8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Remembering D. Boon Of The Minutemen

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Daily Breeze:

Dennes Dale Boon died 30 years ago this month, on Dec. 22, 1985, to be exact.



{As frontman for the Minutemen} Boon had become a talented guitarist with a distinctive staccato picking style that meshed with {Mike} Watt’s increasingly fluid bass playing and {George} Hurley’s innovative, jazz-influenced drumming. They were a part of the punk scene, but the band’s music, with its elements of funk, hard rock, jazz and punk, was unlike anyone else’s on the scene.



Daily Breeze music writer Michael Lev captured it best in this 1985 appreciation of Boon:



“On stage, D. Boon as performer and singer was pained. He didn’t bother to keep his huge body under control. Instead, it grabbed him, flinging him around the stage so it appeared he was holding onto the neck of his guitar for dear life.”



Gary Waleik in The Observer:

D. Boon was a self-described corndog, but he shed his inhibiting outer layer and became much more; a prodigiously talented guitarist, a spectacular showman and a wonderful songwriter and singer. He fronted a band that, though usually labeled “punk” or “post-punk” was sui generis. Minutemen records sound as fresh and challenging today as they did over 30 years ago. But the most ringing endorsement I could offer is that D. Boon was truly one of the nicest men I have ever met, a rare kind soul in a business that usually exalts and rewards the exact opposite.


It almost seems like an understatement to say that the Minutemen changed my life. They opened me up to the idea that a band doesn’t have to be pigeonholed to exist. They introduced me to the art of the lyric. They helped me become politically aware and concerned with what happens in other parts of the planet. They sold me on the worthy ethos of ‘jam econo‘. So much change in so little time … I embraced the Minutemen in their heyday and soon after I’m reading about D. Boon’s fatal accident in a bottom-of-the-page news item in Rolling Stone Magazine. I still listen to them often – unarguably more than any other band that I was into in my teenage years – and I believe I’m still learning from them.

Watch on YouTube

Here’s an ‘Intro To Minutemen’ playlist on Apple Music.
Here are the Minutemen on Spotify.
Here’s the Minutemen channel on YouTube.

Music On The Bones

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The latest Fugitive Waves podcast discusses the fascinating history of Soviet ‘bone records’:

Before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when vinyl was scarce, ingenious Russians began recording banned bootlegged jazz, boogie woogie and rock ‘n’ roll on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives.

“They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole,” says author Anya von Bremzen. “You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan — forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.”


Listen to the podcast here:

Fast Company:

These records only played on a single side, and the quality was low, but they were extremely cheap: A single disc only cost about one ruble on the black market, as opposed to five rubles for a two sided-disc. And it was subversive. According to Artemy Troitsky’s 1987 book Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia, they often contained surprises for the listener: “Let’s say, a few seconds of American rock’n’roll, then a mocking voice in Russian asking: “So, thought you’d take a listen to the latest sounds, eh?” followed by a few choice epithets addressed to fans of stylish rhythms, then silence.”

Soon, an entire underground network of bone music record distributors popped up, called the roentgenizdat, or X-Ray press. Analogous to the samizdat that reproduced censored publications across the Soviet bloc, the roentgenizdat was soon distributing millions of Western records.


Here’s a great TED Talk on X-ray bone records where Stephen Coates asks the question, “What would you risk for the sake of music?”:

Watch on YouTube

And here’s a lively debate over on Discogs.com on whether bone records should be included and cataloged on the site.

SoundCloud Strikes Deal with PRS

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Variety:

Music streaming service SoundCloud has struck a licensing deal with UK-based music rights group PRS for Music, settling a lawsuit and in turn clearing an important hurdle on its way to launch a full-fledged music subscription service. Now, the company just has to get other rights holders back to the table.



SoundCloud has been working for some time on launching a paid subscription service similar to Spotify or Apple Music. However, the company also wants to keep user-generated uploads, remixes and DJ sets on its platform. To this end, it has been looking to offer rights holders the ability to monetize user-generated uploads, similar to the way YouTube has been doing it in the video space.



Music Business Worldwide:

MBW: Do you get a genuine sense from SoundCloud’s side that they have a business ambition to succeed with a subscription platform – and that they’ll remain solvent long enough to do so?



Robert Ashcroft (PRS CEO): It’s clear from our discussions with them that is their intent. I know they have good financial backing. We’re very hopeful that this will be a major service. It has its own particular personality and there’s room in the market for lots of different takes on music services. We do believe that they’re sincere in the evolution of their business.



MBW: Vevo’s looking at a subscription service, Apple Music is already one; Spotify’s conceding ground on the ‘everything free’ rule; YouTube’s even launched Red – a paid-for tier. Now SoundCloud is starting to behave itself. Is there something in the air?



Robert Ashcroft: We very much hope so. We’ve been very public about our feeling that the playing field has not been level between the different kinds of services. We’ve called on the European Commission to examine the boundaries of who can benefit from the hosting defence under safe harbour legislation and who cannot. We’ve called for a clear distinction between those services that are purely passive, like DropBox, and those that are active in that they provide search, curation and various other means of accessing music. We’re in similar discussions with YouTube. My aim is to create a climate were copyright is valued on the internet, and where all of these services can compete with each other on a level playing field.

8D Projects: Eros – “Floating In The Clouds” In Video For ICARO Paragliders

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ICARO Paragliders has used “Floating In The Clouds” by 8DSync artist Eros in their latest video, which was filmed among the wonderful scenery of Macedonia. The special way that the song has been edited to match the video – including a gusty breakdown just past the midsection – really makes this video come alive. Based here in Orlando, Eros is one of our busiest and most requested artists. Check out more of his available catalog on the 8DSync site.

Watch on YouTube

Pandora To Owe More

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Quartz:

For months now, the US Copyright Royalty Board—a three-person government panel that decides how much online radio services have to pay to play artists’ music—has been mulling a tough decision: Increase music licensing rates for the next five years, or lower them? While artists and record labels pushed for higher fees, webcaster services like market leader Pandora insisted on the opposite.



The CRB {has now} announced those new rates, and they are not exactly in Pandora’s favor. While the royalties cost for streaming songs on a subscription platform has dipped a bit, the cost for streaming songs on the more popular ad-supported free-user platform is now higher.



These fraction-of-a-cent changes may seem negligible, but they amount to millions of dollars a year. Last year, Pandora paid $446 million in music licensing costs alone—roughly half of its $921 million revenue. The increased cost for streaming songs on an ad-supported platform means Pandora will have to dip even further into its revenue stream to pay record labels and artists, in the next few years.



All in all, the rate increase is not as dramatic as it could have been: SoundExchange, the royalty distribution platform that represents artists and record labels, had asked the CRB for a rate of $0.0025. Pandora had asked for $0.0011. The new rate is almost exactly in the middle.



Negotiation 101. Aim high, meet in the middle.

Orson Welles’ F For Fake As Storytelling Masterclass

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A video easy from Tony Zhou’s Every Frame a Painting on the classic ’70s Orson Welles film F for Fake (itself a sort of video essay) and how it can teach the fundamentals of good storytelling:

Watch on YouTube

Vox:

{F for Fake is} ostensibly a documentary about an art forger, but Welles (best known as the director of Citizen Kane) eventually builds out the film into more of a freeform essay on the nature of trickery, the impossibility of objective truth, and art’s role as a sort of truth built atop a foundation of falsehoods.



If you’ve never seen F for Fake then do yourself the favor. It’s presently streaming (alongside many other Criterion Collection titles) on Hulu.

This got me thinking about how this storytelling concept could be applied to songwriting. Is there a musical version of the ‘and then’ that should be avoided?

Royalty, Royalty Everywhere

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Ari’s Take:

Before the digital age, royalties were difficult to track, but there were fewer platforms to consume music, so there were far fewer royalty streams to worry about.



With physical sales plummeting, and people shifting from downloading to streaming (like Spotify and Apple Music) and the rise of digital radio (like Pandora and Sirius/XM), there are many more royalties out there, but they can be tracked much easier through sonic recognition and content ID software.



We’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting closer every day.



For indie artists without a label or a publisher, you have to know what these royalties are and know where and how to get them.



Ari Herstand has done a noble service with this informative list of revenue streams for the new-to-it-all artist and songwriter (and it’s a good refresher to those who have been around the block, too). I love pieces like this as they are useful to bookmark and pass on when I encounter an friend or client who wants to learn more about how the sausage is made.

If you’d like to continue your studies, here’s an article titled Now You Know Everything About Music Publishing, as well as a second, completely different article also titled Now You Know Everything About Music Publishing, both hosted by Digital Music News. Now that’s unnecessarily confusing, but appropriately a metaphor for music rights management itself.

The Sad Economics Of Internet Fame

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Fusion:

The disconnect between internet fame and financial security is hard to comprehend for both creators and fans. But it’s the crux of many mid-level web personalities’ lives. Platforms like YouTube mirror the U.S. economy’s yawning wealth gap, and being a part of YouTube’s “middle class” often means grappling daily with the cognitive dissonance of a full comments section and an empty wallet.



Fan-funding sites like Patreon are at the center of a communal movement to fund “smaller YouTubers.” But that definition gets blurry. Is someone with 50,000 subscribers worth supporting financially? How about 200,000? What if people assume you’re too successful to need money, and you’re too proud to tell them otherwise?



Like many other areas of the economy, YouTube has a basic supply and demand problem. Everybody wants to be there, so fledgling performers put up with a lot because they want to be famous.



“It’s not surprising that the failure rate on YouTube would be higher because people aren’t good judges of their own abilities,” [economist Jodi N.] Beggs said. The result is that the market is oversaturated, and subscriber numbers, which rarely make any sense, become the gatekeepers of financial success.



In a 2013 speech, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Alan Krueger said the increase of knowledge about a performer’s life and beliefs due to social media has led to not being able to charge as much for concert tickets. Besides, he said, “most people do not want to think of their favorite singer as greedy,” he said. “Would you rather listen to a singer who is committed to social causes you identify with, or one who is only in it for the money?” If an artist—a YouTuber or Instagram star, for instance—is committed to championing the little guy, they can’t very well look like they’re taking money for their work.



The recent phenomenon of the internet ‘star’ continues to fascinate. These folks sound like the YouTube equivalent of rock bands that van-tour the country by the seat of their pants … sold out shows a thousand miles away, but grueling and necessary day jobs waiting at home. The crucial difference is that the entertainers in this article are relying on third-party platforms outside of their control for their fame, which is partly why their trade is often seen as a calculated, hopeful stepping stone to more traditional media.

(h/t Jon Curtis)

The Expectational Debt of 2015

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My one time music biz collaborator Dave Allen delivers his thoughts on 2015 via Medium:

In a serendipitous moment I happened to read Teju Cole’s article about the famed photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who in 1952 published a book wherein the English title became The Decisive Decision. The original French publication was titled Images a la Sauvette that roughly translates as Images taken on the sly, a much more accurate and nuanced title.



Perhaps we could agree that the internet allows musicians to make music on the sly? Musique á la Sauvette? Cole asserts “The photographer has to be there to begin with, tuned in, tuned up, active.” One might paraphrase that as the musician has to be there to begin with, tuned in and tuned up, active. Different tools are at hand for sure, yet the access to distribution of a musician’s work is now boundless. As for an example of ‘being there to begin with’ I give you Ryan Adams, who has his own studio along with a seemingly endless amount of material, and a work ethic of rather epic proportions. Adams is always on, always there. He sees recording as a never-ending process.



The rest of the piece is equally throughtful and illuminating, also touching on topics like television, income equality, and mindfulness in basketball. Dave’s opinions always make for an absorbing read with plenty to chew on.