Category Archives: Stupidity

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

Seriously… Ray Luzier

Isn’t it time that the argument stops being about what has been lost to what can be gained when it comes to copyright infringement/piracy.

Seriously I am disappointed from artists in the metal and rock genres that talk shit like this. It started with Lars Ulrich and Napster. It continued with Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley talking crap. Scott Ian got in on the act. Yngwie Malmsteen and Joe Lynn Turner also had their views and now we have Ray Luzier.

Lets play a little game.

Who can name a song that Ray Luzier wrote? Does anyone know who Ray Luzier is?

I am pretty sure that no one can name one song that he has written of the top of their heads. So why is he given time to make uninformed comments.

He ripped on a fan of Army Of Anyone because he turned up with a burnt CD of the “Army Of Anyone” album and asked it to be signed. Any artists that equates a fan listening to their music as a lost sale should not be in the music business at all. So Ray starts to have a go at the fan because he didn’t have ten bucks to spend on a CD. He accused him of stealing it.

Does Ray even know the definition of stealing?

It means to take (the property of another) without right or permission.

Music is not property, however the CD that the music is on is property. So Ray is accusing a fan of stealing his CD. But wait a second, the kid turned up with a blank CD, that had music copied on it from a friend. It wasn’t Ray’s actual CD and the music on the burnt CD had not been stolen, because the “Army Of Anyone” catalogue is available for purchase and for streaming everywhere. It still could be available in brick and mortar shops (depending if they have old copies lying around because I can’t see many people clamouring to order it)

So what is it Ray.

Stealing or Copyright infringement. And I am sure that Ray Luzier was an angel who never ever got a copy of another bands music on a cassette tape. He must have had so much disposable income in the Eighties that he purchased the originals all the time.

But this is his best quote. “Someone’s gotta do something — put a chip in there where you can’t duplicate it. You know what I mean?!”

So at first he is having a bitch at people infringing on the music he is involved with and now he also wants is to punish the real fans that purchase the CD by not allowing them to media shift it to their mp3 player.

I think that Ray should read up a bit on the Sony BMG Rootkit scandal first. Sony tried to be that someone who tried to do something. What they did was that when a music disc was inserted into a computer, it installed software illegally (and in the background without the user knowing) that ended up creating vulnerabilities in the computer operating system which was then exploited by malware.

This attempt of DRM by Sony led to public outcry, government investigations and class-action lawsuits. DVD manufacturers also tried this and guess what happened. A kid in a bedroom created a program to circumvent the DRM on DVD’s.

Does Ray even know that Amazon has an AutoRip feature. So when a person buys a CD from Amazon, they get an AutoRip of it from download. Does Ray even know that all Pledge Music campaigns perks come with a digital copy of the album.

Seriously dude, I have the “KXM” CD because I am a George Lynch fan. I haven’t played it again after giving it around 20 plus spins. I have listened to the “Army Of Anyone” CD. I got a ripped copy as well from a friend who is a die-hard Stone Temple Pilots fan. It became a coffee coaster after the initial listen.

But Ray seems to fail to see that people still buy albums that they like, along with streaming albums that they like.

Five Finger Death Punch at the moment have combined sales of over 800,000 copies in the US of their “Wrong Side Of Heaven/Righteous Side Of Hell” releases. At the rate they are going, each album will be certified Gold in the U.S. All of their previous albums have been certified Gold in the U.S and again, they are still selling so expect them to pass Platinum in the years to come.

Shinedown, Avenged Sevenfold and Volbeat are bands that are also selling albums week in/week out.

All of the above bands have double-digit numbers on Spotify plus sold out shows at the box office.

So I think its time that the misinformed musicians stop ripping on their fans and start connecting with them. We are the ones that sustain you and if you choose to not be in music anymore because someone is downloading your music, then be gone because you are in the game for the wrong reasons.

Another will come and take your place that doesn’t think of money, because money was always a by-product of the music. It never was THE PRODUCT.

ONE FINAL NOTE: A local retailer in Australia called JB HI-FI is having a deal going on that is marketed as 3 for $10. I was in there on Friday to buy a Halo game for my kids and I thought I would spend 5 minutes to go through the various boxes to see if there was anything that I liked.

I found “Megadeth – Ruse In Peace Live” on Blu-Ray, “Megadeth – Countdown To Extinction Deluxe 20th Anniversary Boxed CD” ( I already own the 92 release CD along with the 2004 remastered/remixed edition bonus tracks edition, so this is the third time I have purchased this album) and a band that I have heard of in name only called “The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus” just so I could round out the $10 deal.

Today I went to another JB Hi-Fi store about 30 minutes away and they didn’t have those albums as part of their deal. And I was curious as to why. So I found them in the metal section and I took note of the prices.

MEGADETH – Rust In Peace (BluRay) was selling for $27.99

MEGADETH – Countdown To Extinction (20th Anniversary Edition) was selling for $28.99.

THE RED JUMPSUIT APPARATUS – Lonely Road was selling for $18.99

Now for the math. I picked up all three for $10 at one store, however 30 minutes away in another store if I wanted to pick up those three albums I would have had to pay $75.97.

ONE FINAL NOTE II: Today I picked up a “Rush Greatest Hits CD”, “Killers – Battleborn” and Guns N Roses – “Chinese Democracy.” The Gunners purchase was purely to add to the CD collection so that Gunners discography looks complete.

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A to Z of Making It, Music, My Stories, Stupidity, Unsung Heroes

So You Wanna Be In A Band

ENTITLEMENT

I feel bitter as I’m going through a clean up/archiving process of some old emails. What can I say, they just brought back so many bad memories from my ex band members.

The first thing that stands out is the entitlement of my ex band members. Just because they played an instrument on a song, they argued that they were entitled to a song writing percentage. Just because they suggested that we play the riff once instead of twice, they believed they were entitled to a song writing percentage. And the bass player who joined to play live gigs also put in a song writing claim.

The band was formed in 2008. The majority of the songs that I used in the band were written during 2004 to 2006. I registered the songs with the rights organisation during that time as I was planning on shopping them around to other artists. Even though I showed these facts to my band members they still argued with me over their entitlement to a song writing share for the songs.

Let’s face it, bands are complex beasts and very hard to hold together. Instant fame and riches could push aside some of those bad vibes for a little while or maybe even a decade. However those bad vibes will always come to the forefront until an explosion happens of mass proportions. Motley Crue and Vince, Axl Rose and the rest of the Gunners crew, Don Dokken and George Lynch, The Eagles, Machine Head and Adam Duce. And there are many more examples when that innocent love for music turns sour.

Arguments ensure over money all the time because each band member is on a different financial path. Some are on unemployment benefits, some are on unemployment benefits and casual wages, some are on something else all the time and some are full-time workers. Some band members are more important to the band than others.

The thing that pissed me off the most was when I used to hear the drummer or the bassist or the vocalist telling other people that they were involved in creating the songs and that they had some input. That piece of dishonesty didn’t sit well with me and still to this day it makes me bitter.

DISHONESTY

I know that all of the songs have been written by me and only me. I was the one that spent time away from my family to write the songs. I was the one that recorded them on my Zoom 8 track machine alone late into the night. I was the one who tabbed them on Power Tab while my foot was rocking the bouncer in an attempt to put them to sleep.

To me, if a person suggests that we do the chorus once instead of twice that is not a reason to add them as songwriters. They didn’t contribute anything musical to the song nor did they contribute any new lyrical ideas or melodies. All they did was suggest to play a piece of music/words already written once instead of twice. In an end of credits scroll list from a movie these people will be listed as editors. The writer is still the writer regardless of what the editors do with the script flow.

So of course, I confront the drummer at his dishonest statements, and of course he disagrees with me aggressively stating that he did provide input. Of course I don’t let it slide easily and I ask him what input did he actually have. What piece of music did he contribute? What lyrical verse or melody did he contribute?

He answers that he provided ideas on subject matter. I reply that an idea does not mean that he wrote any music and lyrics. He answers that he assisted with a melody in a verse. I ask him what did he actually change that was so different to what I wrote in the first place.

Singing a word by enhancing the syllables is not a reason to get a song writing credit. Otherwise, James LaBrie or Vince Neil would get song writing credits all the time. Hell, if I used the logic that the drummer put forward that would mean that Bruce Dickinson needs a songwriting credit for every single Iron Maiden song, even the ones from the Paul Dianno and Blaze Bayley era of the band as Bruce did enhance the vocal delivery.

At this point, the singer and the bass player are on the drummers side and I feel betrayed.

BETRAYAL

I remember the day when I got a call from the rights organisation advising me that counter claims have been made on the songs I wrote from the drummer, the bassist and the vocalist. I was in a state of shock. And boy did I hate and curse them bad. I will never forget that moment because it made me realise how deceitful and dishonest people can be.

I told the rights organisation that I do not agree with their counter-claim however the rights organisation did not care either way. The songs go into suspension and any money accumulated from them is held by the rights organisation. For the rights organisation it is a win win. But for me, it was a loss. I had to get a lawyer who charged an arm and a leg however the work that he did was not of the quality that he charged me for. I was told that the onus was on me to prove that I wrote the songs. I saw this as unfair and unjust. The onus should be on them to prove that they contributed to the song writing.

So why did all of this rubbish happen?

GREED leads to a sense of ENTITLEMENT. What I had was a bunch of average musicians that have never written a song in their lives wanting to change the truth so that they are seen as more important than what they really are/were. To prove my point once I was out of the band, in the space of eight months they didn’t write nor release not one NEW song. What a bunch of talents, hey? And then the band ended.

So while forming bands are initially fun, if any artist is serious about making it in the music business and they think that the above doesn’t happen then they are living in a delusional world. This is what happens in the real world because untalented people are greedy. This is what happens because untalented people want to trump up their efforts as being more important than what they really were.

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Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity

So Many Different Arguments Over One Word

Copyright like streaming is an argument that is loaded with emotion instead of facts.

Copyright supporters will argue that copyright is tied to creativity while culture supporters will argue that copyright makes culture disappear and the Public Domain supporters will argue that Copyright has been hijacked by corporations that seek to lock up culture in order to preserve profits. On top of all that you also have the PIRACY argument which in a nutshell is really copyright infringement and finally you have the issue when songs start to sound similar, the songwriters go to war with each other over plagiarism, which somehow gets linked back to the copyright.

So many different arguments over one word. COPYRIGHT.

What is true is that Copyright is MEANT to be the piece of legislation that encourages creativity. However, copyright as it currently stands does everything in its power to oppose creativity.

In a nutshell all humans create and we do that without any thoughts of copyright. We don’t wake up in the morning and say, “Gee, thanks to Copyright, I can now create”. We wake up, with an idea in our heads and we get to work on fleshing it out, be it a story or a song or a script or a play or a piece of art.

And that is how it is has always been. Humans create because they want to.

“We always say that the copyright system supports creativity and artists. But copyright’s foundation is about the allocation of economic rights that are bought and sold. It’s a system that’s built on money.”

That is what copyright is today, a monopoly system controlled by corporations and the argument that these corporations push forward with is that “stronger copyright is needed to encourage creativity”. That is why so many works are locked up by these organisations that control the copyrights. That is why they get laws retroactively passed to stop works from falling into the Public Domain.

The whole British Invasion happened because those artists built on the works of the artists that came before them. By doing so, a whole cultural movement happened and the world as it was known changed forever.

Did you know that Sony (who is one of the Corporations that scream for stronger copyright) is now getting sued by musicians for using 10 to 15 seconds of their music without a proper license in “The Interview”.

But with everything that involves money, Sony will pay up to make it go away and then claim it back on their various insurances for the mistakes. But the point is, it shows that everyone infringes on Copyright all the time. It could be intentional or unintentional.

And this happens a lot because copyright is broken. If you need further proof that the true purpose of copyright has been hijacked, then look no further than the various biopics that are getting made.

The Jimi Hendrix biopic does not have any original Hendrix music. The Bon Scott biopic is going down the same boat. For both of these, the heirs of the artists used copyright as blackmail to get the biopic creators to change their story because they didn’t like the way the creators depicted the musical heroes. Very similar to how Judas Priest pulled out of the Rock Star movie when they didn’t like the way the script was heading. By pulling out as consultants they also refused to license their music as well.

We also have a new film about Martin Luther King that has his heirs refusing to allow the filmmakers to use his speech. However in this instance, the heirs didn’t count on the filmmaker being so savvy. What the filmmaker did was create a derivative version of the speech that has the same effect but uses totally different words.

And the reason why the heirs refused permission is money. King’s heirs want as much as they can get for it and Copyright law allows them to do it. What we have here is an Estate that contributes nothing creatively however they do their best at stopping other creations from happening unless they get paid. So can someone please tell me how Copyright is promoting creativity in this instance?

The deeper issue here is that Copyright lasts way too long. The speeches occurred over 50 years ago and Copyright was not designed to provide an income to the heirs of the creator.

Copyright was always meant to provide an income to the creator themselves which very often was not the case. George Clinton the grandfather of funk was in a lengthy court battle with Bridgeport Music who owned the rights of his most popular songs. John Fogerty got sued by his ex-label boss from the CCR days. Both of those artists signed deals without fully understanding what they signed away. And guess what. They still kept on creating regardless of how they were getting blindsided and shafted by the creative accounting of the record labels.

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Music, My Stories, Stupidity, Unsung Heroes

George Lynch and Don Dokken

The history of George Lynch is a complex one to say the least. He auditioned for Ozzy’s band at the same time as Randy Rhoads did. Once Randy got the gig, Lynch got Randy’s teaching gig. He auditioned again after the tragic death of Randy Rhoads and this time he lost out to Jake E.Lee.

And then Dokken broke through with “Tooth And Nail”. They continued that momentum with “Under Lock And Key” and “Back For The Attack”.

And then it was over. Don Dokken said that it was the ego of George Lynch that broke up Dokken. Ego is a very ambiguous word to use. Ego means a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance, so I can’t see how if a person has a high self-esteem it can be seen as a negative or bad enough to break up a band.

What we do know is that Don Dokken was the one that got the original recording deal with Elektra Records. He got that recording deal based on songs that George Lynch and Mick Brown had written in their earlier bands.

This is the way Mick Brown told it:

“He took some material that George and I had wrote and took it to Germany and pretty much put his name on it, you know what I am saying (laughing) and he got a recording contract. So he called me up to play. I looked over at George and I said George, this guy’s got our music and he’s got a record deal and we were pretty upset about that because he’s got our songs. But then we also thought, it’s kind of an open door so we went along with it. I think probably when people talk about the turmoil in Dokken, that was pretty much the moment where it all started. I remember Don asking us to, if he could take some of our songs over there to try and get something going in Europe and we said “No” but he did anyway.”

And this is the way Don Dokken told it:

“When I went to Germany to get the record deal, they wanted to sign me as a solo artist. The original album, Breaking The Chains originally came out in Europe and the band was called was called Don Dokken. It was pretty rare. There were 500 copies of it that said “Don” on the cover. So when we got the band together, I just dropped the “Don” and we became Dokken.”

INSERT: Disagreement Number one.

The label then would not give any extra shares to George Lynch or Mick Brown, so the monies came from Don Dokken’s slice of the pie which was already pretty shitty and that pie got diminished even further when Jeff Pilson joined. This battle for an equal split proved to be a source of animosity.

INSERT: Disagreement Number two.

Remember Vivian Campbell. He was livid that he didn’t get an equal split from Dio. Randy Rhoads confronted Ozzy about the “Blizzard Of Ozz” band and why the album was going to be marketed as Ozzy Osbourne’s solos act.

However the most stupid thing any band could do is split up at their commercial peak.

On a press tour for the “Back For The Attack” Don Dokken said the following about George Lynch:

“I don’t dig him and he don’t dig me. But we respect each other as musicians. He can be a total jerk, but I’m not that easy to get along with either.”

Dokken (the band) at the time of the split were ready to re-negotiate their deal. They had the leverage and the sales on the board. They had Q-Prime Management on board. According to Lynch, Don Dokken didn’t want to share any new deal. He saw it as his band, with his name on it and any new deal would involve Don Dokken only with the remaining band members reduced to hired guns.

According to Lynch, Dokken told the band the following:

“I’m gonna try to take the whole thing and run with it, and you guys are gonna get left in the dust, and if you’re lucky, I might hire you.”

In the end, the band split. George Lynch and Mick Brown got a deal with Elektra Records while Don Dokken got wined and dined by Geffen Records and eventually signed a deal with them. Jeff Pilson, who was in my mind the better songwriter got going with various other creative outlets. According to Pilson, the band had a lot of egos and it was those egos that got in the way.

“It wasn’t really that different from other bands with the exception that we aired our dirty laundry in public.”

That is true.

After the split, the bickering didn’t end there.

In 1990, George Lynch, Jeff Pilson and Mick Brown went to court to stop Don Dokken from using his surname for any new solo band. They heard that Don Dokken was planning to release his first solo album as Dokken II. This didn’t sit well with them and they went to court to get an injunction to stop Don Dokken from using the name Dokken or Dokken II.

However, what Lynch and Dokken did was shoot each other in the foot. A good vocalist will always need a good guitarist and a good guitarist will always need a good vocalist. This is the secret of a lot of the bands successes. Vivian Campbell had Ronnie James Dio. George Lynch had Don Dokken. John Sykes had David Coverdale. Jimmy Page had Robert Plant. Paul Kossoff had Paul Rodgers. Mick Ralphs had Paul Rodgers.

And being in a band is not a guarantee. In the October 1989 issue of Guitar World it was a period of change for a lot of guitarists. Steve Stevens was on the cover with the headline, “Life After Billy Idol”. There was also a boxed picture of George Lynch with the headline “Bye-Bye Dokken”. Jake E.Lee was also featured talking about Badlands and life after Ozzy.

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Copyright, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity

Sony and Stupidity Go Hand In Hand

I am pretty sure that everyone knows about “The Interview” by know.

Regardless of how good or bad or average the movie is, “The Interview” is famous and successful.

It was used as blackmail against theaters, if they showed the movie, another September 11 was threatened. So it got pulled.

Everyone weighed in on the debate from bloggers to journalists to politicians. So many ideals came into the conversation like free speech, the right to make a black humour/comedy movie in the current day, politics between democracy and communism, censorship, the freedom of the internet and capitalism.

Eventually Sony got the balls to release the movie. It was made available in select theaters plus on many Video On Demand outlets. For the first time ever in the major studio’s history, you could see a movie in theaters or watch it online legally at the same time.

This alone is a big step forward for the movie industry and I am 100% certain that in 50 years from now, journalists and bloggers will be writing about how Sony led the way for a new business model and saved the movie industry.

Future historians always like to re-write history to suit a certain point of view. Look no further than Russia at the moment. Vladimir Putin has asked and then taken charge himself to have history books re-written with bullshit so that he and his ancestors look favourable and more important than they really where.

This story is about stupidity and Sony is at the forefront.

So “The Interview” is released on multi-platforms at the same time. Online box office came in at $15m and Theater Box Office came it at $3m. The movie was projected to make $18 to $20 million in its opening week so with all the bullshit that has gone on behind the scenes, it still met it’s opening week target. This hybrid model has shown that a film’s success and money earning capacity should not be tied in to a THEATER.

However the studios are greedy.

If I go to a movie with my family, I need to purchase five tickets at $15 a piece. That comes to $75AUS for a movie. However, if that movie is available for me to get on a video on demand service, then I am charged once and my whole family can watch it. That is why the studios resist and still use the old way of releasing a movie, which is cinemas first, then DVD/BluRay sales, VOD licensing, Cable licensing and Free To Air licensing.

And of course the real test of stupidity is that SONY released the movie online only in the U.S.

Yep, they used geo-restrictions (something that has been pissing off a lot of Australians for a longtime) to keep the movie release in the U.S only. So according to Sony, if you lived outside the U.S and wanted to watch the movie legally, “tough luck”. So what do people normally do when confronted by situations like this.

They turn to P2P.

It looks like stupidity is affecting profits more than piracy to me.

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Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity

What We Know

Machine Head is a premium metal band. They have earned their spot through killer releases since 2003. Slipknot did sell more with their new one however the quality of the music this year was with Machine Head while Slipknot became an institution like Metallica.

Big Corporations fail to learn. Sony got hacked in 2011 and did nothing to tighten up their security or to encrypt their data. In the 2011 hack, all of the Playstation user names, passwords and credit card details were stored on a text file with no encryption. Fast forward to 2014, and a lot of the sensitive information around salaries, payroll numbers and social security numbers were stored on a text file with no encryption.

No one cares that Chris Broderick or Shaun Drover left Megadeth. In the same way no one cared that Jason Newsted left Metallica. Hell no one cared when Dave Ellefson was not a part of the band. Just because they can write riffs it doesn’t mean they are any good. And there is no doubt that Chris Broderick can play and is very technical. But can anyone name a definitive song or riff that he wrote in Jag Panzer or in Megadeth.

The most pirated TV shows are also the most successful commercially and financially. And seriously isn’t it any surprise that the most locked up show behind paywalls and corporate deals is the most pirated. For anyone living under a rock, that show of course is Game Of Thrones.

The most pirated movies this year are movies from 2013. So when are the movie studios going to make these movies available on proper streaming services. The Wolf Of Wall Street finally made it to Netflix just a few weeks ago and it is a 12 month old movie.

Vinyl. Do you see dial-up internet and analog mobiles coming back or Amiga 500’s?

Speaking of vinyl, the fans as usual are getting ripped off. Vinyl is way overpriced, and if you purchase a vinyl record, you don’t get a digital download code. Some bands do it, especially in Pledge Music campaigns however if you purchase vinyl from an online store or a brick and mortar store, you get nothing.

Hellyeah’s “Blood For Blood” is a very underrated album and Tom Maxwell rose to the occasion as a songwriter and a guitarist.

Making money in music is still the same as it has always been. Jesse Leach from Killswitch Engage provides some truths.

Irving Azoff and Global Music Rights (his company) is representing artists in their demands that YouTube take down their music. If YouTube doesn’t comply they will be suing YouTube for billions. And the reason why they are going after Google is that they have been the least co-operative and that Google has failed to license the works properly, while Goolge maintains it has. Yep this is another lawsuit to protect the 1% and nothing else.

The streaming argument is always loaded with emotion and no intelligence. Look at the facts. Pandora pays differently, Spotify pays differently and so does YouTube. Artists get a different payday and the songwriters get a different payday. If the artist is also the songwriter then they get a different payday. But when you add into the mix the record labels (who normally get the monies as the copyright holders) and the Publishing groups (who get a share) and the Performance Rights groups (who also get a share) and the Managers and the Accountants and the Legal teams and you get to see how decent payouts trickle into low payments back to the artist.

To prove my point a silent album experiment earned an independent band $20,000 for a 3 month period. And there stream counts had nothing on the numbers that the bigger artists generate. Goes to show what can happen if you cut out a lot of middle people.

Old men attached to the old ways are still running the music business. Take away their radio lifeline and the labels would be clueless as to what to do.

Data is sales. Why do you think Metallica and Iron Maiden hit markets and sell out straight away? Hell, Metallica is going to hit the road again in 2015. When a band can see huge numbers in certain cities from P2P traffic, streams, Shazam look up and they have the means to hit the road, they do.

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A to Z of Making It, Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity, Unsung Heroes

The War Between Money and Art

The music industry is a thriving industry. It always was and still is. History has shown that musicians have expressed themselves lyrically without interference in their vision. They have been creative and innovative. However, with the rise of the recording industry and the money pyramids that industry created, the musical vision was compromised. Greed became more important than the vision. Once our heroes attained riches, the songs post “most successful album” just didn’t connect or resonate anymore.

As kids growing up, we fall in love with music, the melodies, the riffs, the lyrics, the phrasing and that free rebellious feeling that it inspires in us. Music always captured a sense of time and place. I could hear a song that I haven’t heard in ages and immediately it places me back in a time and a place of my past.

Music is about the creative individual and how they express their creativity. Great creativity equals success and success equals profits. When money enters the game and people who contribute nothing musically start to live a very comfortable life from those profits, then all they care about is keeping those profits the same plus a little bit more. That is why pop music suffered in the Eighties while Metal and Rock took a foothold. Metal and hard rock was honest and real. However once it became a commercial viable product, commerce took over and metal/rock became stale, until Bon Jovi, Def Leppard and Guns N Roses blew open the paradigm again and suddenly every label was chasing similar style of bands or getting their current roster to emulate those two bands.

Impose any financial and marketing frameworks on creativity and you get compromised art.

Conformity.

A business that is 100% about profit.

And the very thing that brought money into the industry in the first place and made the industry so popular is sacrificed. What was free and rebellious becomes controlled and processed. In 2014, the songwriters from Sweden have this down pat, which is no surprise as Sweden did give the world IKEA, which sells generic and bland ready-to-assemble furniture, much like the pop industry right now, bland ready to listen music.

The songwriter of the two thousands is without doubt Max Martin, a Swede. Taylor Swifts pop career has been written by Max Martin. Britney Spears career has Max Martin all over it. Bon Jovi’s comeback hit “It’s My Life”, yep that had Max Martin as well on it. Pink’s “Please Don’t Leave Me” and Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” also had Max Martin all over it.

And where did Max Martin start his career. It was as a singer in a metal/rock band called “It’s Alive”. The band was a stepping stone to meeting other people and eventually he got into song writing and at the moment his team is known as an “assembly line song writing team”. Martin is that big in Sweden, that the Swedes will now be able to lick him via his own postage stamp.

It’s a thin line as artists want to be paid for their creations and record labels want to make money of art that they have funded. Add to that mix songwriters like Martin who also want to get paid along with the publishers. However all sides are forgetting the crucial unknown, the FANS.

The casual music fans will lap up the trashy, mass-marketed pop music and any other music that crosses over into the pop stratosphere. The niche fans will bank roll their heroes forever and a day. Think of Shinedown as an example. They crossed over with “The Sounds of Madness” album and had platinum parties for singles and album sales in excess of a million. The follow-up, while still popular moved half of its predecessor. What that means is that the original niche fans of the band still purchased the album, the merchandise and the concert tickets while the casual fans streamed it and purchased the concert tickets, as Shinedown did big business at the box office on the Amaryllis tour.

But the question in all of this is that labels are seeing a future where the artists are tied to corporate ‘brands’. With this kind of business mindset, would another Dream Theater, Pantera, Machine Head or Metallica even come to be.

How can an artist be free to express their musical vision if they are tied to a corporate brand whose only interest is profit and commerce.

George Orwell said that “Myths which are believed in tend to become true” and the recording industry via the RIAA and the Publishing firms are all about making myths into truths. However Orwell also said that “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act” and that is what the Internet has allowed. The internet has allowed people to tell the truth or to offer a differing viewpoint then the one that is pushed by the lobbyists and the copyright industries.

For artists it is all about the song. That is your ticket and your bargaining chip. The song is your entry into the business. A lot of songs equals a body of work (not an album). But you need to work it, and you need to connect.

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Copyright, Music, My Stories, Stupidity

D.A.T.A

In a November 1992 issue of the Hot Metal magazine that I used to buy, there was a quote said that stuck with me for all of the wrong reasons.

“We want to make money”
Star-Star vocalist Johnnie Holliday.

The reason why it stuck with me was that every single musician I was working with during that period and beyond had the same viewpoint.

Blame MTV.

Suddenly our musical heroes became TV stars. Artists that were big in the Seventies crossed over to super stardom during this period. New artists starting off would end up moving millions of units because of a video clip. Suddenly every prospective musician wanted a piece of that money pie, without fully understanding that the decks are stacked against them from the start.

Fast forward to 2014 and the making money argument is still there. The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn 77 percent of all the revenue from recorded music.

Just because a person decides to create music, it doesn’t mean that they will make money from it. There is no guarantee and there never was. A music career is no different to a small business start-up. Some will succeed and others will not. Some of those that succeed will go on to greater success and from those that go on to greater success, you will get maybe 1 or 2 that will crossover in a big way.

But to make money, the artist needs data and they need to understand what that data means. Basically, data is king and it is a shame that the recording industry has taken so long to understand that.

Universal Music Group uses a database called Artist Portal that was built by interns (who are employees now) five years ago. About a year ago Warner Music created “Artist Dashboard”. Sony Music Entertainment on the other hand has so many separate dashboards in play that they need a whole analytics team to eyeball everything. Guess they have more important issues on their minds right now dealing with hack after hack after hack.

However the labels are still not getting the full picture. What they should be doing is to also compare the artists reach on P2P networks and the countries where it’s happening, even down to the cities. And the data has to be made available to artists in real-time. In the end, the artists are the ones that keep the wheels rolling on the label machine.

And the question needs to be asked. What are the metal labels like Nuclear Blast, Roadrunner, AFM, Metal Blade, Century Media, Spinefarm, etc. doing for their artists? How are they capturing and analysing data for the artists on their roster?

20 million searches take place on Shazam every day. So how many metal and hard rock labels use the data that Shazam generates?

It has been downloaded over 500 million times and even though it’s main user interface is about identifying unfamiliar songs, it’s big secret is that it is an early detection tool for songs that could break through.

Think about that for a second.

By using the data that fans generate, Shazam can identify which songs are having an impact and in what cities/countries. Of course it is great for the pop music business however I am sure it is an under-utilised tool when it comes to metal and hard rock music. How much more evidence does the recording industry need to know that “the wisdom of the fans” is law.

Bands can target what cities to promote in and eventually play in if they had that data. The future is here and data is directing the music business. That is why the big labels still rule. They have the money to throw at compiling DATA.

The barrier to entry may be low, but the barrier to success is higher than ever.

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Copyright, Music, My Stories, Piracy, Stupidity

A Shutdown Equals New Technologies

On December 15, 1877 Thomas Edison patented the phonograph. This simple innovation would give rise to the Copyright Industries and the Recording Labels many years later. On December 10, 2014, the Pirate Bay went offline due to a police raid based on evidence gathered by the Copyright Industries. Meanwhile, P2P sharing has remained at the same levels before the The Pirate Bay shutdown.

Goes to show that the copyright industry really hasn’t learned nothing from the past fifteen years.

Napster came and challenged everything the recording labels and the copyright industry stood for. These industries had two options, embrace Napster or crush Napster. Napster was the sharing community cultural centre for people. If the industries embraced it, then they would have been at that centre. Instead they decided to crush it and Napster’s centralised server proved to be its Achilles heel.

What the Copyright industry failed to conceive was the post Napster generation who innovated even harder, and it is no coincidence that Bit Torrent and The Pirate Bay rose a few years after Napster and the cornerstone of their innovation was decentralisation.

When The Pirate Bay came to prominence people stopped developing because the site was good enough. Everyone became complacent. But now it is down and the same catch cry is heard across the world from developers.

“NEVER AGAIN”

Already the talk around the web is that these new P2P initiatives will protect privacy, free speech, encrypted trackers and block chain technology (Blocks in a block chain are ‘sealed’ with a cryptographic hash). The legacy of Napster will live on and so will the legacy of The Pirate Bay.

Because the funny thing here is that the recording industry had a chance to control digital music. In late 1993 two audiophile computer science students were fascinated by the code that shrunk huge sound files and they started testing compressed songs to see if they could spot the difference. In time, they could no longer tell the difference and that is when it was realised that CD’s could go online. This gave rise to the first mp3 website, the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA). The vision was that by putting songs online anyone could share their music online and potentially build an audience. Bands could upload and advertise their tunes, build their own pages, sell merchandise and, eventually, let people play tracks right from the site. Bands could choose whether to charge or give away their music, in order to build a following for live shows.

With all new technologies it didn’t take long for the record labels to notice. They recognized that the free flow of music would destroy their business. But they passed on the technology and in 1999 the music industry changed forever.

Napster showed the world  how easily one could share music. However, Napster did not last long, but it altered forever the way in which people consumed music and what they should pay.

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My Stories, Stupidity

Failure To Notice My Wife’s Hairstyle

My wife is upset. Upset because I didn’t notice that she was at the hairdressers today. Upset because I didn’t comment on the way her hair looked. Upset because I didn’t comment on her hair colour. Just upset.

What can I say in my defense?

Well, I have no excuses, but here is the story of what transpired.

When I came home from work, I saw that my wife was laying on the couch with the little dude. At that quick glance I didn’t notice nor could I see that she had done anything to her hair although I did know that she was at the hairdressers because she told me earlier on in the day.

From the corner of my eye, I saw that the kids got their school reports for the year, so I turned my attention to the reports. As I was reading the reports, the kids came up to ask me if I was happy with the reports. I was happy and I briefly spoke to the kids about their reports telling them how happy I was with their efforts this year.

The whole time I was oblivious to my wife’s hairstyle.

She came up to me, I hugged her, she flicked her head around like those Pantene hair commercials and I STILL DIDN’T notice.

As I am recalling the events right now as I type this post I can see the many many (just think of the fictional Commandant Eric Lassard from the Police Academy movies saying the “many, many” line) missed opportunities I had to notice the new hairstyle.

What can I say it was a comedy of errors. Did I also tell you that it is our 16 year anniversary in nine days? Yep, 16 years married and three beautiful boys is the result.

My wife’s viewpoint is that if she was my girlfriend I would have noticed her new hairstyle and bought her flowers.

Maybe she is right. Maybe we get comfortable with our long-term partners that we fail to notice them anymore. I could have easily turned it into an argument however I didn’t. It was my bad that I failed to notice.

There are times when life is just too noisy and unfortunately today was just one of those times.

But the beauty of life is to always have a laugh about things afterwards and look at the good things that we have.

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