I recently heard the term “cruel optimism” used on a podcast, and I decided to learn a little bit about it. It was coined by the late cultural theorist Lauren Berlant to describe when people form attachments to beliefs, objects, or relationships that are ultimately detrimental to their well-being.
Frequently, people become attached to a particular vision of the future, a desired outcome or way of life, even when it is unlikely to be achieved or may be actively harmful. This attachment creates a sense of optimism that becomes “cruel” when the desired outcome is not achieved, or when the pursuit of it leads to harm or disappointment.
For example, someone might be optimistic about their career prospects as a musician, writer, filmmaker, dancer, basketball player, or college professor, despite the limited job opportunities in these fields, and then continue pursuing their career goal for many years. As their optimistic vision of the future is not realized, it becomes increasingly “cruel,” sucking the positivity and joy from their life, hindering their ability to adapt to changing circumstances, and blinding them to alternative sources of meaning and satisfaction.
By Apple, Inc. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
I was on Facebook earlier today and came across the comment below from Tim Quirk. It’s apparently about Apple’s new streaming music service, which is slated to launch later this year. Tim’s a musician and has also spent time working at Rhapsody and Google Music, amongst other places.
WHO’s telling you to listen is far, far less important than WHAT they tell you to listen to. Also, GETTING you to actually listen.
Reading the comments underneath Tim’s post, I came to understand that it related to his criticism of what he asserted was the personality-based approach that Apple seems to be using with its new service.
One commenter, Jamie Dolling, asserted that the new service was as much about “personality as it is about music,” and worried that this approach couldn’t help but “poison the water.”
Subsequently, Jon Maples, a digital music consultant formerly of Rhapsody, indicated that it was the same..old…’human music curation’ approach without any understanding of what the listener actually wants.”
I started adding my own comment on that post, but as its length ballooned it seemed to be morphing into a blog post. So I moved over here.
Anyway, here’s my take on this stuff.
As Tim correctly points out, getting listeners to break out of their default is the challenge, because most listeners just want to keep listening to the stuff they are already familiar with (and consume the same products over and over again as well).
To my mind, personality-based approaches to marketing and publicity can be one way to accomplish that goal. Even if there’s an element of bullshit, snake oil to it, they wouldn’t still be using it if personality-based publicity and marketing didn’t sell shit.
For many people, who is telling you to listen/buy is inextricably bound up in what they are telling you to consume. That’s the whole point. It’s a gestalt experience.
The further you move to the right in the diffusion curve on anything new, the less likely consumers are to use their own research and judgment when making buying decisions. These people are much more likely to look to trusted people (opinion leaders) for signals about what choices to make.
This is not a new thing. It’s as old as consumer capitalism (or actually even older still). And while I pride myself on doing my own research on lots of stuff and making my own decisions, there’s lots of other stuff where I just don’t care enough to do that. I want somebody else to point me to an answer that is good enough (or better still, great). The whole point of doing that is that I don’t know what good is, so I can’t really effectively evaluate the quality of the thing being recommended. If I could, I wouldn’t need somebody else’s advice.
So the personality/trustworthiness of the person making the recommendation is extremely important. It becomes a proxy for the knowledge I lack about the thing being recommended, because, rightly or wrongly, I do feel comfortable evaluating what I think about the person doing the recommending.
The logic goes something like this. I don’t trust my judgment about what cool clothes are. This person over there seems to be a person who I think is cool and has on cool clothes (or at least a person who I understand from their reputation is supposed to be cool and wearing cool clothes). Therefore, their judgment about cool clothes is probably better than mine. So I’ll see what they think I should wear, and moving forward I’ll look to them for more clues and cues on that subject.
Unlike data driven metrics, this isn’t just about figuring out what I want. It can also be about creating a new want, because while I may know what I think I want, I may not actually know what I want all the time. Data driven metrics may do a good job of figuring out what I think I want right now or even what I might want based on what I have wanted in the past, but they don’t do such a good job of determining what I don’t know that I want right now but what I might nevertheless want in the future if it was put in front of me in the right way. The right sort of charismatic curator/opinion leader has the ability to do that.
For many people, music is something they are unsure about. It’s also something where they don’t want to have to filter through all the noise to get to the signal. They like having music around. They also know that what music they like says something about them, so there’s something at stake there beyond just the hedonistic experience of consuming the music.
But in many cases, they just want to be pointed towards some good stuff. If liking this good stuff also seems to help make them seem a little bit less uncool, well, even better. Because in 2015, nobody wants to seem uncool, not even middle-aged people like me. Indeed, seeming/feeling less uncool may be just as important–or even more important–than liking what has been recommended.
So yes, Apple’s new music service is a publicity/marketing platform. And yes it appears to be personality-based. That’s because the biggest objection that the music industry seems to have about many of the other streaming platforms is this:
They may deliver a good user experience to certain users, but despite many assertions to the contrary, they have not yet proven themselves to be particularly good marketing/publicity platforms for companies trying to focus demand on a limited slate of new releases (the only way to generate the kind of cash they need to stay in business long-term). They can service demand when it arises. But they don’t drive demand or significantly shape it.
Moreover, to the extent that these services create new wants in people, the want pattern is much more diffuse than in the old system. So the old-line music industry is still trying to find a marketing/publicity platform that looks and works more like terrestrial radio did in the glory days, because that was a great platform for focusing demand on a limited slate of new releases. It had a focused want pattern.
It’s a fair criticism to say that trying to find that sort of platform is a pipe dream. That we’re in a new reality now, and the desire for that sort of platform reflects an unwillingness to get with the times. But there remain very practical reasons why that sort of platform would still be useful to the music business. So it makes a certain amount of sense that its members continue to chase it.
Apple seems to be taking a stab at trying to provide that sort of platform with a more personality-based approach. But just because Apple may, in part, be trying to solve a problem for the music industry, that doesn’t mean their solution is inherently at odds with the user/audience.
After all, terrestrial radio has often been a personality-based marketing/publicity platform both for labels and all the advertisers that subsidize it. But it’s also beloved by many users, because they value both the curation and the personalities they find there. Often, those things cannot be separated.
That doesn’t mean that human curation is always good. Indeed, on average, algorithmic approaches may now be better at delivering a good-enough experience that is more personalized than the average human curation experience.
But when human curation is good, I think it remains the gold standard for curation, even when it is less personalized. Maybe I’m showing my middle-age here, but that’s how it seems to me. That sort of curation is inherently personality-based. That’s a big part of its appeal. You trust the curator enough to give up control and let them take you on a journey of discovery.
In the process, you bond with them, for being associated with a cool personality has the capacity to make you feel cooler and a part of the world they have created around their personality. That experience creates a want in you.
An algorithm rarely makes you feel cooler like this, because it’s a tool. You might use it for the purpose of doing your own research and discovery. It might even show you some things about yourself that neither you nor other people readily see. That, in turn, might allow you to feel cooler when you deal with other people, because of the knowledge you’ve gained. But even when the algorithm is doing a good job delivering quality suggestions to you, it still makes you feel a little bit more like a data point and less like a human.
A friend of mine recently started a Spotify mix-tape group on FB. Each week a different member delivers a 90 minute playlist to the group (a virtual mix tape). So far, this experience has been infinitely better than any algorithmic experience I’ve ever had, because each group member actually takes into account what other people have done and who the audience is.
So if somebody included a track last week, that track isn’t likely to be in this week’s mix and more than likely neither would that artist. Although if it made aesthetic sense in the context of the mix to include the same artist or track two weeks in a row, maybe it would be in there anyway. But in any case, these mixes have a much richer sense of the many contextual factors that contribute to creating a good mix. The same is true of a great show on a non-comm radio station like KEXP. As a result of this, these kinds of mixes reinforce a sense that the group members are part of something bigger than themselves.
Of course, if that mix tape group was me and 25 kids who are under 15, the quality of the curation probably wouldn’t seem as good to me, although I’d probably still hear an occasional great tune I would have missed otherwise. I’d also feel more like an interloper in that group. Maybe that distinction is actually demographic rather than personality-based. But to me, issues of demographics and psychographics are embedded in the idea of personality-based branding. You are buying the gestalt experience that you associate with that person or company.
This is why an anonymous human curator is less valuable than a curator with a personality/reputation that is known and trusted by users, even if the choices of the anonymous curator are objectively just as good as or better than those of the known curator. The lack of an identifiable personality makes it harder to evaluate the utility of the suggestions. And once you’re dealing with that problem, you’re pretty much right back where you started. The curator is no longer solving a problem for you. Now, you need a curator to sort out the anonymous curators for you.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t use algorithmic radio ever. I do. A group of my college friends made a playlist that encompasses many of the songs that were on the jukebox in the coffee house that was in the basement of our dorm at the University of Michigan (the Halfway Inn). Spotify generated a radio station based on that playlist, and it works pretty well, although it still does a poor job of managing repeats of the same song and multiple related songs by the same artist or by related artists (e.g,. Velvet Underground and solo Lou Reed).
A good human curator does not do these things. That’s part of the artistry. They take those things into account. Like I said above, they have a better and richer contextual awareness. Also, part of the reason that particular Spotify station works as well as it does is because it’s based on a playlist that was human curated. So it’s bootstrapping on the contextual awareness of the people who compiled that list.
If enough people trust a guy like Zane Lowe, some of that is his personality. But his personality and that trust is also a function of his talent for curation.
Grunge/Alternative rock broke on commercial radio back in the ’90s in no small part because of Seattle DJ Marco Collins. The relationship that people had with Marco at that time was very much personality driven. They liked him. He was a dynamic on-air personality, and they thought he was cool. But a big part of the reason why was that they came to trust his taste.
If Marco said something was cool and played it on the radio, people gave it the extra listens they needed to appreciate why it was worthwhile, even when their first impression might not have been great. Twenty years later, his impact is clear enough that somebody recently made a movie about him.
Some people have that intuitive gift for knowing what new stuff people will like if they just give it a chance. Computers are also getting better and better at deducing that information based on prior user behavior. But I’m still not sure those two approaches always lead you to the same place.
What’s that term? “Filter Bubble,” where your perceived options keep getting smaller and smaller as the search algorithm feeds back based on your previous choices. At its best, human curation seems less prone to the filter bubble (although it has its own problems and risks–e.g., it’s probably more prone to personal politics and lobbying, which can create a bureaucratic capture problem that undermines trust–See e.g., payola). But human curation only works if people trust the human curators and don’t have to invest too much energy vetting them.
Apple is a high profit-margin, gold standard brand. That’s why people pay extra for it. Its whole message is grace, ease of use, and quality (even if these things are not always actually true). Historically, it’s been about finding the spot where technology and people align. You know, a mix of art and science.
That’s the value proposition it is selling. The personalities are at least theoretically in the service of that. They are supposed to be part of the art that interfaces with the science and tech.
Part of the art is also the fashion sensibility. Undoubtedly, that’s part of what must have attracted Apple to Beats. I have mixed feelings about that. My feathers get ruffled thinking about paying hundreds of dollars for a pair of headphones that may be fashionable but ultimately aren’t very good sounding headphones for the money.
But at the end of the day, I guess I’m a bit of an engineer at heart. I value function over fashion, and I especially hate the idea of paying a premium for something just because it is perceived as being fashionable. Nevertheless, I also recognize that many people are not like that, and that these kind of people are more than willing to pay a premium for something they perceive as fashionable. Indeed, in many cases they are the highest margin consumers.
The personality-based approach also dove-tails with Apple’s history and culture. Before the death of Steve Jobs, it was a personality driven company. It’s also an opinion leader brand. So while it collects plenty of experience data from users, it has not historically solicited explicit input from the public about what it wants. It doesn’t have the same sort of beta-testing developer blogging, two-way conversation that many other companies have as they develop their products.
I once had conversation with a Boeing IT guy in a bar here in Seattle. He said they loved Microsoft, because they were much more open with his department about what they were working on and where it was going.
Typically, Apple hasn’t shared where it’s going until it releases a product for the public to see. It’s not looking for that sort of approval and feedback. When it releases something, the message is this: “Here’s our new thing. We’re cool. We think our thing is cool, and if you try it, we’re confident that you will think our thing is cool too, even if you don’t understand right this minute why it’s cool.”
Over the last decade, it’s had a pretty good track record doing that. So even when it does something that other people have arguably already done, it typically re-contextualizes it in a way that makes it sit differently with the public
We’ll see if Apple’s new music service provides that sort of bold leadership and delivers on the idea that theirs is a place where art does a better job meeting science than at other places. We’ll also have to wait and see whether their approach resonates in the market.
If it just ends up being a re-branding of the Beats music service, then I think the answer will be “no.” While there was nothing really wrong with Beats and it looked cool, at the end of the day, I didn’t find it qualitatively different from its competitors, either in terms of user experience or curation.
So to succeed, imho, Apple will need to extend things considerably on the personality front and keep their curated playlists and other personality-based offerings far more dynamic than they were on the old Beats service. Otherwise, it’s just the same wine in a different bottle.
Note 1: I’ve been chipping away at this post for about eight twelve months off and on. I finally managed to bring it in for a landing yesterday night. File it under #slowblogging and #longreads.
Sam Lefebvre’s recent cover story on Pandora in the East Bay Express overlaps some of what I discuss here, and it’s well worth reading. That said, as our respective focuses aren’t the same in every regard, I’m hopeful that this post will serve as a useful compliment to Lefebrvre’s piece.
Note 2: This post was updated on December 8, 2014 with a bit of new content based on some comments I received when it first went up. I expect there will probably be more substantive updates as time goes by, and if that happens, I’ll let you know right here.
Note 3: If you’d rather read this post off-line, feel free to download a copy of it in pdf, MOBI, or EPUB format. Apologies in advance for any formatting anomalies. I’m not yet a wizard at doing ebook format conversions.
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Of all the dedicated digital music streaming services to come on-line since 2000, none has drawn the ire of the music industry quite like Pandora.
On its face, this may seem peculiar. After all, Pandora is a legal, royalty paying service. It has passed 250 million registered users in the U.S. Moreover, despite loud protestations to the contrary, there’s a credible argument to be made that, on a per listener basis, Pandora actually pays more royalties per spin to both songwriters and master rights-holders than does terrestrial radio.
So shouldn’t Pandora be a win for record labels and music publishers? Aren’t they being irrational in hating Pandora more than all the other services?
Succinctly, no. Pandora has been more disruptive of established music industry practices than any other major legal streaming music service. So the music industry has some very real reasons–both financial and aesthetic–to hate Pandora.
This post is a deep dive into five of those reasons. I’ve tried to keep my thoughts in plain English. But fair warning: I do get into some technical legal stuff towards the end. You can’t grasp the full picture without it. Continue reading “Five Reasons The Music Industry Hates Pandora The Most”
Back in March, the Verge reported that the Beastie Boys had settled their lawsuit against educational toy company GoldieBlox. That suit alleged copyright infringement, trademark infringement, false advertising, false endorsement, and unfair competition, stemming from GoldieBlox’s unauthorized use of the band’s song “Girls” in the company’s popular Internet promotional video.[no_toc]
Photo by Masao Nakagami
According to the Verge, “[a]s part of the settlement, GoldieBlox will no longer be able to use its parody of the Beastie Boys song “Girls” and will publish an apology to the band…The toy maker will also make a donation based on a percentage of its revenues to a charity selected by the Beastie Boys that supports science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education for girls — the very subjects that GoldieBlox’s toy lines try to promote.”
Until recently, the specific amount of GoldieBlox’s donation was unknown. But on May 12, 2014, Digital Music News reported that the amount of the donation had recently been detailed in court filings from the Beastie Boys’ copyright infringement lawsuit against Monster Energy drink: To compensate for its unauthorized use of “Girls,” Goldieblox will donate 1 percent of its gross revenue to the Beastie Boys’ specified charity until it has paid a total of $1 million.
With this final piece of the puzzle in hand, now seems like a good time to offer a little recap commentary on the GoldieBlox drama, highlighting a couple of the important story lines and the lessons they offer for content users and content owners.
The Artist is a very romantic figure in our culture. There’s a lot of ideological mumbo jumbo attached to what an Artist is and what an Artist should be. It’s one of those paradoxes. The dominant ideal is that art is about freedom of expression. Yet lots of people would put a lot of rules on art given a chance. People love to set up boundaries and categories. Some people might even try to shatter the whole notion that Artists making art is a romantic ideal.
I like those kinds of high-minded debates. But this isn’t the place for them. So I’m not going to get into that stuff here. Instead, I’m going to accept the following premises: (1) being an Artist and making art represents a noble pursuit; and (2) if there is anything pure and good in the music business, it starts with the Artists and the art they make.
Why am I going to the trouble saying this? Well, the further you venture into the Fog Machine, the easier it is to lose sight of these ideas. And once you forget them, you’re sunk, especially if you see yourself as an Artist.
At the same time, it’s important remember that Artists make art in a context. Our context is a market economy, where people have to make their living somehow. And the ideals of making art and making a living don’t always easily co-exist.
But if you are an Artist, you have to find a way to deal with this reality. Usually, that involves figuring out where your compromise point is on a broad range of issues. As an Artist, you’ll probably have to face this process head on. But never forget the idealistic goal of art: that the product should come first regardless of what the market seems to be saying.
Sometimes that can be a tough one, especially when people who are supposedly experts about the market are challenging your judgment. But never forget the reality of the Fog Machine. Ultimately, a lot of these folks don’t know anymore than you do. And oddly enough, when an Artist has talent and stays true to his or her ideals, it’s actually pretty surprising how often that resonates in the marketplace.
Please Note: An earlier version of this post attributed the blog post discussed below to David Lowery. Subsequently, I have learned that Lowery is not the author of this post. I have revised this piece to remove references to David Lowery, and I sincerely apologize to Mr. Lowery for any misunderstanding.
A recent post on the Trichordist quoted data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) indicating that the number of working musicians has decreased by 45% since 2002. It included the following graphic to illustrate this point:
The Trichordist’s statistics seemed shocking. Could they really be right?
An employment drop of 45% in a ten year period is pretty extreme, even given the current state of the music business. Therefore, I thought it might be worth a visit to the BLS website, to dig a little deeper into the Trichordist’s numbers. Fortunately, the Trichordist was kind enough to cite its sources in the image above. Unfortunately, it did not include hot links to these sources in its blog post, and I’m kind of lazy. So rather than hand-typing those links into the brower, I first did a web search on “BLS musicians” to see if that would take me to the right place. I ended up at a page titled “Occupational Outlook Handbook” (http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/musicians-and-singers.htm).
This page did not contain the data that the Trichordist used to make the chart above, but it did indicate the following:
that there were 176,200 jobs for musicians and singers in 2010.
that the number of musician and singer jobs was expected to grow 10% by the year 2020.
At this, point, I was getting confused. Why were these numbers different than the Trichordist’s?
Not only were the numbers from the “Occupational Outlook Handbook” completely different (and significantly larger) than the Trichordist’s numbers, they also indicated job growth over the next 10 years, not job shrinkage (which is what the Trichordist had asserted was happening). So I bit the bullet and hand-typed in the links from the Trichordist’s chart above, which are as follows:
When I got to those pages, the numbers were the same as those cited by the Trichordist above. But I was still left wondering why the BLS website had more than one set of musician employment numbers.
It turns out that the Trichordist’s numbers and the Occupational Handbook numbers were drawn from different surveys that used different methodologies.
The 176,200 figure comes from the Industry-Occupation Matrix Data, by occupation (the “Matrix”). You can find that here. The Matrix data is further broken down by industry, and you can download the raw data for an industry in .xls spreadsheet format. (The raw data for musicians and singers is available here: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ep/ind-occ.matrix/occxls/occ27-2041.xls.)
The BLS has this to say about where the Matrix numbers came from. The methodology of the Matrix is explained here. This paragraph from that discussion seems particularly instructive (especially the last sentence):
Base-year employment data for wage and salary workers, self-employed workers, and unpaid family workers come from a variety of sources, and measure total employment as a count of jobs, not a count of individual workers. This concept is different from that used by another measure familiar to many readers, the Current Population Survey’s total employment as a count of the number of workers. The Matrix’s total employment concept is also different from the BLS Current Employment Statistics (CES) total employment measure. Although the CES measure is also a count of jobs, it covers nonfarm payroll jobs, whereas the Matrix includes all jobs.
So where do the Trichordist’s Numbers come from and how do they relate to the numbers from the Matrix?
The numbers from the Trichordist’s chart were drawn from the Occupational Employment Statistics program (OES) (http://www.bls.gov/oes/), a data source that seems to share some methodological similarities with the CES (which was referenced in the paragraph above).
The OES FAQ explains the methodology underlying the OES. For our purposes, the most salient information is as follows:
“Employees” are all part-time and full-time workers who are paid a wage or salary. The survey does not cover the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms, household workers, or unpaid family workers.
It appears that the numbers used in the Trichordist’s chart exclude both self-employed workers and owners of unincorporated firms (i.e., the partners in a partnership or the members of an LLC).
It’s not trivial to omit self-employed workers and owners of incorporated firms. Of the total musician and singer jobs in 2010, the data from the spreadsheet I linked to above indicates that 75,000 (42%) of those jobs stemmed from self-employment. I don’t know about you, but it definitely makes intuitive sense to me that this percentage would be pretty high, as lots of musicians are self-employed/sole proprietors or operating in a partnership or LLC (i.e., an unincorporated association).
Update: In a Facebook comment thread on this blog post, I gave some more concrete examples about common situations for working musicians and how they are captured by the BLS data I looked at. One of the commenters suggested that it would be useful to have it in the main blog post as well. So I’m adding it here.
(a) Let’s say we have a band. They make their entire living from music. The core group is two people. They are organized as a member-managed, LLC with two members. The LLC is taxed as a partnership. They don’t receive a salary. They get their money in the form of distributions from the LLC. This money flows through to each of their 1040s on a k-1 and is treated as self-employment income.
Let’s say that two other musicians also regularly play in this band (perhaps they are the drummer and bass player), but they are not members of the LLC (i.e., they don’t hold equity in the company). These musicians may also pick up work playing gigs with other people when the main band isn’t active. Both in the context of their main band and on any other jobs they do, these musicians get paid as 1099 contractors. So all their income in a year is also from self-employment.
None of these musicians are counted in the OES data the Trichordist has cited, but these musicians are apparently counted in the Matrix data. The scenario above is a very real scenario, especially for the so-called middle class of musicians (i.e., people who are making enough money from playing music to subsist without another job). As the Matrix data shows, the median income of the musicians in their survey was around $22/hr. That works out to a yearly gross income of around $42k (40 hours a week for 48 weeks a year). So half the musicians in the Matrix data made more than that and half made less. I suspect that a lot of full-time musicians in the $20k-$40k range fit the scenario I’ve spelled out above (either co-owner of a partnership or LLC or a sole proprietor receiving living mostly from 1099 contractor income).
(b) Now, let’s think about a more successful band. I don’t know anything about the particulars of Wilco, but I get the sense that Jeff Tweedy is the only equity holder in Wilco, Inc. (or Wilco, LLC). So all the other guys are likely hired guns from a legal and financial standpoint.
In a situation like that, where a band is successful and has more predictable cash-flow, there’s a much better chance that these hired guns won’t be 1099 contractors anymore. Instead, they will be salaried employees of Wilco, Inc., benefits will be paid, exclusivity may be required, etc.
Musicians in the Wilco situation would likely be counted in the OES numbers that the Trichordist cited. And to the extent that the OES numbers say that these kinds of musician jobs have shrunk significantly since 2002, that’s no small thing. For those kinds of jobs are good jobs, and we should all probably be fighting for a world in which there are more jobs like that for musicians. But that’s a different issue than the one the Trichordist has put on the table (i.e., the changing character of musician jobs vs. a change in the absolute number of musician jobs).
Where does that leave us?
I’d love to get a more nuanced picture of things than I have now. Even with the additional info from the Matrix, a lot of important questions remain unanswered. But based on the info I found on the BLS website, I will say this: If the goal is to understand how many working musicians and singers there are over time, the job numbers used must include self-employed workers; otherwise, they aren’t suitable to that task. If we had, say, Matrix data from 2000 that could be compared to the 2010 Matrix data, maybe we would find that the trends in that data are the same as the trends in the OES data that the Trichordist used for its chart.
But absent that sort of data, it seems like the broadest claim one can make based on the OES data is that payroll-based jobs for musicians have shrunk since 2002. However, once we narrow things down to that claim, it significantly muddies the causal link that the Trichordist is trying to make between the rise of digitial music and fall of musician jobs.
The loss of a payroll job doesn’t necessarily mean that the person in question was unable to find a nonpayroll job as a musician. Indeed, a lost payroll job might well be replaced by a new non-payroll job in the economy. Therefore, the absolute number of musician jobs may not have shrunk at all. Instead, it may be that the character of musician jobs has shifted.
Having said that, the loss of payroll-based musician jobs may still be significant. As in other industries, the loss of such a job can mean that a musician is exchanging a job with benefits, etc. for an independent contractor situation, where pay and benefits are not as good. So there may well be economic losses involved. But it seems highly speculative to draw conclusions about the nature or cause of these sorts of economic losses from the BLS data cited in the Trichordist’s blog post.
Perhaps the Trichordist will dig further into this question, find more data, and then share what it has learned with the rest of us.
I’ve been to every SXSW since 1995. Sadly, my streak ends this year. Since I can’t be there, I thought I’d share a few things I’ve learned through the years with those of you lucky enough to be going.
If you’re playing down there, I assume you’ve already gotten some extra day party shows booked, etc. (but not too many of those I hope). I’m not going to cover that sort of stuff here. These tips are more about the spectating/networking side of the festival. They start practical and get progressively more philosophical.
1. Wear comfortable shoes. Everyone wants to look cool down there. But you will be doing a lot of walking. So bring some shoes you know will be good for that. You don’t want to be breaking in new shoes down there.
2. Be prepared for any weather. Best case scenario, it’s shorts and t-shirt weather. But sometimes, it’s Seattle in the winter weather. Lots of stuff happens outside at night, even when it’s 50 degrees. It’s good to have some layers and gloves. Bring some sunscreen too.
3. Try to eat a good meal at the start of the day. There’s a good chance you will start drinking by 2:00 in the afternoon (or earlier) and keep drinking until 2am or 3am each day of the festival. Put something in your stomach first. In the flow of things, it’s easy to forget to eat. Or there may not be food available right at the moment you realize that you need some. Remember to drink water too.
4. Don’t ignore people from your town. Paradoxically, SXSW is a great place to meet people from your hometown. In your hometown, it’s easy to just stay in your own little silo, interacting with the same people all the time. At SXSW, everyone is a fish out of water, and people from your town are much easier to spot and often more open to interacting, even if you’re not from their little part of the scene.
It’s easy to think that SXSW is mostly about connecting with people from other towns. And it’s definitely useful for that. But if you aren’t already super successful in your hometown, you’re missing a great opportunity to build your local network too (a network I might add that will probably be more useful and important in the early stages of your project than your out-of-town network).
Connections made in Texas often resonate for many years. I know I’ve made some great friends down there through the years.
5. Don’t be afraid to head off on your own. Moving around an event like SXSW with a big group of people is a major exercise in cat herding. In this situation, you have two choices: (A) stick with the group and don’t worry too much about where you end up; or (B) head off on your own and go exactly where you want to go.
Option “A” can be a fun and really rewarding experience. Often, you end up checking out some stuff you never would have gotten to on your own. But don’t be afraid to choose option “B” sometimes too. It will probably lead to a magic moment. It’s perfectly acceptable to leave the group at SXSW and strike out on your own. Nobody will be offended. Besides, with cell phones, foursquare, etc. it’s not that hard to reconnect with your posse later.
6. Spend some time in the corners. Every year there are going to be some buzz shows that everybody seems to want to go see. Try not to get too fixated on those shows. If you really want to see one of them and you have a badge, go for it. Those can be special shows. But don’t be afraid to look for stuff in the corners too, off the beaten path. That’s probably where the next big thing will really be happening. It’s also where you are more likely to have a transcendent experience watching a seasoned veteran playing at the festival for the love of the game as much as anything else. These artists are the opposite of the next big thing. But they are still the real deal. They’ll help remind you why you love music, and they might just change your life too.
7. Never assume somebody is unimportant. There are a lot of people down in Texas. Some of them are very important right now. It’s natural to want to focus on connecting with them, because they seem like the most obvious people who can help you. But remember, there are also a lot of people down there who aren’t important right now, but who may be very important a few years from now. If you treat them badly now, you’ll burn a bridge before you even realize you ought to be building one. So don’t be a dumb-ass. Have a little grace.
8. Value quality over quantity (and be open to meaningful coincidences). The festival is not a contest to see who gets the most business cards. There are no clear metrics, and its value isn’t always obvious. It could be years before you fully appreciate the value of something that happened at SXSW. So focus on the quality of your experiences and interactions, not just the quantity. You never know where that might lead you.
Let’s say you meet this gal down in Texas. She doesn’t seem like anybody. She’s just friends with somebody else you’re hanging out with (maybe they were friends from college). She says she books a few bands where she lives in North Carolina. You’ve never heard of any of them, but you’re not a dumb-ass, so you treat her with respect anyway. After the bar closes, you, your buddy, and the gal end up getting tacos on the street, stumbling down Red River past Emo’s on the way to an after hours affair. You folks have a lot of fun at the after hours party, cracking each other up. It feels like you have been friends for years, not just 3 or 4 hours. So great.
Three years later, the gal is booking a really successful rising star band from North Carolina. You’ve kept up with her on Facebook through the years, and she’s always been interested to hear the music you’re making. You had drinks with her at SXSW last year when you saw her down there, and you laughed your asses off again.
About six months after that last round of drinks, she pings you out of the blue. She thinks your band would be a good fit for the northwest leg of the tour she’s booking for that rising star band. Would you be into doing it? You didn’t even have to pitch her on the idea. She pitched it to you. Fucking “A” yes that’s a good idea.
No tacos, no after hours party, no laughing your asses off? No northwest tour with her rising star band. Seems like random good luck, right? But it’s not completely random. It happened because you embraced that moment and helped make it memorable for everyone involved.
You could have spent that time scanning the room trying to figure out if there was somebody more important to chat up. Instead, you opted for quality. Good call.
Over on his blog, Seth Godin just made this post about the perils of spending all your time looking for a magic lottery ticket. More than most people, Seth has the ability to really distill things down to the essence. He had a post a while back called Barry Bonds. It’s a favorite of mine, and I’ve shared it many times with various people I know trying to make something happen in the music business. His magic lottery post is kind of like the sequel, and well worth reading.
You can spend so much time looking for that powerful person who is going to change your life that there’s not much time left to do the work that might actually get you somewhere someday. In my lexicon, the search for a magic lottery ticket is a particularly deluded and futile airpower strategy.
It’s not that powerful people don’t swoop in and help make low profile people better known. That does seem to happen pretty regularly. It’s just that most of these low profile people are a lot less low profile than you realize. That whole overnight sensation 10 years in the making thing is almost always true.
When “unknown” bands get elevated after a music conference like SXSW, they’re rarely really “unknown” to music biz insiders. Probably, they have been busily working on the ground for years to connect all the dots that lead up to more powerful people taking 15 minutes to see their band play in Austin. In Seth’s lexicon, they’ve been building their tribe. To use my lexicon, they’ve built a good ground game.
From the outside looking in, it looks like they just found a Magic Lottery Ticket. But that’s an illusion. For the project was actually built to grow even if Oprah never showed.
During the early days of the first Iraq War, a video seemed to run continuously on television. In this video, a jet fighter launches a smart bomb. Moments later, it hits a ground target the size of a doorway, as the audio backing track explodes with the celebratory sounds of the American pilots and ground crew.
The scene in the video was some high order, whiz-bang stuff, offering, as it did, the tantalizing possibility that America’s future was one of remote control wars waged mostly from the air, with few, if any, casualties on the ground. Continue reading “The Allure of Air Power”
It’s true. Picking winners in the music business is a lot like hitting major league pitching: Most people strike out a lot. For every band on a major label that succeeds, a far greater number fail. This means that the A & R staff of most labels spend most of their time failing. So if you ever meet one of those rare individuals (and they do exist) who seem to pick winners more than half the time, bow down in front of them. In music business terms, this person is a genius. And if you happen to be one of those people, well take a bow. You are a genius.
There’s only one exception to this rule. If you run a small independent business, like an Indie record label, you don’t have the luxury of failing so often, because a multi-national corporation with huge cash reserves does not own you. So you have to be more careful. If you only have one band on your label and it fails, you can survive such a failure if you’ve been smart with your money and structured your project so that all the costs are properly scaled (insert reference).
But once you start juggling more than one project at a time, things get much more complicated really quickly. So growing an indie music business is a perilous game. If you have any success at all initially (and even sometimes if you don’t), the temptation to expand quickly is ever present. But if you haven’t given serious thought to how this growth will be managed and created budgets that accurately address the contingencies involved, it won’t take too many failures to kill the business.
So unless, you’ve got a personal fortune and your business is actually more of an art project, it’s best to remember that small is beautiful, especially at the beginning of a venture. As I said above, failure is common throughout the music business food chain. It’s as likely to happen to a big company as a small one. And as often as not, while the underlying lessons it has to teach may not be that different up and down the food chain, the scale of the damage may vary quite radically. So if it’s almost preordained that you’re going to have some failures and learn some hard lessons, why not try to keep your first failures small? It’s a long game. There’s no reason to risk mortally wounding yourself before you’ve barely made it out of the starting gate.
