Today's New York Times reports that for the first time, Atlantic Records' digital sales surpassed their CD sales. According to Tim Arango:
At the Warner Music Group, Atlantic’s parent company, digital represented 27 percent of its American recorded-music revenue during the fourth quarter. (Warner does not break out financial data for its labels, but Atlantic said that digital sales accounted for about 51 percent of its revenue.)
With the milestone comes a sobering reality already familiar to newspapers and television producers. While digital delivery is becoming a bigger slice of the pie, the overall pie is shrinking fast. Analysts at Forrester Research estimate that music sales in the United States will decline to $9.2 billion in 2013, from $10.1 billion this year. That compares with $14.6 billion in 1999, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
One of the more revealing quotes came from John Rose, a former label executive at EMI:
“It’s not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical,” said John Rose, a former executive at EMI, the British music company, who is now a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group.
Instead, the music industry is now hoping to find growth from a variety of other revenue streams it has not always had access to, like concert ticket sales and merchandise from artist tours. “The real question,” Mr. Rose said, “is how does the record industry change its rights structure so it captures a fairer percent of the value it creates in funding, marketing and managing the launch of artists?”
The word "fairer" jumps out of that last sentence, as if none of these artists would exist or find a market without them. That's true to an extent. A lot of perfectly good music never finds mass audiences, while a lot of mediocre nonsense blows up, but "fairer" implies that somehow the artists they signed hoodwinked them into bad deals, and that the poor, babes-in-the-woods innocent label executives are no match for all those sheisty, conniving artists out there who live to take advantage of them.
Besides, Julie Greenwald, president of Atlantic, says later in the article that the labels are spending less on artists than they used to, which makes the concerns about fairness even more dubious:
“I think we’ve figured it out,” said Julie Greenwald, president of Atlantic Records. “It used to be that you could connect five dots and sell a million records. Now there are 20 dots you can connect to sell a million records.”
In making that transition to a digital business, the music business has become immeasurably more complicated. Replacing compact disc sales are small bits of revenue from many sources: Atlantic Records’ digital sales include ring tones, ringbacks, satellite radio, iTunes sales and subscription services. At the same time, record labels — Atlantic included — are spending less money to market artists. In the pre-Internet days, said Ms. Greenwald, “we were so flush, we did everything in the name of promotion.” Among the cutbacks are less spending to produce videos and to support publicity tours when a new album is released.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Reunited and it Feels ... ehhh, Not Bad
Queen + Paul Rodgers: The Cosmos Rocks (Hollywood): Queen minus Freddie Mercury, John Deacon and pomposity. Paul Rodgers minus the the mathematical power chord precision of Mick Ralphs. The result gives generic a bad name.
Drumbo: City of Refuge (Proper): Magic Band members minus Captain Beefheart, but with Drumbo/John French doing his Beefheartian best on vocals. But they're not Beefheart's, nor are the compositions as rhythmically mad as his. As much as writing on Trout Mask Replica and that era attributes the sound and musical ideas to the band, this says the central musical idea was his and his alone.
Mark Olson and Gary Louris: Ready for the Flood (New West): The two songwriters and vocalists for Americana heroes the Jayhawks during their Hollywood Town Hall heyday reunite, and they're good for each other. The songs they perform together seem far more effortless than those they have made independent of each other, and the low-fuss production makes the album sound like two old friends playing songs together - sometimes with a band that's picking the song up on the fly.
Labelle: Back to Now (Verve Forecast): The reunited Labelle manage the delicate feat of sounding contemporary without giving up what they were or capitulating to the sound du jour (with the exception of the Wyclef-produced "Rollout") which is also the album's weakest track. Sympathetic producers Lenny Kravitz and soul geniuses Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff focus the tracks on their voices, but not at the expense of the songs, which are never mere launching pads for vocal histrionics. In fact, Patti LaBelle's restrained (by her standards) and conscious of both her partners - Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx - and of the songs themselves, almost all of which Hendryx had a hand in writing. A sharper lyrical edge would help the songs, but Back to Now is a reminder that old school soul based on songs can sound modern and be immensely satisfying.
Drumbo: City of Refuge (Proper): Magic Band members minus Captain Beefheart, but with Drumbo/John French doing his Beefheartian best on vocals. But they're not Beefheart's, nor are the compositions as rhythmically mad as his. As much as writing on Trout Mask Replica and that era attributes the sound and musical ideas to the band, this says the central musical idea was his and his alone.
Mark Olson and Gary Louris: Ready for the Flood (New West): The two songwriters and vocalists for Americana heroes the Jayhawks during their Hollywood Town Hall heyday reunite, and they're good for each other. The songs they perform together seem far more effortless than those they have made independent of each other, and the low-fuss production makes the album sound like two old friends playing songs together - sometimes with a band that's picking the song up on the fly.
Labelle: Back to Now (Verve Forecast): The reunited Labelle manage the delicate feat of sounding contemporary without giving up what they were or capitulating to the sound du jour (with the exception of the Wyclef-produced "Rollout") which is also the album's weakest track. Sympathetic producers Lenny Kravitz and soul geniuses Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff focus the tracks on their voices, but not at the expense of the songs, which are never mere launching pads for vocal histrionics. In fact, Patti LaBelle's restrained (by her standards) and conscious of both her partners - Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx - and of the songs themselves, almost all of which Hendryx had a hand in writing. A sharper lyrical edge would help the songs, but Back to Now is a reminder that old school soul based on songs can sound modern and be immensely satisfying.
Monday, November 24, 2008
The Trouble with Lou
I really wanted to like Lou Reed's Berlin: Live at St. Ann's Warehouse, but as is so often the case since Songs for Drella, he sings as if he knows every word is capital A art. Usually, that means he oversells the drama and in this case, it was far better served by his distant deadpan the first time around.
The Nonsense You Have to Put Up With
Robert Christgau once wrote that he did few interviews because none should have to put up with the shit you have to deal with to get and do the interviews. Unfortunately, that extends to many aspects of our jobs these days including trying to review albums that can only be heard at record-listening parties or in the label's offices, or even trying to see a concert.
Last night, I went to the New Orleans Arena to see Down open for Metallica at the invitation of Down's publicist. After the invitation was extended, though, communication fell off, then yesterday afternoon I learned that there weren't actually tickets for me, but if I went to the media entrance and called the road manager, he'd walk me in. That sounded dubious, but I went for it. I genuinely wanted to see Down, and I've never seen Metallica before, so whatthehell.
At the door, I called the road manager, got his voicemail, and never heard back from him. I called a friend/photographer who was already inside and she came out with someone - likely arena production staff, but maybe the guy I was supposed to find - and he literally walked us to the arena floor and said, "There you go." No wristband, no sticker, no laminate. He basically snuck us in. That was fine as long as being on the floor was the only place we wanted or needed to be, but when my friend needed to go to the washroom a few songs into Metallica, he was thrown out because he had nothing to indicate that he was in the show legitimately. That ended the night.
Bottom line - if a band wants press, it has to at least meet a minimum threshold of civility. It doesn't have to want press. I don't begrudge anybody who chooses a strategy that works around the press, but if you want coverage, you've got to try just a little.
The show: The Sword opened, were handicapped by working with a fraction of the PA, and sounded pretty by-the-numbers, with one song that held my attention. Dumb thing: playing without ever introducing themselves or songs so that people could buy or download something the next day. Metallica: Not very coherent (what little I saw). Opened with the opening tracks from Death Magnetic, then cut short a version of "For Whom the Bell Tolls." That was okay, but the first song featured a wild laser show. A song or so later, polished metal coffin/light banks lowered from the light rig, did nothing interesting, then returned to their positions. A song later, serious columns of flame (with no members onstage or anywhere near them) and mid-song, a row of flame columns down the center of the stage (with no one nearby save Lars Ulrich, and they stopped a safe distance from his kit). That's a lot of hamburger helper for a show, and any one of those special effects - the lasers or the pyro or the metal coffins - would have been better. I'm sure they all did cooler shit later, but I didn't get to hang around to find out. Down: They were good, but since they couldn't work up the energy to scrounge a sharpie and date stickers for us, I'm having a hard time finding the juice to say more.
Last night, I went to the New Orleans Arena to see Down open for Metallica at the invitation of Down's publicist. After the invitation was extended, though, communication fell off, then yesterday afternoon I learned that there weren't actually tickets for me, but if I went to the media entrance and called the road manager, he'd walk me in. That sounded dubious, but I went for it. I genuinely wanted to see Down, and I've never seen Metallica before, so whatthehell.
At the door, I called the road manager, got his voicemail, and never heard back from him. I called a friend/photographer who was already inside and she came out with someone - likely arena production staff, but maybe the guy I was supposed to find - and he literally walked us to the arena floor and said, "There you go." No wristband, no sticker, no laminate. He basically snuck us in. That was fine as long as being on the floor was the only place we wanted or needed to be, but when my friend needed to go to the washroom a few songs into Metallica, he was thrown out because he had nothing to indicate that he was in the show legitimately. That ended the night.
Bottom line - if a band wants press, it has to at least meet a minimum threshold of civility. It doesn't have to want press. I don't begrudge anybody who chooses a strategy that works around the press, but if you want coverage, you've got to try just a little.
The show: The Sword opened, were handicapped by working with a fraction of the PA, and sounded pretty by-the-numbers, with one song that held my attention. Dumb thing: playing without ever introducing themselves or songs so that people could buy or download something the next day. Metallica: Not very coherent (what little I saw). Opened with the opening tracks from Death Magnetic, then cut short a version of "For Whom the Bell Tolls." That was okay, but the first song featured a wild laser show. A song or so later, polished metal coffin/light banks lowered from the light rig, did nothing interesting, then returned to their positions. A song later, serious columns of flame (with no members onstage or anywhere near them) and mid-song, a row of flame columns down the center of the stage (with no one nearby save Lars Ulrich, and they stopped a safe distance from his kit). That's a lot of hamburger helper for a show, and any one of those special effects - the lasers or the pyro or the metal coffins - would have been better. I'm sure they all did cooler shit later, but I didn't get to hang around to find out. Down: They were good, but since they couldn't work up the energy to scrounge a sharpie and date stickers for us, I'm having a hard time finding the juice to say more.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Aging Semi-Gracefully
Julien Temple can't make a boring film about the Sex Pistols because he knows them too well and has known them too long. He made The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, the excellent documentary The Filth and the Fury, and now the live DVD, There'll Always Be an England (Freemantle/Rhino). The show's good, and Temple regularly chooses two valuable camera shots--one on the audience that emphasizes how the show is far more of a communal event than a concert, and one from the back of the stage that makes the band look small, de-emphasizing anything mythic about the Pistols.
The show itself does some of that, too. Steve Jones is stocky with a mug's mug, and if Paul Cook was sitting behind a desk instead of a drum kit, you'd negotiate a home loan with him. Musically, they're better than ever so the versions are solid, but even John Lydon's performance has an element of self-satisfaction that plagues most older bands still playing. No matter how punky they were and still are, at some point there's at least a moment that says, "How cool is that we can still do this?" The pleasure Lydon takes in the audience's roaring affection says that over and over.
More interesting is the Sex Pistols' tour of London that makes up the DVD's bonus materials. In it, you get a much more dynamic, complex experience as you watch the meatier, financially successful Pistols walking through their old haunts with varying degrees of self-consciousness. Naturally, they find that much of the world they knew in 1975 isn't there anymore, so they do a lot of pointing at shop fronts that aren't what they once were talking about the adventures they had there. Watching them, you can't help but be aware of how much has changed for them, which makes their more performed moments all the more curious. They often seem genuine when they engage their past, slightly imprecise and chuffed with themselves for all the good times they got away with, but when Steve Jones nips upstairs in Soho seemingly for sex with a prostitute, it seems designed to remind everyone he's still a rogue. When he starts jawing with a barker selling half-priced theater tickets, it seems similarly calculated to underscore his Sex Pistol-ness because he can never escape the quasi-celebrity with a unique pedigree that he has become. Similarly, Lydon's rage at Arsenal's stadium in Finsbury Park comes camera ready; far more convincing and revealing is his reflexive, snide comments about Malcolm McLaren made while driving past the store that once housed Let it Rock! and Sex. Each impulse would be less engaging without the other.
The whole tour of London literalizes the passage of time - how it affected them, how it affected London, and how it affected their legend. A room on Denmark Street that was once Jones and Cook's apartment is now a design house, and the caricatures of band members, McLaren and Nancy Spungen that Lydon drew on the wall have been carefully preserved and are part of the office decor.
The show itself does some of that, too. Steve Jones is stocky with a mug's mug, and if Paul Cook was sitting behind a desk instead of a drum kit, you'd negotiate a home loan with him. Musically, they're better than ever so the versions are solid, but even John Lydon's performance has an element of self-satisfaction that plagues most older bands still playing. No matter how punky they were and still are, at some point there's at least a moment that says, "How cool is that we can still do this?" The pleasure Lydon takes in the audience's roaring affection says that over and over.
More interesting is the Sex Pistols' tour of London that makes up the DVD's bonus materials. In it, you get a much more dynamic, complex experience as you watch the meatier, financially successful Pistols walking through their old haunts with varying degrees of self-consciousness. Naturally, they find that much of the world they knew in 1975 isn't there anymore, so they do a lot of pointing at shop fronts that aren't what they once were talking about the adventures they had there. Watching them, you can't help but be aware of how much has changed for them, which makes their more performed moments all the more curious. They often seem genuine when they engage their past, slightly imprecise and chuffed with themselves for all the good times they got away with, but when Steve Jones nips upstairs in Soho seemingly for sex with a prostitute, it seems designed to remind everyone he's still a rogue. When he starts jawing with a barker selling half-priced theater tickets, it seems similarly calculated to underscore his Sex Pistol-ness because he can never escape the quasi-celebrity with a unique pedigree that he has become. Similarly, Lydon's rage at Arsenal's stadium in Finsbury Park comes camera ready; far more convincing and revealing is his reflexive, snide comments about Malcolm McLaren made while driving past the store that once housed Let it Rock! and Sex. Each impulse would be less engaging without the other.
The whole tour of London literalizes the passage of time - how it affected them, how it affected London, and how it affected their legend. A room on Denmark Street that was once Jones and Cook's apartment is now a design house, and the caricatures of band members, McLaren and Nancy Spungen that Lydon drew on the wall have been carefully preserved and are part of the office decor.
Friday, November 21, 2008
The Confluence of Things
I've been reading Dave Thompson's I Hate New Music: The Classic Rock Manifesto, and for the most part it's disappointing in its dumbness. Tim Gebhart summarizes Thompson at Blogcritics.com and inadvertently gets to the heart of the problem:
Regardless of the blend any reader may think he uses, the ultimate message is the same: rock music has lost something crucial and we're worse off for it.
The vagueness of that doesn't get us closer to the problem - presuming a problem even exists - so the book breaks down to a "things were better in my day" that too often supports itself with easy and false wisecracks.
The classic rock period is a really interesting one, and when Peter Frampton blames himself for killing rock 'n' roll, there's some truth to it. Frampton Comes Alive and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours demonstrated in a big way what musicians and companies were slowly learning in the early 1970s - that there was more money to be made from rock 'n' roll than anybody had previously imagined. The '70s see the birth of rock 'n' roll as a business, and that changed everything. Yes, the growing importance that was put on studio recordings and the technological changes that made "less human" recordings possible affected music, but those changes happened for business reasons, not because musicians were better, more artistic souls then and they're callow sucks now.
Any then-vs.-now argument cheats because all crappy artists who put out lousy albums back then have been forgotten. So far, I haven't seen any discussion of Angel, for example. Many of the trend-following albums and artists have faded from memory, leaving the great hard rock bands to stand seemingly as a posse of Camaro-powered greatness next to which all the pale and nerdy that have followed them seem puny.
That said, during the time I've been reading Thompson's dismissal of contemporary music, I've had doubts about modern music. To pick an example at random, I received three emails from publicists for Sebastien Grainger & the Mountains asking me if I'm going to review his new album on Saddle Creek Records. Grainger was part of Death From Above 1979 and the CD's a perfectly likeable album of guitar-oriented new wave dance rock. The bass is punk rock insistent and the songs are often little more than chord progressions, but they become anthemic and are fun.
Still, I know a year from now I'll have forgotten I own this CD, and I wonder if any of the publicists working the album will think of it again this time next year. And I wonder if my thoughts here have more to do with the business of rock 'n' roll than Grainger himself. He came to me as an example not because the music was so memorable - though again, I enjoy it when I hear it. Find it at an mp3 blog at and check it out - but because someone treated it like it was important. And next month will treat another slate of releases as important, and another. That machine-like cycle suggests that something has changed and not for the better, which is about as far as I'm willing to go with Thompson right now.
Regardless of the blend any reader may think he uses, the ultimate message is the same: rock music has lost something crucial and we're worse off for it.
The vagueness of that doesn't get us closer to the problem - presuming a problem even exists - so the book breaks down to a "things were better in my day" that too often supports itself with easy and false wisecracks.
The classic rock period is a really interesting one, and when Peter Frampton blames himself for killing rock 'n' roll, there's some truth to it. Frampton Comes Alive and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours demonstrated in a big way what musicians and companies were slowly learning in the early 1970s - that there was more money to be made from rock 'n' roll than anybody had previously imagined. The '70s see the birth of rock 'n' roll as a business, and that changed everything. Yes, the growing importance that was put on studio recordings and the technological changes that made "less human" recordings possible affected music, but those changes happened for business reasons, not because musicians were better, more artistic souls then and they're callow sucks now.
Any then-vs.-now argument cheats because all crappy artists who put out lousy albums back then have been forgotten. So far, I haven't seen any discussion of Angel, for example. Many of the trend-following albums and artists have faded from memory, leaving the great hard rock bands to stand seemingly as a posse of Camaro-powered greatness next to which all the pale and nerdy that have followed them seem puny.
That said, during the time I've been reading Thompson's dismissal of contemporary music, I've had doubts about modern music. To pick an example at random, I received three emails from publicists for Sebastien Grainger & the Mountains asking me if I'm going to review his new album on Saddle Creek Records. Grainger was part of Death From Above 1979 and the CD's a perfectly likeable album of guitar-oriented new wave dance rock. The bass is punk rock insistent and the songs are often little more than chord progressions, but they become anthemic and are fun.
Still, I know a year from now I'll have forgotten I own this CD, and I wonder if any of the publicists working the album will think of it again this time next year. And I wonder if my thoughts here have more to do with the business of rock 'n' roll than Grainger himself. He came to me as an example not because the music was so memorable - though again, I enjoy it when I hear it. Find it at an mp3 blog at and check it out - but because someone treated it like it was important. And next month will treat another slate of releases as important, and another. That machine-like cycle suggests that something has changed and not for the better, which is about as far as I'm willing to go with Thompson right now.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Letting it All Sink In
Now that the reality of Obama's election is starting to sink in, people are contemplating what it means. Here in New Orleans, letter writers to The Times-Picayune are complaining that his election means we're in for a radical redistribution of wealth (duhhhh). Salon.com's "War Room" asked a number of writers and bloggers "What Does Obama's Victory Mean?", and not surprisingly, the answers are more provocative and nuanced than that. My favorite:
It means the 9/11 era -- of dealing with the world 9/11 created rather than using 9/11 as a political club -- has finally begun.
-- Brad DeLong, economics professor, UC-Berkeley
It means the 9/11 era -- of dealing with the world 9/11 created rather than using 9/11 as a political club -- has finally begun.
-- Brad DeLong, economics professor, UC-Berkeley
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
In the Spirit of the Moment, Pt. 2
No sooner than I wrote about the desire to enjoy this moment when six kids ranging from 7-ish to 12 or so in my neighborhood marched down the street drumming and chanting, "O-Ba-Ma, ooh na nae / O-Ba-Ma, bom-ba-yae."
In the Spirit of the Moment ...
... I'll focus on the second half of John McCain's concession speech - which sounded genuine in a way he hasn't for over a year - and not the first few minutes, which seemed to minimize Obama's accomplishment as simply a feat for African Americans. I'll also make little of the squalling people who attended McCain's speech, who couldn't simply boo, and the role of McCain's campaign in creating that sort of fractious mess. This is too good a day to spend time chipping on McCain.
I'd rather simply enjoy the moment.
I'd rather simply enjoy the moment.
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