NEWS & VIEWS

I hope you’ve had a chance to see the NEW, improved MBS web site. Everything looks better and there’s a huge, new feature called "The Musician’s Resource Directory." It’s organized along music career path lines. It contains what your’s truly considers the best in books, magazines, organizations and web sites for music career development. Check it!

THE FIX IS STILL IN…

Newspaper reports now confirm what any record buyer already knows: The much-ballyhooed order by the Federal Trade Commission to major labels to stop fixing CD prices not only hasn’t lowered them one penny, it hasn’t stopped the "coincidental" multi-label creep of superstar product to the $18.98 level. On June 6, Colin Hand of Seattle’s Up Records hit the Internet to add that "it’s fairly clear that it’s the chain stores who are the ones responsible for any fixed pricing, or overcharging of the consumer… The problem is that chain stores, such as Tower, will take our ‘list price’ of $12.98 and mark it up to $16.98. Our distributor tells us we should raise our prices because the stores are ‘doing it anyway.’… As a label, we’d like to offer our releases at what we believe is a fair price. Chain stores aren’t allowing us to do that. If prices were not being fixed, I would be able to walk in Tower and pick up one of our releases for $11.98-$13.98 (Tower has them priced $14.98-$17.98). There is a similar situation with online ‘discount’ retailers. They bump our ‘list price’ to whatever they want, and then ‘discount’ it to a price that is still above our suggested ‘list price.’"

UNIVERSAL HOG: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act says that 50 per cent of Internet licensing fees for music go to performers. But Universal Music, the world’s largest label, claims the new money comes from "blanket licenses," on which no royalties are due. The other labels will follow that lead. The RIAA says that it can’t force its member labels to obey the law and pay artists. "We’re not in the business of telling our members what to do," says its spokesperson. No, just everybody else.

END QUOTE: "We can count our money and we can fix our own problems, but we can’t do that if we’re held under these constrictive, restrictive contracts. There were talks in Washington about the work-for-hire clauses which record companies instituted without debate. This states that all sound recordings will become the sole ownership of said companies for all time. Do we really need to discuss this? Work-for-hire would be an art director who designs the cover of a CD. Even at 17, when I got in the business, I never believed that I worked for Warner Brothers. We picked them, after much deliberation, to perform a service." — Prince

))) FEATURE (((

by Peter Spellman

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com is fond of saying that when it comes to the Internet, we‚re in day one. This new technology is transforming the world and none can predict what the future holds for the Net and its millions of users.

Despite the Internet’s promise of democratization, the age-old struggle between art and commerce is alive and well, and barreling like a high-speed train into the digital future. Like all technology, the Internet music revolutions will have consequences that are difficult or impossible to foresee today.

Here’s my prediction. We are now in a painful period of transformation that will change soon. Music will be freely available on the Net or available at a very low price. The upside is that many more people will buy much more music ˆ at a quarter a hit, why not buy 40 songs instead of 10? In the end, the music business will be worth even more than it is today, and everyone, including the artist, will be wealthier as a result.

I also predict that it will be the new generation of music fans, armed not only with cutting-edge technology but with entirely reconfigured appetites, who define how music is consumed in the coming years. The digital downloading revolution is going to transform the music business into a service business. No longer will we see the music industry as the selling of goods, but rather, as the provision of a distribution service, not unlike TV.

And should you think that the consumer really wants to own CDs, think again. The majority of people listen to music on radio much more than to their CDs.

The music world will eventually settle into a new equilibrium some years in the future, and it will look very different from today. Musical artists will make more money from appearances, sponsorships, and product licensing than from the sale of the actual music (this is already true for many musicians). Advertising may play a role, as may new business models such as subscriptions to electronic distributions. We may even find that major artists will choose to deal directly with consumers via the internet, bypassing the need for the large record companies. Innovative industry leaders will embrace the new models and increase their chance for survivability and success.

For several decades now, commercial radio has had a stranglehold on what music gets heard. The advent of Internet-based platforms for music performance and sales will introduce a new flexibility into this marketplace. With a true custom-casting approach to audio programming, the mass-audience derivation of radio formats could be blasted apart by the on-demand programming of the individual.

The problem with current radio formats is less that they empower users than that they don’t empower users enough. The authority of the artist has been supplanted by the authority of the radio programmers. The solution, in my opinion, is not to move back to the artist’s authority, but forward to the user’s authority in terms of programming the experience.

The artistic experience is, of course, a relationship between artist and audience. In the past it was controlled mostly by the artist, currently it is strongly intermediated by promotional/ distributional channels (most commonly, record companies), which often perverts the artistic relationship. Moving forward to individual audience empowerment brings it back into a more purely aesthetic relationship again, which is good for the art itself, and better for artists themselves. Artists may never recapture the kind of control of their relationship with their audience that they had in the past (except live, in concert), but a genuine aesthetic interplay with their audience is much better than being beholden to the least common denominator of the average of a mass audience’s taste.

A Wall Street Journal article described how an already established act, Widespread Panic, has used the Internet to flourish independent of its label. The group’s releases on the Capricorn Records label consistently sold approximately 150,000 units, hardly significant in big-name industry workings. But by cultivating grass roots fan enthusiasm through its online presence, the group grossed $8.5 million touring during 1998. And merchandise and music sales through its web site grew from $100,000 for 1997, to $350,000 for 1998.

This illustrates a potent trend in contemporary music, and one seen also in the careers of Prince, Ani Difranco and others: artist-driven marketing. Such developments herald what John Perry Barlow sees as a possible shift from the "music business" to what he calls the "musician business." Artists are going to be faced with "free agency" for the first time _ analogous to the movie studio systems. This sets the tone for new business models in the music industry. In essence, artists will become clients of the online distributors, as opposed to employees of record labels.

It is clear we are coming to a point of extreme change in the music industry (and really, in all the "content creation" businesses). Technology is pushing the idea of copyrights to the limit, and something is going to give. The good thing about radical change is that, during those times, the little guy has a chance to make a big difference. It is the time when big ideas are brought to life (not all of which will succeed), big names are made, and, yes, even big money is made.

I believe the music industry is reaching a critical point - Napster and all those other file-sharing programs, are only the beginning. If you are a musician, a writer, a photographer, a software developer ˆ you’d be wise to be thinking about ways you’ll be able to earn a living in a dramatically different world. I’m not suggesting you have to have the answer, but if you depend on generating "content" for a living, it’s a topic that will be more and more important in the near future.

ILLUMINATING TRIVIA

…when Crosby, Stills & Nash first began singing together, they were known as the Frozen Noses — for their unique harmonies and their drug habits?

))) GENRE SPOTLIGHT: TRANCE MUSIC (((

As a music style in today’s marketplace, however, Trance has a pretty solid definition and history, as well as mucho-varied manifestations.

Breaking out of the German techno and hardcore scene of the early ‘90s, trance emphasized brief synthesizer lines repeated endlessly throughout tracks, with only the addition of minimal rhythmic changes and occasional synthesizer atmospherics to distinguish them -- in effect putting listeners into a trance that approaches those of religious origin. Despite waning interest in the sound during the mid-’90s, trance made a big comeback later in the decade, even supplanting house as the most popular dance music of choice around the globe.

Inspired by acid house and Detroit techno, trance coalesced with the opening of R&S Records in Ghent, Belgium and Harthouse/Eye Q Records in Frankfurt, Germany. R&S defined the sound early on with singles like "Energy Flash" by Joey Beltram, "The Ravesignal" by CJ Bolland, and others by Robert Leiner, Sun Electric, and Aphex Twin. Harthouse, begun in 1992 by Sven Väth with Heinz Roth & Matthias Hoffman, made the most impact on the sound of trance with Hardfloor’s minimal epic "Hardtrance Acperience" and Väth’s own "L’Esperanza," plus releases by Arpeggiators, Spicelab, and Barbarella. Artists like Väth, Bolland, Leiner, and many others made the transition to the full-length realm, though without much of an impact on the wider music world.

Despite a long nascent period when it appeared trance had disappeared, replaced by breakbeat dance such as trip-hop and jungle, the style’s increasing impact on Britain’s dance scene finally crested in the late ‘90s. The classic German sound had changed somewhat though, and the term "progressive" trance gained favor to describe influences from the smoother end of house and Euro dance. By 1998, most of the country’s best-known DJs -- Paul Oakenfold, Pete Tong, Tony De Vit, Danny Rampling, Sasha, Judge Jules -- were playing trance in Britain’s superclubs. Even America turned on to the sound (eventually), led by its own cast of excellent DJs, including Christopher Lawrence and Kimball Collins.

Related styles: Since Trance music occupies a micro-niche in the music styles landscape, you‚ll often find it in close association with one or more of the following genres: Club/Dance, Techno, Ambient, Dub, House, Progressive House, Detroit Techno, Kraut-Rock, Rave, Electronica and, at times, New Age.

The House side of Trance has been described by Gav on the Goatrance site:

"I can’t give you a definition of Psychedelic Trance simply because there’s NO definition!! But I can give you some typical things of Goa-Trance:

• The time of a track is generally around 8’30", but can be between 6’00" and 12’00" …sometimes more, sometimes under 6’00" (especially on mixed compilations), but too short tracks are generally hard to get into.
• The beat is generally 4/4 and around 135-150 BPM … sometimes less, rarely more!
• In the music there’s a constant use of strange and psychedelic sounds, and that gives a strange atmosphere.
• Sometimes those sounds are frogs, barking dogs, crying baby’s but mostly you can’t describe it… You simply have to hear it!! Also used are the famous acid or 303 sounds, and even guitars, who drive people completely crazy!
• Most Goa (but NOT all) is also very melodic.
• The music is mostly very full on, good to dance…
• The basslines are mostly harder and deeper as from normal Trance or Techno.
• The combination of all those things make this music very good for dancing, tripping and listening…!"

Arpeggiators, Astral Pilot, Joey Beltram, CJ Bolland, Cosmic Baby, Hardfloor, Immersion, Jam & Spoon, Juno Reactor, Loop Guru, MLO, Moby, Paul Oakenfold, Resistance D, Sasha, Speedy J, Spicelab, Sven Väth, Trance Mission

FINDING YOUR ANGEL

"When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest time, and to the latest." — Henry David Thoreau

© 1997 - 2003, Peter Spellman, MBS Business Media, www.mbsolutions.com