Monthly Archives: March 2014

A to Z of Making It, Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Influenced, Music, My Stories

Music Business Rules Found In Songs

On Motley Crue’s 2008 song ‘Welcome To The Machine’ they provided a few general rules about the recording business and the machine that is the music business.

Rule Number 1: “Sign on the x to sell your soul”.

Yep, if you want a major record deal, prepare to sell out. Major labels want hit acts. Hit acts need to play to a formula. The labels are not interested in the Mumford and Sons or Kings Of Leon outliers. They want the acts that will sing the songs written by a committee.

Rule Number 2: “It’s so automatic, Hocking broken plastic, Royalties you’ll never know”.

Yep, the good old measure of success. Record sales. Still used by the labels as a barometer of success in 2014. And the labels still employ creative accounting when it comes to royalty payments. Dollars for the label, pennies for the artist.

Rule Number 3: “Give your ass like a whore, Once you take a hit, You need more more more”.

Once an artist tastes success, they will go back to the same restaurant over and over again. Because we all want to be loved.

Rule Number 4: “Welcome to the machine, Once it sucks you in you’ll never leave, Grind you up spit you out, After all you’re just a piece of meat”.

You can make a memorial wall as big as the Great Wall Of China that has the name of artists who the recording business used and discarded.

Rule Number 5: “Sell out to the rats, Make em rich make em fat”.

Record label executives earn a lot more than the artists that actually make them that money. Is this the way it should be?

On Motley Crue’s 1999 song ‘Fake’ they seem to provide a few more general rules about the recording business.

Rule Number 6 (supporting Rule Number 1 and 2): “Sold my soul while you sold records, I have been your slave forever.”

Yep, when you sign away your copyrights to the record label and then they lobby hard to have those copyrights extended 70 years after your death. It sure sounds like a slave forever.

Rule Number 7 (supporting Rule Number 5): “What are you fat cats doing anyway?, Take our money and flush it down the drain.”

Yep, fat cats fly private and make the Forbes Rich List.

Ugly Kid Joe asked “Mr Recordman” if he knew who they were or if he gave a damn about them or if he was purely there for the dough. Based on their career trajectory, the answer was obvious. Mr Recordman didn’t give a damn about them once they stopped being “commercially viable”

Rule Number 8 – Mr Recordman doesn’t know who you are. Look at the band “Winger”. When Reb Beach called the label after the Beavis and Butthead episode hit TV screens, the label claimed they never knew a band called Winger.

Rule Number 9 comes from Disturbed and their song “Sons Of Plunder”.

Rule Number 9: “You say you’ve found yourself a new sound, one hundred more all have the same sound”

Yep, like the thousand of hard rock bands that came out in the late nineties. Yep, like all the alternative/grunge bands that came out towards the end. Yep, like all the metalcore bands that are out right now and all of them claim to be different, yet they all sound the same.

The song Chainsaw Charlie from WASP is littered with music business rules. The first three lines, “Will you gamble your life?, Sign right here on the dotted line, It’s the one you’ve waited for all of your life” fall into Rule Number 1. Then the lyrics of “And tomorrow when I’m gone, Will they whore my image on?” brings us to Rule Number 10.

Rule Number 10: The record label will forever whore your image on after they have dropped you or after you have departed this Earth. There is a lot of money to make in death.

Rule Number 11: “We’ll sell your flesh by the pound you’ll go, A whore of wrath just like me, We’ll sell ya wholesale, we’ll sell your soul, Strap on your six string and feed our machine.”

This is relevant today when even the image of the artist is owned by the record label in 360 degree contracts.

Rule Number 12: “Welcome to the morgue boy, Where the music comes to die”

Songs written by a committee. It’s soulless, however it sells.

Rule Number 13: “Ah, trust me boy, I won’t steer you wrong, If you trust me son, You won’t last very long”

Remember the advice by Ugly Kid Joe in Mr Recordman.

Rule Number 14: “The new morgue’s our factory, to grease our lies, Our machine is hungry, it needs your life”

The definition of the recording business.

Rule Number 15: “I’m the tin man, I’ve never had a heart, I’m the tin man, But I’ll make you a star”

The Record Label CEO. All promises and that tin heart doesn’t care if those promises are broken.

Savatage is another band that covers the music business in a bit of detail. Rules 16 to 18 are from the song “Jesus Saves”.

Rule Number 16: “You know Jesus he started changing, Things got really strange, He saw his tee shirts everywhere, He started missing shows, The band came down to blows, But Jesus he just didn’t care.”

Yep, it’s a tough gig keeping a band together, especially when a band member becomes the idol that the fans latch onto.

Rule Number 17: “Things got out of hand, And so he quit the band, Still the critics they would rave”

The uncontrollable egos get in the way of a great band.

Rule Number 18: “Her Him cut through the night, On those late night radio waves”

Eventually, we get old and we become “classic rock”. There is no way around out. Embrace it and play to your core audiences.

The final two rules are from the song “When The Crowds Are Gone” from Savatage.

Rule Number 19: “I don’t know where the years have gone, Memories can only last so long, Like faded photographs, forgotten songs”

Rule Number 20: “The story’s over, When the crowds are gone.”

Pretty self-explanatory.

If you’re looking to embark on a career in the game of music, then use the above as a blueprint to get you going.

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Music

Innovation V6.0 – While Spotify Innovates, The Governments And The Entertainment Industries Legislate

Van Morrison once said that “Music is spiritual. The music business is not”. How true that comment is.

Spotify recently announced the acquisition of “The Echo Nest” , a music intelligence company that will give Spotify and its users a better music discovery platform. As is the norm these days, it is technologists leading the way for the music business and in general the entertainment business at large.

When Spotify offered free mobile access, they had more sign ups in one month than the whole year prior. Spotify knows it’s all about domination. The history of the internet has shown us that. Pandora is unrivalled in the radio streaming stakes. Apples iTunes Radio is non-existent.

Labels are rolling it in from streaming services and they are not passing those extras on to the artists. That is not Spotify or Pandora’s fault. That is the labels fault. Again, if Spotify is that bad for the artist, then artists like Metallica and Motley Crue that actually own their own copyrights wouldn’t participate. But they did.

While Spotify innovates, the entertainment industries legislate, still focused on censorship and take downs.

Over at Italy, their communications watchdog has given itself a “Judge Dredd” like power. They are basically censoring websites based on a copyright infringement claim from a copyright holder and without any real judicial due process for the website involved.

Just recently, the Public Prosecutor from Italy has decided to go all “Wild West Sheriff Style” on the Internet by ordering Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) to censor dozens of websites, because he said that the websites are places that contain infringing materials. In this case, no copyright holder made any claim against these websites. Yep, it sure sounds like innovation to me.

This is how bad copyright has gotten. People believe that COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT OF MUSIC is the same thing as PROPERTY, an actual physical tangible product. And because of this viewpoint, sites that infringe on people’s copyrights are treated the same as sites that deal in stolen merchandise. When a copy is made of a song and shared, it is not theft. It is copyright infringement and it needs to be treated as such.

In recent years, studies have shown over and over again that people who share movies and music illegally are the ones that end up spending more on legal entertainment. The research is now even recognized by the “Industry Trust For IP Awareness” which is a body that includes all of the major Hollywood Studios as its members, along with the major labels in music.

The latest anti-piracy message from the IP Awareness Industry Trust is a positive one. Instead of labelling all of their customers as pirates and criminals, they are now saying that they understand people like movies and that they appreciate that people are sharing and spending money on movies. This time around they are pushing a slogan of “Moments Worth Paying For” instead of the Big Brother “You Can Click But Can’t Hide”.

Neil Gaiman is one of those people who actually is open-minded when it comes to piracy. There is a video doing the rounds from a while back (on Reddit) where Gaiman talks about piracy;

“You’re not losing sales by getting stuff out there. When I do a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people ask “What about the sales you are losing by having stuff floating out there?” I started asking the audience to raise their hands for one question — Do you have a favourite author? And they say yes and I say good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favourite author by being lent a book put up your hand. Then anybody who discovered their favourite author by walking into a book story and buying a book. And it’s probably about 5-10%, if that, of the people who discovered their favourite author who is the person they buy everything of and they buy the hardbacks. And they treasure the fact they’ve got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it. That’s how they found their favourite author. And that’s really all this is; it’s people lending books.”

Let’s rephrase those questions in terms of music. Even musicians out there should ask themselves the same question.

Do they have a favourite artist?

How did they discover their favourite artist? Was it by buying their music or was it by someone sharing the music with them or was it by someone lending them a CD, a mix tape, an LP or an iPod full of mp3’s or by someone talking up the artist.

How many people discovered their favourite artist by walking into a record shop and buying a CD without even hearing it? Or in today’s world, how many people discovered their favourite artist by going onto Spotify and listening to music of someone they haven’t heard about.

Gaiman gets it. He is a realist. Hey, look over in Japan. They actually have a rental policy in place for fans of music. People hire/lend the CD, take it home, rip it and then return it for another. Personally, Spotify is a better alternative, however rights holders don’t allow it to exist at this point in time.

Finally, the great land down under, Australia is in the news again. Of course as a country founded by convicts, we have a proud history of seeing higher copyright infringement rates thanks to the lack of legitimate and affordable options.

So we don’t have Netflix and because of that we have resorted to using VPNs to mask our location and subscribe to Netflix anyway.

Of course, the free to air TV stations, the pay TV station Foxtel (who is owned by News Corp) and Quickflix along with the News Corp owned “The Australian” news outlet are labelling these paying users of Netflix as “PIRATES”. Yep that’s right. We are paying for a service that is affordable (something that Quickflix doesn’t know anything about) by masking our IP address so that we can access it and we are still labelled as pirates.

So there you have it, another wonderful week has come and gone, that shows that the Entertainment Industries still don’t get it and technologist and open-minded creators do get it.

http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2014/03/06/spotify-acquires-the-echo-nest

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140305/10000226442/italys-public-prosecutor-orders-isps-to-block-dozens-pirate-websites-just-because-he-said-so.shtml

http://torrentfreak.com/pirates-movie-industrys-valuable-customers-140304/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140303/11511026409/australian-broadcasters-netflix-competitors-pout-because-netflix-hasnt-banned-vpn-users-yet.shtml

http://comicsalliance.com/neil-gaiman-piracy-lending-books/

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140303/11511026409/australian-broadcasters-netflix-competitors-pout-because-netflix-hasnt-banned-vpn-users-yet.shtml

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Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Music, My Stories, Unsung Heroes

Mick Mars and Generation Swine

Mick Mars recently stated that he almost left Motley Crue during the “Generation Swine” sessions and that still to this day, he hates that album.

“Generation Swine” had two major things. The return of Vince Neil and the move to an industrial electronic sound. It was meant to be called “Personality #9” with John Corabi on vocals. Record label pressure won out in the end and Vince Neil was back in. From a record label perspective, the $3 million cost/loss of the self titled album was still fresh on their profit and loss statements.

The Crue started working on the follow-up to the self-titled album in 1995. In an interview from March 1995 Nikki Sixx mentioned that as the songs are written, they will be road tested at smaller venues under different band names. It was a back to the seventies approach, when bands used to debut new songs on the road before committing them to tape in a studio. That is why so many songs from the seventies worked well in a live setting.

I have seen Motley Crue perform a few songs from live from “Generation Swine”. “Afraid” goes down really well. “Glitter” not so much.

“A Rat Like Me” and “Let Us Prey” went down great. The funny thing about that is, “A Rat Like Me” and “Let Us Prey” were recorded live by the band during the sessions. Songs that are easy to record and write, do end up as great live songs.

The biggest Achilles heel to Generation Swine is the lack of the hit song for the genre that Motley Crue are in. When I say hit, I don’t mean number 1 on the Billboard Charts. I mean a song that the fans of the genre can latch onto. Like the song “Kick Start My Heart”. It wasn’t a hit on the Billboard Charts, however in rock circles it was a song that all the rock heads and the metal heads could latch onto. The same for “Dr Feelgood”. Moving into the self-titled album, the songs that should have led the way didn’t. “Hammered” and “Till Death Do Us Part” should have been the war cry instead of “Hooligans Holiday” and “Smoke The Sky”.

The sad thing about the state of the recording business in the Nineties was the need for bands to deliver that “genre hit song” that could crossover into the mainstream. The seventies bands didn’t think about these kinds of things. That is why they all built a career and still to this day, they can rock and roll. When the Seventies bands rolled into a studio, they didn’t need blockbuster style budgets. They didn’t need to write songs in the studio. They recorded what they played live already.

Deep Purple played “Highway Star” for at least 12 months before recording it. Same as Ted Nugent and “Stranglehold”. The list goes on, however today’s rock star doesn’t need to pay their dues on the live circuit. It’s a different approach. The band “Heartist” built their following online before they even played their first sold out concert that had record labels and managers in attendance.

Selling recordings is a high-risk business. Even the RIAA has stated that approximately 90% of the records that are released by major recording labels fail to make a profit. Profit meaning large advances less creative accounting when it comes to recouping royalties.

Regardless of the accounting employed, selling albums is a high risk game. And that is something that the record labels are not telling people about. Instead the RIAA screams PIRACY. Instead the RIAA screams ENFORCEMENT.

In the end, this quote was something that Nikki Sixx had to say about the album during its release cycle;

“We never played the game. In fact, we believe if it’s working, it should be broken.”

A truer saying I haven’t heard. Something that a lot of artists today have forgotten.

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Copyright, Music, Piracy, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit

Copyright In The Modern Day. It’s Not About Driving Innovation Anymore.

It’s all about stopping copyright infringement. It’s all about shaking down internet users. It’s all about a ridiculous and “out of touch with reality” penalty system. For example, if a user downloads one song, the RIAA have argued that the copyright holders are out of pocket between $20 to $10,000. It’s a huge mark-up from its iTunes price of $1US.

When discussions are had on Copyright, it’s all about the enforcement. It’s all about creating a monopoly. The ones that sit on the innovation fence are shouted down to from the ones that control/hold the Copyrights.

There is a great article over at The Conversation website. Go read it. Journalist David Glance has a lot of viewpoints that I agree with.

The thing is, people have been “copyright infringers” since day dot. Anyone that remembers cassette tapes, will tell you how they used to copy songs from recordings onto a cassette tape. James Hetfield used to copy Lars Ulrich’s record collection onto cassettes.

We used to copy songs from the radio onto cassettes. We used to copy movies from TV onto VHS cassettes. Then we got even more creative and hooked up two videos at once to make copies of the latest releases. With the advent of the CD and blank discs, we started making mixed CD’s. When Napster exploded, people flocked to it.

Richie Sambora was a guest host on “The Panel”, a TV Current Affairs/News show on Channel Ten in Australia. This happened last week. There was a segment on Spotify and how streaming has led a slump in music sales. One of the members of the panel asked Richie Sambora, how many records has he sold. Richie replied back with “about 130 to 140 million records”. Richie then further stated that piracy was big even in the days before the internet, as pirated Bon Jovi LPs, cassettes and CD’s sold like hotcakes in Asian, African and Eastern European countries.

So I did some research on this and I came across the Moscow Peace Festival. The Moscow Peace Festival took place in 1989. Hard Rock and Heavy Metal music was hard to get “legally” in Russia, however it didn’t stop over 100,000 people from attending the show to watch Skid Row, Ozzy Osbourne, Scorpions, Motley Crue and Bon Jovi perform.

All of those fans of music must have gotten their music from somewhere. Actually musical sales in the USSR at that point in time didn’t even exist. Hell, it wasn’t until 2010 that the National Federation of Phonograph Producers (NFPF) was established in Russia. And they don’t even have a website. All of this shows how serious the legal music business is treated in Russia.

All of this supports the argument that we are all copyright infringers. Governments need to look at how people adopt these laws and change them to suit. Instead the Governments look at who puts money in their pocket and add more bad laws to existing bad laws.

Australian Attorney-General George Brandis has got no idea what is happening in the real world or how the internet works. His comments show that he is just a puppet for the Movie Industry Lobby Machine. Check out some of his comments;

To pirate a video or a song without paying the fee for it through iTunes, and so on, is an act of theft, it’s pure and simple.

Um, no. To infringe on a copyright is not an act of theft, as the mp3 is still with iTunes. No one has stolen it. What has happened is that multiple copies of that mp3 are in circulation right now. People pirated Adele’s 21 album, however all of that piracy didn’t stop it from moving over 10 million units in the US because no one stole anything. They infringed on an artist’s copyright. Something that fans of music have been doing since day dot.

When people, pirate “Game Of Thrones”, they don’t steal the original master copy from HBO. What they do is download a copy that someone made from the actual legal broadcast.

The ISPs, in my view, do need to take some responsibility for this because they provide the facility which enables this to happen.

Um. No. ISP’s don’t need to take responsibility for bad business sense and business models designed on controlling distribution. To provide a few different analogies, should the gun manufacturers take responsibility for their guns killing people. Should car manufacturers be responsible when their cars kill other people due to high speeds. Should the knife manufacturers be responsible when knives are used for violence. Should gas bottle manufacturers be held responsible for when their gas bottles are used in drug laboratories. Should alcohol brewing companies be held responsible for all the alcohol fuelled violence.

It is easy to lay the blame on others. However it is the record labels that need to take responsibility. They still don’t get it. People want FREE music. Spotify provides a service that is free, however it is still seen as restrictive and people still go to other torrent sites to download content. And then the recording industry claims that these sites make so much money from running ads on their site. If that is the case, then why isn’t the recording industry offering the same service and make that same money.

They don’t want to, because that would mean that their margins will shrink a little bit more and that is all they think about. The NOW. What is the plan for the future? A small return today, could lead to a greater return in 5 year’s time.

The fact is that people don’t have a right to download pirate copies of songs or movies or television programs because the people who make those programs or other items have a right of property in them. The way artists earn their living is through royalties and that’s the way they are remunerated for what they do.

Um no, artists have never made a living from royalties. The record labels have. Artists previously made a living from touring, licensing, merchandise and large advance payments. In today’s world, the main revenue streams are disrupted, however other revenue streams have opened up.

http://theconversation.com/copyright-reform-will-drive-innovation-not-trying-to-stop-the-internet-pirates-23286

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140225/12341626346/australian-copyright-reform-goes-into-reverse-fair-use-out-three-strikes.shtml

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Copyright, Music, My Stories

Is Spotify Suffering From The “Newness Wears Off” Syndrome?

You know the drill. A new technology comes out and eventually it will start to get some traction. Then the word will spread about and everybody flocks to it. It’s new, it’s cool, it’s hip and its innovative. Then when it is at its peak, the people who testified for the new tech, will abandon it, looking for something new and better.

Look at the history of technology innovations and you will see a pattern.

MySpace, Facebook, Twitter are three such platforms that came, peaked and right now are suffering an identity crisis.

MySpace is finished.

Facebook got traction because it connected people in a way that MySpace couldn’t. Now, all of these connected people need to deal with the marketing of products, advertisers, like requests, fake friend requests and spam.

Twitter is well, Twitter. With so many people tweeting or having their tweets connected to their Facebook Posts or their blog posts, everything is getting lost in the mix. When a big news item hits, Twitter is the platform to go to, because people who are directly involved in these big events are the ones that are tweeting.

So what about Spotify. It has been around for a while now and in the last 3 years it set up base in a number of large music markets like Australia, Canada and of course the US.

The people tried it. Some have stuck to it. Some have abandoned it. The ones that speak out against it have never used it.

With the rise of Beats Music, expect the young ones (kids born from 1991 onwards) to go off and explore it. They will give it traction. Then the mainstream will talk about it, trump it up and the young ones will go into something else while the old guard moves in. Like Neil Young who seems to think that people really want large music files taking up large amount of space. Sort of like Facebook. It was the mecca for the youth. Then their parents joined and the youth bailed. No one wants to be friends with their parents on Facebook.

In relation to music, bands on record deals were real slow in adopting Facebook, while the independent bands started using it ASAP. I don’t even have a Facebook account anymore and when I go onto it, it is purely to see what my favourite bands are up to and what people are talking about. In a way it has become like a go to website.

Spotify however needs a game changer. Sort of like how the move to APPS changed the iTunes store. And it’s all about the FREE. Fans of music showed the world that they want FREE music to listen to. And don’t say that FREE doesn’t work. How the hell did Free To Air TV exist and grow over the last 60 years.

Beats Music needs people to vouch for it, promote it. And when people finally get around to using it, it needs to deliver. However, for the kids, YouTube does the job. And that’s the world we live in. One that has all the information that we require at our fingertips and its FREE. Notice the emphasis on FREE again. The public spoke out big time when Napster crashed the party. Our friends testified about it and then we testified about it to others. No one even raised the question of copyright infringement because it was so damn cool.

So what is cool today?

I am all over the shop when it comes to music. I still purchase CD’s from the bands I like. This is more or less done from Amazon and I get the AutoRip feature with it, so then I download the mp3 version of the album to place on my iPhone. I stream music on Spotify. I refer to YouTube. My kids are YouTube fanatics.

And the funny thing is that I don’t use iTunes anymore. Who would have thought that day would have come. And that is what Spotify needs to think about it. Now that the newness has rubbed off, what’s next. Consolidation. How can you consolidate when the modern paradigm is DISRUPTION?

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A to Z of Making It, Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit

The Labels Want To Be The Good Guys

The labels want to be the good guys. They really do. However their lobby group the RIAA does not carry itself it in public in a manner that is acceptable. They put across an image that all the labels are focused solely on the now and what money can be made now. They put across an image that all the labels have no interest in planning for the future. Then the labels follow suit, flying the bullshit flag from the RIAA.

Regardless of the labels motives and business sense, they will survive.

Read the financial reports on Universal Music Group. Spotify has propped up their bottom line and that bottom line will get better each year. And with money, comes power and relationships. So how do the major metal and rock labels rate in relation to influence and relationships.

Century Media Records and Nuclear Blast are still independent labels. While Century Records lost their cash cow “In This Moment” to Atlantic, Nuclear Blast gained a new cash cow in “Machine Head”. Looking at the rosters, Nuclear Blast has surrounded themselves with a stronger group of artists however Century Media are the ones out there trying to identify new talent. Both labels will be around for a long time.

Frontiers have become a major player in the classic rock, melodic rock and hard rock scene. Frontiers kept the flag of melodic rock flying high since 1996, when all of the other major labels put their monies into grunge first and then industrial rock/metal and then nu-metal. Now that they have traction, I am just confused as to what their business model is.

Let’s sign up all the classic popular artists from the Eighties and get them to re-record some of their classics along with new music. CHECK.
Let’s get artists from different bands together to do a super group project. CHECK.
Let’s get female singers to re-record melodic rock songs that the label president likes. CHECK.

What about identifying new talent and breaking that new talent to the masses with creative and innovative ideas? NOT CHECKED.

Metal Blade is still independent however with strong ties to Sony Music and Warner Music Group in relation to distribution while Roadrunner used to be owned by Universal between the years, 2000 and 2006 and after that, they are under the control of Warner Music Group.

Roadrunner is still the major player here, however with ties to Warner, expect them to be “RIGHT NOW” profit driven and be all about the HYPE. With all the corporate deals they organised on the new Dream Theater album, they would have made up the advanced money plus the recording costs and more.

Spinefarm Records is part of Universal Music Group, with a lot of power to operate independently. They are getting out there and signing new talent. However, like all of the above labels, they are stuck in the old way. And that is the ALBUM.

They just need to realise that it is not about the sales anymore. While Steaming numbers and revenue are still small today, in the long term the labels will be able to reap the benefits.

Why?

Because streaming is a regular recurring revenue business.

For example, I have been streaming “Strife” from Trivium non-stop. Each stream is regularly producing revenue for that song. If I purchased that same song as a download, the revenue produced would be at the time it was sold. Every time that I would have listened to “Strife” at home or on my iPod or on my smartphone would not have produced a cent. All that the band or label would have made from me is the sale of the downloaded song. However with streaming they will continue to make money long after the album is released.

So if anyone believes that streaming is bad for music and that it is going to kill the incentive to create new music, tell them they are uneducated. If bands or artists are complaining about their payments, then they need to negotiate better deals with their labels or get back their Copyrights.

Let’s put it this way, if Metallica is on Spotify, then the rates paid back to the COPYRIGHT HOLDERS (and Metallica do own their Copyright) must be good, because Lars Ulrich and Cliff Burnstein would not allow Metallica to enter a business arrangement that is not in their favour.

The real truth is that there is much more music out there than there has ever been, so the issues that are present to artist and labels is how do they get people’s attention directed towards that new music.

Personally, I don’t even know anybody who pirates music anymore. There is no reason to pirate and legitimate customers/fans would always turn to legal alternatives.

In relation to sales figures and charts. Goneski. No longer relevant. Sales (as a stand-alone measure) no longer means anything. Focusing on recording sales is old school thinking. It’s all about everything else today.

“Recording Sales Revenue” plus “Streaming Revenue” plus “YouTube Ad Revenue” plus “Ticket Revenue” plus “Merchandise Revenue” plus “Corporate Deals Revenue” plus “Sponsorship Revenue” plus “Publishing Revenue” plus “Licensing Revenue” and then decide if you are winning or not.

Again, if you are not seeing a lot of revenue, then you need to be speaking to your label, because if you have numbers in all of the above Revenue streams then something is a-miss contractually.

Another thing that the metal and hard rock labels need to understand is that they reside in a niche. The heyday of when that niche was mainstream is long gone. Today, certain artists might have a crossover song that many people will latch onto and then it is back to the niche.

“Adrenaline Mob” released “Men of Honor” last week and by the end of the second week it will be forgotten. The songs are great, the musicianship is great, so what is the problem. The hard core fans picked it up and everyone else doesn’t know about it. It’s a twenty four seven job staying in the public eye and it’s god damn hard. It’s the labels job to figure out it out, however the labels don’t want to spend the money to innovate, so what they do is get most of the hate directed towards them because of their monopolistic extortion like practices from back in the day.

If the labels want to be the good guys, they need to be more transparent. They need to call out the RIAA when they spin shit. They need to do be realists and sensible. And the main thing they need to understand is that the days of when they had control of the distribution channel are long gone. The profit margins from the CD sales are never coming back. So don’t dwell on the past and start to move forward.

http://theconversation.com/music-sales-slump-is-streaming-or-the-music-industry-to-blame-23901

http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/5915732/spotify-drove-universal-musics-75-jump-in-streaming-revenue-last-year

http://torrentfreak.com/artists-think-instead-spewing-spotify-hate-140222

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A to Z of Making It, Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit, Unsung Heroes

Music Trends in Hard Rock and Heavy Metal – What’s On The Up and What’s On The Down

ON A DOWN SLOPE

DAUGHTRY

The band leader, Chris Daughtry messed up big time chasing the crowds of “Train” and “Imagine Dragons”. He was a hard rocker from day dot and that is what gave him his legion of fans. For the ill-fated and recent “Baptized” album, he committed career suicide, throwing his lot with the hit songwriters. The songs are good, however they are not Daughtry songs. It would have been better for him as an artist to have given those songs to other artists that are more electronic pop rock minded. Daughtry needs more music right away and they need it to ROCK.

RECORD LABELS

The major metal and rock labels will continue to sign the bands and artists that had success in the Eighties and Nineties and get those bands to release forgeries of their greatest hits. It’s all about locking up the songs under copyright. “He who owns a lot of copyrights, will make a lot of money in the future, when said artists are dead and buried.”

In relation to new bands, they will sing fewer bands on even more shittier deals and shift their efforts to breaking them. It doesn’t mean that we will pay attention. It will be bands from certain niche’s that will break out and we will gravitate to them.

Also no one wants to pay. Look at the APP business. The highest downloaded APPS are all free ones. And they are still making money. We are happy to provide our private data to Apple and Google, as long as we get what we want, with no strings attached. If a record label has a business model that is dependent upon people paying, re-evaluate.

KIRK HAMMETT

He is out of touch. We live in a world right now that is connected 24/7. A lot of those connections happen because of social media. So his recent, “Ivory Tower” comments about social media show just how out of touch he is. Also from seeing him play live on three occasions, he has made a career on the coat tails of James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich. Don’t believe me, watch the making of the Black album, especially the scene when Bob Rock tells him that the solo he just put down for “The Unforgiven” is garbage.

HYPE

We can see through the hype and we hate it. So much hype was around Dream Theater’s self titled release and it disappeared from the conversation within six weeks. Megadeth’s “Super Collider” is being outsold by the Black album. Daughtry’s “Baptized” took forever to record and it did nothing. You can’t have a song called “Long Live Rock N Roll” and not have it sounding anything like ROCK. It sounds like that one hit wonder song “I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker With A Flower In My Hair.”

RESPONSE SYSTEMS FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT

NAPSTER showed the music business and the entertainment business at large, how fans of music, movies and books want to consume content. They want to download it easily, free of DRM, use it in any way they want and they want to do it for free.

For all of the talentless CEO’s that flew in private jets off the hard work by the artists, this was a big NO NO. So off they went to their lobby group arms, the RIAA and MPAA and they started to lobby hard the governments. The various sister associations around the world started to do the same thing. The best thing they could come up with is a graduated response system, financed by the ISP’s. It failed in France. It failed in New Zealand. In the U.S it is hard to tell, especially when you have a copyright troll like Rightscorp shaking down IP addresses. So if Rightscorp is sending shake down notices to ISP’s, then why does the US have a graduated response scheme?

The bottom line is this, the people who the RIAA and MPAA want to catch are years ahead of them in INNOVATION. And INNOVATION is what they should be focusing on.

THE ALBUM FORMAT

We are challenged with time and we only want the best. Since we are allowed to cherry pick, we will. Heavy Metal and Hard Rock artists need to understand they are in the hit business. It doesn’t matter if they are radio-friendly or not. Each band in each metal and rock genre, needs to create that song that hits us on the first listen.

That is why bands like Five Finger Death Punch, Avenged Sevenfold and Shinedown are so successful. They get the game. That is why Killswitch Engage is successful. Adam Dutkiewicz understands the power of a massive chorus. That is why Trivium is having a career. Over the course of all of their albums, they always had a song that had “hit potential” for the genre they are in.

Making money is hard. Just because a band releases an album, it doesn’t mean that we want to pay for it in its entirety, especially if it has got a couple of crap songs on it. It’s better to release 8 songs that a “certifiable smashes” instead of 12 songs that have four crap ones. However, it turns out the public still has time for Metallica’s “Black” album. It is still moving two to three thousand units a week and it is expected to pass 16 million by May.

Artists need to think about the no limits that digital offers them. We want the good stuff. Artists need to think about how they can provide us the good stuff, without resorting to the album format. Don’t base your career on dropping an album every two years. An artist needs to base their career on constant events.

GOING GOING ALMOST GONE

CLASSIC ROCK

The artists are on their last legs. Motley Crue is ceasing to tour, however stand alone shows, plus new music are still in the works. They have hit the same markets over and over again since their 2004 comeback and in between they have released 3 new songs on a “Greatest Hits” album, 13 new songs on “Saints of Los Angeles” and 1 new song in 2012. The train is slowly coming to a halt.

Aerosmith released a DUD. The train is not a rolling anymore for them. All up, Classic Rock bands have maybe have another 10 years left.

A transition is happening. The younger acts are generating touring dollars, playing smaller venues and at affordable prices. It’s happening.

ON THE UP

STORYTELLING

That is why TV shows are the most downloaded torrents of all time. Tell a good story and the world will be at your door step.

RICHIE SAMBORA

Seeing him in Australia, he is invigorated and he is having a blast. Not having to play second fiddle to Jon Bon Jovi, he is branching out again and this time, his roots are strong enough to balance his branches. The “Aftermath Of The Lowdown” is the best hard rock record from 2012 that went unnoticed because it was released so close to his Bon Jovi work.

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Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit

Innovation V5.0 – It Just Keeps Getting Better from Liberation Music and Rightscorp

Each week, the technology industry and the sites that enable copyright infringing are innovating at a rapid rate to stay ahead of the curve.

YIFY is one of the more popular torrent sites out there. Instead of resting on their laurels they are innovation even more. Read this article. You will see all the development that YIFY carries out. These are the people who the recording industry need to employ, not shutdown. But when the entertainment industry only cares about dollars, sites like YIFY that facilitate sharing are seen as the bad guys.

The funny thing in all of this, is that Napster showed the entertainment industries what people want 15 years ago. So why haven’t they listened. Spotify is trying to compete however it is failing because people still want to download a song for free and be able to do anything they want with it. And they want to do it easy and with no strings attached.

In relation to the entertainment industries, check out their “wonderful” innovation list.

This one has been going on for some time. Liberation Music sent a bogus take down notice to YouTube on a presentation that Larry Lessig posted back in June 2013. Now for those that don’t know, Larry Lessig is a famed professor and a copyright/fair use expert. So they picked the wrong guy to try to censor. Lessig then filed a counter-notice and Liberation threatened to sue for copyright infringement if Lessig didn’t retract his counter-notice.

So who is Liberation Music. Of course they have to be from the same country that I am from, good old Australian. So Liberation Music owns the Australian copyright for a song called “Lisztomania” by the band Phoenix. The Lessig presentation has a snippet of that music.

Let me get this straight. Liberation is an Australian label, who owns the copyright for a song in Australia only and then issues a bogus take down notice on an US presentation that has a tiny “fair use” snippet on it.

So in response, Lessig filed for declaratory judgment and sought damages for the bogus take down offer. Liberation finally came to its senses when it realised it was going to lose and agreed to settle the case with Lessig, paying him an undisclosed sum that Lessig then passed on to the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) who worked on the case.

Moving on to some innovative news, we have the latest internet troll Rightscorp at it again. This time they are trolling the torrent public trackers for IP addresses that are linked to the torrenting of songs that are on the Billboard 100. Nice business model if people actually get scared by the threats and pay. If they send out 10 million notices a year and 1 million pay the $20 infringement tax, then that is a cool $20 million.

Surely some of that money will go back to the artist, songwriter, producer or the performers. Innovation has ceased/never began for the Record Labels. All in the name of the guaranteed dollar.

http://torrentfreak.com/revealed-the-secrets-of-yify-torrents-network-140223/

http://torrentfreak.com/lawrence-lessig-wins-damages-for-bogus-youtube-takedown-140228/

http://torrentfreak.com/billboard-100-pirates-automated-fines-140227/

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