MUSIC|MEDIA|DESIGN

vertigo_1990s: Torture Garden, Scream Boody Murder, Sex Device.

Wow.  I can’t believe anyone would bring up my old band 12 years after our last show.  While we were friends with Scream Bloody Murder, Torture Garden keyboardist Dave Arps later played in Sex Device, in our 4 piece era, and co-produced a couple tracks (maybe one of the ones linked here? I’m downloading the files now!)

Sadly I have no rights to the catalog – the band was literally made for DVD (not hyperbole – we saw the medium as the natural outlet for our work, and Brand New World was conceived as a CD+V (pre DVD format).  In many respects, that band’s challenges are the root of my career.  At every stage, I had to invent tools and techniques.  Media Design was at the core of the solutions.

Forrester to Music Industry: It’s the Consumer, Stupid | Epicenter | Wired.com.

[Note: the story linked above are part of an article paraphrasing a $500 Forrester research paper, not the actual source.]

Any reader of this site knows my take on the “conclusion” or whatever the headline’s relationship is to the story… “Duh!” No news there.

But the diagram above interests me on a couple levels.  First, it’s important to note that it seems to be more of a diagram of standard features than a suggested interface.  Still, even as that, it suggests a level of interaction that may or may not be sustainable or possible for most artists (forget the initial technology investments).  This points to a gets to an underlying problem we all face, even in our daily lives: we live in a subscription world, where we die a death by a thousand features, each sold as a necessity.  Whether it’s a basic cell line, a Blackberry or an iPhone, we can be compelled by profession, employer, or necessity to subscribe to something.  Actually lots of things.

In that context, how many “bands” can any “consumer” really support?  Because that’s where this leads.  The “put-put with the stars” schemes to mono AND stereo boxed tax the ecosystem to the breaking point.  Can it really sustain a full-time always-on connection to an artist or some artist’s fan?  Do we want to?  If so, how much is that really worth?

Most people aren’t super fans.  Most are doing good to know you exist… but everyone has some favorite stars.  If those star’s existence becomes so tenuous they suck up all available dollars down-market.

I like the ideas in this report, and the basic menu of features as a starting point.  It’s certainly all supportable in iTunes LP, so it’s likely to work in the major’s competing (why?) platform as well.  But let’s not get carried away, and certainly, let’s not consider this feature set as some sort of standard.   And by no means is it an ideal: it’s really a mash-up of what exists, and kind of works, not what works best, nor is any consideration given to what works best together.  That’s a design task, not something pure research can provide.  Nonetheless, the direction is clear, and consistent with our view: Time to move forward, and use networked data to connect fans more tightly to music and artists… as a goal that’s certainly worthwhile.

Wired editor in chief and author of the controversial “The Long Tail” and “Free”, Chris Anderson responds succinctly to the much-hyped Wharton critique of his Long Tail theory in  The Long Tail blog.

I linked the sources so you can get the details from the respective horses mouths.  But I think Anderson’s ideas get a bad rap, partly because people don’t like the message, and mostly because he draws many bad conclusion in the later (more sensational) work “Free”.  In the music production journal Mix, for example, he suggests that albums today are essentially commercials for tours.  This is absurd on a number of levels, but he supports it with a variety of anecdotes and symptoms that really don’t add up (or exist in reality).  It smelled like a book tour stunt, but may have been simple ignorance, combined with an enthusiastic amateur’s perspective.  As he describes his experiences within our business, you realize it’s distorted his opinions.  Unlike those efforts, this response points out two things we dare not miss:

• The way you crunch numbers (percentage vs. actual units) matters terribly in any conclusion.  You can easily miss the forest for the trees if you pick the wrong perspective (I’m with Anderson – Wharton blew this basic metric).
• There is indeed a change in sales patterns over a lifecycle of a product.
• The implications of all Long Tail phenomenon are greater in the value-chain as you approach the consumer/fan, and diminish as you get closer to content creators.  So they have more relevance to retailers (iTunes, Blockbuster), aggregators (Amazon, Netflix) and distributors than artist.
• The Long Tail affects artists and creators mostly over time – at the end of a long, productive career, an artist will see some benefit from their work, proportional with it’s cultural impact and quality.

The Long Tail can be 100% right, even if it’s theoretician applies it incorrectly.  Critiques that misapply it dangerously miss the point.

Digipacks vs. Jewel Case – majority decision reached.

Juggernaut Brew is a great industry blog coming from the UK, asking tough questions and working them through to solutions.  In this post, he takes on the often dissed jewel box (pictured above).

Before our launch, MusicMediaDesign and it’s parent, The All Night Party, held some focus groups on this very topic.  We were somewhat surprised to discover some bands and designers didn’t mind the old standby.  But not surprisingly, this acceptance stopped well-short of love.  The jewel box is tolerated, mostly for cost.

Juggernaut Brew makes the case that sustainability, total carbon footprint, and the long term economics combine with market forces to make the jewel box a loser.  It only seems to cost less, and only in small quantities.  It’s a perpetual stinker ecologically: made of hardened petro-byproducts, non-biodegradable and hardly recyclable.  The CD itself isn’t particularly eco-friendly, but throw in the jewel box and you’ve got a real problem in your hands.

It’s an interesting argument.  And for the record, we prefer alternatives for most projects we design.

-d-

Here we go: check this piece from Create Digital Music » The Generative iPhone-iPod Touch.  Finally, it seems things are shaking off the dust of 20th Century music – rediscovering that music can be more than a spectator sport, the piece links to some cool interactive music, but also the tools you need to make it. Now we’re cookin’ with gas…

Back during my days at Sound Images I was responsible for advancing the art and science of podcasting.  I’ve flexed those muscles further as a teacher, using podcasts academically; my students turn in most projects as podcasts!  So I was intrigue by a story I read (yeah, I know, reading is obsolete) in Peter Kafka’s column  on the AllThingsD blog about Radio Refugee Adam Carolla.  What’s interesting is this: Carolla elected to stick to podcasting, rather than seek another morning talk-radio gig.

This decision is interesting for a couple reasons.  First, it appears Adam Carolla’s audience has shrunk to the point where he wasn’t getting the kind of bucks he’s accustomed to, so he’s rolling the dice on this “new media thing.”  Still, a comedian with Carolla’s resume should be able to land a paying gig.  To trade a paycheck for a speculative project like this indicates radio’s erosion continues – the paycheck must not have been very steady!  Talk radio’s appeal is naturally limited, but the shift away from live broadcast to recorded media indicates the model is in trouble broadly. No surprise: Narrow, legal strictures make talk boring, while satellite and now podcasts let the talkers push any and every envelope.  But geek that I am, Carolla’s workflow and process led me to write this post.

Apparently Carolla is applying a principle we’ve been talking about for the past 5 years.  Continuous creation is a process that assumes interesting, useful products surround us.  A new creative role is to recognize, capture and re-package the ideas, images, sounds, or experiences in real time.  All information has value, but we can’t quantify that value when that data is created.  We have to wait.  Only application can unwrap the value of a given bit of information.  Carolla’s show differs from his radio work in it’s recognition and embrace of this creative shift.

According to Kafka, Carolla stumbled onto this paradigm naturally.  He’s been plugging away, doing random, uninterrupted talking on a daily basis.  It appears to be the classic internet startup, moving from a spare room at home to a rented garage.  This adds some costs, but the article pegs them at $3000/month.  No problem: Carolla is prohibited from earning a living with his mouth by a non-compete with his former bosses (been there, done that!), so he needs no steenkin’ revenue model.

This is good.  On a personal level, it can’t hurt Carolla’s chops to keep working the mic.  But in building an audience of 400,000+ listeners, he’s created something akin to a private-label radio station.  The real value of 800,000 ears is actually knowable, thanks to radio.  Carolla’s operations are tiny, far more efficient than any radio station, so he commands an audience of salable size with a much lower investment than his competition.  

It’s not yet obvious to The Powers That Be, but the value of those ears can grow in ways broadcast audiences cannot.  Podcast audiences are more similar to public radio listeners, focused on content and appreciative of curatorial talent.  They are more likely to support sponsors than commercial radio listeners, because those sponsors seem to share intrinsic values.  Public radio sponsorship works because listeners want to support businesses that support the programming they care about.  Well-integrated podcast promotion can have similar appeal.  Interesting times, as they say…

So a guy named Steve Lambert has given me SelfControl. A cool little app that blocks access to incoming/outgoing social and networked media tools!  You select the biggest distractions, define the amount of access to grant yourself, and bob’s yer’ uncle!

My (real world) friend Jay Reynolds posted this interesting Note over on Facebook.

I had a thought.  I’ll repost the start of it here:

it’s easy to control multikilobuck audio interfaces with Apple Remote the dog-simplest controller since the Griffin blue glowing knob thingee. In other words, via iPod Touch or iPhone. Little things controlling/loading from big things. 

I’m gonna embarrass and date myself all at the same time when I confess that in a previous life I was a musician-turned-VJ, mixing/mashing video clips into something resembling music in real time with my band, Sex Device.  This was back in the late 80s/early 90s, and fortunately I surrendered all rights to the music and videos in my divorce.  So I can’t embarrass myself by linking my past here!

I only admit this to explain my long-standing appreciation for mashups (I force students to make them in my DAAP class), and how I came across THRU YOU by Israeli artist Kutiman who mashes YouTube with Flash on his site.  Now THIS is da shizzat! Unreal, wonderful, imaginative, and dare I say it, an exercise in virtuosity.

Kutiman mashes YouTube clips into amazing, deep music.  Unlike many mashups, these actually sound great and are listenable as well as visually interesting.  Nothing special is done: video is cut straight, relating to the samples you hear.  It’s a visual deconstruction of the mix in real time.  The sources aren’t all or even mostly from famous musicians.  Rather it’s a collection of unknowns and undiscovered, all jamming together in an imaginary space

I apologize for the dodgy image above: Kutiman’s site is entirely Flash-based, dynamically linked to YouTube.  No problem: use the Flash site, which plays like an album.  Much better experience than YouTube ever was.

Now we’re cookin’ with gas!

It’s not too soon to start highlighting the lessons of the Bush Depression as they pertain to us.  If nothing else, we must cease advancing flawed ideas and reject gross incompetence to lessen our own pain.  So this article is part of a series exploring what’s happened and how we can use it.

The first domino to fall in the current debacle was the under-regulated mortgage market.  In a nutshell, mortgages were being wrapped up in big, mass bundles and sold as commodities via networks.  The underlying rationale: If you aggregate hundreds or thousands of individual mortgages into a single pool, the failures of any individual loan cannot sink the entire pool.   To some extent this makes sense, as a tool to mitigate risk across a large pool of common, known loans.  The problem is that the individual loans, and their securing assets (homes) were neither common nor known.  Instead these instruments spawned a “mortgage brokering” industry that shopped these products to any and all comers, without ever-fewer checks and balances.  By last year appraisers were in on the scam, over-valuing homes to sell loan instruments with far greater risks than claimed.  In the end, no one could trust that brokers and banks originating the loans were performing with due diligence.  As it became apparent that the problem was widespread, our economy collapsed.  We lost certainty in the value of real estate broadly, and lost faith in the profession responsible for it’s valuation.  Loans immediately ground to a halt, and the economy collapsed around us.

The take home message is not that networks are bad, but that transparency is essential in networks and reputations matter.  The opacity of these mortgage backed securities created the problem, and remain an obstacle to it’s resolution.  Transparency is what makes Ebay and Amazon work so well; mechanisms are built in to ensure buyers know what they’re getting beforehand, and compare it’s value to similar goods.  A sellers reputation is part of the transaction – no one buys from poorly rated sellers, and Ebay actively works to prevent bad actors from signing up under new names.  Even when they come back, there is safety in numbers: a seller with a single 5 star rating is less likely to get a bid or sale than one with thousands of 4 stars and a few rants.  Experience counts when it comes to building a reputation.

In the music industry, there’s a long history of opacity.  Some of this is a necessary evil in an entertainment business: there’s always a mythical element to stardom, and fans really don’t want to know exactly how the sausage is made.  But once the curtain drops, there’s no valid reason for labels to offer opaque contracts with overly broad and vague terms in contracts.  There’s no benefit for reviewers to call turds “tootsie rolls” when it damages their reputation.  And there’s certainly no benefit to force-feeding faux-products to any human network.  In short, the collapse of the mortgage-backed security market has many parallels to the collapse of the music industry.  

One other thing important parallel is found in the perils of complexity.  In the music business one of the biggest failures has been our ability to make it easy for people to pay us for our work.  Licensing is problematic for end-users – it’s often hard to know who to pay what!  Some rates are negotiated, others compulsory.  We’re lashed to an archaic system that evolved around mutual distrust between parties in a zero sum game. 

The music industry has taken big hits based on people’s perception of greed, based not on their direct experiences with musicians, but rather myths spun around stars and star-makers.  Not terribly different from the Wall Street crowd in that respect.  The majority of local bankers making loans at your local branch didn’t create this crisis.  It was Wall Street swingdicks bundling their solid products on the same basis as garbage loans from companies like Countrywide, and individual “mortgage brokers” (kind of like “indie promoters” in radio, eh?) who wrote loans for the closing costs and a quick buck.  The weak link becomes the broker who closes every loan with a few thousand bucks in his pocket, regardless of the buyers ability to pay it off.

More to follow!