Trent Reznor posted yesterday that the Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication reissue is “how you sell music today”. As a rebuttal to the usual “that only works for established artists” replies, he’s followed this up with an extended post on what artists who haven’t reached the Beasties or NIN level of profile can do to get established.

NIN’s $300 deluxe edition of Ghosts sold out in under two days, grossing $750,000. The first week combined sales grossed $1.6million, despite being released for free under a Creative Commons license. (Photo CC Nick Humphries)

Having been part of a reasonably high profile band with an album released through the label system, Trent’s post reads like a list of “how I wish it had been”. Every point he makes is absolutely spot on. The article is filled with active verbs. Make. Give. Sell. Share. Release. Start. Engage. Film. This is the crux of how creators succeed in the digital age: They do things. Rather than waiting for someone else to tell them how to make money from a product that can be easily garnered for free, the people who are doing well are making it up as they go along, trying new things. You know… being creative.

As a web developer, director and general creative tech geek, Trent’s closers are especially poignant:

The database you are amassing should not be abused, but used to inform people that are interested in what you do when you have something going on – like a few shows, or a tour, or a new record, or a webcast, etc.
Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace – it’s dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don’t autoplay). Constantly update your site with content – pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any – Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.

Check out the rest of the article.

For digital artists, a lot of the web and technological networking comes easier than to rock bands. When a laptop is part of your rig, hopefully you understand computers better than someone who exclusively hits their instrument with sticks (SPD20s aside), because you use the computer for music regularly. Ed.: This is a simple fact – if you’re a digital artist, regardless of your instrument, you spend more time behind the screen than people who are conventional instruments – so you should have no excuse for making the most of that technology once the production and performance phase are done. -PK We’re also in the middle of a huge mobile web expansion phase. Now that everyone has web enabled computers in their pockets, what you can do while you’re out there playing shows is getting better and better; I just spent the evening configuring an online store which can be administered via its own iPhone app. If this had been available two years ago, a whole lot more CD orders would have been delivered on time.

Giving some solid metrics to bolster Trent’s advice, Michael Masnick’s (founder of Techdirt) recent presentation at the NARM 2009 conference is truly fantastic.

NARM 2009 State Of The Industry: Michael Masnick from NARM on Vimeo.

The presentation is quite long at 31 minutes, but he breaks it up with 515 slides, so it feels punchy. It expands on many of the points Trent makes, and touches on some themes we’ve been interested in here at CDM. Interestingly, he gives some revenue and sales statistics on the Nine Inch Nails “Ghosts” release: $1.6 million gross in the first week, from an album which was released for free under a Creative Commons license.

Having been quite deeply involved in the “old” way of doing things, and having experimented in the last year with faster, cheaper live performance videography and similarly streamlined “studio” production, I feel that I’m replete with the kool aid, and comfortable with a future in which I’m not looking for “a contract”. In fact, this evening I called my bandmate over and convinced him that the album we’re about to record and shoot will be released entirely under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Finished tracks and stems, music videos and source files, animation sprites, live footage, album artwork, and whatever else we create.

I’ve long believed that “free” and “open” is a big part of the future of creative industries. The label system has kept creators and fans at arms length. Last year I was a rightsholder on an album which spent a week in the top 5 sellers on iTunes in Australia. I know nothing about any of the listeners who put it there. Next album release, I want to know all of those fans by name.

Your pocket is bulging with power.

Wait… okay, that sounded really wrong.

Anyway, the mobile software revolution continues. There’s so much stuff out there that it can actually be hard to track. Here’s a round-up to help you navigate everything that’s going on this week.

And even if you can’t stand another word about the iPhone, consider this: the explosion of iPhone software, more than just a fad, illustrates what happens when you give developers tools to make multimedia capabilities easier, then provide a distribution outlet. I don’t love everything about the iTunes approach, but those are lessons that could easily be learned in desktop and mobile development alike. The iPhone platform, if nothing else, is surprisingly uncompromising in the sound and visual interaction departments, especially for a mobile platform. And even desktop platforms could benefit from this kind of distribution mechanism (see also: Steam for games).

Also, we do have some of the first signs that the iPhone won’t be alone for long – new functionality on Google’s Android could take that platform in new directions. See my next story, Android/Linux/open source fans.

Disclaimer: don’t worry. I’m not giving up on desktop apps. Relax. In fact, even now as I look across these applications, while there are lots of cool ideas, it’s still clear this is a nascent area. The experience is nowhere near as rich as you get on the desktop. But it’s nonetheless worth exploring some of the ideas before we return to our (more powerful) desktop applications for music.

Field Recording, Microphones for iPhone + iPod touch

The big news this week was FiRe, which promises to be the “first professional field recorder” for the iPhone and iPod touch. The developer behind it is one of which we’re already big fans: Audiofile Engineering. AE make Wave Editor, which has rapidly become the secret weapon of choice for Mac audio producers and sound designers, as well as the batch-processing Sample Manager and adoptive parents of the excellent Rax plug-in host. Anything these guys do would get our attention, and then they go and add specs you wouldn’t expect to see on the iPhone:

• Accurate real-time waveform display
• Live, touch-controlled waveform navigation
• Audio markers
• Broadcast WAVE metadata
• Instant downloading in multiple formats – and easy sharing via FTP, Web server, or even a SoundCloud account
• Tag recordings with location data
• Overdub mode
• VU meters for input and output
• Configurable time units
• Mic flexibility: use Blue Mikey, Alesis ProTrack or even the internal mic

US$5.99, available now.

(Update) Hardware Requirements:
iPhone 3G
iPod Touch (second generation)
First Generation iPhone (headset ONLY)

http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/

iTunes link (which is tricky to find otherwise)

Let’s just cut straight to it: this is, bar none, the most full-featured app out there. It’s the first one that would make me seriously consider using this platform for recording.

This, of course, raises the question of which mic you might want to use.

If you’re on the iPod touch, you don’t have even a built-in mono mic. (Don’t knock it: I’ve put together entire pieces based on simple mono mic samples. Creative sampling artists will use anything.)

Even on the first-generation iPod touch, you can use some simple solutions that will let you do basic sound.

The Smule blog has a terrific round-up of recommendations for touch owners wanting to use their Ocarina app. Their technical needs are much lighter than what you might need for FiRe, but this is still worth a look if you have any interest in recording at all:

Microphones for iPod Touch Ocarina

The Griffin SmartTalk wins out for 2G owners. I have Griffin’s TuneBuds mobile, which has worked well enough for applications like RjDj. (Note that Smule have managed to get their app working with the first-gen hardware; FiRe requires the newer generation.)

At the fancier end:

Blue Microphones’ Mikey is a slim-line stereo condenser capsule that plus into the iPod accessory port. It’s hinged so you can play with placement at least a little, and there’s basic gain control (3 settings). It runs about US$80 street, which means it doesn’t have to compete with standalone recorders. Update: Audiofile Engineering say they’ve seen some issues with FiRe and Blue Mikey, and can’t officially support the combination. Readers have had some issues themselves. If you’ve already got a Mikey, this might be worth a try, but otherwise, you can await updated information as Blue and Audiofile Engineering attempt to address the problem.

Specific update: The problem sounds as though it is the combination of the production Mikey with second-generation iPod touch units running the current OS. This is expected to be fixed with the next OS release. Stay tuned for more.

Tha Alesis ProTrack is even more impressive-looking, but at US$249 list, it does start to get into the realm of “you could just go buy a dedicated recorder.” The ProTrack extends the iPhone by adding a shell with an X/Y stereo mic pair – one that looks quite a lot like the Zoom H4 mics – and even has onboard XLR jacks and phantom power. You also get LED monitoring, a limiter, additional power (four AAA’s), a mic stand mount – basically, it turns your iPhone into a real mobile recorder.

The Alesis has its own app, but the Audiofile Engineering option is looking more powerful. Naturally, that’s the advantage of software – because the iPhone is essentially a computer, you can add whatever software you like.

I still think there’s a good place for a dedicated recorder. I’ve started testing the Zoom H4n, seen at right. (Not an iPhone hiding in a shell.) I’m already blown away – it corrects most of the navigation and quality issues with its predecessor, and unlike an iPod or iPhone, has fantastic battery life and onboard XLR input jacks. (Okay, the ProTrack does have XLR’s, so this is getting a little more interesting.) In other words, I’m not sure I’m giving up on dedicated recorders in favor of one of these yet. It’s still handy to have, though – and who says you can’t use both, given how essential it can be to have a backup recording in many situations?

Updated: Officially, here are the mics supported by FiRe:

• Alesis ProTrack – http://www.alesis.com/protrack
  (Requires iPhone 3G or 2nd gen. iPod Touch)
• Blue Mikey – http://www.bluemic.com/products/mikey
  (Requires iPhone 3G)

Thanks to Gaëtan Gravel and everyone else who sent this in.

Paul Van Dyk’s DJ Tools

This one was a bit of a surprise: Paul Van Dyk has released a DJ app, but it’s not just a quick, attention-grabbing, “DJ on your iPhone” gimmick. It’s more like a utility belt for DJs. I’m surprised to see that as a result it’s actually gotten some criticism. To me, finding some genuinely useful stuff you might want to have on your mobile device is the whole point.

What’s in there?

• BPM counter
• Frequency analyzer
• Noise level (the “NYPD Application”), with an oddly beautiful visualization
• Seismic reader (for testing your turntable, not for telling if there’s an earthquake happening – that you’ll probably figure for yourself)

And then some silly stuff, too – glow stick, anyone?

http://www.paulvandyk.com/

Not yet available – coming late May 2009

All interesting, but you know what this means: now we need Live PA Tools. (I can think of some ironic choices for that. Nominations welcome.)

Nine Inch Nails App

NIN, of course, had their app become available on 4/14. There’s been quite a lot written about it – so much, in fact, that I feel like the whole thing is a bit overhyped. The basic development here is that NIN is taking all their fan data and making it location specific. On the upside, this is a lot more than many high-profile bands have done with iPhone development. But then, these guys should be doing more – they have the budget to hire real developers. I do like the idea of fans being able to interact on their mobile device; that clearly makes a lot of sense. But few artists will inspire the kind of loyalty NIN does, which means the real question is, will someone be able to build a platform for everyone else? And if you are a more obscure artist, what should you be doing?

The app is free, so just a conduit for fans, really.

iTunes link

http://www.nin.com/

Gestural Beat Sharing, Celebrate Cinco De Mayo

ZoozBeat is the application I looked at in the fall: the idea is to make musical improvisation more accessible by allowing people to use fun gestures, taps, and the like to assemble beats. The software is not only for iPhone, but the powerful Nokia N95, too.

That story is worth checking out from the perspective of gestural music in general, not just iPhone or mobile apps:

Gestures, Mobile Music, and the “Low Floor” for Novices: ZooZBeat on iPhone, Nokia

The latest news: the guys have gotten funding, for one. More importantly to end users, ZOOZ Mobile is adding a sharing component, much like what we saw with Smule’s Leaf Trombone. New upgraded software adds a Latin component with Samba and Tejano rhythms and is ready-to-go for Cinco de Mayo. Sounds great to me – and the Latin market has been oddly ignored by a lot of musicians and developers. There are also new Pop, Hip-Hop, and Techno beats.

http://www.myzoozbeat.com/

Unusual Instruments

You’ve got plenty of faux-808 apps for the iPhone now. Our friend Henry Lowengard is taking a very different tack, with drone-friendly creations and detuned pianos. He describes this as well as I could, so here’s what he writes to tell us about.

Imagine a piano in a summer home on a small lake, far in the north of the Northeastern United States. Imagine the piano sitting there for 60 or 70 years, untuned and unmaintained.
The naturally prepared timbres of the Lake Piano are now here for you, each missing felt, each individual nuance of the key action and character-filled tones. Briskly recorded one summer in lo-fi, these samples also contain sounds of children, cats, screen doors, and the summer breeze.

The first version of Lake Piano is relatively minimal, Henry says, played as a double row of scrolling piano keys and the ambient sounds stolen from a videotape he recorded. Henry promises more playability and more ambience in an upcoming upgrade, but you’ll get that automatically when it’s done, so you can always go play now.

And for droning on and on – literally:

Hi Droning fans:
I just sent in my new droning app Droneo to Apple for approval, so with luck, it’ll be in the store next week.
I’ll send a more widely distributed email when that happens, but I though you (pl.) might like to take a look at the Droneo "instruction site", http://www.jhhl.net/iPhone/Droneo/ and listen to this tantalizing demo:
http://www.jhhl.net/iPhone/Droneo/Audio%20Examples/Mp3/complex1.mp3
It’s basically my iPhone SrutiBox simplified to 8 oscillator voices, allowing a little more CPU time for complexity, and removing the preconceptions about Carnatic music and harmonium sounds that Sruti box engenders with its somewhat unpronounceable name.

For more on the SrutiBox, see our previous story.

Okay, I’m exhausted. Back to the desktop.

And of course, for the best source of up-to-the-minute mobile music creation news – well beyond just iPhone – be sure to read:

Palm Sounds

• In many circles, Metallica is no longer cool or never was cool.
• Lawyer make people MAD. Angry. Smash. (Apparently in addition to going after 60,000 pages of fans on Napster, Metallica doesn’t even like fan-made buttons.)
• Metallica is not Radiohead or Trent Reznor. (Stop the presses!)
• Even if you’re not Radiohead or Trent Reznor, you probably want your fans on your side. Pitchforks and torches tend to be a bad sign.

Of course, some might see the doomsday scenario of Internet music releases, in which fans determine that all music should be free and you can’t make money on releases any more. Big bands give away their stuff for free, the independent artist dies, music isn’t made any more, etc., etc. But given glowing fans proclaiming that they’re “glad I could shell out 40 pounds for the discbox” of In Rainbows, that seems unlikely.

And that’s the fundamental nature of fans. They’re looking for ways to give you their money so you can give them something back. Lesson learned by Metallica: don’t piss them off.

Fans Rip Metallica a New One [Wired.com Listening Post; enjoy the Napster-era parody video]

Photo: massdistraction, via Flickr.

the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options – all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.

for those of you interested in physical products, fear not. we plan to make a version of this release available on CD and vinyl in july. details coming soon.

The Slip Minisite (NIN)

Okay, 24/96 WAV files seem sort of like overkill, but it’s nice to have these other options.

Updated: It also seems that NIN has used a Creative Commons attribution / non-commercial / share alike license, so you can remix their track for non-commercial purposes, free. (That’s quite a lot more generous, I’m afraid, than Radiohead in their remix contest — the objection from many observers wasn’t just that Radiohead was charging for the stems of “Nude” separately, but that they retained copyright ownership to remix artists’ work.)

One thing no one seemed to mention about the previous NIN release Ghosts was that the content of the music had taken a different and presumably non-commercial direction, meaning the new distribution method was basically a necessity. I enjoyed that direction, and a lot of you evidently did, too.

But judging by the way this is spreading through the Web, I think we’ve learned that there’s a three-step method to making music distribution a success: 1. give people something free, then hope for sales of something else, 2. give them access to the formats they want, 3. be Nine Inch Nails. Now if only #3 were a bit easier.

In case you haven’t seen it, Nine Inch Nails has taken to the multi-touch Lemur control surface and More Buttons Than Thou top-end Monome. There’s a short video of an experiment combining the two with a real (MIDI-enabled) Yamaha piano. It’s just under a minute, but already evocative — I’m not entirely sure why Alessandro is manning the touchpad on his laptop given all this hardware around, but the cascading patterns on the Monome suggest both LED art and a digital take on a player piano.

More videos on the official NIN YouTube page, which has recently launched a visuals contest for interpreting music from the new album.

But lest you think you need all that pricey hardware to make use of an unusual tool, look no further than MilkyTracker. Platform wars end here: MT runs on Windows (95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista), Mac OS X (PowerPC, Intel), Linux (x86, 64-bit x86, PowerPC), Linux game/mobile platforms (GP2X, ARM), UNIX (FreeBSD x86), and Windows CE. Wowsa. And it’s all yours for a donation, if you can spare one. Heck, there are even video tutorials on the site.

But geekdom aside, I love that MilkyTracker ninjas can make so much music out of so little. Without taking on the aesthetic style here, if that’s not your thing, it’s a reminder that economical choices with your tech can produce all kinds of different sounds. So, maybe rather than loading that preset, try to construct a drum kit out of basic waveforms.

Enjoy!

Video by extrabajs; for some reflections on MilkyTracking, see our friend thumbuki — who, speaking of doing more with less, is working with an OLPC. Economical hardware use is back in an age of power efficiency and computing beyond the deep-pocketed “first world” — and everything old is new again:

Milky Tracker @ thumbuki

What? MilkyTracker is fanning the flames of a platform war with the Atari ST? No worries: MaxYmizer is a newly updated (yep, you read that right) tracker tool for the Atari platform. Polyphonic MIDI input and MIDI clock output means it should easily integrate with your existing studio. See the Digital Tools blog for full details.

Trent sez: “Buy all these music formats from meeeeeeeeeee!” Photo: Jenna Foxton.

Artists are known to mouth off a bit about the Future of Music and Digital Distribution and whatnot, but Trent Reznor is putting his money — and not money — where his mouth is.

Nine Inch Nails Menu of Ordering Options for Ghosts I-IV

via Mashable: Practice What You Preach: Nine Inch Nails Gives Away New Album

And they certainly have their bases covered with their new album “Ghosts”:

• Get the first volume of the album free on torrent sites (or via the NIN site)
• Pay US$5 for a download of all 36 tracks (take that, Radiohead!)
• Get a 2 CD box set for US$10 (which also includes immediate full download of the tracks)
• US$75 gets you the 2 CDs, a data DVD with the digital tracks, and a Blu-Ray disc with 96/24 stereo and accompanying slideshow
• US$300 Adds four LPs on vinyl, two prints, and Trent’s John Hancock — limited-run 2500 pieces

I think they should have just kept going. You know, $800 gets you cassette tapes, Pro Tools session files, 8-tracks, surround sound. $50,000 adds an IMAX film (projector not included) and one of those little plastic mini records. $500,000 adds a DIY planetarium show, plus a special Buddha Box edition and a low-power FM radio transmitter so you can self-broadcast the album. $1 million and you get a Jaguar pre-loaded with a specially-signed sound system that plays the album, plus reel-to-reel multitracks. $500 million and Trent comes to your house, brings his studio rig and console, and re-records the album for you in your living room.

Before you assume the downloads are worthless, though, even the torrent file includes PDF “liner notes” and 320 kbps MP3 files. Buy the download and you have an option of either FLAC lossless or Apple Lossless audio — something I know readers here have complained about.

There’s only one problem. The fact that musical superstars are experimenting with various formats amounts to great research into what people may want. But if you’re not a Nine Inch Nails junkie, this is all awfully … well, complicated. For lesser-known artists, it seems like finding just one or two solutions that make most people happy is a better route, and it’s not clear what those are yet.

I’m personally most interested to see how the torrent thing works. Then again, with bandwidth costs plummeting, serving up your own audio — even lossless audio — becomes a viable option for artists and small labels. And so far, the torrent doesn’t seem to be cannibalizing the for-fee options, as NIN’s site says they’re experience high volume of traffic and orders. If enough people spring for the higher-cost options, the free versions may pay for themselves.

It was inevitable. With the likes of Radiohead doing “donationware”, DRM-free MP3 downloads, someone was bound to follow. (And, in fairness, Radiohead were by no means the first — this is something various artists have been talking about or doing for years. Updated: for some examples of other free albums through music history, see comments below. And as the trend grows, expect a lot more artist-to-listener downloads, or even small label-to-listener or small online store-to-listener, soon.)

The latest is Saul Williams, with the album “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!” So, what has he got that Radiohead hasn’t got?

• Trent Reznor producing.


• PDF of liner notes (something missing from Radiohead)
• Simpler options — either free or US$5, and none of this “pounds” or “pay what you want” nonsense. (Wow, you Brits still use that currency? Kidding. And yeah, I know our dollar is presently worthless.)
• Higher-quality download options — 320kbps MP3 or lossless FLAC — for those paying the five bucks
• Embeddable player for the Web
• The backing of the label started by The Fader

And aside from the technological argument, I’ll be interested to hear what poet/musician has to say about race, particularly at this time in America; that’s promised to be a big emphasis of this album as the name implies.

Note that the PDF liner notes and lossless/higher-quality downloads were something people specifically said they wanted following the Radiohead release. Saul and Reznor both single out the Radiohead decision as inspiration, meaning you could see new developments from Reznor and Nine Inch Nails soon.

All of this is academic because I haven’t heard the album. But it’s interesting to watch artists try to out-cool each other on online distribution. I’m guessing we’ll eventually see a norm start to evolve. The other clear message: no one really cares about stopping piracy with crackdowns or DRM, because they’d rather build fan relationships and find the people who want to pay. (Imagine that.)

Niggy Tardust Pre-orders