Author: Bash Daily Group Archive Feed
Can We Revive the Black Community’s Interest in Jazz? – Atlanta Blackstar
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http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/11/23/black-people-still-listening-jazz/
** Can We Revive the Black Community’s Interest in Jazz?
————————————————————
http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/11/22/black-people-still-listening-jazz/john_coltrane_sound_obsession/
John Coltrane
Although jazz (http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/09/04/black-elite-richard-parsons-leads-harlem-jazz-renaissance-mintons/) is widely known as an original creation of African-American people, the numbers are showing a painful lack of attention and regard for this art form from the people who created it.
That’s a well-established fact, but Atlanta Blackstar wondered, How do we rectify the problem? Is there a way to get Black people excited about jazz once again?
According to data from a study conducted by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the audience for jazz is a largely white one. White Americans make up around 80 percent of jazz concert attendees. Blacks account for just 17 percent of those attending concerts and 20 percent of those listening to jazz recordings. Around a third (34 percent) of those who “like jazz best,” identify as Black.
The strongest identifier for participation in jazz (going to concerts, purchasing CDs) is education. The more educated a person is, the more likely that person is to engage in and support jazz and most other arts. In turn, education strongly correlates with income. Support for jazz increasees the higher the income, according to the jazzhouse.org.
Taking into account that Black people in America are generally funneled into worse school systems than their white counterparts, these numbers make a little more sense.
The only way, it seems, to turn this phenomenon around is to not only make jazz more accessible to the very people that invented it, but to do it at a young age.
In an article titled “Jazz in America: Who’s Listening?” by Scott K. DeVeaux, DeVeaux suggests that if African-Americans were more inclined by educational training to attend concerts and more able to afford to do so, they would support jazz in even greater numbers than they now do.
“The data bear this out: nearly half (49 percent) of African-Americans expressed a desire to attend more jazz concerts, as opposed to less than a quarter (22 percent) of whites,” he writes.
“The problem is, it’s not just a decline in jazz, there is a decline in opera and in classical music, period,” said Alexander Smalls (http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/11/17/alexander-smalls/) , owner of the popular New York jazz venue and restaurant Minton’s. “Primarily because we are a society of now. If it’s not happening right in front of people, they have no reference. We have done such a bad job at educating, so there is no celebration of the music. We need to bring jazz out of its classical state and put it in more of a contemporary setting and do a better job in bringing the music and the value of this discipline to the audience that we want.”
The best way to make such a beautiful genre accessible is to bring it to children at a young age, create programs that promote jazz in schools and let children grow up with the art.
“I think that when something becomes a part of your life at the age of four instead of fourteen/ fifteen it just becomes a habit and becomes part of you,” said Ronald Markham, president and CEO of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. “I play music because I grew up in a small church that had amazing music. So I do think that institutionalizing it as a young age you will have a better chance of it becoming a part of a person’s life.”
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Can We Revive the Black Community’s Interest in Jazz? – Atlanta Blackstar
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/11/23/black-people-still-listening-jazz/
** Can We Revive the Black Community’s Interest in Jazz?
————————————————————
http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/11/22/black-people-still-listening-jazz/john_coltrane_sound_obsession/
John Coltrane
Although jazz (http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/09/04/black-elite-richard-parsons-leads-harlem-jazz-renaissance-mintons/) is widely known as an original creation of African-American people, the numbers are showing a painful lack of attention and regard for this art form from the people who created it.
That’s a well-established fact, but Atlanta Blackstar wondered, How do we rectify the problem? Is there a way to get Black people excited about jazz once again?
According to data from a study conducted by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the audience for jazz is a largely white one. White Americans make up around 80 percent of jazz concert attendees. Blacks account for just 17 percent of those attending concerts and 20 percent of those listening to jazz recordings. Around a third (34 percent) of those who “like jazz best,” identify as Black.
The strongest identifier for participation in jazz (going to concerts, purchasing CDs) is education. The more educated a person is, the more likely that person is to engage in and support jazz and most other arts. In turn, education strongly correlates with income. Support for jazz increasees the higher the income, according to the jazzhouse.org.
Taking into account that Black people in America are generally funneled into worse school systems than their white counterparts, these numbers make a little more sense.
The only way, it seems, to turn this phenomenon around is to not only make jazz more accessible to the very people that invented it, but to do it at a young age.
In an article titled “Jazz in America: Who’s Listening?” by Scott K. DeVeaux, DeVeaux suggests that if African-Americans were more inclined by educational training to attend concerts and more able to afford to do so, they would support jazz in even greater numbers than they now do.
“The data bear this out: nearly half (49 percent) of African-Americans expressed a desire to attend more jazz concerts, as opposed to less than a quarter (22 percent) of whites,” he writes.
“The problem is, it’s not just a decline in jazz, there is a decline in opera and in classical music, period,” said Alexander Smalls (http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/11/17/alexander-smalls/) , owner of the popular New York jazz venue and restaurant Minton’s. “Primarily because we are a society of now. If it’s not happening right in front of people, they have no reference. We have done such a bad job at educating, so there is no celebration of the music. We need to bring jazz out of its classical state and put it in more of a contemporary setting and do a better job in bringing the music and the value of this discipline to the audience that we want.”
The best way to make such a beautiful genre accessible is to bring it to children at a young age, create programs that promote jazz in schools and let children grow up with the art.
“I think that when something becomes a part of your life at the age of four instead of fourteen/ fifteen it just becomes a habit and becomes part of you,” said Ronald Markham, president and CEO of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. “I play music because I grew up in a small church that had amazing music. So I do think that institutionalizing it as a young age you will have a better chance of it becoming a part of a person’s life.”
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=e35e616a13) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=e35e616a13&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Foxxy Fatts: legendary jazz drummer set the beat for Birmingham | AL.com
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http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2014/11/foxxy_fatts_legendary_jazz_dru.html
** Foxxy Fatts: legendary jazz drummer set the beat for Birmingham
————————————————————
Foxxy Fatts.jpg
Jazz drummer Foxxy Fatts, left, is shown performing in 2009 at the Birmingham Public Library. (Photo by Richard Manoske, courtesy of the Birmingham Public Library) (Richard Manoske)
Print (http://blog.al.com/living_impact/print.html?entry=/2014/11/foxxy_fatts_legendary_jazz_dru.html)
http://connect.al.com/staff/greggarrison/index.htmlBy Greg Garrison | ggarrison@al.com (http://connect.al.com/staff/greggarrison/posts.html)
| Follow on Twitter (https://twitter.com/greg_garrison)
on November 23, 2014 at 6:22 AM, updated November 23, 2014 at 8:28 AM
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BIRMINGHAM, Alabama – The legendary Birmingham jazz drummer Foxxy Fatts had a distinctive way of keeping time.
“We always called Foxxy the funkmaster,” said trumpet player Bo Berry, who started playing with Fatts in bands in the early 1970s. “His style of playing was unique. He was like a metronome. He was always a groove drummer.”
While his drumsticks tapped out the beat, he kept a toothpick in his mouth, moving just as rhythmically. “People saw that toothpick and they said, ‘That must be Foxxy,'” Berry said. “I can’t remember ever seeing him play when he didn’t have one.”
Once he forgot his toothpicks and had someone run out to buy a box, Berry said. “Somebody went and got some toothpicks so he would feel comfortable,” Berry said.
“He was bigger than life,” said Jim Cobb, a longtime friend and former bar owner. “I can just see those sticks move. And as the sticks moved, that toothpick was moving just as fast. That was his trademark.”
Fatts kept a rhythm going for his band, Foxxy Fatts and Company, but he also set the beat for a city that celebrated with music festivals that always seemed to have him on the bill. He made his city dance and swing and sway for five decades.
Fatts, born in Birmingham as Sherman Carson, died on Nov. 16 of chronic heart failure. He was 65.
“He was the most generous, kind person I’ve ever known in my life,” said his wife, Joeretha Carson. “He’d actually been sick for a couple of years, but he kept going. … He loved music, specifically jazz music, more than anything in the world.”
Fatts always preferred the nickname to his real name. A woman watching the heavyset musician admiring his fancy clothes in the mirror gave him the name, he once said. “That’s what we’ll call you,” she told him. “Foxxy Fatts.” He was even listed as Foxxy Fatts in the telephone book.
Fatts played drums in the marching band at Ullman High School and started as a teenager playing rhythm and blues. Berry introduced him to jazz. When Fatts played with a small group, he called it Foxxy Fatts and Friends. The big band was called Foxxy Fatts and Company, Berry said. Fatts also played drums for the Bo Berry Quartet, a regular at Ona’s Music Room.
Fatts was a regular at the city’s jazz venues, including Jazz Underground and 22^ndStreet Jazz Café. His band played the city’s music festivals, City Stages, Birmingham Jam and the Birmingham Heritage Festival. They were regulars at Jazz in the Park and at the annual Gulf Shores National Shrimp Festival.
Cobb, of the catering company A Social Affair, presented Fatts and his band during the 1970s at Diamond Jim’s, a nightclub on Birmingham’s Morris Avenue. “He never wanted to be Sherman; he was always Foxxy Fatts,” Cobb said. “He was one of the kindest, sweetest human beings I’ve ever known.”
Berry remembers Fatts and Company winning an original song competition in Atlanta with a song called “Being in Love With You.” They went to the next round in Dallas, won that, and then to the finals in Washington, D.C., at an event hosted by Lou Rawls and Patti Austin. Fatts was disappointed they didn’t win there, Berry said.
While he traveled extensively, Fatts was a Birmingham icon.
In August this year, Fatts and his band played the summer concert series at Aldridge Gardens in Hoover. Fatts also played the drums with Berry’s choir this summer at Friendship Baptist Church in Homewood, where they had played together since the 1990s. Fatts also played the drums at numerous other churches on Sundays, Berry said.
Fatts was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1997.
“He had such a following and such a name,” Berry said. “If you met someone who didn’t like Foxxy, there was something wrong. He was always a good-spirited person.”
AL.com music writer Mary Colurso contributed to this report.
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Foxxy Fatts: legendary jazz drummer set the beat for Birmingham | AL.com
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http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2014/11/foxxy_fatts_legendary_jazz_dru.html
** Foxxy Fatts: legendary jazz drummer set the beat for Birmingham
————————————————————
Foxxy Fatts.jpg
Jazz drummer Foxxy Fatts, left, is shown performing in 2009 at the Birmingham Public Library. (Photo by Richard Manoske, courtesy of the Birmingham Public Library) (Richard Manoske)
Print (http://blog.al.com/living_impact/print.html?entry=/2014/11/foxxy_fatts_legendary_jazz_dru.html)
http://connect.al.com/staff/greggarrison/index.htmlBy Greg Garrison | ggarrison@al.com (http://connect.al.com/staff/greggarrison/posts.html)
| Follow on Twitter (https://twitter.com/greg_garrison)
on November 23, 2014 at 6:22 AM, updated November 23, 2014 at 8:28 AM
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BIRMINGHAM, Alabama – The legendary Birmingham jazz drummer Foxxy Fatts had a distinctive way of keeping time.
“We always called Foxxy the funkmaster,” said trumpet player Bo Berry, who started playing with Fatts in bands in the early 1970s. “His style of playing was unique. He was like a metronome. He was always a groove drummer.”
While his drumsticks tapped out the beat, he kept a toothpick in his mouth, moving just as rhythmically. “People saw that toothpick and they said, ‘That must be Foxxy,'” Berry said. “I can’t remember ever seeing him play when he didn’t have one.”
Once he forgot his toothpicks and had someone run out to buy a box, Berry said. “Somebody went and got some toothpicks so he would feel comfortable,” Berry said.
“He was bigger than life,” said Jim Cobb, a longtime friend and former bar owner. “I can just see those sticks move. And as the sticks moved, that toothpick was moving just as fast. That was his trademark.”
Fatts kept a rhythm going for his band, Foxxy Fatts and Company, but he also set the beat for a city that celebrated with music festivals that always seemed to have him on the bill. He made his city dance and swing and sway for five decades.
Fatts, born in Birmingham as Sherman Carson, died on Nov. 16 of chronic heart failure. He was 65.
“He was the most generous, kind person I’ve ever known in my life,” said his wife, Joeretha Carson. “He’d actually been sick for a couple of years, but he kept going. … He loved music, specifically jazz music, more than anything in the world.”
Fatts always preferred the nickname to his real name. A woman watching the heavyset musician admiring his fancy clothes in the mirror gave him the name, he once said. “That’s what we’ll call you,” she told him. “Foxxy Fatts.” He was even listed as Foxxy Fatts in the telephone book.
Fatts played drums in the marching band at Ullman High School and started as a teenager playing rhythm and blues. Berry introduced him to jazz. When Fatts played with a small group, he called it Foxxy Fatts and Friends. The big band was called Foxxy Fatts and Company, Berry said. Fatts also played drums for the Bo Berry Quartet, a regular at Ona’s Music Room.
Fatts was a regular at the city’s jazz venues, including Jazz Underground and 22^ndStreet Jazz Café. His band played the city’s music festivals, City Stages, Birmingham Jam and the Birmingham Heritage Festival. They were regulars at Jazz in the Park and at the annual Gulf Shores National Shrimp Festival.
Cobb, of the catering company A Social Affair, presented Fatts and his band during the 1970s at Diamond Jim’s, a nightclub on Birmingham’s Morris Avenue. “He never wanted to be Sherman; he was always Foxxy Fatts,” Cobb said. “He was one of the kindest, sweetest human beings I’ve ever known.”
Berry remembers Fatts and Company winning an original song competition in Atlanta with a song called “Being in Love With You.” They went to the next round in Dallas, won that, and then to the finals in Washington, D.C., at an event hosted by Lou Rawls and Patti Austin. Fatts was disappointed they didn’t win there, Berry said.
While he traveled extensively, Fatts was a Birmingham icon.
In August this year, Fatts and his band played the summer concert series at Aldridge Gardens in Hoover. Fatts also played the drums with Berry’s choir this summer at Friendship Baptist Church in Homewood, where they had played together since the 1990s. Fatts also played the drums at numerous other churches on Sundays, Berry said.
Fatts was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1997.
“He had such a following and such a name,” Berry said. “If you met someone who didn’t like Foxxy, there was something wrong. He was always a good-spirited person.”
AL.com music writer Mary Colurso contributed to this report.
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Foxxy Fatts: legendary jazz drummer set the beat for Birmingham | AL.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
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http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2014/11/foxxy_fatts_legendary_jazz_dru.html
** Foxxy Fatts: legendary jazz drummer set the beat for Birmingham
————————————————————
Foxxy Fatts.jpg
Jazz drummer Foxxy Fatts, left, is shown performing in 2009 at the Birmingham Public Library. (Photo by Richard Manoske, courtesy of the Birmingham Public Library) (Richard Manoske)
Print (http://blog.al.com/living_impact/print.html?entry=/2014/11/foxxy_fatts_legendary_jazz_dru.html)
http://connect.al.com/staff/greggarrison/index.htmlBy Greg Garrison | ggarrison@al.com (http://connect.al.com/staff/greggarrison/posts.html)
| Follow on Twitter (https://twitter.com/greg_garrison)
on November 23, 2014 at 6:22 AM, updated November 23, 2014 at 8:28 AM
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BIRMINGHAM, Alabama – The legendary Birmingham jazz drummer Foxxy Fatts had a distinctive way of keeping time.
“We always called Foxxy the funkmaster,” said trumpet player Bo Berry, who started playing with Fatts in bands in the early 1970s. “His style of playing was unique. He was like a metronome. He was always a groove drummer.”
While his drumsticks tapped out the beat, he kept a toothpick in his mouth, moving just as rhythmically. “People saw that toothpick and they said, ‘That must be Foxxy,'” Berry said. “I can’t remember ever seeing him play when he didn’t have one.”
Once he forgot his toothpicks and had someone run out to buy a box, Berry said. “Somebody went and got some toothpicks so he would feel comfortable,” Berry said.
“He was bigger than life,” said Jim Cobb, a longtime friend and former bar owner. “I can just see those sticks move. And as the sticks moved, that toothpick was moving just as fast. That was his trademark.”
Fatts kept a rhythm going for his band, Foxxy Fatts and Company, but he also set the beat for a city that celebrated with music festivals that always seemed to have him on the bill. He made his city dance and swing and sway for five decades.
Fatts, born in Birmingham as Sherman Carson, died on Nov. 16 of chronic heart failure. He was 65.
“He was the most generous, kind person I’ve ever known in my life,” said his wife, Joeretha Carson. “He’d actually been sick for a couple of years, but he kept going. … He loved music, specifically jazz music, more than anything in the world.”
Fatts always preferred the nickname to his real name. A woman watching the heavyset musician admiring his fancy clothes in the mirror gave him the name, he once said. “That’s what we’ll call you,” she told him. “Foxxy Fatts.” He was even listed as Foxxy Fatts in the telephone book.
Fatts played drums in the marching band at Ullman High School and started as a teenager playing rhythm and blues. Berry introduced him to jazz. When Fatts played with a small group, he called it Foxxy Fatts and Friends. The big band was called Foxxy Fatts and Company, Berry said. Fatts also played drums for the Bo Berry Quartet, a regular at Ona’s Music Room.
Fatts was a regular at the city’s jazz venues, including Jazz Underground and 22^ndStreet Jazz Café. His band played the city’s music festivals, City Stages, Birmingham Jam and the Birmingham Heritage Festival. They were regulars at Jazz in the Park and at the annual Gulf Shores National Shrimp Festival.
Cobb, of the catering company A Social Affair, presented Fatts and his band during the 1970s at Diamond Jim’s, a nightclub on Birmingham’s Morris Avenue. “He never wanted to be Sherman; he was always Foxxy Fatts,” Cobb said. “He was one of the kindest, sweetest human beings I’ve ever known.”
Berry remembers Fatts and Company winning an original song competition in Atlanta with a song called “Being in Love With You.” They went to the next round in Dallas, won that, and then to the finals in Washington, D.C., at an event hosted by Lou Rawls and Patti Austin. Fatts was disappointed they didn’t win there, Berry said.
While he traveled extensively, Fatts was a Birmingham icon.
In August this year, Fatts and his band played the summer concert series at Aldridge Gardens in Hoover. Fatts also played the drums with Berry’s choir this summer at Friendship Baptist Church in Homewood, where they had played together since the 1990s. Fatts also played the drums at numerous other churches on Sundays, Berry said.
Fatts was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1997.
“He had such a following and such a name,” Berry said. “If you met someone who didn’t like Foxxy, there was something wrong. He was always a good-spirited person.”
AL.com music writer Mary Colurso contributed to this report.
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
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USA
600+ Jazz Books at the ARC Holiday Sale
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** Jazz Me, Bookish
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Here’s a shot of some of the Jazz books that will be available at the ARC’s Holiday Record + CD Sale, Dec 13-21. More that 600 titles never offered before, all shinny new + nice. Zoom in if you can and see the titles. Beyond domestic titles, there are many rare EU discographies, like “V” Disc Catalogue: Discography (No.500-904) from Germany, Born to Sing: A Discography of Billie Holiday from Denmark, and Duke Ellington’s Story on Records, 1945-1974 from Musica Jazz in Italy. Many biographies, autobiographies and jazz photo books also. Many of these came through the generosity of Fred Cohen over at the Jazz Record Center (http://www.jazzrecordcenter.com/) . Do visit them while your in town, and after a trip downtown, to ARC’s sale. And this year there are more than a thousand jazz LPs never before offered!
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join the ARC (http://arcmusic.org/support/monetary-donation/) to attend our pre-sale HOLIDAY PARTY on Thursday evening, Dec. 11, for great food + people + first dibs on all the best wax!
This years party is sponsored by Vinyl.com (http://www.vinyl.com/) . Vinyl.com (http://vinyl.com/) will host our Holiday Party and bring along a table-full of sweet vinyl. Food is once again provided by Two Boots Pizza (http://www.twoboots.com/TW2008/AveA08/AveA1.html) , Bonnie’s Grill (http://bonniesgrill.com/) and our ARC label wine courtesy of The City Winery (http://www.citywinery.com/newyork/) .
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Here’s a shot of some of the Jazz books that will be available at the ARC’s Holiday Record + CD Sale, Dec 13-21. More that 600 titles never offered before, all shinny new + nice. Zoom in if you can and see the titles. Beyond domestic titles, there are many rare EU discographies, like “V” Disc Catalogue: Discography (No.500-904) from Germany, Born to Sing: A Discography of Billie Holiday from Denmark, and Duke Ellington’s Story on Records, 1945-1974 from Musica Jazz in Italy. Many biographies, autobiographies and jazz photo books also. Many of these came through the generosity of Fred Cohen over at the Jazz Record Center (http://www.jazzrecordcenter.com/) . Do visit them while your in town, and after a trip downtown, to ARC’s sale. And this year there are more than a thousand jazz LPs never before offered!
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This years party is sponsored by Vinyl.com (http://www.vinyl.com/) . Vinyl.com (http://vinyl.com/) will host our Holiday Party and bring along a table-full of sweet vinyl. Food is once again provided by Two Boots Pizza (http://www.twoboots.com/TW2008/AveA08/AveA1.html) , Bonnie’s Grill (http://bonniesgrill.com/) and our ARC label wine courtesy of The City Winery (http://www.citywinery.com/newyork/) .
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Here’s a shot of some of the Jazz books that will be available at the ARC’s Holiday Record + CD Sale, Dec 13-21. More that 600 titles never offered before, all shinny new + nice. Zoom in if you can and see the titles. Beyond domestic titles, there are many rare EU discographies, like “V” Disc Catalogue: Discography (No.500-904) from Germany, Born to Sing: A Discography of Billie Holiday from Denmark, and Duke Ellington’s Story on Records, 1945-1974 from Musica Jazz in Italy. Many biographies, autobiographies and jazz photo books also. Many of these came through the generosity of Fred Cohen over at the Jazz Record Center (http://www.jazzrecordcenter.com/) . Do visit them while your in town, and after a trip downtown, to ARC’s sale. And this year there are more than a thousand jazz LPs never before offered!
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join the ARC (http://arcmusic.org/support/monetary-donation/) to attend our pre-sale HOLIDAY PARTY on Thursday evening, Dec. 11, for great food + people + first dibs on all the best wax!
This years party is sponsored by Vinyl.com (http://www.vinyl.com/) . Vinyl.com (http://vinyl.com/) will host our Holiday Party and bring along a table-full of sweet vinyl. Food is once again provided by Two Boots Pizza (http://www.twoboots.com/TW2008/AveA08/AveA1.html) , Bonnie’s Grill (http://bonniesgrill.com/) and our ARC label wine courtesy of The City Winery (http://www.citywinery.com/newyork/) .
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Steve Albini on the surprisingly sturdy state of the music industry – in full | Music | The Guardian
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** Steve Albini on the surprisingly sturdy state of the music industry – in full
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Steve Albini is the producer (he prefers the term “recording engineer”) behind several thousand records. He is also a member of the band Shellac. In 1993, he published The Problem with Music (http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music) , an essay expounding his belief that the major label-dominated industry of the time was inefficient, exploited musicians and led to below par music. On Saturday he gave the keynote address at Melbourne’s Face the Music conference (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at-face-the-music-how-the-internet-solved-problem-with-music) in which he celebrated the fact the internet had both dismantled this system and addressed its inequalities:
I’m going to first explain a few things about myself. I’m 52 years old, I have been in bands continuously, and active in the music scene in one way or another since about 1978. At the moment I’m in a band, I also work as a recording engineer and I own a recording studio in Chicago. In the past I have also been a fanzine writer, radio club DJ, concert promoter and I ran a small record label. I was not terribly successful at any of those things, but I have done them, so they qualify as part of my CV.
I work every day with music and with bands and I have for more than 30 years. I’ve made a couple thousand records for independent bands and rock stars, for big labels and small ones. I made a record two days ago and I’ll be making one on Monday when I get off the plane. So I believe this puts me in a pretty good position to evaluate the state of the music scene today, as it relates to how it used to be and how it has been.
We’re all here to talk about the state of the music scene and the health of the music community. I’ll start by saying that I’m both satisfied and optimistic about the state of the music scene. And I welcome the social and technological changes that have influenced it. I hope my remarks today will start a conversation and through that conversation we can invoke an appreciation of how resilient the music community is, how supportive it can be and how welcoming it should be.
I hear from some of my colleagues that these are rough times: that the internet has cut the legs off the music scene and that pretty soon nobody will be making music anymore because there’s no money in it. Virtually every place where music is written about, there is some version of this troubling perspective. People who used to make a nice income from royalties, they’ve seen the royalties dry up. And people who used to make a living selling records are having trouble selling downloads as substitute for records, and they no longer make records.
So there is a tacit assumption that this money, lost money, needs to be replaced and a lot of energy has been spent arguing from where that money will come. Bitchiness about this abounds, with everybody insisting that somebody else should be paying him, but that he shouldn’t have to pay for anybody else. I would like to see an end to this dissatisfaction.
It’s worthwhile to remember from where we’ve come. From where this bitchiness originates. In the 1970s through the 1990s, the period in which I was most active in bands in the music scene – let’s call this the pre-internet era. The music industry was essentially the record industry, in that records and radio were the venues through which people learned of music and principally experienced it. They were joined by MTV and videos in the 80s and 90s, but the principle relationship people had with music was as sound recordings. There was a booming band scene and all bands aspired to getting recorded, as a mark of legitimacy.
In the 70s and 80s most bands went through their entire lifecycle without so much as a note of their music recorded
But recording was a rare and expensive enterprise, so it wasn’t common. Even your demo tape required considerable investment. So when I started playing in bands in the 70s and 80s most bands went through their entire lifecycle without so much as a note of their music ever being recorded.
Now I’m going to describe the scene as I observed it in America, but I understand that most of the structures and conditions I observed have parallels in other markets. Maybe somebody from my generation can add the local Aussie colour to my comments – I prefer them shouted in as thick an accent as you can muster.
As a yardstick for the economics of the day or for the era, in 1979 you could buy a 45rpm single for a buck, a new album for $5, go see a club gig for $1 or a stadium gig for $7. I know these things because I still have some old ticket stubs and price stickers on my records. Note the relative parity between the live show costs and the recorded music costs. A gradual inflation of prices remained under way through the 90s, making recorded music more expensive, though it remained the principal means of experience.
The whole industry depended on these sales, and sales depended on exposure. Bands on big labels toured, essentially to promote their recordings. And the labels provided promotional and logistical support to keep the bands on the road. This supported a network of agents and managers and roadies and promotional staff, so the expense was considerable.
Retail outlets also offered special placements and promotion: displays, posters, mentions in print ads, giveaways, trinkets and what were called end cap displays. Record labels paid handsomely for these promotions and the stores used the sale of these promotions as additional income. Chain stores especially relied on corporate chain-wide promotions, regardless what the stores might think their local clientele might like. It wasn’t uncommon to see big displays of hair metal bands in urban outlets where they couldn’t sell a single stick but the labels had paid for their utility, so up they went.
Radio stations were enormously influential. Radio was the only place to hear music from any people and record companies paid dearly to influence them. Direct payola had been made illegal but this was a trivial workaround. Record pluggers acting as programming consultants were the middlemen. They paid radio stations for access to their programmers and conducted meetings where new records were promoted.
These promotional offers were quite lucrative. But their metrics depended on radio stations recording that they had added the records to their playlist. To satisfy this requirement and keep the promotional money flowing, radio stations often played tiny fragments of songs jumbled one after the other in any incomprehensible flow during late-night programming hours, to satisfy the programming requirement that they add songs to their playlist. Popular radio stations also staged mammoth concerts, often for free or for nominal cover featuring bands that the labels were promoting. These unpaid radio gigs were a drag on their touring income but the promotional value was presumed to be worth it.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full#img-1‘Promotional copies were immediately sold secondhand to record stores.’ Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters
Journalists and editors who could place reviews, program directors and independent DJs who could add records to playlists or played in nightclubs, were subject to much buttering up. Promotional trinkets and advance copies of records were sent their way. Sometimes by the box. Presumably these were listening and file copies. But they were actually a bribe. These promotional copies were immediately sold secondhand to record stores and it was not uncommon for such stores to be overstocked with a new release prior to its official release as a result. My wife worked in a record store that bought records secondhand in the 90s. And their biggest repeat customers, by a long shot, were the people on these label promo lists. The staff at her store kept a tally for awhile and the editor of the local weeklies music section made a comfortable second income amounting to a $1,000 or more a month from selling these promo copies.
So it was a leaky system, riddled with inefficiencies, but a lot of people made a living through it. Record store owners, buyers, employees, ad agencies, designers, club owners, label reps, A&R, producers, recording studios, publicists, lawyers, journalists, program directors, distributors, tour managers, booking agents, band managers, and all the ancillary services they required: banking, shipping, printing, photography, travel agencies, limos, spandex wardrobe, cocaine dealers, prostitutes. Because of this great bulk of the industry needed to sustain itself. Every facet of the industry was tailored to this need.
The most significant bit of tailoring was an accounting trick called recouping costs. The costs of making a record wasn’t borne by the record label, except initially. Those costs were recouped or taken out of the income the band might otherwise run as royalties. The same was true of all those promo copies, posters, radio pluggers and payola men, producers, publicists, tour support, 8×10 glossies, shipping, freight – basically anything that could be associated with a specific band or record was ultimately paid for by the band, not by the record label.
As the label shifted from vinyl to CD as the dominant format, the labels could easily sell the CD as a convenient, compact, trouble-free way to listen to music. The profit margin exploded and the money got stupid. Retails costs of a CD was half again or double more than an LP but the manufacturing, shipping and storage costs were a tiny fraction. The labels even used vinyl’s legacy as a tool to increase this profit margin by charging bands for unique packaging, despite the fact that CD packaging was designed to be standardised. Or pre-emptively charging back for broken CDs at a rate implying that someone was attacking the inventory with an axe.
If the label is paying you with someone else’s money, the label doesn’t need to care how much you charge
In the end the bands operating under this system earned very little from their record sales, unless they were monumental stars. Often enough bands would conduct their entire careers with a label and never reach the point where they had sufficiently recouped to get paid anything at all. Now the label made its per-piece profit on every record sold. And could recoup the cost of any records unsold. And all those other people got paid using the money that would have otherwise gone to the bands as royalties. Unsurprisingly, those other people also got paid pretty well. It stands to reason that if the label is paying you with someone else’s money, the label doesn’t need to care how much you charge.
During the 90s there was something of an arms race to see who could write the biggest deal. That is, the deal with the most money being spent on the band’s behalf. In a singularly painless contest the money would either be paid to the band as a royalty, which would take that money out of the system and put it into things like houses and groceries and college educations. Or it could be paid to other operators within the industry, increasing the clout and prestige of the person doing the spending. It’s as if your boss, instead of giving your paycheck to you, could pay that money to his friends and business associates, invoking your name as he did. Since his net cost was the same and his friends and associates could return the favour, why would he ever want to let any of that money end up in your hands? It was a system that ensured waste by rewarding the most profligate spendthrifts in a system specifically engineered to waste the band’s money.
Now bands existed outside that label spectrum. The working bands of the type I’ve always been in, and for those bands everything was always smaller and simpler. Promotion was usually down to flyers posted on poles, occasional mentions on college radio and fanzines. If you had booked a gig at a venue that didn’t advertise, then you faced a very real prospect of playing to an empty room. Local media didn’t take bands seriously until there was a national headline about them so you could basically forget about press coverage. And commercial radio was absolutely locked up by the payola-driven system of the pluggers and program directors.
International exposure was extraordinarily expensive. In order for your records to make it into overseas hands you had to convince a distributor to export them. And that was difficult with no means for anyone to hear the record and decide to buy it. So you ended up shipping promotional copies overseas at a terrific expense, never sure if they would be listened to or not.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full#img-2John Peel: ‘He listened religiously to every single record he received in the mail, devoting hours of every day to the task.’ Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/Redferns
The one exception to this was the brilliant BBC DJ John Peel. He listened religiously to every single record he received in the mail, devoting hours of every day to the task. I sent him a copy of the first album I ever made and not only did he play the record on air, he sent me back a postcard with a personal remembrance of Chicago, of visiting a matron aunt as a child in Evanston, the suburb where my post office box was kept. I treasured that note as the first indication that John Peel (http://www.theguardian.com/music/johnpeel) was a great man.
So these independent bands had to be resourceful. They’d built their own infrastructure of independent clubs, promoters, fanzines and DJs. They had their own channels of promotion, including the beginnings of the internet culture that is so prevalent today – that being bulletin boards, and newsgroups. These independent bands even made their own record label. Some were collectives and those that weren’t were likely to operate on a profit-sharing basis that encouraged efficiency, rather than a recoupable patronage system that encouraged indulgence.
That’s where I cut my teeth, in that independent scene full of punks and noise freaks and drag queens and experimental composers and jabbering street poets. You can thank punk rock for all of that. That’s where most of us learned that it was possible to make your own records, to conduct your own business and keep control of your own career. If a bunch of pimply glue sniffers could do it, we reasoned, then anybody could.
The number of records released this way was incredible. Thousands of small releases made their way into the “mom and pop” independent speciality stores, which then provided a market for independent distribution. It was the beginnings of an alternative to the label paradigm. It was cumbersome and slow but it was more efficient than a shotgun approach with the big labels, whose answer to every problem was to spend more of the band’s money on it.
It was the beginning of what we would call the peer network. By mid-90s there were independent labels and distributors moving millions of dollars of records and CDs. And there was a healthy underground economy of bands making a reasonable income owing to the superior efficiencies of the independent methods. My band, as an example, was returned 50% of the net profit on every title that we released through our record label. I worked it out and that earned us a better per-piece royalty than Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Madonna or any other superstar operating concurrently. And we were only one of thousands of such bands.
So, that was the system as it was. That’s what we lost when the internet made everything available everywhere for free. And make no mistake about it, we have lost it. There is still an independent label network but it’s a slim fraction of what it was. The labels continuing to survive do so by supplying niche music to a discerning audience. And because they have been steeled in the art of efficiency their constitution allows them to scale everything to suit the remaining demand.
You may have noticed that in my description of the mass market music scene and the industry as it was pre-internet I made little mention of the audience or the bands. Those two ends of the spectrum were hardly considered by the rest of the business. Fans were expected to listen to the radio and buy records and bands were expected to make records and tour to promote them. And that was about all the thought either were given. But the audience was where all the money came from and the bands were where all the music came from.
Music went from being rare, expensive … to being free worldwide. What a fantastic development
Through the internet, which more than anything else creates access to things, limitless music eventually became available for free. The big record companies didn’t see how to make money from online distribution so they effectively ignored it, leaving it to the hackers and the audience to populate a new landscape of downloading. People who prefer the convenience of CDs over LPs naturally prefer downloaded music even more. You could download it or stream it or listen from YouTube or have your friends on message boards or acquaintances send you zip files. In the blink of an eye music went from being rare, expensive and only available through physical media in controlled outlets to being ubiquitous and free worldwide. What a fantastic development.
There’s a lot of shade thrown by people in the music industry about how terrible the free sharing of music is, how it’s the equivalent of theft, etc. That’s all bullshit and we’ll deal with that in a minute. But for a minute I want you to look at the experience of music from a fan’s perspective, post-internet. Music that is hard to find was now easy to find. Music to suit my specific tastes, as fucked up as they might be, was now accessible by a few clicks or maybe posting a query on a message board. In response I had more access to music than I had ever imagined. Curated by other enthusiasts, keen to turn me on to the good stuff; people, like me, who want other people to hear the best music ever.
This audience-driven music distribution has other benefits. Long-forgotten music has been given a second life. And bands whose music that was ahead of its time has been allowed to reach a niche audience that the old mass distribution failed to find for them, as one enthusiast turns on the next and this forgotten music finally gets it due. There’s a terrific documentary about one such case, the Detroit band Death whose sole album was released in a perfunctory edition in, I believe, 1975 and disappeared until a copy of it was digitised and made public on the internet. Gradually the band found an audience, their music got lovingly reissued, and the band has resurrected, complete with tours playing to packed houses. And the band are now being allowed the career that the old star system had denied them. There are hundreds of such stories and there are speciality labels that do nothing but reissue lost classics like that once they surface.
Now look at the conditions from a band’s perspective, the conditions faced by a band. In contrast to back in the day, recording equipment and technology has simplified and become readily available. Computers now come pre-loaded with enough software to make a decent demo recording and guitar stores sell microphones and other equipment inexpensively that previously was only available at a premium from arcane speciality sources. Essentially every band now has the opportunity to make recordings.
And they can do things with those recordings. They can post them online in any number of places: Bandcamp, YouTube, SoundCloud, their own websites. They can link to them on message boards, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter and even in the comment streams of other music. “LOL,” “this sucks,” “much better,” “death to false metal,” “LOL”. Instead of spending a fortune on international phone calls trying to find someone in each territory to listen to your music, every band on the planet now has free, instant access to the world at its fingertips.
I cannot overstate how important a development that is. Previously, in the top-down paradigm allowed local industry to dictate what music was available in isolated or remote markets, markets isolated by location or language. It was inconceivable that a smaller or independent band could have market penetration into, say, Greece or Turkey, Japan or China, South America, Africa or the Balkans. Who would you ask to handle your music? How would you find him? And how would you justify the business and currency complications required to send four or five copies of a record there?
Fans can find the music they like and develop direct relationships with the bands
Now those places are as well-served as New York and London. Fans can find the music they like and develop direct relationships with the bands. It is absolutely possible – I’m sure it happens every day – that a kid in one of these far-flung places can find a new favourite band, send that band a message, and that singer of that band will read it and personally reply to it from his cell phone half a world away. How much better is that? I’ll tell you, it’s infinitely better than having a relationship to a band limited to reading it on the back of the record jacket. If such a thing were possible when I was a teenager I’m certain I would have become a right nuisance to the Ramones.
A couple of years ago my band mounted a tour of eastern Europe. We played all the hot spots: the Czech Republic, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, we made it as far as Istanbul, Turkey. It was a magical experience, playing in front of audiences who were relatively unjaded by the routine of touring bands and we were welcomed like friends. We played to full houses at the same size venues as the rest of Europe. The same sizes as we would play here in Australia. And the audiences seem equivocally familiar with our music. The key difference being that most of the places have literally never sold a single record. Essentially 100% of our exposure had been through informal means over the internet or hand-to-hand.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full#img-3Steve Albini with his Shellac bandmates, Todd Trainer and Bob Weston
On that trip we established contacts with local promoters and arts organisations and audiences developed an appetite for our music and we have since sold quite a few records into the region. Our next tour through the region was easier as a result and we’re going back to Istanbul this spring, using contacts made on that first exploratory trip. I expect to have a marvellous time.
In short, the internet has made it much easier to conduct the day-to-day business of being in a band and has increased the efficiency. Everything from scheduling rehearsals using online calendars, to booking tours by email, to selling merchandise and records from online stores, down to raising the funds to make a record is a new simplicity that bands of the pre-internet era would salivate over. The old system was built by the industry to serve the players inside the industry. The new system where music is shared informally and the bands have a direct relationship to the fans was built by the bands and the fans in the manner of the old underground. It skips all the intermediary steps.
Bands now have default control of their exposure. It’s no longer necessary to pay people to pay other people to play your records on the radio, only to have those people lie about doing so. It’s no longer necessary to spend money to let people hear your band. It happens automatically.
There’s another, much subtler change that all this instigated. Since people no longer have to make do listening to whatever is on the radio playlist and are no longer limited to owning what the store decides to stock, they have become much more indulgent in their tastes. My friends now normally listen to exotic playlists that they have dreamed up themselves, full of counterintuitive and contrasting choices that are uniquely theirs.
Our office bearer has a hi-fi in that studio office and is as likely to be playing the new 45 from the hardcore band Leather or electro drone by Tim Hecker as he is to be playing a deep cut of Cincinnati soul or handbag disco or improv guitar noodlings, whether newly released from Oren Ambarchi or 30 years old from the Takoma label. People can now listen only to music they are ecstatic about, all the time.
There are active online communities for every kind of music and its subcultures. Whether you’re into Dusty’s Deep Cut reggae, minimal electronics, symphonic pop, Texas blues, Japanese noise, power electronics, children’s music, christmas music, Raymond Scott, or Burl Ives, I guarantee there is an online community where you can connect with other enthusiasts to indulge the minute specificity of your tastes.
These online communities are now a vital part of the scene and this debate and others are hashed out there daily. I’ve probably unconsciously lifted some of my positions in these remarks from discussions I’ve had online so I’d like to confess that plagiarism now, as a way to encourage all of you to get involved in these forums where all the interesting conversations about music is happening.
Imagine a great hall of fetishes where whatever you felt like fucking or being fucked by, however often your tastes might change, no matter what hardware or harnesses were required, you could open the gates and have at it on a comfy mattress at any time of day. That’s what the internet has become for music fans. Plus bleacher seats for a cheering section.
As a result fans are more ardent for this music. They are willing to spend more on seeing it played live. They are willing to buy more ephemera and eager to establish a personal relationship to the people who make the music. Gig prices have escalated as a result. And the merchandise tables at gigs are universally teeming with activity. Back home, gigs that used to cost five or six bucks are now 20 or 30. Over here the ticket inflation has been more pronounced, with club gigs going for $80 or more. As a result gig income for bands has increased exponentially. My band has been playing a lot of the same places for the entirety of our existence, over 20 years now. I guess you could say we’ve saturated our audience, no matter how long we stay at it. Some of these perennial gigs are now paying an over of magnitude better than they were 10 or 15 years ago. That’s right, some places where we used to earn four or five hundred dollars we now earn four or five grand.
This ease of access, redoubled interest and increase in income has created a new partnership and possibilities between individuals, bands and visual artists, online film-makers, choreographers and other kinds of public people. Collaborations take place in real time or displaced over the internet where the parties often never meet face-to-face. I have a dear friend who found himself with a bunch of time on his hands last year so he formed a couple of new bands. One of these bands was entirely populated by people he only knew online and all of their music was made by online collaboration. This music was a pure result of the interconnectivity of the internet.
All of that, all of those characteristics, all of those possibilities were instigated and made possible by the online sharing of music. If not directly, as in the case of building an audience for the band Death and my own band in the Balkans and beyond, then indirectly by changing the expectations of the listeners and musicians.
This explains my enthusiasm for the way the music scene has changed, but what about my optimism? I would like to address a platitude about the online exposure of music. From all quarters we hear that, this is the platitude: “We need to figure out how to make internet distribution work for everyone.” I use finger quotes to indicate intellectual distance between myself and the quotation. I have a friend, Tim Midgett, who uses three fingers for finger quotes to indicate extra irony. This is a two jobber.
I disagree with this rather inoffensive platitude. It’s innocuous and vapid and fills the air after someone asks the question, “How is the music scene these days?” And it maintains hope that the current state of affairs as mentioned, presumed to be tragic, can be changed for the better. For “everyone”. That word everyone is important to the people using the sentence. In their mind the physical distribution model worked for everyone. But the new one does not. Not yet, not yet. Not until we “figure it out”. I’m sure we’re all going to get tired of me doing that [air quotes].
Inside that trite sentence, ‘We need to figure out how to make this work for everyone,’ hides the skeleton of a monster
I disagree that the old way is better. And I do not believe this sentence to be true: “We need to figure out how to make this digital distribution work for everyone.” I disagree with it because within its mundane language are tacit assumptions: the framework of an exploitative system that I have been at odds with my whole creative life. Inside that trite sentence, “We need to figure out how to make this work for everyone,” hides the skeleton of a monster.
Let’s start at the beginning. “We need to figure out”: the subject of that sentence, the first-person plural, sounds inclusive but the context defeats that presumption. Who would have the power to implement a new distribution paradigm? Who would be in the room when we discuss our plans for it? Who would do the out figuring we need to do? Industry and consumers? Consumers is a likely response, but did the consumers get a vote about how their music would be compressed or tagged or copy protected or made volatile? Did anybody? Did the consumers get a choice about whether or not Apple stuck a U2 album on their iTunes library? Of course not. These things were just done and we had to deal with them as a state of being. Consumers rebelling or complaining about things – “market pushback” – isn’t the same thing as being involved in the decision to do something. Clearly the “we” of this sentence doesn’t include the listener. I believe any attempt to organise the music scene that
ignores the listener is doomed.
How about the bands? Do the bands get a seat at the “we” table, while our figuring-out needs are met? Of course not. If you ask bands what they want – and I know this because I’m in a band and I deal with bands every day – what they want is a chance to expose their music and to have a shot at getting paid by their audience. I believe the current operating status satisfies the first of these conditions exquisitely and the latter at least as well as the old record label paradigm.
So who is this “we”? The administrative parts of the old record business, that’s who. The vertical labels who hold copyright on a lot of music. They want to do the figuring. They want to set the agenda. And they want to do all the structural tinkering. The bands, the audience, the people who make music and who pay for it – they are conspicuously not in the discussion.
How about the word “need”, we “need” to figure out? The need is actually a “want”, a preference. These remnants of the music industry are unsatisfied with how the internet, the bands and the audience can get along fine without them. So they prefer to change things to re-establish relevance. You see this in the spate of 360 deals that are being offered now, where everything a band does, from their music to their T-shirts to their Twitter accounts belong to the record label. In exchange the record label offers startup money. I believe this approach is doomed by things like Kickstarter, which have proven more effective and efficient at raising money directly from the audience that wants to support the music.
How about the infinitive “to figure out”? We need “to figure out”. That presumes that we can know how to attack a global distribution enterprise long after the internet has crowdsourced an efficient and painless way to do precisely that. There’s a reason the water faucet hasn’t changed radically over the years. Time and trial have demonstrated that the best and simplest way to control hot water is by turning a tap. Problem solved, no further solving of the hot water faucet problem is required. I cannot be the only one who is annoyed by the constantly misaligned proximity faucets in public washrooms. Imagine if listening to music was as frustrating as that.
The next part of the sentence: “make” distribution work. This implies that we have control over the distribution, that we can make it do some things but not others. The internet proves this to be a fallacy. Once we release music it’s out of our control. I use the verb “release” because it’s common vernacular. But I think it’s a perfect description. Even more apt if you consider what happens when you release other things, say a bird or a fart. When you release them they’re in the world and the world will react and use them as it sees fit. The fart may wrinkle noses until it dissipates. The bird may fly outside and crap on windshields; it may get shot down by a farmer. It’s been released, so you have no control over it. You can’t recall the fart, however much you would like to. You can’t protect the bird.
Distribution is a problematic word. Its prior meaning implies scarcity and allocation of physical products. You can inventory them, you could tax them, duty them, you could search somebody’s book bag for them. None of that is true with digital files. If it were possible to return digital files to the strict control of the record labels (it is impossible, don’t worry), what would be their incentive to be honest in their accounting? In the physical distribution model you could inventory the titles in the warehouse during an audit and compare them with the delivery manifests from the press manufacturing plant, and know with reasonable accuracy how many copies had been sold. How on earth would you inventory a digital file? Count how many were left on the shelf?
That word is problematic, but the most problematic word in the sentence is the word “work”: we need to figure out how to make it “work”. Work is an impossible word in this context. Depending on who uses it, it will have contradictory meanings. For a label the system would work if it generated a profit per play, controlled access to music while providing access to the audience for advertisers as an additional income, and allowed the availability of push marketing for promotion. For the listener it would mean open access, ability to find specific and niche music, continuous playback, lack of nuisance, ease of use, freedom from spying, low or no cost, utility on different devices, lack of push marketing and lack of advertising. For a band it would mean finding an audience and having no barrier to participation, and no limits on amount of material made available. You can see how this is problematic. It is literally impossible for a system to satisfy all of these needs
simultaneously when they are contradictory.
And the hybrid approaches being tried are clumsy and insulting. I recently tried streaming a podcast from an official licensed site. When the cats started fighting I missed a little bit, having to separate the cats and then feed the cats and then calmed them down. I came back to my computer and tried to replay the last few minutes that I had missed but was greeted with a notice that due to copyright agreements this player was not allowed to rewind the podcast. I find it unimaginable that the people who posted the podcast wanted that provision enabled. And the site just ensured that I would never bother with their product again.
The conclusion of that sentence, the “for everyone” is also problematic. I don’t think it is necessary or even preferable to have everyone involved in defining the experience with music or more generally the relationship with the band and its audience. We seem to accept that record stores, who were once the welcoming face of the industry and the recipient of much promotional patronage described earlier, are not coming along in the digital era. Record stores now get their appeal from carrying secondhand records, something the industry used to have a regular shit fit about. And by carrying speciality and niche material that is too marginal for corporate attention, they are clearly not part of the “everyone” in the sentence.
So there’s no reason to insist that other obsolete bureaux and offices of the lapsed era be brought along into the new one. The music industry has shrunk. In shrinking it has rung out the middle, leaving the bands and the audiences to work out their relationship from the ends. I see this as both healthy and exciting. If we’ve learned anything over the past 30 years it’s that left to its own devices bands and their audiences can get along fine: the bands can figure out how to get their music out in front of an audience and the audience will figure out how to reward them.
The internet has facilitated the most direct and efficient, compact relationship ever between band and audience
The internet has facilitated the most direct and efficient, compact relationship ever between band and audience. And I do not mourn the loss of the offices of inefficiencies that died in the process. I suppose some people are out of work. But the same things happened when the automobile replaced the horse, and all the blacksmiths had to adapt, spending their time making garden gates rather than horseshoes.
When I read over these notes on the plane today I felt like I spent too much time enumerating complaints, and I don’t want to conclude without reiterating how terrific the current music environment is. I see more bands and I hear more music than ever before in my life. There are more gigs, more songs available than ever before, bands are being treated with more respect, and are more in control of their careers and destinies. I see them continuing as a constellation of enterprises: some big, some small – most small but all of them with a more immediate response from their audience and a greater chance to succeed. It is genuinely exciting.
I’ve been talking an awful long time, but I have not yet mentioned the intellectual property debate. I’ll try to get that out of the way briefly now. I would like to leave room for questions after I speak, and though I’m leaving out a lot – publishing, stolen credits, sampling, fair use, inspiration – I suspect there will be a healthy discussion afterward and think that such discussions are necessary and overdue.
From my part, I believe the very concept of exclusive intellectual property with respect to recorded music has come to a natural end, or something like an end. Technology has brought to a head a need to embrace the meaning of the word “release”, as in bird or fart. It is no longer possible to maintain control over digitised material and I don’t believe the public good is served by trying to.
There is great public good by letting creative material lapse into the public ownership. The copyright law has been modified so extensively in the past decades that now this essentially never happens, creating absurdities whenever copyright is invoked. There’s a huge body of work that is not legally in the public domain, though its rights holder, authors and creators have died or disappeared as businesses. And this material, from a legal standpoint now removed from our culture – nobody may copy it or re-release it because it’s still subject to copyright.
Other absurdities abound: innocuous usage of music in the background of home videos or student projects is technically an infringement and official obstacles are set up to prevent it. If you want a video of your wedding reception – your father’s first dance with a new bride – it’s off limits unless it is silent. If your little daughter does a kooky dance to a Prince song don’t bother putting it on YouTube for her grandparents to see or a purple dwarf in assless chaps will put an injunction on you. Did I offend the little guy? Fuck it. His music is poison.
Music has entered the environment as an atmospheric element, like the wind, and in that capacity should not be subject to control and compensation. Well, not unless the rights holders are willing to let me turn the tables on it. If you think my listening is worth something, OK then, so do I. Play a Phil Collins song while I’m grocery shopping? Pay me $20. Def Leppard? Make it $100. Miley Cyrus? They don’t print money big enough.
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** Steve Albini on the surprisingly sturdy state of the music industry – in full
————————————————————
Steve Albini is the producer (he prefers the term “recording engineer”) behind several thousand records. He is also a member of the band Shellac. In 1993, he published The Problem with Music (http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music) , an essay expounding his belief that the major label-dominated industry of the time was inefficient, exploited musicians and led to below par music. On Saturday he gave the keynote address at Melbourne’s Face the Music conference (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at-face-the-music-how-the-internet-solved-problem-with-music) in which he celebrated the fact the internet had both dismantled this system and addressed its inequalities:
I’m going to first explain a few things about myself. I’m 52 years old, I have been in bands continuously, and active in the music scene in one way or another since about 1978. At the moment I’m in a band, I also work as a recording engineer and I own a recording studio in Chicago. In the past I have also been a fanzine writer, radio club DJ, concert promoter and I ran a small record label. I was not terribly successful at any of those things, but I have done them, so they qualify as part of my CV.
I work every day with music and with bands and I have for more than 30 years. I’ve made a couple thousand records for independent bands and rock stars, for big labels and small ones. I made a record two days ago and I’ll be making one on Monday when I get off the plane. So I believe this puts me in a pretty good position to evaluate the state of the music scene today, as it relates to how it used to be and how it has been.
We’re all here to talk about the state of the music scene and the health of the music community. I’ll start by saying that I’m both satisfied and optimistic about the state of the music scene. And I welcome the social and technological changes that have influenced it. I hope my remarks today will start a conversation and through that conversation we can invoke an appreciation of how resilient the music community is, how supportive it can be and how welcoming it should be.
I hear from some of my colleagues that these are rough times: that the internet has cut the legs off the music scene and that pretty soon nobody will be making music anymore because there’s no money in it. Virtually every place where music is written about, there is some version of this troubling perspective. People who used to make a nice income from royalties, they’ve seen the royalties dry up. And people who used to make a living selling records are having trouble selling downloads as substitute for records, and they no longer make records.
So there is a tacit assumption that this money, lost money, needs to be replaced and a lot of energy has been spent arguing from where that money will come. Bitchiness about this abounds, with everybody insisting that somebody else should be paying him, but that he shouldn’t have to pay for anybody else. I would like to see an end to this dissatisfaction.
It’s worthwhile to remember from where we’ve come. From where this bitchiness originates. In the 1970s through the 1990s, the period in which I was most active in bands in the music scene – let’s call this the pre-internet era. The music industry was essentially the record industry, in that records and radio were the venues through which people learned of music and principally experienced it. They were joined by MTV and videos in the 80s and 90s, but the principle relationship people had with music was as sound recordings. There was a booming band scene and all bands aspired to getting recorded, as a mark of legitimacy.
In the 70s and 80s most bands went through their entire lifecycle without so much as a note of their music recorded
But recording was a rare and expensive enterprise, so it wasn’t common. Even your demo tape required considerable investment. So when I started playing in bands in the 70s and 80s most bands went through their entire lifecycle without so much as a note of their music ever being recorded.
Now I’m going to describe the scene as I observed it in America, but I understand that most of the structures and conditions I observed have parallels in other markets. Maybe somebody from my generation can add the local Aussie colour to my comments – I prefer them shouted in as thick an accent as you can muster.
As a yardstick for the economics of the day or for the era, in 1979 you could buy a 45rpm single for a buck, a new album for $5, go see a club gig for $1 or a stadium gig for $7. I know these things because I still have some old ticket stubs and price stickers on my records. Note the relative parity between the live show costs and the recorded music costs. A gradual inflation of prices remained under way through the 90s, making recorded music more expensive, though it remained the principal means of experience.
The whole industry depended on these sales, and sales depended on exposure. Bands on big labels toured, essentially to promote their recordings. And the labels provided promotional and logistical support to keep the bands on the road. This supported a network of agents and managers and roadies and promotional staff, so the expense was considerable.
Retail outlets also offered special placements and promotion: displays, posters, mentions in print ads, giveaways, trinkets and what were called end cap displays. Record labels paid handsomely for these promotions and the stores used the sale of these promotions as additional income. Chain stores especially relied on corporate chain-wide promotions, regardless what the stores might think their local clientele might like. It wasn’t uncommon to see big displays of hair metal bands in urban outlets where they couldn’t sell a single stick but the labels had paid for their utility, so up they went.
Radio stations were enormously influential. Radio was the only place to hear music from any people and record companies paid dearly to influence them. Direct payola had been made illegal but this was a trivial workaround. Record pluggers acting as programming consultants were the middlemen. They paid radio stations for access to their programmers and conducted meetings where new records were promoted.
These promotional offers were quite lucrative. But their metrics depended on radio stations recording that they had added the records to their playlist. To satisfy this requirement and keep the promotional money flowing, radio stations often played tiny fragments of songs jumbled one after the other in any incomprehensible flow during late-night programming hours, to satisfy the programming requirement that they add songs to their playlist. Popular radio stations also staged mammoth concerts, often for free or for nominal cover featuring bands that the labels were promoting. These unpaid radio gigs were a drag on their touring income but the promotional value was presumed to be worth it.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full#img-1‘Promotional copies were immediately sold secondhand to record stores.’ Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters
Journalists and editors who could place reviews, program directors and independent DJs who could add records to playlists or played in nightclubs, were subject to much buttering up. Promotional trinkets and advance copies of records were sent their way. Sometimes by the box. Presumably these were listening and file copies. But they were actually a bribe. These promotional copies were immediately sold secondhand to record stores and it was not uncommon for such stores to be overstocked with a new release prior to its official release as a result. My wife worked in a record store that bought records secondhand in the 90s. And their biggest repeat customers, by a long shot, were the people on these label promo lists. The staff at her store kept a tally for awhile and the editor of the local weeklies music section made a comfortable second income amounting to a $1,000 or more a month from selling these promo copies.
So it was a leaky system, riddled with inefficiencies, but a lot of people made a living through it. Record store owners, buyers, employees, ad agencies, designers, club owners, label reps, A&R, producers, recording studios, publicists, lawyers, journalists, program directors, distributors, tour managers, booking agents, band managers, and all the ancillary services they required: banking, shipping, printing, photography, travel agencies, limos, spandex wardrobe, cocaine dealers, prostitutes. Because of this great bulk of the industry needed to sustain itself. Every facet of the industry was tailored to this need.
The most significant bit of tailoring was an accounting trick called recouping costs. The costs of making a record wasn’t borne by the record label, except initially. Those costs were recouped or taken out of the income the band might otherwise run as royalties. The same was true of all those promo copies, posters, radio pluggers and payola men, producers, publicists, tour support, 8×10 glossies, shipping, freight – basically anything that could be associated with a specific band or record was ultimately paid for by the band, not by the record label.
As the label shifted from vinyl to CD as the dominant format, the labels could easily sell the CD as a convenient, compact, trouble-free way to listen to music. The profit margin exploded and the money got stupid. Retails costs of a CD was half again or double more than an LP but the manufacturing, shipping and storage costs were a tiny fraction. The labels even used vinyl’s legacy as a tool to increase this profit margin by charging bands for unique packaging, despite the fact that CD packaging was designed to be standardised. Or pre-emptively charging back for broken CDs at a rate implying that someone was attacking the inventory with an axe.
If the label is paying you with someone else’s money, the label doesn’t need to care how much you charge
In the end the bands operating under this system earned very little from their record sales, unless they were monumental stars. Often enough bands would conduct their entire careers with a label and never reach the point where they had sufficiently recouped to get paid anything at all. Now the label made its per-piece profit on every record sold. And could recoup the cost of any records unsold. And all those other people got paid using the money that would have otherwise gone to the bands as royalties. Unsurprisingly, those other people also got paid pretty well. It stands to reason that if the label is paying you with someone else’s money, the label doesn’t need to care how much you charge.
During the 90s there was something of an arms race to see who could write the biggest deal. That is, the deal with the most money being spent on the band’s behalf. In a singularly painless contest the money would either be paid to the band as a royalty, which would take that money out of the system and put it into things like houses and groceries and college educations. Or it could be paid to other operators within the industry, increasing the clout and prestige of the person doing the spending. It’s as if your boss, instead of giving your paycheck to you, could pay that money to his friends and business associates, invoking your name as he did. Since his net cost was the same and his friends and associates could return the favour, why would he ever want to let any of that money end up in your hands? It was a system that ensured waste by rewarding the most profligate spendthrifts in a system specifically engineered to waste the band’s money.
Now bands existed outside that label spectrum. The working bands of the type I’ve always been in, and for those bands everything was always smaller and simpler. Promotion was usually down to flyers posted on poles, occasional mentions on college radio and fanzines. If you had booked a gig at a venue that didn’t advertise, then you faced a very real prospect of playing to an empty room. Local media didn’t take bands seriously until there was a national headline about them so you could basically forget about press coverage. And commercial radio was absolutely locked up by the payola-driven system of the pluggers and program directors.
International exposure was extraordinarily expensive. In order for your records to make it into overseas hands you had to convince a distributor to export them. And that was difficult with no means for anyone to hear the record and decide to buy it. So you ended up shipping promotional copies overseas at a terrific expense, never sure if they would be listened to or not.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full#img-2John Peel: ‘He listened religiously to every single record he received in the mail, devoting hours of every day to the task.’ Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/Redferns
The one exception to this was the brilliant BBC DJ John Peel. He listened religiously to every single record he received in the mail, devoting hours of every day to the task. I sent him a copy of the first album I ever made and not only did he play the record on air, he sent me back a postcard with a personal remembrance of Chicago, of visiting a matron aunt as a child in Evanston, the suburb where my post office box was kept. I treasured that note as the first indication that John Peel (http://www.theguardian.com/music/johnpeel) was a great man.
So these independent bands had to be resourceful. They’d built their own infrastructure of independent clubs, promoters, fanzines and DJs. They had their own channels of promotion, including the beginnings of the internet culture that is so prevalent today – that being bulletin boards, and newsgroups. These independent bands even made their own record label. Some were collectives and those that weren’t were likely to operate on a profit-sharing basis that encouraged efficiency, rather than a recoupable patronage system that encouraged indulgence.
That’s where I cut my teeth, in that independent scene full of punks and noise freaks and drag queens and experimental composers and jabbering street poets. You can thank punk rock for all of that. That’s where most of us learned that it was possible to make your own records, to conduct your own business and keep control of your own career. If a bunch of pimply glue sniffers could do it, we reasoned, then anybody could.
The number of records released this way was incredible. Thousands of small releases made their way into the “mom and pop” independent speciality stores, which then provided a market for independent distribution. It was the beginnings of an alternative to the label paradigm. It was cumbersome and slow but it was more efficient than a shotgun approach with the big labels, whose answer to every problem was to spend more of the band’s money on it.
It was the beginning of what we would call the peer network. By mid-90s there were independent labels and distributors moving millions of dollars of records and CDs. And there was a healthy underground economy of bands making a reasonable income owing to the superior efficiencies of the independent methods. My band, as an example, was returned 50% of the net profit on every title that we released through our record label. I worked it out and that earned us a better per-piece royalty than Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Madonna or any other superstar operating concurrently. And we were only one of thousands of such bands.
So, that was the system as it was. That’s what we lost when the internet made everything available everywhere for free. And make no mistake about it, we have lost it. There is still an independent label network but it’s a slim fraction of what it was. The labels continuing to survive do so by supplying niche music to a discerning audience. And because they have been steeled in the art of efficiency their constitution allows them to scale everything to suit the remaining demand.
You may have noticed that in my description of the mass market music scene and the industry as it was pre-internet I made little mention of the audience or the bands. Those two ends of the spectrum were hardly considered by the rest of the business. Fans were expected to listen to the radio and buy records and bands were expected to make records and tour to promote them. And that was about all the thought either were given. But the audience was where all the money came from and the bands were where all the music came from.
Music went from being rare, expensive … to being free worldwide. What a fantastic development
Through the internet, which more than anything else creates access to things, limitless music eventually became available for free. The big record companies didn’t see how to make money from online distribution so they effectively ignored it, leaving it to the hackers and the audience to populate a new landscape of downloading. People who prefer the convenience of CDs over LPs naturally prefer downloaded music even more. You could download it or stream it or listen from YouTube or have your friends on message boards or acquaintances send you zip files. In the blink of an eye music went from being rare, expensive and only available through physical media in controlled outlets to being ubiquitous and free worldwide. What a fantastic development.
There’s a lot of shade thrown by people in the music industry about how terrible the free sharing of music is, how it’s the equivalent of theft, etc. That’s all bullshit and we’ll deal with that in a minute. But for a minute I want you to look at the experience of music from a fan’s perspective, post-internet. Music that is hard to find was now easy to find. Music to suit my specific tastes, as fucked up as they might be, was now accessible by a few clicks or maybe posting a query on a message board. In response I had more access to music than I had ever imagined. Curated by other enthusiasts, keen to turn me on to the good stuff; people, like me, who want other people to hear the best music ever.
This audience-driven music distribution has other benefits. Long-forgotten music has been given a second life. And bands whose music that was ahead of its time has been allowed to reach a niche audience that the old mass distribution failed to find for them, as one enthusiast turns on the next and this forgotten music finally gets it due. There’s a terrific documentary about one such case, the Detroit band Death whose sole album was released in a perfunctory edition in, I believe, 1975 and disappeared until a copy of it was digitised and made public on the internet. Gradually the band found an audience, their music got lovingly reissued, and the band has resurrected, complete with tours playing to packed houses. And the band are now being allowed the career that the old star system had denied them. There are hundreds of such stories and there are speciality labels that do nothing but reissue lost classics like that once they surface.
Now look at the conditions from a band’s perspective, the conditions faced by a band. In contrast to back in the day, recording equipment and technology has simplified and become readily available. Computers now come pre-loaded with enough software to make a decent demo recording and guitar stores sell microphones and other equipment inexpensively that previously was only available at a premium from arcane speciality sources. Essentially every band now has the opportunity to make recordings.
And they can do things with those recordings. They can post them online in any number of places: Bandcamp, YouTube, SoundCloud, their own websites. They can link to them on message boards, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter and even in the comment streams of other music. “LOL,” “this sucks,” “much better,” “death to false metal,” “LOL”. Instead of spending a fortune on international phone calls trying to find someone in each territory to listen to your music, every band on the planet now has free, instant access to the world at its fingertips.
I cannot overstate how important a development that is. Previously, in the top-down paradigm allowed local industry to dictate what music was available in isolated or remote markets, markets isolated by location or language. It was inconceivable that a smaller or independent band could have market penetration into, say, Greece or Turkey, Japan or China, South America, Africa or the Balkans. Who would you ask to handle your music? How would you find him? And how would you justify the business and currency complications required to send four or five copies of a record there?
Fans can find the music they like and develop direct relationships with the bands
Now those places are as well-served as New York and London. Fans can find the music they like and develop direct relationships with the bands. It is absolutely possible – I’m sure it happens every day – that a kid in one of these far-flung places can find a new favourite band, send that band a message, and that singer of that band will read it and personally reply to it from his cell phone half a world away. How much better is that? I’ll tell you, it’s infinitely better than having a relationship to a band limited to reading it on the back of the record jacket. If such a thing were possible when I was a teenager I’m certain I would have become a right nuisance to the Ramones.
A couple of years ago my band mounted a tour of eastern Europe. We played all the hot spots: the Czech Republic, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, we made it as far as Istanbul, Turkey. It was a magical experience, playing in front of audiences who were relatively unjaded by the routine of touring bands and we were welcomed like friends. We played to full houses at the same size venues as the rest of Europe. The same sizes as we would play here in Australia. And the audiences seem equivocally familiar with our music. The key difference being that most of the places have literally never sold a single record. Essentially 100% of our exposure had been through informal means over the internet or hand-to-hand.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full#img-3Steve Albini with his Shellac bandmates, Todd Trainer and Bob Weston
On that trip we established contacts with local promoters and arts organisations and audiences developed an appetite for our music and we have since sold quite a few records into the region. Our next tour through the region was easier as a result and we’re going back to Istanbul this spring, using contacts made on that first exploratory trip. I expect to have a marvellous time.
In short, the internet has made it much easier to conduct the day-to-day business of being in a band and has increased the efficiency. Everything from scheduling rehearsals using online calendars, to booking tours by email, to selling merchandise and records from online stores, down to raising the funds to make a record is a new simplicity that bands of the pre-internet era would salivate over. The old system was built by the industry to serve the players inside the industry. The new system where music is shared informally and the bands have a direct relationship to the fans was built by the bands and the fans in the manner of the old underground. It skips all the intermediary steps.
Bands now have default control of their exposure. It’s no longer necessary to pay people to pay other people to play your records on the radio, only to have those people lie about doing so. It’s no longer necessary to spend money to let people hear your band. It happens automatically.
There’s another, much subtler change that all this instigated. Since people no longer have to make do listening to whatever is on the radio playlist and are no longer limited to owning what the store decides to stock, they have become much more indulgent in their tastes. My friends now normally listen to exotic playlists that they have dreamed up themselves, full of counterintuitive and contrasting choices that are uniquely theirs.
Our office bearer has a hi-fi in that studio office and is as likely to be playing the new 45 from the hardcore band Leather or electro drone by Tim Hecker as he is to be playing a deep cut of Cincinnati soul or handbag disco or improv guitar noodlings, whether newly released from Oren Ambarchi or 30 years old from the Takoma label. People can now listen only to music they are ecstatic about, all the time.
There are active online communities for every kind of music and its subcultures. Whether you’re into Dusty’s Deep Cut reggae, minimal electronics, symphonic pop, Texas blues, Japanese noise, power electronics, children’s music, christmas music, Raymond Scott, or Burl Ives, I guarantee there is an online community where you can connect with other enthusiasts to indulge the minute specificity of your tastes.
These online communities are now a vital part of the scene and this debate and others are hashed out there daily. I’ve probably unconsciously lifted some of my positions in these remarks from discussions I’ve had online so I’d like to confess that plagiarism now, as a way to encourage all of you to get involved in these forums where all the interesting conversations about music is happening.
Imagine a great hall of fetishes where whatever you felt like fucking or being fucked by, however often your tastes might change, no matter what hardware or harnesses were required, you could open the gates and have at it on a comfy mattress at any time of day. That’s what the internet has become for music fans. Plus bleacher seats for a cheering section.
As a result fans are more ardent for this music. They are willing to spend more on seeing it played live. They are willing to buy more ephemera and eager to establish a personal relationship to the people who make the music. Gig prices have escalated as a result. And the merchandise tables at gigs are universally teeming with activity. Back home, gigs that used to cost five or six bucks are now 20 or 30. Over here the ticket inflation has been more pronounced, with club gigs going for $80 or more. As a result gig income for bands has increased exponentially. My band has been playing a lot of the same places for the entirety of our existence, over 20 years now. I guess you could say we’ve saturated our audience, no matter how long we stay at it. Some of these perennial gigs are now paying an over of magnitude better than they were 10 or 15 years ago. That’s right, some places where we used to earn four or five hundred dollars we now earn four or five grand.
This ease of access, redoubled interest and increase in income has created a new partnership and possibilities between individuals, bands and visual artists, online film-makers, choreographers and other kinds of public people. Collaborations take place in real time or displaced over the internet where the parties often never meet face-to-face. I have a dear friend who found himself with a bunch of time on his hands last year so he formed a couple of new bands. One of these bands was entirely populated by people he only knew online and all of their music was made by online collaboration. This music was a pure result of the interconnectivity of the internet.
All of that, all of those characteristics, all of those possibilities were instigated and made possible by the online sharing of music. If not directly, as in the case of building an audience for the band Death and my own band in the Balkans and beyond, then indirectly by changing the expectations of the listeners and musicians.
This explains my enthusiasm for the way the music scene has changed, but what about my optimism? I would like to address a platitude about the online exposure of music. From all quarters we hear that, this is the platitude: “We need to figure out how to make internet distribution work for everyone.” I use finger quotes to indicate intellectual distance between myself and the quotation. I have a friend, Tim Midgett, who uses three fingers for finger quotes to indicate extra irony. This is a two jobber.
I disagree with this rather inoffensive platitude. It’s innocuous and vapid and fills the air after someone asks the question, “How is the music scene these days?” And it maintains hope that the current state of affairs as mentioned, presumed to be tragic, can be changed for the better. For “everyone”. That word everyone is important to the people using the sentence. In their mind the physical distribution model worked for everyone. But the new one does not. Not yet, not yet. Not until we “figure it out”. I’m sure we’re all going to get tired of me doing that [air quotes].
Inside that trite sentence, ‘We need to figure out how to make this work for everyone,’ hides the skeleton of a monster
I disagree that the old way is better. And I do not believe this sentence to be true: “We need to figure out how to make this digital distribution work for everyone.” I disagree with it because within its mundane language are tacit assumptions: the framework of an exploitative system that I have been at odds with my whole creative life. Inside that trite sentence, “We need to figure out how to make this work for everyone,” hides the skeleton of a monster.
Let’s start at the beginning. “We need to figure out”: the subject of that sentence, the first-person plural, sounds inclusive but the context defeats that presumption. Who would have the power to implement a new distribution paradigm? Who would be in the room when we discuss our plans for it? Who would do the out figuring we need to do? Industry and consumers? Consumers is a likely response, but did the consumers get a vote about how their music would be compressed or tagged or copy protected or made volatile? Did anybody? Did the consumers get a choice about whether or not Apple stuck a U2 album on their iTunes library? Of course not. These things were just done and we had to deal with them as a state of being. Consumers rebelling or complaining about things – “market pushback” – isn’t the same thing as being involved in the decision to do something. Clearly the “we” of this sentence doesn’t include the listener. I believe any attempt to organise the music scene that
ignores the listener is doomed.
How about the bands? Do the bands get a seat at the “we” table, while our figuring-out needs are met? Of course not. If you ask bands what they want – and I know this because I’m in a band and I deal with bands every day – what they want is a chance to expose their music and to have a shot at getting paid by their audience. I believe the current operating status satisfies the first of these conditions exquisitely and the latter at least as well as the old record label paradigm.
So who is this “we”? The administrative parts of the old record business, that’s who. The vertical labels who hold copyright on a lot of music. They want to do the figuring. They want to set the agenda. And they want to do all the structural tinkering. The bands, the audience, the people who make music and who pay for it – they are conspicuously not in the discussion.
How about the word “need”, we “need” to figure out? The need is actually a “want”, a preference. These remnants of the music industry are unsatisfied with how the internet, the bands and the audience can get along fine without them. So they prefer to change things to re-establish relevance. You see this in the spate of 360 deals that are being offered now, where everything a band does, from their music to their T-shirts to their Twitter accounts belong to the record label. In exchange the record label offers startup money. I believe this approach is doomed by things like Kickstarter, which have proven more effective and efficient at raising money directly from the audience that wants to support the music.
How about the infinitive “to figure out”? We need “to figure out”. That presumes that we can know how to attack a global distribution enterprise long after the internet has crowdsourced an efficient and painless way to do precisely that. There’s a reason the water faucet hasn’t changed radically over the years. Time and trial have demonstrated that the best and simplest way to control hot water is by turning a tap. Problem solved, no further solving of the hot water faucet problem is required. I cannot be the only one who is annoyed by the constantly misaligned proximity faucets in public washrooms. Imagine if listening to music was as frustrating as that.
The next part of the sentence: “make” distribution work. This implies that we have control over the distribution, that we can make it do some things but not others. The internet proves this to be a fallacy. Once we release music it’s out of our control. I use the verb “release” because it’s common vernacular. But I think it’s a perfect description. Even more apt if you consider what happens when you release other things, say a bird or a fart. When you release them they’re in the world and the world will react and use them as it sees fit. The fart may wrinkle noses until it dissipates. The bird may fly outside and crap on windshields; it may get shot down by a farmer. It’s been released, so you have no control over it. You can’t recall the fart, however much you would like to. You can’t protect the bird.
Distribution is a problematic word. Its prior meaning implies scarcity and allocation of physical products. You can inventory them, you could tax them, duty them, you could search somebody’s book bag for them. None of that is true with digital files. If it were possible to return digital files to the strict control of the record labels (it is impossible, don’t worry), what would be their incentive to be honest in their accounting? In the physical distribution model you could inventory the titles in the warehouse during an audit and compare them with the delivery manifests from the press manufacturing plant, and know with reasonable accuracy how many copies had been sold. How on earth would you inventory a digital file? Count how many were left on the shelf?
That word is problematic, but the most problematic word in the sentence is the word “work”: we need to figure out how to make it “work”. Work is an impossible word in this context. Depending on who uses it, it will have contradictory meanings. For a label the system would work if it generated a profit per play, controlled access to music while providing access to the audience for advertisers as an additional income, and allowed the availability of push marketing for promotion. For the listener it would mean open access, ability to find specific and niche music, continuous playback, lack of nuisance, ease of use, freedom from spying, low or no cost, utility on different devices, lack of push marketing and lack of advertising. For a band it would mean finding an audience and having no barrier to participation, and no limits on amount of material made available. You can see how this is problematic. It is literally impossible for a system to satisfy all of these needs
simultaneously when they are contradictory.
And the hybrid approaches being tried are clumsy and insulting. I recently tried streaming a podcast from an official licensed site. When the cats started fighting I missed a little bit, having to separate the cats and then feed the cats and then calmed them down. I came back to my computer and tried to replay the last few minutes that I had missed but was greeted with a notice that due to copyright agreements this player was not allowed to rewind the podcast. I find it unimaginable that the people who posted the podcast wanted that provision enabled. And the site just ensured that I would never bother with their product again.
The conclusion of that sentence, the “for everyone” is also problematic. I don’t think it is necessary or even preferable to have everyone involved in defining the experience with music or more generally the relationship with the band and its audience. We seem to accept that record stores, who were once the welcoming face of the industry and the recipient of much promotional patronage described earlier, are not coming along in the digital era. Record stores now get their appeal from carrying secondhand records, something the industry used to have a regular shit fit about. And by carrying speciality and niche material that is too marginal for corporate attention, they are clearly not part of the “everyone” in the sentence.
So there’s no reason to insist that other obsolete bureaux and offices of the lapsed era be brought along into the new one. The music industry has shrunk. In shrinking it has rung out the middle, leaving the bands and the audiences to work out their relationship from the ends. I see this as both healthy and exciting. If we’ve learned anything over the past 30 years it’s that left to its own devices bands and their audiences can get along fine: the bands can figure out how to get their music out in front of an audience and the audience will figure out how to reward them.
The internet has facilitated the most direct and efficient, compact relationship ever between band and audience
The internet has facilitated the most direct and efficient, compact relationship ever between band and audience. And I do not mourn the loss of the offices of inefficiencies that died in the process. I suppose some people are out of work. But the same things happened when the automobile replaced the horse, and all the blacksmiths had to adapt, spending their time making garden gates rather than horseshoes.
When I read over these notes on the plane today I felt like I spent too much time enumerating complaints, and I don’t want to conclude without reiterating how terrific the current music environment is. I see more bands and I hear more music than ever before in my life. There are more gigs, more songs available than ever before, bands are being treated with more respect, and are more in control of their careers and destinies. I see them continuing as a constellation of enterprises: some big, some small – most small but all of them with a more immediate response from their audience and a greater chance to succeed. It is genuinely exciting.
I’ve been talking an awful long time, but I have not yet mentioned the intellectual property debate. I’ll try to get that out of the way briefly now. I would like to leave room for questions after I speak, and though I’m leaving out a lot – publishing, stolen credits, sampling, fair use, inspiration – I suspect there will be a healthy discussion afterward and think that such discussions are necessary and overdue.
From my part, I believe the very concept of exclusive intellectual property with respect to recorded music has come to a natural end, or something like an end. Technology has brought to a head a need to embrace the meaning of the word “release”, as in bird or fart. It is no longer possible to maintain control over digitised material and I don’t believe the public good is served by trying to.
There is great public good by letting creative material lapse into the public ownership. The copyright law has been modified so extensively in the past decades that now this essentially never happens, creating absurdities whenever copyright is invoked. There’s a huge body of work that is not legally in the public domain, though its rights holder, authors and creators have died or disappeared as businesses. And this material, from a legal standpoint now removed from our culture – nobody may copy it or re-release it because it’s still subject to copyright.
Other absurdities abound: innocuous usage of music in the background of home videos or student projects is technically an infringement and official obstacles are set up to prevent it. If you want a video of your wedding reception – your father’s first dance with a new bride – it’s off limits unless it is silent. If your little daughter does a kooky dance to a Prince song don’t bother putting it on YouTube for her grandparents to see or a purple dwarf in assless chaps will put an injunction on you. Did I offend the little guy? Fuck it. His music is poison.
Music has entered the environment as an atmospheric element, like the wind, and in that capacity should not be subject to control and compensation. Well, not unless the rights holders are willing to let me turn the tables on it. If you think my listening is worth something, OK then, so do I. Play a Phil Collins song while I’m grocery shopping? Pay me $20. Def Leppard? Make it $100. Miley Cyrus? They don’t print money big enough.
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** Steve Albini on the surprisingly sturdy state of the music industry – in full
————————————————————
Steve Albini is the producer (he prefers the term “recording engineer”) behind several thousand records. He is also a member of the band Shellac. In 1993, he published The Problem with Music (http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music) , an essay expounding his belief that the major label-dominated industry of the time was inefficient, exploited musicians and led to below par music. On Saturday he gave the keynote address at Melbourne’s Face the Music conference (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at-face-the-music-how-the-internet-solved-problem-with-music) in which he celebrated the fact the internet had both dismantled this system and addressed its inequalities:
I’m going to first explain a few things about myself. I’m 52 years old, I have been in bands continuously, and active in the music scene in one way or another since about 1978. At the moment I’m in a band, I also work as a recording engineer and I own a recording studio in Chicago. In the past I have also been a fanzine writer, radio club DJ, concert promoter and I ran a small record label. I was not terribly successful at any of those things, but I have done them, so they qualify as part of my CV.
I work every day with music and with bands and I have for more than 30 years. I’ve made a couple thousand records for independent bands and rock stars, for big labels and small ones. I made a record two days ago and I’ll be making one on Monday when I get off the plane. So I believe this puts me in a pretty good position to evaluate the state of the music scene today, as it relates to how it used to be and how it has been.
We’re all here to talk about the state of the music scene and the health of the music community. I’ll start by saying that I’m both satisfied and optimistic about the state of the music scene. And I welcome the social and technological changes that have influenced it. I hope my remarks today will start a conversation and through that conversation we can invoke an appreciation of how resilient the music community is, how supportive it can be and how welcoming it should be.
I hear from some of my colleagues that these are rough times: that the internet has cut the legs off the music scene and that pretty soon nobody will be making music anymore because there’s no money in it. Virtually every place where music is written about, there is some version of this troubling perspective. People who used to make a nice income from royalties, they’ve seen the royalties dry up. And people who used to make a living selling records are having trouble selling downloads as substitute for records, and they no longer make records.
So there is a tacit assumption that this money, lost money, needs to be replaced and a lot of energy has been spent arguing from where that money will come. Bitchiness about this abounds, with everybody insisting that somebody else should be paying him, but that he shouldn’t have to pay for anybody else. I would like to see an end to this dissatisfaction.
It’s worthwhile to remember from where we’ve come. From where this bitchiness originates. In the 1970s through the 1990s, the period in which I was most active in bands in the music scene – let’s call this the pre-internet era. The music industry was essentially the record industry, in that records and radio were the venues through which people learned of music and principally experienced it. They were joined by MTV and videos in the 80s and 90s, but the principle relationship people had with music was as sound recordings. There was a booming band scene and all bands aspired to getting recorded, as a mark of legitimacy.
In the 70s and 80s most bands went through their entire lifecycle without so much as a note of their music recorded
But recording was a rare and expensive enterprise, so it wasn’t common. Even your demo tape required considerable investment. So when I started playing in bands in the 70s and 80s most bands went through their entire lifecycle without so much as a note of their music ever being recorded.
Now I’m going to describe the scene as I observed it in America, but I understand that most of the structures and conditions I observed have parallels in other markets. Maybe somebody from my generation can add the local Aussie colour to my comments – I prefer them shouted in as thick an accent as you can muster.
As a yardstick for the economics of the day or for the era, in 1979 you could buy a 45rpm single for a buck, a new album for $5, go see a club gig for $1 or a stadium gig for $7. I know these things because I still have some old ticket stubs and price stickers on my records. Note the relative parity between the live show costs and the recorded music costs. A gradual inflation of prices remained under way through the 90s, making recorded music more expensive, though it remained the principal means of experience.
The whole industry depended on these sales, and sales depended on exposure. Bands on big labels toured, essentially to promote their recordings. And the labels provided promotional and logistical support to keep the bands on the road. This supported a network of agents and managers and roadies and promotional staff, so the expense was considerable.
Retail outlets also offered special placements and promotion: displays, posters, mentions in print ads, giveaways, trinkets and what were called end cap displays. Record labels paid handsomely for these promotions and the stores used the sale of these promotions as additional income. Chain stores especially relied on corporate chain-wide promotions, regardless what the stores might think their local clientele might like. It wasn’t uncommon to see big displays of hair metal bands in urban outlets where they couldn’t sell a single stick but the labels had paid for their utility, so up they went.
Radio stations were enormously influential. Radio was the only place to hear music from any people and record companies paid dearly to influence them. Direct payola had been made illegal but this was a trivial workaround. Record pluggers acting as programming consultants were the middlemen. They paid radio stations for access to their programmers and conducted meetings where new records were promoted.
These promotional offers were quite lucrative. But their metrics depended on radio stations recording that they had added the records to their playlist. To satisfy this requirement and keep the promotional money flowing, radio stations often played tiny fragments of songs jumbled one after the other in any incomprehensible flow during late-night programming hours, to satisfy the programming requirement that they add songs to their playlist. Popular radio stations also staged mammoth concerts, often for free or for nominal cover featuring bands that the labels were promoting. These unpaid radio gigs were a drag on their touring income but the promotional value was presumed to be worth it.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full#img-1‘Promotional copies were immediately sold secondhand to record stores.’ Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters
Journalists and editors who could place reviews, program directors and independent DJs who could add records to playlists or played in nightclubs, were subject to much buttering up. Promotional trinkets and advance copies of records were sent their way. Sometimes by the box. Presumably these were listening and file copies. But they were actually a bribe. These promotional copies were immediately sold secondhand to record stores and it was not uncommon for such stores to be overstocked with a new release prior to its official release as a result. My wife worked in a record store that bought records secondhand in the 90s. And their biggest repeat customers, by a long shot, were the people on these label promo lists. The staff at her store kept a tally for awhile and the editor of the local weeklies music section made a comfortable second income amounting to a $1,000 or more a month from selling these promo copies.
So it was a leaky system, riddled with inefficiencies, but a lot of people made a living through it. Record store owners, buyers, employees, ad agencies, designers, club owners, label reps, A&R, producers, recording studios, publicists, lawyers, journalists, program directors, distributors, tour managers, booking agents, band managers, and all the ancillary services they required: banking, shipping, printing, photography, travel agencies, limos, spandex wardrobe, cocaine dealers, prostitutes. Because of this great bulk of the industry needed to sustain itself. Every facet of the industry was tailored to this need.
The most significant bit of tailoring was an accounting trick called recouping costs. The costs of making a record wasn’t borne by the record label, except initially. Those costs were recouped or taken out of the income the band might otherwise run as royalties. The same was true of all those promo copies, posters, radio pluggers and payola men, producers, publicists, tour support, 8×10 glossies, shipping, freight – basically anything that could be associated with a specific band or record was ultimately paid for by the band, not by the record label.
As the label shifted from vinyl to CD as the dominant format, the labels could easily sell the CD as a convenient, compact, trouble-free way to listen to music. The profit margin exploded and the money got stupid. Retails costs of a CD was half again or double more than an LP but the manufacturing, shipping and storage costs were a tiny fraction. The labels even used vinyl’s legacy as a tool to increase this profit margin by charging bands for unique packaging, despite the fact that CD packaging was designed to be standardised. Or pre-emptively charging back for broken CDs at a rate implying that someone was attacking the inventory with an axe.
If the label is paying you with someone else’s money, the label doesn’t need to care how much you charge
In the end the bands operating under this system earned very little from their record sales, unless they were monumental stars. Often enough bands would conduct their entire careers with a label and never reach the point where they had sufficiently recouped to get paid anything at all. Now the label made its per-piece profit on every record sold. And could recoup the cost of any records unsold. And all those other people got paid using the money that would have otherwise gone to the bands as royalties. Unsurprisingly, those other people also got paid pretty well. It stands to reason that if the label is paying you with someone else’s money, the label doesn’t need to care how much you charge.
During the 90s there was something of an arms race to see who could write the biggest deal. That is, the deal with the most money being spent on the band’s behalf. In a singularly painless contest the money would either be paid to the band as a royalty, which would take that money out of the system and put it into things like houses and groceries and college educations. Or it could be paid to other operators within the industry, increasing the clout and prestige of the person doing the spending. It’s as if your boss, instead of giving your paycheck to you, could pay that money to his friends and business associates, invoking your name as he did. Since his net cost was the same and his friends and associates could return the favour, why would he ever want to let any of that money end up in your hands? It was a system that ensured waste by rewarding the most profligate spendthrifts in a system specifically engineered to waste the band’s money.
Now bands existed outside that label spectrum. The working bands of the type I’ve always been in, and for those bands everything was always smaller and simpler. Promotion was usually down to flyers posted on poles, occasional mentions on college radio and fanzines. If you had booked a gig at a venue that didn’t advertise, then you faced a very real prospect of playing to an empty room. Local media didn’t take bands seriously until there was a national headline about them so you could basically forget about press coverage. And commercial radio was absolutely locked up by the payola-driven system of the pluggers and program directors.
International exposure was extraordinarily expensive. In order for your records to make it into overseas hands you had to convince a distributor to export them. And that was difficult with no means for anyone to hear the record and decide to buy it. So you ended up shipping promotional copies overseas at a terrific expense, never sure if they would be listened to or not.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full#img-2John Peel: ‘He listened religiously to every single record he received in the mail, devoting hours of every day to the task.’ Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/Redferns
The one exception to this was the brilliant BBC DJ John Peel. He listened religiously to every single record he received in the mail, devoting hours of every day to the task. I sent him a copy of the first album I ever made and not only did he play the record on air, he sent me back a postcard with a personal remembrance of Chicago, of visiting a matron aunt as a child in Evanston, the suburb where my post office box was kept. I treasured that note as the first indication that John Peel (http://www.theguardian.com/music/johnpeel) was a great man.
So these independent bands had to be resourceful. They’d built their own infrastructure of independent clubs, promoters, fanzines and DJs. They had their own channels of promotion, including the beginnings of the internet culture that is so prevalent today – that being bulletin boards, and newsgroups. These independent bands even made their own record label. Some were collectives and those that weren’t were likely to operate on a profit-sharing basis that encouraged efficiency, rather than a recoupable patronage system that encouraged indulgence.
That’s where I cut my teeth, in that independent scene full of punks and noise freaks and drag queens and experimental composers and jabbering street poets. You can thank punk rock for all of that. That’s where most of us learned that it was possible to make your own records, to conduct your own business and keep control of your own career. If a bunch of pimply glue sniffers could do it, we reasoned, then anybody could.
The number of records released this way was incredible. Thousands of small releases made their way into the “mom and pop” independent speciality stores, which then provided a market for independent distribution. It was the beginnings of an alternative to the label paradigm. It was cumbersome and slow but it was more efficient than a shotgun approach with the big labels, whose answer to every problem was to spend more of the band’s money on it.
It was the beginning of what we would call the peer network. By mid-90s there were independent labels and distributors moving millions of dollars of records and CDs. And there was a healthy underground economy of bands making a reasonable income owing to the superior efficiencies of the independent methods. My band, as an example, was returned 50% of the net profit on every title that we released through our record label. I worked it out and that earned us a better per-piece royalty than Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Madonna or any other superstar operating concurrently. And we were only one of thousands of such bands.
So, that was the system as it was. That’s what we lost when the internet made everything available everywhere for free. And make no mistake about it, we have lost it. There is still an independent label network but it’s a slim fraction of what it was. The labels continuing to survive do so by supplying niche music to a discerning audience. And because they have been steeled in the art of efficiency their constitution allows them to scale everything to suit the remaining demand.
You may have noticed that in my description of the mass market music scene and the industry as it was pre-internet I made little mention of the audience or the bands. Those two ends of the spectrum were hardly considered by the rest of the business. Fans were expected to listen to the radio and buy records and bands were expected to make records and tour to promote them. And that was about all the thought either were given. But the audience was where all the money came from and the bands were where all the music came from.
Music went from being rare, expensive … to being free worldwide. What a fantastic development
Through the internet, which more than anything else creates access to things, limitless music eventually became available for free. The big record companies didn’t see how to make money from online distribution so they effectively ignored it, leaving it to the hackers and the audience to populate a new landscape of downloading. People who prefer the convenience of CDs over LPs naturally prefer downloaded music even more. You could download it or stream it or listen from YouTube or have your friends on message boards or acquaintances send you zip files. In the blink of an eye music went from being rare, expensive and only available through physical media in controlled outlets to being ubiquitous and free worldwide. What a fantastic development.
There’s a lot of shade thrown by people in the music industry about how terrible the free sharing of music is, how it’s the equivalent of theft, etc. That’s all bullshit and we’ll deal with that in a minute. But for a minute I want you to look at the experience of music from a fan’s perspective, post-internet. Music that is hard to find was now easy to find. Music to suit my specific tastes, as fucked up as they might be, was now accessible by a few clicks or maybe posting a query on a message board. In response I had more access to music than I had ever imagined. Curated by other enthusiasts, keen to turn me on to the good stuff; people, like me, who want other people to hear the best music ever.
This audience-driven music distribution has other benefits. Long-forgotten music has been given a second life. And bands whose music that was ahead of its time has been allowed to reach a niche audience that the old mass distribution failed to find for them, as one enthusiast turns on the next and this forgotten music finally gets it due. There’s a terrific documentary about one such case, the Detroit band Death whose sole album was released in a perfunctory edition in, I believe, 1975 and disappeared until a copy of it was digitised and made public on the internet. Gradually the band found an audience, their music got lovingly reissued, and the band has resurrected, complete with tours playing to packed houses. And the band are now being allowed the career that the old star system had denied them. There are hundreds of such stories and there are speciality labels that do nothing but reissue lost classics like that once they surface.
Now look at the conditions from a band’s perspective, the conditions faced by a band. In contrast to back in the day, recording equipment and technology has simplified and become readily available. Computers now come pre-loaded with enough software to make a decent demo recording and guitar stores sell microphones and other equipment inexpensively that previously was only available at a premium from arcane speciality sources. Essentially every band now has the opportunity to make recordings.
And they can do things with those recordings. They can post them online in any number of places: Bandcamp, YouTube, SoundCloud, their own websites. They can link to them on message boards, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter and even in the comment streams of other music. “LOL,” “this sucks,” “much better,” “death to false metal,” “LOL”. Instead of spending a fortune on international phone calls trying to find someone in each territory to listen to your music, every band on the planet now has free, instant access to the world at its fingertips.
I cannot overstate how important a development that is. Previously, in the top-down paradigm allowed local industry to dictate what music was available in isolated or remote markets, markets isolated by location or language. It was inconceivable that a smaller or independent band could have market penetration into, say, Greece or Turkey, Japan or China, South America, Africa or the Balkans. Who would you ask to handle your music? How would you find him? And how would you justify the business and currency complications required to send four or five copies of a record there?
Fans can find the music they like and develop direct relationships with the bands
Now those places are as well-served as New York and London. Fans can find the music they like and develop direct relationships with the bands. It is absolutely possible – I’m sure it happens every day – that a kid in one of these far-flung places can find a new favourite band, send that band a message, and that singer of that band will read it and personally reply to it from his cell phone half a world away. How much better is that? I’ll tell you, it’s infinitely better than having a relationship to a band limited to reading it on the back of the record jacket. If such a thing were possible when I was a teenager I’m certain I would have become a right nuisance to the Ramones.
A couple of years ago my band mounted a tour of eastern Europe. We played all the hot spots: the Czech Republic, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, we made it as far as Istanbul, Turkey. It was a magical experience, playing in front of audiences who were relatively unjaded by the routine of touring bands and we were welcomed like friends. We played to full houses at the same size venues as the rest of Europe. The same sizes as we would play here in Australia. And the audiences seem equivocally familiar with our music. The key difference being that most of the places have literally never sold a single record. Essentially 100% of our exposure had been through informal means over the internet or hand-to-hand.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full#img-3Steve Albini with his Shellac bandmates, Todd Trainer and Bob Weston
On that trip we established contacts with local promoters and arts organisations and audiences developed an appetite for our music and we have since sold quite a few records into the region. Our next tour through the region was easier as a result and we’re going back to Istanbul this spring, using contacts made on that first exploratory trip. I expect to have a marvellous time.
In short, the internet has made it much easier to conduct the day-to-day business of being in a band and has increased the efficiency. Everything from scheduling rehearsals using online calendars, to booking tours by email, to selling merchandise and records from online stores, down to raising the funds to make a record is a new simplicity that bands of the pre-internet era would salivate over. The old system was built by the industry to serve the players inside the industry. The new system where music is shared informally and the bands have a direct relationship to the fans was built by the bands and the fans in the manner of the old underground. It skips all the intermediary steps.
Bands now have default control of their exposure. It’s no longer necessary to pay people to pay other people to play your records on the radio, only to have those people lie about doing so. It’s no longer necessary to spend money to let people hear your band. It happens automatically.
There’s another, much subtler change that all this instigated. Since people no longer have to make do listening to whatever is on the radio playlist and are no longer limited to owning what the store decides to stock, they have become much more indulgent in their tastes. My friends now normally listen to exotic playlists that they have dreamed up themselves, full of counterintuitive and contrasting choices that are uniquely theirs.
Our office bearer has a hi-fi in that studio office and is as likely to be playing the new 45 from the hardcore band Leather or electro drone by Tim Hecker as he is to be playing a deep cut of Cincinnati soul or handbag disco or improv guitar noodlings, whether newly released from Oren Ambarchi or 30 years old from the Takoma label. People can now listen only to music they are ecstatic about, all the time.
There are active online communities for every kind of music and its subcultures. Whether you’re into Dusty’s Deep Cut reggae, minimal electronics, symphonic pop, Texas blues, Japanese noise, power electronics, children’s music, christmas music, Raymond Scott, or Burl Ives, I guarantee there is an online community where you can connect with other enthusiasts to indulge the minute specificity of your tastes.
These online communities are now a vital part of the scene and this debate and others are hashed out there daily. I’ve probably unconsciously lifted some of my positions in these remarks from discussions I’ve had online so I’d like to confess that plagiarism now, as a way to encourage all of you to get involved in these forums where all the interesting conversations about music is happening.
Imagine a great hall of fetishes where whatever you felt like fucking or being fucked by, however often your tastes might change, no matter what hardware or harnesses were required, you could open the gates and have at it on a comfy mattress at any time of day. That’s what the internet has become for music fans. Plus bleacher seats for a cheering section.
As a result fans are more ardent for this music. They are willing to spend more on seeing it played live. They are willing to buy more ephemera and eager to establish a personal relationship to the people who make the music. Gig prices have escalated as a result. And the merchandise tables at gigs are universally teeming with activity. Back home, gigs that used to cost five or six bucks are now 20 or 30. Over here the ticket inflation has been more pronounced, with club gigs going for $80 or more. As a result gig income for bands has increased exponentially. My band has been playing a lot of the same places for the entirety of our existence, over 20 years now. I guess you could say we’ve saturated our audience, no matter how long we stay at it. Some of these perennial gigs are now paying an over of magnitude better than they were 10 or 15 years ago. That’s right, some places where we used to earn four or five hundred dollars we now earn four or five grand.
This ease of access, redoubled interest and increase in income has created a new partnership and possibilities between individuals, bands and visual artists, online film-makers, choreographers and other kinds of public people. Collaborations take place in real time or displaced over the internet where the parties often never meet face-to-face. I have a dear friend who found himself with a bunch of time on his hands last year so he formed a couple of new bands. One of these bands was entirely populated by people he only knew online and all of their music was made by online collaboration. This music was a pure result of the interconnectivity of the internet.
All of that, all of those characteristics, all of those possibilities were instigated and made possible by the online sharing of music. If not directly, as in the case of building an audience for the band Death and my own band in the Balkans and beyond, then indirectly by changing the expectations of the listeners and musicians.
This explains my enthusiasm for the way the music scene has changed, but what about my optimism? I would like to address a platitude about the online exposure of music. From all quarters we hear that, this is the platitude: “We need to figure out how to make internet distribution work for everyone.” I use finger quotes to indicate intellectual distance between myself and the quotation. I have a friend, Tim Midgett, who uses three fingers for finger quotes to indicate extra irony. This is a two jobber.
I disagree with this rather inoffensive platitude. It’s innocuous and vapid and fills the air after someone asks the question, “How is the music scene these days?” And it maintains hope that the current state of affairs as mentioned, presumed to be tragic, can be changed for the better. For “everyone”. That word everyone is important to the people using the sentence. In their mind the physical distribution model worked for everyone. But the new one does not. Not yet, not yet. Not until we “figure it out”. I’m sure we’re all going to get tired of me doing that [air quotes].
Inside that trite sentence, ‘We need to figure out how to make this work for everyone,’ hides the skeleton of a monster
I disagree that the old way is better. And I do not believe this sentence to be true: “We need to figure out how to make this digital distribution work for everyone.” I disagree with it because within its mundane language are tacit assumptions: the framework of an exploitative system that I have been at odds with my whole creative life. Inside that trite sentence, “We need to figure out how to make this work for everyone,” hides the skeleton of a monster.
Let’s start at the beginning. “We need to figure out”: the subject of that sentence, the first-person plural, sounds inclusive but the context defeats that presumption. Who would have the power to implement a new distribution paradigm? Who would be in the room when we discuss our plans for it? Who would do the out figuring we need to do? Industry and consumers? Consumers is a likely response, but did the consumers get a vote about how their music would be compressed or tagged or copy protected or made volatile? Did anybody? Did the consumers get a choice about whether or not Apple stuck a U2 album on their iTunes library? Of course not. These things were just done and we had to deal with them as a state of being. Consumers rebelling or complaining about things – “market pushback” – isn’t the same thing as being involved in the decision to do something. Clearly the “we” of this sentence doesn’t include the listener. I believe any attempt to organise the music scene that
ignores the listener is doomed.
How about the bands? Do the bands get a seat at the “we” table, while our figuring-out needs are met? Of course not. If you ask bands what they want – and I know this because I’m in a band and I deal with bands every day – what they want is a chance to expose their music and to have a shot at getting paid by their audience. I believe the current operating status satisfies the first of these conditions exquisitely and the latter at least as well as the old record label paradigm.
So who is this “we”? The administrative parts of the old record business, that’s who. The vertical labels who hold copyright on a lot of music. They want to do the figuring. They want to set the agenda. And they want to do all the structural tinkering. The bands, the audience, the people who make music and who pay for it – they are conspicuously not in the discussion.
How about the word “need”, we “need” to figure out? The need is actually a “want”, a preference. These remnants of the music industry are unsatisfied with how the internet, the bands and the audience can get along fine without them. So they prefer to change things to re-establish relevance. You see this in the spate of 360 deals that are being offered now, where everything a band does, from their music to their T-shirts to their Twitter accounts belong to the record label. In exchange the record label offers startup money. I believe this approach is doomed by things like Kickstarter, which have proven more effective and efficient at raising money directly from the audience that wants to support the music.
How about the infinitive “to figure out”? We need “to figure out”. That presumes that we can know how to attack a global distribution enterprise long after the internet has crowdsourced an efficient and painless way to do precisely that. There’s a reason the water faucet hasn’t changed radically over the years. Time and trial have demonstrated that the best and simplest way to control hot water is by turning a tap. Problem solved, no further solving of the hot water faucet problem is required. I cannot be the only one who is annoyed by the constantly misaligned proximity faucets in public washrooms. Imagine if listening to music was as frustrating as that.
The next part of the sentence: “make” distribution work. This implies that we have control over the distribution, that we can make it do some things but not others. The internet proves this to be a fallacy. Once we release music it’s out of our control. I use the verb “release” because it’s common vernacular. But I think it’s a perfect description. Even more apt if you consider what happens when you release other things, say a bird or a fart. When you release them they’re in the world and the world will react and use them as it sees fit. The fart may wrinkle noses until it dissipates. The bird may fly outside and crap on windshields; it may get shot down by a farmer. It’s been released, so you have no control over it. You can’t recall the fart, however much you would like to. You can’t protect the bird.
Distribution is a problematic word. Its prior meaning implies scarcity and allocation of physical products. You can inventory them, you could tax them, duty them, you could search somebody’s book bag for them. None of that is true with digital files. If it were possible to return digital files to the strict control of the record labels (it is impossible, don’t worry), what would be their incentive to be honest in their accounting? In the physical distribution model you could inventory the titles in the warehouse during an audit and compare them with the delivery manifests from the press manufacturing plant, and know with reasonable accuracy how many copies had been sold. How on earth would you inventory a digital file? Count how many were left on the shelf?
That word is problematic, but the most problematic word in the sentence is the word “work”: we need to figure out how to make it “work”. Work is an impossible word in this context. Depending on who uses it, it will have contradictory meanings. For a label the system would work if it generated a profit per play, controlled access to music while providing access to the audience for advertisers as an additional income, and allowed the availability of push marketing for promotion. For the listener it would mean open access, ability to find specific and niche music, continuous playback, lack of nuisance, ease of use, freedom from spying, low or no cost, utility on different devices, lack of push marketing and lack of advertising. For a band it would mean finding an audience and having no barrier to participation, and no limits on amount of material made available. You can see how this is problematic. It is literally impossible for a system to satisfy all of these needs
simultaneously when they are contradictory.
And the hybrid approaches being tried are clumsy and insulting. I recently tried streaming a podcast from an official licensed site. When the cats started fighting I missed a little bit, having to separate the cats and then feed the cats and then calmed them down. I came back to my computer and tried to replay the last few minutes that I had missed but was greeted with a notice that due to copyright agreements this player was not allowed to rewind the podcast. I find it unimaginable that the people who posted the podcast wanted that provision enabled. And the site just ensured that I would never bother with their product again.
The conclusion of that sentence, the “for everyone” is also problematic. I don’t think it is necessary or even preferable to have everyone involved in defining the experience with music or more generally the relationship with the band and its audience. We seem to accept that record stores, who were once the welcoming face of the industry and the recipient of much promotional patronage described earlier, are not coming along in the digital era. Record stores now get their appeal from carrying secondhand records, something the industry used to have a regular shit fit about. And by carrying speciality and niche material that is too marginal for corporate attention, they are clearly not part of the “everyone” in the sentence.
So there’s no reason to insist that other obsolete bureaux and offices of the lapsed era be brought along into the new one. The music industry has shrunk. In shrinking it has rung out the middle, leaving the bands and the audiences to work out their relationship from the ends. I see this as both healthy and exciting. If we’ve learned anything over the past 30 years it’s that left to its own devices bands and their audiences can get along fine: the bands can figure out how to get their music out in front of an audience and the audience will figure out how to reward them.
The internet has facilitated the most direct and efficient, compact relationship ever between band and audience
The internet has facilitated the most direct and efficient, compact relationship ever between band and audience. And I do not mourn the loss of the offices of inefficiencies that died in the process. I suppose some people are out of work. But the same things happened when the automobile replaced the horse, and all the blacksmiths had to adapt, spending their time making garden gates rather than horseshoes.
When I read over these notes on the plane today I felt like I spent too much time enumerating complaints, and I don’t want to conclude without reiterating how terrific the current music environment is. I see more bands and I hear more music than ever before in my life. There are more gigs, more songs available than ever before, bands are being treated with more respect, and are more in control of their careers and destinies. I see them continuing as a constellation of enterprises: some big, some small – most small but all of them with a more immediate response from their audience and a greater chance to succeed. It is genuinely exciting.
I’ve been talking an awful long time, but I have not yet mentioned the intellectual property debate. I’ll try to get that out of the way briefly now. I would like to leave room for questions after I speak, and though I’m leaving out a lot – publishing, stolen credits, sampling, fair use, inspiration – I suspect there will be a healthy discussion afterward and think that such discussions are necessary and overdue.
From my part, I believe the very concept of exclusive intellectual property with respect to recorded music has come to a natural end, or something like an end. Technology has brought to a head a need to embrace the meaning of the word “release”, as in bird or fart. It is no longer possible to maintain control over digitised material and I don’t believe the public good is served by trying to.
There is great public good by letting creative material lapse into the public ownership. The copyright law has been modified so extensively in the past decades that now this essentially never happens, creating absurdities whenever copyright is invoked. There’s a huge body of work that is not legally in the public domain, though its rights holder, authors and creators have died or disappeared as businesses. And this material, from a legal standpoint now removed from our culture – nobody may copy it or re-release it because it’s still subject to copyright.
Other absurdities abound: innocuous usage of music in the background of home videos or student projects is technically an infringement and official obstacles are set up to prevent it. If you want a video of your wedding reception – your father’s first dance with a new bride – it’s off limits unless it is silent. If your little daughter does a kooky dance to a Prince song don’t bother putting it on YouTube for her grandparents to see or a purple dwarf in assless chaps will put an injunction on you. Did I offend the little guy? Fuck it. His music is poison.
Music has entered the environment as an atmospheric element, like the wind, and in that capacity should not be subject to control and compensation. Well, not unless the rights holders are willing to let me turn the tables on it. If you think my listening is worth something, OK then, so do I. Play a Phil Collins song while I’m grocery shopping? Pay me $20. Def Leppard? Make it $100. Miley Cyrus? They don’t print money big enough.
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From: Arturo Gomez KUVO
The extremely gifted composer and pianist, a resident of the Denver area since the early 1980s has passed away. Joe Bonner was born April 20, 1948 in Rocky Mount, NC, he died Friday, November 20, 2014 in Denver. He recorded and toured with many giants of jazz including Pharaoh Sanders, Woody Shaw, Leon Thomas, Harold Vick, Fred Wesley, Richie Cole, Carlos Garnett, Azar Lawrence, Roy Brook, Billy Harper and many others.
Joe had recently recorded a solo piano CD that was scheduled to be released in early December. Joe played in our own Phyllis A. Greer Performance Studio many times over the years, 3 of those performance highlights are on KUVO’s Live at the Oasis series of CDs, Volumes, 1, 4 and 7.
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
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RIP Pianist Joe Bonner
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From: Arturo Gomez KUVO
The extremely gifted composer and pianist, a resident of the Denver area since the early 1980s has passed away. Joe Bonner was born April 20, 1948 in Rocky Mount, NC, he died Friday, November 20, 2014 in Denver. He recorded and toured with many giants of jazz including Pharaoh Sanders, Woody Shaw, Leon Thomas, Harold Vick, Fred Wesley, Richie Cole, Carlos Garnett, Azar Lawrence, Roy Brook, Billy Harper and many others.
Joe had recently recorded a solo piano CD that was scheduled to be released in early December. Joe played in our own Phyllis A. Greer Performance Studio many times over the years, 3 of those performance highlights are on KUVO’s Live at the Oasis series of CDs, Volumes, 1, 4 and 7.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR0jOdJo0Gshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR0jOdJo0Gs
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
RIP Pianist Joe Bonner
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From: Arturo Gomez KUVO
The extremely gifted composer and pianist, a resident of the Denver area since the early 1980s has passed away. Joe Bonner was born April 20, 1948 in Rocky Mount, NC, he died Friday, November 20, 2014 in Denver. He recorded and toured with many giants of jazz including Pharaoh Sanders, Woody Shaw, Leon Thomas, Harold Vick, Fred Wesley, Richie Cole, Carlos Garnett, Azar Lawrence, Roy Brook, Billy Harper and many others.
Joe had recently recorded a solo piano CD that was scheduled to be released in early December. Joe played in our own Phyllis A. Greer Performance Studio many times over the years, 3 of those performance highlights are on KUVO’s Live at the Oasis series of CDs, Volumes, 1, 4 and 7.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR0jOdJo0Gshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR0jOdJo0Gs
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Spotify: Friend or Foe?: New Yorker
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** REVENUE STREAMS
————————————————————
by John Seabrook
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/141124_r25797-882.jpgDaniel Ek says his company is “not in the music space—we’re in the moment space.”CreditIllustration by Harry Campbell; photograph: Eyevine / Redux
Daniel Ek, the C.E.O. of Spotify, is a rock star of the tech world, but he is not long on charisma. At thirty-one, he is pale, boyish, cerebral, and calm. Jantelagen, the Scandinavian code of humility and restraint, is strong in him. He doesn’t greet you with a firm handshake from behind an imposing desk; he doesn’t have a desk. He sprawls on a couch with his laptop, like a teen-ager doing homework. Or he wanders the company’s offices, which form an oval around the open core of a big building on Birger Jarlsgatan, in central Stockholm. The design encourages “random encounters,” which Ek once read was Steve Jobs’s plan in laying out Pixar’s offices.
Ek’s phlegmatic manner makes his unshakable, almost spiritual belief in Spotify burn all the more brightly. His vision, that Spotify is a force for good in the world of music, is almost Swedenborgian: salvation in the form of a fully licensed streaming-music service where you can find every record ever made. Spotify doesn’t sell music; it sells access to it. Instead of buying songs and albums, you pay a monthly subscription fee ($9.99), or get served an ad every few songs if you’re on the free tier. You can listen to anything on the service—the Beatles (as with iTunes, the surviving members are not rushing in) and Taylor Swift (who left the service in a flurry of publicity in early November) notwithstanding—and there is an astonishing amount of music. When Spotify launched, in October, 2008, in Sweden and a handful of other European countries, Ek’s dream seemed like the longest of long shots. Now Spotify is the Netflix of music sites. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder,
says, “Daniel just saw the opportunities of streaming music before anyone else.”
Spotify appeared nine years after Napster, the pioneering file-sharing service, which unleashed piracy on the record business and began the cataclysm that caused worldwide revenues to decline from a peak of twenty-seven billion dollars, in 1999, to fifteen billion, in 2013. The iTunes store, the industry’s attempt, in partnership with Apple, to build a digital record shop, opened in 2003 to sell downloads, but that didn’t alter the downward trajectory; indeed, by unbundling tracks from the album, so that buyers could cherry-pick their favorite songs, Apple arguably hastened the decline. Legal actions against individuals—thousands of people in the U.S. were sued for downloading music illegally—only alienated potential customers. As bad as the bloodbath was in the U.S., the situation was even worse in Sweden. Pelle Lidell, an executive with Universal Music Publishing in Stockholm, told me that by 2008 “we were an inch away from being buried, and Spotify single-handedly turned
that around.”
Ek was one of the pirate band. Before starting the company, he had briefly been the C.E.O. of uTorrent, which made money in part by monetizing pirated music and movies on BitTorrent, a major file-sharing protocol. Later, the Napster co-founder Sean Parker, for years Public Enemy No. 1 to record-company executives, joined forces with Ek. Who would have imagined, as one label head put it recently, that “your enemy could become your friend”?
Spotify is now in fifty-eight countries. (Canada, its latest market, got the service at the end of September.) It has raised more than half a billion dollars from investors, including Goldman Sachs, to fund its expansion, and there are rumors of an I.P.O. in its future, to raise more. Spotify’s user base exceeds fifty million globally, with twelve and a half million paying subscribers. At the current rate of growth, that number could reach forty million subscribers by the end of the decade. To date, it has paid out more than two billion dollars to the record labels, publishers, distributors, and artists who own the rights to the songs. “I’m very bullish on it,” Tom Corson, the president of RCA Records, said. “The all-you-can-eat access model is starting to make sense to people. And we expect that free is going to roll into subscription and that is going to be a really huge part of our business.”
The question of whether Spotify is good for artists is considerably more vexed. The service has been dogged by accusations that it doesn’t value musicians highly enough. In 2013, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke memorably called Spotify “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse,” a remark that “saddened” Ek. In July, Taylor Swift wrote in a Wall Street Journaleditorial, “In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work.” For Swift, streaming is not much different from piracy. “Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently,” she wrote.
In early November, when Swift’s new album, “1989,” was released, her label, Big Machine Records, not only declined to make the album available on Spotify but also removed her entire catalogue from the service. Is this a gesture of artistic solidarity, or, as one insider put it, “a stunt to wring the last drop of blood out of what is a dying model”—i.e., album sales? Swift’s impressive first-week sales of “1989,” which were just under 1.3 million albums, making her the year’s top seller, are still well short of the all-time first-week high, 2.4 million, set by ’N Sync, in 2000. And the sixty-nine-per-cent drop-off in “1989” ’s second-week sales suggests that Swift’s seventy-one million Facebook fans didn’t rush out and buy the album when they couldn’t get it on Spotify. They just streamed whatever was available on YouTube, which pays artists even less than Spotify does, or on other sites. Or they set sail for the Pirate Bay, where the album was also No. 1.
On Spotify, music consumption is “frictionless”—a favorite word of Ek’s. In tech terms, we’ve gone from a world of scarcity to one of abundance. Nothing is for sale, because everything is available. The kind of calculations you make on iTunes, such as “I like this song, but not enough to buy it,” don’t matter. It is a music nerd’s dream, which may be why the user population on Spotify tends to lie outside the mainstream. On Spotify, the Pixies’ top songs have about four times as many streams as Neil Diamond’s biggest hits.
The difference between Spotify and Internet radio services, like Pandora, is that Spotify is interactive. You can sample the complete catalogue of most artists’ recordings. (Spotify also has a non-interactive radio component.) Spotify now has some twenty million songs on the service, and twenty thousand new ones are added every day. If you are a “lean forward” listener—that is, the kind of motivated fan who takes the time to discover the music you want—Spotify is a celestial jukebox. But, for Spotify to continue its rapid growth, it must bring in the “lean backers” Pandora caters to. Spotify tries to do this with playlists. It has staff-curated playlists, and users can also make their own—there are more than a billion on the site. The playlist is the album of the streaming world. Spotify is working on getting its service into car stereos, and is negotiating agreements with automobile companies; one such agreement was announced this week. The power of playlists will only grow.
When Spotify launched in the U.S., in 2011, it relied on simple, usage-based algorithms to connect users and music, a process known as “collaborative filtering.” These algorithms were more often annoying than useful. You think because I listened to Neil Young that I want to listen to America? America ripped Neil Young off! But over time the algorithms have improved. Earlier this year, Spotify bought a Boston-based startup called the Echo Nest, which has developed a form of artificial music intelligence—a kind of A.I. hipster that finds cool music for you. The Echo Nest powers Spotify’s automated radio stations and is also behind an in-house programming tool called Truffle Pig, which can be told to sniff out music with combinations of more than fifty parameters, such as “speechiness” and “acoustic-ness.” Now that the Echo Nest is part of Spotify, its team has access to the enormous amount of data generated by Spotify users which show how they consume music. Spotify knows what
time of day users listen to certain songs, and in many cases their location, so programmers can infer what they are probably doing—studying, exercising, driving to work. Brian Whitman, an Echo Nest co-founder, told me that programmers also hope to learn more about listeners by factoring in data such as “what the weather is like, what your relationship status is now on Facebook.” (In 2011, Facebook entered into a partnership with Spotify.) He added, “We’ve cracked the nut as far as knowing as much about the music as we possibly can automatically, and we see the next frontier as knowing as much as we possibly can about the listener.”
All this, Ek explained, will help Spotify to better program the “moments” of a user’s day. “We’re not in the music space—we’re in the moment space,” he told me. The idea is to use song analytics and user data to help both human and A.I. curators select the right songs for certain activities or moods, and build playlists for those moments. Playlists can be customized according to an individual user’s “taste profile.” You just broke up with your boyfriend, you’re in a bad mood, and Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River,” from the “Better Off Without You” playlist, starts. Are you playing the music, or is the music playing you?
You can design your own Spotify day. You wake to the “Early Morning Rise” playlist (Midnight Faces, Zella Day), and get ready with “Songs to Sing in the Shower” (“I’m hooked on a feeling/I’m high on believing”). Depending on how much work you have, there’s “Deep Focus,” “Brain Food,” or “Intense Studying.” By eleven-thirty, you’ve hit “Caffeine Rush,” and, after a sandwich at your desk (“Love That Lazy Lunch”), it’s time to “Re-Energize” (Skrillex, Deorro) for the afternoon. A late-in-the-day “Mood Booster” (Meghan Trainor) gets you pumped for your workout (there’s a “House Workout,” a “Hip Hop Workout,” and a “CrossFit Mix,” to name just a few). Then it’s “Happy to Be Home” (Feist, the Postal Service). After “Beer n’ Burgers” (rockabilly) or “Taco Tuesday” (Celia Cruz), you “Calm Down” (Wilco, the National) and then, depending on your love life, click on “Sexy Beats” or “Better Off Without You” (or maybe “Bedtime S
tories,” for the kids), followed by “Sleep” (heavy on Brian Eno, king of the z’s).
My problem with playlists is not the Starbucksy rubrics, or the spying on my embarrassing Lana Del Rey obsession. My problem is that I end up skipping most of the songs anyway. I lean forward and check the next song when I’m supposed to lean back. The human or the A.I. who chose Pharrell’s “Happy” for the “Mood Booster” playlist isn’t getting the job done for me.
By the time he turned twenty-two, Daniel Ek had achieved his life’s ambition: he was rich. A gifted programmer, he had been making money by working on Internet-based tech products since he was fourteen. After selling an Internet advertising company called Advertigo, in 2006, he retired. He rented a big place in Stockholm. He bought a red Ferrari and drove it to night clubs, where he arranged for good tables for friends and attractive female companions, whom he plied with expensive champagne. He lived like this for a year or so, until one morning he awoke to a startling realization. “I was completely depressed,” he said.
“I realized the girls I was with weren’t very nice people,” Ek went on, “that they were just using me, and that my friends weren’t real friends. They were people who were there for the good times, but if it ever turned ugly they’d leave me in a heartbeat. I had always wanted to belong and I had been thinking that this was going to get solved when I had money, and instead I had no idea how I wanted to live my life. And no one teaches you what to do after you achieve financial independence. So I had to confront that.”
Ek describes himself as “missionary,” by which he means he likes to formulate five-year missions for himself. “That’s how I think about life,” he said. “Five years is long enough for me to achieve something meaningful but short enough so I can change my mind every few years. I’m on my second five-year commitment on Spotify. In two years, I will have to make my next one. I will need to ask myself if I still enjoy what I’m doing. I’m kind of unusual that way, but it gives me clarity and purpose.”
Ek sold the Ferrari, got rid of the apartment, and moved to a cabin near his parents’ place in Ragsved, a Stockholm suburb, where he meditated about what to do with his life. He had soul-searching conversations with Martin Lorentzon, the Swedish entrepreneur who had bought Ek’s advertising company, and was himself looking for a new project. “And we always came back to the music industry,” Ek said. Like many teen-agers around the turn of the millennium, Ek had become infatuated with Napster—in particular, with the idea of a site where all the world’s music was available for free. Radio offered free music, too, of course, but radio wasn’t interactive; you couldn’t pursue your own interests, the way you could on Napster. Ek said, “Before that, I was listening to Roxette,” a Swedish pop-rock band from the eighties. “I discovered Metallica and learned that they were inspired by Led Zeppelin, and King Crimson, and then I got into the Beatles. And from there I went to Bowie and the
whole British scene from the Eurythmics to the Sex Pistols. Hearing the anger and frustration of the Sex Pistols or the Clash made you feel like you were in the seventies. You started to understand culture. It was pretty magical.
“It came back to me constantly that Napster was such an amazing consumer experience, and I wanted to see if it could be a viable business,” Ek went on. “We said, ‘The problem with the music industry is piracy. Great consumer product, not a great business model. But you can’t beat technology. Technology always wins. But what if you can make a better product than piracy?’ ” Ek continued, “Piracy was kind of hard. It took a few minutes to download a song, it was kind of cumbersome, you had to worry about viruses. It’s not like people want to be pirates. They just want a great experience. So we started sketching what that would look like.”
Their “product vision,” in tech parlance, was that the service had to give the impression that the music was already on your hard drive. “What would it feel like?” Ek asked. “That was the emotion we were trying to invoke.” The key was to build something that worked instantly. Streaming, whether audio or video, tends to have built-in delays while you wait for the file, which is stored on a server in the cloud. But if the music starts in two hundred milliseconds or less—about half the time it takes, on average, to blink—people don’t seem to perceive a delay. That became Ek’s design standard. He told his lead engineer, Ludvig Strigeus, a brilliant programmer he had worked with before, “I don’t accept anything that isn’t below two hundred milliseconds.”
Strigeus responded, “It can’t be done. The Internet isn’t built like that.”
“You have to figure it out,” Ek insisted.
The solution involved designing a streaming protocol that worked faster than the standard one, as well as building their own peer-to-peer network, a decentralized architecture in which all the computers on it can communicate with one another. In four months, they had a working prototype.
“And I knew when we had it that it was going to be very special,” Ek said.
Ek’s original idea was to launch Spotify in the U.S. at the same time that he launched the service in Europe. Ken Parks, Spotify’s chief content officer, said, “Daniel thought he could just go down to the corner store in Stockholm and pick up a global license.” He didn’t realize that he would have to negotiate directly with all the different copyright holders, a herculean task. Not surprisingly, the labels weren’t interested. Ek was an outsider—a techie, and a Swedish one at that. Parks, an attorney who’d worked at E.M.I., recalled, “We needed to overcome the music-is-free mentality that Spotify represented.” Of the labels’ attitude, he went on, “If you have something you’ve invested a ton of money in, and you’ve been selling it for a lot, and you feel raped by piracy—to say to that person, ‘The only way to beat this is to co-opt the people who are stealing from you,’ that was a challenge.” Ek said, “If anyone had told me going into this that it would be three years of c
rashing my head against the wall, I wouldn’t have done it.”
Eventually, Ek decided to start regionally and prove that his concept worked. “And I invested all of my personal money in it,” he told me, “saying, you know, here’s my balls on the table. For them, the risk of trying it was kind of zero.” Swedish labels, gutted by piracy, literally had nothing to lose.
Sean Parker lives in the Plaza Hotel, in a private residence in the northeast corner of the building, looking out at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. The grand, high-ceilinged dining room has commanding views in both directions, and it was there that the thirty-four-year-old billionaire was sitting on a warm fall afternoon, dressed in jeans and rust-colored high-tops, drinking tea from a white china cup. It was a setting that would have impressed Edith Wharton, even if the owner’s attire might not have.
Parker was talking about Napster, which he and Shawn Fanning started back in 1999. “Napster had been this cultural revolution, much more than it was ever a legitimate company,” he said, stroking his neatly trimmed beard. Napster, which had sixty million registered users at its peak, taught the world how to get music from the Internet. Parker says he had always wanted to go legit, by making a deal with the record industry, but instead the labels put Napster to sleep. “There was this unique opportunity in history. We said, ‘If you shut down Napster, it’s going to splinter, and you’re going to have a Whac-A-Mole problem on your hands, where you’re fighting service after service and you’re never going to get all those users back in one place.’ And that’s what happened.” From the dragon’s teeth sprang Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus, and Limewire. “It was one of those things where it can be totally clear to you and everyone in your generation and you can explain it in the clearest of
terms, not as a threat or a negotiating tactic—just, ‘Look, you just have to see this.’ And they couldn’t see it.” Napster was the enemy, pure and simple, and it had to be killed. “This was the biggest existential threat to the music business and they wouldn’t listen.”
Parker sipped his tea. “So I went off and did other things”—he became president of Facebook in 2004, and helped turn it into a company, which helped turn him into a billionaire—“but in the back of my mind I was thinking about the untimely fate that Napster had met. That aborted mission.” He had watched while other entrepreneurs tried to realize the dream that was Napster. “They’d try to negotiate with the record labels and they really didn’t speak the language and they’d end up adapting their product vision to the terms they were able to get,” he said. In 2009, a friend told him about a Swedish service called Spotify. Parker had never heard of it. He sent Daniel Ek an e-mail and they arranged to meet.
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“The thing that made Spotify very different when I first met Daniel and Martin was that they had this incredible stubbornness,” Parker went on. “In a good way. They were willing to let the product vision lead the business deals.” He agreed to invest in the company and help Ek in his negotiations to enter the U.S. market. “Daniel said, ‘I think it’s going to take six weeks to get our licenses complete.’ It ended up taking two years.” Of the four global music companies at that time—E.M.I., Sony, Warner Music, and Universal—Ek had managed to get E.M.I. and Sony on board, but Universal and Warner were holdouts. The latter was led by Edgar Bronfman, Jr., who had spearheaded the move to close down Napster, back in 2001.
This time, Parker was more persuasive. “He did know a lot of people,” one top label executive said. “Daniel Ek didn’t. And he worked it non-stop.” The Swedish trial period was key. The record industry’s total revenues in Sweden grew by more than a third between 2008 and 2011. Piracy plummeted. As the label executive recalled, “It was like—O.K., proof of concept, we should be doing this if we can get the right license.”
Another factor in the labels’ thinking was Apple’s iTunes store, which had proved to be an unsatisfactory business partner. Music had been an important part of Apple’s business when Steve Jobs first negotiated the iTunes licenses, back in 2002—the music helped sell the iPod. But by 2011 music was more important to the Apple brand than to its business. Apple would not even let Android users, who today represent more than eighty per cent of the global mobile business, have iTunes on their phones, because it wanted to sell iPhones. Spotify offered a way out of a troubled marriage.
Thomas Hesse, who led the negotiations for Sony, told me, “The main reason it took so long for Daniel to get all the majors on board was that he had this free tier, where all the music was on demand. Was that going to cannibalize the download world?” In the end, the free tier was limited to personal computers, so users would have to pay for subscriptions in order to listen on their mobile devices, a major incentive to convert to the paid tier. Nevertheless, Hesse continued, there was “a lot of discussion about how much Spotify needed to pay for the free streaming and how many paying subscribers it could potentially guarantee.”
After Universal made a licensing agreement with Spotify, Warner was virtually compelled to join the other major labels in negotiating. At the time, the company was also looking for a buyer. Parker told me that he tendered an offer to buy Warner with Ron Burkle, the Los Angeles-based venture capitalist. When another buyer, the Russian oligarch Len Blavatnik, expressed interest, Parker said that he told him, “Look, if you make Spotify contingent on the deal, I will withdraw my offer and you’ll get the company.” In 2011, Blavatnik bought Warner, for $3.3 billion. Parker became a Spotify board member and helped broker its partnership with Facebook.
The exact terms of the licensing deals that Spotify made with the majors are not known; all parties signed nondisclosure agreements. In addition to sharing with other rights holders nearly seventy per cent of the money Spotify earns from subscriptions and ad sales—about the same revenue split that Apple provides on iTunes sales—the majors also got equity in Spotify, making them business partners; collectively, they own close to fifteen per cent of the company. Some analysts have questioned whether Spotify’s business model is sustainable. The company pays out so much of its revenues in fees that it barely makes a profit. It operated at a loss before 2013. (The company maintains that its focus has been on growth and expansion.) The contracts are renegotiated every two or three years, so the better Spotify does, the more, in theory, the labels could ask for. This makes Spotify unlike many Internet companies, in which the fixed costs of doing business become relatively smaller
with scale. For Spotify, scale doesn’t diminish the licensing fees.
When Spotify began in the U.S., labels demanded up-front payments as the price of getting in the game. These payments were not always passed along to the content creators, even though it is their work that makes the catalogues valuable in the first place. Month by month, Spotify pays the major labels lump sums for the entire market share of their catalogues. How the labels decide to parcel these payments out to their artists isn’t transparent, because, while Spotify gives detailed data to the labels, the labels ultimately decide how to share that information with their artists. The arrangement is similar on the publishing side. Artists and songwriters basically have to trust that labels and publishers will deal with them honestly, which history suggests is a sucker’s bet. As one music-industry leader put it, “It’s like you go to your bank, and the bank says, ‘Here’s your salary,’ and you say, ‘But what is my employer paying me? I work for them, not you!’ And the bank says,
‘We are not going to tell you, but this is what we think you should get paid.’ ”
Parker’s tea had grown cold, and he poured some hot water into it. The October light dimmed in the high Plaza windows. He pondered the progress of the tide of humanity flowing up and down Fifth Avenue. For him, Spotify was a do-over—a second chance to get Napster right. And that felt “very vindicating.”
The deals that Spotify made with the major labels launched on-demand streaming in earnest. But although the way the consumer gets access to music had changed, the way the creators of music are paid for their work had not. Somehow, the billions of micro-payments parcelled out in the form of streams have to be reconciled with a royalty-payments system that is rooted in a century-old sales model. No economic infrastructure exists for that apples-to-oranges transformation.
Spotify is only one of many streaming sites. There are competing services like Rhapsody (which recently bought a rebranded, fully licensed Napster), Rdio, and Google Play Music, but there are also thousands of other sites where songs are streamed. Labels, publishers, and performing-rights societies struggle with dozens of different technologies to monitor this welter of outlets. And with any given stream of a song there is a myriad of copyrights—performing and mechanical rights apply to both the recording and the composition—which makes sorting out who’s owed what no easy matter. Liz Penta, an artist manager in New York, told me that, in addition to larger payments, she regularly gets checks for one penny from the Harry Fox Agency, which administers mechanical royalties for Spotify, among other streaming services. YouTube, which is by far the largest streaming-music site in the world (it wasn’t designed that way—that’s just what it became), is notorious among rights holders
in the music industry for its measly and erratic payouts. Spotify’s exponential growth rate suggests that the chaos in royalty collection is only just beginning.
Not surprisingly, companies that specialize in digital royalty collection constitute one of the hottest growth sectors in the music business. Among the leaders is Kobalt, founded, in 2001, by Willard Ahdritz. Part collection agency, part music publisher, and part tech platform, Kobalt has built a system of enormously complex Oracle databases that compute billions and billions of transactions and royalty lines from all over the world, and collects on behalf of some two thousand artists, including Paul McCartney, Maroon 5, and Skrillex, while the rest of the industry uses Excel spreadsheets to try to piece everything together. On YouTube, Kobalt’s proprietary song-detection technology, ProKlaim, detects unclaimed videos for its clients. Ahdritz says, “We create transparency, which drives liquidity, and the money is now flowing.”
Spotify’s payouts to indie labels and digital-music distributors such as Tunecore are considerably more transparent than its dealings with the major labels. Spotify sends out monthly statements showing the total streams per artist, broken down into individual songs. To come up with the royalty rate per stream, Spotify divides the monthly streams of a single artist’s work by the total number of streams on Spotify that month, and arrives at the artist’s share. It multiplies that number by the total monthly revenues, and keeps thirty per cent. Labels, publishers, and distributors then pay the artist according to their royalty deals.
But exactly what is the royalty rate for a single stream? It depends on many factors. The more popular you are, the higher your metric. Some countries’ streams are worth more than others’. Free, ad-supported streams are worth less than subscriber streams, because the company makes less on ads than on subscriptions. (One of the reasons that Swift left Spotify was that her label wanted her music to be exclusive to the premium tier in the U.S.; it was willing to make her catalogue available for free in the rest of Spotify’s markets.) According to the company’s Web site, the average stream on Spotify is worth between six-tenths and eight-tenths of a cent. If you do the math, that means that around a hundred and fifty streams equal one ninety-nine-cent download. But that metric is hard for many musicians and record executives to accept. (I don’t stream my Lana favorites close to that many times.) On the other hand, seven-tenths of a cent is better than nothing.
Some artists are already making real money from Spotify. Swift’s music was earning about five hundred thousand dollars a month at the time she pulled it. E.D.M. artists like Avicii and David Guetta are seeing payouts in the millions. Avicii’s “Wake Me Up,” the most streamed song on Spotify, has more than three hundred million spins, which, using Spotify’s benchmark per-stream rate, would be worth about two million dollars to the rights holders. Daniel Glass, a music-industry veteran who is the founder of Glassnote Records, an indie label, told me that he is very happy with the royalties Spotify pays his artists, who include Mumford & Sons, Phoenix, Childish Gambino, and Chvrches. “We’re getting big beautiful checks from them!” he exclaimed.
At a recent series of educational meet-ups with the music industry in New York, Nashville, and L.A., Spotify representatives tried to reassure managers and artists, offering rosy-sounding future royalties, based on growth projections. A niche indie album, which now earns thirty-three hundred dollars a month, will receive seventeen thousand dollars in royalties a month when Spotify hits forty million paid subscribers. A breakthrough indie album, now earning seventy-six thousand dollars a month, will pull in three hundred and eighty thousand dollars. A global hit album, currently earning four hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a month, will get $2.1 million. How likely are these projections to come true? When I asked Ek, he said, “Is there a definitive way of knowing? Of course not. But I’m not the only person who believes it. Pretty much everyone is in agreement that streaming will keep on growing over the next few years.”
AM/FM radio pays the writer of the song on a per-play basis, but gives the performer and the owner of the recording of the song—generally, the record label—nothing. On digital streaming services like Spotify, the situation is nearly reversed: the owners of the recording get most of the performance royalty money, while the songwriters get only a fraction of it. Songwriters, who can’t go out on the road, are particularly hard hit by the loss of publishing royalties. As one music publisher put it, “Basically, the major music corporations sold out their publishing companies in order to save their record labels. Universal Music Publishing took a terrible rate from streaming services like Spotify in order to help Universal Records. Which, in the end, means that the songwriter gets screwed.”
Ek’s answer to the question of whether or not Spotify is good for artists tends toward the tautological. If it’s good for listeners—and almost everyone who uses Spotify likes it—then it must be good for artists, because by encouraging more listening it will “increase the over-all pie.” Many music-business people think he’s right. Richard Jones, the Pixies’ manager, says, “Particularly for artists who are established with solid catalogues and are big live-touring acts, streaming services can be extremely beneficial. I’m a massive supporter.” He said of Swift’s decision to pull her music, “It’s purely P.R.-driven, which is fine. But let’s not pretend it’s artist-friendly. Because actually the most artist-friendly thing here is for everyone to make streaming into something that is widespread.”
Spotify does offer undiscovered musicians new opportunities to break through. Playlists tend to be much broader in scope than commercial-radio playlists. Lorde is often cited around Spotify as an artist who gained crucial early exposure after Sean Parker heard her song “Royals” when a friend played it for him. In April, 2013, before the song was a hit anywhere, Parker added it to his “Hipster International” Spotify playlist, which currently has seven hundred and ninety thousand followers. Parker’s followers added it to their playlists, as did their followers; users shared it with one another; and within weeks “Royals” was the second most popular song on Spotify. Spotify’s director of economics, Will Page, says, “Now, remember, there is no Old World business model here, no radio pluggers or traditional marketing—just a playlist. But it’s like becoming a broadcaster. And you could see the viral nature of growth that led to this artist becoming No. 1 in America before
Christmas.” Still, the fact is that Lorde had a major label and its marketing budget behind her. Jason Flom signed Lorde to his Lava label months before Parker playlisted her. “ ‘Royals’ was not to be denied,” Flom told me. “Nothing could stop it.” Even so, he said, “Spotify—and especially Sean—was definitely helpful in establishing Lorde the way we wanted to establish her. It gave her a foundation with the cool kids.”
Record companies are beginning to figure out how to employ Spotify’s potential to their advantage, sometimes by manipulating release dates. “Windowing” releases—start out on iTunes only, and add Spotify after two weeks of sales—is popular at some labels (and very unpopular at Spotify). In Taylor Swift’s case, Big Machine Records decided to keep her previous album, “Red,” off Spotify in the first weeks after its release in order to increase record sales. “Red” was later added to Spotify, before Swift removed the entire catalogue.
But there is another class of musicians whom Ek hasn’t helped so far. For them, Spotify has further eroded their CD and download sales, without coming close to making up the difference in streaming revenues. Ek acknowledges that the switch from a sales model to a streaming model could be bumpy for some artists. “In Sweden, there was one tough year and then the debate changed,” he said. “That will happen in the larger markets. The end goal is to increase the entire pool of music. Anything else is part of the transition.” He added, “This is the single biggest shift since the beginning of recorded music, so it’s not surprising that it takes time to educate artists about what this future means.”
Two artists who are part of that transition are Marc Ribot, an esteemed jazz guitarist, and Rosanne Cash, whose work has won a Grammy and received twelve nominations. Both are mid-level, mid-career musicians who are a vital part of the New York City music scene. Both have worked with major labels. (Ribot is currently releasing his music on indies.)
I met them in New York one October afternoon. Ribot and Cash brought along their Spotify numbers. In the past eighteen months, Ribot reported, his band made a hundred and eighty-seven dollars from sixty-eight thousand streams of his latest album, available on Spotify in Europe and the U.S. Cash had made a hundred and four dollars from six hundred thousand streams. The math doesn’t fit Spotify’s benchmarks, but that is how their labels and publishers did the accounting.
When I mentioned that both Ek and Parker seemed to be sincere in their desire to help artists, Ribot replied, “Well, our ‘friends’ in the online-distribution business have helped artists to go from a fourteen-billion-dollar domestic record business to a seven-billion-dollar one, and now Spotify wants to help us reduce it even further. With friends like that, give me the old Brill Building system.”
He went on, “Here’s the simple fact that no one wants to talk about. Spotify says it pays out seventy per cent of its revenues to rights holders. Well, that’s very nice, that’s lovely. But if I’m making a shoe, and it costs me a hundred dollars to make it, and the retailer is selling that shoe for ten dollars, then I don’t care if he gives me seventy per cent, I don’t care if he gives me one hundred per cent—I’m going out of business. Dead is dead.”
Cash said, “I don’t think any of us want to make the streaming services go away. We are not Luddites. We just want to be paid fairly.”
“And we’re not going to say a model is viable unless it’s viable for the creators,” Ribot added. “I know Daniel Ek is going to do just fine. I don’t know that about the people in my band.”
“And, if the artist can’t afford to work, the music is going to suffer,” Cash added, with feeling. “Spotify is not acting in its own self-interest by obliterating us.”
Or maybe Spotify itself will get obliterated. Apple, Amazon, and Google have recently begun to enter the on-demand streaming market. (YouTube débuts Music Key, an ad-free paid-subscription service, this week, which will include access to Google Music Play.) Spotify’s advantage, Ek maintains, is its data and its ability to analyze that information. “We’ve been doing this for years,” he said. “And what we’ve built is the largest set of data of the most engaged music customers. I think it would be really hard for anyone to come in and do what we do better. Maybe someone could lower the cost of a streaming service and make it hard for us to survive. But am I concerned that someone will build a better product? No, because they can’t.”
James McQuivey, an analyst with the Boston-based Forrester Research, is less optimistic about the company’s prospects. “Spotify has shown people value streaming,” he said, “and that means somewhere someone could use that value in a bigger chess game. Someone like an Apple or a Google is already realizing how valuable music is as a customer-engagement tool and will offer something quite similar to this, without making you pay for it, the way Amazon has included video in the Prime membership without expressly charging. And then suddenly you’ve disrupted Spotify.” He added, “If I have to say yes or no will Spotify be as big and strong as it is five years from now, the answer will be no.”
Earlier this year, Apple acquired Beats Electronics, an audio company, which had entered the streaming business via Beats Music. It’s not yet clear what Apple wants to do with Beats. It could try to sign up Spotify holdouts like the Beatles (Taylor Swift hasn’t pulled her back catalogue from Beats, which is subscriber-only) and promote its service as more comprehensive. On the other hand, Apple faces the classic innovator’s dilemma. An Apple on-demand streaming service would undermine its iTunes downloads business. But if streaming is the future of music—and even people who fear the prospect agree that it is—Apple will need to enter the market soon. iTunes’ music sales have dropped almost fourteen per cent since the start of the year.
Apple could pose a real threat to Spotify, by pre-installing a service—iStream, maybe—on the next generation of iPhones and including the price of a subscription in the plan. Siri could be your d.j. That would insure a paying user base in the hundreds of millions almost instantly, easily eclipsing Spotify’s. And, since Apple makes money primarily from its hardware, it could afford to undercut Spotify on the price of a subscription—a scheme it is currently promoting to the labels. Of course, that would require the support of the labels, and they are Spotify’s business partners in streaming. “You might want to take a discount in a business you have equity in,” one label head told me. “You might not want to take a discount in a business you don’t have equity in. Would we subsidize Apple with no real upside for us? We did that once before. It was called unbundling the album.” In any case, the downward pressure on price from increased competition seems likely to diminish the pot
of money that the rights holders get to divide.
Even if Spotify does manage to survive Apple, it will take years to complete the paradigm shift to streaming. Meanwhile, album sales will continue to decline—even albums recorded by Taylor Swift. The labels, feeling the pinch in their bottom line, may try to squeeze more money out of Spotify, imperilling its future growth. They may even try to cash in their equity stakes. Proving that, while your enemies can indeed become your friends, the reverse can also be true. ♦
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Spotify: Friend or Foe?: New Yorker
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** REVENUE STREAMS
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by John Seabrook
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/141124_r25797-882.jpgDaniel Ek says his company is “not in the music space—we’re in the moment space.”CreditIllustration by Harry Campbell; photograph: Eyevine / Redux
Daniel Ek, the C.E.O. of Spotify, is a rock star of the tech world, but he is not long on charisma. At thirty-one, he is pale, boyish, cerebral, and calm. Jantelagen, the Scandinavian code of humility and restraint, is strong in him. He doesn’t greet you with a firm handshake from behind an imposing desk; he doesn’t have a desk. He sprawls on a couch with his laptop, like a teen-ager doing homework. Or he wanders the company’s offices, which form an oval around the open core of a big building on Birger Jarlsgatan, in central Stockholm. The design encourages “random encounters,” which Ek once read was Steve Jobs’s plan in laying out Pixar’s offices.
Ek’s phlegmatic manner makes his unshakable, almost spiritual belief in Spotify burn all the more brightly. His vision, that Spotify is a force for good in the world of music, is almost Swedenborgian: salvation in the form of a fully licensed streaming-music service where you can find every record ever made. Spotify doesn’t sell music; it sells access to it. Instead of buying songs and albums, you pay a monthly subscription fee ($9.99), or get served an ad every few songs if you’re on the free tier. You can listen to anything on the service—the Beatles (as with iTunes, the surviving members are not rushing in) and Taylor Swift (who left the service in a flurry of publicity in early November) notwithstanding—and there is an astonishing amount of music. When Spotify launched, in October, 2008, in Sweden and a handful of other European countries, Ek’s dream seemed like the longest of long shots. Now Spotify is the Netflix of music sites. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder,
says, “Daniel just saw the opportunities of streaming music before anyone else.”
Spotify appeared nine years after Napster, the pioneering file-sharing service, which unleashed piracy on the record business and began the cataclysm that caused worldwide revenues to decline from a peak of twenty-seven billion dollars, in 1999, to fifteen billion, in 2013. The iTunes store, the industry’s attempt, in partnership with Apple, to build a digital record shop, opened in 2003 to sell downloads, but that didn’t alter the downward trajectory; indeed, by unbundling tracks from the album, so that buyers could cherry-pick their favorite songs, Apple arguably hastened the decline. Legal actions against individuals—thousands of people in the U.S. were sued for downloading music illegally—only alienated potential customers. As bad as the bloodbath was in the U.S., the situation was even worse in Sweden. Pelle Lidell, an executive with Universal Music Publishing in Stockholm, told me that by 2008 “we were an inch away from being buried, and Spotify single-handedly turned
that around.”
Ek was one of the pirate band. Before starting the company, he had briefly been the C.E.O. of uTorrent, which made money in part by monetizing pirated music and movies on BitTorrent, a major file-sharing protocol. Later, the Napster co-founder Sean Parker, for years Public Enemy No. 1 to record-company executives, joined forces with Ek. Who would have imagined, as one label head put it recently, that “your enemy could become your friend”?
Spotify is now in fifty-eight countries. (Canada, its latest market, got the service at the end of September.) It has raised more than half a billion dollars from investors, including Goldman Sachs, to fund its expansion, and there are rumors of an I.P.O. in its future, to raise more. Spotify’s user base exceeds fifty million globally, with twelve and a half million paying subscribers. At the current rate of growth, that number could reach forty million subscribers by the end of the decade. To date, it has paid out more than two billion dollars to the record labels, publishers, distributors, and artists who own the rights to the songs. “I’m very bullish on it,” Tom Corson, the president of RCA Records, said. “The all-you-can-eat access model is starting to make sense to people. And we expect that free is going to roll into subscription and that is going to be a really huge part of our business.”
The question of whether Spotify is good for artists is considerably more vexed. The service has been dogged by accusations that it doesn’t value musicians highly enough. In 2013, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke memorably called Spotify “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse,” a remark that “saddened” Ek. In July, Taylor Swift wrote in a Wall Street Journaleditorial, “In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work.” For Swift, streaming is not much different from piracy. “Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently,” she wrote.
In early November, when Swift’s new album, “1989,” was released, her label, Big Machine Records, not only declined to make the album available on Spotify but also removed her entire catalogue from the service. Is this a gesture of artistic solidarity, or, as one insider put it, “a stunt to wring the last drop of blood out of what is a dying model”—i.e., album sales? Swift’s impressive first-week sales of “1989,” which were just under 1.3 million albums, making her the year’s top seller, are still well short of the all-time first-week high, 2.4 million, set by ’N Sync, in 2000. And the sixty-nine-per-cent drop-off in “1989” ’s second-week sales suggests that Swift’s seventy-one million Facebook fans didn’t rush out and buy the album when they couldn’t get it on Spotify. They just streamed whatever was available on YouTube, which pays artists even less than Spotify does, or on other sites. Or they set sail for the Pirate Bay, where the album was also No. 1.
On Spotify, music consumption is “frictionless”—a favorite word of Ek’s. In tech terms, we’ve gone from a world of scarcity to one of abundance. Nothing is for sale, because everything is available. The kind of calculations you make on iTunes, such as “I like this song, but not enough to buy it,” don’t matter. It is a music nerd’s dream, which may be why the user population on Spotify tends to lie outside the mainstream. On Spotify, the Pixies’ top songs have about four times as many streams as Neil Diamond’s biggest hits.
The difference between Spotify and Internet radio services, like Pandora, is that Spotify is interactive. You can sample the complete catalogue of most artists’ recordings. (Spotify also has a non-interactive radio component.) Spotify now has some twenty million songs on the service, and twenty thousand new ones are added every day. If you are a “lean forward” listener—that is, the kind of motivated fan who takes the time to discover the music you want—Spotify is a celestial jukebox. But, for Spotify to continue its rapid growth, it must bring in the “lean backers” Pandora caters to. Spotify tries to do this with playlists. It has staff-curated playlists, and users can also make their own—there are more than a billion on the site. The playlist is the album of the streaming world. Spotify is working on getting its service into car stereos, and is negotiating agreements with automobile companies; one such agreement was announced this week. The power of playlists will only grow.
When Spotify launched in the U.S., in 2011, it relied on simple, usage-based algorithms to connect users and music, a process known as “collaborative filtering.” These algorithms were more often annoying than useful. You think because I listened to Neil Young that I want to listen to America? America ripped Neil Young off! But over time the algorithms have improved. Earlier this year, Spotify bought a Boston-based startup called the Echo Nest, which has developed a form of artificial music intelligence—a kind of A.I. hipster that finds cool music for you. The Echo Nest powers Spotify’s automated radio stations and is also behind an in-house programming tool called Truffle Pig, which can be told to sniff out music with combinations of more than fifty parameters, such as “speechiness” and “acoustic-ness.” Now that the Echo Nest is part of Spotify, its team has access to the enormous amount of data generated by Spotify users which show how they consume music. Spotify knows what
time of day users listen to certain songs, and in many cases their location, so programmers can infer what they are probably doing—studying, exercising, driving to work. Brian Whitman, an Echo Nest co-founder, told me that programmers also hope to learn more about listeners by factoring in data such as “what the weather is like, what your relationship status is now on Facebook.” (In 2011, Facebook entered into a partnership with Spotify.) He added, “We’ve cracked the nut as far as knowing as much about the music as we possibly can automatically, and we see the next frontier as knowing as much as we possibly can about the listener.”
All this, Ek explained, will help Spotify to better program the “moments” of a user’s day. “We’re not in the music space—we’re in the moment space,” he told me. The idea is to use song analytics and user data to help both human and A.I. curators select the right songs for certain activities or moods, and build playlists for those moments. Playlists can be customized according to an individual user’s “taste profile.” You just broke up with your boyfriend, you’re in a bad mood, and Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River,” from the “Better Off Without You” playlist, starts. Are you playing the music, or is the music playing you?
You can design your own Spotify day. You wake to the “Early Morning Rise” playlist (Midnight Faces, Zella Day), and get ready with “Songs to Sing in the Shower” (“I’m hooked on a feeling/I’m high on believing”). Depending on how much work you have, there’s “Deep Focus,” “Brain Food,” or “Intense Studying.” By eleven-thirty, you’ve hit “Caffeine Rush,” and, after a sandwich at your desk (“Love That Lazy Lunch”), it’s time to “Re-Energize” (Skrillex, Deorro) for the afternoon. A late-in-the-day “Mood Booster” (Meghan Trainor) gets you pumped for your workout (there’s a “House Workout,” a “Hip Hop Workout,” and a “CrossFit Mix,” to name just a few). Then it’s “Happy to Be Home” (Feist, the Postal Service). After “Beer n’ Burgers” (rockabilly) or “Taco Tuesday” (Celia Cruz), you “Calm Down” (Wilco, the National) and then, depending on your love life, click on “Sexy Beats” or “Better Off Without You” (or maybe “Bedtime S
tories,” for the kids), followed by “Sleep” (heavy on Brian Eno, king of the z’s).
My problem with playlists is not the Starbucksy rubrics, or the spying on my embarrassing Lana Del Rey obsession. My problem is that I end up skipping most of the songs anyway. I lean forward and check the next song when I’m supposed to lean back. The human or the A.I. who chose Pharrell’s “Happy” for the “Mood Booster” playlist isn’t getting the job done for me.
By the time he turned twenty-two, Daniel Ek had achieved his life’s ambition: he was rich. A gifted programmer, he had been making money by working on Internet-based tech products since he was fourteen. After selling an Internet advertising company called Advertigo, in 2006, he retired. He rented a big place in Stockholm. He bought a red Ferrari and drove it to night clubs, where he arranged for good tables for friends and attractive female companions, whom he plied with expensive champagne. He lived like this for a year or so, until one morning he awoke to a startling realization. “I was completely depressed,” he said.
“I realized the girls I was with weren’t very nice people,” Ek went on, “that they were just using me, and that my friends weren’t real friends. They were people who were there for the good times, but if it ever turned ugly they’d leave me in a heartbeat. I had always wanted to belong and I had been thinking that this was going to get solved when I had money, and instead I had no idea how I wanted to live my life. And no one teaches you what to do after you achieve financial independence. So I had to confront that.”
Ek describes himself as “missionary,” by which he means he likes to formulate five-year missions for himself. “That’s how I think about life,” he said. “Five years is long enough for me to achieve something meaningful but short enough so I can change my mind every few years. I’m on my second five-year commitment on Spotify. In two years, I will have to make my next one. I will need to ask myself if I still enjoy what I’m doing. I’m kind of unusual that way, but it gives me clarity and purpose.”
Ek sold the Ferrari, got rid of the apartment, and moved to a cabin near his parents’ place in Ragsved, a Stockholm suburb, where he meditated about what to do with his life. He had soul-searching conversations with Martin Lorentzon, the Swedish entrepreneur who had bought Ek’s advertising company, and was himself looking for a new project. “And we always came back to the music industry,” Ek said. Like many teen-agers around the turn of the millennium, Ek had become infatuated with Napster—in particular, with the idea of a site where all the world’s music was available for free. Radio offered free music, too, of course, but radio wasn’t interactive; you couldn’t pursue your own interests, the way you could on Napster. Ek said, “Before that, I was listening to Roxette,” a Swedish pop-rock band from the eighties. “I discovered Metallica and learned that they were inspired by Led Zeppelin, and King Crimson, and then I got into the Beatles. And from there I went to Bowie and the
whole British scene from the Eurythmics to the Sex Pistols. Hearing the anger and frustration of the Sex Pistols or the Clash made you feel like you were in the seventies. You started to understand culture. It was pretty magical.
“It came back to me constantly that Napster was such an amazing consumer experience, and I wanted to see if it could be a viable business,” Ek went on. “We said, ‘The problem with the music industry is piracy. Great consumer product, not a great business model. But you can’t beat technology. Technology always wins. But what if you can make a better product than piracy?’ ” Ek continued, “Piracy was kind of hard. It took a few minutes to download a song, it was kind of cumbersome, you had to worry about viruses. It’s not like people want to be pirates. They just want a great experience. So we started sketching what that would look like.”
Their “product vision,” in tech parlance, was that the service had to give the impression that the music was already on your hard drive. “What would it feel like?” Ek asked. “That was the emotion we were trying to invoke.” The key was to build something that worked instantly. Streaming, whether audio or video, tends to have built-in delays while you wait for the file, which is stored on a server in the cloud. But if the music starts in two hundred milliseconds or less—about half the time it takes, on average, to blink—people don’t seem to perceive a delay. That became Ek’s design standard. He told his lead engineer, Ludvig Strigeus, a brilliant programmer he had worked with before, “I don’t accept anything that isn’t below two hundred milliseconds.”
Strigeus responded, “It can’t be done. The Internet isn’t built like that.”
“You have to figure it out,” Ek insisted.
The solution involved designing a streaming protocol that worked faster than the standard one, as well as building their own peer-to-peer network, a decentralized architecture in which all the computers on it can communicate with one another. In four months, they had a working prototype.
“And I knew when we had it that it was going to be very special,” Ek said.
Ek’s original idea was to launch Spotify in the U.S. at the same time that he launched the service in Europe. Ken Parks, Spotify’s chief content officer, said, “Daniel thought he could just go down to the corner store in Stockholm and pick up a global license.” He didn’t realize that he would have to negotiate directly with all the different copyright holders, a herculean task. Not surprisingly, the labels weren’t interested. Ek was an outsider—a techie, and a Swedish one at that. Parks, an attorney who’d worked at E.M.I., recalled, “We needed to overcome the music-is-free mentality that Spotify represented.” Of the labels’ attitude, he went on, “If you have something you’ve invested a ton of money in, and you’ve been selling it for a lot, and you feel raped by piracy—to say to that person, ‘The only way to beat this is to co-opt the people who are stealing from you,’ that was a challenge.” Ek said, “If anyone had told me going into this that it would be three years of c
rashing my head against the wall, I wouldn’t have done it.”
Eventually, Ek decided to start regionally and prove that his concept worked. “And I invested all of my personal money in it,” he told me, “saying, you know, here’s my balls on the table. For them, the risk of trying it was kind of zero.” Swedish labels, gutted by piracy, literally had nothing to lose.
Sean Parker lives in the Plaza Hotel, in a private residence in the northeast corner of the building, looking out at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. The grand, high-ceilinged dining room has commanding views in both directions, and it was there that the thirty-four-year-old billionaire was sitting on a warm fall afternoon, dressed in jeans and rust-colored high-tops, drinking tea from a white china cup. It was a setting that would have impressed Edith Wharton, even if the owner’s attire might not have.
Parker was talking about Napster, which he and Shawn Fanning started back in 1999. “Napster had been this cultural revolution, much more than it was ever a legitimate company,” he said, stroking his neatly trimmed beard. Napster, which had sixty million registered users at its peak, taught the world how to get music from the Internet. Parker says he had always wanted to go legit, by making a deal with the record industry, but instead the labels put Napster to sleep. “There was this unique opportunity in history. We said, ‘If you shut down Napster, it’s going to splinter, and you’re going to have a Whac-A-Mole problem on your hands, where you’re fighting service after service and you’re never going to get all those users back in one place.’ And that’s what happened.” From the dragon’s teeth sprang Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus, and Limewire. “It was one of those things where it can be totally clear to you and everyone in your generation and you can explain it in the clearest of
terms, not as a threat or a negotiating tactic—just, ‘Look, you just have to see this.’ And they couldn’t see it.” Napster was the enemy, pure and simple, and it had to be killed. “This was the biggest existential threat to the music business and they wouldn’t listen.”
Parker sipped his tea. “So I went off and did other things”—he became president of Facebook in 2004, and helped turn it into a company, which helped turn him into a billionaire—“but in the back of my mind I was thinking about the untimely fate that Napster had met. That aborted mission.” He had watched while other entrepreneurs tried to realize the dream that was Napster. “They’d try to negotiate with the record labels and they really didn’t speak the language and they’d end up adapting their product vision to the terms they were able to get,” he said. In 2009, a friend told him about a Swedish service called Spotify. Parker had never heard of it. He sent Daniel Ek an e-mail and they arranged to meet.
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“The thing that made Spotify very different when I first met Daniel and Martin was that they had this incredible stubbornness,” Parker went on. “In a good way. They were willing to let the product vision lead the business deals.” He agreed to invest in the company and help Ek in his negotiations to enter the U.S. market. “Daniel said, ‘I think it’s going to take six weeks to get our licenses complete.’ It ended up taking two years.” Of the four global music companies at that time—E.M.I., Sony, Warner Music, and Universal—Ek had managed to get E.M.I. and Sony on board, but Universal and Warner were holdouts. The latter was led by Edgar Bronfman, Jr., who had spearheaded the move to close down Napster, back in 2001.
This time, Parker was more persuasive. “He did know a lot of people,” one top label executive said. “Daniel Ek didn’t. And he worked it non-stop.” The Swedish trial period was key. The record industry’s total revenues in Sweden grew by more than a third between 2008 and 2011. Piracy plummeted. As the label executive recalled, “It was like—O.K., proof of concept, we should be doing this if we can get the right license.”
Another factor in the labels’ thinking was Apple’s iTunes store, which had proved to be an unsatisfactory business partner. Music had been an important part of Apple’s business when Steve Jobs first negotiated the iTunes licenses, back in 2002—the music helped sell the iPod. But by 2011 music was more important to the Apple brand than to its business. Apple would not even let Android users, who today represent more than eighty per cent of the global mobile business, have iTunes on their phones, because it wanted to sell iPhones. Spotify offered a way out of a troubled marriage.
Thomas Hesse, who led the negotiations for Sony, told me, “The main reason it took so long for Daniel to get all the majors on board was that he had this free tier, where all the music was on demand. Was that going to cannibalize the download world?” In the end, the free tier was limited to personal computers, so users would have to pay for subscriptions in order to listen on their mobile devices, a major incentive to convert to the paid tier. Nevertheless, Hesse continued, there was “a lot of discussion about how much Spotify needed to pay for the free streaming and how many paying subscribers it could potentially guarantee.”
After Universal made a licensing agreement with Spotify, Warner was virtually compelled to join the other major labels in negotiating. At the time, the company was also looking for a buyer. Parker told me that he tendered an offer to buy Warner with Ron Burkle, the Los Angeles-based venture capitalist. When another buyer, the Russian oligarch Len Blavatnik, expressed interest, Parker said that he told him, “Look, if you make Spotify contingent on the deal, I will withdraw my offer and you’ll get the company.” In 2011, Blavatnik bought Warner, for $3.3 billion. Parker became a Spotify board member and helped broker its partnership with Facebook.
The exact terms of the licensing deals that Spotify made with the majors are not known; all parties signed nondisclosure agreements. In addition to sharing with other rights holders nearly seventy per cent of the money Spotify earns from subscriptions and ad sales—about the same revenue split that Apple provides on iTunes sales—the majors also got equity in Spotify, making them business partners; collectively, they own close to fifteen per cent of the company. Some analysts have questioned whether Spotify’s business model is sustainable. The company pays out so much of its revenues in fees that it barely makes a profit. It operated at a loss before 2013. (The company maintains that its focus has been on growth and expansion.) The contracts are renegotiated every two or three years, so the better Spotify does, the more, in theory, the labels could ask for. This makes Spotify unlike many Internet companies, in which the fixed costs of doing business become relatively smaller
with scale. For Spotify, scale doesn’t diminish the licensing fees.
When Spotify began in the U.S., labels demanded up-front payments as the price of getting in the game. These payments were not always passed along to the content creators, even though it is their work that makes the catalogues valuable in the first place. Month by month, Spotify pays the major labels lump sums for the entire market share of their catalogues. How the labels decide to parcel these payments out to their artists isn’t transparent, because, while Spotify gives detailed data to the labels, the labels ultimately decide how to share that information with their artists. The arrangement is similar on the publishing side. Artists and songwriters basically have to trust that labels and publishers will deal with them honestly, which history suggests is a sucker’s bet. As one music-industry leader put it, “It’s like you go to your bank, and the bank says, ‘Here’s your salary,’ and you say, ‘But what is my employer paying me? I work for them, not you!’ And the bank says,
‘We are not going to tell you, but this is what we think you should get paid.’ ”
Parker’s tea had grown cold, and he poured some hot water into it. The October light dimmed in the high Plaza windows. He pondered the progress of the tide of humanity flowing up and down Fifth Avenue. For him, Spotify was a do-over—a second chance to get Napster right. And that felt “very vindicating.”
The deals that Spotify made with the major labels launched on-demand streaming in earnest. But although the way the consumer gets access to music had changed, the way the creators of music are paid for their work had not. Somehow, the billions of micro-payments parcelled out in the form of streams have to be reconciled with a royalty-payments system that is rooted in a century-old sales model. No economic infrastructure exists for that apples-to-oranges transformation.
Spotify is only one of many streaming sites. There are competing services like Rhapsody (which recently bought a rebranded, fully licensed Napster), Rdio, and Google Play Music, but there are also thousands of other sites where songs are streamed. Labels, publishers, and performing-rights societies struggle with dozens of different technologies to monitor this welter of outlets. And with any given stream of a song there is a myriad of copyrights—performing and mechanical rights apply to both the recording and the composition—which makes sorting out who’s owed what no easy matter. Liz Penta, an artist manager in New York, told me that, in addition to larger payments, she regularly gets checks for one penny from the Harry Fox Agency, which administers mechanical royalties for Spotify, among other streaming services. YouTube, which is by far the largest streaming-music site in the world (it wasn’t designed that way—that’s just what it became), is notorious among rights holders
in the music industry for its measly and erratic payouts. Spotify’s exponential growth rate suggests that the chaos in royalty collection is only just beginning.
Not surprisingly, companies that specialize in digital royalty collection constitute one of the hottest growth sectors in the music business. Among the leaders is Kobalt, founded, in 2001, by Willard Ahdritz. Part collection agency, part music publisher, and part tech platform, Kobalt has built a system of enormously complex Oracle databases that compute billions and billions of transactions and royalty lines from all over the world, and collects on behalf of some two thousand artists, including Paul McCartney, Maroon 5, and Skrillex, while the rest of the industry uses Excel spreadsheets to try to piece everything together. On YouTube, Kobalt’s proprietary song-detection technology, ProKlaim, detects unclaimed videos for its clients. Ahdritz says, “We create transparency, which drives liquidity, and the money is now flowing.”
Spotify’s payouts to indie labels and digital-music distributors such as Tunecore are considerably more transparent than its dealings with the major labels. Spotify sends out monthly statements showing the total streams per artist, broken down into individual songs. To come up with the royalty rate per stream, Spotify divides the monthly streams of a single artist’s work by the total number of streams on Spotify that month, and arrives at the artist’s share. It multiplies that number by the total monthly revenues, and keeps thirty per cent. Labels, publishers, and distributors then pay the artist according to their royalty deals.
But exactly what is the royalty rate for a single stream? It depends on many factors. The more popular you are, the higher your metric. Some countries’ streams are worth more than others’. Free, ad-supported streams are worth less than subscriber streams, because the company makes less on ads than on subscriptions. (One of the reasons that Swift left Spotify was that her label wanted her music to be exclusive to the premium tier in the U.S.; it was willing to make her catalogue available for free in the rest of Spotify’s markets.) According to the company’s Web site, the average stream on Spotify is worth between six-tenths and eight-tenths of a cent. If you do the math, that means that around a hundred and fifty streams equal one ninety-nine-cent download. But that metric is hard for many musicians and record executives to accept. (I don’t stream my Lana favorites close to that many times.) On the other hand, seven-tenths of a cent is better than nothing.
Some artists are already making real money from Spotify. Swift’s music was earning about five hundred thousand dollars a month at the time she pulled it. E.D.M. artists like Avicii and David Guetta are seeing payouts in the millions. Avicii’s “Wake Me Up,” the most streamed song on Spotify, has more than three hundred million spins, which, using Spotify’s benchmark per-stream rate, would be worth about two million dollars to the rights holders. Daniel Glass, a music-industry veteran who is the founder of Glassnote Records, an indie label, told me that he is very happy with the royalties Spotify pays his artists, who include Mumford & Sons, Phoenix, Childish Gambino, and Chvrches. “We’re getting big beautiful checks from them!” he exclaimed.
At a recent series of educational meet-ups with the music industry in New York, Nashville, and L.A., Spotify representatives tried to reassure managers and artists, offering rosy-sounding future royalties, based on growth projections. A niche indie album, which now earns thirty-three hundred dollars a month, will receive seventeen thousand dollars in royalties a month when Spotify hits forty million paid subscribers. A breakthrough indie album, now earning seventy-six thousand dollars a month, will pull in three hundred and eighty thousand dollars. A global hit album, currently earning four hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a month, will get $2.1 million. How likely are these projections to come true? When I asked Ek, he said, “Is there a definitive way of knowing? Of course not. But I’m not the only person who believes it. Pretty much everyone is in agreement that streaming will keep on growing over the next few years.”
AM/FM radio pays the writer of the song on a per-play basis, but gives the performer and the owner of the recording of the song—generally, the record label—nothing. On digital streaming services like Spotify, the situation is nearly reversed: the owners of the recording get most of the performance royalty money, while the songwriters get only a fraction of it. Songwriters, who can’t go out on the road, are particularly hard hit by the loss of publishing royalties. As one music publisher put it, “Basically, the major music corporations sold out their publishing companies in order to save their record labels. Universal Music Publishing took a terrible rate from streaming services like Spotify in order to help Universal Records. Which, in the end, means that the songwriter gets screwed.”
Ek’s answer to the question of whether or not Spotify is good for artists tends toward the tautological. If it’s good for listeners—and almost everyone who uses Spotify likes it—then it must be good for artists, because by encouraging more listening it will “increase the over-all pie.” Many music-business people think he’s right. Richard Jones, the Pixies’ manager, says, “Particularly for artists who are established with solid catalogues and are big live-touring acts, streaming services can be extremely beneficial. I’m a massive supporter.” He said of Swift’s decision to pull her music, “It’s purely P.R.-driven, which is fine. But let’s not pretend it’s artist-friendly. Because actually the most artist-friendly thing here is for everyone to make streaming into something that is widespread.”
Spotify does offer undiscovered musicians new opportunities to break through. Playlists tend to be much broader in scope than commercial-radio playlists. Lorde is often cited around Spotify as an artist who gained crucial early exposure after Sean Parker heard her song “Royals” when a friend played it for him. In April, 2013, before the song was a hit anywhere, Parker added it to his “Hipster International” Spotify playlist, which currently has seven hundred and ninety thousand followers. Parker’s followers added it to their playlists, as did their followers; users shared it with one another; and within weeks “Royals” was the second most popular song on Spotify. Spotify’s director of economics, Will Page, says, “Now, remember, there is no Old World business model here, no radio pluggers or traditional marketing—just a playlist. But it’s like becoming a broadcaster. And you could see the viral nature of growth that led to this artist becoming No. 1 in America before
Christmas.” Still, the fact is that Lorde had a major label and its marketing budget behind her. Jason Flom signed Lorde to his Lava label months before Parker playlisted her. “ ‘Royals’ was not to be denied,” Flom told me. “Nothing could stop it.” Even so, he said, “Spotify—and especially Sean—was definitely helpful in establishing Lorde the way we wanted to establish her. It gave her a foundation with the cool kids.”
Record companies are beginning to figure out how to employ Spotify’s potential to their advantage, sometimes by manipulating release dates. “Windowing” releases—start out on iTunes only, and add Spotify after two weeks of sales—is popular at some labels (and very unpopular at Spotify). In Taylor Swift’s case, Big Machine Records decided to keep her previous album, “Red,” off Spotify in the first weeks after its release in order to increase record sales. “Red” was later added to Spotify, before Swift removed the entire catalogue.
But there is another class of musicians whom Ek hasn’t helped so far. For them, Spotify has further eroded their CD and download sales, without coming close to making up the difference in streaming revenues. Ek acknowledges that the switch from a sales model to a streaming model could be bumpy for some artists. “In Sweden, there was one tough year and then the debate changed,” he said. “That will happen in the larger markets. The end goal is to increase the entire pool of music. Anything else is part of the transition.” He added, “This is the single biggest shift since the beginning of recorded music, so it’s not surprising that it takes time to educate artists about what this future means.”
Two artists who are part of that transition are Marc Ribot, an esteemed jazz guitarist, and Rosanne Cash, whose work has won a Grammy and received twelve nominations. Both are mid-level, mid-career musicians who are a vital part of the New York City music scene. Both have worked with major labels. (Ribot is currently releasing his music on indies.)
I met them in New York one October afternoon. Ribot and Cash brought along their Spotify numbers. In the past eighteen months, Ribot reported, his band made a hundred and eighty-seven dollars from sixty-eight thousand streams of his latest album, available on Spotify in Europe and the U.S. Cash had made a hundred and four dollars from six hundred thousand streams. The math doesn’t fit Spotify’s benchmarks, but that is how their labels and publishers did the accounting.
When I mentioned that both Ek and Parker seemed to be sincere in their desire to help artists, Ribot replied, “Well, our ‘friends’ in the online-distribution business have helped artists to go from a fourteen-billion-dollar domestic record business to a seven-billion-dollar one, and now Spotify wants to help us reduce it even further. With friends like that, give me the old Brill Building system.”
He went on, “Here’s the simple fact that no one wants to talk about. Spotify says it pays out seventy per cent of its revenues to rights holders. Well, that’s very nice, that’s lovely. But if I’m making a shoe, and it costs me a hundred dollars to make it, and the retailer is selling that shoe for ten dollars, then I don’t care if he gives me seventy per cent, I don’t care if he gives me one hundred per cent—I’m going out of business. Dead is dead.”
Cash said, “I don’t think any of us want to make the streaming services go away. We are not Luddites. We just want to be paid fairly.”
“And we’re not going to say a model is viable unless it’s viable for the creators,” Ribot added. “I know Daniel Ek is going to do just fine. I don’t know that about the people in my band.”
“And, if the artist can’t afford to work, the music is going to suffer,” Cash added, with feeling. “Spotify is not acting in its own self-interest by obliterating us.”
Or maybe Spotify itself will get obliterated. Apple, Amazon, and Google have recently begun to enter the on-demand streaming market. (YouTube débuts Music Key, an ad-free paid-subscription service, this week, which will include access to Google Music Play.) Spotify’s advantage, Ek maintains, is its data and its ability to analyze that information. “We’ve been doing this for years,” he said. “And what we’ve built is the largest set of data of the most engaged music customers. I think it would be really hard for anyone to come in and do what we do better. Maybe someone could lower the cost of a streaming service and make it hard for us to survive. But am I concerned that someone will build a better product? No, because they can’t.”
James McQuivey, an analyst with the Boston-based Forrester Research, is less optimistic about the company’s prospects. “Spotify has shown people value streaming,” he said, “and that means somewhere someone could use that value in a bigger chess game. Someone like an Apple or a Google is already realizing how valuable music is as a customer-engagement tool and will offer something quite similar to this, without making you pay for it, the way Amazon has included video in the Prime membership without expressly charging. And then suddenly you’ve disrupted Spotify.” He added, “If I have to say yes or no will Spotify be as big and strong as it is five years from now, the answer will be no.”
Earlier this year, Apple acquired Beats Electronics, an audio company, which had entered the streaming business via Beats Music. It’s not yet clear what Apple wants to do with Beats. It could try to sign up Spotify holdouts like the Beatles (Taylor Swift hasn’t pulled her back catalogue from Beats, which is subscriber-only) and promote its service as more comprehensive. On the other hand, Apple faces the classic innovator’s dilemma. An Apple on-demand streaming service would undermine its iTunes downloads business. But if streaming is the future of music—and even people who fear the prospect agree that it is—Apple will need to enter the market soon. iTunes’ music sales have dropped almost fourteen per cent since the start of the year.
Apple could pose a real threat to Spotify, by pre-installing a service—iStream, maybe—on the next generation of iPhones and including the price of a subscription in the plan. Siri could be your d.j. That would insure a paying user base in the hundreds of millions almost instantly, easily eclipsing Spotify’s. And, since Apple makes money primarily from its hardware, it could afford to undercut Spotify on the price of a subscription—a scheme it is currently promoting to the labels. Of course, that would require the support of the labels, and they are Spotify’s business partners in streaming. “You might want to take a discount in a business you have equity in,” one label head told me. “You might not want to take a discount in a business you don’t have equity in. Would we subsidize Apple with no real upside for us? We did that once before. It was called unbundling the album.” In any case, the downward pressure on price from increased competition seems likely to diminish the pot
of money that the rights holders get to divide.
Even if Spotify does manage to survive Apple, it will take years to complete the paradigm shift to streaming. Meanwhile, album sales will continue to decline—even albums recorded by Taylor Swift. The labels, feeling the pinch in their bottom line, may try to squeeze more money out of Spotify, imperilling its future growth. They may even try to cash in their equity stakes. Proving that, while your enemies can indeed become your friends, the reverse can also be true. ♦
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Spotify: Friend or Foe?: New Yorker
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** REVENUE STREAMS
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by John Seabrook
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/141124_r25797-882.jpgDaniel Ek says his company is “not in the music space—we’re in the moment space.”CreditIllustration by Harry Campbell; photograph: Eyevine / Redux
Daniel Ek, the C.E.O. of Spotify, is a rock star of the tech world, but he is not long on charisma. At thirty-one, he is pale, boyish, cerebral, and calm. Jantelagen, the Scandinavian code of humility and restraint, is strong in him. He doesn’t greet you with a firm handshake from behind an imposing desk; he doesn’t have a desk. He sprawls on a couch with his laptop, like a teen-ager doing homework. Or he wanders the company’s offices, which form an oval around the open core of a big building on Birger Jarlsgatan, in central Stockholm. The design encourages “random encounters,” which Ek once read was Steve Jobs’s plan in laying out Pixar’s offices.
Ek’s phlegmatic manner makes his unshakable, almost spiritual belief in Spotify burn all the more brightly. His vision, that Spotify is a force for good in the world of music, is almost Swedenborgian: salvation in the form of a fully licensed streaming-music service where you can find every record ever made. Spotify doesn’t sell music; it sells access to it. Instead of buying songs and albums, you pay a monthly subscription fee ($9.99), or get served an ad every few songs if you’re on the free tier. You can listen to anything on the service—the Beatles (as with iTunes, the surviving members are not rushing in) and Taylor Swift (who left the service in a flurry of publicity in early November) notwithstanding—and there is an astonishing amount of music. When Spotify launched, in October, 2008, in Sweden and a handful of other European countries, Ek’s dream seemed like the longest of long shots. Now Spotify is the Netflix of music sites. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder,
says, “Daniel just saw the opportunities of streaming music before anyone else.”
Spotify appeared nine years after Napster, the pioneering file-sharing service, which unleashed piracy on the record business and began the cataclysm that caused worldwide revenues to decline from a peak of twenty-seven billion dollars, in 1999, to fifteen billion, in 2013. The iTunes store, the industry’s attempt, in partnership with Apple, to build a digital record shop, opened in 2003 to sell downloads, but that didn’t alter the downward trajectory; indeed, by unbundling tracks from the album, so that buyers could cherry-pick their favorite songs, Apple arguably hastened the decline. Legal actions against individuals—thousands of people in the U.S. were sued for downloading music illegally—only alienated potential customers. As bad as the bloodbath was in the U.S., the situation was even worse in Sweden. Pelle Lidell, an executive with Universal Music Publishing in Stockholm, told me that by 2008 “we were an inch away from being buried, and Spotify single-handedly turned
that around.”
Ek was one of the pirate band. Before starting the company, he had briefly been the C.E.O. of uTorrent, which made money in part by monetizing pirated music and movies on BitTorrent, a major file-sharing protocol. Later, the Napster co-founder Sean Parker, for years Public Enemy No. 1 to record-company executives, joined forces with Ek. Who would have imagined, as one label head put it recently, that “your enemy could become your friend”?
Spotify is now in fifty-eight countries. (Canada, its latest market, got the service at the end of September.) It has raised more than half a billion dollars from investors, including Goldman Sachs, to fund its expansion, and there are rumors of an I.P.O. in its future, to raise more. Spotify’s user base exceeds fifty million globally, with twelve and a half million paying subscribers. At the current rate of growth, that number could reach forty million subscribers by the end of the decade. To date, it has paid out more than two billion dollars to the record labels, publishers, distributors, and artists who own the rights to the songs. “I’m very bullish on it,” Tom Corson, the president of RCA Records, said. “The all-you-can-eat access model is starting to make sense to people. And we expect that free is going to roll into subscription and that is going to be a really huge part of our business.”
The question of whether Spotify is good for artists is considerably more vexed. The service has been dogged by accusations that it doesn’t value musicians highly enough. In 2013, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke memorably called Spotify “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse,” a remark that “saddened” Ek. In July, Taylor Swift wrote in a Wall Street Journaleditorial, “In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work.” For Swift, streaming is not much different from piracy. “Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently,” she wrote.
In early November, when Swift’s new album, “1989,” was released, her label, Big Machine Records, not only declined to make the album available on Spotify but also removed her entire catalogue from the service. Is this a gesture of artistic solidarity, or, as one insider put it, “a stunt to wring the last drop of blood out of what is a dying model”—i.e., album sales? Swift’s impressive first-week sales of “1989,” which were just under 1.3 million albums, making her the year’s top seller, are still well short of the all-time first-week high, 2.4 million, set by ’N Sync, in 2000. And the sixty-nine-per-cent drop-off in “1989” ’s second-week sales suggests that Swift’s seventy-one million Facebook fans didn’t rush out and buy the album when they couldn’t get it on Spotify. They just streamed whatever was available on YouTube, which pays artists even less than Spotify does, or on other sites. Or they set sail for the Pirate Bay, where the album was also No. 1.
On Spotify, music consumption is “frictionless”—a favorite word of Ek’s. In tech terms, we’ve gone from a world of scarcity to one of abundance. Nothing is for sale, because everything is available. The kind of calculations you make on iTunes, such as “I like this song, but not enough to buy it,” don’t matter. It is a music nerd’s dream, which may be why the user population on Spotify tends to lie outside the mainstream. On Spotify, the Pixies’ top songs have about four times as many streams as Neil Diamond’s biggest hits.
The difference between Spotify and Internet radio services, like Pandora, is that Spotify is interactive. You can sample the complete catalogue of most artists’ recordings. (Spotify also has a non-interactive radio component.) Spotify now has some twenty million songs on the service, and twenty thousand new ones are added every day. If you are a “lean forward” listener—that is, the kind of motivated fan who takes the time to discover the music you want—Spotify is a celestial jukebox. But, for Spotify to continue its rapid growth, it must bring in the “lean backers” Pandora caters to. Spotify tries to do this with playlists. It has staff-curated playlists, and users can also make their own—there are more than a billion on the site. The playlist is the album of the streaming world. Spotify is working on getting its service into car stereos, and is negotiating agreements with automobile companies; one such agreement was announced this week. The power of playlists will only grow.
When Spotify launched in the U.S., in 2011, it relied on simple, usage-based algorithms to connect users and music, a process known as “collaborative filtering.” These algorithms were more often annoying than useful. You think because I listened to Neil Young that I want to listen to America? America ripped Neil Young off! But over time the algorithms have improved. Earlier this year, Spotify bought a Boston-based startup called the Echo Nest, which has developed a form of artificial music intelligence—a kind of A.I. hipster that finds cool music for you. The Echo Nest powers Spotify’s automated radio stations and is also behind an in-house programming tool called Truffle Pig, which can be told to sniff out music with combinations of more than fifty parameters, such as “speechiness” and “acoustic-ness.” Now that the Echo Nest is part of Spotify, its team has access to the enormous amount of data generated by Spotify users which show how they consume music. Spotify knows what
time of day users listen to certain songs, and in many cases their location, so programmers can infer what they are probably doing—studying, exercising, driving to work. Brian Whitman, an Echo Nest co-founder, told me that programmers also hope to learn more about listeners by factoring in data such as “what the weather is like, what your relationship status is now on Facebook.” (In 2011, Facebook entered into a partnership with Spotify.) He added, “We’ve cracked the nut as far as knowing as much about the music as we possibly can automatically, and we see the next frontier as knowing as much as we possibly can about the listener.”
All this, Ek explained, will help Spotify to better program the “moments” of a user’s day. “We’re not in the music space—we’re in the moment space,” he told me. The idea is to use song analytics and user data to help both human and A.I. curators select the right songs for certain activities or moods, and build playlists for those moments. Playlists can be customized according to an individual user’s “taste profile.” You just broke up with your boyfriend, you’re in a bad mood, and Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River,” from the “Better Off Without You” playlist, starts. Are you playing the music, or is the music playing you?
You can design your own Spotify day. You wake to the “Early Morning Rise” playlist (Midnight Faces, Zella Day), and get ready with “Songs to Sing in the Shower” (“I’m hooked on a feeling/I’m high on believing”). Depending on how much work you have, there’s “Deep Focus,” “Brain Food,” or “Intense Studying.” By eleven-thirty, you’ve hit “Caffeine Rush,” and, after a sandwich at your desk (“Love That Lazy Lunch”), it’s time to “Re-Energize” (Skrillex, Deorro) for the afternoon. A late-in-the-day “Mood Booster” (Meghan Trainor) gets you pumped for your workout (there’s a “House Workout,” a “Hip Hop Workout,” and a “CrossFit Mix,” to name just a few). Then it’s “Happy to Be Home” (Feist, the Postal Service). After “Beer n’ Burgers” (rockabilly) or “Taco Tuesday” (Celia Cruz), you “Calm Down” (Wilco, the National) and then, depending on your love life, click on “Sexy Beats” or “Better Off Without You” (or maybe “Bedtime S
tories,” for the kids), followed by “Sleep” (heavy on Brian Eno, king of the z’s).
My problem with playlists is not the Starbucksy rubrics, or the spying on my embarrassing Lana Del Rey obsession. My problem is that I end up skipping most of the songs anyway. I lean forward and check the next song when I’m supposed to lean back. The human or the A.I. who chose Pharrell’s “Happy” for the “Mood Booster” playlist isn’t getting the job done for me.
By the time he turned twenty-two, Daniel Ek had achieved his life’s ambition: he was rich. A gifted programmer, he had been making money by working on Internet-based tech products since he was fourteen. After selling an Internet advertising company called Advertigo, in 2006, he retired. He rented a big place in Stockholm. He bought a red Ferrari and drove it to night clubs, where he arranged for good tables for friends and attractive female companions, whom he plied with expensive champagne. He lived like this for a year or so, until one morning he awoke to a startling realization. “I was completely depressed,” he said.
“I realized the girls I was with weren’t very nice people,” Ek went on, “that they were just using me, and that my friends weren’t real friends. They were people who were there for the good times, but if it ever turned ugly they’d leave me in a heartbeat. I had always wanted to belong and I had been thinking that this was going to get solved when I had money, and instead I had no idea how I wanted to live my life. And no one teaches you what to do after you achieve financial independence. So I had to confront that.”
Ek describes himself as “missionary,” by which he means he likes to formulate five-year missions for himself. “That’s how I think about life,” he said. “Five years is long enough for me to achieve something meaningful but short enough so I can change my mind every few years. I’m on my second five-year commitment on Spotify. In two years, I will have to make my next one. I will need to ask myself if I still enjoy what I’m doing. I’m kind of unusual that way, but it gives me clarity and purpose.”
Ek sold the Ferrari, got rid of the apartment, and moved to a cabin near his parents’ place in Ragsved, a Stockholm suburb, where he meditated about what to do with his life. He had soul-searching conversations with Martin Lorentzon, the Swedish entrepreneur who had bought Ek’s advertising company, and was himself looking for a new project. “And we always came back to the music industry,” Ek said. Like many teen-agers around the turn of the millennium, Ek had become infatuated with Napster—in particular, with the idea of a site where all the world’s music was available for free. Radio offered free music, too, of course, but radio wasn’t interactive; you couldn’t pursue your own interests, the way you could on Napster. Ek said, “Before that, I was listening to Roxette,” a Swedish pop-rock band from the eighties. “I discovered Metallica and learned that they were inspired by Led Zeppelin, and King Crimson, and then I got into the Beatles. And from there I went to Bowie and the
whole British scene from the Eurythmics to the Sex Pistols. Hearing the anger and frustration of the Sex Pistols or the Clash made you feel like you were in the seventies. You started to understand culture. It was pretty magical.
“It came back to me constantly that Napster was such an amazing consumer experience, and I wanted to see if it could be a viable business,” Ek went on. “We said, ‘The problem with the music industry is piracy. Great consumer product, not a great business model. But you can’t beat technology. Technology always wins. But what if you can make a better product than piracy?’ ” Ek continued, “Piracy was kind of hard. It took a few minutes to download a song, it was kind of cumbersome, you had to worry about viruses. It’s not like people want to be pirates. They just want a great experience. So we started sketching what that would look like.”
Their “product vision,” in tech parlance, was that the service had to give the impression that the music was already on your hard drive. “What would it feel like?” Ek asked. “That was the emotion we were trying to invoke.” The key was to build something that worked instantly. Streaming, whether audio or video, tends to have built-in delays while you wait for the file, which is stored on a server in the cloud. But if the music starts in two hundred milliseconds or less—about half the time it takes, on average, to blink—people don’t seem to perceive a delay. That became Ek’s design standard. He told his lead engineer, Ludvig Strigeus, a brilliant programmer he had worked with before, “I don’t accept anything that isn’t below two hundred milliseconds.”
Strigeus responded, “It can’t be done. The Internet isn’t built like that.”
“You have to figure it out,” Ek insisted.
The solution involved designing a streaming protocol that worked faster than the standard one, as well as building their own peer-to-peer network, a decentralized architecture in which all the computers on it can communicate with one another. In four months, they had a working prototype.
“And I knew when we had it that it was going to be very special,” Ek said.
Ek’s original idea was to launch Spotify in the U.S. at the same time that he launched the service in Europe. Ken Parks, Spotify’s chief content officer, said, “Daniel thought he could just go down to the corner store in Stockholm and pick up a global license.” He didn’t realize that he would have to negotiate directly with all the different copyright holders, a herculean task. Not surprisingly, the labels weren’t interested. Ek was an outsider—a techie, and a Swedish one at that. Parks, an attorney who’d worked at E.M.I., recalled, “We needed to overcome the music-is-free mentality that Spotify represented.” Of the labels’ attitude, he went on, “If you have something you’ve invested a ton of money in, and you’ve been selling it for a lot, and you feel raped by piracy—to say to that person, ‘The only way to beat this is to co-opt the people who are stealing from you,’ that was a challenge.” Ek said, “If anyone had told me going into this that it would be three years of c
rashing my head against the wall, I wouldn’t have done it.”
Eventually, Ek decided to start regionally and prove that his concept worked. “And I invested all of my personal money in it,” he told me, “saying, you know, here’s my balls on the table. For them, the risk of trying it was kind of zero.” Swedish labels, gutted by piracy, literally had nothing to lose.
Sean Parker lives in the Plaza Hotel, in a private residence in the northeast corner of the building, looking out at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. The grand, high-ceilinged dining room has commanding views in both directions, and it was there that the thirty-four-year-old billionaire was sitting on a warm fall afternoon, dressed in jeans and rust-colored high-tops, drinking tea from a white china cup. It was a setting that would have impressed Edith Wharton, even if the owner’s attire might not have.
Parker was talking about Napster, which he and Shawn Fanning started back in 1999. “Napster had been this cultural revolution, much more than it was ever a legitimate company,” he said, stroking his neatly trimmed beard. Napster, which had sixty million registered users at its peak, taught the world how to get music from the Internet. Parker says he had always wanted to go legit, by making a deal with the record industry, but instead the labels put Napster to sleep. “There was this unique opportunity in history. We said, ‘If you shut down Napster, it’s going to splinter, and you’re going to have a Whac-A-Mole problem on your hands, where you’re fighting service after service and you’re never going to get all those users back in one place.’ And that’s what happened.” From the dragon’s teeth sprang Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus, and Limewire. “It was one of those things where it can be totally clear to you and everyone in your generation and you can explain it in the clearest of
terms, not as a threat or a negotiating tactic—just, ‘Look, you just have to see this.’ And they couldn’t see it.” Napster was the enemy, pure and simple, and it had to be killed. “This was the biggest existential threat to the music business and they wouldn’t listen.”
Parker sipped his tea. “So I went off and did other things”—he became president of Facebook in 2004, and helped turn it into a company, which helped turn him into a billionaire—“but in the back of my mind I was thinking about the untimely fate that Napster had met. That aborted mission.” He had watched while other entrepreneurs tried to realize the dream that was Napster. “They’d try to negotiate with the record labels and they really didn’t speak the language and they’d end up adapting their product vision to the terms they were able to get,” he said. In 2009, a friend told him about a Swedish service called Spotify. Parker had never heard of it. He sent Daniel Ek an e-mail and they arranged to meet.
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“The thing that made Spotify very different when I first met Daniel and Martin was that they had this incredible stubbornness,” Parker went on. “In a good way. They were willing to let the product vision lead the business deals.” He agreed to invest in the company and help Ek in his negotiations to enter the U.S. market. “Daniel said, ‘I think it’s going to take six weeks to get our licenses complete.’ It ended up taking two years.” Of the four global music companies at that time—E.M.I., Sony, Warner Music, and Universal—Ek had managed to get E.M.I. and Sony on board, but Universal and Warner were holdouts. The latter was led by Edgar Bronfman, Jr., who had spearheaded the move to close down Napster, back in 2001.
This time, Parker was more persuasive. “He did know a lot of people,” one top label executive said. “Daniel Ek didn’t. And he worked it non-stop.” The Swedish trial period was key. The record industry’s total revenues in Sweden grew by more than a third between 2008 and 2011. Piracy plummeted. As the label executive recalled, “It was like—O.K., proof of concept, we should be doing this if we can get the right license.”
Another factor in the labels’ thinking was Apple’s iTunes store, which had proved to be an unsatisfactory business partner. Music had been an important part of Apple’s business when Steve Jobs first negotiated the iTunes licenses, back in 2002—the music helped sell the iPod. But by 2011 music was more important to the Apple brand than to its business. Apple would not even let Android users, who today represent more than eighty per cent of the global mobile business, have iTunes on their phones, because it wanted to sell iPhones. Spotify offered a way out of a troubled marriage.
Thomas Hesse, who led the negotiations for Sony, told me, “The main reason it took so long for Daniel to get all the majors on board was that he had this free tier, where all the music was on demand. Was that going to cannibalize the download world?” In the end, the free tier was limited to personal computers, so users would have to pay for subscriptions in order to listen on their mobile devices, a major incentive to convert to the paid tier. Nevertheless, Hesse continued, there was “a lot of discussion about how much Spotify needed to pay for the free streaming and how many paying subscribers it could potentially guarantee.”
After Universal made a licensing agreement with Spotify, Warner was virtually compelled to join the other major labels in negotiating. At the time, the company was also looking for a buyer. Parker told me that he tendered an offer to buy Warner with Ron Burkle, the Los Angeles-based venture capitalist. When another buyer, the Russian oligarch Len Blavatnik, expressed interest, Parker said that he told him, “Look, if you make Spotify contingent on the deal, I will withdraw my offer and you’ll get the company.” In 2011, Blavatnik bought Warner, for $3.3 billion. Parker became a Spotify board member and helped broker its partnership with Facebook.
The exact terms of the licensing deals that Spotify made with the majors are not known; all parties signed nondisclosure agreements. In addition to sharing with other rights holders nearly seventy per cent of the money Spotify earns from subscriptions and ad sales—about the same revenue split that Apple provides on iTunes sales—the majors also got equity in Spotify, making them business partners; collectively, they own close to fifteen per cent of the company. Some analysts have questioned whether Spotify’s business model is sustainable. The company pays out so much of its revenues in fees that it barely makes a profit. It operated at a loss before 2013. (The company maintains that its focus has been on growth and expansion.) The contracts are renegotiated every two or three years, so the better Spotify does, the more, in theory, the labels could ask for. This makes Spotify unlike many Internet companies, in which the fixed costs of doing business become relatively smaller
with scale. For Spotify, scale doesn’t diminish the licensing fees.
When Spotify began in the U.S., labels demanded up-front payments as the price of getting in the game. These payments were not always passed along to the content creators, even though it is their work that makes the catalogues valuable in the first place. Month by month, Spotify pays the major labels lump sums for the entire market share of their catalogues. How the labels decide to parcel these payments out to their artists isn’t transparent, because, while Spotify gives detailed data to the labels, the labels ultimately decide how to share that information with their artists. The arrangement is similar on the publishing side. Artists and songwriters basically have to trust that labels and publishers will deal with them honestly, which history suggests is a sucker’s bet. As one music-industry leader put it, “It’s like you go to your bank, and the bank says, ‘Here’s your salary,’ and you say, ‘But what is my employer paying me? I work for them, not you!’ And the bank says,
‘We are not going to tell you, but this is what we think you should get paid.’ ”
Parker’s tea had grown cold, and he poured some hot water into it. The October light dimmed in the high Plaza windows. He pondered the progress of the tide of humanity flowing up and down Fifth Avenue. For him, Spotify was a do-over—a second chance to get Napster right. And that felt “very vindicating.”
The deals that Spotify made with the major labels launched on-demand streaming in earnest. But although the way the consumer gets access to music had changed, the way the creators of music are paid for their work had not. Somehow, the billions of micro-payments parcelled out in the form of streams have to be reconciled with a royalty-payments system that is rooted in a century-old sales model. No economic infrastructure exists for that apples-to-oranges transformation.
Spotify is only one of many streaming sites. There are competing services like Rhapsody (which recently bought a rebranded, fully licensed Napster), Rdio, and Google Play Music, but there are also thousands of other sites where songs are streamed. Labels, publishers, and performing-rights societies struggle with dozens of different technologies to monitor this welter of outlets. And with any given stream of a song there is a myriad of copyrights—performing and mechanical rights apply to both the recording and the composition—which makes sorting out who’s owed what no easy matter. Liz Penta, an artist manager in New York, told me that, in addition to larger payments, she regularly gets checks for one penny from the Harry Fox Agency, which administers mechanical royalties for Spotify, among other streaming services. YouTube, which is by far the largest streaming-music site in the world (it wasn’t designed that way—that’s just what it became), is notorious among rights holders
in the music industry for its measly and erratic payouts. Spotify’s exponential growth rate suggests that the chaos in royalty collection is only just beginning.
Not surprisingly, companies that specialize in digital royalty collection constitute one of the hottest growth sectors in the music business. Among the leaders is Kobalt, founded, in 2001, by Willard Ahdritz. Part collection agency, part music publisher, and part tech platform, Kobalt has built a system of enormously complex Oracle databases that compute billions and billions of transactions and royalty lines from all over the world, and collects on behalf of some two thousand artists, including Paul McCartney, Maroon 5, and Skrillex, while the rest of the industry uses Excel spreadsheets to try to piece everything together. On YouTube, Kobalt’s proprietary song-detection technology, ProKlaim, detects unclaimed videos for its clients. Ahdritz says, “We create transparency, which drives liquidity, and the money is now flowing.”
Spotify’s payouts to indie labels and digital-music distributors such as Tunecore are considerably more transparent than its dealings with the major labels. Spotify sends out monthly statements showing the total streams per artist, broken down into individual songs. To come up with the royalty rate per stream, Spotify divides the monthly streams of a single artist’s work by the total number of streams on Spotify that month, and arrives at the artist’s share. It multiplies that number by the total monthly revenues, and keeps thirty per cent. Labels, publishers, and distributors then pay the artist according to their royalty deals.
But exactly what is the royalty rate for a single stream? It depends on many factors. The more popular you are, the higher your metric. Some countries’ streams are worth more than others’. Free, ad-supported streams are worth less than subscriber streams, because the company makes less on ads than on subscriptions. (One of the reasons that Swift left Spotify was that her label wanted her music to be exclusive to the premium tier in the U.S.; it was willing to make her catalogue available for free in the rest of Spotify’s markets.) According to the company’s Web site, the average stream on Spotify is worth between six-tenths and eight-tenths of a cent. If you do the math, that means that around a hundred and fifty streams equal one ninety-nine-cent download. But that metric is hard for many musicians and record executives to accept. (I don’t stream my Lana favorites close to that many times.) On the other hand, seven-tenths of a cent is better than nothing.
Some artists are already making real money from Spotify. Swift’s music was earning about five hundred thousand dollars a month at the time she pulled it. E.D.M. artists like Avicii and David Guetta are seeing payouts in the millions. Avicii’s “Wake Me Up,” the most streamed song on Spotify, has more than three hundred million spins, which, using Spotify’s benchmark per-stream rate, would be worth about two million dollars to the rights holders. Daniel Glass, a music-industry veteran who is the founder of Glassnote Records, an indie label, told me that he is very happy with the royalties Spotify pays his artists, who include Mumford & Sons, Phoenix, Childish Gambino, and Chvrches. “We’re getting big beautiful checks from them!” he exclaimed.
At a recent series of educational meet-ups with the music industry in New York, Nashville, and L.A., Spotify representatives tried to reassure managers and artists, offering rosy-sounding future royalties, based on growth projections. A niche indie album, which now earns thirty-three hundred dollars a month, will receive seventeen thousand dollars in royalties a month when Spotify hits forty million paid subscribers. A breakthrough indie album, now earning seventy-six thousand dollars a month, will pull in three hundred and eighty thousand dollars. A global hit album, currently earning four hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a month, will get $2.1 million. How likely are these projections to come true? When I asked Ek, he said, “Is there a definitive way of knowing? Of course not. But I’m not the only person who believes it. Pretty much everyone is in agreement that streaming will keep on growing over the next few years.”
AM/FM radio pays the writer of the song on a per-play basis, but gives the performer and the owner of the recording of the song—generally, the record label—nothing. On digital streaming services like Spotify, the situation is nearly reversed: the owners of the recording get most of the performance royalty money, while the songwriters get only a fraction of it. Songwriters, who can’t go out on the road, are particularly hard hit by the loss of publishing royalties. As one music publisher put it, “Basically, the major music corporations sold out their publishing companies in order to save their record labels. Universal Music Publishing took a terrible rate from streaming services like Spotify in order to help Universal Records. Which, in the end, means that the songwriter gets screwed.”
Ek’s answer to the question of whether or not Spotify is good for artists tends toward the tautological. If it’s good for listeners—and almost everyone who uses Spotify likes it—then it must be good for artists, because by encouraging more listening it will “increase the over-all pie.” Many music-business people think he’s right. Richard Jones, the Pixies’ manager, says, “Particularly for artists who are established with solid catalogues and are big live-touring acts, streaming services can be extremely beneficial. I’m a massive supporter.” He said of Swift’s decision to pull her music, “It’s purely P.R.-driven, which is fine. But let’s not pretend it’s artist-friendly. Because actually the most artist-friendly thing here is for everyone to make streaming into something that is widespread.”
Spotify does offer undiscovered musicians new opportunities to break through. Playlists tend to be much broader in scope than commercial-radio playlists. Lorde is often cited around Spotify as an artist who gained crucial early exposure after Sean Parker heard her song “Royals” when a friend played it for him. In April, 2013, before the song was a hit anywhere, Parker added it to his “Hipster International” Spotify playlist, which currently has seven hundred and ninety thousand followers. Parker’s followers added it to their playlists, as did their followers; users shared it with one another; and within weeks “Royals” was the second most popular song on Spotify. Spotify’s director of economics, Will Page, says, “Now, remember, there is no Old World business model here, no radio pluggers or traditional marketing—just a playlist. But it’s like becoming a broadcaster. And you could see the viral nature of growth that led to this artist becoming No. 1 in America before
Christmas.” Still, the fact is that Lorde had a major label and its marketing budget behind her. Jason Flom signed Lorde to his Lava label months before Parker playlisted her. “ ‘Royals’ was not to be denied,” Flom told me. “Nothing could stop it.” Even so, he said, “Spotify—and especially Sean—was definitely helpful in establishing Lorde the way we wanted to establish her. It gave her a foundation with the cool kids.”
Record companies are beginning to figure out how to employ Spotify’s potential to their advantage, sometimes by manipulating release dates. “Windowing” releases—start out on iTunes only, and add Spotify after two weeks of sales—is popular at some labels (and very unpopular at Spotify). In Taylor Swift’s case, Big Machine Records decided to keep her previous album, “Red,” off Spotify in the first weeks after its release in order to increase record sales. “Red” was later added to Spotify, before Swift removed the entire catalogue.
But there is another class of musicians whom Ek hasn’t helped so far. For them, Spotify has further eroded their CD and download sales, without coming close to making up the difference in streaming revenues. Ek acknowledges that the switch from a sales model to a streaming model could be bumpy for some artists. “In Sweden, there was one tough year and then the debate changed,” he said. “That will happen in the larger markets. The end goal is to increase the entire pool of music. Anything else is part of the transition.” He added, “This is the single biggest shift since the beginning of recorded music, so it’s not surprising that it takes time to educate artists about what this future means.”
Two artists who are part of that transition are Marc Ribot, an esteemed jazz guitarist, and Rosanne Cash, whose work has won a Grammy and received twelve nominations. Both are mid-level, mid-career musicians who are a vital part of the New York City music scene. Both have worked with major labels. (Ribot is currently releasing his music on indies.)
I met them in New York one October afternoon. Ribot and Cash brought along their Spotify numbers. In the past eighteen months, Ribot reported, his band made a hundred and eighty-seven dollars from sixty-eight thousand streams of his latest album, available on Spotify in Europe and the U.S. Cash had made a hundred and four dollars from six hundred thousand streams. The math doesn’t fit Spotify’s benchmarks, but that is how their labels and publishers did the accounting.
When I mentioned that both Ek and Parker seemed to be sincere in their desire to help artists, Ribot replied, “Well, our ‘friends’ in the online-distribution business have helped artists to go from a fourteen-billion-dollar domestic record business to a seven-billion-dollar one, and now Spotify wants to help us reduce it even further. With friends like that, give me the old Brill Building system.”
He went on, “Here’s the simple fact that no one wants to talk about. Spotify says it pays out seventy per cent of its revenues to rights holders. Well, that’s very nice, that’s lovely. But if I’m making a shoe, and it costs me a hundred dollars to make it, and the retailer is selling that shoe for ten dollars, then I don’t care if he gives me seventy per cent, I don’t care if he gives me one hundred per cent—I’m going out of business. Dead is dead.”
Cash said, “I don’t think any of us want to make the streaming services go away. We are not Luddites. We just want to be paid fairly.”
“And we’re not going to say a model is viable unless it’s viable for the creators,” Ribot added. “I know Daniel Ek is going to do just fine. I don’t know that about the people in my band.”
“And, if the artist can’t afford to work, the music is going to suffer,” Cash added, with feeling. “Spotify is not acting in its own self-interest by obliterating us.”
Or maybe Spotify itself will get obliterated. Apple, Amazon, and Google have recently begun to enter the on-demand streaming market. (YouTube débuts Music Key, an ad-free paid-subscription service, this week, which will include access to Google Music Play.) Spotify’s advantage, Ek maintains, is its data and its ability to analyze that information. “We’ve been doing this for years,” he said. “And what we’ve built is the largest set of data of the most engaged music customers. I think it would be really hard for anyone to come in and do what we do better. Maybe someone could lower the cost of a streaming service and make it hard for us to survive. But am I concerned that someone will build a better product? No, because they can’t.”
James McQuivey, an analyst with the Boston-based Forrester Research, is less optimistic about the company’s prospects. “Spotify has shown people value streaming,” he said, “and that means somewhere someone could use that value in a bigger chess game. Someone like an Apple or a Google is already realizing how valuable music is as a customer-engagement tool and will offer something quite similar to this, without making you pay for it, the way Amazon has included video in the Prime membership without expressly charging. And then suddenly you’ve disrupted Spotify.” He added, “If I have to say yes or no will Spotify be as big and strong as it is five years from now, the answer will be no.”
Earlier this year, Apple acquired Beats Electronics, an audio company, which had entered the streaming business via Beats Music. It’s not yet clear what Apple wants to do with Beats. It could try to sign up Spotify holdouts like the Beatles (Taylor Swift hasn’t pulled her back catalogue from Beats, which is subscriber-only) and promote its service as more comprehensive. On the other hand, Apple faces the classic innovator’s dilemma. An Apple on-demand streaming service would undermine its iTunes downloads business. But if streaming is the future of music—and even people who fear the prospect agree that it is—Apple will need to enter the market soon. iTunes’ music sales have dropped almost fourteen per cent since the start of the year.
Apple could pose a real threat to Spotify, by pre-installing a service—iStream, maybe—on the next generation of iPhones and including the price of a subscription in the plan. Siri could be your d.j. That would insure a paying user base in the hundreds of millions almost instantly, easily eclipsing Spotify’s. And, since Apple makes money primarily from its hardware, it could afford to undercut Spotify on the price of a subscription—a scheme it is currently promoting to the labels. Of course, that would require the support of the labels, and they are Spotify’s business partners in streaming. “You might want to take a discount in a business you have equity in,” one label head told me. “You might not want to take a discount in a business you don’t have equity in. Would we subsidize Apple with no real upside for us? We did that once before. It was called unbundling the album.” In any case, the downward pressure on price from increased competition seems likely to diminish the pot
of money that the rights holders get to divide.
Even if Spotify does manage to survive Apple, it will take years to complete the paradigm shift to streaming. Meanwhile, album sales will continue to decline—even albums recorded by Taylor Swift. The labels, feeling the pinch in their bottom line, may try to squeeze more money out of Spotify, imperilling its future growth. They may even try to cash in their equity stakes. Proving that, while your enemies can indeed become your friends, the reverse can also be true. ♦
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Tucked away in a corner of Elmsford for the past twenty years is a small music firm. The owner Irv Kratka has been running the company since 1950. That’s sixty one years of continuous activity. Kratka, now approaching eighty-six is still working, scoffing at retirement, “That’s for sissies” and making recordings in all genres of music, as well as operating three websites, seen in over 102 countries , Music Minus One, Pocket Song (its karaoke division) and Inner City and Classic Jazz, two jazz imprints.
Dubbed by his industry the National Association of Music Merchants, “the father of karaoke” Karaoke supposedly a Japanese art-form is as American as apple-pie. Pocket Songs, its karaoke imprint offers over 23,000 songs for sing-along purposes which have seen usage in film, TV and Radio and commercial products over the years.
Kratka is also the inventor of one of the world’s most famous music trademarks, Music Minus One, a brand known to three generations of musicians around the world. What is Music Minus One? Well if you play a musical instrument, like the piano or violin, clarinet or flute, MMO will send an eighty piece orchestra to your home via a CD and book of music, voila…your own house band, available day or night. And yes, alto sax, tenor sax, French Horn, trumpet and trombone editions including a rare Harp Concerto, can also be acquired. Having begun in the middle of the last century, the company has managed to obtain the services of the first chair players of the N.Y. Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the Philadelphia , Boston, Chicago and Cleveland Orchestras.
To be standing on a stage (your living room) accompanied by a full symphony orchestra performing one of the great concerti of music, is a musician’s dream come true. Whether you love Mozart, or Beethoven, Mendelssohn or Bach, the greatest concerti are now available in glorious stereo recordings as part of the company’s one thousand albums produced since 1950. Begun at the twilight of the 78 rpm era, Kratka has moved successively through the long playing vinylite era, the cassette era and now offers his product on CD, and via digital download. This company has spawned an entire music industry of book/cd combinations, now copied by every publisher in music, from Hal Leonard, Carl Fischer, G. Schirmer, Warner Bros. Alfred Publishing, Jamey Aebersold, etc.etc.
Kratka has enlarged his own catalogue offerings to include 6000 other publications, offering the largest such selection in music, which he sells world-wide, both direct to the consumer as well as to dealers and distributors, via his websites, www.musicminusone.com; pocketsongs.com and innercityjazz.com . The latter is a set of jazz labels, Inner City and Classic Jazz, featuring music by Dizzy Gillespie, Django Reinhardt, Clifford Brown and early jazz pioneers such as Sidney Bechet, Bob Wilber, Willie “The Lion” Smith and Errol Garner.
Located at 50 Executive Blvd. in Elmsford, the MMO Music Group, heads into its 62nd year on January 1,2012.
Irv Kratka
CEO, President
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Westchester’s Best Kept Secret
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* Westchester’s Best Kept Secret
** Westchester’s Best Kept Secret
————————————————————
Tucked away in a corner of Elmsford for the past twenty years is a small music firm. The owner Irv Kratka has been running the company since 1950. That’s sixty one years of continuous activity. Kratka, now approaching eighty-six is still working, scoffing at retirement, “That’s for sissies” and making recordings in all genres of music, as well as operating three websites, seen in over 102 countries , Music Minus One, Pocket Song (its karaoke division) and Inner City and Classic Jazz, two jazz imprints.
Dubbed by his industry the National Association of Music Merchants, “the father of karaoke” Karaoke supposedly a Japanese art-form is as American as apple-pie. Pocket Songs, its karaoke imprint offers over 23,000 songs for sing-along purposes which have seen usage in film, TV and Radio and commercial products over the years.
Kratka is also the inventor of one of the world’s most famous music trademarks, Music Minus One, a brand known to three generations of musicians around the world. What is Music Minus One? Well if you play a musical instrument, like the piano or violin, clarinet or flute, MMO will send an eighty piece orchestra to your home via a CD and book of music, voila…your own house band, available day or night. And yes, alto sax, tenor sax, French Horn, trumpet and trombone editions including a rare Harp Concerto, can also be acquired. Having begun in the middle of the last century, the company has managed to obtain the services of the first chair players of the N.Y. Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the Philadelphia , Boston, Chicago and Cleveland Orchestras.
To be standing on a stage (your living room) accompanied by a full symphony orchestra performing one of the great concerti of music, is a musician’s dream come true. Whether you love Mozart, or Beethoven, Mendelssohn or Bach, the greatest concerti are now available in glorious stereo recordings as part of the company’s one thousand albums produced since 1950. Begun at the twilight of the 78 rpm era, Kratka has moved successively through the long playing vinylite era, the cassette era and now offers his product on CD, and via digital download. This company has spawned an entire music industry of book/cd combinations, now copied by every publisher in music, from Hal Leonard, Carl Fischer, G. Schirmer, Warner Bros. Alfred Publishing, Jamey Aebersold, etc.etc.
Kratka has enlarged his own catalogue offerings to include 6000 other publications, offering the largest such selection in music, which he sells world-wide, both direct to the consumer as well as to dealers and distributors, via his websites, www.musicminusone.com; pocketsongs.com and innercityjazz.com . The latter is a set of jazz labels, Inner City and Classic Jazz, featuring music by Dizzy Gillespie, Django Reinhardt, Clifford Brown and early jazz pioneers such as Sidney Bechet, Bob Wilber, Willie “The Lion” Smith and Errol Garner.
Located at 50 Executive Blvd. in Elmsford, the MMO Music Group, heads into its 62nd year on January 1,2012.
Irv Kratka
CEO, President
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
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269 State Route 94 South
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USA
Westchester’s Best Kept Secret
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://musicminusone.com/westchesters-best/
* Home (http://musicminusone.com/)
* Westchester’s Best Kept Secret
** Westchester’s Best Kept Secret
————————————————————
Tucked away in a corner of Elmsford for the past twenty years is a small music firm. The owner Irv Kratka has been running the company since 1950. That’s sixty one years of continuous activity. Kratka, now approaching eighty-six is still working, scoffing at retirement, “That’s for sissies” and making recordings in all genres of music, as well as operating three websites, seen in over 102 countries , Music Minus One, Pocket Song (its karaoke division) and Inner City and Classic Jazz, two jazz imprints.
Dubbed by his industry the National Association of Music Merchants, “the father of karaoke” Karaoke supposedly a Japanese art-form is as American as apple-pie. Pocket Songs, its karaoke imprint offers over 23,000 songs for sing-along purposes which have seen usage in film, TV and Radio and commercial products over the years.
Kratka is also the inventor of one of the world’s most famous music trademarks, Music Minus One, a brand known to three generations of musicians around the world. What is Music Minus One? Well if you play a musical instrument, like the piano or violin, clarinet or flute, MMO will send an eighty piece orchestra to your home via a CD and book of music, voila…your own house band, available day or night. And yes, alto sax, tenor sax, French Horn, trumpet and trombone editions including a rare Harp Concerto, can also be acquired. Having begun in the middle of the last century, the company has managed to obtain the services of the first chair players of the N.Y. Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the Philadelphia , Boston, Chicago and Cleveland Orchestras.
To be standing on a stage (your living room) accompanied by a full symphony orchestra performing one of the great concerti of music, is a musician’s dream come true. Whether you love Mozart, or Beethoven, Mendelssohn or Bach, the greatest concerti are now available in glorious stereo recordings as part of the company’s one thousand albums produced since 1950. Begun at the twilight of the 78 rpm era, Kratka has moved successively through the long playing vinylite era, the cassette era and now offers his product on CD, and via digital download. This company has spawned an entire music industry of book/cd combinations, now copied by every publisher in music, from Hal Leonard, Carl Fischer, G. Schirmer, Warner Bros. Alfred Publishing, Jamey Aebersold, etc.etc.
Kratka has enlarged his own catalogue offerings to include 6000 other publications, offering the largest such selection in music, which he sells world-wide, both direct to the consumer as well as to dealers and distributors, via his websites, www.musicminusone.com; pocketsongs.com and innercityjazz.com . The latter is a set of jazz labels, Inner City and Classic Jazz, featuring music by Dizzy Gillespie, Django Reinhardt, Clifford Brown and early jazz pioneers such as Sidney Bechet, Bob Wilber, Willie “The Lion” Smith and Errol Garner.
Located at 50 Executive Blvd. in Elmsford, the MMO Music Group, heads into its 62nd year on January 1,2012.
Irv Kratka
CEO, President
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
New boxed set reveals John Coltrane created ‘terror’ during final tour with Miles Davis, 1960 | Dangerous Minds
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** New boxed set reveals John Coltrane created ‘terror’ during final tour with Miles Davis, 1960
————————————————————
All of You: The Final Tour, 1960
In 1955, Miles Davis hired an up-and-coming musician named John Coltrane to play in his group. Over the next couple of years, the team-up produced some incredible music, but the personal relationship between the trumpeter/leader and the saxophonist was never steady. Backstage at a gig in the spring of 1957, Miles slapped Coltrane and then punched him in the stomach; Trane’s only response was to quit the band.
Coltrane returned to join Davis’ sextet later in the year, but during that short time away he had continued to make a name for himself as a group member, bandleader and recording artist in his own right. Trane played on Miles’ Kind of Blue (1959), now considered one of the cornerstones of the jazz genre, and accompanied Davis on a European tour in 1960, but mentally he was focused on his own music. Miles later admitted Coltrane “was ready to move out before we left.”
Kind of Blue
The spring 1960 European tour was spread out over twenty cities in nine countries. The new boxed set, All of You: The Last Tour, 1960 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N42F4EI/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00N42F4EI&linkCode=as2&tag=thecirpro-20&linkId=PGT5XMFTNZXDNPV6) includes recordings from eight of those performances. Though the Quintet sounds fantastic as a unit, Coltrane’s solos are so unusual they caused quite a stir at the time. Kind of Blue is a lovely record that is also easy on the ears, but Trane was doing his best to make this music sound ugly.
ADVERTISEMENT
Journalist Frank Tenot witnessed the first show of the tour in Paris: “People were very surprised why there was no John Coltrane like on Kind of Blue. So, part of the audience thinks that Coltrane doesn’t play too well, that he was playing the wrong notes, involuntarily.” Tenot went backstage after the show to tell the saxophonist, “You’re too new for the people… you go too far.” Coltrane just smiled and said, “I don’t go far enough.”
Other critics who witnessed the shows wished that Trane had held back. One reporter called his solos “scandalous,” and wrote that they “bore no relationship whatsoever with playing the saxophone.” Another writer was so horrified he equated Coltrane’s solos with the very concept of “terror.”
Trane in pain
As the leader, Davis takes the first solo during every song on these recordings, and as much as I dig Miles—his solo turns are as interesting and as exquisite as ever—after a couple of tracks, I found myself waiting for Coltrane to step up and blow me away. And he would do just that. Every time. It’s fascinating to hear him push the material—and thus, the band—especially as this was Miles’ group, not his. The fact that we now know he had mentally moved on from his role with Davis, as well as facing negative reactions to his output, only makes listening to these tracks all the more absorbing.
John Coltrane and Miles Davis
The Miles Davis Quintet returned to the states on April 11th, and it wouldn’t be long before Coltrane would make his exit. By then, Trane had made a name for himself and was well on his to becoming one of the titans of jazz.
John Coltrane
Some of the recordings on the boxed set are taken from radio broadcasts, while others were captured privately by audience members. Initially, my expectations were somewhat low as far as the fidelity of these live tapes—which date from over a half century ago—but aside from a couple of muddy sounding tracks and occasional issues with how the musicians were mic’d, the sound quality ranges from very good to surprisingly great. Hear for yourself, as we have an exclusive preview track, an up tempo version of “So What,” recorded in Stockholm, Sweden on March 22nd, 1960. The faster beat and Trane’s dissonant solo result in something excitingly different than the subdued mood created for the familiar Kind of Blue version. Enjoy.
All of You: The Last Tour, 1960 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N42F4EI/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00N42F4EI&linkCode=as2&tag=thecirpro-20&linkId=PGT5XMFTNZXDNPV6) will be released on December 2nd.
Here’s a 1959 TV clip of “So What” played at a pace that more closely resembles the one found on Kind of Blue, but with Coltrane beginning to stretch, feeling his way towards the type of solos he would play on his final tour with Miles:
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
New boxed set reveals John Coltrane created ‘terror’ during final tour with Miles Davis, 1960 | Dangerous Minds
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http://dangerousminds.net/comments/new_boxed_set_reveals_john_coltrane_created_terror_during_final_tour_with_m?utm_source=Dangerous+Minds+newsletter
** New boxed set reveals John Coltrane created ‘terror’ during final tour with Miles Davis, 1960
————————————————————
All of You: The Final Tour, 1960
In 1955, Miles Davis hired an up-and-coming musician named John Coltrane to play in his group. Over the next couple of years, the team-up produced some incredible music, but the personal relationship between the trumpeter/leader and the saxophonist was never steady. Backstage at a gig in the spring of 1957, Miles slapped Coltrane and then punched him in the stomach; Trane’s only response was to quit the band.
Coltrane returned to join Davis’ sextet later in the year, but during that short time away he had continued to make a name for himself as a group member, bandleader and recording artist in his own right. Trane played on Miles’ Kind of Blue (1959), now considered one of the cornerstones of the jazz genre, and accompanied Davis on a European tour in 1960, but mentally he was focused on his own music. Miles later admitted Coltrane “was ready to move out before we left.”
Kind of Blue
The spring 1960 European tour was spread out over twenty cities in nine countries. The new boxed set, All of You: The Last Tour, 1960 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N42F4EI/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00N42F4EI&linkCode=as2&tag=thecirpro-20&linkId=PGT5XMFTNZXDNPV6) includes recordings from eight of those performances. Though the Quintet sounds fantastic as a unit, Coltrane’s solos are so unusual they caused quite a stir at the time. Kind of Blue is a lovely record that is also easy on the ears, but Trane was doing his best to make this music sound ugly.
ADVERTISEMENT
Journalist Frank Tenot witnessed the first show of the tour in Paris: “People were very surprised why there was no John Coltrane like on Kind of Blue. So, part of the audience thinks that Coltrane doesn’t play too well, that he was playing the wrong notes, involuntarily.” Tenot went backstage after the show to tell the saxophonist, “You’re too new for the people… you go too far.” Coltrane just smiled and said, “I don’t go far enough.”
Other critics who witnessed the shows wished that Trane had held back. One reporter called his solos “scandalous,” and wrote that they “bore no relationship whatsoever with playing the saxophone.” Another writer was so horrified he equated Coltrane’s solos with the very concept of “terror.”
Trane in pain
As the leader, Davis takes the first solo during every song on these recordings, and as much as I dig Miles—his solo turns are as interesting and as exquisite as ever—after a couple of tracks, I found myself waiting for Coltrane to step up and blow me away. And he would do just that. Every time. It’s fascinating to hear him push the material—and thus, the band—especially as this was Miles’ group, not his. The fact that we now know he had mentally moved on from his role with Davis, as well as facing negative reactions to his output, only makes listening to these tracks all the more absorbing.
John Coltrane and Miles Davis
The Miles Davis Quintet returned to the states on April 11th, and it wouldn’t be long before Coltrane would make his exit. By then, Trane had made a name for himself and was well on his to becoming one of the titans of jazz.
John Coltrane
Some of the recordings on the boxed set are taken from radio broadcasts, while others were captured privately by audience members. Initially, my expectations were somewhat low as far as the fidelity of these live tapes—which date from over a half century ago—but aside from a couple of muddy sounding tracks and occasional issues with how the musicians were mic’d, the sound quality ranges from very good to surprisingly great. Hear for yourself, as we have an exclusive preview track, an up tempo version of “So What,” recorded in Stockholm, Sweden on March 22nd, 1960. The faster beat and Trane’s dissonant solo result in something excitingly different than the subdued mood created for the familiar Kind of Blue version. Enjoy.
All of You: The Last Tour, 1960 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N42F4EI/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00N42F4EI&linkCode=as2&tag=thecirpro-20&linkId=PGT5XMFTNZXDNPV6) will be released on December 2nd.
Here’s a 1959 TV clip of “So What” played at a pace that more closely resembles the one found on Kind of Blue, but with Coltrane beginning to stretch, feeling his way towards the type of solos he would play on his final tour with Miles:
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
New boxed set reveals John Coltrane created ‘terror’ during final tour with Miles Davis, 1960 | Dangerous Minds
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/new_boxed_set_reveals_john_coltrane_created_terror_during_final_tour_with_m?utm_source=Dangerous+Minds+newsletter
** New boxed set reveals John Coltrane created ‘terror’ during final tour with Miles Davis, 1960
————————————————————
All of You: The Final Tour, 1960
In 1955, Miles Davis hired an up-and-coming musician named John Coltrane to play in his group. Over the next couple of years, the team-up produced some incredible music, but the personal relationship between the trumpeter/leader and the saxophonist was never steady. Backstage at a gig in the spring of 1957, Miles slapped Coltrane and then punched him in the stomach; Trane’s only response was to quit the band.
Coltrane returned to join Davis’ sextet later in the year, but during that short time away he had continued to make a name for himself as a group member, bandleader and recording artist in his own right. Trane played on Miles’ Kind of Blue (1959), now considered one of the cornerstones of the jazz genre, and accompanied Davis on a European tour in 1960, but mentally he was focused on his own music. Miles later admitted Coltrane “was ready to move out before we left.”
Kind of Blue
The spring 1960 European tour was spread out over twenty cities in nine countries. The new boxed set, All of You: The Last Tour, 1960 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N42F4EI/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00N42F4EI&linkCode=as2&tag=thecirpro-20&linkId=PGT5XMFTNZXDNPV6) includes recordings from eight of those performances. Though the Quintet sounds fantastic as a unit, Coltrane’s solos are so unusual they caused quite a stir at the time. Kind of Blue is a lovely record that is also easy on the ears, but Trane was doing his best to make this music sound ugly.
ADVERTISEMENT
Journalist Frank Tenot witnessed the first show of the tour in Paris: “People were very surprised why there was no John Coltrane like on Kind of Blue. So, part of the audience thinks that Coltrane doesn’t play too well, that he was playing the wrong notes, involuntarily.” Tenot went backstage after the show to tell the saxophonist, “You’re too new for the people… you go too far.” Coltrane just smiled and said, “I don’t go far enough.”
Other critics who witnessed the shows wished that Trane had held back. One reporter called his solos “scandalous,” and wrote that they “bore no relationship whatsoever with playing the saxophone.” Another writer was so horrified he equated Coltrane’s solos with the very concept of “terror.”
Trane in pain
As the leader, Davis takes the first solo during every song on these recordings, and as much as I dig Miles—his solo turns are as interesting and as exquisite as ever—after a couple of tracks, I found myself waiting for Coltrane to step up and blow me away. And he would do just that. Every time. It’s fascinating to hear him push the material—and thus, the band—especially as this was Miles’ group, not his. The fact that we now know he had mentally moved on from his role with Davis, as well as facing negative reactions to his output, only makes listening to these tracks all the more absorbing.
John Coltrane and Miles Davis
The Miles Davis Quintet returned to the states on April 11th, and it wouldn’t be long before Coltrane would make his exit. By then, Trane had made a name for himself and was well on his to becoming one of the titans of jazz.
John Coltrane
Some of the recordings on the boxed set are taken from radio broadcasts, while others were captured privately by audience members. Initially, my expectations were somewhat low as far as the fidelity of these live tapes—which date from over a half century ago—but aside from a couple of muddy sounding tracks and occasional issues with how the musicians were mic’d, the sound quality ranges from very good to surprisingly great. Hear for yourself, as we have an exclusive preview track, an up tempo version of “So What,” recorded in Stockholm, Sweden on March 22nd, 1960. The faster beat and Trane’s dissonant solo result in something excitingly different than the subdued mood created for the familiar Kind of Blue version. Enjoy.
All of You: The Last Tour, 1960 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N42F4EI/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00N42F4EI&linkCode=as2&tag=thecirpro-20&linkId=PGT5XMFTNZXDNPV6) will be released on December 2nd.
Here’s a 1959 TV clip of “So What” played at a pace that more closely resembles the one found on Kind of Blue, but with Coltrane beginning to stretch, feeling his way towards the type of solos he would play on his final tour with Miles:
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=f5c6275c05) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=f5c6275c05&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Charles Mingus Toilet Trained His Cat. We Put His Method to the Test. – Studio 360
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http://www.studio360.org/story/charles-mingus-toliet-trained-his-cat-we-put-his-method-to-the-test/?utm_source=Newsletter%3A+WNYC+Daily+Newsletter
** Friday, November 21, 2014
————————————————————
Dizzy the cat
The jazz musician Charles Mingus was a celebrated band leader and one of the most important composers of his generation. But at the same time he was recording The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever (http://www.amazon.com/The-Greatest-Jazz-Concert-Ever/dp/B00004URV1/wnyc-s360-20) with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, he was working on another masterpiece of sorts. He figured out how to get his cat, Nightlife, to poop in a toilet — and he decided he’d share his method with the world.
The Charles Mingus CAT-alog for Toilet Training Your Cat (http://mingusmingusmingus.com/mingus/cat-traning-program) was a step-by-step guide available for purchase by mail. It’s full of charming advice and meticulous pedagogical detail:
Here’s an excerpt from Step 1:
Once your cat is trained to use a cardboard box, start moving the box around the room, towards the bathroom. If the box is in a corner, move it a few feet from the corner, but not very noticeably. If you move it too far, he may go to the bathroom in the original corner. Do it gradually. You’ve got to get him thinking. Then he will gradually follow the box as you move it to the bathroom. (Important: if you already have it there, move it out of the bathroom, around, and then back. He has to learn to follow it. If it is too close to the toilet, to begin with, he will not follow it up onto the toilet seat when you move it there.) A cat will look for his box. He smells it.
Read the entire brochure here. (http://mingusmingusmingus.com/mingus/cat-traning-program)
Mingus biographer Gene Santoro (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195147111/wnyc-s360-20/) says there’s something about Mingus’ obsessive detail in the CAT-alog that connects to his composition. His bands improvised, but Mingus “was writing the music for the heads, and the themes,” he explains. “He was attempting to notate, down to the breath control, exactly what each note in those themes would be for every instrumentalist. And this is the period we’re talking about where this [toilet training method] gets generated.”
Reporter Jody Avirgan (http://jodyavirgan.com/) put the method to the test on four-month-old kitten Dizzy. His owners, Kevin and Nicole, even played Mingus throughout the process.
→ Have you toilet-trained your cat using the Mingus Method or any other system? Tell us about your experience in a comment below — or by e-mail (http://www.studio360.org/emailform/contact-us/) .
Bonus Track: Reg E. Cathey reads the full CAT-alog
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
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USA
Charles Mingus Toilet Trained His Cat. We Put His Method to the Test. – Studio 360
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.studio360.org/story/charles-mingus-toliet-trained-his-cat-we-put-his-method-to-the-test/?utm_source=Newsletter%3A+WNYC+Daily+Newsletter
** Friday, November 21, 2014
————————————————————
Dizzy the cat
The jazz musician Charles Mingus was a celebrated band leader and one of the most important composers of his generation. But at the same time he was recording The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever (http://www.amazon.com/The-Greatest-Jazz-Concert-Ever/dp/B00004URV1/wnyc-s360-20) with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, he was working on another masterpiece of sorts. He figured out how to get his cat, Nightlife, to poop in a toilet — and he decided he’d share his method with the world.
The Charles Mingus CAT-alog for Toilet Training Your Cat (http://mingusmingusmingus.com/mingus/cat-traning-program) was a step-by-step guide available for purchase by mail. It’s full of charming advice and meticulous pedagogical detail:
Here’s an excerpt from Step 1:
Once your cat is trained to use a cardboard box, start moving the box around the room, towards the bathroom. If the box is in a corner, move it a few feet from the corner, but not very noticeably. If you move it too far, he may go to the bathroom in the original corner. Do it gradually. You’ve got to get him thinking. Then he will gradually follow the box as you move it to the bathroom. (Important: if you already have it there, move it out of the bathroom, around, and then back. He has to learn to follow it. If it is too close to the toilet, to begin with, he will not follow it up onto the toilet seat when you move it there.) A cat will look for his box. He smells it.
Read the entire brochure here. (http://mingusmingusmingus.com/mingus/cat-traning-program)
Mingus biographer Gene Santoro (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195147111/wnyc-s360-20/) says there’s something about Mingus’ obsessive detail in the CAT-alog that connects to his composition. His bands improvised, but Mingus “was writing the music for the heads, and the themes,” he explains. “He was attempting to notate, down to the breath control, exactly what each note in those themes would be for every instrumentalist. And this is the period we’re talking about where this [toilet training method] gets generated.”
Reporter Jody Avirgan (http://jodyavirgan.com/) put the method to the test on four-month-old kitten Dizzy. His owners, Kevin and Nicole, even played Mingus throughout the process.
→ Have you toilet-trained your cat using the Mingus Method or any other system? Tell us about your experience in a comment below — or by e-mail (http://www.studio360.org/emailform/contact-us/) .
Bonus Track: Reg E. Cathey reads the full CAT-alog
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=033736a7f1) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=033736a7f1&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Charles Mingus Toilet Trained His Cat. We Put His Method to the Test. – Studio 360
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.studio360.org/story/charles-mingus-toliet-trained-his-cat-we-put-his-method-to-the-test/?utm_source=Newsletter%3A+WNYC+Daily+Newsletter
** Friday, November 21, 2014
————————————————————
Dizzy the cat
The jazz musician Charles Mingus was a celebrated band leader and one of the most important composers of his generation. But at the same time he was recording The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever (http://www.amazon.com/The-Greatest-Jazz-Concert-Ever/dp/B00004URV1/wnyc-s360-20) with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, he was working on another masterpiece of sorts. He figured out how to get his cat, Nightlife, to poop in a toilet — and he decided he’d share his method with the world.
The Charles Mingus CAT-alog for Toilet Training Your Cat (http://mingusmingusmingus.com/mingus/cat-traning-program) was a step-by-step guide available for purchase by mail. It’s full of charming advice and meticulous pedagogical detail:
Here’s an excerpt from Step 1:
Once your cat is trained to use a cardboard box, start moving the box around the room, towards the bathroom. If the box is in a corner, move it a few feet from the corner, but not very noticeably. If you move it too far, he may go to the bathroom in the original corner. Do it gradually. You’ve got to get him thinking. Then he will gradually follow the box as you move it to the bathroom. (Important: if you already have it there, move it out of the bathroom, around, and then back. He has to learn to follow it. If it is too close to the toilet, to begin with, he will not follow it up onto the toilet seat when you move it there.) A cat will look for his box. He smells it.
Read the entire brochure here. (http://mingusmingusmingus.com/mingus/cat-traning-program)
Mingus biographer Gene Santoro (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195147111/wnyc-s360-20/) says there’s something about Mingus’ obsessive detail in the CAT-alog that connects to his composition. His bands improvised, but Mingus “was writing the music for the heads, and the themes,” he explains. “He was attempting to notate, down to the breath control, exactly what each note in those themes would be for every instrumentalist. And this is the period we’re talking about where this [toilet training method] gets generated.”
Reporter Jody Avirgan (http://jodyavirgan.com/) put the method to the test on four-month-old kitten Dizzy. His owners, Kevin and Nicole, even played Mingus throughout the process.
→ Have you toilet-trained your cat using the Mingus Method or any other system? Tell us about your experience in a comment below — or by e-mail (http://www.studio360.org/emailform/contact-us/) .
Bonus Track: Reg E. Cathey reads the full CAT-alog
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=033736a7f1) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=033736a7f1&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Jazz films explore the hell and joy of musical perfection – LA Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-et-mn-jazz-films-whiplash-low-down-keep-on-keepin-on-20141120-story.html
** Jazz films explore the hell and joy of musical perfection
————————————————————
“Not my tempo,” the bandleader says. The drummer tries again. “Not my tempo!” The conductor counts down one more time, and again the drummer fails. This time the conductor screams, red-faced as a drill sergeant: “Not my tempo!”
Rarely has a simple music cue sounded so terrifying as it does in Damien Chazelle’s big band psychodrama “Whiplash.” In his Oscar-buzzed performance, J.K. Simmons rips into the role of college jazz instructor Terence Fletcher, who bullies young drummer Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) to the brink of madness in their pursuit of musical excellence.
“Whiplash” marks the most extreme of three highly personal new movies dramatizing the jazz mystique in all its hard-won splendor. “Low Down” casts John Hawkes as real-life bebop pianist Joe Albany, who struggled with drug addiction in full view of his adoring teenage daughter (Elle Fanning). And the documentary “Keep On Keepin’ On” profiles 93-year-old trumpet player Clark Terry, a veteran of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington big bands, as he mentors a 23-year-old blind piano player.
Where such previous films as the Chet Baker documentary “Let’s Get Lost,” Dexter Gordon vehicle “‘Round Midnight” and Billie Holiday biopic “Lady Sings the Blues” earned Oscar nominations by portraying musicians at the top of their game, this year’s best jazz-themed pictures price-check the cost of greatness for players whose peak years lie ahead, or behind.
In “Whiplash,” taskmaster Fletcher and ambitious student Andrew personify the notion that jazz artistry depends on muscular, meticulous technical skill born of relentless training. “For all its sense of freedom and improvisation and joy, the actual craft you need to be a high-end jazz musician requires a really high level of technique,” Chazelle says. “Whether it’s Charlie Parker or Coltrane or Buddy Rich, or any of the greats, the majority of their time on any given day was spent practicing. It’s not just about coming up with brilliant new ideas and musical languages.”
To extract technically perfect performances from his charges, Fletcher hurls insults, throws chairs and stages a drum-off between Andrew and two rivals until their fingers bleed. Such behavior draws from a lengthy tradition that equates high pressure with high standards, Chazelle says. “Throughout jazz history, there’s been many autocratic bandleaders and teachers. It’s well documented, for example, that Buddy Rich screamed at his musicians, but at its height, the band was phenomenal. I talked to Rich’s former bandmates before making this film, and it’s no secret: The culture in that band was brutal. So you look at that and ask yourself, ‘Is it cause and effect?’ Was it because of that brutality that they were so good?'”
cComments
Got something to say? Start the conversation and be the first to comment.
0
“Whiplash” crackles with a wealth of cutthroat detail informed by Chazelle’s experience. As a teenager, he played drums in a championship New Jersey high school ensemble under the direction of a relentless bandleader. “I remember my conductor literally had me play a single down beat on the bass drum over and over and over again for half an hour while the whole band watched,” Chazelle says. “It was one of the most humiliating experiences.”
Unlike Chazelle, Australian drummer-turned-filmmaker Alan Hicks found inspiration for “Keep On Keepin’ On” in a relatively nurturing environment. Enrolled at William Paterson University outside New York City, he took lessons with jazz master Terry and played in his touring band with gifted pianist Justin Kauflin, who lost his sight as a child. Hicks later swapped drums for a video camera and spent five years documenting the teacher-student relationship between Terry, now 93, and Kauflin while fending off an increasingly aggressive diabetes.
Hicks says, “I’ve had bad teachers in my past who really weren’t on board with how positive reinforcement can elevate the student to the next level, but Clark is all about ‘Getting on the plateau of positivity,’ as he puts it. He can be hard on you, but the fact that Clark believes in you means you worked a hundred times harder than you normally would because you don’t want to let this guy down.”
In “Low Down,” teachable moments are nowhere to be seen. Set in 1974 Los Angeles, the film follows heroin-bedeviled musician Albany as he tries to stay clean and find gigs. His daughter, Amy-Jo Albany, who co-scripted the autobiographical movie, observes, “My dad was a great artist who loved his family. If you have a child, you need to be a parent too, but for my dad, it was the dope that made it impossible for him to do both of those things. He just couldn’t pull it off.”
“Low Down,” shot on 16 millimeter film by director Jeff Preiss, catches up with Albany years after his heyday as a sideman for Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Now he’s playing for tips at an empty dive. “Los Angeles was not considered a great jazz town in the ’70s,” Albany says. “I’d go to the musicians union with my dad and it’d be filled with these amazing musicians who couldn’t find any work, so they’d get on a cruise ship or play at the bar near the airport. They were like beautiful relics.”
“Low Down” surveys the collateral damage triggered by the kind of drug habit that hobbled many jazz musicians of Albany’s generation. But as much as the film’s self-sabotaging antihero loved heroin, he loved jazz even more.
“It takes an incredible level of devotion to play as well as my father did,” Albany says. “When he didn’t have access to a piano, it’s like he’d lost a limb. My dad took a lot of wrong turns and blind alleys, but he practiced eight hours a day until the day he died.”
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=9a953daf5d) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=9a953daf5d&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Jazz films explore the hell and joy of musical perfection – LA Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-et-mn-jazz-films-whiplash-low-down-keep-on-keepin-on-20141120-story.html
** Jazz films explore the hell and joy of musical perfection
————————————————————
“Not my tempo,” the bandleader says. The drummer tries again. “Not my tempo!” The conductor counts down one more time, and again the drummer fails. This time the conductor screams, red-faced as a drill sergeant: “Not my tempo!”
Rarely has a simple music cue sounded so terrifying as it does in Damien Chazelle’s big band psychodrama “Whiplash.” In his Oscar-buzzed performance, J.K. Simmons rips into the role of college jazz instructor Terence Fletcher, who bullies young drummer Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) to the brink of madness in their pursuit of musical excellence.
“Whiplash” marks the most extreme of three highly personal new movies dramatizing the jazz mystique in all its hard-won splendor. “Low Down” casts John Hawkes as real-life bebop pianist Joe Albany, who struggled with drug addiction in full view of his adoring teenage daughter (Elle Fanning). And the documentary “Keep On Keepin’ On” profiles 93-year-old trumpet player Clark Terry, a veteran of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington big bands, as he mentors a 23-year-old blind piano player.
Where such previous films as the Chet Baker documentary “Let’s Get Lost,” Dexter Gordon vehicle “‘Round Midnight” and Billie Holiday biopic “Lady Sings the Blues” earned Oscar nominations by portraying musicians at the top of their game, this year’s best jazz-themed pictures price-check the cost of greatness for players whose peak years lie ahead, or behind.
In “Whiplash,” taskmaster Fletcher and ambitious student Andrew personify the notion that jazz artistry depends on muscular, meticulous technical skill born of relentless training. “For all its sense of freedom and improvisation and joy, the actual craft you need to be a high-end jazz musician requires a really high level of technique,” Chazelle says. “Whether it’s Charlie Parker or Coltrane or Buddy Rich, or any of the greats, the majority of their time on any given day was spent practicing. It’s not just about coming up with brilliant new ideas and musical languages.”
To extract technically perfect performances from his charges, Fletcher hurls insults, throws chairs and stages a drum-off between Andrew and two rivals until their fingers bleed. Such behavior draws from a lengthy tradition that equates high pressure with high standards, Chazelle says. “Throughout jazz history, there’s been many autocratic bandleaders and teachers. It’s well documented, for example, that Buddy Rich screamed at his musicians, but at its height, the band was phenomenal. I talked to Rich’s former bandmates before making this film, and it’s no secret: The culture in that band was brutal. So you look at that and ask yourself, ‘Is it cause and effect?’ Was it because of that brutality that they were so good?'”
cComments
Got something to say? Start the conversation and be the first to comment.
0
“Whiplash” crackles with a wealth of cutthroat detail informed by Chazelle’s experience. As a teenager, he played drums in a championship New Jersey high school ensemble under the direction of a relentless bandleader. “I remember my conductor literally had me play a single down beat on the bass drum over and over and over again for half an hour while the whole band watched,” Chazelle says. “It was one of the most humiliating experiences.”
Unlike Chazelle, Australian drummer-turned-filmmaker Alan Hicks found inspiration for “Keep On Keepin’ On” in a relatively nurturing environment. Enrolled at William Paterson University outside New York City, he took lessons with jazz master Terry and played in his touring band with gifted pianist Justin Kauflin, who lost his sight as a child. Hicks later swapped drums for a video camera and spent five years documenting the teacher-student relationship between Terry, now 93, and Kauflin while fending off an increasingly aggressive diabetes.
Hicks says, “I’ve had bad teachers in my past who really weren’t on board with how positive reinforcement can elevate the student to the next level, but Clark is all about ‘Getting on the plateau of positivity,’ as he puts it. He can be hard on you, but the fact that Clark believes in you means you worked a hundred times harder than you normally would because you don’t want to let this guy down.”
In “Low Down,” teachable moments are nowhere to be seen. Set in 1974 Los Angeles, the film follows heroin-bedeviled musician Albany as he tries to stay clean and find gigs. His daughter, Amy-Jo Albany, who co-scripted the autobiographical movie, observes, “My dad was a great artist who loved his family. If you have a child, you need to be a parent too, but for my dad, it was the dope that made it impossible for him to do both of those things. He just couldn’t pull it off.”
“Low Down,” shot on 16 millimeter film by director Jeff Preiss, catches up with Albany years after his heyday as a sideman for Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Now he’s playing for tips at an empty dive. “Los Angeles was not considered a great jazz town in the ’70s,” Albany says. “I’d go to the musicians union with my dad and it’d be filled with these amazing musicians who couldn’t find any work, so they’d get on a cruise ship or play at the bar near the airport. They were like beautiful relics.”
“Low Down” surveys the collateral damage triggered by the kind of drug habit that hobbled many jazz musicians of Albany’s generation. But as much as the film’s self-sabotaging antihero loved heroin, he loved jazz even more.
“It takes an incredible level of devotion to play as well as my father did,” Albany says. “When he didn’t have access to a piano, it’s like he’d lost a limb. My dad took a lot of wrong turns and blind alleys, but he practiced eight hours a day until the day he died.”
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=9a953daf5d) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=9a953daf5d&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Jazz films explore the hell and joy of musical perfection – LA Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-et-mn-jazz-films-whiplash-low-down-keep-on-keepin-on-20141120-story.html
** Jazz films explore the hell and joy of musical perfection
————————————————————
“Not my tempo,” the bandleader says. The drummer tries again. “Not my tempo!” The conductor counts down one more time, and again the drummer fails. This time the conductor screams, red-faced as a drill sergeant: “Not my tempo!”
Rarely has a simple music cue sounded so terrifying as it does in Damien Chazelle’s big band psychodrama “Whiplash.” In his Oscar-buzzed performance, J.K. Simmons rips into the role of college jazz instructor Terence Fletcher, who bullies young drummer Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) to the brink of madness in their pursuit of musical excellence.
“Whiplash” marks the most extreme of three highly personal new movies dramatizing the jazz mystique in all its hard-won splendor. “Low Down” casts John Hawkes as real-life bebop pianist Joe Albany, who struggled with drug addiction in full view of his adoring teenage daughter (Elle Fanning). And the documentary “Keep On Keepin’ On” profiles 93-year-old trumpet player Clark Terry, a veteran of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington big bands, as he mentors a 23-year-old blind piano player.
Where such previous films as the Chet Baker documentary “Let’s Get Lost,” Dexter Gordon vehicle “‘Round Midnight” and Billie Holiday biopic “Lady Sings the Blues” earned Oscar nominations by portraying musicians at the top of their game, this year’s best jazz-themed pictures price-check the cost of greatness for players whose peak years lie ahead, or behind.
In “Whiplash,” taskmaster Fletcher and ambitious student Andrew personify the notion that jazz artistry depends on muscular, meticulous technical skill born of relentless training. “For all its sense of freedom and improvisation and joy, the actual craft you need to be a high-end jazz musician requires a really high level of technique,” Chazelle says. “Whether it’s Charlie Parker or Coltrane or Buddy Rich, or any of the greats, the majority of their time on any given day was spent practicing. It’s not just about coming up with brilliant new ideas and musical languages.”
To extract technically perfect performances from his charges, Fletcher hurls insults, throws chairs and stages a drum-off between Andrew and two rivals until their fingers bleed. Such behavior draws from a lengthy tradition that equates high pressure with high standards, Chazelle says. “Throughout jazz history, there’s been many autocratic bandleaders and teachers. It’s well documented, for example, that Buddy Rich screamed at his musicians, but at its height, the band was phenomenal. I talked to Rich’s former bandmates before making this film, and it’s no secret: The culture in that band was brutal. So you look at that and ask yourself, ‘Is it cause and effect?’ Was it because of that brutality that they were so good?'”
cComments
Got something to say? Start the conversation and be the first to comment.
0
“Whiplash” crackles with a wealth of cutthroat detail informed by Chazelle’s experience. As a teenager, he played drums in a championship New Jersey high school ensemble under the direction of a relentless bandleader. “I remember my conductor literally had me play a single down beat on the bass drum over and over and over again for half an hour while the whole band watched,” Chazelle says. “It was one of the most humiliating experiences.”
Unlike Chazelle, Australian drummer-turned-filmmaker Alan Hicks found inspiration for “Keep On Keepin’ On” in a relatively nurturing environment. Enrolled at William Paterson University outside New York City, he took lessons with jazz master Terry and played in his touring band with gifted pianist Justin Kauflin, who lost his sight as a child. Hicks later swapped drums for a video camera and spent five years documenting the teacher-student relationship between Terry, now 93, and Kauflin while fending off an increasingly aggressive diabetes.
Hicks says, “I’ve had bad teachers in my past who really weren’t on board with how positive reinforcement can elevate the student to the next level, but Clark is all about ‘Getting on the plateau of positivity,’ as he puts it. He can be hard on you, but the fact that Clark believes in you means you worked a hundred times harder than you normally would because you don’t want to let this guy down.”
In “Low Down,” teachable moments are nowhere to be seen. Set in 1974 Los Angeles, the film follows heroin-bedeviled musician Albany as he tries to stay clean and find gigs. His daughter, Amy-Jo Albany, who co-scripted the autobiographical movie, observes, “My dad was a great artist who loved his family. If you have a child, you need to be a parent too, but for my dad, it was the dope that made it impossible for him to do both of those things. He just couldn’t pull it off.”
“Low Down,” shot on 16 millimeter film by director Jeff Preiss, catches up with Albany years after his heyday as a sideman for Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Now he’s playing for tips at an empty dive. “Los Angeles was not considered a great jazz town in the ’70s,” Albany says. “I’d go to the musicians union with my dad and it’d be filled with these amazing musicians who couldn’t find any work, so they’d get on a cruise ship or play at the bar near the airport. They were like beautiful relics.”
“Low Down” surveys the collateral damage triggered by the kind of drug habit that hobbled many jazz musicians of Albany’s generation. But as much as the film’s self-sabotaging antihero loved heroin, he loved jazz even more.
“It takes an incredible level of devotion to play as well as my father did,” Albany says. “When he didn’t have access to a piano, it’s like he’d lost a limb. My dad took a lot of wrong turns and blind alleys, but he practiced eight hours a day until the day he died.”
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=9a953daf5d) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=9a953daf5d&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
THE CULTURAL WORKER by John Pietaro: Obituary of WILL CONNELL: Loss of a Quiet Giant
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http://theculturalworker.blogspot.com/2014/11/loss-of-quiet-giant-will-connell-1938.html
** Obituary of WILL CONNELL: Loss of a Quiet Giant
————————————————————
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-snvSx2G8YVk/VG4ATM_Hx4I/AAAAAAAABG4/qP7kxyR_C_E/s1600/1%2Bwill%2Bconnell%2BDAF%2B2014.jpg
Will Connell at the 2014 Dissident Arts Festival, NYC (photo by Gil Selinger)
Loss of a Quiet Giant: Will Connell 1938-2014
An Obituary by John Pietaro
I was heartily saddened by the sudden unexpected phone call: downtown’s unsung hero of Free Jazz, Will Connell Jr, was hospitalized and non-responsive. Immediately the jazz and new music community rallied and the outpouring of love for Will was apparent. We’d all been preparing for his big moment at the front of the stage, his week-long residency at the Stone, set to occur in December. None of this made sense yet one day later, November 19, the hush of mourning closed out all else; the little giant was lost to us.
Though Will and I only came to know each other several years ago, I connected deeply to him: both in music and politics. When he hired me this past September to serve as publicist for his long-awaited residency at the Stone, we shared long conversations and Will spoke of how deeply this music, the once-New Thing, was born enmeshed in radicalism. When the music and the movement are divergent, the soul, the fight, withdraws. It touched me when he commented, in his characteristic style, “Hey maaaan, you are the most revolutionary cat I‘ve known in many years. You might be the most revolutionary cat I ever met”. Coming from this giant of Free, this cohort of Black Arts and comrade of some very heavy activists, this was indeed a prideful moment.
More than anything, Will was elated about this Christmas-week residency at the Stone. It was a major acknowledgement of his many years of creativity—in his own adopted ‘hood of nearly forty years. This series of concerts was a retrospective of his musical career as well as a focus on his current performance. He asked me to craft a publicity campaign to highlight the residency’s widespread reach: Will’s own music and that of Horace Tapscott, whom he was most closely associated with, but also many of the NYC friends with whom he’d made music over the decades. Wisdom of his age, Will recognized that he might not get this chance again—so this had to be a performance of the highest level. We discussed his vision for the residency and particularly his ideas for the premier of “World Peace, With or Without People–the Legacy of Horace Tapscott”, which he was most excited about. Here, the sounds and the activism would indeed converge.
Will had called me on November 12, a week before his transition, and I immediately heard something in his voice other that the sing-song greeting I’d grown used to. There was anxiety and urgency. He explained he needed to go into the hospital on Friday for same-day surgery and even as he down-played it, I heard the fear. We spoke about this and he told me that he’d only told three people about the procedure he needed: he’d based this on the old adage that in an emergency, “you only call three people: your doctor, your lawyer and your publicist”. We laughed over this but he asked me not to speak of it to anyone and I assured him that I would not and that I would check in with him over the weekend. When I called him next, the call went right to voice mail–and I never got a call back. I suspected there’d been complications and considered whom I should call to inquire. And then the grim reports began to come in.
As of this writing, the musicians slated to be a part of the week-long residency are hell-bent on keeping Will’s vision alive. Several have been in touch with Will’s daughter Safiyah in this hard time. Our thoughts are with her and the rest of the family. Though details need to be ironed out with the Stone, the current plan is that the week of December 23-28 shall serve as a celebration of Will’s life, a feature for his music, his artistry and the visceral socio-political heart of it all.
*******
Will Connell Jr was introduced to music by his father, a violin prodigy. Deprived by racist politics of a career in the classical world, Connell Sr contented his musical longings to avid listening. But music was central to African American family life and jazz served as a vehicle of both art and great pride over the generations. Will Jr became acutely aware of the sounds of Jazz and all music from his earliest memory and was immersed in it even before: “I was told by my parents that Art Tatum played the little piano at my grandmother’s house when I was an infant”, Connell recently recalled.
As soon as Will Jr was old enough, he began accompanying his father to LA jazz clubs and concert halls where most of the greatest jazz artists of the 1940s and 50s were performing. He became immediately drawn to the saxophonists but elements of the music offered a visceral response that was life-changing: “I heard Billie Holiday at 17. Tears ran down my face like Niagara Falls”, Connell offered in retrospect. That same year, 1956, he was inducted into the Air Force, where he remained for some nine years. Between tours of duty, Connell purchased an alto saxophone and it accompanied him to Okinawa. Performances in bars followed but Connell didn’t become serious about music until a suffering a profound experience wherein he was blinded for several days by a chemical blast. Connell pondered his future in the darkness. He vowed then that if he regained his eyesight, he was going to formally study this art that had driven him so deeply. This promise, as well as his growing outrage
about the military’s treatment of Black servicemen and people of color around the world, saw him leave the Air Force forthwith.
In 1965 Connell studied at LA City College (Eric Dolphy’s alma mater) while he worked evenings at the local Post Office; during breaks Will studied harmony. Around this time Connell became acquainted with Horace Tapscott, then in the process of building a powerful community-based organization inspired by both the early Black Arts Movement and the Watts riots: The Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA) and the Pan African People’s Arkestra (PAPA). Almost immediately, Connell took a central role in both the organization and ensemble; he was the latter’s librarian. Tapscott urged Connell to learn the craft of music copying and he took tutelage with copyists at the Motown label, now transplanted to LA. Through this association, he began working as a copyist for a wide variety of R and B artists, including Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack and Michael Jackson, as well as pop artists outside of Motown, Simon and Garfunkel among them. He also worked as copyist for
Tapscott’s large ensemble, writing out the parts for diverse instruments even as he performed with it and the smaller groups that sprang from it.
Connell credits Tapscott with his political education as well: a young Angela Davis was a frequent guest at the organization’s gatherings and they had a close association with the Black Panther Party and played its theme song, “Seize the Time” in the regular repertoire. The Tapscott bands also played regular gigs at various college Black Student Unions, high schools (at one of these they played opposite Sun Ra’s band) and community events. Almost immediately after Angela Davis’ arrest, Tapscott’s band served as the pit band of a new theatre work by Jack Wilson, ‘Free Angela!’. Connell recalled that while the actors were hesitantly preparing for the premiere, Tapscott took charge and led the band in a lengthy set of explosive music which saw the crowded house quaking with jubilance. The movement was thriving.
By 1975, Connell would ultimately leave LA and Tapscott for New York City, which would remain his home. Residing on the Lower East Side, Connell encountered the fading jazz loft scene and the edge of the Beat Generation poets’ waning days. But he was already an elder statesman of the new jazz which became vital as 20^th century composition melded into free jazz and the legacy of the blues; this “new thing” crossed culture and encouraged inter-racial creativity through its celebration of radicalism. The music was immediate and vital and Will happily submerged himself into its center.
After arriving here, Connell sought out Arthur Blythe, who’d been a part of Tapscott’s band and was now playing with noted drummer-leader Chico Hamilton. Brand new to the city, Will sat in the control room as Hamilton’s band recorded a largely improvised score for a Fritz the Cat cartoon film and he immediately grabbed some manuscript paper and sketched out the music notation as the band played. Presenting it to Hamilton, the impressed leader hired Will to write out the scores for other performances, committing to paper what had previously been lost to the air. Connell was added to the band as multi-reeds player, where Paul Horn, Dolphy and others had preceded him.
A year later, Connell was a part of William Parker’s Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra and made an immediate impact downtown. Over the next three decades, he became an integral part of bands led by Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Butch Morris, Pharaoh Sanders, Roy Campbell, Sam Rivers, Steve Swell, Billy Bang, Henry Threadgill, Oliver Lake, Daniel Carter, Frank Lowe and many others. Somehwere in there he toured with Philly Joe Jones too. He also engaged in extensive projects as music copyist, the most famous of which was Ornette Coleman’s ‘Skies of America’; Will’s work allowed Ornette to see a conductor’s score of this celebrated piece for the first time. He also did the music copying for David Murray’s Big Band, the Craig Harris/Seku Sundiata Project for Brown University, and the World Saxophone Quartet, including their Jimmy Hendrix Album.
Connell co-founded the band Commitment with Jason Hwang, William Parker and Zen Maatsura in 1978. The band would perform at the Kool Jazz Festival and Moers Jazz Festival during its first year. But in the same period, he began creating music with the newest residents of the East Village, punk rockers and no wave artists. These included James Chance, as well as the bands Minor Threat and Black Flag when they came through town. Other LES jazz musicians who found this genre welcoming included Daniel Carter and Sabir Mateen. Don Cherry also spent significant time with members of Talking Heads and in this period Ornette Coleman lived on Prince Street and grew Prime Time. There was fertile ground for powerful cross-pollination . Connell saw the connection between the ‘70s-‘80s punk movement and the 1960s’ special brand of openness, acceptance and need to break with convention. Through this circle he became acquainted with singer-songwriter Ryan Adams, with whom he’d perform on TV’s
David Letterman show some years later.
Through the ‘80s and ‘90s, when downtown became Downtown, the music was celebrated and played globally. Will Connell was there to give it street cred. And he continued on this path to serve as a genuine artifact even as he offered a kind of youthful enthusiasm to the moment. Into this century, the vitality was there and an aging Will Connell apparently knew no bounds, never had the want to slow down. He led a series of combos that included such names as Tomas Ulrich, Anders Nilsson, Thurman Barker, Ras Moshe so many others and thrived in his work with the quartet Sadhana, co-led by Vincent Chancey and powered by the young energy of Max Johnson and Jeremy Calstedt. Will was a charter member of the Jazz and Poetry Collective and a series of other bands he was only happy to be a part of if the vibe was there. He served as guest curator at the Stone in 2012, which brought him some note, and his renown among the musicians only grew as he encountered still newer music adventurers
and visitors along the way. Yet popular acclaim continued to elude him. Will was a featured performer earlier this year in an Arts for Art concert dedicated to Tapscott’s legacy. He was also a member of the at least a couple of all-star bands for events that this author produced including the ‘Drums For Warren’ benefit concert in support of Warren Smith, and the ‘The Tribute to New York Eye & Ear Control’ concert this past June and the 2014 Dissident Arts Festival of which he was the headliner.
Though rarely in the spotlight over the decades, Will Connell was a deeply relevant part of this rather unclassifiable musical genre which prides itself on free improvisation as much as post-modern composition, the expansiveness of world sounds and the bite of revolutionary politics. And yet his message, at the close of each warm encounter, remained “peace”. That was Will, the rebel who extended an open hand, never a fist. Usually preferring to be a member of a band as opposed to its leader, often seen as “a section man” in larger ensembles and a “background” guy though a powerfully screaming soloist, Connell may have been the last of the modest greats. And oh, how this quiet giant is missed.
peace, Will….
peace
————————————————————
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THE CULTURAL WORKER by John Pietaro: Obituary of WILL CONNELL: Loss of a Quiet Giant
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** Obituary of WILL CONNELL: Loss of a Quiet Giant
————————————————————
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-snvSx2G8YVk/VG4ATM_Hx4I/AAAAAAAABG4/qP7kxyR_C_E/s1600/1%2Bwill%2Bconnell%2BDAF%2B2014.jpg
Will Connell at the 2014 Dissident Arts Festival, NYC (photo by Gil Selinger)
Loss of a Quiet Giant: Will Connell 1938-2014
An Obituary by John Pietaro
I was heartily saddened by the sudden unexpected phone call: downtown’s unsung hero of Free Jazz, Will Connell Jr, was hospitalized and non-responsive. Immediately the jazz and new music community rallied and the outpouring of love for Will was apparent. We’d all been preparing for his big moment at the front of the stage, his week-long residency at the Stone, set to occur in December. None of this made sense yet one day later, November 19, the hush of mourning closed out all else; the little giant was lost to us.
Though Will and I only came to know each other several years ago, I connected deeply to him: both in music and politics. When he hired me this past September to serve as publicist for his long-awaited residency at the Stone, we shared long conversations and Will spoke of how deeply this music, the once-New Thing, was born enmeshed in radicalism. When the music and the movement are divergent, the soul, the fight, withdraws. It touched me when he commented, in his characteristic style, “Hey maaaan, you are the most revolutionary cat I‘ve known in many years. You might be the most revolutionary cat I ever met”. Coming from this giant of Free, this cohort of Black Arts and comrade of some very heavy activists, this was indeed a prideful moment.
More than anything, Will was elated about this Christmas-week residency at the Stone. It was a major acknowledgement of his many years of creativity—in his own adopted ‘hood of nearly forty years. This series of concerts was a retrospective of his musical career as well as a focus on his current performance. He asked me to craft a publicity campaign to highlight the residency’s widespread reach: Will’s own music and that of Horace Tapscott, whom he was most closely associated with, but also many of the NYC friends with whom he’d made music over the decades. Wisdom of his age, Will recognized that he might not get this chance again—so this had to be a performance of the highest level. We discussed his vision for the residency and particularly his ideas for the premier of “World Peace, With or Without People–the Legacy of Horace Tapscott”, which he was most excited about. Here, the sounds and the activism would indeed converge.
Will had called me on November 12, a week before his transition, and I immediately heard something in his voice other that the sing-song greeting I’d grown used to. There was anxiety and urgency. He explained he needed to go into the hospital on Friday for same-day surgery and even as he down-played it, I heard the fear. We spoke about this and he told me that he’d only told three people about the procedure he needed: he’d based this on the old adage that in an emergency, “you only call three people: your doctor, your lawyer and your publicist”. We laughed over this but he asked me not to speak of it to anyone and I assured him that I would not and that I would check in with him over the weekend. When I called him next, the call went right to voice mail–and I never got a call back. I suspected there’d been complications and considered whom I should call to inquire. And then the grim reports began to come in.
As of this writing, the musicians slated to be a part of the week-long residency are hell-bent on keeping Will’s vision alive. Several have been in touch with Will’s daughter Safiyah in this hard time. Our thoughts are with her and the rest of the family. Though details need to be ironed out with the Stone, the current plan is that the week of December 23-28 shall serve as a celebration of Will’s life, a feature for his music, his artistry and the visceral socio-political heart of it all.
*******
Will Connell Jr was introduced to music by his father, a violin prodigy. Deprived by racist politics of a career in the classical world, Connell Sr contented his musical longings to avid listening. But music was central to African American family life and jazz served as a vehicle of both art and great pride over the generations. Will Jr became acutely aware of the sounds of Jazz and all music from his earliest memory and was immersed in it even before: “I was told by my parents that Art Tatum played the little piano at my grandmother’s house when I was an infant”, Connell recently recalled.
As soon as Will Jr was old enough, he began accompanying his father to LA jazz clubs and concert halls where most of the greatest jazz artists of the 1940s and 50s were performing. He became immediately drawn to the saxophonists but elements of the music offered a visceral response that was life-changing: “I heard Billie Holiday at 17. Tears ran down my face like Niagara Falls”, Connell offered in retrospect. That same year, 1956, he was inducted into the Air Force, where he remained for some nine years. Between tours of duty, Connell purchased an alto saxophone and it accompanied him to Okinawa. Performances in bars followed but Connell didn’t become serious about music until a suffering a profound experience wherein he was blinded for several days by a chemical blast. Connell pondered his future in the darkness. He vowed then that if he regained his eyesight, he was going to formally study this art that had driven him so deeply. This promise, as well as his growing outrage
about the military’s treatment of Black servicemen and people of color around the world, saw him leave the Air Force forthwith.
In 1965 Connell studied at LA City College (Eric Dolphy’s alma mater) while he worked evenings at the local Post Office; during breaks Will studied harmony. Around this time Connell became acquainted with Horace Tapscott, then in the process of building a powerful community-based organization inspired by both the early Black Arts Movement and the Watts riots: The Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA) and the Pan African People’s Arkestra (PAPA). Almost immediately, Connell took a central role in both the organization and ensemble; he was the latter’s librarian. Tapscott urged Connell to learn the craft of music copying and he took tutelage with copyists at the Motown label, now transplanted to LA. Through this association, he began working as a copyist for a wide variety of R and B artists, including Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack and Michael Jackson, as well as pop artists outside of Motown, Simon and Garfunkel among them. He also worked as copyist for
Tapscott’s large ensemble, writing out the parts for diverse instruments even as he performed with it and the smaller groups that sprang from it.
Connell credits Tapscott with his political education as well: a young Angela Davis was a frequent guest at the organization’s gatherings and they had a close association with the Black Panther Party and played its theme song, “Seize the Time” in the regular repertoire. The Tapscott bands also played regular gigs at various college Black Student Unions, high schools (at one of these they played opposite Sun Ra’s band) and community events. Almost immediately after Angela Davis’ arrest, Tapscott’s band served as the pit band of a new theatre work by Jack Wilson, ‘Free Angela!’. Connell recalled that while the actors were hesitantly preparing for the premiere, Tapscott took charge and led the band in a lengthy set of explosive music which saw the crowded house quaking with jubilance. The movement was thriving.
By 1975, Connell would ultimately leave LA and Tapscott for New York City, which would remain his home. Residing on the Lower East Side, Connell encountered the fading jazz loft scene and the edge of the Beat Generation poets’ waning days. But he was already an elder statesman of the new jazz which became vital as 20^th century composition melded into free jazz and the legacy of the blues; this “new thing” crossed culture and encouraged inter-racial creativity through its celebration of radicalism. The music was immediate and vital and Will happily submerged himself into its center.
After arriving here, Connell sought out Arthur Blythe, who’d been a part of Tapscott’s band and was now playing with noted drummer-leader Chico Hamilton. Brand new to the city, Will sat in the control room as Hamilton’s band recorded a largely improvised score for a Fritz the Cat cartoon film and he immediately grabbed some manuscript paper and sketched out the music notation as the band played. Presenting it to Hamilton, the impressed leader hired Will to write out the scores for other performances, committing to paper what had previously been lost to the air. Connell was added to the band as multi-reeds player, where Paul Horn, Dolphy and others had preceded him.
A year later, Connell was a part of William Parker’s Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra and made an immediate impact downtown. Over the next three decades, he became an integral part of bands led by Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Butch Morris, Pharaoh Sanders, Roy Campbell, Sam Rivers, Steve Swell, Billy Bang, Henry Threadgill, Oliver Lake, Daniel Carter, Frank Lowe and many others. Somehwere in there he toured with Philly Joe Jones too. He also engaged in extensive projects as music copyist, the most famous of which was Ornette Coleman’s ‘Skies of America’; Will’s work allowed Ornette to see a conductor’s score of this celebrated piece for the first time. He also did the music copying for David Murray’s Big Band, the Craig Harris/Seku Sundiata Project for Brown University, and the World Saxophone Quartet, including their Jimmy Hendrix Album.
Connell co-founded the band Commitment with Jason Hwang, William Parker and Zen Maatsura in 1978. The band would perform at the Kool Jazz Festival and Moers Jazz Festival during its first year. But in the same period, he began creating music with the newest residents of the East Village, punk rockers and no wave artists. These included James Chance, as well as the bands Minor Threat and Black Flag when they came through town. Other LES jazz musicians who found this genre welcoming included Daniel Carter and Sabir Mateen. Don Cherry also spent significant time with members of Talking Heads and in this period Ornette Coleman lived on Prince Street and grew Prime Time. There was fertile ground for powerful cross-pollination . Connell saw the connection between the ‘70s-‘80s punk movement and the 1960s’ special brand of openness, acceptance and need to break with convention. Through this circle he became acquainted with singer-songwriter Ryan Adams, with whom he’d perform on TV’s
David Letterman show some years later.
Through the ‘80s and ‘90s, when downtown became Downtown, the music was celebrated and played globally. Will Connell was there to give it street cred. And he continued on this path to serve as a genuine artifact even as he offered a kind of youthful enthusiasm to the moment. Into this century, the vitality was there and an aging Will Connell apparently knew no bounds, never had the want to slow down. He led a series of combos that included such names as Tomas Ulrich, Anders Nilsson, Thurman Barker, Ras Moshe so many others and thrived in his work with the quartet Sadhana, co-led by Vincent Chancey and powered by the young energy of Max Johnson and Jeremy Calstedt. Will was a charter member of the Jazz and Poetry Collective and a series of other bands he was only happy to be a part of if the vibe was there. He served as guest curator at the Stone in 2012, which brought him some note, and his renown among the musicians only grew as he encountered still newer music adventurers
and visitors along the way. Yet popular acclaim continued to elude him. Will was a featured performer earlier this year in an Arts for Art concert dedicated to Tapscott’s legacy. He was also a member of the at least a couple of all-star bands for events that this author produced including the ‘Drums For Warren’ benefit concert in support of Warren Smith, and the ‘The Tribute to New York Eye & Ear Control’ concert this past June and the 2014 Dissident Arts Festival of which he was the headliner.
Though rarely in the spotlight over the decades, Will Connell was a deeply relevant part of this rather unclassifiable musical genre which prides itself on free improvisation as much as post-modern composition, the expansiveness of world sounds and the bite of revolutionary politics. And yet his message, at the close of each warm encounter, remained “peace”. That was Will, the rebel who extended an open hand, never a fist. Usually preferring to be a member of a band as opposed to its leader, often seen as “a section man” in larger ensembles and a “background” guy though a powerfully screaming soloist, Connell may have been the last of the modest greats. And oh, how this quiet giant is missed.
peace, Will….
peace
————————————————————
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
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USA
THE CULTURAL WORKER by John Pietaro: Obituary of WILL CONNELL: Loss of a Quiet Giant
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://theculturalworker.blogspot.com/2014/11/loss-of-quiet-giant-will-connell-1938.html
** Obituary of WILL CONNELL: Loss of a Quiet Giant
————————————————————
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-snvSx2G8YVk/VG4ATM_Hx4I/AAAAAAAABG4/qP7kxyR_C_E/s1600/1%2Bwill%2Bconnell%2BDAF%2B2014.jpg
Will Connell at the 2014 Dissident Arts Festival, NYC (photo by Gil Selinger)
Loss of a Quiet Giant: Will Connell 1938-2014
An Obituary by John Pietaro
I was heartily saddened by the sudden unexpected phone call: downtown’s unsung hero of Free Jazz, Will Connell Jr, was hospitalized and non-responsive. Immediately the jazz and new music community rallied and the outpouring of love for Will was apparent. We’d all been preparing for his big moment at the front of the stage, his week-long residency at the Stone, set to occur in December. None of this made sense yet one day later, November 19, the hush of mourning closed out all else; the little giant was lost to us.
Though Will and I only came to know each other several years ago, I connected deeply to him: both in music and politics. When he hired me this past September to serve as publicist for his long-awaited residency at the Stone, we shared long conversations and Will spoke of how deeply this music, the once-New Thing, was born enmeshed in radicalism. When the music and the movement are divergent, the soul, the fight, withdraws. It touched me when he commented, in his characteristic style, “Hey maaaan, you are the most revolutionary cat I‘ve known in many years. You might be the most revolutionary cat I ever met”. Coming from this giant of Free, this cohort of Black Arts and comrade of some very heavy activists, this was indeed a prideful moment.
More than anything, Will was elated about this Christmas-week residency at the Stone. It was a major acknowledgement of his many years of creativity—in his own adopted ‘hood of nearly forty years. This series of concerts was a retrospective of his musical career as well as a focus on his current performance. He asked me to craft a publicity campaign to highlight the residency’s widespread reach: Will’s own music and that of Horace Tapscott, whom he was most closely associated with, but also many of the NYC friends with whom he’d made music over the decades. Wisdom of his age, Will recognized that he might not get this chance again—so this had to be a performance of the highest level. We discussed his vision for the residency and particularly his ideas for the premier of “World Peace, With or Without People–the Legacy of Horace Tapscott”, which he was most excited about. Here, the sounds and the activism would indeed converge.
Will had called me on November 12, a week before his transition, and I immediately heard something in his voice other that the sing-song greeting I’d grown used to. There was anxiety and urgency. He explained he needed to go into the hospital on Friday for same-day surgery and even as he down-played it, I heard the fear. We spoke about this and he told me that he’d only told three people about the procedure he needed: he’d based this on the old adage that in an emergency, “you only call three people: your doctor, your lawyer and your publicist”. We laughed over this but he asked me not to speak of it to anyone and I assured him that I would not and that I would check in with him over the weekend. When I called him next, the call went right to voice mail–and I never got a call back. I suspected there’d been complications and considered whom I should call to inquire. And then the grim reports began to come in.
As of this writing, the musicians slated to be a part of the week-long residency are hell-bent on keeping Will’s vision alive. Several have been in touch with Will’s daughter Safiyah in this hard time. Our thoughts are with her and the rest of the family. Though details need to be ironed out with the Stone, the current plan is that the week of December 23-28 shall serve as a celebration of Will’s life, a feature for his music, his artistry and the visceral socio-political heart of it all.
*******
Will Connell Jr was introduced to music by his father, a violin prodigy. Deprived by racist politics of a career in the classical world, Connell Sr contented his musical longings to avid listening. But music was central to African American family life and jazz served as a vehicle of both art and great pride over the generations. Will Jr became acutely aware of the sounds of Jazz and all music from his earliest memory and was immersed in it even before: “I was told by my parents that Art Tatum played the little piano at my grandmother’s house when I was an infant”, Connell recently recalled.
As soon as Will Jr was old enough, he began accompanying his father to LA jazz clubs and concert halls where most of the greatest jazz artists of the 1940s and 50s were performing. He became immediately drawn to the saxophonists but elements of the music offered a visceral response that was life-changing: “I heard Billie Holiday at 17. Tears ran down my face like Niagara Falls”, Connell offered in retrospect. That same year, 1956, he was inducted into the Air Force, where he remained for some nine years. Between tours of duty, Connell purchased an alto saxophone and it accompanied him to Okinawa. Performances in bars followed but Connell didn’t become serious about music until a suffering a profound experience wherein he was blinded for several days by a chemical blast. Connell pondered his future in the darkness. He vowed then that if he regained his eyesight, he was going to formally study this art that had driven him so deeply. This promise, as well as his growing outrage
about the military’s treatment of Black servicemen and people of color around the world, saw him leave the Air Force forthwith.
In 1965 Connell studied at LA City College (Eric Dolphy’s alma mater) while he worked evenings at the local Post Office; during breaks Will studied harmony. Around this time Connell became acquainted with Horace Tapscott, then in the process of building a powerful community-based organization inspired by both the early Black Arts Movement and the Watts riots: The Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA) and the Pan African People’s Arkestra (PAPA). Almost immediately, Connell took a central role in both the organization and ensemble; he was the latter’s librarian. Tapscott urged Connell to learn the craft of music copying and he took tutelage with copyists at the Motown label, now transplanted to LA. Through this association, he began working as a copyist for a wide variety of R and B artists, including Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack and Michael Jackson, as well as pop artists outside of Motown, Simon and Garfunkel among them. He also worked as copyist for
Tapscott’s large ensemble, writing out the parts for diverse instruments even as he performed with it and the smaller groups that sprang from it.
Connell credits Tapscott with his political education as well: a young Angela Davis was a frequent guest at the organization’s gatherings and they had a close association with the Black Panther Party and played its theme song, “Seize the Time” in the regular repertoire. The Tapscott bands also played regular gigs at various college Black Student Unions, high schools (at one of these they played opposite Sun Ra’s band) and community events. Almost immediately after Angela Davis’ arrest, Tapscott’s band served as the pit band of a new theatre work by Jack Wilson, ‘Free Angela!’. Connell recalled that while the actors were hesitantly preparing for the premiere, Tapscott took charge and led the band in a lengthy set of explosive music which saw the crowded house quaking with jubilance. The movement was thriving.
By 1975, Connell would ultimately leave LA and Tapscott for New York City, which would remain his home. Residing on the Lower East Side, Connell encountered the fading jazz loft scene and the edge of the Beat Generation poets’ waning days. But he was already an elder statesman of the new jazz which became vital as 20^th century composition melded into free jazz and the legacy of the blues; this “new thing” crossed culture and encouraged inter-racial creativity through its celebration of radicalism. The music was immediate and vital and Will happily submerged himself into its center.
After arriving here, Connell sought out Arthur Blythe, who’d been a part of Tapscott’s band and was now playing with noted drummer-leader Chico Hamilton. Brand new to the city, Will sat in the control room as Hamilton’s band recorded a largely improvised score for a Fritz the Cat cartoon film and he immediately grabbed some manuscript paper and sketched out the music notation as the band played. Presenting it to Hamilton, the impressed leader hired Will to write out the scores for other performances, committing to paper what had previously been lost to the air. Connell was added to the band as multi-reeds player, where Paul Horn, Dolphy and others had preceded him.
A year later, Connell was a part of William Parker’s Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra and made an immediate impact downtown. Over the next three decades, he became an integral part of bands led by Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Butch Morris, Pharaoh Sanders, Roy Campbell, Sam Rivers, Steve Swell, Billy Bang, Henry Threadgill, Oliver Lake, Daniel Carter, Frank Lowe and many others. Somehwere in there he toured with Philly Joe Jones too. He also engaged in extensive projects as music copyist, the most famous of which was Ornette Coleman’s ‘Skies of America’; Will’s work allowed Ornette to see a conductor’s score of this celebrated piece for the first time. He also did the music copying for David Murray’s Big Band, the Craig Harris/Seku Sundiata Project for Brown University, and the World Saxophone Quartet, including their Jimmy Hendrix Album.
Connell co-founded the band Commitment with Jason Hwang, William Parker and Zen Maatsura in 1978. The band would perform at the Kool Jazz Festival and Moers Jazz Festival during its first year. But in the same period, he began creating music with the newest residents of the East Village, punk rockers and no wave artists. These included James Chance, as well as the bands Minor Threat and Black Flag when they came through town. Other LES jazz musicians who found this genre welcoming included Daniel Carter and Sabir Mateen. Don Cherry also spent significant time with members of Talking Heads and in this period Ornette Coleman lived on Prince Street and grew Prime Time. There was fertile ground for powerful cross-pollination . Connell saw the connection between the ‘70s-‘80s punk movement and the 1960s’ special brand of openness, acceptance and need to break with convention. Through this circle he became acquainted with singer-songwriter Ryan Adams, with whom he’d perform on TV’s
David Letterman show some years later.
Through the ‘80s and ‘90s, when downtown became Downtown, the music was celebrated and played globally. Will Connell was there to give it street cred. And he continued on this path to serve as a genuine artifact even as he offered a kind of youthful enthusiasm to the moment. Into this century, the vitality was there and an aging Will Connell apparently knew no bounds, never had the want to slow down. He led a series of combos that included such names as Tomas Ulrich, Anders Nilsson, Thurman Barker, Ras Moshe so many others and thrived in his work with the quartet Sadhana, co-led by Vincent Chancey and powered by the young energy of Max Johnson and Jeremy Calstedt. Will was a charter member of the Jazz and Poetry Collective and a series of other bands he was only happy to be a part of if the vibe was there. He served as guest curator at the Stone in 2012, which brought him some note, and his renown among the musicians only grew as he encountered still newer music adventurers
and visitors along the way. Yet popular acclaim continued to elude him. Will was a featured performer earlier this year in an Arts for Art concert dedicated to Tapscott’s legacy. He was also a member of the at least a couple of all-star bands for events that this author produced including the ‘Drums For Warren’ benefit concert in support of Warren Smith, and the ‘The Tribute to New York Eye & Ear Control’ concert this past June and the 2014 Dissident Arts Festival of which he was the headliner.
Though rarely in the spotlight over the decades, Will Connell was a deeply relevant part of this rather unclassifiable musical genre which prides itself on free improvisation as much as post-modern composition, the expansiveness of world sounds and the bite of revolutionary politics. And yet his message, at the close of each warm encounter, remained “peace”. That was Will, the rebel who extended an open hand, never a fist. Usually preferring to be a member of a band as opposed to its leader, often seen as “a section man” in larger ensembles and a “background” guy though a powerfully screaming soloist, Connell may have been the last of the modest greats. And oh, how this quiet giant is missed.
peace, Will….
peace
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Songwriting used to pay a handsome living—and still does if the songs you wrote decades ago continue to be played today on the radio and TV and in the movies. Timeless hits have become annuities for songwriters and their families, since the royalty checks kept rolling in long after the songs slipped off the Billboard charts. Which “golden goose” singles have earned writers the most money? You may be surprised by the list. Jimi Mentis in Athens sent along this BBC documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=supZlAbSARc) that reveals the hottest hits with the biggest paydays…
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Songwriting used to pay a handsome living—and still does if the songs you wrote decades ago continue to be played today on the radio and TV and in the movies. Timeless hits have become annuities for songwriters and their families, since the royalty checks kept rolling in long after the songs slipped off the Billboard charts. Which “golden goose” singles have earned writers the most money? You may be surprised by the list. Jimi Mentis in Athens sent along this BBC documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=supZlAbSARc) that reveals the hottest hits with the biggest paydays…
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Midday Jazz Midtown: December 2014
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Midday Jazz Midtown is a series produced by Ronny Whyte in partnership with Midtown Arts Common. Concerts are 1 hour long, and held on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. at Saint Peter’s Church. A $10 donation is requested.
DECEMBER 2014
Wednesday, December 3, 1:00 p.m.
TERESE GENECCO’S LITTLE BIG BAND
As a solo artist, Terese Genecco is an in-demand Host/MC, comedian, actress, and concert performer and can be seen at many of the world’s finest nightclubs, cabaret rooms, jazz festivals, theaters and concert halls. Visit Terese’s website (http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001hu8Ps3Vx0MFjoZYhFHc2fOZvp4yvlqGI1FsBUi7CA5qbJ69zQzhNNGHRkyT4o9si0SurutstG4gVzx3aOq7WGWEgpHz85PrPhBUxI4AqFMAGLmaVGX-pFGDq1wxHqm28MipWXo_QLj8ehO1Puv5m5oivyJITIlN_NayMri8Ieg8pBNrqvMu99A==&c=YI0xf9jFSBOCyYW_MzvfkRRlxCWJX-VlnSwEvqoqAjm_1yzbsAx3ow==&ch=8uEkru0kwExxU1w9Sh81xNUrAXVLBjCqNLgdUBtpmWw9fVhO4EQ4jA==) .
Wednesday, December 10, 1:00 p.m.
ELTHAM HIGH SCHOOL STAGE BAND
From Melbourne, Australia!
Wednesday, December 17, 1:00 p.m.
YULETIDE CELEBRATION
with Marlene Verplanck, Daryl Sherman, Joyce Breach, Saundra Silliman, Alex Leonard, Boots Maleson, David Silliman, and Ronny Whyte!
Wednesday, December 24, 1:00 p.m.
NO CONCERT — Happy Holidays!
Wednesday, December 31, 1:00 p.m.
NO CONCERT — Happy New Year!
PARKING
Discounted parking is available for all coming to Saint Peter’s Church, at Icon Parking: 51st St. between 3rd & Lex (south side of 51st Street)
Pricing: $15 up to 5 hours M-SA; $8 up to 5 hours on Sunday.
Be sure to have your parking garage ticket stamped at the reception desk to receive the discount!
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DEC
2014 ISSUE
No. 1
MIDDAY JAZZ MIDTOWN
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Midday Jazz Midtown is a series produced by Ronny Whyte in partnership with Midtown Arts Common. Concerts are 1 hour long, and held on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. at Saint Peter’s Church. A $10 donation is requested.
DECEMBER 2014
Wednesday, December 3, 1:00 p.m.
TERESE GENECCO’S LITTLE BIG BAND
As a solo artist, Terese Genecco is an in-demand Host/MC, comedian, actress, and concert performer and can be seen at many of the world’s finest nightclubs, cabaret rooms, jazz festivals, theaters and concert halls. Visit Terese’s website (http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001hu8Ps3Vx0MFjoZYhFHc2fOZvp4yvlqGI1FsBUi7CA5qbJ69zQzhNNGHRkyT4o9si0SurutstG4gVzx3aOq7WGWEgpHz85PrPhBUxI4AqFMAGLmaVGX-pFGDq1wxHqm28MipWXo_QLj8ehO1Puv5m5oivyJITIlN_NayMri8Ieg8pBNrqvMu99A==&c=YI0xf9jFSBOCyYW_MzvfkRRlxCWJX-VlnSwEvqoqAjm_1yzbsAx3ow==&ch=8uEkru0kwExxU1w9Sh81xNUrAXVLBjCqNLgdUBtpmWw9fVhO4EQ4jA==) .
Wednesday, December 10, 1:00 p.m.
ELTHAM HIGH SCHOOL STAGE BAND
From Melbourne, Australia!
Wednesday, December 17, 1:00 p.m.
YULETIDE CELEBRATION
with Marlene Verplanck, Daryl Sherman, Joyce Breach, Saundra Silliman, Alex Leonard, Boots Maleson, David Silliman, and Ronny Whyte!
Wednesday, December 24, 1:00 p.m.
NO CONCERT — Happy Holidays!
Wednesday, December 31, 1:00 p.m.
NO CONCERT — Happy New Year!
PARKING
Discounted parking is available for all coming to Saint Peter’s Church, at Icon Parking: 51st St. between 3rd & Lex (south side of 51st Street)
Pricing: $15 up to 5 hours M-SA; $8 up to 5 hours on Sunday.
Be sure to have your parking garage ticket stamped at the reception desk to receive the discount!
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Jazz at Saint Peter’s
619 Lexington Ave @ 54th Street
212-935-2200
http://www.saintpeters.org (http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001hu8Ps3Vx0MFjoZYhFHc2fOZvp4yvlqGI1FsBUi7CA5qbJ69zQzhNNN8QIIQbnJgeLqSO_hvpullWNUtjR-Up5eBYyiLAB2tHz0P5a4-f-OQ7rio3rtOzXGHi5EAGYrX40P9YrIx-e2yfmj1QoiD-VdINNT-U5y8-lvlySMqnskU=&c=YI0xf9jFSBOCyYW_MzvfkRRlxCWJX-VlnSwEvqoqAjm_1yzbsAx3ow==&ch=8uEkru0kwExxU1w9Sh81xNUrAXVLBjCqNLgdUBtpmWw9fVhO4EQ4jA==)
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Midday Jazz Midtown: December 2014
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DEC
2014 ISSUE
No. 1
MIDDAY JAZZ MIDTOWN
http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001hu8Ps3Vx0MFjoZYhFHc2fOZvp4yvlqGI1FsBUi7CA5qbJ69zQzhNNN8QIIQbnJgeLqSO_hvpullWNUtjR-Up5eBYyiLAB2tHz0P5a4-f-OQ7rio3rtOzXGHi5EAGYrX40P9YrIx-e2yfmj1QoiD-VdINNT-U5y8-lvlySMqnskU=&c=YI0xf9jFSBOCyYW_MzvfkRRlxCWJX-VlnSwEvqoqAjm_1yzbsAx3ow==&ch=8uEkru0kwExxU1w9Sh81xNUrAXVLBjCqNLgdUBtpmWw9fVhO4EQ4jA==
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Midday Jazz Midtown is a series produced by Ronny Whyte in partnership with Midtown Arts Common. Concerts are 1 hour long, and held on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. at Saint Peter’s Church. A $10 donation is requested.
DECEMBER 2014
Wednesday, December 3, 1:00 p.m.
TERESE GENECCO’S LITTLE BIG BAND
As a solo artist, Terese Genecco is an in-demand Host/MC, comedian, actress, and concert performer and can be seen at many of the world’s finest nightclubs, cabaret rooms, jazz festivals, theaters and concert halls. Visit Terese’s website (http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001hu8Ps3Vx0MFjoZYhFHc2fOZvp4yvlqGI1FsBUi7CA5qbJ69zQzhNNGHRkyT4o9si0SurutstG4gVzx3aOq7WGWEgpHz85PrPhBUxI4AqFMAGLmaVGX-pFGDq1wxHqm28MipWXo_QLj8ehO1Puv5m5oivyJITIlN_NayMri8Ieg8pBNrqvMu99A==&c=YI0xf9jFSBOCyYW_MzvfkRRlxCWJX-VlnSwEvqoqAjm_1yzbsAx3ow==&ch=8uEkru0kwExxU1w9Sh81xNUrAXVLBjCqNLgdUBtpmWw9fVhO4EQ4jA==) .
Wednesday, December 10, 1:00 p.m.
ELTHAM HIGH SCHOOL STAGE BAND
From Melbourne, Australia!
Wednesday, December 17, 1:00 p.m.
YULETIDE CELEBRATION
with Marlene Verplanck, Daryl Sherman, Joyce Breach, Saundra Silliman, Alex Leonard, Boots Maleson, David Silliman, and Ronny Whyte!
Wednesday, December 24, 1:00 p.m.
NO CONCERT — Happy Holidays!
Wednesday, December 31, 1:00 p.m.
NO CONCERT — Happy New Year!
PARKING
Discounted parking is available for all coming to Saint Peter’s Church, at Icon Parking: 51st St. between 3rd & Lex (south side of 51st Street)
Pricing: $15 up to 5 hours M-SA; $8 up to 5 hours on Sunday.
Be sure to have your parking garage ticket stamped at the reception desk to receive the discount!
http://ui.constantcontact.com/d.jsp?m=1102324249101&p=oi
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Jazz at Saint Peter’s
619 Lexington Ave @ 54th Street
212-935-2200
http://www.saintpeters.org (http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001hu8Ps3Vx0MFjoZYhFHc2fOZvp4yvlqGI1FsBUi7CA5qbJ69zQzhNNN8QIIQbnJgeLqSO_hvpullWNUtjR-Up5eBYyiLAB2tHz0P5a4-f-OQ7rio3rtOzXGHi5EAGYrX40P9YrIx-e2yfmj1QoiD-VdINNT-U5y8-lvlySMqnskU=&c=YI0xf9jFSBOCyYW_MzvfkRRlxCWJX-VlnSwEvqoqAjm_1yzbsAx3ow==&ch=8uEkru0kwExxU1w9Sh81xNUrAXVLBjCqNLgdUBtpmWw9fVhO4EQ4jA==)
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Midday Jazz Midtown: December 2014
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
DEC
2014 ISSUE
No. 1
MIDDAY JAZZ MIDTOWN
http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001hu8Ps3Vx0MFjoZYhFHc2fOZvp4yvlqGI1FsBUi7CA5qbJ69zQzhNNN8QIIQbnJgeLqSO_hvpullWNUtjR-Up5eBYyiLAB2tHz0P5a4-f-OQ7rio3rtOzXGHi5EAGYrX40P9YrIx-e2yfmj1QoiD-VdINNT-U5y8-lvlySMqnskU=&c=YI0xf9jFSBOCyYW_MzvfkRRlxCWJX-VlnSwEvqoqAjm_1yzbsAx3ow==&ch=8uEkru0kwExxU1w9Sh81xNUrAXVLBjCqNLgdUBtpmWw9fVhO4EQ4jA==
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Midday Jazz Midtown is a series produced by Ronny Whyte in partnership with Midtown Arts Common. Concerts are 1 hour long, and held on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. at Saint Peter’s Church. A $10 donation is requested.
DECEMBER 2014
Wednesday, December 3, 1:00 p.m.
TERESE GENECCO’S LITTLE BIG BAND
As a solo artist, Terese Genecco is an in-demand Host/MC, comedian, actress, and concert performer and can be seen at many of the world’s finest nightclubs, cabaret rooms, jazz festivals, theaters and concert halls. Visit Terese’s website (http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001hu8Ps3Vx0MFjoZYhFHc2fOZvp4yvlqGI1FsBUi7CA5qbJ69zQzhNNGHRkyT4o9si0SurutstG4gVzx3aOq7WGWEgpHz85PrPhBUxI4AqFMAGLmaVGX-pFGDq1wxHqm28MipWXo_QLj8ehO1Puv5m5oivyJITIlN_NayMri8Ieg8pBNrqvMu99A==&c=YI0xf9jFSBOCyYW_MzvfkRRlxCWJX-VlnSwEvqoqAjm_1yzbsAx3ow==&ch=8uEkru0kwExxU1w9Sh81xNUrAXVLBjCqNLgdUBtpmWw9fVhO4EQ4jA==) .
Wednesday, December 10, 1:00 p.m.
ELTHAM HIGH SCHOOL STAGE BAND
From Melbourne, Australia!
Wednesday, December 17, 1:00 p.m.
YULETIDE CELEBRATION
with Marlene Verplanck, Daryl Sherman, Joyce Breach, Saundra Silliman, Alex Leonard, Boots Maleson, David Silliman, and Ronny Whyte!
Wednesday, December 24, 1:00 p.m.
NO CONCERT — Happy Holidays!
Wednesday, December 31, 1:00 p.m.
NO CONCERT — Happy New Year!
PARKING
Discounted parking is available for all coming to Saint Peter’s Church, at Icon Parking: 51st St. between 3rd & Lex (south side of 51st Street)
Pricing: $15 up to 5 hours M-SA; $8 up to 5 hours on Sunday.
Be sure to have your parking garage ticket stamped at the reception desk to receive the discount!
http://ui.constantcontact.com/d.jsp?m=1102324249101&p=oi
http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001hu8Ps3Vx0MFjoZYhFHc2fOZvp4yvlqGI1FsBUi7CA5qbJ69zQzhNNBg1vPczq6W3pK9YTK5gv7p9ph3RAjtb1HHGlSgBiNDY97IkGxBsiupcPaSKW8FJ8Ht5E-XC15BB6XK2bFdAz6v1DskgMQIAM8YpUZeMYpTp2X1kbIcoyRgZOHisQUd4RgDwT6durpGz&c=YI0xf9jFSBOCyYW_MzvfkRRlxCWJX-VlnSwEvqoqAjm_1yzbsAx3ow==&ch=8uEkru0kwExxU1w9Sh81xNUrAXVLBjCqNLgdUBtpmWw9fVhO4EQ4jA==
Jazz at Saint Peter’s
619 Lexington Ave @ 54th Street
212-935-2200
http://www.saintpeters.org (http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001hu8Ps3Vx0MFjoZYhFHc2fOZvp4yvlqGI1FsBUi7CA5qbJ69zQzhNNN8QIIQbnJgeLqSO_hvpullWNUtjR-Up5eBYyiLAB2tHz0P5a4-f-OQ7rio3rtOzXGHi5EAGYrX40P9YrIx-e2yfmj1QoiD-VdINNT-U5y8-lvlySMqnskU=&c=YI0xf9jFSBOCyYW_MzvfkRRlxCWJX-VlnSwEvqoqAjm_1yzbsAx3ow==&ch=8uEkru0kwExxU1w9Sh81xNUrAXVLBjCqNLgdUBtpmWw9fVhO4EQ4jA==)
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Saint Peter’s Church | 619 Lexington Avenue | New York | NY | 10022
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Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Free Concert at Rutgers Featuring Richard Wyands, 12-3-14
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The Institute of Jazz Studies is presenting our second concert in our 2014-15 concert series called: Jazz Piano: Contemporary Currents. The concert is free and takes place from 2-4 PM in the Dana Room on the fourth floor of the John Cotton Dana Library on the Rutgers-Newark campus. So please join us for the following:
Wednesday, December 3, 2014, 2-4 pm
Richard Wyands
RIchard Wyands is a hard bop pianist best known as a side-man. He began playing in his teens in San Francisco, but later moved to New York City. He worked with guitarist Kenny Burrell in the 1960s and also played in Gigi Gryce’s quintet. He moved to New York in 1958, where he played with Roy Haynes, Charles Mingus, Gigi Gryce, and others. Wyands has also headed his own trios, but has only had a handful of sessions as a leader thus far including a 1978 date for Storyville (Then, Here And Now), a 1992 date for DIW (The Arrival), a 1995 date for Criss Cross (Reunited), as well as sessions for Steeplechase (Get Out of Town), Venus (Lady of the Lavender Mist), and Savant (As Long As There’s Music).
For directions to Rutgers:
—
Vincent Pelote
Interim Director
Institute of Jazz Studies
Rutgers University
Dana Library
185 University Avenue
Newark, NJ 07102
phone: 973-353-5595
email: pelote@rulmail.rutgers.edu (mailto:pelote@rulmail.rutgers.edu)
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA