DIY – Nashville Music Scene

August 14, 2017August 14, 2017 tukaglobal636 Comments

DIY.
From Rolling Stone magazine.

How Underground Nashville Bands Are Reclaiming Music City

Long dominated by multi-million-dollar country labels, Nashville’s indie musicians are vying to reclaim the city in the name of DIY rock & roll

Musicians are migrating to Nashville to tap resources they can’t find as easily in New York or elsewhere, such as cheap recording and pop-up house venues.

For years, big labels were the gatekeepers in Tennessee’s capital city. They had the keys to the recording studios and the funds to push singles out to the radio. But in the shadow of the country-music empire, DIY artists have been rising up to find their own voice. “If bands are willing to put the effort forward now, they can make the money themselves,” says Jeremy Ferguson, founder of Nashville’s Battle Tapes recording. “You don’t have to rely on some dick in a fucking suit who’s going to tell you what to do.

Beyond Music Row and the Honky Tonk Highway, underground musicians are building their own scene – and it’s one that spurns the traditional studio system. “A lot of [the Nashville mentality] is anti-establishment,” says Olivia Scibelli, lead singer of Idle Bloom, a band currently writing its second full-length album from Scibelli’s East Nashville basement. “It’s kind of about taking out the middleman.”

Nashville today is a Petri dish of creativity where young artists are gathering wherever they can and booking shows in house venues that pop up in gentrifying neighborhoods. They’re recording albums themselves or with independent producers like Ferguson, who started mixing records in his basement before building a garage studio in his backyard. And they’re organizing into an underground scene that’s starting to look like a rock revolution that could one day dethrone country twang as Nashville’s most famous sound.

One of the launchpads of the movement is DRKMTTR, an all-ages house party of a venue west of downtown that’s set in an old barbershop and flanked by clapboard houses. The volunteer-run venue has been shut down for fire-code violations in the past, and to the young fans showing up with coolers of beer, it can seem like nobody’s in charge. That’s the charm.

On most nights of the week, people drink from cans in the backyard and lounge around on old couches until the band strums its first chords. Then they crowd into the 100-person capacity venue, prepared to be surprised.

Scibelli helps run DRKMTTR, and Idle Bloom has played there in the past, but during a recent rehearsal session, the band’s four members crowd into a windowless room alongside their abused equipment. Bedsheets and worn carpeting along the walls and floor lend bare acoustic treatment, and the music stops cold when a wonky cable craps out. “Real life: We have shitty gear,” says Scibelli. But then everything’s working again, and the band launches into the kind of thunderous melody that draws comparisons to the Breeders and Get Up Kids, with hot-blooded riffs that dance over distorted fuzz to evoke Explosions in the Sky.

“Our scene is definitely more raw,” says Scibelli, comparing bands like hers to the country-driven major label system. “But everyone has their own studio or DIY recording setup. It’s pretty great.”

That Idle Bloom has a scene at all owes some gratitude to the high-profile acts that have given Nashville a shot of rock credibility. Kings of Leon formed in Nashville, while Jack White and the Black Keys are two of the city’s high-profile transplants. Collectively they’ve helped break the “Nashville curse,” the old idea that Nashville rock bands couldn’t connect with a national audience. “The first several bands that got signed out of Nashville – giant contracts – their albums tanked and they were dropped,” says Todd Ohlhauser, who owns Cannery Ballroom, Mercy Lounge and High Watt, three interconnected venues that cater to a rock audience. “If you were a band here and you got signed, you didn’t tell anybody you were from Nashville.”

Ohlhauser finds it easier to book rock acts today than it was a decade ago since there are simply more to choose from. But years back, it was borderline treasonous for local musicians to dabble with grittier sounds. “Once they switched over to rock music, they were almost blacklisted in the Seventies and some of the Eighties,” says Ferguson. “It was always kind of like a keep-it-a-country town.”

Along with the new wave of egalitarian music sensibility, musicians of all stripes are migrating to Nashville to tap resources they can’t find as easily in New York or elsewhere, such as cheap recording and pop-up house venues. The guy changing your oil at Jiffy Lube might play guitar better than the band you listened to on the radio on the drive there.

“The caliber of people that this city attracts makes everything more competitive in a friendly way,” says Grant Gustafson, who sings and plays baritone guitar for Blank Range, a band that started with house shows before graduating to opening slots with Spoon and Drive-By Truckers. And without label execs to answer to, musicians can swing with impunity. “There is an Americana country scene, and there’s a rock scene,” Gustafson says. “All the people in both of those play in each other’s bands and go to each other’s shows, so it all kind of boils together.”

And that’s where underground rock might save Nashville from becoming a honky tonk novelty. It’s putting the emphasis back on what the city has always valued: the song, regardless of genre. “There’s a great punk-rock scene here, a great Americana scene, a great indie scene, and a great pop scene,” says Ohlhauser. “But if there’s one thing that defines the [Nashville sound], it’s that bands here have really good songs.”

It’s the tradition of Loretta Lynn or Kris Kristofferson, Nashville greats who fused poetry with melody. What the underground musicians are realizing is that they don’t need a major label to help them do that. In fact, they might be better off without one.

Why musicians are so angry…

July 18, 2017 tukaglobal543 Comments

…at the world’s most popular music streaming service

Washington Post

By Todd C. Frankel July 14

With the money from CDs and digital downloads disappearing, the music industry has pinned its hope for the future on online song streaming, which now accounts for the majority of the $7.7 billion U.S. music market.

But the biggest player in this future isn’t one of the names most associated with streaming — Spotify, Amazon, Pandora or Apple. It’s YouTube, the site best known for viral videos, which accounts for 25 percent of all music streamed worldwide, far more than any other site.

Now, YouTube is locked in an increasingly bitter battle with music labels over how much it pays to stream their songs — and at stake is not just the finances of the music industry but also the way that millions of people around the world have grown accustomed to listening to music: free of cost.

Music labels accuse YouTube of using a legal loophole to pay less for songs than traditional music-streaming sites, calling YouTube the biggest threat since song piracy crippled the industry in the early 2000s. The industry has pressed its case to regulators around the world in hopes of forcing a change.

“I do think YouTube is starting to panic a little bit,” said Mitch Glazier, president of the Recording Industry Association of America.

But YouTube is not backing down, stressing the benefits to musicians of promotion on one of the Web’s most popular sites — which allows ordinary users to integrate music into their uploads. YouTube also warns against attacks that could reduce competition among streaming services.

“The industry should be really, really careful because they could close their eyes and wake up with their revenue really concentrated in two, three sources,” said Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s global head of music, referring to Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Prime Music. (Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The music industry counters they are backed into a corner when negotiating with YouTube — a unit of Google-parent Alphabet — which is mostly shielded by federal law from being responsible for what users post on the site.

“It isn’t a level playing field,” said one executive at a major music label who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk, “because ultimately you’re negotiating with a party who is going to have your content no matter what.”

Now, the battle is heating up as the European Union is expected to release new rules later this year for how services such as YouTube handle music, potentially upending some of the copyright protections that undergird the Internet.

Online streaming works like a digital jukebox, with fractions of a penny paid each time a song is played. The money comes from ads and subscriptions.

The E.U. has formally recognized that there is a “value gap” between song royalties and what user-upload services such as YouTube earn from selling ads while playing music. YouTube is by far the largest user-upload site.

How such a law would address the gap is still being decided, but the E.U. has indicated it plans to focus on ensuring copyright holders are “properly remunerated.”

Even the value gap’s existence is disputed.

A recent economic study commissioned by YouTube found no value gap — in fact, the report said YouTube promotes the music industry, and if YouTube stopped playing music, 85 percent of users would flock to services that offered lower or no royalties.

A different study by an independent consulting group pegged the YouTube value gap at more than $650 million in the United States alone.

“YouTube is viewed as a giant obstacle in the path to success for the streaming marketplace,” Glazier said.

The dispute boils down to what YouTube pays for songs.

Musicians from Arcade Fire to Garth Brooks to Pharrell Williams say they earn significantly less when their songs are played on YouTube than on a site such as Spotify — even though many listeners use these services in the same way. Both YouTube and Spotify allow users to search for music and find song recommendations. On YouTube, users can find music alongside cat videos and toy reviews in what is generally a free-for-all of content, while people go to Spotify and the like for a more refined experience. Some audiophiles argue the sound quality on music streaming sites is superior.

YouTube pays an estimated $1 per 1,000 plays on average, while Spotify and Apple music pay a rate closer to $7.

Irving Azoff, the legendary manager for acts such as the Eagles and Christina Aguilera, said he has one artist — whom he declined to name — who gets 33 percent of her online streams from YouTube but only 10 percent of her streaming revenue.

Smaller acts see it, too. Zoe Keating, an instrumental cello player, showed The Washington Post a statement from YouTube showing that she earned $261 from 1.42 million views on YouTube. In comparison, she earned $940 from 230,000 streams on Spotify.

“YouTube revenue is so negligible that I stopped paying attention to it,” Keating said.

YouTube admits that it pays less for songs.

But the reason for this disparity is where the two sides split.

The music industry claims YouTube has avoided paying a fair-market rate by hiding behind broad legal protections. In the United States, that’s the “safe harbor” provision, which essentially says YouTube is not to blame if someone uploads a copy-protected song —unless the copyright holder complains.

This, the music industry argues, leads to a costly game of “Whac-A-Mole”: hunting for illicit song uploads and filing notices with YouTube.

“You can’t prevent something from going up on YouTube. All you can do is ask them to take it down,” said Stephen Carlisle, who runs the copyright office at Nova Southeastern University. “At some point, it’s not worth it to do this.”

YouTube says it has the solution: Its Content ID system automatically checks for violations by comparing songs detected in new uploads against a database of claimed songs, capturing 99.5 percent of complaints. The company says it averages fewer than 1,500 traditional copyright claims from the music industry a week.

YouTube also pointed out that it has licensing deals with music labels large and small.

Earlier this year, Warner Music Group — one of the “big three” music labels — signed a new licensing deal with YouTube, and a memo from Warner chief executive Steve Cooper leaked out, saying the deal was signed “under very difficult circumstances.”

“There’s no getting around the fact that, even if YouTube doesn’t have licenses, our music will still be available but not monetized at all,” the memo continued.

Warner confirmed the memo’s authenticity, but, like the other major labels, declined to comment for this article.

Cooper’s complaints surprised Cohen, who worked at Warner until leaving for YouTube last year.

“I never heard that from his mouth during the entire negotiation,” Cohen said.

Cohen’s move to YouTube created waves in the industry. After all, Cohen was famous for taking one of the hardest stands against YouTube when, in 2008, he pulled Warner’s entire song catalogue from the video service to protest low song royalties. It was the nuclear option.

And it failed. After nine months and spending $2 million trying to keep its music off YouTube, Warner capitulated.

Cohen said he was sympathetic to his former colleague’s complaints. But YouTube pays $1 billion in song royalties worldwide each year. Cohen said his company has been hindered by its global reach — ad rates are lower outside the United States — and its slower rollout of a subscription option, YouTube Red. Song royalties are higher with monthly subscriptions than ads.

“What I’m trying to do with YouTube is be a cheerleader to build a subscription business that the industry can be proud of,” Cohen said.

Nabila Hisham, 22, is a music fan on YouTube. Recently, the college student in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, has been playing one song repeatedly: “Despacito,” a chart-topping Latin pop remix featuring Justin Bieber. The YouTube video — which has a total of 412 million plays — is a photo of Bieber’s tattooed neck. The video is beside the point. For, Hisham, it’s about the music.

“I’m glad that YouTube exists,” she said.

Correction: A previous version of this story stated YouTube’s ContentID system automatically handles 98 percent of copyright management for songs. The system handles 99.5 percent.

FAANGs = Public Utilities?

April 25, 2017April 26, 2017 tukaglobal683 Comments

Slide12*

This article (reprinted from the NY Times – read the comments to get an idea of public opinion), highlights the basic problem of the digital information economy with its economies of scale and network effects. (This is the dilemma we are trying to solve with tuka.)

I suspect eventually Google will end up as a public utility or heavily regulated, and Facebook will be disrupted by technology. Amazon will face competitive pressures, especially in digital, but at this point it’s unclear how long it can maintain a monopoly over physical goods through its distribution system. (Odd that this writer would think a libertarian would favor monopolies. Thiel just seems to accept that this is the state of the world today, but maybe not tomorrow.)

Is It Time to Break Up Google?

By JONATHAN TAPLIN

APRIL 22, 2017

In just 10 years, the world’s five largest companies by market capitalization have all changed, save for one: Microsoft. Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup and Shell Oil are out and Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon and Facebook have taken their place.

They’re all tech companies, and each dominates its corner of the industry: Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising, Facebook (and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77 percent of mobile social traffic and Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market. In classic economic terms, all three are monopolies.

We have been transported back to the early 20th century, when arguments about “the curse of bigness” were advanced by President Woodrow Wilson’s counselor, Louis Brandeis, before Wilson appointed him to the Supreme Court. Brandeis wanted to eliminate monopolies, because (in the words of his biographer Melvin Urofsky) “in a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people.” We need look no further than the conduct of the largest banks in the 2008 financial crisis or the role that Facebook and Google play in the “fake news” business to know that Brandeis was right.

While Brandeis generally opposed regulation — which, he worried, inevitably led to the corruption of the regulator — and instead advocated breaking up “bigness,” he made an exception for “natural” monopolies, like telephone, water and power companies and railroads, where it made sense to have one or a few companies in control of an industry.

Could it be that these companies — and Google in particular — have become natural monopolies by supplying an entire market’s demand for a service, at a price lower than what would be offered by two competing firms? And if so, is it time to regulate them like public utilities?

Consider a historical analogy: the early days of telecommunications.

In 1895 a photograph of the business district of a large city might have shown 20 phone wires attached to most buildings. Each wire was owned by a different phone company, and none of them worked with the others. Without network effects, the networks themselves were almost useless.

The solution was for a single company, American Telephone and Telegraph, to consolidate the industry by buying up all the small operators and creating a single network — a natural monopoly. The government permitted it, but then regulated this monopoly through the Federal Communications Commission.

AT&T (also known as the Bell System) had its rates regulated, and was required to spend a fixed percentage of its profits on research and development. In 1925 AT&T set up Bell Labs as a separate subsidiary with the mandate to develop the next generation of communications technology, but also to do basic research in physics and other sciences. Over the next 50 years, the basics of the digital age — the transistor, the microchip, the solar cell, the microwave, the laser, cellular telephony — all came out of Bell Labs, along with eight Nobel Prizes.

In a 1956 consent decree in which the Justice Department allowed AT&T to maintain its phone monopoly, the government extracted a huge concession: All past patents were licensed (to any American company) royalty-free, and all future patents were to be licensed for a small fee. These licenses led to the creation of Texas Instruments, Motorola, Fairchild Semiconductor and many other start-ups.

True, the internet never had the same problems of interoperability. And Google’s route to dominance is different from the Bell System’s. Nevertheless it still has all of the characteristics of a public utility.

We are going to have to decide fairly soon whether Google, Facebook and Amazon are the kinds of natural monopolies that need to be regulated, or whether we allow the status quo to continue, pretending that unfettered monoliths don’t inflict damage on our privacy and democracy.

It is impossible to deny that Facebook, Google and Amazon have stymied innovation on a broad scale. To begin with, the platforms of Google and Facebook are the point of access to all media for the majority of Americans. While profits at Google, Facebook and Amazon have soared, revenues in media businesses like newspaper publishing or the music business have, since 2001, fallen by 70 percent.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspaper publishers lost over half their employees between 2001 and 2016. Billions of dollars have been reallocated from creators of content to owners of monopoly platforms. All content creators dependent on advertising must negotiate with Google or Facebook as aggregator, the sole lifeline between themselves and the vast internet cloud.

It’s not just newspapers that are hurting. In 2015 two Obama economic advisers, Peter Orszag and Jason Furman, published a paper arguing that the rise in “supernormal returns on capital” at firms with limited competition is leading to a rise in economic inequality. The M.I.T. economists Scott Stern and Jorge Guzman explained that in the presence of these giant firms, “it has become increasingly advantageous to be an incumbent, and less advantageous to be a new entrant.”

There are a few obvious regulations to start with. Monopoly is made by acquisition — Google buying AdMob and DoubleClick, Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp, Amazon buying, to name just a few, Audible, Twitch, Zappos and Alexa. At a minimum, these companies should not be allowed to acquire other major firms, like Spotify or Snapchat.

The second alternative is to regulate a company like Google as a public utility, requiring it to license out patents, for a nominal fee, for its search algorithms, advertising exchanges and other key innovations.

The third alternative is to remove the “safe harbor” clause in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows companies like Facebook and Google’s YouTube to free ride on the content produced by others. The reason there are 40,000 Islamic State videos on YouTube, many with ads that yield revenue for those who posted them, is that YouTube does not have to take responsibility for the content on its network. Facebook, Google and Twitter claim that policing their networks would be too onerous. But that’s preposterous: They already police their networks for pornography, and quite well.

Removing the safe harbor provision would also force social networks to pay for the content posted on their sites. A simple example: One million downloads of a song on iTunes would yield the performer and his record label about $900,000. One million streams of that same song on YouTube would earn them about $900.

I’m under no delusion that, with libertarian tech moguls like Peter Thiel in President Trump’s inner circle, antitrust regulation of the internet monopolies will be a priority. Ultimately we may have to wait four years, at which time the monopolies will be so dominant that the only remedy will be to break them up. Force Google to sell DoubleClick. Force Facebook to sell WhatsApp and Instagram.

Woodrow Wilson was right when he said in 1913, “If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government.” We ignore his words at our peril.

Creative Disruption!

Disrupted by technology!

April 10, 2017April 7, 2017 tukaglobal418 Comments

What happened to the music industry? The publishing industry? The television and film industry? The stock photography industry?

Simple: Disrupted by digital technology!

The digitization of creative content that transformed media like music, imagery, text and video has had broad economic consequences:

The production costs of creating such media in digital formats plunged.
The distribution costs associated with sharing that media also plunged.
The combined effect of 1. & 2. has led to an explosion of new content.

Simple economics shows that when the supply of a good rises sharply but the demand does not keep pace, the price falls precipitously. So the price of digital content like music mp3s, video files, images, and eBooks has plunged as well.

Because the duplication and distribution costs are close to zero, consumers of such content assume that the price should be close to zero. [See Chris Anderson’s book, Free.] Unfortunately, while the out-of-pocket production costs of creative media have gone down, the time, energy and skill required to create have not. Thus, the revenue streams and income accruing to creative artists has been hollowed out.

Two of the most disrupted professions has been musicians and writers. A few graphic slides illustrate the problem:

This might seem discouraging, spelling the end of these professions, but we would suggest a more circumspect analysis of the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital age. After all, being an artist has always been a challenge in our commercial world. With tuka we propose that as technology has disrupted the past, it will also disrupt the present and help shape an unanticipated future. Stay tuned…