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Blame Games

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 19:43:00 +0000

The RIAA loves the narrative that CD sales took a precipitous drop in 1999, just as Napster came about. This blog post by Harold Feld reminds us that 1999 is also the last year the major labels were able to illegally fix prices at retail. There are dozens of reasons CD sales declined in the last decade...the RIAA scoffs at most of them and flat out ignores this one.

Needless to say, as part of the general magical thinking problem of the industry, Mr. Sherman and his fellows don’t believe the loss of their stranglehold on industry distribution and the rise of competitors (online and offline) has anything to do with their fading fortune. No, it is all that evil Napster and its wicked legacy of Internet piracy.

He Says He Says

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:18:00 +0000

Mike Masnick at TechDirt has a pretty intense and comprehensive line by line take down of the recent editorial by RIAA chief Cary Sherman on the opposition to SOPA/PIPA and content theft in the music industry. It's worth a read sheerly for the snark factor, but it's also a good summary of the many missteps in the war on piracy.

RIAA Totally Out Of Touch: Lashes Out At Google, Wikipedia And Everyone Who Protested SOPA/PIPA | Techdirt: The RIAA may have been a master at creating moral panics in the past, but doubling down on the same failed strategy after it's been exposed is just kind of sad. I know Sherman has been at the RIAA for ages, but it's time to get a new playbook. The moral panic strategy in which you lie, conflate different issues, and present some massive problem without any evidence is simply not credible any more.

Amazon 1-Click Patent Approved by Canadian Patent Office?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 19:19:00 +0000

Source: CIPO Website. Amazon Patent Application 2246933

Here we go. Both the Financial Post and Barry Sookman suggest that the Canadian Intellectual Property Office's review of the Amazon patent is complete and all but granted. I have argued before that there will now be a flood of business method patents in Canada, as we've seen in the U.S. over the last two decades. I can only hope, for the sake of promoting innovation and preventing excessive patent litigation, I'm wrong.

National Post, Norton Rose and Others Weigh in on Amazon Decision

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:22:00 +0000

Just a quick follow up to this morning's post, with links to other reviews of the decision.

The National Post notes the two-sided nature of the decision, but suggests the case is far from over for Amazon. Norton Rose (a law firm) provide a summary of the case to date and Prof. Emir Aly Crown in the Law Department at the University of Windsor has written an article detailing the case and the possible interpretations of the decision. He concludes that the lack of clarity in the ruling means it should go to the Supreme Court:

"In my view, the Court was at times unfair to the Court below56 and unnecessarily introduced uncertainties into an area of law that could certainly benefit from much greater clarity. Selfish reasons aside, an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada would most certainly be welcome."

In/Decision - Federal Court of Appeal "Decides" on Amazon's 1-Click Business Method Patent

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:36:00 +0000

On Thursday of last week, the Federal Court of Appeal's decision regarding Amazon.com's 1-Click business method patent made its way online (see IPPractice.ca for more details). I'm still in the process of parsing the pdf of the decision, but it appears the FCA has ordered the patent to be re-examined by the Commissioner of Patents, in an expedited manner and in one that is consistent with the findings of the recent decision. Both parties have two months to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Commissioner originally rejected the patent because it failed to show an "invention" as it is defined in the Canadian Patent Act. In other words, it wasn't patentable subject matter. Amazon appealed this at the Federal Court level and the judge there (Justice Phelan) agreed that the Commissioner erred in her reading. Phelan said the Commissioner mistakenly claimed business methods were categorically not allowed in Canada, that she relied too heavily on the "physicality" of inventions and that she didn't follow proper principles of claim construction (the method by which inventions are described in patent applications). Phelan suggested some tests/requirements that should be applied to business method patents to clarify the process and all but approved Amazon's application.

The Federal Court of Appeal set aside Justice Phelan's judgement, but in doing so, it still agreed with many of Phelan's arguments. For example, the court agreed that there is nothing in the patent act that categorically excludes business method patents. It also agreed that an invention must make some kind of discernable physical change or have some kind of practical application in order to obtain a patent.

However, the decision also notes that Justice Phelan's prescription for determining the patentability of business methods was inappropriate and for these reasons, it should be sent back to the Commissioner for re-examination.

On first pass, I find the decision schizophrenic. It reads as if it's paving the way to accept business method patents (and the one-click in particular) but it continually backtracks with statements that call into question the validity of Amazon's claims. For example, just after saying that there is no reason to categorically exclude business method patents, the decision carries on: "However, it does not necessarily follow that the Commissioner was wrong in the result. In my view, it remains an open question whether the subject matter defined by the patent claims is an "invention" within the statutory definition" (Line 48). By not making a judgement on the patentability of 1-Click, the decision simply sends the case back to the Commissioner with little more or no new information than the patent office had previously.

Those worried about the implications of business method patents in Canada (including yours truly) can seek solace in the fact that at least the Court of Appeal didn't outright grant Amazon its patent. But the wording of the decision suggests Amazon.com is one step closer to owning 1-Click here.

Ultimately, the FCA's ruling is a directionless one that leaves the question of business method patents unanswered in Canada.

photo from flickr user Davichi

Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album: A Review

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 17:40:00 +0000

"Radiohead may present a scathing critique of commodity culture but they are reflexive enough to know the role they play in their own commodification."

That's a snippet from a recent review I had the chance to write for Marianne Tatom Letts' new book, Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album (How to Disappear Completely). The review was for Rain Taxi - a print/online publication that focuses on essay-length reviews of literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Since the Letts' book pays particular attention to Kid A and Amnesiac, it took me back to some of the work I did for my MA thesis.

For those not versed in reading music, the book is a bit dense with close readings of scores and musical elements. But even still, it's a book popular music scholars and Radiohead fans alike should take note of.

Read the full review in Rain Taxi's Summer 2011 online editon

The Accidental Criminal

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:43:00 +0000

"Given the consequences associated with illegal downloading, this paper argues that an innovative approach is needed to moderate the activity. Drawing on psychological literature, this paper argues that public policy informed by attribution theory (Heider, 1958; Kelley, 1979) might help to curb illegal downloading within some circles; this might be achieved by increasing opportunities for engagement between the owners and users of intellectual property. Rather than using policy and legislation to restrain access to intellectual property, attribution theory suggests that policy approaches that close proximal distances between creators and audiences, and fosters psychological contracts, might be effective in curbing these violations."

There's a great piece in the latest issue of First Monday by Kalika Navin Doloswala and Ann Dadich on downloading and on the wrong-headed policies that have failed to curb the practice or to re-habilitate the music industry in any significant way. Interestingly, it's one of the first papers on downloading that I've read that ventures beyond gift-theory ideas to explain file-sharing. Instead, the authors bring in attribution theory (i.e. pyschological theory that looks at how people rationalize and make sense of certain behaviours or events, particularly those that tend to fall outside of societal norms and standards). They argue that current policies aimed at punishing downloaders have little effect since they fail to take into account the reasons people engage in the behaviour in the first place.

Although some of the concluding policy recommendations are a little contradictory (i.e. although showing users how downloading hurts musicians and labels should provoke a change in attitude or behaviour, we have years of failed music industry marketing campaigns that suggest otherwise), it seems like this could be an interesting, potentially fruitful, direction for future policy development. I agree that a greater engagement between artists and users is a positive benefit for re-evaluating our relationship with digital commodities; I've noted elsewhere that this promise is at the heart of what makes the digital music commodity so exciting. But the paper leaves the elephant in the room unaddressed: if such a vast majority of users are participating in, or have taken part in, "illegal" downloading, maybe the answer is not with one-off band-aid policy recommendations. Maybe a bigger re-thinking of IP policies for digital commodities is required first.

Still, the authors seem genuinely invested in stopping what they call the "creeping criminalisation of society" and for that alone, the paper is worth a read.

Check out the full paper by Kalika Navin Doloswala and Ann Dadich here: The Accidental Criminal: Using Policy to Curb Illegal Downloading

Easy Pickings

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 20:15:00 +0000

I was wrapped up in a conference 2 weeks ago when the Polaris Prize Long List was announced. I thought I'd paste it here for anyone following the process.

The second round of ballots, those that will determine the 10 albums of the Short List, were due this past Friday. Unlike previous years, it was easy pickings for me, given that the artists on my first ballot all squeaked into the long list.

Every year there's controversy in the press (and among jurors) about who's on the long list and who isn't and every year there are oddities to the list that are relics of a strange but interesting selection process. For every album as good as Sarah Harmer's Oh Little Fire that I'm sad to see off the list there are just as many gems like Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972 that continue to surprise me.

What's your take? You have about 8 days to decide before Polaris Headquarters releases the Short List.

Arcade Fire, The Suburbs

Austra, Feel It Break

Black Mountain, Wilderness Heart

Braids, Native Speaker

Buck 65, 20 Odd Years

Louise Burns, Mellow Drama

D-Sisive, Jonestown 2: Jimmy Go Bye Bye

The Dears, Degeneration Street

Destroyer, Kaputt

Diamond Rings, Special Affections

Dirty Beaches, Badlands

Luke Doucet and The White Falcon, Steel City Trawler

Eternia & MoSS, At Last

Galaxie, Tigre Et Diesel

Jenn Grant, Honeymoon Punch

Tim Hecker, Ravedeath, 1972

Hey Rosetta! Seeds

Hooded Fang, Album

Imaginary Cities, Temporary Resident

Land Of Talk, Cloak and Cipher

Little Scream, The Golden Record

The Luyas, Too Beautiful to Work

Malajube, La Caverne

Miracle Fortress, Was I The Wave?

One Hundred Dollars, Songs Of Man

Doug Paisley, Constant Companion

PS I Love You, Meet Me At The Muster Station

Daniel Romano, Sleep Beneath the Willow

The Rural Alberta Advantage, Departing

Ron Sexsmith, Long Player Late Bloomer

Shotgun Jimmie, Transistor Sister

Sloan, The Double Cross

Frederick Squire, March 12

Stars, The Five Ghosts

Colin Stetson, New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges

Timber Timbre, Creep On Creepin' On

The Weeknd, House Of Balloons

Women, Public Strain

Neil Young, Le Noise

Young Galaxy, Shapeshifting

The 2011 Long List | Polaris Music Prize

Can you really patent a mouse click?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 14:31:00 +0000

Can you really patent a mouse click?

Here's more on the Amazon 1-click case, this time in succinct text form. It's from an op-ed in the Gazette.

Most patents cover specific gadgets, like a new broom or a better mousetrap. Patent holders get a 20-year right to prevent others from making a similar invention and profiting from it. Business-method patents are a special class of patents that grant ownership over technologies and the ways those technologies are put to use.

Business-method patents are troubling because they grant a monopoly not just over a particular technology but ultimately over ways of doing - over ways of interacting with technology. They allow patent holders to stake a claim in what is, in essence, human behaviour. (Apple, for example, has patents covering certain gestures for interacting with their touch-sensitive gizmos).

So next time you click once to buy, ask yourself whether the process is so unique and novel that Amazon should have a 20-year monopoly to it. The basic properties of the Internet (e.g. many-to-many communication, hyperlinks, etc.) opened up new ways for users and companies to interact. These qualities are just as responsible for new ways of doing business as any specific business method.

Read the rest at the Gazette

Amazon One-Click Gets Another Day In Court

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:08:00 +0000

As mentioned in a previous post, Amazon's one-click patent case goes before the Federal Court of Appeal today, June 21st, in Toronto.

If you're not familiar with one-click, that's the button you clicked to order Steven Tyler’s new “memoir” in a mad rush of last minute shopping for Father’s Day. Amazon has a patent on the system in the U.S. and they have been trying to get it acknowledged here in Canada for the last 13 years. The case could end up at the Supreme Court, and it might usher in a new era for Canadian patent law.

As the new Harper government gets back to work on Canada’s long-awaited Digital Economy Strategy they would be wise to consider whether business method patents foster innovation, or whether they act as quiet quests for control over information and cultural practices.

In honour of the trial, and in an attempt to raise a bit of awareness about the Amazon case and business method patents more generally, I spoke with podcaster/agitator/critical tech journalist Jesse Brown, host of TVO's excellent and always insightful, Search Engine Podcast

You can check out the episode here or download the mp3 file directly here.

I want to thank Jesse for taking an interest in the subject and for putting the episode together. I should also thank Dr. Michael Geist, my supervisor on this project, who has been an great sounding board for a legal-neophyte like me. Finally, I have to thank the FQRSC, who made this project possible in the first place.

Processing Polaris - Turning 20 into 5

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 18:41:00 +0000

Today's the deadline for my first ballot in the Polaris Prize process for 2011. If you've been a long time reader of this blog, you'll remember my recaps last year and the year before. Basically, Polaris has a jury of about 220 plus writers, critics, radio hosts, bloggers, other music types who are part of a monstrous list-serv where they debate the merits and faults of different Canadian albums all year long. They pick their 5 favourites in the first cut, and the 40 most voted on albums make up the ensuing long list. There's round of voting in about a month or so to determine the 10 albums for the short list.

We're told to pick albums based solely on quality and merit, dismissing things like genre, popularity, album sales, etc. Despite this lofty and admirable goal, stripping an album from its social context and judging it simply on music alone is next to impossible. We're never separate from the media attention (or lack of attention) that frames our reception of sounds and songs. We're also victims of history…every new album we hear is received and judged based on our previous listening experiences. It's impossible, for example, to judge Arcade Fire's The Suburbs on its own merits, at least for jurors familiar with the band's previous work and their rise from indie darlings to Grammy winners.

Every year I struggle to make picks based on "just the music" and every year I realize the futility of such an endeavour. Every song has its social context; good luck untangling the two.

So, on to the picks then…I seem to have been torn this year between indie pop and experimental excursions. I was particularly taken by albums that combined the two, like Braids. Here's my top 5, and just a few of the many others that just missed the ballot.

5. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges

This is easily the most amazing, impressive, virtuosic, awe-inspiring album I've heard this year, if not this decade. I know that sounds insanely exaggerated. But it's an absolutely incredible collection of artworks, all created by one guy and his sizeable collection of saxophones (well, that's not totally true…credit has to go to the producers and engineers who placed the micas to capture the endless echoes and nuances). When you look into the process of "circular breathing" that underpins the album's sound, you realize it's not just a musical achievement, but a technical and physical one. Stetson is basically a human looping machine, building intricate rhythms by berating in and out simultaneously (check him out here, or, for fun, see Kenny G's description of the process).

4. Timber Timbre - Creep on Creepin' On

I've been into Timber Timbre's creepy, ghost-story infused folk since their last disc, and while the novelty of Taylor Kirk's freaky-crooner voice has worn off a bit, I'm impressed they were able to make an album that's spookier than their last one. The new disc has some stand out singles ("Bad Ritual", "Black Water") but it's also peppered with intermissions of scary-movie type soundtrack instrumentals ("Swamp Magic", "Souvenirs"). All in all it adds up to a pretty strange and different sounding album, one that builds on what was good about the last disc but is still unafraid to venture into a few new dark corners.

3. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Although it's not shocking that Arcade Fire are on my list, it is a bit surprising. Neon Bible left me a bit cold. With the exception of one or two songs, it lacked almost everything I loved about the band's debut. That's not to say it was bad; it just seemed the band was pursuing a different direction and it was one I wasn't particularly interested in following. So I'm happy that The Suburbs shows the band evolving and changing, but in ways I'm much more willing to spend time with. This is a big, killer album; one that cuts across genres and niches. This album will easily make the long list, definitely make the shortlist, and it will likely be the album to beat when the final prize is handed out.

2. Braids - Native Speaker

This hypnotic experimental pop album just keeps on giving. Layers of electronic glitches and sustaining sounds build upon layers of otherworldly vocals. And then everything washes out, and the process starts again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Or, as Robert Everett-Green of the Globe and Mail put it much more poetically, Braids "makes music the way the sea handles water, by overlapping simple elements to produce overwhelming effects." The stand out tracks on this album like "Lemonade" or "Plath Heart" were quick to garner attention, but the song that best encapsulates the band is "Lammicken". Go listen to it. Love it. Then listen again.

1. Hooded Fang - Hooded Fang Album

This album snuck up on me. Completely. Not that it's hard to get into. In fact, at first pass, it seems rather innocuous: happy cute melodies laced over pleasing instrumentation. It seemed so straightforward that I didn't think it would have any staying power. But, as I kept returning to it again and again, almost as if it was against my will, I realized how wonderfully crafted this collection of indie-pop songs is. The tracks are tight, succinct and beaming with romantic innocence. The band is like a more dialed-down, self-depricating version of Stars, but not as serious and moody as Belle and Sebastien. They wear their emotions on their sleeves but they've got jackets on.

Honourable Mentions

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Sarah Harmer's Oh Little Fire. There's something about the way Sarah Harmer tells stories that makes my ears perk up. And while this has been true for all her solo albums (and her work with Weeping Tile), I've been disappointed, musically, by what her last few albums have had to offer. The songs seemed to blend into one another, hinting that maybe she was a bit stuck. Oh Little Fire shows how wrong that assumption was. Her signature catchy smart tracks are surrounded by hidden subtle gems, making for a wonderfully rich album experience. It seems weird to have had to decide between Sarah Harmer and Colin Stetson for the last spot; the two albums could not be further apart. I hope she makes the long list…so I can agonize over her album again.

After that, there were a lot of maybes. Christine Fellows, Jenn Grant, Tokyo Police Clube, Chad Van Gaalen, Miracle Fortress all had solid, but not great albums. D-Sisive's Jonestown was another dark, funny, self-reflexive album from the Toronto-based hip-hop maestro. I also had a tough time cutting Rural Alberta Advantage's Departing from the list. Stamp is probably my favourite all-out rock song by a Canadian act this year. But the rest of the album didn't cohere as well for me as some of the other picks.

And while I'm pretty sure the votes for Quebec/Franco acts will go to Malajube and Tigre et Diesel (both incredibly solid, fuzzy, dancey albums), I find myself going back to the quieter and moodier albums from Monogrenade and Peter Peter. If you're looking for reasons to learn French, be sure to check these last two out.

The long list of the top 40 albums is announced in about 10 days. The next round of voting happens in July. More news then…

You Can Patent That?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Fri, 27 May 2011 20:40:00 +0000

I've refrained from spilling too many details about my post-dissertation research on this site, mostly because new research is a scary thing to talk about. As excited as I was to jump into something new, after spending 3 years on the last project, wading through a new subject matter is daunting. It's like learning a new instrument. However, since I'll be presenting some of this new research next week at the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, I figured I'd better get over it.

I'll be presenting a paper entitled "You Can Patent That? Technology and the Business of Patents." It's primarily a case study of Amazon's 1-click technology, and their attempts to patent it here in Canada and in the United States. I've included the abstract below. You can also read more about what's at stake in the case in this article from the Telegraph-Journal (note, the quote about how selling anything online could mean violating upwards of 4,319 patents belongs to James Bessen and Michael Meurer (2008), not me. I guess she didn't have space to fit the refrence in).

Amazon has been trying to get its application for a patent approved here in Canada since 1998. After much back and forth with the patent office, the Federal Court of Appeal will hear the case next month (June 21). Depending on the decision, it could go all the way to the Supreme Court. Not just a question of how we order books from Internet retailers, the case will be a landmark decision for what’s known more generally as business method and software patents. The decision will have significant impact on Canadian patent law, business and innovation in the technology industries, and for how users interact with the books, music and movies they love on digital devices.

Here's the abstract.

Business method patents (BMPs) are a special class of patents that allow companies to assert ownership over technologies and the ways in which those technologies are put to use. Relatively rare before the 1990s, BMPs flourished during the high tech boom at the end of the millennium. Amazon’s one-click-to-purchase patent, Priceline’s “name your own price” reverse auction system, and SightSound’s patents around the digital downloading of audio and video are all examples of companies that argued that certain combinations of software and Internet use were proprietary parts of their business, no matter how broad the practices they claimed the patents covered. Ostensibly designed to foster and protect innovation, BMPs act as a quiet quest for control over information and cultural practices. They are prime examples of how certain actors use moments of technological change to secure economic and cultural advantages through law and regulation. As an increasing variety of cultural goods (e.g. books, music, film) migrate into digital formats, BMPs have significant implications for the circulation and use of these digital commodities.

The rise and proliferation of this class of patent offers an opportune moment to reflect upon what is at stake during the digitization of culture. Accordingly, this paper presents a case study of Amazon.ca’s attempt to patent the company’s “one-click” technology in Canada. Approved in the U.S., the one-click patent has been at the center of a 12-year legal battle in this country. The Amazon case thus reveals differences in Canadian and U.S. patent law and it highlights how – compared to physical goods – the ways in which digital goods are governed by law, by commerce, and by technology affect how culture circulates.

Happy Friday: First Monday

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:18:00 +0000

First Monday, a great open-access journal featuring research on tech, the internet and culture, just released its 15th anniversary issue this past Monday. They've got some impressive stats up detailing their contributions since 1996 (to which I extend a hearty congrats), but the occasion is also a happy one for me, personally. I am fortunate enough to have a piece on cloud computing and music streaming services included in the issue. It's a synthesis of the last two chapters of my dissertation, and it should be of use for anyone interested in cloud computing and new services like Spotify, Rdio and Amazon's recently-announced cloud drive. I've posted the abstract below, but the rest of the article is available, in full, here:

"This paper investigates the rise of cloud computing, specifically for music. More than just new technologies for distribution, cloud services establish a fundamentally different relationship between listeners and their music. As the metaphor suggests, the cloud offers an infinite space where music is ever available, but cloud services also act as transient and enclosed spaces where the music we “own” is always at an ethereal distance. Cloud–based music services represent a particular cultural model of music distribution — one that enmeshes users in a network of technologies and a process of continual commodification."

Rachel Dubrofsky on Surveillance, Reality TV and Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Thu, 05 May 2011 14:41:00 +0000

Congrats to Rachel on her most recent piece in Communication Theory (Surveillance on Reality Television and Facebook: From Authenticity to Flowing Data). She did a guest lecture about reality TV and the Bachelor/Bachelorette in a class I took with Carrie Rentschler a few years back. I'm not a fan of the show (or the genre, really) but she gave me new ways to think about it. I think her analysis only gets stronger as she integrates her thoughts on social media, which is what this article's about. The abstract is below, but here's the kicker: "On Facebook, the significance of putting out data is highlighted, with little attention to the content of the data or to reception [...] This is freedom of expression in its simplest form: Put out bits of information, as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Any response to the data will do, as long as the information has been noticed, in some way, by someone, because noticing the information is important as a means of further circulating the information down the page, although the content of the response has no particular impact on the movement of data."

Aligning reality TV (RTV) with social networking sites (SNSs) enables the development of a geneology in the use of surveillance for displays of the self. By moving from “older” media such as TV to “newer” such as SNSs, we gain insight into how issues at stake for critical scholars studying surveillance practices shift when the spaces (and practices) of surveillance change. We bring into conversation work in surveillance studies, critical media studies, RTV, and new media, emphasizing the necessity of seeing connections between types of surveilled subjectivity in popular media as these contribute to a larger ethos about surveillance, subjectivity, data, and our engagement with the world. We suggest that Facebook brackets practices for synthesizing the contextualizing.

via onlinelibrary.wiley.com

In Their Own Words: The Montreal Sessions

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 20:31:00 +0000

It seems only fitting that I follow up the last post with another one about Montreal's music scenes. Hopefully you enjoyed the countdown (to skip to the top 5 MTL albums of the decade, go here), but the great thing about this city isn't necessarily the huge albums that spring to mind when you mention Montreal and music. Through the podcast each week, I'm lucky enough to work with dozens (hundreds now?) of emerging musicians who toil away in smaller clubs and bars. Some of them go on to be great bands. Some of them split almost as quickly as they formed. Others find local or niche success with rabid fans of a particular style, genre or sound. Even more go completely unrecognized - and not for lack of effort or talent. There are just a lot of music-makers in this city, and breaking through is sometimes a long and difficult process.

Enter In Their Own Words: The Montreal Sessions. It is a unique, in depth ten-part band profile series curated by local producer/engineer/audio ethnographer Martin Simon Greizis. The musicians featured share their experiences, inspirations, and aspirations in pursuit of their artistic vision. Over at Midnight Poutine we ran volume one of the series back in 2009 (see podcasts #103 - #112). I don't think I mentioned it on this site, but with volume two already 2 shows underway, I wanted to make sure word got out.

The best part about the series, and this is true of almost any profile Martin does, is the space he gives artists to express their thoughts on their musical practices and philosophies. It's clear the musicians feel incredibly at ease during the interviews and what comes out as a result is an honest and insightful account of creativity and artistic labour.

It's well worth a listen if you want to get a better sense of what's new, interesting, overlooked or misunderstood about music in Montreal.

The first episode of volume two is here
Subscribe to the whole series through this iTunes feed

Reflecting on the Scenery

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 03:51:00 +0000

I've been interested in the idea of music scenes for a while. After moving to Montréal in the wake of the hype over the Arcade Fire, I was particularly interested in how mass media attention toward the city and its music during the middle of the last decade created some strange tensions for musicians, fans, critics and the city's very image of itself.

Although I have longer, more academic papers on the subject, I'm happy to announce that over at Midnight Poutine, we just started running our look back at the decade in music in Montréal. It's the result of a large (and largely unscientific) survey we ran with a bunch of music folks around the city.

I give a brief forward to the countdown that I thought might fit in with this blog. It's reproduced here, though I encourage you to check out the series on the site:

When all the "Best Music of the Decade" lists started going up around this time last year, Montréal had the right to be proud. Arcade Fire's Funeral cracked several top tens, Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary and Stars' Set Yourself on Fire made appearances further down the ranks. Whether or not you agreed with the rankings, few would quibble with the argument that Montréal was one of the prime hubs of original music over the last decade. Like Seattle or Halifax in the 90s, the unique sounds crafted by local and adopted Montréalers influenced music here and abroad.

The New York Times and Spin officially declared the city a "scene" halfway through the decade, bringing mainstream media attention to the city's music and provoking reactions from local musicians, journalists and audiences who rejected the label as a trendy marketing tactic. That's the thing with scenes. They exist and yet they don't. The term can alternately refer to a shared musical aesthetic (e.g. the grunge scene), a collection of like musical or cultural practices (e.g. the rave scene), or an inferred link between sound and place (e.g. the Athens scene). Scenes can also take their name from individuals, instruments, or methods of production.

My favourite definition comes from Will Straw, a professor at McGill, who says that scenes are that cultural space in which a range of musical practices coexists. Scenes develop in relation to musical heritage (time) and local communities (space). Scenes are groups of people in a particular place, the movement of those people into and out of other places, and the very infrastructure that allows for and encourages that movement. Scenes create an image of a city, one that is often indistinguishable from its social character.

When mainstream media started writing about Montréal's music scene, they suggested that cold winters, cheap rent, political and linguistic tensions, etc. provided fertile grounds for musical innovation. While these generalizations may have some truth to them, they are by no means unique to Montréal. And they by no means occurred suddenly in time to create the Arcade Fire's debut album. This truth is, this city has many scenes. It has infrastructure, individuals, and pathways that feed these scenes. There's an ebb and flow in what comes out of this city, sonically, that depends on who's here, why they're here, what brought them, and what they do while they're in the city. As outside media attention waxes and wanes, Montréal's various (and varied) music scenes will remain, bound by the places, people, and practices that constitute them.

This is a long-winded way of saying thank you, Montréal. It's a local love letter to the people who make music here, the promoters who hype shows, the organizers who run the countless festivals, the venues who host quality shows every single night, the journalists, bloggers, podcasters and radio hosts who write and talk about new sounds, and the audiences who enjoy and support the city's vibrant musical cultures.

To recognize the monumental contributions of this city to the decade in music that was, intrepid Midnight Poutine contributor Andrés Canella had the idea to send out a survey on the best Montréal albums of the decade. Sure, we should have done this last December at the close of the decade, but we wanted to take our time and get in touch with as many people involved in this city's scenes as possible. We polled MP contributors and sent ballots out to promoters, journalists, and bloggers. We asked them to nominate their top ten favourite "Montréal" albums of the decade. We tried to do our best to find a balance between Anglo and Franco sources, but like the rest of this site, we probably skew a bit on the English side. We also tried hard to find people that could speak to different genres, but again, this list has an indie rock slant. Once all the submissions were in, Andrés dutifully compiled the results. Tomorrow, we start our countdown to number one.

We won't spoil the surprise, other than to say the winner is pretty obvious. Still, the list is a testament to how talented music-makers are in this city. Since getting involved with the Midnight Poutine podcast several years ago, I've been in touch with countless local artists, promoters and labels. I'm consistently amazed and humbled by the quality of music I find in my inbox, week after week. This countdown confirms the last decade in Montréal music was great. But I can't wait to see what comes out of this city's music scenes in the decade to come.

Stop it Apple: The Beatles and The Cycle of Hype

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 14:48:00 +0000

Apple. Please stop with the nonsense. I know you are a big shiny tech company and I know that everyone expects big things from you all of the time. But it's starting to be a bit much. When you position every new thing as the next best thing, users start to question if you actually have anything to say at all. Take yesterday's BIG ANNOUNCEMENT. You took your website offline, you teased us with sneaky taglines and ticking clocks. And you whipped the media and tech blogosphere into a frenzy. It's a testament to your PR people and to some of your previous innovations.

With great hype comes great responsibility. What did you get us all worked up for yesterday? To tell us you've finally added the Beatles to your catalogue? Really? Judging by the hype you put behind your coup, you'd think you had produced and released the White Album yourself. Instead, as Tech Dirt points out, you did this: Beatles & Apple Finally Going To Let You Pay Money For The Beatles Songs You've Been Pirating For Years

Sure, you'll undoubtedly make money off this deal. Especially from bored consumers looking for gift ideas for the holidays. And, true, the Beatles are one of the most important rock bands ever, so we shouldn't underestimate what this means for their fans, old and new. But the recycling of old content into a new medium is hardly something worthy of such lavish pronouncements. My record store down the street doesn't hold the presses every time it makes a new acquisition to its catalogue. It doesn't beg me to pay attention again and again for every new business deal it makes. Because this is what records stores are supposed to do. Sell music.

Mark Mulligan, a researcher at Forrester, is right Why The Beatles On iTunes Really Isn't A Big Deal. Although he's getting trashed in the comments, he underscores what's so frustrating about today's announcement. There are dozens of innovations digital music users would be interested in: streaming service, cloud storage, a Ping that actually works well with other social networks, smarter media management, wireless transfer, less bloat, home sharing that actually works, and on and on. Making the Beatles' discography available is not news. It's something that should have happened long ago, something that should have been a very condition of being a music retailer.

The iTunes store has the Beatles. You're the number one music retailer in North America, it's the least I would expect from you. This is why peer to peer services still represent a more appealing option to millions of users. Digital retailers have incomplete catalogues. They aren't a one-stop shop, no matter how many artists they claim to have on their digital shelves. Moreover, each service has a different catalogue, with various omissions, absences and holes.

Sure. You can give me reason after reason why this move still matters. But the fact is its boring news dressed up an innovation. The strength and problem of brands as well respected as Apple is that they begin to confer meaning onto products or experiences that may or may not be there. Apple thrives on hype, exciting product launches, and massive media events. When it starts deploying these same tactics for useless news, it becomes a mockery of itself. The power of brands is most keenly felt when they disappoint. The expectations the company itself creates facilitates this disappointment.

Apple has now filled the hole the Beatles made in their catalogue. Now it'll have to fill the hole it created by ratcheting up expectations.

Pay What You Want

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 13:47:00 +0000

I came across this article last night from Digital Music News (Maybe Radiohead Was Right After All...) that talks a bit about how the Radiohead Model may not have really done much for music, but the idea seems to be spreading to other sectors.

I'm not so sure the donation model hasn't infiltrated the music industries more than the author suggests. Sure, there were only a handful of high profile examples (NIN, GirlTalk, The Charlatans) that tried to replicate the stunt, but the more lasting effect has been the way independent and emerging bands price their albums through sites like BandCamp and Garageband. At Midnight Poutine, I get a dozen or so emails a week from bands asking me to check out their tunes. At least half of those acts have bandcamp pages that have variable pricing, and in many cases, suggest-your-own pricing.

Radiohead said their model was never meant to be a grand solution for everyone in the industry. Nor do I really think that all musicians can pay their bills and create their art sheerly based on what people think they should be paying. But these kinds of experiments re-engage both artists and users with music’s commodity form and its meaning. They ask us to reconsider our relationship with music: how much is music worth, what do we use music for, where do we want to access music and what should it look and sound and feel like when we do?

This kind of critical engagement with music is the moment afforded to us by the digital music commodity. As one of Radiohead’s managers notes about In Rainbows: “The industry reacted like the end was nigh. ‘They’ve devalued music, giving it away for nothing.’ Which wasn’t true: We asked people to value it, which is very different semantics to me” (qtd. in Byrne 2007). Free music does not mean music without value. In this case, free or the possibility of free forces a questioning of the relationships between users and the objects that circulate around them. The promise of digital music is precisely that it turns our attention towards the process of commodification.

Digital music, like countless other technologies, may never live up to all its promises. It may not disrupt the industry entirely or reduce the number of intermediaries standing between artists and their listeners. But digital music’s less grandiose promise — to turn our attention back to the meaning and form of the music commodity and to re-engage us with the role of music in our lives — is already being realized.

The Book With Faces In It

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 14:20:00 +0000

Sorry for all the old news in the last post and in this one. I recently returned from a trip and I'm still catching up. While I was away, I had the chance to see The Social Network. Can I just ask how talented writers like Aaron Sorkin could end up with a title that bad? I know I'm one to talk (my dissertation, with a sexy title of Understanding the Digital Music Commodity) but really. It's like calling a movie about TV "The Box You Watch From The Couch" or naming a film about cell phones "The Moving Calling Devices".

Not that the movie is as bad as the title. It's full of good dialogue, well shot scenes and a solid soundtrack. Still it shows how hard it is to make a movie about computers. There are way too many "exciting" shots of people typing away furiously at their keyboards, or refreshing their homepages. The computer has become such a regular part of many of our everyday work and play lives, the sight of it on film isn't really as novel as it needs to be for any kind of dramatic tension. We know people can code crazy things on computers. But showing that process is like watching a painter watch paint dry.

The overall story falls apart a bit towards the end too, since there's no real point. The driving hook of the movie is that Zuckerberg is getting sued since he "stole" the idea from classmates and cheated an early partner out of his fair share. But the cases are settled out of court, and there's no admission of right or wrong doing by anyone. It's the equivalent of a draw. Not that the movie needs winners or losers. Viewers can make up their own mind. But the narrative is so focused on the lawsuits that once they dissolve, we're left wondering whether we just witnessed a two-hour long status update.

I wasn't going to write about the movie. But then I saw this. It's an article about the film, praising not how accurate it is - it's highly fictionalized - but how "the Social Network is more than just a movie about Facebook. It’s the first movie about Silicon Valley." I wish this were the case. Having just finished a dissertation largely about software companies, I would have welcomed a movie about Silicon Valley. Instead, the film is about Harvard. About frat parties and being socially awkward. About nerds and jocks and pining for girls. About class and Class. But the closest it gets to Silicon Valley is a few scenes with Justin Timberlake at a swanky club and in a shiny new office.

If the film is to be praised, it's for how it blows up the single creator myth that's so prevalent in the re-telling of technology/innovation stories. These narratives typically depend on one person who holed himself (it's usually a him) up and got to work birthing a beautiful fresh new original idea. Case after case shows how this just isn't true. For every Shawn Fanning, Justin Frankel and Mark Zuckerberg, there are equally as many supporting or bit players. This is the movie's real lesson and the typical state of affairs in start-ups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

Ideas are not solitary affairs. They're social ones. The Social Network does a good job of showing that, if not exploring it as fully as it could.

The Polaris Push

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 01:59:00 +0000

I promised in an earlier post to share numbers, if I had any, on how lucrative the Polaris Prize can be for the winner, in terms of sales. It seems odd that an award that boasts that it is based solely on artistic merit also boasts about sales. But luckily for Polaris and the labels behind the bands populating the long and short list, artistic merit and sales don't necessarily cancel each other out.

From a press release from Polaris HQ:

Karkwa’s Les Chemins De Verre received a significant sales boost as a result of their recent win of the Polaris Music Prize. The record re-entered the top 200 at number 47 on the most recent Soundscan chart. That jump represents a sales increase of 481%. It debuted on the Ontario chart at #42 and the British Columbia chart at number 54.

The record sat in the top 5 of the iTunes album chart during the week following the gala announcement on September 20. Digital sales of the record increased 1200%.

The Cloud Challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 19:36:00 +0000

The last chapter of my dissertation talks about the move towards cloud based services for accessing and storing music. Services like Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, MP3Tunes, Grooveshark, Rhapsody, and others, though they differ in the details, all make use of the idea of the Internet as a storage space for the music they offer. Like the metaphor it relies on, the cloud promises omni-present access to music. But many subscription services or on-line streaming providers also impose limitations on that access, or at the very least, alter the nature of the relationship we have with our music collections.

One of the primary selling points of music in the cloud is access to a massive collection of songs for a relatively low price, if you compared how much it would actually cost to buy individual copies of everything the service provider offers. Paying for the service gives you instant access to more music most individuals would ever acquire on their own. While this makes it easier to get informed about a particular band, style, genre, or historical musical period, it also puts a greater distance between the consumer and their collection. Rather than carefully (or lazily) curated expressions of the self, music collections in the cloud are digital in the purest sense. They are an on/off switch, not a process the listener goes through.

As cloud services become more integrated into our everyday music listening habits, I've often wondered whether or not it could be a viable replacement for a music collection that was located at a more tangible distance to me, either on my CD shelves or on my hard drive. Turns out I'm not the only one wondering.

Check out this this link. It's a challenge to see if you can live off the cloud for all your music needs for the next week or month or something. There are a few rules that go along with it...be sure to adhere to #8, which is both the funniest and most difficult.

Good luck. If anyone makes it through 7 days let me know. I used Rdio for about 4 days and then lost interest. Staring at clouds can be fun, but it gets a little too nebulous when they always remain at an ethereal distance.

A Post about post-

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 20:01:00 +0000

Now that the dissertation is officially submitted (yay, you can check it out here), it's transition time. I'm slowly moving on to other projects. In academic terms, I'm starting a postdoctoral fellowship. Except, since I'm not exactly sure where things are going or how long it will be before I find more permanent work, I really just feel post-. Hence the new blog title and the site redesign.

My post-doc is with Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. The plan is to research Business Method Patents, a special class of patents that allow companies to assert ownership over technologies and the ways in which those technologies are put to use. Relatively rare before the 1990s, this class of patents flourished during the high tech boom at the end of the millennium. Ostensibly designed to foster and protect innovation, business method patents act as a kind of quiet quest for control over information and cultural practices. They are prime examples of how certain actors use moments of technological change to secure economic and cultural advantages through law and regulation. Seeing as I'm working with Michael, I'll also likely be doing some research on copyright and digital music, in particular what the proposed copyright bill (Bill C-32) means for the Canadian music industry.

All the talk in the Canadian music industry today, though, revolved around the Polaris Music Prize which was handed out last night in Toronto. The award went to the immensely talented Montreal band Karkwa for their brilliant album Les Chemins de Verre. There's lots of next day commentary, with reactions mixed on the winner and on the overall usefulness of the award. That's par for the course for the award though; it is inherently polarizing.

As part of the wider jury that helped get the long list together, I've always been more interested in the process of Polaris than in the actual result. One of its stated goals is to get people talking about Canadian music and every year it succeeds in spades. Another, less talked about aspect of Polaris, is to convert all that talk about Canadian music into actual sales. Founded by an ex-record exec and managed by a board that includes lots of big and small label people, Polaris is a new way to sell Canadian music. The sales pitch is never overt, which is why it works so well, but every year its interesting to keep an eye on the sales bumps that artists get from being named long lister, short lister or winner.

Alexandra Moloktow has a piece about Polaris in the Walrus that's worth a read, if you can disregard her misplaced aesthetic attacks (wow...and I thought I didn't like last year's winners). She starts to scratch at the tension between art and commerce and between mainstream and indie that exists in Polaris (and, I'd argue in the Canadian music industry more generally). The landscape is so fuzzy now that traditional lines of division or ways of understanding taste are becoming less and less relevant, or at least certain. I'm not sure why Moloktow feels this is a swindle...it's just the result of a complicated and converged media landscape and an industry that's undergoing constant re-organization.

Polaris aims to pick the best Canadian album regardless of genre, label affiliation, sales numbers, etc. It's a subjective call as to whether or not it succeeds. What it does do without question is start people talking about Canadian music and shedding light on a huge amount of talented (and sometimes unrecognized) artists.

As I was writing, this just came in. It's the process not the prize

Understanding the Digital Music Commodity

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:09:00 +0000

For anyone who is interested (i.e. all 2 of you), here's the abstract from my dissertation. It is subject to change after the reviewers have their way with it, but this is what it looked like a few days ago. If you find any spelling or grammar error or major flaws in logic, please do not tell me until August or some date far in the future.

**
Understanding the Digital Music Commodity
This dissertation concentrates on the changing form of the music commodity over the last two decades. Specifically, it traces the transition from music on compact discs to music as a digital file on computers/mobile devices and the economic, industrial, aesthetic and cultural consequences this shift has for how we produce, present, and consume music. As computers became viable sources for the playback of popular music in the 1980s and 1990s, the roots of the digital music commodity took hold. Stripped of many of their previous attributes (i.e. album art, compressed sound, packaging, etc.), recordings as digital files were initially decontextualized commodities. On computers, music underwent an interface-lift, gradually getting redressed with new features (i.e. metadata, interfaces, digital “packaging”). This dissertation focuses on five technologies – Winamp, Metadata, Napster, iTunes and Cloud Computing – that were key to rehabilitating the music commodity in its digital environments. These technologies and the cultural practices that accompanied them gave music new paratexts and micromaterials that ultimately constituted the digital music commodity.

Through case studies, generative archival research, and descriptive analysis, this study makes methodological and intellectual contributions to the field of communication and technology studies as well as to studies of new media and the cultural industries. By teasing out the differences between the commodity aspects of the CD and the digital file, this project offers fresh perspectives on materiality, aesthetics, labour and ownership in an era of digital goods. Digital music’s fluid and ubiquitous nature seems to subvert those who seek to profit from it. But while digital music offers the potential to disrupt the traditional ways of doing business in music, it also affords new forms of control and power. This has not stopped artists, hobbyists and users from carrying out creative experiments that call into question the codes and conventions of the digital music commodity. In doing so, they make visible the promise of digital music: to turn our attention to the commodification process and to force a reconsideration of the role music plays in the contemporary moment.

Deadlines and Decisions - Polaris 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 03:05:00 +0000

There was another big deadline I had to meet this week,
though this one was far less taxing.

It's Polaris Prize time again, and this week (June 8th at 11:59pm to be precise) the first ballots were due from jurors.

For those not familiar with the process, or not familiar with my run-down from last year, here's the scoop. The Polaris Prize has a jury of about 175 plus writers, critics, radio hosts, bloggers, other music types who are part of a monstrous list-serv where they debate the merits and faults of different Canadian albums all year long. Although the set up is a bit intimidating and there's more than a little of Simon Frith's ideas about music and discourse going on there, the overall high quality of posts on the list is evidence of how passionate jurors are about music.

With all these ballots submitted, Polaris headquarters tabulates and calculates and whatever-ates to come up with the 40 most voted upon albums. This is the long list. In a month or so, the jury votes again and whittles the top 40 down to a top ten. In a nice act of transparency, Polaris HQ has gone to great lengths to provide details on the judging process, which you can read about here

I said yesterday on the list-serv that I thought the quality of albums this year, as a whole, was slightly less than last year. Maybe I was just disappointed with the Plants and Animals follow up, or maybe there were just fewer knockout albums, but I didn't have as difficult a time filling out my ballot. There were clear stand outs but where I had about 30 albums vying for the last spot on my ballot last year, there were only really 3 or 4 albums fighting it out this year. I was particularly let down by the lack of a good solid rock album. Raccoon Wedding had a great disc, as did Young Rival, but nothing like Tokyo Police Club's last two discs or Bruce Peninsula's magnificent A Mountain is a Mouth.

Enough of what could have been. Here's what was, and despite the above caveat, these are all delightful albums, in their own ways. I'm obviously getting old though...most of my picks tended towards the softer, quieter efforts. Still, they were the ones that stuck with me through the year.

Here's what my first ballot looked like:

1. Oh Bijou - Beacons
Beacons came out very near the beginning of the eligibility period for this year's prize. I hope the rest of the jury didn't forget about it in the meantime. Though if you've listened to this album, you know it's pretty hard to forget. For the last 4 years or so, this Trinity Bellwoods-based collective has been making some of the most gorgeous, lush, bittersweet music in Canada. It's quiet when it needs to be but swells and expands like water. "Canon March" is 4min47sec of perfectly paced orchestral pop and the breakdown towards the end of "Make it Gold" is heart-wrenchingly emotive.

2. Yukon Blonde - Yukon Blonde
Easily the catchiest, funnest album made in Canada this year. The debut effort from this west coast crew of psych-rockers is full of clever moments. The harmonies are tight, the production is bright and the mood is pitch-perfect. This is my summer 2010 album, even though it arrived in my mailbox last fall or winter. It's also the only album on the long list that my 3 year old son loves enough to sing spontaneously when we're biking around town.

3. Evening Hymns - Spirit Guides
Giving Oh Bijou a run for their money in the "gorgeous and lush" categories, Evening Hymns' Spirit Guides is a frighteningly pretty disc. I was actually hesitant to include both on my ballot since they are so similar in tone (possibly because someone from Oh Bijou helped them record this), but Polaris rules stipulate that voting decisions should be made regardless of genre or whatever else. As a sound studies guy, I also like that the band included what amounts to a sound walk or field recording as one of their tracks: a 5 minute art piece of rain falling in Ontario. Every time I listen to this album, I'm torn. I want to stay awake to because it's so good, but it's also the perfect music to drift off to.

4. Karkwa - Les Chemins de Verre
Karkwa is one of the best benefits to come out of living in Montreal. I'm not sure how much traction they have outside this city/province, and I highly doubt I would have stumbled across them if I had moved anywhere else. Their last albums, Le Volume Du Vent, was one of my favourites of 2008. I think I was initially drawn to them because they sounded like a French version of Radiohead, but this album has them pulling on sounds from a range of respected rock acts (Beatles, Broken Social Scene, Patrick Watson). It's got moody guitars and pulsing beats, but it's well worth a listen. The lyrics are great too, even if I only catch half of them.

5. Reverie Sound Revue - Reverie Sound Revue
I've been telling anyone that would listen to pay attention to Reverie Sound Revue since this album found my inbox in the fall. The band is mystical, like a unicorn. They released an EP in 2003 which was 5 or 6 slices of indie-electro-pop bliss and then dropped off the face of the Canadian music scene (the band lives in 3 separate cities, making being a band pretty difficult. also, the lead singer, Lisa Lobsinger, is part of the extended Broken Social Scene gang, so that keeps her busy). I couldn't have been happier to hear they had a full length out, finally. It's delicate and fragile and incredibly understated. So much so that it doesn't have a hope in hell of making the long list. Still, I'll keep my fingers crossed for this seriously underrated dark horse.

Runners Up:

Shad. This guy is probably one of Canada's most talented hip hop lyricists right now. I say this having absolutely no credibility in knowledge of Canada's vast hip hop scenes. My point is he's damn good, and so is this album. I won't be surprised if he's on my final ballot.

Aidan Knight. I knew next to nothing about Aidan Knight and his album Versicolour when it landed on my desk. He overcame my lack of expectations and then some. The disc is filled with thoughtful tracks that linger long after listening.

PostdataPostdata is the project of Wintersleep's Paul Murphy. It was locked into my ballot until Evening Hymns came along, but it wasn't easy choosing between the two. It's a (mostly) stripped down intimate album, made up of poetic fragments and dream spaces.

Do Make Say Think Broken Social Scene and Do Make Say Think both had excellent albums this year. I was particularly impressed with DMST's Other Truths and was sad not to have been able to include it on my ballot. They should get to the long list just for having the guts to record an album with 4 12-minute songs. They are easily some of Canada's most talented musicians.

More on Polaris in the upcoming weeks. For those interested in the process, the long list gets announced in 7 days.

Head in the Clouds

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Morris) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:59:00 +0000

I've had my head in the clouds for the last few months. I've been researching and writing the last chapter of my dissertation, which is on cloud computing and the economic, aesthetic and cultural impact of moving our music collections to cloud-based services like Spotify, MP3 tunes, etc. The argument, in a nutshell, is that music in the cloud is both what Jonathan Zittrain calls contingent (i.e. dependent on the service) and what Nicholas Carr calls complentary (i.e. secondary to the service selling it). Cloud-based music services offer users some novel and unique methods for finding and using music, but they also further encroach on the rights of users and musicians, and further commodify our behaviours around music (i.e. listening habits, recommendations, etc.)

In the next few weeks, I'll be putting up a bit more info on the dissertation, now that it's done. The whole thing will be available shortly, (under a shiny and friendly creative commons license I'm proud to say) from this site.

For now, let's just say that the deposit draft is done (hence the pic) and I'm waiting with my fingers crossed to see what my examiner(s) think.

I've been distracted from the blog for other reasons too. Things are really busy over at Midnight Poutine and I had a somewhat unexpected early visit from two adorable new housemates, Rachel and Justine. I'm glad they are here, and I'm glad I get to spend some un-distracted time with them finally.