Thing a Week 37: Rock and Roll Boy I went trolling for some…

Thing a Week 37: Rock and Roll Boy

I went trolling for some interesting audio this week over at the Internet Archive – frankly, I’m a little sick of writing songs, and I wanted to flush out the system with a found audio thingie. I found this treasure trove, a collection of kids on cassette in the public domain (if you’ve never been to the Internet Archive, you should check it out – it’s non-profit with an enormous library of, like, everything). It brought back fond memories of yelling nonsense into the grill of a 40-pound tape recorder with a record button you had to lean on and mash down with your whole hand. And I was blown away by six-year-old Justin’s “Rock and Roll Boy,” which begins with the most fantastic opening lines in the history of rock and roll. So I wrote a song around Justin’s vocals. He wasn’t thoughtful enough to provide a third verse or a bridge, and he wandered a bit in terms of key, so I had to improvise. But I really think he had an actual song in his head. Which is more than I can say for myself some weeks…

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Well, hm. I find my backup vocals hilarious: “He loves to live in this crazy crazy town.” And I seem to remember it was quite a bit of work to get the audio to do what I wanted, so that part feels like an accomplishment. But I can’t really say I’d ever, you know, CHOOSE to listen to this song. I like the guitar solo, which is unusual. One thing I would do differently today is not make it three and a half minutes long – a lot of the songs from the new record are just barely two minutes, and they’re just fine that way. There’s just not enough material here to justify so long a song.

Boy was I tired! I can remember making the decision that I was not going to write anything that week, and how relieved I felt. At this point the relentlessness of the weekly schedule was kicking my ass. It was harder and harder to find ideas and tricks that I hadn’t already used at least a couple of times. I think that after you’ve written enough, that happens, in fact I still feel that way today. Like I’m cooking dinner and nobody’s gone shopping in years. Rice? I guess we could have rice again. Rice with chicken? Haven’t had chicken in a couple of meals. Maybe if I put these mushrooms in, nobody will notice that it’s still just rice and chicken. It’s either that or this can of cheese soup I’ve been staring at for six months. Fuck it, let’s open the can.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Thing a Week 36: Not About You Ah, denial. Sometimes it’s the…

Thing a Week 36: Not About You

Ah, denial. Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps you going. This one cried out for hand claps from start to finish, but I resisted – the first step is admitting you have a problem.

Funny story: while I was recording this, I got a call from the Gin Blossoms. They want their pre-chorus back.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Egads, what a mix! The weird, short, roomy reverb on the vocal drives me nuts. Overall it’s just too busy and monolithic – there are some good ideas in there, but they haven’t really been featured in a way that keeps them out of each other’s way. It’s like there are a couple of radios playing in the background, I can’t hear anything. What’s that synth doing in there? Do you want the synth or not?

The song is OK, catchy, not too deep though. The setup and the one-joke-only aspect of it, plus the appearance of the kicker line in the chorus makes it feel to me like a song that you might hear if you were one of those guys who takes song pitches in Nashville. Of course it’s the same logical conundrum presented by Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” which means it’s already an idea that’s been done QUITE PROPERLY thank you very much. It sounds to me a little like I was flailing, possibly a bit checked out, busy with other things.

As I recall, the title and the line in the chorus had been with me for a long time, like maybe years. I’m looking around on the blog and in my calendar for that week and can’t find much going on specifically, though likely I was in the midst of PopSci podcasts, preparing to release physical CDs from earlier parts of Thing a Week, and trying to leave time free for all the Summer family stuff that starts to happen this time of year. Just like now in fact (except for the podcasts of course).

I don’t remember (nor do I have good records on) how much money was coming in at this point, but I can tell that it was getting really busy in a lot of areas. There’s a point when first you launch into a bossless existence where you think you’ll never be able to fill up the hours of a day, and early on you don’t. You find stuff to do, and bit by bit it creeps up on you. Eventually you have to start saying No to things because you just don’t have time to do them all, and that’s kind of exciting. Pretty sure that feeling was just arriving for me at this point five years ago. Now I work harder than I ever did when I had a job, and I feel slightly behind and out of control of lots of things at once. On the plus side, I do not have to wear pants.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Thing a Week 35: Soft Rocked By Me I find this one a bit…

Thing a Week 35: Soft Rocked By Me

I find this one a bit unsettling. The guy in this song is a total ass – his philosophy is whatever the opposite of carpe diem is. I thought the idea of someone “soft rocking” you was kind of funny when I started this, but now I think it’s just creepy and sad. I’m disgusted with the whole thing.

No bass – no time!

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: No bass, no time, no matter! It’s funny, you obsess over every little thing, and then one day you don’t put bass in and it doesn’t really make all that much difference, the world doesn’t end (literally).

The loathing I felt for this character I created certainly comes from my own tendency to avoid seizing the day at any costs – I really don’t like to strive, or make waves. Here’s a story: I had a girlfriend at some grade school age where having a girlfriend means you tell each other that you LIKE each other and then you never speak again (doing it wrong). Her family moved out of town and we got together for one last (first?) hanging out together time at her house after school, and it was chaste and awkward. After she moved she wrote a letter to me saying that she had a new boyfriend and he was awesome! I found out later at some high school reunion that she made it up because she was mad that I didn’t try to kiss her. I’ve always been too busy “respecting” (I think I might mean “fearing”) girls to ever try to make out with them. I’m pretty sure it was this very memory that made me hate this character so much. The passive voice joke though, that’s a winner.

This song has had much more of a life in live shows than it ever did during Thing a Week, and for that I must thank Paul and Storm. It was their idea to cram a semi-improvised medley in the middle, and it’s always an enormously successful set piece when we perform it together. It’s also a great excuse to sing soft rock songs in three part harmony, which is all I ever wanted to do anyway.

I haven’t talked about Paul and Storm much during this reblog thing, but that’s because this was the year I met and got to know them. They contacted me sometime after Baby Got Back and we started doing shows together, and we’ve been friends and frequent collaborators ever since. I learned a great deal from them about many things, especially touring – from the best envelopes to use when you’re sending posters to the cheapest way to book a hotel (Paul is a master of the Priceline bidding mojo). I continue to rely on them for advice for all sorts of things, and to be a little jealous of their energy and never ending string of good ideas. If it was the internet that helped my career get off the ground, it was Paul and Storm who helped me figure out how to bring it out into the real world in front of real audiences. They are consummate showmen, and if you say otherwise I will write a very long blog post explaining my opinion about it. Count on it!

Seriously, don’t wake the dragon (because he is very tired).

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

On Snuggies and Business Models

On Friday the Planet Money podcast posted an episode about me and my business model, focusing on the question of whether my scene is the future of music business or just a fluke. Alex Blumberg came to JoCo HQ a couple of weeks ago to interview me about how things work for me, how I got here, where the money comes from, etc. He then brought in Jacob Ganz and Frannie Kelley from NPR music blog The Record, to do a little analysis. Their assessment was that while it was obvious this business model worked very well for me, it was probably not something that could be easily replicated. Frannie made an analogy to illustrate her point: I am kind of like a Snuggie. I’m a blanket with sleeves that we didn’t know we all wanted.

A few people were offended on my behalf by this comparison. I’m certain that Frannie’s choice of the Snuggie rather than say, a Mini Cooper or an iPhone, was meant to underline the geeky novelty song aspect of my appeal, to which I say: snarkity snark snark! I confess it stings a little. I’m aware that many people think of me as “merely” a guy who writes novelty songs, which is annoying for a couple of reasons. First, writing novelty songs is actually a real thing that you can do, and many talented people have had fine careers doing it, so let’s not go around denigrating it, shall we? Second, it’s a rather lazy and facile way of labeling me that fails to fully describe what I do.

That said, leaving aside the pejorative nature of the comparison, I think it’s accurate in some respects, in that a Snuggie is a new thing that somebody invented and marketed and sold to enormous success. Do you know who else is a Snuggie? Nirvana, Ben Folds, Madonna, and the Grateful Dead. You have to do something new and unique and valuable in order to get anyone’s attention in this business, in fact that’s sort of the point. Just because I did it with “nerds on the Internet” instead of “teenagers in Seattle” or “hippies at ren faires” or “13-year-old girls on YouTube” is incidental, and beside the point. Similarly, Jacob Ganz says in the podcast that I “won the internet lottery,” which is like saying the Beatles won the British Invasion lottery. It’s accurate but unhelpful, because it fails to draw a meaningful distinction between me and anyone else who has had success in this business. It has always been about winning the lottery, and it has always been about being a Snuggie.

The thing that I think most got in the way of what could have been a much more interesting discussion was some confusion about what a business model is. “Writing a song that gets discovered on Slashdot” is not a business model, any more than “putting sleeves on a blanket” is a business model. It is a thing that happened to me, that part is true, but it’s not really much of a strategy. I make songs that are good and then I sell them (and concert tickets, and Tshirts) to the people who want them – that’s my business model, and it’s patently obvious that it’s replicable because I stole it from every other recording artist in the world.

Here are some things I do differently from some other artists: I own all my music 100%, which means I have complete control over how I sell it (or not). I can give it away, I can bundle it on a USB key or in a zip file, I can allow people to make and post music videos, and I don’t have to deal with lawyers or labels to do any of that. I also get all the profits. During Thing a Week I released every single weekly song that I wrote for free, whether they were good or not, without worrying about whether people would buy them (though I hoped they would). I am extremely public about my creative process, hopes and fears, victories and failures. I communicate directly with fans as often as I can without letting it become my full-time job. I’ve never made a music video. I have extremely low overhead. Most of my sales are digital, which means there are almost no distribution costs. I have never spent any money on marketing and rely completely on blogs, podcasts and social networks to spread the word. I tour solo with an acoustic guitar (used to anyway), and I only play in cities where I have already ascertained there is going to be an audience. I record by myself at home (again, used to!) using equipment that is not very expensive, and that I don’t know how to use very well.

My business model is designed especially for me, by me, and it constantly changes and evolves – I’m now working on an album, with a band and a producer, I’m spending money at a real studio, and I will probably spend money on more traditional marketing and radio promotion before I’m through. Nobody, not even me, should try to do exactly what I’ve done, because there are parts of it that won’t make sense for who you are or what you’re interested in. If you’re a band with a lot of people and equipment, you’re going to need a different touring strategy. If you don’t write nerdy songs, you will have to figure out what your version of Slashdot is. If you are Steely Dan, you will not want to record onto a Mac Mini through an SM58. If you hate writing, please don’t set up a blog. Know only this: to do this you need to work extremely hard, make music that is great, and find people to buy it from you. The end.

So is it replicable? Of course it is! For goodness sake, even the Snuggie is replicable. In fact, the Snuggie itself is a replicant of the Slanket, how’s that for a mindblower? (See also the Cudlee, and the German product Doojo, which has gloves.) I can’t believe I have to point this out, but there are plenty of artists making music and using unique and creative promotional techniques to sell it directly to fans (say it with me, won’t you?): Trent Reznor, Radiohead, Amanda Palmer, Paul and Storm, Marian Call, OK Go, MC Frontalot, MC Lars, the list goes on and on and gets larger every day. We are successful to varying degrees and we have different ways of doing things, some of us came from labels, went to labels, or eschewed labels entirely, but we are all participating in the same basic re-jiggering of the spreadsheet. I obviously don’t know the details of everyone’s business, but I’m guessing that we have this one thing in common: we’ve all decided that it’s fine with us if we reach fewer people as long as we reach them more directly. The revolution in the music industry (which has already happened by the way) is one of efficiency, and it means that success is now possible on a much smaller scale. Nobody has to sell out Madison Square Garden anymore to make a living.

And that is the point. That is what’s inarguably different today because of the internet. We now have an entirely new set of contexts and they come with a whole new set of tools that give us cheap and easy access to all of them – niche has gone mainstream. It is no longer necessary to organize your business or your art around geography, or storage space, or capital, or what’s cool in your town, or any other physical constraint. And this is not to say that anyone can become a moderately successful rockstar just by starting a blog – success is still going to be a rare and miraculous thing, as it has always been. There are just a lot more ways to get there than there used to be, and people are finding new ones every day.

I don’t know why the “funny geeky songs” thing seems to distract people so much from this reality during these discussions, but it does. I’ve had a lot of conversations with industry analysts and insiders, and this kind of hand waving and designation of “fluke” is a sadly familiar phenomenon. And it’s a shame, because before we decide if the internet is “good or bad,” there are some really important questions we should try to answer first. I don’t know the answer to any of these, but I sure am curious to find out. How much money is actually being made in this space that never gets tracked as part of the music industry? What percentage of full time professional artists are making a living, and how does that compare to the old record biz? From an economist’s perspective, is filesharing/piracy hurting artists, or just labels (or is it hurting anyone)? How can the people who used to work at labels continue to have careers bringing valuable services to artists now that the landscape has changed? What are the efficiency breakthroughs that we have yet to discover, who’s going to figure out how to profit from this shakeup? How can we rethink antiquated intellectual property laws in a way that continues to “promote the progress of science and useful arts?” And finally, how can I keep my arms warm without putting on a sweater, which is apparently such a huge burden to so many people?

I honestly don’t fault Frannie and Jacob for having negative opinions about me or different opinions about any of these issues. And I’m not trying to ignite a flame war or tear anybody down. I’m simply amazed and disappointed that none of these questions ever came up in a conversation about the internet and the music business, on a podcast, here in the year 2011. It just feels like a huge missed opportunity, and it makes me sad.

Actually, I take it back, they did address that last one didn’t they?

I should know better than to write this sort of post, because it will inevitably come across as a peevish and whiney response to being called a Snuggie. It probably is that to some extent, and I’m already sorry about it. I am really trying to transcend that though, because I think this stuff is so important. I wouldn’t have authorized Alex to reveal the horribly embarrassing revenue number that I can’t even comfortably mention here if I didn’t think that it would, to some extent, move this conversation past the point where people equate “Code Monkey” with “Hamster Dance” and call it a day. I’m disappointed that it did not. And it’s not about my personal ego. OK, maybe it is a little, but I truly believe that the sooner we all acknowledge the internet is not actually killing art, the sooner we can get back to making things that are awesome.

Now is a better time to be a musician, or a fan of music, than any other time in all of human history. Discuss…