Ultimate Digital Music Guide: One of Que's Editor's Picks

Hey, my Ultimate Digital Music Guide is one of Que's 11 Editor's Picks for Summer Reading 2012. (So's another of my books, My Pinterest.) Check out all the picks and order a copy online!

Find New Music with Spotify and Last.fm

Check out this recent article for Que: Using Spotify with Last.fm to Discover New Music. It really works!

Top Five Portable Music Apps for the iPhone

If you use your iPhone to listen to digital music, you'll appreciate my latest article for Que: Top Five Portable Music Apps for the iPhone. I cover Spotify, Last.fm, Pandora Radio, Shazam, and TuneIn Radio. Plus the iPhone's built-in Music app, and some alternatives to that. Enjoy!

Bob Babbitt (1938-2012)

We lost another great today. Bob Babbitt was one of the main bass players for the group of Detroit studio musicians dubbed the Funk Brothers. Not quite as famous or as influential as the legendary James Jamerson, he came to Motown a little later than James and outlasted him well into the 70s and 80s. I tend to think of Bob as a little new-school funkier than Jamerson, with a little sharper tone.

Bob had plenty of work before and after his Motown days. His pre-Motown tracks include several dates for Del Shannon, "With This Ring" by the Platters, and "Cool Jerk" by the Capitols. (To be fair, that one had a lot of Motown players on it; it was kind of a Motown-in-disguise cut.) For Motown, there was "Ball of Confusion" and "Masterpiece" by the Temptations, "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne, "War" by Edwin Starr, "Losing You" by Rare Earth, "Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I'm Yours)" by Stevie Wonder, "Stoned Love" by the Supremes, "Tears of a Clown" by Smokey Robinson, "Smiling Faces" by Undisputed Truth, "Touch Me in the Morning" by Diana Ross, and Marvin Gaye's "Mercy Mercy Me" and "Inner City Blues."

Bob's post-Motown work included "Mind Body and Soul" by the Embers, "Somebody's Been Sleeping in My Bed" by the 8th Day, "Give Me Just a Little More Time" by the Chairmen of the Board (all three produced by Holland-Dozier-Holland after they left Motown), "Midnight Train to Georgia" by Gladys Knight and the Pips, "Just Don't Want to Be Lonely" by Main Ingredient, "Scorpio" by Dennis Coffey, "Dynomite" by Bazooka, and Barry Manilow's "Copacabana." He also did a lot of work for Philadelphia International Records, including "Games People Play," "Then Came You," and "Rubber Band Man," all by the Spinners.

You can find a more complete discography here. It doesn't take a lot of listening to know that Bob was a terrific talent, one of a select group of studio musicians who made the bulk of the music that we listened to in the 1960s and 1970s. I have a deep respect for those cats who went to "work" in the studios day in and day out and created such memorable sounds. Whether it was the Funk Brothers in Detroit, the Wrecking Crew in Los Angeles, the Stax cats in Memphis, or the pros in New York and London, they defined rock and pop music for a generation. It's amazing what Bob and his colleagues did, truly amazing, and any serious student of popular music should be appreciative.

RIP, Bob Babbitt -- you will be missed.

Paying for Music

There's a big debate going on about whether or not we should be paying for the music we listen to, fueled by a somewhat thoughtful blog post by Emily White, intern at NPR's All Things Considered; and general manager of WVAU, the radio station at American University. (Read her post here: I Never Owned Any Music to Begin With) There are a lot of impassioned responses online, most notably this one from musician David Lowry, of Cracker and Camper van Beethoven fame. (Read it here.) Come back when you're done reading.

The gist of all this kerfluffle is that Ms. White, who works in the music industry and should know better, owns 11,000 tunes, of which she has paid for very few.To be fair, her post was meant to be more about the convenience of living in the world of on-demand digital music instead of buying CDs, but in there she definitely advocates the position that it's okay to download music for free -- in part because it's just so easy to do so. Like, it's hard work to actually go to a store (or click to Amazon) and buy a physical CD, or whip out your credit card while online to buy a track from the iTunes Store. Don't bother us with that inconvenience; we want access to an unlimited library of music right now, and we don't want to have to pay for any of it!

I actually agree with the first part of that supposition; the idea of immediate online access to every track ever recorded sounds pretty sweet to me, and is coming close to fruition with some of the newer streaming music services. But expecting all that music to be free? Not really.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I expect to pay for the goods and services I receive. I know lots of folks disagree, but there's no such thing as a free lunch. If I want the snow plowed from my street or my grandkids to receive a decent education, I expect to pay for it (via taxes, of course). If I download an album from my favorite artist, I expect to pay for that, too. That's because the people who produce these things deserve to be compensated for their hard work. I don't work for free, and I doubt that you do, either. We want to be paid for the work we do. Same thing with musicians; they produce this great music that we enjoy listening to, and they have bills to pay just like us. We should pay them for their music. End of argument.

When you download music from an unauthorized file sharing site or BitTorrent, you're depriving those musicians of much-needed income. That's stealing. You're also devaluing their work; you're saying that the great music they produce is worth nothing. Zero. Zilch. No value at all. I find that insulting.

I have a lot of problems with illegal file sharing sites, both as a music lover and as a musician. As a music lover, I'm appalled by the low quality of most of what's available, and also by the inconsistency; since you're relying on what other people upload, you never quite know what it is you're really getting. There's also a big problem with spyware and viruses, which are rampant among pirated files; I can't tell you how many times I've had to clean up my stepson's computer when he was big into the file sharing thing.

As a musician, I view these sites as what they are -- pirates. Every track downloaded from one of these sites steals money that should be going to the musicians who created the music. And if the musicians don't get paid, they'll eventually quite making the music. Let's see how everybody feels then.

Now, a little bit of sharing is to be expected. Hell, I did my share of taping friends' albums when I was back in college, but that was small scale stuff -- and I still bought a lot of music, including a lot of the albums that I'd previously taped. You'll get no argument from me that passing a CD from friend to friend is a great way to sample new music, and often results in legitimate purchases from new fans.

But to build an 11,000-track library, little of it obtained legitimately, is a problem. Even though Ms. White is an intern now (meaning she's working for free -- at least for the summer), she will eventually venture out into the real world of rents and car payments and such, and desire (nay, need) to be paid for her work. I don't think she'd appreciate the rest of us "sampling" her work for free and expecting her to pay the bills by selling t-shirts on the side. If Ms. White does her job, she should be paid for it -- just the way hard-working musicians should be paid for the job they do.

Bottom line, downloading music for free is stealing, and puts the musicians you love out of work. Don't do it.

Choosing the Right File Format for Your Digital Music

AAC, MP3, WMA, or FLAC? Lower or higher bitrate? Lossy or lossless compression? If you're at all interested in the best way to rip your digital music, check out my latest article for Que: Choosing the Right File Format for Your Digital Music. Your ears will thank you. (Hint: There's no one best solution; every situation is different, and there are compromises to be made.)

In Praise of the Brill Building Professionals

Lots of so-called critics like to dismiss the pop music of the pre-Beatles '60s as trite and easily forgettable, a regrettable detour from the harder rock 'n' roll of the Elvis '50s that was put by the wayside when the British true believers invaded American shores in 1964. I, however, disagree.

You see, the story of popular music in the 20^th century is written, in large part, by  professional songwriters -- the very folks who produced those oft-dismissed early '60s tunes. Professional songwriters apply their craft to the three-minute song, writing memorable words and melodies for other musicians to perform. The key word here is "professional" -- these are folks who know their craft and put out quality product on a consistent basis. None of that introspective bleeding heart emo crap intoned against a strummed chord or two; we're talking tunes with real melodies that anyone could sing along with.

In the first part of the 20th century, professional songwriting in America was concentrated in that area of New York City on West 28^th Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, commonly called Tin Pan Alley. (The name came from writer Monroe Rosenfeld, who likened the cacophony of so many songwriters pounding on so many pianos to the sound of beating on tin pans.) Songwriters, together and in teams, churned out their compositions in factory-like style; the best of these songs got sold to music publishing companies, and were then issued as sheet music (before the explosion of the record business) or picked up by one of the major singers of the day. Sometimes these Tin Pan Alley tunes ended up in vaudeville productions, Broadway plays, or Hollywood movies. The best of the best endured, and became classics.

The best songwriters of a generation filtered through Tin Pan Alley. George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin; all were professional songwriters for hire. Their songs were sung by the top singers of the day—Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Nat 'King' Cole, and the like. Their songs were professional compositions, the work of trained musicians who were masters of their craft. They featured pretty melodies, sophisticated chord progressions, and mature, often witty, lyrics; they were written by adults, for adults.

By the 1950s, Tin Pan Alley and the New York music business had moved uptown—to that stretch of Broadway between 49^th and 53^rd streets. The hub of this activity was 1619 Broadway, in an eleven-story edifice called the Brill Building.

The Brill Building was built in 1931, during the height of the Great Depression. Some of its first tenants were music publishers, including Famous Music, Mills Music, and Southern Music. By 1962 the building was home to more than 150 music companies, and this concentration of companies made the Brill Building a kind of “one stop shop” for aspiring musicians.

The entire music process was contained in that one building. You could write a song on one floor, sell it to a publisher on another floor, have an arrangement written on another, and cut a demo on yet another. If you needed musicians for your demo, there were plenty hanging around; if you were a publisher or a singer shopping for a song, all you had to do was wait around a few minutes and someone would be knocking at your door.

For songwriters, the working environment was Spartan, almost factory-like. Songwriters and songwriting teams occupied tiny cubicles, just big enough to hold a piano (for the music writer) and a desk (for the lyricist). Independent songwriters rented cubicles and tried to sell their songs, one at a time, to the many music publishing companies in the building. The more established songwriters were employed by music publishing firms, typically earning a salary of $150 (or less!) a week.

While the Brill was the nexus of the Broadway music complex, some of the biggest hits came out of a building catty-cornered across the street, at 1650 Broadway. It was this building that housed Aldon Music, which for a time dominated the teen music charts.

Aldon Music was a music publishing company run by a young Don Kirshner and his older partner Al Nevins. Kirshner got his start in the music business thanks to his friendship and professional partnership with Robert Casotto–who became better known as singer Bobby Darin. Before Darin’s later success as a performer, he was Kirshner’s songwriting partner, going door-to-door in the Brill Building looking for business. When Darin finally hit it big as a solo artist, twenty-one year-old Kirshner found a new partner, Al Nevins. Nevins had some previous success as a composer and musician (as part of the Three Suns in the 1940s and 1950s), and with Kirshner, founded Aldon Music in May, 1958.

It didn’t take long for Aldon to make its mark in the music publishing business. Kirshner and Nevins had just moved into their new offices, and were in the process of setting up their new furniture, when two aspiring songwriters knocked on their door. Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield were looking for a publishing contract, and they played a half-dozen songs for Kirshner and Nevins. One of the songs was called “Stupid Cupid;” another was called “Calendar Girl.” Kirshner and Nevins signed them on the spot.

Capitalizing on the initial success of Sedaka and Greenfield, Aldon Music began signing the best of that generation’s songwriting teams, and soon became the most successful of all the Brill Building publishing companies. Kirshner and Nevins had an ear for talent, and a unerring sensibility for the newly emerging teen record market.

The list of songwriters signed to Aldon Music is legend. In 1960, Kirshner hired Neil Sedaka’s high school girlfriend, Carole King, and her new husband, Gerry Goffin; they became the most successful songwriting team of the early 1960s. The following year, Kirshner signed songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil; Mann and Weil wrote separately for awhile, but ultimately teamed up (both professionally and personally) to pen hits for the Drifters, the Crystals, the Ronettes, and the Righteous Brothers. Kirshner also signed another husband-wife songwriting team, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, as well as the teams of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and (later in the decade) Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. By 1962 Aldon had eighteen songwriters on staff, none older than twenty-six.

Of course, Aldon wasn’t the only Brill Building music publisher; dozens of smaller publishers also contributed to the hit-making machinery in that pre-Beatles era. When Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller brought their west-coast R&B stylings to New York, they took up residence in the Brill Building. Burt Bacharach and Hal David, the era’s most sophisticated songwriters, also paid their dues in a Brill Building cubicle.

(And, yes, the typical Brill Building songwriter was actually two people, working together in a team—one providing the words and the other the music. While there were solo songwriters, such as the talented Toni Wine, and while some members of some teams sometimes wrote with other individuals, during the Brill Building era it was the team approach that ruled.)

The sheer volume of songs that emerged from the Brill Building compound was astounding in its own right; that so many songs became popular hits, and even time-honored standards, further speaks of the talent assembled there. While these talented individuals certainly wrote their share of throw-away pop confections (Barry Mann’s “Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)”, co-written with Gerry Goffin;  Goffin and King’s “The Loco-Motion;” Barry and Greenwich’s “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”), the best of Brill Building pop holds its own with the great Tin Pan Alley songs of Gershwin, Porter, and others of their generation.

While Brill Building pop was every bit as well crafted as Tin Pan Alley pop, the Brill Building songwriters were writing to a completely different audience—the then-new teen market. The 1950s marked the first time that teenagers were identified separately from their parents, and they craved their own clothing, movies, and music. Brill Building songwriters targeted the teen market, and wrote songs that that era’s teenagers could identify with.

As most teenagers (then as now) were intrigued by and infatuated with boy-girl relationships, the typical Brill Building song dealt with teenage romance, in one form or another. The lyrics were more to-the-point than in similar Tin Pan Alley songs, eschewing erudite witticisms for the vernacular of the day that spoke directly to their youthful audience. The music was simpler, too; with some exception, the Brill Building sound built on the simple chord progressions and harmonies of 1950s Doo Wop, with catchy, easily sung melodies piled on top of familiar chords.

Another difference between the Tin Pan Alley and Brill Building sounds was the latter’s emphasis on fully produced records. In the heyday of Tin Pan Alley, a song was put out into the world for any artist to sing, and its success was measured in terms of sheet music sold. By the late 1950s, the medium of measurement was the 45 r.p.m. single, so a completed Brill Building song was quickly made into a demo for a specific artist. The typical Brill Building single (whether recorded in New York or in the west coast studios favored by producer Phil Spector) featured elaborate, often bombastic production. There were lots of instruments on these records, including full string sections playing sophisticated arrangements. And, owing to its Doo Wop heritage, Brill Building pop surrounded the singer with multiple backing voices, especially on those songs written for the Girl Groups of the era. These records were short, catchy, and full of hooks—aimed at teenagers, not their parents. And they all sounded great coming from the tinny speaker on the average car radio.

What Brill Building songwriters shared with their Tin Pan Alley predecessors was a high level of professionalism, and a devotion to their craft. These were professionals, in every sense of the word; they worked nine-to-five to produce the flawless pop concoctions demanded by their listeners. The typical Brill Building songwriting team wrote hundreds of songs over the course of their careers, in some cases writing a dozen songs a week. Given the competition, only the best of the best made it onto AM radio’s top forty hit lists.

And, from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s, Brill Building songwriters sent one song after another to the top of the pop charts. Brill Building songs fueled the careers of many a teen idol, helped to create the Girl Group craze of the early 1960s, and supported the many manufactured groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the Monkees and the Archies.

It’s worth noting that, while the Brill Building might have been the east coast nexus of the professional songwriting world, there were other professional songwriters operating in the 1960s, out of many other locations. For example, there was a west coast equivalent of the Brill Building combine in Los Angeles. The two driving forces of this west coast sound were the local office of Aldon Music, headed by Lou Adler, and Metric Music, the California extension of New York’s Liberty Music. The songwriters working for Aldon and Metric included Randy Newman, P.J. Proby, David Gates, and Jackie DeShannon.

Another songwriting nexus was in Detroit, as Barry Gordy employed a raft of songwriting teams for his Motown label. The Motown composers are legend, and include names like Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Norman Whitfield, and Holland-Dozier-Holland.

And not all professional songwriters were American. In England, the center of professional songwriting activity was London’s Denmark Street. Successful British songwriters of the period included Carter and Lewis, Graham Gouldman, Cook and Greenaway, Tony Hatch, Les Reed, Barry Mason, and Geoff Stephans

Of course, Britain was also home to the century’s most successful songwriting team. John Lennon and Paul McCartney weren’t professional songwriters, at least not in the same way Mann and Weil or Goffin and King were, but they did produce a series of popular songs unmatched in the 20^th century. If the Beatles hadn’t existed as performers, Lennon and McCartney could have been Brill Building (or Denmark Street) songwriters without peer. As-is, their songs have been recorded by hundreds—if not thousands—of other artists, and were every bit as influential as anything coming out of that eleven-story building at 1619 Broadway.

Interestingly, many Brill Building composers went on to have successful solo careers of their own. Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond (who, during his stint at Famous Music, penned “I’m a Believer” and “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” for the Monkees), Paul Simon, and Lou Reed all served their time in the Brill Building, although they’re better known today as performers than as songwriters.

The most successful solo artist to come from the Brill Building combine was Carole King. As half of the Goffin-King songwriting team, Ms. King created some of the most memorable melodies of the Brill Building era. After she split with husband Gerry Goffin and moved to the west coast, she began performing her own songs. While she had toyed with performing before (she actually charted “It Might As Well Rain Until September,” under her own name, in 1962), it was her 1971 album, Tapestry, that provided her with megasuccess—as both a songwriter and a performer.

The beginning of the end of the Brill Building era came in 1963, when Kirshner and Nevins sold Aldon music to Columbia Pictures-Screen Gems. Kirshner moved to the west coast to run the parent company’s publishing and recording activities, while Nevins signed on as a consultant. While Kirshner, in his new position, still turned out the hits, they were mainly manufactured concoctions for manufactured groups, such as the Monkees and the Archies.

A further nail in the coffin came in 1964, when the Beatles invaded America. The Beatles marked the ascendance of the fully contained artist, musicians who not only performed but also wrote their own songs. With one new group after another writing its own music, the market for professionally written pop songs began to dry up; by the mid-1970s, that songwriting factory called the Brill Building quickly became irrelevant.

In the 1980s and beyond, professional songwriters became a dying breed—at least in the straight rock and pop genres. Professional songwriting continued to flourish in the fields of movie soundtracks, New Country, and each succeeding current generation of manufactured teen idol performers. The genre that started with Tin Pan Alley writers Harry Von Tilzer, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin and reached its zenith in the hundreds of brilliant three-minute Brill Building pop songs was, by the end of the century, still flourishing, albeit in a different format, and with a different audience. 

I'm a fan of professional songwriting, and of professional songwriters. There's too much amateurish songwriting in pop music today; ust because some guitar player can put a few chords together doesn't mean he knows how to construct a decent melody. It's even worse with rap and hip hop, where the very notion of musicality has been tossed off the turntable. Enough of this thrashing and bashing about; I long for the days of the well-crafted pop song. The kiddies have run the asylum for much too long. Wouldn't it be nice if the  pros returned to save the day?