Wayne’s World

Quiz: The One & Only Billy Shears

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:04:59 -0400

In light of the recent announcement that the Beatles’ legendary catalog is finally coming out on remastered CD's, one of our readers from Liverpool sent in a fun little quiz.

NY Times, Sept. 2007: Can Rick Rubin Save The Music Business?

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:42:01 -0400

The answer? Not quite. For all the hype surrounding Rick Rubin’s arrival at Columbia Records, you’d be hard pressed to name any acts he’s signed let alone Sony artists that he’s produced other than Neil Diamond, often referred to as “The Jewish Elvis”. He’s in the studio with Crosby, Stills & Nash, but his Sony tenure has mostly been highlighted by producing Mettalica, Josh Groban and a number of other non-Sony acts. But let’s face it. Obviously he’s a talented producer. But one who has redefined quirkiness.

I was listening to the Howard Stern Show last week when Howard, who is a friend of Rick’s, let fly that Rick refuses to talk on the phone any longer. He will only communicate by text message or email. And I think that he’s so crazy that he only communicates with his staff this way, even if they’re in the same room! Howard has recounted on several occasions his story of attending a party at Rubin’s Malibu estate where several celebs were in attendance. The really strange thing was that they weren’t speaking to each other. All of the guests were sitting around the room texting each other. It’s also been reported that, other than the studio, he never leaves his house--everyone has to go to him. So I guess that means that if any Sony guys need to meet with him they have to fly out from New York, go out to Malibu, sit down with Rick in his office and start texting!

As Howard said, when you’re eccentric everyone wants to talk to you. And if Rick started taking calls, no one would want him. Go figure.

Is This Man The Next Steve Jobs?

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:35:37 -0400

Not! As you could see from my post last week about Qtrax, you’d have to think twice about lending him your car. Yes, it’s Qtrax CEO Allan Klepshitz. And how is the new Qtrax user experience? Does it equal or top that of iTunes? Is Kelpshitz the digital music genius he would have us all believe? Mike Barthel of idolator.com details his user experience with the new and improved Qtrax. Check it out.

If you’ve tried out the new and improved Qtrax, tell us about your experience in the comments section below.

Phil Spector Gets Orange Jump Suit. Will Dye Hair To Match

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:10:48 -0400

LOS ANGELES (AP)– Rock music producer Phil Spector was convicted Monday of second-degree murder in the shooting death of a film actress at his mansion six years ago.

A Superior Court jury returned the verdict after about 30 hours of deliberations. The jury had the option of choosing involuntary manslaughter, but did not do so.
The panel also found Spector guilty of using a firearm in committing a crime.

Spector exhibited no reaction to the verdict. His attorney argued that he should remain free on bail pending the May 29 sentencing, but Judge Larry Paul Fidler remanded him to jail immediately.

Second-degree murder carries a penalty of 15 years to life in prison, and the firearm charge carries up to three years in prison.

Spector's young wife, Rachelle, sobbed as the decision was announced. It was Spector's second trial. The first jury deadlocked 10-2, favoring conviction in 2007.
The 40-year-old Lana Clarkson, star of the 1985 cult film "Barbarian Queen," died of a gunshot fired in her mouth as she sat in the foyer of Spector's mansion in 2003. She met Spector only hours earlier at her job as a nightclub hostess.
Prosecutors argued Spector had a history of threatening women with guns when they tried to leave his presence. The defense claimed she killed herself.

The murder case was a flash from Hollywood's distant past, a reminder of the 1960s when Spector reigned as the hit maker supreme with such songs as the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" and the Ronettes' classic, "Be My Baby."

Spector, 69, who had long lived in seclusion at his suburban Alhambra "castle," was out on the town in Hollywood when he met Clarkson on Feb. 3, 2003, at the House of Blues. The tall, blond actress, recently turned 40 and unable to find acting work, had taken a job as a hostess. When the club closed in the wee hours, she accepted a chauffeured ride to Spector's home for a drink. Three hours later, she was dead.

Spector's chauffeur, the key witness, said he heard a gunshot, then saw Spector emerge holding a gun and heard him say: "I think I killed somebody."
Defense attorney Doron Weinberg disputed whether the chauffeur remembered the words accurately. In closing arguments, Weinberg listed 14 points of forensic evidence including blood spatter, gunshot residue and DNA, which he said were proof of a self-inflicted wound.

"It's very difficult to put a gun in somebody's mouth," he said.
"Every single fact says this is a self-inflicted gunshot wound," Weinberg argued. "How do you ignore it? How do you say this could have been a homicide?"
But prosecutors portrayed Spector as a dangerous man who became a "demonic maniac" when he drank and had a history of threatening women with guns. They also contended blood spatter evidence proved that Clarkson could not have shot herself.

As in the first trial, they presented testimony from five women who told of being threatened by a drunken Spector, even held hostage in his home, with a gun pointed at them and threats of death if they tried to leave. The parallels with the night Clarkson died were chilling even if the stories were very old — 31 years in one instance.

Clarkson's mother and sister sat through both trials and Spector's young wife, Rachelle, sat across the courtroom from them.

Prosecutors, haunted by the acquittals of stars such as O.J. Simpson, Robert Blake and Michael Jackson, at first seemed invested in making Spector the first star to be convicted in a major criminal case. But after the first trial ended in a deadlock, public interest faded. The second six-month trial was played out in a sparsely populated courtroom with few members of the media present.
During jury selection, only a few panelists remembered Spector's heyday as the inventor of the "Wall of Sound" recording technique and producer of teen anthems including, "To Know Him is to Love Him," The Crystals' "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "He's a Rebel" and Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep-Mountain High." He also worked on a Beatles album with John Lennon.

Do You Know Who This Man Is?

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:43:06 -0400

EMI Lottery Winners Span the Globe

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:18:11 -0400

The EMI Lottery is such a success that I’ve been getting emails from winners all over the world. Like Earl Hargrove of Eufaula, Alabama. Earl bought an EMI Scratch Off Lottery ticket at his local Citgo Mini Mart in hopes of winning that big recording contract (Earl plays accordion in a Myron Floren tribute band at the VFW Lodge up in Seale, AL). Well, he didn’t win the big record deal but he walked away a winner nonetheless. Here’s Earl with his brand new EMI Pocket Fisherman. And as you can see, he’s pretty darned happy with it. Thanks to EMI, that big fish didn’t get way this time!!

Online Poll: Should This Man Be Running A Deli In Miami?

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 12:28:04 -0400

I was reading Peter Kafka’s post in ATD about the new UMG/Google venture, Vevo and was struck by Pete’s analysis. What caught my attention was Pete’s observation that the music industry’s digital/online venture track record is exceptionally poor. In fact, to the best of my recollection, its zero. Nothing these knuckleheads have tried has worked. There’s I don’t know how many 25 year-old kids who are running around with online businesses worth zillions and the music industry Masters of the Universe are still trying to figure out how to program a VCR. Now I’m not suggesting that these 25 year olds take over the record business. I hate those arrogant little shits too. But do you really think that a completely out of touch septuagenerian should be running the world’s largest record company?

Doug Morris’ raison d'être for being a music mogul in the first place was that he was “a song guy”. He was a “music man” through and through. I would venture to guess that Doug wouldn’t know a hit today if it gave him a massage with a happy ending. And he clearly knows absolutely nothing about the digital space as he so eloquently proved in his famous Wired magazine interview of Nov. 2007.

So will Vevo work? Probably not. Because as Peter Kafka’s post made clear to me, they’ll always find a way to fuck things up.

Sooooo. This begs the question “What Should Doug Morris Be Doing?”? What do you think?

Passalong Passes

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:12:36 -0400

It appears that DSP Passalong has ridden off into the sunset, yet another victim of the crashing digital music space that exists outside of Apple and Amazon. This proves once again that the only parties that can operate in the business are the big boys who don’t rely on digital music sales for their livelihood. And, of course, the major labels don’t give a shit about anybody other than the big guys as they have proven that they are lousy partners and only care about squeezing a large cash advance out of anybody they do business with. This certainly helps speed the demise of any start-up and makes it harder to even get funding because VC’s don’t want their money going toward advance to partners who don’t give a shit about your success, no matter how much they claim that they do. With the record labels it is always “heads I win, tails you lose”. The result is that it doesn’t pay to try to play above board with these guys. And that theory seems to have been proven accurate as recently the start-ups who have gained traction without going through the gordian licensing process semm to have been rewarded for their “illegal” activity with not only big licensing deals but also, as in the case of Imeem, record label investment! (See VEVO as well). It’s all sickening.

One of my readers passed this little tip on to me the other day. It is a Facebook post made by Passalong SVP Skip Franklin looking back and opining on what he learned from his experience. I found it to be interesting. Skip, the floor is yours:

Whew ...what a great 5-year ride at PassAlong Networks, with plenty of ups and downs, twists and turns, that leaves me pondering, what exactly have i learned?

The primary thing I've learned is that the digital music model is a very difficult puzzle to solve and that we're still a decade away from fully solving it.

My five observations:

1) That there has not been enough experimentation with the physical retail packaging of music. I look at what the movie industry is doing at retail and wonder what it will take for the music industry to follow their lead in terms of packaging, value, add-ons, special content, and pricing.

2) The domination of Apple is astonishing and close to unprecedented. As great as their closed ecosystem works, history has sided with the open systems. Most mature markets have 5 solid players with the leader ending up with around 50% or less market share, whether Hertz, Ford, or Coca Cola. It will take some serious partnerships and billion-dollar bets to end up with 5 serious competitors by 2012. Hard to see those kind of bets happening in this present economy. And so Apple will continue to have a free ride...a well earned free ride.

3) The Plays-for-Sure disaster. The king of operating systems and open platforms failed in the digital music space by not creating a "windows" for digital music for the hardware manufacturers. I never thought i'd see the day. Oh, will we ever see my Microsoft of 1987-1990 again? I think not. (I must comment that there are lots of Microsofters like Chad Hodge, David Fester, Kevin Unangst, Bill Spencer, David Kaill, et al that really understood the space; they just didn't get the top-down support)

4) Paradigm shift for how music is consumed. The list is too long; and the arguments on all sides even longer. But like all of the music shifts in the past, from orchestras to sheet music, player pianos to records, radio to music videos, things will never be the same again. And in spite of the paralyzing fear and loathing from music professionals, i fully expect in ten years that the total Music Pie will dwarf what it was in the prior "heyday" ...who ever said paradigm shifts were painless? or expedient!

5) That the Consumer-centric Ecosystem will result in an amazing empowerment of the individual. But a foundation of simple worldwide licensing, seamless transactions, auto-library synchronization is prerequisite ...and will lead to new forms of music discovery and music consumption that will amaze all of us.

Farewell for now.

I'm off to fight another fight!!

Another Lame Qtrax Launch

Thu, 9 Apr 2009 12:38:08 -0400

UPDATE--3:49 PM EST

Upon further investigation, Brilliant Technologies, a corporation registered in Delaware and owner of Qtrax, is a publicly traded pink sheet stock (BLLN). All well and good. But it turns out that BLLN hasn’t filed any financial statements with the SEC since May, 2007--an out and out violation of the law. Paging Bernie Madoff! Paging Bernie Madoff! See for yourself here.

The FT reported today that Qtrax was yet again relaunching. Good luck with that. There has been a massive credibility gap with anything that Qtrax says based on past claims, many of which are blatantly untrue. In this story you’ll read:

Mr Klepfisz admitted that it had been “a very expensive exercise” to get to the launch, requiring “tens of millions of dollars” of backing from wealthy individuals and boutique investment funds.

What CEO Allan Klepshitz doesn’t mention is that several of these “wealthy individuals and boutique investment firms” have filed lawsuits against Qtrax parent company Brilliant Technologies including: PLATINUM LONG TERM GROWTH IV, LLC and J&N INVESTMENT LLC, ALPHA CAPITAL ASTALT, CORNIX MANAGEMENT LLC, CAMBRIDGE MERCANTILE CORP, OSHER CAPITAL INC, and JBN INVESTMENT LLC. A total of 9 investor lawsuits inall...at least what is posted on the NY Supreme Court online records. It makes for fascinating reading.

My guess is that there is something up between Qtrax and the labels that will once again lead to more public humiliation, which Klepshitz seems to feed from.

The sheer fact that the FT is even mentioning Qtrax, especially after the entire media corps were made fools of by Klepshitz at Midem 15 months ago, is amazing. This, of course begs the question of why in God’s name am I even giving these guys space? And by the way, in my poll of “who will be the next to shut down”, Seeqpod is in first place with 57% of the vote and Qtrax in second place with 29%.

Seeing The Future? This Will Blow Your Mind! Read On....

Thu, 9 Apr 2009 10:30:41 -0400

Back in 2000, anybody with half a brain knew that the recording industry was blowing it big time by not playing ball with Napster. I was recently criticized by one of those players for saying this and supporting Thomas Middlehoff’s efforts to do so. This big wig told me that Middlehoff didn’t have a business plan for Napster. I, of course, used Steve Knopper’s book “Appetite For Self-Destruction” as a defense. Plus the fact that I know Hank Barry and Milt Olin well and knew of their efforts to bring everybody together for a giant Kumbaya moment. My contention is that everyone BUT the record labels knew that they were fucking up. And, of course, history has proven that to be true.

A few years ago, Rick Rubin, in the great fanfare made about his now questionable hiring at SonyBMG as co-Chairman of Columbia Records, presciently stated in his own Karnak The Magnificent moment (see photo below for evidence of this) proclaimed that the future of the record industry lie in the subscription model. Unfortunately that train left the station with Napster 1.0. Nice try, Karnak, uh, I mean Rick. Stick to playing with knobs.

But I digress. So let’s get to the point. A reader sent me something he found buried deep in a site called The Daily Swarm. If true, and I believe it is, here is the real deal..the guy who really saw the future and salvation of the music business...the real Karnak The Magnificent...dare I say, the real Rick Rubin? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you....

Yes. Frank Zappa. Let me quote The Daily Swarm:

Did Frank Zappa Come Up With A Business Plan For File Sharing In 1983?

Reader SunKing sends in this little tidbit that I'd not seen before (perhaps some of you have). It comes from The Real Frank Zappa Book and discusses his response to "the home taping movement" and the attempt to get everyone to rebuy their old albums on CD by proposing a system where you could subscribe to whatever genre of music you wanted and get it delivered in batches. He first talks about how ridiculous it is to focus just on selling discs of music:
MUSIC CONSUMERS LIKE TO CONSUME MUSIC . . . NOT PIECES OF VINYL WRAPPED IN PIECES OF CARDBOARD.

Then he talks about how to "embrace" home taping:
It is our proposal to take advantage of the POSITIVE ASPECTS of a NEGATIVE TREND afflicting the record industry today: HOME TAPING via cassette of material released on vinyl.... First of all, we must realize that the taping of albums is not motivated by 'stinginess' alone .... People today enjoy music more than ever before, and, they like to take it with them wherever they go. THEY CAN HEAR THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD AUDIO AND BAD AUDIO . . . THEY CARE ABOUT THAT DIFFERENCE, AND THEY ARE WILLING TO GO TO SOME TROUBLE AND EXPENSE TO HAVE HIGH QUALITY 'PORTABLE AUDIO' TO USE AS 'WALLPAPER FOR THEIR LIFESTYLE'.

So he makes the following suggestion:
We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company's difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user's home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1 (SONY consumer level digital tape encoder), Beta Hi-Fi, or ordinary analog cassette (requiring the installation of a rentable D-A converter in the phone itself . . . the main chip is about $12).

All accounting for royalty payments, billing to the customer, etc. would be automatic, built into the initial software for the system.

The consumer has the option of subscribing to one or more Interest Categories, charged at a monthly rate, without regard for the quantity of music he or she decides to tape.

Providing material in such quantity at a reduced cost could actually diminish the desire to duplicate and store it, since it would be available any time day or night.

Monthly listings could be provided by catalog, reducing the on-line storage requirements of the computer. The entire service would be accessed by phone, even if the local reception is via TV cable.

The advantage of the TV cable is: on those channels where nothing ever seems to happen (there's about 70 of them in L.A.), a visualization of the original cover art, including song lyrics, technical data, etc., could be displayed while the transmission is in progress, giving the project an electronic whiff of the original point-of-purchase merchandising built into the album when it was 'an album', since there are many consumers who like to fondle & fetish the packaging while the music is being played. In this situation, Fondlement & Fetishism Potential [F.F.P.] is supplied, without the cost of shipping tons of cardboard around.

We require a LARGE quantity of money and the services of a team of mega-hackers to write the software for this system. Most of the hardware devices are, even as you read this, available as off-the-shelf items, just waiting to be plugged into each other so they can put an end to "THE RECORD BUSINESS" as we now know it.
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Now I ask you, how come nobody listens? As eccentric as Zappa was clearly he saw the future of the record industry and, of course, nobody listened. At least not any record labels. So let me know what you think about this.