Quotulatiousness

July 5, 2025

“This is what happens when a major label morphs into a copyright and IP management business”

Filed under: Business, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia reads the tea leaves of the big music labels and says that the future does not look good. At all:

I follow music industry news the way other people read obituaries.

Those two kinds of articles have a lot in common — both death notices and music biz news deal mostly with the past. The only new thing in the story is that something was living, and now it ain’t.

Here’s an example from yesterday:

This sounds like a happy story, no? These smart people are investing in music.

But it isn’t a happy story. They are investing in the rights to old music. They won’t spend any of that money on new music.

If you have any doubts about Warner’s priorities, here’s another headline — also from yesterday.

If you’re looking for a clear signal from a major record label, it won’t get any clearer than this.

This is exactly what a record label does when it no longer views music as a vital creative force in the current day. This is what happens when a major label morphs into a copyright and IP management business — which can be run by a small team of lawyers and accountants.

Yes, you can make money living off the past — but not for long.

I keep waiting to read a news story about a major label investing a billion dollars in developing new artists. But I never see that story.

I’ve written in the past about fans who prefer old music. But big record labels are even more obsessed with vintage and retro songs.

And it’s not just Warner Music. Universal Music is doing the same thing. So is Sony and Concord and other big labels.

That’s disturbing.

These are the same companies who should be creating the future of music. They should be convincing the public to listen to new songs and new artists. After all, if record labels don’t invest in the future of music, who will?

Maybe nobody.

A few years ago, investment firms started viewing old songs as investments. That didn’t work out very well. The most prominent song investment fund crashed and burned — as I predicted long in advance.

At that point, the smart money headed for the exits.

In the aftermath, the only enthusiastic buyers of old songs were the big record labels. They are the buyers of last resort.

July 1, 2025

The Maple Leaf Forever

Filed under: Cancon, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Columbia Yore
Published 13 Jun 2018

The Maple Leaf Forever was written by Alexander Muir in 1867 and served as the unofficial anthem of Canada from 1867-1980.

June 25, 2025

Experts – “The shorter, the better”. Audiences – “Gimme more long-form, stat!”

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia notes that the experts are all-in on shorter videos, but actual audiences are clearly now more interested in much longer-form treatments:

When I saw the numbers, I couldn’t believe them.

Every digital platform is flooding the market with short videos, but the audience is now spending more time with longform video — and by a huge margin.

Source: Tubular Labs

Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years.

That’s a staggering six-fold increase. But even short videos are now getting longer. Social media consultants call this the “long short” format. Sometimes they are used as teasers to draw viewers to still longer media (often on another platform).

Movies are also getting longer. At first glance, that makes no sense — more people are watching films at home on small digital devices, where Hollywood fare has to compete with bite-sized junk from TikTok and Instagram.

You might think that filmmakers would feel forced to compress their storytelling, but the opposite is true. They are learning that audiences crave something longer and more immersive than a TikTok.

At first, Hollywood insiders tried to imitate the ultra-short aesthetic, but they failed — sometimes in colossal fashion. (Does anyone remember the Quibi fiasco?)

Now they not only embrace long films, but happily release sprawling mega-movies longer than the Boston Marathon. Dune Two ran for 166 minutes — not even Eliud Kipchoge does that. Oppenheimer clocked in at 180 minutes. Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon lasted a mind-boggling 206 minutes.

The studios would have vetoed these excesses just a few years ago. Not anymore.

Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last year. Five top ten hits ran for more than five minutes.

Two of those long hit songs came from Taylor Swift — who has been a champion of longer immersive musical experiences, most notably in her insanely successful Eras tour. She set the record for the biggest money-generating roadshow in music history, and did it with a performance twice as long as a Mahler symphony.

These Swift concerts run for three-and-a-half hours (just like Scorsese at his most maniacal), and include more than 40 songs. They’re grouped in ten separate acts, each built around a different era in her career.

Ten acts? Really?

Even Wagner stopped short of that. But the Eras tour generated more than $2 billion in revenues. And all this happened while experts were touting 15-second songs on TikTok as the future of music.

I’ve charted the duration of Swift’s studio albums over the last two decades, and it tells the same story. She has gradually learned that her audience prefers longer musical experiences.

The New York Times complained about the length of her most recent album — calling it “sprawling and often self-indulgent.” It mocked her for believing that “more is more.”

It summed up her whole worldview with a dismissive claim that she has fallen in love with “abundance”. In fact, the Times opened its article with that accusation.

But I note that a year after the Times laughed at Swiftian abundance, the hottest topic in the culture is a book with that same word as its title. (Full disclosure: I’ll be doing a live Substack conversation with its co-author Derek Thompson in a few days.)

Abundance has dominated the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for the last several months. Even more to the point, the word seems to tap into the public’s hunger for something bigger, deeper, and more expansive than it’s been getting.

June 23, 2025

80% of top-grossing movies are prequels, sequels, spin-offs, remakes or reboots

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia on the death of creativity in the movie business, which also seems to be tracking almost exactly with the trend in music business profits:

I’m not shocked when I look in the mirror. Yeah, the Honest Broker isn’t getting any younger. But that’s the human condition.

Maybe I should start using a moisturizer. What do y’all think?

Nah. I’ll just let this aging thing play out.

On the other hand, I’m dumbfounded at everything in public life getting older — even older than me! Consider the current political landscape.

With each passing year, the US Congress looks more like the College of Cardinals (average age =78) or the Rolling Stones (average age = also 78).

We’re gonna need a lot of moisturizer.

But Congress is young and spry compared to Hollywood.

Back in 2000, 80% of movie revenues came from original ideas. But this has now totally flip-flopped.

Today 80% of the movie business is built on old ideas — remakes, and spin-offs, and various other brand extensions. And we went from 80% new to 80% old in just a few years.

[…]

Look at music — and you see the same thing.

The share of old songs on streaming will soon reach 80%. It’s not quite there yet — the latest figures are 73%. But it was at 63% back in 2019. So it’s just a matter of time.

In 2000, streaming didn’t exist, so we looked to the Billboard chart to gauge a song’s success. And new music made up more than 80% of charted songs. So here — just like the movies — we’re flip-flopping from 80% new to 80% old over the course of a few years.

I don’t have good figures on publishing. But I’m pretty sure that AI-generated books and articles will soon represent 80% of the marketplace. Maybe we’ve already reached that threshold.

AI is deliberately designed to cut-and-paste, rehashing past work as its modus operandi. And it will do this to every field — replacing originality with repetition and regurgitation.

This is the new 80% rule.

Just imagine if traditional businesses operated this way.

  • “Welcome to our restaurant, 80% of the food is leftovers.”
  • “Welcome to our boutique, 80% of clothing is secondhand.”
  • “Welcome to our dating service, 80% of the choices are your ex-girlfriends (or ex-boyfriends).”

None of that sounds very appetizing.

May 23, 2025

Bill Bailey – The Doctor Who theme re-imagined as Belgian jazz

Filed under: Europe, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Royal Ballet and Opera
Published 29 Jul 2021

Comedian Bill Bailey re-imagines the Doctor Who theme as Jacques Brel-esque Belgian jazz. Taken from his DVD Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra.

May 19, 2025

1949: What are those kids listening to? – W2W 29

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 18 May 2025

There seems to be an evolution, that may one day become a revolution, in popular music in the US. Songs with amplified electric guitars, wailing saxophones, and backbeat rhythms are being released more and more often, but it’s not just R&B or jump blues, this is a bit of a different style — a new style. And it’s spreading quickly thanks to a vinyl record revolution that’s also getting in gear. Looks like exciting times ahead for the youth of America, and maybe even the whole world.
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May 8, 2025

Ted Gioia is apparently “the guy you consult about the total collapse of everything“

Filed under: Books, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve been reading Ted Gioia‘s work for a few years now, but I somehow failed to pick up on the fact that he’s some kind of Bond supervillain:

Many articles have been written about me over the years. But I’ve never been hit with an opening sentence like the one published on Monday by The Atlantic.

    Last year, I visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.

Whoa! That makes me feel like a Bond villain.

I need some henchmen — any volunteers?

Ted appears to like the classic goon uniforms for his to-be-recruited legion of minions.

What an unexpected turnabout! For many years, I was known as an expert on music, especially jazz and blues.

But now I’ve taken on a new guise. I’m the guy you consult about the total collapse of everything.

I don’t sing the blues. I don’t write about the blues. I now deliver the blues.

I originally declined the interview request from The Atlantic. But their staff writer Spencer Kornhaber pushed back, insisting that I was an essential source for his article.

The subject was, he explained, a “pervasive suspicion that we’re in an era of cultural decline, especially in arts and entertainment”.

He said that I needed to be part of the story — because everybody saw me as the decline-of-culture guy.

This caught me surprise. But I thought it over. maybe this is why I don’t get invited to many parties anymore.

Dammit, Ted, we’re trying to have some fun here — and you keep droning on about the collapse of the Roman empire.

I eventually agreed to a phone conversation with Spencer, and that went well. And this led to him getting on a plane, and visiting me at home here in Austin.

To help him in his research, I laid out more than 40 books on a countertop in my library — these were essential works, I explained, for anyone studying social or cultural decline.

[At a future date, I will provide more details about these books, and share a reading list on — to quote The Atlantic — the “death of civilization”.]

But this begs the question: Is our culture really collapsing?

I spoke with Spencer for many hours about this subject. But only a few of my comments found their way into the finished article.

So today I’ll offer a fuller diagnosis for your benefit.

May 1, 2025

QotD: The Eurovision Song Contest

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It was all more harmonious in the old days. One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in Zagreb, when the charming hostess, Helga Vlahović, presented her own fair country as the perfect Eurometaphor: “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra,” she cooed. “The string section and the wood section all sit together”. Alas, barely were the words out of her mouth before the wood section was torching the string section’s dressing rooms, and the hills were alive only with the ancient siren songs of ethnic cleansing and genital severing. Lurching into its final movement, Yugoslavia was no longer the orchestra, only the pits. In an almost too poignant career trajectory, the lovely Miss Vlahović was moved from music programming to Croatian TV’s head of war information programming.

The Eurovision Song Contest has never quite recovered, but oh, you should have seen it in its glory days, when the rich national cultures that gave the world Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Purcell, Debussy, and Grieg bandied together to bring us “La-La-La” (winner, 1968), “Boom-Bang-A-Bang” (1969), “Ding-Dinge-Dong” (1975), “A Ba Ni Bi” (1978), “Diggy Loo Diggi Ley” (1984), and my personal favorite, “Lat Det Swinge,” the 1985 winner by the Norwegian group Bobbysocks. The above songs are nominally sung in Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, and even English, but in fact it’s the universal language of Eurogroovy: “Ja, ja, boogie, baby, mit der rock ‘n’ roll”.

Mark Steyn, “Waterloo”, Steyn Online, 2020-05-17.

March 19, 2025

Solving the “Spotify problem”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sadly, as Tim Worstall explains, it probably can’t be done:

It’s that time of year for the ritual complaints about Spotify. Woes, musicians can’t get any money.

The reason for this is that we out here, the Great Unwashed, value recorded music at something just above toss. Therefore musicians get paid, on average, just above toss. And there we have it, there’s the whole and the complete of the thing.

    Spotify is trumpeting big paydays for artists – but only a tiny fraction of them are actually thriving

Yep.

    $10bn is a hefty number, but it needs to be closely examined. This money, around two-thirds of its total income, is what Spotify has paid through to record labels and music publishers. Spotify cannot be held responsible for egregious label and publisher contracts, but it needs reiterating that only a portion of that $10bn will make its way to the people who wrote and recorded the music.

    The company also says this $10bn is “more than any single retailer has ever paid in a year” and is “10x the contribution of the largest record store at the height of the CD era”. That may be true, but it says less about Spotify’s benevolence and more about how streaming’s market share has mostly consolidated into the hands of four global heavyweights – Spotify, Apple, YouTube and Amazon.

Only one part of that has any relevance. The $10 billion and the 2/3rds.

Obviously there are costs to running a company. To running the servers which hold near all of all recorded music. Of being able to get that out onto the internet.

The $10 billion (OK, 15) is about what people think music is worth to them.

[…]

The reason your really important socially relevant indie band is touring the upper peninsula, still after all these years, the bogs are your changing room and the only rider you’ve been able to achieve is access to tap water, is that the general public values your output at some fraction above toss. Therefore you earn that fraction above toss.

Really, that’s it. It’s not capitalism it’s general public indifference. Really, folk just don’t care.

February 24, 2025

“Camouflage” – and a History of Military Deception – Sabaton History 129 [Official]

Filed under: History, Media, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Sabaton History
Published 22 Oct 2024

Today’s episode is about a song that is not a Sabaton original, but a cover they did of Stan Ridgway’s “Camouflage” from 1986. The story itself is easy enough to understand if you follow the lyrics, but it inspired us to do an episode not about the song, but about camouflage itself; its history, how it works, how it’s supposed to work, and even its limitations.
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February 8, 2025

A Love Supreme after 60 years

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme was one of the first four jazz albums I ever bought. It quickly became my favourite and led me to listening to a lot more of Coltrane’s work. Some I loved nearly as much (Giant Steps, Blue Train, The Complete Africa/Brass Sessions) while others I just bounced off (Sun Ship, Interstellar Space, Stellar Regions), but most became fixtures of my various jazz playlists.

Ted Gioia notes the moment as A Love Supreme hits 60 years after release:

Ivy League theoretical physicist Stephon Alexander will even tell you that John Coltrane has a lot in common with Albert Einstein. People still consult the saxophonist’s mathematical analysis — the so-called Coltrane Circle — as if it were a source of esoteric wisdom.

But in 1964, John Coltrane was also a father. John Coltrane Jr. was born on August 26, 1964 — the first of his three children. Ravi Coltrane arrived in 1965, and Oran in 1967.

You wouldn’t think that Coltrane could find time for anything else at the close of the Summer of 1964. But he did.

At that juncture, he disappeared into an upstairs guest room at his home. And spent day after day with just a pen, some paper, and his horn.

He emerged five days later. “It was like Moses coming down from the mountain,” Alice later recalled. “It was so beautiful. He walked down and there was that joy, that peace in his face, tranquility.”

“This is the first time that I have received all of the music for what I want to record,” he told her.

Note that word: Received. He didn’t say composed. He didn’t say created. It was a gift from something larger than himself.

This was the music John Coltrane would perform in the studio three months later. It’s know today as A Love Supreme.

Coltrane said that his music was his gift back to the Divine.

He made that clear in his liner notes, which opened with an invocation in capital letters: DEAR LISTENER: ALL PRAISE BE TO GOD TO WHOM ALL PRAISE IS DUE…

But if there were still any doubt, Coltrane also included a devotional poem — which began:

    I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord.
    It all has to do with it.
    Thank you God.
    Peace …

Needless to say, this was not typical for jazz liner notes in the mid-1960s. Or at any time, for that matter.

Not your typical liner notes.
Photo by Ted Gioia

And it almost certainly would limit sales — or so the conventional wisdom went back then. A few months later, Capitol Records execs had a meltdown when Brian Wilson wanted to give the name “God Only Knows” to a song. But that was nothing compared to the full-blown ritual that Coltrane was now unleashing on the hip jazz audience.

I use the word ritual advisedly here. I’ve heard other people describe A Love Supreme as a suite, but they’re missing the whole point. I have no doubt that Coltrane intended this ritualistic effect.

He even starts chanting toward the end of the opening track.

This was first time Coltrane’s voice had ever been featured on a studio recording. And he didn’t sing a love song or belt out a blues. Instead he was chanting:

    A love supreme
    A love supreme
    A love supreme
    A love supreme
    A love supreme …

He chants that phrase nineteen times in a row.

January 22, 2025

QotD: The Who

Filed under: Britain, Media, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Who’s case for being the greatest rock band in history, and it has one, depends on the band having been a four-piece act in which all four pieces had the absolute maximum of performing ability and musical personality. To find any equivalent — maybe Zeppelin comes close — you would probably have to quit rock and go rummaging through the jazz section.

But I’ll tell you right now, there ain’t no Moon over there. I mean, good Lord: OF COURSE Keith Moon and John Entwistle were a difficult rhythm section for a guitarist to play in front of. Have you listened to those records? Professionals have talked about how watching Moon play up close was an exercise in constant suspense — you would see him take off at the start of the bar and go roaming around the drum kit and wonder how he could possibly make it back in time. He usually did make it — when he wasn’t so zonked he was falling off his stool, which is also a thing that happened sometimes.

This intricate, frantic quality is what made Moon the most inimitable of the great rock drummers — someone whose style you could recognize in a matter of seconds if he were playing on biscuit tins — but the difficulty of playing in front of a notional “timekeeper” so adventurous, and particularly doing it in concert, ought to be self-evident.

The standard advice for a rock guitarist in this predicament would be to make sure he had a very steady, unadventurous bass player to anchor the group. And the bassists for many excellent groups do, in fact, secretly stick to four or five notes they’re real comfortable with. But Entwistle offered Moon-like challenges as part of a rhythm section, albeit without inducing the same terror. At any moment his left hand might start leaping like a salmon on the fretboard, and if he played half notes in one bar, this was no guarantee he wouldn’t be doing startling, blinding sixteenths in the next.

That’s what makes Who records Who records; that’s what lifts the best ones above even the empyrean level of Townshend’s songwriting. But it meant, as Pete explained in his apology, that he could never step out and “shred” as a guitarist. The entire structure of the traditional rock group was topsy-turvy with the Who, and Townshend, whose ego is at least as big as the next fellow’s (spoiler: it’s bigger), was forced in some regard to be the responsible one, the custodian of the rhythm.

Colby Cosh, “Leave Pete Townshend alone!”, National Post, 2019-11-29.

January 2, 2025

QotD: Sincerity

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“… in the ’90s, the human spirit was alive and free. And that’s the vibe that resonates with me.”

This is what the French call le horse pucky. If we may be so bold as to speak of “the human spirit” — which is pretty heavy for a column starting with a professional wrestler — the 90s killed it stone cold dead. The human spirit can flourish in the most awful situations, but one indispensable requirement is: Sincerity. You just can’t be snarky about the “Ode to Joy” or ironic about the Sistine Chapel. If you do, then there really is no difference between Beethoven and MC Funetik Spelyn, nothing to choose between Michelangelo and a dog turd on the sidewalk — someone placed them there intentionally, which is the only distinguishing characteristic of “art” possible in a world overrun by Postmodernists and Deconstructionists.

Severian, “Why the 90s Was the Worst Decade Ever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.

December 25, 2024

Repost – “Fairytale of New York”

Filed under: Europe, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Time:

“Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl

This song came into being after Elvis Costello bet The Pogues’ lead singer Shane MacGowan that he couldn’t write a decent Christmas duet. The outcome: a call-and-response between a bickering couple that’s just as sweet as it is salty.

December 17, 2024

“Freebird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd cover in Middle English BARDCORE

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

the_miracle_aligner
Published Aug 17, 2024

When your king Richard asks you after the battle why you singlehandedly charged at the Saracen lines before he gave the order.

“But my lord, ‘Freebird’ was playing …”

One of my favorites was a hit during the Third Crusade where the English were certainly the MVPs. A very big thank you to everyone involved who helped me bring this into the world 😂
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