If you ever needed to manufacture an excuse to get on Brad’s good side, here comes Brad’s new podcast called Sellout Central. Genre is a funny thing. While I like good music across any boundary my tolerance for mediocre music in some genres is much lower than others so I need some one like Brad to pick through the mess and just pull out the best. In other words I would never dream of digging up the kind of music Brad has in the first podcast episode but through his curating I’m able to save myself a few 100 whinces to get to the good stuff.

I’ve been making a lot of noise about curating as the next step both privately and publicly possibly with a patron/sponsor angle. I certainly appreciate a CC by a huge artist getting all the attention that NIN is getting but I don’t think open music has a shot at making an impact until some unknown artist actually breaks and curating/podcasting has still not fulfilled all of it’s promises.

Brad’s nerd explanation seems a whole lot simpler than John’s Magnatune version. Maybe someone can apply that MC Jack’s amazing Cool Radio show?

As the main face and evangelist of ccMixter I have compiled a rather large list of the excuses to not participate in the site from both music appreciators and musicians. All the excuses seem to stem from a constellation of symptoms one might call boomer-itis. The boomers’ view on remixing, sampling, commercialization, sharing and the creative process in regards to music is the reason why music, of all transitions from analog to digital, has been the most wrenching. At the psychological core is the buried, traumatic truth that music as a cultural influence has completely dropped off the radar.

Boomers who lived through the 1960’s and still hold sway in the halls of politics and culture were so heavily influenced by the popular musicians of their day it is impossible for them to conceive (i.e. they live in complete denial) of a world where 99% of teen males are gaming and only a tiny percentage identifies in any culturally significant way to musicians. On the other hand, for people born after 1980 there is no sense of this loss at all, buried or otherwise. They have no reference point and therefore no understanding of the enormity of say, every release of a Beatles 45 RPM record. To them, the festival at Woodstock is at most “a concert” or more likely, an entry in Wikipedia about a concert some pony-tailed out-of-touch teacher made them look up.

The loss of teen-angst projection onto celebrity musicians is nothing but a favorable development to everybody else but a loss to the boomer’s point of view. On the shallow end of the hand-wringing over this shift, once acknowledged, is nothing more than the sentimental self-aggrandizing that boomers have perfected. The most valid case is the front and center ideology, no matter how naive or contrived, of a John Lennon has been replaced by what Jason Rohrer calls “murder simulators” like Grand Theft Auto. “Today’s pop-rock is a paradigm of a society that has no values; it is ubiquitous even though the record companies admit that most of it loses money,” mourns Donald Clarke in The Rise and Fall of Popular Music (1995, out of print) even before the advent of Halo and GTA.

Clarke is a boomer in every sense. His passion for music and what it represented in his life inspired him to devote his life (once laid off from his unionized auto factory job) to writing and critiquing modern pop music. Unfortunately, by the time he looked up from his assembly line to follow his muse in the mid-1990’s, he found the once powerful and influential world of Elvis, Dylan, Lennon and Morrison to be less relevant than a $3 cup of burnt espresso drowning in milk. (Note that by 2008 this transition is complete as it’s commonplace to get boomer music by Sir Paul, Ray and Joni while buying a latte at Starbucks and unheard of the other way around.)

“The economic machine unwittingly created by the counterculture,” Clarke continues, “sees to it that pop-rock is aimed at each generation of new customers, yet each year not only is it of less musical value, but the market gets smaller, so it is not selling very well these days.” 
Even though Clarke had no real way of predicting the rise of PC-based home recording or the Internet his diagnosis is shockingly relevant today. That these words were written when the ultra-boomerific Jonas Brothers were zygotes can be seen as prescient or depressing. Or both. Focusing strictly on the business model that became prevalent in music since the 1970’s he still manages to nail the cause on the head, still relevant 15 years later: “Perhaps the problem begins with the fact that nowadays we have less input into our own popular culture.”

Some marketing assholes with way too much time on their hands (is there any other kind?) are happy to declare that user generated content is dead. (FTR: if you actually use the term ‘user generated content’ you are already suffering from one-meeting-too-many-itis and need to find a real job.) As long as net neutrality holds I think it’s pretty obvious that any group of musicians that are sincere about their art will find an audience, including fans who tip, film producers who license and sponsors who sponsor. We just have to hang in there and remember where we really are in the cultural food chain. Hint: Not John Lennon circa 1970.

Happy and healthy new year to everybody!

If you’re in the L.A. area tomorrow (Wed.) night I hope you’ll join me and other ccMixter types at Genghis Cohen on Fairfax at 8 PM (be prompt, she’s off by 9) for Shannon Hurley’s gig celebrating her remix album made from ccM mixes. There’s a $12 cover at the door (I think).

…and on a personal note…

I normally don’t talk of such things in public but I guess I can’t resist noting the semicentennial anniversary of the parturition of a certain ornery, perpetual outlier whose accomplishments are to be judged with mixed results.

I only bring this up because I want to take this moment to thank all the people at Creative Commons, past and present, especially Neeru Paharia, Mike Linksvayer, Lucas Gonze and Professor Lessig for their ongoing support to the ccMixter project which I am lucky enough to continue as project lead. Their devotion to the project’s integrity over any personality (including myself) has been an inspiration, a model for how I treat it. I hope I live up to their ideals. I’m also grateful and humbled by the musicians who have taken up the cause at ccM and have been so generous with their time and music. I often worried at the beginning of the project that we weren’t going to attract anybody serious but then along came teru, spinmeister and MC Jack in the Box who have stepped up and given so much to the community and in the process, given me more than a break or two.

While 50 may feel like I’m numerically halfway to something, I’m grateful for all my friends, colleagues and fellow travelers through our online trek for making what I’m sure is the short end of the ride such a fun, greased downhill slide.

If now, or ever, you’re feeling in a giving mode consider the Ella Baker Center, Green for All and Creative Commons.

Here’s a wall stencil I recently saw in Stockholm. It made this old hippie smile.

For the most part, a programmer who is good at algorithmic back-ends can’t be trusted with user interface. There are fantastic examples of exceptions, where there is an overall aesthetic that permeates the programmer’s approach to both coding and interface.

Unfortunately, FL Studio is not one of those exceptions. The back end stuff is as good as it gets: hosting all plugins, overall stability and clean mixer output. This, plus an unbeatable pricing model (lifetime upgrades for free) made it somewhat more palatable to overlook the painful, unusable, un-standard, ever-changing-without-a-direction user interface. Of course, this will incur the wrath of the cult-like following the overtly arrogant makers of FL have gathered over the years. (I finally had enough and dropped using FL completely after the rewrite of the Ableton rendering engine in version 7.)

I’m not generally bothered by a little arrogance. If the folks at Image-Line didn’t have at least a little arrogance they never would have conceived of Fruity Loops or continued it’s growth over the years; in a crowed field such as music software, you have to think you have a better way of doing it than everybody else. But theirs is a somewhat special brand that always struck me as an object lesson in humility that went something like “just because you had 3 good ideas in a row, doesn’t mean you’re next 7 won’t suck.”

It started when Deadmau5, a “big” recording artist I guess, noticed that someone else had released a song on iTunes, for sale, that sounded almost exactly like some tracks he had licensed to Image-Line to include in FL Studio. The tracks were marked as ‘demo’ but, you know, it shipped with FL Studio so, you know, you can use ‘em.

Or not.

Turns out that was never part of the deal according to Deadmau5 and he’s holding Image-Line responsible and everybody’s pissing over themselves and copyright and looping and sampling and ain’t life grand.

As Peter over at CDM is reporting the Image-Line folks are now saying “We’ll remove all melodic loops from FL Studio to avoid this kind of stuff in the future…”

To say that none of this was thought through with a modicum of intelligence is an insult to modicums. According to this logic there are two paths: Including all rights reserved samples in FL studio OR remove all “melodic loops” all together.

I can’t begin to parse the lameness running throughout this. I’m pretty immersed in copyright/copyfight stuff and there’s a world of esoteric stuff that makes my eyes glaze over when serious CC or GPL people start yammering away. But how ignorant of artists’ rights issues do you have to be to come to any of these conclusions. And how arrogant do you have to be to flaunt it.

Any wonder I’m on Ableton.

Avid VT reader Alan Khalfin (jk, he’s got GoogleAlert set to DefCon 5) writes in response to my side missive on MixMatchMusic’s biz model:

Setting up a backend licensing royalty system for sampled music is something I’ve been looking into what with the pending hand-over of ccMixter. It’s a hard problem but somebody’s got to do it. Actually everybody’s got to do it, but somebody has to be first and if it’s Alan, great.

There’s a couple of things to keep in mind though - it will never work unless that royalty back end system is completely open, I mean the technology, certainly the protocol. We do not want to be competing for who has the best self contained royalty system. Music sites must be able expose and share what samples they have and who they belong to with what pricing model. Biz consumers must be able to post back a royalty payment, etc. In other words, a piece of music from Alan’s site must be able to include a sample from Jamendo or BeatPick or Magnatune and have the royalties funneled to those other sites. Otherwise the whole thing is just another lame ass silo and we’re back where we started.

But before we can get any traction on any of that:

This shit needs to stop. This is bad.

Is creativity any match for gameplay? Not if you believe the more than 3,000 reviews of Spore on Amazon that gave it an average of 1.5 stars out of 5 (!)

It seems the kids were confused by the idea of a “game” where all you do is use your imagination to create creatures. I’m not saying this is a Bad Thing. It is what it is. The end of boomer aesthetics.

My bud Lucas is enamored with a very, very groovy Flash ™ app without any game play but crazy fun nonetheless “You don’t score points by playing this game, you make music” or in this case, a video. I give it a 5 - but then, I’m on the short end of the ride. Here’s my insta-video.

I noticed the other day that Trifonic had gone to using a cool viral embedding from MixMatch for their latest stems.

I thought I could do the low-rent version and 4 hours later I had it checked in to ccMixter. (For people in feed readers you may have to just, you know, come to the site).

Now the MixMatch version has some cool Flash(tm)y features that I didn’t even try to match, but still… there it is. I even documented the whole process of making this feature.

MixMatch, the site, is a fully monetized version of ccMixter. They hope to make money for all their remix artists and stem providers by charging everybody (including remixers) on a per download basis. Now, I’m radically simplifying their revenue model - it’s actually pretty complicated — but the fact is they charge money for sharing — including your own remix. Like I said, it’s really complicated - I just thought the viral “remix me” thingy was kind of cool and wanted to see if I could take our publicize feature and use it for this kind of thing.

Over four years ago now I got a call, out of the blue, from a guy called Christian Einfeldt. He says he’s making a documentary called Digital Tipping Point about free culture and thought I may be a good interview. He was most intrigued because I recently crossed the line from corporate culture (Microsoft, et. al.) into free cluture (Creative Commons) - really I think he was looking for dirt on Bill Gates lol.

The interesting thing to me was the way he was making the movie: completely open. He said he was shooting billions of tapes and was going to post them all online at archive.org and create this vast pool of footage and have the community pick up the work pieces and put it all together communally.

That’s cool (and pretty unheard of four years ago).

I hadn’t been in Berkeley for very long at that point so I was especially open to meeting new folks to see where things would lead. We had a few long and fun phone conversations, we met a few times, had a great meal or two and then got down to taping. I met him downtown San Francisco in an office building where his production partner setup a camera opposite me and Christian started firing questions. He kept asking questions (especially about Microsoft) and I kept telling my stories and tried to be amusing. Sure enough we burned through every tape they had on them, in the building, in the truck, probably in the city.

Fast forward four years and all of a sudden last week I get email from Christian saying he’s about to post the raw footage of my interview and to check out DTP’s page on the archive. They have about 80 hours of footage up there (out of 350 shot) and still it’s rolling in. He said “Watching our film will be like reading a Wikipedia page. Our video will be taggable and searchable. The library you see there will provide some of the links for expanded viewing of our documentary. ” Pretty wild. Just the fact that this guy is still at it (at such a furious pace) five years into it - I think this guy may be the most tenacious guy I’ve ever met.

For my part: there are 29 segments, about 4 minutes each up on the archive now. They are a pain the ass to watch at the archive so I embedded them in one page:

See my raw interview footage here

Again, this is raw, basically un-edited stuff. The segments are rendered from the tapes and often stop abruptly mid-sentence so that’s ok, just click the ‘next’ button to load the next segment.

I will say this: this is the least embarrassing public recording of me yet. I think it gives people a fairly good idea of what happens when you let me pontificate (it doesn’t take much) for a few hours. I had fun doing and it shows.

Because it was four years ago a few things worth noting has changed:

- I can no longer go a minute without glasses. I am blind without them.
- This was done before the emergence of WikiPedia, Ubuntu and Firefox all of which proved my point (I am a visionary) about the need for “grandma” apps in the open source world.
- I ramble on and on about the best way to sell an “album” (I am idiot)
- I have, ironically, become more “theological” about the abstract issues involved in free culture.
- This interview takes place about a minute and a half (relatively speaking) before I was introduced to the “mixlog” prototype at the CC offices (’mixlog’ was the working title of what was to become ccMixter). For the people that care, this was exactly the head of philosophical steam I had going in to the project. I don’t know, I think it’s kind of neat seeing that moment captured.

Anyway, like I said, I had fun and I’m really, really grateful to Christian for convincing me this would be a good idea but more important: I’m awestruck by how important and cool a project this is and honored to be a part of it.

[update: corrected figures per Christian]

[update 2: Pieces of the my interview are starting to show up captioned in English and Romanian ;) thanks to Andrei Baciu]

Getting money per “copy” of a piece of music is over. Per album, per song, download, stream, blah blah. Wasted energy. I am totally convinced per-copy distribution of music will be a tiny 100 year blip in the history of man. The thing that puts it over the top are the predictions that within 10-15 years (or sooner) personal storage devices (like your phone) will be able to hold all music ever recorded with or without the use of molecular switches (pdf). So a younger brother leans over the top bunk and says “Hey bro, can I get a copy of all music ever recorded?” and the older brother says “Yea, but it’ll take 15 minutes to copy” and the younger brother says “Really? Oh, OK, well, do it any way.”

Without listing out all the ways musicians can get paid, my favorite, as romantic as it is, is fan funded. Maybe it’s cyber busking at its lowest form but for all the sites that allow a musician to post music with a ‘donate’ button (hello Sound Cloud, Band Camp, join the party…) it strikes me that all of these have exactly the same model: the “free for all” - and by that I mean both “free as in beer” and “feel free to upload any piece of crap music.”

How many times can we prove that shit music does not inspire music appreciators to donate money?

The meme for the last week has been the number crunching on Jamendo done at torrentfreakand commented on by wilkox.

So in Jamendo’s case we confirm that great music, buried along side mountains of shit music also doesn’t yield decent donations.

Quite a while ago Brad commented on a PBS model. That post already seems dated to me as the “reward” he mentions for large donors includes a physical CD. I don’t know about you but at this point I would pay $30 for anybody to take the last few remaining CDs I have off my hands. But that’s besides the point: The thing missing from the discussion is how important the programming is at PBS. People don’t give them money because they air everything that’s ever been submitted. Somebody is seriously curating the air time.

They have to curate and parcel out the air time because it is a sliver thin resource. It’s just possible that all these sites have a serious flaw in that they assume that just because you can host every piece of crap that you must host every piece of crap.

I won’t link to all the discussions of the importance of a layer of taste-making required in ‘net music. Maybe podcasters or social playlist sites like the old WebJay are/were a step in that direction but I still don’t see a full court press on trying to make it work on a large scale, with real money which, again, I believe is there.

Extending the PBS analogy, don’t forget that PBS takes corporate donations (oh, how they take it) and spend concentrated air time periods begging for money (not-so-affectionately called “squirm week”). I would not exclude this kind of “extended under-writing” or concentrated fund raisers from a musician’s collective.

Maybe it exists, maybe 100 times and failed but I haven’t heard of a site like this:

- A collective ‘net label which is heavily curated by a small committee that has proven taste for picking music. No it is not democratic. Is anybody sorry the Tate Modern is not a popularity contest?

- An active corporate fund raising department that knows how to write a grant or otherwise suck money out of the corporates. I would propose zero advertising inside any of the “products.” Ads are bumpers, not interrupters. If getting noticed for supporting and funding public arts isn’t enough for the company being pitched then keep moving.

- An active public fund raising department that also focuses on donations as a public service with probably two all-out fund raisers per year.

- The money is distributed to operations, musicians and curators in that order.

Or something like that.