Sting has opened up about death and drugs in a wide-ranging new interview with Daily Mail. In the lengthy feature, the music icon talks about the inspiration of his latest solo album, The Last Ship and the last conversation he had with his dying father – while also reflecting on his own mortality and how the ticking clock manifests in his art.
“I have lived more of my life than is to come: That is an interesting place for an artist – more interesting than writing about your first girlfriend,” he says. “It is kind of serious. . . In our sixties, how do we face this imponderable idea that we are not going to exist anymore? We make art. We tell stories. We have to face it, to tell it. I am certainly not ready for death. Do I fear it? Well, I fear sudden death. I want to die consciously. I want to see the process. I suppose I already do.”
The musician also gave his stance on another big-ticket topic: drug use. Sting says he smokes marijuana occasionally as a creative catalyst (“If I’m feeling stuck on a lyric or an idea isn’t quite gelling, sometimes a puff of weed will free it up”) but notes that he “rarely smoke(s) it socially.”
“It’s a tool, just as a pen is,” he says, noting other musical icons who’ve used drugs to fuel their work. “I certainly wouldn’t advocate that you have to take drugs to make art, but then you can’t nullify the work of The Beatles. They took LSD and they made fantastic albums. Miles Davis made the most extraordinary music on heroin.
“Some people can cope with it perfectly well,” added the musician. “I’m not here to make rules, or even state that there should be any rules. Drugs are dangerous, without a doubt. At the same time, they can be useful tools, but they need to be thought about as tools.”
SoundExchange, the independent performance rights organization that collects and distributes digital performance royalties, today announced its Q1 numbers. In the fiscal first quarter the nonprofit paid $162.4 million to recording artists and labels, its largest Q1 payment to date and a 38% increase over the $117 million paid out last year.
The report also noted that in 2013, SoundExchange payments made up 8.4% of all U.S. recorded revenue which totaled some $7 billion dollars last year. 21% of that $7 billion was generated from streaming revenues of which SoundExchange paid out 41.3%.
SoundExchange has now paid out some $2 billion dollars since its inception ten years ago growing from $3 million in 2003 to $36 million in 2007 to nearly $100 million in 2008 and nearly $600 million in 2013.
Last quarter, in which SoundExchange celebrated its 10th anniversary, the PRO paid out a record $170.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2013, with an all-time yearly total of $590.4 million, a 28% increase over 2012.
The service collects statutory digital performance royalties from such services as Pandora, SiriusXM and Music Choice, and distributes them to labels and performers. It now counts 2,500 digital radio providers that use the statutory license it administers. After SoundExchange takes its administrative fee — 4.9% in 2012 — 50% of the royalties go to owners of the sound recordings, 45% is paid directly to the performing artist, and 5% goes to non-featured performing artists through a fund administered by AFM and SAG-AFTRA.
How many people does it take to write a hit song? If you’re Pharrell, one. If you’re Pitbull or Jason Derulo, probably eight — or more.
Billboard’s recent Hot 100 chart reflects a group of hits mainly showcasing songs written solely by an act and an additional songwriter or those with seven or eight songwriters, such as Pitbull’s “Timber” or Jason Derulo’s “Wiggle.”
What does it take to craft a hit? Who gets the credit? Is a song written by nearly a dozen people less special than a song with only two or three co-writers?
Pharrell, who has the longest-running No. 1 song so far this year with “Happy,” wrote the tune alone.
“You got six, you got 18 people in the room, you don’t need me,” said Pharrell, who has written hits for Britney Spears and Usher. “Who am I to judge? Just because I do it my way doesn’t mean it’s going to be the stat[us] quo [It’s’ more than likely not going to be the stat[us] quo, as we see.”
The songwriters on Katy Perry’s No.1 hits range from four (“E.T.”) to six (“Dark Horse”). Beyonce and Jay Z’s latest smash, “Drunk in Love,” lists eight collaborators, and Eminem and Rihanna’s “The Monster” was crafted by seven people.
That’s in contrast to Lorde’s “Royals” and OneRepublic’s “Counting Stars” — solely written by Ryan Tedder — to any of the successes from Imagine Dragons’ debut album, which credits the four members and occasionally producer Alex da Kid.
“I don’t think that there’ll probably ever be a time, to be honest with you, that we would sit down with like six songwriters and be like, `Write an Imagine Dragons song.’ It just wouldn’t feel right for us,” said bandleader Dan Reynolds, who will be honored Thursday night at the Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremony in New York. “I’ve heard about artists who have a song written for them and they embrace it … but for us, it’s not real to what Imagine Dragons is.”
Some of today’s hits with a list of songwriters that scroll on and on include others who don’t physically write lyrics: Writing credit can also be earned by producers who design the beats, artists who sing the song and add their own flavor, engineers who mix the track and others who work specifically on the melody. The publishing percentage for each person listed on the song varies, though.
“You have a programmer that’s in (the studio) and they’re like, `OK, give me a beat Simon.’ Simon gives a beat, well now he is a part of the co-write,’” said Linda Perry, who wrote Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” and hits for Pink.
“It’s a crazy jungle in that area. In that room, I don’t want to be a part of,” she added. “And then you got the guy that’s smoking the blunt that’s paying no attention and then he’s like, `Hey, say, “Chow down mother, chow down mother.” Now that “Chow down mother stoner mother” is now part of the songwriting process, even if he only brought in one word.”
Other times, sampling older songs adds to the lengthy list of credited songwriters. Pitbull and Kesha’s “Timber” lists eight songwriters, but technically the total would be 11 because it borrows from Lee Oskar’s “San Francisco Bay.”
The largest group of writers to win the coveted Grammy for song of the year – a songwriter’s award – is four, including Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” Other winners with four songwriters include songs by U2, Coldplay, the Dixie Chicks and fun., where band members count for all or most of the writers.
John Legend, who has dominated the airwaves this year with “All of Me,” said winning the song-of-the-year Grammy is one of his top goals. He wrote the song with Toby Gad, and said within the music business, the long list of songwriters isn’t too shocking.
“But if I were a lay person looking at the credits and I saw six people wrote it, it might turn me off a little bit because you would think it’s writing by committee or it doesn’t feel as personal,” Legend said. “But then when you understand who’s involved and how they are involved, you understand it a little bit more.”
Mariah Carey’s latest album, Me. I Am Mariah… the Elusive Chanteuse, entered the Billboard 200 chart at No. 3 with 58,000 sold, her lowest total for a non-holiday album since 1991′s Emotions entered at No. 4 with 156,000, when SoundScan first started tracking sales.
Not even in her darkest days, being hospitalized for emotional exhaustion and erratic behavior in 2001 after signing a $100 million, five-album deal with EMI’s Virgin Records, and starring in the universally panned Glitter, has an album done so poorly. Even the soundtrack to that disaster sold more, debuting at No. 7 with 116,000 copies.
Island Def Jam’s Antonio “L.A.” Reid famously came to Carey’s rescue in 2005, guiding Mariah to her comeback with the multiplatinum The Emancipation of Mimi, which returned her to the top of the charts, proving it’s still possible she can regain her commercial footing.
Still, these days it’s a lot tougher to get traction in the marketplace. So we turned to a trio of veteran, one-time record label executives to ask what they’d do to jump-start the Elusive Chanteuse’s career, and came away with some constructive suggestions.
Ed Eckstine, son of the legendary crooner Billy Eckstine and a former President of Mercury Records, where he guided Vanessa Williams to a successful singing career, approached the dilemma as a music man. He is currently producing a documentary on his father, My Dad was a Singer.
“As Mariah Carey enters her mid-40s, she must adjust to ‘ever-shrinking’ radio opportunities,” he says. “She has to downsize her commercial expectations, but that could allow her to take some chances artistically.”
Eckstine says Mariah should explore taking the Celine Dion route of a Las Vegas or Atlantic City residency, “a big show with bells and whistles, an over-the-top diva-ready extravaganza” might be the answer, where she can perform her hits and not worry about new material.
The veteran record man also suggests Carey might tone down the “va-va-voom” imagery, record an EDM-dance-Europop album or reunite with Clive Davis to provide her with some quality material.
“Dial up Pharrell and tell him to bring Nile Rodgers with him,” he concludes.
Tom Vickers, a former A&R and music publishing executive at A&M, Capitol, Mercury and Almo Irving, thinks the 44-year-old Mariah has a disconnect with what was once her core audience: 14 to 18-year-old girls. “The biggest issue is she’s a mother with two children of her own trying to appeal to teenagers.”
His recommendation? Collaborate with hit songwriter-producers like Dr. Luke, Max Martin or “this year’s model.”
“Don’t compete with women 20 years younger, but come with more mature versions of what they’re doing that could hit a slightly older demographic,” he says. “Unfortunately, Mariah is no longer perceived as a role model by females nor a sex object by men. She’s caught in between, which undercuts her relevance.”
He also counsels Mariah to seek out duet partners that could broaden her audience, such as John Mayer or even an international star like Pitbull, create an “event” record based on a theme (a period songbook, an unplugged album, etc.) or set her sights on international territories where she has shown strength in the past. “It was not a smart career move getting into bitchy cat fights with Nicki Minaj on American Idol,” says Vickers. “She’s bound to suffer in comparison.”
Publicity guru Bob Merlis, who spent most of his career at Warner Bros. Records, where he applied his magic touch to everyone from Madonna to Morrissey, quipped, “She should do a country record and a Howard Stern interview, where she has the time to explain herself that she doesn’t get in those tabloid sound bites.”
What he failed to mention was how a sit down with the King of All Media in the late ’90s surfaced again during her 2001 breakdown. She went on a rant against Stern during an in-store appearance at Tower Records, saying his form of humor greatly upset her, during her period of “erratic behavior,” which included an infamous drop-in on MTV’s TRL, where she handed out ice cream bars and began a modified striptease to the astonishment of host Carson Daly.
Nearly 13 years later, Carey is seemingly content in her personal life, the mother of two and the by all accounts contented wife of the ubiquitous Nick Cannon. Her professional happiness is another story. Perhaps nothing short of a reunion with ex-husband Tommy Mottola can help Mariah regain her career mojo. She’s seemingly tried everything else.
Love it or hate it, Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics, the tech giant’s largest acquisition to date, will have a huge impact in the music industry and beyond. Beats’ financial backers clearly benefit from the sale price. Others, from consumers to competitors, will also be affected. Here are six of the winners and losers from the biggest music deal of 2013.
Beats’ investors: Winners. Private equity firm Carlyle Group paid $500 million for a 50% stake in Beats Electronics just eight months before Apples $3 billion acquisition. That will work out to a $1 billion profit after $400 million of the purchase price vests over time. Universal Music Group’s 14% stake — acquired for nearly nothing — is worth over $500 million with various dividends and other shareholder payouts. Access Industries, owner of Warner Music Group, invested in Beats Music in 2013 and should make a tidy profit, although Apple has not revealed how much of the $3 billion valuation was assigned to the music service.
HTC: Losers. Apple succeeded in acquiring a top-notch music brand after HTC failed to take advantage of its 50% stake in Beats. HTC acquired a 50% stake in Beats for $300 million in 2011 but sold back its investment over the next two years. Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine called the partnership “a culture clash” that “crashed and burned.” Had HTC held on to its 50% stake in Beats, the Apple acquisition would have turned its original $300 million investment into a $1.3 billion payday and a $1 billion profit.
Mobile carriers: Winners. Mobile carriers looking for music partners now have more choices as well as a distinct choice between the two competing approaches to music subscriptions, the familiar Spotify-type user experience or Beats’ human-generated curation. The greater competition could lead to better services and lower prices. Mark Mulligan of MiDia Consulting believes Beats could even help to expand music-carrier partnerships outside of Europe and North America. “Latin American telcos say they need something cheaper,” Mulligan tells Billboard. “Beats could be the streaming brand of the region, but they would need a price point other than $9.99.”
Rhapsody, Deezer and Rdio: Losers. Apple will make life more difficult for competing subscription services. Over the short term, Apple’s entry into subscription services could create more consumer awareness for the category and benefit all competitors. In other words, a rising tide would lift all boats. Over the long term, only the strongest subscription services will survive. Who’s the strongest? Spotify, with 10 million subscribers, is the world’s largest service and the one best positioned for long-term success. Deezer and Rhapsody have 5 million and about 1 million subscribers, respectively. Rdio has fewer still. While Beats Music has only 250,000 subscribers, Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine revealed Wednesday, it’s now part of a $547-billion company and has yet to launch outside of the United States.
Consumers: Winners. Apple’s bid for Beats will give consumers greater choice in music subscription services and an approach — an emphasis on human curation — and user experience that are drastically different from its competitors. In addition, Apple’s global footprint and relationships with mobile carriers — China Mobile and Japan’s NTT DOCOMO come to mind — give it an advantage over its competitors in creating a consumer-friendly marriage of mobile subscriptions and music subscriptions.
Monster: Loser. Monster founder Noel Lee helped Iovine and Dre design and create the Beats’ brand and products from concept to retail market leader. But after 5 years was forced to give up the relationship when HTC became an investor in Beats. “Hindsight is 20-20,” says Lee. “Since I was not going to be designing the product anymore I decided to give up the stake.” Lee admits its some regret hearing about the deal but says Beats opened up the market for Monster as a company even after the relationship ended.
