Archive for September, 2008
Band kibbutz
Bruce Warila is a futurist music blogger and his advice for bands on the internet is to form a consortium that pools resources and works towards a kibbutz-style cooperative online socialism whereby the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Essentially this would be a new type of record label but more where every band is some kind of equal shareholder.
One key hypothesis of this theory is the following from Bruce:
Standalone Artist Websites And Profile Pages Are Not Entertaining
By default, and by the nature of what it is, a website or profile built around ONE artist/band cannot easily compete (but it is possible) with other sources of entertainment like video games, Internet games, Internet radio, 500 television channels, movie downloads, or even with the activity of surfing the Internet, YouTube or MySpace for entertainment.
As a consequence of this hypothesis, he advises:
A gang, a consortium, a syndicate, or an alliance of many artists working together can competitively deliver the WE ENTERTAIN YOU value proposition on the Internet, and more effectively in the physical world. Where a single artist struggles with just being informative on the Internet, numerous artists on a single site are instantly entertaining.
This feels like an interesting premise but strikes me at the gut level as a misreading of how the internet actually works. The concept strikes me as a 2001 Yahoo! business strategy namely – that artificial or manipulated branding and aggregation will trump natural and individual aggregation.
Why? Because, I believe the power of the internet lies not in groups forming together to impose a “group voice” but rather individuals creating a single authentic voice and systems and platforms serving to unite those voices through natural relationships. Meaning, why do I need to ‘form a consortium’ when the same mechanism is accomplished through the simple concept of the hyperlink or through feed aggregators like Bloglines or Google Reader? I know that I don’t really like ‘group blogs’ and drift away from content that looks to aggregate too explicitly. I know that the most powerful voices for me on the internet are single individuals.
It’s might be true that many people working together in some kind of cooperative may be able to further each other’s careers and awareness than just one group working on their own. In the political world, The Atlantic pursues this strategy uniting Andrew Sullivan under an umbrella brand with other bloggers like Megan Mcardle and Ross Douthat. Maybe I’m just too much of an individualist, however, because the idea of having to manage that infrastructure, having to merge those brands and do the marketing to expose those brands, feels like just more work taking me away from what I think should be the primary focus which is songwriting and song creation.
You need a producer
You need a producer. Well, maybe you don’t. But I do. Here’s why.
I remember this part from the Oscars a few years back where they quoted David Mamet. I’m paraphrasing but it’s something to the effect that while everyone else on a film serves a variety of masters, the editor serves only one, the film itself. I think of that when I think of the role that a collaborative producer plays in the creation of art. I also think of it when I hear a director has received final cut on a movie. Typically a red flag. But that’s neither here nor there.
Listen. People need editors. You need someone to tell you when you’ve gone too far. You need someone to stand back from a more objective place and focus on the meat and the essence. The essentialness. As when I wrote that PB helped me reshape a few songs and cut out some fat in the structure.
You need someone to push you. At least I do. I can tend to settle. To accept something less than what I know a work could be. Maybe because I’m lazy. Or maybe because I am so obsessively focused on an ineffability, the song itself, and I tend to discount the other stuff that goes into creating a song. The arrangement. The specific embellishments. Hell, whether I’m in tune or not. Let’s not focus on the tedium shall we?
Songwriting competitions
There is a whole new class of business that seems to be thriving on charging artists to submit to a song competition and then offering as little as possible in return. Seems like a small but profitable idea that I find myself on the losing side of fairly regularly.
I could link the whole night through to examples. The John Lennon Songwriting Competition charges you $30 per song to submit. The International Songwriting Competition does something similar. There are others all charging for submission.
It’s just one funny little component of the new music business. In the old music business, big conglomerates offered you money and you took that money and spent it on things like recording. In the new business, the conglomerates cash reserves are drying up. And the new model is catered to the perpetual hobbyist.
I don’t use hobbyist in a perjorative sense. I just mean that people are less and less deriving the majority of their income from exploiting their original creations. And the funny result of that is that more and more part-timers are entering the music business and, actually, they have a little bit of money and are willing to pay $30 to enter the John Lennon Songwriting Competition in the hopes that they’ll have something to email their friends about and maybe a blurb to add to their bio.
The entire business seems designed to extract little bits of money from artists with the implicit and underlying assumption that these artists will a) have the dough and b) not really need to win any of these things because they have other sources of income.
The counter-argument is: the entrance and submission fees create a barrier that filters out the non-serious and caters explicitly to the serious performer and the serious musician. I understand why that sounds plausible but my gut is telling me it’s not true.
Here’s a maxim for you: Money earned by musicians in the music industry is way down. But money spent by musicians to create music is way up.
Session players and hired guns
Pretty much from the beginning, I’ve pursued a parallel strategy in terms of music creation, mainly based on relationships I’d developed. On the one hand, when I first started writing songs, I was doing it with close friends. On the other hand, I’d known a few more professional sorta folks from my days running a record label and managing H-list artists. And I’d always had the mind to try and make music in a variety of genres and experiment with different forms. So it made sense to try and tinker with different forms of expression while working with different people.
I remember conversations with some old pals during the pursuit of the former path: making music in a ‘band’ with ‘friends’. In the context of the New York music scene, the connotations essentially refer to the capital structure of the brand and the payment arrangement. If you distribute the equity, you’re in a band and you’re doing that because, like in a traditional start-up, you might not have the money. But also because you’re pursuing a more communal vibe where you write the music together, you work on things together. You’re in it together and if you succeed or fail, again, it’s together.
The ‘band’ itself has some definition and some meaning. It’s a group of people.
But on the other hand, there’s the situation where you’re paying the people you work with. One friend used to shake his head when I told him that I recorded some songs for the first Lipstik record where every player was paid a cash fee. My friend believed rather adamantly that you lost something when you hired someone to play music. You lost the feeling. You lost the enthusiasm for the songs because the players had no connection to the song. Maybe. But actually. No. I’m not sure that’s true.
Time passes. The sun and moon rise and set.
Now I’m on a path where I am pretty much fully devoted to the latter path. As they say in Mulholland Drive, no hay banda. There is no band.
National anthem
We recorded on Friday afternoon. I’d been hearing horns on a song called ‘The Ways That We Destroy Ourselves’ which we call ‘Colorado Drugs’ as shorthand. It’s this dark grimy thing that rips off the progression from Hotel California but hopefully turns it into something more sinister. Smells like garbage. A red light bulb swinging by a chord in a subterranean club.
So Paul called Dan Levine. I was pushing for a baritone sax player. There’s a lot in music that has a kinship with fashion and part of that is the way that different sounds, arrangements and instruments come in and out of vogue. Having a full-time sax player in a rock band typically doesn’t actually work although I did always like the late Leroi Moore’s place in the Dave Matthews Band. May he rest in peace.
But then you have bands like O.A.R. Terrible awful creations where the sax players sound like they comes straight from suburbia and don’t realize they’re aping Kenny G in their solos. Kenny G is a melodic dude and I have no real beef with a guy that does his thing well. But aping Kenny G i.e. bad Kenny G i.e. soulless Kenny G. Well that has no place in the world.
The point is that it is my belief that the bari sax is the new flute. That is, the new black. That is, a cool new (not new per se but fresh sounding) instrument that may date itself in a few years but, for the time being, has moved from passe kitsch to urban retro and which, again for the time being, has a new relevance. So the bari sax has an important new place in rock arrangements. That’s my point. And that, also, maybe that new place is really the old place.
Anyway, long story long, we found a bari-sax player to play with Dan on ‘Colorado Drugs’ and on ‘Don’t Look Away’. And Paul said to the guy (Stan Harrison) that we were going for a Radiohead/’National Anthem’ kinda vibe. And Stan said, “Yeah, I played on that tune.”
Which is amazing. But moreso for me given that that song is a formative moment in my musical timespan and that the pulsing dirty blasts of the bari sax in that song are a revelation. They’re like Oscar De La Renta doing animals or something. The reinvention of the saxophone as cool and relevant and urgent.
And now I have that sound on my record with the guy that played it on that record. He and Dan gave it a whirl on ‘Don’t Look Away’ and ‘TWTWDO/Colorado Drugs’ and it sounds beautific. As JL Gato would say, everything comes full circle. Great stuff.
Two ideas
Everyone is talking about the future of musician. Will you be able to make a living in Panos’s “artistic middle class”. There’s an article in PopMatters, referencing Rhodri’s article that I’ve already cited here, addressing this same idea.
There is a meme emerging. One that I am part of and would subscribe to. The idea that an artist-musician can support themselves through the creation of their art is dying. And it’s okay.
The reasons for this dissolution are the overall commodification of recorded music and the corresponding collapse of a music industry predicated on the economic profit derived from marketing and distributing recorded music.
Questions emerge: What does the future hold for artist-musicians? How should an artist-musician relate to the world? What are the economic models that we should think about?
So two ideas.
