Jackson bump on music biz wearing off

• Mike Barris' trenchant look at digital music (#7)

For millions of bereaved fans, Michael Jackson’s death on June 25, 2009 was the day the music died. For Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, which puts out Jackson’s catalog, it was the day sales of his music spiked sharply and stayed that way for months to come, providing the company with a buffer against the downturn in the music industry.

Michael Jackson's death was chronicled in this breaking news report:

As word spread of the singer’s death from cardiac arrest at a rented mansion in the Bel Air section of west Los Angeles, where he had been preparing for upcoming concerts, fans of all ages turned to digital-music services to grab Jackson’s  best-known tracks and albums. On iTunes, Jackson held the top seven of the 10 best-selling albums, while songs such as “Man in the Mirror,” “Thriller,” and “The Way You Make Me Feel,” accounted for 13 of the top 25 songs sold on the download service.

Over at iTunes rival Amazon.com, Jackson had 13 of the top 25 songs sold, and 11 of the top 25 digital albums.

Although Jackson had long been a leading catalog seller, his material never before had seen so many top sales positions on those services; nor had any other artist commanded as many positions in an individual service's sales lists.

(Watch Michael Jackson's classic "Thriller" video, here:)

Continuing the posthumous mania for Jackson product, in March 2010, Sony Music Entertainment inked a $250 million deal with Jackson's estate to retain distribution rights to his recordings until 2017, and to release seven posthumous albums in the decade after his death. At the time, the deal was signed, U.S. album sales had plunged 52% in a decade. Superstar deals worth tens of millions of dollars per album were rare even at the peak of the CD-sales boom in the late 1990s.

No wonder Jackson, who died at age 50 amid unsavory circumstances that have seen his personal physician plead not guilty to charges of involuntary manslaughter, topped a recent Forbes list of top-earning dead celebrities. The King of Pop leads the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley, $275 million to $60 million. Elvis is in the No. 2 spot, largely thanks to Graceland admissions and the Elvis Presley Cirque du Soleil spectacular launched in Las Vegas earlier this year. In the No. 5 position is ex-Beatle and singer-songwriter John Lennon ($17 million), while Richard Rodgers, who teamed up with Lorenz Hart to compose such Great American Songbook standards as “My Funny Valentine” and “The Lady is a Tramp” ($7 million) is No. 10. Guitarist Jimi Hendrix, whose 1967 debut album, "Are You Experienced," has been licensed to the third version of the "Rock Band" videogame, ($6 million) is tied for 11^th with actor Steve McQueen.

(Frank Sinatra performs Rodgers and Hart's "The Lady is a Tramp" in the 1957 film, "Pal Joey," here:)



(Jimi Hendrix plays "Purple Haze," a standout track from the "Are You Experienced" album, here:)



Jackson not only took the No.1 spot on Forbes’ annual ranking of top-earning dead celebrities, he out-earned the other 12 deceased stars on the list combined. His estate's 12-month earnings total surpassed the combined earnings of this year’s two biggest living acts, U2 and AC/DC. Forbes noted that Jackson’s posthumous earnings come from his stake in the Sony/ATV catalog, the hit Sony film "This Is It" and renewed fan interest in his music, videos and life. (See "The Corpse King Of Pop" at http://www.bullfax.com/?q=node-corpse-king-pop.)

“The death of Michael Jackson really put a focus on - crassly, quite frankly - what someone’s worth when they’re deceased,” was how Forbes quoted David Reeder, vice president of Corbis' GreenLight, which manages the personality rights for Albert Einstein and Steve McQueen, among other dead celebrities. “In a more positive way, it exposed consumers to this idea that there actually is a market for, and an enduring legacy for, these people.”

(U2, one of this year's biggest living acts, performs "City of Blinding Lights," in a concert in Milan, here:)



Financial results from Sony Corp., the Japanese parent of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, however, indicate that the Jackson effect is starting to wear off. Demand for the deceased singer’s work no longer shields Sony from the realities that have roiled the music industry, mostly related to the fading popularity of CDs and the public’s enthusiasm for illegal downloading.

On Oct. 29, Sony reported that overall music sales – a relatively small part of the electronics giant's business activities – for the three months ended Sept. 30 fell 10.8%, or 6% excluding foreign-exchange impacts. Operating income, or earnings excluding extraordinary costs and currency impacts, dropped 6.1 percent. Sony attributed the decrease in the latest quarter primarily to “lower sales" for "Michael Jackson catalog product," and a tough comparison with the same period a year ago when a revenue surge in the wake of Jackson's death had "significantly benefited sales." Sony also said sales were hurt by the “continued contraction of the physical music market" and the negative impact of the appreciation of the yen against the U.S. dollar.

The best-selling titles during the quarter included Santana’s Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics Of All Time and Kenny Chesney’s Hemingway’s Whiskey.

(Listen here to Carlos Santana's version of the Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love," in a cut from Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics Of All Time:)

Overall, Sony swung to a profit in the latest quarter and boosted its full-year outlook as stronger results in its video-game unit offset the negative impact of a stronger yen. (A stronger yen makes money earned overseas worth less when translated back into yen.) Sony posted a profit of 31.1 billion yen, or $384 million, for the latest period, compared with a loss of 26.3 billion yen a year earlier.

Suffice it to say that Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC represents one of Jackson’s triumphs as a businessman. The company was formed by the 1995 merger of the Sony Corporation of America's music publishing business and ATV Music, which Jackson acquired in 1985, for $47.5 million. In addition to receiving $95 million upfront, and a 50% share in the combined company, Jackson kept the Mijac Music Publishing catalog, which holds all of his music, as well as that of many other acts. Sony/ATV owns or administers works by The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, The Everly Brothers, Hank Williams, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond, and numerous others. Among Sony/ATV's most valuable holdings is the Northern Songs catalog, consisting of 180 songs written by The Beatles, mostly by the Lennon-McCartney team.

(Willie Nelson, one of Sony/ATV's artists, performs "You Were Always on My Mind," here:)



Sony's latest results, however, point up the troubles in the digital-music sector, which had been seen as eventually helping to boost industry sales. Data show U.S. sales through iTunes and other outlets have either leveled off or are falling. Observers see the downturn as pushing the labels closer to making deals with radio-type services such as Pandora and Spotify, which are grabbing market share away from the digital downloads market.

Kathleen Ripley, an analyst with IBISWorld in Santa Monica, Calif., told me in an interview that despite the growing popularity of radio-type services, "music lovers aren't going to completely stop buying their own music to have access to it when they don't have access to an Internet connection. I don't think that digital downloads will go away."

Supporting that claim is a new report from Canadian market-research firm IEMR, which sees global digital music spending jumping 17% in the next four years.At the same time, IEMR also notes that online channels will see higher growth in users than the mobile channels over the next several years, surging 21%.

Consumers will continue to want to "own their own music and have access to it when they don't have an Internet connection," Ripley told me. "But I do see the streaming sector (and) digital rights revenue growing."  Furthermore, Ripley said, radio-type services could be poised for further growth through tapping into the automotive market, where consumers tend to listen to music most.

Pandora, for example, has been making an aggressive push into the automotive space, successfully expanding from a desktop service to include mobile users. Consumers now can use Alpine and Pioneer units to listen to Pandora from their phone through the car radio and control Pandora from the car radio. But those devices are just part of a transitional phase. The company aims to move away from the phone concept entirely, and see the service installed in new Internet-connected cars. Pandora chief technology officer Tom Conrad predicted in remarks to the SF Music Tech Summit last December that within a few years, new cars would have Pandora built in and “bundled with either the price of the car or services associated with the car,” ramping up competition with subscription-based satellite radio providers as well as terrestrial radio broadcasters. 

This is a good place to introduce this week's Open Mike interview: Tim Westergren, Pandora's founder and chief strategy officer.

(Watch Tim Westergren explain to interviewer Charlie Rose how the Music Genome Project that underpins Pandora's operation works, here:)



Pandora already has a deal which will see Ford Motor Co's Fiesta cars equipped with software that operates Pandora through voice controls, avoiding the safety concern that hands-on operation raises. Westergren believes that after years of downloads, many people now find managing playlists tiring, and are turning to the free-music radio model because it is easier to handle. "If you look at the way Americans listen to music, they listen to it somewhere between 18 and 20 hours a week, and historically, 80% of that has been radio," Westergren told me. "Only about 20% has ever been music that you own." Westergren said it's "time-consuming" under the iTunes model to "personally curate each song you listen to. (With the radio model) you push a button and you get this music experience .. it's very fast and easy."

Pandora offers two subscription plans. One is free, supported by advertisements, and the other is a fee-based subscription without ads. A free account user may reach the streaming limit of 40 hours per month, and continue unlimited streaming by paying 99 cents.

I suggested during the interview that we may be seeing evidence of a pattern in which the public is working its way through the innovation of downloadable music and is now returning to the easier, more convenient ideal of radio. Westergren agreed. "People will buy an iPod, and use that device for a certain period of time, but then they get tired of their collection of their playlists and they do resort to radio," he said. "The difference is now, radio is so much more personalized. It's an ever more powerful and appealing option."

The next big trend in music? Patronage models, Westergren said. He sees artists connecting intimately with fans who subsidize their careers with small donations - a concept dating back centuries to the time when kings or popes provided financial support to musicians, painters, and sculptors.

(Listen to my entire interview with Tim Westergren, here.)

Let's close out this week's blog with Michael Jackson performing "Beat It," in a Japanese concert in 1987:

Saluting the mighty Moog synthesizer

• Mike Barris' trenchant look at digital music (#6)

It changed music forever.

Long before the digital synthesizer, musicians created new sounds and customized them to their needs by using an instrumental contraption that seemed, quite simply, futuristic: the Moog synthesizer.

The Moog (pronounced “mogue,” like “vogue”) brought electronic sound modulation into music-making, and paved the way for the digital enhancement of music that is a fixture of today’s music landscape. Developed in 1964, the device was featured prominently in the recordings of such pop artists as Stevie Wonder and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, the punk-rock group Devo and disco-queen Donna Summer. Signaling the instrument’s barrier-crossing ability, the Moog was the sole instrument on the top-selling classical-music recording of all time, "Switched-On Bach."

Many techno- and audio-philes claim the Moog puts out a superior sound to the digital synthesizers of today. This BBC news piece eloquently demonstrates and describes the Moog's function:

This past weekend, an estimated 22,000 fans of the Moog converged on Asheville, N.C., for Moogfest, a three-day salute to the instrument. The festival included more than 60 acts, panel discussions, workshops and films, but the beacon for the event was the innovation of Robert Moog, the synthesizer’s New York-born inventor. For 27 years, up to his death in 2005, Moog lived in Asheville, where he was a research professor of music at the University of North Carolina and occasionally performed publicly with his invention. The festival, which relocated to Asheville from New York this year, celebrates Moog’s “legacy as a sonic pioneer,” according to the festival website.

Click here to read about the nonprofit Bob Moog Foundation's effort to raise money to build a “Moogseum” in Asheville based around Robert Moog’s archives.

Among the acts slated to play Moogfest was Devo, a heavy Moog user whose style has ranged from punk to art rock to post-punk to New Wave. Watch Devo perform its then-current chart hit, "Whip It," and "Uncontrollable Urge" on the "Fridays" show in 1980, here:



Moogfest celebrated Robert Moog's invention with interactive sessions that used a variety of Moog instruments. At the 2005 Moogfest in New York, Robert Moog himself introduced a performance by keyboardist Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, one of the first pop-rock bands to perform live with a synthesizer. See it here:

And since Robert Moog mentions EL& P's "Lucky Man," let's listen to the recording of that tune, which concludes with a nice Moog solo:



The Moog crashed the mainstream music market in 1968 when Wendy Carlos, a New York recording engineer and composer recorded an album of pieces by Baroque-era giant Johann Sebastian Bach entirely on the synthesizer. The resulting CBS Records release, Switched-On Bach, captured three Grammy awards for Carlos and shattered classical-music sales records. Carlos went on to compose original music for the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film, A Clockwork Orange, which also featured several Moog versions of classical works by Beethoven and Rossini.

Watch the trailer for A Clockwork Orange, with its Moog-enhanced soundtrack, here:




How does the Moog stand up against today’s digital synthesizers? The original device was by no means perfect – its pitch was inconsistent, and its user-created sounds could not be saved the way they can in the digital age. The instrument had no “pre-set” sounds; musicians twisted dials and knobs by hand to produce the unusual noises and sonorities issuing from the Moog's speakers. But what the Moog had going for it was the continuous electronic signal through which it produced its sounds. Some audiophiles feel that signal is cleaner than the digitally produced sound, which consists of thousands and thousands of samples per second, and thus has thousands and thousands of gaps. Seen as adding weight to that argument is the existence of an iPhone app, Filtatron, a Moog audio-effects suite for the iPhone or the iPod touch.

For a taste of contemporary synthesizer rock, check out The Octopus Project's instrumental, "Truck":



During the '70s, Stevie Wonder's use of the Moog changed the face of R&B, adding to the instrument's growing stature. The singer and keyboard player's complicated synthesizer riffs held together the contrasting textures and voices that underpinned his work in songs such as "Superstition." Wonder shows himself to have a fine touch on the synthesizer in a live-in-the-studio performance of "Superstition," here:




The Moog also gave singer Donna Summer a signature sound that was unusual for the disco era: Listen to Summer's recording of "I Feel Love," here:



And here's a live version of the song, complete with Summer's robot-like choreography:





This might be a good time to introduce this week's Open Mike interview. I chatted with Fred Topinka, an Allendale, N.J., keyboard player who made music using the Moog at clubs, concerts and recording sessions. For Fred and many others, the Moog symbolized the height of creativity in music-making. "I was not inspired by any particular artist to go out and buy it," Fred told me. "I heard it on the radio, and I said, 'I really want to try that.'"

Fred got a kick out of working the Moog in with the Hammond organ he played. "I experimented with it a lot. and I saw all the different, crazy sounds I could get out of it," he said. "If we went to a club and did one song one night and did that same song in another club on another night, my Moog synthesizer  would be different in terms of the way I used it. It was not locked into any one pattern. I always wanted to flavor it differently."

Once in a while, "the guys would turn and give me this crazy look, saying "where'd you get that from?'" he said.

Fred, who played rock music, fondly remembers the Moog as being "really hands-on." Twisting knobs and dials, "you could keep that sound going and going and going, even though your hand wasn't on the keyboard at times," he recalled. "So it gave me the ability to hold that note and then change it and modulate it."

Since there were no pre-sets, "the sounds that you were creating with the Moog were really just based on your own taste," Fred said. "You could change every flavor with just a turn of a knob. It took a lot of taste. It wasn't a locked-in digital sound."

Listen to my entire interview with Fred Topinka, here.

Let's close this week's blog with one more Moog piece. Dick Hyman, best known as the musical director for Woody Allen movies, recorded some of the first commercial electronic-music albums entirely on the Moog. Here is "Minotaur," a cut from Hyman's album, "The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman":

Fortunes sink for LimeWire, Walkman

• Mike Barris' trenchant look at digital music (#5)

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

Rest in peace, LimeWire and Walkman (Japan). Happy Birthday, iPod!

Yep, it’s been quite a week. A giant of file-sharing software bites the dust while an iconic music player of an earlier age limps toward its eventual demise. Meanwhile, the iconic music player of today celebrates its ninth birthday.

On Tuesday, LimeWire officially died. U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood handed LimeWire’s parent, the Lime Group, a permanent injunction ordering the company to halt its distribution and support of its file-sharing unit. The company, embroiled in a copyright infringement lawsuit with the Recording Industry Association of America since 2006, complied with the judge’s order, ending an era which saw LimeWare at one time sharing space on nearly one out of every three iPods.

Read about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/technology/27limewire.html

Just two days earlier, on Sunday, Japanese electronics giant Sony confirmed it would stop producing its Walkman cassette players in Japan, due to declining demand, although it would continue to make the devices in China for the U.S. and European markets. 

You can read more about the Walkman's declining fortunes here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101025/tc_yblog_upshot/sony-walkman-rip

News of the end of the Japan-based Walkman came as Apple’s iPod marked its ninth birthday, following the trail the Walkman had blazed for it years earlier, by showing people that they could incorporate portable music into any lifestyle.

Details follow here: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic/apple-ipod-is-9-years-old-50001302/

Like the Byrds sang, to everything there is a season ….

(Listen to the Byrds’s classic 1960s rendition of their hit, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with words adapted from the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes and music by Pete Seeger, here:)

Let’s start with LimeWire. The seeds of its destruction were sown four years ago when the privately owned company and its founder, Mark Gorton, clashed in court with the RIAA. In May, Lime Group was found liable of copyright infringement;

the injunction, issued by the U.S. District Court in New York, forces Lime Group to disable LimeWire's searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and distribution features, effective immediately. A hearing to determine damages is set for January.

Lime Group, however, is working on a new piece of software that the company promises will adhere to copyright laws, a move aimed at jumping on the burgeoning market for legal downloads and radio-style services. The new service will include a desktop media player, mobile apps and a catalog of music from which people can stream and download songs, the Associated Press reported.

What did a typical Walkman user look like, back in the day? In the '80s, my friend, June Wilson, a wonderful artist from Middletown, N.J., painted this portrait, called "Walkman," which should answer that question:

A TYPICAL WALKMAN USER, BACK IN THE DAY

Note the oblivious countenance, a forerunner to the iPod user of today. No wonder the Walkman, which emerged in 1979, sparked a genuine revolution. "It started to push this idea of mobility," said Nick Bilton, a New York Times technology reporter. "You couldn't really walk around or sit on a subway with a record player and listen to music. You could with a Walkman."

Before the Walkman, "the music industry was essentially an industry being listened to at home," said Bilton. But once the Walkman was introduced, cassette sales "just skyrocketed during that time. It was a huge thing for the industry," Bilton said. Sony has sold more than 200 million Walkmans since the device first went on sale.

Considered by some to be the most significant music invention of the past 50 years, the Walkman was the brainchild of Nobutoshi Kihara, an engineer in the audio division at Sony. Kihara was asked by his chairman, Akio Morita, to design a device that would allow Morita to pass the time on business trips by listening to his favourite operas.

(Speaking of opera, here is a clip of The Three Tenors - the Spanish singers Plácido Domingo and José Carreras and the Italian singer Luciano Pavarotti - performing "La donna è mobile" from Verdi's Rigoletto, in 1994:)

As the Walkman shuffles off into gadget history, let's pay tribute to it in pictures:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/5733286/Sony-Walkman-in-pictures.html

Now let's talk about the iPod’s birthday.

Like the Walkman two decades earlier, the iPod revolutionized music, helping to bring the idea of digital technology - and the Internet - into the mainstream. It wasn't the first MP3 player, but the iPod and its iTunes website made collecting and listening to digital music easy. The success of the iPod also made a star of Apple chief Steve Jobs, and made Apple a corporate juggernaut.

Watch Jobs' mesmerizing introduction of the iPod in 2001, here:

This is a good point to introduce this week’s Open Mike interview: Kevin Brennan, of Bradley Beach, N.J., is a music fan and musician whose personal digital-music collection contains about 130,000 tracks. He has been through vinyl, cassette, Walkmans, minidiscs, iPods, streaming, the whole ball of wax.

“I’ve been building that collection for over 10 years,” Kevin told me. How much time does he spend on his collection? “Usually it goes in spurts,” he said. The library covers "a very wide range" of music, "anything from Amadeus (Mozart) to ZZ Top."

(Go here to watch an abbreviated but stirring performance of  the first movement of Amadeus Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony by the Siam Philharmonic Orchestra:)

(To view a clip of ZZ Top performing "Sharp Dressed Man" in concert, check this out:)

Kevin started out owning vinyl records. "And as soon as CDs came in vogue in the mid-'80s, it didn't make any sense to store your music on such a big, bulky medium, and the CDs were very convenient," he said. "But now with the advent of music being digitized, what once took an entire wall of CD cases jewel boxes now can be contained in one hard drive that you can contain in the palm of your hand.”

He stores the music in "several external hard drives," backing up everything to one hard drive. The backup drive is "left dormant in case I have hardware failure," he said, adding that he has "about another 180 gigabytes of free space, so it’s almost time to buy another drive."

Along the way, there have been mishaps, he said. "One time," he recalled, "I lost an entire drive of video that I had brought over from my TiVo; they were all live concerts that had been broadcast on television and I lost probably 300 hours of really good stuff."

Kevin listens to his tracks using various media. He spends long hours in his day job, driving a truck For the truck, he has "a stereo that my iPod is interfaced to." In addition to the iPod there’s "a USB input so I can just listen to music just on a flash key. At home or in my office on the computer I try to use Lennox (MP3 player) ... usually the player that came with the operating system. On Windows I use Winamp and on the Mac I use iTunes."

I asked Kevin if he thinks that flattening sales of digital music downloads in the past few years signal that people are tiring of music downloads. His reply: "I don’t think they’re tired of downloading music, I think they’re tired of downloading music and having to pay for it." With free music available through illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, "people are sharing the files," he said. "One person buys the files; they rip it and it gets shared amongst thousands."

The increasing availability of legal, radio-type subscription services could be contributing to the sliding sales, he said. "I myself subscribe to Rhapsody. And for $10 a month, you can listen to unlimited tracks in their library, and they have 7 million tracks. So there’s really no reason to buy the music if you are connected to the Net. On demand you can listen to whatever you want. Why store it yourself when it’s available there for you to listen to?"

In the months and years to come, reducing storage will be the big issue, Kevin said.

"There will come less and less of a need for people to amass and store the files themselves .... There’s no necessity for having all the storage and maintaining all the infrastructure and the computing power to have everybody duplicate what’s out there in one source. ...There’s no need for you to keep it yourself."

To hear the complete interview, go here: http://www.box.net/files/0/f/52605102/1/f_516848666#/files/0/f/52605102/1/f_529638477

Since Kevin mentioned country music and we haven't yet featured that genre in this blog, let's close out with a couple of fine renditions of "Miles and Miles of Texas" and "Get Your Kicks on Route 66" by the venerable Western swing band, Asleep at the Wheel. For this music, we can thank an amateur video photographer who caught the band in action when it played a record store in Austin, Texas.

Glee-full labels gain as Beatles' record falls

• Mike Barris' trenchant look at digital music (#4)

Got Glee?

The Emmy-winning musical comedy-drama TV series that airs on the Fox network has become a juggernaut – not just of the small screen, but of the digital-music industry.

Glee, which will next air Oct. 26, has had 75 singles appear on the Billboard Hot 100 chart – smashing, in a mere 16 months, a record that has stood for 40 years, for most chart appearances by a group; a record held by the Beatles, only the most influential rock band of all time. And with weeks still to go in the current season and the show already picked up for a third season, the Glee ensemble potentially could shatter Elvis Presley’s all-time record of 108 chart appearances.

One of the breakout hits of fall 2009, Glee focuses on the misfits who make up a high-school glee club. It has been called A 'High School Musical' with bite.

(Meet the cast of Glee, here:)

The Glee phenomenon is part and parcel of the digital age. The public’s growing disaffection for CDs in the digital age has hammered revenue at major music labels. But fans apparently can't get enough of Glee: they watch the show, buy the downloads of its songs (more than 11.5 million as of this month, according to Billboard), and go to its cast members' concerts.

Consequently, Glee has the power to boost or re-energize the careers of the artists whose music it features. The week after Glee dedicated an episode to the music of Madonna, the show’s soundtrack debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 chart. The show also boosted sales of Madonna’s new concert CD, released a week before, and pushed her greatest-hits album, Celebration, released in 2009, back onto the chart, checking in at number 86.

(Listen to the cast of Glee performing Madonna's "Open Your Heart," here:)





(Watch the Material Girl herself performing "Open Your Heart," from her 1986 video, here:)

Britney Spears' album sales experienced a similar boost in September. Spears' latest release, November 2009's "The Singles Collection," re-entered the Billboard Top 200 album chart after her appearance on Glee.

Such chart-busting prowess hasn’t been seen since the heyday of Beatlemania in the 1960s. During the week of April 4, 1964 – two months after the Fab Four arrived in the U.S. – the Beatles held 12 positions on the Billboard Hot 100, including the top five positions. Those feats remain unmatched; although Glee, which comes out with about seven songs per episode, has the potential to break even that mark, IBIS World analyst Kathleen Ripley told me.

(See the Beatles performing “I Saw Her Standing There” at Washington Coliseum during that first U.S. visit, here:)

(The Beatles, incidentally, are among the few major artists whose recorded catalogue is not available through online music services such as iTunes. Negotations between the band, EMI and iTunes owner Apple Inc. have stalled, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney said in November 2008. "We are very for it, we’ve been pushing it," McCartney said. “But there are a couple of sticking points … They [EMI] want something we’re not prepared to give them.”)

The Glee phenomenon underscores how television shows like this and American Idol are giving the beleaguered music industry a much-needed boost in the digital age. Over the five years to 2010, revenue at major labels fell an estimated 9.7% annually, while TV deal-related revenue surged 15.3%, IBIS World reported.

In 2010, the television production and television broadcasting industries will earn 5.5% of their revenue from music-related content, with the fastest growth coming from prime-time music-focused shows such as American Idol and Glee, IBIS World said. Musical television is expected to garner $1.7 billion in production revenue this year and is anticipated to grow at an annualized rate of 5.8% over the five years to 2015 to $2.2 billion. This is significant growth considering that the television production industry as a whole is expected to increase at an average annual rate of 3.3% during this time to total $36.2 billion in 2015.

IBIS World's Ripley calls Glee's ability to surpass the Beatles' mark after just 16 months in existence on TV "astonishing and astounding."

"I wouldn’t be surprised if (Glee) broke the No.1 record for that Hot 100 appearances held by Elvis Presley," Kathleen told me from Santa Monica, Calif., noting that Glee still has the rest of this season and all of its coming season to topple Elvis' record.

(Check out Elvis performing "Ready Teddy," on the Ed Sullivan Show, in 1956, here:)





The analyst noted that Sony, which has licensing rights to American Idol through 2010, has teamed up with News Corp.'s Fox as Glee’s record label. Under the agreement, Sony has the release-rights to all digital and physical music from the show; the first rights to recording contracts with the show’s cast; and a percentage of sales from merchandising, endorsements, ringtones and live shows.

The agreement will give “fans of the music on the TV show the opportunity to have that instant download, to have that instant satisfaction of being able to listen over and over again to these great songs performed by current television stars,” Kathleen said. 

I'm going to let the cast of Glee close things out this week with their upbeat cover of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin.'" Listen to it, here:

Are downloads losing luster with buyers?

• Mike Barris' trenchant look at digital music (#3)

Can it be true? Are people already tiring of music downloads?

If you believe Matt Rosoff, yes.

Rosoff, an analyst for the independent research group Directions on Microsoft, told a podcast audience early this month that a change in listening habits in just the past several months has caused speculation that people are ready to shift from downloads services such as industry colossus iTunes to more of a radio-type streaming service such as Pandora or Rhapsody.

“A lot of people were used to buying music for a long time," Rosoff opined. "Everybody had their record collections and then their CD collections, and so it was an easy transition when the first commercial digital music services came out.

"And I think about two or three years ago, people started to realize that I’ve got 3,000 or 4,000 songs, but I am kind of sick of arranging them into playlists," Rosoff said. "I am kind of sick of going through my collection and figuring out what I am going to listen to, and there was almost this shift: wouldn't it be nice if somebody else could drive for me?"

Rosoff pointed out on the TechFlash podcast that Apple Inc. tried to capitalize on the change in music-consumption habits without undercutting its business model, by coming out with Genius, which constructs playlists around particular songs in a user's iTunes library. “But I think people are increasingly discovering more radio-type services,” he said. Rhapsody, Rosoff pointed out, was on the scene in the beginning, but "a ton of new competitors have popped up in the last six months," including Mog radio (http://www.mog.com), and Rdio (http://www.rdio.com), created by the founders of Internet phone service Skype, and Spotify (http://www.spotify.com/int/about/what/).

“It seems that there’s a lot of buzz around the idea that instead of buying individual downloads, you’re going to subscribe or you’re going to pay a monthly fee and you’re going to get whatever you want, whenever you want," Rosoff said. "The trick is making sure that that works on all sorts of devices.”

(Read a review of Mog and Rdio here: http://www.masslive.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2010/08/review_rdio_mog_music_service_comparison.html)

(Listen to Rosoff's full comments at: http://icestream.bonnint.net/seattle/kiro/2010/10/p_TechFlash_20101001_1pm.mp3)

The watershed moment in the history of music downloads was Jan. 9, 2001 - Apple's introduction of iTunes, its digital media-player application, used for playing and organizing digital music and video files, and for managing content on the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. iTunes is a brilliantly conceived system in that one can connect to the iTunes Store through the Web to buy and download a range of media, from music to movies to apps. It is also used to download applications for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Rosoff’s comments reflect the flattening of digital-music sales in recent years. Early this month, Neilsen Research reported that U.S. digital music-track purchases for the first six months of 2010 totaled 630 million, flat with the year-ago figure. Sales began to slow significantly after jumping 28% in 2007-2008. In 2008-2009, sales posted a considerably smaller increase of 13%.

Nielsen Research analyst Jean Littolff blames the sagging sales on weak consumer confidence, weak release schedules and confusion over the many choices people have to buy music online. Although the stagnant condition is a “plateau,” it “doesn’t mean that this digital consumption is going to drop significantly,” Littolff said. “It’s a plateau, but it’s not yet saturation.” (Read the full report at:

http://www.internetfinancialnews.com/financialblogtalk/news/ifn-6-20101001USDigitalMusicSalesGoFlat.html)

The slowing downloads sales, combined with the growing appetite for radio-style streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify, are driving interest in online in-car audio, according to data from Vision Critical. An online survey of more than 4,000 consumers in the United States, Britain and Canada found that one in four drivers regularly play personal digital music through their car stereo system. Broadcast radio is still the dominant source of audio in the car, the survey showed.

(Read the survey here: http://www.rbr.com/media-news/internet/28202.html. See more on this topic at:

http://www.rbr.com/radio/28218.html)

This seems like a good moment to introduce this week’s Open Mike interview. I talked with Ed Long, the music director of Trenton, N.J., radio station WIMG-AM 1300. WIMG is a traditional, brick-and-mortar broadcaster whose mission is the “appreciation of black gospel music as an art form.” The station targets primarily an African-American market in western and central New Jersey and the suburbs of Philadelphia. It has an audience of about 500,000, and an Internet presence at http://www.wimg1300.com.

I asked Ed to predict the next big technological change in radio music. His answer speaks to the declining enthusiasm for downloads and the embrace of radio-type streaming systems:

“CD players will be gone," he told me. "I think it will be a improvement of the MP3 quality audio, that it doesn’t take up as much space; WAV files take up a lot of space. I think there will be a way that you can save you file and it will be very good quality, but it won’t take up a lot of space. There will be an iPod-type device built in to a car – they’re already doing it now, where you can upload all your music in your car so you don’t have to carry a CD or carry an iPod anymore. You can just hit a button and all your music is right there. That’s the next thing: being able to store more music, better quality, but taking up less space.”

Listen to my complete interview with Ed here: http://www.box.net/openmike101#openmike101/1/52605102/516848666/1

Ed remembers the pre-digital era, when the radio business was mostly controlled by a small group of large corporations and nonprofit media organizations. Since gospel music abounds on Internet radio stations, “you have to stay current with the website,” especially in making it easy for listeners to download artist podcasts,” Ed said. Audiences, he noted, “can pretty much listen to what they want to. I even have an Internet station myself. You don’t have to rely on a radio station to play what you want to hear.”

ED LONG

Nowadays, Ed pointed out, AM radio stations tend to shy away from music programs – preferring, instead, to embrace talk or news formats. “The digital age has changed it,” he said. “People don’t tolerate the AM signal – the sound is not as clean. But we know our target audience: it’s about 50 years of age, and they know the kind of music we play.” A list of typical WIMG gospel artists would include such names as Donnie McClurkin, Marvin Sapp, Hezekiah Walker, Byron Cage, Kirk Franklin, and Tye Tribbett.

(Listen to Hezekiah Walker's boisterous performance of "Souled Out," here:

Adding CD-quality audio is costly, Ed added, because it calls for more bandwidth to accommodate the signal. "My station sounds the way FM used to sound before digital, so it takes up less space and it's not as expensive," he said. "If the music is good, people won't mind (a slightly flatter sound) as much."

To keep listeners engaged, WIMG's strategy is to keep a playlist that is somewhat more elastic than those of most mainstream AM music stations, Ed said. At many stations, "you will hear the same 10 to 15 songs every couple of hours," Ed observed, "because they want you to hear a hit whenever you turn the station on... Our playlist is not as tight as some." Some of the slack in the lineup, he said, is taken up by breaking in new artists - one way in which WIMG cements its relationship with its core audience. Just the same, cracking the lineup is extremely difficult for unknown performers, Ed added.

We'll close this week's blog with an emotional live performance by one of WIMG's typical artists,

Marvin Sapp, on the contemporary gospel tune, “Never Would Have Made It.” You'll find it here: 

Legit downloads creep into vogue on sites

• Mike Barris' trenchant look at digital music (#2)

It was a pivotal time for music in the digital age.

June 1999. Shawn Fanning, a student at Boston’s Northwestern University, invents Napster, an online music peer-to-peer file-sharing service.

Giving the music industry fits with its end-run around the legal music market, Napster lets millions of ecstatic users share MP3 files. The service lasts through July 2001, when it is shut down by court order. But its impact profoundly changes the music industry. Napster stirs a voracious public appetite for downloadable music.

Fast forward nearly a decade, to June 2008. The speaker is George Van Horn, an analyst with market-researcher IBISWorld. 

"We expect illegal downloads will reach a tipping point, beyond which, further growth will be difficult,” Horn says. “As online music becomes more readily available, and more affordable, we'll see an increasing number of music fans indulging in legitimate downloading, attracted by a legal, quality, guaranteed product." (To read Horn’s remarks in entirety, go here: http://www.ibisworld.com/pressrelease/pressrelease.aspx?prid=127.)

Legitimate downloading? What happened to the MP3 revolution?

Back in Napster’s heyday, users pursued the site's illegal MP3s with a chest-thumping bluster and a spirit of defiance fully sprung from the head of Karl Marx. “I’m not really doing anything wrong – the music companies are already making plenty of money,” some might say. They might also say, “I’ve already paid for these tracks by buying them in vinyl, so I’m entitled.” Marx’s belief was that whoever controls the distribution of media controls the means of production and thus wields enormous power. The heyday of Napster embodied an out-and-out revolt against the big distributors, fueled by the revolutionary spirit of the Internet.

It’s hard to believe that illegal downloading could be going out of vogue when you consider a teenaged Morgan Stanley intern’s July 2009 report on teens’ use of media. The 15-year-old author declared that teen-agers “listen to a lot of music,” but are “very reluctant to pay for it.” The intern observed that most of his contemporaries have “never bought a CD,” and roughly “eight out of 10” are “downloading it illegally from file-sharing sites.”

(Read the full, thought-provoking piece here: http://media.ft.com/cms/c3852b2e-6f9a-11de-bfc5-00144feabdc0.pdf)

Could it be, could it just be, that people are actually willing to pay a price to access something legally, even when a free illegal option is available? Could it be that ongoing prosecution of illegal sites is slowly turning the tide and driving more listeners towards legal downloads?

Yes.

We’re seeing the beginning of a change in attitude about downloading that has raised the outlook for legal music-download services. This projected growth coincides with a surging interest in not just single tracks, but digital albums. In October, United Press International reported that sales of digital albums in the United Kingdom topped 50 million in less than five years, outpacing album sales on CD in their first five years.

Against that backdrop, legal downloads sources are mushrooming. Spotify, a European-based digital music service with 500,000 paying subscribers, appears poised to launch in the U.S., later this year, according to a report by paidContent. (http://paidcontent.org/article/419-spotify-does-expect-u.s.-launch-before-2010s-out/) And Sony Music is launching a new store called Ariama.com that will sell classical music downloads and CDs from over 50 labels.(http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2010/10/05/sony-goes-direct-to-classical-lovers-with-ariama/)


On that note, let me introduce today's “Open Mike Live” spotlight. We're looking at 1201music.com, a jazz-downloads site that is stepping up its efforts to enter the legal-downloads fray. Marketing director Mechele Shoneman gave me an exclusive interview. (You can listen to the entire interview as a podcast, here: http://www.box.net/files/0/f/52605102/1/f_516846328) 


1201music.com (http://www.1201music.com) is noteworthy for its range of music, from classic jazz by Louis Armstrong to more nontraditional rock-flavored jazz by artists such as Dauner Mariano Saluzzi. The site also has distribution deals with iTunes and Amazon.com.

Shoneman, based in Marlboro, New Jersey, is in a good position to comment on the changes in people’s media use that have reshaped the music industry:  She didn’t start out in digital music, but spent 15 years working in traditional marketing for old-media companies such as publishing houses Prentiss Hall and Simon & Schuster. She handled marketing for catalogs, books, and print advertisements, then moved into telecom marketing with Lucent. Her resume also includes a handful of entrepreneurial forays into the online market, including an environmental website called Be Turtle.com.

MECHELE SHONEMAN

 

 “The beauty of online is the economies of scale,” Shoneman says. “You can build out an idea within a couple of months with very little investment and find out if you’ve got something or not.”

1201music.com, she explains, is “essentially a catalog site.” It is best known for its Black Lion label, which specializes in British jazz musicians and international jazz figures and carries a lot of reissued material by seminal artists such as Thelonius Monk.

Shoneman notes that the “distribution network today is 90% online - Amazon and iTunes are the kings of the industry.” And the public’s shift toward buying separate tracks has created “an incredible challenge for online digital music businesses, because their margins are razor-thin and it’s really become a volume business.”

A major challenge, Shoneman says, is dealing with the big third-party distribution networks and “trying to get on the top of the list to run special promotions." She addes that "unless you have a really original title or artist, you’re just another commodity.” Shoneman says separating yourself from the pack “can get really rough,” so it’s important to “build up an identity online that goes over and beyond these distribution channels.”

A jazz site like 1201music has one important thing going for it: The loyalty of the jazz-buying public, which for many years has typically accounted for about 3% of all recorded music sold. That isn't a big figure, but it is constant, even amid the sea-change in the music industry's fortunes.

Shoneman is candid about the challenges music distributors of all stripes and sizes face in competing against the onslaught of media choices vying for the attention of potential record buyers: “We’re at the very beginnings of watching what used to be a one-way conversation," she says. "Today, with the advent of digital media, we have the ability to listen to conversations, to start conversations, to get involved in and to really listen to our customers.”

Joining the dialogue, she says, makes good business sense. “It costs a whole lot more to engage a new customer than it does to re-sell to an existing customer - about 5 to 10 times as much. As well, marketers have been forced to become more genuine. Claims like “the latest and the greatest,” you don’t hear any more.”

Shoneman says the amount of media with which average Americans are hit every day has created “a very discerning audience.”

 It’s "very important to have conversations," she says. "Shoving one-way messages at people, like email blasts, is a no-no. The jazz audience at 1201music is very opinionated, very educated, and they have a long, long memory of what’s gone on in the music business and the music industry. For instance, trying to walk into a forum and talk about a very light subject like, hey, what do you think of our site design? will quickly spiral into one conversation about one particular disc. It’s a really touchy area.”

Shoneman recalls that “in the old days it was all about demographics – who is your audience, how old are they? What’s their income? What do they like to do? What’s their lifestyle? And now it’s really more about what they think. How do they move in the world?"

What "you think your influence is, is almost always wrong," she says. "You can do all the market research in the world, but you can always be surprised.”

Shoneman says that in light of the technology-based upheaval in her business, she would now devote "upwards of 70%" of a budget to online marketing. "Understanding how those keyword-driven algorithms work, so that you come up on searches like Google and Bing when somebody, for instance, types in “jazz music,” is absolutely critical," she says.

“Online, it is all about keeping score," she says. "I can track somebody from the time they came to my site, how much time they’re on my site, which product they’re looking at, and push a promotion at them with dynamic marketing – which you can’t do off line. Off-line, you’re spinning in the wind. Online, it’s a very defined way to go after someone.”

(Learn more about Mechele
Shoneman's marketing businesses at www.repaz.com)

Next week, we'll examine the digital boom's impact on a traditional radio station.

I'm going to let Thelonius Monk, one of 1201music.com's featured artists, take us home with a 1963 televised performance of his famous composition, "Round Midnight." You can watch it here:

Digital music has new blogger kvetching

• Mike Barris' trenchant look at digital music (#1)

How does music fit into your day?

With the digital boom, integrating your favorite tunes with your lifestyle has never been easier. You can multi-task ALL YOU WANT NOW, endangering motorists, pedestrians, animals and Barry Manilow fans.

(Ah, that was a cheap shot. Barry’s fans don’t deserve that. He does, though, for his music, which was the worst kind of nauseating, commercial ’70s treacle. But ever since I saw him coaching, in a nice, musicianly way, contestants on “American Idol” – a show I am embarrassed to admit I like watching, because of the way it encourages acceptance of a lung-power-first singing style and devalues vocal panache and grace – I have newfound respect for the man who gave us “You Deserve A Break Today,” the former McDonalds theme song. But I never will forgive him for “I Write the Songs.”)

(Listen to Barry Manilow [if you dare] here:) 

That is my roundabout way of welcoming you to Open Mike, my blog on the digital-music scene. In the weeks to come, I will veer wildly between stirring up controversy and snickering at the foibles of the music biz. I can promise you this: You will approve of some of my notions, despise others and get an opportunity to give your thoughts on all of them.

Hey, why don’t we put on some tunes right now? A little Howlin' Wolf, maybe? There! Pandora is hooked up.

You know I'm a crawlin' kingsnake baby, and I rules my den
You know I'm a crawlin' kingsnake baby, and I rules my den
I don't want you hangin' around my mate,
Wanna use her for myself

Man, Howlin’ Wolf tells it like it is!  (Listen to the bluesman here:)




(See him perform on television in the mid-1960s here:)

I’m admittedly a glass-empty kind of guy (the Yiddish word “kvetch,” used in the blog sub-title, means, literally, to complain). For instance, I think it’s terrible that I’ve put only 7,000 songs on my iPod. I spend so much time meticulously crafting these precisely sequenced, themed playlists, milking each little track for all its worth, it will take me years to get to the 30,000 max - if the iPod lasts that long. Thanks to my incessant use of it, I fried my first one in three years.

You know you caught me crawlin' baby
When the, when the grass was very high
I'm just gonna keep on crawlin' now baby until the day I die,
because I'm a crawlin' kingsnake baby, and I rules my den
Don't you go hangin' around my mate, wanna use her for myself

A somewhat befuddled technology user I may be, but Pandora, or Pandora Radio, the technology that is bringing us Howlin’ Wolf, is terrific. If you don’t know, it’s an automated music-recommendation website. You just enter the song or artist you want to hear, and Pandora comes back with a playlist composed of tunes that are similar. If you’re inclined to give the list a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, Pandora factors that in to future playlists. Of course, the website makes it convenient for you to buy the tune, right there and then, at iTunes and other vendors.

It’s yet another of those digital-age innovations which manage to impart human characteristics to a machine. The software sorts tunes by thousands of musical traits, such as vocal harmonies, rhythmic synocopation, and instrumental ability. So when I put in that I want to hear songs by jazz pianist Monty Alexander, I get an amazingly well-matched set of songs not only by Alexander, but also by other pianists and jazz artists who embody Alexander’s ebullient spirit and muscular keyboard gymnastics.

(See Monty Alexander in action here:)

You know I'm gon' crawl up to your window baby,
wanna crawl up to your door, you got anything I want baby,
wanna crawl up on your floor
Because I'm a crawlin' king snake baby, and I rules my den

Which brings me to the question: Does anyone really pay attention to all those music channels on TV? They do play some good stuff, I have to admit. It’s like everything else media-related nowadays. I want to be mobile, I don’t want to be chained to the damn TV. I don’t even bother listening to the living-room stereo, anymore.

For an idea of what my well-used childhood family stereo system back in Canada looked like, go here: http://www.canuckaudiomart.com/view_images.php?cat=Vintage%20Equipment&catnick=vintage_equipment&cfid=132206&image_id=1053211

For a rough idea of what my now-neglected non-portable home-music system in New Jersey looks like, go here:
http://img169.imageshack.us/i/nadavec4155pq2.jpg/

Heh. Funny story:

This summer, Bonnie and I were meandering around in the trendy, upscale Grove Shopping Center in L.A. - next to the Farmer’s Market where the movie stars sometimes eat breakfast? We had just finished spotting Paul Mazursky – again – like, for the sixth time, or something in the last 15 years of going to L.A. – that guy is a Market legend – and we were looking at all the incredibly expensive stuff for sale in the mall. Personally, I find the mall kind of loathsome. This wonderful, charming, quaint, open-air farmers market has been around since 1934, at Fairfax and 3^rd, selling fresh produce and groceries, and they messed up its relaxed ambience by putting a giant mall next to it, just so rich Angelinos could have more places to spend their dough.

(See the Farmer's Market here: http://www.you-are-here.com/location/farmer_market.html. See the Grove Shopping Center here: http://www.flickriver.com/photos/hercwad/2761748919/.)

Anyway, as we’re strolling around, the loudspeakers are pumping out a really kick-ass song. I want to know what it is. So Bonnie whips out her iPhone and turns on the Shazam app – the one that lets you identify the tune merely by pointing the phone in the direction of the song. And man, if it doesn’t work! There we are, strolling through a damn open-air shopping plaza, and suddenly, I know that the artist who catches my ear is none other than …Vic Damone? (I meant to buy the song on iTunes when I got home, but I didn’t get around to it, so now I forget the name of the song. Truth is, I’m not a big Damone fan, but I’ve viewed him with greater respect ever since I read that Sinatra thought Damone had the “better pipes.”)

(Listen to Vic Damone performing live on the Hollywood Palace TV show in the '60s, introduced by Elizabeth Montgomery, star of TV's "Bewitched":

Anyway, the point is, there are a lot of ways to hear and manage music nowadays. We’ll look at some of them in this blog, if I ever get out of bed.

In blogs to come, I’ll try to expand the discussion by holding forth about a jazz-music downloads website, a gospel-music radio station, the status of music left “marooned” on vinyl, an amazing discovery of supposedly lost pop music, and much, much, more.

I'll post podcasts of my interviews with some of the central figures in these stories. For a taste, go here:
www.box.net/openmike101.

Wolf, take us home.

You know I'm gon' crawl up to your window baby,
wanna crawl up to your door, you got anything I want baby,
wanna crawl up on your floor
Because I'm a crawlin' king snake baby, and I rules my den