Archive for the 'future of music' CategoryPage 15 of 17

Singles and Fame: Stephan Jenkins and Eminem

published
on October 21, 2008
by
ACtual
in culture, future of music, genres, interview, music, and music business
. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

At the San Francisco Music Tech Summit, which MixMatchers have written about and are currently attending, Stephan Jenkins of Third Eye Blind spoke yesterday regarding the music industry and its future. While I have inside word that the introduction given to Mr. Jenkins’ was a bit gaudy and overblown, he had some interesting thoughts on the future of music and music downloads. What I found most intriguing about his comments was the support he seems to exhibit for the thought process I’ve followed the past couple months, especially in the “What I’m Hearing Now” posts, that the more control the consumer has over what they buy, as opposed to what they’re forcefed by labels (think full albums for $17), the more interested they’re going to be, and the less potential for album filler will exist.

While I think the album can remain an integral part of the music industry, the time when it ruled the Earth is done and gone. There’s a lot of bands out there that don’t deserve full albums, or simply don’t have enough quality material to fill one. Furthermore, with more and more options in terms of buying music, consumers have no reason to buy larger albums when they can save money and have only the music they want. Let’s not forget that not only does the full album raise the price considerations, but simultaneously eats into storage space which can cost additional money in CD and external hard drive back up options. Personally, I’ll listen to every song sample of an album on iTunes. I then make an album purchase decision based on the number of tracks I like enough on their own to buy, and if the difference between that cost and the full album cost makes sense. When I speak of albums remaining an integral part of the industry, I’m speaking of concept albums and others where the coherency and enjoyable aspect of the music is tied directly to its place in the entire album. I think Radiohead’s Kid A, Dave Matthews Band’s Before These Crowded Streets, and edIT’s Crying Over Pros for No Reason are all examples of albums where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

In other music news I found interesting, Eminem has been out interviewing with folks in advance of his new release. Apparently, in hiding, Em has been working on the album Relapse with Dr. Dre for quite some time. Given that chatter is starting to heat up regarding Dr. Dre’s long-awaited Detox album, one has to wonder how much cross-over work is being done by these two, and if and to what extent they influenced each other on albums coming many years after their most recent predecessors. But it’s nice to know that Eminem has had his share of fame and now would just like to make music…he’s been at his best when he concentrates on what brought him to the dance.

Remix Culture is Exploding

published
on October 7, 2008
by
Sandra
in culture, DIY, future of music, genres, music, music law, politics, and remixing
. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

DIY music mashups are becoming increasingly prevalent as more and more musicians see the value of interacting with their fans. Luckily, as DJ Earworm points out, “the music industry is beginning to see the benefit of increased exposure through releasing stems directly to the public”.

Remixing used to be largely the territory of DJs, producers and other “sonic manipulators”, who would typically overlay the a cappella from one song on top of another or sometimes add their own sounds. But now fans are embracing the concept. We owe a big thank you to Radiohead for popularizing the fan remix concept (again) and to all the other musicians who have begun to release stems through various mediums. More and more artists, both underground and mainstream, are warming up to the idea.

Increasingly, average people don’t just want to passively be entertained by media anymore. They want to experience it. Whether it’s pictures, audio, or video, people are manipulating and mashing up media to their hearts’ content. YouTube is a great example. People want to be seen and heard and be free to exercise their creativity in new ways. (Sometimes leaving the rest of us scratching our heads and wondering why they would possibly post a video of themselves doing that… but hey, they should still have that freedom and ideally the tools to do so.)

One has to give some credit to Girl Talk as well. Through his enthusiastic use of unauthorized samples, Girl Talk has been a pioneer in the mashup revolution. While legal remixing is certainly different than the bootleg subculture that grew around unauthorized sampling, these two sides of remix culture seem to be slowly converging. As artists and the powers that be in the music industry begin to embrace the perspective that when someone samples your music it’s not stealing, but rather free promotion, the boundaries begin to melt away. And thus, music evolves.

In an article delving into some mashup history and the growing mashup revolution, Roberta Cruger says:

“In DIY culture, consumers are the producers, owning the tools of production — a laptop instead of guitar, bass and drums. The bedroom is the studio and factory machinery moves out of the nightclub onto the Internet for millions to access. The media monopolies are fighting back, but with the airwaves gobbled up by conglomerates, homespun mash-ups may be the people’s digital antidote.”

When a need becomes apparent (in this case, the desire of fans to remix), naturally the solutions begin to surface as well. Like the MixMatchMusic Remix Wizard, which allows artists (e.g. The Bayliens) to host their own remix promotions easily. As remix culture continues to grow, it’ll be fascinating to see what kinds of creative fusions and deconstructions happen. New genres will evolve, the industry will continue to take unpredictable twists and turns, and who knows what other clever things will surface as the tools and the freedom to explore and create are placed in the hands of music consumers.

For example, someone took the Remix Wizard (created to facilitate music remixes) and set up a page called “Help Sarah Make Sense” where you can rearrange Sarah’s words (for better or for worse). Pretty funny actually. Go make a remix!

MySpace Music

published
on October 7, 2008
by
ACtual
in collaboration, future of music, music, music business, music history, and technology
. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Social networking site MySpace jumped into the music industry recently, setting up deals with the major labels to stream free music to the users of the site. The news I read yesterday stated that in only the first week, over 1 billion songs were streamed. The commentators seem to view this as a monumental feat, despite the fact that a) they’re free, b) there’s millions and millions of users on MySpace and c) they’re instantly and readily available. In fact, the majority of the press I saw yesterday centered around the idea that this was a sort of challenge to Apple’s iTunes.

Let’s be clear. Streaming music that is paid for by advertising is not the same as music sales. The record labels may use the income from the deals to pad their sales/income numbers, but a streamed song does not a music purchase make. The purpose of the move from CD to mp3 rather than CD to stream is that people like owning their music, taking their music around with them and playing it for others. The stream is great as a form of promotion and introduction to the music, but you can’t take it with you.

This isn’t to say that I’m against streaming music in any way. Pandora is pretty genius, and I would never knock my old home, USC’s streaming radio station that can be found at KSCR. But for industry writers, who in some part can help influence the record execs that read their work, starting to compare a free streaming music service on a social networking site to the largest music retailer in Apple’s iTunes is like comparing tap water to wine. Just because it’s free and easily accessible doesn’t mean that it can trump the demand for quality and the ability to save something far into the future. Of course, if users find a way to “bottle” the stream to their music library, how interested in continued streaming would the labels be?

As for where this turns the music industry, I think the only answer everyone has for sure is that no one has any answers. The labels are still looking to make money off of solid media sales, as mentioned previously, data companies like SanDisk are looking for ways to make albums smaller and more accessible, and artists are still trying to figure out how the industry would work without them given that they only make 9.1 cents from a song royalty, but there’s no money for the labels if they don’t have the song to exploit in the first place.

So for now, we watch. I’m sure it won’t take long for MySpace to surpass 5 billion streams, but how the labels will react to that and attempt to use it to influence other sectors of the music industry will be interesting to see.

iTunes, DRM and Artist Royalties

published
on October 3, 2008
by
ACtual
in future of music, music, music business, music law, and politics
. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Earlier this week, alarm bells were ringing when a quote from Apple in 2007 found its way back to the top of the news heap. That quote? That if royalties were to change to a point of being unprofitable to Apple, it would shut its iTunes store down. Now even the thought of this, among Apple and its competitors, has been brewing frightening thoughts for the consumers for a while due to the fact that virtually all the music these stores sell is DRM protected. Of course, the DRM is built into the song, so what exactly happens if the company selling the songs ends their existence? Well, it looks like the DRM for the material would expire, leaving consumers with hundreds if not thousands of “purchased” songs that will no longer play anywhere. As a music lover (and legal buyer of mp3s), this kind of news, even if it is an undeveloped thought, causes a good deal of frustration. Here the studios want consumers to pay for music, foregoing the option of downloading all the music they want illegally for free, but the copyright protection within the music means that if the retailer goes down, the files go down with it? That’s like buying a CD at Tower which is then erased when Tower goes out of business (you all do still remember Tower, don’t you?)

So what can we do about it when the very mechanism that has allowed music labels to go digital, and therefore the infrastructure that controls all of our legal downloads, is compromised by companies willing to close their DRMs? Unfortunately, not much. Short of burning all of your DRM tracks to a CD and then re-ripping them to mp3s to strip of them of their DRM (and some sound quality in the process), if a store goes down and discontinues its DRM licensing, all the tracks you’ve bought could die on your iPod. This to me seems like the ultimate Trojan horse of the music industry…we don’t want you to have mp3s, but if you do, we’ll create a way so that once they’re in your music library, should the stores you bought them from close, we’ll demolish your entire music collection from the inside.

I understand the purpose of DRM, but unfortunately its just not a viable business model if there are ways to stop the music playback at any point after the purchase. The point of buying music is that you have it forever. All the CDs I bought are still mine and will be mine for as long as I manage not to lose or damage them. The idea that you could buy a song which at some point in the future becomes unusable is, to me at least, outrageous.

The reason that all of this has come about this week is because the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) was weighing a decision to raise the artist royalties on digital downloads from 9.1 cents per song to 15 cents a song. From what I can ascertain from the article announcing the steady royalty fees, a .99 cent iTunes song is sold like this…

1) Apple sells the song for .99. 2) Apple keeps .29. 3) Apple gives .70 to the record label. 4) Record label gives the artist 9.1 cents, keeping 60.9 cents. I don’t know about you, but even at 9 cents a song, it seems like the labels and iTunes are getting over on the artist. Are we really supposed to believe that the iTunes store deserves to keep almost three times as much money for a song it sells than the artist receives?

What this scare does do is make it painfully obvious that the record labels and online music stores need to create a way and find a method to allow consumers to legally retain their music, no matter what happens to the store you buy it from. Should royalty rights eventually be raised in favor of the artist, it would be a travesty for Apple to claim it can no longer operate iTunes profitably (with the number of sales they have per year and the fact that they’re getting money just to be a middle man, it would be very hard for me to accept the idea that they aren’t profitable), disable the DRMs and leave music consumers with a bunch of dead and unusable files. Apple needs to show a little more foresight and decency when it comes to wolf cries of lost profits with a change from 9.1 to 15 cents of royalty. This could have been Apple simply playing politics in order to protect its profit margin, but even then the greed factor, given what the artists out there are making, comes into play.

For now (the CRB’s decision lasts 5 years), it appears we can rest easy. But it makes it clear that more thorough examinations of the digital music sales industry, DRM technology and what the rules and technology mean to consumers are necessary and should not be ignored.

Slot Music

published
on September 26, 2008
by
ACtual
in collaboration, future of music, music, music business, and technology
. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

The record labels, and of course those standing to make a lot of money, are apparently unwilling to give up on the physical album sale. SanDisk, who has been making huge strides lately in the world of mini memory cards and cell phone integration has announced that with the backing of four major labels, EMI, Sony, BMG, and Universal, they will be selling albums in mini-SD card format. While not quite the trend we’re seeing in terms of more and more people switching to the mp3 format on players as opposed to hard copies of albums, the format here is an interesting step for the labels as they will be embracing non-DRM mp3 files on these mini-albums. You’ll buy the album in a Target or Wal-Mart, slide it into the micro-SD card on your cell phone and listen. It will be interesting to see how much this gains traction in a market place continually being re-invented to create more purchasing power at home as opposed to in-store physical sales.