Archive for September, 2008
Indie labels, major labels, internet business models
Can you have a music platform that doesn’t include the major labels? That’s a big question. The majors are the ones still holding onto the business in the tightest way with the fiercest grip. And they have both the back catalog and the best artists. So saying that you could build some kind of music business without them seems counter intuitive. The money that these guys want for their content just doesn’t equate to a model that breaks even for an internet business. So how do you monetize profitably?
I suspect that there might be answer in pooling together a conglomerate of indie labels. That’s where it feels like the innovation could happen and where you wouldn’t have to negotiate with these sleazy greasy faux-mobster types staring at you with glassy-eyed corruption.
I’m thinking of a model like Hype Machine with a few different components and inputs. I think it starts with a couple key concepts. First, you get the content on the right revenue share. Don’t start with Sony and don’t start with Universal. Instead, I’d focus all of my time on major indies like Merge, Sub Pop, Touch and Go, Mute and a few others. If you can get Merge and Sub Pop, you’re in as far as I’m concerned. Plus, of course, you create some kind of templated ability for unsigned bands to upload their content in a formatted normalized way. That’s not too difficult. We’re circling around a couple of businesses now. It’s Hype Machine probably. It’s also RCRDLBL. Maybe it’s an extension of CD Baby.
Step two is to build a widgetable player. That’s really the key. A simple embedded widget that publishers can use to scroll through a content directory and create playlists of licensed content they like. Single songs or whole mixes. Whatever. The widget also has some ability to present visual advertising in conjunction with the playing of the song. That’s like the new MySpace music and it’s a good idea. Music bloggers, corporate websites, etc where they feel like they have a rich library of content to choose from and that complements their existing content.
Step three (maybe these aren’t in the right order or maybe they all happen at the same time) is of course reaching out to advertisers and convincing them that this is content they’re comfortable with their brand sitting next to. Maybe what this really is is Pandora. Right? You convince advertisers that for their purposes they need to let go of whether it’s a specific band that their advertising is sitting next to and instead get them to buy into these micro-genres that the weirdos at Pandora have created.
“Listen, Mr. Marketing Director at Coca-Cola, for your new youth-oriented site, don’t worry about getting Fall Out Boy. Instead pay us x and Coke will sit next to over 2,000 different bands all of whom have been broadly categorized as ‘hair driven whining with power chords’”
The money is coming from the advertisers for long tail brand distribution that happens in conjunction with a music delivery widget that is essentially an ad-supported player linked to an ever-growing database of content. And, again, the question is: can you get this thing off the ground with a couple major indies as content anchors (like Merge and Sub Pop) and not worry about the price gouging that the majors will try to enforce. And then hope/wait for them to go out of business.
RCRDLBL seems closest to this approach, based on how their site looks right now. But the point, of course, is that it shouldn’t be a ‘site’ but a widget that syndicates out across the ‘Net.
Dear science
David Foster Wallace is gone. That’s heartbreaking. Have you ever read anything that he wrote? He was this wonderful beautiful genius that dug deep into the human mind and came out with something that looked and smelled just like our intricate and interwoven thoughts. Scattered and chaotic and bubbling and incomprehensible.
The world is melting down. These are the things it seems like. Financial markets cratering. Money leaving the system. The economy shrinking. We’re left with confusion. Less money. And maybe the emergence of some new kind of creative energy. Struck raw with humility and an earnest groove. You know we can hope these things.
I’m writing this on the train between New York City and Washington, DC. We’re going to go meet with Congress to discuss the ‘situation’ and reach an effective resolution thereto and hertofore against which we all emerge victorious. I have some contacts at the Pentagon. No. But I’m thinking of the city landscape and I’m thinking of a soft fall rain and I’m thinking that maybe the city will get a little quieter and I’ll hear less about Gwyneth Paltrow. You know what I mean? Like maybe we can all get more real and get to the heart of this living thing. It’s all in your own head. We’ve always known that. Mindfulness meditation. Prayer. Etc.
A very roundabout way to hold up something that is real. I know that Dave Sitek produced the new Scarlett Johannsson record and this undermines my broader point (perhaps) but she did do a Tom Waits-cover album so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been and truthfully I haven’t bothered to take a listen. She’s got enough good things going on. She doesn’t need my patronage. And neither do TV on the Radio. But they get it.
I’m listening on my headphones for the third time and I’m on the train (as I mentioned) and this is one of those times. It’s nice to have them. Other times (for me) include staring at these big Polk speakers that Mike had in our apartment the first time I heard the first disc of Being There and clapping at the end of Hotel Arizona. That was almost ten years ago. But you know what I mean? When a music gets to you. It kind of sits down next to you in your head and your heart at the same time and awakens a possibility and feels like the beginning of something new. That’s how I feel about ‘Dear Science’.
Skittish polyrhythm. Beautiful melodies. Headphone pop with the right use of horns and strings and handclaps and gorgeous backing vocals and the propulsive beats that were always present in the best TVOTR but absent from the worst. Little noodles of jazzy guitar licks in my right ear. Strings in the upper left part of the aurosphere. This is the harmony of a producer with a vision and a group of musicians supple enough to bend themselves to that vwill. The thing it feels most like is Bowie and Eno and Byrne and New York in the late 70′s and also in the early 80′s.
This is an album in that sense of the word. It’s own sense of the word. It captures this time quite eloquently Now. And I feel and believe that maybe it marks a beginning point of something real and important and maybe the city is getting back to its roots. Or not. But maybe I’m getting back to mine.
Have I told you lately that I like the funky beats?
Seven observations
1. There is a palpable sadness in the song ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ that takes it beyond pop music and helps it become something rather transcendent
2. Gin is good but also devilish and we must not trust it.
3. Have you ever tried to catch a falling knife?
4. We must never lose sight of the hand-clap. The human voice and the human sound have a unique texture that is inextricably tied to music.
5. Thus, the snare drum is the sound of the hand clap mechanized.
6. We’re not listening to each other.
7. There are two sides on two sides on all of us pulling our better selves apart and against the inside. On the inside you have the fear and the self-doubt like bound sheets, hard and full and powerful. And on the frayed edges you have the wind stretching out your anxiety like a main sail in a storm.
CD Baby
There’s a couple great companies in the music world and one of them is CD Baby. Derek Sivers is kind of a Seth Godin-style marketing genius that started with a great concept and focused on counterintutive ideas to drive his business model. One of these counter-intuitive ideas is that you should give open and honest accounting to artists. Second idea is you should pay them promptly. This sounds obvious.
Let me tell you, it’s not.
In the old days, when I ran Annex Records in the late 90′s, I quickly realized what a losing proposition the music industry was. Here’s how it worked: you invested tons and tons of money (at least for me and my organization) in recording and production. Studios, CD replicators, PR firms, they don’t really work on terms. You pay them COD. You pay them when you use the service. They get their money. Believe me.
So if you’re a small band and you want to put out a record, you spend a couple grand on all of these things if not more. Then you approach a distributor. You can also make your own distributor by approaching independent record stores and asking them to stock your CD on a case-by-case basis.
But distributors employ people in the music industry. And back then that meant (and still does to a large degree) shady people that do things the way they do them because that’s how they do them and you can go to hell if you don’t like it. So, even when these distributors or independent stores sell a few of your records, you should not hold your breath waiting for the check to come.
Seriously. Please do not hold your breath.
We sent The Long Walk Home off to Redeye Distribution which, back then, worked with a lot of down-on-your-luck-terribly-run-indies like Annex. Two years later, we had sold a small amount of CDs but hadn’t seen a dime from Redeye. Every time I called them some junior intern would send me some inscrutable spreadsheet that literally made no sense. Because I had a background in Finance I felt like I could at least take a stab at deciphering information presented logically. But of course they were designed to be inscrutable. Because they were designed not to pay (at least that’s what I picked up on their behavior at the time). In fact, my hypothesis at the time that a central part of the old Redeye business model was to aggregate a lot of really small bands through their distribution platform and then simply never pay them, counting on the fact that tiny bands wouldn’t have the time or money to collect on just a few dozen CDs sold.
You see the problem? You invest a ton up front and don’t see a return on that investment for over two years. You know what I call that? A bad business.
Contrast that to CD Baby where I’ve been paid multiple times, I can receive clear and transparent accounting any time I want in an easy to read format and I get comprehensive online distribution at a fair price through every major emusic retailer.
CD Baby has a clear focus on empowering musicians and, as a result, they’ve built a loyal base of users and music purchasers. It’s a valuable marketplace for independent music. They have a high ‘net promoter score’ because of the simple and surprising way they treat their music providers and, as a result, the business has grown. Nice job, guys.
Online profile management
I’ve sometimes struggled with how many profiles to manage as part of my online musical presence. I still don’t have the answer. I do know that there are too many places online where you can go somewhere and be part of a ‘community’ and none of them have really resonated with me.
There’s MySpace, still the best website on the ‘Net that I use to discover new music. It’s not exactly a place for making friends and for a long time now it’s been a bunch of people marketing to each other. So you probably won’t sell anything to anyone through MySpace.
But the key to the whole premise is the fact that the player launches the minute you land on a page.
That specific act of being able to passively discover music without having to launch a separate player is the crucial key to MySpace’s success and a powerful model. You’re not locked into an artist’s site. You don’t feel psychologically trapped in the same way that you do when a player launches on a home page. You feel like you’re grazing. It’s a useful experience and I know that most musicians I know are listening to what I’m doing through MySpace.
Meloditician
The reason I’m never going to be an engineer and the reason that engineers and producers and subscribers to Tape Op (including me) will get frustrated with me is that I am almost completely obsessed with melody often to the detriment of the sound.
The melody is the thing for me. The only true and important thing. Maybe I’m just lazy.
So that’s why I lean towards sending out rough mixes. That’s why I’m probably going to post a whole new bunch of demos pretty soon and send them out through the mailing list. That’s why I might not ever be a great mixing engineer and why my eyes will glaze over when we start talking about which microphone we’re going to use for this next take. It’s also why I hesitate to call myself a musician. It’s why I’m always a little out of tune on the guitar.
I’m drawn to the superficial curve of the melody and the emotion behind it. The way that it’s conveyed. And there are plenty of times that you can convey that idea with bad mics and bad sound and bad mixing but nevertheless the feeling and the vibe shine through. The melody is the graceful arc and the ripple of the water in the creek.
It is why I need help on the ‘sound’ front though. Because I’ll be happy with an arrangement that’s only half-way there sometimes. If I feel like the essence is in the right place. It helps to work with a different kind of perfectionist. Someone that can provide the atmosphere and the framework against which the melody can effortlessly sit.
