This Week in Music Tech

1,000-odd words, once a week, on the state of things in music and technology. Opinions are my own. For bite-size chunks, follow @cortneyharding on Twitter.

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Is SXSW Too Big to Fail?

In a few days, tech folks, music biz folks, and especially music-tech folks start their annual pilgrimage to Austin for yet another SXSW. And right off the bat, I’ll acknowledge that going to a cool city with nice weather to party for a few days is a dumb thing to complain about. I’ve talked to plenty of normal people who would be absolutely jazzed to see a ton of bands, drink free beer, and eat barbeque for a week and do it as part of their job. But for those of us in the biz, with a number of festivals under our belts, SXSW feels like the death march of fun. So many bands! And long lines! And racing all over the city before collapsing in an overpriced AirBNB, only to do it again the next day. And for what, exactly?

SXSW has gotten too big, and even worse, it’s too big to fail. It bring millions of dollars to the city of Austin every year. More and bigger brands throw money at the festival, and turning money down is hard, especially when you employ a big team of people to make sure things run well. The SXSW brand has gotten so diluted that rather than being a place to discover new music and maybe get some business done, it’s about seeing Lady Gaga in a vending machine, or queueing in line for Kanye’s annual “secret” show, or spending half your day texting to try to schedule a meeting before your phone dies.

The festival has fallen into the classic “bigger is better” trap, outlined by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson in their book “Re/Work.” Here’s an example: Harvard could, with their massive endowment and vast landholdings, easily double the size of its incoming freshman class next year. Hell, they could triple or quadruple it, and make even more money. But they don’t, because one of the things that makes Harvard Harvard is just how damn hard it is to get accepted. They could make a bigger profit, but they choose to protect the integrity of the brand.

SXSW didn’t protect the integrity of its brand, simple as that. And now, rather than being a place that feels vital for the best minds in the tech industry and the most vibrant new artists, it’s a massive free for all that feels kinda-fun (see aforementioned bands and beer) at best and obligatory at worst. For startups that don’t have massive budgets, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get lost in the shuffle. Part of the problem is that SXSW doesn’t give companies any guidance -- short of hosting a table in the convention center, there really aren’t official places to go to connect with people who can help you. It just becomes a circle of people pitching each other while screaming over the music in a crowded room. And again, it’s fun -- but really, does your budget allow for a party week?

Music, on the other hand, has shifted away from being a business event and has become just another spring break destination. SXSW can’t do much about this, but I get street-harassed more during my annual week in Austin than I do the other eleven months of the year I live in Brooklyn, and I once got groped watching a show at Stubbs. I’m honestly shocked there isn’t more crime at SXSW, given the massive numbers of drunk people crammed into a relatively small space, and I guess kudos to the Austin PD for that.

For the bands, SXSW seems like a bum deal. You wind up playing a ton of shows, half of which might not even be at proper venues, with no time to soundcheck and short sets. You’re also up against dozens of other shows, a few of which are usually headlined by superstars. Bands this year might actually have it a little easier given the lack of banner headliners (aforementioned Kanye gig aside), but there are still too many damn shows. Most people wind up going to see bands they already know and like, or just sticking with stuff that’s likely to be decent -- it’s easier to just sit at the Fader Fort all day and know that most of what you see will be good and buzz-worthy than to go out and take risks.

And then there are the brands, which seem more and more clueless and inappropriate every year. Converse? Makes sense. Beer sponsors? On brand. McDonalds? Really? We’ve hit a point where every CMO just wants to check the “millennials” box on a list and SXSW is the perfect place to do it. Just stick some buzz bands in front of a food truck (kids like those, right?) and your brand will be redeemed in the eyes of the twenty-somethings.

The only way for SXSW to save itself at this point is for it to shrink radically, which won’t happen -- it brings in too much money, and for better or worse, still draws huge crowds every year. No other festival even comes close, although plenty are trying. But at least if it shrunk, and pivoted a bit, it might have a point again.

Why are people even going to SXSW anymore? No one “discovers” bands there -- that’s what we have the internet for. No one gets deals done there because no one ever makes it to their meetings. Tech startups all chat with one another, but they can do that in the Bay Area and New York all the time anyway. Again, bands and beer equals fun, sure, but then it’s just like Coachella or ACL or Bonnaroo, just more spread out.

It won’t happen next year, or even ten years from now, but eventually SXSW will implode and have to start anew. It’s a shame it got to the point where it’s at now, but if nothing else, it might provide a valuable lesson to other music and tech upstarts -- focus on growing smarter, not faster.

On another note: see you all in Austin! Shiner Bocks and ribs are on me!

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Popping the Bubble

That tech people and music people live inside rarified bubbles should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. If you’ve ever set foot in Silicon Valley, or Brooklyn, or Hollywood, you know just what I’m talking about -- young, over-educated people jabbering on about a hot new app or band. When they leave that bubble, it’s usually to marvel at how gosh-darn quaint everything is -- “look, Tim, a phone that’s not a smart phone.” “Wow, Betty, compact discs. I thought these things disappeared ten years ago!”

I get it, and I’m as guilty as anyone. I’m in India right now (and I promise this won’t be another “white person goes to India and has feels” post) and on the way here, Air France lost my bag. A conveyer belt broke in Paris, and it took three days for my stuff to finally get to me. Meanwhile, I was waiting on hold and posting tweets that took hours to answer. Ten years ago, I probably could have shrugged all this off. Now, I was furious. The last time I was in California, I rode in a car THAT DROVE ITSELF. You’re telling me a conveyor belt broke and that was what screwed everything up so royally? Really?

And that’s light years ahead of India, which is great in many ways but somehow hasn’t figured out that roads should maybe have lanes and they’re not appropriate places for cows, humans, and dogs to wander around. I know I sound like an awful spoiled Western brat, but after coming close to death by bull-hitting-car, it’s a little hard not to be a tiny bit critical.

I mention all this because we, as music tech people, need to stop and recognize that we’re way, way ahead of everyone else (or behind, if you’re one of those people). A buddy of mine shared some work he’d done recently with me, and he found that huge numbers of people still listen to terrestrial radio. Still! With the annoying ads and silly DJs and ten song playlists, people still listen. There are times when I feel like a manic cult leader repping streaming music apps -- a better way is possible! You don’t have to live like this! You can’t possibly enjoy hearing that jewelry store ad again, can you?

But I guess people...do. The vast majority of the world is OK with stupid ads on the radio, with equipment that breaks and takes ages to fix, with driving next to cows. Every so often, though, something breaks through this and a new technology does really change the game. Netflix is an example of this; Uber (for better or worse) is another. But so far nothing in music has come close. Spotify has come close, but so far the only market it has managed to conquer is the Nordics -- great, but not representative of the wider world.

The biggest problem facing music startups right now is not artist payouts, or label deals -- it’s the fact that they are just too damn insular. I’ve been to many streaming service offices, and most people there are under forty and live in major cities. Spotify has hundreds of people in NYC but as far as I know, only one person in Nashville. The might have campus reps at more rural schools, but those kids only focus on converting other students, not the townies.

I originally had high hopes for Beats to crack the mainstream, because their marketing played so close to the center. They had football stars and Ellen DeGeneres on their side; how better to hit middle America? Alas, they also had a too-clever-by-half product and quickly disappeared into Apple-land -- it remains to be seen what their new iteration will look like, and what sort of traction it’ll get. Every other company reeks of cool, which is fine if all you want to capture is that market, but I’m guessing they want bigger things.

It all comes down to this -- was the lack of on-demand streaming music really that big of a problem for most people? For people like me, it was huge, and I’d be really bummed if it went away. But for most people, who still listen to the radio and have maybe shifted to Pandora...maybe it wasn’t a big deal. Maybe streaming services are solving a problem where there wasn’t one to begin with.

This gets back to my central point -- we all need to start getting outside the bubble more. It can help us manage expectations (or make us more driven to solve problems) and it should help shape our thinking when it comes to the problems we actually need to solve. There’s of course the Steve Jobs and Henry Ford school of thought that customers aren’t smart enough to know what they want and need to be told what they need, but I don’t think works most of the time.

All I know is this -- despite everything, the world is still moving really slowly. Ubiquitous wi-fi service is still a fantasy (at least, it’s my fantasy). There are no apps to track lost luggage and airlines can and will just disconnect your calls and ignore your tweets. People still shrug and listen to the morning zoo. Those of us who want to solve this would do well to realize that we’ve got the bring the rest of the pack with us, and find a way to communicate openly with them and show them a better way is possible. Otherwise we risk staying in our bubbles, on the grid and yet fully disconnected from reality.

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How to Make Live Music Suck Less

First off, this is worth a read, if just for laughs: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/theslice/live-music-is-terrible

This piece is written by a comedian and clearly he overstates the case for effect. But I spent the weekend in Nashville for the Pollstar conference, and when I wasn’t falling on ice (free idea: Uber for CLEARING YOUR FUCKING SIDEWALKS), I was talking to people about live music and seeing bands (and one very weird award show).

Fundamentally, the live music space is broken for many of the same reasons most of the music industry is broken -- strip away all the apps and new distribution channels and nothing has changed for the past forty or so years. Venues are still generally cavernous spaces with very limited seating and bands at 9/10/11pm, with half hour breaks between each set. Buying tickets is a pain in the ass, with scalping, sites that crash all the time, and a big supply and demand mismatch for most shows. If there has ever been a show in the history of live music where the venue’s capacity exactly equalled the number of people who wanted to see the show, I’d be shocked. Instead, you get sold-out shows with tons of people shut out, or undersold shows where money is lost. You’ve got overpriced drinks, surly bouncers, and shitty sightlines, not to mention all manner of assholes in the crowd. It’s enough to make you want to spend your money on the approximately one million other options you have if you’re young, have some spare cash, and live in a decent sized media market.

Live shows usually suck, and yet, when they’re great, they’re brilliant. I did some back of the envelope math and I’ve seen probably about a thousand live shows in my time, and can recall maybe twenty or thirty of them with any real clarity. But seeing Liz Phair do “Exile in Guyville” all the way through, or PJ Harvey play the old Knitting Factory, or Lykke Li play for a hundred executives at Mercury Lounge...it’s pretty goddamn amazing. So I keep going, hoping that out of all the terrible to forgettable bands I slog through, there will be another memorable show.

All this said, here are some ways to change the live experience for the better:

Make the shows easier to find. When I was getting ready to go to Nashville last weekend, I thought I’d see if any good bands were playing while I was there. Sounds easy enough. After a bunch of time digging through their local alt-weekly’s site, I gave up -- I couldn’t get the information I needed to establish whether or not any bands I liked (or would like) were playing. And I’m a pretty big music fan, and willing to do the research.

There are apps for this, of course, like Songkick and Bandsintown. But how about syncing up a TripIt account with a ticketing company that can then tell me what shows I might like to check out while I’m traveling. I’d also love to be able to see a list of what the most-buzzed-about new bands are and when they’re playing my market -- I already know that I like what I like, but I want to be able to see new things before they totally blow up.

Start shows earlier. I tried to find the blog post an artist wrote about this a while back but the internet ate it. Regardless, clubs are leaving huge amounts of money on the table by ignoring an older audience that can’t stay out til midnight because they have kids and regular jobs. Start the show at 8pm, so people have enough time to get out of work and eat something, two bands on the bill (sorry, third opener, but no one is watching you anyway), quick set changes, wrap it all up by ten. Done and done.

I realize that this won’t work for, say, Avicii. But for legacy acts this is a great way to cater to their fan base without making it a huge struggle for them to come out.

Shorter transition times. I started going to see live music in 1995. Twenty years later, with all the technological advances, it still takes half an hour between bands. And yes, I know that this is to give people time to go to the bar, because that’s where clubs make their money. But it also turns away plenty of customers; go back to the blog post I wrote about the NEA study, where one of the biggest reasons people gave for avoiding events was that they had no one to go with.

I go to plenty of shows solo, just because I go to so many and it can be hard to rally someone for every gig, especially when your friends are getting older and having kids (see point above). I’m used to it and don’t care all that much, but standing around by yourself for half an hour between bands blows. So plenty of people wind up skipping the show.

To deal with the smaller window for drink sales, venues can add more drink stations. The costs would be slightly higher, but better attendance would likely balance it out.

Rethink the room. The vast majority of live venues are big rooms with no place to sit down. That’s been the way we watch live music for years, but no one has ever stopped to ask if that’s the best way to watch music. I don’t have a solution, but it’s worth stepping back and questioning conventional wisdom. I’m a fan of venues with bleacher seats, like the old Northsix in Brooklyn; any place that allows a short person like me to get above the crowd is great.

Because the live music biz isn’t imploding like the recorded music biz, it’s easier to be complacent and think the money will keep rolling in. But it’s also good to start looking for fixes early, so when venues find themselves behind the eight ball, they won’t collapse.

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Free piece of advice for musicians: if you want to lose a room, the easiest way to do it is by taking minute long pauses between each song. I saw this TWICE in the three days I was in Nashville. Don’t do this.

[thisweekinmusictech]

On QTrax, Snapchat, and Self-Driving Cars

Two interesting music/tech news tidbits came across the wires this morning, seemingly unrelated. The first is that Snapchat, which I know is more than a platform for topless teen selfies these days, is interested in partnering with Apple to buy Big Machine. The snarky part of me feels like Evan Spiegel is doing this to hook up with/get back together with Taylor Swift, but the more I thought about, the more it kind of made sense. More on that below.

The other big story is the supposed launch of QTrax (hello 2008!) with a totally free, ad-supported, Facebook style model. Much like Beyond Oblivion, QTrax is best known for throwing awesome parties and never launching, and also for lying about having deals with labels. But now they are promising a release with 30% of equity going to artists and no paid tiers, claiming that Facebook is able to rely completely on ads, and they should be able to as well.

Here’s the flaw in that logic, though: Facebook doesn’t pay any of their content creators. All my photos and posts and funny comments on links are done for free. I also don’t get paid to tweet or post photos on Instagram. I find myself more drawn to my social media feeds than my blog feeds, especially on weekends and holidays, because blogs don’t update that often. This is a good thing in theory -- bloggers are employees and should have time off -- but if I just want to consume content, my Instagram feed is better bet than my Pulse feed at any given time.

Here’s the sneaky/brilliant/messed up (depending on your perspective) thing about all these companies -- they amass tons of content and don’t have to pay a dime. I’m not a great Instagram photographer (OK, I’m actually pretty bad), but there are people out there who are, and Instagram still doesn’t pay them anything. They make money tangentially, from other companies. The most famous dogs on Instagram aren’t making money on their photos -- they’re making money doing product placements and appearances. Ditto for Twitter; while they might have thrown some cash at celebs in the early days, they probably haven’t paid out anyone in ages, because they don’t need to. People can just make money by having big followings on Twitter, but if they are getting paid to actually write tweets, it’s by someone else.

So, if we follow this logic, what’s not to say the next step isn’t just using socials to distribute music and using that as a platform to make money doing other things (touring, endorsements, etc)? Soundcloud was arguably at the forefront of this -- tons of people were willing to post their music for free and then try to make money elsewhere. The problem was mostly with the user experience -- Soundcloud never got as big as any of the other social platforms and never quite became the place for music discovery. Maybe if they’d built in a Pandora-like functionality they could have cracked a more mainstream audience.

Part of what hampered Soundcloud was the fact that they had to deal with a copyright system that hasn’t caught up with the new digital reality. I say this as someone who believes in copyright but also knows that it can stand in the way of creativity. Presenting someone else’s work as your own is obviously wrong, but sampling and remixing are greyer areas, and on a platform like Soundcloud, you can get bogged down pretty quickly.

This all brings me back around to Snapchat and Apple and Big Machine, and why if this deal happens, it could be groundbreaking. There would be no more third parties standing in the way, and the content could flow directly from the creator to the audience, with the artist monetizing off ancillary revenue streams. I’ve long advocated for streaming services to do direct deals with artists, and this could be first in a number of deals between creators and platforms.

Even if the Snapchat deal does happen, things won’t change for a while. Outside the digital music bubble, there are plenty of people still buying CDs and listening to terrestrial radio, and labels still control radio promotions with an iron fist. But kids these days are sneaky, and consuming content in very different ways. A woman who hosts goofy YouTube shows is just as famous with teens as a boy-band star. Snippets of content (seven second videos, 140 characters tweets) are as important as three minute pop songs. Audio quality is a low priority -- explain the Pono player to a teenager and they’ll just laugh.

I don’t think QTrax will succeed because, come on, it’s QTrax, and because it’s too early. We’ve got at least another generation before everything turns into wonderful nineties-era DIY dream where we’re all just creating and swapping content on the side, and making money other ways.

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The other big recent Apple news is the self-driving car, which I would buy as soon as it came off the lot, because I bet it’ll be awesome. Again, it’s still a ways out, but here’s my hot take on the matter: the self driving car will kill terrestrial radio. Most people listen to the radio in the car because they want traffic reports (which won’t matter if Waze is driving you) and because they can’t do anything else in the car -- read, text, etc (or at least, they shouldn’t do these things). Self driving cars mean that you can read the paper rather than listening to snippets of news between songs. It means you can scroll through feeds, or play games, or watch TV or movies -- all of which will compete with music for your time. Of all the things that will be disrupted by self-driving cars, including millions of jobs, radio is low on the totem pole -- but worth watching regardless.

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Why the Music World Isn't Flat (Yet)

I travel internationally a handful of times a year, and each trip usually has a few “the world is flat” moments. I talked baseball with a cab driver in Japan! I flew to Africa and wound up in a hipster motorcycle shop/coffee bar just like the one three blocks from my house! I watched a movie, starring French people, about young artists in Brooklyn, in Paris. Basically, every trip I have a handful of those moments where I think “we’re all connected. Deep down, we’re just humans! Borders are just social constructs (drawn by British men after wars, sometimes).”

But while all this is lovely, and should definitely get me a New York Times column and a book deal, it doesn’t quite translate when it comes to music and entertainment and tech. The west (which I’m defining here mostly as the US, Canada, and the UK) export the lion’s share of music and film culture to the rest of the world -- and we don’t really reciprocate. Even with all our connectivity, our more open and fluid digital culture, non-English speaking acts are still categorized as “other” in the US.

That doesn’t mean they can’t reach some level of success -- Juanes, for example, sells out Madison Square Garden and the Staples Center. But only one critic out of hundreds surveyed voted for him in the Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll last year. Maybe it wasn’t a great record (full disclosure -- I’m not a huge fan myself) but it was a big release for many people. I’ve been to some Latin shows, and I’m probably one of a small group who doesn’t speak any Spanish. Ditto for the K-Pop show I attended a few years back -- the audience was almost entirely Korean, Korean-American, a few nerdy white dudes, and me.

Meanwhile, Western artists can go to Seoul and pack clubs, despite not speaking the language. Taylor Swift can sell out any arena in the world, but the Taylor Swift of China, or Russia, or Brazil would only attract a niche audience in the US, unless she sang the bulk of her songs in English. And even then, she’d still be boxed in as a “fill-in-the-blank-ethnicity star” rather than just a pop star.

We’re more mixed and more connected than ever, and yet the default in almost all genres remains Western and English-speaking. Part of this is dependent on how widely spoken English is in many parts of the world, whereas in the US, learning a second language if you’re a native English speaker is seen as a privilege, not the norm. Part of it is the high regard in which many people still hold American culture -- I’ve visited every continent except Antarctica, and when I mentioned I lived in Williamsburg, everyone know what that meant. People love New York and Brooklyn everywhere.

But this myopia has downsides for music, tech, and the music biz. If we’re so hung up on English-speaking artists and “othering” everyone else, we’re missing out on some amazing music. K-Pop’s not my thing, but it’s incredible to watch and could have big implications for Western pop artists if they were influenced by it. There’s probably some smoking hot singer in a developing country right now who could make a label millions of dollars and sell a ton of soda in some great branding deal -- but because labels have a narrow view of talent, they’ll miss out.

Tech suffers from this as well -- many of the problems tech companies solve are those endemic to the Bay Area and New York. Which isn’t to say some can’t become global brands -- Facebook and Twitter are the most obvious cases here. But if we limit our scope to first world problems, we miss out on opportunities to solve even bigger issues and potentially disrupt massive industries.

I’m not talking about taking all the bros coding away at apps to deliver your dry cleaning and tasking them with solving malaria, either (although that’s a good idea). One startup I’m obsessed with right now is Snapscan, out of South Africa -- it’s an app that allows you to settle a bill by snapping a QR code. Because mobile commerce is so huge in Africa, it’s been able to thrive in its home market, while companies that have tried to do this in the US have failed. But if Snapscan or another firm like it succeeded, it could disrupt payment as we know it -- no more waiting in line at the grocery store (or the merch table, to bring it back to music). You could buy tickets by snapping a code on a poster. Hear an artist’s music in an ad, take a pic of the screen, and donate a few bucks.

I’m really fascinated by the next emerging markets, like India, China, and Nigeria (specifically Lagos). My hope is that we can develop a two-way music and culture exchange -- these markets have tons of young people and are primed to consume music from the west, but they also have a ton of talented artists who influences are totally different than those of kids in US. A few episodes ago on Broad City, Ilana envisioned a future where we’re all “caramel and queer;” hopefully music can be integrated globally by then.

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Sponsored content (whee, just like Buzzfeed!): My awesome day job, Muzooka, just launched the Partner Platform, and it’s seriously pretty great. Obviously I’m super biased, but this is a nice case where a startup actually solves a real problem. Basically, it’s a way to keep all your demos in one place, as opposed to links in tons of emails or CDs in a pile. The Partner Platform also allows Muzooka’s listener community to vote on tracks and move them to the top of the pile, so you can figure out what’s good, fast. And it’s totally free for everyone involved. Great for venues, managers, labels, and more. More info at muzooka.com.

[thisweekinmusictech]

Music Tech's Long, Cold Winter

An update on last week’s post: there were some pretty good discussions on Twitter and elsewhere, most of which were civil and interesting. Over at Billboard, Andrew Flanagan dug deeper and reported that, according to YouTube, artists who choose not to be part of Music Key would still have right to use Content ID and pull down any or all of their music, should they choose to. Assuming YouTube doesn’t reverse course, it all seems pretty cut and dry -- artists have the right to stay and be part of Music Key, or pull their content and go elsewhere.

I’ve also started hearing rumblings of an artist backlash against Soundcloud’s plans to monetize by putting audio ads at the start of tracks. The logic of all this is a little curious -- how do artists, who presumably want to get paid, think Soundcloud is going to make money? Magic? Sorting out who gets what from the massive numbers of remixes and covers on Soundcloud is going to take a ton of time, and I expect many DJs are going to feel dissatisfied when it’s all over. Some have predicted that this might be a bad year for Soundcloud, and while I’m reserving judgement, they seem to have lost their way a bit recently.

In fact, most of music tech seems to be in a funk right now. Streaming just seems to chug along, with Spotify becoming ever-more-dominant (my guess is that Jay-Z will wind up selling WiMP to them at some point; those Nordic subscribers are probably worth some money). Beats is in limbo until we hear more from Apple, and other services will probably consolidate or disappear. Meanwhile, I still talk to plenty of people who are perfectly happy to just use Pandora and suffer through a few ads in order to have background music all the time. Some smaller companies are doing some cool things (including the company that I work for, Muzooka; look for an announcement soon), but overall, things feel kind of stale.

I’d love to go back and take the 30,000 foot view for a minute -- what problems are we solving, exactly? In terms of distribution, streaming has likely come as far as it’s going to without some pretty big structural changes. All-you-can-eat music is pretty worthless without affordable, universal data coverage, but there’s nothing Spotify can do about that. Wi-fi enabled cars appear to be even closer (I fell for the Chevy ad during the Superbowl as well) but we’re still far away from a connected world. The biggest problems are still structural -- my beautiful iPhone 6, my lifeline to the world, is still useless when I’m overseas or in certain parts of Manhattan.

I’ve often said that streaming is going to wind up being just another format in a long line of formats for music distribution, but now I think it’s going to stick around longer than I originally thought. I might be the only person on earth who is sad that Google Glass flopped, not because the current iteration looked good or had any real promise, but because of what it represented. It could have led to a world of radical transparency, where the whole world really was watching, and listening, and paying attention. I still think seeing the world through another person’s eyes is a great concept, and could have been huge for music. I could have clicked on a livestream of a show down the block, or half a world away. I could have watched music being made in real time, or seen what it’s like to play for a crowd of thousands. Maybe Glass was just too early for its own good.

The live space still seems oversaturated and underserved, with enough apps to tell me what bands are in town on any given evening to fill a phone, but very few to tell me which I’ll like or help me have an enjoyable experience. Most venues continue to focus on attracting a younger crowd without realizing just how much money they’re leaving on the table by not hosting shows that start earlier and feature some creature comforts. I’d also still love to be able to just put on a show in the background and see what a certain band sounds like live before I commit to seeing them, or watch a show I missed because of a work or family commitment.

What I’m most excited about are innovations outside of the music space, and how they’ll impact how we consume music and other content in the future. Twitter was in no way a music app and yet it has radically revolutionized the way we interact with artists; ditto YouTube, Instagram, Vine, etc. Right now I’m really interested in mobile payments startups, mostly because waiting in line at stores is an unnecessary waste of time in this day and age. Will the ability to pay with a click have any impact on how we consume music, especially now that we’ve moved away from purchasing physical copies of albums anyway? Certainly concert tickets could be sold via codes on posters and ads, and of course merch sales would be easier than ever. One-click IRL shopping also allows for more impulse buying -- people waiting in long lines often just give up and decide they don’t really need an item, and mobile payments reduce that friction.

People also hate on the sharing economy, sometimes with good reason, but it could have transformative effects on how artists tour and make music. There’s an “Airbnb for gear” now, which could allow many more low-income artists to start making music and even touring. The sharing economy also allows artists to monetize their apartments and cars when on the road, providing a nice little income boost.

Will the next big thing in music come from inside the space, or somewhere totally unexpected? I don’t know, but I do hope something cool comes soon -- it’s getting a little dull over here.

[thisweekinmusictech]

Sign This Label Deal or We'll Shoot The Dog

Like everyone else, I read Zoe Keating’s blog post about YouTube Music Key’s contracts last week. I was a little turned off by her “I’m a struggling artist! Who met Eric Schmidt at Davos last year!” vibe, but I’ll give her credit for shining some light on the inner workings of these deals. From my vantage point, the deal YouTube is offering isn’t bad -- they’re helping artists monetize, claim their work, and make sure their catalog is complete. If artists want a real alternative to Spotify, Music Key could be the solution. At minimum, having another strong player in the market will create competition, which artists can then use to their advantage to negotiate better deals. A monopoly in the streaming space helps no one.

I also spent some time last weekend watching the flawed-but-still-interesting “Sonic Highways.” The Seattle episode was one of the better ones, but when I saw the inevitable picture of Nirvana on the cover of Rolling Stone with Kurt in his “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” shirt, I felt...rage.

Because here’s the thing with these contracts -- artists don’t have to sign them. I’ll say it one more time, for emphasis -- if someone presents you with a contract you don’t like YOU. DON’T. HAVE. TO. SIGN. IT.

No one forced Nirvana to sign to Geffen back in the day. All members of the band were adults who made the choice freely and decided to put their signatures on paper. They could have stayed on Sub Pop and grown into a respected indie band. They could have quit the band, gone back to school, and had other jobs. They weighed the pro’s and con’s and took the money. So it now rings a little hollow when I hear interviews with Kurt Cobain talking about how much he hates being a rock star, because no one made him become one. And yes, I know he struggled with depression and substance abuse and that clouded his thinking, but being smart enough to engineer posing on the cover of Rolling Stone while dissing corporate magazines is the very definition of having your cake and eating it too, and you gotta be of sound and savvy mind to pull that off.

As for Zoe Keating, if she finds the YouTube contract unsatisfying, she can and should refuse to sign it. If an artist wants to keep their music off streaming, that’s their decision, although I personally think it’s a silly one. But if you want to release your music on flash drives hidden around the world and have your fans go on scavenger hunts to find them, or only release CDs at Target, or whatever, that’s your prerogative. If you’re willing to accept that fewer people will hear what you’re working on, or discover you, or that you’ll likely make less money, fine.

Some people have said that Google is acting as an 800lb gorilla in this situation, and they are totally right. And water is wet, and snow is cold. Sometimes little guys have to deal with big, heartless companies if they want to accomplish a certain thing. I would love to have a custom mortgage that worked just for me, but Wells Fargo doesn’t offer that. My husband and I weighed the decision of signing a deal that we didn’t love against the benefit of owning our apartment, and came down on the side of ownership being a higher priority for us. Other people might decide the benefit doesn’t outweigh the cost and keep renting, or look for another deal.

I’ve been seeing a lot of non-music tech articles that that all seem to have the same general theme: “why can’t I have everything I want exactly when I want it?” I watched a woman throw a fit because she couldn’t bring her toddler into a bar a while back. I heard another person complain about not getting promoted at work because he left at 5pm to go running every day.

Guess what -- you don’t always get what you want all the time. You get the toddler OR the bar. You get the promotion OR you get to take off and go the gym whenever you want. There’s no “right” choice in any of those scenarios, but there are choices.

So if you want your music to reach millions of people, you might have to sign a label deal whose terms you don’t love. You might have to play nice with streaming partners you find distasteful. You might have to do boring interviews with inept journalists, or play concerts when you’re jetlagged or hungover, or wear dumb outfits and dye your hair and shill for products. If you don’t like, no one is forcing you to do any of it. In the old days, with very limited distribution pathways, it was a little harder to go it alone; now, it’s a million times easier to make your own rules if you don’t love the options in front of you.

But it’s really not worth using a deal you don’t like as a personal brand building exercise. If you hate major labels, sign to an indie. Release music by yourself. Drive an Uber and rent your place on AirBNB when you’re on the road and play small clubs. Will you make millions of dollars and headline Coachella? No. But if what you have to do to get there is antithetical to your beliefs, then those things won’t make you happy anyway.

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No dogs were harmed in the writing of this blog post. My dog would like you to know that I did not pay attention to her while I wrote this and, as such, am a bad dog-parent.

[thisweekinmusictech]

Why You Should Be Able to Snapchat at the Ballet

The NEA recently released the results of a ten year long study, finding that rates of attendance at arts events dropped from 2002-2012. In 2002, 39.4% of US adults attended what they define as a core arts events (opera, jazz, classical music, ballet, musical theater, plays, art museum and gallery visits); in 2008 it was 34.6% and in 2012 it was 33.4%. The declines occurred across all age groups except for those 65 and older. 

On the other end of the spectrum, Drew Magary over at Deadspin wrote a piece about getting his kids to watch sports in an age of constant distraction. He admits that football is programmed perfectly to allow people to tune in and out, checking Twitter and fantasy scores during the innumerable commercial breaks and timeouts. He goes on to bemoan the endless round of new and complicated rules, and concludes that football might be done in by being overcomplicated and losing the casual viewer, who just wants to watch in-between smartphone time. 

I bring up both these things because I think they’re interconnected, in a strange way. What younger consumers want, more than anything, is interactivity. They want all their friends to know about the show they’re seeing, the game they’re watching, the food they’re eating. And while the older generation can bray endlessly about putting phones away and paying attention, kids don’t see it like that. Instagramming a pic doesn’t take anything away from whatever it is they’re supposed to be paying attention to -- it adds to it.

Rock shows have adapted to this remarkably well. I’m old enough to remember when venues had no-camera policies -- today that would seem laughable. And yeah, it’s annoying to watch a show through someone else’s iPhone -- but it’s equally annoying to be stuck behind some tall person and unable to see, or next to some drunk girl who sings along loudly. It’s the cost of doing business.

Other forms of live music and theater haven’t caught on. Taking out your cellphone at the opera, the ballet, or the symphony is tantamount to standing up and starting the wave. You can maybe sneak in a quick tweet or pic before the curtain goes up, and then you go into a black hole. And while you can check your phone in most museums, many also forbid taking pictures of the art.

An aside: many museums are terrible user experiences, and I’m guessing they are going be disrupted in the next 10 years or so. I went to the Met a few weeks ago and it was basically a battle to get through throngs of people to maybe glance at a painting for five seconds before getting pushed away. With the rise of better, clearer screens, I’d honestly prefer to spend time examining a painting on my tablet than standing in line for hours just to look at the Mona Lisa for almost no time. Inactive exhibits are great and non-replicable experiences, but I think the standard “shuffle around and stare at paintings behind a rope” experience is not long for this earth.

Another aside, then back to music: movie theaters are just as bad, and as soon as studios start releasing on-demand and charging $20 to let people watch when they want, they’ll be boarded up. I’ve wanted to see “Wild” for the last few weeks, but the screening times at my local theater are inconvenient; I want to be able to stop and restart if I please; and most importantly, I want to socialize. Again, screens in a theater will get you booted. But I want to be able to text all my friends who have equally strong feelings about it, because that sharing is a big part of the experience for me.

Back to music -- if opera, classical, etc want to grow their younger audiences, they have to make their content more shareable. As beautiful as I find Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, maybe they’re not the best venues for these performances all the time. Concerts in the park are a great place to start, but I think performing non-traditional pieces in non-traditional spaces would be a great way to attract younger viewers.

  The length of many of these events is another issue. I know this will lead to much pearl clutching, but most operas are too long. I like the opera, but asking someone to sit for four hours is a lot to ask, especially from kids who are used to constant movement and interaction. I don’t have a great solution, aside from editing the programs, and I realize that will take away a lot of elements of the story.

Another idea is to make these types of media less event-focused. One of the main reasons cited in the NEA study that people give for not attending performances is that they lack someone to attend with. Offering a live stream of the event where people could pay to watch from home is a suggestion I’ve long offered for rock events, and it could work for classical events as well. Using new media to reach out to younger audiences (a Snapchat story about art) is always worthwhile, and making events easier to share could keep younger audiences engaged.

It all boils down to this -- we now almost always have the option to do something else if what we’re currently consuming isn’t holding our interest. I’m not a big fan of forcing people to sit through something just for the sake of perceived moral fortitude -- I’d much rather meet them halfway to give them an enjoyable, if non-traditional, experience. If you keep forcing people to consume content only on your terms, pretty soon you’ll just force them away.

[thisweekinmusictech]

The Death of the (Musical) Middle Class

With the publication of Ethan Kaplan’s totally brilliant “Generic Article About Spotify” a few weeks ago, I thought we’d truly hit the limit on how many ways we could skin the streaming cat. But alas, here’s comes noted old white man and Pink Floyd member Nick Mason to complain about Spotify (and Apple. How cute, he thinks it’s 2006!) They don’t pay artists. They “devalue” music. Only one more cliche and I get a bingo!

Here’s what this is really about, and here’s why the people who complain about streaming tend to fit a certain profile -- they used to make tons of money off music, now they don’t, and that’s not OK. They love to trot out the idea of the “middle-class artist” as something that needs to be preserved at all costs. Here’s the problem -- soon there won’t be any middle class artists, because soon there won’t be any middle class, period.

Now, that sucks. I was raised by boomer parents who got jobs right after they finished college and proceeded to do those jobs for thirty-odd years, until they retired with pensions and benefits. I just went home to visit and they are loving life right now. Meanwhile, everyone I know under thirty (and a fair amount of people I know under forty) are working two or three gigs and paying for Obamacare, just to get by. They’ve had two or three careers already, and a couple of jobs within each. They jump around and pick stuff up where they can. At one time, only a certain subset of people had hyphenated jobs (“actress-waitress,” “model-bartender,” etc); now almost everyone does.

The worst part about it is that we’re still teaching kids to focus on picking lifetime career paths. I spoke to an eighteen year old college freshman yesterday, and she was worried about what she wanted to be when she grew up. I’m almost twice her age, and I’m still not sure about that -- or if that’s even a concept that matters anymore. Rather than focusing on building out a set of core competencies that can be broadly applied to different industries, people are still laser focused on being “something” (a journalist, a programmer, a musician, etc).

I also gave a guest lecture for a college class and a student asked me if I thought music sales would ever come back. They won’t. We’re never getting the music industry of the nineties back, just like we’re never getting the manufacturing industry of the fifties back.

But there’s an upside -- there are more ways than ever to make money as a musician these days. An indie band will never sell a ton of albums, but they can license a track for a commercial. Being in a cool band in your twenties can get you in the door at a hip agency in your thirties. Many brands and startups want to have music experts on their teams, and while teaching kids to play the same four chords over and over isn’t most people’s dream job, it’s an income source.

We have to get over the notion of the old musical middle class, where you could put out an album every two years, do a bunch of tour dates, sell some t-shirts, and make $75k a year. The new reality looks like driving for Lyft when you’re home, maybe taking a few freelance composing gigs for an ad agency, releasing and touring around your own music, and bartending at your buddy’s place on weekends. Is this less fun, perhaps, or more stressful, than the old way? Absolutely. But it’s also the new normal.

As I stated above, there’s a reason most of the artists who speak out against Spotify fit a certain demo -- it’s because they were the ones who had access to the “good old days,” and then lost it. They are mostly white, generally older, and came up making music in a system that paid them well. They had something that they felt they had a right to, they lost it, and now they’re pissed.

But it’s worthwhile to question why so few rappers, or international artists, or younger artists, are making the same arguments. Maybe they feel beholden to Spotify or don’t want to piss anyone off. But it’s just as likely that they never would have had access to the middle class artist life anyway, and that the new order actually helps them get their music out. Do you honestly think Psy could have been Psy ten years ago?

When people talk about the gig economy as a new concept, it’s because it’s a new concept for a very select group of people. Women, immigrants, and people of color have always been part of the gig economy, not because it was cool and freeing and driving for Lyft is a super fun way to make money while finishing their novels -- it was because they had no other options. Being able to “follow your passion” and make art for a living is a very class-based concept -- most people are just working to pay the bills, and the idea that you have a right to write and perform music and make a living doing so is a foreign concept.

I absolutely believe in paying people for their work, but figuring out what they should be paid (or have a right to be paid) is tricky. But opposing Spotify, in the absence of a realistic solution, is just silly and privileged. I’d love to be a (middle class, educated) boomer riding life out on a cushy retirement package...but that’s not an option anymore. Rather than bemoaning the lost past, we need to focus on making the gig economy more sustainable for everyone.

[thisweekinmusictech]

Does Rihanna need a union card?

For the past few weeks, I’ve been extolling the idea that artists should be producing content all the time. Releasing songs, videos, Vines, funny clips -- anything to stay in the public eye and keep your name in circulation. I’ve praised the savvy sex tape, the artfully constructed “nip-slip,” and the notion that all press is good press. This week, I want to come at it from a different angle and probably contradict myself -- because within all these discussions, we’ve forgotten that the artist in question is a laborer, working to create art.

I have a dim memory of Eddie Vedder talking about touring in Rolling Stone, and saying something to the effect of “it’s fun work, but it’s work.” Getting on stage every night, whether you want to or not, is work. And forget half-assing your set -- miss a line and it’ll be all over YouTube the next day. I went to some shows ten years ago where the bands were either too wasted (Modest Mouse) or too...something (Cat Power) to perform -- I don’t think anyone would put up with that now. You gotta be on, all the time.

Artists have to be on all the time in their social lives as well. The highest tier of artists always lived in the public eye, although in the age before everyone had a camera and immediate access to tabloids and social networks, there was the off-chance of striking a deal with the media for a quiet dinner or an uninterrupted playground session with the kids. Now every minute is fair game. Not only that, the artist has to create all their own extra content, in the form of tweets and Facebook posts and Vines and Snapchats and…

I use the term “the social second shift,” because for many people (not just artists) keeping up your brand online has become a second job. The original second shift work (cooking, cleaning) is now easily outsourced thanks to many of the same app developers and VCs who gave us the social apps -- I can press a few buttons and have prepared food, groceries, a house cleaner, and a babysitter at my door in moments. All the time I would have spent cleaning, I spend tweeting.

For artists, this is all magnified, because the thirst for content from them is so great. I praised Miley Cyrus recently for her sharp handling of her social image, but I also wonder if she ever takes a night off. Lady Gaga started out as a character played by Stefani Germanotta, but she eventually morphed into her alter-ego full time. When I spoke to her a few years ago, I asked her if she ever took a few days off and wore khakis or something, and she said she never did.

Part of the reason we have trouble talking about artists and labor is that it’s very hard to define what we mean by “labor.” Sure, there’s recording, and performing, and even modeling and acting if that’s something they do, but what about everything else? What about inhabiting a persona day in and day out? What about talking to fans, and taking selfies, and posting photos on Instagram? Is that labor, or just the cost of doing business? It’s easy when we define the product of labor as a car; it’s much harder when we define the product of labor as a star?

Some of this is due to the fact that we, as a society, see art and music as inessential luxuries, and don’t think we need to pay for them in the end. People make noise about wanting artists to be compensated, but Napster was able to succeed because plenty of people thought it was OK to get art for free. Making a living as an artist is still seen as pipe dream and a luxury, not a viable career path. Imagine a child telling their parent they wanted to be a firefighter when they grew up, and the parent asking about “backup plans” or telling them “not everyone can make it.” Now imagine the response if the child says they want to be a musician, or an artist.

I often think about what an artists union would look like. I should point out that the American Federation of Musicians does some great lobbying work but certainly isn’t as big as it needs to be. A number of classical musicians and symphonies are part of unions, as are backup dancers. But a bigger, more powerful union for musicians would be a game changer. First, there would be age limits, so the face of teen pop would be altered -- but kids would no longer be sold to the machine by momagers. Second, there would be far more transparency around contracts -- ideal in the age of Spotify, when no one seems to understand what they are signing. Collective bargaining for artists could help provide a benefits and a living wage for all musicians. Not everyone would qualify, but maybe it could be set up like the Screen Actors Guild -- play a minimum numbers of shows, or get a minimum number of streams, and you’re in.

This still doesn’t solve the broader issue of how we define labor when it comes to artists like Rihanna and Lady Gaga, who not only work like fiends but exist in the public eye. Maybe fans at least need to step back and realize the need for a social contract, that they are now owed access all the time. Maybe artists need to put up a few more walls, put away the phones, and give themselves a forty hour week once in a while.

********

If you read this far, you can probably guess that I don’t know all that much about modern labor politics. If you want to read some stuff by someone who does, check out Sarah Jaffe (not the musician) at http://adifferentclass.com/

[thisweekinmusictech]

2015 Predictions: Will Spotify Get in the Label Game?

First off, caveats: I have no skin in the game, really, when it comes to Spotify’s success or failure. I pay for, use, and generally like the service, but I don’t work for them (and never have) and have no financial stake in the company. I’m also using “Spotify” as a more or less generic term in this piece; much of what I am writing could be applied to Beats, Rdio, YouTube, etc. I use the term Spotify because it’s easier than writing “streaming service” over and over, and also because it has been on the receiving end of most of the artist criticism.

I now want to say the biggest thing that Spotify can’t say officially, for many reasons: artists should have no beef with Spotify. If they have beef with anyone, it should be with their labels. Spotify (presumably) signed deals with the labels in good faith. If they didn’t, they should be shut down and run out of town, but because that hasn’t happened, I’ll go ahead and assume that the army of label lawyers consented to the deals with Spotify.

So, angry artist mob, go ahead and be pissed at your label. But also, maybe be pissed at yourself. After all, you and your team presumably signed YOUR contracts in good faith (although we’ve all seen enough episodes of Behind the Music to know this isn’t the case sometimes). You gotta read the fine print, though. You can’t use your friend’s cousin who just passed the bar to save a few bucks. If you think your lawyer sucked, I urge you to report them and then see if Sarah Koenig wants to do a Serial series about you.

I’m saying this because I know Spotify has to play nice with the labels and artists and can’t come right out and tell people to back off. The fact that Spotify allows artists to pull their content rather than saying, “tough tits, we had a deal” is a pretty savvy PR move on their part.

This all came up for me again because an indie artist I really like pulled his music off Spotify for no coherent reason. The best he could offer was that it wasn’t “artist friendly,” but his music is all over YouTube and Soundcloud, so...basically, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He then linked out to an interview with another indie musician who defended Soundcloud (which pays nothing, for the most part) while ripping on Spotify (which pays more than nothing).

The other insanely frustrating thing about all of this is that no one seems to be offering any other solutions. It’s like hating Obamacare -- if you offer a solution like a single payer system, that’s constructive and moves the conversation forward. If you stand around and scream “death panels! witchcraft! SOCIALISM!,” eh, not so much.

And no, a time machine back to 1999 isn’t a solution. CDs aren’t the solution. iTunes isn’t the solution. Vinyl is really not the solution, and I’ve gone from being someone who liked vinyl to being someone who wanted to bang my head against a wall when I heard “vinyl is back” for the millionth time. Jack White is not here to save you, people. If anything, judging by recent appearances, he wants to drink your blood and then compress your bones into a 7-inch.

Not liking streaming is fine. Not liking Spotify’s payout model is fine. Tell everyone how to make it better. Want to explore building a streaming service as an artist-owned collective rather than a private company? That’s probably not the solution in the long term, but at least it’s a new idea.

Streaming isn’t going away, at least right now. Ten years from now we’ll have chips implanted in our brains to take care of all this, but for now, this is what we’ve got. And as Spotify continues to grow, it’s just going to own more of the means of production.

Maybe this was all a very long intro to the other 2015 prediction I alluded to last week -- that Spotify will launch a “label” and just start releasing content on their own. Unless they have a clause in their label deals that prohibits this (and I don’t know, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility), it would be a great move for them to find a big artist at the end of a contract cycle and swoop right in. They could also sign a bunch of up-and-coming acts, and they probably should to at least test things out, but then they need to go get a star and fire the first shot.

Netflix has done this, and done it really well. There are probably a fair amount of people who signed up to the service to watch “House of Cards” and then never bothered to cancel, or decided they loved it and binge watched Scandal (me). Amazon has done the same with many authors, and I can only see the trend continuing across formats.

The real test will be whether music can stay windowed forever, or if people will pay for multiple services just to hear a handful of different albums. I pay for Netflix and cable, and also have Amazon Prime, but I don’t pay for Hulu because the content isn’t compelling enough for me. Other than free trials, I’ve never used multiple streaming services, but if my favorite band on earth put out something that I could only get on Beats, I might be tempted.

This will all shake out in 2015, and probably in the coming years. A source at a label told me they project that streaming will become dominant in 2017 or 2018, so we still have a few more years until we catch up with the Nordics. But the trend is clear, and artists need to make sure they’re fully educated about what side of history they want to be on.

[thisweekinmusictech]

2015 Predictions: Will Buzzfeed Be The New Model for the Music Biz?

A note on my predictions: I am often wrong. On the podcast last year, I had about a .500  average, which makes me better than almost all the NYC-area professional sports teams, at least. I was right(ish) about music royalty payments becoming more mainstream news, if only because Taylor Swift made it an issue. I was right that streaming services would fail to crack the mainstream in the US, although they have grown (and are certainly mainstream in the Nordics). I was wrong about EDM continuing to dominate the charts (thank god!). I was wrong about Pandora continuing to piss off artists, which is good in the long run. And I was in the middle on viral videos -- now everyone is doing them, so while they are driving traffic, the traffic might be more diluted than it once was.

But you should keep reading this, because I am right some of the time, and you can make fun of me if not. I’ll be writing about one prediction today and another next week, so come back and see how I spent my holiday.

Anyway, back to the question posed above -- will Buzzfeed become a model for the music business? That the site is wildly successful and influential is pretty much undisputed at this point. I’ve started hearing Buzzfeed correspondents on NPR shows, and much of their news coverage is excellent by any standard. The New York Times just laid off their labor reporter, and a few days later, Buzzfeed announced they were hiring a labor reporter. Doesn’t take a weatherman to see which direction this particular wind is blowing.

But the great thing about Buzzfeed is that for every great piece for reporting on serious issues, they put out ten listicles of cats who are psyched that it’s almost Christmas, or quizzes about which Gilmore Girl you are. Although they’ve hired seemingly every media person in the greater NYC and LA metro areas, Buzzfeed relies on its huge user community for much of its content -- and therein lies the first lesson it can teach the music biz.

Major labels have a huge platform, and yet only a small handful of artists get to use it. When the cost of distribution was high, this made sense -- you could only afford to print and ship so many CDs. But now that the cost of distribution is virtually nothing, opening up the platform makes more sense. Instead of sinking costs into artists who may or may not break, why not open up the platform to allow more content in and let users vote it up -- make it to the “frontpage” of any label enough times, and you could land more promotional resources or production help.

Just like Buzzfeed, labels don’t need to be constrained by false scarcity anymore. Imagine if radio were to open up and adopt a Buzzfeed like system that allowed users to control some of the content, alongside the DJs. Resources once spent on radio promotion would be freed up for other uses. Passive listeners could still sit back and tune in, whereas active listeners could play a bigger role in determining playlists. This is a radical idea and almost certainly won’t happen anytime really soon, but it’s coming.

As I’ve said before, labels need to increase the amount of content they release as well. Buzzfeed puts up an avalanche of posts every day -- some well-researched and serious, others light and quick. There’s room to release both a serious track from a respected artist with great production values, and a goofy chorus from a band that recorded it in the back of a van on a smartphone.

The other area where Buzzfeed’s strategy can help inform labels is in the relationships with brands. Buzzfeed says it makes all its money on “sponsored content” -- if you see a listicle about dogs, chances are that it is sponsored by Purina (or a similar company). We’ve seen artists collaborate closely with brands before (the Chris Brown Wrigley’s jingle springs to mind), but why not go further and just transfer all the costs to the brand, with permission to use the label’s platform. This isn’t another version of Green Label Sound (the Mountain Dew label) -- this is pick-your-major’s release, underwritten entirely by Chase Bank. It’s good exposure for the brands and more money for the labels and the artists.

The one big risk for labels adopting this model is quality control. While Buzzfeed has done a reasonably good job at this, in some cases deleting old posts that didn’t measure up to new standards, other imitator sites have fallen flat. I’ve read articles on some of them that are so poorly written, sexist, and racist that I vow never to go back -- and that’s a huge danger when you have daily posting quotas to meet and basically allow anything onto your site. Then again, outrage does breed traffic, and what I think is sexist and noxious might be some bro’s favorite thing ever. But assuming that someone minds the shop, going the way of Buzzfeed might be a step forward for the labels.

****

The focus of this blog is the music biz and tech, but it’s nice to just chat about music once in a while -- after all, it’s the reason we’re all here. 2014 was a pretty abysmal year for hits (Iggy Azalea, Magic, and Meghan Trainor all stunk to high heaven), but some pretty damn good stuff stuff came out as well, including EMA, which was my favorite record of the year, and the long awaited new D'Angelo album. EMA also put on one of my favorite shows this year, along with Slowdive and Portishead at ATP Iceland; the reunited and still badass Veruca Salt at the Music Hall of Williamsburg; and Trans Am’s face melting set at Baby’s All Right. I also had the weird and fun experience of hitting up a 24-hour drone festival at the now-closed Death By Audio at 7:30am, dressed in running clothes to go do some miles after a good night’s sleep. It was the perfect blend of the stuff I loved then with the stuff I love now, all strange and beautiful and mixed together.

[thisweekinmusictech]

The Naked and the (Near) Dead

After the Ray Rice story first broke, a blog I was reading encouraged readers to turn off football altogether. The reasoning was pretty simple -- the ratings people can’t distinguish hate-watchers from the people who are legit psyched to watch the game. Advertisers still mostly look at raw numbers when determining where to spend money, and this seems to have given rise to a wave of “made-for-Twitter” programming that people will love to hate watch (ever more award shows, Peter Pan Live with the girl from Girls and Christopher Walken, Grumpy Cat vs Sharknado, etc).

There’s still no way to determine viewer intent, and this is something Miley Cyrus understands better than anyone. In the past several years, she’s figured out the secret sauce of keeping attention focused on her, and making it pay off.  She stays just the right side of the outrage line, and she’s laughing all the way to the bank.

A note of clarification, if you’re too lazy to look at her Wikipedia -- Cyrus is 22 years old. She waited until she was a full-grown adult to swing around naked on a wrecking ball, but she also realized that in many minds, she’s still a teenager. Remember those innocent days in 2008 when she posed for Vanity Fair wrapped in a sheet, and even though you couldn’t see anything, people still freaked out? It was the first sign of the genius at work. 

Since then, she’s kept herself in the public eye steadily, and made all her content readily available for listening or viewing, regardless of the viewer’s intent. Want to listen to her music or watch her twerk? It’s all there, for free, in seconds. And it doesn’t matter if the viewer is seeing red, because Miley is only seeing green. She gets paid for every view and every stream, no matter if it’s a hate-watch or not. And she’s figured out how’s it going to go in the future -- curiosity may kill the cat, but it’s going to save the music biz.

Back in the old days, when you had to actually make an effort beyond typing a few words into a browser in order to check something out, Cyrus’s shtick might not have worked as well. It worked for Madonna, but she was a much bigger and more established star by the time she released “Sex.” Now anyone can see something on Cyrus on Good Morning America, and within seconds listen to her album or watch her videos. As long as she keeps the machine rolling, and doesn’t stray too far off the path, she’ll be set for a while.

Cyrus, I should point out, isn’t the only star to do this -- Kim Kardashian has raised this to an art form, and Rihanna seems to be adept at it as well. The age of the curiosity-driven popstar is upon us, and we’re going to be more artists calibrating their lives for maximum clicks.

****

In an early Christmas present to young music writers everywhere, the New York Times released yet another “old man yells at cloud about how the music biz was better back in the day” op-ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/15/opinion/the-internet-not-the-labels-hurt-the-music-industry.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0.

The piece was written by an “online record dealer,” which is a little like having a cattle rancher pen an op-ed about why beef is great and chicken will kill you. But aside from that obvious problem, the pretense of the piece is nuts: people who run record labels are the ones who should tell the public what to listen to; there’s just so much bad music on the internet we need these smart men to program our playlists for us.

First off, the labels are hardly infallible -- setting aside the old straw men like the Beatles and Nirvana, labels put out a whole lot of garbage as well. I grew up in the Northwest in the nineties, and remember when every dude with a guitar and a heroin problem was getting signed - it wasn’t pretty. And God forbid you happened to be a talented woman, or person of color, or person whose style didn’t fit with what was marketable at the moment -- there was no hope for you.

Second, the web has opened up the means of distribution -- and greatly reduced the reliance of people like record store clerks when it comes to telling people just what they should listen to. The author makes note of this in the most perfunctory way possible, stating: “And I suppose it is wonderful, in a way, that the music of some 16-year-old kids in Chicago, say, can be heard in Malaysia with one mouse click.”

But really, in his mind, it’s not, because who cares if some non-Western POC can hear music -- most of that music is crap! I mean, sure, crap is subjective and all -- but it’s not Led Zeppelin, so it must suck.

It’s no accident that most of these op-eds (and the Times seems to run one every few months, because even the Grey Lady is a slave to the clickbait) are penned by older white men, just as it’s no great shock that most of people yelling the loudest about the evils of Spotify tend to be old white guys as well (Taylor Swift aside, of course). The old music biz was awesome if you were a white dude -- it just kinda sucked if you were a lady, or a minority, or non-Western.

Look, I get it -- coming face to face with your increasing irrelevance isn’t fun. But the old saw “adapt or die” has floated around for a while now for a reason. In the battle of the old man yelling into space, or the young pop starlet conquering the internet, who do you think is going to come out on top?

[thisweekinmusictech]

Do Want Some Short Short Songs

Apologies for butchering what was kind of a gnarly reference to begin with.

First, read this: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/hollywood-vine. I’ll wait.

Back now? Did you learn all about Vine, and that some of its biggest stars are really into racial stereotypes? Now imagine Vine — for music.

I wrote a bit last week about why the album format continues to exist; now I want to rip apart the song format. I just skimmed a playlist on Spotify and most of the songs clock in at around three and a half minutes. I would guess that since the birth of pop and definitely since the rise of commercial radio, the vast majority of pop, rock, country, and hip-hop songs have generally come in somewhere between the three and four minute mark. This makes sense in terms of being able to program stations in blocks between ads and in terms of being able to play enough different artists to keep listeners engaged.

For fifty-odd years, this formula has worked just fine. There were always outliers on the margins (punk bands compressing songs into thirty second blasts; experimental acts and jam bands noodling out twenty minute tunes), but for the most part, people followed the rules. We all knew, generally, what a song “was.”

But that doesn’t mean we liked it. Radio stations used to call people and play seven-second clips of tracks they were considering adding; if an audience didn’t love those seven seconds, the track was unlikely to make it into rotation. Anyone who has ever driven around with me has seen me fly up and down the radio dial, giving each track a cursory chance before moving on, and I know I’m not the only person to do this. Apple introduced thirty second clips on songs on iTunes, because that’s all you need to hear to decide if you like something enough to buy it; Spotify reports that one in four songs get skipped before the five second mark.

To me, this points to the fact that listeners want something shorter, more akin to the length of Vine or Instagram videos, than the standard verse-chorus-verse-solo-chorus etc etc format that they’ve been served for the past several years. But this would also force a radical reimagining of what a song actually looks like.

Some musicians are starting to move in this direction, releasing clips and stems of tracks and asking listeners to remix them and create unique tracks. A startup called Muzooka has released a “Tinder for music” discovery platform, where people can swipe left and right based on a ten second clip (full disclosure, I work for Muzooka). But both of these drop users off in the same place we’ve been for ages -- in the case of remix contests, the winners are usually released as a standard full track; with Muzooka, you add the songs you swipe to a playlist and then unlock a longer version of the track.

What I’m interested in is taking this a step further and re-examining why we need to release “songs” in the first place. I know this is weird and radical and won’t happen any time soon. But just as I argued last week that artists need to get outside the box of album cycles and focus on just getting music out to the masses, I’ll argue this week that they need to focus on getting everything out to the masses. Maybe it’s an awesome hook. Maybe it’s a verse. Maybe it’s something they’ve been noodling on for a while and want feedback on. It can be ten seconds or a minute. But it needs to be something.

Again, I realize this won’t happen in the near future. But take a look at what is happening in TV and film -- kids are moving away from the weekly, produced, half-hour to hour format, and getting much more interested in the short, fast, slightly more amateurish YouTube style content. It’s about volume, not necessarily quality -- a few bad episodes could really ding a TV series, whereas a few bad videos will just sink to the bottom of a YouTube channel and allow better content to rise.

Some artists will rise to this challenge, and others won’t. I don’t see Wilco starting to release weird, short snippets anytime soon. And I still think, especially among older consumers, there will be a desire for the traditional song structure. But there also needs to be a recognition that we should broaden the concept of what a song is to include other formats and concepts. The mold needs to keep expanding or it’ll just wind up breaking.

****

I got some great feedback on last week’s essay; thanks to everyone who shared and everyone who wrote me. The biggest obstacles to moving towards the “just-release-a-song” format seem to be radio, late night TV booking, and media, which still rely heavily on album cycles. As media moves more towards volume and judging by clicks, I think we’ll start to see the traditional long-lead cycle fall away; it already has for most online outlets. As radio evolves and we move towards the connected car, I think stations will become more experimental and more customizable, and less focused on adding only a few tracks to rotation and keeping them there for ages. As for late night TV, I think that format will start to shift and come more in line with the YouTube model, although perhaps not for a while.

****

Again, send me feedback. Argue with me. My goal is to start conversations, not necessarily to be prescriptive. If you have topics you want me to riff on, let me know. Assuming nothing major breaks in the next week or so, I’ll be back soon with an essay on why Miley Cyrus is the future of the music biz.

[thisweekinmusictech]

2014: The Year Nothing Broke, and Nothing Got Fixed

This was the year of the treadmill.

I mean that both for me personally (ever train for an ultra-marathon during a polar vortex?) and for the music business as a whole. 2014 felt like a whole lot of running, but there was no real forward movement -- everyone wound up in pretty much the same place they started.

There was some big stories, of course. Beats Music launched, attracted something like 100,000 users, and then was snapped up by Apple for a cool $3 billion for...some reason, yet to be announced. Apple wants a streaming service, even though streaming services bleed money. Apple wants to be cool, because I know when I walk into a Bushwick Coffeeshop, it’s Dells as far as the eye can see. Apple wants to bundle the product with headphones, because selling a subpar product based on cool branding is the path to long term growth. Look, I’m sure they are going to do something amazing and I’ll be forced to eat my words. But from where I sit, I’m still not seeing the logic.

Amazon Prime launched a streaming music service and no one seemed to care. YouTube finally launched their streaming service and no one seemed to care, although to be fair it’s early and no numbers have been released. Deezer launched...something in the US and no one seemed to...you get the picture.

Spotify continued to grow, despite Taylor Swift’s best efforts. They seem to be fairly comfortable with their lead, given that the last time I looked, they were hiring a full time staff member to throw parties for other staff members. Wonder how things will look when they sit down to renegotiate contracts with the labels?

A bunch of small startups launched; a bunch of small startups died. Circle of life and venture capital.

Because here’s the real reason we’re still on the treadmill -- fundamentally, nothing has changed. Artists still write “songs,” which are generally a few minutes long; they record and collect those songs on albums, which are released to the public on a pre-determined date. They do lots of press around those releases, and then they go on tour. Then they tour again, and again. Maybe they sell a song to a TV show, or an ad. Maybe a bunch of people at a music/tech conference have a panel called “Islands in the Stream” or “Radio on the TV” and talk about how this isn’t “selling out” anymore. And the beat goes on, and on…

No one is asking the bigger question, which is “why are albums?” Why are release dates? Hell, why any of this?

I understand artists and labels and radio need organizing principles. And I understand that this model has worked for a very long time. But it’s worth considering that maybe it needs to shift a bit. Maybe artists should release content when it’s ready, not when it’s some pre-selected Tuesday. The technology exists for them to be recording all the time, wherever they are. Some artists, and I won’t name names, are also recording whole albums worth of content that never sees the light of day -- talk about a sunk cost. Unless it’s absolute garbage, what’s the harm in putting it out? Someone will probably like it.

The kids, as they say, have ever shorter attention spans. I’m not here to rag on millennials for their crippling ADHD -- but I am here to say that they have millions more options than most of us ever had. Tinder is perfect site for them -- infinite choices, and if you don’t like something, move to the next thing and forget it. But they also have short memories, and if you serve them something different the next time and they like it, all is forgiven.

So clinging to this old model of releasing bodies of work on a given date, based on all that we know, seems a little off, doesn’t it? And yes, right now some of you will want to Swift-boat me, but Tay-Tay is the exception, not the rule. She’s the 1% of artists if ever there was one.

If I had a wish for 2015, it would be this: kill the album. For some artists, who really want to present a body of work and tell a story, fine, keep it. For everyone else, just scrap it. Albums probably started as a cynical ploy to get more money (“they only want one song, but they have to pay for twelve of them, even if eleven of them suck! Brilliant!”) and this definitely reached a fever pitch in the nineties -- and I should know, because I bought a lot of those albums. It became all filler, no killer, and then Napster laid waste to it.

So just start putting stuff out there. Kids are fine with imperfections. Some of the stuff they love on YouTube makes me feel seasick watching it because the camera work is so bad, but it doesn’t matter. Release little clips of tracks and see what the response is. If it doesn’t get a bite, toss some more chum in the water.

2014 was pretty much a wash, and that’s OK. We’re reaching the end of an era, and we’ve been reaching it for a long time now. A while ago, there was a political cartoon that had an illustration of every president since Kennedy saying one word, and it added up to “Don’t worry, Castro will fall any minute now.” It feels like you could replicate that with every editor of Billboard saying, “Don’t worry, the old music biz model will fall any minute now.” Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t collapse in one, either. But we don’t want to get to the point of collapse -- it’s far better to pivot early and get ahead of the game.