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A hint for the music industry: STOP FORCING GARBAGE ON US

A November 28, 2007 2:38 PM comment by Sabocat on the c|net article,
The recording industry should thank Apple:

I have a theory that what is killing the music industry is not downloads or piracy or people taking “their” product in any way at all. I think that maybe, just maybe, the fact that the biggest musical promotion (supported by bill boards plastered all over) that the industry is currently offering is… A Greatest Hits of the Spice Girls album.

Reheated warmed over formula music has a lot more to do with flagging sales than new media could ever begin to accomplish.

Give us music to buy and we will buy it.

And on a slightly more real level, there’s this comment by Jay Stone on Bol’s post,
Helping massa build a new house:

Like someone above me said Limewire is the shit. Unless the album is classic (Nas exception) there is no way I’m gonna cop it when you can download it for free. [...]

ABSENTBLUE comments on the Gizmodo post,
Radiohead, Saul Williams and the Inevitable Rise and Liberation of the Music Industry

[...] Digital media in any form is easy to pirate, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t enough people like myself who are willing to pay for something legitimate. All in all, big business is going to lose and the common man is going to win. Quality is still quality and can only be created and obtained by certain means, a talent with merit will still stand out against a flood of trite crap without the record industry.

Traditional artists still do after all, and how easy is it to get a JPEG? Very, but I’ll still go out and buy the book or poster if I like it enough, same goes for music. [...]

Clear enough?

Doug Morris said something in the Wired article the other day that I completely let slide in my quasi-review, but I think it’s a stance that’s important to understand because his take on the perceived value of music is indicative of how the corporate mindset hijacked music into serving as a cash cow for men with capital a long time ago:

“Really, an album that someone worked on for two years — is that worth only $9, $10, when people pay two bucks for coffee in Starbucks?”

A cursory read of that quote will probably leave most people in agreement with Morris — that the hard work that goes into creating an album is worth much more than five cups of coffee. Read it again and I bet you’ll agree that the argument is a strawman.

In classic bean counter fashion, Morris is aggregating the average cost of an album, across thousands of artist’s products, and comparing it to a product that has an absolute perceived value to a return customer based on a history of consistently met expectations.

The difference between two randomly poured cups of coffee isn’t anywhere near comparable to the taste of any two random artists. The creative output of people isn’t a natural commodity — a packaged good with explicit value — no matter whose hands are on what levers of industry.

Maybe twenty years ago, but not today.

It’s easy to understand why some people choose to pay exorbitant prices for a box set of their favorite artist’s music, while others choose to download, rip and trade to avoid the markup of prepackaged crap. It’s called free will. And now that our will lives in a world chock full of ways… well, you know the cliche.

We’re all now empowered with the ability to track, retrieve and experience the most discrete traces of information scents — not only the prefabricated packets of promotion-powered product — so common sense would dictate that it would behoove industry executives who care about the vitality of their industry to think long and hard about their strategy to serve only their prehistoric definition of a bottom-line.

Keep pushing crap on us, from ringtones to pre-fabricated personalities, and we’ll move beyond simply circumventing your mechanisms of product pushing to engaging directly with and supporting the source of our inspiration and redemption; the artists themselves.

(Shmoo by Michael Paulus)

Seth Mnookin penned a great interview with Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group, in the December issue of Wired Magazine. There’s so much in those four pages to comment on, but the angle I found most compelling was Doug Morris’ propensity to not be had.

By anyone.

[...]

“There was a cartoon character years ago called the Shmoo,” he says in a raspy tenor. “It was in Li’l Abner. The Shmoo was a nice animal, a nice fella, but if you were hungry, you cut off a piece of him and put onions on it, and if you wanted to play football you just made him like a football. You could do anything to him. That’s what was happening to the music business. Everyone was treating the music business like it was a Shmoo.

“It was only a couple of years ago that we said, What’s going on here?’ Really, an album that someone worked on for two years — is that worth only $9, $10, when people pay two bucks for coffee in Starbucks?” Morris sighs. “People never really understand what’s happening to the artists. All the sharing of the music, right? Is it correct that people share their music, fill up these devices with music they haven’t paid for? If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go,” he says. “That’s what happened to the record business.”

Morris goes on to rail against criminal-minded college students and low-life punks who steal the music that his artists work so hard to create. He admits to being fairly ignorant about technology and insists that his job is to nurture the creative side of the business — work that’s being threatened by all of this other nonsense.

So how is it that an old-school music mogul who can barely hide his indifference to technology or his contempt for the download-loving public is out front on so many digital initiatives? Clearly, it’s not because he wants to improve the music experience for consumers. It’s also not because he finally understands that MP3s are fundamentally changing his business, whether he likes it or not. And if he’s “invigorated and challenged by the opportunities of digital music,” as Caraeff puts it, that’s only because he relishes a fight. In truth, his motive is simple: He wants to wring every dollar he can out of anyone who goes anywhere near his catalog. Morris has never accepted the digital world’s ruling ethos that it’s better to follow the smartest long-term strategy, even if it means near-term losses. As far as he’s concerned, do that and someone, somewhere, is taking advantage of you. Morris wants to be paid now, not in some nebulous future. And if there’s one thing he knows how to do, it’s use the size of his company to get his way.

The problem is that a strategy based on quick returns is unlikely to pull the music industry out of its morass. After all, it was a reluctance to look farther down the road that got the labels in trouble in the first place. But Morris is much less interested in figuring out how to make digital music work for everyone than he is in not being the Shmoo.

[...]

That last line completely encapsulates the feeling I get when any of these major label guys open their mouths or allow their agile-like-a-cruise-ship businesses to bounce off their artists like icebergs in the night.

If Doug Morris wants to build a proprietary subscription-based empire (Total Music) for delivering Universal Music Group and their PIC’s recordings, he’s perfectly within his rights to do so. It’s a bold move to attempt to wrestle back market share from the iPod and iTunes with such a DRM-laden scheme, but Morris is in tight with his executive colleagues feeling the sting of iTunes growth into overall music sales, so I’m sure they’ll collude on whatever level necessary to see progress.

They want their “proper” cut back, even if they step on a bunch of potential customers in the process.

Personally speaking, I don’t give them much of a shot — they can’t even secure the domain name for the service.

In the end, it’ll be the bottom-line customer experience drivers of music fans that decides the success of Doug Morris’ venture. People really do like to play their music where and when they want, especially as technophobes die off and each new generation seems to have an additional USB port built into their skulls at birth.

The nut of all this is that major labels have been cutting into artist profits and ownership since Elvis hit the scene, taking their piece of the pie like a fat kid at Thanksgiving, but they don’t like it when “outsiders” like Steve Jobs flips the script on their own racket.

I’m getting hungry. Anyone have some onions?

More opinions:

• Universal Music’s CEO Gleefully Explains How Clueless He Is
• Open Season: Doug Morris
• Universal Music CEO Doug Morris Speaks, Recording Industry in Even Deeper Shit Than We Thought
• Is Universal’s Doug Morris the stupidest recording exec ever?
• Universal Music CEO is Like Your Cranky, Out-of-Touch Grandpa Who Happens to Run a Huge Record Label
• Apparently Abraham Simpson is running UMG
• The recording industry should thank Apple

Jermaine Dupri’s recent Huffington Post article is a classic spin job; a call for revolution by “artists, producers and label executives” to halt the sale of individual tracks on iTunes in order to get back to the good old days of albums being sold as product — all under the cover of defending artist’s integrity.

Here are a few choice quotes (with my emphasis and commentary):

[...] He’s not the first. He’s not the lone cowboy in all of this. Radiohead and AC/DC have turned their backs on iTunes for the same reason. Doug Morris, the CEO of Universal Group, has been fighting Steve Jobs on this for a minute now. But Jay is at a level people are going to pay attention to. He’s had 10 number one albums. He may run Def Jam but he’s also an artist who put his heart and soul into something that he wants people to hear all the way through. As the creator and investor, he has every right to demand this. [...]

In what world can anyone demand that someone experiences product exactly the way the producers want them to, particularly music? This isn’t the 1970’s; we have options nowadays.

Hey Jermaine, ever hear of the iPod Shuffle? Do you even have a clue as to why Apple was successful in turning a feature of the iPod into a product of it’s own? It’s because they have a finger on the pulse of how people listen to their music.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not an active paying customer of iTunes because I won’t pay for a DRM product and a $.99 digital track is too expensive, IMO.

But when people have a library of music at their disposal, they want the option to add to that collection in a way that matches their listening experience — as if they’re chilling in their favorite pub with a killer jukebox rotating through tracks in the background.

Similarly, when I jog, I don’t want to end my run on the same verse of the same song each time I lace up my sneakers (I have a watch for that experience); I want a brand spanking new jogging soundtrack to occupy my thoughts instead of feeling the deja vu that occurs when I step off a particular curb while Chi Ali drops the same line from Pass The 40.

Why? Because monotony sucks, even when it’s a dope track or album.

The same desire for playback diversity is applicable to the experiences that Pandora, Musicovery, Last.fm and any number of free internet radio stations provide in this information age. Shit, CD shuffle has been a cheap replacement option for a live DJ since 1988.

Dupri doesn’t support the modern-day CD shuffle sales equivalent because a CD (album) isn’t always being sold.

Talk about throwing out the baby with the bath water!

In this day and age, only dedicated fans of artists (teenagers and hardcore listeners) buy albums, rush home, read the lyrics and listen to an album from front to back. That context scenario hasn’t represented a large demographic of music listeners / buyers for a long time now. And because most albums are often rushed to release by a label demanding that bottom-line deadlines are met, many people have lost faith in the album as a commodity.

Illmatic was dope and I’m still listening to it over and over again as an album. Now, name another Nas album that has even come close as a holistic experience.

Not every album is worth full market value. People are simply fed up of being duped and are now enabled by technology to do something about it.

Good for people!

The premise of this article is bullshit to begin with; iTunes allows people to purchase both the entire album and individual tracks. So don’t try to jive us with this move by Jay-Z as being something about “protecting artistic integrity” when it’s all about a price point disagreement.

No matter how much Doug Morris wants this age to retro-fit his business model, it just isn’t happening. People want what they want; either give (sell) it to them or they’ll take it (P2P download).

More Dupri:

[...] More artists and producers are gonna take back control of how their art is sold because his strategy has paid off. Maybe Hova coulda sold another 100,000 to 200,000 units by playing it iTunes’ way, but he still had the number one album last week. He STILL sold 425,000 units. Even more, he’s proven you can still sell an album without those guys. [...]

The music industry (read: many labels and tons of artists) are hemorrhaging sales revenue and Jermaine Dupri is pointing to an example of Jay-Z missing out on on a 23% - 47% increase in sales as a good thing? All for the greater good of controlling how a musician’s voice is heard?

What the fuck is Dupri smoking, ’cause I want to make certain that I never put that shit to my lips.

How fucking elitist are these guys? Indie artists and small label acts need all the support they can get nowadays to expose their sounds:

• MySpace or Facebook profile song adds by people serves as viral marketing
• Song or album purchases helps spread the word while putting money in the pockets of artists
• Tagging up artists or their songs greatly increases the chance of exposure in this 2.0 world

That’s not even getting into post-event media creation and online sharing necessary to draw people to shows.

I know for a fact that Molly cherishes and appreciates every bit of positive feedback and support she receives. To present Jay-Z’s decision to stiff arm iTunes as a revolutionary move for the industry — to lead artists in controlling how people listen to music — is not only a fucking smokescreen to Dupri and Jay-Z serving their boss’ business interests, but it’s offensive to musicians who aren’t living in the clouds.

Dupri continues:

[...] Jay made everyone realize that iTunes taking what we give them and doing what they want with it isn’t the way it has to be. He put the light on and made other people realize, “Oh these guys are just selling our music, they ain’t making it.” If anything, WE made iTunes. It’s like how we spent $300,000 to $500,000 each on our videos and MTV and BET went ahead and built an entire video television industry off of our backs. We can’t let that happen again. These businesses exist solely because of our music. So if we as artists, producers and label executives stand up, those guys at Apple can either cooperate, or have nothing for people to buy and download on their iPods.

Apple thinks that’s never gonna happen. They think that we as the record industry will never stick together. But Universal sells one out of every three records. All it’ll take is for Warner Music to say, “You know what, I’m with you,” for us to shut ‘em down. No more iPods! They won’t have nothin’ to play on their players! We can take back the power if we’re willing to sacrifice some sales to make our point. [...]

And there, my dear reader, is the nut of this posturing; Dupri and Co. want to ratchet up the war against their own market.

The classic part of this bravado is Jermaine Dupri’s call for executives to support his burial of the music industry — keep paying him mad dollars while he sacrifices — to allow him to participate in this revolution to disenfranchise both real and potential customers.

These guys are boycotting iTunes for no other reason than their belief that they’re not getting enough control or money. And who can blame them, because if you really think about it, Jermaine Dupri and Jay-Z created the most popular music service (iTunes) — from the most popular brand in America (Apple) — by getting paid for rapping about bling, booze, broads and bucks for the past 10 years.

Right.

If Universal and Warner both pulled out of iTunes tomorrow, Jobs could shift his focus to the relatively untapped, global long tail market of unsigned and small label acts in the wild. If he made it easier for such acts to upload music to his arena, he could pocket the cut (53%) that once went to labels like Universal and Warner, turn off DRM (the only reason he’s using it is because the big labels insist upon using it) and start a price war that even four gas stations at an intersection haven’t seen before.

You think labels are struggling now? That kind of a move would truly revolutionize the industry. And Jobs wouldn’t have too much to lose as it’s the iPod — not iTunes music sales — that is Apple’s revenue darling.

Who needs whom?

Dupri:

[...] These days people just assume that you need a number one single to have a number one album. But look at what’s really happening. Soulja Boy sold almost 4 million singles and only 300,000 albums! We let the consumer have too much of what they want, too soon, and we hurt ourselves. Back in the day when people were excited about a record coming out we’d put out a single to get the ball going and if we sold a lot of singles that was an indication we’d sell a lot of albums. But we’d cut the single off a few weeks before the album came out to get people to wait and let the excitement build. When I put out Kris Kross we did that. We sold two million singles, then we stopped. Eventually we sold eight million albums! [...]

He’s so fucking out of touch with reality, that he referenced Kris Kross — a pre-internet act — as a business case example and Soulja Boy (who?) as someone who lost sales, instead of someone who should be thankful that he ever sold 100 albums, period.

Anyone who wants to crash and burn in the age of the internet, Mr. Jermaine Dupri — husband of the former artist Janet Jackson, who allowed herself to be exploited on national TV in a desperate move to give her name media attention — is speaking loud and clear. Follow at your own peril.

More:

[...] Did consumers complain? Maybe so. But at what point does any business care when a consumer complains about the money? Why do people not care how we - the people who make music - eat? If they just want the single, they gotta get the album. That was how life was. Today we should at least have that option. Yeah, it’s about the money, but it’s also about quality. Creating each album as a body of work that means something gives the consumer something better to listen to, It’s that simple. Otherwise all anyone would care about is making a bunch of ringtones. [...]

That “eating” line has me doubled over in laughter. When was the last time Jay-Z or Jumaine Dupree missed a meal? Who elected Jermaine fucking Dupri to be the national spokesperson for starving artists and musicians?

I’d bet my bank that an indie artist would jump at the opportunity to have their album/tracks available in as prime of a spot as iTunes with a $.29 price point per song. If I have $10 to spend on music, I have $10 to spend on music. Set a market-friendly price and watch sales jump through the roof while illegal downloads decrease, overnight.

Of course, the majors will never back that move because illegal downloads are only a threat to the perceived market valuation of individual tracks. These greedy bastards are holding so tight to their price point, that they’re willing to sacrifice the future of the industry.

So be it. Music industry 2.0 will be dope for artists, producers, venues and fans. Fuck the middleman.

I do love how Dupri reminds himself midstream that this conversation is also about quality, which of course leads into his whining about how fucking brilliant he is as a producer:

None of this is new. Every record is in some way a concept album. The whole always strives to be better than its parts. I dedicate a whole chapter in my book to this process. Every thing I produce is a product of me spending time with the artist and getting to know where his or her head is at. Usher’s Confessions album was all about where he was at that point in his life. Same with Mariah’s Emancipation of Mimi.

So now I’m supposed to feel guilty for all the morons who disrupted the genius flow of Mariah Carey’s last album by buying an individual track? Dupri is essentially saying that anything thrown together is a “concept album” because, well, they conceived an entire album, therefore selling individual songs “ruins the experience” which naturally stems from the overall creative processes.

To quote my fellow ‘Cuse alumni, Derrick Coleman: “Whoop-de-damn-do!”

Would somebody please introduce the concept of postmodernism to Jermaine Dupri? Being that the internet is not a modern construct, I think he might need to understand the basics of our current reality in a connected world before trying to speak for an entire industry.

[...] Apple, why are you helping the consumer destroy our canvas? We don’t tell you to break up your computers into bits and pieces and sell off each thing. When you go to the Apple store you may only need one thing, but you have to buy all their plug ins and stuff. You have to buy their whole package, even if you don’t necessarily want it, or your equipment won’t work. We’re just saying, if you have the audacity to sell your products like that, don’t treat our products as something less than yours. [...]

Forget the fact that Jermaine Dupri is still insisting that the music industry can control how people listen to music… he just compared selling individual tracks, which are designed to function as an independent object on a CD — allowing for next track fast-forwarding and rewinding, shuffling, individual play, copying, etc. — to Apple not allowing partial sales or the tweaking of Macs with other equipment?

Because it’s impossible to install more RAM from another reseller to a new or old Mac. Or are you referring to how Apple doesn’t “allow” people to install hard drives into their products, Jermaine? And Apple themselves don’t sell individual parts of their computers either, right?

Apple can be a controlling company and will design themselves into a corner at times, but this comparison is ridiculous.

I’d rather not be so harsh, Jermaine — if you guys want to limit your distribution options and cause grief for the people looking to buy your product, so be it — but there are artists out there whose careers might never see the light of day because of these types of ill-informed perspectives.

That said, sometimes you gotta keep it real and call a spade a spade.

Holla!

Other opinions:

• Jermaine Dupri On The Huffington Post
• Music producer is right to defend bad business
• Jermaine Dupri Takes A Stand Against Apple
• David Brooks almost gets it; Jermaine Dupri doesn’t
• cash. money. records.
• Quote of the Day: Jermaine Dupri
• Jermaine Dupri’s Message To Music Fans
• Jermaine Dupri is a Corporate Tool
• Helping massa build a new house
• Jermaine Dupri, rapper, hates iTunes and thinks consumers are dumb