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

Blabbermouth The Sequel – Music Is Melody and Improvisation Is A Genesis Of Composition

The website Classic Rock Revisited conducted an interview with Yngwie Malmsteen recently. The interview was aimed at promoting Malmsteen’s new biography. Malmsteen is one musician who is not afraid to share his opinions. His recent opinions on the state of the music industry has polarised the internet. The mere mention of the word “piracy, and music” a reaction is always forthcoming.

“When I started out, it was very much like the guy with the big cigar in a big office saying, “I’ll give you a record deal, boy.” You had tour support, tour buses, local A&R people, the whole nine yards. I did that, but it’s all gone now. It can be for better or worse, because if you don’t have name recognition now.”

This is what used to happen. Any musician that wanted to write songs and have those songs released to an audience, had to meet that “guy with the big cigar.” In no way did a recording contract guarantee an artist success. Yngwie Malmsteen seems to forget that between the period of 1983 to 1988, he released an album each year in order to get name recognition. The reason why he got name recognition is because he had the songs and two great vocalists in Jeff Scott Soto and Joe Lynn Turner. In the end, as good as Malmsteen is on the guitar, if the song sucked and if the vocals sucked, he would have remained in the underground.

“If you want to start out now, how the f!&k do you do it?”

The same way you always have done it. Create great songs. In the end, it is the songs that will sell you. Regardless of how good you play your instrument, if the songs are not making a connection with people, then nothing will happen. The only difference is that bands these days, don’t need to play 2000 shows to get traction.

Look at bands like Heartist and Digital Summer. Heartist is signed to Roadrunner and Digital Summer is all DIY. Both bands have decent traction. Heartist built their following online. Digital Summer did it in a hybrid way. Starting out before the MySpace craze, they did it with feet on the ground, handing out flyers and playing shows. When technology started playing a part in promoting and marketing a band, these new opportunities got filtered in to their workload.

“Back in the day, DEF LEPPARD said if they could get a few singles on MTV, they’d be able to make it, and they did. That happened with a lot of bands who did that back then. Now we have YouTube, but there are billions of videos and musicians on there and if nobody knows your name, nobody’s going to look you up. It’s a little bit weird, but in that sense, the music industry situation is really bad for whoever wants to start out now.”

FACT – MTV used Heavy Metal music as a means to get traction. Look at the clips produced by hard rock / metal bands. Twisted Sister, had “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock”. Motley Crue had “Smokin In The Boys Room”. Van Halen had “Hot For Teacher.” All of those clips were game changers in the video format. As soon as MTV got traction, they booted metal music and put it back to a monthly/weekly segment that would become Headbangers Ball.

FACT – Music is getting released on a grand scale today. With so much new music out there fighting for listeners attention, artists need to give fans a reason to listen to their music. By saying that they put their heart and soul into it, just doesn’t cut in this day and age. You need to have great songs.

Look at the band Periphery. The band got traction via message boards. Has piracy stopped the band? I saw them live in Australia this year at the Annandale Hotel in Sydney.

Look at the band Shinedown. They came out in 2005, when piracy was rampant. Has piracy stopped the band from becoming a giant in the hard rock scene? They have two albums that have sold over a million units and two albums that have sold over 500,000 units. Singles on the other had have moved in the multi-millions.

Look at the band Digital Summer. They came out in 2005, when piracy was rampant. Has piracy stopped the band from touring and releasing new music? They are all DIY and have total control over their affairs. Even bands that had major deals have asked the band to represent them.

Look at the band One Less Reason. Another DIY band. One of their albums has gone GOLD. Has piracy stopped the band from touring and releasing new music?

Look at the band Protest The Hero. While they were signed to a label, they were told that never made any money. Finally they broke free from the label and started an Indiegogo campaign, raising over $300K (with the goal being $120K). Has piracy stopped the band from touring and releasing new music?

“The good part is that there is no longer this slavery to a certain format going on, where in the ’80s, if you didn’t follow format, they wouldn’t give you the time of day. You had to conform to get a shot at a record deal. That’s gone now, and it’s bizarre.”

I love Malmsteen however he is a confused albeit funny individual. He is putting a lot of information out there without any thought. If anyone was treated like dirt by record labels, it was Yngwie Malmsteen. Elektra chased him, signed him to a large deal and then dropped him cold after one album. During the Nineties, no label in the U.S would touch him. If it wasn’t for the Japanese market, Yngwie would be broke and destitute and without a career in 2013.

As much as Malmsteen is seen as a musical dictator, he knows it deep down, that if he didn’t conform and write more accessible songs, then his career would have been over. That is the power that the labels held over the artists.

Classic Rock Revisited: The Internet changed a lot for the industry; piracy has certainly had a hand in changing the game. Do you think that piracy can be beneficial to some of those bands starting out? How has it affected you?

Yngwie: How could it possibly be positive? If you go into a store and you see a car that you like, you can’t just drive off with it. The cost and the blood and sweat and tears that go into making music is the same thing, it’s not free. Try telling the engineer and the producer that they have to work for free. It’s utterly bizarre. It’s like just going into a store and taking things off the shelves. It’s stealing. The reason there are no bands coming out now is that the money that was once there is not there anymore. So what happened was, in essence, by pirating music, you kill the music industry. The music industry died because of the piracy, and now all the fans will have no new music. Isn’t that wonderful? It’s a direct consequence of that.

Again, Malmsteen is confusing the recording industry with the music industry. The recording industry is not dying. It has changed. The labels made the most money from selling the LP and then the CD. So when fans could pick and choose what tracks they wanted to buy, the biggest cash cow for the labels became obsolete. Licensed streaming is gaining traction. Unlicensed streaming on YouTube is bigger than ever. If the recording industry listened to advice back in 1998, maybe it would still be as powerful as it was back then. However, they ignored the advice.

The whole stealing analogy has been shot down a billion times. Maybe Scott Ian, Duff McKagan and Yngwie Malmsteen should form a band called “Steeler.” Oh wait, Malmsteen was already in a band called Steeler.

It’s simply economics. Digitised music equals less CD’s. The MP3 made music easy to share and distribute just by the click of a mouse button. Chart success and sales of actual music is not as relevant today as it was back in the Eighties and Nineties. What is relevant today is what music of the band are fans listening too.

Look at the band Shinedown. Call Me is their most streamed track, however they do not play the song live.

Finally, the best part of the interview, the quotes.

“Improvisation is a genesis of composition”
Malmsteen

“Music is melody and melody is music”
Mozart

“One must feel strongly to make others feel strongly”
Paganini

“When you’re a writer, you write the whole book, when you’re a painter like De Vinci you don’t say to someone, hey come over here and help me with my painting. There are a few reasons why I work this way. First of all, I’m so full of creativity that I don’t need any other input. The other is that I feel so strongly about my work, it’s like a burning passion to create something that is uniquely me.”
Malmsteen on song writing.

“Back in the day the record label was putting up all this money and you had to record whether you were inspired or not. I like to capture the moment.”
Malmsteen on recording now.

“ I don’t live in the past. The best show I’ve ever done is the one I’m going to do next. The best album will be the next one I do. I don’t look back, I look forward. It’s dangerous too, because if an album does well you might get stuck in that one sound for the next couple albums instead of having this evolution of your sound. I like to have the classical stuff on my records, and some blues. An album to me is supposed to be a snapshot of who you are at that time.”
Malmsteen on progress

http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/yngwie-malmsteen-the-music-industry-died-because-of-the-piracy/

http://classicrockrevisited.com/show_interview.php?id=995

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

Blabbermouth reports on another Blabbermouth – The Yngwie Malmsteen Streisand Effect

Wow. Where should I start with this. First of all, Blabbermouth does a poor job of conveying the tone of the whole interview that took place on the Classic Rock Revisited Website. By pulling out the questions that relate to piracy, Blabbermouth knew that they would get a reaction. All Blabbermouth cares about is the page views. As long as the page views are ticking over in the thousands, they can keep selling advertisements.

By 1992, Yngwie Malmsteen was riding high after five well received albums on the smaller Polydor label. He was ready to release his sixth studio album called “Fire and Ice”, which was his first release on a new major label deal with Elektra Records. The 1988 “Odyssey” album with Joe Lynn Turner on vocals is the album that got Elektra interested. However by 1989, Joe Lynn Turner was not the vocalist. Still Elektra took a punt on him after the album “Eclipse” did reasonably well in 1990, with a new band and a new singer.

The “Odyssey” album was a success because all the lyrics were written by Joe Lynn Turner, while all the music was written by Yngwie Malmsteen. Turner knew how to write in a pop format and that made Yngwie crossover. “Odyssey” was also produced by Yngwie Malmsteen, Jeff Glixman and Jim Lewis. On “Fire and Ice”, all the music and lyrics are written by Yngwie Malmsteen. The album is also produced by Yngwie Malmsteen. So when the album failed to make any impact, guess what happened to Yngwie?

By 1994, Malmsteen was releasing his seventh album “The Seventh Sign” on a British Independent label called Music For Nations. Music for Nations started signing all the Eighties bands that the major labels discarded. He had no distribution in the U.S., while Music for Nations distributed the album in Europe and Pony Canyon distributed the album in Japan. If any other Malmsteen fans wanted to buy the album in Australia or the US/Canada, they had to purchase it as an import, which meant double the price of what it would normally retail for. Nice way to treat the fans.

Fast forward to 2013. There are 12 questions asked before the piracy question that Blabbermouth leads off with. To sum up, the 12 questions relate to the release of Malmsteen’s autobiography, why Malmsteen wrote it himself instead of using a ghost writer and his love for his family, Paganini and guitar playing in general. So we come up to the question that Blabbermouth leads off with.

Classic Rock Revisited: Do you ever get caught up in thinking about commercial appeal of what you’re writing or composing?
Yngwie: I did at one point, when that actually existed. The radio format doesn’t exist, the singles don’t exist. The record label doesn’t exist. The record stores don’t exist. That whole entire thing is gone.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion. Malmsteen has put his out there. Malmsteen knew exactly that what he would say in relation to piracy would get a reaction. As an artist, he has products to promote that no one really cares about in 2013 except for his core audience. He is hoping that the “Streisand Effect” will work for him as well.

Look at what it has done for Lady Gaga. Seriously, if people reckon she got hacked and a snippet of her new song was the only thing that was taken, then those people need to get checked out for some sort of denial illness. It was all orchestrated to bring attention to the single. It was all orchestrated to engage her fan base in finding the offending snippets and to report the websites. It was all orchestrated so that all the media outlets can pick up the story and report on it. The same thing is happening with Yngwie Malmsteen’s comments. Blabbermouth has run with it, I am pretty sure, Noisecreep, Ultimate Guitar, Ultimate Classic Rock, Loudwire and a thousand other blogs like me will run with it.

In relation to Yngwie’s comments, the terrestrial radio format that Yngwie alludes to, ceased to be relevant for metal music when Yngwie was still at his peak in the Eighties. No radio station played Yngwie after the “Odyssey” album with Joe Lynn Turner on vocals. As soon as Radio stations became beholden to the advertisers and needed to make profits for shareholders, metal music was taken out of the playlist.

The single format comments are totally wrong. It is the “single” that is killing the album format. Fans are now able to pick and choose what songs they want to listen to. Even Nikki Sixx has asked fans to stop buying single songs and to invest in the whole album experience. In relation to the record label comments, the record label does exist, albeit in a much different way. The record labels have no one to blame except themselves for the state they are in.

The record stores don’t exist on a large scale because the days of selling plastic for almost thirty dollars are long gone. The public got burnt on this rip off. Fans of bands didn’t wake up in the morning thinking “I need to go to a record store to buy a record”. We woke up thinking, I want to hear this song. The only way to hear the song that we were thinking about was to buy a piece of plastic that had the song on it. So when the history of music is at your fingertips, why would you make the trip to a record store.

I stopped buying Malmsteen CD’s around 1994, when they started to become import CD’s. I wasn’t that keen on spending $50 plus. In 2003, all of his Nineties output came out on SPV in a remastered format, and the pricing was $30. Within 4 weeks, the prices dropped to $3 for $10 and I purchased the music then.

http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/yngwie-malmsteen-the-music-industry-died-because-of-the-piracy/

http://classicrockrevisited.com/show_interview.php?id=995

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