Piece of Crap: Banksy, Fame, and Frames

Apparently, famed graffiti artist Banksy set up a kiosk in Central Park where he was selling his artwork. He hardly sold any. One of my New York friends was walking in the park that day and is still kicking herself for not walking by and picking up one.

"Ha, ha", the stories bark, "aren't people stupid? Aren't you stupid? You could have had this great art for pennies, but you didn't bother looking!"

This is just like when Joshua Bell played a million-dollar violin in Union Station and nobody noticed.

Again, the story is framed as "Gosh, people are Philistines!" The Post article's title stops short of calling everyone "swine" for not noticing the beauty and wonder of the playing and the magnificence of music.

But anyone who attended an introductory class on modern art understands this situation.

This is an issue of "framing".

Context

We have all been conditioned that most things people try to sell you are probably terrible. Capitalism starts giving you wedgies and smacking your face pretty early, yelling "Fooled you!" and running off with your cash. As Neil Young sang:

Saw it on the tube
Bought it on the phone
Now you're home alone
It's a piece of crap.

Current street art fashion

Live in any big city and you'll be quickly trained to ignore all of the noise around you and keep going. Most buskers are terrible. Most goods sold on the street are counterfeit, stolen, and/or low quality. Street art goes through fads, with everyone copying everyone (the latest, by the way, is painting on maps). Stopping to look or pay attention is just inviting tedious interaction. 

The savvy, street-wise people never come bouncing in, smiling, saying "look what I bought on the street today!"

You literally "know better than to do that".

Further, the context most people are in when these stunts have been pulled is simply not conducive to art appreciation. When was the last time you arrived at Union Station (or any travel terminal) and said "well, I've got plenty of time to soak up the ambiance and appreciate the art here"? Most people are thinking "I am late, and I need to hustle to get where I'm going."

If you think that is unfortunate, it says more about the state of society and the pace of life than people's ability to appreciate beauty.

Context matters. And the context that museums, concert halls, and other "art environments" provide is some degree of cultural and social safety, a guarantee that "what is in here is 'real art', and what is not in here is not."

This is the same framing that the actual frame around the art and little title card provide, just on a larger scale. Both the frame and the museum tell you "the art starts here and stops there." Or in a concert hall, it's the curtains opening and closing.

John Cage's famous 4'11" silent piece and Marcel Duchamp's readymades cover this same ground.  

When you go to one of these art boxes, you are dedicating time and putting yourself in a space to have an art experience. 

When those art experiences are presented without the cultural and context cues, most people won't be able to parse them as art at all, and will instead assume they are commerce and/or a rip-off.

The Frame Makes The Art

The other important takeaway here: Framing is a more important element of "great art" than most people are willing to admit. 

You can look at this the following way: Maybe there's not much difference between the pros and the hacks. This is the same thing that allows people to look at some great art and say "hell, my kid could have done that." (which, of course, misses several points, including "but they didn't" and "yes, but painting is about a lot more than the paint on the canvas")

This painting of a wine bottle is by
famous painter Magritte.

Banksy's style has been copied and appropriated and duplicated. Banksy himself is likely to say (tongue in cheek) that you might as well buy "street art" from anyone. Is there that much of a difference between Banksy and not-famous graffiti artists other than name? 

And maybe there just isn't that much difference between a virtuoso on a fancy instrument and the typical busker sawing away. At least not that most people can tell.

But, well, yeah, there is a difference. For one thing, they're not Banksy.

The frame - the "story" around the art object - helps you understand why it is or isn't art. Lots of people have written a lot about this, both simply (Brian Eno) and in much more obtuse fashion. 

A recent study demonstrated people liked wine more if they had been told it was expensive. Exact same idea.

Culture is Framing

Really, everything we think of as "culture" is just a big frame or story around stuff that happened and got made: "This over here is good and noteworthy. This other stuff isn't."

And if you don't believe me, well, a bunch of famous people like Theodore Adorno and Malcom Gladwell and Brian Eno say so, so there!

David Byrne Tells Streaming Services To Get Off His Lawn

David Byrne, courtesy of WikiPedia
(which destroyed encyclopedias)

Some days, I feel like I just write the same articles over and over. Sisyphus pushing the rock, defending streaming services. If it's not some random person on the internet, it's Thom Yorke.

Now here comes white-haired David Byrne, shuffling down the sidewalk, yelling about the good old days and the end of the music world.

Byrne was the leader of Talking Heads, one of those moderately successful bands that manages to become influential and is a part of the undisputed "canon of cool" for many musicians. Like with Thom Yorke, it stings a little for me to hear musicians I respect and who influenced me speaking out against my work - work that I have engaged in for their benefit.

Evil?
Byrne asks "Are these services evil?" It's difficult not to respond with something equally churlish and provocative, like "Is David Byrne stupid, or just ignorant?" Probably the latter, as he admits and then demonstrates a lack of detailed knowledge about how the services work.

Still, I am compelled to respond to these uninformed and incorrect assertions.

All Internet services are not the same. Byrne lumps streaming services in with YouTube and Pandora, which is sort of like lumping your bank in with muggers and vending machines. "Well, sure, they're kinda different, but they all take your money, right?"

Byrne asks if streaming services are "simply a legalized version of file-sharing sites such as Napster and Pirate Bay". Nope, at least not in terms of infrastructure and effort. Napster and Pirate Bay don't ingest and host terabytes of music and push it out to CDNs worldwide. They don't provide customer support. I could go on.

The most important distinction is this: YouTube and Pandora don't need or get permission to offer the music they deliver. Streaming services have to get permission from the artist, label, and publisher. And then they pay huge guarantees and submit to a ton of control from the content owners.

It's streaming or nothing. Byrne repeats the assertion that no one will buy CDs or pay for downloads when streaming is available. But there's literally years of research that show that the most avid streamers still buy music, and buy more music, than people who don't stream. Put another way, for every Spotify user who says "I'll never buy a CD again", I'll show you a Rhapsody user who says "I'm buying more music than ever". Streaming increases sales.

But why would you buy when you can stream? Well, maybe you're trying to give the artist you like more money. Maybe you want a copy to keep. People do it.

Monopoly...someday. Byrne asserts that we'll end up with a monopoly, and that will be very bad. Well, it's been 12 years, and we don't have a monopoly. We have a bunch of struggling services, and tons of competition in most of the major music markets. The USA (the biggest music market in the world) alone has at least a half-dozen streaming services. And Apple and Amazon haven't even entered the market...yet.

Griping about payment size. I've gone into this many, many times. It is true that for some artists, the per-stream payment has been low. That has a lot to do with the artist's deal with the labels. I will also again point out the labels are collecting money from services even when users play nothing. Is any of that money going to the artist? If not, the artist should be talking to their label. And I repeat my favorite question: What payment would you suggest for a single stream?

Go browse a store instead. Byrne says you could just go to Bandcamp instead. Yeah, Bandcamp. A place that has none of the content. Where the artist doesn't get paid at all when it's played. Look, I like Bandcamp. I have some of my music available there. But it is not a good substitute for subscription services for the reasons above. It's more like iTunes, but more fair. Amazon is pretty much the same. And most bands on major labels aren't allowed to put their content on Bandcamp.

People only go to these places when they have already decided to buy something. It is a very different experience.

It's totally true that the purchase links in Spotify and other services are lame. They're in there because the record labels make us put them in there, not because we think they're a good idea.

Great Pull Quote!
Byrne being the media old hand that he is, he closes with the usual "everything will collapse into these services and the poor artists will starve". The pull quote and tweeted memed headline is "the internet will suck the creative content out of the whole world until nothing is left."

Provocative! Exciting! Wrong!
In some ways, this is just an updated version of Sousa's "The Menace of Mechanical Music". But let's look at a similar model: video.

Jack Valenti famously said that the VCR was the Hollywood Strangler. And instead, it grew revenues tremendously. Opened new markets. There are lots of people who subscribe to Netflix. They're also still watching broadcast or cable, going to movies, buying and renting movies on DVD and Blu-Ray and as digital files, watching pay-per-view, and watching free internet video as well. New methods of enjoying art bring more consumption of art in more areas. 

If that wasn't true, then Sousa would have been right, and the dawn of recording would have destroyed music such that people like David Byrne and Thom Yorke would never have had careers writing and performing it.

Look at ebooks. People are buying and reading more books than ever.

It's depressing to keep arguing these points. But there is some hope.

Dave Allen (of Gang of Four and Shriekback) has finally come around. His excellent response is well worth a read, and I'll repeat many of his points here. Mr. Allen and I have discussed these issues in the past, and haven't always seen eye to eye. But he brings some welcome perspective. Some of his strong points:

There aren't enough good rebuttals. The Guardian will print things that Yorke and Byrne say because they're both famous musicians, and their tirades will sell papers. It would be nice for a change to see them either allow someone from the industry to respond, or find another famous musician who will say something positive about these services. In the meantime, I'll keep plugging away.

The old system was as bad or worse. As per usual, people start trotting out how many streams a musician has to generate to make minimum wage, and start comparing it to selling t-shirts or CDs. I will again point out that it requires nearly no effort or upfront cost on the part of the musician to provide that stream - that's the work the service is doing: ingesting content, making it available worldwide, writing client software, and more.

Compare that to lugging t-shirts and CDs around, carrying change, and soliciting transactions. That's why you get to keep more money in those scenarios: you're doing more work, you're carrying inventory.

Making a living by selling CDs is as hard or harder. Fine, ignore the previous points. Focus on the actual statistics:

• There were more than 98,000 new albums released in 2009.
• Of those 98,000 albums, about 2% sold more than 5,000 copies.
• About 1% sold more than 10,000 copies.
• As far back as the mid-/late-90s, the average band on a major label with a national promo push would sell about 1,000 albums

And all those new records are competing with Led Zeppelin IV and OK Computer and Speaking In Tongues.

If you think selling CDs is going to make you more money, you're wrong. Statistically, you're not even making minimum wage.

The current internet alternatives to streaming are so much worse. Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, and other services are paying out 70-80% of their gross income directly to "content owners": record labels, publishers, and yes, artists. iTunes pays 70%. Other internet alternatives like YouTube and 8Tracks pay nothing, and only achieved their current success by either operating illegally (in a "get big, then get licensed and legit" model) or by exploiting a loophole in the DMCA.

Those royalties are cripplingly high. Spotify still isn't profitable. Most of the streaming services are money-losers. Even mighty iTunes just breaks even. These services cannot pay any more than they are already paying...and frankly, shouldn't have to just because artists signed deals with labels which the artist now regrets.

Listeners won't pay more. I've done the customer research many times. The primary reason people don't use these services? Too expensive. And when the free services bloat up with ads, customers turn away and go back to unlicensed services or illegal downloading. Or don't bother playing music at all.

I'll conclude with noting that Messrs. Byrne and Yorke aren't helping the music business, they're hurting it. It's difficult for today's listeners to understand the distinction between legitimate services and piracy, between what pays the artist and what doesn't. And when they attack the services that are doing the right thing, they are sending a message to those listeners that sounds like "you might as well just steal all the music you want, because the artist doesn't get paid anyway." Again, I've done the market research. I've heard it from the music fans

I suppose this constant criticism is a sign of the legitimacy of streaming services, but it sure doesn't feel like a "win".

Life Is Hard
Byrne closes with an appeal that sounds a bit like "won't someone please think of the children???" He notes that life is hard for up-and-coming musicians, and that even talented ones may have to give up if they can't find a way to make a living...and that the future of musical culture thus "looks grim".

OK, three more points and I'm out.

1. It has never been easy to be an up-and-coming musician. It wasn't easy when Byrne was coming up (there are plenty of his peers that never made it big like he did). It wasn't easy when Sousa was coming up, either.

As I noted previously, there were 98,000 albums released in 2009. Recent years have had similar numbers.

That means all those up-and-coming artists have a lot of competition - not only from all the other 199,999 albums released that weren't theirs, but from all the great old records released over the last 50 years, like those by David Byrne and Thom Yorke. It is not an easy job. It never has been. And streaming services aren't making it any worse. If anything, they're offering an easy, low-cost way to make music available worldwide.

2. 98,000 albums. That's a lot of new music, and those numbers keep going up. So even after over a decade of streaming music services, the number of new albums being created continues to rise. If there is some kind of creative apocalypse, it hasn't happened yet. I'd argue we're seeing the opposite - massive growth in content creation.

I also hope Byrne isn't so commerce-minded that he can't see that many artists (as opposed to entertainers) create because they have to, not because it's a good career choice.

3. Look up what "amateur" means. A personal anecdote: I was an aspiring professional musician. I dipped my toe in nearly every part of the music business before Napster came along. It was really hard. And I came to realize that even being talented wasn't enough. You had to be talented and lucky.

That wasn't good enough for me, so I got a day job (making streaming services, it turned out). I still write, perform, and record music. I distribute it worldwide. I don't do it for the money, I do it for the love of music. I am not unique.

I do not consider myself a "great artist", but I am pretty sure most of the folks I do consider great artists create because they love creating first, and because they can get paid second.

It is entirely possible that subscription music is a terrible idea, and one that will become a footnote in history, like the 8-track cassette. But I have a feeling that if it were to vanish, many artists and music lovers would mourn its loss and sing its praises.

That may sound hard to believe, but then who'd have thought David Byrne would be arguing in favor of the past and fighting against the future?

The Silence

On May 8, 2013, I lost my singing voice.

I woke up in a San Diego hotel with a pain in my neck. Not unusual for a hotel night with an unfamiliar pillow. But driving home after a week on the road my throat felt a little funny.

I was singing along with a song in the car, one I had sung frequently. I went for a medium high note...and it didn't happen. My voice just stopped, well below where it was supposed to go.

I tried again. Stopped. Pushed harder. My throat was just closing up. It was like trying to raise my arm over my head and having it stop halfway.

I've been singing for almost my entire life. Done it professionally or semi-professionally for 20 years. I've had laryngitis, resulting in full voice loss. I've had colds and fevers and near-fatal sinus infections. I've had problems from eating the wrong food. I've sung so hard I lost my voice for a day or two.

I had never experienced anything like this.

I went to the otolaryngologist the next day. They said it was probably a virus, and that I would probably be better in 2-3 months.

100 days passed.

During that time, I took it as easy as I could on my voice, singing only enough every few days to know I still couldn't do it. Limited talking, even though I arguably talk for a living. I still got hoarse after speaking too much or pushing my voice even a little bit.

I saw the doctors a few more times and had various cameras put down my throat. There's nothing physically wrong with my vocal cords. They look quite healthy, all things considered. No damage, no trauma.

But I couldn't sing.

I realized how much I enjoyed singing, just to myself, here and there. I had developed a voice that could emulate or match many of my favorite singers: Peter Murphy. Dave Gahan. Bono. Stuart Adamson. Scott Walker. David Sylvian.

And it was gone.

Having thought of myself as "pretty bad at most instruments, but a good singer", this was a big psychological blow. Bigger than I expected.

And then I started thinking "eh, it doesn't matter, nobody listens to your music anyhow". Which led to an even darker place.

Finally, a lab test showed a deep infection. I took strong antibiotics for 10 days, and finally, my voice started to come back.

Like a runner who's had one leg in a cast for 4 months, it's going to be a while before I can sing full-on again. And also like that runner, it is not yet clear whether there will be any permanent impairment or pain.

But I have a new appreciation for my voice, whatever I've got left of it. I hope to record some things soon.

Who killed album sales?

The latest news is that album sales are down.

The usual gripers are blaming subscription services. It's amazing how quickly Rhapsody, Spotify, and the rest have gone from being ignored to being laughed at to being portrayed as ruining the music business. (It's also funny how artists have gone from bemoaning their inability to get on FM radio to bemoaning their inability to get off of internet radio!)

This is especially problematic logic given the relatively paltry numbers of subscribers these services have. It's hard to see how such a small number of users (20 million worldwide) paying $120 a year for a subscription service is devastating the industry. Especially when the data actually shows people who use these services are more likely to buy music, and more of it, than people who don't use these services.

To put that in perspective, in just the USA, around 45 million people bought at least one download in 2011 or 2012. That's compared to 20 million music subscription users worldwide.

Blaming streaming demonstrates a lack of perspective, and a disappointing willingness to point fingers at companies actually trying to improve the business for all particpants - artists, listeners, labels, and publishers.

Here's one problem. There are no record stores anymore. Tower and most of the other big record stores went out of business long before streaming services had taken off (and in Tower's case, before Spotify even existed).

If there are no significant retail outlets for music that are convenient or pleasant for people, they're not going to buy as much stuff. The record business was hurting long before streaming was more than an interesting curio.

So what actually killed album sales?

• Was it the CD format, which some argue encouraged artists to bloat albums with even more filler? Maybe, but this is hardly objective and widespread enough to cause this decline.
• Was it Napster and other file-sharing services, which taught a generation of music fans to steal the songs they want, and forget the rest? 
• Was it the perennial oldster gripe that "music is just no good anymore"? This one is somewhat backed up by industry decisions and data which shows that many post-1990s albums have no long-term catalog value: they do all their sales initially. This trend is not unique to music - many other forms of media (books, movies, apps) follow a similar power law pattern.
• Was it competition from other media and goods? Music fans today can spend their money on DVDs, Blu-Ray, digital video, MMORPGs, Xbox/PS4, apps, smartphones, data plans, and more.
• A more fundamental correction (in the economic market sense). For a long time, the only way to buy music was buying an album. Yeah, there used to be singles, but when big business took over the music industry in the late 70s/early 80s, they started killing that off or converting to absurdly pricey rip-offs like the cassingle or CD single...and even those were hard to find. If you wanted music, you had to buy the whole album, whether you wanted it all or not.
  
  This is like only selling cola in 3-liter bottles. Suddenly someone starts selling it in cans ($1 downloads). Big surprise: not everyone wants 3-liter bottles, and sales of 3-liter bottles drop.
  
  Maybe the music business was historically overselling and overcharging, and the current sales are what economics would "naturally" dictate.

I don't know for sure. I do know it wasn't solely due to subscription services. 

I'd also argue the album isn't dead. There were more albums released in the last few years than ever before! Yeah, fewer are selling big numbers, but just because you or your favorite band isn't doing well (or as well as they used to) doesn't mean the system is broken.

Hi, Fidelity

"Fidelity" means "faithful" and/or "accurate in details". The etymology takes you right to the Latin for "trust" (fides).

Neil Young is still waving Pono around, and I keep hearing people who should know better talk about how "bad" recordings sound today.

There are 3 elements to achieving fidelity in listening:

1. The actual audio to be recorded: the performer/musician/artist/noisemaker
2. The recording system
3. The playback system

The Performer

We can dispense with this pretty quickly. We'll just assume "the music is good". The artist knows what they're doing, and has good instruments, etc.

It is generally true that back when recording was expensive and time-consuming, "the best" musicians got to make records. But you can go back as far as you like, all the way up to the beginning of audio recording, and you'll still find plenty of subjectively terrible artists and work.

Garbage in, garbage out. If what you're starting with is "bad", it's all but impossible to fix. Musicians, get good instruments. Learn how to make them sound good in a room, on their own. Write good songs. Play them well. If you're a listener, choose stuff that comes from talented people, not products of the machine.

The Recording System

Edison Phonograph and cylinders

The very first sound recording devices - the Edison wax cylinder and its eventual replacement, the 78 shellac disc - sound horrible. Even with lots of digital remastering, the "horn" (basically a giant funnel) used to record, and the horn used to reproduce both add resonance, coloring the sound, and the media itself is not great. The entire system adds a lot of noise (as in "undesired signal").

Things got a bit better once electrical recording was developed, using microphones and amplification. However, in the first few years of the technology, electrical recording was considered vastly inferior to the established "warmth" and fidelity of the mechanical system.

From the recording side, things didn't really get acceptable or decent until the 1950s, when there was decent tape and decent recording technology. You can find remastered recordings from the 1950s that sound great...for what they are. You will almost never mistake them for reality.

It takes until the late 1970s for stereo to be standard, and for records to generally start sounding "true" to life, including widespread adoption of real stereophonic recording and playback. But even in that era, many artists focused on making "good recordings" at the expense of just "recording in a room" for a "you are there" fidelity. Classical and jazz are generally exceptions here, but not always - many canonical records from those genres feature tape edits of multiple takes and overdubs.

Since that time, as recording tools have become more powerful, recordings have become hyper-real or stylized. Why stop with documentary photography when you can airbrush, enhance, or digitally create something "better than real", or "perfect"?

The democratization of recording has placed powerful tools in everyone's hands. But those hands are typically far less skilled at actually using said tools, so you end up with lots of records that sound "bad" by most recording standards.

To make good records, learn to use the tools, and use them appropriately. Some of the best-sounding records were made with 2 microphones in a room, and people who knew where to put them relative to the musicians.

In my admittedly limited analysis, there is absolutely zero correlation with how "good" a record sounds (by musician or engineering standards) and how well that record connects with an audience commercially or emotionally. (If anything, there may be some kind of inverse correlation!)

There are a lot of canonical, great records that sound terrible by most audiophile standards.

The Playback System

On the listening side, it's taken a long time for consumer playback equipment to get good. Most cheap record players were and are awful. Most consumer tape players are not properly calibrated (and some can't be). They play at the wrong speed, too. Most listeners had no idea how to maintain them for optimal sound quality and used dull needles and magnetized heads to further destroy their media.

The great thing about CD players - even cheap ones - is all of this went by the wayside. The difference between bad, decent, and great CD players is smaller than most people like to admit.

The problems for most consumer audio playback is the end of the chain: the speakers or headphones. For most people, these are by far the weakest link. Sadly, those white earbuds that have become so popular are part of the problem, and their terrible fit and worse sound quality have helped perpetuate the myth that "MP3s sound bad".

It remains fashionable among musicians and music fans to say "vinyl is better". Well, it isn't. At least, not in terms of fidelity, and not in terms of what most people can afford.

Vinyl is demonstrably not faithful to the original recordings. There's surface noise inherent in the process. The theoretical dynamic range of vinyl is far lower than that of CDs. The available frequency range and accuracy are also narrower than CDs. There are frequently clicks and pops even on "virgin plays" (though quality control has improved somewhat).

And you have to change your recordings to fit the medium: You can't have a lot of bass, and/or a lot of stereo information, without worrying about the needle getting literally kicked out of the groove. Records are fundamentally changed when mastered for vinyl - the high end is dramatically boosted on when the record is made, and then dramatically cut on playback. This is an attempt to reduce the high end noise (at the cost of increasing rumble).

All of that is before you get to the actual record players many people have. Most record player manufacturers used the cheapest possible components to achieve something close to the desired effects above. There actually aren't even standards for tonearm angle, pressure, and other important elements that are fundamental to accurate reproduction. And strictly speaking, any standard "pivoting" tonearm is already terrible. You need a so-called "linear tracking" turntable (popular in the 80s) with an arm that moves in a straight line across the record surface to reproduce accurately.

Records warp. They scratch easily. And on top of all that, because they are physical, mechanical things, the mere act of playing them degrades them.

The Philips compact cassette doesn't inspire the same devotion as vinyl, but was also pretty bad. High noise (even with Dolby, which most people didn't understand), limited frequency response, and lots of tape alignment issues. And playing it also destroys it over time.

The high fidelity audio world is populated by people who can be best described as "nuts". For people who value "truth", they cling to pseudo-science and voodoo. They spend $1,000 on special electrical cords to connect their gear to their home power. They buy oxygen-free speaker cable that "protects the signal from light" by insulating it with fluid or rubber or magic. Gaze into the mouth of madness.

I'm not saying that expensive stereos don't sound good. But I am saying they don't automatically sound good. And that you don't have to spend a lot of money on your reproduction equipment to have a good experience.

If you really want to improve your fidelity, here are the things I'd recommend, in order:

• Get better speakers and/or headphones. You're probably listening to whatever you bought around college. Generally, the headphones that came with your phone or MP3 player are junk. For $100 you can get something decent. It makes a huge difference.
• Fix your listening environment. If you listen on speakers, where you listen matters a lot. Put your speakers at an appropriate height. Not too low, not too high relative to where your ears will be when you're listening. You want to be sitting in the "sweet spot" between the speakers. You want a room with a minimum of acoustically reflective surfaces. If you clap your hands and hear reverb or echoes, your music isn't going to sound right. If you're like most people, you stuck your speakers wherever they fit in your weird-shaped room.
• Pay attention. When you listen to a record, don't do anything else. Close your eyes. Or look at the cover. Get into the music. Just like how you might concentrate on the taste of a good meal. Listen carefully. Don't let the music be background, and it will immediately sound better.
• Get better music. Stop listening to music made on computers out of shards of other digital recordings (or at least go find some of the ones making deep, huge, beautiful works). Go find some 256 or 320 kbps MP3s (or CDs) of well-recorded, great music.

Rhymes With "Oh No"

The Pono player, as seen on David Letterman

All of this is a pretty long way of saying Pono is going to fail.

This bums me out, because I like Neil Young's music.

This is also unfortunate because its mere existence and continued discussion will further entrench the twin bad ideas that "regular old MP3s/digital sounds bad" and that the "fidelity" issue for consumers hasn't been "solved" yet. It has. By MP3s. Which (at 256 or 320 kbps, with a decent encoder) sound amazing compared to vinyl and tape.

Science disagrees with Pono's fundamental premise. Even if Pono wasn't wrong here, the record companies are unlikely to release all of their catalog in this format (or any new format), making it similar to quadraphonic stereo, HDCD, SACD, DVD Audio, and various other "hi-def" audio formats that also failed due to a vicious circle/negative feedback loop of "no content, no users, no demand".

But more importantly, most people don't care that much about fidelity to begin with. Those that do are pretty skeptical of digital audio (even though they're wrong to be).

The average music consumer wants and expects all of the music they want to be available wherever they are, whenever they want it. They care far more about convenience than "quality" (and that is largely the short-sighted music business' fault), and they care about price above all.

If you are reading this, you almost certainly are not the "average music consumer". But ask yourself this: When was the last time you took an hour, sat down, and really listened to something?

"Fidelity" means being faithful - go be faithful to your music. Treat it right. Maybe get some new headphones, too. I work at Sony, I can get you a deal.

"Coincidence that Pono rhymes with 'oh no'" 

- JP Lester

Welcome to 1984, Winston

Several things happened recently, and it doesn't take a genius to draw connections and consequences from them:

1. Bradley Manning is facing a possible sentence of up to 90 years for leaking "sensitive data".
2. The NSA is allowing other law enforcement agencies to use its data for non-NSA business. And it's telling them to cover it up.
3. The TSA is now being used outside of airports, and claiming they have special exceptions allowing them to violate the probable cause protection in the 4th amendment to the US Constitution (also known as the Bill of Rights).

In his aptly named "Counterterrorism Mission Creep: When Everything Is Terrorism", Bruce Schneier says:

Once the NSA's ubiquitous surveillance of all Americans is complete -- once it has the ability to collect and process all of our emails, phone calls, text messages, Facebook posts, location data, physical mail, financial transactions, and who knows what else -- why limit its use to cases of terrorism? I can easily imagine a public groundswell of support to use to help solve some other heinous crime, like a kidnapping. Or maybe a child-pornography case. From there, it's an easy step to enlist NSA surveillance in the continuing war on drugs; that's certainly important enough to warrant regular access to the NSA's databases. Or maybe to identify illegal immigrants. After all, we've already invested in this system, we might as well get as much out of it as we possibly can. Then it's a short jump to the trivial examples suggested in the Atlantic essay: speeding and illegal downloading. This "slippery slope" argument is largely speculative, but we've already started down that incline.

Note that he doesn't say "if" the NSA achieves ubiquitous surveillance. It's "when".

He says "it's really bad." He's right. This is just the stuff we know about. It will get worse until and unless we the people do something about it.

The 2 Questions from Yorke/Godrich/Spotify

Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich's decision to remove some of their music from Spotify hinges on 2 questions, both of which have been asked repeatedly since streaming services matured. One question is tactical and specific, the other more philosophical:

1. How much is a single stream play worth?
2. Are artists entitled to a living?

How Much Is A Single Stream Play Worth?

Busker image courtesy of Wikipedia

I have written and spoken about this before, to much controversy. I have yet to see anyone arguing against Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, Music Unlimited, RDIO, etc. provide their answers to this question.

This is a critical point to resolve. If we're going to claim that (new) artists aren't getting paid enough for plays, we need to know what "enough" is.

A few years ago, I gave a talk where I looked at what similar industries were charging "per play":

• Jukebox in a bar: $0.25-$0.50 per play. Yeah, that's a lot...but how much of this actually goes to the artist?
• CDs: $0.10 per play. The average CD is played fewer than 10 times after purchase. Assume $10 price for 10 tracks, each played 10 times. That's $1 per track, divided by 10 plays. 10 cents. How much of that goes to the artist? Depends on the size of the band and the organization, but maybe 10% overall.
• Downloads: $0.10 per play. Assumes similar usage for purchased CDs, but the artist gets less money because Apple takes 30% of the retail price and pockets it, and because the labels typically pay artists less for downloads than CDs. 
• Lala.com: $0.10 per stream, infinite plays. Lala failed because they, in their words, could not make this model a viable business. Don't know how much went to the artist, but you can assume similar or worse economics compared to CDs and downloads.
• SiriusXM: $0.002 per stream play (on the internet). [Updated]. I am using SiriusXM's internet streaming rates, based on the NAB rates, not its satellite broadcast payment rate (yes, the two are different).
  
  SiriusXM's satellite rates went up in January 2013 as part of a new CRB ruling, and the company currently pays 12.5% of their retail subscription price to copyright holders (either $1.81 or $1.25). (I could write about how logically weird it is that the rate increases .5% each year, implying somehow that the value of music is rising).
  
  The only data I can find is a little bit old, but it suggests that satellite radio listeners play 44 hours a month. Assuming that 25% of that time is ads and drops (a generous estimate), that means 33 hours of music, or 495 4-minute songs. Divided by $1.81, that yields $0.0037 and divided by $1.25, that yields $0.0025 per play for satellite plays, which is close enough to the internet rates and doesn't change the argument much.
  
  SiriusXM is a relatively large company delivering a fairly lame product. Very limited choice for users. It's taken them a decade to get to scale, including hundreds of millions in advertising and merging the only two companies in the space together. They're barely profitable after all that, even with extremely low churn and now, no competition.
• Generic Internet Radio (USA): $0.0012-$0.0022 per stream play. Depends on a bunch of things, like whether or not you're rebroadcasting FM radio or other programming, what your revenues are, and how big you are.
• Pandora: $0.0012 per stream play. That's a tiny bit more than a tenth of a cent. Pandora is the undisputed king of internet radio, and they have not been able to make a profitable business of it, even at massive scale. 
• FM radio (in the USA): $0.00 per play. You might get something if you're the songwriter, but if you are just the performing artist, you get nothing. FM radio remains a relatively strong and viable business, even if the variety of music offers continues to shrink along with their target demographic.

This comparison deliberately ignores how much more difficult it is to get people to do things higher up on the list (buying anything) than items lower on the list (listening to something for free).

It also ignores the huge difference in scale between items. We're just focusing on the gross possible payment to the artist or cost to the user.

The intentionally inflammatory conclusion I drew? The optimal price per stream, in order to have a successful business, needs to be somewhere between $0.00 and $0.002, because anything higher all but guarantees your business will fail.

Even the high end of that admittedly meager scale means you, as a business, will barely be hanging on. It's possible all of the market leaders in their respective industries - Pandora, SiriusXM, and so on - are total idiots and are running their business badly. But it seems more likely these rates are just punishingly high . Even mighty Spotify is not really making any money.

But who cares about business! Fuck those guys! What about artists? What's a fair rate for artists to charge per play?

Well, you clearly can't charge more than what CDs offer - $0.10 per play - or users will just buy CDs and the question is moot. And we're talking about a single stream play, not ownership or "infinite" plays (which is what ownership gets you), and thus you can't really charge more than what ownership costs.

Assuming you stick the rate you need at $0.10 (using my $10 CD with 10 tracks gets played 10 times math), and assuming you can find companies that will pay you those rates to stream your content, you need to generate 11,600 plays per month (139,200 per year) to earn minimum wage of $1,160 per month, or $13,920 per year.

Is that a lot of streams? I guess it depends on how you figure it. If you assume someone listens to your song every week, you need nearly 3,000 fans reliably playing your song once a week all year to make minimum wage. Then again, if you're Daft Punk, you blow past those numbers no problem.

Based on conventional wisdom and misleading graphs, you'd probably decide that artists should sell CDs, and perhaps everything else should be outlawed.

But you'd be condemning most artists to starvation.

Here's why:
According to Soundscan, in 2009 there were 98,000 CDs released (that means physical CDs that sold at least one copy registered by SoundScan).

Of those 98,000 CDs, only 2.1% sold more than 5,000 copies for the entire year.
Of those 98,000 CDs, only 1% sold more than 10,000 copies for the entire year.

Assuming you are a solo performer on a label, you need to sell 1,161 CDs per month - 13,932 CDs per year - to earn minimum wage.

Which means that less than 1% of artists on labels selling CDs earn minimum wage.

(If you go totally indie and do everything yourself, it's much better. You can get by selling 1,716 CDs per year. But remember, you are now doing everything yourself - running the label, collecting payments, shipping, marketing, etc.)

Being an artist is a tough job. Which leads us to the next question...

Are Artists Entitled To A Living?

Daft Punk: Professional Artists

One problem with having this discussion: Some people will pillory you for even asking the question. "OF COURSE!", they shout. "Artists are special and magical people who speak what cannot be spoken and address the human condition and enrich life!" And so on.

To answer this question, you need a clear view of art and business. The way I see it, if you are truly an artist, you create because you want to or have to. Financial remuneration for said creation is a secondary consideration.

On the other hand, if you are doing it for the money - if "the money" is your primary concern - you are an entertainer or businessperson. And you're going to focus on giving your broadest possible audience whatever they will buy the most of. You will think about this as you craft your, uh, craft, and you will budget a ton of money for marketing (again, see Daft Punk)

If you're not targeting either of those edges, you're waffling in the middle, and risk being someone who delivers compromised work to a non-optimal audience.

People should get paid for their work. But is anyone entitled to a living just doing what they want to do? And what's "a living"? How much income is anyone guaranteed, regardless of what they do?

I think of this: If you started a restaurant and no matter how hard you worked, it failed, nobody would say "wow, we should revamp how restaurants work so you can get paid enough to live."

Instead, they'd say things like "maybe you should have served different or better food." Or been in a different location with better traffic and/or less competition. Or had better service. Or decor. Or done something else.

Businesses fail all the time. The reaction is generally a shrug and "that's the market". Why should professional artists be treated differently?

There have been plenty of starving painters, writers, actors, and other "creatives" throughout history as well. Why do (pop/rock) musicians merit special treatment?

Who gets to decide who qualifies as a professional supported artist? (In the United States, we don't even really have much government support for the arts, even for undisputed titans of creativity).

Let's say society did decide to support artists with some kind of stipend/minimum guarantee because as a society, we value whatever artistic contribution these people are making. How much do we pay them? Minimum wage? 2 x poverty level? $100,000?

The economist then asks "well, why should the category of artist be special? What about other jobs?You'll just get the entire world claiming they're artists, and asking for their payment."

Historically, what you see is effectively a kind of means testing or "quality gate" for public or private patronage.

Despite all of the doom and gloom coming from people like Thom Yorke and the record labels, the fact remains that more music is being created, recorded, and released now than any other time in human history. Some of this is because there are more people, but much of it has to do with the tools for creation (computers, cheap instruments) and distribution (the internet and various services).

This does mean we are drowning in music, most of it not very good. Personally, I would rather have music be democratized, in all its messy, not very good, mostly uninteresting glory than have it be limited to a precious few ordained as "real" musicians by a bureaucrat or Pitchfork or Reddit or whoever your proposed authority happens to be.

Music used to be something nearly everyone did, and most people didn't expect to be able to make a living at it. In that respect, it is no different than lots of other things people do...like writing blogs, for example.

I'm all for debate around the business of music. But it needs to be real debate, around facts and proposals and issues. I will keep pushing forward, trying to build businesses that are directly addressing these issues. I hope the rest of the industry, including thought leaders like Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich, will answer the hard questions with some proposals of their own.

Afterword: Some Notes and Clarifications

• The fact that the average CD is played fewer than 10 times after purchase comes from NARM.
• The sales figures for 2009 come from NARM and Soundscan.
• 2009 was not an unusual year in terms of sales and albums - that distribution is typical and has been for quite some time. Even back in the late 90s, the average album by a band on a major label with a national push sold about 1,000 copies.
• All of the other numbers are publicly available data and close enough for argument's sake.
• For SiriusXM, it's worth noting their 12.5% of consumer price royalty is low, compared to the 60-80% that internet services pay. And let's mention they don't have to pay royalties on a whole bunch of content that internet services still do (read the above links). And SiriusXM has no idea how many songs users are listening to.
  
  The "percentage of revenue" model basically says it doesn't matter. If users listen to zero songs, somebody gets paid. Does any of it go to the artists?
  
  If users listen to 10,000 songs in a month, deriving maximum possible enjoyment from the service, artists aren't going to get very much.
  
  "Percentage of revenue" is a perverse system that effectively says "the more listeners like music, the less we pay the artists per play."

44

I raise my mask and stare at the light leaking around the blackout curtain. My phone says it's 6 AM. I roll out of bed and fumble for my workout clothes.

44 today.

I'm not even sure if it is my birthday yet at home. What is home, at 44? I think about how much of my past is gone, erased, lost. Names and faces changed. The houses of my childhood long sold. "Where are they now?"

California. Los Angeles, a lifetime ago.

"Where are we now?
The moment you know, you know
As long as there's sun..."

San Francisco. Home for 13 years, and yet sometimes I still feel like I just got there. I think about articles I've read claiming people like me are ruining the place.

Where am I now?

London. Got here yesterday. I was in Tokyo 2 or 3 days ago.

I am alone in the hotel gym. I step on the treadmill gingerly. Glutes still hurting from Saturday's training session. Hip sore from bursitis and yesterday's workout. I punch in numbers and run slowly, carefully, more focused on my gait than anything else. I make it 25 minutes before pain makes me switch to the elliptical. I can't get my heart rate up as high, but at least it won't aggravate things too much.

My MP3 player blasts a song by Last Amanda. I did a show with them several years ago at Altamont:

"I've got so much I want to tell you/I don't think so
Share my experience with others/I don't think so
...I can't stand myself"

Life has changed so much, so quickly. Just 4 years ago, I had a huge party. You were probably invited, and maybe even showed up. I sang and played guitar. I was working at Rhapsody. I felt like I was on top of the world.

My physical self has been on my mind a lot lately. My voice has been broken for just over 2 months.It seems to be recovering...slowly. I spend far too much time worrying about it, but literally every day I am reminded of the loss, and how much I loved singing, and feeling like I could sing anything.

Largely driven by doctors' orders and by vanity, I have been exercising and watching my diet for the last few months. I am 15-20 pounds lighter than I was in February. In better shape now, in terms of performance and appearance, than I have been since probably my mid-20s. But in recent weeks my right hip has started complaining about the 20 miles of running I've added, and I am not sure how careful I'll have to be or how long that will take to recuperate. I haven't missed too many workouts, and am watching what I eat, but I am still worried about backsliding.

At least my back and leg have substantially improved over the last few years. I still have problems, but they're much less common and more manageable. Getting old. It's all wear and tear. Damage control.

That right hip is stiff and sore as I walk through the unseasonably warm London morning (LONDON! How did I get here?) to work. I listen to music, in glorious high quality on the best headphones I've ever owned.

One of my own songs comes up, from the yet-to-be-released album "The Ghost Town", the last album I've finished to date. It sounds really good. I like my singing on this one.

"When I crossed the desert, there was nothing that I lacked. 
I left in the dead of night, and I never once looked back."

I smile to myself. I really did cross the Mojave desert at night, leaving childhood and my old life behind, and I've never regretted it once.

I have so much to be grateful for, so much to be happy about. Sometimes it is hard for me to see that clearly. Perhaps it's just my nature to focus on the things I wish were better - I think that is part of what makes me good at my job.

I think about my other birthdays. I have made the same wish for decades. I won't tell you what it is, because then it won't come true. But it has come true, time to time, more often than perhaps I deserve.

I already bought myself a birthday present. A fancy new synthesizer. I wish I had more time to explore it, and more time to create with it. I don't really need more stuff, but there are worse things to spend money on than instruments.

Things are good, even great. My biggest challenges all seem to be self-inflicted to some degree. If I could just ease up a bit. If only. I keep trying.

I'll spend most of today sitting behind mirrored glass in a dark room, watching people be questioned about their activities. "Like FBI?", the Eastern European hotel clerk asked. Yes, exactly like FBI, I told him. Maybe I'll have a nice dinner with a colleague tonight.

Business travel is lonely. I don't really mind being alone, even in unhealthy doses, as long as I know there's an end in sight. I flew back home between international trips to see Iran and my friends. A touch of fatigue and loneliness is worth it for the adventure. Totally.

I'll be home again soon enough, with time to noodle around on my instruments and sleep and think and write. I have so many projects in the works (including an unusual one I am very excited about), and so many people to see.

I think of my friends, my family, my wife, and how fortunate I am.

Happy birthday to me.

Thom Yorke Is Wrong, and 3 free solutions

3 Free Solutions

I'll start off with some answers...

For my colleagues in the digital music business, here are 3 totally free product solutions to the problems Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich are complaining about. I may implement some of these myself. Each of these ideas does have its own challenges and problems, of course.

1. Editorial Programming
2. Tip Jar
3. Make it easy to add content

Editorial Programming

The simplest approach to pushing more new music is to promote it. Have the music service editorial staff take a proactive role in seeking out new and cool stuff, and feature it (on the home page, or playlists, or radio channels). Even just badge new stuff.

Today's reality, however, is the services are generally pushed to feature what the labels want them to feature, and are discouraged from picking favorites.

Additionally, despite what Pitchfork et. al. say, most of the "tastemakers" today write about the same few dozen albums every year. For better or worse, there's a lot of overlap between those few and what the industry is pushing. I suppose there's a blog post to be written about it.

But the easiest way to help out new artists is to promote new music aggressively. And it doesn't really cost a thing!

Tip Jar

This is not a new (or even particularly good) idea. But services could include a button to "donate" more money directly to artists they like.

One problem is "who is the artist?" In a few small cases, it's very clear who the artist is. But what if they're dead? What if they can't be found? What if the band has broken up, or is arguing with each other about money?

Where do you send the money? Even assuming you can resolve that issue, generally services only have contact with the label and publisher, not the "artist". Building that database would be difficult and contentious.

The bigger problem is just that most listeners won't even bother donating. They'll say "well, I am already paying for the service, so..." Most of these fans will go to the artist's site and buy stuff there.

(You could also include URLs to the artist's web site, but many of the above problems still apply).

Make it easy to add content

Each service could/should have prominent links "for artists" that give them instructions for how to get their music in the service fastest and cheapest. Consider adding support for direct deals (these days, most services require use of TuneCore or a similar aggregator).

Some stuff that doesn't help:

• Live shows. Not all bands play live, and those that do have finite capacity for it, and fairly large overhead. This will not solve the problem at all.
• Buying downloads instead. Same (or worse) contractual and accounting problems. Artists don't get that much cash from these, either. Plus you're supporting one of two giant companies that combined represent almost 90% of the music retail business. Apple makes more money on downloads than the artist does, by a huge, huge margin. How does that help? 
• Raising the price of services. Most people think music services are already too expensive, and cost is the #1 cited reason for users cancelling. 

Thom Yorke Is Wrong (and so is Nigel Godrich)

Once again, it is time to clear up some misconceptions about the streaming music business.

Super-cool Thom Yorke of Radiohead and Atoms For Peace took to Twitter, (as did his friend and music partner Nigel Godrich), broadcasting that he is pulling his solo album and his new band's albums from Spotify. 

It's not entirely clear why. Some of their tweets:

...It's bad for new music. 

The reason is that new artists get paid fuck all with this model.. It's an equation that just doesn't work 

The numbers don’t even add up for spotify yet.. But it’s not about that.. It’s about establishing the model which will be extremely valuable.  

Meanwhile small labels and new artists can't even keep their lights on. It's just not right.
Millions of streams gets them a few thousand dollars.. Not like radio at all.. 

Plus people are scared to speak up or not take part as they are told they will lose invaluable exposure if they don't play ball. 

If people had been listening to spotify instead of buying records in 1973... I doubt very much if [Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon] would have been made.. It would just be too expensive.

Ok. Let's address these things.

First, it's hard to see exactly why music services (Spotify, Rhapsody, Google Play Music All Access, RDIO, MOG, Music Unlimited, etc.) are "bad for new music". Music services offer access to everyone, and most of them will automatically include "unknown" artists in recommendations and radio channel experiences. If you know what you're looking for, they make it easy to find.

As for payments, in general, all content is treated the same by these services. I've written extensively here and elsewhere about how those payments actually work. I will reiterate some key points:
Services pay the content owners: the labels and the publishers. For small artists, frequently both of these things are the artist themselves. For "new" artists on labels, how much the artist gets paid has little to do with the deal the service has with the content owner, and everything to do with the deal the artist has with the label and publisher.

This album, by a "new" artist, sold 2.2 million copies when
released in 2012. At least one new artist is doing fine. 

"New" artists having bad or unfavorable deals has been the status quo since the beginning of the record industry. Music services have actually provided an alternative - direct deals - which did not exist before.

It is entirely possible that labels (and publishers) are paying out money to the artists in ways that favor them rather than the artist. That's what they do. As an example, most music services have to pay a minimum to labels and publishers, even if users play nothing in a given month. Do the labels divide that up among all of the artists on their roster and give them a cut? Or do they pocket the whole thing. I'm pretty sure I know the answer, and I bet you can guess what it is yourself.

My takeaway? The point Godrich and Yorke are making here is simply invalid.

If they're complaining that new artists don't generate enough plays, well, that's possibly true for some of them, but not true for all of them. Same as any new artist dealing with sales: most new artists have no sales. In fact, most albums have no sales, period. This isn't news. And any decrease in sales has more to do with the sheer volume of music released.

And this is really what most of the artists involved in this discussion are really bothered about. The old way, including radio and sales of goods, was a "winner take all" model. If the average annual per capita expenditure on music was $35, a user who bought 2 CDs would be giving all of that money to 2 artists.

But in a subscription world, that vastly higher sum - ($10 x 12 months, or $120, less the 10-20% services actually get to keep) is divided amongst all the possible things the user can play. This results in many more artists making a much smaller sum. I'd argue it is more fair. It is just less remunerative for the artist.

This album had one good song. The rest was really bad.
Even the "good" song wasn't that good. 

Looked at from a different angle, prior to music services, users would frequently buy an album because they liked one song on it. And then they'd find they hated the rest of the album. The artist captured the full album amount "unfairly", and the user had no choice in the matter.

Is it hard to "keep the lights on" for small labels and artists? Yes, it is. Again, that's been true for the entire life of the business. And music services offer outlets that are far easier and more transparent than previous physical goods distribution systems.

It's not the same as radio. At all. And that's a good thing. New artists and new music have always been totally screwed by radio, except for the tiniest slice of new stuff designated as the next big thing by the machine. And how you get designated "next big thing" involves a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with how good your music is, and everything to do with how you play the game.

Streaming services put everyone on an equal footing. Yes, it's hard for new bands to rise above the noise and the competition. But at least they have a chance, and people can play the music when they want, and not wait for some DJ to make your music their own personal cause.

Yorke and Godrich seem to imply the services are strong-arming artists into participating. That is straight-up garbage. It is absolutely true that artists lose exposure if they don't participate: if people can't find your music because you've held it back, they can't very well play it, can they? It's the same as withholding your content from record stores because you don't like how little they pay you. You don't have to put your music in their store, but it's not fair or accurate to imply the store is pressuring the artist.

I am particularly irritated about these types of accusations because I have worked on several of these services, and without exception, the entire staff have been musicians and music-lovers dedicated to supporting artists and other music-lovers. I take it personally when people impugn their motivations and intents. We love music, and we love musicians.

If we wanted to make money, we'd have either not gone into music in the first place, or at the very least started some kind of dodgy safe-harbor-using-user-generated-content company that "complied with law" (wink, nudge) instead of burning up millions of dollars in cash advances and contracts.

Finally, there is the assumption that a great work like "Dark Side of the Moon" wouldn't have been made because it would have been too expensive.

*sigh*.

Factually, this is problematic. "Dark Side" wasn't a particularly expensive album to make. Yeah, they used Abbey Road, but it was affordable. And it didn't take that long. In many respects, while it was expected to be a "hit", it was not a "big bet" by anyone involved. It was just the next album by a successful band. Nobody knew or expected it to be a huge hit.

When you look at the albums that really were crazy expensive, or had outsized expectations, the resulting product has seldom lived up to those expectations, and most of the money was wasted or spent on marketing.

And nothing is stopping record companies from making similar bets today. Typically, when an album is "expensive", it's because the label is spending a ton on marketing, or paying talented "beatmakers".

But let's set that aside for a more important point: Are you an artist, or are you a businessperson?

I'm pretty sure Pink Floyd's motivation for creating that album wasn't "hey, this will make us a ton of cash". They wanted to make a record. They had been playing most of the songs on tour for months, so they already knew the material, and knew it would go over well for their target audience.

The album had no "hit single", and Pink Floyd didn't really care about such things. They were making art, meaning they were more concerned with "doing what they wanted" than "how it would sell".

If you are businessperson, the reverse is true. You have to care about "what will sell" more than "what you want". And you would do things like minimize your upfront (i.e. recording) costs and not take many risks.

I assume that Godrich and Yorke are basically saying "because there's so little cash coming in, nobody will invest in making expensive albums". Well, not true. People are still spending lots of money on albums.

But spending money has never correlated with success, and in today's world, you don't have to spend a lot of money to make a good record, much less a successful record.

Look at movies or painting or games or any other art form. If you are depending on someone else to give you massive amounts of cash up front on the hopes of massive returns, well, I think you're doing it wrong.

But more importantly, if all of the music fans that had been buying music had been subscribing to Spotify or other music services, the music business would have been drowning in money.

The main problem today, as I have stated several times, is that not enough people care about music to buy or subscribe. Until that changes, whether it is a music service or download store, the industry is in trouble. Where is the fault? With the artists? The labels? The shop owners? The fans? Maybe all of the above.

But the secondary problem is perhaps more intractable - how do you get fans to listen to more new music, and not just the artists and albums they already know?

That's a tough one, and if Godrich and Yorke can fit any ideas into 140 characters or less, I'm all ears. In the interim, I will continue to do what I have always done, and push for a better music business today.

Almost 44

It's hot in Tokyo. The jetway, the airport, the train platform are filled with warm air. I feel the sweat running down my chest behind my t-shirt as I drop into my seat on the Narita Express. Despite all the travel, I'm not crushingly tired yet.

I've been to Tokyo before in July. 23 years ago. I turned 21 here, sweating, alone, with my wisdom teeth tearing up the insides of my cheeks. I bought a beer and some junk food from the 7-11 with some of my precious funds to celebrate.

It seems like a lifetime ago. Then again, I suppose it was. More time elapsed since than the 21 years I was celebrating.

The announcer bot says we're leaving soon and the trains will separate in Tokyo. The empty train car adds people. The air conditioning whispers.

I snap a photo of myself reflected in the window.

The distant and slightly blurred view looks great, I think. A ghost or a memory. A reflection of another train or another time.

As we start to pull away, I run through the list of things on my mind these days. There's so little I can actually do anything about. So many of my concerns seem to have a solution of "take it easy, don't do anything." Oddly enough, that inaction somehow seems much more difficult.

I wipe my brow with my wristband and listen to some music, using the new offline feature in the Music Unlimited iOS app. It mostly works.

When I was 21, I had a Sony Walkman with me for music here. I remember listening to a lot of albums I didn't like at the time, trying to figure out why I didn't like them and if there was anything good about them. Danzig. Gene Loves Jezebel. Those stick out as the worst. I can't remember what else I had, other than a cassette of mixes for my first "real" solo album, Zero Summer Game. I'd lose that cassette in a club with some teenage models. Worth it.

The sun sinks quickly, and by the time I'm at Shinagawa eki, it's nearly dark. I don't even remember how I got from the airport to the city on my trip here 23 years ago. I don't even remember which airport. But like this time, there was nobody there to meet me. Just me, a guitar, a suitcase. Finding my way. Ready for adventure. Sweating.

The train station feels like the inside of someone's mouth, hot and moist. I roll through the rush hour crowds to the taxi stand. I use my limited Japanese language skills to ask the driver to take me to my hotel of choice. I have lost count of how many times I've been here in the last 18 months, but I've stayed at enough of the local hotels to know which one I like best. We glide off, and I try to relax, rolling down the window in the back seat as we roll through Shinagawa.

When I was here in the summer of 1990, I stayed briefly at the Keio Plaza hotel in Shinjuku, basically long enough to sleep off the trip before a brief stay with a friend's family and then taking over someone's apartment. I can't remember much about the hotel other than being exhausted.

At the hotel, I check in and dump my bags. It's nearly 7 pm Tokyo time. I've been awake for something like 22 hours so far. I change into my gym clothes and work out. My hip is complaining, so I stop running after a few minutes and switch to the stationary bike.

I get cleaned up, have some food, and drop into a deep and sudden sleep.

The next few days are a blur of meetings. It's a better trip than most, despite the infernal weather. The building is cooler inside than last year. It's bearable, pleasant. Sad to say farewell to a departing colleague. Some fun dinners, or at least fun until the hammer of jet lag comes down. At the hotel, I can barely get out of my clothes before collapsing from fatigue. There is absolutely no free time during the entire trip.

And almost before I know it, it's Friday afternoon. I'm back on the Narita Express, heading for the airport, the finish line, lifting up into the skies, memories of this trip, other recent travels, and my own ancient history swirling in my head.

I and Me (and Rick and Johnny)

I have had some experiences with Rick Rubin when I worked at MOG. I've also listened to a bunch of music that he has worked on. I've really liked some of it, and really disliked some of it, too.

I have a tempered respect for the man.

This Daily Beast article captures his better sides, and is worth reading just for this:

What do you remember most vividly about working with Cash? 

On our first album, there was a song he wrote, I can’t remember which one it was, but I listened to it and said, “Do you think you could take some of the ‘I’s and ‘me’s out of it?” And he thought about it and he was like, “Yeah, I think I can do that.” And he did. So 10 years later, I’m visiting him in Nashville. He’s in a wheelchair. He’s blind, pretty much. It felt so awkward. So I said, “What have you been working on lately?” And he said, “I’ve been working on using ‘I’ and ‘me’ less.” And I said, “Really?” And he said, “Yeah. Remember? You gave me that comment on the song? That’s what I’ve been working on.” Incredible. He didn’t mean it in the context of songs. He meant it in the context of life.

I am working on using "I" and "me" less, too.

P.S. The new Kanye West album is really great production coupled to totally inane and largely hook-free songs.

Apple's Price Fixing

Apple colluded with major book publishers to fix ebook prices.

Figure A: Apple's Steve Jobs and the iPad

It's really that simple. This Verge article is a good distillation, and this New Yorker article is even better if you want a typical long, brilliant New Yorker read.

You can expect a whole bunch of blog hype, and maybe Apple will settle or even win in court (they can afford aluminum unibody lawyers with MagSafe Thunderbolt connectors and retina teeth or something) but it comes down to this:

• Apple told the publishers it wanted to help them sell books at prices that made the publishers happier
• Apple told the publishers it was only really interested in getting into the market if all major publishers were on board
• Apple encouraged the publishers not to be left out, telling each of them that all the others were doing it
• The publishers and Apple were really excited about this, not because of consumer benefit or business improvement, but because of the opportunity to break Amazon's market share
• Most importantly, Apple's plan would have raised prices for books for consumers (and by the way, that's what really upsets the DOJ). 
• Publishers were so desperate to raise a perceived price point they were even willing to accept slightly less cash on book sales as a result of Apple's regime (in the short term...then publishers would certainly raise prices more). The primary beneficiary of that initially higher price (and subsequently much higher price)? Apple, who would collect 30%.

There is documentation which appears to explicitly and implicitly back those assertions up.

All 5 of the book publishers have already settled with the Department of Justice.

I expect many Apple apologists will say "Apple was just trying to do the same thing they did with music, what's the difference here?". Well, there are several key differences here:

• When the iTunes Music Store first launched, there was not a flourishing market for purchased digital music. The market was highly fragmented, and most content was not available. Put another way, there was no Amazon to fight - it was Napster and terrible niche sites that tried to sell restricted downloads for $3 each that didn't play anywhere. So Apple's effort was not aimed at displacing a direct competitor
• The iTunes Music Store acted to improve price and value for consumers relative to existing markets
• There were far fewer strong-arm tactics involved with getting music content providers on board, partially because at that time Apple was much less powerful than it is now (at the time of launch, Apple had a "paltry 3% share" of the marketplace). Apple pitched it as an "experiment"!
• Apple told the labels what Apple's retail pricing would be, but it did not demand or encourage the labels to change their wholesale pricing (they could charge Apple whatever they wanted), and Apple did not give the labels control over retail pricing. At launch time, it was either "let us sell the songs at a retail price of $1, or take a hike".

Figure B: Amazon's Jeff Bezos and the Kindle Fire

The collusive activity encouraged by Apple resulted in Amazon losing the ability to sell books - the publishers (after colluding) forced Amazon to raise ebook prices. Again, they were so desperate to do this they actually made Amazon more revenue, and themselves less revenue. As one of the publishers said (trying to defend their actions), "it was a dumb way to do price fixing". 

But the end result? We all paid more money for ebooks. 

It has been said no company gets big by being nice. It's worth thinking about that the next time you catch yourself putting imaginary halos around Google or Apple or Yahoo! or Amazon or any corporation you think is virtuous or cool. Those companies have sent people to Chinese prisons, given confidential information to governments, censored media, acted as pseudo-police...and that's just the stuff we know about. 

Amazon is dominant in several areas. That is cause for some concern - serious competition benefits everyone. Before the collusion, they had 90% market share for ebooks. After the collusion, 60%. Some of that is clearly attributable to the introduction of the iPad - the first compelling Kindle alternative. But some of it is clearly the result of the unfair pricing behavior.

I think of it this way: Both of these balding billionaires have reputations for being smart and mean. But one of them, when he had market dominance, fought for book prices to be lower for you, even if it meant he paid publishers the same amount and lost money on the books. 

The other fought for them to be higher for you, even if it meant publishers got paid less, and his company pocketed the difference.

(And to be clear, in both cases, they felt this would make their companies stronger - they were in it to make money for their shareholders and themselves. Books or music or media is just incidental.)

Apple IS the music business now. iTunes has a 63% share of the digital download music business - and remember, that is starting from 0% just ten years ago. Amazon has been fighting a tough battle, and has about 22%. Both companies are rumored to be working on Rhapsody-esque streaming music services.

Flip the story around. If Amazon and the record labels were accused of collusion with the intent of displacing Apple, who would you believe? 

Well, at least in terms of the labels, it wouldn't be the first time. The labels have been frequently investigated by the Department of Justice, and almost as frequently found guilty.

On top of it all, most modern pricing research around media seems to indicate there are huge net wins for lowering prices rather than raising them. This has been repeatedly demonstrated with DVDs and video games.

If nothing else, perhaps we should be worried about how rapidly we're forsaking tangible paper books that can be easily loaned, copied, and preserved for ephemeral digital "licenses" that can be revoked, changed, memory-holed, edited, and tracked by public or private entities. 

Now I'm going to go listen to some digital music while I read an ebook! Seriously!