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":