Music: The "Twin Towers" of the Record Biz

- from Quartz

Lyor Cohen and Jimmy Iovine.

Cohen, who’s about to take over a crucial part of YouTube’s business, and Iovine, now Apple’s music guru, by all accounts should have crashed to the ground alongside the music industry’s antiquated business model—the way the executives who ran Nokia and Blackberry have been tossed aside by the smartphone revolution. But they did the opposite. So who are these two men, and how’d they pull off the near-impossible?

Apple’s true music genius

“Pharrell even told me go with the safest bet, Jimmy Iovine offered a safety net.” (Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)

Jimmy Iovine’s name is instantly recognizable to most hardcore music fans—and not just for its oddly off-beat catchiness.

The record-producer-turned-executive began his career as a recording engineer back in the 1970s, occasionally getting to work with acts like Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and John Lennon. He collected enough cred to eventually found the label Interscope Records in 1990, which was about to go under until it decided to release an album by a small-time producer named Dr. Dre. Soon, Interscope would have acts like Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur on its books.

Along the way, the words “Jimmy Iovine” became somewhat synonymous with the music industry itself. (In 2012, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis recorded a song about record labels and artist exploitation that was literally titled “Jimmy Iovine.”)

But Iovine didn’t sit contently as the head of Interscope, watching the traditional industry’s profits crumble. In 2008, Iovine made his next big move—forming the designer headphones brand Beats with Dr. Dre, selling oversized headphones when minimal earphones were the trend.

Beats, by selling its products as trendy fashion statements, promptly took over nearly half of the entire headphone industry’s market share, and it also pushed into the online music space in 2013. Then, the company—headphones and nascent streaming service and all—was swallowed up by Apple in 2014 in its biggest-ever acquisition.

And that’s when Iovine took his most significant career leap.

Apple didn’t just snag a headphones business; the tech giant scored Iovine’s special knack for making smart bets in the business as a whole. For it was years prior—way before Beats was even put together—that Iovine had already started trying to convince Apple founder Steve Jobs to move into the relatively new field of all-you-can-eat music streaming, where players like Swedish service Spotify (but not many others) had nestled in. Said Iovine in a 2013 interview:

I was always trying to push Steve into subscription. And he wasn’t keen on it right away. [Beats co-founder] Luke Wood and I spent about three years trying to talk him into it.

Iovine’s hunch proved solid. Streaming is now the biggest revenue-driver in the US music industry, and globally, profits from digital platforms have officially overtaken physical ones for the first time. It was last summer that Apple finally took Iovine’s long-nagging advice, unveiling its own subscription streaming service Apple Music–headed, of course, by Iovine, who is now one of the company’s top executives.

Music: With Competing Streaming Services, Jay, Drake start "Digital Beef"

By now you’ve heard that Apple has recently jumped on the subscription-based streaming bandwagon. On Monday, the company revealed its new initiative, Apple Music, at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. The service is said to launch June 30 and will cost subscribers $9.99-$14.99 a month. Of course, launching a music initiative wouldn’t be complete without the presence of a mega-star to co-sign. Apple went with Drizzy (or rather, Drizzy went with Apple). Rocking a throwback Apple jacket, Aubrey “Drake” Graham aligned himself with Team Apple during an endearing keynote speech. “As an artist I can say, for all those kids sitting at home, it is truly amazing to be a part of something that I believe in.” Drake continued, “This is something that simplifies everything for the modern musician like myself, and the modern consumer like you.” Aubrey, your training on Degrassi has done you well.
Here’s the shade: In late March, Jay Z announced his quite similar initiative, Tidal, on a star-studded stage (We see you, Madonna!). Hov’s fancy streaming service will charge subscribers $9.99-$19.99 a month and boasts high-fidelity audio along with artist exclusives, as incentives. According to Billboard, Drake was initially courted by Tidal. The rapper was slated to be an artist partner with the company, but dropped-out last minute—as late as two days prior to Tidal’s launch. Fast forward to June and Drizzy claps back with a major endorsement for Apple Music.
So the rivalry ensues.
We’ve entered a new era in the music industry. It comes with a distinct turf war, and it’s happening online. Today, file sharing and new technologies have redirected the interests of rappers, and the arena in which they battle. Artists like Jay Z and Drake will gain dominance through commerciality, streaming supremacy, and aligning themselves with the right brand. This is the new hip-hop rivalry in the Internet age: Drizzy vs. Hov, gone digital.   

In the present, a perfectly crafted rap song (even songs that take shots at other rappers and fill up tabloid columns) doesn’t have the same effect, in terms of profitability.

“Beef” is pretty common in hip-hop, an arena that is as much about swagger and braggadocio as it is street poetry. And hip-hop rivalries have been ever-present: Back in the day, B-boys and B-girls would battle on the dance floor and MC’s would lay down a pithy verse or two for anyone that tried to “step” to them. For as long as there are wack rappers there will always be another, perhaps more talented, rapper to check him/her and remind them of their wackness. Rappers were also targeted based on where they lived. Old-school notions of owning the streets was key.
Feuds in the realm of rap were often driven by battles over turf, or a struggle to establish a dominant community, and neighborhood. And your ’hood dictated your clique.
One of hip-hop’s most prolific beefs boiled down to a competition of the coasts: East vs. West. Twenty years ago, the dominant names in hip-hop were The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. The rappers took shots at each other (and crew members), one line at a time. Biggie’s “Who Shot Ya” poured salt on a (literally) wounded Tupac just after he was shot in New York. Tupac’s “Hit Em Up” took no prisoners, with the face of Death Row Records bragging that he’d slept with Biggie’s wife, and would be Tupac’s last diss track before his death. B.I.G. and Pac led the lives they depicted in their music, and repped their ’hoods til the days they were gunned down.
Jay Z is no stranger to a good old hip-hop battle. In 2001, Hov went head-to-head with Queens rapper Nas. This was yet another classic hip-hop beef. The rivalry was, once again, based on territoriality and crew control: Nas’s group The Firm vs. Jay Z’s Roc-A-Fella. “Ether,” the 2001 track aimed at Jay, also attempted to establish borough dominance: “Queens niggas run y’all niggas, ask Russell Simmons,” said Nas.

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Music: Apple Enters the Streaming Universe Tomorrow

Music CEO Doug Morris told reporters that Apple will officially announce its streaming platform on Monday. 
Morris's appearance at Midem saw the music industry titan discussing his legendary career, including his decades-long partnership with Jimmy Iovine — the Beats co-founder who is now running Apple's streaming service alongside Dr. Dre. Morris praised Apple's foray into the controversial streaming world, calling their Beats buyout a "brilliant" move.
Morris noted that purported market leaders like Spotify have "never really advertised" because they're simply not profitable, a facet of the streaming model Apple will reportedly not emulate in any way, shape, or form. "[Apple]'s got $178 billion dollars in the bank and they have 800 million credit cards in iTunes," Morris said. "My guess is that Apple will promote this like crazy and I think that will have a halo effect on the streaming business [industry]."

 The rumors surrounding Apple's streaming service — often referred to as Apple Music — have been plentiful, with a few of them already officially addressed. As previously reported, Drake and Pharrell have been confirmed in unspecified positions within Apple's streaming framework — joining former BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe and Oscar-winner Trent Reznor. Last month, fresh rumors surrounding Kanye West's SWISH (the album formerly known as So Help Me God) pointed to a partnership involving an Apple investment in West's creative company DONDA and an Apple-exclusive status for the new album.

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Music: Metal Rules the Streaming Waves

Every diehard metalhead alive and breathing knows that A. heavy metal is the law, and B. other genres pale in comparison, but it's always nice to see some quantifiable data to that effect, outside of what you and your friends howl at one another during especially spirited bouts of Kreator worship. Spotify threw heshers a bone recently by releasing a slew of figures that detail by exactly how wide a margin heavy metal is ruling the streaming airwaves. The study sought to determine which genre's fans were the most loyal—i.e. returned most frequently to their favorite artists. As Spotify noted, "To create a measure of genre loyalty, we divided the number of streams each core artist had by their number of listeners. All of the charts are normalized against the genre with the loyalest fans." Surprise! Metal was the clear winner. From Portugal to the United States to (of course) Norway, metal holds down a spot in the top ten—and usually top five—most loyally listened to genres in every country included in the study. Metal also takes the overall global genre loyalty crown, leaving pop to trail behind as a distant second and folk, country, and hip-hop to founder in the dust. As Mashable notes, Spotify calculated their data around sets of core bands for each genre, with metal's champions comprising Metallica, Slayer, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Sepultura, Pantera, Cradle of Filth and Anthrax. It's not exactly surprising to hear that a lot of people are using Spotify to listen to classic tunes from Slayer and Papa Het and that metal listeners are especially likely to revisit favorite artists, but what is at least a little jarring to see how thoroughly flummoxed some folks are about it.

Image via Spotify

Given metal fans' fierce loyalty to their chosen genre and propensity for making physical purchases, it makes perfect sense that they'd be spending the most time pressing replay on old Iron Maiden songs. As the label personnel interviewed in the Mashable piece noted, metal labels have been selling cassettes and vinyl for years, metal shirts and embroidered logo patches are de rigeur attire, metal festivals regularly draw fans from every corner of the globe, and there's still a multitude of metal print magazines and fanzines circulating in a world that's gone mostly digital. While fans of most other genres are drawn to shiny new artists, metal fandom is generational; newRECRUITS are encouraged to appreciate the bands that came before and build up chronological knowledge while still keeping abreast of current developments. That widened musical net funnels directly into more sales; when someone's buying up the new Mefitic record, they're probably also beefing up their Blasphemy collection or finally grabbing that Hellhammer box set. Metalheads are completists, and metal as a genre is incredibly diverse; there are thousands upon thousands of metal bands out there to whom fans may pledge fealty, and they do so with an (economic) vengeance.

This approach isn't entirely unique to metal fans, but they definitely take it further than nearly any other demographic. It's not as easy to be a metal fan as it is to profess your love for Taylor Swift or Makonnen, and metalheads' extreme devotion to their chosen scene is often a response to societal pressure. When the whole world is telling you that the music you love is stupid, evil, or unlistenable, you're either going to tamp down your interest and keep your tastes to yourself... or you're going to deck yourself out in band shirts, go to shows played by and attended by like-minded individuals, and make your allegiances known at every possibleOPPORTUNITY. 

That same Mashable piece did its best to make sense of the notion that, not only does metal still exist after "the heyday of the genre in the 1980s and 1990s," but more people than ever have fallen under its spell, to which I can only say: big fucking duh, dude. It's tempting to write off pieces like this as mere white noise—as something that doesn't affect our community, and has no bearing on our own relationship to metal—but its implications are grave. In 2015, years after the New York Times started covering doom and car companies started throwing shows with Absu and Napalm Death, mainstream media and mainstream society in general still doesn't take metal seriously as an art form, and we're still seeing articles that introduce the genre with the same kind of condescending marveling with which they'd approach a newly-discovered Amazonian tribe. "Believe it or not, heavy metal fans still exist in this modern age, practicing their strange customs and tribal rituals far from prying eyes..."

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