All posts tagged bob-lefsetz

  • A Conversation With Damian Kulash, OK Go singer/guitarist

    OK Go singer/guitarist Damian KulashOK Go are an American pop band. I don’t want to cheapen their career by naming just its apex, but it’s the easiest way to refresh your memory: they’re the band behind ‘Here It Goes Again‘, better known as ‘the treadmill video‘.

    On February 13 2010, I spoke to OK Go’s singer/guitarist Damian Kulash [pictured right] on behalf of Rolling Stone Australia. He’d been up all night shooting a second music video for their song ‘This Too Shall Pass’. The first video couldn’t be embedded anywhere outside of YouTube because of the restrictions put in place by their parent label, Capitol Records, which is owned by EMI Music. The band’s response was to upload an embeddable version to Vimeo, write an open letter to their fans explaining the situation, and seek outside funding to conceptualise and film an entirely different music video. [You should click the above links to watch the videos, if you haven’t already seen them.]

    Shortly before Rolling Stone’s May issue went to print at the end of February – confusing, right? – OK Go left Capitol Records, effectively undermining my story’s relevance. [More on that experience here.]

    Below is the full conversation I had with Damian, which is one of the last interviews the band gave while still signed to a major label.

    Andrew: Before we start, are you totally sick of talking about this whole issue?

    Damian: The politics of the music industry are… tiresome. I’ll put it that way. It’s important to me and I’m fascinated by it, but I’d much rather be thinking about making things, than how to distribute them.

    What kind of response have you seen from your fans in regard to your letter?

    It’s been pretty positive. My letter has been received by some people as a polemic, or as a big screed, but truly, the letter was just an explanation to our fans about why certain things weren’t available to them, because I think people really didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t see it as a big political move; it was just an explanation to our fans, and we’ve gotten very good response from them. I think they’re just happy that we treat them like adults.

    What kind of response have you seen from the record label? I read your interview on New TeeVee where you said your main contact at the label wants as badly as you do for the video to be embeddable.

    I think most folks at the label probably share our opinion that things should be easily distributed. There are a lot of competing agendas within the record label, so I’ve gotten a wide range of responses. The digital department of EMI France actually tweeted the letter and was distributing it because they felt it was a defense of their position. Other people felt like it was an attack. It’s a big company, so there’s been a wide range of responses.

    Beyond your fan base and record label industry people, the general public has also paid attention to the letter. I refer to your quote in Time about how you think there is a quiet majority who are just interested in seeing how the music industry works these days, and seeing your explanation from the inside.

    That’s definitely been the basic response that I’ve felt. I obviously can’t quantify it, but the loudest comments in the music industry in general are mostly from people who hate labels and who hate major labels and feel the industry is set up to screw musicians. I don’t feel like that’s generally representative. I think it’s easy to hate the machine. You really get those comments from people that actually try to make a living making music. It’s mostly people who have this purist idea of what music should be to them; give up their day jobs because they want their musicians to be absolutely conceptually totally pure and not ever have to worry about money for them.

    I read your Mashable interview where you said that a year or two ago, EMI switched the embedding stuff on all of your videos, but you didn’t pay much attention as you were making your new record at the time. Looking back, do you wish that you had paid attention? Would you have done anything differently back then?

    OK Go singer/guitarist Damian KulashWe have to pay attention to how our records and our videos and everything is distributed because we make ‘em and we care about how they get out there, but I wouldn’t be a student of the music industry’s technicalities if I wasn’t convinced that the animating passion in my life is making things, and how the distribution of them affects that. I know it sounds incredibly circular, but I don’t particularly care if the music industry works until I make something and it fucks up the way I want that thing to be shared with the world.

    I’m glad that when I’m writing music and recording music, in between records, I’m not spending my time trying to figure out the solution to the logistical problems of the music industry. Those are some things that we have to pay attention to out of necessity, not because we like paying attention to them.

    There is a quote from you in the letter where you say, “Unbelievably, we’re stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of sharing videos. It’s like the world has gone backwards.” As musicians, you must feel that having these kinds of conversations about the business side of music drains your creativity or your time that could be better spent creating music.

    It seems to me like there are a couple of things. One, the music industry is very clearly in an incredible crisis and that’s what makes this story complex. There is a lot to talk about because we’re up against what appears to be a sort of unresolvable problem. People want to talk about it. Two, I think a lot of us feel incredibly passionate about music and by its nature – almost by its definition – the important part of music kind of defies words. To me, what makes music sort of magical – what makes music the thing that I live for – is that you can communicate things like music’s four-dimensional emotions instantaneously. It’s like emotional ESP.

    I think when something comes along, something to talk about in music, something very rational or logistical and sort of left-linear logical, that’s attached to the distribution of music or to the manufacturing or production of music, then at least there is something to sink our rational brains into and some people really want to talk about it. Maybe this is something of a stretch as an argument, but we do a lot of interviews and it’s impossible to answer substantive questions about music because music is a feeling, not an argument. Whereas, everything that surrounds music – how it’s distributed, the politics, and the money behind it – gives you something hard and logical to talk about. I think that’s sort of why there is so much fascination on these things.

    Bob Lefsetz wrote in response to this situation that “if the labels want to maintain control, they have to first get the hearts and minds of the artists.” As an artist who deals with labels on a regular basis, do you share his view?

    OK Go singer/guitarist Damian KulashYes, in essence they do. I think that the value in music from which we derive the money in music can no longer be generated by limiting access. The way you assess value in most commodities is related to supply, the whole supply and demand curve. The reason you have to pay to have most things is because someone else restricts your access to them or you have to pay for the access to them. There are certain things that don’t follow that model and music has sort of jumped the barrier, I think.

    Twenty, fifteen, or even ten years ago, music was a physical thing that could be bought and sold. Even if conceptually the music wasn’t, there was a way of controlling access to it: you either owned a CD or you didn’t. Either you had access to it or your friend did, or you got it from a library. More likely, you bought it and had access to music.

    Now that has sort of broken down and the music industry is not going to be able to get that genie back in the bottle. You have to find a different level to work with, and I think that – whatever the financing situation is, no matter which body is financing the logistical mechanics of music – that body will have to have a better relationship with musicians and record labels. Record labels deal in very black-and-white terms with this restricted access thing, and now everyone is going to have to believe in a new model simultaneously, otherwise money won’t be generated for music.

    By now you’re all too familiar with the arguments surrounding this YouTube issue, having lived them out and told the world about it. If you can comment on it, I’d like to know how EMI rationalise the ‘disable embedding’ decision to the average web consumer – the one who just wants to share their cool videos with their friends?

    There has been a conceptual shift between videos being advertisement and videos being product. They’re sort of ‘on the fence’ still. All labels still want their videos to be seen far and wide, but they also want to be paid for them to be seen far and wide. Whereas once upon a time it was just amazing that there was a website out there [YouTube] that would actually help you distribute your advertising. Now, there is a website out there that is actually distributing your product without paying you for it. I think that’s how they justify it. They want people to see it like: “we paid for that thing, how come you won’t pay us for it?”

    Do you think that the thought of the average web user even comes into their equation, or is it all just discussed in terms of profit and shareholders, as you alluded to in your letter?

    They’re not such morons that they can’t take into account what people want. Labels don’t have a singular mind. It’s not like one big beast with one agenda. I think a lot of people at labels understand what people want and are frustrated with the way things are working. I think there hasn’t been a very clear-eyed assessment of that shift in music videos from advertisement to product, or in general, of the attempt to blur promotion and monetization. There used to be an obvious revenue stream, and that was selling records [CDs]. Since that is shrinking so incredibly fast, now all the things that you essentially pay for to promote that revenue stream are now things that they’re trying to turn the tables on and get money for actually having done.

    I don’t think they’re incapable of thinking about what people want. I think everybody suddenly is trying to eat the hamburger at the same time that they’re still milking the cow. You can’t have it both ways.

    Final question Damian, and it’s a bit of a philosophical one, so take a deep breath. If labels continue to herd viewers into absorbing their artists’ content in specific web destinations like on YouTube, what are the wider ramifications for the nature of sharing content online?

    American pop/rock band OK GoFirst of all, I’ve been talking this whole time as if I have a kind of answer, like I know exactly what’s going on and there is an obvious path forward. I don’t know what the ramifications will be. The first step that seems obvious to me is we do need something like record labels to perform some of the functions record labels traditionally have. This is what I think the critics of major labels often miss, is that for all of their exploitative, greedy, and short-sighted policies, they did provide a risk aggregation for the world of music making. They invest in however many young bands a year and most of them fail. Those bands go back to their jobs at the local coffee houses without having to be in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal debt for having gone for it.

    If we don’t want to be just a domain of the independently wealthy and people who can take time off from their jobs for a couple of years to see what happens, or finance their own world tour while they figure out exactly how to make the number at the end of the column black, then somebody has to be doing this risk aggregation.

    Historically, when a band did well, or an artist did well, the profits could be so substantial that they would cover the other nineteen losses that the failed bands meant for a record label. A label could take the very extreme numbers of the music industry: you might have a less than 1% chance of success, but if you do succeed there is a massive reward, and it sort of evens them out over dozens or hundreds of artists a year.

    Something sort of needs to be doing that unless we want music only to be the domain of the independently wealthy. I think then you have to figure out what that means for content distribution. Somehow, some sector of the business has to be able to make a significant reward off of the success of that one-in-twenty, or that one-in-fifty, or that one-in-one hundred in order to keep the system running.

    At the same time, we all want this magical, wonderful, instantaneous global distribution – via the internet – to make music ever easier to get to and to make it more universal and more accessible. We have to figure out how to get the money that people are willing to spend on music into the hands of musicians, and into the hands of those risk aggregation bodies.

    Right now, it seems people are willing to spend money pretty freely on music. They just tend to do it more on hardware or on their broadband connection. People are willing to pay for extremely fast connection to the internet so they can download big files. They just don’t particularly care for paying for the file themselves, or see that as something they should be doing. People will pay a lot for an mp3 player. They don’t expect that part to be free, so to get people to value their music in that way, then we should figure out how to look at the system from a macro perspective and figure out a reasonable way forward.

    Thanks Damian. I admire your ability to speak coherently about the music industry, especially after an all-nighter. [The band had been up working on the second video for ‘This Too Shall Pass‘, which is embedded below.]

    I don’t know how coherent I’ve been, but if you can whip that into shape and make me sound like I was, then more power to you. I appreciate it.

    [You can read more about this story for Rolling Stone Australia here.]

  • The Music Network story: “For The Record: An Album Retrospective Part 3”, August 2009

    In the third piece of a five-part puzzle, Andrew McMillen examines the digitally-inspired shift in consumer habits away from the long-established album format. This week, Andrew ruminates on the death of a pop icon, worldwide grief counselling through iTunes’ figurative cash register, and recent digital sales trends.

    One of the joys of writing on a short schedule is the agility with which weekly publications such as The Music Network can relate to current occurrences. After tracing the history of recorded music in the last two weeks – from technological advances, to the reduced reliance on singular album entities in favour of a more liquid, portable state – a significant event in musical history occurred. Thursday, June 25 2009 found Michael Jackson dead, aged 50.

    The grieving process translated into an outpouring of public reminiscence, which resulted in astounding sales figures for Jackson’s back catalogue. According to Billboard.com, US sales figures put the singer’s album sales for the week ending June 28 at 422,000, of which 225,000 were digital sales. A staggering 2.3 million individual song downloads found Jackson far and away the first act to sell more than a million downloads in a week. Within Australian shores, the disparity between albums and singles was curiously less noticeable: Jackson’s album and single sales were placed at 62,015 and 107,821, respectively, according to Undercover.com.au, while in another strange, archaic turn, only one out of every five Michael Jackson albums sold in Australia last week were digitally downloaded.

    Goodnight, sweet princeRegardless, Jackson’s enormous sales in the US simply couldn’t have eventuated ten years ago. Record stores inventories would’ve been exhausted across the country, and compact disc factories would’ve rushed to press more discs to meet the demand. Both of these outcomes still eventuated, but instead of experiencing weeks-long delays, music consumers have the option of instant online gratification: his 2.3 million download count resulted in six Jackson tracks appearing in the Billboard top ten.

    The Jackson phenomenon highlights several points central to the discussion raised in this column series. First, consumer choices are trending away from the album as the favoured mechanism of music release. Choice is key here: it’s easier to choose to part with around a dollar for a song that you’ll love, rather than parting with $15-20 for an unfamiliar collection. If money is no object to the consumer, then time surely is: as industry analyst Bob Lefsetz phrased it in his July 5th, 2009 Lefsetz.com column, “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?”

    Second, the popularity of digital music sales continues to snowball the trend away from the album as the industry’s singular organising principle. The modern music consumer can now purchase music from her home, without being subject to an array external factors while travelling to the record store. This operates in a similar manner to the ease with which she can cherry-pick her favourite songs from an online store, and ignore the rest, A simple point to make, but it’s worth reinforcing that digital distribution is the spark that set alight the consumer’s reliance on the album.

    Finally, a startling counter to the arguments that copyright theft is the primary factor crippling record labels’ established business models. In the period between Jackson’s June 25 death and July 1, streaming media analysts at VisibleMeasures.com report that combined views of the “Thriller” music video totalled in excess of 28 million. Considering that his aggregate single-song sales during the same period were 2.3 million – and just 167,000 for that particular track – it’s somewhat surprising that less than 10% of his fans chose to buy his music, and instead opted to stream it for free. But to step back within the boundaries of this discussion, let’s discount Jackson’s untimely demise and instead examine recent digital sales trends.

    The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) – comprising 1400 record companies in around 70 countries – released their annual Digital Music Report in January 2009. This report quickly became infamous within the recording industry, as media hurled themselves upon the IFPI’s estimation that, after collating studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, over 40 billion music files were illegally file-shared in 2008, which resulted in copyright theft rate of around 95%.

    But to focus on the near-past so as to not bore you with figures, here’s five key points garnered from the IFPI’s report on the international digital music business in 2008:

    • The digital music industry saw a sixth year of expansion in 2008, growing by an estimated 25% to US$3.7 billion in trade value
    • Digital platforms now account for around 20% of recorded music sales, up from 15% in 2007
    • Single track downloads, up 24% in 2008 to 1.4 billion units globally, continue to drive the online market, while digital album sales grew 36%
    • Consumer demand for music is higher than ever – NPD research found that total music consumption in the US rose by one third between 2003 and 2007

    The typical music listener, as imagined by marketing execs everywhereAt a national level, ARIA’s 2008 figures revealed that:

    • Physical sales declined from 51,866,917 to 44,438,874 (down 14%)
    • Digital sales overall rose from 47,267,034 to 128,532,126 (up 171%)
    • Digital album sales rose from 788,316 to 2,853,040 (up 261%)
    • Digital track sales rose from 17,647,057 to 23,464,576 (up 32%)

    It’s important to distinguish the disparity between album and track sales. While digital album sales experienced growth in Australia, they were still outsold nearly ten-to-one by single digital tracks. Why? In an era of musical abundance and complete portability, the consumer is spoiled for choice. We live in an age where you can experience “Thriller” for around a dollar, with a minimum of fuss – or you can stream it from YouTube, if you’d prefer. Freed from the constraints of physical products, we’re able to sample sounds before purchasing so as to reduce the rampant buyer’s remorse that we both feel while casting our eyes across our music collections.

    The record industry marketplace has fundamentally changed for content creators and consumers. To pound a cliché into your head: the internet has theoretically afforded any artist the chance reach your iPod earbuds. The barriers to entering the recording industry have been lowered, and the costs of bedroom production and online distribution are trending toward zero. As a result, it’s unreasonable for artists and labels to continue propagating an album-release business model that’s so firmly rooted in the past.

    But what about the present? I’m glad you asked, as part four of this five-piece puzzle will find me removing my hats marked “boring history” and “boring sales figures”. In their place, I’ll hatlessly hammer the thoughts that current musicians feel toward my incessant prodding of the album; that alleged, proverbial dead horse. Expect well-articulated rock-posturing, before part five finds us exploding in an orgy of alternative release models, innovative case studies and an unerring optimism for a recording industry who’ll eventually realise that as music fans, all we really want is our favourite artists to release great music as often as possible.

    Brisbane-based Andrew McMillen writes for several Australian music publications. He can be found on Twitter (@NiteShok) and online at http://andrewmcmillen.com/

    (Note: This is part three of an article series that first appeared in weekly Australian music industry magazine The Music Network issue #746, July 13th 2009. Read the rest of the series: part onepart two, part four, and part five)

  • The Music Network story: ‘For The Record: An Album Retrospective Part 2’, July 2009

    In the second piece of a five-part puzzle, Andrew McMillen examines the digitally-inspired shift in consumer habits away from the long-established album format. This week, Andrew highlights portable playlist control as a key component in the reduced reliance placed upon the album by music consumers.

    In last week’s column, I discussed the history of the album format, from the revolutionary, 45 minute-long LP through to the rising costs of compact discs. Now, take your imagination on a mental walk to your music collection. Stand before the shelves and admire your beloved classics, your blinding debuts, your middling sophomores, your utter disappointments, and the hidden atrocities that you’re embarrassed to have purchased.

    There’s an enormous nostalgia value attached to your record collection, whether in actual LP format or CDs. Few cultural topics are as divisive and subjective as one’s music taste. I’m certainly not writing off the value of the album in its entirety; that’d be madness. But why is it that you fondly fondle some albums, and not others? To use a cricketing metaphor: why do some releases hit you for six, while others barely make the length of the pitch?

    So, what'll it be? Barenaked Ladies or Pink Floyd? (photo credit flickr user gsimmonsonca)To elaborate on the latter example: picture the average album you’d buy from a store – perhaps not in this era, since both CD shelf space and CD merchants continue to dwindle – but ten years ago. Hypothetically, the disc is likely to be front-loaded with some great songs. They’re the ones that you’re likely to have heard before you bought the album. These strategically-placed songs are the ones that either – or both – the band and record label wanted you to hear first and enjoy first.

    Then you’d get to the second half of the album and, more than likely, you’d find a dramatic reduction in the quality of songwriting. As with any conversation regarding music, this is an entirely subjective topic of discussion, but there’s not a music fan reading who hasn’t experienced the phenomenon of an album’s proverbial tail failing to wag.

    As I wrote last week, the recorded music industry has revolved around the album for decades. Record deals, release schedules, pricing structure, the touring cycle, the catchy lead single, album reviews; these choreographed industry institutions are all funneled toward the end goal of selling albums. Music consumers were tied to the album format as a force of habit, since it was by far the most convenient method to listen to music. In the LP era, it was easier to let an album play from beginning to end, rather than painstakingly searching for the groove that contained the beginning of your favourite tracks.

    But portability heralded a substantial change in listening habits; the now-ubiquitous MP3 audio compression algorithm was a mere twinkle in German audio scientists’ eyes when Sony released the Walkman to the public in 1979. The device used cassette tapes, which allowed listeners to use headphones to play audio recordings while on the move. This led to label-released albums and singles finding a wide audience, and the proliferation of home taping from sources such as the radio, television, and your existing record collection. The ‘mixtape’ was born!

    The Walkman’s successor, Sony’s Discman, was released in 1984. The CD-based player allowed a greater freedom from the comparably imprecise Walkman method of fast-forwarding and rewinding through a cassette to find your favourite tracks. But the device was still tied to the concept of the album: while songs could be played in a ‘random’ order – an important precursor to Apple’s iPod Shuffle – it could only handle a disc at a time.

    Forward-thinking, back-looking. (photo credit flickr user Neil101)That listening habit was exploded when CD burning technology allowed listeners to compile the circular equivalent of mixtapes, without the cassette-associated fuss. As the audio filetype known as MP3 became easier for the masses to acquire online, consumer attitudes to music further deviated from the past when the first digital audio players became available in the late 1990s.

    Commonly known as MP3 players, these devices allowed a user to transfer CDs encoded in the MP3 audio filetype onto a portable hard drive that could play the files. For the first time, a listener could store their favourite songs in a portable format that could be ordered on-the-fly, as desired. No rewinding or fast-forwarding, no moving parts; control had been placed into the fan’s hands.

    Several unremarkable forays into the digital audio player market from Rio and Compaq set the stage for Apple, whose first generation, exclusively Mac-compatible iPod debuted in October 2001. A Windows-friendly version of the device followed in 2002; frequently-released incremental iterations have boosted its worldwide sales in excess of 210 million, according to the Associated Press.

    Apple’s success in the digital audio player market can be attributed to their user-friendly design and savvy marketing. Their devices satisfied a demand for portable music that’d gathered momentum since the Walkman’s debut. The twin Apple successes of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store – which will be covered in greater depth next week – are evidence that listeners prize portable playlist control, after decades of passively absorbing albums from start to end.

    This newfound control is central to understanding the shift from albums as the key organising principle behind music dissemination. Industry analyst Bob Lefsetz wrote on his Lefsetz Letter website in August 2006: “The track has been disengaged from the album. The label wants an album budget, producers, a full-length that they can charge in the neighborhood of ten dollars wholesale for. No matter that no radio station goes deep and neither do the fans.”

    He’s hinting at the killer-versus-filler argument that’s as old as the industry itself. While there’ll always be pleasure gained by experiencing a classy, calculated collection of songs from beginning to end – see Perth post-hardcore act Eleventh He Reaches London‘s 2009 release, for example – writers like Lefsetz and myself argue that the record industry’s unending fascination with the album as the definitive musical product is misleading and erroneous.

    The record industry’s perceived market expectations are the driving force behind the unending push for more albums. This wouldn’t be problematic – for artists, labels, or listeners – if real supply met perceived demand. Instead, album sales have declined worldwide, while sales of individual songs – key singles often released to radio so as to promote an album – continue to climb.

    Oh god, get it off me! (photo credit flickr user pinkbelt)In 2009, artists shouldn’t automatically sprint toward the album endpoint as a result of historical programming. Their creative output shouldn’t be stretched to meet the 45 minute/12 track (whichever comes first) expectation, just so that the parties involved can proudly call it an album. In an era where more music is being written, recorded and performed each day than at any other point in history, an artist shouldn’t throw together words, chords and beats just to meet an expectation built upon a decades-old concept.

    The question that I put forth is simple: why continue to push acts toward the goal of the album release, instead of working with artists to determine the most appropriate method of releasing their recorded work? Next week, I’ll further investigate the divide between the recording industry’s historical expectations and current consumer habits.

    Brisbane-based Andrew McMillen writes for several Australian music publications. He can be found on Twitter (@NiteShok) and online at http://andrewmcmillen.com/

    (Note: This is part two of an article series that first appeared in weekly Australian music industry magazine The Music Network issue #745, July 6th 2009. Read the rest of the series: part onepart threepart four and part five)

  • Bob Lefsetz On Gladwell’s Goliath-Killers

    The latest Lefsetz Letter is awesome. Bob discusses music and one of my favourite authors; how could I not read it?

    I quote freely from the letter below. I’ve added a layer of links to help you out, and highlighted some particularly good bits. Enjoy.

    […] We met at the restaurant at the appointed time.  It was me, Craig, Felice, Malcolm Gladwell…and a woman Malcolm was waiting for.

    […] And when we finally sat down at the table, I got a vibe…  We were going to leave our identities at the door, this was going to be a friends evening.  There’s no way to alienate a celebrity more than delving into their work, they oftentimes become uptight and raise a barrier, which is never ever lowered.

    […] And then dinner was finished.  And I had an internal debate.  Should I ask my one big question, the one that had been haunting me for months, whether you were fucked if you switched gears and entered a new territory, after devoting 10,000 hours to one?

    I took the risk.

    The change was stunning.  Suddenly, this wiry Canadian turned into “Malcolm Gladwell”.  The gentleman you see on television, the confident storyteller.  Malcolm said you got credit, that the hours were transferable, because those who devoted this amount of time to a pursuit were self-selecting.

    BINGO!

    In other words, it’s hard, and lonely, to put in 10,000 hours.  You’ve seen the Olympic athletes on TV, they send a crew to shoot footage prior to the quadrennial games and the sportsman or woman is running down an abandoned highway in the middle of summer, shvitzing up enough sweat to fill a swimming pool.  If you want to be great, you have to not only work, but sacrifice.  You can’t spend endless hours somnambulant in front of the TV screen, you can’t go out partying every night.  You’ve got to dedicate yourself to your pursuit.  Which is what Malcolm did.

    He used to be a reporter for the “Washington Post“.  For a decade.  He told us about dictating a story, exactly how it appeared in print, upon deadline.  Coldly, calmly, Malcolm spoke into the telephone.  He didn’t say he couldn’t perform, he didn’t freak out.  Hell, he didn’t even think about the challenge.  He’d been groomed for it.  By himself, by his experience.

    Then Felice asked Malcolm about his TED speech.

    Malcolm winced.  He said he was so much better now.  He’d learned that what an audience wanted first and foremost was story.  This reminded me of Don Hewitt speaking of “60 Minutes”.  That’s what he said the success of the show was based on, storytelling.

    In other words, it’s not that hard to assemble the facts.  But how can you convey them in a way that intrigues your audience?

    Malcolm went on to tell us a story he’d been relaying to groups, about David vs. Goliath.  How David can always beat the giant, if he puts in the effort.  I asked him to globalize this concept, to the economic crisis, but Malcolm begged off and the dinner was over.  But what Malcolm stated remained with me.  Was it possible, could David truly beat Goliath?

    Goliath is the establishment.  Which has a set of rules to keep itself in power.  But if you’re willing to work really hard, you can beat the system.  But it requires a lot of effort.

    Today I got an e-mail from the “New Yorker“.  I’ve been a subscriber since the seventies.  I don’t read every line, there wouldn’t be enough time to read “Automobile” or “Ski” or “National Geographic Explorer” or “Vanity Fair”.  But I always comb the table of contents, looking for interesting nuggets.

    And sometimes, especially on planes, or in stolen moments, I start in on an article that appears unappealing but ends up riveting me, because it’s so well-written!  That’s what most magazines lack.  They’ll give you the information, but it’s delivered in a pedestrian style that doesn’t make your heart sing or cause a lump in your throat to form.  Great writing should be able to be about ANYTHING!

    So I’m perusing the “New Yorker” e-mail and the first article listed is “Malcolm Gladwell on how David Beats Goliath“. […] The piece begins with the tale of how an unknowledgeable coach of a girl’s basketball team brought his unskilled charges to the national championship, by challenging the accepted notions of how to play the game.  Rather than start with skills, the coach focused on the full-court press, conditioning was more important to this cause than years of training the girls missed and could not replace.

    Like Napster.  All night coding sessions by college students brought down an entire industry.  The labels had a formula, all boiling down to the overpriced CD.  But if someone did what was seen as socially unpopular, making the music free, and put in the effort to write the program that achieved this, the labels, the Goliath in this story, were fucked.

    That’s what happened.  Those seen as powerless, not given an iota’s worth of attention, decimated the major labels.  Hell, it’s happening in all kinds of industries now.  Teams of online denizens search for gotcha moments and expose the frailties of companies.  Goliaths, like Domino’s Pizza, are caught flat-footed, they’re beaten by those they never even took seriously.

    So you can beat the major labels, you can beat most of the infrastructure in the music industry today, because these people just aren’t working that hard.  They’ve got families, they go on vacation, they like to play golf.  Whereas you’ve got nothing but time and a computer, you can work 24/7 to break your band.  And you’ve got the tools to do it!  Pro Tools.  Exhibition and distribution online.  Today’s acts can give away their music, it’s their choice.  The labels HATE them for this, the old acts HATE them for this!  John Mellencamp wants a return to the old days.  But the old days are gone.

    But at least Mellencamp put in the effort, that’s why he’s so good.

    Are you that good?

    Probably not.

    Anyone can have a MySpace page, Facebook too.  They can tweet about their gigs, can add people to mailing lists that they never asked to be put on.  But none of this covers up the music.  Have you put in enough effort such that your music is truly great?

    Lindsay Lohan didn’t.  Nor did Hilary Duff.  Britney’s a performer.  The Spice Girls are a joke.  Dr. Dre put in the hours, but so many acts working with these beat specialists have a desire to be rich and famous, but that’s about it.  Desire to make it is important, but it must be accompanied with effort, with ACHIEVEMENT!

    The Goliaths believe in top-down marketing.  It’s easy to beat them, it’s very simple.  You’ve got to start at the bottom and have patience.  They’ve got no patience, they need profits NOW!  The Goliaths believe their money will triumph, that if you build it, they can buy it.  But the Net is rife with stories of acts that have been abused by their labels.  And what can a label provide other than little listened-to radio and TV play that doesn’t move the needle.  You don’t want that, it doesn’t satiate your audience!

    You’ve got to get really good and convince fans one by one.  Not by dunning them, but by attracting them, by being so damn great.

    I didn’t read the “Tipping Point” because Malcolm called me, or because someone sent it to me, I felt the buzz.  Which is hard to manufacture.  Or, if you do manufacture it, it doesn’t last.  Now I’m a fan.  I thought “Blink” was a step down from “Tipping Point”, but “Outliers” is a complete return to form, the same way the band’s third album convinces you, the first was not a fluke, they truly are good!

    But how many bands get to a third album today?

    And, let’s not forget, Gladwell had a decade at the “Washington Post“, when his national profile was almost nil.

    He paid his dues.  He invented his own genre.  Now he’s reaping the rewards.

    Don’t complain about the system, don’t bitch that you can’t make it.  That just indicates to me that you haven’t put in enough time.  Because if you’re truly good, people will find you.  Genius is learned, you’re not born with it.  If you write a song every day and perform every night for fifteen years, you will no longer suck.  Then again, there are issues of timing.  THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES!

    Can you stay the course when times are tough?  Can you live in an apartment as opposed to a house, can you drive an old car?  Can you avoid applying to graduate school? Can you not get fucked up at night so you can work clear-headed tomorrow?  Can you not have children so you can focus on your work?

    In other words, can you work hard and SACRIFICE?

    The legends did.  I don’t see why you should get a pass.

    Actually, it doesn’t matter what I think, the public at large will decide your fate.

    The public decided radio sucked.  Decided CDs were overpriced too.

    How have the industries reacted?  Radio still has twenty two minutes of commercials an hour and the playlists are boring.  Online albums cost about as much as physical ones, even though the sound is second-rate and there are no production or shipping costs.  Do you think the public doesn’t know this?  At least Amazon was smart enough to sell Kindle books below wholesale…otherwise it doesn’t make sense!

    I’m a Gladwell fan.  He’s earned my trust.  I’d rather read his work than listen to the musings of your son/best friend/lover/college buddy who’s enlisted you in his effort to break through musically.  Great stuff always breaks through.  But right now, those willing to sacrifice, to work really hard, tend to be in the tech sphere.  We’re not getting the best and the brightest in music.  Because the Goliaths have stacked the deck in their favor.

    But this won’t last.  Enough Davids are building new acts and new systems below the old guard’s radar.  They’re going to triumph.  Just watch.

    Thanks, Bob.