Category: Thinking

  • They’re Just Not That into You

    I know insid­ers claim that peo­ple are lis­ten­ing to music now more than ever before, but what if peo­ple are just not as inter­est­ed in new music as they used to be? Has per­ceived demand for new prod­uct out­stripped con­sumer interest? The answer is easy. Search your heart. Every­thing will be eas­i­er if you can…

  • Tragic Tuesdays

    Tobias Car­roll and I have been hav­ing a spir­it­ed back and forth over at his blog, the Scowl, where we’ve been dis­cussing how best to incor­po­rate leaks into the edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar. I argue that leaks are an indus­try norm that need to be treat­ed as such, rather than an aber­ran­t behav­ior bet­ter ignored. He writes: And giv­en…

  • The Release Date Ritual

    Thinking about the music industry's continued commitment to release dates got me thinking about the Royal Tenenbaums. You remember the scene where Eli Cash is on a show very similar to Charlie Rose and he says, "Wildcat...was written in a kind of obsolete vernacular"? I think release dates are part of the music industry's obsolete…

  • After the Gold Rush

    Call me crazy, but I think the music indus­try is bro­ken. Sure, it’s still pos­si­ble for bands and man­agers and labels to make mon­ey, but it’s get­ting increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to do so. The con­tribut­ing fac­tors are too numer­ous to men­tion, so I’m only going to address the one I can con­trol in my pro­fes­sion­al life:…