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.

gamestrument #2

sull posts a screencast of his session with the innerpartysystem gamestrument, in which he gets high score.

Question: how would you do “high score”? Couldn’t you have ratings on these things to enable that?

Question: is it possible to have really different expressions in a gamestrument, or is the expressive range more limited than that? Is there more than one song in a given set of samples, or are all jams pretty much the same?

Greg brings up r2dj and Bloom as relations if not siblings to innerpartysystem. I did play with Bloom, though not a lot. And with r2dj I watched the tutorial but didn’t snag it myself.

These are both generative music apps which accept input from the user. They’re different from the innerpartysystem app in the way that the user/player interacts. In innerpartysystem the user is directly triggering music events in real time, while in r2dj and Bloom the user is tweaking parameters. An r2dj creator is writing software to react to the runtime environment. In Bloom the creator is injecting randomness in a John Cage-inspired style.

Anybody out there gotten closer to them than this?

birth of the gamestrument

Embed:

No embed: http://innerpartysystem.shuffl.es/dontstop?r=63

That is fucking wondrous.

First of all, the impact of in-browser-music-making is not trivial or obvious. You can’t be blase about it.

But beyond that, what’s striking about this particular hack is how high-level it is. It pulls the end user up several levels from decisions like the selection of video clips or specification of harmonic progressions. The user is closer to the level of a music game like Guitar Hero, except that game play is open ended. You don’t score points by playing this game, you make music.

It would be cool to use a selection of these open-ended-music-games as the DJ for a party. Maybe there would be a person selecting and queuing up the games, so that there was some kind of playlist. The overall impression would be similar to parties where the music is coming from people doing Rock Band or Guitar Hero.

Know of anything similar out there? Instruments verging on games and vice versa?

internet audio FTW

Audio | For The SystemAudio | For The System

Hamlet:

Swear by my sword
Never to speak of this that you have heard.

Ghost:

[Beneath] Swear by his sword.

Hamlet:

Well said, old mole, canst work i’ th’ earth so fast?
A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends.

Horatio:

O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet:

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 159–167

Not that this is the most amazing music in the world, but that the musical creativity flung across the corners of the internet is.

Flash album art at Thinner

The Thinner netlabel uses Flash for album art, but keeps the art conceptually very close to traditional album art — square, static, not too big. What they’re adding to the concept is subtle animations, which you’ll see if you go to one of the album pages, hit a play button, and stay awhile.

various artists – zu hause² remixes is an early version, and the changes are so subtle you barely notice them, like they’re trying to sneak past. daniel gardner – under the shower tower is more recent, and more active.

success of sue em all not good for labels

A comment by Greg on the “Sue Em All Awesome” post:

You’re right about the success of the “sue ’em all” strategy in having achieved the labels’ immediate goals, but the problem is that it has been a pyrrhic victory. Napster was the most effective music discovery and acquisition engine in history, it had an enormous and enthusiastic user base, and the labels killed it in an attempt to preserve their current business model.

Then mp3 blogs arose as a ground-up completely distributed user-driven model for taste publishing and music acquisition. They had a series of early instances of driving wild success of unknown bands (Broken Social Scene, Arctic Monkeys, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arcade Fire, etc), a possibility that was formerly open only to the labels. The labels couldn’t actually sue each blogger — there were simply too many — so they conducted a comprehensive FUD campaign to discourage bloggers from linking to mp3, which has been fairly successful. Simultaneously they have worked to encourage the rise of a small number of highly visible music sites (Pitchfork, et al) which they have worked hard to control via the traditional methods of ad revenue and star access. The result has been the recreation of an online music journalism that looks a lot like its offline counterpart and is hence a relatively poor niche-satisfying discovery engine.

Somewhere in there the iTunes store arose as a very user-friendly interface and captured an enormous portion of the market. It didn’t benefit from any of the network effects of the web, but it did its best to serve users and so it became an incredibly powerful promotion and discovery engine despite its best efforts to the contrary. The labels immediately got scared of Apple’s power over them and so have tried to stand up a whole series of competitors such as the Amazon mp3 store, each their own totally incompatible silo. This has been good for customers in terms of prices and DRM options, but has again eliminated the incredibly powerful networks effects that are what make the web the world’s best tool for getting cultural supply together with demand.

Each of these incidents (and others, such as the Pandora/streaming debacle) has shown the labels choose control and fear of change over the potential distribution, discovery, and money making power of the web. The result has been that while they’ve “won” in the sense that they’ve largely prevented the creation of an online distribution system that would be a competitor for their offline systems, they’ve done it at the cost of utterly poisoning the well: ensuring that music on the web has withered as a market just when so many other digital ecosystems have taken off.

It’s had to argue that an industry that has gone from being enormously profitable to being on the edge of utter bankruptcy in the face of the largest expansion in the consumption of its product in history has done “Awesome”.

As much as I agree with this POV, I don’t think consensus reality is even aware of this bag of issues. Eliminating network effects by ensuring that all internet music is in a silo? Huh? Is that even English? Best not to waste this breath for a couple years.

mini-talk at CC Salon tonight

I’ll do a shorty talk at the Creative Commons salon in Silverlake, in LA, tonight. My topic is going to be the role of permissive licensing in the business of internet music. I’ll lay out a map of the industry as a whole and situate copyleft within it.

Flavorpill describes the event this way:

Creative Commons is at the forefront of the progressive copyright movement, seeking arrangements that allow the free flow of artistry and ideas while at the same time protecting intellectual rights and freedoms. A group taking the middle road, its efforts have been invaluable in the face of technology’s rush into the future. At tonight’s salon, Mark “Frosty” McNeil — founder of noted DJ and multimedia collective Dublab — and XSPF developer Lucas Gonze tackle the ramifications and opportunities that could result from current and proposed copyright policies and discuss their larger effect on the music industry.


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