Thirty six years ago there was a phenomenon. Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant".

"Alice's Restaurant" was almost twenty minutes in length. Certainly too long for AM Top Forty. It had a catchy chorus. But it appeared only briefly at the beginning and end of the song. In between, there was a long story, a RAP! About how Arlo Guthrie's illegal dumping on Thanksgiving got him out of the draft.

FM underground radio, of which there were only a HANDFUL of stations in America, would play "Alice's Restaurant" now and again. They'd announce when they would spin it. And listeners got on the sixties equivalent of IM, the telephone, and called all their peeps. And they heard this song, which RESONATED! And they told all THEIR friends about it. And then, the record started to sell, Arlo Guthrie concerts sold out. An act was broken.

There was no appearance on "Today". No heavy ad campaign. It was all word of mouth, under the radar.

THAT'S artist development.

The time is ripe for a new "Alice's Restaurant". Maybe not a twenty minute talk song, but definitely something that sounds COMPLETELY different from what's on the radio today. It will be downloaded. Word will spread amongst kids. YOU won't know about it until it reaches critical mass. Just like the mainstream had NO IDEA about "Alice's Restaurant" until a story about the phenomenon appeared in "Time" magazine.

The boy band phenomenon didn't teach us selling techniques, rather it taught us that the AUDIENCE had changed. That YOUTH had taken over, the KIDS of the baby boomers. They rejected what came before, they wanted something new, and fresh.

Kids want Taking Back Sunday. They don't want a new Britney Spears.

Spears survives because she was the paragon, the poster girl for youth music. She's a living trainwreck. This is a pretty good figure. But, if it wasn't the fourth quarter, sales would go into free fall almost immediately. Because the music sucks. Still, the record will tank. Right after Christmas. Just like Jewel's last CD. You see they were both out of tune with the MARKETPLACE!

The marketplace wants something real, that touches their hearts.

Oh, there's room for some confections, but not many. The whole business can't survive on them.

But that's what the major labels are doing. They've trimmed the rosters to SURE SHOTS! Very EXPENSIVE sure shots. This is a recipe for DEATH!

Give Edgar Bronfman, Jr. props. It was a brilliant idea to purchase the Warner Music Group. But his reported plans with regard to the future show a COMPLETE LACK OF UNDERSTANDING OF THE STREET!

Cutting costs... You can't tell superstars to cut costs, IMPOSSIBLE! Hell, they believe they're DRIVING your company. Your only hope to reduce their pay is at renegotiation time, after their sales have declined, and you don't want them anyway.

So what are Edgar and his buddies gonna do?

Cut employees.

Now, there are a lot of high-priced employees who don't work hard enough. But, Edgar doesn't plan to lay off these people and replace them with younger, hungrier, CHEAPER people, rather he wants to decrease head count COMPLETELY!

And this is just another step in the major label death spiral.

Now Edgar COULD just lay off EVERYBODY except those at Rhino and turn WMG into a catalog company and make his money back, but that's not the plan. The plan is to GROW the company. Or lay it off quickly, a la SBK Publishing and EMI. But that would just be a banking deal. Question is, if you're in for the long haul, how do you grow a company today?

Sign acts to cheaper deals. Make records for less money. That don't depend on mainstream media support to make it. Hell, this mainstream media exposure actually KILLS acts.

And you need a TEAM of scurrying rabbits to make these new records happen. Bending the ears of retailers, out in vans touring with these new entities, putting up posters. You need BELIEVERS!

The old farts aren't believers. But young kids are. And you need them. To both tell you what acts are hip and how to break them.

There's a generation gap as wide as the one in the sixties. Major labels need decoder rings to survive. But, they just want to invest in the OLD SYSTEM, oblivious to the changing marketplace. They just want to sign marquee names, hype them to shit, get them on the radio and MTV, and get their money back immediately. That worked in the nineties, it's the exception today. It only works for the most base, sold out acts.

Tomorrow XM Radio is going to play "Alice's Restaurant". MORE than once.

Arlo Guthrie had one legitimate radio hit, yet he still tours and makes a living off his music today.

Whereas nobody wants to see the Lemon Pipers, or the 1910 Fruitgum Company or the Starland Vocal Band.

But at least the music of these historical acts is still PLAYED on oldies radio. Whereas most of today's hit acts will have straight gigs in two years, and their music will NEVER be heard again. Kind of like biker pics of the sixties. "Easy Rider" can still draw a crowd, but the rest sit on the shelf.

The reason Warner Music is worth what Bronfman paid for it is its CATALOG! And most of the pearls of the catalog were recorded by acts that were so left field as to be out of the stadium, and their initial records had NO chance of mainstream airplay. Yet, Led Zeppelin and Neil Young survive. To this day. They're bigger and more powerful than most of today's new HIT acts.

Britney doesn't write the songs, she doesn't sing live, she's not a musical talent, but a CELEBRITY!

That was the nineties. We're in a new era. Which the majors don't understand. So what do they do, they BITCH! Saying it's downloaders. Well, if it were downloaders, how in the hell did they sell this many CDs?

Stop carping about new technologies. HARNESS them. To get the word out about the new and different. And there's always a hunger for the new and different. But after so many years of sameness, the public is RAVENOUS!