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Royalty Battle Royale Round Two
Another battle has touched off in Washington DC between different facets of the music industry over royalty rates, again with the additional impetus of those on the emerging new media side of the business. This time, however, the issue is over mechanical royalties and has one very interesting alliance. The Digital Media association (DiMA), a trade group consisting of various companies involved in the delivery of online content, often in new interactive formats like the internet radio station Pandora, has teamed up with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to lobby for lowering the rates.
What is so interesting about this alliance is that just last year SoundExchange (formerly part of the RIAA) lobbied hard for and won heavy increases in the royalty rates to be paid by internet radio. In doing so, SoundExchange and the RIAA fought hard against DiMA and several representative bodies of the internet radio community to raise their royalty rates to a level that would have put most stations out of business, all in the name of artists getting their fair share. Now that the issue at hand is mechanical royalties, and these come out of the labels’ earnings from albums, the RIAA doesn’t seem so keen on standing up for fair artist compensation. It seems the RIAA members are fine with people adding money to their pocket in the name of paying artists, but not so fine with people taking money from them for the same noble cause.
For those of you unfamiliar with royalties for the record industry, the process works like many others, with a label collecting revenue from album sales and then guiding it along to its next path while always taking a cut of the pie. The labels distribute the royalties from album sales, typically making payment to a publisher who takes 50% and guides the other 50% to the songwriter. While the royalty fees mandated are statutory, the law allows labels to negotiate a lower rate in many instances. Usually if the songwriter and the performer are the same, the label negotiates a lower mechanical rate, generally 75% of the statutory rate. Not only that, but the record label shaves off all kinds of percentages here and there for things like breakage (a problem back in the days of vinyl-only distribution) that are no longer issues, and packaging, of which the percentage deducted is often way more than actual cost. This is all before the label takes back the money for recording advances, touring, music videos, etc., but that is a discussion all on its own.
The Summer of One Million Festivals
It’s hard for me to fully appreciate Woodstock. The event may have been in New York, but the place that encapsulated the times and context in which Woodstock took place, San Francisco, is the city I call home. Yet I don’t feel, being just shy of 30, that I can ever really understand what it meant at the time, any more than I could understand Monterey Pop or the Newport Folk Festival.
No matter how many books I read about those times, no matter how many people I hear bear witness, I can never really understand them. Locked up in those music festivals is the spirit of those times. And while I may never understand, I think I get the musical aspect, the very glue that bound those times together.
Thoughts on the XM and Sirius Merger
Last week the Department of Justice announced that it was closing its investigations into the proposed merger between the two sole satellite radio providers in North America: XM and Sirius. The DOJ declined to oppose the merger on the grounds that it would harm competition. The week before, the former Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter, announced on the Howard Stern Show, of all places, that the FCC would likely rule on the merger by the end of the month.
In what has become a sign of the constantly-evolving field, satellite radio providers are being seen not as competitors with each other, but rather as competitors with the various other platforms wishing to be the vehicle of choice for delivering music content to consumers. The combined entity proposes to keep separate subscriptions for existing and future members while eventually rolling out a combination of both services, which would require new receivers to come on to the market. According to Sirius CEO and merger brain-child Mel Karmazin, there is currently only one such receiver in existence, and it’s in his office.
Industry vs. Academia: Part 2
Education and research institutions in North America have become temples of specialization. The process of dividing the world into distinct areas of observation and understanding may have found its beginnings in 18th century Scotland, but it was in America’s great technological upheaval known as the Industrial Revolution that such specialization found its home. It is no coincidence then that one of the earliest disciplines created by the 18th century Scottish pioneers is perhaps the most inaccessible disciple to inquiring minds from the outside. In 1776, as the American Revolution was being ignited, a moral philosopher at the University of Edinburgh invented the field of economics with a very literary account of how aggregate wealth is created. Such is the lucidity of Adam Smith’s account that it is still a source of insight to regain one’s bearings in the field of what, in his own time, came to be called “political economy.” Its mathematical complexity is rivaled only by physics, making its leading edge inaccessible to the laymen.
I am thinking about this particular inaccessibility after reading this week’s news that CD sales have slipped downward (18.8 percent) for yet another year and that Nielson SoundScan is still asserting that some of the decline is attributable to “illegal file-sharing.” There have been several studies proving this wrong. There are many theories as to why album sales have declined, taking the legacy record industry along with it. There is no study proving an exact reason for the decline, and there will probably never need to be; some adductive reasoning is all it takes to decipher the cause. Read some of my former rants if you need a refresher on my opinion. Basically, the reasons all fall under the umbrella of illegal file-sharing. The industry has put resources into fighting against file-sharing at the expense of devoting resources to adapting its business model to a changing market.
A Banner Year for the Music Industry
So I have a confession to make: when the ever-so-patient editors at Crawdaddy! asked me to write a year-end column summing the events of the year I said, “Sure, no problem.” No sooner had I agreed then I wondered, “Wait, what do I have to say that matters, and who really cares?” It dawned on me that the only things I ever write about here are rants on the state of the music business. It had never really occurred to me before that I’ve been focusing exclusively on such a narrow subject.
I realized my raison d’etre here may be to provide quick insights with carefully metered usage of the word fuck throughout so as to seem above the fray. Being the smart-ass in discussing the demise of an industry that was responsible (more than any other industry) for bridging youth culture from around the world (pop culture in its original connotation), was never really my intention. The topics are interesting to me, for sure, and the players involved are easy enough to take a jab at—but the subject matter is actually pretty serious.
Industry vs. Academia: Part 1
There are some things in this world that defy the most basic… Jesus, I don’t know what to call it… childlike reasoning ability? You know, those rare moments when no matter how base and simple you make an argument, a truism even, the receiver just can’t seem to wrap their head around it? It’s the sort of thing that makes a person’s blood boil in a way that few things will ever do. If you think about it, it’s rather rare to encounter such a display of ignorance or stubbornness… well, okay, the last seven years of the Bush administration aside.
For me, the only people that have displayed a more potent mix of ignorance and stubbornness than those in charge of our executive branch of government are the big players responsible for pressing our CDs. Thing is, they’ve been persisting in their folly for a couple extra years. Anyone who follows the business and technology side of the music industry knows that the need for change was brought on from the outside, first by the mp3, and then Napster. There was never any good evidence that the sharing of files over the internet actually harmed the record industry, but it should have been apparent to the powers that be that the new technology should have been investigated to find a way to monetize it.
OiNK Goes Down
Middlesbrough, England is a small city that resides in a borough of the same name in northeast England. The borough, with a total population of just fewer than 135,000, ranks as the 131st most populous government district in England, and its entire metropolitan area ranks 35th, just after Oxford. Leaving Middlesbrough heading north, one passes through less than a handful of small towns before reaching the Newcastle area, and further on the Scottish abyss. Heading due south yields nothing but farms and national forests. The two most prevalent facts about Middlesbrough that turn up upon a quick search are that it’s the first town in the world to be established as the result of a railway, and that British TV station Channel 4 conducted a poll that found Middlesbrough the “worst place to live in 2007.” Other than its latest distinction, that is…
On the dreary northern English morning of October 23, 2007, police raided the Middlesbrough home of Alan Ellis. The 24-year-old Ellis was the creator of the BitTorrent site OiNK’s Pink Palace, usually referred to as simply, OiNK. OiNK was a private BitTorrent Tracker site devoted exclusively to music file sharing. In short, BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing technology that is based around a server hosting a torrent file. The torrent file is uploaded to a hosting server by a member and explains where the initial uploader’s computer is located and where the file referenced by the torrent file is contained. From there, users can download the file from the initial uploader’s computer. After downloading a part of the intended file, a downloader begins to upload the parts of the file he has already received to newly connected users, thus increasing the efficiency at which the files can be downloaded, all without hosting the file on a centralized server.
Even Pirates Have Their Day
We live in interesting times. It used to be that as one began to feel their age tugging from behind—which became ever more noticeable as the march of life progressed forward—one would also notice a chasm between themselves and the generations that were following in the distance. This is the result of the modern condition of a constantly changing world. Progress, I believe, is what they call it. Only today it doesn’t take a generation’s worth of change to separate people’s understandings of the world. It happens much quicker.
Just a few years ago, the media in this country talked of climate change as a curiosity, a theory that some were just beginning to explore, if they mentioned it at all. A few short years later, it is a central topic of the times, and we understand that if we don’t do something drastic now, we may not be able to inhabit this planet for much longer. We have utterly failed to adapt our understanding of the state of things to the new realities brought to light by advancements in technology. Perhaps no industry on the business side of things has failed to do the same more than the music business.
Two Gallants
Two Gallants
Two Gallants
(Saddle Creek, 2007)
From the very first time I gave Two Gallants’ new, eponymous album a listen, I loved it from start to finish. It’s the third LP from the San Francisco two-piece that consists of Adam Stevens on guitar and Tyson Vogel on drums. The two have never really been able to accurately capture their sound on a recording. Stevens admits: “Recording’s something I still don’t really have a lot of faith in, to be honest. It’s this thing you do because you want people to hear your music who can’t, and you want some sort of permanence to be left behind in case you die tomorrow.” Vogel echoes this sentiment: “What drives me and what drives both of us to do what we do is not recording. I think recording is one of the most awkward spaces for us really.” On this album, however, they found a producer willing to help them craft their sound in the studio, giving us an album that captures the organic sound and feel that their live performances are known for.
The 2G’s recorded sound has presented difficulty for some, hiding unrefined yet complex accompaniments that they pair with powerful and emotionally loaded lyrics. Having spent some time with them on tour has perhaps helped me to understand the perspective of two young and talented musicians who dropped out of school to give professional musicianship a go while still in their teens. They spend more time on the road then any band I’ve known, having done two full U.S. tours this summer alone and multiple stints in Europe. Now they are on the road again in support of this album. Spending all that time on the road, reading everything from Nietzsche to Camus, they seem to take what they see of the world and use their own reflection to churn out lyrics that vividly express their translation of it all.
Songs such as “Miss Meri” echo American life observed while spending endless time on the road: “To all my so-called country men who bless this stolen ground / Is Jesus gonna pick you up when your hunger weighs you down?” and “Way out on the open plains / Men pave beneath the sun / The great suburban dawn / If you build it they will come.” My second favorite track,“The Hand That Held Me Down”, bemoans the burden shouldered by someone once abandoned, “And ever since your epitaph was splattered on my wall / No one comes to call they can’t stand the stench / But I still sing your praises every time the curtain calls / The burden on me falls / Yes, I alone stand at your defense.” The first single from the album, “Despite What You’ve Been Told”, is an up-tempo tale of self-deprecation: “I should climb down off my rugged cross / And lay with you / But you know by now it’s half past late / And I only came here for escape / You, you’re just my next mistake / Like me to you / You know you could be anyone / God forgive your unborn sons / I hope they don’t end up like me.” After spending a month listening, however, “Ribbons Round my Tongue” has become my favorite song.
The Two Gallants are often misunderstood. Their bookishness and propensity for obscure traditional American music over whatever is currently hip alienates some, but therein lies the substance of their music and lyrics. Stevens admits: “The main source is ignorance. Writing from a totally uneducated, blind perspective. That’s where the strongest things come from. The more I’ve tried to keep some sort of education going while being on tour, which is sort of impossible… reading, keeping up with what’s going on in the world… I realize the more I learn, the less I seem to have a connection with my immediate thoughts. It’s just about your ability to be totally conscious about what’s being put upon you. It’s like the greatest pieces of literature are books, things that remind you of yourself, because they touch that thing in your soul. And that’s the kind of thing, when I first started writing songs, that was what I felt like I was most tapped into.”
I can see how the folks over at Pitchfork may graze this one again, hearing it, but not getting it. They’ll continue to worship at the alter of Chuck Klosterman while decreeing that the Two Gallants seem to be looking through a window that yields a landscape from a century prior, and is thus irrelevant. But they’ll again be missing the point. While likely wishing for the musical equivalent of more contemporary literary sensations like Augusten Burroughs or Charles Bukowski, they’ll fail to grasp it’s Walt Whitman, not to mention one of the year’s best albums.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
On the Horizon: The Future of the Record Label
by: Jason Thomas
The common thread that binds those of us who span those generations is the music, the soundtrack to our lives. And there’s a decent chance that most of us have a healthy respect for the music adored by those in generations not our own. Where we differ dramatically, however, is how we all discovered and acquired those works of art that so helped shape our everyday lives. The companies that were the original entities who produced and made available music since the phenomenon of popular culture are still around, but they are failing miserably and no longer seem relevant to those of us, well… those of us likely to read this column.
Many people from the earlier generations could often just listen to the radio to find solid rock ‘n’ roll, and even for those on the hipper side of the fence there existed a large and hardly secretive counterculture that was prone to gathering at large music festivals where underground community thrived. Those from the middle generations grew up skeptical, battered by disco, put off by Reagan, and possibly driven insane by what new wave was shaped into by the mainstream. Driven to college radio and hanging out in local record stores, you likely found yourself eagerly awaiting EPs and LPs ordered from distant towns to show up in the mailbox, the feeling of opening each sleeve an indescribable sensation. For those of us who remain consummate seekers of music in a post-Napster world we have to only look to that magical network of fiber-optic cable that leads us to Blogland. We almost never purchase music, and if we do, we increasingly expect neat little files to be delivered to our desktops.
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by: Jason Thomas
published: July 23, 2008
in column: The Smoke-Filled Room
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