In an interview with the BBC, Kid Rock speaks about digital downloads and payment systems, demonstrating throughout his intuitive grasp of the issues:

The performer - whose real name is Robert Ritchie - said his record company Atlantic had asked him to “stand up for illegal downloading” a few years ago because it told him “people are stealing from us and stealing from you”.

“And I go: ‘Wait a second, you’ve been stealing from the artists for years. Now you want me to stand up for you?’

“I was telling kids—download it illegally, I don’t care. I want you to hear my music so I can play live.”

Asked whether he was worried about illegal downloading, he replied: “I don’t agree with it. I think we should level the playing field. I don’t mind people stealing my music, that’s fine. But I think they should steal everything.

“You know how much money the oil companies have? If you need some gas, just go fill your tank off and drive off, they’re not going to miss it.”

But he said he did not implement that advice himself. “No, I don’t steal things. I’m rich.”

 (Like via Wired News’ Listening Post.)

Todd Martens, on his LA Times Extended Play blog, has one of the smartest articles I’ve seen recently on the music industry: He tracks the decline in the price—or value if you prefer—of the record album or CD.

“Less than 10 years ago,” he notes “it was common for albums to cost $15 and above.” And today, he says, Amazon is now running specials on old Coldplay albums and selling them in download form… for $1.99! (Link via The Daily Swarm.)

(He even notes that the service has already been trying to unload Madonna’s newest at $3.99.)

His mini-history, a must read, calls attention to an often overlooked aspect of the trouble the record biz is in: Not only are consumers buying fewer CDs; they are paying a lot less for the ones they do buy.

Martens reviews the so-called MAP program of the 1990s, which was essentially a price-fixing program the labels enforced on retail stores. Once the FTC started to look into this, the labels backed down. That opened the door for the big box retailers to start using CDs as loss leaders, which was the first, crippling shot at the foundations of the nation’s traditional record store infrastructure, and ultimately saw the closing of everything from hundreds, if not thousands, of neighborhood stores to, in the end, mighty Tower.

But it opened up the era of the $9.99 CD, with $7.99 for new releases not infrequent these days.

(The MAP program, in turn, reminds us again that the record industry’s traditional way of doing business was based on three legs of, basically, criminality: Pay radio stations to play your music, price-fix to keep prices up at retail, and then screw the artists by not paying royalties on the back end.)

You can read all of this and feel a little bit sorry for the labels, I suppose. But you have to think back to those corporations’ salad days—the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, where list prices would go up a dollar every year or two, lead by so-called superstar releases. For those big albums, the labels would jack up the wholesale price 50 cents or a dollar, on the (correct) assumption that fans desperate for the new release by their faves would swallow the increase. The came the CD era, which basically doubled the cost of albums overnight, and the vast majority of the sales coming from the catalog.

It was kinda like free money, but also kinda like crack. So when the digital era, in turn, came around, you cold hardly blame the labels for being unable to visualize a world in which they couldn’t slap an $18.98 sticker on a CD and make their customers like it.

I’ve spent part of the last few days pondering a long LAT story on the movie industry’s ever-evolving home video plans—the nexus of DVDs, Blu-ray, on demand, etc. etc.

I wanted to get all the varying strands of the plans straight in my head—Disney tinkering with DVD release windows, Netflix’s new download box, the slow growth of Blu-ray….

Then I realized something. I didn’t want to get it all straight.

I didn’t care.

The problem with every one of the plans now under way is that they are about what the studios or cable or computer companies want to do, or what’s good for them.

The solution is to give consumers something that’s good for them.

I think the papers should turn the coverage around. The stories shouldn’t be about what Fox, or Apple, or Comcast, want to do. They should be about whether what the companies are doing measures up to what people might actually want or use.

After more than a decade dealing with all of the different entities that have provided me with media—various species of cable and satellite and ISPs, Netflix and the iTunes Store, Kozmo and Hulu, and all manner of other crude on-demand and pay-per-view services—I’ve pretty much reached my limit. So I thought about what I wanted, and came up with a helpful précis of what the benchmarks should be for digital distribution of movies and TV shows:

1. I want to choose movies or TV shows to watch, when I want, from my TV screen. I want complete histories of shows (not just the most recent seasons, or part of the most recent seasons, or just some random, haphazard samples), and complete filmographies of directors and stars. (I really don’t care, by way of example, that Woody Allen didn’t make Take the Money and Run for United Artists, and it’s not part of the UA package. If I’m in the mood to watch an early Woody Allen movie, I want Take the Money and Run on the list.)
2. I want a selection system based on a large database, with accurate capsule descriptions and intelligent keywording. I want it all done on an open system to allow networking with other movie and TV fans and browsing other folks’ recommendation and reviews.
3. The database should be arranged on long pages and coded to preload, so paging through choices doesn’t involve five- or ten-second-long delays each time you hit the “next page” command.
4. The download should start immediately and shouldn’t be delayed with promotional crap, bullshit corporate logos, legal enunciations, FBI warnings, previews, or anything in French.
5. The viewing window doesn’t have to be indefinite. Let’s be reasonable. You aren’t always able to watch a given movie in one sitting. Six months—that’s reasonable. If I pay five bucks to watch a movie, I should be able to have it around for six months.
6. If I buy the movie for download, I want the DVD extras, too, all accessible as the movie is playing, so I can switch easily to the filmmakers’ commentary, for example.
7. Ixnay on the oxes-bay. (NetFlix and Apple, please take note.) I don’t want to attach another damn cord to the TV set, and I certainly don’t need another fucking remote. The studios and cable companies should agree on an open-standard cable box that will incorporate a new universal download system and not require me to use up another HDMI plug. (Many households are already juggling cable boxes, video game consoles and Blu-ray players.) Create the service, create the standards, and incorporate it into the cable box.
8. Integrate the on-demand service with cable such that it doesn’t take three minutes and the pressing of nine different buttons to stop watching a movie and check CNN for a bit. The system should be designed to be used in real-world conditions.
9. Do all of that, and then name your price. I’ll pay it.

The problem with this fantasy is that it requires all of the companies involved to play nice with a view toward making things easy on consumers. How they do it I don’t care, but it’s hard to envision the critical mass that all of the industries, collectively, need occurring if they don’t.

The papers have entered again into the credulous and wooly-headed “Spielberg Zone.” Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that St. Steven and his loyal sidekick, David Geffen, are on the verge of suckering an Indian company to bail them out of their Paramount mess and, inexplicably, set them back up in their own mini studio.

That’s not how the WSJ put it, however:

The principals of DreamWorks SKG are close to a deal with one of India’s biggest entertainment conglomerates to form a new movie venture, according to people familiar with the situation, a move that would give director Steven Spielberg the cash to finance his DreamWorks team’s departure from Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures later this year.

Mumbai-based Reliance ADA Group would provide Mr. Spielberg and company with $500 million to $600 million in equity, moving them one step closer to ending one of Hollywood’s most contentious and closely watched battles. In Reliance, the DreamWorks team also would have an unusual and ambitious partner in the film business: an Indian firm with interests in telecommunications, financial services and entertainment that wants to build a media empire by financing Hollywood pictures.

Let’s parse what exactly those sentences really mean:

The principals of DreamWorks SKG are close to a deal with one of India’s biggest entertainment conglomerates to form a new movie venture …

Steven Speilberg and David Geffen have found some suckers to bail themselves out of the sticky position they got themselves in when they sold their company to Paramount.

….. a move that would give director Steven Spielberg the cash to finance his DreamWorks team’s departure from Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures later this year. …

After unloading their failed DreamWorks movie studio on Paramount for an overpriced $1.6 billion, Spielberg and Geffen have decided they don’t like working for the man. They do still like the $1.6 billion, however, so they have to find a new sugar daddy.

… Mumbai-based Reliance ADA Group would provide Mr. Spielberg and company with $500 million to $600 million in equity, moving them one step closer to ending one of Hollywood’s most contentious and closely watched battles. …

The last time around it was Microsoft founder Paul Allen. After Paramount bought DreamWorks, the studio was under the amusing misconception that it owned DreamWorks. That upset Mr. Spielberg terribly. This time the Indian company will be funding the pair’s big dreams and tending to the delicate sensibilities of Spielberg, who will repay the favor, as he did his original investors, by making his biggest movies for other studios,

In Reliance, the DreamWorks team also would have an unusual and ambitious partner in the film business: an Indian firm with interests in telecommunications, financial services and entertainment that wants to build a media empire by financing Hollywood pictures.

Since everyone in Hollywood knows how and why Dreamworks failed, the pair have gone overseas for some less sophisticated investors who will pay a premium for some entree to Hollywood. And this time they won’t even get Jeffrey Katzenberg, who will be staying at Paramount with his fabulously successful animation studio.

———-

Previously in Hitsville:

Scary Steven Spielberg!

Yesterday (“Getting the Stones story wrong”) we saw transcontinental confusion, from London (The Observer) to San Fransisco (Wired News) about rumors that had the Rolling Stones working on a 360 deal with Live Nation.

Today, Reuters has a story saying the Stones are denying the reports. Well, sort of:

“We are not in talks with Live Nation in connection with any record deal,” London-based Rolling Stones spokesman Bernard Doherty said on Monday, reading from a brief statement.

If the denial is to be believed, the Observer was talking through its hat. The story included this assertion: “It is understood that Universal will have a role, with Live Nation licensing new versions of the [Stones’] catalogue to the American label, which would sell them online and as CDs.”

Whether the comment was designed to smooth ruffled feathers at EMI or just to keep attention focused on the band isn’t clear. A touring deal between the Stones and Live Nation will at once be more and less significant than Madonna’s or Jay-Z’s. It certainly won’t be a long-term set-up; Mick Jagger is 65, fifteen years older than Madonna, and sooner or later exhaustion or, sad to say, death is going to catch up with the band.

On the other hand, the Stones’ tour grosses are in a class by themselves; if Live Nation signed the band tomorrow just for touring (not even merchandise) and gave the group an advance equal to the gross of its last tour, that figure ($550 million) would be bigger than that of the Madonna and Jay-Z deals combined.

Meanwhile, Wired corrects itself for a mistake it didn’t make. Originally it repeated the Observer, which said the Stones had been with EMI for 31 years; Wired now says the band had only been with EMI since the conglomerate bought Virgin. But this is true only for U.S. releases; the group did have EMI distribute Rolling Stones Records for the rest of the world since the late 1970s. (My source is Old Gods Almost Dead.)

Wired doesn’t correct its figure for the group’s last tour grosses (”nearly three quarters of a billion dollars”) and displays its unfamiliarity with the concert-ticketing industry as well:

When the company’s contract with TicketMaster runs out next year, it will hopefully bring more competition to the online ticketing market, though we’re not holding our breath.

The company isn’t going to compete with Ticketmaster; it’s going to take the exorbitant and unnecessary fees the company collected for itself!

In the UK, if you’re a kid between the ages of 14 and 24, the number is about 800 tracks, and it accounts for half of your music, a new British study has found:

Teenagers and students have an average of more than 800 illegally copied songs each on their digital music players, the largest academic survey of young people’s music ownership has found.

The average digital music player carries 1,770 songs, meaning that 48 per cent of the collection is copied illegally. The proportion of illegally downloaded tracks rises to 61 per cent among 14 to 17-year-olds. In addition, 14 per cent of CDs (one in seven) in a young person’s collection are copied.

(Link via The Daily Swarm.) One would assume that British kids are less technologically attuned than U.S. ones and that the figures would be higher over here. (On the other hand, music is traditionally more expensive in Britain; will investigate broadband penetration there vs. here.)

Read further and you can see this is part of an industry push to drum up support for either subscription-based music services or a de facto tax on ISPs, to compensate the labels for the money lost to file-sharing:

British Music Rights [a UK artists group] argues that the solution partly lies in developing new legal services that make breaking copyright unappealing.

[Group capo Fergal] Sharkey [yes, that Fergal Sharkey] said: “The positive message is that 80 per cent of downloaders said they would pay for a legal subscription-based service, and they told us they would be willing to pay more than a few pounds a month.”

British Music Rights declined to release the exact amount but it is believed to be about £10 a month.

The organisation is trying to help the record companies to persuade internet service providers to sign up to a new type of music service, in which vast catalogues of songs are available for an add-on fee to a broadband package. Agreements with providers such as Virgin Media are expected in the next few weeks.

In France last week, Orange, France Telecom’s mobile arm, reached agreement with all four main record companies to provide downloads of more than a million songs to mobile phones and home computers for ¤12 (£9.40) a month.

Music sales have been falling steadily and the big companies are desperate to strike subscription-based agreements rather than rely on one-off CD and download sales.

The Observer reports, and Wired’s Listening Post blog picks up, a story that the the Rolling Stones will soon sign a 360 deal with Clear Channel Live Nation. As is typical in such stories, they are largely promotional, don’t examine the implications of the figures they are reporting, and are contradictory of other recent reportage.

From the Observer:

The Rolling Stones are on the verge of ending their 31-year relationship with EMI, dealing a blow to private equity owner Terra Firma, led by Guy Hands, which acquired the label in a £3.2bn deal last summer.

Sources say the group is close to clinching a deal with Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promotion firm, which would market its back catalogue, depriving EMI of around £3m a year. Live Nation, which last year poached Madonna from Warner, would also take highly profitable merchandising and touring rights for future Stones shows, some of which have grossed as much as £750m.

Note that the “31-year relationship” refers only to sales outside the U.S. Even by the lower standards of UK journalism, this is pretty silly. It’s unclear if the Stones will take its catalog with them; the NYT reported yesterday that “If the Stones left EMI, it would have little impact financially, because the company would still have the rights to the band’s catalog.” One of the two stories is 100 percent wrong. Also, the implication of the next sentence is that Live Nation is also taking the Stones’ touring business away from EMI, which is not true.

The Observer story says the band makes EMI three million pounds a year; Wired reports this as three million dollars a year. Fortunately, the Observer is a British news outlet, and not a Japanese one, so Wired is off only by a factor of two. Its hard to believe, however, even the Observer story is correct. If the Stones earn the company only the equivalent of $6 million (which is roughly what £3 million is) a year, that would mean (assuming, crudely, a $9 wholesale price and $3 per disc to the band) the band sells only perhaps a million CDs a year, total, around the world, which is less than I would have guessed. (I’d be happy to hear if any of those assumptions are significantly off.)

And, finally, Live Nation didn’t poach Madonna from Warner Brothers. Given her declining sales and the fact that no one yet knows if these 360 deals make financial sense, it may be just as accurate to say the company took her off Warner’s hands.

As for the Wired story, it says, “the Rolling Stones are the kings of the touring industry, with some tours grossing nearly three quarters of a billion dollars.” Only the Stones’ most recent tour, by far its biggest, grossed something over $500 million, over some three years.

It also says:

Live Nation,for its part, has already become a major force to be reckoned with. Its focus on all-encompassing, 360 degree deals means it only stands to benefit as touring threatens to unseat recording as the largest sector of the music business.

This breathless reportage is inappropriate. Live Nation, formerly Clear Channel, controls most of the U.S. concert business and has been “a force to be reckoned with” for more than a decade. It already makes a lot of money from acts like Madonna, the Stones and U2. The question, which again will only be answered as the music business continues to shake out, is whether there’s enough extra leverage to be squeezed out of the deals (i.e., some new creative ways to gouge some extra bucks out of sheeplike music fans) to make the high initial outlays worthwhile.

Since those artists make the vast part of their income from touring—and have been doing so for many decades in every case—they are not lambs coming to the benevolent concert industry for a piece of the action. Mick Jagger knows how much any Stones show will generate in ticket and mersh sales, and begins the negotiations assuming it’s all his.

The tensions this chancy strategy has evinced spilled over into the pages of the Wall Street Journal ($) last week:

Having laid out so much cash—an estimated $120 million for Madonna and $150 million for Jay-Z alone—Live Nation Chief Executive Michael Rapino has sought to slow the pace of deal making so he can ascertain that deals already struck are working before entering new ones. But the company’s chairman, concert promoter Michael Cohl, wants to quickly strike deals with as many as 15 more artists.

According to people familiar with the matter, the dispute in recent weeks boiled over into a full-blown feud, with Mr. Cohl threatening to leave Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Live Nation.

All of these characters, by the way, deserve each other. Madonna and the Stones are artistically moribund, and U2 and Jay-Z are merely superior practitioners of the art of not looking that way. If Live Nation succeeds in harvesting even more big live acts for its stable, it truly will remake the industry; the company will be able to plan tours out years in advance, carefully doling out superstar roadshows to maximize box office, reduce scheduling conflicts, and avoid clustering too many big name acts on the road at any one time.

It will be accomplished by the simple expedient of taking actual artistic creation out of the equation altogether.

I forgot to link to artist Andrew Kuo’s fanciful graphic representation of the discomforts of the modern rock festival in the Times a couple of weeks ago. Almost nothing in the entire, dense construction could be argued about by any sensible person. Why fans put up with the crazy long lines, terrible sound, weather, horrendous travel times, safety issues, and, often, lack of basic facilities is beyond me.

(I’ve had a lot of fun at festivals and all sorts of other music events with huge audiences and meager necessities. But that’s because, as a critic, I got to hang out in the comfy VIP tents. I particularly remember fondly the original Lollapaloozas, when I’d often have reserved seats in front of the stage … and access to a box high above the floor as well. When you read a review of these out-of-the-way fests that don’t mention the crowds or the difficulty of getting food and water and such, remember it’s because the critics have those tents to go back to.)

Anyway, Kuo’s work got a couple of letters in response yesterday, one in favor, one agin. From the latter, written by Steven LaKind:

Instead of offering a real understanding or opinion (except his experience as a 15-year-old), he comes off as the ultimate insular New Yorker. Someone concerned primarily about insects and rain and unaware of new bands is hardly the ideal audience member for outdoor festivals.

I feel sorry for Mr. Kuo and his ilk; they feel so urbane, hip and culturally superior when in fact they are cut off from the reality experienced by most of the rest of the world.

I don’t think Kuo, like most normal people, was concerned so much about insects and rain as paying for the privilege of interacting with them.

——
Previously in Hitsville:

The best show of the year?
The Business of Festivals
The Year of the Fest

A long, very weird story in the NYT about Guy Hands, chief of EMI, whose antics since his firm bought the fabled label have been watched with dismay in the industry. Little in the story makes one optimistic about the label’s future.

I say “weird” because it’s full of both interesting tidbits and discordant notes.

For the latter, after mentioning the Beatles, it describes the label’s artist history thusly: “Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones and Marvin Gaye have all called EMI home.” It’s fair to mention Sinatra, who was of course on Capitol, part of EMI; the Stones have been on the label since EMI took over Virgin ten or fifteen years ago, but the few albums the band released under its aegis—winners like Bridges to Babylon—aren’t very memorable. (The story also mentions the Stones’ back catalog, but of course EMI didn’t release it originally, and the Stones aren’t a particularly big catalog seller.) I don’t understand the reference to Marvin Gaye, who I thought spent his career on Motown and Columbia, at least in the U.S. You’d think a story about EMI would mention the artists that actually sold some records for it, like the Beach Boys, Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd and, I don’t know, Garth Brooks?

Anyway, some of the tidbits:

The company now wobbles under a huge debt load, a leadership vacuum—it has no chief executive and most major decisions are made by Mr. Hands—and low morale among many of its employees. Mr. Hands said about 80 percent of the $6.4 billion paid for EMI was for the music publishing unit, which owns copyrights and provides a steady flow of cash.

It is the other side of the business, recorded music, that he says he overpaid for, and could wind up selling if market conditions do not improve.

This I assume increases the likelihood that Warner and EMI will ultimately find their destiny together; indeed, later the story details some complex financial details, concluding that Citigroup, which funded Hands’ takeover, might ultimately force the long-awaited merger with Warner.

The story has even turned comical at times. After Mr. Hands discovered that some employees were laundering costs for things that were illegal (drugs and prostitutes, he said), by itemizing them on expense reports as “fruit and flowers,” he set a strict travel and entertainment policy that required receipts for every expense.

One is tempted to snicker that he was shocked, shocked to discover there was gambling in Casablanca, but this is an interesting aside. Payola is on the outs now in the industry. (The labels can’t really afford it any more.) The story doesn’t say if EMI before Hands bought it was a holdout in this area, whether the, ah, “promotional material” was for radio or retail, or whether the activity took place in the U.S. or the U.K.

Some bleak figures:

[…A]ccording to Mr. Hands, the company was doing worse than commonly thought. An analysis by McKinsey and KPMG found that EMI had lost £750 million ($1.5 billion) from selling new music over the last five years.

“We didn’t believe it at first,” he said, explaining that the figures that EMI previously reported counted sales of re-releases of music from old acts like the Beatles as new music revenue.

“They were doing everything they could to hide the fact that they were losing huge amounts of money in new music,” he said.

All of the major labels are having problems, but amid everything else, EMI’s U.S. market share has dropped nearly 20 percent, the story says. And what would an industry story be without some over-optimistic forecasts?:

[Hand’s company] projected that EMI’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization [Ebitda] would grow from £167 million ($325 million) in 2007 to £580 million ($1.1 billion) in 2010, growth that seems at odds with industry trends. (Merrill Lynch, for example, projects that the Ebitda of Warner Music will decline slightly over that time, from $461 million to $444 million.)

The Chicago Tribune takes a look back and decides the verdict came from what everyone’s been saying all week: The prosecution didn’t have a victim:

One paramount lesson to take away from the failed child pornography prosecution of R&B star R. Kelly is this: It’s hard to win a conviction when the alleged victim not only denies it but also doesn’t show up in court.

“Child exploitation cases are usually difficult to defend,” said Paul DerOhannesian, a New York lawyer who is an expert on criminal cases involving the sexual assault of children. “But the lack of a [complaining] victim here was a major weakness that drained the case of emotion.”

There’s another thread here as well:

[…] Kelly’s gold-plated defense team had the resources and skill to put off the trial for years, and legal analysts say that delay may have sapped the potential to provoke juror outrage.

“Time was his friend,” said Andrea Zopp, the former Cook County prosecutor….

It was thought, in the Tribune as elsewhere, that the extraordinary six-year delay in the case was due to the trouble the state had in coming up with something to base the case on, absent the girl they thought was on the tape, who as the story said not only wouldn’t testify, but told police and a grand jury that it wasn’t she.*

It seems that in the end the state’s strategy was to base the case on the production of child porn, rather than statutory rape, which in a way took the victim out of it. You have to give Cook County credit: The case ultimately included a friend of both Kelly’s and the girl’s who could testify to having had three-way sex with the pair—and having been filmed doing it. But that gambit, obviously, didn’t work.

Meanwhile, the Sun-Times goes back to canvas the reactions of some of the witnesses at the trial—particularly those who were friends of the girl in question and ID’ed her in court:

Tjada Burnett, a family friend of the alleged victim who also testified against Kelly, said she “can’t understand” the verdict.

Burnett said she had spoken Friday night with Sparkle, the alleged victim’s aunt who introduced her to Kelly when she was just 12.

Sparkle “was very, very upset,” Burnett said.

Bennie Edwards Sr., the alleged victim’s uncle, who also testified for the state, described Kelly’s acquittal as “B.S.”

“How can the jury let a pedophile go like that?” he asked.

Though he too is estranged from his niece, he said: “She’s gotta be hurting right now.”

Kelly, he predicted, will “get what he’s got coming.”

————-

* Based on the testimony of other people at the trial, the chances are good that the woman was lying to the police and perjuring herself before the grand jury, and that the three relatives of hers who testified at the trial committed perjury as well.

Something I just noticed while looking something up in the original Sun-Times stories about Kelly’s predilections, emphasis added:

The girl in the video, now 17, was identified by her aunt, who said that her niece would have been 14 at the time the tape was made, based on her appearance. Kelly can also be heard on the tape referring to the girl by her first name.

————

Previously in Hitsville:

The verdict: Jim DeRogatis’s take
Post-morteming the R. Kelly case
Who you gonna believe: Your own eyes or R. Kelly’s defense team?

The world’s weirdest defense summation

Everything you need to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly Sexfacts™ IV: The Quantum of Solace! The complete prosecution case!

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™, Parts I, II & III—Every barfy thing you ever wanted to know about the origins of the R. Kelly case

Targeting Jim DeRogatis—literally

More on L’affaire DeRogatis

The DeRogatis ruling

Bad craziness at the R. Kelly trial?

At the R. Kelly trial, they do things they don’t do on Broadway!

Ever hear the one about the guy convicted of murdering his parents who asked for mercy because he was a orphan?

The NYT and R. Kelly: Curiouser and curiouser

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

From the big NYT profile of My Morning Jacket in Sunday’s paper:

[…W]hile many acts have turned to Madison Avenue for ancillary income, My Morning Jacket has remained ambivalent about using its music for advertising. Four years ago its song “Mahgeetah” was used in a beer commercial, but the group says that it gave away some of its earnings to charity and hasn’t done a commercial deal since. Its manager, Mike Martinovich, said the band has not ruled out these opportunities but that they conflict with a wish to hold onto a sense of mystery in its music.

“When you license a song to a commercial,” Mr. Martinovich said, “you run the risk of limiting the meanings the song can have to your audience. If an artist wants to preserve a listener’s ability to have a personal interpretation of a lyric, he may have to forgo the financial gain associated with a commercial license.”

I find the financial condition of artists endlessly fascinating. From a small item in the WSJ ($):

The longtime ski retreat of singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg, after three years on and off the market, is in contract.

Mr. Fogelberg, who died in December at age 56 after a prolonged bout with prostate cancer, first listed the 610-acre ranch in 2005 for $17.5 million. Its most recent asking price was $15 million. The planned purchase price couldn’t be learned. Mr. Fogelberg, who rose to fame during the 1970s, custom-built the estate, in Pagosa Springs, Colo., near the Wolf Creek Ski area.

Emphasis added. Fogelberg wasn’t a minor, star, really; he had a half-dozen platinum albums in the 1970s and 1980s. I’m sure he had a long second career as a perennial on soft-rock radio, and having been college roommates with supermanager Irving Azoff couldn’t have hurt his income. Still, the fact that a second-tier star like him had a second or third house worth that sort of money point out the sort of comfort even a temporary celebrity can afford.

See also: The Kravitz Perplex.

The Chicago Sun-Times reporter, whose reporting kicked off the R. Kelly scandals nearly eight years ago, gives his impression in the paper:

The 41-year-old artist proudly described himself as “the World’s Greatest,” a “Sexual Super Freak” and “the Pied Piper of R&B”—perhaps oblivious to the fact that the Pied Piper of medieval legend led 130 boys and girls from a German village to their doom. Yet despite his acquittal Friday on 14 counts of making child pornography, it remains difficult to dismiss his lyrics and his boasting in the media as mere hyperbole.The prosecution chose to pursue a very narrow case against the superstar, solely concentrating on a 26-minute, 39-second tape anonymously sent to the Chicago Sun-Times in February 2002. But as the paper first reported in December 2000, for more than a decade, public records and lawsuits allege that Kelly abused his staggering wealth and fame to pursue sexual relationships with underage girls, many of whom were left deeply wounded by those encounters.

The voices of those girls were never heard in Judge Vincent Gaughan’s courtroom. But they include:

• The late Aaliyah D. Haughton, Kelly’s celebrated 15-year-old protege, whom he illegally married in 1994 shortly after producing the debut album he titled “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number.” (The marriage was annulled, and Kelly paid Aaliyah a token sum in a settlement.)

• Tiffany H[.]*, who sued Kelly claiming that he began having sex with her when she was 15 after he picked her while visiting her choir class at his alma mater, Kenwood Academy. (Kelly settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.)

• Tracy S[.], a former intern at Epic Records who sued Kelly claiming that she lost her virginity to him at age 17. (Kelly settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.)

• Patrice J[.], a Chicago woman who sued Kelly alleging that they began having sex after he met her at the Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s following her high school’s senior prom. (Kelly settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.)

• And Montina W[.], a legal-age dancer who sued Kelly claiming that he videotaped her without her knowledge while they were having sex. (Kelly settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.)

And these are just the main on-the-record, names-attached cases we know about. (There is photographic evidence of two more, but the girls in them have never been identified.)

DeRogatis’s piece is a reminder of the second-saddest thing about the verdict. (The first is that Kelly’s back on the streets a smarter and wiser sexual predator, presumably with the minor object lesson learned that he merely probably shouldn’t film himself urinating on under-aged girls.)

The second saddest is that he’s now an acquitted sexual predator and will be referred to that way by a press that has already spent nearly eight years downplaying the acts he’s been accused of. A year before the tape came to light DeRogatis and his reporting partner, Abdon Pallasch, had crafted a convincing portrait of Kelly’s activities in that realm.

The acts in that story will now fade as Kelly takes a what will certainly be a victory lap of media interviews, no doubt with pliable folks who won’t press Kelly for explanations.

————-

* Hitsville sees no reason to print the women’s full names.

Josh Levin, who spent two weeks over the trial for Slate, offers his thoughts here:

[…I]n the end, [prosecutors] were undone by what they didn’t have. Even without a cooperative victim, the state’s attorneys might have swayed the jury if Judge Vincent Gaughan had allowed them to present evidence of Kelly’s past transgressions, like the four known settlements he’s paid to underage girls who’ve accused him of sexual misconduct. Once you know all of that stuff, it’s somewhat hard to imagine that R. Kelly didn’t tape himself having sex with an underage girl. If, like the jury, you don’t know the singer’s history, there’s a lot more room for doubt.

The Sun-Times, in its latest update on the acquittal, has a new take on the verdict:

In a dramatic verdict that appeared to stun even his own highly-paid lawyers, the 41-year-old R&B star was cleared of all 14 counts of child pornography.

“Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus,” Kelly whispered as each not guilty verdict was read.

[…]The relatively short deliberations after four weeks of testimony led many to believe Kelly would be convicted. Moments before the verdict was announced, the star’s downcast attorney Sam Adam Jr. turned to Kelly, shaking his hand and somberly telling him, “We did everything we could.”

But an overcome Kelly dropped his head and began sobbing as the first “not guilty” was read shortly after 2 p.m. Friday, keeping it bowed for several minutes as he was cleared on each of the remaining counts.

Sitting next to him, Adam exclaimed “Yes!,” dropping his jaw in shock and hugging Kelly, who dabbed the tears streaming down his face with a baby blue handkerchief.

From the Chicago Tribune:

“All of us felt the grayness of the case,” said one white male juror.Most thought it was probably R. Kelly in the video, said one 54-year-old male black juror. Many thought the girl in the video was underage. But there remained a doubt that she was the victim alleged by prosecutors, the juror said.

The jury spent time looking at facial profiles, still shots and comparing them to the alleged victim’s face. And the young woman’s silence all but ruled out a guilty verdict, the juror said.

“The victim didn’t show up,” he said. “Her parents didn’t. The family that did was split.”

From the Sun-Times:

The jurors, who deliberated for about three hours Thursday and part of today before reaching their verdict, said the closest they came to finding Kelly guilty was a seven to five vote to acquit before a final 12-0 tally.

Jurors who spoke to the media at the Cook County courthouse at 26th and California after today’s verdict said that no juror caved just because they were tired of being sequestered and wanted to go home.

“All of us wanted to go home, but we knew — like the judge said the first day — we had to do our duty,” said one female juror, who declined to be identified by name.

One juror who initially voted to convict R. Kelly said he was convinced the man seen on a sex tape, which prosecutors said was Kelly with his underage goddaughter, was indeed Kelly. But after discussions about the defense arguments that prosecutors had not proven the girl’s identity, the juror decided that prosecutors had not proven Kelly’s guilt in the child porn case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Reporters told the jurors some details the jurors were not allowed to hear in court — that Kelly had married aspiring actress Aaliyah Haughton when she was 15 years old; that three girls had filed lawsuits against him claiming he lured them into sexual relationships when they were underage; and that other girls had threatened similar suits but settled out of court.

Asked by reporters if that evidence would have changed their minds, one male juror said “I would have had to work harder [to vote for acquittal].’’

Added a female juror, “If they had presented it, who knows what we would have done.’’

I’ve noted before how the Tribune’s handling of its R. Kelly coverage is pretty lame:

Incidentally, the Tribune’s odd handling of its R. Kelly stories continues. Where the Sun-Times has always had an R. Kelly main page on the web on which you could access all of the paper’s voluminous R. Kelly coverage, the Tribune’s promotion of this valuable archive online has been spotty. (Valuable to the paper I mean; it’s the logical place for folks around the world to find comprehensive coverage of the trial.) You need to find an actual R. Kelly story, and then try to navigate the (non-chronological) list of stories to the left to get up to speed. If there’s a home page for the paper’s Kelly coverage I’ve never been able to find it.

Now, it seems, some of the early stories in the case have disappeared, apparently because the Trib removes two-week-old stories and sticks them in a (for pay) archive. The Trib had an early deal with AOL and I’ve always thought it was an operation with sophisticated web folks around.

Is it possible, in 2008, that the paper’s web people don’t notice stories drawing increased attention and get to work maximizing the interest? What kind of numbskulls start taking down their on-the-scene coverage of a local story of international interest? Sam Zell know about this?

Now, check out this screen shot of the paper’s acquittal story. (It encompasses the entire screen on my laptop; I had to lower the type size just to get a shot that included story text.) In its desperation to monetize, the paper’s web site fills the window with Google ads. The subject of most of them are funny, but besides that it’s not really a very reader-friendly way of doing things:

Since the jury deliberated less than a full day it’s plain the prosecution couldn’t make its case. And as Hitsville said all along, you can’t go wrong betting that the rich guy gets off.

Still, from reading the local accounts of the defense’s case—and particularly its closing arguments, in which the main Kelly attorney thundered to the jury that convicting Kelly would be calling the poor girl in the video “a whore”—you had the overwhelming sense of a Keystone Kops operation.

This impression turned out not be accurate.

(Story links as they come up will be posted below. In the meantime, I’ll keep adding to analysis.)

The most devastating thing about the verdict seems to have been its quickness. Assuming that there was method to the Kelly defense’s madness, it seems as though they were not pursuing a hung jury, and appealing to the one or two craziest people empaneled. Rather, it seems to have been the equivalent of a “fifty state strategy,” and running the table by attacking every bit of the prosecution’s case.

Indeed, the Trib is now reporting that the initial juror vote was lopsided:

The initial vote after the case went to the jury was 10-2 in favor of acquittal. Subsequent votes during “heated but civil” deliberations moved back and forth, but never very far. A white female juror said the jurors shared opinions, but never saw anything conclusive.

“And at some point we said there was a lack of evidence,” the woman said. “There was nothing concrete enough to say it was him or her on that tape.”

From the outside, it all seemed preposterous. But, in the end, inside the jury room, we have to assume, there was simply not a significant core of people arguing that Kelly was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

From the coverage available to most of us, it seems the most likely weak link was the age of the girl; it could be the jury accepted that the man was Kelly but that doubt existed about the girl, particularly since the defense produced three people that swore it wasn’t she.

Kelly now is free to go back to his old lifestyle, barring Cook County’s finding the girl who was on one of the other Kelly sex tapes floating around who hasn’t been identified yet. As Hitsville has noted before, there have been reports of at least five bits of film floating around that purportedly show Kelly and various young girls having sex.

The piquant reaction USA Today found from the “entertainment director” of Essence magazine Kelly’s prosecution is just another example of how the focus of the scandal on Kelly, rather than on the large number of young girls he’s been accused of molesting, has worked to the singer’s benefit. Here’s Kelefa Sanneh, in the NYT, writing about Kelly two years ago:

Mr. Kelly, the legendarily freaky R&B star, long ago established himself as one of the greatest singer-songwriters of his generation. The sex scandal that threatened to derail his career in 2002 ended up doing the opposite: it made him more productive, more successful and, somehow—maybe because more people began paying attention to his excellent music—more respected than ever before.

______________

This guy has it down.

The Sun-Times’ story is now up:

As the first “not guilty” was read, R. Kelly dipped his head and kept it bowed during the entire reading of the 14-count verdict.

When the reading was completed, he dabbed his face with a baby blue handkerchief from his pocket as tears streamed down his face.

He then bear-hugged defense attorneys Sam Adam Jr. and Ed Genson.

More:

R. Kelly left courthouse to a huge roar from about 75 supporters.

“I love him!” one woman shouted. “I love him! Get that on camera!”

He did not comment to reporters.

A scene from the S-T’s always updating story. Note the subtle decision not to alter the speakers’ speaking style:

Outside the courthouse, Chicago’s Leshi Agee, 25, shouted, “We love you!” to the singer, then said “He looks so good. Bye, baby.”

Agee, who came with her three children between the ages of 10 months and five years, said, “I knew he ain’t done it because he ain’t that type of person. They was hating on him. He proved everybody wrong.”

Fourteen-year-old Kewan Mackey said, “I knew he ain’t do it. I knew he was going to win. Money makes the world go around.”

The Chicago Tribune:

“R Kelly was found not guilty because they had the best jury that Cook County could produce,” said Kelly’s attorney Sam Adam Jr. “Two things happened today. R. Kelly got his name back and [his goddaughter] never had to lose hers,” Adam said.

More:

As the verdicts kept coming in, each count not guilty, Adam said he heard Kelly saying “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.”

Kelly left the courtroom surrounded by his entourage, who kept reporters away from the singer and escorted him to a waiting sport-utility vehicle as some 50 supporters cheered him. Though Kelly did not speak to reporters, he did salute and wave to fans.

Allan Mayer, a Kelly spokesman, said, “Robert has asked me to speak on his behalf for now. Robert has said all along that he believes in our system, and he believes in God. And that when all the facts came out in court, he’d be cleared of these terrible charges.

“He did not expect that it would take 6 ½ years. It’s been a terrible ordeal for him and his family, and at this point all he wants to do is move forward and try to put it behind him. He wants to thank his lawyers who defended him so brilliantly. He wants to thank his fans who stuck by him and supported him with such love.

The Daily Swarm, earlier today before the verdict, had noted this oddly dispassionate analysis of the situation from a couple of industry people quoted in USA Today:

The trial “really hasn’t had an adverse affect so far,” says Chuck Creekmur, CEO of the news site allhiphop.com. “At first, I thought the accusations would be a death knell for his career, but it goes to show just how loyal some fans can be.”

Those fans are torn between giving him the benefit of the doubt and being turned off by the nature of the charges, says Cori Murray, entertainment director of Essence magazine.

“A lot of people feel he shouldn’t be judged,” Murray says. “There’s a feeling in the (African-American) community that we don’t like to air our dirty laundry, that black men in general are persecuted.”

A guilty verdict wouldn’t necessarily damage Kelly’s reputation. “An actual conviction won’t change people’s opinions,” Creekmur says. “In the court of public opinion, he’s already guilty or innocent.”

Kelly’s music output could continue at the same pace, too. “You see it a lot in hip-hop,” Creekmur says. “Somebody gets accused, and they record a ton of product so that things can keep coming out even when they’re locked up.

“R. Kelly has shown that work ethic and seems to have a Midas touch. He would probably move units even from jail.”

———–

Earlier in Hitsville:

The world’s weirdest defense summation

Everything you need to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly Sexfacts™ IV: The Quantum of Solace! The complete prosecution case!

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™, Parts I, II & III—Every barfy thing you ever wanted to know about the origins of the R. Kelly case

Targeting Jim DeRogatis—literally

More on L’affaire DeRogatis

The DeRogatis ruling

Bad craziness at the R. Kelly trial?

At the R. Kelly trial, they do things they don’t do on Broadway!

Ever hear the one about the guy convicted of murdering his parents who asked for mercy because he was a orphan?

The NYT and R. Kelly: Curiouser and curiouser

The NYT finally notices R. Kelly isn’t a nice guy

R. Kelly and the NYT: The Freaky Defense

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

The jury deliberated less than a day and acquitted him on all counts.

Story from a local Chicago TV station here:

R. Kelly has been found not guilty of child pornography on accusations that he appeared on a videotape having sex with a girl as young as 13.

The jury read the verdict shortly after 2 p.m. They found the R&B superstar not guilty of all 14 counts.

Impacting … , as Drudge would say!

Yesterday, the RIAA withdrew one of its many cases against legal file sharers, instead of facing the potential of getting its little legal nose spanked on the “making available” issue in front of a pesky judge. (This is the state of affairs where it can get file-sharing judgments against people without actually showing that they, you know shared files—that they just made files available.)

Details on that case, Warner vs. Cassin, here.

Today, the organization refiled the same suit against the same family, without telling the new judge it had withdrawn the old one.

Details at Ray Beckerman’s intrepid Recording Industry vs. the People blog.

One aspect of the R. Kelly case not often noted is the fact that the man in the sex tape at the center of the case gives the girl in the tape cash before they have sex. (And before he urinates on her.) I don’t know whether the act was quote-unquote authentic or part of the ritual of the taping.

The moment suddenly became high profile in the closing arguments of the case today. Here’s the Chicago Sun-Times on the defense side:

Speaking after prosecutors had showed the jury the notorious sex tape at the center of the case one last time, defense attorney Sam Adam Jr said that the girl on the tape had accepted cash before performing a series of sex acts.

Showing the jury a studio photograph of the alleged victim on a large screen, he then told them that if they were going to find Kelly guilty of 14 counts of child pornography, “you are going to have to call (the alleged victim) 14 times individually and collectively a whore.”

Barely audible, he whispered, “My momma told me when we were kids, ‘if you ain’t got something nice to say about someone, don’t say it about her.”

He concluded his argument saying, “How are you 14 times going to call her a whore?”

Ordinarily, you’d assume the defense in a case like this would base the closing arguments on a very close reading of the mood of the jury. In this case, either the jury has been assessed as being deranged, or Kelly is not getting the defense he might have.  You assume the judge is going to give the jury instructions (or, at this point, has given the jury instructions; it has already begun deliberations) that ask, essentially, whether the man is R. Kelly and if the girl is, or was, under-aged.

It’s hard to see how focusing on yet another aspect of the poor thing’s degradation is going to help the defense in the jury room.

The Chicago Tribune has even weirder details. The paper says the attorney made a different argument, too, to wit:

Wouldn’t a 13-year-old girl blab to her friends about having sex with a star like Kelly?:

“She is a 13 year-old-girl having raunchy, dirty, nasty sex …with a superstar who’s won Grammy Awards and she tells no one?” Adam said. “You couldn’t keep a 13-year-old girl’s mouth quiet about having Hannah Montana tickets.”

Here again, what’s the purpose of speaking like this in terms of influencing the jury? Wouldn’t any 13 year old know that she wasn’t supposed to be having any sex at all, much less “raunchy, dirty, nasty sex”? What’s she supposed to say—”R. Kelly urinated on me last night?”