http://wheretonow.posterous.com Adventures, music and cake. posterous.com http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Thu, 22 Dec 2011 22:34:59 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/RoKEXMSFxgE/in-the-studio-dec-2011 http://wheretonow.posterous.com/in-the-studio-dec-2011 <p> <div><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div style=""><div><div><div>I was in Melbourne last week doing initial tracking (drums, bass, pedal steel!) for an album project that I've been producing for a while now. Tracking was done in a really cool older inner-city house that's been converted to a studio by the owner. It was a very cool sounding and relaxed space to work in, combining the casual nature of a DIY / guerilla retrofit with the considered layout, gear list and workflow of a 'proper' studio. I took a camera to document the session but didn't really have time to grab any shots myself – thankfully if you leave a camera lying around someone will always grab it and start taking snaps so there's some useful shots to refer back to.</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></div></div></div></div><div>I'll blog a bit more about these sessions once the project wraps up in Feb (fingers crossed) but there were a couple of quick observations that I wanted to jot down before I forgot about them:</div><p /><div>– Pre-production is essential when working to a tight timeframe, one of the tracks we worked on wasn't 100% solid going into the studio and it cannibalised time and emotional / creative energy. Similarly it's extremely important to have a clear vision for the sounds you want to capture and commit to them.</div><p /><div>– The start of the day is for pulling sounds, not ten hours into a session. I found myself taking way too-much time and mucking about to get the acoustic sound I could hear in my head to come out of the speakers at the end of a long day. By contrast it took almost no time the next morning.</div><p /><div>– It's important to set aside time to muck about and be creative, most of the last days session was 'free time' and turned out to be really productive and rewarding. Don't try and cram too much in, serious work comes from serious play.</div><p /><div>– If tracking to a click, I've found varying the resolution (say from 1/4 notes to 1/2 notes) can dramatically change the feel and performance delivered by a musician. I always thought this was a pretty intuitive and widely used approach but one of the musicians I was working with thought otherwise and was impressed by how much difference this trick made during tracking.</div><p /><div>– 1176's make a pretty good mic pre at a pinch, especially when combining loud sources and grungy / lo-fi mics.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>– it's always better to find the right bit of air and the right mic to stick in it than reach for an EQ or compressor. This can take time, especially if you don't know the space well but getting the right sound 'to tape' is alway a time saver in the long run.</div><p /><p /><p /><p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Img_4769" height="640" src="http://getfile1.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/l3Teq5EKOcrI6oirTiriK2FepgnD3otpwBjNuyPRWKcc7OlSoomm16qQbkFg/IMG_4769.jpeg" width="480" /> </div> </p><p></p><p /><p /><div><span style="">Drum Mic setup # 1 - high mono overhead augmented by close mics on kick, snare and floor tom as well as a whole of kick and room mic.<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /> </div> <p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <a href="http://getfile6.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/5QdxXsSYLvkydbuavvvcvRAvwfhZg9qmYs2cmbbd3bYPbl2or2slVCb7SHrV/IMG_4782.jpeg"><img alt="Img_4782" height="375" src="http://getfile7.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/kez6qmaBAAV49tdavvFAS7pls9qxcb1NHwonBWUVsvnY4XstHHXUsK8H2n89/IMG_4782.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" /></a> </div> </p><p></p><p /><div>Spaced pair overheads equidistant from kick, snare and the line bisecting both.<br /><p /><p /></div> <p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Img_4790" height="640" src="http://getfile2.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/eV8smy6k9bMn6KZN8VxhY0lxAO9dLJVEROZzDA4LBapcHlJO4HpyuR75wwL7/IMG_4790.jpeg" width="480" /> </div> </p><p></p><div><p /><p /><div>Instructions for non-pianists.... believe it or not this worked really well with two sets of hands on the piano pounding out cluster chords and a 'Day in the Life' style clamour.<br /><p /><p /></div></div> <p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <a href="http://getfile7.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/NsRfnU9jWIURmTLcTOklbEcQSE4MXnvquwbgQZIXbpPmzmAY8ztmRyF7oyth/IMG_4797.jpeg"><img alt="Img_4797" height="375" src="http://getfile8.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/0kh0KJkpHUfk2ZGPKrKsO47EbSfhEuVhgZUMXCRtt6EyS3FoJOnmpx5CiKDO/IMG_4797.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" /></a> </div> </p><p></p><div><div><p /><p /><div>In the womb, very late at night, listening to a squall of guitar feedback – and blocking the rack of outboard. Fortunately it's not about the gear.</div><p /><p /></div></div><p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <a href="http://getfile3.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/zcvSL8Uo7tS8oojJMHI7zI4jgj3CEqOqw2K2fzTPuYhh0CevVprrRFeNSBQT/IMG_4795.jpeg"><img alt="Img_4795" height="375" src="http://getfile4.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/I6vSml5wwihiJbG3jfM8Ip9BC3cBviCFZrsEVQeVk6ptO09kIodLx62tPax5/IMG_4795.jpeg.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" /></a> </div> </p><p></p><div><div><div><p /><p /><div>The obligatory hands-on-faders shot....</div><p /><p /></div></div></div> <p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Img_4814" height="640" src="http://getfile9.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/FMgzYBC9Nw7ienKIbZFF6BkyEQ4v16L9qffoRvxxkYlUMNNX4wSXJjPI48kn/IMG_4814.jpeg" width="480" /> </div> </p><p></p><div><div><div><p /><p /><div>Trusty C-48, capturing a guitar performance from halfway across the room. Evidence that close micing isn't always the best option, and that great musicians don't always make great photographers.</div><p /><div><b>wheretonow</b></div></div></div></div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/in-the-studio-dec-2011">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/in-the-studio-dec-2011#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/RoKEXMSFxgE" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/in-the-studio-dec-2011 Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:15:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/pJHXe8NLIBA/the-producer-as-sonic-architect http://wheretonow.posterous.com/the-producer-as-sonic-architect <p> <p><span>In the first of these series of posts I began by&nbsp;</span>looking at the producer as documentarian and then, conveniently skipping over &nbsp;the US R+B &lsquo;factories&rsquo;, moved onto Jamaica where the record stopped being the final piece in the production process and became recycling fodder.</p> <p><span>My goal has been to demonstrate a continuum of production styles and techniques as recording technology and the popular music industry develop in step over the course of the 20^{<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">th</span></span>} Century.</span></p> <p><span>One of the important shifts that we&rsquo;ve seen is that the role of the producer has changed from someone who&rsquo;s job was focused on pulling the session together and pressing play towards (in the case of Dub) someone who is entirely responsible for the sounds heard on a record &ndash; in some cases doing away with &lsquo;live&rsquo; musicians.&nbsp;</span>We can also observe a similar shift in the way the studio is used from a space designed to capture sound to a place to create new music. Writing in his book &ndash; Repeated Takes &ndash; Michael Channan argues that:</p> <blockquote><span>with increasing possibilities for moulding the sound, a producer&hellip; could begin to &lsquo;direct&rsquo; the musicians; not so much like a conductor in front of an orchestra, but as if they were making a film, not a record.&nbsp;&nbsp; Or as if the studio had become a huge musical instrument at the producers disposal (Channan, 1995; p. 143-44).&nbsp;</span></blockquote> <p><span>Channan&rsquo;s comments are revealing in that they demonstrate the manner in which the producers (perceived) role, particularly in popular music, has been elevated to to that of an architect of the aesthetic and sonic outcomes of a recording through his / her influence on the production process.</span></p> <p><span>One prominent, and obvious example, is Phil Spector&rsquo;s &lsquo;wall of sound&rsquo; production style. </span></p> <p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/r8hjtFq3vE0?wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="417" width="500"></iframe></p> <p><span>Spector&rsquo;s interesting because he started producing at about the same time as Hammond was shifting from Jazz to pop and Jerry Wexler was making moves at Atlantic. He trained as a Brill building songwriter with Lieber and Stohler and was similar in scope John Hammond in that he wasn&rsquo;t a knob twiddler (at least not initially). He achieved the famous &lsquo;wall of sound&rsquo; with big arrangements and running the song over and over and over again until he got the blend he wanted.</span></p> <p><span><a href="http://www.mixonline.com/recording/interviews/audio_righteous_brothers_youve/index.html">Larry Levine recalls</a>&nbsp;working on the session for the Righteous Brothers you&rsquo;ve lost that loving feeling circa 1964:</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">&ldquo;&ldquo;We did it the same way we did most of the recordings, &hellip; There were four acoustic guitars and Phil always started with them, getting them out in the studio and playing the figures. Then, after he had gotten them to the point where he wanted it to sound, we added the pianos. On this song, there were three of them. I could mike the acoustic guitars on three microphones all going into a single input; the pianos had to have separate inputs. Then we would add the basses &mdash; there were three of them: a Fender bass, an upright bass and a Dano bass. Then came the horns &hellip; The drums were always the last to go on. The drums got two tracks, though: I used an RCA 77 for the kick drum and a Neumann 67 on the overhead. &hellip;All the while, as Phil was building the sound, I kept having to get sounds for each new layer of instruments, but at the same time try to keep a balance with each of the previous layers. Every time you raised the fader on another microphone, it changed the balance of the other microphones because it was such a small room. It was always quite a job doing a Phil Spector session, trying to keep everything in balance and have it match what Phil had inside his head.&rdquo;</p> <p><span>Even though he didn&rsquo;t have hands-on the faders (and in fact left Levine alone to mix in the studio) &ndash;&nbsp;Spector is one of the first examples of a producer who bent the recording process and studio to his own artistic vision (his dictatorial behaviour legendarily including not allowing musicians to take a bathroom break once they were seated, in case they changed the sound).</span></p> <p><span>A similar approach can be seen emerging in the UK in the 60s with producers like Joe Meek (and to a lesser extent George Martin) who built his own recording equipment and signal processors to create new sounds for the artists he worked with (before shooting himself and his landlady in a fit of paranoid delusion).</span></p> <p><span>Points of comparison with these producers and the dub guys we spoke about last week is that, unlike many pop record producers of the 30s, 40s and 50s, they make no effort to simply capture sounds &ndash; they use the studio tools to make something new that in some cases couldn&rsquo;t exist but for their engagement. This isn&rsquo;t simply a feature of pop music however, and can also be seen in the electronic experimentations of Stockhausen, Emiert, Berio and Var&egrave;se in the 1950&rsquo;s. Recording technology ceased to be a transparent device for the recording of existing music and instead acts as a vehicle for the creation of new music (Holmes, 2002).&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></p> <p><span><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Tgcc5V9Hu3g?wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="417" width="500"></iframe></span></p> <p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/P-MG_qG5DRc?wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="417" width="500"></iframe></p> <p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BWUXcmoPZxw?wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="417" width="500"></iframe></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>Eno an arts-school non-musician who started playing synth for top 40 pop band Roxy Music (1971-1973) &ndash;&nbsp;one of the important things he developed in the band was a process of mucking with the sound of the rest of the bands instruments using signal processing.&nbsp;Eno called this process &lsquo;treatments&rsquo; and rather than a production credit on the Bowie album we listened to he&rsquo;s credited as responsible for songwriting (with Bowie), performance and treatments. An important aspect to note here is that, as a non-musician, Eno&rsquo;s work tends privilege on texture, rhythm and dynamics over melody and harmony. Take, for example, the following quotes from a Sound on Sound interview back in 1989 (<a href="http://eno-web.co.uk/interviews/sos2.html">archived at Eno-Web</a>):</span></p> <blockquote> <p>Eno: "The first thing to say about my work is that I've almost always preferred a mixture of electronic and acoustic instruments over pure electronics. When I have used just electronic sources, I've always undermined their simplicity and purity by sending them through all sorts of treatments - out through loudspeakers, recorded through curious archaic microphones, then on into echo device, and time-modulation treatments. It wasn't just perversity that led me to construct such labyrinthine signal paths for those poor sounds: it was an attempt to introduce some of the complexity of character that real instruments naturally have without necessarily copying real instruments."</p> <p>"That complexity is exactly what makes it possible for me to sit at the instrument for half an hour just playing the same note - because it isn't making the same noise, and the evolution of sound in time is of great interest to me."</p> <p>"If you're using electronics there are two ways to approach this type of complexity. One is to use extremely sophisticated synthesizers, which was never a course open to me because I can't stand reading handbooks and I don't like spending money on ugly great heaps of integrated circuits. The second is to use unreliable equipment, which is much cheaper and more enjoyable. In the category of 'unreliable equipment' I would include all the conventional musical instruments. In my case (with synthesizers and electronics) what this meant was making complex signal paths within which many of the components were in a condition of continuous variability, ie. were nearly broken or were programmed to vary around a certain value."</p> </blockquote> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>One example of the application of Eno&rsquo;s ideas to his production practice is his use of &lsquo;shimmer&rsquo; reverb, heard prominently on his productions for U2 with Daniel Lanois. Basically the verb is set up on an aux as a feedback loop with a +1 8ve pitch shifter feeding a reverb with a long decay time and sometimes a delay and chorus. By controlling the amount and type of signal sent into the system and controlling the gain and eq of the feedback loop and the length of delay times you get sounds from slowly evolving pads (ala U2) to odd pitched resonances. While Eno and Lanois used Lexicon 224&rsquo;s, EMT 250&rsquo;s Yamaha SPX90s and an AMS pitch shifter (later an eventide H3000) &ndash; you can easily set up a similar system in most DAW&rsquo;s. </span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>Eno is acknowledged as an obsessive tweaker, coaxing amazing sounds out of his DX7 and tools like the Ultra Harmonizer. Over his career as a producer Eno has become increasing interested in &lsquo;scuplting&rsquo; or &lsquo;painting&rsquo; with sounds &ndash; treating recorded audio as a completely malleable substance bound only by the producers imagination. There&rsquo;s an interesting parallel here to the Dub producers &ndash; and in fact Eno has cited the work of Lee Perry as an influence on his own studio practice.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>Post Roxy Music (Eno fell out with Byran Ferry) he worked with King Crimson&rsquo;s Robert Gripp on a couple of albums of echoey ambient sounding material in which he &lsquo;treated&rsquo; Fripp&rsquo;s guitar parts. He followed this with a string of solo albums of vaguely pop material culminating in Discreet Music which he released on his own label &ndash; Obscure &ndash;&nbsp;which he started to put out music that was too weird to find an audience elsewhere. Again we see a repeating theme here of a &lsquo;performer&rsquo; undertaking entrepreneurial activity (of a sort) as part of his production process &ndash;&nbsp;though by this stage the entrepreneurial streak is less significant than his creative practice.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>With his solo albums Eno had developed a toolset that he later applied to working with other peoples music, including Bowie&rsquo;s &lsquo;Berlin Trilogy&rsquo; (Low, Heroes, Lodger), Devo, Talking Heads, U2 and more recently Coldplay.</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>In particular Discreet Music would prove vitally important in understanding a developing aesthetic he would later call Ambient </span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>Prior to releasing discreet music, Eno had discussed the prospect of utilising music as a perfume or tint within certain environments.&nbsp; Writing in Street Life in 1975 Eno stated &ldquo;I believe that we are moving towards a position of using music and recorded sound with the variety of options that we presently use colour &ndash; we might simply use it to &lsquo;tint&rsquo; the environment . . . we might use it to modify our moods in almost subliminal ways&rdquo; (cited in Toop 1995, 9). </span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>Influenced, in part, by an extended period stuck in bed following an accident Eno wanted Discreet Music to become &ldquo;part of the ambience&rdquo;, &ldquo;listened to and yet . . . ignored&rdquo; (Eno 1975, 2), suggesting this aim could be achieved via the use of systems that once set in place would create music with little or no intervention on behalf of the composer (Eno 1975, 2). </span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>Eno&rsquo;s interest in process, or systems-based composition can be traced back to his time at Ipswich Art School where a strong emphasis was placed on the notion of &ldquo;process over product&rdquo; (Tamm 1989, 40).&nbsp; Eno stating&nbsp;<a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.05/eno.html">in an interview for Wired</a>:</span></p> <blockquote><span style="color: black;">I wanted to construct "machines" (in a purely conceptual sense - not physical things) that would make music for me. The whole idea was summarized in the famous saying (which I must have shouted from the ramparts a thousand times): "Process not product!" The task of artists was to "imitate nature in its manner of operation" as John Cage put it - to think of ways of dealing with sound that were guided by an instinct for beautiful "processes" rather than by a taste for nice music (Cited in Kelly 1995 para. 42).</span></blockquote> <p style="line-height: 150%;">Contrary to many &ldquo;systems&rdquo; composers however Eno believed that process in and of itself is not an artistic endeavour.&nbsp; Instead Eno saw systems-based composition as a means to an end, an aesthetic or artistic tool very much dependent on the artists choice of content rather than the architecture of a particular process (Tamm 1989, 42).&nbsp;&nbsp;In the above-mentioned&nbsp;<a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.05/eno.html">Wired&nbsp;</a><span style="color: #144fae;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">interview</span></span>, Eno also mentions that:</p> <blockquote><span style="color: black;">By the early '70s, I had made and experienced a great deal of systems music . . . I wanted to make music that was not only systemically interesting, but also that I felt like hearing again. So, increasingly, my attention went into the sonic material that I was feeding into my "repatterning machines." This became my area: I extended the composing act into the act of constructing sound itself.</span></blockquote> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>In Eno&rsquo;s &lsquo;repeating machines&rsquo; we can see here the marriage of Eno&rsquo;s interest in treatments with systems that, once set in place, would continue to generate music without intervention on behalf of the composer. To quote Steve Reich (whose was a direct influence here) Eno wanted: &ldquo;</span><span>a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing&rdquo;. </span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>Interesting to note that Eno didn&rsquo;t just use technological processes either but utilised a deck of cards with a series of Oblique Strategies written on them that acted as lateral thinking prompts in the studio, such as:</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>&ldquo;Mute and continue.&rdquo;</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>&ldquo;Mechanize something idiosyncratic.&rdquo;</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>Another important theme that comes out in his writings and interviews from around this time about the use of incommensurate loops to create &lsquo;unlocked&rsquo; sounds with a sequencer. Eno:</span></p> <blockquote>When I make loops on a sequencer, I always try to play them all the way through, so I play the whole part, then I listen to it, and quite often I find a long section that I like. Loop that, cut it up so that the loop doesn't recur regularly. The idea of always editing in straight vertical cuts is the most single annoying thing about most of that music. Because a whole part of my feeling has been to make music that is 'unlocked'. &hellip; One of the things I love about soul music is that it's relatively unlocked, so there are things that are very tight, like the rhythm section, but it's not tied: tight, but not tied. People can shift around, and they create inflexions by not falling together when you expect them to and so on. So this unlocked thing has been a big issue for me for a long time. And then suddenly this kind of music appears that is not only locked, but absolutely fucking bolted down together...</blockquote> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>Eno followed Discreet Music with Music for Airports (which we listened to&nbsp; earlier), an </span><span>&nbsp;&ldquo;original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods&rdquo; (Eno 1978, 2).&nbsp;</span><span>Music for Airports</span><span> was created through the use of an incommensurate system of tape loops which, once set in place, would create music without the direct intervention of the composer (<a href="http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/eno1.html">Eno, 1996</a>).</span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;"><span>The work is a fascinating evolutionary point between what we heard on Heroes and Eno&rsquo;s work with U2 &ndash;&nbsp;not only is there a growing focus on systems but also the use of sound to infer and foreground sonic environments (something that would become more prominent in Eno&rsquo;s subsequent work). </span><span>Eno wrote in the liner notes to On Land (which followed Music for Airports):</span><span>&nbsp;</span></p> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote">The idea of making music that in some way related to a sense of place - landscape, environment - had occurred to me many times over the years preceding On Land . . . the landscape has ceased to be a backdrop for something else to happen in front of; instead, everything that happens is a part of the landscape. There is no longer a sharp distinction between foreground and background (Eno 1982,2-3).</blockquote> <p><span>As a sort of summary, Eno&rsquo;s production aesthetic is dominated by a desire to mould sounds using processes that create or inspire new / unforeseen outcomes. He knows his gear, doesn&rsquo;t utilise presets and brings a really interesting conceptual framework to his work as a producer. Eno also, for our purposes represents a kind of mid-way point in the production archetype&rsquo;s we&rsquo;re discussing this semester &ndash;&nbsp;a composer, intimately involved in all aspects of the production and heavily invested in technology.</span></p> <p><span><strong>wheretonow</strong></span><span><br /></span></p> <div><span>_________________</span></div> <p /> <div>Offline References</div> <p /> <div> <div style="">Channan, M. (1995). <em style="">Repeated takes: A short history of recording and its effects on music.</em> London: Verso</div> <p /> <div><span> </span><div style="">Eno, B. <span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span>(<span style="line-height: 18px;">1982). </span><span style="line-height: 18px;"><em>Ambient 4: On Land</em></span><span style="line-height: 18px;">.</span><span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="">&nbsp; </span></span><span style="line-height: 18px;">Liner Notes.</span><span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="">&nbsp; </span></span><span style="line-height: 18px;">Editions EG. EEGCD 20. CD</span></div> <p /> <div style=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="">Eno, B. </span>(<span style="line-height: 18px;">1978). </span><span style="line-height: 18px;"><em>Ambient 1: Music For Airports</em></span><span style="line-height: 18px;">. Liner notes. Editions EG</span><span style="line-height: 18px;"><span style="">. EGED 17. CD.</span></span></div> <p /> <div style="">Holmes, T. <span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span>(2002). <em style="">Electronic and experimental music: pioneers in technology and composition</em> (2nd Ed.). New York: Routledge.</div> <div style=""> <p style="margin-top: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Tamm, E. (1989). <em>Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound</em>. Boston:&nbsp;Faber and Faber.</p> <p style="margin-top: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: normal;">Toop, D. (1995). </span><span style="line-height: normal;"><em style="">Ocean of sound: Aether talk, ambient sound and imaginary worlds.</em></span><span style="line-height: normal;"> London: Serpents Tail.&nbsp;</span></p> </div> </div> </div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/the-producer-as-sonic-architect">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/the-producer-as-sonic-architect#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/pJHXe8NLIBA" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/the-producer-as-sonic-architect Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:19:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/GjTgfS_Wep8/deep-blues http://wheretonow.posterous.com/deep-blues <p> <div>I finished reading Robert Palmer's&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Blues-Musical-Cultural-Mississippi/dp/0140062238"><em>Deep Blues</em></a>&nbsp;earlier this week. It was a frustrating read, particularly in the latter chapters where the narrative got bogged down in repetitive exposition attempting (unnecessarily IMO) to cover the biographies of the Delta pantheon. This tendency towards biography, and cultural rather than musical history, meant that key developments in the sound and style of the blues were subsumed into accounts of performers domestic arrangements &ndash; relevant but not always helpful when trying to contextualise variations in musical style / sound / lyrical content. Palmer also makes some interesting distinctions relating to authenticity and what constitutes 'deep' blues that I didn't think were sufficiently supported / justified and unhelpfully echoed a high / low art dichotomy.</div> <p /> <div>I'm probably being unfairly critical however (also known as being a dick).&nbsp;Palmer's discography swelled my listening list to purchase point and there are more than a few insights that made the leg-jiggling plough through the books final chapters worthwhile.</div> <p /> <div>Palmer's discussion of Charley Patton's 'Pea Vine Special', for example, is supremely useful in framing discussion of the creative use of sampling:</div> <p /> <p>"If the song is broken down into individual phrases it becomes evident that most and quite possibly all these phrases were unoriginal. They were floating formulas, some of which came from older ballads and spirituals while others were folk sayings or everyday figures of speech &hellip; [A]ny formulaic or partly formulaic line could be placed at the beginning or the end of a verse and joined to another line that was either a formula, a combination of a formula and an original turn of phrase, or entirely original" (Palmer, 1982, pp. 8&ndash;69).</p> <p /> <div>And, for me, the kicker:</div> <p /> <p>"Originality in the blues, then, is not a question of sitting down and making up songs out of thin air. Yet a blues singer whose songs consist entirely or almost entirely of borrowed phrases, lines, and verses will claim these songs as his own, and he will be right" (Palmer, 1982, p. 69)</p> <div><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/GznTA-uwQh4?wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="417" width="500"></iframe></div> <p /> <div>Fascinating too was the vitality and influence of performers who didn't begin professional music careers (if at all) until well into middle-age. One of my favourite anecdotes related by Palmer is seeing Chester Burnett, the Howlin' Wolf, perform in the mid '60s:</div> <p /> <p>"Suddenly he sprang out onto the stage from the wings. He was a huge hulk of a man, but he advanced across the stage in sudden bursts of speed, his head pivoting from side to side, eyes huge and white, eyeballs rotating wildly. He seemed to be having an epileptic seizure, but no, he suddenly lunged for the microphone, blew a chorus of raw, heavily rhythmic harmonica, and began moaning. &hellip; Finally, an impatient signal from the wings let him know that his portion of the show was over. Defiantly, Wolf counted off a bone-crushing rocker, began singing rhythmically, feigned an exit, and suddenly made a flying leap for the curtain at the side of the stage. Holding the microphone under his beefy right arm and singing into it all the while, he began climbing up the curtain, going higher and higher until he was perched far above the stage, the thick curtain threatening to rip, the audience screaming with delight. Then he loosened his grip, and in a single easy motion, slid right back down the curtain, hit the stage, cut off the tune, and stalked away, to the most ecstatic cheers of the evening. He was then fifty-five years old" (Palmer, 1982, p. 233).</p> <p /> <div><em>Fifty-five years old!</em>&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>I had to leave the Cafe where I was reading, unable to stifle my incredulous (and very loud) admiration.<br /> <p /> <div> <div><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/oiExHrVXmtE?wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="417" width="500"></iframe></div> <p /> <div>Also noteworthy was the role recording, advertising and performance revenue (as well as patronage) played in establishing 'The Blues' as a commercial 'product'; and, more broadly, how this fits into the broader growth of the American 'Music Industry' as a construct.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>Thoughts for another day.<br /> <p /> <div><strong>wheretonow</strong></div> <p /> <p /> </div> </div> </div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/deep-blues">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/deep-blues#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/GjTgfS_Wep8" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/deep-blues Sun, 06 Nov 2011 17:26:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/sG3JnqEcET8/lee-perry-and-dub-reggae http://wheretonow.posterous.com/lee-perry-and-dub-reggae <p> <p>A little more material pulled from the lecture series I prepared for this semester &ndash; although the content is really an extended lit review (we also do some analysis / discussion of recordings in class) reworking the lectures as prose is proving a useful exercise so I might try and blog out a bit more of the content as time allows. Posterous is playing havoc with embedded content atm so I've lost all the illustrative pictures... I'm also being a little lazy with my referencing here and only citing direct quotes. If you want to know what other sources I've pulled from drop me a line.</p> <div>____________________________</div> <p>To understand the story of Dub it&rsquo;s important to have an understanding of the immediate cultural, historical and musical context. Not only because this provides us with a basis for discussing the musical idiom but also because many of the producers who shaped the sound of Dub and Roots Reggae in the 60s and 70s were first recording artists and sound-system operators who turned their hand to recording.</p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">Until 1962 Jamaica was a UK colony; home to a larger &lsquo;slave&rsquo; population than indigenous people groups due to importation of workers for the plantations. With this mix of British, African and Jamaican people came a similar mix of musical styles.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">The first &lsquo;indigenous&rsquo; Jamaican recorded music was something called &lsquo;Mento&rsquo; &ndash;&nbsp;kind of a Jamaican variant on calypso, that drew on &lsquo;folk&rsquo; music (elements of African, British, Scottish and Irish musical forms &ndash; including fife and drum bands). Perhaps the most important element (or at least the one most readily identified with later Jamaican musical forms) was the syncopated banjo parts &ndash; later mimicked by guitar players in Ska and Reggae.<span style="">&nbsp; </span>At the same time, American Jazz and R+B were also popular &ndash;&nbsp;Jamaica had a thriving live swing orchestra scene in the 30s, gradually displaced by &lsquo;sound-systems&rsquo; by the 50s playing imported R+B records.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">The Sound-System were basically a mobile set of speakers and a record player that could be set up at a venue to provide music for large communal dances held in enclosed flattened areas known as dance halls. </span></span></span></span></span></p> <p><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">The biggest and best systems were operated by Duke Reid, Sir Coxsone Dodd and Prince Buster &ndash;these three (along with King Edwars who dropped out to become a politician) &lsquo;owned&rsquo; the sound-system scene in Kingston throughout the 1950s through a mixture of increasingly complex home-built sound systems, obscure records imported from the states and enforcers who would actively sabotage (and in some cases shoot-up) rival systems. Competition for exclusive sounds was fierce and the need to &lsquo;flop&rsquo; the rival systems and DJ&rsquo;s gave rise to &ldquo;the common practice of scratching out titles, names and even matrix numbers from the disc&rdquo; (Barrow &amp;&nbsp;Dalton, 2001; p. 17). </span></span></span></span></span></p> <p><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">The quest for exclusive content saw each of the three promoters expand into producing original recordings &ndash; initially on acetate plates exclusively for their sound-systems, then on 7&rdquo; Vinyl circa 1959. Recording conditions were quite primitive &ndash; paralleling the 30s recordings made in the states for the Columbia and Okeh labels (among others). </span></span></span></span></span></p> <p><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">&nbsp;Take for example Singer Alton Ellis&rsquo; recollections on reording with Coxsone Dodd:</span></span></span></span></span></p> <blockquote><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">&ldquo;It was a one-track studio, an&rsquo; when they count &lsquo;1-2-3-4&rsquo;, everybody have to be there. Who is not there, the train is gone! One mike standin&rsquo; in the middle of us, everything goin&rsquo; through the same mice. The vocalist would go closest to the mike, an&rsquo; everybody a lickle bit closer an&rsquo; closer accordin&rsquo; to the volume of what he&rsquo;s playin&rsquo; The engineer, he was mixin&rsquo; at the time &ndash; we keep runnin&rsquo; it down an&rsquo; &lsquo;im get a good balance. So when he say &lsquo;Go&rsquo;, we took then &ndash; that&rsquo;s it. One take, no comin&rsquo; back. That&rsquo;s it.&rdquo; (cited in Barrow &amp;&nbsp;Dalton, 2001; p, 21).</span></span></span></span></span></blockquote> <p><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">As this new recording industry developed, early Jamaican R+B merged with mento under the hands of jazz trained session musicians to produce Ska &ndash; combining R+B walking basslines and a backbeat shuffle with an emphasis on beat 2 with syncopated guitar, piano and melodic phrasing influenced by Mento and borrowing from other &lsquo;folk&rsquo; musics. </span></span></span></span></span></p> <p><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">At the same time, more advanced recording technology became available in Jamaica (2/3/8 track recorders, larger desks etc.) and Dodd (who set up the famous Jamaican Recording Label aka Studio One), Reed and Buster set the template for what a record-producer looked like in Jamaica. Entrepeneurs with their own distinct sound, preferred studio, musicians and modes of promotion and distribution. Studio groups like the Skatalites and the Upsetters, as well as &lsquo;name&rsquo; groups like the Maytals and the Wailers all formed in this period and, as studio players in various configurations (often the same band under a different name), would go on to shape the sound of Jamaican popular music as it developed from Ska to Rock Steady to Reggae. </span></span></span></span></span></p> <p><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">As an aside &ndash; this is remarkably similar to what happened at Motown, Stax&nbsp;and, to a lesser extent, FAME studios. However, in Jamaica there was a huge economic imperitive to produce new material as quickly and cheaply as possible. It was really a production-line type process with groups churning out instrumental and vocal tracks (often improvised in the studio) to satisfy the demand for new content. Bassist George &ldquo;Fully&rdquo; Fullwood recalls:</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <blockquote><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">&ldquo;we might go inna the studio for about two hours, and come out with fourteen, fifteen songs! It&rsquo;s a challenge because you have to realize the competition that you&rsquo;re facing. If you don&rsquo;t come up with something crucial enough, that producer don&rsquo;t want to use you again. So you have what, three minutes, three-and-a-half minutes, four minutes to really come up with ideas, with arrangements&rdquo; (cited in Veal. p. 47)</span></span></span></span></span></blockquote> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">As all the studio groups were essentially recalibrations of the same pool of musicians and there&rsquo;s only so many times you can significantly vary rhythm patterns and chord progressions this led to a certain amount of recycled musical ideas and the reuse of &lsquo;<em style="">riddims</em> (generic rhythm feels) became a feature of Jamaican music. Towards the end of 1965, a number of Jamaican records were produced that included &lsquo;riddim&rsquo; solos, a break in the music in which only the rhythm section or backing instruments play. These records became increasingly popular among dancehall patrons and records including a B-side instrumental version of Jamaican songs that would often be used as a background track for DJs or MCs to &lsquo;toast&rsquo; (speak) over (Clarke, 1980). </span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">In concert with the use of acetate &lsquo;dub&rsquo; plates (soft wax over metal discs), to provide exclusive material for sound-system operators, the recycling of material led to the creation of <em style="">versions</em> &ndash; recycling the same recording master-tape to produced several instrumental / vocal variations of a track. Veal &ndash; who&rsquo;s book on Dub is really worth a bit of your time &ndash; notes that versioning became &ldquo;a method of serially recycling recorded material developed by producers desiring to ensure the longest commercial life for a given piece of recorded music despite economic constraints and a limited pool of musician&rdquo; (p. 55). </span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">By this stage guys like Dodd, Reid and Buster had moved up the food chain and a new generation of producers had taken their place. These guys had typically worked as session musicians or engineers on Ska and rock-steady records (such as Bunny Lee of the Wailers) or as sound system operators (such as King Tubby). </span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">Lee Perry began working as a recording artist and then engineer and producer for Coxsonne Dodd.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/JRZdEqpTmD4?wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="417" width="500"></iframe></p> <p>Taken as a body of work the following 'tropes' can be identified in Perry's work - and Dub more generally [in class this discussion is accompanied with listening and discussion of several tracks, particularly how the recording process has affected the 'fidelity' of the sources].</p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;"><span style="">-<span style="font: 7.0pt Times New Roman;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></span></span><span style="color: black;">fragmentation of lyrics, downplaying the role of the singer</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;"><span style="">-<span style="font: 7.0pt Times New Roman;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></span></span><span style="color: black;">reverb as part of the arrangement </span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;"><span style="">-<span style="font: 7.0pt Times New Roman;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></span></span><span style="color: black;">delays used to modify rhythm + harmony (e.g. through drawing out / sustaining resolutions to the tonic)</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;"><span style="">-<span style="font: 7.0pt Times New Roman;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></span></span><span style="color: black;">emphasis on bass and drums within the mix</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;"><span style="">-<span style="font: 7.0pt Times New Roman;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></span></span><span style="color: black;">disassociation between sound and source (e.g. &lsquo;bleed&rsquo; becomes texture thanks to verb and delay and becomes heard as a totally new sound divorced from what went to tape)</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;"><span style="">-<span style="font: 7.0pt Times New Roman;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></span></span><span style="color: black;">heavy use of eq</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;"><span style="">-<span style="font: 7.0pt Times New Roman;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></span></span><span style="color: black;">featuring extraneous / non-musical sounds</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;"><span style="">-<span style="font: 7.0pt Times New Roman;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></span></span><span style="color: black;">tape manipulation and splicing (speed, backwards, edits)</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;"><span style="">-<span style="font: 7.0pt Times New Roman;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></span></span><span style="color: black;">creative abuse of equipment (e.g. King Tubby dropping his spring reverb to create the characteristic echo explosion)</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;"><span style="">-<span style="font: 7.0pt Times New Roman;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span></span></span><span style="color: black;">dub takes the form of a live mix adding and taking away elements over a static riddim </span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">Perry didn&rsquo;t come to producing as an engineer but as a musician, songwriter, talent scout and arranger. Some clear similarities here with Hammond who we looked at the other week &ndash; though Perry wasn&rsquo;t born rich.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">Known for a very quirky personality &ndash; shrouded himself in mystery borrowing imagery from the Obeah sect (like Jamaican voodoo) to describe himself as a sonic magician. Helped to popularise the association between reggae and Rastafarianism, introducing rhythms associated with Groundnation ceremonies (binghi or nyabinghi drumming) as well as Rastafarian lyrics and themes into his productions.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">Learned engineering from Coxsonne Dodd while working as an apprentice of sorts before splitting with Dodd and making a diss record &ndash;&nbsp;something he&rsquo;d do every time a business relationship broke up. Worked as a freelancer with all the main studio groups of the time and probably became best known outside of Jamaica for his early work with Bob Marley and the Wailers (and also for the associated protracted legal dispute over the Soul Rebels material). Eventually set up his own label &lsquo;Upsetter&rsquo; to release his productions (again we see entrepreneurialism as a trait).</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">Eventually built his own Black Ark Recording Studio after the studio where he&rsquo;d been doing most of his work decided to renovate. </span></span></span></span></span></p> <p><strong>&nbsp;</strong><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">The story goes that Perry thought the introduction of a new 24 channel console ruined the sound of the studio &ndash; so he set up his own with comparatively rudimentary equipment that he felt would allow him to capture sounds in his own way.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">Interestingly the studio equipment list was really quite sparse (given it&rsquo;s 1973 and gear was being brought in from the US).</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">Studio was built around a &frac14; TEAC four track; an &lsquo;Alice&rsquo; broadcast desk; an electric piano and cheap clav ripoff; a marantz amplifier and speaker for guitar; a drumkit and a Grantham spring reverb and tape echo. In 1976 a production deal with Island records allowed Perry to upgrade to a Soundcraft desk and (more importantly) a Mutron Bi-Phase and a Roland RE-201 Space Echo.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">Unique aspect of Perry&rsquo;s production style is that he would occasionally dub live to 2 track while the musicians were performing instead of tracking everything down and remixing it later. This also sets Perry apart from King Tubby (perhaps the most famous dub producer) as he stopped remixing others tracks and focussed on producing original &lsquo;dubbed out&rsquo; recordings. </span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">Stories of Perry&rsquo;s antics in the studio are legendary but all suggest a very animated and excited producer at the board, dancing, shouting and constantly flicking the controls on his recording gear. His production practice could be politely described as deeply eccentric and included hanging a mic in a nearby palm-tree to record the &ldquo;living African heartbeat&rdquo;; blessing his recording equipment with mystical ceremonies; writing all over the studio walls and filling every blank space with pictures, icons and talismans; blowing pot-smoke into the tape heads to &lsquo;dirty up&rsquo; the sound; burying his master tapes and &lsquo;treating&rsquo; his tapes with whiskey, blood and urine to enhance their spiritual properties.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style=""><span style="color: black;">As this suggests things got a bit weird at the Black Ark and by the end of the 1970s the studio had fallen into disrepair &ndash;&nbsp;Perry had become increasingly odd (talking backwards, repainting the walls and covering them with crosses and mis-spellings of Pipecock Jackson, digging holes in the yard, talking to himself in extended monologues) &ndash; and the studio burnt down in 1983. There are divergent stories explaining the fire from an electrical fault to Perry believing the Ark had been possessed by Satan and setting it alight. <strong style="">&nbsp;</strong></span></span></span></span></span></p> <p><span style="">&nbsp;</span><span style="">&nbsp;</span><span style="">&nbsp;</span><span style="">&nbsp;</span></p> <p>&nbsp;____________________</p> <div><strong>Offline References</strong></div> <div>Barrow, S and Dalton, P. (2001). <em>The Rough Guide to Reggae</em>. Rough Guides.</div> <div>Veal, M. (2007). <em>Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae</em>. Wesleyan University Press.&nbsp;</div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/lee-perry-and-dub-reggae">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/lee-perry-and-dub-reggae#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/sG3JnqEcET8" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/lee-perry-and-dub-reggae Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:11:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/MNsy7PIyoOE/here-there-and-everywhere http://wheretonow.posterous.com/here-there-and-everywhere <p> <p>I just finished reading Geoff Emerick's&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Here-There-Everywhere-Recording-Beatles/dp/1592402690/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1320188502&amp;sr=1-1">Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles</a>. It was a real disappointment,&nbsp;over-long, repetitive and remarkably light on technical detail.&nbsp;Emerick is a much better engineer and producer than he is a storyteller and his&nbsp;time working with the Beatles had the potential to yield more than anecdotes relating what the Beatles ate in the studio and the significance ascribed to a partially raised eyebrow almost forty years after the fact.</p> <div> <div> <div> <div>Let me save you the trouble of wading through 370-odd pages and highlight the relevant parts:</div> <div> <ul class="MailOutline"> <li>While undoubtedly &nbsp;from talent and hard work Emerick's career (like so many other music industry successes) owes a great deal to good fortune.</li> <li>Emerick really likes Paul McCartney and thinks they have a special bond, he's not such a fan of the other Beatles (or George Martin) who all receive a skewering due to perceived slights. He's particularly derisive of Harrison's musical ability prior to <em>Abbey Road</em>.&nbsp;</li> <li>The sound of the Beatles records at the EMI Studios (Abbey Road) up to the Abbey Road album was most impacted by the tube mixing consoles they were using. Emerick believes that the transistor based console that replaced it circa the recording of Abbey Road was inferior and imparted a fundamentally different sound to that album.</li> <li>Emerick's innovations appear to be close-micing and heavily compressing drums, utilising (for the time) unusual routing / recording techniques like distorting mics and running instruments through a Leslie rotating cabinet, and on later-period releases multi-tracking the group one-by-one.&nbsp;</li> <li>The 'ultimate' McCartney bass sound was achieved through pulling the mic back several feet off the amp cabinet and recording exhaustive takes / punch-ins until the Beatle was satisfied with the performance of every note.&nbsp;</li> <li>The Beatles 'sampled' segments of sound effect / music libraries extensively where it would have proved too costly or impractical to record the real thing.</li> <li>'Creative' sounding accidents were often highlighted instead of replaced.</li> <li>The best compression is a fader ride.</li> <li>Vari-speeding during recording used as a common trick to alter the timbre of sounds and allow for tricky parts to be played correctly &ndash; such as a piano doubling a guitar solo live.</li> <li>It's often quicker to try an impractical idea than argue over it.</li> <li>Emerick is of the opinion that technical concerns are secondary to creative ones; sees a clear and important demarcation between the role of engineer and performer; commits final sounds to tape ahead of mixing; and is derisive of digital recording technology and the commensurate ability to endlessly tweak recordings as antithetical to his own work experience.</li> <li>The EMI studios at Abbey Road where not a magical, creative environment but instead dank and cramped with seaweed hanging from the roof.</li> <li>There's a lot of off-mic swears that made their way onto released Beatles records if you listen closely.</li> </ul> </div> <div>I'm just starting Robert Palmer's&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Blues-Musical-Cultural-Mississippi/dp/0140062238">Deep Blues</a>&nbsp;and hoping for a much more enjoyable read.</div> <p /> </div> </div> </div> <div><strong>wheretonow?</strong></div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/here-there-and-everywhere">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/here-there-and-everywhere#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/MNsy7PIyoOE" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/here-there-and-everywhere Fri, 28 Oct 2011 05:44:30 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/pOyEx5bgSbg/more-quick-thoughts-on-pricing-digital-conten http://wheretonow.posterous.com/more-quick-thoughts-on-pricing-digital-conten <p> <div>A couple of other interesting articles on game pricing came my way after publishing my previous post (via the awfully clever&nbsp;<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/jaymis">Jaymis Loveday</a>).</div><p /><div>The first was a discussion of Valve's pricing strategies on gaming review site&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/24/less-is-more-gabe-newell-on-game-pricing/">Rock Paper Shotgun</a>&nbsp;(commenting on a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economics-valves-gabe-newell">Geekwire post</a>), which also made reference to a brief analysis of&nbsp;<a href="http://wosland.podgamer.com/?p=5267">iOS game pricing by UK games journo Stuart Campbell</a>.</div><p /><div>Both are well worth a read and, although the market for recorded music is different to that of video-games, raise a couple of interesting questions for me.</div><p /><div>1) If demand for music (or games) is relatively elastic - does demand reach its peak when recordings are 'free'?&nbsp;</div><p /><div>It appears from Gabe Newell's comments regarding Team Fortress 2 that this might not always be the case and that the language used to describe 'free' has some impact on consumer sentiment.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>2) Would sporadic discounting, as described by Newell in relation to Valve's pricing experiments, work in a similar environment (say the iTunes Music Store)?</div><p /><div>My guess is no – but I'd be very interested to find out why.</div><p /><div>3) Given the pricing 'experiments' discussed in the linked articles occurred within 'closed-gardens' (Apples App Store and Valve's Steam) is there any way to try out similar ideas on 'open' platforms favoured by many independent musicians such as Bandcamp?</div><p /><div>Again I would assume no – I think variable pricing for recorded music (particularly independent releases) might still be better because the market is so fragmented.</div><p /><div>4) How is music different than video-games with relation to price elasticity / demand &nbsp;– particularly in relation to substitution, brand loyalty and pricing in relation to disposable income?</div><p /><div>There's some interesting parallels in terms of albums / game titles (substitution typically occurs with alternate procurement channels rather than alternate 'goods') and modes of production / distribution (self-releasing / indie / majors) but games are a very different form of entertainment <i>and</i>&nbsp;there's much more room for discounts in game retail than in recorded music.</div><p /><div>Thinking out loud for now with no real idea where these questions are going.</div><p /><div><b>wheretonow?</b></div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/more-quick-thoughts-on-pricing-digital-conten">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/more-quick-thoughts-on-pricing-digital-conten#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/pOyEx5bgSbg" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/more-quick-thoughts-on-pricing-digital-conten Mon, 24 Oct 2011 22:15:38 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/wr56efSuIzU/pay-what-my-invisible-hand-tells-you-to http://wheretonow.posterous.com/pay-what-my-invisible-hand-tells-you-to <p> <div><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Pastedgraphic-11" height="301" src="http://getfile1.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/tdBCs3vHdVUIF8gS4sGm3OalVf4TiPDAr14REwnZa4na6mB6a17AtILzfKA7/PastedGraphic-11.tiff.converted.jpg" width="400" /> </div> </div><p /><p /><div>I read an interesting post by&nbsp;<a href="http://www.stevelawson.net/2011/10/how-best-to-describe-variable-pricing-for-music/">Steve Lawson</a>&nbsp;this morning on the language used to describe variable pricing for (recorded) music and how that might affect the way producers and consumers think about / relate to transactions. After discussing several variants on Pay What You Want, Steve made the following statement:</div><p /><div><blockquote type="cite">The language we have around music, money, value, experience and the ongoing relationship between artists and their listeners is inherited from a now largely-defunct industrial model, and as such isn’t fit for purpose.&nbsp;</blockquote></div><p /><div>This got me thinking about the mechanics of unspecified continuously variable pricing models and the tools we could use to understand how / why they work (and I should apologise here that I've headed off the reservation and not engaging with the substance of his blog at all).&nbsp;</div><p /><div>All else being equal (and it rarely is) the 'best'&nbsp;price for goods and services is one both producer and consumer agree on as fair or in their best interest to accept.&nbsp;Given that the marginal cost of producing a digital copy of a recording and delivering it online is typically very small (<a href="http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all">some would argue approaching zero</a>),&nbsp;and that demand for recorded music appears highly elastic – particularly given the availability of substitute goods&nbsp;(in the form of free downloads or other music) &nbsp;–&nbsp;'any' amount received in exchange for that copy <i>may</i> be considered a 'good' or 'fair' deal.&nbsp;The quandary for musicians&nbsp;and labels is that the market for digital goods typically doesn't&nbsp;take into account the time and resources that went into producing the 'original' / master recording. Additionally, and as Steve's quote above suggests, the value of a recording to consumers may bear little relationship to the costs of production and distribution.</div><p /><div>Variable pricing is designed to take advantage of self selecting behaviour, where some purchasers will pay more in order to feel 'special', 'treat' or 'distinguish' themselves – often with no regard for actual value (e.g. paying an extra dollar for 30ml of flavoured sugar syrup in your coffee).&nbsp;For 'abundant' goods and services variable pricing typcially involve set tariffs often accompanied by&nbsp;<a href="http://joshfreese.com/my_new_friends/#1">different levels of 'bundling</a>', and in some cases graduated pricing (though to be successful this approach really needs actual or perceived scarcity).&nbsp;</div><p /><div>Tariff pricing as applied to recorded music requires the producer to place a monetary value on a collection of work as well as identify incentives / bundles that will provide sufficient perceived value to encourage higher tariff sales. In doing so, the risk is 'pricing out' segments of the market who won't pay $5 for an album (for example) as well as selling short to those who could afford to pay more (due to the purchase price representing a relatively small amount of their disposable income) or who want to pay more (due to brand loyalty or perceived value).</div><p /><div>Unspecified continuously variable pricing (as employed by Pay What You Want and its variants) combines observations on the abundant nature of digital goods; self-selecting behaviour; and consumer heterogeneity (not everyone behaves the same when provided with the same context and choices) to attempt to maximise the potential income from each sale of recorded music.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>To varying degrees, 'Pay What You Want',&nbsp;'Pay What You Think is Fair' and 'Pay What You Think it's Worth' invite the consumer to evaluate the cost of production and the price of similar goods or to completely disregard any notion that production costs and true value are related (as an aside, I think'Pay What You Can Afford' frames the transaction in light of the financial position of the purchaser at the time of purchase and my hunch is that it sets a psychological barrier to paying 'too little').</div><p /><div>Assuming the producer is happy to accept they may make nothing from a 'sale' continuously variable pricing provides a mechanism to ensure&nbsp;a 'fair' transaction regardless of how the consumer values the product.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>Rather than simple economics however I wonder whether there might not be something else going on with these pricing models that exemplify a broader shift in the content industries towards patronage and 'service', which I'd posit have historically been the the dominant forms of funding artistic endeavours.</div><p /><div>One brief illustrative example is the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.humblebundle.com/">Humble Bundle</a>&nbsp;– a series of Pay What You Want indie-game bundles that shares profits between the game developers and bundle organisers as well as charitable organisations&nbsp;<a href="http://www.eff.org/">the Electronic Frontier Foundation</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.childsplaycharity.org/">Child's Play</a>.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span></div><p /><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="">T</span>he bundles are time bound (and thus artificially scarce) and make sure they let you know the 'real value' of the bundled games to demonstrate how great a deal you can get by setting your own price. Interestingly this doesn't appear to be at all related to the published 'average' price paid for the bundles ($5 for the recent Frozen Synapse Bundle valued at $98).&nbsp;However as the humble bundle is ostensibly (but not simply) a charity fund-rasing activity and some purchasers paid thousands of dollars for the same product so there are clearly other motives at play here. For these consumers the Humble Bundle appears to be about patronage rather than transaction, and like much patronage a display of social position and prestige (the tope 10 contributors are named and celebrated).</div><p /><div>This makes me wonder whether and how much continuously variable pricing might be affected by a public acknowledgment of sales and whether the way we value content is as important as the value placed on the transaction itself.</div><p /><div><b>wheretonow?</b></div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/pay-what-my-invisible-hand-tells-you-to">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/pay-what-my-invisible-hand-tells-you-to#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/wr56efSuIzU" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/pay-what-my-invisible-hand-tells-you-to Mon, 17 Oct 2011 23:35:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/cYkdbvZ0BEg/the-producer-as-documentarian http://wheretonow.posterous.com/the-producer-as-documentarian <p> <p style=""><span>I've given a series of lectures this past semester on archtypes in record production &ndash; by a roundabout series of events I'm not sure if I'll deliver this same content again any time soon so I'm going to blog some of the content for my own edification. <span style="font-family: mceinline;"><br /></span></span></p> <p /> <div>_______________________</div> <p style=""><span>The producer as documentarian reflects early approaches to record production &ndash;&nbsp;in 1925 Victor company introduced home record players to consumers &ndash; vinyl was the format and this largely dictated the recording approach. - in the early 1920s (and later) in order to record an act onto vinyl you'd need to use a horn connected to a diaphragm that moved the cutting stylus on a blank record. Recording was all about trying to 'capture' sound (though some tricks were employed to ensure balance).</span></p> <p style=""><span>Take for example the following description of the Carter Family's first recording session in Bristol in 1927 with Ralph Peer (recounted in Zwonitzer and Hershberg's excellent </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Carter-Family-Their-Legacy-American/dp/074324382X"><span style="color: #000000;">Will you miss me when I'm gone? The Carter Family and their legacy in American musi</span></a>c):</p> <p style="">&nbsp;</p> <blockquote><span>When they arrived upstairs in the warehouse loft, the walls were hung with blankets. The 'recording machine' was partitioned off by a second set o blankets and all they could see of it was one horn jutting through a small aperture. &hellip; Mr Peer calmly explained to the three nervous musicians that they would have to mount the jerry-built platform, get right up next to the horn, and direct their voices into it. (Zwonitzer and Hershberg, 2004).</span></blockquote> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p style=""><span><iframe allowfullscreen src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/YCniFuHlPG0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" height="417" width="500"></iframe></span>&nbsp;</p> <p style=""><span>Peer was one of the earliest 'popular music' producers in the US and built up the Okeh record label (small US independent) by recording US folk / novelty and 'race' records &ndash;&nbsp;anything that wasn't being recorded by the majors Columbia / Edison / Victor &ndash; in hopes of snaring a small part of what was, in 1921, a multi-million dollar industry. He hit it big with a fiddle tune and was hired by Victor to record 'hillbilly' music, necessitating a portable recording rig that could be taken out to country towns (this templated the way that many early folk and blues records were made by guys such as Alan Lomax and, also templates the modern record deal where the recordist or label retained copyright to the music in exchange for a cash payment.</span></p> <p style="">In the 20s technological advances in recording technology allowing for the use of microphones and amplifiers (and later magnetic tape) - this allowed for changing of microphone placement relative to performers in order to capture sound. Typically recording / mixing down to 1 or 2 tracks necessitated a similar approach to 'recording' performances and it wasn't until the popularisation of 4 track tape in the 60s that multi-tracking as we know it became common practice.</p> <p style=""><span>In the intervening years recording setups varied between a 'classical' approach (stereo / room mic's) and a close-mic approach mixed down 'live'. The former became an art unto itself and led to many 'documentary' recordings typically captured using a single mic / source with little / no eq / compression. I'm using the term 'documentary' quite liberally here as there was often great artifice employed to balance the sound of the performances being captured.</span></p> <p style=""><span>This aesthetic became enshrined in classical music recording &ndash;&nbsp;the recordists role is to accurately and transparently 'capture' sound. In some instances (such as Decca's orchestral recordings making use of the Decca tree and supported spot mics) this lead to increasingly complex recording setups. In other cases such as Mercury Records Living Presence series an alternate (pre-audiophile) approach was developed that utilised a distinct 3 mic technique to capture recordings of extraordinary dynamics and depth. The husband and wife team of Wilma Cozart Fine and Robert Fine are worth mentioning</span>&nbsp;worth mentioning for the importance they placed on microphone placement and the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.soundfountain.com/amb/mercury.html">process they went through to get the mic's in the right spot of air</a>:</p> <p style=""><span>&nbsp;</span><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Pastedgraphic-1" height="300" src="http://getfile2.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/PxpFR85nrmQIZGXX8cWvMiwnyhkGNOT1F2Ld6uDJQcUOoHDpmpBbneWP2obi/PastedGraphic-1.tiff.converted.jpg" width="500" /> </div> </p> <p style=""><span>"</span><span>First the microphones were put in the right position: the distance above the orchestra and the angle were determined.&nbsp;</span><span>The position also depended as a matter of fact on the acoustic energy generated by a 100 piece orchestra, by a string quartet or by a single performer as in the case with Byron Janis playing Mussorgsky in the Ballroom Studio in New York, or performing Chopin in the large concert hall in Moscow. Also the specific acoustic properties of the hall were the orchestra was playing were taken into account. And finally the nature of the work plays an important part in the game. </span><span> </span><span>The 'Organ Symphony' of Camille Saint-Sa&euml;ns asks for a completely different microphone placement than the Minute-waltz of Frederic Chopin."</span></p> <p style="">I'm getting a little sidetracked here though because what I really wanted to write about was the production style of John Hammond who&nbsp;'discovered' and recorded (among others) Billie Holliday, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan.&nbsp;<span>Hammond represents an early archetype of the 'producer' in the 20th century, somewhere between A&amp;R talent scout, music critic and Alan Lomax style documentarian.</span>&nbsp;&nbsp;His career highlights the sometimes ephemeral role of the producer and the reality that responsibility for the 'production' of recorded works is often a composite role.&nbsp;</p> <p /> <div><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Pastedgraphic-2" height="334" src="http://getfile7.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/zx4S47AcsLX79r9gkoNyFVmWCshsmh9eEd5VIOfwucvFEJd37AFm4z1AebZM/PastedGraphic-2.tiff.converted.jpg" width="400" /> </div> </div> <p style="">&nbsp;</p> <p style="">&nbsp;</p> <p style="">Hammond was a college dropout who started producing as an extension of interest in african american music, touring the south in 1938 with Columbia president-to-be Goddard Lieberson in search of &lsquo;authentic&rsquo; gospel, blues and jazz.&nbsp;Unlike the popular view of a 'record producer' Hammond not a musician, arranger or studio engineer. He was instead a music critic with an entrepreneurial streak (who wasn't above writing glowing reviews for albums he produced).&nbsp;Born into a wealthy NY family, Hammond financed many of his recording projects himself, his&nbsp;&nbsp;entr&eacute;e into the music industry exhibits an intriguing parallel with Rick Rubin's &ndash; the privileged white guy who hung out at clubs in downtown New York.</p> <p /> <div>Hammond's talent as a producer was his discerning ears, he heard the potential in Franklin and Dylan when they'd been canned by other labels / promoters / etc. and managed to pull off the same trick time and time again in different contexts (first jazz, then folk, then soul, then rock). Despite this widely acknowledged talent however&nbsp;he had lots and lots of misses (in fact his recordings with Aretha Franklin were tepid and it wasn't until she moved on to work with Jerry Wexlar / Tom Dowd and the FAME studios rhythms section that she found the voice we associate with her recorded works). &nbsp;</div> <p /> <div> <div>Although covering a range of styles and several decades there are some simple observations that can be made in relation to Hammonds recorded output as a producer. Hammond favoured &lsquo;spare&rsquo; arrangements that showcased the singer / musicians without much studio trickery. Prial notes that&nbsp;</div> <blockquote> <p style=""><span>Hammond &hellip; was outspoken in his disdain for much of the new technology [of the 50s and 60s], dismissing it as gimmickry used to cover up a singer&rsquo;s or musician&rsquo;s lack of talent. He favoured recording the old-fashioned way &hellip; by placing a single microphone in the center of the studio and letting the musicians play (Prial, 2006, p. 231)</span></p> </blockquote> <p style=""><span>This is particularly evident on Dylan's first two records which are basic in the extreme. Interestingly this style of recording often brought him into conflict with the artists he worked with. Dylan went electric with the help of producer Tom Wilson and &lsquo;The Band&rsquo; and Cohen replaced Hammond with John Simon (who&rsquo;d produced Simon and Garfunkle) to get a more &lsquo;lush&rsquo; orchestrated sound (strings / horns).&nbsp;</span>Bruce Springsteen also parted ways with the producer after his manager Mike Appel squeezed Hammond out of the recording of Songs from Ashbury Park (a record that didn&rsquo;t really sell) over (probably) disagreements about using full band arrangements. In Springsteen and Dylan&rsquo;s case the artists instincts were vindicated by time &ndash;&nbsp;though in Cohen&rsquo;s case Hammonds instincts (heard on the out-takes from <em>Songs of Leonard Cohen</em>) proved a truer guide of Cohen&rsquo;s long-term development as a recording / performing artist.&nbsp;</p> </div> <p /> <div>Some of Hammonds productions:</div> <div> <div> <p style=""><iframe allowfullscreen src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Ko2c5yJp8G8?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" height="417" width="500"></iframe></p> <p style=""><span><iframe allowfullscreen src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/6uSoV1RBMB0?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" height="417" width="500"></iframe></span></p> <p style=""><span><iframe allowfullscreen src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/dAIroY3i83c?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" height="417" width="500"></iframe></span></p> <p style=""><iframe allowfullscreen src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/JqY9cq5lW0U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" height="417" width="500"></iframe>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> <p /> <div>Hammond's role in the studio was largely mercurial &ndash;&nbsp;he's described as sitting quietly in the corner, reading a stack of newspapers / magazines. In his biography,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Producer-John-Hammond-American-Music/dp/0374113041" target="_blank"><em>The Producer</em></a>, Dunstan Prial describes Hammond as:</div> <div> <p /> <blockquote>Dressed casually but conservatively in tweed over a blue oxford shirt and a matching tie, he arrived at the studio each day looking more like an english professor than a record producer. Permanently tucked under one arm were at least a half-dozen newspapers and magazines. As the band tuned their instruments, Hammond would sit with one long leg crossed over the other, his face buried in The New York Times. When it was time to record, he would put the paper down and move into&nbsp; corner of the studio where he could observe the entire band. Then he would lean one shoulder against a wall, fold his arms across his chest, and cross his legs at the knees &hellip; like a well dressed barbers pole.&nbsp;Once the band had warmed up, Hammond would grow more animated, nodding his head and tapping his foot in time to the music. A particularly tasteful solo might produce a grin that left him squatting, his molars clearly visible somewhere back near his ears. "That's mah-velous. Hust mah-velous" he would say.</blockquote> </div> <div> <div style=""> <p style="">Such anecdotes might lead to the, rather unfair, impression that Hammond was simply a bystander and responsible for the outcome of the recording sessions &ndash; that his contributions can't be identified in the sound. In fact Hammond played<span>&nbsp;an incredibly important (and sometimes contentious) role, assembling the instrumentalists / performers who would work together &ndash;&nbsp;</span>Hammond 'masterminded' the sessions, documented the results and provided a critical ear to the outcome.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/jhammond.html">According to Leonard Cohen</a>, Hammond was also adept at managing the anxiety and self-doubt that can sometimes overcome recording artists:</p> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote">He had a very curious...a very curious way of affirming the singer, in the studio. First of all, he would sit behind the console, at the side of the console, with a newspaper. And that took the edge off it. You didn&rsquo;t feel that he was surveying every move you made. It was a very compassionate kind of &lsquo;lapse of attention&rsquo; that he would display, which I&rsquo;m sure was a very highly-engineered and very well-tested way of putting the performer at ease.</blockquote> <p /> <div>Though, as noted, Cohen still replaced Hammond once he became more confident in the studio....</div> <p style=""><strong>wheretonow?</strong></p> </div> </div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/the-producer-as-documentarian">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/the-producer-as-documentarian#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/cYkdbvZ0BEg" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/the-producer-as-documentarian Mon, 17 Oct 2011 04:45:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/YBVKxCWCKa8/reboot http://wheretonow.posterous.com/reboot <p> <div>This blog's been dead-space for quite some time now &ndash; sat unwritten, unread and untended it's been reduced to the occasional flashing diode on a server somewhere in the cumulus.</div> <p /> <div>I've been otherwise occupied with work and travel (a lot in the past 12 months) but the biggest impediment to blogging (here at least) has been that I'm not all that interested in 'the future' of the music industries in the same way I was eighteen months ago. For developed, english speaking, economies modes of online distribution and consumption of music appear to have bedded down, or at least stopped emerging at quite the same rapid pace. Further, I'm profoundly disinterested in rehashed debates on piracy or new platforms as other entertainment industries (particularly publishing) experience the 'upheaval' precipitated by Harry Nyquist's work with AT&amp;T at the beginning of the last century.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>There's still lots of new and interesting things happening in the music industries of course, but not enough to keep me blogging regularly.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>It's time for a reboot.</div> <p /> <div>I turned 30 this year, picked up a PhD a couple of years back, and have spent close to half of the last five years travelling and working outside of my home country (Australia). As I write this my wife (of almost seven years) is halfway around the world at an international health conference where she's presenting findings from her own PhD &ndash; hopefully completed next year. We're both still young(ish), healthy and have a desire to be involved in using the education, experience and privilege we're fortunate enough to have acquired to try and leave the world in a better state than we found it (while completely aware of how hopelessly naive - and sometimes plain hopeless - this is). We've spent much of the last five years not knowing where in the world we're going to be or what we'll be doing when we get there.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>So I'm re-appropriating my own blog title in the hopes that, when I don't feel like writing about music, I'll have the space to write about something else.</div> <p /> <div>Where to now?&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>I'm not sure yet, but I'm hoping for adventures, and music, and&nbsp;<a href="http://huetastesgood.posterous.com/traditional-foods-of-hu">cake</a>.&nbsp;</div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Pastedgraphic-1" height="261" src="http://getfile0.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/YDt0CmBxogBo9GjnEiXfFNuGoCXyHTtpm1h9xYDKlnswu7GR3uTI0ICc8Jl8/PastedGraphic-1.tiff.converted.jpg" width="250" /> </div> </div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/reboot">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/reboot#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/YBVKxCWCKa8" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/reboot Sun, 27 Feb 2011 17:09:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/W7SWYdLZlrg/musicadium-research-paper http://wheretonow.posterous.com/musicadium-research-paper <p> <p>I was asked for a copy of the research paper I worked on for&nbsp;<a href="http://blog.musicadium.com/industry-news/musicadium-launches-online-marketing-research-at-big-sound-2009/1624/">Musicadium a little while back</a>&nbsp;via Twitter today and discovered it's no longer available from their website, the company having been taken over by&nbsp;<a href="http://valleyarm.com/">Valleyarm</a>&nbsp;in mid 2010.&nbsp;</p> <p /> <div>This research is now 18 months old and badly in need of a refresh.&nbsp;Unfortunately the data collection was incredibly painstaking and time-consuming so it's unlikely I'll revisit this in the near future unless someone's interested in funding the research. Also, as noted in the opening paragraphs, the study looked at an incredibly small pool of artists and consequently is not generalisable. My thoughts at the time were that this would form a good pilot study from which further research could be conducted. Unfortunately I got a little side-tracked last year running UnConvention Brisbane, trying to publish some more journal articles and relocating to Vietnam for the latter half of the year.</div> <p /> <div>However, for the purposes of posterity, and anyone else who might be interested, I've posted it below.</div> <p /> <p /> <p><div class='p_embed p_file_embed'> <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/musicadium-research-paper"><img alt="" src="http://posterous.com/images/filetypes/pdf.png" /></a> <div class='p_embed_description'> <strong>GriffithMusicadium_OnlineMarketingResearch.pdf</strong> <a href="http://getfile6.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/cLqVqPurWJERHpKQDhvheUS5aaI4w2O5qvLCViU9qNR1Jr7gyfzURnIxOtHZ/GriffithMusicadium_OnlineMarke.pdf">Download this file</a> </div> </div> </p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p /> <p /> <div><strong>Where to now?</strong></div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/musicadium-research-paper">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/musicadium-research-paper#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/W7SWYdLZlrg" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/musicadium-research-paper Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:22:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/08apW_pZ4ns/i-want-my-mar-music-augmented-reality-for-the http://wheretonow.posterous.com/i-want-my-mar-music-augmented-reality-for-the <p> <div> <div style=""> <div><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Pastedgraphic" height="268" src="http://getfile5.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/lakJZcYXVgJQg7YW55Q531iW6SGYCwBLyLet5jlHUdk93FtPjDsajq5YyQyp/pastedGraphic.tiff.converted.jpg" width="500" /> </div> </div> <div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: 10px;">Image taken from&nbsp;</span></span><a href="http://blog.muchmusic.com/10-worst-ways-to-behave-at-concerts-how-youre-ruining-it-for-everyone/"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: 10px;">blog.muchmusic.com</span></span></a></div> <p /> <div>One of my occasional frustrations with watching live music are the punters who choose to view the show through the screen on their mobile phone.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>The part of me that's a Gen X anal-retent (my inner cranky old man) finds something&nbsp;incontrovertibly&nbsp;silly about mediating a 'lived' experience electronically for the purpose of acquiring a fetish item and bragging rights.</div> <p /> <div>The part of me that's Gen Y (I'm a cusper) however wonders at the creative and capital potential of the mobile phone as an interface between 'real' and 'imagined' worlds.</div> <p /> <div>imagine if the fans at concerts holding up there phone's weren't&nbsp;desperately trying to capture how cool they are for posterityt but were instead accessing bonus content?</div> <p /> <div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><strong>A Mash of All Possible Worlds</strong></span></span></div> <p /> <div>Augmented Reality (AR) is a broad term for technologies that interface the physical world with virtual content or vice versa.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>One of the first forays of AR technology into popular culture was&nbsp;<a href="http://www.musion.co.uk/Gorillaz_MTV_Awards.html">Gorillaz performance at the 2005 MTV Europe Music Awards</a>. Using technology developed by UK company&nbsp;<a href="http://www.musion.co.uk">Musion</a>&nbsp;the 'virtual' band were projected on stage in 3S, a purported 'world first' hologram performance.&nbsp;In the last year AR has gone from being the topic of science fiction to a buzz-word in the media and entertainment industries. BBC tech reporter&nbsp;<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8421684.stm">Jane Wakefield</a>, echoing online sentiment, suggesting that 2010 could see the technology "become mainstream".&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>At present AR technologies have been employed in two ways - as 'projections' into the real world often via webcams and glyphs or '<a href="http://magicsymbol.com/">Magic Symbols</a>' (markers that can be identified and tracked by software) - technically 'augmented virtualisation' - and as 'overlays', most recently employed via mobile phone technology - sometimes referred to as Mobile Augmented Reality Systems.&nbsp;While MIT researchers unveiled an impressive&nbsp;<a href="http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/index.htm">prototype wearable computer</a>&nbsp;last year, advances in the widespread adoption of AR are largely due to advances in mobile computing.&nbsp;Almost every laptop and mobile device includes a camera and some kind of internet connectivity and these can be used to create 'overlays' of information on the real world that can be referenced to GPS co-ordinates, kind of like&nbsp;<a href="http://maps.google.com">Google Maps</a>&nbsp;or a NavMan but in 3D and much more interesting.</div> <div> <p /> <div>The most widely known / developed of these is Layar (<a href="http://www.layar.com/">www.layar.com</a>), a free Augmented Reality Browser that adds 'content layers' (such as directions to the closest pub) on top of the camera image displayed on your phone. &nbsp; Cooler still is&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/arquake">ARQuake</a>, developed by the University of South Australia, that allows researchers to play iD software classic FPS while running round campus dressed like B-Movie space invaders.</div> <p /> <div><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <a href="http://getfile9.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/DNfHvEh3uW20rSEbJwcPedUzN6OEVReJnuZUVattkQfwucDbrMy6zSwkej15/0pastedGraphic.tiff.converted.jpg"><img alt="0pastedgraphic" height="375" src="http://getfile0.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/5QHXJtTYCVxWreOwoYsFYuoPlXYKl5MUyR8pnTU9qeF5ImxsXfa1lxWubyBG/0pastedGraphic.tiff.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" /></a> </div> </div> </div> <p /> <div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><strong>Music Augmented Reality</strong></span></span></div> <p /> <div>AR technology is becoming common enough that enterprising musicians are beginning to use it.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.johnmayer.com/ar">John Mayer</a>&nbsp;and Sydney band&nbsp;<a href="http://www.lostvalentinos.com/">Los Valentinos</a>&nbsp;launched AR music videos last year, both claiming a world first, though the Sydney boys&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sosticky.co.uk/sosticky/2009/10/21/lost-valentinos-augmented-reality-music-video-just-beat-john.html">just beat John to it</a>&nbsp;(Aussie, Aussie, Aussie...).&nbsp;There are&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bannerblog.com.au/news/2009/06/35_awesome_augmented_reality_examples.php">many more interesting examples</a>&nbsp;out there&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://musically.com/blog/2009/11/13/trendwatch-augmented-reality/">Music Ally</a>&nbsp;ran a good roundup of how AR is being used by the music industry in November of last year.&nbsp;</div> <div> <p /> <div>One of the more interesting applications however is&nbsp;<a href="http://www.5gum.fr/?lang=en">Wrigley's 5 Gum DJ mixer</a>&nbsp;(see also&nbsp;<a href="http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/04/28/augmented-reality-dj-scratch-it-with-a-camera-plus-ar-resources/%20">Create Digital Music</a>&nbsp;and &nbsp;<a href="http://createdigitalmotion.com/2009/08/07/augmented-reality-music-mixer">Create Digital Motion</a>)&nbsp;which combines AR with mutli-touch tracking to allow users to manipulate turntables and a mixer 'projected' into the real world.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>Returning to my gripe about phones at concerts, Layar has also been used to provide a&nbsp;<a href="http://springwise.com/telecom_mobile/zehnder/">custom overlay</a>&nbsp;for the Voodoo Experience Music Festival, allowing fans to access festival information - such as lineups and performance times - by pointing there phones towards the stage.</div> <p /> <div>Though the long term applications for AR are probably serious endeavours like&nbsp;<a href="http://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/medical-vision/surgery/surgical_navigation.html">brain surgery</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.pixelsandpolicy.com/pixels_and_policy/2009/09/astronauts-turn-to-augmented-reality.html">rocket science</a>&nbsp;much of the commercial potential of AR for the music, and other industries has been squandered on marketing gimmicks.&nbsp;With regards the music industry&nbsp;most of the examples, such as Los Valentino's and Meyers music videos, are passive and don't really utilise the potential of the medium for 'real life' interaction.&nbsp;</div> <p /> </div> <div><strong>The Realm of Science Fiction</strong></div> <p /> <div>In 2007's&nbsp;<a href="http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/books/spook.asp">Spook Country</a>, William Gibson presented a near future in which AR technologies are used to create persistent virtual installation artworks, something already being realised with&nbsp;<a href="http://layar.com/layar-30-launched-5-cases-to-show-the-power-of-the-platform/">Layar 3.0</a>&nbsp;&ndash; released last month. It's not difficult to envisage bands ARcasting concert performances&nbsp;to particular locations resulting in something between a flash-mob and silent disco.</div> <p /> <div>In fact&nbsp;Tokio Hotel recently promoted a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.musion.co.uk/Tokio_Hotel.html">virtual tour</a>&nbsp;utilising the technology Musion used for Gorillaz MTV Awards performance.&nbsp;Given rising fuel prices and the downward pressure of mainstream adoption on this type of technology and Music Think Tank's Bruce Warilla may not be too far off the mark when he suggests:&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote">As prices for technology &hellip; drop, and as broadband speeds increase, the ability to multicast in full-sized, high def will be available to artists everywhere. &nbsp;&hellip; Don&rsquo;t drive to the concert &hellip; invite your neighbors; sell the beer; and charge admission.</blockquote> </div> <p /> <div>Imagine if U2's recent YouTube streaming concert could have been broadcast literally&nbsp;<em>into</em>&nbsp;your living room.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>Now imagine jamming along with Guitar Hero AR.</div> <p /> <div>As is often the case it's likely that many of the first commercial exploiters of this technology will find the going difficult.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.pixelsandpolicy.com/pixels_and_policy/2009/09/the-independent-gets-giddy-about-augmented-reality.html">Pixels and policy</a>&nbsp;argue that the technology may be in danger of burning out on hyped expectations "excessive media hype could end up damaging augmented reality's much-needed development, turning a possibly great future product into a barely useful current one".</div> <p /> <div>However, as the music industry is looking for new revenue streams and ways to monetise music as an experience M.A.R. appears to offer some amazing opportunities for the&nbsp;entrepreneurial&nbsp;and visionary.</div> </div> </div> <p /> <div><span style="font-weight: bold;">Where to Now?</span></div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/i-want-my-mar-music-augmented-reality-for-the">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/i-want-my-mar-music-augmented-reality-for-the#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/08apW_pZ4ns" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/i-want-my-mar-music-augmented-reality-for-the Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:25:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/42RoZhd-n-s/music-like-blubber http://wheretonow.posterous.com/music-like-blubber <p> <div style=""><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Pastedgraphic" height="298" src="http://getfile3.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/KMjRfBYqKqiZZQG0WsxtrusFw1r0rk6spqGETKpVA1pQeW8f3LTJoRYcEwFc/pastedGraphic.tiff.converted.jpg" width="400" /> </div> </div> <div style=""><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><strong>Green Whale -&nbsp;</strong><a href="http://www.behance.net/bubiay"><strong>Bubi Ay Yeung</strong></a><strong>&nbsp;</strong><span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span></span></div> <p /> <div style="">I've been a fan of Brian Eno since my years as a poor student - his writings on and philosophies of record production are one of the reasons I pursued further study - and so I was entertained to read his interview with UK newspaper&nbsp;<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jan/17/brian-eno-interview-paul-morley">The Guardian</a>&nbsp;this week. In the closing paragraph of the interview Eno compared the market for recorded music in the 21st Century with that for whale blubber in the 1850's when it was supplanted by petroleum as a fuel source:</div> <p /> <div style=""> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote">I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. &hellip; The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate &ndash; history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.</blockquote> </div> <p /> <div style="">Whether because it was Eno doing the talking or a latent desire to stick it to blubber merchants this analogy inspired some&nbsp;<a href="http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2010/01/brian-eno-recorded-music-equals-whale-blubber-.html">enthusiastic reposting</a>&nbsp;and also some&nbsp;<a href="http://thecynicalmusician.com/2010/01/no-replacement-for-recordings/">interesting critique</a>&nbsp;by&nbsp;Krzysztof Wiszniewski,&nbsp;<a href="http://thecynicalmusician.com/">The Cynical Musician</a>.&nbsp;Wiszniewksi argues that comparing whale blubber to recorded music "moronic" because where blubber was replaced by petroleum - an entirely different <em>product</em> - the recording industry has been affected by a shift in <em>format</em> - from vinyl and cassettes to CD's, mp3's and beyond - suggesting that the recording industries well documented woes are due to</div> <p /> <div style=""> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote">a supply-side problem. It boils down - at least partly - to the fact that the legal protections of creators&rsquo; rights available to date have been woefully neglected with regards to the Internet. &hellip;&nbsp;when the distributors get a free hand in replicating and distributing creative works without compensating the creators, the creators suffer decreased incomes even though their works may be widely consumed. Unsurprisingly (from this vantage point) when industrial-scale &rsquo;sharing&rsquo; of creative works became possible, the industry that creates these works (that means artists too, by the way) found itself in dire economic straits.</blockquote> </div> <p /> <div style="">While justified in skewering the market for whale blubber as a proxy for the recording industry Wiszniewski, along with most other commentators who reposted Eno's interview, hasn't really engaged with the crux of the matter.&nbsp;Eno, an acclaimed record producer, is of the opinion that the future of recorded music as a viable commercial commodity may be non-existent. [UPDATE: Wiszniewski addressed this in a great followup post <a href="http://thecynicalmusician.com/2010/01/the-paradise-that-should-have-been/" target="_blank">The Paradise That Should Have Been</a>]<br /></div> <p /> <div style="">This is an idea that bears some closer scrutiny.&nbsp;While nothing has replaced recorded music as a commodity, the latter half of the twentieth century has seen dramatic economic transformations of both the production and consumption of recordings predicated on technological change.&nbsp;The reproduction and distribution costs of digital recordings has approached zero at the same time as the tools for creating those recording have become so cheap widespread that <em>anyone</em> can do it (so long as you're in the&nbsp;privileged&nbsp;position of being born into a middle class family in a developed economy).&nbsp;This second point is often overlooked in the discussion of the state of the recording industry - music recording studio's, as traditionally conceived, are becoming an increasingly difficult and unprofitable business; undercut by talented 'amateurs' at the same time as budgets are affected by decreasing returns further downstream. &nbsp;</div> <p /> <div style="">Traditionally, the implications for this type of technological change are not good for the profitability of established businesses.&nbsp;I've quoted Harford (2006) on this before but it bears repeating:</div> <p /> <div style=""> <blockquote>Historically, there has been no clear link between economic transformation and high profits for the average company. In fact, the reverse is often true: economic transformation destroys the profitability of old firms (by replacing or duplicating their scarce assets), while the new firms that replace them often face a high failure rate and very large costs of building their business. The advantages are enjoyed by workers who are paid higher wages on average and by customers who pay lower prices or get new and better goods and services. For example, Amazon's profits of $30milion in 2003 should be wighed against the fall in global music industry profits of around $2.5 billion in the same year, a drop that industry executives blame on internet music downloads and easy piracy. The internet can destroy profits as well as enable them. (p. 153)</blockquote> </div> <p /> <div style="">In practice Hartford's observations seem to be born out by Glenn Peoples analysis of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3ieea0d35bc59ea6b92e4491c9d9e7ff61">Revenue Vs Units Sold</a>&nbsp;in the recording industry over the last four years. While digital sales have been increasing steadily (and unit sales are up), overall revenue has been down at least 10% per year since 2007.&nbsp;Additionally most of the proposed retail business models that claim to be adapting to the way people actually consume recordings - such as a music 'levy'; ad supported streaming or; subscription services - are yet to prove themselves viable long-term or a better deal for artists.&nbsp;In a piece on&nbsp;<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/aug/17/major-labels-spotify">label equity in Spotify</a>, the Guardian's&nbsp;<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/heliennelindvall">Helienne Lindvall&nbsp;</a>noted:</div> <p /> <div style=""> <blockquote>In Sweden, where Spotify has been running the longest, Magnus Uggla &ndash; well-established since the late 70s &ndash; has withdrawn his music from the service. On <a href="http://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/musik/article5637161.ab">his blog</a> he said that, after six months on the site he'd earned "what a mediocre busker could earn in a day". Regarding his record label, Sony Music, he says "after suing the shit out of Pirate Bay, they're acting just like them by not paying the artists". When he found out that Sony had 5.8% equity in Spotify he wrote: "I would rather be raped by Pirate Bay than fucked up the ass by (Sony boss) Hasse Breitholtz and Sony Music and will remove all of my songs from Spotify pending an honest service.</blockquote> </div> <p /> <div style=""> <div style="">The implications of all this for the average recording artist are probably minimal, as the average recording artist rarely made a significant income from their recorded output. For those who's business is making and selling records however the implications are significant.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div style="">For a brief period of time, less than 100 years, making records was a profitable business. There is no guarantee that it will continue to be so and in fact the state of the recording industry today is not dissimilar to that in the visual arts.&nbsp;Anyone can purchase the means to make a painting fairly cheaply and there are many talented amateur painters and artists who are unable to support themselves financially with their art. Some rent out their artistic flair to corporate clients and a few become renowned enough to be able to sell their original work as an, often scarce, commodity.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div style="">It's not difficult to conceive a future in which recorded music will survive as 'art' and as a form of 'service' for commercials clients.&nbsp;Audio recordings as a commodity however are likely to continue to be devalued, not because an alternative has been developed, but because of technological changes in the way they are distributed and produced.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div style=""><strong>Where to now?</strong></div> </div> <p /> <div style=""> <div>__________________________________</div> <p /> <div>Offline References</div> </div> <p /> <div style=""> <div style="">Harford, T. (2006). <em>The undercover economist</em>. Little, Brown: London.&nbsp;</div> </div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/music-like-blubber">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/music-like-blubber#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/42RoZhd-n-s" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/music-like-blubber Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:43:14 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/N0ysCJsPka0/new-paper-published-surface-noise-a-cagean-ap http://wheretonow.posterous.com/new-paper-published-surface-noise-a-cagean-ap <p> <p>As I mentioned&nbsp;<a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/conflict-and-making-records">a couple of posts back</a>&nbsp;part of what I do for a living is research into music and audio production.</p><p>I just got news that a paper I wrote back in April this year has been&nbsp;<a href="http://www.popular-musicology-online.com/issues/01/carter-01.html">published in Popular Musicology Online</a>.</p><p>This is really exciting for me as the journal is edited by&nbsp;<a href="http://folk.uio.no/stanh/">Prof Stan Hawkins,</a>&nbsp;who's a bit of a guru in the world of popular music studies.</p><p>The paper came out of my PHD research on the crossover between Electronica and 'experimental' composers such as John Cage, Steve Reich and Karlheinz Stockhausen. It looks specifically at the work of British sound artist Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner, who you might remember from his 90s albums of intercepted telephone calls, and his work <i>Surface Noise</i>.</p><p>Although it was written for an academic audience I hope the paper's accessible enough for anyone with an interest in the ways that music, history, influence and philosophy fool around when the lights are off.</p><p>Would love to hear what you think.</p><p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Where to now?</span></p> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/new-paper-published-surface-noise-a-cagean-ap">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/new-paper-published-surface-noise-a-cagean-ap#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/N0ysCJsPka0" height="1" width="1"/> http://wheretonow.posterous.com/new-paper-published-surface-noise-a-cagean-ap Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:10:54 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/yheDcmFfZP8/my-interview-for-music-think-tank http://wheretonow.posterous.com/my-interview-for-music-think-tank <p> <div>As a followup to my&nbsp;<a href="http://www.musicadium.com/reports">research for Musicadium</a>, which I&nbsp;<a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/big-sound-2009-presentation-or-why-its-been-s">presented</a>&nbsp;at this years&nbsp;<a href="http://www.qmusic.com.au/bigsound2009">Big Sound conference</a>&nbsp;I was interviewed by&nbsp;<a href="http://arielpublicity.com/blog">Cyper Publicist</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://twitter.com/cyberpr">Ariel Hyat</a>t for a post on&nbsp;<a href="http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/university-research-proves-that-the-smart-interlinking-of-mu.html">Music Think Tank</a>.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>As is often the case, and with good reason, my sometimes rambling responses were edited down to fit the MTT format.&nbsp;</div><p /><div><div>Like any good interviewer Ariel got me to explain some of my ideas in a bit more detail than I otherwise might have so for anyone that's interested I thought I'd provide the full text of my responses below.</div><div><div><br /><blockquote type="cite"><div>Would you say this is accurate? To summarize his study: if you would like to make money at your music:</div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div>1. &nbsp;Create many presences online: Start with your own URL, add Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and Last.fm.<p />2. &nbsp;Interlink them all<p />3. &nbsp;Add a buy-link to iTunes on as many places as possible.<p />4. &nbsp;Get lots of fans engaged on these sites in two-way conversations<p />5. Have a newsletter &amp; e-mail list.<p />6. &nbsp;Give away free content.<p />7. &nbsp;Earn more money than your peers.</div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><p /></blockquote><p /><div>This is a bit tricky. Yes this describes some of the activities of artists who received better online sales of their recordings, but this doesn't mean that if another artist emulates these strategies they will make more money. There are too many other factors at play and there's never going to be a one size fits all approach. What the study does suggest is some ways to optimise your online presence, and that this might be important as so few of the artists studied were using the online space purposefully or, I think, effectively.</div><p /><div>Having an interlinked and deliberate web presence is a good idea regardless of financial returns because in my experience so few artists out there actually do this well.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>The level to which fans engaged on a particular platform is significant but I think you need to take into account how much engagement bands needed to generate before this correlated to increased sales. In the case of&nbsp;myspace and facebook, the&nbsp;bands who benefited most had a fan / friend count that was quite high and probably outside the reach of many emerging bands. I think the point here is that platforms, in and of themselves, won't help you unless you've got traction.</div><p /><div>As I wrote in the report the success or traction an artists experiences off-line is also very important. In my experience this often gets lost when talking about the great new opportunities that have opened up for independent and emerging artists online.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>Mailing lists are important because they provide a tangible link between your on and off-line activiites – and for this reason I think it's important that artists actually 'own' and control their contact list (something that doesn't happen with Myspace friends or Facebook fans).</div><p /><div>Free content is a bit of a red herring I think as only 4 of the 99 artists studied actually did this – that doesn't mean it's a bad idea, just that I wouldn't recommend it on the basis of the experience of 4 artists.</div><p /><blockquote type="cite"><div>MMT Questions for Dave Carter:<p />1. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;In your study you noted that maintaining a private Facebook profile corresponds to proportionally lower royalty returns, why do you think that is.</div></blockquote><p /><div>I have to be careful here as there's lots of reasons why those artists may have received lower returns that don't have anything to do with Facebook. However the artists in question may not have understood or taken into account the way that Facebook functions as a 'closed' or 'exclusive' network. The ability to selectively exclude others and choose who can see what on your profile is one of the functions that, in my opinion, made Facebook a popular service. But for a band wanting to promote themselves limiting access to their profile isn't a great strategy.&nbsp;</div><br /><blockquote type="cite"><div>2. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Regarding blog mentions, how big (traffic-wise) were the blogs that received placements? And, did blog traffic on the MP3 and dedicated music review blogs correspond directly with royalty returns?</div></blockquote><p /><div>Most of the blogs were syndicated via HypeMachine so their&nbsp;<i>potentia</i>l readership was quite large. However most could be described as having a 'niche' readership – couldn't give you exact traffic figures without speaking to the bloggers directly.&nbsp;Researchers at NYU released a study in 2007 called 'Does Chatter Matter?' which discusses the impact of blogging in much more detail.&nbsp;They found that the number of blog posts on an album prior to release could be used to predict how well that album would sell. But they also pointed out that this doesn't mean blog chatter causes sales.&nbsp;In my study the number of blog mentions an artist or album received were generally quite low and so&nbsp;I think it's unlikely that this was the only thing driving higher returns.&nbsp;The NYU researchers noted that bloggers usually only blog about music they think is great and my thoughts are that whatever it is that inspires them to blog about a song is probably the same thing that inspires listeners to buy it. I'm not saying bloggers don't influence sales – just that it's complicated.</div><p /><blockquote type="cite"><div>3. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Re: Myspace: You talk about artists that have a well-integrated presence on Myspace (blogs shows and wall comments etc). &nbsp;seeing higher returns. Could this just mean that the band has more going on and their “act together”, i.e., an outside marketing company or label helping them on Myspace page? Or do you think just focusing on MySpcae yields great sales results?</div></blockquote><p /><div>To be clear - I don't think focussing on Myspace will yield greater sales results. &nbsp;Artists who used Myspace in place of a dedicated website actually received lower returns overall and, on its own, Myspace use didn't correspond with significant increases in sales until an artist started experiencing really dramatic genuine engagement with their fans.&nbsp;To me, the presence of gig listings, blog posts and a wall that isn't full of spam suggests an artist who is on the ball in terms of how they present themselves and is probably using Myspace as part of a deliberate, integrated on and off-line presence.&nbsp;</div><p /><blockquote type="cite"><div>4. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Out of the 19 artists in your study &nbsp;that had mailing list, did you look at how often they sent newsletters? Was it once a month, twice a month, etc. &nbsp;And can you comment on the content of the newsletters?</div></blockquote><p /><div>Unfortunately the study didn't go that deep as so few of the artists actually maintained a mailing list or promoted their list online.&nbsp;</div><br /><blockquote type="cite"><div>5. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The artists in your study that gave away free content, where they giving it away in exchange for e-mail addresses? like a bribe? What was the context for it being given away, just as MP3s, or was it given off their site or off of MySpace?</div></blockquote><p />Only 4 of the artists studied offered free content (mp3's) and in each case it was in exchange for either an email address / personal information or a tweet / request / facebook update. The transaction was generally managed through a dedicated 'widget' or form.</div><div><br /><blockquote type="cite"><div>6. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Based on your studies, What is the first step an artist, just starting out, to do should take in order to make a difference for their own online strategy?</div></blockquote><p /><div>Based on the Musicadium study I think it comes back to basic marketing –&nbsp;deliberately and thoughtfully construct a web presence that engages the type of people you want to speak to through media they use.&nbsp;This sounds simple but in practice it can be very difficult and requires a lot of trial and error.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>Figure out who you want to talk to, where they're listening and what you have to offer them. Then develop a strategy that helps you attract and engage your target audience through the types of media and services they use.&nbsp;An effective promotional strategy&nbsp;is useless if it doesn't result in outcomes that mean something to you and so it's also important to&nbsp;think about what you actually want to get out of the exercise&nbsp;(a bigger email list? more punters at gigs? better gigs? increased merch or recording sales? radio airplay?)&nbsp;and how you will achieve this.&nbsp;</div><p /><div>Based on my observations very few of the artists studied had considered their online strategy in this way.</div><p /><div>My own personal advice to artists just starting out would be to make sure you've got something happening off-line – this doesn't have to mean international touring or massive radio exposure but I think that for most people the online space is still an extension of the real world. Your online promotion should to be an extension of your off-line promotion and they should both result in outcomes that mean something to you.</div><p /><div>As a starting point I would suggest a new artist might want:</div><p /><div>– something that tells the world who they are, what they're doing (gigs etc.) and find out more about them (like a website)</div><div>– some sort of regularly updated content like a blog, vlog or similar</div><div>– a way to communicate with their fans, like a facebook page or similar</div><div>– third-party hosted streaming content, ideally in a format that can be easily shared such as youtube videos and streaming widgets. I'd include Myspace pages and Flickr photo's in this category.</div><div>– downloadable content (this could be through digital retailers but doesn't have to be)</div><div>– a way for fans to give them something of value (not necessarily money and not necessarily in exchange for downloadable content)</div><div>– a way to collect information from their fans (email, location) that can be used to promote future events / releases via email</div><div>– links between each site and service the artist is using, with prominent links to content, ways for fans to give them their details and / or something else of value.</div><p /><div>This might be as simple as a Blog (who you are and what you're doing with updated content), Twitter account (communication with fans), Last.FM page (streaming content), an email list (collecting information on fans) and having recordings distributed via the iTunes Music Store (downloadable content in exchange for $). But for this to be effective the artist involved would need to really work at building a fan-base &nbsp;through these services and off-line activities. It's not the tools that count it's how you use them.</div><br /><blockquote type="cite"><div>7. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Drawing from the results of this study, what are 5 action steps that you would recommend for an emerging band trying to increase their digital sales?</div></blockquote><p /><div>On the basis of this study – and assuming you've got a high quality recorded product.</div><p /><div>1) Get things moving off-line. Play gigs, tour, aim for media coverage (radio, tv, press, online, etc.) appropriate to your style of music.</div><div>2) Identify who your audience is, what you can offer them and how best to communicate with them. As an aside, Youtube appeared to be an underutilised resource among the artists I studied.</div><div>3) Think about and develop a web presence that will help you attract and engage new fans in the places where they are – make sure everything is linked together like a web and that you make it easy for anyone who's interested to give you money</div><div>4) Develop a contact / mailing list that you own and control, add to this at every opportunity and use it to communicate and market directly to your fans.</div><div>5) Identify what services are getting fan engagement – start&nbsp;targeting&nbsp;these channels and reassess your online strategy. If somethings not working, look for another option.</div><p /><blockquote type="cite"><div>8. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Is having an ‘interlinked web presence’ as simple as providing links to all of your existing profiles across your web presence?</div></blockquote><p /><div>Yes and no – what I looked at in the research related to clear links between the different sites and services an artist was using. In practice this meant they were easier to find online and, once found, it was easy to navigate across their web presence. I think there's some other work that bands could do here in terms of SEO and keyword linking but I didn't examine this in the research. What I went looking for, and was surprised not to find, was whether bands were making it easy to be found and share their music with others online.</div><br /><blockquote type="cite"><div>9. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Elaborate on some of the more unique ways that an emerging band can promote themselves online. What are a few things that emerging bands can do that they would not traditionally hear about?</div></blockquote><p /><div>This is probably your area of expertise rather than mine and there's a whole lot of information out there already about how to promote a band online.&nbsp;</div><br /><blockquote type="cite"><div>10. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;What are some ways for emerging artist to attract new fans using a Facebook fan page?</div></blockquote><p /><div>Not sure I'm really qualified to answer this one. Sorry.</div><br /><blockquote type="cite"><div>11. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Do you think it is possible for an emerging artist to gain a large following in today’s industry without having a frequently-updated web presence?</div></blockquote><p />My own opinion is yes, absolutely. However it would be unusual, difficult and&nbsp;I think bands would need a very good reason to ignore what can be a very powerful promotional tool.</div><p /><div>I recently read Greg Kott's&nbsp;<i>Ripped</i>&nbsp;and it's interesting to note that of the bands he documents, the ones&nbsp;whose careers were actually launched online weren't necessarily the ones actively engaging with the technology. I don't have the book to hand but I remember reading a quote (I&nbsp;<i>think</i>&nbsp;from Conor Oberst) to the effect of 'we didn't really understand what was happening online, we just got out of the way'. Things have changed a lot in recent years but I think one of the best promotional tools a band can have is still rabid evangelizing fans.&nbsp;</div><p /><div><blockquote type="cite"><div>12. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Where were the majority of online sales highlighted in your study taking place? Were fans purchasing digital downloads through the artists’ main websites, through their social networks, or through another medium?</div></blockquote><p /><div>Documented sales were entirely through online retailers such as the iTunes Music Store. One of the limitations of the study is that I could only take into account sales recorded by Musicadium.</div><br /><blockquote type="cite"><div>13. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Is there anything else you would like to say about this study that could be helpful for musicians looking to increase their online sales and engage more directly with fans?</div></blockquote><p /></div>The online space offers bands a lot of amazing tools but&nbsp;there's no magic bullet and even a well conceived and realised online strategy may not result in increased sales.&nbsp;While there's a lot to be learned from high profile success stories I think it's important to ask whether this success is typical and could be repeated by another artist using a similar strategy. Often this isn't the case and instead of emulating other peoples success I think it's important for artists to try and figure out how they can best use the available tools to attract and engage fans. The research I conducted for Musicadium provides some useful pointers regarding what is and isn't working for a number of independent artists who are using the online space to help build their profile. If this is you then I'd recommend having a read and getting in touch if you have questions.</div><p /><div><b>Where to Now?</b></div><p /><p /></div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/my-interview-for-music-think-tank">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/my-interview-for-music-think-tank#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/yheDcmFfZP8" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/my-interview-for-music-think-tank Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:52:00 -0800 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/3M2wte_R93M/conflict-and-making-records http://wheretonow.posterous.com/conflict-and-making-records <p> <div>As well as intermittently blogging on the music industry I also teach, research and practice the art of recording production.</div> <p /> <div>Over the last six months I've been on a reading spree of books and articles that document the creative producer-artist relationship</div> <p /> <div>Standout books include Bob Dylan's&nbsp;<a href="http://www.google.com.au/url?q=http://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-1-Bob-Dylan/dp/0743228154&amp;ei=S6nvSqC0MMmJkQW36YSOBw&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=spellmeleon_result&amp;resnum=1&amp;ct=result&amp;ved=0CAkQhgIwAA&amp;usg=AFQjCNFmsXBh2trYd9u2qzRjURgRQXurlA"><em>Chronicles: Volume On</em>e</a>&nbsp;(for his description of working with Daniel Lanois); mega-producer Phil Ramone's&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Making-Records-Scenes-Behind-Music/dp/0786868597">Making Record</a>s</em>&nbsp;(though poorly written there's some fascinating stuff on his partnership with Billy Joel); George Martin's&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Summer-Love-Making-Sgt-Pepper/dp/033034210X">Summer of Love</a>&nbsp;(documenting the making of Sgt. Peppers) and; Zak Albin's excellent&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Poetics-Rock-Cutting-Tracks-Records/dp/0520232240">The Poetics of Rock</a>.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>A common theme running through these works is the degree to which the producers role is one of support <em>and</em> provocation. An example that springs to mind is Malcolm Cecil and Robert Malgologg goading Stevie Wonder into singing take after take of "Living In The City" until his voice started to crack and express the anger inherent in the songs lyrics.&nbsp;Sometimes this type of creative conflict is friendly (Ramone and Billy Joel) and sometimes creative tensions can turn into chair-throwing tantrums (Dylan recalls asking Lanois at the end of a particularly turbulent session "Danny, are we still friends?").&nbsp;Though handled differently in each instance it appears that some degree of creative conflict forms an important part of the artist-producer relationship.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>Conflict means both producer and artist have a vision for the recording and are invested in the outcome.&nbsp;Next to the artist themselves, the producer often has the most creative investment in a recording project.&nbsp;Producers are often employed for their ability to provide external perspective but what's really valuable is their&nbsp;cognitive ear that can hear through through bad takes, demos and poor recordings to imagine what the finished track will be like and work towards that.&nbsp;I'm a big fan of Rick Rubin and find&nbsp;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rick-Rubin-Studio-Jake-Brown/dp/1550228757">his approach</a>&nbsp;to production instructive. A talented performer and engineer Rubin sees his role primarily as an arbiter of taste. Rubin suggests that the most important thing he brings to an album is a fans ear &ndash; a vision for what he wants to hear from a track and a sometimes ruthless editors pen.&nbsp; Of course this vision may be at odds with that of the artist and here conflict can be a catalyst for innovation.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>I've spent the last couple of weeks in the studio with a Brisbane Hip Hop artist.</div> <div>When I took on the project I was presented with an album and a half's worth of unfinished material stretching back a couple of years.&nbsp;The production process has involved&nbsp;a lot of editting, reworking and rewriting tracks to create a more cohesive album that reflects the artists current artistic vision. This hasn't always been easy and there have been several occasions where we've reached an impasse where neither of us is happy with the direction a track is taking. This is an important part of the process as resolving this type of conflict&nbsp;isn't about reaching an acceptable compromise but instead finding another way around. It forces us to re-imagine the sounds in our head and the results can be surprising and inspiring.</div> <p /> <div>One last observation is that the type of creative conflict that exists in the producer&ndash;artist relationship (in fact any artistic collaboration) requires mutual respect and trust &ndash; in the vision of both parties, their desire to create something special and that any disagreements won't lead to long-term hostility. Back to Rick Rubin again and one of my&nbsp;favorite&nbsp;scenes from the Dixie Chicks 2006 documentary <em>Shut Up and Sing</em>. After listening to the bands new tracks (from 2006's <em>Taking the Long Way Round</em>)&nbsp;Rubin turns to Natalie Maines and&nbsp;says "I do not like the words &ndash; It's worth pursuing ... but I would rewrite all the words". This pronouncement&nbsp;generates a palpable uncertainty in the band but Rubin manages and redirects that uncertainty into further creative exploration.</div> <p /> <div><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/bv_o443Uu54?wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="417" width="500"></iframe></div> <p /> <div><strong>Where to now?</strong></div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/conflict-and-making-records">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/conflict-and-making-records#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/3M2wte_R93M" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/conflict-and-making-records Wed, 07 Oct 2009 06:08:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/QK788j9N-Ec/birds-vs-humans-your-kind-needs-you http://wheretonow.posterous.com/birds-vs-humans-your-kind-needs-you <p> <div>Imagine a world without music, art, culture...</div> <p /> <div>Imagine a world without humanity.</div> <p /> <div>This was the bleak message hinted at in a series of&nbsp;intriguing&nbsp;packages delivered to bloggers and media personalities across Australia earlier this week as part of a mysterious marketing campaign Birds Vs Humans.</div> <p /> <div>Whothehell.net's Jerry Soer recently blogged about&nbsp;<a href="http://whothehell.net/archives/6253">receiving mysterious phone calls and packages</a>&nbsp;directing him to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.birdsvshumans.com.au/nogigs">this personalised apocalyptic flash movie</a>&nbsp;and it turns out he wasn't alone..</div> <p /> <div> <p>&nbsp;</p> <blockquote class="posterous_short_quote">On Tuesday October 6 2009, selected blogs and sites received the first of two packs that will unravel the story of birds vs humans</blockquote> </div> <p /> <div>A number of Australian bloggers, Tweeters and cool hunters have received similar packages, and as everyone loves a good mystery the campaign's generated a decent amount of chatter despite resembling an avian Blair Witch Project and no-one knowing what it's all about.</div> <p /> <div>Australian blogger AWOL Monk&nbsp;<a href="http://awolmonk.blogspot.com/2009/10/truth-about-birds-vs-humans.html">claims to have cracked the mystery</a>&nbsp;already (though is not telling <strong>EDIT:</strong> but has confirmed I got it right - see comments) but as I like mysteries and think this is quite an interesting Australian online campaign I thought I'd look closer.</div> <p /> <div>A little bit of digging revealed that the birdsvshumans&nbsp;domain is registered to a Suzette Muir / Mackenzie &ndash; most probably&nbsp;an ex campaign / account manager with New Zealand marketing firm Wow Rapp Collins and currently working for&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cleanerclimate.com/suzette-mackenzie">Cleaner Climate</a>&nbsp;who seem to be some sort of 'green marketing firm.</div> <div> <p>The domain was registered through a sole-trader ABN, set up quite recently (July 09) &ndash; probably for the purpose of running this campaign. ABN is registered to Neutral Bay (Cleaner Climates offices are in Sydney).</p> <p>Then I dug a bit further and found that birdsvshumans site shares a host with a bunch of brewer Lion Nathan's products developed by Sydney marketing agency <a href="www.hollersydney.com.au">Holler</a>.</p> <p>This is significant as Suzette Muir has won at least one NZ advertising award for&nbsp;<a href="http://www.marketing.org.nz/cms/winners/1641">work on a Lion Nathan campaign</a>.</p> <p>More interestingly, a Google for Holler Sydney and Suzette Muir turned up this:</p> <p><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <a href="http://getfile9.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/waU14XDKam7canplcpuE28gaaeFkTRW1hV8c2kmBtkfGpHz9JBi0mzQPlVRV/holler.tiff.converted.jpg"><img alt="Holler" height="77" src="http://getfile1.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/fc8JoSW9046sU4YINW4Og3snKgEvTBX4WXEOgzJhNnGxuClyoTKClFdFQH89/holler.tiff.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" /></a> </div> </p> <p>XXXX Angels (and the other groups mentioned) is part of a Holler campaign for Lion Nathan hosted on the same server as Birds Vs. Humans.</p> <p>So - I'm guessing what we have here is the launch of some new booze [UPDATE: ok so I was right, it's a campaign for Tooheys <a href="http://www.facebook.com/5seeds">5 Seeds Cider</a>] with a fairly finessed online campaign.</p> <p>Maybe I'm wrong - it's possible that Holler / Lion Nathan are donating the server space and it has nothing to do with them (my initial gut hunch was that this had somehting to do with Native Digital).</p> <p>Regardless, this is the first ad campaign in a while that I've actually been interested in and there are some good lessons to be learned here in terms of how to get the attention of Australian bloggers.</p> <p>Doesn't really have anything to do with music but it made for an interesting afternoon of detection.</p> <p><strong>Where to now?</strong></p> </div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/birds-vs-humans-your-kind-needs-you">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/birds-vs-humans-your-kind-needs-you#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/QK788j9N-Ec" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/birds-vs-humans-your-kind-needs-you Sat, 26 Sep 2009 01:02:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/nm_LKwT0K4o/the-album-redux http://wheretonow.posterous.com/the-album-redux <p> <div><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <a href="http://getfile5.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/ZGqpMkdNU1mRMqBHR1voa2VIec28stmkqidQbd7ba61OKSIYp7plUWkduyTT/pastedGraphic.tiff.converted.jpg"><img alt="Pastedgraphic" height="314" src="http://getfile7.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/9k9ANJTgaLHZP7Q1gdCPNJvKPNEhMT1a06KFEE8KFInfHlS60c2pmVzn05mk/pastedGraphic.tiff.scaled.500.jpg" width="500" /></a> </div> </div> <p /> <div>The relatively low-key launch of Apples iTunes LP format signals the first 'serious' (major-label supported) attempt at format-shifting the album.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div> <div>The iTunes LP appears to be a concession to major labels Sony, EMI, Warner and Universal &nbsp;who,&nbsp;<a href="http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article6788159.ece">according to the Times Online</a>, approached Apple with a plan to boost online album sales through value-added content. The issue for the major labels is that, while they're investing money producing and promoting album content, consumer sentiment and activity online has favored singles &ndash;&nbsp;probably driven by the ability to 'cherry pick' and compile a selection of tracks (to mix CD's / iPods / etc.).&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>Though Apple is said to have initially turned down the request (after all, they were doing fine as a singles retailer) they are first to market 'digital albums' ahead of the anticipated release of the label-driven&nbsp;<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/aug/10/major-labels-new-digital-format">CMX digital album format</a>&nbsp;in November this year.&nbsp;However&nbsp;with only 6 titles as-yet available and a softly-softly approach it's questionable how seriously Apple are taking the idea of a 'digital' album. And if they're not, why should we?</div> <p /> <div> <div style="font-size: 17px;"><strong>Bundles of Joy</strong></div> <p /> <div>The term 'digital album' is a bit like 'ATM Machine' because most albums, excepting vinyl and cassette, are digital already. Instead&nbsp;CMX and Cocktail are an attempt to value-add to the album format through bundled multimedia content - much like the Enhanced CD's of the 90's. Bundling is not a new concept and has been applied to everything from coffee to computers as a way of extracting higher sales volume / income, normally at only slightly higher cost to the manufacturer or retailer.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>With regards to the distribution of recordings in the online space, bundling has&nbsp;traditionally been used to&nbsp;combine a commodity that can be easily replicated (digital recordings) with a scarcer commodity (t-shirts / vinyl /&nbsp;<a href="http://joshfreese.com/buynow/75000/">'shrooming in a ferrari with Tool members</a>) or to provide a collection of recordings at a 'bundle' price.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.topspinmedia.com/">Topspin Media</a>'s online promotion platform appears to&nbsp;<a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/reverse-engineering-topspin-media">make use of the former</a>&nbsp;while subscription&nbsp;services, such as&nbsp;<a href="http://www.emusic.com">eMusic</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.virginmedia.com">Virginmedia</a>, allow consumers to create their own 'bundles' of individual recordings or albums.&nbsp;Both approaches take into account the very low cost (essentially $0) of reproducing and distributing digital content online and respond by offering extra 'value' to consumers through a lower price per track or the inclusion of physical (normally 'collector') content at a premium price.</div> <p /> <div>In contrast, iTunes LP's bundle digital content (audio commentary, videos, pictures, etc.) at the same or higher price point as their other inventory items. Consumers don't end up with more tracks for their money and there is no added scarcity value&nbsp;(pirate copies of Muse's iTunes LP were purportedly up on file sharing networks&nbsp;<a href="http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/09/16/looks-like-itunes-lp-can-be-pirated-after-all-muse-album-found-online">a week after release</a>). &nbsp;Consequently the success of the format (and probably CMX when it's released) depends entirely on the ability of the retailers to create demand for what is essentially trimming. This seems like a bad deal for everyone involved but,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2009/08/the-album-is-dead-and-your-stupid-cmx-format-wont-bring-it-back-record-labels/">contrary popular opinion</a>, the major labels and Apple aren't stupid. So what's going on?</div> <p /> <div style="font-size: 16px;"><strong>Value for Whom?</strong></div> <p /> <div>Firstly, Apple doesn't really have a financial interest in selling albums over singles and have remained mostly above the&nbsp;fray&nbsp;in the debate over music piracy. This is because there aren't affected by these factors in the same way as the major labels.&nbsp;Apple does however have an interest in selling hardware and so it's interesting to note that the extra content bundled in iTunes LP's is&nbsp;<a href="http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/09/14/new-itunes-lp-and-extras-built-using-tunekit-framework-aimed-at-apple-tv/">intended for a much larger screen than an iPod or iPhone</a>. Just like iTunes and the iTunes Music Store was used as a way to sell iPods, the bundled multimedia format in an iTunes LP could conceivably be used to drive sales of&nbsp;Apple TV's and the <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">rumored Apple Tablet, if it ever sees the light of day </span>(UPDATE: <a href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/" target="_blank">iPad</a>). This also enable Apple to differentiate it's iTunes LP's from the increasing number of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;ct=res&amp;cd=3&amp;url=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.wired.com%252Fepicenter%252F2009%252F08%252Fthe-album-is-dead-long-live-the-app%252F&amp;ei=Nsa9SvWVAoGTkQXIkOhW&amp;usg=AFQjCNE0rriOKr-Yfgs-h1t_BSXixqvZKw&amp;sig2=N4tpWwVVJNjNxjIeysUarg">album Apps</a>&nbsp;available for it's portable devices.</div> <p /> <div>In the case of the major labels, and the recording industry more generally, there's a clear financial benefit in encouraging consumers to purchase albums over singles. I don't believe the iTunes LP (or CMX) bundle offers enough benefit to consumers in the form of cost or content to achieve this. However&nbsp;as&nbsp;<a href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=903893.903946">Zhu and MacQuarrie</a>&nbsp;note, bundling can also be an effective way to 'exclude' competitors from the marketplace who either cannot bundle or can't provide the same quantity or quality of product within a bundle. Zhu and MacQuarrie argue, with specific reference to large-scale bundles offered by subscription services, that:&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div> <blockquote class="posterous_medium_quote">Bundling has very powerful implications for competition and industry structure. It preserves the competitive strength of large firms by giving them an advantage in three key areas: competing for customers, competing for content and deterring entry.</blockquote> </div> <p /> <div>While the iTunes LP is a slightly different proposition,&nbsp;Pete Mortennsen at Cult of Mac&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cultofmac.com/itunes-lp-the-first-digital-album-good-enough-to-criticize/16132">argues</a>&nbsp;that the format is&nbsp;"too complex" for an average artist or label to implement without "the budget of Dave Matthews or Bob Dylan".&nbsp;<a href="http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/09/14/new-itunes-lp-and-extras-built-using-tunekit-framework-aimed-at-apple-tv/">Daniel Eran's</a>&nbsp;dissection of the format suggests that this may be a little defeatist but until Apple publishes a set of standards the major labels have an apparent monopoly on new format that may be destined to promote and sell Apple's must have new consumer item.</div> <p /> </div> </div> <div><strong>Where to now?</strong></div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/the-album-redux">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/the-album-redux#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/nm_LKwT0K4o" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/the-album-redux Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:31:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/2DHDuJKdobA/music-like-sports http://wheretonow.posterous.com/music-like-sports <p> <div> <blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 40px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-color: initial; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px;">Music and sport have a lot in common, they are both recreational activities around which both commercial and non- commercial sectors and cultures have developed, with channels of cross over existing between the two.</blockquote> </div> <div> <div> <p /> <div>While I wish I could claim this great analogy for myself it belongs to Mike Ross, who was&nbsp;<a href="http://blog.musicadium.com/general/can-we-decide-if-the-music-industry-is-booming-or-on-the-decline-please/1087/comment-page-1/#comment-811">contributing</a>&nbsp;to a discussion over at (Australian digital distributor)&nbsp;<a href="http://www.musicadium.com.au">Musicadium's</a>&nbsp;blog. Mike pointed out that, just like the music business. <p /> <blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 40px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-color: initial; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px;">"A hell of a lot of people play a sport their whole lives, always trying to get better at it, whilst knowing full well that no one will ever pay them to do it . . . They are happy because their fun is derived from the activity rather than the result. . . . Pay most people anything to play a sport they like and they will be stoked, it&rsquo;s gravy&hellip; The same applies to those who administer the sports sector&hellip; A bit of money at the top, but again, the majority of sports&rsquo; administrative activity is driven by passion"</blockquote> <p /> </div> </div> <div> <div>In fact the Classical music 'industry' has traditionally worked just like this - a few well paid teams and superstars with a level of semi-professional groups / orchstras and then a mass of enthusiasts who are 'coached' &nbsp;in the hopes of one day making it to the big league or simply for the joy of creating beautiful (or not) sound.&nbsp;&nbsp;There is a recognition that collective participatory music making - what Small (1998) calls 'musicking' -&nbsp;&nbsp;is an important, if not fundamental component, of human society and experience.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>More recently however the cults of youth and celebrity have conspired with the mythology that 'anyone can be a star' &nbsp;to obscure and devalue the vast majority of musicians and performers that don't 'make it'.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>This not only affects the way we value music and musicians but also how we think, speak and write about the business of music.</div> <p /> <div>As a simple example, have you ever noticed how often 'music industry' is used to refer exclusively to the recorded music industry?&nbsp;Or how discussion of 'new music business models' tends to focuss on how to create revenue streams from recorded works?</div> <p /> <div>This got me wondering about what the music business might be able to learn from the business of sports.</div> <p /> <div style="font-size: 14px;"><strong>Amateur athletes don't feel ripped off paying to play sport.</strong></div> <p /> <div>For the vast majority of athletes, sport is a recreational activity for which they are happy to pay. There's no stigma attached to the term amateur or expectation of financial reward &ndash; though sport participation undoubtedly brings with it a variety of other rewards.&nbsp;This doesn't mean there's no money in amateur sports, just that the money goes to third parties such as clubs and retailers.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>There's a clear analogy here with music education and retail, both of which generate sizable profits from amateurs and hobbyists (remember these aren't dirty words).&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>One Australian company,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.weekendwarriors.org.au/">Weekend Warriors</a>, took the analogy one step further and is profitably exploiting a hole in the market for amateur pop and rock musicians who want the chance to perform in public.&nbsp;Now a national movement in Australia, Weekend Warriors runs like a sports camp for recreational muso's. Participants pay to be coached in small teams and perform in public for their friends and family and the program provides them with the rock-star treatment.&nbsp;Australian singer / songwriter Russel Morris and Weekend Warriors session presenter neatly summarises the concept:</div> <p /> <div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span>"You have the camaraderie of the other guys in the band. It's like going down to play local cricket. It's almost akin to playing in the local football or cricket team and you play on the weekend. You do it, <span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span>then you have a few beers afterwards. It's a wonderful experience, a great emotional experience and a wonderful connection with you and your mates, because you feel like a team .. a team that is doing <span class="Apple-tab-span" style=""> </span>something together, conquering something."&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div style="font-size: 14px;"><strong>The sport industry invests a lot of time and energy looking for and developing talent</strong></div> <p /> <div>When I was a kid growing up in Canberra I used to play Rugby League. I was bigger than most of the other guys my age and I have fond memories of struggling towards the try-line with the oppositions back row hanging off my legs &ndash; though perhaps I'm idealising.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>I never expected to take Rugby very far, but I remember that for a couple of guys I played with, the game was a serious proposition. They played at state level, attended coaching clinics and, if they continued to show promise, were funneled into junior league teams. A lot of energy was invested in these guys when they were young on the basis of their <em>potential</em>&nbsp;value.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>Contrast this with the commonly expressed view, exemplified in the following interview with Owen Husney,&nbsp;that the music industry has come to expect overnight success and is not willing to invest in artist development.</div> <p /> <div> <div style=""> <object height="240" width="320"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.artistshousemusic.org/player/flvplayershare.swf?file=http://www.artistshousemusic.com/video/lashoot/oh_artistdev.flv" /> <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed src="http://www.artistshousemusic.org/player/flvplayershare.swf?file=http://www.artistshousemusic.com/video/lashoot/oh_artistdev.flv" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="240" width="320"></embed> </object> </div> </div> <p /> <div style="font-size: 15px;"><strong>The real money in sports is in patronage and sponsorship</strong></div> <p /> <div>While value of sports resides with individual and corporate experience - for players and spectators - most of the money is in advertising. Sporting clubs and athletes are often supported by sponsors and&nbsp;advertising revenue has become increasingly important as, just like the recorded music industry, the business of sports has been impacted by technology (television broadcasts) that has allowed consumers access to a previously scarce commodity (access to watching games) at marginal extra cost to the rights-holder (club) (Buraimo, 2006).&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>Similarly many of the biggest names in music &ndash; such as Beethoven &ndash; have relied on patronage to survive and&nbsp;many of Australia's orchestra's would be unsustainable if not for corporate sponsorship. &nbsp;As recorded music becomes devalued as a product&nbsp;patronage (in the form of publishing and synchronisation rights), sponsorship and advertising are again being considered as serious revenue streams for 'serious' musical acts; including Bob Dylan.</div> </div> <p /> <div> <div> <div>I've skimmed over a lot of detail here, some of which I hope to return to in future posts, but just imagine for a minute if the music industry were run like the sports industry: inclusive and encouraging of amateurs; focussed on uncovering and developing talent and; deriving revenue from experience and IP (in the form of broadcast rights and branding deals) rather than product.</div> </div> </div> </div> <p /> <div>Now imagine that the sports industry were run like the music industry...</div> <p /> <div><strong>Where to now?</strong></div> <div> <p /> <p /> <div>__________________________________</div> <p /> <div>Offline References</div> <p /> <div>Buraimo, B. (2006). The demand for sports broadcasting. In W. Andreff and S. Szymanski (Eds.), <em>Handbook on the economics of sport</em>&nbsp;(pp. 100&ndash;111). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.</div> <p /> <div>Small, C. (1998). <em>Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening</em>. Hanover: Wesleyan Press.</div> <p /> <p /> </div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/music-like-sports">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/music-like-sports#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/2DHDuJKdobA" height="1" width="1"/> http://wheretonow.posterous.com/music-like-sports Fri, 11 Sep 2009 06:23:13 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/vXfqNSr9I0U/big-sound-2009-presentation-or-why-its-been-s http://wheretonow.posterous.com/big-sound-2009-presentation-or-why-its-been-s <p> This week I released <a href="http://www.musicadium.com/reports">some new research</a>&nbsp;on Independent artists and online promotion at the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.qmusic.com.au/bigsound2009">Big Sound</a>&nbsp;music industry conference here in Brisbane, Australia.<p /><div>The research was made possible through collaborate with digital aggregate&nbsp;<a href="http://www.musicadium.com">Musicadium</a>&nbsp;and has been the focus of much of my writing and reading time over the last couple of months at the expense of other projects, including this blog.</div><p /><div>The report can be&nbsp;<a href="http://www.musicadium.com/reports">downloaded from Musicadium's website&nbsp;</a>and for the sake of posterity I thought I'd post the text of my presentation here as a form of recompense and documentation for my own benefit.</div><p /><div><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Slide01" height="225" src="http://getfile9.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/508KhMP4gDJLqjVNIhNStqeo4UxaWDm7KGOzjjsTrsS7Q2A6w8w92kho4Ysv/Slide01.jpg" width="300" /> </div> </div><div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">For anyone that wants to go looking, there’s a world of opinion out there about the online music 'revolution' and the benefits that online distribution and promotion offer independent self-promoting recording artists.&nbsp;It's easy to point to a number of success stories that demonstrate the potential for online promotion to boost an artists fan-base and earnings, but the question is whether these successes could be considered typical or can be replicated.&nbsp;More importantly, while there are plenty of opinions about how not-yet-famous artists should be promoting themselves online (my favourite was ‘<a href="http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/the-kama-sutra-of-music-marketing.html">The Kama Sutra of Music Marketin</a>g’); there doesn’t appear to be a lot of information about what they’re actually doing and if it makes any difference.</span></p> </div><div><p /><div><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Slide02" height="225" src="http://getfile5.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/5a2cMOFwxQOdclkeVqXQavy7kstR4lSuyoTl2MXRFOnm52Jmp3qBg5PgmYQ8/Slide02.jpg" width="300" /> </div> </div><div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">Given that a lot of discussion centers on how the online space can benefit independent and self-releasing artists it made sense to me to start looking at what they were doing online and if they were seeing any benefit from their actions.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">So, working with Musicadium I documented the sales figures, online promotional activities and off-line profile of 99 artists distributed by Musicadium.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">This included information, such as the services an artist was using and number of Myspace profile views, as well as observations about the artists’ profile within the Australian music industry based on number of releases; length of career; media interviews and reviews; regularity and venues of performance / touring and; radio / television airplay. &nbsp;</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">I&nbsp;then examined this information to identify if there was anything the artists were doing that resulted in proportionally higher sales.&nbsp;Obviously this information is fairly sensitive and was examined and reported anonymously with earnings described as a percentage of the total earnings of the artists studied.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">As can be seen on the slide earnings were skewed towards a small number of high earners and so a median value of.2% was used as an 'average' return for the purposes of comparison.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">The study doesn't take into account alternate revenue streams (physical CD's / Merch) or other benefits that might flow to an artist (e.g. gigs), BUT most of the artists studied are self-releasing independent artists who do not have a physical distribution deal in place. So, though imperfect, digital sales are a good place to start.</span></p> </div><p /><div><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Slide03" height="225" src="http://getfile1.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/NxFBrCEIHHA3G1XSmdKOkxq4hABqwsScfrf2yUKaTIDD16L5gHjAAfGpTajc/Slide03.jpg" width="300" /> </div> </div><div><br /><div> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">If you were to sift through the various opinions advocating online promotion to independent artists you'd probably come up with a set of tools – what we might cal a web-presence –&nbsp;that looks something like this with each tool serving a purpose and being linked together in a strategic manner.&nbsp;In fact, barring Reverb Nation (which along with a number of other services wasn't used widely enough to comment on in this research) these were the most common tools being used by the artists studied.&nbsp;One of the key findings of the research that we'll come to in a moment was that artists who build an interconnected web-presence such as this actually do receive proportionally higher earnings BUT...</span></p> </div><p /><div><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Slide04" height="225" src="http://getfile7.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/OMIoyLVRgUJew0CQ3ApdEPNGvHi8cUzn1PaI0U9NsXF991YMCzqJb7iGLUMv/Slide04.jpg" width="300" /> </div> </div><p /><div> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">This is the web presence of an artist with a 0% royalty share – it's very close to what might be considered 'optimal' and, though I can't reveal who the artist is, they're essentially following the general advice out there on how to effectively promote themselves online.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Slide05" height="225" src="http://getfile3.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/izzveZPyARsn2ixWV0aE0BGqxicg0fwUptPEnRhM7Yu3ViJpASvpmtgz3luR/Slide05.jpg" width="300" /> </div> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">... and this is the web presence of the third highest earner among the artists studied - 1 myspace page with less than 100 friends.&nbsp;The cautionary tale here is that while there are some interesting trends to come out of this research we have to be careful when generalising.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Slide06" height="225" src="http://getfile9.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/6qiwGXKjtiT3yRjUDkolYBi7f3OFg2OukGfMiPrZNyQUXMQwdNjhsAVkInSW/Slide06.jpg" width="300" /> </div> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">When examined on a service by service basis the use of most of the prominent tools for bands to promote themselves online didn't correspond with dramatic<span style="">&nbsp; </span>proportional increases in earnings.<span style="">&nbsp;For example the median royalties returned to Youtube users (.27%) wasn't dramatically higher than the overall median royalty return (.2%). Interestingly, Unearthed and Myspace use actually corresponded with median earnings below the norm as did, interestingly, using myspace in place of a dedicated website.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">As we get to right of the graph though things look different –&nbsp;as I’m sure you’ve already noticed Twitter users did receive proportionally higher earnings than the suckers not tweeting.&nbsp;This might suggest that all the commotion about Twitter is right after all.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Slide07" height="225" src="http://getfile5.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/J47IADdPUT8tLOTSOCzWZXHkiOnWfDgJlAM5fLCeo9NSyqqzm2Zq85xNdDDb/Slide07.jpg" width="300" /> </div> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">But, actually Twitter users are kind of like Emo kids. </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">&nbsp;I'm never sure if they listen to bad music because they feel like crying or if their taste in music makes them want to cry...</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">&nbsp;More seriously, the point here is that while we can identify that, among the artists studied, Twitter users receive proportionally higher earnings it's not possible to say if Twitter use was responsible for those higher earnings.&nbsp;Most Twitter users also tended to be artists who maintained a well-integrated web-presence spanning multiple sites and services and so, in this instance, I'd suggest it's unlikely that their increased earnings were the result of their tweets.&nbsp;So another limitation of this study is that it’s not possible to infer causal relationships without further research.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Slide08" height="225" src="http://getfile1.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/MTuMejJYgMZSZ0EjiAEVGaL6ZEr2Sp664EhCkcDDcaBQRt85LlKSKOSiXY9L/Slide08.jpg" width="300" /> </div> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">Getting back to the findings – as I said before,in general the use of popular web services such as Myspace, Facebook and YouTube to promote an artists music did not correspond to a dramatic increase in artist earnings.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">However higher levels of fan or audience engagement, for example in the forms of Youtube Views, Facebook Fans or Myspace friends, did tend to correspond to proportionally higher earnings even across Myspace and Unearthed.com. For example, Unearthed who received reviews by Triple J staff or were played as a result of their Unearthed profile also received proportionally higher royalty returns.&nbsp;Again we have to be careful about generalising here – while proportional earnings tended to increase with myspace views earnings for artists with Myspace views greater than 100,000 were proportionally lower than the norm (.06%, overall median .2%). Though I can't prove it – this is probably the result of artists gaming the system to appear more popular than they really are.&nbsp;</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Slide09" height="225" src="http://getfile7.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/m2JaFLK1mjUwgJ7AlLKBVI035xMTUrbLzNyKo2Ihiz8nLuGMKulO1QnaP8zb/Slide09.jpg" width="300" /> </div> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">As well as web services the research also looked at other promotional activities undertaken by the artists studied from simply including buy links to their recordings (a surprising number didn't) to prominent mailing list signup forms / widgets; giving away free content and interlinking the different parts of their web-presence.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style=""><div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Slide10" height="225" src="http://getfile1.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/E2qPG4uWlLC263wIoAfbSWhPF2EaC5z5MJsh1gTmqElKEoMA6k9jgXJ5HM2x/Slide10.jpg" width="300" /> </div> </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">This last point is important because of course artists don't just use one site or service, they use several and the highest proportional increase in earnings corresponded with the use of multiple inter-linked sites, including a dedicated website, myspace, facebook, last.fm and twitter.&nbsp;However, that's not the whole story as within this group of artists those with an established off-line profile recieved significantly higher median returns (6.52%) than artists with an emerging or low profile. In fact across the board artists with an established off-line profile earn proportionally more (1.41%) than emerging (.2%) or low(.11%) profile artists.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="">&nbsp;<div class='p_embed p_image_embed'> <img alt="Slide11" height="225" src="http://getfile9.posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/wheretonow/dE9kcXYdlBhELjjxUFcuGyKazdb42gtpNNDwjvIvSy2A2vmm1IJFQb50C9Xi/Slide11.jpg" width="300" /> </div> </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p><p><span style="">There’s a lot more information in the full report, or you can come have a chat after the session but what you really want to know is what should you should be doing to get your music selling online.</span></p><p><span style="">Unfortunately I can’t tell you that.&nbsp;However, there are some general points that you might want to take away from this morning.</span></p><p><span style="">1) Not many artists were using online tools well</span></p><p><span style="">As I examined artists web-presence there was a lot of doubling up, broken links and sites that obviously weren’t being updated anymore. About a quarter of the artists studied didn’t even include buy links to an online retailer anywhere on their web presence. If this sounds like you I’d suggest there are some easy improvements you could make.</span></p><p><span style="">2) Engagement seems more important than any individual service or strategy</span></p><p><span style="">This seems like a bit of a no-brainer but the purpose of your online promotion is to engage and recruit fans who will support your music in one way or another. Given that engagement levels seem more important than the service your fans engage with you on, figure out what tools help you do this best and focus on those.</span></p><p><span style="">3) Creating a well integrated and deliberate web-presence appears beneficial</span></p><p><span style="">This seems basic but of the artists studied, few had developed this type of integrated or strategic web presence and as I pointed out just a minute ago, many of the artists studied could be making more effective use of the tools available to them. </span></p><p><span style="">4) Off-line exposure is still very important</span></p><p><span style="">The level to which higher earnings corresponded to online activity appears relative to artists off-line profile. That is, artists who perform and tour regularly, receive radio airplay and off-line press and media coverage tend to receive significantly higher returns and appear more likely to benefit from online promotional activities. , If you don’t have that off-line profile yet perhaps you’d be best served by putting more energy into the off-line world than the on-line one.</span></p><p><span style="">5). Don’t Forget the Emo Kid…</span></p><p><span style="">Finally, don’t forget the limitations of this research. This is really a preliminary study and I can’t claim to have the full picture. So it’s important to be careful when generalising or suggesting that a particular promotional tool causes sales.</span></p><p><b>Where to now?</b></p> </div><p /><p /></div></div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/big-sound-2009-presentation-or-why-its-been-s">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/big-sound-2009-presentation-or-why-its-been-s#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/vXfqNSr9I0U" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/big-sound-2009-presentation-or-why-its-been-s Thu, 28 May 2009 05:34:00 -0700 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~3/oiE04BoqJ1Q/marketing-vs-the-market http://wheretonow.posterous.com/marketing-vs-the-market <p> <div>I'm spending a lot of my reading time at the moment trying to get my head around economic theory and it's application to the current state of the (recorded and live) music industry. I ended up down this particular rabbit hole when I began researching best practice, or at least <em>suggested</em>&nbsp;best practice,&nbsp;online promotion strategies (post coming soon).&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>As I've been reading up on online music promotion there seems to be an expectation that the transformation of the music industry by the technological developments associated with the web will result in a raft of new revenue streams and profits for the savvy entrepreneur. Despite the incessant rumblings from the 'old' recording industry about the impact of piracy digital sales figures&nbsp;<a href="http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/billboard-soundscan-digital-album-sales-up-32-in-2008/">saw a rise of 32% in 2008</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;and there's plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that profitable new business models are emerging from the 'Music 2.0' imbroglio.</div> <p /> <div>Then I read this:&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div> <div> <div style=""> <blockquote>Historically, there has been no clear link between economic transformation and high profits for the average company. In fact, the reverse is often true: economic transformation destroys the profitability of old firms (by replacing or duplicating their scarce assets), while the new firms that replace them often face a high failure rate and very large costs of building their business. The advantages are enjoyed by workers who are paid higher wages on average and by customers who pay lower prices or get new and better goods and services<span style="">. (Harford, 2006, p. 153).</span></blockquote> <p /> </div> </div> </div> <div>Undercover economist&nbsp;<a href="http://timharford.com/">Tim Harfard</a>&nbsp;suggests that the type of economic transformation (driven by technological change) experienced by the recorded music industry - one that has fundamentally altered the production, duplication and distribution costs - is likely to result in less overall profit, the decline of established players and a hostile, difficult market for new ones. This is exactly what the recorded music industry has been experiencing for several years and, if Harford is correct, we should expect the trend to continue as the trade in recorded music continues to move online. The interesting thing is that, despite the various scapegoats and new business models currently being proposed this shift in the profitability of recorded music is a function of the changing market that has historical precedent (Harford points to railways in the US as just one).</div> <p /> <div>While this shouldn't really be news to anyone it did get me thinking&nbsp;&nbsp;that most of the advice out there focusses on marketing or business 'models' while very little explores the market itself.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>As a simple (and superficial) example, a quick search of popular 'new music business' site&nbsp;<a href="http://www.hypebot.com">Hypebot</a>&nbsp;for posts relating to '<a href="http://www.google.com/custom?domains=hypebot.com&amp;q=economics&amp;sitesearch=hypebot.com&amp;sa=Google+Search&amp;client=pub-3016567813326396&amp;forid=1&amp;channel=9505600721&amp;ie=ISO-8859-1&amp;oe=ISO-8859-1&amp;safe=active&amp;cof=GALT%253A%2523008000%253BGL%253A1%253BDIV%253A%2523336699%253BVLC%253A663399%253BAH%253Acenter%253BBGC%253AFFFFFF%253BLBGC%253A336699%253BALC%253A0000FF%253BLC%253A0000FF%253BT%253A000000%253BGFNT%253A0000FF%253BGIMP%253A0000FF%253BFORID%253A1&amp;hl=en">economics</a>' reveals only 1 post that directly addresses the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/05/changing-the-economics-of-music.html"><em>Changing the Economics of Music</em>&nbsp;</a>&nbsp;while '<a href="http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/band_label_marketing/">Marketing</a>' posts occupy their own category on the site.&nbsp;While there is some great discussion on the digital music economy out there - notably&nbsp;<a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20070503/012939.shtml">Mike Masnick</a>&nbsp;[via Techdirt] and&nbsp;<a href="http://thecynicalmusician.com/category/economics/">The Cynical Musician</a>&nbsp;- the relationship between the music industry and economic theory only seems to attract attention when&nbsp;<a href="http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/">Chris Anderson</a>'s talking.&nbsp;</div> <p /> <div>I'm not intending criticism here, merely pointing out&nbsp;that for Musicians and labels wanting to understand the 'digital music revolution' &nbsp;<a href="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/">Seth Godin</a>&nbsp;appears to be considered more relevant reading than the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.economist.com">Economist</a>. While I don't necessarily disagree, I wonder if there's much point applying the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2008/06/5-top-20-tools.html#comment-120097754">Top 10 Indie Marketing Tools</a>&nbsp;if you don't understand the market or arguing over the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.futureofmusicbook.com/">future of music</a>&nbsp;if we don't understand it's past.</div> <p /> <div><strong>Where to now?</strong></div> <p /> <div>_______________________________________________</div> <p /> <div>References</div> <p /> <div> <div style="">Harford, T. (2006). <em>The undercover economist</em>. Little, Brown: London.&nbsp;</div> </div> </p> <p><a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/marketing-vs-the-market">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://wheretonow.posterous.com/marketing-vs-the-market#comment">Leave a comment&nbsp;&nbsp;&raquo;</a> </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/posterous/Wusd/~4/oiE04BoqJ1Q" height="1" width="1"/> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1053844/Dave_UnCon_Mug.jpg http://posterous.com/users/1gEUqAmcDF7 Dave Carter wheretonow Dave Carter http://wheretonow.posterous.com/marketing-vs-the-market