8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

DJ Set Monetization Platform Dubset Gets Monetized

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We haven’t heard much from Dubset in a while. Like all good start-ups, they’ve been biding their time collecting cash. Via Hypebot:

Dubset Media has scored a $4 million Series A funding round, led by Cue Ball Capital. Founded in 20o8, the company had previously closed two funding rounds for undisclosed rounds from investors including Rhapsody and Three Six Zero.



Dubset’s MixBANK technology identifies musical recordings used in mixes and remixes, determining the appropriate rights holders (a DJ mix could have as many as 100 different rights holders), and simultaneously clearing the mix or remix across all rights holders. That enables record labels and music publishers to set permissions for access via a simple rules-based system which enables catalogs to be efficiently monetized and precludes the need to conduct time consuming searches and initiate claims.



Music Business Worldwide:

Dubset enables record labels and music publishers to set permissions for access via a rules-based system which aims to prevent the need for time-consuming searches and initiate claims.



Last year, the company signed agreements with Spotify and Apple Music for its system to be used on their platforms – potentially allowing user-generated/amateur remix content to be uploaded onto the services for the first time.



We’re still waiting for this technology (or something like it) to make serious waves in the monetization game.

Previously and Previously.

Speed It Up and Start Again

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Ubergizmo:

There are a number of ways that music streaming services can set themselves apart from one another. This can be done through price, the size of their catalogue, and also exclusives. However Tidal seems to be going one step further and that is through features where they will now allow users to edit song length and tempo.



Dubbed “Track Edit”, this feature is basically what its name suggests. Users who feel that certain songs could do without a lengthy intro or could be faster can now edit these songs and save the edited versions to a playlist.



Engadget:

While playing a song in the Tidal app, you can change the length and speed with the new Track Edit feature from the options menu. To make any tempo adjustments, you will need to select a segment of a song before you can do so. The tool also allows you to make changes to how the song fades in/out.



This is novel, but I doubt many artists outside of the dancier genres would approve of their songs being manipulated in these ways (especially the ability to dramatically speed up the tempo). Prince – who until recently was touted as a Tidal exclusive artist – would certainly be unhappy with the prospect. I wonder if catalog can be excluded when an artist wishes his or her songs to remain untouched by Tidal’s users.

Dark Days for College Radio

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Pitchfork:

One of the remaining bastions of the college-rock era has fallen silent, at least for now. For the second week in a row, CMJ has not published its weekly college radio charts, calling into question the fate of an institution that has tracked the music played by college stations around the country since 1978. No date has been set for when the venerable—and, once, invaluable—charts will resume.



The chart hiatus is just the latest in a series of setbacks for CMJ. The last-known remaining employee, Lisa Hresko, recently took a new job with indie-label trade group A2IM. And last year’s lack of a CMJ Music Marathon, for the first time in the event’s 35-year history, came despite {CMJ owner Adam} Klein’s assurance it “absolutely” would happen in 2016.



Also from Pitchfork:

The rise of CMJ coincided with the heyday of college radio during the late 1980s and early ’90s. Though initially used as an education tool for broadcasting lectures, by the end of the ’80s college radio had become an indispensable musical tastemaker, with trade magazines and multiple nationwide charts tracking the growing popularity of the market. Bands including U2, R.E.M., the Cure, the Smiths, Dinosaur Jr., Hüsker Dü, Minutemen, the Replacements, and more were first broadcast by enterprising students with open ears.



The influence and relevance of college radio has undoubtedly diminished since the ’90s, challenged by new outlets for musical discovery and listening that began with the rise of blogging, file sharing, and widespread broadband access around the turn of the century. The entire economy of critical and economic success for musicians has changed so rapidly in the last 25 years that exposure on college radio can seem quaint in 2017.



Starting around 2010, a growing number of colleges began transferring their FM broadcast licenses to larger conglomerates for a short-term economic windfall. While each case is informed by different circumstances and buyers, they are united by the administrative opinion that students don’t really care that much about radio anymore (and that fast cash can be made).



When licenses are sold, the process can be messy, divisive, and upsetting. Such sales can also have further consequences, cutting off exposure for nearby businesses and artistic communities. That said, administrators are not necessarily wrong in doubting terrestrial radio’s continuing relevance. College radio has always occupied a very tiny space, and most stations are so small they don’t even show up on the ratings system that measures listenership. And last year, a nationwide survey on media consumption found that only 9 percent of people in the 12-24 age bracket use AM/FM radio as their source for keeping up with music; the same demographic was more likely to use YouTube (22 percent) or streaming platforms like Pandora, Spotify, and SiriusXM (11 percent in total across the services) to find their favorite new artists.



College radio may be the only hold-over from the music industry’s fading recent past that gets me wistful and nostalgic. My time as a college radio DJ and music director is incalculably responsible for what I’m doing today. Even before that, discovering new sounds on static-filled college radio signals beaming in from faraway cities changed my young life … I grew up in the middle of nowhere and actively sought out these distant stations, often only picking them up in the middle of the night. Here in Orlando we’re lucky to still have a freeform college station, WPRK 91.5 FM – one of the oldest college stations in the USA. I really should tune in more often.

But I’m also heartened by the democratization of broadcasting, whether it’s from podcasts on Mixcloud, or shows on internet radio stations, or even meticulously crafted playlists bursting with esoterica. I know, it’s not the same, but all is not lost either. To pull another quote from the second article, “if anything, the platform’s loose mission of promoting discovery, serendipity, and community has persevered despite setbacks because the desire for those very things will continue …”. As long as there are freaks like me (and those I grew up listening to) who obsessively crave not only finding the latest sounds but also sharing them with others there will be something like college radio. Unfortunately (or not?), it just might not have anything to do with college.

The Endurance of Hype Machine

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Technical.ly Brooklyn:

The Greenpoint-based Hype Machine is a website that conglomerates music blogs and forms music charts out of what the blogs are covering. The more blogs are writing about a particular song, the higher it is on the Hype Machine’s Popular chart. As music blogs tend to be on the early adopter side of the industry, the songs you hear on the Hype Machine’s popular playlist are unlikely to be those you hear on the radio, or Spotify for that matter.



The site grew to become a place where tastemakers would go to hear new music, and, thus, a critical part of the music industry. In 2008, Billboard described the Hype Machine as “One of today’s most groundbreaking online music services … emerging as a juggernaut of growing influence.”



But the world moves on. Where Hype Machine was well-positioned in the new universe of music blogs, the industry has continued changing. People still write and follow music blogs, to be sure, but not as they once did, when Vampire Weekend went from unknown to indie kings off the strength of blog buzz.



“It definitely changed the type of blogs that are out there, it’s way more professional [now],” said Volodkin. “And that’s another thing I’m thinking about, too. If we don’t have blogs in the same way we did what are some other ways we can accommodate?”



It may surprise you how popular the aged (in internet years) Hype Machine is among young starting-out independent artists. Getting massive blog notice and thus moving up the Hype Machine chart is a strategic priority among the SoundCloud set, even more so than Spotify plays and Pitchfork reviews. As the article alludes, it’s one of the last outlets for breaking emerging / unsigned artists. However, the purity of the process has been tainted by pay-for-play blogs and repost channels, and many young artists have no problem ponying up for a blog placement.

Facebook’s inevitable foray into music streaming could harness some of Hype Machine’s approach by utilizing social media shares, posts, and mentions to build its own automated music charts (much like Hype Machine presently does with its Twitter chart). Integrating a streaming service with an already vibrant social media community has innovative potential and, somehow, is uncharted territory.

Delving Into HyperNormalisation

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Acclaimed documentarian Adam Curtis is at it again with HyperNormalisation, another stab at explaining the many forces responsible for the confounding state of our present world. Hyperallergic has a fascinating analysis of Curtis’s latest project and pulls this frightening / enlightening quote from the documentary’s narration:

The liberals were outraged by Trump, but they expressed their anger in cyberspace — so it had no effect. The algorithms made sure it only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead, ironically, their waves of angry messages and tweets benefited the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. As one analyst put it, ‘angry people click more.’ It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the Internet no longer had the power to change the world.



Going a bit off path (if you’ll indulge me, as this is primarily a music biz blog), we can also read this as a warning against putting all of one’s promotional efforts into social media. There are indeed many potential listeners to reach through, say, Facebook but there are limits. And those limits – determined by an algorithm you can’t control, and reaching into a bubble of the already converted – won’t give your project much expansion outside of your current circle. It’s low hanging fruit in the short term as you’re hitting those who are into ‘similar music’ (at least those that pay attention to Facebook), but once that’s exhausted there’s nowhere to go, at least organically. Your own site and outside promotional efforts should always be a focus, with social media simply a tool to point the way. Treat social media like another – albeit quite effective – form of newsletter, instead applying the bulk of your energy where it matters and potentially affecting more people.

But I digress. HyperNormalisation is fantastic though IMO not as masterful (or convincing) as 2015’s Bitter Lake. But that’s a high bar, and HyperNormalisation is effective and affecting, with many brilliant examples of Curtis’s hallmark montages and expert music selections working in tandem to wordlessly implant his message. I watched it before the presidential election and its themes continue to haunt (and scar) my thoughts afterwards. If you’re in the UK you can view HyperNormalisation now on the BBC iPlayer. If you’re not, have a look on YouTube and you might just see it pop up now and again.

Artspace recently interviewed Adam Curtis, focusing on HyperNormalisation‘s assertion that a rise in individualism (epitomized in the film by Patti Smith and the ’70s NYC art scene) created an un-unified weakness in liberal movements.

{Curtis:} We look back at past ages and see how things people deeply believed in at the time were actually a rigid conformity that prevented them from seeing important changes that were happening elsewhere. And I sometimes wonder whether the very idea of self-expression might be the rigid conformity of our age. It might be preventing us from seeing really radical and different ideas that are sitting out on the margins – different ideas about what real freedom is, that have little to do with our present day fetishization of the self. The problem with today’s art is that far from revealing those new ideas to us, it may be actually stopping us from seeing them.



This might be quite a difficult one to get over, but I think this is really important: however radical your message is as an artist, you are doing it through self-expression – the central dominant ideology of modern capitalism. And by doing that, you’re actually far from questioning the monster and pulling the monster down. You’re feeding the monster. Because the more people come to believe that self-expression is the end of everything, is the ultimate goal, the more the modern system of power becomes stronger, not weaker.



That whole Artspace interview is a mindfuck, as is pretty much Adam Curtis’s entire output. If this is new to you then prepare yourself for the rabbit hole.

Jaki Liebezeit’s Eternal Rhythm

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Can drummer and founding member Jaki Liebezeit shuffled off this mortal coil yesterday at the age of 78. As far as drummers go, I can’t think of anyone more influential on my own music-making. I’m not alone.

The Guardian:

Along with Klaus Dinger, a founder member of Neu! and inaugurator of the “motorik” beat, Can’s Jaki Liebezeit was responsible for restructuring rock’s basic rhythm, influencing countless bands including early Roxy Music, Talking Heads and Joy Division. He devised a more continuous, open-ended alternative to the Anglo-American blues-based, verse-and-chorus model. In the late 60s and early 70s, while a new generation of heavy rock and prog instrumentalists were showing off their virtuouso prowess, Liebezeit and fellow Can members – including keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and bassist Holger Czukay – devised a way of playing and jamming that was about creating space, rather than soloing pointlessly. Theirs was a style, developed on albums such as Tago Mago, Future Days and Ege Bamyasi, that achieved its ends through loops and repetition, creating a cumulative intensity. When they played, with Liebezeit’s percussion in full flow, circling like rotor blades, they achieved a kind of lift-off.



{In his final years} he worked in a small studio in an arts complex on the edge of Cologne, where he kept a dazzling collection of percussion instruments from around the world. By rights there ought to have been a statue of him in the market square and a day of national mourning declared for him in Germany, so colossal has been his influence, but he went about his home city entirely unrecognised.

I’ve written here about my fascination with artists who are hugely influential while the general public are, for the most part, completely unaware. I seem to gravitate towards these solitary figures for my own inspiration and, from what I know about them, they are largely content and appreciative of their status.



The Quietus:

A rare innovator that saw the unlimited possibilities that rewarded a little altered thinking, Liebezeit – who first began his musical career as a trumpeter and later as Germany’s leading jazz drummer, playing with the likes of Chet Baker – helped pioneer the style of Motorik polyrhythms that came to define the genre. Where Can’s textures and compositional freedom blended Cage’s spontaneous music and Schoenberg’s dissonant explorations, Liebezeit’s craft – which he regularly said was influenced, above else, by machines – took repetition, accuracy and unusual rhythms to fashion stark, thrashing, hypnotic grooves that simultaneously married an open-ended jazz mindset with distinctly metronomic precision.



While Can’s Holger Czukay once said Liebezeit was “more inhuman than a drum machine” the drummer himself said it best when he told an interviewer back in 2014, “I can play a little bit like a machine but the difference between a machine and me is that I can listen, I can hear and I can react to the other musicians, which a machine cannot do.” By simultaneously marrying rhythmic precision with percussive vision, his ultra-disciplined, hypnotic approach has influenced generation after generation of musicians as mottled as various techno pioneers and punk bands, as well as the likes of Sonic Youth, Stereolab, The Fall, Beak> and countless others besides.

I’m pretty sure the very first drum sample I ever looped and used in a song (around 1990, pre-Q-BAM) was from Can’s “Mushroom”. “Mushroom” contains just one of Liebezeit’s many baffling (in a good way), kosmische-ly groovy rhythms, and that’s only the first time that I lovingly borrowed from him. The ‘he lives on’ cliché is undisputedly apt here as his beat is the heartbeat of many artists and producers, now and still to come.

Vinyl Nostalgia and the Album Experience

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Music Industry Blog:

Vinyl sales may have hit their highest level in the UK since 1991 but this is hardly a sign of what is to come. Indeed, a quick look through the top 10 vinyl albums of 2016 reveals that all but one of the artists were releasing music back in 1991! The exception is Amy Winehouse and she’s dead. The majority of the volume of vinyl sales is driven by nostalgic older music fans.



Not only is vinyl not the future (it was just 2.6% of sales in 2016), the big differences between the most popular vinyl, streaming, singles and album artists reveal just how fragmented the music business has become. Each of the top 10 charts (album sales, singles, top streaming artists, vinyl sales) almost reads as a standalone group of artists with remarkably little cross over. In fact, only 2 artists appear across streaming, singles and albums. None appear across all four charts.



As large volumes of older consumers switch to streaming (and Amazon should play a key role here) there will be more opportunity to join the dots. But do not mistake this simply as an opportunity to try to revive yesterday’s formats in today’s platforms. The album is clearly fading. According to MIDiA Research survey data, 68% of subscribers state that playlists are replacing albums for them. It is time to start investing though and effort in rethinking what album experiences should be in the digital era. And that conversation should have no bounds, everything should be on the table (number of tracks, street date vs continual updates, interactivity, changing content etc.).

2017: ‘The Start of Something Big’

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Brian Eno:

This is the start of something big. It will involve engagement: not just tweets and likes and swipes, but thoughtful and creative social and political action too. It will involve realising that some things we’ve taken for granted – some semblance of truth in reporting, for example – can no longer be expected for free. If we want good reporting and good analysis, we’ll have to pay for it. That means MONEY: direct financial support for the publications and websites struggling to tell the non-corporate, non-establishment side of the story. In the same way if we want happy and creative children we need to take charge of education, not leave it to ideologues and bottom-liners. If we want social generosity, then we must pay our taxes and get rid of our tax havens. And if we want thoughtful politicians, we should stop supporting merely charismatic ones.



Inequality eats away at the heart of a society, breeding disdain, resentment, envy, suspicion, bullying, arrogance and callousness. If we want any decent kind of future we have to push away from that, and I think we’re starting to.



There’s so much to do, so many possibilities. 2017 should be a surprising year.

Hitting the Links: Chris Bell, Sci-Fi Buildings, Viva La Spicy Food

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In short, and as part of our unpredictably recurring feature, here are five online articles I’ve enjoyed recently:



The Genius of Chris Bell, One of Rock’s Greatest Tragedies

Gradually fading out towards the end of “I Am The Cosmos,” Bell eerily repeats: “I’d really like to see you again.” He died just a few months after the single’s limited release on indie label Car Records in 1978, driving into a pole on the way home from a late night studio session.



The Sublime Sci-Fi Buildings That Communism Built

These are not your parents’ dour architecture monographs, complete with such entries as “On the problems of developing the center of Kishinev” or “Approaches to using the vernacular in Tashkent and Navoi” (real items from a 70s-era release) but are lavish, glossy, and handsome. One of these volumes was released in 2007, the rest date from within the last two years. What does this all mean?



The Next New World

It’s a fearful sight in a way, the Port of Long Beach, this endless, crushing vista of metal and dust, with not so much as a blade of grass to relieve the impression of an infinite, silent or clanking perpetual machine, of a global engine, of “global industry”; compare this to say, a view of Central Park, and you’ll feel you’ve landed in a nightmare scene out of Mordor (or Isengard, I guess).



Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food

The Soviet agent’s tender taste buds invited Mao’s mockery. “The food of the true revolutionary is the red pepper,” declared Mao. “And he who cannot endure red peppers is also unable to fight.’”



Where Did Son Of Bazerk Go Wrong?

This astonishing record sank more or less without trace. There are reasons for this – and some of them, with the benefit of hindsight, are teeth-looseningly obvious. Yet Bazerk, Bazerk, Bazerk is a record that still, 25 years on, sounds like it’s crash-landed on your stereo from some indeterminate and unknowable point a long way in the future.