A Conversation with Author Jay Frank – HuffPost 9.29.10

Mike Ragogna: Jay, you have this new book, FutureHit.DNA. Could you just give a brief synopsis about its mission?

Jay Frank: What I found when I went looking at popular music was that technology has a huge influence on music consumption. While a lot of people have been creating songs especially made for radio in the last few years, as the music discovery has largely moved to an online mechanism, the methodology by which they discover has also changed. Through that, the type of music that would react, and how it would react to people, has changed drastically. So, I set about to write a book so that artists, songwriters, and producers could be better armed with the way new technology has adapted what songs become hits.

MR: That’s very smart. There’s a Bible out there for the music business in general…

JF: All You Need To Know About The Music Business.

MR: There you go. Can you take us from the decline of CDs through when did digital downloading take over as the main way to purchase music?

JF: Well, I think the seeds got sewn way back in ’97 and ’98, before Napster. They really started with a ruling called the MAP ruling, which stands for minimum advertised price. The courts ruled that the labels colluded with each other to set minimum pricing guidelines which is, of course, illegal. That led to price wars within Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy stores that allowed them to grow into huge market shares by underpricing records, and then, subsequently, the independent and chain stores couldn’t survive as much because the pricing for records went down. Simultaneous to that, of course, was the huge rise in real estate, which neatly coincided with that. So, all of a sudden, chain, and independent record stores had to charge less for their product in order to be competitive, while their price per square foot was jumping in double digit percentages every single year.

So, the perfect storm for failure was created in those kind of climates, and the fact that digital downloading and file trading was basically just the icing on the cake at that particular point. Throughout the ’00s, you created a natural synergy where record stores were becoming less and less common, and that forced more people to buy music digitally. More importantly, during that entire time, the discovery of music was going digital. Kids were growing up finding radio playlists boring when in an on demand world, you could go to a multitude of sites and actually discover music, at your leisure, in the time frame that you wanted to. So, the biggest paradigm shift, in my opinion, has not necessarily been the sales shift, although that has been significant. It’s really been the music discovery shift changing so dramatically.

MR: Right. And price wars devalued the perception of music.

JF: Well, I think it was the combination of the price wars plus the easy access to music, and the ability to get singles had a slight influence on that as well. The biggest difficulty, in terms of sales going down, was that you used to be able to buy a single for one dollar and ninety-nine cents and an album was eight dollars and ninety-nine cents, and this was twenty years ago. So, an album cost five times the price of the single. Well, you get to iTunes, and the album was ten times the price of the single, nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. So, who wants to buy an album when there’s no real bargain in buying an album. Now, I see us getting it back with a lot of different promotions and pricing schemes where purchasing an album is much more of an affordable buy than just a single, and that’s what is going to have to happen for people to not just buy singles only.

MR: Has the graph leveled-off on digital music purchases?

JF: It depends on who you are, and what graph you’re making. The interesting thing is that, literally, this quarter, we should be transferring over to where more than fifty percent of music purchases will be happening online. That should be happening right now, but we’ll see when the final numbers come out. That’s a pretty significant shift, and that’s based on dollars, not based off of unit sales. If you go by unit sales, it’s a lot easier to count the individual single downloads and conclude that online has been dominating the conversation pretty dramatically. But then, you actually go in terms of dollars and cents on the graph, and a lot of people try to point to the album chart which is still considered the bellwether, and the reality is that the album chart no longer is an accurate bellwether for the industry. So, while everybody goes and says, “Album sales are currently down thirteen percent year over year, isn’t the business bad,” I actually look at the combined revenues coming in, and we’re pretty much leveling off at the bottom and should start seeing a rise in overall revenues in the next couple of years.

MR: Interesting. What is the biggest demo of music downloads right now?

JF: It’s pretty much across the board. One of the things that I’ve actually been finding in my studies that has been a significant shift, is that females are now accounting for more purchases of music than they ever have. Traditionally, it’s been about fifty-fifty, and maybe a little bit skewed male. If you think to ten or fifteen years ago and the people that haunted the record stores, most people think of them as mostly being guys. But I’ve doing a lot of studies in the past year and seeing the music that’s selling most, and it’s females. I think the reason for that has more to do with the fact that the female audience tends to congregate around what’s socially acceptable. So, the top of the charts are really gravitating to artists that skew toward the female demographic, and because of that, it just feeds upon itself and those artists get bigger and bigger. Meanwhile, the males are really, really fragmented. They’re all over the place, they can’t reach any consensus or very little consensus, and subsequently, they’re not buying as much. That makes it very difficult for the music business because I think for the next couple of years, they are going to be directing more music at the female population than the male population.

MR: That’s interesting because my theory used to be that more of those fragmented dollars are being spent on things like video games, right? And there are DVDs, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, movie blockbusters, Imax…

JF: Yes. Well, the problem is that there is a big paradox of choice. There is so much out there, and again, for the guys, when they have so many things that they could be interested in musically, why purchase things? They can’t figure out exactly what it is to purchase. Females, on the other hand, have the same access to the same artists, but they tend to gravitate around the same fifty or so artists, and therefore, it’s a lot easier for them to pinpoint what it is they would like to buy. Overall, you’re right that there are more dollars going in more places. The mobile app market is one that just quickly siphons off things, dollar for dollar. As you said, gaming is a huge component, and people still like to go out to the movies. When movies cost us an extra four bucks to see in 3-D, that four bucks comes away from somewhere else.

MR: That’s true. But I feel that the female market always has gravitated towards teen idols or major pop fads.

JF: Well, I think actually, the teen idol stuff tends to be, somehow, fairly cyclical. So, you’ve got 2010, and you’ve got the rise of a bunch of disposable, good looking pop acts. 1990 was New Kids On The Block, 2000 was Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, and Britney Spears. So, to some degree, the pop stuff does end up coming in through cycles, and we are in the peak of a time that a pop cycle like this is due. At the same time, it’s drastically different in the sense that the artists are showing a little bit more depth and musicality, and I think that the marketplace itself is showing that it’s not just the teenagers that are wanting it. You’re finding that the moms are wanting it, and I think that’s a little bit different than what we’ve had before.

MR: Interesting, that’s true. And from another perspective, for a while, CDs took sales from vinyl, VHS took sales from CDs, then came DVDs, and now Blu-ray. Then again, those sales also have declined. And you’ve got a bad economy.

JF: DVD sales have definitely leveled off, and are starting to decline for sure. A lot of things right now, to me, really come down to that pricing element. It comes down to how does one actually look at a value? For a few years, I was in a store, and there was the Steven Spielberg movie, Munich, which had just come out on DVD maybe three months earlier. It was already being marked down for sale, so I could buy the DVD for seven dollars and ninety-nine cents, but I could walk two steps over to the soundtrack section, and the soundtrack to the same movie was thirteen dollars and ninety-nine cents. So, you kind of say, “Well, wait a minute. I can get the whole movie in 5.1 surround or I can pay double to get just the score isolated.” People are actually weighing one against the other, which is why when things get down to ninety-nine cents, it becomes an impulse purchase, and if you look at the music industry as a whole, the area we’ve lost is that impulse purchase. There are much less stores, so you can’t just wander into a store and say, “Yeah, I’ll just throw in a ten dollar CD, why not?”

The music industry is having so much trouble because they need somebody to say, “I’m going to go spend eight dollars and not think about it,” versus somebody who’s trying to sell a CD for twelve dollars, and the person has to think about it. You need those absent-minded, no brainer, “I purchased it before I really realized where my budget was,” purchases that have driven the music business in the best of times. Because of the lack of stores right now and because of the lack of true pricing initiative, for the most part, by the record labels, it’s getting very difficult for us to be at that part anymore.

MR: Jay, you have a history of being one of the music industry’s gate keepers. You were the head of music programming at Yahoo Music, right?

JF: I was the head of music programming at Yahoo for seven years, and I currently am the Senior Vice President of Music Strategy for CMT.

MR: Okay, so at CMT, what are you looking for? What are some of the strategies that are involved in your daily work?

JF: Well, my daily work is trying to make music that is going to succeed cross-platform–television, internet, mobile, and radio. What we’re looking for are songs that really can actually cut through, that speak to people, and that are active. This is not a time for passive songs. There used to be a time where songs just sort of sifted into the background, embedded themselves into your skull, and then somebody might want to go buy them because they’re familiar. This is a time, now, when it’s a very active culture, and therefore, active songs are what people respond to. We tend to look for those much more than others, and it has to make a dent. This is certainly a time when anybody who is just going to make an average song or do something that just sort of says something but doesn’t really make a statement will seldom sell anymore.

MR: Interesting. So, that brings us into another territory here–when artists are looking at this environment, how should they be approaching it?

JF: Well, the first thing that I say to everybody is that you have to impress the listener in seven seconds. When you look at the way that people are discovering music online, whether it’s through mostly internet radio, streaming on a website, downloading it legally, or downloading it illegally, the reality is that nearly every music experience starts at the same point, and that’s at the beginning of the song. And it seems obvious, but the reality is that this is a new thing. Most people were discovering music through radio and television, and in radio and television, you might switch the station and stumble along a song in the middle. Now, though, when you hear about a song, you’re discovering it at the same exact point of the song, and that’s the beginning. One of the things that I’ve seen time and time again through data is that as many as half of the people who go to discover a song leave the song within the first seven seconds. People are really giving songs that little of a time to impress them. If you’re not actually wowing them, you’re doing your song a disservice. So, I really advocate very strongly to artists, no matter which way you do it, at some point, you’ve got to engage the listener very, very quickly.

MR: What other kinds of advice do you have?

JF: I’ve got a lot of different advice. One of the other things I like to talk about is, much like other songwriting ideas, you have to think about the beginning, middle, and end of the song. The difference now, in the digital age, is that you have to think about it differently. Time and time again, we’ve seen through data that at about the two-minute mark in the song or the middle of the song, the audience grows a little bit bored of it, and I think for the younger audience in particular I call it the mix-tape mentality. They’re so used to hearing DJ mixes, where the song shifts every minute and a half to two minutes, that at that point, if the song just continues to do the same old thing, in their brain, they go, “Well, I’ve heard all this already. I don’t need to hear anymore,” and they leave the song. If they leave the song, they are creating a negative impression in their mind about that song, even if they may have liked it. So, I encourage artists to do something in that two-minute area to make sure that somebody is going to stay engaged. Then, at the end of a song, you want to do something that will leave people remembering it. I talk a lot about putting in false or incomplete endings, failing to do chord resolutions, and things like that because what ends up happening is you want somebody to stop listening to a song, and then as they go on to whatever the next song is, find that that the song they just finished is still stuck in their head. A lot of that is because if you leave the song incomplete, then the brain is going to try to fill in the gaps and make that song complete in their head. It’s just a very, very sneaky way for the artist to make sure that their song is going to be memorable compared to others. The competition out there is way too dramatic. If you actually tried to listen to every single song that comes out in a given week, it’s physically possible for you to hear only five percent of the recorded music that is released in a given week, which is astounding. So, you have to do whatever you can to make sure that your song has that edge and is remembered because otherwise, you’re going to be listened to once, and then get lost in the clutter.

MR: Jay, you’re also speaking about this from an angle that’s more broad. You’ve dabbled in many areas of music, right?

JF: Sure. Ultimately, throughout my life, I’ve spent a large portion of my time in programming music for television, radio, and the internet, but I’ve also run an independent record label, I’ve managed and booked bands at a night club, I’ve DJ’d, I ran a record store, I’ve managed bands, and I’ve done just about everything that one can do within the music business. So, I kind of have that broad overview perspective to know how these things tend to work, in that kind of honeycomb way, with each other. What I tried to do in the book is to recognize that it’s all an intricate system, and if you don’t have that music discovery, then you’re not going to be able to succeed through the other elements. The other part is too many people in the music business are ready to give up on recorded music as a loss leader to other things like live shows and t-shirts, but I’m not ready to do that. I think there is plenty of money to be made–you look at someone like Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift, who in a three-year period are doing hundreds of millions of dollars in worldwide business on recorded music alone. That tells me that the business is still there if you can make the right music for it. That’s why I came up with the book, for understanding all those different aspects of the business, and saying, “Alright, how can I apply that to help an artist take a song and subtly craft it just a little bit differently to make sure that it’s more sellable?” I think the ultimate validation, to me, was I actually met an avant-garde, classical artist from Iceland who told me that the theories in the book were helpful to him, which was probably the last person I actually wrote the book for–it’s certainly aimed more towards an artist making popular music, but it works in those fringe genres as well, which is pretty amazing.

MR: One of the bullet points on the back of the book says it gives a history of technology’s involvement in past hits. Are there a couple of stories you can tell about how technology has placed something in the Top Ten?

JF: Well, it has more to do with a lot of technical limitations of whatever a technology is at the time. It really started significantly back in the 1800s when piano rolls were a major distribution of songs. But a piano roll could only be so thick, and that thickness dictated how long that song was going to be. Then, that length of a song, three minutes, ended up becoming a standard bearer when you finally move to vinyl records. It’s interesting that the technology was dictating that. You could have written a seven-minute song, but it wasn’t going to go anywhere because you couldn’t physically distribute it.

Then, I found other things. For example, Mariah Carey had the longest length of an intro of any artist in the pop era. That happened to coincide with a time where scheduling software was used in many radio stations. Radio consolidation was occurring, and through that consolidation, they were trying to make more money, and that included selling the time that the DJ talked. So, if you follow this, the scheduling software would schedule songs with longer intro’s a little bit more than songs with shorter intro’s, so the DJs could send those advertising messages, Mariah made those songs with the longer intros, the one radio company who needed to do this owned multiple stations, and all of the sudden this is affecting chart positions because it’s happening over and over again. It’s not seen, it’s not something that’s done on purpose, it’s not something that radio programmers were thinking about. But the computers were subtly making it happen and that had a subtle effect to make Mariah Carey as big as she was.

MR: There is going to be a conference coming up soon that I’ll bet you can tell us about.

JF: Sure. In Nashville, we’ve got the Leadership Music Digital Conference now in partnership with Next BIG Nashville, which is sort of like Nashville’s South By Southwest–a ton of great bands playing over several nights. The Leadership Music Digital Conference part of it is pretty much the only digital conference in middle America for music to really go after and discuss what is happening in digital music, what are the trends, where are things going, how we all can get there, and how we can all continue to have successful businesses from it. It’s been running for five years, I’ve been involved with it from the start, and it’s absolutely a great conference that just grows year after year.

MR: I imagine you’re going to be doing a couple of presentations too, right?

JF: I’m going to be around there, for sure, doing a lot of things. One of the great things about my book, FutureHit.DNA, is that it’s been well received. Since its publication, I’ve already spoken about it in six countries, and at various conferences around the world. It seems like every time I speak at a conference, I get asked to do three other conferences on top of it just because it’s been so impactful. For me, that’s been the greatest thing about writing this book, and the main reason why I wrote it is because I can visibly see artists, record labels, and producers benefiting from reading this book. Even if they’re skeptical, they go and try a couple of things, and then are surprised that what they try grows that song’s popularity at any level. They’re amazed by it, and the more that we can do that, the more I know that we can tap into a growing music business again.

MR: Like any book, especially a popular non-fiction book, you have to keep doing revisions in order to keep up with changes. Have you already seen some interesting innovations or technology come out that you wish you could have put in the book?

JF: Well, I knew going into it that the book was going to be outdated literally the moment I put it to press, and sure enough, that happened. The week that the book was released last year was the week when Google included their one box music search, which significantly changed some of the music discovery methods. Thankfully, most of the tips that I would recommend for Google’s music searches were in the book already, albeit in different forms, but it is rapidly changing. I pretty much started rewriting the book the minute that the book hit the shelves, and the next version of the book is going to have two chapters that I already have begun working on that are new ideas for people to be able to more likely succeed in the music business.

MR: Nice. Now, let’s look at the artist’s creative process regarding all this information. Are we looking at something that’s more about the editing and production once you’re done or are you suggesting that, right from the start, as an artist is developing a piece, he or she needs to be looking at all this and getting into new habits?

JF: It varies song to song. I definitely think that, in terms of the book’s influence, it’s certainly much more likely to be felt during the arrangement or production process. I tell artists that I offer fifteen different tips in the book, and if you try to include all fifteen tips in one song, you’re probably going to have a song that will fail as well. Some tips work better for some songs, and others work better for others. I think, for the most part, I personally am with you. I think that artists should just go with the creative process, however that works for them. With most artists, they say, “Look, write the song the way you would have written the song. Then, when you’ve gotten it to a place that you’re feeling pretty good about, take the book and start overlaying some of those ideas to see if the songs improve.” In most cases, when I talk to artists about that, they’ve really found that that works well.

MR: Yeah, I come from the school of thought where you can’t put anything in the way of the flow of creativity.

JF: I have a friend of mine that wrote a song that hasn’t come out yet. But there are a lot of high expectations for this song, and as he was writing the song, he went ahead and said, “You know what? I think that the end of this song, because I need a twist at the two minute mark, I want to put in a gospel choir there.” So, he wrote the song knowing in his head that, production-wise, a gospel choir was going to come in at that point, and certainly, when you listen to that song, the song sells itself because of that gospel choir, for sure.

MR: What’s interesting is the seven second, two minute, unique ending theory. Once someone hears that enough in their own music and has the end result of a hit, my feeling is that these are things that will become part of the creative process, more naturally included.

JF: I think so, and I think that part of it is when you listen to the biggest charting, most successful songs right now, and you start hearing more and more how people are doing something to engage the listener very quickly at the beginning of the song, the more that it becomes very standard. Again, it’s not something that necessarily works for every single song, and it’s different for other artists. Somebody asked me earlier this week, “Does that seven second impact have to happen for every artist?” No, if you’re U2, you’ve built up a lot of loyalty and trust with your fan base and audience, and they’re willing to sit through more of the song. When U2 has a new song come out, they’re not going to make a judgment quite as quickly. But if you’re a brand new artist that somebody may have only read about in a paragraph or a tweet, for that matter, you really do only have that seven seconds, and if it doesn’t work right way, it’s not going to work. It doesn’t matter that the hook of the song or the meat of the song is something that that person would like. If they’re bailing out after seven seconds, it’s the tree falling in the forest.

MR: Well put. I always ask my interviewees if they have any advice for new artists, but this whole segment has been advice for new artists.

JF: (laughs) Pretty much. I think FutureHit.DNA has been a book that, for some artists, has helped find a hit that has very quickly gotten them a record label deal. And for some of them, it’s just been a natural growth where they’ve gone from one hundred downloads to two hundred to four hundred, and they’re just growing fan bases. But it’s been great to see that the book itself has been invaluable to artists all over the world.

MR: Nice. Well, Jay Frank, your book certainly takes us into practical ways of dealing with recorded music.

JF: I should also mention that if you still remain skeptical, you can go to futurehitdna.com, my website, where not only do I have a blog to update on some current trends, but you can download a chapter of the book for free. So, if you’re still a little skeptical, go ahead and give me your email address and we’ll send you over the chapter so you can see if you like it before you buy it.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney