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| Rockin' the Retirement Home January 31st, 2006 -- Annie and I went to Barnes and Noble the other night, and we eventually wandered over into the CD section, primarily to listen to CDs that we definitely wouldn't buy there since, according to my math, $19.98 is more than $1.42. Anyway, I was listening through some of the new CDs hanging around one of the headphone listening station dealies, and I thought "wow, all of these CDs are really good." And then I looked back at the CDs I had just listened to -- Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond, and Paul McCartney, and up on the wall it said "New CDs from Classic Artists". Oh, so no wonder I hadn't heard of any of these new albums or heard any of the songs on the radio. Those guys are old, so everything they do, by definition, must suck, and we have to make room on the radio waves for the new Ashlee Simpson or Hillary Duff song. What a sad state of affairs. But I blame the musicians more than anything else. There's no reason for musicians to get lazy and not release an original album for five years (Diamond and Clapton), nine years (McCartney), or eight years (The Beastie Boys. Lazy jerks). But they're better than most. Most musicians who make it big coast on their old fame for the rest of their lives, and never release anything else. When the Sex Pistols got back together for their reunion tour a few years ago, not only did they not release a new album, they didn't even bother to come up with one new song. So, what's the deal? Throughout history, you've had both sides represented. Haydn, Beethoven, Vaughan Williams, Tchaikovsky, and many others composed until they died, but you also have the occasional Rossini (the guy who wrote the Lone Ranger theme song and a bunch of things you would recognize from Bugs Bunny) quit an incredibly successful music career when he was forty in order to eat a lot. But, on balance, great composers write throughout their lives, many times getting better and better, sometimes getting more experimental, and occasionally they get worse. But very few just stop for no reason and only come back to retread some of their hits from yesteryear whenever PBS is having pledge week. Part of that might be because there was no RIAA back then, and you could count on your sheet music being pirated as soon as you produced it, and you would only get a fraction of the money that your music actually earned, so you were forced to keep writing new music for your patrons. But, I have to think that at least part of it is the fact that record companies really don't care if old people make music anymore, even if they're good at it. I don't know exactly why this is, but I bet it's at least partially the same reason why young people end up working at McDonald's. They just don't know how crappy of a job it is and they can be fully taken advantage of by a more experienced employer. Old people know that it's not fun to tour for forty weeks in a year, or to sign a contract where you will only make money if your album sells 500,000 copies, otherwise you owe the record company money. They know that earning fifty cents per $19 CD doesn't really adequately represent the effort and importance of their contributions artistically to that album, and that making a fool out of yourself for promotional purposes really, in the end, isn't that fun. *********************** In Wind-Ups news, we're working on finally integrating the whole guitar techno thing into the live act. It should be cool. Just wait. Have a great week, folks, Keith Update -- Cliff sent me this:  Ha ha. |
| Human Worth January 24th, 2006 -- Okay, I'm delving into non-music land, a land that has, in the past, caused me some trouble. Humor me, though. What is the best way to define a human's worth? I've come to realize that I value a person almost solely by how intelligent he/she is. It doesn't matter to me so much if he is conservative or liberal, atheist or theist, gay or straight, or comes from a nuclear family or a broken home. But, if he's intelligent, I think he's pretty cool. I've started to realize that this is really a form of bigotry. Hear me out. I think smart people are cool because they're inventive, interesting, creative, funny, productive, and responsible. I don't like dumb people because I think they tend to be the opposite of all of those things. If that doesn't sound bigoted to you, then there's a pretty good chance that you are a like-minded bigot. Just imagine if I said that White/Black/Chinese/Hispanic/Laotian/Elfin/etc. people are uninventive, dull, uncreative, unfunny, unproductive, and irresponsible. You would feel pretty comfortable calling me a bigot. Why is that? Why is intelligence still in-bounds when it comes to hatred? Is it because race is inherently genetic and uncontrollable by the person, therefore it's like making fun of a kid with three eyes? The main way people deal with this bigotry is not to find other ways that people of lower intelligence are valuable to society, but to pretend that everyone is equally intelligent, and that their intelligence just isn't made manifest because of differences in family wealth, or education, or oppression by The Man, etc. So, the popular solution seems to be that if you give everyone a free education, or stress multiculturalism, or bigger welfare checks, that the disparities will disappear because everyone is supposedly equally intelligent. But think about it. Do you really believe that intelligence isn't largely a genetic condition? I think this comes across in business as well. Intelligent people will always be able to outsmart less intelligent people. So, if someone is smart enough to set up a successful business and find employees who don't see their true worth to the company, does that give the smart person the right to "buy" the unintelligent people's labor at a lower than fair price? I don't think it is. I've worked blue collar jobs and white collar jobs, and I can say for absolute certain that blue collar jobs are harder. Yes, white collar jobs can be stressful and tiring, but they don't even compare to the stress of a blue collar job. That's why most people, if they have the choice, work white collar jobs. So, if it's an easier job, why do the blue collars get paid so much less? If it's because of education, what if the blue collars just aren't intelligent enough to get a good education? Does that mean they deserve to live at a lower standard of living? So, what should we do? I don't know. I'm a libertarian at heart, largely because I think the government is unbelievably incompetent, so I don't go for wealth redistribution programs. I think the simpler and more effective solution is that people just need to be decent to eachother. If you're an employer and you have employees who work hard for you, show up every day, do their jobs, but don't have the intelligence it takes for them to make it higher up the ladder, then you should reward them by making sure they don't have to live in squalor. It's easy for me to preach to them, of course, because I don't have any employees, but I've worked on jobs where the boss of a reasonably small company lives in a multi-million dollar mansion while his employees live in nasty trailer parks, and their wives have to work equally bad full-time jobs and they still have to be on medicaid and food stamps. That's just wrong. Gladly, in my experience, that's been the exception, because even dumb people know a better job when they see it, and they tend to migrate to those better jobs while the worse employers get worse employees, the ones who don't show up to work and who steal from the company. When it comes to labor, you get what you pay for. ****************** Wow, from introspective criticism to a diatribe on the evils of social injustive, all in a few short paragraphs! It's like a roller coaster ride, except not fun. Well, like a roller coaster ride, then. I set up a little RSS dealy, and if you're using Firefox there should be one of those little things like this in the lower right-hand corner of your browser. You can use it to set up a live bookmark to see when I've posted something new, if "every Tuesday" is too hard for you to remember. If you use some other method to read RSSes, here's the url. I finished my new little invention that allows me do the toggle switch techno thing without the toggle switch. Now I guess it will have to be guitar button techno, or something. It's pretty cool. Now I have to patent it, start a company, and become filthy rich, so I can oppress my own tribe of ill-tempered employees. That would be great. I've also added a little comments thing, so please do. Whoever does so today will be the first ever to leave a comment, so let the races begin! Keith |
| Advertisement January 17th, 2006 -- The band game is really, most of the time, the art of letting people know about you without being too pushy or fake-seeming. I just got our first request to be someone's friend on myspace via our laughable and intentionally terrible myspace page this morning, and I wondered how (1) anyone could find our page and (2) why someone, upon reading our page would say "I want to be those people's friends." I wondered the same thing, so I looked at their page and saw that they have over 9,000 myspace friends. Now, I still don't quite understand myspace, mostly because I hate it and don't want to visit a myspace page anymore than I have to, but becoming someone's "friend" basically means that you can add comments to their page and whore yourself out to the people that visit that page. Who visits those pages? Other bands, of course. Most likely from places that are nowhere near you. So, it's an incredibly effective way to get a large group of dedicated local fans who aren't visiting your page just to plug their own crappy bands. Did I say "effective"? Sorry, I meant "mind-warpingly, soul-crushingly sad". I'm new to the whole networking game, but I talked to a guy this past week who is a successful working Nashville musician who tours all over the Southeast and has won a number of awards. Scott, our new booking agent (oh yeah, we have a booking agent now), asked him what the best way to get gigs was. He said "do you know what the difference between butt-kissing and brown-nosing is?" Scott said "no, what?" He said "depth perception." I thought "I don't get it", but I said "HA HA HA HA HA!!!!" (I'm a quick learner.) And so it begins. I've always kind of retreated to "I'm an artist" when facing the real world, when trying to avoid doing the things you have to do in real life in order to be successful, but I'm starting to realize that it's an illegitimate line of thinking. I didn't want to get a job in high school because I was too busy practicing the trombone, and because I thought I'd be some kind of sellout if I worked for someone. Again, I was in high school and didn't really think about the, well, I just didn't think too much in high school. Again and again I've kind of retreated to this idea that if you have to work to be successful in music, then you must not be very talented. Maybe that's true to an extent, but I'm starting to see that being a good businessman really goes hand-in-hand with being a successful musician. Good musicians who are good businessmen end up being very successful, while good musicians who are bad businessmen end up getting taken advantage of someone who is a better businessman. But, sometimes I wish that I was more of a "musician factory worker", like I could just show up for work every day, have someone else tell me what to do, I do it, and I collect my paycheck at the end of the week. I could just be a mindless drone, and I wouldn't have to worry about being creative, being innovative, doing the hard work of rehearsing and perfecting what we do, and I could just sit back, let the notes go by, and play in rhythm with my other drones. But hey, I got out of the classical music world for a reason (ha ha, a big "sorry" to all of my classical homies out there. I know we's all just squirrels, tryin' to get a nut. Ya dig, yo?) Keith |
| Ready for the Big Dance January 10th, 2006 -- Alright, we've finally declared ourselves officially gig-ready. I have the stamp from the Notary Public emblazoned right on my forehead. Most people would have seen us as stageworthy a good six months ago, but not us. We are merciless critics, and we've devised a show that is creative, enticing, and more than a little harrowing. We have twelve songs at a playable level, with some more in the cooker. It's over an hour's worth of material, and it includes songs that cross genres, defy genres, and generally make genres ill-tempered and unpleasant to be in a car alone with. It's going to be big. If you look around the website, you'll see a few new additions, and some new subtractions. First, I've taken out the forums for right now. But, in its place, I've enabled comments for each of the posts. Say hey, not just because we're interested in what you say, but also because I still haven't really tested it out and I want to see how well it works. Second, I've added a page about my revolutionarizing guitar technique, which is taking the world by storm. And, in that page, but also over on the music page, you'll find a demo for the first song of ours to utilize that technique, a little number called The Perfect Fit. Check it out. Third, I'm looking for someone to book us some gigs. I'm terrible at booking gigs. To be a band's booking agent, you have to be a salesman, and I am possibly the worst salesman in the history of the world. When I get on the phone with a club owner, what follows is mostly an embarrassing series of "umm", "uh", and barely audible grunts puncuated occasionally with "I'm in a band" and "can we play at your place, pretty please?" It's really sad. So, if you feel like you have the knack for band-sales, email me at keith@thewindups.com and we'll see what we can put together. Have a great week, Keith "Bad Phone Etiquette" Groover |
| The Music Industry is the New Old Hollywood January 3rd, 2006 -- Or, to be more accurate, the music industry has always been like old Hollywood, but old Hollywood grew out of it. It works like this: Musicians are poor. I've talked about this several times, the best one being here. But, to make some money, they have to sell something. The best thing for them to sell, most of the time, is an album. You record an album in a studio. Now, studios cost a lot of money to make. The equipment in a decent studio, not even counting the building itself, will pretty quickly go over $100,000. So the savings get passed on to the consumer, in this case the consumer being the band. Studio rates differ, but if you can find a decent one for $100 an hour or less, you have a pretty good deal. Recording takes time, and after tracking, mixing, mastering, and duplication, about 1,000 copies of a self-financed, self-produced cheap CD will probably cost at least $10,000. So, if the band sells every CD for $10 a piece, and they sell all of them, they'll make exactly zero dollars. Negative dollars, actually, if you account for the fact that they've likely had to sacrifice at least a week at their jobs to go into the studio, then spent tons of time doing shows trying to sell all of those CDs, and they probably had to give away a good number of them in order to possibly (but not probably) get played on the radio. In other words, the prospects aren't that bright. However, if you're willing to spend about $30,000 more dollars, you can do some advertising, get your album produced, mixed, and mastered by professionals, maybe sell 15,000 copies of your CD, and everything after about your 4,000th will give you a much higher profit margin. You won't make enough money to make a living, but it'll be a cool part-time job. If you want to get rich, you have to spend about $100,000 more dollars, do a video, national tour, and you could sell 100,000 or so CDs. At that point you've spent $140,000, and you've brought in $900,000 (if everything goes really well). Not too bad. The problem is, of course, where are you going to get all of that money to throw at something that only has a small chance of turning a profit? The answer, for most bands, is to turn to record labels. Let them finance and market your album. All you have to do is to write fantastic music, be amazing performers, tour relentlessly, and rack up a huge fanbase. In return, the label gets almost everything, and you, the band, get almost nothing. Also, as a side benefit, the label gets to own the music that you wrote and recorded, and they can use it for whatever purposes they want, putting it on the "Tales of a Racist Necrophiliac" movie soundtrack if they want to. And, to top it off, you probably have to record at least two more albums for them. I don't blame the record companies. They are putting forth most of the money and risk, and what are musicians? They're scum. They don't deserve to make a decent living, they're just bar rats who happen to play an instrument. Right? Well . . . This is all very similar to how Hollywood used to work in the first half of last century. Actors were kept on a short leash back then, where they had to sign whole eras of their life over to doing movies for one studio and one studio only. They were on a salary, saw none of the profits, had to work endlessly, and had no or very little ownership in the movies they made. But then the actors got wise to the whole thing, refused to sign their careers over, knowing they were worth a ton of money outside of the studios they worked for, and now an actor can show up to work on set for four weeks and make $20 million, plus some percentage of the movie profits. I think the music industry is transitioning to something similar. More and more successful musicians are opening up studios, and those studios are turning into record labels, and those record labels are treating musicians decently. Hopefully, eventually, the big labels will catch on and follow suit. I also see a lessening of the importance of a "band", and a greater importance put on the individual musicians. Essentially, you won't have just an album, you'll have a project with a bunch of superstars. What do The Postal Service, Audioslave, and Velvet Revolver have in common? Two things. One is success, the other is that they were all collaborative efforts between established musicians, paid for by someone besides the musicians. I think the labels are going to notice this trend, and start combining different groups of musicians together to do "a project", instead of paying (or, not paying) the same group of musicians to make endless variations on the same album, over and over again. ********************* Holy cow, this was a long post. Sorry about that. I'm hoping to book us a couple of shows in the next few months. I want to get us on the Handlebar battle of the bands series (if they're doing it, I haven't found any info about it), and I'm trying to get us a gig at the newly established establishment, The Scene. It only exists once a month, and, according to its myspace page, it's 21 years old and . . . female? Hmm, I thought it just started this past Fall. In a related link, check out myspaceisgay.com. Also, in another related link, check out this pathetic page. Anyway, it's also my birthday tomorrow, and I'll be thirty minus one, so that's cool. See you all later, folkses. Keith "Not Even Close To Figuring it All Out" Groover |
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