Gabriel N's List: Music and Video

• Digital is about to surpass the CD, and once it starts to happen it’s going to happen faster and faster and faster. The more interesting thing to me is who is going to control the playlist. If there is an infinite amount of music available – and I would argue that as soon as the amount of music available exceeds the amount of time you have in your life, that’s infinite – somebody will have the leverageable spot of deciding what to listen to next. And it’s unclear whether someone will charge to tell me that or will pay to tell me that. It’s still up for grabs in every one of these vertical silos. Who are the tastemakers and how do these ideas spread? The analogy I like to give is if you’re an author and Oprah Winfrey calls, you don’t say, “How much are you going to pay me to go on your show and give away all the ideas in my book?” In fact, if you could you would pay to be on Oprah. For a really long time the music industry has had two minds: On the one hand, they would pay money to be on Clear Channel or MTV; on the other hand, they would charge you money to hear their music in concert or out of your stereo. Those days are all getting intermingled now. “I am the program director of my radio station, so where’s my payola?”
• Digital is about to surpass the CD, and once it starts to happen it’s going to happen faster and faster and faster. The more interesting thing to me is who is going to control the playlist. If there is an infinite amount of music available – and I would argue that as soon as the amount of music available exceeds the amount of time you have in your life, that’s infinite – somebody will have the leverageable spot of deciding what to listen to next. And it’s unclear whether someone will charge to tell me that or will pay to tell me that. It’s still up for grabs in every one of these vertical silos. Who are the tastemakers and how do these ideas spread? The analogy I like to give is if you’re an author and Oprah Winfrey calls, you don’t say, “How much are you going to pay me to go on your show and give away all the ideas in my book?” In fact, if you could you would pay to be on Oprah. For a really long time the music industry has had two minds: On the one hand, they would pay money to be on Clear Channel or MTV; on the other hand, they would charge you money to hear their music in concert or out of your stereo. Those days are all getting intermingled now. “I am the program director of my radio station, so where’s my payola?”
• I define a tribe as a group of people sharing a common culture, a goal, a mission, probably a leader. There are tribes of people – like the ones who go to South by Southwest – who are connected because they want to remake the music industry. There is the tribe of people who follow Bruce Springsteen and will pay unreasonable amounts of money to hear him live and compare playlists. The important distinction here is that music labels used to be in the business of grabbing shelf space, on the radio and in the record store. Now, the music industry needs to realign and be in the business of finding and connecting and leading groups of people who want to follow a musician and connect with the other people who want to do the same...
• Music vs. the music industry
• I define a tribe as a group of people sharing a common culture, a goal, a mission, probably a leader. There are tribes of people – like the ones who go to South by Southwest – who are connected because they want to remake the music industry. There is the tribe of people who follow Bruce Springsteen and will pay unreasonable amounts of money to hear him live and compare playlists. The important distinction here is that music labels used to be in the business of grabbing shelf space, on the radio and in the record store. Now, the music industry needs to realign and be in the business of finding and connecting and leading groups of people who want to follow a musician and connect with the other people who want to do the same...

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• We attended my daughter’s fifth grade graduation this morning. I expected to pop in, sit on metal folding chairs in the oppressively hot gym, watching while the teachers said a word or two and passed out certificates. Then I was going to run to my office to catch a meeting. I figured the whole event would be wrapped up in 45 minutes.
  
  Now, I am as sentimental as they come, as you will notice in this probably melodramatic post. But I was not prepared.
• We attended my daughter’s fifth grade graduation this morning. I expected to pop in, sit on metal folding chairs in the oppressively hot gym, watching while the teachers said a word or two and passed out certificates. Then I was going to run to my office to catch a meeting. I figured the whole event would be wrapped up in 45 minutes.
  
  Now, I am as sentimental as they come, as you will notice in this proba
• All was going as expected, certainly. But when the teacher given the keynote assignment said a few words, they were not the rote, “your kids are all special now let’s get the hell outta here before we pass out” sort. This was a heartfelt speech by a dedicated educator, someone who is passionate about her job and seems to truly appreciate the individual traits of these children. And we watched the kids watching her.
  
  I was welling up with emotion, trying to let it ebb as I can’t get weepy on a hot Monday morning in a gym full of strangers (more or less). But then it comes: the slide show.
  
  All they had to do was flash up t
• he first picture of these very kids as kindergartners and the whole room melted with an collective melancholy sigh. Fifth grade, 11 years old plus or minus, the dew is still on these little ones. You can feel the pull into adolescence and beyond. You can see the aging process, can see them growing up. You watch them in the metal chairs, watching themselves growing up in the photos on the screen behind them, making funny faces; dressed up and looking goofy as historical figures; arm-in-arm at a field day; on a visit to a farm; out on the playground; their childhood to this point rendered up on the screen as they sit next
• o their colleagues and friends, most of whom will graduate high school alongside each other in 2017, and some of whom will not make it as far as the others. We know, because we think back on friends we lost too young. A horrible thought, no doubt. But it just is. And these are the underpinning, inarticulate emotions that tug the heart. It is not just lost youth; it is loss itself.
• Before the slide show, beaming with pride and a concrete sense of accomplishment, the kids eventually stepped to the stage to sing two songs, “What a Wonderful World,” and “Lean on Me.” Just typing the title of the Louis Armstrong standard makes me weepy. I tear up it every time he comes to the lines (never mind when sung by a room full of children) “I hear babies cry, I watch them grow/They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know/And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”
• That’s it. There is no other line that better encapsulates the sense of mortality, the impermanence of existence, the full realization that the world belongs to none of us any more than the other. There are thousands of songs, poems, novels, and movies about the subject. Religions exist to address such concerns. But nothing else needs to be said, there is no other knowledge that you need other than Louis Armstrong singing these simple lines. Because no other knowledge about out mortality exists. We were born, we went to school, perhaps we had kids of our own, we watch them grow, we say good bye to our elders, we die, and life goes on, the cycle continues. And what a wonderful world.
  

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