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The Counterintuitive Environmental Cost of Digital Streaming

April 9, 2019 · Leave a Comment

File this story under ‘This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,’ via Billboard:

Published on Monday (April 8), the research — a collaboration between the University of Glasgow and the University of Oslo –found that despite a sharp drop in the use of plastics in music production over the last two decades, the “storing and transmitting” of digital music files has actually led to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) by the industry.

“These figures seem to confirm the widespread notion that music digitalised is music dematerialised,” said University of Oslo Associate Professor and lead researcher Dr. Kyle Devine in a statement, referencing statistics citing the decrease in plastics use since the year 2000. “The figures may even suggest that the rises of downloading and streaming are making music more environmentally friendly. But a very different picture emerges when we think about the energy used to power online music listening. Storing and processing music online uses a tremendous amount of resources and energy — which [have] a high impact on the environment.”

More parade-raining from the original report in The Conversation:

Obviously this is not the last word on the matter. To truly compare past and present, if it were even possible, you would have to factor in the emissions involved in making the devices on which we have listened to music in different eras. You would need to look at the fuel burned in distributing LPs or CDs to music stores, plus the costs of distributing music players then and now. There are the emissions from the recording studios and the emissions involved in making the musical instruments used in the recording process. You might even want to compare the emissions in live performances in the past and the present – it starts to look like an almost endless enquiry.

Even if the comparison between different eras ultimately came out looking different, our overriding point would be the same: the price that consumers are willing to pay for listening to recorded music has never been lower than today, yet the hidden environmental impact of that experience is enormous.

I don’t see any mention of the environmental burden of additional landfill created by excess physical media so I wonder if that was a consideration. Regardless, it would seem the solution is not a change in consumption but in the sources and production of energy.

🔗→ Digital Music Consumption Has Led to Increase in Greenhouse Gas Emissions, New Study Finds
🔗→ Music streaming has a far worse carbon footprint than the heyday of records and CDs – new findings

Spotify’s Auto-Play Means Less Royalty For Songwriters

March 25, 2019 · Leave a Comment

An astute observation by Billboard:

Although songwriters, publishers, or everyday people may not be aware, Spotify — like YouTube — has now moved to a model that auto-plays songs after a user listens to one they selected. […]

On the plus side, what this does is keep listeners engaged on the site, which is a benefit that Spotify likes. And it has the potential to turn listeners on to more music, a benefit that all rights owners, publishers, songwriters, labels and artists should like. And it steers payments to artists and songwriters whose songs weren’t chosen to be played.

But it represents a downside in per-stream payments for songwriters and artists, too. Since the payout pool is divided by streams, the more streams that occur in a month, the further the per-stream payout decreases. In addition to songs that users choose to play, their devices will automatically play other songs after they hear the song they wanted. Who knows how many additional plays accrue due to automation — but it’s safe to say those plays are further diluting the per-stream payout for artists and songwriters whose songs the consumer chooses to play.

I also believe Spotify’s auto-played songs fall under ‘non-interactive streaming’ (AKA ‘internet radio’). This means that mechanical royalty does not apply. So this auto-play feature may partly serve to lessen a user’s amount of ‘interactive’ streams, allowing the platform the decrease its overall royalty pay-out.

Please correct me if I’m wrong. But if I’m right, and you’re a Spotify user, maybe think about turning off the auto-play mechanism in the app’s settings.

🔗→ The CRB Rate Trial Explained: How Publishers, Digital Services Weighed In At The Time

It’s Me and Your Granny on Bongos: Who Owns a Band Name?

March 22, 2019 · Leave a Comment

The proliferation of reunion tours by veteran acts — including bands formed over 50 years ago — is arguably a result of dwindling sales royalty mixed with the advanced age of the art form and its fans. The age factor inevitably leads to original members dropping off the bill, whether for ill health (or demise) or weariness of road life.

The New York Times examines the fine line of when your favorite band is no longer your favorite band because it’s missing key members — or even all its members:

“If it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s the Fall,” the singer Mark E. Smith, who peremptorily hired and fired dozens of members of the Fall, once said. But only a few musicians can carry off such lordly “l’état, c’est moi” proclamations. Mick Jones might be on that short list.

Over the years, Foreigner has shed every main member of its early lineups until only Jones was left. But, argued Phil Carson, the band’s manager, “There’s only been one original member, ever. Mick handpicked everyone. We’ve had five or six keyboard players, almost countless drummers. If Mick Jones says it’s Foreigner, it’s Foreigner.”

{But Jones} sometimes misses shows, depending on his health. Last year, when he was forced to skip a show at a 10,000-seat arena in Tel Aviv, a fan told The Jerusalem Post he felt the night was “tainted with con.” {…} But Carson says fans enjoy Foreigner just as much whether Jones is onstage or in his slippers at home: “I’d say 90 percent of people at the shows have no clue who was in Foreigner.”

This piece also discusses an important topic that’s rarely brought up at band practice — the assignable ownership of a name:

Disputes over the rights to a band’s name are thorny because they combine elements of trademark law and contract law, said Loren Chodosh, an entertainment attorney whose clients have included Nada Surf and TV on the Radio.

Band names typically qualify as trademarks, and trademarks can be assigned by contract. “A band agreement, in a lot of ways, is like a prenup,” Chodosh said. “It’s about what will happen if things go wrong and somebody leaves, which nobody wants to talk about. Bands don’t start to hate each other until they’re successful.”

Most bands, Chodosh said, never establish contractually how the band trademark is owned. In the absence of a contract, she added, “Trademark law prevails. And because trademark law is not uncomplicated, it’s difficult to say who owns that trademark.”

Once a band feels like a growing concern (which may occur as early as the moment the band comes up with a name) it’s a good idea to determine where the band name resides. Does it follow all the band members, like the “last man standing” agreement Bobby Colomby of Blood, Sweat & Tears mentions in the article? What if the band splits in half? Is there indisputably a ‘band leader’ or defining presence that’s logically tied to the name? Figure this out. Get it in writing.

I think it was Mike Mills’s podcast interview with Brian Koppelman where he tells the story of REM’s band name agreement. If one band member called it quits REM would have to dissolve. So when Bill Berry left the band, he had to give explicit permission for REM to continue as a trio. I’m not sure if this was a legal requirement — that is, in writing, agreed upon by all band members — but my feeling is it certainly was.

🔗→ Reunion Tour! The Band Is Back! Wait, Who Are These Guys?

Notice How TV Music Is Getting a Lot Cooler?

March 7, 2019 · Leave a Comment

In a recent piece, Noisey explores the rise of independent artists working on scores for television programs, such as Julia Holter‘s work on the UK Channel 4 show Pure. Music supervisor Jen Moss explains how the scoring landscape is now a bit more adventurous:

“Things like cable channels and streaming platforms are allowing for slightly more leftfield storytelling and non-traditional narratives and voices,” she explains. “The creatives behind them want to to extend that experimentation into the music as well. So what we’re getting now is a move away from all the orchestral traditional scores you used to tend to get, into soundscapes that are as artful and unique as the visuals they’re accompanying.”

I imagine another factor is that so much content is created now, with even more on the way as new streaming networks from the likes of Disney and Apple appear on the horizon. With all these shows, studios are going to unexpected (and lower budgeted) places to fill composer shoes.

But the odd tone of the article stood out to me:

The trend of indie artists scoring films is finally trickling down to TV. But while on the surface it might appear like a winning arrangement for both artists, TV creators and small screen bingers alike, underneath it reveals a darker truth about how indie musicians are increasingly being forced to diversify in a time of crushingly low streaming platform royalties railroading acts into exhausting cycles of touring.

Weird. Even before streaming, indie musicians would jump at the chance to score for TV. And I don’t think I’ve ever discussed goals with a songwriter or producer without ‘scoring a film or TV show’ coming up. Yes, diversification is essential for musicians in 2019 and non-stop touring sucks. But artists given opportunities to work on television is often considered a golden opportunity, despite streaming’s impact.

🔗→ TV’s ‘Golden Age’ Has an Extra Meaning for Indie Musicians

You Don’t Have To Read ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ To Name Your Song

March 4, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Previously I mentioned that Brian Eno and David Byrne named their seminal album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts without reading the book of the same title. The latest issue of Philip Christman’s The Tourist newsletter talks about other song titles taken from unread books:

Joy Division recorded the song “Atrocity Exhibition,” which in mood and feel is a pretty exact match to the almost unendurably grim J.G. Ballard novella of the same name. JD and Ballard are often mentioned together, as having a similar sensibility. But Ian Curtis wrote the song without having yet read the book–all he needed was the title. It’s as though he knew the book without knowing it. The inspiration for Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” was her catching the last few minutes of a 1967 TV adaptation of the novel as a child; though she did eventually get around to reading the book, you get the sense that her doing so was almost an afterthought. The song is about those last couple minutes, that demanding ghost at the window, as seen by a nine-year-old musical genius. {…}

{A way to think about it} is that our half-formed conceptions and the things that inspire them are both actualities–the song Ian Curtis started hearing in his head when he learned that there existed a novel called The Atrocity Exhibition and the actual novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, are both real things, and they need to be kept in some sort of ecological balance in order for both to fully exist. The song isn’t ready to confront the novel until it’s had some time to grow.

I remember, in my teenage punk band, naming songs after artsy books and movies I hadn’t read or watched. My motivation was to appear smarter and more rounded than I was but, I assume, it’s the same end result as Christman notes above. ‘Art’ is shaped by the ghosts and impressions of its inspirations, despite whether those inspirations are fully ingested or understood.

🔗→ The Tourist–Volume 65

Hitting the Links: Screwed Twitter Coffee Attack

February 25, 2019 · Leave a Comment

In the previous incarnation of this blog, I did a thing called Hitting The Links, a sort of ‘what I’ve been reading’ link round-up. Now that we’re riding the blog train again I’m bringing it back, perhaps as a weekend staple. God knows I read a lot of things and some of it is interesting. These lists could go long, but I’m limiting this one to four fun items of note.

First up, there was an excellent article in Popula by Chris O’Connell profiling Houston’s Screwed Up Records and Tapes:

Screwed Up Records & Tapes is not a normal business. It’s a brick-and-mortar record store that sells neither records nor tapes, but rather CDs. These discs are all by a single artist, the late DJ Screw, the inventor of chopped and screwed music, who has been dead almost two decades. […]

This is perhaps the only record store in existence where no albums appear on the floor. You order one off the menu, by name or catalog number, and Big A slides back behind the glass and grabs it for you. You cannot take communion until you have cash—only cash—in hand. I start scanning the whiteboard, but my eyes glaze over.

I remember the first time I heard a ‘screwed’ mix (It may have even been a recording of DJ Screw). It was around 1994, and I’m driving through South Beach Miami. I heard about Miami’s then-thriving pirate radio scene and thought I’d check it out. I spun my radio dial to a bottom frequency, and there was this crazy station playing 45 RPM R&B records at 33 (and then probably pitched down -6 — at least — on the Technics). I had no idea what I was hearing. It was mesmerizing, and I listened to that station every time I rode in my car during that Miami stay.

Jon Ronson had a freewheeling — and often emotional — conversation with Russell Brand on the latter’s Under The Skin podcast. Jon Ronson is always interesting to listen to (I’m a fan). And If you only know of Russell Brand as the MTV-approved comedian/sometimes movie actor/Katy Perry ex, then you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how thoughtful his podcast is. Taken from this discussion, here’s Jon Ronson on what went wrong with Twitter:

The problem is that we fell in love with a new weapon too much. So it became a place where people could become very unselfconscious … a level playing field … at the core was a utopia. And then when somebody transgressed on the outside … we could hit them with a weapon we understood and they didn’t, which was social media shaming. And so we certainly found that we had power. Voiceless people had a voice and powerless people had power … then what happened is that we fell in love with our new power too much. And a day without shaming felt like a day treading water. So the parameters of what we considered shame-worthy grew wider and wider … and then as a result of that, what happened — and what is still happening — is that instead of seeing humans the way we ought to which is (as) a complicated mess of positive and negative character traits it’s a stage for constant artificial high drama where everybody’s either like a hero or a villain.

Next, David Moldawer, in his must-subscribe weekly newsletter, lays out ‘the coffee situation’:

It doesn’t have to be good coffee. It doesn’t matter if the people there even drink the coffee. However, if the coffee is plentiful, easily accessible, and constantly on offer, you can count on a constellation of other factors related to good work, from a serendipity-boosting layout to an appropriately stimulating but non-distracting acoustic environment. The space itself doesn’t have to be pretty or clean, but it will be conducive. The coffee situation tells you a lot. […]

I’m not telling you to decide on a publisher—or on any other collaboration—based on whether you’re offered a cup of joe as you walk in the door. And then another one when that one’s finished. But, come on, shouldn’t you?

I’ll close out with this great profile on Massive Attack in The Guardian. Check out the photo at the top of the article — no one does ‘morose’ like those guys. Banksy — oops I mean Robert del Naja — addresses one of my favorite topics, a resistance to nostalgia:

“I don’t think I’ve got a problem with nostalgia, because a lot of the time things are self-referential. When you’re working in the way we do, taking things from the past and making them new, making collages…” He pauses. “I stopped feeling nostalgia for the moment because I imagine myself looking back on it from the future, which really freaks me out. I get this vertigo where I’m not thinking about the past, I’m thinking about how I’m going to feel in 10 years’ time.” Nostalgia isn’t as good as it used to be, I joke. Del Naja rubs a hand forwards through his hair.

It’s a bummer that this Massive Attack Mezzanine tour is coming nowhere near our Orlando home base. I think Washington D.C. is the closest stop. Massive Attack, Elizabeth Frazier, Horace Andy, Adam Curtis … I’m equally a huge fan of each, and here they are on tour together (well, Curtis’s visuals in his case). Alas.

🔗→ The Screwtape Records
🔗→ Porn, Sadness & Madness (with Jon Ronson)
🔗→ the coffee situation
🔗→ Massive Attack: ‘I have total faith in the next generation’

An Interview with 5 Magazine

February 19, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Some self-referential housekeeping: the wonderful and kind 5 Magazine just published an interview with yours truly where I dive deep into all things Eighth Dimension and 8D Industries. I also talk a bit about my personal philosophy of running a label and releasing music. I’m super happy with how this conversation came out — it’s an accurate picture of who I’ve been, what the hell I’m doing, and where my head’s going. This section of the interview is a perfect summary of my outlook:

The main constraints that you should be worried about are the ones you impose on yourself. Fixations on social media numbers, coverage in the hippest blogs, and getting that A-list DJ to play your record are distractions that hold you back, especially when you’re just starting.

As music artists (or creative artists in general) we have to understand the long game. And we have to be into it, and I mean really into it, otherwise the long game becomes unbearable. Once you understand the long game you’re playing, and the patience required, and accept the freedom that now exists to do whatever you like creatively, the pressure’s off, and the fun begins.

🔗→ (Re)Introducing… 8D Industries

P.S. More housekeeping: I’m claiming this blog on Bloglovin and I’m required to put this code somewhere on the site → Follow my blog with Bloglovin … and, yes, please follow this blog if you’re on Bloglovin.

Merzbow Inspires Podcast Reflections

February 13, 2019 · Leave a Comment

The Wire:

A new underground music podcast has set itself a mighty challenge: to listen to and discuss one-by-one the albums of Japanese noise godfather Merzbow. Each episode of Merzcast sees Greh Holger of Chondritic Sound and another musician or noise fan sit down together to absorb a particular album by Masami Akita and reflect on it afterwards. […]

The podcast episodes are lengthy and detailed, with the contributors breaking down the album track by track, dropping thoughts on equipment, effects, track titles and more. Pictures posted online show sheets of paper with notes on each track written during the listening sessions …

I love the idea of this podcast. Merzbow is a tough swallow for most and it might be a challenge to keep the podcast fresh over hundreds of brutal noise releases. I’ll check out at least a couple of episodes and am curious how it’ll shake out.

I’m intrigued by the idea of a podcast diving into a singular sonic oeuvre. I’m sure something like this has been done before but I think there are unexplored ways to combine the album-listening experience with the podcast format. Of course, there are music clearance issues to consider. But the podcast doesn’t have to actually contain the music. How about a podcast host telling the listener when to start an album at home, and then the discussion is edited to coincide with songs as they play in real time?

🔗→ New podcast Merzcast sets out to listen to the discography of Merzbow

The Politics of Nostalgia

January 31, 2019 · Leave a Comment

I’ve written previously about the phenomenon of music made to sound like it’s playing in a mall and the evocation of fake nostalgia. A recent piece in MEL Magazine examines this oddball subgenre and attempts to make sense of it all:

… Tills’ life at the mall is imaginary. He’s nostalgic for the 1990s, which he thinks was a better time to live. At the core of this mental construction is “mallwave,” a lo-fi subgenre of vaporwave that listeners refer to as “music optimized for abandoned malls.” Like Vaporwave creators, Mallwave musicians use soft drum tracks, ambient sounds and low-quality synthesizers to create soft, calming electronic music. But they also mix in pop music associated with the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with the purpose of creating a holistic “nostalgic” experience, one that recreates the experience you would have had when visiting the mall. Or, in Tills’ case, what that experience might have been like, for people who lived it. […]

To Grafton Tanner, author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, the turn to nostalgia in vaporwave is all about this reflection of contemporary societal trends — whether it’s grappling with late capitalism or dreaming of an allegedly sunnier bygone era. Speaking over Skype, he tells me, “Nostalgia is a popular tool in marketing, and it’s probably the most defining cultural product of our time. You see it in movies and TV with reboot trends, and of course, apps like Spotify use algorithms that recommend music that you’ve probably listened to in the past.”

Simon Chandler, writing for Bandcamp Daily, dares to dig even deeper:

… society for decades has been pursuing consumerism and neoliberal capitalism when it’s often accepted that neither are perfect, and the way some of us have coped with this is through adopting a position or attitude of irony (cf. David Foster Wallace). We’ve mocked politicians on both sides while continuing to elect them and we’ve ridiculed McDonald’s while continuing to buy Big Macs, and vaporwave has masterfully symbolized this social phenomena by subverting clichéd samples while relying on them to a massive extent. […]

Nonetheless, it can be argued in vaporwave’s defense that, like much uncompromising music and art, the genre’s ‘mission’ appears to be focused more on mirroring our imperfect world than on reforming it. It may not offer any solutions, but it almost perfectly depicts a political domain in which media-generated images have alienated us from reality, and in which a minority of us have drifted into self-conscious irony as a way of coping with an imperfect environment (we think) we can’t change.

There’s an interview with Brian Eno (that I can’t find) where he says that he often makes music as a soundtrack to his hopes for a better world. This is like the opposite of that.

🔗→ The Teens Who Listen to ‘Mallwave’ Are Nostalgic for an Experience They’ve Never Had
🔗→ Music of the Spectacle: Alienation, Irony and the Politics of Vaporwave