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20Apr2010
Updated: Crobar to Reopen with 'Urban' Theme
Yeah, it's as bad as you expected.
The former Crobar in Chicago will remain shuttered for less than one week before reopening as a tacky mainstream joint called The Vibe. The new club's "urban" theme appears to be a code word for "dumping as much cheese and douche in one room as possible".
Here's a copy of the flyer for The Vibe's "launch party" - just 6 days after Crobar's closing party.
Prominently displayed is "Natalie 'I Run LA' Nunn from Oxygen's Hit TV Show Bad Girl's Club", who is hosting what is sure to be a night filled with more fist-bumps than anywhere west of Jersey. I'm not sure if this is a step up or a step down from wheeling out Dennis Rodman in his walker - we're talking degrees of tackyness here - but it's... different.
Apparently she's an amazing DJ as there's no other music information listed.
And good luck to the owners - apparently most of the staff has long since been let go.
20Apr2010
Julius Malema Rant: The House Music Remix
This is awesome.
Julius Malema, leader of the Youth League of the African National Congress in South Africa, recently held a press conference in which he screamed at a BBC reporter, calling him a "bastard", a "bloody agent" and accusing him of having "white tendencies". The Guardian has a 2 minute video of his bizarre temper tantrum here.
The speech was a sensation in South Africa. One week later, House Music remixes of Malema's tirade are appearing on South African radio stations with a souled-up House beat. Below is just one of a half dozen quick-and-dirty edits making the rounds. (It's actually a really good beat!)
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19Apr2010
Crobar to Reopen with 'Urban' Theme
If you're hoping that the recent closure of Crobar's Chicago location will result in quality dance music returning to what was once a downtown mecca, I've some bad news for you. According to the Sun-Times (which jibes with what I've heard), the club's "closure" this weekend will result in a very brief layoff and rebranding. The former Crobar is slated to soon re-open under the name "Vibe" in the not too distant future.
Unfortunately, the word on the street is that the club is going for the "young urban demographic." What this means: commercial Hip-Hop, bottle service - you know the score.
Crobar had been largely seen as in decline for a long time. Perhaps this was never so apparent as during their closing second-to-last weekend, which featured geriatric "bad boy" and Reality TV retread Dennis Rodman as a "celebrity host" - yet another instance when music was entirely secondary to spectacle at a club.
19Apr2010
Blackcoffee SA's Male Artist of the Year
Nathi Maphumulo, better known by those in the know as Blackcoffee, was named Male Artist of the Year in last weekend's South African Music Awards for his stunning 12 track album Home Brewed.
It may seem strange to people in the rest of the world that a House Music producer would have this kind of name-cred, but, yeah, as I've said before, House Music is hot in South Africa. But more than that, Blackcoffee's creations are tinged with local flavor as well as part of the global House sound. Elsewhere, local distinctions seem to be dissolving, probably on account of the Internet (when was the last time you heard something like the "West Coast sound" - and the record actually came from the West Coast?), but South Africa's new jacks have managed to adapt this music to their own time and place. What's that they say? Think global, act local. It's that gorgeous authenticity that makes their music sell here, for sure.
Oddly, Blackcoffee is currently midway through his long-awaited tour of the United States - tonight he'll be appearing at Boom Boom Room in Chicago, as fate would have it. And naturally 5 Magazine will be taking a few minutes of his time for an interview.
Photo via Blackcoffee's myspace. Pick up a copy of this gorgeous album here.
19Apr2010
Mark de Clive-Lowe and Jody Watley Make Beautiful Music Together
Back in 5 Mag's November issue, New Zealand soul/house phenomenon Mark de Clive-Lowe told me about a single he had coming out with R&B diva Jody Watley. Usually these things are released even before I get an interview posted from print to the web. But in this case, the fruit of their collaboration - "Tonight's the Night" - has been picked up by Strictly Rhythm and is moving in the usual slow and majestic cycle toward an eventual release.
Here's a short clip from this monster - the Original Mix (one by youngblood Ralvero and another by Mashi round out the release):
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19Apr2010
Industry Footbullet of the Day: Internet Radio
Last week, this handy infographic began to make the rounds. It purported to show how many copies of music in varying formats an artist would need to sell to make the equivalent of the USA's minimum wage. Many artists and labels made a public display of sweaty hand-wringing in response to these giant pink blobs.
It's unclear where this infographic came from (the site listed as a source comes up with a 404 page), but a link at the bottom goes to this spreadsheet where the raw numbers are listed and sourced.
Many people are debunking this graphic (including in the comments of the original gizmodo article) with the claim that with a few exceptions, musicians never made a living wage off recorded music. This is true - if you're not Mick Jagger, your royalties probably didn't buy a goddamned thing, much less provide you with a living wage.
In fact, one of my favorite reads of the last year was this blog entry by Tim Quirk. Who is Tim Quirk? Back in the 1990s, he was in a band you might have caught on MTV's 120 Minutes called Too Much Joy. These days he works at Rhapsody, the online music service. And back in December, he posted about Too Much Joy's latest royalty statement from Warner, which not only has him owing Warner Music $395,000 a couple of decades later, but also states he's made a grand total of $62.47 off digital royalties.
The money shot? Too Much Joy's indie albums, which the band controls, have made about $12,000 off digital royalties. Their major label records? $62.47.
But beyond this, there's one important column missing. Radio. As in, AM, FM, got-a-big-tower-and-call-sign radio. Radio has no column in this table because terrestrial radio is completely exempt from paying performance royalties: the size of the big pink blob representing how many times your music would have to be played on terresterial radio to make minimum wage would be larger than Planet Earth.
Streaming internet radio's royalties might be absurdly low, but for terrestrial radio they don't exist at all. You could take over a radio station and force the staff at gunpoint to play your souled-up disco cover of "Can't Turn Around" for hours on end and you wouldn't see one penny from it. A fraction of a penny isn't much at all; yet even this purely theoretical sum is more than the billion dollar terrestrial radio has paid in performance royalties.
That's what's kind of irritating about it. The point of this graphic is to show that, hey, burning your own CDs will make you more than internet radio, but fails to mention that those gigantic pink circles represent a revenue stream that until the internet came around did not exist at all. People made billions in terrestrial radio, and they did so entirely on the backs of these same artists. Internet radio - as small as the sum may be - is paying something. It represents something new and experimental, but if this graphic is indicative in any way of the industry's sentiments, it's already been written off as worthless.
11Mar2010
Lineups for Southport Weekender and Detroit Electronic Music Festival Announced
The talent roster for two of the largest electronic music festivals in the world were announced on Thursday, March 11, 2010: the Detroit Electronic Music Festival (Detroit, May 29-31, 2010) and Southport Weekender 46 (May 7-9, 2010).
The Detroit Electronic Music Festival (which frankly no one but the latest in the shuffle of organizers calls by its true name - "Movement Electronic Music Festival") features:
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10Mar2010
(Ableton) Masturbation and You
So you're a youngblood, you're living in the city. You play a weekly residency and some gigs here and there. You're not the first guy on the flyer but you're not the last. You've played some big clubs, more often in the smaller room of a large venue, and you've been invited to some cities and even had people pay to bring you there.
You usually open up for the big name DJ and you think it's about time that some of them start opening up for you.
So you fire up BitTorrent, find a copy of Ableton Live, Google your way through cracking the copy protection and get ready to launch the next phase in your career. It's not very intuitive at first, but after working with it for a few weeks you're able to put together some sounds that aren't altogether displeasing. You don't have a vocalist, you can't afford a band and your engineer is your roommate Clarence who used to do the sound at raves.
Listening to the finished product, it's not much of a "song" - but really who cares? Nobody makes any money off records in House Music anymore anyway. It's all promotion, baby! And you looked through Beatport and saw these guys who throw out dozens of these instrumental beat tracks a year. They're big names and they have fans and when you opened for them last month at Le Club, it didn't seem that attaching their name to unmitigated shit did their careers much harm.
So you post it up and wait for the marquee gigs to roll in. Your friends (you've been in the game for awhile now, so you've got lots of those) say it's the greatest fucking track since they first heard "Phreaky Muthafucka" on a big system. Or that's what they say, because the last four times you went to see them, they told you apologetically that your 6 minute piece of McHouse Music didn't fit with the "vibe" on the floor. It's "jackin'" but the crowd was more "laid back". You nod your veteran (some say "legendary" but you - humbly - wouldn't go that far) head, because man, you know the psychic connection between a DJ and his audience. It's tight like that, bro.
The funny thing is that your friends all love it, but no one else does. Or at least the sales suggest that this is the case. But it's not that bad for a first effort. For the next release, you'll budget free drink tickets to Clarence, who in addition to being your engineer and roommate also has a cracked copy of Photoshop and can do some flashy artwork. Something with a chick, like an Effen Vodka ad. And you already have your next 14 releases completed. You've really got the hang of jerking off Ableton now, and your loops are so mental, your beats so crunchy, so chunky, so funky, that you kick yourself for not getting in on this racket years ago.
Flash forward a couple of years. You've now got 20 releases on your label, which in a spark of enlightenment you decided to call DeepSoulGasm Records. You've made new friends, and now you trade gigs with these guys in other cities. They remix your records, you remix theirs and you both praise each other like you're giving an oration at a fucking funeral.
You keep thinking that you're just ONE record from really breaking through. On Twitter and Facebook, you're constantly hitting up the big boys with your tracks, hoping to wind up on some comp record from OM or Agave or whatever. Sometimes they throw you a bone and say it's "nice", which, with your years of hard-earned marketing savvy, you now put on all of your releases as:
"Nice."
-- Some Big Name Guy
And yet, when you look at it, nothing's really changed. The gigs you've gotten barely account for the massive timesink of sending a quota of 50,000 private messages a month on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to "promote" yourself. Your releases barely make a dent. Some publishing company (whatever the fuck that is) is sending you threatening letters about a 6 second sample off a disco record you found at a flea market. They don't get it: you're just trying to PROMOTE them. And fuck, it's not like you made more than a hundred bucks on any of these pieces of shit anyway.
For one month, you miss a release date (it's for your highly-anticipated opus called "FUCK ON THE DANCEFLOOR NAKED LIKE YOUR MOMMA SAID TO"). Surprisingly, nobody seems to notice. You read a site called House Music Daily and some fucking dork is criticizing "Ableton Masturbation" like he invented the term (holy shit, it looks like he did!) and you think, "That's not me. I've got a hundred quotes from legendary people saying it's 'nice' and 'great beat' and 'loved the energy!'"
But it IS you. YOU'RE the douche ruining this. Let's be charitable: most people's first attempts at something - whether it's building a birdfeeder or making music - sucks. It's terrible. But in the Good Ole Days, when this music was somewhat popular, there was a barrier to entry which prevented the Anti-Hero of our story from shoving his bullshit into the marketplace. Would he be willing to spend several hundred or several thousand dollars pressing vinyl in quantities large enough to stock the key dance music shops in the United States, plus promo copies to Big Name DJs who will say it's "nice"? Not unless he thought he could make it back, or come damn close.
Ultimately though - and this is the main point right here - those records shoved off this mortal coil into closets, attics or the trash, where bad music goes to die (and die quietly). They weren't preserved forever on a site, on someone's harddrive, and most importantly in the memory of those 50,000 people you spammed every month to promote this quick-and-dirty spit-lubed fit of Ableton Masturbation. It's an unwritten rule that self-promotion involves putting your best foot forward. Probably half of all releases every month (and that's a conservative estimate) are the equivalent of FedExing someone a box of dogshit.
Maybe you're really gifted and have a great song ready to burst forth after a few years of seasoning. Unfortunately, your name is now associated with the musical equivalent of a ricecake: totally lacking in substance, weight and good taste. And it's not even a heartfelt piece of garbage. You did it in 30 minutes. Anyone who knows music also knows this. DeepSoulGasm Records has anything but soul. It exists to shove crappy loops into a crappy market to make someone famous.
I sometimes wonder if this hasn't already happened - the final act of this era of McHouse Music and Ableton Masturbation, where anyone who ever had the misguided notion that "Hey, I could do that too!" went ahead and did (and had his friends proclaim it the best fucking record in the history of percussion). I have no doubt that sheer persistence and will can make someone a name, and repetition and effort can make even the unskilled competent craftsmen. But when they finally release their hit - when they finally got all their ducks in a row and wrote a real song, with real hooks, and real feeling rather than slamming some beats together in an afternoon and pushing it on to Beatport - will anyone notice? Will anyone other than their BFFs still care? Or will the promo sheet still be littered with big name DJs saying it's "nice"?
I Beat It shirt from cottonfactory; Happy Bunny from lovehappybunny.com.
16Feb2010
How Hot is My Track? Rating the Promo Services
Are you still using sendspace as a promotional tool? Unless it's personalized, as part of a larger campaign or sent specifically to a few key DJs or buds (for whom sending a track "just to you" has a personal touch that is indeed a stroke of genius), there are better options for getting music in the hands of the people who play it.
These days, any DJ or music writer spends hours every week clicking links and being sucked into the abyss of promo pages. It's actually frightening to think how much time someone like Louie Vega or Kenny Dope spends just sorting through the hundreds or thousands of tracks sent every month with a corresponding promo page for each (though by the time you get to that level, you probably have someone at least doing the initial clicking for you).
Considering how many promos are being sent out these days, the reaction to a label's promo page and the service they use probably has a lot more to do with their music catching on than anyone cares to admit.
Though I know it shouldn't be this way, I've often found myself just moving on to the next flagged email when a promo page doesn't let me do what I want to do or proves to be too irritating to bother. Seven minute instrumental Ableton masturbation from someone I've never heard of? Most people, I think, are nice and will give that a fair hearing unless you make it too complicated for them to bother trying.
There are four primary services in use today among House Music labels that I get sent to every month. I'm the king of cheap, I don't believe there's any product or service on this planet that you can't do for cheaper, but unless pop-up ads for mortgages and erectile dysfunction are concepts what you want people to associate with your music, you could do with spending a few bucks and maybe learning a little more about which of the DJs that say A++++++ WILL PLAY AGAIN are actually even listening to it.
I hated it at first. I'll freely admit that. But like the Boof character in a 1980s Michael J. Fox coming-of-age comedy, Fatdrop decided to hang around long enough for me to decide that I love her. This is the gold standard of promo services. Their reporting for the label is robust, and while their pages allow for some customization, your DJs know exactly what they have to do to listen to and download music. Fatdrop's widespread use has made their interface so familiar that most people can sleepwalk through the process. If everyone used Fatdrop, my life would be 10x easier.
Labels and PR firms run the show at Fatdrop: the service itself is invisible except for a generic "fatdrop.co.uk/promo" in the URL, which completely eliminates the somewhat antiquated model of the DJ pool. Labels have to add DJs directly to grant access; for the labels, this means total control over who is seeing their product.
Most labels require that you leave feedback, favorite a track and give it a star rating to download tracks. This may seem cumbersome if you have hundreds of promos to sort through, but really, it's not that much to ask. Much of it winds up being useless platitudes anyway but if you're getting free tracks, I think most people agree then 30 seconds of your time is a small price to pay. (Some DJs apparently give "five stars will play!!!!" ratings to everything, no matter what it sounds like, which is sheer comedy when the label uses it for sales promotions. Laurent Garnier's nice guy endorsement of everything he's sent was an inside joke among labels for a long time, but it seems someone else has noticed it too.)
Cost: £50 set-up, £35/month for 2gb of bandwith and 5gb storage. Additional bandwith is £6/gb. By today's conversion rate, that's about $78 set up and $54/month.
Info: fatdrop.co.uk.
I have no idea how I was signed up for Release Promo. Supposedly, it uses the model of the old DJ pool, in which labels supply the music for free and DJs are charged $59/month, but with a 3 month minimum (basically, $177 to start).
Unfortunately, the interface is clunky and out of the internet circa 1998. Incredibly, just to preview tracks, Release Promo forces you to download an m3u file and load the songs in iTunes rather than simply using a flash-based player to preview the tracks in the browser. Flash players are everywhere - there are even free varieties which can basically be adapted to any sort of service known to man, with whatever skin you'd like to use. Previewing tracks is of paramount importance when you have little to no familiarity with the label or artists. And you want me to download something just to do that? Thanks but no thanks.
Cost: Free to labels, $177 for a 3 month membership for DJs. They apparently have a "total" package in which labels can pay to blast out their music as well, which is probably how I was added.
Info: releasepromo.com
Label Worx more or less a cheaper alternative to Fatdrop. The service is not terribly different (though putting the feedback form at the bottom means that many people will miss it), with the opportunity to preview and label control on whether or not feedback is required. Really the only substantial difference between Label-Worx and Fatdrop, at least from my end, is a slightly negative one: a little ticker keeps track of how many times you've downloaded a song vs. how many times the label will allow you to do so. I've no idea why this is even on there: with simple IP tracking, the label can easily find out if you've downloaded it from your computer and phone or given it out to 10,000 of your closest friends and deal with your pirating ass accordingly.
Additionally, you can host the tracks on your own server and just use Label-Worx's tracking system for an even cheaper rate.
Cost: £7.50 for hosting and tracking; £5 for tracking only. It roughly works out to $12 for the complete package or $8 for just the tracking.
Info: label-worx.com/promomanager
AheadPR recently redesigned their promo interface and for the life of me I can't figure out. It's easy enough to preview tracks - the flash player here is sleek and cool - but the feedback section is located way down at the bottom of the page and it's not entirely clear where the download option comes from or if one is even provided. I say this having used the service and filled out feedback saying, hey, maybe I'm a mental cripple but I can't figure this one out. Nobody got back to me, probably because the info was sent to the label and AheadPR never saw it.
Cost: AheadPR provides basic information on their website (£400 for their "bundle offer" on the high end, £200 on the low end), but no information is provided that I could find on what this means outside of general audience divisions into Tastemakers and International Press and Radio). To get more detailed info (is this yearly? quarterly? are there additional bandwith charges? how easily can I track it?) you apparently have to fill out a form.
Info: aheadpr.com
11Feb2010
What Happened to Gemini? A Spencer Kincy Update
I've put off writing this for awhile, much like I put off writing the original Spencer Kincy article 5 Magazine published last April. It's not a happy subject. But with renewed interest in this as well as wild speculation and rumor circulating in place of fact, it's probably about time for an update as well as to ask one of the philosophical questions posed by Spencer's disappearance from the scene seven or eight years ago. I also have some good news for fans of Spencer's music about a new re-issue by one of his original labels.
But first, let's start with brass tacks. Spencer Kincy is not dead. He's living around Chicago but has done more or less everything in his power to remain far, far away from the music scene.
I haven't seen him and I don't know exactly where in Chicago he is. My proof is that Spencer Kincy, on a single day last August, filed 3 lawsuits against various United States government bodies and individuals in Federal Court seeking a grand total of $29,997,000 in personal injury and other damages. The parties being sued in these lawsuits are:
- US Department of Defense
- The FBI
- FBI Director Robert Mueller
- FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Robert Grant
- FBI Agent Mitchell Marrone
- Office of General Counsel
- Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald
- Thomas Walsh
- Gillian Ferguson
- Cathleen Martwick
(It's not 100% certain, but I believe the three names listed after Fitzgerald are all either lawyers or prosecutors here in Illinois.)
The filings in these three cases are available to anyone that wishes to pay per-page fees via the US Federal Courts' PACER system.
I do not. There is a slight chance that this is a case of mistaken identity, but the odds of there being two Spencer Kincys in the city of Chicago (with unusual spelling and all) are very low indeed. You can see pretty clearly what's going on here, and answer any questions you may have about Spencer, without worrying too much about jumping to conclusions. It's sad, but it is what it is...
If you're new to this saga, I suggest going back and reading at least the beginning of my story on Spencer from last April. CliffsNotes version: Someone, anonymously, sent me an enormous archive of Spencer Kincy's mixes, tracks and material. That person has never identified himself, and has never contacted me again.
If everything I've written so far leads us to an accurate understanding of Spencer's current station, then the question presents itself: what of the fate of Spencer's music? Much of it is on out-of-print vinyl, yet I can testify that fans are desperate to get their hands on it. Not a week goes by without a fan of Spencer's discovering the article and asking if I can share the archive I was sent.
I have no special knowledge of the contracts that Spencer signed with Relief, Balance, Peacefrog, Planet E or any of the other outfits that released his music. Some, all, or none of the rights may have reverted to Spencer (though that hasn't prevented other seminal labels from putting out re-issues - Felix da House Cat posted just last week that labels are re-issuing FdHC's material without his knowledge).
Oddly, this is the reverse of the usual dilemma in The War Between Artist and Industry. If one or more of Spencer's labels no longer have the right to re-issue his music, and the sole rights now belong to Spencer, then it's hard to believe these will ever be re-released.
More likely, though, the labels do still have the right to re-release his music, but haven't yet. In some cases, these labels barely exist anymore, which also presents a problem. I remember interviewing Sunshine Jones two years ago about the fate of some classic Dubtribe recordings, particularly those on Organico. He told me that the band had the right to re-record them, but otherwise, the originals belonged to the label. And the label had gone out-of-business.
In the case of Spencer, it's a real nightmare scenario for someone that enjoys his music: a label that's gone defunct and an artist with apparently no interest at all in re-issuing his works to the masses. (This presumes that Spencer is still legally competant. The lawsuits he's initiated indicate that he likely is.)
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