Music Articles

Song Rights After 35 years

• Since their release in 1978, hit albums like Bruce Springsteen's 'Darkness on the Edge of Town,' Billy Joel's '52nd Street,' the Doobie Brothers' 'Minute by Minute,' Kenny Rogers's 'Gambler' and Funkadelic's 'One Nation Under a Groove' have generated tens of millions of dollars for record companies. But thanks to a little-noted provision in United States copyright law, those artists - and thousands more - now have the right to reclaim ownership of their recordings, potentially leaving the labels out in the cold.
  
  When copyright law was revised in the mid-1970s, musicians, like creators of other works of art, were granted 'termination rights, which allow them to regain control of their work after 35 years, so long as they apply at least two years in advance. Recordings from 1978 are the first to fall under the purview of the law, but in a matter of months, hits from 1979, like 'The Long Run' by the Eagles and 'Bad Girls' by Donna Summer, will be in the same situation - and then, as the calendar advances, every other master recording once it reaches the 35-year mark.
  
  The provision also permits songwriters to reclaim ownership of qualifying songs. Bob Dylan has already filed to regain some of his compositions, as have other rock, pop and country performers like Tom Petty, Bryan Adams, Loretta Lynn, Kris Kristofferson, Tom Waits and Charlie Daniels, according to records on file at the United States Copyright Office.
  
  "In terms of all those big acts you name, the recording industry has made a gazillion dollars on those masters, more than the artists have," said Don Henley, a founder both of the Eagles and the Recording Artists Coalition, which seeks to protect performers' legal rights. "So there's an issue of parity here, of fairness. This is a bone of contention, and it's going to get more contentious in the next couple of years."
  
  With the recording industry already reeling from plummeting sales, termination rights claims could be another serious financial blow. Sales plunged to about $6.3 billion from $14.6 billion over the decade ending in 2009, in large part because of unauthorized downloading of music on the Internet, especially of new releases, which has left record labels disproportionately dependent on sales of older recordings in their catalogs.
  
  "This is a life-threatening change for them, the legal equivalent of Internet technology," said Kenneth J. Abdo, a lawyer who leads a termination rights working group for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and has filed claims for some of his clients, who include Kool and the Gang. As a result the four major record companies - Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner - have made it clear that they will not relinquish recordings they consider their property without a fight.
  
  "We believe the termination right doesn't apply to most sound recordings," said Steven Marks, general counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America, a lobbying group in Washington that represents the interests of record labels. As the record companies see it, the master recordings belong to them in perpetuity, rather than to the artists who wrote and recorded the songs, because, the labels argue, the records are 'works for hire,' compilations created not by independent performers but by musicians who are, in essence, their employees.
  
  Independent copyright experts, however, find that argument unconvincing. Not only have recording artists traditionally paid for the making of their records themselves, with advances from the record companies that are then charged against royalties, they are also exempted from both the obligations and benefits an employee typically expects.
  
  "This is a situation where you have to use your own common sense," said June M. Besek, executive director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at the Columbia University School of Law. "Where do they work? Do you pay Social Security for them? Do you withdraw taxes from a paycheck? Under those kinds of definitions it seems pretty clear that your standard kind of recording artist from the '70s or '80s is not an employee but an independent contractor."
  
  Daryl Friedman, the Washington representative of the recording academy, which administers the Grammy Awards and is allied with the artists' position, expressed hope that negotiations could lead to a broad consensus in the artistic community, so there don't have to be 100 lawsuits. But with no such talks under way, lawyers predict that the termination rights dispute will have to be resolved in court.
  
  "My gut feeling is that the issue could even make it to the Supreme Court," said Lita Rosario, an entertainment lawyer specializing in soul, funk and rap artists who has filed termination claims on behalf of clients, whom she declined to name. "Some lawyers and managers see this as an opportunity to go in and renegotiate a new and better deal. But I think there are going to be some artists who feel so strongly about this that they are not going to want to settle, and will insist on getting all their rights back."
  
  So far the only significant ruling on the issue has been one in the record labels' favor. In that suit heirs of Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley, who died in 1981, sued Universal Music to regain control of and collect additional royalties on five of his albums, which included hits like 'Get Up, Stand Up' and 'One Love.'
  
  But last September a federal district court in New York ruled that "each of the agreements provided that the sound recordings were the 'absolute property'" of the record company, and not Marley or his estate. That decision, however, applies only to Marley's pre-1978 recordings, which are governed by an earlier law that envisaged termination rights only in specific circumstances after 56 years, and it is being appealed.
  
  Congress passed the copyright law in 1976, specifying that it would go into effect on Jan. 1, 1978, meaning that the earliest any recording can be reclaimed is Jan. 1, 2013. But artists must file termination notices at least two years before the date they want to recoup their work, and once a song or recording qualifies for termination, its authors have five years in which to file a claim; if they fail to act in that time, their right to reclaim the work lapses.
  
  The legislation, however, fails to address several important issues. Do record producers, session musicians and studio engineers also qualify as 'authors' of a recording, entitled to a share of the rights after they revert? Can British groups like Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and Dire Straits exercise termination rights on their American recordings, even if their original contract was signed in Britain? These issues too are also an important part of the quiet, behind-the-scenes struggle that is now going on.
  
  Given the potentially huge amounts of money at stake and the delicacy of the issues, both record companies, and recording artists and their managers have been reticent in talking about termination rights. The four major record companies either declined to discuss the issue or did not respond to requests for comment, referring the matter to the industry association.
  
  But a recording industry executive involved in the issue, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak for the labels, said that significant differences of opinion exist not only between the majors and smaller independent companies, but also among the big four, which has prevented them from taking a unified position. Some of the major labels, he said, favor a court battle, no matter how long or costly it might be, while others worry that taking an unyielding position could backfire if the case is lost, since musicians and songwriters would be so deeply alienated that they would refuse to negotiate new deals and insist on total control of all their recordings.
  
  As for artists it is not clear how many have already filed claims to regain ownership of their recordings. Both Mr. Springsteen and Mr. Joel, who had two of the biggest hit albums of 1978, as well as their managers and legal advisers, declined to comment on their plans, and the United States Copyright Office said that, because termination rights claims are initially processed manually rather than electronically, its database is incomplete.
  
  Songwriters, who in the past typically have had to share their rights with publishing companies, some of which are owned by or affiliated with record labels, have been more outspoken on the issue. As small independent operators to whom the work for hire argument is hard to apply, the balance of power seems to have tilted in their favor, especially if they are authors of songs that still have licensing potential for use on film and television soundtracks, as ringtones, or in commercials and video games.
  
  "I've had the date circled in red for 35 years, and now it's time to move," said Rick Carnes, who is president of the Songwriters Guild of America and has written hits for country artists like Reba McEntire and Garth Brooks. "Year after year after year you are going to see more and more songs coming back to songwriters and having more and more influence on the market. We will own that music, and it’s still valuable."
  
  In the absence of a definitive court ruling, some recording artists and their lawyers are talking about simply exercising their rights and daring the record companies to stop them. They complain that the labels in some cases are not responding to termination rights notices and predict that once 2013 arrives, a conflict that is now mostly hidden from view is likely to erupt in public.
  
  "Right now this is kind of like a game of chicken, but with a shot clock," said Casey Rae-Hunter, deputy director of the Future of Music Coalition, which advocates for musicians and consumers. "Everyone is adopting a wait-and-see posture. But that can only be maintained for so long, because the clock is ticking."

Music has a fundamental affect on humans.

It can reduce stress, enhance relaxation, provide a distraction from pain, and improve the results of clinical therapy. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery demonstrates that music can reduce rejection of heart transplants in mice by influencing the immune system.

The link between the immune system and brain function is not clearly understood, nevertheless music is used clinically to reduce anxiety after heart attack, or to reduce pain and nausea during bone marrow transplantation. There is some evidence that music may act via the parasympathetic nervous system, which regulates the bodily functions that we have no conscious control over, including digestion.

Researchers from Japan investigated if music could influence the survival of heart transplants in mice. They found that opera and classical music both increased the time before the transplanted organs failed, but single frequency monotones and new age music did not.

The team led by Dr Masanori Niimi pinpointed the source of this protection to the spleen. Dr Uchiyama and Jin revealed, "Opera exposed mice had lower levels of interleukin-2 (IL-2) and interferon gamma (IFN-γ). They also had increased levels of anti-inflammatory IL-4 and IL-10. Significantly these mice had increased numbers of CD4+CD25+ cells, which regulate the peripheral immune response."

It seems that music really does influence the immune system -- although the mechanism behind this still is not clear. Additionally, this study only looked at a limited selection of composers, so the effect of music on reducing organ rejection may not be limited to opera.

Reverse Abbey Road

A photograph of the Beatles walking "backwards" across Abbey Road has sold for £16,000 at auction, several thousand pounds more than expected. The photo was taken by the late Iain Macmillan, during the same shoot that resulted in the Fab Four's famous album cover.

An unnamed buyer won the auction following a "frenzied bidding session" at Bloomsbury Auctions in London, on 22 May 2012. The rare item, one of six photos taken for Macmillan's shoot, reached almost twice the expected purchase price of £9,000.

Besides the direction of the Beatles' transit – and the purchase price – there's not much distinguishing the auctioned photograph from the official Abbey Road cover. But whereas Paul McCartney is barefoot on the LP cover, he wears sandals in this photograph. It is unknown what happened to his footwear in between.

Macmillan took the photos in just 10 minutes, standing on a ladder by the Abbey Road zebra crossing. Police were hired to stop traffic. "I think the reason [the photo] became so popular is its simplicity," Bloomsbury's Sarah Wheeler said last week. "It's a very simple, stylised shot, which people can relate to.".

Music As Therapy

When we first see Henry he is slumped in a wheelchair in a care home, his head down, his face expressionless. Then a member of staff puts headphones over his ears and tells him that they are going to play his music. A transformation takes place. Henry’s eyes open wide, he sings to himself and beats out the rhythm. His whole body becomes animated.

Later, he talks passionately and coherently about his musical tastes. It is as if a stimulant has been pumped into his brain, which in a sense is what has happened. Music is doing its miraculous work. The mesmerising YouTube clip of Henry has notched up 5.7 million views and alerted the world to something that those in the know have been aware of for many years — that music can have a profound effect on health and wellbeing.

From hospital foyers to operating theatres, from labour wards to care homes, music in all its forms is used to calm, to stimulate and to speed learning and recovery. It has been found to lower blood pressure and heart rate, to alter brain chemistry and levels of antibodies in the blood.

On a practical level, its effects can be extraordinary. When music from the Twenties and Thirties was played at mealtimes, care home residents ate more. Hip and knee replacement patients exposed to music and art needed less pain relief and left hospital a day earlier than those deprived of these stimuli.

According to Dr Claudius Conrad, the director of music in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, Mozart could save your life by reducing the need for sedation after surgery.

It is in dementia where the biggest strides have been made, from singing groups (see panel) to reminiscence singalongs and improvisation. Dr Trish Vella-Burrows, a music and health researcher at the Sidney De Haan Research Centre for Music, Arts and Health at Canterbury Christ Church University, says: “It’s a fantastic field to be working in now because the Government’s commitment to dementia care and the awareness that we need to reduce pharmacological interventions has coincided with a rise in community singing and music sweeping across the UK.

“At the same time we have more sophisticated tools for looking at the brain and the blood and working out what is happening. A study of amateur singers found raised levels of the hormone oxytocin, which helps to stimulate memory and social bonding.

“Brain scans show that the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that is highly stimulated when we make music together, is among the last to atrophy in many dementias. This may explain why music can elicit strong responses from people unable to communicate on any other level.”

Caroline Welsh, a flautist, witnesses this often though her work with Music for Life, a project run by Wigmore Hall and Dementia UK that sends leading musicians into care homes.

The residents selected to take part often show challenging behaviour that leads to their being isolated by staff and other residents. The aim is to encourage them to interact and show that a person remains — with a history and a personality.

The musicians visit for eight weekly sessions. “Once people lose language a whole range of things that matter to them cannot be discussed,” Welsh says. “They give up trying to communicate because it is too hard. But over the eight weeks we see people open up and try to communicate, and as they do they get more response from the musicians and staff. Because they feel somebody is trying to understand how they feel, they make more effort.”

Communication may not be verbal. “You can see changes in the way they sit, and move. They breathe more easily and show less agitation. One man, who spent most of the day in a state of great anxiety asking where the toilet was, always went straight to the music room on the right day without being prompted. Staff were amazed.”

Children with profound learning disabilities make up another group with whom music can be used as a communication tool. Felicity North, a senior therapist in the North West with the charity Nordoff Robbins, the UK’s largest private provider of music therapy, says: “At a non-verbal level, all the components of speech are present in music, including pitch, speed, phrasing and structure. Just as a baby vocalises and the mother repeats the sound, reflecting back what the child is doing, we can do that with music. We use music to work towards communication: some children may never actually develop speech.”

North encourages children to experiment. “They experience our understanding in a way that might be new for them. In time they learn about turn-taking, concentrating and imitating.”

The rewards of producing music can help profoundly disabled children to make choices and take chances. “You may have a child who has found it very difficult to hold anything. Then they become motivated to play an instrument with a beater and to hold it longer because they enjoy it. In time, they may be able to take a spoon and feed themselves.”

Mankind has probably been producing music longer than speech. Perhaps this explains why music can be used to calm and humanise the sterile settings of hospitals. Research at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital showed that music — sometimes in combination with visual art — reduced anxiety among new mothers, people receiving chemotherapy and patients being prepared for surgery.

Similar findings came from a study at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, among patients who listened to recorded music while having surgery under local anaesthesia. According to Dr Hazim Sadideen, who led the study, “calmer patients may cope better with pain and recover quicker”.

Dr Conrad, a pianist, has found that playing the right music — notably Mozart — to patients in intensive care lowered their blood pressure and heart rate, and they needed fewer drugs. “Respiratory complications are a major killer of postoperative intensive care patients. The quicker they can come off a ventilator the more likely it is that they will survive,” he says. With fewer sedative drugs that can happen faster. “You could say that Mozart helps you survive.”

There’s little doubt that live music brings something extra to the party. The charity Live Music Now, founded more than 30 years ago by Yehudi Menuhin, works with young musicians in health settings. Trudy White, Live Music Now’s strategic director for health and wellbeing, says: “The power of music ... can be greatly intensified when played live by a skilled musician. The musician responds to the mood of the audience, creating connections that make those present feel valued. If live music is used appropriately, people may visit the doctor less and need less pain relief; care homes can be happier places and budgets could be saved.”

Melodies for the mind

Mary Jenkins has advanced dementia. She has very little speech and is cared for during her waking hours by her daughter, Pat Clements. Ask her what day of the week it is and she is unable to tell you. But every Wednesday she knows she is going singing. That is the day she attends the Alzheimer’s Society’s Singing for the Brain group, run by Pat near their homes in Whitchurch, Bristol. “I have no idea how she knows it’s a Wednesday,” Pat says. “But she gets quite excited. She has a good sense of rhythm and tells me when I am going too fast.

“It amazes me that even people with quite severe dementia seem to be able to recall music and enjoy it. They sing songs they knew when they were younger, but can also learn new ones and recall them the following week. “You can see the sense of relief come over them. Their shoulders go down and smiles come over their faces. Some carers tell me the people they look after are more content and stable for the rest of the day and into the next.”

Research carried out at the Sidney De Haan Research Centre shows that choral singing has a clear effect on wellbeing. The researchers have identified a number of benefits, including engendering happiness and countering depression; distracting from everyday worries; controlling breathing, which reduces anxiety; and offering social support, which combats isolation and loneliness.

David Phelops, who runs the 50-strong Harrow Community Choir — funded by Rethink Mental Illness and aimed at users of the mental health services — agrees. “Choir members tell me they are more focused, happier and more energetic.

“Some have gone on to develop their musical skills. One young man with paranoid schizophrenia has returned to his trumpet since joining the choir. Others have formed a band. Some have joined a singing and composition course run by Live Music Now and will bring what they’ve learnt back to the choir. “People can get lost in the fog of their illness and the drugs they take. They suffer a loss of confidence, stigma and fear. One man spent his first session in a corner mouthing the words. Within a year he was standing in front of the choir doing a solo.”

Obsessives

Men who collect multiple copies of same album

(story begins bottom right corner "It's a Numbers Game")

Vinyl

ONE common trend in many Western countries, regardless of the health of their recorded-music markets, is clear: vinyl is back. Sales of LPs were up in both Britain and Germany last year. In America vinyl sales are running 39% above last year's level (see chart). In Spain sales have risen from 16,000 in 2005 to 104,000 in 2010. That is an increase from a tiny base, but any rise in media sales in Spain's ravaged market is noteworthy.

This is a second revival for vinyl. The first, in the late 1990s, was driven largely by dance music. Teenagers bought Technics turntables and dreamed of becoming disc jockeys in Ibiza. But being a DJ is difficult and involves lugging heavy crates. Many have now gone over to laptops and memory sticks.

These days the most fervent vinyl enthusiasts are mostly after rock music. Chris Muratore of Nielsen, a research firm, says a little over half the top-selling vinyl albums in America this year have been releases by indie bands such as Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes. Last year's bestselling new vinyl album was “The Suburbs” by Arcade Fire. Most of the other records sold are reissues of classic albums. Those idiosyncratic baby-boomers who were persuaded to trade in their LPs for CDs 20 years ago are now being told to buy records once again.

What is going on? Oliver Goss of Record Pressing, a San Francisco vinyl factory, says it is a mixture of convenience and beauty. Many vinyl records come with codes for downloading the album from the internet, making them more convenient than CDs. And fans like having something large and heavy to hold in their hands. Some think that half the records sold are not actually played.

Vinyl has a distinction factor, too. “It is just cooler than a download,” explains Steve Redmond, a spokesman for Britain's annual Record Store Day. People used to buy bootleg CDs and Japanese imports containing music that none of their friends could get hold of. Now that almost every track is available free on music-streaming services like Spotify or on a pirate website, music fans need something else to boast about. That limited-edition 12-inch in translucent blue vinyl will do nicely.

Deconstructing Pete Townshend and The Who

Much of what we talked about that day in 1997 was connected to the Second World War, Townshend’s father’s generation and his own, and the postwar trauma that he saw as the driving force behind rock music. His father, Cliff, had been a saxophonist in the Royal Squadronaires, an Air Force band employed to entertain British troops at home and abroad. I knew this, but didn’t know how much it meant to the guitarist and songwriter for the Who, who seemed to me beyond, above, and dismissive of all that.

“Trauma is passed from generation to generation,” he said, waving his arms emphatically, his crossed legs bouncing. “I’ve unwittingly inherited what my father experienced.”

In his new memoir, “Who I Am,” Townshend elaborates in a voice that is calm, frank, and willfully exacting, like someone carefully extracting clarity from the past’s haze. “So many children had lived through terrible trauma in the immediate postwar years in Britain,” he writes, “that it was quite common to come across deeply confused young people. Shame led to secrecy; secrecy led to alienation. For me these feelings coalesced in a conviction that the collateral damage done to all of us who had grown up amid the aftermath of war had to be confronted and expressed in all popular art—not just literature, poetry or Picasso’s Guernica. Music, too. All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to the truth.”

In retrospect, Townshend’s violent and somewhat awkward hotel-suite entry seems entirely apt. His onstage persona epitomized frustration writ large, with an array of shadowboxing gestures to compensate for inadequacies, perceived or real. His windmill style of slashing at his guitar strings signaled a failure to pick them fluidly, even if it made him shed blood and fingernails in the process (and it did). His scissor kicks and crouching leaps into the air merely brought him back down again, stomping on invisible enemies, or, as Townshend himself would write in one of his songs, “pounding stages like a clown.” He jumped, bounced, shook and swayed from side to side, but he never really danced, nothing so sexy or elegant for the gangly, slightly stooped and narrow-eyed guitar player with the impossibly large nose.

For Townshend, music is physical. As a child he was awakened by the late-night swing jam sessions of his father and friends, whose beats and crescendos thrilled even as they stole sleep. His devotion to a career in music was sealed while he was watching his father perform on stage. As a pre-teen seated next to two female fans, he overheard one of them gushing over his father’s sexual desirability.

Townshend would eventually tower over rock music, which he helped to create, successful in no small part because he smashed his instrument in an act of “auto-destructive art,” a concept championed by his former teacher, Gustav Metzger. But for Townshend, the guitar was not trashed, it was remade, transformed. “I haven’t smashed it,” he recalls in his memoir of his first unwitting stage act, prompted by a potentially embarrassing physical gesture that broke the guitar’s neck. “I’ve sculpted it for them…. I stumbled upon something more powerful than words, far more emotive than my white-boy attempts to play the blues.”

Visually, the members of the Who formed a kind of collective sculpted destruction. Their movements were tight, jerky, and erratic. Drummer Keith Moon, the inspiration for the character Animal in the Muppets, rocked in his seat, distended his arms, mouth agape as if he wanted to eat his drums whole. Singer Roger Daltrey stomped around in circles like an imprisoned convict, swinging his microphone (taped to its cable like a hockey-stick blade), wanting to hit someone hard, though only hinting at it, because he couldn’t, not in this jail. Bassist John Entwistle stood still but looked and sounded loud and angry, stewing in his corner.

And Townshend was in a fight. In his so-called “windmill” move, he could well be swinging a machete or turning a helicopter prop on its side. He leapt and slid on his knees across the stage, not in ecstasy, but in anger. He banged his guitar against his head, hating and hurting himself in equal parts, implicating the audience. At times, he strummed staccato hard and aimed his guitar at the audience, mowing them down with an aural machine gun.

It was never friendly or pretty. There were many rock stars singing about war, and the British experience of it in particular (Roger Waters and Pink Floyd adhered to this theme). But no one but Townshend and his band seemed in songs and onstage to be reenacting war, in all its rage, pathos, stupidity, and barbarism. “I was a yobbo [hooligan],” Townshend repeats throughout his book, “who desired respect and affirmation.”

I discovered Townshend’s music as a teen-ager. I soon realized that most of the rock music I’d liked before I heard him paled next to what he was producing. His music was demanding, you either listened to it or passed, because the music was played angrily, loudly, and menacingly, and then switched into passages of plaintive loneliness and humiliation. Several girls I was trying to woo hated it. Who wants to rock out and be humiliated?

If Led Zeppelin made you want to boogie, and the Rolling Stones and the Doors made you want sex, Townshend and the Who made you want to smash something up, maybe even yourself, and survive the assault. I didn’t understand the power of Townshend’s songs then, but now that I have known and spoken with him for several years, the map is clearer. Townshend was writing about the fallout from two world wars, and I’ve only experienced “war” as an abstraction. What would it mean, like Townsend in post-war England, to know that everyone you know has suffered and survived, but not without questions?

For Townshend, abstract suffering made his art sting—and, as is clear in our conversations and his memoir, he always wanted to make art with a capital “a.” This desire is equal parts plaintive and pathetic in his memoir. Older, consecrated artists like Leonard Bernstein grip him by the shoulders to tell him that his rock opera, “Tommy,” is momentous, a new form of art injecting blood into a tired medium. He nods appreciatively, and doesn’t believe them.

In the years since our first encounter in London, I have met Townshend on several occasions in New York and Tokyo. Each time, we have talked about war—what it means to him, and to me, twenty-plus years his junior. When I published my first book, “Japanamerica,” about the odd synchronicity between two societies, Japanese and American, at once at great odds and suddenly allies, my publisher asked me to send the book to Townshend. He had asked for it, why not give it to him? I was apprehensive. What if he didn’t like it, or worse, ignored it?

Instead he wrote the following: ”Japan’s holocaust was equally traumatic to the ones experienced by many Americans, and perhaps more sudden, more extreme and more focused. This story shows how today we all use movies, comics, music, art and advertising to face our past and its traumas, rather than to escape.” Now that I have read his memoir, I think what Townshend understood was my attempt to draw a parallel between what British musicians of his generation—beaten down by war, nuclear disaster, and identity crises—shared with Japanese artists, whose backgrounds and fierce artistry were shaped by the horrors of apocalypse, the bomb that can end everything as we know it. In contrast to all that was American whimsicality in the face of disaster. Japanese manga and anime artists created new visions out of the rubble of humiliation. They couldn’t fight, per se, but they could rattle the door and re-invent themselves, bursting through, tears and all.

Getting Rid of Earworms

They are the songs you cannot get out of your head. Now scientists may have found a way to help anyone plagued by those annoying tunes that lodge themselves inside our heads and repeat on an endless loop. Researchers claim the best way to stopping the phenomenon, sometimes known as earworms – where snippets of a catchy song inexplicably play like a broken record in your brain – is to solve some tricky anagrams. This can force the intrusive music out of your working memory, they say, allowing it to be replaced with other more amenable thoughts.

But they also warn not to try anything too difficult as those irritating melodies may wiggle their way back into your consciousness.

For those unwilling to carry around a book of anagrams, a good novel may also do the trick.

“The key is to find something that will give the right level of challenge,” said Dr Ira Hyman, a music psychologist at Western Washington University who conducted the research. “If you are cognitively engaged, it limits the ability of intrusive songs to enter your head.

“Something we can do automatically like driving or walking means you are not using all of your cognitive resource, so there is plenty of space left for that internal jukebox to start playing.

“Likewise, if you are trying something too hard, then your brain will not be engaged successfully, so that music can come back. You need to find that bit in the middle where there is not much space left in the brain. That will be different for each individual.

“It is like a Goldilocks effect – it can’t be too easy and it can’t be too hard, it has got to be just right.”

Dr Hyman and his team conducted a series of tests on volunteers by playing them popular songs in an attempt to find out how tunes can become stuck in long term memory.

By playing songs by the Beatles, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé while the volunteers completed mazes drawn out on pieces of paper, they found they could get songs to play mentally in the participants heads and that they were then likely to recur intrusively through the next day.

They then tested whether performing puzzles such as Sudoku or anagrams would help to reduce the recurrence of the earworms.

They found that while Sudoku puzzles could help prevent the songs from replaying their heads, if they were too difficult it had little effect.

Anagrams were more successful and they found that solving those with five letters gave the best results.

“Verbal tasks like solving anagrams or reading a good novel seem to be very good at keeping earworms out,” said Dr Hyman, who now hopes to examine whether similar techniques could be used to prevent other intrusive thoughts caused by anxiety or obsessiveness.

He added: “Music is relatively harmless but easy to start. Choruses tend to get stuck in your head because they are the bit we know best and because we don’t know the second or third verse, the song remains unfinished. Unfinished thoughts are more likely to return.”

Surveys by scientists have revealed a wide variety of songs tend to end up as earworms with three quarters of people reporting unique songs not experienced by others. The most common tend to be popular songs that are in the charts or are particularly well known.

Researchers, however, claim there is often little logic to the songs that become stuck in our heads but they often are songs we know well and like.

Dr Vicky Williamson, a music psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, has been studying earworms and says that the most likely songs to get stuck are those that are easy to hum along to or sing but are often unique to individuals. She has identified a number events that can trigger these songs to intrude on our every day lives, including repeated exposure to a piece of music, recent exposure to the music, seeing lyrics from the song, moments of stress and allowing your mind to wander.

She has been working with BBC6 Music to ask members of the public to identify their own stories involving earworms and is now attempting to identify new “cures” for those bothered by unwanted tunes.

Dr Williamson said: “Even reading a line in a newspaper can trigger the domino effect that starts a song running. During the trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor, we got a lot of people reporting Michael Jackson songs getting stuck in their head.

“Earworms seem to be the key to understanding how music gets so automatically connected in memory – we think we can use that. It could help alleviate people who are suffering from distressing thoughts.

“On learning we could help people suffering from cognitive decline, so if they can’t remember the stages to make a cup of tea, if you tech them it as a song, then they could make their own cup of tea rather than relying on other people.”

The Internet

It’s the weekend, Doctor Who’s back on TV and I’m doing a little time-travelling of my own. “God, this place is perfect,” says the boy, as we drive past the manicured cricket green and identikit cul-de-sacs of the small-town hell I grew up in. “I know,” I nod. “Can you imagine anywhere worse to be a teenager?”

That evening, back at my childhood home, we watch a BBC documentary about a dreamer from Bromley called David Jones, who wanted out of the suburbs so badly that he changed his name to Bowie, revolutionised pop music and ended up with a V&A exhibition in his honour. It reminded me of another broadcast I’d watched from the same armchair 15 years earlier. It was 1997, the 20th anniversary of the punk-rock wars. On my screen, face after battle-scarred face recalled how the limping pace of parish life had spurred them on to join the great youth uprising of 1977.

It was life-changing viewing. That same night I retreated to my bedroom to remodel my long, girly locks with a razor blade, and pen my own manifesto for getting out of Dodge — sorry, Dirge — City.

Fast-forward a decade and a half, and I’m getting the same swelling feelings of parochial frustration from watching the Bowie documentary. Only this time, instead of scurrying to my bedroom for another bout of hairdo terrorism, I reach for my iPad and merrily spend the rest of the evening swapping video clips of the Thin White Duke with the rest of the internet.

Until, fully sated, I fall asleep and wake up the next morning, not dreaming of trans-cultural anarchy, but worrying whether there is enough milk in the fridge for breakfast.

The internet has made me content. Even here, in the most mundane town in Britain, my wifi connection is all I need. Imagine having spent my teenage years like this — with the entire history of rock’n’roll at my fingertips and an endless online community of music fans to share it with. Blissful.

Too blissful, in fact. Because chances are, if that had been the case, I’d still be there now. Along with all the other dead-end shire kids who went on to use their restless energy for far more dramatic and creative ends than I ever managed.

Kids like the young David Jones. Would he have become David Bowie had he got broadband rather than a heavy dose of boredom and isolation for his 16th birthday? Or would he still be at home in Bromley, plugged into the Status Quo channel on YouTube and juggling a job in accounts? It’s a quantum-space problem too nightmarish to contemplate. One thing’s for sure: the boy was (almost) right: my small-town hell really was the perfect place to grow up. But especially 15 years ago, before the first internet router arrived.

Rolling Stones at Glastonbury

THE most famous lips in rock were sealed last week as the Rolling Stones prepared to take to the stage at Glastonbury.

Insiders revealed that Mick Jagger had rationed his speaking to no more than two hours a day and in no more than ten-minute bursts to preserve his voice for the big occasion.

The only public comments made by the 69-year-old, who sprays diluted Manuka honey and herbs into his mouth to lubricate his throat four hours before performing, were in an interview with the BBC’s John Humphrys recorded two weeks earlier.

A band insider said: “For him [Jagger] stopping talking has always worked best. It’s partly to do with the vocal cords, partly a calming technique.”

After 20 years of saying no to Glastonbury, the self-styled “greatest rock’n’roll band in the world” were leaving nothing to chance for their appearance last night.

As part of his preparations, Jagger applied at least three of his favourite Lift face masks (these are done at home) alternating with a £300 La Prairie Caviar facial — renowned for “intensive tightening and rejuvenation”.

Ironically, given that Michael Eavis, Glastonbury's creator, is a dairy farmer, Jagger also eschewed all dairy products for a week before the concert.

The singer spent weeks scrutinising videos of the headline acts for the previous four years to learn from their performances. The band’s road crew was pared down from the usual 200 to 50 but still included caterers, guitar engineers, sound and lighting technicians and Jagger’s masseur. There was, however, a large entourage of friends and family, including Jagger’s girlfriend L’Wren Scott, and the guitarist Ronnie Wood’s son, Jesse, who was with his partner Fearne Cotton, the broadcaster.

As part of their preparations, Wood and fellow guitarist Keith Richards spent hours running through the play list to cement their “running memory”, ensuring they could slip seamlessly from one song to the next, while Jagger spent months working with Torje Eike, a Norwegian fitness trainer. His gruelling fitness regime included running, kickboxing, cycling, gym work and ballet. In stark contrast, Richards told friends his main concern had been “making sure all my lighters have been filled”.

The band presented Glastonbury with one of the most eccentric and specific riders of its 43-year history, with requests for everything from Superglue (in case Ronnie Wood’s veneers drop out) to Richards’s regular request for HP sauce for his shepherd’s pie cooked to his own recipe by a member of the Four Seasons catering team who accompanied the band to Glastonbury.

Among Jagger’s requests were Prescriptives Super Flight Cream — noted for its superior moisturising properties for dehydrated skin — and a DAB radio (so Jagger could listen to the cricket). Meanwhile, Charlie Watts, the drummer, requested a “comfortable armchair” for his luxury yurt.

Jagger’s biggest concern, according to insiders, was the notoriously poor Glastonbury sound. He feared the Stones could end up sounding like a particularly ropey pub band.

After weeks of wrangling with the BBC over the rights to broadcast the performance (they finally bowed to allowing one hour of their set to be aired), the band had several meetings to discuss how to improve the sound quality. A Stones engineer was duly dispatched to the BBC’s outside location trucks to oversee sound mixes — costing the band thousands. And Richards came up with a guitar trick to deal with the vast sound on the night: he removed his low E string to create his instantly recognisable open G tuning. Glastonbury can be unpredictable for the legends of rock, with notable flops including U2. So the Stones took a big risk for a payment believed to be no more than £400,000. It was decades since they had earned so little for a concert.

But, as ever, they held a trump card. Plans are under way for a Stones DVD, tentatively titled 13 Stoned, which, although yet to be finalised, will probably include highlights from Glastonbury and their two Hyde Park concerts on July 6 and 13.

It will make them millions of pounds — so no matter what, the Stones will be the big winners from Glastonbury.

Spotify

It seems strange that just a few weeks after Pink Floyd relented and put their back catalogue on Spotify, Thom Yorke, of their spiritual heirs Radiohead, did the opposite, removing his records from the streaming service and tweeting: “Make no mistake, new artists you discover on Spotify will not get paid. Meanwhile shareholders will shortly be rolling in it. Simples.”

When I founded Saint Etienne in 1990, we pressed up white labels of 12in singles, put them in the car and sold them in London’s dance specialist record shops. It was reasonably lucrative but, more importantly, it meant we were written about. We were then offered a publishing deal from Warner/Chappell that was big enough for me and my bandmate Pete Wiggs to put down a deposit on a three-bedroom flat in Tufnell Park.

I was almost welling up as I wrote that paragraph. The industry has changed beyond all recognition. Publishing deals and record company advances like that don’t exist any more. Most people will buy music digitally, from iTunes — Apple, not the record companies, nor Spotify, and certainly not the artists, makes the lion’s share of money from music now.

Do they put it back in by saving historic venues,or supporting new talent? Not that I’ve noticed. They don’t have to take risks on advances for new acts, nor do they chance having piles of unsold stock in a warehouse. It’s an admirable business plan, the most successful in the history of the industry.

Yet, in spite of this, it is Spotify that is taking the heat. True, I don’t think I’ve ever had a cheque from Spotify, but even though Saint Etienne sold about 60,000 albums last year, the royalties I received from Apple weren’t enough to buy a second-hand Ford Fiesta.

A year ago I’d have suggested that a record should be available only as a physical product for the first six months, before going to iTunes and Spotify, rather like a film getting a cinema release ahead of the DVD. But Apple and others have thought of a way around this — most new laptops no longer have a disc drive, so you can’t add to your iTunes library from a CD. Nigel Godrich, the Radiohead producer, has said that “the music industry is being taken over by the back door”; in truth that happened more than a decade ago. Yorke and Godrich sound like a pair of medieval knights, and their anger has ancient precedents, in the 1930s when radio was seen as the enemy of record sales, and again in the 1940s when climbing record sales put live musicians out of work.

“We are just cutting our throats with this record business,” said James Petrillo, the musicians’ union leader, in 1942. “In New York music comes out of the walls and out of the ceiling all over town, but you never see a live musician ... we are scabbing on ourselves.” Strikes didn’t stop the way people consumed music then, and Yorke’s stand can’t change it now. The Spotify model is closer to radio than to digital downloads. With six million subscribers paying a maximum £10 a month, it isn’t surprising that Spotify’s royalties are tiny. But it helps younger listeners who have grown up with free music to discover new acts. This drives ticket sales, and a new talent will be paid for playing live or, if they get really big, on TV, in adverts and on film soundtracks. At which point this new talent could become rich and arrogant enough to thumb its nose at the industry, just like Thom Yorke.

Spotify - the Royalties  

In June, David Lowery, singer-guitarist of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, posted part of a royalty statement to his blog The Trichordist. Cracker's song "Low," he revealed, had been played 1,159,000 times on Pandora in three months; Lowery, in his capacity as the song’s co-composer, was paid $16.89. For 116,280 plays on Spotify, Lowery got $12.05. Meanwhile, "Low" racked up only 18,797 plays on AM and FM radio stations during the same quarter. But for far fewer spins, Lowery received far more money: $1,373.78, to be exact.

Just last month, Thom Yorke of Radiohead and producer Nigel Godrich pulled their Atoms for Peace project off of Spotify, citing similar inequities in how music-streaming services pay artists. "Make no mistake new artists you discover on #Spotify will [not] get paid,” Yorke declared on Twitter. “[M]eanwhile shareholders will shortly [be] rolling in it. Simples."

Maybe. Or maybe it's not quite as simples as that. The image of wide-eyed young musicians having their lunches eaten by rapacious corporations is pretty compelling, and the ongoing collapse of the record business makes it look even scarier. The week ending July 28 had the lowest total album sales documented since Billboard started using Soundscan to track sales in 1991.

But it's also worth considering who's paying whom when music gets streamed, and how that might change. Whenever you read a shockingly low number and worry about the fate of your favorite band, it's worth keeping three things in mind.

1) "The music business" is not the same thing as "the recorded music business"—especially for musicians. A recent survey by the Future of Music Coalition found that, on average, 6 percent of musicians' income comes from sound recordings. That's not an insignificant amount, but it's also a lot less than what nonmusicians might guess. (And, although there isn't reliable data from the pre-Napster era, anecdotal evidence suggests that the percentage has never been much higher.) Recordings are how listeners generally spend the most time experiencing music, but not how we spend the most money experiencing music. In practice, recordings mostly serve as promotion for the other ways musicians make money: performing, most of all, but also salaries for playing in orchestras and other groups, session work, and so on.

2) Streaming music is not the digital equivalent of radio. For the most part, each time a song is played on ad-supported Pandora or subscription-based Spotify, it reaches one person. Each time a song is played on the radio, it can reach thousands of people—but when you turn on a radio station, you don't know what you're going to hear. Musicians expand their audience when new listeners stumble upon their work, which is why getting airplay is so important to them. Neither Pandora nor Spotify currently has anywhere near as many listeners as AM and FM radio—another reason it makes sense for them to pay less—but they also don't present the same kind of opportunities for discovering new music. Pandora lets you pick particular artists you like, so you'll hear them more often (although you might also discover similar artists you don't know already). Spotify lets you choose exactly what you want to hear from a near-infinite jukebox (although it has a "radio" setting, too). Meanwhile, iTunes Radio has appeared on the horizon.

3) "Paying to play a song" is not as simple as handing a performer a check. Sound recordings tend to be owned by record labels, which pay performers upfront against the possibility of future royalties. American radio stations don't have to pay anything to the copyright holders of the sound recordings they play. (In fact, payola scandals suggest that money tends to flow from copyright holders toward radio.) Spotify and Pandora, on the other hand, do have to pay rights-holders for permission to play particular recordings. (For more details on who pays whom, which rates are public, and how rates are determined, see this excellent essay by Jean Cook of the Future of Music Coalition.)

Spotify's on-demand service typically pays copyright owners something like half a cent per stream. That doesn't sound like much, but at the level of record labels that hold the rights to thousands of songs, it adds up. (During the week of release of Jay Z's Magna Carta … Holy Grail, Spotify streamed 14 million of its tracks. At that rate—and who knows if that's even close to the rate Jay gets—his label would have raked in $70,000 or so. He's good at math!)

Likewise, Pandora has taken pains to note that heavily streamed artists can make plenty of money through their service. Last October, co-founder Tim Westergren blogged that the company pays upward of $10,000 a year apiece for playing recordings by more than 2,000 artists. That's not saying that the artists will see that much money, naturally, since the rights-holders are the ones who get paid; for a label, though, $10,000 is like selling 1,000 CDs.

But then there's the question of publishing, which is what’s bugging Lowery—the way songwriters get paid. Performers benefit from having their recordings played that aren't directly monetary: glory, promotion, name recognition. Songwriters generally don't, so they get a rate determined by law when their work is purchased or played. Though middlemen such as performance rights agencies and publishing companies take their cut, somebody like Lowery can still see a significant trickle of money from co-writing a minor hit 20 years ago.

But the momentum of online streaming shows no signs of slowing—in the first half of this year, it was up 24 percent from last year—and that's why songwriters are worried. Statutory publishing rates for streaming audio are currently low enough that the amount Pandora lays out for publishing amounts to only 4 percent of its annual revenue, or less than one-hundredth of a cent per stream, according to this editorial by two members of Congress. Pandora's hoping to lower that rate even further; earlier this summer, the members of Pink Floyd wrote an indignant USA Today opinion piece about Pandora's shady maneuvering. (It didn’t mention that the band had released its catalogue to Spotify a week or so earlier.)

There are plenty of high-profile holdouts whose music isn't on Spotify: AC/DC, Tool, Garth Brooks, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles—all artists for whom Spotify arguably can't do much good anyway. Nobody's going to hear the Beatles' music for the first time and fall in love with it by stumbling onto somebody's Spotify playlist, and Led Zep doesn't need to convince young music fans to come see them play live. But the rates Spotify pays to the kind of big names that attract subscribers are often much higher, as Sasha Frere-Jones notes.

At the other end of the scale, there are some independent labels (like the Chicago-based indie-rock label Drag City) and artists who have opted out of Spotify, which, as Thom Yorke correctly observed, doesn't generally pay them much anyway. English singer-songwriter Sam Duckworth complained last month that 4,685 plays on Spotify netted him a bit under 20 pounds, "the equivalent to me selling two albums at a show ... I think it's fair to say that at least two of those almost 5,000 listeners would have bought the album from me if they knew the financial disparity from streaming."

That might well be the case. If we're getting into hypotheticals, though, how many of those listeners might have bought the album, or come to one of Duckworth's shows, because they heard the stream and were impressed by what they heard? And how does that compare to what would have happened if one of Duckworth's songs had been broadcast once on the radio and heard by 4,685 people? More broadly, when does it make financial sense for musicians to restrict access to their recordings, and when is it simply a matter of asserting more control over their art?

There's no way to know the answers to those questions, but Nigel Godrich's explanation that pulling Atoms for Peace's recordings from Spotify was "about standing up for other artists' rights" doesn't entirely hold water. For less-than-famous performers, recording royalties have never been a way to get rich, or even to make a living; they're a way to build up enough of a reputation to make a living through other means, and maybe accrue a little bit of cash. It's songwriters—whether or not they're performers too—who need to be wary about what's going to happen as radio and recording sales gradually give way to streaming.      

Mondegreens  

If you ever sang along to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust with the words “Making love to a Seagull” rather than “ego” you may like to know that the Wellcome Trust has given £60,000 to the Clerks choral ensemble to explore the science behind misheard lyrics. The research aims to help our understanding of music perception among the hearing-impaired. The project, Tales from Babel: Musical Adventures in the Science of Hearing, will see the choral ensemble testing audiences across the UK on why they are able to follow some lyrics and texts in music but mishear others.

Edward Wickham, director of The Clerks, said audience members will use electronic handsets to record which words they can hear when the six-strong group sings different lines simultaneously.

As part of the project, the Wellcome Trust conducted a survey into what lyrics are often misheard. As well as the Bowie’s “ego” to “seagull” lyric, there was also “You’re gonna be the one at Sainsbury’s” instead of “You’re gonna be the one that saves me” for the song Wonderwall by Oasis.

The Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds has the line “A girl with kaleidoscope eyes” which was often misheard as “The girl with colitis walks by”.

Other examples included “Dance then, wherever you may be; I am The Lord of the dance settee” from the popular hymn Lord of the Dance by English songwriter Sydney Carter, and “Your voice is soft like submarine” instead of “summer rain” from Jolene by Dolly Parton.

The technical term for misheard lyrics is “mondegreen”, after a famous mishearing of the words “laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen” in a Scottish ballad.      

Music and Generosity  

Tipping in a restaurant isn’t just about the quality of the service. Customers give bigger tips to waiters who compliment them on their food choice and men give bigger tips to waitresses who wear make-up. But our generosity can also be increased by the right song lyrics or briefest message on the check.

In Europe especially, tipping is more optional than it is in the US and often runs to 5-10% rather than the 15-20% expected in the US. Celine Jacob et al tested the influence of the music played during lunch at a busy French restaurant. Two music CDs, each with 15 songs, were prepared. One CD had songs judged to have ‘prosocial’ lyrics while the other had neutral lyrics. These popular French songs were first selected by 281 passers-by and then rated by 95 undergraduate students. Customers listening to the prosocial lyrics left bigger tips.

Just how these prosocial songs affect us has been studied by Greitmeyer et al who tested the effect of songs with prosocial lyrics on the helpfulness of German students. If you’re wondering, as I did, what kinds of songs made the prosocial category, the English songs on Greitmeyer’s list included Michael Jackson’s ‘Heal the World’, Live Aid’s ‘Feed the world’ and, somewhat curiously I thought, ‘Help’ by the Beatles. These were contrasted with the socially neutral Jackson’s ‘On the line’ and the Beatles’ ‘Octopuses Garden’. These tracks might not be top of everyone’s playlist (I doubt that any amount of Michael Jackson would make my husband feel helpful) but as always these songs had been pretested for their power to bring out the prosocial in us. Of the 34 German students who listened to selected tracks, those who listened to the prosocial songs went on to show more empathy, co-operation and helping behaviour. This suggests that the customers in Celine Jacob’s French restaurant left bigger tips because the prosocial songs made them fell more empathic and helpful to the waiting staff.

But how do we know it was the lyrics and not, say the tempo or style of the tracks? Celine Jacob recently tested this by swapping song lyrics for written quotes on the customer’s bill (or check, as our US cousins call it). Five waitresses recorded customer behaviour, including tipping, over weekday lunch hours. Some customer bills carried the altruistic quote ‘A good turn never goes amiss’ from the French writer George Sand. Others had the Latin proverb: ‘He who writes reads twice’, and the remainder had no quote.

The quotes were first given to 20 passers-by who then rated their own level of altruism. Those who had read Sand’s quote were left feeling significantly more altruistic than those who read the Latin proverb. Back in the restaurant, customers, regardless of sex, who got the altruistic quote, gave bigger tips more often than those with the neutral quote or no quote at all.

What struck me was how easily our behaviour can be influenced by such a small, barely noticed message. Think of all the messages that we experience throughout the day, from jingles to bumper stickers. Our motives are constantly being manipulated and we are usually completely unaware that this is happening. As for dining Chez Ragsdale, I’m thinking of making my own dinner playlist.      

Lively app records concerts  

The hordes of music fans going to see bands this week at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex., can relive the concerts a couple of ways. They can make recordings of dubious quality using their smartphones.

Or, if they’re willing to spend a few bucks, they can get audio straight from the sound board at the concerts and, in some cases, professionally shot video by downloading an app called Lively. Some of the music is even free.

The app is from a new Seattle start-up, which is using the festival as a way to get wider exposure for a service it wants to make as essential to a touring band’s toolkit as microphones and amplifiers. The idea behind the Lively service is to give bands another way to make revenue while touring, without forcing them to become technology wizards.

To offer their recordings through the Lively app, bands simply need an iPad with an audio management app from Lively and an inexpensive piece of hardware for plugging into soundboards at concert venues. Lively is getting some venues to set this gear up permanently. For some concerts, it sets up three-camera shoots to create videos of the performances.

Lively clears song rights issues with music publishers. Bands can then put audio and video recordings of their concerts up for sale — $4.99 for audio; $9.99 for video and audio is standard — soon after the concerts happened. About half of the bands that use Lively choose to make their music free to fans. Lively takes a 30 percent cut of the sale, with artists taking the rest.

The idea for Lively came to Dean Graziano, the company’s founder and chief executive, in 2012 when he was at a concert in Seattle and witnessed a common, irksome sight: a sea of fans staring at the smartphones in front of their faces, rather than at the performers on stage.

“I saw 20,000 people with phones in the air and said this is lose-lose for everybody,” said Mr. Graziano in a recent interview in Lively’s loft-like office in an industrial neighborhood in Seattle, outfitted with performance spaces for visiting musicians.

Fans were pirating the concerts, most likely without even realizing it, he said. The performers, meanwhile, were missing out on an opportunity to make money from their fans with much higher quality recordings.

Lively’s service is getting more uptake at this point from up-and-coming bands, rather than the headliners selling out stadiums and giant amphitheaters. A few bigger names, however, have begun using the service, including the Pixies and Keith Urban.

At South by Southwest, Lively expects to providing recordings for more than 100 bands. By the end of the summer, the service expects to have more than 500 hours worth of live shows, said Mr. Graziano.      

Radio Caroline 

If you can remember the 1960s, so it is said (in a remark attributed variously to Dennis Hopper, George Harrison, Robin Williams and Grace Slick), you weren’t there. Actually, the exact opposite is the case. The decade is venerated precisely because so many people can remember it so well. They thus feel, as did Wordsworth about the early French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/To be young was very heaven.”

Central to this misty-eyed vision of the 1960s is Radio Caroline, which next week — how the years fly by when we’re having fun — celebrates its first half-century. It launched on air on March 29, 1964, when the achingly glamorous Simon Dee said these words: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is Radio Caroline on 199, your all-day music station.”

Supposedly named after President Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline was the first of Britain’s pirate radio stations. Operating in international waters, generally in converted trawlers or abandoned wartime forts on the North Sea, they unleashed all-day pop on a music-starved country, which until then had had to rely either on Radio Luxembourg (dire reception and evenings only, with the airtime sponsored by big record companies as a platform for their own artists) or the Light Programme (which confined the dangerous irreverence of pop and rock to a few hours a week).

In breaking this stranglehold, Caroline’s founder, a young Irish music promoter called Ronan O’Rahilly, who had been unable to get Georgie Fame any airtime, was following a family tradition of resistance to authority. He launched the station on an Easter Sunday because his grandfather, shot by the English in Dublin in 1916, was one of the leaders of the Easter Rising.

In a country now saturated with music, via radio, iTunes, Spotify, Deezer, Napster, MySpace, Blinkbox and YouTube, it is hard to convey just what a sensation Caroline was. Within a month, it was getting 2,000 letters a day; MPs were in uproar; and its advertising was used by the Duke of Bedford to bring visitors to Woburn Abbey. By autumn, it had more listeners than the three BBC stations put together. It nurtured groovy young DJs such as Tony Blackburn, Johnnie Walker, Emperor Rosko, DLT and Roger Gale, who showed how hip he was by becoming a Tory MP.

Most important, Caroline and the other pirates led directly to the birth of Radio 1, which launched the month after the pirates became illegal. It was Tony Benn who, as Labour’s postmaster-general, threw them off the air — and not the Tories, as depicted in Richard Curtis’s film The Boat That Rocked.

In some form or another, in different places on sea and inland, Caroline has mostly been broadcasting ever since. Today, online only, it operates from a studio in Kent, a 24-hour classic-album station run by volunteers and funded entirely by listeners. A campaign to get it on medium wave has come to nothing. But it is still here, and celebrating its 50th birthday. The first record it ever played was the Rolling Stones’ Not Fade Away, which certainly turned out to be prophetic.      

Urinetown  

Urinetown? Are they taking the piss? But no, it’s no good, all the best pee puns and wee jokes have been made. Some of them are in the show itself. Even the title is a pun (You’re In Town). We will just have to take it seriously, for it is at bottom a fundamentally serious piece.

Urinetown started life on the New York fringe in 1999, went on to Broadway, where it ran for three years and won three Tonys, and now arrives over here, directed by Jamie Lloyd. It’s an extended lavatory joke that’s also a satire on American corporate capitalism, which is hardly a daring or original target — what about the operations of Chinese state capitalism in Africa, for a change? Still, when global corporations seem increasingly unlikely to pay tax, while claiming ownership of earth, water and air, and even patenting genes, Urinetown still has a point.

Caldwell B Cladwell is head of UGC (Urine Good Company) and sports a scary moustache. There’s been a drought for the past 20 years, the reservoirs have dried up, but UGC has come to the rescue with a brilliant plan: it collects the public’s urine, recycles it as drinking water and limits everyone’s daily allowance. Everyone’s? Well, mostly the poor’s. But such enlightened green policies also require some pretty dictatorial laws and curbs on liberty, as we are discovering in the real world. It is now illegal to pee anywhere except in a “public amenity” — owned by UGC, of course — and, what’s more, you have to pay for the privilege. Don’t pay, don’t pee. UGC is becoming richer and richer, the public more and more desperate.

Meanwhile, there’s Cladwell’s daughter Hope, a bit of an ingénue. After a kindly explanation from her father about UGC’s benevolence, she exclaims: “Gosh, I never realised large monopolising corporations could be such a force for good in the world!” But after witnessing a confrontation between the brutal, corrupt police and the heroic, handsome lavatory attendant Bobby Strong, she starts to wonder. Bobby has become radicalised after his poor old dad was caught short and ended up being sent off to the penal colony of Urinetown — a place from which no one has ever returned...

There are scenes that hover on the edge of tiresome silliness, but some amusing jokes, too, the best delivered by Jonathan Slinger as the horrible Officer Lockstock, with his customary creepy, gloating grin. Often they’re jokes about the show itself. “Nothing can kill a show like too much exposition,” he explains near the start. “How about bad subject matter?” asks Little Sally (Karis Jack), a wide-eyed Dickensian street child. “Or a bad title?” There’s also a rare olfactory joke here, with the auditorium lightly spritzed at intervals with some horrible approximation of pine-scented air freshener, of the kind favoured by unlicensed minicab drivers.

Eventually, Bobby leads the people in revolt against UGC and their utterly corrupt political cronies, bearing banners with slogans such as “Free to Pee!” and “Power to the Peeple!”. Then the show darkens, with some genuinely unpleasant stage brutality that wipes the smile from our faces completely. As a song’n’dance satire, Urinetown is not that funny. The lyrics, by Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis, aren’t clever or biting enough, the musical parodies aren’t overblown enough — it’s not even rude and bawdy enough. (The childish mind, ie mine, will immediately want to know: yes, but what about everybody’s poo?) Its ropy fringe origins are too obvious, despite talents such as Slinger and Lloyd, Soutra Gilmour’s powerful industrial-nightmare set and Ann Yee’s excellent choreography.

The ending, though, is grimly satisfying. The ultimate villains of the piece aren’t the CEOs and the megacorps. Because who actually used up all the water? Us. We did. As with every other environmental problem or disaster now facing us, there are seven billion perpetrators and, cleverly playing dual roles, seven billion victims. Little Sally wants to know why this musical can’t have a happy ending. Because, says Officer Lockstock, it’s not that kind of show. Life isn’t like that.

As an extended satirical lavatory joke, Urinetown hardly compares with, say, Jonathan Swift’s The Benefit of Farting Explained; as a water drama, it isn’t An Enemy of the People, and I’d hesitate to say “Urine for a treat”. But it’s certainly different.        

Spotify Stunt  

Spotify, the Swedish streaming service that looks primed for an IPO, has divided the music industry for years.

+ Vociferous detractors like Radiohead’s Thom Yorke (who had an imaginative description for the service last year) and David Byrne of Talking Heads fame have criticized the penny-pinching royalties it pays; supporters like Billy Bragg and the Eurythmics Dave Stewart (who said musicians should “worship” Spotify) say resistance is futile. The six million consumers who pay $10 a month for the premium version of the service are obviously fans.

+ Regardless, this week Vulfpeck, a funk band based in Michigan, thinks it has cleverly figured out a way to make Spotify pay the bills: by recording an album of complete silence and getting people to stream it while they sleep.

+ In this YouTube post Vulfpeck’s frontman Jack Stratton claims that for each Spotify user that streams “Sleepify”—which is comprised of ten tracks of complete silence—on repeat throughout the night, the band will make $4. If enough people do it, that could help it fund a free tour, which Stratton claims will visit the cities that stream the album the most.

+ So has Vulfpeck unearthed a new threat to the Spotify business model? Probably not. A spokesman for Spotify describes it as a “clever stunt” and confirms the company’s “artist services team” has already been in touch with the band. He said there are no plans to crack down on silent music.

+ Last year, Spotify paid out $500 million in royalties (70% percent of its gross revenues) and detailed typical monthly payments to artists in the following chart.

+ So, even in the unlikely event that Sleepify were to become a global hit, it wouldn’t break the bank. Whether other artists jump on the silence bandwagon remains to be seen.

+ Of course, Vulfpeck are not the first to record silent music. Composer John Cage is known for his use of silence, while Sonic Youth’s 63 second noiseless composition “Silence” was actually suspended from sale on iTunes for a while.      

Confusing Lyrics  

 Eggmen, distrustful elephants and plenty of jambo jumbo feature among the most confounding lyrics of all time, according to a survey. The research, which asked 2,000 people to rank the song words they find most confusing, singles out Lionel Richie, the Beatles, the Killers, Michael Jackson and Oasis.

A third of respondents said that Brandon Flowers of the Killers had baffled them with the words to Human, from the 2008 album Day and Age. In it, the frontman apparently deliberately decides to dispense with proper grammar in a reference to a quote from Hunter S. Thompson, the late drugaddled journalist.

The chorus involves Flowers posing the indecipherable question: “Are we human, or are we dancer?” The singer later states that he is on his knees begging for the answer.

Martin Cloonan, an expert in pop music at Glasgow University, said: “[He] has admitted that the line is taken from a Hunter S. Thompson quote, ‘We’re raising a nation of dancers’. Flowers said, ‘I say that it’s a mild social statement, and that’s all I’m gonna say’.”

In close second with 27 per cent was a line from I Am the Walrus, in which John Lennon points out: “I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the walrus, goo goo g’ joob.”

Professor Cloonan said: “John Lennon spoke of writing some of this while on an acid trip, which might help explain things. It is an exercise in surrealism and wordplay. Lennon did once declare [in the song Glass Onion] that ‘the Walrus was Paul’ but it appears to in fact be a reference to Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter and so, a reference to surreal or imaginary worlds.”

Among an array of eccentric achievements, Michael Jackson asked the world: “What about elephants? Have we lost their trust?” in Earth Song. Nearly 20 per cent of those surveyed put this in their top three.

“Ultimately this is a misjudged protest song,” Professor Cloonan said. “[It] sees a world in which the innocent simply have things done to them by malevolent forces. It could be construed as an attack on the ivory trade.”

In fourth place was the lyric “tom bol li de se de moi ya, hey jambo jumbo” in the song All Night Long by Lionel Richie, who admitted that the lyrics were “a wonderful joke”. He originally intended to use an African dialect that could not be fitted to the rhythm, so instead he made the words up.

Carly Rae Jepson may not be well-known, but her song Call Me Maybe is. In it she states: “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad.” Professor Cloonan said: “You really can miss something you’ve never had . . . it is about having something, rather than an actual person, missing in your life — a fairly common experience.”

Polling surprisingly low was Champagne Supernova, written by Noel Gallagher of Oasis. He admitted the lyric “slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball” was written when he couldn’t think of anything else that rhymed with “hall”.      

Millions of Vinyls  

Paul Mawhinney, a former music-store owner in Pittsburgh, spent more than 40 years amassing a collection of some three million LPs and 45s, many of them bargain-bin rejects that had been thoroughly forgotten. The world’s indifference, he believed, made even the most neglected records precious: music that hadn’t been transferred to digital files would vanish forever unless someone bought his collection and preserved it.

Mawhinney spent about two decades trying to find someone who agreed. He struck a deal for $28.5 million in the late 1990s with the Internet retailer CDNow, he says, but the sale of his collection fell through when the dot-com bubble started to quiver. He contacted the Library of Congress, but negotiations fizzled. In 2008 he auctioned the collection on eBay for $3,002,150, but the winning bidder turned out to be an unsuspecting Irishman who said his account had been hacked.

Then last year, a friend of Mawhinney’s pointed him toward a classified ad in the back of Billboard magazine:

RECORD COLLECTIONS. We BUY any record collection. Any style of music. We pay HIGHER prices than anyone else.

That fall, eight empty semitrailers, each 53 feet long, arrived outside Mawhinney’s warehouse in Pittsburgh. The convoy left, heavy with vinyl. Mawhinney never met the buyer.

“I don’t know a thing about him — nothing,” Mawhinney told me. “I just know all the records were shipped to Brazil.”

Just weeks before, Murray Gershenz, one of the most celebrated collectors on the West Coast and owner of the Music Man Murray record store in Los Angeles, died at 91. For years, he, too, had been shopping his collection around, hoping it might end up in a museum or a public library. “That hasn’t worked out,” The Los Angeles Times reported in 2010, “so his next stop could be the Dumpster.” But in his final months, Gershenz agreed to sell his entire collection to an anonymous buyer. “A man came in with money, enough money,” his son, Irving, told The New York Times. “And it seemed like he was going to give it a good home.”

Those records, too, were shipped to Brazil. So were the inventories of several iconic music stores, including Colony Records, that glorious mess of LP bins and sheet-music racks that was a Times Square landmark for 64 years. The store closed its doors for good in the fall of 2012, but every single record left in the building — about 200,000 in all — ended up with a single collector, a man driven to get his hands on all the records in the world.

In an office near the back of his 25,000-square-foot warehouse in São Paolo, Zero Freitas, 62, slipped into a chair, grabbed one of the LPs stacked on a table and examined its track list. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, khaki shorts and a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt; his gray hair was thin on top but curled along his collar in the back. Studying the song list, he appeared vaguely professorial. In truth, Freitas is a wealthy businessman who, since he was a child, has been unable to stop buying records. “I’ve gone to therapy for 40 years to try to explain this to myself,” he said.

His compulsion to buy records, he says, is tied up in childhood memories: a hi-fi stereo his father bought when Freitas was 5 and the 200 albums the seller threw in as part of the deal. Freitas was an adolescent in December 1964 when he bought his first record, a new release: “Roberto Carlos Sings to the Children,” by a singer who would go on to become one of Brazil’s most popular recording stars. By the time he finished high school, Freitas owned roughly 3,000 records.

After studying music composition in college, he took over the family business, a private bus line that serves the São Paulo suburbs. By age 30, he had about 30,000 records. About 10 years later, his bus company expanded, making him rich. Not long after that, he split up with his wife, and the pace of his buying exploded. “Maybe it’s because I was alone,” Freitas said. “I don’t know.” He soon had a collection in the six figures; his best guess at a current total is several million albums.

Recently, Freitas hired a dozen college interns to help him bring some logic to his obsession. In the warehouse office, seven of them were busy at individual workstations; one reached into a crate of LPs marked “PW #1,425” and fished out a record. She removed the disc from its sleeve and cleaned the vinyl with a soft cloth before handing the album to the young man next to her. He ducked into a black-curtained booth and snapped a picture of the cover. Eventually the record made its way through the assembly line of interns, and its information was logged into a computer database. An intern typed the name of the artist (the Animals), the title (“Animalism”), year of release (1966), record label (MGM) and — referencing the tag on the crate the record was pulled from — noted that it once belonged to Paulette Weiss, a New York music critic whose collection of 4,000 albums Freitas recently purchased.

The interns can collectively catalog about 500 records per day — a Sisyphean rate, as it happens, because Freitas has been burying them with new acquisitions. Between June and November of last year, more than a dozen 40-foot-long shipping containers arrived, each holding more than 100,000 newly purchased records. Though the warehouse was originally the home of his second business — a company that provides sound and lighting systems for rock concerts and other big events — these days the sound boards and light booms are far outnumbered by the vinyl. Many of the records come from a team of international scouts Freitas employs to negotiate his deals. They’re scattered across the globe — New York, Mexico City, South Africa, Nigeria, Cairo. The brassy jazz the interns were listening to on the office turntable was from his man in Havana, who so far has shipped him about 100,000 Cuban albums — close to everything ever recorded there, Freitas estimated. He and the interns joke that the island is rising in the Caribbean because of all the weight Freitas has hauled away.

Allan Bastos, who for years has served as Freitas’s New York buyer, was visiting São Paulo and joined us that afternoon in the warehouse office. Bastos, a Brazilian who studied business at the University of Michigan, used to collect records himself, often posting them for sale on eBay. In 2006, he noticed that a single buyer — Freitas — was snapping up virtually every record he listed. He has been buying records for him ever since, focusing on U.S. collections. He has purchased stockpiles from aging record executives and retired music critics, as well as from the occasional celebrity (he bought the record collection of Bob Hope from his daughter about 10 years after Hope died). This summer Bastos moved to Paris, where he’ll buy European records for Freitas.

Bastos looked over the shoulder of an intern, who was entering the information from another album into the computer.

“This will take years and years,” Bastos said of the cataloging effort. “Probably 20 years, I guess.”

Twenty years — if Freitas stops buying records.

Collecting has always been a solitary pursuit for Freitas, and one he keeps to himself. When he bought the remaining stock of the legendary Modern Sound record store in Rio de Janeiro a couple of years ago, a Brazilian newspaper reported that the buyer was a Japanese collector — an identity Bastos invented to protect Freitas’s anonymity. His collection hasn’t been publicized, even within Brazil. Few of his fellow vinyl enthusiasts are aware of the extent of his holdings, partly because Freitas never listed any of his records for sale.

But in 2012, Bob George, a music archivist in New York, traveled with Bastos to São Paulo to prepare for Brazilian World Music Day, a celebration that George organized, and together they visited Freitas’s home and warehouse; the breadth of the collection astonished George. He was reminded of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who lusted after seemingly every piece of art on the world market and then kept expanding his private castle to house all of it.

“What’s the good of having it,” George remembers telling Freitas, “if you can’t do something with it or share it?”

The question nagged at Freitas. For the truly compulsive hobbyist, there comes a time when a collection gathers weight — metaphysical, existential weight. It becomes as much a source of anxiety as of joy. Freitas in recent years had become increasingly attracted to mystic traditions — Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist. In his house, he and his second wife created a meditation room, and they began taking spiritual vacations to India and Egypt. But the teachings he admired didn’t always jibe with his life as a collector — acquiring, possessing, never letting go. Every new record he bought seemed to whisper in his ear: What, ultimately, do you want to do with all this stuff?

He found a possible model in George, who in 1985 converted his private collection of some 47,000 records into a publicly accessible resource called the ARChive of Contemporary Music. That collection has grown to include roughly 2.2 million tapes, records and compact discs. Musicologists, record companies and filmmakers regularly consult the nonprofit archive seeking hard-to-find songs. In 2009 George entered into a partnership with Columbia University, and his archive has attracted support from many musicians, who donate recordings, money or both. The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has provided funding for the archive’s collection of early blues recordings. David Bowie, Paul Simon, Nile Rodgers, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme all sit on its board.

Freitas has recently begun preparing his warehouse for his own venture, which he has dubbed Emporium Musical. Last year, he got federal authorization to import used records — an activity that hadn’t been explicitly allowed by Brazilian trade officials until now. Once the archive is registered as a nonprofit, Freitas will shift his collection over to the Emporium. Eventually he envisions it as a sort of library, with listening stations set up among the thousands of shelves. If he has duplicate copies of records, patrons will be able to check out copies to take home.

Some of those records are highly valuable. In Freitas’s living room, a coffee table was covered with recently acquired rarities. On top of a stack of 45s sat “Barbie,” a 1962 single by Kenny and the Cadets, a short-lived group featuring the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson on lead vocals and, as backup singers, Wilson’s brother Carl and their mother, Audree. In the same stack was another single — “Heartache Souvenirs"/"Chicken Shack,” by William Powell — that has fetched as much as $5,000 on eBay. Nearby sat a Cuban album by Ivette Hernandez, a pianist who left Cuba after Fidel Castro took power; Hernandez’s likeness on the cover was emblazoned with a bold black stamp that read, in Spanish, “Traitor to the Cuban Revolution.”

While Freitas thumbed through those records, Bastos was warning of a future in which some music might disappear unnoticed. Most of the American and British records Freitas has collected have already been digitally preserved. But in countries like Brazil, Cuba and Nigeria, Bastos estimated, up to 80 percent of recorded music from the mid-20th century has never been transferred. In many places, he said, vinyl is it, and it’s increasingly hard to find. Freitas slumped, then covered his face with his hands and emitted a low, rumbling groan. “It’s very important to save this,” he said. “Very important.”

Freitas is negotiating a deal to purchase and digitize thousands of Brazilian 78 r.p.m. recordings, many of which date to the early 1900s, and he expects to digitize some of the rarest records in his collection shortly thereafter. But he said he could more effectively save the music by protecting the existing vinyl originals in a secure, fireproof facility. “Vinyl is very durable,” he said. “If you store them vertically, out of the sun, in a temperature-controlled environment, they can pretty much last forever. They aren’t like compact discs, which are actually very fragile.”

In his quest to save obscure music, Bastos told me, Freitas sometimes buys records he doesn’t realize he already owns. This spring he finally acquiesced to Bastos’s pleas to sell some of his duplicate records, which make up as much as 30 percent of his total collection, online.

“I said, ‘Come on, you have 10 copies of the same album — let’s sell four or five!’ ” Bastos said.

Freitas smiled and shrugged. “Yes, but all of those 10 copies are different,” he countered. Then he chuckled, as if recognizing how illogical his position might sound.

Freitas and the interns joke that the island is rising in the Caribbean because of all the weight he has hauled away.

In March, he began boxing up 10,000 copies of Brazilian LPs to send to George in an exchange between the emerging public archive and its inspirational model. It was a modest first step, but significant. Freitas had begun to let go.

Earlier this year, Freitas and Bastos stopped into Eric Discos, a used-record store in São Paulo that Freitas frequents. “I put some things aside for you,” the owner, Eric Crauford, told him. The men walked next door, where Crauford lives. Hundreds of records and dozens of CDs teetered in precarious stacks — jazz, heavy metal, pop, easy listening — all for Freitas.

Sometimes Freitas seems ashamed of his own eclecticism. “A real collector,” he told me, is someone who targets specific records, or sticks to a particular genre. But Freitas hates to filter his purchases. Bastos once stumbled upon an appealing collection that came with 15,000 polka albums. He called Freitas to see if it was a deal breaker. “Zero was asking me about specific polka artists, whether they were in the collection or not,” Bastos remembered. “He has this amazing knowledge of every kind of music.”

That afternoon, Freitas purchased Crauford’s selections without inspecting them, as he always does. He told Crauford he’d send someone later in the week to pick them up and deliver them to his house. Bastos listened to the exchange without comment but noted the destination of the records — Freitas’s residence, not the archive’s warehouse. He was worried that the collector’s compulsions might be getting in the way of the archiving efforts. “Zero isn’t taking too many of the records to his house, is he?” Bastos had asked a woman who helps Freitas manage his cataloging operation.

No, she told him. But almost every time Freitas picked up a record at the archive, he’d tell a whole story about it. Often, she said, he’d become overwhelmed with emotion. “It’s like he almost cries with every record he sees,” she told him.

Freitas’s desire to own all the music in the world is clearly tangled up in something that, even after all these years, remains tender and raw. Maybe it’s the nostalgia triggered by the songs on that first Roberto Carlos album he bought, or perhaps it stretches back to the 200 albums his parents kept when he was small — a microcollection that was damaged in a flood long ago but that, as an adult, he painstakingly recreated, album by album.

After the trip to Eric Discos, I descended into Freitas’s basement, where he keeps a few thousand cherry-picked records, a private stash he doesn’t share with the archive. Aside from a little area reserved for a half-assembled drum kit, a couple of guitars, keyboards and amps, the room was a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling shelving units filled with records.

He walked deep into an aisle in search of the first LP he ever bought, the 1964 Roberto Carlos record. He pulled it from the shelf, turning it slowly in his hands, staring at the cover as if it were an irreplaceable artifact — as if he did not, in fact, own 1,793 additional copies of albums by Roberto Carlos, the artist who always has, and always will, occupy more space in his collection than anyone else.

Nearby sat a box of records he hadn’t shelved yet. They came from the collection of a man named Paulo Santos, a Brazilian jazz critic and D.J. who lived in Washington during the 1950s and who was friendly with some of the giants of jazz and modern classical music. Freitas thumbed through one album after another — Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Leonard Bernstein, Dave Brubeck. The records were signed, and not with simple autographs; the artists had written affectionate messages to Santos, a man they obviously respected.

“These dedications are so personal,” Freitas said, almost whispering.

He held the Ellington record for an extended moment, reading the inscription, then scanning the liner notes. Behind his glasses, his eyes looked slightly red and watery, as if something was irritating them. Dust, maybe. But the record was perfectly clean.      

Record Company Tricks 

One of the biggest battles in pop this year won’t take place at the top of the charts or at a swanky awards ceremony. Instead, it looks likely to happen in an unflatteringly lit American courtroom, involving lawyers whose daily rate exceeds Lady Gaga’s annual wig allowance — and it will be as baffling to ordinary pop fans as the lyrics of a Kate Bush song.

At stake are millions of dollars, but also, much more important for the future of pop, the right of artists to receive (what they consider) a fair share of income from their songs in an increasingly complex digital age.

In brief, a lawsuit brought by the label 19 Recordings alleges that Sony Music is depriving American Idol alumni — including Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood and a host of solid-selling stars — of income by paying demeaning streaming rates, fudging the wording of contracts in its favour and diddling them over TV advertising. The devil, of course, is in the details, which are so convoluted that scarcely anyone understands them.

Boil it down to basics, though, and something suddenly stands out: a decade after the internet threatened to bring down record labels, much about the music industry remains the same.

Back in the MySpace days, the internet promised that anyone could become a pop star. All you had to do was post some songs online, maybe get a mate to make a £10 video, then wait for the world to discover you. In a handful of instances, that happened, but almost all of the wannabes remain exactly that.

Check out YouTube, SoundCloud and the countless other places we now consume pop, and you can see why most artists still require the financial muscle of a record label. These sites are clogged up with the modern equivalent of dodgy pub acts. To get noticed, you need to advertise, which costs. Or to be picked up by big bloggers, which usually calls for contacts and influence. Those who do catch the public’s attention require either a manager with a genius business brain or, more likely, a label to negotiate those purposely tricksy contracts, without which you can’t collect any online income at all.

The good news is that artists moaning about labels siphoning off millions of pounds of profits — as they did in the golden age of CD sales — is a sure sign that the record industry has bounced back. And before you feel sorry for the artists, even the biggest stars are not above resorting to tricks themselves.

Last year, Lady Gaga’s Twitter account had a link to her so-so single Applause. If you clicked on it, you put Applause on a loop that lasted nine hours. Fans could click and go to bed, knowing they had helped inflate the fading star’s “views” and thus her single’s chart position. That came seven months after Gaga’s Vevo account was stripped of 150m-plus apparently faked views, of which she denied any knowledge. In YouTube’s crackdown, Justin Bieber was another big loser, as were major labels including Universal and Sony, which had more than 2bn views removed from their accounts.

Dozens of pop stars are also thought to have employed the surprisingly easy and cheap practice of purchasing fake Twitter followers. Even unknown artists have admitted to it, to get a first foot on the ladder or even to catch the eye of Radio 1’s playlist team, who use social-media stats to help them decide which new acts to back.

Strip away the tech terms and the revolution in distribution that the internet brought to pop, however, and you could be back in the 1970s, when labels sent teams of teens to the small number of record shops from which sales counted towards the charts to buy multiple copies of certain songs every Saturday. Chart manipulation has gone on, in different forms, ever since, and the recent inclusion of streaming in the UK singles chart undoubtedly offers new opportunities.

The 19 Recordings lawsuit against Sony Music offers parallels to the past. For example, record labels have long slashed royalty rates when ads for an album appear on TV. That sort of made sense when there were only a handful of channels and advertising cost an arm and a leg, but not in a multichannel age with plummeting ad costs.

As for the profits from streaming paid to artists — not by services such as Spotify, but by the labels, which collect the payments and pocket a whopping percentage — they summon the spectre of the old “record clubs”, mail-order services for which you posted off a penny or less and received an album a month; later, you discovered you had to pay for umpteen other albums you didn’t want. Countless big-name acts were paid paltry royalties by their labels, who claimed huge “service” costs that didn’t exist. In 1995, Meat Loaf’s label sued Sony for unpaid royalties for 1m-plus “record club” sales of Bat Out of Hell.

If dirty tricks are thriving in pop, it means pop matters again. Welcome to the future — but be careful to keep an eye on the past.       

Taylor Swift and the Streaming Revolution  

An orgy of Tayloriffic Swiftacular commentary on the release of Taylor Swift's new album, 1989, flooded the internet last week. Soon after came a second front of discussion. Swift, it was said, had broken up with Spotify. There would be no streaming of her new album — and she removed all of her previous work from the service to boot. Was it smart? Well, we were informed, the numbers told the story. The album sold 1.2 million copies its first week out. (This was the highest any album had sold in one week in more than ten years.) The gross on the album would be about $12 million. Spotify's payments are almost impossible to calculate given the variables of how the service works, but Swift might have gotten a few thousand dollars for every million streams on the service. It's a no-brainer — Swift was a genius. The CD lives!

Is that analysis correct? No.

First of all, readers should beware when the big, hyped story is that a big star does something big stars are supposed to do. Swift sells more records than anyone this side of Adele. All pop marketing these days is about making a splash. That's why we've seen Beyoncé and U2 go to such lengths to get our attention with their latest releases. Swift didn't have any real tricks like that up her sleeve, so she worked overtime before the release, calling attention to it, and in the end, she and her label did a good job.

Remember that Swift comes from country, with a much more traditional record-buying audience, and this album is her big crossover bid. She's a somewhat bland but sprightly star who appeals to moms and kids, genetically designed to be as ingratiating as possible. The successful marketing of such stuff shouldn’t be greeted with looks of wonder.

Now let's look at the numbers. First of all, Swift doesn't make $12 million from her record. Her record company, Big Machine, does. And the company doesn't make it either, in the end. It makes 60 or 70 cents on the dollar from iTunes. It's selling for $10 at Amazon, $14 at Walmart. Big Machine might make $8 a sale on average. That's $9 million in round figures. Now, these numbers could be larger if Swift's promotional deals with the retailers got her more money; barring that, Swift is going to make about $2 per sale. But remember that typically the label would have given her a large cash advance against future royalties, so it's probably keeping most of the money at this point. (Remember as well that labels have a highly evolved ability to route all money that does come in into its pockets, rather than the artist's, but that's a story for another day.)

Anyway, that means Swift might be making $2.4 million off the album this week in straight artist royalties. The real comparison is not between the gross of the album versus what she might make from a streaming service like Spotify, but the difference between her Spotify income and the income from the physical and digital sales she would have lost to the service.

Let's say it's 10 percent. That's $240,000 in royalties. If 1989 totals 100 million streams on Spotify, that might only produce $200,000 in payments back to Swift — and let's remember that on paper, at least, she's splitting those with Big Machine. So let's say $100,000 versus potential lost royalties of $240,000

... meaning Spotify might have cost her $150,000. That's not nothing to me and you, but in TaylorWorld, it's really not much. On Swift's last tour, she grossed an average of $1.8 million — almost as much as she's making off her new album with its spectacular sales — per show; even after expenses and administrative costs, she will have made that $200,000 differential up at about the 20-minute mark of her next appearance.

The second misleading aspect of the debate is that the decision to be on Spotify or not is not really Swift's to make. She's a big star and undoubtedly has more juice than a lot of performers, but it's Big Machine's job to maximize its own sales. The label — again, this is in crude terms — is probably making three times as much as Swift is on the CD. The differential is a lot greater; from its perspective, it makes so much more off a CD sale that its business focus is on little else. (Also, as the Times reported, a sale of the label might be in the offing, and a strong performance by the label's star performer couldn't hurt the potential sale price.)

This is where the story gets portentous and sad. As we've seen over the past 15 years, the decisions record labels make are quite often not in the best interests of their customers, their artists, or, in the end, themselves. The CD Era is long gone. Sales will go on, of course, particularly in genres like country that haven't entirely made it to the digital world yet, but will continue to drop significantly each year. (At least until the CD becomes a neo-retro accouterment in the bewhiskered hipster pad the way LPs are now.) The iTunes Era is over as well. Few have been paying attention, but digital sales are now collapsing in unison with CD sales. Swift's 1989 sales are not a sign that this process is being reversed; she's just an outlier with a good marketing staff.

The future of the industry lies in streaming. (It's not pretty — as Thom Yorke put it, it's "the last desperate fart of a dying corpse” — but that's what it is.) And here's the rub. Any transition in a business affects different parties differently. The sad fact of the music business is that everyone's making less money than they used to, and are going to make less in the future, but no one's working to maximize whatever that long-term lower status is. The labels weren't great on making tough decisions during their go-go years, so you can imagine the fighting to get to the lifeboats that's going on behind the scenes now. (It couldn't have happened to a nicer group of people.)

So let's look at the future. Spotify has a value to its customers if it actually has all the music people want to listen to. If all the major artists pull a Swiftie on the service when their new albums come out, it significantly devalues the value of the product to consumers. ("Why should I pay this place $10 a month if Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Kanye, and Adele aren't on it?") In this standoff, Spotify, which is constructing the industry of the future, has the high ground; it knows what it needs to do to succeed.

The proper play even for a greedy record industry is to put all the music on the streaming services all the time and make it part of everyday life. Then they can start jacking up the fees and ad rates. (There's a line of argument that in any case the industry will ultimately suck the service dry of all its profits, so it can never succeed, but that's a story for another day as well.)

Swift has already shown herself to be a very naïve person when it comes to the music business: Her Wall Street Journal op-ed piece last summer was strikingly solipsistic and uninformed. If she supports Big Machine's decision, as she seems to be indicating, she's really hurting both other artists and herself in another way.

Why? Because we can already see where folks are going to get their music if they decide a streaming option like Spotify doesn't give them the service they want. Here's what Swift's — and Spotify's — real competition is:

That's a screenshot of just part of a Pirate Bay page dedicated to 1989 torrents. I count about 7,000 folks sharing the thing right then, a week after the album came out. (With that many seeds, downloading an album takes about 45 seconds, so you can imagine the churn.) A single page on a different BitTorrent site, Kick Ass Torrents, said that just one particular torrent of many for the album had been downloaded close to 110,000 times. And remember that this comes in the face of what I'm sure was a strong behind-the-scenes campaign by her label to keep the thing off the illegal networks.

Spotify's per-stream payout seems small, all right, but it's a lot bigger than the Pirate Bay's.

Thus far, the only big winner is Big Machine. Long-term, Swift has screwed herself over as well. This week, she announced a world tour. Tours are, of course, where the real money is; her next one, depending on how many dates there are in the end and whether she starts jacking up her (relatively low) ticket prices, may gross $200 million or more.

I'll bet you dollars to old scratched CDs that U2's plan was to announce its next world tour as the band members basked in the glow of their big Songs of Innocence album giveaway at that now-notorious Apple announcement; the silly imbroglio that resulted may well have held those plans up. Why? Because U2's next tour may well gross a billion dollars. If bad PR mojo should have cost the band a one percent drop in ticket sales, that's a lot of money down the drain. (Live Nation gets mad when that happens.)

Look what's happened to Swift. The message of her tour has been muddled with this Spotify debate; even if the coverage is overwhelmingly pro-Swift (which is how it reads to me), at best, the intimation that's she's doing things not for her fans but for money clashes with her brand. The next decision those readers are going to make is whether they should shell out $100 or $150 to see her live, or pay for their kids to do so. Their decision might put a frownie face on even the nicest pop star's tour accountant.      

Radio Revolution  

Former jazz pianist Steve Hogan has a fascinating job. The chief music analyst for the online radio service Pandora has been heading off to work in Oakland, California, every weekday morning for the past 14 years, sitting in a room with a bunch of other musicians, and trying to map the DNA of contemporary music.

"It's called the Music Genome Project," he says. "Our music curators take each new song and analyse it across hundreds of musical attributes - the sound of the voice, the harmonies, the rhythm, the instrumental arrangements. If it's an electronic tune, there'll be 20 genetic traits concerning the synthesiser alone. We'll look at the type of synth, the tone, the effects. We'll ask- is there an arpeggiator on there?"

Hogan makes an impressive blipping synth noise with his mouth. "Are there filter sweeps?" He makes a peculiar synthetic swooshing sound, like digital wind rushing through cyborg trees. "My point is, once we carefully analyse all these different sounds, we can use that information to help anyone in the world to create their own radio station."

The way Hogan tells it, every song ever made can be reduced to a set of around 400 characteristics, like the trait-determining genes of living organisms. Once you work out a song's genetic makeup, you have its musical DNA. And if a listener loves that song, it's a simple matter to build that listener their own highly individualised radio station, streaming songs with similar "genes".

You want an all-bluegrass station? Pandora can give you that. Keen to hear nothing but Jamaican dub, New Orleans jazz or hardcore German techno? No worries. Nothing is impossible in the brave new world of "radio me" internet narrow-casting. Eventually, interactive technology like this could make traditional "one size fits all" radio broadcasting a thing of the past.

Pandora was founded in 2000 by Tim Westergren, a former touring musician with a Stanford University political science degree. He had the Music Genome idea while tripping on psychedelic mushrooms, and went $US300,000 into debt trying to get his fledgling company off the ground. At one stage, Pandora was so broke, Westergren asked staff to work without pay until things improved. Most left, but Hogan stayed.

Pandora has since become the world's largest internet radio platform in a crowded market which also includes services such as Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, iTunes Radio, Soundcloud, YouTube, Google Play, iHeartRadio and Beats Music.

In the US, Pandora has over 250 million registered users and provides nine per cent of all radio listening, with the vast majority tuning in via mobile devices such as smartphones. The company launched in New Zealand two years ago, and has notched up 260,000 local users. There are two listening options: a free version, if you're willing to listen to a few ads, or a monthly subscription for an ad-free version with higher quality audio.

"We're a music discovery platform like radio, because you can't predict what song might play next, but it's far more personal than conventional radio because you keep on fine-tuning it to your own needs over time," says Hogan. "You just type in a favourite artist or song as a 'seed', and we use that as a starting point."

Is internet radio really the way of the future? We'll see. But in the meantime, it certainly feels like an overdue evolution from the status quo. As a media model, old-school commercial radio often seems like a particularly obnoxious dinosaur that's still sticking around at a mammal party, talking far too loud, monopolising the stereo and generally making a dick of itself.

The vapid small-talk. The relentless advertising. The unadventurous playlists. The excruciating breakfast "personalities" trying so desperately to be hilarious.

Little wonder commercial radio audiences have been declining here for over a decade. Between 2003 and 2013, the proportion of New Zealanders listening to traditional radio fell from 91 per cent to 79 per cent.

"There are so many ways of listening to music now, so why put conventional radio in the mix?" asks Simon Woods, communications manager at the NZ Music Industry Commission. "Commercial radio largely caters to people who just want a bit of background noise in their car. But if you want less talk and more interesting music, you're extremely well catered for by more responsive streaming platforms that give you more choice in what you're listening to. Really, it's a great time to be a music fan, and traditional radio is no longer a big part of that for many people."

I'm one of those people. I parted company with commercial radio many years ago. These days the only broadcast station I listen to is RNZ National. I go online to listen to specialist music stations streaming from London, Jamaica, New York and New Orleans, and check out new music on YouTube, Soundcloud, Spotify and Pandora. Damian Vaughan, chief executive of Recorded Music NZ, which represents record labels and recording artists, says I'm not alone: "Our figures show that streaming has increased by over 300 per cent in the last year alone. On-demand music streaming accounted for nine per cent of all music sales revenue in New Zealand last year, and that doesn't even include internet radio, so the streaming figures would actually be even higher."

So high, in fact, that Recorded Music NZ has been forced to rethink its policies. The organisation compiles the official NZ Music Chart, ranking the weekly sales of albums and singles. Previously, they have been compiled using physical and digital sales figures. Just two days ago, the chart began including on-demand streaming figures as well.

"We had to reflect what was really going on, because streaming and downloads together now make up 51 percent of all record sales," says Vaughan. "Really, what we're seeing is the second great transition. First we went from physical record sales to downloads, and now we're going from downloads to streaming."

Physical CD sales continue to decline and downloads also declined slightly last year, but streaming services are gathering pace. As for traditional radio, we know those listening figures are falling, and you can safely say that streaming services sometimes set the musical agenda now.

"Look at someone like Lorde," says Vaughan. "She started out by streaming her music free on Soundcloud, built up the hype and then established a career where she's selling millions of units across multiple platforms."

But while streaming services might be embraced by home listeners, many musicians complain that they are little more than slave labour in the radio revolution, receiving just a fraction of a cent each time their songs are played.

After co-writing a song which had over a million plays on Pandora, American songwriter David Lowery received such a puny cheque he posted his royalty statement online. "As a songwriter, Pandora paid me US$16.89 for 1,159,000 plays of my song last quarter," he fumed. "That's less than I make from a single T-shirt sale. OK, that's a slight exaggeration. That's only the premium multi-colour long sleeve shirts, and that's only at venues that don't take commission. But still."

Other vocal opponents of low streaming royalties include The Black Keys, Katy Perry, David Byrne, Thom Yorke, Metallica, Pink Floyd and Rihanna, with Pandora widely slated for lobbying Congress for permission to further decrease their payouts.

On Monday, Taylor Swift pulled all her music from Pandora's rival Spotify and refused to allow her latest record 1989 to stream on the site; Spotify begged her to return, saying: "We hope she'll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone."

New Zealand musicians who don't generate the dollars Swift enjoys are more pragmatic about internet radio.

"Those kind of [minimal] royalty payments are just a cold reality, unfortunately", says Sam Scott from the Wellington band Phoenix Foundation. "Really, I don't make any money from music sales at all, even though our band does quite well. I don't get any money from iTunes, or Spotify, or Pandora, so I don't really give a f**k about royalties.

"I probably make 50 cents a month from each of these things, so if I'm lucky, it all adds up to enough to buy me a very cheap lunch. Of course, I'd love it if they paid more money, but I don't know too many local musicians that are too distressed about it, because they're all too poor to refuse to be part of anything that might earn them ANY potential revenue, no matter how pathetic.

"Someone like Taylor Swift can afford to take her music off those services, because she's already ridiculously rich and famous. But for most New Zealand musicians, the main thing you want is for people to hear your music, so any platform that gets that music out to people, you want to be on it."

Paul Dodge, from Kiwi electronic trio Minuit, also accepts internet radio may be, at best, a way to promote his music. "When you get a printout and it says you got 0.001 cents every time your song played, well, all you can do is laugh, really.

"Even so, streaming is a great way to listen to music. I listen to Rdio to find new music and I use Bandcamp to get our music out to people. And if we pull our music from Pandora or Spotify, we're the ones who lose. No one else cares; it just means a few less people hear us, whether we get paid or not."

Pandora maintain their royalty payments are fair given the current market, and that their service provides niche artists with exposure, pointing out that 80 per cent of the artists they feature receive zero airtime on traditional broadcast radio. And while they're not budging on royalties, they can offer other things of value to musicians - such as information.

Just last month, Pandora launched AMP (Artist Marketing Platform), a free service that will allow artists access to Pandora's huge databanks so they can discover who's listening to their music, how often, and where. With profits from music sales continuing to fall, such detail can help artists target tours, marketing and merchandise sales.

Spotify and Pandora also insist that artists can expect a lot more cash once streaming becomes the dominant way people consume music. That day may be getting closer: over 100 new car models will roll off global production lines this year with Pandora interfaces pre-installed for car radio listening.

"As more people start using streaming services and the revenue base grows, I'm sure more money will flow back to music makers," agrees Vaughan. "You have to remember that traditional radio and record sales models have been around for decades, and it just takes time for audiences to embrace new technology. But it will happen. My mother knows how to use iTunes now, but that took about five years. Eventually I'll teach her how to use Pandora, too. She may be 75, but I'm sure she'd love her own radio station."      

Kurzweil Samplers Win Grammy  

In Fall 1983, visitors crammed into a packed demo on the fifth floor of the New York Hilton Hotel during the New York AES convention and marveled at the Kurzweil K250, noted Electronic Musician magazine in its March 2015 issue.

“The first ROM-based sampling keyboard to successfully reproduce the full complexity of acoustic instruments, the 250 offered natural-sounding pianos, thick drums, lush strings, and more, and its 88-note, velocity-sensitive wooden keyboard provided a piano-like playing experience,” EM said.

“The K250 was a perfect component for studios and musicians looking for a realistic grand piano sound, and didn’t have the space — or budget — to allow it. Everybody who heard the Kurzweil K250 wanted one.”

Grand challenges. But the engineering had involved overcoming major challenges. “Due to the multiple strings for each note that are slightly out of tune with each other, the overtones of the piano are not perfect multiples of the fundamental frequency,” Ray Kurzweil explains. “They are ‘inharmonic,’ which gives the piano its unique rich character of sound.

“Traditional samplers at the time would loop the last waveform during the decay phase of the sound and this turned the piano sound into what sounded like an organ. We developed a unique way to retain the inharmonicity of the partials throughout the evolution of each note. We were able to model the effect of key pressure on timbre, and to capture many other complexities.”

That jaw-dropping realism of the K250 evolved over the following 32 years into Kurzweil Music Systems‘ K150, K1000, K2000 (my first synth), K2500, K2600, PC88, and the SP, PC2, and PC3 series of synthesizers, along with advanced stage pianos like the Ardis (I got a great demo at NAMM last year — it’s like an entire band in there, but one that can be changed instantly from, say, jazz to salsa).

Small wonder that over that time, virtually every major synthesizer keyboard artist from Pink Floyd to Billy Joel, Elton John, and Paul McCartney has used Kurzweil synthesizers in their performances (see videos on our Ray Kurzweil receives 2015 Technical Grammy Award for achievement in music technology post).

Chip innovations. One key to Ray Kurzweil’s music-technology success has been his Steve Jobs-like ability to assemble a stellar team of sound, electronics, and computer experts, such as legendary inventors Robert Moog, physicist Bob Chidlaw, and electrical engineer/programmer Hal Chamberlin, whose landmark 1981 The Musical Applications of Microprocessors book was a key reference for the music-technology industry.

Over the 32 years, the Kurzweil Music team has introduced innovations such as ASICs (application specific integrated circuits) and DSP (digital signal processing) chips, which operate many times faster and at higher quality than conventional chips.

Forte non largo. Last year, Kurzweil Music made history again.

Bucking the conventional use of computer software to generate synthesizer sounds in sample loops, the company introduced a new technology called Flash-play. It runs on the new Forte stage piano, which “currently outclasses, by a comfortable margin, any hardware pro keyboard instrument on the market,” says Keyboard magazine.

Flash-play achieves super-realistic live sounds with zero-loading time by using 16 GB of ROM (read-only memory) to store complete recorded sounds — from the beginning of a note until it decays into silence — while providing extreme dynamic range (soft to loud) and multiple voicing.      

$1000 LPs

HOW MUCH WOULD you pay for an original copy of The Beatles’ Abbey Road? If you shop at Better Records, the answer is plenty: $650. Other staples from the heyday of vinyl command equally astronomical prices. Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous LP: $500. The Police’s Synchronicity: $350. Even kitsch like The B-52s is a sticker shocker at $220.

And that’s the cheap stuff. Prices for wish list titles like The Who’s Tommy, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and The Beatles’ White Album would make a military contractor blush: $1,000.

Price gouging? Not according to Better Records owner Tom Port. He thinks a thousand bucks is a bargain to hear a classic rock opus sound better than you’ve ever heard it sound before—stoned or sober.

“I’d like to charge $1,500, because that’s what I think these records are worth,” he says. “But I don’t, because the customers balk.”

This is what passes for fiscal restraint in the world of high-end audio: drawing the line at three figures for mass-produced records that sold in the millions, the same dorm room relics found in milk crates at tag sales. But Port insists that his meticulously curated discs are special. Unlike many record dealers, he doesn’t peddle the usual dreck pocked with scratches and pot resin. He traffics strictly in “hot stampers,” the very best of the best.

Hundreds of factors determine what a vintage record will sound like, from the chain of ownership and whether it’s been properly stored to the purity of the vinyl stock and the quality of the equipment that produced it. One factor many serious record collectors fixate on is the quality of the stampers, the grooved metal plates used to press a lump of hot vinyl into a record album. Like any metal die, these molds have a finite lifespan. The accumulation of scratches, flaws, and other damage resulting from the tremendous mechanical stress a stamper is subjected to—100 tons of pressure during a production run—leads to a gradual loss of audio fidelity in the finished records. To ensure the best sound quality, some boutique companies that press heavy vinyl today limit their stampers to 1,000 pressings. In contrast, during the peak of the vinyl boom, major labels churned out as many as 10,000 copies on a single stamper. It’s preferable to have a record pressed early in a production run, before the metal exhibits signs of wear, rather than toward the end, right before a fresh stamper is slapped on.

Nab an early pressing of an iconic title produced under ideal conditions, take really (really) good care of it for 40 years, and maybe it’ll be judged a hot stamper worth four figures.

Scott Hull, a recording engineer who owns Masterdisk, one of the world’s premier mastering facilities, compares producing a vinyl record to making wine. “Each pressing of the grape, and each pressing of the disc, is unique,” Hull says. “Hundreds of subtle things contribute to each pressing being different. Everything matters, from plating the lacquers to various molding issues to the quality of the vinyl pellets.”

Selling these artifacts at these prices requires more than a list of customers with too much disposable income. It takes hard work, chutzpa and catalog copy that ignites neural brush fires in the amygdala.

Consider these tasting notes for the Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue ($230): “A killer pressing … serious punch down low, superb clarity, all the extension up top and a HUGE open sound field … you’ll have a hard time finding any Stones record that sounds this good period!” Confirmation bias? Probably. Port had me at “killer pressing.”

Although Better Records offers jazz, blues, classical, and the occasional genre novelty (faux-Polynesian exotica is a recurring guilty pleasure), invariably it’s nostalgic classic rock albums like that Stones semi-classic from 1980 that become hot stampers.

But finding such pristine and aurally transcendent records isn’t easy.

Hot or Not?

The painstaking process begins by scouring the used market—from Salvation Army bins to eBay—for a dozen or more clean copies of an album. Next comes the obligatory spa regimen: a three-step enzyme wash followed by a deep groove vacuuming with two record cleaning machines, one of them an $8,000 Odyssey RCM MKV, an instrument the size of an airline beverage cart handcrafted by persnickety Germans.

Grunt work completed, the hot stamper king and his minions meet in the Better Records listening room for a round of tests dubbed a “Shootout.”

By the standards of your stereotypical tube-loving, power-junkie audiophile, the amp Port uses as the hub of his Shootout machine is shockingly ordinary: a 1970s Japanese integrated transistor amp rated at a feeble 30 watts per channel, a typical thrift-store find. “I use a low-power, solid state amp because it doesn’t color the music,” he explains. “Tubes make everything sound warm and add distortion. That can sound nice, but I need accuracy.”

The other components are much more upscale. The Legacy Focus speakers have been modded with Townshend Super Tweeters, for example, and the turntable sports a Tri-Planar Precision Tonearm and a Dynavector 17D3 cartridge. Everything has been carefully selected for sonic neutrality. This isn’t about conjuring mega-bass or shimmering highs. The goal is flat frequency response, getting as close as possible to the sound on the original master tape. Nothing added or subtracted. The total price for Port’s shootout rig comes to $35,000.

When the shootout finally gets underway, lights are dimmed, eyelids fall and ears peak. With each cut sampled, the usual things are carefully pondered: presence, frequency extension, transparency, soundstage, texture, tonal correctness, and an elusive quirk called “tubey magic” (seriously). Every element is scrutinized in granular detail. If opinions diverge or memories fail, reference copies are pulled from the archive to check benchmarks. It’s tedious work. Deciding whether Side B of Emotional Rescue is a “Mint Minus Minus” (7 on a scale of 1-10), or a “Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus” (8-9), requires dedication, stamina and intense focus. When the grades are tabulated, a sonic pecking order emerges:

It’s tempting to dismiss hot stampers as pseudoscience, like cryogenically treated speaker cables, power amp fuses zapped with Tesla coils, and every other confidence scheme devised to separate affluent middle-aged audiophiles from the contents of their wallets. Talk to enough studio engineers and record plant technicians, though, and it becomes apparent that the aural disparity between records that Tom Port prattles on about really does exist.

Industry experts agree that copies of the same album can, and often do, sound different; sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Not just from copy to copy, and from side A to side B, but from track to track, and, yes, even within the same track. In fact, vinyl records made on the same stamper, during the same production run also can vary in sound quality. Other copies, bearing different record labels, pressed in different countries, using different equipment and personnel, will impart their own sonic flavor, which only muddles the issue further.

“There’s actually little reason why any two discs should sound the same,” says Masterdisk’s Scott Hull. “A grading system based on the different significant factors makes sense: surface noise, relative distortion during playback, and things like skips and major pops.” Before this becomes a hot stamper endorsement, Hull lowers the boom: “Saying one disc is wrong and another is right is very controversial. Only the producer, the mastering, and cutting engineers really know what that record was supposed to sound like.”

Most members of hobbyist web forums who discuss vinyl records are vehemently anti-hot stamper. It's the exorbitant markup, of course, that provokes all the outrage.

The textbook example of good mastering gone bad is the 1969 Atlantic Records release of Led Zeppelin II. The first pressing, mastered by a young Bob Ludwig, beats every other pressing and reissue by a wide margin. This record is easily identified by scanning the matrix, a product code located in the run-out area next to the label. There, etched in the dead wax are the letters “RL/SS,” shorthand for Robert Ludwig/Sterling Sound. Known among dealers as the “hot mix,” it has such energy and dynamic range that when it was released it caused the needles on cheap record players to literally jump out of the grooves. This happened when Ahmet Ertegun, the president of Atlantic Records, brought a copy home to his daughter. Judging the record defective, he immediately ordered a new pressing with the signal dialed down and compressed. Ludwig would later lament that this version “sounded puny and aghh!”

Still, like everything else having to do with manufacturing vinyl records, there are no rules or absolutes. A desirable matrix isn’t foolproof. It’s only a good omen. A random hot mix of Led Zeppelin II may sound fantastic, but some of the 200,000 “RL/SS” copies that were pressed sound better than others. This is what keeps Better Records in business and earns Tom Port a comfortable six-figure income. A Led Zeppelin II white hot stamper is $1,000.

If there is one question that needs to be asked at this point, it is this: Who actually buys these things?

The Collectors

Although there are currently 117 testimonials posted on the Better Records website, the success of this bold enterprise hinges on 20 to 30 “preferred customers” who spend as much as $100,000 a year on hot stampers. These clients are wealthy audiophiles with a penchant for classic rock who like nothing better than to sit in an overstuffed wing chair sipping Pétrus and reading Tom Port’s vivid descriptions of the latest shootout winners.

Bill Pascoe, a full-time political consultant and part-time audiophile, is one such customer. Like all hot stamper addicts, he was initially skeptical. The gateway LP for him was Steely Dan’s Aja. Port’s notes boasted that it crushed the lavishly praised Cisco 180-gram Aja reissue. Pascoe was dubious. But as a Washington power broker, he could certainly afford $130 to find out.

“After the first track, I said, ‘My God, there’s something to this!'” That was eight years ago. Today, Pascoe owns more than 100 hot stampers. “I’m not a recording engineer,” he says. “All I know is that Tom’s records sound better.”

Roger Lawry, a biomedical engineer in California, was hooked by a hot stamper of Blood Sweat & Tears‘ self-titled LP, the title Port deems “the best sounding pop or rock album ever recorded.” Lawry has accumulated about 150 hot stampers since then. Adjusted for inflation, that’s the equivalent of buying a new Mercedes E-Class. The only difference is that one has an excellent resale value.

Lawry admits this pricy vinyl won’t pad his investment portfolio, but he has no regrets. “If you’re going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on hardware, why wouldn’t you pay a few hundred for the software?” he asks. A recent salary cut, however, has forced Lawry to curb his vinyl excess. Still, if the right hot stamper came along, he says he wouldn’t hesitate pulling the trigger: “I’d be willing to pay $500 for the best copy of Aja.”

The Chorus

Not only are these original vinyl copies shiny and minty fresh, Port will tell you they also sound better than any of those $30 reissues “sourced from the original master tapes” currently in fashion. Port has particular disdain for these premium, heavy vinyl records, with their bonus tracks and glossy liner notes.

“Those records sound horrible,” he growls. “A flea market copy of Sweet Baby James will sound better than any new 180-gram version.” Surely, there must be some notable reissues of other pop albums? The 60-year-old California native pauses. “If there are, I haven’t heard them.”

This outright dismissal of an entire industry has made Port a pariah in most audiophile circles. It’s an emotional subject. Jonathan Weiss, the owner of Oswalds Mill Audio, a hi-fi sanctuary in Brooklyn known for its outstanding horn speakers, barely contains his contempt. “This guy is the poster child for everything that’s wrong with the business,” he says. “He caters to the worst fears and anxieties of audiophile victims. It’s really absurd.” Weiss finishes by calling Port a couple of names we can’t print.

To truly understand the fears and anxieties of vinyl aficionados, follow the impassioned threads that unravel on the hobbyist web forums. Although Port has supporters, they’re a minority. Most members of sites like audiokarma and audioasylum who discuss vinyl records are vehemently anti-hot stamper. It’s the exorbitant markup, of course, that provokes the outrage.

Port finds the criticism amusing. On his website, he mocks these people where it hurts: By criticizing their obsessive-compulsive love for bachelor pad hi-fi gear from the Boogie Nights era. “Pioneer turntables? In this day and age? What time warp did these guys fall through anyway? It’s as if the last thirty years of audio never happened.” (Never mind the apparent hypocrisy of his using a 40-year-old amp to rate his records.)

He also relishes ripping their precious 180-gram LPs to shreds and stomping on them. “Heavy vinyl is just a gimmick, like gold plated CDs,” he says.

To Port’s dismay, record labels have doubled down on the surging vinyl market, promising even higher fidelity by pushing a new format: the 45-RPM, double LP. Remastered at half-speed, these limited edition records, if properly produced and manufactured, have the capability to outperform single 33-RPM discs because the stylus spends more time in the grooves retrieving data. Critics gush about greater dynamic range and improved transient response.

Predictably, Tom Port isn’t a fan. Here’s his review of Metallica’s Ride The Lightning, a Warner Brothers 45-RPM album remastered at MoFi from the original analog tape: “Compressed, sucked-out mids, no deep bass and muddy mid-bass, the mastering of this album is an absolute disaster on every level.” He chuckles when asked how many business relationships have soured over the years due to unpopular opinions like this. “I burn all my bridges,” he says. “I want nothing to do with any of these people.”

The Duel

Stereophile columnist Michael Fremer falls into this category. In October, the audio critic conducted a poll on his blog, Analog Planet, to address the hot stamper vs. heavy vinyl debate. The material chosen for this audio contest was RCA’s 1960 “Living Stereo” recording of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a symphonic poem considered by audiophiles to be one of the greatest performances ever captured on vinyl.

In one corner was the prohibitive favorite: Analogue Productions’ 200-gram, 33-RPM reissue, a record that prominent critics, including Fremer (he called it “transformative”), argued was better than the original. The challenger was a vintage RCA pressing of Scheherazade that Port had personally selected from his hot stamper stash. The records were transferred to hi-res 24bit/96KHz files—well above standard CD quality—and posted on Fremer’s blog for readers to sample. When the votes were tallied, the new Analogue Productions version was declared the winner by a 6 percent margin.

Port dismisses the results as meaningless, blaming his hot stamper’s poor showing on flawed methodology. “Fremer labeled one of the files ‘AP,'” he says incredulously. “Voters knew that was Analogue Productions. So, the experiment was biased from the start! When it was corrected, we caught up fast.”

He could have left it at that, but the thought of smoldering bridges excites Port too much. Convinced that the industry high priests are aligned against him, he lashes out: “Michael Fremer once said he had six copies of Aja, and they all sounded the same. That’s impossible on a good system! Is he deaf?”

Fremer has since conducted several live listening sessions using the same two Scheherazade pressings. In each case, the results were, in Fremer’s words, “pretty much 50-50.” Which would seem to indicate, at least in this instance, that heavy vinyl and hot stampers are more about personal preference than one record actually sounding better than the other.

“If you can afford it, I think Tom provides a good product,” Fremer says diplomatically. “Although, I don’t always agree with him on everything.”      

Jackie Trent  

As one half of what became known as the “Mr and Mrs of British songwriting”, Jackie Trent seemed to exemplify the “happily ever after” sentiments of so many of the easy listening songs that she wrote with Tony Hatch. Their cowriting of the theme tune to the Australian soap opera Neighbours seemed to sum up their domestic bliss; she wrote the lyrics and he the tune in an hour while they were engaged in tasks such as ironing and chopping vegetables.

However, her life came to mirror Neighbours’ most dramatic storylines. On her 55th birthday she was dancing with her husband when he remarked casually that he had been in love with another woman for 17 years. “He said she was the love of his life and that he was leaving me for her.”

Having written more than 400 songs together for Frank Sinatra, Jack Jones, Des O’Connor, Val Doonican, Shirley Bassey and Dean Martin among others, it also marked the end of their professional partnership. Trent subsequently attempted to sue Hatch for not crediting her on several of his songs.

The coalminer’s daughter from Newcastle-under-Lyme had emerged as part of a rich seam of British female pop singers who added a touch of bright and breezy glamour to the charts in the Swinging Sixties. She took her place in the hit parade alongside Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw, Dusty Springfield and Lulu, scoring her biggest triumph in 1965 when her single Where Are You Now (My Love) knocked the Beatles’ Ticket to Ride from the No 1 spot. As one critic put it, her pitch-perfect voice was “better suited for reaching the back row of Broadway auditoriums than soul or rock”, and she favoured a demure girlnext-door image rather than that of the thigh-booted, mini-skirted “dolly bird”.

Many of her best-known hits as a songwriter were taken into the charts by Petula Clark, including Don’t Sleep In the Subway, I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love, Who Am I and Colour My World. The biggest crooners in showbusiness came calling. “To have Frank Sinatra ring you up and say write a song for me was wonderful,” Trent recalled. “I would say to them, ‘Great, that’s fine’, but that was when the panic really set in.”

Named Yvonne Burgess, she was born in 1940 in Newcastle-under-Lyme, into a music-loving home; she started piano at four. A hint of her future success as a lyricist came when she won a national poetry competition at the age of nine. At the age of 11 she won a talent contest and began singing in working men’s clubs, where she became known as “the Vera Lynn of the Potteries”.

She abandoned school at 15 and headed for London in search of fame. “I packed a single suitcase and caught the train to London: alone; no agent, no contacts and no work.”

With a new stage name she swiftly found work in pubs and clubs in Soho and the East End, including one called The Two Puddings, which was run by the Kray twins. She later recalled that the gangsters showered her with gifts of teddy bears but were less generous when it came to paying her.

For perhaps the only time in the life of a woman with big hair and an even bigger personality, she refused on one occasion to go on stage after she landed a job in the nearly naked chorus line at the Windmill Theatre. When her family turned up to see the show she told the theatre’s manager, Vivian Van Damm, that she could not take her clothes off in her father’s presence.

At 16, she joined a troupe that entertained British and American troops in Kenya, Malta, Turkey and Germany, where she met a GI named Elvis Presley. “There were eight of us and our gear jammed in an old VW Transporter van — even the double-bass.”

Her career took off in 1964 when she signed with Pye Records. Her third single for the label, Where Are You Now (My Love), was her first collaboration with Hatch, who had been asked by Granada TV to produce a song for the TV series It’s Dark Outside. It was released as a single in April 1965 and went to No 1 before it was dislodged by Sandie Shaw’s Long Live Love. Both Trent and Shaw shared the same manager — the “queen bee of showbusiness”, Eve Taylor — but the two singers disliked each other. Their animosity erupted again in 2012 in the BBC Radio Four programme The Reunion. Warm reminiscing degenerated into a spat as Shaw accused Trent of being a bully and alleged that she had attempted to drown her in a swimming pool in the 1960s. Trent responded: “You should have been drowned.”

Following the success of Where Are You Now (My Love), Trent embarked on an affair with Hatch, who was married, in spite of disliking him on first acquaintance. She remembered him as “full of you know what”.

One of their next compositions, I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love, was so blatantly an autobiographical account of their affair that it was decided that Trent could not record the song. Instead, it was given to Petula Clark, who took it into the Top Ten. The couple did record The Two Of Us in 1967; they married that same year in the full glare of paparazzi flashlights.

During the 1970s Hatch and Trent branched out into musicals, notably The Card, which ran in the West End starring Jim Dale and Millicent Martin. In 1972 they wrote the theme song We’ll Be With You for Stoke City FC. As a big fan, Trent was delighted that it was still being played at home games more than 40 years later. They also wrote the theme tune for ITV’s Mr and Mrs.

Their publishing company flourished and among the young hopefuls to send them a demo tape was Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou. He sent them three of his songs, including Wake Me Up Before You Go Go, and asked for £3,000. Trent loved the work of the future George Michael, but Hatch scuppered the deal, saying the songs were “too commercial”.

The couple emigrated to Australia in 1982 and wrote Neighbours, ignoring the producers who had commissioned a song called Ramsay Street. Trent thought it would sound too much like Coronation Street. When the producers heard Neighbours, they loved it so much they changed the name of the programme. After separating from Hatch, Trent married Colin Gregory, a policeman who had escorted her during a trip to Nottingham at the height of her fame. Gregory survives her along with a son, Darren, who is a sound engineer, and a daughter, Michelle, who is an an actress, both from her marriage to Hatch, who also survives her.

She returned to Stoke 18 months ago for a recording of her song Heroes, to raise money for local servicemen who had been injured in Afghanistan. The Potteries finest came out in force to provide backing vocals. Among them was the world darts champion Phil “the Power” Taylor. Big on enthusiasm, Taylor was low on singing ability, and Trent had to position him rather discreetly right at the back.

A stage show about her life is scheduled to open in Stoke in May, signalling what will now be the posthumous return of the Vera Lynn of the Potteries. Jackie Trent, singer-songwriter, was born on September 6, 1940. She died after a long illness on March 21, 2015, aged 74      

Whistling  

FOR decades it was the soundtrack of the streets, the workplace and the stage. But in recent years the art of whistling has all but disappeared.

“Go onto the streets, into the workplace and it’s silent,” said Chris Cook, a cultural historian at Syracuse University London.

“It’s nothing like it was a few decades ago when you would hear people whistling tunes everywhere.”

Other experts agree that Britons now ignore the advice of the seven dwarfs in Disney’s Snow White to “whistle while you work” — or as you walk along the street, wait for a bus or browse in the shops.

The trend was confirmed by a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times that found 70% of people believe fewer people whistled tunes now compared with 20 or 30 years ago.

Nearly half attributed its demise to the fading of working-class culture while a third said whistling had been replaced by iPods and other portable music players.

John Lucas, co-author of A Brief History of Whistling, said: “The sound of workers whistling as they went to and from the factory or the coalmine used to be common. Miners, for example, had whistling choirs on the buses that took them to and from work.”

Other jobs traditionally associated with whistling have vanished. “Errand lads and delivery boys on their bicycles and the coalman — they’re not there any more,” said Lucas.

Whistlers do not appear to be appreciated now. In 2013 Kevin Gifford, a milkman in Leicestershire, was given a formal warning by his employer after five residents on his round complained about his early-morning whistling.

Whistling in the workplace has been silenced, too, partly because bosses such as Henry Ford, who banned it at his car factories, believe it means workers are not concentrating. Its demise was hastened in the 1980s, when wolf-whistling was discredited and later banned by some firms.

The decline of whistling is also linked to the end of the variety show, which often featured professional whistlers. One of the greatest stars was Ronnie Ronalde, from Islington, north London, who became a top-selling artist with Columbia Records and toured the word as a whistler, yodeller and birdsong imitator.

Britain still has one champion whistler, however. Sheila Harrod, 70, from Loughborough, won the International Whistling championship in Berlin in 1995 and still performs 1940s-style variety shows in the UK and abroad.

“I was 13 when I started whistling but young people these days don’t seem interested,” she said. “The audiences are quite old too. You don’t really get anyone under the age of 40.”

The popularity of whistling spread from big band music into Hollywood films, variety shows and pop music. Musicals reflected the trend with Disney’s whistling dwarfs and Jiminy Cricket urging Pinocchio to “give a little whistle”.

Music for spaghetti westerns, such as A Fistful of Dollars in 1964, also gave whistling a boost, said Lucas. Other hit films with whistled tunes include The Bridge On the River Kwai in 1957 and Scarface in 1983.

Whistling was used in many pop songs in the 1970s and 1980s such as Paul Simon’s 1972 hit Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard and John Lennon’s Jealous Guy, later covered by Bryan Ferry’s Roxy Music in 1981 as a tribute after the former Beatle’s death.

Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, from the film Life of Brian in 1979, is still popular at football matches and funerals.

Another key factor behind whistling’s decline is the growth of mobile phones and iPods. “The tunes are in people’s phones so they don’t need them in their heads,” said Cook.

Whistling was always thought to be unseemly for women, largely because prostitutes used to whistle to attract customers, but Lucas says there is still snobbery around whistling. “I was once told it was a sign of a vacant mind,” he said.

Catherine Bott, the soprano and Classic FM broadcaster who presented a recent BBC Radio 4 documentary on whistling, said it can be “relaxing for people who’ve got a lot going on in their brain”.      

Learning With Music  

TEENAGE girls are being provided with soundtracks for learning in an innovative study to assess the impact of different kinds of music in schools.

For the past year, pupils at Queen Anne’s, an independent boarding school for girls in Reading, have been listening to songs by Laura Marling during assembly, Latin American hits in Spanish lessons and tracks by the Black Eyed Peas while playing netball.

The project, created by headmistress Julia Harrington after she attended lectures by Anna Scarna, an experimental psychologist at Oxford, is now to be extended to four other schools, involving 3,500 girls.

They include Grey Coat Hospital School in Westminster, where the Tory chief whip Michael Gove’s daughter, Beatrice, is a pupil and where David Cameron’s daughter, Nancy, will begin this autumn. Initial results from Queen Anne’s suggest tailoring music to subjects and activities has improved girls’ performance.

“We are developing a tool kit called BrainCanDo to work through different aspects of brain function,” said Harrington. “For the last year we have given it to the teachers and said, ‘Go and use it where you can.’

“My job is to help teenage girls understand what is going in their heads. Their brains are going through a massive process of development, with neurons being regenerated and brain pathways strengthened, which is very exciting.”

The use of music is a part of that project. Chemistry and language teachers have, for example, used songs with clear patterns to help pupils memorise the periodic table and learn verb endings. Those wandering past Spanish lessons might hear the strains of Juan Luis Guerra, a popular Dominican singer.

“The teacher plays a song, Ojala Que Llueva Café by Guerra, in which the musical pattern is predictable. At certain points the song is stopped and the pupils then have to work out the missing words, which all take the subjunctive,” said Harrington. “The girls remember it easily, because the pattern of the music helps them embed it in their memory.”

In PE, girls practise netball to the sound of loud, discordant music, which raises stress levels to replicate the pressure of competitive matches.

“I started off with Requiem for a Dream by Clint Mansell, then I used the theme music from the Saw horror movies and finally I tried blasting out Pump It Up by the Black Eyed Peas, which really pumped the girls up and increased their anxiety and arousal,” said Laura Cox, a PE teacher.

“The first time I played the music, the girls in my top netball team hated it and only scored two baskets in 15 shots. The third time, they scored five out of 11 shots and by the time the two teams went to the county championships, they scored an 85% shooting average which . . . is unbelievable.”

More complex combinations are used for creative subjects such as art and drama. One example is Marling performing with Mumford & Sons and traditional musicians from India. According to one critic, the tracks feature “piercing tonal wails . . . as well as a Tantric swell of banjos and sitars”.

“I tell the girls, ‘Listen to this. It will be uncomfortable for you but it will give you a creative kick,’” said Harrington, who added that, by contrast, pupils settling down to algebra and geometry are played the rather calmer Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart.

“This music is focused on structure, proportion, balance and inner logic, which is what is needed for the patterns of invention that are required for these maths problems,” said Harrington, who believes that helping girls better understand the development of their brains will reduce mental illness. Academics at Goldsmiths, University of London, are working with Queen Anne’s to evaluate the music research, and professors at Reading University are assessing a different aspect of the study, the so-called “contagion factor”, where girls crave the company and respect of their peers.

The brains of girls in the contagion factor study will be scanned using neuroimaging techniques to evaluate if they become more similar as emotional links between the girls grow closer. The results will be shared with the pupils. “This will help students understand when they go to university how to deal with the stresses of being in different groups of people,” said Harrington.      

Penny Lane 

Like many of the greatest works of art, the Beatles’ hit Penny Lane was at first quite different from the version we now know.

The Beatles: had a classical revelation

The archaeology of the 1967 hit has been uncovered by a studio recording that does not feature the trumpet solo that made it one of the band’s most memorable singles. The evidence — an acetate 45 produced for the record label EMI — is being sold at auction on Saturday. It reveals that the iconic fanfare was originally performed on an instrument that sounds more like a kazoo.

It is believed that the band was about to release that version until Paul McCartney watched a BBC broadcast of a Bach concert and heard a solo played on a piccolo trumpet. He then enlisted David Mason, the classical trumpet player, for the recording sessions at Abbey Road studios.

McCartney had written the song about a street in Liverpool in response to John Lennon’s track Strawberry Fields Forever, and the two were released as a double A-side. Penny Lane took three weeks to record, compared with their entire first album taking only one day in the studio.

The potentially unique pressing is being sold by a collector in the United States. The single-sided recording has a white label with the song title written on it by Geoff Emerick, the recording engineer. Bidding at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, starts at $1,000.

Dean Harmeyer, a music memorabilia specialist, said that the Beatles were then experimenting with layers of richer, denser sound, having moved into the studio after years of touring. He said: “They now had more time and freedom to craft denser soundscapes which are quite distinctive from their earlier recordings. The sessions for Penny Lane stretched over three weeks — an eternity for a single in those days.

“Over the course of those weeks, the Beatles built layer upon layer of instrumentation which included complex wind and brass arrangements by producer George Martin, and extensive keyboard parts played by Paul McCartney.

“To our knowledge the complete trumpet-less version has never been heard by the general public. It sounds very similar, yet very different, to the Penny Lane we all know and love.” The single was released in February 1967. It reached No 2 in the UK, being held off the top spot by Engelbert Humperdinck’s Release Me, but was No1 in the United States, Canada, Germany and Australia.

A version of the song with a longer trumpet solo was sent as an advance release to a small number of American radio stations. It is now worth thousands of dollars.      

Piracy  

A couple of years ago, someone wrote on a student website: “Hey relevant organisations reading this. I download shitloads of illegal music and movies. Please trace my IP address and arrest me.” Provocative it may have been, but the writer knew nothing would happen.

And while it may only have been one person, make no mistake: these are the words of a brazen, law- breaking generation. The idea of paying for the arts is utterly alien to them. It’s become so common, even people who work in the arts world themselves do it, undermining their own financial future. It’s so shrugged at these days that when episodes of the new Game of Thrones were leaked online, commenters on a newspaper website were openly telling each other where they could find them.

In a fast-moving story with few heroes, various villains and a changeable cast of brands — Napster, LimeWire, Netflix, Pirate Bay, Spotify — one thing is constant: nobody wants to cough up for music, film or TV. Actually, it’s worse than that. After 15 years of ever faster internet speeds offering the latest in pop culture, an entire generation simply don’t think they should have to pay for whatever entertains them — and it isn’t even about ownership any more. Take music, for example. ( Most people do.) As streaming becomes the way that most under-35s listen, labels are forced to explain to anyone born after 1980 that, well, people used to pay for this stuff. Please can we at least have £9.99 a month?

The latest development involves the biggest stars. “The challenge is to get everyone to respect music again, to recognise its value,” Jay-Z said last month, speaking alongside Kanye West and Madonna. They — and others, including Chris Martin via Skype — were there to flog Tidal, a rival to Spotify that charges £19.99 a month for its “lossless high fidelity” sound. It was a narcissistic and naive launch — how essential is sound quality to teenagers creaking out chart pop from mobile phones on the bus? — but Jay-Z, the owner of Tidal, was at least making a good point, albeit badly. When the young people who listen to music most don’t pay for it, everyone — star or support staff — suffers. It’s a problem.

Chris, 34, works for a state-owned company. We meet in a pub and pay for our drinks: he has, however, barely paid for the arts since 1999, when, in his first year at university, he discovered illegal downloading. “Though it wasn’t described as ‘illegal’ at that point,” he points out. “It was ‘free’.” First, via a modem, it was songs, taking an hour each to download, but soon he leapt into the rampant sharing of TV and film. Entire series of Friends in minutes, at the click of a mouse. The latest Matrix without having to leave his bed. He has seen all of Game of Thrones this way. You know it’s illegal, right? “Yeah.” Does it bother you? “No.”

Some of his justifications are infuriating. He is, he says, a “small fish”, as if a little bit of pinching is fine. Others, such as the complaint that big distributors didn’t provide alternatives to file- sharing quickly enough, are attempts to shift the blame. Yet, when he talks about intellectual property, his argument strengthens. He spent hundreds of pounds on VHS tapes that “rotted away”, yet he had paid for their content and “when you’ve grown up with a film, you feel you own the content inside you”. But, surely, illegal downloads of titles you had already paid for form a tiny portion of your stash? He nods. “Yes, but it becomes like an addiction. You’ve justified the bit you already owned, but you have the means to do it more — and it’s immensely easy. I don’t think anything could have stopped it. The ability to be able to record on a VCR, or record off the radio, or make a mixtape — it confused people. We’ve been doing that since we were five, so it was a small step to illegal downloading.”

In 2003, the British record industry made £1.2bn; 10 years later that had shrunk to £731m. In 2009, 80% of UK sales were CDs and vinyl, which bring in much more than digital consumption. A mere four years on, that figure was 50%. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, the average price of a single last year was $1.17, compared with its high point of $ 5.87 in 1994. As Damon Krukowski, an indie stalwart, observes, 1,000 vinyl singles in 1988 earned the same as 13m streams of the same song in 2012. Spotify might have 60m active monthly users, but only 15m of them actually pay anything. And while few subscribers bother to pirate any more, they don’t buy costly albums either.

Back in 1997, I walked into my local Our Price and bought the CD of OK Computer by Radiohead. It is the best £13.99 I have ever spent, providing me with teenage angst and encouragement, not to mention a broadening of my social and political outlook. You don’t get that from throwing the equivalent coins at four pints and a pack of crisps. And yet, even back then, before we had access to free music, people complained about the price. Now music has become essentially worthless, those who rely on it for a living need to figure out what to do.

Michael Spearman is the drummer in the Mercury-nominated band Everything Everything. He is a man so in love with his profession that he visited a cymbal factory while on holiday in Istanbul. His band’s third album, Get to Heaven, comes out in June and he is, to sum up, grateful, happy, but concerned for the job he has. Back in the 1990s, being an art- rock musician like Spearman was more secure. Money from physical sales led to labels allowing bands to take more risks without them fearing the drop. Now, though, he says, “conservatism is creeping in” as labels seek the middle ground, the somnambulist sounds of Sam Smith or Emeli Sandé for the over-35s who still buy CDs in Tesco.

“The arts in general aren’t seen as very serious,” says Spearman, when I ask how it got this way. “And it’s not very rock’n’roll to say, ‘Can you not break the law, please?’ Which was part of the problem. It was never taken seriously, and there’s a worry now that there’s a generation that think, well, I can stream it for nothing or I can download it for nothing and I don’t feel bad about that. It feels like piracy is a foregone conclusion and there’s no going back to making money from records. The issue is, do people think it’s wrong? At the moment, people don’t think it’s wrong.”

An affable Northerner as pointed and lively as his music, Spearman, 29, spies on BitTorrents when his band release music, watching what they spent years producing being swapped for nothing. “In some ways it’s frustrating,” he says. “But also, at least people want it.”

He is an optimist, clearly, adding that if dwindling money forces artists to get second jobs, then at least the songs may improve. “If you’re very comfortable,” he says, citing the recent trend for artists from privileged backgrounds, “it’s no environment for good art.” But then reality — a word his hedonistic industry has hit head-on — bites. “The problem with second jobs,” says Spearman, “is you have to tour...” As tickets costing £80 to see Blur this summer suggests, there is still money in live music.

Back to Tidal, and an interview Jay-Z gave before launch suggesting his brain isn’t entirely fixated on his wallet. “Someone like me,” he said, “I can go on tour. But what about people working on the record, not just the artists?” He’s talking producers, songwriters, studio owners: those whom, Spearman says, “money doesn’t trickle to, because money isn’t there”. Tidal’s fees would help them, as do Spotify’s, plus sums from the iTunes streaming service, Beats, coming in the summer. All amounts not earned in the heyday of dodgy file-sharing.

When asked what the biggest issue facing the business is today, Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the British Phonographic Industry, replied bluntly: “Free music.” It's the result of a “bold decision” to make all of it available. First, of course, he means the illegal sites, but then he mentions the “legal sites offering music for free supported by advertising, which are building huge businesses, but currently paying very little money back to the music industry”. Migrating fans to subscription services is key, as “free streaming is not yet generating enough income to offer a sustainable future”.

But what if this — as Radiohead's Thom Yorke put it — is a “last desperate fart of a dying corpse”? What if something drastic is needed, like enforced retirement for pop stars at 50 in order to funnel budgets to new talent? (If you want to counter that, name one essential album by someone over that age.) The problem for music is it went digital during the social network boom, when sites such as MySpace and Facebook offered their services free and further distanced under- 35s from the idea that anything on their phone or PC is owned, let alone monetised. Downloading illegal files was ethically no different from going into a farm shop and pinching eggs, but then streaming services legitimised that freeness of content and now they are trying — as well they should — to find ways to pay back. Because — back to the farm shop — eventually the money will run out and the farmer will stop investing in free-range eggs to concentrate on battery chickens instead.

Solo stars such as James Bay, a man who wears a hat to distract listeners from the fact his committee drivel songs are one minor chord away from Westlife, epitomise this. He is part of a production line, backed by labels with songwriting teams that churn out a hit a year for anodyne artists. This mimics the way much of the movie industry now works. Studios have moved to favour a blanket infantilisation of their product: the effects-laden superhero genre is made to be a huge spectacle for 3D and Imax screens and thus less appealing pirated on a laptop. Make a film big and brash enough and teenagers are more likely to make that trip to the heavily branded multiplex.

What a horrible future. But Stephen Witt, the author of How Music Got Free: What Happens When an Entire Generation Commits the Same Crime? (published in June), is “bullish”. He says that at the moment only 5% of fans pay for streaming. If that grew to 25%, it would be a “hell of a lot of money”. For that to happen, two things have to happen. “One, you have to provide functional subscription services,” he says. “Two, you have to vigorously suppress the people who make the pirated files. For copyrighted goods to have value, you have to crack down on bootleggers. Money has value. Why? Because we don’t permit counterfeiters.”

The biggest obstacle? Imminent battles between Spotify, Tidal, Beats and whatever other new brand appears. “If you have a fragmented sphere of services and each has a few different artists, then that’s not good for consumers and you’ll see a return to piracy,” Witt says. Taylor Swift, for instance, is on Tidal, but not Spotify. What may happen, he suggests, is what happened to Netflix. A few years ago, to bring people to their site, it started to make original programming: it worked, with the award-winning House of Cards. But if similar exclusives were created for competing music sites, the big question is whether kids would be willing to pay to access, for example, a special Daft Punk remix on one, and a new track from Jay-Z’s wife, Beyoncé, on another. Last week, the Tidal app dropped out of the iTunes top 700 chart in the US.

Finally, back to Chris, who hasn’t shelled out for music in a decade, has only ever bought one TV box set and last went to the cinema a year ago. He has a baby and I ask what, when she asks for her first album, he will do. “I wouldn’t advertise to her I’ve done these things, so if she wants music, it would be legally.” But then it hits him. Within a decade physical product will cease to exist. “I can’t imagine a kid requesting a streaming subscription for their birthday,” he ponders. And he’s right. The question, then, is how the hell a generation of thieves keep the music (and TV and film) alive for those who should love it next?

Which Music Revolution?

“I’m the king of rock, there is none higher. Sucker MCs should call mesire,” explained Run-DMC in the late 1980s. “The rhymes we say, shall set a trend,” the band continued, somewhat modestly. “Because a devastating rap is what we send.”

It seems the pioneering hip-hop trio were on to something: scientists have said that the music revolution they helped to start was the greatest in history. An analysis using techniques normally applied to evolutionary biology found that hip-hop was a more significant musical intervention than even the “British invasion” of the US charts that began in 1964 with the Beatles.

Scientists from Imperial College London and Queen Mary, University of London, analysed 17,000 songs from the US Billboard Charts between 1960 and 2010. Giving each song a unique signature based on harmony and timbre, they were able to trace the rise and fall of different genres.

Armand Leroi, from Imperial College London, who is an evolutionary biologist, said he had long been interested in the evolution of music and wondered if he could build something like a family tree. Using the website Last.fm, he and his colleagues looked at whether similar techniques could be applied to music as were used in evolution.

“What we have is 50 years of music,” he said. “For evolutionary biologists that is like having the ultimate fossil record — a historical record changing week by week. It’s fantastic.

“We asked the kind of questions palaeontologists ask. How does music change? Can we divide it into genres?” Their data showed clear trends that correlated with human musical experience. One particular type of harmony for instance, using dominant-seventh chords, corresponded to artists such as BB King and Nat King Cole. It becomes more and more rare over time. The authors write in the journal Royal Society Open Science: “The decline of this topic, then, represents the lingering death of jazz and blues in the Hot 100.” Other genres fared better.

One of the elements of timbre that Professor Leroi looked at was “thrashing guitar”. He said: “Measuring the quantity of thrashing guitar you can see it go up and down with time. That’s rock’n’roll going up and down.” He said that one of the aspects of the chart they wanted to look at was when the most significant changes happened.

“Everyone has their own self-serving story about when revolutions occurred,” he said. “It depends basically on how old they are: when were they 17? I bought into the baby-boomer mythology that in 64 the Beatles hit America — that before then American music was conservative and boring doowop music, then everything changed. What does the science say though?”

He identified three big changes: in 1964 with the Beatles; in 1983 with synth music; and in 1991 with hip-hop. The last was by far the most significant, he said. The 1983 revolution was the most boring: afterwards, diversity of music plummeted as electronic synthesizer bands such as Duran Duran and Eurythmics dominated record sales. Professor Leroi had wanted to see if he could validate or refute a persistent idea that music was getting duller. “The story is often told that once upon a time there was a golden age of music, then multinational media came along and crushed it and turned it into homogeneous pap. By the time Simon Cowell came along, it was the end game.”

His data did not back this up. “Diversity has stayed pretty constant. The only decline was in the Eighties, probably due to new technology. Everyone was using synths — that’s why the Eighties sound like Duran Duran.”

It was a period of electronic conformity shaken up by the arrival of hip-hop. But try not to tell any hip-hop artists; they don’t need the ego boost. After all, the only thing more annoying than Kanye West saying “I am Warhol. I am the No 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh . . . my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live” is knowing that he is sort of correct.

Revolution 2

You say you want a revolution? Don't expect scientists and statisticians to be manning the barricades.Ignore the evidence of your own ears, dismiss the comments of eyewitnesses, scorn the testament of other musicians, reject the opinions of critics and historians, science has spoken: the Beatles were not really all that significant.

There is something very pompous and disdainful about the presentation of new research from the Queen Mary College and Imperial College, London, suggesting the Fab Four did not spark the musical revolution they have long been credited with. "They were good-looking boys with great haircuts but as far as their music was concerned they weren't anything new," according to Professor Armand Leroi, senior author of the paper. He sounds like a lot of fun at a party.

The gist of his study of underlying chord progressions, beats, lyrics, trends and "tone" in all US hits between 1960 and 2010 seems to be that there is no such thing as a musical revolution, only incremental progression. It is surely the latest dispatch from the department of the bleeding obvious. Our human instinct to create narrative by retrospectively shaping events into manageable storylines has a tendency to focus in on big bang moments, when the direction of history seems to be suddenly and profoundly altered. More subtle analysis always reveals a convergence of underlying trends and influences. No revolution ever came out of a vacuum.

Lenin didn't single-handedly take to the streets and bring down imperial Russia. Picasso didn't spill some paint on a canvas and invent cubism. Elvis didn't pop out of the womb singing "awopbopaloobop".

The sensationalist way this group of London academics has chosen to draw attention to their not particularly original or remotely surprising findings is by impugning the Beatles' originality. Yet their smug conclusions are at once completely obvious and fundamentally wrong. Because if pop music ever actually had a big bang moment, it was the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in America in February 1964.

The Beatles's music percolated with the energy of rock 'n' roll, the drive of rhythm and blues, harmonic shades of jazz, doo wop and soul, the melodic elegance of the music hall and Broadway show tunes and formal pop of their childhoods. Yet it was the incredibly singular way they brought all those into one place and combined them into a seamless electric shock of sound that sparked a cultural revolution. It is all very well to point out that the Beach Boys had taken Surfin' USA into the charts before the Beatles landed in America, or that Twist and Shout was actually a cover of an Isley Brothers hit, but the Beatles sound combined both the harmonic daring of the Beach Boys and the raw soulful energy of the Isley Brothers and infused it with their own very particular quality of attack and invention.

And as any teenager could tell you, pop music operates in spheres far beyond quantifiable chord changes and rhythmic patterns. Can you scientifically calculate how much of the Beatles' appeal lay in their irreverent gang camaraderie and how that played with the coming-of-age of the post-war baby-boom generation? Is there a mathematical measurement for the impact of their long forward-combed hair style (and should that be in inches or centimetres)? And what part did America's collective shock at the assassination of President John F Kennedy play in their response to the arrival of these upbeat, free-spirited, funny, irreverent Englishmen in a traumatised nation?

Every American musician of a certain age that I have ever interviewed has spoken of their intense memories of seeing the Beatles on TV for the first time. About 75 million people tuned in to The Ed Sullivan Show, almost half of the American population. "It was like the whole world changed overnight," as Tom Petty memorably put it. Beatlemania took America with dizzying speed. A month later, they occupied the top five consecutive positions on the US singles chart and were in the midst of a 30-week run at the top of the album charts with three different albums. I don't think there has ever been a pop moment like it, and I doubt there ever will. And that, as we all know, was just the beginning. Yet for the researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Imperial College, "it's entirely coincidental. The Beatles didn't make a revolution or spark a revolution, they joined one."

All these dry numbers really prove is that you can't measure magic on a graph. And when it comes to pop revolutions, don't count on scientists and statisticians to man the barricades.      

U2 Tour Budget 

Dennis Sheehan spent more than 30 years keeping U2 on the road as tour manager of a gargantuan operation that grossed the band hundreds of millions, but he landed the job entirely by accident.

“In 1982 I was looking for the perfect tour manager,” recalled Paul McGuinness, who discovered U2 in 1978 and managed the group’s affairs for 35 years. “We’d had a couple of duds. It was before the band was successful but we were touring constantly. I arranged to meet Robbie McGrath who had been tour manager for the Boomtown Rats. But Robbie didn’t show up. He got a better offer and sent Dennis along instead. I was annoyed but I didn’t take it out on Dennis. I hired him on the spot.”

When Sheehan started working for U2, he drove the band to gigs himself in a bus. By the end of the 1980s they had become the biggest band in the world and the logistics of touring — and the sums of money involved — were mindboggling.

Every tour took months of militarystyle planning and scheming. It was Sheehan’s task to schedule the group’s private aircraft (an Airbus 320 for the touring party and two smaller jets to shuttle family and friends to and from Dublin); to book accommodation (hotel suites for Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton but privately rented houses for Bono and the Edge and their families); to oversee an on-the-road personal support staff of almost 30; and to organise the transportation of the group’s equipment and gigantic stage sets plus the catering and merchandising arms — an operation that required a fleet of 200 trucks.

Sheehan’s organisational skills helped U2 to mount the biggest-earning concert programme in musical history in 2009 when the “360 degrees” world tour earned $736 million, playing 110 shows and selling 7.2 million tickets. The net profits were considerably lower; McGuinness calculated that it cost $750,000 a day to fund the operation, which Sheehan was charged with overseeing. “That’s just to have the crew on payroll, to rent the trucks, and all that!” McGuinness explained.      

The Monkees  

 The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame inductions are an annual tradition that, for all the wrong reasons, unite Monkees’ fans (of which there are millions) and Monkees’ haters (of which there are thousands). Each year The Monkees get passed over, and each year a lively but pointless argument ensues: Why aren’t the Monkees in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame? The argument always seems to center around whether or not they are a “credible” or “real” rock band, but it’s a pretty easy argument to dismiss, whether you choose to argue the facts of the Monkees (yes, they did write songs, play instruments and tour) against the parroted misperceptions rooted in the first 18 months of their 50-year career. The arguments against the Monkees could also be knocked down by simply holding up even the most dismissive view of the band against the careers of many proud Hall Of Fame inductees. Objective, substantial parallels can easily be drawn between the Monkees and the Sex Pistols (assembled, manipulated, and marketed by their media-saavy manager), Ricky Nelson (TV star first, rock star second), Elvis Presley (didn’t write his own songs), or any number of the vocal groups currently gracing the Hall Of Fame, but The Monkees most closely resemble the Motown acts that have been rightfully honored as inductees.

When you stop comparing the Monkees to The Beatles and Bob Dylan, but instead start comparing them to The Supremes, The Four Tops or The Temptations, everything about them, including their deserved place in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, makes a lot more sense. Rock snobs who cling to calcified rules of “authenticity” (a word that has no place in popular culture, let alone rock & roll, but that’s a different rant), seem to make exceptions for R&B artists who violate all the sacred commandments of rock cred. Certainly nobody protested The Supremes’ induction by claiming that they didn’t write any of their songs, or that they were rigorously controlled and coached on every aspect of their image to ensure the widest possible appeal with the least possible room for personal expression or controversy. There was no campaign to keep The Four Tops out of the Hall Of Fame because they didn’t play the instruments on their hits and were backed instead by an anonymous (if furiously talented) band of studio players. We heard exactly nobody tarnish the Temptations as honorees because they were fed hits by producers eager to cash in on the next next-big-thing, shifting the band’s sound and image to cash in on trends ranging from supper-club pop to psychedelic rock.

Ironically, the crass, production-line mentality of Motown’s hit machine is the key to its glory. Berry Gordy assembled the best writers, producers and musicians and then put them all through a quality-control regimen with infinitely higher standards than the Cadillac factories he was emulating. He literally sent his artists to charm school, where they were taught how to dance, dress, shake hands and conduct TV interviews in a way that would avoid giving folks any sense that that the raging turmoil that defined the mid-to-late ’60s had any impact on the lives of the singers behind their favorite songs. This not only produced some of the best music of the 20th century, but it allowed Motown to take it mainstream via prime-time TV. Everybody wins.

Now don’t take a word of what’s been written above as a cynical dismissal of Motown, its music or its methods: We’re unabashed, b-side-level fans of what they did and how they did it, even as we celebrate artists like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder for breaking free and dragging Motown in to the eye of the storm the label consciously provided shelter from. But we think it speaks to a larger point about dismantling these tired, old ideas about credibility and authenticity and the need to stop conflating them with quality. Because when we listen to The Monkees, we undeniably hear quality. As we do with Motown, we hear a confluence of the era’s best songwriters (Neil Diamond, Gerry Goffin & Carole King, Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, David Gates and, of course, Boyce & Hart) and musicians (the Wrecking Crew) backing four accomplished singers who had the talent and charisma to take these songs to the masses.

Where the Motown comparison falls apart, and where the myths of The Monkees being “fake” crumble, is in the nagging fact that less than two years after forming, The Monkees deliberately stepped out of the star-making machinery that created them and assumed creative control of their music and image. In a particularly rock ’n’ roll move, Mike Nesmith sealed the contentious break with the band’s puppet-master Don Kirshner (ironically, a Hall Of Fame inductee in part for creating The Monkees and The Archies), by putting his fist through a wall while shouting to Kirshner, “That could have been your face!” From there, the band started writing, playing and touring in earnest (hand-picking then relatively unknown Jimi Hendrix as their opening act, no less). Once they started calling their own shots, they made their most critically acclaimed album, Headquarters, which Mojo called “a masterpiece of ’60s pop.”

From there, The Monkees were free to explore psychedelia, which they did with their deeply surreal film Head and its equally trippy soundtrack, which kicks in to gear with ”The Porpoise Song” (since covered by indie rock bands, …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead and Django Django).

It should surprise no one who does their homework that the Monkees could survive on their own. After all, each member had a solo career going before the TV show brought them together and Nesmith was already a successful songwriter, having written “Different Drum,” the hit that introduced Linda Rondstat to the world. He’s also since gotten his due alongside Gram Parsons as an early pioneer of country-rock, which you can hear in The Monkees’ “Some Of Shelly’s Blues.”

So, yeah, The Monkees are more than most people give them credit for, but even taken at face value, reduced to the false stereotypes that have dogged them for almost 50 years, they still hold up and deserve respect. If all they did was have a run of massively successful pop records crafted by the most talented producers, musicians, and songwriters of the ’60s — pioneering the music video and inspiring two generations of kids to pick up guitars and start bands along the way — they’re still every bit as valid and credible as the Motown artists we revere and welcomed in to the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame with open arms and warm memories. Change your point of view, strip away the unwarranted baggage, and you’re left with a pile of great music. And that’s credible enough for us.      

Who's In The Group  

As the Rolling Stones tour North America this summer, only three of the original five members will still be in the band. But those three, most people would agree, are the essential core: singer-songwriter Mick Jagger, guitarist-songwriter Keith Richards and drummer Charlie Watts. The second guitar slot has changed over twice—from Brian Jones to Mick Taylor to Ron Wood--and retired bassist Bill Wyman has been replaced by non-member Darryl Jones. But few would dispute that this is the genuine article.

The Beach Boys are also touring, but only one of the original members will be on hand: lead singer Mike Love. Two of the original five (brothers Carl and Dennis Wilson) are dead, but the other two surviving members (Al Jardine and third brother Brian Wilson) will be touring this month under the Brian Wilson banner. Love will be joined by another longtime Beach Boy, Bruce Johnston, but Wilson will also have another former member, Blondie Chaplin. So why does Love get to present his show as the Beach Boys, when Wilson, the group's chief songwriter, secondary lead singer and producer, can’t?

Love would explain that he has the legal rights to the name, and he would be right. But if we view the situation not from a lawyer's perspective but from a fan's, it's clear that Wilson deserves our allegiance. And this raises the questions that every fan must confront sooner or later: What gives a band its identity? How much can you change its personnel before it's no longer the same band?

Early in my music-critic career, the Washington Post sent me to review the Marvelettes, the female Motown trio that had its first hit in 1961 with “Please, Mr. Postman.” It didn’t take much investigation to learn that the 1983 version not only contained no members of the original group but also no members who were old enough to read when “Please, Mr. Postman” was first released. It was a scam operated by promoter Larry Marshak, who had registered his right to the name after Motown dropped the group. The former members sued him, but it wasn’t until 2012 that the original members’ heirs finally prevailed in court. In 2007, California became the first state to pass the Truth in Music Advertising Act, soon followed by other states.

That clarified the legal issues, but what about the artistic question: How much can a band change before it no longer deserves our attention? Is a music group more like a baseball team that changes so gradually that it retains our loyalty no matter who’s on the roster? Or is it more like a basketball team, where the departure of one superstar such as Lebron James can dramatically alter the identity of the Cleveland Cavaliers or Miami Heat?

We usually link the identity of a band to its lead singer and/or chief songwriter. As long as that person is still around, we’re willing to accept a new drummer or new keyboardist. This may not be fair, but it's true. Keith Moon and Tiki Fulwood were great drummers before they died, but we’re willing to accept the Who and Parliament-Funkadelic without Moon or Fulwood as long as Roger Daltrey and George Clinton are on hand. But once that key voice is gone, we usually lose interest in the band.

John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr might have been able to carry on as the Beatles after Paul McCartney quit, but it seems unlikely that audiences would have accepted Harrison and Starr as the Beatles if both Lennon and McCartney had left. It would have been foolish for Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic to go on as Nirvana after Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994. Wisely, they didn’t, and Grohl launched a new band, the Foo Fighters, with its own identity.

But it's not impossible for a band to survive the loss of a lead-singer-songwriter if they handle it properly. Witness the quick sellouts for the farewell concerts by the Grateful Dead this summer. No one disputes that Jerry Garcia, the singer-guitarist who died in 1995, was the band’s linchpin. But fans recognize that the band was not only a musical democracy but also the binding glue of a community larger than any one person.

The Temptations, another Motown group, handled personnel turnover like a baseball team. The lead-singer role was passed from Al Bryant to Eddie Kendricks to David Ruffin to Dennis Edwards, but it always sounded like the Temptations thanks to the gospel-based harmonies and the Motown songwriting/production system. Otis Williams, the baritone harmonizer, wasn’t a lead singer but he was the organizational leader who guided the group through all its changes.

Fleetwood Mac also handled changing personnel smoothly, morphing from a British blues band led by Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan to a California pop band led by Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie. It worked only because the unchanging core—drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, who gave the band its name—had a distinctive sound and a vision of what the band should be.

Sometimes a strong vision can be as effective as a great talent in keeping a group relevant. Williams and Fleetwood kept their bands alive by recognizing that there are always talented singers out there if you have the good taste to identify them and the sagacity to link the new to the old.      

Beatles Hits Without The Beatles 

The three strange Lennon-McCartney hits that went to No. 1 without Lennon or McCartney—and what they tell us about the secret to recording a smash.

Fifty-one years ago this summer—in late June 1964—the No. 1 song on Billboard’s Hot 100 pop chart was a Lennon-McCartney composition. Only it wasn’t by the Beatles, and John Lennon had nothing to do with it. It was a Paul McCartney–penned song recorded, and taken to the chart summit, by a British duo named Peter and Gordon, one of whom was McCartney’s would-be brother-in-law.

Seventeen years after that, in late June 1981, the Hot 100’s No. 1 song also sported Lennon-McCartney writing credits. Only neither man had anything to do with this song, a disco medley of covers—mostly Beatles tunes, though not entirely—by a Dutch studio collective calling itself Stars on 45. Lennon and McCartney weren’t even singing on the record; their vocals were covered by a bunch of sound-alike Dutchmen.

The fact that these two singles rank among the only non-Beatles, Lennon-McCartney compositions to top the chart—ever—says something about the quirky place the Fab Four’s catalog holds in the American imagination. To be exact, there have been three such No. 1 hits. You may have heard of the guy who recorded the third one, back in the mid-’70s, at a time when he had a penchant for large glasses and feather boas.

Before I probe these three strange records—even the one by Elton John is peculiar—let’s take a moment to marvel that none of these chart-topping covers is “Yesterday.” Guinness World Records claims, perhaps apocryphally, that that McCartney-penned tune is the most covered song of all time. “Yesterday” was issued in 1965 as a Beatles single even though Paul McCartney performed it alone, backed only by a string section. Despite the absence of John Lennon and the other two Beatles, it was—like all songs written by either man in the 1960s—published under the songwriting entity Lennon-McCartney.

According to Guinness, “Yesterday” has been recorded more than 2,200 times at last count. Yet the song’s history on the Hot 100 chart is remarkably scant. Two years after the Beatles single topped the Hot 100, Ray Charles’ 1967 version of “Yesterday” reached a modest No. 25 on the same chart and peaked at No. 9 on the R&B chart. Amazingly, Charles’ 1967 cover remains the only version of “Yesterday” besides the Beatles’ own to successfully breach the U.S. Top 40. One other cover, by ’90s R&B girl group En Vogue, briefly appeared on Billboard’s radio charts in 1992; it reached No. 73 at pop radio, No. 29 at R&B.

Of course, recording artists have taken on many other Lennon-McCartney songs. A half-dozen Beatles songs have been turned into Top 10 hits by other acts. These include “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” by the Silkie (No. 10, 1965); “The Fool on the Hill” by Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 (No. 6, 1968); “You Won’t See Me” by Anne Murray (No. 8, 1974); “Got to Get You Into My Life” by Earth, Wind, & Fire (No. 9, 1978); and “I Saw [Him] Standing There” by Tiffany (No. 7, 1988). Two more covers by soul legends made the R&B Top 5 and the pop Top 20: Stevie Wonder’s “We Can Work It Out” (No. 13 pop, No. 3 R&B, 1971) and Aretha Franklin’s “Eleanor Rigby” (No. 17 pop, No. 5 R&B, 1969). As good as many of these covers are, this is a pretty random assortment of songs; many are album cuts, albeit well-regarded ones. Other renowned Beatles covers did even worse on the U.S. charts. For example, neither of Joe Cocker’s classic singles, “With a Little Help From My Friends” and “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” broke into the Top 30; and two well-known covers of “Come Together,” by Ike and Tina Turner and Aerosmith, missed the Top 20.

We’ve heard Brill Building songwriters and the studio musicians of the Wrecking Crew talk about how the self-contained Beatles made it tougher for the industry’s supporting players to earn a living. But it could be argued that they made it tough for song interpreters, too—once the Fab Four had laid down their George Martin–produced, meticulously recorded versions, other artists approached the songs at their peril. When it comes to the charts, the public has shown, time and again, that it’s wary of Beatles covers.

This trapped-in-amber cultural perception about the Beatles’ catalog might help explain why the only three Lennon-McCartney covers to reach No. 1 are such curios. Each hit’s success was more about the moment than about the song itself. The strange alchemy that makes a song a No. 1 record is always somewhat fluky. But when it comes to Lennon-McCartney songs, it’s really fluky.

Seven Lennon-McCartney songs topped the Hot 100 during 1964, the year the British Invasion kicked off in America. Six of these songs were by the Beatles—from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “I Feel Fine.” The seventh, smack in the middle of the year, was by a British duo who’d never had a hit before, Peter and Gordon.

How did these two pasty-faced lads wind up in possession of an unrecorded, unreleased Lennon-McCartney song in 1964? As with all things show business–related, a little networking never hurt.

The bespectacled half of Peter and Gordon was one Peter Asher, brother of actress Jane Asher. Like his sister, Peter Asher had been a child actor in the 1950s, but around 1963, as Beatlemania gripped England, he formed an earnest, bookish pop duo with his Scottish schoolmate Gordon Waller. In a bit of fortuitous timing, 1963 was also the year his sister began a half-decade courtship and eventual engagement with one James Paul McCartney. While McCartney infamously never married Jane Asher—she finally broke it off in 1968, just before he married Linda Eastman—McCartney spent the mid-’60s as de facto extended family to the Ashers, and his relationship with Peter Asher was brotherly, as chronicled in Bob Spitz’s Beatles biography. McCartney wound up giving his would-be brother-in-law four songs that became Top 40 hits, the biggest of which was the first.

“A World Without Love” was a song McCartney wrote by himself as a teenager. It was deemed unworthy of the Beatles and was even rejected by fellow Merseyside musician Billy J. Kramer, who had hits with several Lennon-McCartney compositions. But Peter and Gordon took it and ran to producer Norman Newell, who openly emulated the then-hot “Mersey sound.” Even if you’ve never heard the song, the chiming guitars and dewy vocal harmonies instantly read as an early-Beatles pastiche. One slightly innovative touch was a Hammond organ bridge—at this point, the Beatles were still months away from prominently employing organ on “Mr. Moonlight.”

Despite this small sonic novelty, on the whole “A World Without Love” is British Invasion without the invasion, as if the lads have been cordially invited to America for a cup of tea. Critic Tom Ewing, in his post on the song for his blog on every U.K. No. 1 hit (“World” topped both the U.S. and U.K. charts in ’64), calls it “a glimpse at a world where the Beatles didn’t make the step up from national to global phenomenon. … Instead they … pursue a profitable sideline and afterlife as a superior pop songwriting team.”

Peter and Gordon had not only the songwriting of McCartney on their side but also great timing. That’s because “World” caught Beatlemania during a brief interlude where the band itself had no product. When the Beatles broke in America in early 1964, they dominated the Hot 100 like no artist before or since. One week in April, famously, they held down the entire Top 5; at various points that spring they held up to 14 spots on the chart. The week in May that “A World Without Love” debuted on the chart, the Beatles still occupied multiple berths—two slots in the Top 5 that week, and four out of the Top 12.

To borrow an economic term, Peter and Gordon were filling a market gap.

However, what also kept the Beatles busy in the spring of ’64 was shooting a movie, A Hard Day’s Night. This kept them out of the studio and recording for a crucial couple of months, and their many singles finally began slipping off the Hot 100. Indeed, the week in late June that Peter and Gordon took over the No. 1 spot, there were no Beatles singles in the Top 10—former No. 1 “Love Me Do” had slipped to No. 11, and Billy J. Kramer’s cover of the Lennon song “Bad to Me” had just reached its No. 9 peak—and there were only three Beatles singles on the entire Hot 100.

To borrow an economic term, Peter and Gordon were filling a market gap. “World” spent eight weeks in the Top 10. The very week it fell out of the Top 10, from No. 8 to No. 22, debuting right next to it at No. 21 was the Beatles’ own single “A Hard Day’s Night” (the film had premiered a couple of weeks earlier). Two weeks later, “Hard Day’s Night” had shot to No. 1, and “A World Without Love” had fallen off the chart entirely.

Mind you, this wasn’t the end of Peter and Gordon’s hit-making career; they were back in the Top 20 twice before the end of ’64—with two more songs written by McCartney—and they scored two additional Top 10 hits in 1965 and 1966 before disbanding in 1968. Peter Asher ultimately wound up a renowned producer—he recruited a young James Taylor to the Beatles’ label Apple Records in 1968, and he manned the boards for a raft of platinum soft-rock stars in the ’70s and ’80s. But Peter’s ’60s breakthrough with Gordon was all about parlaying his connections at the best possible moment; Asher was to Paul McCartney in 1964 what one-hit-wonder Motown artist Rockwell was to Michael Jackson in 1984.

While Peter and Gordon’s hit had been a Paul McCartney composition and a leftover, Elton John’s “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” was a chart-topping cover of a song largely written by John Lennon. And “Lucy” was far from a leftover—it was a track from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album that famously had no singles issued from it in 1967 and, hence, no chart hits. But what Elton’s cover of “Lucy” had in common with Peter and Gordon’s fluke chart-topper was that it didn’t matter what they knew so much as whom they knew.

Elton John met John Lennon at a great time for Elton’s career, and a strange moment for Lennon. It was Lennon’s so-called “Lost Weekend,” a debauched 18 months from late 1973 to early 1975 in which he was estranged from wife Yoko Ono and drinking and drugging his way through Los Angeles. Elton was no slouch in the debauchery department, but when he and Lennon met up in the summer of 1974, Elton’s career was at an apex—he was in the middle of an unprecedented American run of No. 1 albums and hit singles. Lennon, by contrast, had to that date built (oddly) the least commercially successful career of the four solo Beatles—even Ringo had scored No. 1 singles while Lennon had none. (His canonical hits “Instant Karma!” and “Imagine” had both peaked at No. 3 in America, in 1970 and 1971, respectively.)

Lennon’s and Elton’s sessions in the summer and early fall of ’74 changed all that. Elton did Lennon a major solid, singing backup on “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” and betting Lennon that the song would be his first solo-career chart-topper; if proved right, Elton said Lennon had to join him in concert. In November, “Whatever” indeed became Lennon’s first solo No. 1 single, and the Beatle made good on the bet by appearing at an Elton John show at Madison Square Garden at Thanksgiving 1974. (It turned out to be Lennon’s last live appearance.)

Even before that show, Lennon had already repaid Elton by helping him record a cover of Lennon’s composition “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” Not that the public needed it from Elton at that moment, but the bromance between him and Lennon was a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval on Elton’s cover of “Lucy.” Lennon even provided backing vocals and guitar on “Lucy” under the pseudonym Dr. Winston O’Boogie. Like Lennon’s “Whatever,” Elton’s “Lucy” also wound up atop the Hot 100, at the start of ’75. Elton was especially prolific during this period—“Lucy” was a non-album single, and it was followed immediately by another one-off No. 1 hit, the smash “Philadelphia Freedom.”

This 1974–75 period marked the apex of what we might call Elton’s Imperial phase, and it explains why the “Lucy” cover even exists: It was a total Because I Can move. In its original Beatles incarnation, “Lucy” already had a reputation as a drug anthem. But in Elton’s hands, “Lucy” turns whimsical—it is largely meant to play off of and boost Elton’s brand, his glittery, cuddly Captain Fantastic persona.

In a review several years later of the Greatest Hits Volume II album on which “Lucy” appeared, dean of American rock critics Robert Christgau called Elton’s cover “dippy,” and I’d agree—everything about it is too cute by half. Listen to the way Elton overplays the courtliness of Lennon’s whimsical lyrics. (I’m thinking especially of the way he says “maaashmallow” around 1:40.) Then there’s the head-scratching reggae version of the chorus, during which Elton—and an audible Lennon—do some plinky white-boy toasting for half a minute. A novel concept, to be sure (listen for it around 3:30), but it only further establishes the track as a novelty.

Even if you are a big Elton John fan, it’s hard to regard “Lucy” as much more than a footnote. For a No. 1 hit, it had a remarkably quick burn on the charts (just 14 weeks, versus 21 weeks for “Philadelphia”), and on the radio of today, it has a modest legacy. Nielsen reports that last year, Elton’s “Lucy” was played on oldies radio less than one-sixth as much as “Philadelphia,” its twin 1975 chart-topper. In sum, Elton’s “Lucy” is to Elton what “Who’s That Girl” is to Madonna or the cover of “I’ll Be There” is to Mariah Carey—a No. 1 hit whose very existence is a reflection of a megastar’s own megastardom.

Stars on 45, “Medley …” – No. 1, June 20, 1981 (one week)

Where should we begin with everything that’s strange about the Stars on 45’s chart-topping 1981 hit—the true outlier among this collection of Lennon-McCartney outliers? Let’s start with its twisted backstory.

The story starts with the Shocking Blue’s “Venus,” a worldwide smash in 1970, including here in America where it was No. 1 (you may also know its second chart-topping version, a 1986 cover by Bananarama). The Shocking Blue is a Dutch group, and the copyright for that song was owned by Dutch publishing company Red Bullet Productions, run by one Willem van Kooten. In the summer of 1979, van Kooten was in a record store and heard a 12-inch disco medley, which mashed together original recordings of songs by the Beatles and the Archies with then-current hits by Heatwave, Lipps Inc., and the Buggles. Disco medleys like this weren’t unprecedented. The Ritchie Family’s 1976 Top 20 hit “The Best Disco in Town” strung together snippets of a half-dozen current hits; and countless white-label disco 12-inches would mash together current hits on the gray market, like modern-day hip-hop mixtapes.

But the 1979 bootleg 12-inch single van Kooten heard was more brazen in its use of so many original recordings, many of them hard to clear. What piqued van Kooten’s curiosity was a small snippet of the Shocking Blue’s “Venus” in the mix; he knew he hadn’t authorized it. The bootleg sported the not-quite-grammatical English title “Let’s Do It in the 80’s Great Hits”; it was credited to a faux band, Passion, on a faux record label, Alto—but the bootleg’s real origins were in Montreal. It was the handiwork of French-Canadian DJs Michel Gendreau and Paul Richer, who specialized in splicing together bits of music from different genres, a kind of analog Girl Talk. Despite invoking the ’80s in their record’s title, the single largely trafficked in ’60s nostalgia. One version of Gendreau and Richer’s medley included three Beatles songs: “No Reply,” “I’ll Be Back,” and “Drive My Car.” A longer version added another five Fabs titles: “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” “We Can Work It Out,” “I Should Have Known Better,” “Nowhere Man,” and “You’re Going to Lose That Girl.”

Charmed and inspired by the unlicensed 12-inch, van Kooten decided that rather than stamp it out, he would better it, creating a licensed version of the medley using sound-alike artists to replicate the original hits (covers require only the payment of publishing fees, not licensing of the original recordings). He contacted producer Jaap Eggermont—formerly of the veteran Dutch rock group Golden Earring—who in turn worked with musical arranger Martin Duiser. In addition to all eight Beatles songs from the Montreal 12-inch, Eggermont threw in a small snippet of “Venus,” as well as one other oldie from the bootleg, the Archies’ 1969 hit “Sugar Sugar.” The Beatles sound-alikes were by established Dutch singers, all of them in current Dutch bands.

The recordings were spliced together, analog-style, against an unremittingly chipper clap track. That clap track is what you’ll remember most from the final Stars on 45 single. It is to this record what the relentless snare beat is to 1989’s “Swing the Mood” by Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers (that ghastly mashup of ’50s songs that wedding DJs love). The clap also specifically dates the track to the turn of the ’80s—when the disco backlash was at full force, and dance music was transitioning into forms like electro where it could hide in plain sight.

What’s charming about the Stars on 45 single, however, is its unhip, unabashed attachment to pure, late-’70s disco—made explicit by Eggermont’s incongruous introduction to the record. It’s an original melody he wrote, sung by a female vocalist and chorus, with Bee Gees–style harmonies and multiple references to disco in a kind of pidgin English (curiously, the intro mentions two Beatles song titles, “Twist and Shout” and “Tell Me Why,” that never appear in the Stars on 45 medley):

You can boogie, like disco—love that disco sound.
Move up your body, spinnin’ round and round.
But don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t forget, oh no.
Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t forget, no, no, no.
The Stars on 45
Keep on turning in your mind.
Like “We Can Work It Out.”
Remember “Twist and Shout”?
You still don’t “Tell Me Why” and “No Reply.”

This incongruity is what is most surreal about the Stars on 45 track—the idea that Beatles-era production would ever fit so comfortably next to late-disco-era production styles, let alone lead to a hit single. (A previous, very recent attempt to do the same with a bigger budget had proved disastrous.) Eggermont and Duiser’s production labors mightily to pull this off, taking more than a minute to segue from its original disco lead-in into “Venus” and “Sugar Sugar” before all the Beatles hits show up roughly a minute and a half into the record. There are some ingenious moments: The juxtaposition of “No Reply” with the ensuing, minor-key “I’ll Be Back” is the single’s most inspired segue.

While the original, nearly 10-minute Dutch single made its first appearance in early 1980, it only really took off about a year later, after Dutch DJs focused on the four-minute Beatles segment. In response, Eggermont and Duiser came up with a tighter, sub-five-minute mix that focused on the Beatles segment and fit on a 45-RPM single. That version topped the Dutch charts in February 1981 before beginning its improbable world conquest, hitting either No. 2 or No. 1 in England, Australia, Germany, Spain, and other countries before finally hitting the top in America.

The Stars on 45 single is Beatles kitsch on steroids.

And in our country, it had a unique title. In most parts of the world, the song was released simply as “Stars on 45 (Medley),” and the artist credit was sometimes also Stars on 45 or the generic Starsound. But the single’s U.S. label, Radio Records (a subsidiary of major label Atlantic), covered its bases with litigious publishers by listing every song in the title. The result—“Medley: Intro Venus / Sugar Sugar / No Reply / I’ll Be Back / Drive My Car / Do You Want to Know a Secret / We Can Work It Out / I Should Have Known Better / Nowhere Man / You’re Going to Lose That Girl / Stars on 45”—remains the longest title of a No. 1 hit in Hot 100 history, more than four times the length of a 10-word chart-topper from 1975, B.J. Thomas’ “(Hey, Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.”

In the U.S., the Stars on 45 single was so popular in the summer of ’81 that it interrupted the nine-week run at No. 1 of the year’s biggest single, Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes.” Which prompts the question: WTF, America? Or more politely, why? European pop kitsch only occasionally crosses over in the U.S.—otherwise Boney M. would have had bigger hits here. Not to mention the fact that Stars on 45 also had to get past the mirror ball–exploding fever pitch of the disco backlash, which was at its apex by 1981.

How did Stars on 45 overcome these hurdles?

I would credit two cultural phenomena—one global, one specific to America. First was the murder of John Lennon in December 1980. The fact that the song only took off globally in early 1981, more than a year after its release, can clearly be attributed to the outpouring of grief prompted by Lennon’s death, which prompted a fusillade of Beatles nostalgia and a kitschy reinvigoration of Lennon’s, and the Beatles’, legacy. The Stars on 45 single is Beatles kitsch on steroids. As with Peter and Gordon in 1964, the song was helping to satisfy a hungry market.

After Lennon’s murder, sales for his music exploded: Double Fantasy, his just-issued album with Yoko Ono, shot to No. 1 in America and generated three Top 10 hit singles, the most ever from a Lennon album. The third and final of these three hits, “Watching the Wheels,” reached its No. 10 peak in the spring of 1981, the same week the Stars on 45 medley broke into the Top 10. In effect, the public was passing the baton from Lennon himself to other acts that could help them grieve. Indeed, just over a month later, George Harrison began climbing the Hot 100 with “All Those Years Ago,” his breezy, unabashed homage to Lennon. The week Harrison’s song peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100, Stars on 45 was still in the Top 10. Both singles were embraced in the summer of ’81 as tributes to Lennon—but only Harrison’s was intentional.

The other, more U.S.-specific reason Stars on 45 caught on was another fluke of timing: the aerobics-and-fitness craze, fueled by the release of Jane Fonda’s 1981 book Workout. “Stars on 45,” with its clap beat and novel repackaging of a familiar Boomer hit parade, was the ultimate hit by which a 35-year-old record-buyer could feel the burn. (I myself have junior high memories of our gym teacher soundtracking our seventh-grade workouts to her vinyl copy of “Stars on 45.”) The song was ahead of the curve on a uniquely American phenomenon—later in 1981, Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” would be a bigger hit here (10 weeks at No. 1) than in any other country around the world. This one-two punch—grief-stricken Beatles nostalgia and resonance with the year’s biggest U.S. fad—proved potent.

Indeed, Stars on 45 proved so popular that it actually spawned a fad of its own: a roughly 18-month-long medley craze. Before the end of 1982, the estates of Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, and the Beatles themselves would all score Hot 100 hits with official medleys of their original recordings. (The Beatles’ medley, a mashup of their movie themes that lacked a click-track beat, was awkwardly mixed and actually made the Stars on 45’s clap-beat approach look more deft.) Meco, the guy behind the chart-topping 1977 disco version of the Star Wars theme, came back to the Top 40 in ’82 with a medley of other random movie themes, from The Magnificent Seven to Goldfinger. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra—an actual classical ensemble from London—amazingly reached the Top 10 with the symphonic disco medley “Hooked on Classics” (selections included “Flight of the Bumblebee,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” and “The Marriage of Figaro”). And as for the Stars on 45 themselves, they were no one-hit wonder—“Stars on 45 III,” a medley of Stevie Wonder covers, reached No. 28 in the spring of 1982, almost a full year after their world-beating Beatles medley.

All three of the Lennon-McCartney-attributed No. 1 hits I’ve discussed here feel like fads or flukes. As recordings, they defy categorization, but they do offer a small window into the strange alchemy by which songs become hits. If the first three rules of real estate are “location, location, location,” the first three rules of hit-making are “timing, timing, timing.” Peter and Gordon’s pleasant McCartney recording found a small window when the public was starved for a novel simulacrum of the Beatles’ sound. Elton John’s Lennon cover went all the way to the top, where other ’70s Beatles covers fell short, by riding Elton’s own tsunami just as it crested. And the Stars on 45 producers hit the ultimate timing jackpot, in the saddest way possible.

Other than a brief Top 10 run by Tiffany’s 1988 cover of “I Saw Her Standing There,” there have been very few Lennon-McCartney hits since the Stars on 45. Actually, the last one was by a 1995 band that had the temerity to call themselves the Beatles.

That would be the trio of Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, reunited for the 1995 ABC-TV Beatles Anthology documentary series and recording over leftover solo recordings by John Lennon. While the Anthology project generated a trio of chart-topping, multiplatinum albums, the two singles released from those LPs charted much more modestly: a No. 6 peak for the breathlessly awaited “Free as a Bird,” and a No. 11 peak for the follow-up, “Real Love.” They peaked quickly on the Hot 100, fueled largely by sales to the most rabid Beatle fans, but radio airplay was minuscule. A quarter-century after they broke up, the Beatles’ inimitable recorded legacy—having frustrated generations of song interpreters—finally foiled the Beatles themselves.      

What Is Classic Rock?  

Led Zeppelin is classic rock. So are Mötley Crüe and Ozzy Osbourne. But what about U2 or Nirvana? As a child of the 1990s, I never doubted that any of these bands were classic rock, even though it may be shocking for many to hear. And then I heard Green Day’s “American Idiot” on a classic rock station a few weeks ago, and I was shocked.

It was my first time hearing a band I grew up with referred to as “classic rock.” Almost anyone who listens to music over a long enough period of time probably experiences this moment — my colleagues related some of their own, like hearing R.E.M. or Guns N’ Roses on a classic rock station — but it made me wonder, what precisely is classic rock? As it turns out, a massive amount of data collection and analysis, and some algorithms, go into figuring out the answer to that very question.

No one starts a band with the intention of becoming classic rock. It’s just sort of something that happens. Figuring out which genre a band fits into — is it techno or house? — has always been a tricky part of the music business. Identifying what’s classic rock is particularly challenging because it’s a constantly moving target, with very different kinds of music lumped together under the same banner. How the people who choose what music you hear — whether on the radio or an Internet streaming service — go about solving this problem reveals a deep connection between data and music.

To see what the current state of classic rock in the United States looks like, I monitored 25 classic rock radio stations1 operating in 30 of the country’s largest metropolitan areas for a week in June.2 The result, after some substantial data cleaning, was a list of 2,230 unique songs by 475 unique artists, with a total record of 37,665 coded song plays across the stations.

I found that classic rock is more than just music from a certain era, and that it changes depending on where you live. What plays in New York — a disproportionate amount of Billy Joel, for example — won’t necessarily fly in San Antonio, which prefers Mötley Crüe. Classic rock is heavily influenced by region, and in ways that are unexpected. For example, Los Angeles is playing Pearl Jam, a band most popular in the 1990s, five times more frequently than the rest of the country. Boston is playing the ’70s-era Allman Brothers six times more frequently.

To put today’s classic rock on a timeline, I pulled the listed release years for songs in the set from the music database SongFacts.com. While I wasn’t able to get complete coverage, I was able to get an accurate release year for 74 percent of the 2,230 songs and 89 percent of the 37,665 song plays.3 The earliest songs in our set date back to the early 1960s;4 the vast majority of those are Beatles songs, with a few exceptions from The Kinks and one from Booker T. and the MGs. A large number of songs appeared from the mid-’60s through the early ’70s. Classic rock peaked — by song plays — in 1973. In fairness, that was a huge year — with the release of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”(an album of classic rock staples), Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” and Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”5 — but the trend steadily held for the rest of the ’70s and through the mid-’80s. The 10-year period from 1973 to 1982 accounts for a whopping 57 percent of all song plays in the set. Besides a small trickle of music from 1995 onward — a trickle to which the Green Day song that inspired this article belongs — the last year to make an actual dent in the listings is 1991. That’s largely due to releases by Nirvana, Metallica and U2, the groups that make up the last wave of what is currently considered classic rock.

But clearly it’s not just when a song was released that makes it classic rock. Popularity matters, as does as a band’s longevity, its sound and a bunch of other factors. To find out why some artists are considered classic rock, I spoke to Eric Wellman, the classic rock brand manager for Clear Channel, which owns nine of the 25 radio stations in our data set. He’s also the programming director at New York’s classic rock station, WAXQ. Wellman said release years have nothing to do with what makes a song “classic rock”; the ability of the genre to grow based on consumers’ tastes is one of the things that’s given it such longevity.

In fact, radio stations are using data to make their selection decisions. Wellman said any radio company with the resources conducts regular studies in its major markets to find out what its listeners consider classic rock. And so it’s you, the consumer, who’s helping to define the genre.

“The standard in the industry these days is an online music test or an auditorium music test where you just gather a sample and have them rate songs based on the hooks — the most familiar parts of the song — and you just get back a whole slew of data,” Wellman said. The stations find a cluster of people who like the music that makes up the core of classic rock, and then finds out what else they like. They like R.E.M.? Well, R.E.M. is now classic rock. “It’s really that simple,” Wellman said.

The top 25 most frequently played artists — the likes of Led Zeppelin, Van Halen and the Rolling Stones — together account for almost half of the spins on classic rock stations in the U.S. Another way of saying that is 5 percent of all the bands played on these stations made up nearly 50 percent of the song plays — which shows that there is at least a classic rock core.

While it’s cool to quantify the most essential classic rock musicians out there, what’s even cooler is comparing each station’s mix to what’s playing in the rest of the country. Doing so demonstrates that the very definition of classic rock can change just by going over to the next city.

This list looks at the 25 most-played artists in our set and then finds the city where they’re played most disproportionately. So if you can never get enough of Led Zeppelin, pack it up and move to New York, where 7 percent of all songs played on WAXQ are by Zep. If you’re like me and can’t stand the Eagles or Tom Petty, stay the heck out of Tampa, where WXGL appears to specialize in them.

Every station has its own character, informed by its audience’s preferences. Classic rock stations do a massive amount of market research to understand who their listeners are and to figure out what songs to play, Wellman said. For example, in the South, listeners like the rock as hard as it comes. According to Wellman, immigration plays a role. “The Hispanic influx across the southern United States vastly changes the rock landscape,” he said. “The common conventional wisdom is that Hispanics who listen to English-language rock like a significantly harder brand of English-language rock. In markets where that is an influence, you’ll see that.”

Migration within the 50 states also plays a role. Billy Joel is bigger in New York than anywhere else in the country, but he’s also the most disproportionately played artist in Miami. Why? Think about who might be listening to classic rock stations in Miami: retired New Yorkers! I looked at each city in our set to find the artist its classic rock station played most disproportionately. Essentially, this map shows the local and regional preferences in classic rock. (Click on the image to see it larger.)

Cities where rock stations have longer legacies, like Detroit and Philadelphia, tend to prefer an older style of classic rock — think J. Geils Band and the Beatles — while cities without that history tend to favor the more contemporary set.

But do radio stations rely at all on the institutional knowledge of their DJs to decide what to play?

Nope. The role of the song-picking DJ is dead. “I know there are some stations and some companies where if you change a song it’s a fireable offense,” Wellman said, cavalierly ruining the magic.

While all of my data collection and analysis focused on radio stations, which have been around for decades, I decided it was also worth reaching out to digital-native startups and streaming services to see how they’re defining classic rock. The Echo Nest, which is owned by Spotify, uses data to generate song recommendations. A huge part of this work entails placing artists into genres. At its very core, the methodology used by The Echo Nest isn’t all that different from what Clear Channel does: Pick a center of the universe — if we’re talking classic rock, that would be Zeppelin, Floyd, etc. — and then find out what orbits the center. Radio stations figure this out based on interviews and music tests. Glenn McDonald, who’s in charge of developing the genre algorithm at The Echo Nest, goes about it using math.

“We start from a set of artists and use a lot of complicated math to extrapolate the rest of the universe if those artists are the the center of it,” McDonald said. In order to define a genre, first McDonald has to find out the relationships among different artists. To do that, he relies on a mountain of data that The Echo Nest collects from users and elsewhere. “We have listening histories and machines that go read the web,” he said. “We read charts, we read reviews, we read blog posts, we read news articles, Wikipedia entries, pretty much anything we’re legally allowed to read.”

These inputs are then interpreted into a relational map among artists showing how similar each is to another — essentially a map of the musical universe. For example, if each artist was a point in space, McDonald would know how close that point is to every other point. And “genre” is what happens when McDonald sees a cluster of points form.

In addition to the web-crawlers and listening histories, The Echo Nest uses sophisticated music-analysis software to figure out the qualities of different songs. McDonald looks at 13 dimensions when evaluating genre: tempo, energy, loudness, danceability, whether a song is more acoustic or electric, dense or spare, atmospheric or bouncy, and so on. Some genres are defined by one of these dimensions in particular — electronic music with a very finite range of beats per minute, say — and some are painted in broader strokes, like classic rock.

Classic rock, McDonald said, has a much wider range of tempo and rarely is powered by a drum machine. The Echo Nest can detect whether an actual person is behind a drum set based on minor imperfections in tempo, or beats that a drum machine can’t mimic. “The timing will be very human and unmechanical,” a dead giveaway, he said.

But McDonald agrees with Clear Channel’s Wellman: The classic rock genre is always changing, and that’s one of the things that makes it so hard to define.

So what’s next for Classic Rock? Should I steel myself for One Direction’s eventual air time on the WAXQ of tomorrow?

It’s going to come down to economics, Wellman said. As baby boomers and Gen X-ers age out of the key advertising demographic over the next five to 10 years, one of two things will happen. Either advertisers will chase them, or classic rock will start to skew younger.      

John Berg  

Astute art director of Columbia Records who created the most emblematic album covers of the Sixties and Seventies.

The sleeve of the long-playing vinyl record provided the canvas for some of the most striking and creative artwork of the latter half of the 20th century: John Berg was the form’s acknowledged master — the Pablo Picasso of the medium. He was responsible for designing or commissioning more than 5,000 record covers, including iconic images of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and totemic designs for bands such as Santana and Chicago. His “greatest hits” have since been exhibited in art galleries and four of his LP covers are in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

His 25-year career was almost exactly coterminous with the high tide of the vinyl LP. He became art director at Columbia Records in 1961, when the LP was a newcomer on the block and the recording industry had only recently discontinued producing cumbersome 78s. By the time he retired in 1985 the digital age had dawned and the 4.7-inch compact disc — which dramatically diminished the impact and importance of cover art — was about to eclipse the 12-inch vinyl platter.

When even the vinyl cover proved too small for his ambition, he pioneered the use of the “gate-fold”, in which the sleeve opened up like a book to double the size of the artist’s canvas. The first of his designs to do so was Bob Dylan’s 1966 album, Blonde On Blonde. It was one of the first double LPs in rock history. To mark the event, Berg placed Dylan’s face on the front but designed the sleeve to open vertically, revealing a near full-length image of the singer. “The record would fall out on the floor when you opened it up,” he said, “but that was a big selling point. Everybody wanted one, because they’d never seen that before.”

During a quarter of a century at Columbia he rose from head of the art department to creative director and eventually vicepresident. It was “the best possible job at the best possible time”, for throughout the 1960s and beyond the label boasted a roster of artists that spanned folk (Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel), pop (Barbra Streisand), rock (Santana and Chicago), jazz (Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis) and classical. “Working at Columbia was like going to Harvard. It was the centre of the graphic universe,” he said.

Berg employed well-known photographers and illustrators, including Richard Avedon, Milton Glaser, Paul Davis and Seymour Chwast, and he liaised closely with the musicians whose work he was packaging.

He was a hands-on director, skilled at getting his own way and with an ability to recognise a good idea. A case in point was Janis Joplin’s Cheap Thrills album with Big Brother and the Holding Company, which featured the brilliantly irreverent cartoons of the underground artist Robert Crumb. “We couldn’t agree on a treatment. Everybody hated everything. Finally Janis went off and hired Crumb,” he recalled. “She brought it into my office and laid it on my desk and I loved it. The president of Columbia hated it. I told him, ‘You can hate it all you want, but this is it’.”

Bob Dylan liked to select his own photos but took Berg’s advice on their presentation. One of the most striking was the backlit profile photo on his Greatest Hits collection, released in 1967. At Berg’s suggestion, the album also included inside a poster designed by Milton Glaser, depicting Dylan with his hair a mass of psychedelic whorls.

For a Barbra Streisand album in 1963, his artist’s eye chose a picture of her face in shadow. “I had to sell it to her. Nobody else in the company wanted to touch her with a 10ft pole, but I’m a pretty good salesman,” he said. The artwork won Berg the first of several Grammy awards for best album cover of the year. Bruce Springsteen wanted to use a serious photo that “made him look like an author on the back cover of a book” for Born To Run. Berg hated the image and instead chose a relaxed picture of the guitar-toting singer leaning playfully on the saxophonist Clarence Clemons. A reluctant Springsteen agreed.

Not everyone succumbed to Berg’s charm. He had a difficult time with the conductor George Szell, who called him a “flaxen-haired ****” and argued endlessly over the packaging of his recordings with the Cleveland Orchestra. After Szell’s death in 1970, Columbia reissued his recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; Berg put on the cover an unflattering photo of Szell holding his hand in front of his face, as if blocking the photographer’s lens. “Getting even was right up there with selling the LP — and I got even,” he said.

John Hendrickson Berg was born in New York in 1932. After graduating from the Cooper Union school of art in Manhattan, he worked for advertising agencies and magazines including Esquire. When he pitched up at Columbia he had never worked on a record cover. “I dropped my portfolio off for consideration and got hired on the spot as art director.”

Berg learnt to keep a design in his “back pocket” for emergencies. Asked to produce a cover for Santana’s Greatest Hits at a day’s notice, he pressed into service a photo hanging on his wall depicting a white dove held against a naked black torso. “I’d always admired it but couldn’t find a use for it until I got this panic call from a meeting upstairs. ‘Can you come up with a cover by tomorrow?’ I said, ‘sure’, got the thing off the wall and said, ‘ How do you like that?’ They said, ‘That’s great!’”      

The Invention of Rock 'n' Roll  

In 1968, when Patti Smith was twenty-one and working in a Manhattan bookstore, she went to a Doors concert at the old Fillmore East. She loved the Doors. As she described the concert in her memoir “Just Kids,” everyone was transfixed by Jim Morrison, except for her. She found herself making a cold appraisal of his performance. “I felt,” she concluded, “that I could do that.” For many people, that response is the essence of rock and roll.

To this way of thinking, rock and roll—the music associated with performers like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and the early Beatles—is music that anyone can play (or can imagine playing) and everyone can dance to. The learning curve for performing the stuff is short; the learning curve for appreciating it is nonexistent. The instrumentation and the arrangements are usually simple: three or four instruments and, frequently, about the same number of chords. You can add horns and strings and backup singers, and you can add a lot more chords, but the important thing is the feeling. Rock and roll feels uninhibited, spontaneous, and fun. There’s no show-biz fakery coming between you and the music. As with any musical genre, it boils down to a certain sound. Coming up with that sound, the sound of unrehearsed exuberance, took a lot of work, a lot of rehearsing. No one contributed more to the job than Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records, in Memphis, and the man who discovered Elvis Presley.

In twenty-first-century terms, Phillips was an industry disrupter. He had a regional business, little access to capital, and no reliable distribution system for his product. He recorded a style of music that the major record companies—there were six of them when he started out, and they dominated the national market—had deemed unprofitable. But he helped identify an audience, and that audience transformed the industry and the nature of popular music.

In the beginning, Phillips had not planned to run a record company. He was born, in 1923, in a small place in Alabama called Lovelace Community, not far from Muscle Shoals. His father was a flagman on a railroad bridge over the Tennessee River. Phillips got his start in radio, working in Decatur and Nashville, and, finally, in 1945, making it to Memphis, his version of what Paris was for Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. In January, 1950, he opened the Memphis Recording Service, in a tiny space on Union Avenue, just a block away from Beale Street, the heart of the Memphis music scene. (The building still stands, now a National Historic Landmark.)

“We Record Anything—Anywhere—Anytime” was the slogan. This meant a lot of church services, weddings, and funerals, but Phillips’s dream, the reason that he set up the studio, was to have a place where any aspiring musician could come in and try out, no questions asked. Phillips would listen and offer suggestions and encouragement. If he liked what he heard, he would record it. For a fee, the performer could cut his or her own record.

Phillips was extremely good at this. He was patient with the musicians; he was adept with the technology; above all, he was supportive. He hated formulas. He thought that music was about self-expression, and he liked songs that were different. The pop sound in 1950 was smooth and harmonic. Phillips preferred imperfection. It made the music sound alive and authentic. Word got around, and musicians no one else would record started turning up at the Memphis Recording Service. Phillips got them to believe in him by getting them to believe in themselves.

To have the recordings pressed and distributed, he relied on small independent labels like Modern Records, in Los Angeles, and Chess, in Chicago. But he found the men who ran those outfits untrustworthy—he felt that they were always trying to poach his artists or cheat him on royalties—and so, in 1952, he started up his own label, Sun Records.

Phillips rarely scouted for artists. Sun was designed as a walk-in business. And amazing performers walked in, some on their own, some referred by other musicians. By 1958, Phillips had produced sides by a major-league roster of talent. He was the first to record, besides Elvis, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy Orbison. He produced and released songs that people born decades afterward still play in their heads while doing the dishes: “Mystery Train,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk the Line,” “Ooby-Dooby,” “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On,” “Great Balls of Fire.” That’s a plausible soundtrack at Starbucks more than half a century later.

Still, despite commercial success, Phillips continued to lose his artists, this time to major record labels, like Columbia and RCA Victor, and, around 1960, he more or less gave up producing. A wealthy man, he disappeared from the music scene for almost twenty years. When he reëmerged, he devoted some of his time to creating new radio stations but most of it—he died in 2003—to burnishing his legend. Peter Guralnick’s “Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll” (Little, Brown) is an interesting contribution to the self-promotion project.

The book is a labor of love. Guralnick is an eminent authority on rock and roll and related musical styles. He is passionate about the music, but he doesn’t let his passion overinflate his prose, and he seems to know everything about everyone who was part of the Southern music world. He is best known as the author of a classic and probably unsurpassable two-volume biography of Presley, “Last Train to Memphis” (1994) and “Careless Love” (1999). He spent many years trying to get an interview with Phillips. Finally, in 1979, the year Phillips decided to come out of hibernation, he succeeded. It turned out to be worth the wait, and not only professionally. “Meeting Sam for me was a life-changing event,” Guralnick says.

Phillips and Guralnick became friends, although it was a Yoda-Luke sort of relationship, which appears to have been the sort of relationship Phillips was most comfortable with. He was always a great talker. In his later years, and with a glass of vodka in hand, he seems to have been a verbal Niagara. He told Guralnick how it was, and Guralnick wrote it down (or taped it).

In some respects, therefore, “Sam Phillips” is the memoir that Phillips never wrote. The book adopts a down-home slash mythomaniacal voice that is presumably meant to capture Phillips at his most loquacious: And it came to him in that moment that this could be his calling: not just the righting of wrongs but the study of humanity, in all its diversity, in all of the multitude of its manifestations.

In the opening pages, Phillips is equated with Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, and Michelangelo. Even in a eulogy, it would seem a little much. When our hero’s patronage of the local brothel is described as a humanitarian act in support of women down on their luck—women who, if not for such patronage, might have had to turn to . . . what? cleaning houses?—you know you are not reading a conventional biography.

But Guralnick understands his subject, and, after a while, you pick up on the subtext. Phillips had a genuine feel for a kind of music that was, in a Southern context, slightly asymmetrical to his own race and class. He liked the blues, and his liking of the blues was bound up with progressive views on race relations. He really did believe that by recording B. B. King and Howlin’ Wolf—and many other African-American musicians, most of them now largely forgotten—he was doing God’s work. He respected his musicians as artists and as people; he identified with their travails; and he threw himself into the job of getting their music out.

Personally, as becomes clear in the course of the biography, he could be self-centered to the point of coldness. He made it a principle never to let other people’s feelings stand in his way. As a number of witnesses explained the deal to Guralnick, Sam was Sam; he did what he wanted to do. He was a good-looking man. Women fell for him, and he did not demur. He had several long-term mistresses with whom he lived publicly, though he remained married to the same woman his whole life. At some point, he simply moved her into a house of her own, so that he could live with his girlfriend. That girlfriend had to wait out other public affairs later on. All the women seem to have remained loyal, including his wife.

Phillips was also not a very good businessman. Other independent labels, like Atlantic, managed to keep their artists and to thrive well into the nineteen-sixties. Phillips got out of the business just as the pop-music revolution that he helped make happen was starting to cash out in a big way. Even if he had just kept running the studio, he would have had plenty of work. FAME Studios, which was founded in Florence, Alabama, in 1959 and moved to Muscle Shoals in 1961, recorded huge hits by artists like Arthur Conley (“Sweet Soul Music”), Wilson Pickett (“Mustang Sally”), Percy Sledge (“When a Man Loves a Woman”), and Aretha Franklin (“Chain of Fools”).But Phillips, after losing virtually all of his original hit-makers, was convinced that the majors would always stick it to the little guy, and had largely dropped out. A sound he did much to develop conquered the world through work done by other hands.

As for the mythomania: it seems that, basically, you just gotta love it. Phillips could be petty about insisting on credit for various things, but he was an outsized personality. Putting up with a little grandiosity, and some occasional cornball wisdom, came with the territory. He was one of those people with whom, if you are willing to play by their rules when you are in their house, everything is better than good.

The subtitle of Guralnick’s book should probably be read in quotation marks. “The man who invented rock and roll” is a phrase that Phillips wanted to be remembered by, and the label has stuck. Guralnick suggests that it might be more accurate to call him “the man who discovered rock and roll.” But even that seems misplaced, not because Phillips wasn’t in the yolk of the egg, which he was, but because how the egg got hatched is still a mystery.

Rock and roll is usually explained as rhythm-and-blues music—that is, music performed by black artists for black listeners—repurposed by mostly white artists for a mostly white audience. How do we know this? Because that’s the way the industry trade magazine Billboard represented it. Billboard started charting songs in 1940. By 1949, it was publishing charts in three categories: pop, country-and-Western, and (a new term, replacing “race music”) rhythm and blues. Every week, in each category, there were lists of the songs most frequently sold in record shops, most frequently requested in jukeboxes, and most frequently played by disk jockeys. (These rankings were all relative; actual sales figures were proprietary.)

The charting system was predicated on a segregated market. How did Billboard know when a song was a rhythm-and-blues hit, and not a pop hit? Because its sales were reported by stores that catered to an African-American clientele, its on-air plays were reported by radio stations that programmed for African-American listeners, and its jukebox requests were made in venues with African-American customers. Black artists could have pop hits. The Ink Spots, a black quartet, had fourteen songs in the Top Five on the pop chart between 1939 and 1947. That was because their songs were marketed to whites.

The foundation on which this scheme rested was obviously extremely shaky, and several industry developments made it even shakier. One was the rise of the local radio station. Before the nineteen-forties, radio was dominated by national broadcast networks like CBS, NBC, and Mutual. As a consequence of an F.C.C. policy designed to break up this oligopoly, the licensing of local stations increased from around eight hundred in 1940 to more than two thousand in 1949. By 1950, the radio stations most people were listening to were local. And everyone listened. Ninety-six per cent of homes in the United States had a radio.

One article of faith in the music business is that repetition is a key to sales. The more often people hear a song, the more they feel the need to buy it, and radio was one way to lodge a song in people’s heads. Jukeboxes were another. By 1940, there were close to half a million jukeboxes in the United States. This is why d.j. and jukebox plays were charted in Billboard: they were market indicators. A song that was played a lot could be predicted to sell a lot, so distributors and retailers took notice.

Jukeboxes and local radio stations allowed the music audience to segment—a key development in a racially divided society. A third of the population of Memphis was African-American, for example, and so a small local station could survive profitably with programming for African-American listeners. In fact, the first station with all-black programming in the United States (it was owned by whites) was in Memphis: WDIA, which began broadcasting, at two hundred and fifty watts, in 1949. B. B. King started his career there, as a disk jockey and on-air performer.

The major record companies got out of the “race music” business in the nineteen-forties. But the spread of jukeboxes and the success of local radio showed that the market, though small, was still there. As if on cue, a swarm of independent labels arose to manufacture and sell rhythm-and-blues records: Specialty, Aladdin, Modern, Swingtime, and Imperial (all in Los Angeles—for a time, oddly, the capital of R. & B.), King (Cincinnati), Peacock (Houston), Chess (Chicago), Savoy (Newark), Atlantic (New York), and many more. All those labels were established between 1940 and 1950. Phillips actually came late to the party.

Rock and roll became possible when it started to dawn on people that not everyone buying R. & B. records or listening to R. & B. songs on the radio was African-American. In 1952, the year Phillips launched Sun, forty per cent of R. & B. record buyers at the Dolphin Record Store, in L.A., were white. The year before, a classical-music d.j. in Cleveland, Alan Freed, had been astonished to see white teen-agers eagerly buying R. & B. records at a local record shop, and he started following his “quality music” program with a show devoted to R. & B. In 1954, Freed moved to WINS, in New York. He was one of the first people to call R. & B. music listened to by white kids rock and roll—a key move in repositioning the product.

By the time Sun opened for business, it was obvious that many white teen-agers wanted to listen to R. & B. Sam Phillips knew it, but, as Guralnick says, everybody knew it. The problem was not how to create the market but how to exploit it. Phillips is supposed to have gone around saying, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.” In an unsympathetic biography of Presley, published in 1981, Albert Goldman has Phillips referring to “the nigger sound”; Guralnick makes it clear that Phillips didn’t talk or think that way. And Guralnick is confident that Phillips didn’t talk about the music in terms of getting rich, either.

Still, it raises an interesting question. Phillips had had success in 1951 with a song called “Rocket 88” (the title refers to a model of automobile), performed by Ike Turner’s band and sung by Jackie Brenston, who became the headliner (much to Turner’s annoyance). The band had damaged an amplifier on the way to the studio, so it buzzed when music was played. Phillips considered this a delicious imperfection, and he kept it. That is the sound that makes the record, and many people have called “Rocket 88” the first rock-and-roll song. (I guess some song has to be the first.) But “Rocket 88” was performed by a black group. Why, if white kids were already buying records by black musicians, did the breakthrough performer have to be white?

The answer is television. In 1948, less than two per cent of American households had a television set. By 1955, more than two-thirds did. Prime time in those years was dominated by variety shows—hosted by people like Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, Milton Berle, and Perry Como—that booked musical acts. Since most television viewers got only three or four channels, the audience for those shows was enormous. Television exposure became the best way to sell a record.

On television, unlike on radio, the performer’s race is apparent. And sponsors avoided mixed-race shows, since they were advertising on national networks and did not want to alienate viewers in certain regions of the country. Nat King Cole’s television show, which went on the air in 1956, could never get regular sponsors. Cole had to quit after a year. “Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark,” he said.

The stage was thus set for Elvis Presley. Presley was a walk-in. He showed up at the Memphis Recording Service in the summer of 1953, when he was eighteen, to make a record for his mother. (At least, that’s the legend.) He paid four dollars to record two songs, “My Happiness,” which had been a hit for several artists, including Ella Fitzgerald, a few years earlier, and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” an old Ink Spots song. Whether Phillips was in the booth that day or not later became a matter of acrimonious dispute (he insisted that he was), but someone wrote next to Presley’s name, “Good ballad singer. Hold.”

A year later, Phillips invited Presley back to try out a ballad he’d discovered. The song didn’t seem to work, and Phillips had Presley run through all the material he knew, any song he could remember. After three hours, they gave up. But Phillips thought of putting Presley together with a couple of country-and-Western musicians—Scotty Moore, an electric guitarist, and Bill Black, who played standup bass—and invited the three of them to come to the studio.

They began their session with a Bing Crosby song called “Harbor Lights,” then tried a ballad, then a hillbilly (or country) song. They did multiple takes; nothing seemed to click. Everyone was ready to quit for the night when, as Elvis told the story later, “this song popped into my mind that I had heard years ago and I started kidding around.”

The song was “That’s All Right,” an old R. & B. number, written and recorded by Arthur Crudup. “Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them,” Scotty Moore recalled. Phillips stuck his head out of the booth and told them to start from the beginning. After many takes, they had a record.

Phillips had become friendly with a white disk jockey, Dewey Phillips, who played some R. & B. on his show, on WHBQ, in Memphis. (Becoming friendly with d.j.s who played the kind of music you recorded was basic industry practice. Leonard Chess, of Chess Records, used to have a trunk full of alligator shoes when he drove around visiting local d.j.s. He’d ask for their shoe size and gift them a pair.) Sam gave the recording to Dewey, and Dewey played it repeatedly on his broadcast. It was an overnight sensation.

To make a record that people could buy, they needed a B-side. So, the next day, Presley, Moore, and Black recorded an up-tempo cover of a bluegrass song called “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and, in July, 1954, Elvis Presley’s first single came on the market. In Sun’s promotional campaign, Phillips emphasized the record’s “three-way” appeal: to pop, hillbilly, and rhythm-and-blues listeners.

The point was that Elvis was not a pop singer who covered R. & B. and country songs. Plenty of pop singers did that. Elvis was a crossover artist. “Operators have placed [“That’s All Right”] on nearly all locations (white and colored) and are reporting plays seldom encountered on a record in recent years,” Phillips announced in a press release. “According to local sales analysis, the apparent reason for its tremendous sales is because of its appeal to all classes of record buyers.” The press bought the theory that Elvis was unclassifiable in conventional terms. “He has a white voice, sings with a Negro rhythm, which borrows in mood and emphasis from country styles,” a Memphis paper explained.

Presley’s next two singles on Sun didn’t have much success. He finally made it onto the national country-and-Western chart in July, 1955, with “Baby Let’s Play House.” In September, his cover of “Mystery Train,” a song that Phillips had recorded two years earlier with Junior Parker, the black singer who wrote it, made the Top Ten on Billboard’s country-and-Western chart. Guralnick says it was Phillips who persuaded Junior Parker that the train should have sixteen coaches. “Mystery Train,” Phillips told Guralnick, was “the greatest thing I ever did on Elvis. I’m sorry. It was a fucking masterpiece.” Two months later, he sold Presley’s contract to RCA Victor for thirty-five thousand dollars.

Presley was made for television. Offstage, he was bashful and polite, but, with a microphone and in front of an audience, he was a gyrating fireball with an unbelievably sexy sneer. He loved to perform. He made his first national television appearance on Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey’s “Stage Show,” on CBS, in January, 1956. His big television moment came a few months later, though, when he sang back-to-back versions of “Hound Dog,” the second time with full range of pelvic motion, on Milton Berle. Forty million people watched his performance, and that summer “Hound Dog” and its flip side, “Don’t Be Cruel,” went to No. 1 on all three Billboard charts. The rest is history.

But let’s rewind the tape. Originally, Phillips never had any idea of using Presley to cover an R. & B. song. He called him in as a ballad singer, and that is what Presley always believed he essentially was. Presley’s favorite among his own songs was “It’s Now or Never.” The song is not bluesy, and it’s not rock and roll. It’s Neapolitan. Musically, “It’s Now or Never” is a cover of “O Sole Mio.”

When Phillips decided to bring in two white musicians, Moore and Black, to back Presley, he had them try pop and country songs. “That’s All Right” began as a joke. Moore and Black thought the song was a joke, too. It worked, but it seems to have been completely unpremeditated.

“That’s All Right” did not make the national charts. It was a regional hit. Its reception sent a signal that “a white man singing black” excited listeners, but Presley didn’t make it to the big time for another year. By then, as Elijah Wald points out in his recent revisionist history of popular music, “How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll,” white performers and producers had stopped recasting R. & B. songs in a pop style and had started imitating them. Producers knew where the new sound was headed.

Rhythm and blues was hot. By 1954, the all-black-programming WDIA had become a fifty-thousand-watt station reaching the entire mid-South. A year later, there were more than six hundred stations, in thirty-nine states, that programmed for black listeners. When the young Pat Boone walked into the studio at Dot Records, in Gallatin, Tennessee, in the summer of 1955, he was shocked to be asked to sing an R. & B. song. Like Presley, Boone saw himself as a ballad singer. But he recorded Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” and it went to No. 1 on the pop chart. The same summer, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” became a No. 1 song after it was heard in the movie “Blackboard Jungle.”

African-American performers began to benefit from the popularity of the new sound. In May, 1955, Chuck Berry recorded “Maybellene” for Chess Records; Chess rushed the record to Alan Freed, in New York, and it went to No. 1 on the R. & B. chart and No. 5 on the pop chart. Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” was released a few months later. By January, when Presley was beginning to appear on television, it had reached No. 17 on the pop chart. In 1954, only three per cent of songs on the pop retail chart were by African-American artists; in 1957, it was nearly thirty per cent. That was unprecedented.

Presley quickly covered “Tutti Frutti.” So did Pat Boone, who, in the nineteen-fifties, was second in record sales only to Presley. An aspiring English teacher, Boone insisted on announcing his first big hit onstage as “Isn’t That a Shame.” He did not, even remotely, “sound black.” But, from an industry point of view, he brought respectability to the material. He helped make R. & B. the new pop. In 1956, seventy-six per cent of top R. & B. songs also made the pop chart; in 1957, eighty-seven per cent made the pop chart; in 1958, it was ninety-four per cent. The marginal market had become the main market, and the majors had got into the act.

When we look back at this history, the best conclusion seems to be the one reached by the sociologist Philip Ennis in his valuable analysis of popular music, “The Seventh Stream” (1992). “Did the music industry force-feed teenagers into the acceptance of rock and roll?” Ennis asked. “To the contrary, it was almost the reverse.” White listeners began consuming a style of music that had not been manufactured for or marketed to them. The d.j.s and the record companies were only scrambling to meet the demand. That demand seems to have sprung up everywhere—in Cleveland and Memphis, in Los Angeles and New York—and all at once. If advertising and promotion didn’t bring about this phenomenon, what did?

It’s tempting to interpret it as a generational rebellion against a buttoned-up, conservative domestic culture, but this is almost certainly a retrospective reading, created by looking at the period through the lens of the nineteen-sixties. Folk songs had a message, and some sixties rock songs had a message. Rock and roll did not have a message, unless it was: “Let’s party (and if you can’t find a partner, use a wooden chair).” Or maybe, at its most polemical, “Roll over, Beethoven.” But it was music intended for young people, and this was the distinctive thing.

In order for a music for young people to come into being, young people have to have a way to play it. The jukebox was one delivery mode: kids could listen to the music in a diner or an ice-cream shop, someplace outside the home and in the company of other kids. More significant, as Ennis points out, were several inventions. The 45-r.p.m. record—the single—was developed by RCA and marketed in 1949. Soon, RCA introduced a cheap plastic record player, which played only 45s and sold for twelve ninety-five. This meant that teen-agers could play “their” music out of their parents’ hearing. They did not have to listen in the living room on the family phonograph.

In 1954, transistor radios came on the market. Kids could now carry the music anywhere, including to school. A robust national economy in the United States after 1950 meant that teen-agers were staying in school longer than they had in the nineteen-thirties or during the war years. High school became an important social space. Material conditions therefore existed for a quasi-autonomous “teen culture,” and rock and roll beautifully fit the bill.

It has also been tempting to make sense of the rise of rock and roll as somehow related to the civil-rights movement, whose origins date from the same period. White enthusiasm for R. & B. music looks like a cultural indicator of future changes in race relations. This, too, seems largely a retrospective reading. The music of the movement was gospel, not pop or rhythm and blues.

In fact, the racialization of the rock-and-roll story, which continued after the nineteen-fifties in the form of charges that white artists had appropriated an African-American art form, is a simplification. It’s based on the idea that there is or was a “black” sound or a “black” musical style. That idea is an artifact of the old Billboard charting system, which was premised on just such an assumption. When you get down to cases, the racial elements become complicated very quickly.

Take “Hound Dog,” one of Presley’s biggest hits. It was originally released by a black R. & B. singer named Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton, in 1953, and went to No. 1 on the national R. & B. chart. But Thornton didn’t write the song. It was written by a couple of Jewish teen-agers living in L.A., Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, on commission from the producer Johnny Otis, who was recording Thornton for Peacock Records. It took them about fifteen minutes to compose it.

Leiber and Stoller thought they had written a raunchy blues number, but when they brought it into the studio Thornton insisted on crooning it. Leiber had to sing it for her so she could hear how it was supposed to go. When she was ready to record it, the drummer wasn’t making the right sound, so Otis played the drums himself (and also took co-writing credit). Otis always considered himself part of the African-American community, but in fact he was the son of Greek immigrants; his real name was John Veliotes.

Presley needed thirty-one takes to record “Hound Dog.” He didn’t cover Big Mama Thornton’s version, though. He had decided to record the song after hearing it performed by an all-white Las Vegas lounge act called Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, who had rewritten the lyrics to turn “Hound Dog” from a song about a lover who won’t go away to a song about, actually, a dog. It was a gag number, and that’s how Elvis performed it. When he sang it on “The Steve Allen Show,” Allen brought a basset hound onstage and Presley sang to the dog. Whatever sexual innuendo a couple of white songwriters had invented and had managed to persuade an African-American singer was in the lyrics had been completely erased.

The flip side of Presley’s “Hound Dog” single, “Don’t Be Cruel,” is completely different, a doo-woppy, country-sounding song. “Don’t Be Cruel” was written by Otis Blackwell, who later gave Presley two more songs with the same sound, “Return to Sender” and “All Shook Up.” Blackwell was African-American.

All history is retrospective. We’re always looking at the past through the lens of later developments. How else could we see it? We are ourselves, as subjects, among those later developments. It’s natural for us to take events that were to a significant extent the product of guesswork, accident, short-term opportunism, and good luck, and of demographic and technological changes whose consequences no one could have foreseen, and shape them into a heroic narrative about artistic breakthrough and social progress. But a legend is just one of the forms that history takes—which is why it’s good to have Guralnick’s book      

Enya  

Everyone knows how to get to Enya’s castle. At least everyone in Killiney, the sloping oceanside village 45 minutes out of Dublin. Walk past a massive public park, where paths thread by a resting quarry and an obelisk, erected in 1740 to distract the Irish peasants from the hard year that had come before. From there, it’s a quick stroll down the road, past the groundskeeper’s cottage that’s now a coffee shop, and through a stone gate that narrows an already spindly road.

Here, you’ll pass clumps of walkers taking the air, most with golden retrievers, all with sturdy anoraks in sensible colors. Those walkers don’t pause when they pass the place in the 8-foot stone wall where a legit turret peeks over massive wooden gates — where, if you look closely, you can see the seam in the stone wall where Enya added four additional feet of height when she moved in back in the late ‘90s. Surveillance cameras eye and remind: Enya does not accept visitors unbidden.

The castle is small, as castles go: just six bedrooms. But when Enya moved in, she redid them all. And the bathrooms, which she’s filled with Lalique glass — a word she pronounces like it were a bonbon melting on her tongue. Her bedroom has no curtains, just shutters, and when she opens them each morning, the Irish sea sprawls out before her. There are the Wicklow Mountains in one direction, and there’s Dalkey Island, where the mystical stones of the druids still mystify, in the other. “I open those shutters, and the sea, it’s different ev-er-y day,” she says. “It’s very inspiring to me. I just look at the view, and if it’s overcast and raining, no matter: I never tire of it.” Her bedroom, Enya tells me, is her favorite room. Traditionally, castles were passed through family lines. Enya — whose wealth is estimated at $136 million, about double that of Chris Martin — bought her own. But unlike her neighbor Bono, whose income stems from massive world tours, Enya does not tour, and never has toured. She submits to minimal press. She takes up to seven years between albums. Yet she has sold a total of 80 million records, and is one of a dwindling group whose records people are willing to buy.

Her success so deeply contradicts accepted industry wisdom that it’s inspired a term — “Enya-nomics” — to describe it. Several years ago, she was invited to Harvard Business School to discuss the subject, but, like most invitations, Enya declined. Her underexposure, after all, is at the heart of both Enya-nomics and her appeal. Unlike other local celebrities — Bono, The Edge, Van Morrison, Pierce Brosnan, director Neil Jordan — who’ll make odd appearances at the local establishment, Enya is seldom seen outside the walls of her castle. One shopkeeper claims to have seen a woman matching her description in a tracksuit, but the idea of Enya in a tracksuit boggles the mind. No one knows much about her private life, save that she’s close to her family, hasn’t been married, and enjoys old Hollywood.

There are no photos of Enya in pants, or without the makeup that emphasizes her alabaster skin and dark, pooling eyes. Her look, like her sound, is markedly different from the norms of musical celebrity: her pitch black hair trimmed short, her clothes Arthurian. On her album covers, Enya’s always posed against a backdrop of nature or old regency; the cover of her 1988 breakthrough album Watermark renders her the subject of an impressionist painting.

Her look, like her sound, seems to exist outside of time. In her songs, there are no references to objects, technological or otherwise: just emotions, swells, landscapes, time. In her real life, she checks her email once every few weeks, and even then, very quickly. “It feels so cold,” she says, making a face like she’d bitten into a lemon. “The energy is no good. I’d rather go for a walk.”

It is as if a woman of the 18th century, renowned for her beauty and voice, was transplanted to the present, where she would sell as many albums as Beyoncé and baffle all industry experts. She transcends centuries, but she also exceeds hierarchies of cool. Her style has been derogatorily described as Muzak or New Age — the aural approximation of a warm bath — but might be more fairly described as ancient choral music on synth steroids.

Enya, for her part, describes her genre of music as “Enya.” It’s played at weddings. It’s in car commercials. It made the Fugees’ “Ready or Not” feel like an incantation. It’s perfect at Christmas. After 9/11, it was all over CNN. People probably don’t have much sex to Enya, but women have assuredly orgasmed to it. It’s at once stunningly flexible and spectacularly safe.

Enya is basic, which is to say, she’s elemental: sacred without religion. And as she prepares to release her eighth studio album — and first in seven years — the conversation isn’t about reinventing herself for the digital age, or “Enya’s Second Act.” Her career is like a continuously held note: a single tone, but a rich one, shielded, at least to this point, from the vagaries of the age and industry. Which isn’t to say it’s been easy. It’s taken years of work — of carefully cultivated mystery, of continuous self-effacement — for Enya to feel this inevitable and eternal. For her to become not just an artist, but an adjective.

That’s the feel of the listening party for the new album, Dark Sky Island, held on a blustery day in October: very Enya. Warner Bros. Records, her label since the days of “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away),” is throwing an event that makes you feel like CDs are selling for $17.99 apiece all over again. Even the invitation, which promises “canapés,” feels like a throwback. It’s at an Upper East Side marbled mansion, with a spiraling marble staircase that, as you ascend, reveals Enya’s name projected on the ceiling above. The crowd skews young and hip — a mix of music journalists and Warner employees flown in for the occasion. One, in his late thirties, tells me that seeing Enya has been his life’s dream: “I’ve seen Cher and Adam Lambert, so now I’ve seen them all.”

Clustered at small cocktail tables, everyone’s invited to turn off cell phones so as to “replicate the experience” of the locale invoked by the album — a real island, Sark, off the coast of France, where the 600 residents have committed to emitting no light pollution. People start closing their eyes, trancelike — even the journalists with the coolest hair — and get that softened look people get in their faces when watching a wedding, or a sunset. The “Enya” look.

When the intro to “Echoes in Rain” plays, the exec sitting in front of me goes nuts, in a subdued, candlelit way. “This is the shit!” he whisper-shouts. Then there’s a ballad, “So I Could Find My Way,” that a journalist will later tell Enya will be perfect for a breakup scene in a rom-com, and “Sancta Maria,” the sort of escalating march to which my brother and I would’ve made an intricately choreographed dance when we were 6 and 9.

An exec from Warner Music UK comes out and effuses about Enya and her 80 million records. When he mentions that Enya’s one of the only artists who’s been on their roster since the ‘80s, it’s with gratitude, tinged with just the slightest bit of desperation. And while her albums have performed well (A Day Without Rain sold 15 million and became the fifth-biggest international album of 2001; Amaratine, released in 2005, sold 6.5 million copies; her Christmas album, And Winter Came, sold 3 million in 2008), the numbers for Dark Sky Island won’t be what they used to be, even for an artist whose core audience might still buy CDs. For the first time, Enya is talking publicly, and seriously, about the idea of a tour.

In the meantime, she’s adapting to this new landscape. A 2013 Volvo ad with Jean-Claude Van Damme featuring her 2000 single “Only Time” has been viewed 81 million times on YouTube and launched the song back into Billboard’s Hot 100 over a decade after its initial release. The song has 36 million streams on Spotify, where Enya’s artist channel has 1.2 million monthly listeners; there’s a reliable market for music that can meld so seamlessly into the background.

“In the next year you’ll start to see all kinds of usages for the songs on Dark Sky Island,” says Dion Singer, executive vice president of creative at Warner Bros. “It’s all about finding ways of exposing her music while being absolutely aware that it needs to keep the elegance and respect of her compositions. We can also see how being in films and commercials kept her music so front-of-mind. It’s exciting when you see how many people stream her entire catalog every week and the different kinds of playlists she ends up on.”

Enya emerges from the shadows wearing a full-length black taffeta dress and a velvet shrug. She’s 54, but she has the skin of someone much younger — or someone who spends most of her time in an Irish castle. She looks like a mix of Deanna Troi and my mom, which is to say, she is the most beautiful woman in the world. She appears, nods as the room applauds her, and disappears without a word. “Now, for a light mingle,” the exec announces.

In the next room, Enya has a receiving line, like a bride in all black. Everyone has a story to tell her: Here is what you mean to me; here is where your music made room in my life. “Was that a harpsichord I heard on ‘Sancta Maria’?” someone asks. “Oh, we never reveal our secrets,” she says, with a half-smile.

She’s referring to the work of the so-called “triad” that make up Enya, the musical entity. Enya conjures the melodies; husband-and-wife team Nicky and Roma Ryan are responsible for the production (him) and lyrics (her). Nicky Ryan is a student of Phil Spector’s famed “wall of sound” school of production, and applies the same principle to each of Enya’s songs, layering her voice up to 500 times, then adding in a mix of instruments, some of which Enya plays and others he’s sampled. Nicky and Roma go everywhere that Enya goes, and they’re here at the listening party, holding court, flanking her during the dinner party and staying even after Enya glides away before the dessert course arrives.

Enya, born Eithne Ni Bhraonáin, grew up in the Northwest corner of Ireland in a town called Gweedore, in County Donegal. “There’s the mountains, the bitter Atlantic, and that’s it,” Enya explains. Her father led a band before opening up the family pub; her mother was a piano teacher, but had little time to teach Enya, the sixth of nine children. She grew up speaking Gaelic and was regularly summoned — at family gatherings, at the pub, wherever — to sing in front of crowds. “At 3 years of age, I used to go to singing competitions,” she says. “And part of the competition would be for the whole family, and we’d have to sing harmonies after hearing a song once. I never found it strange.” Enya was in the deep middle of the birth order. “Let’s say there’d be a question like ‘Will we go to the pictures today?’” Enya recalls. “What chance did I have to say yes or no?” At this, she laughs: It’s not a point of resentment. “By the time it came down to number five, — that’s me — it was just like, Here we go. It was difficult to be heard, but I was very comfortable with that because I was able to be myself, able to be let alone.” Enya taught herself to play the piano on her own, borrowing her mother’s instructional books, leading herself through the levels. “I got the duets, and I asked my sister to play a bit, and she’d refuse. I’d say, ‘I’ll give you my sweets for a week if you play it!’”

Growing up amid The Troubles, she learned to live with the quiet terrors of everyday life. The “six counties” occupied by Britain separated Enya’s hometown from Dublin, and her family was regularly pulled over and searched on the way and back. “You’d go into a shop in Derry and you’d be checked by people standing with guns,” Enya says. “And my family, we’d have to be careful speaking Gaelic: If you did, you were pinpointing where you came from, and it was too political at the time. Whereas for us, it was our first language, and we didn’t see anything wrong with it.”

As a child, Enya had resigned herself to attending the local school, which lacked a music program. A nearby boarding school did, but the family was already paying for private school for three of Enya’s siblings. “I thought, Oh well, it’s not possible to send us all. But I was very close to my granddad and grandma, and they took me there one day and showed me around, and asked if I’d like to go. There was choir, and there was music, and at the time I was reading Malory Towers and all the boarding school books, and I just thought it was going to be all midnight feasts — I was over the moon.”

At this, Enya gets the sort of look on her face that former campers do when describing their childhood summers. “Parents ask me, ‘I don’t know whether to send my kid to boarding school,’ and I say, ‘It’s either for you or it’s not.’ And it was definitely, definitely for me.”

Meanwhile, three of Enya’s siblings and twin uncles were in a band, Clannad, that was starting to receive notice in Ireland. Nicky was their manager, and listened closely when Enya’s sister, Maire, told him about Enya’s incredible vocal range. “I knew what she could be,” he says, admitting that Enya’s beauty was part of the equation. When Nicky clashed with others in the group over their drinking, Enya had a choice. “Stay with us or be famous or go with him and be nothing,” the ultimatum supposedly went. Enya went with Nicky — and watched as Clannad’s popularity exploded in 1982, when “Theme from Harry’s Game,” sung entirely in Gaelic, became an international hit.

If Enya regretted her decision, it doesn’t come out in the telling. “Those were some of the simplest and happiest times,” Roma says. They cobbled together a studio in the background, auguring the soundboard with a blowtorch, and Nicky, whose aptitude and reputation for mixing sound was becoming gradually known, made a living producing the albums of traditional Irish groups. Meanwhile, Enya composed, fiddled, and worked with Nicky to produce the distinct vocal layering and synth sampling that would become her trademark. That sound wouldn’t go public until 1986, when she was commissioned to compose the soundtrack to the BBC miniseries The Celts, and Enya, the monolithic entity, was born.

“That’s when I convinced her to change the spelling of her name to Enya,” Nicky says. “Before, it was spelled the way it’s spelled it Gaelic: Eithne. But I knew that anyone who’s not Irish would look at that and say ‘Eth-ney.’ So I told her, ‘Why don’t we spell it phonetically?’” They also dropped her last name, a decision that no one will explain, but they do chuckle at the mention of all the great divas who’ve gone by one name: Madonna, Cher, Beyoncé, and Adele — an artist whose return after five years away and general reluctance, when it comes the public eye, mirrors Enya’s own.

Reticence has been her posture from beginning, when, after the 1988 release of Watermark, people were showing up en masse to the record store demanding the “Sail Away” song — prompting the label to give the track, originally entitled “Orinoco Flow,” its parenthetical second half for the remaining 11 million sold. When Enya first sat for interviews, she was shy and receding, as amazed as everyone else that a sound like hers would find itself sandwiched between Bon Jovi and MC Hammer. In her first national American interview in 1989, she and Joan Lunden smiled warmly at each other with matching haircuts of different shades. Enya was even more soft-spoken than she is now — and clearly overwhelmed. “It was such a whirl,” Enya recalls of that time. “But from the beginning, I didn’t feel like a celebrity. When people heard ‘Orinoco Flow,’ they didn’t know if it was a band, if it was a man or a woman; they had no idea. So I had to be the spokesperson for the music.”

Shepherd Moons, her 1991 follow-up to Watermark, spent 238 weeks on the Billboard charts; Paint the Sky With Stars, her 1997 greatest hits compilation, hung out there for four years; in 2000, a radio-friendly remix of “Only Time,” the lead single from A Day Without Rain, hit No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary Chart. It appeared in commercials for everything from Friends to benefits for the survivors of 9/11, effectively sealing Enya’s role as life’s ambient soundtrack.

It also cemented the collective fortunes of Enya, Nicky, and Roma, which are unassumingly on display at the studio designed uniquely for their use, off the Ryans’ gated home in Killiney. The road there used to be a quaint avenue, with trees on either side so high they’d touch in the middle. Now it’s more like a thoroughfare, and one of several things that, in Nicky’s words, “niggle” him, including the leashless dogs of Killiney Park, and every single song he’s ever produced. Like Enya, he’s a perfectionist, the drawbacks of which he discusses as we pull into the driveway, where an interior gate trimmed with golden stars and the names “NICKY,” “ENYA,” “ROMA” guard the entryway to the studio. "It’s a bit much, but I don’t care what other people think,” Nicky says. “We got it when Paint the Sky With Stars hit four years on the American charts.”

The entrance to the studio is lined with awards: four Grammys and dozens of others — from Japan, from Germany, from the Phoenix Film Critics Society. There’s a giant piece of glass etched with the cover of Shepherd Moons. “Radio City Music Hall sent this to her in the hope she would do 15 concerts there,” Nicky narrates. “But, she didn’t.” From the control room, you can see into the recording space, where a Steinway piano, three antique mics, and a well-cushioned white leather easy chair form a loose triangle. There’s a particularly soothing incense-like smell — “that’s Enya’s doing” — and a wall-to-wall curtain, which, with one button, recedes to reveal a massive acreage, an entire avenue of trees.

It’s the first time back to the studio in months — enough time for the Steinway to go woefully out of tune. After the release of the Christmas-themed album And Winter Came in 2008, they took an indeterminate break. “I felt I didn’t know what to do,” Enya would later tell me. “I thought I needed a break, and the music needed a break.” That break ended up spanning three years. “I know it sounds like a long time,” she said, “but to me, it felt like six months.” Eventually, Roma shared some of poems she’d been writing — rotating around the loose concept of the “dark sky island” of Sark. Only then did she finally feel the urge to come back.

Nicky plays one of the bonus tracks from the album. “We always controlled the music,” he says. “From the beginning, we never allowed an A&R man here, or anyone who wanted to deviate or move the album in any direction.” Enya has never worked with anyone other than Nicky and Roma — and, since pairing with Enya, Nicky and Roma have never worked with anyone but her.

Enya’s memory — for her childhood, for her work — is pointed, uncluttered. “Anytime I hear a song, it’s the whole story of the song,” she says. “You actually go into the moment, into that year. It’s like a diary: going back to that day, where you had written it, worked on it, the life of it, the day you finished it. What you ate that day, the earrings you wore. Every song — every song is a punch in the gut.”

When asked how she spoils herself, Enya replies, “Well I have a castle and I just bought a place in the south of France — is that spoiling myself enough?” Remodeling that property, just 20 minutes from Cannes, took up much of her time between albums. You get the sense that she does a lot of gauzily puttering around, or spending many hours contemplating potential slabs of granite, or just forgetting the passage of days. “Oh, is it Friday?” she’d quietly asked at Powerscourt. “Enya walks through the door,” Nicky told me, “and then I open it.”

When Enya talks about the castle — or the ceremony, held in her honor, in which a giant mass of Japanese children lit candles in a field — she gets a misty, faraway tone in her voice. Part of it is her accent: Enya speaks with the slightest intonation of Gaelic, and the careful, measured breathing of a lifelong singer. “The exterior of the castle was built in 1840, in honor of the young queen, and called Victoria Castle. It was placed on the hill, and he was hoping to entice Queen Victoria to come to visit. It was her second year on the throne.” She pauses, like a good storyteller. “But she never came.”

“There was a fire in the 1900s, and it sat for several years,” she continues. “Someone sent me an old clipping of it just sitting, with no roof, just the walls, and it was so very sad. Then, it was bought, by a whiskey heir, and he called it Ayesha. But then it passed through some hands, and when I bought it, it didn’t know what it was. Victorian, but also trying to be a tourist castle?”

“I used to say fame and success are two different things,” Enya says, choosing her words carefully. “I realized, there’s no rulebook that says, ‘Your music is successful; you must now become famous.’ And so I questioned: Why must I do this? Is the focus more on me or the music? So I started to back away from things that were focusing solely on me.” Like any interview that focused on the men in her life or the once-strained relationship with her family. “It does cause an intrigue,” she says. “Which was not my intention, either! But when you don’t do interviews or don’t answer certain questions, people write a fiction. I’ll always retain a bit of a mystery about me, because I like to. I never felt that if you’re an artist, you had to live in a particular way, even though if you’re creative, and mysterious, then people automatically say you’re eccentric.”

Or fixate, destructively, on you. Enya’s had several stalkers: One stabbed himself in the neck after being thrown out of her parents’ pub in 1997; another gained access to her castle in 2005 and tied up a maid, forcing Enya to flee to a panic room. But Enya made a decision about how she would face them a long time ago. “In the beginning, it was strange, but after a while, I saw the other side: a person who cannot deal with certain parts of life. They’re in a very unhappy place. It’s not really their fault, especially if they associate something disturbing with a song. I had a choice to either deal with it and move on or experience all that negativity every time. So I moved on. It does not spook me. It’s not really about me — it’s just that I’m a fixation, and it could be anyone.”

That’s the problem, to some extent, when an artist sketches only the slightest outlines of her image: People will fill it in however they want. Take questions about Enya’s love life. She has never married, and doesn’t discuss specifics of past relationships. “At first, I thought, How dare they!” Enya says. “Why did they ask me that? What’s that got to do with music? But you do mellow, don’t you? [Those questions] are unimaginative, yet it’s what people want to read. Still, all this information, it’s too much. It will turn.”       

Bob Dylan Refs in Scientific Papers  

From a stem cell investigation titled “Like a rolling histone” to a germination study titled “Knockin’ on pollen’s door”, the world’s research output since the 1970s has increasingly seen the clunky insertions of Dylan lyrics.

While the first use of Dylan in the research literature was in 1970, with an article in the Journal of Practical Nursing titled “The times they are a’ changin’”, a study published yesterday in the British Medical Journal found that it was only after 1990 that the practice became commonplace.

“It was quite an extraordinary trend,” Carl Gornitzki, librarian at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said. “There were a few in the Seventies, some in the Eighties, from the Nineties it rose exponentially”. Favourite papers he found included, “Dietary nitrate — a slow train coming” and a study on the generation of neurones from bone marrow titled “Blood on the tracks: a simple twist of fate?”

Ordinarily one would expect such jokes to be spotted in the publication process, during which colleagues pledge their time to read journal articles in their field and remove mistakes. So if fellow scientists had not been indulgent it would be all over now, in peer review.

This clearly did not happen. Instead, the scientists from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute found that to date there have been at least 727 Dylan references in the literature, of which 135 were a variant on The Times They are a’ Changin and 36 were Blowin’ in the Wind.

The discovery means this trend represents the first demonstration of a coherent scientific conspiracy to get puns into journal articles. In other words, it is subterranean wordtrick news.

Mr Gornitzki became interested in Dylan lyrics when he discovered that his colleagues had a competition to insert as many as they could. “Four of them have a small contest. It’s quite subtle. They send an email to each other when they manage a Dylan citation in papers. The eventual winner will buy lunch.”

He wondered whether this behaviour was more widespread. “As this paper shows, a lot of people are doing this,” he said. “In particular, The Times they are a-Changin and Blowin’ in the Wind are common. A lot of articles use these as the start of an editorial about something in the medical world changing. Some journals who do this are obscure, but others are quite famous.”

Six of the references were from the prestigious journal Nature.

The work goes some way to rebalancing the doctor-Dylan relationship. “Recent evidence suggests that Dylan has a great deal of respect for the medical profession,” Gornitzki and his colleagues write in the BMJ. “In fact, in the song Don’t Fall Apart on me Tonight, recorded in the early 1980s, Dylan laments: ‘I wish I’d have been a doctor/ Maybe I’d have saved some life that had been lost/ Maybe I’d have done some good in the world/ ’Stead of burning every bridge I crossed.’ But does the medical profession show the same respect for Dylan? The number of articles citing his work suggests that it does.”

Now that Gornitzki has shown just how prevalent the practice is, will that be the end of it – or will he just encourage more? “Maybe every researcher feels he or she is unique in doing this,” said Mr Gornitzki. “Maybe now the citations will go down.” Equally though, it could be possible, he suggested, that the practice could spread to other artists such as Abba.

If it does, then it seems reasonable to say that the puns, they are a-changing.      

Rockers and Mortality 

Tradition has always dictated that 27 is the most lifethreatening age to be a rock star. Members of the so-called 27 Club of rock’n’roll bucketkickers includes Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.

Yet new research for The Sunday Times suggests that those who survive their twenties are by no means out of the woods. Beware the 69ish Club.

In an analysis of 1,042 deceased musicians, 83% died before reaching the biblical age of 70, compared with just 20% in the UK male population.

While rock stars in the 25 to 29 age bracket are 25.5 times more likely to die than the national average, the prospects for 55 to 69-year-olds are far from rosy. As the excesses of youth catch up with them, midlife rockers are still twice as likely as the general population to take the stairway to heaven.

Rock-star deaths peak in the 55 to 69 age group, a whole two decades earlier than the general UK male population.

Les Mayhew, professor of statistics at City University London’s Cass Business School and adviser to the Office for National Statistics, undertook the research. “The ones dying at this [later] age might have overcome [wilder rock-star vices] but if they’ve remained smokers for the rest of their lives, they lose the standard 10 years,” he said.

It is hard to be more precise about the likely years lost to other harmful addictions such as cocaine or heroin.

“The ones who have survived are either lucky or they’ve managed to abstain at a much earlier age,” Mayhew added.

In the 1970s, Bowie lived to full rock’n’roll excess. The record producer Tony Visconti claimed the singer took enough cocaine to kill a horse and Bowie’s former lover Romy Haag said he wasn’t doing lines of the drug but “bowls of it”. Bowie himself described his intake as “phenomenal”. “I really did think that my thoughts about not making 30 would come true,” he said in an interview in 2013. “Drugs had taken my life away from me. I felt as though I would probably die.” The Thin White Duke kicked his addiction after relocating from America to Berlin in 1976, but it wasn’t until 2004 — six months before he survived a near-fatal heart attack — that he managed to give up his 50-a-day smoking habit.

Studies show that those who quit smoking at 25 to 34, 35 to 44, or 45 to 54 years of age live for approximately 10, nine and six years longer respectively than those who continued to smoke. Bowie was 57 when he gave up.

If anything, Lemmy made Bowie’s lifestyle look tame. Besides a prodigious intake of amphetamines, the Motörhead frontman consumed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey a day from the age of 30. In 2013 he switched to vodka and orange “for health reasons” but by then it was too late. His autopsy attributed his death to prostate cancer, cardiac arrhythmia and congestive heart failure.

Frey of the Eagles had a long history of intestinal problems that he blamed on his earlier use of drugs and alcohol. Cancer, drug overdoses and alcohol poisoning are among the main causes of death for rock stars, but there are other hazards to think about for anyone considering a career on stage.

The first rule is to avoid twin-engine aeroplanes. Buddy Holly, Otis Redding and John Denver are among 18 musicians in our 1,042 sample to have died in plane crashes. A further 45 died in car crashes, well above the national average.

There are other, stranger risks. Les Harvey, guitarist of Scottish band Stone the Crows, was electrocuted while tuning up for a gig in Swansea. Keith Relf of the Yardbirds went the same way: death by electric guitar in his home studio.

Terry Kath, lead guitarist of Chicago, shot himself with a 9mm pistol that he presumed — wrongly — was unloaded, while Michael Edwards, the Electric Light Orchestra’s cellist, wins the award for the least rock’n’roll demise: he was crushed by a hay bale on the A381 to Teignmouth, in Devon.

Yet there are, of course, rockers who defy the odds. Keith “I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem” Richards has defied medical science to reach his eighth decade, along with fellow Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts.

Fifty per cent of the Beatles are still with us. And both Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, founding members of the Who, perhaps the wildest of the original rock bands, will continue their Hits 50! tour next month.

Their frontman, Daltrey, is one of the few rock stars who chose to steer clear of hard drugs. “They didn’t work for me,” he said. “They gave me a dry throat and I couldn’t sing. It was a straightforward decision. I was either going to be a good singer, and care about what we’re doing on a stage, or I could chuck it in right there. “There were some great bands out there, fantastic bands, and they never made it. I didn’t want to be part of one of those bands. So I left the other three to it.” As something of an outlier, Daltrey can offer a unique perspective on life inside the rock world. “I’ve watched so many friends turn into absolute a******** on drugs,” he said. “When you’re in their company, it starts off and you’re all mates and then someone disappears to the toilet and they come back and then someone else disappears, and before you know it, you’re not sitting with your friends any more. It’s like you’re at a different party.”

Daltrey has lost two of his bandmates over the years. Drummer Keith Moon died in 1978, at the age of 32, overdosing on prescription drugs after years of alcohol and drug abuse. In 2002 the bassist John Entwistle died of a heart attack aged 57 after taking cocaine in a Las Vegas hotel.

“So many times in my life I’ve had to be tough and the ones I was tough with are still here,” said Daltrey. “The ones where I wasn’t tough enough didn’t make it. And that’s something I think about often. It’s something I think about when we perform today. The two of us that are left.”

Daltrey himself has survived plenty of rock’n’roll skirmishes, from car crashes to a fractured eye socket, courtesy of a microphone stand swung by Gary Glitter. He was forced to postpone the second leg of his band’s latest world tour last September after contracting viral meningitis. He will return to the stage next month just shy of his 72nd birthday.

For any prospective rock stars, the statistics might be bleak but the advice is clear. Don’t smoke. Don’t do drugs. Consume no more than 14 units of alcohol per week and eat your five a day.

It doesn’t sound very rock’n’roll, does it?      

The music industry 

 Living with your frustum

David Bowie left behind an estate worth about $100 million.

And there were perhaps five hundred musicians of his generation who were at least as successful. From Brown to Dylan to Buffet to Ross, there were thirty years of big hit makers. That's the top of the pyramid. Lots of people tried to make it in the music business, and there were many thousands at the top, hitting a jackpot.

In geometry, a pyramid without a top is called a frustum. Just a base, no jackpot.

The music industry is now a classic example...

The bottom is wider than ever, because you don't need a recording studio to make a record. And you don't need a record store to sell one. More musicians making more music than ever before.

And the top is narrower than ever. Fewer hitmakers creating fewer long-term careers. Radio is less important, shelf space is less important, and so the demand for the next big hit from the next reliable hitmaker is diminished. Without Scott Borchetta or someone similar leading you to the few sinecures left, it's almost certain that you'll be without a jackpot.

A similar thing happened to the book business, of course. The big bookstores needed a Stephen King, a Jackie Collins and a Joyce Carol Oates, because they benefitted from having something both reliable and new to put on the shelf. Printing a lot of copies and using a lot of shelf space is a gamble, best to bet on the previous winners. The ebook world doesn't care as much.

The long tail, easy entry, wide distribution model does this to many industries. It's easier than ever to be a real estate broker or to run a tiny dog shelter--easier, but harder to get through the Dip.

While the winner-take-all natural monopolies get the headlines and the IPOs, it's not surprising that many industries are frustrating frustums.

The good news is that it's entirely possibly you don't need the the peak of the pyramid. The leverage that comes from digital tools means that it's entirely possible to do just fine (and have a powerful, positive life) without being David Bowie. Once you know that this is it, perhaps this might be enough.

Enough to make a difference and enough to make a life.

The way music used to be. And is again.      

If streaming is the future of music, songwriters may soon be back to where they started. Stephen Foster, America’s first professional songwriter, was also the first to die broke. His songs, which include “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks at Home” (a.k.a. “Swanee River”), “My Old Kentucky Home,” and “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair,” made lots of money for other people—music publishers, music-sheet sellers, minstrel-show promoters, concert-hall owners, and star performers. But not very much of that money reached the chronically impecunious Foster, who died, in 1864, in New York City, at the age of thirty-seven, with three pennies in his pocket, some Civil War scrip, and a scrap of paper on which the songwriter had written “Dear friends and gentle hearts.” His best-known melody, “Beautiful Dreamer,” came out only after his death.

Over the next century and a half, American songwriters’ prospects improved dramatically, largely thanks to the Copyright Act of 1909 and subsequent government intervention. Under the regime that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, composers own the “publishing” rights to their songs—the copyright on the song’s words and melody, as they exist on paper. Most songwriters assign part of these rights to a music publisher in exchange for an advance and for marketing services. If the music publisher succeeds in getting a song recorded, the songwriter then grants the backers of the recording—a record label, generally—what’s known as a “mechanical license.” (The word “mechanical” derives from the days when player-piano rolls were the primary commodity of the nascent record business.) With each copy of the record sold, the owners of the master recording, as the audio copyright is known, pay a mechanical royalty to the owners of the song’s publishing rights. Today, that royalty rate works out to about nine cents per copy.

Songwriters also earn performance royalties when a record is played in a large commercial venue, such as a restaurant or a theater. With the spread of broadcast radio, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, performance royalties became a significant part of a songwriter’s potential income. Generally, when a song plays on the radio, the station pays the publishing-rights holders a fixed rate that represents a percentage of the station’s advertising revenues. The owners of master recordings, on the other hand, don’t make anything from radio play, nor do the performers. The reasoning behind this bizarre arrangement, which apart from the U.S. exists only in Iran, North Korea, and China, is that the promotional value of radio play is recompense enough; the labels and performers can make up the difference with record and ticket sales.

In 1941 the Justice Department issued what’s known as the Consent Decree, which allowed performing-rights organizations (P.R.O.s, or collecting societies) to process the licensing fees for large numbers of songwriters, collectively, for obvious reasons of efficiency. In return for an exemption from what would normally be treated as an antitrust issue—private owners banding together to set prices—the music publishers agreed to let a federal court set the royalty rates, if the parties disagree on them. The Consent Decree also mandated compulsory licensing, requiring songwriters to make their entire catalogues available to whomever pays the licensing fee. Accordingly, songwriting is now the most heavily regulated of the creative arts. Seventy per cent of a songwriter’s income comes from rates set by the government, rather than by the songwriters and publishers, on the free market.

Regulation helped to insure that songwriters avoided Stephen Foster’s fate and were paid fairly for their work. Today, the system supports perhaps a million American songwriters. (The estimate is based on the memberships of the two largest collecting societies, ASCAP and B.M.I., and a guess about the much smaller SESAC, which doesn’t publish its numbers.) It offers a decent living for many in the trade, and the prospect of extraordinary wealth for a few. Indeed, the amount of money that a hit song can earn for its composers is staggering. Court papers in a recent infringement dispute involving Pharrell Williams, Robin Thicke, and the estate of Marvin Gaye have revealed that the song “Blurred Lines” earned almost seventeen million dollars in under two years, mainly from radio play, with Thicke and Williams each getting more than five million dollars. And a long-running suit launched by the family of Randy California, the former front man of the band Spirit, whose 1968 song “Taurus” is alleged to sound a lot like “Stairway to Heaven,” calculated that the Led Zeppelin song, which was released in 1971, had earned half a billion dollars by 2008. Since copyrights last for up to seventy years, depending on when the song was released, the rights to a couple of hit songs can support an entire family for several generations.

The remarkable worldwide popularity of American music is often ascribed, rightly, to the talent and diversity of the country’s artists and musicians. But it also happened because of a system that inspired and allowed songwriters to devote themselves full time to their craft. (Of the top ten most-downloaded songs in the U.S. in 2015, according to Nielsen, only one, Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen,” was written solely by the artist.) The system not only rewarded proven talents; it also let promising novices secure advances against future earnings, affording them the time to learn their craft gradually, until they too had a hit and could begin nurturing the next generation of talent.

But as the music business began to be slowly and agonizingly stretched across the rack of the digital age, the songwriter’s comfortable spot amid music’s royalty flow started slipping away. The steep decline in album sales—the result of a shift from brick-and-mortar distribution to digital retail, and now to streaming—has dealt a blow to songwriters’ mechanical-royalty income. (In the album era, even a throwaway track on a best-selling LP earned as much for a songwriter as the hits that made people purchase the album in the first place.) And, as Lewis’s experience demonstrates, the performance-royalty rates that songwriters command from streaming services such as Pandora, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Apple Music are in most cases far lower than the ones they get for terrestrial-radio plays—the entire royalty payout, remember. Typically, under terms that the record labels worked out with the streaming services (and somehow persuaded the federal rate courts to sign off on), when a song is streamed, sixty per cent of the income goes to the owners of the sound recording, thirty per cent goes to the service itself, and ten per cent goes to songwriters and publishers. When a song is streamed on an Internet radio site—Pandora is by far the largest—the holders of publishing copyrights receive a thousandth of a cent per stream.

Why are streams worth so much less than radio spins? The standard reason given is because a stream is generally a one-to-one transaction, whereas a spin goes out to thousands or even millions of people at a time. But if millions of people hear your song on YouTube, and you still haven’t received a check, you begin to sense that something is amiss. Also, why is the value of the publishing copyright worth so much less, relative to the sound-recording copyright, in the streaming world? There appears to have been a digital land grab by the record labels, who own most of the master recordings for the U.S. catalogue. Having lost out, historically, on income derived from performance royalties and sound recording for terrestrial radio, they were careful, in the digital era, to guarantee themselves income, and in some cases equity interest, from streaming.

Kara DioGuardi, a longtime songwriter known for her turn as a judge on “American Idol,” told me recently, “I’ll be at a party and I’ll hear a friend’s song, and then I’ll realize it’s being streamed. And I’ll think, ‘Wow, that sucks,’ because I know the songwriters aren’t getting paid what they deserve.” For songwriters, there are both big, sweeping rationales and smaller, more nuanced reasons to hate streaming services. Perhaps the greatest outrage, apart from the primal sense that the services are picking their pockets, is directed at the corporations benefitting most from streaming music—Google, Amazon, Apple. These companies, which are among the wealthiest on earth, use music to draw traffic to their sites and keep people within their ecosystems, but for them, the business end of music is hardly more than a rounding error. In 2015, for example, the global music-copyright industry brought in twenty-five billion dollars, barely more than a tenth of Apple’s revenues for the year. What makes the situation positively Kafkaesque is that under the terms of the Consent Decree, which was created in part to prevent songwriters from monopolizing the market, composers are now often compelled to license their songs to these monopolistic behemoths at absurdly low rates.

As for the more nuanced reasons, some streams are worse than others. Spotify’s free, ad-supported platform has been the source of much complaint, as has YouTube’s. Spotify’s total revenues from its ad-supported tier in the first half of 2015 were a paltry hundred and sixty-two million dollars, sixty million less than the revenues from the sales of vinyl albums and EPs over the same period. Revenues from the company’s paid tier are usually marginally better than from its ad-supported one, but it’s still having issues with publishing royalties there. It appears that while the company was assiduous about getting the licenses for the audio-recording copyrights from the labels, it was less thorough about obtaining all of the necessary mechanical-publishing licenses, partly because the metadata needed to identify the rights holders is missing from many song files. Spotify is holding about seventeen million dollars in royalties in a segregated account until these copyright holders can be identified (publishers say that the number should be closer to twenty-five million), and is in the process of building a database that will make it easier to identify them.

In late 2015, David Lowery, the frontman of Cracker and Camper van Beethoven, and a persistent industry gadfly, filed a class-action lawsuit against Spotify, charging the company with willfully infringing the mechanical rights to a number of his songs, and those of others, and seeking up to a hundred and fifty million dollars in damages. According to TechDirt’s breakdown of the suit, Lowery is arguing that Spotify is failing to obtain the necessary mechanical licenses for many of the compositions in its database, including some of his; the case may hinge, among other issues, on whether the company properly complied with technical requirements for situations in which it didn’t know who the copyright holders were. (A second lawsuit was filed by the singer-songwriter Melissa Ferrick in early January.)

Certainly the missing names did not slow co-founder Daniel Ek’s quest to license all the world’s music. However, it’s not entirely clear whether Spotify even needs a mechanical license to stream music. A stream isn’t a copy in the same way that a download is - in many ways, it is more like a performance. The Copyright Act of 1976 is too dated to provide much useful statutory guidance.

Amid all of the anger and uncertainty, last year LaPolt, the copyright lawyer, brought together Lewis, Hanley, and some hundred other songwriters, and inspired them to found an education and advocacy organization, Songwriters of North America (SONA), that seeks major reforms in the song-licensing system, to better suit the digital era. There are already a few legislative initiatives under way, nationally—among them the Songwriter Equity Act, a bill first introduced by Doug Collins, a Republican from Georgia, and Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from New York, and then in the Senate by, among others, Orrin Hatch, who is himself a prolific songwriter. (Copyright issues make for strange political bedfellows.) It would amend two sections of the Copyright Act of 1976, to raise the rate songwriters get from streaming services. Another effort, the Fair Pay, Fair Play Act—which would require terrestrial-radio companies to begin paying royalties to audio-recording-rights holders, as well as to songwriters, alongside some reforms to the digital-music industry—was introduced in the House of Representatives in 2015.

In LaPolt’s view, the best hope for real change is a major revision of the Copyright Act of 1976. Bob Goodlatte, a Republican congressman from Virginia and a techie, has made copyright reform a signature issue of his tenure as chairman, for the past two years, of the House Judiciary Committee, holding twenty subcommittee hearings on the issue, and inviting a number of songwriters, including Rosanne Cash and Sheryl Crow, to appear. LaPolt thinks it is unlikely that Goodlatte would leave the chairmanship (in 2017) without at least trying to effect significant reform.

Songwriters have never really had to organize before, but they’re learning, Lewis said. “It’s because we’ve been doing fine. As long as the checks showed up it was, like, ‘This has nothing to do with me.’ But about two years ago people started saying, ‘Hey, who moved our cheese?’ ” Even now, she added, some writers are loath to complain, because “the psychology is, ‘I can’t believe they’re paying me to do this at all, and I’d better not rock the boat or they’ll find out about my scam!’ ”

Savan Kotecha, whose “Love Me Like You Do,” was recently nominated for a Grammy, told me that songwriters are increasingly aware of the stakes. “It affects how you plan for the future and whether you invest in new talent, because in the streaming world you won’t necessarily see any return on your investment. For now, terrestrial radio is holding out. But radio could go away, because everyone has phones. And once streaming gets into cars in a big way, it’s over.”

Indeed, music listeners continue to embrace streaming. On-demand streaming-service usage rose ninety-three per cent in 2015, with three hundred and seventeen billion songs streamed, in all. Adding YouTube and other unpaid services pushes the total into the trillions. Meanwhile, album sales, the longtime mainstay of the business, continued their decline, in spite of the record-breaking success of Adele’s “25”, which accounted for three per cent of the entire U.S. album market in 2015, according to Billboard. For a songwriter, taking a stand against streaming can seem like taking a stand against your own future.

Performers are facing many of the same challenges, but they, at least, have the option of going on tour. Without royalties, songwriters will have only dear friends and gentle hearts to support them. That didn’t work out so well for Stephen Foster.       

“Live Fast, Die Young.” 

It’s been hard to avoid tragic tales of troubled musicians lately. Two recent documentaries, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (on HBO) and Amy (in theaters), chronicle the lives, and early demises, of Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, respectively, beloved singers whose struggle with drugs, depression and the consequences of fame precipitated their deaths at age 27. Another recent biopic, Love & Mercy, takes us inside the head of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, who only just survived such swirling forces and more in his own life.

In some ways, like Achilles, the legendary Greek warrior in Homer’s Iliad beset with inner conflict, these artists sense that joining the tour and pursuing earthly glory could mean dying young, but many choose to embrace it nonetheless. “[I]t’s better to burn out than to fade away,” Cobain wrote in his suicide note. Of course, such tales of downfall and destruction are not limited to musicians as well known as Cobain, Winehouse and Wilson. Indeed, according to the alarming findings of one new study, pop musicians more broadly tend to live up to 25 years less on average than the rest of us, and have much higher rates of death by accident, suicide and homicide.

But is it just the temptations, hazards and vicissitudes of life on the road and in the limelight that are to blame for such numbers and destructive tendencies? Or are these musicians really just playing out a life strategy that lies dormant within almost all of us should we be placed in the path of fame’s freight train?

* * *

“I’d been shooting coke for three days straight,” Anthony Kiedis begins his 2004 book Scar Tissue. The tales of debauchery and drug addiction that the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ frontman relates in his memoir provide one of the more colorful windows into what the “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll” lifestyle really entails. Kiedis offhandedly notes the “marathon sex/heroin sessions” that come with his profession the way you or I might mention brainstorming sessions on a dry-erase board.

Not every musician engages in routine sex marathons. “I’m just not turned on by naked bodies,” the celibate Morrissey once observed. Boy George famously quipped that he would “rather have a cup of tea” than sex. But, as anyone who reads rock memoirs and biographies can tell you, such abstentions are hardly par for the course in the business, particularly for its male participants. Take, for example, one band, Aerosmith, with 45 years on the road and two recently published memoirs. “A free-spirited woman with an affinity for unabashed sex and good coke may be seen as a gift from the heavens,” the band’s guitarist, Joe Perry, observes in Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith. Perry’s book — along with lead singer Steven Tyler’s 2011 memoir, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? — is not shy about recounting the band members’ legendary sexploits (Tyler claims his first sexual experience was a ménage à trois at age 7 with the French twins who sat next to him in the church choir).

The temptation to indulge in short-term pleasures in the face of escalating long-term risks lies at the core of human nature.

Niko Wenner, a guitarist and co-founder of Oxbow (with OZY’s own Eugene Robinson) who’s played with Jellyfish, Swell, God, Whipping Boy and others, recalls the time he queried Aerosmith’s longtime road manager of said sexploits. “I naively and sincerely asked her if the whispered road-stories of their drugs, orgies, whatever, were true,” says Wenner. “Brief pause. And she looked at me with just the right mix of incredulity (‘Are you serious?’) and pity (‘You poor boy’) … and equally sincerely answered, emphatically, simply, ‘Yes.’”

The tales go on. But there’s something to be said for living to tell the tales as well, and Kiedis, Tyler, Perry and Wenner are among the fortunate ones who are able to do so, having reached a peak that many popular musicians never attain: middle age. Even if we all knew that life in the fast lane could be hazardous to one’s health, having a quarter century docked for being a modestly successful musician seems rather harsh. It’s a reality, however, that leads some to conclude, as the researcher behind the study, professor Dianna T. Kenny of the University of Sydney, tells OZY, “the music industry is more or less killing its musicians.”

Kenny came to her disturbing findings after examining the life histories of more than 12,000 musicians across all popular genres who died between 1950 and 2014. More than 90 percent of those in that group were male — something that, as we shall see, may not be all that surprising. Kenny found that musicians, in addition to having dramatically shorter life spans, are five to 10 times more likely to die an accidental death, and two to seven times more likely to commit suicide — even if there was no evidence to substantiate the so-called “27 Club,” named for the famous musicians, like Cobain and Winehouse, who died at the age of 27. Of course, musicians are not the only ones prone to living fast and dying young, and as research from a number of disciplines, including evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics and anthropology, demonstrates, the temptation to indulge in short-term pleasures in the face of escalating long-term risks lies at the core of human nature.

* * *

Broadly speaking, every species faces a trade-off between survival and reproduction. Biologists who study life history speak of two broad strategies that different species pursue to maximize those ends. “K-selected” species like elephants and other large mammals, which evolved in stabler environments, generally invest more parental resources in fewer offspring, while “r-selected” species like insects, which evolved in more unpredictable circumstances, invest resources in making more offspring, often at the expense of their own survival.

Humans generally fit the K-selected model, but we are certainly capable of more r-selected strategies and sex drives, depending on the environment in which we find ourselves. “The constellation of traits and behaviors that comprise the fast life,” Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, once summarized in Psychology Today, “may have evolved through the course of human evolution as a strategy to enhance reproductive fitness in dangerous and unstable environments.”

Triggers in our environment can thus “activate the fast life genes,” as Kaufman puts it, and by making the fast-life behaviors rewarding and pleasurable, evolution ensures that we pursue them doggedly, up to and including Kiedis’ sex-heroin marathons. A number of environmental factors can serve as triggers, including several quite relevant to the life histories of many well-known musicians. For example, having a father who hasn’t invested much in caring for his children increases the likelihood that boys will live a fast life of delinquency and aggression, and that girls will employ shorter-term mating strategies (having learned not to count on men as long-term providers).

In general men, whose minimal investment in offspring has been set much lower by evolution than women’s, are also more likely to adopt higher-risk, fast-life mating strategies, Catherine Salmon, a professor of psychology at the University of Redlands, tells OZY. But women are perhaps the most important aspect of the male environment — a man’s behavior is typically only as good (or bad) as his options. “How much fooling around men do depends on how willing women are,” says Salmon. “If there are lots of women available and willing to have sex, then men are not going to say no, for the most part.”

And most male rock stars do not make a habit of refusing their many female admirers. Nor would many of the rest of us if placed in their spandex and shoes. “Given the particular temptations that go along with that lifestyle,” says Salmon, “there are relatively few individuals who would not engage in it when given the opportunity, especially when it’s given to you as a young male.”

Which is not to say that people don’t change, and change their life-history strategies throughout their lives, based on their environment. If people did not become rock stars until they had already achieved middle age, Salmon points out, you would probably see much different behavior.

* * *

Musicians, of course, are not merely participants in some sex-filled pageant of song and smack. They are artists, public figures and role models, constantly communicating messages to impressionable young people, including about the fast-lane lifestyle itself. “I’m living la vida rapido / Die young, but fuck it, we flew first-class,” rapper Rick Ross intones in his 2010 hit with Kanye West, “Live Fast, Die Young.”

Such songs advertise the fast life, embodying the fantasies of their listeners — usually without a corresponding discussion of la vida rapido’s risks and hazards. To the extent the music industry encourages such messaging and is complicit in the fast-lane lifestyle, says Kenny, it valorizes the destructive behavior that contributes to the high rates of depression, suicide and death among its artists. And most young musicians are not so mature to say “enough” to the stresses and indulgences that accompany life on tour or in the business. “The difference between indulging in too much of every good thing and destructive behavior quickly becomes academic,” adds Wenner. “In other words, you might say destructive behavior is self-valorized.”

Indeed it is, and often with a tragic ending, one not consolable by references to flying first-class or the evolutionary benefits of r-selected mating strategies. “Because of the job I do and the industry I’m in, there’s just so much opportunity to go out every night and get smashed,” Amy Winehouse candidly informed the Mirror in 2007, already in the midst of a high-profile struggle to control her drinking. “I’m still going to misbehave!” she insisted, despite it all.

Four years later Winehouse was dead, from alcohol poisoning. One more glorious, ill-fated Achilles snuffed out on the altar of the music gods.      

3D Printed Violin  

Prince Obituary (London Times) 

 In a song on his landmark Purple Rain album, Prince slyly teased his listeners by singing, “I am something that you just can’t understand.” He spent the next three decades ensuring that it remained that way and there were few who claimed fully to comprehend some of the maddening choices and quixotic pronouncements that made him pop music’s most enigmatic and eccentric superstar.

Yet there was universal recognition of a lavish and often thrilling talent that enabled him to sell more than 100 million albums and produced enduring hits such as, Let’s Go Crazy, 1999, Purple Rain, When Doves Cry, Little Red Corvette, The Most Beautiful Girl In The World and Nothing Compares 2 U, which was memorably covered by Sinéad O’Connor. He was once asked by an interviewer if there was anything he could not do. He appeared puzzled. Eventually he replied: “Anything I can’t do? Yeah. I can’t cook.” Had he applied his attention to the kitchen rather than the studio, he would probably have become a master chef, for musically there appeared to be nothing that was beyond him. At the age of 19 he was credited on his debut album with playing 27 different instruments. “Produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince,” ran a sleeve note. He seldom worked with other musicians, for his self-confidence and audacity were such that he believed that he could do the job better himself.

He mastered a myriad of musical styles, from rock to funk to jazz to psychedelia. His records were as poptastically danceable as the hits of Michael Jackson, with whom he had an intense rivalry. However, like David Bowie, every album was expansive, experimental and never the same as its predecessor, as he balanced artistic and commercial imperatives with a rare astuteness.

He was a magnetic performer, a provocative sex symbol, and combined the flamboyance of James Brown with the theatricality of Madonna. Like Jimi Hendrix before him, he liquidated the conventional boundaries between white and black music.“Can you keep up?” he often asked during his concerts. The answer was invariably an ear-shattering “Yes” from his fans, but sometimes it wasn’t easy.

A prolific songwriter, he sang about sex and seduction and flirted with the listener outrageously. It was Prince’s lascivious lyrics — including, “If you’re tired of the masturbator/ Come on over 2 my neighbourhood” on Jack U Off — which provoked Tipper Gore, wife of the American politician Al Gore, to launch the campaign that led to the introduction of “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” stickers on CDs. Yet his songs also addressed serious social concerns and delved into arcane areas of mysticism and mapped out strange sci-fi visions.

The one subject he seldom sang about was himself. When he did, it tended to be in throwaway lines such as, “I don’t wanna die, I’d rather dance my life away.” The paradox of the arrogant, self-assured global superstar, who was at the same time intensely private, was one of the many dualities that drove his art and sustained his sphinx-like mystique. He seldom gave interviews and, when he did, gave little away. His last encounter with journalists before his death was conducted from behind a piano and tape recorders; mobile phones and cameras were forbidden. If he did not like the question, he shook his head and played the theme tune from The Twilight Zone.

His eccentricities were legendary, from his obsession with the colour purple to his idiosyncratic spelling, using “U” for “you” and “2” for “two” many years before the advent of textspeak. Then there was the battle with his record company over copyright, which led to him appearing at the Brit awards in 1995 with the word “Slave” written on his cheek in felt tip pen. “If I can’t do what I want to do, what am I?” he said. He renounced his name and insisted that he should be known as an unpronounceable emblem that he had designed and which had nothing to do with any of the 26 letters of the alphabet, but approximated to a combination of the scientific symbols for male and female. The gesture was designed to throw his record company, Warner Bros, into confusion but caused consternation in the media too. Broadcasters were unable to pronounce it and newspapers were stymied because the symbol did not exist on any keyboard, and so he was called “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”, sometimes shortened simply to “The Artist”. When The Times refused to go along with this, and continued to refer to him as Prince, he ordered his British PR company to ban the newspaper from attending his Wembley concert during his 1998 tour of Britain. Nigel Williamson, The Times reviewer, bought a ticket from a tout outside the venue and his piece ran on the front page. Despite the review being surprisingly positive under the circumstances, Prince was furious and fired his press officer.

Two years later, he announced that he was resuming the use of his original name, which led critics to refer to him, rather waggishly, as “The Artist Formerly Known as ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Prince’”. Having regained ownership of his copyright, he then took on the internet, fighting to keep his music offline. “The internet’s completely over,” he prophesied somewhat prematurely in 2010. “I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

Like Michael Jackson, he used his wealth to create his own fantasy world in which the rules and values of conventional society did not apply. Just as Jackson built his bizarre private theme park, Neverland, the physical manifestation of “Prince world” was Paisley Park, the “fun factory” that he built at Chanhassen, near Minneapolis. Named after a song of the same title — the lyrics of which declared “Love is the colour this place imparts, there aren’t any rules in Paisley Park” — the huge 70,000 sq ft site resembled an industrial complex or a branch of Ikea. Within were his private living quarters, a recording studio, a hair salon, a concert hall and even his own nightclub with velvet circular sofas, a dancefloor, balcony and chrome stairway and two 20ft-high screens showing his own videos.

Several rooms were decorated all in purple with purple toy clowns and music boxes and the famous unpronounceable symbol hanging everywhere. A purple garage housed his purple cars and even the toilets were purple. The corridors were lined with platinum discs and decorated with murals of the singer. One end of the building housed a permanent team of tailors, employed to make bespoke clothes for his band and girlfriends and, of course, the singer himself.

Dubbed the “peacock of rock” for his use of androgynous costumes to subvert gender stereotypes, he could be clad in motorcycle leathers one minute, and the next in pink feathered shoulder pads. “He can wear lace and still have women chasing after him,” said one girlfriend. On stage there might be seven wardrobe changes a night, from matador to white flares to his purple suit. “I get attacked for the clothes I wear. It would be nice if everyone were nude. We could be the same,” he said.

The one glaring absence in Paisley Park was a bar; he was teetotal and a vegan and guests reported being offered glasses of water and sliced melon and raw vegetables. However, if the victuals were sparse, spiritual nourishment was in more plentiful supply: there was a “Galaxy Room” for meditation, illuminated by ultraviolet lights and painted with planets, and a library labelled the “Knowledge Room”, and filled with Bibles and other religious books reflecting his faith as a Jehovah’s Witness. That such a libidinous figure who wrote and sang some of the raunchiest, most carnal songs in pop — one of which boasted about “23 positions in a one night stand” — should become a devotee of a conservative, even puritanical sect was another of the paradoxes that made Prince such an enigma. “I know those paths of excess, drugs, sex and alcohol — all those experiences can be funky, but they’re just paths, a diversion, not the answer,” he said.

He was raised as a Seventh Day Adventist but become a Jehovah’s Witness in 2001 when he was recruited to the church by Larry Graham, formerly the bass player with Sly and the Family Stone. He began attending meetings at a local Kingdom Hall and a Minneapolis newspaper reported he was knocking on doors asking, “Would you like to talk about God?” and offering copies of The Watchtower. One orthodox Jewish couple found him ringing their doorbell on Yom Kippur, but recognised him and invited him in for a religious discussion. “Sometimes people act surprised, but mostly they’re really cool about it,” Prince noted. His faith reportedly led him to refuse hipreplacement surgery because Jehovah’s Witnesses do not accept blood transfusions and resulted in his opposition to same-sex marriage: “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘enough’.”

One critic described him becoming a Jehovah’s Witness as “the least fashionable religious awakening of all time”, but his biographer, Touré, in his 2013 book, I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon, attempted to square the carnal/ spiritual dichotomy: “Prince intended sexuality to be linked to the worship of God, and he filled his music with classic Christian messages,” he wrote.

The multimillionaire rock star was once a quiet, doe-eyed schoolboy. He was born in 1958 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His father, John Lewis Nelson, was a jazz pianist and used the stage name Prince Rogers; his mother, Mattie Della Shaw, was a jazz singer. His father entered the name Prince Rogers Nelson on the birth certificate “because I wanted him to do everything I wanted to do”, but he was known to his friends as “Skipper”.

He had a difficult boyhood: he suffered from epilepsy and his parents separated when he was ten. He lived first with his mother, but after fighting with his step-father he lived briefly with his father, who he watched perform. “It was great, I couldn’t believe it,” he later recalled. “People were screaming. From then on I think I wanted to be a musician.” While still in his early teens he was given a home by the family of a schoolfriend, Andre Cymone, with whom he formed his first band — named Grand Central — when he was 15.

By then, he had already stopped growing at 5ft 2in and wore stack heels to compensate throughout his life; according to his first wife, he even wore them around the house. His diminutive stature was further emphasised by his 6ft 8in bodyguard, “Big Chick” Huntsberry, who seldom left his side. By 1977 Prince was with a group called 94 East and the word was out that the outfit’s singer, multi-instrumentalist and writer was destined to be “the next big thing”. The bidding war was won by Warner Brothers, which granted him artistic control over his recordings, an unprecedented clause in a first contract for an unproven artist who was not even out of his teens.

What followed was often described as Prince’s “imperial phase”. A string of 1980s albums that included Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade, Sign o’ the Times and Lovesexy put him in a “triumvirate of titans” alongside Michael Jackson and Madonna as the defining artists of the decade. Not even being booed and pelted off stage when invited to perform as the support act to the Rolling Stones on their 1981 tour could halt his rise. Among the items hurled at him on stage was a bag of chicken giblets.

What sparked the audience’s ire was not clear but perhaps he was just too full-on, even for Stones fans. While Mick Jagger worked his double entendres on (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Prince sang openly about oral sex and threesomes on libidinous songs such as Head, Do It All Night and Sexuality. He shrugged it off: “I’ve always written real explicit . . . I don’t think sex is dirty at all. I think it can be described as anything just as soccer can be described.” He populated Paisley Park with starlets, backing singers, supermodels, girlfriends and hangers-on, many of whom he seemed to fashion and shape to his own tastes, Warhol-style. Among them were the singers Vanity, Susan Moonsie, Sheila E and Carmen Electra, whose careers he directed and with whom he was romantically involved. His 1984 touchstone album Purple Rain — the opener Let’s Go Crazy had the pulpit introduction: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life” — was accompanied by a somewhat absurd semiautobiographical film of the same name, in which Prince played a rock star known simply as “The Kid”. The album spent six months at No 1 in the US and sold more than 13 million copies.

With celebrity came the first signs of his eccentric behaviour, which was not always endearing. He was monosyllabic at the award ceremonies that fêted him and ended his 1985 world tour by announcing that he was retiring to go and “look for the ladder”. It was all nonsense, of course, and he continued producing music at a prolific rate, ending the decade by recording the soundtrack for Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman and duetting with Madonna on Like a Prayer. The 1990s were less happy, owing to the “slave” dispute. However, his fanbase remained huge and loyal, both in the US and in Britain: in 2007, he sold out 21 nights at the O2 Arena in London. In 2014, he rejoined Warner Bros as the undoubted master.

He was engaged in the mid-1980s to his backing singer Susannah Melvoin, about whom he wrote Nothing Compares 2 U. Later, Sinéad O’Connor was not impressed when she met the song’s writer. “We had a fist fight,” O’Connor alleged. “He summoned me to his house to tell me that he didn’t like me swearing in my interviews. I told him to go f*** himself and it went downhill from there. I ended up having to escape from his house at six o’clock in the morning . . . He’s a very frightening person. His windows are covered in tin foil because he doesn’t like light.”

There were relationships with Madonna, Kim Basinger and Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles, whose hit Manic Monday was written by Prince. Then in 1996 he married another backing dancer, Mayte Garcia, who was 15 years his junior. She was already pregnant but their son, Boy Gregory, died from Pfeiffer syndrome, a rare defect of the skull, when he was a week old. The couple appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and maintained a pretence that he was still alive.

Garcia became pregnant again but had a miscarriage and the double loss tore the couple apart. They divorced in 1999. “I think I’m now screwed for life because my first relationship was the most bizarre relationship ever,” she said several years later. Their marriage had coincided with him renouncing his name: “Technically, I was married to the Symbol. Our house was full of them, but I just couldn’t say the word. I don’t think in the whole time we were together I called him anything, which I guess is a bit weird.”

In 2001, he married Manuela Testolini, whom he met while she was working for his charitable foundation. They divorced in 2006. There was also a relationship with the interior designer Charlene Friend, who unsuccessfully attempted to sue him for emotional distress in 2003. She claimed to have been an 18-year-old virgin when she met him and in her deposition said: “His staff were not allowed to look at me and I was not allowed to look at them.” Prince confessed to difficulty sleeping at night. “I always wanted to be really famous,” he once said. “But now, just like Elvis, I find myself a prisoner of my fame.” In recent years he reopened his mansion to host his infamous parties where he would jam with 20 instruments and invite fans from his mailing list.

Unlike Bowie — to whom he sang a tribute in one of his final shows — he had no time to prepare for his end. More prolific than ever, he had recorded four albums in the past 18 months, and was writing a memoir. He kept a vault of unheard songs and said he recorded every day: “If I didn’t make music, I’d die.” After recent hospitalisation,h he announced that he was going to throw a dance party at Paisley Park with tickets priced at just $10 and dismissed concerns about his health, saying: “Wait a few days before you waste any prayers.”      

Iron Maiden's 747  

Iron Maiden’s aircraft is a symbol of a rock group with business ambitions that go far beyond their music, writes Nic Fildes

Aman who urged the world to Bring Your Daughter . . . to the Slaughter and more famously to Run to the Hills, belting out both numbers to crowds of long-haired, leather-clad head-bangers, is perhaps the least likely defender of the corporate jet culture that that many can imagine. But Bruce Dickinson knows what he is talking about. Iron Maiden front man he may be, he is also a veteran commercial pilot and captain both of industry and Ed Force One, the band’s heavily customised 747-400, and he argues a strong business case for “Flight 666”.

“Touring is an expensive business,” he says. “It costs a huge amount of money to pay the crew to sit on their arses waiting for the freight to arrive.” Or, to put it another way, packing hundreds of tonnes of gear and scores of crew on to the bespoke aircraft means that Iron Maiden can add dozens of shows to a global tour and reduce costly downtime. Between April 16, when the band played in Los Angeles, to May 18, when the Book of Souls tour hit Cape Town, Maiden played 11 shows in Japan, China, New Zealand and Australia. This would have been totally unfeasible without Ed Force One.

The other benefit is marketing. The jet, which appears on airport screens as Flight 666 and which features its zombie-like mascot Eddie the Head on its tailfin, “is the world’s largest billboard. People see it and they just go mad.” A point proved when he and it land at East Midlands airport in full view of the Download Festival taking place next door. Hundreds of fans are there to greet Ed Force One, as well as the airport’s workers, out in force to take photos of the heaviest metal hull in the business.

The aircraft may be a big beast, but it is only the most visible part of a true commercial juggernaut. On its fuselage are the symbols for some of the band’s forays outside the world of music, including Trooper beer and Legacy of the Beast, a smartphone game due to hit the download stores next month.

The band’s economic credentials are easy to overlook, but over the course of a career spanning almost four decades Maiden have racked up sales in the low billions of pounds. Album sales have almost reached 100 million while the past two global tours, both seen by more than four million people, achieved combined ticket sales of $122.5 million, making the band one of the world’s largest touring acts. That came to the fore three years ago when the London Stock Exchange issued a report that named Iron Maiden LLP as one of the 1,000 companies that could drag the country out of recession. It put Maiden’s earnings in the £10 million to £20 million bracket

Not bad for an act that Rod Smallwood, the band’s manager, describes as “the least corporate band in the world”. Mr Smallwood was the brains behind Sanctuary, the record label, publishing and merchandising company that was launched by Iron Maiden and represented artistes from Dolly Parton to Morrissey and has since been absorbed by the music majors. A smaller new venture called Phantom Music that employs about 20 people at the group’s HQ in Soho has lead the charge of Maiden’s heavy brigade into products not normally associated with musicians. For Mr Dickinson, Iron Maiden and the other ventures in beer, video games and his foray into aircraft leasing, maintenance and pilot training under the Cardiff Aviation name all centre around one economic urge. “We are exporting. Everything about Maiden is about exports. Everything about Trooper is exports. Everything about Cardiff is about exports.”

Indeed, the stock exchange noted that Iron Maiden’s army of fans around the world gave the band a big digital presence. Maiden’s Facebook page has almost as many “likes” as Star Wars and more than twice as many as Doctor Who. That, according to Dickinson, could be crucial as it pushes the Legacy of the Beast into China, a market that is tough to crack for British music and companies alike.

“It’s a bit like chucking seeds on to stony ground and seeing if they take. We see the game, forgive the pun, as a gamechanger. It is not just getting people to play the game. The core of everything we do is the music. It is a Trojan horse. It is about getting into the music through the game.”

In an era when streaming has sucked the value out of recorded music, it is now the band’s huge shows that create value. “The music is free but the T-shirt costs you $50. It used to be the other way, but that doesn’t matter. The reason someone buys the music or the T-shirt is all to do with integrity.”

Off-stage and away from the glare of the Super Troupers, the breakout hit has been Trooper beer, which has sold almost 13 million pints worldwide. Only three years after its launch, it is thought to be the third or fourth largest export ale produced in Britain and accounts for about four fifths of the production of Robinsons, the brewer that makes it. Dickinson, 57, who was the master brewer for Trooper, believes that its success echoes that of the band. “We played small clubs, small venues and word of mouth gets out. That’s how we built Trooper and it stands on its own. It is self-sustaining now.”

Next for Trooper is a stout named after the epic song The Red and the Black that could be another export star. “When I was a kid, little old ladies with blue rinses sat around and drank a half of milk stout. But it’s extremely popular in the US now but some are sickly sweet. They taste like alcoholic Red Bull.”

Mr Smallwood jokes that if you could bottle “Bruce’s energy” it would be the biggest product Iron Maiden would have. Dickinson was treated for cancer last year, when a tumour the size of a golf ball was removed from the back of his throat. Three weeks after the operation he was in Djibouti in east Africa signing a deal for Cardiff Aviation with the national airline and was soon out on tour again.

Splitting his time between being a pilot, master brewer, game developer, singer and company chairman, Dickinson could be said to have taken a leaf out of Allan Leighton’s book by going plural. Yet he quotes William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience in explaining his strategy.

“My philosophy in life is never try to be too professional at anything. Then you lose the amateur in you and you lose the love for it and it becomes a job you lose the plot. You become self satisfied and smug.”

That, he says, is the key to the band, and the company, staying in the black, not the red.

The Phonograph

Long before Spotify and iTunes, the phonograph revolutionized the way we experience music.

These days music is increasingly free—in just about every sense of the word.

Right now, if you decided you wanted to hear, say, "Uptown Funk," you could be listening to it in seconds. It's up free on YouTube, streamable on Spotify or buyable for about two bucks on iTunes. The days of scavenging in record stores and slowly, expensively building a music library are over. It's also become easier than ever to make music. Every Mac ships with a copy of GarageBand, software powerful enough to let anyone record an album.

Are these trends a good thing—for musicians, for us, for the world of audible art?

Now the arguments begin. Some cultural critics say our new world has liberated music, creating listeners with broader taste than ever before. Others worry that finding music is too frictionless, and that without having to scrimp and save to buy an album, we care less about music: No pain, no gain. "If you own all the music ever recorded in the entire history of the world," asked the novelist Nick Hornby in a column for Billboard, “then who are you?”

Artists fight over digital music too. Many say it impoverishes them, as the relatively fat royalties of radio and CD give way to laughably tiny micropayments from streaming companies, where a band might get mere thousandths of a penny from their label when a fan streams its song. Other artists disagree, arguing that giving away your music for free online makes it easier to build a global fan base avid for actually giving you money.

A confusing time, to be sure. But it’s certainly no more confusing than the upheaval that greeted a much older music technology: the phonograph. Back in the 19th century, it caused fights and joy too—as it forever transformed the face of music.

It’s almost hard to reconstruct how different music was before the phonograph. Back in the mid-1800s, if you wanted to hear a song, you had only one option: live. You listened while someone played it, or else you played it yourself.

That changed in 1877 when Thomas Edison unveiled his phonograph. It wasn’t the first such device to record and play back audio, but it was the first generally reliable one: scratchy and nearly inaudible by modern standards, but it worked. Edison envisioned a welter of uses, including for business, “to make Dolls speak sing cry” or to record “the last words of dying persons.” But in 1878 he made a prediction: “The phonograph will undoubtedly be liberally devoted to music.”

He was right. Within a few years, entrepreneurs began putting phonograph recordings—mostly on wax cylinders— into “coin-in-slot” machines on city streets, where passersby could listen to several minutes of audio: jokes, monologues, songs. They were an instant hit; one machine in Missouri hauled in $100 in a week. The next obvious step was selling people recordings. But of what?

At first, nearly everything. Early phonography was a crazy hodgepodge of material. “It was all over the place,” says Jonathan Sterne, a professor of communication studies at McGill University who wrote The Audible Past. “It would have been vaudeville stars, people laughing, people telling jokes and artistic whistling.” An example was “Uncle Josh Weathersby’s Visit to New York,” a skit that poked fun at urban mores by having a country hick visit the big city. Meanwhile, in the wake of the relatively recent Civil War, marching music was in vogue, so military bands recorded their works.

Soon, though, hits emerged—and genres. In 1920, the song “Crazy Blues” by Mamie Smith sold one million copies in six months, a monster hit that helped create blues as a category. Jazz followed, and “hillbilly” music, too. If people were going to buy music, producers realized, they’d want some predictability, so music had to slot into a known form. One surprise hit was opera. In 1903, in an attempt to eradicate the phonograph’s working-class vaudeville associations, the Victor Talking Machine Company recorded the European tenor Enrico Caruso—so successfully that labels began frantically cranking out copies. “Why has this great interest and enthusiasm for Opera so suddenly developed?” asked one journalist in 1917 in National Music Monthly. “Almost every layman will answer with the two words, ‘the phonograph.’”

But the nature of a “song” also began to change.

For one thing, it got much, much shorter. Early wax cylinders—followed in 1895 by the shellac discs of the inventor Emile Berliner—could hold only two to three minutes of audio. But the live music of the 19th and early 20th centuries was typically much more drawn out: Symphonies could stretch to an hour. As they headed into the studio, performers and composers ruthlessly edited their work down to size. When Stravinsky wrote his Serenade in A in 1925, he created each movement to fit a three-minute side of a disc; two discs, four movements. The works of violinist Fritz Kreisler were “put together with a watch in the hand,” as his friend Carl Flesch joked. Blues and country songs chopped their tunes to perhaps one verse and two choruses.

“The three-minute pop song is basically an invention of the phonograph,” says Mark Katz, a professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music.

What’s more, the early phonograph had terrible sound fidelity. Microphones weren’t commonly in use yet, so recording was a completely mechanical process: Musicians played into a huge horn, with the sound waves driving a needle that etched the audio into the wax. It captured little low end or high end. Violins turned into “a pathetic and ghostly murmur,” as one critic sniffed; high female voices sounded awful. So producers had to alter the instrumentation to fit the medium. Jazz bands replaced their drums with cowbells and woodblocks, and the double bass with a tuba. Klezmer bands completely dropped the tsimbl, a dulcimer-like instrument whose gentle tones couldn’t move the needle. (Caruso’s enormous success was partly due to the quirks of the medium: The male tenor was one of the few sounds that wax cylinders reproduced fairly well.)

Recording was physically demanding. To capture quiet passages, singers or instrumentalists would often have to stick their face right into the recording horn. But when a loud or high passage came along, “a singer would have to jump back when hitting a high C, because it’s too powerful, and the needle would jump out of the groove,” says Susan Schmidt Horning, author of Chasing Sound and a professor of history at St. John’s University. (Louis Armstrong was famously placed 20 feet away for his solos.) “I got plenty of exercise,” joked the opera singer Rosa Ponselle. If a song had many instruments, musicians often had to cluster together in front of the cone, so tightly packed that they could accidentally smack an instrument into someone else’s face.

Pundits began to warn of “gramomania,” a growing obsession with buying and collecting records that would lead one to ignore one’s family.

Plus, perfection suddenly mattered. “On the vaudeville stage a false note or a slight slip in your pronunciation makes no difference,” as the hit singer Ada Jones noted in 1917 , whereas “on the phonograph stage the slightest error is not admissible.” As a result, the phonograph rewarded a new type of musical talent. You didn’t need to be the most charismatic or passionate performer onstage, or have the greatest virtuosity— but you did need to be able to regularly pull off a “clean take.” These demands produced unique stress. “It is something of an ordeal,” admitted the violinist Maud Powell. “Does your finger touch by accident two strings of your fiddle when they should touch but one? It will show in the record, and so will every other microscopic accident.” Plus, there was no audience from which to draw energy. Many performers froze up with “phonograph fright.”

Even as it changed the nature of performing, the phonograph altered how people heard music. It was the beginnings of “on demand” listening: “The music you want, whenever you want it,” as one phonograph ad boasted. Music fans could listen to a song over and over, picking out its nuances.

“This is a very different relationship to music,” as Sterne notes. Previously, you might become very familiar with a song—with its tune, its structure. But you could never before become intimate with a particular performance.

People started defining themselves by their genre: Someone was a “blues” person, an “opera” listener. “What you want is your kind of music,” as another advertisement intoned. “Your friends can have their kind.” Pundits began to warn of “gramomania,” a growing obsession with buying and collecting records that would lead one to ignore one’s family. “Has the gramophone enthusiast any room or time in his life for a wife?” one journalist joked.

A curious new behavior emerged: listening to music alone. Previously, music was most often highly social, with a family gathering together around a piano, or a group of people hearing a band in a bar. But now you could immerse yourself in isolation. In 1923, the writer Orlo Williams described how strange it would be to enter a room and find someone alone with a phonograph. “You would think it odd, would you not?” he noted. “You would endeavor to dissemble your surprise: you would look twice to see whether some other person were not hidden in some corner of the room.”

Some social critics argued that recorded music was narcissistic and would erode our brains. “Mental muscles become flabby through a constant flow of recorded popular music,” as Alice Clark Cook fretted; while listening, your mind lapsed into “a complete and comfortable vacuum.” Phonograph fans hotly disagreed. Recordings, they argued, allowed them to focus on music with a greater depth and attention than ever before. “All the unpleasant externals are removed: The interpreter has been disposed of; the audience has been disposed of; the uncomfortable concert hall has been disposed of,” wrote one. “You are alone with the composer and his music. Surely no more ideal circumstances could be imagined.”

Others worried it would kill off amateur musicianship. If we could listen to the greatest artists with the flick of a switch, why would anyone bother to learn an instrument themselves? “Once the talking machine is in a home, the child won’t practice,” complained the bandleader John Philip Sousa. But others wryly pointed out that this could be a blessing—they’d be spared “the agonies of Susie’s and Jane’s parlor concerts,” as a journalist joked. In reality, neither critic was right. During the first two decades of the phonograph—from 1890 to 1910—the number of music teachers and performers per capita in the U.S. rose by 25 percent , as Katz found. The phonograph inspired more and more people to pick up instruments.

This was particularly true of jazz, an art form that was arguably invented by the phonograph. Previously, musicians learned a new form by hearing it live. But with jazz, new artists often reported learning the complex new genre by buying jazz records—then replaying them over and over, studying songs until they’d mastered them. They’d also do something uniquely modern: slowing the record down to pick apart a complex riff. “Jazz musicians would sit there going over something again and again and again,” says William Howland Kenney, author of Recorded Music in American Life. “The vinyl was their education.”

Records weren’t terribly profitable for artists at first. Indeed musicians were often egregiously ripped off — particularly black ones.

In the early days, white artists often sang “coon songs” in the voice of blacks, lampooning their lives in a sort of acoustic blackface. Arthur Collins, a white man, produced records ranging from “The Preacher and the Bear”— sung in the voice of a terrified black man chased up a tree by a bear—to “Down in Monkeyville.” When black artists eventually made it into the studio, the labels marketed their songs in a segregated series of “race records” (or, as the early label executive Ralph Peer called it, “the [n-word] stuff ”). Even in jazz, an art form heavily innovated by black musicians, some of the first recorded artists were white, such as Paul Whiteman and his orchestra .

Financial arrangements were not much better. Black artists were given a flat fee and no share in sales royalties— the label owned the song and the recording outright. The only exceptions were a small handful of breakout artists like Bessie Smith, who made about $20,000 off her work, though this was probably only about 25 percent of what the copyright was worth. One single of hers—“Downhearted Blues”—sold 780,000 copies in 1923, producing $156,000 for Columbia Records.

When “hillybilly” music took off , the poor white Southern musicians who created that genre fared slightly better, but not much. Indeed, Ralph Peer suspected that they were so thrilled to be recorded that he probably could pay them zero. He kept artists in the dark about how much money the labels were bringing in. “You don’t want to figure out how much these people might earn and then give it to them because then they would have no incentive to keep working,” he said. When radio came along, it made the financial situation even worse: By law, radio was allowed to buy a record and play it on the air without paying the label or artist a penny; the only ones who got royalties were composers and publishers. It would take decades of fights to establish copyright rules that required radio to pay up.

Last fall, Spotify listeners logged on to discover all of Taylor Swift’s music was gone. She’d pulled it all out. Why? Because, as she argued in a Wall Street Journal article, streaming services pay artists too little: less than a penny per play. “Music is art, and art is important and rare,” she said. “Valuable things should be paid for.” Then in the spring, she hit back at Apple, which launched its own streaming service by offering customers three free months—during which time artists wouldn’t be paid at all. In an open letter to Apple online, Swift lacerated Apple, and the company backed down.

“It’s very rare to come across someone of college age who’s only invested in one or two styles of music,” and they’re less likely to judge people on their musical taste.

Technology, it seems, is once again rattling and upending the music industry. Not all artists are as opposed as Swift is to the transformation. Some point out an upside: Maybe you can’t make much by selling digital tracks, but you can quickly amass a global audience—very hard to do in the 20th century—and tour everywhere. Indeed, digital music is, ironically, bringing back the primacy of live shows: The live-music touring market in the U.S. grew an average of 4.7 percent per year for the last five years, and it brings in $25 billion per year in revenue, according to IBISWorld.

It’s also changing the way we listen. Nick Hornby may worry that young people aren’t committed to their music because it costs them less, but Aram Sinnreich, a professor of communications at American University, thinks they’ve simply become more catholic in their interests. Because it’s so easy to sample widely, they no longer identify as a fan of a single genre.

“In the age of the iPod, and the age of Pandora, and the age of Spotify, we’ve seen the average college student go from being a hard-core ‘rock fan’ or a hard-core ‘hip-hop fan’ to being a connoisseur of a lot of different genres, and a casual fan of dozens more,” he says. “It’s very rare to come across someone of college age or younger who’s only invested in one or two styles of music,” and they’re less likely to judge people on their musical taste.

One thing is true: While the recording medium may constantly change, one thing won’t — our love of listening to it. It’s been a constant since Edison first produced his scratchy recordings on tinfoil. Even he seems to have intuited the power of that invention. Edison was once asked, of your thousand-fold patents, which is your favorite invention? “I like the phonograph best,” he replied.

The Rolling Stones 2020

Keith Richards is on the phone from his back garden in Connecticut, comparing lockdowns with me. “We’re just hunkering down. It’s Alice in Wonderland here,” he cackles. “I’m keeping my head down and let’s see what happens, mate.”

Keith is on the line and being filmed because he’s not going anywhere near a computer (“I don’t do mice,” he once told me). Mick Jagger, though, is Zooming in from his retreat in Tuscany, both of them in the cause of trying to remember what they were doing nearly half a century ago.

They’re looking healthy and relaxed, Keith casual in hat, beach shirt and patterned trousers, Mick in a crisp white shirt, surrounded by guitars. Their memory-searching has been prompted by a deluxe repackaging of the Stones’ 1973 album Goats Head Soup, which will arrive to fill the gap left by their postponed 2020 American tour. Covid has also put paid, for now, to the sessions for the new album they have been making, their first of original material since 2005’s A Bigger Bang.

It’s been a surprisingly productive few months, all the same. In April they were an inspirational part of the Global Citizen online special One World: Together at Home, performing from their respective quarters to recreate You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Days later they released the much praised and apposite single Living in a Ghost Town, completed in isolation — which became their first No 1 in Germany since Jumpin’ Jack Flash. “Ridiculous. It gives one hope, really,” Richards jokes.

Now there’s a new old record to sell. Jagger and Richards are both talkative as they pursue their twin-track lives of adding to the band’s legacy while living parts of it again.

Ten years ago, the deluxe reissue of the landmark Exile on Main St took that album back to No 1 in the UK after 38 years. Now Goats Head Soup gets the treatment: a deluxe box set offering three previously unavailable tracks (among them the excellent Scarlet, with lead guitar by one Jimmy Page) and seven other morsels from the sessions. There are three essays, the de rigueur high-res mixes and a live disc from a gig in Brussels during their 1973 European tour.

“It’s very nice that people remember them, even,” says Jagger of the original releases. “Pop music, by its very definition, is so transient, so if people would want to buy it again or be interested in it, it’s really nice. I like to find songs that haven’t been released.”

There’s some rediscovery for Richards too. “I’m not against it at all, otherwise you’d have heard about it,” he says. “Also, it actually makes you go back and listen and reconsider. Because sometimes you’ve forgotten a lot about what you did and how it got there.”

Goats Head Soup began its life in the aftermath of Exile on Main St. However debauched its creation, that album at least had its own headquarters, in sessions at Richards’s rented belle époque mansion in the south of France, Nellcôte. In its wake the Stones scattered, and phase two of the Jagger-Richards songwriting relationship began.

“It [Goats Head Soup] was the first album where Mick and I truly had to deal with the ‘exile’ bit,” says Richards. “On Exile, hey, we were ready to go. We just lived in my basement, everybody, and did what we did. But by the time we got to cut Goats Head Soup, Mick and I — well, all of the band — had separated over the world for a while. So we had to figure out how to write songs not being in each other’s pocket.

“Mick and I finally agreed, ‘We’d better get together,’ I don’t even remember where, and said, ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’ So it really came out of that way of working a bit more separately and then putting it together.”

The world of the Rolling Stones in 1972 was a litany of court appearances, arrest warrants, drugs charges and entry bans. Richards, by now the routine nemesis of immigration departments, had to hole up in Switzerland. How was it? “Not funky,” he says, semi-serious for once. “At least if you write songs and you’ve got an instrument, you don’t go bananas.”

Thankfully, even at the mercy of the class As, he continued to compose. The mournful (his word) Coming Down Again was one soul-baring result. Another was the immaculate ballad that became the calling card of Goats Head Soup and an American hit single, the deathless Angie. Richards wrote it, he says, in a Swiss clinic.

“Angie was a pretty ballad with strings,” says Jagger, “so if you’re going for the lead-off track, it couldn’t be further away from the gritty stuff of Exile. But we’d had ballads before that had been successful, so it wasn’t weird. I could hear its musical, singable potential, if you like. Always wanted to put strings on it and bring it out that way.”

Drilling down into the album, I’m reminded, as in every conversation, of the intense musicianship of the Stones. Jagger and Richards are ready with a laugh, sometimes at their haziness about dates and details, but alongside it all is a quiet pride in the band’s collective achievements. That includes the first-team squad on whom the Stones could again confidently draw for the sessions. “The cats,” as Richards always calls them. “Billy Preston, Nicky Hopkins, Bobby Keys ...” he starts, reverentially. “All of our guys have gravitated to us, for some reason or another. And Jimmy Miller was one of the best producers I ever worked with, especially at that time for the Stones.

“Before that we’d not really worked with a producer who was a musician, and I think that really tightened us up and brought out the best in us. I loved him dearly. For that period Jimmy was part of the band, because that’s what happens with the Stones. If you’re in, you’re in.”

With its funk and soul undercurrents, Goats Head Soup is a less overtly rocking record than Exile, which numbered Tumbling Dice, Happy, Rocks Off and All Down the Line among its strutting highlights. But Jagger says the contrast was by no means calculated.

“Most of it was recorded in Jamaica, but not all of it, and it’s obviously very different from Exile. But Exile was this sprawling thing. It was recorded over a long period, and it was mixed up with excerpts from previous sessions. I don’t really recall us having a sit-down talk and saying, ‘OK, we’re going to make a record that’s different.’ I don’t think we did at all.” The Jamaican sessions took place across two block bookings at Kingston’s Dynamic Sound Studios, where Bill Wyman recalls in his Rolling with the Stones book that the band were admitted by a guard carrying a shotgun. Richards had been to the island for a few days off in 1969, but these sessions crystallised his love for its culture. Not to mention its recreational possibilities.

“There was so much happening in Jamaica at the time,” he says. “Apart from us making a record, it was the year Bob Marley came out with Catch a Fire, and Jimmy Cliff with The Harder They Come soundtrack. There was a feeling in the air in Jamaica that something was happening. In a way it reminded me of London in ’63. Jamaica was feeling that it was finally on the map, and it was a great moment.”

So great, in fact, that, with Anita Pallenberg and their children Marlon and Angela, he stayed and, as he says in his book Life, effectively became Jamaican. “Yeah, it took me a while to get out of there,” he says. During the recording they didn’t really have enough time to “soak up what was happening. I did stay later — and I did a lot of soaking.”

The album’s rerelease was triggered by Universal Music’s discovery of recordings they felt were ripe for exposure: as well as Scarlet there are the equally infectious Criss Cross and the Brown Sugar-esque All the Rage.

“They said, ‘We’ve found these three tracks,’” Jagger recounts, grinning. “I said, ‘They’re all terrible.’ That’s always my initial reaction, ‘They’re all useless!’ I mean, actually, I always liked the songs, but they weren’t finished.

“Sonically they still sound like they were recorded then, even if they weren’t perfect. You can make them sound a little better than they did. But I think these three songs are all up there with the rest of the songs on this record.”

Jimmy Page, calling in via Facetime, puts his appearance on Scarlet in the context of his already long relationship with the Stones. “I first met Mick and Keith at one of those very early blues festivals,” he tells me. “We were all in the back of a van going from one place to another. But I’m sure it registered with them. It registered with me.”

He has more clarity than either of them about the session that produced the exhilarating track, which took place at the future Stone Ronnie Wood’s house in Richmond. “He had a studio in the basement,” Page says, “and he said there was an invite to do a session. It was with Keith, and Ian Stewart [“Stu”, the Stones’ long-suffering road manager and Jimmy’s old friend] was going to be there. So I thought, ‘That’s going to be really great, let’s go along.’

“Ronnie didn’t actually play on it. Keith came in and set up his equipment, and I took my guitar. Obviously I paid a lot of attention to what he was doing and then came up with a riff that would go with a contraflow. It was great to work with Keith right from the bare bones of something.

“More recently they sent through a file of the mix, and I thought, ‘Wow, that sounds really powerful.’ All the guitar parts I remember doing, everything was on there. I thought it sounded really solid, and everybody’s really on form.”

Only the Stones could launch a decades-old album simultaneously with a merchandise store, as they will on September 9 when RS No 9 Carnaby arrives in Soho. They hope to return to the road next year.

“We can’t be touring,” says Jagger, “so it’s good to do this kind of stuff and keep moving.” Richards agrees: “It’s one of those things to stay in contact with everybody as much as we can, which is why I miss playing on the road this year. But some things we can’t do.”

Goats Head Soup 2020 is released on September 4.

Other Resources

• Books About Music
• Anecdotes About Music
• Quotations About Music