American Idol: Keeping the A&R Myth Alive
A group of our colleagues share notes on why — despite all its guilty pleasures — American Idol is rotting our industry from the inside out.
Editorial
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Goodbye, Corporate Pop?!
Andre Grey from DEMO has posted one of the most concise, coherent explanations of the current state of music commerce. I don’t know that I agree with him about how swiftly this will happen (I think it will take a…
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Clear Channel Has It Right
You heard me! Whenever folks get in front of an FCC panel to rant about the state of radio, invariably someone gets upset about the lack of independent music on major market radio playlists. We should be upset about radio…
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Pitchfork Staff Member Says “Hi” To Real-Life Woman
Ha! Suddenly, Sub Pop Records has rediscovered its sense of humor, with this parody of Pitchfork Media and scattered references to new services like the “Ass-Kick of the Month Club.”
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And I Thought 74 minutes was long…
Okay, a TEN HOUR ALBUM is way too indulgent. This is why ProTools has the Edit function. /rant
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What to do with your MP3’s
Following an outdated link on a band site, I swung by the discussion boards at MP3.com the other day. It strikes me as sheer lunacy that a number of otherwise talented folks are sitting around waiting for some other company…
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Justification #2,341,389 for hiring CDBaby as our exclusive commerce provider.
Another illustration of why we’re going exclusively with CDBaby in 2004. This is the kind of company that people laughed at in the nineties. It’s (relatively) low tech, but high touch. Instead of investing zillions in offshore servers like other…
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Indie Music Dating
Dunno, but so much is summed up in this bulletin board posting.
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Obligatory Sappy New Year Post
2003 was a challenging year for a lot of us. I know it was for me. I watched a business I founded in 1994 crumble under the weight of the struggling economy. I had to make some hard choices involving…
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Bullseye
Invariably, in my classes and seminars, someone will ask me about distribution. It’s part of the Dream — if you can get distribution, you’re guaranteed success, right? No. All distribution means is that you’ll get a few copies of your…
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What’s Funny About MP3.com
24 hours before it goes dark, and not a peep on the public site about the announcement.
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What I Am Thankful For
Thousands of readers who visit this site every week to learn how to play a bigger game in our field. Hundreds of musicians who carry dog-eared copies of Grow Your Band’s Audience. Dozens of clients who are prepared to build…
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Go with the best. Discard the rest.
Jason Kottke’s weblog usually focuses on media design and production, but there’s a post in there this week that I think applies just as well to bands. If the “average” band has a life span of a few years and…
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Who Needs Radio
MSNBC’s Carolyn Brown examines that question in a recent commentary. Because you get what you measure, the current audience measurement systems used at mainstream radio force programmers to over-spin proven SALES hits, rather than spend any effort on breaking new…
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Microclassification
This crosstalk on Fark got me thinking… in seminars and group calls, I talk a lot about making it easy for your audience to talk about your music. But relying on (cliche?) microclassifications can actually turn OFF a potential fan…
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Are the Stakes Too High?
An interesting discussion at Velvet Rope today, around the idea that one of the major problems in the mainstream music industry today is a glut of artistic sense and a LACK of business sense. Many independent projects are bottom-line profitable…
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TicketMaster Changing The Rules
In the NYT today, an article outlining TicketMaster’s expansion into auctions and brokerage. We’ve already seen them restrict “pre-sales” this year, and it looks like the long term model is to move to a completely dynamic price structure for tickets.…
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Snapster, Meet Jazzio
Two more clever ideas for a file-sharing system… Jazzio could be the next evolution of ClearChannel, and/or a permutation of Cringely’s Snapster idea, based on the public library model of sharing licenses for media.
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We have Uh-Oh.
Okay. I understand the complexity of running a huge national tour. And I feel sad for the techs that have to clean up the mess that an Atlantic City venue made of Justin and Xtina’s stage when the ceiling collapsed.…
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Do You Suffer From Big Cup Syndrome?
Today at the store, I saw something astonishing. The Reese’s Big Cup. My wife, my friends and my casual acquaintances all acknowledge my love for the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. And someone in Hershey, PA clearly believes that if folks…
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Does Your Club Owner Sound Like This?
When I first wrote Grow Your Band’s Audience as a series of magazine articles in 1998, one of the things I discovered was that this animosity between bookers and bands was mostly show. Posturing. Folks acting like that was the…
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Why Newsletters Are So Important
Mini-rant time. I am on the road quite a lot. And even when I am not on the road, I have a tendency to drop in at Kinko’s (or such)and use borrowed terminals. If I happen to surf across a…
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RAVE Act is in effect…
One of the first examples of the legislation-formerly-known-as-RAVE. This is a pretty extreme example, but as local authorities become more aware of the powers of this law, musicians are going to have to take a leading role in educating audiences…
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Hot Music Career: Process Server
Seriously, if the RIAA would put this much energy into helping its members recruit stellar A&R staffs and invest in real artist development, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
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I Am (Not) Shelby Lynne
Grammy winner Shelby Lynne, who has a remarkable tale to tell about major label relations, is coming to town. Here’s the rub — her old label still owns her domain name (shelbylynne.com) and is re-directing it to IslandRecords.com. Understandable, but…
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Place Your Bets…
Pearl Jam may not know what they’re going to do, now that their deal with Sony is up, but whatever it is will be a good example for a lot of us to follow…
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Kids Do Pay For Quality
In all the commotion over file sharing, this gem of a discussion on Slashdot illustrates the point that tweens and teens are more than willing to pay for entertainment — provided it’s of high quality. Ask yourself: will your audience…
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Sellout Watch
Just stumbled upon the tongue-in-cheek Sellout Watch of indie artists with prominent placements in commercials.
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Who’s Buying Indie Music?
In the Christian Science Monitor article on Indie Music (and O’Reilly’s discussion of it), lots of attention is focused on the notion that purchasers tend to be older audience members who are unwilling/unable to download music. I agree with O’Reilly…