new dog old trick

R.I.P. Paul deLay

I just heard the news that blues harmonica player Paul deLay passed away back in March.  He was only 55, so like William Clark a few years ago another still young harp player taken from us far too soon.  R.I.P. Paul.

If you don't know deLay's music, and you like the blues, you should really give him a listen.  His personal life was such that he had paid some dues, but there's a lot of joy in his brand of the blues.  He was a tremendous blues harp player - probably one of the two or three best of his generation.  He was also a good singer and fronted his band well. 

You might want to start with deLay's Nice & Strong for an introduction to his music.

Another good option is his Ocean of Tears CD. 

Bluebird on the Mountain starts new season

Linda and I had a great evening last night at the first Bluebird on the Mountain concert for 2007.  For those not in Nashville, The Bluebird is the preeminent singer-songwriter club in Nashville (and hence, in the civilized world).  The Mountain is actually more of a big hill, but on the top of the big hill is Vanderbilt University's Dyer Observatory.  Bluebird on the Mountain is a concert series hosted outdoors on the grounds of the Dyer Observatory where the concert is held more or less in the same format as one of The Bluebird's three performer round-robin shows and the talent is booked by The Bluebird.  The audience tends to show up early with blankets, chairs, picnic baskets, coolers, etc. and settles in for some al fresco eating and drinking and then some music.  Imagine mixing a big outdoor picnic with a crowded singer-songwriter club, plus a big dome covering a telescope, and you have Bluebird on the Mountain. 

Last night was a beautiful night to be outside on the top of the mountain: warm but not humid, gentle cool breezes, and early enough in the season that there weren't any bugs to speak of.   The three performers were Kim Carnes, Greg Barnhill, and Dana Cooper.  They were backed by what I take to have been Kim Carnes back-up band.  We weren't familiar with any of the songwriters but the music was great and the evening was just about perfect. 

It was also a nice way to celebrate Mother's Day.  In a way, the night out was a gift from our son.  Linda's grandmother lives with us and needs constant monitoring, so we don't get out together very often.  Our son Lee has agreed to watch grandmother on one Saturday night a month so that we can go to each of the Bluebird on the Mountain events.  Thanks Lee!

The LP record was a disruptive innovation...a little historical perspective

I had a chance to hear Jac Holzman talk about the music industry a couple of days ago. Jac's name didn't ring a bell with me, but once I heard his bio from the person who introduced him, I was blown away. This is a guy who was "present at the creation" of the current music industry and who helped introduce some of the seminal acts in rock music history.

Jac was the founder of Elektra records, a very early indie label (yeah, before Elektra was part of the Warner megalith, it was an indie label). He's the guy who signed and helped produce the Doors. He was also involved with signing and/or producing Judy Collins, Carly Simon, Harry Chapin, and Queen.

One of the points I found very interesting was that a disruptive innovation (my term - not his, he called it a new technology though) had created the opportunity for indie labels like Elektra to start. That piece of high technology innovation? The long-playing (LP) record! That was high tech in the music business circa 1950. But it led directly to the creation of dozens - heck, more like hundreds - of independent record labels. Jac was subsequently directly involved with all of the technology innovations in music over the next forty years or so, including stereo, tape and the ability to leverage it courtesy of the Walkman (your music in your pocket) and car 8-track and cassette players (your music in the car), several generations of recording technology evolution, the compact disc, compression technologies, DVD, cable, the internet, and digital radio.

Jac's talk provided a useful reminder that technology innovation is a process - not an event - and that disruptive innovations come along and reshape most industries on some regular basis. He certainly seemed to feel that the current music industry giants have screwed up leveraging the potential of the internet and that we haven't seen the end of changes to the music business driven by technology innovation. But he also reminded us that in the long run it's still all about the music - all the technology is great but it's only an enabler for the music.

Listening to Winds Of Change from the album Reservation Blues by Eddy 'The Chief' Clearwater

The Ecto blogging tool has this cool feature that lets you capture what song you're listening to at that moment on iTunes. That's where entries at the end of some of my recent posts, like the one immediately above, have come from. Very cool.

WSJ.com - Downloading Music Gets More Expensive

WSJ.com - Downloading Music Gets More Expensive

This Wall Street Journal article (subscription req'd) talks about moves to raise prices on some online downloads above the price of the same CD purchased in physical form. Un-freaking-believable. The article points to examples of both entire CDs priced higher in download form as well as moves to raise prices on some singles about the $.99 level.

For months, digital-music services have been touting albums for $9.99 to entice more people to buy online. But Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store has been charging $16.99 for "Fly or Die," while Roxio Inc.'s Napster service sells the 12-song collection for $13.99. Both prices are higher than the $13.49 that Amazon.com charges for the CD itself. The same pricing shifts are showing up on albums by a growing slate of artists, from Shakira to Bob Dylan. [snip] All five of the major music companies are discussing ways to boost the price of single-song downloads on hot releases -- to anywhere from $1.25 to as much as $2.49. It isn't clear how or when such a price hike would take place, and it could still be months away. Sales of such singles -- prices have remained at 99 cents -- still account for the majority of online music sales.

The industry is also mulling other ways to charge more for online singles. One option under consideration is bundling hit songs with less-desirable tracks. Another possibility is charging more for a single track if it is available online before the broader release of the entire album from which it is taken. There is also talk of lowering the price on some individual tracks from older albums.

As the article points out - legal online downloading comes without many costs to the record companies.

Unburdened by manufacturing and distribution costs, online music was supposed to usher in a new era of inexpensive, easy-to-access music for consumers. In many cases, buying music online is still cheaper than shopping for CDs at retail outlets. But just a year after iTunes debuted with its 99-cent songs and mostly $9.99 albums, that affordable and straightforward pricing structure is already under pressure.

Which means that raising download prices means even fatter profit margins rolling back into the record companies. NOT rolling back to any artists though, or at least only indirectly. You just had to know that the freaking rip-off artists at the major record companies, who came to legalize downloading years too late, would somehow find a way to screw this up to. If lower prices for legal downloads (lower relative to physical CD costs) were starting to offset illegal file-sharing piracy and starting to create new growth for legal music sales, this kind of thinking will only kill the growth genie and reignite the fire under illegal file-sharing.

The article does allow how some music industry people think that raising prices at this time is a mistake.

That growth is why some in the industry are uncomfortable with the talk of price increases. Most music-company executives believe that the download market is still in a critical early-growth stage, which could be disrupted by raising prices. "For us right now the issue is not, 'Do we make another $300,000 by raising the price 5 cents?"' says a music company executive. "It's making sure the market grows."

ARRRGGGHH! Even with legal downloading, I think the business model of the record industry is broken in fundamental ways. There's going to be a lot more disruption before things settle down in the music biz.

The Big Picture: CD Sales Rise as Economy Recovers

The Big Picture: CD Sales Rise as Economy Recovers

The economy slows, CD sales slow. The economy recovers, CD sales recover.

If I am going too fast for you with this complex and sophisticated economic argument, please let me know.

Barry Ritholtz has a good post on music industry sales/revenue (link courtesy of BusinessPundit). It's a little surprising to see the data that shows music sales recovering right along with the rest of the economy. You'd think after all we've heard over the past couple of years about how file-sharing was killing the music industry that the impact of the economic cycle had been cancelled for the music industry, but think again. Despite that, as Barry points out, CD revenues are tracking closely to the overall economy. So maybe those nasty p2p guys aren't all to blame after all - maybe it's also disintegrating retail distribution channels, crappy music, rotten pricing models, rotten licensing models, technology eroding traditional industry economics...and maybe also a crappy economy.

Economic cycle or not, I do think that the music industry is caught in a "perfect storm" that they are desperately trying to hold off (or ignore). But the whole music industry is in the process of being disrupted, like it or not.

Part of the problem in the music industry is the focus on home runs. Or has Ritholtz says:

A large part of CD sales is that the music industry remains wed to a "superstar" business model. Despite the fact that consumers are demanding ever more diverse music in increasingly narrow genres, we see a continued overdependence upon a small number of artists producing the lion's share of sales. This model --more suitable for the film industry than music -- is vulnerable anytime there are weak offerings. That's the risk when only a handful of artists become the main beneficiaries of the ever more consolidated radio industry's limited playlists:

There are really two problems in the preceding quote - one is the focus on building the next megahit and the other is the problem of homogenized radio playlists (thank you, Clear Channel et al.). I'm no expert, but those seem to me to be related. I think there's a big opportunity to give the fans who follow all of the myriad of niche music markets (e.g. blues, bluegrass, cajun, zydeco, celtic, gospel, etc.) ways to follow (and buy from) their favorite artists while at the same providing ways for those artists to take their music to the market either just for listening or for sale/licensing.

Ritholtz goes on to worry...

The question now remains whether the industry and the RIAA will continue its ruinous course of litigation and self destruction. As the industry alienates its customers, they risk losing an entire generation of music fans. "Some experts and users say that file sharers are only being more secretive, and that file swapping is actually increasing. At least two research firms say more than 150 million songs are being downloaded free every month."

Young consumers are increasingly turning to other forms of entertainment --the internet, video games, and music DVDs. The industry should expect to see additional negative reactions, including boycotts and consumers increasingly seeking alternatives to mainstream fare, as they react to the music self inflicted foibles.

The danger is the industry may be alienating an entire generation of music fans. Once lost, these fans will be gone forever.

I'm not so worried that the music industry's self-destructive actions will drive an entire generation away from music. I think that's unlikely. I do think that their behavior is helping to make both established music fans and younger fans even more ready for alternatives to "big music". We're already seeing such alternative emerge (for example, check out Magnatune, the self-described "open music label"). I think we'll see more in the near future.

Road trip report - Stax Museum of American Soul Music

After several days in New Orleans my travels took me to Memphis. I spent a couple of days there visiting my brother-in-law and waiting for my wife to arrive and join up with the road trip. While there I took the opportunity to visit the (relatively) new Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

The Stax Museum is located on the site of the original Stax recording studio. It's in the middle of a residential neighborhood on the south side of Memphis. I really enjoyed the museum and found that I spent quite a bit more time there than I had anticipated. I highly recommend it for anyone visiting Memphis and anyone interested in the history of American popular music in the second half of the 20th century.

The museum tour opens with a 20 minute or so film (this seems to be a real trend - I've noticed a lot of newer museums sending people through an opening film that sets the stage for the tour of the museum - the National D-Day Museum is set up exactly the same way) which was informative and enjoyable. Of course it would be hard to not be enjoyable with all that great music to use as a starting point. Then the museum tour starts with an exploration of the roots of the great R&B/soul music recorded at Stax by talking about the Mississippi delta region that fed Memphis with the gospel and blues traditions. It then moved into the early days of the Stax record company, and then continued to jointly explore the evolution of Stax records as a business and of the artists and music recorded at Stax.

The music from Stax/Volt was always my favorite American music of that period in the mid to late 60s and into the early 70s - led by Otis Redding and Sam & Dave and Booker T. The Stax/Volt artists - along with James Brown - were to me the epitome of soul music and of great American R&B. I mean, I always enjoyed some of the Motown acts (how could you not love the Temptations), and Atlantic had their own stable of great artists - Aretha, Aretha, Aretha - but the Stax/Volt sound just seemed so much more elemental and driving to me. Of course, what the hell did I know - a white kid from Ohio and Indiana. But I loved that music.

What I didn't know was so much of the story behind it. While it was obvious even back in the day that one difference with Stax was the multi-racial element - you couldn't miss Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn backing up Otis or Sam & Dave - I didn't realize that the entire Stax company story was as integrated as it was. Of course, that eventually ended after the assassination of Dr. King in Memphis, but in the early days the sounds flowing out of Stax were the product of an integrated team of folks on both the artistic and the business side. I'm not sure what, if anything, that had to do with the differences in the Stax sound, but retrospectively it's an element of the Stax story that I find interesting.

If you love music and enjoy music museums like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland or the Music Experience in Seattle, I think you'll find a trip to Soulsville, U.S.A. to be worth your while.