Digital revenues set to offset CDs’ fall

Tim Bradshaw in London 01/23/12 Financial Times

The global music industry says it is close to a turning point where growth from digital revenues offsets declining sales of CDs, thanks to a combination of subscription services and tougher action on piracy.

The IFPI, the music industry’s international trade organisation says global revenues from digital music grew by 8 per cent in 2011 to $5.2bn, an acceleration on the previous year’s growth.

A slower rate of decline in sales of physical formats meant that the overall market’s drop slowed to 3 per cent, at about $16.2bn.

Rob Wells, president of global digital business at Universal Music, the largest record label by revenues, said he believed the “inflection point”, when digital revenues overtook physical globally, would happen in 2013, after the number of downloads overtook CD sales volumes in the US last year.

The growth in digital revenues lags behind the rate of volume growth in the industry, suggesting pricing pressure as the market reaches that transition. Downloads of single digital tracks rose 11 per cent in volume, with digital albums up 24 per cent, according to the IFPI.

However, Mr Wells and others insist that subscription music services, such as Spotify and Rhapsody, are providing incremental revenues, rather than cannibalising “à la carte” download services, of which Apple’s iTunes remains the largest.

The number of people subscribing to “all you can eat” music streaming leapt 64 per cent to 13.4m globally in 2011, the IFPI estimates.

Mr Wells said: “We haven’t seen a decay or decline in other methods of consumption.

“Some of those big global subscription players are only playing on a small playing field. Those services will expand over the next 12 months.

“As they mature, they are more likely to be bundled with internet service provider or operator subscriptions which is where we start to see real scale. The future is looking extremely bright.”

Universal, along with the other leading labels, owns a stake in Spotify but as its rivals Rhapsody and Deezer expand internationally, labels and artists stand to benefit because they are paid every time a track is listened to.

Edgar Berger, chief executive at Sony Music International said “We are going from headwind to tailwind.

“There is no question the music industry is going to be in great shape shortly, it will become a growing business again. The internet is a blessing for the music industry.”

After last week’s shutdown of Megaupload, the file sharing site which the US justice department alleges cost the entertainment industry hundreds of millions of dollars in sales lost to illegal downloading, music company executives hope that other websites – including Google – will do more to prevent piracy on their networks.

Frances Moore, chief executive of IFPI, criticised last week’s protests by Google, Wikipedia and other technology companies against two proposed US laws to stem file-sharing, the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act.

She said: “I often wish instead of hysterical resisting, our opponents would come forward with some constructive suggestions. It’s always ‘no, no, no’.”

Ms Moore said that in spite of the suspension of congressional debates about SOPA and PIPA last week, she was confident that US lawmakers would come back with “a different angle” to prevent piracy. “It shows me there is a commitment from Congress to come forward with legislation that tackles some of these problems,” she said.

The IFPI says that there has been a 26 per cent reduction in use of “peer-to-peer” file-sharing since the introduction of France’s “Hadopi” law to suspend persistent pirates’ internet connections.

Internet service providers have also been ordered to block piracy sites in New Zealand, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Finland, Malaysia and India.

For Once-Obscure Music, a Golden Age of Reissues

By Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones 12/26/11 Atlantic Monthly
Why are so many cult albums being re-released?

The curious few who were lucky enough to have bought Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats when it was originally released in 1979 were in for a treat. Possibly one of the most subversive albums of all time, the cover features the band posing in a pastoral field of wildflowers near a cliff’s edge, warmly offering the possibility of ’70s jazz funk that lay inside. Rather than easy-listening hits, the listener would soon discover they had purchased an album of pounding industrial vitriol from the “wreckers of civilization.” The cliff the band was standing near was an infamous English suicide spot.

Until the rise of online file sharing, obtaining such an influential anti-pop album meant frequenting obscure, eclectic record stores that trafficked in independent, experimental recordings. Since then, though, 20 Jazz Funk Greats’ importance has become more widely accepted—so much so that the album was remastered and re-released this past November.

The Throbbing Gristle reissue comes amid a wave of reissues for once-obscure bands, providing another sign that we’re living in a renaissance for cultural omnivores.

The stream of now-classic, once-hard-to-find albums that have been recently reissued, and those still to be released, would have been once unimaginable. The list of boxed sets from this year alone is worthy of awe: collections from American primitivist John Fahey, Chicago punk band Jesus Lizard, DC hardcore outfit Void, krautrock originators Can, Turkish psych pioneer Erkin Koray, Seattle funk, indie rock stalwarts Neutral Milk Hotel, music of the Ottoman-American diaspora, and Ghanian folk. Over the last 10 years, this list would expand to include Orange Juice, Bad Brains, Big Star, Fela Kuti, Gang of Four, Kleenex/Liliput, Les Rallizes Dénudés, Neu!, Suicide, the Fall, the Homosexuals, the Buzzcocks, Métal Urbain, the Raincoats, ESG, Beat Happening, the 13th Floor Elevators, Wire, and the Stooges. Then there are the collections of girl group sounds from the ’60s, Indianapolis funk, murder ballads, punkabilly, unending collections of international garage and psychedelic rock, or music from countries like Mauritania with no previously recorded output. And while the Beach Boys don’t rate as obscure, the 2011 release of their long-languishing Smile tapes handily encapsulates the trend: What was once sought after on bootleg by a relatively small group of collectors has been packaged for official release, to be displayed on Best Buy shelves across the country.

The unifying element across this list is that the original recordings weren’t commercially popular. These bands might draw a fervent cult following in certain circles or parts of the world, but few of these names would have been recognized in the larger forum of pop music when they first started. Some were independent musicians with unique sounds, and some weren’t interested in marketing—or were actively antagonistic to the idea of marketing.

As it has done with so many kinds of media, the Internet has helped these acts find and grow an audience—one that’s big enough to warrant reissuing albums that not many people bought in the first place. So much is accessible so easily that it’s hard to remember a time when an extremely influential act like Neu! would have been known only to a small set of music collectors. Now the current barrier to hearing something considered unpopular or outside one’s usual tastes can easily be breached by a cursory Google search. That has led to new, larger followings for old cult bands.

But with so much readily available online, re-releasing an album in a physical format may seem strange. In part, it’s a prestige play. A band like the Smiths—which came from the world of independent music and saw some success in the UK charts but were hampered by some aspects of independent distribution—now have the opportunity to put out a boxed set to an audience half-composed of older devotees keen on nostalgia and half an ever-widening, younger audience unfamiliar with their songs. That means a new chance to sell albums, and a new reason for the music press to sing the band’s praises. It’s the same motivation behind the rise of reunion tours (although, famously, The Smiths have yet to do one).

The irony of the download era is that older bands that were ignored and unappreciated during their existence have recently seen their influence and credibility rise, even as their work is now being given away for free. Some of the people behind reissues feel it’s only right for these acts to try to cash in on their new cultural cache. As Paul Smith of Industrial Records, which reissued 20 Jazz Funk Greats, put it in an email, “The attitude of ‘free for all’ culture encourages a lack of respect and appreciation/acknowledgement for the work, time and talent that goes into making music.”

But given that so-called “free for all” culture, even if a band experiences a resurgence of appreciation, does that translate to sales for new physical copies of old recordings? Recently, Joyful Noise Recordings re-released six Dinosaur Jr. albums on cassette tape, which went on to sell out in a matter of days. “[With] the prevalence of digital music today, a lot of music listeners have never owned a physical copy of a recording,” Karl Hofstetter, owner of Joyful Noise, says by email. “Digital music has reached a point where you are not required to purchase music in order to listen to it. All the music in the world is at our fingertips for free, but the obsessive fan’s desire to own something tactile isn’t going away.”

Spotify’s Daniel Ek: The Most Important Man In Music

StevenBertoni 01/16/12 FORBES magazine.

Spotify’s Daniel Ek created a free, Facebook-enabled platform that could save the recording industry from piracy–and iTunes.

It’s a typically damp, dark November afternoon in Stockholm, and Daniel Ek is ill. Over the past month the 28-year-old chief executive of Spotify has worn himself down jetting from his Swedish base to San Francisco, New York, Denmark, the Netherlands and France to visit his expanding sales force and launch his music service in one or another of the dozen countries it now operates in.

But there’s no rest for the weary. Next week he’s scheduled to return to New York to unveil Spotify’s new platform in front of his first-ever press conference—a platform that he admits still isn’t ready for a public debut. “I should be home in bed,” sighs Ek, his voice weak and scratchy, “but we need to get this thing perfect.” So the bald, barrel-chested Ek zips his white hoodie to his chin, swaps tea for his morning cup of coffee—the first of six he throws down in a typical day—and heads into an office that resembles a university library during finals. The pool table has been traded for more IKEA desks, and gray daybeds offer a place to nap between all-nighters. Forgoing his large office, which he mostly uses as a meeting room, Ek plops himself down at an open desk. Around him, a dozen engineers from nearly as many countries, united by their geek-chic uniforms—skinny jeans, printed T-shirts and cardigans—frantically bang out code on their silver MacBooks.

All this frenetic energy reflects the strange new reality of the music business. More than New York or L.A. or Nashville, this rented office space along Stockholm’s Birger Jarlsgatan has become the most important place in music, with Ek now standing as the industry’s most important player. Superstar bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers—formed the year Ek was born—now trek to Sweden to kiss the ring; he sits shotgun in vintage cars with Neil Young (his iPhone boasts a picture of them cruising in a white 1959 Lincoln Continental); he texts breezily with Bono. “Both my (maternal) grandparents were in the music industry,” shrugs Ek, “so I’m fairly grounded about the whole thing.”

The music industry has been waiting more than a decade for Ek. Or more specifically, someone—anyone—who could build something (a) more enticing to consumers than piracy while (b) providing a sustainable revenue model. In the 1990s Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker essentially broke the recording industry with their short-lived illegal download site, Napster, which Ek describes as “the Internet experience that changed me the most.” It was fast and free and limitless—through the site Ek discovered his two favorite bands, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin—and he became one of the 18-to-30-year-olds now considered a lost generation: Those who don’t believe you need to pay for music.

In building his iTunes juggernaut out of the wreckage, Steve Jobs subsequently proved that the cure could be almost as destructive as the disease. By training consumers to buy singles, rather than the CDs that had been the industry’s lifeblood, and taking an outsize cut of the action, Apple stoked the continuing ­spiral. Recording industry revenue, a healthy $56.7 billion in 1999, according to IbisWorld, clocked in at about $30 billion in 2011.

Enter a third disrupter, Ek. In the current tech landscape, where Google provides the search, Facebook the identity and Amazon the retail, Ek wants Spotify to supply the soundtrack. As he describes it: “We’re bringing music to the party.” Which explains what’s keeping his sleep-addled engineers on a 24-hour cycle: Rather than a mere music player—albeit one with a revolutionary model that allows legal access to almost every song you’ve ever heard of, on demand, for free—Spotify aims to create an entire music ecosystem.

For a consumer, Spotify is an easy sell: The service’s 10 million active users (people who have listened in the past month) have access to 15 million songs on their desktops, all for the cost of hearing an occasional advertisement. It has the speed and ease of iTunes, the flexibility and breadth of Napster and the attractive pricing of online radio service Pandora. And unlike those predecessors, Spotify was social from the start, with tools that let you share playlists with pals—more than 1.5 billion songs have been swapped on Facebook so far.

After he was bounced as Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker begged Ek to let him invest: “Ever since Napster I’ve dreamt of building a product similar to Spotify,” his introductory e-mail read. The service impressed Mark Zuckerberg, too. “I checked it out and I thought, This is pretty amazing,” the Facebook founder tells me. “They internalized a lot of what we’ve talked about in terms of social design of apps.” That means turning the core product—in Ek’s case, a hard-fought song library—loose on third-party app developers to help Spotify evolve, making it even more tempting to potential customers.

Here’s how that social stickiness translates into revenue: You explore your friends’ playlists, discover new music with apps from Rolling Stone, Billboard and Last.fm, and build your own jukebox. Eventually you want to take it everywhere. That’s where Ek has you trapped. With Spotify you pay for portability—$10 a month buys you access to your collection on your mobile device.

This model has proven it can save the music business—in Sweden. One-third of Ek’s home country has signed up, and about one-quarter of those pay for premium access. According to Mark Dennis, who runs Sony Music in Sweden, Spotify single-handedly stemmed a decade of nonstop revenue drop when it launched in 2008; in 2011 Sweden’s music industry will likely see its first growth since the Clinton Administration, with Spotify accounting for 50% of all sales (up from 25% last year). This in a country that has long been a hotbed of piracy.

Extrapolate that on a global scale and the industry will have its magic bullet. With the stakes nothing less than the future of the recording business Ek arrived in the U.S. in July for a three-front battle with Apple, Amazon and Google. Some 400,000 Americans have already subscribed to the premium plan, according to a well-placed music executive, lending credence to Ek’s pitch that he can rescue the record labels by giving their product away for free.

The two facets of Spotify—music and technology—were introduced to Daniel Ek at age 5, when over the course of a few months he received a guitar (his mother’s parents had been an opera signer and a jazz pianist) and a Commodore 20 computer (his father left the family when Ek was a baby, but his stepfather worked in IT). He was a natural at both instruments. Within two years he was writing basic code as MTV played in the background of his family apartment in the rough neighborhood of Ragsved (known to the locals as “Drugsved”).

At 14 Ek latched onto the late-1990s dot-com mania, making commercial websites in his school’s computer lab. The going rate then for a commercial home page was $50,000, but Ek charged $5,000 and made it up in volume: He recruited his teenage friends, training the math whizzes in HTML and the artists in Photoshop. Soon he was netting $15,000 a month and buying every videogame out there (one favorite: a business game called Capitalism).

True to the first generation to grow up online, he sought to master everything Internet. He bought some servers to see what made them tick, and wound up earning another $5,000 a month hosting Web pages. At 16, obsessed with Google’s speed, he applied to be an engineer there (“Google said come back when you have a degree”) and then set out to build his own search company.

That project failed, but led to a gig at a company called Jajja, where he worked on search engine optimization. The money was good, but the high schooler wasn’t really into it. He used the paychecks to buy more servers and tuners to chase his latest obsession: recording every program on TV at once (he had no clue TiVo was pulling off the same trick). The stacks of servers in his room got so hot that Ek would strip to his underwear as soon as he walked in.

After high school Ek enrolled in Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology to study engineering. After eight weeks, realizing that the entire first year would focus solely on theoretical mathematics, he dropped out. Eventually a Stockholm-based ad network called Tradedoubler asked him to build a program to tell them about the sites they contracted with, and Ek built something so effective that the company paid him about $1 million for the rights to it in 2006; he made another $1 million selling related patents.

Then things fell apart. A self-made millionaire at 23, Ek found himself holed up alone in the woods 20 miles south of Stockholm enduring a harsh Swedish winter and a harsher bout of depression. Seeking the fast life, he had bought a three-bedroom apartment in central Stockholm, a cherry-red Ferrari Modena and entrée to the city’s hottest clubs. But it was still hard to attract girls, and the big spending attracted the wrong ones. “I was deeply uncertain of who I was and who I wanted to be,” Ek says. “I really thought I wanted to be a much cooler guy than what I was.”

Miserable, he sold the Ferrari and moved into a cabin near his parents, where he played guitar and meditated. Ek had already started three tech companies, but he now toyed with the idea of getting by as a professional musician. (Ek plays guitar, bass, drums, piano and harmonica; he doesn’t sing). “I wouldn’t be rich, but I could have made a living.” There in the woods Ek finally decided he’d somehow marry music and tech, the two passions that drove him. During this time Ek started hanging out with Tradedoubler’s chairman, Martin Lorentzon, an energetic 42-year-old who works out twice a day. A Silicon Valley veteran (Alta Vista), Lorentzon took Tradedoubler public in 2005, netting himself $70 million. No longer involved in the day-to-day operations, he too was bored and adrift. The first time Ek visited Lorentzon’s Stockholm apartment he found only a mattress and a laptop balancing on an IKEA chair. “I asked him when he had moved in,” says Ek. “When he said it had been more than a year ago, I knew he wasn’t happy.”

The pair bonded over marathons of gangster films like the Godfather trilogy and Carlito’s Way (a ritual they repeat each year). “I got a very strong feeling when I met Daniel,” says Lorentzon. “To partner up I have to like the person like a brother, because we’ll face so many problems. The value of a company is the sum of the problems you solve together.”

Ek doubted Lorentzon would leave Tradedoubler, so later in 2006 he set a one-week deadline. Before they committed to partnering, Lorentzon would have to publicly resign as chairman and ­transfer a million euros of seed money into Ek’s account. The next Monday ­Tradedoubler sent out a press release announcing Martin Lorentzon’s resignation. Later that day he told Ek to check his bank account. The money was there. The two men had yet to decide the type of business they would start.
Lorentzon and Ek were in a unique place: The former no longer needed the money, and the latter no longer cared about it. So they decided to ignore the dollars and aim for disruption. Their target: music. “It disturbed me that the music industry had gone down the drain, even though people were listening to more music than ever and from a greater diversity of artists,” says Ek.

Sitting in two different rooms at Ek’s apartment, the pair yelled out possible titles for a music site—without even yet knowing what it would do—when Ek misheard one of Lorentzon’s suggestions. He typed the word “Spotify” into Google. There were zero hits (today: 64 million). Ek and Lorentzon registered the name, and started working on the ad-based plan. Once that gelled, they recruited a handful of engineers and took the new team to Barcelona to party and listen to what Ek calls “weird German electro-pop.” Then they got to work.

Back in Stockholm they built a prototype based on the interface of Apple’s iTunes and the sleek black styling of Ek’s Samsung flat-screen TV. Unlike music sites that had launched with pirated music, Ek wouldn’t debut Spotify until he signed deals with the labels. “We wanted to show that we were not in it to use their content to flip the company like others have done,” Ek says.

Ek, with the help of industry lawyer Fred Davis, initially tried to get global music rights and was quickly turned down. So he aimed for European licenses, which he figured would take three months—it took two years. Ek and his team hounded label execs, pitching them that their free, ad-based model would eventually lead to more sales. No one bit. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, this sounds really interesting’ or ‘Send me over some stats,’ which really means ‘There’s no way in hell we’re going to do this,’” Ek says and laughs. “But I was 23 at the time, and I thought, Wow, this is great, we’re going to get this done.”

Ek eventually loaded Spotify with pirated songs and sent demos to industry execs. That got them noticed. “With Spotify people don’t get it until they try it,” Ek says. “Then they tell their friends.” As Ek negotiated with the music companies, Spotify burned through cash. On top of salaries and overhead, Ek and Lorentzon were pledging million-dollar advances to labels for access to their music catalogs. VCs wouldn’t touch them. To stay afloat they plowed nearly $5 million into Spotify, atop the $2 million Lorentzon had already seeded. “We bet our personal fortunes, and sometimes we bet the entire company,” says Ek. “We led with our conviction rather than rational, because rational said it was impossible.” In October 2008 Spotify went live in Scandinavia, France, the U.K. and Spain. It took nearly three more years to finalize deals in the U.S.

“He’s the only tech entrepreneur who’s had the patience to achieve what he has with the record business,” says Sean Parker, now a Spotify board member, who helped open the door to U.S. deals, including one with Facebook. “He has this Zen-like patience and an ability not to crack under pressure or get frustrated. Over and over again he puts himself in a situation where a normal person would have thrown in the towel.” As I talk with Ek in his office, he sits straight and motionless like a Swedish Buddha; the only thing moving is his mouth, not even blinking his icy blue eyes.

Such calm helps manage the chaos: Last year Ek was on the road 100 days—mostly a triangle between Europe, New York and California, a schedule that recently cost him his girlfriend of two years. When he’s in Stockholm, Ek wakes around 8:30 a.m., answers e-mail for an hour, then takes the five-minute walk to Spotify. He spends about 25% of his time recruiting; otherwise he’s at his open desk or walking the floor. “Ek’s one of the few people,” says Parker, “who can handle the technology side, the strategic side and the deal side of the business.”

Ek works in the office until 8 p.m., eats dinner out and then returns home to unwind, either by playing guitar for a few hours or juggling a rotating trio of books (most recently, the Steve Jobs biography, a primer on typography and a guide to bonzai trees). Then he hops back on e-mail, before typically turning in around 2 a.m. Lorentzon wants Ek to find a balance: more exercise, less junk food, more sleep, less work. The last goal will be tough to achieve for the foreseeable future.

Ek bounds up the sleek white stage in Greenwich Village’s Stephan Weiss Studio on Nov. 30, as dozens of typing journalists and rows of live TV cameras stand ready. Though thrilled that the new platform is set for launch, he can’t wait for the press conference to end. When Ek operated just in Europe, he could lie low. But now that Spotify has made it to America—home to the cults of Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg and Jobs—Ek must switch from programmer to preacher. For Spotify to scale, he needs to hype his platform, generate buzz and get labels, artists and now developers to be excited to partner up.

He doesn’t need to win over investors. Ek’s roster has surged over the past few years. Spotify went from some smallish Swedish funding to a heavyweight round from social media elite (Li Ka-shing, Sean Parker and Founders Fund), who collectively put in more than $50 million at a roughly $250 million valuation. This past summer DST, Accel and Kleiner Perkins reportedly invested close to $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. “Daniel was an entrepreneur that we had to, and wanted to, work with,” says Accel’s Jim Breyer. “The combination of a passion for music as well as his idea of making music as frictionless as possible for discovery and sharing is where we hit it off.” Ek still holds about 15% of the company. Thanks to all that seed money, Lorentzon owns some 20%.

With 2.5 million paying customers worldwide (85% pay the $10 a month for portable and the rest pay $5 for ad-free access), plus advertising revenue, Spotify is currently generating a run rate of around $300 million. Using Pandora as a comp, that would make Spot­i­fy worth north of $2 billion—and Ek, at 28, worth over $300 million on paper. But the company is likely worth more: Spot­i­fy has Pandora’s radio capability as well as its limitless library of shareable songs.

Plus, Pandora doesn’t have Spotify’s social media muscle—specifically, Facebook, which is embedded into Ek’s platform, and vice versa. Those billion-plus shared songs don’t happen by accident: Before cinching the deal this September, Ek’s team spent a year perfecting the app, basing five engineers at Facebook’s headquarters. “I don’t think there’s a Facebook app so well-resourced,” says Ek. “We wanted it perfect.” Adds Zuckerberg: “He clearly is very forward-thinking on where he wants to go. He’s very clear on the things he wants for the product and what he doesn’t want.”

The real threat to Ek, ultimately, isn’t his product—it’s the industry Spotify purports to save. Spotify will only be as successful as its music library, and some bands—notably his two favorites, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin—aren’t playing ball. Recently Coldplay and the Black Keys denied Spotify access to their new albums. Scooter Braun, agent to Justin Bieber, understands the thinking but tells me: “They should then tell radio not to play records for free and call YouTube and say don’t allow my music to stream on videos for free.”

More ominously, the initial music licenses expire in two years, and Ek must deliver enough cash flow to prevent the labels from demanding higher royalties—or pulling out all together. (So far, Spotify has paid them about $150 million.) Right now the labels have the leverage, and Ek has wisely brought the big players into the tent—as part of the licensing deals, Spotify granted equity stakes to the four largest music labels (Warner, Universal, EMI and Sony) and Merlin. Industry sources put their collective cut at nearly 20%.

Those stakes, while significant, aren’t enough to automatically quell an insurrection. Ultimately Ek needs to change the power dynamic before the licenses are up. He has two years to make Spotify the world’s dominant music source, a hitmaker so big no label or artist can afford to opt out.

Globally 500 million people listen to music online. With a 2% market share he has plenty of upside, albeit plenty of competition, including iTunes, burgeoning cloud services from Amazon and Google and the pirates Napster set free all those years ago. That’s another motive for opening up Spotify to developers: He’s hoping they’ll turn it into a universal music platform, while allowing him to focus all of his employees, now 500 strong, solely on growth.

“Google has 30,000 employees,” Ek says. “A part of me wonders what if they were all focused on really solving search.” He takes out his iPhone. Using its Siri voice software, he asks it when tomorrow’s first appointment begins. After a few seconds the computerized voice says 11 a.m. “Imagine if this was three times as fast or truly understood my intent,” Ek says. “It’s probably the biggest threat to Google; it’s a whole new way of interacting.”

Does he plan on building a voice activated Spotify interface? He flashes a mischievous smile. “Play me some Coldplay,” he tells the phone. Its small speakers ring out with the opening piano chords of the band’s hit “The Scientist.” “We hacked into it a few weeks ago,” Ek says, with a satisfied nod. “I’m not an inventor. I just want to make things better.”

The best song of 2011? It had to be by Lana Del Rey

Alexis Petridis Guardian.co.uk 12/19/11

First, the case for the prosecution. It would be nice if Lana Del Rey really was the mysterious polymath auteur she briefly appeared to be when the vaguely Adam Curtis-like clip for Video Games started doing the rounds on the internet, rather than a female singer who’s worked – like Adele, Duffy, Florence Welch and Katie Melua – with blue-chip songwriters-for-hire Eg White and Guy Chambers. It would be nice if the record company biog that called her “a recent resident of a New Jersey trailer park recently emerged from smalltown USA” didn’t feel at least slightly duplicitous given she’s actually Lizzy Grant, the daughter of a wealthy estate agent and internet domain magnate – “Hypnotic New Album From Domainer’s Daughter Lana Del Ray Now Available!” offered Domain Name Journal’s headline on the release of the 2010 debut album her management has gone out of the way to suppress – and the small town was Lake Placid, ski resort, tourist spot and self-styled “playground of North America”. And it would be nice if the image overhaul she underwent – including the name change, never mind rumours about the size of her lips – hadn’t provoked the kind of prose you find on MTV’s Style Blog: “ZOMG she is so important … the self-proclaimed “gangster Nancy Sinatra’ embodies the best of strong, sculpted eyebrows, bump-its and hairsprayed tonsorial PERFECTION.”

Now the case for the defence: none of that matters. For one thing, you could argue it’s the prerogative, perhaps even the duty, of pop stars to reinvent themselves in interesting and fabulous ways: what is pop if not a theatre of dreams in which David Jones from Brixton can reimagine himself as a gay alien, Bob Dylan can spin ridiculous yarns about his uneventful, middle-class childhood and – a personal favourite – a diminutive Italian-American called Ronald can become Ronnie James Dio and slay a dragon onstage every night? Authenticity is for the Antiques Roadshow, not pop music: if you’re that concerned with authenticity, you might consider avoiding pop and rock and sticking with field recordings and Topic’s Voice of the People series.

And for another, it’s hard not to feel that if Lizzy Grant had had a song as good as Video Games on her debut album, she would have attracted substantially wider attention than the pages of Domain Name Journal and the Adirondack Daily Enterprise (“a girl from an upstate New York town who may be on the verge of something great!”). She might not have needed the makeover at all. Regardless of who made it, where they came from, who their dad is, what they’re called and whether or not their lips have been subject to the ministrations of a surgeon, Video Games would be a magnificent song. There’s something imperishable and undeniable about its sighing melody, the way it rises and falls with the mood of a lyric that can’t seem to decide whether the bloke it’s about is the best thing since sliced bread or a unbelievable pain in the arse. You can see why Video Games united the guy who writes Pitchfork’s Track of the Day column with whoever picks the Radio 2 playlist, why it doesn’t seem to have lost any of its haunting power in the face of ubiquity. And if one of the marks of a great song is how it can withstand radical reinterpretation, you could point to the variety of fanatstic remixes of Video Games, which in the hands of Balam Acab, reinvented the song as hallucinogenic ambience, and via Joy Orbison as strange, beguiling, disjointed house music.

Video Games (BALAM ACAB Remix) – Lana Del Rey by BALAM ACAB
It’s tempting to say with a song that good it doesn’t matter who sings it, but that’s not strictly true. As pop divas who collaborate with Eg White go, Lana Del Rey sounds hugely understated. Her voice has a lot in common with Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval – not exactly a touchstone for many artists who’ve made the top 10 in 2011 – which fits the song perfectly, chafing against the orchestral bombast, the harps and pizzicato strings in the background: this is a song about big emotions brought on by everyday events, an indolent boyfriend opening a beer, a visit to a bar, putting on perfume. It would sound terrible if, say, a contestant off The X Factor did that awful thing Louis Walsh persists in referring to as “making the song your own”: it wouldn’t work if it was decorated with a load of showy look-at-me melismatics.

The future for Lana Del Rey feels a little uncertain. She went from mysterious internet phenomenon to the Q awards at such speed you suspect even the shadowy management that suppressed her first album and got her to change her name are a bit taken aback. You might feel more confident about her ability to deliver an album that lives up to the mammoth expectations and confounds her critics if she actually were the mysterious polymath auteur she briefly appeared to be. That said, being an arch, artfully constructed figure certainly doesn’t preclude making great albums and she’s already made one extraordinary record, which is one more than most people make. Whether Video Games turns out to be the one truly remarkable thing about her, or a portent of greatness to come is a moot point. But, like the criticisms levelled against her it doesn’t seem to matter, at least while the song is playing.

The Year When Rock Just Spun Its Wheels

JON CARAMANICA NY Times 12/29/11
Every week since the end of May the band Sublime With Rome has had at least one song, sometimes two, on Billboard’s Rock Songs chart or its Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart, often both. The most successful have been “Panic” and “Take It or Leave It,” both true to the band’s mission to reincarnate the band Sublime, whose singer, Brad Nowell, died in 1996, and whose ska-lite Sublime With Rome both covers and, in its originals, shamelessly apes.

It is pure historical re-enactment, interrupted only to write new material in the style of the band it’s standing in for, like the hired hand who steps in for the mystery-novel author who keels over before finishing a trilogy. It’s designed to satisfy fans who still crave the feeling, if not quite the author himself. It quenches pre-existing thirst.

Anomaly? No. The same can be said of almost the whole of major-label rock these days, a musical universe in crisis like no other, full of old bands spinning their wheels, praying for one more summer out under big-tour sheds, and their young reinforcements, not much more than a field of dullards who are the artistic equivalent of grocery store generic brands.

2011 may well be remembered as the most numbing year for mainstream rock music in history. (For the purposes of this article, that’s more or less rock released on American major labels, regardless of origin, and played on mainstream rock radio stations.) The genre didn’t produce a single great album, and the best of the middling walked blindly in footprints laid out years, even decades, earlier. Plenty of juggernauts — U2 and Bruce Springsteen, among others — took the year off, but the genre’s failings are creative, not commercial. At this point rock is becoming a graveyard of aesthetic innovation and creativity, a lie perpetrated by major labels, radio conglomerates and touring concerns, all of whom need — or feel they need — the continued sustenance of this style of music. The fringes remain interesting, and regenerate constantly, but the center has been left to rot.

Declaring a genre dead is the worst, least imaginative sort of proclamation, so let’s call it zombified: it moves, it takes up space, it looks powerful from afar — with oodles of bands working hard, and some even making money — and garish up close. It lacks nutrients. How else to explain the critical consensus around a band like Foster the People, whose album, “Torches” (StarTime/Columbia), was one of the most lauded rock albums of the year by an emerging band, even though it did little to add to the soul-infused lite-rock of the 1980s. And what of the Black Keys, who have committed themselves to undistinguished garage-soul and have cruelly outlasted their onetime peers the White Stripes? Their latest, “El Camino” (Nonesuch), is one long airless, swingless jam, a flat boogie primer for foreigners and marketers. Or take a less acclaimed but still popular band: the colossally dopey Hot Chelle Rae, which on “Whatever” (RCA) recalls the early breakthroughs of pop-punk bands like Sum 41 and Blink-182, though with sprinkles of power-pop and hip-hop.

These bands at least are doing their best to resist the tides around them, borrowing from different influences than their far more numerous neighbors. Those bands — Nickelback on “Here And Now” (Roadrunner), Chevelle on “Hats Off to the Bull” (Epic), Disturbed on the B-sides collection “The Lost Children” (Reprise) — all released big albums this year that work the post-grunge rock spectrum, to varying degrees of success but with equal amounts of innovation, which is to say little. The burly guitars are the same, as are the melancholy choruses, the assertive but not affirming drumming and the sense that this has all been done before, and better (in some cases by Nickelback itself, several years ago). Daughtry almost fell into this same trap, as it has in the past, but avoided it by taking its morbid power rock and moving toward Bon Jovi hopefulness on its new album, the largely enjoyable “Break the Spell” (19/RCA).

Even for those whose version of arena rock didn’t lean so heavily on groaning, this was a terrible year full of creative flops, and often commercial flops, by long-reliable acts that failed to arouse even their typical level of interest: Evanescence’s “Evanescence” (Wind-Up), Blink-182’s “Neighborhoods” (DGC/Interscope), Coldplay’s “Mylo Xyloto” (Capitol). That’s to say nothing of the airless comeback albums by bands well past their sell-by date: the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “I’m With You” (Warner Brothers), Limp Bizkit’s “Gold Cobra” (Interscope), R.E.M.’s “Collapse Into Now” (Warner Brothers), Sum 41’s “Screaming Bloody Murder” (Island). There was also the outrageously fraught “Lulu” (Warner Brothers), by Lou Reed and Metallica, which defied most categorization yet somehow still falls neatly into this one.

Scale in and of itself need not be a deterrent to creativity; look at hip-hop, where plenty of sonic innovations take place on the biggest stages, proffered by the biggest stars. Even major-label country, no firestorm of originality, has been riskier in the last decade than major-label rock, which is hiding out in a few comfortable modes, hoping no one will ask much more of it.

But it wasn’t so long ago that major-label rock had bursts of vitality; at least two infusions of energy in the last two decades kept it slightly unpredictable. There was Nirvana’s breakthrough in 1991, which brought grunge to the mainstream and also unapologetically splattered the advances of 1980s alternative rock — college rock back then — all over a huge canvas. And a decade ago came the arrival of bands like the Strokes, the White Stripes and several others whose creative vision revolved around a definite article, who ascended quickly from the indie-rock underground to something grander without sacrificing the fundamental quirks that helped them connect in the first place.

The veteran band with the best 2011 was Foo Fighters, which continued its quest to average-out all the great rock albums from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s on “Wasting Light” (Roswell/RCA). The band won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Rock Video, besting four younger but probably not better bands (the Black Keys, Mumford & Sons, Foster the People and Cage the Elephant); in his acceptance speech, the frontman, Dave Grohl, once of Nirvana, took a stand that almost certainly fell on deaf ears: “I just want to say, never lose faith in real rock ’n’ roll music, you know what I mean? Never lose faith in that.”

About an hour after Mr. Grohl’s speech, the lone rock band of the night performed: Young the Giant, which made a tepid showing as if to rebuke Mr. Grohl for his empty hope. Which was a shame, because that band’s self-titled debut (on Roadrunner) is one of the year’s most careful major-label releases, a modest reframing of the breakthrough indie rock of the 1990s that, while pushing no boundaries, still felt promising, a foundation for something riskier. The same could be said of Needtobreathe, which has done a good job of being the next Kings of Leon, except with a more potent motor; its album “The Reckoning” (Atlantic) felt dangerous in places, as apt to seek out idiosyncratic harmonies as sticky melodies.

These bands are a couple of rare bright spots working in the major-label system. Add to that pile Paramore, which didn’t release an album this year. It stands out not only for its ability to match manic energy and powerhouse melodies, but also that it’s fronted by a woman, Hayley Williams, one of the most convincing singers in mainstream rock. It doesn’t help that some bands are beginning to bypass major labels altogether. The Gaslight Anthem, for example, has the potential to make huge, sweeping, pastoral post-Springsteen anthems, but thus far it has committed to doing so on an independent label.

Can you blame it? Too often major labels continue to commit resources to bands whose albums linger on the Rock Albums chart for months, free of ambition. 30 Seconds to Mars recently set a Guinness World Record for most shows performed in a single album cycle (over 300), which, viewed cynically, means it was easier for them to play old songs than write new ones. The album in question, “This Is War” (Virgin), was released in 2009 and only certified gold a few weeks ago. It’s a post-industrial, post-prog yelp-fest, a faint tracing of an early Nine Inch Nails album, and were it not for the fact that its lead singer is Jared Leto, it might have fizzled some time ago.

But here’s to another 300 shows by 30 Seconds to Mars, if only as a reminder of the band’s fundamental flimsiness, and of the flimsy system that props it up. It’s a living funeral, and it’s got to come tumbling down sometime.

Thanks to Gaga and Adele, Music Business Finally Improves in 2011

Chris Willman at TheWrap 12/27/11

Among musicians, “flat” is a word you don’t want to hear. But to the industry, flat is truly music to everyone’s ears.

Soundscan’s sales year doesn’t end until Jan. 1, but current year-to-year comparisons have album sales for 2011 ahead of comparable 2010 business.

OK, it’s only by a whisker of 1 percent. But it is welcome news in an industry where album sales for 2010 were down 13 percent from 2009. And prior to that they’d been down an average of 8 percent every year through the 2000s, suggesting an incredible shrinking music business.

This year reversed the trend, but there is a cloud buried in the silver lining: the success stories of 2011 will not be easy to replicate.

The year’s two biggest albums were Adele’s “21” and Michael Buble’s “Christmas” — and even the most copycat-prone execs aren’t foolish enough to start looking for pleasingly plump Englishwomen or Sinatra-bred carolers to sign.

Regardless of how applicable the lessons might be, here’s our look back at what worked and what didn’t in 2011:

RETRO ROCKS … IF YOU DON’T CALL IT RETRO

Artists from Adele to the Black Keys thrived by recalling good old days for oldsters while seeming utterly contemporary to kids who’d rebel at the word “throwback.”

Also read: Review — Adele Bares It All in Candor-Filled ‘Live at Albert Hall’

At last tally, Adele’s “21” had sold 5,281,000; with two sales weeks yet to be reported, the blockbuster should finish out the year a little shy of 6 million. (The only release in the past few years to cross the 6 million mark was Taylor Swift’s “Fearless.”) Moreover, she sold an additional 750,000 copies this year of her previous album, “19.”

Adele is a singles artist, too. “Rolling in the Deep” has sold 5,665,000 downloads, followed by “Someone Like You” with 3,352,000, “Set Fire to the Rain” with 963,000, and “Rumour Has It” with 551,000.

Also read: Why Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ May Save the Music Industry

On a smaller but louder end of the spectrum, the Black Keys put the lie to “rock is dead” theories — again — by moving 426,000 copies this year of their two-year-old “Brothers.” Their brand new “El Camino,” whose nostalgic aspects lean more toward glam-rock than neo-blues, has sold an impressive 293,000 units in two weeks.

BET ON THE RIGHT CAROLER

Everyone guessed there’d be a big Christmas album this year. Almost everyone guessed it’d be Justin Bieber’s. But Buble’s sold 1,964,000 of his holiday CD, versus Bieber’s 1,003,000.

We should have seen it coming, since Buble’s previous album quietly sold 2 million-plus. Despite his crooner image, Buble’s holiday set wisely had something for everyone, whereas Bieber’s had something to annoy just about everyone outside his core.

“Christmas” currently stands at No. 3 on the list of 2011’s bestsellers, and will surpass Lady Gaga to land at No. 2 by Jan. 1.

Again, maybe not a surprise to anyone who recalled how Josh Groban’s “Noel” became 2008′s surprise bestseller.

FORGET WHAT WE SAID ABOUT ROCK NOT BEING DEAD

The news wasn’t so great if you weren’t the Black Keys. One of the biggest bands of the 2000s, Evanescence, belly flopped with their self-titled third album, which has sold an anemic 284,000 units in 10 weeks and currently sits at No. 101.

Also read: Universal’s $1.9B EMI Deal: IN a Digital World, Market Share Counts for Less

Some other big rock names did just OK. Coldplay sold 877,000 copies of “Mylo Xyloto” in eight weeks … impressive, until you remember their last album sold 721,000 in one week.

Don’t call Blink-182′s “Neighborhoods” a comeback. The dormant superstars’ return moved 259,000 units in 10 weeks. Their current neighborhood (No. 200 on the Billboard 200)? The chart ghetto.

Daughtry looked to be one of the big sellers of this holiday season, on paper, but their new album sits at No. 27, having sold 241,000 in a month.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers sold 458,000 of their latest, leaving a long road to catch up with the two and a half million their last effort managed. The term “red hot” just doesn’t seem to apply to anything related to rock …

Unless, of course, it’s U2’s “360” tour, officially the highest grossing ever. Their lengthy worldwide trek brought in $293 million, playing to 2.8 million patrons.

SINGLES ARTISTS VS. ALBUM ARTISTS

Adele and Taylor Swift sometimes appear to be the only acts who can move millions of long-players and singles. Swift’s 2010 release “Speak Now” sold another 902,000 copies this year, upping its total to 3.9 million.

But the trend is toward acts like LMFAO, who had far and away the year’s biggest single with “Party Rock Anthem” — a 4,579,000 seller as of mid-month.

Also read: Review — Amy Winehouse’s ‘Lioness’ Opens Up an All-Too-Empty Vault

The dance duo also have the current top-selling single with “Sexy and I Know It,” with 2,544,000 downloads. Another song, “Shots,” has moved 1,540,000. Fans clearly prefer the a la carte approach. The act with the year’s top-selling song can only lay claim to the 56th best-selling album, as “Sorry for Party Rocking” has sold 401,000 copies.

The ultimate example of a singles-only act: Hot Chelle Rae. The pop group won best new artist at the American Music Awards, after their “Tonight Tonight” single sold an astonishing 2,382,000 singles. The subsequent album has moved 31,000 copies in three weeks.

Britney Spears may also fall into this category now. Her “Femme Fatale” did better than expected, given a run of bad pre-release publicity, but its 725,000-copy total wasn’t good enough to push it into the top 20 sellers of the year.

NEW COUNTRY VS. OLD(ER) COUNTRY:

It used to be that country was the genre most hospitable to mid-career artists. Tell that to Martina McBride, who’s sold a mere 119,000 in 10 weeks. Toby Keith is down to No. 28 after just eight weeks, with an OK 266,000 tally, the kind of number he used to do in just his opening week.

So who’s barnstorming down the dirt road? Country’s new new guard of guys. Jason Aldean’s “My Kinda Party,” a late 2010 release, has racked up a 2.2 million total, and it moved back up to No. 16 in the week prior to Christmas. No other album that’s been out more than a year has anywhere near that ongoing momentum.

For second-tier success stories, check out Eric Church at 504,000 units, Luke Bryan at 580,000 with his latest, the Zac Brown Band adding 720,000 to their 2010 album’s total — and Scotty McCreery, putting an end to the recent “Idol” curse with 748,000 and counting.

One female-fronted group broke through the wall of dudes: the Band Perry added 666,000 to the 998,000 total for their debut album, which will be well over a million by year’s end — capitalizing on their 3.5 million-selling single, “If I Die Young,” the funeral song of the millennium.

DID HIP-HOP FAIL TO WATCH ITS THRONE?

Eminem had the top-selling album last year, but there were no such contenders in 2011. Lil Wayne had the best first-week tally, selling over a million — but he has yet to double that. Still, his “Tha Carter IV” is the year’s fourth-best seller, with 1,826,000 so far.

Jay-Z’s and Kanye West’s “Watch the Throne” is up to 1,116,000, but was expected to have done better. Drake’s sophomore “Take Care” will soon surpass it. As for the old guard, you only have to look to The Game to see who’s lost his game, with a braggadocio-defying 222,000 units.

LOSS LEADERS TAKE A LOSS

Lady Gaga should end up with the third best-selling album of the year, after Adele and Buble — but it’ll always have a steroid-sized asterisk, since first-week sales were goosed by a controversial 99-cent sale on Amazon.com. Billboard allowed the sub-dollar sales when they celebrated a million-plus opening week for “Born This Way,” but later announced they wouldn’t include virtual giveaways in the future.

That’s not to say Gaga’s fans aren’t willing to shell out where it counts: at the box office. Her concert trek grossed $72 million — even without putting any tickets on sale at the Dollar Store. She was the only performer under 30 besides Swift to land among Billboard Boxscore’s top 10 money-making tours, a realm otherwise largely populated by the veteran likes of U2, Bon Jovi and Roger Waters.

With music shelf space still shrinking at big-box stores, which of course helped kill dedicated music outlets during the flush years, it’s doubtful whether music can manage another up or flat year in 2012.

That might take Adele breaking her every-other-year release pattern and giving us a surprise “22″ on the inevitable path to “23.”

Kaskade continues to break down walls between electronica, pop

DJ Ryan Raddon’s shows have become an international destination — he has two New Year’s Eve gigs — even as he tries to put July’s Hollywood Boulevard debacle behind him.
August Brown, Los Angeles Times 12/30/11

As Kaskade, Ryan Raddon is at the forefront of an electronica wave that’s sweeping pop music and upending underground dance culture. But after a year when he did almost everything right as a DJ and producer, he’s still trying to shake the one concert that went wrong.

The San Clemente-based artist was among the biggest stories in dance music this year, reportedly commanding up to six figures per gig and conquering the global circuit with a double album, “Fire & Ice,” that redefined his near-decade-long career and landed in the Billboard Top 20 (with its iTunes release hitting No. 4 on those charts). DJ Times deemed him the best DJ in the world, and he headlined global festivals, including the groundbreaking IDentity dance tour. He’ll cap the year with two headlining New Year’s Eve performances, jetting between sets at the White Wonderland rave in Anaheim and at Marquee in Las Vegas, the site of his popular year-long monthly club residency.

But in July, at the L.A. premiere of a documentary film on the Electric Daisy Carnival, things went awry. Raddon tweeted that he would be spinning atop an ad-hoc mobile stage on Hollywood Boulevard. Promised “ME+BIG SPEAKERS+MUSIC=BLOCK PARTY!!!,” thousands of fans swamped the street, leading to a confrontation with police, a shutdown of the boulevard and the media calling it a “riot.” Fearful theater chains canceled subsequent screenings of the film, and a public debate flared anew about whether dance music attracts a volatile audience.

For an artist who prides himself on clean living and a relentless work ethic, it was a low moment that, he believes, missed the point of his music.

“It was disappointing on so many levels,” he said. Raddon admits that he “didn’t anticipate the draw. But it was a bummer how it got played in the media. I always get angry when people make dance music out to be something cheap, where they think it’s all about drugs or no one would come.”

That such a mishap didn’t faze his career is a testament to his demand as a DJ and to the rising tide of dance music worldwide. This coming year may be when Kaskade obliterates the last walls between orthodox rave music and mainstream pop. And despite the Hollywood incident, it might also be the year he helps change the genre’s decadent reputation into something more wholesome and maybe even spiritual.

As his recent album title suggests, Raddon’s career as Kaskade has been defined by seemingly incompatible elements. Raised in the Chicago suburbs, Raddon was brought up in the Mormon faith, attending Brigham Young University and the University of Utah, where he refrained from the stereotypical dance-culture staples of drugs and drinking. He traveled to Japan for a Mormon mission and speaks fluent Japanese.

After school, he began releasing singles upon taking a job with the San Francisco dance label Om and released his first full-length in 2003, putting out albums roughly every two years and moving to the influential Ultra label in 2006. As he entered the top flight of global DJs, however, the 40-year-old snowboarder and married father of three kept strong ties to his faith. He cites the atmosphere and emotion of religious music as one of his chief influences as a dance producer.

“There are real similarities. Listening to music is such an uplifting, spiritual thing,” Raddon said. “It’s far-fetched to some, I understand that. But the way dance music brings people together, it’s not a big stretch from hymns.”

Incantatory, melodic vocals are what sets his tracks apart from the morass of dance peers. Pop has thoroughly accepted dance music sounds, and artists like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga (Raddon has remixed for both) have deployed them for huge hits. But the reverse has been slower to take hold — orthodox dance producers usually structure songs around micromanaged samples and long-simmering bass drops rather than verses and choruses.

Raddon’s sound has been arcing in a songwriterly direction for years, and on “Fire & Ice,” he fully settled into a template where he uses the inventiveness of dance and the hit-making aspects of pop.

He collaborated with rising artists as disparate as the ADD-dubstep producer Skrillex, peacocking rock band Neon Trees and the Eminem and Dr. Dre vocalist Skylar Grey, alongside dance-scene singers like Haley Gibby and Becky Jean Williams. His forthcoming single, “Room for Happiness,” rides big washes of synths and Grey’s whispered encouragement — “Don’t be fooled by your emptiness, there’s so much more room for happiness.” “Lessons in Love” has the seductive sonic energy needed on a packed dance floor but with the lyrical self-doubt of an angsty rock band.

“In the beginning, I was so hung up on production, tweaking perfect sounds and spending hours getting the right snare drum,” Raddon said. “Now I’d rather be involved in a song where the words and melody mean more. It took Lady Gaga to really put a light on that, where you can have artistry in a fun dance song. She made the underground pay attention.”

That growing underground may be the biggest development in the live music business.

Dance music has long been the default mode of European pop, and in the last few years American stars have caught up sonically. But the more interesting aspect might be the sweep of festivals like Electric Daisy (which played in Las Vegas this year to bigger daily crowds than Coachella) and young artists like Skrillex and Deadmau5, who became amphitheater-filling stars. Kaskade’s Marquee residency heralded not just a major artist growing his reputation but an entire business model in which dance music is a self-sufficient entertainment attraction in the U.S.

“He was a top priority for us to join the DNA of what Marquee was all about,” said Jason Strauss, co-founder of Strategic Hospitality Group, which manages Marquee and other popular Las Vegas and New York clubs including Tao, Avenue and Lavo.

Marquee, which opened in January, invested $3 million in an LED screen to showcase visuals for Kaskade’s sets, which regularly sold out its 3,000-guest capacity and became an international destination.

Strauss notes the sex appeal of a Kaskade set, citing his singles’ sultry vocals and his “fierce female fan loyalty.” Promoters know that where the women go, money follows. Thus, Raddon can now reportedly demand up to $200,000 a night for tour dates, which require few of the logistical trappings and financial outlays of a touring rock band.

But what about that mission? Dance music is America’s most important new sound and scene, but it’s also still battling a rowdy reputation. The kind it might take a God-fearing, bass-dropping teetotaler to undo.

“It’s still shocking to me to see this acceptance,” he says of electronica’s popularity. “I love this music so much, and I didn’t think this day was coming.”

Cee Lo Strikes Gold, Without a Gold Album

BEN SISARIO NY Times 12/26/11

Ducking through a crowd of tourists at Rockefeller Center, the singer Cee Lo Green took a breather during rehearsals for NBC’s annual tree-lighting concert on Nov. 30. But between a shopping detour at Swarovski Crystal and last-minute talks with the show’s producer, there wasn’t much time to rest.

It’s a pace that Cee Lo, as he is also known, is accustomed to. In the last year, he has won a Grammy Award for a song that became a blockbuster hit despite its unprintable title (officially bowdlerized as “Forget You”), become a celebrity judge on NBC’s talent show “The Voice” and, through a calculated media blitz orchestrated by his managers, broken through as a face of mainstream pop culture after nearly two decades as a cult figure.

To sustain his success, Cee Lo has become one of the hardest-working stars in pop. In the days around the tree-lighting schedule he logged about 20,000 miles taping television shows, recording an album and making personal appearances across the United States and in Britain. One day last spring he managed a promotional trifecta, performing in New York in the morning, Alabama in the afternoon and Las Vegas at night.

“I’m still just a working-class artist, basically,” Cee Lo said of his schedule, as he waited backstage at Rockefeller Center for some hot tea to soothe his well-traveled vocal cords.

Cee Lo — a cannonball-shaped man devoted to the Liberace and Elton John school of showmanship — will earn about $20 million this year. Record sales represent the smallest slice of the revenue pie, according to Larry Mestel, the chief executive of Cee Lo’s management company, Primary Wave Music. The collapse in record sales over the last decade has decimated the bottom line, and a hit song alone is no longer enough to bring in superstar wealth.

So even musicians with multiplatinum success have started looking elsewhere for income, especially to increased touring and the kind of commercial deals that result in Miracle Whip product placement in Lady Gaga videos and Taylor Swift’s performing at a JetBlue airport terminal.

A look at the numbers shows how the economics of music stardom have changed. Born Thomas Callaway, Cee Lo first struck gold in 2005 as producer and co-writer of the Pussycat Dolls’ hit “Don’t Cha”; the next year Gnarls Barkley, his duo with the producer Danger Mouse, reached No. 1 around the world with “Crazy.”

Those hits brought Cee Lo an industry perch but little mainstream name recognition. The pattern might have continued with his third solo album, “The Lady Killer,” which had a modest opening at No. 9 when released late last year by Elektra. By then, however, “Forget You” had already snowballed from an online novelty hit into a pop culture phenomenon, with Gwyneth Paltrow singing it on “Glee.”

“Forget You,” released in August 2010, reached No. 2 and has sold 5.3 million downloads in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, making it the 12th most downloaded track of all time. (By comparison, Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” the top song of 2011, has sold 5.7 million.)

But today even extraordinary sales numbers like those translate to limited financial success.

A chart-topping single could once be counted on to drive big sales of full albums, which bring in greater royalties. But the “unbundling” of albums in the age of iTunes — the loss of album sales at $10 or $15 when consumers can buy a single song for about $1 — has contributed to a 58 percent reduction in album sales since 2000. Despite the success of “Forget You,” “The Lady Killer” has sold only about 450,000 copies in the United States.

“How much do you make on five million singles?” Mr. Mestel asked. “It’s not $5 million. Apple takes a piece of it, the record company takes a piece of it, the producer takes a piece of it, and then Cee Lo gets a piece of it as the artist.”

A recording contract for an act like Cee Lo would typically offer a net royalty of about 15 percent, according to several music executives. That means that for a $1.29 download from iTunes, after Apple takes its standard 30 percent fee, the artist would be paid 13 or 14 cents; for five million downloads, that amounts to about $650,000. As one of five writers of the song, Cee Lo would also make about $45,000 in publishing royalties on those downloads.

That leaves him a long way from the $20 million he is estimated to make this year. So to help establish Cee Lo as a household name, Primary Wave has over the last year arranged a steady series of TV appearances and endorsement deals that trade on the singer’s sense of pageantry, good humor and musical catholicity — his “brand.”

The company is made up of many former major-label record executives who have learned to push for unusual marketing strategies. Jeff Straughn, chief executive of the Brand Synergy Group, a partnership with Primary Wave, developed the mini-Elle magazine — featuring actual paid ads — that doubled as the liner notes to Mariah Carey’s last album.

Cee Lo describes Mr. Mestel and Primary Wave with characteristic impromptu poetry: “I would describe Larry as a picket fence around my garden of wildflowers.”

The company was set up in 2006 as a music publisher when it paid an estimated $50 million for a 50 percent stake in the Kurt Cobain song catalog, an anchor that brought in Hall & Oates, Gregg Allman, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, Def Leppard and others. Primary Wave now controls the copyrights to about 10,000 songs — a minuscule catalog compared with giant music publishers like EMI and Universal, but the company has also established marketing, branding, television and artist management units to exploit songs to their fullest.

In September, Primary Wave’s talent management division merged with Violator, one of the top hip-hop and R&B management companies, adding to its roster major acts like 50 Cent, Busta Rhymes and LL Cool J.

“Most publishing companies look at the world as a place to collect,” Mr. Mestel said. “They hire lots of accountants and royalty people and wait for opportunities to come in. Even though the biggest piece of our company is publishing, we are a marketing and branding company.”

To promote the Hall & Oates catalog, Primary Wave developed an irreverent online cartoon called “J-Stache,” which, like Gogol’s nose, follows the exploits of John Oates’s signature bushy mustache. Once Joe Elliott of Def Leppard heard about it he made a deal for the group’s publishing rights.

“What usually happens when a band signs with a company,” Mr. Elliott said, “is that two years down the road it all goes wrong. But these guys seem to actually sweat for their part. They’re a publishing company, but they’re actively out there working the stuff, banging on doors.”

When Primary Wave took over Cee Lo’s management, shortly before the release of “The Lady Killer,” he still had a relatively low profile as a solo artist. But the company seized on the early viral success of “Forget You” to make Cee Lo a ubiquitous face.

His over-the-top performances at half a dozen award shows — performing with the Jim Henson Company puppets at the Grammys, playing a piano that spun 360 degrees above the crowd at the Billboard awards — proved highly successful. His television campaign for the year has also included “Saturday Night Live,” an appearance on the NBC comedy-drama “Parenthood” and his own talk show on the cable channel Fuse (“Talking to Strangers”).

Primary Wave also booked numerous commercial endorsements for Cee Lo, in traditional TV spots like a 7Up commercial that has been running since October, as well as a Web video series for Absolut Vodka and personal appearances for Duracell and Pretzel M&M’s.

“He has a very strong brand, an unusual look and a great sense of fun,” said Mark Burnett, the veteran reality-TV producer, who signed up Cee Lo for “The Voice” shortly after seeing him on “Saturday Night Live.” “It’s a sense of theatrical, big-scale fun. It’s not just singing. It’s a real show with Cee Lo.”

More television is on its way. Backstage at the last night of “The Voice” last June, he signed a contract with Mr. Burnett for a reality show on British television, “Cee Lo Takes the U.K.,” on which his old group, the Goodie Mob, records a reunion album in London and soaks up the local customs. And next year Cee Lo will follow Celine Dion and Prince to Las Vegas with “Loberace,” a theatrical show to be presented at Planet Hollywood.

With his schedule and his association with various companies and products, Cee Lo inevitably faces two risks: overcommitment and overexposure. After “The Voice” became unexpectedly successful, he had to pull out of a tour with Rihanna.

Overexposure may be hard to judge for an industry that relies on as much promotion as possible. But despite the array of companies Cee Lo has worked with, his representatives say they have guarded his integrity. (“You don’t know how many deals I’ve turned down,” Mr. Straughn said.)

For Cee Lo, turning himself into a marketable brand has been an essential part of his success, even if it does keep him busy.

“There’s security in being a brand; there’s certainty in being a brand,” Cee Lo said. “McDonald’s is a brand. And when you get your fix for a Big Mac, where do you go? There’s only one place you can go for a Big Mac, and that’s big McDonald’s. But my brand has a broader horizon, because my brand is, ‘Whatever you think you want, I just may be able to give it to you.’ ”

Challenging Hip-Hop’s Masculine Idea

By TOURÉ NY Times 12/23/11

HIP-HOP is primarily a celebration of black masculinity. Sure, there have long been significant black female and white male figures, but the majority of the conversation in hip-hop is and has always been about the actions, thoughts, feelings and ethos of black men. But this hegemony cannot last forever. Eventually the throne will have to be shared. The world of hip-hop has some diversity: Eminem, Mac Miller and Nicki Minaj now; the Beastie Boys, Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott in the past. We have respected rappers of South Asian descent: M.I.A. and Heems from Das Racist. But what about the American white woman? Could she ever rock the mic for real?

The cosmology of American celebrity requires several blond white women be major planets at all times. From Marilyn Monroe to Madonna to Britney Spears to Paris Hilton to Lady Gaga, our culture refuses to allow a void in the job called America’s Favorite Blonde. (Some might say the woman currently holding that office is Beyoncé.) Given that cultural law, how long will it be until some blonde — or any white woman — rises to fame through hip-hop? I daresay it’s inescapable. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already. Well, it may happen soon. We now have a small movement of white female rappers who want to be taken seriously, including Iggy Azalea, Kreayshawn and K.Flay.

There are too many cultural consumers who love rappers and who love blondes to keep a collision of the two from occurring, especially when the dominant hip-hop consumer is the young white suburban male. Imagine if Pamela Anderson could flow, allowing him to get his hip-hop fix and his soft-core pornography fix at the same time. That would blow his mind.

There is nothing about the skills required to be an M.C. that makes it impossible for white women to rhyme. It’s not that their mouths can’t do it. The true barrier to entry is that there is an essence at the center of hip-hop that white women have an extraordinarily hard time exuding or even copying. For many Americans, black male rappers are entrancing because they give off a sense of black masculine power — that sense of strength, ego and menace that derives from being part of the street — or because of the seductive display of black male cool.

Black women and white men who have been successful in hip-hop have found ways to embody those senses and make them their own. But hip-hop coming from a white woman is almost always an immediate joke. Take Gwyneth Paltrow, for example, showing how much she loves hip-hop by earnestly rhyming the lyrics to N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton” on a British television show or Natalie Portman furiously spitting rhymes in gangsta-rap style on “Saturday Night Live.”

As soon as white women start rhyming, no matter what they say, it’s seen as cute and comical, like a cat walking on its hind legs. Seeing them try to embody the attributes of hip-hop’s vision of black masculinity is a hysterical gender disjunction: they wear it as convincingly as a woman wearing her husband’s clothes.

Even when a talented vocalist like Lykke Li tried to make Rick Ross’s song “Hustlin” her own, she simply could not rise to the level of the song. The sense of danger or cool that black male rappers manifest so easily is hard for white women to display. Of course that won’t stop those who want to rhyme from trying.

If a group of white teenage boys conspired to construct their dream white female rapper they might come up with Iggy Azalea, 21, a sexy rapper with long blond hair, a model’s enticing looks and the detached, hyperconfident air of a dominatrix. She has an aggressive vocal approach and a silky flow. There’s nothing cute or comical about her rhyming. She lives in Los Angeles and grew up in a tiny Australian town idolizing Tupac and Grace Kelly. Now she’s a highly sexual M.C. in the tradition of Lil’ Kim and Trina. If the white women of the world can possibly produce one superstar rapper, Iggy Azalea could be it.

The best song on her mixtape, “Ignorant Art,” is all about her sexual power. It’s title is unprintable. There’s an ominous tone to the song, as if she could kill you in bed or turn you into a hopeless addict. “Hook ’em like crack,” she rhymes. “After shock/Molten lava drop/This should be outlawed/ Call me Pac.” Linking her bedroom potency to the power of the most important name in hip-hop is a bold statement but a familiar gesture in modern hip-hop.

The video features Iggy Azalea in yellow skin-tight, high-waist pants and high heels, flinging her ponytail and licking ice cream suggestively. It was shot in the same sort of South Central Los Angeles neighborhood we saw in the movie “Boyz N the Hood” and in Snoop Dogg videos, placing her in an area that is recognized by longtime hip-hop fans. She raps as she sits on a stoop and dances in front of an ice cream truck, surrounded by black people. The video begins with her eating breakfast as an older black woman watches. Although their relationship is not clear, all this proximity to blackness characterizes Iggy Azalea as a person who is no stranger to black culture and communities, suggesting it’s no anomaly for her to rock the mic.

Strangely, for a video so overtly sexual, she spends a lot of time with a black boy, maybe 6 years old, sweetly draped on her back or playing at her feet or making sexually suggestive moves on a toy horse. Is she bad at baby-sitting or does he represent a man she’s been with and dominated so completely she’s infantilized him? Iggy Azalea is unsigned, but she has high-powered management, so she won’t be for long. Expect a lot of noise to surround her 2012 debut album.

Where Iggy Azalea works at establishing her hip-hop bona fides, Kreayshawn, a 21-year-old from Oakland, Calif., plays with hip-hop signifiers but sees no need to establish her cred. She has black men in her video for “Gucci Gucci” but spends most of it with her white female D.J., who oddly looks like her twin, at her side. The first time I watched “Gucci Gucci,” which has become an Internet sensation with millions of views, my primary thought was “interloper.” Does she really understand or respect what hip-hop’s all about? I doubt it, but if her audience doesn’t, then it won’t hold her back.

She rhymes, “I’m lookin’ like Madonna, but I’m flossin’ like Ivana,” tying herself to rich white women as well as childishly simple rhyme patterns. The song is about a rejection of label worship. She says she doesn’t wear Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Fendi or Prada because everyone does, explaining that she’s liberated from the fashion establishment and able to create personal style without buying it from them. But in the video she hangs out on Rodeo Drive and at a party in a room at the Standard Hotel in Hollywood dancing in front of Warhol-print curtains. She wears a large Minnie Mouse-inspired bow on her head as well as the door-knocker earrings that were stylish decades ago in hip-hop, making her look like a retro caricature.

The song basically attacks a central tenet of hip-hop: Many rappers embrace labelism as part of their celebration of upward mobility as well as a postmodern sentiment that you are the brands you wear. Her rejection of that reeks of white-girl privilege. But similarly privileged people may find her message refreshing.

Kreayshawn has that slow, nasal, staccato, cutesy approach to rapping that you might expect if a white girl was making a rap song as a lark. She doesn’t come across as sexy or even very sexual. She’s more nerd chic. She calls her crew the White Girl Mob (as opposed to Iggy Azalea’s White Girl Team), and in her songs she repeatedly refers to women she loves as “bitch,” making certain we hear her doing what black rappers routinely do, using a pejorative slur in a transgressive way.

At one point in “Gucci, Gucci” she says, “I got the swag and it’s pumping out my ovaries,” which is intended to sound hard core but is kind of gross and self-satirical. She attended film school, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this were part of a guerilla documentary making fun of hip-hop.

More skilled and perhaps more interesting is K.Flay, 26, a Stanford graduate and a talented vocalist who uses rhyming as a sonic technique. Culturally she is not trying to push her way into hip-hop; she’s more of an indie rock chick. Her rapping is melodic and semi-sung, and on her most recent mixtape, “I Stopped Caring in ’96,” she samples indie groups like the xx and the Vines and talks about alienation:

Mind in a permanent state of flux

Mental double Dutch

Had a bag of Cheetos ate ’em up

3 p.m. and I’m still waking up

Wishing I could save myself, but I’m not brave enough.

She dresses like an un-self-conscious hipster, wearing T-shirts and Nike high-tops, little makeup and barely styled dark hair. K.Flay has no black people or hip-hop signifiers in her videos. She represents a generation of white kids who grew up with hip-hop but who weren’t obsessed with it so they feel rhyming is theirs to use without needing to pay homage to the culture.

Does the slight rise of white women pose a threat to the soul of hip-hop? Will this moment be recalled years from now as a crucial step toward the whitening of hip-hop, toward a world in which hip-hop looks the way rock ’n’ roll does: a neighborhood that’s been so completely gentrified that the kids have to be reminded that rock was once a black space? I don’t think so. It will take a lot more than a few white women to fundamentally impact hip-hop, which remains unbreakably connected to the spirit of black masculinity, for which America continues to hunger.

The man who made music videos pay

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and David Gelles Financial Times 12/21/11

Doug Morris, a non-technologist leader in a technology-led field: ‘You know how you lead this company into the 21st century? You get a lot of hits’
Doug Morris credits his grandson with the inspiration for Vevo, the website that in two years has turned music videos from a promotional expense that an embattled industry was finding harder to justify into a source of digital income that executives talk of in the same breath as Spotify.

Vevo, a venture of Sony Music, Vivendi’s Universal Music and Abu Dhabi Media Company, told the FT this week that it plans to take on MTV by getting music videos and related programmes on to television screens through internet-connected devices or even a channel of its own.

Mr Morris, chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment since this summer, expects Vevo’s revenues to rise from $50m in 2010 to $300m next year, hailing its success as evidence that record labels are not as digitally flat-footed as critics maintain.

It was born out of frustration with music video economics a generation after MTV launched, he says as he recalls finding his grandson consuming music videos online.

“I’m watching him watch In Da Club, [produced] by Dr Dre, and I see all these ads coming up alongside,” he says. Mr Morris, then running Universal Music, asked a colleague how much they were making from the ads and was told: “Nothing”.

He threatened Yahoo, MTV.com and others that Universal would take its videos down if they did not pay up. The tactic worked, but by 2008, when Google’s YouTube had become the dominant online video site, neither side was happy with the revenue being generated.

YouTube was struggling to recoup its music licensing costs, as many advertisers were wary of their brands appearing alongside more unruly user-generated content. “You could have a perfectly professional video of Beyoncé mixed in with two elephants mating,” Mr Morris notes.

Negotiating with Google’s “layer upon layer of engineers” was “like dealing with a wet cloud”, he recalls, until Bono, the U2 frontman, arranged a meeting with Eric Schmidt.

Mr Morris told the Google chairman that Universal could replace poor-quality video copies on YouTube with high definition originals in a slick setting that would appeal to advertisers. He picked Rio Caraeff, Universal’s head of digital music, as Vevo’s CEO, with YouTube providing the technology and sharing advertising revenues.

Mr Morris took the idea to Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, Sony Music’s then CEO, who became his rival’s partner in Vevo. Abu Dhabi Media Company made a small financial investment, EMI made its music available without getting a stake, but Warner Music remains a holdout.

Since the 2009 launch, about 50 videos have racked up more than 100m views, led by Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga hits; more than 600 advertisers have signed up, from American Express to Walmart; and about $100m has been paid out to music companies.

The proceeds rank far behind global digital download revenues, which Gartner estimates reached $3.63bn this year, but Mr Morris says Vevo can be as important a digital business as Spotify and Pandora, which drove subscription revenues to $532m this year.

Vevo has not ended the industry’s clashes with YouTube – this week a US music lobby group declared that Google’s anti-piracy promises “remain unfulfilled” – but Mr Morris says the partners’ interests are aligned.

He also sounds confident that the alliance of Universal and Sony, the clear industry leaders after this year’s auctions of Warner and EMI, will survive. “Joint ventures have their own set of unique challenges,” Mr Caraeff adds, but he insists that he is not planning a sale and has “no interest personally in running a public company”.

Were there to be any initial public offering or deal, Mr Morris says, “it would be important for record companies to maintain some control”. For now, Vevo’s focus is on TV and mobile platforms, and on building revenues outside the US.

It has plans to hire sales forces in France, Australia, Brazil and beyond in 2012 and for Vevo Arabia, a separate venture with the Abu Dhabi Media Company. It is also looking at charging subscriptions for video premieres or an advertising-free experience.

Building Vevo has been “the most fun I’ve had,” Mr Morris says, but he is also keen that it should silence those who doubt music executives’ digital credentials.

“Not being a technologist, I get criticised. People say, ‘how’s he going to lead this company into the 21st century?’ You know how you lead this company into the 21st century? You get a lot of hits. I don’t know why that’s such a hard concept for some people.”