Once seen as a contender to take on the majors, Starbucks is now retreating from the music biz.  So much for synergy and branding but don’t believe that this is the end of big name brands outside the industry pushing music.  The industry is in such disarray that any established major brand can consider inking deals with artists to put out their music, get some hip cache from the connection and push their product alongside their own.

Speaking of industry woes, music publications are suffering also, with ad revenue way down now for some of the biggest players, excluding Spin magazine.  Maybe that’s why Paste is putting ads down in the page number footers and Rolling Stone is trying to get its readers to look for ads outside the magazine.  Expect to see more unorthodox ad experiments, especially if these pan out.  Come to think of it, expect to see more of them even if they don’t pan out.  Things are THAT bad…

—Jason Gross

As much as I love the bard of Hibbing, I did sympathize a bit with Jon Friedman’s Marketwatch column about Dylan’s Pulitzer Prize.  He’s a Dylan fan too (hell, it sounds like he almost has as many bootlegs as I do) but he insists that anointing Bobby is just a play for the Prize people to look hip.  I wonder about that myself and you can’t honestly think that such a sentiment didn’t cross the minds of the Prize committee.  It’s only in the last decade that the committee decided that jazz was worthy of the honor and even then, they’ve only chosen a small handful of recipients then. 

Dylan represents the first time that a rock performer has gotten any kind of recognition from them (it was a special citation after all). But much like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you wonder why other performers haven’t gotten a similar nod. Dylan was noted for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” It’s nice that they recognize that he’s a great songwriter and that if they are going to start to recognize someone in rock for these kind of skills, you might as well start with him.  Dylan is an easy choice for them also because much of his work has a literary tinge to it so it falls in line pretty well with other artists that they’ve honored.  Also, his recent Chronicles book is one of the best rock bios you’ll ever read- no doubt that helped him too.  But is this just going to be a blip or an ongoing concern with the committee?  Which rockers, if anyone, will they recognize in the coming years?

—Jason Gross

I’d been mulling over this Idolator story about Vanity Fair editor Lisa Robinson and her publicists’ memo about ‘no more promos’ (even if the memo itself isn’t recent).  I’ve seen reactions range from ‘when did VF really care about music?’ to ‘good for her for going green’ to ‘everything’s going digital anyway...’ I think all these responses are legit actually though from the tone of the memo, it does sound like she’s being an elitist crab who’s using ‘green’ as a cover for her decision. 

I get lots of promos too and while I’d love to listen and write about every single one of them that I find interesting, there just isn’t the time to do that.  I wouldn’t go so far to say ‘no more promos’ though.  Even with all of the music blogs out there plus MySpace plus P2P sites plus Last FM plus Pandora plus Napster plus E-Music plus mailing lists plus dozens of other ways to discover music, I still get surprises from promos.  I’d hate to give that up, not just because I wanna get off any gravy train but because the music nut in me wants to keep discovering music I didn’t know about or appreciate before. 

I’ve got no beef against downloads if they’re listenable- I received a recent one from a label for a great R&B band that was all tiny and fuzzy to hear, really distracting a lot from the music.  For streams, they’re not the same as accessing music the way you want and when you want so that’s not as convenient to hear and appreciate the music.  If labels can overcome these hurdles, I’m all for digital promos.  I have enough problems with finding shelve space for my CD’s and the price for external hard drives has dropped so much (500GB for only $100??) that it makes sense to go this way. 

On the external HD tip, I’d recommend getting one regardless if you’re filling up your old hard drive or not- do you really wanna lose all that music that you ripped or downloaded for months or years now?

—Jason Gross

In an old game of ‘she said’ and ‘they said,’ Alicia Keys is peeved about a Blender article where she claims that she didn’t say what they claim that she did say (about Tupac and Biggie being killed by the government, which even the Los Angeles Times’ Chuck Philips hasn’t come up with yet). It’s not the first time (or will be the last time) a magazine published a story where a star said “I never said that!” I was just curious about what could be done to clear things up in cases like this.

Obviously, both Blender and Keys can’t be totally right about this. One of them is fibbing, at least a little. Even if you give the benefit of the doubt all around, the end result would be that the magazine did inadvertently misquote her. 

(continue...)

—Jason Gross

Maybe you shouldn’t be amazed that the 2nd biggest Net provider in the U.S. ain’t necessarily nice people.  Even forgetting their crappy service record, Comcast is also fighting and biting about the issue of Net neutrality where they see fit to block any big P2P traffic that they don’t like as chronicled in an AP article and this Channel Web article.  In the former article, they admit to hiring ‘seat warmers’ at their public meetings where they usually get lambasted so that they have some friendly folks to applaud their efforts.  The later article notes CC’s ‘bill of rights,’ which is seen as a red herring to distract from their poor record of such.  Is Karl Rove consulting these guys are what...?

Just be glad that you’re not an indie band getting cut out of MySpace’s deal with the major labels for ad revenue sharing.  In an interview with Wired magazine, the MS folks admit that unless a band is hitched up with an aggregate service like The Orchard, IODA, Merlin and CD Baby, they’re cut out of any potential ad money.  But… note this quote at the end where they say that the aggregations are “all possible candidates for signing equity deals with MySpace Music.” Note the word ‘possible.’ That means that if you’re an indie band and you sign up with one of these services, they MIGHT be able to cut a deal with MS, or they might not.  You sign up with them and then gamble and hope that things will work out peachy with MS.  Quite a racket, eh?

—Jason Gross

PBS’s MediaShift site has an interesting critique of Gawker’s system of paying bloggers based on page views.  They don’t like the idea mainly because it emphasizes sensationalism (make a splashy, eye-grabbing post) over view loyalty that a site can build up and maintain: they quote the Gawker memo that set up this system where even they themselves realize that this model “ can overstate the value of cheap items with superficial appeal, but which damage a site’s reputation.” Fair enough but as Tom Foremsk of Silicon Valley Watcher comments on the PBS site, “It’s nice to make up new types of fantasy business models but the reality is that online publishers get paid by advertisers based on page views. Find me a media buyer that is going to buy a loyalty index or any other fantasy measure..” So what’s the right answer to the problem of getting web traffic and maintaining an audience without looking too hungry or eager for web eyeballs?  The PBS article has some good ideas about this but Foremsk’s point is well-taken.  In the end, the model for this isn’t out there yet, which isn’t surprising since newspapers haven’t figured out a viable long-term model to their problem of maintaining or even increasing readership.

But… Folio Magazine has a story about how Hearst Publications are going to distribute their content among Facebook, MySpace and other Web 2.0 biggies.  Will this help to increase readership and spread their brand?  It remains to be seem but odds are that this is a smart strategy to get the word out about their publications and their work.  Stay tuned…

—Jason Gross