racial politics

It’s Martin Luther King’s birthday so I’ve been thinking about racial politics.

For the past couple of years I have been exploring public domain music via archives of sheet music online, and this has turned into an extended dumpster dive into American history. I spend a lot of time with primary historical sources, and whenever I find anything to do with the ethnicity we currently call “black” it is almost guaranteed to be nasty. “Whites” were cruel on a staggering scale.

The cruelty was casual and ubiquitous. Comedy and blackface were inseparable. Artwork virtually always shows “blacks” as caricatures of stupidity and laziness. Song lyrics dipped into nigger and coon references and moved on without noticing.

And at the same time, I can’t believe that “whites” were unaware. The only adults who don’t know that people are people are sociopaths. I think that there were hundreds of millions of people — “whites” — who knew of their complicity in evil.

And many “whites” did become aware. The abolitionist movement was a revolt of conscience. Some artwork by “whites” depicting “blacks” is not caricature. Some writing is not racist. The “whites” involved surely did things that would make our jaws drop, but they deserve credit for doing the right thing.

In a way I have stopped feeling like I belong to a distinct ethnicity which is either “white” or “black.” The ethnicities have lived together as neighbors, workmates, friends, enemies, lovers, business partners, customers, and family for hundreds of years. Our current culture has long since become a hybrid. Most of us are in a subculture which clearly identifies with one ethnicity or the other, but this is an illusion. Our music, art, and language are unified.

That’s why I have been putting “black” and “white” in scare quotes. I’m going to stop doing that now, though, because it’s annoying.

However there is also evidence of a big divide — our continuing physical differences. Blacks and whites look different. For that to be true there must be pressures against interbreeding which have remained intact throughout our long history together. These pressures are still there. They mean that we don’t hang out together, so we don’t mate, so we don’t make interracial babies.

I despair. I can’t stand to be part of yet another generation which accomplished nothing, but I can’t imagine anything I could do.

The civil rights movement was recent. It did made a big difference. I just don’t think that there has been progress since then. We have a new plateau that is slightly better. What will happen in the long run? Historical-scale changes are too slow to see.

gigs thursday 4/3 and saturday 4/5

If you’re in LA, c’mon down and see me play at the Hyperion Tavern in Silverlake tomorrow night, Thursday April 3. I’ll sit in with Madame Pamita for her set at 9:30, then will do a set of my own guitar music at about 11:00.

Among other fine songs trashpicked from the dustbin of American history, I’ll be dusting off an 1882 jingle for a brand of rat poison:

The sheet music, “Rough on Rats,” was offered as a premium by Ephraim S. Wells, chemist, Jersey City, N.J., the manufacturer of “Rough on Rats” poison. “Send 35 cents for Song and Chorus of ‘Rough on Rats.’ Just out. Everybody crazy for it.”

The “dwelling house size” of the product sold for 25 cents. Wells’ advertisements claimed “sure death to rats, mice, flies, vermin, ants, insects, roaches, waterbugs, bed bugs” and “one application clears out a building.”

Sheet music for that tune at Library of Congress. I imagine it hasn’t been heard in a public place for at least a hundred years.

Then on Saturday April 5 I’ll play an 8:45 show under the stage name Alvin Pleasant at a little gallery right off the beach in Venice for an event called Foolfest:

Sponto Gallery at 7 Dudley Avenue was the home of the infamous Venice West Cafe from the late 50’s to the early 60’s – an important birthplace for the Beat movement, much like North Beach in San Francisco, the Village in New York and the Left Bank in Paris. Sponto Gallery retrieves the explorations of Alan Kaprow’s Happenings, Jack Smith’s experimental films and the Fluxus art movement with its various film, poetry and comedy events. Visit 81x.com/7dudley/cinema AND myspace.com/sevendudleycinema for more information.

Sponto is a groovy little spot — tiny, good acoustics, comfortable, free.

Checking in

I suppose I ought to blog once in a while, so this post is to check in. Since last time I posted here the big news is that the software I have been working on in stealth mode for the last three years finally went public under the name of Yahoo! Media Player. It has gotten great reactions, been picked up on a bunch of notable pages, and been covered by well known sites like Tech Crunch. This software was originally going to be Webjay 2.0, but wasn’t released before the Yahoo! acquisition and ended up becoming the nucleus of a new Yahoo! project.

It’s not much like Webjay the site, which was a combination playlist editor, portal, generator, and social networking site. But philosophically it is still about media with URLs, openness, sharing, and interoperability.

It is also still about playlists. But it is a major twist on the concept. The player accepts all sorts of traditional playlists, like XSPF and M3U, as well as feed formats like RSS and Atom; it even has an integrated screen scraper which can use a remote web page as a playlist. But primarily the web page in which the player is embedded is the playlist.

Web pages are a very good playlist format. They are visually customizable, semantically rich, standardized, documented, open, flexible, decentralized and implemented world-wide. To the extent that they didn’t have syntax for everything playlist-oriented, we were able to use semantic HTML with a light sprinkling of extensions.

However I can’t use the player on my blog here, which is the reason why I haven’t been writing on this blog. This blog is hosted by wordpress.com, which blocks out Javascript. I need to move my blog to another host.

The code name for the player project, by the way, was “goose.”

making a case for portable identifiers

One followup to my post on portable identifiers for songs using XSPF’s content resolution abilities happened on J. Herskowitz’ blog. I asked whether the problem in developing interoperability between music services is technical or economic. J’s answer was:

I think it is both. Since there appears to be a need for ongoing resolver work to map to lots of catalogs, the opportunity cost of one company to do so becomes too high. Just look at Paul Lamere’s work on Spiffy (http://research.sun.com:8080/SpiffyContentResolver/)- it was a great start, but he couldn’t rationalize the opportunity costs to keep it going.

As a consumer, I want it though…. I want to be able to find a playlist somewhere and then click “play” – by which enables me to determine what vendor fulfills it. Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo, YouTube, free-range MP3s, etc.

Paraphrasing him, the value to users seems clear enough, but the work to enable it need to be shared across vendors, since no one vendor benefits more than the others. It’s social value which has to be funded by everybody and nobody.

Back here at home I asked the question slightly differently: does this technology provide enough business benefit to be worth implementing? If not, what would have to be different?

Jay Fienberg came back with an answer a lot like J’s:

I think there’s a bit of a mismatch here: catalog resolution of the type described is especially beneficial and necessary in “open” multiple-catalog systems–where the goal is linking / sharing info between as many systems as possible. And, the question is being asked of people involved in furthering the goals of “closed,” single-catalog systems.

These single-catalog systems have the goal of, more or less, focusing only on incoming links, e.g., focusing on making their single catalog a more unique authority.

I think another way to look at this would be: how hard would it be for these services expose to their own unique, permanent, identifiers to the public? (Not very, one would imagine.) Then, rather than these services building their own catalog resolution systems, they could make it possible for others to do so.

Similarly, Scott Kveton of MyStrands said: From the MyStrands perspective we’re simply not in the catalog resolution business. I would wager that Pandora isn’t either.

Jay’s trick of flipping the question around is insightful. Almost all online music businesses right now are in the distribution business, even if they see other functions like discovery or social connection as their main value, because they have no way to connect their discovery or social connection features with a reliable provisioning service from a third party. But provisioning is a commodity service which doesn’t give anybody an edge. They don’t want to import playlists from third parties because *that’s* where they are adding value.

Exporting playlists for others to provision, though, is a different story, and it makes much more sense from a business perspective. Let somebody else deal with provisioning. This is what it would mean for somebody like Launchcast or Pandora to publish XSPF with portable song identifiers that could be resolved by companies that specialize in provisioning.

Chris Anderson said:

The portability problem is a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma for music providers. If everyone addresses it, the benefit is great, but if only a few do, and in different ways, then the costs can outweigh the gains.

…

In the absence of a bottom-up revolution resulting in audio resources that can be resolved to, there has to be cooperation among audio brokers. Perhaps Imeem et. al. could provide an API that takes XSPF <track/> fragments and provides a flash widget with the appropriate content.

And Scott Kveton again:

What I would love to talk about is using something akin to Musicbrainz to be the public commons that companies like MyStrands, Last.fm, Pandora and others can use as a basis for playlist portability.

And that’s where internet music vendors are right now: stuck waiting for ways to cooperate without disarming unilaterally. The closest thing to cooperation is that companies are willing to export Flash widgets that can be embedded in any third party site, and the reason we’re using Flash is that it allows us to define and limit points of interoperability.

Ok, so let’s just say that the business and technical problems can be factored into separate projects. Yves has been working on the technical problem of mapping identifiers from different vendors into a unified framework:

I played a bit with such lookup algorithms (using metadata+acoustic fingerprints) when I experimented linking a Creative Commons label collection (Jamendo) and Musicbrainz – this is described here, and uses a technique close to the “similarity flooding” one in the record linkage community:
http://blog.dbtune.org/post/2007/06/11/Linking-open-data%3A-interlinking-the-Jamendo-and-the-Musicbrainz-datasets

Yves’ work deals with interlinking experiences based on the Jamendo dataset, in particular equivalence mining – that is, stating that a resource in the Jamendo dataset is the same as a resource in the Musicbrainz dataset.

For example, we want to derive automatically that http://dbtune.org/jamendo/artist/5 is the same as http://musicbrainz.org/artist/0781a….

It’s a fascinating and productive investigation. I am aware of at least one private proprietary effort to do this kind of thing, but no open project, and this is exactly where work has to be (as Scott says above) for multiple vendors to become interoperable without unilateral disarmament. One immediately useful result of this work is to make a direct connection between the XSPF concept of content resolution and the semantic web concept of Equivalence Mining and Matching Frameworks. This allows music developers familiar with the application domain of catalog management to benefit from high-academia research into techniques that can be used to auto-generate links between data items within different datasources.

Phew. I’m done. This was a hard post to write because I had to digest all the different strands in this conversation. It took a long time to figure out what people were talking about. Still, now that I’ve done the legwork I feel like I understand the problem better than before, even if parts are still a complete mystery.

new forms of live shows

Conversation on the kid gig 12/8 post developed around the interaction between changing music and existing forms of performance. The internet is changing recorded music. How can those changes be reflected in live shows?

Live music for most musicians is either in a bar or in a stadium. These contexts are in a continuum where one leads to the other. But stadium shows are an artifact of the economics of the 20th century recording industry.

Said Pribek:

I play too much in bars. It’s like going to a football game and already knowing the outcome.

The times that I have had an opportunity to play for kids, have all been a blast. Kids give honest reaction with no preconceived notions.

Playing in bars is all about reducing the musical experience to the lowest common denominator. I’m not complaining. I’m glad to have a chance to fire up the Tele tonight regardless.

T-Bone Burnett once said something like; “The music industry is based on the principal of selling music to people who don’t like music”.

Who knows how the selling of music shakes out in this “brave new world”? Personally, I don’t care.

I have a hunch that when the dust settles, there will be more opportunity to find a venue to play live for people who do like music.

(As always, I have made lots of edits to comments while converting them to full-fledged posts).

gurdonark replied:

Lately, I want all music to be in matinee’ form.
The “nightlife prison” for music does conjure up some rich, almost cinematic associations. Yet live music becomes so limited when its trapped in that dates-and-drinks-and-diversion mesh, and perhaps limited in a different way in the “concert as religious experience” groove.

I don’t play live, but if I did, I’d always play starting no later than 2 p.m.

…

Also, I’d rather have my music accompany a planetarium show or a multi-media presentation than be a performer. I am all for concerts and performances, but I like the idea that one can be one component of a fun in which music is incorporated into a multi-media activity.

…

Most of my things appear at netlabels like NSI.
I am not opposed to CDs, but they’re almost irrelevant to me, as you suggest. I made and even sold some a few years ago, but now they’d be more a curious gift for friends than anything like “music distribution”.

I love meatspace performances. But I think the consructs for them are all rooted in performer/audience assumptions that are no longer the right assumptions. By this, I mean that
I have no desire to hold a candle up for a superstar anymore, but instead want to be drenched in an interactive medium. I love what Kristin Hersh and radiohead and Issa (nee’ Jane Siberry) are doing with self-directed payments, and what numerous people are doing with netlabel creative commons. I recently was on intelligentmachinery.net’s “collusion” dark ambient piece–12 artists contributing to create one whole–not for the glory of anyone, but for the sheer participation of the thing. That’s the present, and the future.

And Jay Fienberg said:

The last live show I did was a band reunion where most of the audience was made up of band members’ kids, nieces and nephews. Playing for kids is really great–in many ways better then when I was a kid and most of the audience would be our parents, aunts and uncles.

btw, Seattle has lots of live music in bars, pubs, coffee houses, laundromats, etc., and it’s really a great thing to be a music fan and be out at night and be around live music. It looks like it’s a lot more fun to play here than the places where I used to play (in LA, SF). Bar gigs are not glorious for a musician, but they’re often a big break from spending one’s whole life in a cubicle, etc. And, if there’s a crowd of real music fans in the mix, it can approach some real glory, IMHO.

So here’s the question: the recording industry is changing dramatically. What aspects of live music rely on aspects of the recording industry that are going away? What new kinds of live music does the internet enable?

kid gig 12/8

I’m playing at the Ocean Charter School Winter Faire tomorrow afternoon. The one time before that I played for kids was great at its best. The teens were too uptight and not a lot of fun, but the younger kids got up and moshed and were generally a stellar audience.

Location: 12606 Culver Blvd, Culver City, CA 90066. The nearest major cross street is Centinela. Time: 1-1:30.

It’s good to play outside of bars. My music developed in the context of my blog, and the vibe of my blog matches up better with galleries and schools than bars and parties.

Kristin Hersh

From the “Downloads” section of Kristen Hersh’s web site:

Every month, CASH Music brings you Kristin’s newest recordings in several formats including lossless audio. For each song, Kristin also provides lyric sheets and a “Works in Progress” demo version of each song. Kristin also offers her songs to the CASH community in “Read-Write” format — by making available her Pro Tools mix stems!

Very clued in: periodical small releases of one song in an interactive format rather than irregular large releases of many songs on a static CD.

I can’t do a remix because I don’t have Pro Tools but I did play guitar along with the MP3 and it was fun. And I found that by engaging directly with the music I actively enjoyed Kristen Hersh’s work for the first time, so there was clearly a promotional effect.

paid content means badly paid musicians

Jaron Lanier editorial in the New York Times:

How long must creative people wait for the Web’s new wealth to find a path to their doors? […] Information is free on the Internet because we created the system to be that way.

We could design information systems so that people can pay for content — so that anyone has the chance of becoming a widely read author and yet can also be paid. Information could be universally accessible but on an affordable instead of an absolutely free basis.

Lanier doesn’t understand music economics.

Advertising allows some people to specialize in attracting eyeballs and others to specialize in turning attention into revenue. Content creators, like musicians, do the attracting. Advertisers do the monetizing.

If you have the musicians do the monetizing, they will do very stupid things like sell $80 CD box sets, which have a high ticket value but don’t move enough units to be a great business. If you have the advertisers do the monetizing, and you take the ones who pay the highest prices, you will have an alliance with whoever is best at turning these eyeballs into a living.

If some musician is putting his music on the web because he wants to sell CDs, he’s competing with advertisers to monetize the eyeballs his music is attracting. Maybe he’s the natural winner of this competition, but probably not. Frozen peas are generally a better product than CDs. Cars are a better product. iPods are a better product. Pretty much anything is a better product than a CD.

And that applies to downloaded song files as well as songs on hard media. The packaging and distribution are not the issue. The issue is that not many people want to continually purchase music. It’s a small market.

The business of music is not to maximize the number of songs sold. It is to maximize the amount of money earned. And it happens that lots of people want to enjoy music in a transient context. They like a good DJ at the club. They like radio when they’re stuck in traffic. They are interested by whatever their friend plays when they visit. This is a market that’s big enough to matter.

Musicians will make less money from paid content than ad-sponsored content because there is less demand for paid content. Regardless of whether paying for music is a declining business, it was never much of a business in the first place. The economics have always sucked and they simply continue to suck. The rate of decline in the CD business just doesn’t matter because the CD business is so small in comparison with other businesses that music can complement via advertising.

Paid content means you sell the music. Ad sponsored content means you use the music to sell whatever is most profitable. Since paid content means that musicians are probably not selling the most profitable product, it’s a bad business.

Portable playlists at Media Web Meetup in SF

I’ll be in San Fran on December 11 for the Media Web Meetup at the Songbird offices.

Here’s the event description:

Subject: Portable Playlists and other POSH-ibilities
Speakers: Tantek Çelik, Lucas Gonze, Scott Kveton and Tom Conrad

This Media Web Meetup should be HOT! We are having a panel of people who will lead a discussion on the possibility of portable playlists and other ways for media lovers to carry around their data with themselves as they move around the web.

Think about it…wouldn’t taking that Amazon data with you as you browse other sites (last.fm, iTunes, Pandora, the music web in general) to get better recommendations rock? Perhaps we can get a base discussion of what kinds of solutions there are out there and where to go forward from.

Question: what does POSH (“Plain Old Semantic HTML”, a ) have to do with it? Why must tech religions crush everything in their path? Per Wikipedia:

The purpose of the term ‘POSH’ is to:

  • educate HTML authors who want to use microformats, but haven’t understood the intermediate step of ‘semantic html’ markup.
  • encourage use of the term ‘microformats‘ only for semantic html patterns which have been through the rigor of the microformats process.