From ir767@cleveland.Freenet.Edu Mon Jan 6 14:41:59 1997 Date: Sat, 28 Dec 1996 11:25:48 -0500 (EST) From: Stan Zylowski To: asv@sai.msu.su Subject: Web Music Just thought i would send you some interesting comments made by todd rundgren regarding the future of music and the web. peredai privet pivnomu baru v konkova _________________________________________________________________ What does the Future hold for the Music Industry? Here is Todd Rundgren's Visionary Comments delivered at the recent Musicom2 Conference Musicom2 Conference Transcript -- by [3]Karen Pals, Reseda, CA Todd Rundgren spoke at the Musicom2 artist panel in Santa Monica, California on December 9, 1996. Ted Cohen from Philips Media introduced the panel which included Thomas Dolby Robertson (formerly known as Thomas Dolby), [4]Todd Rundgren and Phil Ramone (producer of Billy Joel, Barbra Streisand and Luciano Pavarotti). ******************************** Dolby, the moderator of the panel, asked for a response regarding "Who are you beholden to in the music industry? What is your relationship with your audience? What are the channels to get your music out to them?" Following are Todd's response to these questions and other comments he made during the panel: *********************************\ TR: I've been involved in the long term divestiture of my previous obligations to the traditional record business which is actually pretty painful. You get addicted to these constant infusions of money and start to forget about the other elements of the system until you're forced to confront the fact that, particularly for an artist like myself, there is an element of entropy in the business. You can only be new once. You may be allowed a comeback but, of course, you have to go away to have a comeback and I never went far enough away to have a comeback. Four or five years ago, I realized I was stuck in this entropic system and had to do something about it. I started visualizing at that time (the Web was not a factor) what the different things are which you can do with the experience of a disc. I first started changing the way people could address the music. Now there are different media for delivering the music as well. This opens up what I believe is the ultimate evolution of that process which is moving from being in the business of selling things to getting into the business of selling a relationship. If you're making a traditional record there's a huge amount of disconnection between you and the audience because by the time you finish the record, there's still going to be 3-6 months of preparation and slotting it into the release schedule. The audience has a relationship with the record store or the radio station or MTV, the vehicles by which they find out what you are doing, but their relationship to the artist has not evolved over all this time. As of the end of 1996, I will have divested myself of all my previous obligations. Then I'm going to start basing my future survival upon a direct relationship with the people who listen to the music. I'm going to offer myself for subscription to them. What that allows me to do is to deliver as I create and it also allows the audience to realize they are enabling me to create. They are committing themselves to me up front, which I don't think is unreasonable from the audience standpoint. A lot of people feel loyalties toward certain artists. But if they had to pay now for an album they would receive 2 years from now, I don't think that would work. I think the essence of the relationship is that they get a window into the creative process -- a window into where my head is at musically now. That becomes the valuable thing because I won't be offering just one version of a song. It's not as if I will break an album into 10 songs and offer one this month and another next month. What I want to do is have a clear flow of creativity to the audience that enables me to say, "What about this way? What about that way?" or "I just came up with another couple of verses for this song" or "A friend of mine came in and decided to jam on this song, how about that?". Ultimately, this would result in delivering to the audience far more than would fit on a CD and allowing them to decide how much of it they want. It's no longer a question of selling a finite element: a disc or even a piece of sheet music. It's selling a relationship to people and this is completely different than the model that the business is based on now. The biggest problem with the current record industry model is inventory. The reason people succeed or fail is mostly because of inventory management, making exactly the right number of discs to meet demand. With a subscription-based and direct delivery system like this, you know exactly what the demand is up front. The demand can only increase as time goes on. So I have come around to the realization that I'm not trying to sell product to people. I'm trying to form a relationship with people, one in which they are my patrons, rather than the record company underwriting what I do. The people who listen to the music directly underwrite what I do. That's the exciting new thing from my standpoint. A lot of people don't know why the music business is the way it is. They were not privy to all of the evolutionary elements that caused it to become what it is. The first element is the legitimation of the album format, moving from the single format, to the album format, being the most important form. The Beatles did that for music by taking that format far more seriously than other artists did. So people started to think more in terms of the longer form than the short form. But the unfortunate thing that happened after that in the early 70's was that as an industry, the music business thought, "Market analysis works for cereal and soap, why wouldn't it work for us?" So they came up with the Arbitron rating system. They took a cross-sectional audience and sat them down and record companies would send records they were going to release to Arbitron. Then Arbitron would send them back a number representing the likelihood of success based on people sitting there turning dials and galvanic skin response just as they would use to evaluate a commercial or some other product, or the likely success of a movie by doing test marketing. This had an effect on the kind of music that got produced, which artists got signed and it narrowed the scope of music down to specific trends. How did something like disco, something that wasn't necessarily meant to be listened to, come to dominate so heavily what music was about? It was all about market analysis. The other unfortunate thing that happened was "Frampton Comes Alive". Previous to that, there was no such thing as a multiplatinum selling album. When that happened, other corporate entities aside from record companies became interested in the music business. The music business became this Gold Rush thing. Gulf & Western started buying up companies and they also started determining which artists would and wouldn't get signed. Somebody in a central accounting office somewhere looked at the bottom line of the record company and said, "Van Morrison, losing money, drop him". That heavily affected which music was made. Another thing that happened was that the way music was listened to changed because of devices like the Sony Walkman. The audience's attitude became, "Music is supposed to service me, I don't submit to the music, the music submits to me. It goes where I go and I copy the songs I want off a CD and take them around with me while I jog or I'm on the subway or I do aerobics." So, generally, we had that reverence for music in the 60's, partly because of the mechanism of listening, because if you wanted to have a personal listening experience, you had to go home to do it. Often, you made special time for that. Now the music can follow you anywhere you want so music is meant to accommodate you. It's gone from building up to this album form, peaking with the so-called mythological masterpiece, the blockbuster such as "Thriller". You can say the entire music industry peaked in this phase with "Thriller" and has been on a downward slope ever since, moving toward fragmentation into smaller pieces again. Classical music was all about the vitality of music as an evolutionary form. Before we had recordings, there wasn't one way to perform music -- it always changed. Every conductor who joined the orchestra had their own idea about how this piece should be performed. They would do it differently. This is the basis on which audiences and critics compared them. It wasn't until we had musical recordings that the idea of a musical albatross came up. The attitude became, "I want to hear this song exactly the way it was on the record". Making records is an arbitrary process of closure. You could spend your entire life making a record. You could say "I could change that a little bit", but if you've got a release date coming up, you've just got to stop some time and you finish it. That doesn't mean that's as far as the music could have gone. It just means you had to stop there, press it onto disc and release it. But that's as good as saying that's as far as the music's going. So now we're starting to say the music can be constantly recontextualized. We can add new verses and choruses to it. It's not a question of technological or economic limitation anymore. The only stumbling block is restoring the attitude in the audience that they have a right to hear music evolve. Rather than to hear only this so-called blockbuster finished product. (audience claps) The priorities of the record company which are pretty much defined by the demographic taste of the audience, and the priorities of the artist, are never going to be in sync except for a very small handful of artists. Artists are looking for a way to survive for the rest of their life on what they do but the problem is that the people in the lower echelons of the record company, the local promotion people and such, are turning over, they are becoming a younger audience who want music they identify with as well. They can't go into a radio station and pretend to be excited about someone who's been around 25 years and is not part of their generation. You are only going to be valuable to the record company within a certain window anyway. The record company either out of guilt or precedent, may string you out, until they finally cut you off, but you want to be doing this for the rest of your life. You're almost obligated to build a relationship with other people who are going to grow old with you and support you no matter how old you get. The model has to change. Even if record companies wanted to, they can't force audiences to change their buying patterns. They can't force people 35 years old to start going out and buying records. The question is always whether the artists themselves are capable of taking responsibility for building the relationship because in the music business, there's no denying it, it's a feckless business. There are people who get into it for reasons having nothing to do with the love of music. When any business starts making that much money, you're going to have people who are just looking for the money. Anyone who's unwilling to build a relationship with the audience won't be able to sustain one of these more ongoing relationships. The traditional economics of the record industry is completely upside down. The record company and the people they deal with get 80-85% of the cost of the music and the artist gets the tiny bit at the other end. You can completely reverse that by subscription or direct delivery. When you know what the size of the audience is, the infrastructure is the smallest part of it. The artist is getting more, so a broader range of artists can survive on smaller audiences. Then there are more artists living off the fruits of their musical labor than is possible in the old system because there's a certain critical mass you have to reach. For artists who aren't willing to build a relationship with people on that basis, they won't get the loyalty that will accrue any kind of money at all. They need the old-fashioned hype, glitz and glamour and obfuscatory stuff that hides the fact that they don't much care about the audience. What they care about islooking cool, getting money or hanging out with other rock stars. Dolby says (and Todd repeats): Which is good. (audience laughs) But the audience doesn't get the benefit of that. They only get the benefit of your music. There are artists for whom it will be far more difficult to build and hold an audience based on a real relationship between them. For them, there's another alternative. We're not trying to squeeze them out of the business. There's always room for the feckless. There's always a K-MART or bargain basement. There's always shoddy stuff that falls apart in a year so it can be replaced by other stuff. We've got to keep people employed you know. (audience laughs) The other alternative is middlemen who package the work of others. They don't own or produce content but they are astute about content and they can recontextualize content into something that will match the audience. There will always be a feckless audience as well as feckless artists. The middlemen match them up. The audience and the artists still have no loyalty to each other but they develop a loyalty to that middleman which is what a record company is right now. The artist has loyalty because the record company has paid for that loyalty and the audience has loyalty because the record company has developed a mechanism which convinces the audience they are being delivered something they want through the constant promotion and glamorization of artists, whether the music is good or not. The idea of the middleman is also an important concept not just for music that may not win a loyal audience but also for people who have a loyal audience but want to be able to maximize the distribution of their music or find a new audience. You've got to do that through middlemen people will grow to trust to deliver music of a certain character or quality. There's a way to promote on the Web just like there's a way to promote outside the Web. This is an ideal time to do it. It may not always be like this but the Web is driving so much conventional media that if you do it right on the Web, you've got a lot of free publicity. New things have to be publicized. You have to latch onto middlemen who are credible sources. It used to be there weren't program directors at radio stations. Program directors now don't even pick the records they play. They look at a format sheet that says who's playing what somewhere and they tick off things. They don't even have to listen to the records anymore. The djs play what they are told. Loyalty in radio is not to the audience, it's to the advertisers. A radio station will change its format in a minute if its major advertiser tells it, "We're interested in this other audience." The credible middleman who is represented by, for example, the WPLJ dj, has to enjoy a renaissance as well. An example would be a record label that has credibility like Verve, Atlantic or Elektra where you know that every artist on these has something worthwhile to say, and may even characterize the genre they're working in. Verve is jazz, Elektra is folk and Atlantic is R & B. All these are helpful in connecting up audiences and artists. The new artist will have to take advantage of those things that are unique to the 'Net now and that actually are cheaper and in some ways more effective than conventional promotion. A year from now I may have a different attitude. There's a lot you can do right now. So many people involved in Internet commerce just want everybody else to succeed. It's one of those rare times. The people who are doing battle are the people who've got the sound streaming plug-ins. But everybody else wants the idea of commerce on the Web to succeed. They want someone to go out and prove a model that works so everybody else can adopt it. It's a great time to try to break something new on the Web. I believe there was a "Time" article which said there have been bands where at least that initial wedge into a greater audience came through the Web. It's not that difficult right now but it may get more crowded as time goes on. Also, American and Anglo cultures recently have gone through a difficult period, an extremely cynical period. The hip music press, Spin magazine and others have tried to help promulgate the myth that all music is crap, and that all musicians are feckless. The interesting thing is to watch them go through their contortions -- they don't care that much about the music. It's so interesting what they do, almost like lab rats. We have an opportunity with the new medium to restore the myth of quality. You could promote a band by saying, "Yeah, they're good, and if they found the support, they could go on as long as possible, continuing to improve and make good music rather than being just this week's flavor." Which is what has become interesting to the conventional music press. The conventional music press has no interest in the longevity of artists because they are addicted to this idea of newness and being a smart-aleck about it and being so damn hip because they know that the artists who are hip this year are going to be gone next year. Why should an audience have confidence in the music business and the seriousness of artists in their attempt to communicate with them unless the industry as a whole has that attitude? We've played along with this for a long time -- that the only way to make music is to pretend you don't know how to make music, that this is the only way to be valid. It's nearly impossible for preexisting record labels to make a commitment to delivery through the 'Net because of their relationship to retailers, the brick and mortar stores who are the ones who have the most to lose in this whole process. There still will be record companies who underwrite the expenses of producing, promoting and marketing music no matter in what form it comes. The problem is if record companies start to direct market to people, it pisses off Blockbuster and all these others. They say, "Wait a minute, you're cutting out our customers and reducing our business by direct marketing to them." The element that has to be replaced electronically is that brick and mortar record store before anybody like Atlantic or Warner can make a full commitment to direct or electronic delivery. This is the middleman component. There has to be a Web component that is Tower Records or Blockbuster on the Web to broker music. Those who buy expensive music here, cheap music here, put it together into a reasonably priced package that's appealing to consumers, and compete that way, but the economics of doing that is different. The hope of many record labels, the reason why so many of the artists' fortunes were connected, not necessarily directly, but to the success of, for example, a Michael Jackson release, was that record retailers realized that the first problem is getting people into the store. They need a giant blockbuster release every now and then to get people into the store. Once they're in the store, maybe they'll buy two records -- some other record they didn't necessarily come in for but they've got a little more income to do that. If there are still brick and mortar stores, they will evolve to be a repository for a lot of CD-Rs (recordable CDs). The store will be just a place where you go in and say, "I want these songs. I don't have my own CD-R machine. You make me a disc." They won't have records anymore because the essential problem of the record business is inventory. You don't know how many discs to press. Unlike almost any other product, it costs you money both ways. It costs money to get the record out to the end of the distribution chain and if it doesn't sell, there are returns, and you have to pay to pass it back up the distribution chain. It's a waste of money, gasoline, paper and plastic. It's a completely wasteful system. We have to more completely tailor that initial wedge into a greater audience came through the Web. It's not that difficult right now but it may get more crowded as time goes on. [12]New Media Services [13]DigArtz.com [14]DigArtz.com [15]Sheryl in Bosnia [16]DigArtz.com [17]DirecTv Links [18]Downloads [19]DigArtz.com [20]Click Center [21]We Use PageTunes! We Use [22]PageTunes by [23]DigArtz.com -- /\ /\ o o (**) deeply meaningless --LAA05391.851789594/kanga.INS.CWRU.Edu-- -- /\ /\ o o (**) deeply meaningless