slow music #2

What would slow music be?

A relevant aspect of slow food, per wikipedia, is that:

It claims to preserve the cultural cuisine and the associated food plants and seeds, domestic animals, and farming within an ecoregion.

So local musicians and styles. Does that mean garage rock in Boston, hair metal in LA, and hardcore in DC? Here’s a gurdonark comment on the previous post:

I went last Saturday night to our local library auditorium, where the friends of the library sponsored a really fine jazz harpist doing arrangements of holiday songs, and the local symphony chorus did a selection of international songs of the various seasons. The arrangements and skill on display where amazing.

On the other hand, I saw on public television a major-label ensemble do a bombastic holiday special which was amusing in its scope, but ultimately entirely pre-packaged and non-local.

Maybe there’s an asshole factor. The musicians have to be pretty damn great, but the point isn’t to get arena rock musicians to come over for dinner. Having Axel Rose come over to mooch beers is probably a drag.

The World Institute of Slowness has an Alan Watts vs South Park mashup on slow music:

I dunno, though, man. The whole thing seems like it’s pining for the past.

One thing I’ll say about my own (living history) music, anyhow: it’s slow. The edits that most musicians make with software, I do with practice and retakes. If I want a section to be rounder or sharper I need to find a way to get my hands to do it in real time, and then I have to get enough repetition in that I’ll keep doing it when I’m on stage. If I’m making a recording I have to keep doing takes until I get one with all the details the way I want them to be. It makes me think about life in the olden days.

slow music

Allison Outhit posted this to the Pho list:

What we need is Slow Music. Just like Slow Food. It’s a perfect metaphor.

Slow Music would focus on local, sustainable artists who don’t have to travel thousands of miles to get to your “table”. Slow Music appreciates and promotes “heritage crops” (ie, life-long careers… Artists over 30…) as well as tasty new varietals.

Slow Music tastes better, looks brighter, comes in astonishing variety. It may look a bit flawed compared to the airbrushed Frankenbands we’re used to having foisted on us. But that’s because it’s non-GMO, farmed, produced and consumed with care by people who give a damn.

That’s a beautiful idea, not to mention a very fine marketing angle for local music.

For example, there’s a piano teacher in your neighborhood who really can play the hell out of Brahms, and there are people in the neighborhood who’d enjoy great Brahms playing if they didn’t have to get dressed up and go to symphony hall.

Streampad to AOL

Streampad acquired by AOL:

Streampad has been acquired by AOL! As many of you know, I’ve been working at AOL Music for the past year as a Lead Engineer. When I joined AOL a year ago, it quickly became apparent how much in line my vision for Streampad was with the roadmap of AOL Music. Now, we can combine the vast library of assets and editorial voice of AOL with the playback and library management features of Streampad.

Dan Kantor, the author of that post, was the creator of Delicious PlayTagger as well as Streampad. The impact of this move on online music would be for AOL to ship large scale software incorporating Dan Kantor’s webby vision.

unbundling sux

Coolfer is worried about growth of album sales at the expense of singles sales:

In a perfect world (from the artist point of view) bands would sell only albums. More revenue than what they get from unbundled albums. But that’s not how the world works any longer.

Music Week has a report on a Music Tank panel titled “Lets Sell Recorded Music” in which renowned artist manager Peter Jenner lashed out at the changed brought by iTunes. The store, he said, has “had the disastrous effect on the record industry of debundling the album” and letting fans choose two singles instead of a full album.

That’s pretty much the conclusion I came to in a quick-and-dirty Excel computation of album-for-tracks substitution. Since the launch of iTunes, the loss of every additional album (beyond the rate of loss before iTunes launched) was replaced with 1.38 track downloads.

I don’t get it. Users don’t *want* to download singles.

– They don’t want to download at all. What they want is to listen. Downloading is labor.

– And they don’t want to do that labor one piece at a time — much better to download an album’s worth of songs.

– They’re not listening that much less, if at all. The number of listening hours in the day may have gone down, but not at the rate of 1.38 (song downloads now vs album downloads before)/13 (songs per album).

– And they’re not playing the same song more times. It’s not an issue of how many songs they want to listen to, it’s an issue of how many songs are able to motivate people to put up with the iTunes Music Store.

Unbundling should only hurt musicians (and record businesses) who were sneaking crappy songs into albums that contained hits, and this was always an unfair way to make money. Whatever the problem is here, it’s temporary. The market is in the process of adjusting. For now the listeners need to really really love a song for the song to move a lot of transactions at pay-per-download stores.

My best guess about what’s going on is that all the rest of the listening hours are filled with fileshared music. Maybe the deal is that paying is optional, and listeners are only choosing to do it for songs they actively love, meaning that going to the iTunes music store might be a form of tipping.

blip jam NYC

I am super bummed that this is in NYC. It were in LA I would be there from start to finish, but I’m not quite motivated enough to travel for it.

Blip Festival 2008

Archaic game and home computer hardware is recast into the unlikely role of musical instrument and motion graphics workstation in the BLIP FESTIVAL 2008, a four-day event showcasing nearly 40 musicians and visual artists occupying the international low-res cutting edge. The Blip Festival takes place DECEMBER 4—7, 2008 at The Bell House, and is presented by Manhattan art organization THE TANK and NYC artist collective 8BITPEOPLES.

Highlighting the chipmusic phenomenon and its related disciplines, the festival aims to showcase emerging creative niches involving the use of legacy video game & home computer hardware as modern artistic instrumentation. Devices such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Nintendo Game Boy and others are repurposed into the service of original, low-res, high-impact electronic music and visuals — sidestepping game culture and instead exploring the technology’s untapped potential and distinctive intrinsic character.

The Blip Festival assembles nearly 40 practitioners selected from the chipmusic movement’s expansive global underground, taking care to represent as many as possible of the genre’s surprisingly diverse styles, geographical and technical scenes, communities, and traditions. The festival’s concert program will be supplemented by daytime events to be announced, including workshops, presentations, and screenings. The Blip Festival’s intended result is to provide a cross-section of a movement currently in explosive flux, teeming with artistic exploration, and poised at the cusp of global awareness.

Question: am I the only person calling this genre “bleep” instead of “blip”?

Other names: chip music; 8-bit music.

mix2r

mix2r

A music-makers community which improves on prior art by adding a collaboration platform.

Mix2r basically echoes the traditional workflow involved in creating multi-track digital audio recordings with one important difference. It uses a centralized portal to allow collaborations between musicians from any geographical location as long as they can access the site and have a basic (free) or pro (paid) membership. Mix2r has a well thought out data model which allows needs and capabilities to be matched.

postapocalyptic visions of the record industry

From the comments on sue em all not good for labels, here’s Greg on the prospects for the music industry:

It’s kind of like Dr. Bloodmoney or one of the other good Phil Dick post-apocalyptic novels: most of civilization may have been destroyed, but some industrious tinkerer out there can probably put together a wood-burning car, the kindly kid in the radio shop turns out to be telekenetic, and the small rodents evolve high intelligence.

On my optimistic days, I find this state of affairs exciting and stimulating — you never know what weird creature could come along mext — but just as often it seems dreary and near hopeless: there is, after all, a lot to mourn for.

And Victor’s response:

it does seem that taking something away as fundamental as charging per “copy” would be wrenching under the most visionary, forward thinking authority.

Meanwhile, the death of “my favorite band” seems to me a cultural phenom almost separate from sue-em-all and more a by product of other forces. Kids don’t seem to pin their parental-anxieties on celebrity rocks stars like they did in past generations. I don’t mourn that.

Unlike most, I don’t think things are over for the labels. I think that they are going to shrink to the size of the licensing opportunities, for example in helping jeans, cars, and games to sell. But once they get there they’ll stop shrinking, because the recordings they own will stay cultural milestones. If the song publishers — an industry rooted in the 19th century — can remain a big deal in the 21st century, the record companies can find a durable niche as well.