Cake tastes yummy (and other observations)

The headline of the e-mail caught my eye right away: "Cake’s Showroom of Compassion debuts at #1 on the billboard top 200, achieves highest chart position of their career."

Heh.  You see, it was just a few days ago that I gave Showroom a distinctly lukewarm B-. But then, the point of both enjoying music and writing about it is not to be influenced by others' opinions of it. That may sound slightly self-contradictory coming from a music writer, but I don't think people should blindly agree with me any more than they should blindly agree with the lemmings in the crowd.

Cake is a very talented band that's made some great music in the past.  I don't happen to think Showroom lives up to the promises made by past outings, but music buyers clearly had other ideas. More power to them, and good for Cake.

There did seem to be consensus on one point. I said "Sick of You" was a terrific single, and the market seems to agree. To quote the e-mail again: "'Sick of You' reaches top 5 at both alternative & triple A radio." Nice.

Of course, there was a depressing footnote to all of this. Showroom of Compassion achieved the #1 position with sales of 44,000 units, making it the lowest-selling #1 album in SoundScan history. 

The Music Copyright Enforcers

Fascinating article in the New York Times the other day about the nuts and bolts of music copyright enforcement. I'm not sure what was more interesting, the ride-along look inside the life of a copyright enforcer, or the total cognitive dissonance displayed in the poll results cited, wherein people expressed strong support for artists being compensated fairly for their work, while expressing strong resistance to giving up their own money for said product. It's like the old saying about people who want top-notch government services but don't want to pay for them: "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that guy behind the tree."

1,000 true fans = a career in music?

The peripatetic Ariel Hyatt of Ariel Publicity recently spotlighted a fascinating piece by technology blogger Kevin Kelly -- now 18 months old but relevant as ever -- in which he argues that all the DIY musician needs to establish a viable career as an independent musical act is to cultivate 1,000 true fans. Agree or disagree, Kelly's piece makes for fascinating reading for anyone interested in exploring what the still-emerging new music business paradigm means for artists in the trenches.

Tales of the new music industry model: Wonderlick

Add to the tales of the new music industry model (coming someday in the future to a wireless card near you), the saga of California indie band Wonderlick's new album.

Wonderlick recently conducted an "extremely successful" fan pre-order campaign on their forthcoming album Topless At The Arco Arena. The band ran a month-long pre-order offer via their Web site which allowed fans to set their own price for the album, with an additional incentive offered to fans who paid median price or higher: a thank-you by name in the album package. The final median price was $29.13. The low price paid was $5, and the high price paid was $500. Several fans paid over $100 for the disc.

Says band member Tim Quirk: “I wasn’t too worried about people paying less than the CDs themselves cost, but I was completely unprepared for just how generous fans were. When the first $30 payment came in, that was pretty cool. Then they just kept getting higher -- $45, $50, $100. I’m writing them all personal thank you notes, like my grandma taught me.”

Topless At The Arco Arena will be released on July 7, 2009 via Missing Piece/Rock Ridge Music. According to Quirk, the record, “examines the intersection of art and commerce from people who have been on every side of it.” In fact, Quirk and bandmate Jay Blumenfield both have successful careers in other endeavors: Tim is VP, Programming of Rhapsody and Jay is a TV producer and video director. Wonderlick has experimented with the donations-for-downloads approach previously while posting songs from their former group Too Much Joy. Based on the response this time around they seem to be onto something -- at least for their own small niche in the great big Wild West that is the music industry today.

The box sets are coming! The box sets are coming!

'Tis the season for overspending, and the desperate-for-your-cash music industry is cranking out the box sets in hopes of enticing a few more of your dollars our of your wallet. That would be the cynic's way of viewing the cornucopia of new holiday-season box set releases, at least. For the innocent, acquisitive music-lover (and most of us have one hiding under our world-weary, cynical shell, c'mon, admit it), it's a bonanza of new purchasing opportunities.

We won't try to run down the full list here, since USA Today has already kindly done so and done so quite well, thank you. But here's just a few names and genres to whet your appetite: Chuck Berry, Black Sabbath, Cheap Trick, Genesis, Grateful Dead, heavy metal, Robyn Hitchcock, Jesus & Mary Chain, KISS, Minnesota acts, Nada Surf, Roy Orbison, Phish, Elvis Presley, Rare Earth, Sevendust, The Coasters, White Zombie, Frank Zappa. And that's just the Rock section... then you get to R&B/Jazz/Blues/Gospel/Reggae, and Country/Folk/Roots, and Spoken Word/Theater/Classical... whew. Look at it this way -- you may not need to go to Target after all.

Video games boosting music sales?

In the latest evolutionary cycle of the now nearly unrecognizable "music industry," video games have become a sort of booster rocket for music sales. In a recent post, New York Times Freakonomics guest blogger David Edery -- also a manager for Xbox Live Arcade -- notes that Rock Band and Guitar Hero have generated millions in catalog sales for bands like Aerosmith and The Who, and even gave a noticeable bump to sales of Motley Crue's recent single "Saints Of Los Angeles."

The question still to be explored is, does this effect extend beyond further lining the pockets of the already successful and famous? Does a placement on Rock Band help your unknown indie band? The jury is still out, and the chances of a big video game employing nothing but undiscovered acts continues to waver somewhere around zero. That makes those lesser-known acts who do manage to get into the video game mix alongside veteran million-selling acts something akin to lottery winners.