“Are You an Idiot?”
I can still remember the day a few years ago when I was running along the Embarcadero in San Francisco, thinking about the state of the music industry and, well, how drastically fucked up it was…that was the day that the initial idea around Fuzz was born. The night before, I’d been talking to a friend married to the front-man of a band that toured about 150 nights a year. The band had fans all across the US and internationally. Their most recent gig was at the Fillmore and I assumed they were blowing up. Exactly wrong. I asked about record sales and she nearly punched me. “Are you an idiot?” she asked. I nodded pretending to empathize, but I was really nodding in response to her question as I had no idea what she was talking about. She explained, “My husband, like most artists, has never made money selling music. The reason he tours and is never at home is because we pay the rent by selling merch and playing live. He’s signed, has thousands of fans, and from the outside, he’s a success. The truth is we’re still having problems making ends meet.” To ensure her further ranting, I naively asked about the label and what they were doing to improve the situation. She then went nuclear and began spewing concepts at me like “recoupment” and “advances are akin to slavery.” My wife then came running over to apologize thinking that I was drunk and was being a jackass. It was a pretty sobering chat to say the least. I was confused though–was it the artist that just didn’t have the business sense to make it work or was it that there were fundamental problems with the industry? Was it a little bit of both? As I started to find the answer, I was soon hearing similar stories on an increasingly frequent basis.
I’ve played in several bands since I was 13, none of which you’ve likely heard of. For me, I just loved the end to end process of playing - the nervous anticipation prior to a show, lying awake all night imagining playing to a packed house, hanging backstage after the show with, you know, attention, the focused intensity as I set up my gear. I loved the whole basic routine: properly setting the levels on my amp, not too much reverb to sound cheesy, but enough to cover my mistakes–check, making sure the 9 volt battery in my pedal still worked–check, tuning and re-tuning–check, making sure the makeshift channel switcher still worked–check. Then when the lights came on, the thrill of going on stage to be met with the harsh reality that there were more people in my band than folks in the audience…
OK, so it wasn’t always like that. We had our moments of glory. Maybe not in a universal sense, but enough to keep me tooling away in the woodshed practicing my chops, driving my parents crazy by asking for every piece of new gear that came out on the market, and the countless guitar geek zines that seemed to find their way to every corner of the house. Rewinding and playing cassette tapes to capture every nuance of one of Jimi’s riffs or even trying to learn Larry Carlton’s solo note-for-note on Kid Charlemagne was part of an ongoing ritual. The world was a great place and music was everything. Like every kid with a guitar in America, there were times I thought, “One day, I’m gonna be a star!”
Now I look back on those days thinking, “Damn, I was a clueless.” The reality of the music business then and now is that trying to be a hit making machine is next to impossible. Becoming a star or being “discovered”–forget about it. Trying to be that artist (or the label for that matter) at the top of the pyramid that can sell a million units–highly unlikely. Sure, there are always exceptions to the rule, but the truth is that going about the music business the way that it’s been done for years is a recipe for disaster.
Steve Albini once wrote a famous article about the dreams and the realities of the music business entitled, “The Problem with Music.” It’s an eye-opening piece that transparently and plainly discusses the dreams and the harsh realities of artists trying to make it in the traditional model.* After reading it, my entire conversation with the angry wife at the party made perfect sense. It’s no surprise that being signed to a traditional label has often times been described as the modern form of indentured servitude.
But, there is hope, if one can overcome the narrow notions of success as an artist. Success in today’s music industry can be defined differently, individually, and with more tools at your disposal than ever before. Success can be defined within the context of being able to pursue one’s art on a full-time basis; it’s about taking control of one’s own career and having the choice to make decisions both creatively and financially based on actual information that’s available anywhere at any time; it’s about realizing that dreams can be quickly smothered by the weight of harsh reality, but hard work increases your odds for success; it’s about the willingness to do business in an entirely different way–and it’s about making great music that means something to you.
It’s a revolutionary time to be in the music business…if you have the willingness to do things differently. You don’t need to be a 30-year industry veteran to figure that out. The web and technology has challenged the fundamental way that the music business is done. From discovery to production, marketing to distribution, the landscape has changed dramatically. Artists, known and unknown, are self-releasing new albums and are reaping the financial benefits overnight while maintaining full ownership of their masters. Gone are the days of $100,000 production costs for professional recordings. Mainstream music is dying fast as the internet has provided an easy means to discover even the most obscure niches and genres in the long tail. Online marketing has become a key means other than touring for emerging artists to make a name for themselves. One of the majors is owned by a private equity firm and radio is no longer the primary music discovery vehicle. In fact, more than 5,000 folks have been let go from record companies since the turn of the millennium. It is changing.
The turbulence brings great opportunity–artists now have more choices about how to take their career to the next level than ever before in the history of this industry. The four pillars of the old regime are decaying rapidly as new entrants are evolving innovative ways to contribute to the music uprising. No one has all the pieces and it’s going to be a hell of a show, but revolutionizing and democratizing the production and access to music is certainly a cause worth fighting for.
*In April, watch for the exclusive interview with Albini here on The Fix as he revisits his infamous observations on the music industry
As a teenager, Jeff Yasuda cast aside his cultural roots of violins and violas and asked his parents for an electric guitar. They said “no.” After saving to buy his own, further years of gear acquisition, and miles of tablature studies, he proudly states he is a bona fide hack. Yasuda strayed from his true love while pursuing bean counting, the IPO market, and venture capital. After 6 months away from that to travel the world, he reunited (and it felt so good) with his passion for music and the artists that create it. Yasuda grew up in San Francisco and has lived in Hong Kong, Boston, and New York. He started Fuzz with a few friends who share his belief that the music industry is ready for change and his strong desire to do something about it. Between being a husband, father, and running a start-up, he continues to hack in two San Francisco bands.
Last week Time Warner’s AOL, getting somewhat long-of-tooth in the digital age, announced the $850 million acquisition of Bebo, described as the third largest online social networking site after MySpace and Facebook. This major web-related M&A deal comes on the heels of the proposed $44.6 billion take-over of “web pioneer” Yahoo by Microsoft (or the ultimate combination of Yahoo with another large corporate or private equity aggregator that Yahoo prefers in order to retain its iconoclastic persona , to the extent it still may exist).
I just learned that “Bebo” is a backronym (love that word) for “Blog early, blog often”. Indeed, early-adoption and frequent, even obsessive, participation may well be a necessity for developing a sustainable identity and voice on the Web.
The recent deals by the Masters of Universal (read: suits) are centered around projected future revenues streams derived from high velocity “web-action” not yet proven to be capable of monetization. To justify the hefty amounts involved in the recent M&A transactions, fiduciary and shareholder pressures will force the suits in these hierarchic organizations to try to commercialize and monetize the activity within the still “protected walls” of the acquired “networks” in competition against one another.
This arms-race to commercialization by each of the major web-oriented players operating behind their own protected gardens is based on a dubious proposition. Most of the existing online social networks (MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo) and others are already only one “OpenSocial” click apart. This one-click is, for now, a barrier to seamless connectivity–but the walls are about to be breached. The techno-gunslingers, an independent breed of giant killers nurturing their magic bean-stalks in their garages everywhere, are developing a multitude of schemes to merge online activity across networks. This will increase the rush to monetization and the web frenzy.
Within a few short months we will have de facto convergence into the Mother-of-All-Social-Networks, the effective consolidation of Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, and most other platforms in cyber-space. This motha will be big, wild, and woolly–and cluttered with commercialization. What happens then?
There are already a mind-boggling eight million (8,000,000!!!) bands registered on MySpace alone–with duplicate satellite pages created by musicians at “OppositeOfMySpace” for redundancy and reach, and the numbers keep growing. The 1) pressures for mass-based commercialization and monetization of web-action by the major players and 2) convergence of all music sites described above, encompassing established artists, indie artists, and artists-in-the-making, will present (as usual) both crisis and opportunity.
Netizens use the web in two operating modes. 99% of the time (it is probably more) we are in “passive” mode, and 1% of the time we are in “active” mode (blogging early and often, whatever). It is a no-brainer that it is better to be in active mode as a player rather than a passive observer if one chooses to enter the digital arena. If, as an artist, you are unable or unwilling to increase the amount of time to project your true identity and voice on the web, you should align yourself with those you trust, your most passionate fans and intermediaries/facilitators, who will “be-bo” on your behalf if you give them the proper incentive.
How do you project your identity and voice on the web effectively? Let’s frame this issue for possible resolution in terms of 1) “signal” and “noise” in the broad context of 2) linkages operating within a hierarchy of networks within networks (within networks–you get the picture). You must create nuanced identity and voice to fit network context ranging from “small groups” to linkages in a hierarchy interconnected by “super-nodes”. In communications theory and in life, what is “noise” (spam) to some, may be “signal” (a valuable communication or network connection) to others–depending on what part of a hierarchy of networks you are dealing with. Even spam sucks for some, but not necessarily for others. As the techno-slingers like to say, this is a non-trivial exercise. Again, without a calibrated incentive/disincentive system, the complexity of this undertaking would defy resolution.
There are elements of “value” in our activities as economic and social beings that cannot be quantified with the same level of precision as financial capital (i.e., money). For now, we call these things of value “social capital,” in contradistinction to “spam” on the one side with little or no value and “tangible capital” on the other side that clearly, and by definition, is value that can be created, stored, and exchanged–Economics 101.
Our inability to quantify social capital gets to the very heart of the dilemma facing indie artists: the wild and woolly web in process of infinite expansion at the same time that Mr. Big is trying to consolidate and commercialize the web-action, a process that most indie artists as iconoclasts find antithetical to every fiber of their being.
When convergence takes place, we should strive to develop at our Nightschool a better way for indie artists to create, store, and exchange social capital which is, for now, a default metaphor for things of value that cannot be measured. Just one notion that seems to be heading in the right direction is the concept of SocialBuxx™, a well-articulated quantitative approach to “keep score” and maintain some semblance of order without surrendering to Mr. Big. To be sure, trying to quantify an elusive intangible to become a de facto standard may well be quixotic–and some have noted with insight that it may take the magic out of creation and discovery. Nevertheless, in my view, excellence is the absence of disorder without unrelieved uniformity, and we should do our utmost to establish this condition as we individually seek to develop our identity and voice on the Web.