Prelude to a Review


Now that Olivia Rodrigo has a second album out, i toyed with the notion of actually listening to the first one. While i was waffling about the certainty of not doing that, though, i saw a thing that made me do a thing i said i wasn't going to do. You know how me and coincidence like to get physical, so it's the other Olivia. 

Why am i taking one for the team? Well, for one tiny little detail in the fine print. Primary (goddamned) Wave. I hate them so much. I want to drive to corporate HQ in Satan's Taint, Nebraska (or wherever they're located) and take a dump in their lobby. 

"The leading Independent publisher of iconic music in the world." That might be the most vomitous sentence i've ever read or said out loud. Think about it for a moment. What could possibly be the business model for publishing "iconic music" at a global level other than buying high profile artist catalogues for as little as possible and republishing things from them for profit? As opposed to publishing new and upcoming artists? An acquisition model that looks a whole lot more like ambulance chasing than publishing? Fuck Primary Wave. 

Maybe that's not a fair assessment. Maybe actually managing the legacy of significant artists, getting it physically out there for the fans, and then reinvesting in new emerging talent really is the heart of their mission like their corporate copy says it is. It's hard to see though. It sure looks a lot more like a "cash for clunkers" or "we'll buy your house today" spiel. 

Whose music do they own now? Curt Cobain, Steven Tyler, John Lennon, Bob Marley, those were their first acquisitions. Then we got the ones i've mentioned in the last couple years (Prince and Stevie Nicks), and so many more. Go see for yourself: 

https://primarywave.com/writer/ 

Obviously you can make the argument that the living people on that roster didn't HAVE to sell out to Primary Wave (assuming they still own enough rights to have any say in the first place), but on the other hand we're about to listen to this 2021 repub of Physical after Olivia Newton John recently died. I've tried to shut off all the ball valves on my snark ejectors, but that just means the pressure is building up behind the scenes; Counting Crows, Boyz II Men, Devo for crying out loud, I could spring a leak any time. 

I know this distinction is confusing and abstract, but i'm not out here to libel or defame anyone, i'm criticizing a business system i don't like but in which we all (for lack of viable alternatives) participate. We looked at both sides, remember? I said you definitely can't fault Bob Dylan and Stevie Nicks for collecting their well deserved retirement funds up front, but then you've also got Jesus And Mary Chain wanting but not getting control of their own back catalog, the Zappa kids suing each other over dad's music, and Prince winning his rights back only to unexpectedly die and the family immediately sell them right back to the highest bidder. None of that is good. 

We aren't talking about careers here, we're talking about passive income streams from intellectual property rights. Adam Duritz deserves every penny he can squeeze out of writing Mr. Jones and Round Here (those are great songs), but why do we need Larry Mastel and Adam Lowenberg and 9 secondary A&R teams leveraged against each other siphoning profits to get that $0.004 per stream to his checking account? Sure, i would rather pay $36.50 for a reissue of August and Everything After (fun coincidence that it's near the end of August as i write this) than the $172 median value the European import is currently fetching, but i'm not gonna pay more than $9 for the CD, and that's only if i've already committed to walking in the store and there is literally nothing more interesting (like today). 

The point i'm trying to make is that by and large artists can't afford to publish their own work whether they want to or not, all they can do is pick a front-end user interface for an investment firm and hope something they wrote magically gets licensed by a Netflix series that may or may not become popular and/or nobody tries to sue them for arpeggiating an Fm7 chord in the bridge. 

What was i avoiding talking about? Oh yeah, ONJ's best-selling 11th studio album from 1981, Physical (in Target exclusive form), I guess, if we must. Lemme take a shower first, then i guess we'll get busy doing that... 

... who am i kidding? The cover art is sideways. If i know me even a little, i'm probably going to love it, so join me later over at Bottle of beef on this Summer night when we find out. TTFN and stuff.

The review

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