WORDS Brian Carroll
This month in MADE, Brian Carroll gets an opportunity to talk with Ethan Kaplan, Senior Vice President of Live Nation and co-founder of Live Nation Labs. Ethan worked his way up from running the most popular fan site for rock band R.E.M. (becoming close friends with that band) to the position of record executive at the band’s label, Warner Bros., before making the move to Live Nation, the world’s largest music promotion and ticketing company. He joins us in advance of an upcoming lecture and talk at the Cloverdale Playhouse on February 25th about the current state and future of the music industry.
So, tell me, just how screwed ARE bands that don’t have an internet presence?
Uh, you’re not a band, basically. I know zero bands that don’t have an internet presence.
You can’t really be a functioning, performing entity known as a band without one at this point. It is kind of the only outlet left, besides just playing in front of people. So, there may be bands of convenience that just play in front of people, but if you’re serious about making money from your art, its kind of a prerequisite.
Can you tell us a little bit about Live Nation Labs and their mission in a nutshell?
Live Nation Labs is basically an internal startup to Live Nation. Live Nation is the largest concert promoter in the world. We also own Ticketmaster, making us one of the ten biggest e-commerce sites in the world, and we have an artist management company. We’re a division that sits alongside all those. We’re responsible for Livenation.com and Live Nation Mobile in the US and Canada. Our aim when we started was to really take a technology-focused approach to solving business problems, so we’re very engineering-focused. We operate like a startup with the support of a big company. We tackle problems in the way a startup would: we try to learn from our customers, hypothesize, testing-wise, built fast, build fast, and keep extremely nimble. So, we’re entering our third year of existence, I have twenty five people on my team, which is a mixture of mostly engineers, some designers, and some product leads, and we have a lot of stuff to do, but we’ve accomplished a lot since we started it.
Bands with several members may have no problem getting someone in the band to run promotion, but solo artists can often find themselves too busy recording and practicing to give it much thought. Do you think as music promotion becomes easier through apps that we will see a rise in independent solo artists, or is the day of the lone wolf over?
I always say, “Water finds it way.” Solo acts have existed since music has existed, and it’s always been tough to be a singer-songwriter on your own. You’re playing open mics, you’re trying to get shows, you’re hauling your own equipment; It hasn’t changed much. Certainly there’s tools that make it easier.
I have a lot of friends that are well-known (and some not well-known) acts, and they always have a network of people that may not be in a band, but certainly support them. Their wives, their brothers, their sisters, sometimes their parents, and you know, where there’s a will, there is always a way.
If someone is really serious about what they do, they’ll definitely find a way to make it happen. Technology (in terms of apps, sites with different services, and software) has made certain aspects of it easier to do on your own and from the road; certainly outreach is easier with Twitter and things like that, but I don’t think it really makes much of a difference if you’re solo or if you’re in a band. There’s more work being in a band than being alone, just trying to keep a band together, for instance.
If a band or artist had to pick just one currently available app to use for music promotion, which would do you think would be the most effective in reaching an audience that actually cares?
I’d say Twitter at this point. I mean, it’s between Twitter and Facebook, but I always lean towards Twitter because I like their products better.
If music artists had the same access to collated meta-data (such as tags and descriptions) as webmasters and marketing departments do behind the scenes, they could easily determine the least-often-used characteristics of music to generate work unlike anything the world has ever heard. What resources, if any, do you think an artist can currently use to hack music history like this?
Every music service tries to tackle music discovery in meta-data. Beats Music just launched today, and they try to do the “curated playlist” thing, Spotify tries to do it, ARIA tries to do it, ECHOnet is an entire service that a lot of these use to do it. I think being a student of musical history is not predicated on having a service that gets you access to what genres there are. You can easily rabbit-hole yourself into genre explorations in any of the services. You can start tracing the history of punk music from Spotify, for instance, and you can spend all day going through every aspect of punk and new wave music from today back into the Velvet Underground - if you wanted to. It’s not going make you any better of a musician than going to a local record store and asking the clerk, you know, “What record should I buy besides the Velvet Underground’s ‘Loaded’ or ‘...and Nico’?” There’s always ways to explore the history of what you make, but everybody is always informed by whatever sources of history they wanted to be, whether it’s a data service and tool telling you that, your older brother, the record store clerk, or Wikipedia. There’s no real good answer there on how you make and form your influences.
Does devoting one’s career to digital media like apps, as opposed to physical media ever feel risky? Do you ever imagine a time when the screens just won’t turn on anymore?
I’ve been in digital as a career career since I was fifteen. The screens have never got turned off, there’s just more of them. I’m surrounded by [screens.] It used to be there was one computer on my desk, and now I have an iPad, a computer, an iPhone, four computers on various desks, screens everywhere. In my car and when I fly in airplanes there’s a screen, so I tell you, I can’t get away from them at this point. They’re just multiplying. I think that they’re going to just disappear in certain ways, I think technology moves towards zero, or towards transparency, and we’ve seen that happening in the past couple years, with screens getting smaller and more ubiquitous, or screens getting bigger and more ubiquitous. I think technology always is on a path to the infinite in that way, and that’s definitely transpired.
In 2007, an infamous study was conducted by the Spanish National Research council, in which pop music for the past fifty years was mathematically analyzed and scientifically proven to be increasingly less complex and dynamically interesting of late, validating a common complaint of older generations. Does it ever feel like artists are being unfairly rewarded for setting the bar too low?
Umm, no. If you ask any pop music act if they set the bar too low, they would point to their producer or record company for the reason they did so. Attention spans are less, because there’s more options for how to consume stuff, so getting attention above the band is harder. What you’re seeing is just normal organization and optimization, given [the] increasing amounts of output. So, radio starts normalizing because there’s less attention given to it; it has to find the path toward getting attention. It’s like genetic algorithms: the fittest survive. Sadly, in pop music, which is radio-driven for the most part, the fittest is crap, but that’s not a slight on pop music, that’s just what pop music is. Pop has never really changed.
If you trace the history of Top 40 pop, you know, the old Dick Clark kind-of-stuff, the structures are the same, chord progressions are the same, methodologies are the same, nothing’s really changed. Radio is still the primary outlet for pop. Now what constitutes pop has adapted, right? It used to be that Urban music was more of a heavy influence on Top 40, now it’s EDM, Country is bigger than ever right now, but the fundamentals of what makes a good pop song? You can go back to Stax, and Sun Records, and any of the older record labels that did that and it’s not much different. The production for us is less adventurous, certainly, than, you know, Phil Spector, but Dr. Luke and Phil Spector are cut from the same cloth.
In a related question, if we have the technology to analyze the content of music, meaning it is not entirely subjective, is it ever automatically sorted by quality or complexity on these apps, for the benefit of listeners who might feel, like you said, that ninety percent of the music on these apps is not good enough to justify the download, or is that sort of generic judgment best left to the fans rather than algorithms?
I think that’s the human factor of music. There’s no predicting what people are going to react to in music. Your taste is always formed a lot younger than people expect it to be and people are a lot less adventurous than app developers and manufacturers want them to be. Taste is so highly subjective, everyone has a guilty pleasure, and everybody has a fanatical drive towards certain artists, but it’s so individualized that no algorithms can really parse that. I can say, somewhat, that if you like this band, you may like that band, but that’s an informed decision based on me being somewhat of a tastemaker and knowing musical history and knowing why this band sounds so similar. And that’s more me knowing, personally, “Oh, this band listened to that band, so I know they have similarities and since they are similar to each other, fans of these might be similar to each other,” but no algorithm’s going to tell me that; it’s all based on the human factor.
Did you have any mentors in college, and what was it about them that inspired you?
In college, I was in the newspaper industry and I had a lot of mentors in that industry. Sadly, a couple of them are now unemployed, when that industry died, a couple of them just lost their job recently. I worked with newspapers since I was fifteen. On the music side of things, during college I was working with R.E.M. and their manager, Bertis Downs, was one of my big mentors as I worked through college and grad school, and eventually landed at Warner Bros. Records. That entire band is definitely people I look up to, and gave me very good advice along the way in terms of the direction music was taking. There’s no better education in getting into the music business than being friends with one of the biggest acts of the last forty years. That didn’t work if I just favor it, it helped a lot.
If the foundation of a hipster ethic is avoiding the mainstream, does it make it harder for artists to hide in the shadows as a “coveted secret of the hipster elite” when everyone’s music becomes more accessible across the board? What steps have you seen artists resort to to try and reclaim that shrinking underground real estate?
I look at Jack White as an example of an artist that does this very well. Jack White is one of the most successful indie artists, but he’s retained the indie cred by not ever subscribing to one specific label or one specific method of doing anything. He’s unpredictable, and by being unpredictable, he is by nature more indie than any of the hipster bands, the Owl Citys and the Mountain Goats, and the whatevers of the world, even though he’s sold more records by far than any of them. So I think that is what I look at, or the David Byrnes, the Patti Smiths, and the Michael Stipes of the world. They defy a label by refusing to be labeled as hipster. Hipster is mainstream at this point, it’s just like flannel was in the post-Grunge era, and the Seattle sound, when that became co-opted by MTV. So, you know, hipster doesn’t mean anything. There’s artists that live outside of that by just not being defined by it, and that’s always going to be the most inky and individualistic thing that artists can do.
One always tends to feel a little repressed on the internet when a music review or blog post does not allow user comments. Do you feel that the reason that a website like Pitchfork Media disallows comments is that their audience will publicly reject, and therefore socially inspire rejection of their tastemaker status?
I think it’s important that a review stands on the review, and if you’re going to be a curator of records, as Pitchfork tries to be, or Rolling Stone, or NME, or Vox, or Selector, or MOJO, or Q, or any of the other magazines and curators, you have to stand on your own as a critic. Critics shouldn’t necessarily engage like that. I think the act of criticism is, by nature, a solitary act of judgment. It has to stand on its own. I think comments, to a degree, devalue a lot of what criticism has done. And, you know, I’m an advocate of community, and online community, and online identity; I just think there’s a time and a place. It doesn’t mean I like Pitchfork, and certainly as a curator and a critic they fall flat a lot, but I admire the ethos that stands on its own. It doesn’t have to rely on engagement with their audience or acknowledgment of that audience to be.
Two common methods of music promotion employed by record companies is to pay journalists directly to review their releases, and even more subversive, to pay interns disguised as peers to post loads of positive feedback about their new releases on music forums and blogs under multiple accounts. But if you were to inform the average music listener of this, they may not understand why these tactics are unfair, or, more likely, they may just not care. So my question is, if social media pressure to digest buzz wholeheartedly, especially among young people, already topples the sensation of being mislead by an entire industry, is there really any reason for record companies to resort to what is basically dishonesty in the first place?
I don’t even think they do anymore, at this point. It’s so much easier to get the entire fanbase to mobilize around an act than to try to be subversive.You don’t have to. Mainly in the Sixteen-Indigo days, interns were “astroturfing,” and certainly you did favors for journalists, that’s just good PR. You don’t even need to do that now. You can activate a fanbase, as an army, really easily at this point if you have a good Twitter following or Facebook following, to a dangerous extent. I haven’t been at the label in three years, keep in mind, but when I left we were able to mobilize street teams very easily as authentic promotions.
What was the first ticketed concert you attended?
Oh god, when I was four, it was Sheena Easton at the Concord Pavilion. After that, it was R.E.M., October 31st, 1995 at the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim.
What was the last concert you attended?
Devotchka? I think it was Devotcka, band from Boulder. Oh, it was Peter Buck’s wedding; it was “Edwardian Chair.” A bunch of R.E.M. guys, the Decemberists, and a bunch of people played.
It was a rock star wedding, so it counts.
Americans pay four-hundred percent more for internet speed only a third as fast as what is standard in Japan and South Korea, and we currently rate sixteenth worldwide in terms of internet speed. If everything we do now is connected to the internet, why do you think more corporate pressure isn’t being placed on ISP’s to lay the fiber optic networks they were ordered and paid to do by the U.S. Government? Why can’t some large corporation with a vested interest in the infrastructure just sue the pants off of the lazy bastards?
We’re a big, loosely federated nation of states, very large, with no economic incentive to do that. They have much more economic incentive to tariffs than to drive the local stuff, because that’s where the money is. There’s not a lot of money in home Ethernet, unfortunately, and the fiber activation has been a money loser for so long. They don’t have an incentive, one, and also they don’t want net neutrality upheld, two. So, [we have] the ISP’s because we’re a private enterprise state -- we’re not a BBC, or in the UK, where they actually provide that. They want net neutrality struck down, and they’re going to be holding out to a huge degree, as it’s just not in their economic interest. I think a lot of that is going to fall down as the cable model disintegrates. As everything goes IT-based, it’s going to be more incentivized to increase the speeds because they’re going to need it. In most cases it’s the upstream that’s limited, not the downstream.
What once-common genre do you seriously feel is most overdue for a comeback, given today’s music trends?
I’d say Rock music. There’s not a lot of good Rock, sadly.
Describe the penultimate music app of the future, “one app to rule them all,” and why it isn’t here now.
I don’t think there is one, that’s a loaded question. It could be an app that dis-intermediates all the streaming [music] providers and helps you match that, and there are apps like that, but these are all to various degrees of success. It’s a tough one, because I can’t think of any that are universal music apps. It’s an area that remains to be discovered, basically.
Could you let our readers know what apps Live Nation Labs has taken under their wing or developed, and how these apps differ from one another?
So far, the only big production app we have is the Live Nation app. It’s basically a content discovery app, and it’s the first version of it that we relaunched. We have more features added to it, coming soon. And we have other apps pending, for Android, iPad, and potentially some other small apps that we’ll be working on.
Internally, does your company ruffle feathers or scratch heads at Live Nation, or does everyone seem to “get it”?
Well...our approach is definitely sometimes controversial, but for the most part, people seem to get what we’re trying to do. We are disruptive in the sense that we approach things in a way that’s unique, more similar to how a startup would than a fourteen-thousand-person company.
On your company’s blog, one is just as apt to find personal business philosophy as they are marketed information, making it a veritable treasure trove of seemingly UN-corporate wisdom, guided by a genuine desire to show rather than tell. Given the common view on success in business, that it involves selling ideas to solve real problems, how much do you think altruism factors into the success of one startup over another?
I think goodwill with the user base, certainly, is an aspect of the success of a startup, but the reality is that however altruistic a startup is in respecting their users, and respecting their base, it does fail. The main aspect of being a startup is trying to develop a product market. You have to respect your investors, you have to respect your users, and you have to respect yourself, in terms of what you’re doing, and I think honesty on our site – you know, we’re a big company, and where we have to focus is being honest with our users, respecting our users, and not being a big, corporate identity and hiding behind that. So we try to take that same approach of being authentic, of being real, and apply it to how we deal with fans. It’s tough, because we’re a big company and people see us as a big company, but we have to apply that and check ourselves often and not rely on whether we’re the biggest; we have to listen.
In talking to music fans in Alabama, there is a general feeling that we are overlooked, excluded, or given a inferior selection of concerts compared to the rest of the country. Does the music industry know that we use the internet in Alabama, or should we just be glad to have a choice between, say, Jeff Dunham and Toby Keith?
Well, you know, people wrap tours based upon where they can sell tickets, sadly. Auburn is a college town, so you certainly do get people touring through there, I’m sure. Maybe not the biggest acts, but I’m not even sure what the venue picture looks like down there. But, you know, the whole indie music scene has its roots in the American South between Athens and Charlotte, so it’s not like you guys are forgotten about.
What music have you guys been listening to in office lately, and how have you been listening to it?
When I control it, I always put it on Sirius XM’s Classic Alternative station, which is essentially music, basically, by all the people I know or admire, like the Replacements, R.E.M., Television, Patti Smith, stuff like that. It drives everybody crazy because it’s like “old guy” music, and I’m not old, but it’s considered old guy music because it even predates me. Actually, the best record of the year for me was Joseph Arthur’s new record, ‘The Ballad of Boogie Christ,’ and a caveat: he’s a friend of mine, but the record’s amazing, it’s a double album - concept album - it’s really good. So that’s the new new record I’ve been listening to a lot.
You’ve given talks at SXSW on the future of the music industry. It seems like people in the industry, musicians and label owners, might especially benefit from your inside information in order to stay abreast of what is happening. Can you tell us a little bit about what topics we can expect at the upcoming talk at the Cloverdale Playhouse, and what impact or benefit checking it out might have on the music listener?
The title of the talk is “Nothing Can Save the Music Business But A Musician,” and it’s based upon a post I wrote, actually. The whole point is: there’s a lot of people that talk about how to save the music business, and how to solve music, and a lot of startups try that are often making products they think will fix the music business, or labels think they’re going to fix the music business, but the reality is that it’s a musician that’s going to fix the music business by being a musician. They’ve made music way before people even called it a business. People have been making music since they banged rocks together. Music may even predate human history and civilization. So in the end, startups will come and go, labels will come and go - labels have come and gone – artists will come and go...Music always survives. Music is very resilient and the business around music is actually very resilient; it’s just not resilient in the ways that people want it to be. So, a lot of what I want to talk about is not, just, you know, “I work in the music business,” but I’ve been friends and worked with musicians since I was fifteen, and in front of the biggest musicians in the world [R.E.M.]. I had to live through the latter half of their career arcs and a lot of what I think about music stems from my whole worldview revolving around that one band and all of their friends and the people associated with them. I saw this whole arc play out between 1996 and today, in terms of the “future of music” conversation. It’s been a conversation for fifteen, sixteen years, but in the end nothing much has changed. People still make music, people sell music, and people still like to go to concerts. People are still fans and are willing to lay down in front of a train for their favorite artists. I’m really passionate not about the future of the music business, but what music means and why music means what it means.
Ethan Kaplan will be speaking and taking questions from the audience at the Cloverdale Playhouse on Tuesday, February 25th at 7pm. The event is free, but donations are encouraged.