Salon.com > music industry

“Frank Ocean makes the decisions where Frank Ocean is concerned”

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 21:30:00 +0000

Frank Ocean catapulted himself out of obscurity this year to become one of the most talked-about recording artists — in part because of a revelation of same-sex heartache in the liner notes of his breakout album, "Channel Orange," which he posted on his Tumblr a couple of weeks before its July release, and in part due to his public spats with the notoriously combative Chris "Breezy" Brown. Now the 25-year-old soulful singer-songwriter, whose lyrical candor, evocative storytelling ability, and musical dexterity have earned him hyperbolic comparisons to an incredible, if strange array of talent — Stevie Wonder, Prince, Joan Didion, J.D. Salinger — is being honored at this Sunday's Grammy Awards with six nominations, including best new artist, record of the year and album of the year. And he very well might clean up. Though Ocean, whose real name is Christopher Breaux (he changed it in 2010), tends to be guarded around reporters — you might say stingy and not a little prickly — he did grant the New York Times Magazine's Jeff Himmelman an interview, who extracted what there was to extract from the exacting, arguably megalomaniacal R&B star. Here is what he got:

2012′s best-selling album is so two years ago

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 15:19:00 +0000

Despite the album having gone on sale in February 2011, Adele's "21" was the best-selling LP of 2012 according to the year-end Nielsen SoundScan figures. This gives Adele the crown two years in a row, and caps off a year in which Adele won the Album of the Year Grammy, recorded the theme to the Bond film "Skyfall," and began a break from recording occasioned by the birth of her son.

It's that last part that may have the record industry a bit concerned. Adele's success (her album sold over 1 million more than Taylor Swift's "Red" in 2012, though it had several more months on shelves) is among the only inspiring stories that music labels can tell themselves about the album, a form that may have outlived its usefulness in a post-CD world. After an uptick in 2011, album sales were down in 2012 as they had been for years before; CD sales continue to flat-line, though they make up the majority of album purchases.

Who killed the music industry?

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 22:34:00 +0000

In the 1920s, the recording industry faced a new medium that threatened to make it obsolete: commercial radio. Suddenly, stations around the country could broadcast music hundreds of miles in every direction, which meant listeners could hear for free the same songs they had previously purchased. Record companies went into a frenzy. As Sean Wilentz writes in “360 Sound: The Columbia Records Story,” “Record company executives blamed their new troubles less on the sweeping forces of politics, law, and economics than on the arrival of commercial radio, and with good reason.”

Radio proved immensely popular, thanks to crisper sounds and lower prices. That meant, of course, that record sales tanked. “The record companies claimed that existing copyright law permitted them to ban the radio stations from broadcasting commercially recorded music and, in effect, stealing their product. Records appeared with labels warning that they were not licensed for broadcasting, and, even though the claim lacked formal legal sanction, live music did remain the rule on radio through the 1920s.”