Olivia
Online
The Michaelverse
@popantipop
Michael Patterson - Novelty Generator. Magick Maker. Culture Creator. mixer/producer of records & film scores.
Hollywood, Los Angeles
Joined May 2007
3K Following
2.1K Followers
9.2K Posts
@albion4truth @KenRosatoTV It feels like they're tone deaf in the way of someone who's lost their hearing. If I were building the show and their in-ear mix, I would certainly make sure that I was playing a string sound with the pitch you should be entering at before every line starts.
What's weird to me is the number of people who say they love Star Trek and want a world like that, but don't like AI. The only way out is through, and AI research and applying it to human existence right now is the only way to get to that place. Yes, there need to be adjustments, and safety needs to be a priority, but anyone who's anti-AI is anti-future. There needs to be a balance between humans and technology, and we should strive to find that place. I am a human supremacist, so I want to make sure that we are always on the top side of that situation until we don't need to be. Live long and prosper.
@darkwebhaber This video shows exactly why you DON'T run or walk during an earthquake. She could have easily smashed her head or the kids on the wall. That's how one person died in the Paso Robles earthquake.
@KenRosatoTV I've changed my mind on this. If I were them, and even if I had to use a talk box because I couldn't speak, I would still be out there singing these songs every chance I could. Do what you love, and do it until you move on to the next stop.
What the fuck are you talking about? He sounds horrible. It's not about the high or low notes, even just singing basic notes; he's all over the place, above and below the pitch he should be. The Juno Awards were an embarrassment for his vocals. I love them, but I gotta say it's time to stop.
I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
After writing the other replies and seeing more videos, I actually looked at getting tickets because it would be interesting to see them in a cultural consciousness kind of thing. It felt good to watch them even if things were a bit off. Also, I'd be bummed if I were the keyboard player and there was never light on me, which seems to be the case.
@KenRosatoTV I did watch a little bit of Tom Sawyer from a fan video, and his vocals were much better than in this clip. It almost brought a tear to my eye that she nailed the drums in a way that wasn't Neil, but in her own way, and that made me happy.
I wonder if GG Allin fans left his shows disappointed if he didn’t shit on the stage the way I would leave a Kiss show disappointed if they didn’t play Rock and Roll all Nite
a reminder that branding matters.
About 20 of my friends voted for Raman and they all voted by main. I’m not surprised they are surging due to mail in votes. I’m really surprised Pratt did not easily come in second or even first. The other half of my friend group all voted Pratt and were not saying so publicly. They voted in person. I wonder if what we are seeing tracks with other elections. Dems voting by mail or drop off because they trust the system and Republicans going in person because they don’t trust the mail in system.
The future of AI control of DAW‘s is unbelievable. I don’t need to use it for creative work. I just need to say “I need four tracks each with a compressor and Eq and each one sending to different reverb and delay. then give me an delay that is the average of the last five delays I used and surprise me. Using it in this way will save me days of my life. At some point I want to just be able to think this instead of having to type it or say it. I never type anymore so I would just say it.
When I was nineteen, I was making a record across the hall from them at Kiva while they were making the Fly Me Courageous album. Great guys, great record. A highlight of that time period was them playing a 1 a.m. show at the Antenna and doing their version of "American Woman" called "American Hamster." Happy they are still out there playing music.
Sitting at my gate at LAX waiting for my flight to Denver. Just realized every person on a laptop in this terminal falls into exactly three categories. Well-dressed creatives on MacBooks. Executives in expensive suits on MacBooks. Executives in cheap suits on Windows machines.
Make of that what you will.
Spotify saved the music business. I know that's heresy. But piracy was a $12B annual bloodletting, and streaming stopped it cold. Every artist mad at their Spotify check should ask what they were getting from Limewire. I wrote the reply below to a discussion about streaming, which is relevant to this discussion. https://t.co/wEO0M2Gt9y
I want to start with something from my own experience, because this is not abstract to me.
I mixed The Social Network for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
My quarterly royalties are usually a decent amount, but every so often they spike dramatically.
Not 10% or 30%.
Sometimes 10x to 30x.
When I look at why, it is often because of a limited vinyl release, a physical edition, a collector’s version, or some other physical product.
Everyone in this conversation is arguing from a piece of the truth.
Shooter is right that the current streaming economy is brutal for artists trying to make real records with real studios, real musicians, real engineers, real producers, and real time.
If you spend $15k, $30k, $150k making an album, the current per-stream economics are not designed to recoup that quickly.
That is obvious to anyone who has actually made records.
Jonathan is also right that the old model is being romanticized.
A lot of artists in the CD era did not “make money from record sales.”
They recouped if they were lucky.
The recording budget was often a loan.
The label owned the masters.
Packaging, manufacturing, breakage, marketing, tour support, advances, video costs, and every other line item could get recouped before the artist ever saw meaningful royalty money.
So the question is not:
“Old model good.”
Or:
“Streaming good.”
The question is:
What kind of music economy actually compounds value for artists over time?
And this is where I think the bigger picture is being missed.
The perfect example is Kate Bush.
Imagine a world where there was no streaming and “Running Up That Hill” exploded from Stranger Things.
In the old world, the song would have had to move through physical bottlenecks.
Somebody would have to manufacture product.
Press vinyl.
Make CDs.
Ship units.
Get them into stores.
Hope retail ordered enough.
Hope the public stayed interested long enough.
Hope the moment did not pass before supply caught up with demand.
Sure, money would have been made.
But the old world cannot handle the time compression of the new world.
A sync happens on a global show.
The emotional moment hits.
Millions of people reach for the song at the exact same time.
Not next month.
Not after the repress.
Not when the record store gets stock.
Immediately.
That is the new reality.
Streaming is the only system that can absorb that kind of sudden global acceleration without friction.
Kate Bush did not need to wait for the market to catch up.
The catalog was already there.
The song was already available.
Every person who felt that moment could immediately turn into a listener.
A passive viewer became an active participant in seconds.
That is not a small change.
That is a total restructuring of time in the music business.
The old business was built around scarcity, manufacturing, distribution windows, and moments of purchase.
The new business is built around access, recurrence, rediscovery, and infinite shelf space.
And this is not theoretical.
“Running Up That Hill” was already a classic, but after Stranger Things, it became an active global event again.
Before the show, it reportedly had around 150 million streams on Spotify.
It hit one billion Spotify streams in 2023, decades after its original release, and later crossed 1.5 billion.
That kind of reactivation is almost impossible to imagine at the same speed in the old physical-only world.
That does not mean streaming pays enough.
It does not.
That does not mean Spotify is benevolent.
It is not.
That does not mean artists should be grateful for pennies.
They should not.
But it does mean the architecture is more powerful than people are admitting.
The post-Stranger Things surge likely generated millions in streaming royalties for the rights holders.
And because Kate Bush reportedly retained unusually strong control over her catalog, she may have participated in that upside far more than a typical legacy artist would have.
The same thing applies to older country catalogs, rock catalogs, punk catalogs, soul catalogs, everything.
If a Waylon Jennings song lands in a major television show today, do you really want the audience to wait for a CD or vinyl campaign before they can engage with it?
No.
By the time the physical product gets manufactured, shipped, marketed, stocked, and discovered, the audience has already moved through 27 other cultural moments.
Streaming captures the lightning while it is still lightning.
Now let’s use U2 as a simple thought experiment.
Not as actual contract data.
Just to make the math visible.
When I was 15, I bought War, and I played “New Year’s Day” obsessively.
For the fun of it, let’s imagine the wholesale value of that CD was $10 to make the math easy.
And let’s say there are 10 songs on the album.
In that simplified version, each song represents about $1 of album value.
Now imagine the artist royalty was 10%.
That means the band might earn roughly 10 cents from my purchase of that song through that CD sale.
I bought the CD once.
I later ripped it into iTunes, back when iTunes showed play counts, and I know I played “New Year’s Day” thousands of times over the years.
But economically, the transaction had already ended.
Whether I played the song once or 3,000 times, the purchase of the CD generated no additional master royalty from my listening.
Now compare that to streaming.
If a stream generates roughly $0.003 to $0.005 to the rights holder, then 3,000 plays from one obsessive fan creates roughly $9 to $15 in gross master-side streaming revenue.
Even if the artist only receives 20% of that after the label or rights holder takes the rest, that is still around $1.80 to $3 from one listener.
Dramatically more than the 10 cents in the simplified CD example.
The casual listener who plays a song 10 or 20 times may not beat the economics of the old CD purchase.
But the lifelong listener does.
The obsessive catalog listener does.
The person who returns to the song for decades does.
And streaming finally monetizes that behavior.
That is the part the old model could not capture.
The old model monetized the purchase.
The new model monetizes the relationship.
A CD was sold once.
A song can now earn every time it is played, rediscovered, shared, placed in a show, revived by culture, or passed to a new generation.
Had streaming existed when I bought that record, U2 would likely have made far more from my actual lifetime listening than they made from my single CD purchase.
Now multiply that by millions of listeners.
Then extend it across 50, 100, or 150 years.
This is where the old music-business brain struggles:
It keeps comparing one CD sale to one stream.
But the real comparison is one purchase against a lifetime of recurring usage.
The mistake is treating streaming as if it is supposed to replace the entire record business by itself.
It should not.
Streaming alone is not enough.
But streaming plus physical, plus sync, plus merch, plus touring, plus direct-to-fan, plus publishing, plus catalog marketing, plus ownership is potentially more powerful than anything artists had before.
The old model let you sell one object once.
The new model lets the same recording create value over and over and over again.
That is the part people keep skipping.
This is why I think the “we made 100x more from CDs” argument is true but incomplete.
Yes, you may have made far more money in the short term from selling CDs.
A CD sale was a powerful front-end monetization event.
If you sold 50,000 CDs and made $1 each, that was real money.
That could recoup a record.
That could fund the next record.
That could pay rent.
But the CD was sold once.
The deeper question is:
How many times can that same recording create value over 10 years, 30 years, 80 years, 150 years?
That is where the new system becomes much more interesting.
The tragedy of streaming is that the short-term economics are starving the people who are supposed to be creating the long-term catalog.
That is the real criticism.
Not that the long-term model has no value.
The criticism is that the current system makes it too hard for artists to survive long enough to benefit from the compounding effect.
That is the problem we should be solving.
The answer is a more sophisticated model:
Streaming for permanence and instant access.
Physical for high-margin fan commitment.
Sync for cultural explosions.
Direct-to-fan for margin and data.
Touring for experience.
Merch for identity.
Publishing for durability.
Catalog marketing for rediscovery.
Ownership for generational wealth.
That is the future.
That is my model for success.
And that is why the Kate Bush example matters so much.
A song from 1985 became one of the biggest songs in the world again because the infrastructure was already there when culture called for it.
That is not “music becoming worthless.”
That is music becoming permanently available to be reactivated.
The problem is not that streaming exists.
The problem is that too many artists do not own enough, do not get paid enough, and do not have teams actively working the music like living culture.
A catalog cannot just sit there.
It has to be worked.
It has to be reintroduced.
It has to be given new context.
It needs sync, editorial, physical product, storytelling, community, and strategy.
That is what companies like Primary Wave understand.
They do not just buy songs and wait.
They treat catalogs like active labels.
They rebuild the artist in the culture.
That is the model more people need to understand.
The future is not “free music.”
The future is music as an always-on cultural asset.
The old world had big upfront but limited transactions.
The new world has smaller transactions that can repeat forever.
Now, back to the studio to continue my mix.
I love the thought process, but it does distract from making music at times.
@davidclowery @shooterjennings @Janastas
I'm one more dip away from selling feet pics
@donwinslow This explains Florida.
I want to start with something from my own experience, because this is not abstract to me.
I mixed The Social Network for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
My quarterly royalties are usually a decent amount, but every so often they spike dramatically.
Not 10% or 30%.
Sometimes 10x to 30x.
When I look at why, it is often because of a limited vinyl release, a physical edition, a collector’s version, or some other physical product.
Everyone in this conversation is arguing from a piece of the truth.
Shooter is right that the current streaming economy is brutal for artists trying to make real records with real studios, real musicians, real engineers, real producers, and real time.
If you spend $15k, $30k, $150k making an album, the current per-stream economics are not designed to recoup that quickly.
That is obvious to anyone who has actually made records.
Jonathan is also right that the old model is being romanticized.
A lot of artists in the CD era did not “make money from record sales.”
They recouped if they were lucky.
The recording budget was often a loan.
The label owned the masters.
Packaging, manufacturing, breakage, marketing, tour support, advances, video costs, and every other line item could get recouped before the artist ever saw meaningful royalty money.
So the question is not:
“Old model good.”
Or:
“Streaming good.”
The question is:
What kind of music economy actually compounds value for artists over time?
And this is where I think the bigger picture is being missed.
The perfect example is Kate Bush.
Imagine a world where there was no streaming and “Running Up That Hill” exploded from Stranger Things.
In the old world, the song would have had to move through physical bottlenecks.
Somebody would have to manufacture product.
Press vinyl.
Make CDs.
Ship units.
Get them into stores.
Hope retail ordered enough.
Hope the public stayed interested long enough.
Hope the moment did not pass before supply caught up with demand.
Sure, money would have been made.
But the old world cannot handle the time compression of the new world.
A sync happens on a global show.
The emotional moment hits.
Millions of people reach for the song at the exact same time.
Not next month.
Not after the repress.
Not when the record store gets stock.
Immediately.
That is the new reality.
Streaming is the only system that can absorb that kind of sudden global acceleration without friction.
Kate Bush did not need to wait for the market to catch up.
The catalog was already there.
The song was already available.
Every person who felt that moment could immediately turn into a listener.
A passive viewer became an active participant in seconds.
That is not a small change.
That is a total restructuring of time in the music business.
The old business was built around scarcity, manufacturing, distribution windows, and moments of purchase.
The new business is built around access, recurrence, rediscovery, and infinite shelf space.
And this is not theoretical.
“Running Up That Hill” was already a classic, but after Stranger Things, it became an active global event again.
Before the show, it reportedly had around 150 million streams on Spotify.
It hit one billion Spotify streams in 2023, decades after its original release, and later crossed 1.5 billion.
That kind of reactivation is almost impossible to imagine at the same speed in the old physical-only world.
That does not mean streaming pays enough.
It does not.
That does not mean Spotify is benevolent.
It is not.
That does not mean artists should be grateful for pennies.
They should not.
But it does mean the architecture is more powerful than people are admitting.
The post-Stranger Things surge likely generated millions in streaming royalties for the rights holders.
And because Kate Bush reportedly retained unusually strong control over her catalog, she may have participated in that upside far more than a typical legacy artist would have.
The same thing applies to older country catalogs, rock catalogs, punk catalogs, soul catalogs, everything.
If a Waylon Jennings song lands in a major television show today, do you really want the audience to wait for a CD or vinyl campaign before they can engage with it?
No.
By the time the physical product gets manufactured, shipped, marketed, stocked, and discovered, the audience has already moved through 27 other cultural moments.
Streaming captures the lightning while it is still lightning.
Now let’s use U2 as a simple thought experiment.
Not as actual contract data.
Just to make the math visible.
When I was 15, I bought War, and I played “New Year’s Day” obsessively.
For the fun of it, let’s imagine the wholesale value of that CD was $10 to make the math easy.
And let’s say there are 10 songs on the album.
In that simplified version, each song represents about $1 of album value.
Now imagine the artist royalty was 10%.
That means the band might earn roughly 10 cents from my purchase of that song through that CD sale.
I bought the CD once.
I later ripped it into iTunes, back when iTunes showed play counts, and I know I played “New Year’s Day” thousands of times over the years.
But economically, the transaction had already ended.
Whether I played the song once or 3,000 times, the purchase of the CD generated no additional master royalty from my listening.
Now compare that to streaming.
If a stream generates roughly $0.003 to $0.005 to the rights holder, then 3,000 plays from one obsessive fan creates roughly $9 to $15 in gross master-side streaming revenue.
Even if the artist only receives 20% of that after the label or rights holder takes the rest, that is still around $1.80 to $3 from one listener.
Dramatically more than the 10 cents in the simplified CD example.
The casual listener who plays a song 10 or 20 times may not beat the economics of the old CD purchase.
But the lifelong listener does.
The obsessive catalog listener does.
The person who returns to the song for decades does.
And streaming finally monetizes that behavior.
That is the part the old model could not capture.
The old model monetized the purchase.
The new model monetizes the relationship.
A CD was sold once.
A song can now earn every time it is played, rediscovered, shared, placed in a show, revived by culture, or passed to a new generation.
Had streaming existed when I bought that record, U2 would likely have made far more from my actual lifetime listening than they made from my single CD purchase.
Now multiply that by millions of listeners.
Then extend it across 50, 100, or 150 years.
This is where the old music-business brain struggles:
It keeps comparing one CD sale to one stream.
But the real comparison is one purchase against a lifetime of recurring usage.
The mistake is treating streaming as if it is supposed to replace the entire record business by itself.
It should not.
Streaming alone is not enough.
But streaming plus physical, plus sync, plus merch, plus touring, plus direct-to-fan, plus publishing, plus catalog marketing, plus ownership is potentially more powerful than anything artists had before.
The old model let you sell one object once.
The new model lets the same recording create value over and over and over again.
That is the part people keep skipping.
This is why I think the “we made 100x more from CDs” argument is true but incomplete.
Yes, you may have made far more money in the short term from selling CDs.
A CD sale was a powerful front-end monetization event.
If you sold 50,000 CDs and made $1 each, that was real money.
That could recoup a record.
That could fund the next record.
That could pay rent.
But the CD was sold once.
The deeper question is:
How many times can that same recording create value over 10 years, 30 years, 80 years, 150 years?
That is where the new system becomes much more interesting.
The tragedy of streaming is that the short-term economics are starving the people who are supposed to be creating the long-term catalog.
That is the real criticism.
Not that the long-term model has no value.
The criticism is that the current system makes it too hard for artists to survive long enough to benefit from the compounding effect.
That is the problem we should be solving.
The answer is a more sophisticated model:
Streaming for permanence and instant access.
Physical for high-margin fan commitment.
Sync for cultural explosions.
Direct-to-fan for margin and data.
Touring for experience.
Merch for identity.
Publishing for durability.
Catalog marketing for rediscovery.
Ownership for generational wealth.
That is the future.
That is my model for success.
And that is why the Kate Bush example matters so much.
A song from 1985 became one of the biggest songs in the world again because the infrastructure was already there when culture called for it.
That is not “music becoming worthless.”
That is music becoming permanently available to be reactivated.
The problem is not that streaming exists.
The problem is that too many artists do not own enough, do not get paid enough, and do not have teams actively working the music like living culture.
A catalog cannot just sit there.
It has to be worked.
It has to be reintroduced.
It has to be given new context.
It needs sync, editorial, physical product, storytelling, community, and strategy.
That is what companies like Primary Wave understand.
They do not just buy songs and wait.
They treat catalogs like active labels.
They rebuild the artist in the culture.
That is the model more people need to understand.
The future is not “free music.”
The future is music as an always-on cultural asset.
The old world had big upfront but limited transactions.
The new world has smaller transactions that can repeat forever.
Now, back to the studio to continue my mix.
I love the thought process, but it does distract from making music at times.
@davidclowery @shooterjennings @Janastas
@DASBUNKER I'm rooting for a Das Bunker "Deez Nuts" night.
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