8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Moving Past The Jukebox Model

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Wired:

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



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



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



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



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

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

Musik Von Harmonia

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The New Yorker:

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



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



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



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

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

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On The Media:

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



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

Hitting The Links

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Italian Photographer Documents The Ruins Of Former Nightclubs Across Italy

“Discotheques, the symbol of ’80s and ’90s hedonism, were fake marble temples adorned with Greek statues made of gypsum, futuristic spaces of gigantic size, large enough to contain the dreams of success, money, fun of thousands people. And then the dreams are gone, people disappeared and nightclubs became abandoned wrecks, cement whales laid on large empty squares, places inhabited by echo and melancholy.”



Billy Name’s Enigmatic Images Of Warhol’s Silver Factory And The Velvet Underground

Billy {Name} was Warhol’s brief lover, long-term friend and celebrated archivist, documenting the glamourous and surreal goings on of the Silver Factory, which he was commissioned to decorate by the artist in 1964. This decor took the form of coating the East 47th Street space almost entirely in silver foil or silver spray paint – hence its name – and creating a futuristic-looking playground for talents like The Velvet Underground and Edie Sedgwick.



How Punk And Reggae Fought Back Against Racism In The ’70s

Putting black and white bands on stage together was a political statement in itself. We didn’t go on stage shouting “smash the National Front” and all that sloganeering, but we did want to extend the argument and talk about Zimbabwe, South Africa and apartheid, Northern Ireland, sexism and homophobia. We wanted to go, “Look, the National Front is not just against black people, they’re against all of this as well.”



How Brian Eno Created A Quiet Revolution In Music

A proper “furniture music” had to wait until the invention of recorded sound. This made possible a new form of listening, which Eno’s Music for Airports embodies to perfection. Recorded music is infinitely repeatable, and subject to the listeners’ will. We can ignore it or pay attention, as we choose. Ambient music celebrates this special form of listening like no other genre. As Brian Eno said: “I wanted to make something you can slip in and out of.”



HC-TT Human Controlled Tape Transport

The HC-TT Human Controlled Tape Transport is a compact cassette manipulation device that lets you play a cassette tape with your hand, similar to how you scratch a vinyl record. It’s like the love child of turntablism and musique concrète, letting you ‘scratch’ cassette audio recordings and more.

SoundCloud’s Life Raft Floats In Rough Waters

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Digital Music News:

SoundCloud has now finalized an incredibly important licensing deal with Universal Music Group, according to details confirmed by both sides Wednesday morning. Exact details on the tie-up are still trickling in, though SoundCloud is likely paying a handsome pound-of-flesh for UMG’s blessing. That probably includes a sizable equity share for Universal, with upfront payouts also a possibility, according to top-level details not yet confirmed.



The deal leaves Sony Music Entertainment as the lone major label not licensing Soundcloud, with Sony CEO Doug Morris demanding for more tear-downs and payouts than other big label CEOs. As UMG crosses the line, earlier sources predicted that Sony would be more likely to forge an agreement as well, though that still remains a separate negotiation.



With some punishing (and somewhat speculative) details of the arrangement outlined in this article, and the real possibility that Sony will want even further concessions, there’s little likelihood that SoundCloud will resemble its present form this time next year. The service does have the advantage of a huge active listenership as it begins this transformation, but it’s safe to say the majority of those users are interested in what makes SoundCloud different and more interactive than the other digital service providers. If new stipulations force SoundCloud to homogenize towards another free tier / subscription tier streaming service then it’s anyone’s guess how they will fare.

David Bowie’s Music Industry Future Vision

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The Week:

{David} Bowie’s capacity for groundbreaking even extended into the arena of economics. In 1997, he pioneered the idea of using his future royalty payments as backing for financial securities that could be sold on the markets to investors. The so-called “Bowie bonds” themselves didn’t work out too well. But the idea of turning the streams of royalty payments from intellectual property rights into a financial security took off in film rights, comic strips, pharmaceuticals, restaurant franchises, and more. Such oddball securities now make up 21 percent of the U.S. market for asset-backed insurance.



But what’s even more interesting is why Bowie cooked up this idea. In 2002, in the heyday of Napster and the free file-sharing craze, Bowie told The New York Times he thought the entire business model of the music industry was collapsing. Fourteen years later, things did not pan out as dramatically as Bowie predicted — but he got the basic thrust right.



David Bowie in The New York Times, 2002:

”I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way,” he said. ”The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.”



”Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,” he added. ”So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

Untangling Streaming’s Copyright Conundrum

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For publishers, purchases result in mechanical royalties that are paid by record labels, which must match their recordings to the associated songwriters and pay the publishers accordingly. In contrast, streaming royalties are paid by the streaming service, shifting the administrative burden to companies like Spotify. Both purchases and on-demand streams require mechanical licenses to be obtained from publishers. This is where Spotify appears to have problems — it does not have publishing licenses for all the songs it streams.

A key problem is the compulsory license used by subscription services. A subscription service doesn’t need to secure mechanical licenses from publishers in advance of adding their musical works to its catalog. It can send what’s called a notice of intent and simply pay the appropriate royalties. But it’s not quite that easy in practice.

Because record labels are not required to provide publishing information associated with their sound recordings, services don’t always know which publishers they’re supposed to contact and pay. The end result is an incomplete record of songwriting credits and publishers for tens of millions of tracks.

Major music companies, which have equity in Spotify, want the streaming space to grow and believe imposing damages “could trigger mutually assured destruction,” one industry participant told Billboard. That could explain why some publishers are trying to reach a resolution with Spotify through the NMPA that would deliver back royalties in return for foregoing legal action.

Here’s the thing about copyright law: historically, as new technologies come along, copyright has a lot of trouble dealing with them. And, typically, the pattern is that the industry freaks out and tries to stop the new technology, but eventually someone duct tapes on a new bit of copyright law to cover it. Unfortunately, this means that there are all these weird periphery sections of copyright law that are supposed to apply to specific circumstances, which then get made obsolete by later technological situations, and it leads to lots of confusion and anger… and lawsuits.

There is also a complex bit of copyright law, known as Section 115, which gives the specifics on compulsory licensing of mechanical licenses in certain circumstances, if certain rules are followed. But here’s the crazy thing: it’s 2016 now, streaming services have been around for years, and still no one’s entirely sure if Section 115 compulsories actually apply to them. It’s never actually been tested and many services (including Spotify) assume they do, but a potentially big question is whether or not they really do.

Spotify can (and likely will) argue that it complied with the rules required in Section 115(b) for a “notice of intention” in order to get the compulsory mechanical license. Basically, Spotify would argue that it did what is necessary to get a compulsory mechanical license when it was unsure of who held the publishing/songwriting rights on a song. If it actually did do this, {David} Lowery’s case may be dead in the water — though I’m guessing Lowery’s lawyers will argue that it failed in some aspect of properly using Section 115 — or, as mentioned above, that Section 115 doesn’t actually apply to streaming services. If Spotify did not actually follow Section 115’s rules, then Lowery’s case suddenly is a lot stronger. Similarly, if a court suddenly determines that Section 115 doesn’t apply… well, then a lot of streaming services are in serious trouble.

Make no mistake, people … we – the music industry – are at fault here. Our data is fucked and in some cases non-existent. We all know it.

Some labels / distributors don’t upload the relevant meta or do and it’s corrupt and thus this situation arises. We need a global rights database … we’ve needed one for years. It’s time for this to be actioned properly with full support from every corner of the business. Until now much of the industry has been a bunch of lazy bastards cutting corners or uploading bad data at the expense of our life blood – the artists. That is unacceptable. If the meta was there Spotify would pay.

And despite having blanket licenses in place we are letting the services we deliver to take the blame for our industry-wide tardy incompetence. It actually saddens me that of all the digital service providers {David Lowrey} could have chosen to go after he’s going after one that actually recognizes this fact and are actively trying to build one. If Spotify are found to be at fault here every DSP will be guilty of this without exception. But I believe the fundamental fault here lies with us, the industry. Not the service … and we have a collective responsibility to sort this out.

Streaming’s Elephant In The Room

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Music Business World:

If you missed it, video music streams – YouTube with a bit of Vevo, essentially – were bigger and grew faster than audio streaming services in 2015 {according to recent Nielson data}. That’s all audio streaming services combined – including AOL, Beats Music (RIP), Cricket, Google Play Music, Medianet, Rdio (RIP), Rhapsody, Slacker and Spotify.



In 2016, then, the music business’s quest to restrict YouTube’s dominance of ‘free’ music looks like a bigger challenge than ever before. “This is absolutely the legacy Lucian {Grainge} is determined to leave,” one ally of the UMG boss recently told MBW – referring to Grainge’s recently-inked new contract with Vivendi. “Getting ‘free’ under control and dealing with the YouTube problem is his No.1 business priority.”



Yet there might be one more ace up the sleeve of Grainge and his old mentor Doug Morris. Sony and UMG are both major shareholders in Vevo – a platform that’s part-rival, part-partner, part-moneymaker and part-irritant to YouTube.



As many have pointed out, if Vevo’s YouTube relationship fell apart, it would be a in a world of pain. Lots of people can’t even distinguish between the two brands. But what’s often overlooked is that the Vevo/YouTube balance is more reciprocal than many appreciate. According to ComScore, Vevo uploads bring in around 38% of YouTube’s monthly traffic. (Videos from Warner Music, which isn’t an investor in Vevo, independently attract another 20%.) Messing with Vevo means messing with a significant chunk of YouTube’s existing $9bn annual revenue.



With all this talk of Spotify and publishing lawsuits, YouTube’s dominance in the free arena remains the hulking elephant in the room. Personally, I’m much more eager to see them reined in than Spotify.

Total Music Streams Doubled In 2015

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Digital Music News:

Song downloads plunged another 12.5 percent last year, and a depressing 23.4 percent since 2013, according to preliminary US-based stats from Nielsen Music. Indeed, downloading is plunging downward, but streaming is absolutely soaring: according to the same dataset, the total number of streams doubled in just one year. As in, gained 100 percent, in 365 days.



Also from Digital Music News:

Accordingly, the music world will witness a more dramatic download plunge in 2016, with 12.5 percent shifting towards 18 percent, according to conservative DMN estimates. The decline will subsequently accelerate to 25 percent in 2017, with a 40 percent drop anticipated in 2019.



The reasons for this aren’t mysterious: last year, the number of music streams doubled to 317.2 billion streams in the US alone, thanks to explosive growth across Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music, among others. That is directly assassinating paid downloads, with Apple accelerating the plunge by aggressively pushing consumers towards Apple Music streaming accounts.



The rest, as they say, will be history, with downloads occupying a niche space in music listening experience, alongside CDs and other marginalized formats.



The tone of these articles is a little gloomy, which is interesting from a site called Digital Music News. I see the download decline as inevitable by nature of the technology (just wait until the wireless / streaming CDJ is invented for the club DJs), and the rapid acceptance of streaming as a good outcome. Those numbers will get higher and higher as download numbers plummet. It changes the game, but I’m confident fleet-footed independent labels will adapt and succeed.

8D Projects: E1sbar’s “Du Jour” In Nude Nite Video (NSFW)

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Now here’s a spicy music license from our 8DSync agency. Nude Nite is a annual event held in Orlando and Tampa that focuses on artistic nudes and it’s the largest event of its kind in the country. Nude Nite brings together hundreds of artists for three evenings of visual art, performance, and a cast of characters both in costume and out. Before each new show a video teaser is created with highlights from the past year’s event. This latest video features the lovely sound of E1sbar’s “Du Jour” to accompany footage from the sensual festivity. As may be obvious, this video is probably not safe for work. You can listen to more tracks from E1sbar HERE and you can find info about Nude Nite HERE.