It’s that time again and while I’m not football fan, I’m always interested in the music for the half-time show.  As such, here’s two oldies-but-hopefully-goodies about that:

Stones’ superbowl self-bleep (from 2006)

Paulie cleans and flushes the Superbowl (from 2005)

Notice that I mention the Who in both posts!  I wonder if the NFL are reading my posts…

—Jason Gross

The good people at PopMatters put out my listing of best music journalism of 2009.  Hope you like it.

After going through the exhausting process of putting it together in late December and thinking about the previous 11 months that I spent compiling the material, I’m thinking that it might be a good time to take a break from doing this list every year.  This will be the seventh listing I’ve done, with the last three of them appearing here at PM, while all the previous ones appeared at rockcritics.com. 

Don’t get wrong- I like doing the work as far as I think that MAYBE it provides a good source for anyone interested in music journalism as well as a bunch of well-deserved pats on the back for some great writers (and a couple of pies thrown at some bad ones too).  I was also gratified to hear from Greil Marcus, who compiled the latest Da Capo series on music journalism, saying that he found my previous list to be useful in his own research as did the editor at Perseus who said that my guides were regularly used as a reference for the series.

I have to admit though that it’s pretty tiring work and to be even more honest, I’m not sure what I get out of it anymore.  I love to write and edit but I have to try to balance that with the work on my own zine (where I’m finishing up the next issue now), my freelance work (just handed in two assignments and I have two more to do now), not to mention my day job.  Also, I want to do more blogging right now (like this) plus add more to the two other blogs that I do, at Ye Wei (centered more on individual releases and musicians) and for Audubon magazine (not to mention the one that I promised to do for WFMU and occ. for Boogie Woogie Flu).  Also, I still feel really bad for dropping the ball on the idea for an NYC music commission (which I’d still be glad to help with if someone else took up the mantle) and I’d still love to do a collection of non-U.S./U.K. music journalism as there’s some great writing out there might many music fans never see.  I really want to do a good job with these other things and having this extra work detracts from it.  This is basically the same reason that I decided to give up on producing reissues, even though I was very proud of those too (Kleenex/Liliput, Delta 5, Essential Logic, Oh OK, DNA).

I’m also concerned frankly that I’m getting too glued to my computer as I’m doing all this work and want to free myself up a bit from it.  When I’m old and incapacitated, it’ll be fine for me to park myself in front of my computer and type away all day.  Before then, I’m like to spend more time with my girlfriend, see my friends and family more, experience life outside of my apartment on evenings and weekends, etc..  Not that I’m automatically gonna do all those things but let’s just say that now I’ll have less excuses to avoid them.

I’m not looking for any sympathy here but I would have one request for other writers out there.  It would be great if someone else could do these yearly listings- not just compiling a list of noteworthy articles but also come up a decent summation of each year, trying to synthesize the info, look forward and add some suggestions and ideas about what should or could be happening.  Da Capo’s series does this to some extent but we need more than one voice addressing this each year.

Who knows?  I might get bored and jump back into this by the end of the year or later but hopefully, I’ve earned my time off for now.  Time for some new blood to jump in there and mix it up!

—Jason Gross

For anyone that’s concerned that the proposed merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation (two of the hugest companies selling concert tix in the States) might not actually pan out with all the consumer benefits that the two companies promise, there’s somewhere for you to sound off about this pending monopoly.

A coalition of concert promoters have formed Ticketdisaster as a clearinghouse of information about the dangers of the merger and info about how to contact the Justice Department to voice your disapproval.  Hyperbot has more information about the group.

—Jason Gross

Greg Sandoval provides great analysis of Net and music issues for CNET and has done another service to anyone interested in these topics with his recent column, A year out, where’s RIAA’s promised ISP help?.  The answer to the question is ‘nowhere to be found.’  Turns out that it was just hokum, A.K.A. a publicity stunt on the part of the RIAA to continue to put the fear of god into the hearts of unauthorized downloaders (who, according to Big Champagne, aren’t really being deterred).

What seems even more interesting is a little tidbit hidden in the middle of the article about why the RIAA stopped pursuing new lawsuits (as opposed to the old ones they’re still pursuing).

“The reason that some at the labels wanted an end to the litigation is that for years it brought down mountains of public scorn. The lawsuits were also expensive and RIAA’s members wanted costs slashed, which happened earlier this year.”

Sandoval also reveals that yet another reason is that the RIAA was trying to get other Net providers to play ball in their imaginary scheme, to have downloaders’ account cut off eventually (a three strikes law).

Sorry to burst the bubble of anyone who thought that the RIAA was being good-hearted and offering a peace offering on this.  Hopefully, as labels have to keep cutting expenses, their payments to RIAA will dwindle down to nothing.  Or at least the RIAA can get back to one of the few things that they were good at- giving out gold and platinum awards (though nowadays, there’s less and less of those to hand out).

—Jason Gross

Last week, the Wall Street Journal had a good scoop about Apple and their purchase of the Lala service but WSJ also made news in another way that they (and especially Rupert Murdoch) didn’t intend.

When Apple bought up Lala (a service that offered limited free streaming and shared playlists), the big question in the music biz was ‘why?’  WSJ seemed to have the answer in a December 11th article, saying that Apple was merely using Lala to retool their iTunes architecture.  Like many WSJ articles, this story was stuck behind a pay-wall which let you read the first few sentences and then asks you to subscribe (pay) to read the rest.  Murdoch is ultimately planning to put all Newscorp publications into the same framework of pay-to-read. 

There was one little problem with the Apple scoop that WSJ had- you could read about it without paying Murdoch.  That’s because both the Yahoo! Tech blog and Ars Technica had their own stories about the WSJ article itself, quoting and referencing it several times.

In a way, it’s a feather in the cap for WSJ to make news themselves but it also points to the problem of pay-wall- you can keep people from getting direct access to the stories themselves via search engines but the info can just as easily leak out to other legit sources and be read without any pay toll in your way.

So does that defeat the whole purpose of pay-walls and make them useless?  As this happens again and again, Ol’ Rupe might raise a stink and demand that other publications will have to pay him to quote his stories but unless a huge chunk of the articles get copied elsewhere, the law ain’t on his side.  He and other publications have said that they’re ready for a drop in readership (and thus ad dough) as they demand money to read their articles but if the material is getting filtered out to other sources where you DON’T have to pay, what’s going to be the incentive to pay up for the original articles?

But give Rupe a little credit- at least he’s not as stupid as Variety magazine.  According to Folio, they’re gonna use a pay-wall too.  Variety is more hardcore in its demands for its readers though- 10% of the online readers will be prompted to pay up after reading 2 pages.  The price?  $248.  That’s about $50 more expensive than an iPhone.  Which one of those do you think will be more useful to you and a better value?  And which one do you think will get more sales?  And by the way, Variety’s price is about $100 more than a WSJ subscription for both their print and online edition.

UPDATE: According to this article from The Wrap, Variety’s decision might be a less ditch desperation move.

—Jason Gross

Even if you’re like me and you don’t care for her music (can’t wait for all the hate mail about that), you have to admit that Susan Boyle is easily one of the biggest phenom’s in the music biz this year.  She didn’t do it by letting fans set their price for her album or trying new and innovative things through social media but just the ol’ fashion way- selling lots of records.  She even beat out Eminem for the best first-week sales of his year.

So how do you explain how she became such a huge star?  For one thing, there’s no denying that she has a great voice, even if you don’t care for what she’s singing.  But there’s lots of great singers out there who’ll never reach her level.  Here’s a few reasons why:

* Simon Cowell and his company deserve lots of credit for setting the whole thing up in the first place. Of course, not every singer he works with through his companies (i.e. American Idol) get to this level but having that platform in the first place was a huge boost for her.  Earlier this year, I talked about how Cowell set up the story about her in the first place.

* The Anti-model Factor. I haven’t seen any of the record buyers polled about this but I’d wager that since Boyle doesn’t look like your typical singing star, lots of people were rooting for her since they don’t have hot bods either (I sure as hell don’t).

* The story behind her. Again, I think this is another (non-musical) reason that many people were rooting for her. One day, she’s nondescript and unknown and then suddenly she becomes a star. And unlike many other instant stars who don’t deserve the fame, she actually does.

LATE THOUGHT: After Beyonce and Taylor Swift got all the Grammy nominations, it’ll be an interesting battle to see who wins next year and (at least temporarily) wears the diva crown but in the meantime, Boyle has them both beat in initial sales (Swift’s last album sold less than Boyle’s in first week sales, ditto Beyonce).

—Jason Gross