I don’t really know much about this music, but that’s ok, because he obviously does*. It sounds magnificent.

* indeed, he’s one of our generation’s most erudite and articulate musical commentators, something that people would talk about more if he didn’t also play the piano.

Generalizations can be helpful, but they can also lead us astray if we don’t understand what we’re doing with them. Let’s look at a few plausible statements that you might hear in a marketing meeting, backed up with some authoritative-sounding research from somewhere like the NEA. They might individually be true, but if you’re going to base decisions on them, it helps to know how little information they really contain.

Most classical music fans are well educated.

Most classical music fans are old.

Most people don’t like contemporary music.

Most people come to at least two concerts a year.

Each of these statements tells us something about the makeup of the audience, but combining these insights to create a picture of a typical customer can be disastrous, misusing demographic data to create a stereotype that doesn’t exist.

It might be that only 1% of the audience is both old and well educated. It might be that most of the people who come to more than three concerts a year are really into contemporary music. Even if most of the “mosts” do travel together, you only need a tiny percentage of the total audience to fill the hall or buy a record.

The best-selling record of all time is Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Worldwide, more than 110 million copies have been sold. There are 6.9 billion people in the world. That means that for everybody that bought it, 61 people didn’t. Put another way, 98.4% of people have not purchased the most popular album of all time. In the US, where most people have access to a stereo, nine out of ten people didn’t buy it.

Forget about most people. You don’t need them. Nobody sells music to most people. The New York Philharmonic can fill the hall playing Varèse and Ligeti.

The audience comes to an average of 4.7 concerts a year.

The average record buyer purchases 1.7 records a month.

Most people have two arms. A few people have one. I’m not sure it’s even possible to have three. If Thomas Pink got their customer research from arts organizations, then none of my shirts would fit: I have an above average number arms.

Some people buy one ticket for themselves. Some people take a date. Others take their whole family. Group them together, and you’ll completely misunderstand the purchasing process.

When your variables only exist in whole numbers, nobody conforms to the mean. You’d get more accurate results by asking just one of your customers. Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.

Classical music purchasers are more likely to care about audio quality than other music consumers.

12% of the US population is black. 44% percent of the US prison population is black. There is a higher incidence of incarceration among black people than among white people.

It’s not ok for me to assume that black people are criminals, but even if it were, it wouldn’t be sensible: it’s alarming that one in 36 black people is in jail, but this doesn’t tell us anything about the other 35.

The same is true of the audiophiles. They might be more prevalent among classical music fans, but it doesn’t mean they’re the majority, and it doesn’t tell you anything about the others. Build a store for the audiophiles and you might find yourself catering to a very small audience.

There’s not much else to say, except that I made it using xtranormal.com, which was amazingly frustrating to use. Oh, and happy social media day. Whatever that is.

1) Never say what you expect to achieve in advance, and you can spin anything as a success: “We’re going to do direct mail. We think it’ll be great.” If somebody asks for your “clear criterion for failure” dismiss them as negative. Say that you’re focussed on achieving a positive outcome. Don’t say what that is.

2) Declare the results of your projects in positive terms, regardless of the actual outcome: “Our junk mail was a great success. We wrote to 10,000 people and generated two new subscriptions.”

3) Use lots of buzzwords and horrible grammar so the reader can’t understand what you’re actually saying. Force them to take their cue from your tone, rather than the facts. Misusing mathematical terms will help lend an air of empty substance to your presentation. Suggest that the best is yet to come, so that it’s too early for criticism but high time for praise: “Our direct mail initiative has been a great success, generating 10,000 user impressions with a .02% conversion ratio to date and still rising.” Don’t bother to mention that the growth in your response rate is already miniscule and trending toward zero.

4) Compare your work to arbitrary baselines. Select these baselines after you’ve had a chance to see the results: “In direct mail, it’s common to have a 0.01% response rate, so we’ve outperformed the baseline by 200%.” Never mention what it cost, or somebody will work out that it lost money.

5) If anybody works out that two $200 subscriptions wasn’t much of a return on $4,400 in postage, claim that the real value of your campaign was in impressions: 10,000 of your best customers now have a brochure, and many of them will be coming back later to make their purchases. Claim credit for a portion of all subsequent sales. Talk about the “bigger picture” so everybody who disagrees with you will seem short-sighted or narrow-minded.

6) Set incredibly low expectations. Find evidence of decline in one aspect of the industry and use it as a baseline across the board, claiming everything above that line as a victory resulting directly from your work. If you’re forced to set realistic targets, don’t worry: you can always adjust them later to account for unexpected events beyond your control.

7) Don’t waste your time with teamwork. Instead, ask questions in meetings like “How can we connect this with what the education department is doing?” If anybody comes up with an idea, you’ll be able to take the credit whilst looking like a team player. If they expect you do to some of the work, make sure the whole thing comes out of their budget.

8) Make a show of staying informed about everything. It’s much easier to steal ideas and associate yourself with the organisation’s successes if you know what they are, and if it seemed, in some vague way, like you were involved.

9) Announce everything positive to the interdepartmental email list before anybody has enough information to know if it really worked. You don’t actually need to claim that you did anything. After a while, people will come to associate you with stuff that goes well. Praise others for their part in it, and they won’t even be able to complain that you’re taking the credit. Do this for long enough, and eventually you’ll become the arbiter of success: a project hasn’t gone well until you announce that it has.

10) Present everything as an experiment, and there’s no such thing as failure. Claim the information gleaned from your expensive mistake is “invaluable”. Never quantify it. You don’t want somebody comparing what you are getting paid to the cost of learning something you should have already known.

Both Anne Midgette at the Washington Post and David Ng at the LA Times linked to my review of Renée Fleming’s new rock album.

David quoted the New York Times, the BBC, and me. Does that seem strange to anyone?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining. It’s quite an honor to have two such impressively credentialed commentators let me do the talking. It just seems a bit odd that they didn’t do it themselves. It makes me wonder how Fox News might approach arts commentary:

“Some guy in Northern California thinks Renée’s album sucks. We don’t particularly care whether or not it actually does and we don’t want to alienate any potential viewers by taking a position on the subject so we’ll ask you a barely related leading question that allows us to sneak in a completely unverified statement as if it were fact: Should Obama have endorsed the record by inviting her to perform at the Whitehouse? Call us now and tell us your views.”

Maybe this is how music criticism works now. Maybe the nation’s critics have followed my mother’s advice, and aren’t saying anything unless they have something nice to say. Maybe I should do the same. Maybe that’s unfair: Maybe David’s trying to give a balanced report of a record that has polarised listeners¹. Maybe somebody at Decca’s PR department has naked pictures of everybody, and that’s why it was so hard to find a negative review of the record from a major news outlet². Maybe somebody at Decca’s PR department has naked pictures of me too. I didn’t hold back, so I guess we’ll find out now³.

¹ …into the two distinct groups of “don’t like it” and “don’t know any better,” because the appreciation of music is completely subjective unless you disagree with me, in which case you’re wrong.

² Unless you count The Awl as a major  news outlet. They went to town on it.

³ NOBODY wants to see that.

There are lots of ways to mess up a live recording. You can play the wrong notes, you can forget to press record, you can use the wrong kind of tape or drop the hard drives down a lift shaft. They’re all risky though. If you really want to make absolutely positively sure that nobody buys your record, just follow these simple steps:

1) Identify a major event that will be well attended, well reviewed and widely broadcast. Plan to release the record six months later, when nobody can remember what all the fuss was about. Blame this delay on an obsession with the quality of a record nobody will hear.

2) Skip over all the scary new music in the program and choose something that has been recorded a thousand times before.

3) Get scared about ticket sales. Don’t mention the recording in any of the pre-event publicity.

4) Get scared about a bad performance. Don’t mention the recording on post-purchase materials like tickets and programs.

5) Ask the audience to turn off their mobile phones because the concert is being recorded. Don’t tell them when or where it will be available.

6) Don’t plan far enough ahead to build promotion of the recording into your broadcast deal, mention it in your printed materials, or even get the producer the right edition of the score.

7) Treat the recording as a “new media” side-project and not as a part of the ensemble’s core activity. Assume all the work is done once the union has signed off on the idea, and that promoting a record is either easy or not your problem.

8) Don’t use any of the information you have about who attended the concert to market the recording to your audience.

9) Don’t think about the timeline and logistics for artist approvals until you’re up against a deadline and the conductor is on a plane to Russia.

10) Jealously guard all rough cuts of the album and make absolutely sure that nobody reviewing the concert has a copy of it before their deadline.

…and this is how much they’re going to pay me.

In retrospect, he worried that the “walking on water” idea was a bit too subtle.

It didn’t seem absurdly dangerous until afterwards, when they were explaining it to the man from the insurance company.

It was a brief encounter, but it was to change both of their lives forever.

He’d achieved so much, but all he really wanted was to play outside with the other kids.

Her experience of first dates was limited, but even she was starting to think this one wasn’t going well.

He wasn’t really a misogynist. He liked to think of the rankings as a celebration of femininity.

Tall, scruffy, and implausibly lit: another home run for the design department.

He’d sat in something wet, and he liked it.

He had absolutely no doubt that it had all been worthwhile.

]]> http://properdiscord.com/2010/06/15/what-were-they-thinking-part-2/feed/ 1 properdiscord Yo-Yo Ma plays Morricone Solti Angele Dubeau Lefevres Maxim Rysanov Alina Ibragimova plays Bach Alexandre Tharaud Piotr Anderszewski at Carnegie Hall Louis Lortie Zuill Bailey's Bach Suites http://properdiscord.com/2010/06/10/decoding-the-pitch/ http://properdiscord.com/2010/06/10/decoding-the-pitch/#comments Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:30:38 +0000 properdiscord http://properdiscord.com/?p=1352 ]]> What are they really saying on that conference call?

I don’t have any music for you = I haven’t heard it

This hasn’t been mastered yet = they’re still fiddling with it

We’re really excited about this release = Our expectations are bigger than our budget

You have to see them live = the record isn’t impressive at all

This is a huge priority = we’ve spent a fortune on this and we plan to ignore the fact that you think it’s terrible

We’re expecting the story to build post-release = We have no plan

We’re coming to you very early on this = We hope you’ll come up with a plan

This act is building a lot of buzz = We can’t name a single major media outlet that has mentioned them

We’ve got a great opportunity for partnership = We don’t have the budget to do this properly

This is a supergroup = We hadn’t heard of any of these people until last week

We know this is going to be huge = We desperately need to recoup all the money we spent on this

Building on the success of their last album = A poor imitation of their last album

Prodigy = promising youngster

Legendary artist = hasbeen

We have an NPR hit confirmed for release week = The NPR feature will run two months before (or after) release date

We have a PBS special airing in the fall = You mom will want this. You’ll hate it.

They’re big in Germany = Run while there’s still time

Our “target street date” is… = It will be leaked by…

We don’t know who leaked it = We know exactly who leaked it

I don’t want to talk about initial orders = This is going to be a disaster

We have a deluxe edition = We changed the cover and doubled the price

It has been remastered = It sounds the same but louder

It has been digitally remastered = It sounds the same but much louder

It has been digitally remastered by the original producer = There was nothing wrong with it the first time

Once the whole band had contracted narcolepsy, it became impossible to get a picture of them all with their eyes open.

It was hard to be intimate when they could no longer stand to be in the same room.

It was in the contract. What part of “at my feet” did they not understand?

Not organic? He’d put a plant on it and everything. They were going to have to be more specific.

It wasn’t until somebody called her bluff that she discovered you really could make an album cover out of pictures you’d found on Facebook.

5…

…4…

…3…2… Ok. Fine. It was Renaud. Truth be told, the shame was so unbearable that he didn’t even want to be seen with himself any more.

She was right. It was much less awkward once she’d moved them closer together.

Renée Fleming’s rock album comes out today. I almost gnawed off my fingers trying not to write about it, but after seeing the New York Times carefully dance around its glaring flaws not once but twice, (see also the LA Times and WSJ)  it’s time for a review.

In general, there are two kinds of crossover records: the good kind, where two or more musicians who have achieved a degree of success in their respective disciplines collaborate to create something new and interesting, and the bad kind, where a musician who has achieved a degree of success in one genre of music assumes that they’re naturally equipped to excel in another.

Classic Meets Cuba, the Silk Road Ensemble, Paul Anka’s rock album, Sting’s luteny, almost everything the Kronos Quartet does, and even this ridiculous polka band fit into the former category. They’re not all great records, but nor are they crippled by artistic hubris, and they all contain a sound you’ve never heard before. They succeed by their own standards, achieving what they set out to do.

Bond is a string quartet that plays derivative, cheesy dance music. The Planets was a bunch of classical musicians who butchered classical-based rock music. Sarah Brightman is a musical theater actress who sings pseudo-classical tunes, behind the beat and out of tune. This is the bad kind of crossover – records that fail to achieve what they set out to do because they underestimate the size of the task at hand – and this is where Renée’s record belongs.

Why?

The odd thing about all this is that Renée Fleming is a more than competent singer in this repertoire. She sounds like a young Shirley Bassey, with plenty of power, all the control she needs, a good sense of when to hold back, when to let go and how to create drama and tension in the music. It might not be to everybody’s taste, but it’s hard to fault the singing: it succeeds by its own standards.

So what’s wrong with it?

Pretty much everything else. These are all either songs by bands or by solo artists known for ensemble works, but the arrangements here all depend on the vocalist to carry a weak ensemble.

Just compare the sound of “Endlessly” as recorded by Muse with Renée’s version.

You might actually prefer Renée’s vocal, but listen to the keyboards. Muse manage a fuzzy, intense sound like you’d get from a bunch of old vacuum tubes being driven really hard. Renée’s keyboards sound thin, fake, and one-dimensional. They add no intensity to the sound, they have no clear musical function. They just fill up a bit of space in the mix.

Listen to the drums: Muse obviously used a real kit, miked it up really well and compressed and gated it until they could spread it all over the mix like Dom Howard is hitting different bits of your brain with his sticks. Renée’s nameless, faceless band used a drum machine. It doesn’t add much.

I don’t particularly like Muse. I think they’re an enormously overrated band, but at least they know what their job is.

The same mistakes are repeated all over the record – Band of Horses’ sparse ballad “No One’s Gonna Love You” is transformed into a half-hearted syrupy mess. Willy Mason’s naïve “Oxygen” becomes overworked with the addition of synthesized strings.

What do you think would happen if you tried to put these strings on one of Renée’s classical albums? How is it ok here? Is there a good reason to accept lower standards because it’s a rock record?

On “Today” Jefferson Airplane ought to be at a technological disadvantage, but all that 43 years of invention has done for Renée’s band is a synth pad that sounds consistently behind the beat. In 1967, you could basically only have one kind of reverb. Digital reverb gives you a lot of options, but they’re much more effective if you don’t use all of them on the same song.

I don’t assume for one moment that Arcade Fire used a real church organ for “Intervention“. It sounds a bit too in tune, but I suppose it might be real. They resort to childrens choir at the end, but at least it’s low in the mix, which is more than you can say for the morass of general midi sounds that took a dump on the end of Renée’s version – and it keeps going…

The Mars Volta open “With Twilight As My Guide” with some funny noises, but they’re nothing compared with the unconvincing cat-on-a-keyboard heap of barely-tonal harmonic obfuscation that opens the cover.

You could argue that Tears for Fears are at an even greater technological disadvantage than Jefferson Airplane. In 1982, there were lots of toys in the studio, but hardly anybody knew how to work them properly – apparently the start of a tradition that is alive and well today. My favorite bit of this arrangement is the random interjections by Phil Collins’ horn section.

I’m pretty sure you can buy a keyboard that plays Renée’s version of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” when you press the “Demo” button.

Duffy’s “Stepping Stone” is an extreme example of faux-vintage production. Ditch that (or do it badly), and you’ve got a boring song.

I don’t think Death Cab For Cutie is a great name for a band, but they have at least learned what all the knobs and buttons in the studio do. There’s never too much going on. Acoustic and electronic instruments blend seamlessly to create one delicious texture after another. You can’t reproduce these sounds in an afternoon using a keyboard and a computer, it this sounds exactly like that’s what somebody has tried to do.

All this half-assed karaokeism brings us to Hallelujah. It’s not like the world needed another version of this song. Leonard Cohen wrote and recorded it as a histrionic anthem. Jeff Buckley demonstrated its effectiveness as a simple song of melody and harmony. American Idol wannabes use it to show what sensitive performers they. What does Renée’s “band” do?

A few bars of synth chorus that never comes back, a few bars of directionless bleepy noodling, and then cue the vocals with a smooth jazz rhythm section and the Twin Peaks electric piano. Those synth strings are back just in time to suspend the minor fall right past the major lift. If they had used real strings and changed nothing else, thing could have been quite beautiful. Instead, it’s a disappointing end to poorly executed recording project.

In classical music, it’s the composer’s job to write the notes, the musician’s job to make a good sound, the engineer’s job to capture it and the producer’s job to let you know when everything is in the can.

In pop music, they all work together to create a sound. The notes themselves are simple, so the sound needs to be great. That hasn’t happened here, or, at least, it hasn’t been done well enough to make it work.

Covers like this are going to be compared to the originals, and the originals were all put together by people who knew how to make a band sound good.

It seems like everybody involved underestimated what it took to make a modern rock record, and it’s a shame, because the talent was there. It didn’t need to suck.