RUTHERBLOG

Death can be a great career move -- but it takes considerable skill to pull it off successfully.

Elvis is the role model for passed-on profits. The pelvic mumbler may have ingested his last burger in 1977, yet in 2008 (three decades after his ‘bathroom’ demise) he earned $52m. That was 25% more than Madonna.

Having said that,   he’s been seen working the fries at McDonalds in Memphis so, like-for-like, Madge way not be too far behind.

Of course, this is not generated by a flesh-and-blood person; this is a revenue stream for Elvis the Corporation. It’s a brand, a back-catalogue and a devoted fan base determined to keep the man and his music ‘alive’.

This is a global business, and you have to admire the endless creativity of rights owners in fully exploiting both their intellectual property and the gullibility of the public.

ELVIS! LIVE!!

Did you know that you can still go and see Elvis in Concert? He’s touring Europe in 2010. Thanks to a mix of projection technology and the reunion of his ‘former band members’, you can spend an electrically-charged evening (literally) watching the musicians who failed the Cocoon audition try to keep pace with a film of a man on steroids.

A case of sixty, drugs and rock’n'roll.

And while you’re booking your tickets, you can also buy -- “for the first time ever” -- a DVD of the his legendary performances on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Or how about going to stay in one of the ‘Elvis-accented’ rooms at the Heartbreak Hotel? (Read the small print, and you’ll be disappointed to learn that ‘accented’ means there’s a picture of him in each room.) You might want to splash out and upgrade to one of the Elvis-themed suites. There’s a choice -- the Graceland, the Hollywood, the Gold & Platinum and, of course, the honeymooners’ Burning Love suite.

Ahunk ahunk of Burning Love indeed.

And if you can’t move out of your house (a statistical probability for Elvis fans), then he’ll come to you -- at least, you can sign up for Elvis updates. This is a new definition of the word which the student of career death needs to understand:

In my Concise Oxford Dictionary, ‘update’ means ‘the act or instance of updating’; in Graceland it means letting you know that they’ve found another tape in a box in the loft, and that a 52-part series (with never-before seen photos) will be available soon.

All of which can be paid for with you Elvis-branded Visa card.

FAB FOUR AND MORE

You don’t have to be entirely dead to benefit from no longer being around. Half The Beatles are still with us, and yet we now have another re-issue of The Beatles back-catalogue: “re-mastered, re-packaged and re-discovered”. And to much acclaim. Read the customer reviews on Amazon, and it’s 5-stars all the way. Then again, if you’d just paid £170 for 12 albums that you already owned in two previous formats, you’re not likely to say ‘I wuz robbed.’

Also this week, the launch of ‘The Beatles -- Rockband’ on Sony PS3, dutifully supported by wall-to-wall Beatles coverage on the BBC -- an entire weekend on Radio 2, and a week of programs on BBC Four. Even my daughter had the good sense to ask why: “Did someone die, Daddy?”

No darling. But one of them is now a pension salesman and the other got divorced.

To be fair, those in the know say that Rockband is beautifully produced and very engaging -- if playing plastic toy guitars and pretending to be a pop singer is your thing. It just isn’t mine.

But don’t think that making money from being dead is a foregone conclusion. The holders of the Presley and Beatle brands are (despite my cynical tone) very, very good at what they do. Wild horses couldn’t drag me to Heartbreak Hotel, but you have to admit -- it’s an obvious ‘brand extension’, and probably serves its target audience very well. Stick of Jailhouse Rock anyone?

The Michael Jackson Estate could learn a lot from Graceland and Cavern Club.

TICKET TO (BE TAKEN FOR A) RIDE

How black must the mood have been in the AEG offices the day that CEO Randy Phillips heard that Jackson had shuffled (moonwalked) off?  Phillips’ company was promoting the 50-date concert series at London’s O2, and 750,000 people had paid up to £75 each. AEG would have to pay it all back.

Or not. In a stroke of genius -- and commercially, I don’t think the word is too strong -- Phillips re-invented the very nature of ‘ticket’.

Consider the usual purpose of a ticket: it is proof of purchase, a receipt for a transaction that is not yet complete. In effect, the purchaser is exchanging one promissory note for another: ‘I promise to pay the bearer…if you promise to provide a service that will entertain me’.

(As a Southampton fan, I’m not sure how that works…but that’s for another day.)

Not so, said Phillips. It’s not a ticket at all; it’s a souvenir -- albeit of an non-event. In a stroke, Phillips created an entirely new market: the virtual memento. So what if something doesn’t happen? There’s still a merchandising market opportunity for it. To join in the fun, I am open to offers for my Led Zeppelin 2009 World Tour jacket.

Anyway, this wasn’t just a common-or-garden ticket. This was a MJ ticket. The man himself had hoped that people would ‘keep it as a reminder of the memorable evening that they would share together’. He had personally been involved with the design. And it had been produced using a Lenticular printing 3D process.

So fans had a choice: refund or non-ticket.

PRECIOUS MEMORIES

Websites and blogs were hot with indignation. Out of respect for Michael, and out of respect for Michael’s  fans (and their respect for his respect for them), how could AEG do this? It was immoral. And anyway, “I bought a £75 ticket and my friend only bought a £50 ticket, so I’m paying 50% more than her for a memory of an event that didn’t happen.”

Yes -- but your non-existent memories would have a clearer view.

Despite the absence of respect, AEG later claimed that ’40%-50% of ticket purchasers had taken the option to receive their tickets’. Worst case, that’s 300,000 people who are now spending time thinking about the evening they didn’t spend together. With or without Michael.

(If that wasn’t enough, at the end of October Sony Pictures releases a film of the concert that never happened. Remember that 30-second rehearsal clip that Phillips showed as evidence of Jackson’s well-being? It’s now going to be a motion picture event, and ‘a gift to Michael’s fans’.)

It will give them something to cling to while they wait for the next non-performance.

Just yesterday, the much-heralded Vienna Tribute concert collapsed, with many of the promised stars failing to commit an appearance. It’s now being rescheduled, to London in June 2010.

Tickets start at £44 -- although no-one seems to know what you’ll get for your money. Not that an absence of content seems to stop any of the riders on the Jackson bandwagon.

DEAD CERT?

This looks like a chronic case of ‘more haste, less speed’ in the Jackson camp, but with an army of would-be Colonel Tom Parkers out to make a buck or two, Jermaine and Co obviously think they need to strike while the body’s still warm. (Fancy buying the Jackson Opus, and 38-pound book with -never-seen-before-photos? Yours for just £109).

Whatever your opinion of the man (repugnant) his music (infectious) or his dancing (the best on film since Astaire and Kelly), watching this soap opera play out could some day become a business case worthy of Harvard or LBS. The Wacko side of Jackson won’t be a hurdle: as pop-commentator Paul Gambaccini pointed out shortly after Jackson’s death, Judy Garland was a washed up, alcoholic mess when she died. Today, she’s an icon.

The collective memory will paper over Jackson’s cracked behaviour, and remember only the performances. More difficult to call will be the management of the core material -- the ownership of which will become a bloodbath. There’ll be some very rich lawyers at the end of all this, and probably a very bitter family.

Meanwhile, the man in the mirror will either become a billion dollar enterprise, shadowing all that has gone before, or a forgotten footnote.

It’ll take 30 years and a generation to decide.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Bill Drummond thinks that we have reached the end of recorded music.

His thinks that ‘real’ music makers are looking for new ways to create and share their work – like his ’17′ project, in which he’s recording 100 choirs of 17 people all singing a single note, which he will play back to them at a one-off, never-to-be repeated event, before destroying the recordings.

Bill Drummond might be mad. And I love him for it.

WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONARE?

To set this in context, he was behind KLF, the acid house group that made a fortune in the early 1990s, then incinerated it to kick off their ‘K Foundation Burn a Million Quid’ tour.

He also considered cutting off his hand at The Brit Awards, but had second thoughts on that one.

Since then, he has popped up (I was about to say ‘on the art scene’, but Drummond really transcends that sort of pigeonhole), acting as one of life’s agents provocateurs, challenging conventional wisdom, posing difficult questions, and generally making people feel uncomfortable.

His latest notion is that recorded music is dead. The more I think about this, sitting  at my PC, listening to some easy jazz on Windows Media Player, the more I think he’s onto something. Here’s a summary of the story so far:

1) The most important artist in the history of recorded music is… Enrico Caruso. In his short life (he died aged 48) he made over 220 recordings of tenor arias which meant that his public could now listen to him at home.

While that appears to be stating the blindingly obvious,  that’s because we’ve all grown up with it, and  assume it to be part of the  ‘natural’ state of affairs. In Caruso’s time, that was as significant a leap as powered flight. It changed everything.

He reached an audience with a representation of his work that hitherto had been the preserve of those who could get to La Scala or The Met. It was the beginning of the ‘democratisation’ of music.

In his way, he was the Bill Gates of the early recording industry. Edison and, later, Berliner may have created the hardware platform, but Caruso created the software. What did a member of the gentry want with an ugly wooden box and a great horn stuck on top of it? In itself, they didn’t – but they did want to listen to and to show their friends that they listened to the world’s greatest tenor.

2) The most important day in the history of recorded music is 5 July 1954, when a young truck driver walked into Sun Records to record a couple of songs for his mother. Fooling around between takes, he sang ‘That’s All Right (Mama), and the legend of Elvis Presley was born.

Putting aside Presley’s importance as a cultural icon, his significance in this context is that prior to recording, he had no musical career. He was entirely created by the record industry, a reversal in the relationship between artist and medium.

3) The most important year in the history of recorded music is 1966, when The Beatles and Glenn Gould made the same, paradigm-shifting decision: they would no longer play live:

Classical pianist Gould wanted to concentrate of the Bach canon, and felt that the intimacy of the chamber genre couldn’t be communicated from the concert platform;

For The Beatles, the decision was more complex, but there’s no doubt it was heavily influenced by the fact that the techniques they had started to use on Revolver (tape looping and early sampling) couldn’t be toured. Sgt Peppers would be impossible to perform live.

And so the template changed again. The record (more specifically the album, by now format-of-choice) became an artefact in-and-of itself. Not a device for promoting the live performance, but an artwork that would stand alone.

4) The most important technology in the history of recorded music is the mp3 file. Think about how it is changing our relationship with recorded music:

* The album is redundant: through iTunes, Napster or any other file sharing site (legal or pirate) we can now pick and choose our tracks;

* Music is ubiquitous: we can play it anywhere, any time, in almost any circumstance. Muzak used to be limited to lifts, hotel lobbies and shopping centres. Now we take our own aural wallpaper wherever we go;

* There is no barrier to access: we can now reach any artist, any genre, any song, any composition, any time. And that ease makes us lazy. Music has become background sound, filling the empty spaces of our days, and plastering over the sonic mess of everyday life.

THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED

Drummond points out that before recording technology, music was context-depended: from orchestral compositions for State occasions to folk-songs in the field. Once it could be packaged and transferred into another setting – more importantly, any setting – it started to lose its meaning.  Which in turn, diminished its value.

It is the paradox of the democratisation. When something is available all the time, at very little cost, we value it less. This is not an argument for exclusivity; rather it’s just pointing out that when the tap can be turned on at any time, we take water for granted. And with that, the thrill has gone.

The thrill of knowing that your favourite artist’s new record would be released in three months. Saving your pocket money to buy it. Selling stuff at school to make up the difference. The bus trip to town on Saturday. Entering the record shop and seeing its bright cover, smelling the cellophane wrapper, turning it over and reading the track list – the liturgy for the mass that will follow. Handing over the money, receiving the plastic bag and realising that the prize was yours. Cuddling it on the bus ride home, the hero returning from his/her quest. Rushing upstairs to your bedroom, turning on your record player, and then, and then…

The black circle, etched with a fine line that fragmented the light on its surface. Your hand, palm-spread as wide as possible across the underside, balancing it with care so not to mark the surface. Two hands now, fingers either side of the round, lowering it gently into place. Start the turntable. Bend down, eye-level with the needle. Gently lift the arm and …pause…anticipation…will it be as good as…swallow nervously…holding your breath… you drop the needle onto the surface…the speakers ‘bump’ then ‘hiss’ then…it begins. And it’s the best moment of your life. It is glorious.

Today? Point. Click. Type. Listen. Forget.

WAKE ME UP BEFORE YOU GO-GO

Do not think that this is a Luddite’s blast against the new and a return to the ‘good old days’. I love the web to the point of addiction. But there is no doubt that a lot of the ritual has gone, and with it, the magic.

This is what Drummond – with his off-the-wall, left-of-centre performances – is addressing. More specifically, he’s asking us to wake-up. If you’re one of 1700 people to have participated in his choral project, and you know that when you hear it in its full performance, it is the only time it will ever happen and that it will be destroyed immediately after – wouldn’t you pay attention?

Like you did the first time you placed the needle on that album.

The quality of that moment wasn’t in the music itself (the experience is equally relevant to the classical collector, the punk and the Roller’s fan). The quality was in the attention.

In the film Diva, the plot centres on a pirate recording of a operatic soprano who has never made a record. The only way you can experience her voice is to see her live. She believes that scarcity increases the quality of the moment.

That truth and the iPod are not easy bedfellows.

Popularity: 25% [?]