On the first New Yorker Radio show, the most excellent rock writer Kelefah Sanneh goes to the Philly suburbs and talks to the guys in the band Spraynard.
Now, I’ve only heard the radio segment and my first impression is these pop punk guys are as formulaic as the death metal guys. What’s with that voice dudes?
But the interview is worth a listen, especially since it takes place in a batting cage.
Here are some thoughts about streaming and recorded music from recent reading. In some sense, this is a dump of links for future reference, but I hope I connect some dots, too.
Ben Sisario told the story, in yesterday’s New York Times, of a songwriter name Perrin Lamb, whose independently released song ended up in a popular playlist on Spotify and earned him $40,000.
Which reminded me of Rosanne Cash’s comment that 600,000 Spotify streams earned her $104. She called streaming “dressed up piracy,” but I think she misses what’s happening here. The streaming services are often owned, at least in part, by the big three labels, and the labels collect money and distribute it to their artists (while taking their own cut, just as they did off records). As the artist in Sisario’s story shows, if you don’t have a label more money passes through to you.
One problem with the idea that streaming services are ripping off artists is that the streaming services are all losing money. Pandora announced huge losses this past quarter, plus ended settling with music publishers for three times the cost it want to pay for the rights to stream music written before 1972. Pandora has tens of millions of customers. If it’s still losing huge numbers and it’s costs are going up, how is it going to survive? Spotify is in a similar position, losing lots of dough despite being the leader in subscribers.
Making money on recorded music, this guy Philip Kaplan argues, was a historical accident. Records were meant to be a spur to get people to buy record players, but the software companies that eventually emerged figured out ways to make more money selling copies of music than the machines to play it on. Streaming services, Kaplan argues, are simply restoring market efficiency to a process that was exploited by the labels.
A guy who has a blog called Startups and Shit, pointed me to a NY Times article from 2007 about how cultural hits, like hit songs, happen. According to the experiment Duncan Watts writes about, predicting hits is so hard because there is no single line of taste that hits have to cross. Not quality, not simpleness, not nothing. In fact, hits erupt out of apparent quality blips, in which a small network likes something which somewhat randomly spreads to other related networks simultaneously. When enough networks light up, there it is, a hit!
These network explosions amplify the perceived quality of the hits, though objective analysis among any of the individuals in the network would show a small advantage in quality. Watts calls this a “rich get richer effect.” Watts writes:
This, obviously, presents challenges for producers and publishers — but it also has a more general significance for our understanding of how cultural markets work. Even if you think most people are tasteless or ignorant, it’s natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow “better,” at least in the democratic sense of a competitive market, than their unsuccessful counterparts, that Norah Jones and Madonna deserve to be as successful as they are if only because “that’s what the market wanted.” What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market “wants” at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history: there is no sense in which it simply “reveals” what people wanted all along. In such a world, in fact, the question “Why did X succeed?” may not have any better answer than the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss’s surprise best seller, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” who, when asked to explain its success, replied that “it sold well because lots of people bought it.”
The Startups and Shit piece links the hitmaking effect of networks with the network the major labels control most tightly, namely radio.
His suggestion for the streaming services is to sign their own artists and try to break them on their own radio services, much the way Perrin Lamb, who surprisingly earned $40,000 for a song from an album that wasn’t even on Spotify when it broke on Spotify.
In this way, Spotify and other services, could break the discovery grip of the labels on radio, and arrange to get more money to artists at a lower cost. Win win.
Well, not for the labels.
This leads us back to Philip Kaplan, whose piece ends with a link to a band called Extinction Level Event’s lead guitarless metal viral hit, Entropy, and to his own band’s self produced and promoted metal band, Butchers of the Frontier. Rockers, he says, from recording, promoting, selling tickets and merchandise, are doing it for themselves, as they should be.
Thomas Beller goes for a bike ride in Central Park with his wife and their two kids. A remembrance in a little less than five minutes, featuring the Rolling Stones and Merry Clayton.
This isn’t really breaking news. This link leads to a story from June 2014, but it’s new to me.
Yes, it seems that the Upper Crust’s Lord Rockingham, an Upper Crust member in 1995 through 1997, wrote Hard Choices, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s inside look at the choices and challenges she has made and faced.
But not Bernie Sanders.
The linked story has some clips, but let’s add one more. h/t to Cindy Brolsma.
As if that’s not enough, there is a surprise Upper Crust documentary, that features plenty of Ted Widmer, aka Lord Rockingham.
I’ve just started it, but, um, it is called Let Them Eat Rock!
This clip is from a live show the Cramps did at the California State Mental Hospital in Napa in 1978. I found it in a blog post about the excellent music that has come from Ohio over the years. This is kind of funny because a few days ago my daughter played me some music by a band called Twenty One Pilots. They play in that style of modern rock that has a huge drum sound but no guitars, is sometimes rapping and sometimes singing, and lots and lots of added noises from various machines, which means they don’t really rock at all. But they’re from Columbus, Ohio. I asked her if she knew that and she said she didn’t care. I’m not sure why I do.
A writer and photographer for the NY news site Gothamist are in Havana, and reported today on the city’s metal scene. Good reading, and turn it up for way music seeps in everywhere. Hair flipping, too.
And dig Combat Noise, Solidiers Must Like to Kill:
He was a DJ on Sunday nights on WNEW when I was in high school. Back then NEW was a free form radio station. The DJs played what they wanted. This meant that you might get a mash up of different styles, hard rock and jazz in the same sequence of songs, or show tunes complementing something odd. Or they’d play pop songs sometimes.
The thing about free form radio was that you really got to know the DJs. They had taste and they demonstrated it every show. Sometimes the music was your style, sometimes it was something you’d never heard before in a style you didn’t know existed.
This is different than Pandora, which tries to match you with bands that play in a similar style to the bands you like. Free form mostly exists at college stations these days, and most of those shows feature a DJ known for playing a single style, at least most of the time.
But back in the hey day, the big palette was a virtue, at least for those of us who loved it, and WNEW was an incredibly great station while it lasted. In those years I also lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco, both of which had great free form rock stations, and Boston, which had a great oldies station.
Today, Boston has one of the best college stations in the country, at Emerson College. WERS is sort of free form, like Fordham’s WFMU (Scelsa’s last radio home), but is also fully aware of the value of having contributors who enjoy (and pay) for the programming.
Free form radio was (and is) great art, but it is niche. The Iheartmusic industry is built on the scientific finding that most people like to hear what they know, and are repulsed (or bored) by what isn’t what they already like.
Perhaps the best free form radio station today is WPKN in Bridgeport Connecticut. It takes no commercial or syndication money and relies solely on listener contributions. This is great, but most PKN shows are dedicated to a form. Bluegrass, polka, country, blues, free jazz, you name it. There is a show, but it isn’t a Vin Scelsa show.
Vin Scelsa’s thing was wild leaps of musical imagination, a love for Firesign Theater (if I’m remembering correctly), and a digressive patter that could extend to long closely-tended tales that I’ve long forgotten, but the memory of which produces astonishment still.
When I started this website, my heart was in this free form mixing of styles and enthusiasms and the energetic exploration of different stuff. That’s because of Vin Scelsa. And Jonathan Schwartz. WNEW DJs when I was in high school. And my high school (11th grade?) social studies teacher, Charlie Backfish, who is to this day a DJ on the SUNY Stoney Brook radio station.
Nick Paumgarten writes about him in this week’s New Yorker, which does a good job of capturing Scelsa’s quirky personality.
Paumgarten also mentions that for his final show Scelsa opened with Sopwith Camel’s Hello Hello and finished with Lou Reed’s Goodnight Ladies. Both feature a brass bassline that sounds good to me.
Tim Marchman has written something very long about The Mekons over at Deadspin (on the Concourse, whatever that is). It is a history of the band and an attempt to explain why they’re so great (and were so especially in the 80s), by discussing their elpees of that period in Tim’s order of preference.
I thoroughly enjoyed it because I learned some things about the band I didn’t know, there are good funny quotes from the band, and his song choices and clips are excellent and I enjoyed listening to them all.
On the other hand, the idea of convincing someone that a rock band is great because of the way they embody the moral ethos of failure, and embrace it like a lover or a murderer or something like that, seems kind of pretentious and beside the point. The reason a person might get into the Mekons and think about their history and the way they changed over the years and struggled with lack of sales but also wore that proudly as a badge of honor, is because you fell in love with the music. In other words, you heard a song, you went to a show, and it turned out to be one of the best shows you’ve ever seen. That’s when these other ideas start to have some importance.
I mention this because I think if you didn’t like/weren’t interested in the Mekons you might throw your computer at the wall as Marchman goes on and on, like this about the band’s album, Rock ‘n’ Roll:
“This is basically how the whole record plays out, as a very good and very bitter joke; there are reasons why many aficionados claim this is the Mekons’ best record, and why they may be right. They were certainly never tighter, more confident, more focused, or better engineered than they are here; the whole thing is just a straightforwardly great rock and roll record, which they seem to be uncomfortably aware of. It’s hard to think they meant lines like Throw another rock n’ roll song on the fire, or This song … is in a pretended family relationship with the others on this record and on the charts all that sincerely, and while they may have been mocking a gringo military fighting a rock and roll war, you know they had a little sympathy for them, too. The Mekons may not have wanted to be a great rock and roll band, but they were, and perhaps consequently, they were too honest to either moderate their view of rock and roll as an expression of imperial capitalism’s worst impulses or to take it at all seriously.”
Lou Reed’s sister tells the story of their childhood together, when some mistakes were made. It’s a gripping story told directly, sweet but awful, too.
And it’s hard not to come away with a different conclusion than she does. Or at least a bit of reservation about her sureness.
, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s inside look at the choices and challenges she has made and faced.
