logictortured.com Blog

Gee, I’d hate to own a major music label nowadays

Gee, I’d hate to own a major music label right now. As I’ve written about previously, song writers and recording artists are going to be able to start getting back their copyrights in 2013. That means the labels might lose control over a huge backlog of music.

If that’s not bad enough, the labels might owe billions of dollars to artists for the digital licensing of their music, e.g., music “sold” on iTunes and Amazon.

And not to mention that Rebecca Black was able to get a top ten single without any label support. If a no-talent nobody can do it and get to keep most of the money and the copyright for herself, why would anyone sign to a label? Especially established artists.

These problems make the loss of sales to P2P look mighty insignificant in comparison.

Share this:

What a great scam…

Sometime ago Madonna (the singer) decided to build school in Africa for poor girls. She raised 18 million dollars in donations to build that school. (God, can you imagine the awesome school you could build in the third world for 18 million bucks?!)

Anyway, people are now noticing that nothing is being done with the millions and millions of dollars she’s collected. There are no current plans to build any school in Africa or anywhere else.

Instead of rolling up her sleeves and getting to work getting the school built…. (Seriously how hard would it be to have a school built?! The hard part is getting the money to build it. After that you just hire some people and it’s built. What’s taking so fricken long?!)…. Madonna has taken a different approach.

Instead of using the 18 million she’s currently raised, she wants to raise even more and build an even bigger school.

“I realize that the plans we had in place for the Raising Malawi Academy for Girls simply would not serve enough children. My original vision is now on a much bigger scale. I want to reach thousands not hundreds of girls. I want to do more and I want to do it better.”

So what happens when she gets enough money to build a school for thousands of girls?! Will Madonna suddenly decide she wants even more money to build a school for millions of African girls?

What a fricken scam. Get people to give you money. Spend it. When those charitable souls complain about you not spending the money as you promised, hit them up for more!

Madonna may suck as a musician, but she’s got the business world down cold.

Share this:

Who owns Friday?

I was going to spend a lot of time writing about the copyright intricacies involved in the awesome Rebecca Black song Friday.

The issue is interesting (well, at least to me) because Miss Black is not signed to a label. Usually, i.e., always and forever, the label holds the copyright to the music and collects all the money while the artists get paid in peanuts.

However, the song Friday was released by Ark Music Factory, which is not a music label. That company will write and record songs and videos for kids whose parents are rich enough to pay. Apparently, Black’s mom paid 4 grand for the song and video of Friday.

Well, legal blogger Aaron Moss already beat me to it. He wrote a very thorough over-view of the legal issues at play here. Check it out.

Share this:

Most Awesomely Ugly Piano Ever!!

A picture truly is worth a thousand gags. Click the pic if you dare to buy.

Share this:

Does the US really support free market capitalism?

Guitarist Jack White is being heavily criticized for the evil act of selling products at a fair market price. Wait, since when is selling products at fair market price evil?

Here’s a little background. Jack White has a record label. His label sells limited release collectibles. He used to sell them well under market value. However, some people would buy them and then resell them for significantly more on sites such as ebay.

White decided to cut out those middlemen and sell the collectibles directly on ebay. And because it’s an auction where people are able to pick the price they are willing to pay, we necessarily know the collectibles are selling for a fair market price.

But yet there a huge outrage that White is a money grabbing scum bag. Do these idiots work for free? When they last sold their car or house, did they sell it for vastly less than it was worth?

White is in the business of selling music. He’s selling music at a price people are willing to pay. If you don’t like his price, don’t buy it. But don’t bitch about it.

Bitching that you can’t afford a Jack White collectible is about as asinine and petty as bitching that you can’t afford a Rolex watch. Let’s put this in perspective. Try bitching about the high cost of Jack White collectibles to unemployed parents who have no idea how they’re going to feed or shelter their children.

This same erroneous argument is used against fair market concert ticket prices. The bands and concert promoters fight for tough laws against scalping. Unfortunately, scalping is simply buying low and selling high. There is nothing wrong with that. Our entire economic model is based on doing that.

The “problem” of ticket scalpers is that some tickets are priced way too low. Bands should follow Jack White’s lead and sell their tickets on an ebay type site. Since the tickets would be selling for a more accurate market value, there would be no profit in buying and reselling. Scalpers would be eliminated in a second without a single law being passed.

Why musicians don’t do this is beyond me. They have a choice. They should either sell their tickets at a fair market value or accept that buying low and selling high is a fact of life. If international corporations are allowed to do it, so should the little guy.

Share this:

How Copyright Infringement both Helped and Nearly Killed Metallica

As we probably all know by now, Metallica was one of the first bands to come out against file sharing. They nearly killed off their fan base by attacking fans and suing Napster.

What’s interesting about this is that Metallica’s entire career was built on copyright infringement. Yes, you heard me right. Metallica became a huge success because their fans infringed their copyrights.

Back in the early 80s radio and MTV did not play Metallica’s brand of metal. This was way before the internet. Nowadays if you have a band you can give it exposure to the world by setting up a facebook/myspace page. But back then alt metal careers were built on building up fan bases one person at a time.

Despite the lack of an internet, there was a huge subculture of metal fans throughout the world. Each city had its own “scene” with its own metal bands. Each scene had its own fanzines. These were photocopied fan-made magazines talking about metal (and punk) music.

You’d do shows. That’d earn you some money to record a demo. You’d start selling those cassettes at your shows. Someone from a local fanzine would write a story about your band. It’d include your address so you’d sell more demos.

You’d continue playing live shows expanding out to other cities. You’d sell more demos and get written up in more fanzines. Thus, you’d sell more demos.

Eventually some of the more commercial metal magazines might do a story about your scene and feature you. That’d allow you to sell more demos and get exposure to the independent labels.

But the demos you’d sell would only be a drop in the bucket compared to what would be going on with your fans. Your fans would be sharing cassette tapes like crazy. Every time someone found a new band they liked, they’d copy it for their friends. Their friends would copy it for their friends. And so on and so on. If you were hot, for every demo you sold, you could guarantee that at least 100 people had a copy. If you sold 1000 demos, you’d have 100,000 fans.

To show how this worked, Metallica’s first independent album, Kill ‘Em All, reached 120 on the US Billboard chart, without any radio, television, mainstream press, or any videos. Heck, it reached number 12 in Finland and 28 in Sweden.

Kill ‘Em All did so incredibly well because fans had been sharing Metallica’s demo tapes since 1981. Before even being signed to an independent label, Metallica were huge in the alt metal movement. All because their fans shared their music.

Which makes Metallica’s attack on Napster users so incredibly ironic.

Metallica used sharing to build themselves up. But once they got to the top, they suddenly became extremely greedy.

And the weird part is that Metallica makes almost all of their profit from touring. Money from album/CD sales are just chump change. But for that relatively nominal amount of money, they still decided to piss on their fans.

Share this:

What did we do before the net?

I’m taking my family to see a Kiss concert this summer. The kids and wife are not as familiar with Kiss’ music as I am. So I put together a playlist of some of their more famous songs so everyone could become familiar with their music.

But I got to thinking. It’d be awesome to know exactly which songs Kiss will be playing. Certainly, someone, somewhere must have posted Kiss’ current setlist on the internet.

Sure enough, SetList.fm saved the day.

Looking through the list it appears that Kiss has been playing the same 21 songs all summer. While that sounds very un-Rock & Roll, considering their stage show, it’s not as if they can improvise anything. I’m sure every single note and every single movement is accounted for.

Anyway, thank you internet!

Share this:

A rebuttal to John Mellencamp’s view on the decline of the music industry

John Mellencamp wrote a piece about what’s wrong with the music industry. While he made some good points, some of his points were completely erroneous.

His point about the music industry being taken over by bean counters is completely correct. I worked in a mom & pop music store from the mid 80s to the mid 90s, the exact time John was talking about. What he left out was that music industry intentionally set out to kill such stores. Starting about in the 90s stores such as Best Buy were selling CDs cheaper than we could buy them at wholesale. But of course retailers such as Best Buy and Walmart does not have the knowledgeable staff that a real music store would have. So when you were looking for a particular artists or CD, you could find it with us. At a big box retailer, you’d get a shoulder shrug and a confused look. (But of course the music store would have died anyway, because the internet is a more efficient system for researching and buying music.)

His criticism of SoundScan is not completely correct. He praised the prior system which was based on “manual research.” But because that system was not based on any objective criteria, it was easily gamed. Here’s a specific example. During the time it switched we sold cassette singles. One song on one cassette. Paula Abdul had a number one single the week prior to the switch. The week it switched, the single dropped completely off the charts. Why? Because no one was actually buying it! SoundScan used actual sales to chart hits, which means it was harder for the music industry to manufacture hits.

He complains that after the switch to SoundScan that “All of a sudden there were #1 records that few of us had ever heard of.” That’s because the charts were no longer being gamed! Duh, is he really that ignorant about what was going on?

Suddenly the music we’ve been selling a lot of, alt metal (i.e., metal that was not oriented around hair styles), alternative, country, and rap dominated the charts. Because that’s what people were actually buying.

John then criticizes modern music because you cannot sing it. But parents and old fogies have been doing that for generations. The biggest mistake any musician makes is thinking that his style of music will never go out of style. Styles change John, get used to it.

Of course John is right, completely right, that the music industry completely missed the boat on portable music.

But his argument that he does not want to be a “P.T. Barnum” is pure nonsense. On one hand he wants to be completely free to make music, and not worry about anything else. And that’s fine. He can do that. No one is stopping him from doing that. The nonsense comes from him wanting to do nothing but music, but also demanding access to everyone’s ears. Or to put it another way, he wants to do exactly what he wants to do, without any compromise and earn a very good living in the process. He does not want to sit alone in his room making music, he wants to “enrich” the world with his art, and enrich his bank account. A question to John, since when does the world owe you a good living for doing exactly what you want?!

And here’s a note to John, the internet will allow both! He can sit in his room and do nothing but eat, write, perform, record, and sleep. And he can put his music up for sale on Amazon and iTunes, or sell it himself. He can have complete freedom and access to the world without ever leaving his house, and without signing away his precious freedom and copyrights to the labels!

I wish to god that we had the net back when I was a musician in the 80s and 90s. It would have made it much easier to escape obscurity and to please fans worldwide. The fact that John is oblivious to this borders on a mental condition on his part.

Update 11/19/10:

John might be starting to get it. Here’s a good quote from a recent interview.

So the greatest thing that ever happened to (my career) was the breakdown of the record companies, because there were no more stupid questions about how many hits are on the next record. It was very liberating. These records we make now are just a calling card for me to go out and play. I was on tour with Bob (Dylan), and he said it was that way when he started. He didn’t expect his records to sell. It was a way of getting out there and playing for people, and that’s the way the record business has come around now.

That’s exactly what I said. Dumping your label and using the net for promotion allows complete artistic freedom.

Share this:

What’s wrong with the music industry and how to fix it

Everyone is talking about how the music industry is in the dumps. But, the problem is not really new. Whenever there is a lack of exposure to new music the music industry takes a dive. Some of you might be old enough to remember when the music industry crashed back in the early 80s. Experts and pundits at the time laid the blame on piracy and video games. The theories were that kids were sharing music via cassette tapes and that kids were too distracted by video games to buy music. Sound familiar?

So the early 80s had Tom Petty shooting an arcade video game with a gun in one of his videos and Bow Wow Wow pissing off the industry with their pro-copying song “C30, C60, C90, Go.” It all seems so incredibly naive now.

Of course the music decline had nothing to do with either cassette tapes or video games. It was that white kids were sick of what radio was playing. (I’m guessing black kids were sick too, but I cannot speak from their experience.) They were sick of faceless corporate rock featuring bland music by such groups as Styx, Journey, and Reo Speedwagon. They wanted their own music, but no one was playing it.

However, once MTV got into enough homes it started exposing kids to new music and the industry took off big time. MTV brought black music to white kids along with English new-wave, metal, and alternative. (And the surge was certainly helped by the release of the CD format which made plenty of people re-buy their music collections.) The music industry was so successful that MC Hammer’s “Too Legit to Quit” was considered a complete flop and ruined his career despite going triple platinum! Today even the best selling records don’t go triple platinum.

That huge wave continued until the 90s when MTV stopped playing new music. About that same time the radio industry started consolidating and extremely narrow play lists killed off any music diversity heard on the radio. The music industry was stuck exactly where it was back in the 80s: Radio stations playing bland corporate music and fans not giving a damn because they had nothing worth giving a damn about.

It was also at that time that I stopped buying new music. Most of the music I had been exposed to was via word of mouth, sharing mix tapes among friends. Artists such as Husker Du, John Zorn and Fishbone. Once I went to law school and didn’t have time to hang out and share music with friends my exposure to new music ended.

That changed with Napster. The cool thing about the original Napster was that it was more than peer-to-peer, it was actually person to person. With modern P2P programs you’re not downloading from one person, but from several people all at once. But with Napster you were connected to one person and they were connected to you. When you saw someone download one of your favorite songs, you’d think, “Gee, if they like that song, they might have something I would like.”

I’d check out share lists of those people and would be exposed to music I had never heard. And I’d chat with people all over the world about music. I went from buying no new music to buying about two or three CDs a month. Bands such as Wilco, the Old 97s, and Pizzicato Five, to name a few.

Of course that ended when Napster pulled its plug. And because other P2P programs didn’t have the same person to person feel, I stopped being exposed to new music and stopped buying new music again. Modern P2P programs are only good when you already know what you want. They’re not designed to expose you to music you’ve never heard. And we have the music industry to blame for that.

The music industry has to accept that the vast majority of people only buy music they’re exposed to. People will see a movie based solely on a commercial, but they will not buy a CD based on a commercial, unless they’ve heard at least one song enough times to actually like it. Marketing music is odd because you basically cannot sell it until after the person has already “used” the product. Nowadays the music industry is holding its assets so tightly that they’re killing themselves off.

If the industry really wants to save itself, here’s what they should do. First, come out strongly against radio consolidation. In fact, press the FCC and Congress to backtrack and open up radio ownership. Push for licenses for as many low-wattage stations as possible. Let’s go back to the time when radio stations existed not solely for profit, but because the owner and DJs loved music. (I have a theory that people with MBAs are unable to love anything that cannot be quantified, so maybe they should be banned from working in the radio industry!)

Second, treat internet radio as a marketing tool and not a source of direct revenue. Real radio only has to pay the composer and publisher for playing music. Why should internet radio be any different?

Third, create a music television channel that plays nothing but music videos. Then spin it off and give it complete independence so it’s free to innovate and play any form of music. Don’t let it become a drone of the corporate music industry. Corporations cannot innovate. No corporation created Jazz, Punk Rock, or Rap. Corporations are great at milking the innovations of others. So give the people who are innovating exposure and then capitalize on it.

Fourth, accept that music is more than just a product. It’s not a new floor cleaner or a dessert topping. It’s an integral part of people’s lives. People use music to shape their identity in ways no other product can. Locking up music is about as asinine as locking up your first kiss or your first roller coaster ride. It’s a part of our identity and culture and people should be allowed to revel in it, not be locked away from it.

Update – 10-23-09:

The band U2 now acknowledges that the problem with CD sales is that no one cares anymore Or as Adam Clayton said,

“The commercial challenges have to be confronted… But I think, in a sense, the more interesting challenge is, ‘What is rock ‘n’ roll in this changing world?’ Because, to some extent, the concept of the music fan — the concept of the person who buys music and listens to music for the pleasure of music itself — is an outdated idea.”

Share this: