Once in a while I get the Monome mailing list, which updates you on how they’re still unavailable. It’s very uninformative to say the least, but I like how they’re beginning to take on a Soup Nazi tone.

“those on the list will receive invoices on monday, january 19 at 1pm EST. the list is closed, do not e-mail us asking to get on it.”

You can at least be polite when telling people not to email you about a product you will sell to them. On the website they decided to be a bit more friendly, “please do not e-mail us to confirm your position”.

To this I say, “No soup for you! Come back one year!”

Anyways the plan for the new year is to find a niche for this project i’ve started. Instead of producing one-off video tutorials, i’m working on compiling some sort of TV show cause I think that would be fun.

I also want to make some sort of database that’s useful to everyone. KVR pretty much has all the plugins covered, so i’m looking to go in a different direction than another vst db.

Oh and i’ll be rebranding soon cause The Bulk Dump is far too inside a joke. If I do change the name everything will redirect cleanly.

So sit tight, and thanks to everyone who has been patient with me thus far.

This really caught my attention because over here in North America all everyone talks about are vintage Moogs and Korgs, that sort of thing. If you want to start collecting, your selections are rather thin.

I’m curious to learn more about why the Soviets were so involved in making their own synths, as well if they were exporting them during the Cold War, or if foreign people had to wait for the fall of Communism there to get their hands on these machines.

Be sure to search on youtube to see if you can find a demo of the synth before considering your purchase.

The first case happened when I signed up for a service about two years ago that aims to license music for films and the like similar to how Magnatune operates. It’s kind of like stock music, but the emphasis is on artists and albums, and those can be purchased normally without any of the licensing stuff. They selectively accept candidates to enter the catalog, making the selections more high quality than on sites where they accept anyone. Looked like a great concept to me, and when my application was accepted I was happy about trying it out.

I wasn’t promoting my music on there very heavily, and after say a year and a half, I emailed to let them know that I want to remove my music from the catalog because it just doesn’t need to be there if it’s not generating any revenue. They got back to me and said that it’s ok, but please reconsider removing your music because we just licensed one of your songs. Well needless to say I found it funny that my songs weren’t licensed anywhere in the time it’s been up there, but all of a sudden I apparently have a cheque for like $200 on the way. I said why not give them a bit more of a chance and see if my pending request to exit lights a fire under their butts to do more with my music.

Months started to go by, and the payment was never completed yet. I was starting to get frustrated because I didn’t want to cause trouble and risk not getting paid for the project they said was going through, but on the other hand my BS meter was in the red and I wanted out. Half a year later my money showed up, but this was just the start of the problem.

When Googling myself, I found that one of my tunes had appeared on a real stock music library. I was really confused because I had never put this particular song up for any stock libraries(there is one i’ve worked with when I was starting out many years ago). I literally started to panic that someone has been selling my music like this without my permission. I looked over the credits and found that the site I have been describing above, had taken the liberty of supplying this library with tracks from their catalog.

The whole point of signing up with this company in the first place was to be able to sell music in a stock manner, without being in a blatent stock music library. They didn’t even do as much as notify me of this procedure before they went ahead and did it. So I wrote them and said we are absolutely finished, take my music off of your main site and on this other site you have farmed tracks out to. They agreed but also mentioned that this is a bit annoying because they had to spend time uploading and tagging my track to this other company, which I had no sympathy about since they didn’t even discuss it with me first.

Months later, I go back to the stock music site, and my track is still there. This time my name is removed from the credits and another artist takes the credit for this. I wrote the company and told them how appalling this is, to which they replied that they agreed and are finished with the experiment working with this other stock music site. What a bunch of knuckleheads, and i’m kind enough to not post their name on here. Just to be clear, I didn’t have much of a case against what they did since typically whenever you sign up with almost any service of this sort, they will have a clause in the contract that says something like you give them permission to take action on anything involving promoting your work without needing another contract signed by you again.

I’m writing about this nightmare-ish incident because I was reminded about it this week when something similar happened. Around the same time I was experimenting with the quasi-stock music service, I also tried out something else called Podshow which allows you to supply music for podcasters to play your tunes on their show and have permission. When I first applied, I asked the management if their contract allows podcasters to use your song as a theme, because I felt that it’s a bit silly to try to sell my music as stock on another site, and then this site lets people use the same track for free in this manner. They weren’t really sure what to answer, but they sort of suggested that it’s not the goal of the site for people to use your tracks as theme material. On with another bad experiment.

This year I started getting notifications that a podcast was playing my music, every week. I go over and check it out, to find that my song is indeed being used as a theme. It was also a very childish and immature production that I don’t want to be associated with, as are many of the podcasts that get made. My response to this is to remove my music from the site so that the person would get the hint to stop using it. Getting it removed from the site was a work of art in itself since the company switched names and all sorts of stuff over the years, so my login info took a good week or two to retrieve because customer service wasn’t answering. I had to email the department that’s in charge of advertising(read: money) in order to get anyone’s attention. That’s a good tip for you to hang on to, sometimes the basic email addresses go no where but the ones that deal with new sources of income will always get someone on the other end.

Ok so the song gets removed, and now I stop getting notifications if a podcast played it, cause technically it’s not in the system any more and couldn’t notify me of this even if it wanted to. I go back to this podcast, and find that they are still using my song on a weekly basis, and now I get no credit(just like in the last story). I politely email the podcaster and notify them that the song was removed, please stop playing it, and also stop playing it without giving me credit. I’m not sure if I even want credit but it’s worth mentioning to the person infringing.

I get an email back and the person is pleading with me to get the permission to keep on using it. I’m not really sure if I want to grant this permission, but it’s also not really this person’s fault so much as the service that supplied them with the music, and also this being a service that I was weary about from the start. Thankfully it’s an old tune that I don’t really care about, but the moral of the story here is that you can experiment with these services all you want, but you might not realize you’ve fucked up until you start seeing your music on a shitty stock library, or a ridiculous podcaster is playing the song every damn week.

It’s sort of like the rule of thumb with Facebook these days, don’t put up pictures that you don’t want your future employer to see. Well, don’t supply music to companies that you’re not sure of, cause in the world of user-generated media where everyone is a filmmaker or radio show host, anything is fair game. Do you want your name and work attached to anything and everything imaginable? In a future post I will actually counter-act this discussion with why trying out these services can be a good thing, but for now you’ve heard my stories so be careful.