Category: Music

Isn’t it bad business to sue the people you hope to sell a product too? Why is the music industry going down the path of litigation? Can they hope to succeed with this strategy?

I address these questions in my recent column for the Social Affairs Unit in the United Kingdom. You might know that an international music consortium has just started bringing lawsuits in the UK and on the continent as well, thus prompting the essay.

Here is the bottom line:

I see the music companies as trying to hold back a new commercial norm. Specifically, the music companies are trying to maintain the old norm that you should always pay for music.

Two years ago most [American] downloaders did not know that their activities were illegal. Few uploaders felt guilty about making large numbers of songs available for free on the Internet. It was viewed as akin to lending your CDs out to your friends, except that the “friends” here were both anonymous and large in number. “Art should be free,” right?

Since the United States lawsuits, there has been a subtle shift of opinion. Many people, especially those beyond their teenage years, are now proud of not being downloaders. They brandish their Apple iPods with pride. The cultural climate has shifted to the point where people, even if they download, are embarrassed to admit as such. Only in the under-twenty crowd is illegal downloading still a badge of honor. And many of these children now face (admittedly imperfect) regulation from their parents.

The music industry knows that the long run will bring a network of free music. It knows that free music may have illegal status, a “grey” status, white status (recorded from the radio), or perhaps be pirate (from abroad) but not illegal in the actionable sense. But there will be two networks, a pay network and a free network.

The pay network stands a good chance of competing against the free network. Perhaps the pay network can offer better sound quality, tie-ins (concert tickets, T-shirts, etc.), upgrades and maintenance service, better information such as album liner notes, song selection services, easier interface, and other benefits. The future course of technology is difficult to predict. Nonetheless it is easy to see why a pay network will have a greater ability to finance these goodies than will a free network.

The music companies – present and future suppliers of the pay network – do not wish to face a ten year period where everyone is used to getting music for free. They do not want an entire generation to grow up thinking of music as a free commodity. They do not want hackers and illegal downloaders to become established as folk heroes.

Once commercial norms become established, they are difficult to dislodge. We are all used to breathing air for free. Imagine the response if suddenly we had to pay for air as we now pay for ice cream cones. Maybe the air would have a better quality and the price would be very low. Still I predict there would be a public outcry. It would be very difficult, in the legal and public arenas, to set up a business to charge people for breathing clean air.

Similarly, bread riots were a common phenomenon of the twentieth century in the Third World. When bread subsidies were removed or cut, the price of bread would rise. The new price of bread still might be lower than would be found in many other poor countries. Still rioting might occur. People cared not only about the absolute level of the bread price, but the level of the price relative to what they had been expecting.

The music companies know they are in for a rough ride. They will never win the competition on the basis of price, but they hope to win on the basis of quality. They feel they need commercial norms on their side. And this means that downloading cannot be allowed to proceed unanswered and unhindered. They cannot live with a norm that music should be free.

Note that the music companies are demanding far smaller penalties than they might hope to win in a formal lawsuit. This is not out of benevolence to the illegal downloaders. The lawsuits are about spreading the idea that downloading is wrong and illegal, not about inflicting the maximum possible punitive damage. Think of the lawsuits as one way to buy space in the newspaper, but without paying advertising rates. And the company gets the journalists – a more credible outside source – to be the ones reporting that downloading is illegal. Too high a penalty would make the companies look mean.

I am not here to attack or defend the behavior of the music companies, but rather to explain it.

Wondrous Strange, the new biography of late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould is splendid, even in a relatively crowded field. If you’re not tuned into the obsession, try Gould’s rendition of Bach’s Partitia #1, in B flat major; this is perhaps my favorite classical music recording of all time. Don’t forget these either.

Yes, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys has finally released his this one the most accurate and interesting. Here is a broader round-up of opinion. Now if we could only get Roger McGuinn to finish his projected two-disc space opera Gene Tryp…

The DVD format is taking over the classical music world, especially opera:

Sales regularly hit 5,000 units, the standard break-even figure for classical CDs, and go as high as 40,000 worldwide, says Klaus Heymann, the Hong Kong-based head of Naxos International. Also, the hard-core classical community doesn’t have to wait around for the video companies to finish issuing meaningless Luciano Pavarotti galas before going on to the real stuff.

Major classical labels initially hesitated to jump into DVD, so smaller, specialized concerns took the medium directly into niche marketing. Upfront “authoring costs” (translating video to the small disc) were as low as $2,000 a few years ago, says Gilbert, and are now half that.

Once a nightmare of regional formats, DVDs are increasingly universal (look for the “0” in the code box), though savvy consumers still need a specially doctored player to read all codes on discs available on European Web sites. Disc prices, which range from $10 to $35, are still unstandardized. The Deutsche Oper’s Die Meistersinger is $39, but the Australian Opera’s better cast sells for as little as $25.

Whatever the reason, even the most expensive DVD operas cost less than sound-only, full-price CD sets (emphasis added).

Here is the full story.

The answer is Queen’s Greatest Hits, and Freddie Mercury is the lead singer. The accompanying booklet “tells Queen fans that Bohemian Rhapsody is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution he calls God in Arabic, “Bismillah”, and so regains his soul from Satan.”

Here is the full story. It is reported that the album, shorn of a few love songs, is selling well.

1. Rodrigo, Concerto for Guitar. I used to think this piece was classical radio fluff, short, lightweight, and accessible. I now see it is as a precursor of modern ambient music. So much of the Spanish acoustic guitar tradition makes sense when heard through this perspective.

2. Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. A sprawling mess, to be sure. Hardly anyone is drawn to the melodies here. Is this his worst and least listenable symphony, or the beginning of a new Mahlerian sound world? If you want to hear it swift and severe, try the Boulez recording as well.

3. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and the Piano Concerti. I put these on immediately after returning from Mexico. The slow movement of the Emperor Concerto is one of Beethoven’s most beautiful moments. And could Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who plays on this CD, be the greatest pianist in the world today? Try his Ligeti Etudes or Debussy as well.

4. Late Elliott Carter. Carter remains prolific beyond his ninetieth birthday. His late short pieces, dryly contrapuntal, are usually written for a very small number of instruments. I used to think of Carter is an amazing composer in his early years (e.g., Sonata for Cello and Piano), but who later stagnated. This picture could not be more wrong. Over the last ten years his reputation has skyrocketed, and rightly so.

5. Handel’s Theodora, conducted by William Christie. Much of Handel is too earthy and straightforward for my tastes, but this is the best Handel recording I’ve heard, up there with S. Richter doing the keyboard sonatas. Here is an excellent blog post on why Handel operas and oratorio are less boring than the modern listener might think.

6. William Byrd, Complete Keyboard music, by Davitt Moroney. The scrunchiest parts are the best, and seven CDs are not too much. Byrd has one of the best claims running for “most underrated composer,” try also the vocal music.

And when Yana gets home from visiting her high school friends, I hear a great deal of Beck, arguably the best popular musical artist of the 1990s, with apologies to Kurt Cobain.

Do you know the old saying: “Music is enough for one life, but one life is never enough for music”?

1. Looking at the Billboard Top 20 for rap music, 59 brands have been mentioned 645 times in songs so far this year.

2. Very high end and very low end brands are the most popular mentions.

3. The top brand so far this year in rap songs is Hennessey, a kind of cognac. Cadillac comes in second.

4. Mercedes, a previous favorite, now has fallen behind Cadillac, Rolls-Royce, and Jaguar.

5. Autos, fashion, and beverages provide the brands most likely to be mentioned in rap songs.

6. Cristal, an extremely expensive champaigne, may be losing appeal because it is now so closely identified with hip-hop.

7. Polariod, in contrast, has benefited greatly from rap music. The product has been hurt by digital photography, but Outkast sang “Shake it like a Polaroid picture” in its hit “Hey Ya.”

That is all from the Mexican edition of the Miami Herald, August 26, sorry no link available from here. Agenda Inc., a San Francisco marketing firm, compiled the data.

Catching Blondie’s reunion tour broadcast at 4 in the morning wasn’t an option for XM satellite radio subscriber and single father Scott MacLean.

“I was missing concerts that were being broadcasted when I was asleep or out,” he said.

So the 35-year-old computer programmer from Ottawa, Ontario, wrote a piece of software that let him record the show directly onto his PC hard drive while he snoozed.

The software, TimeTrax, also neatly arranged the individual songs from the concert, complete with artist name and song title information, into MP3 files.

Then MacLean started selling the software, putting him in the thick of a potential legal battle pitting technically savvy fans against a company protecting its alliance – and licensing agreements – with the music industry.

MacLean says he is simply seeking to make XM Radio – the largest U.S. satellite radio service with over 2.1 million members paying $10 a month for about 120 channels – a little more user-friendly.

And get this:

XM has said it plans to launch in October a new car and home radio receiver that lets users pause and rewind live broadcasts. XM also has a deal to stream its broadcasts over next-generation TiVo recorders.

The bottom line: Who needs illegal downloads? At some point radio and other media will become “thick” enough that you can just pluck the song you want. Probably this will prove well within the reach of the law. And once storage becomes essentially free (are we so far from this right now?), you will buy or download a program to record a (near) universal music library for yourself.

Here is the full story, which includes a link to the relevant software.

Kansas City radio station Mix 93.3 FM, which threatened its listeners to play Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart” continuously until the station had met their goal of $20,000 to contribute to the travel expenses of Courtney McCool’s (U.S. Olympic Gymnast) family.

The station started with $6,000 and raised $14,000 in a little under four and a half hours, during which they played the song 48 times in a row.

I am surprised it took that long.

Thanks to jaded economist Craig Depken.

There was a time when teenagers did not dominate music markets, but was this for the better?

For some perspective, I pulled together the top-selling music of 1951, 1961, and 1971.

1951: The soundtrack for “Guys and Dolls.” Mario Lanza. Yma Sumac. The Weavers. Les Paul. Tony Bennett.

1961: Bert Kaempfert. The soundtrack for “Exodus.” Lawrence Welk. Judy Garland. But also: Elvis, Connie Francis, Brenda Lee, and Paul Anka.

1971: George Harrison. “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Janis Joplin. Sly and the Family Stone. Michael Jackson. Carole King.

Teen tastes, in other words, weren’t present on the 1951 charts at all; took up only half the list’s space in 1961; and didn’t triumph entirely until 1971.

Les Paul I like, but overall kudos to the teenagers. The list is from the ever-excellent www.2blowhards.com, and we welcome the new addition Vanessa Blowhard to the blog; here is the post itself.

Addendum: Did you know that the word “teenager” only popped up in the dictionary in 1942?