Sometimes things look interesting even before you can fully grasp just what they mean. Such is the case, I think, with what’s happening with SoundCloud’s on-the-go tools. Now, back in the beginning of this service, I predicted it’d become the Flickr of audio, and I wasn’t alone. But it’s becoming something else, something that really involves mobility.

The SoundCloud crew are out at South by Southwest, as good a gathering as any for the intersection of Web nerd culture with music and film. And they have something to show for it, too: they’re unveiling new Android and iOS mobile apps, among other updates – and location, with FourSquare.

Android phone owners certainly no longer need to feel like second-class citizens, with bug fixes, track commenting, and Twitter and Facebook sharing. You can also add widgets to your homescreen, a feature that iOS lacks. (I have to say, for all of iOS’ sophistication, the one thing Android does very well is make apps integrate with one another, and with data and the cloud.)

There are updates not only for Android, but iOS and desktop, too, detailed in a blog post geared for South by Southwest:
Create & Share (Even) More Easily

Both Android and iOS users get Foursquare interaction. That could mean … well, something. The ability to make recording a sound an event, to tie it to a place in the real world, is theoretically compelling. Exactly what you’d do with this data I think has a lot to do with the content itself. Might this be a way to tie, say, a live set to the venue at which it was played, or sound samples of an interactive art gallery installation, or an open mic night that has recordings and not just pictures? Possibly – although there’s nothing saying you really need a fancy tool to do those things, either.

With the Interactive portion out of the way, SoundCloud now gets unleashed on South by Southwest’s Music Festival, which has grown to an extent that it feels like all musical output has collided on one point. It’s a quantum singularity as much as a music festival. So we’ll see if SoundCloud does something interesting at those events – or if it’s just another eager Web name against the backdrop of a lot of booze-drenched music parties. And to me, it’s an open question how to use these tools to get more people in person, in the flesh, at live events, which I think for many musicians is the goal. (That is, you’d use SoundCloud to encourage people to get off their computers and go hear some live music!)

SoundCloud isn’t sitting around hoping you’ll figure it out, though; they have some tips:
SoundCloud 101: How to host your events sampler!
SoundCloud 101

Any of you in Austin or elsewhere in the musical world, if you do catch cool stuff happening with SoundCloud or other Internet-enabled audio, we’d love to hear about it.

Like the aspiring artists themselves, there’s an abundance of Web services with big dreams of stardom. Most will fall into obscurity, and wading through them is a big chore. And then, love them or hate them, there are the huge pop hits, raking in cash and making kids swoon.

So, here’s a bet. Topspin, already one of a handful of genuinely-promising services for artists and managers to make the music business work, is about to get bigger. Think the Beatles right after they land in the US.

You’ve probably already used Topspin from the other side: know those ubiquitous boxes that ask for your email and return the favor with a free track? That’s the one. (I’ve included a couple from our friends at Saturn Never Sleeps, and Tricil, who tipped us off on this story, to jog your memory.)

Collecting emails is vital. Over the past few years, Web and music conferences have been packed with sessions describing a future where independent artists don’t languish in obscurity, because they collect a handful of “true” fans. Without being able to stay in touch with those fans, none of those visions is possible.

Topspin is a lot more than that, though. It’s an easily-embedded shopping cart for music and merchandise that works on any site or Facebook page. It does international currencies. It’s that email tracking, but it also manages connections on Facebook and Twitter, and helps you follow up on those emails without violating privacy. (Hint: abusing emails isn’t something anyone wants to do. On the contrary, you want to be as well-behaved with email as possible to keep from getting blacklisted.) It has extensive analytics, so you can figure out who your fans are and where they are.

To me, these services are really essential to music in culture. The actual income for most artists won’t be enormous, though every little bit helps. (For instance, imagine artists earning just enough to pay for their health insurance here in the US. That can transform your life and career.) But income aside, the connection between artists and listeners is necessary to getting music heard, and knowing where to play live gigs. That means having smarter artists impacts the rest of us – it means that someone we’ve discovered and loved might actually come to our town and play, for instance, or is motivated to release an extra EP.

And that’s where the news portion of this story enters: Topspin, previous accessible to the few, is coming to the many. In March, just in time for the epic South by Southwest Music Festival, Topspin is rolling out their platform to absolutely everyone, with pricing starting at a lean US$9.99 a month.

With anyone able to climb onboard, and evidently wildly-affordable service prices, Topspin could become the service everyone uses. The company is also promising new platform features and a redesigned app. 4,000-plus artists use Topspin now since it opened in 2008 as a private beta, including the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Arcade Fire. I’m guessing that number could rise from four thousand to “just about everybody.”

That’s all Topspin is saying as of yesterday, but more details are coming; we’ll be watching. I hope you’ll watch here on CDM, of course, but naturally you can use a Topspin widget to get in on the announcement, like so:

There’s also a US$5000 grant program for exploring direct-to-fan business plans, with celebrity judges from Columbia Records, William Morris, the Pixies, Billboard, Berklee, and the like. Details on both:

New Features + Open Access for All Artists+ $5000 D2F Grant

Speaking of how to make this all work, there’s an excellent presentation from LA’s New Music Seminar that explains how you’d put this together as an artist. It’s relevant really whether or not you want to use Topspin. (The contest above also is open to non-Topspin users.)

Getting Practical: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building an Online Marketing Plan That Works (Ian’s Presentation From New Music Seminar Los Angeles, February 2011)

So, in the spirit of this, here are two sets of artists I really like who demonstrate just how useful Topspin can be in practice. First up, Atlanta-based musician (and long-time CDM community member) Johnny Blaze, aka Tricil, who tipped me off to this story this week via Twitter.

Tricil’s a perfect example of the kind of artists who can thrive in the Web age, a solo “melodic IDM”-centric musician and keyboardist, Live programmer, releasing a music video via iPad, and so on. Tricil tells us that this tool, particularly the mailing list signup, has been invaluable.

On the band-cum-label side, there are our friends at Philadelphia-based Saturn Never Sleeps, including King Britt and Rucyl. They likewise rely on mailing lists to promote unusual, often experimental music from lesser-known artists, along with their far-out musical parties.

There you go — see how easy that was? You got to immediately hear some music, and see if it’s for you without sacrificing cash or worrying about filling out a payment form. They got an email address to keep in touch with you, but can repay you in the form of more free music or, depending on where you live, actually playing for you live and meeting you in person.

And whatever other analyses there may be, if any of this helps keep live music alive, it’s a good thing.

Tried Topspin? Let us know what you think – including criticisms of what you don’t like about the platform, along with what you do.

Before diving into the litany of gripes from artists regarding Apple’s Ping social service, it’s worth saying: some critics say they expected better. Many artists want a smarter, more social iTunes. That’s the only reason anyone is spending time talking about the service’s perceived flaws.

Cellist and laptop musician Zoë Keating, an independent artist with collaborations from Imogen Heap to DJ Shadow, reminded me of that via Twitter. Even amidst her own criticisms, she was quick to add:

“But it’s Apple, so good or bad we all want to be invited to the party!”

That sums up not only the most disappointing aspects of Ping, but also why anyone would care in the first place. This isn’t the age of the hit parade, of Ed Sullivan, or even MTV. It’s the era of the Web, and people expect music media to be genuinely participatory. Because of the popularity of iTunes, the introduction of Ping seemed to artists like an opportunity.

Apple has responded to criticism, addressing some user concerns: Forbes’ Philip Elmer-DeWitt, asking “Can Ping be Saved?” last week, updated his article to reflect that issues with spam and forward and back navigation were fixed over the weekend.

The problem is that the fundamental complaints – and those of artists – run deeper. They may or may not be fixable.

Every artist I talked to said the same thing: the problem with Ping is that you’re not invited to the party. Missing from the guest list: independent (or, indeed, almost any) artists, alternative music stores, iTunes listening data, musical genres, and, above all, the World Wide Web.

Artists can’t make their own pages; Apple invites artists. In May, I criticized analysts for describing the iTunes App Store as being curated, a term I felt didn’t fit. This, on the other hand, really is curation: Apple invites a small number of artists at their discretion, which is why Ping makes some curious recommendations. As Keating puts it, “I’ve never bought Lady Gaga or anything remotely similar, but she is the #1 recommendation and I have to see her everytime I log on. That goes for Katy Perry too…I’ve created a world where I can pretend she doesn’t exist, but Apple really wants me to listen to her.”

Here, there’s a perfect contrast between Apple design and Apple curation. Apple design is beloved in the musical community, for the reliability and attention to detail of their hardware, operating system, and software. But Apple as curator, as tastemaker, is another matter. Apple’s (or Jobs’) obsession with artists like John Mayer had been a punchline, not a source of inspiration. For that matter, why should your computer vendor be responsible for musical taste? Would you ask Microsoft what clothes to wear today?

Apple ignores other music sources. When iTunes is criticized for promoting “lock-in” to Apple’s music store, listeners often respond that they rely on other sources for music. Apple may command big statistics when it comes to online sales, but that’s an aggregate of all music styles. For independent artists, everything from free distribution to specialized online stores – and physical CDs, which still rake in billions of dollars in sales annually – can matter more than iTunes.

Here, Apple runs into the tension between iTunes the player and iTunes the store. Ping as an add-on to iTunes the store makes some sense. As a modest feature that tells you what other iTunes shoppers are buying, it’d be unremarkable but also reasonably uncontroversial, at least before Apple hyped it as a new social network.

But iTunes the player demands higher expectations. iTunes is, for many, the virtual jukebox that the tool was when it began its life, before the debut of the integrated music store or even the iPod. I’ve even talked to frequent iTunes users, people who buy a lot of music, who have only purchased tracks from Apple a couple of times. For nearly anyone, iTunes – and by extension, Ping – must catalog all their musical activities, not just stuff they bought from Apple.

Ping is dumber about iTunes data than non-Apple services. Leaving other music stores out of the picture is perhaps unsurprising. But leaving out iTunes itself is more of a puzzler. The beauty of services like Last.fm is their ability to collect data about yourself that you can use. Sharing that data should obviously be a choice, but as Last.fm has demonstrated, the information can be useful to yourself, to fellow listeners, and to artists. It can make sure you see a favorite artist live or discover musicians based on human interactions, without violating privacy. But Ping is an inferior tool for iTunes data, compared to a third-party service like Last.fm. Wiley Wiggins, an Austin-based visual artist, has an extended complaint about Ping.

The killer insight: Ping is “store-centric,” not “user-centric,” says Wiggins. Flaws in genre handling and awkward mechanisms for tracking music and friends “make Ping seem like it is currently designed for users who 1) do not listen to much music, and 2) do not have many friends.”

Ping Feedback Form [Wiley Wiggins Blog]

Apple’s curatorial tendencies don’t make for a social network. Keating argues some of the tension here is philosophical: “Good social networking is chaotic and grassroots,” she says. “Apple is all about top-down control. Not sure this blend of the two works.”

And then there are … the genres. Aside from limiting you, comically, to choosing three genres you like, Apple seems to have lifted its genre categories from a BMG Music Club sign-up form.

It’s all too broken to be social. User interface trainwrecks, hidden “like” buttons, a “lonely” scene devoid of users or artist pages, and a laborious process to add friends made worse by Apple’s row with Facebook mean that getting anything social going is a waste of time. Mario Anima, who has led community efforts for Current and Community Speak Up! sums up the problems in an excellent post. Even with some navigational tweaks, there just isn’t much in the design that works. Even with Apple’s user base, I that could spell doom for the service. If users don’t spend time, the whole thing becomes pretty useless to artists, who are already fatigued by the amount of heavy lifting they have to do to get noticed online as it is. (See more on that below.)

Apple ignores the Web. Wired Magazine infamously ran an inflammatory cover this summer claiming The Web is Dead. That article could have been written about Ping. Ping isn’t visible on a browser; click on a link to a Ping profile, and it looks for an iTunes 10 client. Ping isn’t searchable. Ping is completely disconnected, at least for now, from the rest of the world – no integration with other services, and no public API. (One developer source told me an API is coming, with extensions to be approved by Apple, but I can’t yet confirm that, and that’d still fall short of making this a Web app.)

Ping is more than a walled garden: it’s a room with no windows or doors. It’s a tomb.

If Ping were the future, the Web might be dead – but early indications are that the reality is just the opposite. (Among many retorts to Wired’s “Web is Dead” thesis, The New York Observer is spot-on, and Boing Boing negates the graph they use to open the story, which turns out to say the opposite of what they claim.)

In fact, if anything, the negative reaction to Ping proves that the Web is more important now than ever before. People expect open participation, they expect browser-based interfaces (at least as an option), and they expect open interoperability and data portability in some form.

Browsers and links matter. Even Twitter and Facebook are popular partly as ways of linking back to other sites – I know this personally, because they’re two of this site’s biggest referrers. The Web make these services publicly searchable, connected, and accessible anywhere. They are the Web, and they also make the rest of the Web even more popular. Apple’s iPad and iPhone may focus more on “apps” than the “browser,” for now, but that singular example hasn’t yet been proven elsewhere. Meanwhile, competing browser-based music services have done just fine without an iTunes client.

Oh, yeah – and don’t forget that the lack of an open API also means hackers are shut out. This past weekend, Music Hackday – which I’ll cover separately – again gathered hordes of geeks to create new musical tools. That included things you’ll never see on Ping, like MixCloud on iPad.

Best of all: Brian Whitman of The Echo Nest had a pithy answer to how recommendation services should work. He created The Future of Music, which tells you which music you shouldn’t listen to. And that brings us to the last point:

In the end, maybe recommendation services aren’t everything. Whitman has a strong argument as he describes his tool:

I have a strong aversion to music recommenders and music similarity services. I especially deal with a lot of cognitive dissonance as the company I co-founded makes a lot of $$$$$ (that is 5 dollar signs) selling ordered lists of artists to multinational music streaming conglomerates.
Nonetheless, we recently completed our first live recommender system (to be announced near the Boston Music Hack day in October) and to perhaps get myself more comfortable with a future in which children will no longer ask their cooler older dope-smoking brothers what to listen to in lieu of some HTML table in a UL, I decided to really sign up wholesale to this movement. If we rely on these computer programs to learn about music, well we might as well rely on them to fix the sins of our past and delete the crap we are obviously not meant to listen to anymore.

“Future of Music (2010)” is a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to listen to anymore based on your preferences. It then helpfully deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive. Skips the recycle bin.

I don’t think Future of Music will have one million users any time soon. But it does raise the most important point: the actual music has to come first.

Whether or not the general public is fatigued of social networks promising to revolutionize music, you can bet musicians are. Oliver Chesler is the blogger behind “wire to the ear” and, as The Horrorist,” an electronic musician who has topped German charts. He sums it up best:

As a musician the word to describe how I feel about the new Apple Ping social network is: exhausted. Musicians have become the tech industries guinea pigs. Why not? We try anything and work cheap right? After creating and curating profiles on MySpace, Last.fm, Imeem, Facebook and then Facebook Fan Pages and on and on now it’s time for Ping.

For his part, Chesler says he’ll make his own Ping page and promote it, even as “the Lady Gaga’s get all the love.”

Remember why we were all excited about the Internet for music in the first place? It’s a chaotic, level playing field. That can be scary, but given the miraculous, mind-boggling diversity of musical output and taste on planet Earth, it’s perfectly natural. And any business model around music must be built around that reality.

Don’t believe me? Ping may have one million members, but the fastest-growing musical sensation right now is a guy who came to his sister’s aid in an attempted rape and was AutoTuned into… actually, that’s a long story, told neatly by the New York Times. (I couldn’t wrap my head around it at first, either.)

Take a look at his fans. The guy is, literally, a rockstar. How did he get big? He spread on the Web – not on apps, not in any “curated,” walled garden vertically integrated experience. Not in any way, frankly, that makes any logical sense at all. (AttemptedYou know … on the Web.

My guess is, you’ll know Ping (or a competing service) has been fixed when you find Antoine Dodson’s profile. Antoine, if you have music recommendations, we’d love to hear them.

Magic Bonus Addendum!

Broken Social Scene references that fit iTunes Ping! (thanks to the story above)

“Broken Social Scene”
“You Forgot It In People” (or, at least, you forgot people in it)
“Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” (Katy Perry? Lady Gaga? Even Coldplay?)

Segue – Reset (Live at Big Day Out 2008 Two-up Edit) from Jaymis on Vimeo.

How do you make live performance documentation that doesn’t suck? You’ve been there: you’re trying to shoot footage, you’re trying to edit footage someone else shot, or you’re trying to tell someone shooting footage how to take material you can actually use. Jaymis from Create Digital Motion talks a bit about a recent experience working on footage of Segue – or skip to the end for some tips, either for you or to give that young, eager videographer you hope can make you look cool. Got more thoughts? We’d love to hear them. -Ed.

I’ve posted about this on CDMo, but the topic is applicable to musicians as much as visualists, so I think it’s worth repeating here.

I’m currently editing some video of a gig and interview, taken at an album launch party here in Brisbane. The promoter supplied me with a DVD containing about 10 minutes of interview, and about 45 minutes of “party” footage. If you’re in to documenting your work you’ve probably shot some just like it yourself: Crowd dancing. Shot of the artist. Over the shoulder of the artist tweaking his Lemur. Cute girls dancing. Repeat.

Of that 45 minutes of party action, I was able to extract only about 40 seconds of usable footage. It wasn’t badly shot, just homogenous. There was no shot variation, so it wasn’t interesting to watch, and there was no way to edit for continuity, to give an overall, consistent feel for what was going on.

The missing ingredient, which would allow me as an editor to glue it all together, was closeups.

Last year my collaborators Segue had a high profile gig at the Big Day Out. At the last minute the festival organizers said we couldn’t provide our own visuals, so I took my camera along instead, with a view to shooting footage which could be used for a live video. As there was just a single camera, I tried to cover as much ground as possible, shooting from the front and back of the stage, out in the audience, getting wide shots of the crowd and zooming up close on details of the rig and artists. I’m not a very good cameraman, but I knew that with enough details, enough cutaways, enough different shots, I’d be able to tie everything together at the end.

Getting the footage back to my studio, I took over 9 hours to edit that 45 minutes of footage into a single 7 minute live video. At the time the band were wondering why it was such an intensive job, so I exported a two-up edit of the video to show them how I was able to use closeups, crowd shots, and details to take that single-camera shoot and make it look like there had been a team of ninja cameramen swarming the stage.

The two-up edit shows the final mix on top, and the original continuous camera feed underneath.

This edit took so long because I was very careful with the continuity of shots. If I was cutting from a wide shot of an artist drinking, the following closeup should show him putting the bottle back down. If he had headphones on, then subsequent shots should have them as well. It didn’t matter if those clips were dragged in from 20 minutes earlier in the set, because close shots don’t show enough of the stage detail for the viewer’s brain to realise that things are happening out of order.

I’m sure many CDMu readers have been lumped with the task of capturing video of your own performances, or those of your peers. You may have edited the video yourself, or given it to a handy visualist to have a crack. Even if you have someone else shooting video of your show, it’s worth giving them some direction on what you’d like to to see. Hence:

Jaymis’ Tips for Great, Editor-Friendly Gig Shooting

Leave the camera(s) running constantly: Even if there’s only one, you won’t miss anything. If there’s more than one camera, continuous tape makes multi-camera editing exponentially easier.
Closeups are your friends: Close, detail shots allow you to tie disparate pieces of footage together and to cover camera moves. They also add variety, and show some intimate details of what’s happening on stage. Closeups of the crowd and venue are also great for adding context, without having the distraction of a full human body unrelated to the action.
Keep the camera moving: If you just want to document your set for posterity, having it up the back on a tripod is fine. But if you want to produce some thing visually interesting, then get that camera moving around the space. Remember to hold it still in between moves so you don’t get stabbed by your editor. Take your cues for the music. Move a couple of beats, hold focus for a phrase. Make your moves in between sections of music. Wide shots for builds, close shots in the middle of a section.
Don’t be scared of manual focus: Out of focus shots can be a great transition device. For fast, exciting music, hunting focus reinforces the frenetic nature of the action.

All of the other standard photography rules apply of course, so find someone to tell you about white balance, aperture, shutter speed, exposure etc. If you stuff those up though, there’s a lot which can be done in the edit, but we can’t make up interesting footage in post-production. That has to happen on the night.

Something has happened with electronic musicians and producers. We’re not confined to the ghetto of electronic sounds any more. You could argue it’s a sign of waning interest in those timbres, but I think it’s something else: people are simply becoming more flexible creative producers, comfortable with acoustic and electrified and synthesized sounds alike.

So, in that spirit, one of my most anticipated albums of this year has been one that’s mostly instrumental and not-terribly-electronic or digital. It’s the March release Saskamodie from Mocky, Somali-Canadian-Yemeni musician. I’ve just begun listening to it, and I’m quite enjoying it. It’s definitely retro, a groovy, poppy reverie that seems more than a little inhabited by the soul of Serge Gainsbourg, who once recorded in the studio in which it was recorded. It’s also effective partly because it fits squarely into the realm of jazz. It oozes warmth and humor, sonically and musically.

In the meantime, Mocky himself has shown us how to market effectively with tongue planted firmly in cheek, as seen in the video above. It’s a dangerous maneuver to attempt – trained professionals only. But by invoking some digital effects and a heavy dose of hyperbole, Mocky I think manages to strike a balance between self-promotion and self-deprecation.

He has some help from his friends, too: collaborators Jamie Lidell, Feist, Gonzales, Kevin Blechdom, and Peaches show up. That lineup puts Mocky in with a crowd that embodies a growing retro-savvy aesthetic. I actually don’t think that “retro” has to even carry any negative connotations. Done poorly, of course, an album can simply seem backwards-looking or out of place – but that’s true anyway. Done well, we have a new sense that time can fold in on itself, that in an age of digital recordings, we share musical space virtually, even with musicians who are now very dead. And maybe that’s the zeitgeist this video unwittingly touches.

After all, at worst, we live in an age that could be a simple, cheap digital effect – the kind being (cough) mocked here. We could paste ourselves onto old musical styles, and look just as awkward as a couple of the motion-tracked faux heads floating on the bodies of drummers of the past. Happily, I don’t find that that’s the case here. Mocky has a comfort and sensibility that somehow hints that it’s 2009, but perhaps 2009 doesn’t have to be 2009.

That said, I’d still like to hear more envelope-pushing in these retro directions. Sure, it’s fun channeling Serge Gainsbourg, but I don’t hear people challenging someone really tough, like bleeding-edge Miles Davis. The styles we cherish so much came out of real experimentation. Maybe that’s a challenge for myself as much as for the albums on my listening queue. Nonetheless, Mocky’s mock-marketing and self-branding is as suave as his music, and Saskamodie is like an easy-to-drink, expensive port – a dessert drink, but a delicious one.

You can download the new album from the label, Crammed Discs.

http://www.mockyrecordings.com

Thanks to Tobias Thon for this one (via Facebook).

Enough of the empty cheerleading. Web-only networking can have a dark side, too — and the music community can do better. Playing devil’s advocate this week to one-dimensional Web 2.0 optimism, we welcome Dave Dri, musician, producer, and founder of Segue. -PK

I write a column for a weekly street press magazine in Australia. The vast majority of the universe won’t have picked up that magazine, of course. But my topic this week has been bouncing around Interwebs, cafes, and clubs like an alarm clock, waking the electronic music community from a happy slumber. The cause for alarm: the dire state of expectations amongst electronic music producers, digital labels and online stores.

Thanks For The Add!!!

For the host of fresh-faced producers who know only digital labels and online stores, the process of making and releasing music is relatively seamless, and entirely virtual. Countless producers have access to affordable computing power, an endless choice of software, and the ease of uploading to sites like Myspace and Purevolume. For much of this generation, the idea of marketing begins and ends with “thanks for the add!!”. Even veteran producers and performers can be lulled into the steady hypnosis of the Web and its links, emails and forum posts.

The process of song writing often finds a global audience almost as soon as one can come up with a catchy, if eventually regrettable, artist name and an upload of the latest renders. Imagine their surprise when a weekend of link farming across MySpace yields a reply from a digital record label showing interest in one or more tracks. Some emails bounce back and forth, the artist agrees to a 50% share of the profits and, soon enough, the label has uploaded a new release to Beatport. What’s not to love about this system? The producer feels validated as a “real life producer guy”, the label has another release on its books and the wheels of the music industry keep rolling.

The Back In My Day Bit

What’s wrong with this process is, basically, everything. As a contrast, let’s look at the previous generation of producers and live acts. This generation existed on the cusp of technology change and would have its feet grounded in the almost unthinkable days prior to cry of “thanks for the add!!!” These artists swapped tracks on CD-R’s with other producers in their local area and shopped and networked with local records stores by virtue of their primary access to local music alone. They stressed over refining and releasing actual EPs. They met, partied, and bought and sold music with other DJ’s, producers, promoters and music press. They refined their DJ skills or live performances and pushed music as a part of a growing local scene. They knew the local street press writers and sent out promos, hung up posters and generally interacted with the real world. IRL – in real life.

One might suggest that while the younger producers are adding each other to friend lists, the veteran live acts and producers are still out working the venues, pushing discs into the hands of promoters, and doing such wild things as asking for interviews and promotions in street press. As I asked a Web forum recently, guess what the proportion is between digital labels and producers sending MySpace and Facebook messages, versus those actually sending well-written press releases and calling to ask for interviews and promotional assistance? The answer is pretty dire, and quite telling.

Take The Red Pill

If anything positive can be taken from the state of the current industry, then it should be a revisiting of the basic ideas of the music industry. Artists should be backing up their passion for music by investing more efforts into creating better music, and pursuing the best deals from the best labels by building their profile through real-world networking and performances. Labels should be sourcing the best artists, artists whoare actually working to push their own music in the real world, and developing them with the aid of a strong network of industry captains, DJs, credible promoters and all the existing and fringe music media. That means actually writing press releases, actually getting out and meeting people, and following up important emails with phone calls. Most importantly, it’s asking for coverage across the full spectrum of media and constantly developing reasons why the act deserves it.

Really, one might say it just boils down to effort. Why an artist wants to give music to a label that spends little effort promoting a release is as hard to fathom as a label wanting to sign an artist who spends little effort creating their art and profile. Maybe your local community and musical genre mirrors these examples; maybe not. But electronic music has little to lose and everything to gain from more effort and more real-world local community.

Oh — and, before I forget, thanks for the add!

Ed.: Now, of course, I’m not going to slam online communities, seeing as I, erm, run one. But I kept thinking while reading Dave’s article how much online tools can help power real-world connections. We’ve had extraordinary opportunities getting together for events like Handmade Music. I still swap CDs. (Bet your laptop still has a CD burner, huh? It runs at, what, 60x now?) I hate press releases, even when they’re well-written. But I love real-world connections.

That’s, of course, just the beginning. So to reframe Dave’s challenge, how can we use online tools to make meatspace connections easier and more powerful, for indie artists and labels alike? How can we start raising expectations again? -PK

slotMusic.org | Press Release

See also GearLog, which notes that SanDisk previously did a free promotional SD of music

Wired News asks, “but why?”, to which I’d answer – it might well be easier to load music onto a phone in parts of the world other than the US, you might more easily distribute videos, and artists looking to increase the value of their CDs could innovate on revitalizing album art.

First, let’s start with the players, as that’s basically the big news here.

Hardware: SanDisk, the folks who invented flash storage and make more of it than anyone else

Labels: A huge set of the majors – EMI Music (which includes the likes of Angel, Capitol, Blue Note, and Astrelwerks), Sony BMG, Warner Music (including Atlantic, Nonesuch, Rhino), and the world’s biggest music company, Universal Music Group

Retailers: Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and other US retailers, with Europe to follow – keeping in mind, Wal-Mart remains the biggest brick-and-mortar seller in the US

When it’s happening: Exact date TBA, but officially by the holidays

Which artists: Most likely, lots of them. An EMI representative who spoke with CDM confirmed two chart-topping examples: Coldplay’s Viva la Vida and Kate Perry’s One of the Boys.

Now, you’d be right to be skeptical of how this format will be received, but it’s certainly a big distribution play with that arrangement of labels and retailers.

The hardware in question is basically SanDisk’s tiny removable flash memory format microSD, rebranded and repackaged as slotMusic. (A representative of SanDisk tells us there are some other subtle technological differences; more on that soon.) The important thing about this is that the hardware you buy has no DRM on it at all; it’s just standard flash memory you can plug into phones and mobile devices, or, via a tiny included USB sleeve, a computer.

SanDisk’s format specifies DRM-free, 320 kpbs MP3s as the music format. Gruvi, SanDisk’s previous attempt at turning their lucrative flash memory business into a music format was a miserable failure, but by contrast, it was locked with DRM features and, excepting a big release by the Rolling Stones, lacked support from labels and retailers. (I see Gruvi has even been largely erased from SanDisk’s website.)

What’s the Business Angle?

My colleague Eoin Rossney sent me this story under a headline on Ireland’s SiliconRepublic.com that screams “SanDisk and big labels in tech deal that could save the music business.” That’s obviously hyperbolic, but it’s also wrong. To me, it seems to be about three things:

1. It’s an experiment. Music labels want their music everywhere they can get it – as, frankly, they should; that’s their job.

2. It’s a massive end run around iTunes. Remember, part of what helped prompt some of the more stubborn labels to remove DRM was the realization that their DRM deal with Apple had placed Apple in the position of dominating download sales for the device most people owned.

3. Most phones aren’t iPhones. Labels will continue to do business with iTunes because iTunes is selling their music – but they’d be nuts to turn their back on the rest of the mobile phone market, which is far bigger. The press release notes 1.2 billion phones are due to ship this year, a number Apple can’t approach even with all their iPods and iPhones put together. In fact, it’s hard to wonder if, on a global scale, iPod won’t slip into the shadows with the number of increasingly multimedia-savvy phones out there.

Despite the hip factor of the iPhone, Apple has a tiny slice of an exploding global market for mobile devices. Instead of using a cable and a fancy vendor-specific store, you can just give people music they can pop directly into their phone, which – from vendors other than Apple – typically has a microSD slot. And as I noted last week, Apple’s alternative is a store/software sync arrangement that they control exclusively.

Music Everywhere, and Back on Objects

I’m not sure slotSD will be the “new CD,” or that it even needs to be. I think it’s better to see this as one of a variety of options you’ll see for music distribution. And, of course, even slotSD is best understood in the context of a growing amount of music showing up on flash memory, because it combines the flexibility of digital formats with physical objects.

“This is one of many initiatives to make our music available in as many different forms as possible,” Jeanne Meyer of EMI Music tells CDM. “Our big MO is to experiment with as many as possible.”

EMI, for one, has a record of trying just this sort of thing. There was a re-release of Radiohead’s studio albums on memory stick, though that seemed to cause some controversy. EMI has even toyed with big retail, with a release of UK superstar Robbie Williams at England’s own big box, The Carphone Warehouse. (It’d be interesting to know what sales were like.)

Of course, you can easily download files. Physical media is all about the object. A SanDisk representative confirms that labels are planning physical liner notes and album art in the package. You can also expect the memory to be loaded with digital extras, in the form of artwork, videos, and the like. Given the middling quality of online video, and the fact that bandwidth costs aren’t going down at the rate many had hoped, I think that could mean higher quality and more access to video via physical formats than online.

Indie Artists and Digital Contents

So, I imagine for many of you not on Sony BMG, and listening to many artists who aren’t, this won’t be terribly earth-shaking news. But I do know SanDisk reassures CDM that they have worked with indies in the past on various promotional projects.

What can artists do with a format like this? Well, they can load it up with goodies that might actually be otherwise rack up bandwidth costs. One excellent example of an artist experimenting with this format is Sound Tribe Sector 9. They sent their latest release, Peaceblaster, to me. It’s loaded up not only with the files for the album, but extra images, podcasts, a screensaver, and videos. We saw these kinds of extras squeezed onto CDs at one point via formats like Enhanced CD, but there’s no question it’s more convenient on USB stick.

I think the big challenge will be how to make these contents interesting and unique, and even with bandwidth costs comparing unfavorably against increasingly high-definition media, how to compete with online alternatives.

Somehow, I imagine the slotMusic format winding up being a plain-vanilla blister pack that, stuck in a dull music department in Best Buy, just confuses consumers. I’m happy to be proven wrong there. But there is, in the meantime, plenty of room for independent artists and labels to innovate with short-run releases and ideas for what to pack inside the digital media that no one has thought of yet. And while majors have earned the skepticism of consumers and artists alike, I wouldn’t be surprised to see majors being more adventurous – especially once they discover that, in addition to the perils digital media pose, there could be a significant profit payoff for those experiments.

Actually, forget everything I’ve said in this entire article, and let me sum it up in one line:

If physical distribution brings art back to album releases, it’s a good thing, and it’ll work.

The generation of music lovers staring into album art wasn’t wrong.

Brad Sucks, the (despite the name) well-loved Internet musician, has been blogging and releasing tools he’s building to make his online music life better. This one is especially nice: it’s a simple, open source script that connects mailing list sign-ups to Google Maps. Armed with this information, it’s easier to see where your fans are. (Image at right seems to suggest at least a one-person gig offshore of Nigeria, but you get the idea.)

Brad’s Mappy Email Signup Release

Early data is really interesting already. Of course, you need to have more than, say, five fans, but now’s a good time to start. I’m revamping some sign-ups around CDM, so I hope to try this here soon.

Previously from Brad: the brad sucks digital download store, which hooks you up with your own Amazon S3 and PayPal-powered online music store.

Brad also has a tool for asking for donations:

http://www.bradsucks.net/gimme/
http://www.bradsucks.net/projects/gimme/

The Web holds huge potential for music sharing and music discovery, but figuring out how to make that potential work — and how to navigate copyright and licensing laws in the process – has been a major challenge. This week, the creators of the website Mixaloo promised to “bring mix tapes into the digital age.” Whether you buy into that concept or not, or their particular implementation, the site does demonstrate both some of the opportunities and legal hurdles in Web sharing. They also inherit the closed model supported by labels (no full streams, previews only, DRM), but already that’s changing (MP3, and the promise, hopefully, of full-length tracks soon). It’s like a microcosm of the whole business at the moment.

Mixaloo.com

I spoke to the founders shortly before launch, and they described how their approach differs from the online radio model, which is constrained in part by the law:

There’s the streaming radio camp … you have a minimum of forty tracks, you can’t have the same artist twice in a row, and then you get into the whole mess of royalties. Then there’s the way we’re going — user-generated albums. And we like that because it’s personalized.”

The basic model:

• 10 or more tracks on the “mix tape”
• Mix your album from 3.5 million + tracks.
• Majors and indie music — the founders say they have “deals with all the major labels” but also “a ton of independent aggregators like CD Baby, The Orchard, and Iota
• Embed players and market mixes on Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, etc.
• Sell tracks via any of your players and earn a 50% commission
• For now, 30-second previews — but hopefully that will change? (more in a moment)

To make it easier to compile mixes, the tool incorporates a recommendation engine, so when you select a track, Mixaloo guesses other likely artists and tracks. You can also add custom feedback to the engine if you disagree, which is a badly-needed outlet missing from a lot of online music sites. When you’re ready to purchase tracks, the major option now is Windows Media files with PlaysForSure DRM — but that’s changing. 600,000 tracks are already on DRM-free MP3, that number is growing, and the service gives preference to MP3 over WMA. (The big picture: I think DRM might remain for subscription tracks or rental, but purchases will likely all be DRM-free in the near future via any outlet that wants to stay in business.)

So that’s the good news — now the deal-killer. For now, Mixaloo supports only 30-second previews, which to me pretty much defeats the purpose. (Mixaloo says that “the feedback we’ve gotten across the board has been positive” after several thousand users on the beta, but I think the service will fail to catch on until they can get full-length streams.) They do say full-length tracks are something they’re talking to the labels about, without making any specific promises.

That said, as we discussed in regards to Pandora, there is a potential for artists to make these tools work for them. Using playlists of artists you like, artists who influenced you, artists like you (artists who are copying you?) could be a great promotional tool. Why wait for iTunes to call and make you a celebrity playlist author when you can dub yourself a celebrity? (Seriously.)

The trick with all of this is not necessarily to sign with a major label, but simply to get hooked up with the right online distribution outlets. Once you do that, you can connected with any number of online music outlets. There’s no saying whether Mixaloo will or won’t take off, but you’ve got plenty of other online tools to try. The Mixaloo team advises that “for an independent artist, the path of least resistance would be to register with a CD Baby for digital distribution,” while indie labels (of which we have a few reading this site) might work through Iota Music Publishers or The Orchard. And this approach also works for sites like Pandora; see our interview there for thoughts about how people might use these various tools, and how musicians could benefit from them.

Previously:

Pandora’s Founder on Decoding Taste and Promoting Indie Music

Ed.: Social networking, online sites (this being one of them), Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace … sometimes it seems like all the connections are being done online. Naturally, the Web’s real power is when you can meet all those virtual personalities you’ve gotten to know offline. Far better than getting demo CDs in the mail or listening to someone’s tracks on MySpace: meeting them at a party over a drink and getting their music from them directly.

Such is the genius of Chicago’s Demo Swap. Co-organizer Liz has this wrap-up of what July’s party was like. Non-Chicagoans (heck, fellow New Yorkians), clearly this is a model to be replicated elsewhere. A huge thanks to all of the CDMers who showed up. It was fantastic to meet you, and I hope to see you again soon — ideally with more leisure time to hang out! (I’m in Chicagoland regularly.) I was especially impressed by Karl, who was in Chicago from Austria and was embarking on a cross-country drive across the entire length of Route 66 the following morning. Why is that foreigners appreciate America better than most Americans do?

Here’s how the demo swap went; read closely for some nice music tips and perhaps insight into how to get a demo swap going in your neck of the woods. -PK

Having done a Demo Swap for Modsquare a while back, we decided that Ramp Chicago‘s 2^nd Tuesdays at Sonotheque residency would be a great venue to host the 2007 resurrection of the networking event. On Tuesday the 17^th of July, having plugged-in and sound-checked our guest live PA artists, Protman and Bounte, the crowd started filtering in just as the doors opened at 9pm, and we slapped name badges on them and encouraged them to mingle and swap their demos.Emulsion DJd a downtempo / ambient / electro set while the crowd started to get to know each other and get their drink on, while I schmoozed with the crowd, collecting demos and handling some last minute line level issues that popped up at the last minute. As I was checking said levels in the booth, Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music and his girlfriend arrived and we started introducing them around to the patrons, which would continue to be a non-stop process, as more and more people would come up to me and ask “which one is Peter Kirn?” Thankfully he was wearing a striped shirt which made my task a bit easier.

Bounte took the stage (which usually means the two satellite tables we set up in front of the booth) and entertained the crowd with his particular style of downtempo-meets-electro pop / credible, instrumental hip hop, completely off of his laptop, mostly undeterred by curious fans who wanted to ask him about his process, software, and upcoming releases.

Protman followed up with his signature “wireless set” (photo at the beginning) which means using a wireless Xbox 360 Wireless Controller to trigger clips in Ableton Live 6 via his custom-coded PD (Pure Data) interface. As I was making the rounds with our email sign up sheet, I noticed that about a third of the interested people were confused as to why Protman was wandering around with an Xbox controller, and
where the sound was coming from. Another third told me that he was “absolutely
mindblowing” or a similar adjective, and the final third wanted to know who was DJing now (Answer: No one. Protman was playing his set with an Xbox controller. Yes, really.).

Along the way I collected a serious amount of demo discs and I find it rather inspiring that we have such a dedicated range of talent here in Chicago (mostly, as we had a few non-natives make an appearance such as Karl (CDM member from Austria).

People from the CDM community that I’ve chatted with on Tuesday include Josh Schnable, Michael Una, Nathan Koch and Karl Petermichl. Check out the post on my blog, where I give an overview of the more notable demos I received. At the end of the night, I had to excuse myself from networking so I could DJ the rest of the night, which I posted on my blog. And I was inspired enough to do a remix myself of one of the demos I received. Overall, the night was a success and I’m confident another one will be in the works. Here’s some more photos from the night.

Previously:

How To Create a Successful Demo Disc: Tips and Resources