• NPR and the PBS series Live at Lincoln Center will team up to produce original content for the Internet. Interviews with conductor Louis Langrée and pianist Garrick Ohlsson are currently available. On Wednesday, August 2nd, the Mostly Mozart Festival will be broadcast. (Playbill)

• Cheap Trick and the Allman Brothers have added to their list of grievances in their suit against Sony BMG for underpayment of royalties related to digital sales. Ringtones are now part of the contentious and eagerly awaited lawsuit. (Billboard Radio Monitor)

• VNU shareholders approved the company's conversion into a private company with limited liability. VNU, a former public company that was taken over by private investors earlier this year, owns ACNielson, Nielson Media Research (owner of Soundscan), Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and other trade magazines. (Press Release)

• As the old saying goes, you know when DRM is a hot (and approaching a mainstream) issue when USA Today has a story about it. This one is about eMusic's DRM-free platform. "EMusic's pitch: Download song — and own it," says the title. (USA Today)

• Roots labels have been squeezed off record store shelves, says the San Mateo County Times, which is affecting local labels like Arhoolie and HighTone. Arhoolie encourages sales at shows such in-store exposure is hard to come by. (InsideBayArea.com)

Posted by Glenn at 9:08 AM | Link
|DRM||Internet||Sony BMG Royalties Lawsuit|

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, popularized the long tail, a new, digitally-enabled business model, with an article on the subject and for a couple of years has spent given speeches and proselytized about the new era of digital economics. Anderson just doesn't hit the technologist circuit. He recently spoke at the Alternative Distribution Alliance conference in Philadelphia.

Now Anderson's book, The Long Tail, is available...and doing well enough to be currently ranked #78 at Amazon.com. (Today at Wired.com there's an adaptation from The Long Tail that's titled "The Rise and Fall of the Hit.")

John Cassidy reviewed the book for The New Yorker and gave it a luke warm grade. While he complements Anderson for taking an established model (power-law distribution) and presenting a "readily graspable picture," Cassidy points out some flaws and ommissions. Part of what's missing has to do with consumer behavior that distribution alone doesn't take into account.

"A widening of choices doesn’t necessarily lead to cultural fragmentation and a defection from mainstream fare; sometimes it has the opposite effect, as befuddled consumers congregate around the same things. To be sure, some curious individuals will rent Japanese anime and science documentaries from Netflix, but far more people will turn up for the fifth 'Harry Potter' film and 'Shrek 3,' because they’ll want to see the movies that everybody’s talking about. Big-time movie releases aren’t merely stories and images on a screen; they’re news events—a fact that Hollywood studio executives have long recognized. Sony’s 'The Da Vinci Code' was a good illustration."

And later:

"A widening of choices doesn’t necessarily lead to cultural fragmentation and a defection from mainstream fare; sometimes it has the opposite effect, as befuddled consumers congregate around the same things."

One phenemenon of digital distribution was the center of an article at The Times Online last week, and it appears to conflict with the niche-creating theory of the long tail: Songs stay on the UK singles chart longer than before digital downloads were taken into account. Some songs, like The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" and Oasis's "Wonderwall," never leave the chart. And longevity has been affected. The typical hit stays on the UK singles chart for five weeks, up from three and a half weeks before digital sales counted. That doesn't jibe with Anderson's theory. In the Wired article, Anderson writes that "the number of weeks the average best-selling novel remains at the top of the list has fallen by half over the past decade." Shouldn't there more, not less, turnover on the music charts?

Continue reading "The Long Tail Book Arrives" »

Posted by Glenn at 2:10 PM | Link
|Books||Digital Music||Internet|

A continuination of my thoughts on the negative affects of keeping industry trade articles behind password- protected and subscription-required doors. This is from Slate's slide show that looks back at its ten years. In 1998 it tried to go to a subscription model. It failed.

"Charging for Slate was a noble experiment but a doomed one. Even in the pre-blog, pre-Google era, it quickly became clear that if other sites couldn't link to our stories, Slate would be left out of the national debate. We watched our traffic, and our influence, fall."

Slate's influence is greater because it's not closed off. People can email links. Bloggers link to articles.

Now, there aren't an incredible number of music industry bloggers right now, but there will be more in the future. Beyond that small group of information filters, others interested in the thoughts of labels, executives and journalists -- such as the technologists who blog daily for a painful death to the RIAA -- would be able to get a different viewpoint.

If the music industry wants its viewpoints to be part of the national debate, it needs an open model online. No registation. No subscriptions. Open it up.

Posted by Glenn at 10:29 AM | Link
|Internet||Music Criticism/Writing|

The topic of net neutrality has been practically talked to death over the last few weeks. (At least in the progressive, tech-savvy corners that pay attention to this kind of thing.) Here's a viewpoint from Jenny Toomey and Michael Bracy of the Future of Music Coalition. Their piece titled "Indie Rock Revolution, Fueled By Net Neutrality" was in yesterday's The Hill, "the newspaper for and about the U.S. Congress." Paragraph five sums up their viewpoint:

"For musicians, net neutrality means they should have the unfettered ability to make their work available to potential fans without undue interference from corporate gatekeepers. Similarly, music fans should have the ability to access this music via a range of legitimate business models. Net neutrality also ensures the continued innovation that has spurred the growth of the indie sector, the transition to a legitimate digital economy and, more widely, consumer adaptation of broadband services."

The article closes with this thought: "We will never trade the emerging promise of the open Internet for one that is narrowed by Internet payola."

Posted by Glenn at 11:30 AM | Link
|Internet|

Much was been written on Pitchfork, but the article by the Washington Post's J. Freedom DuLac about the hugely influential music site, "Giving Indie Acts A Plug, or Pulling It," is the best Coolfer has read. What DuLac has done is capture the business and cultural impact of Pitchfork and add the personality of founder and editor-in-chief Ryan Schreiber.

DuLac spent time with Schreiber at this year's SXSW to witness a day in the life of the country's leading indie music trendsetter. To his interview DuLac intersperses stories of people touched by Pitchfork's hand: Merge Records, which benefitted from a near-perfect review of an album by The Arcade Fire; a product manager for Chicago's Reckless Records, who tracks the sites reviews to help manage inventory; and artists who taken hits to their careers after ruthless Pitchfork reviews. That review was for a solo album by Travis Morrison of the Dismemberment Plan.

"The album was branded with a dreaded 0.0 rating (Liz Phair and Sonic Youth are among the other artists who've suffered that indignity), and Morrison's bandwagon quickly emptied: College radio programmers cooled to his new project, a record store in Texas initially refused to stock the CD, and fans suddenly decided they probably shouldn't like Morrison anymore, either."

Think back to the guest-blogged Coolfer post about Pitchfork and its sometimes negative influence, "Stick a Fork In It." This industry insider decried Pitchfork's ability to harm a budding band's career. Most people queried felt it was better to get no review if was mediocre or worse.

Such is the potential danger of a powerful voice like Pitchfork -- and really no other single magazine or website to challenge it. Even when Pitchfork does good like when it helped jumpstart the career of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah it can do some bad. DuLac writes of being unable to get inside a club because of the mass of people waiting to see Clap Your Hands. Schreiber is "agitated" by the long line and tells DuLac the band got "too much too soon." Of course, Schreiber helped create that long line and gave the band too much too soon.

Posted by Glenn at 1:13 PM | Link
|Indies||Internet||Pitchfork|

What does the Gnarls Barkley, the duo of Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo, have to do with the way the Internet has breathed new life into old music? The Times Online thinks easy access to the world's collection of music partly explains the UK success of the group. The combination of styles -- from old soul to new beats -- has reference points that a teenager wouldn't have understood just a few years ago.

From a profile on Gnarls Barkley:

"It works like this. Immersed all day in their music websites, the poor dears are bombarded with messages that wheedle, for example: 'If you like this you’ll also like Long Tall Sally by Little Richard.' Naturally, they don’t know Little Richard from Keith Richards or even Cliff Richard, but the chances are they will try it and perhaps recommend it to their friends. Fashions, eras and genres have become irrelevant.

The result is that savvy teenagers are listening to Jimi Hendrix and back catalogues of the classics from the 1960s and 1970s. The record companies, while petrified by the Internet, can’t believe their luck at this potential windfall."

Goes hand in hand with the explosion of vintage rock shirts.

Posted by Glenn at 2:03 PM | Link
|Internet||P2P|

Quite a while ago Coolfer created a MySpace page. And it sat there, unused, for month after month. But now it's active again, and I'm adding a few friends to my embarassingly low number of MySpace friends.

Why get back into MySpace? Simple. A lot of bands spend more time on the MySpace page then they do on their websites. The news is fresher. There's often newer music than at the band's main website. And because MySpace is so often the first -- and sometimes the only -- place to get information, Coolfer needed to get back into the MySpace game.

So, MySpace, you couldn't be ignored any longer. The network effect overtook me.

Posted by Glenn at 1:43 PM | Link
|Internet|

The media went crazy when it found out that RCA had signed singer Sandi Thom after her webcasts were heard by a reported 100,000-plus around the world.

Were we taken for a publicity ride?

A thread at the Velvet Rope and a post at Chartreuse explains that Thom wasn't just discovered and signed after building a webcast fanbase.

Thom signed a publishing deal last year with Windswept/Pacific Music Publishing, who has big name clients such as Beyonce, Pete Townshend, Talib Kweli and Craig David. And those 70,000 webcast listeners Thom was said to reach from her basement? Scrutinization hasn't been kind to Thom. Spikes in traffic have been explained to coincide with press releases and articles about her rags-to-riches story. Thom is said to have the financial backing and has her PR done by Quite Great PR.

Same story, different spin.

Posted by Glenn at 10:30 AM | Link
|A&R||Internet||Music Industry|

Members of the media -- and the blogosphere -- can lose their skepticism at the wrong moments. A few days ago Pitchfork admitted that it had been part of a prank and retracted its story that singer-songwriters Sufjan Stevens and Rosie Thomas were going to have a child together. Days before an amateur video taken a Death Cab For Cutie concert started making the Internet rounds...and surprisingly a lot of people bought into it.

For its part, Pitchfork claims it followed procedure and checked the story for accuracy. "We fell for it-- hell," admitted news editor Amy Phillips, "our information came directly from the source (Rosie), was corroborated by a close friend (Denison), and even Sufjan's publicist was being slippery about it." Hey, when it's a conspiracy even a by-the-book news editor can be duped. What can you do?

Then there's the case of the amateur video (watch at YouTube) taken by a fan at a Death Cab For Cutie concert during which a fan calls out for the song "Talking Like Turnstiles" and is so overjoyed when the band starts playing it that he hops on stage. The Tripwire went haywire at the fan and calls him a "big stupid douche." At Stereogum's post only a few called it staged and noticed how well the fan knew the backstage area where he was taken by security.

Frank Chromewaves thinks it "seems just a little too staged to be real" and points to a Philadelphia Daily News article that talks about the band's upcoming DVD, Directions. It includes a bonus track that's a live performance "captured in looney, slapstick fashion by a camera-phone-toting Lance Bangs," says the article.

How should people have known the YouTube clip was staged? Didn't anybody notice the name of the YouTube member who uploaded the video, John10104? That's a zip code for midtown Manhattan, home to many record label offices. As it so happens, that's the zip code for the Atlantic Records offices at 1290 Avenue of the Americas in New York, NY. Those paying attention will know that Death Cab is signed to Atlantic Records. Ahem.

Posted by Glenn at 2:57 PM | Link
|Internet||Marketing||Music||Weblogs||YouTube|

A recent NY Times article on YouTube came just as Coolfer had began spending a bit of time searching for the kind of rarities and interesting clips that have the potential to make the site a landmine. For the uninitiated, YouTube is a website that allows users to upload videos to the site free of charge. There's a social aspect to the site, just as Flickr creates social networks from photos; it's easy to share a video with a friend, and videos are grouped by the tags applied to them.

Videos can only be streamed, not downloaded -- getting around thorny legal issues mean playback can be jerky -- and the video and audio qualities aren't spectacular. The trade-off comes in the variety of content. A search will result in all sorts of things, some recordings of proper videos and telecasts, others homemade movies.

There are other similar sites, but as Ben Ratliff points out in "A New Trove of Music Video in the Web's Wild World," YouTube has more to offer from every search query. The social aspects are nice, but the public archival aspects are better. As more people upload files, more rare, interesting and almost forgotton clips will be available to all Internet users.

Here's a short list of some things Coolfer has found on YouTube:

• Dave Brubeck performing "Take Five" on Jazz Casual in 1961.
• The Beastie Boys performing "She's On It" in the movie "Krush Groove."
• Husker Du performing "Could You Be The One?" on the "Joan Rivers Show." The clip includes a hilarious interview with Joan after the song. Missing is the band's performance of "She's A Woman (And Now He Is A Man)."
• Miles Davis with John Coltrane performing "So What" on a 1958 television show.
• Nas featuring NTM: Affirmative Action" Saint Denis Style remix. From 1996. NTM, a Parisian hip hop group, remixed the track by New York rapper Nas.
• The Replacements at the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis in 1981.
• Os Mutantes and Gilberto Gil performing live on a television show.
• A performance by krautrock legends Amon Duul II.
• Iggy and the Stooges playing "TV Eye" live in Cincinatti in 1970. The introduction makes this clip special.
• A crowd recording of the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne inside a transparent plastic ball.
• If Alf were to make a death metal video.

And, for those of us who didn't watch the Grammys, there's a stream of Sly Stone's mohawked performance.

Posted by Glenn at 12:55 PM | Link
|Internet|

Billboard launched its new website over the weekend. The more stylish site is a welcome change to a destination that is standard surfing for music industry followers as well as more casual music fans. It would be nice to have more above the fold text and news, but it's a big improvement over the older site (and hopefully will load faster).

Now if Hits would redesign its Clinton's-second-term website the music industry's trade publications would be well on their way into the 21st century. (Hey, I know Coolfer could stand a new look. I'm just saying.)

Posted by Glenn at 3:36 PM | Link
|Internet|

Most every band, at least the young ones, is using social networking site MySpace.com to reach out to fans. Some artists (or their families or record labels) were slow to catch on and have lost their MySpace domain names to young cybersquatters. Interestingly, some long dead artists have pages while some who are currently performing -- such as Dead Can Dance -- have missed the opportunity to grab the domain. They can still set up a page, but the MySpace.com domain bearing their names are gone.

• Dead Can Dance : An 18-year-old female from Kansas City, MO.
• Marky Ramone: A 25-year-old mohawked male from the Phillipines.
• Nick Drake: A 19-year-old female from Savannah, GA.
• Flesh For Lulu: A 16-year-old female from Saint Petersberg, FL.
• Arthur Lee, a 32-year-old from California.
• Billy Joel, a 26-year-old male from Van Nuys, CA.
• Buddy Guy, an 18-year-old male from Whitehouse Station, New Jersey.
• Fugazi, a 19-year-old male from Yucaipa, CA.
• Dead Boys, a 21-year-old from Long Beach, CA.

Not everybody has lost out to a squatter. Take these musicians who managed to grab a MySpace page:

• Jimi Hendrix
• Janis Joplin
• 2Pac and Tupac
• Pink Floyd
• Rush

Posted by Glenn at 9:07 AM | Link | Comment (1)
|Internet|