8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Some Podcast Recommendations

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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

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Thump:

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

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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

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Music Industry Blog:

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

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The Quietus:

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.”


Update: Steve Albini vs. Dance Music: A Timeline

8D Projects: JP Soul – You Want Her (Roam Recordings)

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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.

Beyond Rip It Up: Towards A New Definition Of Post Punk

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The Quietus:

So why does post-punk work so well as a brand when its content remains amorphous? [Simon] Reynolds [author of Rip It Up And Start Again] himself defined it as “less a genre of music than a space of possibility”. Yet we can’t lose sight of the fact that the Latin qualifier means after, subsequent or later. Some limitation on duration is also necessary, though application can’t be merely calendar-defined. We have to respond to the term with some reference to musical discipline and its entanglement with punk itself. Is there a compelling argument for digesting the period 78-82 as a single musico-sociological unit? I know not of such a beast. Unless you deconstruct the repeated message broadcast from 1978 onwards that punk was ‘dead’ and that a new dawn was implicit from that point. But punk wasn’t dead. Some of its most critical interventions still lay ahead.



Punk begat vast dissonance and fragmentation. There are no means by which the wealth of music thus engendered in the period 78-84 (to use Reynolds’ own parameters) can be adequately unified. It was all too untidy (and thrilling, as Reynolds conveys well). On the basis of reactions here [at the Leeds ‘post-punk conference’], post-punk has become a little akin to the Human League’s ‘Black Hit Of Space‘, sucking everything into its orbit. Let’s look again at some of the musical subjects this conference tackled: Throbbing Gristle, Orange Juice, Hazel O’Connor, the Fleshtones, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Mission of Burma. It would make for an interesting mix tape. But you can’t imagine too many fans of each artist ever gathering in the same room.


You probably already know how I feel about ‘post-punk.’ Those bands changed my teenage life a lot more than ‘punk’ did. As for a stylistic definition, you know it when you hear it (or even see it) … that’s pretty much the best we can do though Reynolds does make a valiant stab at it in his aforementioned book. The fact that, as a genre, it’s all over the place is part of the attraction. Those were messy times, and ‘post-punk’ was a correspondingly messy thing. Admittedly, I do try to imagine the excitement of recording music in those uncharted waters every time I flick on the studio gear in this present era.

Inside the Rise and Receding of Russia’s Music Industry

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Billboard:

Under communism, the country had just one record label, Melodiya, which was strictly controlled by the government, which made sure that only “safe” records and artists were released and promoted. FM radio simply didn’t exist. Concerts were managed by state-run agencies, and rock musicians were mostly barred from touring. It would be charitable to characterize the last century of the Russian music industry as barebones.



Over the next two decades [following Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms], a music industry was allowed to mature with little or no government involvement, eventually growing to be worth $2 billion annually by the early ’10s, and which faced the same challenges as other, more mature markets, such as the continuing decline in physical sales and the question of growing streaming revenues.



Last year brought the symbolic end of the physical format era in Russia; the segment’s contraction led to the closure of all remaining brick-and mortar outlets of Soyuz, once Russia’s biggest nationwide CD chain.



Meanwhile, companies in the digital space, especially streaming services such as Zvooq and Yandex.Music (the music service of Yandex, “the Russian Google”) appear to be doing well.



“We’ve seen local music services closing down because of [an overall economic downturn in Russia], or losing part of their catalogue, and foreign players leaving,” Konstantin Vorontsov, head of Yandex.Music, told Billboard. “However, demand for digital music isn’t declining… there is growth.”

The Hit Charade: On Algorithms and Creativity

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MIT Technology Review:

Just as computers cannot yet create powerful and imaginative art or prose, they cannot truly appreciate music. And arranging a poignant or compelling music playlist takes a type of insight they don’t have—the ability to find similarities in musical elements and to get the emotional resonance and cultural context of songs. For all the progress being made in artificial intelligence, machines are still hopelessly unimaginative and predictable. This is why Apple has hired hundreds of people to serve as DJs and playlist makers, in addition to the algorithmic recommendations it still offers.



More recently, algorithms have begun producing playlists that can feel a lot more nuanced and tailor-made. The world’s biggest streaming service, Spotify, which has more than 75 million users, is pushing the state of the art, using vast amounts of data to make personalized recommendations.



Spotify’s deep-learning system still has to be trained using millions of example songs, and it would be perplexed by a bold new style of music. What’s more, such algorithms cannot arrange songs in a creative way. Nor can they distinguish between a truly original piece and yet another me-too imitation of a popular sound. (Spotify’s Chris) Johnson acknowledges this limitation, and he says human expertise will remain a key part of Spotify’s algorithms for the foreseeable future.


Though some consider human curation to be elitist, I feel music fans and listeners welcome and crave it. Who doesn’t enjoy a trusted source giving suggestions of cool new music to discover? It’s been the secret of success for certain radio shows, record store clerks, magazine music reviewers, and music blogs. The whole mixtape phenomenon is built on it. My SoundCloud stream is built on it. Basically, if you’re into discovery, you’re into the trusted recommendation … or, in modern industry-speak, “curation”.

Despite my love of human recommendations, I am genuinely curious about Spotify’s algorithmic ‘Discovery’ playlist and want to dig more into it. (There are some technical issues I have with Spotify’s OS X app that keep me from using it more which I won’t go into here.) The team at Spotify seem very confident in what the technology is able to do, and anything that encourages listeners to check out new music is all right by me. But I can’t help but wonder if a human / tastemaker guided algorithm – a mixture of computer recommendation and ‘music fan’ supervision – might be the way to go. From this article, it sounds like this is where we are headed.

An area that I find frustratingly overlooked is the realm of the Pandora-like ‘sounds like’ radio stations. These don’t work for me, not on any of the services, and this ‘radio’ would be my most accessed feature if they did. Pandora drove me crazy because (as an example) I’d program a Joy Division station, and then would hear “Love Will Tear Us Apart” every single time I chose it, but didn’t necessarily want to give it a ‘thumbs down’ and banish the song from its repertoire. I might want to hear it now and then … but not every single time. Of course, I’m not picking solely on Pandora here as none of the services get this radio feature right. If I create a ‘station’ based off Brian Eno’s “Lizard Point” – a beatless, droning composition opening his album Ambient 4: On Land – I’m sure all the services will give me large doses of ’70s art rock instead of the ambient music I’m looking for.

Apple Radio – the one pre-dating Apple Music – tried to address this to a degree with a slider allowing the user to choose if he/she wanted to hear more of the ‘hits’ or, with the slider all the way to the right, to choose an adventurous discovery-oriented path. It wasn’t perfect, but the concept was solid and I would have loved for Apple to fine tune it rather than ditching it altogether in Apple Music at present. Regardless, we’re a long way from computers getting it right (and potentially achieving music snob A.I.) but it’s a fascinating study to see the aims and attempts to move us closer. And, once again, all this effort going into helping listeners find new independent artists is a terrific thing.