Music Festivals

How Coachella, Bonnaroo and More Festivals Revamped the Music Industry

(By Steve Knopper, Rolling Stone, 13 May 2104)

In 2001, the last time Outkast hit the road for a major tour, they were coming off a multiplatinum album and a Number One single, "Ms. Jackson." André 3000 and Big Boi played 46 shows on the Stankonia tour, and grossed $4.8 million, according to Pollstar. That sounds impressive – until you compare it with the reunion tour they're launching this spring and summer. Outkast will play fewer gigs – 40 shows, every one at a festival – and make vastly more money: around $60 million, according to concert-business sources.

Welcome to the strange economics of the modern rock festival, where every summer, defunct or dormant bands reunite to earn more for a few gigs than they did in years of touring and recording. Outkast, who haven't released so much as a new song in eight years, are the most extreme example yet: Unlike many big festival acts, they're not famous for their live performances. "For the good bands, there's always going to be demand if you're away a long time," says Charles Attal, a partner with C3 Presents, which produces Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits. Outkast's success reflects a new reality: Thanks to huge competition for "event bookings" that sell $300 tickets and even more expensive VIP packages, festivals can afford to pay headliners up to $4 million.

All of this is possible because festivals have come to dominate the music industry, with more than 60 slated to take place in the U.S. this year. Fifteen years ago, when Coachella organizers got 25,000 people to see Rage Against the Machine and Beck in the California desert, nobody could have predicted that an event like Las Vegas' Electric Daisy Carnival would draw more than 400,000 people for a single weekend. "Festivals have become a huge part of American culture," says Pasquale Rotella, chief executive of Insomniac, promoter of Electric Daisy, which began as a rave in 1997. "When we first started, it was really foreign – all people could remember was Woodstock. It made it really difficult to explain. That's no longer true." 

Festivals have changed the way music is experienced – and released. A fan with a Spotify account and a Bonnaroo ticket can sample hundreds of bands, live or on record, in one weekend. "It's a good time to be a fan, if you just want a piece of everything," says Ben Dickey, manager of indie band Spoon, whose new album coincides with a tour that includes dates at Governors Ball and Shaky Knees this summer. "[Spoon] is going to play to tens of thousands of people at each festival – that's a pretty huge promotional platform for new songs."  It's not just big names who are cashing in. In the Nineties, when Neutral Milk Hotel recorded their landmark album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the group was lucky to make a few hundred dollars per show. But this summer, the band, whose last LP came out 16 years ago, will pull down much more money a night at festivals like Bonnaroo and Pitchfork. "You can add a lot of zeroes, basically, to what they made," says Jim Romeo, the group's booking agent.

A decade ago, festivals had distinct personalities: Coachella had the alt-rockers, Bonnaroo was more of a jam-band event. But as crowds grew, major headliners became harder to find, which meant more pressure to score high-profile reunions or megastars like Bruce Springsteen, whom Bonnaroo's promoters spent years wooing before he agreed to headline in 2009. The fiercest competition is regional. Cliff Burnstein, co-manager for Metallica and Red Hot Chili Peppers, says California is one of this summer's big battlegrounds, now that Jay Z's Made in America will be in Los Angeles, joining Outside Lands in San Francisco and BottleRock in Napa Valley. "They will fight over the acts," he says.

Major festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza regularly sell out within hours of announcing their lineups. One way those fests stay on top is with "radius clauses," which means bands can't perform at any other show – not even a club gig – within, say, 300 miles and four or five months of their festival date. That can make bands' summer schedules increasingly complicated, to the point that mega-booking agency William Morris has had to create a separate department devoted exclusively to making bands' deals with festivals and managing their touring routes. "It's like playing air traffic control," says William Morris' Kirk Sommer, agent for the Killers and the Arctic Monkeys. "You have to think about how playing Governors Ball in June could affect another festival in the fall."

Of course, not every festival succeeds – in recent years, Rothbury in Michigan, Bamboozle in New Jersey and Kanrocksas have folded, despite snagging strong headlining names such as the Black Keys and Foo Fighters. Bamboozle suffered from promoter infighting, Kanrocksas had trouble selling tickets and Rothbury couldn't line up consistently huge headliners.  "It sometimes takes years of development to get these events into profitability," says Bob Roux, Live Nation's co­president of U.S. concerts. In the earlier days of U.S. festivals, it was easier for independent companies to build a festival on niche music, like jam bands or electronic-dance DJs. That's not the case today. "There's a lot more politics and a lot more investment to make something happen," says Insomniac's Rotella.

Given the recent boom, you might think festivals have hit a saturation point. But numerous band managers and promoters say there's still room for growth. "It's getting dense," says Attal. "But I don't think it's peaked – it's just hit a pretty good stride."  Even for baby bands – if they get the right time slots and are able to play effectively to big crowds – festivals can make the difference between just surviving and thriving. "A festival pays three and a half or four times more than the average club show," says Dylan Baldi of Cloud Nothings, who are playing Bonnaroo, Pitchfork and several European fests this summer. "We're still a small-scale band, but the festival shows make you realize what happens when you try to become more popular."

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/how-coachella-bonnaroo-and-more-festivals-revamped-the-music-industry-20140513

Kevin Smith On Batman At 75: The Enduring Heartbreak & Why We Still Worship Him

(By Kevin Smith, Hollywood Reporter, 02 May 2014)

As Bruce Wayne's alter ego continues to pervade pop culture, TV and film, a famous fanboy expounds on the primal fear at the heart of his appeal.

Since he was created 75 years ago by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, Batman has captured more fancies than he has colorful characters from Gotham's Rogues Gallery en route to the revolving door of Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. The appeal of the Batman has become so undeniable that at the conclusion of his latest multi-billion dollar franchise, the Caped Crusader wasn't gifted with the eight-year vacation his character was afforded by Christopher Nolan between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises.  Instead, Warner Bros. lit the Bat-Signal and put his Bat-ass right back to work: on TV in Fox's Gotham, in video games like Batman: Arkham Origins, in animation like the short-lived Beware the Batman on Cartoon Network and on the big screen again, in Zack Snyder's Man of Steel sequel, the tentatively titled Batman vs. Superman, and the director's just-announced Justice League.

But why does Batman endure? In the age of the Marvel movie, a mild-mannered doctor can lose his temper and become a giant green monster, or a rich guy can put on a flying suit of armor and blow away bad guys with repulsor technology.  In The Avengers, a whole slew of super souls battled side by side, giving us so much ass-kickin' eye candy, the worldwide audience collectively screamed, "JUST TAKE ALL MY MONEY NOW!" The Marvel heroes were unwittingly designed for today's modern movie, where digital artists can finally depict not only what it looks like but also how it feels to be Spider-Man swinging through the canyons of Manhattan.

By comparison, however, on paper Batman comes across as kinda dull. He pulls on a mask and a cape and fights street-level bad guys. He has no superpowers. He has cool tech like Iron Man, but he likes to rely on his brains and brawn more than anything else. In a world of super- heroes, he's pretty uncinematically normal. When you take away the Batmobile and the Batcave, Batman is just a guy fighting mad men in makeup. He's not invulnerable: He's a human being.  And therein lies the appeal of the Batman: He is one of us. We can't identify with Superman because, in the real world, he'd be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. We can't identify with Wonder Woman because, in the real world, we don't know any Amazonian women made from clay. We can't identify with Green Lantern because, in the real world, there are no aliens giving out power rings.

But in the real world, parents die. Sometimes it's a car crash that does it, and sometimes it's a natural disaster. Sometimes it's merely something mundane and medical. And sometimes, it's a grisly crime at the hands of the desperate or demented. The thought of losing both parents is a primal fear that preoccupies our childhood imagination: There never has been a child who hasn't fretted, at one point in their lives, "What if Mom and Dad disappear and I'm left all alone?" It's a terrifying thought for a kid: "What would happen to me if the only two people in the world who love me the most were suddenly dead?"  See, it's the Passion Play aspect that keeps us coming back to Batman. In 1966, Batman went mainstream in a campy television show that only once mentioned the heartbreaking origin of the Dark Knight. This was a fun Batman, Biff-ing and Bam-ing bad guys -- in Dutch tilt shots -- simply because it was the right thing to do. But after Watergate and Vietnam, the bubbly Batman was returned to his onerous origins as the boy whose life would be forever altered in Crime Alley. And to a country and world that had lost its innocence with the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, the more somber Dark Knight Batman had a deeper impact than the Bright Knight that was the Adam West iteration of the character.

Ask someone in 1966 why Bruce Wayne became Batman and they couldn't tell you. Ask anyone now? Even the least geeky of us can tell you a young Bruce Wayne watched a mugger murder his parents in the midst of a back-alley robbery. We take this aspect of the story to heart because it's what appeals to us about Batman the most: his humanity. Before he was punching the Riddler in his turkey neck, Batman was a boy who survived the worst thing that can happen to a child.  Yes, we love the look of a man in uniform -- particularly when that uniform includes a cape and cowl. But while Batman is visually arresting, it's what lies at the heart of the character beneath the bat emblazoned across his chest that we respond to. We root for him with a mix of pity and power, the way we silently cheer on any kid we read about in the news who has to deal with issues and complications some full-grown adults couldn't be expected to weather.

And in this less innocent age, where greed and corruption are so commonplace it makes our world more like Gotham and less like shiny-happy Metropolis, we trust the establishment less and less. When even priests and politicians are pederasts, what authority figure can you believe in anymore without including caveats or excuses? Although he's a fictional character, Batman presents an adult any child (and most adults for that matter) can feel safe with, knowing that this masked man with his hidden identity will ironically never betray your trust. He will lay down his life to save yours. But because he spent his formative years honing his body and mind for a lifelong war on crime, we know he won't have to die for us: Unlike most messiahs, you can't stop the Batman.

At the core of the character is an arrested development of sorts: Only a child makes a vow as untenable as “I will spend my life avenging my parents.”  And even though he's a lethal fighting machine who refuses to kill, at the heart of the heroic adult is just a broken boy -- so broken, in fact, that the man adheres to the juvenile promise he made as a child.  But without parents to tell him he's mounting an impossible task, the shattered kid becomes the driven adult, and his dark days make him a Dark Knight.  Bruce Wayne is the original "boy who lived," but his Voldemort isn't the Joker -- it's injustice. The injustice of loving parents taken too young. The injustice of a ruined childhood. The injustice of those superstitious and cowardly criminals taking not only things that don't belong to them, but also the innocence, joy, safety and security of the wonder years.

It wasn't fair what happened to Bruce Wayne, so instantly, we're on Bruce Wayne's side. But he wins our loyalty not because he's the victim we never want to be, but because he's the survivor and champion every one of us dreams we are, with or without childhood trauma and tragedy. Bruce the Boy vows to avenge his parents' murders, and Bruce the Adult makes good on the promise, taking it all one step further: On his watch, no child will ever have to know the pain of losing Mom and Dad. So even though this billionaire playboy has mountains of money with which to dry his eyes or can boo-hoo into the bosoms of any woman (or man) he desires, Bruce Wayne spends every waking hour as a soldier in the service of strangers. And because of this, we feel more connected to Bruce Wayne and Batman than Tony Stark and Iron Man, or Clark Kent and Superman.  Or the pope.  Or the president.  Even the good ones.

We won't let Batman go because, for such a ridiculous notion, he's so easy to believe in. He's a spiritual icon of survival for so many that it doesn't matter if he's a fictional character. He endures because of that young boy who made it through the worst thing that can ever happen to a child and came out stronger for it. And since every one of us has either faced or will face their own personal Crime Alley, where we lose someone precious to us, it's good to know there's someone out there who can show us how to survive heartbreak -- even if he does it by overdressing and socking bad guys in the mush.

Kevin Smith is the writer-director of Clerks, Dogma and the upcoming Tusk, starring Justin Long and Michael Parks.   For DC, he has written Green Arrow: Quiver and Batman: The Widening Gyre. He also is the executive producer of Comic Book Men on AMC.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kevin-smith-batman-at-75-699807?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=hollywoodreporter_boxoffice&utm_campaign=THR%20Box%20Office_now_2014-05-02%2016%3A02%3A26_rford

Pity The Cheerleaders. Really.

(By Catherine Rampell, Washington Post, 28 April 2014)

It’s hard to have too much sympathy for cheerleaders. They’re pretty, perfectly proportioned and popular. If they didn’t persecute you personally in high school, a Hollywood facsimile probably at least bullied one of your favorite fictional protagonists.  Which perhaps explains why such scant attention has been paid to the plight of National Football League cheerleaders, who appear to be frequent victims of both wage theft and other, far weirder indignities (including elaborate rules about how to wash their vaginas; more on that later).  In the past few months, veterans of the Ben-Gals (who cheer for the Cincinnati Bengals), Raiderettes (Oakland Raiders) and Jills (Buffalo Bills) have filed lawsuits alleging that teams paid the cheerleaders less than minimum wage and subjected them to intrusive and belittling conditions.

Some of the allegations, like those regarding wage theft, seem pretty straightforward.  Raiderettes, for example, were paid $125 per game day but often nothing at all for the other appearances and rehearsals they were required to attend, one suit alleges. Factoring in all those time commitments, cheerleaders were reportedly paid as little as $5 an hour.  The teams say the cheerleaders are “independent contractors,” a designation that would exempt them from minimum-wage laws. The IRS says you can classify an individual as an independent contractor rather than an employee if you have “the right to control or direct only the result of the work” but the worker controls “what will be done and how it will be done.”

Yet to look at the rules and contracts required as a condition of cheerleaders’ pay, you’d be hard-pressed to argue that these “independent contractors” had control over anything, really.  The teams set the schedule and location for rehearsal and (often unpaid) promotional and charity appearances. A cheerleader’s hair color, makeup and level of tan-ness are dictated by the teams. In some cases the teams require the “contractors” to patronize specific salons to achieve the desired cosmetological results (and the cheerleaders have to pay for these services out of pocket, which the suits say cost hundreds of dollars each season). Cheerleaders say they were subjected to weekly weigh-ins or “jiggle tests” to assess whether they jiggled too much (in the wrong places, of course). Raiderettes deemed “too soft” could be benched the next game without pay- but would still be required to attend the entire game and participate in pregame and halftime activities anyway.  Then there are all the other really bizarre, often retrograde requirements that some teams have to regulate not only the cheerleaders’ professional appearances and performances but their private lives as well.

Here’s a selection of rules from the Buffalo Jills’ handbook, as published on Deadspin. It includes an entire section titled “General hygiene and lady body maintenance,” quoted here with typos intact:

“Do not be overly opinionated about anything.”

“When menstruating, use a product that right for your menstrual flow. A tampon too big can irritate and develop fungus. A product left in too long can cause bacteria or fungus build up. Products can be changed at least every 4 hours. Except when sleeping, they can be left in for the night.”

“Do not linger in restrooms having conversations and applying make up at length while other people are using the facilities.  When you wash, remember where your hands have been while washing, do not transfer dirt or germs to other areas of your body.”

“Intimate area’s: Never use a deodorant or chemically enhanced product. Simple, non-deodorant soap will help maintain the right PH balance.”

“When trying to ‘capture’ a small piece of food onto a utensil, it is acceptable to use another utensil for aiding it aboard. Never use your fingers.”

“Remove make-up every night before going to bed . . . Make-up left in the creases of your skin creates early wrinkles.”

“Don’t ask for cash gifts as wedding gifts (in print), Rely on word of mouth instead.”

Some of the rules read like they come from a 1950s etiquette guide; others, from Leviticus. In any case, the organization seems to have exerted a lot of control over cheerleaders’ lives, on and off the field, while still somehow classifying them as “independent contractors.”  I’m sure plenty of non-opinion-expressing, right-size-tampon-using women would kill for the chance to replace these disgruntled cheerleaders and bounce around in crop-tops before an adoring crowd. But that doesn’t mean employers are entitled to mistreat the lucky few ladies they do hire.  One of the points of labor law is to offer basic protections to workers for whom the balance of power vastly favors employers: people such as migrant farm workers, burger-flippers and, yes, pretty cheerleaders. Even workers who face great competition deserve to be shielded from abuse and exploitation by their bosses — perhaps especially so when those bosses come from a taxpayer-subsidized, multibillion-dollar industry like the NFL.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/catherine-rampell-pity-the-nfl-cheerleader-really/2014/04/28/df331bc4-cf08-11e3-a6b1-45c4dffb85a6_story.html

Stacks Of Possibilities

(By Ann Patchett, Parade Magazine, 12 April 2014)

As we celebrate National Library Week, Ann Patchett reflects on the modest spaces where she discovered a passion for reading. Her essay is excerpted from The Public Library by Robert Dawson—a photo survey of these vital institutions across the country.

Had I grown up down the street from the New York Public Library, I might have thought that libraries were defined by the size of their lions. If some of my earliest memories had been of Harvard’s Widener Library, I could have believed that sweeping murals by John Singer Sargent were baseline. But I attended a small Catholic girls’ school in Nashville, where our tiny library consisted of two rows of bookshelves, one on either side of the short hall between the classrooms and the nuns’ dining room. At the end of the bookshelves, Joanne Baily sat at a small table. Mrs. Baily was a mother who volunteered to help children find the book they might not know they were looking for.

Just about the time I read Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I advanced to the upper school across the parking lot. The library there was a big step up. The books were kept in their own small room. I remember wanting to check out Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie because it looked romantic, but at the circulation desk I was denied. Sister Bonaventure, taking a long look at the cover (a painting of a girl looking vaguely pensive), deemed the book inappropriate. I went back for another novel, and then another, and every time was instructed to reshelve my selection. I finally decided that Sister Bonaventure did not approve of fiction. Testing my theory, I brought several books of poetry to the checkout and sailed through. That was how I came to start reading T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats and Sylvia Plath in seventh grade.

So while I went on in life to be deeply impressed by the Philadelphia Free Library and the Los Angeles County Public Library and our own stunning Nashville Public Library, my idea of what a library is remains simple: a collection of books, however many or few, that are loaned out and gathered back.  We may never have full equality in our legal system, or our schools, but in our libraries there is parity: All are welcome, all books are free, and, if you can wait a little while, all books are available.  These days, with the advent of the interlibrary loan system, that includes just about any book you might want. The one-room structure in rural Kansas is as rich in books as the aforementioned Widener.

Of course, my book-centric view of libraries could easily be seen as dated. Libraries have considerably more than books to manage these days. So why, in a time when libraries also serve as computer centers, senior centers, teen centers, classrooms, and homeless shelters, is there so much speculation that they’ve become irrelevant?  In 1897 Mark Twain wrote a note to a friend that read, “James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration.”  Like James Ross Clemens, the book industry has endured a serious illness. The advent of ebooks caused a great deal of panic. But books, ever tenacious, have made a strong recovery. It is my belief that the publishing industry’s illness brought about the notion that libraries were on their last leg. Libraries, like Twain himself, had never been sick in the first place.

So, if you are fortunate enough to buy your own books, and you have your own computer, and you’re not in search of a story hour for your kids, then don’t forget about the members of your community who perhaps lack your resources—the ones who love to read, who long to learn, who need a place to sit and think. Make sure you remember to support their quest for a better life. That’s what a library promises us, after all: A better life. And that’s what libraries have delivered.

http://parade.condenast.com/274254/annpatchett/stacks-of-possibilities/?utm_source=parademagazine&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=vanity20140413

The Grammy Awards

Grammy Nomination Snubs And Surprises

(By Kyle Anderson, Entertainment Weekly, 07 Dec 2013)

The nominations for the Grammy Awards always seem to lead to more arguments than any other music awards shows’ choices do. That’s inevitable, since the Grammys’ list of categories is so vast and sometimes confusing, and the criteria by which the nominating committee settles on its selections is often inexplicable.

The announcement of the list of potential Grammy winners last night was no different, and it starts at the top: Jay Z lead all artists with nine total nominations, even though his 2013 release Magna Carta…Holy Grail was considered tepid at best (an adjudication Jigga himself seems to share). What’s even stranger is that none of those nine nominations are in the Big Three categories: Song of the Year, Album of the Year, and Record of the Year. He also shares a couple of those nominations with Justin Timberlake for “Suit & Tie.” So Jay taking home the most nominations is a little deceptive — it’s not like the year Adele scored a boatload of nods and then dominated the proceedings.  That’s only the beginning. Here are nine more confusing snubs and pleasant surprises embedded within the Grammy nominations.

Surprise: Justin Timberlake
Weep not for JT; he picked up seven nominations across a multitude of categories, including Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. But it’s a little bit shocking that he did not find his way into any of the big three categories: Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Album of the Year. Based on past Grammy love (and his overwhelming haul at the American Music Awards a few weeks ago), any of his singles or the entirety of The 20/20 Experience could have picked up some nods. This isn’t necessarily a snub, because on balance a lot of the material Timberlake put out this year was problematic, but considering his ubiquity it’s mildly shocking he didn’t walk away with more potential gold.

Snub: Lorde in Best New Artist
Again, Lorde still had a pretty good night, snagging four nominations including one each for Record of the Year and Song of the Year (not to mention delivering a killer performance of “Royals”). But in the one category where she seemed like a slam dunk—Best New Artist—she was shut out. Her eligibility was fine and all of the dates of her releases qualified, so she was not left out on some sort of weird Grammy technicality.  Perhaps voters thought Best New Artist was already beneath a girl who had a number one hit? Except that logic didn’t extend to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, who did get a Best New Artist nod and have topped the Hot 100 twice. Lorde may have actually dodged a bullet, since the Best New Artist award still seems mildly cursed, and she’ll be a frontrunner for Song and Record of the Year anyway.

Surprise: Sara Bareilles’ The Blessed Unrest
Album of the Year remains one of the key categories in the Grammys even though nobody buys albums anymore, and four out of the five titles nominated make perfect Grammy sense: Taylor Swift’s Red is a well-reviewed commercial juggernaut, Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, m.a.a.d. city is their annual “cool” choice, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ The Heist is a great narrative surrounding independence and positivity, and Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories scores points for being both forward-looking and a throwback. The fifth choice is a head-scratcher, as Sara Bareilles’ The Blessed Unrest is by no means a bad album, but feels very unremarkable. In that light, Lorde’s Pure Heroine and Bruno Mars’ Unorthodox Jukebox feel like mild snubs. 

Snub: Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop” and “Wrecking Ball”
Miley Cyrus’ 2013 album Bangerz came out too late in the year for it to be eligible for consideration, but both of her massive singles were sitting right there, waiting to be drafted. Sure, Cyrus has been a bit of a lightning rod, but that shouldn’t have stopped voters from tapping into either of these songs—especially “Wrecking Ball,” one of the defining tunes of 2013.

Surprise: Kendrick Lamar
Mark this one down as one of the Grammys’ most pleasant surprises; Lamar is one of the best new MCs working, and his album Good Kid, m.a.a.d. city is an instant classic. The Grammys tend to pick out one cool kid every year, and it’s a relief that they chose such a fine representative. All told, Lamar is nominated for seven prizes, including Album of the Year. He probably won’t win the big one (that seems reserved for Taylor Swift), but it probably means he’ll get some performance time in January, and on stage is where Kendrick eats.

Surprise: “Roar” vs. “Brave” in Best Pop Solo Performance
OK, so now the Grammys are just trolling us. Not only did Bareilles snag the Album of the Year nomination, but she also picked up a second nod in the Best Pop Solo Performance category for “Brave.” Her competition includes Katy Perry’s “Roar,” and as the Internet pointed out earlier this year, those songs sound remarkably similar.

Snub: Every good comedy album
This is a pretty low-level snub, but the category for Best Comedy Album is a travesty. Outside of Tig Notaro’s genuinely funny and deeply affecting Live, the entire field—Katy Griffin, Bob Saget, Craig Ferguson, and Ron White—is horrible, especially when you consider that the past year was a killer year for comedy albums. Along with Notaro, the nominees should have included Pete Holmes’ Nice Try, The Devil, Kumail Nanjiani’s Beta Male, Kurt Braunohler’s How Do I Land? and Maria Bamford’s Ask Me About My New God. Who would have thought Grammy voters would have no sense of humor? (Oh, everybody?  Okay.)

Surprise: Best Rock Performance might be the best category in the field
There’s no real rock to be found in the upper echelon of the Grammy nominations, which should not come as a surprise considering what a weak year is was for rock and how little the Grammys seem to care about it anyway. But the Best Rock Performance category might be the best mix of nominees in the entire field. Queens of the Stone Age’s “My God Is the Sun,” Alabama Shakes’ “Always Alright,” David Bowie’s “The Stars (Are Out Tonight),” Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive,” and Jack White’s “I’m Shakin” all made it seem like a killer year for guitars, and the only thing that sours the category is the nomination for a live version of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” which is 38-year-old tune that was performed poorly on Zep’s deeply overrated concert film Celebration Day.

Snub: Sound City
Dave Grohl’s documentary Sound City should have been catnip for Grammy voters; it took a loving look at classic recording techniques and the makings of cornerstone rock albums from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. But it didn’t get a nod for Best Music Film, which feels like a slight. The argument against Sound City is that it’s an amazing documentary that completely falls off a cliff in the final 20 minutes while Grohl works with people on making new music, but that was apparently the voters’ favorite part, as the film’s soundtrack Sound City: Real to Reel got a nod for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media and the song “Cut Me Some Slack” (Grohl’s melding of the surviving members of Nirvana and Paul McCartney) got a Best Rock Song nod. 

http://music-mix.ew.com/2013/12/07/grammy-nominations-justin-timberlake-sara-bareilles-lorde/

The Rules Of The Super Bowl Ad Game

(By Paul Farhi, Washington Post, 31 January 2014)

It’s one thing to create a buzzworthy commercial packed with celebrities, hot babes or that old reliable, Stuff Blowing Up. You’ll see plenty of that during Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast, from Budweiser’s puppy-meets-Clydesdales spot to Jaguar’s cinematic extravaganza on behalf of its new $65,000 coupe.  But it’s quite another thing to figure out how to deliver all that would-be buzziness to the most people at the lowest possible price.  That’s the game within the big ad game, the multimillion-dollar Super Bowl sponsor challenge. Advertisers know their commercials will be seen by tens of millions of people, and that airtime will sell for appropriately ludicrous amounts. This year, the average cost of a 30-second commercial will be about $4 million, or $133,000 per second, about the same as last year.

But, as the ads often say, your results might vary. The average cost is all but meaningless to Super Bowl sponsors, who cut complicated deals with the game’s broadcaster (this year, Fox), often many months in advance. What advertisers really care about is an ad’s “efficiency,” or its cost per viewer.  Figuring that out is harder than you’d think — “more art than science,” as marketing professor George Belch of San Diego State University puts it. The calculation involves some educated guesswork about when to buy a Super Bowl ad, how much to pay and where to place a spot during the nearly four-hour broadcast.  The process is complicated by an unknowable factor: Will one team dominate, or will the game be close? And for how long? It matters — a lot. Viewers stick around for competitive games but leave by the millions during a blowout. The NFL found this out to its chagrin in the 1990s, when ratings dipped for a series of lopsided games.

The rules of the Super Bowl ad game have evolved over the preceding XLVIII years and are evolving still in the age of social media. Here are a few of the basics:

Rule No. 1: No one pays the sticker price.

The Super Bowl advertising marketplace is like a Turkish souk: Everyone haggles.  Yes, $4 million is the average cost per ad, but the actual cost to an advertiser varies widely. The biggest advertisers — Coca Cola, Anheuser-Busch, General Motors, etc. — will pay far less than the reported average, says Marc Morse, senior vice president of media-buying agency RJ Palmer in New York.   The primary reason: Big buyers command big discounts. They buy multiple ad “units” — 30- and 60-second spots — spread over the game. Anheuser-Busch, for example, will run three ads for Bud Light and two for Budweiser. It also has a multi-year contract to advertise during the game, further reducing its overall costs.  No such luck for one-off advertisers, such as SodaStream, which markets do-it-yourself soda-making machines (and has lately been involved in a controversy over its decision to build a factory in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank). The company, whose ad stars Scarlett Johansson, paid top dollar for its single, 30-second unit, though President Yonah Lloyd declined to specify his cost. “For us, the Super Bowl is the perfect vehicle to educate the American consumer” about the company’s products, he said in an interview.  And deals involving Super Bowl ads usually involve more than Super Bowl ads. Time during the big game is often sold as part of a package that includes commercials during other programs or on channels owned by the Super Bowl’s broadcaster.  “The networks try to get you to buy other things,” Morse said. “CBS [last year] said, ‘If you want the Super Bowl, you have to [buy] March Madness. This year it was, ‘If you want the Super Bowl, be prepared for an equal spend on Fox [Sports] 1,’ ” a Fox-owned cable network.

Rule No. 2: Buy early, save later.

Spending millions on a Super Bowl ad isn’t all that different than spending a few hundred on a plane ticket or hotel room. The sooner you buy, the lower the price is likely to be.  Many advertisers buy at the “upfronts,” the annual meetings between network sellers and advertising buyers, held in June. As a result, much of Fox’s “inventory” of Super Bowl time was spoken for by last summer. (Fox declined to comment for this article.)

As long as there’s demand, prices for whatever is left tend to rise as the game gets closer. But on occasion, it pays to be patient. When Detroit’s slumping automakers passed up the game during the worst years of the recession, last-minute advertisers snapped up unsold spots at bargain prices.

Rule No. 3: First in, last out.

Advertisers pay extra to air commercials in the first and last positions in a “pod,” or cluster of commercials. These are considered the most-watched and the most memorable positions.  Basic inertia explains why it’s good to be first: People haven’t jumped off the couch yet as the game stops for the commercial break. Anticipation explains why the last spot is primo: People are rushing back to their seats as the game gets set to resume.

Rule No. 4: Buy early in the game, too.

Advertisers tend to clamor to show ads in the first half of the game and usually in the first quarter. The reason? It’s when the audience is most stable, most predictable and most attentive to the advertising.  “It’s the safest place to be,” says Jennifer Clayton, the manager of advertising planning and buying for Herndon, Va.-based Volkswagen of America, which is airing a humorous one-minute ad in the second quarter (in the first “pod” position of the second ad break) Sunday. “The game hasn’t been determined, and there’s a lot of hype about what the brands are doing. People focus on that.”  Which is why advertisers pay premium prices for ads shown during the first half.  Second-half advertisers, meanwhile, not only risk losing droves of viewers to a bum game, they also have to fight viewer fatigue.  “A lot of people are watching the game at parties. They’ve been there for hours, and they’re getting tired,” says San Diego State’s Belch. “By the third or fourth quarter, the same enthusiasm is just not there. So, you’re rolling the dice a little bit” by placing an ad during this part of the game.  Last year, the bet paid off. According to the Nielsen ratings service, the audience for the Ravens-49ers contest grew by 25 percent from its low point to its high point, peaking at nearly 115 million viewers late in the second half of what turned out to be a dramatic game.  Although that result delighted fourth-quarter advertisers — Big audience! Low price! — it was a fortuitous result, Morse said. “You can look like a genius [under those circumstances], but you can’t really plan it,” he said. “If we could, we’d be running the world.”

Rule No. 5: You need ads for your ads.

A Super Bowl commercial is just the start of an advertiser’s advertising . . . about its Super Bowl advertising.  The commercial is just the middle. Thanks to social media, companies engage in a buildup about their ads before the game, and most follow up afterward, too.  Volkswagen says it was the first advertiser to release its Super Bowl ad online before the game in 2011 (for a charming spot called “The Force”). It also says it was the first to release a teaser ad, called “The Bark Side,” for its Super Bowl commercial in 2012. The effort propelled its commercials to viral status.  (Well, technically, Apple may have been the first advertiser to “pre-release” its legendary “1984” Super Bowl ad 30 years ago by quietly airing it a few times in places such as Twin Falls, Idaho, in late 1983; it did so to qualify the commercial for advertising awards.)  Now, pre-release promotion is common. Many advertisers have released teasers on YouTube, Facebook and other platforms. And many advertisers release the ads themselves days before the game, seemingly undercutting their big-game “reveal.”

The idea, of course, is to create buzz before the buzz starts.  SodaStream’s Johansson commercial, released this week, led to calls for a boycott of the Israeli-based company; a Cheerios commercial featuring a biracial family also got media attention after Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus objected to MSNBC’s characterization of it in a tweet. (MSNBC tweeted, “Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww,” but then withdrew it and apologized.)  This year, Volkswagen promoted its Super Bowl commercial with a teaser ad making fun of Super Bowl ads. It will also run mobile ads mentioning its Super Bowl ad after the game in an effort to capture residual interest, according to Clayton.  But there’s a limit to how much anyone can keep hyping the hype; search-engine queries for Super Bowl ads start to fall quickly about 48 hours after the game ends, she said.  At which point, of course, the company will be thinking about the 2015 Super Bowl.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-rules-of-the-super-bowl-ad-game/2014/01/31/6333b7fe-89f3-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html?wpisrc=nl_lunchln

Read This If You Want To Be Happy In 2014

(By Scott Adams, 03 January 2014)

I have no expertise whatsoever on the topic of happiness. But I do have a knack for observation and simplification. That’s what I do for my day job as the creator of Dilbert. Today — as some of you are already backtracking on those New Year’s resolutions — I’m going to strip out all of the mumbo-jumbo around the topic of happiness and tell you the simplest way to get some.  You’re reading this in the business section because every bit of what follows on the topic of happiness is relevant to your career, especially if you have entrepreneurial ambitions. You’ll need all the good health, good looks and mental energy you can muster to influence people and survive the long hours. As luck would have it, the good habits that make you healthy and energetic help to make you happy at the same time, so it’s a double win.

As far as I can tell, people usually experience the sensation of happiness whenever they have both health and freedom. It’s a simple formula:  Happiness = Health + Freedom  I’m talking about the everyday freedom of being able to do what you want when you want to do it, at work and elsewhere. For happiness, timing is as important as the thing you’re doing. For example, your favorite food is useless to you if the only time you can eat it is when your stomach is already full. But if I offer you bland food when you’re starving, you’ll feel as if you won the lottery. The timing of things matters.

The same principle is true for exercise. If you exercise when you’re in the mood for it, you can enjoy the workout. But if you can only exercise after a long day on the job and a grueling commute, you might hate it. There’s a right time and a wrong time for nearly every activity, from sleep to sex to paying bills. Matching your mood to your activity is a baseline requirement for happiness. The good news is that timing is relatively controllable, especially in the long run.

If you’re just starting out in your career, it won’t be easy to find a job that gives you a flexible schedule. The best approach is a strategy of moving toward more flexibility over the course of your life. That quest could take the form of badgering your pointy-haired boss into letting you work from home one day per week, or it might mean going back to school to learn a skill so you can run your own business. In my case, it means waking up several hours before the rest of the family. There isn’t one formula for finding schedule flexibility. Just make sure all of your important decisions are consistent with an end game of a more flexible schedule. Otherwise you are shutting yourself off from the most accessible lever for happiness — timing.  We can’t ignore the role of money in all of this. Money can’t directly buy happiness, but it can give you more options, and that’s an important part of freedom. So don’t give up too much income potential just to get a flexible schedule. There’s no point in having a flexible schedule if you can’t afford to do anything.

The second part of the happiness formula is health. It’s never a good idea to take health tips from cartoonists, so check with your doctor if anything here sounds iffy to you. I don’t know how many people have died after reading health tips from cartoonists, but it probably isn’t zero. Don’t say you weren’t warned.  The most important thing to know about staying fit is this: If it takes willpower, you’re doing it wrong. Anything that requires willpower is unsustainable in the long run. And studies show that using willpower in one area diminishes how much willpower you have in reserve for other areas. You need to get willpower out of the system. I’ll show you some tricks for doing that.

My observation is that you can usually replace willpower with knowledge. That isn’t an obvious point, so I’ll give some examples.  Imagine you are hungry and I offer you a delicious but unhealthy dessert. It would take a lot of willpower to resist. Now imagine the same scenario, but I simultaneously offer a healthier food option that is also delicious. Suddenly it is easy to pick the healthy alternative over the dessert. The dessert was only irresistible when the alternative was starving. So the trick for avoiding unhealthy foods is to make sure you always have access to healthy options that you enjoy eating. Your knowledge of this trick, assuming you use it, makes willpower far less necessary. 

Now imagine I offer you a choice of pasta or a white potato. And let’s say you enjoy both to a similar degree. Which do you choose? If you have only a basic understanding of nutrition — similar to what most people have — you might say it’s a toss-up. You’ve heard carbs are bad for you and that’s where your knowledge ends. But if you knew that pasta is far lower on the glycemic index than a white potato, you would make a far healthier choice that requires no willpower at all. All it took was knowledge.  And while you’re eating your pasta, feel free to pile on the parmesan cheese. Cheese adds calories, but the fat content will help suppress your appetite, so you probably come out ahead. If you didn’t already know that, you might end up using willpower to avoid cheese at dinner and willpower again later that night to resist snacking.

A little knowledge replaces a lot of willpower. Is there anything else you should know about diet? Let me give you a quick quiz.

Did you know that sleepiness causes you to feel hungry?

Did you know that eating peanuts is a great way to suppress appetite?

Did you know that eating mostly protein instead of simple carbs for lunch will help you avoid the afternoon energy slump?

Did you know that eating simple carbs can make you hungrier?

Did you know that exercise has only a small impact on your weight?

If this is the first you have heard any of those facts, and you are sporting some extra pounds, you probably have a knowledge gap that feels to you like a shortage of willpower.

Speaking of knowledge, I’ve recently discovered that my cravings for certain foods can be manipulated. That surprised me because I thought my food preferences were baked into my DNA. I once loved french fries with an almost insane passion. But after I started noticing how drained and useless I felt after eating simple carbs, french fries became easy to resist. Knowledge weaned me off french fries when willpower could not.

I also learned that I can remove problem foods from my diet if I target them for extinction one at a time. It was easy to stop eating three large Snickers every day (which I was doing) when I realized I could eat anything else I wanted whenever I wanted. I can give myself that kind of permission because I’ve trained myself to enjoy relatively healthy food and to always have it nearby.

If you’re on a diet, you’re probably trying to avoid certain types of food, but you’re also trying to limit your portions. Instead of waging war on two fronts, try allowing yourself to eat as much as you want of anything that is healthy. I think you’ll find that healthier food is almost self-regulating in the sense that you don’t have an insatiable desire to keep eating it the way you might with junk food. With healthy food, you tend to stop when you feel full. That has been my experience anyway. In my 20s I could snarf my way through an entire box of donuts. But not once have I eaten an apple — which I also enjoy — and started in on a second apple.  One of the biggest obstacles to healthy eating is the impression that healthy food generally tastes like cardboard. So consider making it a lifelong system to learn how to season and prepare healthy foods. If you know how to make your veggies taste great, it isn’t so hard to avoid junk food. Here again, knowledge replaces willpower.

It’s easy to spot the people who are trying to use willpower instead of knowledge to get healthier.  

They tend to say things like this:

My goal is to lose 10 pounds.

In my experience, the fittest people have systems, not goals, unless they are training for something specific. A sensible system is to continuously learn more about the science of diet and the methods for making healthy food taste great. With that system, weight management will feel automatic. Goals aren’t needed.

I’m limiting my portion size.

You only need to do that if you are eating the wrong foods. Eating half of your cake still keeps you addicted to cake. And portion control takes a lot of willpower. You’ll find that healthy food satisfies you sooner, so you don’t crave large portions.

I’m increasing my workout to lose a few pounds.

No one can exercise enough to overcome a bad diet. Diet is the right button to push for losing weight, so long as you are active. People who eat right and stay active usually have no problems with weight.

I’m doing the (whatever) diet or cleanse.

Following a diet is hard. A cleanse is even harder. It takes effort and willpower. You’re better off learning to eat right and letting that knowledge nudge you in the right direction over your lifetime.

Once you get your diet right, the next topic to tackle is exercise. I’m about to share with you the simplest and potentially most effective exercise plan in the world. Here it is:  Be active every day.  Under this system, anything that gets you up and moving counts. It doesn’t matter if you’re swimming, running or cleaning the garage. When you’re active, and you don’t overdo it, you’ll find yourself in a good mood afterward. That reward becomes addictive over time. You’ll be like Pavlov’s dogs, but conditioned to be active. After a few months of being moderately active every day, you’ll discover that it is harder to sit and do nothing than it is to get up and do something. That’s the frame of mind you want. You want exercise to become a habit with a reward so it evolves into a useful addiction. When that happens, you no longer need willpower to exercise.

It’s important to remember that the intensity of your workout has a surprisingly small impact on your weight unless you’re running half-marathons every week. If your diet is right, moderate exercise is all you need. Your natural impulse to seek variety and challenge will cause you to learn more about the best practices of exercise over your lifetime. The only thing you absolutely need to get right is the part about being active every day.

When I was in my 20s I enjoyed playing pick-up games of soccer on Sunday mornings. It was terrific exercise, but it left me so sore I couldn’t exercise for several days afterward. Whoever came up with the saying “No pain, no gain” hadn’t thought it through. For me, the pain kept me from gain. These days I simply stay active every day, without pain and without the need for willpower, and I’m in the best shape of my life at age 56.

You will be tempted to quibble with some of the things I said about diet and exercise. Don’t get hung up on the details, because science keeps changing what we think we know anyway. The important point is that there are simple ways to substitute knowledge for willpower so you can ease into healthier eating and an active lifestyle. When your body is feeling good, and you have some flexibility in your schedule, you’ll find that the petty annoyances that plague your life become nothing but background noise. And that’s a great launch pad for happiness.

 

As you find yourself getting healthier and happier, the people in your life will view you differently too. Healthy-looking people generally earn more money, get more offers and enjoy a better social life. All of that will help your happiness.  Keep in mind that happiness is a directional phenomenon. We feel happy when things are moving in the right direction no matter where we are at the moment. The homeless guy who finds a promising dumpster is happier in the moment than the billionaire who just lost $100 million on a bad investment. It’s the direction of your life — progress if you will — that influences happiness. When you are learning more about diet and exercise it will give you the sensation of progress and control over you destiny. And that feels good compared to losing ten pounds and gaining it back.  I’ll reiterate that you shouldn’t get your health information from cartoonists. I’m a simplifier, not a doctor. All I’m offering is the idea that happiness is more accessible if you replace willpower with knowledge and you replace short-term goals with lifelong systems.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/read-this-if-you-want-to-be-happy-in-2014/2014/01/02/d96370f0-7192-11e3-9389-09ef9944065e_story.html