Thoughts on iTunes' User Interface Problems

Consider the record store.

Not today's record store. Jump back 20, 25 years. When I was high school age, at the center of the record-buying demographic.

There's about four choices then. No, five.

• The Record Section in K-Mart or the Equivalent - About four racks at best
• The Mall Record Store - Better selection. If it was popular, there was a good chance for you to find it. If not? Well, I special ordered Allan Holdsworth's Metal Fatigue. I saved up my money for it before I ordered it. Got a postcard later, saying it was unavailable. So I bought something else. Then I looked in the Jazz section and found it, after I had spent my money.
• The Cool Record Store - Cool record stores didn't exist in every town. The place I had my Mall Record Store experience was in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The nearest Cool Record Store, the place I got the first Suicidal Tendencies album, was in Raleigh, about an hour drive away. I had to beg my parents to take me when we were there for another reason. And once you were there ... well, watch High Fidelity. Many more Jack Blacks than Todd Louisos in those places. And, for another point, those were pre-Soundscan days. Those were the guys who would say they're selling the "cool" stuff rather than what they were really selling. For example, they notoriously underreported Country. Garth Brooks came out right after Soundscan. He probably wouldn't have been nearly as big if the contrast wasn't as big.
• Mail Order - That works when you know about it. I got Program: Annihilator via mail order, on cassette. But if you don't know about the band, about the label, how do you know where to order? You had to send a dollar to even get the catalog in the first place.
• The Columbia Record Club - 10 CDs for 1 cent or so, but a) you had to get some later at a higher price, and b) they're all Columbia. Columbia was a cool label — DYLAN and MILES were on Columbia — but not everything cool was on Columbia and not everything on Columbia was cool.

This is how it was at the height of the Rock era, when the labels were where it's at. Tell me how iTunes isn't vastly superior to this.

Gibson's Five Ideas That Will Not Work

Jonah of Gibson's Lifestyle website has five ideas to Save the Music Industry. I for one am entirely unconvinced by them.

• Fix Ticketmaster — Just what business are we talking about here? Generally, if you're talking the "music business", you're talking about selling music. If you're in the venue business, you're using the alcohol business, using the band to attract an audience. Just like the business of newpapers and magazines isn't the text, but using the text to sell the readers to the advertisers. Just like talking about Shell and BP has little to do with the auto bailout, fixing Ticketmaster, while in general a good idea, will do nothing to fix Warner and Capitol, etc.
  On the other hand, if we're talking about the big rooms, the concert halls and the stadiums with blue mats on the basketball boards, they can only do it if there are big acts to fill them, and you need to have small venues pushing small acts that grow to be big acts, or else the system dies when the last big fish dies.


• Shift The Focus From CDs To Vinyl — CDs might suck ("They’re easily scratched, ugly and make album artwork so small that it’s difficult to see without a magnifying glass ..."), but consider this. There were singles, individual good songs. The 50s were all about singles. The 60s only started to not be about singles toward the end. It was the 80s when the rock single died, and even then, it kinda didn't. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was the video, the "single" even when no single was released. Same with "Rockin' in the Free World". We wanted singles, but we couldn't buy singles. Then came MP3s, and iTunes and such. We have singles again. Vinyl sales are constant to DJs and audiophile geeks. CD sales are slipping. With downloads, you have good-enough music quality wherever you want, without having to build a Hi-Fi shrine to music in your living room. That's a dog.


• Make Better Music — If only it were that easy. On the one hand, you think you're going to make "better" music than the Allmans, the Beatles, Miles Davis, Benny Goodman, Bach? (Depending on what you're going for.) On the other hand, you could make the best music possible and if nobody hears it, it goes nowhere. Radio is dead, and it's dead by self-inflicted wounds. Until you work out how people know about your music, making it "better" is futile.


• Make the iTunes Store More User-Friendly — Amazon MP3 is plenty user-friendly to me.


• Look to the Past for Perspective — It just might be that the era of recorded popular music, call it from the Bristol Sessions to Napster, has been what economists would call a bubble, and it's just done burst.

A Question Of Your Honesty

I found this through Slashdot. There's a guy who claims that, through code, he can graph and determine whether or not a track was made with a click track.

I can get both sides. Really. On the one hand, it's easy to work out your whole creative blueprint with a drum machine and guitar, and once a drummer comes in, he messes up your creation with his pounding. No drummer is better than a bad drummer, as a guitarist friend says. And for band practices, why is it always the timekeeper who arrives late? But on the other, you can listen to Tom Petty's "American Girl" and compare it to "Free Fallin'" and know that having a drummer in a box just isn't nearly as good.

I conclusion, I use the words of my friend, Jack Pribek. Save The Drummers!

In Other News, Two Truckloads of Snowblowers Shipped to Hades

Chinese Democracy has a release date.

More evidence to support my theory

that we'll see democracy in China before we see Chinese Democracy.

Songs You Know By Heart

The Lefsetz Letter is on about belonging.

I just finished reading the Eagles story in "Rolling Stone". Halfway through I wondered why. I decided it was because it was written by Charles M. Young, one of the legendary second wave "Rolling Stone" writers, and because I cared, I had an investment. I’d bought the debut on a whim, knowing it contained "Take It Easy", but discovering it contained not only "Witchy Woman", but "Earlybird" and "Tryin’". I bought the follow-up because that’s what you did. Buying the debut was like purchasing stock, owning a piece of the band, you were devoted, you didn’t need to hear a new single to be convinced, you purchased the follow-up without hearing it first. "Desperado" was just another cut, on a failed album, financially. But I purchased the third record, which had "My Man" but wasn’t quite as good, and then the band broke through and started to be hated for its wimpy ballads. That’s what success breeds, hatred. But I soldiered on. I bought "One Of These Nights", and on the day it came out, "Hotel California". When I dropped the needle and sound started pouring out of the brand new stereo I purchased as a reward for attending law school, I was stunned. The track was not on the radio, hipsters were not debating the band… Everywhere I went I told people about this one track… That they had to hear the new Eagles album.

I guess that’s what had me reading the "Rolling Stone" article. My sense of belonging.

Me, I could care less about the Eagles, but it would require invasive surgery. But I get his point. His point is, we want to belong. We hear a band and we get involved. It becomes part of our life and we want to be part of their life. I bought a copy of American Songwriter because it has a small interview with Gary Louris in it, and in 1992, Gary and others were in a band called the Jayhawks, who recorded an album called Hollywood Town Hall. There is no way that Bob Lefsetz would consider the Jayhawks a classic band — his idea of classic ended when Diamond Dave was kicked out of Van Halen, I think — but for me, they were. When I was in college the first time, Hollywood Town Hall was folksongs, because everybody knew the words.

I drove with my eldest yesterday. I knew my MP3 player was near dead, so I grabbed a CD. When it died, I put it in. I play music for my eldest, who is thirteen, that I wouldn't for my other two because he's older. He won't reject it because it's "not the Beatles". (I'm a Stones man, myself. I'm alone in the family that way.) I stick in Trace by Son Volt. It's a CD I've had since 1995. Basically, it's a CD I've had as long as I've had my eldest. And I started singing. Because I knew every word.

This music is not evanescent. It’s part of our collection. We carry it in various formats, everything from vinyl to cassette to MP3… Not that we truly need a copy, because it’s embedded in our brain, our DNA, it’s part of us.

"There's hopes shattered every day"

This post edited out due to pointlessness. I never came to a solid point, so I'm taking it down.

Makes me really wonder if I ever really cared about them....

That Youtube vid yesterday? The one with Teo Macero talking about how he assembled the classic Miles Davis albums?

I came to that because Tom of MusicThing wrote an article for The Word magazine on why all records sound the same these days. It's a brilliant piece that gets into the center gears of the music-making machinery.

Central to the article are these two videos from the making of a Maroon 5 song.





I suppose you really have to keep working on a song after you're sick of it when you're at that level.