It really was of a piece with other cons like family values.Once upon a time the Music biz was content to just figure out what the street cared about and provide recorded examples for the market. Of course it would follow the money but it wasn’t foolish enough then to imagine it could contrive something and have it amount to much. Early 60s pop like Frankie Avalon, Pat Boone and Chubby Checker was an attempt at a contrived reality and the numbers sucked compared to the rise of street based boomer pop whether from Motown or Liverpool.

The 90s ushered in the zenith of contrivance and corporatism in all aspects of life with the rise of faith in marketing as a secular biz religion. This may have been due to the example of Microsoft and Windows. The company grew preposterously huge from a triumph of marketing over product value.

Branding became the epicenter of this mystique and the golden cow on the altar. It was the operating assumption. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that a convergence of crackpot marsalists and corporatists would result in a wildly contrived narrowly defined ‘brand’ that would appeal to right leaning suits. They no doubt envisioned practical biz advantages.

For example, if the idiom is reduced to Art Blakey reenactments in suits/costumes, it makes A&R functions robotic and eliminates all the messy experimentation labels made with different releases. You could replace a Cuscuna or a Michel with an accountant and a spread sheet, maybe a pie chart. Everything else, sales and profits, would be covered by the holy application of marketing. Entire cadres of free floating writers could be replaced by recruits from the world of corporate boiler plate and other dodges and the regular press could be conned into thinking this was the version needed to keep the thing going.

This was further exacerbated by all these ridiculous mergers I’ve lately been boring you with. Each ridiculous pipe dream deal meant that the acquiring chump drove up the cost without necessarily adding to the value. This pattern has turned many aspects of our lives to shit but this is a jazz blog. The purchasing boob had to mess with the thing to justify his idiot decision. Some labels have changed hands several times over the past few decades with a frequent pattern of ridiculous overpayment at each transaction .

But all this churning turned on sets of assumptions that didn’t imagine a web2 impact and how could they as these MBA fossils were mainly tech illiterates and are still flailing. It was further exacerbated by the preference for crypt keeping and artificially inflated sales as the result of the Burns effect. By 2005 or so the sales of dead jazz icons were heading south and the living, in all their diversity, were all but invisible except to the younger web savvy seekers.

And the concentration of focus on a small array of icons also left money on the table for lots of bygone artists whose work makes following the music interesting. Jazz is such a fascinating mosaic of associations and contributions that a fan can easily be drawn in to a vast world.

You hear a Trane record and then wonder about other things Jimmy Garrison did. A Max Roach Clifford Brown release leads to to Percussion Bitter Suite, Booker Little or Dolphy. A Miles interview snippet makes you wonder about Freddie Webster.

People who like having the music around will often get drawn into these explorations as Jazz is a portal.

By eliminating vast areas of the catalog from availability, you are leaving steady money on the table. The old music biz types knew this but the newer MBA pinheads don’t and saw all this extra stuff as slow moving inventory clutter in a just in time logistical world.

Now, of course, it can all be bit streams with physical storage reduced to server farms but heads remain deep in asses as a likely final destination before they roll from all this compounded arrogance and stupidity.

Hapless Jazz.com was funded by just such a dumb shit tycoon from Vegas and he threw the dice on being able to foist a very narrow Marsalist version of the thing in a deranged corporatist marketing context with the added twist of utter failure at monetization.

In some delightful twist of irony Mr Tycoon and much of Jazz Inc were lured to their implosion by a Marsalist con or resultant swindle. I don’t presume to imply it was intentional. Wynton no doubt really believes in his crackpot model as much as W probably really believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or people really believed that home prices always go up.

And, intended or unintended, the resulting swindle and diversion of capital and resources made the legendary Sex Pistols ‘Great Rock and Roll Swindle’ look like a minor purse snatching. It hasn’t done much for my friends, either.

Wynton surely has done well by it but the cult of selective aggrandizement and nearly obscene JLC ostentation are of a piece with gaudy skyscrapers in Dubai, now mainly as empty as the assumptions that made Jazz Inc.

I thought out some remedies for Jazz.com back when I was helping Ted and other site owners seek ways to squelch Hines but I got distracted and never sent them. I did send him my web marketing ace friend and good old Triple Double let me know there wasn’t much evidence of decisiveness or a clue even though he projected a likely basic daily income flow of up to 20 grand based on a traffic and back link assessment.

So the thing really doomed itself by becoming an expensive vanity project probably micro managed from Vegas, that preposterous greed shrine in the middle of a water challenged desert. Sure the people who got Mr. Tycoons checks probably loved it but the broader potential audience, not so much.

Anyway, my recommendations summary I never sent,(in part because I was confident it couldn’t be embraced), is below and I believe it is useful for anyone trying to make a good biz model that works with web2.

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It all turns on changes in the meaning of ‘content’. In earlier phases of web world, ‘content’ meant actual code structures, page layouts and so on. Now it means what regular people think it means the articles and images and stuff people read, listen to and watch.

The structures can be pre fab, out of the box templates, that’s what a blogspot is. So web design, while important, is less significant than aiming for the broadest array of material on a site’s given subject matter.

They needed:

1. More connection to African Diaspora elements, Blues elements, Cumbia stories, African Pop and so on as it increases the number of people who have a reason to go there. An Oumou Sangare story would work very well.

2. Substantive improvements in the presence of Free Jazz. There is a fat demographic of Gen X, Gen Y and upcoming Millenials who don’t get the ‘jazz wars’ thing that us boomers made, (in retrospect, ‘jazz wars’ is misnomer as one side hardly knew they were being attacked beyond the usual malign neglect, it was more like ‘jazz raids’, corporate raids). But they do get the idiom emotionally.

3. Enhanced utility. More ‘how to’ and resource stuff like information on grant givers, business issues, festival operations, besides just Wein, radio trends, music software, etc. More involvement by scholars, a piece on John Gilbreath and how he puts Earshot together etc. The return of Esp disk to active status is a fascinating story. Also papers on method from the most advanced practitioners you can find.

A good summary on the concept of ‘fluidity’ in improvisation from Joe Morris would be valuable or Matt Lavelles research into trumpet techniques. Gerard Cox excels on philosophical issues.

This makes it more of a resource for musicians.

Hat tips to Mr. Crane and Mr Kelsey. Note to Kurtz: This shop has low troll tolerance, sorry about the lost paycheck.With luck and pluck, someone else will pay you to write about Manhattan Transfer and if not, there’s always corporate boiler plate where you have a clear advantage.