Barren Waste, the old industry

[JGriffin]

My friend Gary Myerberg

Oh, right. Got it.

[JGriffin]

How about a new group devoted to the obnoxious and outrageous world that has relegated some of the finest professionals to the status of steam engine mechanics.

Looks like he understands my point already, actually.

[radiationroom]

Today's musical climate has lots in common with the 50's, Sun Records, early rock era.

Like the Areosmith song goes... "DREAM ON"... Things are VERY DIFFERENT today compared to what a musician's life was in the 1950s or even the 1980s. Back in the 1950s every town had at least one live music joint and independents could get on the radio.

Today, the mom & pop live music venues are far fewer in number and getting on the radio is damned near impossible for an indie with innovative new music due to a combination of focus-group research based playlists and the consolidation of station ownership among a handful of corperations.

To add insult to injury, Live Nation, the concert promoter that owns or controls all but...two?...or...maybe...three?... of the big stadiums and ampatheaters nationwide is now in the record business, the artist management business, the tour booking business, the ticket sales business, and artist merchandising business, giving one company almost TOTAL CONTROL over who gets to perform at the national level and who doesn't.

And remember, Live Nation used to be part of Clear Channel, which still controls more than 1,200 radio stations in the United States alone, along with another couple of hundred around the world.

Technically, Clear Channel and Live Nation are separate companies on paper but that doesn't mean that they have to act as seperate companies "in the wild". Corperate cross-ownership is common, and I wouldn't be at all suprised if the execs of one company sit on the board of the other.

So.... Where does that lead us? HHMMM..... Let's all think about this for a moment.... You want a career in music where you have the potential of having national success {along with the potential of quitting your day job}? Sign with Live Nation or forget it. And take what they offer or forget it.

TOTAL

AND

COMPLETE

VERTICAL

MONOPOLY

Until there is some serious Sherman act enforcement on the major radio, media, and venue congolmerates, you can kiss your dream of having a bright, innovative, lively, exciting music business goodbye. FYI - The last time the Sherman Act was used was to break up the original AT&T during the Carter Administration 1977-1980.

You are one lucky dude in that you have a steady stream of musicians who have no problem financing their performance and recording hobby. Yes, I said "hobby". Statistics suggest that 94% of your independent recording clients as well as 94% of my independent recording clients won't sell enough CDs to recoup their project investment. Actually, since I don't have the hard numbers on the sales of "vanity disks", that flop rate may be as high as 99%. Of course having a CD out makes for a very nice business card to secure gigs and build brand loyalty, but still it would be nice not to have to get up on Monday morning and punch a time clock at 6AM.

Think about this: CD brokers such as Diskmakers, Oasis, Trutone, and United have made a ton of money pressing "every musician's dream" in the form of a thousand CDs. Then there are the gear pimps who are in the business of selling every musician their "dream recording studio", preying on people's materialistic instincts, which helps them push more gear out the door. Lots of people get sucked up in the hype of indie recording which then gets them to part with their money, making the gear pimps {who are actually a subset of the consumer electronics industry and not the music business} rich.

The public is hungry for something new and the majors are bloated and clueless. A scrappy, independent artist, producer, visionary can clean up. Sam Phillips where are you?

The public is only interested in what the public already knows. Focus group research proves this. Like it or not, payola is the incentive for radio to go against their research and play something new. Payola is what initially got Elvis on the radio. Payola made the Beatles. Payola made Led Zepplin, Billy Joel, Stone Temple Pilots, Reba McEntire, Janet Jackson, and Pearl Jam. Like it or not, everything you hear on commercial FM {and on ocassion, college radio} has been bought and paid for in one form or another, otherwise commercial radio has zero incentive to risk "tune outs" by playing a song that is unfamiliar to the general public.

Remember: Money talks. And the one thing that most indies lack is money. Ample promotional funding more often than not is what makes or breaks an act. Talent, excellent performance, quality songwriting, and skilled production values have nothing to do with it. If Bob Dylan was a new act, today's corperate radio wouldn't give him the time of day without someone being bribed because they program everything according to focus group research. And new music in the same veign as Dylan bombs in focus groups. Focus groups are truly evil but when accountants write the playlists in the same manner that they write a spreadsheet, what else can one expect?

What we really need are radio programmers with a spine along with some Sherman act enforcement and a repeal of the Telecommunications act of 1996. Until that happens, forget about having a vibrant, exciting music scene, because without radio exposure the general public will pretty much ignore you.

So if you care about the future of music, call your congressional representitive as well as your two senators and tell them to start enforcing the Sherman Act on big media. If you don't know how to reach your elected officials in Washington {assuming that you live in the USA}, you can call the capital switchboard at 202 225-3121. Further info is available online at http://www.callcongress.org

Enjoy.

[daved]

You know, I'm not sure I agree with many of your assumptions, so the conclusions are suspect. Specifically:

Live venues in my town are more plentiful, and pay better for indie bands than at any time in my memory. When I started in music (circa 1978) the only live venues REQUIRED bands play covers. The lucky few got to throw in originals, but only until the club owner/manager figured it out and shut it down. Yes, this during the punk rock era.

Punk clubs appeared around that time, but the term "club" is euphemistic. They were uniformly dives, and the pay was strictly door-based, subject to stiff doorman/bouncer-tax. Since none of the indie bands had PAs, the rental fee was also taken off the top. And original bands lacked repertoire for more than a set, so whatever was left over was typically split between a half dozen or more bands. Translation: You drove often 300 miles to make $50. Oh, and most towns had exactly ONE venue back then, booked by junkie scenesters who generally needed a fix by nights-end. At any rate, most bands of the time had very few options for venues, promotion was poor or non-existent, and the pay always sucked. Today up-and-coming bands have at least 4 venues to play here, and that number's been roughly steady for nearly a decade. So that's MUCH better than in the past.

When I started in music DIY recording was also non-existent, so all records were made in proper studios, generally for full rate. Just as lots of folks look down on hip hop artists today, punk and indie bands in the 70s and 80s were pariahs, so the relationship was often parasitic and one way. Fortunately, this led to a proliferation of options and new facilities, which again, simply didn't exist.

In 1982 the CD appeared, but cost literally twice what it does today to press, and lead times were absurd. So few indie bands bothered, instead going to vinyl. That too wasn't cheap, and distribution was nearly impossible - most indie bands lacked the budget to press enough copies for a distributor to stock/handle, and those that did often suffered terribly from returns and other shenanigans. That situation no longer exists. Todays artists can easily distribute nationally via CD Baby or Amazon, or a host of other options (including old-school bad deals like Orchard). More important, a band selling it's own product can actually see a real, tangible profit, which in fact never occurred "back in the day".

While indies cannot get onto big box shelves, indie record stores are thriving. We have two big indie stores in my town, and whenever I'm in Chicago I have a couple favorites as well, and the owners of all of them have few complaints. As specialty retailers, the woes of piracy by teenage fans are largely non-existent, and the built-in scene appeal provides steady traffic. Smart ones are taking advantage of overstocks and such to beat the big boxers at their own game. The trade groups for US indie music like A2IM et al, unlike the RIAA, are not bleating about lost sales and the collapse of the CD market, because their market simply isn't collapsing. Lost in the RIAA's numbers are some important facts: The total number of music CDs sold in the US is actually increasing (based on manufacturers numbers, not labels), and while large, the majors share of those sales is where the declines we read about are concentrated.

While broadcast radio is a wasteland for music, the fan has more and better "discovery options" in the 21st century than ever before. Even regionalism is making a comeback, via the internet, satellite and HD radio. A few years ago WOXY, perennially recognized among the "best indie radio station" by every recognized media outlet that concocts such awards, went off the air to internet only. This year they've returned to the local airwaves via an HD subchannel, and with it their "Local Lixx" feature. Lala.com has done great things with them, but Radio Paradise, KCRW and many others are pioneering new web-based formats. iPods make these accessible to more people than radio ever has been able to reach.

I'll concede major problems and limitations with EACH of the opportunities and outlets I've mentioned. The DMCA has probably put us back a decade in the development of digital delivery (neither radio nor LP businesses ever faced so much regulation and so many artificial technical impediments to development). 360? Deals are a giant backwards step, foisted on the market because the Big Fish are getting smarter, and the little fish are more numerous and hungrier. No doubt it's rough out there and will likely get rougher.

But none of this takes away from the bottom line: the market for music and musicians who aren't on major labels has never been better. Starting out is easier, getting attention more possible, and making records more attainable than any previous era. If your music sucks, your investment remains irrelevant, so we can't equate the mere existence of affordable production with success, whether you're an indie or on a major. But if you've got good product, common sense, and a hard work ethic you CAN make a living making music today. More to the point, there are more ways than ever before to do this.

Given all this, I just can't accept conclusions that flow from false assumptions. I agree the DMCA needs to be repealed for instance, but really don't care if I ever hear music on terrestrial analog radio again, since most music lovers stopped listening a decade or more ago. I couldn't care less about payola today, and I encourage the majors to buy up every endcap at WalMart, to protect indie artists and labels from the temptation to join the corporate suicide pact required of all their vendors! And I applaud the emergence of new venues and applications for music, from in-store appearances to web radio and podcasting to Starbucks. In the meantime we have to consider the source and substance of the bleatings from the RIAA, the majors and their affiliated artists - they have little to do with us or the real world.

-d-

[daved]

Oh, in terms of "flop rate" of indie records, I suspect it's actually much lower than majors because:
- recouping is faster/easier at the bottom where there's less to recoup
- bands are less likely to speculate with their own money than a label spending from corporate coffers

I worked at a replicator, QCA, for nearly a decade ending a couple years ago. My anecdotal evidence (the number of my mastering clients who re-ordered a title) suggests that the majority of "serious" bands really did recoup (why else would they re-order an old title?)! By serious, I mostly mean stable and moderately professional - roughly, the bands who saw the record release party as the starting gate wound up re-ordering down the road, while those who saw it as the finish line didn't.

Sure, when I left there were at least 50% of my clients who were pure vanity releases. But easily 20% re-ordered, and did well selling from the merch table. Of that minority, I doubt more than 10% bothered to register with SoundScan, and less than half affiliated with BMI, ASCAP or SESAC, so their efforts are entirely invisible.

At any rate, talking to colleagues in mastering, inside and outside replicators, those numbers aren't unusual. It could be that artists who choose to master records are a skewed cohort ? the recognition of a need and value for mastering suggests a different level of participation and maybe seriousness. But still, that's a lot of records recouping enough to re-order, and not surprisingly bands are better able to spend their own money than a label exec is at spending someone elses.

-d-

[@?,*???&?]

And remember, Live Nation used to be part of Clear Channel, which still controls more than 1,200 radio stations in the United States alone, along with another couple of hundred around the world.

This is false. Clear Channel was forced to sell over half of its properties after Senate hearings on the 'indie promoter payola problem'. They are down to 500+ right now.

As if it makes a difference.

[daved]

What exactly does Clear Channel have to do with (new) music? Last I checked they're all atwitter for the "Jack" format, wherein the hits of the last 50 years are put on shuffle. Other than that and Madonna, they've pretty much left the field when payola became too much trouble. People don't discover new bands and songs on commercial radio anymore. That's been impossible for almost a decade now.

Satellite and the web, along with specialty retailers and licensed placement, own the game when it comes to breaking new artists. Terrestrial analog radio's deadeadead.

-d-

[JASIII]

In a recent interview, Bill Bottrell theorized that in the not too distant future, recordings will exist almost solely as 'business cards' whose purpose will be to promote live music performances. What a novel idea. Me thinks it's already getting like that.

[daved]

I read that interview, and while I see his point, I tend to discount the conclusions.

This may be wishful thinking on my part, but at the same time, there are many examples of assembled media products (albums, films, tv shows) that are unique experiences unto themselves. For instance, while I loved the Talking Heads "Stop Making Sense" tour and movie, I find the album many of the songs were featured on, "Speaking in Tongues" more compelling (I've listened to the album dozens of times, but only saw the Heads twice on the tour, and the movie a couple times). Many truly classic albums, like Sgt Peppers or Never Mind The Bullocks or It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, are definitive documents in their own right, never surpassed on a stage by the original performers.

Go back in time 200 years, and try to name the greatest performers of post-Colonial America. Hell, name ANY performer from that era... most have been long forgotten. Yet we remember great composers hundreds of years earlier than that. Performances only stand the test of time through recording. Reviews and written scores can be no closer to the "truth" of any performance than journalism is to dancing. The experience can only be described, but not recovered. Albums (and maybe bootleg recordings for jam bands) will define the artists for future fans, not their most legendary performances.

Anyway, until live performances replicate and propagate the experience of great albums, this question remains open. For me, I'll pass on the show and take a great record, thanks.

-d-

[JGriffin]

I read that interview, and while I see his point, I tend to discount the conclusions.

This may be wishful thinking on my part, but at the same time, there are many examples of assembled media products (albums, films, tv shows) that are unique experiences unto themselves. For instance, while I loved the Talking Heads "Stop Making Sense" tour and movie, I find the album many of the songs were featured on, "Speaking in Tongues" more compelling (I've listened to the album dozens of times, but only saw the Heads twice on the tour, and the movie a couple times). Many truly classic albums, like Sgt Peppers or Never Mind The Bullocks or It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, are definitive documents in their own right, never surpassed on a stage by the original performers.

Exactly. And Sgt. Pepper's was 40 years ago. Why do people still not get it?

[fossiltooth]

I'm amazed that a thoughtful, compelling dialogue was able to emerge from this "Barren Waste" of a thread.

Cool.