A detailed examination of why music industry Blockchain (capital B) dreams are not going to work out.
Read More
Category: Opinion
Choreography about architecture.
The Spotify-Universal 2017 deal, with windowing, probably won’t change much.
Apart from revitalising the torrent sites, but everyone seems to have noticed that bit now.
Read More
Record labels want money YouTube doesn’t earn, just because Google has some and they’d like it.
With cites that they know this money doesn’t actually exist yet.
Read More
Music journalism: still dead, thank goodness.
“Can music journalism exist at all?” “Do Music Journalists Matter Anymore?” I mean, if you have to ask …
Read More
All these streams will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
There is no “cloud”, there’s just someone else’s computer. Will we find a listener who cares?
Read More
Whatever happened to Winamp? (which you can still download, by the way)
Fifteen to twenty years ago, Winamp was the MP3 player that everyone used. It was the first MP3 player not to suck: playlists, shuffle, convenience. And you can still download the last version.
Read More
Virtual Reality: it’s the new 3D! Expensive, consumers don’t want it and it makes you throw up.
3D technology has been the next big thing for only the last sixty years. It offers amazing improvements over ordinary moving images: darkness, muddier colours, blurriness, headaches from watching for more than twenty minutes and slower action sequences so the viewer doesn’t bring up their last meal.
Read More
The time has come to listen to Ethernet cables.
The sound with the Pearl becomes lighter and has less impact and detail compared to the Supra. Stereo image shrinks, but more obvious is a reduction in detail. Changing to Cinnamon with only one switch in my network produces a surprising result.
Read More
What the death of What.CD fails to mean for all of humanity.
There’s a lot to be said in favour of massive copyright violation in the interests of cultural preservation, but “fixed targets are stable and sustainable in a world including the record companies” is not any of it.
Read More
Aestheticblogging.
aestheticblogging basically taught me to have feelings, that werent anger.
Read More
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.
Read More
Death in Rome: Max Martin did nothing wrong. And the touchier aspects of neofolk.
Death in Rome do neofolk covers of pop. And what’s neofolk? Well.
Read More
Hip-hop and post-punk synthpop: Ich habe der fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n auf der Autobahn blues.
I don’t often see it noted just what was happening with early hip-hop and English and European synthpop in and from the post-punk era. Hip-hop histories gloss over it, and the reconstructed histories of techno somehow jump straight from about 1988 back to Kraftwerk, as if all that stuff from 1978 to 1984 never happened.
Read More
J. G. Ballard and music. How to write the entire New Wave into being.
Post-punk’s favourite writer, who didn’t listen to music himself. It’s all about the imagery.
Read More
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.
Read More
Theodor Adorno wrote all the Beatles’ songs as a Cultural Marxist assault on America. Possibly.
One of the finest conspiracy theories in popular culture is the claim that Theodor Adorno, a main figure in the Frankfurt School of “cultural Marxism” fame, secretly wrote all the Beatles’ songs.
Read More
Radio and television finally admit, in 2016, that they’re competing with the whole vast Internet.
The mass media have suffered the effects of the Internet much in the manner of the record industry, as consumers, conclusively sick of their shit, withdraw their attention. Their worry has gone from piracy to … being ignored.
Read More
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.
Read More
Rowland S. Howard and his albatross, “Shivers”. (And more.)
Rowland S. Howard plays his albatross “Shivers” on ABC TV Studio 22, 25 November 1999. The band is Rowland with Brian Hooper on bass, Mick Harvey on drums and Edward Clayton Jones on keyboard. And a lot more stuff.
Read More
On this day in 2015 … gettin’ piggy with it.
At approximately 10:20pm BST on Sunday the 20th of September, 2015, the image of the Daily Mail‘s Monday front page hit Twitter. And Britain exploded.
Read More
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.
Read More
Fenris Wulf: Loki’s Child (2016 edition). A witty political satire using pop music! I bet you’re delighted already.
Every field has its standard ways to fuck up.
Read More
The Hugos, the Sad Puppies and 1970s science fiction paperback covers, which were ridiculous.
The thing that really struck me about Hugo vote-stackers the Sad Puppies was founder Brad Torgersen’s lament that he could no longer tell from the cover of a science fiction novel what it was about.
Read More
Witch house: I’d make myself a majickal sandwich.
Witch House is a made-up genre that became real. It was invented as an in-joke and now goth DJs claim they play “witch house”. Perhaps the secret ingredient is the gr▲†u‡†Øu§ Un‡cØd3.
Read More
How to slum as a rock critic, like generations of rock critics before you.
Sometimes you see a piece of modern music journalism and you wonder why these people are allowed fingers.
Read More
Links: cultural markets in late capitalism, Patricia Morrison, the 1938 synthesizer.
Consumer markets, a nice Patricia Morrison interview and the 1938 Novachord.
Read More
Strap On Halo: Altar of Interim EP, Prayers for the Living CD (2016).
Strap On Halo are a goth rock band from the goth scene. This is unfortunate, insofar as not even current goths are interested in current goth music — it’s a subculture of new clothes and old music.
Read More
Whatever happened to all the sociologists, anyway? Not like the ones we had in the ’90s.
Back in the ‘90s, sociologists and students seemed desperate to find anything resembling a subculture to write about. I ran a fanzine, remember, and was fending off calls regularly. They were a plague. This was just before Nirvana hit big. It was blindingly obvious to everyone in indie rock that someone was going to hit super-big at some point.
Read More
J. G. Eccarius: The Last Days of Christ the Vampire (1988).
If you’re going to suffer unresolved literary trauma, you should get it from a title like that, which you will be unsurprised to hear is far and away the best thing about the book.
Read More
The enduring popularity of bishonen: the Wraeththu Trilogies by Storm Constantine.
I have unresolved literary trauma, so you can have some too. These books are “sexy gender-ambiguous goth boys ahoy” porn from Storm Constantine as early ‘80s goth girl. (Note the cover star’s hand stapled to his forehead.) Apparently originating in a short story she wrote in 1973 at age 17, so David Bowie’s in there too.
Read More