MUSIC|MEDIA|DESIGN

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!

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!

Broadly speaking there are a couple conventional ways to pay for media:

1. Some individual or entity purchases time outright for presence (commercial TV or “Pay to Play”)
2. An individual or entity pays to receive programming from a source (Pay Per View)

Obviously cable TV is a hybrid, with elements of both systems.  But that mashup has never been easy or comfortable.  A decade ago terrestrial broadcasters banded together to force cable companies to pay for what had always been free, over-the-air programming.  Even over-the-air HD broadcasting has strengthened the hand of cable-carriers, since a cable subscription now locks many legacy-TV viewers into a subscription (fear is a powerful motivator).  Still, in many areas, the interests and business models of the broadcast and cable industries align.  The problem known as “the internet” has always been one of those areas.

When it became impossible to ignore Napster and the like, content owners were in an understandable panic.  They pushed for draconian rules for entertainment media on the net, in an over-reaction not unlike 9/11: Criminalizing code, ideas, and legislating uneven rates that favored the powerful, legacy industry, and punished the upstarts and innovators by design.  From this mindset came the environment we’ve inherited.

So it occurs to me that the internet is already very much a pay-t0-play model.  Success is punished asymmetrically by hidden hosting charges that force you to decide whether you can actually afford for your video to go viral.  Up and coming artists are ensnared in a rats nest of legalities, and like modern investors, engaging in markets and deals that no one really understands.  The internet was been rigged, top to bottom, to ensure the winners of the 20th Century remain players in the 21st.  To a great extent uneven control of access to public dataways (switches), and favoritism in the tolls assessed (royalties) have returned us to an almost industrial circumstance.

Ironically (or symptomatically) the same forces that limited industrial power at the dawn of the 20th century are forcing contraction in infoculture in our times.  Infoculture, like pre-ecology industry, appears to be a limitless game, bound solely by our ability to store and move electrons around the physical world (which is reliably always growing).  Back then when companies or their leaders abuse the trust of consumers, who also happened to be workers and voters, there were great crises of confidence.  The debate over the “gold standard” was roiling precisely because no one trusted bankers and politicians.  Today people no longer trust bankers or politicians because our trust has been so abused.

To the extent that the stock market is a measure of how financiers view their future prospects, things must be looking up.  The reality is the value of equities bear no tangible relationship to the relative confidence or cowardice of any group of geniuses.  This conceit is little different from that of soviet socialism – both perspectives concentrate undue weight and power in the hands of the most successful exploiters of an inherently flawed system.  When the argument that “this bad idea is better than that other bad idea” we can make some progress.  The real promise of infoculture, over industry and agriculture, is the potential for win-win.  Since we can manufacture (or at least modulate and amplify) wealth with data, there are transactions where growing your pile doesn’t shrink my pile.  Not only is this a game changer in human culture, it renders most of our notions of value, power and economy obsolete.

So we’re catching up.  And while the market is surely wrong about many companies, in the main it’s probably right about many more who will just never get it, or find their entire business model dissolved beneath them.  We vainly stamp industrial patterns onto new industries that have entirely unrelated fundamentals, and are genuinely surprised when the resulting company or model fails.  Internet access and infrastructure, including the machinations required to legally use any piece of media in any manner, are obvious victims of this failure.  Electronic media are less than 100 years old, yet we apply laws of matter to electrons, whether logic, business costs, or even free will deems it sensible.  Too often the response to new models is a Ted Steven’s  ”No!” instead of experimentation.  There’s enormous bottled-up potential for new products and ways to make money.  When we open ourselves to the new reality and circumstances, it’s a lot less scary.  We’ll be able to see that by letting go a little, and treating people fairly (as opposed to lobbying for perks or punishments) we create more value for ourselves, not less.  Partnership and community are the new exclusivity.

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.

Timeline of Year Zero Discovery – NinWiki .

I know, I know… I suspect folks think I’ve crawled up Trent Reznor’s butt and called it heaven (just wrote another piece about a Telegraph UK article  over at The All Night Party).  Nonetheless, for anyone wondering about the directions a modern record can take, there are few better sources than ninwiki, which documents each of NIN’s experiments in depth.  Year Zero was a classic response that looks smart 2 years later.  Check it!