David Hall

Everyone in the Adult Rock community was taken aback at the news of the passing of David Hall.

We all knew him, and we all continue to have great respect for a great guy.

But, most of us knew him from a business/industry perspective. We knew him as a music lover who could break bands and kept the trains running on time at a fiercely independent station.

So when we remember David, we’ll likely remember him in some context related to his Program Director role at WRLT/Nashville.

Then there are his fans. For them, David did exactly what an on-air talent is supposed to do. Curator. Companion.

Just a few posts from the Radio Lightning site, from David’s fans:

Pamela says:

I am just so sad today as I know everyone at WRLT is. I know David was the voice and feeling behind the idea of the fabulous independent radio station we are so lucky to have here in Nashville, and I hope his dream and legacy continues, as I’m sure it will. His loss will leave a huge void, but he touched a lot of folks and kept the spirit of independent music alive and well in an industry that does not honor true independent artists. My heart goes out to all of you who were fortunate to have worked closely with him, as I know you’ve lost a good friend.

Brian says:

Music on the radio is such an important part of life. Where would we be without it? Like so many in Nashville, while I never met David Hall in person, I knew him well through his wonderful voice on WRLT radio and consider him a special friend. He was there for me every afternoon on the drive home and on Sunday nights to wind down the weekend. He brought so much of that special joy of independent radio to my life. His knowledge and dedication to his craft was inspiring. Words cannot fully express my deep appreciation toward him for how much he enriched all of our lives. It is so very sad that he will no longer be there filling those moments for us. Thank you for the many wonderful years, David Hall. As a longtime dedicated listener, I will always remember you, and truly miss you, as a very special friend.

Dan Haseltine says:

Absolutely broken by this. He was definitely a fierce advocate for independent music, and the welcome and familiar voice on the radio for so many years. His passing is so incredibly sad. David… you will be missed. -Dan Haseltine(Jars of Clay)

Lynne Collier says:

Lightning 100 is such a treasure – an independent station that brings a great variety of music to Nashville. David was an equally independent dj and a champion for local music & musicians. My thoughts are with David’s family, both inside and outside the station, and may you all support each other during this difficult time. Thank you David!

kj says:

Just have to say Thank You, David Hall, for rockin’ us all so sweetly for all these years. Your radio personality has always been a true friend and inspiration for so many. You’re one cool Nashville Cat!!!!!

Thank you for culturizing us with some awesome music. You surely did rock us all! Thank you for the tunes, friend…

Todd Adams says:

So few cities are as fortunate as Nashville to have a radio station like Lightning 100, where the music is locally programmed by people who care about music, and David Hall was synonymous with Lightning 100. From hosting his radio show to hosting Sunday evenings at 3rd & Lindsley, you could tell David’s life passion was quality music and there was no bigger advocate for local Nashville musicians than David Hall. He is irreplaceable and will be dearly missed.

Mary Davis says:

I can barely remember a time when David Hall was not a part of Nashville radio. We have lost the best DJ this city will ever know. My thoughts & prayers are with David’s family & the staff at Lightening 100. Rock on, David – you will be greatly missed.

Mindy says:

Although I never met David, I feel like a good friend has passed just in listening to him on the radio all these years in Nashville. My condolences to all those who did know him….. his family and friends.

RIP my “vocal” friend.

mark says:

new to Nashville, I happily found lightning 100 on the dial. A great radio station much in part because of David. I never met David but feel a great sadness none the less that his voice has been silenced. A great loss for his family and the larger Nashville community. My deepest sympathies.

Ruth Ann Minshall says:

I was a year out of high school when David came to WKDF.I can remember how delighted I was when he joined WRLT. Those were the good ‘ole school days! I don’t think I will be able to survive the commute from Nashville to Spring Hill any more without hearing “David Hall rocks y’all!” He was a sweetheart of a guy, and really knew his stuff. He will be sorely missed!

Rufus Wainwright, courtesy RufusWainwright.com

The musical lineup for the 12th Annual NON-COMMvention is beginning to take shape with a slew of announcements.

Brandi Carlile, Sinead O’Connnor, Rufus Wainwright, and Diego Garcia are scheduled to perform at the Philadelphia-based conference May 17-19.

Also announced are Dry the River, JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound, Lee Fields, and Father John Misty. Many more artists are yet to be announced.

Sinead O'Connor by Kevin Abosch, courtesy of sineadoconnor.com

As the NON-COMMvention returns to Philly from Wilmington, performances will take place at World Cafe Live, adjacent to the WXPN studios.

Early Bird registration rates are currently in effect, with multiple radio station employees able to attend for as little as $50. See the NON-COMMvention registration page for details.

The official hotel will again be the The Inn at Penn, with reservations now being taken. Learn more at the NON-COMMvention hotel page.

TheTop22.com will have complete details as the conference further develops. Information is available via the 12th Annual NON-COMMvention tab on the top navigation bar.

On August 30, 2009 I wrote that radio was blaming all of its problems on the recession, and once the economy bounced back, everything would be fine.

In short, I called bullshit.

Instead, I argued that commercial radio’s business model was on fire well before the recession, and everything big radio companies have done since has simply fed that fire.

I pointed out Bob Garfield’s excellent observations in his book The Chaos Scenario. Among other things, Bob noted that media’s expansion was seriously outpacing the ad dollars that supported it.

The result would be sinking CPMs and a greater proportion of the ad dollars going into digital.

Big Radio’s response to all this has been to circle the wagons, cut costs, and turn the content into a commodity. Arbitron’s Personal People Meter handed over more data, which was immediately misused by managers and consultants who didn’t understand how to use it.

In the almost two and a half years since I wrote that piece, commercial radio has gone literally nowhere. On the other hand, Broadcast TV, Cable, Digital, and Mobile are up big across the board — regardless of the economy. Only print has fared worse.

With commercial radio having just announced another flat month (December year-over-year), Strata’s fourth quarter survey sums it up.

(Strata, by the way, is a software company in Chicago that supports around 1000 ad agencies.)

Check this unfortunate finding…

The top medium of choice for clients in Q4 2011:

* Spot TV (Broadcast and Cable) 51%
* Digital 31%
* Spot Radio 8%

As bad as the 8% is, it’s down from 16% last year.

As Bob Garfield correctly predicted, not enough dollars being spread too thin across too many new forms of advertising.

And if you’re wondering where the next trough of money is going to go, look at your phone. Ad Age reports that mobile advertising will be up 80% in 2012 to $2.6 billion.

If you’re curious as to why Clear Channel dropped radio from its name, the answer lies in this chart:

Mobile Advertising Projection: Ad Age

I’ve said it before and will say it again — it’s not the medium, it’s how the medium is being programmed. Pubradio is hanging in there and in many places, growing. Commercial radio is just plain getting it wrong with a game plan that may provide audience, but that audience is less and less desirable to advertisers.

And that’s all that matters.

The dashboard of the 2013 Chevrolet Sonic, sans CD player.

News out of the Consumer Electronics Show has GM announcing that the 2013 Chevy Sonic RS will not have an in-dash CD player. And the reason is not because the Sonic is a stripped down cheapo.

It’s inevitable that CD players will disappear, but it comes as a bit of a shock — and has implications for music lovers, record labels, radio stations, and the car companies.

For music lovers, it’s a miserable development.

We have two cars in our household, and both have in-dash CD players. However, only one has an auxiliary input for my iPhone. Guess which car I prefer.

But a dashboard without the CD player will suck for one simple reason – most MP3s, satellite, and all streaming music sounds like ass. If you’re serious about rocking out in your car, it has to be on CD.

For labels, the message is clear: physical goods are one step closer to being manufactured for superfans only. Everyone else will tolerate lower grade digital copies.

For radio stations, the auto industry’s hyper-focus on high tech entertainment systems is only bad news — particularly if that radio station has reduced itself to a nationally distributed jukebox. Music-stations-as-commodities are dead men walking.

And speaking of commoditization, that’s the exact reason why the auto industry is so hot for connected dashboards that can provide Pandora and so much more. In short, so many cars are so well made by so many companies, they’re desperate for product differentiation. They’ll innovate to make the product more desirable wherever they can.

Radio stations would do well to follow their lead.

Legend Etta James died Friday following a long battle with leukemia and other health complications. She was 73 years old.

James first hit the charts as a teenager with the 1955 #1 R&B hit The Wallflower. Her career took off after signing with Chicago’s Chess Records, which found her a wider audience.

Best known for the international hit At Last, James continued to work as long as illness would allow, releasing her final album The Dreamer in November.

James battle drug addictions throughout her career, and a legal tussle over her estate also brought unwelcome attention from the press.

Johnny Otis with son Shuggie Otis.

Johnny Otis was born Ioannis Veliotes – a child of Greek immigrants – in Northern California and was known as “The Godfather of Rhythm and Blues” for his work as a performer, DJ, and producer.

Otis, who discovered Etta James, Jackie Wilson, Hank Ballard among others, passed away January 17 at the age of 90.

In the studio, Otis made his mark by producing the original version of Hound Dog, performed by Big Mama Thornton, and by writing and singing Willie and the Hand Jive, among other hits.

Our sister site, TheBluesMobile.com is the online home of The House of Blues Radio Hour, hosted by Dan Aykroyd in the Elwood character. We dug into the archives for two special shows dedicated to Etta and Otis.

Take a listen to learn more about the contributions of these greats…

Music industry pundit Bob Lefsetz

WXPN is pleased to announce that registration for the 2012 NON-COMMvention is now open.

Early Bird registration rates are now in effect, with the added twist this year that allows multiple radio station employees to register for as little as $50.

The NON-COMMvention returns to Philadelphia May 17-19, with meetings and music performances taking place at the WXPN studios – adjacent to World Cafe Live.

The Inn at Penn will serve as the official hotel and is currently taking reservations.

Additionally, the NON-COMMvention is proud to announce that music industry pundit Bob Lefsetz will be at the center of the NON-COMMversation with WXPN host Dan Reed. Certainly this will set the tone for a fun and frank event.

The musical lineup is being finalized and TheTop22.com will report additions as they are confirmed.

Additional details and appropriate links to registration and hotel reservations are available from the top navigation bar of TheTop22.com. Look for the 12th Annual NON-COMMvention Home Page tab.

You might recall Google and YouTube fending off a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Viacom not long ago.

While YouTube prevailed in court, they may have also prevailed in a larger sense — in a kind of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” way.

Earlier this year, YouTube settled a lawsuit with the National Music Publishers Association over music copyright infringements. The deal was that YouTube would have to pay $4 million up front, then 15% of net advertising revenue to publishers. In order to facilitate that, Google/YouTube needed a company or software solution that could track that mess and make the payments.

RightsFlow does just that.

But to us, that’s not the real story. The real story is that we’ve come from a place where everyone was suing over copyright infringement to, instead, “just cut me in on the revenue and you can leave my stuff up.” It’s actually quite amazing.

More on RightsFlow in ZDNet.

Related to the above, stats are just in that the number of videos that people watched online was up 97% in the third quarter.

Amazing as that is, it’s not the real story. The real story is the number of pre-roll ads that people watched was up 128%.

While the numbers should go up in tandem, the pre-roll number shows that not only is the viewing public accepting the idea of watching an ad before content plays, but ad agencies are accepting it as well. Worth noting that some of that increase is due to more advertising success at VEVO.

Expect both numbers to continue to climb, soaking up more of the advertising pie.

Good article with fun stats in Social Times.

So if there’s a lot of interest in watching video online, and people are watching ads before the video, what’s the best case scenario?

Create an ad that’s so strong that people will not only watch it online, but watch a video pre-roll ad before it. It’s an ad-agency’s wet-dream!

Anyway, Mashable compiled the most-shared commercials of 2011. The winner? The VW spot where the dad is messing with the head of his Darth-costumed kid, making junior believe that he started the car with his mind.

Can’t wait ’til that kid is 16 and rolls that same car after a night of revenge-filled binge drinking.

Watch the top spots in Mashable.

I’m rethinking my relationship with Amazon.

I’m a heavy user. Almost not a single day goes by without a UPS truck delivering something to the house from Amazon.

Using Amazon Prime, the membership that offers free shipping, I constantly use the service to deliver otherwise hard-to-find items. I figured, that UPS truck would be on the road anyway, so it might even be green for me to use Amazon rather than get in the car and start driving all over creation.

My family uses Amazon streaming services for movies via our Roku box, and the sister-site to TheTop22, TheBluesMobile.com is an Amazon affiliate. We make only loose change on our referral fees, instead seeing it as a great way to get more blues CDs and downloads sold in an environment where physical blues titles are hard to get your hands on.

But I’m starting to think very differently about Amazon these days, and the promotion they’ve unleashed for Saturday, December 10, is only adding fuel my new line of thinking.

On Saturday, Amazon is encouraging people to head to retail, snap pictures or scan bar codes with its price comparing mobile app, then walk out — in exchange for $5 off as many as three different products.

That’s right, Amazon will pay you to spy for them.

It’s no secret that Amazon has been at war with retail since it crushed booksellers. In addition to massive volume discounts, the online retailer makes no bones about selling things below cost — from Lady Gaga to the Kindle Fire. But that’s just business. People have used loss-leaders forever.

But Amazon has a patently unfair advantage over brick and mortar stores by not having to charge sales tax in most areas.

Saturday’s promotion goes too far. It’s not about price comparison so much as it’s about flipping your local retailer the bird — and they want you to do it for them.

Think of it this way: the local retailer invests in the facility, personnel (your neighbors), expertise, and the community — all things that cost money. Not to mention they pay local taxes. Yet Amazon wants you to take advantage of that — literally take advantage of them — by viewing and touching the product, getting your questions answered etc.

And then walk out and buy the product from Amazon. This feels sleazy.

This is Walmart all over again. The big box retailer was punished repeatedly for killing Main Street, but for some reason, Amazon has escaped the same fate.

Amazon is in court all over America — even trying to re-write California’s tax code — in order to keep their sales tax exemptions. Meanwhile, our Main Streets are increasingly deserted, jobs are hard to find, and local governments start looking for ways to make up shortfalls.

And that’s the connection people are failing to make. They think they’re saving money by shaving off a few bucks off products by evading sales tax. But then, as your kids’ school lays off teachers, you get hit with a a nice property tax hike.

Amazon is on the wrong end of this argument. Tactics like this will result in sales-killing negative PR and perhaps start turning the tide in favor of local retailers.If this story were to get picked up by national news, think of the value of that negative press.

Amazon has enough going for it to win on service, extraordinary variety, and convenience. The company should suck it up and start collecting sales taxes.

Fair is fair.

Special thanks to Michael Bunnell of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores, who actually has a dog in this fight, for getting me thinking on this topic. His email was as follows:

Today I was sent a link to a story about an Amazon promotion to encourage use of their bar code scanning application. They are offering a $5 incentive to their customers to go into physical stores, scan bar codes, and supply Amazon with the store’s pricing information and then buy the item from them. Of course the promotion is being sold as a consumer friendly option that allows them to beat every other retailer’s prices. Now let’s face facts here–this is nothing more than an attempt to steal local customers and steer them to online sales from what amounts to the biggest box store of all. It is an attack upon physical retailers everywhere. Retailers who pay local taxes and who pay rent to local landlords and hire local workers, who in turn spend their wages to support the local economy, providing support for schools, police departments, roads, libraries, fire departments–everything we all take for granted. Prompting consumers to spy on other retailers with the promise of a monetary incentive is underhanded and amounts to industrial spying. It uses modern technology to the advantage of a single entity and to the disadvantage of the rest of the retail businesses who actually pay the bills that support the communities we all live in.

It’s just wrong.

They did not blow much shit up in Moneyball.

The Year in Film

Let’s start with the coolest clip this week, a film called The 2011 Portfolio.

It’s a mashup of 166 films that came out in 2011, and it’s really well done. First watch, then we’ll discuss…

Cool, right? But here’s where we get disturbed by what we see:

1) A lot of these movies look like the same movie.
2) Violence, lots. Blowing shit up is just boring. Did Hitchcock need to blow up that much shit? Thought not.
3) I think I counted more blue people than black people. Seriously, there are four blue characters and I think I only saw two black actors, not counting Harold and Kumar, who are, of course, not black. WTF Hollywood? What country do you live in?

Tom Waits Satisfied

What happens when Bob Dylan’s kid shoots a video for Tom Waits? This does. Jesse Dylan directs…

The Black Keys

The Black Keys were all over TV this past weekend, and despite our tease for the SNL performance, they were better on Colbert as SNL continues to lag behind just about everybody in the live mix department…

Lonely Boy performance…

Gold on the Ceiling performance (web only)…

The concert-going world has never loved Ticketmaster and its “convenience fees.”

Now, based on the proposed settlement of a class-action lawsuit, a few of those dollars may be coming back to consumers. Seems that the ticketing giant got caught on what really amounts to a technicality in not properly disclosing that Ticketmaster was profiting from some fees. Really?

Anyway, a legal team went after them for this oversight and it could mean as much as $30.50 coming back to ticket buyers. While amounting to roughly a concert T-shirt for consumers, it will stress the already stressed parent Live Nation even more. The attorneys who filed the case are looking for more than $16 million in fees — and then there are the potentially tens of thousands of claims. Do the math. Not good.

See our previous post on the struggling concert giant here, and read more specifics about the lawsuit on Huffington Post.

If you missed this stat a week or so ago, it’s worth circling back on.

We all know about the Six Degrees of Separation, but we know about it primarily from the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon meme.

Researchers at the University of Milan and Facebook cranked some numbers, and found that the 721 million “friends” on Facebook are actually much closer.

It’s now just 4.74 Degrees of Separation. Not quite as catchy, but quite amazing nonetheless.

Geek out on the story in The New York Times.

Lots of fanfare about the official launch of Google Music.

While probably a pretty solid product, it’s launch is something of a snooze since it comes years after iTunes and Amazon have been cementing relationships with users.

Among Google Music’s major challenges is acquiring customers — no small feat with the millions who are already have accounts elsewhere. Getting those accounts created is a true pain in the ass for any online retailer.

Earlier in the year, we saw the genius stunt pulled by Amazon in selling the Lady Gaga album for just 99 cents. It likely resulted in tens of thousands of new accounts for the retailer, and many more probably took the service for a test-drive for the first time. The loss Amazon took on the deal is just a customer acquisition cost.

It’s really not at all different that when Best Buy took losses on CDs in order to get customers in the store.

On Cyber Monday, Google tore a page out of that playbook, offering albums from Coldplay, Florence and the Machine, and many others for just $1.99.

While there’s a danger in devaluing music further, at least they’re training the consumer to pay for the product rather than rip it off. Expect more of this as the three-way download war heats up. More in Mashable.