or at worst, a scam to access bank-accounts etc. I told him to check with his bank and to get his "house in order" regarding all of this. I had never given any account details so I had nothing to worry about.

All that was left was to directly call InterScope records and have them confirm or deny whether this individual is on payroll.

The Final ACT

Immediately the following day, a phone call was made to InterScope's head office in California. Ali explained the situation to the gentleman on reception who then put us through to another guy who was able to access the database of current employees of the company.

No such person existed. We checked spelling back and forth a few times. Nup. Nothing. There is no record of any such person working for the company.

We were given the number for HR and payroll services in order to double-check this. At this point, I wanted nothing left to chance. We placed the call but got the message-bank service. We left a message explaining the situation along with a contact email and phone number.

We received an email the following day confirming again our suspicions of this person:

"...Hello, We do not have an employee named ____ with the last named spelled ____ or ____ in our payroll database. She could possibly be an Intern but we do not maintain payroll records on Interns. Sorry and thanks..."

Now we had it in writing. She was a fake. A total fake.

All that was left to do was to alert InterScope legal. The real InterScope legal.

We made another phone call and obtained an email address and all correspondence and claims made by this person were handed over. I copied emails, included IP addresses, phone numbers and social media links.

We were assured he would be chasing this up. I hope they prosecute her for all they can. Although I think A is a veritable clown, she has played on this guys dreams and so totally misled him it's not funny. I don't know that anyone deserves the kind of "practical joke" she has played.

To date, I've not heard from A or M since this all came about although I am sure at some point I will. Douche-bags the pair of them. They should have checked this out long ago instead of placing myself and others in a potentially compromising situation. I was accused of "running before I walk" but it seems that advice should have been taken first before handing it out so casually to others.

Here they were talking of being on the same playing field as bands like U2 and Coldplay and "raping and pillaging" the music industry. The entire time it was nothing short of a colossal wank. Douche-bags the pair of them.

It's all turned out well for me. I've come to see that someone I thought was OK was nothing less than an ego-driven maggot and that gut feelings and instincts are worth listening to, seriously, they are. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

So concludes my fairy-tale week. Thanks for reading.
Comments welcome, except of course if you're an InterScope employee writing from a "live.com" email address...

Magic Mouse Drivers - Windows 7

2011-07-10T23:25:00.000-07:00

And now for a completely unrelated post...

Had a few requests via Twitter DM (direct message) on where and how you use the Apple Magic Mouse with Windows 7. I just picked one up today... What a fab bit of kit. Doesn't need a mouse-pad, very accurate and stable and I can use it on both Mac and PC without having to adjust to a different one when I switch over - schweet :)

To start with, you need a blue-tooth USB dongle so your PC can "pair" with the MM. I picked up a generic one from the local "Dick Smith" today for $20 although you can nab these on Ebay for under $10.

Secondly, you'll need the drivers so that scroll and swipe functions work...

Without them the mouse installs fine and both "click" functions work as expected but scrolling horizontally or vertically is out of the question. Click here to grab these - right click and "save target as."

Now that you've downloaded these... Unpack or unzip the folder and navigate to either the 32-bit or 64-bit folder.

You can find out what version of Windows 7 you're running by going to "My Computer"and then clicking "System Properties."

You'll see a informative dialog screen and under "System Type" you can read whether you've got a 32 or 64-bit cylinder under the hood.

Once you're in the appropriate folder, navigate to "DPInst" (Driver Package Installer) Double-click it and setup installs the necessary drivers.

Now flick the button on your MM on and open up the blue-tooth preferences and allow it to search for new devices. Hey presto... You'll see the Apple Mighty Mouse come up and Windows takes care of the rest for you.

Have fun!

Sleepwalking Into The Future? Brain Function, Web 2.0 + You

2011-07-10T16:44:00.000-07:00

Modern Technology Is Changing The Way Our Brains Work Says Neuroscientist

(original article published on the Daily-Mail here)

By SUSAN GREENFIELD

Human identity, the idea that defines each and every one of us, could be facing an unprecedented crisis.

It is a crisis that would threaten long-held notions of who we are, what we do and how we behave.

It goes right to the heart - or the head - of us all. This crisis could reshape how we interact with each other, alter what makes us happy, and modify our capacity for reaching our full potential as individuals. And it's caused by one simple fact: the human brain, that most sensitive of organs, is under threat from the modern world.

Unless we wake up to the damage that the gadget-filled, pharmaceutically-enhanced 21st century is doing to our brains, we could be sleepwalking towards a future in which neuro-chip technology blurs the line between living and non-living machines, and between our bodies and the outside world.

It would be a world where such devices could enhance our muscle power, or our senses, beyond the norm, and where we all take a daily cocktail of drugs to control our moods and performance.

Already, an electronic chip is being developed that could allow a paralysed patient to move a robotic limb just by thinking about it. As for drug manipulated moods, they're already with us - although so far only to a medically prescribed extent.

Increasing numbers of people already take Prozac for depression, Paxil as an antidote for shyness, and give Ritalin to children to improve their concentration. But what if there were still more pills to enhance or "correct" a range of other specific mental functions?

What would such aspirations to be "perfect" or "better" do to our notions of identity, and what would it do to those who could not get their hands on the pills? Would some finally have become more equal than others, as George Orwell always feared?

Of course, there are benefits from technical progress - but there are great dangers as well, and I believe that we are seeing some of those today.

I'm a neuroscientist and my day-to-day research at Oxford University strives for an ever greater understanding - and therefore maybe, one day, a cure - for Alzheimer's disease.

But one vital fact I have learnt is that the brain is not the unchanging organ that we might imagine. It not only goes on developing, changing and, in some tragic cases, eventually deteriorating with age, it is also substantially shaped by what we do to it and by the experience of daily life. When I say "shaped", I'm not talking figuratively or metaphorically; I'm talking literally. At a microcellular level, the infinitely complex network of nerve cells that make up the constituent parts of the brain actually change in response to certain experiences and stimuli.

The brain, in other words, is malleable - not just in early childhood but right up to early adulthood, and, in certain instances, beyond. The surrounding environment has a huge impact both on the way our brains develop and how that brain is transformed into a unique human mind.

Of course, there's nothing new about that: human brains have been changing, adapting and developing in response to outside stimuli for centuries.

What prompted me to write my book is that the pace of change in the outside environment and in the development of new technologies has increased dramatically. This will affect our brains over the next 100 years in ways we might never have imagined.

Our brains are under the influence of an ever- expanding world of new technology: multichannel television, video games, MP3 players, the internet, wireless networks, Bluetooth links - the list goes on and on.

But our modern brains are also having to adapt to other 21st century intrusions, some of which, such as prescribed drugs like Ritalin and Prozac, are supposed to be of benefit, and some of which, such as widelyavailable illegal drugs like cannabis and heroin, are not.

Electronic devices and pharmaceutical drugs all have an impact on the micro- cellular structure and complex biochemistry of our brains. And that, in turn, affects our personality, our behaviour and our characteristics. In short, the modern world could well be altering our human identity.

Three hundred years ago, our notions of human identity were vastly simpler: we were defined by the family we were born into and our position within that family. Social advancement was nigh on impossible and the concept of "individuality" took a back seat.

That only arrived with the Industrial Revolution, which for the first time offered rewards for initiative, ingenuity and ambition. Suddenly, people had their own life stories - ones which could be shaped by their own thoughts and actions. For the first time, individuals had a real sense of self.

But with our brains now under such widespread attack from the modern world, there's a danger that that cherished sense of self could be diminished or even lost.

Anyone who doubts the malleability of the adult brain should consider a startling piece of research conducted at Harvard Medical School. There, a group of adult volunteers, none of whom could previously play the piano, were split into three groups.

The first group were taken into a room with a piano and given intensive piano practise for five days. The second group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano - but had nothing to do with the instrument at all.

And the third group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano and were then told that for the next five days they had to just imagine they were practising piano exercises.

The resultant brain scans were extraordinary. Not surprisingly, the brains of those who simply sat in the same room as the piano hadn't changed at all.

Equally unsurprising was the fact that those who had performed the piano exercises saw marked structural changes in the area of the brain associated with finger movement.

But what was truly astonishing was that the group who had merely imagined doing the piano exercises saw changes in brain structure that were almost as pronounced as those that had actually had lessons. "The power of imagination" is not a metaphor, it seems; it's real, and has a physical basis in your brain.

Alas, no neuroscientist can explain how the sort of changes that the Harvard experimenters reported at the micro-cellular level translate into changes in character, personality or behaviour. But we don't need to know that to realise that changes in brain structure and our higher thoughts and feelings are incontrovertibly linked.

What worries me is that if something as innocuous as imagining a piano lesson can bring about a visible physical change in brain structure, and therefore some presumably minor change in the way the aspiring player performs, what changes might long stints playing violent computer games bring about? That eternal teenage protest of 'it's only a game, Mum' certainly begins to ring alarmingly hollow.

Already, it's pretty clear that the screen-based, two dimensional world that so many teenagers - and a growing number of adults - choose to inhabit is producing changes in behaviour. Attention spans are shorter, personal communication skills are reduced and there's a marked reduction in the ability to think abstractly.

This games-driven generation interpret the world through screen-shaped eyes. It's almost as if something hasn't really happened until it's been posted on Facebook, Bebo or YouTube.

Add that to the huge amount of personal information now stored on the internet - births, marriages, telephone numbers, credit ratings, holiday pictures - and it's sometimes difficult to know where the boundaries of our individuality actually lie. Only one thing is certain: those boundaries are weakening.

And they could weaken further still if, and when, neurochip technology becomes more widely available. These tiny devices will take advantage of the discovery that nerve cells and silicon chips can happily co-exist, allowing an interface between the electronic world and the human body. One of my colleagues recently suggested that someone could be fitted with a cochlear implant (devices that convert sound waves into electronic impulses and enable the deaf to hear) and a skull-mounted micro- chip that converts brain waves into words (a prototype is under research).

Then, if both devices were connected to a wireless network, we really would have arrived at the point which science fiction writers have been getting excited about for years. Mind reading!

He was joking, but for how long the gag remains funny is far from clear.

Today's technology is already producing a marked shift in the way we think and behave, particularly among the young.

I mustn't, however, be too censorious, because what I'm talking about is pleasure. For some, pleasure means wine, women and song; for others, more recently, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; and for millions today, endless hours at the computer console.

But whatever your particular variety of pleasure (and energetic sport needs to be added to the list), it's long been accepted that 'pure' pleasure - that is to say, activity during which you truly "let yourself go" - was part of the diverse portfolio of normal human life. Until now, that is.

Now, coinciding with the moment when technology and pharmaceutical companies are finding ever more ways to have a direct influence on the human brain, pleasure is becoming the sole be-all and end-all of many lives, especially among the young.

We could be raising a hedonistic generation who live only in the thrill of the computer-generated moment, and are in distinct danger of detaching themselves from what the rest of us would consider the real world.

This is a trend that worries me profoundly. For as any alcoholic or drug addict will tell you, nobody can be trapped in the moment of pleasure forever. Sooner or later, you have to come down.

I'm certainly not saying all video games are addictive (as yet, there is not enough research to back that up), and I genuinely welcome the new generation of "brain-training" computer games aimed at keeping the little grey cells active for longer.

As my Alzheimer's research has shown me, when it comes to higher brain function, it's clear that there is some truth in the adage "use it or lose it".

However, playing certain games can mimic addiction, and that the heaviest users of these games might soon begin to do a pretty good impersonation of an addict.

Throw in circumstantial evidence that links a sharp rise in diagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and the associated three-fold increase in Ritalin prescriptions over the past ten years with the boom in computer games and you have an immensely worrying scenario.

But we mustn't be too pessimistic about the future. It may sound frighteningly Orwellian, but there may be some potential advantages to be gained from our growing understanding of the human brain's tremendous plasticity. What if we could create an environment that would allow the brain to develop in a way that was seen to be of universal benefit?

I'm not convinced that scientists will ever find a way of manipulating the brain to make us all much cleverer (it would probably be cheaper and far more effective to manipulate the education system). And nor do I believe that we can somehow be made much happier - not, at least, without somehow anaesthetising ourselves against the sadness and misery that is part and parcel of the human condition.

When someone I love dies, I still want to be able to cry.

But I do, paradoxically, see potential in one particular direction. I think it possible that we might one day be able to harness outside stimuli in such a way that creativity - surely the ultimate expression of individuality - is actually boosted rather than diminished.

I am optimistic and excited by what future research will reveal into the workings of the human brain, and the extraordinary process by which it is translated into a uniquely individual mind.

But I'm also concerned that we seem to be so oblivious to the dangers that are already upon us.

Well, that debate must start now. Identity, the very essence of what it is to be human, is open to change - both good and bad. Our children, and certainly our grandchildren, will not thank us if we put off discussion much longer.

Read more:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-565207/Modern-technology-changing-way-brains-work-says-neuroscientist.html#ixzz1RkLj7Irz

Blow By Blow: Auditioning For Lady Gaga

2011-07-07T20:21:00.000-07:00

American guitarist/band-leader/Berklee School of Music student Ben Levin talks about his experience auditioning for Lady Gaga - a really insightful read. Be sure to check out Ben's homepage for some fantastic compositions as well.

________________________________________________________________

Dear Fellow Musicians,

In January 2010 I had the opportunity to audition for the guitarist position on Lady Gaga’s international arena tour. I made it to the final 15 guitarists and learned a few valuable things about the music business, particularly the music world outside of Berklee. I think it is definitely worth reading this because the experience was fascinating.

The audition opportunity fell on my lap by sheer luck. My brother’s girlfriend received the information from an acting forum she belongs to, and she passed the application information on to me so that I could submit. I emailed some links to the casting company and after they reviewed my website and videos, I got an appointment reservation. Here is exactly what my email to the casting company said:

Lady Gaga

My name is Ben Levin and I am a guitarist interested in auditioning for Lady Gaga’s band. I am available for all of the audition, rehearsal, and performance dates if I get the gig, and I believe I would be an excellent fit for Lady Gaga’s music and energy on stage. I am currently a guitar performance major at Berklee College of Music in Boston and have a lot of performance experience in my own band Ben Levin Group as well as several other projects in Boston. I am experienced in rock, pop, electronic, jazz, and funk music and have excellent stage presence. Here is a video of me playing with my band so you can hear/see what I do. Of course I will dress more Gaga’esque when I play her music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3jlUbrhCMU

Here is my website for some more examples: http://www.benlevingroup.com

I hope you enjoy the music!
Sincerely,
Ben Levin

After I found out that I had been accepted to audition, I immediately began absorbing Lady Gaga’s repertoire. I learned as many songs of hers as possible, starting with the ones that have guitar parts, and then moving on to her top hits and newest songs. I ended up knowing 13 of the songs by the time of the audition. I also bought an audition-appropriate outfit at a used clothing store. I tried to pick clothes that reflected her music videos.

The first day of auditions was on Monday, January 18th, 2010 in New York City. The audition was supposed to start at 11:30 so I arrived at 10:50 to warm up and get used to the environment. The waiting area before the audition was full of people dressed in insane outfits straight out of The Matrix. I remember feeling intimidated by how many people there were and how much crazier their outfits were than mine. Many of the musicians looked like they were headed to a rave in the year 2070. Most of the other musicians auditioning were friendly with a few exceptions. It was a good enough atmosphere and I was fortunate enough to see a few of my friends from Berklee waiting, as well.

A few hours went by and the casting staff told the guitarists to line up. They took roll to make sure we all had received confirmation emails. I turned to the guitarist in front of me and said, ‘Man! I can’t believe I am really about to do this!’
She replied, ‘Why? We are musicians, this is our job.’
‘Yeah, but this is the biggest band in the world right now and we are auditioning for an arena tour.’ I replied.
She answered with a long-winded response about how she went to jazz school and blah blah blah blah blah blah…..
I stopped listening and started thinking about what it must feel like to be that jaded.

The audition room was a big hall with stadium seating and a huge mirror for a wall that made it look twice as big as it was. At the front of the room was a panel of 4 judges that looked like they were pulled straight out of American Idol. They didn’t look intimidating to me, and actually seemed pretty friendly. Beyond the panel there was a full band setup including a drum set, keyboard, and guitar and bass amplifiers. The guitar amp was a Fender Twin Reverb.

When all of the guitarists were seated, one of the judges picked up her microphone and explained that playing guitar for Lady Gaga is the easiest job in the world, and that what they are really looking for is a guitarist who can rock a whole stadium with great stage presence. To me that meant that I would have to jump and play really bombastically. The guitarists were told to play a pop song of their choosing and then some Gaga material. The first five guitarists lined up and the auditions began.

The first guitarist played for about 6 seconds before the judges told him to stop. At that point I realized that I would have to grab their attention immediately and I began planning what I was going to do. Most of the guitarists that followed performed without looking up at the judges or rocking out at all. There were some good players with no presence, but overall the atmosphere was dead. When it was finally my turn to play, I walked up to the amp, plugged in, and stated in a monotone, ‘Hello my name is Ben Levin and I am going play ‘Summerboy’ by Lady Gaga.’ Then I screamed, ‘ONE!!!!!! TWO!!!!! THREE!!!!! FOUR!!!!!!!!’ and began to play ‘Summerboy’ as if it was a cut off of a Rage Against The Machine record.

I flailed around and jumped with the riffs and to my surprise the cable came out of my guitar (not that surprising really.) When the cable came out I kept playing and ran up to the judges table, so they could hear my guitar acoustically. That made them laugh and they applauded. They told me I should plug back in and show them a ‘rocking mad crazy shredding solo.’ I went up to the amp cranked the distortion all the way and played a Gaga riff, then soloed over it. Keep in mind this audition did not allow for backing tracks and I was playing by myself. I outlined the chord progression from the Gaga riff as I played, and used a lot of rhythmic phrasing in addition to playing fast. I also used the whammy bar a lot. (NOTE: These details are VERY IMPORTANT, as you will see if you read on to what happens at my next audition when I failed to phrase well……)

After I finished, I left the hall and the casting director told me that I had made it to final callbacks the next day. I was thrilled! Really really really excited!!

The next day I waited around all day practicing the Gaga songs and arrived for the 4:30 callback at 3:50. When I arrived I found out that Lady Gaga had left and would see selected musicians in an additional third audition the next day. I cringed at the thought of missing three days of school and possibly not getting into the band, but I quickly realized that I was learning a lot at the audition that I couldn’t learn anywhere else. As I waited around for the audition to start, I talked to some of the other guitarists and my Berklee friends who had made callbacks.

The guitarists were generally really nice people. One person was a Berklee graduate who moved to LA. He gave me a lot of advice, stating that LA is the place to go if you want to tour with other bands a lot, and New York is the place for jazz, but he didn’t know which was better if you are leading your own band. I met another guitarist who graduated from USC. He was really cool and friendly. He was older and more experienced then me, and I could tell that he knew what he was doing (turns out I was right, he made it through to meet Gaga).

2 hours passed slowly and the guitarists were finally lined up to audition. I had the misfortune of being called 2nd in line. We entered the same hall, however this time there were more people sitting at the judges table. The judges seemed like they were getting tired and the casting staff was a lot more stressed out than they had been the day before. We were told to play a solo and then some Gaga. They also made a point to emphasize the importance of stage presence.

So, there I was… In a group of 15 guitarists from all over the world, dressed up like vampire bikers and about to play in front of managers, casting directors, famous musicians and who knows who else, for a spot on an international arena tour with the biggest name to hit pop music in a long time. It was so surreal, and I couldn’t help but smile. The guitarist before me seemed to be a well-established guitarist already. The judges appeared to have heard of him. He played pretty well, but didn’t freak out the way I thought they wanted us to. So, in my head I figured, ‘Let’s take yesterday’s fiasco up a notch.’ It was my turn to audition and I went about everything the same way as I had the day before but slightly more insane.

I plugged my guitar in, checked the tone for less than a second, then asked the judges if they were ready. I proceeded to play all of the open strings really loud, then I played a bunch of over the top shred and hit a really high note (B bent up to C# 19th fret.) I held the note and kept hammering into it (no reverb channel on the amp, so that didn’t sound as good as I had hoped.) I started simulating the love act with my guitar and then I picked it up by its whammy bar and held a really high harmonic while pointing to the sky. I looked the judges right in the eye and started playing ‘Just Dance’ by Gaga. They stared at me blankly as I ran back and forth across the stage, and I realized that they didn’t get it. I finished and knew that I wouldn’t get to the next round. I forgot to groove and phrase well. Every guitarist after me tried to out-shred me, and even though a lot of them were sloppy, some players were good enough that it made my playing seem average. Then, a couple players went really crazy onstage literally smashing guitars, which made me seem even more average.

I know that if I had gone later, my strategy would have changed, but that’s just how it goes. The truth is that a lot of the guitarists were very good. Four of them were exceptionally good in my opinion.

Here are things that they did, that I will do next time I audition:

Three of them made great use of effects pedals, particularly octave, loops, whammy, and delay.

They all avoided moving around too much while playing the rhythm guitar parts so they all established a great groove and solid performance from the start, but moved more later in the performance when they were more comfortable and had already demonstrated a solid groove.

They all shredded a little. Not a ton, but enough so that they showed their chops.

They all played for as long as they could, and didn’t cut themselves off until several minutes had passed.

Three of them looked the part (which makes me really impressed with the fourth guitarist who got through with just blue jeans and a flannel shirt.)

Here are some things that I found disturbing about the process:

One guitarist who made it to the final rounds was an attractive girl. She was very friendly and played with a lot of energy but was having a rough audition. After she played the judges asked her to remove her coat so they could see her body better. She had a great figure and one judge who never said anything throughout the whole audition process looked up from his cell phone and exclaimed, ‘That’s what’s up!!’ The judges nodded at each other and she sat back down. I am not going to say whether or not she made it through because of her looks, her playing, or both, because anything I state on the subject is purely speculation and I don’t want to assume anything. What I will say, however, is that I thought it was demeaning to her since they never inspected any of the male guitarists, and it was my first significant brush with the sad but predictable reality that the pop industry has a shallow and rotten side to it.

They never asked the guitarists or any of the instrumentalists to play in a band setting, and I think that makes the audition less effective at picking out the best group.The drummers’ final audition was a drum-off (synonymous with shred-off.) I don’t see how that will result in finding the best drummer for Lady Gaga’s band.

Final thoughts and important observations:

If you get an audition, begin preparing as early and thoroughly as possible and have a resume ready.

Be as good at your instrument as possible: Learn how to shred, learn how to groove, learn how to improvise, learn how to move while you play.

Dress the part for auditions but don’t put too much weight on that.

Remember tone and groove are just as important (not more or less) as chops. (At least for this audition.)

No audition in the future will ever be exactly the same as this, so I actually have no idea if any of my advice will apply to your experiences, but if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that you will have to be able to deal with chaos. No matter how much you prepare, you will face surprises. A friend of mine told me, ‘Luck is when good preparation and opportunity meet.’ I definitely believe that now.

Are You Experienced?

2011-07-07T15:17:00.000-07:00

An excellent forum post from fellow Aussie Indie Guitarist Chris Brooks.

Chris is of similar vintage to myself and like Chris, I remember the days of cassette and then later, the CD. Like Chris too, I remember walking into an "imports" record store and being in a state of euphoria at the sheer amount of music from artists I'd read about in Guitar magazines but had never actually heard...

As we all know, the web and iTunes has changed the musical landscape forever. Instead of being blown out the door sideways by a unique album cover or liner notes, one is more likely to have the same experience via an artists flash-heavy web-page or interactive on-line something-or-other. Over to Chris:

________________________________________________________________

When writing a Forward for my upcoming CD packaging, I was reflecting on the anticipation I used to feel when a new album from my favorite artist (or some new discovery) would finally come into stock at Utopia Records in Sydney, and the "process" I used to go through before hearing it. Here's what I wrote for the CD jacket.

Between you and me, I love the fact that you paid for this album. Yes, it’s getting harder as each year goes by for a musician to find suitable compensation in the recorded medium, but I’m so glad you’ve made your investment in me. We’ve all got our points of view on “the industry”, but I thank God that there are still people willing to look past the price of plastic and paper involved in a reproducing a CD, and make a symbolic contribution to the artist for the experience of an album.

As a younger man, I relished the ritual of buying an album from the store (sometimes completely blind, buying on a whim, a guess, or a recommendation), then spending the hour-long train ride home reading the CD jacket, taking in the details of who did what on the album, reading and analysing the song titles and lyrics, scouring the thank-yous for names I recognise, and guessing what the songs might sound like. The anticipation often made the eventual first listen even more exciting. And if the album rocked, which it mostly did (I always was a good pick), it would stay in my CD player for two months, where it would be, to use a cliche, the soundtrack to the events happening in other areas of my life.

We’re truly in ever-changing times, and there has been such a change of mindset towards music and its value in our lives. Albums are gobbled down like breakfast cereal, and like cereal, we’re ready to replace it with another meal a few hours later. It seems like the listening experience in our time-starved, information-loaded, easily-distracted lives has somehow diminished the impact we allow a single album to have in our lives. It is my hope that you buck the trend and really take time to enjoy this album!

Let's not talk about file"sharing" here, but instead... do you feel that the instant availability (by whatever means) of music, the faster than ever pace of life, and our extremely divided attention in this current age has diluted the experiences I described above?

I'd be keen to hear what the teens and 20 somethings out there feel about how us old guys in our 30s and beyond grew up listening to vinyl and CDs.

Apple's iCloud + The Music Industry = ?

2011-06-06T23:27:00.000-07:00

Apple's penchant for pushing the envelope of possibilities has some music industry peeps up in arms it seems. Some would call Apple's new service "innovation" while others may simply label it more marketing hype and mere "aggravation" that promotes laziness and an "everything for nothing" mindset on part of the music consumer.

Original article (authored by Asher Moses) as published on the Sydney Morning Herald website below:

Apple's new cloud music service has been criticised by sections of the music industry for encouraging piracy by allowing people to essentially legitimise their pirated music collections.

Today Apple announced iCloud, which will allow people to store their songs, calendar entries and other files on Apple's servers and have this content readily accessible over the air on Apple devices including the iPhone and iPad.

But alongside it is a new tool called iTunes Match, which has been dubbed by some as a "music pirate amnesty" and others as a way of bringing pirates into the legal music store fold.

The $US24.95 a year service scans users' hard drives for music, including files obtained illegally, and matches them with the authorised tracks in Apple's iTunes library. It then makes a quality iTunes version of the tracks automatically accessible in the iCloud.

iTunes Match will initially be only available to US users but it is understood Apple is working on signing licences to enable it to launch in other territories.

Michael Speck, who ran the music industry's landmark court case against file sharing network Kazaa and is now working on technologies to reduce piracy, said Apple was "no better than the old p2p pirates".

"If you can store all your pirate content you won't need to buy content will you?" said Speck of iTunes Match.

"Let me put it this way: if you can legally park your stolen car in my garage will you rush out and actually pay for your own car?"

Speck dubbed the $US25 access fee for iTunes Match a "$25 fee for an alibi" and questioned whether that amount would be split fairly among the copyright owners.

"Putting aside that this means a 1000 song catalogue will only cost the pirate 2.5 cents a song, there is no way that Apple could fairly compensate the actual victims and still take its cut," he said.

Nick O'Byrne, general manager of the Australian Independent Record Labels Association, also expressed concern, saying in any deal record labels would make just a tiny proportion of the amount they would have if they had sold the tracks legitimately.

"Why buy at 'full price' when you can pirate as many songs as you like and absolve yourself of guilt by paying $25 a year?" he said.

But O'Byrne pointed out that, with iTunes Match, record labels would get the chance to "monetise tracks that have already been pirated".

"[They are] tracks that they were never going to make money on anyway," he said.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple will take 30 per cent of the $US25 a year fees and give the rest to the record labels.

Copyright law expert and senior lecturer at the University of Queensland Kimberlee Weatherall said that even if people passed their pirated music collections through iCloud they could still be targeted.

"You could still be sued for the act of downloading, which involves the making of an unauthorised copy not covered by any licences Apple might have," Weatherall said.

"It makes sense for the labels to license and get a cut from these uses – at present, they get nothing from any unauthorised downloads and uses of unauthorised downloads."

But Weatherall was concerned about the long-term competitive implications of services such as iCloud because it further locked people in to a single music service.

She was also concerned that by allowing Apple to scan their hard drive for music, people were potentially opening themselves up to legal action from the music industry if Apple was ever forced to hand over data on users.

However, it is understood that Apple's service is unable to tell the difference between a legitimate and pirated music track stored on the user's hard drive.

Colin Jacobs, chairman of the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said the service raised interesting questions about whether people could essentially "launder" their pirated music collections by porting them to iCloud.

He fully supports the service but said it was an excellent example of how the traditional concepts of copyright struggle in the digital age.

"Innovation in services such as this is crucial and a benefit to productivity and the economy," he said.

"We can't derail them by letting the copyright police examine everybody's content and demand to know if the songs once came from a CD or not."

A spokesman for the Australian Recording Industry Association said: "ARIA will not be making an official comment on any aspect of the iCloud service at this stage."

The iCloud service is similar to music lockers recently launched by Google and Amazon but these are not fully supported by record labels and, unlike Apple's offering, users are required to go through the lengthy process of uploading every song in their libraries.

In addition to iCloud, Apple also unveiled a revamped version of MacOS X, Lion, which will be available in July for $31.99, while the next version of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 5, could be installed by Australians from "spring".

The music industry is in negotiations with internet service providers to come up with a solution to widespread online piracy.

Yesterday, Fairfax Media reported that the industry in Australia had backed down on demands that repeat copyright infringers have their internet services disconnected. It is still calling for ISPs to send warning notices to those it identifies as illegal downloaders.

Unlike in the US, so far the Australian music industry has been reluctant to sue individuals for illegal file sharing.

A recent survey of 700 Australians by The Project Factory found 40 per cent of respondents admitted to digital piracy while 30 per cent said they never paid for any content downloaded online. Key reasons outlined for pirating content were that it's free (76 per cent), convenient (74 per cent) and that there was no way to get hold of the content legally (70 per cent).

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mp3s/apple-icloud-legitimises-music-pirates-20110607-1fq76.html#ixzz1OZHrLrZh

Change Is Constant

2011-02-10T16:43:00.001-08:00

A fantastic article by Craig Anderton from their online newsletter service "HC Confidential" (issue 103 to be precise) on the one constant that all musicians face, regardless of age, style or nationality - change.

Over to Mr Anderton:

It's more true than ever that the only constant is change. When the internet appeared, pundits felt it would alter the music business forever. But few could anticipate how total, and how swift, those changes would be. No one predicted that the mighty Tower Records or Virgin Megastores would fall, or that the quest for fidelity would turn into a quest for portability - otherwise we'd be listening to SACDs instead of iPods. Few realized that the future of cutting-edge radio wasn't in satellites, but on the net; even fewer anticipated that the reign of the album would give way to the return of the single's dominance.

Trends have a certain similarity to surfing. Waves come, and either you're in the right place to catch that wave and ride it, or you're not. Or worse yet, you try to catch the wave, but it wipes you out. How can you make sure you're not only in a position to catch that wave, but also to ride it?

As musicians, we face a double whammy: Like it or not, music is a fashion industry. Sometimes hemlines go up and sometimes they go down. There was a period of time when it almost seemed like Congress passed a law mandating that rock music had to apply gated reverb to drums and that new age albums had to have a DX7 imitation Fender Rhodes piano patch. These days, pitch-corrected vocals are hot - but this too shall pass and something else will take its place.

Couple this with the rapid rate of technological change, where skills you learn can become irrelevant all too quickly. I'm really good at programming an Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer - so what? Sure, musical technique will always be helpful to you, but will being able to play scales really fast matter if you get bitten by the DJ bug and find the most important skill is being able to beat-match with unerring precision over a multiple-hour set?

Different people react differently to a changing world. Some cling to their "tubes and Teles," and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that - a well-crafted, great-sounding guitar part will always be able to find a home. Others use new technology like a disposable tissue. I knew L.A. studio musicians in the '80s who'd buy a new synthesizer, exploit a few presets to the max ("Digital Native Dance," anyone?), and then move on to the next synthesizer and repeat the same process. They never really learned their instruments, but it didn't matter: After all, the checks cleared.

Perhaps the best way to react to change is simply to give up trying to make sense of what's happening. Returning to our surfing analogy, if you get caught in a rip current, trying to fight it will only weaken you and probably take you further out to sea. Savvy swimmers know to swim sideways, out of the range of the rip current, and let the waves push them gently back to shore. If you don't like surfing analogies, try this one: When you're driving in the snow, turning against the skid will just get you into more trouble - you need to steer with the skid. Only then will you regain control of your car.

Resisting change is doomed because change is going to happen anyway - just ask the Egyptian government, as one recent example. But embracing all change as it comes along doesn't work either, because you'll end up going down a lot of dead ends (is anyone still using a Stepp guitar? I didn't think so).

To loop back again to our surfing analogy, you don't have to paddle madly to reach every wave just as it's cresting. Sometimes it's better just to wait for a wave to find you, then catch that one. Or you might see a wave forming on the horizon, decide it looks promising, and paddle to reach that one. The point is that in this scenario, you're the one in control, not the waves; waves come and go, but it's up to you to decide which ones you want to catch, and which ones you don't.

Remember, surfing isn't about catching every wave, it's about enjoying and riding the ones you do catch. And you don't have to jump on every change just to be trendy. Back in the 60s, in the midst of the psychedelic revolution, a group named Creedence Clearwater Revival resurrected a swampy, bluesy sound that hadn't been popular in years - and achieved huge success, because turning their backs on change ended up being change in itself.

Sure, sometimes it's a good idea from a commercial standpoint to follow a fashion trend or two, and sometimes it's worth changing how you work to accommodate a technological advance. But when all is said and done, it really is all about the music. And the only change that really matters there is pursuing your art, being true to yourself, and getting better and better at what you do. Then regardless of what happens, you'll be ready with what people really want from music: emotional impact. And that doesn't come from a plug-in, the state of the internet, or a new synthesizer . . . it comes from inside you.

—Craig Anderton

Facebook Folly

2011-02-05T19:06:00.000-08:00

A great article from Suzy Freeman Green (click here for the original article) on the authenticity of Facebook friendships, something I've blogged about previously. Here it is:

The folly of unquestioning belief in Facebook friends

Suzy Freeman-Greene - February 5, 2011

Facebook is a brilliant time-waster and a nifty way of sharing stuff with relatives or like-minded people. But how is it shaping our idea of friendship?

SCREENS are everywhere in the new film Catfish. Screens displaying urgently typed Facebook comments. Screens filled with text messages or Google maps or GPS co-ordinates. In one lovely shot, filmed at night, the blue light of an iPhone screen casts a ghostly shadow across its owner's hand. This screen illuminates his world.

The phone belongs to Nev Schulman, a New York photographer whose online friendship with a Michigan family is documented in Catfish. Schulman first befriends eight-year-old Abby on Facebook after she sends him a painting of one of his photos. Gradually he is also drawn into a friendship with her mother, Angela, and an intense flirtation with her older sister, Megan.

Inevitably, when Schulman tracks down this family after eight months of messages and phone chats, things are not as they seemed. Those online renditions of pop songs (Megan claims to be a talented singer), breathless status updates (''Megan is now single!''), glamorous Wall photos and flirtatious messages turn out to be the work of someone with a rich imagination and a deeply poignant story.
Advertisement: Story continues below

Catfish is a Facebook-era morality tale; a cautionary fable about taking too much at face value when friendships are mediated by screens and software.

As a documentary, it didn't always ring true to me. (Why does the handsome, successful Nev befriend these distant strangers? Why didn't they Skype?) But when I saw it in Carlton this week there was a lot of knowing, squeamish laughter from the audience as the action unfolded. The flirty messages and intense, seductive trajectory of this networked friendship struck a chord.

Of course it's pretty easy to avoid this particular Facebook scenario - don't befriend people you haven't met (though such restraint can seem positively monk-like in a world in which friends are collected and displayed like trophies). But in more subtle ways, the filmmakers argue, we're all polishing our Facebook identities with carefully chosen photos or lists of interests. ''You're curating who you are,'' Schulman suggested in a recent interview.

Facebook is a brilliant time-waster and a nifty way of sharing stuff with relatives or like-minded people. But how is it shaping our idea of friendship?

A few months ago I realized the more time I spent there, the more it felt like I was hovering around people with busier, cooler, more exciting lives. The effect was strangely deflating. Friendship isn't meant to feel like this.

Such feelings are partly vindicated by new research from Stanford University's psychology department. A survey of college students found that they generally underestimated how unhappy other people were - and thus often ended up feeling more miserable as a result.

Lead researcher Alex Jordan got the idea for the study after watching his friends' reactions after visiting Facebook. ''They were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life,'' he told Slate columnist Libby Copeland.

Social networking, Copeland observes, may worsen our tendency to overestimate other people's happiness. ''By showcasing the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions of people's lives, and inviting constant comparisons in which we tend to see ourselves as the losers, Facebook appears to exploit an Achilles heel of human nature.''

You can't have 500 or even 50 close friends. Unless you come from an unusually large, close family (I don't), most Facebook friends are acquaintances. Jordan suggests we view their Facebook profiles with the same scepticism used to assess airbrushed magazine photos - no one is really that happy, just as no one is really that thin.

True friends, as Alain de Botton has written, do not evaluate us according to worldly criteria. ''It is the core self they are interested in; like ideal parents, their love for us remains unaffected by our appearance or position in the social hierarchy, and so we have no qualms in dressing in old clothes and revealing that we have made little money this year.''

But how different is this ''core self'' to our Facebook self?

Author Zadie Smith, who quit Facebook two months after joining, has described its prevailing tone as ''falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous''. This is an overstatement - Facebook is a valuable conduit for political activism and you can be miserable there, too - yet she has a point.

Facebook's software, as Smith notes, reflects the preoccupations of the Harvard nerd who designed it, with its ''pokes'', ''status updates'' and endless friend trawls. It's a popularity contest, in a way. And as Copeland writes, the presence of a ''like'' button but no ''hate'' button reinforces a kind of upbeat spin doctoring of bad news. Posting a comment no one responds to can feel pretty lonely.

Facebook is a parallel world now; you can weave in and out, documenting and organising your non-screen life. Increasingly, it's the chief portal through which many of us access the potentially liberating chaos of the internet.

Everyone uses Facebook differently. I still visit, mostly as an onlooker, but I tend to talk to close mates privately. My friends provide a constant, diverting flow of photos, film clips, links, news items and sometimes choice observations but I don't necessarily confuse this with a deep connection. I recently bumped into one and we exchanged three sentences of conversation.

Record Companies Struggle With Digital Reality

2011-02-01T13:29:00.000-08:00

Music Industry Struggles To Make Digital "Leap Of Faith."

Article by Alexandra Topping
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/31/music-industry-digital-midem

In the louche Martinez hotel bar in Cannes, a sharply dressed young man launched into a tirade against the music industry convention he was attending. ''All you hear is these old men whining about the past,'' he said. ''Well you know what? The genie is out of the bottle. You try and put it back in and you will die … and then we will take over.''

His was an extreme view but at this year's Midem, Europe's biggest music conference, there was an undeniable feeling of transition of power from music's old guard to its digital avant-garde.
But even as the industry recognises it needs to change, it is not clear that the digital future is strong enough to support the global rock'n'roll machine.
In a keynote speech, Jean-Bernard Levy, the head of the media giant Vivendi, which owns Universal Music Group, said the company was working to ''reinvent the music industry'', with 30 per cent of its revenues coming from new business models, but admitted ''the music business is still only part of the way to reinventing itself''.

This reinvention is taking far too long, according to Forrester Research's analyst Mark Mulligan, who gave an explosive presentation at Midem. ''Unless the labels and publishers change the way they license services … the trend of dying CD sales and stalling digital downloads [will] continue,'' he said. ''Labels are going to have to feel the long-term pain before they start licensing as aggressively and liberally as they need to.''

Mulligan said the music industry had to come to terms with the fact that its raison d'etre - songs - was no longer the product it had to sell. ''Content is no longer king. Its throne has been taken by experience. Yet how many music services really focus on experience?''
Certainly the digital experience could improve. Digital startups complain that getting publishers and labels to license new services, such as streaming sites, is fiendishly complicated.
Rights holders - the music majors - insist they are making the deals but say they are being held to ransom, asked to make cut-price arrangements with hundreds of unproven services that offer only nominal revenue.

The result is that new investment money is no longer chasing startups focusing on serving up songs online. Many startups and investors, fed up with the byzantine licensing process of music content, are beginning to focus on peripheral music services, such as Songkick, which gives fans the bands' touring itineraries, or MXP4, a social music gaming service.

Of course, the labels vehemently deny dragging their feet. Francis Keeling, the vice-president of digital at Universal Music, insisted the company wanted to work with the full gamut of startups, adding: ''[We want] to make the licensing process fast, so that they can get to the market as soon as possible.''

Yet the transition from recorded to digital music industry has been painfully slow.

The streaming service Spotify is only now edging towards launching in the United States after more than one stalled attempt. It is not available in Australia. Others have been lost - most recently, Sky Songs, BSkyB's music-streaming subscription service, which closed in December after failing to attract enough customers. That has not deterred Sony which, in an event featuring big hitters from all the major labels, announced the rollout of its subscription service. Unlimited Music will cost from €3.99 ($5.50) a month for a basic plan to €9.99 for a premium service, with unlimited listening and the option to make playlists. The service is expected to start in Australia within six months.

Sony says it will not follow the ''freemium'' model of ad-supported services such as We7 or Spotify because, as Thomas Hesse, the head of digital operations and corporate strategy, succinctly put it: ''Free doesn't make any money.'' He has a point.

By the end of 2010 Spotify was estimated to have about 750,000 paying subscribers, up from 320,000 in March, but has yet to make a profit. Its competitor, last.fm, made a pre-tax loss of £2.8 million ($4.5 million) in 2009 after a £17 million loss in the previous year. The growth in the digital market - once hailed as the industry's saviour - appears to be stuttering.

A report from the international music industry body, the IFPI, revealed last month that the global growth in digital music halved in 2010, with only ''single digit'' percentage growth in the more mature US digital music sector. If this is to change, Mulligan said, digital services must lead innovation. ''If you play to the record labels' rule book you get nowhere. These startups need to make their own rules, and not let the labels lead the conversation.''

At the Martinez, the conversation was stilled for a moment as music executives and tech geeks stood and listened to the Guillemots performing during the British music show. With an irony not entirely lost on the audience, their final song's insistent refrain was ''yesterday is dead''. That is something that most in the music business now seem to recognise but whether they can do what it takes to make tomorrow live remains to be seen.

Left Field Musician Pre-Requisite: Motor-home

2011-01-24T13:05:00.000-08:00

This just in on the Rave Magazine classified section, and just when I thought I'd "seen it all" -

Western Qld tour for 4 weeks with singer/guitarist around Oct Nov playing 80/20 cover/originals. I have the PA & gig contacts - Do you have a motor home or camper-van? Must be competent lead player with good BVs. Some accommodation supplied.

And here I was foolishly and ignorantly believing that motor-homes were exclusively for retirees or mega rock stars - I guess I forgot to factor in the occasional 4 week tour playing covers and originals. I've got a long way to go!

Just For Laughs: Crowd FAIL

2011-01-15T15:05:00.000-08:00

What exactly is it with the inverse relationship between stellar musicianship and crowd numbers? Just another of life's mysteries I guess...

Social Media Mirages: The Fakery of Online Friends :(

2011-01-10T00:54:00.000-08:00

Just this past week, I read the disturbing true-life story of Simone Back, a middle-aged lady with a collection of Facebook friends that totaled just over 1000 mark.
What's tragic about having over a thousand virtual friends? Well nothing per say, but in Simone's case, she posted a suicide note only to find that virtually all of her "friends" were anything but.

According to the Mail Online article in question, Miss Back posted her final status update at 10.53pm on Christmas Day. At 11pm, one of Miss Back’s friends wrote in response: ‘She ODs all the time and she lies.’

An hour later a Facebook user wrote: ‘Did you catch the part about Simone taking pills?? .. the ‘bye bye’ part?? Did anyone go by personally and check on Simone.. or call 999?? what’s wrong with you people??’

The first friend responded: ‘She does it all the time, takes all of her pills,’ adding: ‘She’s not a kid anymore.’

Another Facebook user replied: ‘If any of you lot actually call yourself a friend one of you should call around and see if she’s ok, so glad I don’t personally know any of you, heartless.’

While Facebook may have it's positives, scenarios like these accentuate the fact that your posse of online friends are at best semi-contactable and at worst, just plain fakes who have accepted your request to boost their online status or web-appeal. I ditched my personal Facebook page a few years ago after a family member tipped me over the edge with their online fakery and absurdly insincere conduct. It just struck me at the time how "dumb" the entire thing was so I literally "upped stumps" and haven't looked back since.

Yes, you can call me old-fashioned, but it seems to me at least that the majority of people are happy to skimp on the "real thing" and settle instead for an online-mirage that propagates the fantasy of affluence and popularity. Hey - did you know that you can even purchase online friends these days? True story kids.

So what has any of this got to do with the music industry?

Well, if you didn't already know it, the entire music industry is pretty much built on contacts and networking. You need to "know" certain people to get your foot in the door sometimes; that's just how it works people - I can't emphasize that enough!

I have lost track of how many times I've read about or spoken to people who've scored great gigs because they were on speaking terms with someone who was able to recommend them for a gig or an opportunity of some description. And here's the thing: just because you've added "____" to your MySpace page or as a Facebook friend, it doesn't amount to a single thing. I dare say they've taken very little notice of little old you :(

99.99% of the time, having an actual face-to-face conversation with a person and engendering a sense of trust and affability will go a lot further than a lengthy email or a poke via Facebook.
Social media has it's place but in the real world, nothing quite suffices for a living, breathing interactive human being - wouldn't you agree?

Not that there is anything wrong with Facebook or MySpace or Twitter but just be real for a second... Would you recommend someone for a gig just because they were an online pal that you'd never actually met? Probably not.
What I think we're losing with all of this "online connection" is the reality of solid relationships that are built over time through shared experiences and mutual respect for one another. You don't have the luxury in real life of just "adding" a friend - it takes time and it takes effort on both the part of both people; bear that in mind next time you shoot a well-respected musician or musical connection an email wanting work or a favor of some description.

Same thing goes for relationship breakdowns... Whatever happened to being honest with each other? It's just too much "hard work" for most people, much easier instead to simply ignore a phone call, an email or a text message. Yeah that's the way, plead ignorance "Nah man, I never got your message..."

Or better yet, why not break it to them via SMS?

I had one very short-lived staff member cancel on me at the last minute via SMS when I ran my tuition school - I can't tell you how disrespecting that is so please, if you're ever tempted to go that route, think again because if the person you send it to is anything like me, your head will be on the chopping block at the next available opportunity.

So to conclude, if you're looking to "break into the scene" the very best thing you can do is to actually get off your keister and go physically meet some people and put the time into building a solid relationship. It's as important a skill as anything you'll ever do on your instrument and it's probably going to get your further than endlessly honing that 32nd note triplet you've been practicing for the past 3 years.

Annoying musician habits... name dropping

2010-12-09T13:25:00.000-08:00

Name dropping or as it's commonly referred to, "the name-drop" is an idiosyncratic affliction that seems to habitate and dare I say, "infect" virtually any and every music scene around.

Now I've lived in 3 different states in Australia but I have to say, the name dropping culture seemed particularly bad in Sydney. True story. Emphasis on the "particularly" part.

Now perhaps it was just my experience or the circles I moved in but virtually every muso on the scene felt the need to drop in any and every name they had worked with, made coffee for, had the email address of or met one time at a party in order to somehow inflate their own sense of self-importance to you. It was a tragic thing to behold. Tragic.

Worse though, it was expected you'd do the same. It was almost like you had to recite your resume and mention every "A to C list" player you'd gigged with or had a remote 3rd-party connection to.

Here's a typical conversation I'd have with a fellow muso at a gig when I lived in Sydney:

Bill: Hey, nice to meet you, you're the bass player right?
Bass player: Yeah hi. This your first gig with the band tonight?
Bill: Yep, I'm sure it'll be a good one...
Bass player: I had a good gig last night!
Bill: Oh yeah?
Bass player: Yeah, did a gig with "____", "____" and we had "____" sat in as well. Those guys are killer, great players. "____" just came back from tour with "____" as well.
Bill: Oh cool... (rolls eyes) There you go.
Bass player: Who else have you played with?
Bill: Well I've only just moved here from interstate so I'm still finding my feet and all of that
Bass player: Yeah man, you gotta hook up with "____", he gets all the gigs in town.
Bill: Right... I'll keep that in mind.

I'm sure you've had similar conversations before. Somehow the credibility of a musician seems intricately tied to how many names they drop or whether they've played with "such and such" on a regular basis. Someone pass me the vomit bucket.

And then there was the "venue drop" - that's where you drop in the venues you'd played at or better yet, you'd "one-up" someone if they mentioned they were playing there. It'd go something like this:

Musician 1: Hey, how's thing?
Musician 2: Yeah good man, had a gig last night
Musician 1: Oh?
Musician 2: Yeah we played at "____"
Musician 1: Cool!
Musician 2: Where are you gigging tonight?
Musician 1: At the "____"
Musician 2: Yeah it's a cool venue, I've played there quite a bit with "____" and "____"

Musician 1 just copped simultaneous venue and name drop action from smarty-pants musician 2 and as you can probably tell from the sub-text, musician 2 was relishing in said dropping of names and venues. You know it.

Fact is, it doesn't really matter what "scene" you're in, musicians egos seem naturally inclined towards such shallow and superficial banter. The connections these name-droppers have with the names themselves are about as proverbially as broad as the horizon but more often than not, less than ankle deep.

But as they say - "that's the way the cookie crumbles", it's just part and parcel of the industry and it's probably not going to disappear in a hurry.
Here's the thing though - next time you're on a gig, try and think a bit less about how you can work "____'s" name into the conversation as a way of advancing yourself in the eyes of your peers and more about how you can complement the musical situation you're currently in.

You know, it's not really about you at all :)

All that glitters - Henry, Gibson and the Revolution?

2010-12-06T14:06:00.000-08:00

A fantastic blog post by guitarist/musician Alex Skolnick on Gibson guitar's so-called "revolution"

From: http://www.guitarplayer.com/BlogComments.aspx?id=123187&blogid=967

Exhausted from a long recording session the previous day, mentally prepping for an upcoming tour the next week and granted one day of free time, there were places I’d rather be at 11am on a crisp Fall Thursday morning—relaxing at a quiet neighborhood coffee house; enjoying the sanctity of my Brooklyn apartment and its books, paintings, and vintage guitars; or going for a run in the park. Instead, I found myself packed into a crowded theater within the Hard Rock Cafe theme restaurant, right smack in the middle of Times Square.
Why? Because it’s not every day one gets an e-mail invite that is written in bold ‘stencil’ font, has the feel of a classified military document and says this:

GIBSON INVITES YOU TO WITNESS A REVOLUTION.
Henry Juszkiewicz, Chairman and CEO of Gibson Guitar Corp, will address members of the press, artists and fans, with an announcement that will change music forever. This is more than a press conference. More than an event. THIS IS AN UPRISING!

Revolution? Uprising? Change music forever? Those are some pretty strong words.
The first words that came to my mind were, "Give me a f**king break." At the same time, I was curious. After all, Gibson is the "Coca-Cola"of guitar companies—the biggest in the world, the most recognizable brand name, and the one with arguably the most historical significance (although a case can be made for Fender Musical Instruments—the "Pepsi" of guitar companies).

Surely Gibson wouldn’t make statements like this without having the goods to back them up. Right?

After checking in at the door, my manager and I grabbed one of the last available tables, joining the fray of music biz folk clamoring to see what the fuss was all about—journalists, music retailers, guitar enthusiasts and over in the right corner, posing for pictures, a famous Gibson endorsee and childhood hero of mine: original Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley.
As random acquaintances began coming over to say hello, it felt as though the annual Winter NAMM convention was starting three months early. Then the lights went down, and an announcer introduced Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, whom I’ll hereafter refer to as, Mr. J.

Casually dressed in an official denim jacket and khakis, the balding Mr. J looked like a 50-something business type doing his best to look ‘hip.’ He appeared from behind the giant movie screen, hopped off the stage and walked the floor amongst the puzzled people in the front row. Taking his place in front of the left side of the stage, he looked up at the screen and, skipping all formalities, began speaking into the microphone as the slide show began:

1877—Thomas Edison invents the worlds first phonograph machine. (Cue to next image): 1894—Orville Gibson sells his first instruments, launching Gibson Guitars.

Thus began the photographic retrospective of strategically chosen musical and technological milestone achievements, including the first power tubes, first Moog synthesizers, and more recently, the creation of Blue Tooth (sic) technology.
The majority were Gibson guitar innovations including the early L series archtops, the first humbucking pickups (designed by Seth Lover for Gibson) and Les Paul’s initial solidbody prototypes. This chronological slide show effectively conveyed a message that what we were about to witness would be next in line—a "game changing" creation sure to live up to all the events depicted on that screen.

Where was he going with all this? Would Gibson deliver on their promise? Were we actually watching history in the making?

As the slide show ended, Mr. J began pacing back and forth, practically disappearing in the darkness. He would have been invisible had it not been for his height (Mr. J is well over six feet tall). The crowd quietly murmured above the awkward silence until, in the tone of an NBA coach riling up his team during half time, Mr. J launched into a diatribe about today’s guitars, including those of his own company, describing them all as inexcusably dated:

They’re based on 1950’s technology, for god’s sake! Have we no shame? Where’s the spirit of all those legendary innovators? What about all the breakthroughs in computer and cell phone technology? Why not guitars?! Isn’t time we take instruments forward again, into the future? Hasn’t the time has come for—REVOLUTION?!!

That’s when things got a little weird ... Mr. J stopped pacing for a moment as an assistant handed him a guitar. Like a magician showing the crowd his black magic hat, he held the instrument up for all to see—it looked like a classic red Gibson SG. Grabbing it by its neck, he raised it high above his head like an oversized hammer at a carnival. Then, in a tone reminiscent of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, the part where he shouts out "You can’t handle the truth!" Mr. J. defiantly declared "This is the past!"

I couldn’t help but wonder, "Is he gonna do what I think he...." No sooner had this phrase formulated in my mind than Henry Juszkiewicz, Chairman and CEO of Gibson Guitars, began smashing the red SG against the stage like a frenetic madman. Lacking the physical strength to break it in two, he tossed the wooden corpse as far as he could onto the side of the stage—it landed with a ringing thud. As the crowd gasped in a mix of bemusement, shock, and unmitigated horror, he clamored, "And THIS is the future!"

The screen lifted...

Now, before we get into the Frankenstein-like creation that lay behind that screen, a few words about what we’d just witnessed: smashing a guitar is a contentious gesture under any circumstances. It’s one thing if we’re talking about the Clash, Paul Stanley of Kiss, or most famously, Pete Townshend of the Who—and even then, it’s debatable.

While I, as a fan, have never had a problem with these undeniably great rock bands smashing instruments for their grand finale, I’ve known many musicians—clearly more socially and environmentally conscious than myself—who’ve been bothered by it. But the head of Gibson?! What kind of statement does that make? One would assume that the guitar he destroyed was one of Gibson’s lower end SG’s (let’s hope so), but in Mr. J’s hands, it was nonetheless representative of all that Gibson has ever stood for.

As the makeshift curtain lifted towards the ceiling, a mist of smoke shrouded that which had just been unveiled: a petite, gleaming electric guitar with three shiny chrome pickups, four toggle switches and several knobs (one of which lit up). Bringing to mind what they thought the future would look like in the 1960’s, it resembled a gadget from the animated series The Jetsons—the size was perfect for the tiny hands of George Jetson’s son Elroy and with its feminine reddish/orange hue, better suited for a girl-band fronted by George’s teenage daughter, Judy. Mr. J (Juszkiewicz, not Jetson), then formally introduced us to this colorful concoction: the Gibson Firebird X.

No sooner had we been given our first glimpse of Gibson’s baby monster than the screen came back down and a new slide show started. This one featured close ups of the model—Mr. J’s new pride and joy—one of which he had just been handed.
In one hand he awkwardly held the guitar, in the other hand, a microphone, which he’d often forget to speak into. Describing the Firebird X’s thousands of pick-up configurations, third party ‘apps,’ audio interface, wireless Bluetooth footswitch, robotic tuning pegs and more, he resembled a budget impersonation of Apple CEO Steve Jobs introducing the iPad.

According to Mr. J, every sound you could ever want, electric and acoustic, is right here in the ‘engine’ of this instrument. You want a 1970’s Les Paul Standard with a Seymour Duncan ’59 pickup? It’s here! You want a pre-CBS Strat with split humbuckers? It’s here! You want a Martin steel-string guitar with Fishman Transducer coils? It’s here! You won’t need those guitars anymore! And effects: Delay? Flange? Chorus? Phase? It’s all right here!

I couldn’t help but think of this TV commercial from my youth—an ad for Prego Spaghetti Sauce. "Just as good as homemade" they said, with all the ingredients "Mom" would use. Parsley? Basil? Oregano? IT’S IN THERE! Bulls**t. No jarred, canned or otherwise pre-packaged spaghetti sauce can ever capture the freshness, essence, and vitality of a lovingly homemade pasta sauce by a real Italian mom (or any good cook for that matter). And no great vintage guitar, Gibson, Fender, Martin or otherwise, can ever be replicated in the form of a digitalized, turbo-charged super-guitar. Sorry, not going to happen. Why? Because replication can only take place through processing—and the more processed something is, the more the original quality is lost, whether we’re talking guitar tone or spaghetti sauce. These thoughts would unintentionally be proven right only moments later, during the Firebird X’s official product demo.

As Mr. J barked out "We want you to join our revolution!" his words cueing the screen to rise yet again, the makeshift curtain revealed, standing in the mist... a chubby, middle aged guy from the factory.

With his short dark hair, moustache, and miniscule Firebird X resting upon his belly, he made the guitar look like a plastic toy, as if it were a game controller for Rock Band or Guitar Hero. He proceeded to demo the instrument for us.

Now, I’ll be the first to describe this guy as a very good player—effortlessly gliding from hard rock to blues, to country and other styles. He seemed like a nice, down to earth, unpretentious fellow, an "average Joe."

Unfortunately, his demo fell flat flat, for a couple reasons: First, it was underwhelming from a purely aesthetic standpoint. Let’s face it, image and style isn’t everything, but it is a part of the equation, especially when we’re talking about rock guitar.
Gibson has plenty of great pro players on its roster (Slash, Zakk, Frampton etc..) that would have not only played well but added star power—where were they?

With all due respect, it was a bit awkward to look upon that smoke-filled stage and see this supposed "guitar of the future" played by someone who barely moved and looked less like a performer and more like a plumber (or a portly waiter from Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy)

Secondly and more importantly, everything we heard sounded as though it came from one of those tiny handheld micro-processer/headphone amps, like those made by Zoom and Korg. As an endorsee of one such product, the Korg Pandora PX5D, I find these units wonderful for certain applications, such as warming up, working out ideas and dressing room jams—but not for live performance or serious recording.

While the convenience of these types of processers is amazing, the pre-packaged sounds do not come anywhere near the tone of genuine rigs created by state of the art guitars, real amps, and quality effects pedals and racks. From what I heard, neither does the Firebird X.

One of the beauties of the electric guitar as a musical instrument is the pure, organic quality, despite the fact that the sound is amplified. When guitar tone is done well (Jeff Beck, Billy Gibbons, David Gilmour, Brian May, and Slash being among my personal favorites), our ears are still able to decipher the distinctions of the naked wood through the layers of tonal clothing. In this sense, electric guitar tone is like a fashion statement: ultimately a body (human or guitar), is the core, the solid foundation—"solidbody," if you will.
Any layers, whether sonic or fabric, should serve the purpose of accentuating, not hiding, that which lies underneath. From that demonstration, I got no sense of how the Firebird X—the guitar itself—even sounded underneath its internal labyrinth of technology.

As the guy from the factory wrapped up his product demo, one thing was certain: his boss’s claim that this guitar would render other guitars irrelevant, incite a revolution, and change music forever appeared to be steeped in delusion. For us in the audience, the giant box under the Christmas tree turned out to be a lump of coal, or rather, a lump of coils.
And the next time Mr. J cries "wolf," we will be not running to the scene, but going about our day as planned.
Nonetheless the Firebird X seemed like it might be a fun little gadget to own—worth having not to replace any other guitars, not to play in concert and certainly not to represent the future of music, but as a potential tool, for jamming, songwriting, home recording, etc. Perhaps it would be worth it to pick one up at some point?

Just then, Mr. J opened the floor to questions and someone asked him the inevitable:
"How much is it?" The answer? $5,000. No thanks.

We got up and left.

At this point, it’s time for a disclaimer: I endorse Heritage Guitars. Heritage builds fine handcrafted instruments in the original Gibson plant in Kalamazoo, MI, and is considered to be the David to Gibson’s Goliath. However, the history between these two companies is none of my business and has no impact on my assessment of the Firebird X. At the risk of sounding like those who say, "Some of my best friends are [insert ethnicity, creed etc...]," I proudly proclaim: some of my favorite guitars are Gibsons. When it comes to Gibson, I have no axe to grind (or more appropriately, no chisel to sharpen).

Leaving the Hard Rock, we walked back into the bustle of 42nd St, ready to get back to our lives and reflecting upon all we’d just witnessed. It was difficult not to feel a bit concerned for the future—not the future as embodied by the new Gibson Firebird X—but for the future of Gibson itself. During these trying economic times, instead of developing exorbitant, overpriced, computerized guitars (not to mention tribute models that most potential buyers will never be able to afford, such as the $9,000 Randy Rhoads Tribute Les Paul), what Gibson needs to do is put its energy back into doing what it used to do: create timeless guitars, not futuristic ones, and offer them for prices that, if not low, are at least fair. Instead of flooding the racks of retail stores with watered-down versions of the classic models, such as the current crop of cheapened, hollowed-out Les Pauls mass produced on the assembly line (for the same prices previously designated to the hand-built models), these inferior instruments should be properly labeled and priced as "entry level" or "discount," not passed off to unsuspecting buyers as the real thing.

If there is any hope for Gibson's future, it lies not in its current bombastic leadership, not in its global mass production assembly line factories, but in the hands of those at the little Gibson Custom Shop, where a supremely talented group of master craftspeople continues to painstakingly and lovingly create instruments in the best tradition of Gibson.
During a tour stop in Nashville earlier this year, I had the privilege to witness these men and women at work—it was like watching a team of modern day Michelangelos and Da Vincis in action.

These anonymous, humble folks represent nothing less than the soul of the company. Their stellar creations should be priced like they used to be—worth spending a few more bucks on but not contingent on the buyer being in an upper tax-bracket.
By bringing the costs of their genuine Custom Shop items back down to Earth, presenting (and pricing) the mass-produced assembly line models for what they really are and focusing on remaining "timeless," Gibson could help get more guitars in the hands of players at all levels, remain profitable and earn back something much more valuable than sales figures: it’s integrity.

Some final thoughts: The type of revolution brought about by the Gibson Les Paul could never have been announced or predicted in this manner. I don’t get the sense that the late great Les Paul (the man) introduced the Les Paul guitar for "revolution" as much as innovation.
I can’t picture the warm, self-deprecating Les publically destroying another instrument to make his point. It was the sounds created on the Les Paul over a period of decades, and the musical movements associated with them, including Les’ own country and jazz mix in the '50s, Peter Greene’s electric blues in the '60s, Jimmy Page’s psychedelic textures in the '70s, Randy Rhoads' classically influenced metal in the '80s and Slash’s bluesy, thematic solos in the '90s which, in combination with the design of the Gibson Les Paul, would one day be looked back upon as revolutionary.

I could be wrong, but I just don’t see the Firebird X ever catching on with relevant artists and movements in such a way. Even if it were to catch on (which I think it won’t), my guess is that the Gibson Firebird X would take its place alongside the Keytar (strap on keyboard), a campy vision of the future that became dated before it even left the showroom.

Talent for nuthin'

2010-11-29T14:10:00.000-08:00

It never ceases to amaze me how many grasping and delusional folks inhabit the music industry. Apparently, when God was handing out the musical gene, he must have thought it amusing to throw in several other key ingredients as well?

Take for instance this recent posting on the popular musician classified service here in Australia called "Gumtree" - Here it is:

Music producer with independent record label, seeks expressions of interest from musicians and vocalists (lead and harmonies) for album studio recordings and performance projects in the following genres: Urban Gospel; Neo Soul; Contemporary Jazz/Funk and R&B.

Please reply if you are: willing to contribute your talents for musical exposure; passionate about your craft; experienced; available; committed for the long-term and easy to work with.

If you take the time to read between the lines, it's pretty obvious that:

Said music producer wants talent for not just the stereotypical "minimum wage", but rather "zero dollar" - how charming!

Somehow, Mr or Ms producer sees this as being of benefit to you? Note the emphasis on "exposure" - yes, if you take the time to schlep your gear to their studio (read: bedroom or garage), you'll get a whole lot of "exposure" out of it. Do you really believe that? I hope not.

Not only does this guy or gal want passion, he or she also wants "experience" - and all at no cost to themselves... Un-freaking-believable

Lastly, the icing on the cake is the final statement in this classified of severe delusion: "committed for the long-term and easy to work with" - so in other words, you've got to be able to fit in with his/her schedule, take criticism if need be and of course, stick around for as long as they want or need you to do so.

This whole scenario would be funny if it weren't so sad...

There's a saying that goes along the lines of "if you pay peanuts, you'll get monkeys" and it looks like our hot-shot producer forgot to factor that one into the equation?

It bears mentioning that talent doesn't come cheap.

I know this point is lost on a good many individuals so I'll spell it out here for the dummies - Anyone who is good at what they do has spent untold hours in practice (likely tens of thousands of them), thousands of dollars on musical equipment and has probably spent quite a few years in study as well, probably again, at their own expense.

To imagine that you can spend all of 5 minutes throwing an advert on a free classified website and then kid yourself into thinking that you're going to attract someone of quality and have them stick around and all for absolutely nothing on your part is not only sheer ignorance but abject stupidity.

If only those that placed these kinds of adverts knew how undermining it was for the rest of the industry and how at the end of the day, they're hamstringing their very own future pony ride - here's hoping...

Death by 1000 cuts - why I am boycotting Myspace, Facebook and YouTube.

2010-11-17T14:29:00.000-08:00

Ever heard of the way the Chinese used to do away with especially nasty criminals? Death by 1000 cuts was the way it was done in the good old days and it seems that history has a way of repeating itself. For those unfamiliar with this concept, here it is in graphic detail:

Slow slicing, also translated as the slow process, the lingering death, or death by a thousand cuts was a form of execution used in China from roughly 900 AD until its abolition in 1905. In this form of execution, the condemned person was killed by using a knife to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time. The term língchí derives from a classical description of ascending a mountain slowly. Lingchi was reserved for crimes viewed as especially severe, such as treason and killing one's parents. The process involved tying the person to be executed to a wooden frame, usually in a public place. The flesh was then cut from the body in multiple slices in a process that was not specified in detail in Chinese law and therefore most likely varied. In later times, opium was sometimes administered either as an act of mercy or as a way of preventing fainting. The punishment worked on three levels: as a form of public humiliation, as a slow and lingering death, and as a punishment after death.

You may be wondering what on earth this has to do with me boycotting the "big 3" - Myspace, Facebook and YouTube? (Add the bogus Triple J "unearthed" in there as well)

Well, unfortunately the music industry is now at a point in the so-called "social media revolution" where the independent artist is also subject to this torturous manner of death on an artistic and more importantly financial level. It seems to me that we're living in a world where there's more "independent artists" than there has ever been and yet, there is less original music in the mainstream than ever before. Yuck!

You see, as an independent artist, you're expected to upload your music on literally 1001 websites (no pun intended) with the scarce hope that you'll attract a reasonable fan-base in the process of this venture. The only problem is - if people are getting your music for free, why are they going to bother paying for it? I guess someone forgot to mention that right? Duh.

It's a win-win situation for those hosting the social-media websites, that much is true. Business is booming people - it's a veritable marketers and ad-revenue wet-dream come (or is it "cum"?) true. And for the lazy suits who work for the major labels? Well, for them it's also a bonus; they get paid to sign on a new artist who's already done the work that the label should be doing for them in the first place - marketing and developing a fan-base.
It does work for already established artists but here's the thing - they're always the ones who need the exposure least of all. I heard Tom Cruise remark in a radio interview that he routinely is offered cars, boats and motorbikes off movie sets for free. It's always the people who don't need the stuff who are lapping up the limelight and basking in the freebies.

Ironically, Myspace purports to be "all about the artist" - only thing is, you and I forgot to factor in the reality that it's the ESTABLISHED artist who is rocking the Mypace charts. Duh again.

Do you really think they're going to feature you or I on the front page? They're too busy waving the flag for the latest TV show like Glee or cheering Robbie Williams next release while he contemplates his next controversial remark.

So for me, it's a case of "being the change" - I'm no longer going to play this stupid game. I'm out and I'm proud to be out.

I have to wonder as well - does any amount of social-media networking ACTUALLY produce anything? In the 4+ years I had my Myspace account with it's 17,000 profile views and 12,000+ song plays I don't think in all that time I got one legitimate phone call or gig that eventuated from it. True story. Did I get a butt-load of spam and dumb emails that wasted my time? Yep.

Same goes for YouTube - 22 videos with a combined view count of almost 15,000 and apart from some stupid commentary from try-hard noobs, nothing of substance to show for it.
Have I made any real friends out of it? Nup.
Did I meet anyone who I felt was a kindred spirit? You know the answer to that.

For me, the game is up, it's over and I'm done with posting my stuff online for free so others can offer nothing but criticism and sour-faced remarks.

You want to "get to know me?"

Buy my CD on iTunes or at CDbaby and you'll learn more about me than any amount of Myspacing or YouTubing will give you.

If we all had this attitude, I know that the industry would turn around in a moment. For now, I'll simply do my bit and keep on dreaming... *sigh*

Everyone is wondering if we'll ever have another "Beatles" or another "Elvis" - well, not in this current climate we won't. It's just not going to happen. I'm sure they're out there but when he/she is flogging their material on social-media sites for free, nobody is going to stop and take notice are they?

10-1 Music Industry Myths Exposed - Myth #10

2010-11-15T16:47:00.000-08:00

Myth #10 - Talent Equals Success

We've all heard this one. Maybe your mum or dad, a teacher, your older brother or your aunt or uncle threw this at you while you were young, naive and still had the sparkle of innocence in your eyes -

"...If you practice hard enough, and you put in enough effort, you never know what could happen... One day you could be just like ___________________________________"

*insert your childhood musical inspiration in the blank space provided*

Well the sad reality is that in the so-called "music industry", talent DOES NOT equal success. One only has to look at the array of talentless schmucks who are "living large" to see that talent certainly didn't get them to where they are.

I'm sure, no, I'm certain you know of obscenely talented people who have not "made it" and who are not household names. I could rattle off at least 2 dozen people whom I think are supremely talented but who have only experienced a modicum of success in the music industry. Some of them work "normal" jobs during the day and are happy to exist in the industry without all of the trappings that accompany those who've "made it"

But hang on - where does this notion come from? How is it that almost every young musician actually believes this myth? And let's face it - we've ALL been there before.

Well for starters, in almost every other industry, talent does equal success. Yeah that's right, it's pretty much the case. Stop and think about it for a second. Supremely talented chefs, lawyers, surgeons, accountants, business people, tradesmen etc all usually end up doing rather well for themselves.

But here's the thing. Can you comprehend if some of these professions took the stereo-typical "muso" attitude to their work?

Can you imagine a baseball player getting signed to a major league team who had issues hitting the ball on a consistent basis or who had a half-baked attitude to his training regime? Probably not.

What about a surgeon who turned up for his gig hung over and looking like the stereotypical "dog's breakfast?" We both know it wouldn't happen and if it did, there would absolutely be dire consequences in the boardroom after the fact.

Thirdly, how about a "hot-shot" lawyer who didn't have his or her stuff "together" and couldn't return a phone call or make an appointment on time? We both know the guy or gal would soon lose credibility and clients in a big way.

Somehow though, if a musician takes this approach to either their craft or their practice it's seen as "cool", "keeping it real", "mixing it up", "chilling out" or some other ridiculous epithet that justifies their laziness or general ineptitude to their work.

Somewhere along the line turning up late, not returning phone-calls, an inability to read music, not practicing for the gig, being unorganized, getting smashed at the gig and 1001 other things became not only "OK" but in a sense it defined what was expected.

Oh and then there's the flip-side - if you don't do these things, you automatically qualify as an uptight stressed-out wanker who can't relax and doesn''t have the "vibe" - am I missing something here???

Here's a perfect case in point from news website SMH - full article here

Author - Craig Mathieson (November 5th 2010)

THE American education of Jessica Mauboy began more than a year ago, when the young pop singer and Australian Idol graduate arrived in Los Angeles for arranged songwriting sessions with a slew of successful and famous names in the US urban music scene.

Her first stop was the most intimidating: writer and producer Rodney Jerkins, whose credits include Michael and Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston and Britney Spears.

Mauboy, traveling alone, arrived punctually at Jerkins's Darkchild studios at 9am. "I love his music and I was really, really nervous," she recalls. She was asked to wait while Jerkins got ready and spent an hour imagining how he would introduce a song they would work on and finish together. But when she was ushered into his studio, where Jerkins sat behind a keyboard console, he didn't say a word. For two hours they sat in silence. Jerkins then left the room without explanation, while an offsider attempted to put Mauboy at ease by asking her if she had a kangaroo in her backyard.

At 1pm Jerkins returned, still having not spoken to Mauboy, and he began to essay a rhythm track. This was the signal that Mauboy could broach creative matters and they worked until midnight, although Mauboy was nonplussed when Jerkins decided a Jamaican dancehall tune was the best outcome. She describes the finished song as "interesting" and notes it was not chosen for recording. "It's in a vault somewhere," Mauboy says.

"They all had their little posses, with the smoke blowing, and it was just like that Notorious movie," Mauboy says.

"There was a lot of them sitting back, doing what they want and drinking 'bubbles', which is what they call champagne." Working with a comparatively concise Australian budget, Mauboy discovered that while a fee should get you a producer's name and skill, it doesn't always work that way.

At one Atlanta session, with Jazze Pha (Lil Wayne, Big Boi), the producer was asleep almost the entire time Mauboy was in the studio tracking one of his songs, Handle It. An assistant handled the actual recording work.

hilARIA's - Australian music awards are a "Con Job"

2010-11-11T00:22:00.000-08:00

Irish pop star and now X-Factor Australia judge Ronan Keating has come out publicly declaring that the Australian music awards hosted yearly - the ARIA's - are a "con job"

Read the full article here

While I have some reservations about a pop star from a boy-band naming and shaming such things and throwing words like "credible" around, I really do think that Ronan Keating makes many valid points in his arguments and I would have to concur that the awards have become their own cliche and a real-life parody of themselves.
Indeed, the whole "Australian music industry" is by and large a cesspool of mediocrity and "average" sounding acts. But I guess when the industry can't support itself and people see no issues with downloading music for free, you really do "get what you pay for" and hence, the mess that is the Australian music industry.

Some of the comments on this page I found rather enlightening, I found the honesty rather refreshing.

Here's a sample of some of them:

The Australian music scene will always remain fringe while record companies continue to promote overseas acts as greater events than local bands and singers. It's a shame that so many ultra talented Aussies aren't high profile international stars

I agree with Ronan, the ARIA's is so full of fakeness and is rigged to no end, I refuse to watch it anymore. And by the looks of it nobody else either!! Yet another attempt for Australia to gain publicity for their so called "Awards" nights. At least it has a better name than "the Logies" !!

I'm not a huge fan of pop music and I do prefer JJJ, but I have to agree with Ronan, it's a joke. The Aus music industry is so pretentious now it seems anything that remotely resembles a melody is being shunned. I believe that Angus and Julia Stone have merit, but were they really the most successful artists of the year? Give me a break. Their performance was tediously boring and better suited to the Annandale Hotel than an awards stage.

The ARIA's are a joke because the Austalian Music Industry is a joke. Honestly, who ever heard of most of these artists? The recording industry is run by bankers and accountants who couldn't give a toss about music, just about selling CDs.
You can get out at Pubs and clubs and hear better live bands than those that get the nod at ARIA's. There are a heap of great bands and artists out there that never get a break, never get that recording contract, because they are not playing music that sells. The ARIA's are passed their used by date.

They are industry awards and, as such, the winners are chosen by faceless industry types for reasons nobody else need to know. The real shame about the recent ARIAs is the same thing that's been wrong with Triple J for many years: there's a culture of discrimination against acts with high sales stats, which are seen as "inauthentic", but there's no discrimination against unoriginal and pretentious music (you know, acts that are ACTUALLY inauthentic). From the irritatingly cutesy mumblings of Angus and Julia Stone (I know, you'd think the quota would already be full of Regina Spektor, Joanna Newsom, et al) to the utterly gutless come-on-girls-get-your-clothes-off-and-dance-yeah-babe unimaginative DJ rubbish from Muscles (perfectly at home on 2DayFM, of course), Australia's "indie" music scene is a monstrous marketing industry with no real grasp of independence. And Triple J is so pious about discrimination that it's forgotten to rightly discriminate against total, absolute crap.

I do agree that Ronan is the pot calling the kettle black, but the poor ratings for the ARIAs are due to this year's poor-form music. When will we ever get over ourselves and realise that most forms of pop music are considered AMERICA's artforms? The quality of Australian music has been on the decline since Triple J went national in the 90s. A lack of hooky melodies, shitty production values and crap songwriting all combine to give us acts like the ever-so-Northcote-Social-Club-ish Angus and Julia Stone. It's time the songwriters of this country put their hearts on the table and wrote some honest music, rather than denying the quality of their American influences all in the name of having an 'Australian' sound. What we end up with is a diluted musical identity based on half-arsed ideas and a denial of the world's disinterest in our arts.Good onya, Guy. Although I initially wasn't thrilled about the idea of talent scouting on reality TV, you're the only artist from this phenomenon who has developed as a musician and songwriter.To test my theory: next time you go and see an international touring act, seriously consider whether the Aussie support act would be invited to tour with the Yanks anywhere else but here. Consider everything: the production, song arrangements, originality, the stagecraft. Be honest with your assessment - you might surprise yourself with your conclusion!

Frank - November 11, 2010, 1:31PM - "What annoys me with the Australian music scene is that to legions of 'hip' people Triple J is the holy bible for what is cool music..." I hear ya, but the thing is Frank, Triple J used to be (however momentarily, decades ago, following the lead of Triple R and PBS) a place of worship for good Australian artists and little heard internationals, without expectation of commercial success. Then came Aus. music quotas that are still inadequate, then Triple J was infiltrated by the majors who are disguising acts like Washington in "indie/ alternative" garb and marketing plans. (Looks to me like she wolfed down that 'blue pill'.) And here we are being asked to boo-hoo with Guy Sebastian and Ronan Keating cos they feel like losers! They are losers because they somehow expect the ARIA's to have NOT been a con! The entire entertainment industry is a gigantic con run by thugs and muppets.

"Thugs and Muppets" - sums up my thoughts exactly! On that note, over and out...

G.A.S - getting off the update cycle

2010-10-28T13:48:00.000-07:00

One thing that I've often lamented of recent times is western man's insatiable appetite for all things "new" and along with that, I'm guilty of using the phrase "they sure don't make 'em like they used to..."

It used to be that white-goods would last you at least 15 years. My wife and I recently had our 12th wedding anniversary and during that time we've replaced washing machines, microwaves, TV's and other necessities not out of greed but because they either malfunctioned or ceased to work altogether. The cost of repairing these same goods is often far more than what it costs to buy the new "upgraded" model and while it seems like such a waste to do that, it's also often the most economically viable thing to do.
A lawnmower I'd purchased recently had the hand crank fail and the cost of repair was substantially more than the cost of the entire lawnmower. Same thing when my original Xbox decided to call it a day...
So the faulty goods make their way to the local tip while you take delivery of the new much improved model. And this is "progress"? Why do I feel so used then? *sigh*

On that note, I've seen my fair share of musicians (and I'll admit, I've also been guilty) subscribe to a similar mindset when it comes to musical instruments or products.
G.A.S as it's commonly known - Gear Acquisition Syndrome.

In short, the afflicted soul becomes behooved to purchase the latest and greatest whatever just because it's the "latest and greatest" and they become caught up in an endless cycle of upgrades and buying and selling all in order to be relevant and contemporary.
Of course, as the product in question becomes more powerful, what often happens is that other components that are used in conjunction also need to be upgraded or replaced altogether so pretty soon, the meager musician's budget has blown itself out on what largely amounts to an exercise in futility.

This is particularly true and relevant when it comes to software, effects or outboard gear.

At the moment, I'm running Pro-Tools 7.4 and it works perfectly for me. Pro Tools 8.something is already out and has been for a while but if I wanted to upgrade, it'd involve purchasing a new computer with a faster processor, a lot more ram and additional i/o and I just don't have the budget for that right now. Apart from which, my version works great and I don't need to learn anything new or refer to the manual if I want to record.

The same goes for effects - I've got a Boss GT-8 even though the GT-10 has been out for yonks. I've tried the 10 when I worked for Roland - didn't like it at all. But hey, it had all these "new" features. My 8 works great and again, I've become comfortable using what I've already got to realize any possible sounds I may need.

I'm convinced that none of these "new" things actually make you a better musician or will suddenly or instantly allow you to craft highly original material.

We've all seen pictures on the web or in magazines of where high profile bands get to record their stuff. Massive automated mixing desks, fully sound-treated and proofed rooms and oodles of outboard gear. But here's the thing - does it really make you "sound better"? I'd argue no.

I've heard plenty of albums recorded in those kinds of environments and let me just say this - if a song exhibits poor songwriting or repeats lame cliche musical moments throughout, no amount of technology can save it. It's doomed.
Sure, all these things can assist the creative muse if you like but I stopped believing that technology can "save" you or I musically. It's gotta come from within. I'm equally comfortable with my guitar, a pen and some manuscript as I am with Logic and Pro-Tools.

I've seen exactly the same scenario played out (pun intended!) with guitar players. They'll go get themselves all hot and sweaty over the latest guitar and amp and spend a veritable fortune in acquiring these goods. I'm talking boutique amplification, hand-wired effect pedals and signature or custom made guitars. But hey - here's the thing; can they play any better than they did before they had this stuff?

Nup. No. Negative.

I recall some years ago going to see a local band and before I heard them play a single note, I was checking out the guitar players rig - Mesa Boogie rack power-amp, Soldano pre-amp, couple of Eventide processors and some analogue pedals with a custom switching unit. And along side the rig was a custom shop Fender. I whistled to myself and shook my head as I eyed his gear in all it's glory.

I remember thinking - this guy must be world-class!

Hah... How wrong I was.

He was a dismal musician who had very little in the way of genuine talent. It was laughable and I felt embarrassed for this guy at the end of the show. I recall thinking "if only he spent as much time on his technique and chops as he did on his gear"

After all - it's all just a means to an end!

PS - You may find this article from Harmony Central helpful... It's along the same lines and echoes my sentiments exactly.

Everyone knows what it's like to suffer buyer's remorse after a gear purchase. This is the feeling that manifests itself sometime between one minute and 24 hours after you finally plunk down your hard-earned cash. You suspect that the company you've just supported by buying their product will instantly relegate that model to the scrap heap and release something more powerful, cheaper, shinier, and happier. And inevitably they do. If you stay in the technology-buying game long enough, you will swear that the company is simply waiting for you to buy before they announce their new releases.

To look at it from a non-musical perspective for a moment, let's take the case of the Kindle, which I own. To say that the new version, released just last month, is an improvement over the original laughably understates things. It positively trumps its predecessor in every conceivable benchmark. The new Kindle costs less, has a smaller footprint (while retaining the same viewable screen area), is lighter and thinner, faster, more readable, has more memory, longer battery life and a better keypad, offers a choice of configurations (you can buy a cheaper Wi-Fi-only version or the full wireless version), and it even looks better (a more mellow charcoal-gray versus glaring appliance-white). And the biggest kicker: if you have an old one, you can't update it for any of the newer features.

All of this made me resent Amazon for its closed-system approach to technology. I can't even upgrade my memory? I have to buy a new unit altogether? I have to dispose of my working version in a landfill to keep up? What is this, 1980?

But then I got a grip. My original still does every single thing it did the day I bought it. My experience reading everything from Moby Dick to the Eleven Rack manual on my original Kindle would have been no better than on the new Kindle. The realization opened my eyes to a bad habit: I'm focusing on the tools again.

Let's go back to music technology. The age of your interface has absolutely nothing to do with the music you create on it. Wouldn't you rather have a five-year-old audio interface than no audio interface? Among other things, it would mean that you've been producing work on it while your careful friend waits for the preamps to get just a little more transparent. Thinking about the next one down the line takes your eyes off the prize and will make you crazy. And there's actually a paradox in updates: The only true hedge against obsolescence, the only way to make sure you buy only the latest model, is to make your purchase the day before you die.

Buy the best thing you can afford today, run it into the ground, and when you come up for air, look around to see what's happened while you've been busy working. Isn't it the best feeling in the world to be able to say, "I can't upgrade my OS this weekend because I'm on a creative roll. No time to do anything but write." This time the artist wins against Big Technology.

—Jon Chappell

School for the gifted: street press frauds

2010-10-25T22:09:00.000-07:00

I'm sure wherever you live in this world of ours, there's bound to be at least a couple of "street press" magazines that are distributed to all the muso haunts in town. Y'know, I'm talking rehearsal venues, music stores (the few that remain), music schools and the like.

These street press mags are generally distributed free of charge, have the obligatory gear reviews and have a classified section dedicated to "musicians wanted" - what discerning muso can resist such temptation in paper form?

In such classified sections are everything from the bogan boys down the road who want their next drummer to high profile cover bands who desperately seek the lead guitar chops and high-pitch vocals needed to entertain the punters with their renditions of Bon-Jovi and Warrant covers for their upcoming gig at the casino.

What I have generally found over the years though is that despite the abundance of "musicians wanted" within these pages, there is decidedly very little in the way of genuine talent and very much in the way of school for the gifted time-wasting carry on.

Now what exactly does that mean I hear you ask? Well, for arguments sake, let's take a recent advert in Rave Magazine that inhabits the haunts I mentioned previously in my particular neck of the woods. Here is an advert that was recently run:

PROFESSIONAL GUITARIST WANTED!
A high profile cover band is seeking a talented, reliable, energetic & youthful guitarist to work in a highly experienced professional working act. For more info email your details

For fun, I decided to email them and see how "professional" they really were and as expected, I never received an email back and for that matter, nor do I expect to. This kind of advert is pretty much "par for the course" when it comes to street press and the response I had from them about the same. Frauds, pure and simple.

Many of these guys are just simply "talking a big game" and while they may have work lined up, a high percentage of them probably wouldn't know what professional was if it bit them in the you know what and sadly, nor do they care.

A few years ago, I went ahead and advertised for a bass player for some gigs I was doing locally in the same street press mag that the advert above appeared in.
I was pretty specific in the advert that these were paying gigs for a competent bass player who could read. I emphasized the fact that you had to read. This was because I wanted to minimize rehearsal time and I don't have the patience to hold others hands musically and hopefully, I was hoping to attract someone who was at least semi-competent.

Unsurprisingly, I was contacted by quite a few bass players - all who couldn't read a single note of music. A few of these guys were insistent that they could pull it off it they heard the tunes first so I went ahead and mailed them a CD. And wouldn't you know it, one of these guys wrote me back and said that it "wasn't his thing" despite the fact the same guy was advertising weekly looking for "paid work" - that's a fraud if you ask me! He wrote me a year later looking for tuition work at my music school but I don't think I ever bothered to write him back. Karma anyone?

A couple of others turned up for the audition but hadn't learned anything and of course couldn't read so it involved me showing them the bass line on guitar and counting the rhythm out for them - more frauds who'd be better off getting a gig as a mobile door-to-door Pez dispenser.

The bass player that took the cake though rang me and engaged in the "talking a big game" thing mentioned previously. I recall asking her - "So you can definitely read OK?" She said "Yeah, it's no problem at all"
We spoke about some other things and she seemed to have half a clue but the only catch was she'd recently moved here and had no car so if I picked her up from the local train station, she'd be able to audition.

I took the bait....

Well, she seemed nice enough, I'll give her that. However, when it came time to audition I waited about 15 minutes for her to tune up as it was obvious from the outset that her bass was way out. She mindlessly noodled away for the 15 or so minutes while I waited but let me emphasize here that it was *not* in the chops or cool or interesting sense of that word. It was more like musical epilepsy but even that is perhaps being a little too generous.

I then had to say something - "Are you going to tune or what?"
Her response - "I think we're good"
I then raised my eyebrows and started to think I'd scored yet another dud but little did I realize the extent of this revelation and my ensuing frustration at her incompetence.

"Yeah, I don't think you are, let's check it off the guitar"

As it turns out, she was way off and then proceeded to tune but at approx. 1.5 second intervals of this process, she would look intently at me and ask: "Which way? Up or down?"

I was really losing my patience at this point so grabbed her lead and my tuner and plugged it in for her. Somehow, she still couldn't tune her bass so I started doing the lowest 2 strings but then I stopped myself.

"Did you learn the tunes I sent you? You bought those charts I mailed you right?"

"Um, yeah I think... Ah.. No, looks like I forgot them - can you run me through the tunes?"

"No I can't, I expected that you'd be organized enough to learn them before coming to an audition..."

"Why don't we just jam them out?"

She then begins to play some bizarre bass line that resembled nothing of my tunes.
At this point I realized I struck the proverbial bottom of the barrel so I just came out and said it:

"You're no good I'm afraid, there's no way I can work with you. I think you need to pack up your bass and leave. You've just monumentally wasted my time..."

Her response? Priceless -

"There's no need to get all stupid!!! I've done YOU the favor remember? This audition is just as much about me feeling you out and I don't like the vibe at all, I'm out of here!"

Me: "That'd be great - the doors that way"

Oh that's right - I'd driven her here. Thankfully, my wife had been listening the whole time and promptly offered to drive her time-wasting ass back to the train station.

Another fraud, straight from the heart of the "musicians wanted" section of the local street press.

I've got a few more stories up my sleeve but that's for another time... Suffice to say, I've learned my lesson when it comes to big talking wanna-be musicians.
Sure, you do come across some really good people in those adverts but like anything in life, it's pretty much the "luck of the draw" and those cats are in the extreme minority.

So what's the life lesson for all of this? Easy - the "gifted" need to go back to school!

Endorsement fever - what's it all about?

2010-10-21T17:45:00.000-07:00

Endorsements are everywhere - that's pretty much a fact in today's media-driven world in which you and I live.

Let's see... You've got clothing lines, designer fragrances, specialty sports-goods and yes, the obligatory tricked out musical instruments that are a "direct replica" of your favorite artist - including the much debated "relic'd" models that RRP for more than most musicians earn in a fiscal year.

Guitar endorsements and signature models have been around for a while now but the craze seems to have taken (in my opinion at least) a turn for the somewhat bizarre with companies throwing their weight behind total "unknowns" - not that that's necessarily a bad thing per say, I'd consider myself somewhat of an "unknown" - but what is troubling is when I see a 15 year old kid who easily borders on the newbie phase on You-Tube, barely able to squeeze out a lick who then raves about how they've just been endorsed by company "x"

To me, such endorsements defy belief and it serves to undermine the whole thing as a blatant "wank" (to use an Australian euphemism) - whatever happened to paying your dues?

Whatever the case, I do get questions from time to time regarding endorsements and I at one time had the same questions; How does it work? Who approaches whom? Do you really get free stuff? Is it all it's cracked up to be? Hopefully, some of this will help:

Firstly, a product endorsement is a 2-way street; You are offering a service to a company and likewise, some level of service from this company is reciprocated back to you.

At this point, it may be wise to dispel some common myths and frequent internet innuendo -

*Very few and I mean VERY FEW guys in the music industry would get gear totally free*

Sure, a Satriani, Steve Vai or a John Petrucci would get free guitars but these guys are at the absolute top of their game and can sell out an arena in a blink; endorsements of that nature are hardly the "norm" and don't represent the average or status-quo deals that would be handled on a monthly basis by most companies.

Guys who are at this level of endorsement often have some kind of royalty thing going on whereby they receive a negotiated cut/payment for every unit sold. Being that the instrument in question is either a signature guitar or an amp that is specified to their tastes and, more importantly they have sold millions of albums, this is a pretty fair deal.

Again - these kinds of deals are extremely rare. Bear that in mind! You may liken it to a career in the butterfly breeding industry. What? You've don't know anyone in that industry? Exactly my point. How many guitarist's guitarist can sell millions of albums at a time? Very, very, very few, that's who.

The majority of endorsements out there involve "artist pricing" whereby the company sells direct to the artist at a significantly reduced price when compared to the M.S.R.P (manufacturers suggested retail price)

This allows the artist to utilize the company's gear at prices he or she would never get in a regular music shop and obviously gives the company an additional outlet of sales that has the added bonus of keeping the endorse satisfied and more importantly, playing the company in questions products which in turn will hopefully generate more sales for the company.
And really, at the end of the day, that's what it's all about; the company needs to make money and not only cover their costs but profit from their business.

The only time I've ever received "free stuff" was when I worked for Roland here in Australia as a product demonstrator - a very short lived gig in the scheme of things. The only catch though is that when you resign as I did, you've then got to give the stuff back so was it really free in the first instance? No, not really. I was just borrowing it wasn't I?

*You're probably not going to be endorsed by a company if you're not already using their products and are absolutely passionate about them*

It's pure delusion to think that company "x" is going to throw free stuff or an endorsement at you just because you decide to send them an email with links to your Myspace page playing a competing companies product. Yes, even if you are playing your proverbial rear-end off in the process.
Seriously - put yourself in their shoes - would you entertain such an email if you'd spent the money manufacturing, producing and advertising your own products that you or your business partner designed and consequently sweated into fruition? Hardly. You'd delete it in an instant and mutter something under your breath about "kids these days"

This may be a revelation to some but you actually need to love the stuff you want to endorse. Sounds crazy I know but it's true.

My endorsement with Fender/Charvel resulted from me winning a local guitar competition. The prize was a Charvel guitar which I immediately fell in love with, so much so that I quit playing the Music-Man guitars I'd been using for the past 10 or so years very soon after!

Any manufacturer appreciates that someone who is passionate about a product is going to play it anyway and sell it without trying to do so and for them, that's really what it's all about.

However - the other side of this coin...

I have seen people go absolutely out of their way to endorse a product and promote a brand name only to be told by the company in question that they're basically, "barking up the wrong tree"
I've even seen well established artists who may have been endorsed previously then pipe up for their own signature model only to be told the same thing - Vinnie Moore of UFO fame comes to mind...

If the endorsement isn't being reciprocated OR there is nothing in writing, then you're basically involved in a one-sided deal and sometimes, like any relationship one side can "move on" while the other sees nothing wrong with things the way they already are.

I've also sadly seen guys proverbially flagellate themselves on a company forum (or the like) desperately pleading to the company in question for an endorsement deal. They'll post up every last bit of press, songs they've written and of course, the obligatory hi-res photos of themselves with the company in question's product gleaming front and center.
Why do this to yourself? Honestly? I really don't know.

One thing I can tell you though with 100% certainty - absolutely nobody will take you seriously if you do that including your peers or another company who may have initially been interested.
Do yourself a favor and have some class and show some restraint.

If you feel the deal is all one-sided, you should definitely say something and if you're not being promoted or catered to, you probably need to look elsewhere. Some companies lack such finesse and you will find there a lot of bullies and plenty of "ego" when dealing with particular companies because after all, human beings run such companies and as we all know, human beings are flawed imperfect things.

*You're probably not going to be endorsed by a company if you haven't got anything to show for yourself (or your band)*

Again, put yourself in the company's position. Would you consider endorsing someone who has zero creative output? Probably not. You may play great and all of that but if there is no "fan-base" for what you do, it's unlikely you'll be able to generate much of an interest from a 3rd party such as a potential endorser.

Having said that, there are smaller-scale companies who will endorse just about anyone provided they detail something of a live performance schedule or have enough hits on YouTube or Myspace. I even heard recently of a manufacturer here in Australia who had an "open night" and if you played well enough, you scored yourself an endorsement deal that involved the "artist pricing" previously mentioned; Horses for courses folks!

Personally, I wouldn't take an endorsement from this company or another like it because quite honestly, it's hard for me to take them seriously when they do that but it's all good and if that's your thing, then go for it.
Sometimes you find that companies like this resort to such measures because sales are down and this is way for them to clear the warehouse. Yes, it's true - it's not really all about you after all.

*An endorsement isn't going to give you instant fame or rocket you to the top of the iTunes or top 40 charts*

Yes, it's true. Any endorsement you may receive isn't going to do for you any more or any less than what you can already do yourself. Sure, it may help and every little bit does but don't imagine that it's going to somehow blow your career into the stratosphere cause it just won't happen. Let me say that again - IT JUST WON'T HAPPEN.

As amazing as having a top-notch signature model might be, would it really help you sell a significant number of albums?
Do you think John Mayer would sell more or less records if he played a Squier rather than a legit Fender? In all probability, the record sales would be unaffected either way because let's face it, the general public couldn't give a toss and they're the ones who buy albums by the millions.

Would I go out and buy Joe Satriani's new album if he suddenly decided he was playing Fender or Charvel guitars instead of Ibanez? Well, it would definitely pique my interest if he did make a switch but I still wouldn't buy his new album because I've already got 8 of them and I've yet to hear anything "fresh" from camp Satch in a long time - Sorry Joe :(

Be realistic - what any endorsement will do is give you a level of "credibility", mostly among your peers and other industry people and as mentioned previously, if you can score some great gear that you already love at a price you as a working muso can actually afford then it's all good.

What it won't do is make you an instant rock-star, hone your chops overnight or allow you to out riff Jimmy Page. Like a lot of things in this industry, these things often sound better than they actually are.

Do yourself a favor - keep it real, don't BS yourself and you'll avoid unnecessary disappointment - especially when it comes to endorsement deals.

So You Want To Be a Rock and Roll Star?

2010-10-15T02:13:00.000-07:00

An excellent blog post here by the CEO of Ernie Ball Sterling Ball.
I read Sterling's posts from time to time and this one stood out as a well thought out article with some strong points.

Here it is -

If dreams were cognizant of reality I would be toast. Why? Up to now the perception of the Rock and Roll star for young kids was Hot Chicks, Limos, Touring, Recording. The finest of everything and boatloads of money. The perception created the dream of being a rock star drove the kids to play the guitar and emulate their fav's. Like a kid wanting to be Tiger Woods in golf.....arrrghh. Barry Bonds in baseball...Now the biggest selling Rockstar is an energy drink.

When I was growing up you dreamed of being a Beatle or a Stone. That drove sales. Sales of everything musical. What do kids today dream of being or emulating? Who is going to tell them that if you want to be a rock star that it no longer pays?.... Who is going to tell them that dreamed about career has a half life of a fruit fly?....

In the old days I would tell parents that their kid should enjoy the guitar and play for fun and the passions that the instrument can bring out and create in their child....the relationships that it can help develop and the outlet for application of the kids attention. That still works. I told them that their kids chances were about as good as becoming a senator....I said that in the eighties, nineties.....What is it now? More like an astronaut.

We had record stores..they were social hubs and stocked a wide variety of music and you sort of hung out in the section where your music was...the dorks were in the other sections. Record stores have gone the way of the banished politician...except for the politician will be back.

Business schools may study the fall of rock and roll commerce.
They may start with Sony vs Apple. Here is the basic breakdown:

Sony. Owned the largest catalog of music.
Sony. Owned the largest record company.
Sony. Created the personal music player (remember the Walkman?)
Apple. Zero Music Catalog.
Apple. No record company.
Apple. No consumer electronics experience.
Apple. just two percent of the world computer market pre-iTunes.

How on God's green earth does Sony get so thoroughly crushed? It was a dwarf David vs a Steroid Goliath. Apple won. Why? Because while the dipsticks from the record companies were expense accounting their relevance they suddenly realized that they may not be relevant due the fact that kids didn't want to pay $18 bucks for a crappy CD with one good song and they didn't have to anymore because of Napster. So they mobilized and lobbied capital hill... they hired the best lawyers. They legislated and litigated to protect their outdated model. Meanwhile Steve Jobs of Apple understood that the public would like to get their music differently and the Walkman is in grannies hope chest and the Ipod is king. What if the record companies had spent the money creating the new sales channel instead of fighting to save the dead one? They actually won though....

Guess what? Itunes is great and Apple is the hero but not for the artist. You buy a song for 99 cents and Apple gives the record companies not the artist 65 cents.....then after all is said and done the artist if they are heavyweights get 14 cents. The struggling artist average 9 cents a song and they have to pay back the record company for all of the costs involved in the creation and production of the product.

There is still retail but it is so limited...If you are on the "end cap" of Wal-Mart you are one of those astronauts I talked about earlier. Who would have thought that Wal-Mart would be king of retail recorded music? Q - Who would of thought a great selection of music was 25 Cd's?

AM radio was the 60's...FM ruled the 70's and 80's...I think the nineties got lost. Consolidation of programming killed the DJ...Clear Channel came along and became radio. Satellite Radio tried but fouled their depends.....The internet once again saved the day....the pirate programmers of the late 60's and early 70's re emerged on the internet. I can actually listen to a channel called "Steel Guitar Radio"

Music is free now. How did that happen? I have Pandora radio and feel guilty listening to it.

On the live side there are no venues to start, grow and if you put the space suit on get ready for Ticketmaster to net more than you do. Can you believe that people are still FORCED to pay up to 25% over face value for the ability to purchase a ticket on to a concert?

The pimps keep making more than the ho's.

We need to figure out how to monetize the right people here...the people who write and create the music. The funny part is that the kids that steal the music are stealing their dream too.

You still want to be a Rock and Roll Star?

Here is the link to the original article:

http://www.ernieball.com/forums/blogs/big-poppa/24-so-you-want-rock-roll-star.html