The Madonna Live Nation deal was first reported in the WSJ ($) last week. The deal was described as “the latest seismic shift to rock the music industry.”

Two days later, the shift was seen as being seismically lacking, in the pages of that same newspaper:

While singer Madonna is still wrapping up negotiations for a $120 million, 10-year deal with concert-promotion company Live Nation Inc., Wall Street has reacted quicker than a ray of light to question the landmark accord — and make some cutting comments in the process.

“For $120 million, she’s all yours,” wrote analyst Michael Savner of Banc of America Securities.

The story has nothing to do with changes in the record business and everything to do with the fact that Madonna—like Paul McCartney, and like whatever other boomer idol is in the news next week cutting a deal with Starbucks—doesn’t sell any records.

Madonna deserves whatever money she can get for hauling her tired-ass act on the road, of course. This story is all about moving the money around: She’s getting her tour funds up front, and I’m sure she has accountants who can explain to her why it’s a smart thing to do financially. Fans, I’m sure, will see it differently, when two factors make a mark on her shows. First, the artist herself will no longer have the burden of creating what passes, in her world, for an innovative show. She’s already been paid, and it’s Clear Channel’s Live Nation’s job to monetize it. Look for ever-more-rote productions. Secondly, because the company has pretty obviously overpaid for Madonna’s services, the money-squeezing at Madonna shows will be even more pronounced than it is at a typical LN operation. The mersh will be more expensive; the rows of seating will be closer together; the ancillary advertising (like commercials on the video screens between acts) will be more prevalent; the food and parking will cost more; and there will be a lot more low-budget activity like corporate booths and people wandering around giving out free samples of crummy products in the arena walkways. (I’m sure some LN experts are dreaming up even more tacky things as well.)

Here’s Madonna herself spinning the deal in the Times today:

“The paradigm in the music business has shifted, and as an artist and a businesswoman I have to move with that shift. For the first time in my career, the way that my music can reach my fans is unlimited.”

Actually, of course, given her tanking record sales and worn-out welcome on radio and TV, precisely the opposite is true, but she’s nicely positioned to make more money than ever nonetheless.

Idolator attacks the Moby Quotient. Concerns about selling out are just a tired boomer trope, it says here:

…Wyman still takes the idea of pop sellouts very seriously. The text of the article leans on all the leaky assumptions that will comfort the Post’s crusty boomer readership–that “Imagine” is more important than “Get Ur Freak On” and therefore in more danger of being “corrupted,” that Kelly Clarkson or Fall Out Boy are somehow less tainted by doing the advertising dance than the Stones.

Why the Stones, artistically speaking, might matter more than Kelly Clarkson is part of the “rockist” vs. “popist” debate. “Popism” is based on the straw man that “rockist” critics don’t appreciate pop music. “Popism” is conveniently indistinguishable in practice from “entertainment journalism” but it lets the people who practice it have a clubhouse and a neat handshake.

Idolator continues:

[C]heck [out] this quote from “one time rock critic” Bill Brown:

“The problem with branding yourself and selling your songs to commercials is the music is no longer for the listener.”

Huh? The repetition of a popular ad has the power to turn a song you love into an annoying earworm, sure. But it’s an odd quirk of boomer critics that songs already designed to reach a mass audience somehow void their warranty when they come into contact with “commerce,” or that a band hawking its song to an advertiser automatically equates to “greed.” It’s become a sad, but viable, option for many during the industry’s never-ending commercial downturn.

1) No one said anything about earworms. 2) Brown’s point isn’t that the song is besmirched by contact with commerce (though that is one of my points); he is saying that the artist is now crafting songs for the audience of the commercial. This has obvious implications, among them the fact that the motivations of the performer will inevitably be at least affected, and most likely changed, by the potential of scoring more Volkswagen money. 3) The rock in commercials epidemic long predates the industry downturn. This is another excuse for greediness. But of course, “popists” aren’t known for their critical thinking.

I’m being interviewed by the CBC this afternoon for a segment tonight, though that of course may change.

Metafilter has a fun group of comments on it here.

For those interested in the subject, here’s a long NYT piece by John Leland from six years ago:

Fourteen years after Nike outraged Beatles fans, and the surviving Beatles, by using ”Revolution” in a sneaker ad — Michael Jackson controlled the publishing rights to the song — the revolution is over, and the advertisers have largely won. Bruce Springsteen famously refused a reported $12 million to license his song ”Born in the U.S.A.” to Chrysler in 1986 and remains one of the handful of high-profile holdouts. (Others include Neil Young and Tom Petty.) But such opposition appears to be in retreat. ”Artists no longer feel stigmatized about being used by corporations,” says Cyndi Goretski, artists-and-repertoire manager in the licensing division of Warner Music. Counterculture anthems by the Who or Jimi Hendrix now sell cars. When Sting couldn’t get airplay for his recent song ”Desert Rose” or for the video, which featured him riding in a Jaguar, he licensed the video to the company to turn it into an ad. The exposure helped ”Brand New Day” become his top-selling solo album.

I’m traveling for the next couple of days, and posting will be light.

From the October GQ, an interview with Dr. Dre:

I read that you didn’t want to put “Fuck tha Police” on the first record, but an experience changed your mind.

Nah, that’s not true. The experience motivated the song.

Can you tell me what it was?

It was me and Eazy riding around. He had this paintball gun, and he was shooting people at bus stops. The cops caught us and we were facedown on the freeway, with guns pointing at us,. We thought it was bullshit. So we want to the studio and created the song.

I’m going to write a new song. It’s gonna be called “Fuck tha Chucklehead Who Shot my Mom at a Bus Stop with a Paintball Gun.” It’s going to be an underground classic that encapsulates a poetic new strain of streetwise reality. And the cool thing is that only a select group of people will really be able to appreciate its gritty potency. One of their characteristics will be knowing the demographics of the typical LA bus rider.

Hitsville has a story in Sunday’s Washington Post. Your comments and criticisms welcome.

A.O. Scott likes Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic:

The worst and most common failing in movies of this kind — biographies of artists, musicians in particular — is that they turn creativity into a symptom and fate into pathology. One of the great virtues of “Control” is that it does not fall into this trap. Where it might have been literal-minded and sentimental, it is instead enigmatic and moving, much in the manner of Joy Division’s best songs.

“Control” is opening today in New York. The Times also ran a feature on the two upcoming Joy Division films last weekend:

Both were made with the cooperation of those who best knew Mr. Curtis. “Control,” the feature directing debut of the portrait photographer Anton Corbijn, is loosely based on “Touching From a Distance,” a 1995 memoir by Mr. Curtis’s widow, Deborah, of their life together. “Joy Division,” directed by the music-video veteran Grant Gee and written by the author and critic Jon Savage, takes a panoramic approach, combining archival footage with revealing interviews of firsthand observers and Mr. Curtis’s surviving bandmates, who went on to form New Order.

Hitsville thinks “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is the greatest rock single of all time. As potent of any musical memory is the day the new Joy Division 12-inch came in to the sprawling Telegraph Ave. record store where I was working during college. It had that desolate Factory cover and was pressed, as some singles were in those days, on super-heavy vinyl. We put the thing on the turntable, turned up the volume and watched, as we liked to do, how the crowd in the store responded to a new song. Together we marveled first at the eight bars of guitar rave-up–and then the disconcerting, arresting, unforgettable synth line that came after. The force of the song lies not in its very sad lyrics or Curtis’ fine vocals, though both are powerful and, I think, timeless, but in that musical transition. It heralded first the end of punk rock and the beginning of post-punk, which however radical it sounded at the time is I guess of minor historical interest at this point. But it also reminded us, as Jonathan Richman and Talking Heads did, that punk is an idea not a sound; that it was personal as well as political and could be defiantly, insistently musical even as it adhered to verities of simplicity and (as the artist saw it) truth. Joy Division never equaled the majesty of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (New Order came close several times, notably with the single “Temptation”), but it didn’t have to. Curtis didn’t have to demonstrate the truth of the song, either, but he did.

The WSJ reports ($) that new copy protection on some Blu-ray discs makes them not work on some players:

The password change caused problems for those who watch discs on a computer using software from Cyberlink Corp., of Taiwan. An upgrade, released Sunday, is required to play the new discs. And Fox’s fortified discs won’t play properly on some Blu-ray players for television sets, including a model from LG Electronics Inc. and two from Samsung Electronics Co., both based in South Korea.

The change was prompted by hackers who quickly figured out how to break the heralded copy-protection on the discs. This all seems relatively minor, and company spokespeople say the problem is fixable. But it’s another step in a cat-and-mouse game that hurts both consumers and the industries. Here’s the best part of the story:

Twentieth Century Fox began releasing new Blu-ray discs with an added layer of copy protection called BD+. Fox had stopped issuing new Blu-ray discs in April — shortly after hackers defeated the existing protections — and has called BD+ a “key factor” in its decision to publish only Blu-ray discs.

Blu-ray plus! Shouldn’t a product that works worse than the previous edition be called Blu-ray minus?

The NYT has a story today about students organizing over the broad issue of copyright constraints. The organizing came after students started getting letters from the RIAA, and some had to settle for sharing music files. But the point of the story is this:

But in recent months, the group has made a point of branching out beyond music copyrights. At its first national conference, held at Harvard in May and attended by more than 130 people, speakers gave presentations on topics like enhancing Internet access in impoverished countries, and loosening patent regulations for pharmaceutical drugs.
…

The movement is not without its critics. Early on, Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, said the group should pick more consequential problems to rally around than access to music.

“Part of what’s so tricky about this movement is trying to pry apart access to entertainment from some of the more serious issues, like access to medicine,” he said. “The movement does itself a disservice by blending all the issues together.”

The idea that students will begin actually to organize on a large scale over this issue is far-fetched. More likely—and this is the record industry’s Achilles heel—is that students legally attacked by the RIAA will begin to fight back, simply and lethally. The industry can be sneaker-netted to death in a heartbeat once folks start swapping mp3 discs seriously. One lazily enterprising guy on the floor of a dorm can stick 15 or 20 CDs’ worth of new music onto a disc and pass it down the floor and distribute the equivalent of thousands of downloaded songs in an hour or two. (More energetic ones, of course, simply set up private nets for distributing songs among a trusted group.) This all happens now, of course. But as awareness grows of the results of the industry’s misguided and destructive legal campaign, won’t music fans begin to apprehend there’s an easy and devastating way to fight back?

Hitsville has returned. Thanks much for the kind notes after my mother passed away last month. Your comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome.

xxx,

Bill