The sole 99¢ song on iTunes’ list of its 20 best-ever sellers

The outstanding question: Is its price an implicit admission that the song is 23 percent worse than all the others?

Bleak Expectations: If Dickens wrote the story of EMI

There’s a Dickensian novel just dying to be written about the plight of EMI. An iconic British institution mired in debt, unraveling quarter by miserable quarter. A tragicomedy of financial hubris, with offshore tax havens in the Channel Islands, betrayals, and corporate vultures circling the sad carcass of a once-great record label.

And the names! Guy Hands, the swashbuckling, baby-faced financier who gambled big and blew it. David Wormsley, his foil at Citigroup, whom Hands accuses of fraudulent counsel (and really is “widely known as The Worm”). Wormsley! Only Murdstone is a better name. Then there’s Elio Leoni-Sceti, the stylish Italian label manager who wears his overcoat loose over his shoulders and once handled Mop & Glo and French’s Mustard. Edgar Bronfman Jr., the cash-hoarding ginger ale heir, waits to swoop in for the kill.

The names of the firms are not quite Jarndyce and Jarndyce, but they’re good. Hands’s company is Terra Firma, whose $8 billion investment ends up on shaky ground, written down by 90 percent after an exodus of artists who objected to being treated like “furniture.” In the bidding for EMI three years ago, Terra Firma competed with Cerberus Capital Management and Fortress Investment Group. So in this drama we have firm ground, a fortress of money, the guard-dog of hell, a Guy who can’t keep his Hands off bad investments, a profligate Citi/City, and a deceitful worm.

(If you haven’t been following every sad update in this tale, read Devin Leonard’s excellent summary in Sunday Biz. The basic plot is that Terra Firma relied on Citi as both advisor and lender, but is now suing the bank, saying that Citi deliberately misled Hands & Co. by failing to report that Cerberus had dropped out of the bidding, causing Terra Firma to overpay.)

I see a young Guy Hands at school, ridiculed for his dyslexia and driven to prove the bullies wrong and win the love of his sweetheart, Julia. He finds his way from the hinterlands to the halls of power in the City of London; makes shockingly risky, obscenely profitable deals; marries Julia; buys Churchill’s house and an estate in Tuscany. He’s a Guy of the world, and he did it all with his own two Hands — as well as the help of his friend Wormsley, with whom he became so close that he invited Lord and Lady Worm to Tuscany for her 40th birthday.

At the height of the credit bubble our hero hitches his do-no-wrong company to a crusty old anchor that sinks immediately to the bottom of the sea, taking endless liquidity with it and leaving Hands dry. That Worm tricked him! Guy thought he had triumphed over the dogs of Cerberus but in reality they were never really there. Then the market crashes, and Hands becomes increasingly isolated at Guernsey, his family life sacrificed for a tax protest. To succeed, and turn it all around, he’ll have to pull off some kind of incredible heist, and do a far, far better thing than he has ever done. (That is, woo Paul McCartney back.)

Serialized for your enjoyment every three weeks in the Financial Times.

The China overground

China Music Radar, a blog written by expat Westerners, has an interesting corrective post today. Western journalists (myself included) tend to focus on the “underground” rock scene, ignoring the robust pop world that dominates Chinese life. And I do mean pop: this is candied, light stuff that you hear in cabs, on TV, piped into Beijing’s glitzy shopping centers.

There aren’t a lot of opportunities for China’s punk- and indie-influenced rock bands, for fairly obvious reasons. But as with many industries in China, the pop market there looks like an advanced version of what’s going on in the West. Near-100 percent piracy killed physical sales long ago, which leaves pop stars to make money in other ways:

• reality TV
• endorsements
• gala performances (“the bizarre concept of taking X number of the hottest ‘stars’ at that moment and get all of them to perform/lipsync one song each for glowstick waving fans on national TV”)

Maybe I’m behind the times slightly, but I thought that mobile sale (ring-backs, etc.) are also a big revenue stream. Is that dead already?

Mariah’s leak strategy

A somewhat ballsy story in The Times of London about Mariah Carey's business schemes — it calls her "one of the few people successfully to screw a major record label" — includes this nugget explaining how Mrs. Nick Cannon manipulates paparazzi at her public appearances via leaks to selected, and presumably controllable, fan-bloggers:

Carey’s itinerary, which is supposed to be top secret but which an aide has helpfully left lying on a table, reveals that she uses the Internet to leak details of each appearance to favoured bloggers and Facebook groups shortly beforehand. This way, only the most devoted fans turn up, and freaks and weirdos are weeded out. The selective leaks also help to make sure there are enough paparazzi but not so many that there’s a scrum. Just before she is due to arrive at the Asahi studios to appear on Music Station, Carey’s aides “leaked the time she will appear at entrance through social online sites, blogs, etc. We are expecting to have 100 fans and some paparazzi”, the schedule reveals. The cybertrickery works to script. Just after 6pm, Carey pulls up in her stretch limousine and steps out into a small but perfectly formed crowd.

According to the article, we can also expect to see Carey in a lot of tourism ads:

She has a house in the Bahamas on the island of Eleuthera. She won’t say if she is paid by the Bahamas tourist board to talk about how great the place is but you’d be forgiven for thinking she is, given the amount of time she spends doing so. ... Carey also plans to team up with the New York tourist board to attract visitors to her adopted home town. When she had her 18th No. 1, the city authorities lit up the Empire State Building in her favourite colours: pink and lavender. It was good publicity for Carey and for New York. Expect to see “Mariah in New York” advertisements soon.

(HT TDS.)

Press release of the day: Is the guitar pick remastered?

The bad news for AC/DC fans, particularly those who bought Bonfire — hi Sam, Dave — is that there’s yet another box set. But the good news, particularly for those who bought Bonfire — Sam, Dave — is that for a mere $200+, you get another guitar pick! You also get a working amp, a coffee table book and a bunch of other crap.

COLUMBIA RECORDS AND ALBERT PRODUCTIONS UNLEASH BACKTRACKS

THE ULTIMATE AC/DC EXPERIENCE, AVAILABLE IN TWO SPECIAL BOXED EDITIONS, ON TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10

Deluxe Collector's Limited Edition Features 3 CDs of Live & Studio Rarities, 2 DVDS Including the Long-Awaited "Family Jewels Disc 3," A Vinyl LP of Studio Collectibles, A Coffee Table Book, Facsimiles of Authentic Memorabilia, Fine Art Lithographs & More Boxed In An AC/DC Working Guitar Amplifier - Available Exclusively Through Band's Website

[...]

In addition the deluxe collector's edition comes with a 164 page coffee table book and an Original Memorabilia Reproductions Envelope containing an astounding array of facsimiles including the "I DO IT FOR AC/DC" button (the band's very first tour merch), the 1976 "Lock Up Your Daughters" tour flyer, the Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap recording track sheet, a 2' x 3' 1977 Let There Be Rock European Tour poster, a Bon Scott parrot tattoo replica, an AC/DC logo guitar pick, an Australian Money Talks dollar, three b&w fine art lithographs of never-before-seen photos of the band in the Alberts Studio in 1977 and more.

UPDATE: Dave wrote in on Wednesday afternoon to say that he had pre-ordered it the night before.

A conversation with Tom Waits

“Songs drive along the same neural pathways that dreams do. So using them — misusing them — to sell hairspray, it just seems obscene.”

In 1988 Tom Waits sued Frito-Lay for using a sound-alike in a Doritos commercial, and won $2.5 million in damages. That case, and a similar one by Bette Midler, became landmarks in establishing an artist’s right to his or her voice. But Madison Avenue was undeterred, and for the next two decades Waits would fight many advertisers who copied his distinctive vocal style without permission.*

It happened again in 2005, when Audi and Opel used suspiciously similar-sounding singers for European ads. Waits sued both companies. I wrote a news item, and got a quote from Opel saying they had never considered Waits for the ad — despite a paper trail clearly showing that they had approached him and been turned down flat.

Waits was apparently so pleased with this that he agreed to an interview about it, something he doesn’t often do. I remember picking up the phone around 6 p.m. on Jan. 18, 2006, and hearing, “It’s Tom!” We talked for about 45 minutes, and although the resulting story turned out fine, it was frustrating how few of his marvelous quotes made it into the piece.

Here is a transcript of our conversation, minus a few trims for redundancy or irrelevance.

❧

It must be extremely time-consuming and expensive to pursue these cases. Why is it so important to you to do this?

I ask myself that sometimes. Because there are things I would rather be doing. It does take a tremendous amount of time, energy and money. But in a way you’re building a road that other people will drive on. I have a moral right to my voice now. It’s like property. There’s a fence around it, in a way. In Spain now there’s such a thing as moral rights. So that’s a good thing.

In both these cases — the Scandinavian/German Opel thing and the Spain Audi deal — they called me first to ask me if I would do the commercial. Then, when I politely declined, they turned around and hired an impersonator. So they’re really left hanging out there in the wind legally, since I had documentation that they asked me; it only strengthened my case. But there’s plenty of other situations where they just out-and-out do it. There’s a whole sound-alike industry, and it has to eat too. Like flies at a picnic, you know. “Enjoy your lunch, but we live here too.”

Why do you think they want a voice like yours selling cars and salty crackers?

Maybe it’s because I don’t want it. They want me more. Or maybe over there they think that I’m just kind of a nobody. “I found this really weird guy in my record collection. I think he’d be good for the Harley Davidson account or something.” I don’t know.

Does it happen a lot, given that the Frito-Lay case is such a well-known precedent?

It does. I get people that usually call me, say, “Hey, I saw this ad. Sounds just like you. I didn’t think you did ads.” I don’t!

Why not?

It’s part of an artist’s odyssey, discovering your own voice and struggling to find the combination of qualities that make you unique, whether you’re Yma Sumac, or Walter Brennan, or Caruso, or William Burroughs, or Sister Rosetta Tharpe — you shape yourself. It’s kind of like your face. You’ve got an identity. It’s like a fingerprint. So now I’ve got these unscrupulous doppelgängers out there. [Laughs.] My evil twin who is undermining every move I make. That’s the way it feels.

You’re as defined by the things you say yes to as the things you say no to, right? So if you saw Ralph Nader lying in his underwear stroking a panther on a billboard, would that impact his position in the public’s mind on global warming? Hell, it would change whole definition of global warming! [I laugh.]

Does it offend you more that somebody is copying you, or that they’re doing it to sell a product?

I don’t mind if someone wants to try to sound like me to do a show. I get a kick out that. They got these bands over there in Europe that do my songs, have a singer with a really deep voice. It’s my own little raggedy version of Beatlemania. [Laughs.] These little bar bands that try to sound like me.

But the product stuff, it bugs the hell out of me. The idea is to make it so commonplace that you barely notice that the whole world is being dominated and controlled by big business. I didn’t get into this to write jingles. I’m trying to have some effect on the culture, and my own growth and development.

I make a distinction between people who are using voice as a creative item and people who are selling cigarettes and underwear. It’s a big difference. We all know the difference, and it’s stealing. They get a lot of out standing next to me and I just get big legal bills. It’s like someone coming into your house and stealing something. It slowly erodes my own credibility. So that’s a pain.

Most of these companies operate more like countries than companies. They’re so large. And the way they behave is kind of like the might and the right of a country, the way they roll over you. They don’t think anything of taking something that they want, because they’re going to get a parking ticket. And it doesn’t even ever reach the brain of the company. The news of this is just like gum on the bottom of their shoe.

When it comes to the face that most of them want to put on for the public, they don’t want to wear corporate feathers. They masquerade more like one of us. So that’s why want to wear your music. It’s the first thing that gets your attention: “Hey, I know that song.” Now they’ve got ya — that’s the foot in the door.

You said that you’re “building a road.” Do you get support from other musicians?

To be honest with you, I think it’s gotten rather flea-bitten. But there are several people that are scrupulous, and they really stand next to me. Neil Young’s against it, Springsteen’s against it, people like that. Those guys are big guys.

But for the most part I think the idea is that ultimately the only way you will be able to get exposure is by tying yourself to a new car. Out on the hood. I think it’s getting like that now. You try to make a voice, and get heard, but it’s getting to the point where — like these blue-jean ads, and all that. Nobody thinks anything of it, for the most part. They think, “Oh, I saw you in a magazine, man, that was cool. How you doin’?”

Do you feel that you’re part of a dying breed?

I’m not dying, and I’m still breeding. I only know how it is for me. I can’t really legislate my own morality about it. I know how I feel about it, and it just doesn’t go down right for me.

You’ve done well financially with these cases, right?

It barely comes close to scratching the surface of your legal bills. I think with the Spain thing it was 70,000 euros, or something like that. That’s like a couple of days with a lawyer over there. Plus you’re hiring people 5,000 miles away. You have to stay on top of it. It’s a pain. It’s like making dinner at the bottom of a swimming pool.

Do the lawsuits interfere in making music?

Oh, yeah. You gotta get on the phone at 4 in the morning with guys who don’t speak English. It’s no fun. I have a certain amount of zeal about it, and my wife has got a really great mind for this. She’s always been in my corner. We kind of slug it out together, like a tag team.

Can you quantify how much of an investment it has been for you to pursue these cases?

Oh, Jesus. I don’t really know. Millions! No, not millions. But I’ve had a lot of them. Some of them settle. You go, “OK, you gotta put an apology in the paper.” In Italy, man, it’s really crazy over there. They’ll just take a record of yours and they’ll put a new cover on it and they’ll glue it to the front page of their daily paper. And they’ll say, “Get the paper, and for an extra 50 cents you get this Tom Waits record.” Stuff like that. They just do it. And you just go, “What?!” Is the record selling the newspaper, or is the newspaper selling the record? Which is it?

How many of these suits do you have going on now?

This one [in Spain] just wound up with a decision. This other one in Germany, Opel — they asked me to take the Brahms Lullaby, sing the melody of it, add some kind of phony words. I said no. So they did a car commercial, putting a car to bed in the ad, and they hired a guy that sounds just like me doing it. So we attacked them. [Laughs.]

Whatever you do to create something unique in your voice, it’s a spell that you’re able to weave with it. The ads kind of lay eggs in your brain. They’re getting more and more expensive. They get really insidious. And then there’s more and more people that you don’t think would ever do them, doing them. You can’t believe it. It’s like, “Why are you doing that? You don’t need money.”

You think the Who needs money? They got to do car ads? So why do they do it? Because I think they think they feel current or something, just to be around. I guess they’re not getting any airplay.

For a lot of younger musicians, advertising isn’t really about imitation, since their voices aren’t as well known. So for them to get some money to have their song in a car commercial, might that be a good thing?

I don’t know. And I think that’s the trouble. There used to be a very clear answer to that, and now people are going, “Maybe this could be a good thing for me.”

Could it be?

Maybe for them, but not for me. You build up a certain amount of good will with your audience. And I think I’ve taken the road less traveled and all that. For a band to get a break doing an ad for a car — Why don’t you go get a gig at a club? Do it the old-fashioned way.

I do believe in my feelings about it and why I think it’s a bad thing. It was a bad thing for me because songs are deeply meaningful to me. They drive along the same neural pathways that dreams do. So in a sense, using them — misusing them — to sell hairspray, it just seems obscene to me. It weakens the muscles of the song. It pisses me off.

I think other artists doing commercials erodes everyone’s credibility. It gets to a point where songs really are like jingles — they contain jingle material, and they’re bouncy, and surface, and simpleton. And it’s more about how they’re marketed and the size of the campaign than that which you are marketing. These songs that they’re putting in these ads aren’t nothing, if they’re willing to pay $5 million for usage. They know the great power that a song carries.

Everybody’s got a different way of seeing it, and that’s just mine. John Densmore’s got some really great thoughts on the topic.

Are you offered that kind of money?

I’ve been offered a million bucks for a beer commercial, restaurants and stuff like that. I’m not a big-hit, iconic artist. I think they maybe like me more because I’m more obscure, and I seem more beat and more inside, you know, wink-wink. Maybe that’s why I get hit.

What’s the state of the Opel case in Germany?**

It’s just grinding through the snail pace of the court process. You throw a rock and you wait two years to hear it go through a window. I do other things in the meantime. [Laughs.] It’s not like my life is built around it. But it is a pause. My life is now like a pause in between lawsuits.

I must get a kick on a certain level, the David and Goliath approach. The old guy with the shotgun on the front porch. I’m the old guy now.

But do you think it might deter some of it?

Maybe. “Waits didn’t do it, we’re not doing it. Fuck you, man, I quit!” So who knows. You don’t always know when you stand up, who’s standing near you.

As far as changing the way these companies do business, it’s a beginning. They really hate apologizing and really hate bad publicity. They’re not going to change anything until punishment costs more to them. If you can’t get Bob Seger to do something for a million bucks, get an impersonator to do it for 30 grand. That’s kind of what they did with me. I’m not even for sale. They still ask you and they tempt you, wave something in front of your face. They figure everybody has their price. It’s not that I can’t be bought because I haven’t been offered enough money. For a lot of people that’s the case.

I want to be kryptonite. These aren’t the people that are my heroes, big corporations and ad agencies. I’m a musician. That’s my world. I’m just saying, “Find another way.” But yeah, maybe I’ll have some influence on younger people. It becomes part of your profile. And what you say you’ll do and what you say you won’t do becomes part of your music, too. Do you want to see a guy do a concert who’s on-air every five minutes doing ads for cars ad stuff? It kind of mixes his message. I got to try to keep my work as clean as I can.

The other thing is that they aren’t just your songs. Because once people hear them then they think, “That’s my song.” They say, “Look what they done to my song, maw! Look what they done to my song.” So there’s that angle too. That’s what Densmore was saying about all the Doors songs. It’s like the soundtrack to the Vietnam War, and now you want to turn them into jingles? No way, man. You got to know what you believe in. Stand for something or fall for everything, right?

I probably sound like ... I don’t know, maybe I’ll run for office.

Good. We need people with some principles.

No, I’m just kidding.

---

* Waits isn’t totally without stain here. In 1981 he recorded a voice-over for a commercial for Butcher’s Blend, a dog food made by Purina. Here it is:

I hadn’t known about this when I conducted the interview. If I had, I would have asked him about it.

** He won a year later, via settlement.

❧

Golden oldies: Roberto Benigni, Thurston Moore, Al Green, Lou Reed, M.I.A.

Lou Reed’s little-known first album for $5

I wasn’t even aware that it was available digitally, but Lou Reed’s self-titled first solo album, which was released by RCA in 1972 and includes an early version of the song “Berlin” — as well as the first appearances of a bunch of Velvet Underground odds ’n’ sods like “I Can’t Stand It,” “Lisa Says” and “Ocean” — is on sale at Amazon.com for $5.

To my knowledge it’s long been available only as an import, which is how Amazon’s two CD versions of the album are listed (for $20.99 and $42.98). iTunes is selling it for $9.90, crediting it to “BMG Entertainment International UK & Ireland Ltd.”

It’s definitely not the greatest Lou Reed album, but it’s actually not bad, and any fan should have it. “Berlin” is especially interesting.

Internet desperately drives traffic to W.A.S.T.E.

Hey, did you hear that Thom Yorke is releasing a new solo single?

• Thom Yorke Announces “Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses” Single (Rolling Stone)
• Thom Yorke to Release New Old Song (New York magazine)
• THOM YORKE CONFIRMS NEW 12", CONSIDERS NAME CHANGE (Stereogum)
• Thom Yorke's new 12inch (Sound Verite')
• Thom Yorke Confirms Two New Tracks on September 21 (Green Plastic Radiohead)
• Thom Yorke Confirms Plans To Release New Solo Songs This Month (Gigwise)
• Radiohead's Thom Yorke Announces New Solo Single (Billboard)
• THOM YORKE TALKS FEELING PULLED APART BY HORSES AND HOLLOW EARTH 12-INCH... (The Daily Swarm)
• Thom Yorke Confirms New Single (Pitchfork)
• NEW THOM YORKE 12” VINYL AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER (Radiohead At Ease)
• New Thom Yorke 12" coming soon (Burn the Bowery)
• Thom York [sic] Confirms Solo Single for Sept. Release (Prefix)
• New Thom Yorke 12" (wdub new music blog — "reviews, news, and general musings of the music staff of WDUB 91.1 FM in Granville, Ohio")
• Thom Yorke confirms new 12″ (Consequences of Sound)
• Follow-Up: Thom Yorke Single (Absolutepunk)
• FeelingPulledApartbyHorses/TheHollowEarth 12inch(Radiohead/Thom Yorke (Drowned in Sound)
• Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Confirms Upcoming Single ... But Is It “New Moon” Bound? (Wall Street Journal)
• Thom Yorke Announces “Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses” Single (Fuzzfizz)
• Radiohead's Thom Yorke picks new solo project name – video (NME)
• Thom Yorke Confirms New 12" (Paste)
• Thom Yorke (of Travis, Muse, Coldplay, and Radiohead cover band The Karma Police) Confirms 12-Inch Due This Month (Tiny Mix Tapes)
• Thom Yorke Confirms New Songs Are Coming (INDIEBLOGHEAVEN)
• FeelingPulledApartbyHorses/TheHollowEarth 12inch(Radiohead/Thom Yorke) (Drowned in Sound)
• Anuncio oficial de nuevo single (Exit Music)
• Thom York [sic] releases solo single (Digital Spy)
• Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Picks New Solo Project Name, Video Available (Frantik)

Oh dear

Snapped on Ludlow Street earlier this evening:

In their short time together, The Pixies managed to invent a musical style all to their own, that went on to influence an entire generation of rock music. The Death to The Pixies Sk8-Hi honors the legendary band by bearing a graphic from their earliest poster and T-Shirt art, depicting lead man, Black Francis, showing the thumbs-down salute. There’s no better backdrop than the Vans model that influenced a generation of high top skate shoe, the Sk8-Hi.

They’re $65.

Big scalpin’

My story about strange new world of ticket scalping is in the paper today.

It’s a complicated issue, and everybody has been covering it in recent months, including me. My story attempts to explore the phenomenon of the “secondary ticket market” from the point of view of the scalpers themselves, whom you don’t usually hear much about. Decide for yourself about their ingenuity and legitimacy in business.

Hope you enjoy it.

Kurt’s Guitar Hero avatar: Cardigan skank or ‘Adonis’?

Rolling Stone has a piece today on the story behind Kurt Cobain’s character in Guitar Hero 5. Getting Nirvana’s music in the game seems to have taken some wrangling with Courtney Love and Universal Publishing, but also apparently with Dave Grohl, the magazine reports.

Not surprisingly, though, it sounds as if Courtney was a particularly difficult negotiation. An Activision executive explains some of her requests, particularly on how buff the digital Kurt would be:

Naturally, Love did have some concerns. Namely, Cobain’s physique, [exec Tim] Riley reveals. “Courtney supplied us with photos and videos and knew exactly what she wanted Kurt to look like,” he says. “She picked the wardrobe and hair style, which turned out to be the ‘Teen Spirit’ look, then we went back and forth over changes — some subtle, some not so subtle.” In column B? Love’s reference to the Greek God Adonis, whose youthful good looks made the male deity an object of desire. “She certainly had a physical image in mind,” says Riley. “She wanted him to have that sort of athletic definition but not overly so.”

Was it Courtney or Dave Grohl who got the Daniel Johnston shirt in there? And does Daniel get any licensing bread from this?

Rolling Stone also has a brief video of scenes from the game’s Nirvana songs, which are “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and a live version of “Lithium.” On this clip, at least, there’s virtually no screen time for any of the rest of the band, but curiously there is another guitarist on stage, and it looks vaguely like Pat Smear. Which might be a slight anachronism: Smear joined for the In Utero tour, when Cobain didn’t look like this anymore.

Pepsi now one degree from Chinese government, via music partner

Couple of interesting announcements today involving PepsiCo, China and music.

First, Pepsi is launching a music venture in China called QMusic, which is based around an Idol-style TV contest show for “aspiring bands and singers to record, market and merchandise their music.” Essentially Pepsi hopes to grow some cheap talent in China that they can then use to sell soda there. The venture’s Chinese boss, “music industry executive” Tony Yapp, sez: “This is like music label 3.0.”

Coke reportedly has a stronger hold in China, but Pepsi is working hard to catch up. The Eye on Asia blog at Business Week sees this as an attempt to compete with Coke’s efforts at the Shanghai World Expo next year, where Pepsi is spending $5 million to sponsor the U.S. pavilion. (Coke will have its own pavilion there.)

But for Western companies to do big business in China, they are generally required to partner with a Chinese company, which takes the majority position. For QMusic, Pepsi’s partner will be A8 Digital Music, which last year claimed profit of $38 million on revenues of $103 million. (Conversion rate: US$1 = 6.83527 RMB.)

And who is this A8 Digital Music? A separate announcement today reveals that A8 is “the exclusive music partner” for a mobile media thing by Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency and official propagandist.

So the majority partner of Pepsi’s new Chinese venture, which will do all of its legwork and palm-greasing — sorry, “government relations” — and whatnot, is itself one short step from the state censor. And what does this mean? Well, I doubt Pepsi would ever care about issuing reports on Tibet or Falun Gong, but let’s just say that Björk is now definitely never going to do an ad like this:

The non-Jackson charts: Amazon and iTunes

By now you’ve probably heard 300 times that ever since Michael Jackson died, he has dominated the rankings of the best-selling albums on Amazon and iTunes — which, even though they don’t accurately reflect the full marketplace, are the closest things we have to real-time sales charts.

But what else is selling? And what does this tell us about who’s doing the buying? As of Sunday evening, here are the albums in the top 25 of Amazon and iTunes that are not related to Michael Jackson:

Amazon:

No. 14: Wilco
No. 15: Dave Matthews Band
No. 16: Regina Spektor
No. 17: George Harrison
No. 19: Green Day
No. 20: Steve Martin
No. 21: Rob Thomas
No. 22: Dream Theater
No. 25: Susan Werner

iTunes:

No. 7: Black Eyed Peas
Nos. 8 and 24: Transformers soundtrack and score
No. 10: Regina Spektor
No. 11: Dave Matthews Band
No. 14: Lady Gaga
Nos. 15 and 21: Kings of Leon (regular and deluxe)
No. 16: Jonas Brothers
No. 18: Taylor Swift
No. 22: Twilight soundtrack
No. 25: Daughtry pre-order

The lessons:

• Amazon’s customers are much older than iTunes’.


• Amazon’s customers are mostly white. (The first nonwhite, non-Jackson artist is Black Eyed Peas, at No. 26, and after Maxwell at No. 28, you have to go to No. 58 to find the next one — Bernie Williams!)


• Diversity is a relative term. iTunes’ top 25 has pop, R&B, country and alt-rock. Amazon’s has no R&B or country, but adds jazz, Americana and whatever Dream Theater is.


• Amazon’s customers are out of sync with the mainstream: 16th-century vocal music (No. 43) sells better among them than Taylor Swift (No. 45) and the Jonas Brothers (No. 56).


• Amazon’s rankings are not useful indicators of the overall charts. For example: Steve Martin’s banjo album is No. 22 on Amazon. But last week it was No. 128 on the Billboard 200, with roughly 4,000 sales. If one of Amazon’s top 25 doesn’t crack Billboard’s top 125, how much is all the other stuff selling?


• iTunes is probably better as a chart indicator. The albums that I’ve included above under “iTunes” were ranked thus on last week’s Billboard 200: Jonas Brothers, Black Eyed Peas, Dave Matthews, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift. Albums in Billboard’s top 10 absent from iTunes’ current top 25: Eminem, Incubus, Chickenfoot, Hannah Montana, Green Day. Based on this I’m going to predict that on next week’s chart, Jonas Brothers will sink, as will Eminem, Incubus and Chickenfoot, while Dave Matthews, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift will hold strong. We’ll see.


• You could argue that iTunes is a better predictor simply because of its bigger sample size. But if iTunes has maybe 80 percent share of digital, and digital is 23 percent of the whole pie, then iTunes represents only about 18 percent of the whole pie. That’s still huge, but statistically it wouldn’t necessarily dominate the overall picture. The reason it does is that iTunes’ customers have tastes similar to those of people buying at retail; Amazon’s don’t.


• Daughtry is going to be pretty huge.

I’m not exactly breaking any news here, but it’s instructive to see just how big a difference there is.

The big question, of course, is whether Billboard will do anything to accommodate all the Michael sales. They’re spread over dozens of titles, which means that none of them would chart terribly high, but most if not all of them are catalog, so they wouldn’t count on the Billboard 200. Will they do anything special? We’ll see.

When a Chinese festival promoter pulls the plug ...

... this is what it looks like. Courtesy of China Music Radar, a blog run by Split Works, a group of Westerners based in Shanghai and Beijing who have promoted shows by Sonic Youth, Ozomatli, Talib Kweli and, last week, Ghostface Killah.

At the beginninng of June, we pointed you in the direction of the JinShan Crazy Beach Music Festival. You can read the post HERE. If you read the post, you will remember that we were dubious about it, seeing as we were 6 weeks away and there were few if any references to it online of in the media..

We’ve just received word that, despite commitments to media partnerships (and, we presume, artists and production), the investors have pulled their investment overnight. The following email tells it better than we possibly could:

Sorry to inform that Crazy Summer Music Festival has encountered big problem and all the promotion and execution works for the festival need to be stopped right now. The investor party had stopped investing on halfway, all due payment for treatment to media partners, for tickets exchange, for artists etc all have no way to continue. Sorry for that. I highly appreciated your big support. We know there are already promotions out at this point, and all the due resources i promised to give are not dispear anyways, please help me exchange all the promotion coverage and exchange resources into countable values and give back to me. We will ask for a rightful payment for giving back to you.

If the investor party had made any behavior in order to get off this obligations, just ignore, all rights and values for you to help promoting the event will be returned.

If there are already pages of promotion out, please exchange into value, and get back to me, iwill get those values back to you. If there are enough to get every information withdrewal, please let those not out. and please still give me the value exchanged from all the preparation and pages left for it. Thanks. Sorry for the big trouble, Sorry.

Sorry for everything, and thanks for your understanding. Sorry.

Honestly, we expected something like this, and we also expect more in this vein as the market progresses. Inexperienced organisers and investors see sexy opportunity – fail to budget properly, fail to obtain the right artists/ promotion/ licenses – investors pull out, festival gets canned. Festivals are very historically tough to get off the ground – conventional wisdom is that they take 3-4 years to break even (if indeed they ever do). We may see more of this before the cycle reaches any sort of maturity...

Hypebot’s ‘10 commandments of music 2.0’

1. Thou Shalt Not Worship False Prophets - Neither a record deal or auto-tune are your saviors.
2. Thou Shalt Worship Only One God - He (or she) is called The Fan.
3. Thou Shalt Giveaway [sic] Free Music - Like Jesus and the loaf of bread, give your flock a gift that multiplies as they pass it around.
4. Thou Shalt Not Steal - Borrowing a beat is one thing, but stealing...
5. Thou Shalt Blog - Your flock wants to know what you’re doing.
6. Thou Shalt Create Profiles - Wherever your flock may go, you must be there.
7. Thou Shalt Upload Photos - Staged, unstaged, backstage, from the stage and at every stage of a project.
8. Thou Shalt Upload Videos - Longs Ones. Shorts Ones. Tall ones...you get the idea.
9. Thou Shalt Share Thy Bounty. Share gigs. Share ideas. Share with your fans.
10. Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You - You meet the same people on the way down that you did on the way up.

He asks for an 11th. My suggestions:

• Thou shalt not make sudden and outrageous price hikes.
• Thou shalt not foist weird formats and technologies upon thine customers. For it will be harder to pass Clive Davis through the eye of a needle than to get people to embrace slotMusic.
• Thou shalt keep ticket fees down. And when thou sayest “no fees,” thou shalt mean it.
• Thou shalt not exploit fans’ loyalty by reissuing the same product again and again with minor permutations.
• Thou shalt have good radio stations, and not flip them unless really necessary.
• Thou shalt have music videos on TV.
• Thou shalt not leak thine own music while also waging crusades against piracy.
• Thou shalt maintaineth good record stores. For even though people download music, they also liketh to browse thine physical product.
• Thou shalt not foist poorly designed, ad-supported online services upon thine customers. SpiralFrog and QTrax, we are talking to thee.
• Thou shalt get thine Grammy categories under control. Considereth a maximum of 30 or so awards, including technical. The reason that thine Hollywood neighbors coveteth one another’s Oscars is that scarcity createth competition.
• Thou shalt openly debate the fairness of “dynamic pricing” in all of its forms, including the so-called Radiohead model. For the best idea that anybody hath had about the value of music was Steve Jobs, who said that everything should costeth 99 cents. Why he caved on that, only the Lord thy God knows.

One eMusic (ex-?) customer’s opinion

eMusic made a pretty significant announcement today. In a few months it will add some 200,000 tracks from Sony for download by subscribers. After years of being shunned by the major labels — who didn’t like eMusic’s lack of DRM, as well as its low prices — it has now snagged the second-biggest one. (It’s a catalog deal: it includes only songs more than two years old.)

DRM is a thing of the past. But what’s more important about this deal is what it tells us about the majors: (1) that they hungrily pursue every source of revenue, including those they once ignored; (2) that they have devalued their catalog (a couple of months ago, remember, they cut the price of most older songs on iTunes by 30 percent); and (3) that they are still trying to reduce iTunes’ market share by giving favorable deals to other retailers.

So now you’ll be able to download Michael Jackson songs for less than anywhere else. Which is good! The catch, though, is that the deal now is not nearly as good as it used to be. Sony muscled a big price increase out of eMusic, which sprung it on its customers in a most confusing way. For example, my plan used to be 600 downloads a year (50 per month) at $143.90, or 24 cents per song. On Monday I was told that this would be changing to “the new eMusic Bi-Annual 210 plan, which gives you 210 downloads for $95.90 every 180 days.” What? Do the math and you’ll see that it means 420 downloads a year (35 per month) at $191.80, or 46 cents per song — almost double the price!

I’m not thrilled about this, and need to figure out whether I’ll renew. But I’m not the only one who feels this way. A friend of mine, let’s call him Peter W. — no, let’s say P. Waisnor — has been a longtime eMusic subscriber, and he wrote a heartfelt note about his disappointment. This is the kind of customer no business wants to lose. And eMusic, you just blew it:

As a subscriber for nine years, I have weathered my share of policy and pricing changes from eMusic, but I have always continued my membership. I have to say that this new change is a hard one to accept. The price increase is far more than I would have ever expected given (what I thought was) the underlying focus of eMusic, their catalog and their membership... I work in sales and marketing, so I understand how improvements can raise the price of a product, but I also know that if I raised the price of my product by almost 50% overnight that my customers would say unpleasant things to me before switching to one of my competitors.

Even if I continue my membership, I will now be forced to treat eMusic no differently than I treat iTunes or Amazon, and this — more than anything — is what’s incredibly sad to me. iTunes and Amazon are fine, but I think of them like I think of a grocery store or an appliance warehouse — impersonal, utilitarian, get in and get out, know what you need before you go in. I have always thought of eMusic like my local record store, or like a friend’s basement in high school where I would just sit and discover new music for hours...

I was disappointed when unlimited downloads went away (which was probably eight years ago or something), but I learned to love my subscription and my 90 downloads per month. I bought booster packs until I was told that I went over my limit for the month and would have to wait until the beginning of my next billing cycle. I set up a second account just to get more music. I even changed one account from a grandfathered 90 downloads to a connoisseur plan because it was cheaper than maintaining my booster pack habit.

I have been mainlining music through eMusic for nine amazing years and I am sad to see that relationship change. eMusic has outlasted relationships, jobs, cars, apartments, laptops, and countless hard drives of ever increasing size. I have not decided whether to keep my membership yet, but I won’t let the unfortunate changes affect all the great music I have downloaded and the time I have enjoyed on the site. I just feel betrayed by what I perceive as an enormous amount of greed, and a wildly inappropriate price increase.

UPDATE: I hadn’t known, but Peter — I mean P. — posted his comment to eMusic’s official announcement. He's comment No. 335 out of 549 (and counting).

Chinese quake: Death by real estate bubble?

Peter Kwong, a professor at Hunter College, has an interesting Op-Ed today about the student deaths in the Sichuan earthquake last year. Kwong mentions something I had neglected when I wrote about the Chinese government’s crackdown on journalists and pesky families: the hush money offered to parents of students killed in schools (5,335 kids according to the government; 10,000 according to Kwong and many others).

[G]overnment officials offered the parents $8,800 for each child killed in exchange for their promise not to pursue the issue any further.

Kwong also gets at another important aspect of this. There’s a simple economic reason that the schools were constructed so poorly that they collapsed like cardboard, while neighboring buildings weren’t hit so hard. In its push to modernize, China has diverted money away from inland social welfare programs — like building schools — and toward developing its coastal mega-cities as global showpieces.

For a capitalist marketplace that is closely controlled by a central government, it’s their version of a real estate bubble: build build build in Beijing and Shagnhai and Guangzhou, at the expense of the villages of Sichuan.

Meanwhile, the neo-liberal economic policies of the central government over the past 30 years stripped away much social-welfare funding and investment in education. Local governments had to raise cash through bank loans and donations.

The dearth of funds led to what critics call the construction of “three without” schools in rural areas — classrooms built without standardized design, without construction supervision and without quality control. Since contractors made very little from school projects, they resorted to cheating on construction material.

So to answer the parents’ questions about who was responsible for the safety of school buildings, the authorities would have to reveal their own relationship with contractors, developers and other interests.

The one-year anniversary of the quake is tomorrow.

Press release of the day: ‘No further information available at this time’

Keywords: Beatles, catalog, digitally, remastered.

Could it be that the Beatles are finally coming to iTunes, as has been rumored and rushed into print so many times? Nope. Reissued CDs, that powerhouse commodity of 2009:

London, England – April 7, 2009 – Apple Corps Ltd. and EMI Music are delighted to announce the release of the original Beatles catalogue, which has been digitally re-mastered for the first time, for worldwide CD release on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 (9-9-09), the same date as the release of the widely anticipated “The Beatles: Rock Band” video game. Each of the CDs is packaged with replicated original UK album art, including expanded booklets containing original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited period, each CD will also be embedded with a brief documentary film about the album. On the same date, two new Beatles boxed CD collections will also be released.

Hey, it's better than a $395 White Album fountain pen ... right?

To their credit, the biggest-selling act of all time did offer this thoroughly lawyered non-update on the issue of digital distribution:

Discussions regarding the digital distribution of the catalogue will continue. There is no further information available at this time.

Dubious enticement

Get your own Sally Jupiter cheesecake print

James Jean created a Vargas-style pinup of Sally Jupiter for the Watchmen movie — you can see it for a moment on the wall in Comedian’s apartment — and he’s now selling a 17 x 22 giclée (i.e. ink-jet) print of it on his own site. It’s going for $85, plus $8.75 shipping. Closer detail of it here, Jean’s sketches here.

Wonder if the Warner Brothers lawyers know about this.

(Via The Poster District.)