Tynan's Anger

At 3 p.m last Tuesday, I had no idea who the Auctioneers were, but I was trying to finalize my plans for the evening. I then got an email from a rep at Shore Fire Media, who had told me that he had just signed the Auctioneers today. He directed me to two songs on their MySpace page, which I dug, and then said that drinks were on him at their Mercury Lounge show tonight. Out of many emails I get like this daily, it was ultimately three factors--new band with two good songs, free drinks, and tonight--that got me to the show.

Sure enough, I was there with a friend at 10 p.m., and though I've seen shows with Jon Spencer and the XX at the Mercury Lounge in the past, the Auctioneers set was the most packed I've ever seen the already tiny venue for an opening band. The only difference was the music, which, as my friend Pat said within the first two songs, sounded like a Counting Crows cover band. I did not disagree.

Nonetheless, by the end of the set, I heard the two songs I liked, one ("Young Man's Blues") I still liked by the end of the night. A more impressionable young scab might have stayed loyal to the Auctioneers for much longer, mainly to save the cred they had with the Auctioneers until it was embarrassing (no doubt the Counting Crows were a small local band who only 6 people saw at some point). Nor did I have anything against the Shore Fire rep who sent me the email and paid for my beer; he had done his job exceptionally well, in the same O.J. Simpson's defense team had done their jobs well.

When I spoke to the rep after I got my beer back, he said that the band had already had finished an EP (later confirmed over emai), and that they'd spend the next 6 months shopping to a label while touring. That way they'd keep contol over the actual artistc product, a noble goal indeed. The only problems were a) the ambiguous group of people referred to as "they," and b) the artistic product itself.

In reality, this kind of story is pretty commonplace now; Shore Fire Media is basically one big publicity firm with a handful of A & R functions for new bands, founded in 1990. Their clients, who include Norah Jones, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and Wynston Marsalis, won 9 Grammys on Sunday, and were nominated for 28. Shore Fire happens to be particularly good at what they do; their strategy to get me to the Auctioneers show on Tuesday night was a textbook example of an effective email marketing campaign. (Don't get me wrong, I love music and beer in any form, even if it sucks, and especially when it's free.)

My main concern is what exactly Shore Fire's rep meant when he said they had just signed the Auctioneers today. Even though no major label was involved, my hunch is that the contract was negotiated in the same way major labels use to negotiate contracts; Shore Fire has a lot of industry veterans on board, and I wouldn't be surprised if the contract resembles the kind that Steve Albini infamously blew the whistle on in his 1993 article, "The Problem With Music". I also know that, for all intensive purposes, the Auctioneers should treat this day with the same enthusiasm bands use to receive when handed major label contracts in the '90s, no matter how dangerous that excitement may be. The gleam in the band's eyes when performing on signing day was certainly the same.

I don't mean to pick on Shore Fire or the Auctioneers in any significant way, but this particular exchange is crucial because of the particulars of the situation. Overall, Shore Fire clients are much more commercially successful and Grammy-winning than clients of similar companies who engage in identical tactics. Some of those other companies, however aim less for commercial success than critical plaudits for many bands, a good review on Pitchfork can be more valuable than a major label deal once a marketing firm is on board. The marketing tactics are the same independent of anything related to art. In many cases, critics will give well-marketed bands plaudits that are not independent of art, but based on the marketing campaigns that are. Most critics that do this are probably unaware that they are doing so.

It's important to note that in all these cases, the success rate of rock stardom is significantly lower than 100%, and always has been. If the Auctioneers are successful, I wish them all the best, and glad I was able to see them last week.

But it's these kind of confounded online scenarios that are often responsible for a band's success, and these scenarios never get covered by editorial media--the arm of the media world that still claims to be charged with defending artistic integrity, not good marketing.

I've seen a real failure on this front of late, and the development is understandable. Why should a bitter, impoverished group of music journalists avoid a free drink for passing plaudits? After all, it's just music, surely there are bigger injustices to call out, even in the music world. The Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger is a lot more evil and destructive to good music than a successfully deceptive marketing campaign by an independent marketing group for an independent band, right?

My problem is, I'm not sure; I'm not sure if the butterfly of a clever little marketing deception doesn't lead to a massively deceptive music conglomerate tsunami. And this is what this new feature, named in honor of the song "Collagen Rock", by Mclusky, aims to find out:

Labels: auctioneers, Grammy Award, marketing, music industry, myspace, one of those bands got paid, pop music, shore fire

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

I've been a fan of unmoderated conversations between two movie types ever since I saw Coffee and Cigarettes, and I must say, this interview/conversation between John Cusack and Diablo Cody—a perfect combination if there ever was one—is rather Jarmusch-esque:

Artist on Artist: John Cusack and Diablo Cody


Of course, the video is nothing without Cody's commentary:

Three things to look out for:

1.) The moment in which I play it cool and feign a lack of recall when John mentions the infamous "Two dollars!" quote. "Oh yeah..." (Please. I own that movie.)

2.) Me rocking in my seat like a stimulus-deprived Romanian orphan.

3.) The goofy straight-to-camera look on my face right after we exchage Eurokisses at the end. Boing!

To be fair, Diablo, kiss only one cheek does not a eurokiss make. Her pose at the end is still priceless.

Labels: coffee and cigarettes, diablo cody, john cusack, myspace