5 MESSINGS THE MUSIC INDUSTRY CAN'T LEARN FROM TV

For a moment there, the savior could be seen on a slice of toast.

Here, The Daily Beast (I think that used to be Newsweek's website) gives us the simple answer to the death of the music business:

WOW...Five easy lessons to FIX THE WHOLE MUSIC INDUSTRY!

AND...it opened by declaring that the Seniormole Mephisto assholes of the world were wrong, and that "Giving Away" music is both stupid and inefficient!

So I continued to read...with ever increasing frustration...and pessimism.

The author declares that TV is having a "renaissance." It began with The Sopranos, and now, with "The Wire," "Breaking Bad" and "True Detective," people are happily watching TV and...PAYING FOR IT.

"HBO and its peers have proven that consumers will embrace a subscription-based model for content, but you need to give them a reason to do so..."

Uh, not quite, Mr. Beast. First off, you can get anything you want via the torrents and forums. I don't subscribe to Netflix or HBO. I also don't have the fucking time for hour upon hour of complicated spy bullshit, dreary police procedurals, or inane sword-and-sandal fantasy shit with the added attraction of NAKED BOOBIES.

But let's give Mr. Beast his due. No question, HBO makes money, and Netflix rose from the ashes of "little DVD discs you mail back and forth and hope don't get scratched" to a pay-for-stream success.

So? "Here are the five lessons the music business needs to learn from TV..." the Beast declares

1. Target adults, not kids.

This should be obvious to the music execs, but somehow they haven’t figured it out yet. Fourteen-year-olds will not support a subscription-based model for music. HBO realized that the dumbing down of network TV left a large group of consumers under-served, namely sophisticated grown-ups—and these were the same people with the most disposable income to spend on entertainment.

In contrast, the major record labels are still stuck in kiddie land. No wonder they’re convinced they have to give away their product for free: their core target market is the poorest demographic group in the country—and also the group with the time and know-how to use complicated pirating tools.

Put simply, the recording industry needs to grow up, because the high-potential consumers they need to survive have already done so.

2. Embrace complexity.

Have you noticed how complex the hot new TV shows are nowadays? A few days ago, Malcolm Gladwell pointed to TV as proof that attention spans aren’t getting shorter. “Thirty years ago,” he explains, “you could go and get a sandwich in the middle of a Kojak episode, come back and still follow it. Today, if you get a glass of water in the middle of Homeland you have to pause and go back.”

Complexity appeals to the sophisticated grown-ups mentioned above. But also, more complex content inspires repeated listenings and greater long-term loyalty. The subscription TV networks have figured this out. Meanwhile the music industry is hoping that simple songs, without harmonic modulations and built on repeated-note melodies, will solve their problems. They won’t.

3. Improve the technology.

Fifty years ago, most households still owned clunky black-and-white TV sets. The picture quality was lousy, and the set was always breaking down. How times have changed! Television has gone high tech with big screens, crystal-clear pictures, and concert-hall audio.

Meanwhile, the music business has moved in the opposite direction. In a telling repudiation of its corporate priorities, serious music fans increasingly want to own vinyl from 50 years ago. It’s a hassle tracking down those old albums, but who can blame these audio junkies? They are tired of the flattened, compressed sound from today’s digital devices, and want something better.

Think about this: music is the only branch of the entertainment world to embrace progressively inferior technologies. Movie theaters have upgraded their experience. Video games have achieved unprecedented standards of visual quality, far beyond what the inventors of Pong and Pac-Man ever dreamed of. No one wants to watch TV shows on a 1964 console. But music devices sound worse than they did a half-century ago.

4. Resist tired formulas.

My big gripe with the old TV shows was their reliance on predictable formulas. How many times can you watch a sitcom featuring a family sitting in the living room insulting each other? How many times can you sit through the predictable cowboy shoot-out, medical cure by the star doctor, or even arrest by the good-looking crime scene investigator?

Every one of the old shows suffered from the same obvious problem: you could predict how the story would end even before it started, so why watch at all? But the beauty of the smart new TV shows is that you still aren’t sure how it ended, even after you’ve seen it—hence the endless debates about the conclusion of The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. At every step in the process, the masterminds behind the award-winning new TV show are resisting the formulas of the genre, and striving for fresh, unpredictable narratives.

The music industry should learn from this. Every album and song nowadays is marketed as part of a genre—rock, hip-hop, country, jazz, etc. But the very decision to sell songs to targeted genre fans has turned into an aesthetic straitjacket. The labels rely on formulas and rules because their genre categories are defined by them. Yet much of the best new music defies genre classification; great artists take chances and cross boundaries. Record labels struggle to promote and sell this music because they have created an entire downstream system defined by the old formulas. They need to emulate the boldness with which the leading pay TV networks have sabotaged genre recipes.

5. Invest in talent and quality.

An amazing battle between two different philosophies has taken place on our TV screens during the last 15 years. The reality TV model, embraced by broadcast networks, is built on the radical view that you don’t need trained actors or high-priced talent. You can take Snooki off the streets of New Jersey and turn her into a celebrity star.

HBO and its peers have adopted the opposite approach. They believe in traditional metrics of talent, and are willing to pay for those who measure up. HBO spent $18 million to get Martin Scorsese behind the pilot of Boardwalk Empire. In recent years, they’ve hired Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon and other leading literary authors to work on pilots and series. When Netflix decided to back House of Cards, they were willing to pay top dollar for Kevin Spacey—Snooki wasn’t good enough. These were both daring and expensive moves, and not all of them worked, but the overall impact of investing in highly-trained talent has been decisive. The new renaissance in television would never have happened without this commitment to excellence.

The music industry is still stuck in the old model. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been told that traditional standards of musicianship don’t matter any more. Singers don’t really need to know how to sing, because Auto-Tune will fix it all. You don’t need a real drummer, because a cheap machine can do the same thing. We can argue about each of these statements, but you can’t debate what’s actually happening at the major labels. Do you see them hiring the best graduates from Juilliard or Berklee? They would laugh at you if you even suggested it. They know that the Snooki path to celebrity is the model to follow, because the public doesn’t really care about musicianship and those tired traditional metrics of talent.

Maybe they are right. But, then again, maybe the music execs ought to turn on their TV set, and pay close attention. Some folks are backing old-school talent. And guess what? They don’t have to give their content away for free.

* * * *

Easy. Simple A 5 step program. So what's wrong with what Mr. Beast wrote? First off, music IS a kiddie medium. Look at Viley Virus and Bieber. Remember The Beatles and The Monkees and The Osmonds. Who bought it? KIDS. With their parents' money.

Second problem: music is a dead medium. McCartney, Elton, Jagger...they are writing and singing the same shit. Only not as good. Same with country and rap. There hasn't been a good new classical composition in 50 years, if not 100.

Third problem...it's a minority of people who care about quality...just as there's a minority who own 50 inch plasma TV screens and care about 3D. People are happy with mp3. They are happy with the convenience of iTunes and the easy of..YOUTUBE and other instantly available FREE pirated music.

Complexity? It might work for "The Wire" but the average person doesn't like Stravinsky. Miles Davis. Frank Zappa. So much for complexity.

At best, there will always be some new singer-songwriter that people will want to see in concert, but who won't make much money off the music. "Weird Al" got his new album to #1 but spent a fortune to do it...with a huge publicity campaign keyed to expensive FREE music videos. He'll be lucky to make back a penny, and if he does, it'll be due to touring and t-shirts.

The music business, like the related business of opera, ballet, and symphony orchestras...is fucked. It's that simple. It's getting more dumbed-down every day...with stupid twerking bitches, obnoxious dumbass rappers, jerky "boy bands" and "Baby" singers, the usual big-hat country clowns, the boring Taylor Swift-type pretty kitties, and no work for intelligent or complex artists (who didn't make that much money anyway...Randy Newman had one freak hit with "Short People" and most critically acclaimed rock bands starved).

The answer is to combat piracy...to stop making it so easy to steal everything, and to underline simple ordinary respect for human rights and copyright. Instead, piracy is continuing to grow...it's killing the publishing world, it's killing the movie industry (why doesn't this guy tell me why he chose TV to talk about and not movies) and it's just a fluke that a FEW very popular TV shows are keeping Netflix and HBO afloat. An awful lot of people bitch that they don't want to keep subscribing...and that it's usually only one or two shows that keep 'em hooked. That can't last. It's just too easy to download that wonderful Ricky Gervais or Kevin Spacey show, or whatever the latest "ooh, naked boobies" sci-fi thing might be.

Hope is the thing with feathers.