ArsTechnica: The state of the music industry 2008
If you follow news about the music industry, then you already know that the piecemeal drip-drip-drip of bad news is relentless. But coherent big-picture stories aren’t easy to come by. Last week Nate Anderson of ArsTechnica wrote the best analysis of music business trend lines I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s accompanied by interesting and accessible infographics. Highly recommended.
Excerpt:
“Don’t put all the blame on file-swapping… or chalk the problems up to an inability to ‘compete with free.’ Digital music sales soared in 2007, and in fact, the total number of ‘units’ moved during the year increased over 2006. eMusic, the number two music download service in the US behind iTunes, doubled its own projections for the Christmas season, pushed out 10 million tracks in the month of December, and added 50,000 new paying customers in the last six months.
“And all of this happened without the four major labels even offering DRM-free tracks online. Now that Sony BMG has finally capitulated, 2008 is poised to be the year digital goes so mainstream that even your parents use it.
“All that good news means that music is alive and well—but it doesn’t mean that things are rosy at the major labels. Let’s run the numbers from 2007, then do a case study on eMusic’s recent results to see just what kind of success can be had in the digital download world by competing with free.”
Video: LA buzz band Dengue Fever has a Minneapolis connection
Last weekend the New York Times featured a long profile by RJ Smith of LA’s Dengue Fever [Myspace], a budding critics’-pick indie band whose new album, Venus on Earth, is being released today. Halfway down the story, Smith drops this detail regarding Cambodian singer Chhom Nimol: “An invitation to sing in Minneapolis brought her to the United States, and her sister, already living in Long Beach, introduced her to the local dinner-club scene.”
Below: Dengue Fever performs “One Thousand Tears of the Tarantula” live at last year’s Silverlake Film Festival in LA.
It’s a good day to remember the worst pop singles of all time
That’s because Bobby Goldsboro, auteur of the record that usually wins top honors, was born on this date in 1941. Goldsboro recorded “Honey” in 1968, and the ballad about a wife who drove badly and died young became the biggest pop hit of the year, outselling the Beatles’ all-time top-selling single, “Hey Jude,” also released in 1968.
As a bonus, we’ve thrown in a mystery video of the record the Mole picks as the true worst-ever pop single, from 1974.
Video: Harry Shearer, “Waterboardin’ USA”
This is from actor/writer Harry Shearer’s corner of the new-ish video site My Damn Channel. You certainly know Shearer’s work–multiple characters on The Simpsons, movies from Spinal Tap to Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind–but if you don’t really know Harry, check out his page here, and especially check out the archive of his weekly syndicated radio broadcast, Le Show, here. It’s comedy, music, and commentary about subjects ranging from politics to show biz trade journals. Highly recommended.
Below: It’s not torture. Why, it’s almost like surfing: “Waterboardin’ USA”
Fuzzy warbles
The Magnetic Fields, Distortion
Magnetic Fields auteur and 60s pop apologist Stephen Merritt has plied his awesomely mannered Brill-Building songwriting in a number of quite brilliant groups (the aforementioned, the Gothic Archies, the 6ths) across a number of equally brilliant albums (especially the Fields’ astonishing Get Lost and the neck-breakingly diverse — and long! — 69 Love Songs). Each album along the path has been a sort of self-contained unit — not quite a concept album per se, but certainly an attempt to get across a particular thing, be it a vibe, a sound or a theme.
And okay, so as far as Distortion goes, I get it. Merritt is trying to weld his usually quite stately songs to a kind of proto-Mary-Chain fuzzpop backing to kind of funk up the pretty with a layer of art-punk tough. I’m just not at all sure it succeeds at all — I know that I don’t particularly care for the thing, though it has a few rather modest charms. First problem? Sonically, he’s not even in the fuggin’ ballpark. Yes, he gets the Mary Chain / My Bloody Valentine notion that layers of fuzzy noise can be quite lovely. But he completely misses the point that said layers need to wash over you and envelop you in a kind of warm embrace. Instead he buries the fuzz almost apologetically, pushing the entire backing track so far into the background that it begins to sound like it’s playing on mom’s shitty transistor radio somewhere in the next county. It ends up sounding appallingly tinny.
Worse, some of the lyrics on the record are the dumbest stuff he’s ever done. Merritt’s never been much of a poet, but he’s always been the master of the cynical, black-hearted love ballad. Here, however, he’s written two songs that actually had me cringing — “California Girls,” a kind of anti-Beach-Boys poison pen letter to chicks from Cali, which might’ve been cool about five years ago, and “The Nun’s Litany” which tries hard to be shocking and arch and fails rather miserably.
That’s not to say the record is an abject failure. There’s pretty melodies all over the thing: “Mr. Mistletoe” sounds like it could be legit Brill, and “Please Stop Dancing” is legitimately tear-inducing. And “‘Till The Bitter End” is such a lovely dark thing that Audrey Hepburn could have crooned it with an acoustic guitar sometime in the mid 60s. It’s more that it doesn’t hit as high as it could. Songs like “Zombie Boy” and “Too Drunk To Dream” aim much lower than Merritt’s capable of, and are sort of easy and softball compared to some of the amazing stuff he’s managed across his career. It’s awesome that he’s trying something different each time, and I appreciate the conceptual thought and effort that went into Distortion — I just wish it was more damn fun to listen to.
RIAA starts new year as it rung out the old: with lawsuits
The recording industry’s litigation focus remains the nation’s college campuses. But Digital Music News reports that if you’re a student who’s into file-sharing, it’s best to be a Harvard man or woman:
“On Thursday, the organization announced that its university-focused legal enforcement campaign would be continuing in force in 2008. Just this week, the group issued 407 legal notices to students across 18 universities, including Stanford, Duke, Bowdoin, Arizona State, and UCLA. All students received pre-litigation notices, which allow quick settlements without formal court paperwork. Absent from the list was Harvard University, a school not-yet-tapped by the college campaign… Last year, Harvard law professor Charles Nesson — among others — openly questioned the RIAA assault, and set the stage for a future challenge.”
Finally, a taser that plays mp3s
Media Guardian (UK) makes note of a new product that deserves much more publicity than it’s gotten so far: The iTaser, writes Richard Wray, “combines a Taser stun gun, used by 12,000 law enforcement and security forces, including the Metropolitan police, with an MP3 player and earphones…
“The company says the new device is particularly aimed at women–with red, pink and even leopard print designs intended to make carrying a stun gun fashionable. A spokesman in Las Vegas said the inclusion of a music player would encourage purchases by women who want a form of self defense while out jogging, but would otherwise choose to take an iPod or other MP3 player with them instead of a weapon.”
RIAA wars: Jammie Thomas can’t afford an appeal
Jammie Thomas of Brainerd, Minnesota, the first person to lose at trial in an RIAA copyright suit, will have to find an organization willing to handle her appeal pro bono, CNet News reports. She got some good news as well: She won’t be on the hook for the record companies’ legal fees. Those were waived–not out of the goodness of the labels’ hearts, but because one of the plaintiff labels screwed up in preparing its case.
Your stereo is obsolete
You knew this was coming, too: Sales of home iPod-docking playback devices, per the trade pub Twice (This Week in Consumer Electronics), “will outsell combined sales of traditional compact shelf systems and home theater in a box (HTiB) systems for the first time in 2008, Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) forecasts show.”
YouTube of Plenty: Sally Timms, “Drunk by Noon”
Sally Timms of the Mekons sings the Handsome Family’s “Drunk by Noon.”
(You don’t know the Handsome Family? You should.)
Freemusiczilla: Something new to keep music execs awake at night
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch raves about a new music-sharing utility:
“Freemusiczilla is desktop based software that basically lets you download any song you can stream on the Internet. There are lots of services like it, but none are as easy to use, or work as well, as Freemusiczilla did in my testing… Clearly Freemusiczilla can be used for the improper downloading of copyrighted materials. We don’t recommend or condone its usage that involves copyright infringement, of course.”
Yeah, what he said. Caveats: Windows-only, limit of 10 downloads a day (unless you buy the retail version that’ll come along later).
Music: These dragons will slay you
The Dragons, BFI
Absent any good new music around the year’s end, it’s time, my friends, to dig back into days of yore for this delightfully cracked gem from the mid-60s. Never released, and discovered languishing in a vault by cut-n-paste genius DJ Food, this incredibly forward thinking album by the brothers Dragon (Dennis, Doug and Daryl — yes, The Captain of “…and Tennille” fame) sounds like absolutely nothing else from the era. While everybody else was worried about making everything LOUD and TRIPPY and FUZZ-DRENCHED and GUITAR-SCREAMY, the Dragons batshit theory was: let’s eliminate guitars all together. Oh, and how about these new “synthesizers” everybody’s talking about?
The keyboard-dazzled result sounds like it could have been recorded in, I dunno, the mid-80s maybe? By, like, an acid-soaked Joe Jackson? I mean, honestly, it really has none of the touchstones of the era apart from a desire to do things totally differently. Listen to album opener “Cosmosis,” which sounds totally sample-worthy (are you listening, Kanye? GRAB THIS STUFF!) as it percolates along on waves of Moogy strangeness, or “Sandman” which sounds like a warped, dark “Sesame Street” theme, or “Sunset Scenery” which sounds like easy listening filtered through new wave — its so out of touch with its own era its no wonder it languished in a vault for 30-plus years. Bonus: the songwriting’s totally strong, too, and the Bros. Dragon have weird little choirboy voices that give this thing a kind of awesome geek-chic that modern listeners will totally dig.
I think BFI would have flopped merrily if it had been released when it was supposed to, and even still, it’ll sell, like, twenty copies, eighteen of them to rap producers who are gonna have a field day. Hopefully eager, experimental Daily Mole readers will pump those figures up — trust me, if you want something totally different for the New Year, this is a good place to start.
YouTube of Plenty: Spade Cooley, western swing king and killer
Once, in an age before OJ, Christian Brando, Robert Blake, and Phil Spector made the Hollywood murder case a full-blown genre, the most storied death star–among hipsters, at least–was a musician and b-movie cowboy named Spade Cooley. A popular bandleader in the 1940s, Cooley (the self-proclaimed “king of Western swing”) had a string of six straight Top 10 hits in 1944-45. He also played bit roles in movies starting in the late 1930s, sometimes as a stand-in for Roy Rogers, and later starred in a trio of entirely forgettable Westerns in 1950. But TV was where Cooley earned his living from 1949 on, starring in one of Los Angeles’s most popular shows, a weekly live musical broadcast from the Santa Monica Ballroom.
On April 3, 1961, the 50-year-old Cooley, enraged at his wife Ella Mae for confessing adultery and asking for a divorce, beat and stomped her to death in front of their 14-year-old daughter. He spent the rest of his life in prison until being furloughed to appear at a benefit concert for the local sheriff’s office on November 23, 1969. There, after playing several encores, the lifelong alcoholic and ne’er-do-well Cooley got the last laugh by going out as he probably would have wished: He died of a heart attack backstage before they could return him to the joint.
Music trivia: Mike Cooley of Drive-By Truckers is Spade Cooley’s grandson.
More about Cooley: brief bios from Wikipedia and IMDB; crime writer John Gilmore’s collection LA Despair includes a long piece about Cooley.
Below the jump: In this 1945 Warner Bros short, Cooley and his band perform “Who Killed the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg,” “The Trouble With Me,” and “Turkey in the Straw.”
Read more
Mexican music business, in bed with the drug cartels, turns deadly
On the day after Christmas, the Washington Post published a little-noted but fascinating story about Mexico’s popular music industry, where artists’ careers are routinely financed by drug bosses and disagreements can turn deadly fast:
“Among music industry insiders, Sergio Gómez’s death [Gomez is pictured above] and the previous killings are also forcing a quiet assessment of the influence drug trafficking kingpins wield over the business. It is common knowledge in Mexico’s music industry, but not known to the general public, that drug cartels finance the careers of some budding musicians, then launder money through unregulated concert ticket sales, according to industry sources, musicians and law enforcement.”
Manuel Roig-Franzia writes that the past year’s violence killed two of the five musicians nominated in the Grammys’ best Banda album category for 2008; a third was attacked but survived.
Highly recommended, and here.
Audio: More Hank Williams Health and Happiness Show radio broadcasts
I think I’ve read practically all the Hank Williams biographies that have been published, but probably the most acute and revealing portrait of Williams I ever encountered was by an art critic named Dave Hickey. Hickey’s 1997 book Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy includes a stunning little “autobiographical” soliloquy written in Williams’s voice from beyond the grave:
“…if the truth were told, I ran so hard and stayed so crazy during my life on earth that sad hardly mattered. Sad I could deal with, sad I could put in a song, and if it was a good song, one that tasted good in your mouth when you sang it, and felt good under your boot when you tapped it out, there was a chance you might tear up and sniffle a little bit when you sang it. But otherwise, the sadness just stayed put, right there where you put it, in the song. So you could say, I guess, that those songs were like bus-station lockers where I stowed the pieces of my broken heart–and forgot them. Because, except when I was writing songs, I didn’t spend too much time worrying about the state of my heart. I spent a good deal more time trying to keep my liver and my lungs and my dick in working order, which, considering the way I lived, was no small task.”
Here, as promised, are the last two 1949 Health and Happiness Show broadcasts from the Internet Archive:
Hank Williams, Health and Happiness Show #3
Hank Williams, Health and Happiness Show #4
Audio: Hank Williams, Health and Happiness Show
Like the show we played yesterday, this is another broadcast from October 1949–the year that Hank Williams released his biggest-selling record, “Lovesick Blues,” and finally made it at the Grand Ole Opry. There are four preserved Health and Happiness Shows from that period; we’ll play the last two tomorrow.
Hank Williams in the movies: It’s a little odd that there’s never been a decent film biography of Hank Williams; Hollywood’s lone pass at making one, Your Cheating Heart (1964), stars latter-day tanning king George Hamilton and b-movie princess Susan Oliver and is absolutely as campy and absurd as it sounds. On the other hand, there’s a little-known Canadian TV movie called Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave (1981) that’s actually quite good. The action is set on the last day and night of Williams’s life, as he’s riding in the back of his Cadillac to the Canton, Ohio New Year’s Day 1953 show that he never played. (See a poster for that show above.) The performance scenes of Sneezy Waters (honest) are probably as close to capturing the feel of a live Hank Williams performance as anyone’s ever come.
And, special movie-trivia bonus: The Show He Never Gave features a very young Jim Carrey in his first movie appearance. He’s a very recognizable extra in the performance scenes, playing a gawky-looking kid straight out of a Diane Arbus photo–and it’s not even credited on Carrey’s IMDB page, so you heard it here first.
Hank Williams, Health and Happiness Show ep 2 (12:45)
Internet Archive: Hank Williams radio broadcast
This week marks the 55th anniversary of Hank Williams’s last ride, on New Year’s Eve 1952, depicted here by Guy Peelleart in Rock Dreams (a book that’s presently out of print and that you should own).
This week we’ll be playing episodes of Williams’s Health and Happiness Show radio broadcasts from 1949. Please note: These files are hosted at the Internet Archive, where the servers have been known to balk from time to time–so if you find it won’t play the first time you try it, try again later.
Hank Williams, Health and Happiness Show (October 1949 #1, 12:40)
Xmas tracks audio video: Darlene Love, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”
Here concludes the Mole’s 13 days of Christmas music celebration, and we figured we should save the best for last: Darlene Love in her annual Letterman performance–nixed this year by the writers’ strike–of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”
Research: Mac users pay to download music, PC users don’t
Gizmodo reports that market research by the NDP Group indicates that only 16 percent of PC users paid to download music during the third quarter of 2007, while fully half of Mac users did so. This isn’t so mystifying, since, as the author notes, “a startlingly high number of Mac disciples who involve their computer in their music habits also regularly pay to hit the iTunes bong…”
Music industry falls into even deeper hole in ‘07
Here’s the best short-form state of the music biz piece we’ve seen in a while. “Album sales have been sinking for most of this decade, but this year marks a sudden change,” writes Paul Resnikoff at Digital Music News. “Instead of a single-digit percentage drop, albums–mostly CDs–are now roughly 15 percent below already-depressed 2006 totals. And with less than two weeks left, the fourth quarter has failed to produce a recovery.”
What lies ahead? The further depletion of record company assets, says Resnikoff. Like top-selling performers:
“The Eagles are now partnered with Wal-Mart, Madonna is hanging with Live Nation, and Radiohead is playing an independent card. Majors no longer play a critical role in the promotion, distribution, and development of artists–instead, they are now liabilities to the artists they once helped to develop. Even publishing assets are being auctioned off…
“Perhaps the most overlooked liquidation is happening in the human arena. All four majors have been shrinking their workforces, and Sony BMG and Universal Music Group are currently doing the most downsizing.”
More: Techcrunch has a good summary post about Amazon.com’s various forays into the digital music business.
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