A Night of Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl

Last night was a most enjoyable and interesting experience - I joined THOUSANDS of other people that went to see Dave Brubeck at the Hollywood Bowl. Along with Dave there was Madeleine Peyroux and Bruce Hornsby
Bruce was trying out his new album in front of a big audience, and he was joined by album mates Christian McBride and Jack Dejohnette.
Well, let's just say that Brubeck showed the youngsters how it is done - his quartet was awesome - great dynamics, incredible interplay, wonderful choice of material. It was wonderful to see a master still in the game at 87 years old!
I enjoy M. Peyroux's song(s), and her phrasing is fun, but her voice got a bit annoying by the end of the set - and she never bothered to introduce her band. It was that Norah-Jones kind of music where you know the musicians must be having a good time, but damn if they are ever going to show it - it looked like the bass player and drummer were on quaaludes, or some type of drug that sapped all creativity out of their playing.
Mr. Hornsby, on the other end, was full of creativity, but was sorely lacking in dynamics and chord progressions. It is always a blast to hear Jack Dejohnette, and Christan McBride and they did a great job lending some jazz authenticity to Hornsby's stab at being a jazz pianist. The best tune of the night for him was a Keith Jarrett song. This was most appropriate, as Jarrett seems to be his main influence.
For some reason they had Bruce Hornsby close out the evening, and I would not want to have to follow Dave Brubeck, especially with a band that was performing on stage only for the fourth time in their existence. Talk about starting at the top - way to go, Bruce! Now, if only he had reworked a cool jazz version of "The Way It Is", and sung it with the guys, maybe they all would have loosened up some and had more fun. As it was, it just seemed like Hornsby had something to prove, and was working really hard to live up to some Jazz-Worthiness level to play with those two giants.
Dave Brubeck, on the other hand, had nothing to prove. He was clearly having the time of his life on the stage with band mates that he has played with for decades. They were a well oiled machine. And the best thing was - thousands and thousands of people showed up to hear a jazz quartet play, with no flash or trash, just great music in an wonderful setting. Go Dave! Long may you wave!

LALA Land Redux

The big news this last week in the digital music arena was the announcement by LALA.com that they intended to make money by - giving music away! This is news?
LALA.com started as a CD-swapping site, where you can list CDs you want, and CDs you own, and they would connect you to others that HAD the CD you want, or wanted the CDs you own, and for a buck you would get to "swap" the CDs, thereby avoiding purchase or resale through used CD stores or sites. Did this idea work? I dunno, sounded kind of kooky to me.

On Monday 6/4, newly revamped Lala launched a free service (in Beta, at this point) that scans your digital tracks—everything you own from ripped CDs, iTunes downloads or any other means—and then lets you log into the website anywhere to access that music. You can even sideload tracks to your iPod when you're far away from home. Sounds kind of like a big digital juke box in the sky - access to all your music anywhere, plus access to streaming of "shared" music by anyone who is on the LALA network. What does Lala get out of this? They hope that, once you sample the music, you will buy the album through their sales site. Does this idea work? I dunno, sounds kind of kooky to me, very Internet1.0, don't you think?

Actually, excuse me for showing my age, but it sounds almost identical to what MP3.com tried to do and then got sued into oblivion for attempting. It all comes back to the old argument that once someone buys a CD of music, they can do what they want with it. Michael Robertson of MP3.com argued this fact when he created mymp3.com. Here is the info from wikipedia:

"On January 12, 2000, MP3.com launched the "My.MP3.com" service which enabled users to securely register their personal CDs and then stream digital copies online from the My.MP3.com service. Since consumers could only listen online to music they already proved they owned the company saw this as a great opportunity for revenue by allowing fans to access their own music online. The record industry did not see it that way and sued MP3.com claiming that the service constituted unauthorized duplication and promoted copyright infringement.

Judge Jed S. Rakoff, in the case UMG v. MP3.com, ruled in favor of the record labels against MP3.com and the service on the copyright law provision of "making mechanical copies for commercial use without permission from the copyright owner." Rather than fight on appeal, MP3.com settled with the major labels for more than $200 million and the service was discontinued. This decision turned out to be the beginning of the end of the original MP3.com as the firm, unaware of the impending dot-com bust, no longer had sufficient funds to weather the technology downturn. To add to their woes music publishers, spurred by the success of the record label suits, also sued MP3.com with their own claims of payment due."

The only big difference here is that lala is also trying to sidestep Apple's iTunes player, so there may be a lawsuit lurking there, also. Meanwhile, in the spirit of research and curiosity I tried adding the program to my Mac this week, and found it to not work at all, and just slowed down everything else on my computer. So I removed it again.

Is the problem with the music industry the lack of access to music? I don't think so. If Bill Nguyen, founder of lala.com, took his millions and helped support the creation of new music rather than creating a new way for people to avoid buying music (and thereby avoid paying the musician's royalties), perhaps the music business would have more of a chance to flourish.

Can Jazz Survive Inside the Big Box?

More statistics regarding the music business, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal: Ten years ago, back in the long dark history of 1997, big-box chains (like Target, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart) sold about 20% of all music. Now, these stores account for at least 65% of music sales. This is due to the aggressive pricing and advertising that these type of stores use to lure customers in. These stores will use the newest American Idol release as a loss leader, in the hopes that you will buy a plasma TV on the way out.

Along the way, old fashioned "record stores" (like Tower or Sam Goody) were squeezed out of the market. Tower needed a profit margin of 30% to make it fly, while a place like Target can get by just making 14% on a sale of a CD. They can do this by only stocking the albums that sell: a typical Best Buy store will carry as few as 8,000 different titles, while Tower's average location carried more than 100,000 music CDs.

So where does this leave the Jazz music buyer? Really, how many copies of "Kind Of Blue" does one person need to own? If a jazz fan is looking to explore choices in music, the obvious location now is on the Internet, where the "LONG TAIL" of Jazz music is flourishing.

The "Long Tail" discussion is for another day. Today the question is, can even a Norah Jones or a Diana Krall exist in the Big Boxes? And who's to blame here? Is it that people's taste in music has gone to hell in a hand basket? Is it that the stores aren't stocking music, so people aren't buying? Or is it that the record companies are turning out crap, and so everyone has moved on to DVDs and video poker games?

One convincing argument is that the record companies have priced themselves out of business. Gary Arnold, Senior Vice-President for Entertainment at Best Buy, was quoted in the WSJ Journal article: "Music has become a commoditized product. The CD is perceived by consumers to be a $10 item, and the manufacturers continue to release new titles at ...$18.98." I can't agree more - How can I justify spending $19.99 on the soundtrack for "Dreamgirls" when I can buy the DVD of the movie for $15.99? It just doesn't make sense.

At my gig last night at the Jazz Bakery in LA, I decided that, instead of selling my CDs at the gig for $15 or $20 bucks like more indie artists do, I would price them at $10 bucks each. Unlike other recent gigs where I might sell one or two CDs if I am lucky, this time a full 10% of the people there bought CDs on the break or before they went home. Let's get real - everyone knows that the cost of manufacturing the CD runs at MOST $1.80 a unit, so why get greedy? Let's spread the music, and spread a little love at the same time.

Even in jazz, there are people that are willing to spend the extra money to get the original artwork and packaging of a CD, but how many more people would test out new types of music, including jazz, if they could by a stripped-down, no frills package of music priced cheaply enough to let people test the waters? How about a paperback version of Miles Davis' Greatest Hits? We may need to think outside the "Big Box" to finally get inside the "Big Box".

The Sad State of Jazz Album Sales

An article in the Wall Street Journal today speaks about the slump in Jazz sales in 2006. While classical and country music have increased, Jazz sales are slipping away, down from the paltry 3% of all album sales that it used to achieve. Once again, as they say every 5-10 years, "there are signs of rebirth" in the jazz music arena.
But let's take a look at the three albums that the WSJ says are notable new albums:
WYNTON MARSALIS: From the Plantation to the Penitentiary
Well, after a month of release, the newest album from the "King" of retro jazz cannot even muster 10,000 units sold. It used to be a jazz album that sold 50,000 was considered a "hit". Of course, the low sales might stem from the fact that Mr. Marsalis decided to "rap" on one of the cuts, or it could be that people are just tired of his pontificating.
MATHENY/MELDAU: Quartet
A jazz marketing dream, combining the new-aged ramblings of Pat Metheny with the just plain ramblings of Brad Meldau is bound to trigger album sales, enough that the record company has released this, their second collection. Don Heckman in his recent review of the concert here in LA by the quartet said: "it was easier to admire the virtuosity and inventiveness of both players than it was to feel any sense of involvement. Despite the firepower, the talent and the marquee names on the bill, this was a program in which — unlike Simon's "The Odd Couple" — the two disparate elements never found a fully engaging (and engaged) way to interact with each other."
See the complete review

KIM WATERS: You are My lady
Well, I dunno this guy, but he has put out 9 albums over the last 9 years, FOUR of which include the word "love" in the title (this falls into the "know your market" category of successful marketing). Sad to say, even here in the "smooth jazz" world the heat is off- after three weeks on the market Kim has sold 6,100 copies.

Now, I am not casting aspersions on anyone that can sell over 5000 albums in less than a month. But I do think that the sales of jazz music will continue to slip, as long as people continue to turn out formula-based albums. It is time to break out of the mold. Play the Coachella Music Festival, anyone?

The Genie is still out of the bottle, and EMI rubs the lamp

Today EMI Music announced that they would allow people to buy digital downloads with no copying restrictions. All I can say is, it's about time, don't you think?
Here is the Wall Street Journal article from today.
Having been around since mp3.com (and an original shareholder - that was a good ride for a while), I always really agreed with Michael Robertson - the record companies let the Genie out of the bottle when they created CDs. Once they released the music in digital form, the bits and bytes get hard to hang on to. And, if the record company was very happy to take our money when we converted the music (vinyl albums) we owned to digital form by purchasing the CDs, shouldn't we have the right to move it from there onto our computer, iPod, Walkman or wherever? Do they have the right to charge us again every time we move it to a different machine or format?
YES, I know the argument that this doesn't solve the problem of people illegally sharing song files or downloading the music without buying it. But suing college kids probably isn't the solution either. If the music has value, people will pay for it - once. If they like it, they will come back for more. And if you give them unfettered access, they are more likely to pay the $1.00 entrance fee, knowing they get to keep the music with them, wherever (and however) they go.

April 1, '07 - The downfall of record companies, the rebirth of music

April 1st – we have just entered the second quarter of 2007. Amazing.
The newspapers report that CD sales are off 20% from last year. Digital sales are up, but not nearly enough to offset this loss.

The record companies, in the meanwhile, are all setting up Digital record Labels, focused on putting out individual downloads by composers, or from TV shows or movies.

But the bigger question is: who needs the record labels anymore? Actually, while we are at it – who needs radio anymore? We seem to have reached a TIPPING POINT in the music industry, where the idea of buying a $12.00 (or $18.00!) album to get the one song you heard on the radio just makes no sense. Buy the songs you like, pop ‘em into your ipod, and plug it into your car and go cruising – no more ads, no more Cd jewel cases to crack. Makes sense to me!

But what happened to that time of discovery – when you would sit down for 30-40 minutes and get into someone’s audio vision of the world. When not just a song, but a SET of music put together by an artist could carry you to a whole ‘nother world? The ideal is still there – I still want to share that kind of experience with my listeners, and not just a three minute snippet of what I do and who I am. That is why I love jazz – we are in another time zone with it (maybe another place and time). I hope you will still come along with me when the moment appears.