“For When A Scrapbook Is Not Crazy Enough”
h/t the Back To Work podcast … listen to the hosts come to terms with Crazy Walls HERE.
Vinyl Sales May Be Rising, But Have You Seen Who’s Buying It?
Bill Brewster for The Guardian:
The demographic of the average vinyl buyer is very clear. It’s a middle-aged man, possibly bearded (OK, definitely bearded); kids have probably left home, no longer on speaking terms with wife, spare bedroom has become a shrine to his teenage love: the Floyd (their album The Endless River was the best-selling vinyl LP in 2014). Essentially it’s me.
Vinyl will never again reach the 1970s and 80s heyday. Having reached a nadir in 2007, when vinyl album sales slumped to 205,292, last year they topped 1m. The predictions for 2015 suggest double that. It’s now the craft beer of music formats. But just as craft beer is not the answer to the alarming closure rate of public houses, neither will vinyl save the music industry. It will survive thanks to the network of enthusiastic collectors, indie record labels and DJs – but no thanks to any input from the major labels.
The problem the indies face is that they are being crowded out of the marketplace by the enthusiastic entry of companies like Universal Music Group who are said to have reissued 1,500 different titles on vinyl this year – most of which could be picked up in a charity store for pennies.
Seventy-Nine Years Ago Today: Robert Johnson In The Studio
Seventy-nine years ago today, the legendary bluesman, Robert Johnson, made his recording debut in room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas – one of only two recording sessions he would make in his short life, but whose sounds would ignite the entire post-war world …
November 23, 1936 was a good day for recorded music. Two men – an ocean apart – sat before a microphone and began to play. One was a cello prodigy who had performed for the Queen of Spain; the other played guitar and was a regular in the juke joints of the Mississippi Delta.
Listen to this episode of the always excellent Radio Diaries:
Advice For Budding Label Managers
Josh Rosenthal, Grammy-nominated producer and founder of the Tompkins Square imprint, has a few opinions about what it takes to run a label.
I don’t like hiring publicists because I like driving the narrative, having my own relationships, and I like to save money. I’m not convinced that I’ll get incrementally more press by hiring someone. Plus there are very few press hits that actually move the needle. Work your consumer email list. If your music is any good, certain outlets will embrace it without a middleman. Social media is effective at spreading terrorist propaganda. For music, not so much. There’s too much chatter, nothing sticks. Is it helpful? Yes. But if you’re relying on it, that’s really sad.
Music content will be owned by technology companies eventually. There’s already this morphing of digital services and the major content holders, which are buying stakes in said services. Forget the delivery method, you can’t control that broadly. Keep up with developments in technology, but don’t let them guide your creative principles. If you can’t make money using the present day delivery systems, innovate, or go do something else. Old world constructs made musicians and labels feel entitled to reliable income, but that doesn’t mean it will be that way going forward.
These are excerpts from Rosenthal’s new book The Record Store Of The Mind, which seems to be an interesting read. Check out more of his – sometimes serious / sometimes not so much – thoughts on label management at The Vinyl Factory.
8D Projects: JJ Bull – “121 Miles” In Video For Burton Snowboards
The emotional instrumental to JJ Bull’s “121 Miles” is used in this great Burton Snowboards video, licensed through 8DSync. Professional boarder Kelly Clark talks about her preferred boards and gear as Bull’s music sets a nostalgic-then-uplifting mood. JJ Bull is a folk-based artist from Scotland, and we love his distinctive and evocative style … be sure to check out more of his music on our 8DSync site.
YouTube’s Music App Could Rule All Streaming Services
YouTube’s audience is unique. They love to engage. They watch, like, and share. They make remixes, covers, lyrics clips, and response videos. And they do this for everything that’s already part of the YouTube collection, including official music videos, fan videos, and concert footage.
Now, YouTube is taking this massive corpus, mixing in some neat new features, and opening it up to everyone as a standalone app with a clear focus on just the music. Today, the company is launching its first official standalone music app called, well, YouTube Music.
My favorite feature of all is something called the offline mixtape. You determine how much of your phone’s data you’re willing to spare for songs, pick the audio quality, and let the app make you a playlist. It’s a lot like Spotify’s excellent Discover feature, except it’s refreshed daily, not weekly. The offline mixtape is another exclusive for YouTube Red subscribers.
The manner that Google has been able to develop and expand YouTube is remarkable. The YouTube that they acquired in 2006 is still recognizable today, but its present culture and varied uses of the service (such as this music focus) would be alien then. I’m certainly interested in the ‘offline mixtape’ and what YouTube does with it, as well as the integration of user generated content. Some things need to be solved … the way that YouTube presents its auto-generated music ‘videos’ is a bit clunky (here’s an example) and I’m curious how that will translate to the YouTube Music app. And there’s also the familiar issue of YouTube’s fuzzy transparency with how music creators are getting paid.
Empire Building: Vinyl Edition
[Josey Records managing partners Waric] Cameron and [Luke] Sardello say they approached [vinyl pressing plant owner Stan] Getz about buying A&R in July. They’d known him for years, having run dance-music labels of their own in the mid-1990s; like every local label, they had to get their records pressed at A&R, especially since the CD essentially killed the vinyl industry by the early 1990s and the nearest facility is now in faraway Salina, Kansas.
As recently as five years ago, buying a record-pressing facility might have been considered a dreadful investment unless you also had a time machine to go with it. Yet sales of records continue to climb: According to figures provided by the Recording Industry Association of America, more than 13 million LPs were sold in the U.S. alone in 2014. Numbers haven’t been that high since 1990.
“The business of vinyl is an old business model, and it’s the one that has survived everything,” Sardello says. “Vinyl has survived streaming, and not only has it survived, it’s thrived. It’s up 40 percent each year. So what else is there to detract from it? It’s never been easier to access music, and yet vinyl is as strong as it’s been for the last 25 years.”
At the same time, they will begin opening other Josey Records stores: Cameron says he wants to have six to 10 more outlets in the next two years in “major metropolitan areas,” including San Antonio.
“The thought was always vertical integration,” says Sardello, “We started thinking about bands. We started thinking about a label. We started thinking about a studio. We started thinking about more stores and how we can work with bands and labels and go from pressing your records to distributing our records to putting them in our stores to sending your band on a store tour.”
Kudos to these guys, who I’d met on and off back in my DJ’ing days. The lede buried in the main story, but that I highlight above, is the plan to eventually cover the manufacturing, distribution, and retail stages of releases under the company operation. This is the strategy major labels used to dominate in their heyday, so it’s interesting to see an independent upstart take on similar goals. Of course the elephant in the room is that today’s ‘physical product’ climate is much different (despite comparisons), and the majors themselves no longer follow this process – acquiring equity in streaming services, in hopes to somewhat replicate the traditional food chain, seems to be the current major label modus operandi. So it’s a gusty move to pin such high aspirations on a format with an unpredictable shelf-life … vinyl’s extended perseverance is an optimist’s hope. But, as I join in optimistically rooting for vinyl, I’m also rooting for Josey, and we certainly need more gutsy maneuvers like this in the independent music biz. Rock on.
How Well Does the Factory Model Explain Pop Music?
From one musical vogue to another over the years, the notion of pop songs as industrial product has persisted, sometimes taken up by the music makers themselves as a source of pride. Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records in Detroit, the then-booming home of the auto industry in its postwar V-8 heyday, had put in time on the assembly line at a Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan, and he modeled his whole vertically integrated musical operation on what he learned at the factory. As he recalled in his memoir, To Be Loved, “At the plant, cars started out as just a frame, pulled along on conveyor belts until they emerged at the end of the line—brand-spanking-new cars rolling off the line. I wanted the same concept for my company, only with artists and songs and records.”
Today, the pop music that’s most popular is produced and distributed by methods that, in many ways, appear to be more regimented and mechanized than the means by which any music had been made in the past. Producers generate instrumental tracks by sample-mining and synthesis, using software and keyboard plug-ins; teams of “topliners” add melodic hooks and lyric ideas onto the tracks; and the results are cut and pasted, Auto-Tuned and processed, then digitally tested with software that compares the sonic patterns of a new song with those of past hits. The world of this music is both familiar and unique, connected in elemental ways to the first popular music produced in America and, at the same time, utterly inconceivable in any era before the digital age.
[However,] a more accurate and illuminating way to understand today’s pop might be to think of it as post-industrial, a phenomenon not of the machine era but of the information age. Music is made today by mining the vast digital repository of recordings of the past, or by emulating or referencing them through synthesis, and then manipulating them and mashing them up—with the human fallibility and genius that have always laced popular music and probably always will. Indeed, it is accessing and processing—the methods that digitalization facilitates—rather than gearing and stamping for uniformity and mass production that distinguish 21st-century pop. Like machine-age plants everywhere, the song factories have closed, and the work of the day is being done electronically.
John Seabrook’s book The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory is certainly inspiring some interesting think pieces on pop music. I’m also starting to suspect that one of my most mentioned labels – Factory Records – was probably the least suitable imprint to hold that name. Motown (based on Gordy’s quote above), Tin Pan Alley, or today’s assembly line song laboratories could have really run with the moniker.
Today In History: MC5 – Kick Out The Jams
“The duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution. The duty of the musician is to make the music. But there is an equation that must not be missed: MUSIC IS REVOLUTION.” – John Sinclair (MC5 Manager)
“Brothers and Sisters, I wanna see a sea of hands out there. Let me see a sea of hands. I want everybody to kick up some noise. I wanna hear some revolution out there, brothers. I wanna hear a little revolution. Brothers and sisters, the time has come for each and every one of you to decide whether you are gonna be the problem, or whether you are gonna be the solution. You must choose, brothers, you must choose. It takes five seconds, five seconds of decision. Five seconds to realize that it’s time to move. It’s time to get down with it. Brothers, it’s time to testify and I want to know, Are you ready to testify? Are you ready? I give you a testimonial: THE MC5!” – Brother J.C. Crawford
BTW – Dorian Cope’s On This Deity is an essential daily read. Check it out.
Revenue Neutral
In a new working paper, University of Minnesota economist Joel Waldfogel and Luis Aguiar of the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies in Seville, Spain, estimate how Spotify has affected both music sales and piracy during its fast expansion across the globe. Their method: comparing countries where the service grew rapidly between 2013 and 2015, and those where it didn’t. The upshot? According to the authors’ calculations, Spotify does seem to have put a damper on piracy, but it’s also displaced some digital sales (neither is exactly a shocker). Add it all up, then factor in the payments Spotify itself is sending to labels, and the effect appears to be roughly “revenue neutral” for rights holders. They don’t make any more money. They don’t make any less.
If these findings hold up (again, it’s just one working paper), it should put the ongoing debate about Spotify’s treatment of artists into some new perspective. If the platform’s business model hasn’t shrunk the total pie of cash being divvied up by rights holders, but some artists really are seeing their paychecks shrink, it suggests the problem (insofar as one exists) has to do with the way record labels are distributing the cash.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- …
- 61
- Next Page »