Trying something a little new this week… a video blog.
I hear a lot of people say we need to “save the music” by preserving the old business models of the music industry. “If there are less career opportunities for musicians,” they argue, “surely there will be less good music.” I call shenanigans on this short-sighted perspective. There is more music than ever before, and a new breed of musician is being born, blurring the lines between creator and consumer. Bring on the new thing.
Well, folks, I’m back for another book update as the first month of project Mediapocalypse comes to a close. With the book having pretty much taken over my life at this point, on the rare occasion that I venture into the outside world I get the same two questions: How’s the booking coming along? What’s it about?
It’s coming along great, thanks. As is my style, I’ve been inventing my own method as I go along, only to later find how close it is to the established process. This is most apparent in my focus over the last couple of weeks: the bibliography.
In many ways, writing a book is like writing an album. Songs are very much reconstituted from influences, or as Kirby Ferguson would say, Everything is a Remix. Similarly, a nonfiction book begins as the sum of its sources.
Since I first became interested in the subject a decade ago, I have amassed a voluminous library of music nonfiction. Thus, half of my bibliography was already done — I simply had to dust off my MLA style guidelines and start typing.
I am unashamed to admit that during the rest of the bibliography process, I got a huge assist from Amazon.com. Once I had catalogued my own collection, it became clear that I had a single mission: to find any and every other book that would be a useful source. Luckily, Amazon.com made discovery painless, with its related product referrals and faceted search. Even better, it was easy to ascertain the quality and content of the works via customer reviews and the ‘look inside this book’ feature. What’s a library again?
My bibliography (at least the book portion) is now complete. I’m sure to find a handful of secondary and tertiary sources during the writing process, but right now I feel super-confident about my factual foundation.
Posting the bibliography before the book seems sacrilegious and anticlimactic — like playing an audience tracks from your favorite artists and then asking them to guess what your album will sound like. Instead, I will give you some stats…
There are 107 nonfiction book titles currently in my bibliography, comprised of 17 primary sources, 34 secondary sources and 56 tertiary sources. I read each primary and secondary source carefully, and key passages are highlighted and marked on a 1-4 scale of importance. Any relevant notes are scribbled in the back of the book (or, on the iPad, in Evernote). The tertiary sources are skimmed rather than read cover to cover. Many of these are the dryly academic texts, from which I am seeking only to mine facts and evidence.
Of the key sources, I’m 30 for 51, meaning I have 21 more full books to read, along with a few dozen tertiary sources to skim. Yeah, that’s a lot of reading. At present, I’m reading at about 150 pages per day, which averages to around three nonfiction books per week, so I should be done sometime in mid-June.
Thinking myself rather smart for inventing the bibliography-first method of nonfiction book writing, my lovely wife, who holds a Master’s Degree to my High School Diploma, pointed out this has been standard practice for decades. Maybe I should pick up a book on nonfiction writing? Nah, making it up as I go along is too much fun.
Enough with the reading, you say, how is the actual writing going? And what the hell is the book about?
My writing process at this point is essentially the opposite of pulling meat off the bone. Poring through my source notes, I attach meaty facts and concepts to my skeletal outline in a program called OmniOutliner, nesting text into hierarchies. In the process, themes and topics emerge almost organically. In a way, I’m not deciding what the book is about explicitly — the patterns in my notes of interest are telling me what it’s about.
The dispassionate answer to the topical question can be found in a tag cloud. I tagged each of the books in my bibliography from a list of 60 terms describing topics, and then fed them into TagCrowd to see what my major themes were. Here were the top 20:
business, cognitive, commodification, copyright, corruption, culture, digital, history, industry, legislation, listener, litigation, meaning, musician, neuroscience, origin, philosophy, society, sound, technology
I think that’s a pretty good description of what I’m going for. But to give you a better idea, I will share with you the general structure of the book, in terms of the major “parts” that I will organize chapters within. This builds off my decision to proceed chronologically, interweaving the story of the musician, listener and industry to build my overall thesis. It’s shaping up to be a sort of “People’s History of the Music Industry” Howard Zinn-like epic retelling of history from the perspective of its losers — in this case, musicians.
After a typical introduction, the book will be comprised of three major parts:
Part I tells the story of the origin of music, and how musicians and listeners came into being. I seek to answer the question “What is music?” by defining the relationships between these two groups, using all the interdisciplinary tools at my disposal. This epic story spans from millions of years ago to the dawn of the 20th century, as we end Part I by introducing the origins of the music industry.
If Part I tells the story of how and why musicians, listeners and industry came into being, Part II describes how the industry came to dominate the relationship shared by those groups. Over the course of the 20th century, we witness the subjugation of music’s meaning and purpose to commerce, and examine the paradox of popular music. This section appropriately ends with the rise of Napster at the beginning of the new millennium.
Part III brings us from the digital music revolution to our present-day crossroads. This is where the payload of my thesis is delivered. The narrative threads of musician, listener and industry culminate in a blunt and critical appraisal of why the record business deserved to die, and the unprecedented opportunities listeners and musicians have in the aftermath of the industry’s fall. It ends by looking ahead to the new business of music, and how digital technology will continue to shape its future.
I’ll wrap it all up with a unique epilogue, which will use the book’s content to look ahead to chart a futuristic vision of the relationship between musician, listener and industry during the rest of the century.
In the end, I hope to publish a book that can be enjoyed by musicians, listeners and industry alike, though they may all get something different out of it. Core to my mission is to challenge readers to reconsider everything they thought they knew about music, and to become a more active participant in its creation and/or consumption.
That blog post may have been a book unto itself, but what can I say, I’ve got the writing bug. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements.
For those of you who don’t already know, the purpose of this blog is mostly to chronicle my journey as a first-time book author. The nonfiction book I’m currently working on (currently sharing the same working title as the blog) is something that’s been cooking on the backburner of my mind ever since Napster first hit the scene. To put it bluntly, as a musician and fan, I couldn’t help but notice how the music industry was ruining music for profit.
Ten years and hundreds of pages of notes later, I now have a unique opportunity to take a sabbatical from my regular full-time job as a producer of websites and other creative media. I am using that time not only write my magnum opus, but to engage in entrepreneurship related to blending creative technology with my deep knowledge of the dynamic between music industry, musicians and listeners.
Now two weeks into the process, I’m sure I’m not the first to remark that writing a book has been, above all, a humbling experience. I kept writing the perfect outline, only to wake up the next day and write a more perfect outline. Even worse, as the outlines evolved, the stack of research questions that needed hard-sourced answers grew and grew. Dipping a toe into research was alarming (and eye-opening), with so many contradictory figures and findings from supposedly reputable sources. Yes, writing nonfiction was hard — and I hadn’t even written much yet.
Somehow though, all these fast-accruing research tasks and content refinements snowballed recently into a big breakthrough in terms of structure. For the first time, I feel like I have laid the foundation and erected the scaffolding of what will be the final book. Up until now, I was thinking of the book as building an argument, because what I am writing about is going to primarily challenge many deeply-entrenched views of music and the industry, some of which are taken for granted.
However, when I really thought about it, I realized I should draw inspiration from the books I most loved to read, and a couple in particular came to mind. Both Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to Present — very different books on disparate topics — had the same general narrative structure. There was an overlying chronological progression, but at the same time, three primary topical narratives weaved their way through each chapter of the book. Often, a chapter would have a dominant topic, but the aim of the larger narrative was to illustrate the interplay between the three topics in the title.
My eureka moment was in realizing this is exactly how I should present my book. One of my foremost goals with the book is to provide a new understanding of the interplay between musicians, listeners and the industry. By threading these topical narratives chronologically through history, through the present and into the future, I would have a content structure that is proven and fits my communication goals like a glove.
Now my studio walls are beginning to look a lot like a scene out of a police detective TV series, with timelines stretching across walls dotted with key events, running along separate tracks which represent the narrative of the primary themes. I recently began organizing my timeline in Preceden, a pretty awesome web-based “fancy timeline creator”. Stepping back, I see everything starting to take shape, with repeating cycles and unique accents — like a song. It’s all very befitting for a book on music.
Several weeks ago I attended the Rethink Music conference in Boston. I can honestly say it felt like I downloaded the entire music industry in 48 hours. A non-stop parade of executives and managers concisely detailed the challenges they faced in the digital music age. In panel after panel, their guarded optimism shone like a dull reflection off a classic automobile that won’t start. Between furious note-taking and tweeting, I got all the the insight, confidence and enthusiasm I needed to begin writing the book I’ve been planning for ten years.
I want to extend thanks to the organizers and everyone who made this conference possible. Attending it changed the way I look at music and the music industry forever. Writing a book about musicians, fans, technology and the music industry has been a dream of mine since Napster hit the scene. After spending the beginning of the year cataloging my key thoughts and ideas from the past decade, I am now tackling this monster project every day.
I approached the conference deeply entrenched in my disdain for the overall apparatus that controls access to and thus commodifies music. I believed that technology got us into this mess and could get us out of it. I felt that music should be free like water (and bottled for profit when it serves the artist’s best interests). Most importantly, I felt that our culture had become a wasteland for the benefit of a corporate media oligarchy.
After attending the Rethink Music conference, that smoldering resentment of the exploitative music industry has never been more fully stoked. The trampling of artists’ and fans’ rights in a quest for revenue continues unabated, but you can’t blame the industry. It’s their job. But I’m not writing the book to change the attitudes of the music industry. I’m trying to change the attitudes of fans and artists — it’s the only way to force the industry to change.
Here are my five big “lessons learned” from the conference:
I learned what many Americans already know — that lawyers are generally evil, and entertainment lawyers are worse. I always knew IP law was horribly broken, but I never realized how this was the absolute bedrock of the talent exploitation business. he lawmen justify their dubious ethical position by telling musicians, “I’m doing this to protect your rights and revenue”, which rings about as true as a cigarette company telling a smoker they are protecting their freedom of personal choice. What’s worse — with rock and pop publishing deals involving multiple parties, I learned that some big deals just don’t get made. The result? The rights holders can’t afford legal representation to make a deal after the fact, caught in a Catch-22 because the deal isn’t done. Millions of dollars are floating around unpaid because deals don’t get made, period.
I learned the industry is really as dumb as you think they are when it comes to technology. Incredibly, Napster hasn’t really taught them anything, now 10 years down the road. There were a few exceptions — Open EMI’s pre-cleared license hacker sandbox was the most notable. The Echo Nest is clearly and deservedly well-positioned to become industry tech darlings, enabling the big boys to play with the same tools the small, agile tech startups hold inherent to their hacker talent and creativity. But by and large, the entertainment is a lot like the government — it still doesn’t understand IP in the 21st century, and thinks it can use the old tactics to prevent the freeing of music for the good of fans and artists (to benefit the industry). But without technology in their blood, it’s going to be a multibillion dollar quixotic struggle of epic proportions to try to steer the future of music into conglomerate control. Since they can’t dam Niagara Falls, all they can do is pass laws to make it illegal to visit. But what happens when all the rivers flood? Consider that in the U.S. Apple generates over 100x the annual revenue of all domestic record labels combined, and then you see how badly the music industry needs help in the technology space. This is all so ironic because the entire record industry is based around leveraging technology to make people pay for music.
I learned that one of if not the biggest impediments to the industry generating revenue in the digital space comes from their technological stupidity. One of the main themes of the conference was how screwed everyone will be for years to come because of the industry’s inability to manage the information that is responsible for profitability. There are an infinity of micro payments flying around for songs with different metadata and all manner of licensing, publishing and other exploitation rights and rates to be tracked. Though there are myriad solutions being put on the table, the industry seems to have collectively shrugged its shoulders, hoping the geeks will figure out eventually if they throw enough money at the problem. I heard a lot of guarded optimism as a facade for folks who were clearly flummoxed by the complexity of digital music analytics.
I learned that what I believe to be most exciting and promising thing happening in music today — the gamification of social music advocacy — is something the industry is largely oblivious to. While the conference’s Genesis award winner Have You Heard was honored for proposing such a system, it’s insanity that the big players like Spotify had nothing specific to show in that regard. Perhaps they thought they were protecting “trade secrets” but I’ve got news for them: this is exactly why the music industry is choking. someone smarter than you is going to beat you to it. You need a Turntable.fm to come along and flout licensing until the Big 4 say, “why, look at how you’ve grown! Accept our terms or we’ll kill you.” That’s the industry’s current model for innovation — let the geeks figure it out, then buy it or sue it out of existence. For the young entrepreneurs fresh out of Harvard who proposed the “FourSquare for fans” idea at the conference — I’m afraid this too could be your fate.
Perhaps the most important lesson of all: I learned that when artists blame the fucked up music industry for their failure to succeed — or worse, their failure to get paid from their success — they’re ultimately blaming the industry for their own failure to understand the music or the business. There are a million “How to Succeed in the Music Industry” books, none of which have ever helped anyone write a good song. Conversely, there are thousands of great songs written by musicians that no one will ever hear, because the artist has no faith, interest or aptitude in the music business. Why should they? The industry is actually OK with its role as artist scapegoat, because if the artists really understood their responsibilities, they wouldn’t have to put up with such exploitation. Being a musician is really about being an entrepreneur, starting a small music business. What we need is millions of small music businesses, not a handful of monopolies trying to squeeze the last dime out of a dying industry, willing only to co-opt and rarely to innovate. Music, like life, is free and alive — and as they said in Jurassic Park, “life finds a way.”
Fail is heavy in the air for Madonna, who saw sales of her new album MDNA nosedive 88% to a measly 46,000, setting a record for biggest second-week drop in chart history.
This from arguably one of the top ten names in the music industry, signed to an obscene $120 million, 10-year 360 deal with LiveNation, with one of the largest promotional budgets in the business. Her marketing plan started with a Super Bowl half time performance — an album release doesn’t get a much bigger springboard than that.
No matter what IPFI propaganda will tell you, the CD is the end of the road for physical music media. For the majority of music fans, there is far more value in having access to the digital copy. This is clear as crystal in the numbers: Physical sales fall year-over-year while digital sales are on the uptick. Keep in mind Madonna’s miserable numbers included these digital downloads.
The new trend in physical music media sales can be found in Madonna’s first-week album sales (359,000), when the music industry temporarily convinced themselves that the slo-mo flash crash of the CD media format had hit a plateau. The secret behind the trophy showing was bundling — in this case, the bundling of a free CD or album download with any concert ticket purchase. That’s right — if you wanted to take your friend to the Madonna show, well, you both bought the album too. This gross inflation of actual sales (180,000 albums were bundled with tickets) makes the official SoundScan numbers pathetically hollow.
Good thing LiveNation has a 360 deal — they’re going to need that licensing revenue.