8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Quick Take: Breaking a Monster

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Breaking A Monster, a fine documentary on the signing and marketing of ‘tween metal band Unlocking The Truth, is now streaming on Netflix:



This ‘fly-on-the-wall’ style documentary is filled with behind-the-scenes music industry clichés, but only because unfortunately many of these clichés exist and thrive. The closed door meetings with the record company execs are especially uncomfortable. That said, it is amazing how self-aware these kids are. Kudos to them for realizing they need to take a stand, especially against adults out to intimidate them into caving to the record company’s contrived vision of how a young, African-American rock band should be presented. For example, the band shoots down a music video idea that doesn’t ‘match the song’ (despite heated push-back from management) and belligerently and repeatedly keep their team focused on the band’s priority: actually getting to work on their album in a recording studio. I was also struck by how at ease the band is playing Coachella early on, like they’ve played on stages that size dozens of times before. Though I knew of them, I hadn’t followed Unlocking The Truth so I was expecting a ‘screwed over by record label’ downfall to occur in the third act, but the documentary just ended in the midst of the band’s rise. That third act may be yet to come … or maybe not. Regardless, I think these three smart and talented young rockers will do just fine.

Quit the News

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Co-signing this article found on Raptitude:

The news isn’t interested in creating an accurate sample. They select for what’s 1) unusual, 2) awful, and 3) probably going to be popular. So the idea that you can get a meaningful sense of the “state of the world” by watching the news is absurd.



Their selections exploit our negativity bias. We’ve evolved to pay more attention to what’s scary and infuriating, but that doesn’t mean every instance of fear or anger is useful. Once you’ve quit watching, it becomes obvious that it is a primary aim of news reports—not an incidental side-effect—to agitate and dismay the viewer.



Curate your own portfolio. You can get better information about the world from deeper sources, who took more than a half-day to put it together.



I quit watching TV news (and reading the more opinionated news sites) several years ago and I can attest that my life, outlook, and – I truly believe – knowledge of the issues have improved. I used to watch daily news shows that mirrored my liberal preference and thought they were rationally informing me, unlike those ‘other’ news shows. All it took was a month-long media break to clear my head and, upon returning to TV, see these shows for what they were. I was surprised to realize they were just as alarmist, loose with the facts, and conflict-oriented as their conservative counterparts.

How do I stay informed? I subscribe to two fine email newsletters that I read on my lunch break: The Week’s 10 Things You Need To Know Today and Vox’s Vox Sentences. If there are any stories in those that I want to learn more about then I’ll easily find additional articles for a deeper dive. I try not to read news any earlier than the afternoon as my mornings are sacred, dedicated to setting the day’s tone and working undistracted on my most important tasks.

I highly recommend quitting the news.

YouTube, Unpaid Royalty, and Missing Metadata

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The New York Times:

In a persistent problem for the online music business, large numbers of songs have missing or incorrect data about their songwriters and which music publishers represent them, leaving what is widely estimated to be millions of dollars unpaid. The publishers’ association has made a series of deals to address the problem, most recently with Spotify.



On Thursday, YouTube, which is by most estimates the most popular destination for music online, announced that it had reached a settlement with the National Music Publishers’ Association, a trade group, over the complex issue of unpaid songwriting royalties.



The agreement with YouTube {estimated to be worth more than $40 million} will give participating publishers — the companies that traditionally manage songwriting rights, which are separate from those of recordings — access to a list of songs for which YouTube has missing or incomplete rights data. YouTube will then pay any accrued royalties from a fund it has set aside for this purpose.



Again, the services get the all the blame but messy data collection and management within the industry itself is a major part of the problem.

Previously and Previously.

Video: Saving “Happy Birthday”

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Here’s a short video documentary on the sinuous story of that song everybody knows and sings and how overnight it went from being a Warner/Chappell cash cow to the public domain. The affair offers some insight into the often complicated worlds of music publishing and rights management.

For years, global music publisher Warner/Chappell claimed copyright of the “Happy Birthday” song, demanding payment for any public performance of it. Jenn Nelson tells the story of her four-year campaign to prove that the company did not in fact own the rights to the world-famous song, whose tune was composed by two sisters in Kentucky in 1893.



Previously: HERE and HERE and HERE,

Don’t Believe The Vinyl Hype

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The Guardian:

Earlier this week, it was widely reported that vinyl is outselling digital downloads in the UK for the first time since the iTunes store was launched here in 2004. The real story is that sales of downloads are dropping not because vinyl is wooing back digital listeners but because streaming is becoming the default way of consuming digital music.



The relentless spin on the so-called “vinyl revival” is getting ridiculous – as the Daily Mash pointed out in a piece about how vinyl has become more popular than food. The Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) has been spinning this line for the last couple years, since taking over the reins of Record Store Day. Unless you are reissuing Foo Fighters albums to be sold in the supermarket chains that have jumped on the vinyl-revival bandwagon, the situation is nowhere near as VG+ as ERA is suggesting.



We have to ask ourselves why people prefer to buy old records. Is it because vinyl is essentially a retro format, so people naturally look backwards instead of forwards? Is it because the whole culture of music – from the BBC 6Music playlist to festival lineups – is so focused on reliving past glories? I’m guessing it’s because these things are a known quantity, and that is what people want from their records: familiarity, nostalgia, a warm and cosy signifier that can be used in ads for banks, cars and clothes.



Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that people are still buying vinyl, and it’s no bad thing that it’s becoming more widely available. But it seems to have had very little impact on the industry at large, apart from making things even more difficult.

Spotify Ditches SoundCloud Bid (Again)

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Techcrunch:

The Financial Times reported in September that {SoundCloud and Spotify} were in “advanced talks” over an acquisition — things went pretty quiet after that, but we now understand that the deal died this past week. The source told TechCrunch that the company ultimately walked away because it feared that an acquisition could negatively impact its IPO preparation.



Spotify hasn’t officially said it will go public in 2017, but there has been plenty of speculation, including a funding round with incentives tied to a listing. The source said Spotify went cold on SoundCloud because “it doesn’t need an additional licensing headache in a potential IPO year.” That’s in reference to the complexity and financial cost that comes with negotiating with music labels, something that is hugely important to SoundCloud, which has a far larger catalog of tracks than other services because it caters to creatives, indies and remixers.



Spotify is reported to have declined to acquire SoundCloud two other times over the past two years, the FT said, with a proposed price apparently the sticking point on those occasions. Beyond expanding Spotify’s ad network and userbase, a deal was seen as key to strengthening its position as well-funded competitors ramp up their music services.

Music Industry Blog wondered back in September if SoundCloud has already peaked:

Throughout the 2010’s Soundcloud’s growth was impressive, growing from 1 million registered users in May 2010 to 150 million by December 2014. But registered user numbers only ever tell part of the story. The most telling statistic is Soundcloud’s Monthly Active User (MAU) number: 175 million. Impressive enough, and 50 million more than Spotify’s 125 million. But Soundcloud hit that number in August 2014 and it hasn’t reported a bigger number since. In fact, it could well be that Soundcloud hasn’t actually issued a new number since, but instead has simply being restating that number. If it had grown, you can be sure we’d have heard about it. If it had fallen, perhaps not.

The Dark Side Of ‘Mobilizing Your World’

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The Verge:

AT&T’s zero rating model is pretty much the nightmare scenario that internet advocates and pro-competition observers have been warning us about. That’s because AT&T owns DirecTV, and is now giving DirecTV Now privileged access to AT&T’s wireless internet customers. The corruption is so obvious here that it doesn’t need a fancy net neutrality metaphor — AT&T is clearly favoring a company it now owns over competitors.



The company stands to reap massive tolls on the other end of that “most favored nation” deal with DirecTV, because it also offers something called “sponsored data” to other companies that want the same kind of privileged access to AT&T customers. So, for example, if Netflix wants to compete fairly with DirecTV, it would need to pay AT&T to exempt its video traffic from data caps.



This is what ISPs really want the internet to look like: a bundle of premium services that run up the cost of access to their networks. It’s the same game internet companies have been playing from the beginning, when they got the government to classify them as “information services” instead of “telecommunications services” — the ISPs really don’t want to be “dumb pipes,” because there’s less money to be made when you just give people high-quality internet with no restrictions.



They’re using the same playbook: turn the internet into basic cable, and charge everyone for features and content on top of that. Then, charge competitors to compete with their own vertically integrated video services. It’s a two-way toll that ISPs have been trying to erect forever.



Republicans have been trying to gut the FCC for nearly a decade, and between Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress there’s probably enough support to dismantle net neutrality policy, if not the agency itself. If that happens, zero rating and sponsored data schemes could become completely monstrous.



I wish I could offer some optimism here, but I have the sinking feeling there are tough times ahead for us self-employed citizens who rely on an unvarnished internet for our bread and butter.

Music Matters In Our New World

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The Undefeated:

{Nina} Simone revealed the inspiration for her “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life” from 1968’s ‘Nuff Said! (RCA/Victor) and gracefully transitioned into talking about another song from the same project, “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)”. Composed by bassist Gene Taylor 24 hours after the murder of {Martin Luther King Jr.,} in Memphis, Tennessee, the ode became a haunting soundtrack as uprisings ignited across the country. Simone posed an open-ended question to a country eviscerated over civil and human rights and one barreling toward an election that would alter the course of America. “Folks, you’d better stop and think,” she crooned, “Everybody knows we’re on the brink / What will happen / Now that the King is dead.”



“The song is extremely powerful. There’s no conclusion,” she said of the song in PBS’ Blank On Blank. In a time when every slab of concrete was seemingly red with black blood and wet with black tears, she displayed strength, and found vibrancy. “It’s a good time for black people to be alive,” she said. “It’s a lot of hell and a lot of violence. But I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life.”



And here we are, nearly a half-century later.

Cory Doctorow on Writing and the Influence of Science Fiction

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The always thought-provoking Cory Doctorow recently appeared on the London Real podcast, and I enjoyed his thoughts on the process of writing and how good science fiction is influential rather than predictive. These are the kinds of words that help me realize I should get up right now and start making new stuff. Click on the image below to listen from the point he starts talking about these subjects and, if you’re into it, be sure to listen to the rest of the podcast.

“Talent is just not realizing that you’ve practiced.”

— Cory Doctorow on London Real

Sound Design: “Everything You Hear On Film Is A Lie”

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Here’s a fun Ted Talk about the role of sound design in media and how the best examples of this dark art intentionally lie to us:

Sound design is built on deception — when you watch a movie or TV show, nearly all of the sounds you hear are fake. In this audio-rich talk, Tasos Frantzolas explores the role of sound in storytelling and demonstrates just how easily our brains are fooled by what we hear.