The far-reaching effects of the Stop Online Piracy Act (house) and the Protect IP Act (senate) are being discussed throughout the internet right now- just as they should be. I wish every bill our leaders bring to the table fell under the same public scrutiny. I, however, don’t need to add to the discussion of global implications, I want to discuss just one. One implication has made me support SOPA: Grooveshark

You see, if SOPA passes, I want to own Grooveshark.com

It’s not about fairness or liberty or innovation, really. My support for SOPA comes strictly from the fact that it wouldn’t be difficult for me to own Grooveshark once these bills pass.

If you’re not familiar with Grooveshark, here’s their business plan in a nutshell:

1. Allow users to post and distribute MP3′s of any band they like
2. Whatever the users don’t post, Grooveshark will post for them
3. Ignore DMCA takedown requests, court orders, and lawsuits
4. Don’t pay any royalties to labels or indie musicians.

Don’t ask me how a site like this gained any legitimacy, but for some reason tons of people think Grooveshark actually supports the music it’s using to sell ads and subscriptions. There’s a reason they’ve been sued by every major label and why independents like Zoë Keating have had to issue DMCA takedown notices upwards of seven times. Just like the United States Congress, Grooveshark has become a respected batch of pirates that nobody seems to sense as a threat.

How SOPA Can Help

Under the terms of the SOPA bill (yes, I’ve read it, have you?), pretty much any site on the internet becomes a site that facilitates piracy. My dad’s blog about shit he finds on the beach in Washington? Total pirate haven. Forget YouTube, Wikipedia, and of course Grooveshark, any site with a comments section falls under this bill’s definition.

All I’d have to do is issue a notice to sites associated with Grooveshark under the new law. You read that correctly, I don’t even have to inform the site I’m attacking. At that point those sites have 5 days to stop servicing Grooveshark- Paypal, Google, whomever. If Grooveshark doesn’t somehow sense they’re being targeted via some disturbance in the force, they’ll probably keep violating copyrights and ripping off musicians as though nothing had happened.

At that point, I can literally own their domain name through a simple court procedure. I wouldn’t get their bank accounts or assets, but think about all the traffic I could funnel directly to my website through their more popular name. Hell, I could just point Grooveshark.com to my Pandora Radio station since Pandora actually pays royalties to guys like me.

If Grooveshark bothered to notice and tried to defend themselves, it’d be even better. Since every site- even mine -is now a Pirate Bay, they’d be perjuring themselves the second they tried to claim otherwise. That means jail time for their directors and executives, but SOPA adds a bonus: They would immediately be responsible for my legal fees. I could hire the ten best lawyers on the planet and let Grooveshark pick up the tab.

How You Can Help

You too can help me own Grooveshark.com – it will be a simple matter. Besides, if you don’t help me, I’ll just own your domain name instead. It will be far, far easier than you can imagine and you will have no legal recourse to fight these claims.

If you doubt any of this, I suggest you educate yourself on SOPA/PIPA right now… though I wouldn’t recommend it. Congress and their friends at the MPAA/RIAA are counting on you NOT knowing what the hell is going on in order to pass these bills.

So you’re better off joining my quest to own Grooveshark. Just tell your representatives how you feel about SOPA/PIPA and together we can make this happen!

General Ebel here, fresh off the plane from Fishcon 2011. I was recently interviewed by the Freelance 4 Real show and we talked about what it takes to survive as a small business- any small business -but particularly the über-competitive world of independent music. Co-hosts Justin Kownacki and Michael Sorg asked me about the delicate balance involved in asking YOU to spread the word about my music. It’s the difference between begging for attention and earning your assistance.

I don’t like begging, I don’t know anyone who does, but to be frank my very survival depends on your involvement. You’ve already heard the music and I’m glad you’re a fan, but I need you to go one step further than the ordinary masses out there. Chris Penn would talk about changes to Facebook and Google and how their systems now depend almost entirely on people sharing stuff with their friends, but I’ll put it in terms of the music industry:

• Blogs, Magazines, and Radio stations only want to run stories about bands that have a buzz going.
• Venues and booking agents only want to work with artists who inspire their fans to action.
• The #1 reason people buy new music is based on a recommendation from a friend, not from ads or promotions.
• I will only be able to tour to your town if we can generate enough buzz to get people’s attention.

Music, like any other small business, depends on people like you spreading the word around your town and your online community. Without your help, all I’m doing is begging for attention. It’s like two lovers having a fight: Music industry types aren’t going to hear me if I tell them I deserve a shot, but as soon as they hear the same message from one other trusted source they’ll take it seriously. It’s amazing what a little word of mouth can accomplish.

The Ask

Something we talked about during the interview was not being afraid to ask.  So what am I asking you to do? I need you to keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities to spread the word. Here are a few examples:

• Whenever I post a video on my YouTube Channel – Don’t just “Like” it, share it via email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
• When I post something to the blog, use the Share buttons at the bottom.
• If you hear of a local event or business that could use my music, throw it at them. If I knew anyone behind #OccupyWallStreet right now, I’d be sending them copies of It’s Raining Bankers and They Got The Money

In a nutshell, YOU are my record label. Every artist you like depends on you to help them grow and survive. If you truly want to see this lone goofball’s music rise and dominate the world (a modest goal), then I need YOU to share me with your friends. Anything I do that doesn’t flat-out offend you or injure your soul, please share it with others. I’m counting on you every day, so thank you for not letting me down.

I’m doing my best not to let you down, ever.

Every ten minutes another Indie Music website is born.

Okay, that statistic is a completely ad rectum statement, but sometimes it seems that way. I get emails from these budding young social networking sites weekly. Almost daily. Honestly, I’m not sure whom some of them are trying to kid; nobody wants to go to a website to listen to indie music.

Every one of these sites function the same: They expect musicians to upload their music, bio, photos, tour dates, and videos, a process which can take upwards of an hour for some of us with extensive catalogs. The sites don’t really do any outreach of their own to connect these musicians with new fans, relying instead on the musicians to bring their own audience to the site. Why the hell would I funnel my fans into someone else’s website just so they can reap the rewards of ugly banner ads and pre-roll commercials?

I have yet to see a site whose events calendar can interface with… well, any other calendar known to mankind. This is why ArtistData exists, the only good service Sonicbids offers (and they didn’t create it). And let’s not even talk about hidden, indecipherable, dubious clauses in these sites’ twenty-page Terms of Service. Who owns the rights to what? Perpetual license? Are you selling my music to MTV reality shows and pocketing the money, or just making sure I don’t sue you for carrying music that I uploaded in the first place?

Occasionally there are real innovators. Turntable.fm lets users play DJ with other users. Pandora developed an alarmingly accurate recommendation engine (robot voodoo, I say). Noisetrade.com gives you a handy widget to trade free tunes for email addresses and even some Paypal tips. New music social networks aren’t always bad, but for some reason the good ones are few and far between.

General Ebel’s Advice

My advice to musicians: There are only two things you should focus on when looking at social networking sites. The first question is obvious: is anyone here but other musicians? Normal people and potential fans are on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. Why waste time on some unknown site that’s only full of other indie artists trying to pimp their latest hip-hop remix tribute mashup album?

The second question is harder to answer but is still important: Does this site do something that I absolutely, positively need to be a part of? If it’s not so cool that your fans will jump out of their chairs in excitement, maybe your time is better spent reaching out to new people on the big sites. Scratch that… how about playing an online concert or releasing a new track to the fans you already have? Tell them to share it, let them do the social networking.

My advice to anyone who wants to start up a new music site: If you don’t already have a significant population of non-musician users, you’d better provide some kind of service that musicians actually need. If you expect musicians to drive their fan base to your site (and your site ads) without offering anything they can’t already get from Facebook, Twitter, or their own website, you’re just wasting your time. Worse yet, you’re wasting my time.

This is another post about Spotify, believe it or not, and why James Bond has made me afraid to use it.

As we all know, the famous British secret agent is a crafty one. He’s entertaining to watch, worth every penny I’ve paid to Netflix to see him. In fact, the entire James Bond catalogue appearing on Netflix Instant Watch is what prompted me to sign up for the service in the first place. (If it hadn’t, the entire Star Trek TNG series would have.) So now I get to watch Mr. Bond do battle with evil masterminds, Grace Jones, and the governor from those pirate movies, all while skillfully avoiding death, imprisonment, and chlamydia. I’ll be entertained for months.

Except I won’t. Secret agents are trained to disappear, remember? The rights holder for the James Bond franchise pulled the entire library out of Netflix Instant Watch shortly after I signed up. As a token of their remorse for my disappointment, they promptly raised their prices to make up for it. But I’ve still got my Star Trek, right? Right? Well, as of this posting I still do, anyway.

Compound Mr. Bond’s untimely disappearance with the concerns raised by James Allworth of the Harvard Business Review. The main concern I share with Mr. Allworth is one of habits: We don’t tend to watch the same movie over and over again (unless we’re really, really high), but we will listen to the same album repeatedly. What happens if the cost to keep listening suddenly jumps? Or what if that album disappears entirely?

Maybe 007 stole it for his Lotus in-car turntable. He’s probably got one, you know.

Either way, the conclusion I’m rapidly approaching is that Spotify, like Pandora, is best used as a way to discover new music, that’s all. And again, Pandora is a much better system for discovery since you really don’t have to do any work to be exposed to new music you’re likely to enjoy. The robots pick the playlist and there’s no illusion of “owning” or even renting the music; it’s just like radio with no DJ and your own personal program director.

So I’ll be here with no James Bond. At least, not until I can afford the full DVD collection or whomever’s pulling the strings decides to let me enjoy what I paid for. Again.

At long last, Spotify has launched here in the United States! My initial instinct is that it’s a technological one-two punch: Discover an artist on Pandora Radio, go listen to the full album on Spotify. Let’s see what happens every time you listen to a track on Spotify…

If 10,000 people buy a track from iTunes, I can pay off my credit cards and keep making music. If 10,000 people listen to a track on Spotify, I earn $13 and change; I can almost buy dinner at Chili’s.

Shit. Please, folks, buy an album if you like what you hear.

This is a reblog-with-permission from fellow musician Rob Michael of the Atmos Trio. I thought it was perfectly in line with my previous post about other people lowering your expectations for you.

I’ve had people say to me, on a few occasions, “You play so great, why aren’t you Famous?” or “I’ve never heard of you, sorry the music thing didn’t work out.”

Since I was very young, my goal in life has been to make a comfortable living doing what I enjoy doing. I was never driven by Visions of Grandeur or being a Big Star. I just wanted to be a great musician and have the ability to support my family while doing that.

I have enjoyed the privilege of doing exactly that. In my view, things have worked-out exactly as planned-beyond my dreams really… I thank the Universe every single day and shake my head realizing that I’m actually pulling this whole thing off.

Whenever someone says “I’ve never heard of you.” I smile and say “That’s OK, I’ve never heard of you either.”

I’m starting to wonder if people actually listen to themselves as they speak. Watching Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin is enough proof to the contrary, but in this case I’m referring to ordinary people, far far from the political spotlight. They’re aunts, parents, friends, even teachers who should know better. They all say the same thing, totally oblivious to how defeating a simple question can be.

All you English, Philosophy, Music, Art, or Theater majors can say it with me. On three, ready? One… Two…

So you’re getting a Music degree, eh? You going to be a music teacher?

I thank God that I never grew so frustrated with that question as to shout back, “no, I’m actually learning this shit because I intend to use it.” It seems unfathomable to most people that a degree in anything but Engineering, Business, Law, or Medicine could ever be used for a wage-earning skill other than teaching that skill to others. I didn’t take more than two decades of piano lessons just so I could be another part-time piano teacher.

The irony is that, when I was in college in the late 90′s, nobody asked all my Computer Science friends if they planned to teach Computer Science. It was assumed that they’d step off the commencement stage directly into the limo that would whisk them to their cushy Silicon Valley job. Maybe if someone asked them The Stupid Question a few of them might’ve pondered alternate career tracks. You know, just in case their entire industry was propped up on an ever-weakening economic bubble.

Do people ask Education majors if they plan to teach other aspiring teachers about how to teach? That concept just seems too recursive for me to focus on right now, so forget I even mentioned it.

My problem isn’t with the act of teaching; I have great respect for those with the patience and knowledge to make someone else smarter. Teaching anything requires a skill set I simply don’t possess and the great teachers wield it with all the skill of Stevie Ray Vaughan on a guitar. No, my frustration lies with the question itself. Roughly translated, it reads something like this:

So you’re getting an English degree, eh? You know you’ll never actually earn a living as a writer, so what’re you going to do to pay the bills? You going to be an English teacher?

There are a very small number of people who will become “famous” thanks to their artistic endeavors, but everyone has to earn a living. Those aspiring programmers I knew ended up in jobs ranging from network admins to gas station attendants. All of us have one simple task before us: Create something of value and earn compensation for it. Artists, for the most part, are entrepreneurs by definition. Everyone else can work for an established company and climb a ladder or start their own law firm or software company if they’re brave enough. The fact that no readily available corporate structure exists for artists (there is no mail room or reception desk for Philosophy majors) doesn’t mean they won’t earn a living from their art.

Don’t torpedo someone’s aspirations simply because you’re too narrow-minded to see their path to success.

If you find yourself confronted with a young artist and feel the urge to ask The Stupid Question, ask yourself a couple of questions first:

1. Are they getting an Education minor? If so, go ahead and ask, it’s no longer a stupid question.
2. What do I do for a living? How would I feel if people assumed the only way I’d be able to use my education was to teach it to others?
3. If everyone who got one of these degrees just taught English or Philosophy or whatever, who the hell is writing the books that I read? Who’s making the music I listen to?
4. Do I want a piano shoved up my ass? (This one’s really just something I wished people would’ve asked themselves before asking me this question in college.)

I’ve discovered that there are two factors that motivate The Powers That Be (otherwise known as the Us from my Manifesto): Eyeballs and Influence. You, my awesome fans, matter only insomuch as either how many of you are out there or how much you’ll do when I ask you. You’re either a valuable demographic or an eager volunteer.

If you want me to become famous and tour the planet, you need to help me prove myself to the Big Industry Players. At least, that’s the way they want it to work. If you ever want to see me on a big stage with sparklers and moving lights, I have to show The Powers That Be that I can mobilize you like… well, like a Robot Army.

Would you do that for me? If I asked you not just to share my music but to get five or ten of your friends to join my mailing list, would you make it your mission? If I book a show 50 miles from your house, would you pack the car with friends and road-trip out to the concert? Those are the kinds of things The Powers That Be want to see; I must be able to command you like the President deploying the 101st.

Fuck that.

Again, as I said in my Manifesto, you are not just a listener drone. I don’t empower you, You empower me. I am neither your commander-in-chief nor your boss nor your mom. All I’ve done to deserve your support is show You support when you use your voice.

Do I need more fans? Of course I do. Would “being noticed” by the Big Industry Players help me get on stage in your town? Very likely. I won’t pretend that an active crowd of Matthew Ebel fans wouldn’t propel me into a new echelon of rock stardom. I’m just not going to pretend I’m your leader, even if I call myself General Ebel from time to time.

If you need a mission, there are always a few over at www.matthewebel.com/help. But I’m proud to say that my fans are not mindless followers. You are creative, you are proactive, and you mobilize me.

All I ask is that you influence others as much as you’ve influenced this lone piano-rocker.

payola |pāˈōlə|
noun
the practice of bribing someone to use their influence or position to promote a particular product or interest : if a record company spends enough money on payola, it can make any record a hit.

A tweet-link from the prolific, intelligent, and fine-looking independent music revolutionary Ariel Hyatt caught my attention today, linking to an article by Bobby Owsinski about Payola. In a nutshell, the fact that 60 million people have watched that godawful Rebecca Black “Friday” music video and yet radio stations aren’t running with that ball into the endzone pretty much proves how out of touch they are with what music consumers actually consume.

Owsinski also links to (and quotes) another article where a radio Program Director admits that a song doesn’t make it to radio unless a major record label “brings all of its resources to get it played.” Having interned at a well-known label, I heard all kinds of stories about non-payola payola. Even a decade ago the industry was rife with “this big-screen TV is totally just a gift and has nothing to do with the new single we just sent you (*wink wink*).”

Slimy? Of course. Illegal? Nope. Promotional expenses are as tricky to control as campaign financing; the line between legitimate contribution and vote-buying is purely subjective. Payola is still alive and well despite the laws against it.

And I’m all for it.

Competition Is Good

Payola might have been bad when no competition existed for music radio. Now we have terrestrial radio, satellite radio, podcasts, internet streams, and the vial of liquid awesome that is Pandora. Rumor has it iTunes and Amazon will be duking it out for market share in this field soon.

With all these venues gaining traction to compete with terrestrial radio, record labels could go broke bribing (or totally-not-a-bribing) all of them, if they even can. Pandora’s playlists are picked by algorithm, not by meat-based decision makers. It’s hard to bribe a robot, I’ve tried. At the end of the day it will be the consumers that drive the industry, not the program directors. The days of dictating taste from on high are over.

I say Payola should not only be legal, it should be encouraged. Let the stupid record labels funnel so much money into radio that they bankrupt themselves and flood the airwaves with mediocre over-compressed crap (*cough* Nickleback *cough*). People have options now- I can listen to Pandora through my refrigerator, for shit’s sake. I’ve already abandoned everything but NPR on the airwaves because half the artists I’ve fallen in love with lately (see my recommendations below) don’t get played.

The smart record labels (yes, they exist, somewhere) will focus on helping good artists develop their craft into music that stands on its own. Or they’ll spend money outside the music stream, promoting the artists where it makes more sense. Who knows, they may even come up with creative marketing ideas. If the airwaves are a known paid-for entity, the public at large will gravitate towards the organic sources of good ideas.

Payola on the Internet

Oh yeah, and it’s not like Payola isn’t thriving on the internet either. A new music site seems to pop up, function, and die about every month or so, nearly all of them taking bribes- sorry, Premium Artist Payments -for better playlist positioning. Nothing ever changes.

Anyone remember MP3.com? Anyone? Beuller? At the turn of the millennium they were big- so big, in fact, they couldn’t cover their bandwidth costs. So they opened up a pay-for-a-promoted-chart-position system that didn’t actually move your songs up in the charts, but placed your song just below the legitimate #1 spot. Payola? Maybe, but as you can imagine it guaranteed that the people with the most money got more plays.

A decade later we have the shitty music service Jango. If you’re a consumer, it’s totally free. If you’re a band, you have to pay for guaranteed plays on their service. Wait, let me get this straight… musicians that are most likely barely paying their bills are providing your website with thousands of hours of content and not only are you not paying them anything for it, you’re asking them to pay you? Count me out.

Robots (and humans) to the Rescue

With the explosion of new media, the signal-to-noise ratio of bad music versus shining stars has grown almost unbearable. Radio once functioned as the sole taste-maker, but everyone knew the system was corrupt. As the industry’s adolescence catches up with it, two new taste-makers will arise: Robots and humans.

Like I said, robots can’t be bribed. Services like Pandora force the listeners to decide what they like based on a complex algorithm. It also forces musicians to produce material that can survive on its own merit. On the human side, there are disc jockeys everywhere. Not the talking heads that sit in broadcast booths playing a pre-set playlist, I’m talking about your BFF on Facebook that puts up a link to a track. That podcaster whose show you like and whose taste you trust. That artist you’re already listening to that recommends another artist she’s fond of.

I believe that opening the floodgates of Payola will simply accelerate a process that’s already happening: Corporate douchebags will blow all their money promoting tepid product while smart consumers move on to greener pastures. The situation’s like a boil that needs to be lanced.

Let the money flow, let the system devour itself, and let the music live or die on more level playing fields.

Those of us that live for The New face a challenge that never changes: When is it the right time? I’m a fan of all things technological and it’s difficult- sometimes outright painful -to come to terms with a new development while the majority of the population still doesn’t “get it”. The trick is to equip your Robot Army with the Cutting Edge, then implement it when the rest of the world is ready.

Example 1: Virtual Reality

Remember Virtual Reality? If you weren’t around to witness the 90′s, just read the Wikipedia article. Otherwise, you’re well aware of the big hype that kinda went nowhere. VR hit pop culture like the Hula Hoop, from Nintendo’s migraine-seeding Virtual Boy to Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man to the thank-God-it-was-never-widely-adopted Quicktime VR. All this at a time when the hottest Power Mac sported a whopping 110 MHz processor and could hold up to 264 MB of RAM.

Here we are in 2011. High-resolution LCD screens are so ubiquitous we’re turning iPods into digital watches with them, yet you can’t find VR goggles in the gaming peripherals at Best Buy. CPU’s, memory, and graphics technology have improved to the point where fully-rendered 3D games exist on your iPhone. Broadband internet now makes it possible for dizzyingly complex render files to travel across the world in milliseconds.

Shit, we actually invented Virtual Reality the way it was hyped up 20 years ago. For real. Virtual people, virtual objects, virtual sex, prims, and rock and roll. And the majority of the public couldn’t give a shit. Why? Because the hype happened 20 years too early. We saw the potential on the horizon and had our party before the birthday boy actually arrived. Now that he’s here, we’re all sick of cake and booze. Virtual Reality happened at the wrong time and now it’s merely a toy that lonely geeks and marketers play with.

And most of the marketers have already left.

Example 2: Podcasting

If only there was a way to listen to new music, talk shows, fiction, and all that cool radio stuff without having to schedule a time to sit in front of the magical talking antenna-box. Imagine it’s 2005 and Apple’s iPod has been out for 4 years. Everyone had one by 2003. Yes, everyone. Don’t argue with me, Steve is watching.

More importantly, blogs existed and circulated via something called RSS. By 2005 RSS had been around for six years and most people today still don’t even know what it is. Then someone (maybe Adam Curry) decided to test if an audio file could ride on that RSS feed. MP3′s started floating around college campuses five or ten years before iPods did. All three of these technologies had been invented, circulated, and field-tested for years. Unlike VR, they had no sex appeal. Stephen King didn’t write any short stories of crazed men killing people through blog feeds (at least, not that I know of anyway). Duke Nukem wasn’t reprogrammed and brought to video arcades as an XML stream.

I won’t say Apple started it (hi, Steve, I love you), but it certainly hit the public consciousness when iTunes added a little extra icon on the left side of the screen. Suddenly there’s a feeding frenzy: Podcasting companies open, rise, fall, and dissolve faster than sand castles. Companies throw marketing budgets at podcasting with a fervor rivaling a squid orgy. The RIAA sends out CDL’s to anyone who even thinks about the possibility of maybe considering the merits of planning to play big-label music on their own little show.

And because of that last part, guys like me suddenly have a career. Thank you.

Now it’s six years later and anyone with an iPod knows what a podcast is. NPR re-broadcasts all their content this way, formerly unknown authors are now well-known among the podcast-listening public. Some of us musicians are earning most of our living through podcasting. And we didn’t even need Pierce Brosnan and Jeff Fahey in rubber suits to pull it off.

Is It The Right Time?

I’ve ditched cable TV and watch all the same programming I used to via HD broadcast, iTunes, and web streams. I only torrent shows when their producers are too stupid to give me a legitimate means of buying them directly- but I still get the shows I want. Is it the right time for everyone to do this? Maybe, I’d give it another 2 years before everyone’s got a Mac Mini replacing their cable box.

I’ve stopped listening to commercial radio and find much better quality music with far fewer commercials via Pandora Radio and, of course, Podcasting. Is it the right time for everyone else to get their music digitally? Absolutely. The variety is much wider, the barrier to entry much lower. Services like Pandora and some podcasts ensure that musicians get paid every time their songs are played. Radio doesn’t do that, yet they run 1 minute of commercials for every 2 minutes of music.

I live on a spaceship somewhere just outside the Earth’s atmosphere and live on a diet of squid meat and quinoa. Is it time for everyone else to follow me? Hell no, will someone please send up a steak and some ice cream? It’s definitely the right time for that.