Brian Eno: I am my own worst critic.
Cat: Not while I'm alive. pic.twitter.com/OZWXGdUu25
— Mark Baker (@1630revello) October 6, 2015
Hey Google, That’s Not Me
As a roundabout way to admit that I don’t ‘Google’ myself too often, it was brought to my attention today that something odd happens when one does a search for ‘Q-Burns’. The info panel that comes up on the right side of the Google search page looks like this:
OK, that’s not my photo. That’s a picture of my friend Brett Johnson, who I have worked with many times but that’s no reason for him to inadvertently take over my identity.
I put a call out to Twitter for theories on this mishap. Pete Dafeet helpfully pointed out that the photo is sourced from a YouTube still on my Reverb Nation page. No offense, Reverb Nation, but I haven’t touched my page there in over five years, and it seems odd that this is where Google’s robots would choose to grab my ‘artist photo.’
On Pete’s advice, I deleted the video from Reverb Nation (which you can watch here if you’d like … it’s for my remix of Brett Johnson’s “Missing You”) which in turn deleted the offending photo from my Reverb Nation page. It will be interesting to see how long it will take Google to change my default image in its search results and, even more interesting, what its robots might replace it with.
So, if you’re like me and don’t ‘Google’ yourself that often, and are a musician or are in a band, you might want to do so to see what image is attached to your results.
Update: It looks like deleting that video from Reverb Nation did the trick.
EDM After The Drop
I’m not one to complain about EDM – it’s sort of like complaining about the weather on Mars to me – and SFX’s troubles just give me a headache, so I usually avoid posting here about either. But this article on NPR regarding the intertwined futures of the two is a great read.
This section gave me a giggle, and seriously makes some sense:
Few acts today stand with one foot in SFX’s world and another in the underground, says Marea Stamper, who DJs and produces music as the Black Madonna and works as a creative director and talent buyer at Chicago club Smart Bar. “It’s like comparing Kiss to the Clash,” she observes. “They’re just not related.”
[Music journalist Philip] Sherburne agrees with Stamper’s comparison between SFX-scale acts and vintage pop-metal bands. “Just sonically, Avicii or mainstream EDM sounds to me like Van Halen’s ‘Jump,'” Sherburne says. “It’s the same synthesizers; it’s the same pleasure centers. You could say that Alesso is Bon Jovi. Bon Jovi took metal or hard rock and aimed it squarely at a very mainstream, middle-American public. That’s exactly the same thing: These artists have taken what was once a subculture and redesigned it along a pop format. I don’t know the economics of hair metal, but it seems to me pretty clear that [with EDM] we’re in the era of the Wingers and the Whitesnakes.”
Drew Daniel of Matmos and Soft Pink Truth is also perceptive and a bit nostalgic:
“There were always limits and doubts that I had about the utopian ambitions of the rave era, but there was still a feeling that raving could mean cutting ties to business as usual,” Daniel says. “It’s epitomized in that kind of hilarious gatefold drawing inside one of those early Prodigy LPs.”
The artwork for the 1994 album Music for the Jilted Generation shows a long-haired raver cutting a bridge that connects the toxic, heavily policed city to an idyllic meadow.
“That exemplifies this idea that radical forms of dance music could also lead to radical forms of creating community,” Daniel says. “There’s always been a spectrum, so I don’t want to say there used to be a good thing and now there’s a terrible thing — that’s overly simplified.”
Be sure to check out the full article.
Full Stack Music: 1 Trillion Streams, 200 Million Tickets
Going back to 1999, the record company would use radio as a way to get fans to discover a new act, then monetize that investment, primarily via selling “on-demand” access in the form of CDs and, finally, drive additional discovery by subsidizing touring (known as “tour support;” a label would underwrite some of the cost of touring to help build an audience to whom to sell CDs). Touring represented a small percentage of artist income.
[Fast forward to 2015:] Over the next few years we will see [the] connection between streaming [i.e. “on-demand” access] and ticket sales become completely explicit. Streaming services will increasingly make it seamless for fans using their services to see when the artist has a local show; Songkick’s existing API partnerships with Deezer, SoundCloud, Spotify and YouTube are hints at what this could look like. It’s not impossible to imagine a time when you could possibly buy tickets directly from your favorite artist right inside your streaming service.
When that happens, artists will finally be able to see a connected picture of how their music is distributed and monetized. An act who gets 100 million streams will see that 10 million of those were monetized via paying subscribers, 90 million by ads and another 5 million fans via ticket purchases. The outcome will be a more seamless experience that results in casual music fans attending more concerts.
The key point across all of this is that the central, most valuable asset of streaming music services will be the listener data they generate. As we shift from offline radio to online streaming, artists will know how those 1 trillion tracks of music were streamed — which fan listened to them, where they were based, which concert tickets they purchased in the past — and be able to tailor personalized and richer experiences to their fans.
The TechCrunch article quoted above was published three days ago. Seems a bit prescient, as the same site revealed this breaking story earlier today:
[Pandora] just announced it will purchase Ticketfly, a Ticketmaster-type site, for $450m in cash and stock. Pandora says in a press release that Ticketfly’s service will allow Pandora listeners to better find live music events.
“This is a game-changer for Pandora – and much more importantly – a game-changer for music,” said Brian McAndrews, chief executive officer at Pandora, in a released statement today.
It’s likely that Pandora will use this extensive data set to attempt to sell tickets through Ticketfly to events it knows listeners will enjoy.
Some Podcast Recommendations
On the latest episode of Road Work, John Roderick has some deep thoughts about a culture where we are all artists and the difficulty of filtering the truly great works in a society where everyone is creating. The Peaches record store chain even gets mentioned. This particular discussion starts at around 23:00 … listen here via Overcast..
I also enjoyed this incisive discussion on The Talk Show about advertising, the philosophy of content blockers, and attitudes towards piracy … Marco Arment and John Gruber get into these subjects pretty much straight away. Listen here via Overcast..
The “Blurred Lines” Verdict And Dance Music
The [“Blurred Lines”] verdict has, perhaps unintentionally, shifted the interpretation of music copyright beyond composition, towards sound itself. This poses an interesting problem for electronic music producers whose personas are, through hours spent toiling over oscillators and EQs, often linked to intentionally crafted sonic characteristics. How much can these artists legally grasp for to protect the sound that they have created from a deluge of imitators?
In this piece Thump speaks with UK Music Lawyer Ben Challis who, like me, feels this verdict was wrong-headed and has troubling implications for creators (and not just in music, or dance music, when you really think about it).
Ben Challis: My personal opinion was that the jury got it wrong. It’s a very grey area and everyone made those puns about “blurred lines,” but it is a very grey area and judges have always struggled to define what is inspiration and what’s appropriation. Yes, the two recordings sound pretty similar, but the whole case is about the song, and in my own personal opinion the songs are not similar. If the case had been brought by the company that owned the sound recording I might have supported the decision.
Thump: What’s the difference between an electronic musician hearing another contemporary track and saying “I want to make that sound,” and Pharrell Williams saying “I really like that aural quality, that sound that Marvin Gaye had.” In both cases, you are trying to replicate a specific quality, a specific sound, correct?
Ben Challis: Correct. I don’t think there is a difference in what you’re saying or the question you’re asking. It’s the same question and of course again you can be influenced by someone, you can be inspired by someone, that’s fine in legal terms. What you can’t do is appropriate someone else’s work or copy their work, or at least copy a substantial amount of their work.
Update: I also ran across this fine article for WIPO Magazine by Ben Challis that goes into greater detail about the “Blurred Lines” verdict and gives some historical, legal background.
As Time Magazine put it, the decision would have a “chilling effect” on future song writing. Some went further, arguing that sampling should be recognized as an integral part of modern music creation, and that the case showed that copyright law was out of touch with current methods of music production. There are only a limited number of notes on the standard musical scale and surely it was now generally accepted that certain expressions cannot be subject to copyright, they said. Others argued that one of the purposes of copyright is to encourage creativity, not stifle it – hence the position that copyright only protects the expression of ideas, not ideas themselves. And yet others contended that transformative use can, at least in the United States, be protected as fair use. The general feeling seemed to be: “some protection is good – too much protection is not good”. As ever, it’s all down to where you draw the line.
Unsurprisingly, an appeal in the Blurred Lines case has already been formally announced.
Rise of the Synthesizer
Here’s a fantastic article in Collector’s Weekly with a selected history of the synthesizer, focusing on Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits who just got the old name back and is restarting the brand.
This section on the making of Switched-On Bach paints a remarkable pitcture of the early days:
In a word, synthesizers in 1974 sucked. Sure, their vintage cred looks cool from 2015, but all synthesizers in 1974 were monophonic, which meant they could only produce one note at a time. That was a major headache if you were Wendy Carlos and you had made it your mission to include a composition such as Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 3” on “Switched-On Bach.” Because her Moog was monophonic, Carlos had to play the notes for each of the concerto’s nine stringed instruments—as well as the harpsichord part—one at a time. Worse, Carlos was forced to play each note in each of the chords any of those instruments might be required to produce one at a time, too.
As if that limitation were not hobbling enough, early synthesizers, including the Moog, were notoriously bad at staying in tune, which meant Carlos typically had to work in bursts—often lasting no more than 5 seconds at a time—before the tone she had found by twisting one knob this way and another that way had degraded. Once a clean burst was recorded, the tape would be rewound, cued up, and the next burst would be added in real time. It was a painstaking procedure, requiring endless takes. In retrospect, that a project like “Switched-On Bach” was completed at all is something of a miracle.
The article is a bit of a ‘long read’ but is totally worth it.
Unplugging The Rebellious Jukebox
At the Future Music Forum, Frukt’s Jack Horner observed that most music genres, and indeed media as a whole, are becoming age agnostic, which means that it is really hard for Generation Edge [i.e. our current pre-teens and adolescents] to find music that they can own, that their mum and dad aren’t going to sing along to too. This is the price to be paid for media and brands having successfully convinced aging 30 and 40 somethings that they are still young at heart and in the pocket. So with no music subculture to cling to Generation Edge has instead gravitated to YouTube stars.
For those not in the target demographic, it can sometimes be difficult to grasp exactly what the creative value is of many YouTubers. But that generational inability to grasp the essence of YouTube talent is exactly the same dynamic that music always had when it was the spearhead for youth rebellion. A kid trying to explain to his mum why Stampy Does Minecraft is worth watching hours on end is simply a 21st century rerun of kids trying to convince their parents of the musical worth of Elvis, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols and so on. That is the entire point of a youth culture – older generations aren’t meant to get it.
I’m not going to go all ‘old man shaking fist’ on this, but it does present interesting challenges for the music industry. First of all, the author’s observation on the effect of music no longer being seen as ‘rebellious’ by teenagers is keen. I’ve long believed that youth-led cultural changes related to music would start to be driven more by technology than sound or style as ubiquitous access to a world of recordings makes genre labels passé. And the fact that the YouTube movement is being driven by content creating peers of ‘Generation Edge’ (ugh – I will shake my fist at that term, actually) is a bit cool and kind of sci-fi, really. Encouraging music integration into this content will probably be key, which would require an open embrace of ‘remix culture‘ by the powers that be. Services like Flipagram seem to be on the cusp.
Sample Clearance With Steve Albini
Seeking clearance for the vocal sample, Powell emailed Albini, saying how much the music of Big Black had meant to him and explaining what he did. Mr Albini subsequently replied that though it seemed that “you’ve got a cool thing set up for yourself” he was hardly partial to the sort of fruity EBM that Powell makes. “I am absolutely the wrong audience for this kind of music. I’ve always detested mechanized dance music, its stupid simplicity, the clubs where it was played, the people who went to those clubs, the drugs they took, the shit they liked to talk about, the clothes they wore, the battles they fought amongst each other… basically all of it, 100 percent hated every scrap.”
Oh dear. Albini continued: “The electronic music I liked was radical and different, shit like the White Noise, Xenakis, Suicide, Kraftwerk, and the earliest stuff form Cabaret Voltaire, SPK and DAF. When that scene and those people got co-opted by dance/club music I felt like we’d lost a war. I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth. So I am against what you’re into, and an enemy of where you come from”.
Despite this, Albini was quite happy to let Powell use the vocal sample: “I have no problem with what you’re doing,” he wrote. “I haven’t bothered listening to the links, mainly because I’m in a hotel with crappy internet at the moment but also because it probably wouldn’t be to my taste and that wouldn’t help either of us. In other words, you’re welcome to do whatever you like with whatever of mine you’ve gotten your hands on. Don’t care. Enjoy yourself.”
8D Projects: JP Soul – You Want Her (Roam Recordings)
Our intimate relationship with San Francisco and its labels continues with this latest release for veteran bay area deep house imprint Roam Recordings. Proprietor and DJ resident JP Soul takes the reigns for this single, revealing the enticingly slinky “You Want Her” and its deeply hypnotic remix by Glasgow’s The Revenge. As a bonus, JP collaborates with Hector Works impresario Anthony Mansfield on the melodic mid-tempo wonder that is “Everything Is Real”. Serious stuff … and it’s one of our latest 8DPromo projects.
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