A worthless waste of time, so give it to me free

Vacancy

Something sure to irritate and offend you, I'm afraid: an article written by someone named Joakim Book, Music Has No Economic Value. It's all about how music has no economic value, because Spotify devalued it. 

Book writes: 

The rhythmical vibrations that move into my ear canal as I write this—

...these guys like to reduce music to that— empty data, oxygen, little more than an atmospheric disturbance. How could it have value? 

—depend on a combination of incredible technical and economic features before they can successfully reach my brain. Set aside the two devices under my control that make the entire thing happen on my end (phone plus headphones), equally crucial is the streaming service (Spotify) and the hardware in their business that supply these sounds to me at the click of a button. (Let’s also ignore the background conditions of electricity supply and internet connectivity, and the general wealth and division of labor of my society that allows me to do this rather than eke out a subsistence farming a hostile Earth.) 

Yes, incredible things are being done by the people who make his smart phone, headphones, his very wonderful and crucial streaming service, and a whole lot of other infrastructure. Many, many wonderful valuable people make it possible for him to fill his useless ears with whatever the hell people like him listen to [see below, and prepare for a shock]. 

Without the producers and musicians who created this specific song, I wouldn’t have had anything to listen to and all these other adjacent products and services lose some of their appeal. 

Music: somewhat more appealing than just listening to dead air through headphones, he conceded. 

Below all of this sits an economic relationship between all of us that permits this pleasant and concentration-enhancing consumption to take place. Modern global capitalism truly is astonishing.

Music: a pleasant and concentration-aiding enhancement to your meaningless mechanical existence in service of modern global capitalism. 

There is plenty of economic value going on here, ultimately because I as a consumer value the state of affairs that comes from it enough to hand over other valuable resources to those who provide me with all of this. Hence I purchased the devices that let me do it, and pay the monthly fee to Spotify. In the background, they kick back some money to whoever maintains their servers as well as the artists who made the songs I’m consuming.

Lots of very valuable services being provided there. And my $7 monthly subscription which gives me virtual ownership of all the music in the world— astronomically below cost, because even Spotify itself only turned a profit for the first time this year— also, in a gesture of unfathomable beneficence, goes to pay even the artists who created the content at their own expense. The Spotify is generous.  

But the individual song that currently streams directly into my consciousness (“The Hymn of Nivoria,” by NIVORO) has no economic value- 

-perfectly illustrated at the end of its three minutes and seven seconds: Another song (“Your Gravity,” by Somna) takes its place. 

 

After that, another and another and another until the playlist with all my favorite songs repeats — but even if it didn’t, I could keep going until I exhausted Spotify’s 100-million-plus songs (which would apparently take me some 300 years). I run out of patience, energy, or even life before I run out of songs. Ergo, the marginal song has no economic value for me. If I didn’t listen to this one, I’d listen to another.

It's a novel argument, that the music industry creates more music than I can ever listen to, therefore the product is valueless. Apply this same reasoning to cars, candy bars, or toilet paper to comprehend its staggering inanity.  

It is also very important to this person's ideological project that music be non-specific. Spotify provides an unending river of stuff to go in my undiscriminating head holes, why should I value any individual item?   

If, for whatever reason, “Hymn of Nivoria” had never been created or its creator had legally withheld it from Spotify’s catalog I would merely have consumed another, similar song. No big deal. 

Yes, not all songs are the same, and I do suffer some marginal loss from never having heard Hymn of Nivoria, just as humanity as a whole would be shortchanged had Mozart never been born. But not really: We would have just listened to and admired something else.

Mozart is just a trademark to this guy. I don't know why he bothers conceding to bleeding reality that not all sounds are the same, just to say well, they really are all the same.  

The specious reasoning is: if McDonalds didn't exist I could just go to Jack In The Box. Therefore McDonalds hamburgers should be free. And Jack In The Box. All hamburgers.

If marginal songs don’t have economic value, then their creators (i.e., musicians) are also disposable, a fact that is quickly dawning on the industry as music creation becomes yet another domain for large language models to conquer. Jeremy Engle for The New York Times asks the same thing: “Will AI Replace Pop Stars?” 

And oh my God, what a glorious day that will be, when the all-conquering language models rightfully expel humans from every corner of capitalistic endeavor... except the one this guy clings to, with his little tech propagandistic blog posts. But he left a logical gap here, from music having infinitesimal value (see below) to it having no value, and transferring that from the musical product to the person who made it. 

Strangely, it is also very important that music be made by people, and not business entities— which, in economic terms, it is. Individual humans are almost as devalued in this belief system as music is. Business entities exist and have rights. So music must be made by undeserving, no-rights having people. 

Economically speaking, the pennies* the musicians earn per stream land somewhere between donations and rent-seeking. 

* - Actually Spotify pays between 3-4 tenths of a single penny per stream for tracks exceeding a 1000 stream minimum threshold.   

So, he is saying: Musicians, at best you are a beggar, at worst you are an encroaching exploiter, intervening between your music and its rightful listener with your demands for dirty money. These guys think they get to decide who gets money in this economic system, like they already claimed it.   

I don't know why these psychopathic artist-hating freaks are always Swedish. Maybe they all live in the same apartment in Stockholm and infest each other's brains full time, intellectualizing about why they should get to profit off music for free. Sorry Sweden— I don't imagine there are a lot of them. 500 years ago cats like this would have occupied themselves devising ingenious methods of torture. Today they write this kind of stuff and fantasize about turning their brains into a microchip. 

It all seems disturbing and weird because it is. Humans are repelled by this stuff. It's corporate propaganda servicing one narrow field of high tech industry, and the would-be oligarch human deformities that inhabit it. People like this dream of their money-spewing auto-jerkoff perpetual motion machine— software creating its own music endlessly for other software to listen to, lavishly spewing itself with software currency it invented. But human culture endures in the small way it always has. 

Except it's not that small. There are still way more of us. Their hubris and their cluelessness about what humans want and need will be their end. 

POSTSCRIPT: Spotify, having annihilated the music business as it once was, has decided it can't make enough money giving away all the music for free, and that it therefore does not want to be in the music business any more. Since spending money to develop and promote artists would be an absurdity to them (see above), they will instead give a quarter of a billion dollars to sweating right wing gashead Joe Rogan to shower the planet with addled inflammatory gibberish.  

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Ha, I got self-conscious about my vitriol and toned down some of my language slightly. They don't call them rants for nothing. I'm just enjoying myself; language is a fun instrument for me, and I'll load it the hell up when I find a deserving target, like this particular creep. 

Ordinary

“Oh! How ordinawy.”

A little bit of an business/economics side track here: 

In the USA the word ordinary is rarely a compliment. It's usually taken to mean unexceptional, uninteresting, not that good. It's not a word you apply to a product you want to sell in a crowded marketplace. We want everything to be extraordinary, extreme, incredibly good— incredibly something, incredibly anything.  

There's a British usage that is interesting: ordinary bitter is a popular style of beer, for example. In the movie Gosford Park there was a line: “We don't have bourbon sir, we have Scotch and ordinary whiskey.”  

The meaning in that case is not boring crap. It's more about what is suitable and economical for daily consumption. Meaning, it needs to be accessible, pleasing, inexpensive. It's worth thinking about the idea, to understand what we're doing commercially as musicians and creative artists— clarity about what we're making, what it's for.   

I don't know if the word is only used in the alcoholic beverages industry, but that's a convenient field for talking about it. Compare how Americans regard good beer, vs. Germany, the UK, or Czech Republic. American “craft brewers” are trying to figure out how to get more hops into the product; in the other countries people are drinking incredibly good, balanced, satisfying ordinary beer— the equivalent of Budweiser, except much better. Which is how it should be; it's a people's beverage with an important social component.   

That carries over into European food generally; what's good is usually simple, and made with fresh ingredients. Often it's accessible to everyone. When things are taken to a high level, as in gourmet French cooking, it's built around a deep culture and craft, and social culture of appreciation. Meanwhile Americans are dreaming of Chernobyl-Style Ghost Pepper Mule-Attack Fajitas. 

A little bit of that is fun and OK, but over the last ~10 years that impulse became first the brainless pursuit of eternally more of whatever ingredient drew us to the thing in the first place (see IPAs); and more recently into just doing the wrongest thing possible— getting attention by making the worst combination of ingredients we can think of. See: the Strawberry Honey Balsamic with Black Pepper ice cream offered by Salt & Straw, the current hip place. Then you go to Italy and discover you could happily live the rest of your life eating just the chocolate chip (stracciatella) offered at any gelateria in the country. People who live there already know that because they've been eating it since they were children, and it has always been great. 

The extreme products thing relies on a consumer mentality of always seeking out the next extreme thing, at the expense of core life experience— which many Americans are lacking, because the ordinary available products are historically pretty crummy. 

We could talk about music that is intended for regular repeated listening, vs. music that is meant to be a very intense or challenging listening experience. Some jazz acts you hear at festivals use overwhelming energy and complexity to stand out in immediate comparison with a lot of other good music. That's how that music functions, the players are just doing what they do. It's not really meant to be listened to day to day— you couldn't, and don't— it's meant to be experienced live as a high performance act. 

Pursuing that kind of thing without having any concept of normal great music, and of normal ways of playing— most people don't play like that, they don't want to play with people trying to play like that, they don't want to listen to people trying to play like that... most of the time. The extreme high performance thing is a niche. 

It raises some questions: what is playing great? Beyond just overwhelming abilities with difficult music. Why can I listen to some overwhelming music every day— McCoy Tyner, Live Evil— and I never want to listen to other overwhelming music. Segment from Dave Holland's Triplicate, for example. There's some kind of spiritual depth to the former, that's missing from the latter, even with some of the same players. Why do I want to listen every day to some players who are never overwhelming? What do they have that the modern festival headliners don't? What's the difference between dense and exciting music that is listenable, vs. the other thing? 

As a line of product, what I'm doing with my visual art could be called ordinary— I make paintings that are meant to be hung in people's homes, and experienced daily, and enrich their lives over time. It's abstract modern art that still offends some people, but I'm using the same basic visual language of the past 100 years of art— not unlike what we do in music. Contrasted with industrial scale art that is meant to hang in museums, or corporate environments, or in public spaces, or that is meant to rewrite art history, or be collected by billionaires, or challenge people's idea of what art even is, or get over with people giving away grant money— that's something else. 

Protecting your business

Maybe not.

This is a situation I had recently, which is common for teachers working with music stores, teaching studios, or other services. Many of those businesses require teachers to sign contracts to keep them from poaching students, sometimes to stop them from competing with them generally.

I worked with a business like that, where I would get paid half my normal rate to teach at students' homes. Presumably it would be worth it if they were able to fill out my schedule a bit. During the two years I was with them, they never provided me with many students. They students they did refer to me were good kids, in supportive households, but retention was poorer than in my own practice. When the following thing happened, I was teaching one weekly half hour student through them.

The company owner called me for a meeting. I thought he was just checking in to see how I was doing, and that we would talk about how to get me more students. So we can all make some more money. When we met I told him my own teaching business was doing well, and answered all of his many questions.

Increasingly it became clear that the non-compete contract was the primary reason for the meeting. There were probing questions about my recent business activities, the relationships between my ongoing students and my new referral students; about me teaching piano to some beginner students, which we had discussed doing with his business. I had been keeping a marimba for them, which they had previously been paying to store— he wanted to know if I was teaching anyone on it. He wanted to know about my activities in “his” part of town.

Basically, he was taking a proprietary interest in things that were none of his business, trying to find out if I was taking money out of his pocket.

Obviously, it was way out of line. No rational person would expose himself to this kind of scrutiny, and possible legal action, in exchange for $17.50 a week— that's what I was making with him at the time. Him thinking that employing me for $17.50/week entitled him to do that was very troubling.

This was my response to that meeting:

Hi [the business owner]— 

I was very surprised at the nature of our meeting yesterday— I was not expecting an interview about contract enforcement, and was very surprised to learn what you were construing as possibly infringing on my contract with [the business].  

It made me wonder if I understand our relationship correctly. I believed our arrangement was that I provide services at a substantially discounted rate in exchange for a) students in bulk, b) reduced office work. At present, with you offering a) negligible employment, and b) interviews about contract enforcement, it is objectively little more than an agreement for me not to compete with you (interpreted sweepingly) in exchange for very little. 

I sympathize with your business needs, but there is obviously no incentive for me to agree to a relationship on those terms. I can't conduct my own business while worrying about whether anything I do could be construed as conflicting with my contract with you. It would be very difficult if you were providing substantial employment for me; it is obviously impossible when you're giving me nothing.  

I am happy to continue offering my services as a feature of [the business's] product, with a verbal agreement to work ethically and respect that [the business's]contacts/clients are not my contacts/clients; I can't do it under the cloud of a sweepingly-interpreted non-compete contract. 

Please let me know how you want to proceed.  

Todd Bishop

His response was to refuse to continue the relationship without a contract, and I responded to agree to end the relationship. I have a fairly robust teaching business of my own, and it was not difficult to walk away from the speculative income they offered, but showed no sign of being able to deliver.

Just because there's some small amount of money involved, you do not have to tolerate any conditions people want to impose. Especially when it involves a contract— which always carries a background threat of legal action.

At some point, you have to move out of the just-out-of-college mindset, where you will take anything, and start acting like a professional, and protect your own interests. You are the talent, without whom they have no business. Beware of people who see you as simultaneously their employee and their competitor.

Negotiating for prostitutes

Not to hire one, to be one— good not to have too many illusions about our economic place in society, as musicians. From the Quartz web site, an excellent piece on business negotiation as practiced in one of Nevada's legal brothels, from which musicians can learn a lot. If you've ever led a commercial band, or tried to book a tour, you'll recognize many of these situations immediately, and hopefully see what you're doing wrong, and what you can improve on in the future. There are also some good angles to think about in structuring your teaching business. Do go read the entire piece.


1. Establish a connection. The negotiation begins the moment the counter-party lays eyes on the escort. She smiles, says her first and last name, displaying a confidence and warmth that puts the customer at ease and projects value. Almost no one likes to negotiate. The woman’s friendly self-confidence not only makes the counter-party more comfortable, it puts the escort in control.

After the lineup, the woman takes the customer by the hand, the first point of physical contact. They walk side by side—never one in front of the other, as they tour the ranch. As they walk, they talk about why he’s there, his background, and his hobbies and interests. One escort got a large booking ($6,500, up from her usual $1,000) because during the tour they connected over a similar childhood in the Southwest. Forging a connection creates power in the negotiation. If a customer is attached to an individual, he is more likely to meet her price.


2. Don’t talk about money or time initially, just the service you’ll provide. The women are instructed to describe an ideal scenario while touching the arm, leg, or hair of the client. They don’t bring up money or how long it will take until the client is hooked and wants the full service. Instead of leading with how much they’re worth, they describe their value in a way that’s appealing to the counter-party.

Hof described it this way:

'The guy’s, like, “Well, I need four hours and I need to do this and I need to do that.” What I would tell her to say is “We’re not going to have to worry about time. We’re going to have plenty of time together, all the time that you want, because I’m not rushing you out of here because I want you to come back.” Now, you just eliminated the whole discussion about time. Then the guest says, “Well, how much time do I get?” “You get what you need. I’m not rushing you out of here.”'

3. The most controversial question is whether to say the number first or let the client. The younger women always make the client say what he’s prepared to spend first. It’s hard to tell how much money a client has. Some of the less flashy looking clients ended up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. If they say the number first, they risk low-balling themselves.

But Hof and the older women like to say the number first. They say it sets the tone and takes control of the negotiation. They don’t worry about saying a number that’s too low, because if the client readily agrees they then go in for the more expensive service and still get more.

I asked negotiation expert Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business school, about who is right. He studies the power dynamics of negotiations in other industries. He agrees with Hof that it is better to say your number first. That’s especially true when pricing is not transparent (as it is in the brothel). It gives the seller more power if she throws out the number first. It also frames the discussion and puts the prices in a higher range. “It is better to make an ambitious offer and give yourself room to concede—unless the other side has more information [on pricing].”


Continued after the break:

Your big paycheck is just around the corner.

In Salon today is a conversation with Marc Ribot about the future of copyright, the Internet, and the state of the music business in general. What started the conversation was some statements by producer Steve Albini, and Ribot's open letter in response to him:

Dear Steve Albini: 

I’m writing as a recording artist, musician, and activist with c3, the Content Creators Coalition, a working-artist-run organization dedicated to economic justice in the digital domain.  

In a recent Billboard article you referred to copyright as an “expired concept”. 

You further stated that:  “… the intellectual construct of copyright and intellectual property ownership is not realistic…That old copyright model of the person who wrote something down owns it and anyone else who wants to use it or see it has to pay him, I think that model has expired.” 

If you truly believe that “Ideas, once expressed, become part of the common mentality. And music, once expressed, becomes part of the common environment…”, are you willing to sign a Creative Commons license placing your entire catalogue in the public domain? 

Or are you just another lousy hypocrite shilling for Google and other huge tech corporations who have made billions in ad-based profits while using our work, often without paying us or asking our permission, as click bait to increase their advertising rates? 

Working artists and musicians, at least those of us who can’t afford to make another record unless the last one paid its production costs, await your response. 

Sincerely, Marc Ribot

In perhaps the least-surprising outcome of the century, Albini has declined to move his catalog over to Creative Commons.

Here's the rabble-rousing conclusion of the Salon conversation with Ribot; do go read the whole thing.

What showed you just how bad the current situation was? 

Well, first of all, like everybody, in the beginning I thought the digital revolution was going to be the best thing since bread was sliced. I remember, my manager at the time was always telling me, “Oh, no, this is going to be fantastic, don’t worry about a thing.” 

And then, I started seeing something. I started seeing the record deals that were being offered cut in half. Then cut by two thirds. I started seeing the checks that were coming in cut in half, cut by two thirds. And everybody saying, “Don’t worry, you’re going to get checks from new digital sources, and they’re going to be much better, they’re going to make up for that.” And so we waited, and waited, and waited, and then I got my check, and it was for six dollars. I think that my first SoundExchange check or something like that. 

And I thought, this can’t be right, I must have done something wrong. I must have failed to register. And then I found out, no, we’ve done everything right, we’ve registered, and meanwhile — and I started talking to other musicians, they were having the same experience — but meanwhile, the hype was going on: “No, this is great! This is fantastic!” 

And, when people started to speak out about it, started to ask questions, “Well, how come we’re not getting paid, and how can we get paid if these people on the pirate sites are posting our stuff for free download?” Anyways, I saw that there was a lot of hype going around. I saw that there was a taboo against us speaking up about what was really going on. And, you know, I’ve always thought rock and roll is about farting in church, you know. 

So, I started to say what I wasn’t supposed to say. And that’s when I started to get involved. I started to see more and more hype, more and more bullshit. I started to see half of the people who were defending what was going on, saying, “No, utopia is just around the corner,” and “Oh, your big economic — your big paycheck is just around the corner!” And the other half were saying, “You don’t have the right to get paid at all! You know, we’re saying copyright is bad…”

Also see this VOQOTD by Ribot. Visit his site to read about the Content Creators Coalition, and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Why you don't need to get paid

This guy will tell you
what you deserve.

I see that the old downloader “culture”— always a sketchy-sounding crew, even in the early days when they were led by high tech vanguard types writing in Wired— has at last entered its degenerate, snake oil phase. The words nihilistic, parasitic, sociopathic, living in a Libertarian fantasy world come inescapably to mind as I read this thing, written by some Norwegian cat who is the leader of the Pirate Party, which has been getting some press recently.

I've quoted the piece in its entirety, with my comments interspersed throughout. Keep in mind that what follows is the best, most coherent, polished argument they have to offer in favor of piracy:

“How Should Artists Get Paid?” Isn’t a Question, it’s an Insult

Throughout the debate on sharing culture and knowledge in violation of the copyright monopoly, one question keeps popping up. But it’s not a question as much as an insult to all artists.

Pay attention, he's going to tell you what insults you.

We’ve all heard the objection to sharing culture and knowledge many times – “How will the artists get paid, if you manufacture copies of their creations without paying them?”

This question is delusional on so many levels I’ve lost count.

First, artists that are copied do get paid, only not by a per-copy sale but in other ways. I encourage copying of my leadership handbook Swarmwise, for example, because I know the book promotes other avenues of income. The average income for musicians has risen 114% since people started sharing culture online on a large-scale, according to a Norwegian study. Other studies agree with this observation.

The law says the artist authorizes and gets paid for copies. That's kind of the end of the story. Whatever publicity you get from having your work circulated is not compensation.

In case you're wondering what happened to your 114% pay raise, after following several links, I was able to learn that the study is in fact a non-peer-reviewed master's thesis by a couple of Norwegian business students, entitled The Norwegian Music Industry in the Age of Digitalization, which you can follow the link to read if you wish. Norway, for your information, is a country along the subarctic northwestern fringe of Europe, with a population slightly larger than that of the US state of Alabama, but with decidedly smaller cultural influence outside of the world of Death Metal music.

Second, even if they didn’t get paid, people who share still don’t carry any kind of responsibility for the business models of other entrepreneurs. Because that’s what artists are once they go plinking their guitar in a kitchen looking for sales: entrepreneurs. Same rules apply to those entrepreneurs as to every other entrepreneur on the planet: nobody owes an entrepreneur a sale, you have to offer something which somebody else wants to buy. Wants. To. Buy. No excuses, nothing deserved, just business.

Those plinking guitarists he's so plainly contemptuous of are the people making the music he's justifying stealing. He is quite right that no one owes anyone a sale, but he's talking about product he wants. He just doesn't feel like paying for it. Just because you don't want to pay for something you want to have, doesn't mean you are entitled to a free, copyright-infringing copy of it.


There's oh so much more of this after the break:

The club scene

Here's a great piece on understanding the, well, near-dead state of live music in clubs (professionally, anyway), and what musicians can begin to do about the situation, by LA pianist Dave Goldberg.


It opens:

AS I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR GIGS LATELY, I’ve never seen so many free and low paying gigs. Well the economy is bad, so I can understand that a little bit. However, it is no longer good enough for the musician to be willing to perform for little compensation. Now we are expected to also be the venue’s promoter. The expectations are that the band will not only provide great music, but also bring lots of people to their venue. It is now the band’s responsibility to make this happen, not the club owner. 

Just the other day I was told by someone who owned a wine bar that they really liked our music and would love for us to play at their place. She then told me the gig paid $75 for a trio. Now $75 used to be bad money per person, let alone $75 for the whole band. It had to be a joke, right? No she was serious. But it didn’t end there. She then informed us we had to bring 25 people minimum. Didn’t even offer us extra money if we brought 25 people. I would have laughed other than it’s not the first time I’ve gotten this proposal from club owners.

Much of the focus is on educating club owners, but musicians also need to internalize concepts like this:

If you want great food, you hire a great chef. If you want great décor, you hire a great interior decorator. You expect these professionals to do their best at what you are hiring them to do. It needs to be the same with the band. You hire a great band and should expect great music. That should be the end of your expectations for the musicians. The music is another product for the venue to offer, no different from food or beverages.

He makes this important point, on something which has long baffled me about the expectation that musicians to bring their own personal flash mob to each and every gig:

When a venue opens it’s doors, it has to market itself. The club owner can’t expect people to just walk in the door. This has to be handled in a professional way. Do you really want to leave something so important up to a musician?

And even when an amateur group is able to pack the place with friends and family:

The crowd is following the band, not the venue. The next night you will have to start all over again. And the people that were starting to follow your venue, are now turned off because you just made them listen to a bad band. The goal should be to build a fan base of the venue. To get people that will trust that you will have good music in there every night. Instead you’ve soiled your reputation for a quick fix.

Every musician should read the entire piece and reorient their thinking about their relationship with clubs.

(h/t to clownbaby90 on Reddit)

...or, to just fail.

I would add:

- Think of your work as being in competition with that of all artists, everywhere, at all levels of the business, past and present.

- Imagine that your every creative move and decision is being judged by people better than you.

- Be dominated by your weaknesses. Be oblivious to your strengths.

h/t to Ed Domer and Universal Audio

Making any money in jazz

Dollar bill.

This is something I wrote last week, but decided against posting, as it can be kind of a downer. I have actually officially banned from my presence discussion of how much being a jazz musician sucks financially. But now it's being thrust upon me- sort of- by this post at Jon Crowley's blog; here a young elite is not pleased with his career prospects as a jazz musician, and has put together a petition to remedy matters:

I am a saxophonist living in New York City. I have lived here for the past ten years, attended and graduated from some of the best music schools in the world. I have toured and played with many of my jazz heroes including Dafnis Prieto, Jean-Michel Pilc, Chris Potter and Richard Bona, and have been a working musician on the scene. I now find myself looking at a broken, antiquated system—a system that no longer serves us and is no longer self-sustaining. The jazz system sends young hopefuls through music schools, charges them upwards of $150,000 and then spits them out into a world where it is almost impossible to obtain the most basic sustenance. We're not talking about low-level products; these are amazing and virtuosic musicians who are struggling for work. How did jazz arrive at this current state? 

He goes on for a good while outlining the state of things, ending with the questionable solution of starting a new "genre", which he wants to be called Stretch. The idea seems to be that giving the music a new name will force society to create an entirely new apparatus for its distribution and performance, which will be better for the musicians formerly known as jazz musicians. I think he could've just as well named it Mr. McFooty's Neo-Olde Tyme Hijinks for the all the likelihood of anyone anywhere ever adopting his genre name, but he does an OK, New York-centric job of outlining some of the systemic problems with the jazz end of the music business. If you choose, you can sign his petition at the mymomthinksimgreat.com.

More after the break:

Alan Greenspan won't let me give make-ups

Via Steve Korn, here is an economics professor's opinion on make-up music lessons:

[...] I'd like to explain to other parents why I feel - quite strongly, actually - that it is unreasonable of we parents to expect our teachers to make up lessons we miss, even if I know as well as they do just how expensive lessons are, and, equally importantly, how important that weekly contact is with the teacher to keeping practicing ticking along smoothly. I think that it is natural for we parents to share the point of view that students should have their missed lessons rescheduled, but if we were to 'walk a mile' in our teachers' shoes, we might change our minds about what it is reasonable for us to expect of our teachers.

Like many parents, I pay in advance for lessons each term. In my mind, what this means is that I have reserved a regular spot in the busy schedules of my sons' teachers. I understand - fully - that if I can't make it to the lesson one week (perhaps my son is sick, or we are away on holiday, or there is some other major event at school) then we will pay for the lesson, but that my teacher is under no obligation to find another spot for me that week, or to refund me for the untaught lesson. And this is the way it should be.

In my 'other life' I am an economist and teach at our local university. Students pay good money to attend classes at the university; but if they don't come to my lecture on a Monday morning, then I am not going to turn around and deliver them a private tutorial on Tuesday afternoon. When I go to the store and buy groceries, I may purchase something that doesn't get used. Days or months later, I end up throwing it out. I don't get a refund from the grocery store for the unused merchandise. If I sign my child up for swimming lessons at the local pool, and s/he refuses to return after the first lesson, I can't get my money back. So there are lots of situations in our everyday lives where we regularly pay in advance for goods or some service, and if we end up not using what we have purchased, we have to just 'swallow our losses'. On the other hand, if I purchase an item of clothing, and get home and change my mind, I can take it back and expect either a refund or a store credit.

So why do I believe that music lessons fall into the first category of 'non-returnable merchandise', rather than into the second case of 'exchange privileges unlimited' (which I think is one of the advertising slogans of an established women's clothing store!)?

Joey Baron master class, part 1 : Paying Your Rent Is High Art

This is part one of a transcript of a master class Joey Baron gave at the New School in 1994. I originally found this in '98 on the rec.music.bluenote news group, and was just able to dig it up again. I've edited it substantially for clarity- the original transcript is by a student who left in all the 'likes' and 'I means', and fragmented sentences. It's long, and editing it is a giant pain, so here is part one:

MUSIC SCHOOL VS. MUSIC WORLD:
It's difficult. Most of my experience is like out in the field... maybe i should give you a little bit of background. I'm 38 years old. I've been playing since i was 9 and travelling, starting on weekends when I was a kid travelling since i was about 10 and a half. So my expertise is kind of like out there in the field, so any questions you have about that kind of stuff- I'll do my best to answer and... to answer your point: it is really hard, to get out of school and out of the academic world. It's a whole other thing, surviving, and paying your rent... if your can pay your rent, that's being a success, forget about Downbeat awards and all that stuff, paying your rent, that's like high art.

It's difficult and everybody has their own way of making things work. I have some really good friends who came into music through a different angle than i did. Most of my experience has been as a player, doing apprenticeships, and as sideman with a lot of different kinds of musicians. I have friends like John Zorn, who's mainly a composer- that's his main thing he's been doing since he was a child. And he had his own way of making music and he just stuck to that and in terms of surviving, he did day jobs, worked at record stores, he helped assist people in the theater, you know, and he kept his overhead low. He didn't live in a big fancy place or anything like that. A lot of people do that, other people do a lot of commercial work, they end up doing club dates or if they're lucky enough to do recording work or jingles. It's as many different people as there are that's as many different stories as there are, as to how people pull it together.

NY Times: Freelance Musicians Hear Mournful Coda as the Jobs Dry Up

This is via the blog Jazztruth by pianist George Colligan- a NY Times story about the collapse of the freelance market for classical musicians in New York; much of it also applies to jazz musicians, only more so. I've officially banned discussions of how much the business sucks/is dying/is killing us from my presence, but I wanted to link to it to share a comment from the wife of legendary bassist Henry Grimes:

My husband is a great "avant-garde" jazz musician and poet. He is a 75-year-old African-American free-lance musician named Henry Grimes, educated at Juilliard, with no current academic affiliations, no salary checks, no benefits, no pensions, no security. He lives by his faith in, passion for, and dedication to his music. He constantly surpasses himself artistically and has gone far beyond levels most musicians or poets will ever achieve. He has to keep playing until he dies, and he wants to. We can only hope that this deadly system we live under will let him, if not help him, keep on. 

You can learn more about him, including something of what he has been through and something of how he has overcome all obstacles so far, at henrygrimes.com.