MUSIC|MEDIA|DESIGN

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  So I was intrigue by a story I read (yeah, I know, reading is obsolete) in Peter Kafka’s column  on the AllThingsD blog about Radio Refugee Adam Carolla.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!

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!