By Greg Kot
A quick story that relates the massive shift that the music industry experienced in the first decade of this century. With anecdotes told by musicians, radio programmers, producers, labels, and anyone in between that internet-driven massive change.
Entertaining read, but that's it. You'll find the same ideas and arguments that you've might known from other sources.
Best book insight: "“We’re trying to force a nineteenth-and twentieth-century business model into twenty-first-century technology."
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 7 / 10
Click Here to Read My Notes
A quick story that relates the massive shift that the music industry experienced in the first decade of this century. With anecdotes told by musicians, radio programmers, producers, labels, and anyone in between that internet-driven massive change.
Entertaining read, but that's it. You'll find the same ideas and arguments that you've might known from other sources.
Best book insight: "“We’re trying to force a nineteenth-and twentieth-century business model into twenty-first-century technology."
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 7 / 10
Click Here to Read My Notes
“We’re moving into an era of massive niche markets rather than a mass market,” Jenner said. This was bad news for people awaiting the next Beatles or the new U2—a band that could unite the masses in a whirlwind of hits and hype. For everybody else, this was an opportunity for more music to flourish in more places than ever.
There’s no room for idiosyncratic artists. You have to fit the mold, and radio defines that mold. Right now, if you’re not a teen pop star, an R&B artist, a hip-hop artist, a generic alternative rock band, or a female singer-songwriter, you might as well not even think about making records.
In this environment, taking chances on unproven artists supported by underfunded independent labels was considered bad business.
Indeed, no comment summarized commercial radio’s attitude toward music more succinctly than one made by Clear Channel chairman Lowry Mays to Fortune magazine in 2003. “We’re not in the business of providing news and information,” he said. “We’re not in the business of providing well-researched music. We’re simply in the business of selling our customers products.
The biggest losers of all were the listeners. “When all a young audience hears on the radio is pop groups backed by businessmen willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their songs on the radio, they’re being ripped off,” Anastasio said.
“A revolution? Call it what you want, but something has changed,” Prince said. “It’s a new way of looking at things.
Prince has a deep appreciation not only for music history but for the work ethic and aesthetic of big bands, from Duke Ellington’s to Sly Stone
It was all rather surreal to Gibbard. As a middle-class child of the eighties he was intimately familiar with Poison and Mötley Crüe videos, which quickly convinced Gibbard that people like him simply didn’t have what it takes to become rock stars. “I thought there was no way to be in a band unless you could play a ripping guitar solo,” he says. “I thought it was a prerequisite that I would never be able to achieve.
Gibbard’s modest songs didn’t rock particularly hard, either, but they turned melancholy into a powerful muse.
What remained constant was Gibbard’s confiding tone: an underrated singer, he always sounds like he’s sitting on the edge of the listener’s bed, immersed in an intensely private 3 A.M. conversation.
“Hüsker Dü and Dinosaur Jr. were the progenitors of people at the majors wanting to take chances on Nirvana and Green Day in the nineties. People who have seen that good music can also be a foundation for a good business plan are in position to make that happen.
“What I was trying to champion was the craft of it, the craft and the discipline of it,” he says. “I heard those Public Enemy records and ‘B-Boy Bouillabaisse’ as a teenager growing up in northern California, and I wanted to do something on that level. That meant going through a ton of records, finding little moments or happy accidents of brilliance in otherwise mediocre records, and trying to make something good out of them.
Free culture has been about the right of the next generation to make its mark by either demonstrating how they are really artistically creative and worthy of attention, or at least having the chance to fail at that showing.
“New York got huge in the seventies with the Talking Heads and Ramones and early hip-hop because it was a wasteland, a cheap place to live where it was easy for people to do creative stuff,” Deacon says. “Now it’s expensive and everyone has something going on and it’s tough to make a living. People laughed at me when I went to Baltimore, because in comparison nothing was going on there. But you do the one cool thing on a night when nothing’s going on, it becomes easy to get known. And when you become the most known thing in a city, it’s a lot easier to get known on a national level.
The music industry does not know how to deal with the technology and the culture that it lives in, and it’s panicking.
“The original function of songwriting is to tell a story that might otherwise die,” Texas songwriter Steve Earle said at the time.
Musicians loved to complain about their record companies almost as much as they loved to complain about music critics, but few were eager to assume the responsibilities of distributing and marketing their music.
“My band was saying, ‘We want to have our own record label,’” says Bert Holman, manager of the Allman Brothers. “And my response is, ‘Yeah, great, but there’s more to it than you guys think. We need distribution. We need professional distribution, accounting, licensing, all that stuff. It needs to be handled by people who know what they’re doing.’ It’s like asking you as a writer to start publishing a Web magazine. Maybe you can write it, but do you know how to construct the site and attract subscribers? And what about the financial component? There are so many pieces. You can do it all, but could you do it as well as somebody who has been working their whole life at it?
This was a new type of music corporation, tailored for multimedia stars for whom music is just one aspect of what they do, and how they sell.
This was power speaking to power. With the rise of file sharing as the new distribution system, the Internet as the new radio, and YouTube as the new MTV, the major labels had lost their clout. Now a new corporate elite was emerging to replace them: Live Nation, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Apple. The names had changed, but the system remained much the same.
There’s no room for idiosyncratic artists. You have to fit the mold, and radio defines that mold. Right now, if you’re not a teen pop star, an R&B artist, a hip-hop artist, a generic alternative rock band, or a female singer-songwriter, you might as well not even think about making records.
In this environment, taking chances on unproven artists supported by underfunded independent labels was considered bad business.
Indeed, no comment summarized commercial radio’s attitude toward music more succinctly than one made by Clear Channel chairman Lowry Mays to Fortune magazine in 2003. “We’re not in the business of providing news and information,” he said. “We’re not in the business of providing well-researched music. We’re simply in the business of selling our customers products.
The biggest losers of all were the listeners. “When all a young audience hears on the radio is pop groups backed by businessmen willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their songs on the radio, they’re being ripped off,” Anastasio said.
“A revolution? Call it what you want, but something has changed,” Prince said. “It’s a new way of looking at things.
Prince has a deep appreciation not only for music history but for the work ethic and aesthetic of big bands, from Duke Ellington’s to Sly Stone
It was all rather surreal to Gibbard. As a middle-class child of the eighties he was intimately familiar with Poison and Mötley Crüe videos, which quickly convinced Gibbard that people like him simply didn’t have what it takes to become rock stars. “I thought there was no way to be in a band unless you could play a ripping guitar solo,” he says. “I thought it was a prerequisite that I would never be able to achieve.
Gibbard’s modest songs didn’t rock particularly hard, either, but they turned melancholy into a powerful muse.
What remained constant was Gibbard’s confiding tone: an underrated singer, he always sounds like he’s sitting on the edge of the listener’s bed, immersed in an intensely private 3 A.M. conversation.
“Hüsker Dü and Dinosaur Jr. were the progenitors of people at the majors wanting to take chances on Nirvana and Green Day in the nineties. People who have seen that good music can also be a foundation for a good business plan are in position to make that happen.
“What I was trying to champion was the craft of it, the craft and the discipline of it,” he says. “I heard those Public Enemy records and ‘B-Boy Bouillabaisse’ as a teenager growing up in northern California, and I wanted to do something on that level. That meant going through a ton of records, finding little moments or happy accidents of brilliance in otherwise mediocre records, and trying to make something good out of them.
Free culture has been about the right of the next generation to make its mark by either demonstrating how they are really artistically creative and worthy of attention, or at least having the chance to fail at that showing.
“New York got huge in the seventies with the Talking Heads and Ramones and early hip-hop because it was a wasteland, a cheap place to live where it was easy for people to do creative stuff,” Deacon says. “Now it’s expensive and everyone has something going on and it’s tough to make a living. People laughed at me when I went to Baltimore, because in comparison nothing was going on there. But you do the one cool thing on a night when nothing’s going on, it becomes easy to get known. And when you become the most known thing in a city, it’s a lot easier to get known on a national level.
The music industry does not know how to deal with the technology and the culture that it lives in, and it’s panicking.
“The original function of songwriting is to tell a story that might otherwise die,” Texas songwriter Steve Earle said at the time.
Musicians loved to complain about their record companies almost as much as they loved to complain about music critics, but few were eager to assume the responsibilities of distributing and marketing their music.
“My band was saying, ‘We want to have our own record label,’” says Bert Holman, manager of the Allman Brothers. “And my response is, ‘Yeah, great, but there’s more to it than you guys think. We need distribution. We need professional distribution, accounting, licensing, all that stuff. It needs to be handled by people who know what they’re doing.’ It’s like asking you as a writer to start publishing a Web magazine. Maybe you can write it, but do you know how to construct the site and attract subscribers? And what about the financial component? There are so many pieces. You can do it all, but could you do it as well as somebody who has been working their whole life at it?
This was a new type of music corporation, tailored for multimedia stars for whom music is just one aspect of what they do, and how they sell.
This was power speaking to power. With the rise of file sharing as the new distribution system, the Internet as the new radio, and YouTube as the new MTV, the major labels had lost their clout. Now a new corporate elite was emerging to replace them: Live Nation, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Apple. The names had changed, but the system remained much the same.