Credit: Mike Gormley

Bernie Yeszin

By Mike Gormley

Bernie Yeszin designed the famous Motown Records logo, and did lots of covers for the label in the '60s.

In fact, he was at the center of the industry back then, and did everything from playing poker with Marvin Gaye to letting an 11-year-old Stevie Wonder hang out in his office.

But he's fallen on hard times and now lives in a van, in a parking lot under a Ralph's grocery store in L.A. Why there? "I'm not leaving my neighborhood," he says, adding that staying off the streets helps protect him.

Yeszin is now 71. He later transitioned from the music industry to television, and even won an Emmy, in 1990, for art direction on The Tracey Ullman Show.

But he hasn't been able to find work, and was even forced to pawn his Emmy, which was eventually sold by the pawn shop.

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flickr/Administrador Galeria Uninter

Ten dollars a month is a small price to pay for practically every piece of recorded music except The Beatles. Which is why, late last year, I signed up for Spotify. Only two months in, however, I was out, and feeling like I'd been ripped off. Turns out I'm not the only one.

See also: What Are You Listening to on Spotify? Guess What, Nobody Cares!

A little background: Spotify Premium, the ad-free and mobile subscription arm of the streaming music service, has been available in the U.S. since 2011, and has over 5 million global users. All the kinks have surely been worked out, right? Not quite. When I signed up in December I was charged $9.99, the price for a month of service. The next day, my credit card was charged another $9.99. That's when the trouble began.

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Gary Copeland, courtesy of Torche

Torche

This week, Hydra Head Records founder Aaron Turner announced the label's closing. The L.A. metal imprint -- by way of Boston and New Mexico -- is home to first-rate acts including Torche, Botch, Cave In, Harvey Milk and, occasionally, Converge. Co-founder Aaron Turner says that they'll stop putting out new music after December and then continue clearing out their back catalog for debt-servicing purposes.

I'm originally from Boston, and there was a time when Hydra Head catered specifically to a small scene of Massachusetts hardcore kids, of which I was more or less one. Some of us, either bored by the monotony or the territoriality of the Boston punk scene -- with its collection of tired punk tropes and alcoholic anomie -- turned to the quiet post-industrial Merrimack Valley 30 minutes north of the city. The Valley was where they had the empty VFW halls and barns willing to host the first free all-ages shows by now-nationally-known bands like Converge, Cave In and Piebald.

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After being purchased by Buzzmedia last week, Spin magazine looks to be on its last legs -- the magazine part of it, anyway. Though Buzzmedia representatives haven't said it's going digital-only, they haven't committed to maintaining the print edition, either. It seems likely that we won't see much more of it. (A Buzzmedia representative did not respond to requests for comment.)

And so please indulge me as I reminisce about the glory days of a music rag that was a formative part of my childhood. Much like your cool but wacky older cousin, Spin played the foil to that burnout uncle of rock & roll magazines, Rolling Stone. Rather than being forever behind the times (and way too full of politics), Spin was always about what was interesting, even if it wasn't always about what was particularly good.

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By Chris Kornelis

In the two decades since Nielsen Soundscan started to keep track of U.S. album sales in 1991, the company has seen the industry fold in half, digital sales catch up to physical, and vinyl mount a resurgence. But until last week, they'd never seen old records outsell new ones.

The first six months of the year saw sales of 76.6 million catalog records -- industry-speak for albums released more than 18 months ago -- compared to 73.9 million current albums.

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Will Calcutt

Sam Valenti and Miguel Senquiz of Ghostly International

[Editor's note: Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. Be sure to also check out the archives.]

It's hard to pinpoint the date when the music industry stopped speaking like a shell-shocked trench poet, but the sky quietly quit falling. Last year, album sales increased 3.2 percent from 2010. That's a first since Napster's Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning came through and crushed the buildings. Total music purchases, including digital singles, now equal the calories Rick Ross consumes in a single 12-month period: 1.6 billion, which is certainly more bawse than anyone expected.

The industry isn't back to pre-crisis highs, and probably never will be. It's like a reconstructed New Orleans: functioning but filled with immense wreckage. Major-label attorneys invented 360 contracts to bleed artists, while Adele and Lady Gaga proved that superstars could still be minted in the Internet era -- even if profit ceilings and common denominators stay low.

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Jeffrey Weber is the author of the recently-released You've Got A Deal: The Biggest Lies Of The Music Business.

Based in Beverly Hills, Weber is a longtime industry producer known for his work with Luther Vandross and Ronnie James Dio, and two of his projects won Grammys.

But after 30 years he's left the corporate rat race to work directly with artists. With his new freedom Weber has decided to expose the more dubious aspects of the business. Here are his top ten record industry lies, pulled from his book. We talked to him about what exactly these lies mean.

10. "We love your stuff."

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