per stream. Even by those standards,
however, jazz fares poorly.
“In our most recent statistics for
overall revenue, jazz represents the
two-percent range,” Pierson says. “But
jazz only represents 0.8 percent of the
streaming revenue. Jazz fans don’t
listen on streaming platforms, and the
people on streaming platforms don’t
gravitate towards jazz.”
Nevertheless, streaming platforms
represent both the music’s present and
its future. Jazz artists who want to
make money from recordings will need
to grab the attention of streaming mu-
sic listeners—and to lure reluctant jazz
fans onto Spotify, Apple Music, and
other platforms. It requires bold action.
That’s where Grasso’s EPs come in.
“People who are predisposed to digging
jazz, how do you get them migrated
over to the streaming platforms?”
Pierson asks. “Well, in this case, you’ve
got an extraordinary musician who the
jazz world is gonna flip over, and they’ll
discover, ‘Oh, the only way I can hear
the guy is digitally.’ The idea being that
you encourage them to go to the digital
platforms and check this guy out.”
Attracting non-jazz listeners? They
have a plan for that too. When jazz is
streamed, it’s often as part of curated
playlists. Some, like Spotify’s State of
Jazz, are genre-specific—but not all.
“There’s Peaceful Guitar, which some
of the ballads might end up on; there’s
Shredders; there are other guitar-cen-
tric playlists,” Pierson says. “Because
of the distinct way [Grasso] plays, as a
bridge between jazz and classical guitar
techniques, the hope is that a lot of the
classical guitar people will get into it
too. We’ll try to build a viral thing with
somebody who’s distinctive.”
This viral-aimed installment ap-
proach to releasing music has prece-
dents in the streaming era. Pop duo the
Chainsmokers’ 2018 sophomore album
Sick Boy compiled 10 tracks that had
previously been released as digital-only
singles. Scores of other pop artists have
made several tracks available to stream
and download in advance of new
albums. In jazz, Esperanza Spalding’s
12 Little Spells began life as a series of
individual tracks (and music videos)
released over 12 days in October 2018.
“The jazz listening experience has
been traditionally album-focused,”
Lerman acknowledges. “But we have an
artist that is interpreting some of the
great, familiar songs, and unlike a lot of
jazz recordings, these are all three min-
utes, four tops, as opposed to things
that are going 10 minutes or longer.”
Music in a longer, perhaps moreambitious format doesn’t suit this
approach so well, it’s true—but with
album sales falling (vinyl’s resurgence
may be a profit center, but it’s a nicheone), one could argue that for many
listeners the “full-length” experience
is already history. If anything, it was
an aberration in a longer continuum of
shorter experiences—78- and 45-rpm
records, LPs and cassettes broken
into sides—in which the track-centric
streaming era represents reversion to
the mean, not a radical departure.
Also fading is the idea of music as
a tactile object with which listeners
must directly engage. Sony’s solution
is to replace physical with consistent
engagement, allowing listeners to hear
new music on a more frequent basis.
“Fans of any genre want to feel like
they’re having an ongoing conversa-
tion with the artists,” Lerman says.
“With this body of work that Pasquale
has delivered with Matt, it gives us
an amazing opportunity with that
constant engagement approach and see
how it works out.”
That, in fact, is Grasso’s favorite
aspect of the strategy. He previously
self-produced a CD, Reflections of Me
(in 2015), and notes how often people
at his gigs ask for a recording. “The fact
that people every month get to hear
another four or five songs, I think it’s
fantastic,” he says. “They always have
something to listen to.” JT“We realize that
jazz in the modern
age is commercially
challenged, and
we’re using Pasquale
[Grasso] to try to
change things up.”
—Josh Lerman, Sony
Music Masterworks
Antonio Adolfo
Presents his new CDSAMBA JAZZ ALLEY
AVAILABLE A
M T^ ALL^
AJOR RETAIL
ERSArranged and produced by Antonio Adolfo
AAM Music 0713Multi Latin Grammy and Grammy nominee pianist,
arranger and composer, “Antonio Adolfo pays
tribute to the birthplace of Brazilian Jazz on new
album, Samba Jazz Alley.”
(Mark Holston -- contributor to Jazziz, Latino and All About Jazz)Antonio Adolfo (piano),
Lula Galvao (guitars),
Jorge Helder (bass),
Rafael Barata (drums and percussion),
Dada Costa (percussion),
Jesse Sadoc (trumpet and flugelhorn),
Marcelo Martins (soprano, tenor saxes and flute),
Rafael Rocha (trombone)
plus guests.