From: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org (ecto-digest) To: ecto-digest@smoe.org Subject: ecto-digest V8 #152 Reply-To: ecto@smoe.org Sender: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk ecto-digest Saturday, June 1 2002 Volume 08 : Number 152 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Today's your birthday, friend... [Mike Matthews ] spare All About Eve ticket [ebgb@textmode.net] Rosie Thomas [ebgb@textmode.net] Article with Kate Bush mention [Dan_Stark ] Re: Article with Kate Bush mention [Jeffrey Burka ] Re: Article with Kate Bush mention [Neile Graham ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 03:00:01 -0400 (EDT) From: Mike Matthews Subject: Today's your birthday, friend... i*i*i*i*i*i i*i*i*i*i*i *************** *****HAPPY********* **************BIRTHDAY********* *************************************************** *************************************************************************** *************** Urs Stafford (Urs.Stafford@natlib.govt.nz) **************** *************************************************************************** -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- - -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Urs Stafford Thu May 31 1973 Give Way Perttu Yli-Krekola Thu June 02 1966 Kaksoset Alex Gibbs Thu June 08 1967 Betelgeuse Gleb Zverev Tue June 09 1964 Gemini Sonja Juchniewich Mon June 10 1963 Pegasus Joerg Plate Mon June 12 1967 Gemini Chris Montville Tue June 13 1978 Gemini Ectoplasm (original name) Mailing List Thu June 13 1991 Fuzzier blue Paul Huesman Wed June 14 1967 coffee drinker Mark R. Susskind Wed June 15 1966 Gemini Mike Matthews Mon June 16 1969 Sr. SAFH Albert Philipsen Mon June 17 1968 Gemini Neal R. Copperman Thu June 17 1965 Gemini Susan Kay Anderson Tue June 17 1969 Gemini Ecto-The Mailing List Tue June 18 1991 Fuzzy blue Tracy Barber Mon June 18 1956 Gemini Greg Dunn Thu June 18 1953 + Paul Blair Thu June 18 1964 Objectivist Mike Connell Sat June 18 1955 Apollo David Lubkin Fri June 20 1958 OurLady Marisa Wood Fri June 20 1969 Gemini Cheri Villines Sun June 20 1965 Gemini-Leo rising Ray Misra Sat June 20 1970 Gemini Nik Popa Sun June 22 1969 Cancer Teresa VanDyne Thu June 23 1960 Cancer Dave Torok Mon June 24 1968 Cancer Ethan Straffin Thu June 24 1971 Cancer Kevin Dekan Mon June 27 1960 Cancer Samantha Tanner Tue June 30 1970 Wild Goose - -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 12:53:12 +0000 From: ebgb@textmode.net Subject: spare All About Eve ticket 'lo. Ticket for "All About Eve" tonight in London, Shepherd's Bush Empire, still up for grabs... Anyone? G. - -- The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance. Socrates (B.C.469-399) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 13:23:16 +0000 From: ebgb@textmode.net Subject: Rosie Thomas 'lo. Some of you may have seen Rosie Thomas supporting Jewel recently. I caught her again last night, at an Acoustic night in London, and was very impressed. Again. Like at the Jewel gigs she mostly accompanied herself on guitar with her brother joining in on piano on some songs. Highly recommended for fans of the folky/country side of ecto. I bought a copy of her album last night which, based on 1 and a bit listens, sounds very promising. More posted when I've had a few more listens. There's a couple of mp3 available at rosiethomas.com for the curious. G. - -- Nature uses as little as possible of anything. Johannes Keppler (1571-1630) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 13:30:46 -0400 From: Dan_Stark Subject: Article with Kate Bush mention I received this rather depressing article on another mailing list today. Editorials like this one that are critical of the state of the music business seem to be getting more and more common, but I thought this one was particularly good. I especially like how the author cites Kate Bush in the second-last paragraph. One thing I'm optimistic about is the fact that the louder the criticism gets, the sooner there may be a wide scale public backlash against the current trend in the music industry, not unlike the one experienced with disco or any other obsessive phase the business seems to cycle through. Unfortunately, no link was provided to the original publication but I thought the content was interesting enough to repost it the way I received it. Rock bottom: The music industry in trouble The music business has always been a business - but once upon a time it was a business with ears. Not anymore. So what happens, asks erstwhile counter-culture idealist Charles Shaar Murray, when the bottom line meets the bottom of the barrel? 09 April 2002 When Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham founded his own company, Immediate Records, in the 1960s, the paper sleeve of each and every single bore the slogan "Happy to be a part of the industry of human happiness". Those words, echoing down the decades from a more innocent and ingenuous era, currently ring somewhat hollow: there has been precious little happiness in the music business of late. The venerable institution originally known as Electrical and Musical Industries (EMI) was recently in the news because it's posting record losses, slashing its artist roster and laying off thousands of workers. It's also having to dig deep into its currently threadbare pockets if it's going to stand even the slightest chance of hanging onto the services of British pop's golden scamp Robbie Williams, whose contract is up for renewal or transfer. And this is the worst possible time for them to be doing so because of the fall-out from the deal and deal-breaker which rendered the company an industry laughing-stock. EMI paid power-ballad diva Mariah Carey a telephone number to defect from rival megacorp Sony Music. Her first album and its risible accompanying movie promptly dived straight into the toilet, and now they're having to give her another telephone number to go away. As the saying goes, you'd need to have a heart of stone not to laugh. And EMI's competitors amongst the major record companies needn't feel too smug: a few bad decisions and it could just as easily have been any of them. And there aren't as many of them as there used to be, either. A vicious round of mergers and acquisitions has reduced the number of key players to a mere handful: Warner Music (the music arm of AOL Time Warner), Sony (formerly CBS), BMG (an abbreviation of the "Bertelsmann Music Group"), Universal (formerly MCA) and the ailing EMI itself, which was about to leave the field by selling out to BMG before that deal fell through. All of the once-great record labels like Atlantic, Tamla-Motown, Elektra, Island, Sire and Virgin, with their own distinctive tastes, styles and aesthetics and originally helmed by great record men like Atlantic's Ahmet Ertegun, Motown's Berry Gordy or Island's Chris Blackwell, have long since been swallowed up by one or other of the conglomerates. Even venerable pillars of the modern establishment like Sting and Elton John are sounding notes of warning. Today's pop scene has very little to do with making music, they point out: music is simply one of the pegs on which the New Instant Celebrity is hung. All notions of quality and artistry seem to have gone out of the window. By concentrating on short-term profits from instant hit singles by a fast turnover of disposable pop stars who are little more than karaoke singers, and all the major labels trawling the same over-fished pool of international talent by splashing out obscene sums of money for those few artists who can notionally guarantee massive sales, the "industry of human happiness" is ultimately digging its own grave. So that anguished squawking you hear in the distance isn't simply the sound of a bunch of freaked-out EMI shareholders, or even of laid-off music-biz footsoldiers awaiting the imminent arrival of their P45s, or artists unexpectedly "at liberty". It's the unmistakable sound of chickens coming home to roost. The music business has been cruising for this particular bruising for years. It's not in crisis there's still plenty of money being made but it is worried, and with good reason. Not only has the economic culture of the Bottom Line fused with the artistic culture of the Bottom of the Barrel but, to paraphrase the magnificent Artie from the late, lamented Larry Sanders Show, it has broken through to a whole new bottom, the existence of which we had never previously suspected. No one, as William Goldman oft-quotedly remarked, knows anything. In 1972, when I first joined the New Musical Express as a fresh-faced, misty-eyed counter-culture idealist straight from the underground press, we thought we had it rough. After all, the Great Sixties Dream had just collapsed, The Beatles had but recently broken up into component parts the sum of which seemed distressingly less than the whole, Jimi Hendrix was dead and Richard Nixon was still in the White House. And Marc Bolan was the biggest pop star in the country. Oh well, we thought, we may have failed to change the world, but at least we could change our shirts. Of course, what then seemed like the very doldrums of Teenage Wasteland now gleams in retrospect, through admittedly rose-tinted shades (remember rose-tinted shades?) as a golden age, albeit one of fools' gold. Chasing Bolan up the charts was the rather more substantial and intriguing figure of David Bowie, and just behind him were the louche postmodernists of Roxy Music, and the decidedly dangerous figures of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. Alice Cooper, freshly arrived from the States and winding up the old folks something chronic, was an instant moral panic on legs. Of the older folks, the Rolling Stones, still a year shy of their tenth studio anniversary, released their murky, menacing masterpiece Exile On Main Street. And black music was no less awesome. The soundtrack to The Harder They Come enabled thousands of rockers and hippies to play catch-up to all the fabulous Jamaican music they'd previously ignored, warming them up for The Wailers' Catch A Fire, waiting in the wings for 1973. On Planet Soul, the Shaft Era was in full swing, with Motown unleashing The Temptations' "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" and Curtis Mayfield upping the urban-terror stakes with Superfly, while Marvin Gaye raised the swoon ante with Let's Get It On. All records which were the product of distinct sensibilities, eccentric talents and genuine creative energy: qualities which currently seem in steadily decreasing supply in the output of major record companies. But when major labels were bringing us the likes of Bowie, Iggy, Reed, Roxy and Marvin, who cared? And that was just 1972. We could have talked about 1967, or 1977. But as the 1980s lurches into its 22nd year, we have to concede that it's now a different world. For a start, the increasing social atomisation we see in every other aspect of our lives is mirrored in pop. Someone once remarked that Los Angeles is less a "city" than a collection of villages linked by freeways: the new decentred pop is similarly less a "scene" than a series of microscenes notionally linked by media. In a narrowcasting environment, devotees of, say, speed garage or nu-metal can lead a musical life enclosed in the bubble of their particular choice, unscathed by exposure to any other music. Yet so much of the real energy of pop is generated when different musics strike sparks off each other. In the 1960s, to say that your favourite artists were The Beatles, The Temptations and Jimi Hendrix wouldn't have represented daring eclectism: it would have been mainstream pop taste. Even in the 1980s, four acts dominated: Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince and Bruce Springsteen: they were, if you like, pop's centre. Modern pop has no centre; the very idea is an anachronism. Yet without a centre, the majors are off-balance. Good music is still being made: to suggest otherwise would be aurally blinkered as well as reactionary. Yet the best stuff is now on the independent fringes: the majors condemned to seek a centre which no longer exists. Make no mistake, the music business has always been a business. It's always had at least its fair share of sharks and philistines; and it's always been concerned with making big fat healthy profits. Nevertheless, record companies used to be run by people with ears. Shrewd commercial ears, in the cases of the successful ones, but ears nonetheless. Now they're run by bean-counters who not only don't seem to know very much about music, but don't even seem to like it very much. Goldman's Theorem holds that No One Knows Anything, but the industry knows an awful lot now. Enough to really screw things up. They know that, as the technology changes and the forces of global capitalism tighten their grip on every aspect of our existence, that the "industry of human happiness" is going to have to deliver bigger and faster profits, just like every other industry. The problem is that it's not so easy to quantify the assets of the music industry except when it comes to proven back catalogue (so let us not shed too many tears for EMI: they're sitting on a backlist which includes the complete works of The Beatles and Pink Floyd, plus the great Frank Sinatra catalogue of Capitol recordings from the 1950s). In accounting terms, it probably made sense for EMI to offer Mariah Carey all that money: she had proved that she could deliver big hits and big profits. Except that this time, she didn't. But the labels will continue to put more and more eggs in fewer and fewer baskets, provided those baskets have a track record. For those who don't, with hit singles the name of the game, it makes absolutely no sense now to take all the risks involved in building an act to last. If they don't at first succeed, it's a lot easier to chuck 'em out and launch another one. So it's not surprising that the major labels are no longer inclined to sign up a pudgy singer-songwriter on the off-chance that he might be the next Elton John, a weedy-voiced young dancer who might grow up to be Madonna, or a stroppy rock band who could be another Oasis. They'll let an independent record company make the running, and if that label happens to unearth an act with potential staying power, they can always zoom in and cut a distribution deal. In terms of their own signings, they prefer to aim for sure things and quick profits. When EMI first signed a very young Kate Bush, they nurtured her for two years before releasing anything, and their willingness to invest in the long-term viability of a promising young artist paid off. Who could be bothered to do that now? The modern metaphor is that of the revolving door: if a young artist hasn't delivered a hit first or second time around, they're back out on the streets again. And why not? There are plenty of others, as Pop Idol and Pop Stars have proved. And if you're pretty enough, and vocally and physically flexible enough, and ultimately obedient and disciplined enough, then you too, Cinders, can go to the ball. And who cares whether these are the qualities which will enable an artist to carry on earning for the label for a decade or more to come? After all, as Johnny Rotten once spat over the thunderous roar of The Sex Pistols (surely, if nothing else, the greatest manufactured band of all time), "There's an unlimited supply". The name of the song? "EMI". ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 13:45:58 -0400 From: Jeffrey Burka Subject: Re: Article with Kate Bush mention Dan_Stark sez: > Unfortunately, no link was provided to the original publication but I > thought the content was interesting enough to repost it the way I > received it. Google Knows All[tm] http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/features/story.jsp?story=283313 jeff n.p. _Recovering the Satelites_, Counting Crows ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 10:46:23 -0700 (PDT) From: Neile Graham Subject: Re: Article with Kate Bush mention An extremely similar article could be written about the state of the publishing industry. The good news is that small labels (and small presses) still flourish, thanks to the hard work of people who do it for love, and not money. And places like cdbaby exist to help make that music available more widely. The bad news is that doing it for love and not money most often eventually causes burn out, but then others rise up to do their time. Probably more music (and books) are created now than ever before, numerically. The trick now is to help art find its audience, and to help audiences find the art. - --Neile - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- neile@drizzle.com / neile@sff.net......http://www.sff.net/people/neile The Ectophiles' Guide to Good Music ......... http://www.ectoguide.org ------------------------------ End of ecto-digest V8 #152 **************************