From the world of your music on other people’s computers.
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Category: Industry
And it’s-a-one for the money, two for the money.
Digital distribution: Streaming takes over, Apple goes label, go to your listeners, Bandcamp 2016.
The fine art of getting your music to paying listeners as of late 2016.
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From the high seas: Pirate Bay in Australia, DDOS attacks, Kickass Torrents revived, monetising piracy.
Yo ho ho and three megabytes of hot RAM.
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Links: Side-Line goes full Nazi, CDDB bought by Nielsen, 23 random Naked Lunch quotes.
Side-Line indulges a straight-up Nazi, Nielsen buys Gracenote metadata, random Burroughs readings from The Naked Lunch.
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Niland’s music classifier and similarity searcher, and a demo you can play with.
Niland are an “AI startup” who sell a search and recommendation engine for music companies. They have a demo for you to play with: paste in a track from SoundCloud and see what it makes of it.
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Links: Bandcamp for New Zealand charts, EFF versus the music industry, the productivity of silence.
The important thing is to wear a fetching Skullcandy hat like the one up there.
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Links: Spotify without SoundCloud, 808 classics, the Legendary Pink Dots, millennials.
Spotify rejects SoundCloud again, ten 808 greats, the Legendary Pink Dots and you awful millennials.
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Links: Independent music earnings, Pakistan’s music industry, answering recruiters, Spray.
How much money one musician actually makes striking out as an independent, the Pakistani music industry, responding to recruiters and Ricardo Autobahn and Spray.
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Links: World industrial, the economics of EDM, the eyes have rhythm, fretless bass an octave up.
Have some more links, this time with a video.
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Links: Floor-sweepings editions, Paul is Still Dead, Imogen Heap’s $133.20, a good industry report.
Fifty year old records, fifty year old conspiracy theories, one hundred and thirty-three twenty and an actually non-stupid music industry report.
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Why Blockchain won’t save the music industry, and Imogen Heap wants to spyware you.
The blockchain book I’m writing; a couple of short excerpts from the music section I drafted about half of today.
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Recording links: a new vinyl process, Brexit and UK records, Pono no mo’.
Exploring new frontiers in obsolete technology, why Brexit will affect UK music precisely how you think it would, and the state of Neil Young’s Pono.
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Industry links: Consumers may only rip CDs to properly copyright-levied 80 minute MP3s of silence.
It was 35 years ago today, Sergeant Adorno taught the band that HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC.
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Links: Indonesian and Mexican record markets, the Mekons, jazz saxophone relationship advice.
Music goes with chicken, retrospective on a scrappy punk band and how to be so foolish as to go out with a musician.
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Links: Psychoacoustics for recording, blockchain band names, Dépèche Mode demos.
Scurvy recording trickery, scurvier buzzword-compliant scams and Dépèche Mode so too has the accents in.
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Culture is not about aesthetics redux: scented candles in a human face, forever.
A retrospective on Rocknerd’s 2013 one-hit wonder “Culture is not about aesthetics. Punk rock is now enforced by law.” What musicians are now faced with.
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Links: bad lyrical subjects, worse record companies, Psychic TV and Polka Floyd.
Don’t whinge or povertysplain, worse music industry players, Psychic TV’s film Kickstarter and a reworking that works too well.
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Links: September, Ziggy Stardust, Alan Turing, rap as social news system, even cheaper streaming.
Today at work I’ve been busy discussing the horror of Blockchain. So have some interesting webpages that are completely not about that in any manner.
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Links: The record industry is still suicidally stupid, torrented MKV at 11.
Shazam makes a profit but not from records, the record industry goes back to trying to sue the Internet out of existence, the record industry thinks a YouTube employee is really working for them for free, Spotify and Soundcloud will prove that 2+2=1.
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The streamingpocalypse first hit the record industry in the 1930s. It was called radio.
The music industry occasionally forgets that entertainment is an optional expense, consumer confidence is a critical material condition for what they do, and when times are tough people stop spending.
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Arts Council of England to introduce quantitative performance metrics across all cultural endeavours. Seriously.
In an attempt at the prize for most fatuous bureaucratic innovation of the decade, Arts Council England plans, against all non-conflicted recommendations, to impose a standardised numerical system for arts quality on its national portfolio organisations.
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Stephen Witt: How Music Got Free (2015, 2016).
This purports to be the story of the last twenty years of the record industry, told by one of the kids who collected MP3s in his college dorm just before Napster. It isn’t the story of the MP3 revolution, but it is some stories, only one of which is seriously important to the claim in the title. But the details mostly aren’t wrong.
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Links: floor-sweepings editions, musician forums, Piracy: The Better Choice.
A site for multi-disc reissues, a new musicians’ forum, DRM still doesn’t work, exclusive deals don’t work.
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Fool’s gold rush: Blockchain initiatives for everybody! Especially the artists, our eternal and only concern.
It’s heartwarming how keen all these “blockchain” people are to helpfully intermediate between you, the artist, and the prospect of money.
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Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of online record stores? Hell yes.
The New York Times offers a nice writeup of your friend and mine, Bandcamp. Describing how it works and a bit of the story of the company. We talk to quite pleased musicians also.
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Links: Records and machinery.
Online streaming, ’70s music technology and ’90s record shops.
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SingularDTV: a “blockchain entertainment studio” using Ethereum for DRM on their totally boss sci-fi TV show about the Singularity.
SingularDTV is an exciting new blockchain-based entertainment industry boondoggle. It’s part DRM snake oil marketing, part pseudo-Bitcoin scam and part sincere Singularitarian weirdness. You should not fall for it.
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Links: Dr Dre and Apple, Alan Vega, Dangerous Minds.
Dr Dre and Apple’s new headphone jack, reminiscences on Alan Vega (and Bruce Springsteen) and clickbait for aging record nerds.
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Why De La Soul’s ridiculously important albums are unavailable on the face of the earth.
Why you can’t buy De La Soul’s albums: the sample rights are so complicated, Warner refuse to sell them to anyone.
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Dischord releases most of its catalogue on Bandcamp.
It’s the happening thing. Doesn’t appear to be everything they’ve ever released, but it’s a pretty fair chunk of it for you to try before you buy and give them your money.
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