In a (generalized) nutshell, the pro-SOPA lobby represents factions that control the most valuable creative content. These include the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and other big-business groups. The anti-SOPA lobby represents factions trying to introduce and build value in new content, such as independent content creators, tech innovators, and third-party content aggregators (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

Sound familiar? Food for thought:

Infographic via: Business Insurance Blog

Aside from its promise to generate plenty of legal red tape, SOPA is a complex bill with both potential drawbacks (censorship) and potential benefits (control of creative works) for recording artists. As you sift through the propaganda on both sides, consider this: Sen. Al Franken, one of the most progressive legislators in Congress (and a lifelong creative), supports SOPA. Rep. Ron Paul, one of the most reactionary, opposes it. If that surprises you, you should get up to speed on SOPA before you sign any petitions. There are corporate interests lined up on both sides of the aisle, and none of them are particularly interested in the fate of your latest song.

The debate goes far deeper than piracy, to who really owns digital content. Do you know where you stand?

You don’t need to worry about the interests of Microsoft or Facebook or Dell or Google or Sony or eBay (despite their gaudily financed pleas). Instead study and understand how SOPA will affect the long-term viability of your creative work. And then raise your voice to the rafters.

Aside from resorting to self-delusion, we can listen to those who believe in us.

According to the book jacket, Believe in Me is a gripping story of rock ‘n’ roll and political activism. And it is that, but it’s a lot more. Warburg, a music critic and political scientist by trade, traces the bonds between artists and activists, and between everyone who has ever made a leap of faith to try to help make the world a better place. When we take that leap, he suggests, there is a lot to discover in the world and in ourselves.

While writing this book, Jason occasionally mused aloud on his setbacks and breakthroughs and creative travails. He sometimes questioned the wisdom of working so hard on something that seemed to be fighting against him.

Again and again, his answer was the same. And the Catch-22 – believing, achieving — was history.

Buy | Read a sample chapter

Press release

Until the successful U.S. launch of Spotify last summer (before which the popular streaming service was Europe-only), Wampus recordings had generated an average Spotify royalty of $.004 per streaming play during 2011.  As paltry as that sounds, it appears the service is beginning to support artists in proportion to its growth. In the short time since its U.S. launch, Spotify has quietly upped its average royalty per play to $.0053 — an increase of more than 32 percent.

Might be a blip, might be a trend.

To be successful in the marketplace, Spotify obviously needs to pay its own light bill. It also needs to keep its prices low enough for subscribers (and advertisers) to participate in droves. Finally, it needs to compensate artists at a competitive level — i.e., at the level at which the competition does.

That’s how iTunes became the leader – by supplanting the status quo.

If Spotify — along with Rhapsody, Pandora, Napster, and others — can grow margins enough to step up their royalty rates (to the range of, say, $.04 or more per play), they could challenge iTunes. And not just as the preferred access system for consumers, but as the preferred delivery platform for artists. A strong relationship with artists is key to market dominance, as streaming services will lose their access to content if they fail to pay enough for it.

Spotify, are you listening? What is your compensation plan for independents?

One of the record’s best songs was a splashy toe-tapper called “I Like the Street.” It was about a world that contained every conceivable kind of person — “the grifters and the starstruck / the poets and the punks / the PhDs, the jailbirds / the models and the drunks.” In this lyrical sketch, Blair said more in four minutes than some novelists say in 400 pages.

Before long he decided to expand the song into a full-blown album, I Like the Street.  The characters, streetscapes, and spiritual quandaries proliferated, and rendered a familiar world in three dimensions.

Thanks, Johnny, for disregarding every story except the one you had to tell.

Press release.

Buy at Amazon | CD Baby | iTunes

Johnny J Blair – If I Could Dress Like Clive Owen

As an indie artist in a Spotify world, you have a choice. You can either mistrust Spotify or you can make it work for you. Here are a few clues to carry as you navigate the streaming jungle:

1. Spotify is not a revenue stream (yet).

Imagine your new single blows up on Spotify. How many plays equal success? 10,000? 100,000? 500,000? For enjoyment’s sake, let’s say your song is played a million times. Hundreds of thousands of people are listening to it. How much revenue do you see?

Spotify pays a royalty of $0.002 to 0.008 per song. A million plays generate about $5,000 in royalties (compared to $700,000 for a million iTunes downloads). If your song is played 10,000 times, you make about $50. If it’s played 1,000 times, you see about the same profit as you would from the sale of a single CD.

2. Spotify is free advertising.

If Spotify isn’t a revenue stream, what is it? Legalized piracy? Royalty-free radio? No, it’s free advertising. It’s free exposure for you.

Artists used to refuse to sell their music on Amazon because the store paid them “only 45%” of the retail price. How, they asked, could Amazon justify keeping that whopping 55% for themselves? Wasn’t it just a ripoff? No, it was cheap advertising. It was cheap exposure for the artist.

Spotify, like Amazon — and Facebook — is a powerful marketing platform. It features and disseminates your music. It provides a sleek search capability to help people find and listen to you. It gives you links to your own content that you can spread, willy-nilly, to everyone you know. And it doesn’t charge you. Instead it pays to expose you.

3. Spotify is a multinational mixtape party.

With its deep social-media integration through Facebook, Spotify is a lot like a traditional mixtape party. Only this party is enormous (and growing). Your Facebook friends can share playlists that include your tracks, making it easier than ever for your music to spread rapidly through your social circle and beyond. If that sounds like a legitimization (and legalization) of file sharing, it’s because that’s what it is. It’s what everyone has wanted all along.

Your music isn’t a product — it is a manifestation of your identity as a recording artist. Use it as a doorway, as a means for reaching the audience waiting for you.

Was it past time?

We loved their best albums — Murmur, Lifes Rich Pageant, Automatic for the People — as well as others that were nearly as great. They never released anything boring (unless you count 2004′s Around the Sun, which, in fairness, only seemed dull next to everything else they did). They somehow sustained a recognizable identity over three decades while continually showing different facets of it. We ultimately saw every room in the R.E.M. house, through every door and window.

The wheels started to come off for R.E.M. in the mid-’90s, when drummer Bill Berry suffered a brain aneurysm while the band was touring Europe behind Monster. He soon retreated to his Georgia farm, leaving Peter Buck, Michael Stipe, and Mike Mills to soldier on as a three-legged dog. Sometimes this mattered and sometimes it didn’t, but the balanced chemistry the band had enjoyed since the beginning — driven by Berry’s straight-ahead, propulsive style — evolved, or dissolved, into a more mannered, less lively formula for music-making. After the exhilarating experiments of New Adventures in Hi-Fi, R.E.M. settled into a cozy studio domesticity with Up and Reveal, coasting through the millennium and gently scraping bottom with Around the Sun.

So why didn’t R.E.M. just break up when Berry left? Because they needed to find out what was left for them. The remaining members were loath to stop short of The End. Regardless of how it played out, it’s hard to begrudge them their courageous pursuit. Their last albums, Accelerate and Collapse into Now, fit comfortably, even admirably, into the heart of their canon. In light of the inevitability, after three decades together, of repeating themselves, making something fresh was likely more difficult than it appeared.

And now R.E.M. knows.  Breaking up is hard to do — until it’s all that’s left.

We met May Bees leader Gregory Orange about five years ago when he was looking for a label home for The May Bees’ first album, Drop Little Boy.  We heard the rough mixes and flipped.  The single, “The Enemy’s Scientist,” soon became a Wampus staple.  We were hooked.

Thanks, Gregory, for making that record — and for eclipsing it somehow with Saint-Denis.

For the deets on Saint-Denis and the band that made it, check out the press release.

Buy at Amazon | CD Baby | iTunes

For the inaugural episode, “A Girl in Every Port and No Health Insurance,” I sat down with Grahame Davies of The Crowd Scene.  And by “sat down,” I mean on a dusty floor in a house devoid of furniture or anything at all but Grahame and me.  Grahame and his musical (and wedded) partner Anne Rogers are moving soon into this manse with their two daughters, and the kitchen and bathrooms are in a suspended state of rip and tear.  And yes, our conversation echoes over the hardwoods like water through a concrete tunnel.

They say to create something you first have to tear down whatever stands in its way.

We talk about Michael Penn and The Soundcarriers and Picasso and Brian Wilson and Lady Gaga.

Listen:

Life of the Troubadour #1 – A Girl in Every Port and No Health Insurance

Instead we might be watching television or napping — and not sprinting headlong into the unknown.

Passion is like coffee.  It gives us a rush and wears off (at least sometimes).  That doesn’t mean it isn’t important.  It just means it’s there to get us started.  To get us off the sofa.  To help us focus and commit.

It doesn’t do the work for us.

We might think, when passion ebbs, that we need to change what we’re doing.  We might think the album or book we’re dreaming up has to change, fundamentally and right now, because it isn’t exciting us anymore.  Because we’re “not feeling it.”  And we might take that as a sign.

But just as purpose withers without passion, passion is nothing by itself.

Stop obsessing on your passion.  Think instead about who you are – and what you absolutely need to do with it.

No sweat, you think.  You ignore the stuff in the latter category. Yet these aromatic works — records or books or films — continually find their way into your media stream.  And to what end? Well, if you’re an artist or author, they are actually showing you where to draw the line.

Drawing the line has nothing to do with making your work “perfect.” Perfection is an abstract conceit that lives in your imagination, an ideal you will never actually reach. So forget that. Focus on what you do.  You are in the business of making something unique and conveying it to someone else.

In a media world saturated with content of all sizes and shapes, it is hard to stand out from the teeming mass. Lots of people are creating acceptable things, stuff no one will abjectly hate, and if you want to stand apart from them, you have to do something different from what they do.  You have to refine your work, make it distinctive, make it special.  As an artist, you have to make it something no one else could have made.  Once you’ve done that, you can pull out a nice, handmade box — and ship it.