8DPromo is presently working this 43rd release for NYC’s Get Up Recordings, the “Internal Waves” single from label co-proprietor Christy Love. Prime time house music elements abound in the original track, ready-made for an extended strobe light work-out. The remix by Londoners Severino & Hifi Sean lays down the swing and the funky 303, while MissB goes into more traditional territory, peppered with pleasingly spacious highlights.
Search Results for: SoundCloud
8D Projects: Venntaur – Just Once (DeepWit Recordings)
Danish label DeepWit Recordings is one of our favorite deep house labels – and we mean ‘deep house’ very much in the traditional, non-diluted sense – so it’s always a pleasure to work with them. This forthcoming release showcases two fine tracks by Finnish producer Venntaur, backed with remixes from Tokyo’s Datakestra and Jason Mitchell, who is the proprietor of another of our client labels, Australia’s Deep House Aficionado. Lush and melodic stuff here, complete with beefy rhythms and dreamy textures throughout. It’s our latest promotions project at 8DPromo.
8D Projects: Urian Hackney – The Box (Cold Busted)
The Los Angeles-based Cold Busted label is another imprint I’ve been working with for a while, since its humble beginnings in Denver, Colorado. Cold Busted has been focused on the funkier, often downtempo, edge of breakbeat music, with a visionary ethos that has allowed it to branch out into cool releases such as this forthcoming single by Urian Hackney.
The Box is a meticulously recorded solo effort from Hackney, whose father and uncles were members of cult Detroit proto-punk band Death, as profiled in the acclaimed documentary A Band Called Death. With The Box – named after his studio in Burlington, Vermont – Urian Hackney presents two songs intended to send the listener back in time to the smooth, funky sonic realm of the ’70s. All instruments were played by Urian, multi-tracked one-by-one to a tape machine through microphones aimed at amplifier cones and drum heads. It comes together sounding like some rare 7” that might be found in DJ Shadow’s record bag.
“You Don’t Own Your Fanbase. You Rent Them.”
It’s been said that we live in an era of “access” – a kind of golden age of artist communications and marketing. Rather than rely upon the faulty medium of the journalist or the tabloid, artists can now talk “directly” to their fans without any intermediary. Well, except for SoundCloud, or Twitter, or Facebook, or…
The reality is that you don’t own your fanbase. You just “access” them. You rent them in exchange for your data. And at moments like this – when you want to end your lease and move to another block – it becomes incredibly clear what the distinction is.
The important thing to realize is that these barriers between fan and artist are entirely artificial. There’s really no reason why they need to exist, other than to impede you from doing exactly what SoundCloud’s frustrated producers want to do: leave.
Terry Matthew’s insightful piece could almost serve as a thesis statement for our blog here. Musicians now live in an incredible time, when autonomous promotion, presentation, and distribution are all completely attainable. But why are so few artists choosing this? As I’ve opined here before, these tools (Facebook, SoundCloud, etc.) are useful, but should compliment the artist’s subservient infrastructure rather than serving as that infrastructure.
Music Break: Law Of Fives
The first installment in a continuing series, each spotlighting five interesting new tracks discovered while navigating the Internet machine. Inspired by Malaclypse the Younger.
Data To Date: The Rapid Rise Of Social And Streaming
Next Big Sound has released a fascinating industry report on the current state of social media and streaming:
Streaming is fast becoming the primary way we consume music, whether that be through the more interactive on-demand services, algorithmically-driven lean-back experiences, the increasingly popular format of human curation and playlists (think Beats One radio or Spotify’s discovery feature), or some combination of the above.
What really blew our minds when tallying these totals was that the number of online plays in just the first six months of the year far exceeds what we tracked in all of 2014, even before the addition of Pandora’s data. Let’s take a moment to consider what impact this could have on the music industry at large. For musicians, their piece of the streaming pie will only continue to grow.
It would seem streaming is here to stay. Is this the final step in the format wars? I mean, what could possibly come after streaming as a music delivery format? Honestly, I’m sort of open to the idea of a combination of streaming, downloads (if you gotta have it), and vinyl or deluxe physical packages as our musical diet from here on out.
The Next Big Sound report also has some news about SoundCloud that would normally be encouraging for them. Instead, it will probably just add to the pressure they are receiving from the majors:
SoundCloud’s play counts continue to climb at a steady rate year over year. Next Big Sound tracked close to 5 billion plays on the service in May 2015, which is twice that of the same month a year before, and five-fold the year prior. At the same time, unless you’re living under said rock, you know that the social streaming service has long been in ongoing negotiations with labels for direct licensing deals, reportedly with the intention of launching a subscription service.
If slow and steady wins the race, SoundCloud could plausibly compete with more mainstream platforms such as Spotify or Rdio. However, SoundCloud provides a valuable niche service in that it is optimized for content such as mix tapes and DJ sets. If striking direct deals with rights holders – integral to legitimizing the service and monetizing content – means they are essentially strong-armed into charging users for a service they were once offered at no cost, they’ll want to see that growth rate remain as stable as it has been.
I sincerely wish them the best of luck with that.
There’s some further dissection of Next Big Sound’s report from Forbes:
You read that right: one trillion streams. That’s the number tracked by Next Big Sound in the first half of 2015 across YouTube, Vevo, Spotify, Rdio, SoundCloud, Vimeo and Pandora. In other words, the average Earthling has streamed more than 140 songs over the past six months. There should be no doubt not only that streaming is here to stay, but that it offers the music industry a level of reach never previously seen in human history.
8D Projects: Kartech – Larrisa (Wind Horse Records)
We’ve been working with the New Delhi-based deep house label Wind Horse Records since the early days of 8DPromo and are excited to be involved in the continuing growth of this ambitious imprint. As Wind Horse moves into its twenty-fifth release, there is more of a global feel, with the Indian talent that label-founder Hamza works hard to expose rubbing shoulders with renowned producers outside of South Asia.
This latest single from Thakur Kartik AKA Kartech exhibits the exotic musicality and expressive range of dynamics that set Wind Horse apart from other house music labels. Indian producers Llewellyn Hilt and Aaryan are on hand to remix, as are Alvaro Hylander, a prolific DJ and label owner (DeepWit Recordings) from Denmark-via-Spain, and UK duo City Soul Project. It’s our latest promotions project here at 8DPromo … here’s a preview of the “Larrisa” single:
The Music Web Is Now So Closed, You Can’t Share Your Favorite Song
Music curation community This Is My Jam is shuttering its service next month. Co-founders Matthew Ogle and Hannah Donovan explained in a blog post that, in addition to wanting to move on to other projects, it became difficult to keep up with changes to services like YouTube, SoundCloud, Twitter and more that the site depends on.
Over 2 million tracks have been shared over the last four years of This Is My Jam’s existence. When it launched, it focused on careful curation over frequent sharing — and that’s what made it special.
If you pull apart some of the backstory behind the end of a service called “This Is My Jam,” you’ll come across an unnerving reality of the way music on the Web is evolving (or devolving).
Apart from This Is My Jam, I still have to think that independent producers and labels ultimately benefit from a more open Web. Embedding players means more data about would-be fans and listens, data that’s hugely valuable to musicians. It means the flexibility to easily get your music where you want it. And ultimately, it means easily facilitated sharing, which is vitally important in an age of abundant music from around the world.
I don’t mean to suggest that we should go back to the tools we had. But simply giving up the possibilities of sharing is a retreat, not an advancement. We ought to be able to do more with the Internet.
I’m probably like a lot of people out there in that I really like This Is My Jam, but I don’t use it that much. That’s too bad as it was a fine, though ultimately flawed, idea. Now and then I’d recall a song that I love and that would inspire me to post it to This Is My Jam, eventually making my account serve as a repository of these great songs that pleasantly interrupted my days. I also know someone who would post a song every morning as a sort of ‘good morning, friends!’ message. Things like this made TIMJ a warm and personable way to share music, a lot more so than what is available on the other music services. Additionally, TIMJ’s main feature which gave you a stream of your friends’ favorite songs — and just their favorite songs, as was the unwritten rule — made for some appealing and educational sonic excursions, especially if you kept your ‘friends’ list limited to those whose musical taste you admired.
But, alas, TIMJ relied on other services that were outside of its control. TIMJ created its stream of music from shares of content already posted on YouTube, SoundCloud, and a few others who are understandably working to drive traffic to their own sites and services. It was an easy peasy work-around from having to cough up licensing fees (technically, it was the host of the original stream paying). So, for reasons described in the Create Digital Music article, TIMJ is doomed as the world of online music becomes more insular within its specific services. Cymbal, who I’ve mentioned previously, will also likely meet this fate.
The oft-repeated moral of the story: relying on all these different services whose only goal is to make profit from your content is sure to end in heartache. I’m not saying to abandon them, but be very aware of your place in their solar system. Rather than having your fan outreach dependent on external services, have them compliment your own self-reliant architecture — preferably based around your own site — which can’t be screwed with.
Beatport Freezes Payments To Labels – And Gives Artists Just 5% Of Streaming Money
In a letter to music rights-holders sent last night and obtained by MBW, Beatport told labels that SFX’s ‘going private’ procedure had “trapped certain earned label payments”. Beatport believes the process will be “coming to an end in the next few weeks, at which time all payments will be able to be made”.
The big problem for the small labels we’ve spoken to is one of cash flow: this blocked payment covers three months of income, from April-June, and was due to be paid last Thursday (July 30). With Beatport accounting for 90% of digital income for some dance labels, such a delay in a primary revenue source risks badly damaging their stability.
This is pretty bad news for the labels concerned, and I’m sure Beatport’s actions here are not as villianous as some in the online world are making it out to be. They are a corporation, and this is the kind of thing corporations do. However, any label deriving 90% of its digital income from one source — and one that’s outside of its control — should be prepared in advance for situations such as this. (And — broken record time — that also applies when labels depend on something like Facebook for their entire fan outreach strategy.)
Meanwhile, Beatport is now taking on SoundCloud by permitting anyone to upload and monetize their own original tracks onto the platform. But there’s a big catch for artists: according to the terms and conditions of Beatport, it will only pay a measly 5% of income for plays of these user-generated streams. That’s for all rights, too.
I was hopeful when Beatport was just setting this up … I spoke to someone there about how they were aiming for this service to be seen as a monetizable alternative to SoundCloud. Using embeddable players that might pay some royalty would be a game-changer, as long as including advertising on our content wasn’t the trade-off. This 5% figure is disappointing, but I don’t understand where it’s coming from. This implies there’s another 95% that is going elsewhere. Their agreement speaks of the payment coming from a ‘pro rata share of funds made available for the payment of streams.’ So, there’s a pool of funds for this royalty (as I understand it), and then a set share of that pool designated for each play, but the label / artist only gets 5% of that. Hmm? Anyway, I look forward to someone explaining this further.
Update: Sources Tell Music Week Beatport Has Paid ‘Trapped’ Royalties To Majors
According to Music Week sources Beatport has already released those “trapped” royalty payments to major labels, but neglected to do the same for indies. Music Week understands that the UK’s indie trade body AIM hasn’t taken kindly to the treatment and has contacted Beatport demanding to see its members paid within 24 hours.
Whoa, if true, but not surprising. The three majors presently have a hold on the ‘new music economy’ via their consistent threats of litigation and non-participation. The Louis CK model more and more seems like a great idea for indies and self-released musicians who want to avoid getting involved in the mess.
Music Break: Steve Cobby
Highly recommending this wonderful nearly two hour mix of pleasant sounds from Steve Cobby (who you may remember from his exploits with Fila Brazillia):
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