MURKETING

Music sales at lowest level since …

… 1960?

… 1940?

… the dawn of time?

I don’t know what I would have said, but the answer according to this story is 1985. Global unit sales were 1.8 million billion in 1985, and the “equivalent of” 1.86 billion in 2007.

I’ve always wondered how much the industry’s revenue situation has been exacerbated by the the fact that from 1985 to at least 1998 or so, sales must have been falsely inflated by ever-growing CD sales (both overpriced, and involving a lot of simple format replacement for stuff we already owned). I wonder, if there was a way to remove such sales, how much difference it would make.

Again, I’m not denying the real drops, or factors like rising population (in particular demographic bulge of Gen Y). Just musing.

Note: I know I said I’d get to that Nike follow-up today, but it’s not going to happen. It’s half written, and a little too unwieldy. I’ll get it cleaned up and presentable, and when it’s ready, will post.

Music, coolness and legality: You tell me

You’re a legal expert, right? Good, well maybe you can answer a question for me.

I’ve been very interested to learn recently about things like Muxtape (via Delicious Ghost and Popgadget), Mixwit (via Sleevelessness) and the somewhat similar but more conceptual (and very much worth checking out) “Cassette From My Ex” (via Delicious Ghost).

I’ll just use Muxtape as an example, since I’ve played around with it a little — and I really liked playing around with it. It’s cool. Basically it’s a very easy way to upload MP3s into an online mixtape kind of thing that anybody can listen to. When you actually upload something, it says: “By uploading a song you agree that you have permission to let Muxtape use it.”

Well! That might let Muxtape off the hook. But how do I knew whether I have “permission to let Muxtape” use a particular song?

If you know, please tell me.

[And please understand, my question has nothing to do with any ideological statement one way or the other about the idea of “sharing music” etc. It has to do with not wanting to get sued. Ever.]

And are any of you using Muxtape or Mixwit, either as mix-makers or as listeners? What do you think?

Catching up: Ghostly/Adult Swim project

Going through the list of things I’m behind on, here’s one I wanted to be sure to mention: Independent record label Ghostly International‘s collaboration with Adult Swim on a 19-track collection called Ghostly Swim. You can download the whole thing for free here — and see Ghostly “mascots” BoyCatBird in a video titled “City Suckers.”

Ghostly founder Sam Valenti IV gave Murketing a great Q&A last August, here. I wrote about Adult Swim in Consumed, 1/18/04.

Mr. Valenti talks about the Adult Swim project with Coolhunting, here.

In The New York Times Magazine: To The Fallen Records

BATTLE CRIES:
How one veteran tries to use entertainment to to convey the war experience

If you’ve seen the polls tracking American interest in the war in Iraq, you already know: If the war were a TV show, it would be cancelled.

The war, of course, is not a form of entertainment. And the apparent loss of interest is a source of frustration to current and former military personnel. One man has found a way to convert that frustration into something positive — a form of entertainment: In 2006 he founded To the Fallen Records, which has since released three compilations of songs made mostly by current military personnel or recent veterans.

Read the column in the April 6, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

SX$W

I’ve been wanting to use that headline all week.

My excuse is this Wall Street Journal piece about a squabble between the music festival, and encroaching brand-promoters doing private events. Some are invite-only, meaning that your $650 all-access badge won’t get you into. Others are free and open to all — no pricey badge required. Both scenarios are an annoyance to festival organizers.

The festival now has deep-pocketed sponsors … including Citigroup Inc., Miller Lite and Dell Inc. They pay between $100,000 and $200,000 each in exchange for having their logos plastered around town.

One concern among SXSW organizers is that as more bands play outside events, music lovers could have less reason to pay for the festival itself. The parties also represent competition for sponsorship dollars and venues. For instance, one unaffiliated concert is sponsored by Tecate and Dos Equis beers.

The festival organizers’ responses to this have included calling in the fire marshall, and of course litigation.

Hopefully AdPulp, who I believe is still on the ground in Austin, will weigh in on this matter.

Bands and brands

Speaking of the whole SXSW thing, catching up when I got home yesterday I enjoyed this story in the WSJ about the hunt for bands to use in ads and videogames and so on. And today AdPulp notes this Ad Age piece noting that “Rock’s anti-corporate ethos has softened in recent years (read: totally disappeared in the case of most artists).” Both pieces are worth a read.

(For what it’s worth, the WSJ story includes a KCRW DJ who also picks songs for various TV shows and so on; I’ve written about KCRW in Consumed (January 23, 2005), and earlier with a particular focus on DJs involved in the music director biz for shows, movies, and ads here.)

Fan power

Just reading this AP story about Jill Sobule’s effort to get her fans to bankroll her next recording session, I was a little surprised about this detail: If you donate $10, you get a free download of the resulting record, and for $500 or more, “Sobule will mention your name in a song, maybe even rhyme with it.”

I know the official response lisinopril to this sort of thing is supposed to be that it’s great that an artist can avoid the crass music business, and fans are so empowered, etc. But there’s something a little creepy about this $500-and-I’ll-mention-your-name thing. I guess it’s sort of funny. But really, is this what being an artist is about (https://www.worthingdentalcentre.co.uk/lasix-online/) now?

Anyway, according to her site as I type, she’s raised more than $65,000.

Insanely long and overly detailed breakdown of my favorite (I think) songs of 2007

Looking at everyone else’s lists of favorite songs or albums of the year makes me reflect on what my own choices might be. I suppose this is natural and lots of people do the same. I wonder how far others get, because in general I don’t get far at all. I can’t remember what came out when, I tend to overrate the stuff I’ve acquired most recently, and so on. I don’t know that I’ve ever progressed from idly wondering to even jotting down a few tentative choices — let alone really nailing down a Top Ten. How do these list-makers keep track? Do they take notes all year long?

Besides, I’ve always been vaguely annoyed at the underlying conceit of the top songs/albums “of the year,” since much of the music I acquire in any given year wasn’t actually released that year. I dislike the idea of organizing my taste reactions to the calendar of the music business, because that’s not how I listen. And it’s not how I think most people listen.

But reading over the lists this year, it occurred to me that I now do so much listening on iTunes that I could take a different approach, and simply review the data. This won’t help in coming up with a list of albums, because I don’t buy that many new albums anymore, I tend to buy songs, or batches of songs. Even if I buy a new release on CD – or, more typically, an old release – it’s rare that I keeping every single track from it in iTunes.

Still, I’m fairly fastidious about keeping up the parts of my iTunes data that I’m responsible for (making sure the proper release year, to the best of my knowledge, is entered). And I actually use the one-to-five-star rating field.

Plus there’s lots of data I’m not responsible for: How many times a track has been played, what date it was added to iTunes, when it was played last, and so on.

So, this morning, before listening to anything, I went into iTunes and gathered up what data I could. I looked at what I’d rated highest, and what I’d listened to most often. Perhaps predictably, there were some disparities. Namely, the most-listened-to songs were not the same ones I’d pick as my favorites. I’ll get to that in a minute, but to arrive at a Top Ten I had to overlook some data and just apply, you know, subjectivity. (It’s my list, after all.) Still, what I arrived at was definitely affected by having looked at the data first. If you’re curious, full details after the jump. Here are my ten:

1. “You Know I’m No Good,” Amy Winehouse
2. “Psychedelic Woman (Bonobo Remix),” Honny & The Bees Band
3. “Girls In Their Summer Clothes,” Bruce Springsteen
4. “All Out King (featuring Romanowskiy),” Up, Bustle & Out
5. “La La La,” Mexican Institute of Sound
6. “Salt Truck,” Eleni Mandell
7. “Trouble,” Over the Rhine
8. “Paper Planes,” M.I.A.
9. “Oh My God,” Mark Ronson featuring Lily Allen
10. “My Computer Is Funk,” DJ Bitman

So here — in disturbing detail — is some of the process I used to get to this list: Read more

In Consumed: Getting Along Famously

Buddylube: A company greases the wheels between (the online presences of) celebrities and their fans.

In an interview with Rolling Stone published earlier this year, Bob Dylan commented that “the relationship between a performer and the audience is anything but a buddy-buddy thing.” The role of the Dylan fan, he suggested, is to appreciate Dylan music. This seems out of step with the pop zeitgeist. While the impact of digital technology on record labels gets more attention, it also affects the fan-star dynamic: online social networking tools promise us more interaction, or a more direct connection (to use the buzz terms of the moment), with artists. This version of the “buddy-buddy thing” has obvious appeal — so much so that the birth of a company like Buddylube seems almost inevitable….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

UPDATE: Nancy Baym (quoted in the column) has these interesting follow-up thoughts.

What can we conclude from the new Radiohead release?

So today is the big day: The Radiohead release that the music-and-marketing blognoscenti have been spazzing about for a week. As you know, the former EMI band is currently label-free, and has offered consumers a chance name their own price for the band’s next album, In Rainbows, which is available for download today. I can understand the excitement: Any excuse to beat the Big-Labels-Are-Over drum (Thom Yorke has mused that “the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs” a label), plus there’s the consumer empowerment angle. It’s a paradigm shifter, y’all!

Is it? Well, it’s definitely an interesting experiment, and I’m be curious to see how it works out, like everybody else. This morning I named my price. Based on my past experience of Radiohead, I guessed that I would like approximately one song. You can’t hear samples in advance, and you have to buy the whole set of ten tracks anyway, so I went with $1, or about half a British pound. The transaction fee added another half-pound, so really I ended up paying around $2. (Despite reports that the site’s servers were overwhelmed, I had no problems. After one listen, I like the track “Bodysnatchers,” and ambivalent-to-against the rest.)

Perhaps this experiment will tell us something about the future of the music business, but there are some pretty important caveats that are worth keeping in mind. The caveats, and the stuff that I think is actually noteworthy, are after the jump. Sorry for the rambling post. Read more

Rolling Stones: The Kubrick

The exhibition Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, sounds pretty cool. But what about the collateral merch? Well how about a Rolling Stones Kubrick, eh?

The Rolling Stones lips logo is nearly as iconic as the group itself. Inspired by Kali, a Mother figure in Hinduism with large lips and Mick’s own mouth, it took artist John Pasche just one week to create it in 1970. Here, Medicom features the logo on their 100% (3″) and 400% (11″) Kubricks.

I have a secret wish that there are Kubrick fanatics who will respond to this by wondering who the Rolling Stones are. But of course that’s absurd: everybody knows they’re those older guys who do music for lots of TV commercials.

Music biz slump 2: Optimism or denial?

Edgar Bronfman, Jr., CEO of Warner Music Group, says:

Our business is poised to rebound because the demand for music is as strong as it has ever been and our determination to meet that demand has never been greater

While it may take some time for the rise in all the new revenue streams to overtake the short-term effect of the decline in the CD, there is no doubt in my mind that the mid-to-long-term future for Warner Music is very bright indeed.

There’s no particular argument advanced in this news brief about why this might be true.

The music biz slump: Good for indies?

Some of the reader comments to this Freakonomics “quorum” on the music business suggest that “indie” music is doing better as “big label” music does worse. One person writes: “My suspicion is that the internet and emusic services have led to a dramatic increase in consumption of and money spent on music from smaller independent labels as artists on smaller labels – who would have difficulty getting radio airplay otherwise – can use new methods to spread word of their music (blogs, myspace, etc).”

So you, wise Murketing reader, what do you know about this? Is there any real data that proves or disproves this theory?

Not anecdotal evidence, not suspicion, but actual data?

I had been under the impression that music sales are down across the board. If you know something, I beg you to share.

The power of the Internet … to help a major-label artist

I’ve been waiting for a story like this: Singer Marié Digby, supposedly discovered by the grass roots in the all-empowering wilds of YouTube (“I just turned on my little iMovie, and here I am!”), was actually a major-label signee all along. She gigged in L.A., met a veteran music manager who connected her with a publisher, who connected her with Hollywood Records, which signed her in 2005, and hooked her up with a veteran producer.

Once the album was completed late last year, Ms. Digby and her label began looking for ways to gain visibility. …

That’s when the idea of posting simple videos of cover songs came up. … So she posted covers of hits by Nelly Furtado and Maroon 5, among others, so that users searching for those artists’ songs would stumble on hers instead. Her version of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” proved a nearly instant hit.

As Ms. Digby’s star rose, other media outlets played along. When Los Angeles adult-contemporary station KYSR-FM, which calls itself “Star 98.7,” interviewed Ms. Digby in July, she and the disc jockey discussed her surprising success. “We kind of found her on YouTube,” the DJ, known as Valentine, said. Playing the lucky nobody, Ms. Digby said: “I’m usually the listener calling in, you know, just hoping that I’m going to be the one to get that last ticket to the Star Lounge with [pop star] John Mayer!” The station’s programming executives now acknowledge they had booked Ms. Digby’s appearance through Hollywood Records, and were soon collaborating with the label to sell “Umbrella” as a single on iTunes.

Proper comparison points for Kanye West, Michael Jackson, 50 Cent, and Norman Mailer

Kanye West has a new CD coming out in a few weeks — can you feel the excitement?

Me neither. So I was a little surprised to read West saying this about Justin Timberlake: “I look at me and Justin like Prince and Michael Jackson in their day.”

Right. Only much less popular.

Seriously, what’s he talking about? I don’t know whether it’s a permanent change or just a slump, but pop music is just not the center of pop culture to the degree it was in the Prince/Jackson era, and surely West must be aware of this. I assume part his goal was to backhand 50 Cent, who has apparently vowed to retire if he doesn’t out-sell West.

West ought to be thanking 50, who obviously has a much better feel for the entertainment zeitgeist, and how to game it: Not by making silly comparisons to the past, but by stirring up a confrontation in the present, for no good reason whatsoever.

In fact, I look at 50 Cent and Kanye West like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal in their day. (50, of course, is Mailer.) Mailer and Vidal were trying to sell their products to a nation that had many more entertainment choices than it used to. Solution: Infiltrate one of those choices (chat shows) and make a fuss (possibly even throwing a punch). Same with 50, except he’s infiltrating the Internet celebritytainmentsphere to sell CDs instead of books. I’m not sure whether West just doesn’t get it, or if he’s trying to enlarge the feud somehow — sort of like dragging Truman Capote in.

If they can keep this hype up till the actual release date (Sept. 11), the strategy might even work.

Meanwhile, who is really the new Michael Jackson? The iPhone of course.

[Thanks, E.]