who is Bob Lefsetz?

Lefsetz has been reading too much Saramago and is infatuated with the comma splice

Kid Rock and Ted Nugent are lining up, paragons of the past, do you see them anywhere on the Spotify Top 50, nowhere close, and you’ll probably get a couple of country acts too, brain dead singers of others’ songs who oftentimes are racist underneath it all, then again, some of the biggest country acts rap, isn’t that confounding, hell, Florida Georgia Line made massive hits integrating the urban sound, even Luke Bryan does it too, what’s up?

on the kennedy center honors:

even worse was Juanes doing “Hotel California. Why don’t you get Timothy B. Schmit to sing at the Latin Grammys?

and

Believe me, CEOs don’t want to be Pitbull, they want to be Don Henley or Glenn Frey or Joe Walsh

All CEOs:Well, yeah.

haha

In other news, Lefsetz's "source" claims George Michael committed suicide...

That’s when Wham! first resonated for me. I woke up after the first night with my ex-wife and “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” was playing on the MTV. When that channel defined the culture, with a power not seen since. We Americans were still trying to figure out the transition from classic rock. We thought we killed disco, but we did not know what came next. Then the Brits came along and stole our lunch, not only Soft Cell and Human League, but Culture Club and George Michael. The sensibility was different. It was not about being coolly attached to what once was, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater and starting anew. Pop was no longer a dirty word. Synthesizers were as important as guitars. Limits were being tested and the acts seemed to be having so much fun, we found them irresistible.

Debbie Reynolds RIP

First of all, there's touch. And sex. After all, we're animals. Try and hug someone every day, not in a perfunctory way, but in a style more conscious, like life is hard but at least you have each other. My parents never touched me growing up, could be a fifties thing, I don't know, and I struggle with flesh on flesh, but I do know when done right touch roots me, and you.

I'll stick with perfunctory hugging for most.

I'm more of a discrete-head-nod-from-across-the-room person.

Found on Twitter:

http://i66.tinypic.com/xmk9qh.jpg

"Personally, I love to give oral. It's a gift."

--Bob Marley

The biggest act in the business is Adele, and although she faltered with "25," her previous album, "21," outsold its competition by a factor of ten.

If Lefsetz thinks that selling 8 million copies is faltering, then he clearly doesn't have a Soundscan account

I wonder what the Lef's stance is on 'New Jersey's...

every mega-platinum selling artist has their "25"--an album that sells 8 million copies but wasn't immediately put up on Spotify and therefore is a failure

hahahaha

hmmmmm. He seems to think every musician is on a big, old-school corporate label:

My inbox fills up with both the famous and infamous, the known and the irrelevant, bitching about Spotify payments, they think the Swedish company is the devil. They believe Daniel Ek got rich off the backs of musicians and this wrong must be righted, that there will be no harmony until he is dethroned and the service pays them a higher rate.

But Spotify is already paying out 69%+ of its revenues.

What’s the truth?

You’re being screwed by the label. And Spotify can’t say this, because the labels are their partners.

Of course there’s more to the story. Songwriters are getting the shaft, they are getting a lesser percentage than they deserve. And marginal artists are getting a tiny share of the pie. But assuming you’re playing for real, that people are actually listening to your music, that it’s not just posted on Spotify and hanging out in darkness, if you want to get paid cut out the middleman.

Well, he kinda acknowledges "marginal artists" I see

i can't believe he's clueless!!!!

I'm reading this new book, "The Upstarts," you can't buy it. It's not coming out until the end of the month.

bragging about that very exclusive idea of a prerelease or review copy

You see, Taylor Swift lives in a bubble, just like Milo and PewDiePie.

What the fuck is his problem?

That was some good reasoning-- Swift, like every other star in the world, tried to cultivate a social media presence. But because she suffered criticism from a weirdo celeb stalker and an ex-boyfriend she is just like some fascist troll who came to fame on twitter.

I tried to imagine what a crazed person who would stalk Lefsetz would be like and I now feel very uncomfortable

site down; I didn't know they rewrote all the HTTP errors to include things like "reading lefsetz on milo is the opposite of self-care"

dedicated concertgoers prefer StubHub. Because they can wait until the last minute, when they know they’re free, and get a good ticket.

"dedicated" concertgoers apparently are not quite dedicated enough to make plans to go to concerts in advance.

dedicated to maybe going to a concert if nothing else is up

tbf if you really love music but don't want to pay a lot to see acts that are overpriced you might see if you can get some last-minute tickets for cheap after the scalpers have failed to sell

stubhub kind of has killed that by making the resale process easier for scalpers? walking around outside the venue after the opener is already playing and haggling seems harder now

dedicated concertgoers prefer StubHub. Because they can wait until the last minute, when they know they’re free, and get a good ticket.
"dedicated" concertgoers apparently are not quite dedicated enough to make plans to go to concerts in advance.

― fact checking cuz, Wednesday, February 22, 2017 1:52 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dedicated concert goers love it when shows instantly sell out because of bots buying them all up and instantly repricing them at double the price! so cool

it's the best

Was gonna make a "...spirit here..." joke, but upon actully looking at the piece, I see he made a worse one:

This is about letting fans and potential fans know that Eric Church is on their side, and we haven’t had that spirit here since the MTV era, not in someone who can sell out arenas.

does anybody have any scannable copies of, or links to scans of, this thing during the pre-internet area? I imagine there is some old gold in the print edition of TLL

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-man-who-broke-ticketmaster

Very few of the shows sold out, and I had to sell the tickets for pennies on the dollar. On any given day, you can check StubHub and, hours before almost all but the most popular events, you can find tickets for at or below face value. Many of these tickets were bought by scalpers, who are trying to ditch them at the last minute.

ah yes, this is the "stubhub doing the people good" angle

Retired American Psycho

I'm sitting there listening to Bruce Hornsby's latest album last night and trying to read the newspaper, doing both ineffectively. And who knew Hornsby put out an LP where he plays dulcimer instead of piano last year, actually, I did, but after the advance single I lost the plot, I never listened, although last night I realized "Rehab Reunion" was good. But it's like it almost doesn't exist, there's no chart action, unlike "The Way It Is," which inspired me to search, but that initial hit was back in '86, does he still have to play it in concert and does he squeeze the new stuff in? The dirty little secret is tickets are so expensive the audience feels entitled to hear the hits, and it's hard to blame them.

Lefsetz on man buns is essential reading.

"A blue collar denizen" is the clear winner from that.

Yes, 9/11 happened, but that was in New York, first stop for Europeans, a bit more of a hop, skip and a jump from the Middle East, but the centralized city, Manhattan, makes a perfect target.

But if they're lobbing bombs from North Korea, L.A.'s the place.

The top five tracks on Spotify are by Kendrick Lamar, Future, Lil Uzi Vert, Drake and Ed Sheeran. Forget having heard them, have you even HEARD OF THEM?

old man yells at (the) cloud

i'm the most out of touch person in creation and even i've heard of all those people except lil uzi vert

so... i guess i'm not the most out of touch person in creation

just heard lil uzi vert on the radio in the car, idk what planet lef is on now

a better planet, one we will never know

can you really blame a man for not knowing or caring about the newest lil whoever

otoh Drake..

...or Sheeran, given his obsession with La Swift, or the fact he was just on the cover of Rolling Stone.

site:lefsetz.com "ed sheeran"

"Drake is a party of one atop the pop/urban heap and he’s the beneficiary of attention, people are interested in what he does, they’ll spend time checking it out, and they’ve got almost no time for anything else." -- lefsetz, less than a month ago

Lef's def got his finger on the pulse, it's a shame pop/urban acts like Beyonce, Rhianna, and Future have to labor in obscurity

It's not that you can't reach us, it's that we don't CARE!

Even worse, if you overload us, we go on backlash.

Kinda like Mac DeMarco... I knew the name, but there was an exquisite article on him in yesterday's "Times," saying how he gave out his address so his fans could stop by, and it made me wonder, who was his publicity agent? Getting into the "Times" is so hard.

It's Jessica Linker at Pitch Perfect PR. But if you use her beware. Now I HATE MAC DEMARCO!

sweet, I was missing the "weird namedropping of female industry figures" bingo square