Was Jay-Z wise to plunk down $56 million for the Aspiro music streaming company? The Decemberists (pictured) return with their seventh studio album, "What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World"; Frank Gehry's home was the inspiration for music commissioned by the L.A. Chamber Orchestra; Lynn Shelton talks about directing the pilot for "Fresh Off The Boat."
Will Jay-Z's $56-million gamble on Aspiro music streaming services pay off?
Jay-Z may be a rapper, a husband and a dad, but more than anything else, he’s a business.
In addition to his record label, clothing business interests and management company, Jay-Z just paid $56-million dollars to buy a Scandinavian media company called Aspiro, which owns two music-streaming services, WiMP and TIDAL.
The company has about 500,000 subscribers, which means Jay-Z is starting out way behind Spotify and Pandora, who count their subscribers in the tens of millions. In addition, Apple — with its vast iTunes library — is expected to launch its streaming service this year.
Is Jay-Z is making a smart move? Can his caché in the music industry give him a leg up on the competition? Glenn Peoples, Senior Editorial Analyst at Billboard magazine, joins the Frame to explain why he thinks Jay-Z knows what he's doing.
Interview Highlights:
Why does this move make sense for Jay-Z?
Subscription service is a really expensive game to get into and it can take 18-to-24 months just to launch a service. So he can come in and, for $56 million, get a service with about half-a-million subscribers. They have licensing deals in many European countries, in Canada and the U.S., and he can hit the ground running, which he couldn't do if he were building from scratch.
Hitting the ground running is very important, because he has relationships, not just with his wife, but with a lot of other artists who are part of his Roc Nation company — Kanye West, Rihanna. Can you explain how he might be able to leverage that relationship into this new enterprise?
Jay-Z must have one of the best Rolodexes in the music business. He could leverage artists on his record label, artists that he manages, maybe even bring in athletes to help promote these services. I think there are a lot of opportunities here to use Roc Nation to bring awareness, to promote, to bring content to the service. And sometimes exclusive content is really important to a streaming service, and he can do that possibly better than any single person in the business.
Is there a way that Jay-Z might be able to differentiate his streaming services from others in the marketplace right now?
When we talk about Jay-Z being behind and having to play catch up with Spotify and Deezer and even Rhapsody, I don't know if he necessarily has to play catch-up. This is a very young market. Aspiro has a service called Tidal that just launched in the U.S., U.K. and Canada. It's a high-definition audio streaming service and it does have some high-def video as well. High-def streaming is a very new type of service and that could be a niche. That's just one way he can carve out a really good part of the business.
It's been reported that even Spotify, which has a lot of subscribers, is not profitable at this point. What's keeping these services from turning a profit?
The margins are tough and these services pay out about 70 percent of revenue to rights holders, so they have to subsist on the other 30 percent. As you're growing, it takes a lot of money in the first many years of the company to grow to the kind of scale where you can, hopefully, turn a profit. I don't think it's bad at this point that these companies are losing money. It's just like startups anywhere else, just in the case of these music services, the royalties they pay are quite high.
There are a lot of audiophiles who say Beats By Dre aren't really the best headphones, but because Dr. Dre is associated with them, they have a caché. Does Jay-Z's brand name mean a lot to this new enterprise? And is there a way to quantify what that name recognition means?
I think there is a way to quantify it. It would probably take an economist and a few months and a really good academic paper. I don't know if I could do that. I think you could just take a look at Jay-Z and his career, the types of fans he has in this country and all around the world. He's not playing to small audiences in major cities, he's playing all around the country, in major venues and stadiums to all kinds of different fans. So he has an appeal that's across the board. He's a crossover artist if there ever was one.
Colin Meloy gets personal with The Decemberists' new album
Members of the indie-rock band The Decemberists are known for writing epic tunes about everything from sea battles to historical events. Yet on the band’s newest album — “What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World” — the music has evolved noticeably. The band’s songs now deal with more personal issues.
The Decemberists' Colin Meloy spoke with The Frame's host, John Horn, about how the audience has affect the band's songwriting process, how he started to sing more about his sons, and why he's tired of playing "The Mariner's Revenge Song" live.
Interview Highlights:
Your last album, "The King Is Dead," came out very strongly in 2011, and then you took a pretty long break before "What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World." What happened in those intervening years? Did the events of that time period affect the creative process for this new album?
Well, in those intervening years, songwriting became a hobby again. So in some ways it was hearkening back to when I had a day job and I was writing songs between shifts, and in that sense it was fairly freeing.
At a certain point, even as you're writing songs for your new album, do you find yourself thinking about what the audience expects you to do, and whether you're going to meet those expectations?
Well, yeah, we're not working in a vacuum any more. We have fans and we have people come out to our shows, so you can't help but be mindful of that. I wish I could lie and say that I don't ever take those things into consideration, and maybe I would be a truer artist if I didn't, but it's also important to keep in mind the road you've already traveled.
There's a desire, especially 15 years and seven records into a music career, to avoid repeating yourself. You want to be constantly refreshing and creating something new, but without losing or somehow pushing away an audience that's come to expect a certain thing from you. I'm clearly over-thinking this, but I think it's an important part of being an artist.
Is it a compliment to the way you write songs if people might be looking at the lyrics with a thesaurus or dictionary beside them?
That's one thing that's so funny and I hear it a lot: Oh, it's another Decemberists record, time to bust out your dictionary. And while I know that rock music is supposed to be a populist medium that's easily digested, it has its roots in verse-storytelling and poetry.
Nobody would ever say, "Oh, there's a new Philip Larkin collection of poems, better get out your dictionary." It's a weird double standard for something that's basically the same thing: writing stories in verse.
You're also the father of two boys, Henry and Milo. How has being a father changed the way you see songwriting and the message you want to send out as someone who's both a parent and a creative person?
I think it affected me more than I initially thought. I'd never wanted to be the sort of person who started singing about my family all the time once I had kids. [laughs]
Sometimes it's more interesting than your love life!
Maybe it is. I think that's one of the other reasons I'd initially been writing so many songs about people outside of myself and outside of my own time. I didn't find my own life particularly interesting, and I think once I had kids they started to find their way in. My mind is constantly thinking about them, my hopes for them, and my protectiveness of them. It just became this really important part of the fabric of my life.
But initially I think I was fighting against that: "The Rake's Song," on "Hazards of Love" is basically about infanticide, and my first son was about a year old when I wrote that. I remember playing it for Carson, my wife, and her jaw dropping.
Was that basically your way of saying, "I'm not going to become this sentimental dad?"
[laughs] Yeah, that was my way. So hopefully that tempers the sappy sentimentality that was to follow.
You're about to go out on tour. What song are you tired of playing?
There's not one that survives. That's just the honest answer. I think once you've been on tour enough it's very rare that each song retains its freshness. I think we've probably played "The Mariner's Revenge Song" more times than I care to say. And maybe that might be the obvious. I do love playing it 'cause it's not for me anymore. It's for the audience and as long as the audience is having fun with it, I can get over my selfishness of playing it a lot. You give your stuff over to the audience. It no longer belongs to you at a certain point and there is a kind of obligation there.
That's part of the opening song on your new album — "The Singer Addresses His Audience" — that the audience at a certain point is as much in control of that relationship as the singer is.
Yeah, and there's something kind of nice about that. Not only can you be grateful that you've created something that somebody else can feel ownership of, but you're doing a service to the community. That's kind of how I'd like to think of it.
You've written a song in the past about your not-quite-fond feelings for Los Angeles, the city in which this show originates. Have you evolved in your thinking about how bad Los Angeles is?
I still feel exactly the same way about Los Angeles. I find it endlessly fascinating and also endlessly terrifying. And kind of nauseous, in the traditional sense of the word. I don't know what that is, and I think the song addresses that. It's a little ambivalent, like, "Take me into your arms, I'm so afraid of you."
“What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World” from The Decemberists is out now. The band will headline The Greek Theatre on May 2.
A composer is inspired by Gehry's architecture for 'Frank's House'
Frank Gehry is the most celebrated living architect in the world, but less well-known is his brief, intermittent career as a musician.
While growing up in the Canadian province of Ontario, he took lessons on the Hawaiian guitar. And as a student at USC, he joined a traditional Japanese Gagaku orchestra, playing a small gong to accompany a wind instrument called a Shou.
Even after his architecture career began, Gehry still involved himself in the world of music by performing in a Dada-esque pickup band. He explains by saying that he "graduated at one concert to taking a toilet plunger into a floor washerwoman's bucket and making noise."
These experiments mirror those of Gehry's architecture. His home in Santa Monica, where he and his wife have lived for more than 35 years, is a 1920s Dutch colonial bungalow that Gehry reconfigured and enclosed in a framework of industrial plywood, corrugated aluminum and chain-link fence. As cool as it might sound, the resulting structure wasn't so popular with all of his neighbors. "They hated it," he says with a slight chuckle.
Despite eventually abandoning his musical pursuits, Gehry has maintained a strong association with music throughout his career, in his design of performance spaces such as Walt Disney Concert Hall and his friendships with well-known musicians. So when the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra asked if they could commission a musical work inspired by his Santa Monica house, Gehry said yes.
Andrew Norman was an obvious choice for the commission, and not simply because he's the composer-in-residence for the orchestra. As Norman explains: "I wrote a piece about the Farnsworth House, which is a Mies van der Rohe building in Illinois; a piece about Frank Lloyd Wright's stained glass windows; something on the proportions of a cathedral in France; and a piece on my favorite buildings in Rome."
Norman’s string trio, “A Companion Guide to Rome,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2012.
His new work, titled “Frank’s House,” replicates Gehry’s process in creating his Santa Monica residence by starting with something conventional and homey, and wrapping it in a raw, industrial framework that some might find jarring.
Norman began his composition, he says, by looking "to include a sort of musical found object, or a piece of old music that is sort of buried within the new piece. I came upon a set of Brahms waltzes for four hands — so that's two people sitting at one piano — and I thought it was perfect, since this piece was going to involve two pianos and there was nothing that suggests the nostalgia and comfort of domestic life like piano four-hands, which was such an important part of home music-making in the 19th century."
He describes the waltzes as having "a very comforting and predictable sound. And then, of course, I subject it to all manner of deconstruction and alteration and sort of build the sort of clangorous percussive structure around this tune."
The percussive structure starts with some unusual sounds made on the pianos themselves, and it expands to include a variety of materials associated with Gehry’s house, including plywood, corrugated metal and chain-link fence, played with the kind of wooden sticks you’d usually use to stir paint. L.A. Chamber Orchestra percussionist Wade Culbreath helped Norman refine the palette of sounds found in these unusual instruments. He points out a corrugated piece of steel: "It’s got a texture and a sort of a wave to it, so that makes it easy to do something percussive with that."
The composer’s interest in using construction materials as finished instruments took him on a musical journey through Home Depot, to explore the use of plywood, industrial ducting and even wooden crates, which, he says, "have a really nice sort of wood-slatted sound."
Norman hopes that his composition "will directly engage people in thinking about music and how music is put together and is similar — or on a parallel path — to architecture, and how we think about that. Also, if they can find it exciting, or beautiful, or in any sort of way emotionally engaging, that’s great, too."
And how's Gehry feeling about it all? "I expect my feelings to be pushed somewhere where I haven't been before," he confesses. "I’m going to try not to listen to it as my house to begin with. I want to hear it just as a piece. So I’ll probably listen to it more than one time, I hope."
"Frank's House" premieres February 5 at 7:30 p.m. at the Moss Theater in Santa Monica.