What's Your Price?

Amoeba Music

You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who's music buying habits have not been affected by the "napster revolution". Personally, I've slowly migrated from the CD to Napster to torrent to digital stores with no shortage of frustration and mixed emotions. At this stage of the game, I am finding myself more and more willing to pay for music just to have some control over the reliability of the tracks and their bitrate. Here are just a few of the issues effectively muddying up the industry:

1. The corporate music industry is easy to villainize. High album prices, minimal percentages to the artist, pushing mainstream trends, the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger, the Payola scandal.

2. Itunes is an Apple product. In a lot of areas, Apple just doesn't feel the need to compete. Consequently, you get painfully subpar products catered to a general audience. Not only is Itunes highly limited in its customization, selection and pricing, but has been one of the last providers to release DRM-free, high bitrate songs. For ages, Itunes felt it was fine to offer 128 bit, copy-protected music. This meant that if you weren't using a product starting with "i" you were going to be frustrated.

3. Pirated music is illegal. Although readily available, it's kind of like buying a watch from a crackhead on the street. There's about an equal chance of it being fake as it is a Rolex. Plus, he'll most likely try and slip in some porn with the deal. Such is the case with downloading music online. It's a seedy world. Try and download an album and you'll being tossing the dice as to what bitrate you'll end up with, how complete the album art is and how reliable the tracklist is. Plus, most likely the embedded mp3 data is full of some eastern European websites and promos.

With all that said, there are interesting trends developing. The onset of legitimate streaming services (i.e. Pandora, Hype Machine, Grooveshark, Mog) coupled with an explosion of online MP3 sales have slowly paved the way for a purely digital music industry. The consumer will see benefits as the industry evolves. One sign of life is Amazon's recent introduction of $5 Albums, which change on a monthly basis. A few standouts in August include:

Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More

LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening

Rick Ross - Teflon Don

Lady Gaga - The Fame Monster

The Roots - How I Got Over

Lauryn Hill - The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

Ray Lamontagne - Trouble

Radiohead - OK Computer

Robyn - Body Talk Pt. 1

Outkast - Stankonia

Grizzly Bear - Beckatimest

Boston - Boston

Coconut Records - Nighttiming

Miles Davis - Birth Of The Cool

Blu & Exile - Below The Heavens

Basement Jaxx - Rooty

The Bug - London Zoo

How much would you pay for legality?

_Michael

Live and in person

The Ticketmaster / Live Nation merger, yet another bully monopoly move in the corporate world, has been on my mind lately after reading the lengthy article about ticket prices in a recent issue of Rolling Stone. As a consumer, I'm obviously unnerved by the fact that ticket price averages have tripled in the past 15 years (~$25 to $65) and Ticketmaster can easily be held responsible for that atypical percentage increase. It is also, to some degree, a reflection of the evolving business. Many artists make most of their money on live shows, where they get a big cut of the earnings, as opposed to the ever-increasing inconsistency in revenue from albums sales where the record companies reap most of the profit. I'd always rather the money go to the artist, but concert prices are increasingly making live shows less accessible to the average consumer.

Luckily, there are still options even in the most obscure of places. I have many fond memories of seeing live shows of small unknown bands at small unknown venues. I grew up driving to places like The Bottleneck in Lawrence, KS (among others) and was happy to see they still sell tickets independent of ticketmaster. Similarly, here in San Francisco, you can see amazing shows at The Independent for low prices and avoid the ticketmaster trap. Here are some upcoming shows I'm excited for:

July 16

Kanye West's DJ, A-Trak will rock the stage with opening acts from Theophilus London, Treasure Fingers, and I've heard rumors of Rye Rye.

August 25

Chicago/Portland band Fruit Bats will be on tour promoting their upcoming album under the killer label Sub Pop.

September 18

Out of Selkirk, Scotland and now in Glasgow, Frightened Rabbit are a great band who recorded a fantastic album with an even better title, Midnight Organ Fight.

September 19

Victoria Christina Hesketh, known as Little Boots out of the UK released the album Hands recently to provide you with even more 20 something girly "good time" pop music.

Follow the artist links and check out some of their tracks. Even more good news? All of these shows are under 20 bucks. What?!

_Michael