Best books: The Drummer's/Musician's Lifeline

Looking at two little books co-authored by Peter Erskine and Dave Black— The Drummer's Lifeline, and The Musician's Lifeline, subtitled, respectively, as Quick Fixes, Hacks, And Tips Of The Trade, and Advice For All Musicians, Student to Professional.

The Musician's Lifeline is the larger and more broadly focused of the two, and is more interesting to me. It's packed with advice from a whole lot of famous players, relating to every aspect of doing music as a job, career, and art form, largely in one-liner format. It's a little values sketch of a particular community* of musicians— many top jazz and studio professionals, performers, educators, and the tier under them— what they think about, how they generally look at things. It will be most valuable to jazz studies majors— this is the field your education is for.    

* - And it's my same community, though in terms of career accomplishment I'm in the category scrappers below the least-biggest person here. Everyone in the book is doing big gigs, or more likely is the big gig. But I know a few of these people, been in workshops with many of them in school, and/or there's one degree of separation with many more of them, via my peers. 

The Drummer's Lifeline is shorter, with a lot of duplicate materials, but with more that is narrowly of interest to drummers, mostly from Erskine and Black. The unique materials are largely minutia, mostly related to gear— I don't sense a larger philosophical center to it as with the other book. 

Much of what the books cover will be familiar to professionals, and to many serious students. There are some choice bits that were new to me. And it's good to have obvious things restated and reinforced. There's a lot that will be good for people to hear early in their playing life, before they learn it the hard way. 

On the other hand, we live in a neurotic age. If you're prone to general anxiety over ever doing anything wrong... or prone to focusing on minutia at the expense of actually playing your instrument... or to preparation neurosis, where you're permanently in a state of feeling a need to do more to be ready to play with people... maybe you don't need more voices in your head issuing dire instructions. Musician's Lifeline in particular gets a little overbearing just from the sheer volume of wonderful advice.  

At least the sources are unimpeachable— these are not just a bunch of chattering youtubers. You can readily dismiss any contrary advice you've been worrying about. And there is some helpful advice dismissing some areas of worry— like where Erskine realistically assesses the variety and difficulty of most of the reading he has had to do in his career (that is, basically never any Zappa level stuff).

They're worthwhile, and you should be buying books. Get them from Steve Weiss Music: 

The Drummer's Lifeline by Peter Erskine & Dave Black - Alfred - 191 pages
The Musician's Lifeline by Peter Erskine & Dave Black -  Alfred - 126 pages

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. 

Very occasional quote of the day: getting fired

“There’s been times when I was fired from gigs because, lets say I had the ability to get my foot in the door, but wasn’t living up to the expectations that people had. In that process I’d go through a lot of reassessment and then address my weak points and make them strong points. That’s a situation that happens to a lot of musicians. 

Psychologically you can’t let that get you down. You have to use those situations as learning opportunities, not to develop attitudes about people, but to develop a perspective of your strengths and weaknesses. At those times I did a lot of deep analysis of my playing and tried to be as objective as possible. I’ve tried to address my weaknesses and really work hard to develop them into strengths. 

Over the years I’ve been let go for not having good time, not being able to play with a click track, not being a real asset as a guy on the road that has a good attitude, you know any number of things which I’ve learned from and developed my playing and developed my personality to be easy to work with and professional as a musician on tour and in the studio.”

- Steve Smith in The Psychology of Drumming by Chris Peacock

You can download a pdf of the book on Scribd— though I don't know if it was posted with the consent of the author. I believe Peacock is the author of the Drum Ninja site, so maybe you can get it through him, or at least make a donation for pirating his book. 

Buy records: a screed

Go to places like this and buy things.

I was half an hour early for an appointment with Tim at Cymbal & Gong— picking out a career ride cymbal for one of my students— so I hopped over to Music Millenium, the venerable SE Portland record store, for a few minutes, and bought some CDs.  

And, gang, buying records has really never been cheaper. I got used CDs of Sketches of Spain, Bill Evans with Joe La Barbera, and a Joey De Francesco record with Idris Muhammad, for $16. For $50 you could get enough of Miles Davis's catalog to occupy your listening for the rest of the year.   

For the rest of the year— that's how you're supposed to listen: to one thing over and over for a long time, until it occupies a corner of your mind, soul, and musical ear. There's a limited amount of music you can take in that way. For a relative pittance you get all the music you can realistically absorb, and you're supporting an economy that is healthy for music.  

And anybody serious about music needs to control their own library. You can't have your stuff be sitting on somebody else's server, with your access to it beholden to your internet connection, and the good graces of whatever corporate streaming platform. Beholden to the state of their licensing contracts, whether those are sufficiently lucrative for them. The streaming people don't care what business they're in, if they can figure a way of making more money without having to handle music, they'll take it, and you'll get stuck.  

See Spotify— offering up virtual ownership of all the music in the world for $0 was a good way to drive everyone else out of business, but— shocking everyone— they can't figure out how to make that profitable. Right now it's dawning on them that they can do better with inflammatory podcasts, and are paying millions to broadcast “Joe Rogan” doing what he does. While cutting royalties for music.  

They have a much better feel for that kind of “content” than for music, which is a more difficult product to predict. Listeners' attraction to music is less than tangible than a guy talking and deliberately trying to make you mad about nothing real in your life. Manipulating people to anger is a mechanical skill, and easily drowns out fulfilling, happiness-producing things like music.   

See also the movie streaming platforms: having driven every video store in the country out of business, they've decided they don't like being in that business very much, and are cutting a lot of movies:

No s***. 

“Consumers, the poor ridiculous saps, thought they'd be able to see what they want forever.”

No, they will screw you at the first opportunity, regardless of what promises they made about being “the future of movies” going in. The director Guillermo Del Toro recently made this statement: 

So there's a larger picture. They tried to sell you an image of a future reality that benefitted them, where there would be no physical media, but then they decided there are easier ways of making money than giving you the things they promised. Thus you become stuck— potentially or actually— without access to art that is an essential part of your life. 

Last point: buy people's CDs— at shows, gigs, clinics. Pay the extra $10. Doesn't matter how many times you think you'll listen to it, just buy it. They lost money making this record and need a little encouragement that there is value in losing money making the next one. Thus this whole music making ecosystem is able to continue to exist. You can afford it— how many shows do you go to? 

You have to be a part of the money machine— you have to pay into it. 

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.

Jazz RUINED MY LIFE and other red-blooded tales

this is what jazz does to you

Apparently there is a blog called JAZZ RUINED MY LIFE that is not written by the Napoleon Dynamite guy. It's about [cue mournful saxophone]:

The long drives; the dive bars[...]; playing for the door and getting handed 14 dollars at the end of the night; the drunk dancers[...] crashing into you when you are trying to play; the creepy club owners[...]; and the fact that, for the most part, we are making the same money now that we made 20 years ago–and sometimes less[...] this is the stuff that wears you down after a while.   

He invites people to share their experiences as musicians sorry they ever got involved with the jazz music. That's the site. The following person shared his own story on the Drummerworld forum, which is how I found out about it.

...now, I don't want to pick on the guy, but there are some lessons to be learned here about how not to go about having a career in music, and how not to play music:

Jazz did not ruin my entire life, just the musical part of it. I am a drummer and everyone knows me as one. I used to be in all sorts of classic rock cover bands, indie rock bands, and filled-in for various projects over the years. Then I discovered jazz. 

My playing started to change. I was throwing in ghost notes everywhere, doing more short fills and only keeping time on the ride cymbal. That’s great for be-bop, but not so much for any other genre. I would be preparing for a fill-in gig for a country act by trying to emulate Elvin Jones as best as possible.  

and this 

I became addicted to the style. I got rid of all my drums and bought a small kit. A 16" Bass drum doesn’t work for hard rock music. Dark cymbals don’t cut through harder music. Showing off my hundreds of hours spent learning to play with brushes did not score points with the punk band I was sitting in with 

I looked around for jazz gigs, and there was simply no scene. Put out ads, recorded/filmed demos, went to open mics…never once scored a paying gig or found any reliable musicians with the same interests. 

All my expensive gear and years of practicing amounted to frustration, loneliness and isolation in the local music scene. Nobody wanted to play with “the Jazz guy.” My name is no longer a “name you can trust” for backing up your band. It’s a name that gets mocked and thrown out as a contender for any serious gig. 

Laying on the ground, unable to take it anymore, looking up at my gear, I wanted to throw it away. It brought me nothing I ever desired or worked for. Hitting rock bottom in my jazz room, there was no path from here. 

I had to give it all up. Box up those hours of listening to standards, all those ads seeking like-minded musicians, for it brought nothing positive to my life.

Sooo yeah. Can you spot where he went wrong? Here's what I caught:

1. My playing started to change. I was throwing in ghost notes everywhere 
The unseen hand of jazz made him to do these things. Oddly impersonal phrasing, as if he's describing a situation over which he had no control.


2.  I would be preparing for a fill-in gig for a country act by trying to emulate Elvin Jones
This statement should trigger intense alarm. Like, I went into my job as a line cook and I just started throwing chocolate sauce everywhere. Why would anyone do this? How is this on the radar as an appropriate way to approach a professional situation where something very obvious, very specific, is called for?


3. I became addicted to the style.
Style-of-drumming addiction is not an actual thing. We can have a philosophical discussion about the nature of free will, “how truly free is man” and all that, but you do actually have a choice in how you play a country gig.


4.  I got rid of all my drums and bought... a 16" bass drum.
He says he was doing various rock projects before jazz entered his life. Why would someone sell the gear he needs for the work for which he's actually getting called and buy something that's useless for it? Who knows?


5. [My name] gets mocked and thrown out as a contender for any serious gig etc etc
Engages in a lot of professionally self-destructive behavior, then wallows in self-pity. I think “the jazz” might not be the problem here.


6. I had to give it all up.
I don't understand this mentality: going about something in a completely crazy way, then dramatically renouncing the whole endeavor when the approach inevitably fails. What did he expect to happen? I have no idea.


I hope the lessons here are obvious, like: do your actual job like a professional in all situations, and take responsibility for your creative decisions, and don't totally abandon the thing you're ok at to do something you're bad at. Don't expect instant returns when you decide to get into something new and hard.

Regarding the larger point of the blog, (maybe “jazz kinda ruined my life in general because I could use some more gigs”?): I hope nobody is taking up jazz for the money, fame, and/or adulation. The reliable paycheck and retirement benefits. The massive gig-load. The actual reason you do get into it is maybe a subject for another day, but economically it's a very challenging field even for the best players in the world.

Hackwork

Apropos of no particular part of this post,
these are remarkably similar to many drum
teachers I've encountered.

A short beef about the nature of teaching. Maybe I should've included this in my recent post, “I complain about things said online.” There's a special attitude among some teachers, some students,  and a considerable number of people on the internet, that your job as a teacher is to teach the client “what they want” or “the way they want.” The customer is always right, they're the one signing the check, blah blah, insert another platitude...

Problem: You're supposed to be the expert. Part of your actual job is to educate the client on how things are done, and on the reasons for doing things the way they're done. Often this comes up in regard to reading, or “theory”— whatever they think that is, they don't want it. Usually it means reading. The student can't read, has never had much success with it, and wants you to teach him without doing any reading. Can't we come up with a way of doing that? It seems doable!

Maybe it is doable in the sense that you can definitely eat up a lot of lesson time walking someone through whatever basic patterns you can get through in 30-60 minutes. It's poor practice, and they're not going to learn anything much, but they'll pay you to do it for a few weeks or months— however long it takes them to get bored with their lack of real progress— so you do it.

This is not good. In doing this you are a hack. It's the definition of hack work.

Actually Merriam-Webster's online dictionary defines hackwork as “literary, artistic, or professional work done on order usually according to formula and in conformity with commercial standards.” I would expand that to include “doing anything at all for money”, regardless of professional standards and best practices. Or doing whatever stupid thing the client thinks he wants, or lazily doing whatever you can get away with because the client doesn't know any better. Perhaps a level below hack are teachers who deliberately teach this way with the goal of making the student permanently dependent on the teacher. That appears to be business model of several online “lessons” sites.

The ethical thing to do: Maintain your standards. Take a minute and educate the student on how things are done, and why the thing they are asking you to do is not done.

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:

Laughable myth, or laughable math?

Click here if you
can't enlarge this

So here we have a piece called The 17 Most Laughable Myths Of The Music Industry, by blogger Ari Herstand. It's mostly OK, except for laughable myth number 3, which is about streaming:

3) Streaming Is Bad For Music [to be clear, that's a myth, according to the premise of the piece- tb]

A CD or download sale is treated equally no matter how great the album is. It’s a one time payment never to be earned on again. Contrast that with streaming. If a song is great it will get played over and over again for years and years. Earning MORE than just a single sale ever could. Streaming pays less initially, but much much more in the long run – if the music is good of course.

Laughable myth number 10 is also relevant:

10) Record Sales Matter 

He goes on to say that CD sales are “over”, whatever that means. Since he phrased this as specifically CD sales vs. streaming equation, I want to look at the economics involved, and the style of consumption required for streaming income to replace album sales income. Obviously it's more complex than that, but framing it this way was his idea, not mine.

We'll assume one album purchase per customer; and that a CD has ten songs on it, and they sell for $10 each— the basic reality for independent artists.


First: Hold on, an album purchase is not necessarily a one time payment— there are a number of records of which I've bought multiple copies, either because they got lost or broken, or because I liked it so much I gave it as a gift, or because a new format became available. “If the music is good”, people may well buy multiple copies. But from here on out, we'll assume one CD purchase per release per customer.


Second: Spotify pays around $.007 per play; so to earn our $10 from that customer, we need about 1425 plays, or about 142 plays per track. If they only really like three tracks, they'll have to listen to each track 425 times each. But the author says our compensation will now be amortized over “years and years”; to get our $10 within, say, ten years (while hoping our royalties are indexed to inflation— probably not), the customer will basically have to listen to the album fourteen times a year, every year.

Of course, you have the rest of both of your lives to get 142 complete plays, assuming Spotify still exists, and has not gone to a zero-compensation model. You may never get to 142, meaning you are a net loser for that customer, or you could just as easily get 143 plays from that customer before your death, in which case, cha-ching, streaming has paid off!


Third: Yours is not the only record in the world. Other people need to get paid, too. If an average music fan owns smallish collection of 200 CDs, averaging about 40 minutes long, in order for those artists to get paid, that individual has to listen to over 18,900 hours of music on Spotify— about six hours a day, every day, for eight and a half years. For the new economy to work better than the old one, as advertised, everyone has to do that— this exceptionally committed level of real consumption has to become the norm.


Fourth: We can assume that is an indeterminate number of other people will be streaming our stuff, who never would have bought a CD— they're contributing, too. We can count them as “helping” your committed customers reach their 1425 plays, though in fact they'll still be out there listening even if we don't abandon traditional hard formats. You'll need a lot of them to make up for, say, 500 CDs you won't be selling. The catch is, if you're attracting a whole lot of random listeners, many of them would have gone ahead and bought the CD, so you'll need that many more random listeners to help compensate for all those CDs not purchased. It's not an entirely realistic equation, but it illustrates the core problem, that getting paid places too much of a time burden on your fans, which can't be compensated by random semi-interested listeners.


Fifth: If Spotify becomes the way music is consumed by individuals, everyone, regardless of their commitment, means, and style of consumption, is moved to the same system of just paying nothing, or a very low flat rate, to a streaming service in exchange for unlimited music. The disposable income they were spending on albums is now going someplace else. Maybe they'll spend it on something music-related, maybe not— but now music people have to figure out how to get them to spend it on music again. That's the reality when there are changes in the business, but make no mistake that it is only happening to benefit two or three large, wealthy companies— it's not some impersonal, implacable “the future.” It's just some guys trying to make money by devaluing our end product.


Sixth: About this little barb “if the music is good”— suggesting that if you're not cleaning up in streaming, it must be because your music sucks too badly to deserve compensation: people buy CDs for all kinds of reasons. They liked your other records, they liked it when they previewed it in the store, they're part of your local fan base, they saw you play, liked you, and wanted to support you. Those are all excellent reasons to spend $10-15, and those customers are getting a good value. Probably they don't all listen to your CD 142+ times; very few people listen to anything 142 times. Reducing it to strictly a pay by number of hours listened equation means that all of those people who liked you enough to buy your product now have to put in a whole lot of listening hours for you to get paid. If that doesn't happen to be the way they consume music, we're just sacrificing that income.


Let's end with a lame zinger: The idea that streaming, as it is currently structured, is going to replace hard media purchases for independent artists may be the true laughable myth.

Your bio sucks. My bio sucks.

OBLIGATORY TENUOUSLY-RELATED

IMAGE AND CAPTION: Boilerplate should 

never be anything but a creepy, late-Victorian,
steampunkish, fictional robot in your life— it

has NO PLACE in your bio! 

Via Ted Gioia on Twitter, here's a good piece from NPR on artist bios, by classical writer Anastasia Tsioulcas. Basically, artist bios suck, and they tell the reader nothing about who the person is as an artist:

Paragraph 1: six quotes praising their brilliance from major American critics, crammed together then lightly glazed with enough subjects and verbs to form sentences. 

Paragraph 2: a list of their awards and international venues where they've played. 

Paragraph 3: a long list of composers who have written for them (most of whom very few people would be familiar with, unless the reader were also a composer or performer). 

Paragraph 4: a list of academic institutions they've worked with. 

Paragraph 5: a list of other performers they've played with. 

Snooze.

Jazz musicians are particularly egregious with this— who I played with is the bulk of a lot of bios. If somebody ever got near a stage holding an instrument while somebody famous was present— in a clinic, at a jam session, whatever— into the played with list it goes. Paraphrasing something my brother once said, Right, they played with Herbie Hancock for one concert when there was no budget for him to bring in his own players, Herbie didn't dig it, and that was the end of it.

This is an American thing, incidentally— everyone thinks the arts are a joke, including the artists, so they fall into this thing of proving they're serious by just listing all the serious things they've done.

Tsioulcas continues:

[T]his is an opportunity to shape one's personal brand. In my experience, classical artists often pride themselves on not having to debase themselves for the sake of commerce. Maybe that's part and parcel of existing so far outside the musical mainstream. But what such artists fail to recognize, in my opinion, is that this can be not just a marketing exercise but a chance for a bit of self-reflection. What makes what you do — and what you want to express — meaningful? 

To be more blunt: Why should we listen to you, whether you're an international soloist or still in school? Think of this as a chance to craft a compelling narrative in a truncated form. Who was your inspiration? Who was your teacher? What other music do you listen to, aside from your own repertoire? 

It's difficult for musicians to say why people should listen to us, not least because we're not confident that people should listen to us, having had feelings of unworthiness pounded into us in our early careers. And we just deal in an abstract medium, and we're generally unclear about its value, and of our value as individual players to our consumers— writers, radio people, venue bookers, and the public.

It's not actually a real productive way of thinking about it: Oh my God, why should they listen to me? I don't know!!! God, I suck!!!  Instead, maybe tell them what you are, and let them assume you're good. Figure out your high concept— the three or four general things that you're about. Thinking of Bill Frisell, you think: Americana, Hendrix, avant-garde noise, composer. Thinking of Don Pullen, you think deep blues, classical chops, tone clusters. Thinking of Paul Motian, you think primitivism, simple tunes, heavy swinging groove. If you can't come up with a compelling similar description of your own work, you might need to dig a little deeper in making something special out of yourself. “Just another pretty good modern jazz drummer who plays pretty good because college has figured out how to make people play pretty good” is not good enough.

I got away from listing influences some years ago, after seeing a comic strip in an alternative paper with an illustration showing a lot of 90s hipsters walking around thinking “My main influences are Sonic Youth and Pavement.” It rather indicates an amateur mindset— if you don't already have a reputation, or if you're not real good writer, I think it can sink you with a skeptical reader. If you've made an exceptionally serious study of someone in particular, or are his protégé, go ahead and say it. Same with inspiration— it's a sappy word, and you have to handle it carefully.

None of this is real easy. You can screw up in all sorts of horrible ways:

• It can take years to figure out who you are, and to figure out that who you are is more interesting than who you think you should be— like, don't pretend you're a some kind of thrilling hard-core New Yorker with deep jazz roots, when you're really from a fracking town in North Dakota. A noise artist from a fracking town is actually a lot more interesting. From NY? Whoopdedoo, dog bites man, WGAS? From ND? What, wow, really? That is so WEIRD! I want to hear that!
• You want to have a story, but you also don't want to tortuously act like there's a story where there is no story.
• Emotional appeals and hyperbole have a tone of pleading, and are best avoided— let it be assumed that you are sincere, and are emotionally invested in your work.
• Also avoid myth making: Then in 2007 Cory got his first copy of Stick Control and his universe exploded like God Himself rode a hydrogen bomb onto Cory's mom's house, and he realized that being a drummer was indeed his true calling— Cory, I mean, not God... yeah. No.

So there. We have a big mess of stuff to think about. Time to get out our copies of Strunk and White, and get cracking. And don't go looking at my bio for examples of not doing the things I'm telling you not to do. 

Creative Apocalypse coda

No, it's this.

Since my last update, there have been many more responses to Steven Johnson's New York Times Magazine piece The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn't, but it was largely piling on, and the essential points had been covered in the articles I originally linked to. The tone was continued unanimous outrage and derision, except for this blog post by Cortney Harding, The Creative Nonpocalypse. About the response to Johnson's piece, she says this— mind you, just about all I have left on this subject is snark. I think we're being played for suckers in this “debate”, and scorn is actually an appropriate response. Anyway, Harding says this:

Predictably, the responses from the music industry rolled in...

Yes, predictably, like a knee-jerk thing. Thoughtless, and likely meritless. Industry, suggesting representatives of big business, not the actual working artists who the respondents largely were. A bad start, to quote Zack Galifianakis.

First, [the major responses to TCATW] operate off of a narrow definition of “creative work.” The New York Times piece focuses on a giant data set that includes professional athletes, and then a smaller data set of self-employed musicians; Levine’s refutation responds to these stats. What’s being left out here is the massive number of creative workers who have jumped from self-employment into other creative professions — careers that didn’t exist before the rise of the internet. 

While I have no doubt that large numbers of formerly-creative artists have gotten day jobs, we have nothing but Harding's assurance that “massive” numbers of people are moving into other creative professions. She provides no evidence of that, save one example:

Take Bruce Henderson, for example. In 1999, he was a self-employed musician and writer who was booked on Letterman — surely something that would boost his career into the stratosphere. He played the Late Show and sold a grand total of 80 copies of his latest album. Around the same time, he started working at a fledgling website called Agency.com. He was doing creative work, some of it musical, just in a different place. Henderson stayed in the advertising world, eventually become the chief creative officer for North America of Geometry Global. When I spoke to him last month, he was calling from his beach house, so you can guess how things worked out for him.

Oh my goodness, a beach house! How incredibly patronizing. I guess, because the journalist obviously did not ask, the fact that he owns a beach house of indeterminate size/niceness somewhere on Earth, suggests he's making a lower middle class income or better. If you were wondering if there were non-music jobs that pay that kind of money, there's your answer.

Continued after the break— the best part, a response from another writer, is at the end:

Tech-boosting NYT writer beat up

For starters, I don't believe anyone was
predicting an actual apocalypse... 

UPDATE: More links at the end! Lots of people talking about this article. 

STILL MORE UPDATES: This thing is a hit. Will Buckley at Fareplay comments, in a piece called The Creative Meltdown That Is, author Steven Johnson writes a follow-up to his original article, gets comments from Marc Ribot and T. Bone Burnett! Excerpts at the end of the post.

UPDATE AGIN: Robert Levine at Billboard responds!  

Also see the comments of my Internet media piece for an ongoing discussion of the issues involved here, between me and an anonymous, pro-piracy/libertarian[?] reader. 

A little follow-up to do with one aspect of my Internet media piece of a few days ago: a New York Times Magazine article, The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn't, by Steven Johnson, has been making the rounds lately. In it Johnson makes a case, based on very broad categories of statistics, that all the bad effects of Internet 2.0 media on artists' livelihoods, which artists say are happening, are not happening. Or are offset by good things.

I said this about it in the comments of my Internet media piece, where someone left a link for it:

Interesting article. We'll put him in the camp of writers boosting the idea that recorded music is now worth nothing (ignoring that a lot of people are making money off of it), and there's nothing anyone can do about it. The article is not a scientific study, it's one writer's opinion, based on very broad categories of statistics— which it seems to me would be prone to distortion because of the vast amount of money concentrated at the top, say, 1% of the business. His conclusion “Consumers spend less for recorded music, but more for live.” is indicative of that— if revenues for middle class musicians fall off a cliff, well, hey, U2 is getting $500 a ticket, so that makes up for it. I don't see his conclusions borne out in the lives of the musicians I know, and clearly a lot of artists have been alarmed about the way things are going. 

Similar questions and criticisms are now being raised by more able reporters than I. Jonathan Taplan, an artists' rights firebrand, calls it “one of the most brain dead pieces that the New York Times Magazine has ever published”, and says “Whenever the technology industry comes under criticism, they can always rely on the epic logroller Steven Johnson to roll out a book or article that 'proves' that everything you are observing is actually wrong.” He makes the same complaint as I do about the distortion of the statistics caused by the concentration of wealth at the top:

As we have pointed out before, the recorded music business is a winner take all business in which 80% of the revenue flows to 1% of the artists. So the fact that Beyonce and Jay Z are making more money today that in 2002 does not have anything to do with the lives of the average musician. If you average in the incomes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page, it looks like the median income is rising. Bullshit. 

Taplan is fun to read, but other writers go more in depth refuting Johnson's claims. Like Kevin Erickson at the Future of Music Coalition, in The Data Journalism That Wasn't. It begins:

Steven Johnson’s article “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t” frames itself as a data-driven response to concerns about the plight of creative workers in the digital age. But Johnson’s grasp of the limitations of the data he cites seems tenuous, and he ends up relying on some very dubious and all-too-familiar assumptions. In its sweeping dismissal of artists’ various concerns, the article reads as an exercise in gaslighting.

The piece is so detailed that it's difficult to summarize— do go read that whole thing. I promise you will encounter Johnson's arguments again. Erickson concludes:

The debate today [is]... not just about whether art will make money, but whose art, what kind of art, and how much of the money generated by art ends up with artists, and what they’ll have to endure to get it. It’s about how much agency artists get in defining the terms of the digital landscape. It’s coming from artists who hated Napster passionately and artists who really had no problem with unauthorized file sharing. It’s coming from artists who’ve recorded for major labels, indie labels, or no label at all. 

Let us be clear: our problem with Johnson’s article isn’t that he fails to conform to some doom-and-gloom scenario for artists working today. Indeed, there are a lot of new opportunities for artists, and those opportunities are worth celebrating. Most frustrating to us is that Johnson reinforces a false binary between pro-technology optimistic futurism and anti-technology digital pessimism. And that simply doesn’t describe the state of the contemporary debate about art and the digital age. 

If you want to know how musicians are faring, you have to ask musicians, preferably a whole lot of them. You’ll get different answers from different musicians, and they’ll all be correct in terms of their own experiences. But your overall understanding will better reflect the complexity of the landscape. 

More after the break:

In which I call BS on Internet media

Cheaper than everything but outright piracy

Internet era music consumership reminds me of this passage from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas:

The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug-collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

Like, everyone is sitting on mountains of free and illicit stuff they're never going to have the time to use, but they've gathered it because they can. Following are some thoughts on what this means to professional musicians, and the economy of our business:


Internet music is infinite, you are finite.
Wonderful, you have a couple of terabytes of music you got for free, and unlimited streaming of all the music in the world, for free or for a pittance. You're still one individual linear consciousness with 16-18 waking hours in a day, with a limited amount of time available for serious, focused listening. Professionals are focused listeners. You don't need all that, and you're never going to use it.


Streaming is not acceptable for professional musicians.
I don't care if you can pull up the entire Red Garland catalog instantly for no money on Spotify, you have to have a library. You can't have your library existing on a server somewhere, at the pleasure of whatever streaming service, who can change the rules any time they want, as can their licensors. If you've used Netflix streaming, you are aware that movies are pulled from circulation seemingly at random— either Netflix decided not to offer them any more, or a licensor pulled them, or a contract expired or fell through. An author who doesn't own any books, who just uses a Kindle, would be deeply suspect. You're supposed to be a serious musician, which means your studio is full of music stuff.


You have to pay. And you have to pay the right people. And as much as possible, that should be local people. Yes, you are a poor artist doing God's work by dedicating your life to music, but there is a cost of admission. And that cost is all your money during your youth— other than what you spend on food, beer, rudimentary body-coverings. You can put that money into your local economy, where it will get into the hands of people who may come to your shows, and talk about you, and it will mean something because you have a thriving local music scene, because you put your money into it... and so on. Or you can send your money, never to be seen again in your community, directly to some people in Sweden, or Seattle, or Denmark, or Silicone Valley— who may know/care jack squat about music, but who wrote some computer code. Meanwhile your local scene has starved to death, because the myriad small transactions that are its lifeblood have dried up— the people who used to have music-related jobs are all doing something else for a living, and don't have time hear music or talk to much of anyone any more.


Music costs money, but it doesn't cost that much money. I don't care how broke you are, you can afford all the CDs you will have time to listen to seriously. I bought a used LP of Nefertiti in 1983 for $3, and then this new CD of it in 2015 for $5. That's a pretty small price for something you're going to listen to for the rest of your life. A record store I frequent has hundreds of scuffed copies of great, essential CDs for $2-4 each. With the massive CD reissuing of the entire modern history of jazz over the last 25 years, you'll find just about everything you want sooner or later, if you adopt the scavenging, record store-loitering habits we all used to have.


What's really going on, part 1: selling at a loss to starve the competition 
What companies like Spotify are trying to do is drive the cost of recorded music down to near zero, to drive everyone else out of business, at which point they can charge you whatever they want. And their advertising revenue will skyrocket— you'll be paying to be advertised to, just like with cable TV. Which, if you haven't noticed, sucks. The clearest evidence of this is that, as successful as Spotify and Pandora have been, they are not making money. They're just trying to hold out selling music wildly below cost— they're undercharging the public, and underpaying artists— until everyone else dies.


What's really going on, part 2: no, spend all of your money on hardware!
Companies like Apple— which was always a hardware company— want media to be free, so you can spend all your money on their newest techno-bauble device every eight months. And, transfixed as everyone is by that little touch screen, they're doing it. Finding myself with time to kill in a shopping mall recently, I could not find a book or record store, but there was a bustling Apple store, full of diffused white light, and a lot of excited, energized people for whom this was clearly the best day of their year; when they can finally get a NEW DEVICE, which temporarily satisfies some non-specific desire to see MORE DAZZLING THINGS appear on the micro-fairyland of the touch screen.


The point here is not to demand that we go back to the golden age of my teenage years, when everything was great; it's to be thinking about what our real needs are as professional musicians; and to illustrate how the current thing is at odds with what serious musicians have always done; and to be thinking about economy of the business we're in, and about how we participate in it in a way that serves our interests. In these discussions people will say, as if on cue,  what tech companies are doing now = the future, and to be opposed to those companies means just absurdly trying to turn back the clock. That's untrue. These companies are just the latest iteration of a long history of self-interested people trying to grab other people's money. Some of them are making the world a better place, some of them are outright evil, none of them were anointed by God almighty to be the guaranteed future of everything.

In which I give naked clickbait much more attention than it deserves

There's TONS of this stuff out there. 

UPDATE: Ari Herstand at Digital Music News has also ripped the guy a new one.

Here is something which is at best is clickbait— some drone working for some website desperate for traffic writes something outrageous, with some thin pretense of seriousness, to get people to click through to their site, which will use the data to make themselves a more attractive prospect for advertisers. At worst, it's a form of gaslighting— an abusive person taking advantage of others' insecurity to make them feel worse, more in line with the abuser's own self-loathing. It's probably both: a crappy site engages a bitter, failed talent to vent his resentment, to the satisfaction of the lowest needs of all involved. Whatever these creeps' motivations, the piece does point to real misconceptions held by a lot of musicians about the music business. And these same complaints come up again and again from anti-artist types, so maybe this will give you some fuel for dealing with them.

I will pay them the respect of letting them live up to their values, by not supplying them with a direct link, thereby tainting them with the resulting filthy lucre. If you want to search for it, it was printed on the web site of some free paper in St. Louis [oh, the hell with it— here. tb]. The introduction:

You've seen those memes: the ones about how musicians spend thousands of dollars on gear, hours rehearsing and loading/unloading, and drive 40 minutes to just play a show for $100. How noble and brave our poor musicians are, selflessly sacrificing themselves at every turn for a chance to do what they love while constantly griping and whining about every aspect of it. So of course they deserve to get paid -- they're performing a vital service to our lives, just like an ambulance driver. 

Although musicians are indeed shafted by entire industries that are built purely around their creative output, truthfully, they don't deserve to get paid anything. Now tremble with indignant rage as I explain precisely why.

And with that, here we go: one writer's idea of “Why musicians DON'T deserve to get paid.” I have to warn you, my commentary may be quite unintelligible with typos, as I am totally trembling with rage at the power of this schlub's words:

6. Most Music Sucks Honestly, most of everything sucks. Most architecture sucks. Most visual art sucks. Most writing sucks. Falling in line with this noble, sacred truth, your music also probably sucks. Do you really think you deserve to get paid for sucking, just because you took the time to suck?

Well, yeah. Of course. Are you stupid? This is America.

Obviously, no one is paid based on whether they “suck” or not— not even architects! They are paid based on the fulfillment of a contract with a client, a formal arrangement with an employer. In any field you have to have some kind of appeal to your customers and clients, but that's a very different thing than sucking according to some bargain-basement music writer.

There's more of this sort of thing after the break:

Tech is not your friend, part eleventy

A piece called Sleeping Through A Revolution, by Jonathan Taplin, who is a professor at USC, and the producer of a bunch of great movies— Mean Streets, To Die For, The Last Waltz. He's not big on this new artist-impoverishing digital paradise, and the corporate propaganda about the “inevitability” of its present form.

Since the introduction of Napster in 2000, global recorded music revenues have fallen from $21 billion to $7 billion per year. Newspaper ad revenue has fallen from $65 billion in 2000 to $18 billion in 2011. Book publisher operating profits have fallen by 40 percent, and the revenue from DVD sales of movies and TV (of the top 100 titles) has fallen from $7 billion to $2.3 billion. 

The astonishing fact of the precipitous declines in revenue has nothing to do with the idea that people are listening to less music or watching fewer movies and TV shows. In fact, all surveys point to the opposite. Consumption of all forms of media is rising. So where did the money go? Two places: into the pockets of Digital Monopolists and Digital Thieves.

Musicians are generally pretty politically aware, except about their own business as it relates to tech. Do hit the link above and read the whole piece. It can be depressing reading this stuff, but the first step is realizing you have a problem. The current thing is not sustainable. When we're aware that we have a problem, we can start looking for, and getting behind, people who are in a position to make their voices heard on the subject.

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.