Music
Emo ho ho ho
The ever-brilliant No Rock’n'Roll Fun, reporting Emo fans’ plans to demonstrate outside the Daily Mail, made me laugh like a drain:
Hundreds of angry young people wearing black shirts marching up and down the streets of London. That was the sort of thing that Mail loved back in the 1930s, wasn’t it?
Digital music: still shit
Record labels are losing their battle with digital piracy as the number of people who regularly download songs legally falls back, research will claim today.
That’s in the UK where, by an incredible coincidence, the overwhelming majority of digital music is still sold with DRM.
Elsewhere in the Guardian, in a piece by Tim Anderson:
“The industry has finally been able to get some hard data about how removing DRM restrictions from legitimately purchased tracks affects piracy,” says Bill Rosenplatt, DRM specialist and president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies. “The statistics show that there’s no effect on piracy.”
So if people aren’t downloading legally, what are they doing? Surprise!
While 28% of music fans have paid to download music from a legal download store such as iTunes or 7 Digital, just as many have tried downloading from an illegal filesharing site.
Tellingly, 22% have carried on sharing files illegally, but only 14% have continued to download tracks from legal sites.
As ever, you can use a single album to demonstrate the problem. Let’s take Madonna’s Hard Candy, the Deluxe version with three remixes tacked on the end.
- Full quality CD version from Tesco, Amazon etc (without remixes) - £8.93 to £8.99
- DRMed, standard quality iTunes with a digital booklet - £9.99
- DRMed, unknown bitrate WMAs from Tesco Digital - £10.97
- DRM-free, 256Kbps MP3s from 7 Digital with a digital booklet - £10.99
- DRM-free, 320Kbps MP3s from torrents with scans of the CD artwork - nowt
True, the CD version doesn’t include the remixes - or “filler”, as it probably should be called - but given that digital is much cheaper to produce than the physical version, charging eleven quid for a download with a couple of extra mixes makes me want to torrent the Madonna album out of sheer spite. And I don’t even like Madonna.
In the UK, digital music is all over the place. Most music is still protected WMA (Windows) or AAC (iTunes), and while unprotected music is beginning to go mainstream it’s far from perfect. iTunes Plus is still being conspiciously ignored by most of the labels. Tesco now offers MP3s (of unspecified bitrate), but its selection runs to just 40 albums, most of them older than the universe. Play.com has a better selection at £6.99 for unprotected albums (of variable quality - most are 320Kbps, but some are 192), but there are huge gaps in the catalogue and £6.99 is still rather expensive for something whose manufacturing cost is essentially zero. Nice to see Half Man Half Biscuit in there, mind you.
If digital music was some new-fangled technology then the current mess would be forgivable, but it’s nine years since Napster demonstrated the power of P2P for distributing music, eight years since AllofMP3.com suggested an alternative, and seven years since the birth of Bittorrent and iTunes.
So why on earth is digital music still a mess? Former A&R man John Niven may have the answer.
Today you can walk into Asda or Tesco and pick up an LP for seven or eight quid. Back in the mid- to late nineties a new release routinely cost £12 to £15 - nearly £30 in today’s money. Factor in manufacturing costs of a few pence per unit and a royalty rate to the artist of about a quid and you’re have a profit margin to make Third World sweatshop owners wince.
It seemed that the artificially inflated good times would roll for ever.
Music business to Apple: give us more cash, for no good reason
Apple want to sell over-the-air downloads - that is, music you buy over the phone network - and the record companies want to charge more for them. As ever, John Gruber nails it (but he perpetuates the HST misquote about the money trench*):
The music labels think we should pay more for a song downloaded from a server that isn’t theirs, over a network that isn’t theirs, because, well, just because.
* I know, I know, but it really annoys me - not least because I misquoted it once myself. The full quote, from Generation of Swine, is: “The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”
Should NME become a freesheet?
An interesting suggestion from No Rock’n'Roll Fun as NME unveils the seventy-third redesign this year:
Maybe the logical thing to do would be to abandon charging - perhaps except for subscribers, who could pay to ensure their supply - and try to build the readership that way. It might make more long-term sense than another relaunch every six months.
The full post takes an in-depth look at the NME’s latest new look. The verdict isn’t exactly a massive thumbs-up.
Kill Your Friends: good on music, sub-American Psycho story
John Niven’s book, Kill Your Friends, is set in the music business at the height of Britpop. Niven knows what he’s talking about - he was an A&R man at the height of Britpop - and his protagonist’s rants about the music business, consumers and the general bovine stupidity of artists clearly come from experience. Pity the opening quote, Hunter S Thompson’s “cruel and shallow money trench” is a misquote (HST was talking about the TV business).
Here’s the book blurb:
It’s not dog-eat-dog around here…it’s dog-gang-rapes-dog-then-tortures-him-for-five-days-before-burying-him-alive-and-taking-out-every-motherfucker-the-dog-has-ever-known. Meet Steven Stelfox. London 1997: New Labour is sweeping into power and Britpop is at its zenith. Twenty-seven-year-old A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, a world where ‘no one knows anything’ and where careers are made and broken by chance and the fickle tastes of the general public - ‘Yeah, those animals’. Fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine Stelfox, blithely criss-crosses the globe (’New York, Cologne, Texas, Miami, Cannes: you shout at waiters and sign credit card slips and all that really changes is the quality of the porn’) searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification.
But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cutthroat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.”Kill Your Friends” is a dark, satirical and hysterically funny evisceration of the record business, a place populated by frauds, charlatans and bluffers, where ambition is a higher currency than talent, and where it seems anything can be achieved - as long as you want it badly enough.
As a satire on the music industry, Kill Your Friends is pretty much peerless. (Real) A&R stupidity is mercilessly skewered, artists of all stripes get it in the neck and one particular rant, a Trainspotting-esque monologue about bands who want record deals, should be printed in 72-point type and nailed to the wall of every rehearsal room in the world. Some of the fictional artists are clearly drawn from real ones, like the self-indulgent drum’n'bass superstar and the band producing sub-Radiohead whiney nonsense, and many of the music business characters appear to be thinly disguised versions or composites of real-life characters.
As a novel, though, it isn’t great. Niven’s going for an American Psycho thing here, but American Psycho did it much better. You can’t help but think Niven should have written a memoir rather than a novel.
Don’t all rush to HMV at once, now
From the press release pile:
Finnish operatic rock supergroup, Northern Kings, release their debut album, Reborn, in the UK on Monday 16th June, on Warner Music, and the single ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’ will be released in the UK as a digital download and limited edition CD on 12th June.
Reborn, which has achieved gold status in Finland, features symphonic orchestral rock interpretations of eighties classics ranging from Brothers in Arms, Ashes to Ashes, Sledgehammer, Hello, I Just Died In Your Arms, We Don’t Need Another Hero, plus Radiohead’s 1993 song Creep.
Here’s the full track listing.
Don’t Stop Believin’
We Don’t Need Another Hero
Broken Wings
Rebel Yell
Ashes To Ashes
Fallen On Hard Times
I Just Died In Your Arms
Sledgehammer
Don’t Bring Me Down
In The Air Tonight
Creep
Hello
Brothers In Arms
Comes with music. And stupidly large bills
Is Nokia’s Comes With Music deal one of the dumbest digital music deals ever struck? Could be!
The deal, which enables the phone firm to give users unlimited music downloads, could cost Nokia a fortune.
The Register has learned that Nokia must pay the wholesale per-unit rate for downloads over a certain ceiling - believed to be 35 songs per user.
Morrissey, racism and the NME
No, not that story. This one.
It seems that Morrissey has stepped in to save the Rock Against Racism event after the NME, which was sponsoring the gig, pulled out. So Moz is saving anti-racists from the NME. Blimey.
Elsewhere, Metallica appear to be considering “doing a Radiohead” and embracing downloaders rather than suing them.
It’s a funny old world.
Hey, musicians - it’s time for the machines to take over
If you thought Autotune was clever, this will blow your mind.
Direct Note Access is a technology that makes the impossible possible: for the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material. The unique access that Melodyne affords to pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters of melodic notes will now also be afforded to individual notes within chords.
[Via Metafilter]
Insanely expensive speaker cable isn’t any better than a coat hanger
There’s a nice post on Consumerist about those expensive high-end speaker cables that will apparently transform your stereo’s sound:
Seven different songs were played, each time heard with the speaker hooked up to Monster Cables, and the other time, hooked up to coat hanger wire. Nobody could determine which was the Monster Cable and which was the coat hanger. The kicker? None of the subjects even knew that coat hangers were going to be used.
As one of the commenters notes, the only time you really need heavy duty audio cables is when you’re jumping around on stage playing an instrument. Then, ultra-cheap cables are a false economy.