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I’ve done a several interviews in the last few weeks where journalists have asked about the value of music, as if this is a major cause for concern.

I’ve never really worried about this, and here’s why:

We just got our water bill. Water is clearly valuable – we would die without it – but it isn’t always expensive. In the last six months, we used 66,000 litres of tap water, at a price of just over £162 (including standing charges).

Water is fairly readily available where I live. It falls out of the sky. Indeed, an average of 736,000 litres of water land on my house and garden each year.*

There’s also a stream at the end of the street which must carry far more than that, and I live walking distance from the sea. Let’s forget about these sources though: the hundreds of millions of people around the world struggling to survive without clean drinking water wouldn’t appreciate it if we confuse this with the stuff coming out the tap.**

Still. In the park at the end of the street, there’s a drinking fountain. There’s also a cafe where you can get a plastic cup of water, free of charge. If these are closed, the reservoir is at the top of the hill. With some inconvenience and fewer baths, I could get free water if I wanted.

The water supplied to my house costs about 0.1 pence per litre. It’s metered, although some people are still on the “all you can drink” subscription. Whichever tariff you’re on, you’re allowed to put the water in a mobile device or “bottle” and take it out with you.

The bottled water we buy from the supermarket is 8.5p a litre***. I’m fairly sure this is tap water, marked up to more than 80 times the price, but it still seems hilariously cheap when you can pay ten or twenty times this amount for a glass bottle of fancy water, still or sparkling.

The cafe in the park offers bottled water at £3 a litre. This is 3,000 times the price of tap water, and it’s offered right next to the big jug of free stuff. Still, business is good. People buy the bottles. If you’re willing to leave the Shire, you can pay a lot more.

What I find really interesting about all this is that most of the bottled water brands (or at least the companies that currently own them) entered the market when cheap, good-quality tap water was already available to almost**** everybody in the country, apparently unfazed by this massive pricing disparity.*****

I’m surprised, then, when people tell me streaming music is somehow unsustainable, will completely replace downloads or is devaluing music. I don’t have to pay anything to listen to the radio. People give me free CDs. I can listen to most things on Spotify when I’m at my computer. I still buy music, both as downloads and occasionally as physical products in almost every imaginable format. I buy them with the money I make from selling recordings, and while I fully expect to have to keep looking for new ways to do it, I have no plans to change career.

With apologies to Information is Beautiful.

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Footnotes

* You can figure this out yourself: multiply the length of your property by the width (in meters) and multiply this by the annual rainfall in mm. Then check the order of magnitude about six times because it seems like A LOT of water. I live in one of the least-rainy parts of the UK.

** With a big tank and a filter we could be self-sufficient, but this over-simplifies the clean water problem. To live off the grid, we’d also have to disconnect the sewer. That’s where things get problematic, especially if any of the neighbours were planning to use the water from the stream at the end of the street.

*** Including delivery.

**** The near ubiquitous availability of bottled water makes us less inclined to install drinking fountains in public places, which may not be a good thing.

***** My local water company announced a profit of £79.9m last year, up 147.7% on 2011. The global bottled water industry is doing fine.

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There’s an article on Digital Music News from yesterday entitled “Happy F%*@ing Birthday, iTunes…” and, as it illustrates so many of the reasons I avoid reading anything on Digital Music News, I thought I’d take a look at it here on my blog.

It opens with a personal attack on Steve Jobs who, if he hadn’t been dead for fifteen months, would surely have been humbled into changing his ways by the brilliant rhetorical device of calling him an asshole on the Internet*. It then launches into what seems to be the central assertion of the piece: that iTunes is “one of the greatest piracy-enabling vehicles the music industry has ever witnessed”.

This surprised me. The occasion for this piece is the 10th anniversary of the iTunes store, which sells music. I worked on the iTunes Store for more than half of the last ten years, and it never seemed like enabling piracy was a high priority for my department. If you’re going to make a claim like this then, naturally, you’re going to have some evidence for it, but we’ll come back to that, because there’s more.

The line “its legacy is a complicated one” dangles the possibility that we might get some meaningful analysis here.

One easy way to make headway through all this complexity would be to look at the winners and losers. The iTunes store made some people very rich, while others did less well. Whole companies sprang up to support the digital supply chain, while some businesses began a steady decline. In some instances the cause-and-effect relationship is quite obvious. One might even choose to divide the music business into “artists”, “audience”, and “people who take their money” and examine what ten years of the iTunes store has done for each of these.

Instead, we get a restatement of the famously positive things about iTunes, along with one other criticism: “the rise of iTunes also meant a fall in control for content owners.  Jobs demanded 99-cents a track, for every track, for years, and refused to entertain bundling tomfoolery like album-only downloads.”

The music business has its fair share of bad deals, but nobody is forced to sign them at gunpoint. To suggest that anybody is compelled to hand over control of their artistic output to a massive corporation (label or retailer), or that they are driven by anything but greed to accept a huge advance in return for their music is to fundamentally misconceive the way the world works.**

After this brief detour into moral outrage on behalf of the poor, defenceless label execs, we’re back to the piracy thing:

“…only a certain percentage of people were actually purchasing paid downloads.  Indeed, the IFPI routinely estimated that 19 out of 20 MP3s were pirated, ie, not purchased from the iTunes Store.  Yet, all of those downloads — free, paid, whatever — were feeding an iPod frenzy, with only limited restrictions on either side of the iTunes+iPod equation.  The source of the content didn’t matter; the consumer experience was everything.”

So there you have it. The iTunes store (which never sold MP3s***) is a bad thing because a different division of the same company sold hardware to people who may have also stolen music****. I sometimes wonder how we sleep at night. But wait. There’s more:

“Because if the iPod could comfortably hold 20,000 songs, the next question was where fans were getting these 20,000 songs.  CD-ripping, sure, but also ol’ favorites like Limewire and BitTorrent.  On the most basic level, no one was paying $20,000 for a digital collection.”

This is just innuendo, and it’s misplaced. I must have been off sick from work the day they called us all into Town Hall and said “So you guys, don’t worry about trying to get people to buy more music. It turns out we’d rather they stole it.” because I  don’t remember that happening. Still, I won’t ask you to take my word for it. Instead, let’s consider for a moment just how foolish this whole “iTunes only exists to sell iPods” argument really is.

The iTunes store looks like it will sell about $5bn worth of music alone this year. That’s a Fortune 500 company, all by itself, and around 4% of Apple’s turnover. Even a 5% profit margin yields a quarter of a billion dollars. I count 129 Fortune 500 companies that didn’t make that much profit last year. When you consider that iTunes had massive growth to finance out of its slim margins, articles about its break-even origins seem rather daft.

But I digress. Digital Music News still has one absurd paragraph left:

“Fast-forward to the present, and Apple is still getting away with mass murder.  Because iCloud and iTunes Match not only ports entire, multi-thousand collections in the sky, it’s also giving every pirated collection a pardon.  And $24.95 a year is all it takes to absolve your sins.”

This is a bit vague but it sounds serious. If you didn’t know better, you could be forgiven for thinking iCloud and iTunes Match made it easy to share your music, and that using iTunes Match would protect your from prosecution for music piracy.

Neither of these things are true. Access restrictions make it difficult to share music with others using iCloud, and iTunes Match will not protect you from prosecution for piracy*****. I don’t know where this rumour came from, but it’s widespread and very much mistaken: it’s the act of piracy that is illegal, not the possession of pirated music. It might not feel this way to users, but that’s an issue that could have been addressed in a bit of intelligent analysis.

I struggle to understand what the point of this whole article was. An enterprise as wildly successful as iTunes would surely have left some people worse off, but after reading this, I’m no wiser as to who those people might be.

If there’s a decision we might make differently after reading it, I can’t imagine what that could be either. If it was intended to inform, then it fails by containing almost no information – mostly just a bunch of bloviating. Indeed since it is, in places, misleading, you could end up knowing less after reading it.

I don’t read much news at all******, but I certainly don’t read Digital Music News any more. It joins the Daily Mail and Norman Lebrecht on the list of sources who seem, consistently, to place page-views above accuracy, creating content for the benefit of advertisers or personal vanity rather than for the benefit of the reader.

There’s space for both daily industry news and sensible analysis in the digital music space. If this is what you’re looking for, though, you’d do well to look somewhere else.*******

Footnotes

* This is the only thing in the whole article to get a citation, to another Digital Music News article about how Steve Jobs was an asshole.

** It’s reasonable to ask who wins and loses under such a deal, but to behave as if they didn’t have a choice is to absolve one party to the deal of responsibility for the outcome. The artists made their choice when they signed away their albums to a label, and the labels made their choice when they signed the deal with iTunes and accepted the billions of dollars they were paid in return. If you want to control how your music gets sold, you can sell it yourself. If you want to control how your catalog is priced, you can start your own shop. Occasionally markets need regulating to prevent monopolies from exploiting people, and it’s reasonable to point out when this needs to happen. Everything else is whining.

*** At least 100% of MP3s were not purchased from the iTunes store. If anybody had bothered to cite a source for this “estimate” we might get a clearer idea of what was being talked about. The closest I can find is this, where the estimate is based upon total downloads, without reference to (1) what percentage of these downloads are substitutes for a purchase or (2) how many, if any, of the illegal downloads are made by iTunes users.

**** The iPod could be filled up with stolen music, in much the same way that a suitcase can be filled with stolen money. We don’t condemn people for making suitcases. This would be dangerously close to the “guns don’t kill people, Americans do” argument, except that killing people (or transporting stolen music) was never the intended function of the iPod, and Apple made common-sense attempts to make piracy difficult. Unlike almost all other popular MP3 players, the iPod made it genuinely difficult for you to copy music off it onto a friend’s computer. It’s closely integrated with the best legal download store ever created and even came with a sticker on the screen that said “don’t steal music”. That’s not to say that no pirated music ended up on them, but I’d be interested to read what other reasonable steps Apple could have done to prevent this without completely hobbling the product.

***** It’s in the terms and conditions. “You hereby agree to use iTunes Match only for lawfully acquired content. Any use for illegitimate content infringes the rights of others and may subject you to civil and criminal penalties, including possible monetary damages, for copyright infringement.”

****** This article in the Guardian covers many of the reasons why I tend to avoid news coverage. I found the article when a friend shared it on Twitter – one several people I know who read it, evidently thought it worth sharing, and then went back to reading and sharing a steady stream of pseudo-news every day.

******* Not here though. Adrian Covert? You’re next.

Jolly Roger

The US Supreme Court is being asked to decide whether or not a $222,000 fine for sharing 24 songs in unconstitutional.

Readers may be surprised to learn that, in addition to gay marriage, abortion and semi-automatic weapons, the US constitution also remains frustratingly silent on the subject of Kazaa, so instead, I’d like to look at the more useful question of whether or not this sort of penalty is sensible.

As things stand, the statutory damages for copyright infringement are up to $150,000 per count of willful infringement. A count of wilful infringement is offering a work for download so that’s 150 grand per song.

The RIAA has already stopped suing individuals for file sharing. These lawsuits weren’t completely ineffective: pretty much everybody knows that filesharing is illegal now, but they weren’t terribly effective at preventing online piracy.

For a penalty to be a good deterrent, it has to be severe enough that wouldn’t want it to happen to you, and you have to believe you can get caught. When you’re doing a risk assessment, you might look at it like this:

Risk = Penalty x Chance of getting caught*

If the chance of getting caught is low, the penalty has to be more severe.**

The trouble with this line of thinking is that if the penalty is too harsh, it cannot be meted out more than once.

Let’s say, for example, you’re an intern at NPR and you’ve obtained 11,000 songs by dubious means. You’re on the hook for $1.6 billion in damages. If the RIAA comes knocking, you’re screwed. So screwed, in fact, that you won’t be in a substantially worse position if you do it one more time.

According to one source, about four billion songs are illegally downloaded in the US each year.

At $150,000 per count, the total exposure to damages is six hundred trillion dollars a year.

With only $1.08 trillion in circulation, there’s only enough US currency in existence to cover the fines on about fourteen and a half hours of US music piracy.

Constitutional or not, this is daft.

Something the framers of the US constitution certainly were familiar with, though, was real piracy.

From 1790 until 1897, piracy was punishable by death under US law, and the death penalty remained (at least technically) available under UK law until 1998.

Notorious captains aside, if you were going to catch somebody committing old-fashioned piracy on the high seas, you pretty much had to catch them in the act, which effectively gave the crime a very short statute of limitation. The one time you had to worry about getting executed for pillaging was right around the time you were deciding to do some pillaging.

This solved the $1.6 billion problem, and created an ongoing deterrent that worked (or didn’t) just as well for the 11,000th count as it had for the 10,999th: you knew that if you stopped now, you’d probably get away with it.

Now, this might seem like a rather harsh response to downloading a few songs, but there’s an argument to be made that all we need to do to fix piracy is to reintroduce the death penalty, contingent on actually catching people in the act.***

After all, it wasn’t until the UK abolished the death penalty for piracy 1998 that things started to go downhill…

ifpi_recorded_music_revenue

…and that, my friends, is proof, if ever I saw it.

* There’s an argument to be made that this should have worked: if people were truly rational, they’d understand that you only need a one-in-150,000 chance of getting caught for stealing a song to be a bad deal. Even if it wasn’t effective as a deterrent, the RIAA should have been able to recover its losses: if the losses due to piracy account for $12.5 billion/year, the RIAA only needed to recover damages on one in every 48,000 counts of piracy. The trouble with both of these lines of reasoning is, as it turns out, people who steal music don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets lying about.

** Or you have to increase the perceived chance of getting caught, effectively tapping people on the shoulder and saying “we can see what you’re up to. This is what they do in France, and it really seems to work.

*** If this doesn’t end piracy, it will at least get us faster broadband.

I like to think I came pretty close, once. If we’d released this album a year earlier, we’d have been almost guaranteed a nomination in the Best Polka category: there were five openings and only four entries. This, though, was the last straw for the GRAMMY folks, and so it was that what may very well be the best (or at least the most elaborately orchestrated) polka album ever made was released the year they dropped the category altogether.

Anyway. After a lot of therapy and with the help of my sponsor, I’ve been able to get over the injustice. In the process, I’ve also  learned some valuable strategies for coping with life without a small brass model of an obsolete record player.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the GRAMMYs, so let me explain how it works:

Any record released in the US is eligible for entry. You or your label can enter. There’s a form. Somebody has to fill it in.

You have to specify which category you want to enter (this year there are 81). This is fun, because the definitions of the categories are secret.

Inevitably this means some records are entered in the wrong categories, so a committee of volunteers from the industry goes through the thousands of entries to check they’re all in the right categories. I did this once. It took three days.

Once your record has been accepted (and moved to the right category), you have to get nominated. You can nominate yourself. There’s another form. Only voting members of NARAS can fill it out. To be a voting member of NARAS you have to pay an annual fee and fill out another form, enclosing proof that you’ve actually appeared on an album.

If lots of people nominate your record, you make it to the ballot, except that the names of the nominated records aren’t printed on the ballot because we learned nothing from the Patriot Act.

Consulting a second document containing the actual names of the nominees, the members of the academy (the 20,000 people who appeared on at least one record, paid a fee and filled out a form) fill out another form and select the winners.

If the definitions of the categories are completely secret, the criteria for selecting the winners is at least marginally less opaque. The letter accompanying the ballot cautions you “please judge by quality alone, uninfluenced by personal friendships, company loyalties, regional preferences or sales”. Clearly, the idea is you’re supposed to vote for the best ones.

Obviously, then, what everybody does is vote for themselves and then use their remaining votes for anybody they know, anybody on their label, anybody local and finally anybody they’ve heard of.

If you want to win a GRAMMY, I’d suggest you bear all of these things in mind, and for pity’s sake don’t forget to vote for yourselves. Orchestras? You know who you are.

When the votes are counted, you get to go to the Staples Center in LA to see the prizes get given out at an A-list televised event. Unless, that is, you want to see the classical awards, which happen somewhere else earlier in the day. All voting members can get tickets. You have to pay for them, and fill out a form, obviously.

Is it all worth it? Well, there’s some evidence that winning the GRAMMY for Album of the Year will improve your sales, but there’s not a lot of evidence that winning any of the smaller categories will sell a single extra record.

I was always more taken with the prestige of it, although as time goes by I’m less excited by this. You see, any prestigious club derives its prestige from its exclusivity, and while I have my doubts about any club that would have me as a member, some of the past winners make you wonder how many voting members live next door to the authors of “Who let the dogs out?”.

Similarly, if a miniature gold victrola is an essential accessory for the successful musician, how come so many big-time musicians have never won?

In the end, the GRAMMYs are a lot of forms and hoopla, which is nice if you like forms and hoopla, but it isn’t the end of the world if you don’t win. Led Zeppelin, Queen, Abba, Justin Bieber and Diana Ross all did ok without a GRAMMY, and so can you.

Grammy

* Which they write out in all caps, a trademark issue everybody else quite sensibly ignores

Some people are worried about the shape of the music industry. Every other day, one of my clients will send me some scary bit of analysis from a newspaper or music industry blog, projecting the end for CDs, labels, streaming, downloads, classical music or for the entire human race.

I’m not worried about this.

You see, my second child was born in November. It’s certainly true that my growing family provides valuable perspective on what’s really important, and I barely have time to sleep, let alone read daft speculative analysis, but there’s another reason these projections don’t scare me.

When baby no. 2 was born, he weighed nine pounds and was 50cm tall.

When he was six weeks old, he weighed twelve pounds and was 62cm tall.

He’s a fairly big boy. I wondered how big he’d get.

Not to scale

Now, there are lots of babies, and a lot of them get weighed and measured so there are lots statistics available on how fast they grow. I could use these to find out how big he’s likely to get, but you know what? Those statistics were gathered by looking at other children, and not mine. My child is unique, and if I want to know what he’ll do, I should look at what he’s done.

I think you’ll agree that it makes total sense to ignore all these statistics because they cover situations that are merely very similar and not exactly the same as the one in which I’m interested. This approach has the added advantage that I don’t need to check or even understand anybody else’s data. This is good because I’m lazy and not very good at statistics or research.

Instead, I opted for a bit of basic arithmetic.

If he puts on three pounds (and twelve centimetres in height) every two months, he’ll be 80 feet tall and weigh just under 613lbs by the time he’s my age.

That seemed pretty big, so I figured I should probably check my working. After all, perhaps his growth is slowing down.

If his growth was indeed linear, he should have weighed 10.5lbs at one month old. If it were more, his growth rate would be slowing. Alarmingly, though, the real figure was less than that. Based on these three observations, I concluded that his growth is exponential.

So if instead his body weight increases by one third every two months and his height increases by 24%, he’ll get even larger. Much, much larger.

By his first birthday, he’ll be about as tall as I am, and will weigh 50lbs. At fifteen months old he’ll be the tallest person who ever lived. He’ll weigh the same as me by the time he’s 19 months old, and by then he’ll be more than twice as tall.

He’ll be heaviest person on record by the time he’s three.

When he starts school, he’s likely to be the only boy in the reception class who weighs more than twelve metric tons, but he won’t be the fat kid. At 839ft tall, he’ll be positively lanky.

Growing boys eat a lot, but I do genuinely worry what we’re going to feed this one. At fourteen and a half, he’ll weigh more than the world’s current population. Then again, at 41,000 miles tall, his arms should be just about long enough to give the planet a bear hug. If he wants to eat something, anything, anywhere, he can get it for himself.

At sixteen, he’ll have to be careful he doesn’t bump his head on the moon.

By the time he’s my age, he will have consumed the entire mass of the Earth, and unless his own gravity has rendered him completely spherical, he’ll be roaming the solar system, looking for planets to snack on.

So what I’m saying is don’t worry too much about the alarming analysis that all so frequently fills the news. It might be based on simplistic mathematical modelling that ignores the vast majority of serious research on the subject.

Even if it isn’t, and the music industry really is doomed, why worry? You’ll have been crushed by a giant toddler long before it becomes a problem.

Yesterday, you posted a story about James Oestreich’s departure from the New York Times.

Lebrecht vs Oestreich 1

This article reflects poorly on you in a number of ways:

1) You are dismissive of his contribution to the New York Times without offering a single example of something he’s supposed to have done wrong. This is weak: it’s pretty easy to identify specific flaws in bad writing. I’m about to demonstrate this, but I suspect you’re familiar with the method. I imagine you probably read this review in the New York Times, in which your book Why Mahler is systematically torn to shreds by a critic called James Oestreich*. Journalism is subject to the principle of falsifiability: you only need to show that somebody got something wrong once to establish that it can’t be relied upon.

2) You offer the barely-meaningful commentary that “his departure will unblock a function that has ossified and gone rancid in recent years”. This may be a slightly pedantic point, but whatever the “function” is, it has either ossified (ceased to develop in any direction) or gone rancid (actively decayed). Either way, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that your low opinion of his work is not universal.

3) A cynic might suggest that this vagueness is deliberate ploy: you’ve tried making specific accusations before, and seen one of your books pulped as a result. This, too, was covered by the New York Times - I’m speculating here, but I imagine with the approval of the classical music editor, James Oestreich. The lesson most people would learn from the whole libel/pulped book experience is to avoid attacking somebody’s professional reputation unless you know what you’re talking about. To instead switch from specifics to innuendo is a particularly repulsive and cowardly form of bullying.

4) Ossified, rancid, or both, what you’ve done here is a casual slur, something you’d know all about, since you complained about such sloppy, misinformed writing here, in an article written last July in which you take issue with a story in the New York Times written by a critic called James Oestreich.

5) Aside from a non-specific disdain for his body of work, your story is short on verifiable statements. I count just three: he’s leaving immediately, he’s retiring, his departure is a consequence of Jon Landman’s resignation. You offer no source for these assertions, which leaves the reader to trust that you are both (a) an honest and neutral observer and (b) a knowledgable insider (as your tagline “the inside track on classical music and related cultures” might imply).

6) You illustrated the story with a picture of somebody who is not (and does not particularly resemble) James Oestreich. This rather undermines the notion that you have specific, accurate inside knowledge of this matter. You might have simply grabbed the image from this blog post without bothering to check a second source. I suppose “this is what Jim Oestreich looks like” might be considered a fourth verifiable statement, and in this case, it’s false.

7) You later added what you assert to be his farewell email to staff (as an “Update” and not as a correction), but you did not acknowledge that, while it is silent on one of them, this email contradicts two of the three assertions above: he says he is not leaving immediately and has no plans to retire. That means 75% of this story has already been shown to be untrue, with the veracity of the remaining 25% (the reason for his departure) as yet unaccounted for.

Lebrecht vs Oestreich 3

8) You eventually found a picture of the right person, but again made the correction quietly. It is not good practice to make corrections without acknowledgement, and here’s why: you might fool some people into thinking you never make mistakes, but you leave anybody who is paying attention with the impression that, if what they’re reading subsequently turned out to be untrue, you’d make no effort to tell them. I can’t think why you’d do this unless you were totally indifferent to the truth and thought your readers dumb enough not to notice.

So, to recap: in this instance at least, you don’t have much to say. That which you do say is largely untrue, and when you find out  it’s not true, you don’t bother to tell anybody – either because you don’t care or because you actively wish to hide it.**

This is why I very rarely look at your blog: it’s like the factual equivalent of antimatter. I can feel myself getting dumber and less well-informed as I absorb one misleading headline after another. It’s simply too much work to go back and check each of your assertions, and they’re wrong far too often for me to assume they’re not. There are more than 4,000 posts on your blog. Who knows how many mistakes are in there? You’ve given us no reason to suppose that you’d tell us (or even change it) if you found one.

When I accidentally start reading something you’ve written, I now make an effort to check every verifiable statement in it so I don’t walk away with a head full of half-truths and distortions.

In the end I came to the conclusion that I’d have a more accurate picture of what’s going on in the music industry if I just ignored your work all together.

Now that I’ve finished this post, that’s what I’m going to do.

* If I’m going to call you out for attacking somebody who gave you an unfavourable review, I should probably say that while several of my projects has received favourable coverage in the New York Times, I’m not aware of anything James Oestreich has written about me, and as far as I know the only things you’ve written about my work are here and here. Both are laughably bad bits of reporting, but I have never lost any sleep over them.

** The difference between these two is eloquently and concisely described in Harry Frankfurt’s excellent On Bullshit. I suspect, Norman, that you’re more of a bullshitter than a liar, but that’s just speculation on my part.

I don’t read a lot of reviews. With few exceptions, I tend not to find them very helpful.

What I do read, though, are reviews of my own stuff. I’m not alone here. Today an extremely successful composer told me that there’s a critic he’d like to boil in oil because of a review written many years ago. He’s not the first to express such a sentiment.

Criticism is a touchy subject for artists. With this in mind, I suggest a few coping strategies:

1) Don’t obsess. If you want to know what it says, you have to read it. You have to draw a line, though, somewhere between skimming the thing and obsessing over it more than the writer did. The correct place for that line is after you have read it once. Read it slowly, read it carefully, but only read it once. Then put it down and get on with your life, just like everybody else did after reading it.*

2) Celebrate the stupid negatives. If you played the wrong notes, they could say that. If you played everything mezzo forte**, they could say that. Many reviewers don’t feel like they’ve written a balanced review unless they complain about something, though, and if that something is completely stupid, that means you won. They liked the music. Learn to take “yes” for an answer, and get on with your life.

3) Accept that the critic’s opinion is a possible interpretation. I often hear people say that critics are in no position to judge the ability of a performer to do something the critic cannot themselves do. This is a bad argument. I cannot, myself, lift a grand piano above my head, but if you try to do it in front of me, I’ll know if you succeeded. The critic may remember things differently to you: if you’re sure you juggled five Steinways and the critic says they never left the ground, you have to admit your performance may be too subtle for some audiences. Either throw those pianos higher, or accept that what you do isn’t for everybody, and get on with your life.

4) Don’t take this too seriously. From a commercial standpoint, I generally measure the success of a PR campaign in terms of the number of reviews it gets, not how positive they are. After all, things don’t get reviews because they’re good, they get reviews because they’re important, and because the publication will look silly if they don’t cover them. Who needs who here? Remember that you won the moment they decided to write about you, and get on with your life.

Then again, maybe getting on with our lives is the last thing we should do. Maybe the right response is to do something more like this…

* Except me. I am bad at following this advice. Very bad. Very bad indeed.

** Like this.

I’ve heard it said that Facebook needs a “dislike” button.

I don’t know much about the corporate culture at Facebook, but at Apple we wouldn’t have gone for this, not out of some bias toward positivity, but because it’s complicated. It adds another button to the UI. Apple doesn’t add buttons to solve problems. It removes them.

What’s really needed is a single button that does both jobs.

As it’s election season in the US and my news feed is flooded with one-sided political rants, I think it’s time to ask Facebook to adopt my suggestion for a single more versatile button:

You think Romney’s grasp of geography is deeply concerning? This confirms your existing opinions. You think Obama only knows how to find Syria because he went there on his apology tour? BAM. Opinions confirmed. You think these two positions are in any way equivalent? Click the button: it was made for you too. You think politics is dumb? Clicketty click. There’s a button for you.

We could probably simplify it a bit. Change the thumbs up/down to some rolling eyes and shorten the text to “heh”, and we’ve got a significant functional improvement, giving people the chance to interact, no matter what they think, without actually communicating any of the dumb opinions we don’t want to hear anyway.

Everyone’s a winner.

I have a sort of love/hate relationship with Digital Music News. I’m really pleased somebody is trying to do it, but they keep posting stuff that makes me angry.

They do these little bullet-point roundups of what’s going on, often linking to original sources. That’s really useful.

They also do analysis, and it’s often really stupid.

Two themes keep cropping up:

1) Somebody in a suit says something stupid, and they treat it like it’s important

2) Some third-hand speck of data surfaces, and they construct around it an absurdly speculative narrative

The two surface together quite prominently in this story from last year, in which Lyor Cohen is quoted saying that vinyl will outlast CDs at about the same time as the news came out that vinyl sales had gone up and CD sales had gone down.

Let me explain why this is daft.

It makes me want to get a t-shirt that says “There’s no way of knowing. Why the hell are we even talking about this?”

That was a year ago. So what am I whining about now?

Well. Yesterday, they published a story entitled “I took one look at this graph and suddenly lost hope for streaming music” and it contains some even odder fun with statistics.

The graph in question looks like this:

 

(Original source here)

So Pandora and Spotify have got to the point where they’ve convinced customers to give them about a quarter of a billion dollars a year, but neither are profitable, and their losses have got bigger.

Now, if you had no idea how companies work, you might think this was because Pandora and Spotify were not able to work.

The relationship it’s easiest to see in this graph is that, particularly for Spotify, bigger sales means bigger losses. It’s like they can never win.

Except that’s not the important relationship, which is why people running companies don’t often look at graphs like this.

Companies are rarely profitable from the outset. A few are, and they fund their own growth while turning a profit for their shareholders. This is how my company works, because I didn’t have any expensive set-up costs, and my only marketing expense was some admittedly horrifyingly expensive business cards.

Generally, you need to spend some money to get the company to the point where it turns a profit. This is called “investment”. Digital Music News knows about investment: they keep publishing updates on how it’s up or down. They can count it, but they don’t seem to know what it’s for.

If you wanted to look at a graph that told you how you were doing in a company’s early phases of growth, you’d want to isolate the setup costs from the running costs to see if what you were doing was sustainable.

From the outside, that’s difficult, but if all you have is revenue and profit to go on, you can do something far more useful than looking at the graph above. You can look at the ratio between revenue and profit/loss. This is the profit margin and it will tell you if the company is heading towards profitability. You want it to be above zero.

Put like this, the situation seems to be getting better, rather than worse.

Of course, either of these companies might know exactly where they could shave off $20m-$50m in costs and make themselves profitable tomorrow, and they might be sensibly investing in further growth before they sit back and let the cash roll in. Alternatively, they might be as close to profitable as they’ll ever be.

We just don’t know, and there’s no point in talking about it.

Daft analysis like this isn’t just pointless, though. It’s misleading because it sells the lie that the answer will come if you stare at the runes for long enough.

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