“I am acting on behalf of later generations.” Seneca
You’re mostly likely interested in music, otherwise you probably wouldn’t be reading this. In my mind almost nothing today is as it seems and those that accept a representation, via the internet, are receiving a narrowly focused outlook. Music was never meant to be a spectacle, it was never meant to sway you with visuals, and it will never be a reality inside a virtual space. What virtue is there inside a static environment. What are we saying when we say static? We are merely translating the differences in music industry models. When we say static there is this picture of a recording studio that pops in my head where those in attendance are most likely being paid to add their two cents, like college professors, psychologists, and social theorists.
On Labels
This is how record labels work. Everything they teach is backwards. They are not involved in live music and they are not involved in pushing NEW music to the world. New music would be derived from a new proven sound, not from a sound that is signed, then records, then goes on tour. This is a backwards model to what music is. Music is not technology, music is the act of transferring human energy through an instrument (the voice is my favorite instrument). Record labels are technology dependant, their business has always been about the sale of a piece of recorded media. This media is a second step in the process of music. It is not up to the artist to expect label execs to know what is happening the world when they remain in an office environment, radio station, recording studio. In these environments everyone would essentially be listening to the same music and commenting on what everyone is listening to. Outside of this office or building, who else is listening, when and where (context) has never been deduced. Data from sales and radio model does not tell us who is listening, but if you look at a ticket sale vs. an album sale, you can see who was listening to what song and at what time (*this is estimated, but still more concrete than an album sale). My aunt knew I liked music but would often buy CDs I didn’t like. The label only counts the sale.
In the shrinking of the label system, those who are no longer at a label are quickly hired by streaming services who are poised to be the “next record label”. So the next record label is going to look a lot like the first? Doubt it. Why were record label staff even approached, when it was a fight for streaming to even get licenses? My guess, probably so they can hang around their college friends, name-drop, and talk about the music they like. I can imagine the water cooler being something about the fact that “they” get to work on “so-in-sos” project. I also feel they push their favorite artists so they can meet them and then title it “in-studio sessions”.
It has carried from somewhere and indoctrinated all that work in a label. Think about the promotions department, who may not even like the music they are having to sell, but does so for the paycheck. Somebody saying that music sounds good, for money, isn’t saying much. In this mode the record labels and streaming services all think alike and all listen to the same music (like their college peers). Musicians rarely finish college but only college degree candidates need apply to work in the globalized (catalogued) music industry. There is not much diversity inside a system that thinks alike. More on that later.
Labels do not tour with artists, unless it’s on the back of that promotion department. Labels also enjoy telling artists what a larger audience will “want to hear” or more pertinently “want to see”, all from the comfort of a board room. Labels sometimes even manage to get artists to sign away publishing rights all in the name of getting your music to a larger audience (shame, shame, know your name). These label/streaming staffers enjoy music but most enjoy doing “something else”. They’d rather be doing that “other thing” but instead got stuck in the music business because of their college degree.
I will now make the statement that the college degree era of music has moved us away from a primary source of music and its structure within humans. Musicians, who you listen to, most likely did not finish college. While labels fill their staff with college grads and musicians don’t go to college, what we get is a next generation that don’t seem to remember how it was done before. Asking people not on the scene, to help deduce data around the engagement between the music and the audience, is second hand knowledge.”You must go to the scene of action, first, because men put more faith in their eyes than in their ears” -Seneca. Or Feliz Salmon’s take, “The ones on the ground, who see the facts in a real world context, should be doing the contextualizing.”And (emphasis mine) if you want to understand how an audience reacts to music, you will want to be in the closest engagement between the audience and the music. In this the idea of a producer has become somebody who knows how to play a video game vs. somebody with an ear for long term success.
On Physics
The dynamics of music have been slowly eroding. Active listening is not a lean back approach and also done a lower level. It doesn’t need to be loud if you are paying close attention. Sometimes I play music through a bluetooth speaker and have to turn it down to the lowest setting in a quiet environment or else it hurts my ears. The loudness war is exactly that, a small minority railing against a decision made in the early 90’s to increase the volume in the mix/master process. When older generations complain that things are too loud, it isn’t because their hearing is going bad, they actual have very active and sensitive hearing (just cause many older people wear hearing aids doesn’t mean all older people are in need of hearing aids, or the Taleb version of mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence). They are accustomed to listening and learned over the years that the best approach to listening intently is active. Or Seneca’s version, advice is not delivered at the top of the voice. If it’s not delivered this way, why have we humans been steady reversing this idea. Headphones and compressed audio files are a dangerous combination for anyone interested in conserving their hearing.
People who say streaming sounds like downloads/cds are possibly going deaf, or just don’t listen well enough. The technicality of this can be mapped to what compressed waves are. They are narrow, and with less space comes smaller waves (more waves crash near the shore). What doesn’t like time/space doesn’t like unpredictability or randomness. The asymmetry or nonlinearity in wave functions maps to the fragile and antifragile generalization. With less time you have more actions, again more waves crash near the shore. Time is more events happening in a space. The more events happening the faster a higher level frequency. Turbo chargers (in engines) have a high whistle. The faster, higher frequency of wave the the less space the wave has to move. The smaller, shore crashing waves don’t like time, and are spaced much closer to another (like a college millennial who believes the world is coming to an end). These smaller waves are treble heavy, think of the size of a tweeter to a sub. A sub is large in part because the waves it pushes are large, and a tweeter has the opposite effect. In the information age we are being forced (through loudness and digital compression) to listen backwards to how nature intended. The EARth is round and your EAR hears circular sound waves. The lack of warmth, the lack of fullness, and the lack of breath, all things computers (electronics) lack. So for your own hearing conservation (or not needing a hearing aid when you are older) we should be listening at low volumes and without headphones. Headphones direct a narrow channel allowing sound to pass, like compression. Around the time of Van Halen (MTV) the in-ear mold was produced for performing artists. Starting with the drummer who couldn’t get his monitor loud enough. When our ears remain the quickest sense we must ask ourselves why the music, in the image age, is getting louder, and louder, to the point where we shove direct tubes in our ears and proceed to play at loud levels. If you look at a screen long enough, you’ll go blind, and if you continue to use headphones you’ll go deaf.
Bass shakes and treble breaks. What do larger wave patterns have to do with compression: Our ears our shaped to react better to lower tones and some lower frequencies register in the sense of touch. So we like it slow and low, naturally. “When the object is not to make him want to learn but to get him learning, one must recourse to these lower tones, which enter the mind more easily and stick in it.” Seneca….. A high pitched scream is much worse than listening to James Earl Jones speak. This is why you feel the car with bass before you hear anything else. Feeling (your gut) is primary to decision making, ears are secondary, and the eye is wherever. It only takes two to make new. I’m sticking with my gut and my ears to deduce music, not my eyes. A majority of EDM makers today are also great video game players, who can get the screen to do stuff, they just can’t seem to get their body to do much. Sitting in front of screens doesn’t make one quick on their feet. No one likes the person who walks in front of a movie.
Are more people watching vs. listening? Is anyone dancing? We reject the eyes as being primary, they are prone to illusions and are worthless in the dark (under opacity). The ear tells the eye where to look, as in which direction will the ambulance be traveling. Who’s sorting (applying algorithms to) your music? Visual or Audible first people? Can you mimic someone’s dance moves by watching them dance? Is it easier for you to dance on your own while listening to music? What was dancing before it was given a name and we had a term to describe it. For this matter what was anything before it was given a name. What’s in a name? What are the things you understand without giving a name. The shimmy, the shake, the twist, the swing, the step. Ask a baby to explain why it is dancing. Terms for things are nice but they too are not primary. What’s more important is a feeling. If you feel it, it’s moving you (somehow). I can’t saw what a DAW is, but I can with better certainty say what it is not, it is not a drummer, it is not a dancer, it is not, at its essence able to dance with locomotion. Robot dancing was a joke at the club to make people laugh. It still is a joke. What worries me is that we are moving more in the direction of this robotic, engineered, music. There is no lag, no hitch in their get up, and no way to self heal. Do you think a robot has a limp? Without this lag, they can’t swing. Without an orbit there is no gravity. Without locomotive movement (full of uncertainty principles) there is no depth. In the shallow shore will many waves crash. Treble heavy, compressed, unnatural systems.
On Video Gamed Hits
The mass production (not to be confused with the band) taking place today has vaulted the engineer in front of the producer with no clear hit(s) leading the way. Those who use the Max Martin/Dr Luke excuse don’t see the point. We are not talking about Swedish song-writers, who study American R&B to reproduce hits from classic styles (globalization), we are stating an obvious structural defect in making every engineer a producer just because he/she has the ability to manipulate a computer screen. This video game style of music has come to the the foray of the music industry. So much music is made by people who cannot make music without a computer screen in front of them. Electricity in humans is sufficient to make music but the humans using electricity outside of their body aren’t making anyone move naturally. Making music in a computer is the same as allowing the computer to make music. This is an attack on any musical person who allows music to move through them. Taking a line from Keith Jarrett: “electricity is inside every human, why are we playing with electronic toys”. For the non-dancing robotic movement, hand-waving EDMers, If the power goes out, make sure to find a drummer so you can still dance.
A producer is there to find the right sounds and the right movements within a piece, and reconstructs (with the artist) a better overall product for presentation. Engineers in recent times have had to put all their time into learning the newest technology (which changes often… protools 10.1 HD, plugins, logic, etc.). This is very similar to the person who has to have the latest version of a video game. The time needed to learn the new version is obvious time diverted away from listening to music or going to shows, or getting outside, or dancing, you get the point. What we are being pushed are decisions from a group of computer nerds, whose love for these new digital technologies becomes a form of neomania, leading them away from sounds into what the screen is doing.
An engineer/producer story
The story usually goes as such: The label owes a favor to an engineer ( I refuse to call him/her a producer, more on this later) who is hired on to mix a record furnished by a live band (who sold tickets). This engineer has the task of taking what an audience has already heard and making it his own on the grounds to reach a larger audience. Now the label should care, but doesn’t (remember they owe this engineer work, due to some contract negotiation or friends of friends, type of thing), know that this engineer does not play an instrument professionally (just in living rooms), nor do they care that his/her experience is strictly within a DAW, not around musicians, and especially not around a seven piece band. This caring attitude should extend to record sales but those don’t sell so what we have witnessed is this story play out over and over with remanufactured hits, or remakes, or copies, or flash-in-the-pan, forgot it already type of music that they mistakenly call HITS. To get this info, labels and studio engineers would need to ask the live audience the difference between a song and a hit, and would also need to make sure to ask the superfans to get the better answers. This unknowingness of anything related to the fan and the music is brought inside of their recording and production facilities and essentially becomes a game of knowing how to capture sounds in a computer vs. having any depth of understanding about which sounds to capture.
So with this agency problem we see two things: the artist’s intention to have a record that reaches a bigger audience & the diverting intention of the label to pay back a favor to a recording engineer (who has never seen/heard the audience respond to the band in real time to the music which he/she is about to mix). The non skin-in-the-game types are not deducing information about your record (mix) by being at your shows and/or listening to you rehearse, but from a boxed in, static space (usually some board room where they hold “meetings”). This gives them no experience with the crowd that hears the band in the real transaction. This obvious model error shows us that their ears are not in tune to the listening audience. I have no sympathy for artists who believe in this model, just like I have no sympathy for the engineer who believes they are a producer, or the label executive who is better at baking bread than listening to live music.
A producer today has to be more dynamic than that of a DAW engineer. Producers cannot spend their time keeping up with all the digital changes nor can they be expected to look at music and decide on the basis of a hit by staring at a computer screen. Producers today (and tomorrow) should be listening, not just for new sounds, but for those elements in music that will be able to play in twenty years time. To stay relevant, all these EDM producers will have to produce tracks/songs/music that we will find ourselves listening to in twenty years. In twenty years, if you’re still listening to Avicii and Aloe Blaac singing about waking up when it’s all over, you are probably still sleeping and would have missed twenty years of music. What’s most disheartening about the sensational recording industry is that they sent a guy like Aloe to D.C. on behalf of song-writers. Most song-writers I know face the problems of the day. They do not bury their head in the sand and they do not ask to be woken up when it’s over. These types sound like the farthest things from musicians, and more like the type who ask you to do something that they wouldn’t normally do. This is the inverse-hero and I long for the day when musicians were heroes and stood up for what they felt was right. This can only come from a varied type of musician, one who travels and plays in front of diverse groups, one who is dynamic.
So the same static recording engineer the label hired to mix a seven-piece band will most likely not enjoy attending shows, and if he/she does, they will probably critique every shift in sound. A personal story: I once mixed an eight piece band in a live setting and after it was over I was approached by some recording engineer types who had only this to say, that I moved the faders too much. Did they miss the concert going on, onstage? I guess they are accustomed to a recording room where they set the dials and let technology do its thing. I’ve fired these engineering types in the live setting as they tend to “set it and forget it”. They didn’t come on their own volition, they knew somebody in the band. They do not seem to understand that a human (x’s eight) playing in front of live crowd, will play harder/softer at all different times. They will dance, get tired, get winded, get amped, scream, shout, whisper, sweat, pause for a break, drop the microphone, put the microphone in the crowd, dip it in the wedge, etc. Recording Engineers want things to be automated (static), and live engineers live in the moment, each moment, every night, in a different room, with a different (dynamic) setup. From this we see that engineers can easily capture the wrong sounds, keeping the audience in a static state. A producer who knows what sound to capture (or not capture) is primary to an engineer who merely knows how to capture sounds.
Like the narrow focus of looking through your camera phone, these engineer types see music but have a hard time hearing it. What we get is a skewed version of reality. If you take your eyes off the camera phone, your focus expands to include everything around you, but this everything around you awareness cannot be found inside a recording studio/office, by staring at a computer screen or from those who use their eyes as the arbiter of music. The natural stress provided by an audience in attendance makes the performer stronger, but the stress inside a recording studio is usually directed towards a machine not functioning properly. And we can’t forget that those in the recording studio (static) are being paid to be there, while the audience at a show (dynamic) paid to be there. The social dynamic of music is currently under the watch of the non-social, non-interactive, and non-skin-the-game types. Where do you pay for music? What music would you pay for? What elements need to be present for you to feel you got your monies worth?
On Low Dimensionality
Low dimensionality and low variability leads to blowups and diversity is proclaimed inside the record industry but they are the furthest from diverse. They have been surely loading their roster/portfolio with Look-A-Likes and Sound-A-Likes for over fifteen years. Listen from Aguilera – Ariana. The “Me-Too” company is all but original, yet the technology is new. Let’s go back to the label (who did not conceive the idea for said technology), and who owes a favor to a engineer/mixer who, just likes me, enjoys some Hip-Hop every now and then (again we are not calling them producers). The label asks this engineer to mix a recording by a live band. There isn’t a person I don’t know who doesn’t have a story about a Hip-Hop concert that goes something like this. We went to the show just to wait for hours for the act to hit the stage, only to do a shortened set of their hits (in medley form) and then bounced off stage as if they were late for a recording studio session. So now the engineer asked to mix a band’s record is doing so from an idea that is not as musical as one would think. Yes the bass line is the most relevant after the beat (in the music not lyrics) but the musical melodic lines are absent if you travel to another country that doesn’t speak the language. They can rap along (talk in rhyme) but they can’t sing-a-long. This really doesn’t matter much as the goal was not performance, it was selling a mix-tape. You know the type who stands on the street and asks if you like rap, tries to put headphones on your ears, and then asks for money for the CD ( I also hesitate calling Hip-Hop music, just like people hesitate calling us drummers, musicians). Anyhow, the label loves these go get em types, the type of record salesman you can find on a street corner, but who may not stay on stage longer than the minimum time stated in the contract (and sometime much less). I’ve seen stand-up comics do four hour sets without a break. In the last era of the record industry (when CDs sold) more rappers were signed than almost any other style or genre. The ultimate sales > performance model.
This isn’t to say I don’t like Hip-Hop or its producers, on the contrary, it is to say that there is an obvious error in the overall process of the macro music industry, stemming from a record label model or the idea that sales > performance. If you are trying to get a record deal this is what you will aspire for as this is what the label signals. This cycle is vicious. This is next to impossible for a real musician or the opposite of Ariana Grande to comprehend, as they have to perform in order to make a sale. If the performance is horrible, the audience will tell their friends and the tickets for the next show won’t look so hot. (The fact that this girl, who hates Americans, is still signed to the ironic label Republic Records is similar to those who turned their head the other direction when Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright used his words against America.) The label is out of the live performance business, so they will not be finding these live acts (a clear agency problem with no skin-in-the-game) and pushing them to you via Spotify’s interactive technology. Quite the screw-up we’re involved in at the moment. It’s also why my ethics won’t allow me to use these wrong models. There is nothing interactive about top-down strategies that put sales before performance. If you cannot perform, you aren’t going to sell. If you sell something besides your performance, you are better off going the video, image driven artist that MTV appreciates. The idea that all you need to do is get your music in front of the “right person” to reach a larger audience is utter BS. People are not lottery tickets. Make the right music (don’t lie to yourself) is all you have to do. Putting your music on Spotify doesn’t say anything about your music. The Swedes don’t understand “God Bless America” “America The Beautiful” or “The Star-Spangeld Banner” but are being touted as the channel for Americans who want to listen to music. Chuck Berry recently died as well. He wasn’t from Sweden. Where is your music coming from? From a programmer or from inspiration.
On Models
A large model error is having antiquated processes of the label decide what to do with new technological platforms for the artist and audience. Streaming services are staffing those who do not work with the artist and the audience to help decide what to do with the new technology that connects the artist and the audience. The money labels made from a physical product vanished into software and their only hope is to restart from the ground up. Their model of sales>performance is a structural defect inside an interactive, real-time model, and there is no cure for structural defects; we must allow them to collapse. Mr Iovine says something about the model of free/subs in relation to charting and everyone agrees. First off, these charting ideas are just as antiquated as their models. To break it down again, if you read my last post it states that radio models were about airplay in a bullseye region and sales were about albums and sometimes singles. The trumpeted Billboard chart was all about sales but remember my aunt also bought CDs that I didn’t like. Their understanding of bulk sales is no understanding at all. We don’t know what we don’t know, and the labels don’t know performance metrics in interactive models. They do not have this transactional knowledge inside a radio/album model (We have already debunked this). The new technology and the data it provides is new to label minded folk and does not fit inside their structural framework of decades past. They didn’t have the wherewithal to build the technology but are trying to decide with the tech geeks about how the audience listens, reacts, and interacts with music.
If subs are the only things counting towards popularity the BIGS are stating that non-interactive and interactive subscriptions count. This seems off, if we are living in a “singles world”. If we are to be counting singles then by all means we should be counting interactive free streams (I change the radio station in the car If I don’t like the song, Does Jimmy?). Interactive subscriptions are great, but a lot of people and businesses that pay for subs are prone to letting playlists play. They are not being interactive but their subs count towards these dumb charts. How do they know what to measure when they don’t even know who’s listening. We should be measuring interactiveness (ticket sale style models) and not sales of subscriptions in hopes to call it an “album” which suffices the label’s antiquated P/L. And if playlists are your leader then it’s once again label driven (through spotify types) songs being pushed (non-interactives know how to push). If someone pushes you it is b/c you were standing still. If you pull someone then both of you are moving in the same direction. When we interact with a song (whether free, nothing is free) we are pulling the “product out of the startup” or the “song out of the artist”. So Jimmy is neglecting the free service which he agreed to for so long. Radio got the music from the label, for free, and often the label paid for songs to be on radio. Now Jim doesn’t want to count the people who listen to free radio, only those people paying for something. Interesting when the coming of age is around 14-18 and they don’t pay for music.
The free tier is also ad supported. If your song gets big on Youtube, you win. If it gets big inside of Spotify, you do not share ad revenue and the labels are propped up with your song’s popularity and your audience’s money. When they see this they will come running, offering you the world. What are they offering? The technology made to be interactive with the music audience (harvest/analyze data between the interaction of the audience and the music) is being composed by nerds who don’t dance, but who play video games, label executives who aren’t on tour and cannot explain what your fans want to hear, and engineers (in a box) who call themselves producers of large swaths of audience desirable content. The engagement properties of content work this way: the further you are from the real transaction the further you are from understanding music’s primary function. Live performance is a deeper understanding of the communication structure or interaction between the music and the audience. The closer the engagement the closer the action. In the macro word of sales it is much easier to bullshit your way to the title of music expert, like Bob Lefsetz (never heard his music) or these kids who get hired by Pandora, that play a guitar in their living room, and by this and their computer science degree are deciding what music you hear. You can’t do this at the micro level, where dynamics of said music remains interdependent. How many of these people, deciding the music you hear, actually get paid to play music, and feed their families doing so? I think the streaming title of “artist in residence” is to signal how they employ working artists. Let me catch a hook somewhere D.A. Wallach. Bread makers make bread and others make noise. I don’t want a federal arts program if this is type of music that is gonna get funded. Spotify has been around for 6+ years in the US and not one artist worth noting has come from strictly interactive means. The popularity of interactive growth is all over Youtube. In fact the majority (if not all) of the acts you hear about “breaking records” on Spotify are already record label artists. So these were acts that had RECORD deals not Streaming deals. So Spotify has to create their own music artists to compete or not compete with the labels. Spotify has to break an artist outside of the record label model. Spotify has to prove what interactive music does. And Spotify has to do this all while hiring record label individuals. Old ideas and structures inside new technology. New ingredients, same old shell. Doesn’t sound promising.
On Faculties
Audience interaction in the live setting is complex, but it’s also about simplicity. Songs, in the classical, non-recorded, performance only form, were called “movements”. If the song today moves an audience, the real-time flow, pulse, and reactions in the context it originates, will show us these elements. The record label is in bed with streaming and a record is a rerun. What we get in this horrible combination is change (technologically) without aesthetics (hits).
In 2011 I attended the Billboard music touring conference and proposed to the panel pictured below, a question about the relevance of EDM in a live setting and the music leading its way. (I’m sitting somewhere house left, probably out of the frame).
Bill Werde shrugged my comment off as aesthetics because I proposed the audible argument vs. the visual spectacle that was EDM. Bill is no longer at Billboard and SFX was delisted and filed for bankruptcy. This 2011 year was also the same year Coran Capshaw received a humanitarian award. I was upstairs reading a book in the Roosevelt hotel outside of a backstage entrance and saw the poor man get turned away from this backstage entrance due to not having the right credentials (no fault on the part of the Billboard college intern working the door who didn’t know what a Virginia cowboy looks like). Coran was such a gentleman about it and walk away. That’s a sign of true success, when you don’t care for the award and you’re fine with being turned away at the door. Sitting in this same chair I was also approached by Kenny Chesney, and who I presumed to be his manager, they asked where the nearest bathroom was. I wasn’t working this event but I guess there is something about a touring musician that reflects outwardly to other touring musicians. I politely gave them the direction to the nearest mensroom. Now this Billboard intern, did he not know who these music people were? Was this not taught in college? Which leads us to the primary statement of the music industry collapsing due to its reliance on college graduates or “the educated class”. This says that the musicians who make the music, and in which the majority of them do not have a college degree, are not credentialed enough to be a part of the label/streaming world. What will new musicians and their new music do? Where will they go for development? They can’t trust the old process inside such an interactive technology and they can’t trust this globalized system to lead them in the direction of new success.
The college degree candidates for music will continue to head to the Big Streamers for jobs and these jobs will be there to push what music is already in catalogue form to the rest of the world. Your college degree candidates are not deducing new sounds for the market, they are disseminating catalogue music. And new acts through these services sound a lot like the current acts in a label catalogue. So it seems then the bifurcation of music is among us. One leading in the direction of a globalized strategy (or label model) the other in the form of new developments and a new direction for new artists with new music. The globalized strategy works, it takes from what is and makes it better. This focus is where Spotify and others will continue to be moving, in the direction of scale. What I am excited about in the globalized era is the amount of next generation performers who will (so easily) with Youtube and streaming services, be able to emulate James Brown, The Eagles, Bill Evans, Tower of Power, Keith Jarrett, and a host of talents. We will see growth from this but there are key elements our top performers share, they do not have college degrees, and they come from a performance model (live) vs a recording model (rerun). The reruns and derivatives are out there. With all theses people listening to the same music, who originates what you will hear next?
On New Structures
With all the current systems in place to derive from what is and make it better, what area of the music industry will then be the ones who do something new, authentic, original, and make it stick out amongst the forty million available tracks to stream? What area of music can decide quicker and with better metrics if a song/artist will stick. Re-referencing the true statement above, If you want to know better how an audience will respond to music, you will want to work in the environment where the audience is at its closest engagement with the music. A quote from the above Billboard 2011 article states, “No matter what the genre, live music is of high interest to investors these days”. Does that make recorded music (catalogued) a low investment strategy? What are investor returns who invest in the globalization radio/label/streaming model? If live music is of “high interest” to investors, where are these investors who are interested in partnering with businesses and individuals who are steeped in live music. How much longer will we wait before the influence of live connects with with the technology that interacts with the fans. Labels, who don’t attend concerts regularly, or are non-musical, have missed many hits that went into obscurity and will continue to do so. Labels and streaming are not experienced in live music (interactive models) and investors should heed this main point when making decisions. EDM leads with visuals, and an old model with new technology is mispriced in the market. The opportunity to make new sounds for a new generation sits right in front of us.
