I just saw a new video interview with Glenn Ballard over at Berklee Music. He’s famous for producing artists such as Alanis Morissette, Dave Matthews Band and so forth.

His views about what is important when producing, what will happen next and so forth are worthwhile to check out. For example, he said that if the original material is mediocre, it takes a lot of effort to product this to something decent.

The important skill to develop and find in a fragmented future market is the taste. All music has an audience, if it’s done well, you could get it sold, even if there’s less of a market compared with the golden days of music when the jobs paid really well. But then you could be involved with music you really want to do. There’s always an audience for any kind of music, as long as you really are involved in the style — it has to be something you really like working with.

I just saw a video clip about Monster Studios, the place where Kate Perry and others have recenty recorded tracks (like that it seems to become summer hit I Kissed a Girl.)

The one big sales pitch behind this studio is that they have a house band that plays for tracks. I think this will become a good sales pitch for studios and producers. In today’s world anyone could configure a very good studio in the bedroom using semi-pro equipment and computers.

However, the sound will just sound the same concerning productions, micro-edits with loops and so forth. If you multiply this a thousand times or more you start to see the problem with the produced sound — it takes a lot of effort to sound unique and have a specific sound for productions. Same with creativity, one person could only get to a certain point concerning creative ideas with music.

Compare this with a studio setup where you have a pool of musicians that know each other inside out. Based on sessions you could configure this group and put together new tracks. I think this sounds very much like the old Motown system of sessions. Still, I think this is a good way to define a separate sound from anyone else out there, in this age of swing percent values and auto-alignment of pitch and midi quantizations…

One of the lesser talked ways to have a chance to become a successful artist or band is to be part of the first wave using a music technology product or shift. This goes back to the very early days of rock&roll. Those who understood the paradigm shift of using amplified guitars, bass guitars, even the new role of the kick drum finally being heard through amplification, they were part of the early day rock&roll circuit and the rest is history. They even play today for big crowds.

The same also happened with introduction of electronic instruments such as synthesizers, the whole new romantic style introduced by cheap synthesizers. Human League, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, it was just a bunch of musicians in England who saw the promise of using them in combination with pop tunes. Instead of using guitars, they switched over to cheap synthesizers. They are world-known today, and the royalty checks will make their grandchildren very happy.

It’s been one of my pet things to follow such technology trends, disruptive paradigm shifts as we call them in the computing business. I still remember when Yahoo had 20 pages of bullet-listed web links, same with the early day Google web page — not that it’s still classic and to the point. The web revolution was huge, and we are very much in the toddler stage concerning Internet.

Which leads to today’s situation with music technologies and opportunities. I was hoping that the combination of Internet and easy-to-use recording technologies would break the label monopoly - anyone could release anything they wanted. And it happened. However, the amount of boring music is staggering, instead of doing something unexpected, everyone copies each others so going through Mypage page after page reveals the same mush of electronic music. Or in the case of songs in general, same kinds of arrangements and songs, over and over. So it really lead to self-publishing but not in the sense of being unique and have a voice, rather sounding like everyone else.

Someone with a unique sound will have a chance, but being heard is tough compared with the early days, getting a synth and being the first made it possible to become recognized.

I don’t really foresee any huge technological shifts in the music industry just now — I could be wrong — but we have cheap instruments, cheap and easy to use recording gear as well as cheap ways to publish. If someone invents a new synth paradigm, it will just drown in the rest of the synthesized sounds out there. Few consumers are willing to buy specialized audio for pure audio experiences. Games is really the domain for music just now.

I could of course be wrong, and I hope so. There’s something very inspiring to be in the pioneering group of musicians that jump on something new, go with it and get recognized. Please show me something that you think will start another revolution. Meanwhile I will keep my ears and eyes open. Somehow I suspect the revolution will happen in the ‘live music’ arena, especially custom live shows for smaller audiences providing unique experiences.

There’s indeed something interesting happening over at Amazon MP3 concerning cheap deals on MP3 album downloads. This Digital Audio Insider blog entry talks more about the pricing structure and maybe what’s behind it all. I’ve picked up some of the Amazon MP3 album deals from time to time, such as a collection of James Brown hits (20) for $1.99 or a similar ridiculous low price.

Personally I think that if the price for albums would indeed be $5 for any record older than five years, the whole idea of the long tail of Internet marketing would really take off. It’s quite OK to take down the price for a product that has already been distributed as vinyl and as a CD, no need to try to squeeze out even more money from consumers. There are many contemporary releases where such a lower pricing structure would generate more downloads and ultimately more revenue compared with keeping prices high.

Tunecore just announced that they will distribute one single song, or a single, to all of their distribution channels (iTunes, AmazonMP3 and so on) for a flat fee of $9.99 per each year.

This is indeed a good pricing for anyone who knows that they want to just sell one entity and expect to get more than that cost in revenue. Or at least dip the toes into distributing a song and see what happens.

I personally think that the whole concept of albums in this age of digital download will become a lesser issue. Long time ago — and we all know that — many songs on LPs were fillers just to get the necessary 20 minutes per side in place. Especially the other side, end part, used to have miserable music.

See Ars Technica report from the Digital Music Forum.

Imagine how much money and new ideas the major labels would have made over ten years ago if they understood the power behind Napster. This will to to the classic business blunders of all times.

Kind of. See this and this. It only allows you to listen to a specific track three times. After that you need to purchase it from a download site. Hey, three times is better than nothing.

The other footnote in the Last.fm announcement was that unsigned artists could also upload music for streaming and get a little bit revenue from anyone playing the song. I don’t know how much, but I suspect it will be tiny amounts.

It’s interesting. Pandora does not have the same deals in place, so it could only stream inside US, just now. And it tends to repeat itself. So if you like to possibly hear the same tracks and be frustrated now and then, use Pandora. If you want to hear any music, but one track only three times, use Last.fm.

Somehow I think consumers would prefer something between these two extremes.

Maybe you’ve seen this posted a couple of times, from Washington Post:

Sony BMG’s chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, testified that “when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Copying a song you bought is “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy,’” she said.

Well, I think this is just one spokesperson who spoke herself into her foot. Anyway, even if RIAA and the big recording industry is suddenly changing their policy, there’s so much from past related to them supporting this activity so that any attempts to change their policies will be tough. Unless they get the congress behind them, which I doubt.

Anyway, even if they got this into a low, how could they keep track of millions, not not speak of billions of users?

It’s very simple, digital material could be cloned as much as you want. The only way is to make consumers willing to provide money for music. Law enforcement and digital protection tools are always doomed to fail.

If there’s one more thing I hope to happen next year is that the music industry will finally get in tune with the consumers. We like DRM-free material, and also don’t like someone keeping track of what we do behind our backs.

I really don’t care how this is done, by a tax on CDs or ISPs compensating artists, eMusic style services, iTunes, and so on. But something consumer-friendly is better than what the five five are trying to achieve just now — give up your old and non-working ideas.

I have not visited a classical record store for a very, very long time. One of the few existing ones here in the Bay Area is Rasputin Music, you could find them here and there. They are very interesting places, as they cover both contemporary music, as well as all kinds of obscure genres, used material as well as new, T-shirts, posters and so on.

Well. It was a culture shock for me, especially after a long time of either purchasing digital tracks, or chasing interesting material on net labels.

To start with, phew it was dirty business to handle old CD covers, albums and so on. I had to wash my hands when I came home….

Secondly, how icky is it to purchase something without a decent chance to hear the tracks? To be fair, you had play stations for the new material, but for used stuff there was no obvious way to listen to the CD? I guess I could drag over a big pile of material to the one controlling the PA in the store and ask them to play 20 second snippets of each track…

Other observations? I was surprised to see so little vinyl available, especially used vinyl. That side is really dead. In addition, now close to one third of this store was dedicated to new and used DVDs and other non-music related stuff.

I’m sure Rasputin Music will be around for a long time. For me, I just gave up even purchasing 1 dollar CDs, and I rather spend my time looking for music using electronic services on Internet. It’s very clear indeed that material music  stores will go the way of smaller book stores. When I moved to the Bay Area there used to be a specialty book store around every corner, used books, SciFi, computer books and so on. Now there’s mostly Borders and Barnes&Nobles super stores, and they are pinched in by Amazon, too.

One of my favorite movies if High Fidelity, it’s a nice combination of relationship issues as well as about fanatical music collectors, creating top five lists about nearly anything. And if you have not seen the roots of Jack Black’s Rock&Roll persona, this is the movie to watch, especially the initial introduction with him dancing that silly sexy dance in the record store.

Anyway, this is about record collecting. The biggest thing I miss from the vinyl days — and those days are over — is that you could collect all kinds of obscure records. There’s still something like that around, see this YouTube video with the most amazing cellar full of old records.

Anyway, the biggest problem with digital distribution is that if a band or a label cease to exist, of many reasons, and there are many, the digital material might no longer be available. You can’t find it on garage sales, in the basement of old record stores, at a friend’s house, scavenging through your parents’ old records, and so on. It means that as we speak a lot of of music is disappearing from this universe, in forms of web sites closing down, hard disks accidentally or deliberately being destroyed, and so on.

Especially concerning net labels this is not a good thing. I actually finally realized the biggest benefit as a netlabel for using archive.org as the content server. Yes, the downloads are somewhat slow, but if the netlabel or artist will disappear, at least the material is still around. As such, I really recommend using archive.org for any free material you are creating.

The other thing is just to scavenge and find free material, and keep it around on hard disks and DVDs as backups. At some point you might be the only one who has access to this material. As we get more and more mass distribution of commercial stuff, it is really nice to have small nuggets of special music that nobody else remembered to put aside.

The other, somewhat sad part, especially after I watched High Fidelity the Nth time last night is that there’s something special about big vinyl sleeves, the artwork, listings, and so on. The CD half-way killed this part of a release, and now with digital releases, if we are lucky, we could get a PNG/JPEG image from some server out there. But the whole thing of a tangible part that you could put in a shelf, that’s now missing.

I hope something new and exiting will arrive so that music is again tangible. However, if one is pragmatic, with this digital age and cost cuttings, I don’t see anything happening. Unless any of you reading have a scoop. I nearly thought of burning CDs of material I’ve downloaded from the netlabels and put those into a nice shelf, but then again it’s just a big pile of transparent CD packages…

Long time ago, actually when my dad was a teenager, nearly everything was released as 45 rpm singles. I still remember when I inherited his pile of classical singles as a small kid and managed to destroy most of them by experimenting with them, melting them over a stove and so on. My kids behave much better.

Anyway, then we got LPs and the record companies of course liked that much more as they could charge more for such products, and with the advent of CD players they could make even more money by just re-releasing their album catalog in digital format. Those were the days when the record companies drowned in money, and it explains their dismal situation today as the consumers have taken control again, and they demand much more, such as again cherry-picking single entries. A typical album release usually had one or two filler tracks so the product could be released, and that can’t be done today. So sorry record execs, you can’t get you leased BMW any more.

The single lived on, mostly thanks to DJs using 12″ singles and remixes. There was this odd thing called an EP, 3-4 track version, that co-existed, it was somewhat invisible during the CD days, but it’s doing a come-back, and that’s what this article is about.

I do think that EPs are an excellent release format, for many reasons. If you release just one track, or a track with let’s say three remixes, you could get something out but it might not maximize the purchase power of the consumers. If they like your style then they are very tempted to purchase more at the same time. I don’t know if multiple remixes really cuts it, for me it would be boring to purchase the same track with three different variations…

An album is a nice thing to put together, but today albums are no longer max 45 minute long as in the vinyl days (excluding Todd Rundgren’s Initiation that has a vinyl running length of 68 minutes!). CD album releases run up to an hour or more and that means a lot of material — it could take many months to put this together. And remember again, no filler material, thanks.

So, an EP is a good compromise, let’s say three, four or five unique tracks. Usually the turnaround for such a product is a couple of months max. The consumer is not that worried about getting let’s say all four tracks for .99 times four, compared with getting the whole album.

Anyway, this is the reason why a many of the PlanetoidPark releases since last summer have been EP releases (especially the forthcoming ones yet to be announced!), and most likely it will continue this way. I won’t say that this will always be the case, but just now it’s a nice compromise. It also means that eMusic and iTunes releases are nice, compact releases rather than singles or long term albums, and happen more frequently.

There could be new formats out in future. For example, I would really like to see at some point a format where multiple tracks are included, and the DJ or consumer could remix their own versions by just using and balancing various tracks — and who was a pioneer concerning this concept, again, Todd Rundgren with his interactive CD No World Order. I have that CD, alas I’m not even sure I could play it on the latest computer setup I have. This shows the problem, for something like this to take off, we need a technology agreement across the audio software products, consumer players, and especially an agreement amongst all the labels to use such a format. It also means that there’s enough interest from the consumers for this to happen.

Somehow I doubt the big record labels are that much interested in new formats, it looks like they are battling a battle they will lose, anyway, i.e. protecting digital material that can’t be protected. I would rather like them skating where the hockey puck will be next.

I spend four years, I think, in the dot-com bubble economy here in Silicon Valley. This was the time where the business plans were  based on these three phases: 1) Build a web site, 2) ?!??!???!, 3) Profit. Those were strange times, and based on that I decided to never work in a company where the second part was not fully defined.

Anyway, I still don’t understand the business model of providing free disk space for downloads. Maybe someone is making some profit from blinking ads, but most consumers  by now should have developed a mental block to just ignore any ads on any web page.  Anyway, for us working with music it’s a bonanza to get free disk space here and there for use. Yousendit is a tool I use a lot, it’s the best to just blast demos and promos to other producers, and avoid overloading my web site’s transfer numbers.

Another place I just signed up for was Divshare. I’m still not sure if they have figured out phase 2, but hey, unlimited uploads, so why not. I just reserved an account in case I want to upload temporary mixed material, late night Ableton Live jam sessions, and other transitory material where I don’t care if the link is suddenly stale due to the owners figuring out another business model. Meanwhile, make use of this offer. If you tell your end users that this link is temporary, download now this mix or piece of music, they will get it.

By the way, the business model described above is actually from a South Park episode, the Underpant Gnomes, where phase one is to collect underpants, phase two is ’silence’, and phase three is profit. You could check out that episode on youtube. I think that rule applies to any other business enterprises, even related to doing music.

I just read this longer NY Times article online about Rick Rubin and his position over at Columbia Records. It was indeed a long reading, but very interesting.

About half-way in the article he finally talked about his solution how to solve the problem with today’s big labels that are indeed totally out of sync with business realities. And that is to provide a subscription service where all music is available, so the end user could just pick up anything he or she likes.

The record companies are indeed worried about this solution, as they can’t really control the outcome of such a big change in their business models. But as he said himself, if this won’t happen by the companies, their stock prices will go down, and then someone else will pick up the companies for cheap and launch this idea.

We who work with smaller labels, we have very little to say about this, but I don’t see anything else than good appearing from such a business paradigm shift.

Rick Rubin, by the way, is quite a fascinating character, if you read the whole article. I must salute to him, as he was one of the key players, the owner of Def Jam, to get hip-hop out to the big world.

I also liked his views about music production, where his key focus is good songs, or tracks, timeless pieces. So true.

A friend sent me this link to YouTube, and I won’t embed it, just the link, it’s here.

Anyway, this video has been watched over a million times! Now that YouTube is opening up the ad revenue sharing for videos, it actually means that it’s one of the first times in history that music videos could generate revenue.

Anyway, if you go down that route, you need to think in terms of generating clicks, that means music videos about pets, children, goofing, and doing silly tricks — watch America’s Funniest Home Videos or similar TV programs for inspiration. Or if you don’t get inspired by this, even if you could make money, I understand you…

I don’t think this music video will create millions of hits, unfortunately. But it was fun making it with my sons. I should make more of those — but the biggest obstacle for me is to figure out a cool idea behind the video, something odd and interesting, style what Beck is doing. Anything else just looks so stereotype today.

One of the many headaches most of us label owners have is the issue of releasing material that will stick around for a very long time. With this I mean that the material is not something that sounds fresh today.

It’s very easy to fall into this trap — you want to sound the same as everyone else, for example electro is a big thing just now, so let’s kick start a couple of crummy software synths with a saw oscillator and a nasty filter, and get the job done.

Or, let’s look at an example of an album that has stood the test of time, and is still fresh: David Bowie’s Heroes. When it came out, most of us just scratched our heads, what’s this thing, it was odd, totally unexpected, weird. But the album is still interesting after all these years. Another opposite are any of those ‘Best of Trance’ records, if you listen to the tracks today you just feel sad about all the effort going into something that is today digital fodder.

It’s really tough, you want to release unexpected and interesting material, but the audience is maybe not ready, or they actually finally enjoy it years after you retired, or even died. Or then you go with the latest trend from Berlin, London, or let’s say Auckland just to spread the trends out. Then you are part of the pack and you sell and get attention, but soon later you are just forgotten.

Again, if you release exactly what you want, and you don’t care, expect comments such as ‘this sounds old/weird/unconventional’, or ‘this is not exactly what we expected’, and a variation of these topics.

Oh, just make interesting music and don’t worry about fitting into the crowd. Don’t stay between the lines!