Ed Christman, in Billboard, nicely focuses in on the nitty gritty of the music business in this column. There are huge forces at work disrupting the industry, of course, but there’s also more mundane issues, like retail strategy:

While we are on the topic of Black Friday, it is frustrating to report that 2007 will mark the third year in a row where the DVD industry has outmaneuvered the music industry, according to retailers. But there’s more bad news for labels: Merchants say the videogame industry is out-hustling the record labels, too.

Music merchants say that, other than rap titles, this year’s holiday selling season release schedule is weaker than last year’s—and the rock slate is especially underwhelming. Meanwhile, the movie studios have or will unleash “Transformers,” “Spider-Man 3,” “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” and “Shrek the Third” for the holidays, says Sue Bryan, who heads up J&R’s music and movies area. And Trans World Entertainment VP of movies and videogames Mark Higgins says there will be at least 16 movies coming out on DVD that each generated $100 million or more at the box office during fourth-quarter 2007. “It started on Oct. 16 with ‘Transformers,’ and we have one event title every week through the rest of the year,” Higgins says.

Of course, the industry can’t win; the problem in previous years was retailers’ complaining that the companies were concentrating superstar releases in the last quarter and letting stores shift for themselves the other nine months…

A couple of years ago I noticed Lenny Kravitz turning up a lot in stories about… real estate, like this one about a Manhattan townhouse once owned by Doris Duke, on sale for $50 million:

Lenny Kravitz, the rock star and budding designer, has visited the house twice, said Mamdouh Nasr, the owner of an ice cream truck that has parked for 28 years on the corner of 82nd Street and Fifth Avenue, just steps from the mansion’s front door.

To Mr. Nasr, it’s clear evidence that the musician, who enjoys buying and fixing up real estate, is buying the home. “To this guy time is money,” Mr. Nasr said. “So why he comes inside two times?”

He was also in another Times story, in the Style section, about a $38 million piece of real estate in Miami. Neither story remarked upon it, but I wondered, Where does Lenny Kravitz come up with that sort of money?

In the new Billboard, there’s a cover story about how Kravitz and Virgin are trying to repair a supposedly frayed relationship. Why that relationship frayed is skirted in the story, but it can be plainly seen in an accompanying chart, which details how Kravitz’s album sales, which topped out at 3M for “5″ and then 4.5M for a greatest hits set, have been in the toilet since then.

The answer, of course, is touring. Kravitz has had a respectable sales career; he’s plainly in that top 5 percent of artists who have actually made serious money from CD sales. But you could take all his sales royalties and put them in a box and they would be barely enough to make a down payment on a couple of homes like that. I see that Kravitz is a designer now, and has been flipping real estate for some time, so he’s obviously made some money doing that. But as the record industry continues to complain about file-sharing, this is a good example of where the real money is.

Artists like Kravitz, and coevals like Bon Jovi, are in their way footnotes to the 90s music scene. They each sold a lot of records, but they were never critical favorites and left little in the way of an artistic footprint. But as their fans grew older their incomes grew bigger as well, and today it is not unusual for artists whose time had seemingly come and gone to make tens of millions of dollars in just a few months on the road.

While acts like Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones have long been record-setters when it comes to tour income, in the last decade or two many others have been getting into the mix. The Eagles pioneered this phenomenon in the early 1990s, when the band’s long-awaited first reunion tour boasted a then-groundbreaking $120 a ticket. As ticket prices have increased, tour grosses have gone up too. An average ticket price of $100 leveraged against a mid-sized basketball arena can suddenly produce multi-million-dollar nightly grosses—and that’s before additional sales from merchandise.

On the top level—marquee acts like Simon and Garfunkel and of course the Stones—breathtaking amounts of money can be had. Case in point: The Stones’ two-night stand at that baseball park in downtown San Francisco (the one whose name keeps changing to one or another phone company): 44,000 fans a night paid an average of more than $250 each to see the band, producing a heady $11.2 million gross for the shows.

But, again, here’s the much lesser Bon Jovi at the new Prudential Center in Newark—ten shows with an average $1.6 million a night. For them, and other nostalgia acts on the road like Van Halen, the magic $100-a-seat number produces one- and two-million-dollar paydays, night after night after night.

During “Desperate Housewives” last night, John Lennon’s “Real Love” turned up in a J.C. Penny commercial. The plaintive song was first excavated by Yoko Ono as a device to publicize the “Imagine: John Lennon” movie. Then it got pulled out again and reworked by the other three Beatles as something to spice up the second of the “Anthology” sets, back in 1996, and has been turning up in various iterations on this or that Lennon compilation regularly in the years since.

And now here it is again being used to generate what I would assume would be well into the six figures for the Lennon estate. The Moby Quotient gives it a 57 and change, a robust number for a classically skanky move on Yoko Ono’s part.

The Moby Quotient? you ask? Details from the Washpost here, with a calculator here.

More on the Moby Quotient from Hitsville here.

There is a strange logical force field around the Microsoft Zune that makes it hard to think about clearly. It seems like every article I read about it doesn’t make sense; there are non sequiturs, or irrelevant or insufficient information. Here’s an example, from a recent Wired News piece on the release of the mp3 player’s second iteration:

The most ballyhooed (and misunderstood) feature of the first Zunes was their wireless music sharing feature, which ran aground after owners noticed there was no one around to share with.

With the new Zunes released Tuesday, Microsoft has moved “the social” back where it belongs: other companies’ social networks. Users of the free Zune software can embed a widget that shows their most recent, most frequently played and favorite tracks on Facebook, MySpace and so on — wherever HTML is used.

Doesn’t this not make sense? What does listing songs you’re listening to (or rather, have listened to) on Facebook have to do with the Zune’s wireless sharing feature? And who cares about that in any case? You’ve been able to show off the music you’re listening to on IM programs for years; why is a marginal software feature worth mentioning so substantively in a description of a multi-hundred-dollar piece of hardware?

After the articles talking about the Zune’s new models last month, the player to me at least seemed to have dropped out of public consciousness. It was a surprise to see it back in a flurry of articles this weekend, and now my head is hurting again.

A story in USA Today says that the Zune is hot hot hot!:

As much as they may swoon, some holiday shoppers may not be able to get a Zune.

…is the story’s euphonious, buzzy lede. The immediate impression you have is that the Zune is suddenly jumping off shelves; but if you read down a bit, you learn that Microsoft made a decision to manufacture more of its smaller flash Zunes and fewer of the 80-gig hard-drive model. Since the piece never says how many the company made or how may have been sold, you suspect that the “shortage” is manufactured. Or rather, wasn’t manufactured. No one was swooning, either, incidentally.

Similarly, over at CNN Money, an article there has the exciting hedline “Retail hordes go loony over Zune”. But when you read that story, you find out that here, too, euphony gets in the way of accuracy. No one’s going loony—unless you want to be unkind to the folks in the story, who were trying to buy last year’s Zune, one of the more ridiculed products in recent tech history. Why on earth? Turns out a Toys ‘R’ Us in Manhattan had them as a Black Friday loss leader, on sale for 80 bucks, or 60 percent off the list price.

Indeed, there was even a short story on PC World that says that the Zune was number one on Amazon’s list of best-selling mp3 players. That’s a pretty stunning bit of news—until you read on to find out that, again, it was a heavily discounted year-old model that (briefly) topped the list, which in any case featured Ipods in 15 of the top 25 slots.

Daniel Eran Dilger’s Roughly Drafted site, incidentally, has a very cold analysis of why the Zune won’t be successful in this iteration. (Link via Slashdot.) Writes Dilger:

Microsoft doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes in consumer electronics very well. When it does however, it frequently gets the timing wrong. This year, Microsoft appears set to compete against the Apple of 2006. It now offers two flash models, last year’s leftover 30 GB unit, and new 80 GB version.

Wrong Products: The problem is that Apple moved the goalpost dramatically. Apple’s new 3G Nano is ultra thin and small, but delivers the same video resolution as Microsoft’s boxy flash Zunes at the same price. It also plays games.

Microsoft also has no match for the standout iPod Touch, which delivers a luxury product with WiFi store features, web browsing, and YouTube streaming for about the same price as Microsoft’s hard drive based players. Microsoft seems to think it is competing against last Apple’s 2005 iPod refreshed for 2006.

Later in the piece he claims (and seems to have the screenshots to prove) that a WSJ online poll asking folks what products they were planning on buying this season had the Zune at zero percent—until:

Microsoft discovered the embarrassment, and the next day there were 16,481 new votes, 14,999 of which happened to be Wall Street Journal readers exclusively excited about the Zune. That’s over 91% of the readers of an article that had fallen out of sight by that time. There aren’t that many people on Earth who have heard of the Zune and read the Wall Street Journal.

A Little Rock, Arkansas, writer named Jennifer Christmas previews an upcoming R. Kelly show with more information on the singer’s tawdry legal affairs than most big city writers can muster:

In 1994, Robert Sylvester Kelly secretly wed a 15-year-old — the late singer Aaliyah; the marriage was annulled. In 2002 a videotape surfaced that prosecutors say shows R. Kelly engaged in sex acts with a 14-year-old; the trial, after much delay, is expected to happen next year. In September 2005, R. Kelly’s wife Andrea obtained and dropped a restraining order against him; they are divorcing.

He has also had well-publicized professional issues. He was kicked off the 2004 Best of Both Worlds tour he co-headlined with former collaborator Jay-Z.

Christman doesn’t detail the singer’s 2003 Florida arrest after a digital camera containing sex photos of an underaged girl was found at his house, but the story does give folks a sense of the issues surrounding Kelly, which, again, most national stories regarding Kelly have found not worth detailing.

Meanwhile, Kelly’s publicist, Regina Daniels, recently quit. Tmz.com quoted her statement:

“I have prided myself on loyalty, respect and professionalism. It saddens me that I was not always shown those same courtesies during my 14-year tenure as Mr. Kelly’s publicist … There are some lines that should never be crossed professionally or personally. Mr. Kelly crossed a line that forever altered the scope of our relationship. For this reason I made the decision to resign.”

The NYT has an astonishingly misinformed story on Ipods and audio quality today, a matching bookend with Lee Gomes’ in the WSJ from a few weeks ago.

[O]ver the last decade the ranks of true audiophiles have been thinning, in large part because of the growing popularity of MP3 players and iPods. These nifty devices enable you to store thousands of hours of your favorite music and take it with you as you bop through your day. You can listen while shopping, while jogging or even, depending on your job, while at work. No one, not even devoted users of MP3s or iPods, claims that the sound reproduction on these technological marvels is equal to that of the best home CD systems. After all, they work by eliminating some of the digitized sound bits to open up storage space for multiple compressed files of music, rendering the sound a little thinner. Still, for consumers, easy access has trumped high fidelity.

The writer, classical music critic Anthony Tommasini, meanders on and on pondering the end of high fidelity. Like Gomes’ story, the point is true, as far as it goes. Mp3s do have inferior sound quality, in a relative sense; they are compressed sound files that make sonic compromises. But as the cost of computer storage continues to go down, the situation will slowly begin to right itself as more and more fans begin to listen to uncompressed files on their ever-bigger Ipods. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has scooped up a discounted half-terabyte drive and is busy digitizing CDs in the Apple lossless format.

(Another issue the audio bemoaners overlook is that, like most other electronic gear, the quality of even low-end audio equipment, particularly speakers, is much higher than all but the best stuff from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.)

As I’ve written before, the change will give the record companies one last resale opportunity, as they mount a campaign to inform iPod owners that the audio quality of their songs is inferior, and to give them the chance to rebuy their music, one last joyous time, in a lossless format.

The biz section of the Times profiles Brian Grazer today. The thesis of the article is that Grazer isn’t famous enough:

[D]espite Mr. Grazer’s enormous success in the movie business, his public profile remains relatively slight when compared with his Hollywood peers. Imagine Entertainment, founded 20 years ago by Mr. Grazer and the director Ron Howard, has produced a strong slate of films, including “Liar Liar,” “Eight Mile,” “Inside Man,” “A Beautiful Mind” and “The Da Vinci Code.” His latest, “American Gangster,” opened two weeks ago as the top film in the country, taking in more than $43 million at the box office its first weekend.

The diversity of his films makes Mr. Grazer an anomaly in Hollywood, where careers are typically built on well-defined brands. Everyone knows what a Steven Spielberg movie is, or a Jerry Bruckheimer film. But few people could describe a Brian Grazer project, except to say that it will probably make a lot of money.

The assertion is risible: Besides maybe Saul Zaentz, Grazer is in fact probably the best-known producer in Hollywood who is not also a filmmaker. (Scott Rudin is more colorful, but Grazer’s several films nominated for best picture and his partnership with Ron Howard have gotten him much more mainstream ink.) What he is really unhappy with (and this is something that the writer doesn’t mention) is the phenomenon of the faceless producer. That’s a mildly interesting issue, in that they are sometimes the creative force behind a particular film, even in the ongoing era of the cult of the director. But this story isn’t about that. This was my favorite part:

For the last 20 years, Mr. Grazer has met each week with a person who is an expert in science, medicine, politics, fashion, religion — anything other than entertainment. He is so serious about the meetings that he has a staff member whose job it is to find interesting people.

He is not so serious about garnering outside knowledge as to do what normal people do, which is read a book every once in a while!

But those meetings are key parts of his creative process, we are told:

The weekly get-togethers have led to some of Mr. Grazer’s most successful ideas. After meeting with five of the top trial lawyers in the country, Mr. Grazer came up with the idea for “Liar Liar.”

Liar Liar, the Jim Carrey Movie, is about a lawyer who all of a sudden can’t lie any more. For that Grazer needed to meet with not one but five top trial lawyers, when he could have just listened to a Jay Leno monologue and saved himself the expense of that hard-working staff member. The piece mentions Grazer’s well-known head of ludicrously spiked hair, but doesn’t dwell on it. Instead we learn:

He wears a conservative uniform to work each day — black pants, a white shirt and skinny black tie — because he fears looking like the typical Hollywood producer struggling to appear young.

The story also doesn’t mention the junk Gazer has produced, including ultraviolent crap like The Missing. He also gets a pat on the back because Angels and Demons, his follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, will purportedly be his first sequel. What about “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps”?

As of today the editorial pages of both the New York Times and the Wall St. Journal have offered their thoughts on the new album by the Eagles, “Long Road Out of Eden.” (The album, you will recall, was offered for sale only at Wal-Mart; prompted a revision of the Billboard charts, which previously had excluded CDs not universally available; and ended up topping the charts that week with 710,000 copes sold.) The Times editorial, from last Sunday, discussed the prime criticism of the album—that the band, with its latter-day anthems attacking environmental despoliation and corporate greed, had gotten in bed with a big source of such problems—and ended on a cautious note:

Have the Eagles sold out? Mr. Henley says that by doing business with Wal-Mart, he has more influence and easier access to the company’s executives, including the ones responsible for trying to make the company more environmentally conscious. His argument is almost certainly bolstered by the strong sales of ”Long Road Out of Eden.”

We hope, with him, that he has the influence he suggests, otherwise this arrangement may well turn out to be nothing more than a long road to Wal-Mart.

The WSJ editorial ($), impishly hedded “Desperados,” took a much rosier view:

In cutting out the record company, the band cut itself in for a bigger share of the per-album profits. While it might have expected fewer sales from restricted availability, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Wal-Mart’s retail price of under $12 for the two-disc album has allowed smaller retailers to stock up on the album at Wal-Mart and then resell them with a markup.

The Eagles aren’t the first to try new ways to sell a record. Garth Brooks signed an exclusive deal in 2005 with Wal-Mart and has sold millions of records. Beyonce has released an exclusive DVD through the store. Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney are selling their music through Starbucks. Billy Joel’s daughter, Alexa Ray, is trying to establish her own music career by doing an exclusive with Target.

These and others are evidence that Napster and its filesharing successors weren’t the death of the music business but a smart bomb that forced the creation of new delivery models. Apple’s iTunes is the most famous. But the Web has allowed thousands of bands to find new audiences, and even create global niche brands. Thanks to the Internet, a Norwegian metal band named Enslaved has been able to fill small town bars and auditoriums in the U.S.

The unexpected, wholly thrilling appearance of Enslaved on the WSJ ed page comes from a NYT piece on the band from a week or so ago. The editorial concluded:

We believe in property rights as much as anyone, but when technology is changing, businesses have to change too — and that includes the business of music. So let’s applaud Mr. Henley, Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh and the other Eagles for some creative capitalism, however politically incorrect.

The trouble here, as with Starbucks’ selling the latest Paul McCartney album, is that these are one-time PR events. The Eagles deal isn’t the start of something new, it’s a last gasp. Barring the band’s conjuring up some new radio hits, the next Eagles album will not be as notable, and selling it only through one retailer probably won’t make any sense. This will of course also be true for Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello and whatever other fading stars are looking for a way to call some attention to themselves when they have a new product to sell.

Financially, it probably was a smart move for the Eagles, just as the Starbucks alliance was a smart move for McCartney. They both will get more money for their crummy new album than they otherwise would. The McCartney record had a high price, as I recall; Starbuck’s strategy was to make the CD as expensive as its upscale clientele would tolerate. Wal-Mart’s audience isn’t so much downmarket as it is more suburban and rural, and carried a much-more-reasonable $12 price tag. (It’s a two-CD set, too.) In both cases, to varying degrees, the retail outlets are subsidizing the artists’ profits. Starbucks’ motivations were mostly marketing driven; they got million of dollars worth of publicity on the deal. For Wal-Mart, the deal was a more traditional loss leader, designed to get folks into its stores to buy the Eagles album and some other crap, as well.

What is down market, in the end, is these artists’ ever-more-limited options when it comes to selling actual records. (Both make kazillions touring.) I said above that selling the next Eagles CD through one retailer probably won’t make sense. When Wal-Mart inevitably passes, however, there may be another, slightly grimier outlet looking for a little buzz to liven its image: K-Mart, say, or possibly Linen ‘n’ Things, or maybe 7-Eleven. I hope I live to see the day the new Eagles album is offered for sale exclusively at the Cracker Barrel.

Paul Farhi in the Washington Post engrossingly details the evolving mechanics of ticket scalping, which is now irritating music fans of artists from Hannah Montana to Bruce Springsteen. The internet is affecting the market in several ways, some of them at cross-purposes. For one, the pool of potential buyers spans the whole country—not just for potential attendees of the show, but potential ticket-flippers who may want to resell or simply turn the tix over to a scalper. At the same time, the public resale sites must compete with each other; consumers can see who has the best prices, which makes life tougher on the scalpers. Meanwhile, scalpers can create bots that can buy tickets off Ticketmaster’s site faster than humans can.

Fans who strike out on the initial sale of seats to popular shows have found themselves confronting heart-stopping prices on hundreds of reseller sites—often only minutes after promoters have posted “sold out” signs. Markups of as much as 10 times the face value are not uncommon for popular concerts, sporting events and Broadway shows.

The complaints became a collective shriek in recent months when thousands of tween-age fans and their parents were shut out of a sold-out “Hannah Montana” concert tour featuring Miley Cyrus, who plays the title character on the mega-popular Disney Channel show. The complaints have prompted investigations and lawsuits by officials in three states, each alleging some variation on this question:

Is the ticket market stacked against the average consumer?

This question is somewhat off point—all music fans are average, right? But there are some interesting issues here. Tickets to popular shows—and of course close-up seats to any show—exist is an economic netherworld. The realities of the concert business dictate that acts are booked into venues that are more likely to sell out. If demand is unexpectedly strong, it’s difficult to create more of the product—another night must be booked. And consumers can’t buy the product from different vendors, either.

That creates the problem of scalping. Many years ago the head of Ticketmaster said concert tickers were the most underpriced commodity in American life. He was right, too, in that, back then, a front-row Stones or U2 or Springsteen ticket might be on sale for $50, $60 or even $100, but could be resold for many times that to a desperate enough fan.

Since then, canny promoters and acts have sought to capture some of that renegade cash, ushering in the era of “golden circle” pricing and the like, and Ticketmaster, of course, has even started its own resale site, creating the interesting spectacle of a company selling a product and then having to broker the action when it is inevitably resold at a higher price. This has created a thoroughly corrupted process.

As Farhi makes plain, the problem will not go away. There are two solutions. One is for all concert tickets to essentially be sold at auction, with the market, in the end, determining the public value of any particular performance. There would still be opportunities for scalpers, but they would be considerably circumscribed. Particularly in a world in which it will be increasingly difficult to make money from recordings, this would allow touring artists to extract the full commercial value of their performances.

The only problem with this is that it will create a class-stratified concert audience, with the swells up front invited to rattle their jewelry and the plebs in the back left to stand and shove for position.

The other solution, which Hitsville favors, is simply to recriminalize the reselling of performance tickets above face value. Artists should be able to choose the price at which they want their performances to sell, and there’s a public interest in keeping access to an unusual commodity open to all. Tickets confiscated in scalping scams would become the property of the city, which could then resell them, which would pay for the costs of enforcement. What’s wrong with that plan?

Debuts at number one, with 710,000 copies sold exclusively through Wal-Mart. Billboard traditionally excludes albums sold at only one retailer from its charts, but lifted the rule this week, mostly on the grounds that it would be absurd not to do so, the Times reports:

Many record executives privately criticized the unexpected shift, and some expressed fears that the shift might provide new incentive for artists to sell straight to retail chains like Wal-Mart, Starbucks and others.

Geoff Mayfield, the senior Billboard analyst who oversees the charts, played down any suggestions of strong-arming.

“We were not pressured. I did not get one phone call from Irving Azoff about this,” Mr. Mayfield said, referring to the Eagles’ talent manager, “and I did not get one phone call from Wal-Mart.”

Rather, Mr. Mayfield said, he made the change amid worries that the [sic] Billboard’s brand-name charts, regarded as the industry’s gold standard, were in danger of appearing out of sync with the music market.

Most of the reviews are overly respectful; in this context, you have to love the Guardian …

Self-importance is a given in the world of soft rock, but the Eagles’ double-disc comeback propels musical smugness to previously inconceivable proportions.

… and Mr. Jim Derogatis:

How do lyrics such as those, from “Frail Grasp on the Big Picture” and “Business as Usual,” square with the politics of Wal-Mart’s corporate honchos and what many critics call the company’s monopolistic, anti-labor, big business-uber-alles practices? They don’t, but consistency has never been the band’s strong point.

I want to say Todd Haynes’ ballyhooed Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, is disappointing, but what, really, did we expect? A test for films like this is whether, in the end, there is something in the result that the subject would dislike or be offended by, and it’s hard to think of anything here that Dylan, a master controller of his image, or his longtime manager, Albert Grossman, would have blanched at. And there’s many things, too, he would definitely appreciate, much of the result tracking thematically with the images of himself he presented in the PBS film No Direction Home.

Here, Haynes responds to the songwriter’s manifold career with a cubist trope—having Dylan represented not just by different people at different stages of his career, but by entirely different heavily fictionalized characters in what in effect are separate movies, all wound together in a shattered but tangentially chronological order, stretching from his first days on the road to, roughly, the gospel period in the early 1980s. In one, for example, Heath Ledger plays a film star, come to prominence by playing a Dylan-like pop icon in a biopic, who meets, marries, raises a family with, and then splits from a French artist, in what is supposed to represent Dylan’s relationship with his first wife; in another, a campy Cate Blanchett plays the Dylan we know best, the combative press conference jouster and suddenly electric showman.

But in the end, almost all are disappointing. In the most ambitious segments, for example, Richard Gere plays a Billy the Kid-like figure adrift in a frontier town where everyone’s in costume. The scenes conflate Dylan’s work on the Pat Garrett sound track and his Gethsemane with the Band at Woodstock, but in the end it seems as if all Haynes could do with the Basement Tapes was play off the menagerie on the inside cover. The Dylan suckup industry is so huge these days it’s hard not be a little exasperated at the A-list folks lining up just to get a little reflected glory. I mean, you’d think Martin Scorsese or Haynes would at least find it interesting that Dylan married a former Playboy bunny named Shirley Noznisky. But no—she has be made into a famous artist, and be played by Charlotte Gainsborough. Speaking of which, save in those segments in which American piggishness must be portrayed by grotesques, a lot of the supporting players here have suspiciously high cheekbones. That, the hipster appearances (like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon in an entirely cuttable segment), the uneven performances, and some jarring moments (like actual footage of Dylan playing, which intrudes, to no purpose, at the end), make this a largely unsuccessful film. Beyond that there’s an air of … not self-indulgence, exactly, but the feel of someone whose ambitions far outstripped his abilities, or whose intentions were never fully formed. The result feels more like a desperate, unfocused tribute to Dylan than an organic (and aesthetically independent) work of art.

All that said, there’s fun to be had here for Dylan fans who don’t care that much about the truth: there are the scraps of Dylan lyrics in magazine ads, passing references to characters in his songs, and some carefully schematized nods to key bits of Dylaniana. (For example, in keeping with the redolence of the film’s title, a heretofore unreleased Dylan bootleg track, Haynes includes not only a careful recitation of a key Rimbaud line, “Je est un autre,” but also the most reverberating Dylan mot from Dont Look Back, the 1966 Pennebaker documentary: “I’m sure glad I’m not me.”) In the Pat Garrett segment, Gere puts on a clear plastic mask similar to the one Dylan sports in some of the more compelling live footage from his Renaldo and Clara movie, which I think was the film’s one reference to the Rolling Thunder era. And I can’t swear to it but I also think Haynes in a couple of the Blanchett scenes took the time to re-create moments from Dont Look Back or other Dylan footage from the time.

p.s. The controversies over Dylan’s epochal switch to electric are I think overplayed, both here and in No Direction Home, which is credited to Martin Scorsese. Haynes has a comic interlude in which Dylan and his band turn machine guns onto the crowd; Scorsese makes the issue the frame of his four-hour film, plainly suggesting the controversy drove him into seclusion. The complaints of a few priggish folk aficionados have now created an image of “Rite of Spring”-like riots. In fact, “Highway 61″’s first single, “Like a Rolling Stone,” became an immediate huge hit; the war was essentially over before he played Forest Hills, a month after Newport. (The best by-the-minute contemporary reportage on this remains Robert Shelton’s biography, also called No Direction Home.) It doesn’t fit into the rock mythos very well, but in large part Dylan stopped touring to lower his fame quotient and raise a family in (relative) peace. It can’t have been easy to be married to Bob Dylan, but Sara (née Shirley) Lownds (née Noznisky) did have her husband around during those years–Dylan didn’t make regular concert appearances again until 1974.

p.p.s. The film No Direction Home really isn’t a documentary. It’s an assemblage, by Scorsese, of a lot of promotional material that the Dylan organization had generated. (The highly unusual sight of Dylan speaking, coherently and at length, about his influences and career, was the product of the simple expedient of the interviewer’s being his manager.) The film, while engrossing, isn’t journalism or a true documentary. That it was awarded a Peabody is a minor scandal.

Over on Jim’s Romenesko’s Media News blog, there’s a pretty funny memo from the head of Gannett, Craig Dubow. It was sent to all Gannett employees to announce a new central email system that will serve the company more efficiently. Gannett is a big operation, and I don’t want to make light of the difficulties any old media company has in transforming its technology. (It’s always easier for new media companies to ramp up operations using the newest and easiest technology and a lot harder if you have calcified tech infrastructures, sometimes decades old, already in place, not to mention calcified tech managers.)

All that said, there’s a priceless line here:

That means more reliable messaging and new email features at less cost to the company. It used to take up to four hours for one of my emails to be delivered across the company. With this new system, it will take minutes.

A couple of observations:

a) Boy is Dubow a dope. Anyone who thinks that getting an email message in minutes is an acceptable goal for a company information system, much less something to brag about in an email, needs to take a class in Internets 101.
b) If I were a Gannett stockholder, I’d wonder if someone that detached from basic working knowledge of the transformative medium of the particular brand of widgets the company dealt in was the guy I’d want at the helm.
c) Then I’d look at the company’s stock price and wonder if there was a connection
d) In my experience, Dubow’s cluelessness is not unusual. When I left Salon, and San Francisco, in 2002 to work at a fairly well-known traditional media company, I felt as if I’d stepped back into the past five years. Shortly after that, I went to work at another fairly well-known traditional media company and, astonishingly, felt as if I’d stepped back another five years. The technological backwardness impaired employees’ ability to do simple day-to-day work, much less meet the challenges of the roiling media waters of the last few years. This is not often mentioned in writing about the media today, but it’s probably the biggest challenge old media has to deal with.
e) The real problem here is misguided company concerns about control and security, which are, respectively, unachievable and largely chimerical. The lost productivity alone, in my experience, from using restrictive and awkward corporate email programs like Lotus Notes or Outlook are enormous. (At one place I worked, email storage was limited to 50MB, at a time when a typical PR email might contain a 3MB attachment.) Just think if Gannett had just decided to use Gmail or even AOL: Dubow might soon find his emails arriving in—wonders!—seconds. Just like the rest of us.