Category — Music

Numero Group is thriving “despite breaking almost every record-business rule in the book,” reports Duff McDonald in Businessweek (5/7/12). The tiny Chicago-based label starts with an unlikely premise: It specializes in re-issues of “lost musical treasures — primarily in the realms of soul funk and gospel.” Its three founders — Ken Shipley, Rob Sevier and Tom Lunt — share a passion for finding what had been lost and their idea is to make it easier for others to do so, as well. “We wanted to make records that were collectible but also accessible to a normal record buyer,” says Ken. “You didn’t have to have deep pockets or knowledge of some obscure record store. You could create your own library of obscure records through us.”

Numero’s success begins with embracing failure — the label actively looks for acts that never made it. “Success stories are nice, but they’re not as interesting,” says Ken. Rather than selling each album as a one-off, Numero has adopted a subscription model, where, for “$150 a year, ‘super-fans’ receive every Numero album, a release model more akin to a magazine publisher’s than a music label’s.” They avoid internet sales: “Numero’s typical release is now 61% CD, 34% LP and 5% digital. Sales on iTunes account for just 6.2% of sales. Over 10% of Numero’s sales are via mail order.”

Numero also invests heavily in its packaging, and with special attention to liner notes. “They want to talk to the people who made the music, the people in the engineer’s booth that day. They want the full picture: how it’s made, who makes it, where it’s made,” says Oliver Wang, a college professor and music blogger. They also stake out a strong brand identity. “We wanted to be a library,” says Tom Lunt. “All our releases look the same, and because of that they look more important than the other things on your shelf.” And they spend “almost nil” on marketing, relying on word of mouth. Launched in 2003 with just $23,000 in seed money, Numero last year saw profits of $1.1 million.

Madonna and Lionel Richie are living the risks and rewards of old artists marketing new music, reports Eric Felten in the Wall Street Journal (5/4/12). Madonna, as you may recall, released her latest record, MDNA, with the SuperBowl halftime show — “a promotional opportunity worth more than $80 million” by some estimates. Her album sales quickly charted to number-one on Billboard during the first week, and just as quickly plummeted by “more than 86%” during the second. Its decline has continued and MDNA currently owns the #34 spot on the hit parade.

Lionel Richie, meanwhile, launched his new record, Tuskegee, with an hour-long appearance on the Home Shopping Network. Tuskegee occupied the number-two spot during its first week of release, and then climbed to number-one, where it has remained for past two weeks. Madonna certainly had an edge in the promotional department and both records received good reviews. The difference, apparently, was that Madonna was trying to get her fans to buy new music, where Lionel Ritchie’s offering was a countrified version of his greatest hits — in other words, “a pleasant reworking of his standard repertoire.”

As Eric writes: “One would think that legendary artists would have every advantage needed to put across new hits — they are brands, after all, with large and loyal customer bases.” Maybe their new songs just aren’t as good. Maybe their aging fan base has trouble connecting with new music. Or maybe, says Eric, it’s a Catch-22: “If the established musician does something really fresh, her audience is unhappy she’s strayed from what they know and like. But if she keeps doing new songs in same vein as the old, why should the listener bother with the new release?” Lionel Richie “managed to escape the conundrum by doing the old favorites in a new way.”

Sam Kopper is bringing back the Rock of Boston from an "electric green school bus" parked outside his home, reports Elizabeth Jensen in the New York Times (4/16/12). It’s a safe distance from Sam’s heyday as program director and on-air personality at free-form rock radio station WBCN-FM, a favorite of college students, among others, from 1968 until the late ’80s. Sam, himself, left the station in 1991, disillusioned as the radio business "became more corporate and consolidated." CBS acquired BCN in 1996, and killed it "in 2009 in a complicated switch to make room for a sports station." Now, CBS wants to revive the format on HD radio and has enlisted Sam and his "biodiesel-burning bus."

HD is a digital radio format, introduced in 2006 to compete against "the static-free signals of satellite radio." It is set up so that existing FM radio stations can "broadcast their original analog station on HD1, with additional space for differently formatted substations, known as HD2 and HD3." The challenge has been that listeners need to invest in "expensive new radios" to access HD, although the cost of the radios has come down and "most automakers" now offer them. "It’s the frontier-land of our industry right now," says Mark Hannon, svp of CBS Radio Boston. He’s betting that good programming will "drive the new technology, just as the 1968 WBCN prompted students to buy FM receivers."

The new BCN has some "1,500 songs as various as classic rock, reggae and country in rotation and 4,5000 in its library, far more than most commercial competitors." Sam Kopper says the station "is not a nostalgia trip," calling the approach "radio theater, the human voice put together with every other element that you can use for sound" — not only the music but "ambient street sound." He says that "radio is all about the human connection." He’s mostly promoting the station on Facebook and he’s not entirely alone: Former BCN deejay Carolyn Fox has invested $10,000 in equipment so she can transmit from her Manhattan apartment, picking up on a career she left behind ten years ago. "I saw some possibility to connect with the listener," she says.

A trio of personality traits is "a crucial predictor of well-being," reports John Tierney in the New York Times (2/14/12). The three traits are novelty-seeking, persistence and self-transcendence. Persistence and novelty-seeking may seem to be at odds, but experts say that "the two traits can co-exist and balance each other." As psychiatrist C. Robert Cloninger explains: "To succeed, you want to be able to regulate your impulses while also having the imagination to see what the future would be like if you tried something new."

Self-transcendence, says Dr. Cloninger, "gives people a larger perspective." It provides "the capacity to get lost in the moment doing what you love to do … when it’s combined with persistence and novelty-seeking, it leads to personal growth and enables you to balance your needs with those of the people around you." Of the three traits, novelty-seeking is not traditionally linked to well-being — in fact, it’s "long associated with trouble," such as "attention-deficit disorder, compulsive spending and gambling, alcoholism, drug abuse and criminal behavior."

However, Dr. Cloninger says when adventurousness and curiosity is combined "with persistence and a sense that it’s not all about you, then you get the kind of creativity that benefits society as a whole." Winifred Gallagher, a journalist, classifies people as either neophobes, neophiles or neophiliacs, depending on how much one shuns or craves novelty. Neophilia is somewhat genetic and is also linked to dopamine, but it depends on upbringing, local culture and age, too: "By some estimates, the urge for novelty drops by half between the ages of 20 and 60."

"… Altering the pitch and instruments used in background music can alter the way food tastes," reports the Economist (2/4/12). Anne-Sylvie Crisinel and Charles Spence of Oxford University conducted an experiment in which "each volunteer was given four pieces of toffee. While they were eating two of them, a sombre, low-pitched piece of music played on brass instruments. They consumed the other two, however, to the accompaniment of a higher-pitched piano piece."

Volunteers confirmed that the toffee eaten while listening to the low-pitched brass number tasted more bitter than the toffee consumed during the high-pitched piano piece. The findings build upon Anne-Sylvie’s and Charles’s earlier experiments, in which volunteers were asked to associate various aromas — "ranging from apple to violet and wood smoke" — with various pitches. In this experiment, "sweet and sour smells were rated as higher-pitched, smoky and woody ones as lower-pitched."

Still more specifically: "Blackberry and raspberry were very piano. Vanilla had elements of both piano and woodwind. Musk was strongly bass." It’s not clear why this is, but Anne-Sylvie and Charles speculate that it’s because people live "in a multisensory world and their brains tirelessly combine information from all sources to make sense, as it were, of what is going on around them." Humans, moreover, aren’t alone in this: "Studies of the brains of mice show that regions involved in olfaction also react to sound."

When the Costa Concordia capsized last month, people described the panic and chaos during a rather unruly evacuation as reminiscent of the pandemonium on board the Titanic as it sank nearly 100 years ago. I remembered hearing this song in the Harry Smith Anthology of American Music and decided it would be fitting for the Folk Den’s February release. There are many versions of this. I combined the two that I liked best, says Roger McGuinn in The Folk Den. (listen)

Cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus "investigates the intersection between neuroscience and music" in his latest book, Guitar Zero, reports Bruce Headlam in the New York Times (1/26/12). Gary’s interest was both personal and professional. At age 38, he decided he wanted to learn to play the guitar; as a scientist he wanted to explore the "long-held tenet" that the older we grow the harder it gets to acquire new skills. This may be especially true of guitar skills, given the instrument’s quirky, non-linear bent (e.g., "the guitar has the same notes at different frets along different strings").

The challenge was especially acute for Gary, who claims to have no musical talent. But he did have a year-long sabbatical from New York University, during which he dedicated himself to learning to play guitar, using a $74 Yamaha acoustic and various instruction books. Scientifically, he was interested in "how the brain can essentially rewire itself to make up for deficits caused by stroke, trauma or even a non-existent sense of rhythm." Musically, he was mainly interested in learning how to improvise, as opposed to learning specific songs or riffs.

Learning scales and improvising versus learning songs and copying actually represent the two "modes of mental processing at the heart" of Gary’s book. The former requires "a tool kit of rules that can be applied in new situations" while the latter is more about data mining, or "dredging up material from a vast store of knowledge." Gary’s interest is "in how the human mind toggles between the two approaches." Gary’s goal now is "to move beyond both and play from emotion, or as he said, ‘from the brain stem.’" He confesses to being mostly analytical as a guitarist but adds that he’s "not sure if that’s a limitation of me as a musician or as a human being."

For some recording artists, the boxed set carries "the whiff of embalming fluid," writes Eric Felten in the Wall Street Journal (12/2/11). “When it comes to creativity, those elaborate boxes are less cases than caskets,” Eric writes. The trouble is that “the very act of compiling an oeuvre suggests that the body of work is in some way complete, that the artist is done. Boxed sets are overwhelmingly retrospective.”

Elvis Costello, whose recently released box set, "The Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook," arrives just in time for the holidays, doesn’t come right out and say as much, but his comments about the project were unusual, to say the least: He told his fans to buy the latest Louis Armstrong box set, Ambassador of Jazz, instead. "Frankly, the music is vastly superior," he said, while adding the pricetag on his own box set ($339.98) appeared to be "either a misprint or satire."

He went on to describe the book that came with the set, which also included just one CD, a vinyl record and a DVD, as "all manner of whimsical scribblings, photographs and cartoons." As Eric observes: "It’s ironic that boxed rock ‘n’ roll has taken on the stifling air of a crypt, given the genre’s celebration of youth. We might credit Mr. Costello then, not for his tender concern for his fans’ pocketbooks, but for having the admirable instinct to hop out of a box being lowered into the ground."

A combination coffee bar, record shop and antiques store is fitting in "by not really fitting in," reports Brendan Spiegel in the New York Times (12/4/11). "We wanted to make a place that revives the idea of discovery," says Jeff Ogiba, owner of Black Gold Records in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. "Searching for a record should be like a treasure hunt," he adds. "A lot of this is stuff you won’t find in any other shop … Sometimes it’s one-of-a-kind, literally."

The store’s stock is not only exclusively vinyl records, but LPs rescued from obscurity. "We had a guy come in a few weeks ago and say, ‘Congrats, this is the most records I’ve ever seen without recognizing a single artist’." Such quirkiness has attracted a "small but loyal clientele" that is also diverse. "We have a young regular who’s 11 or 12 and always comes in asking for Pink Floyd, the old-timers looking for jazz, and everyone in between."

The shop also has "antiques lining the walls, which "are as much atmosphere as inventory." Everything is for sale. And then there is "the steady stream of coffee regulars," many of whom never buy anything else. But creating "an environment that encourages lingering is half the point," according to co-owner Sommer Xavier Santoro. "Shopping is all about instant satisfaction these days … Nobody likes to hunt anymore," she says. Except, apparently, at Black Gold Records.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen: "I recorded the vocals and acoustic guitar at the Lee’s “Farm Niente” over Thanksgiving 2011. When I got home I overdubbed the Rickenbacker 370/12/RM JETGLO which Bill Lee graciously gave me,” says Roger McGuinn in The Folk Den. (listen)