Tynan's Anger

Given the confusion that increasingly occurs between the music business and the music art, especially in an era where the rules have changed/broken down, I figured I'd separate the wheat from the chaff by focusing on the events moments that changed the music industry this decade. I'll focus on the artistic developments later.

Many of these business developments have gone underreported by older music critics who were not raised on the internet. In my case, I saw them all happen in middle school, high school, college, and beyond. Without further ado, here are the biggest music business gamechanger--from a consumer's standpoint--of the past decade.

1. The iTunes Store Opens.


More than Napster, LimeWire, bitTorrent or any other online platform for music distribution, the release of iTunes Store did more than anything to end the CD as the format of choice. What the iTunes store's release in 2004 essentially provided was a completel, widespread, legally-sanctioned way to download music online, the type of thing previously reserved for those with enough cash to burn on eMusic or mp3.com. While a dropdown from the price of CDs, 99 cents/song and $9.99 an album was still overcharging for a distribution method that would have turned a profit with $5. Nonetheless, iTunes essentially gave legitimacy to the same platform that had been used for piracy for the past four years, and the line between legal and illegal downloads had never become so blurred (not coincidentally, Napster failed with an identical business model released around the same time).

2. The iPod integrates with the iTunes store.

There were several botched candidates to replace the Walkman (thousands of minidisc players now occupy landfills nationwide), and both iTunes and the iPod had existed since 2001. But it wasn't until the seamless integration of the iTunes and the iPod (as well as the more affordable iPod mini) took over in 2003 that it became a tour de force of music distribution. At this point, music consumers could purchase, download, and transfer music to a portable music player in seconds, and listen to just about any song they own on the go without lugging around a case of CDs. Apple is the master of integrating several of their products, and the iTunes/iPod integration was the crown jewel of their business strategy.

In sum, the combination of the iPod and the iTunes store made 2003 the most transformative year in the music industry this decade. Tracing any attitude about the music industry now must take into account whether that attitude was developed before and after 2003. I'll never forget a particular moment as a junior in high school in the spring of 2003, when one of my favorite teachers, a just-over 40 Social Studies teacher who played guitar in class and loved to talk about how Gene Simmons used to be an NYC public school teacher too, made some crack about how all the records he owned were wasted on kids with CDs. A classmate of mine responded "CDs? Please, MP3s!" She wasn't joking.

3. The Shins's Wincing The Night Away sells over 100,000 albums and debuts at #2 on Billboard on an independent label in 2007.

In terms of the nexus point of artistic, critical, and industry tastes, there's no more influential moment this decade than this too-often ignored development in music sales that occurred in January 2007. The Shins a band on the previously downtrodden indie label Sub Pop, had seen a rapid spike in popularity following their lauded appearance in the 2004 indie film Garden State. They weren't quite the same indie darlings afterwards, but it didn't matter. Wincing the Night Away, by no means the band's most critically beloved album, reached #2 on the Billboard chart, seemingly out of nowhere. While Sub Pop was 49% owned by Warner Music, the fact that it remained primarily independent meant it didn't have the same corrupt industry standards (unreasonable 5+ album deals, less artistic control, payola, etc.) that had led Napster users in 1999 to see piracy as a method of Civil Disobediance.

Soon afterwards, Arcade Fire, a band made famous by the Internet, also reached #2, with less sales despite much better reviews. Modest Mouse, Spoon, Vampire Weekend, and Animal Collective all followed suit (some on completely independent labels, some on semi-majors with deals similar to Sub Pop). By this point, the raw sales were too disappointing for most majors to realize the significance, and even less so for a generation of music fans trained not to trust the charts. But the #2 chart placement for the Shins meant that they were one of the most popular bands in America, be it from music snobs who remember the Shins before the band was cool, casual music fans with high speed internet connections who downloaded the album by the band from Garden State, or music fans who only had access to music via Walmart or Target. It's understandable how this blurred the indie/mainstream divide. The former was a business term, and the latter was a cultural term. The difference was that those two categories were no longer mutually exclusive.

4. Guitar Hero is released.


I hated Guitar Hero when I was first exposed to it, primarily because my college dorm-mates exclaimed, "it's like playing real music, but it's a video game!" (like my high school classmate, they weren't joking). Raised on video games but with a devotion to music, I was sympathetic but simultaneously felt the same disgust older music fans felt. Than I played the game, and realized that it was as good as the best video games I'd played.

More related to the music industry, however, I should have opened my eyes when my friends with no interest in music suddenly found themselves enjoying songs by Cream, Motorhead, Blue Oyster Cult (Godzilla!), and Joan Jett, and that was just the first iteration of this game. Later versions expanded music tastes, and in most cases, actually improved them. All the while, the music industry realized they could make a boatload with their back catalog, as did bands. Guitar Hero's meathead metal (which I love) soon expanded to Rock Band's mix of just about every rock music style imaginable which involved guitars, drums, and singing (which I love even more). A fan poll on VH1 put "Ace of Spades" in the top 10 of the greatest hard rock songs of all time. I don't think that respect for a critically beloved but oft-forgotten single from a gold album from 1980 would have happened without Guitar Hero.

5. Pitchfork becomes the new Rolling Stone/record store clerk/fanzine, but moreso.

I first discovered Pitchforkmag.com via a Google search for The Darkness as a high school senior in 2003. I don't remember if I searched for "the darkness" or "the darkness review," but I do remember that Pitchfork was the first site I clicked on, and it provided a positive review for an album I already liked, just as I was transitioning from listening to Queen and Linkin Park to the Ramones and the Velvet Underground. Pitchforkmag.com had been on the Internet since the mid-90s, but it didn't take on its tastemaking role until 2003 and 2004—not coincidentally, just as iTunes, Google, and MySpace were all starting to become the primary distribution vehicles for music.

Not only did Pitchfork essentially replace the authority of print magazines dominated by older critics (e.g., 50-year-olds, not 30-year-olds), but its style epitomized the lack of a line between indie and major label pop music that had been brewing for quite some time, applying all albums to a universal scale that equated albums by Spoon, Interpol, and the Arcade Fire to the Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, and Pearl Jam, with the traditional "critics picks" usually winning out.

While Pitchfork's review style has remained somewhat notorious, circa 2003, they had enough credentials to have known about Modest Mouse a decade before they became popular. They were the only site to give a negative review to Elephant by newfound MTV sensations the White Stripes, and weren't above giving a 0.0 review (the "Blutarsky") to just about any band, be it Jet, Sonic Youth, or the Flaming Lips.

Things have changed by 2009, including Pitchfork's tastes, which included a lot of releases the site initially lambasted on their end of the decade lists with a younger generation of critics on staff. The remains of the print music industry also learned how to use the internet better, as Rolling Stone now dominates Pitchfork in terms of web traffic. Nonetheless, Pitchfork dominated online music coverage during a critical period in the web's development, and now the site has unprecedented tastemaking ability. A good review on Pitchfork will do more for a band than a good review in any other music publication, website, or blog these days, for better or for worse.

6. Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" video becomes the most viewed YouTube video of all time.

How easy it is to forget that, as late as mid-2006, many websites, blogs, and publications were afraid of embedding YouTube videos on their site, lest they face the same kind of lawsuits given to 8-year-old Kazaa users three years earlier. Nonetheless, YouTube already was becoming the primary vehicle for music video distribution, legally or not, even for major label bands (OK Go, anyone?). The fact that MTV stopped showing full music videos on the now-defunct Total Request Live only furthered YouTube's role in filling a pre-existing demand. Before "Girlfriend," the long-running champion of YouTube's most viewed video was "The Evolution of Dance," a live performance that featured four decades of pop music, a preposterous dance routine, and mostly organically-generated traffic. The fact that "Girlfriend" swept away the most viewed title so rapidly showed that the same consumers who were buying this week's top CD at the mall 10 years earlier hadn't changed all that much, but had just moved to computers. With the power of a full-marketing campaign, major industries realized they could overpower any user-generated content in terms of eyeballs, if not in terms of the bottom line.

7. MySpace remains the go-to site for bands even after Facebook.

Social media platforms come and go at such a rapid rate these days that it's easy to forget when MySpace was the undisputed dominant social networking site on the web. I didn't sign up for it in high school because it creeped me out, but I was in the minority. Of course, I signed up for Facebook as soon as it became available for my college-to-be in the summer of 2004.

For at least 3 solid years before and after the sale to Newscorp, MySpace dominated the social networking world, including the magical year of 2003, when all bands started going online. Even today, when MySpace as a personal networking site seems as archaic as AOL or Friendster, MySpace is still the dominant platforms for bands, replacing just about all individualized domain names for a more uniform distribution method that evened the playing field, even if it reduced the playing field's size. By now, major labels finding bands via MySpace is no longer an Internet success story; it's the only success story.

This was a change that ultimately benefitted Napster-raised consumers; after years of trying to find out about bands I liked in high school via awful, cryptic, Flash-based websites, I took to finding bands via MySpace naturally. In most cases, of course, I googled them.

8. DRM protection is removed from iTunes tracks.

In elementary school, I had a computer teacher who insisted to us that we would go to jail if we uploaded games onto floppy disks. It seemed preposterous at the time, and as it turns out, no one wants to imprison children for dubious corporate purposes. What this meant was that all the controversies over bootlegged recordings and sneaking cameras into concerts in the early '90s seemed preposterous to those who came of age just a few years later. Anything that prevented the seamless distribution of music from one friend to another was suspect, and only promoted more piracy. Hence, while DRM protection standards were a huge concession circa 2003 (you can buy a song once and put it on five separate computers?!?!), the concession of a concession occured--long overdue, in the eyes of most consumers--with the erosion of DRM that occurred in 2007. It was the last humiliating blow to the record industry's complete control over the product of their bands.

9. Modest Mouse sells "Gravity Rides Everything" To A Nissan Ad.
Modest Mouse may have been a breakthrough success with 2004's Good News For People Who Love Bad News, but their real contribution to the music industry came a few years earlier, when they sold "Gravity Rides Everything" a track from 2001's critically acclaimed but commercially ignored The Moon and Antartica. Modest Mouse had spent nearly a decade touring indie clubs, and before Garden State and the OC made indie rock sales in movies a norm, this entirely respected band broke an enormous boundry for struggling bands: selling songs to commercials. As late as the 90s, this was verboten in the world of indie ethics, but with the anarchy that would dominate the later part of this decade's music industry, selling songs to ads has become not just one of the better ways for bands to pay rent (in the words of Isaac Brock), but to get mainstream attention. The long-term history of songs in advertising has been controversial--Rob Horning and Ze Pequeno at PopMatters have started some excellent discussions on the subject--but it's hard to imagine how anyone from the Shins, MIA, Saul Williams, or any number of smaller bands would become as popular as they became without ads.

10. Twitter and Google Trends set the tone for music coverage.



As soon as Michael Jackson died in June of 2009, I pretty much stopped blogging about music for the rest of the summer. I did so because I knew the majority of music coverage would revolve around Michael Jackson, and since I don't remember black Michael (I was in kindergarden when the "Black and White" single came out), I had nothing to contribute to the conversation.

Nonetheless, Michael Jackson was a dead celebrity, which meant that he dominated Google Trends and Twitter Trends that day. I had seen this two years earlier when Ana Nicole Smith died, and the dominance of her death on Google Trends let to an F1 story in the New York Times. It is unclear how much people searching for Ana Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton's prison sentence, etc. were doing so because they were obsessed with celebrity and how many were searching just because they heard that Ana Nicole Smith had died. Nonetheless, the eyeball-starved mainstream media, from the New York Times to CNN to NBC Nightly News, latched on, and the tabloid side of music news began to dominate even the critical spectrum.

How many people who RIPed Brittany Murphy across the Internet had an emotional attachment to Tai in Clueless? How many people who hyped the Pavement reunion concert in record speed remembered the release of Slanted and Enchanted? Why did blogs start publishing the same "why do you care, you dumb consumer" articles that they used to lambast newspapers for doing?

Traffic, traffic traffic. Music websites that "needed" traffic spikes in any way possible, no matter how short term, saw articles they "had" to cover. Again and again with media old and new, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Postscript: Many readers may note that this list did not include Radiohead's "it's up to you" distribution of In Rainbows. This is not an accidental omission. I fully recognize the insane amount of coverage this record's distribution method received. Radiohead made a lot more money this way than they would have on a major label, but the official release of the CD still charted at #1, even as roughly 30% of all online copies of In Rainbows were still pirated. Nine Inch Nails followed suit with arguably more success but less coverage, as did Saul Williams, who flopped in terms of sales with this method. While the In Rainbows story was probably the most symbolic of how the record industry has changed, it has yet to drastically change how music listeners actually consume music.

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Labels: ads, art versus business, billboard, consumers, google trends, guitar hero, ipod, itunes, modest mouse, music industry, myspace, napster, pitchfork media, riaa, the shins, twitter, youtube

Image via WikipediaYesterday, the folks at findingDulcinea released SweetSearch, which combines Google algorithmic rankings with quality reviews by actual human beings. When playing around with it, I noticed that when you search for a specific business type in a specific location, rather than getting the results of any individual firm or company, your results are almost exclusively a listing of directories for that business type.

What interests me about this is what it says for the future of SEO: Jeff Jarvis and others have argued that when personalized and semantic search become more powerful, the SEO industry may cease to exist. I never really gave all that much credit to that argument, but after using Sweet Search I saw how that could eventually come to pass.

The reason the end of SEO as we know it today is a possibility, however remote, is the differences in priorities between the searcher (Google's customers) and the people working towards being found on search engines. On the one hand, a listing of a directory of businesses, rather than one or two individual businesses that happened to have gamed Google (or hired someone who has) is more useful to the searcher. While gaming the system is not inherently illegal or unethical, it does probably end up hurting the product for the searcher, even if everything is kept White Hat. On the other hand, the field of SEO is booming—it's one of the few tech fields that is still seeing growth, and the fact that Sweet Search produces search results that are all but useless for hired SEOs is a potentially devastating and portentous sign for anyone who makes their living in the industry. It's still unclear what exact mechanisms Sweet Search uses to get its results, but it may be the closest indication we currently have to what Google is striving for in the long run in terms of their search product.

Note that even if SEO were to decline as a result of this discrepancy, it would NOT mean the end of the SEM industry by any means. There's still a lot that can be accomplished by marketing through search engines without strictly looking to improve organic rankings, even if getting a high ranking is a much sexier and more noteworthy goal. Regardless of what happens to SEO with contextualized and semantic search, here are the two main conclusions I can draw from the future Sweet Search depicts:

1. SEO'ers should focus more extensively on directories—and for reasons other than backlinks alone. While backlinks are nice things to have for traffic and crucial for SEO, directories can also provide companies with clients without those clients even touching Google. If the categories are sufficiently specific, potential customers would be likely to convert at a higher rate through a directory rather than a general organic search. Of course, while most directories SEO marketers use now are independent of Google, and many exist purely for providing links, it's inevitable that Google will look to get a larger pie of the online directory business. This is why directory search marketing Google Local, which is already a rapidly growing priority for SEOers (especially for businesses that mainly operate locally), may become an expanded and someday even predmoniant form of search marketing.
2. Paid SEM like PPC, while not as immediately cost-effective in the short term, may have more endurance in the long term. I would never tell anyone to stop building skills and experience with SEO simply out of a general fear for where the industry is going. I'd be stupid to do it myself. But no matter what happens to SEO over the next 5 years or so, it's inevitable that industry standards will go through major changes rather frequently over this time. Volatility in SEO conventions means volatility in its usefulness, and hence, volatility in its potential to earn money. While PPC, AdWords, and other paid methods of search marketing may cost more and produce smaller ROI, paid search marketing has much more stable standards, and probably won't face all that many significant changes over the next 5 years, especially when compared to SEO. Hence, PPC and paid SEM are probably a more reliable bet in the long term. For yet another disclaimer, remember that the risks of SEO may be overrated. Of course, that's what they were saying about real estate derivatives 3 years ago, so one should keep in mind all the dangers that come with a higher risk/higher reward form of marketing, even if the risk is only slightly higher.

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How America Failed Theater: A capitalist marketing perspective on theater's socioeconomic role in American life.

In case you're not convinced that it's essentially impossible to make money as a theater blogger, try this experiment. First, watch this video by online media guru Gary Vaynerchuk:




Now, take Gary V's suggestion and apply it to theater blogging. First, google "theater" and see what Google Adwords come up with. You'll likely get a lot of results on movie theaters or home theaters; perhaps the term is too general. So search for New York theater. When you do this, you'll get a lot of websites of individual theaters themselves, and maybe a few other publications. Search for "regional theater," and you'll get the same, as you probably will for any city you happen to live in. The only other results I got were for vacation and ticket services. This is probably the best option for advertising, but keep in mind the majority of the desired audience of these sites are out-of-towners whose interest in theater doesn't go all that far out of The Little Mermaid or Wicked. They're not going to be all that interested in your Brechtian analysis of some way off-off-Broadway show.

In Gary V's video, the way to make money off your blog is to call up these people and get them to advertise on your blog. Of course, most theater people are introverts, and get clamped up at the prospect of cold calling. But besides that, if you're focus is being critical and editorial, there's simply no way you can court advertisements from individual theaters and claim to have independent critical judgment. If you were going to get advertising from these sources, you'd need someone else who works on your website for strictly advertising purposes. For smaller theater publications, and especially theater blogs, that's a virtual impossibility. Even if you could get someone to do it, the amount of time you'd need to invest wouldn't be worth the minimal results you'd probably get.

From a marketing perspective, it shows the limits of niche marketing, even though theater isn't by any means the smallest niche to try to make a profit. Within the theatrical community, however, there are two main factors keeping these kind of marketing strategies from succeeding. For one, theater is based more around a sense of community. Any show produced or artist supported by a theater is seen as more of a means of adding something to the theatrical discussion. Unless you're making something like The Little Mermaid, it is not seen primarily as a revenue stream (even if profit is still in the back of your mind).

Secondly, in the case of individual theaters as possible advertisers, it is impossible to extract the product of the theater (be it talent, show, or community) from the theater that's producing it. If you're selling beer, you're almost always selling someone else's beer. From a business perspective, you have no emotional attachment to the brand of beer you're selling, even if you have a weird beer specialty market. In theater, the product your selling is inherently produced by your own personal labor and belongs to the individual laborers who produce it. Do you know anyone who buys Budweiser from Anheuser-Busch directly? Or for an off-off Broadway parallel, you can't even buy Summit Ale from the Summit Brewing Company online store.

In How Theater Failed America, Mike Daisey spoke of contemporary American theater submitting to the American capitalistic system of constant competition, fear of failure, and an artistically counterproductive need to make theater marketable to a stable audience. Tom Stoppard spoke of this just last night. Tony Adams recently talked about how theater don't focus on content anymore. Scott Walters has fought for artistic emphasis constantly. The consensus seems to be that this is a recent, troublesome development. Daisey suggested that a better title for his show would have been "How Theater Became America."

Yet, from the capitalistic perspective that these sources lament, the Gary Vaynerchuks of the world, theater is still a hopelessly unmarketable faux-commodity, one that flies in the face of long-term financial stability, and maintains a system of ethics entirely outside of that of American capitalism. From this perspective, theater still seems like something you do in spite of your desire to make a living. Whether it be theater's Marxist heritage or the nature of the artistic endeavor in general, success in theater is an entirely different mindset from success in business. The standards for good theater (artistic excellence) are wildly different from that of normal business marketing (ROI, profit).

If you're in theater, even using the term "commodity" in referring to theater will make you cringe. Yet, the fact that this cringe is nearly universal is a unique thing to theater, in terms of business and even in terms of the arts. Technologically reproducible art, be it film, music, fine art or literature, have all become dominated by a top-down big business structure to various degrees (the high art/low art distinction be damned). Theater can be top-down too, especially in New York (less so in Chicago or London). But despite the stereotypes of the Broadway producer, theater still exists on an immensely smaller business scale than just about any other form of art in the country. For all the complaining of theater's increasing commercialization and commodification, theater simply does not exist in the same financial stratosphere as any other form of art, even at its highest level. Some people who do theater are rich, but virtually no one gets rich—and I mean really rich, megamillionaire style—purely from theater itself.

As a result, theater has more of a focus on artistic excellence over profit than almost anything else in our culture. No matter what you think of the current strength of American theater, that's an enviable position for any artist to be in from an aesthetic standpoint. The downside is thatit's much harder to make a good living in theater. Of course, that's a tradeoff virtually every theater artist is willing to make.

But at the same time, most people in theater have problems with the notion of the majority theater artists having to live in poverty. As much was we like to romanticize the notion of a community of financially stable theater practicioners, without a wide-ranging income spectrum that includes the (relative) ultra-rich and ultra-poor, you simply cannot reconcile theater with the free market capitalist system that we currently live in. The Cold War proved that this liberal capitalist system is ultimately the most sustainable from a global economic perspective. By no means does that mean theater has no value in America—it may even give it more value simply precisely because it is so different. But again, what that means is that theater, at its core, has and will always run in spite of the larger socioeconomic spectrum of a capitalist society. If you go into theater, you better only want to make a sustainable living, or else you're screwed. No one should have to live in poverty. But poverty for some is virtually inevitable, and that rate will inevitably be higher a large-scale community that does not conform to the liberal democratic capitalist system. Communities like that national theater community we all strive for.

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Labels: art versus business, Broadway theatre, economics, gary vaynerchuk, how theater failed america, mike daisey, Summit Brewing Company, tom stoppard