Pomplamoose, "The Future of Music", Interview at Hypebot

This is the best interview I've read all year.

Jacke Conte of Pomplamoose, a band heralded as "The Future of Music" breaks down their entire business model with Hypebot.

I'm not going to give you all the highlights, this is too good an article to ignore.

Jack Conte: Yeah. The thing that I think you should learn from Pomplamoose is not about YouTube. It's not about social media. It's not about music. It's about iterations. It's about trying a million things until something works. That's all we did. We tried a million things and something finally worked, and we were sick and tired. I literally went on three tours where I played – I mean, there were shows where I played where the bartender left. There was literally nobody in the room that I was playing for, and I was not a successful thing. It was a total flop, failure, but we just kept trying and trying and trying, a million different things, and that's what I hope everybody takes away is.

...In fact Derek Sivers, who started the company CD Baby, wrote a book and he put little episodes of the book on YouTube, and one of the episodes is called "If It's Not a Hit, Switch, " and basically his idea is try something. Is it a hit? Are people flocking to it? Are people running to your idea? Do you have value? Are you adding value to the world? Do people really want it? No? Switch, something else. Iterate. Iterate. Iterate a thousand times until you have a hit, and then you've got something. So I love that idea – if it's not a hit, switch.

Jacke brings up one of my recent talking points:

We are not one of those bands that believes that you need to post on your Facebook page every day to engage your fans. I've gone to a lot of these social media conventions and I always just kind of throw up a little bit in my mouth when people are like, "You have to post on Facebook every day, and if you don't post on Facebook every day, then there's no point in posting on Facebook at all." And that's just a giant load of steaming bullshit because when we post on Facebook after not posting on Facebook for two weeks or three weeks, and we post a picture, it's awesome. People are into it. They're excited because we have a new, cool picture, and if we were posting every single day, we'd just dilute the effectiveness of our posts. I think at some point people are going to get really sick of all of the crap in their Facebook feed.

People want to be updated when you have new content. That's really what we've found is people want to know about something when there's something to freakin' know about. If there's not something to know about, don't force it, you know? People want new content. They want to hear a new song. They want to see an awesome picture of you guys backstage, you know, stuff, things that add joy to your life.

Another great point:

You have to think that you're not a genius. You have to think that, "Well, I just worked really hard and I kept working on this song until it sounded good, and I spent hours and hours and hours tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until I really liked it." If you think you're a genius, then you're just going to fucking barf onto a piece of paper and call it art and put it out on the Internet, and then it won't be very good any more.

Go read the rest.

Is the Album Really Dead?

I'm conflicted.

I love albums. That's how we've all grown up listening to and understanding music. It's a milestone upon which a band builds its mythology and expresses a grand vision. Albums allow for extended storytelling that couldn't fit in a single song. (Could you imagine The Wall being released as a series of singles?)

However, after I've given most albums a listen, I move the tracks I like to a genre/emotion-based playlist and move on to the next band. Very few albums get a complete repeat listen from me.

This is not uncommon.

The landscape of the music industry has irrevocably changed, and there are compelling arguments in favor of releasing singles instead of albums.

1. The number one listening platform for music among teens is YouTube.

More than radio, iTunes and CDs, YouTube is where the next generation of music obsessives (teens) get their music. It's free, streaming, and instant access to any song you could ever care to listen. With the prevalence of smart phones and 4G wireless, this a better service than CDs or MP3s for these listeners.

As Lefsetz puts it:

You want to know how they listen?

They pull up your track on YouTube. Whether in an authorized version on Vevo or a bootlegged take posted straight to YouTube. And they instantly decide whether they like it or not. And if they don’t, they forget about you. Just that fast. It’s like they’re carrying your album straight to the dumper. As if you walked into McDonald’s, sniffed and left and they threw all the food out and closed the doors. As for listening to all twelve of your tracks, are you nuts! Don’t tell me people have a short attention span, hell, they’re marathoning “Breaking Bad” as I write this. They just don’t have time for what is not exceptionally great, and if you can tell me ten albums from the last two years that are good from beginning to end, I’m all ears.

Listening has changed. It used to be entertainment options were limited. You bought little and played that which you owned. And it’s not only music, newspapers are competing with blogs, TV is competing with YouTube, everything’s changing, are you?

You’ve got to step up your game. You’ve got to focus on excellence.

The album isn't center stage on YouTube.There's no need to buy an album full of mediocre filler tracks anymore. Two clicks and you're listening to the song you want, for free. 

2. We're moving towards an access-based music model where owning albums is irrelevant.

Ownership isn't always best, and the music consumer is beginning to realize this.

Think about all the CDs & MP3s you have that sit around collecting dust. Other than earning "cool points" for having stacks of music lying around (guilty), is there any additional value to having piles of stuff? If it's about having access to your music, streaming beats owning. Streaming gives you an infinite collection that you can access instantly, without having to search through poorly labeled MP3s or polish scratched CDs. Streaming gives you all the access of ownership without any of the hassle.

We systematically over-value ownership for countless other knicknacks, too. The US spends $22.45 BILLION on storage space to keep all of our stuff that won't fit in our house. Everyone I know has a "crap room" that happily houses mountains of junk that "had" to be owned. How often do you dig around in your storage space / attic / crap room? Wouldn't it make more sense to skip the price tag of ownership and only pay when you actually need a Gene Simmons costume?

This is the direction businesses are heading.
 
Entertainment services like Spotify, Steam, and Netflix aren't alone in moving toward access-based services The software industry long since figured out the real value in Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) as a business model. Even items that traditionally were owned are moving to access-based services. Startups like car-sharing service Zipcar allow people all the benefits of having a car to get around without any of the annoying maintenance or registration.

Derek Thomson and Eric Weissmann at The Atlantic elaborate on the Millenial generation turning down ownership:

The typical new car costs $30,000 and sits in a garage or parking spot for 23 hours a day. Zipcar gives drivers access to cars they don’t have to own. Car ownership, meanwhile, has slipped down the hierarchy of status goods for many young adults. “Zipcar conducted a survey of Millennials,” Mark Norman, the company’s president and chief operating officer, told us. “And this generation said, ‘We don’t care about owning a car.’ Cars used to be what people aspired to own. Now it’s the smartphone.”

Expect access-based services to continue growing. Just don't expect people to understand how they work.

3. In an access-based marketplace, profit comes from utilization (listens) instead of album sales.

A Hypebot interview with D.A. Wallach explains how Spotify sets up it's payments:

We feel the metric of success should be based on how many people are listening to your music over a period of years, as opposed to looking at how many units are shipping in one week. People are used to seeing big numbers from a unit-based model, but that’s really front loading what is happening. Comparing iTunes sales with Spotify payments over a two month period of time is not a great way to look at things.

What we are trying to create is a system in which you earn royalties forever for good music, and the time horizon is simply different than what folks are familiar with now. One can actually think about a download sale as a down payment on all future listening that a fan will do. If you took the effective per play rate that I’ve paid for every time I’ve listened to my Dark Side of The Moon CD, it would be trivial compared to what I’d have generated if I’d done all that listening on Spotify. 

This is fascinating.

This new pay structure rewards musicians who create music with longevity over those who create one-off sales. Even if the band hasn't released new music in years, dedicated fans keep royalties flowing to the artists simply by continuing to listen. This is great news for bands making classic albums, not so much for bands relying on hype to make a splash with first week album sales.

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While I don't forsee the complete demise of the album format, I suspect that they may become a niche release strategy (like prog rock concept albums) as opposed to the dominant music paradigm.

Time will tell if this is good or bad.

(For more about new music strategies, see my previous post Electronic and Hip Hop Better Suited to the New Music Industry)

When Should You Quit Your Job? (1 of 2)

Musicians I talk to seem to view being a full-time musician as the be-all, end-all metric of success.

I get that. Playing music all day is a big slab of groovy in my book.

But we're defining success in the wrong way.

Defining success as having music as your only job is dangerous. Going full-time as an artist before you're financially ready will wreck both your art and your sanity. What you've effectively done is given up a low-paying stressful job with a low-paying stressful job without benefits or stability. Music is not an easy living. Unless your creativity is fired solely through desperation  making yourself miserable because you didn't plan ahead is silly. Ask anyone who has let The Hunger consume them.

Real success is about being happy with your only job being music.

Before you decide to make the leap, consider a few things.

1) Stability allows you to be more experimental with your music.
Experimenting with new sounds and styles in inherently risky. Failure is a very real prospect. Once the band establishes a "sound" and becomes full time musicians, everyone's ability to pay the bills relies on that sound. Would it be easier or more difficult to completely revamp your sound if your rent depending on success? (This is strictly conjecture, but I suspect this may be one reason why some bands peak on their first album.)

2) Growth eats cash
This is a cardinal rule of business. Even if going on tour will score you a tasty lump of cash, you have to pay expenses like van rentals, merch, promoters, and venues before you're able to earn that cash. You've got to eat and pay for places to sleep while on tour. Will you burn all your cash before you can earn it? Yes, you can use credit cards to delay paying for a month, but mistake with credit cards are expensive and eat into your profits.

3) Burnout
Working at a restaurant can kill the joy of its food with boredom. The same could be said of playing your top 3 hits for years on end. For some, music is an escape from boring reality. Changing music from an escape to an obligation can have a profound effect on how you view your music. The life of a full time musician is about hustle. If you're not naturally inclined to that lifestyle in addition to the process of creating and performing music, it'll be easy to get burned out.

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Before making a big decision like this, you need to do serious soul searching into what you actually want out of your music.
   -Do you like writing and recording but hate performing?
   -Do you value stability over creativity?
   -How much am I wiling to cater to my fans?
   -Will I only be happy with a sold out stadium, or would I be happy having a few dedicated fans buying music through bandcamp?
   -Would I actually enjoy the musician lifestyle?

There are big questions.

Next week we'll talk about how to prepare.

(Part 2)

Evil Works

As does good, but it's easy to overlook that fact.

True Change requires force. Structures and habits roost upon study foundations of inertia and fear. They won't be moved except through sustained, herculean force.

Often, the only tactics that comes to mind to clear blockage are conflict-driven. You can't smooth talk a form, so getting angry at red tape at the DMV seems like the most obvious solution.

But there's a selection bias at work here.

We view our world through the lens of stories. Naturally, more memorable stories affect us more than the boring ones simply because we can recall them easier (aka cognitive fluency). .

Conflict is far more interesting than snuggling.

In fact, a 2010 Wharton study confirms that

“the most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes” [emphasis mine]. I will say it again: The most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger. ...

...Anger has such a profound effect that one standard deviation increase in the anger rating of an article is the equivalent of spending an additional three hours as the lead story on the front page of NYTimes.com.  (Except from Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, via Barking Up The Wrong Tree

It's easier to recall famous artist meltdowns than it is to recall skillful mediation, leading us to more easily make the connection between "aggression" and "success".

Throwing a guitar at your band mates in the recording studio makes for a fantastic story, it's "emotionally loud". Sitting down with your bassist over drinks to talk about what's been bugging her lately and where her creative block came from makes for dreadfully boring reading, it's "emotionally quiet".

You can accomplish great things by being a jerk. I'll be first to admit, that sometimes you have to get aggressive to break past resistance.

But pay attention to the leaders you admire and you'll begin to pick up on their methods. Sometimes all you need to get someone to put forth their best effort is to get them to publicly commit that they'll put forward their best effort. (see my Negotiation Without Being A Jerk series for additional tactics)

Real, positive leadership power isn't about using deception and coercion to meet your ends. "Light Side" persuasive methods use soft force, so that even if the target of the message understands exactly what you're doing, they wouldn't be mad at you. The same could not be said for gaslighting, an effective but terribly manipulative method of planting false memories and instilling doubt.

As you dig deeper into management and psychology, you'll begin to see the framework that managers act within. Most are of mixed style, only rarely will you see a pure-evil or pure-good individual.

Be aware that people are naturally attracted to others like themselves.

The strategies you use will create your environment.

Will "The Hunger" Consume You?

I've yet to meet an artist who was immune to The Hunger. It strikes artists young and old, established and amatuer.

This is about The Hunger for success and recognition we feel when we're at the end of our ropes.

It will consume you if you don't manage it.

The Hunger manifests itself in different ways among different artists. Some turn the urge inward, others lash outward. I've seen it through:

-Burnout
Watching a talented artist give into despairation and repress their innate artistic nature is a sad march. Some give up art altogether, others

-Bitterness
Some artists will go out of their way to denigrate others and put down new musicians. Everyone began out crappy and it's only through sustained effort that we become good. But bitter artists can serve up steaming bowls of negativity chili nonstop until new artists are full of negativity themselves.

-Drugs
We all know someone who deals with chemicals instead of their stress. What a waste.

-Starting a Predatory Business
This one I find especially irritating. Washed out musicians starting "pay to play" promotional companies or bogus "managers" who skim small bands without doing any work are all too common. They tend to like the phrase "exposure". Yes, it is clearly a sustainable business model to take advantage of inexperienced artists since that is one market that will never disappear. But that doesn't make taking advantage of others right.

The Hunger is a scary beast to confront.

Thankfully, there are ways to help:

-Side Projects
   Creativity comes from assembling disparate sources of inspiration. Take a break from anything that remotely resembles your current project to work on an entirely new skill set. If you're a singer songwriter, start working on a standup comedy routine. If you're a painter, start learning how to breakdance. Everything is connected to the creative mind. Sometimes all you need is the right spark to jump start your main project.

-Structured Hiatus
   You're pushing too hard to allow your mind to wander and make the connections needed to make great music. Choose an exact period of time, say a month, where you don't even so much as look at your instrument. Having to wait for your deadline to get back to your instrument will make you value it more.
If you're as addicted to music as I suspect, you'll soon begin longing to play again and with that renewed passion comes ideas.

-Change Teams
   Some people are toxic to the creative process.

Is someone saying "no" to every new idea? Too much negativity and stonewalling could be choking creativity.

Saying "yes" to everything is just as fatal. Hearing "no" shows us what people value and without this feedback, we can't refine our art. Sometime we need negativity.

You can't run without balance.
Sometimes it sucks kicking someone off the team, but being stuck unproductive and unhappy is even worse.

-Change Strategies
  If you're not getting the results you want, it's counter productive to keep doing the same thing.

-Stop Working For Free / Cheap
   If you've got lots of work but are still struggling, maybe you'er not charging enough. Of course you'll have less customers, but you'll also have more money and time to focus on doing more fulfilling work. The one fatal pricing error is pricing yourself too low to keep making art.

-Day Job
   As romantic as becoming a full time artist right away is, being able to pay rent will severly impact your art whether you like it or not. Having at least one steady source of income gives you much more freedom to explore your art without having to worry about profitability before creativity.

I'll be posting more on this topic soon.

-Find a Positive Mentor / Peer Group
   We become those around us.

If you're surrounded by naysayers, sloths, or haters you're probably one as well.

Scour craigslist, forums, blogs, and friends for meetup groups for artists like you. If there isn't one, start one. Plan on once-a-month coffee / bar meetups, promote a little to attract initial attendees, and trim out negative individuals from the group. Having positive support from peers will keep the negative energy from metastasizing into The Hunger.

This is only a start for such a huge topic.

What are some ways you've seen The Hunger manifest itself, either in yourself or others?

The Science of Inspiration

Jonah Lehrer, science-writer extraordinaire, walks us through recent research shedding light on how we can become more creative people.

He begins by breaking creative "revelations" into two different categories; inspiration from relaxation and inspiration from perspiration.

Some ideas will only come when you're not focused on the problem. Researchers found that watching stand up comedy clips or having a beer before trying to solve creative association tasks increased performance by 20-30% over the control group.

What explains the creative benefits of relaxation and booze? The answer involves the surprising advantage of not paying attention. Although we live in an age that worships focus—we are always forcing ourselves to concentrate, chugging caffeine—this approach can inhibit the imagination. We might be focused, but we're probably focused on the wrong answer.

And this is why relaxation helps: It isn't until we're soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up comic that we're able to turn the spotlight of attention inward, eavesdropping on all those random associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain's right hemisphere. When we need an insight, those associations are often the source of the answer.

This research also explains why so many major breakthroughs happen in the unlikeliest of places, whether it's Archimedes in the bathtub or the physicist Richard Feynman scribbling equations in a strip club, as he was known to do. It reveals the wisdom of Google putting ping-pong tables in the lobby and confirms the practical benefits of daydreaming. As Einstein once declared, "Creativity is the residue of time wasted."

The other type of creative task involves a long, steady grind on the problem. We know this as the "two measures that took fifteen hours to write." They're nasty beasts, yes, but ones worth fighting.

But wait, aren't those two methods completely opposite one another? How do we know which way we should try to solve our problem?

The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we need. Researchers call these intuitions "feelings of knowing," and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to problems that don't require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved—knowing whether we're getting "warmer" or not, without knowing the solution.

This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When we don't feel that we're getting closer to the answer—we've hit the wall, so to speak—we probably need an insight. If there is no feeling of knowing, the most productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we're getting close, we need to keep on struggling.

And there's even more insight within the article as Jonah walks us through important factors for kick starting our creativity.

One of the keys to being more creative is immersing yourself in new and diverse experiences.

Steve Jobs famously declared that "creativity is just connecting things." Although we think of inventors as dreaming up breakthroughs out of thin air, Mr. Jobs was pointing out that even the most far-fetched concepts are usually just new combinations of stuff that already exists. Under Mr. Jobs' leadership, for instance, Apple didn't invent MP3 players or tablet computers—the company just made them better, adding design features that were new to the product category. 

And it isn't just Apple. The history of innovation bears out Mr. Jobs's theory. The Wright Brothers transferred their background as bicycle manufacturers to the invention of the airplane; their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings. Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of wine presses into a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. Or look at Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with their famous search algorithm by applying the ranking method used for academic articles (more citations equals more influence) to the sprawl of the Internet.

By seeking out new experiences, our status as an outsider may even allow us to solve someone else's unsolvable problem.

At 3M, engineers are typically rotated to a new division every few years. Sometimes, these rotations bring big payoffs, such as when 3M realized that the problem of laptop battery life was really a problem of energy used up too quickly for illuminating the screen. 3M researchers applied their knowledge of see-through adhesives to create an optical film that focuses light outward, producing a screen that was 40% more efficient.

Such solutions are known as "mental restructurings," since the problem is only solved after someone asks a completely new kind of question. What's interesting is that expertise can inhibit such restructurings, making it harder to find the breakthrough. That's why it's important not just to bring new ideas back to your own field, but to actually try to solve problems in other fields—where your status as an outsider, and ability to ask naive questions, can be a tremendous advantage.

Finally, we can embrace the Buddhist concept of the beginner's mind to discover new islands of thought. The beginner's mind is a way of approaching a problem not as a seasoned expert but as a fresh apprentice, eager to learn and willing to ask "stupid" questions that challenge assumptions. When composer Bruce Adolphe wrote his first cello piece, the piece was deemed unplayable because of an "impossible" chord written into the piece. But famous cellist Yo Yo Ma sight read the piece and nailed it.

Mr. Adolphe told Mr. Ma what the professor had said and asked how he had managed to play the impossible chord. They went through the piece again, and when Mr. Ma came to the impossible chord, Mr. Adolphe yelled "Stop!" They looked at Mr. Ma's left hand—it was contorted on the fingerboard, in a position that was nearly impossible to hold. "You're right," said Mr. Ma, "you really can't play that!" Yet, somehow, he did. 

Other recent research describes how to jump into the beginner's mind using a method called the Generic Parts Technique.

Here's how GPT works: "For each object in your problem, you break it into parts and ask two questions," explains McCaffrey, who is now a post-doctoral fellow in UMass's engineering department.

"1. Can it be broken down further? and 2. -- this is the one that's been overlooked -- Does my description of the part imply a use?" So you're given two steel rings and told to make a figure-8 out of them. Your tools? A candle and a match. Melted wax is sticky, but the wax isn't strong enough to hold the rings together. What about the other part of the candle? The wick. The word implies a use: Wicks are set afire to give light. "That tends to hinder people's ability to think of alternative uses for this part," says McCaffrey. Think of the wick more generically as a piece of string and the string as strands of cotton and you're liberated. Now you can remove the wick and tie the two rings together. Or, if you like, shred the string and make a wig for your hamster.

Awesome.

It's truely wonderful to be alive in a time when we're beginning to unravel the mysteries of creativity so that we can become more creative, enlightened versions of ourselves.

Should I Always Listen to My Fans?

The second you stop becoming a passive listener and create something, it's on. Everyone has an opinion and would love to be your CEO for a day.

This is good.

Feedback and constructive criticism help develop your art and your business. Listening to your fans is a good habit to get in; they do pay your bills after all.

However, sometimes they're very wrong.

Steve Blank's piece in The Atlantic describes A Great Way to Kill Your Startup: Listen to All Your Customers. It's a conversation between Steve and an ex-student Satish. Satish spent loads of time doing customer research and is now facing a stagnant business where no customers are converting from his free version to his paid version. After Satish finishes explaining his predicament, Steve finally reveals the wisdom he hinted at with the title of the post:

Part of Customer Development is understanding which customers make sense for your business. The goal of listening to customers is not please every one of them.  It's to figure out which customer segment served his needs - both short and long term.

If airlines did exactly what I wanted I'd be flying around for free in a jacuzzi-only section of the plane. As awesome as this would be, I suspect this may not be in American Airlines' best interests, especially with that whole bankruptcy thing going on. Fans will tell you what makes them happy, which is very important, but be aware that they're not thinking about your underlying business model.

Be open minded, but do the work in evaluating the idea before you run amok.

Brainstorming Doesn't Work

Johan Lehrer's article in the New Yorker lays it out bluntly.

...Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”

This provides some interesting insight into the dynamics of group creativity. This further develops my earlier thesis describing changing social dynamics as the primary cause of "lame supergroup-itis".

But there's more nuance to this story than outright dismissal of brainstorming. One of the defining factors of brainstorming, according to it's creator, is not allowing negativity as it supposedly stifles creativity. This is wrong.

According to Nemeth, dissent stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with the work of others and to reassess our viewpoints. “There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings,” she says. “Well, that’s just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.”

Sometimes blind positivity isn't the best answer.

As the article continues, researcher Brian Uzzi studied Broadway musicals to develop a measure Q of how familiar different artists were with one another. The higher the Q, the more familiar the artists are with one another and vice versa. After running the data to analyze Q scores with relation to the success of these musicals, the results were stunning.

When the Q was low—less than 1.7 on Uzzi’s five-point scale—the musicals were likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. “This wasn’t so surprising,” Uzzi says. “It takes time to develop a successful collaboration.” But, when the Q was too high (above 3.2), the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation.

...The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy. The ideal level of Q—which Uzzi and his colleague Jarrett Spiro called the “bliss point”—emerged as being between 2.4 and 2.6. A show produced by a team whose Q was within this range was three times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced by a team with a score below 1.4 or above 3.2.

If these results were to hold true across the creative spectrum, they could explain countless musical phenomena.

• Could this be why so many "legendary" acts tend to flame out after producing their masterpiece instead of producing two masterpieces many years apart?
• Is this at fault for the sophomore slump?
• Is there an optimal creative lifetime for a band?  I suspect yes.

Profound food for thought.

Is it time to reevaluate some of your band's procedures?

How Can Classical Music Make A Comeback?

Classical music is in crisis.

With the hit of the recession, donations to orchestras and symphonies took a nose dive.

The Philedelphia Orchestra declared bankcrupty. The Honolulu Symphony, Syracuse Symphony, and Louisville Orchestra folded. The Dallas Symphony, The San Francisco Opera, and The Colorado Symphony are all having massivie financial problems.

But it's not like people aren't going to concerts anymore. Worldwide, as of 2010 the value of the music industry was $168 billion dollars, up $32 billion from 2005. I consistently blow a hole in my monthly budget with concert tickets and I have no intention of changing this. If you're a music junkie I'm guessing you can say the same as well.

The real issue isn't the lack of financing for orchestras, it's the disconnect between concert-goers and the symphony business.

When is the last time you went to a classical concert?

When are you planning to go next?

Personally, I adore string quartets. I'm such a sucker for cellos that I almost always immediately like a band with one. But I don't have any desire to hear anything from the Dallas Symphony. The "Symphony Experience" of being a fanicly dressed statue has no appeal to me. It's a crappy school field trip that costs up to six times the price of a normal concert ticket. As callous as it may be to say this, should the organization fold I'd feel only a slight "meh".

It's surprising how artists, who live off of their creativity, can be too stubborn to change their presentation when it's clear the market isn't interested in their current offerings.

In times of crisis, it's the artists who unleash their creativity on their business who prosper.

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment realized the conventions of classical concerts weren't attractive to their fans, so they went on a pub crawl.

Maggie Faultless, joint leader of the orchestra, elaborates on their Night Shift concert series:

...I'd like to think that some people will feel that we have broken down some conventions and after this they might like to try other performances of classical music, but this isn't about enticing people into the concert-hall to hear an 80-piece OAE in concert, this is about empowerment. Audiences want to have a bit more ownership of what they're listening to. The best performances involve a three-way relationship - the music (ie what's on the page) the audience and the performers. The performers react not only to the written notes but to each other and most importantly, to the audience. But all too often in today's concerts, the third part of that equation is forgotten. Often when we're performing you can't even see beyond the first couple of rows, let alone to the back of a thousand-seat hall.

This idea is utterly fantastic. If the Dallas Symphony were to pull off something like this I'd be all over it.

Other ideas that have sprung up from clever musicians are lie-down concerts of Bach (bring a bean bag!), drive-by Handel, and my favorite, baby-sitting for concert attendees. These are more than just "stunts" to be discarded, they're a targeted response to customers' needs.

Creativity isn't just for your art, it's for your business as well.

Are you making it easier or harder for your customers to throw dollars at you?

Why Being Polite is Overrated

Negativity as a tactic is severely underrated.

We're taught to say something nice or not say something at all. After all, art is subjective so even if we don't like something, we don't have the right to critique, right?

But what do we do when the execution of the song is obviously flawed?

Sometimes, however, the best thing you give someone is a piping-hot plate of uncomfortable truth.

Steve Jobs was notorious for his outbursts of anger, but there's not a person in the world who wasn't affected by the inventions he shepherded into the market. He busted heads because he had to bust heads in order to release high quality products.

To make a masterpiece you must be willing to disagree.

Sometimes forcefully.

In fact, arguing and sarcasm make you more creative by forcing you to view concepts in a different light. Negativity improves group performance on idea-generation tasks. Competitive tasks improved creative output, (like Eric Clapton competing for the love of Layla). Moderate rule breaking is positively correlated with number of leadership roles. Anger at people who slacked off can make them up their effort (assuming they cared in the first place). Being angry also makes you process information more analytically. 

Being negative will also help you be more persuasive.

Negative reviewers were perceived as more intelligent, competent, and expert than positive reviewers, even when the content of the positive review was independently judged as being of higher quality and greater forcefulness.

However, don't storm into your next band practice, punch a hole in the wall, and go full-on Ghaddafi expecting magic to happen. A willingness to be negative when needed is different than oppressive pessimism. As anyone who has worked in a dictatorship of a job knows, pervasive criticism without positivity leads to learned helplessness. This is about the necessary balance between being emotionally sensitive to the needs of your band mates and being assertive enough to push through hard decisions to get serious work done.

Negativity is a tactic, to be used in some situations where strong analysis or action is needed. Breaking deadlocked negotiations, evaluating new opportunities, critiquing new songs: all of these are times where a little negativity might be needed to push through resistance. Trying to write new songs, improvising, networking or marketing: these activities would be much better served by positivity.

The next time you're stuck, step back and ask:

Should I be using a soft or firm touch to solve this problem?

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*Shout out to Eric Barker at Barking Up The Wrong Tree, almost every link referenced was from research he found.

Do We Really Need 10,000 Hours to Achieve Mastery?

(Warning, long post)

By now you've probably heard about the 10,000 hours theory popularized by Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers. According to Anders Ericsson's work on expertise, to attain mastery in something (such as playing bass) you'd need the equivalent of 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. (Three hours a day for ten years) This message, like many disseminated by Gladwell, has reached audiences far and wide. The Freakonomics team of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt even uses this theory to propose an explanation for why so many all-star soccer players are born in the first few months of the year (age cutoffs).

But Ross Tucker and Johnathan Dugas of Sports Scientists took at a different look at Ericsson's data in the context of athletic performance.

"Let me start out by saying that culture, training, diet, opportunity are all crucial to producing sporting champions or elite performances.  But the problem with the debate as it stands is the relative dismissal of physiological factors like genes, and also the extremely oversimplified view that "it's all about the training", or that science suggests genes don't matter.  My purpose with these posts is thus not to dismiss the role of training, culture or belief, but rather to balance out the argument with the facts.

And in so doing, to give an indication of just how complex it really is - the only certainty is that whoever says that success is due to one or two things is wrong."

Tucker and Dugas point out a huge omission in Anders Ericsson's work; the 10,000 hours theory talks only about averages without regard of variance. Even though the average practice time needed is 10,000 hours, it's possible to get that average by having one person practice 17,000 hours and another practice only 3,000 hours. That's a few practice years worth of difference.

Concerning a study of high-performing darts players by Duffy and Ericsson, Tucker and Dugas note that practice alone doesn't tell the whole story:

What is most interesting about this is that 10 years of practice explained 25% of variability, while 15 years explains 28%.  So clearly, the more you practice, the more you can explain performance.  That's not surprising, but the question is this:  How many hours of practice would it take to explain "most" of performance as a result of practice?  Look at the quote in the figure above, where Ericsson writes that "the development of expert performance will be primarily constrained by individuals' engagement in deliberate practice" (Ericsson, 2009).  Well, 28% is not "primarily constrained" and even though more practice explains more of performance, there is clearly a lot missing from this practice argument.

Tucker and Dugas propose a different theory that is equally valid using Ericsson's data:

Ericsson concludes that these children just accumulate more training time and that this explains performance.  The difference between the "best experts" and the "least accomplished players" is the training time.

But what if it is exactly the other way around?  Let's take two children at nine years old.  Do they have the same ability to play on first exposure?  Ericsson's model says yes, and that the difference comes later, when one child practices more, gets better teaching.  But what if the difference is present from the very first note, the first exposure to the activity?  The parents of a child who shows some ability encourage further practice, they invest in teaching and training, and this child, by virtue of the fact that he/she has more ability to begin with, accumulates more practice.  

But the child who has little innate ability makes the violin sound like the death march of stray cats, and their parents do not encourage more play.  In fact, they discourage it - the "go play outside" syndrome takes over, and the child is never exposed to teaching or practice.  His trajectory is set precisely because he has less innate ability.

Same data with a wildly different conclusion. For anyone who has taught before, it's very obvious that some students have more innate talent and drive than others.

Clearly, practice will always be important to success. You can't pick up a Squier at a garage sale and become Frank Zappa over the weekend. That'd be crazy (awesome). But denying that people have differing levels of innate talent is as silly as denying that tall people exist.

In fact, I even saw a tall person last week!

Everything Is Connected (Continued)

Touching off of last week's post, I'd like to share with you how getting personal training helped improve my musical skills.

I've been into lifting weights for a couple years now as a way to blow off steam and keep myself healthy. After hitting a frustrating plateau in my weight lifting for a couple months, I decided to get over being stubborn and ask for help from a personal trainer.

I've had more progress in these last six months than in the last four years. Wow.

Lessons I've learned:

   -There's a limit to how long you can have an effective workout. Anything over an hour and you're getting diminishing returns. 30 minutes of optimal practice a day is more effective than two hours once or twice a week. Not only will you be more focused, but you'll retain more of your practice over the long term.

   -Change your workout every 6 weeks. Your body adapts to how you train it. When you hit a plateau, it's time to change your patterns. P90x calls this concept muscle confusion, but that's primarily a marketing term for what trainers have known for decades. Plus, constant change keeps you from getting bored and not focusing intently on your practice.

Even better, midway through a workout, an idea pranced through my head. What if I were to take what I've learned from my trainer and applied it to my practice?

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My Current Bass Guitar "Workout"

Grinding on scales can get boring, so this practice regimen aims to sandwhich in the boring drills with fun improv stuff. Practice sessions are to last ONLY 30 minutes. If I'm "in the zone", I go on to the next day's routine because Practice is more effective if you vary between different tasks, such as between dexterity and improvisational exercises.

   -A Day, Speed Scales: One scale, two octaves starting at bottom, 3 different fingerings, fast. Then do it in 3rds, arpeggios (135 and 1357), picked and fingered.

   -B Day, Ear Training: I'll pick a song solo I like, preferably not a bass solo so I'll expand my style, and try to learn it by ear. Miles Davis has brought my solo game up a few notches already.

   -C Day, Slooooooo Scales: Same scale as A day, two octaves starting at top, all conceviable fingerings, played painfully slow, arpeggios (135 and 1357), played as eighth notes, triplets, doubles, and triples both picked and fingered.

   -D Day, Brain to Instrument Improv: This exercise is to help improve the connection between what I think and what I can play, which has been something I've been wanting to fix for some time now. First, I listen to a 30 second segment of a song I want to work with. Then, I'll sing an improvised bassline into my computer's sound recorder. After that, I'll try learning the part I sung on my bass.
Two important things I've learned:
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Everything is connected.


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Everything is Connected

It's disheartening when you plateau in your playing skills. Guitar in hand, skillfully dodging doing scales by watching youtube videos of amazing musicians, which only makes it harder to practice.

Once you're stuck, it's hard to see a way to get get unstuck.

But the secret to getting unstuck is reminding yourself the true nature of creativity: Creativity is about mashing up disparate ideas in totally new and strange ways to develop something amazing.

Translation: The best way to get over writer's block is do something totally unrelated to what you're stuck on. The answer will come to you from the unexpected connection your mind makes between disparate activities. Everything is connected.

Need to improve your stage presence? Learn to dance salsa. Dancing is all about body language, confidence and rhythm. These may or may not be relevant skills for a musician.

Need to write more clever lyrics? Take an improv comedy class. Improv comedy is about quick thinking, using tropes effectively, and creating strong emotions within the audience.

Need a new way to improve your playing? Talk to a personal trainer. They deal with motivation, self-improvement, and overcoming plateaus all the time.

Everything is connected. There's a reason geniuses have so many interests. They feed one another.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

How much control are you willing to trade for cash?

There's a tradeoff that must be made, and your choice will determine the ultimate strategy your band uses to achieve it's goals.

How much control are you willing to trade for cash?

Money isn't free.

If a label gives you $20,000 to record an album, you're not going to be able to change your genre midway through the recording sessions. No replacing the drums with a sitar, either. Likewise, if an angel investor funds your startup with $500,000, you can bet your life that she'll want to have a big say in how your business is run. That's how the whole shareholder thing works. Cash is exchanged for control.

The addition of cash to any transaction carries with it an expectation. Failure to meet that expectation is a breach of trust at best, and a catastrophic breach of contract at worst. Either way, it's not good.

So you must find a balance. How much control are you willing to trade for cash? Are you willing to give up publishing rights and royalties for a fully-funded album? Would you change the way you dressed on stage if it meant your next merch order was free? Would you adjust the style of singing your songs for a shot at a bigger show?

There's no right answer for everyone, this decision is personal. Your music might be perfectly served with a 40-60 split for rights in exchange for an album and you not having to deal with the "business" of your music. Your music might also be too niche or personal to attract investment, so total control might be your only option.

In business terms, are you aiming for a buyout (Label) or not?

The choice you make defines what strategies your band should use. More on this next week...

Tear Down

We tore it all down. Everything.

Two years of blood, sweat and beers washed away. After painful deliberation, we decided to drop every song Onward We March wrote for our first EP, The Golden Vine. No more playing these songs live.

It hurt, mentally and financially,

But it had to be done.

The idea for our music was to have a concept running through all our albums (similar to Coheed & Cambria), since we're all about depth in our music. But this story was the child of our departing singer, and it felt wrong to try and raise it as our own. The lyrical style, too, was all his.

It hurt, but we realized we would have to give up all we've done so far to start fresh with our new singer.

Which is ok.

Like I mentioned in an earlier post about getting songs stolen, it's not an individual item that makes you important, it's your entire body of work. If you want long-term success in music, you have to have a legacy of great work.

Otherwise you're just a one-hit wonder.

There's Nothing New In "The Business"

"The Business" of promoting art isn't remotely new. Artists have always had to hustle to market their art. So it's silly to keep talking about the current music business as if it's a radically new web 2.0, crowdsourced, fan engagement monster.

The goal of engaging people has always been the same. Only the tools have changed.

Check out this New York Times book review for The Sinner's Grand Tour, a book about how famous writers have promoted themselves through the years.
"Crowdsourcing" isn't new:

"Perhaps the most astonishing P.R. stunt — one that must inspire awe among authors today — was plotted in Paris in 1927 by Georges Simenon, the Belgian-born author of the Inspector Maigret novels. For 100,000 francs, the wildly prolific Simenon agreed to write an entire novel while suspended in a glass cage outside the Moulin Rouge nightclub for 72 hours. Members of the public would be invited to choose the novel’s characters, subject matter and title, while Simenon hammered out the pages on a typewriter. A newspaper advertisement promised the result would be “a record novel: record speed, record endurance and, dare we add, record talent!” It was a marketing coup. As Pierre Assouline notes in “Simenon: A Biography,” journalists in Paris “talked of nothing else.”


As it happens, Simenon never went through with the glass-cage stunt, because the newspaper financing it went bankrupt. Still, he achieved huge publicity (and got to pocket 25,000 francs of the advance), and the idea took on a life of its own. It was simply too good a story for Parisians to drop. For decades, French journalists would describe the Moulin Rouge event in elaborate detail, as if they had actually attended it. (The British essayist Alain de Botton matched Simenon’s chutzpah, if not quite his glamour, a few years ago when he set up shop in Heathrow for a week and became the airport’s first “writer in residence.” But then he actually got a book out of it, along with prime placement in Heathrow’s bookshops.) "
Now that's some groovy promotion.

You don't need to be a "Social Media Guru" to understand that No one cares more about your music than you.

There's nothing new in "The Business".

Becoming "Content Providers"

I read this fantastic article by comedian Stewart Lee against the push to turn artists into "content providers".

As much as I enjoy reading all the various music-business blogs, one philosphy that frustrates me is the conviction of "new media" bloggers that an artist must always be available. "Fans won't tolerate a band who isn't always connected. You should always be tweeting, facebooking, and emailing about your music. Perfect your SEO daily. Release across every platform and have a presence on all social networking sites or risk missing fans.”

This is counterproductive. An artist should not serve anything but their art.

Art is the master.

Yes, the business side is vital. That's a given. But the spotlight should be on your music. Period.

Sometimes it's better to choose a medium for your art that forces the viewer to become engrossed in the art instead of being able to easily digest it through tweets and sound bites. Stewart Lee purposefully wrote the book How I Escaped My Certain Fate to require constant cross-referencing of pages so the reader is forced to interact and connect with the book. This doesn't translate to an e-book at all, and that's exactly what he wants. Pink Floyd’s album Animals can’t be turned into a 3 minute radio version, it’s designed to be an extended, introspective experience.

It’s all about the art. Compromising the vision is an insult.

Only by trying to please everyone will we please no one.

If you are sacrificing the integrity of your art for “new media”, STOP IT. Integrity is what we respect about you.

There's enough mediocre songs on the planet. We don't need a live-blogged, ustream video of a song that sucks; we need a album that will stand up for thirty years as a testament of greatness. Sometimes you must ignore the world to concentrate on your art.

Make amazing art.

THEN think about business.

Fun. Fun. Fun. Fun. Fun. And so on.

File this one under "Learning Experiences."

Recovering from losing our singer back in January, the band was understandably a little shaken up. Each of us responded to the stress in out own way.

My response was to keep pushing hard and working on anything possible to keep up our momentum. New songs, putting up flyers and messages trying to find someone new, managing the album release... anything to keep moving.

You could feel the negativity slinking thick through the air at practice. Progress on new material was frustrating and everything felt sloooooooooooooooooooooooow.

We decided to take a month off from the band.

I spent time talking to everyone to see what we could figure out was the cause. We wanted to get the energy back, but until we knew what was sapping it, we were stuck.

Finally, it came out.

It wasn't fun anymore.

My initial response to the stress of losing a singer was to push hard, and it was this push that drove the fun out everything. Practice was somber because we were "not making enough progress."

You can feel when a song is lifeless. Even though every note was spot on, there wasn't a heartbeat to a single measure.

With all the business advice and focusing on "getting things done", it's easy to get caught up in 'work mode'. But, above all else, music is about Love.

So I tabled my "to do" list, forgot all the grandoise plans, and we started jamming for the sake of jamming.

And all was right again.

You Just Gotta Fight Your Way Through

Courtesy of Reddit user malmc, a stylized wallpaper of this Ira Glass quote:

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase; they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through this years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting our or you are still in this phase, you gotta knknow that it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you finish one piece. It's only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And it took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's gonna take a while. It's normal to take awhile. You just gotta fight your way through." - Ira Glass

No Monitors

I saw a show a while back where the sound crew was way behind on setting up stage. No power anywhere until 10 minutes into the set, and then no monitors for the remainder of the set.

It was an acoustic act so it wasn't a devastating blow to the set, but the singer made a BIG deal about it. After every song, a half-hearted joke about not being able to hear herself. You could feel her unhappiness dripping through her pores.

It got me to thinking.

In the world of art, you'd better get used to having no "monitors". Getting regular, constructive criticism of your work is in no way guaranteed, even if you're in art schools. For large spans of time in your artistic career you may hear only haters, idiots, and sadists talk about your work. They can be suffocating, and it's easy to beciome a slave to the cult of negativity.

The measure of a true artist is whether they are able to persist past the onslaught of negativity and indifference to create their beautiful art.

No monitors.

Can you play without them?