Review: Love - “Forever Changes”
With the recent 2-CD reissue of Forever Changes the album continues to astound four decades on.
To read the read the full review, pay a visit to BigTakeover.com
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Originally posted at Bigtakeover.com on January 26th.
The compact disc is in serious trouble. That’s no secret. But recent headlines suggest it’s in even worse shape than previously thought.
The U.S. consumer, responsible for more than two-thirds of domestic economic activity, is facing a possible recession. Oil is near record levels. Inflation is rising. Credit problems are growing. The real estate bubble is bursting. And the stock market is getting hammered.
And unlike the late nineties when stocks—and tech stocks in particular—pumped money into oh so many brokerage accounts and unlike the past several years, when real estate exploded in value, we are now in a period where no widely owned assets are in a bull market.
Heck, even people who stash cash under their mattresses are coming up short. In a bid to stimulate economic activity, the Federal Reserve, in an inflationary move, this month slashed interest rates dramatically at a time when the dollar is already at multi-year lows against other major currencies. (In November, the Taj Mahal said it would no longer accept payment in dollars!)
Within this increasingly negative macro-environment, the music business has more than ever to worry about (not to mention Radiohead’s name-your-price experiment, which we’ll likely see more of in the future from other acts).
According to Nielsen SoundScan, U.S. compact disc sales plunged 19% last year. With the consumer wobbling like a Weeble (but with no guarantee that he won’t fall down), results will likely be even worse this year.
Alicia Keys’ latest topped the Billboard charts for the past week, selling all of 61,000 copies, according to Nielson SoundScan. That’s the lowest weekly figure ever for a #1 album aside from the “Dreamgirls” soundtrack, which sold 60,000 copies last year.
And there was more bad news this month.
On January 10th, Barnes & Noble surprised Wall Street slashing its fiscal fourth-quarter profit projection, saying, “Sales of recorded music were significantly below forecast.”
Yes, even with all this doom and gloom swirling about the industry, the numbers still were a shock.
Barnes & Noble stock suffered its biggest one-day decline in seven years, plunging almost 20% to a 52-week low. The sell-off cut about $400 million from company’s value. Later that day, Borders Group said its music sales fell almost 13% from a year earlier.
Barnes & Noble’s results – in particular – weren’t a total surprise.
I’ve bought discs at Amazon.com, Overstock.com, eBay.com, Amoeba Records, Virgin Records, the WFMU Record Fair, stoop sales in Brooklyn and even a flea market in Rome (the Fabulous Poodles’ hard to find His Master’s Choice).
But never from Barnes & Noble.
Why?
It offers the worst of both worlds: limited selection at awful prices.
As a bookseller, first and foremost, Barnes and Noble should seriously rethink its music strategy, up to and including exiting the business entirely.
But don’t shed any tears for the big boys. Save them for the smaller players who have much more to worry about than just downloading and CD ripping.
A lack of scale, resources and product diversity prevents them from competing effectively against deeper-pocketed rivals who can sell music at a loss to attract customers in hopes that they’ll buy higher margin items.
Therefore, CD sales will come from fewer and fewer retailers. And because these are primarily general interest destinations that cater to the masses, if you’re looking for something even relatively obscure, well….good luck to ya! Go online.
Exacerbating this downtrend, many retailers are reducing or plan to reduce the amount of space allocated for CDs. An April 27, 2007 Wall Street Journal article pointed out that 65% of U.S. music sales (including digital sales) are through big-box chains like Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy. To be fair, although these retailers offer little to discerning music fans, they shouldn’t shoulder all the blame:
“For his part, Best Buy’s Mr. Arnold [senior vice president for entertainment] says the blame for waning consumer interest in CDs lies with the record labels, not with stores like his. “Music has become a commoditized item,” he says. “The CD is perceived by the consumer to be a $10 item, and the manufacturers continue to release new titles at $15 to $18.98.” To remedy that situation, he says he has urged labels to move to a “paperback-book model,” with no-frills packages priced cheaply for most customers, and more deluxe presentations for die-hard fans.” (WSJ 4/27/07)
Mr. Arnold is right. The take it or leave it one-price approach is increasingly anachronistic.
My question to the record companies: Since I, like many people, won’t pay a retailer $18.98 for a new CD why not get some of my business rather than none of it?
Yes, that would require some adapting. But if adapting is out of the question then empty stores will soon provide the answer.
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With its name your price approach, Radiohead made people feel that they owed the group something and that indebtedness, however manifested, only led to better buzz and more goodwill. (full post at bigtakeover.com)
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time enough at last?
In the 1959 Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last,” Burgess Meredith plays a frustrated banker who has virtually no time to read because his disapproving wife and boss, representing anti-intellectualism, continually thwart his efforts to engage in his favorite activity.
Today, time scarcity resonates more than ever (one could argue that anti-intellectualism does too). When “Time Enough at Last” was made, one wage earner per household was typical. Now, two incomes and longer hours are the norm.
And unlike yesteryear, when Meredith was primarily a consumer of information, today he could also actively create it, blogging about books or composing music on his computer and sharing it on MySpace. He might also use his iPhone to watch old Twilight Zone episodes on YouTube or blow off steam with his Nintendo Wii. In short, Meredith would likely find objects of bliss left and right but only indulge in a fraction of them.
Photo: SciFi.com
With less free time and ever more options, people will increasingly sniff out precisely what they want when they want it. The Internet should fare best in this fragmented and cluttered environment because its most common uses — e-mail, articles, songs, images and videos — do not generally require major investments of time.
And with the Internet everything can be quantified. Page views, unique users, time spent online etc. An advertiser looking to quantify its return on investment will have a much easier go of it online.
The Internet also targets messages more precisely than other mediums. This narrowcasting echoes Chris Anderson’s “Theory of the Long Tail,” which asserts that we will increasingly see more niche items sold at a lower volume to a greater variety of people at the expense of fewer mass market success stories.
Lastly, younger people are increasingly accustomed to interactive communications and having news and information delivered in the context of a dialogue. The Internet wins hands down here too because most other mediums continue to favor disseminating information in a top-down, gatekeeper controlled manner.
To make things more challenging for all parties involved, if a magazine, Web site or video game fails to meet expectations, its creators shouldn’t automatically assume their offering is subpar.
The problem could simply be that with so many attractive options and so few hours in the day, people have more important things to tend to.
Which reminds me…Gotta run!
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“Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day” was on April 26th. Chances are you don’t remember the exact date but you probably do remember seeing proud parents strolling cubicle to cubicle, introducing their precious little gems while collecting coos and compliments.
But did the kids learn anything? Will they remember the experience? If they do, it could well be something random and unrelated to actual work, like someone choking on a piece of cake and letting loose with a string of expletives. (Okay. In fairness, that’s something an adult would remember too.)
But let’s assume your child did fall under the spell of watching you work as say a cashier. The job of picking up objects, sliding them past a bar-code scanner and stuffing them in a bag, however, will probably be rendered obsolete sooner rather than later.
And even if your job does survive in the future, your child will likely spend most of his or her adult life in the confines of a drab gray office anyway. So why rush the inevitable? You’ll blink and in no time your baby, sadly, will fully “get” Dilbert.
If you have a partner, chances are you talk a lot about work and the people there. Though some names will become familiar by dint of sheer repetition much will remain abstract, including what you actually do every day. Chances also are your job is fairly specialized and for that matter your significant other probably knows little to nothing about your industry.
So ultimately, you and your partner spend most of your waking hours circling in separate orbits, which is why “Take Our Spouses and Significant Others to Work Day” seems like a sensible idea.
But there’s a catch.
Taking a child to work costs a company nothing. In contrast, if you take a day off to observe your partner on the job, your company has to pay someone to cover for you. So clearly, they have no vested interest in making this happen.
A more feasible possibility would involve taking a personal day. But would the average person sacrifice a sunny day at the ballpark to stare at a Dell monitor at a thirty degree angle for eight hours? You know the answer to that.
So, if you want to bring your child to work next April, do so. I know that when my wife and I can bring our daughter to work next year, we will. But don’t call us hypocrites. We’re only in it for the coos and compliments.
Filed under: Career and Work, Musings, Videos | 0 Comments
my music blog at bigtakeover.com
Reviews, interviews, essays and more about artists including Thee More Shallows, Stew, The Stranglers, Catherine Wheel, Love, Stiff Little Fingers, Captain Sensible, Devo, Robyn Hitchcock, Pat Metheny, Boards of Canada, The Replacements, The Undertones, The Damned, Brian Eno, Deerhoof, Soft Machine, Idlewild, The Cavedogs, Leatherface, Readymade, Robert Wyatt, Hugh Cornwell, The Fields, Rob Dickinson, The Smiths, Teenage Fanclub, the Music Machine and much, much more…
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Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!
With Barry Bonds on the verge of breaking Hank Aaron’s career homerun record, Major League Baseball (MLB) is showing that it would rather use strong-armed tactics to control how people perceive the game rather than respect the wishes of its fans, the very people who have made record revenue, record attendance and commissioner Bud Selig’s $14 million salary all possible.
A Transformers-like Bonds in 2006….
Source: KPIX-TV
The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported that at certain ballparks, employees are banning anti-Bonds signs. Granted, most people can agree that profane signs shouldn’t be permitted in a family environment. But this involves far tamer messages.
The Chronicle mentions that Arizona Diamondback employees confiscated signs held by fan Don Regole because they were deemed unacceptable. Regole complained in writing, the paper states, and received a reply from the team that said in part:
“As Mr. Bonds approaches the homerun record, we have been asked by Major League Baseball to carefully screen the signs that are brought into the ballpark by our fans.”
The Chronicle report also suggests that MLB’s influence extends far further. A fan wanted to mimic the popular foam finger that some fans wave at games but didn’t want to cause offense so he opted for a mere asterisk on the finger. But he had trouble having the foam finger made. The Chronicle wrote:
“Among the foam companies he called was Rico Industries in Niles, Ill. Wilson said Rico turned him — and his money — down flat because it has a licensing agreement to make products for Major League Baseball.“
Talk about irony. While MLB acts to prevent one of its fans from securing a foam finger, it’s defiantly extending its own rigid middle finger to all of its ever tolerant fans.
….and a comparatively svelte Bonds in the 1990s
Source: Odds and Sods
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