MUSIC|MEDIA|DESIGN

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!

How NPR Became the Hippest Way to Discover New Music, by Anya Kamenetz, is a cool piece.  It’s wonderful to hear indie music back on the air via NPR, and they’re proving there’s still a market for music on terrestrial radio.  But the conclusion’s a little distressing.  Let me quote it directly: “I respect and even applaud their integrity, but I still wonder how, under a nonprofit model, artists are gonna get paid. I guess part of the answer comes from celebrating and elevating live music, as a complement to the online experience.”  I can’t help but read this as a white flag/shoulder-shrugging surrender to a terrible, quaint meme.  The notion that live music is (effectively or rightly) the only valid revenue stream for music is offensive.  Offensive or not, the real question is whether this meme has enough traction to carry the debate.

On the surface, one could say it cannot.  The Beatles were forced off the road by their fame; the hassles of touring and weak amplification of the day made the appropriate venues for the crowds impractical.  There are many kinds of music that exist only in recorded formats, and still others best delivered there (chill electronica isn’t dance music).

But younger audiences are comfortable with the meme of live=paid, recorded=free.  And while downloads have continued to grow, file sharing hasn’t gone away and file sharers continue to mouth these words when challenged.  So it’s hard to say how this will all shake out.

I decided to post about the article not just because it’s interesting, but because our readers might have more vested interest in preserving revenue streams for recorded products.  If this view is left unchallenged, even when dropped casually in a quizzical manner, it may metastacize.  Frankly it’s an attractive notion to consumers.  We live in a world where multimillion dollar TV productions are given away on the back of Tivo-skippable ads.  What force is strong enough to oppose free music?

It’s a war the remnants of the music industry are losing.  The RIAA’s ill-conceived war-on-fans had a huge price tag.  Whatever good will the industry ever earned was torched, while disingenuous arguments tarred artists alongside their labels.  Big lies and hysteria bred disgust and antipathy.  Meanwhile big stars keep touring and showing up on TV.  Billy Corgan and Madonna cheerlead for a merger that will kill opportunity for young artists – Like Goodfellas they only know “Fuck you, pay me.”  So even the live end of the business is looking dicey.

If you liked Sgt. Peppers, Dark Side of the Moon, or Moby’s Play, you must acknowledge a market and value for recorded music.  In truth, most live shows are imperfect analogs of recorded compositions.  The recording, not the concert, is the definitive document.  Look: If you caught the Stones in the Sticky Fingers era, or saw Pink Floyd originally tour The Wall, you could make a strong case for the unique value of live performance over recordings.  But if you catch the same bands today, playing the same songs, you’re getting something else.  It may be played better or worse, but time changes everything.  At the Super Bowl a few years ago we learned that Rolling Stones can gather a lot of moss.  Eventually the recording is all we’re left with.  How can we not value that?  Are todays 18 year olds better off with nothing or a recording of The Beatles?

Ask them.  Then the right answer becomes clear: Recorded music matters, and recording artists deserve to be paid for their work whether or not they choose to tour it.

Not News: CD Buyers Disappearing Daily. Might Be News: Music Buyers Disappearing, Too | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD.

hoooboy.  This is NOT good!

m|m|d regulars know I’ve never been concerned about declining CD sales, since  they perfectly mirror the normal end of every medium’s lifespan.  The drop only seems dramatic because the product was so wildly successful, and the industry so tightly lashed itself to it that people in the business can no longer remember (or imagine) life without it.  This is different: for the first time we’re seeing a decline in the audience for recorded music, not just the sales of a particular format.

Unfortunately the article provides no help with interpreting their numbers.  For instance they claim we lost 13 million customers, but don’t provide the size of the original pool.  While it’s entirely possible this report signals a big, negative change in music consumption/listening habits, it’s also possible that the problem is entirely related to the bushpression, which was in full swing when this survey was conducted.

I can’t help but think that the Presidential election hurt all time-based media in 2008.  Time is a finite resource.  There are only 24 hours in a day, and 365 days in a year.  When your attention is dominated by a current events, it can’t help but impinge on leisure activities and spending.  The election of 2008 was all-consuming, with more debates and must-watch events than any contest in modern memory.  The controversies and campaigns were engaging.  People cared.

So we’ll have to wait and see whether the NPD survey represents a real shift in music audience, or a temporary slump, caused by a spike in demand for time/attention and plummeting incomes.

It’s true!  I’ve left the sound design world behind to refocus on music.  Job 1 for me now: Mastering CDs and New Media!

I have a few other things I’m working on, including a new kind of record label.  But as usual, working on music is my real passion.  I’ve worked out a way to have the best of all possible worlds, working in all the best (and my former!) rooms in town.  

Most of all I hope this change is painless and transparent to the people I work with, recording artists. For people who’ve worked with me at QCA or Sound Images or UltraInteractive, but aren’t sure what to do now, it’s simple: Go wherever you’re used to going!  All 3 companies can now accept projects from all of my past clients, and schedule me for work.  Go wherever you’re most comfortable, or used to working.  Rates are pretty close either way, but may be a little more or less depending on how your project breaks down.  And of course, you can just ping me right here, at MUSIC|MEDIA|DESIGN, my new professional home.

For attended sessions or analog work, we should probably speak directly.  First, the number of people, technical needs, even time of day might lean me towards one facility or another.  This brings up one of the real benefit of this move for me personally.  It’s fun to specs and route the projects that come through here to the room that best fits the job.  When you work someplace, part of the job is selling the room.  No more.  At Sound Images, the Lipinski L707 monitors and Bel Canto amp are fed by a very unique, special interface, based on the SonicStudio 305.  A fully-keyed SonicStudio soundBlade system is there, still loaded with a lot of my own custom goodies.  QCA has been greatly improved by Ashley Shephard’s tenure there since my departure… I like his Lynx PCI-based interface and plug suite, but I LOVE the Sontec eq that’s permanently in-line.  I bring my own interfaces and toys as well, as I’ve really gotten hooked on 80-bit processors and paths.  Like many mastering guys, I’m a gear-head at heart!

So that’s it.  I’m really looking forward to this new phase of my career.  If you’re working on a CD or music DVD release, call me.  And if you’re working on digital-only stuff, or other new media music release then definitely call me!

dave.davis@musicmediadesign.com

CityBeat Feature on Play It Forward

One of the coolest charity projects I’ve been involved with in a long time was mastering this new 2 CD set for Cincinnati’s new music support group Play It Forward.  Play It Forward was founded by former WLW host Gary Burbank (who happens to be a very talented drummer, originally doing sessions in Memphis!), and is working to raise an endowment to create a sustainable fund to help needy musicians cover health care costs.

That would be reason enough to support the record (and the show,  Thursday 3/12/2009 at The Madison Theater) but the 30 track disc is pretty interesting too: With a diverse range of artists, genres and tempos it represents our community well.  I was pretty honored for the opportunity to work on it, and I hope the mastering does the performances justice!

Lest anyone forget the most unique and inventive regional band of the 1990s, the Buddha Den has hipped us to a brand new Brainiac Live Archive Project, including a free MP3!  Assembled by a super-fan, this collection fills a big hole in the discography of Dayton’s greatest noisemakers.  Leave it to the people to rock us out.

While researching a story, I came upon a great retrospective by my bud and sometime-boss, Mike Breen.  It’s an old CityBeat Cover Story: Foggy Memory Breakdown.  As I read down the list of past winners and ceremonies, I realized my career (not just memories) is wrapped up in this community.  The names of artists who’ve entrusted me with their work, and the progress all have made since make me proud to be a small part of it.

There are some great artists in this town!  And hard times, inequality and injustice historically drive great artists to make great music (think of the 1930s when country and pop emerged with radio, or the late 1960s when music drove civil rights and anti-war movements).  So while The Bush Gang was busy torturing, starting wars, and signing laws to hurt the poor and widen the gap between the rich and the rest of us, Cincy artists were hitting back.  From the old guard Psychodots Terminal Boulevard to The Sundresses’ Barkinghaus the voice of reality kicks down the door.

So starting today, I’m going to devote some time/space to chronicling the projects I’ve worked on that have grown up to matter.  My previous posts on Wussy’s cover story and Daniel Martin Moore’s vinyl release are just the first.  In future installments, I’ll include more editorial.  But that’s the plan…

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!

YouTube – Frank Proto: Sketches of Gershwin for Clarinet & String Orch.

Man, what a session.  I’m totally blown away this Grammy Nominated performance from  and recording has found it’s way to the internets, courtesy of YouTube and Frank Proto’s Red Mark Records.  Even more blown away to see 22,000 views, and passionate comments!  Not far behind, is the live recording of the chamber portion of the same album, Bridges, with 19,000 views and counting.

Speaking as the engineer for both very different sessions, the Gershwin piece was the bigger challenge and biggest payoff (in terms of Eddie’s performance).  But for my money  this one’s the real treat, for the ensemble (and reall drove the Grammy nod):