8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Blocked on Spotify: The Public Has Spoken

by // Leave a Comment

via Thurrott:

With an upcoming update, Spotify will let you block music from any artist you don’t like throughout the app. This means it will block music from that artist on your personal library, playlists, automatically curated playlists, charts, radios, and everything else. In fact, you won’t be able to manually play music from an artist you’ve blocked even if you wanted to — and you’d have to unblock an artist before you can play a certain track from them.

I’ve seen this being sold as a way to no longer hear artists that annoyingly keep popping up in algorithmic playlists — the feature is touted as “much-requested” and I think that’s originally why it was requested — but it’s obvious this is Spotify’s way of dealing with deplorable artists on the platform. It’s a passing of the buck, if you will, after Spotify’s disastrous attempt at self-censorship.

I can’t say I blame Spotify for putting this decision in an individual user’s hands. At least they’re responding and doing something. Knowing Spotify, I’m sure there’s some data-gathering at play, too. It would be in the platform’s best interest to learn of artists that are being blocked en masse by its users. Then Spotify would be able to quietly downplay those artists in playlists and features. The public has spoken.

Update: Another take, Spotify’s New Mute Feature Is a Patronizing Misstep

A Mural Made Famous by Daniel Johnston

by // 2 Comments

I’ve been reading about the Hi, How Are You Project, which is throwing a benefit concert this Tuesday in Austin, TX. Fantastic line-up. Here’s a description of the organization:

The Hi, How Are You Project is a non-profit organization inspiring new conversations around mental health issues by funding and creating thoughtful media content, projects, and events. The Foundation, created with the support of Daniel Johnston and Family, provides a platform for the exchange of ideas and education on mental well-being.

I admit that I learned about the project via the latest 5-Bullet Friday newsletter from Tim Ferriss, though I’m a little miffed that he identifies the organization as ‘so named for a mural made famous by Kurt Cobain.’ I mean, sure, I guess that’s technically true, but I still wouldn’t pass up a chance to give Daniel Johnston his propers.

This news sent me down a Daniel Johnston rabbit-hole. I was one of the lucky few who sent off for his home-dubbed cassette releases in the mid-80s. I discovered Johnston on an Austin-centric episode of the MTV show IRS’ The Cutting Edge. Do any of you remember that show? It was a considerable influence on this trapped-in-Central-Louisiana teenager. I was starved for new music and appreciated the variety of mostly American indie-bands introduced by host Peter Zaremba.

I know there’s a ‘best-of’ DVD retrospective of the show floating around, but I’d give a stack of bolo ties for a complete set of all the episodes. I’m sure re-licensing the music would be an impossibility but, seriously, that show is an important historical document of a special time. Young America was discovering its independent music scene, and it was a uniquely American scene, very different from the DIY bands and labels from across the pond. IRS’ The Cutting Edge should be playing in a museum.

I remember looking, years ago, for the clip of Daniel Johnston that inspired me to seek him out. I couldn’t find it anywhere. There are a lot of clips from IRS’ The Cutting Edge on YouTube but many of the iconic moments are missing. You would think there’d be a bazillion uploads of Run DMC performing in the streets of L.A. on the back of a moving flatbed truck, but there’s nothing.

I decided to look again after reading about the Hi, How Are You Project and hey, here it is — Daniel performing “Hard Time” for a single camera, as initially seen on IRS’ The Cutting Edge:

I was maybe 15 or 16 when I saw this, and I’m not sure what jumped out at me, what made me want to track down Daniel Johnston’s tapes. I was already into ‘weird’ music, but this isn’t that weird. The song is great. However, Johnston’s vocals are an acquired taste (to put it mildly), and the rockstar charisma quotient is at the bottom of the meter.

I think it’s the earnestness. Johnston is just so into it, inside his world. Others try to pull this off, but it’s almost always an act or a show, like Crispin Glover on Letterman (a TV appearance that also affected me at the time). It’s refreshing how honest Johnston is here, all coming through in the performance. Admittedly, you might not see it like I do and chances are it’s not for you. But Daniel Johnston must have been a revelation for this shy, geeky teenage kid who wanted nothing more than a pathway into a life of music-making. Like Daniel, you just had to believe in it.

So I sent off for a small bagful of Daniel Johnston cassettes from Stress Records (I probably got the address and info from an ad in Factsheet Five, a ‘zine that was basically my internet) which I listened to endlessly, much to the bewilderment of my friends. The songs were raw and real, and also touching and relatable. I was going through a lot, but not as much as Johnston was going through and, in its way, that made me feel better. I think this played a part in giving me the courage to pursue music.

There’s a fantastic documentary on Daniel Johnston, titled The Devil and Daniel Johnston. I highly recommend it — it’s a beautiful doorway into Johnston’s music and his heartbreaking world. And it always thrills me when his name comes up (which is why I was disappointed in Ferriss’s newsletter lack-of-mention), or someone covers his songs, or — miraculously from the lens of 1985 — one of his songs appears in a movie or a TV show. His artwork is terrific, too, always good for a smile.

Which brings us back to Hi, How Are You and the iconic mural. Don’t get me wrong — I’m thankful that Kurt Cobain frequently wore that t-shirt as it turned a lot of people on to Daniel Johnston. Cobain was good about using his influence to help out fringe musicians. And I’m also grateful that Ferriss is spreading the word about the Hi, How Are You Project, helping that worthy cause.

It’s always amazing to look back at our little pockets of music history and realize how they’ve spread out over time. These micro-scenes seem inconsequential while we’re living in them, meaningful to a privileged few. It helps us understand that everything has an influence. Our work may seem minor and unnoticed, but we should still give it our boldest effort. Great work often perseveres in ways we can’t predict.

Vinyl’s Rise in Defiance of the Intangible

by // Leave a Comment

The vinyl revival persists, proving itself more than just a ‘flash in the pan,’ according to Buzzangle Music’s 2018 U.S. Music Industry Report. As related by The Verge:

Vinyl sales grew by just shy of 12 percent from 8.6 to 9.7 million sales, while cassette sales grew by almost 19 percent from 99,400 to 118,200 copies sold in the US. It wasn’t quite the 41.8 percent growth seen in music streaming, but it’s still very impressive for two formats that are decades old.

Billboard has some even more encouraging numbers from Nielsen Music:

16.8 million vinyl albums were sold in 2018, according to Nielsen Music (up 14.6 percent) — marking the 13th consecutive year of growth for the format. 16.8 million is also a new yearly high for vinyl album sales since Nielsen Music began tracking sales in 1991.

Before you start charting the course of your digital label toward vinyl production for big profit, understand that most of this growth is outside of the independent sector. It’s mainly driven by legacy catalog and albums that you could have purchased in the used bin for a few dollars each fifteen years ago. The Verge again:

The popularity of both physical formats seems to be being driven by sales of older albums. BuzzAngle reports that over 66 percent of vinyl sales are of albums that are over three years old, with releases from Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd all featuring in the list of the bestselling vinyls from last year.

Despite the prominence of superstar legacy releases, this growth is good news for independents. The pressing plants remain healthy and active, and vinyl distributors and stores are more optimistic than they would be with vinyl’s lifespan tied to a fleeting trend. It’s still tough for an emerging artist to move a couple of hundred record albums — making the per-unit cost enormous, which is partly why you’re seeing $25 LPs — but at least the option is alive and supported. Vinyl production can move the status of a label, differentiating from the low-barrier bulk of digital labels. But one must consider the vinyl aspect as part of a label’s marketing effort rather than a sales driver. Breaking even is often the highest measure of success when it comes to record sales.

To bring the point home, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie has the Billboard album this week, and that’s based on some previously unheard of figures. The New York Times:

Billboard and Nielsen credit “Hoodie SZN” with the equivalent of 58,000 sales in the United States last week, a number that incorporates streams and downloads of individual tracks, as well as sales of the full album. But the vast majority of that composite number is from streaming — so much so that the sales number represents a new low on the chart.

The 823 copies of “Hoodie SZN” that were sold last week — all as downloads, since that title has not been released on any physical formats — is the least number of copies that any album has sold in the week it went to No. 1.

Despite the hype and statistics, vinyl isn’t mainstream enough to warrant a release of a number 1 hip hop album on the format. Even more significant, download sales on the release are incredibly slim (823!) showing the widespread acceptance of music outside of the traditional ownership model. It’s an earth-shaking shift, connected to vinyl’s rise in defiance of the intangible. How vinyl continues to segment itself over the next few years will be a fascinating story.

Word of the Day: Chimping

by // Leave a Comment

A candidate for ‘word of the day,’ via Shutter Muse:

What is Chimping?

Chimping is the act of looking at your camera’s LCD screen as soon as you have taken a photo. The term is jokingly derived from the noises that photographers often make when they see a shot they like on the back of the camera (oooh ohh), followed sometimes by “ape like” hand motions for others to take a look.

I look forward to my first opportunity to use this phrase in the wild. Also, it must be noted that Shutter Muse doesn’t necessarily consider ‘chimping’ a bad thing.

Digging Your Scene

by // Leave a Comment

The heyday of music blogging predicted a future of endless niche outlets for music coverage. Instead, the number of music sites is condensing and release coverage appears increasingly homogeneous. Could there be even fewer places for publicists to pitch to then there were in the pre-internet era? Billboard examines the ‘Shrinking Media Landscape:’

Part of the problem, [publicist Nathan] Walker believes, is the decimation of regionally focused media outlets: alt-weeklies, zines, city-specific blogs and websites. The loss of publications like Baltimore’s City Paper, the Boston Phoenix and The Village Voice took a valuable rung out of the ladder many bands in those markets used on their way to landing national coverage. “There’s something to be said for organic growth that is fostered by local music writers,” he says.

This goes hand-in-hand with my theory why we aren’t seeing obvious new music movements or genres pop up: the waning influence of local and regional identities, made opaque by the absence of dedicated support systems (local music papers, college radio focused on regional scenes, and so on). There are opportunities here for local music communities to fill these holes … the strategy is to think local, aim global. When starting out, it’s a mistake to think global out of the gate.

Another quote from the Billboard piece:

There’s no magic formula for “going viral” and most publicists interviewed agreed that, no matter how much the media landscape changes or contracts, their number-one job is still to help their artists tell their story in a way that will compel journalists and fans alike. … [Publicist Talia] Miller: “I’ve found the most helpful way to promote new tracks from less well-established artists is to develop the story behind those songs.”

As a recording artist, the best place to create a compelling story is within your local scene. And, if you’re starting a music blog or media outlet, the easiest way to fill a niche is to cover that scene.

The Digital Evolution of Bootleg Culture

by // 1 Comment

When I owned a record store in the early ‘90s, a guy would pull up in his van once a month and hawk a selection of bootleg CDs. These discs contained recordings of live concerts, out-of-print rarities, and unreleased demos of your favorite band. I admit that I bought and sold more than a few, as the super-fans prized these limited (and often high-priced) CDs. It was a small scene — though morally precarious the distribution of these discs was regulated by extreme scarcity.

Napster and other file-sharing sites eliminated the scarcity, to a degree, but access was still for those ‘in-the-know.’ But as the internet crossed the chasm, technical inexperience was less-and-less a barrier to finding the unreleased stuff.

Distribution barriers have also crumbled — overwhelmingly a positive development — and pay-to-distribute services like Distrokid and CD Baby now supply releases to streaming platforms with minimal vetting. More-and-more of these instant-distribution services are popping up, with Spotify recently announcing their own direct-to-platform portal.

It’s not surprising that these technological advancements have bolstered seedier elements. That’s the story of the internet, and bootleg culture’s exploitation of the available tools is inevitable. Both scarcity and exclusivity of access have been eliminated, and so we can probably get used to episodes like this (via Music Business Worldwide):

The two [bootleg Beyoncé] albums, released under the name “Queen Carter,” were on Spotify and Apple Music for around a day, long enough to generate furious traction from Beyoncé fans on social media, before being taken down. And the albums came out shortly after R&B star SZA also “released” music under a fake name (“Sister Solana”) that turned out to be stolen demos as well.

Soundrop, an independent DIY distribution service through which both Beyoncé and SZA’s tracks were apparently uploaded via different accounts, says it is working with authorities in an investigation into the “potential intellectual property theft” and that it took down the music as soon as it was aware that it breached the company’s terms of service.

… and then there’s this, via Film School Rejects:

[The movie] One Cut of the Dead should never have been on Amazon Prime to begin with. In an email to Film School Rejects, Third Window Films owner Adam Torel confirmed that the film had not been uploaded by either his company or Nikkatsu, the organization in charge of sales for the Asian marketplace. “I saw some posts on Twitter saying it was available on Amazon Prime in both the US and UK,” Torel explained. “Considering the UK theatrical [release] is January 4th, and as it was very hard to get an Asian independent film into cinemas, you can imagine how much I started to panic and fear for my chances of getting Asian indies into cinemas from now on.” […]

For many, this was an ugly introduction to Amazon Prime’s dual nature as both a streaming platform for Amazon’s high-profile acquisitions and a self-distribution platform with little oversight. “Amazon has this whole section that effectively operates like YouTube,” explains Todd Brown, head of international acquisitions for XYZ Films, “and is governed by the same laws as YouTube, which really absolves Amazon of a lot of responsibility for what people do on the platform — but, from the outside looking in, appears almost exactly the same as the fully Amazon-controlled, curated service.”

There is a delicate balance between ease-of-access (and democratization of distribution) and the illicit exploitation of these tools. On the one hand, it’s incredible that anyone can have a self-released film on Amazon Prime next to Hollywood blockbusters. I’m 100% in favor of that. On the other, IP owners may be looking at an endless game of whack-a-mole on platforms with the perceived legitimacy of, say, Apple Music. That’s troubling.

The services, both on the distribution and DSP sides, should look at a robust method for spotting these oversights. Ideally, there would be an independent watchdog organization that worked with all DSPs to remove infringing or bootleg content. Of course, that will never happen because there’s no one to pay for it, and there’s no money to be made. The more conspiratorial of you may argue that actively eliminating this content is seen as money lost, explaining the lackadaisical takedown environment. But reputation and authority are at stake. In the short-term, the profits matter, especially to shareholders, but the absence of prestige and position will create destructive long-term problems. Just ask Facebook.

Which brings us to Beatport and the logical next step in the evolution of the digital bootleg. 5 Mag has been reporting on a ‘prolific’ dance music producer who isn’t simply plagiarizing — he’s releasing other artists’ material as his own. And he’s been doing it unimpeded for at least a decade:

Incredibly, it appears [Flavio] Lodetti’s alleged plagiarism was first discovered when Lodetti sent demos of stolen tracks to the person who made them. On January 7, Gábor Szeles, proprietor of Witty Tunes, posted a warning on Facebook addressed to label managers and producers that “an artist called FLOD” was claiming other people’s work as his own. […]

Multiple producers have posted screencaps of their inboxes with a “flood” (sorry) of emails from Lodetti submitting a half-dozen or more demos at a time. Apparently quite a few bit: new tracks from Lodetti are still being identified and traced to earlier releases from other producers as we speak. “Unfortunately as a result of this post I double checked the upcoming single I signed from Flod and as you would expect it’s a stolen track from 2015,” one label manager wrote in the comments of Szeles’ post. “There’s not even any changes made to it.”

I’ve heard of this happening before but not at the scale that Lodetti has achieved. A follow-up by 5 Mag confirms that a release as far back as 2010 was a master recording stolen outright from another producer. How widespread is this practice? I fear it’s more common than we imagine, and extends to all the independent platforms — Bandcamp, Traxsource, etc.

It’s curious that Beatport doesn’t have a Content ID-like tool in place to identify the resemblance of newly submitted tracks to releases already on the platform. Beatport may see the problem as infrequent, thus not warranting the investment. But, again, there are numerous examples of pirated tracks showing up on Beatport in the past — tongues are wagging on dance music producer forums — and it’s going to get worse. Lodetti’s exposure may shame him into obscurity, but, as with the One Cut of the Dead and Queen Carter incidents above, it also shows how easy this is to pull off without much repercussion.

Put It Into the Fire Without Reading Any Farther

by // Leave a Comment

Brain Pickings reproduced a fan letter that Bram Stoker wrote to Walt Whitman and I’m going to steal its opening text for the greatest cold email template ever:

If you are the man I take you to be you will like to get this letter. If you are not I don’t care whether you like it or not and only ask that you put it into the fire without reading any farther. But I believe you will like it.

Music, Memory, and Sleeping Next To Boomboxes

by // 3 Comments

My friend, writer Jamie Blaine, is interested in nostalgia — the things we remember and how we selectively remember them. We’ve had many discussions about memory and our memories. Jamie and I grew up in central Louisiana and have been good friends since our teenage years, so there are a lot of recollections we share. He’s much better at remembering the details than I am.

I wouldn’t say I’m distrustful of nostalgia, but I do try to be aware of how it shapes our attitudes and feelings in the present. I’ve had arguments with the ‘music was so much better then’ crowd — what you listened to when you were young and actively discovering music for the first time is always going to sound like the best music ever. I’m certain that present-day teenagers will be saying today’s music was the best thirty years from now.

I like Andrew Weatherall’s attitude. In an interview with The Guardian, he was asked to name his favorite period of music. Weatherall said, “Last week. I’m not a golden age kind of person.”

But there is something about those special songs, heard for the first time under magical circumstances. They aren’t ‘the best,’ but they’re the best for us. These songs are intertwined with our memories and, when listened to, cause spine chills. Is there another art form that imprints on us in this way? Can a painting be locked with a memory?

Jamie loves this story of my most affecting song moment:

I craved new music as a teenager in Pineville, Louisiana, but it wasn’t easy to find. I ended up learning about new music from far away college radio stations, all static-y and fading in and out. Baton Rouge’s KLSU would come through under certain weather conditions, as would Houston’s KTRU. But the most reliable signal came from Lafayette and the college station KRVS. The format was mostly NPR and regional music (Cajun) programming, but from midnight to 6 AM the students took over and played ‘alternative music’ (what we used to call it in the mid-80s).

I couldn’t exactly stay up all night listening to the radio. My solution was to buy a pack of 120-minute cassette tapes (60 minutes per side, the longest you could get) and record the station nightly. I’d put a boombox next to my pillow and start recording at midnight and fall asleep. Once the tape ran out the ‘record’ key on the boombox would make a loud click. This sound woke me up for a second so I could groggily change the tape.

The next day at high school I would listen to the radio show from earlier — on my commute, in between classes, on lunch break, whenever I could. That’s how I kept up on all the cool music that was coming out.

That’s the set-up. The actual story is this:

One night I’m sleeping while the radio is recording and I’m suddenly semi-awake. I’m in that halfway state between asleep and cognizant, not fully conscious. And I hear this music playing, the weirdest, strangest music (or so it seemed at the time). I’m in bed, partly dreaming, and this magical sound is all around me, and I can’t quite believe it. I feel euphoric. Then I fall back asleep.

The next day I’m up and trying to remember. I’m not sure what happened. Was that music real? Was it all a dream?

So I’m at school trying to steal any chance I can get to listen to my tapes of the radio, to see if this strange song exists and if I’d even recognize it. And then — and I remember being in the middle of the hall on the way to class — the tune suddenly comes on. It’s this:

I’m frozen and get chills. It’s not so much that the song is so amazing (though it kinda is), it’s that weird connection with how I heard it for the first time — and how I heard Cocteau Twins for the first time — that moved me. I still get chills when I hear the song, and it brings me back to the time when I was just starting to get excited about discovering music, discovering my music. It transports me to that boombox next to my pillow, and to that high school hallway where I stopped in my tracks with a big grin on my face – “This is that song!” It brings me back to the best music ever.

Update: After reading this post, Jamie wrote to me to say, “Nostalgia is just history with feelings.”

The Culture-Changing Rollable TV

by // Leave a Comment

Chances are you heard about the 2019 International CES debut of this revolutionary television:

As the host notes, these will be super-expensive at first, no doubt. But flat-screen TVs were expensive as well, and now almost everyone has one. Likewise, I think this ‘rollable’ TV (and the inevitable competing versions) will catch on in a big way. What interests me is how our culture is affected when the TV is no longer the centerpiece of our living rooms. A TV that’s made to be hidden— replaced by a painting or whatever is behind its previously allotted space — proposes a mindset that’s foreign to almost every generation. Can you imagine a house where a big screen isn’t the focus of the primary social room’s furniture and all the attention?

Streaming’s Song Disparity

by // Leave a Comment

Buzzangle Music’s 2018 U.S. Music Industry Report has tongues wagging this week as there’s a lot of information to analyze and digest. Everyone agrees it shows a music industry in transition (though, when was it not in transition?) and growing financially. I may highlight other aspects of the report in future posts but, for now, let’s focus on this nugget via Rolling Stone:

The most popular 10 percent of songs accounted for 99 percent of all audio streams. … Flip that statistic around: 90 percent of streamable music is responsible for just one percent of actual streams.

That concentration was only a smidgeon less severe at the top of the distribution in 2018, according to BuzzAngle’s latest report. The top 500,000 most popular songs in 2017 accounted for 93.6 percent of all streams. The comparable number in 2018 fell the tiniest bit, to 92.4 percent of all streams.

Music Business Report takes a rosier view of these statistics:

The interesting bit: in 2017, the USA’s Top 500,000 tracks racked up 14.6-times as many audio streams as every other piece of music. In 2018, however, this multiple had fallen significantly, down to 12.2. Despite on-demand audio streaming’s overall volume growing by 41.8% in the US in 2018, the actual number of plays dedicated to the Top 50 tracks fell harshly – down by a pretty shocking 74.6%. […]

In other words (give or take a couple of billion streams): pretty much all of the growth in the US audio streaming market last year came outside the Top 500 tracks (aka outside the weekly Top 10 chart).

I suppose that could be interpreted as great news for independent labels though the popularity of back catalog on streaming platforms might cancel out some of the joy. But is this disparity really a consequence of streaming? Twenty years ago, I’m not sure if 10 percent of songs represented 99 percent of what was played on the radio, or sold in all record stores, but I bet the statistic was close. I’m not as alarmed by the statistic as some.

And if the disparity has indeed gotten worse, then that may also be representative of other factors than the platform. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I was pleased to see Rolling Stone hit the nail on the head with this easily overlooked sentence:

… the fact remains that the rampant inequality that has become pervasive in other aspects of American life is similarly acute in the streaming-verse.