Archive for November, 2009
Real Data
I had a thought the other day when I was in a cab riding through New York. I saw all these show posters for some bands that are sort of mid-level and I was wondering how those bands were doing. And it may be because I’m on the periphery of things and can’t really tell if this exists or not. But it seems to me that there’s a dearth of real hard objective facts in the conversations that are happening about the music industry.
To put it more precisely, it seems like the music industry has obviously evolved. And there’s a good amount of data at the high end that looks to measure performance for the old industry. That is, CD sales on a national level and attendance and ticket revenue for major venues. But, given that most of the music industry actually happens in the longer tail of clubs, session musicians, and working class musicians, it feels like the data mis- or under-represents what’s happening in the middle market.
Obviously, we’ve all read about how CD sales are declining. And we’ve read about what’s happening with digital sales. But the music industry that I’m part of, and that most of my friends are a part of, isn’t really defined by those statistics or those metrics. Irving Azoff and Jimmy Iovine have nothing to do with with what I, or my friends, are trying to do every day with our music.
Our music industry is probably defined by things like what rates session players are getting for gigs, whether that’s changed from last year, how many days they’re being booked on a time scale, etc. And it’s further defined by the strength of the venues where we play. Madison Square Garden is somewhat interesting. And Bowery Ballroom is more interesting. But even more interesting than that is how clubs like Rockwood, The Living Room, Town Hall, Union Pool, Pete’s Candy Store, etc. are doing. Because if those clubs go out of business, we don’t have anywhere to gig anymore. And if they’re doing well, as I suspect some of them are, then whether or not national CD sales are declining is largely irrelevant.
This is, I think, gettable and useful data. You’d have to build a database of session musicians, of local studios, and of clubs, and you’d have to, by hand, start pulling together a survey that asks those folks how they’re doing, particularly in reference to previous time periods. And then, you’d give survey respondents the aggregate answers to the survey for free and you’d charge for high-end analytics that cuts the data more finely and helps them understand how their business is performing against relevant benchmarks.
Maybe it’s something like if they’re charging too much or too little for drinks. Or if the session guy is charging too much or too little for his gigs. Or if a band is getting below or above average cuts from the door based on attendance.
My instinct is that this data, some kind of monthly index that would be distributed to the middle-market industry players, is both quite valuable and currently unavailable. There may be a business there. A small business. But a service that would be helpful to the people that are actually part of today’s music industry. Not the old guard of the music industry – older dudes in LA and New York that don’t have anything to do with the constant hustle that’s happening every day on the street as artists try to get their music heard.
Heroism and Autobiography as Fiction
Next week, we’re playing our first gig at Piano’s on the Lower East Side. I’m not sure what the sound will be like but I do know that it’s a great club with a great atmosphere. As part of that gig, I decided to do something different and, rather than just get up there and play a show, incorporate a little theater into the show, and perhaps more broadly, the idea of the show.
To that end, we’re calling this next group of shows “An Autumn Symposium”. At first, that’s all it was going to be. Just a little branding mechanism. Something to link the show that we’re playing next Wednesday and then the subsequent gig that we’re playing at Rockwood on Thursday, December 3rd at 9pm.
But then I was remembering that Bronwen, one of the singers in the band and a teacher during the day, had spent all this time a few months ago putting together a course reader for her students and the beginning of the school year. And then I was remembering the old days when John used to work at The Copy Shop and you’d go there or to the book shop above it to pick up your course reader for class and how you’d have all these photocopied pages in your hand, excerpts from books and articles, how that experience felt cool and home-made and like your teacher or professor had spent some time actually thinking about things and was leading you on this strange photocopied path through some place new.
So, anyway, I decided to make a course reader myself and I decided on two lessons for these two shows and the first lesson is going to be “Heroism and Autobiography as Fiction: Themes from Saul Bellow” and I got in touch with noted cultural historian, Frederick Pettigrew, to write an introductory essay. We had coffee on the Upper West Side by Columbia where he teaches. And I told him I was looking about some of the ideas that I had and that I was looking for some kind of introduction to the whole thing, maybe like Nat Hentoff wrote on the sleeve of some Bob Dylan records I remember. You remember those essays that people would write on records in the 60s and 70s. They’d be all beat prose and poetry. Rambling run-on sentences and you’d imagine some horn-rimmed glasses guy with a fuzzy goatee, smoking cigarettes and drinking and sleeping with his students and he’d be a person that people referred to as a “cat” and he’d frequent the jazz clubs and his apartment would be very messy and there would be books everywhere. He’d have written one great novel and then years later a spartan little book of poems and then he’d be working on some translation of an obscure German writer that you’d never heard about and your heart kind of sank when he told you that was what he was working on because it was the same old story, as they say and as you know. That story being the story of squandered youth and unrealized potential.
Doctor Pettigrew understood what I was saying and he wrote this great little essay that you’ll get to read later. And the point of the whole thing is both silly (me being weird) and somewhat serious. And it really does relate to notions of heroism in fiction and what it means and how maybe we misrepresent things second of all and first of all we tell stories to make ourselves the hero. Because we are working our way through life with this concept of heroism which is also about mortality. It’s about meaning. It’s about, “There must be a narrative here that has me doing something heroic at its climax and ultimate moment and that must be why it’s okay that I’ll die and evaporate or dissolve into the earth one day.” And then some older people reading this will perhaps scoff or laugh. Maybe a small chuckle. They’ll say, “Geez, Sam is really dark and a downer and why’s he got to be so darn melancholy.” Which is maybe true but, of course, missing the point. I’m not saying it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m not saying, “It’s so sad that we’re going to die.” I’m saying that people have these concepts of narratives and they give their lives stories and stories have protagonists and the reasons are because the time is finite, not infinite, and we want there to be a story to our lives and a plot.
And in the midst of that are storytellers – singers and songwriters and writers and producers and creative people and also everyone – and we tell big stories and weave in larger narratives and try to make big human truths from these things and the other point of the idea, and specifically pulling from Saul Bellow, is that there are always more sides to a story than the one being presented. And life isn’t neat and doesn’t fit in boxes with brown ribbons up on the shelf in the hall closet. You can say, “Oh, that’s my youth” or something to that effect but that’s now how it works in reality. And when you do say, “Oh that’s my youth” or something to that effect, maybe you shouldn’t be trusted. Because, whether it’s a book or a song or a film or a bunch of people sitting around the metaphorical campfire, you’re still presenting just one side of that story. And it’s not good or bad. We’re all just being human. It just is. And it is and is and is.
So, anyway, that’s what we’ll be presenting in this course reader next Wednesday and there are excerpts from books I’ve been reading. One of them is Becker’s “Denial of Death” that my friend, Mary Ellen, gave me. And then others are from the Bellow books I’ve read this year. And then some stuff from Rilke because that’s always good and, as cliche as it may be, the guy dropped some very beautiful knowledge and reality in his letters. And a few other things. And the first 20 people will get a copy for free and they’ll be strange and weird and you probably won’t read all the way through but you’ll maybe pick up one or two things and then it’s also art and it will have traveled its way into your life somehow.
Enjoy yourselves, mates.
Building Teams
For some reason I have teams and groups on the brain these days. As I wrote, I think that structured collaboration is the key to driving beauty and, ultimately, success in a group context. And, I suppose, I think groups are important in general. And teams. The people you work with. They mean something. They’re important. I still can’t tell, for myself, whether the quality of the team is so important that it trumps the mission of the team.
But I know that it’s really really important to have a productive dynamic with the people you work with.
Teams and groups are important and the ways that people work together in those groups are important and a good team can be bigger than the sum of its parts. Which is a different way of saying that a team of average people that can work really well together is often much more valuable and productive than a team of all-stars that don’t have a working relationship together.
And one thing I’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter at what level you’re operating. You still want to create a team dynamic. And there is no point at which basic human motivations, basic human psychology trumps these notions. There is no point at which you can say, “Well, they’re professionals. It’s their job to create a team dynamic. That’s what they’re paid for.” Well, you can say it, I guess. But it won’t get you very far.
I’m a musician. And I’m a business dude. And I like football. And I am a Washington Redskins fan. And I see Dan Snyder and Vinny Cerrato fundamentally misunderstanding team dynamics when they make decisions. They seem to think that these players they pay for are just cogs in a machine and that you can you swap pieces in and out and ultimately you’ll stumble upon the right combination of players that will win you championships.
But, I guess, I’m making a nurture vs nature argument with teams. And teams are grown. And team dynamics are grown. And you can delude yourself that you can swap people in and out until you discover the combination that wins you awards. And, of course, sometimes you really do need one new piece or two new pieces or what-have-you.
But, really, I think that it’s more likely that with practice and determination and a focus on the long term, the team will emerge. And the people on the team will become better than they might have been otherwise. And constantly shifting and changing the dynamics and the pieces will probably give the impression to the other folks that they’re equally dispensable and the team loses an identity and you start to feel like you’re in those terrible trust-building exercises and that if you close your eyes and fall backwards you’ll crash onto the cold marble floor and your back will hurt very badly.
I remember the Redskins from my youth and the things that stand out, besides the championships, is the great sense of team. The constancy. I know the names of the players. And I also know that some of those players would not have been all-stars on different teams. But they were critical components of the Redskins. Only on a great team can an otherwise average quarterback like Mark Rypien become an all-star and a Superbowl MVP.
I watch the Pittsburgh Steelers play or the Phillies or the Pittsburgh Penguins or the Celtics and I get that same understanding.
Same deal with music, of course. I saw my friends play the other night at the Mercury Lounge and, again, you got that team vibe. You got that idea that these guys had been playing together for years and, as a result, the set was tight, energetic, and powerful. Each player was better for being on that team, in a way that wouldn’t be possible in a different context.
And I guess I’m coming back to the same ideas I’ve been writing about for awhile. That relationships matter. Because relationships are how you create good team dynamics. And that you need to focus on nurturing and building relationships in honest and good ways to create the chemistry that will ultimately lead you to success.
