8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

Ghosts of Christmas Past

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I was obsessed with my Tascam 246 Portastudio. I mowed a bunch of lawns, saved my money, and somehow found the Tascam for sale (cheap!) in the local newspaper. A church was selling it. The Tascam was practically new. I assumed the church bought it to record choirs or whatever and then realized a four-track multitrack recorder was more than what was needed. 

I lucked out. At the time (1986), the 246 was the Rolls-Royce of Tascam four-track recorders. It had features like two speeds (you could run the tape faster for better audio quality), pitch control (handy for creative tomfoolery), and an effective dbx noise reduction system. I learned most of what I know about recording from my experiences with that Portastudio. I recorded my punk band, one-off ‘bands’ with various friends, and my solo experimentations. I ended my teenage years by recording almost every day. 

I was a fan of albums over songs, so I was always recording with some future ‘album’ in mind. Sometimes I assembled songs into an album, fitting them snuggly on a 60-minute cassette — or a 90-minute cassette if I was feeling proggy. I was always looking for ways to connect songs for these imagined albums, or finding ideas that maintained my interest for the time it took to record a long-player from scratch.

It was on a Halloween — again, probably 1986 — that I walked into a shopping mall and heard Christmas songs. Though we now accept the Christmas season seemingly starting earlier each year, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How dare anyone play Christmas music on Halloween? At the very least, someone should ‘spookify’ the songs, giving the holiday standards a ghostly twist. 

Light bulb moment — my next album project was born. I called it something like Have a Spooky Christmas, but I don’t know for sure. I don’t remember a lot about it. 

There’s a box in my closet with all the original four-track cassette tapes from those years. But I can’t play them without a Tascam 246 — these are one-sided cassettes recorded on four-tracks. They’re at double speed, encoded with the 246’s aggressive dbx noise reduction that rips the sound quality apart when played on anything else. 

Maybe someday I’ll hear this (and my other teenage tape experiments) again. But, for now, it sits only in my fractured memory. Chances are it sounds better trapped in nostalgia. In my experience, my music never sounds as good as I remember it. That doesn’t mean a lot of it sounds terrible — just not as good as I think it will. 

Here’s what I do remember:

  • A version of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” turned into a horror soundscape, voices ominously whispering the unaltered lyrics revealing the creepiness of the words: “He sees you when you’re sleeping … he knows when you’re awake …”
  • “Jingle Bells” as a funeral dirge. The “laughing all the way” lyric triggered multi-tracked tortured, maniacal cackling. 
  • “Twelve Days of Christmas” was epic. It was a somewhat straight cover musically, but I substituted the various items (turtle doves, lords-a-leaping, etc.) with sounds from Halloween sound effect records. Thus, “On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: (werewolf howling).” This track was a particular endurance test (just like the real song) as it cycled through all the Halloween sound effects in reverse order as the song went along. This was long before I ever touched a digital sampler, so I have no idea how I technically pulled this off.
  • Out of all the tape’s songs I want to hear again, “Silent Night” sticks out. I remember creating all sorts of droning ambient tones and noises as the initial music bed. Then, I plucked out the “Silent Night” melody from memory using an echoed piano-ish Juno-106 patch. I didn’t rehearse and didn’t know the song ahead of time — I figured it out while the tape was recording, one take only. This is my memory talking again, but I recall the song ending up especially spacious, mysterious, and melancholy-sounding. It was my personal favorite on the album.
  • I know I recorded two or three other songs. I did a strange version of “Blue Christmas,” but I don’t remember anything about it except that I drearily repeated the song’s opening line throughout. 

I filled a 60-minute cassette, dubbed off about ten copies, and gave them to my close friends as Christmas presents. No doubt, confusion and concern for my well-being followed.

Someday I’ll get ahold of a Tascam 246 and go through this box of four-track tapes. Those old Portastudios aren’t cheap nowadays (retro fever — catch it!), so it won’t happen anytime soon. But, when it does, the spooky Christmas album by 17-year old me is the first thing I’ll revisit. 

I’d love to follow up this post on a future Christmas day with a stream of this odd early attempt at an album. But only if it sounds at least half as good as it does as I sit here remembering it. No promises. 

I hope you’re having a wonderful Christmas day.

An In-Store Music Mystery

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Last month, an episode of the podcast Reply All aired that included a music mystery. Brian, the protagonist, recorded a jazzy version of a Christmas song with his friends, burned a few CDs, and uploaded it to YouTube. After views (and listens) never broke double-digits, he forgot about the song. And then, months later, he hears his song playing over the speakers as he shops in a major grocery store chain.

It’s a fun episode, and you should listen to it before reading any further into this post. I’ll end up spoiling it for you. Here you go:

Interesting, eh? The mystery is unsolved. The first question is: how would anyone get ahold of the song? It’s verified that Brian or his friends did not distribute the song through a service like CD Baby. Someone would need the CD or, more likely, the ability to rip music from YouTube. Next: How did the song get into the grocery store? At first, it’s naïvely thought that an employee played the music, but major stores all use music services like Mood Media (who now own Muzak, which you’ve heard of). This is mostly for licensing and rights purposes — it saves the stores from having to individually clear the rights to play music in a commercial establishment.1This leads to a fascinating discussion in the podcast about how the services select music for in-store play. For example, a song’s tempo should resemble the rate a shopper is pushing a cart down an aisle. Seriously, listen to the podcast if you haven’t. But a service like Mood Media would only acquire music submitted to them. This submission could happen directly or through a distributor like CD Baby.

There’s also an Occam’s razor theory that Brian misheard the music in the store and mistook it for his song. He’s given some entertaining tests to find out how well he can identify music. Brian passes with flying colors — he’s got an exceptional ear.

There are other theories thrown about, like the unlikely idea that the music service is pirating Christmas songs to avoid paying royalties. When you think about it, that’s more trouble than it’s worth — a large company isn’t going to spend time trawling YouTube and ripping songs, and if caught, the penalties and reputational harm would be enormous.

The episode ends with a big shrug. The case of the errant Christmas song remains a mystery. The hosts thought through every possible theory, and each is flat-out wrong or unverifiable. 

But I have a theory. It’s a theory that’s not touched on in the episode. And, if Brian did hear his song, I bet I’m on to something. I wrote the Reply All team to let them know my idea. Here’s what I told them:

My guess is the song was indeed unscrupulously downloaded and put into circulation. But it wasn’t the music supplier who did this. The clue was when the representative asked if the song could be available from an aggregator like CD Baby.

Let me now give you two examples that will help illustrate my theory:

Check out this article about a ‘music artist’ grabbing songs that don’t have many plays, downloading them, and then releasing them as his own (via 5 Magazine). 

And on my blog, I wrote about Kevin MacLeod, who makes music and lets people use it for free in their YouTube videos in exchange for credit. But then someone downloaded his songs and, claiming to be him, registered them with YouTube’s Content ID. This unsavory person was able to monetize the videos that are using Kevin’s music.

So, here’s my theory: Someone is searching YouTube looking for Xmas songs with very low play counts. I’m sure there’s a lot of unreleased, amateur Christmas music on YouTube. And, the lower the play count, the less likely anyone uncovers this scheme. This individual then downloads the songs using a stream-ripper and then collects them into a Christmas ‘album.’ Then this ‘album’ is sent to a service like CD Baby or directly to an in-store music service. The ‘album’ is released under this individual’s name — not Brian’s — to get royalties and payments from places like major grocery store chains for plays.

That said, two factors do *not* support this theory. First, I played the song off the YouTube video for Shazam. A distributor like CD Baby would usually give the music to Shazam’s database. When I tried Shazam, it either could not identify the song or misidentified it. (There was one version of the same song that Shazam suggested that had a very similar piano style, but no drums or sax.)

Another factor is YouTube’s Content ID, as mentioned above. Like Shazam, most distributors would make their aggregated music available to Content ID. If that were the case, Brian’s original video would get flagged.

But we could be dealing with someone who does this kind of thing *a lot* and knows what they are doing. Some distributors will let the artist tell them which outlets to supply music to and which to exclude. I would guess CD Baby and Distrokid offer this option. So, if the individual who ripped this music is explicitly targeting in-store play outlets and the royalties from those, the distributor could be told only to give the music to in-store play music suppliers. In other words, no Spotify, no Shazam, no Content ID. Thus, there’s even less chance to discover this scheme.

The individual could also have a direct account with the in-store music supplier, bypassing normal distribution channels (and thus also Shazam and Content ID). If that’s the case, this person does this a lot — the in-store music services will only deal directly with labels and artists submitting content regularly. 

This secret person could be a ‘professional’ — supplying lots of unreleased holiday music ripped from YouTube, repeatedly played over the season (which, as noted in the podcast episode, is getting longer and longer), and collecting royalties. 

That’s my theory, but I suppose we’ll never know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯