I love the Sound Opinions podcast from music critics Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot and listen to it every week. Last week they did a great show where they broke down their favorite live albums of all times. As usual I learned a few things and discovered some music (in this case the Ani Difranco album). But guys, how do you not even mention the live music that promoter extraordinaire Bill Graham gave us from his Fillmore East Club in the East Village?
We still have great albums coming out of the re-opened Fillmore West – check out Lucinda Williams Live @ The Fillmore double CD, and the 60s produced some killer stuff by Santana, Chuck Berry and the Jefferson Airplane on the west coast. But to me the Golden Age of Live Recordings occurred in New York at the Fillmore East in the roughly year and a half after New Years Eve 69-70 when Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsies the recorded their incredible live album Live At The Fillmore East. Two months later Alvin Lee and Ten Years After made a seminal live album Live At The Filmore East, and in March Neil brought his new band Crazy Horse down to work the kinks out of Down by the River and Cortez the Killer, which was only released recently as Live At The Fillmore East as part of Neil’s archive project. Later in the year Clapton came by and recorded his amazing Derek and the Dominos Live album Live At The Fillmore. In April of the following year the Dead recorded 5 shows there that turned into Ladies And Gentlemen…The Grateful Dead: Fillmore East, New York City, April 1971. Frank Zappa brought the Mothers and closed out the run in June 1971 with a solid live album shortly before the venue closed. And of course what is in my opinion the greatest live rock and roll recording ever made – The Allman Brothers Band “At Fillmore East” (rereleased as The Fillmore Concerts) which was recorded in March 1971.
Other notables who made great live records at the Fillmore were Aretha, John Mayall, John and Yoko, Miles Davis and the Byrds.
Some of the greatest live guitar solos ever recorded happened on Second and Sixth in Manhattan in that 18 month period, and damn it Jim and Greg, you blew it by not including them in your show.
The intellectual output coming from Peter Strauss’s cabana is truly impressive. It must be the water. In Jonathan’s latest post (with graphs!) he makes a compelling argument that introduces the “Piracy gap” that exists between a passive/defensive online content strategy and an online aggressive strategy. The theory clearly illustrates what happens in the space between trying to lock your content down and embracing the future in which all content is ubiquitously indexed and freely available. I would tweak the graph slightly (see below) to account for Ian Rogers’ attention scarcity theory so the gap becomes defined by both piracy and people moving to the next most marginally valuable piece of content on the infinite playlist that is the internet. I.E. if you make your content a pain in the ass to use people will either steal it or consume something else. Which makes Jonathan’s point even more salient (piracy is better than no eyeballs at all!).
Jonathan’s excellent post does however repeat a somewhat faulty point of view that is shared in countless articles, blog posts, and music industry forums about the state of the music industry and just how wrong the labels got it. It is *not* true that investors value the long term survival of the company over short term profits. They actually value the net present value of all future cash flows – classical Finance 101 is about trying to predict what those cash flows might be and correctly assign a present value to them in order to make investment and management decisions. So as the CEO of a company (both public or private) you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to try to maximize that number within the constraints of myriad other variables. I find that critics often make this mistake when breaking down the recent history of the music industry. Put another way:
Sometimes the most profitable/ethical course for a business is one that sets it on a path to obsolescence.
One of the best 5 or 6 classes I took at Anderson was a Business Ethics course given by Bill Cockrum (a legendary finance/entrepreneurship professor at UCLA). The framework he taught for ethical problem solving was essentially one in which we identified all of the stakeholders for a given issue and detailed the outcome from each point of view. So a hypothetical problem involving gender equality in the workplace would be looked at from many points of view: shareholders, male employees, female employees, residents of the local community, etc… Interestingly, one common theme that came from our casework is that managers often incorrectly overvalue a company’s survival at the expense of creating shareholder value. Most executives try not to work themselves out of a job.
To oversimplify, consider a case in which a CEO has to choose whether or not to create a new product that will require expensive-to-the point- of-bankruptcy new R&D and marketing. All of his analysis tells him that the product’s probability of success is a binary coin flip: 50% of the time it will be incredibly profitable and increase earnings 5X, 50% of the time it will put the company out of business. Given those odds the right answer from the shareholders perspective is to green light the product – they’d gladly flip a coin to risk $1 to make $5. But from management’s point of view its not such an easy decision. Heads I get some kudos and maybe a bonus, tails I lose my job in disgrace. This ethical problem is pretty much why companies like to compensate their executives with stock and stock options, and also why big companies are typically not good at taking risks (its one thing to bankrupt a startup with a few dozen employees, quite another a big public company with 100o’s of employees).
Now lets take a look at what happened in the music industry. Say you could wind back the clock to the Napster era in 1998 and provide the heads of the labels with perfect clarity about their probability weighted expected returns for 3 courses of action.
Lock It Down and Sue Your Customers: If you follow this strategy, you slow down the death of your existing CD sales line of business to the greatest extent, but you alienate your customers and allow smaller nimbler players to take all of the future online profits, putting you out of business in 10 years.
Hybrid: You drag your heels somewhat, slowing down the rate of cannibalism of the CD sales business and developing alternate forms of business that allow you to fumble your way into an evolved but less profitable business model in 10 years time.
Open It Up and Survive: You clearly embrace a customer-centric view of the future, and rapidly develop long-term winning strategies for content consumption that hasten the demise of your existing business but put you on a long term path to sustained profitability.
Now lets calculate the net present value (discount rate=10%) of your hypothetical expected cash flows.
Clearly, given this spectrum of expected returns, the best course of action is the one in which you drag your heels into planned obsolecence.
NOTE: I’M NOT SAYING THAT THIS IS WHAT DID HAPPEN OR WHAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED!! IT’S AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION. The labels did not act rationally in possession of omniscient foresight, just as the other media companies actions wrt Boxee etc. are not likely profit maximizing.
In most cases profits are maximized by reinvesting profits from cash cows into evolved business models that strike a balance. The intended take-away is that in the case of killing highly profitable cash cows, its incorrect to argue that all decision making should be predicated on long term viability as a business. Sometimes the most profitable (and correct) course kills you.
Jason Isbell is a singer/songwriter from Muscle Shoals Alabama who is best known for his 3 album stint with the Drive-by Truckers (he left the band last year). I’ve seen him live before 3 or 4 times with the Truckers and I caught his phenomenal acoustic show last week (with Browan Lollar on guitar and vocals) at the Mint in Los Angeles presented by an Aquarium Drunkard.
Isbell’s music is both easy and difficult to categorize. Easy: He’s an alt-country singer songwriter from Alabama. Hard: He’s a little bit of Townes Van Zandt (imagery), Bruce Springsteen (symbolism), the Band esp Danko (brawling musicianship), Willie Nelson, Tom Petty (hooks), Dylan (songwriting). With the release of Sirens of the Ditch he’s got a shows worth of great songs to perform, going back to his early Truckers’ songs (Outfit, Goddamn Lonely Love) and before (TVA). He’s also not afraid to do a cover – Dylans The Man in Me was a real highlight last night. He made mention that there “probably aren’t too many cover bands in Los Angeles”, like he was the only one in on the joke.
Another highlight of the evening was the young Marine from Jason’s hometown of Greenhill, Alabama who had driven up from the proving grounds at 29 Palms to see the show. Juxtaposed against Isbell’s poignant intro to Dress Blues where he talked about the empty space a dead soldier could leave in a small southern (anywhere?) town that inspired the song, the young soldier’s presence was moving.
It was a great performance that left me really looking forward to his 2nd solo album which is due out in early ‘09. He mentioned last night that the album is in the can and seemed really happy with it.
If by some Google’s chance in hell the guy taping last night’s show stumbles across this post – hit me up I’d love a copy. Also MickO leave a comment when you get your film developed and up on Flickr.
MTV just launched a cool site that has legal embeds for their entire music video catalog. Its also integrated with Flux, which is excellent. Here is a Wilco vid grabbed at random. As of now there doesn’t appear to be any advertising, although I’m betting that will change.
Congrats to my friends at Topspin Media for helping David Byrne and Brian Eno release their new album today. I’ve been a fan of David Byrne since he wore oversized jackets (“geek is chic”). I drove 2.5 hours to Indianapolis to see him in college in an old van that had no business being on the road – his music was way ahead of its time and totally blew us away. And is his show last summer at the Bowl was epic. Good times. And I have listened to Eno’s Music For Airports on headphones in coach coming back from somewhere east (and a few times west) of California more times than I can count since my brother-in-law Sam introduced me to it probably a decade ago. I listened to the new album this morning, and I agree with everyone else – it’s great. You can stream it here for free, and then there are a bunch of options for purchasing direct from the artists’ site itself.
There are so many great ways to discover and enjoy music that didn’t exist 10 years ago. Internet radio, music blogs, social networks, recommendation technology. The prevailing wisdom is that we need all these new forms of music discovery because Clear Channel killed terrestrial radio in the 90s by rolling up all the good old stations and programming them from an office park in Dallas with lowest common denominator corporate schlock. Which they basically did.
But it turns out you can’t kill great radio completely. We Angelenos are fortunate to have an incredible station in Indie 103.1. Ian Rogers (who knows I dig the alt-country and other forms of cool roots) first tuned me into Chris Morris’s excellent Sunday morning show Watusi Rodeo a few years ago. Its still my favorite program. Excellent week in and week out.
Another solid program on 103.1 is Big Sonic Heaven weeknights from 10-12 PM. I usually tune in a few nights a week while reading or playing Wii. Its heavy on the Sigur Ros, Portishead and other chill out type stuff. I bet Mick O tunes in regularly.
Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols has a show called Jonesy’s Jukebox at noon and 6PM. He gets some great long format interviews and guest DJs (Robert Plant, Public Enemy, Spoon, OK Go, Harry Shearer as of late) and plays some great R&B, soul, etc. as well as pre through post punk.
There is also a great DJ (forgot his name) who plays around 7 or 8PM midweek who is totally geeked about rareties, the vinyl-ier the better. He doesn’t pre-announce the tracks he is going to play, but he gives a great post-play synopsis including how to find the rare tracks. They don’t appear to have a page for him on the site so I’m not sure what the show is called, but he’s turned me on the some great rare stuff in the past few weeks. His setup for Makanda Ken McIntyre’s Cosmos was “get prepared for 5min and 26 sec of sonic perfection.” I thought so too – check it out (loud works better). It’s off an Complete United Artists Sessions compilation which is only available new on Makanda’s site (the vinyl is amazing and also hard to come by).
If you are like me and had given up on ad-supported terrestrial radio, start tuning into 103.1 on your stereo or checking out their live stream on their site. They run fewer ads than most stations by a longshot, and a lot of the ads they do run seem to be promoting local music events and festivals – like this tribute to Johnny Ramone in Hollywood next weekend that I want to attend (as long as it doesn’t interfere with Broken Ocean’s gig that night at Viper Room).
Sometimes art and music makes you scratch your head I didn’t think I much liked The Replacements all this time. I even went to college in the midwest while they were still together in the late eighties and had lots of friends from the Twin Cities. I bought their studio greatest hits compilation a bunch of years back and listened to it a few times and basically thought it was unremarkable.
Then last week I pulled a DownThemAll from Aquarium Drunkard straight to a playlist on my ipod for a flight to Denver last week. (Highly recommended quick iPod refresh technique – we can call it Raymonating your iPod). Luckily for me it included the entire Shit, Shower and Shave compilation, which is a “long-traded compilation” from some live 1989 shows opening for Petty (which wikipedia calls a disastrous tour for an unknown reason).
Holy shit shower and shave, I’m a huge fan! Sort of a Springsteen everyman point of view (switch out Asbury Park for Sheboygan) with a Waits gift for turning a great metaphor, combined with a Drive-By Truckers brawling drunken coming straight at you live personality and a Ramones intensity. I can’t get enough of it. How did I miss these guys for so long?
Chalk up another victory for the mp3blog era – I will definitely be rounding out my collection from some timely reissues of their studio stuff – a positive activity music economy-wise the lousy label greatest hits compilation didn’t trigger 10 years ago. But I’m preaching at the choir.
I’m not going to bother to rehost the tracks, head over to the AD if you want to check them out.
For the first time ever, I found myself hitting refresh on a liveblogging Jobsnote this morning. (Engadget blew away Techcrunch in the coverage, clearly). There was nothing surprising about what they announced (slightly different form factor, 3G, GPS, push Outlook) except for the we’re-ready-to-grab-market-share pricing. The phone’s only Achilles heel is that the keyboard doesn’t work as well as a berry’s. Its a calculated trade off versus slim form factor and big beautiful screen. Wonder if they are considering a flip keyboard form factor?
Great consumer electronics products are not merely the sum of the feature set. If I had a nickle for every time a CE maker told me that their fill-in-the-blank mp3 player was better than the iPod because it had an FM tuner, I’d have at least a quarter. Damn iPod still doesn’t have an FM tuner. Even better example: GPS. Obvious that its a killer app for mobile phones – every phone will have it 5, 10 years from now max. I use the poor resolution triangulation version on the iPhone *all the time*, its awesome, I don’t know how I ever got along without it. GPS on the iPhone is probably reason enough for me to drop $300 on a new one. But before iPhone had it, phones that had it jammed in to their overloaded interfaces and subpar form factors, weren’t superior phones. They were inferior phones that had GPS.
Brand matters. Working on another blog post about that (TEASER ALERT!) but anybody who has ever owned an Apple product knows what I’m talking about. There isn’t another CE/Mobile/PC company in their class, not even close.
Don’t release a feature until it is rock solid. Supposedly (this is an unconfirmed rumor but it could be true) GPS was an iPhone 1.0 feature but they backed off because the battery drain was too great. They were right to wait a year and get it right.
ABC announces that they are introducing a video-on-demand service that doesn’t let you skip commercials. I’ll be about the millionth person to pile on, but this is such an amazingly bad idea I can’t help myself. “As we developed this at every stage, there was an agreement that however we put this together, disabling the fast-forward function was key.” As my friend Adrian used to say “That’s a stupid comment, and you’re a stupid person for making it”. Why don’t you build a better car by disabling the gas pedal?
Some of the comments refresh the tired old “pile on the music industry” meme, but this is sooo much worse. Its 2008. We know how this movie ends.
If you haven’t seen it yet Chris Anderson (author of the seminal “Long Tail” theory) wrote an excellent article about how “free” works on (and off) the Internet. There isn’t anything terribly groundbreaking in the article, but it’s really well written. Maybe someone at ABC will read it before they embarrass themselves like it’s an all-night naked karaoke session.
Update: Read/WriteWeb has an excellent rebuttal to the Freemium article. Good points all. Musicmatch was one of the greatest “freemium” product of all time in terms of cash flow conversions, but the model wasn’t a good match for Internet scale when we tried to port it to Yahoo! One of the reasons that “unlimited mail” storage works at Yahoo and Google is that most people can’t use a lot of that storage – it doesn’t have a lot of utility to have tons of files in mail. I’m interested to see how the “media locker” product evolves over the next 5 years. There is no doubt that either Yahoo, Google, Amazon, or some well funded third party (or all of the above) will offer unlimited free media storage in the next 5 years with a decent player interface. That will put the freemium model to the test.
Another interesting development will be all these tech companies going carbon neutral via offsets, increasing the marginal cost of networked computing. I’d love to see what that cost of storage curve is projected to look like with the offset costs overlayed.
I bought an Apple TV on a spur of the moment as a Christmas present for my wife (lame, it was really for me). I had never really given the product much thought before, I bought it primarily to be able to access the huge number of mp3s I have on hard drives in my house from the living room. We live in a relatively small place, I really only need to send music to 1 set of speakers with 1 control panel so I didn’t need to do much thinking. When purchasing the Apple TV (I got the $300 version with the smaller 40G hard drive), I sort of felt like I was overpaying for a box/functionality that if I did some research I’d be able to get much cheaper.
But I knew (instinctively, that the Apple solution would look good, minimize cables, and work with my iMac and home network out of the box. So I said screw it and shelled out.
Damn what a great brand they have. There are all kinds of case studies you do in business school about brand marketing, but my experience with Apple in the last year basically tells you all you need to know about brand marketing. Oh and don’t forget the engineers and product people, because the whole experience has delivered.
After this latest free software upgrade here is what I can do with my 6 button remote.
Access all the music/photos/video on my iMac and any external drive connected to it
Browse iTunes and purchase music
Browse iTunes and purchase or rent movies and TV shows
listen to or watch free podcasts
Youtube
Flickr
I can’t power the thing off, oddly enough, which I don’t get.
But there isn’t much more internet functionality I really want on the TV. I’d love to add some tweaks on the margins and I’m sure new stuff is coming, but for really anything else (ie. requiring a keyboard or mouse) I can grab my phone or laptop or sidle up to the desktop. A year ago I was hoping Apple didn’t get the internet, now it’s obvious they really get it.
I’ve been working on the fringes of the Interactive TV space since I went to an international conference on the subject in the fall of 2000. eNow/Relegence founder and product genius Edo Segal had the web 2.0 server-side xml/rss syndicated feed model down before just about anyone else and I was over there looking for distribution opportunities for our content indexing tools. WAY too early of course, thank god my Amsterdam boondoggle was the limit to our investment in interactive TV at that time. Of course at Musicmatch and then Yahoo I had lots of meetings and numerous deals with hardware companies, software companies, MSOs, and retailers about digital home products and concepts. It would be scary if I actually listed them all out. I even helped launch and market a few. The “digital home” space is a lot like mobile on a smaller scale: there have been a lot of entrants, a lot of ideas, a lot of money spent bringing failed products to market. Big corporations with vested interests in yesterday’s cash cows creating walled gardens, copyright issues muddying the waters, competing standards, etc. Meh.
So where are we in 2008 on the digitl home front? There are basically 3 products that can be considered really good in the market: Tivo, Sonos, and Apple TV. And Apple TV is by far the best (I think – I don’t have a Sonos or a Tivo anymore, but I know people that do). Not to flog a dead horse as Ned Martin would say, but notice none of the products were brought to market by cable companies, satellite companies, non-Apple PC companies, MSFT (although Xbox 360 deserves honorable mention even though they have lost close to $30B on it), Intel, telecom companies, etc. My DirecTV DVR sucks, but I had no choice if I wanted dual tuners which is the killer app. And I have no hope that it’ll ever improve to the Apple TV level.
These 3 products have a few things in common
They set out trying to tackle specific problem (time shifted TV integrated with personalization and guide; synchronous or asynchronous streaming music in every room of your house, getting the content from your computer onto your TV/stereo) and avoided extra features that added complexity.
They were willing to lose money at the beginning (and for a while) as the market filled in
They charge a premium for the device, making sure it has a feature-set rich enough for early adopters, and avoid the temptation to compete downmarket with undercutting products.
Generally this is is the model that worked so well for Apple with the iPod. Focus on making the hardware excellent (interoperable, reliable, easy to set up). Don’t aim for the mass market at first. The last point is the interesting one IMO, because it goes against what we are taught usually happens in consumer electronics and PC businesses. Calculators, walkmans, boomboxes, CD players, HD TVs – they all started diving in price almost immediately upon release.
Of course, Apple needs to open up Apple TV at some point – same problem they have with iPhone. Let me add cool 3rd party apps. And I’m not buying any content with DRM on it (ill happily rent DRM’d content though). But they definitely nailed it with this upgrade.
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Jason Isbell is a singer/songwriter from Muscle Shoals Alabama who is best known for his 3 album stint with the Drive-by Truckers (he left the band last year). I’ve seen him live before 3 or 4 times with the Truckers and I caught his phenomenal acoustic show last week (with Browan Lollar on guitar and vocals) at the 
For the first time ever, I found myself hitting refresh on a liveblogging Jobsnote this morning. (