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It’s called CMX. It’s not by itself either. CMX is a knee-jerk reaction to a project Apple us supposedly calling “Cocktail.” The premise is to package additional content into what would represent a digital album. You would of course get the music, but also liner notes, photos, videos, lyrics and the like. The goal is to revive life into the concept of the studio album.

The problem is that all of this content should be, and probably is, free elsewhere. I know the lyrics are online. Zune manages to package tons of photos in. For some odd reason these companies still try to charge people for music videos, which I always thought were a promotional vehicle to sell more music, but I guess I had that wrong.

This is just another example of the record labels refusing to understand that the business and the market has changed. I am a customer. Sometimes I want full albums, sometimes I don’t. I am savvy enough to easily find photos, lyrics, even the music videos are almost always available free on YouTube. I would love the lyrics to be available on the device, but it seems much more sense to just include them in the digital song file, instead of making someone buy the album to get them.

There is a trend in the software industry. The trend is that things go online, users pay more like a service, and instead of long drawn out release cycles with versions every few years, the software companies are able to be much more agile and release new changes when they are available. Give the customers what they want when they want it.

Apply that trend to the music industry, and you start to think about it differently. Artists release new music when they have it. They stay relevant the whole time they tour, and we don’t forget about them for years between each album. The album sales dwindle, sure, but the single song sales trickle all year, every year. The music, the videos, all drive us listeners to the concerts, they make money in product and movie/TV placements, and of course merchandise. There is absolutely still a profit model in music, the mob(Sony, BMG, RCA) has just lost their way to run a protection racket.

Most artists are starting to find the ability to record and engineer their own music. The need of a label to back a major studio is going away. The Foo Fighters, pictured above, have all the major label backing they could want, and they still built their own studio so they could engineer their own music and have control.

You find articles all the time about the music industry changing, and what they should do. Obviously they aren’t reading them, and they don’t care what customers actually want. Right now they are most concerned with trying to get you to pay $16 bucks for 4 good songs and 8 tracks of filler, because you chopped their leg off when you started only buying the good stuff.

Before we get started, I want to clearly define something. The Music Industry, as protected by the RIAA, is largely considered as the business of music: Record Labels, Concert Promoters, Merchandising, Distribution and the like. Ironically there is a huge piece missing from the traditional definition, the artist.

Key #1: If you are an artist, never give up ownership of your music, ever.

If you read Mix Magazine’s interview with Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine, you will read about a technologist’ un-watered down opinion of an industry that’s dying. Surely you are not surprised by this, but let’s state it again for clarity. The greed and fear that surrounds the music industry is toppling from within, but it goes far beyond business men clinging to antiquated business models. It is centered around one of the most obvious oversights in the history of business. An industry that has forgotten it’s product.

In order to maximize profits, the music business is offering more of less music. By this I mean, they are more than happy to release greatest hits collections, remixes and rehashes of everything you have ever heard, than promote a newer, unproven artist. Today, the music business is still the primary source of new music. Channels like radio, iTunes/Zune and television still promote known artists because they know it sells.

Suffer the long tail

Chris Anderson’s book focuses on the long tail, a concept that says that basically says, with an unlimited ability to provide products to customers, you will reach more customers than providing a more limited set of more popular products.

Key #2: Take your music to your audience, record labels don’t tell people what to listen to anymore, make sure that you are where they go.

The internet is that unlimited shelf. These days anyone has the ability to get their music on iTunes, Zune, Amazon, Facebook, Myspace and the like. The places where people congregate are finally accessible. Get your music into the path of the long tail, and if it’s good, it will reach the head.

The rap industry has embraced this philosophy and it has made countless millions under the radar of Sony, RCA and the like. With home studio equipment being affordable and capable of the quality many major studios produce, it was just a matter of replacing the distribution model.

Is history repeating itself?

I have seen something very similar to this before. I have been writing since I was in my teens. Submitting editorials to newspapers, I even published my own weekly paper for about a year. I love to write, but I have never been in a position to truly write professionally. In those days, that meant having your articles picked up by some sort of a major circulation, having a book published, etc. Today that means pop up a blog, say something interesting, promote yourself a bit, and watch the readers come. These days they come to the tune of about 30,000 a month. That’s 10 times the circulation that my weekly newspaper reached. It’s even more so than that because I know they came, publishing a newspaper like I did was “put it out and hope they read.”

Fast-forward to today, and you will see newspapers and magazines falling left and right. Some bloggers have become quite powerful, and an entire industry struggles stay in the game because while they were sleeping, a pretty incredible replacement for their medium showed up in the night.

It’s already happening

Take a stroll to Trent Reznor’s NIN.com. Trent in particular, has quite a good grip on how things are going. Being a particular premium product, and that’s what artists are in the music industry, he managed to just stroll out the door of the bigs and walk his own way.

Key #3: Be your own marketing pioneer, manage your own community, use your music as a reward to loyal listeners.

How it will look in the future

If random guys like Shoe Money can make tons of money on the hype of blogging via ads, I am betting that many other musicians can too. The ways a musician can make money are still there.

• Some people will still want physical CDs, instead of making thousands, use a service that makes one on demand, of course it will cost you $3-4 per CD plus shipping, but I guarantee you the $6-7 left over is loads higher than what a label would ever give you.
• Don’t give up merchandising, and do it yourself. Make your band/artist website the exclusive place to get T-Shirts, Hoodies, Hats, etc.
• Play out and play a lot. Concert money is yours, you will still have to deal with promoters and such, but get with it, you are your own business manager now.
• Stream some of your performances on your website to entice people to visit your site and hopefully visit you in concert.
• Build your own site, use sites like MySpace and FaceBook to point people to your real site. Monetize it with ads, endorsements and sponsorships.

Being someone who considers themselves both a musician and a technologist, I find the entire development both fascinating and hilarious. Music will continue to survive, and when the traditional industry sees the bottom clearly, it will begin to thrive again. Keep jamming out and support your favorite artists until the ship rights itself.

Related Links:

• NIN.com
• Chris Anderson @ Wired Magazine
• Mix Magazine

I am going to pre-warn my readers that this might be the most overly indulgent, completely butt kissing, over the top glowing review I have ever written. Recently I purchased Guitar Rig 3: Software Edition (*more on why that was a mistake later) and I have to admit to being completely and totally smitten by this little jewel of a software tool.

First what it does. Either standalone, or as a plug-in to your favorite Digital Audio Workstation software, Guitar Rig 3 is your complete bag of tricks as far as tone goes. I have built some of the most incredible amp monstrosities playing with it and have come to believe that there are very few sounds that you just can’t achieve with it. Your basic setup is an input and output module. In between these two modules, you can place a nearly infinite number of components. You have 12 amps with matching cabinets, mostly for guitar but a few for bass. You have a range of “Personal Guitar Assistants” including a tuner, metronome, loop recorder, splitters, mergers, and more. Finally you have a massive collection of stomp box and rack effects for pretty much any shredtastic need you might have.

Of course you can modify these sounds with a wide array of mics, adjust their placements and even tweak the room a bit. The big question you are probably asking is “How does it sound??” That my friends, is simply amazing. The models are dead on, the tone is sweet or biting, you have total control. The emulations of classic amps and stomboxes are truly faithful. This software is just simply fun.

So why do I suggest not getting the Software Edition? Well, the hardware edition comes with a foot controller/audio interface for a trite $100 more, and the control itself is $300 if you want to add it later. Easy decision as if you want wah or volume control, not to mention preset switching, it’s a no brainer, I regret buying the version I did, but not the software itself.

So I am working on some music for Dawngrrl’s video project and here is my first clip. It’s supposed to be dark and industrial, kind of a movie intro/outro credits thing. Think intro to Seven or House on Haunted Hill. All Logic Studio.

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You caught me, guilty pleasure, what can I say. The last few weeks have been like a walk down Crue memory lane to me. It probably all started almost a year ago when my sister turned me on to the new The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack CD and connected book The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star. I read the book and absorbed the CD. Both are spectacular and I highly recommend them by the way.

More recently I heard the Saints of Los Angeles single and was curious so I started exploring the Crue I missed when I left them along with the rest of the world (After Dr. Feelgood).

It turns out that I missed quite a bit of Motley, some good, some bad. Along with a small review of The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band book I read, I’ll spell out some of the past Motley Crue music you might have missed and why you should check it out.

Discography

Please see Mötley Crüe discography, for a complete discography

Studio albums

I’ve crossed out the ones you know, so let’s go through what’s left..and thanks to Wikipedia for the snazzy table.

Motley Crue (The album John Corabi instead of Vince Neil)

I have been listening to the hell out of this album lately. As a matter of fact I am trying to adopt some of it’s sounds into my new work. I want to go on record saying that we are all to blame for not giving this album a shot. I honestly think that this version of Motley Crue would have followed in the footsteps of the post-Roth Van Halen to go on and have a great career kicking out some awesome music.

This album came out in 1994, 14 years ago and it’s as fresh as if it has come out yesterday. It has the current detuned guitar sound everyone loves, a scream-singer with a current sounding voice and some awesome hooks and riffs. If you skipped this one, go back and pick it up, it’s fantastic.

Generation Swine

Ok, so Vince is back, but I am not so sure that it’s a good thing. The music was written for Corabi, and honestly the sound is just, well, odd. I don’t really like it that much. There are a few tracks, and it’s got it’s novelty hearing Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee sing a bit, but it just totally misses the mark and is not only un-memorable, but down right bad in places. I hate to speak bad of the Crue, but this is a definite miss.

New Tattoo

Once you hear what I have to say about the new album, you’ll see why I call this album a warm-up to Saints of Los Angeles. It was 8 years ago, Vince was back and sounded like himself again, but it seemed like they just couldn’t quite shake the dated parts of their old sound and the oldness of the feel was showing it’s wear. There are some memorable hooks and if this was released in 1991 we would have probably loved it.

Saints of Los Angeles

This is probably going to sound bad, and I don’t mean it to be, but I would say this is as good as they can hope to sound with Vince Neil. I like Vince, he is a cool guy, fun to watch and all, but after hearing John Corabi, then James Michael on the Sixx AM disc, and even Tommy Lee on his solo stuff, Vince just kinda belongs in the 80s. Motley is definitely quipped and capable of making sellable records in 2008, but I don’t think Vince can sing them. That being said, this is a good fun album, it’s definitely a throwback, but that’s not all bad, I mean you still rock out when you hear Girls, Girls Girls, right?

On Tour

So with that, I think all of them, except Generation Swine, are worth the purchase, and with the new Motley Crue tour this summer, I can say that I’ll be going to see them rock out for the first time since I saw them on the Dr. Feelgood tour. Check out the links below to purchase some of these from Amazon if you are interested.