Ochre

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You might have noticed a few changes to the site of late, as I’ve just updated Wordpress to the new 2.5 version, which includes a whole host of updates on the admin side of things to make my life a little easier. Cosmetically though, there are few changes, although you’ll have noticed the addition of Gravatars to the comments section.

For the uninitiated, Gravatars are ‘Globally Recognised Avatars’, and exist to make it easier for us to have a uniform identity across the net (the avatar equivalent of OpenID, if you will). It will become quickly apparent, by the dearth of avatars in my comments section, that this is very much A New Thing, and has yet to catch on within the online world (although I have noticed one or two commenters have caught on already).

So, if you fancy procuring a Gravatar, all you need is an email address to sign up and associate an avatar with and you’re all set (you can assign multiple emails with different avatars).

Continuing the theme of updates, I’ve tweaked and tinkered with the download store, mainly to a) reduce the number of tracks I have to tend to, and b) by popular request, arrange the downloads into more manageable album-sized chunks, with the option of buying individual albums separately.

The previously ‘orphaned’ tracks are now separated into three volumes, imaginatively titled I, II and III (yes, I did take a pinch of inspiration from the recent NIN release), and are now approximately grouped chronologically (by completion date, rather than upload date). Each album is about 45 mins long, and will cost you just £2 (~$4—yep, I’ve switched currencies, allowing me to accept Google Checkout now too!).

Finally, I’ve also provided each release in 320kbps and FLAC formats, as a single purchase, to save you having to pick which format when buying. You’ll get links to separate zips of each format emailed to you—just choose which you’d like to download.

Here’s an interesting (and at times chucklesome) essay by ex-Depeche Mode member Alan Wilder, concerning the music industry and its ongoing existential crisis. Topics covered include an increasingly fickle and attention-starved attitude towards listening, the loudness war’s attempt to catch the consumer’s ear for a moment—along with the ensuing ear fatigue that sets in when you try to listen intently, and musings on alternative modes of operation and distribution. Bang-on the nail and well worth a read.

Coincidentally, making use of the boutique-approach discussed by Wilder, Trent Reznor just released some new NIN, entitled Ghosts I-IV, directly available through his site (or at least, it will be available once the server-crushing traffic wanes—I ended up getting the free release through a NIN-authorised torrent). There’s an almost bewildering variety of products and prices available in addition to the free version, right up to the $300 Ultra-Mega-3000 Edition.

It’s interesting to see these special editions increasingly being offered alongside standard releases, to subsidise the mp3 and basic CD releases. Giving away part of the release for free also makes a lot of sense, especially when there are so many tracks on offer anyway; Ghosts I clocks in at almost half an hour of music, free for familiarisation, to become lodged in the mind of listeners, who’ll then hopefully be back for more. Assuming I get enough material written, I can see myself utilising a similar method. After all, why limit a release to a single CD or 74 minutes of music if you’ve written the equivalent of two CDs? Package it all together as a single release, and give away 30–40% of it as mp3s to get people listening straight away before you’re eclipsed by next week’s news. Little use saving it for a separate release if no-one will give either release a chance.

It’s that time of year again when the North-East of England sees the biennial AV Festival descend upon its streets for a week. Working feverishly over the preceding fortnight, I managed to get involved by writing a piece of music for the festivities being held in Newcastle’s Culture Lab, as part of the Music & Machines VIII conference.

This year the symposium shared the AV Festival’s theme of Broadcast, featuring a variety of lectures, presentations and interventions by various key writers, artists and musicians. In between the scheduled presentations, artists from Newcastle University presented a series of installations and performance pieces taking inspiration from Jeffrey Sconce’s notion of Haunted Media, using sample material sourced from Antonin Artaud’s Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu, a recording originally commissioned by Radio France sixty years ago for a broadcast that never was (unsurprising, given the blasphemous and and somewhat scatological subject matter).

My resulting contribution was a 4.1 9-minute piece called Reception (here mixed down to stereo):

Download

Other highlights of the weekend for me were Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec’s Reality Soundtrack and Tetsuo Kogawa’s Deconstructing Broadcasting.

After recently reading some articles and interviews on Wired featuring Talking Heads’ David Byrne, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and NIN front man Trent Reznor, I got thinking again about mp3s, and how best (if at all) to sell them directly. Looking at how Radiohead and Saul Williams have priced their downloads, can we glean any more clues yet as how best to price music downloads alongside CDs?

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If I had to profess some sort of New Year’s resolution, it would probably be along the lines of ‘be more productive.’ So, apologies for the radio silence over the past couple of months or so; I’ve been pretty much occupied by some festive employment, which will thankfully draw to a close this weekend. I’d like to think that from then on I’ll be a little more forthcoming with blog updates and future project information.

But just to let you know I haven’t been completely idle, as apart from the Ed Chamberlain remix, I’ve also been collaborating with the industrious multi-instrumentalist Benet Walsh, whose name you may recognise in electronica circles from his work with Plaid (providing guitar for the tracks Ralome and Eyen, among others). Hopefully we’ll have penned a couple more tracks together, in addition to those we’ve already completed, for release at some point this year.

On the mastering side of business, I’ve been enjoying some rich and varied projects ranging from Gaelic laments to experimental ambient, house and metal—hopefully this will continue through 2008!

I’ve recently stumbled across a couple of blogs that have, as well as make me feel hideously under-productive, also inspired ideas and motivated me, as well as reassure a few inklings of my own.

The first site is New Music Strategies, run by Andrew Dubber, who provides a list of twenty tidbits of information regarding how to present and promote yourself as an online musician. Admittedly it’s not rocket science — most of the posts are pretty much common sense and should be reflexive for any musician with their head screwed on. But it’s great to see all these ideas bundled up in a neat list, though not complete or at all definitive — Andrew has already begun to expand upon the initial ideas present in greater detail, and also presented them in an essential free pdf.

The second site that has caught my eye and made it on to my newly-created blogroll, is Hometracked, a site dedicated to, as the name suggests, all things DIY music production, from production hints and tips to industry news and commentary. Quite a lot of material already exists on the site, but for now I’ll continue the theme and link to a follow-up interview with Andrew Dubber, discussing some of the points put forward in his ‘20 things…’ list.

It’s nice to see Andrew reflect my personal irk of 30 second track snippets — it does nobody any favours, and in my experience makes the listener feel short-changed when the full track doesn’t live up to the potential suggested by the snippet. (iTunes take note, and congratulations Bleep for showing how it should be done.) Also, it’s nice to read about the value of giving away music for free, provided in addition to that for sale.

Both sites are a goldmine for indie musicians. Feel free to discuss below or in the forum.

Spending the last five years nurturing the music community website has paid off handsomely for three London-based entrepreneurs, after striking a deal with US-based radio conglomerate CBS. I’m still finding it difficult understanding how exactly a website becomes worth $280m, but I suppose attracting 15 million users is something not to be sniffed at. The deal is apparently part of a plan by CBS to attract a younger demographic, presumably to re-divert music and video previously snubbed by younger music lovers tuning-out of mainstream radio, in favour of their own custom online playlists. But enough of my wildly speculative conjecture.

Source: BBC News

“The whole of economic theory is the theory of scarce resources. If milk is scarce, the price is up: this is economic theory. But it doesn’t work for music; it doesn’t work for information as a whole. If I have a pot of milk and give it to you, I don’t have it any more. But if I give you a piece of information I still have it, I keep it. Which means that if I give something to you I create something new: abundance. And this means that economic theory doesn’t work for information, when that information can be separated from its material support — a CD, or whatever is the case today.” (Jacques Attali: 2001)

Quoted from a speech by Jacques Attali, the author of Noise: The Political Economy of Music, given at a Cybersalon Net.Music conference at the ICA, London, May 2001.

Given we accept mp3s as information rather than treating them as material commodities, existing outside traditional economic theory, how do we go about selling them? Using traditional models of scarcity, supply and demand, clearly won’t help us price music downloads, being freely copyable and distributable (despite music industry attempts to model mp3s as physical products by implementing DRM copy protection etc.). We can’t price them according to the time and energy that went into them (is an album that took three years to create more expensive than one that took six months to create?) or rely on manufacturing costs to set a base price. So instead the likes of iTunes and other stores price mp3s how they see fit, in comparison to good old CDs. Is that fair? Isn’t paying almost a quid a track a bit steep, seeing as though you’re paying for something that doesn’t exist? We can buy the proper CD for just a couple of quid more. Should we be paying much less for mp3s, or do we pay for the privilege and convenience of near instant delivery? After all, it’s not as though we can sell them on once we’re no longer interested in listening to them, as we can with our old CDs, tapes, vinyl etc., is it?

What do you think? I’d hope that we all still see it fit that we remunerate artists for their hard work in putting together an album, but as I see it, selling mp3s short-changes both the artist and listener. Surely the music industry wins once again if we accept the purchase of mp3s as just another media format (except a more disposable, ephemeral , lower quality format at that). I’d personally rather not create music that only exists in the fragile state as data on somebody’s hard disk, but would want to produce a physical document of my music. Isn’t selling mp3s simply a stopgap ‘fight fire with fire’ measure by the music industry to force a habit of purchasing mp3s onto consumers, clawing back mp3 sales to make up for the deficit in single sales, or is it the way all music will be sold in the future? I kind of feel as though illegal music file-trading has forced us down this avenue, and rather than celebrate mp3s as a novel, liberating future music format, it’s managed to turn music into something meaningless, like sand falling between our fingers while we scratch our heads and try and put a price on it.

Perhaps in the future we’ll enjoy ‘free’ music subscribed to as part of our internet connection service price, with a small fee trickling back to labels and artists (though this approach could be very dangerous, negating the need of innovation within the industry as labels continue to rely on the big names to rake it in). We might conclude that music downloads should be free and legal, and artists rely on performances alone to make money, relying on the scarcity and uniqueness of a live performance spectacle to create value. Or do we simply need to make mp3s a lot cheaper, and hope that listeners will find it just as convenient to buy music downloads as to head to the nearest torrent site?

But back to the question: do you pay for mp3s?