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MUSIC BIZ INSIGHT #44Power Reading for Busy Music ProfessionalsHope you're hungry! MUSIC BIZ INSIGHT is published for musicians, songwriters, managers, label reps, booking agents, entertainment attorneys, studio owners, music publishers, and all others involved in the music business. Its purpose is to help boost your business, find new markets, make the right connections, develop professionally, work smarter and improve your bottom line. As a general rule, the most successful people in life are those who have the best information. —Benjamin Disraeli Written and published bimonthly by Peter Spellman, Director of MUSIC BUSINESS SOLUTIONS: Turning Music Business Data into Useful Knowledge. Career-building books, articles, training, consulting and more. P.O. Box 230266, Astor Station, Boston, MA 02123-0266, USA Phone: 888-655-8335 Email: success@mbsolutions.com Web site: http://www.mbsolutions.com © 1997 - 2007, Peter Spellman, MBS Business Media, www.mbsolutions.com Please feel free to redistribute with above credit and copyright notice. IN THIS ISSUE — MBI#44
))) NEWS & VIEWS U CAN USEOh, That Internet Japanese beatboxer Dokaka has never met a genre he didn’t like. His a capella covers of everyone from Miles Davis to Slayer have become a worldwide phenomenon, thanks to the free MP3s on Dokaka.com. In 2004 Bjork tapped the vocalist for Medulla, and he can be heard on the soundtrack for the popular video game “We (Love) Katamari”. So much for the notion that Japanese pop music doesn’t translate: He expects to release a CD this year. —Brian Ashcraft for WIRED magazine (4/06) Tool Your Own Approach Neil Aspinall may be caving into the iTunes meanies and Chris Daughtry may have been swallowed whole by the moguls of American Idol, but those dismayed can take heart in the maverick ways of a band called Tool, which is cutting its own path by making CDs the old fashioned way, as reported by Kelefa Sanneh in The New York Times. The group’s latest collection sticks it to the MP3 generation and pop-music conventions by just about forcing the listener to listen to the whole damn record, from beginning to end—the way we used to in the olden days. This is accomplished with healthy doses of "atmospheric filler" that isn’t exactly suited for 99-cent downloads, interspersed between the “full-bore songs.” “Bore” actually may be the operative adjective, as it can take "11 minutes for a Tool song to reach its writhing, crashing climax." But that’s for the fans to decide, and Tool has plenty of them: “Last month ‘10,000 Days’…sold about 564,000 copies. That was easily enough to put the album on top of the Billboard chart, and it’s about twice the sales figure for the new self-titled CD from Pearl Jam, which was released on the same day.” The CD’s first single, “a six-minute marvel called ’Vicarious’," reached No. 2 on Billboard’s modern rock chart, but it isn’t the kind of song that might cross over to pop radio.” However, the last song on the record, “Viginiti Tres” is not likely to hit the charts because “it’s essentially five minutes of digital groans and sighs.” Nor would “Viginiti Tres” find many takers as a download, because, by itself, it makes no sense as a song. They probably couldn’t even give it away as a download. But as part of a carefully orchestrated aural experience, it works as the last thing you hear before the CD starts over again: “It’s the digital equivalent of a needle stuck in the empty groove at the end of the record: a gentle reminder that the music is over.” Perhaps it’s the musical equivalent of comfort food. Perhaps. As lead singer Maynard James Keenan puts it: “These are not commercials, they are not three-minute jingles, they’re not as easy to get into—this is more like presenting a film.” And if you don’t like it, that’s okay. By “shedding casual listeners while retaining—even attracting—serious ones,” Tool is topping the charts. The Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship How would you like to hang out at the foothills of the Smoky Mountains for a few days this summer, dreaming up business ideas or creatively tackling an issue your business is facing? Join me and a host of other music entrepreneurship movers & shakers for two days of fun and illumination in North Carolina. Get the skinny at: http://www.BCOME.org “Where The Money Goes” In The Music Industry “It behooves all audio professionals to understand just where their ‘product’ lands. Those who work in the 24-bit/192k world may lament the widespread adoption of MP3 playback and consumer compression, but as with the advent of the cassette and the Walkman, it cannot be ignored…” READ MORE AT: http://mixonline.com/reports/audio_music_go/ Creative Colonists Richard Florida thinks that the most successful companies of the future “will look more like an artist colony or inventor’s laboratory than the office of today,” reports Joanne S. Lublin in The Wall Street Journal (3/20/06). Richard is author of a book called The Rise of the Creative Class, and you can count Tom Putnam, chairman of Markem Corp., a printing machinery company, among those who see “creative colonies” as a competitive advantage. Tom sent a diverse group of his people—“engineers, software programmers, lab technicians and marketers”—to “MacDowell Colony, the nation’s oldest and most famous artist colony” in hopes of inspiring them to design “a new label-applicator machine.” After all, MacDowell is where the likes of Aaron Copeland, Thornton Wilder and Leonard Bernstein created some of their most enduring work. “MacDowell colonists work in 32 isolated cabins that typically contain a bed, a fireplace and relevant tools such as a piano or printmaking press. Picture windows offer panoramic views of pine trees and wildlife on the 450-acre campus,” located in Peterborough, N.H. “To minimize interruptions, the studios aren’t equipped with radios, television sets, phones or internet access. Breakfast and dinner are served communally in a converted barn. At lunchtime, a wooden basket silently appears on each studio doorstep.” One key is, no one at MacDowell is required to produce anything. Another is the combination of isolation and exposure to other artists, the mixing of disciplines: “Informal exchanges occur during odd-hour encounters, dinner chats and artists’ presentations about pending projects.” Some suggest that elements of the environment could be adapted to workaday life. Jane Brox, a writer, thinks companies might “create a plant-packed green room or exterior garden, where workers could spend an hour a week, alone except for a blank pad and pencil.” Google perhaps echoes “aspects of MacDowell’s approach,” as its “engineers and technical staffers can devote 20 percent of their time to any projects they choose,” which “helped give birth to news and social-networking products.” SAS Institute meanwhile “encourages innovation through an egalitarian culture, flexible schedules, few meetings, interdisciplinary project teams and generous perks intended to eliminate hassles.” As for Markem, the MacDowell experience “led to many innovations” and the “team designed and assembled a working prototype in six months, half the usual time.” What kind of retreat can you conjure for your company to help re-charge your batteries?
))) ILLUMINATING TRIVIA (((Did you know…. The original name of the band Dream Theater was “Majesty”. Another band with that name sued them and they had to give up rights to the name. but as a joke, Dream Theater called their publishing company “Ytse Jam”, which is Majesty spelled backwards.
))) FEATURE: Music Metadata: Getting the Right Coded Information into Your MusicAdapted from, Indie Marketing Power by Peter Spellman If you plan on releasing your music on the Net, through satellite radio, or via music services like Muzak, you’ll need to understand the following. A lot of information on a music CD isn’t music. Some of it is codes that help trace the uses and sales of your music online. Without them there is a good chance you’ll miss out on royalties owed you. The four important codes you’ll need are:
Keep good records of all this information to ensure accurate and comprehensive monitoring of your music’s uses in the digital age.
TO SUBSCRIBE to MUSIC BIZ INSIGHT: send email with the message in the body, "subscribe" to success@mbsolutions.com It's not an autoresponder so feel free to include any other comments, ideas, suggestions, etc. you may have. About the Publisher PETER SPELLMAN is Director of MUSIC BUSINESS SOLUTIONS, a business and marketing consultancy to the music industry, and Director of Career Development at Berklee College of Music, Boston. He is the author of several books for music entrepreneurs and teaches music industry courses at Northeastern University (Boston) and the University of Massachusetts (Lowell). A musician since he was ten, Peter continues to spin riddims in the improvisational collective, Friend Planet and sing Cat Stevens' songs to his kids every night before bed. BLOOM WHERE YOU'RE PLANTED! Quote of the Month…. The gatekeeper used to be the radio station. And MTV. Now the gatekeeper is the public. The key isn't trying to get a middleman to say yes, but to get the FINAL CONSUMER to say yes. And this is rough. Because THIS depends on QUALITY! The SOFTEST of sales techniques. The only people selling hard today are those who desire short term results, who are going to be out of the business in a few years, like those running major labels. — Bob Lefsetz, Industry Gadfly Written and published bimonthly by Peter Spellman, Director of MUSIC BUSINESS SOLUTIONS: Turning Music Business Data into Useful Knowledge. Career-building books, articles, training, consulting and more. P.O. Box 230266, Astor Station, Boston, MA 02123-0266, USA Phone: 888-655-8335 Email: success@mbsolutions.com Web site: http://www.mbsolutions.com © 1997 - 2006, Peter Spellman, MBS Business Media, www.mbsolutions.com Please feel free to redistribute with above credit and copyright notice.
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