Month: August 2007

Amazon.com to launch music service in September

Amazon.com to launch music service in September: report – Yahoo! News

Amazon.com Inc has tentatively set a mid-September target for the launch of its music service, the New York Post reported in its online edition on Friday, citing sources familiar with the situation.

The store will offer songs in the MP3 format and give consumers an alternative to Apple Inc’s iTunes, the report said.

Notice what they’re *not* doing: launching music software for the client or a portable music device. They’re competing with the iTunes Music Store, but not with the iTunes client software or the iPod.

Listening Aug 16 2k7

Tom Larson – “Klänge der Nacht Vol.3” (DJ set)

This is a dj set which is low, glitchy, and minimal. The individual tunes all seem to be net-based stuff, e.g. from the Wazzotic netlabel. I found it via Starfrosche.

I love this style for driving on the highway at night with the top down.

Set list:

01 – Peripherique – Koralle

Musicartistry 006 (www.musicartistry.de)

02 – Mike Less – Loran

SMT 001 (www.smt-rec.de)

03 – Rene Hamel – Nonamed (M.Masuhr Remix)

Insectorama 004 (www.insectorama.de) 04 – SCSI-9 – Time’s Up

Fragment 005 (www.fragmentmusic.net)

05 – Max Marlow – Skorpion

Kreislauf 004 (www.kreislauf.org)

06 – Zofa – Aria Giovani

Yuki Yaki 003 (www.yukiyaki.org)

07 – Igor O.Vlasov – Metamorph

Thinner 091 (www.thinner.cc)

08 – Yatsuo Motoki – Deep Trip

Stadt 003 (www.stadtgruenlabel.net)

09 – Acidrain – Sunday

Gruen 004 (www.stadtgruenlabel.net)

10 – K.Fog – K3

Musicartistry 031 (www.musicartistry.de)

11 – Phil Baker – 3Way

Ear-Min 012 (www.ear-recordings.nl)

12 – Clara Bailar – Being Deep With My Beat

Wazzotic 002 (www.wazzotic-records.com)

13 – Christoph Schindling – Modulator

unreleased

14 – Klartraum – Desoliert

Deep In Dub 001 (www.deepindub.org)

15 – Pellarin – Dependency 6 Where Your Food Is Made

Yuki Yaki 001 (www.yukiyaki.org)

16 – Pete Larson – City Highway

Thinner 025 (www.thinner.cc)

17 – Dominik Paß – Rotationssphere

Dreiton 007 (www.dreiton.net)

giant wood heart Thursday

Hey LA people — I’ll probably go over to this bizarro show at the Machine Project HQ tomorrow night:

Etiology of Innocence lecture

8pm, Thursday August 16, 2007

Artist Bernie Lubell makes giant mechanical installations out of wood which are both crazy neat and neatly crazy. He’ll be passing through Los Angeles in August and has graciously agreed to come discuss his room-sized interactive heart simulation, “Etiology of Innocence” on Thursday, August 16th.

Mr Lubell’s interactive installations have evolved from his studies in both psychology and engineering, and include a stone age digital computer, a rainstorm of chaos and nostalgia, a phone booth-confessional network, a mechanism to investigate Intimacy and room sized simulations of the brain and breathing.

Location:
1200 D North Alvarado Street
Los Angeles, CA 90026
213-483-8761

Give me a shout if you want to arrange to meet up.

Shelly Palmer: Music Publishers Lawsuit against YouTube Doesn’t Solve the Problem

Shelly Palmer: Lawsuit: Music Publishers v. YouTube Doesn’t Solve the Problem – Media on The Huffington Post

Lawsuits will not solve the problem, which is: there is no easy way to identify who owns which rights in and to most pieces of music and there is no easy way to get a quote and pay them.

And as part of this, there’s no way to automate the process of figuring out whether some bit of user generated content is aboveboard or not.

For example, the composer of a famous hit song once emailed me the URL of a famous hit recording of it. It was hosted on his personal ISP account. He told me that the performer on the recording had said it was fine.

Everything about this set up was indistinguishable, on a technical level, from an unauthorized source, and yet he absolutely had at least some of the rights.

Or did he have the rights? Had he done it as work for hire? Had the famous singer really said that it was ok? If so did the famous singer even have the rights? And how could a web developer hosting user generated content write a program to figure this out?

On a personal level this songwriter was a maniac extremist about copyright. He was to the right of Satan on the topic of Napsterization.

Old tunes, new opportunities « Jon Udell

Old tunes, new opportunities « Jon Udell

As I watched and listened to all those different versions of The Tennessee Waltz, I couldn’t help but wonder what might happen if that dynamic were applied to out-of-copyright tunes. Can more of the old tunes be reborn? If so, will our new ability to share, teach, and learn turbocharge the creative process surrounding them? If so, will that process in turn lead to the production of new tunes? If so, will some of those new tunes achieve cultural ubiquity? If so, will some of those conceivably remain outside the copyright regime?

This is indeed a long shot. But in another sense it’s just a matter of patience. Think of it as a disruptive technology:

Sometimes, a disruptive technology comes to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill (as more expensive, lower capacity but smaller-sized hard disks did for newly developed notebook computers in the 1980s) or by successively moving up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents (as digital photography has begun to replace film photography).

For readers not from the tech industry, the classic example of a disruptive technology is that weak little PCs ended up replacing ultrapowerful mainframe computers.  Songs like Ella Waltz doesn’t have to be as obvious a source as songs like Proud Mary, they just have to outlast them.

Jon has the perfect example:

though I wouldn’t have thought Episcopal hymns would be toe-tappers, I love to hear — and play — John Fahey’s arrangements of tunes like In Christ There Is No East Or West.

It happens that this is a reasonably simple tune to play, the song has already lasted for an improbably long time, there is an easily accessible recording online, and not only is there guitar tablature available for Fahey’s version but the tab is published on Fahey’s own site.

It’s not an accident that we’re discussing this particular bit of music. For a song that isn’t a pop hit, it has an incredibly high chance of survival over the long term. And not just surviving but reproducing, in the form of lots of little baby covers which may themselves be covered and end up displacing our current generation of pop hits.

It’s true that next to current chart toppers this song doesn’t stand much of a chance of being covered right at this moment, but over time the odds will grow in its favor. The monster hits of 2007 will disappear from cultural memory, while coverable songs will hold onto their niche.

Try starting your view of history in 2006, as if you were born last year and had never lived in a time when music and physical media were tied together. The internet era has barely begun.

Dae somethin’ we ken, can ye?

David Kilpatrick says:

There are ways in which the overall output of YouTube could be fairly assessed to provide a royalty payment and give permission for all covers. A snapshot of the music content on a given date could be analysed (a hell of a task) and YouTube pay an agreed overall royalty, divided in the usual way according to the analysis. This is grossly unfair to unsigned, minority interest stuff as what always happens is that the big copyright holders get all the money.

It’s how PRS (Performing Rights Society) do it in the UK. On September 7th, one of their reps is due to visit our folk club. Our crew has been briefed – no Beatles, no Elvis, no Elton John etc! Not too much traditional either (it goes nowhere, they still charge the same fee). Phil Ochs, John Prine, Leonard Cohen, Billy Bragg, Ewan MacColl, Dick Gaughan stuff – great! Make sure the PRS rep lists a set of deserving copyright holders instead of Sir Paul, Jacko, and corporate friends. Then until the next spy is sent to asses us, our playlist will make sure the £6 a week royalty fee provides a few pence to worthwhile songwriters…

And, of course, people can then play as much commercial cover stuff as they like thereafter. You can’t stop ‘em, it’s what the average pub audience wants. ‘Dae somethin’ we ken, can ye?’

I sense that that means “what can you do about it?”

So what *can* you do about it?

Pub players are jukeboxes for popular songs. That’s the gig and I don’t see any way around it. But I also don’t see that as a blocker, because there are other gigs, and new songs will become popular through them.

It’s not even necessarily a thing which you have you *do*, because this whole thread about cover songs is as descriptive as it is prescriptive. Songs which can’t be covered on the internet aren’t going to remain pub standards. That’s the way nature works. Do nothing, you will receive your new body of songs which are both popular and coverable anyway.

Yes, this is about creating culture which is amenable to participation, and for musicians this means playing songs which others can play too. But all you have to do is only play songs on the internet which you learned from others playing on the internet and things will work out that way no matter what.

The results won’t arrive instantly, they will arrive very slowly, over decades. It’s a drip-drip-drip kind of process. Before you know it, the songs which have been controlled too tightly will be just as forgotten as the waltzes that I have been covering here.

Joe Pribek on the unreturned library book from hell

In this comment on Brett’s post, Joe Pribek sent a chill down my spine:

Personally, I would not release a cover song for free over the internet. The nature of the digital world is that data doesn’t disappear. Over a period of time, even at a couple hundred a year, the downloads would add up and at some point the copyright owner could demand the mechanical royalty for each download.

Ok, so you bang out “Proud Mary” on the acoustic, put it up on Blogger and forget about it.  Ten years later a bill arrives to remind you that the page is still there and that you have been accumulating debt the entire time.