Among my first jobs as a teenager I worked at a local record store which helped me amass a respectable collection of albums before they became more or less obsolete. (They may actually get occasional use as my older brother rescued them from the attic many years ago and maintains a music library.) My boss was a beautiful woman named Jo Ellen who couldn’t have been kinder and somehow tolerated the occasional beat up album slipped inside the return stack that my friends pressured me to exchange even though it didn’t sit well with our parent company in Philadelphia. The next year I attended Penn State and I continued working at a record store though the manager was a habitual stoner who got high at the top of every hour and it was more like High Fidelity than where I had started.
Yet I can recall the thrill of new music being dropped in the stores and the moment when you pulled off the shrink wrap and opened up the packaging and smelled the ink and vinyl and read the liner notes and the sometimes nonstop fanatical listening that the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty or James Taylor’s Gorilla or Bonnie Raitt’s Streetlights or Stevie Wonder’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale or Joni Mitchell’s Hissing of Sumer Lawns or Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky or Little Feat’s Dixie Chicken or any of dozens of other albums could induce. You had brushes to clean the records and the needle and crates to store the albums and apparently there is a revival for vinyl these days but I think it’s only for true stereophiles. I imagine that Alejandro Amenábar, who is very involved in the production of the music for each of his films, listens to vinyl records, but what do I know.
I have continued to produce CDs and create artwork with my friend Roberto Carra which have gotten more complex and well thought out for each successive recording project. This is probably not a wise business decision because with each passing day people abandon CD technology in favor of streaming. It reminds me of the day Quincey and I passed by the closed Tower Records flagship store at the bottom of North Beach in San Francisco and tried to explain the kid-in-a-candy store like experience of shopping there to our kids to which our 12 year-old daughter, Willa, replied, “what’s a record?”
Streaming is the present dominant model of music distribution. Yet I am stuck in a time warp where you want to hold something physical in your hands that is paired with what you are listening to and read about the artist or follow along with the lyrics and discover who is playing on your favorite tracks even though you are only hearing a fraction of what was actually recorded because of the loss in the digital translation process. Computers no longer have disc drives and people no longer have stereos so making CDs is a fool’s errand. I legitimize them by considering them business cards which is further proof of my shortcomings as a business person.
And so it was a somewhat depressing two days at the DIY Musician’s Conference listening to the folks from CDBaby, who serve as the middlemen for independent music distribution in North America and around the world today. They came all the way from Portland, Oregon to Valencia, Spain to convince a few hundred people from around Europe that there is not a better time in the history of mankind to record and distribute music. Depressing, not because of the rare success stories of artists who are paying their mortgages and making hefty sums from Spotify and Apple Music and iTunes royalties. I too receive Spotify royalties on an almost daily basis from people listening to my music. But let’s be serious. I’m making $.001 per song which takes a lot of streams to pay for recording studios and musicians and engineers and CD duplication.
No, it was depressing because most of the two days were filled with panel discussions and sessions designed to help us independent musicians “juice the streaming algorithms” in our favor. This includes but is not limited to continually updating your artist profiles, creating a steady output of products that show your fans how talented and cool you are, generating Spotify playlists that draw listeners to your songs, piggybacking on every conceivable social media platform to get people clicking through to your music so the numbers eventually catch on. My late father-in-law was prone to say that the nerds run the world. The CDBaby folks were telling us we can be our own nerds. Russian hackers, if you are listening, please direct people to my Spotify account and place one of my songs on the playlist of “Your Favorite Coffee House.”
In Roger Steffens’ excellent oral history biography of Bob Marley, So Much Things to Say, I learned that the Wailers’ label used to hire thugs to visit Kingston radio stations and demand that the DJ’s play their new singles everyday on the hour or else. This was one way the hard working reggae band rose to the top of a deeply talented and highly competitive music scene in Jamaica. Pun intended.
Collaboration was mentioned more than once as a good networking practice (which of course it is) and there were some valuable check lists on how to prepare for successful album releases and build your musical identity. In one session, we were walked through an exercise to generate clever taglines about the uniqueness of our musical selves. I came up with a few:
“If Graham Parsons had stopped drinking and graduated from Harvard” or “One of the finest songwriters you will probably never hear of” or “Jeff Tweedy meets Paul Simon in the hills of Northern California.”
Isn’t this like Donald Trump lying to a reporter about his “greatness” by pretending to be somebody else? Just a month ago we had a label executive visit campus who brazenly advised students to ‘exaggerate.’ “If you have 10,000 streams say you’re approaching a half million,” she said. “Happens all the time.” Yes, this kind of bullshitting even happens in the White House on a daily basis.
Midway through the second day of the conference the lightning bolt struck. I just need to make better and better music which is why I was at Berklee in the first place.
The next week my guitar teacher, a truly lovable man with a fluid mastery of the fretboard named Daniel Flors, gave me a challenging arrangement he wrote for a piece called “Lakes” by Pat Metheny. “When you can play this,” Daniel told me, “you’ll be able to play almost anything.” I was an early fan of Pat Metheny’s, who spent time at Berklee before becoming one of the world’s greatest touring guitarists. I bought and fanatically played his early records. In doing some research on “Lakes,” I watched an interview where he said that his first album “Bright Size Life” sold only 800 to 900 copies. It wasn’t until 15 or 20 years later, that his fans really began to take notice. “I consider that my most ardent listeners haven’t even been born when I am making music,” he told the interviewer.
I’m certainly no Pat Metheny, but maybe there is a glimmer of hope. Oh, and please listen to me on Spotify if you do that kind of thing. I thank you and the Big Data monopolists who track your every digital click thank you a whole lot more.
