Moved

After a long while of thinking about stuff, then forgetting about stuff, then having Christmas, then letting 6 months happen, I've finally delivered on my promise to start a new blog. With its own domain.

My new website is at: http://www.withoutqualities.com/

This is not a new post

I noticed that I'm still getting visits to this website, despite my lack of posting. Which is nice and all, but really, you don't need to. This is just a reminder that, if you want to keep up to date on blogs etc. get an rss reader. That way you'll know when pages like this finally get updated, and, until then, you can ignore it.

And ignore it you should - I won't be returning for a while, but when I do it will be the most amazing thing you've even imagined imagining.

Changes

I've been hesitant to post recently, because, after about a year of this, I'm starting to think more about what I want from this blog, and what I don't want. Initially, the focus of this was band activity, but that in itself isn't much to write about, particularly given the fairly repetitive nature of gigging and recording.

I still don't have much interest in having a blog which is just personal info, and I still want the primary focus to be on music, but with a slightly different angle. At the moment, though, I find the format of this goes against how I think I could make it work.

In general I think posts need to be closer to daily than fortnightly (or monthly, as is the case now), but there needs to be a good distinction between minor stuff that gets thrown up, verses things I've actually thought about.

Subtraction and I Am Alert both have good ways of dealing with this hierarchy quite elegently: my blog does not.

Also, things like tags are a good idea but ultimately completely useless in their current form. So what's the point?

These things seem minor, but the fact is that the way this blog is laid out, and the way I publish posts works against me ever feeling like posting something, even when I have stuff I want to write.

So, I'm taking a break, while I figure out what to do.

Playlists

I've been meaning to write a bit about the massive rehearsal and recording sessions with Potential Falcon that I recently finished, but, as usual, I got distracted.

And then, today, I noticed this little comment in the middle of an article on Coolfer, about the future of the album as a format. While Coolfer argues that the album is still the main format in which people purchase music, he got a reply from Aram Sinnreich, of the Wall Street Journal, that I though was kind of interesting.

Aram says that "neither the single nor the album product format adequately addresses the way today's music fans are actually listening.

The new dominant consumption format is the playlist. Only business models that address this behavior -- such as online radio, subscriptions, and ISP taxes -- will take full advantage of consumers' rapidly expanding tastes. The album -- ten songs by a single artist in a fixed order -- just doesn't cut it in this context. "

Whether or not this is true is something I won't pretend to know: people keep making various predictions about "where the industry is headed", and it's impossible to tell who's going to turn out to be right.

But it puts the artist in an interesting position.

As Coolfer points out, it suits both the listener and musician to bundle groups of songs together into an album: it's more economical for both parties, for one.

Also, most artists are at least slightly uncomfortable about just releasing "single songs" and no "album songs". For some this may be a way of covering up their mediocre song-writing abilities, but it is still a genuine concern. Writing a single that will be attractive to radio stations is a useful skill, but it would get tiring to try to make all of your songs fit that mould. Some bands made an art of the single, like, obviously, The Beatles, but for most bands some of their best songs aren't "single songs".

This may simply be because, if you like the work by any one musician, the songs you'll end up loving the most may often be the ones that don't get thrashed to death on the radio. But it's also because if you listen to an album 100 times, the catchiness of a single stops being as much of a great feature, as you come to appreciate the other elements in the music.


So, what about playlists? In some sense, it's like the problems with singles all over again: if musicians suddenly have their music bundled with other bands as the primary format, then won't they just need to write catchy singles and ditch all their other, possibly experimental stuff? That's the obvious answer, but not necessarily the only one.

If a musician was able to play it right, they could use the playlist format as a way to explore more diverse musical styles. An album usually has to have some sort of unifying structure, or it doesn't really work as an album. A performing artist often gets expected to put out some sort of similar product each time round, as this makes both record labels and most fans happy.

But if your primary format for putting out music was the playlist, couldn't you potentially write all manner of songs and find different playlists that would accommodate them? There's always going to be someone who wants to listen to that 10 minute jam piece (if it's good), and they might be someone who wouldn't otherwise buy your album, full as it is of 3 minute pop songs.

I'm still skeptical about the whole idea, but hey, I'm just thinking out loud (but not really, because I'm not talking while I'm writing).

Notation and Interpretation

I've been reading an essay, if you could call it that, by Cornelius Cardew, about systems of notation and the interpretation of notation by the performer. If that seems dry, it's really not. Though I'm reading it for uni, it's quite funny, at least in my mind:

"I have heard people criticizing interpretations of music in a variety of ways, 'he played some wrong notes, but was faithful to the composer's intention', or 'he played correctly but seemed to miss the point'. Such criticism disturbs me (though I have often found it valid) because it implies that there is something behind the notation, something that the composer meant but did not write. In my piece there is no intention separate from the notation; the intention is that the player should respond to the notation."

Also, this:

"15 - The only criterion for a sound is: 'was the player expecting (intending) to make it?' If not, it was a mistake, and makes a different sort of claim to beauty. As a mistake, it comes under the criteria for action: mistakes are the only truly spontaneous actions we are capable of."

and this:

"19- Towards a music without structure! The 'feeling of structure' is not a very important feeling, I should say, and it is therefore fine if a note goes, say, flat or sharp at the end of a breath. It gives an apparent reason for stopping (the real reason, after all).


Ok, maybe not hilarious. But interesting, and entertaining. To me, anyway. Does anyone else think he's being funny in the first quote?

Copyright

Greenleaf has an interesting little piece/discussion about music in the digital age (as everyone likes to call it), which is fairly common. Dave Douglas is pretty clued in to what's going on in terms of digital distribution, and as a successful jazz artist has an audience probably comparable in size to many small to medium indie bands, albeit one that's much more devoted.

Although the article is a little rambling, or seems that way in my current state, the thing that I noticed about it was this comment:

"Is copyright protection really helping you as a composer/author all that much?"

It's an interesting thought. Copyright seems fair to most composers and authors, but I wonder whether its intuitive fairness masks its impracticality, at least in the 21st century. Royalties pay the bills for a lot of rock musicians, particularly when they get older and they stop appealing to such a mass audience. So it would be a big risk to give that up, despite the fact that most musicians will never see a cent from royalties in the first place.

I wonder, what would happen if I gave everything I wrote and recorded away for free, if everything was immediately public domain. I wouldn't be able to collect any royalties, but that would most likely only be a problem if I ever became famous enough to earn them in the first place. Barring the nasty possibility of someone else taking my work and copyrighting it for themselves - which I'm certain is an obstacle you could overcome - I wonder what the other issues might be.

I'd be interested to try it, but I don't know what the implications would be, even for a small work. Can I write a song, record it, host it here and on sites like myspace and just say "here it is world, do with it what you will. I require no reimbursement if you choose to cover this song, record it on your own album, put it on ads, play it on the radio, sample it, edit it, etc."?

To some extent, it seems like this is already implied in most freely downloadable tracks, but the author isn't really giving up total control. Presumably they would want to be reimbursed if someone decided to put it on an iPod ad, for instance. But who gets offered that anyway?

Coolfer

I just updated the sidebar, as you can see. I actually think it looks crap so I may change it, but the idea of having a display of recent posts is kind of good.

More importantly, I added a couple of blogs that I've been reading recently. Most importantly, Coolfer. Coolfer is a blog devoted to finding music industry news and analysing it with some level of depth. Which is good. Read about the kind of profit margins Live Nation makes, etc.

One interesting series of posts was about the idea of the long tail in music. While pop artists get the lion's share of profits, thanks to various circumstances it's been suggested that indie artists have more exposure these days and, thanks to the lower cost, may be making better margins for their labels overall. Coolfer disputes this, basing his arguments on statistics and surveys rather than wild speculation, which is refreshing. It's amazing how much even senior people in the music business conduct their affairs like some sort of voodoo: they rely on rituals that they performed on a previous band that became successful, hoping that the ritual had some part to play in that success. They never know, and it often seems like no one bothers to really examine what works and what doesn't.

Everyone just blindly wanders about, hoping that their album will sell, despite not knowing why any albums sell in the first place.