8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Decolonise: A Punk Fest Celebrating People Of Color

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The Quietus:

For those who have no experience of being a person of colour the fact that this event is even happening may come as a surprise. Why would anyone need a punk festival for people of colour in 2017? What does race have to do with the music you listen to? Why are you complaining, isn’t racism over? You might be reading this thinking the very same. Well despite your misgivings I can explain why WE ALL need a festival dedicated to the music of people of colour, today more than ever.



Looking back at the snotty, gob-throwing days of the late 70s punk scene in the UK you might at first think the stories of punks of colour ended with Poly Styrene, lead singer of the effervescent X-Ray Spex. Of course, delve a little deeper and we find other bands such as Alien Kulture, a majority Pakistani Muslim punk band who formed in the late 70s in defiance of Thatcher’s ‘fears’ of being swamped by new cultures. Even going back to the roots of punk you’ll find Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a queer black female guitarist who combined the fire of gospel preaching with the soul of early blues to devise the earliest form of rock & roll.



No matter where you look in history you can find stories of people of colour going against the norm to either add to genres previously considered white or create whole new spaces for themselves. We are there but our stories are fragmented across history. There is no linear narrative to this narrative because as with all history it is written by the dominant culture who, whether with malice or ignorance, repeatedly seek to prop up their own achievements forgetting to acknowledge the black and brown people who inspired or helped them along the way. It’s why the Sex Pistols had two documentaries made about them but a Poly Styrene documentary is only just in the making and had to be crowdfunded by her family.



The Decolonise Fest starts June 2 in London. More info HERE.

Spotify Settles With Songwriters

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Spotify has reached a settlement with a group of songwriters who had sued for copyright infringement, eliminating an potential complication to the public offering that the streaming service is planning later this year.

Under the agreement which will need to be approved by the court, the streaming company will set up a fund worth $43.4 million to compensate songwriters and publishers whose compositions the service used without paying mechanical royalties.

Spotify has to pay record labels to use their recordings and publishers to use the underlying compositions; it pays mechanical royalties directly to publishers and public performance royalties to performing-rights groups like ASCAP, which distribute the money to their member publishers and songwriters. Streaming services don’t need to negotiate with publishers, since they can take advantage of a “statutory license” offered by the federal government.

But they need to find the right publishers to pay — a challenge in cases where recordings have entered Spotify’s system without proper metadata. Spotify has always made a point of holding money aside for publishers it couldn’t identify, but doing so doesn’t make it compliant with copyright law.

Beyond past and future compensation, the settlement agreement outlines a process by which Spotify and the class counsel “will work collaboratively to improve the gathering and collecting of information about composition owners to help ensure those owners are paid their royalties in the future,” according to the plaintiffs’ motion.


Previously, Previously, and Previously.



Update: Complete Music Update does a great job explaining this mess:

In some countries, the music publishing sector has traditionally licensed the performing and mechanical rights separately through different entities, meaning streaming firms need to ensure that – not only do they have deals in place for both recordings and songs – those deals cover both the performing and mechanical rights of any works streamed.

In the US this has proven challenging, because while there are collecting societies that licence performing rights, there is no one-stop society that represents mechanical rights. In other countries where the two elements of the copyright are licensed separately, there is a mechanical rights society that can provide a licence to cover any songs that are not subject to direct deals between the streaming firms and the big music publishers.

On one level this shouldn’t matter because there is a compulsory licence covering mechanicals in the US, which includes a set statutory rate to be paid, so streaming services don’t need to negotiate terms and they know from the outset what the mechanical costs will be. However, the compulsory licence obliges the streaming service to alert each and every rights owner that it intends to exploit their work or – where they can’t identify the owner – it should file paperwork with the US Copyright Office instead.

Few services did this, mainly because of the big music rights data problem, whereby there is no one stop publicly accessible database to tell you who controls which song copyrights, nor which song is contained in which recording. However, by failing to adhere to the formalities of the compulsory licence, whenever a streaming service streams a song in the US which is not covered by one of its direct publisher licences, it is technically committing copyright infringement.


Update 2:

Compare Spotify to Facebook. Facebook has no licenses. None. Zero. Zilch. They know they have no licenses and they don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to solve this problem. For all of Spotify’s problems, Facebook is not Spotify. Facebook is a royalty deadbeat.

What the Spotify cases should tell Facebook is that Facebook should not expect to get a pass for their bad behavior. Facebook should expect to write a very large check for the past and a very large check for the future.

Make LUFS, Not (Loudness) War

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Ask Audio:

It appears as if Spotify have decided to join the majority of online streaming platforms and reduce their streaming target loudness from -12 LUF to -14 LUFS! By my own measurements, a solid thirty to forty minutes of the Top 50 global playlist off the free Spotify app yields an integrated value of -14 LUFS with true peaks well below -1 dbTP.



Spotify has long been the outlier in terms of online loudness, streaming a full +4 LU (1 LU = 1dB) above AES recommended streaming practices of -16 LUFS/-1dBTP and causing no end of confusion in the last days of the loudness war. So this move brings Spotify into the same Loudness ballpark as TIDAL who are normalising to no louder than -14 LUFS, YouTube who seem to be normalising high view count videos to -14 LUFS, and 2 LU higher than iTunes and iTunes radio with “Sound Check” loudness normalising to -16 LUFS.



As of now, most online streaming services are matching the perceived loudness of tracks to each other to a unified target level. So regardless of how much you worked on squeezing a few extra dB out of your hyper-compressed “master”, if an online streaming service measures your track as higher than -14 LUFS (integrated) YOUR MUSIC WILL GET TURNED DOWN!



Unfortunately for us electronic music makers we still have to deal with SoundCloud and Bandcamp, and neither service even seems to be aware of the loudness issues facing their content. SoundCloud and Bandcamp are a free-for-all at the moment with incredibly loud music being uploaded every day, and it sucks that dance and electronic music is the last bastion of the loudness war. Soundcloud was never built on its reputation for quality audio, but a target loudness value of -14 LUFS/ -1 dBTP is highly recommended regardless of your “competition’s levels”.



A Poke in the Ear (With a Sharp Stick):

So, you could care less about The LUFS Standard and will just mix and master your track or project so loud that it will blow out your listeners eardrums on the first listen. Fine, go for it. It’s your music.



Just remember that if you ever want your tunes to be on one of the major Music Streaming Services or on The Tube Of Yous they are going to turn the level down for you. If it hits the Broadcast Airwaves it’s going to be turned down even more.



Would you rather have control over what it sounds like when it gets turned down, or do you trust the Providers and Networks to do that for you? LUFS ain’t going away kids – it’s a Standard and a Broadcasting Law in the US and Europe. Start adhering to it now and you’re futureproofed, but if you do make headway in the Industry you’ll have to invest time and money to remaster your older works.


My audio nerd friends are pretty excited about Spotify’s decision. I’m thinking it’s in preparation for the launch of a high fidelity audio plan. It still probably doesn’t excuse the bad pun in this post’s title.

Hitting the Links: Talk Talk, a Package from Felix Laband, and Hippie Architecture

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Talk Talk – 10 of the Best:

Engineer Phill Brown, speaking to the Guardian in 2012, recalled “an endlessly blacked-out studio, an oil projector in the control room, strobe lighting and five 24-track tape-machines synced together. Twelve hours a day in the dark listening to the same six songs for eight months became pretty intense.”



Felix Laband – A Life In Collage:

Hailing from Johannesburg South Africa, Felix hasn’t exactly become a household name here in the States. His obscurity made legitimate purchases of his music difficult, so like any rabid fan I resorted in the early 00s to piracy and felt the pain of having shorted an artist that has contributed so much to our well being. But now more than a decade later it’s easier than ever to patronize the artists we love. And so we did, with the largest music-related purchase we’ve ever made.



Psychedelic Supersonic Silicon Space Age: Photos Of The Radical Hippie Design Sense:

In the 1910s, the horrors of the First World War had pushed disillusioned creatives to invent new ‘modernist’ modes of expression. Fifty years later, Vietnam, civil rights, and their political backlash had radical thinkers again refusing to get in line. We all know well the profound musical heritage of this period. But the influence of countercultural aesthetics on the graphic design and architecture of the era is far less recognized, even as its impact continues to ripple some half a century on.



Why Time Seems To Speed Up As We Get Older:

If our memories can trick us into thinking time is moving quickly, then maybe there are ways to trick our brains into thinking that time is slowing down — such as committing to breaking routines and learning new things. You’re more likely to remember learning how to skydive than watching another hour of mindless television.



There’s a Replica of the Otherworldly Bedroom from 2001: A Space Odyssey in a DTLA Warehouse:

{Simon} Birch, a Hong Kong-based British artist, has transformed the space into a series of micro-exhibitions meant to take viewers on a “hero’s journey,” a reference to Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth. The various large-scale immersions feature projections, paintings, sculptures, and, in one instance, a lush patch of real grass. But the most Instagram-worthy is a bedroom—one that happens to be an exact replica of the one in Stanley Kubrick’s Oscar-winning film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Ceding Control to an Unseen Force

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A reminder from Music 3.0 blog:

A website many times gets overlooked as an integral piece of your digital promotional life because there are so many other places that you can use as your online focal point. Having a Facebook page or Tumblr blog, or relying on another social network as your online central focus has a number of potential flaws, not the least is control of your message.



When you depend on a social network for your online presence, you’re ceding control to an unknown, unseen force that can change its will at any time with no regard to your online well-being. If you rely on an external network, sooner or later you’re going to get burnt. It’s the nature of the Internet to constantly change, and it’s too early to get a feel for the life span of even of the largest sites and networks.



An artist’s website is the only place online that you can control the look, feel, and information and never have to worry about it changing unless you want it to. Don’t trust your online presence to social networks.



This mirrors the first piece of advice I give every time I start consulting an artist or label. Relying solely on social media (or not having social media posts consistently point to the artist’s website) is the most common and harmful mistake out there.

Sampling in the 21st Century

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DJ Shadow in The Guardian:

“I’ve always believed in clearing samples, however I believe it needs to be done on a musicologist basis.” This would involve, {DJ Shadow} explains, breaking down a song in a forensic way, and working out compensation accordingly: “This bass line sample constitutes – based on the space that it occupies and the number of seconds that it plays over the course of the track, in relation to other elements that come and go … this sample is worth 16.7% of the composition.”



“Now, if that could be done,” he says, “then I would clear everything. But the problem is, you go to the first person – they want 75% whether they deserve it or not. You go to the next person they want 70% – whoops – you can’t cut a pie that many times, there isn’t enough pie to go around.”



“In a strange sense I feel like music has never been worth less as a commodity, and yet sampling has never been more risky. We work in a hyper-capitalist time, where you grab what you can, get everything you can, doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong, it doesn’t matter whether it’s valid, it doesn’t matter whether it’s deserved.”



My own story: I had to leave a song off Invisible Airline because it had a short vocal sample, and the publisher for the sampled artist (hardly a ‘big name’) wanted $10,000 and 75% ownership of the final song to clear it.

Then there’s the unfortunate case of De La Soul, via The New York Times:

“We’re in the Library of Congress, but we’re not on iTunes,” {De La Soul member Posdnuos AKA Kelvin} Mercer said, adding that when the group interacts with fans in person or online, they always ask the same question: “Yo, where’s the old stuff?”



That old stuff may be fraught with problems, according to people familiar with the group’s recording and publishing history. In 1989, obtaining the permission of musical copyright holders for the use of their intellectual property was often an afterthought. There was little precedent for young artists’ mining their parents’ record collections for source material and little regulation or guidelines for that process.



“My understanding is that due to allegedly uncleared samples, Warners has been uncomfortable or unwilling to license a lot of the De La Soul stuff,” {sample-clearance agent Deborah} Mannis-Gardner said. “It becomes difficult opening these cans of worms — were things possibly cleared with a handshake?”



An added possible complication lies in the language of the agreements drafted for the use of all those samples. (There are more than 60 on “3 Feet High and Rising” alone — the group was sued by the Turtles in 1991 for the use of their song “You Showed Me” on a skit on that album and settled out of court for a reported $1.7 million.) If those agreements, written nearly three decades ago, do not account for formats other than CDs, vinyl LPs and cassettes, Warner Music would have to renegotiate terms for every sample on the group’s first four records with their respective copyright holders to make those available digitally.



In a statement, a person speaking for Rhino, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group that deals with the label’s back catalog, said: “De La Soul is one of hip-hop’s seminal acts, and we’d love for their music to reach audiences on digital platforms around the world, but we don’t believe it is possible to clear all of the samples for digital use, and we wouldn’t want to release the albums other than in their complete, original forms. We understand this is very frustrating for the artists and the fans; it is frustrating for us, too.”



There’s an understandable nostalgia for the anything-goes sampling climate of the late-80s/early-90s, and a lot of sample-free music made today would sound completely different if that anomalous musical era didn’t happen. Now we’re seeing technological solutions paving the way for new sample-based producers, through services like Tracklib and maybe even Dubset (if you can clear unauthorized remixes using Dubset, then why not clear samples eventually?). But these services can’t replicate the thrill and risk of surreptitiously sampling a favorite groove into your production. Take my word for it … it can be intoxicating.

All Is (Not) Fair In Love and Streaming

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Complete Music Update:

Artist managers argue that they need to know more detail about the deals done between the labels and the streaming services, so that they can properly audit the streaming royalties their artists receive. This would allow them to better understand the streaming business and advise their clients on which platforms to champion. They could also then be reassured that the value of the booming streaming market is being fairly shared between all stakeholders within the music community, ie artists and songwriters as well as labels and publishers.



Noting that the new deal struck between Universal and Spotify – and the pending deals due to be agreed with Sony Music and Warner Music – continue to shrouded in secrecy, the CEO of the Music Managers Forum, Annabella Coldrick, said: “The news that Spotify and Universal have struck a new licence deal to help support continued streaming growth is welcome. However the lack of transparency around the terms of such deals means it is still impossible to properly understand and verify the flow of money from fan to artist and ensure those who create the music share in the growth in its value. Transparency is essential and should be baked into any new deal, not hidden behind NDAs”.



Music Tech Solutions:

The same criticism could equally be made of non statutory direct agreements by digital aggregators like CD Baby, Tunecore. LyricFind, Pledge Music, the Orchard and Loudr, each of which offer varying degrees of transparency of their own books, much less the deals they’ve made with digital services on behalf of the artists, songwriters, labels and music publishers appointing them as agents for relicense of music.



It would be very simple for aggregators to disclose the terms of their deals or to at least summarize them so that artists or songwriters who are considering who to sign with could compare payouts. It’s fine to tell people what their royalty split, flat fee, or distribution fee might be, but the assumption is that the revenue stream being shared is identical from one aggregator to another.



A related hot topic I encountered on more than one occasion at last week’s Music Biz 2017 conference was access to data, and how this varies from deal to deal. For example, it’s well known that the majors have negotiated access to more detailed ‘play’ analytics from Spotify (such as listener retention, more demographic options, and so on). And a plausible rumor is that the majors have negotiated others not have access to this information, giving preferred partners a leg up. Herein lies the danger of a few companies becoming the sole distribution portals for music streaming.

Blockchain: Anchoring Music in Time and Space

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Benji Rogers (dotBlockchain Music) via MIDEMBLOG:

Blockchains represent the opportunity to anchor a digital event – in this case, music – in time and space. To say “at this time, in this place, these are the people that own the work.”



Today, in 2017, if I’m a songwriter or an artist, I have nowhere in which I can digitally express my rights. As an artist, I come out of the studio, I put that recording on a 20 year-old format like a FLAC or a WAV or an mp3, then I send it out into the world. And I rely on all these other architectures and databases to link together, talk to each other, and get me paid. The problem is that you usually only find issues after they’ve happened, and I just don’t think that’s a modern way to converse machine to machine, using these old formats.



If you’re going to create a new system to digitally enscribe rights, do you do it in a centralised way? That is, do you want to rely on one entity to be the holders of the keys, and therefore give them the ability to overwhelm the system? And if so, you have to trust and rely on them being good people and not wanting to screw artists or performers. If we consider that many centralised systems have been attempted before and have failed, what blockchains represent is a decentralised system, where you are equal among all peers within the system.



That’s powerful because today, if we put our rights into mp3s or WAV files, they’re all alterable. Wherever they go, there’s no way to talk to them. You have to talk to the service providers that administer them and pay out on them. What I think is a much simpler path is if you create a smart, modern digital asset, which is the music with the metadata, and you write that music & metadata to the blockchain, then what you have is a decentralised way of looking at 360°s of the rights of the asset itself. Therefore, wherever I send that asset, if changes are made at the blockchain level, they will express themselves outwards to the asset.



So the obstacles to overcome are that a bunch of the music industry does not want the transparency that this would engender; and a bunch of the music industry is highly invested in payments not reaching the right people in the right way. But that said, what those parties and players are seeing is that if they’re holding a thousand euros under the table, they’re losing out on a million over the table. This system would allow for massive speed in sync licensing, and in confirming who owns what, as opposed to who we think owns it. And I think the other obstacles are ideological: “we’ve already built everything we need, and we’re going to carry on with that, so you take your fancy blockchain somewhere else.” I think that’s a head-in-the sand attitude. It wouldn’t be the first time; hopefully, it’s the last.

2017: Saxophones No, Flutes Yeah

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The Outline:

There’s no song in the Top 40 right now with a saxophone solo. There’s hardly a defined saxophone part on any of those songs at all, which is incredible because for most of American popular music’s history, the saxophone was the backbone of making a song a hit. In today’s pop, the saxophone is used sparingly, because instead of seeming cool and propelling singles, it runs the risk of making you look corny.



{A} shift — toward electronic production and away from acoustic, as exemplified by the rise of disco in the ’70s — was notable. The saxophone thrived in jazz fusion with guys like Grover Washington Jr., Tom Scott, David Sanborn, and Michael Brecker. But as the genre became gentrified, there was a definite move away from saxophone sections and horn sections, to the sexy saxophone solo.



Big name ’80s pop stars started using the saxophone to create hooks that were catchy, but inescapable and incredibly annoying. And that use took it from being a cool instrument with a strong sound, to being a weird, almost tacky gimmick. Saxophone historians skim over this section of the sax’s perception in spite of the fact that it was the site of a major turn. When George Michael used the saxophone as the intro to “Careless Whisper,” its grooving, sensual riff became a parody quickly. Much to the dismay of saxophone lovers, the indelicate saxophone riffs of ’80s pop became the instrument’s primary associations, and the instrument fell out of fashion.



“I’d say once we hit the 2000s, it’s almost like the saxophone had become extinct,” {professor of woodwinds at Berklee College of Music Jeff} Harrington said. “It’s like a dinosaur now.”



GQ:

Flutes are an incredibly wack instrument. Possibly the wackest. Instruments like the oboe and the clarinet are more sonically irritating, and the douchiness of intentionally complicated instruments like the Chapman stick exceeds the flute’s pompous reputation (which it held well before Jethro Tull inflicted itself on the world). But the flute stands alone at the intersection of irritating sound and annoying personality.



And yet in the hands of “Mask Off” producer Metro Boomin, the historical weight of every shrieking prog rock flute solo and “Actually the term is flautist” ever inflicted on the world evaporates in a cool, blunt-scented breeze and the mournful soul of Tommy Butler’s Selma soundtrack. Through some powerful occult maneuver, Metro’s made the flute not only tolerable, he’s made it bang.



In fact, the flute’s become one of the stickiest trends in hip-hop production. It probably has something to do with the inevitable aural fatigue that audiences developed from Southern mixtape rap’s years-long reliance on maximalist bombast and blaring, Inception-style horn arrangements (something Metro Boomin once specialized in). It might also be related to the surging interest in gentle New Age sounds that’s popped up in other genres like indie rock and dance music.



Or maybe we’ve just been wrong about the flute for all these years. Maybe we let prancing prog rockers and irritating small-time band-class divas get in the way of a perfectly fine and exceptionally chill instrument when we could have been letting it soothe our ears with its mellow tones. Whatever the reason is, it’s starting to seem like this is going to turn out to be the Year of the Flute, and I’m not even a little mad at it.

Blockchain and the Rights Management Renaissance

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Mediachain Labs blog, one year ago:

The problem is simply that no central database exists to keep track of information about music. Specifically, there are two types of information about a piece of music that are critically important: who made it and who owns the rights to it. Right now, this information is fiendishly difficult to track down, to the great detriment of artists, music services and consumers alike.



If we want to enable maximum value flow and creation, we’ve got to solve the data problem first. Given that context, we should view a blockchain solution as a simple metaphor for shared, networked, media metadata.



Platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud have an incentive to find a reliable, long-term solution to the fractured data problem in order to avoid future lawsuits. Spotify seems to be leading the charge, having recently committed to “fix the global problem of bad publishing data once and for all”. They also have the scale and technical resources to ensure the availability and operation of the network.



Mediachain Labs is leading the open source development of Mediachain, a decentralized data network that aims to make it simple for organizations, creators, and developers to share and reuse information about creative works. As a shared metadata network for music, Mediachain offers a uniform interface to data contributed by multiple participants with no central authority. Because Mediachain is open source and decentralized, all participants remain in control of their data and there is no central point of failure.



TechCrunch, today:

Spotify has acquired the Brooklyn-based blockchain startup Mediachain Labs, whose team will join the company’s office in New York where they will work on developing better technology for connecting artists and other rights holders with the tracks hosted on Spotify’s service.



This is an area where Spotify can use some help, as it turns out. Last year, Spotify settled a licensing dispute with the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) in the U.S. over unpaid royalties. Spotify had claimed that it didn’t pay out the royalties because it simply didn’t have the necessary data to help it figure out whose claims were legitimate, or even how to locate the parties. It said it lacked an authoritative database that covered all existing music rights. This opens it up to litigation, which is obviously not the ideal way of managing these payments.



With Mediachain, Spotify potentially has a solution on its hands – but instead of building out a centralized database with music rights information, it looks like it will build a decentralized one. Mediachain says it will turn over the technology it had already built to the open source community as it moves to Spotify.



There’s this announcement – and the dotBlockchain Music Project’s recent alliance with SOCAN, Songtrust, CD Baby, and FUGA – and ASCAP, SACEM, and PRS for Music collaborating on a blockchain-powered “shared decentralized database of music work metadata with real-time update and tracking capabilities” … could we be on the cusp of a rights management renaissance?



Previously and Previously.



Update: CMU Daily once again with the definitive take:

How do you convince the music industry that you’re taking the data issues that continue to hinder the streaming business seriously? Tell em you’re going to fix it via the blockchain and ‘boom’, no one knows what you’re taking about, but boy are they impressed.