 Digon i chi ddechrau eu bod yn gwneud y wneud faint amherwydd i chi rwy blog ac mae'n gwneud yn gwneud i chi'n gwneud. Felly, yn I do a thing called Welcome to Music Business, you're fucked. I don't know if you saw my little movie up at the top there, I've been in a bunch of bands, Public Image, Limiting, Killing Joke, Ministry, Nine Each Nails, Pinkface. I have a label, I've been to China, I made a documentary, I've just completed a successful kickstarter for my third book, which is called Band Smart. It didn't start at the clock. You see, I could have been such a dick. It seems like two hours, but I've still got 30 minutes on the clock. So I was here four or five weeks ago, I don't know if those of you... Who was here four or five weeks ago? So you might have noticed, I've lost six or seven pounds. Thank you. It's a penile reduction surgery, and that's been terrific. It really has. Anyway, I thought, what can I do? What can I reach out? What can I talk about that will unite everybody? Right? I came up with this, the top five tips. What to do when one of your songs is used in the opening ceremony of the Olympics. As one of mine was four weeks ago. I mean, who of us here hands up? I mean, who hasn't had a song? Okay then. All right, well, I just had a few... Here's a few tips anyway. Don't start a conversation with that, hey, an Olympic. I'm sure my mom does, but I shouldn't. If that was to you, don't start a conversation with it. Don't keep mentioning it. Oh, here it comes, Mr fucking Olympics. Share the credit. Spread the credit around. Who's the guy who put all that music together? I've forgotten his name, but thanks to him. Be thankful. Absolutely be thankful. And stay humble. Let's just go over those again. Share the credit. Be thankful. Don't start a conversation. Don't keep mentioning it. Stay humble. Is there a problem with the lights? Is there a problem with the lights, Mr Lightman? Oh, my light isn't working. Oh, this would have been superb, wouldn't it? So there you go. Hopefully you could put that to use. I just wanted to see what that looked like, that big. It's awesome, isn't it? Will someone take a picture and post it on Twitter? This guy's a fucking dick. So let's get into it for real. Enough joking aside. Are there any rock stars here today? I don't mean rock star, rock stars. I mean programming Ruby UX. So you've got the fucking lingo down. Sass. Atari. Commodore. Are there any rock stars here today? That's great because Jimmy John Sandwich Shop. Looking for some rock stars. And I do that for two reasons. One, I am a dick as we've established. And two, things are just changing all the time. Everything's participatory. Everybody's a rock star. Everybody's doing it. Everybody's a producer. Everybody's a DJ. Everybody's a rock star. And I'm a dick. So let's have a look at formats. We looked at this last time. I like this. Formats keep changing. I think I've been lucky in my music business and entrepreneurial experience to have things just constantly change around me all the time. When I came up, when I started my label, vinyl and cassette, not all the time. And that made things difficult because we'd have a successful band, but maybe we didn't sell any cassette or we didn't sell any of the vinyl. So a band was successful, but we were holding all this inventory. Then CDs come along and then we're doing three formats. It's just been crazy and that's been my world. And it just keeps on changing. What's next? Vinyl. Of course, just after I threw a whole storage space of, fuck this vinyl. Yeah, bad news. As I said last time, I don't know what this chart means, but it's great, isn't it? I saw Ash tweeted last night, only in Madison. What was it? A guy? It was a good job I wasn't out with you last time. I would have just punched him in the face. Bwm. I mean, you know, live and let live ish. I was trying to find a picture of a guy. So let's have a look at my theory about what happens with formats and objects in general. Things are weird and they're new. They become adopted and iconic. Then they become lame and discarded and after a variable amount of time, they become a hip memory prompt and they become an object to get. That's what's happening with vinyl. This is a coffee table at the hotel I was at in Memphis a while ago. Now people are going to be like butchering, buying up coffee tables to get the vinyl back. That's recycling right there. Punk is now a beer. Yeah, what's up with that? What's next? Cassette tapes. I love cassette tapes. I just found this online yesterday. It's a cassette tape USB drive in this huge fold out thing where you have to keep changing pens and mess things up and scribble things out. But it's 29 fucking dollars. It's a fucking USB drive. Just so people go, oh, cassettes. I'm just looking at this now. I want to leave an order one from Amazon right now. So an object's weird new becomes adopted. Then it's iconic. It's lame and it's discarded and after a variable amount of time it becomes hip again and a memory prompt and a USB stick. So let's test our theory with Mr Robert De Niro. Unfortunately, I saw Robert in New Year's Eve last night. Has anybody seen that movie? What was he doing? Could he not have learned his lines? I mean, bad news. So at first he was weird, new, mohawk, taxi driver. He becomes adopted. Then he becomes lame and discarded. Analyzed this and this is where this was a music business class. I had questioned the value of his management team when they persuaded him to do analyze that. But no, he's not lame and discarded. He starts the Tribeca Film Festival, injects the very damaged New York City with a new energy after 9-11 and then Tribeca becomes a car. Tribeca's a car, punks a beer. No! Don't plug me in, baby. What about recording studios? New York, L.A., does anybody want to work at the hip factory? You'd say yes or no, you don't have to sparkle. Well, if you do want to work at the hip factory you've got a bit of a problem on your hands because they've turned it into penthouses. They've taken, it's like a Saturday Night Live skit. They've taken all of the people who recorded there and put all their music in the elevator. But there's only one penthouse left, so, you know, hurry. It's not about the square footage or the faucets. It's like, yeah, Lou Reed did fucking heroin right there. Okay. It's an object, it's weird, it's new, it becomes adopted and iconic. And after a valuable amount of time it becomes a memory prompt. Does anybody go to Abbey Road Studios to record because of the equipment? It's to get an erection while you're using the microphone that Paul McCartney sang into. Is that his spit still... Or to try and avoid the microphones that Ringo Starr sang into. Not that I'm not digressing all the time, but what an asshole. Did you see the email he sent out? Just as a warning to anybody. As of October of this year he will no longer be signing anything for anybody. So do not send him fan mail. I thought, asshole, just bury it in the back garden. Don't just tell people they can't write to you. Have some intern scribble bullshit on an envelope. You know, why would you do that? Anyway, so your fuck Ringo Starr is the side message of this. So what's important really with all of this? It turns out it's just vibe. And we're back to a car. Well, how weird I just looked up there and it's just apple logos. Can't see anybody, it's just like an apple. It's weird though, isn't it? I just got asked to speak at the Apple Store in Chicago. Anybody here from Chicago? You don't have to say yes or no, just sparkle. Sparkle with your phones. Yeah, and I've done a lot of shit in my life, but I'm kind of, it's like the Carnegie Hall. Apple Store, Michigan Avenue, it's like, oh shit. It's just a fucking shop. It's just a shop selling electronics, and I'm going to be like, hey, make sure you get the apple logo behind me. They're going to whittle my 120 slides. Here's the four slides that we've cleared. Go get them, Marty. Let's have a look at some strategies. Strategy number one will be to have a fucking strategy. Yeah, you could laugh, but people in bands don't. People in bands don't, hey, where are you going? We're going on the road. Where? Hollywood. Do you have a map? Fuck off. Map. Number two, get the fuck out of bed. Easy for me to say. I have four-year-old now, four-year-old and eight-year-old, a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old. So most mornings I'm up between four and five. I'm getting kicked in the back, congealing vomit. Oh, across my neck. Very similar to the situations I think some of you find yourselves in tomorrow morning. But I'm up an atom of five in the morning. And when I see other people start filtering into Twitter at 10, I'm five hours ahead. At the end of the week I'm 35 hours ahead. At the end of the month I'm 140 hours ahead. Not that it's a competition. We're all in this swirling ball of shit together, right? But we kind of are in a little bit of competition. In fact, we're all in fucking competition and stab somebody in the eye with a pencil. That's another strategy. Practice for catastrophe. Oh, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I was at the rehearsal hotel in Norway. They just have bags of money over there because of the oil and whatever else they've got going on. So I'm touring this rehearsal hotel, they called it, and it was gorgeous. There was metal plate halfway up the walls, carpeting, a nice PA in every room, a flown hanging from the ceiling, monitors, bless you, that worked. A piano, not that anybody uses pianos anymore. Keyboard stand, bass rig, two guitar rigs. It was just gorgeous. The elevators worked, there was air conditioning. This is fantastic. But is that what we need? Is that what we need to use to get better? If I owned that rehearsal space, I'd be behind the two-way mirror with a series of buttons. Once the guitarist started to get into it and the vocalist started to get into it, I'd press one of those buttons and electrocute the guitarist. I'd let them go for a little bit longer and I'd make the vocalist's microphone stop working. I'd press another button and electrocute the guitarist again. I don't know what I'd do to the drummer. Something. I'd turn the PA on and off, I'd have a hole open up in the middle, the fucking... Ah! I'd have piss raining from the ceiling. Because that's every show I've ever done. So... and a bunch of Apple laptops floating in the sky. So those are the... Those are the situations under which you practice so that when you're on stage at Lollapalooza and you've been electrocuting the... Air King! The microphone's not working and even though it's an outdoor show, there's piss raining! The fucking piss. Martin Atkins was right, we should buy his book. You can triumph in the face of adversity. That's what it's all about. Anybody can do it when it's easy. Triumph in the face of adversity. I've got shit dribbling down the back of my legs. Right now. But if I hadn't told you, you wouldn't have known. Because I'm a fucking professional. Free is a new black. Just give everything away. If you're prepared to give absolutely everything away, someone's gonna buy something. You don't just give people a wheelbarrow full of your shit. You give them one thing and a second thing, kind of if they want that. Unless your music, your book, the stuff you have to sell is shit. They'll come back for more. If the stuff you're dealing, drugs, programming, same thing, whatever, if your shit stinks, then they're not coming back. I think that's kind of correct. Just do good stuff, give it away and people will come back for more. It's not a problem if 20,000 people illegally download your music. It's a problem if they don't. Monty Python gave all of their shit away. Their sales went up 23,000. Their sales went up 23,000%. I don't know if that works, actually. It's a free code for my second book, Welcome to Music Business. We'll post it later. Did you get it? Fuck by somebody else's business plan, mascarading has helped. I've seen so much of this in the music business. Home taping is killing music and it's illegal. No, it didn't kill music. This is 1980, 1970. I don't know when this was, but music survived another 30 years after that. It's shitty bands with crappy live shows and out of tune vocals and not enough juice for the fog machine. That's what's killing the music business. Home sewing is killing fashion. There's a whole bunch of these. It's just a whole range of t-shirts. They're all wonderful. Use your social media with Japanese table manners. It's rude in Japan to pour your own drink, so you sit and wait for somebody else to pour yours. That's social media, isn't it? You have to sit there and be nice and pour everybody else's drink and wait for them to pour yours. You wouldn't use that as a pickup line. Oh, that was an interesting silence. Wasn't it? But you have to camouflage your message. If you're in a band, you don't go on social media. I'm in a band. Fuck off. Everybody's in a band. We just released an album. Fuck off. Everybody's released an album. We've got a show. Fuck off. Everybody's got a show. Find out what everybody else is doing. I love this quote. My dad gave me this quote. You can make more friends in two months by being interested in other people for two years trying to get other people to be interested in you. So I use that all the time. Love that one. Fuck by yourself, number five. Of course, these are all out of sync. The need for external validation. Success is not external. Success is like bad gas or appendicitis internal. Fuck by geography because America is big. The top, Albert XVI of the top 100 markets in the US are east of a line from Minneapolis down to Texas. So stay east of that line. The first time I saw that map and anybody in a band I've shown that map to, they just go, oh fuck. I was out to dinner with Todd Rungren for a ridiculous sequence of confusing circumstances. And he's like, oh fuck. If only I'd seen this map. Just look at the data. Look at the available data and have a look at a map before you spend your life driving around the country. Because gas prices, I don't know what a gallon of gas is up here. It's like five, four eighty nine in Chicago now. What is it here, like three, twenty? Almost four. There's another reason not to go west of that line. There's nobody there. I was trapped jet lagged in a hotel room in Norway and I've got like 90 maps. Like incidences of pig swine fever. Oh yeah, that's one of the good ones. Fuck by yourself pursuing technical ability. Whatever field you want to get into, type that into YouTube. Followed by Child Prodigy and you'll see some little nine-year-old kids smoke your ass. Fuck by allowing yourself to think that anybody gives a shit. They don't. Nobody gives a shit about what's important to you. More than you, really. Fuck by yourself, a lack of imagination. One of my students gave me this idea. I went to class at Madison Media Institute. I teach here in town like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday sometimes. And he's sitting there with a defrosting like a home jelly pot on his desk. What's that? I make my own organic blackberry jam. Get me some and I'll give you an A. Because that's how I roll. Grades for jam scandal. It's Madison Media Institute. This is great. Next week he's there with his pot of like defrosting organic homemade blackberry jam. Ah, yes. This teaching shit is finally starting to pay off. I reach for the pot of jam. He reaches behind it. Pulls out a demo. Fuck. I'm like, think Martin, think, think, think. Take the demo. I'm thinking this is fine. I've got the jam. I'll throw that out the window on the drive back to Chicago. Problem solved. Because you know when you give somebody a demo, it's not a gift in position. When I listen to somebody else's music, which I don't have any time anyway, at least of all to listen to someone else's music that doesn't make sense because I don't know it. And then my brain starts working. Well, if they lose the first four or move that bit there, it's a fucking nightmare. So it's not a gift. Weirdly, I don't throw it out the window on the way home. I think tomorrow I'll put it in the garbage disposal or set fire. I'm not sure. I'm going to do something heinous to this guy's demo. So the next morning I come downstairs, jam, demo, put a couple of slices of bread in the toaster, and I open up the jam pot. It made it like one of those noises. Thank you. Shame that isn't one of the noises on your telephone. Anyway, it makes that sound cool. That was filthy. That was absolutely... I get this like of like, just fresh. Not like store bought. It was just really aromatic and blackberry. Look at the demo. The toast pops up. Put some butter on the toast. I put the spoon into the jam and it's quite runny. It's not like a store bought jam consistency. It's quite runny. And as I spread the jam on the toast, I know. I'm going to have to listen to his fucking demo. Not only do I listen to his demo, I film myself with the CD. It's a bandit's called Colour Phase. James works at the frequency around the corner. Look at me as if I know... Yeah, a frequency around the corner. I film myself putting the CD into my car stereo and I post it on YouTube. As if he would know that I was going to destroy his demo. Which he wouldn't have. I told him. He was sitting in the lecture the first time I did this. He was like, what the fuck? This whole adventure. But my point is, what's your blackberry jam scam? Right? His pot of blackberry jam. Now I'm sure he's on social media talking about blackberry jam and whatever it is you do to make... I don't know what you do to make blackberry jam. But there. That's my blackberry jam scam. Small is the new huge. Why is it bands always play the largest venue instead of the smallest? Just play the smallest. The worst thing that can happen is you sell it out and play another one. Aim low, get high. Yeah. I like that one too. Can I go on extra five minutes? Yeah. So, I like aim low, get high. It's not a bad thing to have ambition. You should have ambition. You should be looking to the clouds of Apple logos in the sky. But if you do, if you are looking up there, you'll miss your next step, which is there. I was lucky enough to be at the Great Wall of China. And it's a great analogy for this. On the one hand, you can stand to a distance amazed by one of the seven wonders of the world. I'm standing there and I got hungry because there's a Kentucky fried chicken at the Great Wall of China. I went down and I said to that guy, this is wrong on so many extra Christmas. You stand off to a distance and you look at the Great Wall of China. It's just a fucking pile of bricks. It's just a pile of bricks. You can start your own pile of bricks. Six weeks from now, you'll have a shitty, meaningless, not very focused pile of bricks. Six months from now, you'll have Great Wall of China 2 going on. And your friends will come over and go, look at this, and you can proudly say Great Wall of China 2, this quick wall. And some of your friends will dismiss you as crazy and someone will be like, hey, this is insane. How can we help? I like to help people with things that shouldn't be happening that are kind of insane. Making those things happen is fueling us, fuck. When everything makes sense on a business plan, fantastic, fuck off. That looks like it's going to happen. You made a really great plan there, buh-bye. I'm interested in the stuff that this is impossible. 3D printer? If those guys went to engineering school, they thought that it was impossible to make a 3D printer. Boom. So some of my little phrases, three is the new black, aim low, get high, get difficult sometimes. And when I saw one of them printed in a major publication, it made me cry. Sometimes I feel like I'm just banging my head against a wall. And to see it in print like that, even though it was kind of stolen, it made me cry. A great life isn't about great, huge things. It's about small things that make a big difference. And when I saw that in the Ikea catalogue, stay on top of the... Stay on top of... Was that me? Opening ceremony of the Olympics. Yeah. Almost 11 seconds. Yeah. I heard a politician say, not a politician, a political strategist said this on, I don't know, LRT, is that NPR? Is WRT the... I don't know, whatever. NPR Radio said, it doesn't matter what's happening with this or that momentum trumps everything. And I think that's true. You can try and buy momentum with money, get people to help you, take out ads and do stuff, and pretty soon you won't have any money or any momentum. If you have momentum, you could get whatever you need once you have momentum. Always be nice to everyone. Do the opposite. A great example of do the opposite. Some of my students struggle with this. You've got Avatar, $500 million new technology, and the artist. I don't know what the budget was for the artist. Black and white? What's the budget for microphones? No budget for microphones. It's fucking silent. Fuck off. Brilliant. Go green. Do I care about your band? No. Do I care about the planet? Yes. Only safety comes from risk. The riskiest thing you can do in this world is to be safe. It's a fucking font nightmare, isn't it? I've had people come up to me afterwards. I can help you. Really? With which one of my problems? Fonts. We're not looking for something that's global and huge and has a massive impact around the world. We're looking for a fart in the elevator. Not at the Sheraton. Fuck those. You create an action that works and Vidal Sassoon the fuck out of it. Rins repeat. Rins repeat. Rins repeat. Never mind the fonts. I've changed slide styles. Halfway through. It's a mash-up. Make cool shit. There's two types of shit. There's cool shit and not cool shit. You just have to make cool shit. My friend Moldova. He made an album with the song titles printed in electronic circuitry. It's a light sensitive theremin built into his album. I talked to you about these last time I was here. Where did they go? Smell my seven inch. Scratch and sniff white vinyl. Blueberry. What's it sound like? Fuck off! It's scratch and sniff blueberry. That's what it sounds like. Change the conversation. Do something interesting. Kind of lastly, if you know that you're fucked then you're not. If you think that you're not, then you are. It's a lovely little Disney-esque thing. I'm thinking about doing a whole musical based on that. Never be afraid to throw blueberry muffins. Thank you.