People just don't care. 

Every day I get e-mail castigating me that I've pissed on someone's favorite act, or haven't given enough coverage to another. I don't doubt that you like these acts, but what fascinates me is most people don't. Music is now niche. Kind of like knitting or needlepoint, but a bit bigger.  

Maybe we'll spread the analogy to sports. Music is tennis. Gargantuan decades ago, most people just don't care today. Billie Jean King, Jimmy Connors, even McEnroe... Today we've got Federer and Nadal and I can't tell them apart and might turn on a match once a year, whereas I used to watch religiously. But now there are few stars. Few personalities. And on the men's side, the game has become so damn fast as to be something completely different, the same way music veered off into hip-hop and divadom and most people stopped caring. Sure, some people cared, but relatively few, otherwise Mariah Carey would be selling out arenas every night, and she's not, and a rapper other than Jay-Z could do 20,000 a night too. 

Or maybe we should look at golf. There's one superstar, Tiger Woods, getting the whole nation golf-crazy, but if he's not playing, viewership drops dramatically. Sure, Phil Mickelson is a great golfer, but only golf devotees care about him, the average citizen might know his name and nothing more. 

We're under the illusion that music is king, that it drives the culture, but it's not. Music has become the sideshow. Even on "American Idol"...does anybody expect Lee DeWyze to make it? We're interested in the comings and goings of Simon Cowell, not the contestants. Sure, music is featured on the show, OLD MUSIC! 

And many people will go to hear old music live. But fewer each year at higher prices. 

After you've heard that famous act do its hits live, do you really need to go back? And the old acts are truly in it for the money, they've got no dignity, otherwise, why would they be shilling on TV, appearing on "American Idol"...I'm stunned they didn't lobby for a crawl with a link to tickets. Then again, everybody knows you go to ticketmaster.com for an experience you endure, but hate. 

This business will not be vital again until there’s a stable of stars, hopefully a plethora that people follow and want to see. And it would be great if they had something to say, if they were three-dimensional. GaGa is a start. Sure, she’s got train-wreck value, but people believe there’s substance underneath, and it’s not what you think, it’s what they think. Then, who else? 

Everybody else lives and dies on the hit single. If Christina Aguilera had fans, she’d be able to sell tickets without airplay. But she needs hits to get bodies into seats. In the old days, bands could tour without hits whatsoever. But that was back when music drove the culture, when you knew the players like sports team members, when you had to go to the show, when you were addicted to the radio. 

The radio. And then MTV. They centralized focus. They delivered a platform for star-building. Someone left of center could get exposure and make it. Like Culture Club. MTV broke Boy George big, radio followed. But FM radio built Hendrix and Cream, the music was so exciting you listened every night. Because everyone was different, everyone was testing limits, everybody wasn’t the same. And if you don’t think everybody’s the same today, try listening to Top Forty radio. 

So where do we go from here? 

Attention without substance is worthless. In other words, if you shoot someone, we’ll all know your name, but soon we’ll be on to the next headline. 

The audience demands universality, something mainstream. And mainstream does not mean compromised, it means quality! Something so good that it cannot be denied! Do you really think people care about a black/Asian golfer? Of course not, what drew people to Tiger was his ability, his greatness! So you’ve got a band that you like, are they so good that you can drag almost anybody to see them and they’ll like them too? If not, they’re niche. 

But, like I said, the whole business is niche. Labels believe if file-trading is stopped, an impossibility, sales will go up dramatically. I doubt it. People don’t care about music that much, they’re satisfied with free YouTube play. And certainly most people don’t care about the individual acts purveyed…how do we get them to care? 

It would be great if there were a Website, like Yahoo or Amazon or Google, actually more like the Huffington Post, to focus attention and build acts. But the site builders are only interested in money, not music, and therefore they focus on advertising, everything but the consumer experience. MySpace had a music focus, but its user interface sucked, still, how come every year there’s a new Net phenomenon, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and there’s never one solely music based? Ever think about that? 

The new Spotify is great, the social-networking elements trump iTunes, playlist sharing with instant listening ability is so cool…but it still doesn’t solve the problem that we’re lacking hit acts. 

I don’t want a world of endless niches. It’s incomprehensible. 

And the public doesn’t want one either. Which is why sales are so damn bad. It’s not like they just invented a new file-trading technique. No, most people can live without the music that’s being sold. 

You solve the problem the way you always have, with hit music. And the public doesn’t believe today’s music is full of hits. Their opinion, not yours. If you’re happy in your private little backwater, salivating in front of the stage before your favorite niche act, fine. But you’re not, because you keep telling everybody they should like your act too. 

But most people are never going to like the Hold Steady, the National or the Black Keys. Never gonna happen. And the fact that you’re a big fan and react to my point by going ballistic and e-mailing me does not solve the problem. I like “The Deadliest Catch”, shouldn’t you? No, that’s too mainstream… I like A&E’s “Intervention”…shouldn’t you? No, that’s pretty successful too. You can watch either of them even if you’ve never fished or never been addicted, because they’ve got underlying human elements that appeal to all. That’s the way music used to be. And it’s not that way now.

I made flower essences several years ago.  It’s very easy and they have been used medicinally for centuries.  Here is an excerpt about dandelions from the Fower Essence Repertory by Patricia Kaminski and Richard Katz.

“Dandelion - Positive qualities:  Dynamic, effortless energy; lively activity balanced with inner ease.  Patterns of imbalance:  Overly tense, especially in the musculature of the body, overstriving and hard-driving

Cross-references:  Body  Grief  Hardness  Heart  Masculine Consciousness  Massage  Mid-Life Crisis  Perfectionism  Relaxation  Release  Repression  Resistance  Study  Tension  Time Relationship  Work and Career Goals

The soul needing Dandelion essence feels a natural intensity and love for life.  Such individuals are compulsive “doers” who enter with great zeal and zest into many activities.  Unfortunately, they can over-plan and over-form their lives beyond the natural capacity of the body to sustain such intensity.  Furthermore, such persons may become unable to experience more contained moments of reflective activity.  The unexpressed inner life of the soul and the harsh demands on the body collide to create extreme tension, especially in the musculature.  The Dandelion flower teaches these individuals how to listen more closely to emotional messages and bodily needs.  As tension is released the soul feels more inner ease and balance, allowing spiritual forces to flow through the body in a dynamic, effortless way.

If the attempt to combat illegal downloading of copyrighted music and illicit filesharing is taking a “carrot and stick” approach, then the Trustmark is the carrot. The stick will be provided by the Digital Economy Bill, which is likely to be rushed through Parliament before the election. The Bill proposes powers to disconnect people from the internet for persistent filesharing and to close down sites that are offering copyrighted material illegally.

The limited opportunity for a Commons debate on the Bill has angered many, including some internet service providers and several consumer groups. The Open Rights Group says that more than 10,000 people have written to their MPs to complain about the disconnection plans, which they say are disproportionate and open to misuse.

The music industry says nobody would be disconnected without several warnings and the right to appeal and dismisses such concerns as “scaremongering”. The fight against music piracy has been going on for more than a decade with limited success. The pirates had the web to themselves at first because the music industry was slow to wake up to the potential of the internet and hampered by the need to clear legal services with a huge range of rights holders. It took Apple to drive legitimate internet music into the mainstream. By combining the massively popular iPod, the iTunes music store and some tough negotiating with record labels, Apple built an online music service that still dominates the market today.
 
However, it’s a service that simply replicates the offline world. iTunes is a music shop: you pay, you receive, you own – just like buying a CD at the shops. More recently a range of music services have started that use the internet for more than just delivering files. Streaming services, such as Spotify and We7, remove the need for you to own and store the music.

The music is stored on a server – in ‘the cloud’ – and users can stream it to their computer without charge in return for having their listening broken up by adverts. Subscribers can turn the ads off and access their music from a mobile phone. Demand for Spotify is so great that Daniel Ek, its founder and CEO, says “on certain days we are consuming more internet capacity than Sweden as a country”. Spotify deals with this by using peer-to-peer technology. Peer-to-peer services don’t require all of the data to be streamed from a central server but instead spread the load to other users on the network. It’s an approach that has been taken by illicit filesharing sites, in part because it makes it harder to track down filesharers.

The use of the word ’sharing’ is important because that’s an intrinsic part of the appeal. People naturally want to share things that they find interesting and that includes music. Instinctively the music industry wanted to prevent that at first. If your business model is based on selling songs then you need to ensure that everyone who wants your song has to come to you to get it. Daniel Ek says that the new version of Spotify, which is due for release some time in the next few months, will make sharing much more integral to the experience. Next month a new service, mflow, will be launched that puts sharing at the heart of the service. Without its community element mflow is just like the iTunes music store. You can search for tracks, listen to 30-second snippets and then pay to download them.

However, the service has a Twitter-like element that allows you to follow people and for them to follow you back. You can “flow” music to your followers, which allows them to hear the entire song – not just the 30-second snippet. If they buy it you get 20 per cent of the price, which you can use to buy more music. Once you begin following a few people on mflow your in-box soon fills up with shared tracks, each accompanied by a short message – of 140 characters, like Twitter – from the person who shared it. Pretty soon you have your own personal radio station, programmed by your friends. It’s the first internet music service I’ve come across that has no real offline equivalent.

OLGA has signed 3 of her CDs with Songs2Share.  We’ve gotten one song onto a playlist that got submited to a client looking for music for a project.  John Malcolm, another S2S songwriter got his song onto a Folk call for music playlist.  We’re marketing & marketing for those licensed placements as well as - how did Ms. Olga put it - “I’d like to have another artist record my songs.”  Yes dear, so would we.  We also have an artist song licensing program and promote license for a demo exchange between songwriter and cover artist.  

When unknown singers pen personalised songs for their biggest fans and top stars let people mess around with their hits, they have one thing in common.

They are both finding new ways to make money from their music that do not rely on the old-fashioned ways of simply selling records and gig tickets.

With music sales declining, artists, record labels and even opera houses are being more inventive in order to encourage fans to fork out.

Known as “monetisation” in business speak, that was the main theme at the largest music industry gathering of the year, the Midem conference in Cannes. And some of the best ideas are below.

THE PERSONAL TOUCH

When American singer-songwriter Allison Weiss from Athens, Georgia, wanted to make a new EP, she turned to her fans to raise the money she needed.

But rather than just asking for donations, she sold personalised products and experiences that she thought her fans would love.

Forty dollars (£25) got a signed copy of the EP, $100 (£62) got a hand-written thank you letter and $300 (£185) got a CD-R of Weiss performing five acoustic songs of your choice. For $500 (£310), two people got songs written especially for them about subjects they chose. (”Nothing explicit, sorry guys,” she warned.)

The singer did this via the website Kickstarter, which helps raise funds for all types of creative projects with the proviso that the backers must get some kind of reward.

“Alison let her small fanbase on Twitter and Tumblr know that she was doing this project, trying to raise this money, and within 10 hours she had raised her full $2,000 (£1,240) goal and she ended up raising four times that by the time it was over,” says Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler.

Another musician charged fans $40 to come round to his house for a meal, while someone else asked supporters for $70 (£43) to spend a day in the recording studio and contribute handclaps to her album.

BANDS MEET BRANDS

Bands that took the corporate buck may once have been accused of selling out, but commercial sponsorship is now often seen as a smart way to fund your music.

So UK dance act The Young Punx accepted sponsorship from beer company Warsteiner, which wanted to raise its profile among clubbers in Germany.

Warsteiner put on club nights where The Young Punx DJ’d and performed live, the company gave away their music, used it in its MTV ads and the band featured the drink in their podcasts.

“They were paying to have us associated with their brand,” says Young Punx singer and Dizzee Rascal’s live musical director Hal Ritson. “We were happy to be associated with their brand since our brand is basically having a few drinks and having a good time.”

During last year’s promotion, according to Facebook statistics, the number of Young Punx fans in Germany shot up and Germany went from being “a territory of no relevance” to third on the list behind the UK and USA.

“That’s a fanbase that came through one year without us maybe selling many records, but with many, many people hearing our music. And we got paid, so everyone’s happy.”

FAT LADY, BIG SCREEN

When Peter Gelb took over New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2006, he was faced with an ageing, dwindling audience.

The Met had broadcast its productions on radio for almost 80 years, so Gelb decided to see whether he could bring in a new audience - and new money - by offering the “full blown visual experience” in cinemas as well.

The live broadcasts started on 60 screens but are now shown in more than 1,000 cinemas around the world, with typical ticket prices around $20 (£12) in the US.

“We approach them very much like a sports broadcast,” Gelb says, with backstage cameras capturing the action in the “locker room” and an off-duty star such as Renee Fleming or Placido Domingo acting as a reporter and interviewing singers as they come off stage.

The Met keeps half of the box office takings, he says. “That 50%, when there are hundreds of thousands - which is the average attending these transmissions - more than covers the incremental costs of producing them in high definition.

“And it actually provides a profit stream which helps us cover our other costs, which are extremely high.”

GIG MEMENTOES

Kiss fans who saw the rock band on their 2009 US tour had the chance to take the show home with them in their back pockets when they walked out of the venue.

“We do a multi-track recording of each night and make the recording available on a USB drive right at the end of the show,” says Gerrit Schumann from German company Music Networx, which makes the recordings.

“We have USB duplicators that do it pretty much automatically at the venue. We stop recording about half an hour before the end of the show and include a download code, with which the fan can then download the encores and remaining 30 minutes online.”

Each stick cost about $20 and an artist will get anywhere between 20-50% of the price, he says. With around 1,000 sticks sold a night at 58 dates last year, that adds up to several hundreds of thousands of dollars for Kiss.

They will do it all again for their European tour this year, where they will also introduce an instant download-to-mobile option.

Kiss, already the masters of music merchandise, are also selling meet-and-greet gig packages for £905 per person in the UK.

MIX IT UP

Letting fans remix, re-record and generally mess around with songs by established artists has given those songs a lucrative new lease of life.

I Am T-Pain is an iPhone app that lets users record themselves singing along to songs by the US rapper with the help of AutoTune, and post their recordings to Facebook and other sites. Costing $3 (£1.85) - three times the cost of an average song on iTunes - the app sold more than 600,000 copies in two months.

French company MXP4 provides technology that lets fans loose on songs by the likes of Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and David Guetta in a similar way, both online and on the iPhone.

Users can remix tracks and buy their mixes - at a premium price - or record their own vocals and share the results with friends, who may then discover the originals.

In the next 10 years, the music experience will be revitalised in the same way that 3D has revitalised movies and innovations like the Wii and Rock Band have revitalised gaming, says MXP4 chief executive Albin Serviant.

“Our vision is about having a 3D music experience, where you can not only play and listen to music but play with it, remix it, get the lyrics on the fly, share with friends and record your own version.”

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/8483665.stm