I mean that doesn't really answer your question regarding particulars, I guess, but it gets at the greater issue. I'll try to answer it more clearly later. Sorry!
I'm in the middle of three other things and this is super complicated but fortunately my friend Aaron just Gchatted me something that might help, so I'm just gonna copy-and-paste (the answer to his first question btw is "yes" so everything that follows is sound):
royalties question for you:
don't spotify royalties just divide up a portion of the revenue available in a given month, so that the more streams that happen in a given month the less each stream is actually worth?
like there's no actual minimum amount for a streaming royalty, right?
if drake is basically crushing Apple Music but nothing else, it basically just means no one else is making shit off of Apple Music.
i dunno how many total streams apple music gets, but i assume he's gotta be something like 50% of them (who knows honestly), so if every stream of his just lowers the total royalty rate, every smaller artist just went from making very little to making virtually nothing
meanwhile a bigger percentage goes straight to drake, who gets the blessing of Uncle Apple
The whole idea of exclusive deals gets into weird variations on a payola theme.
And those exclusive deals almost certainly include actual cash in exchange for the exclusivity too.
So it's like weird reverse payola that still has the same anti-competitive effects.
Counter to your counter:
1. I didn't mean to imply that Beyoncé's numbers were "within the range of reason." I said those engagement numbers challenged the laws of physics and I tried to illustrate that, based on appearances, even the people behind the scenes at Nielsen weren't entirely convinced by them. I apologize if that was unclear. We could do a breakdown on Lemonade's numbers if you want. I'm not really sure the results would inspire confidence in Nielsen's methodology.
2. Can't really compare Adele and Drake because 25 was physical-only whereas VIEWS was available for sale in iTunes store and on Apple Music. You're talking percentages, but a data set of 4 million can't be expected to behave the same way as a data set of 400 million. Do I think it's unusual that an album did 245.1 million streams in week 1, then dropped to 140 in week 2, when the previous all-time best was 77 million on a service with exponentially more users? Drake LOST more streams in week 2 than Bieber did in week 1, and Drake week 2 STILL beat Bieber week 1 by nearly 100%. Yeah, I think it's nuts. But I didn't imply anything beyond that; I said it's profoundly fucking weird. It is!
3. "You're not taking into account piracy..." is not a great argument in favor of exclusivity deals. Was VIEWS cannibalized by piracy? Then Drake seriously fucked up by not going wide in week 1.
4. Glad you brought this up, because I wanted to mention it too but the piece was already running a little long. "If You're Reading This" DID set a new first-week streaming record in February 2015 on Spotify.
How many streams did it get? 15.8 million.
How many users were on Spotify in February 2015? 75 million.
A year later, on a service with 15 million users, VIEWS did 245.1 million in one week.
That's also profoundly fucking weird.
5. Ugh yes I know; this is how everything gets obfuscated in the press btw and this was some of the small-sample data I chose to exclude. So you wanna say VIEWS did 200 million on Apple Music rather than 245 in week 1, and the other 45 were from Spotify? I'll give you that. Did three old VIEWS songs do 15 mil apiece in one week on Spotify? I kinda doubt it, but I'll give it to you just because it doesn't change anything: 45 mil in the context of a billion is peanuts. You want to challenge that, though, I'll get the actual data from Spotify.
The "Hotline Bling" streams only count toward RIAA sales certifications (i.e., Gold and Platinum awards). The RIAA numbers are WAY MORE skewed if anything, but nah, they don't factor into this.
Maybe it's just a question of personal opinion or perspective or something. Look, here's a writer whose opinion I respect very much -- Craig Jenkins at Vulture -- who wrote one of the most positive reviews to come out of the festival. This was his thesis -- excerpted from the first and last grafs of his review:
The first Panorama went swimmingly despite the sweltering July heat, which pushed temperatures well into the 90s for much of the weekend and transformed even the most euphoric of live sets into a war against the weather.
...
Year one of Panorama Music Festival was an endurance test, a winner’s game for the patient. Next year, pray for a light chill and a dusting of cloud cover.
Here's a big takeaway from CoS' very positive review:
It’ll be interesting to learn more about Panorama’s attendance, but at a glance, the grounds appeared much less crowded than at GovBall. Decent spots flanking the main stage were available for the headliners right up until their sets started. While probably not good for business, this proved ideal for navigating the crowds in the heat and helped reduce lines for food and the upscale bathrooms.
I guess you can read that kinda stuff as endorsements or praise, and that's totally fair. And you can find quotes that focus on the performances or installations that don't mention the crowds or the weather. I'm just giving you my thoughts on the festival's financial viability based on the impact and impression it made this year. I think it needed more than faint praise to be considered a successful launch, but I definitely could be wrong.
You and others are raising a lot of great points in these comments, and I don't have time to reply to them one by one right now, but depending on what next week brings news-wise, I may do a follow-up column that tries to address them in some cogent and coherent fashion. I apologize though for not getting to them sooner, and I really appreciate the thoughtful response up and down these comments. Thanks!
This doesn't cover all the questions you raise but the piece I wrote in January goes kinda granular on the stuff about the date/location/city stuff and I think it will at least answer some of them?
http://www.stereogum.com/1854338/all-points-east-what-the-hell-is-going-on-with-panorama-governors-ball-the-battle-for-new-york-city/franchises/sounding-board/
I didn't attend; I meant it was a disaster in terms of getting bombed with historically bad weather, very low turnout, and benign reviews. Agreed AEG are super proficient at staging impressive and smoothly run events, but all those little touches add up to a lot of money, and while festival goers like being in a 65-percent-full space, that's fatal for promoters. They need it to be FULL. It's a drag for performers too. Schoolboy Q killed his set 15 minutes early because the crowd at Panorama was so dead.
It will definitely be back next year though. I don't think it will be here come 2019 though and I bet AEG will take a bath on the whole endeavor when all is said and done. But I'm incredibly curious to see what they do to change it up, and depending on what that includes, my outlook could change too.
I just don't see how it can survive. AEG cancelled All Points West after two years of doing roughly 80-percent capacity, and the margins here must be worse; if they don't crack at least 90-percent it's probably a loser. GovBall already announced their 2017 dates and they have that first weekend of June locked up again so precedent suggests that Panorama will get late July again, and late July is just really, really hard. The city is kinda empty and the weather is generally horrible and if you're coming in from out of town, why would you spend three days at a music festival? It's kind of a waste of a trip to NYC unless you're seeing a grail-type act. The other thing is, AEG's biggest value add on the talent side is that they can book acts for both Coachella and Panorama, but Coachella is the start of festival season and it's the biggest festival by far, so a lot of people from around the country/world just go to Coachella every year, and those same people are pretty unlikely to go to Panorama too if they're just gonna see LCD Soundsystem again or whatever. AEG basically just walked into a ditch with Panorama and I think it's dead tbh but I'm definitely interested to see how they ramp it up (or down) for 2017 because my guess is that's the litmus test.
Thanks! I'll probably take a week off soon, but there's really no shortage of stuff to write about and I like doing it. But yeah I'm definitely not looking to collapse from exhaustion after two months of this so I'm gonna find a way to pace myself.
I don't even hate Carpool Karaoke; I actually do think that Adele segment is pretty great, although everything else I've seen of it has been kinda cringe-y. But Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee is a total fucking gem, just this beautiful blend of aesthetics and humanity and intellect, and it irritates me to no end that Corden just stole that concept, reduced it to a fucking meme, and made a name for himself on it.
The thing is there's no single problem with a plateau; there are several different factions with skin in this game, and they all face different problems if the market doesn't grow. But their interests aren't entirely aligned -- and in some cases, they're at odds -- so one entity's problem might operate to another's benefit. Double-digit growth encourages an uneasy truce, because everybody is getting a taste, even if the shares aren't equal, buy when you've got numerous contingents trying to expand in a status quo market, you're gonna see numerous problems, most meaningfully loss of jobs. I'm not saying vinyl is doomed! I'm saying some people are gonna be screwed to varying degrees because the vinyl market can't sustain.
I've seen a couple surveys dedicated to this, and the numbers are truly insane -- like claiming 25% of people who buy vinyl actually own a turntable or something. But the survey sizes are never large enough to be meaningful, IMO, which is why I don't talk about them here. Still, fun read if you just wanna laugh/cry:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/04/14/icm-poll-48-of-people-who-buy-vinyl-dont-listen-to-it/
http://www.allaccess.com/net-news/archive/story/140454/survey-one-third-of-all-vinyl-buyers-don-t-own-tur
Weird timing; this was just published: http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/7446554/hastings-entertainment-shutting-down-all-stores-following-court-ruling-on?utm_source=twitter
This is also probably not a GREAT development for the vinyl market in general fwiw. Just two years ago, Hastings was one of the biggest vinyl sellers in the country:
"A Billboard analysis shows that Amazon is the largest seller of vinyl in the U.S., with about 12.3% market share, followed by Urban Outfitters with 8.1% market share. Rounding out the top five retail accounts selling vinyl, the next-largest is Hastings Entertainment with 2.8% of the market; Hot Topic with 2.4%; and Trans World Entertainment with 2.2%."
http://www.billboard.com/articles/6266616/urban-outfitters-doesnt-sell-most-vinyl
Well, the majors are never gonna bail on vinyl entirely, and if they did, the market would probably collapse, because the big sellers are still things like Adele, Taylor Swift, etc., plus catalog stuff like Zeppelin or Miles Davis or whatever. Indie stores still stock and sell a lot of major label product, and they'd probably die immediately if the majors just pulled out. Beyond that, as to the rest of your scenario, it's by no means impossible, it's just that there are all these factors pushing against it. The majors are gouging, meaning indie shops have to either stock fewer titles to minimize risk, or raise prices. Either/both of those things are customer-unfriendly practices, meaning fewer people coming into the stores, meaning fewer sales, meaning stores shutting down. When stores shut down, it makes it harder for indie labels to get their product (vinyl) to consumers, which makes it harder for indie labels to stay afloat. Plus you've got these new vinyl plants set to press tens of thousands of records a day. But if orders drop, some of the existing plants won't be able to stay open, and the plants that do stay open will be the ones getting the biggest orders, i.e., from major labels, which puts indies at a further disadvantage. I mean, this is just armchair "analysis," and there are a whole lot of other things I'm overlooking, forgetting, or just too lazy to include, but my point is, it's a perfect storm of elements and it's not gonna kill EVERYONE but it's hard to see everyone surviving long enough to make it to the next stage, whatever that might be. And again, I could be wrong. Wouldn't be the first time!
I think it's someplace in the middle: they want to maintain as much of a pro-sales stance as possible because that's still a fast path to the biggest possible payout and they also want to negotiate their positions with the streaming services and the artists with as much public sympathy as possible. If they were saying, "ANTI is now 10x platinum because of its YouTube streams" it would embolden YouTube and Rihanna (both of whom take money from the label) with no direct benefit to the label. I mean I'm blindly guessing AND wildly oversimplifying here so take it for what it's worth...
A couple things being asked here, some of it probably better suited to a future column, but I'll offer a sort of overarching and incomplete response: The point of the Billboard charts and the RIAA Album Awards isn't to reflect revenue but consumption or "popularity." We actually have no idea what the profits and losses on any of these albums are because there are a billion additional factors that are specific to each project. Planet Money did a piece on this a while back and estimated that it costs on average approximately $1,078,000 to make a hit song for Rihanna: $78k on the song (which goes to many different contributors) and $1m on promotion. Nielsen isn't accounting for that, they're just telling you what people are listening to, so the idea of factoring in some sort of weighted priority for CDs over streams is antithetical to their mission. And I think this campaign of failure being staged by the industry does have a negative impact on the bottom line, but they're reluctant to abandon it. There are a lot of ways to to make money off music and musicians, it's just that CD sales are not really the standard or baseline anymore. But Rihanna's chart position doesn't factor in her endorsement deals so ... I dunno, I'm gonna come back to this in a future column but yeah regarding this one, I honestly do think these data compilers should employ a metric that more accurately measures actual engagement adjusted for the era, because I think that's more honest, more instructive, and more meaningful.
Haha, yeah, it'll be published pretty regularly, but I don't wanna make promises I can't keep, so we'll see how it takes shape as we proceed. Most Fridays? Unless something huge breaks on a Tuesday or something and I wanna write something right away? It will definitely not always be a four-part multi-media epic like the one above, I'll warn/assure you in advance. But there is NO SHORTAGE of wild-ass shit going on in the music biz right now, so there's plenty for me to write about.
That's totally my mistake, not John O's. I got rid of the Boris parenthetical -- I think the broader point still applies, especially to Farage and Cameron (who didn't "back" Brexit but basically brought it into existence to support his own political ambitions).
Also, fwiw, they're the least "hipster"-ish people in the world to an almost comical degree (based on the interview I did with them, anyway). They worship Devin Townsend; the two founders have sound engineering degrees; and the band name was born when they were playing some sci-fi video game for hours on end the day it came out, and one of the dudes said "asteroid" wrong, which they both thought was funny. But I get what Doug's saying, and I doubt anyone who seriously uses the term "hipster metal" (or "hipster" for that matter) really cares to examine that kinda stuff anyway.
Well I was talking about Britain specifically, and the British faction that would like to see its country become less European by way of leaving the European Union. But yes, Trump's "policies" mirror those of France's longstanding National Front party, among others.
Point taken about America's fascist nutjobs and their countless acts of murderous violence dating back to...I mean, I'd like to start the clock with John Wilkes Booth, but we both know it predates him by almost a full century. I stand corrected.
In any case, I didn't intend to start a conversation about politics on a blog about music, and for that I apologize. As long as we can all agree that the Brexit debate was at least in part motivated by a segment of the British public feeling chastened after hearing Jonathan Groff as King George singing "You'll Be Back" while being clowned by Lin-Manuel Miranda's heroic Hamilton, then we've reached a meaningful understanding while also staying on-topic. Thanks guys!
Nah I was being, how you say, cheeky? I think the sentiments powering both the Leave initiative and the Trump "campaign" are identical, and both pander to nationalist ideologies. Feel free to strike the last sentence from my reply; I do not mean to suggest that Leavers endorse the assassination of Remain-backing pols. If that's the only claim in my comment with which you take issue, then we, in fact, agree. The reason Noel is telling politicians to "do their job" and ignore the emotionally charged views of the public at large is because he knows that THEY know leaving is a terrible idea with terrible consequences, but they're punting because they're backlash-averse cowards. "Hey you guys wanted this, we were just doing what you guys wanted us to do..."
I guess I called it that because it's jingoistic populist exceptionalism promising economic vitality by localizing industry, creating borders, and eliminating immigration. It masks fear and xenophobia as "pride." And if it wins the vote, it will almost certainly be catastrophic for the country and the world. But no American politicians have been killed by zealots for opposing Trump, so it is different in that respect...
Nah, not at all, he's saying it's really easy for copyright holders to keep their content off YouTube, but they choose to keep it ON YouTube. I think this excerpt covers the salient points:
If you don’t want your song on YouTube, upload it into the ContentID database and issue a blanket takedown for all videos using that song.
Boom. Done.
And yet, this is done only very rarely. Every record label has their own policy for what they will do, and many individual artists have their policies as well, but very few do blanket takedowns of their property.
Yeah this is exactly right. All these music-industry criticisms of YouTube are just trying to win favor in the court of public opinion and I've read a bunch that seem willfully disingenuous. Hank Green recently wrote a fantastic essay about this in the form of an open letter to Irving Azoff. http://www.recode.net/2016/5/10/11645760/youtube-hank-green-response-irving-azoff-artist-rights
I'd be pretty surprised if Tidal had a really big pre-sale block, which is exacerbated by the fact that a high percentage of Tidal's subscriber base is gonna want tix to these shows, so I can definitely envision Thursday morning being pretty fraught and resulting in a lotta anger, frustration, and heartache...but still better than waiting till Saturday. I might do it.
He's probably got the weakest verse on "Monster," but everybody looks bad next to Nicki Minaj on that one. However, his nadir is "Drunk In Love," no question.
Well I'm not gonna argue with thoughtful analysis from a serious fan. All I'll say is, I feel like some of the things you perceive as weaknesses are, to my ears, strengths. I actually think the "simpler" approach and "repetitive" sections serve the music really well, but I also felt like the first two albums were compositionally scattered and dense, like they wanted to work in every trick they could -- often very abruptly and only once, as if to maximize some sort of "WTF HOLY SHIT!" reaction in the listener -- which made for a pretty exhilarating experience, but sometimes at the expense of truly memorable or immersive songs. And for me, this album just feels more like the band is working to do something bigger and more permanent, and they're hitting a better balance of wild acrobatics and really solid, engaging song structures. But I'm not saying you're wrong or that you should come around to my way of thinking, just trying to give you an idea of where I'm coming from. In any case, I really appreciate you following up -- I hope the album grows on you, and if it does, lemme know!
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