OK, I’ve been finally listening to a gift I got at the Salvation Army about three years ago… Time Life’s “Super Hits From The Seventies ‘Have A Nice Day”. Twenty Five CDs with everything that made the seventies, er… whatever they were.

But whether or not you swoon (or run for the loo) when you hear ‘Billy Don’t Be A Hero’ you can’t help but be impressed by the sound of all the best recordings of that era. It truly is the Golden Age Of Recording for all devotees and it can be summed up with one word. No not cocaine–that was the 80’s, dude.

The word is compression.

Compression is the steroid that made everything sound good. In fact, I’ll go so far as to suggest that it is the answer to the question of ‘why?’

A little history and a little theory. A compressor is a device which automatically adjusts the volume of audio signals. In it’s most basic form it is much like the governor on an engine… it keeps the […]

I saw a very interesting post by John Mellencamp the other day in Huffington Post (of all places—who knew he was so literate).  He made some very articulate points on the music biz. To both paraphrase and use a well-worn marketing metaphor, he suggested that, back in the day, touring was the razor and ‘records’ were the blades. Musicians toured in order to support a record. That was how we talked about it. We supported the record. You didn’t worry so much about making money on the tour because the record was the thing that brought home the bacon.

However, today, he posited that this equation has become reversed; it is now it’s the music which is almost the give-away, which tries to lure customers to the  tours (and ancillary merchandising deals) where the real money is made.

Why the shift? Several reasons:

1. Money (duh). For quite some time, the artist’s share of CD revenues has been shrinking, not to mention the fact that sales of CDs themselves are falling off a […]

The thing I am learning, much to my cost, is that this business we call ‘show’ is flipped on it’s head. See it used to be that one toured in order to sell content. More and more now one basically gives the content away in order to get people to either:

a) Go to shows

b) Purchase swag

c) Promote a corporate tie-in

This is a bargain with the devil for any number of reasons, which I’ll delve into another time, but for now the question is ‘how did we get here?’. And the answer is simple: we got pimped.

Remember when ATM machines first hit? They were free, Free, FREE! Not so free anymore are they? We got used to them and then, like any good dealer, the banks then started charging. Good plan.

Now Google came along and gave us something very cool and very innocuous. They got us used to searching for stuff for free. And since we could search for stuff for free, we tended to seek out free solutions. And so […]