8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

When Classic Rockers Embraced The New Wave

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Writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine has tackled a fascinating (to me) subject for Medium’s Cuepoint: the odd collision of classic rockers and the emerging ‘new wave’ in the late ’70s.

Cuepoint:

Three or four years after the revolution, all the upheavals of the back half of the 70s were no longer contained in the underground. Disco and punk, synthesizers and drum machines, hip-hop and new wave — these strange new sounds started to seep into the mainstream and not just through new acts. Baby boomers facing their forties decided to try to dig the new breed, albeit on their own terms.

Erlewine goes on to document amusing efforts of varying success by Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop (working with XTC / future Shriekback keyboardist Barry Andrews), Robert Palmer (collaborating with Gary Numan and Chris Frantz), and even Shaun Cassidy (who enlisted Todd Rundgren to help with his attempted transformation). But he saves most of his wonderment for Paul McCartney’s unlikely embrace of these sounds:

Of all these odd records reckoning with new wave, none were as surprising as Paul McCartney’s McCartney II. Decades later, its cloistered, claustrophobic single “Temporary Secretary” can still startle and so can its accompanying, misshapen album.

On “Temporary Secretary,” McCartney sets his whimsy — which arises in the form of a rhyming, murmured sing-song appropriated from Ian Dury — to a frenzied synthesized loop that undercuts whatever cutesiness he utters. Sounding like a computer in collapse, that loop leaves the lasting impression that McCartney really was attempting to be fashion forward.

The results of these pre-synth era artists coping with onrushing trends would make for a fun compilation album … has anyone done this? Anyway, this is a fine article and worth some time and thought.

SoundCloud Partners With LANDR

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With the introduction of SoundCloud’s paid ‘Go’ service and external pressure to become a more commercial enterprise, there’s been heated speculation that the site might forgo its commitment to the independent musicians and DJs who have been SoundCloud’s emphasis. Today’s news, though a minor announcement to most, may be a signal that music creators will remain the focus of SoundCloud’s long game. Via FACT:

SoundCloud has announced a partnership with online mastering service LANDR that means all users can get free track optimization for the streaming platform. The partnership sees SoundCloud focusing once again on its original market of music creators rather than consumers after the launch of its paid subscription service, SoundCloud Go.

A LANDR spokesman said: “We use exactly the same algorithms but we did some research to find the best output for optimizing the sound of any track on the SoundCloud streaming format. The optimized tracks will only be hosted on SoundCloud and not in LANDR’s track library. It is really aimed at streaming on SoundCloud."

Professional mastering is regardless still mandatory for commercial release (seriously … please), but this is a smart move that not only gives the music uploader a little something extra out of using SoundCloud, but also improves audio consistency throughout the site.

Update, via Ars Technica:

Landr’s landing site describes the mastering process as “complicated and elusive,” then insists that its product, which is almost entirely algorithm-driven, delivers a quality product for small-fry musicians by intentionally limiting how many options they can pick from. “Great design is all about limiting the field,” Landr says. As a result, the company touts that “we’re confident you’ll hear the difference” between professional mastering work and what Landr can pull off.

After our tests of SoundCloud’s new Landr functionality, we can safely agree with that statement—in every bad way possible.

Encouraging Steps Towards Closing The Publisher Data Gap

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Music Industry Blog:

Artist concerns about transparency in streaming services are well founded but it is an eminently fixable problem because virtually all of the necessary data is in place. When a record label or distributor licenses music to a service it literally provides a data file of its music which is then ingested (uploaded) by the service. But when service licenses from a music publisher or PRO there is no such data file, because the recorded works are owned by the labels. Publishers do not even provide a comprehensive list of what works their license covers. So music services instead do a ‘best efforts’ licensing effort, licensing all the key publishers and PROs.

The problem is that until there is a market level solution that sort of action won’t go away. This means any music service operating in the US, where there is a statutory damages system, cannot operate with certainty that it will not face another legal suit with potentially vast damages awarded. The nightmare scenario is that streaming services start pulling out of the US, or restricting their catalogue to identified works (which largely means major publishers only) rather than face potentially fatal legal challenges.

The music industry needs a solution and now just like busses that never come, two arrive at once: Google’s Open Source Validation Tool for DDEX Standard and Canadian PRO (Performing Rights Organization) SOCAN has acquired Medianet essentially as a digital rights reporting play.

Previously.

I sort of feel like the old guy grumbling “we can land a man on the moon but we can’t even (insert impossible thing here)”, but in this data-obsessed age we really should have a centralized publishers database that can be updated and utilized throughout the industry. Hopefully multiple companies getting involved (there are also rumors of Music Reports entering the fray) will finally bear some fruit, and we can begin slowly stumbling our way out of this wild west phase of the streaming economy.

Tearing Up The Rules Of The Album

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Ars Technica:

Teens of Denial couldn’t possibly exist 15 years ago—least of all because songwriter Will Toledo hadn’t yet turned 10 years old. Toledo instead stands as a “new” voice among a younger generation of musicians (ala Chance The Rapper, age 23, or Torres, age 25) who grew up alongside our current digital music ecosystem. As such, Car Seat Headrest’s first original album for a label represents a culmination of many changes the industry has gone through in the past decade-plus: instant accessibility to vast catalogues; the democratization of recording and releasing; the need to share it all immediately.

Perhaps equally as important as making the music, Toledo always had a home for it. His first release (called 1) dates back to spring 2010, and it still lives on Bandcamp (which itself dates back to 2007). At the age of 23, Toledo already has 11 albums and an EP to his name on the Car Seat Headrest Bandcamp page (Teens of Denial will make it an even dozen).

Toledo’s first release for Matador, last year’s Teens of Style, didn’t include a single new song. Instead, the label wanted Car Seat Headrest partially because of this built-up history. Teens of Style essentially acts as a best-of for Toledo’s Bandcamp output, although the musician re-recorded each selected track. This highlights perhaps the most modern characteristic of Car Seat Headrest: any song can be a continuous work in progress.

Over the years, Toledo has kept a consistent presence on Tumblr (a service that coincidentally started the same year as Bandcamp). He posts plenty of ideas and early demos, including a recent Radiohead tribute. This transparency and symbiotic interaction with fans became part of his process. So whenever Toledo made the types of sweeping changes that services like iTunes might demonize, “people commented, but now people don’t really remember that was a thing.”

You may have heard about someone else trying a similar approach earlier this year. Kanye West released his Tidal faux-exclusive The Life of Pablo on February 14, tweaked some tracks in mid-March, and then shocked fans by producing an almost entirely new version on March 31. “What Kanye is doing is a lot more recognizable to younger people who are more used to this sort of low-key LP release,” {Toldeo} said. “Even with official LPs, people get leaks and half-finished versions before the album actually drops, and this only became prevalent with the Internet. People today are used to the having the LP come into shape more slowly and not get dropped all at once, so what Kanye did was brilliant. He got so much shit for it being a disastrous release or whatever, but that’s not what I saw. He understood the power of the Internet, and he was using his massive celebrity to use Tidal like it was the next Bandcamp.”

Hitting The Links

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The Essential Sun Ra

Sun Ra is often cited as the founding father of afro-futurism, a tangent of thought which extends through the mothership connections of Parliament-Funkadelic, to the astral techno of Underground Resistance, to the aquatic, lardossian narratives of Drexciya; his work examines racial identity and the black experience in America through the eyes of an alien visiting humanity. The language of this deconstruction is peppered with his own neologisms, like the “astro-black” of outer space, the “myth-science” or “solar-myth” of creation, right down to the name he chose for his band, “the Arkestra”, a linguistic riff on Noah’s biblical safe haven.

Giant Abandoned Soviet Spaceship Made of Wood

Buran, the Soviet Union’s answer to NASA’s Space Shuttle programme, wasn’t quite as successful as its American rival. Just one flight-capable Buran orbiter (craft OK–1K1) was completed, and flew only once, unmanned, on November 15, 1988. Today, a handful of relics from the Buran programme lie strewn across the former Soviet Union and beyond, from half-finished orbiters to a series of full-scale engineering rigs and other test articles; among them was this wooden wind tunnel model, abandoned for years in a corner of Zhukovsky Airfield in Moscow Oblast.

Electron Microscope Shows How Vinyl LP’s Are Played

Have you ever wondered how a vinyl player actually plays a record? Well, wonder no more. Microscopic Images shared this image on their Twitter some months back, showing what a record’s groove looks like under 1000x magnification.

The Meenakshi Temple of Madurai, India

Meenakshi Temple was originally built by Kulasekarer Pandya in the 6th century BC, but the credit for the present look of the temple goes to the Nayakas, who ruled Madurai from 16th to 18th century. The reign of the Nayaks marks the golden period of Madurai when art, architecture and learning flourished expansively. The riot of colors, however, is a more recent addition.

Graphic Designer Mark Ohe of Matador Records

Mark’s approach to working with a band always began with hearing their ideas for the project first, because, he pointed out, they always had ideas for it. “It’s pretty rare that someone comes to me and says, ‘Hey I’m doing this record, but I don’t know what to do for the cover.’ That almost never happens. What they really usually need is for someone to edit those ideas.”

Who’s To Blame For Music Startups’ Bleak Outlook

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David Pakman in Medium:

(The) bleak outlook for profitability among standalone digital music companies is a direct result of the high royalty rates incumbent upon startups who wish to license digital music for use in their apps. Whether you negotiate voluntary agreements or avail yourself of the existing compulsory licenses, you will not turn a profit. At least, no one ever has. The few that refused to pay these rates were often sued out of existence.

The end result of these perilous market conditions is that the only companies who can afford to be involved with digital music are the internet giants prepared to subsidize their digital music services with profits from their other businesses. The high royalty rates and up-front cash advances required by the record companies prevent profitable, sustainable businesses from emerging. As a result, the recorded music businesses is left only with these giants: Amazon, Apple, YouTube and, to a lesser extent, Spotify and Pandora.

But this is a “crisis” of their own making. Many of us argued for years that it was in the industry’s best interest to create a healthy ecosystem of hundreds or thousands of successful companies, all enjoying successful businesses around music. But those arguments fell on deaf ears, and instead the industry fought repeatedly to raise royalty rates over and over again, despite evidence that not a single company ever achieved profitability.

In my mind, it would have been in the best long-term interests of the recorded music business to enable the widespread success of thousands of companies, each paying fair but not bone-crushing royalties back to labels, artists and publishers. But the high royalty rates imposed upon startups, even after clear signs over the past 19 years that the strategy killed companies, has prevented a healthy ecosystem from emerging. It’s a bed the music industry made for itself, and now it is left to lie in it.

On the other hand, via Hypebot:

The indie music community has embraced Bandcamp and its suite of direct to fan monetization tools. And unlike most music tech startups, Bandcamp, which launched in 2008, has been profitable “in the now-quaint revenues-exceed-expenses sense” since 2012.

Bandcamp grew 35% last year, according to new stats just released by the direct to fan music platform. Fans are paying $4.3 million to artists monthly using the site, including 25,000 records a day.

Subscription-based music streaming “has yet to prove itself to be a viable model, even after hundreds of millions of investment dollars raised and spent,” the company wrote in a blog post. "For our part, we are committed to offering an alternative that we know works.

Update; There’s now a rebuttal to the original piece, via Medium’s Cuepoint:

More and more artists have chosen to go independent, direct to consumer, self-release their art. Stuff like Blockchain is exciting. If the labels are so impossible to deal with, then shouldn’t the investment be in platforms that will succeed in a post-label world? Shouldn’t the new startups, or the established players, be investing in content and talent development directly with artists, in a more substantial way? Shouldn’t they just take their great ideas and bypass the stubborn major labels?

Update 2; via Music Business Blog:

The music industry is in a transition phase. In such periods, the old and new worlds co-exist and collide. There are statistics that both sides of any argument can hold up in their defence, in fact they can often hold up the very same numbers to support opposite perspectives. Similarly, the comparisons you chose to benchmark with, can paint entirely different pictures. Such is the nature of transitions of human and business behaviour. For example, 83% of Spotify’s gross revenue going to rights is clearly too high and unsustainable, yet $0.00098 per song going to artists is also clearly too low and unsustainable. Something needs to give, for both ends of the value chain.

Maybe if/when Spotify gets to 50 million subscribers it will feel it has enough clout to compel rights holders to rethink licensing economics. Perhaps it will take Spotify getting to a 100 million to make that happen. Perhaps it will never happen. But if it doesn’t, the economics of streaming will remain so broken that only companies with ulterior business objectives will remain viable players, enter stage left streaming’s Triple A: Apple, Amazon and Alphabet (Google). The labels need to ask themselves whether that is the streaming future they want…

A Boost for DJ Mixes and the New Streaming ‘Sub-Economy’

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Billboard:

The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) and Dubset have reached a deal that will allow the NMPA’s independent members, both publishing companies and songwriters, to take part in a new streaming “sub-economy” that only recently became technologically feasible. This new revenue source is through derivative works, or pieces of music that are wholly or partially based on others’ creations, like DJ mixes and remixes. Through its MixBANK, Dubset cross-sections these creations and identifies their constituent parts (a vocal line here, one-half of an entire song there), determines the appropriate royalty splits, then services them to its clients, like Apple Music.

Dubset isn’t the only company making advances in this highly technical space. SoundCloud’s new subscription service, Go, uses an undisclosed process to identify derivative works, which its platform has plenty of. (This, despite a recent report to the contrary.)

Hypebot:

Through the Rights Agreement, NMPA members who opt-in will have access to Dubset’s MixBANK platform where they can set terms and rules around how and where their catalog may be used in mix content. Each time a new mix or remix is delivered to MixBANK the clearance rules set by rights holders to determine whether the content is cleared for distribution are applied. Cleared mix and remix content is then made available to legal music services under an approved royalty structure.

Pay no mind to Digital Music News’s shadowy anonymous sources … DJ mixes and remix culture are on the rise in the social sphere.

(Previously)

Update (May 25, 2016); via Hypebot:

Dubset Media announced today that it has reached an agreement with Spotify to use its MixBANK distribution platform. The deal makes it possible for DJs to upload and legally stream their mixes and single track remixes. In addition, the new agreement is expected to enable Spotify listeners to stream radio shows and other user generated mixes that have not been previously legally available to music fans.

‘We Only Sign Artists That We Like As People’

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The [PIAS] blog has a very informative interview with Simon Raymonde (known for his distinctive multi-string bass lines with Cocteau Twins) about his experiences running the Bella Union label. This bit of advice should be especially heeded, in my opinion:

A few years ago I decided I wouldn’t sign anyone I didn’t like as a person.

There’s brilliant bands everywhere. But when you meet a manager who’s an idiot or meet a band and think they’re just not very nice, I don’t want to work with them. Even if I think their music is the best thing ever.

I’ve worked with people over the years where I’ve thought: ‘These people are going to kill me. This manager is going to force me into an early grave.’

We don’t do that anymore. They meet my wife and my cat. We go for coffee and I ask who their manager is, who the agent is, who the lawyer is. If it’s a nice bunch of people, we take the gamble.

Apple Music and Dubset: Good News For SoundCloud?

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Billboard:

Apple has announced an agreement with Dubset Media Holdings that will allow Apple Music to stream remixes and DJ mixes that had previously been absent from licensed services due to copyright issues.

Dubset is a digital distributor that delivers content to digital music services. But unlike other digital distributors, Dubset will use a proprietary technology called MixBank to analyze a remix or long-form DJ mix file, identify recordings inside the file, and properly pay both record labels and music publishers.

Licensing remixes and DJ mixes, both based on original recordings, is incredibly complex. A single mix could have upward of 600 different rights holders. According to {Dubset} CEO Stephen White, a typical mix has 25 to 30 songs that require payments to 25 to 30 record labels and anywhere from two to ten publishers for each track. The licensing has been done in-house at Dubset. Thus far the company has agreements with over 14,000 labels and publishers.

*In many ways, Dubset is like any other distributor. The {streaming} service pays Dubset for the content. Dubset then figures out which label and publishers to pay. It retains a percentage of revenue for the service and pays the creator (the remixer or DJ) a share of revenue. *

Apple is just the start, says White. “The goal is to bring this to all 400 distributors worldwide. When you think about unlocking these millions of hours of content being created, it’s significant monetization for the industry.”

Much of the coverage I’ve seen, such as this article in FACT, assumes that Apple Music will use this alliance to go after SoundCloud. I have my doubts. For one thing, user-generated content isn’t really Apple’s bag (and adding this to the already muddled Apple Music interface would just create more headaches for casual users). My guess is that Dubset’s involvement is related to Beats One (and the inevitable Beats Two, Beats Three, etc) and making the station(s)’s sets ‘on demand’. Presently any radio sets that are on demand will have to consist of 100% pre-cleared music. I bet Apple would love to create more on demand content from the Beats station(s) without restricting their celebrity guest DJs. They would also be able to integrate featured guest DJ sets in Apple Music’s curated ‘For You’ section. Based on the timing of this announcement, I’m wondering if we might hear more at Apple’s event next week … there are rumors of a much-anticipated Apple Music overhaul.

As for SoundCloud, this news bodes well rather than being “ominous”. Apple doesn’t have an exclusive deal with Dubset, as the company openly aims to bring this technology to “all 400 distributors worldwide.” Having a huge corporation like Apple be one of the initial adopters will do a lot to convince others to come on board. What the technology accomplishes, once accepted throughout the industry, should do much to push ‘remix culture’ forward as it goes legit. And SoundCloud, who already dominate the niche of user-generated mixes and content, could end up coming out on top. Dubset’s tech, after all, seems to solve most of the problems that rightsholders have with SoundCloud’s service.