Monday, August 31, 2009

Monetizing music

I actually don't think levies on memory is a terrible solution to the collapse of the music industry.

Let's play with some rough numbers, just for fun. Let's say you had a music consumer who used to spend an average of $150 a year on music--10 albums annually at $15 a pop. Now a compulsive downloader, he doesn't spend anything but his annual music downloads have a retail value of $4,000.

Right now, the music industry seems to think it's entitled to the $4,000. But if illegal downloading were to end tomorrow, so would his massive music consumption so he's soon be back to the $150 of spending again. So the question is not how to prevent this guy from downloading every song ever recorded, but how to extract $150 or more annually from this guy, no matter how much music he gets. It would be better if he paid more for more music, and there are probably ways of doing that, but for the moment we're just trying to restore an acceptable level of financial remuneration to the system. I think "the same as before" is more acceptable than zero.

But I'm not even sure "the same as before" is possible when your starting point is zero. So let's be even more realistic. I've read reports that artists have make as little as 30 cents per album, that $1 per album is a good deal. So under the new business model, why don't we give the artist $3 per album. With downloading as part of the new distribution model, let's keep marketing and administration costs to another $3 per album. Now our music fan is paying $60 for his 10 albums. Pro-rated as a fee applied to media that can hold music files, that's not an outrageous amount of money.

How do we get a little closer $150? License file-sharing services that meet certain criteria. Better search function, better speeds, fewer ads and spyware programs and less bogus files would lure people from illegal file-sharing to legal file-sharing. Or, because those terms are a little moralistic, unlicensed file sharing to licenced file sharing.

Even someone obsessed with "free" would give serious consideration to a monthly fee of $7.50 to legally download all the music he wants in a way that's as convenient as iTunes and that actually gives money directly to the artists he likes, much like how libraries pay fees to the creators of works that circulate. In fact, in paying for high-speed Internet access, he's already accepted the premise that downloading media files is going to cost him something each month. Why not 10 or 10 percent more, especially if he's getting value for it and is no longer a "criminal"?

The thing is to keep the price low. $7.50 montly is a much less dramatic departure from zero than, say, $30. Again, the industry is obsessed with the $4,000 worth of songs on his hard-drive, but they've got to let it go and focus on the conversion rate, rather than on their idea of justice.

By charging a (mandatory) fee on storage devices and by charging an (optional) monthly high-volume file-share fee, we can bring the same $150 a year back into the music industry. But, with online distribution and a de-emphasis on corporate systems, we've eliminated many of the "suit" and retail positions, giving the more of that money to artists instead. We give indie bands comparable access to larger acts, if they can do a good job of getting their name into the memories of music-searchers. If we have a system of licensed file-sharing services, we can keep track of who is getting downloaded and split the storage fee and monthly fee in a fair way. The distribution/marketing system becomes the finance department.

The corporate suits, though, are not interested in exiting stage right and so obsess over the $4,000 in "lost revenue," not realizing that that money is never going to be available to them, no matter how many court cases they launch. They've got to start with zero and build up, not start with "He's got our whole catalogue on his hard-drive!" and seek revenge.

Turning the Pages


I remember before I moved to Toronto, I had a friend who lived there who was (and is) a great enthusiast of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. He'd swing by Pages bookshop on Queen West with astonishing regularity to see if new Deleuze stock had arrived. Pages is where such intellectual capital could disperse itself beyond the dusty halls of academia. He would take note that, say, three copies of Capitalism and Schizophrenia had arrived and, a few days later, note with equal or greater joy that one had been sold.

He successfully passed on the Deleuze meme to me. When I came to live in Toronto, I would also monitor the Pages' Deleuze collection as something of a guide to the rise and fall of his popularity, of a way to feel that there were other people out there who shared my interest. I would also browse the art books, first looking for naughty bits, then architectural porn, which I'm not sure is any more wholesome. I'd also track the books of people I knew. And end up buying a few magazines or remainders. Or the occasional splurge.

So it was a sad moment when I swung Pages by on closing day. I must admit my motivation was predatory. I felt a moment of personal disappointment; I was hoping for a better discount than the 35 percent off they were offering. Then I took a look at the empty shelves, the oddball handful of remaining stock and I was a little choked up. The bookstore at the beating heart of the city is no more. It makes it much harder, and much less fun, to take our collective cultural pulse.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

All in a Heap


Funny where naiveté can leave you. When I had seen the name of the musical entity Imogen Heap in print, I had, in my head, pronounced it "Ih-MOE-gen Heap" and visualized some nasty punk band, referencing toxic waste. So I didn't care when their song appeared on The OC. Of course, Imogen is pronounced more like "Emma-Jen" and the "heap" is a last name, not a metaphor. And she sounds more like Sarah McLachlan produced by Enya, with bursts of Bjork kookiness and Tori Amos indulgence. Actually, the songs on her new album have more shape than Sarah's, Bjork's (well, late Bjork) and Tori's. She's a much more grounded eccentric, musically speaking.

In fact, I think Imogen has taken over the sleek and emotional pop ship Dido abandoned after her debut album (well, she abandoned the "sleek" and the "pop" part).

Anyway, Ellipse is a lovely album, especially the first single.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Electro Calvinism


As much as I loved "I'm Not Alone," the first single from Calvin Harris' new album Ready for the Weekend, I knew there was trouble on the horizon when I read an interview with him talking about how, at 25, he was starting to feel old, wondering about the merits of club life. Oh God. The man who sang, "I like all the girls" is getting philosophical and world-weary. Most young turks manage to get a couple of albums to market before they consider themselves codgers.

But maybe there is a finite amount of energy in each of us and Harris front loaded most of his. His fantastic debut album I Created Disco was the kind of pure deadpan chutzpah only the British can get away with. Each song contained such audacious and catchy ideas, the execution hardly mattered. "I've got my car and my ride and my wheels, when I go to Vegas," he sang, glorying in the stoned redundancy. The songs on I Created Disco may not merit a place in the immortal canon of pop music, but they grabbed you immediately, gave you a laugh on the dancefloor and stayed with you for weeks, at least. Call it vapid, the album knew it was vapid and let you in on the joke.

The songs on Ready for the Weekend aren't so starved for attention. The world, it seems, is a more serious place and Harris has had to impose some structure in order to survive. The humour, which had made Harris a peer of LCD Soundsystem and Daft Punk, is notably absent.

It's like Harris is pacing himself. Each of the songs has its role to play, sometimes dance-y, sometimes more--it freaks me out to say this--reflective. "Burns Night," for example, is a loping late-night instrumental jazz jam, seemingly designed to encourage drunk patrons to roll home, while "Limits" is full of robotized regret.

Ready for the Weekend is simultaneously a more utilitarian and more serious album. Its 90s aesthetic aims to please with its piano chords and house-soul backing vocals. "Stars Come Out" reminded me of nothing less than the dancey tracks from Moby's Everything is Wrong, which I'm quite sure Harris wouldn't take as a compliment.

But when you're self-consciously producing a retro album, I suppose that effective emulation is an accomplishment. There are four tracks here that would not drive me from the dancefloor and two more--"I'm Not Alone" and "Dance Wiv Me"--that I would scramble across a crowded room to turn up. It's a far cry from I Created Disco but it's still a better batting average than most pop-dance albums (though I suppose that one could say that Lady GaGa had raised the bar in this regard).

It's the future I fear for. The best track, "Dance Wiv Me" an electro-hip-hop collaboration with Dizee Rascal, predates the rest of the album. Harris' more methodical direction seems to be taking hi further and further away from what made him such a lovable sod.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Drinking & driving


The LCBO has finally decided where to put its Roncesvalles liquor store. This comes a year--a full year--after they told me that they were close to picking a location. And the new location won't open till next summer. It's great to see how quickly this retail monopoly works.

Now, they could have had a role-model store on Roncey. Something cute, storefront and pedestrian friendly. But no. The LCBO's passion for huge parking lots won out. They're putting it in the the plaza currently shared by the city's saddest Loblaws and a contender for the city's saddest Zellers (the latter category is a very competitive one, I know, thus the qualification). It's a dying plaza. There used to be a dollar store or two there, but they're gone now. It's certainly close to Roncey. It's walkable, yes. But it's really meant for driving to. The LCBO's suburban car-oriented mentality again trumps all other factors.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Coasting through

The Toronto Star's continuing grudge match against cyclists raises some interesting questions.

Firstly, while their reporter was watching 138 cyclists fail to come to full stop at a Stop sign, how many accidents did they cause? Judging by the story, it seems they caused none. Secondly, while the experiment was being conducted, how many cyclists elsewhere in the city--say, along nearby College or Dundas--received an injury because a careless driver opened their car door into their path? That number is harder to guess at--the Star's experiment certainly required less effort--but I figure there were a few. A few weeks ago, I nearly missed being car-doored three times in the two-minute ride along Dundas between Dovercourt and Brock.

This obsession with the letter of the law rather than general traffic safety made me think of harm-reduction strategies when it comes to drug use. Sure, you could arrest every junkie in Vancouver's downtown Eastside for possession, but who does that help? The junkie's illegal behaviour creates a situation where she's the primary victim. As a society, we've parsed out a drug-use strategy that, while it could bear improvements, at least acknowledges that treating everybody by the same standard to the exact letter of the law does nothing to achieve the goals that the standards and laws were created to achieve.

Good traffic policy and good policing should be about results, not making jealous Star-reading motorists feel vindicated in their contempt for cyclists.

If I thought that encouraging all cyclists to come to a full stop at all Stop signs would reduce accidents and create a situation where drivers were not so careless about opening their doors without looking, I'd be on that bandwagon in a second. But it is not cause and effect. The most lawful cyclist in a city full of lawful cyclists still takes her life into her hands every time she passes a parked car.

Cities need to stop treating cyclists like thin, slow cars and come up with policies and infrastructure that reduce harm. By that I mean, saves lives and prevents accidents and more broadly, reduces gridlock, toxic emissions and the urban-heat-island effect. Because I think you could stand at the corner of Beverly and Baldwin for weeks, counting rolling-stop cyclists and never see an accident. So what's the point?

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Game-changing moves


Depeche Mode had been around for a decade when it released 1990's Violator album. It turned out to be a game changer for the band and for electro-pop/Brit pop in general. The Pet Shop Boys' masterpiece Behaviour was a response to it, an album that placed the PSB on a track that has kept them relevant to this day. Depeche Mode had shown how versatility and depth could be wrung out of a preexisting sound and image. Shania Twain performed a similar kind of magic when her Come on Over album showed how country music could be loosed from its genre, how production techniques could re-purpose songs for different markets.

(As an aside: During DM's recent Toronto concert, the first time I've ever seen them live, I was surprised how theatrical the show was, how much closer it was to glam rock than to knob-fiddling; as someone who does most of his music-listening through headphones, who thinks of Depeche Mode as a studio band, the energy and the spectacle was totally unexpected, helping me understand how the band's longevity and success has been nurtured on the stage as much as in the CD player. It's hard to imagine, say, New Order selling millions of concert albums and tour T-shirts.)

When it first came out, I thought Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)" video was brilliant. Well, of course, a lot of other people did as well. But it wasn't until I saw Shakira's "She Wolf" that I realized that "Single Ladies" was a game changer.

Dance has always been integral to the music video genre; early videos were often merely shots of people dancing. As some contributors to the recent outpouring of retrospection about Michael Jackson have argued, dance was an integral part of Jackson's talent tool-set long before the "Thriller" behemoth. But, with due respect to Paula Abdul, "Single Ladies" is a particularly provocative waypoint.

Where music-video dancing had, even at its most profound and eye-catching, usually been relaxed and accessible, with moves the viewer might want to casually try out at a nightclub, Beyonce introduced a particular kind of aspirational precision coupled with a choreographic specificity. If you have mastered these steps in "Single Ladies," you will not be muddling through them to an Ashlee Simpson song, you will be tied to a very singular notion of what those moves are--your success or failure at mastering them will be obvious to any observer.

Not only are Beyonce and her posse tight and polished, the steps they are dancing are innovative, adding contemporary dance tropes to refined hip-hop moves. And they're shot in a way that the dancing is the video, not just something to cutaway to, from closeups of an emotive singer or some vague storyline. The presentation is relentless. Even in her regimented "Rhythm Nation", Janet Jackson doesn't stay so intently in choreographic character, breaking from shot-to-shot to swaying-and-facing-the-camera mode. The group dancing in Janet's video also allows the camera to break away from close-ups, allowing any potential flaws to be edited away.

Which brings me to Shakira, who has recognized the athleticism and the precision of Beyonce--well, she's even recognized the hair styling and posture of Beyonce--and met the challenge with a style that's both exact and--her own contribution--loopy. Her flexibility is aspirational. Her choreography is as unnerving as some of the most cutting-edge contemporary dance. Her delivery is clean and confident, as it it is perfectly natural to arrange your knee above your head. Her spider pose, for example, would be a little circus-show freaky if it was not delivered with a playful wink. Shakira has shown that she can match Beyonce move for move, that she can suffer the glare of an unforgiving camera and also--her trump card but also the twist that might obstruct her way to international domination--that she doesn't take her Olympian performance skills so seriously.