8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

The Revenant By Tarkovsky

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The Playlist:

To highlight just how incredible the experience of watching “The Revenant” is, The Petrick’s “The Revenant By Tarkovsky” supercut does exactly what the title suggests, putting it side-by-side with the work of the great Andrei Tarkovsky. There’s no question about how indebted Iñárritu’s film is to Tarkovsky’s body of work, both thematically and, more obviously, visually. “The Revenant by Tarkovsky” beautifully captures the homage, helping to peel back another layer of the deceptively complex film that, on the surface, pretends to be nothing more than a tale of revenge, but is really much more.

This is impressive. When I saw The Revenant I caught the Tarkovsky influence, but didn’t realize it was often so explicit.

I also thought the bird scene might have been quoting Jodorowsky.

Related: Here’s a primer on Andrei Tarkovsky, which includes links to where you can watch his films for free.

RIAA Announces Streaming Will Count Toward Platinum and Gold Certifications

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Pitchfork:

Since 1958, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has awarded platinum and gold certifications based on the quantity of albums sold by an artist. One million sold copies meant a record was platinum; half a million meant gold. Today, the RIAA announced a change in that methodology. Now, it will count on-demand audio and video streaming, along with the traditional album sales, in determining whether a record is platinum or gold.



One stream doesn’t equal one sale, however. Instead, 1,500 on-demand audio or video streams will amount to one album sale. (On-demand streaming refers to the ability to choose what song you’re listening to—services like Spotify and Apple Music, not internet radio sites like Pandora.) The RIAA’s announcement didn’t mention how these 1,500 streams will be tallied up—for example, whether one stream of a 17-song album will count the same as 17 streams of a single taken from the album.



Billboard:

Effective immediately, the RIAA will include on-demand audio and video streams and a track sale equivalent in determining which releases get the coveted album awards, a change that follows a similar tweak in 2013 to include on-demand streams for its Digital Single Award.



“After a comprehensive analysis of a variety of factors,” writes the organization in a statement, “including streaming and download consumption patterns and historical impact on the program – and also consultation with a myriad of industry colleagues the RIAA set the new Album Award formula of 1,500 on-demand audio and/or video song streams = 10 track sales = 1 album sale. Also effective today, RIAA’s Digital Single Award ratio will be updated from 100 on-demand streams = 1 download to 150 on-demand streams = 1 download to reflect streaming’s enormous growth in the two plus years since that ratio was set.”

Welcome To The Jungle: Amazon Could Enter The Streaming Fray

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The Verge:

Amazon could be preparing to challenge Spotify, Apple Music, and other subscription music services with a full-fledged rival that’s much bigger than Prime Music. The New York Post reports that Amazon executives have kicked off licensing talks with the music industry for a Spotify-like offering that would tentatively cost $9.99 per month.



Prime Music, a perk that comes included with Amazon’s annual membership, offers on-demand and ad-free access to over 1 million songs. But the overall music catalog isn’t anywhere near as large as those offered by Spotify and other paid services. It’s pretty scattershot, often missing the newest releases that consumers can stream elsewhere. Prime Music is a nice “there when you need it” kind of thing, but it’s not any real threat to Spotify. It seems Amazon is ready to change that with a standalone service that’s completely separate from Prime.



Mashable:

Perhaps the most surprising detail about the latest rumor is a claim that the expanded music offering would operate as a standalone paid service with a fee — rumored to be $9.99 a month — separate from Amazon Prime.



By providing the music streaming service separately, it could give Amazon an alternative product to pair with products (the rumor is it might offer a discount when purchased together with its Echo personal assistant). But that would nonetheless mark a departure from its usual strategy. Consider that it has invested heavily to build what is effectively a mini-Netflix, complete with original programming, and yet that offering is not broken out, but rather kept with Prime.



If Amazon is planning to go whole hog on streaming then they will need to pay special attention to interface and design. Much of the Amazon digital space is overly clunky (including the store site, though it works out of familiarity) and lacks the intuitiveness and ‘razzle dazzle’ that they will need to compete as another music DSP, especially with younger listeners. As far as another tech giant presumably entering the fray, I suppose it’s good in that the battle will push streaming quicker to the mainstream with higher rates of adoption for paid services (one can hope, right?). But the battle could also lead to cut-throat underpricing and lower pay-outs, as well as a lot more release windowing and exclusivity which (IMO) doesn’t much help streaming’s cause.

Touring Can’t Save Musicians (But Independence Might)

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The New York Times Magazine:

In the predigital era, labels profited only from the physical recordings they funded, but as that income began dwindling, a new logic was applied to the artist-label relationship. Labels argued that by promoting the recordings they owned, they were also promoting the artist’s career as a whole, and were entitled to profit from the full spectrum of artist’s revenue streams — the “360 deal,” named for the totality of its coverage.



But labels do not take on the additional risks associated with their additional profits. Instead of protecting the health of their revenue-generating engine, they simply point to an artist’s independent-contractor status, which releases them from any liability they would be on the hook for if artists were labeled employees. Rather than sparking a labor dispute, these 360 deals quickly became the new normal. As a result, administrators, support staff and office spaces are insured against the risks of doing business, while the company’s income generators — the creators of their master recordings — are on their own.



The question of why recording artists have been unable to organize and collectively bargain the way other artists have — actors and screenwriters, for example — is one that has dogged them since the dawn of the record deal. Musicians do have a union, the American Federation of Musicians, but it’s not a particularly strong one; it primarily represents members of symphonies, and it hasn’t been on a national strike in 70 years. *



*Perhaps musicians’ renegade spirit is what ultimately will save the next generation of recording artists, who are increasingly forgoing record deals altogether and going it alone. As true independents, they work the margin between the technology that makes recordings cheaper to create and a public that is steadily buying fewer of them. Without a label taking a bite out of multiple revenue sources, the numbers can actually work. Others are coming together in groups centered on advocacy and pressing for changes to the laws that dictate royalty payments in the new streaming economy — something that could mean all the difference when injury, accident or age brings a touring musician’s career to a halt. But in the meantime, the vans and buses roll on.

How File-Sharing Affects Album Sales (c. 2008)

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Billboard:

In a study called “Purchase, Pirate, Publicize: The Effect of File Sharing on Album Sales,” Jonathan Lee of Queen’s University in Ontario monitored both the sales and pirated downloads of 2,251 albums… from 2008. (For some perspective, that’s the same year that Spotify arrived in the U.S.) Legitimate album sales data came from Nielsen SoundScan, while file sharing stats were pulled from a BitTorrent tracker. “From the results, I conclude that file sharing activity has a statistically significant but economically modest negative effect on legitimate music sales,” he writes.



He added, “But the results can also inform business and policy decisions in the market for music and for other media as well. Trade groups such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) spend considerable effort and resources to deter piracy and shut down file sharing networks like the one studied in this paper. If the effect of file sharing on sales is small, this expense may not be worth it. The results of this paper should help to inform such cost–benefit analysis by trade groups, law enforcement agencies, and policymakers.”



TorrentFreak:

One of the downsides is that the data itself is relatively old, from 2008, and the music industry has changed a lot since then. This means that the results may have been different today. Also, it’s worth noting that the download numbers come from a BitTorrent tracker that counts a relatively high share of music aficionados. They may also act differently than the general file-sharer.



Complete Music Update:

{According to the study,} while file-sharing activity had a negative impact on CD sales, the word-of-mouth marketing power of the file-sharing community actually aided legit download sales. Perhaps suggesting that file-sharers were quick to shun physical products as file-sharing became an option, but they nevertheless used the file-sharing networks – to an extent at least – as a try-before-you-buy platform.



Lee adds that the extent to which the marketing power of file-sharing offset lost CD sales varied according to the level of artists, with “bottom tier” acts losing out the most. Though, the researcher ponders that this might be because their music wasn’t as attractive to file-sharers who were trying before they buy, i.e. the music itself was the problem.



As for what all this tells us about today, the report focuses on data that pre-dates the big shift of digital consumption from downloads to streams, so mainly identifies trends occurring in a specific moment of time. Though, given the disparity in ‘is file-sharing good or bad for music?’ reports over the years, it’s good to see one that acknowledges both outcomes and tries to balance one off another.

Discovering Electronic Music: A Short Documentary From 1983

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Electronic Beats:

In his documentary “Discovering Electronic Music” director and writer Bernard Wilets explores the basics of early analog synthesizers and the first digital sampling techniques. With its dreamlike and slightly dated approach, it’s a worthwhile watch— and if you’re curious about how future technology was referenced in the past, this short documentary is every paleofuturist’s dream.



Update: Here’s a handy GIF I created from this video.

Moving Past The Jukebox Model

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Wired:

Spotify announced today that it’s acquiring two companies: Soundwave and Cord Project. Both are small-ish startups, founded in the last couple of years, that have won accolades for their design chops. Soundwave in particular makes perfect sense for Spotify. It’s a social tool for finding, sharing, and talking about music, which are all things Spotify would like to be as well. Cord Project is a more curious fit: it’s an audio-first messaging app, a sort of walkie-talkie for the smartphone age.



What Cord really did—what founders Thomas Gayno and Jeff Baxter do best—is design audio experiences. “For years,” Gayno says, “we’ve been listening to music on phones and on laptops kind of the way we listen to music on our hifi stereo, by just looking for a song and hitting play.” We find and listen to music like we’re at the world’s biggest jukebox. Spotify has recently started experimenting with variations on that form, with features like Running and Party and the brand-new Behind the Lyrics feature it created with the folks at Genius. They’re trying to do more than just find you music you’ll like—they want to change the way you experience it altogether. That’s a hard problem to solve.



Through The Echo Nest’s incredibly detailed tech and its years of usage data, Spotify has a ridiculous trove of data about much more than just music. The Cord crew is the start of a new team at Spotify dedicated to turning that data into entirely new kinds of auditory experiences, “leveraging all the amazing technology that is available on my MacBook Pro, on my iPhone, all these things,” Gayno says. “The accelerometer, the geo-localization, all the social network data I have provided, is available for Spotify to create a compelling music experience.”



“The place to innovate is on the consumption side,” Baxter says. “So we’re still working on that. It’s still, what are unique ways that you can serve up audio to people, on phones, but also on devices of the future?” It’s not enough to have 30 million tracks in your library anymore. The streaming wars will be won by the company with the best experience, the best discovery, the best tools for listening to the right thing at the right time in the right way.



As SoundCloud seems to be moving towards Spotify’s model, Spotify in turn appears to be implementing tools for more SoundCloud-like interaction among users. And the idea of playlists and suggestions based on one’s activity, location, and such is intriguing. The streaming wars are apparently moving on from who’s the best at ‘discovery’ and into the social, user-experience terrain. Apple has had a history with social integration in their music services but, with the failure of Ping and the underwhelmed reaction to Connect, it’s an area that’s still up for grabs.

Soundwave presents some interesting concepts that Spotify could easily adopt. Here’s an interview with Soundwave co-founder Craig Watson on an episode of the Music Biz Podcast from a few months back:

Musik Von Harmonia

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The New Yorker:

The Germans invented electronic dance music, just as surely as German engineers, working between the wars, had invented magnetic tape. And, at the same time, groups like Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Cluster, and Neu! were playing songs that seeped much more softly into the atmosphere. It took Brian Eno to coin the phrase “ambient music,” but it’s worth remembering that he did so after playing with German musicians, and after collaborating with David Bowie on “Low”—an album (the first in Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy) that might be heard as an homage to Krautrock and, at its worst, becomes Krautrock pastiche.



Harmonia was a sort of supergroup, composed of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Michael Rother, a guitarist who had played in Neu! and an early incarnation of Kraftwerk. The trio made two albums: “Musik von Harmonia,” in 1974, and “Deluxe,” in 1975. They played to audiences that were indifferent or hostile. “Harmonia was completely ignored or hated,” Rother told me, over Skype, recently. “Ignored would have been the better thing. People did not understand it, did not want our music.”



The idea, Rother told me, was to scrape clean the musical palate. “By that time,” he said, in lightly accented English, “I had left behind the idea of being a guitar hero, of trying to impress people by playing fast melodies. So I went back to one note. One guitar string. It was quite a primitive music, really.” What this meant, in practice, is that Rother—who’d grown up covering Cream, the Stones, and the Beatles—had subtracted the blues (if not the funk) from his playing. Eventually, he’d simplified chord progressions, or removed them entirely, playing single-note runs against a tight matrix set up by his partner in Neu! and Kraftwerk, the drummer Klaus Dinger. The resulting songs, most of them instrumental, could sound like a stream or a flood; either way, the effect was one of constant, cleansing forward motion.



Yes, indeed, let’s listen to Harmonia today.
Here’s their music on Apple Music
and Spotify
and YouTube.

The History Of Copyright And The Wunderkind Of The Free Culture Movement

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On The Media:

In a new book, The Idealist, writer Justin Peters places {Aaron} Swartz within the fraught, often colorful, history of copyright in America. Brooke {Gladstone} talks with Peters about Swartz’s legacy and the long line of “data moralists” who came before him.



Via the always dependable On The Media, this is a fascinating report on copyright law and the contemporary influence of the sadly departed Aaron Swartz, alongside some enlightening historical context. We’re also treated to this quote from the dawn of copyright legislation: “My neighbor might love the light but that gives him no right to steal my candles.” Have a listen: