All this hype for no music...

Every musician has played some lousy gigs, and some more than others.  Small crowds, weak sound reinforcement, cramped space, short money, high drama, the list of the stuff that can make a gig lousy goes on and on, and is enough to keep some people from ever playing out.  Dealing with gigs that don’t cut it is as much part of the process as rehearsal, glory, and getting paid.

There are so many more bands than venues to play, and gigs are much harder to find than people to play them.   Maybe it’s because anyone can grab an instrument and book a gig.   Maybe people don’t care about integrity.  Or, as the skeptics say, maybe some people are just evolutionary dead ends.  Regardless of the circumstances of any gig, I am baffled that bands cancel gigs at the last minute without a reason involving well-being, or natural disaster.  I am talking about local gigs, which is a completely different game than being a touring musician, where routing and expenses can often cause tours to fall apart weeks before they get started.  I have compassion for the challenges of creating sustainable touring.

Imagine you’re at a venue.  People have paid a cover, bartenders are working, electricity is being guzzled almost as fast as beer.  Promoters and management are running around getting the room set for an evening of fun.  And a band calls at the last minute saying they don’t want to play, they’ve booked another gig, or they’ve changed their mind about playing.  Cue empty stage, disappointment form everyone involved, and another failed event.

This is the entertainment business.  Our job as musicians is to provide entertainment.  How upset would you be if you showed up at the movie theater and they decided at the last minute to not air the film… after you’ve bought your popcorn and soda?

While I agree that bands often get the short end of the stick, I don’t believe that justifies blowing off a commitment to provide entertainment when your job is an entertainer.  I’ve never seen a band forced to take a gig.  It seems obvious to me that if you agree to take a gig, you play it.  I’m unclear how people who don’t do that will ever draw 1,000 people per night, or perform regularly.

When a band changes their mind at the last minute and bails on an event, the impact is on the venue, the promoters, and the audiences;  in short, the entire music community in that area suffers for it.  It’s easy to say “Oh, but that’s a lousy gig, it doesn’t matter anyway,” and circumstantially that may be valid.   Any band that wants to be taken seriously might be interested in having an impeccable reputation as a professional.  I’ve seen many bands cancel at the last minute, or just not show up.

It is unprofessional to cancel a gig at the last minute.   People who get paid in the music business are called professionals.

As a semi-professional musician myself, I can understand why people are so hesitant to pay musicians for their work.  Perhaps if bands up the level of professionalism, they can command more.

Bottom Line:
If you don’t like a gig that’s presented to you, don’t take it.   Every time you leave someone scrambling to cover your mess, they remember your name.  And it’s a fact that people are ten times more likely to share a bad customer service experience than a  good one.

T Racks 3 Screenshot

One of the most important, yet often overlooked, elements of a professional recording is mastering. Mastering isn’t a part of mixing, it is the final stage before audio is duplicated, where the fidelity (punch, clarity and volume) are added to the track. Mastering is one of the separators between demo and pro recordings, and high quality mastering can literally separate a hit from just another song. IK Multimedia’s latest installment of the T-Racks Mastering Suite takes the art of digital mastering to a whole new level, bringing advanced signal processing and fidelity to the masses.. With T-Racks 3, anyone can get music mastered at the level of a professional mastering lab.

I’ve been a T-Racks user for years, and I recently had the opportunity to work with the new T-Racks 3 software. I thought T-Racks 3 was going to be a rehashed version of software I loved. I couldn’t have been farther from the truth. The interactivity, new plug ins, and sound quality blew my mind. I expected to see a familiar piece of software, with 4 signal processors popping up on the screen. When I opened the program and saw the 12 configurable slots for the signal chain, my first thought was “is this for real?” This didn’t even look like the program I have used for years. Once I started testing the program out on a final mix, I found it to be easy and fun to use. Within two hours I had three distinct masters to choose from, and each of them sounded sonically equal to almost any major label release I have heard.

T-Racks 3 is available for both Mac and Windows, and the plug ins can be loaded into almost any audio program as well as used as standalone software. The program is beautiful and the plug ins look real (and gorgeous). All the modules can be turned on and off individually (allowing you to actually hear the difference each plug-in makes to your master), and the 12 slots are configurable in a variety of ways. There is even a bypass button that lets you compare your original (plug in free) mix with the mastered version.

As if all that isn’t enough, the five new processors (available in the Deluxe version) are recreations of some of the most powerful and well-known studio equipment in history, including limiters, compressors, and equalizers. T-Racks brings the quality, equipment, and results of some of the finest mastering studios on the planet into your home studio, and the program clocks in at under $400. If you want your tracks to sound professionally mastered, and have the highest professional fidelity, then T-Racks 3 may be the best choice for your home studio.

Top 10 Indie Music Marketing Tools

5. GYDGET - Everybody’s got widgets, but these guys get it right by enabling you to grab your info, music, and video and spread it across the net. Free.

6. REVERBNATION – Communicate with fans, build a street team, get widgets and Facebook apps, sell stuff. Tools do do it all and most of them free.

7. TUNECORE - Affordable flat rate digital distribution to all the major download sites worldwide with no strings attached.

8. TUBEMOGUL – You made a great video for a $23.57 budget. Now what do you do with it? Simultaneously upload to 18 sites including all the biggies then track performance. Basic service is free. (Bonus: A list of viral video sites.)

9. ARTISTDATA – Update tour dates on your website, MySace, Pure Volume, Last.fm, Jambase, Pollstar, Sonicbids and more all at once plus submit tour dates to local media.

10. MOZES, BAND TXT ALERTS (tie) You could use Twitter to communicate with fans, but not everyone wants an account. Every cell can accept text messages. Mozes is free (carrier rates apply) and robust, but pays for itself with ads that could upset some. Band TXT Alerts costs a little, but takes a way the ads.

bluhammock’s Jaylaan Shares “What Is Working?”

In conjunction with US. independent music trade group A2IM (American Association Of Independent Music), we’re asking indie professionals: In this fractured media landscape, what is working? What outlets and tools are helping your artists build an audience?

In this third installment Jaylaan Ahmad-Llewellyn, the founder of indie label bluhammock music (KaiserCartel, Cary Brothers, Swati, Val Emmich and more) responds:

“I think that this is an interesting question because it begs the question of what do you consider ‘working.’ There is building an audience that buys music, an audience that attends shows, and simply building awareness that you even exist as an artist…

click here to read more…

video of the city skies performance by rich & josh! whee!

Yours truly, threv, joined Jeremy Dickens (www.offnominal.com) and Secret Life bandmate Tricil (John Jacobus) at Kavarna in Oakhurst this past Saturday for the City Skies festival.

Hosted by the ever-smiling Jim Combs (jimcombs.com), it featured artists such as Richard Devine and Josh Kay (from Atlanta and Phoenecia), Collaboration with Sounds (from South Carolina), Don Hassler (from Atlanta), and Bribing The Buddha (from Atlanta).

Kavarna is an awesome little coffee/wine/sandwich shop in Oakhurst, which is a lot cooler IMO than Decatur, but whatever. Perfect little setup for a stage full of modular synths, a LEMUR, Tenori-On, Moogs, and macs-a-plenty.

We got there just as Collaboration with Sounds performed some noisy ditties w/her Moog Rogue & Macbook.

After she performed, Don Hassler tweaked a synthhead’s dream – an EMS Synthi A & Buchla Modular.

Closing out the night was Richard Devine & Josh Kay (of Schematic & Phoenecia) who jammed on a box of modular gear for about 1.25 hours. They projected Rich’s Reaktor patches on screen as Josh tweaked their modulars (heh, that’s what she said). Rich futzed around w/his JazzMutant Lemur, which was hooked up to Reaktor, as well as his Tenori-On.

most of the music of the night was self-similar, but you won’t hear us complaining. shit was dope, and overall an awesome night for live electronic music played by humans.

above: Rich & Josh’s modular setup

above: Don Hassler’s Synthi A & Buchla

“When the history of our digital times comes to be written, one of the questions that will puzzle historians is why the record companies missed the significance of the internet.”

What a great thought (and a very catchy headline). Here is a summary of the article, with some commentary.

Since World War II, the record industry had a total monopoly on the recording, packaging, and distribution of music. They controlled the careers or artists, the way the music was disseminated, and dictated terms to music retailers. When the CD came around in the early 1980′s, and as the article says “recording studios converted the sounds made by musicians into bitstreams – long sequences of ones and zeroes – while, at the consumer end, CD players converted those bits back into high-fidelity sound.”

The sales model for this era was to create the plastic disks and packaging, ship them distribution houses, and then off to retailers. While this model proved to be profitable, the overhead costs were astronomical, with up to 50% of the retail price of a CD eaten up by production costs.

The internet was poised to change all of this for major labels. It presented the opportunity to drop production costs to the floor, while expanding profits. But the internet was ignored at first, and then it was treated as a realm for legal prosecution. Even bands chimed in, complaining about the evils of the internet. This practice got so widespread that the RIAA began prosecuting teenagers and single moms. And as the industry resisted the internet, CD sales bottomed out.

To put it simply, the major labels did not want to let go of CDs in the face of an evolving marketplace. Rather than adapt to the climate, they attempted to maintain the status quo. The writer of the article states “The obvious hypothesis – that the senior executives of all the record companies were idiots – has always seemed implausible to me. Or it did until I read the recent interview in Wired magazine with Doug Morris, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group.”

Because CDs were so profitable, the music industry turned a blind eye to what was next, and settled into a short sighted approoch rather than looking at the big picture.

Bottom Line: The record industry can turn itself around virtually overnight by embracing and adapting to technology. Welcome to the Future.

The folks at Forrester Research recently published an 18 page paper on the decade long decline in music sales. The article points to the idea that the shift in music sales is permanent, thanks to the Internet. I haven’t read the paper, but thanks to the blogosphere, information abounds.

The Forrester paper predicts half of all music sales will be digital by 2011, but that the boost will not make up for lost revenue in CD sales.

The paper predicts that subscription services will only grow “modestly”, and (no surprise here) that DRM will die.

In other words, technology is the future of the music business.

A synopsis on Cnet points to some of the concrete data in the report:
“A Q3 2007 survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults with online access showed that 94% of them still listen to the radio, and on average spend 43% of their overall audio-listening time with radio–far ahead of #2, CDs, which occupy only 20% of listeners’ time.” – Radio and streaming audio are still powerful tools for listeners, and in the era of choice, people are exercising their freedom to choose.

“…the survey showed that 62% of the subjects listen to music files on a PC, while only 43% of them listen to music on an MP3 player. Even 48% of them listen to Internet radio.” – True convenience isn’t defined by product availability or features, it’s defined by the individual.

The paper also suggests that corporate sponsorship and advertising will become a major factor in platinum music success.

While this is a comprehensive analysis of the music industry, it’s not really new information. Technology has become the key to the future of music, and I believe that the future of music will be more artists selling less albums. Labels will have less investing in broader catalogs, and artists’ will become more business minded, using the resources of labels instead of being exploited by them.

Bottom Line: The music industry isn’t collapsing, it’s evolving. Welcome to the future.

“Music publishers, the record labels and digital music distribution outlets began a three-way legal wrestling match Monday over just how much songwriters and the publishing houses should get paid for digitally delivered music.”

At stake in this debate is mechanical royalties for internet streams. Major labels, Apple, and Yahoo want the royalty rate for artists to be lowered. The big publishing houses are currently promised nine cents a song, a figure that often gets negotiated lower, and the consortium against them wants that rate moved to 8%. Apparently, publishing revenues are up, while major label revenues are down. The Digital Media Association is upping the ante, pushing for the royalty rate to be dropped to 4%.

On the other side of the fence, the National Music Publishers Association wants the rates raised to 12.5%.

The driving concern here is the financial ‘burden’ that paying these royalties puts on the large companies that offer music. The claim is that streaming media should be treated like terrestrial radio.

Bottom Line: Without content, there is nothing to stream.

This number is likely slightly lower than reality. There is no information to measure how many people downloaded the album for free then went back and bought it. CNET interviewed both Trent Reznor and Saul Williams, and their opinions are quite different.

The album has been out for two months, and the major campaign of videos and touring begins in the next few weeks. The album sold almost 30,000 downloads and gave away another 120,000 with almost no marketing campaign, and no publicist. Although the album hasn’t gone digitally platinum, this experiment is a positive sign. Williams’ music does not neatly fit into a pigeonhole. While the sales model is similar to Radiohead’s In Rainbows (which is no longer available as a free download), these two artists are not in the same position, and the IRLNT test will be a gauge of what mid level artist can expect from this model, at least for this year.
Having 20% of your listeners buy your album may not seem like a large amount, but it’s hard to measure who they are, how they know Saul Williams, and whether they were pre-existing fans or not. Consider that an album’s life span is long – upwards of two years, and over the next eight to ten months we will see how this model works when promotions are put into play.
Bottom Line: Whether or not this model of selling albums works is still unclear. As time passes, and more artists try this model, we will see whether audiences will pay for something they can get for free.

Have you ever heard of Pretexting? It’s a manipulation technique often used to fool organizations into disclosing private information. In December of 2006, a California Law was proposed: “…any person…obtaining or attempting to obtain…personal information about a customer or employee contained in the records of a business …by making false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or representations…”. Although the bill was unanimously endorsed by members of the CA Senate, the MPAA stepped in and had the bill killed (see Wired Magazine, “MPAA Kills Anti-Pretexting Bill”, 12/1/06). To put it simply, the MPAA and RIAA demand the right to lie to us in the name of Copyright Protection.

It seems the RIAA and MPAA are willing to allow privacy laws to deteriorate for all of us to protect their profit margins. The question on my mind is: Why should the MPAA and RIAA get special freedoms to prosecute people for file sharing?

Back in 2003, the MPAA and RIAA filed for a permanent Antitrust exemption. The bill was sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch. It contains a revision to The Copyright Laws of the US in Title 17 of the US Code. Here’s the revised copyright law of the US according this (thankfully non-passed) bill by Sen. Hatch (the revision is underlined):

For purposes of this chapter … any reference to copyright shall be deemed to include the rights conferred by section 106A(a) except that the court in its discretion may determine that such parts are separate works if the court concludes that they are distinct works having independent economic value.

These are the tactics of the MPAA and RIAA are using to transform entertainment. Creating exceptions to copyright laws and the having legal permissions to lie, cheat, and sue us into buying media for the prices they set, and in the forms they dictate.

21st century entertainment is not based on mafia style coercion by transnational media conglomerates. An outdated business model cannot survive by excusing themselves form laws the rest of us have to follow. Corporations are legally recognized as people. People cannot have laws rewritten for their personal benefit.

Polyvibe Records‘ response is our forward thinking business model. We do not take our artists’ copyrights. Our prices are set by the perceived value of our audience. Our digital albums are 100% MP3. And best of all, we make sure our artists’ are taken care of financially and personally. Taking copyrights from artists, then prosecuting others for sharing them is in the past. The future is ours.