Jay Z signs with Live Nation

The record industries might be losing money like a chronic gambler on a bad run in Vegas but the music industry ‘crisis’ hasn’t done Shawn Carter any harm. He’s just signed with Live Nation, concert promotion giant.

The overall package for Jay-Z also includes an upfront payment of $25 million, a general advance of $25 million that includes fees for his current tour, and advance payment of $10 million an album for a minimum of three albums during the deal’s 10-year term… A series of other payments adding up to about $20 million is included in exchange for certain publishing, licensing and other rights. Jay-Z said Live Nation’s consolidated approach was in sync with the emerging potential “to reach the consumer in so many different ways right now.” He added: “Everyone’s trying to figure it out. I want to be on the front lines in that fight.”

from New York TImes

Madonna’s already in with these cashed up promoter types and it definitely shows where the money is in the digital age - with the ’spectacle’.

Live performance is a unique experience and people are willing to throw large amounts of cash in the direction of concert promoters to get access to that experience. Concert promoters have what record labels don’t - the power to exclude.

What do you with CD’s?

EDIT: I wrote this post in a rush but realise now that this concept subconciously grew from two sources. So here’s kudos. One was a witty quip from a Cory Doctorow podcast and another was this post.

 

Recently I’ve started producing for a local community radio program and have fallen into the wonderful position of scoring free CD’s, which has been a life long dream of mine.

If I ever had a career counsellor who bothered to ask me what I wanted to do when got older, my fifteen year old self would have said ‘Work somewhere where I get stacks of CD’S for free!’. Who doesn’t like free music? Especially when at that time it cost me more than my weekly income to supplement my music collection with the latest offering from Unwritten Law or Blink 18..*cough* I mean early Miles Davis and Slint.

But what’s the big deal? I mean music is free these days anyway. You can download it or buy it at a ridiculous mark down price from itunes (even if you are horribly restricted with what you can do with your music after purchase). 

Well because this has lead to a weird situation. It means I’ve been taking actual, no joke CD’s home with me regularly (something I hadn’t been doing prior to this production job) and at the moment it’s a bit wtf?!? 

Now I listen digital. Even though my CD buying hasn’t stopped completely, all I do is upload the music and ditch the liner notes, artwork and casing. And they drop out of my radar completely. 

I used to take so much pleasure in re-organising cd’s by genre, title or artist in a Cusack-ian sort of manner only a few years ago and now they’re basically rubbish, to the point that I’ve sold or thrown out any CD’s which I don’t have a long standing attachment to.   

I remember being shattered if instead of liner notes there were weird photos taken by the ‘arty’ lead singer, or if song titles were written on the CD so that the only way you could work out what song you were listening to was to take out the CD, look at the CD then put it back in. 

I also remember awesome cover designs like Sonic Youth’s Goo and Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. CD’s which had designs which were so evocative they almost became part of the music.  

Yet even though I feel like I’m casting down a billion awesome album covers to a fiery death, I think good music should be like penguin classics. Even if the album’s got a crappy cover (or in the case of digital music - no cover), the music and even the imagery of the music will shine through. Hearing Goo and Aeroplane, I knew what the covers would look like before I even saw them. That’s how good the music was. I didn’t need the physical embodiment of the music, I already had the imagery in my head. The covers just re-enforced that imagery.  

I’ve come to this belief more through practice than belief. But is it wrong? What should I be doing with CD’s

my studies summed up by a blog

i lol-ed for about ten minutes after reading this post.