The Entertainment Industry Now Belongs To You And Me
I don’t post this to bring everyone up to speed on the frickin’ South by Southwest music festival, or even the state of the record industry per se. I’m posting this to remind and inspire everyone who has anything to say, if it’s good and you’re good at promoting it, you can get it seen. Had I myself been a little less caught up in old school thinking, all this “Showtime”/Writer’s Strike/Name Producer Old School distribution issues that have led to the ridiculous delays in YA’s release may have never happened, and I would have been more of the true single-vision pioneer I was when I started the project. I can’t tell you the hell I go through every day, regretting that I actually went back to the sewer that I left to get the project released…I fight the urge every day to just say “fuck it” and get it out my way and my way only, via the net and utilizing the mind-blowing media support I have behind me. I feel at times like a cheap whore holding on to the cable deal, too afraid to let it all loose as independently and unrelentingly as it was filmed…
NYT:
AUSTIN, Tex. — “I don’t want to feel like I don’t have a future,” sang the Shout Out Louds, one of more than 1,700 bands that have been performing day and night at Austin’s clubs, halls, meeting rooms, parking lots and street corners since Wednesday.
The Shout Out Louds, from Stockholm, were singing about a romance, but they could have been speaking for thousands of people attending the 22nd annual South by Southwest Music Festival. It is America’s most important music convention, particularly for rising bands, gathering a critical mass of musicians and their supporters and exploiters from the United States and across the world. While major labels have a low profile at this year’s gathering, other corporations are highly visible, using sponsorships to latch on to music as a draw and as a symbol of cool.
Southwest is a talent showcase and a schmoozathon, a citywide barbecue party and a brainstorming session for a business that has been radically shaken and stirred by the Internet. For established recording companies, the instantaneous and often unpaid distribution of music online is business hell; CD album sales are on an accelerating slide, and sales of downloads aren’t making up for the losses. But for listeners, as well as for musicians who mostly want a chance to be heard, the digital era is fan heaven. As major labels have shrunk in the 21st century, South by Southwest has nearly doubled in size, up to 12,500 people registered for this year’s convention, from 7,000 registered attendees in 2001, not including the band members performing. In an era of plummeting CD sales and short shelf lives even for current hit makers, the festival is full of people seeking ways to route their careers around what’s left of the major recording companies.
Sooner or later, public forums and private conversations at this year’s festival end up pondering how 21st-century musicians will be paid. For nearly all of them, it won’t be royalty checks rolling in from blockbuster albums. Musicians’ livelihoods will more likely be a crazy quilt of what their lawyers would call “alternative revenue streams”: touring, downloads, ringtones, T-shirts, sponsorships, Web site ads and song placements in soundtracks or commercials. Festival panels offer practical advice on all of them, for career-minded do-it-yourself-ers.
The key is to gain enough recognition to find an audience. Over its four days, SXSW, as the festival is called, is like MySpace moved to the physical realm: more music than anyone could possibly hear, freely available and clamoring to be heard.
Major labels used to help create stars through promotion and publicity, but their role has been shrinking. Multimillion-selling musicians who have fulfilled their major-label contracts — Radiohead, the Eagles, Nine Inch Nails — are deserting those companies, choosing to be free agents rather than assets for the system that made them famous.
Even a moderately well-known musician can reach fans without a middleman. Daniel Lanois, who has produced U2 and Bob Dylan and is also a guitarist and songwriter, noted during his set that he now sells his music directly online in high fidelity at the Web site redfloorrecords.com.
“We can record something at night, put it on the site for breakfast and have the money in the PayPal account by 5,” he said. “With all due respect for my very great friends who have come up in the record-company environment, it’s nice to see that technology has opened the doors to everybody.”
South by Southwest has insisted, ever since it started in 1987 as a gathering for independent and regional musicians, that major-label contracts have never been a musician’s only chance. Musicians who have had contracts are lucky if they recoup their advances through royalties. Lou Reed, who gave an onstage interview as a convention keynote, was terse about getting a label contract. “You have the Internet — what do you need it for?”
There’s never a shortage of eager musicians. Many bands drive cross-country by van or cross an ocean to perform an unpaid showcase at South By Southwest, and the most determined ones play not only their one festival slot but also half a dozen peripheral parties as well, hoping to be noticed. Sixth Street and Red River, two downtown streets lined with clubs, are mobbed with music-hopping pedestrians until last call.
Musicians make the trek even though discovering a local band from another town or another country is just a few clicks away. That spread of information opens new career paths, from tours stoked by blog buzz to recognition for a song tucked into a commercial or a soundtrack. South by Southwest draws like Ingrid Michaelson and Sia got big breaks through songs that appeared in television shows, while Yael Naim found an international audience through a MacBook Air commercial.
With music whizzing across the Internet, South by Southwest probably has fewer completely unknown so-called baby bands, but hundreds of more toddlers. They have unlikely allies now. If record labels can’t help them, corporations might. Few musicians worry about selling out to a sponsor; now it’s a career path. This year’s festival has brand-name sponsors everywhere, from Citigroup and Dell to wineries, social-networking Web sites and the chef Rachael Ray (who is the host of her own day party).
Governments subsidize bands from countries including Australia, Norway, Spain and Britain, which see new markets and trade value in music.
Radio stations are also active. Two well-established bands, R.E.M. and My Morning Jacket, played through their coming albums at packed South by Southwest shows that were broadcast live on National Public Radio and can be streamed at nprmusic.org/music — giving away new songs they know full well will soon be bootlegged. The logic is that fans who hear them will show up for concerts, pick up T-shirts and perhaps even buy the studio versions.
But for many of the performers at South by Southwest, the ambitions are on a smaller scale: just to be heard. Casey Dienel is the 23-year-old songwriter, pianist and wispy-voiced singer of White Hinterland; her gentle melodies carry tales of visionary transformations. She said she was at the festival just hoping that “if you put yourself out there authentically, you’re going to attract people who think like you.” Looking at her rapt audience of perhaps three dozen people, she smiled shyly. “There are so many of you!” she said.
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Is there a way to hook your PC to also play on your television? I’d rather be in the lazy-boy for long programs than sitting up in an office chair.
March 15th, 2008 at 3:06 amYes, John, it’s called the future of television, The very-near future of television. Television will no longer be about schedules. It will be about branded Video On Demand channels whose menus will appear on their web page, and you will pick and watch whatever you want to watch it. The TV and Computer are becoming one by the minute. Which is partially why I’m having second thoughts about handing some of my best stuff to a dinosaur of programming instead of building up my site as a video on demand source. It’s the talk of Hollywood - no one needs the studios for in-home distribution, so why sell citizen journalism and flmmaking to any army of suits and egos with opinions and scissors, especially since they are a dying breed anyway?
March 15th, 2008 at 3:38 amPat, I want to send you my music groups little promo CD but I need an address. I did all the audio mixing and video editing on it. Who knows, you might like it if you heard it, we can play a little bit. It’s a house rockin’ bluesy kinda vibe. I’d love for any of it to be in YA but of course, it’s up to you.
We played at Walter Reed last Fall for the troops there, and the lady in charge of MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) said in an email to me that we’re the most requested and popular band she’s had for any of their events. She wants us back for July 4th weekend this year. In the past they’ve had the great troop supporter Gary Sinise’s band Lt. Dan Band, John Cougar Mellencamp, The Beach Boys, Tim McGraw, and other famous acts and they all played the same room/stage we played on. We also got to play at Cal Ripken Stadium two weeks later, on the USMC birthday of all days, for the “Welcome Home Maryland Vets” event. Those were a great, great honor!!
My main goal in life anymore is to try and get our group to Iraq and Afghanistan to play for the troops there, although the Walter Reed and Ripken gigs were quite literally the very next best thing to that. We had the best gig on planet earth for those two days!! No other band in the world could say that on those two days.
For the WR gig last fall, I got the idea of getting together sponsors to pitch in with gifts to give the troops. With very, very, very short notice, we had some really good folks help out. Along with some veteran buddies and private citizen patriots I also had ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt, the Washington Redskins, the University of Maryland’s Athletic Director Debbie Yow sent me a box of t-shirts, and The Babe Ruth and Baltimore Sports Legends Museums all sent us some nice gifts to pass out the troops and their families as a small way of showing our appreciation for their service during wartime.
We’ll be doing it annually from the looks of it and we’ll have much more time this time around to try and make it even better. But we want to go to Iraq too!!:beer:
March 15th, 2008 at 3:40 amAlso Pat, I personally can’t see having to edit down to just seeing a few hours out of all the footage you must have collected. 8 30 minute episodes isn’t enough, I wouldn’t think, but that’s just me.
I want to see as much of what you shot as possible, and this to me is screaming out:
DVD series
like a Ken Burns thing or something, you know, where each episode can be given it’s proper time to cover it in depth and not miss ANY important parts.
March 15th, 2008 at 3:50 amLet me be very clear. The mistakes of the past are done. Playing the assinine ego game of “Hey, babe, I’ve got a series on HBO, Showtime, The Blowjob Channel….”, whatever, are over. Bob, you are right. I could write a novel on what had to be done to boil things down to 8 half-hour episodes, that people involved STILL want to fight about. Nothing bad to say about Showtime, in fact the networks President, Bob Greenblatt is one of the coolest and smartest people I’ve met in my 20 years in Hollywood, it’s just that the future of a certain type of filmmaking, of which YA is a type, is about allowing it to flourish in the full freedom of personal public distribution, which, my friends is the distribution of a future that actually started a while back. I’m more interested in using what is shot, plus my upcoming work in Mosul and Afghanistan to build a branded Video On Demand channel of my own, not to serve it up as fodder for a dying system that often causes shit to happen, like happened here. Showtime said “yes” a YEAR AG0!! I encourage you to really meditate on that for a minute. Last April. You seen the 8 Ramadi episodes on tv yet? Me either. And it’s no one’s particular fault, and I ain’t criticizing Showtime; We all ended up battling programming madness vis a vis the strike, too many creative cooks got in the kitchen ( and hey, I may have been the worst cook but I was the only cook in it who had lived and filmed it ) but anyway, point being, I fucked up at the ten yard line. I did this as, to quote a Marine officer “a wild eyed zealot with his own story to tell” and that’s how it should have stayed until the end, instead of trying to jam my square peg into Hollywood’s round hole for reasons that don’t even matter anymore, and worst of all, perhaps because of ego. Truth is, I’m not your typical indie documentarian. I have enough media and other contacts to get as much attention for this project as I would if I keep it on Showtime, which, let’s face it, the vast majority of the country doesn’t even subscribe to. So the point being for all that long-windedness is to let everyone know that the upcoming Mosul and Afghansitan projects will be broadcast in near live time over the net with a link to tv, without the wait of this first series. I’m one of those people who believe that things happen in God’s time, and every time I want to almost literally kill myself over these delays I realize that they were all for a reason that maybe I just don’t understand yet. Yes, it would’ve been nice for it to have been out for the midterms, but what if for some reason none of us understand yet, the purpose of this up close and personal view of this worst-yet battle with Al Qaeda is best served by being seen just before this election than the last one. I have no answers to such questions, I’m just a little guy with his camera who follows his heart. I do what I do, and I think I know why, but how will I ever be sure? To me, it’s because I love my country. And once I saw heroes that I knew, and I’m not talking patriotic bullshit here, but you don’t know what I’ve seen these kids do, and you don’t know what I’ve seen these animals do either, and once I saw this world, the real one, where the war for the only humane way of life was really happening, I couldn’t stop filming. I still have no other idea what to do with myself, and so many people have actually tried to stop me out of both politics and bizarrely, jealousy, which I really don’t understand.
March 15th, 2008 at 4:27 amShit, Bob, sorry.
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Thanks for the input and music, Devil.
March 15th, 2008 at 4:30 am
Pat, we are all behind you! 
March 15th, 2008 at 5:13 amas I’ve told you, you can and will be a primary pioneer in this “new media” … setting the Gold Standard by which all others will measure themselves.
Sometimes the head, gut, and heart are unified on making a decision … (most especially if it is one of great importance and innovation). Sounds as if that’s exactly where yours are right about now.
March 15th, 2008 at 7:23 amGo for it, Pat!
March 15th, 2008 at 7:47 amPat…May God Almighty bless you for anything you need. Don’t stress brother but stay faithful. You are an inspiration man. I will keep you in my prayers.
March 15th, 2008 at 8:23 amPat,
March 15th, 2008 at 8:26 amI think the greatest thing to come out of all of your hard work is a lot better understanding of our troops’ experiences. The more we “back home” know what it may have been like and what they may have gone through, the better we can understand and meet the needs of our returning men and women in uniform. This type of raw information is rare and vital. My son will be entering college next year. He will be majoring in film. When he told me of a project he had in mind having to do with the returning Vietnam vets I was very proud of him. I hope to see a lot more from patriots like yourself and him.
Yeah Pat this project is huge. Some people need a serious visual smack to the face before they better understand something. well most people for that matter. Just remember that you are doing a great thing and all great things are rewarded.
March 15th, 2008 at 9:21 amHell Pat, you know I love and support you and everything that you are doing for our troops and us here but dammit, I can’t get that image of you jamming “my square peg into Hollywood’s round hole”. Just what I need, another scary place in my head.
March 15th, 2008 at 9:27 amCarry on. Lots of us out here backing you in whatever way we can manage. Keep the bandwidth open brother, we’ll see where this rabbit hole goes.
Wait, is YA only going to be on Showtime when it comes out? How long before I can get a DVD set or stream it online maybe??? I’ve got VeohTV, DivX, but I don’t have Showtime…frack!
Everything happens for a reason Pat. I’m sure this thing will be released exactly when it’s meant to be released.
March 15th, 2008 at 9:53 amYa know, I was thinking, we really need a lot more conservatives in control of media and academia.
March 15th, 2008 at 9:49 pm“Ya know, I was thinking, we really need a lot more conservatives in control of media and academia.”
That Bob is the understatement of the century.
March 16th, 2008 at 2:14 pm