Rap Coalition

2011-10-01T17:05:00.000-07:00

I've just set up two new blogs through my websites. They are a blog where I'm posting ALL of my articles (in one place so there aren't 5 article archive sites with articles, just 1....and that blog is:

www.rap-coalition.com

And then I've set up a personal blog where I talk about life and music industry stuff (everything BUT articles I've written)...and that blog is:

www.WendyDay.net

Also, my new eBook dropped today and you can get it here:

Amazon.com Widgets

2011-05-08T13:39:00.001-07:00

I'm reading an article on the Navy SEALS. It recounts Hell Week, wherein you either pass or fail, make it or don't. Only 21 of the author's class of 220 survived the test. What does it take to succeed?

"What kind of man makes it through Hell Week? That's hard to say. But I do know - generally - who won't make it. There are a dozen types that fail: the weight-lifting meatheads who think that the size of their biceps is an indication of their strength, the kids covered in tattoos announcing to the world how tough they are, the preening leaders who don't want to get dirty, and the look-at-me former athletes who have always been told they are stars but have never have been pushed beyond the envelope of their talent to the core of their character. In short, those who fail are the ones who focus on show. The vicious beauty of Hell Week is that you either survive or fail, you endure or you quit, you do - or you do not."

Sounds like an audition for "American Idol". Did you see that article wherein the stars of "The Voice" were shown to have appeared on previous TV shows? (http://bit.ly/kq3KDV) That's taking the easy way out, that's a desire to strap yourself onto a rocket to the moon, real stardom demands more. It's not a lucky break, it's all that preparation when no one is looking. Making it comes when you least expect it, when you've almost given up but are still slogging along on sheer adrenaline.

It is about character. Much more than talent.

"Some men who seemed impossibly weak at the beginning of SEAL training - men who puked on runs and had trouble with pull-ups - made it. Some men who were skinny and short and whose teeth chattered just looking at the ocean also made it. Some men who were visibly afraid, sometimes to the point of shaking, made it too."

You can't predict who is going to be a star. That beautiful girl with the fantastic pipes in high school, where is she today? Your buddy who could wail on the guitar?

Making it is like becoming a Navy SEAL. You've got to endure all kinds of horrific abuse, when no one is watching. Are you gonna flake out for the doughnut or hang in there? Used to be getting a record deal was like becoming a SEAL, the beginning. Now even that doesn't count. People wanting record deals are pussies, they want someone else to do all the work. Today, if you want to survive, you've got to do the work.

It's a battle.

Very few can make it in music. Even fewer than can make it in movies. You can fake it in acting (Arnold Schwarzenegger?), but you can't fake it in music.

Oh, don't complain about the pretty faces with Top Ten hits written by the usual suspects. Everyone knows they're not real. Which is why they can't sell a ticket and are forgotten almost instantly.

And the old labels don't want to do the hard work and neither do the concert promoters.

The old labels just want to plug you into the system. Get you TV and radio exposure, play online games to make you famous. If the labels wanted to do the hard work, they'd sign people who sounded nothing like what's on the radio and break them. That's what they used to do, but now it's too hard. Just try getting a deal at a major label if you don't make Top Forty music.

And once upon a time, promoters broke acts. Before consolidation, when agents and managers were loyal. Now promoters are conglomerates focused on the bottom line, it's about anything but music. Live Nation trumpeting the success of the Charlie Sheen tour? Would Bill Graham have promoted that? Money doesn't trump everything. Let's see you try to book ANOTHER Charlie Sheen tour. In the old days, the acts started small and ended up big. Charlie Sheen started out big and ended up small.

The reason we haven't had many new breakthroughs, in both music and business, is it's so damn hard to do. Techies want instant returns and so do the acts. No one wants to put in the hard work.

What struck me about all the e-mail regarding the Outsiders was that this was not everybody's first band. Jimmy Fox was in many before forming the James Gang. Greatness takes a while to pan out. You don't make it immediately. You keep slogging on, rejiggering, practicing, refining, getting it right. To the point when people discover you you look like an overnight success, yet you're anything but.

On some level, that's what's wrong with America. No one wants to do the hard work.

But some do. And they're the ones who succeed.

"The Seal Sensibility": http://on.wsj.com/lofLcq

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2010-02-10T22:22:00.001-08:00

It hit the internet last week in a study by Tom Silverman that a label that I had built and consulted, TMI Boyz out of Houston, were the second largest selling independent release last year. And while it would have been nice for us to hit #1, I am quite happy with the #2 position as well, of successful indie releases from last year. Upon our first week release, we hit the Billboard rap chart in the Top 10, which as an indie is always exciting. That week we outsold BloodRaw, another artist I had consulted who was signed to Young Jeezy’s CTE and distributed by Def Jam.

Last week, Tom Silverman (he built the most successful indie label in urban music in the 80s and 90s—the Tommy Boy Records empire was responsible for Afrika Bambaataa, De La Soul, Queen Latifah, Naughty By Nature, Information Society, Coolio, House of Pain, Everlast, etc. He owns the New Music Seminar), published a study on numerous music industry websites. (You can see his study and read an interview with him at www.MusicianCoaching.com).

He pointed out that in 2009, there were 1,500 independent releases in all genres. Of those 1500, only 13 releases sold over 10,000 units (that’s only $70,000 to $100,000 in wholesale sales). The #2 release was the label I consulted, TMI Boyz. They were the ONLY rap act on that short list of 13. And that list was based on the (inaccurate) SoundScan sales of 30,000 CDs sold. While on the road for a year and a half, TMI Boyz sold 2 mixed CDs and a full length CD. Tom’s research was based solely on the CDs that were sold at FYE stores in the mid-South. Since we weren’t focused on SoundScan, just on making money, we weren’t trying to have each sale counted. The bulk of sales were at shows, Mall parking lots, state fairs, flea markets, street corners, gas stations, car washes, high schools, clubs--anyplace where a mass of people were gathered so TMI Boyz could jump out of their wrapped van to make a sale. You may have never heard of them, but they made $1.6 million in sales in 2009. Isn’t that the best measurement of all? But being #2 is good, too.

Here’s what Tom said about the State of the Music Industry:
(Excerpted from Musician Coaching from January 2010)

Last Thursday, the new 2009 statistics came out from SoundScan and what we’ve been identifying at the New Music Seminar is that overall music sales are up by 2.1% -- 1.545 billion sales were made. That includes physical, digital, singles, albums, everything, video, music video. Total album sales including digital are down 12.7%. Digital tracks are up 8.3%, which is pretty great considering everyone is saying digital is leveling off, and I find that to be hype. The percentage of increase is slowing down, but that’s because it’s a numerator/denominator thing. The actual amount -- the number of additional units was almost 100 million more digital tracks sold this year than the year before, and 100 million is nothing to laugh at.

Vinyl sales are up 33% going from 1.88 million to 2.5 million; so, the increase on that was about 700,000. Full-length digital albums are up 16%, but then again they started at only 65.8 million, so they’re only up to 76 million. The interesting trend we follow at the Seminar also is the ratio of singles to album sales. In 2004 there were virtually no singles sales-- it was all albums. Last year there were 2.5 times as many digital download singles as albums, physical and digital combined. This year it’s moved to 3.1 times as many, so look to see the ratio of singles to albums to increase. A lot of this comes from the radio hits. What’s happening is that where the major labels play, they’re getting marginalized faster than the indies and the smaller artists. We identified that the Top 10 has dropped 65-70% since 2000, probably 70% as of this year. If you just take records that sold over a quarter of a million that’s down 65%; but if you take records that sold under 10,000 it’s only down three or four percent.

In 2008 there were only 112 releases that sold over a quarter of a million copies. The major labels can’t survive on that. They need sales larger than 250,000 copies sold to survive. So those 112 records are the only records they could make money on at all. Probably 25-50% of those didn’t make money either. So only 60 releases make money, and the amount of money they make except for maybe four or five giant hits – the Lady Gaga and Black Eyed Peas level of hits – aren’t really making significant money. In the old days, one hit used to pay for 20 stiffs. Now one hit doesn’t even pay for one stiff.

What if half of those 112 didn’t even make money or broke even. To sell 300,000 albums and not make money? That’s not a good thing. It’s because they were hoping to sell 600,000 or 700,000 or 800,000. The labels are getting more cautious. So here’s what’s happening, and this is what we discuss at NMS. The labels-- majors and independents, are more conservative; they’re not going to take risks on artists or invest in artists just because they hear the demo and they like the songs or just because they can pack a house. That’s not enough – at least not the major labels. They need to know the artist is going somewhere between 30 and 60 miles per hour already to make an investment in it. They can’t start from scratch anymore, because so few artists are breaking.

Here’s another statistic: in 2008 there were 1500 releases that sold over 10,000 album units. Out of that, there were only 227 of them that were artists that had broken 10,000 for the first time. So in the whole year only 227 of the artists were artists that had broken what we call the “obscurity line.” When you sell 10,000 albums, you’re no longer an obscure artist; people know about you. You may not be a star yet, but you’re in the game. That gets you out of the glut and into the game. We looked at the 227 and identified that only 14 of them were artists doing it on their own and all the rest were on majors and indies; a little more than half were on indies. And that includes Lady Gaga in that number of 227. It includes the biggest artists and ones that sold 10,000 as well, whether they sold a million or 10,001. That’s a pretty daunting number.

By starting the New Music Seminar again and doing tons and tons of research deep in the data, we’re identifying what’s happening and not happening. We’re talking to people who are making it happen and doing it alternative ways; we’re identifying what the opportunities are out there. Tommy Boy is more than a record company; we don’t consider ourselves a record company anymore, we’re much more than that. Now we’re sort of a strategic artists positioning company, and our job is to take an artist from where they are in revenues to a much higher number. If we work with Artist A that’s making half a million dollars a year, our goal is we take them to a million in year one, two million in year two, and three or four in year three. That’s our goal. And then we take a percentage of that revenue. And we’re talking about dollars, not record sales, because we may decide to give the records away, and we may only make about 10% of our money from the music and master use or 20% and the rest of it will come from touring and merch, publishing and possibly sync and other things. We’re not concerned with where the money comes from as long as it comes.

Tommy Boy is known for building brands, from Queen Latifah and Ru Paul, to De La Soul and Afrika Bambaataa, Naughty by Nature, House of Pain, so many household names now that you know. When you mention the name, you can see them; like Digital Underground, when you close your eyes, an image of who they are comes up. Coolio … they all became significant brands, and that’s what we did. Tommy Boy is itself as a significant brand. We’re not just a record company. Our business always was building brands. How we used to make money was selling records; but we don’t see it as the way we can make money now. It’s one of the streams of revenue that we can make money from, but it’s no longer the most significant or even the second most significant way we’ll be making money. We can no longer be limited in how we see artists to the music domain. It’s more than the music. We have to work with the artist’s positioning.

So, back to the New Music seminar. As it’s harder for artists to break, no labels are going to come to an artist just because they like the demo, and that’s hard for artists to take. Artists don’t want to hear that. They’re spending all their time, because they’re musicians making a cool record. And that’s what they should do, but that’s only the very beginning of it. One of the things we identified is that three times as many people buy singles as a whole album, so it probably doesn’t make any sense to make a whole album, or it’s a waste of time and money in the studio making an album when they’re just getting started, because every artist breaks with one song. And they might as well focus on finding that one song before they waste the money on the album.

As you build fans, if you’re touring – and every artist should be regardless of genre right now to build their fan base and also sell merch and actually make money – they should be touring all the time. You create music to satisfy your live audience. Once you have fans that are coming to your site, then you need to keep flowing new music to them on a regular basis to keep them engaged, and hopefully good music. You’re going to say, “I’m no longer an album every 18 months or two years. I’m a song every two months or a song every month. I’m a monthly publication or a bi-monthly publication.” You look at yourself as more of a periodical than as an album-making business.

I think the album days are coming to an end. Unless you’re already established and you already have hundreds of thousands of fans, in which case the touring and album making might make sense. I just talked to one of the writers and producers for Black Eyed Peas, and they’re going out on tour right after the Grammys. They’re bringing out two tour buses that are studios, so they’ll be recording while they’re touring. I think that’s the new world, is that artists will do their shows and then they’ll go into their mobile recording studio and write and record. Now that recording equipment is so mobile, it’s easier and cheaper to do that, and the top artists are going to do that, and even the smaller artists are going to have to be writing on the road constantly. And whenever they’re in a place where there’s a studio, they may want to drop a track or they can record live tracks to perform and practice and rehearse and do live tracks and record those live tracks and make them available. The flow of music from artist to fan is going to be more important. It didn’t used to be important because there wasn’t the kind of 24-7 contact between artists and fans. So as you build your fans, they’re not going to be happy with one album every two years anymore. That’s not going to work. After three months, they’re off finding another artist that’s going to take your place. If you want to keep their interest, you have to keep at the top of their consciousness, and that requires new creative on a constant basis.

So at the New Music Seminar we talked about all of this. We talked about the new model, which is no longer based on records, it’s based on fans and the relationship between artists and fans, and how you monetize that relationship. We talked about the fan relationship pyramid. We have to look at our fans based on their levels of passion and their levels of spending. What kind of content we see delivered to our fans – whether it’s for money or for free – depends on their level of passion and their level of spending.

So somebody that doesn’t want to spend any money – a tire kicker – probably shouldn’t get something first. They probably shouldn’t get exclusives. The exclusives should go to the most avid fans. That’s the new world. And there’s a science – we call it “fan migration science.” How do you migrate a passive fan into an active fan? How do you capture fans? The new music business is about getting fans. That was always the business, but we – artists and labels – were always confused. We thought it was about selling records. Record sales were how we used to make money. It may not be how we make money now. But really how we made money from it is that fans bought our records. Passive fans bought the single, active fans bought the album, super active fans bought the album and went to all the shows, and bought the t-shirt. So we have to look at our audience in that way from now on.

When I think about the indie artists that are doing it themselves, like Sufjan Stevens or Bon Iver or this guy Corey Smith.. This is a guy from North Carolina who was a school teacher and about three years ago and his manager got him up to about a million dollars in revenues, then the next year he got him up to four million in revenues. Really, the game is how can you build your revenues, not how can you sell more records. You may not sell records at all. You may decide to give records away to get your revenues up. If your revenues go up, that’s what you care about. Tommy Boy is in the “how do we make more revenues” business and “how do we create a strategic plan to do that?” That’s what Tommy Boy has molted into. It’s kind of what we always did, but we just never really looked at it that way.
When you have 105,000 albums in 2008 released and 17,000 of those releases only sold one copy, and 80,000 of them sold under 100 copies, it’s a pretty depressing scene. You can’t just build it and they will come. You have to do more than that. I was going to say before that Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver and Corey Smith are selling a significant amount – above 10,000 units – a lot of which is at their shows, and they’re not active online. They’re not Twitterheads. They didn’t break from the Internet. They broke from touring, and they had a good story, and the good story spread like wildfire through traditional media like NPR.
I’ll tell you the one thing that works: if you’re great live and you bust your ass on the road, that works. And it’s the one thing that has always worked and your social network is at the show. You come to the show and everyone who comes is into the band, so they all have that in common and it’s a social network. But you can actually see them and talk to them and scream with them. There’s an excitement that happens at a gig that never happens online. The online thing is great for finding out about stuff, looking things up or for making purchases; but for exposing stuff, so far it’s been disappointing.

That may not be true with webcasting – Last FM, Pandora and Slacker and some of the other big webcasters as they start to invoke discovery tools and more and more sophisticated discovery tools to suggest and discover new music get better and better. Maybe we can fix some of that, but when the Web was proposed for music ten years or twelve years ago, we all thought this would be the Golden Era and that there would be an Elvis that would break every three months, or some big act. There’d be a Lady Gaga every two weeks, but it’s not happening. It’s not happening at all. And Lady Gaga didn’t break off the Web. She broke by hard, hard work touring and doing promo shows and every place she could go, we saw her. There was nowhere she wasn’t. They pushed and they pushed and put posters on the street – old analog shit. I’m sure they did the online stuff too. A lot of artists think if they do a big online push that’s enough, and it’s really not enough anymore. In fact, you could probably break without any online work at all; but you can’t probably break without any offline work at all. So that’s the big myth that’s being purported.

You know where the investment money’s coming from in the music business now? It’s coming from venture capitalists that are investing in businesses like Spotify or any of those artist service businesses. There must be half a billion dollars in online investment in the music business over the two years. That’s more than all the labels in the world have spent on A&R in the last five years combined – a lot more – and probably on marketing too. That’s where the money’s coming from, so they’re leading the press. So of course everybody thinks shit is selling because of the technology, but it’s not. That’s the hope, and where the investment’s been, but that’s not the reality. We’re really not seeing any evidence that stuff is breaking off the Web.

There are a lot of groups that are breaking because of a big write-up on Pitchfork that leads to maybe a usage on a TV show like The Hills or something like that. People see something on TV or MTV or something like that or hear some song on MTV. The combination of that plus touring might work. If radio and print are moving towards the Internet and they can get enough reach and frequency, which has been the challenge for them so far, like the Huffington Post or maybe you can say Pitchfork. There are Pitchfork bands that consider themselves Pitchfork bands. They’re not going gold and platinum, but they’re getting booked and they’re starting to break that obscurity line. I think the more powerful Pitchfork gets … I mean, Oprah wasn’t Oprah in the very beginning. It took her years to build an audience. Now she can talk about a book and that book goes into the Top 10 on the Best Seller list the next week. There’s not a lot of people that have that kind of juice online. In fact, I don’t think there’s anyone that has that kind of juice online yet. There will be something that everybody watches just like they watch on television online or that they look at that will move the needle substantially. Right now it’s still really early days for that.

And a lot of artists are really putting all their faith in that and focusing on online, but when you look at the numbers, the artists that are doing it are the ones that are doing the grinding on the road. At the Seminar we want to talk to artists about if there’s 120,000 albums that come out in a year, how do they differentiate themselves from all of them? Because clearly it’s tough. There’s such a glut, and how do I break through the glut? The best way to break through the glut if you’re limited in funds – and everyone is – is to differentiate yourself. So we talk about how do we differentiate ourselves in every one of the four important aspects that define an artist: 1) the songs, 2) the recording, 3) the image & concept, and 4) the live show. The concept is really big. It means- “what do you stand for?”

That’s why Susan Boyle sold more records in six weeks than anybody else in three years, and she wasn’t even American and had no radio play or anything. She had a story, and it was a compelling story. Anybody with a compelling story that can get that compelling story told. It is a lot easier to get exposed with a story because everyone wants to talk about and write about a compelling story. You have to have a good story.

The Live show is important too. Your live show has to be great, because so many artists are breaking from the stage now. You’re much more likely to get exposure and get a buzz if you have an unbelievable live show that makes people talk than if you have an unbelievable record. Records are not going to get radio play, because the radio stations that are left are hardly playing anything, and there’s nobody listening, especially in the rock area.

I taught a class at FIT in NY. There were 40 kids in the class, and I asked them, “How do you guys find out about new music? Do you listen to the radio?” And only four or five kids listened to the radio in that whole class. All the rest of them said online-- they find out about it some way, or word of mouth. That’s with every genre. Still, pop and urban are still breaking on the radio, and those are the ones that Eric Garland at Big Champagne said people are downloading and not paying for. The biggest radio hits are the ones that are more pirated. Everybody talks about peer-to-peer being a great way to expose new music. It’s not a great way, because 90% of the files being traded on peer-to-peer are the hits. It would be a much different ratio if it was a discovery tool. People aren’t using it as a discovery tool. They’re trying to get the songs that are already exposed. What we’re doing at the Seminar is saying, “Where should we go to get the exposure?”

In preparing for Los Angeles New Music Seminar, [Tom Silverman] wanted to learn more about how many new artists are breaking each year. After all, the New Music Seminar is dedicated to helping more new artists break. First we had to determine the definition of breaking. At the New Music Seminar we identify the obscurity line arbitrarily as 10,000 albums sold in the year of release. That is not a hard number, nor is it the only meter of success. 300 hard ticket sales for a headliner in multiple cities might be another definition. 25,000 paid single downloads might be another. I’m sure there are many more but 10,000 albums doesn’t sound as elusive as gold or platinum (those archaic arbiters of success) or even 50,000 which only a decade ago might have been considered below the obscurity threshold. Looking at the 1517 albums that were released in 2008 and sold more than 10,000 units in 2008 we find that only 225 of them were by artists that had surpassed 10,000 for the first time in their career (either by themselves or with another band).

The vast majority of these were released by significant indies (110) or majors (103). Last Friday, I thought that only 14 of those were self released artists or artists on start up labels. Further inspection disqualified two of them. One was a gospel record whose Bishop had exceeded 10,000 in the past under a slightly different name and the other was a Soundscan placeholder for a title distributed by Anderson Wholesale, the distributor for Walmart, that showed the title “TBD.” We had thought it was a Dutch electronic artist called Anderson but alas, nay.

Who were these valiant artists? A quick inspections indicated that beyond Bon Iver, the real indie artist success story of 2008, there were three hip hop artists, one that had financing of $10 a unit in marketing spent to sell under 30,000 units, another associated with the big indie hip hop powerhouse Tech N9ne and the last a gospel hip hop artist. The rest were largely alternative rock artists, two had been contestants in America’s Got Talent or American Idol and a few others were on small labels with big budgets.

What does this say about the Chris Anderson “Long Tail” promise he outlined in his book? Clearly the ease of making and distributing music does not benefit “breaking” music. Breaking music requires mass exposure which requires luck or money or both. I can say with great authority that less new music is breaking now in America than any other time in history. Technology has not helped more great music rise to the top, it has inhibited it. I know this is a bold statement but it is true.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to all of the technologists that participate in the New Music Seminar is to correct that issue so that great music can rise to its true potential regardless of politics, power or money. I believe that the next decade will bring improvement to the music web that allows that to happen. In the meantime, artists can still make a very good living without selling 10,000 albums by careful cultivation of their fan relationships. This is another theme of the New Music Seminar…redefining the music business around the artist/fan relationship…how to manage it…how to monetize it. Records are no longer currency in the next music business…fans are.

Here’s the list of the 12 artists that sold over 10,000 albums in 2008 for the first time. Remember these are 12 albums out of 105,575 new album releases that year.

BON IVER
Record Label: Jagjaguwar (US/CAN)
Album: For Emma Forever Ago 103,112

TMI BOYZ
Record Label: TMI Entertainment
Album: Grindin’ For a Purpose 29,119

CAS HALEY
Record Label: CaptainHooks, also Big Karma Records, a “Texas start up label”
Album: Cas Haley 22,580

DUKE SPIRIT
Record Label: SHANGRILA
Album: Neptune 19,403

EYES SET TO KILL
Record Label: BreakSilence Recordings
Album: Reach 16,133

PROZAK
Record Label: Strange Music Inc./ DeadMan Productions Inc.
Album: Tales From the Sick 14,929

SLIGH*CHRIS
Record Label: Brash Music
Album: Running Back To You 14,785

REBEL SOULJAHZ
Record Label: GO Aloha Entertainment
Album: Nothing To Hide 14,262

BLIND PILOT
Record Label: Expunged Records,
Album: 3 Rounds & A Sound 11,281

MORNING BENDERS
Record Label: +1 Records Album: Talking Through Tin Cans 11,201

STS9
Record Label: 1320 Records
Album: PEACEBLASTER 10,601

TRIP LEE
Record Label: Reach Records
Album:20-20 10,003

2010-02-10T12:27:00.001-08:00

FROM BOB LEFSETZ BLOG:

The Warner Music Group is making money. The publicized loss is due to accounting, having to do with amortization and other issues Wall Street understands and lay people do not. But what is the future?

You can read the transcript of the Warner earnings call here:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/187591-warner-music-group-f1q10-qtr-end-12-31-09-earnings-call-transcript?page=-1

And if you trudge through it, you'll learn some fascinating things.

Like Warner is not about to authorize Spotify in the U.S. That's big news on the Interwebs today. Edgar Bronfman, Jr. said no free streaming. Hell, let me quote exactly what he said:

"Well, first of all we don't know what consumer behavior is going to be in the cloud and whether we can correlate purchase to sort of subscription or other kinds of models. But we do a lot of sort of modeling work here to talk about what â€“ to think about what kind of scale is necessary at what pricing and we do see that the opportunity to expand music consumption and music purchase, whether that's by track, by album or simply by service across a vastly greater number of consumers is net extremely positive for the industry. That having been said, free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry. And as far as Warner Music's concerned will not be licensed. So this sort of get all the music you want for free and then we maybe we can â€“ with a few bells and whistles move you to a premium price strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future."

Actually, it's not as bad as it appears. Because Bronfman is for licensing at the ISP level, or bundling the cost of music into a mobile device. This is not a bad strategy, one that Spotify itself is trying to employ. Maybe you get music with your Internet access. Might seem free to you, but someone's paying Warner and other rights holders for that content. Is this imminent? One would hope so. And a far better strategy than Bono and his manager beating up on the ISPs. Better to come up with a business solution than to jawbone someone into accepting a responsibility they don't think they have. But we see how long it took Nokia's Comes With Music initiative to launch, and it was a bust upon final release. Speaking maybe to software. Which augurs for a relationship between music companies and third party software companies, allowing streaming and possibly downloading of music easily. This could come tomorrow, but will it? Every day there's no reasonable solution is
another day people steal music.

Then there's Vevo. Which Universal is trumpeting as a savior and Warner refuses to join. Bronfman says there's more value to be extracted by monetizing individual bands on Websites. I like that he believes in his acts, but is the future about aggregation or individuation? About subscribing to everything or cherry-picking? I'd say the former, which makes me wonder whether Bronfman wants to keep Universal at arm's length, whether that's the real reason he refuses to join the Vevo consortium. That's an excellent strategy, for Universal is both a bully and old school. It's Warner that's pioneering digital initiatives, it's Warner that makes the highest percentage of revenue via digital, not Universal. Vevo is a minor step by a rearguard company. You don't want to be pulled down by a slow enemy.

Which brings us to 360 deals. Warner wants 'em. And will pay dearly for these rights. But they won't overpay for the flavor of the moment without them. Bronfman says they've lost acts to competitors who are willing to make these deals. But, without 360 degrees of revenue in the future, the company cannot thrive.

And Bronfman says that 360 rights are not always tied to the length of the recording agreement. In other words, you can make five albums and be free to record elsewhere, but you might be paying a percentage of touring and merch for years thereafter. Smart on Warner's behalf, good for an act? Try selling your recording rights to another company without these other rights... Probably difficult. Meaning that you will probably be signed to Warner for the length of your career. Because in order to release more records, you renegotiate the entire deal, extending it even further. That's how renegotiation works, you get more money for more time, for a greater commitment.

So should you sign a 360 deal?

This is where the call gets truly fascinating. Bronfman is asked about the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger:

"Yeah. Look, I think we think of Live Nation-Ticketmaster largely as a complimentary business to the business that we're in. I think Live Nation-Ticketmaster is a business of scale, it's a business of consumer relationships and venue relationships, and it deals almost entirely with artists that have proven that they have a significant ticket purchasing capability.

Our business, on the other hand, is essentially a venture capital business where we're betting on a bunch of unknown artists who have yet to develop that opportunity. And when we sign those artists we sign, as I said, essentially all of them to expanded rights deals which means whether they go through Ticketmaster-Live Nation when they're eventually touring or through some other form, we're going to partner with the artists in the revenues derived from their tours. So our sense is that these are largely complimentary businesses, not really competitive businesses. I think Live Nation-Ticketmaster has the opportunity to be a very strong and powerful company, but in an area of the business where we do not currently compete, although we do expect to derive significantly increased revenue over time."

What Bronfman is saying is Warner invests in its acts, Live Nation does not. Live Nation wants to tour established acts, Warner establishes them.

But does it have to be this way?

Make no mistake, Live Nation is strapped. Is it willing to invest in artist development? Is it willing to pay to build artists who can play its venues?

It all starts with the manager, and in this case, Live Nation has the largest management company, Front Line. If you've got a manager, do you need a label?

Managers today have radio promotion departments, marketing departments, but they've always looked to deep pockets to fund their acts. Should they step up and risk money themselves?

Boutiques will not, they haven't got access to capital, the risks are too heavy. But Live Nation? Can Live Nation build acts, that will tour their buildings, make exotic merch and distribution deals, leaving out the major label completely? It takes money, will Live Nation/Front Line pony up? And will Live Nation require said acts to tour its buildings? Its own 360 deal? Are we robbing Peter to pay Paul, or is Irving Azoff going to save the artist from the big bad labels, keeping all the money for the talent?

This is the big question.

Warner has attempted to enter the promotion sphere. We see whenever the company ventures from its core capabilities there's trouble, whether it be Bulldog or LaLa. I don't think Live Nation has much to worry about here.

Whereas Azoff knows every element of the business. He's run a major label and has been a manager, to say he's familiar with live entertainment is an understatement. But is Azoff in for the long haul, or does he want to get another paycheck and ride off into the sunset with Don Henley?

If Azoff wants to continue to play, watch out. Sure, he'll make a major label deal on exorbitant terms. But really, it all comes down to what's best for his artists. And why pay a third party if you can do it yourself? Anyone can distribute one's music online. Anybody can hire a radio promotion and marketing team. But are Azoff and Front Line willing to risk, signing unknowns and investing in them? Hell, managers always sign unknowns, but are they willing to pay for development? If they are, Warner should be very afraid. Warner will have its catalog, and..? Live Nation might be able to offer an act more, a hell of a lot more, the act giving up less in the process.

In other words, are we on the verge of a revolution, or are managers just too cheap and will continue to make onerous deals with deep-pocketed labels?

We're gonna find out.

--
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/

2010-01-26T16:59:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I posted an article Tom Silverman wrote about the indie music business. As a disclaimer, I must say that I set up and consulted the label for TMI Boyz--the group listed as the second most successful indie label in 2008 and 2009, AND the #1 successful RAP indie label of all indie releases in 2009. Of 200+ labels that year that released indie projects, only 13 sold above 10,000 copies. TMI Boyz came it at #2 accounding to SoundScan, but since our goal was NOT to ever sign to a major label, most of our sales were not SoundScan sales, and the group did faaaaar better than it would appear from the article.

Congrats to TMI Boyz. They are always Grinding For A Purpose. #1!!

2010-01-26T16:50:00.000-08:00

More Bob Lefsetz:

The Tommy Silverman Debacle
Tommy’s larger than life, but so old school as to make Will Ferrell seem like a high school student.

Tommy’s a hustler. Who made it on his own ingenuity and ears. But does what he have to say today truly apply?

Maybe you’re not in the same network as me, but I’ve been e-mailed Tommy’s interview with musiciancoaching.com again and again in the past twenty four hours (musiciancoaching.com? Does that make you want to run or what?)

It’s just plain wrong. It states that no one breaks from the Internet, everybody needs the deep pocket of a label.

I’d say money helps, although I wouldn’t take the money of a usual suspect label…

But this is the kind of thinking that would have Kodak saying that they’re relying on film, or newspapers saying they’re relying on print, or labels saying they’re relying on CDs. Just because you can’t see the cliff from where you are, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Everybody said no one would read a book on a hand-held electronic device, and suddenly everyone’s saying the opposite, Kindle’s got many competitors and Apple’s unreleased tablet gets more press than a starlet without panties getting into a car outside a bar.

The old ways are history. But am I really going to respond to musicianscoaching.com? Actually, doesn’t matter what I say, that’s what I love about the Internet, you can’t steer, you can only jump in the river and keep your eyes open, and try to detect where the current is going. In other words, the public triumphs, it has control, the only way to possibly steer is to be so far out ahead, no one knows what you’re doing. That’s the Apple paradigm, not the major label paradigm.

Anyway, Jeff Price of TuneCore decided to respond to Tommy. And even if you don’t read Tommy’s ravings, you should read Jeff’s. They’re incredibly eye-opening. The labels’ advantage wasn’t their money, but their lock on distribution. TuneCore is the labels’ worst nightmare, for almost nothing your music can get distributed and you can get paid.

Read what Jeff has to say here:

January 21, 2010

How people use Neilsen to hurt musicians.

I read an article today at Digital Music News about comments by Tommy Silverman - founder of Tommy Boy and the New Music Seminar.

With all due respect, his information is wrong. But worse, the conclusions he reaches from this faulty information could be damaging to artists.

Some highlights include statements like:

Silverman counted 105,575 new album releases that year, and found that just 225 of those were new artists surpassing the 10,000 unit threshold for the first time. Of that, just 14 were do-it-yourself artists, unaffiliated with a major, indie, or other entity."

and

"What does this say about the Chris Anderson 'Long Tail' promise?" Silverman blogged in Musician Coaching. "Clearly the ease of making and distributing music does not benefit 'breaking' music. Breaking music requires mass exposure which requires luck or money or both. I can say with great authority that less new music is breaking now in America than any other time in history. Technology has not helped more great music rise to the top, it has inhibited it. I know this is a bold statement but it is true."

I wrote a response to the editor of the blog where the article appeared, I do not know if he will post it, but I feel so strongly about making certain word gets out, I am re-posting my response to Tommy's statements here

------------

I hope this email finds you well. I am writing you in response to Tommy's information and posting - the good news, he is dead wrong. The truth is more artists and bands are breaking now in America, and around the world, than at any other time in history. Technology has absolutly helped more great artists and bands rise to the top.

The Nielsen data cited is not only incomplete, but also provides a false analysis.

Let me provide you some hard stats to back this up:

According to Nielsen and Tommy there were:
"...106,000 new (music) releases in 2008"

In 2008, TuneCore released approximately 90,000 newly recorded releases

This means, according to Neilsen and Tommy, almost every single new music release in 2008 was distributed via TuneCore.

I know this simply not to be true - the base assumption that Tommy is making is as dead wrong as his other statistics.

Another example, Tommy states:

" just 225 of those (the new releases) were new artists surpassing the 10,000 unit threshold for the first time. "

This is an empirically false statement for a few reasons.

First, in order for Neilsen to accuratly track sales, the UPCs for those albums must be pre-registered in their database. If the UPC is not registered in its database, Neilsen can not match the sales data to an album (or song). For example, if a digital store tells Neilsen it sold 100 copies of UPC # 123456789, and Neilsen has no idea what UPC # 123456789 is, it can not report the sales.

Next, the majority of the 90,000 releases via TuneCore in 2009 were not registered with Soundscan therefore making it impossible for them to track or report on the sales.

But these two points are actually kind of moot. Music is no longer bought by the album, it is bought by the song across an artist's catalog. Tracking album sales as the sole indicator to determine if something is "breaking" is analogous to tracking only vinyl album sales to determine if something is "breaking"

Some examples:

When they were unsigned, the following TuneCore artists sold the following quantities of songs across their releases:

Kelly sold over 2,000,000 million tracks
William Fitzsimmons sold over 150,000 tracks
Soulja Boy sold over 200,000 tracks
Boyce Avenue sold over 1,200,000 tracks
Ron Pope sold over 250,000 tracks
Colt Ford sold over 300,000 tracks
Secondhand Serenade sold over 250,000 tracks
Tapes N Tapes sold over 200,000 tracks
Nevershoutnever sold over 1,000,000 tracks
Drake sold over 300,000 tracks
MGMT sold over 225,000 tracks
The Medic Droid sold over 150,00 tracks
Nickasaur sold over 150,000 tracks
Harry and the Potters sold over 200,000 tracks

This is just a very quick partial list that goes on and on and on

Under Tommy's model, none of these artist sales count as they are not "album" sales.

With all due respect, Tommy might discount selling over 1,000,000 songs by an "unsigned" artist as not "breaking", but I do.

On a macro level, in 2009 alone, the internet allowed the "long tail" unsigned artists that used TuneCore to generate over $32,000,000 in music sales by selling over 42,000,000 songs - this is more than one song a second selling by a TuneCore Artist on iTunes. This "long tail" catalog that TuneCore's Aritsts represent is now one of the most valuable music catalogs in the world. And this all happened due to the net, social networking and access to the media outlets (like YouTube).

"Breaking" is not just about selling albums or even just the music - it is about generating revenue off of fame. This is done via merch, gig, publishing, music sales, ad revenue and more. Nevershoutnever sold over 35,000 t-shirts in a number of months via a regional sales program with Hot Topic. Surely Tommy does not mean to discount these sales and revenue simply because the artist is selling merch? How about if the band sold no music but consistently sold out 1,000 venue clubs and made $15,000 a night? Why does Tommy discredit bands for their success if they are not selling "albums"?

Another distributing and incorrect point suggested by Tommy is that music sales are down due to the fact that there is more music available to buy, share and discover.

As a matter of fact, its quite the opposite

In the late 90's - also known as the "golden age" of market share and revenue for the music industry - more music was being released and bought than ever before (as an example, Warner was releasing one new release a day). Despite this increase of releases, sales (not just revenue) went up, not down.

Or from a pure logic perspective, if iTunes had 2,000,000 less songs, would an artist that is not selling now as no one likes their music magically start selling. Or to flip it around, I would suggest more music on the virtual shelf causes more music to sell as it allows the music buyer to discover music via the digital stores own recommendation association engines.

Tommy's goes on to state:

"Breaking music requires mass exposure which requires luck or money or both."

This statement is also dead wrong - and he knows it based on is own experiences at Tommy Boy.

Historically, in the music industry, 98% of what the record labels distributed, spent hundreds of millions of dollars on to market and promote and get played on commercial radio and MTV did not "break". If "breaking" simply "required mass exposure", there would have been a 98% success rate, not failure rate. But music is not a math equation, and therein lies the problem with Tommy's statement. Yes, to break you need exposure, but that by no means guarantees success. The music has to cause reaction. For example, if "Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not a song that people liked, it would not have mattered how much money was spent on getting you to hear it.

And that's the excitement and beauty of the internet. The masses now have direct access to the media and "music discovery" social networking outlets. - i.e. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, Jango and more. These new social networking and media vehicles allow mass communication in an instanteous fashion at a click of button. Suddenly one person's opinion does matter and can can impact a bottom line. Even the digital stores themselves provide a vehicle to market and promote yourself off off (i.e. iTunes iMixes or recommendations of other music to buy). Through these vehicles the internet has delivered the ability for anyone to "break", and they actually are. The masses now have access to the media outlets to get heard. The problem is the old school view that "breaking" is simply defined by selling albums. This could not be farther from the truth.

Tommy also goes onto say:

"I can say with great authority that less new music is breaking now in America than any other time in history. Technology has not helped more great music rise to the top, it has inhibited it. I know this is a bold statement but it is true."

It might be a bold statement by Tommy to help get headlines, but it's also false (and kind of silly). The truth is more artists and bands are breaking now in America, and around the world, than at any other time in history. Technology has absolutly helped more great artists and bands rise to the top.

The distressing part for me about this is based on Tommy's statements, if an artists' release is not counted by Neilsen than it is not actually released. If music does not sell as an album then it has not sold. In effect, he is de-legitimizing artists.

With all due respect, I believe an artist's release should "count" even if not recognized by Neilsen as this de-recognition closes off possible opportunities based on the perception that a release is not "real"

I also find it distressing that the media, and other outlets, turn to Neilsen as the definitive source to determine what is occurring in this industry thereby decreasing the opportunities for musicians and artists that are not part of this old school system.

The reality is the majority of music is now being created, released and sold outside of the traditional system. Ad agencies, music supervisors, video game manufacturers, radio programmers etc turn to Neilsen for information to discover music in an attempt to use/license it. They need to understand that the Neilsen information is an incomplete and an inaccurate portrayal of reality. This inaccurate perception is holding back opportunity and validation for others. Tommy needs to stop propagating this false perception as it hurts artists.

It's important that an accurate picture of what is occurring be presented to fans and businesses to provide additional choice and opportunity for musicians. They work hard enough as it is, the last thing we need to do is propagate a false reality to hurt them. Tommy's heart is in the right place, we are here to help musicians, but let's start with a more accurate description as opposed to a "bold" but false statement that helps promote an agenda.

Here's the Link to Tom's original article:
http://musiciancoaching.com/

2010-01-26T16:48:00.000-08:00

Tone Deaf
Forty years ago, if you worked hard and saved your pennies, you too could live the life of the rich and famous, if only for a night, or a weekend. Now the gulf between the worlds of the rich and the poor, between the haves and the have-nots, is so vast as to seem uncrossable, and the public is pissed. Not only right wing Tea Party members, but left wing Democrats. How did we get such a raw deal?

You need to read Frank Rich’s column in yesterday’s "New York Times". Because he nails it. It’s about jobs and foreclosures, stupid! How did Obama and his minions get it so wrong? Beholden to Wall Street, not in touch with the average man, the Administration has squandered its political capital.

Just like the music industry.

Once upon a time, it was a dream to work at a record company. Unless you knew someone it was impossible to get a job. Hell, it was impossible to get a job in music retail, far from the halls of Warner’s ski lodge and Black Rock. Music was where it was happening.

But no longer.

It starts with the acts. The acts were our beacon, pointing the way to truth, justice and the American way. Yes, if you were really good and worked really hard you could get rich, but nowhere near as rich as today’s Wall Street fat cats, even adjusting the dollars for inflation. Hell, you criticize the underprivileged for dreaming of playing in the NBA? What are the odds you’re going to work hard, get into Harvard and be accepted in the white corporate world? Not high. You’re better off shooting for the NBA, which might only pay for a decade or two, but it’s better than dealing drugs.

And let’s not equate athletes with artists. Athletes show their skill physically, artists radiate something intellectual, from the inside.

And suddenly, there are no artists.

Not in the mainstream.

It started thirty years ago, with the advent of MTV. First and foremost, you had to look good. And then you had to play the music MTV aired, because radio took its cues from the TV monolith. Suddenly, what was acceptable musically got really narrow. The opposite of the FM days a decade before. You used to listen to the deejay as he took you on an aural trip around the world, from folkie to metal monsters. The criterion was that something be good, not what genre it was made in. We had a very big tent.

The tent got smaller and smaller.

And those inhabiting it no longer played the game of Mo Ostin, but the construct of Tommy Mottola. Let’s homogenize it to the point where every media outlet will promote our wares for free. Let’s sell tonnage!

Sure, a lot of people liked it for a while. But they liked buying houses and watching them go up in value too. In other words, both paradigms were built on nothing but air, there were no underpinnings. Who wants the music that Clive Davis promoted in the nineties? Who wants any music from the nineties?

Those acts that remained, ironically aged classic rockers, could no longer get airplay in this new world. So, they toured playing oldies to great demand, raising prices all the while. Employing shenanigans like scalping their own tickets in order to book even more revenue. Hell, if the Wall Streeters could do it, why shouldn’t they?

And speaking of Wall Street, Robert Sillerman rolled up the independent concert promoters into what is now known as Live Nation, which just merged with Ticketmaster, and suddenly you’ve got a giant enterprise that needs to put on shows to make the whole thing work and is thus willing to overpay for talent, resulting in ever higher concert ticket prices. Indie promoters can walk away from a bad deal. Behemoths need to book revenue. Just ask Detroit, which produced cars whether people wanted them or not, it was easier to keep the factories humming then reconstruct, i.e. deconstruct. After all, it was all about market share.

But what does a fan care about market share? Hell, a fan doesn’t care who puts on the show, as long as the talent appears and delivers.

But with prices so high, you rarely went. And couldn’t understand how people wanted to see the evanescent pop stars at all. Why was the media trumpeting these stiffs, especially after MTV stopped airing videos, after radio crumbled, after the Internet destroyed the monoculture and the world split into niches?

Media doesn’t want to acknowledge niches, because then it has to reevaluate its own place in the landscape. But that’s the land we live in today, a zillion acts with their own audience. As for having contempt for another niche, for someone else’s music, does a fan of A&E put down people who watch Discovery, or Bravo? Railing against another’s taste makes no sense in this market, where everybody gets to listen to what they want, assuming they can find it.

But people can’t find it, can’t find the new music they want to hear. Top Forty is too sold out, and the hipster acts too far from center. Really, listen to the Dirty Projectors and tell me the mainstream cares. Please note, I’m not evaluating the quality of the Dirty Projectors, if you love them, great. All I’m saying is one listen will tell you that they’re niche, most people won’t like them. Yet, the Dirty Projectors have gotten the most media coverage of any new act, and the public that’s paying attention is throwing up its hands and saying huh?

The music industry is in deep shit. Not because of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger, but because of the gulf between the industry and the public, which is sick of overpaying for everything, meanwhile, not wanting much. To trumpet the success of Top Forty acts is like hyping the sales of Harley-Davidson. Sure, there’s a market for these overpriced American bikes, but most people want a much cheaper foreign job.

But at least Harley-Davidson has cred. Imagine if Harley-Davidson had the image of GM!

Enough with the analogies. The point is, music has squandered all its advantages. It no longer evidences truth, more quickly than any artistic medium. Radio is unlistenable. And the public has been ripped off for decades. You can tell people they shouldn’t steal, that music is a great value, but you’re just wasting your time, because the public is pissed!

I really don’t see how the usual suspects worm their way out of this one. Because to succeed in the future, you’ve got to develop, earn trust, give plenty and leave something on the table. And that’s anathema in the modern music world. Rather than argue about scalpers, make everybody show ID to get in. But most acts don’t want this, because really, they want that extra ticket revenue themselves, ergo platinum packages and American Express pre-sales.

The public wants good and affordable.

It hasn’t been that way for eons in the music business. It’s like we’re selling $60,000 Malibus. And you wonder why Hyundai has made inroads, it’s cheap and it’s good!

Music can come back. But the artists need to be about songs, not endorsements. You’ve got to want to play music first, and get rich…way down the line. And your handlers have to have this same philosophy. And you’ve got to stand for something. May sound easy, but looking at the landscape, it appears to be damn difficult.

FRANK RICH'S OP-ED PIECE:
January 24, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
After the Massachusetts Massacre
By FRANK RICH
It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated (with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the toilet. Brown had the good sense not to identify himself as a Republican in either his campaign advertising or his victory speech.

And yet Tuesday’s special election was a dire omen for this White House. If the administration sticks to this trajectory, all bets are off for the political future of a president who rode into office blessed with more high hopes, good will and serious promise than any in modern memory. It’s time for him to stop deluding himself. Yes, last week’s political obituaries were ludicrously premature. Obama’s 50-ish percent first-anniversary approval rating matches not just Carter’s but Reagan’s. (Bushes 41 and 43 both skyrocketed in Year One.) Still, minor adjustments can’t right what’s wrong.

Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.

That’s no place for any politician of any party or ideology to be. There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft. And the conviction that the game is fixed is nonpartisan. If the tea party right and populist left agree on anything, it’s that big bailed-out banks have and will get away with murder while we pay the bill on credit cards — with ever-rising fees.

Politically, no other issue counts. In last weekend’s Washington Post/ABC News poll, 42 percent of Americans chose the economy as the country’s most pressing concern. Only 5 percent picked terrorism, and 2 percent Afghanistan. Obama’s highest approval ratings are now on foreign policy and national security issues — despite the relentless hammering from the Cheney right — but voters don’t care.

Does health care matter? Not as much as you’d think after this yearlong crusade. In the Post/ABC poll, the issue was second-tier — at 24 percent. Obama has blundered, not by positioning himself too far to the left but by landing nowhere — frittering away his political capital by being too vague, too slow and too deferential to Congress. The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”

Worse, the master communicator in the White House has still not delivered a coherent message on his signature policy. He not only refused to signal his health care imperatives early on but even now he, like Congressional Democrats, has failed to explain clearly why and how reform relates to economic recovery — or, for that matter, what he wants the final bill to contain. Sure, a president needs political wiggle room as legislative sausage is made, but Scott Brown could and did drive his truck through the wide, wobbly parameters set by Obama.

Ask yourself this: All these months later, do you yet know what the health care plan means for your family’s bottom line, your taxes, your insurance? It’s this nebulousness, magnified by endless Senate versus House squabbling, that has allowed reform to be caricatured by its foes as an impenetrable Rube Goldberg monstrosity, a parody of deficit-ridden big government. Since most voters are understandably confused about what the bills contain, the opponents have been able to attribute any evil they want to Obamacare, from death panels to the death of Medicare, without fear of contradiction.

It’s too late to rewrite that history, but it may not be too late for White House decisiveness. Whatever happens now — good, bad or ugly — must happen fast. Each day Washington spends dickering over health care is another day lost while the election-year economy, stupid, remains intractable for Americans who are suffering.

On the economic front, Obama needs both stylistic and substantive makeovers. He has stepped up the populist rhetoric lately — and markedly after political disaster struck last week — but few find this serene Harvard-trained lawyer credible when slinging populist rhetoric at “fat-cat” bankers. His two principal economic policy makers are useless, if not counterproductive, surrogates. Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, was probably fatally compromised from the moment his tax lapses surfaced; now he is stalked by the pileup of unanswered questions about the still-not-transparent machinations at the New York Fed when he was knee-deep in the A.I.G. bailout. Lawrence Summers, the top administration economic guru, is a symbol of the Clinton-era deregulatory orgy that helped fuel the bubble.

The White House clearly knows this duo is a political albatross. After the news broke that 85,000 more jobs had been lost in December despite some economists’ more optimistic predictions, Christina Romer, a more user-friendly (though still academic) economic hand, was dispatched to the Sunday shows. This is at best a makeshift solution.

Obama needs more independent economists like Paul Volcker, who was hastily retrieved from exile last week after the Massachusetts massacre prompted the White House to tardily embrace his strictures on big banks. Obama also needs economic spokesmen who are not economists and who can authentically speak to life on the ground. Obama must also reconnect. The former community organizer whose credit card was denied at the Hertz counter during the 2000 Democratic convention now spends too much time at the White House presiding over boardroom-table meetings and stiff initiative rollouts instead of engaging with Americans not dressed in business suits.

When it comes to economic substance, small symbolic gestures (the proposed new bank “fee”) won’t cut it. Nor will ineffectual presidential sound bites railing against Wall Street bonuses beyond the federal government’s purview. There’s no chance of a second stimulus. The White House will have to jawbone banks on foreclosures, credit card racketeering and the loosening of credit to small businesses. This means taking on bankers who were among the Obama campaign’s biggest backers and whose lobbyists have castrated regulatory reform by buying off congressmen of both parties. It means pressing for all constitutional remedies that might counter last week’s 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision allowing corporate campaign contributions to buy off even more.

It’s become so easy to pin financial elitism on Democrats that the morning after Brown’s victory the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee had the gall to accuse them of being the “one party who bailed out the automakers and insurance companies.” Never mind that the Bush White House gave us the bank (and A.I.G.) bailouts, or that the G.O.P. is even more in hock than Democrats to corporate patrons. The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative.

Last year the president pointedly studied J.F.K.’s decision-making process on Vietnam while seeking the way forward in Afghanistan. In the end, he didn’t emulate his predecessor and escalated the war. We’ll see how that turns out. Meanwhile, Obama might look at another pivotal moment in the Kennedy presidency — and this time heed the example.

The incident unfolded in April 1962 — some 15 months into the new president’s term — when J.F.K. was infuriated by the U.S. Steel chairman’s decision to break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages). Kennedy was no radical. He hailed from the American elite — like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.

Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Kennedy,” reporters were left “literally gasping.” The young president called out big steel for threatening “economic recovery and stability” while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at “a high point in popular support.”

Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.

2010-01-26T16:46:00.000-08:00

Here are some Bob Lefsetz RANTS that I've been meaning to post over the past few weeks:

Bundling
The recorded music business must switch to subscription, it’s its only hope of economic survival.

The iTunes Store is killing the music business. Sure, it provides a legal alternative to theft/copyright infringement, but the economics make no sense. Because instead of spending $10-$20 for an album, people are now purchasing $1.29 tracks. And it takes many $1.29 tracks to reach the equivalent of an album. Essentially ten. So, you’re asking the public to make ten purchases instead of one. Get it? Can you imagine someone saying yes ten times in a row? Imagine buying the White Album a la carte. How many people do you think would have purchased "Revolution 9"? But we did, as part of an album, there were no singles from the White Album, and therefore we know "Revolution 9", because oftentimes we were just too lazy to jump up and lift the needle past it, and we ended up hearing it, it’s in our DNA, like the rest of those album tracks.

But it makes no sense to complain that people should buy albums instead of singles, you’re pissing in the wind, the Internet has unbundled the album. That doesn’t mean you can’t try to get people to buy as many of your tracks as possible, it just means that the concept of paying once for ten tracks is something that no one has to do, and almost no one wants to do.

So, inherently, we’re selling less music, and making less money.

Who do we want to blame? Apple, the customer? That makes no sense, as stated previously Apple is providing an alternative, and without customers you’ve got no business. The key is to get more cash from each individual consumer, so in the aggregate, we end up with a lot of money.

The classic example is cable bundling. You cannot buy your cable channels a la carte. You must buy them in tiers. Which drives you nuts. Why am I paying for something I’m never going to watch? But economically, it makes sense. For if the channels were unbundled, the cable system wouldn’t be able to make enough money, so it would have to raise the price of each individual channel substantially, to the point where you’d be paying just as much. According to this article in the "New Yorker", at most you’d be saving thirty five cents. And you’d give up the ability to surf all those extra channels, and possibly find something interesting.

That’s what we want people to do. Surf the music and find something interesting. That was the old album paradigm. Since you paid four or six or ten bucks for the LP (the price went up with inflation), you listened to it, and found out you liked cuts other than the hits, to the point you wanted to see the act live, to hear it perform all these songs, and bought the next album not worrying about a hit, because you were a fan of the band.

I hope these days can return. But we’ve got to switch the game in the interim. We’ve got to make people fans of music!

Yes, instead of paying ten bucks for an album, you pay ten bucks for music. And technology allows everybody access, so instead of charging our good customers more, we charge everybody one low flat fee, kind of like cable television, the provider doesn’t care if you watch all day long or not at all, it’s the same price.

And speaking of price, we can argue whether ten bucks is appropriate, we can argue price all day long, but we can’t argue paradigm. The key to survival is charging everybody something. Not breaking it down by track, but providing the whole smorgasbord for a single price.

Now the Spotify trick is to get you hooked for free, then upsell you. That’s a good concept, works in sampling across all wares. Don’t think it’s about giving music away for free, it’s ultimately about getting a chance to convert many people. It’s just like a retail store. The first key is getting traffic, then, once people are in the store, you do your best to close them. Hell, sometimes you do giveaways just to get them in!

Not that Spotify is the only solution. But the labels must see they need to drive subscriptions, or lose the bundling war. That site allowing you to get tracks for experiencing ads? That’s economic death. As is Apple’s concept of letting you stream the tracks you own via the cloud. If either of these take hold, the odds of subscription winning go down, and you want them to go up, because the pool is so much larger.

Don’t see this as a music problem. Don’t see this as a value problem. See this as an economic problem. How do we get the most money? Certainly not by selling tracks. Definitely by selling low-priced subscriptions.

Furthermore, if the music is streamed (with thousands of tracks on your hand-held in case you’re out of range, Spotify provides this today), there’s no issue of someone stealing everything and then disconnecting. What’s there to steal? People believe YouTube clips will live in the cloud forever, very few people save them to disk. We have to migrate music to this same sphere.

Please read this article about bundling. It will make the concept clear to you. The cable companies and content providers are tempting unbundling by fighting their silly wars in public. We have the reverse problem in music. Our content has been unbundled. Only by bundling it again can the industry regain health.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2010/01/25/100125ta_talk_surowiecki
New Yorker Bundling Article

2010-01-15T13:07:00.001-08:00

The Ever-Changing Rap Music Business
By, Industry Veteran Wendy Day (www.WendyDay.com)

2009 marked the end of a decade and there were many changes that occurred in the music business.

When Don Diva called and asked me to write about the changes I’ve seen over the last 10 years, I started writing this before I even got off the phone. It’s easy to write about something you live and are passionate about. In fact, it almost wrote itself. I’ve been in the music industry for almost 20 years now (March 2010 marks the beginning of my 19th year) and there are very few people left who started back when I did or who’ve been in it as long as I have. I chalk that up to the continual changes and to insanity—ya gotta be a little nuts to stay in this industry any length of time. Especially the folks like me who do this for the love, and not solely for the money!

Since The Dawn Of Hip Hop

Before I talk about the changes over the past decade, there are two changes that have occurred over the past two decades that I need to mention first: the music and the industry people. The music went from being an art form in the 80s and 90s, to being a business. When Hip Hop began in the late 70s and early 80s in the Bronx, it was art. Artists made music to express themselves, tell stories, and entertain fans. And although artists today also do the same thing, the motivation has changed drastically. Artists rarely make music today solely to entertain fans, express themselves, or tell stories. Almost all well-known artists try to make music that is marketable, fits a radio format, and will sell to the masses thereby bringing revenue and income to the artist. It went from being an artform to big business. Many years ago Chuck D said “Rap is the CNN of the Ghetto.” Today, it’s the new dope game—everyone is trying to hit a lick and make a quick buck in the music industry, it seems.

This change in the music (from art to commerce) also brought about a change in the people working in the music industry. The industry originally went from people outside of the artists’ community pimping them to people inside their community pimping them. At one time, the folks coming into the music industry to work were people who loved the musical art form, lived it, and wanted to be surrounded by it. Qualified workers were attracted into the fray. This changed in the 90s, bringing in people who saw the music industry as a “come up.” It became an industry with a low barrier to entry (meaning you didn’t need any special training or knowledge to work in the music industry) and where anyone could believably proclaim themselves a specialist or authority within any area of the industry (marketing, promotions, etc). Access replaced aptitude. It went from being fun to being the cut throat, over crowded, greed driven business that it is today.

Spreading The Wealth

In the 90s, I watched (and helped) the music industry shift from being centered in NY to giving access to many other areas of the country (L.A., the Bay Area, Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, Detroit, Atlanta, etc). The music went from being lyrically motivated (artists used to HAVE to have, and prove, their skills) to being motivated by sales (measurement of success was whether an artist could sell Platinum as opposed to lyrical skill). It became a multi-billion dollar business by its height in the early 2000s.

That geographic change also changed the discovery of artists and distribution of music from national through the Major Labels, to regional through independent labels. This is when Rap-A-Lot, Cash Money Records, No Limit Records, Swisha House, etc, sprung up and began to make money and gain fame. Even in NY and L.A., the major labels began to sign production companies like Bad Boy and Death Row to focus on urban music. As long as they brought in more money than they spent, and let the Majors continue to own all the masters, it was all good. Even when wars broke out.

Change Gon’ Come

And then things began to change in the past decade, and the change happened pretty quickly. The internet came along, increased in popularity, and by the height of rap music sales, the labels were complaining about all of the free downloading and swapping of the music through outside web based companies like Limewire, Kaaza, and Napster. This also affected software companies and the film industry, but not like it impacted the music industry since what was being “stolen” was only 3 or 4 minutes in length per song...by the millions. As bandwidth got wider in the internet world, the problem increased due to the ease of downloading. Instead of labels embracing downloading and figuring out how to monetize it, they fought it. Unsuccessfully. Fans were happy to take songs for free because it was common knowledge that their favorite artists weren’t being properly compensated for it anyway.

The internet also leveled the playing field. At one time, the only way to “get on” in the music industry was through a major label based in NY or Los Angeles. They were the gate keepers who allowed access to the industry because they controlled the distribution and the radio promotion, so either an artist had to make a connection with a label employee to get a deal or they had to sell a large amount of their own CDs regionally and attract a record deal from a Major label (or a successful middleman label or production company that already had access like Bad Boy, Death Row, DTP, Grand Hustle, etc).

The Playing Field Is Leveled

The internet allowed any artist the opportunity to upload their music to a website or social networking site and reach their fanbase and consumers directly without going through a Major Label’s distribution system. This was especially attractive to many artists without any funding opportunities. With an influx of artists coming into the marketplace, there was an even larger absence of how the industry worked or how to market and promote music successfully. It seemed easy and was treated as such. In reaction, up cropped unsavory people ready to prey on that ignorance, and lack of proper funds—the “get a deal” websites, the marketing and promotion websites, the Ning social networking websites for “members only,” the A&R evaluation websites, the producer websites that help you sell your beats, the consultants, etc.

This past decade has allowed many artists to flex their entrepreneurial skills and become their own independent record label, uploading mixed CDs, EPs, and singles to the web and building a buzz. Hundreds of thousands of websites, MySpace pages, and eblast companies sprang up to give these new artists access to the fans. Ancillary companies sprang up everywhere to help market, promote, distribute, and educate artists about the new frontier—the internet. People with no experience and no track record were jumping into the fray because they had computer knowledge or ability to reach artists through the internet. Internet sites were hiring people on the fringes of the music business because they needed authorities on urban music but couldn’t tell who was who.

People who believe they have talent or who think it’s easy to succeed have come into the marketplace in droves. The mindset that music is free began to prevail—not only free to own through downloading, but free to market and promote. Poorly financed “record labels” began to spring up and sign artists to “deals” because they felt they could make money digitally without spending any money (or spend limited money). The focus became to look for one hit that could make them millionaires overnight. Artists signed to those companies in droves hearing affiliations with major labels like Universal and Asylum, for example. Some folks took songs to radio to land deals (for a fat fee whether the deal came or not). There was a rebirth of “one hit wonders,” especially coming out of Texas. The legitimate labels began avoiding Texas artists for fear that they’d only get one hit wonders, thereby hurting all artists in that region.

The Splintering Effect

The internet also leveled the playing field with the industry. No longer were the key players behind the scenes people with a track record of success, people with trained skills, or people that the industry chose to “let in.” Through the internet, anyone with a healthy email list or some blogging skills could post their ideas and opinions online and attract followers to their opinions. The music industry went from a gatekeeper basis (an inner circle of a few choosing who to let into their circle) to a popularity basis (whomever had the largest following on the internet became accepted in the industry). An entire blogging culture sprung up, and gossips like Sandra Rose, Nicole Bitchie, and Media Takeout, and urban news sites like AllHipHop, HipHopDX, and SOHH took the places of importance of XXL, Vibe, and Source magazines because they could spread information quickly. Sensationalism also found a place in Hip Hop with sites like World Starr Hip Hop and Vlad TV, and artists soon learned that if they do scandalous stuff on video, they will get millions of views within days. Fame began to rule the music industry as artists vyed for reality shows thinking it was the next get rich scheme, only sharing too much information with fans and pushing them away in disgust.

Until the blogging sites and websites popped up, fans had to wait til the next month to get news, new music, reviews, and gossip--and only in printed form. In today’s instant internet culture, we can almost find out that Keiysha Cole is pregnant the day she conceives the child, or we can hear the latest Young Buck/G-Unit dis the second Buck finishes recording. Also, the magazines were based in NY for the most part, as were the staffs, so the bulk of coverage seemed to center around NY artists and lifestyle. The internet opened the coverage up to the world, so now the artists and topics covered are more international and chosen by whomever controls the websites—so information is no longer based solely in NY. The sales now reflect that shift.

The downside of this easy access is that the bloggers are not trained in journalistic skills or ethics/integrity, nor are they backed by large corporations with legal departments that reel in the inaccurate content. These folks can pretty much say whatever comes to mind no matter who it affects. They also don’t have access to the bigger, more famous artists, so they write mostly about the newer and local artists, thereby splintering (and scattering) the coverage even further. They feed off of each other regurgitating the same information overloading viewers—the rush to be first outweighs the need to be accurate. The popularity of Blogs and Websites also changed the overall point of view in general from News to Opinion. So an industry that once had less than a hundred artists in circulation, now has thousands with everyone giving their own opinion about them. This is far too many for fans to absorb so they tend to tune out most of the superfluous information.

This same scattered approach also affected promotions and marketing. Gone were the days of people accessing music through one or two local radio stations, a handful of TV stations or video shows, and a few magazines. Now to advertise and promote, artists and labels have to reach potential consumers wherever they’re getting their news, information, and relaxation—and these fans could be playing video games, surfing any one of millions of sites on the internet, listening to terrestrial radio, satellite radio, or internet radio, etc. The ways to reach potential fans has become too fragmented, and therefore too expensive, to use for marketing and promotions purposes. Magazines began to shut down because they couldn’t afford the lost advertising dollars. TV shows switched to reality TV format because they were cheaper to film and had a “trainwreck” quality of viewership, as their viewer base (and therefore advertising income) reduced. The most scandalous and extreme seems to attract the most attention (see “Balloon Boy” for proof of this). The downside of this need for extreme measures to attract attention is that it often makes the urban music industry feel like the WWE.

Cash Rules

As recording equipment became cheaper and more widely available to the masses, the amount of rappers, singers, and producers increased. This over saturated the marketplace with music. Anyone could now make music inexpensively and upload it onto the internet. The quality of the music began to decline. The industry went from thousands of potential artists to hundreds of thousands of potential artists (as evidenced by the number of rap MySpace pages). As the necessity to be lyrically skilled disappeared, anyone could call themselves a rapper. The ability to develop a buzz switched from skill to funding. Anyone with an investor could promote themselves alongside successful artists. Where lyrical skill once made an artist stand out, now image and adlibs were the stand out features for many rappers.

Cash became king in the past decade—people began to buy their way into the industry both on the artist side and the label side. It became a joke amongst industry people how those without money had talent, and those with money had no talent. More and more unsavory people were coming into the music business with the intention of getting a share of that money, and the old adage “a fool and his money are soon parted” became the norm in this industry. With this new influx of people, it was hard to tell who was real and who wasn’t, so the instances of people getting jerked out of money soared and continue to soar today.

Anyone spending money at a club or spending money on wrapped vehicles and flyers became a target for folks trying to get a check from them. I watched D Boys give industry folks $125,000 in a duffle bag to guarantee record deals that never materialized. I watched a shady Atlanta radio promoter take $45,000 in cash and not secure one radio spin for an indie label. An indie label had a bunch of DJs on “payroll” for years to play records that never came out. A consultant set up a label and helped them spend over a million dollars to sell less than 1,000 CDs with no distributor in sight. A small distributor allegedly put mixed CDs by well known DJs into Best Buy and forgot to pay them til they got sued by the DJs and the Major Labels—and it appears Best Buy still sells those CDs despite the cease and desist letters while the indie retail stores selling legitimate mixed CDs got shut down by the Feds. Gotta love this past decade!!

Today, anyone can walk into any industry event and pass out business cards saying they are a manager, or a promoter, or even that they own a record label, and they will be treated almost the same as Chris Lighty (a real manager), Alex Gidewon (a real promoter), or Jason Geter (a real label owner)—three people with extremely long, proven track records of success. Anyone with good game can bullshit and get over easily in this industry, and most do. And rather than starting a business based on seeing a need and filling it, most people band wagon jump. When they see someone doing something, they take that same idea and run with it. Anyone with internet access can be a Blogger or own an Urban Website. Anyone with a $200 iFlip can run a website or DVD Magazine. Anyone with an email list can have an eBlast service, and anyone with access to a free Bridge line can offer conference calls. Anyone with access to a handful of DJs can start a DJ Crew. Anyone with access to a venue can set up an industry seminar or conference. Truth is, anyone who can see someone else doing anything can jack their idea and replicate it, and there seems to be no downside or consequence for this action. On a positive note, anyone with access to any of these things, who is willing to put in the time and hard work and build something real, can easily stand out in this industry. Whether or not they can make money from it is the question…

Greed Took Over

With major labels desperate for revenue, and desperate to have things go back to the way they were (an impossible dream), they cut expenses by firing key staff members or squeezing out staff with track records of success and experience, replacing them with new people who were willing to work for less money. As money became harder to find, and as the labels were downsizing (meaning salaries decreased while workload increased), many enterprising label employees began to make money on the side by signing artists willing to give them a kickback or a percentage of their careers. This changed the artists getting signed from a talent basis to a financial incentive basis. This meant that the artists coming into the labels’ pipelines were there only if they were willing to take less money, do a shady side deal, or sign a 360 Deal with the label. Talent no longer mattered. The attitude amongst labels was that artists are a dime a dozen and if one artist won’t agree to this, some other artist certainly will. And they did.

This greed spread into every area. Producers became a dime a dozen and were asked to give up a share of their ownership in the publishing in exchange for placements. Some management companies, like Roc Nation, made it a prerequisite to be placed on one of their artist’s albums that the producer has to give up a percentage of their publishing for the placement—even producers with Platinum hits under their belts. The albums have become about who benefits financially instead of making the best music possible.

Many of the labels only use producers that they have on staff to produce albums because they want a bigger ownership financially. For example, Young Jeezy albums (my favorite artist) have a plethora of CTE owned producers on each album so that CTE can collect the lion’s share of the publishing and income. The radio singles seem to be well known established independent producers, but the album filler seems to be mostly CTE staff producers. This is the new music business model and neither CTE nor Roc Nation are the only companies taking a bigger share of the pie as the price for doing business with them—they are actually the norm. Could this possibly be why sales are so low in the rap music industry? Is the music suffering from this need for ownership instead of using the best music possible? After all, it’s a business today, not an artform. The industry is run on a need for ownership and money (greed) instead of displaying the best talent. Capitalism at its finest….

In the middle of this decade, the Major labels changed the recording contracts that it offered artists. The standard deals went from artists getting a 12% to 15% share of the pie after they paid everything back out of their small share, to “360 Deals.” These oppressive deals take a percentage of everything that the artist earns while signed to the label. In 2005, I stopped doing deals with labels because the deals became so oppressive for artists. I’ve even seen Atlantic Records refuse to work an already signed artist until he agreed to convert his contract to a 360 Deal—a worse deal for him, even though his leverage and popularity had increased in the marketplace. His lawyer advised him to do so, as well.

Once used to a healthy profit margin that afforded grand lifestyles for those at the top of the food chain, the major labels became disgruntled as sales dropped while they missed the boat on less profitable digital sales. Taking on the role of dinosaurs fighting for survival, they tried everything from stopping the new digital revolution, to fighting it, to suing it, to band wagon jumping too late. Nothing worked for them. And they still haven’t learned from their mistakes—they still continue to fight the ways the consumers want to receive their music, even though they are willing to pay for it.

So to justify their continuing existence, the labels decided to take an even larger share of the pie from the ONLY aspect of the equation that they controlled—the artist (or the “content” provided for digital download). Back in the day, labels took roughly 88% of the pie while giving the artists 12% of the money AFTER the artist paid back everything spent on them from that 12% share. In exchange for giving up the lion’s share of the sales, the labels always told the artists that they’d make 100% of the touring. Any show money, was the artist’s to keep! Not today!!!

When the shit hit the fan financially for the labels, they decided to tap into the show money, and all other streams of income for the artists, as well. After all, if your profit margin is made smaller, you need to eat more of everyone’s income to keep the fat cats at the top, and the stock holders, happy. Most 360 Deals share in endorsement income (15% to 30% depending on the artist), performance income (10% to 30% depending on the artist), merchandising income (20% to 50%) and Film/TV money (15% to 40%), and as has always been the norm: 50% of the publishing income (ownership in the actual music and lyrics).

How do labels justify taking an even BIGGER share of the pie from artists? They complain that they are doing all of the developing, investing, marketing, and promoting. Their argument is that they believe in the artist when the artist has nothing, and they feel that assuming the lion’s share of the risk should result in sharing in a lion’s share of the profit. If the label is developing and building the artist to a level of super stardom, they feel they have the right to share in a percentage of everything that super stardom affords the artist. So if they drive the artist platinum, they feel they should get a piece of the tour that came from the fame the label helped the artist build, and a piece of the endorsement deal or film income that came from the fame that the label helped build. I guess I could see this argument better, if I actually agreed that the labels did their jobs well of building artists. No 360 Deal to date, has resulted in an artist becoming a SuperStar.

40 Is NOT The New 30

A major shift this past decade has been in demographics. The age of the fans has changed. They’ve grown up into other types of music than rap. Urban music is no longer the mainstream center that it once was. It got old and uncool. Hell, the bulk of our rap stars are older than 30 years old!! Jay Z and Puffy turned 40 this year. And even though their lyrics say that 40 is the new 30 (LOL), that’s the age of the average rap fan’s Dad! Who wants to follow a star that looks like somebody’s Dad!? We don’t have new younger Rap Stars replacing the older Rappers yet other than Soulja Boy. While sales have proven there still is a market for Jay Z, it’s not what it once was. We need a new crop of rap stars that are able to deliver what the mass audience wants….whatever that is. The folks controlling the music industry are all as old as the rappers. When I came into this industry at 30 years old, I was often the oldest person in sight. Today, the industry is made up of folks 30+. How can someone so far away from teenagers in age know what a teenager wants to buy? They are still the bulk of the music buying public. And the folks running most of the labels are my age or older! No wonder the music industry is so out of sync with the youth.

So, while sales have declined in urban music, the artists have been treated worse than ever. They’ve been asked to give up a larger share of their already limited income, and the labels rationalize this by the fact that there are more artists than ever to choose from. Talent doesn’t enter into the business decisions as it once did, or as it should. The music has suffered because it has been created to fit established radio formats (which are bought and paid for through payola) rather than made to be creative and artistic. Artists are controlled through money and financial incentives, and are quickly replaced when they don’t conform. Greed has taken over the industry and artists’ mindsets (most, not all), and drives the current urban music industry. The barrier for entry has been lowered and allows anyone with access and a business card a way in to make his or her share of the pie—usually without delivering what was promised. This industry is very shady and the majority of people can not, or do not, deliver what they promise. And it’s aging quickly.

Yet all in all, it is a fame based industry where glamour seems to reign supreme. People continue to want in and are willing to do anything to get in. It’s an industry that is built on smoke and mirrors and hype and sells dreams for profit. And the truth is, I can’t imagine doing anything else in the world than being right here in the middle of it all, trying to do what’s right and make sense of it.

In the past decade, overall, I’ve seen things grow exponentially worse even though the access has opened and the playing field has been leveled with the internet. I believe the key to on-going success in this music business economy is two-fold: 1) We need to get rid of the old guard—fire everyone who has played a part in getting us to this point, and start over. Everyone! We need to set the standard of doing good and fair business with a consequence for those who get excessively greedy or who jerk people. Those of us in positions of power for years are too set in our ways and remember the days of huge income too readily and we need to be replaced by folks with no expectations and who are willing to embrace the future no matter what it brings. And 2) we need to bring it back to the music and deliver what the fans want, how they want to access it, and what they are willing to pay for. With the internet it’s even easier to tap into research and development of the music and deliver what is needed and wanted. If it’s a customer based business, we need to treat it as such. The artists need to be talented and compensated fairly for what they bring to the table. Lil Wayne, Taylor Swift, and Susan Boyle have proven in 2009 that people will buy what they want to buy—by the millions. In the next decade, let’s give them what they want, shall we? Before the music completely dies.

2009-11-30T07:22:00.000-08:00

Although I didn't write this expose, I found it important enough to post it here. Julia Beverly is officially my hero for this one... We HAVE to clean up this industry, folks!!

SCAM AFTA SCAM: A TRUE STORY

OZONE investigates how a new breed of greedy artist managers and booking agents, led by Gucci Mane’s representatives, are sucking the blood out of the music industry.
by Julia Beverly (this article also appears in the upcoming print edition of OZONE Mag)

To continue reading in PDF format with images (recommended)
http://www.ozonemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/ScamAftaScamArticle_lowres.pdf
To download plain text (no images), http://www.ozonemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/soicey.rtf
To comment on this article, http://www.ozonemag.com/2009/11/30/scam-afta-scam

“Johnnie [Cabbell] is the grand vampire,” proclaims legendary Chicago-based promoter Godfather. For over twenty years, Godfather has been promoting concerts through his company Star Power Entertainment Group. He estimates his losses from bad business deals with Johnnie Cabbell and Debra Antney to be nearly $100,000. “I don’t work with Johnnie anymore,” he states emphatically. “He sucks the blood out of you.”
As the CEO of Hitt Afta Hitt (otherwise known as HAH), Johnnie Cabbell is Gucci Mane’s exclusive booking agent and also manages Bankhead rapper Shawty Lo. Johnnie’s “partner in crime,” Godfather says, is Debra Antney, who describes herself as Gucci Mane’s “business partner and manager.” As CEO of Gucci’s So Icey Records and the management company Mizay Entertainment, Antney also oversees the careers of OJ da Juiceman, Nicki Minaj, and others. Multiple promoters from across the country allege that Cabbell and Antney have collaborated to defraud them collectively of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

THE SO ICEY TOUR

Scheduled for at least 12 cities in July 2009, the So Icey Tour was supposed to feature OJ da Juiceman, Nicki Minaj, and the headliner, Gucci Mane. It sounded promising. Gucci’s buzz was at an all-time high. He had just returned home from prison a few months earlier to ecstatic crowds at “Welcome Home Gucci” parties throughout the South. His artist/protégé OJ had been steadily building a buzz of his own and helping to keep Gucci’s name alive by flooding the streets with mixtapes and fresh material. They were both hot commodities. And in an industry nearly void of female artists, up-and-coming emcee/sex symbol Nicki Minaj was quickly building a name for herself, strengthened by her affiliations with Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane. The timing seemed perfect.

But by all accounts, the “tour,” organized by a Carolina-based promoter named Shannon Marshall, was a mess and fell apart almost immediately. None of the artists showed up for the first two Florida dates (July 4th & 5th), leaving veteran promoter Mr. CC (who, like Godfather in Chicago, has been successfully promoting concerts for over 20 years) with losses of over $140,000. He claims that nearly half of that money, around $70,000, is in the hands of Cabbell/Antney, who refuse to return the deposits or reschedule his dates.

On July 19th, 2009, midway through the scheduled tour dates, Soulja Boy tweeted, “My nigga Gucci back in jail. Free Gucci.” (right) Rumors quickly spread that Gucci had again violated the terms of his probation and was back in jail (or rehab). Although Gucci’s management and label denied the rehab rumors and it’s still unclear exactly where Gucci was in mid-July, it’s clear where he wasn’t: He wasn’t on the So Icey Tour. Of the 12 scheduled tour dates, OZONE has confirmed that at least six, but probably more of these shows (Jacksonville, FL; Pompano Beach/Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Louisville, KY; Chicago, IL; Baltimore, MD; and Detroit, MI) never happened, leaving furious promoters demanding refunds.

That’s a less than fifty percent success rate. “People get fired for those type of numbers in baseball,” laughs Baltimore attorney Paul W. Gardner, of the Gardner Law Group. Gardner spoke to OZONE on behalf of his client, who also lost “a significant sum of money” by booking the So Icey Tour for a stop in Baltimore on July 18th, the day before word of Gucci’s alleged re-incarceration leaked on the ‘net.

“[About] four days before the event, [Cabbell/Antney] said that [Gucci] might not show up,” says Gardner. “Later we found out it was because he was in some sort of rehab facility.” Gardner declined to reveal the exact amount of the deposit, but based on other promoters’ experiences, it is reasonable to assume his client’s total losses were in the range of $40,000-50,000.

When Gardner’s client attempted to reschedule the date, So Icey suddenly changed their story. “They said, ‘How can we reschedule something we don’t have the [deposit] for?’” he laughs. It’s a theme that is repeated over and over in other promoters’ stories: after months of contracts, wire transfers, and conversations, Cabbell/Antney suddenly played dumb, either pointing the finger at each other or hiding behind a complex web of multiple contracts with middlemen.

The So Icey Tour dates were officially contracted through two other entities: reputable New York-based booking agency Ujaama Entertainment, and the much less reputable third-party agent Shannon Marshall. Both of them apparently kept a small percentage of the deposits as a booking fee before sending the bulk of the funds to Cabbell/Antney, presumably to secure all three artists. Because of the complicated paper trail, most of the various promoters’ attempts to legally retrieve their deposits have been difficult and thus far unsuccessful.

“I’m not sure if it’s on purpose,” notes Attorney Gardner, “but [the way the contracts are written up] are very nasty and sinister. It’s multi-layered. From a legal standpoint, when someone does something wrong to you, you can sue that person. Person A sues Person B; laymen understand that [concept]. But the problem arises when a middleman is included and the person on the backend does the harm. Person A has to sue Person B to get to Person C, but in this situation, Person B’s contract says ‘You can’t sue me.’ With the [So Icey Tour] contracts, Person A is the promoter. Person B is Ujaama [and/or Shannon], Person C is Johnnie, Person D is Deb, and E is the artist.” For this reason, he explains, proceeding with a lawsuit is both a difficult and costly endeavor. “Because of the difficulty of the third-party situation, I have to prove which party has the money,” he explains. “Or maybe it’s all of them.”

Complicating the matter even further, the agents’ contracts state that they cannot be sued in the event of a breach of contract. Although this clause is standard in most booking contracts where the agent is only a broker for the artist, Gardner advises his clients to cross it out before signing. “You can’t do business with people you can’t sue,” he says. “It’s legally impossible.”

Ujaama’s attorneys have advised them not to comment on the matter due to pending litigation. Shannon Marshall, who did not return numerous calls for comment, appears to be in hiding. Most of the promoters interviewed have not been able to reach him at all since the cancelled tour dates. “I guess Shannon was a guy that got caught up with them thinking they were good businesspeople over there at Mizay Entertainment and found out they weren’t,” theorizes Godfather. “They were double-booking shows and Johnnie was taking all the deposits.”

Unanimously, the disgruntled So Icey Tour promoters say their money vanished into the hands of Cabbell and Antney. Although the initial deposits were wired to Ujaama, most of the promoters have seen confirmed wire transfer receipts that verify the money ended up in Antney’s bank account. Many have done business with Ujaama for years and never experienced similar issues. “I’ve dealt with Ujaama [before] and never had a problem, so if they say they [sent] the money to the next person, I tend to believe them,” adds Attorney Gardner, who compares the scenario to the sleight-of-hand shell game (left) practiced by street magicians. “It’s like being on the beach and watching the guys with the coconut shells. We just don’t know whose hand is on the coconut.”

“I’ve had a great relationship booking artists with Ujaama for over ten years and I really didn’t wanna get into a legal battle with them. [In the past,] if [an artist] didn’t show up, Ujaama promptly refunded my money. But this? This is a nightmare,” says a frustrated Mr. CC. “I’m out so much money right now that I don’t have a choice. Legally, I have to sue Ujaama. Then Ujaama has to sue Shannon, who disappeared, and then Shannon’s gotta sue Gucci’s management.”

Godfather, while emphasizing that his Ujaama representative Dave Nelson is “a good dude,” blames the fiasco on Cabbell/Antney. “[Ujaama] did a good job of trying to sit down and work the [So Icey Tour] situation out, but [Johnnie and Deb] didn’t want to. If you had $300,000 in deposits, would you want to ‘work it out’?” he asks. “Who’s going to come down to Atlanta and mess with an old lady and go to jail? That’s why you have to sue [Deb]. Everybody else is suing her too.”

Attorney Gardner agrees that hundreds of thousands of dollars appear to have vanished. “The one [deposit] my client sent was a significant sum, and if you multiply that by a 10+ city tour, that’s a hefty bill they have to return. Somebody has the money and can’t repay it,” he reasons. “I don’t know if it’s Johnnie, Deb, or Ujaama. We don’t know how deep the rabbit hole goes, but what’s in the dark always comes to light. If my client decides to sue, we will get to the bottom of it. Multiple defendants always end up telling on each other.”

MODERN DAY SLAVERY

While it’s clear that Ujaama, Shannon, Cabbell, and Antney all received a piece of the So Icey Tour pie, it’s unclear how much – if any – of the initial hundreds of thousands of dollars in show deposits actually went to the artists. It appears that none of it went to OJ da Juiceman or Nicki Minaj, and it’s questionable how much the headliner Gucci received, if any.

Chicago-based John Mosley of Power Move Promotions, a.k.a. John Doe, believes Gucci received little or nothing of the upfront deposits. Since 1997, Mosley has been successfully promoting events in Chicago, Miami, and Atlanta with artists like R Kelly, Jeremih, Twista, Too Short, Gorilla Zoe, and Plies. He partnered with Godfather for the Chicago So Icey Tour date. Although he didn’t reveal the source of his information, Mosley claims that Gucci is locked into a 360 deal with So Icey/Asylum/Warner, and a good portion of the initial show deposits goes to the label, So Icey, which Deb controls. “Gucci Mane is a slave, man,” says Mosley. “Call him and ask him how much of the [show deposits] he’s actually getting.”

360 deals, which are the norm in today’s digital music world, guarantee record labels a percentage of their artists’ revenue from many different sources, including touring. A high-ranking executive at Warner Music Group wouldn’t disclose the exact terms of Gucci Mane’s deal, but did confirm that 360 deals are now standard. “All new [record] deals are inclusive to everything [including a percentage of show monies]. It’s a full-fledged deal,” says the exec. If true, it would appear that large portions of the show deposits (the 50% upfront) are being pocketed by Cabbell and Antney, and the artists themselves don’t get paid at all until they actually show up for the show and receive the back-end money – which could explain why Cabbell/Antney don’t appear to be too concerned if the shows actually happen.
Another source familiar with 360 deals at WMG doubted that Warner itself would have received a portion of the show deposits, stating that the artists’ performance revenue isn’t closely monitored by the major label.

Regardless, “I’m sure Gucci never saw any portion of the deposit,” insists Attorney Gardner. “The artist [only] gets the back end when he shows up [to the show]. I’ve seen it [in other situations]. The label tells the artist, ‘You have fees.’ It’s just business. If Gucci owes them $10,000 for bottles or flights or jewelry, they’re gonna take 100% of what’s owed out of the [deposit].”

FEDERAL FRAUD

The most sinister element of the scenario is the fact that it appears Antney/Cabbell continued accepting show deposits throughout much of the Fall 2009, fully knowing that Gucci would not be able to leave the state of Georgia. They allegedly told one promoter that they were simply “hoping” the judge would clear Gucci Mane’s legal obligations.

According to Attorney Gardner, conspiracy to commit federal fraud (which can bring both civil and criminal charges) “involves two or more people coming together to fraudulently take someone’s money.” Accepting deposits and signing contracts for show dates that legally cannot happen is fraud, and money has been wired across state lines, potentially making it a federal offense.

Taking it a step further, Gardner implies that Gucci himself could be liable for criminal fraud charges, even though he didn’t personally sign the contracts. “The state [of Georgia] already has Gucci [imprisoned], and the Feds are licking their chops to get him on something,” notes Gardner, who is also advising his clients to demand that artists personally sign booking contracts in addition to their management. “If you want to hire Gucci Mane, there should be one page with Gucci Mane’s signature saying, ‘I know about this date, and I agree to be there.’ Tie him into it legally.”

Attorney Gardner notes that both he and his client had previous dealings with Deb, before her stint as Gucci Mane’s manager, which were “extremely positive.” So although his client is not currently pursuing criminal charges, Gardner adds, “I wouldn’t play with it [if I were them]. I’d say Johnnie, Deb, and Gucci need to meet and figure out where the money is, [because] any attorney that really wants to spend some time on this could make things interesting for them.”

PITTSBURGH, PA

Even if Gardner’s client chooses not to go that route, it appears that Pittsburgh attorney Jim Cook, who represents promoter William Marshall of B. Marshall Productions, is preparing to “make things interesting” for Deb and Johnnie. Marshall, along with his partner Derrick Brown of Rock Star Entertainment, invested nearly $50,000 for two Gucci Mane dates that never happened. Their pending lawsuit alleges that “[Radric ‘Gucci Mane’] Davis/Cabbell/Antney have continued to book shows, take money from other associates & clients, refuse to return deposits or lost promotion expenses, and reschedule show dates, although they are/were aware that Gucci Mane is not allowed to leave Georgia..thereby committing a state and federal fraud.” In addition to a civil lawsuit on behalf of Marshall, Cook is threatening to turn the case over to the Pennsylvania Attorney General and the FBI for investigation into criminal fraud charges.

In June 2009, Marshall wired $27,500 to Hitt Afta Hitt and So Icey Entertainment to book Gucci Mane for a show on August 22nd, 2009. He also spent an additional $13,500 to begin promoting the show and secure the venue. About a month later, in mid-July, Marshall heard the rumors of Gucci Mane’s imprisonment and immediately contacted Johnnie and Deb, concerned about his $41,000 investment.

On August 5th, Deb and Johnnie assured Marshall both verbally and in a written letter on HAH letterhead (below) that the show was “in good standing” and would proceed. They also offered similar assurances to G. Rowell, an associate of Marshall’s in Washington D.C. who had another upcoming Gucci Mane show. Based on these guarantees, Marshall continued spending money to promote the event. Just two days before the scheduled date, he was notified by Deb that Gucci Mane would not attend. She refused to return his $27,500 deposit or cover any of the $13,500+ he lost promoting the show.

“At no time would Cabbell/Antney explain Gucci Mane’s confinement or restriction or the length thereof, and both were aware that Gucci Mane could not make the Pittsburgh or DC show dates when they issued the letters [on August 5, 2009],” Marshall’s pending lawsuit continues.

Several weeks later, Marshall was issued a new contract for a rescheduled date and guaranteed a video drop to help salvage his reputation in the city. Video and/or audio drops are typically used by promoters on radio or TV commercials to prove to local fans that the show is legitimate (for example, “Hey, this is Gucci Mane, and I’ll be in Pittsburgh on November 7th!”) After two months of waiting for the video drop, which was never received, Gucci was again a no-show for the rescheduled date.
“Why are [they] continuing to book shows and Gucci Mane doesn’t have movement yet?” asked Godfather, during our interview in late October. “What if the judge says no when he goes to court?” It appears Cabbell/Antney continued scheduling dates for Gucci, including Birmingham, AL, Chicago, IL (Nov. 19th), Lakeland, FL (Nov. 28th), and Houston, TX (Dec. 27th), even as he was legally unable to leave the state of Georgia.

And as it turns out, the judge did say “no.” On November 12th, 2009, Gucci was led away in handcuffs from a court hearing and sentenced to twelve months in prison (he may only be required to serve six months; his lawyer, Dwight L. Thomas, is optimistic and told MTV News that Gucci could possibly be released as soon as the first of the year with good behavior).

The second paragraph of Marshall’s contract with Hitt Afta Hitt explicitly states, “In the event that Artist fails to appear, 100% of the show money is guaranteed to be refunded to the Purchaser.” But despite the written guarantee, as of press time, Marshall has not been refunded the $27,500 deposit that Cabbell/Antney have held for over six months, not to mention the money he lost on promotion, the credibility he lost as a promoter, and the money he could’ve made had he invested those funds elsewhere.

FLORIDA

Around the same time B. Marshall sent his Pittsburgh deposit, Florida promoter Mr. CC of Mr. CC Productions (right) says he wired $105,000 to the Shannon/Ujaama/Cabbell/Antney collective to secure three consecutive dates on the So Icey Tour - July 4th (Pompano Beach), 5th (Jacksonville), and 6th (Orlando). According to Mr. CC, his contract with Shannon Marshall – who then had contracts in turn with Ujaama, Cabbell, and Antney - stated that the total $55,000 fee was all-inclusive, meaning that CC was not responsible to pay additional travel expenses (OZONE was not able to obtain copies of these contracts and was therefore unable to verify the specifics of the travel arrangements).

On July 4th, says Mr. CC, “I spoke to Shannon the evening of the [first date] and he said [the artists] were on their way.” He never heard from Shannon again and the artists never showed up. Frantic, he tried to contact Ujaama, So Icey, and Hitt Afta Hitt – and the following day, no one showed up for the second date either.

By the time Mr. CC finally got in touch with Johnnie, he says, word had spread that Gucci and co. were no-shows for the tour dates. “[Johnnie] told me the artists didn’t come [to Jacksonville and Pompano Beach] because we didn’t send them travel money,” reveals Mr. CC, who says that his reaction was one of shock. “’Travel?!? My contract doesn’t say anything about travel. It’s all inclusive. It’s stated specifically in our contracts!’ They said my contract [with Shannon] was wrong.”

Johnnie told him the only way to make the Orlando date happen was to send $10,000 – that same day – for travel expenses. To salvage his name, Mr. CC paid the $10,000 immediately and Gucci and OJ did perform in Orlando on July 6th (but no Nicki Minaj – Johnnie refunded Mr. CC only $3,000 for Nicki’s no-show, while during the same timeframe, he was charging promoters upwards of $7,500 to book her). The previous no-shows, CC says, seriously hindered the turn-out. “We lost $30,000 in Orlando,” he sighs, noting that the local crowd didn’t think the artists were coming. “Those other two Florida no-shows directly affected the Orlando date.”

“Johnnie and Deb admitted that they did receive the [deposits] for all three dates. No one ever called me [prior to the shows] about travel [expenses],” insists Mr. CC. “Not once. They had all my information and nobody called me, so I had no idea [that travel was an issue].”

Between the $30,000 loss in Orlando, the $35,000 Jacksonville deposit, the $35,000 Pompano deposit, and an estimated $40,000 he spent securing venues, radio commercials, flyers, and other forms of promotion, Mr. CC calculates his losses to be over $140,000. And on top of that, he alleges that Johnnie personally robbed him of an additional $5,000. “I said, ‘Look, man. I just need those two makeup dates because I’m out a lot of money. I’ll deal with the travel,’” recalls CC. “He said if I sent him a $5,000 [booking fee], he would work it out for me. He didn’t work it out, and now he refuses to refund my $5,000. He’s lost his damn mind, because I’ve never heard of that in my life. Holding money for a booking fee for an event that never happened?”

CC even agreed to pay the additional $10,000 travel fee per date, even though he says it wasn’t included on his initial contract, just for the opportunity to try to recoup some of his losses. “I just want my damn dates!” he exclaims. After months of getting the runaround from Johnnie, who insisted that he would reschedule, the story suddenly changed. “Now he’s blaming it on Ujaama and Shannon. He’s saying, ‘We didn’t get paid for travel, so it’s a breach of contract. We don’t have to give you back your money.’”

“I guess I have to do a lawsuit that includes everybody,” sighs Mr. CC. “I have to go after all of them for my money and let the judge decide who’s gotta pay. Somebody’s gotta pay for damages – potential earnings and the losses I incurred while going through all of this.”

JOHNNIE CABBELL

Cabbell told Atlanta newspaper Creative Loafing, which briefly investigated the fraud allegations, “I’ve been doing business since 2002, and I never [before] had a problem with any promoter.” But OZONE found plenty.

“If any promoter deals with [Johnnie Cabbell], [it’s because] they just don’t know. I’m not gonna do business with him ever again. I’m done,” says Mosley. Several promoters didn’t want to speak on the record to avoid “burning bridges” or damage pending dates, but many have a negative impression of Cabbell as a businessman. One word that kept coming up over and over again: “disrespect.” And phrases like, “I just don’t like his attitude.”

At worst, Johnnie Cabbell is conspiring with Debra Antney & co. to commit federal fraud. At the very least, he’s a liar, according to promoter Jesse Peak (left).
“That whole camp is fucked up. Johnnie is someone who continually tells you he’s gonna do something and then doesn’t do it. He promised me 200% support [on my show],” says Peak, who followed up a successful Plies show in Orlando by booking Gucci Mane in New Orleans in May 2009. In early 2009 when he sent a deposit for Plies [to his booking agent Coach], he promptly received a phone call with a voice drop, an email with eight pre-recorded studio drops, and met Plies at a local radio station to film a video drop for promotional TV commercials.

Impressed with Plies’ camp and their professionalism, he then contacted Gucci Mane’s agent expecting the same courtesy. “I told [Johnnie], ‘This is what I expect from you.’ He promised me radio drops as soon as I sent my deposit. They promised video drops so I [paid extra] to book TV commercials,” recalls Peak. But after sending his $21,000 deposit, weeks went by with no response. Finally, HAH directed him to the Mizay/So Icey office, where he also spent several weeks calling with no response.
“Once Johnnie gets your money it’ll be at least a week before he picks up his phone again,” concurs Godfather, who also never received drops for multiple Shawty Lo shows before his attempted Gucci Mane booking. “Johnnie must be busier than damn [Barack] Obama,” snorts Mr. CC. “I have to call eight or ten times before I can get him on the phone, and he’s always ‘busy.’”

According to Peak, his show’s turnout suffered without drops to add credibility to the promotion. “The city of New Orleans thought it was a fake [Gucci show], just some bullshit, because I didn’t have any [drops].” Also, when he brought the balance of $17,500 cash to Gucci Mane’s road manager G-Boy on the day of the show, he was told that he had to pay an additional $3,500 for travel or Gucci Mane would not perform. Peak’s contract does state that he was responsible for travel – however, he claims that So Icey/Hitt Afta Hitt never told him the cost or details of the travel even after repeated calls to their offices inquiring.

Some people have successfully booked shows through Cabbell. “We haven’t booked Gucci Mane, but I haven’t had any issues dealing with Johnnie Cabbell or Hitt Afta Hitt when I’ve booked Shawty Lo through them,” states Amy Jurkofski of Atlanta-based booking agency The Music Group. Tallahassee, FL promoter Willie McKenzie, who booked Gucci Mane to perform at Florida A&M University’s homecoming this past October, received his deposit back (from a third-party booking agency, not Hitt Afta Hitt) when Gucci was unable to perform due to his legal troubles.

If there’s one thing Johnnie has done right, it’s lock down a niche in a previously untapped market. While Hollywood actors and actresses have a wide selection of agencies to choose from and New York-based acts or major pop/R&B artists are often represented by established agencies like the William Morris Agency (WMA), ICM Talent, or Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the recent explosion of Southern rap left a void waiting to be filled. At least in Atlanta, Cabbell helped fill that void by representing many of the smaller acts that sprang up.

“Johnnie came to me for advice on how to do [bookings],” says Coach of Florida-based Direct Connect Entertainment, a reputable agent who has been booking shows for over 15 years. Currently, Coach is Plies’ exclusive booking agent (pictured at left together). “I’m not saying I trained [Johnnie], but I kinda lectured him on the business when he first started out,” Coach recalls. “And as far as what he does [now] I’m not 100% pleased, and he knows that. He’s never put me in a bad position, but I’m hearing stories from other people saying that he has. He’s never done me wrong, I guess because of his respect level for me or because he knows I wouldn’t tolerate that type of behavior.”

Pittsburgh promoter B. Marshall agrees. “[Johnnie] does a lot of deals with dope boys because he knows they won’t go the legal route. He wouldn’t try to pull some of these moves on [someone like well-known Atlanta promoter] Alex [Gidewon of AG Entertainment] because he won’t get away with it.”

Some of Cabbell’s affiliates defend him. “I think [Johnnie’s] reputation comes from being a hard-nosed businessman,” says South Carolina DJ Chuck T. “He’s known for having crazy ass riders… but he’ll bring in one of the lesser-known groups he fucks with and have them open up. So basically you get a good deal on booking artists but at the expense of bringing one of his new artists and paying for their shit.” Marcus “Rip” Rippy, of Hoodrich Entertainment, echoes the same sentiment. “I’ve seen Johnnie at work and I can understand why some people could feel the way they do. But the truth is that he goes hard for his artists. They are his top priority.”

California-based DJ Nik Bean (left) disagrees, arguing that Johnnie’s bad business practices hinder his artists more than help them. Billing himself as “LA’s Mixtape King,” Nik Bean has toured with Cali up-and-comer Glasses Malone and worked with many other West Coast favorites like Daz, Kurupt, and Nipsey Hussle. Prior to the BET Awards in June 2008, Nik says, he contacted Shawty Lo to inquire about doing some work with him as a DJ.

“[The experience] changed my perception of [Shawty Lo],” says Nik, bitterly. “I liked his music but [dealing with Johnnie] made me question him. Like, ‘Why are you doing business with this guy?’ I can’t say anything bad about Lo, but I’m not doing no more business with Johnnie, period, point blank. And I’ll make sure he can’t do business out here [in L.A.].”

As Shawty Lo’s manager, Cabbell asked Nik for a favor. “[Johnnie] was like, “We’re gonna be out there [in L.A.] for the BET Awards. Set something up for me; get me some money,” recalls Nik. “I made some calls and got the ball rolling on a situation for him to make some show money.” As other promoters got involved, Nik sensed things getting too complicated and backed away. “I was supposed to get some money off the show but the situation got too sticky. I saw too many sharks in the tank, so once I realized I was gonna get screwed, I’m not a professional booker, so I just said ‘fuck it.’”

Johnnie agreed to “make the situation right” with Nik by promising him a Shawty Lo verse for his digital album. Shawty Lo got his money for the LA show Nik set up, but Nik never got his verse. “I had everything ready,” recalls Nik. “I had Glasses Malone do the hook, and we put the beat together. We left an open verse for Shawty Lo. The song was custom-made for him, ‘Concerns of A D-Boy,’ right up his lane. Johnnie promised me, ‘I got you. No problem,’ and I assumed that since he’s Shawty Lo’s manager, it was official. I didn’t think people would do business like this; it just didn’t make sense to me. I would think an artist of that caliber would have the sense to have a decent manager.”

After the BET Awards, four months passed. Nik called Johnnie’s phone repeatedly only to hear, “Yo, I’m in a meeting.” “He kept bullshitting me; I heard the same thing four or five times,” says Nik. “I could smell the bullshit from a mile away. How many ‘meetings’ could you have?”

Nik never received the promised verse. “I told Johnnie, ‘Don’t ever come back out here [to L.A.],’” Nik recalls. “It’s not a [physical] threat, but I meant, ‘Don’t try to [break] no records here.’ There’s other people in the game like [him] too. I guess I’m too nice. If I ever get wind of Johnnie trying to work a record out here, best believe I’m gonna try to shut that shit down.” While it might appear a minor incident, Nik felt personally insulted. “I was so mad because I helped him make money in my city. It’s disrespectful and foul.”

Personally, I’ve had my share of problems with Johnnie. The first was a feature I booked for Shawty Lo for an independent label. Johnnie quoted me $10,000 and I set up the deal for $12,000. I sent the record and the paperwork to Johnnie’s email and waited several weeks as he continually assured me that Shawty Lo would get the verse done. When I later learned that Johnnie had contacted the artist directly after seeing their name on the paperwork and charged them $12,000 for the feature, pocketing my commission, I confronted him. He claimed to not know that it was the same feature I had set up – even though I had emailed him the record three weeks prior. I reluctantly gave him the benefit of the doubt and let it slide.

Then, I booked Shawty Lo to host a party at Las Vegas nightclub Prive on a Monday night with Johnnie’s explicit assurance that he would perform two songs from the DJ booth to satisfy the club’s expectations for the event. I was awakened at 5 AM East Coast time on the night of the event to a conference call/screaming match between Johnnie, the club’s manager, and one of the club owners – a huge mess which went on for hours until Shawty Lo calmly took the phone from Johnnie and agreed to fulfill the requirements of the date. Problem solved. The manager is supposed to fix things for the artist – not the other way around.

Diamond, who was a standout member of the group Crime Mob (represented by Cabbell) before launching her solo career, feels that Deb, not Johnnie, is primarily to blame for the bad business. “I’ve heard of [promoters] having situations with Johnnie, but when I was dealing with him, he was about his business. I haven’t had problems with him myself. It’s about 50/50. I know some people that don’t fuck with him and some people that do fuck with him,” says Diamond. “But I don’t deal with Deb at all and I don’t wanna ever deal with Deb. I’ve heard her attitude is fucked up and her business is fucked up. I’ve never heard anybody have anything nice to say about Deb.”

DEBRA ANTNEY

Often confused as Gucci Mane’s “auntie” because of her last name, Debra Antney is actually not a blood relative of the rapper. She is, however, the mother of up and coming So Icey rapper Waka Flocka Flame (pictured at right together). 49-year-old Deb made the unlikely transition from a non-profit organization called Rah Rah’s Village of Hope and popped up on the scene as Gucci Mane’s manager after bonding with him at a charity event a few years ago.

And yet even with a background in non-profit and charity organizations, many people who’ve dealt with her question her integrity. “[Deb] is the ringleader behind the desk,” says Godfather. “She’s got everybody by the nuts. She’s robbing everybody over there [at So Icey/Mizay], and Johnnie is her partner in crime.”

Some evidence appears to corroborate this. Although most of the promoters’ anger is directed at Cabbell, it appears that bad business practices existed in the So Icey/Mizay camp long before Cabbell/HAH got involved in March 2009. A high turnover rate within both entities and poor communication between the two appears to have only complicated the existing problems.

ROCKFORD, IL

A year ago, in the fall of 2008, Gucci Mane’s asking price was $15,000 plus expenses. Illinois party promoter Yungwaun (left) booked him through So Icey/Mizay for $17,500 plus expenses – a premium rate for a holiday performance. Gucci was scheduled to perform in Rockford, IL on Halloween (October 31st, 2008). Yungwaun sent a $10,000 deposit along with several thousand dollars for travel, secured a venue, and began spending money advertising the show.

“No one ever [contacted me] to let me know that he wouldn’t make the date,” he says. On September 12th, 2008, a month and a half before Yungwaun’s scheduled show, Gucci appeared in court for a probation violation hearing. Various websites reported that Gucci, who had been convicted of assault in 2005 and sentenced to probation, had failed to meet his required community service hours (he was required to serve 50 hours a month and had only clocked in 25 hours over a three year time period). In addition, he had reportedly tested positive for ecstasy, marijuana, and alcohol during a random drug test. The judge revoked one year of his probation and sent him to jail.

Concerned, Yungwaun contacted So Icey/Mizay to find out the status of his show deposit. Severe Green, a So Icey employee, told him that it was not her responsibility to handle his show because the original person he dealt with at the company had already taken a commission and no longer worked there. After repeated inquiries, Severe assured Yungwaun that the show would move forward as planned and advised him to continue promoting, but he was skeptical. “My investor said, ‘No one’s gonna come because [they know] Gucci is locked up,’” says Yungwaun. “It’s all over the internet.”

Two weeks before the scheduled date, he was officially notified that Gucci Mane would not be attending. Naturally, he wanted his money back. But So Icey/Mizay refused to refund Yungwaun’s $10,000 deposit, first claiming that the “force majeure” clause in the contract released them from the obligation. According to Wikipedia, force majeure is “a common clause in contracts which essentially frees both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the parties, such as a war, strike, riot, crime, or an event described by the legal term “act of God” (e.g. flooding, earthquake, volcanic eruption), prevents one or both parties from fulfilling their obligations under the contract.” Clearly, Gucci Mane popping pills, smoking weed, failing to do community service, and therefore returning to prison on a probation violation does not qualify as an “act of God” (continues Wikipedia: “force majeure is not intended to excuse negligence or other malfeasance”).

So Icey/Mizay held Yungwaun’s money for over six months. When Gucci Mane was finally scheduled to be released in March 2009, he says, “[Gucci] was so booked up [So Icey] wouldn’t even tell me when he was getting out.” Instead of scheduling a make-up date at his initial contracted price of $17,500, So Icey/Mizay tried to sell him a date for $30,000. “They told me I couldn’t get a date unless I paid the [difference of $12,500],” recalls Yungwaun. “I told them they must be out of their mind, because I had a contract.”

After months of back and forth, Yungwaun, who could not afford the $30,000 price tag, reluctantly accepted his deposit back – minus a $500 commission. “They kept the commission for a show that never happened!” he laughs bitterly. “They held my money for six months! They had $10,000 just sitting there. Plus I had [paid for] commercials and flyers. I lost the potential to make money; I could have made more [money] off the show than I spent.”

Around the time of Gucci’s release from prison in March 2009, So Icey/Mizay handed over the booking responsibilities to Cabbell and Hitt Afta Hitt. Due to a combination of factors (including OJ’s buzz, a slew of Gucci Mane mixtape material floating around, and an overall slump in the music business) the street demand for Gucci Mane had risen during his incarceration. According to simple economic theory, a combination of high demand and low supply (because of his unavailability) equals an increase in price. So during the span of his 6-month incarceration, Gucci’s asking price magically rose from $15,000 to over $40,000. And instead of honoring the previous contracts that had never been satisfied, So Icey/Mizay allowed Johnnie to double or even triple the original prices.

“There’s no way I would have charged [the promoters] more,” says Coach. “For their inconvenience, they should be charged the same price [as their initial contract] or even given a discount. When an artist fails to show, not only is the [promoter’s] name and character at risk, but [the promoter] has incurred a lot of advertising expenses. The radio money, the flyer money, the street team, the venue rental…he’s not gonna get any of that money back. So there’s no way he should have to pay more, because he already lost [money] the first time the artist didn’t show. The booking agent’s responsibility is to get all the money that was sent [for the deposit] returned.” Beyond that, Coach says, the promoter would have to sue the artist directly for breach of contract to attempt to recover funds lost on promotional expenses. “Some [promoters] have won [additional monies in a lawsuit] for damages when the artist couldn’t give a legitimate excuse for not being there.”

CHICAGO, IL

Less than a hundred miles away, promoters Godfather (right) and John Mosley (below right) experienced similar drama when they teamed up to bring Gucci Mane to Chicago, IL in the fall of 2008. Their contract was for $15,000. Since Gucci Mane was incarcerated on the date of the scheduled show, So Icey/Mizay promised to reschedule. Mosley estimates that he had to call So Icey at least 200 times before they finally confirmed a make-up date.

After the make-up date was confirmed and they had been advertising for four weeks, Godfather says, Cabbell suddenly tripled the price. “[Johnnie] called and said someone else wanted the date [for a higher price],” Godfather recalls. “I don’t care that his stock went up. That’s why you invest. I lost over $15,000 [on the deposit and promotions] and they held my deposit for a whole year!”

Johnnie threatened to book a show with another promoter in the same city if they didn’t agree to match the offer. “We were only supposed to owe $8,000 [on the back-end to So Icey/Mizay],” confirms Mosley. “But Johnnie got involved and said he was getting thousands of calls [for shows in Chicago] from promoters who want to give him $40,000, and we’re gonna have to match those offers, even though we already had a contract!”

Cabbell refused to honor the $15,000 contract, saying that Gucci was hot in the market and deserved more. Laughs Mosley, “Right! I made him hot in the market! They played his records on the radio because we spent so much money [promoting his show] with the station.”

To avoid losing the date to another promoter, Godfather and Mosley ultimately agreed to pay Cabbell $42,500 for Gucci Mane, plus a $10,000 travel fee – a total of $52,500, plus the money already gone down the drain on advertising and venue rental fees. Why did they continue spending money rather than demanding their deposit back? “I’ve been promoting shows for 20 years and in this market I have a reputation to uphold,” explains Godfather. “My name means more to me [than money].”

Almost a year after sending their initial deposit, the show finally happened in May 2009 and 5,000 people showed up. According to Godfather, it was the biggest show Gucci Mane has ever done (right) [as the headliner] to this day. Mosley says there was plenty of bad blood in the city from his previous no-show. “People were threatening [Gucci’s] life,” he recalls. “The things we went through even getting him into [Chicago] and on stage alive were ridiculous.” The promoters were able to recoup their previous losses (and, one would assume, turned a hefty profit).

Several days later, Johnnie called Godfather and offered him a date on the upcoming So Icey Tour. “He told me, ‘I apologize. Let’s do another date to make it right.’ He tricked [us]. He told us he had a tour coming and he was gonna show me some love,” recalls Godfather. In retrospect, he snaps, “If this is ‘love,’ I don’t want nooooo love from him ever again.”

Godfather and Mosley agreed to book a date on the So Icey Tour for $55,000, which was scheduled to take place on July 24th, 2009. They sent a $35,000 deposit for the artists, a $5,000 booking fee which went directly to Cabbell (“Johnnie thought I was trying to go around him [by dealing with Ujaama] and said I couldn’t do another show unless I sent him $5,000 cash,” alleges Mosley), and $10,000 for travel. But after wiring over $50,000, the promoters learned that all three of the artists on the So Icey Tour were booked on their date in various other cities – so they were forced to push the date back a week, to August 1st. “Johnnie just completely lied [to me],” says Godfather. “On top of that, he knew Gucci was scheduled to take a drug test three weeks before my show and he was high as a kite.”

“I found out Gucci was in jail on Twitter,” laughs Godfather. “Johnnie never called, management never called [to tell me he wasn’t gonna make my show]. Soulja Boy said on Twitter [on July 19th] that Gucci Mane was in jail, and I know him personally, so I was asking him not to say that because he was killing my ticket sales in Chicago.” Nicki Minaj, Godfather adds, was also posting “free Gucci Mane” on her Myspace and Twitter pages less than two weeks before their scheduled event. Meanwhile, Johnnie reassured Godfather, “Gucci is straight. He’ll be at the show,” but never sent the promised drop. Shannon stopped returning calls altogether.

Less than a week before the show, Godfather says, they suddenly changed their tune. “Johnnie is like, ‘Aw, man, I don’t know [if Gucci will be able to come].’ Then he says, ‘We’ve got a bunch of deposits. How do we know we have your [money]’? I’m like, ‘What?! We’ve been talking for months! I’ve got all kinds of contracts! So now you’re trying to say you don’t have my money?’ Deb plays like she doesn’t know what’s going on and hangs up.”

So Godfather retraced the paper trail: Ujaama received the initial deposits. Ujaama in turn wired money to Shannon, who then deposited the money with Deb. “I have definite confirmation that Johnnie and Deb have my money,” says Godfather. Having spent over $50,000 plus promotional expenses, with less than week before the show, he says, Deb or Johnnie didn’t answer the phone for three days. Finally, he reached them by calling three-way through one of Gucci Mane’s bodyguards and sent copies of all the contracts, paperwork, and receipts proving that the money was transferred to Deb’s account. According to Godfather, at that point Deb finally admitted, “I don’t know if Gucci can make that date.”

“This is four days before the event!” exclaims Mosley. “When we advertise an event in Chicago, we blow it up. No one has it on lock like we do. We’ve been promoting for six weeks. 100,000 flyers, [SMS] text blasts, Facebook [invites]. Gucci Gucci Gucci! Gucci’s coming! And four days before the event, they’re telling me he’s got legal problems. Are you kidding me?”

The next day, just three days before the show, Deb demanded an additional $3,500 “security fee” that was never previously discussed and was not included in the contract or rider. They threatened a no-show if the fee was not paid. “Johnnie said my show wouldn’t happen unless I [paid for] more security. He threatened me and my business partner!” Godfather says, incredulous. “At that point, I told him, ‘Fuck you. I don’t care if any of y’all come. It’s embarrassing now.’”

“[Calling a promoter at the last minute with additional charges] is not standard practice for a booking agent,” says Coach. “Everything should be on the contract. Nothing should be added on [verbally] unless somebody defaults on the agreement that’s already in writing.”

With Gucci Mane’s status in limbo, Godfather then learned that no funds from his initial deposit had been used to secure OJ da Juiceman or Nicki Minaj, even though all three artists were supposed to perform. He took matters into his own hands and booked OJ through a local Chicago artist who had a relationship with the rapper, spending an additional $12,000 and getting a studio drop from OJ to continue promoting the show. Nicki, who was on the road with Lil Wayne’s Young Money crew on the America’s Most Wanted Tour for most of the summer, did not attend the show.

On the day of the scheduled Chicago date for the So Icey Tour (right), Godfather was informed that Gucci wouldn’t make it either. “Of the three artists I booked on the tour, OJ was the only one who came, and I had to pay him [an extra] $12,000 to salvage the show!” he exclaims. At the end of the day, Godfather estimates they lost over $90,000, including $8,000 for security, $5,000 on advertising and over $46,000 in ticket refunds that Ticketmaster issued to unhappy patrons because of Gucci Mane’s failure to appear. “I didn’t get a dime back from the ticket office,” laments Godfather. “We put signs on the door saying ‘Gucci will not be here,’ and we still got 3,500 people in there, but we had to give all that money back,” sighs Mosley. “[The fans] blamed us, saying we were false promoting. DJ Pharris had to get on the radio [in Chicago] and let people know it wasn’t our fault.”

“[The promoter] should definitely get their money back if the artist can’t fulfill the contract. Without a doubt,” says Coach. “It’s just like a [UPS] delivery. If you agreed to do a show for a certain amount and now you’re unable to do the show, you have defaulted. If [UPS] promises to deliver something and they don’t, for any reason, the bottom line is they didn’t deliver. It doesn’t matter if the tire was flat or the driver was sick or the weather was bad. The fact is, you had an agreement to deliver, and you didn’t.”

As of press time, Godfather says his $35,000 deposit has not been refunded. Godfather says that he also lost the $5,000 Johnnie pocketed as a booking fee for a show that never happened, as well as the $10,000 travel fee and $3,500 last minute security fee for artists who never arrived. “They haven’t even tried to give me my money back or reschedule the show,” says Godfather. “Getting my money back would be cool, but I want them to reschedule a date with me so I can try to save some face with the radio station. These are people who I’ve known for 20 years, and [the no-shows] ruined my name with the station, fans, and artists. I have to do a make-up show with the radio station to save face with the Program Director.”

It also hampered Godfather’s ability to continue promoting shows in his market. “All the venues here talk to each other. Even though I had no fights and people got their money back [from the Gucci Mane tickets], they still question letting me get venues. I’ve never experienced anything like this,” he adds. His credibility and reputation, he feels, are priceless.

While Johnnie and Deb refused to refund Godfather’s money or reschedule his August date, they accepted a Gucci Mane show deposit from one of his competitors, Chicago promoter Mark Yukon (that show, scheduled for November 19th, 2009, also did not happen).

“Gucci Mane can’t come to Chicago unless I okay it,” declares Godfather. “They all know it. He knows it, his security knows it. He knows his squad is messing up, so it’s on him. He can’t come here unless he works it out with me, so he’s pretty much dead in the market. The radio is gonna stop playing his record and everything. I’m a part of the reparation squad for Johnnie Cabbell’s overcharging. OJ [da Juiceman] is a good guy, but Gucci has signed his life over to Johnnie Cabbell.”

Booking back-to-back shows in the same city with two different promoters is another favorite trick of Cabbell’s. When a savvy promoter requests an exclusivity clause be included in the contract, which normally prevents an artist from performing anywhere in a certain radius for 30 days prior or 30 days after the show, HAH’s carefully worded “exclusivity clause” reads, “artist(s) are not permitted to perform two weeks before or two weeks after the date above at the listed venue,” a loophole which could technically permit Cabbell to book the same artist at two competitive venues on the same street, in the same city, on the same day.

“That’s not something I would do out of respect for the promoter I’m doing business with. You’re going to cause both people headaches,” says Coach. “That definitely shouldn’t be happening at all and that’s one of [Johnnie’s business practices] that I disagree with. I know promoters that have had real bad episodes with [Johnnie] and are displeased.”

THE VAMPIRES

Godfather feels that Cabbell’s shiesty business practices have rubbed off on other up-and-coming booking agents. Combine that with the desperation of the recession and it’s an ugly formula. “There’s a lot of guys like Johnnie now. People in Young Jeezy’s camp are doing the same thing,” mentions Godfather. “[Jeezy’s booking agent] Asha is now following standard Johnnie Cabbell practice: they call you a week before the show and threaten to not show up if you don’t send an additional $5,000 or $10,000 for travel [or security]. Then you have a choice: either cancel it and [forfeit] all the money you put into it and disappoint [the fans], or go ahead and take that $5,000 or $10,000 hit because you’ve already sold thousands of tickets. These new dudes like Johnnie are spreading venom to the managers and killing the smaller promoters. I’ve known Asha for years, but she just turned into a vampire last year. $10,000 for travel!? He’s not using jet fuel to get here. He’s using regular gas [for his tour bus]!”

“Travel buyouts” seem to be one of the vampires’ favorite ways of sucking every last drop of money out of a promoter. After Orlando, FL promoter Dawgman (left) sent in a deposit to book Shawty Lo through Cabbell in Spring 2008, in addition to the artist’s fee, he learned that he was also required to spend $4,000 on a “travel buyout” instead of booking flights himself. Johnnie explained that the fee was high because their travel agent was purchasing “refundable” tickets for the entourage, and because Shawty Lo needed to fly first-class (which is always refundable).

But on the scheduled date, Shawty Lo never showed up, and Dawgman was forced to issue refunds to his patrons to salvage his reputation in the market. During separate phone calls to the promoter and the promoter’s assistant, Cabbell and Shawty Lo’s road manager Jay provided two different reasons for Lo’s absense - one claimed he was in the hospital, while the other said he was attending an aunt’s funeral. Of the seven round-trip flights that were supposedly purchased with the $4,000 travel buyout, only three of those people showed up (the road manager and two entourage members). When the date was rescheduled, Johnnie threatened a no-show if Dawgman didn’t again pay a $4,000 travel fee. So what was the purpose of paying extra for “refundable” tickets if they weren’t really refundable? And more importantly, where did that initial $4,000 go?

“Johnnie is trying to pocket money everywhere,” complains Mosley. “He gets it any way he can get it, and he never leaves [Atlanta] to deal with the problems [on the road]. He’ll send the road manager [like Gucci Mane’s G-Boy, Shawty Lo’s Jay, or OJ da Juiceman’s Big Sam] out there to deal with the problems.”

Any hot artist with records getting regular radio spins (like Shawty Lo, back in Spring 2008) is generally working at least 3-4 nights a week – meaning that each of those three or four promoters is paying a high “travel buyout” for round trip travel. Multiply that $4,000 by 3 or 4 and if you’re really only paying one-way expenses – from each city to the next (if the artist even shows up), and you can see how it could become profitable. Let’s say Johnnie charges four promoters $4,000 each for travel expenses for Shawty Lo to go out on the road for four consecutive dates (Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, for example) and only spends $10,000 on travel. Who do you think is pocketing that extra $6,000?

Mizay and So Icey seem to have gotten wise to this additional source of revenue early on in their relationship with HAH, insisting that all travel and hotel be handled through their office for Gucci Mane and OJ da Juiceman shows instead of through Johnnie. Similarly, they demand that promoters pay a high fee upfront which is wired directly to them. Traditionally, for most bookings, an “all-inclusive” artist fee means that all flights, hotel, and ground transportation is included – unless otherwise specified. But So Icey/Mizay often require a “travel buyout” and then later inform the promoter that there is also an additional “hotel buyout” due, plus ground transportation, which must also be booked through them at a premium rate. The HAH contracts generally only vaguely define the travel expenses, leaving room for “the vampires” to tack on thousands of dollars in additional fees at the last minute.

Kym Hall of Royal Pair Entertainment booked OJ da Juiceman to perform in Orlando, FL on Saturday, November 21st, 2009, and although ultimately pleased with his performance, she expressed exasperation with the Mizay/So Icey booking process and feels that they skimmed off the travel money. She claims Jamie Dixon, her So Icey representative, refused to divulge any of OJ’s basic travel information (such as when his flights were arriving, so she feared he would be a no-show) and refused to show her any receipts documenting the actual travel costs.

In addition to paying the “travel buyout” for the flights, So Icey demanded a large sum (which Hall feels was excessive, but declined to disclose the exact amount) for a “hotel buyout,” stating that OJ must be placed in a four-or-five star hotel, but refused to tell Hall where he was staying. “The only reason we found out where he was staying is because [OJ had] an ‘incident’ at the hotel and we had to go over there,” explains Hall. It turns out that Mizay/So Icey had taken her large lump sum “four-or-five star hotel buyout” and placed OJ at the SpringHill Suites Maitland, a three-star hotel at best which can be purchased online for around $80. Hall says she is demanding to see receipts and insisting that So Icey refund the difference between the amount of her “hotel buyout” and the actual amount they paid for the hotel (good luck, Kym).

BURNING BRIDGES

In the January 2009 issue of Atlanta-based Street Report Magazine, the editor General addressed his issues with Deb in his editorial (below) stemming from an OJ da Juiceman no-show at a Street Report event at Club Frequency. According to General, Deb had promised OJ’s attendance in exchange for advertising in the magazine.

“One of the 2009 topics is burning bridges and breaking your word to sell your soul for the almighty dollar,” wrote General. “What’s up to OJ da Juiceman (Chevron Shawty) for keeping the streets on fire in the A and getting to the money. I also want to add that you are a grinder and the streets are loving you but the flip side to that coin is ‘WOW’ when it comes to your management grinding just as hard as you? Debbie we are talking about you so therefore we are not going to do it like the rappers do it by subliminally sneak dissing. You know what I am talking about with the December 10th Club Frequency situation…”

General continued addressing OJ later in the editorial, adding, “A rapper can be hot today and glacier frozen like the titanic the next. So have that street/business meeting with your camp and tell them the minute that they lose focus of becoming that fucked up word in the game, that shit follows you no matter what business that you are in and people are whispering about it now but they are just keeping shit quiet is kept until they are positioned to voice their say so. Keep getting your money Juice and remember that every move is a calculated step, but your management can lose my number because their word is in the same book as George W Bush (I don’t trust what is being said to me) and for the record, I am not trying to assassinate your character (Debbie) by telling people not to deal with you. Everybody can fuck with you as far as I am concerned but I know not to fuck with you because you lied to me directly and it was not a third party lie. Street Report Magazine doesn’t want any bargains from you. Send over some ad money not a conversation. Aye!”

Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of Street Report Magazine’s bad experience when I made a similar deal with Johnnie and Deb in May 2009 to trade an advertising package in OZONE for a free OJ da Juiceman show.

After fulfilling our part of the agreement, we here at OZONE shopped around for a venue and finally settled on Club Libra in Atlanta. As the Libra representatives sat in my office prepared to sign the contract, I called Johnnie and Deb to let them know we had secured a location. Johnnie told me that OJ would not perform at Club Libra because they had “issues” with the club. After much discussion I reluctantly agreed to keep looking. Less than three weeks later, a commercial began playing on Atlanta radio for - guess who? - OJ da Juiceman performing live at Club Libra! Rather than giving OZONE the free date we had agreed on, Johnnie apparently went around me and booked the date himself.

I suppressed my urge to curse him out, opting instead to try to peacefully resolve the situation. I shopped around for an alternate venue and closed a deal with Freelon’s Nightclub in Jackson, MS, for OJ to perform on August 8th, 2009. Johnnie sent me a signed contract confirming that the OJ show was paid in full as per our advertising agreement. As per the contract, we (OZONE and the promoter) were obligated to pay $3,500 for travel and there were no additional funds due for the show. The promoter wired the travel money to So Icey/Mizay several weeks prior to the show. The contracts were signed by myself, Johnnie, Deb, and the promoter in June.

Almost two months later, on the afternoon the day of the show, Johnnie and Deb called me on 3-way demanding that I pay an additional “security fee” of $3,300 or OJ wasn’t going to leave Atlanta – a fee which had never been mentioned or discussed at all during the month and a half that our contract had been in place. It was also never included on our paperwork. OZONE had fulfilled our obligations and now Johnnie and Deb were refusing to fulfill theirs. Deb claimed she didn’t know the Jackson date was my show, pointing the finger at Johnnie and saying it was his fault. I told them I wasn’t going to pay an additional $3,300 for a “free” show and whatever miscommunication had happened was between the two of them, and they needed to figure it out immediately. A few hours later, Johnnie told me, “We worked it out,” saying that he and Deb had settled their miscommunication and OJ’s tour bus was leaving Atlanta, headed for Jackson.

At 11 PM the night of the show, as a line of fans eager to see OJ formed at the club, I was still 45 minutes outside the city. OJ’s road manager Big Sam went to Freelon’s and told the club owner that if they didn’t receive $5,500 cash immediately (including $500 overtime for their driver – another additional fee that was never discussed and was not our responsibility) they had been instructed by Johnnie and Deb to leave town immediately. Without $5,500 cash, OJ would not perform at OZONE’s “free” show. So here I was faced with the choice that so many other promoters have had to make: cancel the show, ruin my relationship with the promoter and the promoter’s reputation, and fight Johnnie and Deb in court for $10,000 (the value of the advertising package)? Or move forward and only fight them for $5,500?
Similar to the So Icey Tour contracts, the OZONE contract with Johnnie involved multiple parties, so going the legal route would probably also mean suing a long-time client and friend (Freelon’s) because of Johnnie and Deb’s fraud. I later learned that OJ and Big Sam had no idea what was really going on, didn’t know that I was even involved with the show, and were simply following Deb and Johnnie’s instructions.

THE GOOD OL’ DAYS

When established artists like T.I. and Lil Wayne first started doing nightclub shows years ago, they were reasonably priced. “They earned their way up the ladder, and they have stronger foundations because of it,” explains Coach, who recalls booking T.I. for $1,500 or $2,000 in the early days and Lil Wayne for $10,000 when he was touring with Sqad Up and already had two albums under his belt. “They made solid movement all the way up the ladder until they’ve reached this point [where they command six figure show prices], and I can respect any artist that is willing to go out and work from the ground up.” Johnnie is certainly not the only booking agent to charge exorbitant prices for an artist with one hit record, but it’s one thing he is infamously known for – resulting in a short lifespan of many artists he has represented (where are the Shop Boyz, of “Party Like a Rock Star” fame? Fabo? D4L? Crime Mob?).

Nicki Minaj, for example, has a strong buzz, but doesn’t have an album out yet. Jesse Peak inquired about booking Nicki for a BET Hip Hop Awards afterparty in Atlanta in October 2009 but quickly changed his mind when her former manager Cortez directed him to Hitt Afta Hitt. “They were shooting out dumb numbers like $12,000 plus I’ve gotta pay a travel fee, even though she was already scheduled to be in Atlanta,” says Peak. “When an artist is represented by Hitt Afta Hitt, it discourages me from booking them because I know exactly what to expect from them: They say whatever you wanna hear to get your money, and once they get your money, you can’t get a call back.”

Mosley laughs while offering some words of advice to artists considering Hitt Afta Hitt representation: “You’ll have better luck diving off the Sears Tower.”

“A lot of artists are overpriced, and that hurts their career,” explains Coach. “If an artist is really overpriced and a promoter takes a risk on him and loses badly, when the artist tries to make a comeback the promoter is gonna say, ‘I did you when you were hot and I lost, so I’m definitely not gonna do you when you’re cold.’ So when you put the artist’s price up so high just because they’re new and the demand is high but they haven’t been proven, you’re risking their career longevity. These artists today get one single and they want $7,500 for a show. They haven’t been tested. The single may be hot, but the promoters lose money. Some might win, but most lose. And [as a result] the artist’s careers are short-lived. Very short-lived.”

D4L frontman Shawty Lo (left) is a perfect example of this phenomenon. “I don’t get requests for Shawty Lo [now],” says Coach. “In my opinion, he should have been charging less than [he was] at his peak. It would have made him a much more viable product today if he had been at a lower price when he was really hot. More people would’ve had accessibility to him. He would’ve been in more venues; more promoters would have been successful with him and would’ve had a better opinion of him. When [a promoter] loses, it leaves a bad taste in their mouth as far as that artist afterwards. Not saying that they lost at every show, but there were some where the price was just too high.”

Godfather is even more direct. “[Johnnie] killed Shawty Lo; destroyed his career,” he confirms. “[Shawty Lo] can’t get shows now because of his relationship with Johnnie. Johnnie overcharges and double-books. [Shawty Lo] was battling with T.I., the so-called King of the South. How were you on his level and then you fell from grace that fast? It’s because [Johnnie] was overpricing him, [charging] $40,000 or $50,000 for a guy with two songs, then doing no-shows, then threatening you with the $5,000 booking fee. He took his price past what he was worth and he fell off quick. [Now] I wouldn’t give [Shawty Lo] $1,000 to go anywhere. That’s not personal on Lo, it’s Johnnie. And he’s gonna do the same thing to Gucci [Mane’s career]. I didn’t deal with him on D4L because they had so many no-shows. No one wanted to book them anymore and they fell off. Anyone he touches, he kills their career. He’s bad, man. He’s a very shiesty businessman.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum, artists like Lil Boosie and Webbie and legends like Too $hort and Uncle Luke have consistently toured throughout the country, putting on good shows and hosting parties at a reasonable price. The cost is fair and the demand is still strong. In turn, the promoters are able to turn profits and bring these artists back time and time again, contributing to their career longevity.

“Boosie and Webbie get [booked] for a lot of shows because their price is good enough that promoters can make a profit,” agrees Coach. “There’s two people involved: the artist and the promoter. In the end, both people should be happy. I don’t think it should just be one guy coming to get all the money and going home happy, while the promoter lost all his money and he’s unhappy. [Promoting shows] is a risk, but there should at least be the opportunity for the promoter to make some money if he does it correctly. If the artist’s price is too high, the promoter doesn’t have the opportunity to make money.”

SHOWMANSHIP

With all the hype surrounding Gucci Mane’s 2009 shows, you’d think the price tag would be worth it. For $40,000 or more, you should get a well-rehearsed, energetic, exciting sixty minute performance and the fans go home satisfied, right?
“Gucci’s show is garbage,” says Yungwaun. “I saw him perform in Milwaukee. He doesn’t move, he just stands there.” Comparing Gucci Mane’s performance to other in-demand rappers of a similar genre like Plies or Young Jeezy, agrees Jesse Peak, is laughable. “[Gucci’s] show is shitty. He doesn’t have much showmanship at all. If you pay somebody that kind of money, you think they’re gonna get down [and put on a good show]. He comes to shows high as a kite and he just doesn’t do anything. He sits on a stage like he’s in a booth and raps into the mic. That’s it.”

“I wouldn’t book Gucci Mane again even if the tickets were pre-sold out,” emphasizes Peak. “I wouldn’t pay him anything. He’s not worth it. I was completely disappointed with the whole experience. I wish [Gucci] luck, but I hope Johnnie don’t ever come to one of my parties.”

IN CONCLUSION

To be fair, there’s always more than one side to a story, and Deb and Johnnie’s side is not represented here. But when a dozen promoters in different cities with no prior affiliation are interviewed separately and all tell the same infuriating tales, chances are there’s some truth to it. Although I too have been bitten by the vampires to the tune of $5,000, that amount is pennies compared to some of these promoters’ alleged losses, and I have made every attempt to be reasonable and objective in my reporting.

As they became aware that their dirt was being dug up, Deb and Johnnie tried valiantly to slander my name (hateful email blasts about me containing baseless insults), damage my credibility (recording highly unprofessional online “conference calls” with racial accusations), and scare me (attempting to sue me and get an emergency injunction for “defamation of character”) away from investigating these fraudulent activities. I did not reach out to them for comment because I doubt it would be a productive conversation for anyone involved. Johnnie even attempted to file a warrant for my arrest when I commented on Twitter that he rapes promoters. I think this article contains sufficient evidence to prove that fact, and telling the truth is not a crime.

“What Johnnie is doing ain’t right, and it’s dangerous because you’re dealing with people’s money,” says Mosley. “I respect promoter’s money,” concludes Coach. “I don’t think [Johnnie] respects promoter’s money.”

The solution to all these problems, it would seem, would be for management to put more effort into keeping Gucci sober and free, and less effort into taking deposits for show dates he can’t legally attend.

“I can’t see how [artists] would want to put their trust in someone like [Johnnie],” laments Nik Bean. “Gucci Mane obviously needs new management. Everybody’s talking about ‘Free Gucci Mane’ when we really should be saying, ‘Gucci Mane needs to get a new manager.’ Why’s he doing all this time [for failure to meet community service requirements]? They’re supposed to be managing him and his time.”

Unlike Gucci, Lil Boosie, who began serving a reported 2-4 year jail sentence in November 2009, did not leave behind a slew of angry promoters. Courtney Scott of Trill Management, who handles Boosie’s show bookings, explains that they “slowed down” on Boosie’s dates as soon as they became aware of his legal troubles. They returned three promoters previous deposits, Courtney says, adding, “We made a conscious decision as a management team to prepare for the fact that he might [have to go to jail]. People kept offering to book dates, but we just didn’t take their deposits. We told them we can’t accept it, because he has to go to court.” This seems to be a much more logical management strategy than the get-as-much-money-as-possible-now-and-worry-about-the-consequences-later mentality exhibited by Cabbell and Antney.

Mike Jones (not the rapper), who handles marketing for the clothing store chain DTLR, sponsored Godfather’s Gucci Mane no-show in Chicago. “It’s [all about] the fans, man. You can’t blame them for wanting to see their favorite artists,” he reflects. “I was at the show [where Gucci was scheduled to appear] and it was just a bad look. Some fans don’t even care if you perform. They just wanna see you and take pictures with you. When you don’t even show your face, it’s just bad for business. It’s about the fans; the consumers.”

“Y’all see what’s happening in Chicago on CNN and the news [with so much violence]. It’s Beiruit out here,” finishes Mosley. “People can’t afford to jack off $50 or $60. To play with people’s money and emotions, it’s not a good look. All that money is going somewhere.” Jones vividly recalls tearing down the Gucci Mane promotional posters from his stores, one by one. “I don’t even wanna be affiliated with Gucci Mane anymore. I don’t wanna see anything with his name on it,” he vents. “The word up here [in Chicago] is, ‘Man, I wouldn’t touch Gucci Mane’s show if Jesus was hosting it.’ Real talk.”

Now that Gucci is gone again for at least six months, most of the promoters just want to cut their losses and get their initial deposits back. “Cash is king in this recession. Rescheduling a show isn’t even a possibility for at least eight months, [and that’s] assuming Gucci behaves himself and gets out early on good behavior,” explains Attorney Gardner.

Although Gucci’s previous 6-month incarceration increased his demand, this time around, things could easily go the other way and cool down his buzz like it has for many other rappers (Mystikal, for example, is out of sight, out of mind). “When he does get out, who’s to say he’ll even be relevant at that time?” questions Gardner.
But as long as Gucci, OJ, Nicki, Waka, and the rest of the So Icey artists continue making hot music, the streets will continue demanding their appearances and promoters will continue to book them. Gucci has found a way to make lemonade out of lemons, turning his legal troubles into the theme of his upcoming album, The State vs. Radric Davis (left). At the end of the day, though, the artists’ management is supposed to be working for them, not against them, and all the fraud allegations can’t be good for business. “This is how empires fall,” says Mosley. “It’s going to come back on them.”

When confronted with the accusation that her and Cabbell’s actions have not only been unethical but also criminally fraudulent, at least in the case of Marshall’s Pittsburgh no-shows, Antney defended herself to Creative Loafing. “The only thing you have is your name, and if you ruin your name, you ruin everything,” she says. At least we can all agree on that. //

If you have experienced similar problems as the promoters interviewed in this article, please contact me at jb@ozonemag.com.

To comment on this article, http://www.ozonemag.com/2009/11/30/scam-afta-scam.

©2009 OZONE Magazine | 644 Antone St. Ste 6 Atlanta GA 30318

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2009-10-28T10:09:00.001-07:00

Hip-Hop Marketing in the Digital Era
[21 August 2009]

By Quentin B. Huff
Thanks to waning album sales, the experts say we’ve reached the end of the Record Store Era. It looks like we’ve finally come to grips with the reality that the music business is different now, in the Digital Age, compared to the industry’s business model of the past. Much of our analysis pertains to the changes in that business model, often attributed to downloading, file sharing, and e-commerce.

At the same time, technology has aided the proliferation of home studios and decreased recording costs, creating a boom in “independent” output. With this higher volume of musical traffic, how do the players in this ever-changing system market themselves and distinguish their wares from the pack? What are the marketing strategies for the Digital Age and, interestingly, how have the tools of the past been transformed in importance by our evolving technologies and methods for disseminating information?

The artist of the ‘80s might have relied on a record company’s promotional vehicles, making sure to reach his or her audience through public appearances, videos, product endorsements, and performances. Street teams were, and still can be, vital promotional avenues. Touring is still relevant—maybe more so. But the artist of the ‘80s only expected “hits” on the radio and the charts, not the “hits” we look for today on websites.

Back then, you might hear music playing in stores while you browsed. Now, music is streamed and gets embedded in blogs and MySpace pages. Music, and indeed information in general, sits at our fingertips. Our access to information through online culture impacts the ways in which we become privy to, and ultimately enjoy, music. Below, I’ve outlined some of the strategies I’ve noticed that hip-hop artists are using in order to give their work extra shine.

1. Radio on the TV
Musicians are appearing on television and in movies, either in song or in person. Well, that’s nothing new. But for our purposes, the fundamental level of significance is that hip-hop artists weren’t always so prominent in the entertainment business.

Hip-hop’s rise in profile and perceived legitimacy, from a “mainstream” point of view, has opened new opportunities and revenue streams. These days, a show like HBO’s Entourage, produced by former rapper Mark “Marky Mark” Wahlberg, can be a rapper’s delight. Entourage follows the ups and downs of a young actor struggling to climb the Hollywood ladder to stardom while maintaining his relationships with his two closest homeboys and his older half-brother who’s also in the acting biz.

A single episode might feature a hip-hop song or two (or more) along with a cameo or extended guest spot from artists such as Mary J. Blige, Saigon, Kanye West, Bow Wow, and 50 Cent. Of course, we can’t forget Snoop Dogg. He has enhanced his career by showing up on as many TV spots as he can. For Snoop and everyone else, clips of TV shows and movie scenes play on official sites and other sites like YouTube, creating more opportunities to keep the artist in front of an audience.

In the case of Entourage, the show has done a great job of 1. featuring a mixture of “mainstream” and “underground” rap for its background music and 2. offering a wide array of music from various genres and eras. The latter, I think, is at least as important as the former, since this sort of musical integration suggests a certain amount of foresight and planning. That is, the songs are being chosen to fit the mood and pace of the scenes in which they appear.

Some rappers go beyond mere television cameos. Instead, they do entire reality shows about finding talent (P. Diddy’s band making series), reuniting with partners in rhyme (Salt ‘N’ Pepa’s foray into reality-vision), making amends and spearheading community outreach activities (T.I.‘s Road to Redemption), MC Hammer’s Hammertime, and (once again) Snoop’s Father Hood. People can say what they want about Flavor Flav, but the absurdity of his reality show career has at least made him relevant as a cultural punchline.

Artists, it’s tough to go wrong with TV promotion. It definitely keeps you away from the stigma associated with something like, say, “ringtone rap”. Personally, I think it could be a smart move to make songs that would sound good as a ringtone. Unfortunately, there’s a prevailing undercurrent of disdain for ringtones, largely due to the image of ringtone music as frivolous and utterly disposable.

Back to the screen, it’s a good idea to properly time your TV and movie events. If you’ve released a song or album, why not follow it up with a TV appearance? Play an attorney on Law & Order or just play yourself on a sitcom. On the other hand, a solid TV performance might enhance your profile prior to a release. For instance, Mos Def, before his Ecstatic album dropped, capitalized on his acting chops for an episode of FOX’s House, M.D.. Mos Def’s work on the show was a highlight in an otherwise scattershot season.

The release of The Ecstatic has seen critical acclaim, although I’ve listened to it at least seven or eight times and I’m still undecided about what I think of it. I’m pretty sure I’m a bigger fan of his earlier LPs Black on Both Sides and The New Danger (there, I said it!), but that’s not the point. The point is that Mos Def’s acting abilities didn’t hurt, and probably helped, his album promotion.

TV commercials provide artists with another marketing tool, either in voiceovers (like MC Lyte has done) or personal endorsements (like a bunch of people have done). I find these commercials to be a strange and awkwardly executed strategy, though. There’s something about a celebrity personality endorsing a random product that never sits right with me. Like, Dr. Dre’s commercial tying a well known soft drink to the good Doc’s skills as a deejay.

I don’t see how being a success or an expert in one field, such as rapping or deejaying, translates into a learned opinion about food, soft drinks, weight loss, automobiles, or any number of products we see advertised. These kinds of commercials always strike me as kind of goofy.

For Free or Not For Free
Big Quarters

2. For Free or Not For Free

I respect the Big Quarters hustle. It says the artists are confident enough in their work to expect consumers to pay for it and, more significantly, to want to pay for it. At the same time, they are asking consumers to expect a steady output of quality material to justify the price of admission.Legitimate internet access to music is great, but the problem is: what’s the best way to provide access? Artists, in hip-hop as well as other genres, have approached the question in different ways. Some allow snippets and streaming songs on their MySpace pages and official sites.Others offer free downloads.

Although it’s not a directly related to hip-hop as a genre, Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want pricing scheme for their In Rainbows album highlighted the internet’s ability to challenge the traditional business paradigm. Poet and actor Saul Williams, with the help of Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor, originally marketed his The Inevitable Rise & Liberation of Niggy Tardust as a choice of five United States dollars or nothing at all. Obviously, downloaders would receive more for their five dollars than the free downloaders, but the choice was there.

Both albums garnered sales, with In Rainbows not surprisingly raking in more cash and then also selling as a special edition package and a physical in-store release. But neither strategy ended up with everyone downloading the albums for free. Somebody paid for the work, which says something important about what music lovers are willing to do to get what they want—and possibly to support an innovative effort.

An alternative strategy comes from Big Quarters, a Minnesota hip-hop duo I’ve been raving about since 2007. Big Quarters is not, however, a household name. Nevertheless, the duo (consisting of Brandon Allday and his brother Medium Zach) has been running a monthly subscription service through their website. For five dollars a month, subscribers receive five songs. In the days of old, five songs could have been an “EP” or a “maxi-single”.

I respect the Big Quarters hustle. It says the artists are confident enough in their work to expect consumers to pay for it and, more significantly, to want to pay for it. At the same time, they are asking consumers to expect a steady output of quality material to justify the price of admission.

It’s not my intention to rehash the Radiohead discussion. In fact, hip-hop artists tend to shy away from the pay-what-you-want technique. Instead, they’re often willing to give music away for free, usually in the form of mixtapes.

Now, free music isn’t a new phenomenon. Record companies have been giving away free stuff for years, setting aside album copies for promotional events, giveaways, music reviews, and the like. Free stuff doesn’t usually count in the artist’s royalty configurations. Sneaky, huh?

Mixtapes used to actually be cassette tapes. Now, you’ll find that many of them are legitimately available for download in digital formats. Mixtapes used to help rappers create interest in their skills, creating enough buzz to get a record deal and a debut album. This old function of the mixtape, to herald the arrival of new music, still exists and it’s probably more important than ever to the rapper’s promotional bag of tricks.

For some listeners, the existence of a rapper’s mixtape is the primary means of learning about new releases. A snack today (the mixtape) means a meal (the official album) somewhere down the line. If Chubb Rock and Wordsmith hadn’t put out a mixtape, A Crack in the Bridge and if Chubb Rock had done a guest verse on one of K’naan’s songs, I probably wouldn’t have heard about good ol’ Chubb Rock’s return to the recording scene.

When you think about it, mixtapes require quite a bit of effort as fans have come to expect a unique listening experience. As such, mixtapes mostly contain original production from the artist, providing more of a preview of the artist’s versatility and level of creativity than a sample of the finished product. Dude, that’s what leaks are for, right?

More and more, the mixtape itself is becoming the main event as it equals and sometimes overshadows “official” albums as the source of our listening pleasure. Not only was Lil Wayne’s mixtape hustle a defining moment in music, but rap mixtapes have earned spots on year-end “best album” lists. Lil Wayne’s Da Drought 3, Wale’s The Mixtape About Nothing, Little Brother’s Mick Boogie-assisted And Justus For All, Royce Da 5’9's Bar Exam mixtape series, and Joe Budden’s Mood Muzik mixtapes are just a few examples of mixtapes considered by fans and critics to be as good, or better, than “albums”.

Going forward, the difference between mixtapes and albums seems indistinguishable. Containing coveted guest spots, unifying concepts, and original production, mixtapes are frequently in high demand. At the start of Wale’s 2009 mixtape, Back to the Feature, in which every track contains a featured guest verse, he apologizes for taking so long to complete the project, noting that he was busy touring. That’s how much people like mixtapes. A brotha’s gotta apologize for not getting it out quickly enough.

Likewise, the buzz was so great surrounding up-and-comer QuESt’s mixtape, Broken Headphones, people were counting down the hours until its release. Love that title, by the way, for obvious reasons.

Mixtapes have also revitalized the position of the deejay. Once upon a time, hip-hop culture revolved around the deejay, as the record spinner was the prime mover of the crowd. Then, as the emcee became the focus, the record spinner receded into the background. But now, mixtapes are often hosted by respected deejays such as DJ Premier, Mick Boogie, DJ Soul, DJ Green Lantern, DJ Honda, and 9th Wonder. I spend an excessive amount of time hating on trends—like the use of Auto-Tune, for instance. The reemergence of the deejay, however, is definitely a good thing.

3. Themes & Concepts
Ideally, an album should, in general, probably contain songs that work well together and leave the listener with a cohesive experience. The songs should at least speak to the artist’s vision even if they don’t display musical or conceptual unity. Lately, the concept game has helped rappers set their albums apart from the competition. I’ve already mentioned Wale’s The Mixtape About Nothing, inspired by Seinfeld and drawing upon the show’s real audio and a badass near-rap cameo from Julia Louise-Dreyfus. It’s dope.

Rhymefest’s 2008 Man in the Mirror mixtape was ahead of its time in paying homage to Michael Jackson. With offbeat samples from Jackson’s tunes and snippets of his interviews, Rhymefest made it sound like he was right there in the studio with Michael Jackson. Mixtapes honoring greats like J. Dilla and the Notorious B.I.G. gain momentum from their cohesive focal points.

Themes and concepts need not be as dramatic as a tribute to a fallen icon. Serengeti’s Dennehy deals with characters and alter egos, along the lines of The RZA’s Bobby Digital persona and Kool Keith’s Dr. Octagon. Mixtapes can also be collections of an artist’s b-side material or unreleased tracks. Another way to go is to become immersed in the fantasy you’re creating. Tanya Morgan’s Brooklynati operates in a fictional world based on the combined strengths of the group’s three male emcees hailing from Brooklyn, New York and Cincinnati, Ohio. A rap group of three male emcees rapping under a female name is gimmicky enough, but there was even a funny website, Brooklyn Nati.com, detailing the fictional city’s hotspots.

Of course, a full blown concept can succeed on a less flamboyant level. In this regard, you might consider Black Milk’s Tronic as having a theme of musical and songwriting growth. There was also a futuristic quality about its sound.

An album with a concept comes across as being more focused, more inspired, and more thought provoking than the “average” effort. Whether that’s actually true or not is up for debate. The idea that Jay-Z’s American Gangster was inspired by the feature film of the same name worked as a big selling point, especially when you compare its reviews to the mostly lukewarm reception to American Gangster‘s predecessor Kingdom Come.

4. Group Dynamics
Just as the status of the deejay has experienced a surge through mixtapes, it’s possible that hip-hop groups are also reemerging. I’d like to think Wu-Tang Clan’s 2008 reunion with 8 Diagrams is partially responsible for this, but that might be a stretch. An easier argument to make is that super-groups may be putting the group dynamic back on the musical map.

The super-group is different than a regular group or band. It’s a lineup of stellar emcees joining forces for a recording. Okay, you could probably argue that Wu-Tang Clan fits the bill. No problem. But I prefer to think of a rap super-group as a collaboration between titans. Just put three or more emcees together that would complement each other, either by being so similarly dope or by providing contrast to one another’s style. Posse cuts give me good ideas of super-groups I’d like to see. Canibus, Royce Da 5’9, and Elzhi worked well together on one of Royce’s Bar Exam 2 tracks.

Back in the day, I liked Chuck D, Ice Cube, and Big Daddy Kane on Public Enemy’s Burn Hollywood Burn. Throw MC Lyte in there with those guys, hook ‘em up with a deejay, and I’d love to hear the results. I also wouldn’t mind hearing Andre 3000, Snoop Dogg, Devon the Dude, and Scarface working together on a regular basis, and I haven’t decided who should join her, but I think Missy Elliott would bring the noise as part of a collective.

In the real world, I think eMC truly sparked a renaissance in the group, or super-group, format. With a lineup of Masta Ace, Punchline, Wordsworth, and Stricklin, their album The Show melded the talents of these four emcees into an album loosely chronicling the lives of rappers on the road. In 2009, Slaughterhouse (Royce Da 5’9, Joe Budden, Joell Ortiz, and Crooked I) has emerged as the super-group to beat, while Detroit emcee-producer Black Milk joins with Sean Price and Guilty Simpson to form Random Axe. These types of collaborations raise the profile of the individual emcees, plus three or four emcees promoting a single project is better than one.

Oh, and another thing. I know this is a duo and not technically a super-group, but I’m fascinated by producer and rapper Madlib’s decision to work with rapper Guilty Simpson. Using the initials of Otis “Madlib” Jackson’s name, the two of them plan to be called “O.J. Simpson”. I don’t know. I’m fascinated to see how, or if, that’s going to fly.

5. Word of Mouth
One marketing strategy that never goes out of style: good ol’ fashioned word-of-mouth. There’s nothing better than a music lover sharing a good album with someone. Doesn’t matter if you email it, Facebook it, update it on Twitter, or blog it like they do in the PopMatters media center. Some things will never change.

Quentin Huff is an attorney, writer, visual artist, and professional tennis player who lives and works in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In addition to serving as an adjunct professor at Wake Forest University School of Law, he enjoys practicing entertainment law. When he’s not busy suing people or giving other people advice on how to sue people, he writes novels, short stories, poetry, screenplays, diary entries, and essays. Quentin’s writing appears, or is forthcoming, in: Casa Poema, Pemmican Press, Switched-On Gutenberg, Defenestration, Poems Niederngasse, and The Ringing Ear, Cave Canem’s anthology of contemporary African American poetry rooted in the South. His family owns and operates Huff Art Studio, an art gallery specializing in fine art, printing, and graphic design. Quentin loves Final Fantasy videogames, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, his mother Earnestine, PopMatters, and all things Prince.

Published at: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/109263-hip-hop-marketing-in-the-digital-era/

2009-10-14T14:39:00.001-07:00

Will Your Life Work The Way You Want It To in 2010?
By Jack Canfield (Chicken Soup For The Soul series)

It's never too early to start planning for next year, especially now that we've marked 2009 as one of recession and things may turn brighter in future months. This year carried with it uncertainty and unsettling economic news, but I say these circumstances compel us to take a deeper breath and pause to think about our lives. Are they moving in the direction we want them to be? Will you be ready to embrace 2010 when it arrives in a mere months?

When people ask me about the single most important ingredient to success, I always share the same response: realizing what's making you achieve success, and then realizing what is stifling your success. Sometimes recognizing the things that are NOT working in your life can be painful, yet more powerful to shaping the life you want. Don't try to rationalize them, make excuses for them, or hide them. This is when it's even more critical to take personal inventory and evict those excuses, rationalizations, and hidden habits that don't serve you. Let me give you some examples:

• Do you want to be active, fit, and strong? Then you have to stop making excuses about your weight, diet choices, and lack of exercise.

• Do you want to embrace Monday mornings and feel excited about going to work every day? Then you have to stop hiding your true passions and go after whatever it is you really want to be doing day in and day out.

• Do you want to lose the debt forever? Then you have to stop ignoring your spending habits and get real about a budget that will pull you out of debt and allow you to reach financial freedom.

• Do you want to feel more connected to the people in your life, such as your partner, children, friends, and colleagues? Then you have to stop complaining about your poor relationships and figure out why you don't feel as connected as you'd like to be.

Successful people do not waste time in denial (or complain or make excuses for that matter). They face situations like a warrior. It's okay to identify a problem even though you haven't a clue about solving it right away. The first step is just recognizing the issue, and then having faith that you'll figure it out with careful attention to it.

Following are the three things to do constantly in pursuit of your successes, however big or small:

1) Awareness: Life tells you things every day. Do this. Don't do that. Think about this. Try me. Forget that. We live in a world that seemingly encourages us to live on autopilot. Successful people fly manually every day and so should you. When those feedback signals come in, listen to them and use them in planning your next step.

2) Commitment: Commit to finding out why things aren't working and learn what will fix them. Once you start the process it will be much easier to continue. Nothing fruitful stems from inaction.

3) Trust: Trust that making changes to the situation will ultimately bring about the best results. Sure you might go through a bit of discomfort during the change, and some unlikely or unwanted outcomes, but in the end you will triumph!

So are you ready to admit the things that just are not working out?

Make a list of the things in your life that are working against your success and ask how the situation can be improved. If you need help organizing those "things" in your life, try using the following list of categories. I recommend reflecting on each of the these 7 areas and ask yourself, what's not working here in each one?

1. Financial Goals
2. Career/Business Goals
3. Free Time/Family Time
4. Health/Appearance Goals
5. Relationship Goals
6. Personal Growth
7. Making a Difference

Remember, by facing what is not working, you can only improve your life!

And if you don't know where to begin, just start writing. I have a set of handy worksheets for you that can help you make plans. Click here to download these free resource and start creating all that you want from your life.

© 2009 Jack Canfield

Jack Canfield is America's #1 Success Coach, co-founder of the billion-dollar Chicken Soup for the Soul brand, and a leading authority on Peak Performance. If you're ready to be more accomplished and have more fun in all that you do, get your FREE success tips from Jack Canfield now at: www.FreeSuccessPrinciples.com.

2009-10-12T19:23:00.000-07:00

This came in last week's Bob Lefsetz's email blast:

Just want to hip you to this week's "New Yorker", the "Money Issue".

There's so much good shit here, I almost couldn't turn out the light last night.

Start with Tad Friend's article on Nikki Finke, "Call Me â€” Why Hollywood Fears Nikki Finke". Not only are Ms. Finke's personality and working agenda delineated, you learn how the movie business truly operates. Stay in until Joel Silver leaks Joel Robinov's sexist comment and then says that maybe they both might have made it. Wow, such duplicity is not evidenced in the realm of ordinary households. When that executive lies to you, know that your mind is not playing tricks, it's truly an untruth. Like the President of a major label who told me the quote I read from a ubiquitous rock star in a London paper was untrue, even though, of course, it was real. Damn, if say it's so, it is!

When you're done reading about Ms. Finke, and her petty wars with Patrick Goldstein, who knew everybody took this stuff so seriously...

Oh wait, I almost forgot the most significant point!

It's not about movies.

One of Ms. Finke's favorites is "Legally Blonde".

Nikki doesn't care about movies, she cares about power.

And if you think David Geffen isn't all about power, read through to his quote. Wow. I can't tell you how many phone calls I've gotten from people wherein King David has...

So when you sit home and complain that the labels aren't about music and the movies suck, know that you're right!

Then read the story on Google.

I've got to quote this one passage, it's priceless:

"Diller was disconcerted that Page, even as they talked, stared fixedly at the screen of his P.D.A. 'It's one thing if you're in a room with twenty people and someone is using his P.D.A.,' Diller recalled. 'I said to Larry, "Is this boring?"'

'No. I'm interested. I always do this,' Page said.

'Well, you can't do this,' Diller said. 'Choose'.

'I'll do this,' Page said matter of factly, not lifting his eyes from his hand-held device.

'So I talked to Sergey,' Dillerr said. 'I left thinking that more than most people they were wildly self-possessed.' Later, Diller said, he came to think that what might be construed as rudeness was also purpose."

There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear. But nobody from the old guard, nobody with money, no one whose picture appears in the society pages of the "New York Times", treats Barry Diller that way. But Larry Page of Google did.

They say that the younger generation can't focus. Bullshit. They just don't want to waste time in a world where there's more information than you can ever graze.

And then there's David Owen's article on executive compensation. Turns out the expert, Nell Minow, says regulation is the wrong strategy. It's about shareholder power, to penetrate the CEO-controlled boards.

Whew!

The article about the guy who's got the market analyzed based on pi is fascinating too, and I've just started reading about Obama's economic advisers...

Pick up the physical magazine, it's the October 12th issue.

But you can read the Nikki Finke article online here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/12/091012fa_fact_friend

Whilst the public is entertained by the gossip circus, while people are anesthetized by TV, those in power rule absolutely. Read this issue of the "New Yorker" if you want to know how the game is played.

Bob Lefsetz.com

2009-10-12T19:21:00.000-07:00

The Spotify Guys
By, Bob Lefsetz

They're Swedish!

Martin Lorentzon couldn't stop saying how much he loves L.A. Because in the winter in Stockholm, it gets light just before nine and dark again around three, and that's just too little daylight, for too little time. If only winter were a couple of months shorter, it would be tolerable.

Then again, Sweden's got better cell service. You don't get the dropouts we do in America. And the tech companies are more open.

Speaking of tech companies, Martin made a mint. After working for Alta Vista in San Francisco back in the nineties, he started a company in Sweden that...let's just say it counted data. I'm afraid most people reading this wouldn't understand it if I explained it. And there's your digital divide right there. People who like to win on intimidation and those whose educations allow them a superior vantage point, enable them to move mountains, change worlds, make tons of money.

And Martin put his millions in with Daniel Ek's and they founded Spotify. Which the labels were glad to extract an advance from, but were surprised actually launched and was successful.

Are you following their latest products? Wherein you can download 3,000 odd tracks to your laptop or mobile device? It's just like owning them. Of course, you get this privilege only if you sign up for the premium service.

And they've got software for not only iPhone, but Android and soon BlackBerry, they're the anti-Apple, they're not a closed system, they want to play with everybody.

And they just might end up dominating. If the labels will realize that streaming is inevitable and play ball.

Oh, they're playing ball so far. That breakdown that hit the Web re Spotify's costs isn't accurate, they've got special deals with the labels, but they don't go on forever, Spotify's got to prove its mettle, it has got to generate profits.

A couple of days back, Martin Lorentzon e-mailed me, he was in town, did I want to get together?

Normally, I say no. It's a one way street. You demonstrate your wares hoping that I'll help you out. But Spotify is revolutionary. I was intrigued. But I wasn't sure of the agenda.

So I showed up at the Mondrian today to find a well-dressed man of forty, voluble, polite and excited. Not a passive manipulator, but someone intent on ingratiating himself.

And after catching up, hearing a bit of history, Martin's iPhone rang. I could see it in big block letters. It was Daniel Ek. He was coming down.

Wow.

Where to begin?

Spotify employs P2P software, that's why it's so damn good. It takes 2-5 seconds to ramp up each and every song, which has reduced bit rate during that window, but usually that's a relatively dead window and the listener isn't paying close attention anyway. Yes, there are tricks. Only seventy five percent of the song is downloaded, an algorithm provides the remaining twenty five percent. This is how they all do it, it's de rigueur. And the files don't only come from Spotify's servers, bits and pieces come from other users with the software installed on their computers. Net effect? It feels like you own the track. Usability is equal to iTunes. You can fast forward, rewind, there's no lag time.

But that's on your desktop. What about your mobile?

Well, that's a bit different. You see then Spotify depends on the network. Which is why they've limited sign-ups in the nations they've already launched in. They want the streaming experience to be perfect on your mobile device, after all, you're depending on it, their servers and their wallets cannot be strained.

But if you want to pay, you can get Spotify instantly.

And in order to use the mobile app, you've got to pay.

And when you do pay, you can download the aforementioned 3,000 tracks to your hard drive too, which truly is like owning them. Of course, if you stop paying, you don't own them. But if you start paying again, they return magically.

Daniel was focused on the rental issue. Needing to make purchase available too. I think that's bullshit. You can't listen to the hoi polloi. In America we rented movies on videotape, bought them on DVD and are now renting them again via Netflix and Redbox. Who says America is anti-rental? It's all about the user experience. And the Spotify user experience is so good, that you don't need to own once you've got it.

But what about Apple?

Martin and Daniel wonder too. Why exactly did Apple approve their app? They gave it a 50/50 shot. But Cupertino said yes. Was it because Apple was worried about the backlash or Apple just doesn't care that much about music. Better to take thirty percent of apps than the small margin in music. Then again, since the Spotify app is free, there's no gross to skim from. Then again, you can't stream music in the background on an iPhone. If you go to write an e-mail, you lose Spotify. Whereas you can listen to your iTunes library while you surf on your iPhone. All of which begs the question, will Apple compete? Will Apple suddenly roll out a streaming service? The guys at Spotify DON'T KNOW!

But someone will. Streaming is going to rule. It's just a matter of when.

So when do we get Spotify in the U.S?

At the end of this year or the beginning of next.

Oh, I get it. These guys are in way over their heads. They can't get it together. They promise, but don't deliver.

Absolutely wrong. They could launch tomorrow, they just don't have all the rights. You see a certain company doesn't believe in free. So, they won't let Spotify launch with the European model. But, without the free element, is Spotify doomed to fail?

Believe me, Spotify wants people to pay. They want to integrate so many desirable elements into the paid model that you'll want to pay. Being able to see what stars are spinning, what your friends are listening to. Yes, merging social networking elements with music, something absent from iTunes. But you can only convince people to pay if they get to try the service out. And so far, other than a handful of the connected, no one in America has Spotify, few even know what it is!

Daniel felt this was a problem. He had to convince the community, the artists and executives. I laughed. This is like MTV. Once you see it, once it launches here, word will spread like fire, people WILL WANT THEIR SPOTIFY!

Daniel feels he could have 50 million users almost instantly. But it's too soon. He doesn't want to risk messing with usability and doesn't want to burn through the company's cash that fast. Yes, it costs to stream, not only server power, but licensing fees. Also, he wants to tweak the service. They showed me some unreleased elements, but they've got tons more. They want to build it so you will come.

What a radical change from those in the music industry, and from those in tech a decade ago.

Ten years ago, the techies were arrogant. They wanted to rip off the music industry's wares. The Spotify guys are different. They want everybody to make money. But they want the time and support to make it happen. Honestly, they're not exactly sure of the business model, they're figuring it out. They want most people to pay, they want different tiers, but the customer is king, you've got to serve the customer. Which the music business has not done in eons.

These are not charlatans. These are not guys in it for the fame.

They are in it for the money. But shouldn't the music industry love them for this, feeling the same way?

They're smart. They know tech. They don't intimidate physically, they make their moves via their intelligence, which flummoxes the music industry. An industry that likes to bully and rip partners off.

But is that paradigm truly sustainable? In an era where the customer is savvy enough to steal whatever he wants? If you think free availability of music can be eradicated, you don't know dick about computers. The only answer is a better mousetrap. Spotify is the first step.

Most people bore me. It's all about them. They want to tell me how great they are, why I should endorse what they're selling. But I was positively riveted for two hours. I felt like I was at ground zero of the music industry. Right there at the source. Better than meeting Bob Dylan, who doesn't talk much anyway. Better than hanging with the rock stars of yore who feel they're entitled, never mind the underschooled and inexperienced nitwits of today. As for dealing with the label people, other rights holders, it reminds me of the sixties, there's a huge generation gap. My eyes roll back in my head, I just can't waste the time. But today, in the lobby of the Mondrian Hotel, I was excited. These guys want to deliver more music to more people and get them to pay for it! And the service is so good, it is worth paying for.

So I don't want to hear one naysayer. You can still sell tracks at iTunes as a hedge, you can even sell CDs. But streaming is the answer and these guys are the cutting edge. They wanted the conversation to be off the record, but I insisted it couldn't be, word has to GET OUT!

P.S. Let me make this perfectly clear. If you've got the premium service, you're not reliant upon a wireless connection to listen to music. You can download a little over 3,000 tracks to your mobile permanently (as long as you continue to pay, of course). So if you're in a dead zone, or camping in Timbuktu, you can listen to your music - as long as you can keep the battery of your mobile charged! (No, your music doesn't disappear if you run out of juice, the songs remain, but without power, you've got to bang on rocks, you've got to make your own music!)

P.P.S. Please read Chris Anderson's "Free". The guy's been beaten up so heavily regarding the Long Tail that his new book has been ignored. But check it out. Primarily because it explains the concept of "freemium" upon which Spotify is based. I'll reference the Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium But Anderson does a much better job of explaining it. Giving numerous examples. As for being afraid of the future, free's been around for eons, Anderson makes this clear. Stop being afraid of losing what you've got and start figuring out how you can make it in the future by reaching so many more people!

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2009-10-07T10:09:00.000-07:00

The Secret to Making Money Playing Live Music
From: www.LiveMusicMachine.com (a cool new website/app for booking artists)

The simple secret to making money playing live music is:

1. Create exciting market worthy music products, both recorded and live
2. Expose your music through every possible avenue at your disposal, both terrestrial and digital
3. Focus more of your time on selling live music interactions to your fans than to night clubs.

Unfortunately, most artists think that making it onto the club circuit will pave the way to financial security and, eventually, that almighty record deal. This is not true. However, until artists truly understand their position in today’s music marketplace, clubs will still be able make them think they have all of the leverage and thereby the upper hand in booking matters. By working smarter not harder, artists can change this perception and build a large moneymaking base from their fans and eventually from clubs who will pay them for live music interactions. Here’s how.

Fans are desperate for more personal interaction with the artists they love. Because booking has been an intimidating task for most fans and something they have never really known how to do, the average person has never booked an artist. On the artist side, most fail to realize that the best source of live music bookings for them is their own fan base.

When a fan wants to book an artist for a house party, private concert or other type of special event, which most booking agents generally don’t want to deal with, they rarely know how to go about doing it. More than likely, cost is not the same determining factor for a fan that it is for clubs. When a fan is booking an artist they love, their priority factor is that they are looking to make a personal connection with an artist and they are willing to pay well for that connection. They get to deal with the artist directly, an exciting factor in and of itself and they control their own event. The price point will usually be much higher for a fan than a club because a fan is buying from emotion whereas a club wants to fills its room with the best talent it can find for the cheapest price so it can sell tickets and alcohol.

Sometimes playing for free makes a lot of sense. Find artists with large followings and sell yourself to them as a free opening act. Go to restaurants and bars with moderate to large client bases that don’t have live music and offer to play for free as long as you can sell some merchandise. Remember, the more you play out live, the tighter your live music product becomes. If friends are have parties, offer to play for free. A party is always better with live music and it makes you seem cool and provides great exposure. Slowly you will lock in a base of “True Fans.” These are the people most likely to pay you money for a a live performance or a CD. Go to malls and offer to play for free. Pass out flyers for future paid gigs and sell merchandise. Talk to high schools and offer to play for free but make sure that you will help the school with something that’s important to them, like raising money for band instruments or team sports.

It is extremely important that you put your music everywhere you can for free. Give free downloads of your music away on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and on any other website that people into music are exposed to. Give away a new download frequently, say at least once or twice a month. Figure out which music blogs talk about your kind of music (use Echonest.com’s Promobot to find the right blogs) , email them, but even better, talk to them and tell them they can give your music away for free. If you are an emerging artist with no real base, the more you give away your music for free, the better chance you have of converting people into true believers. Also, you will have a greater opportunity to be booked and to sell CD’s, downloads, ringtones, or other digital products like a mini EP with photos, artwork and lyric sheets. Look at giving away music for free as extremely cost effective way to advertise yourself to the world.

Most bands are not organized enough to get booked through their MySpace page or from anywhere else on the Internet. Most of the time your page is so cluttered that people wouldn’t know who or how to contact you so they can book you. When they play live, a truly great band will work whatever room they are in to connect with as many of their fans as possible. Your fans may ask you for a card so they can book you. Chances are even if you give them one or you exchange numbers, they won’t ever call you because they probably lost your card or your piece of paper and you will almost never return their email on MySpace anyway.

So here you are. You have a good music product, you are continuously exposing it to as many people as you can and you still aren’t reaping the benefits of more bookings. What can you do to increase the possibility of your being booked more often from this group of people who really would like to book you? Well you should sign up for LiveMusicMachine.Com, the first booking tool on the Internet that, if used properly, can definitely increase your opportunity to get booked.

LiveMusicMachine has a music booking widget that you can put anywhere on the Internet to get booked, including from your MySpace page, your Facebook fan artist page and even directly from your YouTube videos. The LiveMusicMachine widget has a calendar, with 3 views (List, Availability Calendar and Tour Map) that automatically updates everywhere you embed it on the Net when you make changes on your booking page. Anyone who clicks on the “Book Us” button on your widget, immediately sees all of the information they will need to book you -- your price, availability, distance you are willing to travel and requirements that must be met before you can be booked. If they click the submit an offer link, they first have to put up a credit card and pay a $10 fee before the artist gets the formal offer. Any email you get from LiveMusicMachine will be an offer for an actual paid date. If you accept the offer, you also pay a $10 fee and the booking is set. LiveMusicMachine provides hosts and artists with all the tools they need to see their booking through to success. The artist keeps the entire performance fee. LiveMusicMachine takes no commission.

Promotion! Promotion! Promotion! Wherever you put your band info, including CD’s, flyers, promo materials, ads, signage on stage, YouTube videos and your various profile pages, you should always promote your band website and, along side of it, the fact that you can be booked directly from LiveMusicMachine. The more exposure people have to where they can book you for a live performance, the more opportunities for booking will come your way. It’s only a matter of time before a fan reaches out and submits an offer to book you and, more than likely, for more money than you will ever get from a club. Besides, your future as an artist ultimately lies in the hands and hearts of your fans. If you can emotionally bond with them as an artist, you can pretty much sell your “true fans” almost anything.

2009-10-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

Pitching Songs And Market Research

If you write songs in the hope that you will get them recorded by artists who might actually sell some CDs or downloads, or get airplay (all of which can make you money), then the first step you need to take is to do some market research. This is the business of songwriting we are dealing with, not songwriting itself. I am going to give you some tips for beginning to develop your understanding of the market you are trying to break into it.

Bear in mind that, because you are pitching your songs to industry pros, it doesn’t matter much what the listeners think of your songs. That might sound weird, since they are the ultimate consumers, but you are once removed from them. You need to impress and wow the trend setters, not the trend followers. Doesn’t matter if you write country or hip hop, you can’t be writing songs that should have been on the radio last year and sell them this year.

Let’s assume you know what genre your songs fit into. Unhappily (for songwriters) genres are moving targets these days, so even that step means staying in touch with the current labels. For instance, the reality is that Motown R&B hits don’t have much in common with what is currently called R&B. But if you’ve got that base covered, let’s move to the next step.

•Look at the charts. Pitching songs requires knowing what songs and what kind of songs within the genre are getting airplay. In pop, ballads work for some artists but typically the hits tend to be uptempo. Does that still hold? And what tempo is uptempo?

•What vibes are popular? Are the songs within that genre downbeat or positive? What values do they promote—street rioting or family values?

•Are the newer artists following the trends or breaking new ground?

•Identify the singers who sings songs that you like. Do they cover a variety of styles or promote one style? Are the lyrics in your face or subtle? Are the themes personal or universal.

The intent here is to find out how you will fit into something that is alive and ongoing. The music business is alive and vital. It might not be as profitable as it was, and there are certainly new business models, but it has always been in flux. Think of it as a merry go round. You have to watch it a bit before you successfully jump on board.

That is step one. Once you’ve got this information, the next step is going to be pitching it. We’ve talked before about tip sheets and collecting this sort of information, but the key point is getting the information. If you don’t have the money for tip sheets or to join up with organizations that can help with placements, you are not up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Google is your friend. With a little creative effort you can find ways to get songs to artists you’ve identified in step one. So pick an artist and:

•Find their producers

•Find their management company

•Find their record label

These are the key players in determining what gets on a CD. So go to the web sites. Often you will find songwriter friendly submission links, or instructions on how to get your material to them. You might find an email address or mailing address. Now is the time to move slowly, however. Don’t email a gigabyte of mp3s. Don’t just mail a CD. Use the contact information to send a short note about yourself and ask for permission to submit material for a specific artist. Keep the note concise—no one cares where you went to school—and friendly. Make sure the language is good English. This isn’t time for text messaging. You are supposed to be a lyricist and that means understanding that while “Yo” might work well in a hip hop tune, it still is not English. No, that doesn’t mean that good English produces good songs—just good impressions. And initially, that is the entire point. The rule here: Make it easy for them to say yes.

If you are invited to submit music, you will need your demo and a typed lyric sheet. Make sure your contact information is everywhere—in your email, on your lyric sheet, on the CD… Folks don’t mean to be careless with your email address, but they are busy and you are not that important yet. Make things easy for them. So this rule is: Make it hard for them to lose you in the shuffle.

Even if you’ve done your homework and gotten permission, odds are you will never hear anything back. That isn’t necessary a reflection on your music or your research. It might be bad timing, the person is no longer connected with the act, or any number of things. In this industry, few people bother to say no—they just ignore you.

So you move on to the next one. And that is probably always a good rule. Move on to the next one and work with the willing.

About the Author
Ed Teja

Ed Teja is a musician, composer, and book author who writes, arranges, and performs a variety of music.

http://deezbeats.ning.com/profiles/blog/show?id=4089882%3ABlogPost%3A359&xgs=1

2009-09-23T09:51:00.001-07:00

Meltdown Advice For Serena, Kanye and Rep. Wilson
Susan Adams, 09.14.09, 6:44 PM ET

The human temper is a dangerous thing. Unleash it, and you can get yourself in a whole lot of trouble.

There has been a rash of shocking outbursts lately. Rapper Kanye West jumped onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards Sunday night and interrupted country-pop singer Taylor Swift's acceptance speech to insist that Beyoncé should have won the award. At the U.S. Open Saturday, tennis star Serena Williams let loose on a line judge, reportedly threatening, "If I could I would take this f---ing ball and shove it down your f---ing throat." It cost her the match and her chance at a title. And then there was Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., blurting "You lie!" in the middle of President Obama's primetime health care address to Congress last week.

If you absolutely have to lose it in public, how do you pick up the pieces?

Corporate and political leaders should keep three main things in mind, says Michael Robinson, chair of the corporate and regulatory practice at Levick Strategic Communications, in Washington: Immediacy, full-throatedness and a focus on the future. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, when word travels at the speed of instant messaging, there is no time to gather your thoughts. If you blew it, take responsibility, instantly and thoroughly. Then move the story beyond the outburst and the mea culpa, and focus on how you're going to change your behavior in the future. "By the time someone is asking you a question about your outburst," Robinson says, "you should be talking about your corrective behavior."

Ronald Culp, a partner at the public relations firm Ketchum, in Chicago, agrees that an apology must come without hesitation. He even advocates using sites like Twitter to spread the word. "If you screw up, get it on the record as quickly as possible that there's a lesson learned," he says.

Don't think you're safe just because you lose it behind close doors, cautions Robinson. "You could be in a closed meeting, but someone there could be on Twitter," he points out. "They could write, 'Guess what so-and-so just said.'"

Context matters, adds Eric Dezenhall, a communications consultant and co-author with John Weber of Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management Is Wrong. Celebrities, for instance, "are expected to be completely self-absorbed," he says. Indeed, Sunday was not the first time Kanye West lost his cool in public. He has ranted at previous award ceremonies, including the Grammys. But West stuck to at least two of the rules laid out by crisis consultants. He apologized both abjectly and promptly on his blog, where he wrote, "I feel like Ben Stiller in 'Meet the Parents' when he messed up everything and Robert DeNiro asked him to leave. ... That was Taylor's moment, and I had no right in any way to take it away from her. I am truly sorry." Wilson and Williams have both apologized slowly and halfheartedly at best, and that's a big advantage for Kanye.

Corporate leaders, unlike Kanye West, are expected always to behave, especially if they're in industries that get intense public scrutiny. "I once told an oil company executive I represented, 'The fact is you represent an oil company and nobody likes you,'" says Dezenhall. Technology executives face a less rigorous standard, he adds: "The tech media sees it as a hip, cool, progressive industry." For instance, he points out, if an oil executive had covered up his health problems the way Steve Jobs did, the deceit would have led the business news until he was forced to resign.

Another valuable tool for hot-tempered leaders is a sense of humor. When Ronald Culp was running the public relations operation at Sears a decade ago, an executive blew his stack in a meeting with 30 employees. "He was pressed on something, and he totally lost it," Culp recalls. The executive promptly fell on his sword, and he cracked a joke at the same time. "I'm sure no one expected what you just heard," Culp remembers him saying, "including myself."

The result, according to Culp: "Everyone came up to him afterward and said, 'What a big hole you dug for yourself--and you came leaping out of it.'"

From Forbes.com

2009-09-14T09:55:00.001-07:00

A Successful Sports Label
By Wendy Day (www.IndieLabelBuilder.com)

Why is it that no one has built a successful record label owned by an athlete? I want to build the first successful independent rap record label owned by a sports figure!!! Now, I don’t mean an athlete who raps….I mean an athlete who has business sense and wants to be in the music business. And it would be an added plus if he or she was looking to run the label after retiring from sports, but not mandatory.

When I first moved to Atlanta three years ago, I was interviewed for ESPN.com. I was asked why I thought no sports figure had ever succeeded in starting an urban record label even though so many had tried. I was shocked by the long list of athletes who’d tried and failed. Millions and millions of dollars had been wasted. Last month, that same journalist called me again. Although he has since moved on to Bloomberg TV from ESPN, three years had passed and he was following up to see if any athletes had come into the business and been successful. Not one has been successful. This bothered me immensely, and now I am on a mission to find an athlete with the right mindset to win big in this industry.

Still, to this day, there has not been a successful label owned by a sports figure. I’ve danced around a tiny bit over the past 18 years of my career with Dennis Scott, Nick Van Exel, Jamal Tinsley, Quentin Groves, and even Roy Jones, Jr. I spoke briefly with Winky Wright a few years ago, who eventually chose Damon Dash to help his start his label—neither of them have labels now. I’ve spoken with sports agents who had no interest in their athletes owning record labels, so they sabotaged them to fail either in the negotiations or the initial stages of them starting labels (I won’t work with those who have disinterested or bullshit agents—it’s impossible to win, so I am proud to say I’ve never been part of the failed process). But I’ve yet to find the perfect athlete with the right mindset, the proper funding, and great music. And of course, the will to win in this industry.

I’ve watched sports guys hire industry people who aren’t qualified to help them start labels, either because they’ve never done it or because they run competing labels themselves. Some fall into both categories, sadly. I have seen hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted on false starts for artists and on elaborate parties, neither of which have anything to do with selling records. Building hype is a wonderful thing, but isn’t it better to build hype from the grind and the great music than for throwing parties? This is a b-u-s-i-n-e-s-s! I’ve watched MLB baseball players waste millions of dollars because they had the wrong staff in place. I’ve seen NBA super stars lose millions on the wrong artist and waste hundreds of thousands of dollars trusting the wrong consultants (please sue them!!) especially regarding radio spins. I’ve seen NFL players spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on elaborate parties to never even put out an artist or recoup any of the spending.

To put out a rap record successfully, it takes great music, artists who work hard, an experienced plan put together by someone with experience and connections and a successful track record in putting out music. It also takes proper funding—to put out a rap act in today’s economy, an investment of about half a million dollars per release is necessary…on the low end. I’ve done it for non-athletes with $300,000 but every penny of the income gets recycled back into the business to keep it running.

To break an act, you need excellent music…not just good music, but great music. It needs to start breaking at the street and club level and be worked in a regional area until radio is ready to embrace it. It then needs to be worked at radio by an experienced independent radio promoter who can take it to the next level. The artists need to get out on the road and stay on the road as long as possible going from town to town and city to city, working their record. The indie label needs great, legitimate distribution that has a hard working sales staff to get the record into stores and onto the internet for legal downloads-- and successfully collect the money after the music sells from the stores and websites. I’m making it all sound easy and effortless but it’s not. It’s hard work, and takes experience, connections, favors, proper funding, relationships, and time.

As I analyze the sports labels that have come before, I have seen a large amount of mistakes. This advice applies to all labels, but especially to sports labels since the goal of MANY people in this industry is to separate wealthy people from their money. This attitude has always surprised me because it is just as much work to make money by selling music as it takes to scam somebody. So why jack someone out of money when you can just do the work and be successful?

Have GREAT Music and Talented, Hard-Working Artists

The biggest mistake I see is in the quality of music. This is also the #1 reason that I turn down consulting work with labels—not just athletes, but everyone. This is a business first and foremost! Treat it as such. When you are running a real business, you choose the best artists with the most commercially viable music you can find. You don’t fund your son, your cousins, your niece, or your neighbors, unless they are worthy of that investment. Artists must have talent, song writing skills, and a work ethic that won’t quit. Do NOT listen to the artist or the people surrounding you for advice when determining if an artist has the right stuff or not. Listen to professionals (DJs, retail store owners, fans, bloggers, etc). If your neighbor can sing circles around Whitney Houston, that might be a good funding choice. A regional rap group that has found a way to press up their own CD and is already selling independently on the web and in their local area might also be a good choice for funding. But your wack ass nephew who can’t rhyme or make songs as well as Jay Z is NOT a great choice for backing, unless your goal is to write off the money you will spend as a loss. Of course, you’ll make your family happy by working with your nephew-- until the project fails.

In terms of artist work ethic, that goes a very long way. Given a choice between a super lazy artist with supreme talent, and one with less talent but a get-up-and-go work ethic, I’ll take the one with work ethic any day. But they can’t be wack! They must have talent if you plan to sell music. On a scale of 1 to 10, the artists need to be a level 8, 9, or 10 in talent, as judged by others outside of your circle. On a work ethic scale, they need to be 9 or 10 as evidenced by their current work level. An artist sitting around waiting to be “discovered” is a bigger risk than an artist who is attending conventions and events, performing at the local talent shows, or even trying to get their music out there to the world via the internet or pressing CDs a few at a time and selling them.

Learn The Game Before Jumping In

The second biggest mistake I see in athletes coming into the music business is the lack of knowledge and research about the business. Just like you didn’t get into sports without learning the game and the other players, you shouldn’t come into the music world cold. Learn how the industry works and who the key players are. That doesn’t mean the key players won’t fuck you out of money, but it does mean that you’ll have an understanding of who is who. Once you know who’s who, you can start infiltrating and asking around about them. If many of the same people say the same things, it’s most likely accurate. If you want to build a successful company, seek guidance from those who’ve done it before. But if they already own their own labels, they may not be the best person to help you start yours. Do NOT be blinded by fame or hype—99% of what you see in this industry is not real.

When you hire someone to run your business for you, choose the best GM (General Manager) that you can find. Find someone who has run other labels successfully (preferably more than one) and who knows what they are doing. Google them, ask for references, and check their references. The best people can put you on the phone with their last 3 or 4 clients so you can ask questions.

This business isn’t a scientific business, meaning that we go on emotions and feelings a lot. If you aren’t a good judge of other people, DO have someone who is good at that help you out. Almost everyone who has complained about losing money was able to mention afterwards something about the person that made them wonder if he or she was shady. If you are thinking it, there’s probably a good reason for it. Do more research on them. And never, never, never hire your boy/cousin/friend/trusted sports advisor to run your label for you. This is a specialized business that requires connections, experience, knowledge that’s specific and hard to find, with favors from industry insiders in order to win.

Keep Your Fucking Mouth Shut

Because of those who’ve come before you and failed, it is NOT to your advantage to broadcast to the world that you are an athlete coming into the music business. The sharks and vultures who want to separate money from the wealthy will hone in on you like a sailor on shore leave looking for a scantily clad hooker. And the true professionals in the industry will immediately assume you’ll fail as all others have, and avoid working with you to avoid a failure on their resume. But here’s the kicker—no one will admit this to you, they will either just give you excuses of being too busy and bow out, or tell you what you want to hear while they take your money and not deliver (as history has shown time and time again). It is best to move around in silence until you’ve started to experience some success with your label and then announce to the world that it’s a label owned by an athlete. In this situation, silence is golden!

There is only one other way to do this where people already know you are a sports guy about to start a label….do it SUPER publicly. Secure a reality show and put a giant spotlight on you and your project. This will scare away the roaches and snakes (people who want to steal from you will want to do so cloaked in darkness, not with cameras rolling on national TV). The downside of this idea is that it will attract to you people who are more driven by fame rather than the true professionals who can help your label succeed. The trick is to find balance. You, as the owner of the label, need to step up in front of the camera and let those behind the scenes do their thing. No one wants to fail live in front of millions of viewers, which will scare away the scammers, but it may also scare away the key professionals you need, as well. Yep, balance is key!

My plan is to set up a label for a sports figure, but only to inform folks on a need to know basis. The distributor and artists will need to know where the funding is coming from, but the fans and consumers won’t need to know until the label is chugging along successfully. Let’s face facts, no one cared who owned Death Row, RocAFella, or Bad Boy until their artists were successful. If a reality show can help add positive benefit to the success of the artists, then we will figure out a way to do so effectively.

Do NOT Be The Artist

I can’t believe I even need to say this. If you are an athlete, do not try to sing or rap. Even if you have incredible talent, you will not be taken seriously. Rappers don’t try to professionally play ball (yeah, I saw Master P try), box, golf, or play tennis for the same credibility reasons. Rap is especially not an arena where gimmicks are accepted. We don’t embrace actors who rap (Drake may be the first to change this thinking), athletes who rap, or game show winners who rap—yes, I’m talking about “America Has Talent” and “American Idol.” These may all be fine for the mainstream masses, but it hasn’t translated into the rap marketplace yet. Thank God.

If You’re Going To Do This, Do It Right

This is a business, and like any business it takes proper funding to build your company. If you think this is an arena where you can come in with a small investment and win big, you are sadly mistaken. If you plan on investing less than $100,000 in a rap artist (the barre is even higher for a singer), save your money. You will absolutely end up dumping more money into your company later to save your initial investment, but you will do so after scaring away the true professionals who could have helped you if your budget was realistic in the beginning. Look at this logically, you will spend at least $50,000 to secure radio regionally (and this is a MINIMUM budget). Most singles take $50,000 to $100,000 to break regionally at radio. That’s just one single. A promo tour costs about $15,000 to $25,000 for a thirty day run. And thirty days on the road is not enough to support the release of an established artist, let alone break a new unknown artist. Add to these costs marketing, promotion, publicity, advertising, video costs, touring, internet promotions, street teams, etc.

If you are smart, you will end up paying a consultant or a great GM $50,000 to $150,000 to guide you in these treacherous shark infested waters, either monthly or in a single lump sum. A great consultant will end up saving you far more than you spend on him or her, but the point is that there is a cost associated with this. The bottom line is that if someone is offering you a great deal to start a label, or says they can do this with a minimal investment on your part, do more research. It is highly unlikely! It is as unlikely as you being able to purchase a brand new Bentley convertible, loaded, for $30,000. It just doesn’t happen….something isn’t right. If you want a Bentley, you will pay for a Bentley. But at least with a label, you’ll get a return on the investment. We hope.

Even if your goal is not to start a label, but to build an artist to the point where a major label will step in and offer you a deal, you still will need more than $100,000 in investment. As you do your research on this industry, you will find that putting out an artist regionally and selling CDs and downloads IS the best way to attract a larger deal from a major that will lead to success. Meanwhile, you still need to start with a realistic investment to properly fund your goals.

The bad business I have seen in this industry is heart breaking. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that there has never been a successful athlete owned label, but it does. I’ve seen athletes higher party promoters to help them start their labels, spend upwards of $100,000 on parties, only to end up doing joint ventures with their artists at a bigger label—do you realize you just paid $100k to give up half of your artist? I’ve seen NBA All-Stars lose millions in promoting family members or themselves as rappers, only to sell less than 5,000 CDs and downloads. Even with a $500,000 budget, that’s a cost per CD of $100 to make a $6 to $8 return. Was it worth it?

This industry isn’t difficult. Selling music is fun and rewarding when you know what you are doing or guided by the right, legitimate people. Not everyone who separates you from your money means to jerk you—some just promise more than they can deliver. But at the end of the day, this is a business and we all need to treat it as such. My goal is to find an athlete who wants to win in this business, and until I find the right one, I’m going to keep searching. I had a meeting last week that was VERY promising. I met with a sports figure who has the same vision and work ethic as me. We’re both driven by success instead of money, and the artists are tight. So we’ll see what happens…. Maybe we’ll even build the label publicly to show you how it’s done!!

2009-09-14T09:54:00.001-07:00

Dear HIPHOP,

It's been a while since we last spoke. I think about you all the time. What you're doing, where you're at, and if you're happy now. You don't need to apologize for your absence from us. You were right to leave. We took advantage of you, and didn't even pay you proper respect. We took it upon ourselves to try and fix you, but the fact was you weren't even broken. Since you have been gone we have had many attempts to imitate you. Some have worked, but most have failed.

Majority of the world is waiting for your return where others are capitalizing on your departure. The new wave of music is consumed with money. They will sing Jimmy Crack Corn in order to make a buck. No morales or integrity in the industry anymore. No more making a good album just a catchy song. No more selling platinum or gold. Only selling ring tones and singles; I really can't remember the last album I bought. Well now BP3, The radio has brain washed us into thinking that they break records…Artists send out endless music for free but It's illegal to download. The Mixtape isn't an occasion it just clogs my inbox. Gone are the days of DJ Clue, DJ Whoo Kid, P-Cutta, DJ Drama, & K-Slay Mixtapes that you couldn't wait to come out. Now you just visit a blog site, and scroll through. Everyone is too scared to hear something new so they just download the same artists, and throw them in their mixes. Same songs on the radio, same songs in the club; everyone is a record breaker, without actually breaking a record. I don't blame them though. We have lost guidance and understanding of what it truly means to be successful. There is a preconceived notion that success is measured by your bank account. Success is different for a lot of people we in music have become shallow. We no longer do it because It's an art. We no longer make music to express…we make music for money, which is weird, because I thought we sold music for money.

We have strayed away from loyalty, instead we turn our backs on our closest friends, we pretend to be someone else, because who we are isn't good enough, and we disassociate where we are from, and forget the people that have gotten us here. We took a once community culture and made it a solo act. We let money, and status change us, and what we stand for. So even though my heart hurts for your return HIPHOP…I understand. You saw it coming long before we did and tried to warn us. We didn't listen…Just know you still have fans waiting for your arrival.......Until we meet again…………………

Yours Truly

The Mic Fiend
visit www.micfiendmusic.com

follow me on www.twitter.com/micfiend

follow www.twitter.com/thaddwilliamssc

2009-08-06T16:58:00.001-07:00

And more Lefsetz from Lefsetz.com....

Maybe we need to let Ticketmaster and Live Nation merge to pave the way for what comes next.

What killed the major labels was radio consolidation. With Clear Channel owning so many stations and populating them with twenty plus minutes of commercials per hour, people started tuning out. Conventional wisdom is Bill Clinton fucked up, he never should have let these mergers take place. But if terrestrial radio hadn't gotten so bad, would Pandora have flourished? In other words, is it fruitless to prop up the past? Does it only delay the coming of the future?

I hate to quote the "Wall Street Journal" editorial page, but today's lead opinion piece, "The Antitrust Anachronism", caught my eye.

You see Peter Paterno is vehemently antitrust. Peter's not a right winger, but he is a free-thinker. Most music business attorneys are not attorneys. Oh, they can make you a deal...but understand the legal underpinnings? Foresee what will happen in a crisis? Peter never leaves out the law. And has been very successful being a maverick. (Yes, there was that stint at Hollywood Records, but unlike all other attorneys who left practice to run labels, Paterno's been able to rebuild his legal business after the fact.) So I pay attention to what Peter has to say. And he's truly gotten this dyed-in-the-wool leftie thinking...is antitrust good for the people?

The merger the WSJ is speaking about is last week's big deal, between Microsoft and Yahoo on search. How long will it take the government to give its stamp of approval? Or withhold it? Months, at least. Does government ever work at the speed of technology? And diving into the details, the author of this piece, L. Gordon Crovitz, references Google's triumph over AltaVista and Excite. I still occasionally use the former, does the latter still exist? Sure, Microsoft dominates the office apps market, but when apps move to the cloud, which is inevitable, will the Redmond company still dominate, will it even be able to charge? Will the apps be free, but service the key?

I don't know. But I do know that Congress and D.C. regulatory bodies know little about tech. And almost nothing about the concert business.

Google doesn't search Twitter. Bing has made an attempt. Real-time searches make spider-crawling results look like last year's baseball scores. Will Google dominate in real-time search?

If Ticketmaster and Live Nation are prevented from merging will the public truly benefit?

Those challenging the merger most vehemently, Seth Hurwitz and Jerry Mickelson, are not newbies, they've been promoting for years. They're fiercely independent, cut in the cloth of their progenitor, Bill Graham, but are they truly where the innovation is coming from? Sure, JAM promotes concerts on baseball fields, and Hurwitz does festivals, but could the revolution be coming from people much younger, with no investment in past relationships?

The concert business is not a paragon of health. Live Nation says 40% of its tickets go unsold. This is the summer of papering. And few superstars are being developed. This system is not working.

And it's not making the public happy. Hell, that's why there's such an uproar. Ticketmaster is more hated than North Korea! Is prevention of this merger going to solve the add-on crisis? Azoff says that he'll lobby for all-in ticketing when the merger takes place, and controlling both acts and promotion, he's got a good shot.

But maybe he'll fail.

Live Nation is burdened with debt, and has razor-thin margins. Ticketmaster is not Apple, rolling in profits with a surging stock price. So maybe the two companies merge and we get a disaster. Isn't that good? Doesn't that pave the way for the future?

Or maybe by merging, whatever the result, new opportunities are created for upstarts. The more the major labels merged, the more opportunities grew in the indie sphere. The majors want to sell millions. The indies can make money on fewer sales, having less overhead. And now you've got no cred if you're on a major, you almost can't make it in the KCRW world unless you're on an indie.

And maybe the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger results in the new Google. Maybe what Irving says is true. That he'll be able to get all the rights in the hands of the artists, that the artists will make all the money, not the labels. Is this a bad thing? Certainly not. Should we stay in a past where you search in AltaVista and rarely get what you want? Unless you know how to use Boolean logic? So only the brilliant can get the results they need, the same way only the rich and connected can get good tickets?

Stopping this merger certainly isn't going to make things better.

Sure, it could make them worse.

But maybe, like with radio consolidation, they've got to get worse to get better.

Don't have a knee-jerk reaction here. Concerts have become an overpriced, once a year event. Maybe they're imploding under their own weight, maybe the public is mad as hell and isn't gonna take it anymore. Maybe the future is small scale shows by virtual unknowns, niches on steroids. Will Live Nation be the king in that world? I wouldn't think so. That would be like Warner telling Wall Street that it's found the key to success, from now on the company's only going to sign acts that sell fewer than one hundred thousand copies!

That would make Warner's stock tank. The Wall Street game is about tonnage. How do we generate more more more from less less less. Major labels aren't signing more acts, but fewer, in a world where anybody can make music and distribute it. Are they really going to rule the future?

Sure, concert promotion involves real estate. But look at the failure of malls. They raged for decades, now few want to shop there and they're stumbling.

The past doesn't go on forever. Unless you use all your power to prevent the future.

The future can be bleak, but only by going through the rough times can you get to the good.

No one's preventing a ticketing company from establishing a better service than Ticketmaster. No one's preventing anybody from being a concert promoter. Sure, Ticketmaster and Live Nation look dominant now. But the Walkman was eclipsed by the iPod. Samsung rules flat screen TVs, not Sony. Wii is the gaming superstar, not PlayStation. Sony's lost its cred. Because it took its eye off the ball. Should we have prevented its failures? No.
Let this merger go through.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204313604574326250751120772.html

2009-08-06T16:56:00.001-07:00

A reprint from Bob Lefsetz at Lefsetz.com:

Now the concert business is imploding.

It's not like promoters, managers, agents and acts couldn't see this coming. They just didn't want to believe it. They're just as ignorant as their major label brethren. It's just that their comeuppance is occurring a decade later.

How long did you think it was going to last? Did you really think people were going to want to overpay to see the Stones, believing this was the last tour, when that whisper campaign began TWO DECADES AGO?

Do you really have to go see Aerosmith? Sure, they outlasted their seventies contemporaries, had hits in the MTV era, even played the VMAs year after year, but you don't even want to hear those lame Geffen hits, you want the Columbia classics, and you've been able to hear them year after year. So, you say NO MAS!

It's not only Aerosmith that's having problems selling tickets. AC/DC is papering stadiums. Paul McCartney is essentially giving tickets away. Springsteen's tour is a joke. Come on Bruce. You're on a closing buildings tour? Just call it what it is, a going out of business tour! You're just so greedy, you want to get the money before it evaporates.

Ticket sales are not in the dumper because of the economy. That's like saying major labels are in trouble because of piracy. Sure, piracy put a dent in the Big Four's bottom line. But what about the fact that people hate the crap they're purveying, and where they're purveying it most people aren't paying attention anymore? Sure, the economy is hurting ticket sales. But that's just the cover-up. The true story is the business has broken very few superstars, and the old ones are on overpriced tours, blaming Ticketmaster while they scalp their own tickets.

You say the labels should have seen Napster coming. That they should have authorized P2P. When is the concert business going to have an all-in ticket price? When is greed going to be put aside for the long term health of not only the promoters, but the acts themselves? Do you really think Live Nation can overpay forever? Look at the company's financials. And no new entity is going to line up to overpay guarantees.

We've got to start over.

But the live business, like the recorded music business, doesn't want to start over. It just wants to raise prices in order to assure growth.

Hate to tell you, but music doesn't drive the culture. Because all the big acts are tied in with corporations, and are fearful of speaking the truth for fear of being Dixie Chicked. Used to be the artists were beholden to no one, which is why the business blew up. Artists lit the way. Now techies lead.

You've got to start small, charge little and build an audience. Which you nurture over time. Trying to break a new superstar overnight is like GM believing it can save itself with a new Malibu (it didn't, in case you weren't paying attention). GM drove itself towards a cliff with no consciousness of the future. People want mileage and longevity. GM provided neither.

Concert attendees want music. Sure, Madonna might be able to survive selling spectacle, but how many successful circuses exist? There's Ringling Brothers and...

And a night at the show must not break the bank. Broadway overcharges because it's seen as a once in a blue moon event. You've got to go to New York City... It's like selling tickets for a U2 show on the moon. You can charge up the yin-yang for that!

As for U2... They don't sell out either anymore. Maybe because they're no longer seen as vital, they're the new Stones. U2 could possibly rehabilitate itself, by releasing a string of singles, one every month. By releasing a live album from the tour in progress. Instead, playing by the old rules they topped every mass media event with their lame "Get On Your Boots" and no one cared.

Just like no one cared about Springsteen's album after the Super Bowl.

Maybe no one cares to the equivalent of a multiplatinum level anymore. Maybe the live business has to give that paradigm up. At least for a decade, until new acts are grown.

We want music that resonates. And we want music. Lady GaGa is outfits. Katy Perry is so second rate she's third rate. The future looks more like the Kings Of Leon. A band that's been around for years that finally breaks through. And doesn't break the bank when it sets ticket prices.

Screw lawn tickets at a discount. That's like listening to music on your neighbor's stereo. How about getting a ticket for a developing artists show when you buy the ticket for a star. We've got to get people sampling, we've got to get people coming to the show on a regular basis. Now we've got a business of extravaganzas. We're like North Korea, trying to blast rockets into the stratosphere, but usually failing. To the point we're a joke.

Last minute concert tickets hot items in recession: http://www.reuters.com/article/musicNews/idUSTRE56T6VZ20090730

2009-07-10T21:11:00.000-07:00

Labels Must Become Managers
By, Bob Lefsetz

The vaunted 360 deal is basically a land grab. Challenged financially, major
labels are forcing acts to fork over interests in ancillary rights, most notably
touring and merchandise, and delivering almost nothing in return. The future
company will have in-house or subcontracted companies that deliver these
services. What was seen as a label today will be a quarterback tomorrow.

This is why Guy Hands is so stupid.

Guy Hands can only see capital. There's an asset, primarily EMI's catalog. How
can he maximize revenue from this, at the same time breaking new acts cheaply.
But no one wants to sign with a label that's cash-poor, with few employees.
Musicians want a full service stop. And that's Irving's play.

Irving wants to turn the business upside down. He wants to put all the power in
the hands of the acts. The press is focusing on ticketing fees. That's like
analyzing the Iraq war based on the food shipped to the troops. It's an
important consideration, but not the essence.

At risk in the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger is not Seth Hurwitz and the other
independent promoters, nor the ignorant ticket-buyer who doesn't realize that
all the best seats are NEVER available, but the labels. If this merger goes
through, the labels will become second-class citizens essentially overnight.
Sure, Irving will do a deal with Interscope or Sony or...whoever ponies up a ton
of bread. And believe me, the labels will pay, they need talent for their
pipelines. Which is why they should shut down and become licensing companies.
Because the path they are on is one of destruction.

In order to compete with Irving, you've got to become Irving, you've got to
become a manager!

Sure, you need marketing and promotion people. But what you need most is
vision, of a team that is in business with the act, that shares in the upside
and is not guaranteed compensation. Right now, the label and the act are
adversaries. If the act hits, the label gets rich and the act becomes famous.
In addition to this fame, you used to be able to make bread on the road. Now
the label wants a piece of that! Not an attractive deal.

But what if the label took a percentage. And had a merch company. As for being
the agent, there is a finicky California law, but there are ways to get around
it. Yes, labels must be reconstituted, as opposed to being fat cats they must
be headed by people like Irving, Cliff Burnstein and the myriad of indie
managers like Bruce Allen and Gary Borman.

That goes for indie labels too. If all you're doing is putting out records,
you've got me scratching my head. If you need to make the band's manager a
partner, so be it. You've got to have all the rights to make this work. In
order to be nimble, in order to make a profit.

Terry McBride had the theories right, he was just too early and sans enough hit
acts. Furthermore, how happy can an act be if its manager is flying around the
world playing the role of star himself?

Rather than being forces of nature, heads of labels/managers must be relatively
faceless. To the average Metallica fan, Cliff Burnstein is a credit on the
album. He's not making pronouncements. Even Irving is not grubbing for
publicity. The act is the star, not the handler!

We've got to move away from the record being the prime driver. This does not
mean music should be free, but sometimes it has to be, to help spread the word.

A new partnership would look like the one Trent Reznor has with Jim Guerinot.
There's no need for a traditional label.

But not every act is a visionary like Trent. So you've got to stock your
company with people who can provide these services, everything from iPhone apps
to exotic online marketing initiatives. You must invest money, managers always
do, but there cannot be a huge advance and the act cannot be screwed.

This is where we are going. Are you smart enough to get on the bus?

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2009-07-10T21:10:00.000-07:00

Pricing
By, Bob Lefsetz

If only tracks had cost a nickel, or a dime. Do you really think everybody
would have jumped through hoops to steal them?

Pretty soon, music's gonna be free. Call that Spotify. As for labels pulling
Spotify licenses, isn't that like the government enacting Prohibition? It would
be one thing if no one had ever gotten drunk, if the effects of alcohol were not
known. But once they were, people needed to get high, damn the law.

So I just don't understand this ten year period. What did the rights holders
prove?

That the public doesn't care about internal bickering? That licenses require
publishers and labels to agree on terms, and they can't?

That ten years of revenue not only went uncollected, but never will be?

That's why the rights holders are fucked. They continue to live in a world they
want to see, not the one that actually exists. Eric Garland proffered at NARM
that the rights holders were not prepared for terabyte transfers offline. I.e.
hard drive swapping. As for three strikes laws, intimidating both ISPs and
traders, oops, there's a question of legality. As the French court said, you
can't mess with someone's basic rights without a full legal proceeding.

When are the rights holders going to get off their high horses and realize
they're in the pit with their customers. That the day of dictation is over.
Or, are they going to be like their brethren in the newspaper business, crying
it's just not fair until the very end. And even Letterman took a cut when he
re-upped with CBS. Network ratings aren't what they used to be, and ad revenues
certainly are not.

Rights holders could have reaped revenue for a decade, and then sold consumers
the same damn tracks all over again. Instead, they fought downloading until it
became streaming. This is like losing out on the revenue of cassettes waiting
for the CD.

End result? Labels will have less power and less income. Why go with the major
label who will restrict you, yet want to take all the revenue?

Today it's not about being married to the past, but fighting for your place in
the present. iPhone has to adapt, even lower prices, to compete with not only
the Palm Pre, but Android and RIM. As for Nokia... Remember when everybody had
one in the U.S? I don't know anybody who's got a Nokia phone today. And
Motorola is going down the tubes. Their RAZR was a one hit wonder. They booked
tons of revenue for a short period of time, now what?

Point is, Apple tells app writers to price their iPhone programs extremely
cheaply, to make them impulse buys. As a result, a billion apps have been
downloaded in a month, and irrelevant of the revenue generated, it's these apps
that have made the iPhone such a dominant platform.

Let me explain this to you... The more people who have your music on their hard
drive, the more people who want to see you live and buy your merch and keep your
career going.

If you're overpriced like the Pre, and no one wants to utilize the declining
Sprint, you're dragged down the drain.

Most people can't figure out how to steal. Napster was easy, even KaZaA, but
BitTorrent is too daunting for them and the RIAA anti-piracy campaign has got
them afraid to steal. Yes, the RIAA campaign worked! It took millions and
millions of people who were consuming mass quantities of music via Napster
completely out of the game. Left them with their money and time to watch TV,
buy DVDs and play video games.

The way you deal with shrinking margins is to cut costs, not to raise prices.
Raising prices when your product can be obtained for free is like charging
$100,000 for a Hummer. Huh?

Utterly ridiculous.

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/snow-leopard-takes-a-page-from-the-app-store-playbook/?emc=eta1

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2009-07-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

From Moby (To Bob Lefsetz)

How's it going?

The album just came out and it would be #1 euro charts if not for michael
jackson re-releases.

So that's good.

But here's something funny: the best selling itunes track is 'shot in the back
of the head'.

Why is that funny?

Because its the track we've been giving away for free for the last 2 months and
that we're still givng away for free.

Odd.

How are you?

Moby

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

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2009-07-10T21:04:00.000-07:00

The TuneCore Deal
By, Bob Lefsetz

So what we've got here is a Universal alliance that allows the music
conglomerate a chance to pick up nascent acts, merging them into their system
with all its advantages. Huh?

That's the problem here. No one knows what acts are successful! We've got to
get that data, we've got to get inside, so we know what's happening. If
ANYTHING is happening everybody with an ear to the ground knows it immediately.
So I don't see the advantage to Universal here. Nor do I see the advantage to
acts. If you've got some success and you want to go with a major label is the
problem that you don't have a preexisting relationship? Are you kidding? Every
single major will take a meeting with anybody who can demonstrate sales success.
Their problem is wading through the wannabes who want to get signed, get a ton
of cash with NO track record. Furthermore, so many of today's acts with a track
record DON'T want a major label deal. Why give up all that action to be told
what to do, giving up the lion's share of the profits along the way?

As for selling CDs in Guitar Center... Wow, how eighties! We sell them at
Whole Foods, we sell them at convenience stores, that's the problem, that's why
revenue sucks, people have nowhere to buy CDs! Absolutely ridiculous. To turn
Tunecore into a backward-looking operation is like using your iPhone to
calculate when your typewriter ribbon will run out. Huh?

If only there were some true innovation here. What if Universal offered
something more than the usual "rich and famous" contract.
What if Universal was in partnership with ALL the bands on Tunecore and offered
unique opportunities?

That's how dumb Universal is. In order to truly enter the twenty first century
and profit they must be a distributor for ALL, skimming a tiny profit on each.
A great musician is usually a lousy businessman. Rather than try to rape the
player, offer him something he can't do himself. Like a Website where not only
do you sell his music, but you sell merch, facilitate contests and giveaways,
where you generate additional revenue beyond recorded music!

That's the opportunity. Stop crying in your beer about iTunes. Give me one
site where I can buy ALL my music-related stuff. That's what Ticketmaster wants
to do with its Live Nation merger. That's the play. Maybe even give away the
music with the sale of a concert ticket, but also sell merch as part of the same
transaction. But what if you're a wannabe band, just starting out, and
Frontline won't manage you and Live Nation won't promote you? Who's your friend
then? Some of these acts will be successful...who's gonna start out on the
ground floor with them and help them? Believe me, Universal is no help. Have
you seen one of their contracts? And now they want a piece of EVERYTHING, not
only recorded music. Blows my mind that they've got no vision of the future
other than saying we're best at selling music the old way! Isn't that what Doug
and Jimmy are doing? We'll get you in front of millions and make you a success,
and now not only will you get screwed on recordings, you'll get screwed on live
appearances...what a deal!

Someone's gonna roll up the new acts. And based on this Tunecore deal, one can
say Universal will not be the one. You're gonna need someone who can see the
future. Who sees that a ton of pennies is worth more than a few dollars. Who
sees the future is about partnership with the acts, with transparent accounting
and fair deals. Michael Jackson called Tommy Mottola the devil and he was
making more money selling records than anybody!

But he wasn't making as much as CBS/Sony.

As long as Universal believes it's entitled to the lion's share of the revenue,
while offering nothing new, nothing innovative, nothing helpful in this new
digital era, the company is laughable.

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2009-07-10T20:57:00.000-07:00

Perez Hilton's Label Deal
By, Bob Lefsetz

Oh stop whining. He earned it. By doing everything you won't.

He used his own money to start a site made in his own vision, compromising not a
whit, to the point where Warner Brothers was attracted to him. Are you really
creating unique music, doing it your way, making money to the point where the
majors come knocking on your door?

It's an American story. Guy stumbles on to business idea, perfects it and rides
the glory all the way to..?

I'm not sure. Perez is famous. He's making money now. But he's under the
illusion that people truly care about him. They don't care about him, they care
about gossip. And once Perez stops slewing the gossip, adding his unique brand
of commentary atop it, almost no one's going to care. Hell, they're going to
care even less than they do about his vaunted Madonna's acting career!

You see Perez Hilton is a twenty first century train-wreck. Who's hopefully
intelligent enough to know his days are numbered. He didn't put 10,000 hours
into perfecting anything, he just stumbled into the spotlight and wants to stay
there. Like that evil doctor on "Big Brother" and that nasty couple who won
"Survivor". Huh? Who?

Exactly the point. In order to last, you've got to have substance. Depth.
Something that appeals to people that they don't think they can do themselves.
Kind of like Google. Everybody wanted a search engine that could deliver the
results they wanted, they just didn't put in the years in math class learning
how to write the algorithms! Perez is far from dumb. But talented?

As for his deal with Warner... Do you know anything about human nature? Do you
really think Perez is going to trash Warner acts now that he's in business with
the company? Do you really think he's not going to hype their acts? Shit, they
should have done the deal earlier! If nothing else, Perez is going to be
sitting in Warner offices, hearing what they're hyping, and he'll be prone to
hype it too. After all, we live in an attention economy. And suddenly, Warner
has Perez Hilton's attention!

As for the deal...

Come on, is that what you really want? A deal with Warner Brothers? Isn't that
like the aforementioned Google selling out to Microsoft? If you establish a
beachhead, you build upon it, expanding your own empire. If you truly believe
in yourself.

Perez thinks he's got an ear for talent. Let's just say he does. That's a
small percentage of the overall pie in an act's success. Does Perez know
anything else about winning in the music business? Hell, supposedly his
partners at Warner do. But how long until he says one thing and Warner says
another? If he's so confident, why doesn't he go into business by himself?
Tying up with Ian Rogers at Topspin as opposed to a major label.

But Topspin's not going to bankroll you, it's just an apparatus to effect your
success, allowing you to do it yourself. The story is not sexy, there's no
gossip column angle. In other words, Perez is completely old school! Yes, for
a guy who claims not to care what people think about him, who thinks he's
playing by his own rules, he's playing by twentieth century rules!

He could use some of that $72,000 a day advertisers pay to be on his site to
break his own bands. And own everything. Emulate another gay hero, David
Geffen. Do you really think if Geffen was starting out today he'd go into
business with Edgar Bronfman, Jr. or Doug Morris? No way. Or, if he did, he'd
want the lion's share of the money. But that's one of the things Geffen does
best, sidle up to you, making you think he's your best friend and then executing
a lucrative deal. Perez is not famous for negotiating. He's just famous!

I wish him no ill will. But there's a date on success like his. There's no
core in what he's selling. It's all flash and no substance. And last I
checked, it's hard to profit in the music world on flash. You can sell a
single, not an album, and no one wants to see you live. In other words, would
you rather be in business with Kings Of Leon, not even ubiquitous enough to be
parodied on Perez's site, or Flo Rida? Flo Rida might have a hit...but in an
era where so many people don't know what's atop the chart and just don't care.

Watch the movie. That's what you're paying for, with your eyeballs, going to
his site. Watch Perez navigate the entertainment industry, creating a new
paradigm of fame, just like John Mayer. But John Mayer took a year off from
high school to study the guitar, he went to Berklee, he paid a great deal of
dues. Perez listened to a lot of records. Welcome to the club! If that's all
that was required, we'd all be rich record executives. But knowing how to
navigate the corridors of business, knowing everything from airplay to
distribution to endorsements to...that's how you gain money and power in the
music business.

Hell, Perez would have been better off going into business with Terry McBride,
who understands the new game yet is lacking a working superstar. Perez could
have done it different.

But he chose not to. He chose to play the same old game.

And you're pissed he stole your opportunity?

I'm laughing at you, not him. At least he built something and tried. You're
just bitching the world wasn't handed to you on a silver platter.

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2009-07-06T10:34:00.000-07:00

The Death Of Traditional Media
By, Bob Lefsetz

The story was broken on TMZ and spread on Twitter. Not only was the straight media caught flat-footed, stating that it was playing by traditional rules, waiting for confirmation, it let TMZ continue to own the story.

In other words, in the future, if a story is breaking, you will not go to nytimes.com. You'll fire up TMZ, or maybe CNN.com, which provided heavily-watched video of the inauguration and the Presidential debates, instead.

When newspapers were the only game in town they could survive by being all things to all people. But that model has evaporated, as quickly as the concept of the ubiquitous pop star. We don't want that which appeals to everybody, we want that which appeals to us!

I get three physical newspapers a day. But like the commentator said on the "Daily Show", it's "aged news" (http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=230076&title=end-times). The "New York Times" was so stupid as to let Jason Jones inside their building, not realizing they'd be ridiculed. These are the people we want reporting our news?

And the old saw that websites just repost the stories of traditional reporters... Well, that was blown out of the water by TMZ. TMZ has its own sources, does its own reporting. If there's a gossip story, that's where I'm going. Even Perez Hilton doesn't realize the change. He's been relegated to commentator status. He's become niche overnight. We want the gossip facts, and for that information we're going to the source, TMZ. If Perez wants to compete he's got to hire reporters, pay off tipsters. Now he's what he's become. A self-promoting tyke. Perez is famous, he's created a mini-industry where he gets on TV and sells books. He's a star. Hopefully, he's happy. Because he's no longer the king of gossip.

So do one thing incredibly well.

Not only did the traditional media miss the Michael Jackson story, it didn't own it. And it's not only the newspapers, but TV. We didn't want others' opinions, we wanted the story! The story wasn't Lou Ferrigno talking about working out, but what drugs truly killed Michael Jackson. Give credit to the AP, they got an exclusive with Michael's nutritionist, about the anesthetic. On TV, we got has-been celebrities talking about their distant memories.

So good riddance to newspapers. Who were too stupid to know that the landscape had changed and too stupid to change with it.

If the "New York Times" is so good, why didn't they put a whole team of professionals on this story, who could have ferreted out the details we wanted to know? Why didn't they put a box on their homepage, linking us to a plethora of stories? The L.A. "Times" tried the latter, but failed, because they had almost no reporting. We're supposed to support you after you fire everybody? No way.

TMZ stayed on the story. Even when scooped by the AP, they didn't ignore the anesthesia story, but reported it.

We got the news we wanted, with deep reporting.

That's what we want now. Incredible depth about what we're interested in.

Don't load your band's website with an entrance page and tons of Flash. That's good for people who go once! But true fans go multiple times and are frustrated by the delay. Make your site fast, with a constant stream of new information displayed, so people will come back and get what they want. This is how labels blew it on the web. They didn't exploit their own sites, and the public went elsewhere. As for labels, are they that different from newspapers? Is there really a need for one company which releases product in a multitude of genres? It made sense in the era of physical distribution, when terrestrial radio was king. But haven't we seen that trying to be all things to all people in the internet era is a failed strategy? If you're going to consolidate acts, have a pop label, or a metal label, get people to be fans of your label the same way those interested in gossip are fans of TMZ.

The Album Is Dead

How come no one is writing this story? That Michael Jackson sold so few albums in the wake of his death?

Huh?

MJ only sold 422,000 albums. But he sold 2.3 million individual tracks!

Now that album figure is physical and digital combined. 225,000 were digital. And there was only so much physical product in the stores. But it turns out that online people only want the single!

Are you getting this? A legendary artist, with at least two classic albums, and most people just want to cherry-pick the singles.

Even more fascinating is that through Wednesday, the "Thriller" video had been streamed more than 8.5 million times online.

In other words, are the labels' woes related to piracy or a changing marketplace?

Turns out for many a view of the "Thriller" video was better than owning the track.

And those who need tracks, who are paying for the privilege, don't want to buy a bundle, but just what they desire.

So, if you're making albums, know that you're making them for the core. Everyman might like a single, but he doesn't want the album. You could say he's been burned by too many filler cuts packaged at too high a price, but I'd say it's got more to do with time. Who's got the time to listen to an hour of music that you're not truly interested in when there are all these other diversions that fascinate you?

If you're a pop act, you're screwed. Because no one thinks your albums are any good. Despite a few exceptions, most people believe the touring rock acts, who've been at it for years, are the ones creating a body of work that is worth owning and investigating. The pop single is an evanescent artifact. It's hard to reap huge financial rewards on evanescent artifacts. In other words, the web might kill the pop star. Video killed the rock star and replaced him with a pop star, the web is bringing the rock star back. Someone who knows how to play, who you bond with based on his music and identity as opposed to his looks and his hired creative posse is positioned well for the future.

And that future will involve multiple revenue streams in order to make your money. Not just recorded music, but live and merch and fan clubs. It's not about ripping people off, but charging them to get closer!

Joe Jackson's Faux Pas

You screw up on video, it lives forever.

Hyping your new business venture at the BET Awards when your son just died is not only in poor taste, your faux pas lives in perpetuity online, tainting you.

The era of hype, of self-promotion, of acts going on the MTV Video Music Awards and telling you to buy their new album, are done. We don't want to see you sell. We want you to create great shit that sells itself. We determine what's worthwhile. If your hype is better than your product, you're screwed.

Kind of like Josh Freese. Brilliant marketing. Has anybody listened to his music, does anybody care?

Start at 3:25 if you don't want to watch the whole clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27665VPRmQ&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo%2Egoogle%2Ecom%2Fvideosearch%3Fclient%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%2Dus%26q%3Djoe%2520jackson%2520bet%2520awards%26oe%3DUTF%2D8%26um%3D1%26ie%3DUTF%2D8%26sa%3DN%26hl%3Den%26tab&feature=player_embedded

Celebrity

Everybody knows who MIchael Jackson was. Today many don't know what the number one record is and don't care. There's a chart, but it's a sideshow. Asking someone to recite the Top Ten is like asking them to name the ten best Little League teams. Parents care about their kids' teams, but it ends there. The machine foisting these concoctions upon the public just doesn't realize that most people don't care. It's not about making them care, eradicating piracy, but what the public cares about! You can't castigate the public, you must entice it! You must earn people's attention. And then respect them in the ongoing relationship. Rip a person off once, and not only will you lose that individual as a customer, you'll lose a whole swath of the public when that person tells everybody he knows online.

We're living in a changed universe. The web enables ubiquity, but how many people will want to buy a Susan Boyle album, even a single, in five years? Two years? One? There's train-wreck value, but not lasting value.

We may never have mass grieving for a pop star again. It's the end of an era.

That's the story here. We're not only mourning Michael Jackson, we're mourning MTV, Top Forty radio, albums and our collective youth. Memories are great, but the old days are not coming back.

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2009-07-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

Music Industry’s Refusal to Breed New Talent, Cripples it
By, Kevin Ross from Radio Facts
July 5, 2009 · Posted in radio facts

Over the last decade the music industry has been on a downward spiral ever since Napster reared its ugly head in 1998. The record labels took a hard hit as millions of participants downloaded and uploaded free music on a peer to peer network set up by of all things… a college student named Shawn Fanning. Shawn was very smart and very dumb. He was a computer programmer and the setup of the system was ingenious but he didn’t set it up where he could make a profit. He was shut down by court order and later sold the brand and logo and even though the company is still in business today, it immediately lost its appeal when users had to now pay for the service. Has the industry learned its lesson since then? Security companies often hire criminals to help them make their systems more secure. Why didn’t the labels hire Shawn? The industry should have seen this coming after all, the industry created mp3 technology a couple of years before Napster came along. Instead of utilizing this kind of talent, the industry spent millions fighting against the technology. A fight that is still going on today but it’s now coupled with slow record sales.

If the record labels have suffered, radio has taken an even harder hit. The lost profits from file sharing all but shut down artist’s promotions for many stations, which were not almost fully owned by corporations on the urban side like Radio One and Clear Channel. Trade magazines died and the frivolous spending came to a screeching halt. Industry parties, conferences and trade ads with labels bragging about their chart position all died simultaneously around 2002.

Radio corporations realized they were not going to be able to incorporate massive incomes from the labels which was what attracted several of them to purchase mass stations in the first place and they had to come up with other ways to garner revenue. Radio One owner Cathy Hughes raised eyebrows in the early 2000s when she went national with a campaign to stop programmers from receiving payola starting with her stations. Her statement was, (paraphrasing) ‘Why should I pay them and they are getting money from other sources to play music on my stations?’ The other corporations didn’t touch that one publicly and Cathy stood alone in the media but the other corporations followed suit. They made stringent rules and watched programmers like hawks to make sure the programmers were not earning revenue that could be directly going to the station. In addition they stripped programmers of creative duties like nurturing new talent by giving them extra responsibilities.

Urban radio, it is said is 75% syndication today and even though the numbers for those shows in several markets are impressive, these syndicated shows are cancerous to the urban radio format. Why? urban radio has always been the leader in creating trends. Networks like MTV have made millions from realizing the trend over the last few decades when other networks refused to utilize research that clearly indicated black kids in urban communities created the trends that white suburban kids adopted. Hip Hop remains the prime example.

Urban radio in the 60s, 70, and even the 80s created trends, radio stars and was a make or break platform for new artists. When corporations took over the urban radio landscape and hired constipated consultants who didn’t know anything about the urban lifestyle and trends (even several of the conservative black consultants) it was the first nail in the coffin of urban radio’s creative edge. Consultants for urban radio are like the worst bacteria in your system causing the most putrid smelling diarrhea you can imagine. Most consultants for urban radio are old and dated and if you asked them who the top rapper is they would say Will Smith. They WAIT for trends instead of creating them, they advised urban radio on which announcers to use and the announcers were almost always what we call in the industry “liner-driven robots” or “Yuckers” which basically means arrogant jocks who enjoy hearing their own voice in their headphones and don’t ever really say much of anything of substance but the call letters of the station and reading public service announcements or station promotions.

These types of announcers come a dime a dozen are are about as exciting as watching water run out of the faucet. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, other trends were created to continue to rape urban radio’s creative edge. Voicetracking, (basically liner-driven robots and yuckers who announce for several stations in different markets) and syndication.

Urban radio syndication is not all bad but it’s certainly not all good. Dominating 75% of urban radio’s landscape is unacceptable and so few of the shows are creative or have hosts under 40. Syndication is killing urban radio because it is a direct hit on the development of local talent and urban radio’s (former) winning, trend-creative edge. Tom Joyner has been on over 10 years. In that time there were literally hundreds of potential urban jocks who could have started a lucrative career and they would have risen through the ranks to be a programmer at the end of that 10 years. Tom is almost 60 and his show is about as funny as a cold cup of coffee. He’s not breaking new music, he’s not creating stars and he’s not breeding new talent. Code Blue on the urban industry… CODE BLUE. In addition his presence, and others like him in the urban radio landscape, has not only stifled the development of new morning show talent but it has also halted the birth of new urban programmers in more than a decade. AT LEAST Tom is a radio veteran….

Comedians who are basically frustrated with Hollywood’s racist practices and their inability to find suitable work have found an ally in urban radio. Corporations like Radio One, Clear Channel and radio consultants TRAINED urban radio announcers to be robots and to not have personalities and then punished them for it by hiring out of work comedians who didn’t have to abide by those rules. There is currently an overdose of syndicated show flooding the urban radio market with more to come.

In the 60s and 70s urban radio announcers were STARS. They were allowed to program their own shows, book their own gigs and they probably made more money THEN then the urban announcers make today 25 to 40 years later. That practice was halted when radio stations realized they were forking over too much potential revenue to announcers who had too much power. So consultants and corporations stripped them of their self esteem by removing all opportunities to shine and making idiotic statements like “The Music is the Star.”

Corporate greed has stifled the growth of the urban industry and while corporations complain about the lack of advertising revenue and the Performance Tax issue they fail to look at what they produce. When the economy is tight, advertisers spend money where it’s most effective. What’s the answer to all that the industry is currently going through? Sometimes the answer is in the question: The industry will start growing… when the industry starts GROWING.

Kevin Ross/Radio Facts

2009-05-15T21:07:00.001-07:00

How The Mighty Fall
By, Bob Lefsetz

MTV and CDs. The combination of these two delivered a plethora of profits.

Name the great acts of the MTV era. Sure, we've got Michael Jackson and U2, but both Mr. Jackson and the band from Ireland predated MTV. Michael Jackson was famous for eons. Ultimately his "Off The Wall" album made him a solo star, but not a superstar. That was dependent on MTV. And all those videos.

During the era of "Off The Wall", MTV didn't even play black music. But once the public saw Michael moonwalk on that Motown TV special, and he danced in both "Billie Jean" and "Thriller" on MTV, suddenly, he owned the best-selling album of all time.

Was "Thriller" that much better than "Off The Wall"? Actually, many consider the latter to be better. But "Off The Wall" sold a fraction of what "Thriller" did, because it lacked TV exposure.

I just upgraded my Mac to 10.5.7. Took an hour, what with repairing permissions, using the combo update and repairing permissions again. While I was waiting, I read magazines. First "Entertainment Weekly", then "BusinessWeek".

One of the business book gurus is Jim Collins. He wrote "Good To Great", which I never read, but have observed in the best-seller listings. Normally, I'd skip over an article of this depth, but not knowing how long it would be until I had my computer back, I decided to read.

Mr. Collins was brought to West Point, where he chaired a discussion amongst military men and civilians. Had America lost its greatness, was it in decline? The attendees were split as to America's future, half optimistic and half pessimistic. But what fascinated Mr. Collins was the observation of the CEO of one of America's most successful companies during a break. This gentleman stated: "I've been thinking about your question in the context of my company all morning. We've had tremendous success in recent years and I worry about that. So what I want to know is: HOW WOULD YOU KNOW?"

This question engendered Mr. Collins' analysis, it formed the basis of his new book, "How The Mighty Fall".

The record companies were quite mighty. But they broke the first rule of Mr. Collins' book. Which he labels Stage 1: "Hubris Born Of Success".

"Stage 1 kicks in when people become arrogant, regarding success virtually as an entitlement, and they lose sight of the true underlying factors that created success in the first place."

Bingo! MTV and CDs.

The record execs actually believed they were geniuses, who'd found the golden formula. From now on, hit acts would all sell ten million copies, there would be untold profits!

Rather than questioning their success ("We might have been just really lucky/were in the right place at the right time..."), they believed they were entitled to it. And ultimately blamed the decline of their fortunes on P2P theft.

Make no mistake, P2P has impacted the major labels. But not as much as the decline of music on MTV, the lessening importance of radio and few good tracks on overpriced CDs.

Stage 2 of Mr. Collins' theory of corporate decline is "Undisciplined Pursuit Of More". Here we have the Tommy Mottola/Clive Davis paradigm. If TV sells CDs, let us find the most telegenic performers and craft their acts for TV consumption! Mr. Mottola ultimately lost his job and Clive was pushed aside. Neither of these consequences would have taken place if the numbers were good. But they were not. Despite massive spending, there were many fewer CD sales.

Stage 3 is "Denial Of Risk and Peril"

That's the beginning of this century. "Those in power start to blame external factors for setbacks rather than accept responsibility". It was the damn Internet, IT RUINED OUR BUSINESS!

But what WAS the label's business? Manufacturing overpriced two-dimensional product for sale on television and Top Forty radio?

Stage 4 is "Grasping For Salvation". "The critical question is: How does leadership respond? By lurching for quick salvation or by getting back to the disciplines that brought about greatness in the first place?"

We've got Universal investing in the Farm Club and MP3.com and now Vevo. Is that their core mission?

We've got Warner investing in concert promotion and online distribution with LaLa.com.

And we've got the whole industry suing its customers.

All to protect a model of overexposure of limited product to reap giant rewards. But MTV moved on from music because it was no longer generating ratings. The industry was pissed that Viacom got rich and the labels did not... But once again, what was each entity's core mission? MTV was made to expose. The labels were made to..?

MAKE!

That's what labels do. Find and nurture talent. That is their core competency. That is their defining MISSION! But that got lost in the shuffle of incredible profits during the eighties and nineties. Labels weren't selling music, they were selling overpriced DISCS!

Stage 5 is "Capitulation To Irrelevance Or Death". That's where the major labels are today. "In some cases the company's leader just sells out; in other cases the institution atrophies into utter insignificance; and in the most extreme cases the enterprise simply dies outright."

How long until a major label is sold for its catalog value? Before one of the Big Four gives up new music production? EMI already has stated it's not going to spend big bucks to sign and promote new talent.

Irving Azoff's Front Line is more powerful than any label today. By far.

What is the future?

Not the past.

"Never give in. Be willing to kill failed business ideas, even shutter big operations you've been in for a long time, but never give up on the idea of building a great company."

It's clear. PERFECTLY CLEAR! A record company needs to be about MUSIC! Everything flows from the tunes. It's all right to take a percentage of 360 degrees of revenue, so long as it's not a land grab, but a reasonable compensation for services rendered.

You can't sign an act based on whether you can get them on television or radio, neither of those deliver enough profits. You've got to sign an act based on whether it's GOOD! The iPod was a product seen as overpriced and unneeded, and then Apple rode it to one success after another. The iPod not only dominated its sphere, which blew up and became dominant, computer music rules, it also delivered sales of Macs and iPhones. In other words, your business won't deliver its future based on the Pussycat Dolls, but something seen as unneeded at first, which is so great its audience bonds to it and delivers revenue over a period of years.

Instant success on MTV ultimately rendered instant irrelevance. The wheel had to be reinvented time and again. Sure, you could break the first album, but you couldn't count on making money on the fourth and fifth, frequently not even on the SECOND (can you say Chumbawamba?) The execs lost sight of what business they were in. Ahmet was concerned with greatness. Mo too. Today's execs are just interested in tonnage. They could be selling ANYTHING! They are not NECESSARY!

That's what you need to survive..."to build an enterprise that makes such a distinctive impact on the world it touches (and does so with such superior performance) that it would leave a gaping hole - a hole that could not be easily filled by any other institution - if it ceased to exist." This describes XL Recordings, but not Interscope or Atlantic or Columbia. Everyone knows the real bands are on indies. That's commercial crap on the majors.

And maybe the majors won't survive. Maybe Doug Morris rides the train to complete irrelevancy, if not bankruptcy. But whoever takes Doug and Universal's place will be focused on finding unique talent and nurturing it. Artist development isn't finding more people to buy the first album, it's a creative arc, over a period of albums, wherein the act grows and more and more people come along for the ride. "Sgt. Pepper" sounded nothing like "Meet The Beatles". The Beatles couldn't have made "Sgt. Pepper" the first time out. There's experimentation, there's a learning curve. It's not just finding the same hack songwriters to write fodder for good-looking people.

Most lasting successes to not happen overnight. Because the public is not ready to consume the product/artist. Hipsters need to glom on, mavens need to spread the word, to ultimately reach Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point". And once you've caught fire, you have to protect the essence. If the act is tied up with corporate endorsements/commercials, how honest can its music be? If the act works with the same producer as everybody else, how unique will the sound be? If you're not allowed to fail, how can you stretch yourself and succeed?

Labels demand singles. Won't release the album until they deem it ready. Which is about commercialism more than artistry. Instead of multiple albums in a short period of time we've got an extended selling period of the same damn collection to the point where the core audience abandons the act. And if you've lost your core, you've lost everything!

We're in the music business. The greatness of the major labels was that they sifted through the available talent and found the gems, and then helped the quality acts grow, both artistically and commercially. That's not the business of the majors today. Today it's about finding cookie-cutter stuff and yelling at the public to buy it, all the while bitching that they're stealing it. This is a recipe for disaster. This is why the recorded music industry is failing.

Maybe recordings do not generate as much revenue in the future as they did in the past. Rather than whine, be the company that MAXIMIZES revenue, that accepts reality, that notes change and adapts to it. That does not mean charging huge upfront fees for anybody who wants to sell or stream music online. Those are your partners, they're the ones who are going to make you money. You control the essence, the music. That's what lasts. No one wants the remnants of Friendster, but they do want the music of yesteryear. Especially those classic rock hits. Bands that tested limits and developed, all at the same time, the ones selling tickets to arena shows today. "Purple Haze" is so good, you want to hear everything Hendrix ever did, it never grows old. You might want to listen to "Ice Ice Baby" as a novelty, but you don't want to hear anything else Vanilla Ice does, and only a small coterie want to see the guy perform live. But the Stones? It's not only "Satisfaction", but "Midnight Rambler", and "Under My Thumb" and "Can't You Hear Me Knocking". "Brown Sugar" was deep into their career, there's a cornucopia of greatness. Which is lacking in quantity and quality today.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_21/b4132026786379.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories

2009-05-14T13:51:00.001-07:00

Performance Royalties, By Bob Lefsetz

"The last time the artists united was when they all said they wanted their MTV."

Andy Gould

Last week, at the close of Musexpo, there was a dinner at the Gordon Ramsay restaurant in the London Hotel. I ended up sitting with Ron Spaulding, head of Fontana distribution, Jason Flom, A&R man for the ages, and Andy Gould, producer of Rob Zombie's movies as well as manager of so many musical acts.

Andy and Jason reminisced about the old days, women and cocaine in New York City hotels. And then Andy started speaking of how the industry had mishandled the future, because it believed it would be the same as the past, that no change would ever take place, that the end would never come.

Andy was of the belief that if the artists had just told their fans not to steal, the problem could have been thwarted. I thought this was hogwash, sometimes the inevitable march of history flattens you, as is happening with the newspaper industry today. What could publishers tell readers? Stop going to our Website, continue to subscribe to the physical paper?

But Andy was on to something. The inability of artists to unite on their own behalf. Like with this performance royalty, how come the artists weren't standing up.

I couldn't agree more!

We live in a land of perception. How come the artists and rights holders always come out on the wrong end of the stick?

Like with this Choruss thing. Sure, the devil is in the details, but I've broken bread with Jim Griffin over this topic, the intent of the rights holders isn't to fuck college students, but to create a legal avenue for music acquisition that generates revenue to purveyors. Suddenly this is a foul goal? Music should be free forever more? There should be no legal alternative to P2P theft?

But if you read the online prognosticators, this is an evil plot by the record companies, to collect names and add heinous college fees. How this story has gotten so twisted, I do not know. But I will say that Choruss has done a bad job of telling its story, of getting the facts of its mission across. Labels have been hated for so long, having sued their customers, consumers no longer give them a pass, they believe if the labels are behind it it's a rip-off, it's faulty, it must be stopped. So a few bloggers take down the entire mission.

Kind of like what's going on with the radio industry.

Those cats got so fat over the past few decades it's unreal. Clear Channel is bitching today because it took the company private and then got caught in a cash crunch. This is the record industry's fault? This is like Wall Street saying we've got to sympathize with bankers, because after enriching themselves with multi-million dollar bonuses their trading houses were bankrupt. Sure, we ended up giving them money, so they would lend, which they haven't done, but at least the public outcry is a roar.

I don't care what excuse radio uses, financials or breaking artists or what, they need to pay a performance royalty. It's a raw matter of fairness.

It's great that songwriters get paid. But last I checked, when a song is broadcast, there's someone SINGING IT! And it's not always the person who wrote it. There's a performance right for satellite radio, Internet radio too. But somehow, being an antiquated industry, terrestrial radio should be immune? Isn't this like letting old plants pollute based on their age? No, we RETROFIT THEM, so they don't foul our air any longer!

Andy now represents the Monkees. They didn't write those hits and record royalties were anemic or nonexistent back in the day. So, having sung "I'm A Believer", one of the great records of all time, Micky Dolenz should continue to go uncompensated? Believe me, it's his breathy delivery that makes the track, and revenue is generated when stations air this sixties classic and those of other uncompensated artists.

This is not breaking new ground. Around the world the performer is compensated for radio airplay. And, most countries have laws preventing performance monies from coming to the U.S. unless there are reciprocal rights! In other words, it's not only money for U.S. radio play, but WORLDWIDE radio play!

But somehow this has been portrayed as record label and artist greed online. While the rights holders hope and pray that elected representatives will save them.

Same deal with the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger. No one's going on record, no one's selling the story to the public, they're just counting on the usual suspects, their lawyers and paid for people in D.C., to get approval.

Now the government has launched an investigation into the Google-Apple relationship, the cross-pollination of their boards. But somehow Ticketmaster/Live Nation is immune, based on some twisted notion of stare decisis? Obama takes on offshore tax havens and the credit card companies but somehow he's going to give Ticketmaster and Live Nation a pass? Irving Azoff and Michael Rapino might know a lot about concert promotion, but they don't know diddly-squat about public perception. Their deals are made behind closed doors, acts plotting to scalp their own tickets as the public nearly riots. Isn't this a recipe for disaster?

And these same wealthy artists are so afraid of pissing off radio that they won't take a stand. Andy Gould said the artists should unite, on their own behalf.

Enough bitching about Ticketmaster Springsteen, how about standing up for a radio performance royalty?

And Don Henley! You can only support Walden Woods?

And Jay-Z. Supposedly you're a great businessman, why are you leaving this money on the table?

Even Pete Wentz. You've got everything covered but this?

When are the artists going to stand up on their own behalf? When are they going to organize and change public perception. Where are the ads, where's the benefit concert, WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?

This is a no-brainer. The only people opposed are those who own the stations, fighting to keep more of the pie. The public would hew to the rights holders' side if the story was explained. But rather than take their case to the public, rights holders would rather put their faith in Mitch Bainwol and his team at the RIAA. Isn't that just like putting the war effort in the hands of Halliburton and Blackwater?

We're living in an age of clarity, and egalitarianism.

We need a performance royalty.

And our best chance of getting it is if those who are in line to reap the rewards stand up and say WE'RE MAD AS HELL AND WE'RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!

2009-05-14T13:48:00.000-07:00

Extremely important letters to Bob Lefsetz, weighing in on the royalty controversy:

Dear Bob
Ellen Shipley here.
Recording Artist in the late 1970's-1984; hit songwriter ("Heaven is Is A Place on Earth".......)
Survivor of the monstrous music business for 30 years. One of Dave Marsh's best friends. Mother of two kids, three dogs.
Married to veteran keyboard player (as they like to describe him) Ralph Schuckett.
It's all there---google away!

I thought I was through. Sold part of my catalogue in 2007 to feel clean.
Not getting paid again.

I like your style. This is what I have to say....If you're interested in this piece of the rotting music business pie, let me know.

It's time to tell the story of the Music Publishers who have ripped off the songwriters for years
and the songwriters who have buried their collective heads in a PC bubble in order to keep getting covers...
The audits, the sell-outs, the fear..... All the dirty little secrets..song writers feeling forced to give their publishing away to Recording Artists
(who think its a privilege for you to have a song on their record --so bow down, eat dirt and give them part of your royalties or you won't get your song recorded);
to managers who think you"re lucky to have them and they should be rewarded beyond the percentage they already take; to heads of publishing companies who want to make as much money as they can whether they actually work for you getting covers on records or they sit round taking the credit anyway even if they did nothing.
The Big Time lawyers who play golf or footsie or whatever with the Big Time Publishers that you need to hire so you can get your own money from the company that somehow doesn't want to give it to you.
although the money is yours and they have no right to keep it. Oh--they always have kids at the same private school---cute.
The endless games you learn to play; the lack of fighting spirit on the part of the song writers;
the lack of a song writing community; the lack of any "power" on the part of the song writers as they are taught to believe they are totally dispensable, replaceable,
("if you don't behave we'll use someone else's song on the record") ---low man on the proverbial music totem pole. Wow! Really??? Go write your own shit
which some artists inevitably do although they can't write. Which reminds me---do you iknow the one about the song writer who has to sit with the
recording artist who can't write at all but hold his/her hand and then give them credit as a writer of the song even though THEY CAN'T WRITE???
Swallow that. Quietly.

Yeah. I know. I'm venting.
I was angry 30 years ago when a DJ at a radio station told me to blow him or he wouldn't play my song on his station; when my Record Company A&R guy
wouldn't stop eating his Chinese food and talk to me about my record even though I flew 3,000 miles for the appointment; when, when when........
I'm going to stop now. I'm not having a pity party. I'm having a "someone tell the fucking truth, already" celebration because it's time...

Let me know if you are interested in this chapter.

I am going to meditate now that someone at one of those BIG PUBLISHING COMPANIES will send me a check.

THanks----

Ellen Shipley

___________________________

Bob,
I'm Andre Pessis. I've had 16 hit songs including songs recorded by Huey Lewis, MR Big, Waylon Jennings, Bonnie Raitt, Tim McGraw, Southern Pacific and others.

I would like to add to Ellen's list.

How about the practice of record companies forcing songwriters to help pay for Indie promoters on singles with the threat that they will never get another cut with that label if they don't?

Or how about the fact that record companies make it a policy to withhold a percentage of songwriter and publisher royalties and won't pay unless audited which forces the songwriter and publisher to pay Harry Fox a percentage in order to Audit?

What about producers who take a big chunk of publishing to play your song for the very artist that they are supposed to find material for?

What about the policy of putting your song on hold and asking you not to play your song for other artists without any payment or guarantee of a cut, yet in the movie industry, writers are given a fee for an option?

Sometimes these holds last so long the song is no longer "current".
Years ago Rod Stewarts people asked my then publisher Bug Music for 100% of the publishing for a songof mine that he wanted to cut. When Bug asked them - How will we make anything?, they were told to take part of the writers share of royalties.

And finally, what about the practice of big companies paying a producer a hefty fee to place a song on the record of an artist whether or not it's the best song for that project.

The music business has always been corrupt but the art itself saves us time and time again and so we adapt by developing Rhino hide in order to get paid for what we are truly in love with and good at. Big sigh.

Andre Pessis

________________________________

Dear Bob,

Ellen is obviously telling it accurately. I can't imagine her comments if she lived through the music business of the 50's and 60's. I'm not being negative but one always has the option of saying no, I know a number of successful people who did, Ray Charles, Bryan Adams, Don Henley, Diane Warren, Kara Dio Guardi, James Taylor, Quincy Jones, Donald Fagen, Walter Becker, Jimmie Buffett, Paul Simon, Randy Newman, and The Dixie Chicks off the top of my head. I also know some good publishers who worked with and for writers, a bunch of artists who were grateful for a good song, a few decent attorneys who cared about their clients and a couple of managers with talent and integrity but mostly she is right.

The business or what's left of it is littered with the trash that greed
always leaves behind. That's the good thing about where we are heading now. The artist can be self sufficient and offer their work directly to the fans.

Maybe between Ellen's 2 kids, 3 dogs and Ralph she has some good music percolating in there that she kept safe because of her horrendous people experiences. I don't blame her a bit if she has it and keeps it safe.

But she has the gift of creating music and no one can take that away
from her whether she shares it or not.

Joel Sill

________________________________

Bob,

Thanks for printing the letter from Ellen.

Regarding publishing, song-writing, producing, real talent, and generosity;
I'm a songwriter. I have some cuts and two big hits. I believe in songs first. Not shredding, blowing, rapping, hyping, hybrid cosmetic/movie/tv/clothing lines. Songs. What will make me hit the rewind button? An amazing song. Still today. A great song is the only thing that matters.

I work with David Lasley, an amazing singer/writer who currently is on tour singing with James Taylor.

David's songs have been hits for Bonnie Raitt, Boz Scaggs, Anita Baker, etc. Endless cuts. Genius writer, sweetheart of a guy. I have learned the most important lesson from him. Hold on to your publishing. Own your content.

David's gave "You Bring Me Joy" to his publishing company as one of the songs to fulfill his agreement of ten songs a year. He felt strong about it. They passed. He runs into Anita Baker, gives her the song personally, she records it. Top ten hit behind Rapture, the big single.

Result?

The publishing company creates an amendment that states from now on, if we pass on a submitted song, WE STILL OWN IT. Basically, this means they can pass on everything you submit, own it, and not pay you. You would actually be in breach if at the end of your year, there were no "hits" submitted, and they wouldn't have to pay you. All because they couldn't admit they were unable to detect a great song.

Years later, a huge diva singer tracks David down and says I want to record "You Bring Me Joy." David is honored and says sure. But first, they want him to sign a new agreement making them co-writers! They say it's a risk for them. He says "It's already been a hit!" And passes.

I remember hearing the diva's album without David's cut and by then it didn't matter about the material. Her package was so established that the songs, (all B and C quality) were unimportant. But what happens is, all her imitators do this very thing and the watering down of songs continues.

Own your content.

He is consistently writing, lives to do it. He is the only writer in LA I have ever met who will refer other writers to a project if he doesn't have a song that fits what is being looked for. NO ONE does this. He was part of a song-writing community that no longer exists. Before the hype. Before producers started saying, "I am getting cowriter share of every song because I'm the producer." Not because they were writers, but because they could.

He actually believes in and supports the art of song-writing. He'll call from the road and say "check out the bridge on Joni's tune from Hissing of Summer Lawns. Use it as a template and write one like that."

Bob, you need to find him and interview him. Ask him how Bonnie came to record "Ain't Gonna Let You Break My Heart Again" from Nick of Time. Amazing story!

Ellen is exactly right. I have sat with a no singing, no writing, talentless hack who looks like Brad Pitt, written the song completely for him and at the end heard him say, "I really loved writing with you!"

Now, I'm a New Yorker, and we don't buy into bull shit. So I responded, " I don't mind making a deal that says we co wrote this, but right now, shake my hand and admit you had nothing to do with writing this. Look me in the eye and admit it, and I'll sign an agreement and keep my mouth shut for life." "Oh man! dawg! Why you gotta be like that? It's all good!"

True!

I wrote a song for a medium sized career artist looking to blowup. This tune was killing. Her husband/manager said, "we have to have cowrite on this." Which was a compliment. They believed in the song. He actually mentioned (or dangled the carrot) the idea of the song being the album title and tour name! So I said fine, as long as I get a percentage of the gross of t-shirts, hats, tour swag etc with "our" song title on it.

They passed. I wonder why.

Artists will never admit to being exhausted from a long tour, with no new song ideas, and having a demanding label that wants a followup album. They will give a "newbie" a chance and will suddenly be a co-writer on a song. If the newbie disagrees? "I'll have to pass on your song. My audience needs to think I am writing." And that's actually better than most artists, who talk to you through their managers and do the good cop - bad cop thing.

New music is supposed to be different from what's on the radio now. Not an imitation. It has all crumbled in and caved on itself out of greed. But it's not only the execs at the labels. The producers. They all want to be Quincy! Who was a musician first and foremost.

Geoff Emerick, Phil Ramone, etc, they all say the same thing. We let the artist do their job. We encourage, but they are the writer/singers. We only document, and get the best performance out of them.

Today producers manipulate. They correct performances. They cut and paste.

It started in the 90's. Labels signed "artists" on age and looks alone, and producers had a much bigger hand in the final outcome. Send the artist to the Beverly Hills Car Wash for a nip and tuck, auto tune their voice, and play all the instruments yourself on a computer. It's the man behind the fucking curtain. And it killed it. For all of us. Lip synching in "concert." Non-singers getting Grammy's for singing! Madonna can't sing but she is adored for "reinventing herself." Uhm, no. She is hiding behind the reinvention. Paula was auto tuned on her albums. Now she judges singers on TV. Barely.

Black Eyed Peas "Where Is The Love" is a great pop song. The new one? A fucking cheerleading nursery rhyme. A safe, lame ass song with no feeling. Why can't they come up with another batch of great songs? Because they're busy being all that ya'all! Ya feel me?

Elton John, Stevie Wonder, they came up with so many great fucking songs in a 7 year span, it boggles the mind. They loved the craft of song-writing. Elton or Stevie could not get signed today. BTW Elton partied and fucked his way through two continents! Bein all that!

At a NARAS event a few years back, Andy Johns spoke about recording Led Zep. At the end of the night he said, "We witnessed the beginning of the end. One of the execs from Atlantic walked into Jimmy Page's studio and tried to hang. Page kicked him out. He yelled "Do I come in to your office and tell you what to do?" Humiliated, the execs mumbled to each other, "we have to find talent that listens to what WE say." "It has long been coming down the pike", said Johns.

Great songs are still the most important part of this. Satellite, internet, independent concerts, house concerts, small venues. Artists, honor your individuality! Joni Mitchell says in order to be considered hip, you have to be willing to be considered being thought of as unhip. Songwriters, believe in yourselves! And hold onto your content!

Name and email withheld.

2009-05-14T13:45:00.001-07:00

Bob Lefsetz opinion....follow him at twitter.com/lefsetz

Rights, distribution and radio. Those are the three cards the major labels and their controlled publishing companies held. And until Napster, those cards always triumphed.

You needed exhibition to sell. And that's where the labels' relationship with radio was so important. Independent labels could not get their songs played. Still cannot get their songs played, despite the Spitzer agreements.

It was not easy to get records in retail establishments. But even if you managed to accomplish this, it was almost impossible to get paid if you didn't have a steady flow of desirable product. That's how retail worked. Stores paid you when they needed new product. If you had no new product to deliver, you didn't get paid. And it's hard to run a business with no cash flow.

And then we get to the rights. This is what tripped up Napster. He who owns the product gets to say how it's sold. You just can't take someone else's wares and give them away for free. You can't take them and sell them either, the rights holders have veto power.

So, innovation has been locked out.

I just read a fascinating story in the "New Yorker". Entitled "The Instigator", subtitled "A crusader's plan to remake failing schools."

Speaking of failing schools. I'm stunned how many times I make an argument and my readers can't comprehend it. They've never been taught the power of analysis. You've got right and wrong, black and white. Subtlety? Wrestling with the facts to your own conclusion? Frequently their teachers couldn't even exercise this. And now, everybody gets a college education, but they take business courses, they've got no understanding of the arts and reason, and our society is poorer for it. But the poor are another matter entirely. They often go to schools where the teachers literally don't teach. And the students end up dropping out, and that ends up as all of our country's problem. Because even if you pull yourself up by the bootstraps and buy a BMW, where are you going to park it? Where can you leave it where some poor citizen doesn't break in and steal the airbag, to sell for cents on the dollar so he can buy drugs, feeding his habit that he employs to cope with the futility of life.

We don't live in India. Not even China. We're not a country rampant with strivers, willing to work long hours to get ahead. Rather, you don't need an education because you're going to be an athlete, or a rapper. Sure, some kids go on to get computer science degrees and change the world...

But they haven't changed the music business. Because of the triumvirate of rights, distribution and radio.

This guy Steve Barr. He's been taking over schools in Los Angeles, one by one with his charter organization Green Dot. High schools. When it's supposedly too late to have an effect. But his Green Dot schools now send eighty percent of their students to college, whereas in L.A. we've got a forty-seven percent dropout rate. Standardized test scores are twenty percent higher than L.A. Unified's. How did this happen?

The power of one.

Steve Barr is fifty, met his wife at Burning Man, married her three weeks later... He's not conciliatory, he threatens to create rival schools if the district doesn't play ball. He's got a deal with the teachers union, but it's not the standardized contract, and he makes all of the teachers in Green Dot schools reapply in the transition. Where is the Steve Barr in the music world? Where is the single individual who's going to change the landscape, for the benefit of listeners?

It's not Irving Azoff. Sure, he wants to deliver rights to the artists via the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger, but now, in light of the Obama administration's recent antitrust pronouncements, I doubt that merger goes through. And even if it does, Irving's so tied up with Doug and Jimmy and the rest of the usual suspects that he can't lead a revolution.

But he did start one. With the Eagles and Wal-Mart. Suddenly, the big acts are no longer signing with the major labels. It's not financially prudent. Which brings us to distribution.

Physical sales are dying. Getting paid online is no problem. The biggest problem is attention! How is anyone going to know you're releasing music, never mind hear it?

Music radio means less than ever before. Not only because of the endless commercials, but the alternatives. Net radio, streaming on demand, iPods...why be subjected to unappealing tight playlists if you have options?

Rights. This goes back to Mr. Azoff. If suddenly the artists control the rights, it's a whole new ball game.

But Irving deals with the old acts, the superstars. How about the wannabes?

The lawyers make those 360 deals because they want to get paid. As do those acts who put down their John Hancocks. Handlers convince them it's the way to go, or they're so desperate for cash, they see no alternative.

But there is an alternative. Especially when 360 deals forfeit so much for so little. Check SoundScan, no one's going diamond, almost no one is going platinum. How much can the label advance?

Still, innovators in the music sphere have been hamstrung by those rights the labels and the publishers still hold. How many stillborn online music services have we had? Playing by the established industry's rules is a license to go out of business. Just ask iMeem (which supposedly has found new financing, but they're losing money streaming music.)

For the past few years, the innovators have thrown up their hands. If you want to be in charge of your own destiny, you create an iPhone app, you don't try to solve the problem of music distribution.

But this is going to change.

New acts see value in giving away their music. And if you control it, you've got the right. How long until there's enough unfettered new music, tunes the creators control as opposed to the fat cats, that someone from the outside can roll up these rights and create a viable alternative to the established game?

It's just a matter of when. The old guard just wants to keep the old system in place. Kind of like the French three strikes law. What kind of garbage is that? Rearguard and unenforceable. Do they really think it's going to increase revenues significantly? No, legal alternatives are necessary. But they're impossible to establish when the old guard has so much power.

But we've established that the old guard is losing its power!

We're not talking artists here, we're talking businessmen. Great artists are almost always shitty businessmen. But great artists recognize great businessmen, which is why when David Geffen started his eponymous label, John Lennon, Donna Summer and Elton John immediately signed to the company, even though Geffen had been out of the business for years. It's why and how Irving controls all those acts today.

But Geffen's essentially retired. And Irving is not about the new wave, but the old.

And what people want most is exhilarating new music. We love our oldies, we want to remember our summer camp girlfriend, but we don't want to be married to her.

So he who controls new music controls the world! What if new music does not align with the usual suspects? What if new music goes with the entrepreneur? Who is more about protecting the artist and his career than making a quick buck?

The old players don't like this, they don't want this. But they're losing their stranglehold. We've got a ripening landscape wherein a revolutionary like Steve Barr can build a position and then cause the old guard to blink. Break a bunch of new acts by delivering the tunes in an innovative way and how long is it until the old guard has to sign up on your terms?

You've got no leverage if you control no rights, if you can't break your act without terrestrial radio and physical distribution. But if you can get the word out online, and control all revenue streams via a storefront you own, the old guard will come to you.

And even if the old guard does not capitulate, it ends up being neutered. Because of its diminishing control of hit music.

I'm doubtful anybody in the established music business can lead the charge. There's too much history, too many alliances with the past. As Malcolm Gladwell says in the same issue of the "New Yorker", David only beats Goliath if he puts in incredible effort and is willing to do what is "socially horrifying". "Socially horrifying" means you challenge the rules, and break them. Or as Gladwell states, "He couldn't fight the establishment, because he WAS the establishment." "The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider." Even Irving Azoff, with his reputation for questionable veracity, can't fuck Jimmy Iovine. He's in business with him! You're not going to break the rules if your wives are friends and you vacation together, play golf every weekend at the private club.

So, it has to be an outsider who leads the charge. Who has to be desirous of putting in the effort. But after Napster and Grokster and KaZaA and the Pirate Bay, no one's been willing to make the effort. But what if you weren't stealing? What if you were setting up a better shop across the street? More in tune with what the public desires? Then, you're on the road to success. But not overnight.

It takes time. You can't play by the old guard's rules if you're trying to break them. You can't be desirous of driving a Lamborghini based on the venture's profits in the first year. Which is why the charge won't be led by people like Tim Westergren, or Michael Robertson, who aren't about music, but money. The lead will be taken by someone who's been to a million shows, who's got multiple hard drives of music, who first and foremost is a music lover! That's how Ahmet made it, that's how all the legends made it. But too many of those in power today have always worked for the man, they've never done it themselves, which is why they are vulnerable.

Never underestimate the power of one. The David who challenges convention with a ton of effort and succeeds. There is no innovation in the mainstream music sphere. It's not wanted. Risk is anathema. But we've just about reached a tipping point. Where someone unknown is going to amass rights and power and change the entire game. Just you watch.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_mcgray

2009-03-31T09:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.brokencool.com/broken_cool/2009/03/lobbyist-for-a-day.html

Interesting post on the practice of lobbying...

2009-03-25T16:34:00.000-07:00

I FOUND THIS INTERESTING:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-mellencamp/on-my-mind-the-state-of-t_b_17
7836.html

John Mellencamp

Musician and Activist
Posted March 22, 2009 | 08:18 PM (EST)

Over the last few years, we have all witnessed the decline of the
music business, highlighted by finger-pointing and blame directed
against record companies, artists, internet file sharing and any other
theories for which a case could be made. We've read and heard about
the "good old days" and how things used to be. People remember when
music existed as an art that motivated social movements. Artists and
their music flourished in back alleys, taverns and barns until, in
some cases, a popular groundswell propelled it far and wide. These
days, that possibility no longer seems to exist. After 35 years as an
artist in the recording business, I feel somehow compelled, not
inspired, to stand up for our fellow artists and tell that side of the
story as I perceive it. Had the industry not been decimated by a lack
of vision caused by corporate bean counters obsessed with the bottom
line, musicians would have been able to stick with creating music
rather than trying to market it as well.

During the late 80s and early 90s the industry underwent a
transformation and restructured, catalyzed by three distinct factors.
Record companies no longer viewed themselves as conduits for music,
but as functions of the manipulations of Wall Street. Companies were
acquired, conglomerated, bought and sold; public stock offerings
ensued, shareholders met. At this very same time, new Nielsen
monitoring systems -- BDS (Broadcast Data Systems) and SoundScan were
employed to document record sales and radio airplay. Prior to 1991,
the Billboard charts were done by manual research; radio stations and
record stores across the country were polled to determine what was on
their playlists and what the big sellers were. Thus, giving Oklahoma
City, for example, an equivalent voice to Chicago's in terms of
potential impact on the music scene. BDS keeps track of gross
impressions through an encoded system that counts the number of plays
or "spins" that a song receives. That number is, thereafter,
multiplied by the number of potential listeners. SoundScan was put in
place at retail centers to track sales by monitoring scanned barcodes
of units crossing the counter. A formula was devised whereby the
charts were based 20% on the SoundScan number and 80% on BDS results.
The system had changed from one that measured popularity to one that
was driven by population.

Record companies soon discovered that because of BDS, they only needed
to concentrate on about 12 radio stations; there was no longer a
business rationale for working secondary markets that were soon
forgotten -- despite the fact that these were the very places where
rock and roll was born and thrived. Why pay attention to Louisville --
worth a comparatively few potential listeners -- when the same one
spin in New York, Los Angeles or Atlanta, etc., was worth so many more
potential listeners? All of a sudden there were #1 records that few of
us had ever heard of. At the time we asked ourselves, "Am I out of
touch?" We didn't realize that this was the start of change that would
grow to kill, if not the whole of the music business, then most
certainly, the record companies.

Reagan's much-vaunted trickle-down theory said that wealth tricked
down to the masses from the elite at the top. Now we've found out that
this is patently untrue -- the current economic collapse reflects this
self-serving folly. The same holds for music. It doesn't trickle down;
it percolates up from the artists, from word of mouth, from the
streets and rises up to the general populace. Constrained by the
workings of SoundScan/BDS, music now came from the top and was rammed
down people's throats.

Early in my career, I wrote and recorded a song called "I Need A
Lover" that was only played on just one radio station in Washington,
DC the first week it came out. Through much work from local radio reps
at the record company, the song ended up on thousands of radio
stations. Sing the chorus of "I Need A Lover." It's not the best song
I ever wrote nor did it achieve more than much more than being a
mid-chart hit, but nevertheless, you can sing that chorus. Now sing
the chorus of even one Mariah Carey song. Nothing against Mariah,
she's a brilliantly gifted vocalist, but the point here is the way
that the songs were built -- mine from the ground up, hers from the
top down.

By 1997, consumers, now long uninvolved, grew passive, radio stations
had to change formats. Creative artistry and the artists, themselves,
were now of secondary importance, taking a back seat to Wall Street as
the record companies were going public. The artists were being sold
out by the record companies and forced to figuratively kiss the asses
of their corporate overlords at the time these record companies went
public. In essence, the artists were no longer the primary concern;
only keeping their stockholders fat and happy and "making the
quarterly numbers" mattered; the music was an afterthought.

Long-tenured employees of these companies were sacrificed in the name
of profitability and the culture of greed was burned into the brains
of even the most serious music lovers. It seemed that paying attention
sales, who had the #1 record from one week to next, and who fell or
rose on the charts was all that validated music.

One of my best friends in life was Timothy White who had been the
editor of Crawdaddy, then Rolling Stone and, finally, Billboard. As a
music critic, he championed singers, songwriters and musicians of all
stripes. He was a music lover, beloved in the industry and by artists.
Timothy, as many of you know, died suddenly, at the age of 50, waiting
for an elevator at Billboard's office in New York. Artists including
Don Henley, Brian Wilson, Sheryl Crow, James Taylor, Jimmy Buffett,
Roger Waters, Sting and me thought so much of him that two sold-out
concerts -- one in Boston and one at Madison Square Garden -- were
produced to raise money to support his widow, Judy, and family that
includes their autistic son. Each of you, who care enough to read
this, should ask yourself if people would be there to celebrate your
life so lovingly as this.

In the early 90s, Tim started talking to me about the new service
called SoundScan. Then the editor of Billboard, he was leery about the
whole idea, realizing its potential to turn the record business upside
down. He was pressured by his boss, publisher Howard Lander, who had
warned that if Billboard didn't buy into SoundScan, its competitor,
Hits, would become the premier music industry trade magazine. I
remember performing at a City of Hope benefit dinner in 1996 where he
and I argued with Howard on the pitfalls of SoundScan and BDS and how
there would be consequences that would not be good for the music
business once it was embraced. It was a very unpleasant evening.

Let's pause here to note that the record business has always been
known for its colorful characters like Colonel Tom Parker, Ahmet
Ertegun, John Hammond, etc. The most important thing is that different
artists were able to express themselves in ways that were uniquely
original, expressing their hopes and disappointments. That kind of
artistic diversity and the embrace of eccentricity made the recording
business great. It also made the record business horrifying in some
ways. Look at what happened at Stax Records where financial finagling
and skullduggery brought a great enterprise to a screeching halt that
ended so many brilliant careers.

During the time of the upheaval wrought by SoundScan, BDS and the
"Wall Streeting" of the industry, country music seized the opportunity
and tacitly claimed the traditional music business. Country has come
to dominate the heartland of America, a landscape abandoned or ignored
by the gatekeepers of rock and pop. Great new country music stars came
from seemingly nowhere to grow to tremendous popularity; think Garth
Brooks.

While all this was going on, technology, just as it always does,
progressed. That which, by all rights, should have had a positive
impact for all of us -- better sound quality, accessibility, and
portability -- is now being blamed for many of the ills that beset the
music business. The captains of the industry it seemed, proved
themselves incapable of having a broader, more long-range view of what
this new technology offered. The music business is very complicated in
itself so it's understandable that these additional elements were not
dealt with coherently in light of the distractions that abound. Not
understanding the possibilities, they ignorantly turned it into a
nightmarish situation. The nightmare is the fact that they simply
didn't know how to make it work for us.

The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to
prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their
record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased. They
used to call this "planned obsolesce" in the car business. Sound
quality was supposed to be one of the big selling points for CDs but,
as we know, it wasn't very good at all. It was just another con, a
get-rich-quick scheme, a monumental hoax perpetrated on the music
consuming public.

These days, some people suggest that it is up to the artist to create
avenues to sell the music of his own creation. In today's environment,
is it realistic to expect someone to be a songwriter, recording
artist, record company and the P.T. Barnum, so to speak, of his own
career? Of course not. I've always found it amusing that a few people
who have never made a record or written a song seem to know so much
more about what an artist should be doing than the artist himself. If
these pundits know so much, I'd suggest that make their own records
and just leave us out of it. Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter, once told
me a story about a reception she was at where Bob Dylan was in
attendance. The business people there were quietly commenting on how
unsociable Dylan seemed to them, not what they imagined an encounter
with Dylan would be like. When that observation about Dylan's behavior
and disposition were mentioned to Nora, the response was very
profound. She said that Bob Dylan was not put on this earth to
participate in cocktail chatter with strangers. Bob Dylan's purpose in
life is to write great songs like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times
They Are A' Changin'." This sort of sums it all up for me. The artist
is here to give the listener the opportunity to dream, a very profound
and special gift even if he's minimally successful. If the artist only
entertains you for three and a half minutes, it's something for which
thanks should be given. Consider how enriched all of our lives are
made by songs from "Like A Rolling Stone," a masterpiece, to "The
Monster Mash," a trifle by comparison.

Now that the carnage in this industry is so deep you can hardly wade
through it, it's open season for criticizing artists, present company
included, for making a misstep or trying to create new opportunities
to reach an audience, i.e., Springsteen releasing an album at Wal-Mart
and, yes, we all know what Wal-Mart is about. The old rules and
constraints that had governed what was once considered a legitimate
artist are no longer valid. When you think about it, you must conclude
that there really is no legitimate business; there is no game left.

Sadly, these days, it's really a matter of "every man for himself." In
terms of possibilities, we are but an echo of what we once were. Of
course, the artist does not want to "sell out to The Man." Left with
no real choice except that business model of greed and the bean
counting mentality that Reagan propagated and the country embraced,
there is only "The Man" to deal with. There is no street for the music
to rise up from. There is no time for the music to develop in a
natural way that we can all embrace when it ripens and matures. That's
why the general public doesn't really care. It's not that the people
don't still love music; of course they do. It's just the way it is
presented to them that ignores their humanity.

If we have any hope for survival of the music that we all love,
compassion must replace name-calling, fairness must replace greed and
we need to come together as a musical community and try to understand
each other's problems. I once suggested to Don Henley, many years ago
after I had left Polygram, that we should form an artist-driven record
label, much like Charlie Chaplin did with the movies when he, more
than 90 years ago, joined forces with Mary Pickford and Douglas
Fairbanks to form United Artists. Don's response was correct. He said
that trying to get artists and business people together to work for
the common good of everyone involved is akin to herding cats. When all
is said and done, unfortunately, it's not really about the music or
the artist. It's about you and your perception of yourself and how you
think things ought to be. And we all know that this very rarely
intersects with what actually is. Just because you think this is how
it should be only makes it just that: what you think; it doesn't make
it true. So let's try to put our best foot forward and remember that
anyone can stand in the back of a dark hall and yell obscenities but
if you want a better world it starts with you and the things you say
and do.

AND THEN, BOB LEFESTZ WEIGHED IN WITH HIS OPINION:

Reading Mellencamp on the music business is like listening to Fred Silverman or another legendary network programmer lamenting the advent of cable, which decimated dominant television shows from the big three. Mellencamp wants us all to bury our heads in the sand and jet back to 1972, or at least 1982, when he became a superstar, and live in a world of darkness, where shady characters playing a Mafia-esque game had a tight grip on music production and distribution.

Hogwash.

To criticize SoundScan is to demonize statistics. It's bad to know how many people pursue an activity, it's bad to quantify behavior. No, the problem is what people do with this information! Which Mellencamp does detail, but his points about record companies and stock prices in the nineties? Didn't most record companies go corporate in the sixties and seventies? Isn't that when Elektra and Atlantic sold out? And weren't MCA and RCA and PolyGram always part of the big bad corporate machine? As for laying off employees, that happened after Napster, not before the year 2000. The record companies were fat in the waning days of the last century.

You've only got to check statistics. Which Mellencamp has not seemed to have done here. Just because he rewrites history in his head, that does not make it true.

And blaming BDS for bad radio is like blaming baseball statistics for bad Yankee teams. The real crisis in radio can be traced to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed radio consolidation, and the homogenization of playlists.

We can argue about history, but what bugs me about Mellencamp's diatribe the most is how he has a problem with the present.

Let's look at the present.

The major label hegemony has been broken. No longer is the musical landscape dominated by fat cat gatekeepers who get to control what America hears. You can write and record your own music, and release it too. Will anybody buy it? Probably not if it's bad, but you no longer have to get permission to play, and that's great!

And you can get paid! Make a deal with TuneCore, and you won't get any lying on your statements. I've never met a musician who's audited a record label and found out he's been overpaid. The label recoups recording costs not based on actual dollars spent, but your record royalty, and then screws you if a profit has been made. This is the system we're trying to prop up? Which was originated by the original shysters, um, legends? We've entered an era of transparency, where data can tell you exactly what has transpired. Tell me an artist has never employed SoundScan to tell the label it was owed money. More information is good for the artists, not bad!

You can choose your own business model! You don't have to be beholden to the major label game of selling physical product! If you want to give away your music online to drive concert attendance, great! Furthermore, at least you've got a chance of being heard, unlike in the days where you had to pay off the radio programmer to play your record. And you can sell your own merchandise, which you can order as needed, just in time, online.

The tools available to the musician are staggering. From the production to the exhibition of music. Yes, you can use eventful.com and tour where people want to see you, and you can make money.

But my major complaint is Mellencamp's misguided concept that musicians have to do it all by their lonesome, that they've got to be "songwriter, recording artist, record company and the P.T. Barnum, so to speak, of his own career". Uh, John... Isn't this the way it's always been, when an act was starting out? The singer may have written the songs, but the drummer was making fliers and calling clubs and... Hell, bands have always done almost everything themselves until they've broken through. The same is true today. The only difference is, once you've gotten traction, you don't have to play by the old man's rules, you can invent your own!

If you've got any traction, a plethora of people will track you down and try to make deals with you. Labels still exist, agents are more powerful than ever and every successful act needs a manager. Doesn't matter whether you've got a record deal or they're playing your track on the radio, that doesn't mean you don't have a handler, who takes care of the business for you. Even nascent bands have managers, who sometimes stay with the acts beyond their breakthroughs.

The act has more power than ever before and this is a problem?

No, the problem for John seems to be that you can't plug into a giant machine that will spit out a million dollar lifestyle. The problem is not record companies or radio, but America in the twenty first century. In today's world, where people use Google to search for exactly what they want, where ads are targeted to their exact desires, do you truly expect everyone to listen to the same damn music?

I too lament the lack of melody on Top Forty radio, but to get pissed about that is like bitching about the quality of play at a minor league ballpark. It's a backwater! Top Forty radio is not dominant because there are so many options! Why listen to radio with umpteen commercials when you've got an iPod, when you've got satellite radio and over 100 stations? If broadcasting were the future, network television ratings would be going up! But they're tanking, to the point where many people believe the network model is dead, with shows being launched on cable outlets, to the point where Starz is now airing original programming!

You've got to pay for Starz, it's not even basic cable, it's a pay channel! But it makes economic sense for the outlet to make shows to satiate its subscribers. Just like a band you've never heard of can be profitable, playing to its audience. This is a bad thing?

Sure, it's hard to know what's good, hard to find the good stuff. But that's only because a filtering system akin to MTV has not emerged online. But be sure, when it does, it won't be limited to forty clips, it might be limited to forty genres! I had to listen to Louis Armstrong on WABC to get to the Beatles, sure I now know "Hello Dolly", but thank god I don't ever have to listen to the music of Mariah Carey that Mellencamp derides, because I've got options!

The old systems have broken down. Because they don't comport with the new reality. Are we at the final destination yet? Not even close. But to lament the loss of the past is to miss the point.

Sure, if you want to make a lot of money overnight, you can sell out to a major corporation. But even they don't have that much money or reach anymore. And playing the Super Bowl didn't make Bruce's new album a hit. No, in today's world, first and foremost you're a musician, not a star. Can you make a living? Sure! But you might struggle mightily along the way and not end up flying in a private jet. Why should musicians be immune, when the financial industry is crumbling, when the veil has been lifted on the shenanigans of corporations?

Sure, the major labels made mistakes. But the artists played into their hands. By compromising, trying to make it. Now these compromises yield limited results. Now you've got to rely on the fundamentals. And that all comes down to the music. That's a bad thing?

As for Mellencamp's statement that "I've always found it amusing that a few people who have never made a record or written a song seem to know so much more about what an artist should be doing than the artist himself. If these pundits know so much, I'd suggest that make their own records and just leave us out of it.", I guess a football coach needs to have played on a Super Bowl team, or an auto titan needs to have won the Indianapolis 500. Isn't this the exact thought process that got the major labels in trouble to begin with? That a nineteen year old college student couldn't possibly come up with a better concept of music distribution than they could?

If you think you've got to be a musician or record producer to know anything about the music business, then I guess you never wanted to be managed by David Geffen or Irving Azoff, neither of whom has twirled a knob in the studio. And Cliff Burnstein, who's steered Metallica to the top, is first and foremost a fan, not an artist.

Hey Mellencamp! You're talented, you've written some great songs, but you're not entitled to live your life and guide your career the same way you did twenty years ago. There's no longer guaranteed employment at the corporation and you have to go through career changes, just like the rest of the American population. Why should you be different, just because you're a musician?

Create a great track. If it's truly good, it will reach its audience. But you won't sell ten million albums, no one can! And you probably won't play stadiums, maybe not even arenas. Because so many of those Mariah Carey fans hate your music, and don't want to see you!

And that's a good thing. As Devo sang, "freedom of choice".

The musicians now control their own destinies. The listeners have more music at their fingertips than ever before. It's a brave new world. And it's good. As your buddy Don Henley sang, get over it!

2009-03-16T12:43:00.001-07:00

Why can’t I get on?
By, Mic Fiend from Mic Fiend Promotions

I know that’s the question all you artists are asking yourself right now. Why is he getting all this attention, my music is better? Well for some of you that maybe the case, your music probably is better. I know about 1,000 artists right now that submit music to me on a regular, that have way better songs then Soulja boy, or Stanky leg. The difference is people in positions to give extra exposure don’t know about you. They don’t know you are out there, and if they do know you are out there. They probably only heard a couple songs that you blasted out. Did you follow up with fliers, did you reach out to all the djs you could personally. Are you trying to get on shows? Bottom line; are you being everywhere all the time. Are you staying up all night pressing up cds to give out? Are you targeting all areas of the market? Are you contacting fans, industry tastemakers; and other hating artists? That won’t listen to your music anyway, until you gain enough exposure for them to want to collab with you.

So what do you do? First of all believe in your music, I mean really believe in your music. Second keep in mind that no one is going to give you a chance until your buzz is up. That is the universal saying. “The record is hot, but we can’t do anything until your buzz is up. “ Third be everywhere, call everyone, and force your music down people’s throat. They can’t just get your music from your e-blast. Have other people blast it. Have different types of flyers. Be at every event that is going on. So what if you give the same person a cd every week. I’ll give you an insight to this industry and Djs. Djs love good music, but what they love more than that is hard work and grind. You ever wonder why certain djs play artists whose music may not be as good as others. That’s because they respect the grind of that artist.

They respect the fact that they are following up a spin of the record with promotional items, or that they come out to the club and show support, or that they are constantly doing something. Anything, There are millions of people out here trying to get rich, trying to get seen. Right now you are a needle in a hay stack. There are artists right now making great music, and can’t get love from anyone. Artists right now with all the connects in the world, and crazy grind, but less talent. Those artists are taking your place in the industry. Those artists will be the ones you read about. They are the reason you sit mad when you hear about someone getting more pub then you. I know it seems everyone you contact wants some type of money for something. That’s when you gotta do things yourself. Only invest in things that you can’t do yourself, and when you do pay someone for something make sure you are supporting it yourself, and brining more attention to it. Everyone has their circle of friends; it’s hard to gain new friends in the industry no one wants to let you in, until you’re already in. Hope you understand that. Surround yourself with people who really want to help, but in order for people to really want to help, you have to make them believe. You have to work harder than anyone in the world or at least give that perception.

2009-03-02T19:33:00.001-08:00

More Bob Lefsetz ranting:

I was going to write about Saul Hansell's article in the "New York Times" about the sale of "iPhone: The Missing Manual" at the App Store. Mr. Hansell focused on the fact that people paid for it, but more interesting to me was that not only was this the number one computer book this year, the number one format is as an app for the iPhone. All in a week that Prince announces a triple album set available from Target. Unless he's going to write a hit song and play in each and every store in the chain, this is a bad deal. We've got enough Prince music. We want two CDs and a third of a protege? I don't know about you, but I've got a life. And Prince hasn't put out a good album in this century. He keeps making more and more irrelevant music, to the point I don't even bother checking it out. He's lost me. If only he'd cut one good track. And then another. Sure, I can understand a need to express yourself, but not at the expense of your audience. Prince gets a check, we ignore him. Next!

You probably think I'm making a point about CDs. How they're history. But that is not the analogy that struck me reading Saul Hansell's article. The printed edition of "iPhone: The Missing Manual" costs $24.99. The App Store version costs $4.99. And when the publisher lifted the cost to $9.99, sales dropped 75%! So they lowered it back down.

If I hear one more asshole singer, songwriter or record company executive tell me about the value of music, I'm going to puke. A record is worth a billion dollars if listening to it keeps you from committing suicide. It's invaluable if you propose to your spouse when it's playing in the background. But that doesn't mean it should cost a buck, that when you tote up the cost of ten tracks you reach the price of a CD. Music needs to be much cheaper. Actually, it's free. It's just that the rights holders won't admit it. Or believe by suing the Pirate Bay as opposed to embracing new economic models we can all jet back to the nineties, when the labels were fat and happy.

Which brings me to why I'm writing this missive. It's got nothing to do with the App Store, but an article about network television in Saturday's "New York Times". In the 1978-9 season, "All In The Family" had a 30.5 rating, meaning almost a third of the homes with TV watched it. In 2007-8, "Desperate Housewives" had a 10.9!! Was "All In The Family" that much better? Or are there just that many alternatives these days?

Let's speak music business numbers. Back when the music business was fat and happy, in 1998-9, "E.R." had a 17.8 rating. So, in ten years, a popular network show lost almost HALF of its viewers. So, if you think that the Boss or U2 or any superstar of yore is selling so poorly because of piracy, you just haven't thought enough about the equation. There are only 24 hours in a day, music is fighting against not only television, but video games and the Internet too. Furthermore, every record is fighting against every other record in history. You can only play one record at one time. Do you want to spin the newly-hyped crap or an old classic? If you do create a new classic, how hard is it to get the word out?

In other words, we're seeing the death of the superstar. Maybe one or two could emerge, kind of like "American Idol", but the ubiquitous star, known by everybody, is history. In other words, shoot lower and try to make your profits in more ways than selling records.

No diamond albums, no stadium shows. Probably no arena shows either. So to hear indie promoters rail against Live Nation and Ticketmaster merging is missing the point. The labels have bitten the bullet, become marginalized, unable to cope in this new world. And historically, the labels have built demand for live performance. Who is building that demand today? And how great is it anyway?

We've got a clean slate. Don't try to reach everybody, because everybody isn't interested. Don't care if the A&R man doesn't hear a single, just worry if you've got an audience that wants to hear your music. Don't focus on your SoundScan number, but your bottom line. How many t-shirts did you sell. How many deluxe packages. You've got to get people into the gig so you can sell them other shit. It's no different from a supermarket putting cheap items by the cash register. That's where you are, that's where you check out!

So the deafening roar of complaints by the oldsters should be completely ignored. The glory days are never coming back, certainly not in the old way. The major labels are marginalizing themselves, by clinging to the model of distributing hit product, when hit product is almost an oxymoron. Unless you sell the ones and twos, unless you're in the marginal world, you're screwed. It's kind of like Google. Imagine if they only provided a few searchable sites, and were looking for people to pay ten bucks for a direct hit. That's the model of the music business. Whereas Google serves everybody, exactly what they want, and makes its money on servicing a zillion niches. Everybody doesn't click on the same ad, you just click on what you want to.

Will someone roll up the acts to his and their advantage? That's Irving Azoff's play. That's what the merger is about. Is it the only way out? Of course not. But the alternative starts at the grass roots. With bands that generate followings. And finding a way to monetize those followings. Irving's a sexagenarian. The twentysomethings will inherit this business. But so many would rather work in Silicon Valley, the odds of success, the number of zeros on the paycheck, are so much higher...

I don't want you to believe in your record. I want other people to. And they come to music not by being hyped, not by being marketed to, but by word of mouth. It's a whole new paradigm. Radio broadcasting is a dying medium, just like network TV. Oh, there's still a business there, but it's not the future.

The handwriting is on the wall. Don't be dazzled by what's on TMZ, most of those people don't make any money. Don't look for an advance. Just look to make music so good that when someone hears it, they need to tell others about it.

How many people are going to tell their friends about Prince's new album? None. No one has hipped me to a new Prince track in fifteen years. The release of his album is a dead end. He's abused our trust. When you e-mail me an unsolicited track you abuse my trust. When you add me to your mailing list without asking first, you abuse my trust. When you focus on marketing as opposed to music, you've got your head up your ass.

"Why Are iPhone Users Willing to Pay for Content?": http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/why-are-iphone-users-willing-to-pay-for-content/

"Broadcast TV Faces Struggle To Stay Viable: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/business/media/28network.html?ref=todayspaper

"Prince To Release Latest Album At Target": http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE52206920090303

2009-02-12T16:25:00.000-08:00

Lil Wayne came out 35 weeks ago and is at 3 million CDs sold

T.I. came out 19 weeks ago and is at 1.6 million CDs sold

Kanye West came out 11 weeks ago and is at 1.3 million CDs sold

Plies came out 8 weeks ago and is at 255,299 CDs sold

Ludacris came out 11 weeks ago and is at 542,441 CDs sold

Notorious Soundtrack came out 4 weeks ago and is at 98,202 CDs sold

Young Jeezy came out 23 weeks ago and is at 765,503 CDs sold

Souljah Boy came out 8 weeks ago and is at 125,892 CDs sold

Game came out 24 weeks ago and is at 670,535 CDs sold

Common came out 9 weeks ago and is at 200,234 CDs sold

Scarface came out 10 weeks ago and is at 104,841 CDs sold

E-40 came out 10 weeks ago and is at 83,557 CDs sold

DJ Drama came out 8 weeks ago and is at 41,545 CDs sold

I was looking at the February 8th SoundScan--more analyzing than looking, and in the Top 200 album sales for the week, there are only 13 rap releases that even made the weekly sales chart. Thirteen. Am I alone in remembering when the first 13 releases listed on the Top 200 were all rap CDs?

If you look at the rap artists who’ve sold the most CDs, they are the ones whose teams and labels crossed them over into the pop realm: TI, Lil Wayne, and Kanye. They are also the artists who stay in front of their fans.

I recall when Ludacris, Souljah Boy, Jeezy, and Plies were considered more mainstream than not. What happened on their most recent releases?

Souljah Boy proved to be more of a gimmick than talent, as the fans tried to tell us (we didn’t listen).

Common, E-40, and Scarface have to be in their late thirties or older, so the average rap fan (14-21) is looking at them at around the same age as their parents…

The rap purists cry foul at the content of today’s rap music…yet it doesn’t seem they supported Common with only 200k sold. If they want “more intelligent” rap as they cry on blogs and in coffee shops, why didn’t they vote for the intelligent rapper with their dollars? If Common went platinum, there would be a slew of intelligent rappers coming out next year, I promise you that.

We better make a move soon, or there will be no more rap sales to analyze.

2009-02-12T15:46:00.001-08:00

Dancing With The Devil
By, Wendy Day from Rap Coalition

Mark Curry is my new poster child for Rap Coalition, but he doesn’t know it yet. Not because he has written a tell-all book slamming Puffy’s business practices, not because he takes responsibility for his own bad decisions, but because he tells his firsthand experience about the shadier practices in the entertainment industry that prevail in almost every company. And he tells it loudly, with examples, and from his experiences in the music industry being signed to Bad Boy for more than a decade.

This is a similar story that I have heard over and over and over in my 17 years in this industry. The story hasn’t changed much in 40 years since artists were given fancy new Cadillacs in exchange for their music, nor does my reaction to this and similar stories change (it always depresses me; I am not desensitized to it). When I sit down with most artists, it’s more of “to what degree did you get jerked?” than “did you get jerked?” Obviously they got jerked. Most do. Sadly, it’s the price many creative people are willing to pay for their chance at “getting on” or some primal need for money and fame. Every time I hear this similar story, my first question is always “why did you stay so long?” The answer always floors me: I believed him. We were family. I knew he needed me so he’d have to do right eventually. He said if I would just wait a little longer, all of my dreams would come true. It’s a building process. My turn would come. All I wanted to do was buy my Mom a house, and he was on his fourth Bentley so I knew he’d break bread eventually. Blah, blah, blah.

Mark Curry was signed to Bad Boy Records through a production company that was bought out almost immediately. It is a way for people behind the scenes in the industry to get a quick pay check. Someone finds an artist and brings the artist to the record label (in this case, a well known street dude). The label recognizes the value of that artist and wants that artist in their camp. The label “tests out” the artist’s talent by giving him, or her, an assignment. The assignment is usually to write a song or make a track for another already signed artist who is struggling for a hit record to “help” the family, or company, or team. In Mark Curry’s case, it was P Diddy himself looking to make a hit single for a soundtrack to a Godzilla movie. Mark delivered.

Once the label is convinced the artist has value, it comes time to pull out the paperwork. In Mark’s case, he says Puff gave him a contract to sign with the middleman. When Mark asked why he couldn’t sign directly to Bad Boy instead, he was told because the middleman was Puff’s friend (as an ironic twist, this same friend is the person Puff testified in front of the Grand Jury that he didn’t know his real name—the same crime that sent Lil Kim to prison in a different case) and actually found Mark and brought him to Puff. After Mark balked at the language in the contract that he was unable to understand, he says Puff was kind enough to send him to an attorney (after Puff allegedly asked that famous question, “Don’t you trust me? I thought we were cool?!”). That attorney, Kenny Meiselas, turned out to be one of Puff’s entertainment attorneys at a strong and credible law firm. Conflict of interest? Not exactly, Mark wasn’t exactly signing to Bad Boy. Mark was advised to sign the deal by counsel, so he did. Puffy then bought the contract from the middleman, thereby putting a wad of money--recoupable money from the artist, in the middleman’s pocket and landing Mark Curry on Bad Boy.

That contract, entitled Mark to a $75,000 advance: $25k was a signing bonus (recoupable), $25k was for the rights to half of his publishing (recoupable), and the remaining $25k would be given to him upon release of his debut album (also recoupable)--an album that never came. Since the middleman had taken half of Mark’s publishing off the top, he received that $25k, so all Mark received for signing to Bad Boy was $25,000. He knew it didn’t feel right, but he focused on the future and what other ways there were to make money in this business—touring, endorsement deals, etc. I wonder why we didn’t see this scenario on any episode of The Making Of The Band. It’s all too commonplace in this industry.

As Mark was consistently promised the opportunity to work on his own album, he was side tracked with tours, writing songs for Puff, and teaching Puff how to deliver his rhymes. Basically, he was put on hold to build the artistic career of his boss. Mark went along with that because he saw everyone else in the camp doing so, and figured it was the way things worked. He watched Puff enact sales pitches on the “Bad Boy family” of other artists and producers to get them to do whatever he needed done. He watched Puff get into numerous legal scrapes to emerge victorious. He watched Puff use Biggie’s death to increase his own popularity, fame, income, and fan base. Mark watched one disgruntled artist after another leave Bad Boy. He babysat other artists under the guise of “developing” them at the label. And Mark watched promise after promise fade into dust, even when he was most desperate.

When Mark Curry reflected on why he spent ten years at Bad Boy without ever releasing his own record, he surmised that he had more value to Puff building Puff’s career. He also felt that it was because he was trusting enough to believe his mentor and label president when he spun him by telling him the timing wasn’t right, or that he was busy with the planning of his next party or his clothing company or his world tour…or the most common excuse: we’re waiting for your budget to be approved (a lie that a label accountant finally exposed upon telling Mark that Puff never had submitted a budget for Mark’s project).

In “Dancing With The Devil,” Mark pointed out numerous ways that Bad Boy and Puff, directly, was able to profit from artists. In most Bad Boy contracts there is a clause stating that the artist has to pay Puff for appearances on a record. Since Puff is creating the album, he controls those appearances on all singles and album cuts. At $40,000 per appearance (even if just whispering “Bad Boy! Bad Boy!” in the background), he can make a fortune on appearances on his own artists’ records. Bad Boy artists often record at Daddy’s House, a studio owned by the mogul. If an artist receives a recording budget of $250,000, that fund can easily be spent with Hitmen producers (you guessed it, producers who are signed to the mogul with a stake in the publishing rights) at Daddy’s House studio (rumored to be the current going rate of studio time at $125 an hour in the late 90s). Not only does the production and recording fund go to Bad Boy owned entities, but it is all recoupable from the artists’ budgets—a double win for any company willing to do business this way.

Mark also pointed out that when Mary J Blige was recording at Daddy’s House, for example, she would be billed for 8 hours in the studio, but may have only used 6 hours. Those additional 2 hours would be paid from her MCA recording budget, but would be used by Bad Boy Recording artists to record-- artists with no ties to MCA. Mark also set the record straight about Kirk Burrowes, a former Bad Boy President, who was allegedly threatened into signing away his 25% ownership in Bad Boy, but was strung along long enough (apparently with the promise of money) to miss the statute of limitations deadline to sue for what he claimed was rightfully his. Once he filed suit, he was falsely painted in the media as a disloyal, money-grubbing liar out to gold dig a mogul (for the record, Puff spent more on jewelry for his women than he paid in annual salary for Kirk Burrowes to run the label during the early years of Bad Boy--his argument being that Kirk was a 25% owner of the label and would make money in the long term). The “relationship” that Puff had with his artists and staff seems to have been a powerful hold which kept them around long enough that they couldn’t do anything about it, and close enough that they didn’t want to….until they caught on and it was too late. In which case, either violence allegedly ensued, or images and careers were destroyed.

There are two things I didn’t like about “Dancing With The Devil,” although it’s an amazingly honest, insightful, and brave book. The way Mark listed names of street dudes who were in Puffy’s circle was a bit excessive. Now, I’m not saying he did not tell the truth, but I don’t feel he needed to discuss by name who allegedly shot Tupac in Quad, or who allegedly killed Puff’s bodyguard Wolf, or who allegedly shot Jake that fateful night that is credited with kicking off the East Coast/West Coast beef. Secondly, while there are more artists than not who’ve signed to Bad Boy and eventually cried foul, shady industry tactics are not the sole dominion of Bad Boy. Shady and fraudulent practices exist at many other companies throughout the music business. It doesn’t seem to be a Black or white problem specifically, but a green (money) problem. I realize Mark is speaking from his personal experience, and it is his autobiography, so he is only speaking about what he knows. Bad Boy is NOT the only company, by any means, in this industry that has been accused by its artists of shady business practices. Although it IS one of the most successful, and has been accepted without due diligence by journalists, the media, fans, executives, the industry, star fuckers, hoes, and party goers alike.

All in all, “Dancing With The Devil” was a riveting read, and a must for anyone who takes a career in the music business seriously. Once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down til I was finished the book. It is available at www.MarkCurryBooks.com.

“I told you that we won’t stop…” –Sean “Puffy" Combs

2008-12-31T20:44:00.000-08:00

Album sales plunge, digital downloads up
from The Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. December 31, 2008, 08:13 pm ET · Music sales have continued to slump in 2008 as the increased number of downloads of digital tracks failed to make up for a plunge in the sale of compact discs.

Year-end sales figures released Wednesday by The Nielsen Co. show total album sales, including album equivalents made up of single digital tracks, fell to 428.4 million units, down 8.5 percent from 500.5 million in 2007.

Physical album sales fell 20 percent to 362.6 million from 450.5 million, while digital album sales rose 32 percent to a record 65.8 million units.

Digital track sales, such as those conducted in Apple Inc.'s iTunes Music Store, were up 27 percent from last year, breaking the 1 billion mark for the first time at 1.07 billion.

The report continues a troubling trend for the recording industry, which has a harder time maintaining profits when consumers buy single songs instead of albums. The number of transactions rose 10.5 percent to 1.5 billion, although the figure treats single track and whole album purchases the same.

"You can see the overall unit sales as a positive, but their model is really built on album sales and that just continues to decline," said Silvio Pietroluongo, director of charts for Billboard magazine.

"Music consumption has never been at a higher clip, it's just a matter of trying to turn it into revenue," he added.

Some record labels are making progress. Craig Kallman, chief executive of Warner Music Group Corp.'s Atlantic Records, whose artists include Kid Rock and T.I., said his label passed a milestone in the year to September by having its digital revenue exceed that from physical CD sales.

The label, the top-selling in the U.S. in 2008, has had to become more careful in choosing which artists to promote and more patient in waiting for their songs to break out, he said.

"You have to really be right about your hits. If you're going to invest that amount of time in them and not run as many records, you have to be way more right today than wrong," Kallman said.

Nielsen SoundScan said album sales fell in every genre. Classical music saw the biggest drop at 26 percent, followed by country at 24 percent and Latin at 21.1 percent.

Taylor Swift was the year's best-selling artist with more than 4 million albums sold, followed by AC/DC, Lil Wayne and Coldplay. Sugarland finished No. 8.

Swift had two albums on Nielsen's Top 10 sales list: her self-titled debut at No. 6 and her sophomore album "Fearless" at No. 3.

"Taylor Swift is a great artist development story that started as organically as you can in the digital age," said Scott Borchetta, president and CEO of her label, Big Machine Records. "It involved online, non-stop radio tours and strategic TV opportunities which led to non-stop touring. But — most importantly — Taylor connected with her fans like no other artist in 2008."

Lil Wayne had the year's top-selling album, "Tha Carter III," with 2.87 million units sold, with Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" (2.14 million) and Swift's "Fearless" (2.11 million) rounding out the top three.

The top selling digital artist was Rihanna with 9.94 million tracks sold, followed by Swift and Kayne West.

Ironically, as digital downloads grew, vinyl album sales also climbed. In 2008, more vinyl albums were purchased (1.88 million) than any other year since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991.

More than two of every three vinyl albums were purchased at an independent music store during the year, the company reported. The top selling vinyl albums were Radiohead's "In Rainbows" (26,000 units), the Beatles' "Abbey Road" (16,500) and Guns 'N Roses' "Chinese Democracy" (13,600).

Nielsen also reported that music sales exceeded 65 million in the final week of 2008, representing the biggest sales week in the history of Nielsen SoundScan. The previous record was Christmas week of 2007 with 58.4 million music purchases.

2008-11-20T15:01:00.001-08:00

ASCAP Distributes Approximately $2.7 Million In ASCAPlus Cash Awards

Url: http://www.ascap.com/ascapplus

Approximately $2.7 million in cash awards for 2008 - 2009 has been made to writer members of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) by the Society's ASCAPlus Awards Panels, it was announced today by ASCAP President & Chairman Marilyn Bergman. The purpose of these special awards, which have been given each year since 1960, is to reward writers whose works have a unique prestige value for which adequate compensation would not otherwise be received, and to compensate those writers whose works are performed substantially in media not surveyed by ASCAP.

Commenting on the awards, Ms. Bergman said, "Since 1960, the unique ASCAPlus Awards program has provided deserving music creators with something meaningful and tangible in the form of recognition and money. I can attest to this personally because at an early stage of my career, I was a Special Awards recipient. As always, we are greatly indebted to each of our hard-working panelists for giving their time and effort to this important endeavor."

The members of the ASCAPlus Awards Panel are: JoAnn Falletta, conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Virginia Symphony Orchestras; Peter Filichia, drama critic for the (Newark) Star-Ledger; Brian Mansfield, country music authority and Nashville correspondent for USA Today; Melinda Newman, well-known music journalist; Pat Prescott, veteran radio personality who currently co-hosts the morning show on KTWV ("The Wave") in Los Angeles; H. Robert Reynolds, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan; and Steve Smith, Classical Music Editor for Time Out New York.

2008-09-21T16:46:00.001-07:00

Can MySpace Save the Major Music Labels?
Record companies are counting on their new deal with MySpace Music to help make up for declining CD sales
by Catherine Holahan

In a small Atlantic Records Group studio in New York, rapper Clifford "T.I." Harris Jr. leans into a silver microphone. "It's the T.I.P. man, the king himself," he says. "Dig this." There's no music on this recording, though, no rhyming lyrics. The Atlanta artist simply talks in his Southern drawl, creating an audio clip that will be posted on his Web site and others across the online universe. The clip and more like it are designed to pull in fans—and generate revenues from advertising on the sites.

Meet the record label, version 2.0. After nearly a decade of plunging music sales, the labels are trying to overhaul their traditional business. Instead of just selling recorded music, they want to use music to sell a range of related extras, from online advertising to mobile phones packed with tunes. The new business model puts the Internet at the heart of the industry in an attempt to transform artist Web sites from promotional vehicles into money-making enterprises.

The biggest bet on this new model is MySpace Music. The joint venture between News Corp.'s (NWS) social networking site and the three largest record labels—Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and Warner Music—is set to launch in the next few days. The partners are expected to unveil the venture officially and name a chief executive during the week of Sept. 15. On the short list for CEO: Owen Van Natta, the former chief operating officer at Facebook, and Andy Schuon, former CEO of Universal Music's International Music Feed. MySpace declined to comment on the CEO search.

"Skin in the Game"
While the labels already work with a number of online retailers, from Amazon.com (AMZN) to Apple's iTunes, this is their most ambitious push yet to develop online advertising and e-commerce revenues. The labels will have equity stakes in the new venture. They'll also get a cut of the revenue from ads on artists' pages, as well as those from music downloads, ring tones, merchandise sales, and concert tickets. "We wanted the music companies to feel like real partners and to have some skin in the game on the upside," says MySpace.com founder Chris DeWolfe.

How much upside is the key issue. The record industry has been hammered in recent years by online piracy and a dearth of mega-hits, with sales sliding steadily since their peak of $14.6 billion in 1999. As CDs sales have dropped, the labels have tried repeatedly to develop digital strategies to make up the difference, and they've all come up short. Last year was the industry's worst yet in terms of revenue losses. The total value of digital and traditional sales dropped 12% in 2007, to $10.4 billion, compared with a 4.4% slide the year before, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Record labels have high hopes that this time will be different. Michael Nash, head of digital strategy at Atlantic's parent, Warner Music Group (WMG), predicts MySpace Music and related moves will help reverse the industry's fortunes. "We will be able to return to overall growth," he says.

Cushioning the Decline
That will be a stretch, though. Even if it's successful, MySpace Music will be too small to make up for plummeting CD sales. The labels are "really dwindling," says Paul Verna, a senior analyst at market research firm eMarketer. Still, the new strategy could help the labels cushion the decline in the years ahead and perhaps begin to rebuild revenues a few years out.

The idea behind MySpace Music is that it can help generate revenue for artists every day, not just around an album's release. The venture gives the labels access to MySpace's global audience of 118 million users and its ad sales team of more than 250 people. It also provides the labels with a prominent venue to pull in audiences and advertisers with new types of nonmusic content, including music news, behind-the-scenes videos, and artist interviews such as the one with T.I.

Major advertisers are signing up. Industry sources say MySpace Music has signed multimillion-dollar ad deals with McDonald's (MCD), Toyota Motor (TM), and other major brands for its launch. Toyota and McDonald's confirmed their participation, although they wouldn't specify the ad dollars involved. Kim McCullough, Toyota's manager of marketing communications, calls the MySpace Music launch an "unprecedented opportunity."

MySpace is designed to do more than bring in ad revenue, though. It also gives the industry a new channel through which to sell songs, ringtones, T-shirts, and tickets. With 5 million artists using the site to promote their bands, MySpace has already become a major destination for discovering new music and upcoming concerts.

Model Venture?
MySpace Music can't save the industry on its own. The whole site takes in about $743 million in advertising revenue now. Make some reasonably optimistic projections about MySpace's prospects, and the record labels could end up with $1 billion in new revenue from the venture by 2012. That helps, but given the current rate of decline in CD sales, the industry could lose an additional $3 billion in yearly CD sales by that time.

Still, MySpace Music may prove to be a model for future ventures on the Net. If the concept works, it could help the labels turn other online hangouts, like the leading social networking site, Facebook, into forums for music sales and related revenues. It could also help demonstrate that the labels will see tangible benefits from new contracts under which they share in advertising, e-commerce, and merchandise sales. "If they do all that, then maybe they can stem the tide of these rapidly falling CD sales and start to see the pie get a little bigger," says Paul Verna, a senior analyst at eMarketer. "But it is definitely a big if."

The labels are experimenting with a host of new efforts beyond MySpace. One recent deal with Nokia (NOK) will let the Finnish mobile-phone maker, through its Comes With Music program, sell phones preloaded with music subscriptions. A separate deal with imeem, a Web site designed to help people discover new music, provides the labels with licensing fees and a slice of advertising revenues. "There is a larger degree of sophistication at the labels and a willingness to embrace more cool stuff," says Dalton Caldwell, imeem's chief executive.

Lack of Innovation
The labels are intent on reinvigorating music sales on the Net. Digital sales growth slowed from 74% in 2006 to 43% last year. Record executives believe that, as Apple (AAPL) has come to dominate online sales through its iTunes store, sales growth has been hurt by a lack of innovation. "I think everyone has a sober understanding that the next three years will be challenging," says Mitch Bainwol. chief executive of the RIAA. "But the long-term prognosis is outstanding."

Not everyone likes the labels' latest approach. Under new contracts, bands are being asked to give labels a cut of revenues from concert tickets and merchandise sales, instead of just from music sales. Jason Debiak, keyboardist with the band New London Fire, thinks that's a bad deal for musicians, unless the labels are going to pay for singing lessons or other development. "It's an offer that should be thrown in the garbage," he says.

Still, the major labels have made a sharp reversal that may improve their prospects. For years they fought Internet companies for fear that their music would be stolen. Now they're racing to capitalize on the new opportunities on the Web. Warner has created a special digital studio to help artists develop unique online content. And Warner artists T.I. and Grammy Award-winning rapper Missy Elliott have album releases timed to coincide with the MySpace Music launch. "The labels were very reticent to embrace change at a time when it could have actually worked to their advantage," says eMarketer's Verna. "Now there's a sense that they have no choice."

With Tom Lowry in New York. Holahan is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.

2008-09-02T19:43:00.000-07:00

HOW TO CREATE A HIT SITCOM
A simple, step-by-step guide to prime time success.

by Chuck Lorre
© April 2004

Start drinking early. I don't mean early in the day. I mean early in life. Eight years old oughta do the trick. Heavy drinking isn't necessary. All you need is enough hooch to get through a Cub Scout meeting without tearing your skin off.

Your ability to make the big bucks as a sitcom writer is directly tied to the sickness of your parents. Stop whining to your therapist and send mom and dad a thank you note for royally fucking you up.

Fail to become a member of any group worth joining. Once again, this is something you need to get an early start on. Whether it be athletics, academics or crime, make sure you don't measure up. Social rejection combined with the hard-wired damage done by your folks creates the insecurity and self-loathing necessary for a writer to "know where the funny is."

Nurture your fear of women. Long for them. Ache for them. But always keep in mind that you don't deserve them. If you should happen to get involved with one, always remember: If she loves you there is something fundamentally wrong with her. You just can't see it yet.

Don't start as a sitcom writer. Find something you love more than life itself and then fail at it. Once the reason God put you here has been revealed to be a cruel hoax, you'll be a better team player. Thoroughly defeated people are more inclined to take those tough network notes.

Don't be afraid to experiment with soul-crushing poverty. You'll find yourself ahead of the pack when it comes time to write that warm, family sitcom because you know what it means to enjoy a big bowl of ketchup soup.

Don't cheat yourself out of being a colitis patient in a rundown teaching hospital. Dealing with psychotic sitcom divas is a snap for someone who's had an anesthetic-free colonoscopy in front of twenty giggling med students.

Join a religious cult. Any cult will do. Just make sure they promise you the one thing you desperately need: power over people, places and things. When, after many years and thousands of dollars you still don't have power over your ulcerative colon, become a bitter door-to-door greeting card salesman and patiently await the day when you can sell your cult accessories on eBay.

Marry a woman who is beautiful, kind and loving and encourages you to drink.

Have a kid when you're poor and uninsured. Convincing an OB-GYN and an anesthesiologist to perform a caesarean section on credit is invaluable training for really tense pitch meetings. In fact this is such a helpful exercise, have another kid so you can do it twice.

Walk in the first door that opens. It doesn't matter if it's the door you want. Someone wants you to write shitty Saturday morning cartoons in order to sell a bunch of shitty toys? What do you care? You left your last shred of personal dignity in the teaching hospital. And your kids still don't have medical insurance. Write the damn thing and see if the check bounces. If it doesn't, write as many as you can before they find out you don't have a fucking clue what you're doing.

Ignore your ignorance and make yourself irreplaceable. Work harder than everyone else. If it helps you get through the night, con yourself into thinking that your My Little Pony script will actually impart life lessons to some snot-nosed, lead paint licking kid somewhere.

Eat staggering amounts of condescending shit from condescending assholes who don't have children and whose only hope of getting any is with candy and a panel truck.

Now that you've scratched and clawed your way into a stable, well-paying job writing Saturday morning cartoons, watch passively as your wife runs out and buys a house. There's nothing like a big mortgage to make sure you don't quit a job that has already begun to kill you.

Don't be complacent. A moving target is harder to hit. When the limited animation geniuses go home at night you stay late and write sitcom and drama spec scripts. It doesn't matter if your next job involves writing, "Hey, which one of you kids put a chicken in my pants?" Or, "We caught a floater in the East River. John Doe, shot twice at the base of the skull with a small caliber pistol. Probably a twenty-two." Your goal is to charge through the first open door that has health insurance, residuals and enough prestige to show those dickweeds in high school just how wrong they were about you.

Slowly start to destroy your marriage because of many of the unresolved issues mentioned above.

Now that you're working it's easy to get an agent. Don't dwell on the fact that the little fuckers wanted nothing to do with you when you were unemployed. Get one anyway. It doesn't even matter which one you pick. For the sake of simplicity, take the first one who says they love your writing. Don't get hung up on whether or not they're lying. You'll be firing them soon.

Get your first freelance, sitcom writing assignment for which you are paid the incredible sum of six thousand dollars. Become a proud member of the WGA for the incredible entry fee of six thousand dollars. Attend a 'new members' cocktail party and feel like you've finally joined a club worth belonging to. Enjoy the night immensely because you're blissfully unaware that the next WGA event you'll attend will require you to carry a picket sign.

Roll your freelance success into your first sitcom staff job. Sure it's an embarrassingly silly show, but you don't embarrass easily. You still have vivid memories of playing guitar and singing "Big Bad Leroy Brown" at a Filipino wedding in Long Beach for forty dollars and all the lamb kabob you can eat.

Continue to work harder than anyone else so you can't be fired. Turn in your first script which follows the executive producer's outline beat for beat. Almost get fired. Quickly write another script which follows your instincts and get an atta boy. Learn a priceless lesson that you will ignore over and over again during the course of your career.

Write four scripts in succession that are produced and get paid for none of them because "term writers don't get script fees." This is your first clue that the WGA is not completely on the ball.

Continue to eat condescending shit from condescending assholes while working fifteen to seventeen hours a day and six days a week. Discover the boundless joy of driving home when the sun is coming up. Make friends for life with the aforementioned assholes because you are now one of them.

Drink more. You can afford the good stuff now.

Notice that writers further up the food chain are quitting in frustration. Take this as an opportunity to ask for a promotion. Get one. What the hell, ask for another. Get it. Rise from term writer to supervising producer in two and a half years because you are a glutton for punishment and everyone else quit. Remember the phrase "two and a half" for later use.

After three years of miserable, seventy hour weeks someone at the network belatedly realizes that when the premise of a show is two men who have never met agreeing to live together and raise the daughter of a dead woman they both slept with twelve years ago because either one of them could be the little girl's father but no one wants to go to the trouble of taking a blood test, the show should be cancelled.

Facing unemployment, fight to get on a hit show that everyone else is fighting to get off of because the star, while undeniably talented, has a few personal issues not to mention a coke-addicted boyfriend she just made executive producer. Consider the shit you've lived through and think, "How tough could it be?"

Quickly discover that working on this show causes you to look back at the anesthetic-free colonoscopy with fond nostalgia. Sign non-disclosure forms that threaten you with dismissal and legal action if you tell anyone the truth about what actually goes on there.

Take more abuse than you ever considered possible but hang in there for two years and fifty episodes because you're making more money in a week than your father made in a year. Think to yourself, "The suffering and sacrifice of my ancestors is redeemed through my success," in order to avoid thinking, "If I'm a whore, does that make my agent a mack daddy?"

Become single again and, after an initial surge of joy and freedom, discover that she was not the reason for your misery. Oh, well, no time for self-reflection now, you're on your path to creating a hit sitcom!

Quit drinking. For almost a whole day.

Roughly nine years after walking through that first door, finally get a chance to create your hit sitcom. But it won't really be yours. You have no creative clout. Your employers have lots of clout so, ignoring the priceless lesson, rely on their series premise, their casting choices and their comic instincts. Your hit sitcom is cancelled in five weeks. Your employer calls it a "noble failure", but noble isn't the word used in any of the reviews. The word putrid is used twice.

Get back on your feet by pitching a single-camera film comedy based on Douglas Adam's "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency." Your employers think it's a swell idea but instead want you to write a sitcom about a blue collar single mom on videotape. You see little room for compromise.

Write a heart-warming script about an heroic single mom who struggles against overwhelming odds to raise her children and make a new life for herself. Fail to take into account that the gal cast by your employers to play mom, hates kids, hates people, hates sitcoms and, most importantly, hates you.

Wake up to discover you have created a hit sitcom and Ralph's doesn't sell enough Stoli to ease the pain. Find yourself looking back at the bent superstar and her twitchy consort with fond nostalgia.

Quit the hit show you created and get right to work creating another hit sitcom for another wack-job diva because you are just plain stupid. Get fired from your second hit show because the co-star wins a fucking Emmy... and you're stupid.

FINALLY learn from your mistakes and create a hit show with wonderful, loving people. Late in the second season during a rehearsal suddenly realize they are not going to hurt you.

Stop drinking.

Marry again. This time to a beautiful, warm and loving woman who encourages you to drink water.

Write a half dozen pilot scripts that are used as landfill. Write and produce three busted pilots in a row because you think you know what's wrong with TV comedy, but are really still stupid.

Then, when you're about to quit the business in disgust, write a pilot script with an old friend. Not because you like him. No one really likes him. Write it because he has two young kids, dental problems that would scare English people, and if he doesn't write something quickly he'll lose his WGA health insurance, which is something you know about. Anyway, a script is written and when it's time to come up with a title, the phrase "two and a half" effortlessly floats into your consciousness.

To everyone's surprise and delight, the script attracts an incredibly talented, easy-going, warm and generous star. The star attracts a green light. Green lights attract Jimmy Burrows. He has script notes. You have creative clout now, ignore them.

Brilliant, sane actors join the cast. A young boy who was obviously a world-class actor in a previous life and is simply picking up where he left off makes the whole thing feel like it's really going to happen.

A group of extraordinary writers overlook that you're a condescending asshole pummeling them with condescending shit and help you make a great pilot. Great pilots get killer time slots. Killer time slots get lots of viewers. Lots of viewers are required for a sitcom to be considered a hit... if the viewers come back week after week.

They come back.

Drive to your big, fancy house in your big, fancy car, drop to your knees and whisper, "Thank you, God, for showing me this simple, step-by-step guide to prime time success but couldn't we have done this without the teaching hospital?"

Share the guide with others.

2008-09-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

Of course, I was always of the opinion that these TVT slugs WENT bankrupt to avoid paying Lil Jon all that he was owed:
Rapper signs deal with The Orchard By NEKESA MUMBI MOODY, AP Music Writer
Tue Aug 5, 5:29 PM ET

Lil Jon, who was musical limbo after his longtime record label TVT Records went bankrupt earlier this year, has reached an agreement that frees him from his TVT obligations while entering into a new venture with digital entertainment company The Orchard, which is purchasing TVT's assets.

Lil Jon will work with the Orchard's Brand Entertainment Group to develop "lifestyle-oriented marketing and promotion programs," as well as serve as a consultant for some of Orchard's artists, labels, and branding opportunities, according to a joint statement from both parties.

As part of the deal, Lil Jon withdrew his objections to TVT's sale to Orchard. In return, Orchard released Lil Jon from any contractual obligations left over from TVT and allowed him the rights to the master recordings of his upcoming album, "Crunk Rock." The Orchard also will digitally issue Lil Jon's back catalog, for which he will provide new material, according to the statement.

That means Lil Jon is still free to sign to another label as an artist.

"It's about time I get what's owed to me from the situation I was stuck in," Lil Jon said in a statement to The Associated Press. "It's unfortunate things have turned out the way they did, but artists deserve to be compensated fairly by their labels for the work they do, and that wasn't happenin'. In my case. I'm happy to finally be a free man and make a new start!"

According to Orchard, it has purchased most of TVT's assets, except for a few that are being challenged, for between $4.5 million and $6 million.

Lil Jon, together with his cohorts the East Side Boyz, has sold millions of records and helped fuel the crunk music wave a few years ago. His hits include "Get Low," and he's produced smashes like Usher's "Yeah" and Ciara's "Goodies." The Atlanta-based musician also has his Crunk!!! Energy Drink and a wine line.

The Orchard, based in New York, distributes and markets millions and songs and videos through a variety of companies.

2008-08-26T22:15:00.000-07:00

More Bob Lefestz:

Now this deal makes sense.

This is how I remind you that the major labels are too hip for the room. None of them wanted to sign Nickelback, they had to go to an indie. You could hear the greatness on their RoadRunner debut, all that was absent was the hit single. Which came on the very next album! An A&R man is supposed to be a visionary. A label is supposed to sign an act for the future, not one moon shot that is either successful and burns the act out or fails.

This is how I remind you that we live in a rock and roll nation, not a hip-hop country. Fortune 500 companies would be better off licensing a Nickelback track than a rap cut. This is the sound of America. This is the sound people want to see live.

This is how I remind you that the audience doesn't give a fuck what you think is good. People want something ear-pleasing, that envelops them and allows them to forget five dollar a gallon gas and low wages. Sure, the rock star life might be one of excess, but it's not about saying you're BETTER than your listeners, just that you're lucky. Actually, it's about hard work. As opposed to hanging in Hollywood clubs and appearing in TMZ and Perez Chad focused on the music. Guess you need someone from Canada to do this, someone smart, someone who can put two words together.

This is how I remind you that Nickelback's career has not peaked. Chad could do it alone, with Mutt Lange, he's got an ace in his deck. One thing Mutt truly understands is powerful rock. After all, this is the guy who produced "Back In Black", "Pyromania" and "Hysteria".

This is how I remind you that EMI isn't responsible for the Coldplay album's success, the band's manager Dave Holmes is. He quarterbacked the effort, assembled the team. Nickelback no longer needs Warner, to the degree recorded product is part of the equation all resources can be outsourced, hired on a need to use basis. You can hire a marketing guy, a radio promo team. Doesn't matter that Live Nation presently doesn't have infrastructure. If the company is smart, it will be lean and mean and rely on contractors. It's the overhead that kills companies.

This is how I remind you that Richard Branson signed the Stones to drive up the price of Virgin Records, knowing that the investment community was too stupid to know the legendary band didn't sell many discs. I've been scratching my head at all the previous Live Nation signings. Madonna's recording career is way past its peak. But she won't admit it and won't do a greatest hits show, the only thing that a truly mass audience is interested in. Jay-Z could sell records in the future, but hip-hop has always been a dicey live enterprise. Shakira was made in the U.S. by Charlie Walk, he did that deal with Verizon Wireless, he got the online community to make its own videos, he's the one who masterminded the integration of Wyclef Jean. Who's going to do all this at Live Nation? Who's going to care? And, without the train-wreck, how many people want to see Shakira live? She'd better start doing more work in Spanish, hopefully Live Nation can make its money back in South America and other Spanish-speaking territories. But Nickelback... Nickelback is something different. The band is not sexy, Wall Street may not understand, but it makes financial sense. This is Rock and Roll 101, hit records beget live demand, tickets are sold at a reasonable price, a ton of merch is moved, everybody makes money, year after year. Nickelback has already had enough hits. The band might not quite be classic, but almost. Certainly more than Rihanna and almost everybody else on Top Forty radio.

This is how I remind you about the power of one hit single.

Send me that MP3 running Nickelback's two hits together, tell me they're the same song. Tell me how the music's meat and potatoes rock. Tell me how it's not innovative. I'll just tell you "How You Remind Me" is a PHENOMENAL track.

Doesn't matter if you're a fan of this kind of music. You only need to hear it once. It's got power, it's got a catchy melody, great changes and worthy lyrics.

This is how I remind you that it's a new music business.

This is how I remind you that Michael Cohl was only about readying Live Nation for sale and it was smart for Michael Rapino to stop the endless spending, the deals that didn't make sense.

This is how I remind you that Live Nation can offer more to Nickelback than any label. Hell, a label's not even going to offer a killer ROYALTY rate. Give me fifty percent of the action. Seventy-five! Then maybe I'm interested. But you're beholden to the old model. So, the Eagles, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails say fuck you and go off to make a ton of money elsewhere. They don't need the label, the label needs them.

But maybe the concept of the label is antiquated. 360 deals might make sense, just not ones where you're beholden to a record company.

This is how I remind you that the Napster era is over. This is not about theft of music, this is not about major labels lording over the business, this is about reaching the public, not holding back, but giving more. This is a new era, where you have to do whatever you can to make it, and then reap the ultimate rewards. This is an era when it's all about the music. You might think otherwise, but the public believes "All The Right Reasons" is great.
Are we having fun yet?

2008-08-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

Bob Lefsetz weighs in on Management:

I'm fascinated by Usher firing Benny Medina and returning to his mother for management. The question arises...should you stay with who got you there, or switch allegiance to the big swinging dick?

My friend Jake Gold built the Tragically Hip. The first time I heard from him was back in '89, when the band's MCA debut hit the streets. It was hard to get him off the phone, his excitement was palpable.

Jake built the Hip into the biggest band in Canada. He got them to open for the Stones in Europe. But, despite signing them to multiple labels in the U.S., the Hip never broke through in the Lower 48. And the band abandoned him.

Jake talked about the Hip 24/7. He was always dreaming up new ideas. A fan club. Net exploitation when major labels didn't even know what the Internet was. "Newsweek" did a story. He got them on national TV at the turn of the millennium. But Jake was not the biggest manager around, and the Hip was his biggest act. So the Hip moved on to greener pastures. To a manager with platinum acts in his stable. A new record was released, and did worse. The Hip still have marquee value, but they're not as big as when Jake managed them. They can't be, because no one will ever care about the Hip as much as Jake Gold did.

There are two sides to every story. And a band built of five members has to go with the majority. This is not about the Tragically Hip so much as, should you leave your manager? The one who you started out with, the one who built you?

Usually your first manager is your friend. Who often gives way when you get some success. He's only doing you a favor, because of his passion. But frequently this original "garage manager" stays with the band as it rises. Then, when it hits the big leagues, the act starts getting whispered in its ear. It sees what other acts get paid, how they tour. Lawyers tell them about their options. Major managers swoop down and offer a better deal. So what do you do?

First, are you getting ripped off? If your manager is stealing from you, move on. It's too frustrating to work and not get paid.

Furthermore, if your manager is inept, leaving too much money on the table, fucking up everything from delivery dates to routing, he should go too.

But what if your manager's major failing is you're his only big act?

Should U2 fire Paul McGuinness?

Even though Irving Azoff has got a stable that dwarfs that of Principle, Irving's never going to take a bullet for Bono. He'll take a bullet for Don Henley, that's how he became Irving Azoff to begin with. Oh, Irving would make phenomenal road deals. But in the middle of the night could he talk about what happened in Dublin back in '82? Could he discuss your parents, your first wife?

Maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe your career is essentially on autopilot, maybe you just want the check. Like Aerosmith, like Def Leppard. They switched to Front Line and they're making incredible money. That's the kind of leverage Howard Kaufman has. And both acts know it's no longer about hit records, building their cred, but cleaning up on the road.

So, if what you need is a booker, if you're not confronted with questions beyond whether to go on the road and what your t-shirts should look like, it doesn't matter whether your manager is your best friend. It's truly a business relationship.

But if you've got more questions than answers, if you're still building, you need someone who will kill for you. Their passion, thinking about you 24/7, is more important than what their status is. You can't buy passion, you can't contract for it, people have to believe!

Like Jon Topper with moe. The band had a major deal for a time. If they were managed by a hack, or someone with bigger commission paydays in their stable, the members of moe. would be working day jobs today. But Topper lives and breathes moe. He's got them making first class records, doing their own festival. He's not worried about the major league business, he's in the moe. business, which is quite profitable.

Or Coran Capshaw... Maybe being outside the system, being based in Charlottesville, allowed him to come up with new paradigms for Dave Matthews. Coran could think outside the box, unencumbered by how it used to be done.

However, in today's changing times, your manager could make a deal with Front Line and you'd get the best of both worlds. Assuming your manager's loyalty continued to be to you, and not the Front Line behemoth.

But there are advantages to being with Irving. First and foremost, leverage. Irving is owed more favors than a union boss. And he uses these, to get Christina Aguilera on seemingly endless awards shows. To get Jewel on TV...

So what do you do?

Benny Medina didn't need Usher to succeed. He already has Mariah Carey. Whereas Usher's mother is only concerned with her son.

You've got to gauge the passion. Passion covers up a lot of inexperience. Passion has your manager scheming 24/7. If you succeed his image is polished and he makes money. If you don't, he's a broke nobody. You've got to succeed. It's his only way out of the hellhole!

So, if you've got traction and you're not getting ripped off, you should probably stay with the manager you've got. It's kind of like marriage, those who get divorced once are at higher odds to get divorced again. Divorced people are skeptical rather than trusting. They look over their shoulders. Whereas those married only once are dreamers, who believe they can conquer the world. They trust that their team will stay together forever!

Would Usher have sold more records if his mother had been his manager when his new album was released?

Maybe not. Certainly not many more.

But if he called at midnight, he'd get her complete attention.

You want personal management. You want someone in the trenches with you, bonded with you. Find a good one and stick with him (or her!)