Home, What Was, and the Brave New World

2006-12-10T18:44:00.000-05:00

"The CD as it is right now is dead" EMI Music Chairman and Chief Executive Alain Levy, to an audience at the London Business School in October.

Home, my new release, is now available as of November 6 on iTunes.

But, there's more to the story...

If you live long enough and are as obsessed with music as I have been throughout my life, you will see formats change again and again.

I learned to read while playing 45s on my little red record player and staring at those labels, probably trying to put the words together with the songs I heard.

I started going to nursery school when I was four, in 1961. I found the games played by my peers boring and unnecessarily emotionally involving, so I avoided them like an incurable disease. Instead, as my teachers complained in my permanent record, I tended to go off by myself, picking out tunes on their piano or playing records. "He needs to work on his social skills," they insisted.

My favorite record at that school was a Bozo the Clown album. It was a multiple set of 78rpm records in a fold-out cover, brightly illustrated, like a photo album, hence the name album. All was well in my 78-spinning young world until one day I dropped and broke one of the 78s. I cried and was guilt-ridden, and later talked my Dad into checking into a replacement for Bozo at Jack's Record Shop in downtown Elkhart, which was patterned after Wallach's Music City in Hollywood, with listening booths and everything at list price.

My Father returned with the news: they didn't make 78s anymore, only LPs and 45s. I never owned a 78, so it made sense.

So was the first change noted in my young mind: 78s were dead, replaced by the 45 and the LP.

Sometime in the late 60s, cassettes emerged, and I got a Norelco cassette player for Christmas. It was fun and portable, but nowhere near as nice and hi-fi as LPs or even 45s. Eight-track cartridges were also popular, and I actually bought a home 8-track player which I sold later. I did love sticking my head between the speakers and turning up the volume, and this was the first really identifiable stereo music player I'd ever possessed.

There were also 4-track cartridges, similar to 8-track cartridges, but they died a fairly quick death.

Eight-track cartridges were cool since they were the first portable media to catch on, so you could listen to something other than the radio in your car. Dealers had trade-in programs for eight-tracks. Pirate eight-tracks meant that you could often find well-compiled tapes full of the hits of the day, before big copyright changes came in 1972. But they were fragile, and their design flaw of unspooling the tape from the center meant that the lifespan of an eight-track cartridge was short. They also didn't sound as good as LPs.

For those of you who read my Tower blogs, you'll know I got a job there in 1979, and there were still eight-track cartridges on the shelves, but not for long. Only the cassette survived in the realm of tapes as the 70s drew to a close. Vinyl still thrived, until the mid-80s, when compact discs emerged. Suddenly, vinyl was disappearing as compact discs took over the shops. What the hell was going on?

Overnight, prices for recorded music doubled. CDs had a heyday when labels began to reissue long-out-of-print albums, and add bonus tracks to CDs. Still, something was wrong, consumers knew it, and slowly people stopped buying CDs.

So, here we are. My daughter and her friends think that iTunes is totally legit, in fact, preferred. Why buy a CD for nearly $20 when you can download it to your iPod for $9.99?

As you know if you were listening to Ghost Train, Flying out of London and Belladonna on MySpace, I have a new release that kept nagging at me: "When am I coming out Dad? Don't people like me as they did my older brothers and sisters?". To stop that nagging, I've made my usual rounds to CD labels old and new, and I heard:

1) CDs are really hard to sell nowadays.

2) I'm going through a divorce, and the label had to go as part of the settlement.

3) We folded about a year ago, despite our best efforts. It just wasn't profitable.

4) I can't see this type of music on my label. (Label goes bankrupt weeks later)

5) You want an advance??? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

6) Mastering? Sure, I've got software that came free in a box of Wheaties.

7) (the sound of crickets)

Meanwhile, thanks to my old friend Gary Stewart, once bigwig at Rhino and current Chief Music Officer (CMO) at iTunes, I inked a swell deal with AWAL UK. Home, my new release, will be available November 6 via iTunes. I'll be writing more in the coming days about this release, but for now, keep watching, because it's coming soon.

Already I've fielded weird looks. Among those that remember the bygone eras above, iTunes is simply not a substitute for a real LP/CD/8-track that you can hold in your hands, study the liners and gape at the pictures. It's a brave new world.

Moments

Home, What Was, and the Brave New World