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John Mayer's Battle Studies

Finally, the release of the highly-anticipated album, Battle Studies by John Mayer. Well, it was highly anticipated by me.

http://play.rhapsody.com/john-mayer/battle-studies

My Martin OMJM Guitar gets into Modeling.

Who would have thought that may Martin OM John Mayer signature would get into modeling? I took it recently to get it "set up" and they decided that they were going to use it to plug the new soundhole humidifiers made by planet waves. Below is the blogpost from Chicago FretWorks

The Best Humidification For Your Guitar

posted by Steve | October 22nd, 2009

“An ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure.” In this post, we’ll break down the best way to protect your guitar in the cool months ahead.

Chicago winters kill guitars. The weather gets dry and cold, so we turn on our furnaces – drying out the air in our homes even further. Many will see their indoor relative humidity drop below 20% . That’s 25-30% lower than the factories where guitars are made and the wood just doesn’t like it. Like the skin on our fingertips and the seams on our hardwood floors, dry guitars can split open without ever being dropped or otherwise mishandled. Other symptoms we see include:

• rough fret ends that stick out past the edge of a fretboard
• loose bridges and braces
• loose neck joints
• separations along the many glue joints that hold a guitar together
• dramatic changes in playing ‘action’

So what can you do to prevent costly repairs to these problems? There’s so many choices hanging in guitar stores that it can be hard to tell which one to buy. We may kick ourselves for giving away the secrets that keep us in business – but here’s a look at the products that will best help you keep your guitar healthy and happy this winter. You’ll also find a simple formula for how to effectively use them.

We’ve heard some interesting home remedies over the years – from leaving a baggie with a wet sponge in a guitar case to putting an apple or potato inside a case (NOT recommended by these two technicians.) And we’ve seen lots of products too -from film canister size humidifiers with clay inside to rubber tubes with a sponge inside to space-age devices that can offer protection for months. When selecting products to carry here at Chicago Fret Works, we applied the lessons we’ve learned over the years and chosen these winners:

Best Choice For Acoustic Guitars – Planet Waves Humidipak*

($30) We were thrilled when Planet Waves (D’addario) recently re-released the Humidipak for guitars. It utilizes sophisticated modern technology for a low-maintenance, long-term solution to keeping fine acoustic guitars properly humidified. Three removable packets hang in black mesh pockets (two for the soundhole and one for behind the headstock,) releasing just enough moisture to keep the inside of your guitar case at 48% for 3-4 months. The moisture is all in those packets – no need for constant refilling with water. Read more about it at www.planetwaves.com . While you’re there, be sure to check out the video of Bob Taylor from Taylor Guitars to see what he thinks.

*Planet Waves did recall this product twice in the past few years for design flaws. They’ve spent lots of time and money eliminating those problems and are releasing it now, confident that it is finally ready for prime-time. More on that subject here.

Runner-up Choice for Acoustic Guitars – Oasis

($20) We really like these humidifiers. They hold enough distilled water to last from one to two weeks without needing to be refilled. Special crystals inside expand into a super absorbent paste that should be replaced each year (replacement kits are available at CFW for $6.) One advantage Oasis holds over every other product is that it will tell you when it’s time to refill by collapsing into a raisin-like appearance that says “Yo! Gettin’ a little dry over here!”

For the tight budget – Planet Waves Humidifier

($8) If you play your guitar every day or two and don’t mind refilling a sponge that often, Planet Waves’ original guitar humidifier is the least expensive option. It’ll work as well as the others but will need more attention.

Humidifying F-hole guitars on a budget

($8) Finally, we do keep a few of the old-style tube humidifiers for guitars and mandolins that have F-holes or for those who just like this style. Fill them up every one to two days.

The Recipe For Keeping A Guitar Properly Humidified:

• A FULL humidifer
• Inside the guitar
• Inside the case (NOT hanging on the wall or on a stand.)
• From October through April (or as long as the heat is on in your home)

The Passing Scene Cafe extends a huge hug

to those of you have had moments of sadness in the last few years. We are always here to sing with you.

Can't believe it's over
I watched the whole thing fall
And I never saw the writing that was on the wall
If I'd only knew
The days were slipping past
That the good things never last
That you were crying

Summer turned to winter
And the snow it turned to rain
Then the rain turned into tears upon your face
I hardly recognize the girl you are today
And God I hope it's not too late
It's not too late
'Cause you are not alone
I'm always there with you
And we'll get lost together
'Till the light comes pouring through
'Cause when you feel like you're done
And the darkness has won
Babe, you're not lost
When your world's crashing down
And you can't bear the thought
I said, babe, you're not lost

Life can show no mercy
It can tear your soul apart
It can make you feel like you've gone crazy
But you're not
Things have seemed to change
There's one thing that's still the same
In my heart you have remained
And we can fly fly fly away

'Cause you are not alone
And I am there with you
And we'll get lost together
'Till the light comes pouring through
'Cause when you feel like you're done
And the darkness has won
Babe, you're not lost
When the world's crashing down
And you can not bear to crawl
I said, baby, you're not lost

Economics of Ticket Prices

Justin Dantonio and I had a brief discussion of the music and ticketing industry here.

Justin stumbled across an interesting blog called http://www.ticketeconomist.com/. One particular post, called the Battle of the Ticket Geeks, reviews two of the secondary market "price forcasters," called FanSnap and SeatGeek.

"The challenge is that most of the academic research I have performed or read indicates that resold ticket prices usually go down following the on-sale date. Though this is mostly true for concert tickets, I have seen these price patterns occur with sporting event tickets, too. However, sporting events can be subject to price fluctuations driven by unique influences such as weather and rankings, so that is likely where there is a value in forecasting. As cool as the forecasting piece could be down the road, I don’t agree that SeatGeek is (right now) as impressive as its competitor, FanSnap."

Here is a link to a podcast which discusses the economics of Ticketmaster.

Young Guitar Gods

Live Nation and Ticketmaster

The Price of the Ticket

What does it take to get to see your favorite band?

by John Seabrook August 10, 2009

ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF ENTERTAINMENT about Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and the live-music industry. With the collapse of the record business, the business of selling live music has become the main source of revenue for the popular music industry. This year, Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, will promote some twenty-two thousand concerts. Last year, Ticketmaster Entertainment, the world’s largest ticket seller, sold more than a hundred and forty-nine million tickets. Yet almost everyone agrees that the business of live music is dysfunctional. Live Nation and Ticketmaster are loathed by fans and their stock prices are depressed. Two recent shows that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Izod Center, in the New Jersey Meadowlands, on May 21st and May 23rd, have come to serve as a referendum on what’s wrong with the live music business. Discusses the decision by Springsteen and other prominent artists to price their tickets below market value, inadvertently creating a thriving secondary market for tickets. Tells about the history of scalping and the numerous attempts by public officials to prevent it through anti-scalping laws. The Internet, through sites such as StubHub and TicketsNow (which is owned by Ticketmaster), has made ticket scalping for events as common as day trading. However, the rock-concert industry has not, by and large, been able to take advantage of this new market. Writer describes a Springsteen fan, Maria Shwalb, attempting to obtain tickets to one of the Izod Center shows via the Ticketmaster Web site. She was redirected to TicketsNow, where tickets for the shows were available at much higher prices even though tickets at face value were still available. Tells how Live Nation and Ticketmaster came to achieve their places of prominence and the federal investigation into the proposed merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation. Describes the controversy caused by the redirect of numerous Springsteen ticket buyers to TicketsNow. Springsteen himself posted a letter saying that he and his team were “furious.” More than two thousand complaints were filed with the New Jersey Division of Consumer affairs. A bill to make ticket selling more transparent was introduced in Congress. Ticketmaster, which blamed the redirect on a software malfunction, denied any wrongdoing but came to an agreement with the New Jersey Attorney General’s office to stop linking fans to TicketsNow for one year. Writer interviews independent promoter John Scher, who believes that the concert business was never right for consolidation. He also interviews Irving Azoff, the C.E.O. of Ticketmaster Entertainment. Azoff suggests that a dynamic pricing system, in which prices would fluctuate with demand, might be the future of concert ticketing.

My friend Justin Dantonio, something of a music industry buff, read the article and responded below:

"that was a really interesting article. it is unique in that it at times seems to paint Ticketmaster as almost misunderstood. I would argue there are some serious logic jumps in the article. Mainly, the author seems so focused on the ticketing industry he fails to recognize a few really important things about other aspects of the music industry such as selling records and radio. The premise that piracy killed the record industry, for example, is extremely misleading and perpetuated by the record industry themselves.

The record industry killed themselves through a terrible business model and by pissing off their consumers. All technology did was provide consumers with the ability to by-pass the record executive. Consumers of music will continue to support artists like via concert tickets, singles downloads, merchandise, etc it just needs to be done different than it was done from the late 60s til the early aughts (2003 or so). Artists will make less money than they did in the 80s and 90s but much like the housing and stock markets, a realignment was necessary. EVERYTHING was inflated. True story --- Napster went to major labels before Napster went live in 99 or so and said 'here is our technology, this is what it's going to do' and tried to make a deal to sell music as digital downlaods or subscriptions in return for access to major label's catalouges. This would have made Napster much more like iTunes about 5-6 years before iTunes existed. The labels laughed them off and turned them down. The labels made the mistake of believing that their was more value in the service they provided (marketing a band like a used car, getting radio play -- sometimes illegally [see: payola] and overcharging for a CD). The consumers want what the artists produces, not the record label.

The people who stand to lose the most are the major record labels. They are no longer needed. There are millions of people who want to and enjoy the practice of discovering bands on their own or through their friends. Marketing bands like you market laundry detergent holds increasingly less weight in this culture. Artist will still be paid enough to live off of, major record label types though serve little-to-no purpose.

But anyway, I'll probably write you a really long email tonight/tomorrow with more thoughts on this. I have to jet for now.

I have to say I have no problem with the idea of ticket prices fluctating based on demand, seat location, etc via a company like Ticketmaster. Unfortunatly my distrust of greedy people leads me to believe this won't really happen; ie - I dont believe Ticketmaster would really lower the price of a ticket if the demand wasnt there. I think they'd just let it go unsold. They could do that right now if the 40% of all seats being unsold was something they were that concered about. If it was that big of a deal, why not slash the cheap seats in the final 5 days before a show that was not sold to a level they were satisifed with? Also, the line about the TicketsNow link for the Springsteen show being a technology glitch seems like BS. I've seen it happen for years and I've seen TicketsNow and StubHub advertise tickets they don't own yet for years too"

I am inclined to agree with Justin since he is much more knowledgeable on the subject than me. I wrote an analysis both Justin's comments and the article below. Enjoy.

The music business is an industry with so many variables with so many moving parts and variables that it’s difficult to make sense of it all. However, as Justin observed above, even casual followers of the music scene will note that

• 1) The rise of the “file to file sharing” movement sometime in the late 90s allowed for the free distribution of music files and, as a result, an increase level of piracy.
• 2) Concert ticket prices remain stratospheric---not only is there a difference between seat price and the purchase price of a ticket (fees, tack-ons, surcharges) but there exists a “spread” between the purchase price and often what the ticket fetches on the secondary market, e.g. craigslist, StubHub, TicketNow, and other brokers.

At first glance, these two points appear to be unrelated, i.e. the profits made from record sales do not correlate well with market prices and quantities for concert ticket sales. But I will try to connect the two below.
One would be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t burned a c.d. for someone else or downloaded a song/album for free off of Napster, Kazaa, or bit-torrent sites. Okay, let’s face it: we’ve all done it. The question then becomes, “what has this meant for the music business?” Justin observes in his review of the article that, “the premise that piracy killed the record industry, for example, is extremely misleading and perpetuated by the record industry themselves.” I might argue with Justin here although I think he and I would reach the same conclusion. Throughout much of the modern music era the production of music and its promotion was controlled by four major recording labels and their subsidiaries: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI group. This oligopoly served as a de facto gateway for aspiring musicians and exerted an enormous ability to control the terms of an artist’s recording contract. Want to record a few albums and be heard on the radio? You have to go thru them, and not without selling a pound of flesh.

Very few industry observers would argue that musicians were “coerced” into signing recording contracts at disadvantageous terms (I’ll leave the thuggish and knee-capping tactics of Suge Knight out of the analysis for the moment). Furthermore, I fully support the doctrine of free contract: two capable parties who CONSENSUALLY enter into a contractual arrangement ought not to have that arrangement altered by external forces. However, an artist’s first record deal was notoriously stacked in favor of the recording labels, e.g. musicians earning less than $1 for every $13 LP or compact disc sold, and artists had no alternatives save for producing their own cd’s and selling them out of their garages or vans.
Even the staunchest free market advocates, such as me, had considerable trouble watching David Geffen and his ilk reap billions off his artists and then threaten to sue them into the Stone Age for breach of contract if the artist’s production lapsed. A couple of highly publicized squabbles between artists and labels, such as the one between Prince and Warner brothers, coincided with a populist backlash against the music empire. Over time, however, the music industry evolved the way most industries evolve when only a few firms make windfall profits: market participants innovate and find ways to increase reward and lower cost. The rise of the internet and file sharing programs shattered the status quo and threatened record producers’ bulldog grip on profits. Every musicphile by now has heard of Napster or Kazaa, and technologically astute music lovers have found ways to avoid paying altogether for a record or album .
Justin Dantonio argues the following:

“The premise that piracy killed the record industry, for example, is extremely misleading and perpetuated by the record industry. All technology did was provide consumers with the ability to by-pass the record executive.”

The idea that the prevalence of free, perhaps unlawful, distribution of music “killed” the record industry (I don’t have knowledge of the industry’s sales and profits over the last 20 years) seems intuitively correct to me. I would guess that the profits of the recording industry declined along with its intrinsic relevance to the production process. Musicians don’t need big record labels carry them anymore. An array of musical production software programs can assist any aspiring musician, and the internet provides plenty of forums to promote and publicize.
Justin also attributes the decline of record industry profits to a “bad business model,” specifically the failure of major record labels to adapt to technological change. Specifically, he mentions the record labels’ refusal to “read the tea leaves” and cooperate with the developers of file-to-file software, particularly Napster. I am inclined to agree with Justin on this particular anecdote since he is more knowledgeable on the subject that me.

However, Justin and the article miss an important development. The record companies filed a copyright suit against Napster and won a fairly large settlement. I should also note that Napster lost its appeal in the appellate court for the Ninth Circuit, a court that is notorious for its left-leaning and presumably anti-business opinions. In fact, the New Yorker article fails to even mention the Napster/Metallica/record label lawsuit and its implications. So while I agree with Justin that it is difficult for anyone to view the record labels as victims of the millions of digital pirates, there is an important intellectual property factor that is being overlooked. Napster did not receive cooperation from the record companies for the distribution of their library, so they acted illegally and contributed to its theft. It’s a bit like saying the banks aren’t making the huge profits they used because bankrobbers, hustlers, and other miscreants stole from them----then turning around and blaming the record labels for a bad business model.

Profit is a dirty word to many. The argument goes something like this: music is a form of art and should not be subject to the ruthless ways of profit-maximization and capitalism. But I am not as reflexively anti-corporate as Justin. Everyone is entitled to make as much money as they want. A brazen disregard for intellectual property and the sanctity of contract is undesirable, even if it presumably benefits consumers of art and music.

Sidenote: Time Magazine contributing editor Mark Helprin wrote an intriguing book on copyright and the public domain in book entitled Digital Barbarism; A Writer’s Manifesto. Joseph Epstein reviewed the book in the Claremont Review of Books here.

LiveNation, Ticketmaster, and concert ticketing is a different story. Ticketmaster seems to have made some very shrewd moves in the late 1980s with the acquisition of several of its smaller, poorly run competitors. I will also assume that the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission examined these mergers at the time and concluded they did not or would not restrict competition.
Few would deny that, in the internet age, Ticketmaster does offer the benefits of expediency and avoiding the hassle of going to the box office. Furthermore, Ticketmaster does disclose its fees up front, so customers know what additional costs they are paying.

Ticketmaster’s business does not seem prone to the competitive pressures that have afflicted other businesses that have specialized in transactions. Many different types of credit cards offering no fees and a variety of special interest rates have put downward pressure on both fees and interest rates. In cities where multiple banks offer “free checking,” ATM fees and check writing ordering fees have gone down as well (conversely, rebates by banks for competitor’s ATM fees have kept them at current levels, as how most subsidies work). Competition between airline ticket sellers, e.g. cheaptickets.com, orbtiz.com, expedia, et al, has kept their transaction fees low as well.
Ticketmaster, with its use of contractual relationships with LiveNation and other concert venue owners, has managed to sidestep competitive pressure. And some bands (Pearl Jam comes to mind) have tried to challenge Ticketmaster’s grip on ticketing but have largely failed. But this will not last. It is only a matter of time before some entrepreneur comes along and says “I can provide a ticketing service for less money, and the fans will like us more.”
The secondary market for tickets and the so-called business of “scalping” or speculation are different issues. Ticket prices are subject to the laws of supply and demand, so whenever the price of the ticket is below what the market should dictate, then a vibrant and vigorous secondary market will emerge. We see this in high profile sporting events all the time. And secondary markets exist in real estate, art, and finance and mostly without the same degree of vituperation from its “customers.” Efforts to ban it outright have been unsuccessful, both legally and practically, as the article points out. So what, if anything, should be done about ticket scalpers?
What offends people the most is that scalpers are essentially “pricing out” the true consumers of music. In other words, there appears to be a huge disconnect between those who really want to the see the musical acts and those who can ultimately afford to go to the concerts. Consumers of music are not exceptionally wealthy, as opposed to say real estate speculators or art collectors. So millions of fans feel left out and alienated.
One solution would be to build bigger venues and create more supply, hence putting downward pressure on the market price of tickets. To be sure, bigger venues would imply seats that are far away from the stage, but at least tickets would become affordable for fans. Concert venues can try to restrict the “transferability” of tickets to reduce the ability of resale. Another would be for the bands and venues to charge a ticket price that is closer to the market price, effectively reducing the “spread” that scalpers can earn. This would ensure that most of the money from ticket sales go to the actual bands and not the heartless, disinterested scalpers. In this case, however, bands risk the negative publicity that comes with charging lots of money for tickets, i.e. being perceived as entirely motivated by money.


Justin read this post and responded below. Fyi, my nickname is "Sandy"


The Ticketmaster / LiveNation and Record Label sagas are interrelated as is the decline of Radio with Clear Channel as the other mega player in this story of dying Dinosaurs.

Obviously I am anti-corporate when it comes to music. That probably doesn't surprise anyone.

Sandy you are very correct that the rise of do-it-yourself technology as well as the internet's ability to explain how to use do-it-yourself technology has left us in a place where more people can record, produce and distribute music without a record label. It has also give independent labels with much smaller budgets tools to sell records and maximize their profits greater than ever before. Indie labels, as you can imagine, have much less overhead.

But we need to stick with the majors for now. Some counter-points and addendums:

Sandy: 1) The rise of the “file to file sharing” movement sometime in the late 90s allowed for the free distribution of music files and, as a result, an increase level of piracy.

* Point - MP3s and file sharing increased piracy. MP3s, however, did not allow for popular music to be copied for the first time. Cassette tapes could be copied VERY easily and the music industry had no way to track how much that occured because it didn't have the internet to study / track / observe said piracy.

If you recall most boomboxes came with a record function. You could record radio or tape to tape. The shear population of developed countries alone prove that tape sharing wasn't as big as MP3 sharing, but it was such an issue that the major labels unsuccesfully tried to sue electronics companies for making devices that allowed tapes to be copied. The courts ruled against the labels. This was the mid to late 80s. It is a very important point in the story because of 3 things:

(1) Major label profits were big but not as excessive as they were from 98-03 (their peak)
(2) The MP3 was invented in the late 80s
(3) Major labels slowly but surely accepted the CD.

The CD is an important precursor to the technology aspect of the story. Labels were extremely slow to accept it as a viable means to distrube music even though the sound quality was better and longer lasting, and the physical product itself proved more durable, if properly stored, than a cassette tape. At the time there were 6 major record labels --- pre mergers --- and one of them, I believe Sony, went all-in on manufactoring CD players and redistributing it's catalog on CD. Once they started to rake in unbelievable profit the other 5 joined the CD game.

So major labels resist technology until one of it's own starts making tons of money then copy them, join in and phase out the tape --- consumers pay the labels (who get a bigger share than the artists) for the same music twice. Labels profit sky-rocket.

Sandy: "Want to record a few albums and be heard on the radio? You have to go thru them, and not without selling a pound of flesh."

* Point - Major labels involvement in payola scandals goes back to the 1950s. Labels have been sued successfully at least 3 times to my knowledge and most recently in New York by Govenor Spitzer. Labels effectively owned radio. It was 99.99% impossible to get on the radio without a contract with a major label because the labels paid radio stations millions of dollars (both direclty and indirectly). Thus, want to get on the radio? You HAVE to sign a terrible deal that favors the majors.

Further, I would argue this backfired on the majors long term and its part of the broken model. Radio stations all went to similair formats and similair playlists thus disregarding any desire a consumer might have to hear more bands. Radio no longer because a viable format to hear new bands that weren't approved by Majors which was a band or two a year, the rest of the play time slots were alloted for releases by bands that had already sold a ton of records. People who enjoy the act of hearing new / fresh bands that might bring something different or new to the table were essentially forced to look elsewhere for different / new / non mainstream sounds.

This isnt toothpaste were there majors could package and sell the same commodity over and over again and that seems to be what they tried to do. But with art, our culture subscribes to fads, trends and breaking ground. This is true of paintings, music, sculptures, architexture, etc. Newness means something and the majors forgot about that or disregarded it in failing to develop new artists on the radio at a level deemed acceptable by it's consumer base. This ties in direclty to what Live Nation and Ticketmaster are worried about. Sure the small venues (the Metro in chicago) are selling more Arcade Fire tixs but STARS like U2, Dave Matthews, John Mayer --- where these corporations make their most profit --- are not being "developed" by the majors at nearly the same clip as the 80s, 90s and early 00s.

Sandy: "...market participants innovate and find ways to increase reward and lower cost. The rise of the internet and file sharing programs shattered the status quo and threatened record producers’ bulldog grip on profits. Every musicphile by now has heard of Napster or Kazaa, and technologically astute music lovers have found ways to avoid paying altogether for a record or album."

* Point - Record labels knew about the MP3 in the late 80s and refused to acknolowedge it as a means to sell/distribute music until after Napster. While I realize computers didn't run at the speeds they do now, then, it's important to note that file-sharing was not something a slacker in SoCal invented. Big wigs knew about this just like they knew about the CD and they ignored it like they did the CD originally. Only difference is that the speed of technology & culture in the late 90s was infinetly faster than the 80s so before a corporate businessman could get around to figuring out the potential impact of the MP3 (like they did with the CD over the course of say 1-2 years), hundreds of computer experts were figuring out how to create and distribute them (the rise of hacking and code-writing as a hobby plays into this too).

It is also important to point out that major labels cashed in on the CD and increased there reward and lowered their costs but never passed on ANY of this savings to the consumers. In fact the major labels have been successfully sued twice in the last 10 years for (1) All the majors were found guilty of strong-arming distributors to buy their products and ridiculous bulk amounts and refusing to buy back any of unsold products, and (2) the labels were successfully sued for --- I think -- price collusion. Or something similair where the record stores who were forced to sell the products at a value so high they couldnt sell as many records were able to prove that the majors had all secretely agreed to a minimum price to sell the CD at.

Final thing then I have to end with a big TO BE CONTINUED......

When I say the model was broken here is what I mean. The idea that you had to pay for the entire album, or get nothing at all was stupid. Always was. Singles became obsolete because the label chose the single and pumped millions of dollars into it. No choice. Consumers wanted choice. The biggest thing Napster SHOULD have told the labels was that people no longer wanted to be forced to buy an entire album or nothing at all.

Unfortunately we cant go back in time but I have a feeling that the iTunes model of cost per song and then albums at slightly less than cost-per-song would have been EXTREMELY effective. More so than it is today because iTunes didnt come along until 6 years after file-sharing was very popular and free. Too late. Also it was developed by Apple who is not a record label. Huge mistake.

This ties back into radio and major label promotion the business model of having only a handful of artists / albums actually making money each year but they make SO much damn money that it pays for a hundred albums that didnt make money.

He had more to say on this late last week. Read below:

4 parts of the model were/are broken, all inter-related:

(1) Radio. We've touched on this plenty but the labels shot themselves in the foot by standardizing playlists everywhere a radio station would accept a financial handout. This will tie directly into parts 2 and 3. Short term ramification in the 90s was that people gave up on radio but not a ton of people. The reason I got into more indie bands was that I gave up on radio by the end of high school and started turning to message boards / blogs about bands I liked to turn me onto other bands. it didn’t matter to me if they were major label or not but what ended up happening is that the stuff coming out on labels sounded increasingly homogenized so I wasn’t nearly as interested in the product or radio.

(2) The 'There’s only 1-2 good songs on this album but I had to buy the whole thing' problem. I like to call it 'The Sugar Ray Phenomenon.' In the 90s we ALL bought those albums. One sweet song or video, but the album is 90% crap and sounds nothing like the 1 song that got on the radio. You had no choice. The single was a promotional tool on the radio and MTV to sell the $12-$17 album. In a way, it inflated the notion of how much people wanted to pay for art. I referenced Sugar Ray b/c let's think about this....Sugar Ray had put out a handful of albums before their one with "I just wanna fly" on it and they never sold anything, never got on popular radio, never got on MTV. They make the song "fly" which doesn’t sound ANYTHING like the rest of their album which was primarily hard rock / metal-ish. Record execs hear a hit and pour tons of $$ into getting the song on the radio and the video on MTV. Millions of people have only the option of buying the entire album for approx $15. *IF* the sold a single -- which labels started to do less and less -- the single would have no other songs on it. There would be no opportunity to hear the rest of the product. Which leads to problem #3

(3) you couldn’t hear 95% of the art before you bought it. You could only hear what labels let you hear which was the singled. Why would consumers buy any product without knowing what you were getting if there was technology available to allow them to hear the album and then decide if they want to own it? I still legitimately buy something like 90% of all music I have on my iPod. I’m in the minority there. BUT my favorite thing now is that I can actually hear an entire album before I buy it or at least hear 4-5 songs that are on their MySpace. I am not forced to take shots in the dark because certain blogs or critics like them and it sounds like it might be something I might like.

(4) The '1 band to pay for 100' philosophy. Majors have been operating like this since the 80s when people started to purchase music more than ever -- and there were more people with disposable income than ever before. Majors have hundreds of artists, most of which even I have never heard of. The overwhelming majority of these artists never make money and most of them lose money. Majors have 20 maybe 30 artists that make them money and of those only maybe 10 put out an album a year. BUT they make so much g'damn money it pays for all the losses and then some. The losses for the bands that don’t make a ton of money are minimized by the fact that the majors don’t pump really any money into the release of an album/artist they aren’t 100% sure is going to sell millions of records. This is why sugar ray was on a major label but you never heard of them until "Fly." They never got marketing dollars so their losses on the first few records were small and covered for by the fact that the Smashing Pumpkins put out an album that year.

Now with people legally buying just the songs they want (referencing the inflation of profit I discussed in #2/3) the profits aren’t so humungous. They don’t cover as much of the losses as they use to. Obviously stealing then plays a huge factor here too.

This again ties to #1 because the labels set-up an illegal kickback system with radio and radio expects X amount of $ to play a band. So when the marketing dollars are being divided up the only bands that are going to get a push are the bands that are guaranteed to sell albums. So now the record labels are in a situation where they need to increase the number of bands that can make them money since each band that makes money is making less than before. But they would have to undo the amount of $ they pump into each band to get them on the radio, mtv, etc because they don’t have as big of a budget to work with. Finally there is a matter of the art itself. It remains to be seen if record labels can make decisions about what bands to push based on anything other than popularity and 'does this band sound like another band that makes a lot of money.' The system has been set-up void of the artist side of it and what consumers have been demanding --- and the mp3 & internet allows for -- is more choice. More different types of bands/music/sounds. Majors so far have not been able to supply that for one reason or another.

So to bring it back to Sugar Ray. If Sugar Ray's 'Fly' came out now instead of over 10 years ago, a certain % of people who bought their album for $15 would still do that. Some would buy the hard copy and some would just by the digital version which would only be $10 and a cut of that goes to Apple who came up with the iTunes model first before the labels did. Another % would steal the song and/or album. Another % would listen to the album for free as a stream on MySpace and decide they don’t like it and only buy the songs they liked at $0.99 a song --- most of that would just be 'fly.' Can anyone even name another single off that album? I can’t. All I remember is that their next album sure sounded like 10 songs that wanted to sound as catchy as "fly." (this also leads into the idea of the sophomore slump which is basically a band trying their hardest to catch lightning in a bottle again in order to make money which is hard to do).

So now I think you could say at least 1/3 of the people who bought the sugar ray album in the 90s for $15 would only pay for a handful of songs at .99 cents each. Further, some of them wouldn’t pay for it for $15 b/c all they care about is the mp3 which they get cheaper than the CD and label loses out a little bit more b/c of the agreement they have to succumb from apple. So the label is no longer in complete control of the market.

And I for one am not the least bit sad about that.

Henry Garza from Los Lonely Boys

This guy can play. I saw this performance of Cottonfields and Crossroads by Los Lonely Boys at the Bonneroo Music Festival yesterday. If you have 10 minutes and like watching a guitarist wail on fender strat, watch this video. This might be one of the best guitar solos I have ever seen. Sorry, Slash...

Jazz Musician Wayne Krantz

Making Music With John Mayer

Very Funny!

Makin' Music with John Mayer from John Mayer

John Mayer's Music Column from Esquire Magazine

One of the most natural (and absolutely maddening) facets of creating music is that the product is constantly being refined. What you thought was a brilliant song title yesterday is probably just good enough to be a passing lyric in the third verse. That chorus you lost sleep over? Turns out the chords work perfectly in the bridge of that other tune you've been trying to finish for eight months.

I've never experienced anything like the recording process involved in making Continuum, my third-album-to-be. The songs continually beg for more work when they fall short of being great. I had been working on a very trance-inducing two-chord tune when I wrote the lyrics below. As it turned out, the song didn't need lyrics at all. Looking to make some use of the time and emotion I spent writing them, I've decided to share a few random excerpts with you here:

I keep a note that I wrote on a taxi receipt
It says, "Don't listen to anybody other than me"
I hit the big time for a nominal fee
You lose a friend in the end for every dream that you see come true

I got scars upon scrapes, I've got bruises on breaks
Masochistically committed to see how much of this I'll take
Three years under water, and I ain't even got the shakes
I'm going deeper and deeper and deeper

I've got dreams to remember, I've got days to forget
I've got some phone calls in to God but he ain't called me back just yet

I'm still not done with these lyrics. But I don't want to let them sit idly on my mind's shelf. So here's my offer: I'm inviting all aspiring songwriters to write their own chords and melodies around my lyrics. Go ahead, I'm not using them. You can tell people that we wrote a song together. I want to hear what you come up with, so send a CD of your song to the address listed below. The best submissions will be featured on the Esquire Web site, and I'll announce my favorite in an upcoming issue. But don't be surprised if these words end up in some other song I've yet to write. Until they wrap my album in cellophane, anything can happen.

John Mayer Does It Again

I am a little overstimulated and disgusted by the amount of coverage the death of Michael Jackson received by the media. Yes he was a gifted singer, dancer, and artist. Yes he was a great humanitarian and activist. Yes his fettish for cavorting with toddlers and pre-adolescents was, if not criminal, very strange.

But allow to publish the best part of Michael Jackson's memorial service

Blues Practicing Tips from John Mayer

Words of Wisdom From the High Priest of Blues

"I'd like to talk to y'all for a second if I can, cause you know, basically I get to start off thanking God that i'm alive and well enough to be with you today, and its always as well as it is. you see, Less than 2 years ago..i found my self in a real bad situation. I found myself down on the ground and I couldnt get up, and I mean I was trying and I couldnt. what I m telling you about is, you see i thought I could stay at the party forever, it dont work that way, cause that shit will kill ya, that stuff will kill ya. all i'm asking you to do, is to stay away from them drugs and things cause what they do is they eat ya inside out, you know they make you forget about those people that you really love, and it makes you run from love, cause you cant stand how good it looks. im asking you to take care of yourself, so you can be there for your brothers and sisters when they need ya, are you with me"

Stevie lays out his feelings about his former drug addiction during the intro to "life without you". Before you begin reading, close your eyes for just a moment and try to amagine the rhythm to Life without you

Dave Matthews Band's New Album...

reviewed in the New York Times. I gave it a "run-through" over the weekend. It is surprisingly good.

Weighing Public Problems and Personal Pleasures

Dave Matthew's Band's studio albums have a weird tendency to be "over-produced," i.e. their sound has been marinading in synthesizers and equalizers for too long. Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King suffers from that, although not as much as, say, Everyday.

Since I am an amateur guitar player, my perception of certain types of musical arrangements is sharpened. DMB's music has a quality that I would describe as "spaciness." For starters, a quintet rock band that features a violin player and a woodwind instrument player is quite rare. Because of the vastly different nature of the instruments that are played, there exists a lot of "space" between each instrument's sound. The highly-evolved human eardrum can sense this. Contrast DMB's arrangements with the very typical rock quintet that features a vocalist, lead guitarist, rhythm guitarist, bass player, and drummer. There just isn't a lot of "space" between the different instrumental parts. This is not to say that the Dave Matthews Band consistently achieves musical utopia and the average rock quintet does not.

Also, Dave Matthews's chord voicings are somewhat unique. Rather than play chords across 5 or 6 strings....he plays triads, such as a 1st, a 3rd, and a 5th... on 3 strings and does a lot of muting with his left hand. Again, this contributes to the spaciness mentioned above, for the sound is not quite as full as other voicings. This leaves a lot of room for other instruments to fill the space.

Whoever produces Dave Matthews Band's studio albums, at least the last few, has succeeded in eviscerating the "spaciness" factor of their sound. In other words, the gaps are being filled by synthesized vocal parts and layered instrumentals. Doesn't sound the same.

Dave Matthews Band's New Album

Big Whiskey at the Groogrux King

Berklee School of Music----Songwriting Clinic

http://www.berkleemusic.com/welcome/pattison_clinic

John Mayer's Battle Studies

You Know Spring Is Here...

Jazz, Blues and Dylan

By MELANIE GRAYCE WEST

Sonoma Jazz | Sonoma, Calif.

The Sonoma Jazz festival, now in its fifth year, brings popular jazz musicians to wine country for a four-day music and wine extravaganza. There will be seven headliner concerts hosted in a giant tent with a food and wine plaza (wines from Kunde, Nicholson Ranch, Gloria Ferrer and Viansa will be poured). The more intimate "Wine & Song" tasting event around the Sonoma Plaza pairs eight different music acts a day with wine (JazZin' and Piano & Pinot, for example). Festival sponsor tickets include special parties and a private food and wine tent; sonomajazz.org.

WHEN May 21-24
WHERE Downtown area of Sonoma, Calif.
HOW MUCH $39 to $259, festival concerts; $69, Wine & Song; $500 and up, sponsor

Moon Dancer Vineyards & Winery

Jazz & Pig Roast | Wrightsville, Pa.

Moon Dancer Vineyards & Winery will host six bands for its fifth annual jazz festival. The winery will release its 2006 Meritage and a new root beer it calls Cellar Rat. Buy wines by the glass or bottle to pair with barbecue chicken and the roasted pig. Tours of the cellar, too. Bring lawn chairs, blankets and the kids. Details at moondancerwinery.com.

WHEN May 23-24, 2 p.m.
WHERE 1282 Klines Run Rd., Wrightsville, Pa.
HOW MUCH $20 a day; $10 a day for kids

Warwick Valley Winery & Distillery

Dylan Tribute | Warwick, N.Y.

Joseph Grizzanti, one of the owners of Warwick Valley Winery & Distillery, 12 years ago launched a Dylan Festival, which has grown from a few dozen attendees to almost 3,000 over three days. At this year's festival, 20 bands will play nonstop Bob Dylan. There will be bottles and glasses of wine and cider for sale and food will be served from the winery's Pané Cafe and an outdoor barbecue. Arrive early for parking and buy tickets in advance; wvwinery.com.

WHEN May 23-25, noon to 5 p.m.
WHERE 114 Little York Rd., Warwick, N.Y.
HOW MUCH $10, $15 at door for daily ticket; $20, $25 at door for three-day ticket

Blues & Wine | Somerset County, New Jersey

There will be 25 wineries pouring about 200 wines at the 15th annual New Jersey Blues & Wine weekend. The Craig Thatcher Band will perform Saturday and the Matt O'Kee Band will play Sunday. Tickets at newjerseywines.com.

WHEN May 23-24, noon to 5 p.m.
WHERE Natirar Park, Somerset County, New Jersey
HOW MUCH $18, $20 at door

Hottest Cool Jazz Festival | Middleburg, Va.

Chrysalis Vineyards, a winery located within an hour of the D.C. area, is best known for its Viognier and Norton, but it also makes Albariño, Tannat and Petit Verdot. Two bands will play during the festival and there will be a guided tasting of nine wines. Fusions Cuisine will serve food and there will be other vendors, too. Jump up and swing when The Joker's Wild band plays its song, "What's Your Drink?" Tickets at chrysaliswine.com.

WHEN May 16-17, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
WHERE 23876 Champe Ford Rd., Middleburg, Va.
HOW MUCH $12, $15 at door

Jazz'n the Vines Concerts | Bush, La.

Pontchartrain Vineyards hosts 12 concerts a year, six in the Spring and six in the Fall. Three concerts remain for the Spring season including the Memorial Day weekend concert featuring Nashville singer-songwriter Casey Kelly with Todd Cerney and Leslie Ellis. Wine lovers make an event of the concerts with elaborate picnics, silverware, candelabras and wines purchased on-site. Vintner John V. Seago describes the evenings like this: "People convene here, they watch the sun go down while the music comes up, drinking wine produced right over your shoulder." If the spirit moves you, grab your honey and dance. Details at pontchartrainvineyards.com.

WHEN May 23, June 6, June 20, 6:30 to 9 p.m.
WHERE 81250 Old Military Rd., Bush, La.
HOW MUCH $10

New Zealand Winegrowers

Kiwis in Canada | Montréal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver, Canada

The New Zealand Winegrowers trade group sponsors this annual tour of major cities. At each location, about 200 wines will be sampled, focusing on the 2008s for whites and 2007s for reds (more and more wineries are now making a Pinot Noir). The events are sophisticated and include small tasty bites and music. It's a good start to a night on the town. Tickets at nzwine-events.ca.

WHEN Montréal, May 19; Toronto, May 21; Calgary, May 26; Vancouver, May 28; 7 to 9:30 p.m.
WHERE Montréal, Marché Bonsecours, 350 St. Paul St. E.; Toronto, Design Exchange, 234 Bay St.; Calgary, Hotel Arts, 119 12th Ave. S.W.; Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Center, 999 Canada Pl., Room 301
HOW MUCH C$60 (US$51.16), Montréal and Toronto; C$55, Calgary and Vancouver

Interview with Jason Mraz...

Jason Mraz: 'I'm In The Songwriting Process Constantly'

Starting out as a busker on the streets of New York City, Jason Mraz later moved to the warmer climate of San Diego to hone his writing and performing skills. It was there that he finally received attention from Elektra Records, which released Mraz’ debut Waiting For My Rocket To Come in 2002. Producing the hit singles "The Remedy (I Won’t Wait)", which Mraz co-wrote with pop hitmakers the Matrix, "You & I Both" and "Curbside Prophet," Waiting For My Rocket To Come received platinum certification and paved the way for Mraz’ reputation as a clever, inspired and observant songwriter.

Mraz’ second release, the Grammy-nominated Mr. A-Z (2005), debuted at #5 on the U.S charts and featured the hit single "Wordplay". His third album We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things, which was released last year, resulted in three Grammy nominations, including Song of the Year for "I’m Yours", which is a warm breeze of a song about finally giving into love and life’s possibilities set to a lilting island tempo. "I’m Yours" also holds the distinction of being the only song to ever top the airplay charts in the U.S. in all four major pop radio formats – Top 40, Adult Alternative, Adult Contemporary and Hot Adult Contemporary - and has sold over five million copies worldwide. Currently on another world tour, Mraz took a break in his busy schedule to speak to Ultimate-Guitar’s Joe Matera about touring, acoustic guitars and his plans for his next album.

UG: I want to start by asking you how the songwriting process is coming along for the next album, have you got any material ready?

Jason Mraz: I have written songs for the next album. It is my life’s work really. There will always be albums and there will always be songs so I’m in the songwriting process constantly. At the moment this tour is going to last until October, so realistically, I don’t think I can get into a studio until maybe November or December. But even that is being ambitious. So let us just say that I am going to go into the studio in early 2010 and hope to have the album out some time next year.

Do you tend to demo a lot of material on the road or prefer to just write it and demo later?

I do write it but I also usually have to demo everything that I write too because I have a tendency to forget things. So I either demo stuff in Garage Band or if I really like how the song sounds, I will pull up Pro Tools and get something sounding good in that. And also by putting the demos into my iPod they are in constant storage and so I can have this wealth of material to draw from and know where I have left off, and know where the songs are currently sitting. I can arrange them into a play list too which can give me a feel to how they’re all shaping up. So demo-ing is very, very important to me.

"If I do an electric album, I hope its only for beautiful reasons and not for volume."

Obviously with time it will also help you refine and work on the song until you have it the way you envisage it?

Yeah, absolutely and we have already started testing out a couple new songs on this tour. The sooner you can start playing the songs, and hear how they’re sounding coming back to you through the PA, the better life the songs will have which will be important in getting them captured finally for the album.

In my last interview with you in early 2008, you mentioned that you were playing a Fender Jaguar on some parts of your then tour and had ambitions to do an electric record?

And funnily enough when we were making this last record I was real specific about not having electric guitars on it too. And there was one electric guitar that made an appearance from time to time but I monitored every lick, and even in the mixing, I asked for things to come down because I didn’t want it to be too heavy on the album. And more importantly, I didn’t want to tour with it. I really wanted this album to exist even without the production because the songs still came through just on an acoustic guitar. If I did do an electric album, I hope it came out sounding like Jeff Buckley’s Grace because that is such a brilliantly melodic album, flooded with reverb, and his playing and technique is so tender and delicate. Then at times, the dynamics just take you to all new heights in only the way an electric can. So if I do an electric album, I hope its only for beautiful reasons and not for volume.

When it comes to guitars, are you still using Taylor acoustics?

Yes I am. These days I take out three Taylors with me on the road, mainly because we’re flying so much. But when I keep it closer to home, I usually have about five guitars with me on the road. I’m using the nylon string Taylor NS72CE. For the past few years, I have only been playing nylon strings and really getting into it. The Taylors have the Fishman pickups which I like because it’s got the pro blend where you can blend it between the pickup and the built in microphone and if you’re in the right venue, and it can support it, you can really make it sound like its miked. Of course, when we get louder, we crank up our monitors, but I can’t really turn the mike on because it will feedback. I’ve been also using some pedals from this company called Moollon, an awesome custom company out of Korea. I use their Overdrive and this trio called a Moollon 3-Plus pedal that has got a Compressor, an Equalizer, and a D.I plus Signal Boost in it as well as, their Delay pedal and Wah pedal. And it all goes into a Fender Deluxe Reverb amp. And everything is super clean and fat.

You tour heavily and have built up your fan base that way, how relevant is a record label to you these days then?

Believe it or not it is still relevant because the record labels are still connected all over the world and the distribution companies as well are through them. And I have got a great team, people who love the work that I make. They’re kind of like my art dealer to me. I can make my art at home and then send it to them and they do their best to get it out there in the world. I can’t imagine how I would do it otherwise. I know I have got a real loyal fan base and could use the internet, but I am not a business man. And I wouldn’t want to turn my life into business as well.

Obviously touring the numerous countries can inspire much of your songwriting and music?

It does and it can. For me I have always used songwriting as a way to help me organize reality. And sometimes touring can warp reality quite a bit because you are never in one place long enough to get a feel for it. You don’t interact with humans long enough to know what real life is. Especially in touring because a lot of people you run into, want to take a picture or want an autograph and so they put you in a place that they normally don’t put other human beings in. So it gets weird. And that’s why you get a lot of people writing songs about longing and missing people, songs of loneliness when they’re out on the road. I do my best to keep my mind open and I read a lot when I’m out on the road. So I hope I still get good things to write about.

"I need to start playing a little bit more progressively."

As you mentioned many artists write songs about heartbreak and sorrow, yet you’re known for your positive vibe. Do you see a trend in music moving more to the positive especially now with the economic crisis that the world is facing?

Well I can’t really speak on the trend because I don’t follow enough to know better. I do think that any time there is a crisis it does bring out the best in people. It brings out their ability to volunteer, it brings out their ability to speak up or just be compassionate. And that becomes reflected in the music as well. So people perk up and they want to hear different songs and they want something that resonates with the change going on in their lives and in the world.

I first interviewed you back in 2002 on the eve of the release of your first record and at the time hardly anybody knew who you were. Do you ever look back over your career and think, “how did I get here?”

Every day, man. Every day I wonder how I got here. It is hard to believe that I have been at this for ten years now and I wonder where those years went. Every once in awhile somebody will remind me of a story of something I did like four or six years ago and I am like, ‘oh my God, I did do that!’. It is amazing to me. I never get tired. I have taken up running, I run now in every city and that is where I feel it the most, when I am exploring the city on its river bank or on its coast somewhere and I see these new buildings and these new scenes and new sunsets. And I think, ‘whoa, I can’t believe I am in this part of the world and it is all thanks to music’.

So are you comfortable with where you are musically and have arrived at?

I am but in fact, I’m too comfortable and I am at a point where I am ready to hit my self on the head and take it up a notch. I need to start playing a little bit more progressively. I recently saw John Butler Trio’s set and I just had forgotten how progressively and how much of a brilliant machine that guy is, especially on the guitar. And it just mad me enough to realize how comfortable I really am. And I thought to myself, ‘you know what? I need to turn this up some…”

Interview by Joe Matera
Ultimate-Guitar.Com © 2009

Ultimate-Guitar.Com © 2009