Jimmy Guterman’s Jewels and Binoculars

Over the weekend, Nat posted “Artistic License 2.0 and … REM?!” which noted that the veteran rock’n'roll band was releasing its new video under an open license (if not in an open format). It’s good to see an old band learn a new trick, and it suggests what those in the music industry might do if they want to have a future in it.

In “A rare post about the music industry that isn’t completely depressing,” I looked at Jill Sobule’s attempt to fund her next record via online contributions. It’s a savvy attempt that seems to be succeeding: she’s more than two-thirds on her way to meeting her not-so-modest recording budget. A performer like Sobule (and, as we’ll see shortly, R.E.M.) comes to alternate ways of funding or promoting new music with baggage — unlike younger performers, like Yael Naim, who can get lucky thanks to novelty (see “Steve Jobs rules the recording industry. Now what?”) These performers are experimenting with new ways to get heard because the old ways weren’t working. Prince, to cite one high-profile example, wouldn’t have started distributing his records via concert add-ons or newspaper inserts if the old distribution methods were still working for him.

R.E.M. can still be a thrilling band live, but its commercial heyday was long ago — back when the U.S. president was Ronald Reagan, in fact — and even diehard fans acknowledge that the trio’s recorded work has limped since the band’s original drummer, Bill Berry, left 11 years ago. The band’s decision to distribute the “Supernatural Superserious” video is, at its heart, an attempt to create buzz for the record. That’s something the band has been trying for months, in particular its attempt to hype the relatively rocking nature of the new record, after a number of ballad-heavy snoozefests.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Commercial desperation can lead to innovation, both in terms of the art itself and the art with which you sell it. Everyone is eulogizing the death of the traditional rock’n'roll business, but the successful old rockers are still successful. Bruce Springsteen is selling out arenas and will move up to stadiums in the summer. Tom Petty’s Super Bowl halftime gig — timed right before his summer tour tickets went on sale — rejuvenated his record sales. And the hoary hard-rock band Aerosmith has turned to a new installment in a successful videogame franchise to keep up its profile. Even when radio and even video outlets have turned cool to these performers, there’s still an audience waiting to hear, see, or play with them. The lack of traditional intermediaries does not mean there’s a lack of audience.

Having emerged from the early-’80s Amerindie movement, an assemblage of rock’n'roll bands with a combination of optimism and hardheadedness that mirrored the very best of the open source movement, R.E.M. knows it can’t compete with what’s at the top of the charts. It’s unlikely that fans of the current flavors — Miley Cyrus, Flo Rida, or T-Pain — will be moved by R.E.M.’s music. But the band isn’t ready to rent its songs to Madison Avenue or diverge from the aesthetic that made them stars. If you can’t play on an even field, change the field. Just as open source projects reached critical mass by serving areas the proprietary vendors were ignoring or giving short shrift, the Amerindie bands — in love with punk’s sense of possibility — provided an alternative to the mainstream. Now, the thinking goes, we can’t get people to find out about our new record the usual ways, we have to find new ways. The future, as always, belongs to the clever.

(A slightly different version of this was posted earlier today on the O’Reilly Radar.)

Last night’s Grammy Awards ceremonies were even less relevant than usual, no small achievement. The TV broadcast began with a “performance” by that cutting-edge new artist Frank Sinatra and fell down from there. The only real emotional charge of an evening celebrating the most emotional of media came when we viewers were confronted with the disparity between the preternatural confidence of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” and the shaky, shell-shocked manner in which Winehouse accepted her award for it. Alpha geeks had a moment to celebrate, too, when one of the winners behind Historical Album of the Year (Woody Guthrie’s Live Wire) turned out to be a mathematician.

But, those and few other brief moments notwithstanding, the action in the music industry is elsewhere.

One of those places is Apple’s iTunes online music store. For several days last week, the top-selling track on the store was Yael Naim’s “New Soul,” a song available, at least to U.S. audiences, exclusively via iTunes. The exclusivity isn’t a big deal — the store is powerful enough to offer plenty of high-profile exclusives — but the reason “New Soul” became a hit is a big deal. “New Soul” was a hit solely because it appeared in Apple’s commercial for the MacBook Air. Until the 1980s, record companies looked to radio to break new artists. Until five years ago, the place to launch new performers was music video. For most of this decade, the breakdown of traditional music channels has led to new songs being noticed via video games, television shows, and — most of all — commercials. Whoever is programming the music for Apple’s television commercials may be, right now, the most powerful talent scout in the record industry.

How did Apple gain all this power? The record companies, desperate, vain, and stupid, handed it over. As Michael Hirschorn wrote in the March Atlantic (I’d link to his terrific essay, but the venerable Atlantic tends to get around to uploading new articles to its website weeks after they appear in print), “Steve Jobs shanghaied and basically destroyed the CD business. The major record labels, in giving Apple’s iTunes the right to sell individual songs for 99 cents each, undermind their own business model — selling bundles of songs gathered together into something called an album for up to $20 a pop — because they didn’t see that people were about to consumer music in an entirely new way. The labels saw iTunes as free money; ‘ancillary,’ in the legal vernacular. Jobs took their cheap music and used it as a loss leader to sell his expensive iPods, and the traditional music business now lies in tatters.” The punch line, of course, is that the record industry is trying to shut out Apple by selling music online elsewhere such as Amazon — for a mere 89 cents per cut.

I’ve written before here about clever ways to sell music nowadays. Like the performers I celebrated in that post, record companies have to adopt new ways of packaging and selling if they want to stay in business. Just as twin geniuses Sam Phillips and Ahmet Ertegun reinvented the record industry in the 1950s, we need a new generation of tech-savvy entrepreneurs who accept that recorded music consumed in $20 increments — except for that created by a small subset of veteran performers with large and reliable fan bases — is a dead notion for now. Music is everywhere, just as software is everywhere. We’ve seen an explosion of new models in recent years for selling software — web-based, software as a service, various levels of open source, and so on — some of which have been quite successful. Software may be useful, but for the most part it doesn’t satisfy the emotional need that music does. It should be easy to sell music, certainly easier than it is to sell software. The music industry has much to learn from the computer software industry about reinvention and staying in touch with the customer. (In future posts, I’ll probe what the music biz can learn from the software biz.) If what remains of the music industry doesn’t look to successful technology industries for ideas, it’ll be as lifeless as the Frank Sinatra half of last night’s Grammy “duet.”

This post was written for O’Reilly Radar