Another day, another documentary on the history of dance music. This one at least focuses on a subset of what would eventually become a wildly diverse scene, and is narrated by Robert Owens and that's hard to beat.
But it's pretty hard to judge anything by a trailer - view it here (or here) and judge for yourself.
Dennis Ferrer headlines this year's list of nominations in the Grammy Awards' dance music and remixing categories. His remix of "Don't Believe in Love" by make-out music queen Dido on Arista Records is nominated for the Grammy for Best Remixed Recording (Non-Classical).
The actually Dance Music categories however (the so called "Field 2" of nominations) are dominated by the likes of David Guetta, Lady Gaga, LMFAO and - somehow - The Black Eyed Peas. Sadly, this continues the trend by which the Dance Music categories have become another way for major label pop artists to add another nomination to their belt, rather than honoring original productions in an exceptionally crowded Dance Music field.
The full results from Best Remixed Recording and the Dance Music categories are below.
Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical
Don't Believe In Love (Dennis Ferrer Objektivity Mix)
Dennis Ferrer, remixer (Dido) [Arista]
The Girl And The Robot (Jean Elan Remix)
Jean Elan, remixer (Röyksopp) [Astralwerks]
I Want You (Dave Aude Remix)
Dave Aude, remixer (Dean Coleman Featuring DCLA)
Track from: I Want You [Yoshitoshi Recordings]
No You Girls (Trentemøller Remix)
Anders Trentemøller, remixer (Franz Ferdinand)
Track from: Blood: Franz Ferdinand [Domino]
When Love Takes Over (Electro Extended Remix)
David Guetta, remixer (David Guetta Featuring Kelly Rowland)
[Astralwerks]
Best Dance Recording
Boom Boom Pow
The Black Eyed Peas
will.i.am & Jean Baptiste, producers; Dylan Dresdow, mixer
Track from: The E.N.D.[Interscope Records]
When Love Takes Over
David Guetta & Kelly Rowland
David Guetta & Frederic Riesterer, producers; Veronica Ferraro, mixer
Track from: One Love [Astralwerks]
Poker Face
Lady Gaga
RedOne, producer; Robert Orton, RedOne & Dave Russell, mixers
Track from: The Fame [Streamline/Interscope/Konlive/Cherrytree]
Parents: get between your kids and trance. It may save a life.
From the police report:
The (18 year old) victim and (DJ Seasunz, aka Juan Carlos Portieles) have been romantically involved for approximately 2 year(s). On the above listed date and location, the victim and (DJ Seasunz) were involved in a heated verbal altercation. The altercation escalated and (Seasunz) began to beat and bite the victim repeatedly and she fought back. (DJ Seasunz) choked the victim until she stopped moving. (DJ Seasunz) sustained several injuries which include: scratches throughout face and torso, swollen right hand.
(DJ Seasunz) visited several witnesses with the victim in the front passenger seat relaying to each his involvement in the incident.Later he responded to MDRD Midwest Station, told the desk officer what he had done and he was arrested without incident.
DJ Seasunz was charged with 2nd Degree Murder. He allegedly began dating the 18 year old victim when she was just 16 (and he was 28). The Miami New Times has the complete story with photos and a copy of the arrest affidavit from which the confession of this convicted criminal, douchey DJ/promoter and alleged pedophile scumbag is quoted.
There are very few tracks I'd hype without hearing more than a snippet. Anything produced by Ralf GUM (discography, myspace, facebook) is right at the top of the list.
Launching tomorrow (September 30, 2009) is "Little W. 12th St.", Ralf Gum's follow-up with Monique Bingham to last year's smash "Kissing Strangers" on his own GOGO Music label. (You can read my interview with Ralf from May 2009 here.)
"Little W. 12th St." features remixes by Benny Pecoralo and none other than DJ Spinna. The vinyl and worldwide download will be available on October 26th, with the promo download on Traxsource tomorrow, September 30th. (Update: the link is already up here!)
Six months ago in this space, I wrote that "The freedom brought about by the decline of vinyl and the high production costs associated with producing it hasn't led to better music - just more of it."
The signs of the music apocalypse are becoming increasingly apparent. A year ago, 5 Magazine received maybe 40 promos a month. We now receive well over 200. At least half of these are EPs containing three or more distinct tracks (and at least half of those sound like Eric Cartman singing "She Works Hard for the Money" with a disco beat, but anyway...). In other words, the amount of music flowing down the pipe every month has multiplied about seven-fold in the course of a year.
And of those 200 promos, we might print reviews of maybe 20. You can see where I'm going with this, yes?
If you've gone ahead and started your own digital label in this climate, you've got my best wishes and sincere gratitude for getting into the arena in what was a horrible environment even before the great glut fell upon us. I can only assume that you're doing something you believe in. The world needs more people like that.
There's a very big difference, however, between making good music and getting it heard.
There are a number of guides - some good, some bad - on how to start and market your own digital label. I won't write another one here - I'm not qualified, and actually can't think of more than a half-dozen people on the entire planet who are (opinions = assholes, etc.) Everyone seems to enjoy dispensing advice on the subject and there's no shortage of rejects from the music industry selling you ebooks on how to GET FAMOUS NOW!
Instead, I can tell you the things that make me grab a track or press play instead of putting them in the slush pile for later consideration. Considering that I've written probably a few hundred reviews (and decided to write a few dozen feature stories based entirely on promos I've received), this could be useful if you're thinking of starting a label or if you already have one but would like to tighten up marketing.
The most important rule, which I think you can apply to everything nowadays, is: Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
With production costs so low for a digital release, there's a temptation to do all kinds of things that would have been prohibitively expensive with vinyl. This is what's lead to the tremendous glut of filler material. And unfortunately, a lot of really good music is getting buried - not just by the glut of other releases in the market, but by the label itself which hasn't taken these words to heart.
THE REMIX GLUT Just because you can release 12 remixes with a single, doesn't mean you should. In the old days, including a big-name remixer on a single meant shipping more units to distributors and stores. Obviously, you're not dealing with physical units when you're selling MP3s, but having a Johnny Fiasco or Mike Dunn or Louie Vega remix your track is definitely going to get it heard. Period. Stop reading now because if you've got Fiasco or Dunn or Vega remixing your shit, you really don't need to read anything from me.
That hasn't changed. Nor has the value of remixing a track for different markets, particularly with how fragmented the House scene is.
So remixes are good. And like everything else, you can carry it too far.
If you're including remixes just because they're from your friend, you've committed the fundamental mistake of thinking of yourself instead of your market. There's no reason why you can't release more remixes down the line. One of the cool developments of the digital marketplace is the extended remix collection, released months or even a year after the original single. It can add months to a track's lifespan. But those are already hit singles when the next batch of remixes hit the market - you can say that the market demanded more, and the label filled that demand with additional remixes.
But if you're taking a decent song and tacking 8 or 9 remixes onto it right out of the gate, and the remixers aren't named Fiasco, Dunn or Vega, you're not really doing yourself any favors.
You might think that it can't hurt. It can. People just aren't going to give the same sustained attention to an 11 track package of remixes by unknown names than they are to a tight 5 or 6 track package. Blame it on shortened attention spans, the fast pace of the world or just human nature.
Attention, like money, is finite. Having to slog through a number of uninspired and unnecessary remixes uses it up rather quickly.
The Catalog Glut Just because you can release 75 tracks a year doesn't mean you should. I've yet to hear of any artist in any genre who could write five great songs in a month. And if you're really an artist, "great" should be what you're aspiring to.
Let me give you an example. Terry Hunter is one of the most prolific producers in House Music today. His independent T's Box Records puts out one quality release every month. Sometimes it's by Terry, sometimes it's by another artist - in addition to his own work, he's released tracks by Jazzy Jeff and Leonard Part Sixx, and his own tracks usually feature a different vocalist from previous ones.
Now, aside from richly produced tracks (which are properly arranged songs, with proper vocals), Terry probably has thousands of beat tracks lying around. Someone could steal the man's harddrive and probably have enough material in there for years of new releases.
Terry could very easily release them all, sell a few of each of them and in the short term scoop up enough money to buy a solid gold jacuzzi. He's doesn't, though, and I think the commonsense reason why he doesn't is that it would (a.) oversaturate the market and (b.) diminish the reputation for quality that people now associate with T's Box Records. Sure, he could cash in now, but he'd pay later.
Be like Terry (and don't forget the bling).
Now that's Terry Hunter - a producer who has built a reputation for decades, and a DJ that can headline any night in any town in damn near any city with a scene in the world. Your average producer probably doesn't even have that opportunity. And oversaturating the market when you're relatively unknown is commercial suicide.
Every now and then someone does it, and I can almost put a number on how long it will take for them to burn out, discouraged and demoralized (if you're curious: about five months). This will be someone that isn't even terribly well known locally, but pumps out four or five tracks a month regardless of the poor reception. In most cases, they're pretty young and enamored with the instant feedback of someone (maybe someone just being nice) saying how much they love it.
But the balance sheet doesn't lie, and no one can feed their family based on positive feedback on myspace. You need sales, not bumps on a message board.
The Album Glut
I'm continually mystified by young, up-and-coming artists still working on their name who release full albums without much of a business plan. Everyone these days is releasing an album. It's like how after Star Wars, every director felt he had a trilogy in him just waiting to get out. But I'm here to tell you: Just because you have 12 tracks you're happy with doesn't mean you should release an album.
Jay-J, Fred Everything and Miguel Migs have all released albums in the past year, and we've written feature stories on all of them. That's because before an album hits the streets, they have a full release schedule already planned. They know which singles will be released, in what order, and have a general idea who is doing the remixes, if they're not already in the can. Sure, they can change things up down the line, but they're not simply throwing 12 tracks together and chucking it out there as basically a super extended play EP. And they'll be touring in support of that album for probably over a year.
In short, they have a business plan. An album is something that you build toward, after your reputation is somewhat established and you're ready to take it to the next level.
I've received endless "albums" however which are basically 12 track EPs, from people relatively unknown locally and completely unknown nationally. There not only won't be a tour, but I don't think they could get many people to attend an album release party. The quality of the music is sort of irrelevant to the argument here, but it's almost uniformly true that the majority of these albums are also made up of instrumental, sample-heavy tracks rather than songs.
(I'm not saying this to be cruel. Everyone starts somewhere. But in the past, a young blood with some good-not-great music didn't have the opportunity to press a full record of mostly mediocre tracks unless he was rich and didn't care about seeing a return on his investment. Today, there are far too many people selling themselves and their music short by doing this, and I don't think any of their buddies or people bumping their music on myspace have the balls to tell them.)
And as it is with the remix glut, so it is with the album glut. Reviewing an album is no problem when there are 12 great songs. It's a chore when you're staring in the face of 12 "jazzy" instrumentals that have clean high hats and not much else. In the middle of those 12 may be one gem, a good track that stands out - or would have if you hadn't surrounded it with 11 mediocre bits of filler.
"Music for Losers" is from the fabulous lpcoverlover.com. Photo of Terry Hunter and Andre Hatchett by Czarina Mirani, 5 Magazine.
Forget making music, playing records, singing, learning an instrument or anything else of any value in the world. Become a lawyer, you get paid better and there are two chicks for every boy.
Case in point: ASCAP has argued that every time your cellphone rings and plays a piece of music as a ringtone, it counts as a "public performance" and they want to collect performance rights. To be clear, the music is already licensed - Verizon or your telecom provider of choice is not bootlegging tunes. But the license isn't enough, they say: every time your momma calls you, another fraction of a penny should be transmitted to the artist. The 5 second ringtone on your cellphone, in their view, is the same as playing a complete song on the radio, with ads sold against it.
Incredibly, Verizon appears to have caved on this dubious argument, buying an "interim license" which is probably a precursor to negotiating a long-term licensing agreement.
This isn't something that will benefit the average songwriter or singer or band, so please don't throw that one down. It means another solid gold shark tank for Kanye. And your ringtone will get a little more expensive. This is what the industry is reduced to: snagging theoretical fractions of a penny for really one of the few positive growth areas for recorded music as a whole in the last 10 years.
A round-up of sorts from the world of dance music today:
Ultra Nate's Deep Sugar was picked the "Best Dance Party" in Baltimore by the local Baltimore City Paper.
Ultra Naté's legendary Deep Sugar party keeps on trucking over baby-powder-coated dance floors every month in its adopted home of Paradox. From big names in house like producer Louie Vega to turntablist DJ Spinna to choice locals like KW Griff and the Unruly Records crew--which takes over the club's back room every month with its powerful DJ roster--Deep Sugar delivers again and again.
Fabric, the UK label/venue/blob taking over every aspect of music one step at a time, is celebrating their 10 year anniversary with a 4 day party featuring Ricardo Villalobos, Steve Bug, Kenny Larkin, Halo, Fred Everything, Doc Martin and more. Full line-up from the press release here.
Practically a one-page website, with buttons only for extra info, the Smart Bar website sports a few digital sticky notes with a very a fresh look.
Here's an interesting interview with Daniel Mnookin from Chicago's Siteholder label on the Cacophonous Bling blog. Quite a bit quoteworthy here if you can manage to tell the questions and answers apart. Formatting!
And two hot releases that have been rocking my socks: Getting a Rise, the second release from Jay-J's album Love Alive (that was fast); and the Fall EP from Franck Roger, who seems to release more great music with less fanfare than anyone I know of.
It just ain't House Music until we take a fun idea and run it into the ground.
This weekend, I received four - count 'em, four - emails from labels promoting "remix contests". I've been seeing this everywhere, from Evolution Media to Depeche Mode to Mariah Carey to Jay-J to Radiohead
Would it kill anyone to try a little creativity in their promotions, though? Trumpeting a remix contest in 2009 is like bragging that the streets are cleaner since those horseless carriages came around.
It's actually gotten so bad that there are even spam sites (click at your own risk) which purport to gather info about all of the wonderful remix contests for all of the wonderful artists across the big wide internet.
Yes, there are that many.
Here are results #1 through #10 of the four hundred and three thousand hits on Google for "remix contest". I'm not even sure 403,000 tracks were released this year in the entire world, from dance music to Mongolian throat singers.
Okay, we get it: you're open about your music and want to encourage people to enjoy it. You're all Web 2.0, you want to give a youngblood a chance to shine, it's all about the fans and giving back. I'll even believe you've got the best intentions. Just try something else, okay? Maybe give away a couple of the filler tracks - maybe an instrumental or a dub - rather than charge for them? Or since everyone's dumping 3 or 4 filler tracks with every release, how about a sliding scale? I bet you might see more sales if you throw in that "Super Re-Rub Instrumental Bonus" for $0.99 on Traxsource.
It's at least worth a try rather than driving an already tired trend straight into the ground.
There's something similar to the "remix contest" in graphic design. In fact, most trade organizations take a very dim view of "design contests", particularly when they're run by corporations seeking "fan input" for new logo designs or what not. It's fine if you're a college student looking for a challenge, but it's been long understood that design contests are often a dishonest way for a client to get free work - work produced "on spec" albeit without admitting it as such, because most designers won't work on spec.
If you're a producer, and you're serious about it, neither should you. There may be an appalling glut over music on the market these days, but there's never been a better time for someone to break into the game. You don't need to be bought and sold as a cog in someone else's promotional machine to get 'er done.
The Feds took down piracy crew Rabid Neurosis, or RNS, last week. According to most reports, RNS had retreated underground in early 2007, when the group was publicly fingered for uploading Eminem's album Encore more than a month before it was due to hit the shops. But for close to a decade, they were responsible for uploading an estimated 6,000 albums+ per year and were behind the pre-release leak of hundreds of tracks.
How did they get them? Simple: at least one of the members worked in a peripheral but crucial link in the music industry's distribution chain.
THE ORIGINS OF RAPID NEUROSIS
It's interesting to dwell on the history of RNS, if only because the structure worked out by the founders in the late 1990s is the same way pirated music gets to the "average" downloader today.
It's amazing that few people who are actually in the industry understand how this works. Often, they see a link to one of their songs on a blog and assume that the same person ripped it, uploaded it and posted the link. In reality - then as now - as many as a hundred people may have had a hand in getting that single song to "market", so to speak.
It took about two years for MP3s to become widely used. In 1997, Winamp was released. This dovetailed nicely with the explosion in commercial usage of the internet, which made home computers something more than a box for playing games and writing book reports.
Because of the new MP3 format, music could now be compressed down to as little as 1 or 2 megabytes. When the hippest nerd in your neighborhood owned a blazingly fast 56k dial-up modem, things like that mattered.
Rabid Neurosis (RNS) grew out of the warez trading subculture on IRC and was one of the original (if not the original) MP3 trading crews. A crew usually formed as a result of internet politics - ostracism, infighting or simply elitism, and was typically considered legit once they controlled their own FTP server. In the beginning, this served as a distribution point to specially invited members. Later, RNS controlled several FTP servers, with known members gaining access to a special RNS-only server which contained all of their accumulated trophies of MP3s.
Other IRC denizens were rewarded with access to the RNS guest FTP servers. Still later, "couriers" were rewarded with limited RNS privileges for uploading RNS-ripped files on sites across the world.
PIRACY IS SERIOUS BUSINESS
All of this was free. Why did they do it? Because they could. The indictment against the leaders of RNS makes much of the "personal benefit" members derived from access to their private RNS-only FTP server, but that's legalspeak to secure hefty fines for copyright infringement during the penalty stage if the defendants are found guilty.
In truth, anthropologists and other social-types have written an incredible amount about subcultures and the reward mechanisms that surface in every group, whether it's a Fortune 500 company or a church bingo club. If the average pirate receives a vicarious thrill from providing free MP3s and seeming "in the know" to his peers, to organized crews like RNS the reward/reputation benefits must have felt like a hit of angel dust to the back of the brain.
And rewards really don't work without some form of competition. By 1999, the RNS was in a hilariously insipid but nonetheless ferocious battle with other crews such as apocalypse (sic) Production Crew (aPC) over who could upload more music, with better quality sound, and before anyone else - and often before the record companies, too. Sometimes, the crews made "peace treaties" with each other (srs bznz, amirite?), but were rocked by the same betrayals and petty squabbles that lead to wars in any subculture that takes itself 1000 times more seriously than anyone else does. This is a message from the RNS leader ("AlCapone" - still srs bznz) from the year 2000, which sounds like it could be written by any angry 17 year old pissed off that his favorite band is selling out:
a letter to the scene
I am deeply saddened by the current state of the so called scene as we know it, a few years ago it started off with cda, dac, rns, and a few other groups, back then it was ripping single tracks and putting them up in 1.44m rar/zips, putting them all on one site (World Domination, thanks to Nitecrew & Greaser) and it was only for the tracks that people wanted... enough with reminiscing, I have had the privelege of being able to watch it from a birds eye view for the past year now, and the scene went from sugar to shit over the past 4 years, now all it's about it see what we can put up on the sites, doesn't matter how many tries, doesn't matter if anyone is going to ever download it, nothing matters except that it's new and people can brag about it, I'm not saying we haven't contributed to this, but it's the scene that's made it this way, everyone has tried to convert the mp3 scene into the warez scene, and brought the same damn attitudes, same 0day bullshit , same fucking lameness that made the warez scene so gay, and nobody gives a fuck about it, well, honestly, I can't say I'm impressed on how the newer people to the scene have made it such a fucked up place to contribute to. Quit with the bullshit, just all of you shut the fuck up, anyone who is putting anything besides a review of the cd in the notes section, please, do everyone a favor and just take your tongues and slam them in the trunk of a car, most of the people who are talking shit don't even know where the scene originated, or care. I know this won't affect many people, nor should it, too busy with the bullshit to actually take a look at what terrible shape the scene is in. I used to take part in this fun, but it's not until you take a break, take a breath, and then take a look at it before you realize what a circle of bullshit has been created.
- Al Capone, President of RNS from 97-99, council member since 96, member for the rest of the scene's life, one of the major 'founders' of the scene as you know it.
rns would like to thank all of its helpers over the years, all of the people who have contributed to us in many ways, you are not forgotten, and your help is much appreciated. to those who hate us, why are you here? we are in this game for the love of music not for the competition unlink some other ghetto group out there with big ego's *hint hint* expect the best out of us for the y2k, for we will never die.
FROM THE CREW TO YOU
It was at the RNS servers that most of their MP3s started their dissemination down to the masses. From the RNS-only server, they were distributed to the RNS guest servers, and from there proliferated to other FTP sites, IRC channels, BBSs and USENET groups. The end user usually saw the "RNS" appended to the filename without having a clue what it meant, but those in the scene knew.
Now, the "end user" in 1998 was really a pretty small pool of individuals. Most of these things like FTP and IRC and BBC and USENET were beyond the reach of the average AOL subscriber. Their outré nature meant that you really had to learn a few computer protocols if you really wanted to sink your teeth into the soundtrack to Titanic (the best selling album of 1998, doncha know?)
Time being money, it was much easier to just suck it up and throw down 13 bucks at Sam Goody for the right to experience Celine Dion's voice stripping a layer of your skin off.
And then something new came along: Napster. You didn't need to call Tech Support to find out your news server's IP address or learn how to join and unpack multi-segmented ZIP files. You double clicked on the Napster client and, magically, thousands upon thousands of files appeared.
Napster became the new terminal - the final distribution point where the average downloader found his "free" music. The names change but it's not much different today. In the late '90s it was Napster. In the early '00s, Kazaa. Then BitTorrent. And finally, around 2004, the explosion in blogging and sudden proliferation of cheap or free upload services like RapidShare made the blog the final link in the chain, from elite pirate crews like RNS on down to the average guy behind a computer.
THE BOYS IN THE WAREHOUSE
But we've jumped ahead of ourselves. RNS members were just teenage geeks (and we know today that they were indeed teenagers). How did they obtain and upload full albums months ahead of their official release?
They could only be obtained from someone in the music industry itself. And the industry knew this. Unfortunately, they concentrated their attention on what they thought were the most obvious suspects, the real culprits went undetected and the pre-release leaks went on for years.
The first suspects were music reviewers for trade and general circulation publications. These people are often the biggest music fans and collectors that there are, and are typically poorly paid when they're paid at all. Others suspected radio DJs as supplying RNS and other pirate crews with pre-release leaks. Contrary to popular belief, radio DJs are damn near as poorly paid as music reviewers.
The presumption of guilt upon reviewers and DJs has drastically changed the way the music industry releases promos, probably to the detriment of the health of the industry overall. Promos are often sent simultaneously with the public release to stores, depressing pre-sale hype. There's even a label out there which runs a massively popular digital download store that, at least as of a year ago, sent out their promos on special copy-protected CDs (which I discovered as I tried to play the CD in iTunes, as I no longer really use my stereo. It came out as a searing blast of white noise.)
The industry's paranoid precautions had little effect on RNS, because music reviewers and radio employees weren't the ones leaking the tracks.
Two members of RNS (only one is identified in the indictment) worked in a hiliariously low-glamour but crucial point in the industry's distribution chain: a CD manufacturing plant. From last week's Federal indictment against Bennie Glover (aka "Adeg"):
GLOVER, along with another RNS member who used the nicknames "St. James" and "Jah Jah," worked for a compact disc production plant in Grover, North Carolina that produced music albums for, among others, Universal Music Group. GLOVER and "St. James" acquired many albums during the course of the conspiracy, including nearly all the major rap (and some pop/rock) pre-release albums, and provided them by various means to CASSIM weeks or often months prior to their commercial release.
Glover and his pal "St. James" weren't the only ones, of course. Sometimes the CDs were legitimately purchased by RNS members overseas, before the official American release date (the industry practice of a staggered release has since been discontinued). But more often, it was folks like these - low-wage or low-glamour employees at warehouses, duplication plants, studios and the like - that completely changed and nearly destroyed the music industry.
In hearings held before the US Congress, European parliaments and a legion of industry panels over the years, one of the most alarming war stories of the battle against online music pirates is the tale of the track that's leaked before it's official release.
A number of tracks have suffered this fate in recent years. Just last week, Jay-Z announced he was moving forward the release date for The Blueprint 3 after online leaks had supposedly ruined his label's marketing plan (though that link, of course, and this story you're reading now are acting as a form of advanced publicity. Jay-Z himself commented on the leak by saying fans should "enjoy" what he interpreted as a "preview".)
What's rarely stated, however, is how exactly music that theoretically no one but the artist and his label should have are getting leaked to start with. Certainly music fans and The Pirate Bay aren't to blame. Many have pointed a finger at advance copies made available to music reviewers, radio stations, DJs and other industry insiders (about which we'll have more to say shortly).
Without insiders, pre-release leaks wouldn't exist. But it's not often talked about. From private conversations with labels, producers, artists and agents, I know it's every bit as significant to their bottom line as the "ordinary" piracy of tracks legitimately purchased by consumers after their release. But maybe it's not PR-friendly for the industry to point the finger of blame over the issue straight back at the industry itself.
A couple of ongoing legal cases this week, however, have pushed the issue of piracy by the music industry itself to the forefront.
One of the major piracy groups which specialized in pre-release leaks, DV8, was broken up back in June in the UK as members were picked up by City of London Police. On Friday, the p2p news site torrentfreak.com reported that a "label executive" was picked up in conjunction with the case "in late August". Unfortunately, their report relies on unnamed sources, but this paragraph in particular spells out why industry insiders are the indispensible cornerstone of pre-release leaks:
DV8, like many release groups, specialized in pre-release piracy - in this case the publication of music on the Internet before official release dates... In order to put the material on to the Internet in this way, Scene groups and individual uploaders need contacts somewhere in the supply chain, so-called industry insiders who act as suppliers for pre-release material. In the case of the OiNK uploaders, they had simply purchased CDs legitimately from online retailers who shipped products a day or two early, possibly in error. But to have the really juicy leaks, people more deeply involved in the supply chain can prove invaluable. (emphasis added)
And in an unrelated case back in the United States, last Wednesday the Feds swooped down on what they claimed were the ringleaders of Rabid Neurosis, or RNS, a piracy ring relying on "music industry insiders" for their wares - and according to some, the originators of the MP3 file sharing scene back in the late 1990s.
According to the Federal indictment filed September 9, 2009 in the Eastern District of Virginia:
In addition to being a piracy group, RNS was a "pre-release group"; that is, the group was often the original source or "first-provider" of pirated music that was distributed on the Internet. Members of RNS sought to acquire digital copies of songs and albums before their commercial release in the United States. The supply of pre-release music was often provided by music industry insiders, such as employees of compact disc manufacturing plants, radio stations, and retailers, who typically receive advance copies of music prior to its commercial release. (emphasis added)
We're still sorting through indictment, but so far it seems to be a fascinating lil exposé on how a song makes it from the CD pressing plant to the blogs - basically, just like legitimate music industry distribution, from insiders to the public. More to come.
You really can't make this up. Almost 1 year to the date since a "suspicious" fire gutted famed nightclub Stereo Montreal - previously owned and perhaps intricately bound to the name of founder David Morales - another"suspicious" fire has burned the club just two days prior to the grand re-opening.
The July 2008 fire caused an estimated $500,000 in damages, though Stereo's acclaimed sound system was said to have survived. Management claimed initially that the club would re-open within a matter of weeks, though it took more than a year for an announcement that the club would be reopening.
The July 2008 fire was reported to be arson. No one was ever charged.
Last night's fire was reported by a club employee in the early morning hours after she heard "what sounded like a small explosion". The fire caused "substantial" damage and the arson squad has reported that accelerants -- usually gasoline or other flame propellant -- were found on the scene.
Like the 2008 fire, last night's blaze is also being treated as arson. Why the same nightclub would be deliberately set on fire twice in 13 months is unclear.
Morales no longer owns Stereo. He was noted for his marathon 16 hour sets called "La Vie en Stereo" at the club.
A PR agency recently sent us a publicity sheet for Stereo's grand re-opening this Labor Day Weekend, claiming the new Stereo would be "eco-friendly, a 'full green club,' using re-purified water and recycling methods; where party people can make their mark on the dance floor, not on the environment." Irony noted!
This is probably one of the most anticipated long-players of the year. Jay-J has been working seemingly forever on this 14 track artist album and the results are well worth the wait. Leaks that emerged from the sessions for the album Love Alive were tantalizing and the final product showcases vocalists Big "Brooklyn" Red, Michelle Shaprow, Charlene Moore, BAM, Judy Albanese, Fabian Leo and showcases the musicianship of the multi-talented Scott Wozniak.
And oh lookie, someone made a kick-ass promo video!
Love Alive dropped this week in stores and is available at dancetracksdigital.com among others.
I've had a million conversations about the subject of social marketing in the House Music scene. David Sabat at DJMarketing101.com (who was one of the poor saps that had to listen to my rants) addressed this subject better than I can do here. If you're one of those folks printing your myspace address on every single thing you produce and think that's enough, I strongly recommend you go read that now.
Being old enough to remember Gopher, an active USENET and even BBS, the notion that the next big thing can overnight become the last big thing - that all of this stuff can vanish tomorrow - is something I've taken for granted. A more recent example is Friendster. Those of us who were active on the internet back then remember hearing the buzz about this "revolutionary" social networking system and witnessed the hysterical peak and inevitable decline.
The same pattern was repeated a few years later with myspace (which is more or less what killed Friendster in the United States), but writ large. Millions of users signed up, blinged out their pages and friended everyone and everything in existence. And then it began to decline.
What happened? Sure, Facebook is the new It Girl, but it's something more than that. MySpace used to be "the place for friends". It's now something like "the place for people desperately trying to sell something to each other". What was (theoretically) a neat way for people to keep up with what one another were doing eventually unraveled to become a hyperactive mutual-promo society, with music producers endless swapping Traxsource links back and forth amongst each other. It resembled not a "place for friends" as much as one endless TV commercial - and outside of the Super Bowl, I don't know any time people turn on the TV just to watch the commercials.
If everything you do resembles a giant, unending television comercial, you're doing it wrong. If you treat your "friends" (real and pretend alike) as if they were faceless customers and the internet like a giant cash register, you're doing it wrong. If every interaction is about something with a price tag attached, don't be surprised if your legions of "fans" don't bother responding anymore.
But that's inevitable, isn't it? Theoretically, these are all neat things to keep in touch. When the rubber hits the road, it's about shoveling as much self-promotion at each other as possible.
But the point is, all of these systems (even those that peaked before we had the words "social networking" to describe them) reach some point of critical mass - when people you meet in ordinary life are using it, but before their kid sister and your niece and nephew sign up. And afterwards, with all of us suffocating beneath each other's links and eflyers and event hype, they burn out. And then everyone moves on to the next big thing.
And that brings us to the latest social media darling, Twitter. The same cycle (Novelty, Use, Overwhelming Promotion, Burn Out) is happening there too, but at a sharply accelerated rate. Those who have been on it for more than a few months won't be surprised to learn that it's now been scientifically verified that it's mostly "pointless babble, spam and self-promotion":
The Texas-based research firm declared that pointless babble accounted for 40.55 per cent of traffic, while spam accounted for 3.75 per cent and self promotion 5.85 per cent. We'd take a guess that "conversational" will largely consist of people asking the pointless babblers what exactly was in their sandwich. Either way, it accounted for 37.55 per cent of Tweets.
Do you want to know what's crazy? I've tried to contact several DJs and producers lately - yes, even now - only to find a trail of dead social networking pages in their wake. None of them have bothered to maintain a theirname.com website, as Sabat argued they should do. And so I moved on to the next artist. If they can't bother publishing an email address or put a simple contact form on a website (total cost: $20), I can't be bothered to figure out whether MySpace, Facebook, Podomatic, SoundCloud or Twitter is their preferred method of communication.
Sure, some business is conducted on Twitter. Some folks have gotten booked on myspace. I'm sure some people have also gotten married to people they've met on the El Train, but it's not exactly the place you'd think of looking for a boy or girl to bring home to mom. Anyone that's maintaining a myspace, facebook or twitter as their primary contact for the community is just asking for what's coming to them.
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.
It's a depression. People aren't going out, people aren't buying anything and every goddamned thing they could buy is on the first page of Google a week before you release it anyway.
I hear plenty of things that my grandmother would find funky and it sounds like bullshit to me, just pure, unadulterated bullshit, music made for cocktail parties and swingin' bachelor pads and beat poetry slams and makes me want to fall asleep with how goddamned respectable the whole thing has become.
The outlaws became the industry and now the industry is falling to pieces and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.
We know our music isn't as popular as it used to be, and we sit reading DJ Mag or BPM telling us that electro and mash-ups and gigging with an 808 and the Buena Vista Social Club in the background are the hot new things and they sell 15,000 copies and we can't sell 63, as if that's the way things are supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad, they're crazy!
It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, pointing and clicking and creating smooth jazz with a 4/4 beat and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our bedrooms! Let me have my Serato and my iTunes and my super unreleased Masters at Work Rip-Off Volume 47 and I won't say anything. I'll make nice, quiet lounge music with sophisticated tempos and very warm instruments that you could put on AM radio and not offend anyone. Just leave us alone!"
Well, I'm not going to leave you alone! I want you to get mad!
I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to shut down Blogspot or Rapidshare. I don't want you to send angry twitters to 500 broke DJs and producers that you know because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the economy and the filesharing and the sell-outs and the days when good music was just as popular as their music and we didn't need to put fucking violins in it to make it that way. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, "I'm a fucking human being and I like House Music, this music has value goddamnit!"
I want you to get up now, I want you to put on the last goddamned record that made you excited and then I want you to break it and make a better one. I don't want you to think how many units it's going to sell or what wallpaper you can rip off Google Images for a cover when you put it on Traxsource.
I don't want you to submit the same Top 10 DJ Chart to 15 different magazines in hopes they'll print your name and your myspace so you can get even more fake friends you're never going to meet.
I don't want you to puff up your resume about the bodies you've rocked and the houses you've brought down and the Beatport charts you've topped and the names of the DJs more famous than yourself that you can drop.
I don't want you to mention your Facebook fan page and how many people SEND U SUM LUV with sparkly graphics and all of the other forms of meaningless bullshit. Because I've run completely out of bullshit. I really don't know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit and I'm not going to take it anymore.
Things have got to change. They've got to. But first, you've got to get mad. Then we'll figure out what to do about the economy and the filesharing and the days when good music was just as popular as their music and it didn't even need congas and warm guitars and violins that would put a senior citizen to sleep.
But first you've got to get mad. You've got to remember why the fuck you're doing this, and it isn't to become a low-resolution flash video star and it isn't to make tribal cocktail music. It isn't to make five more pennies than the poor schmuck next to you. It isn't to become the most recognizable name on YouTube that no one's ever heard play in the flesh.
You've got to stick your neck out, you've got to put a speaker in the window and tell the rest of the fucking world that this is what you like, you're not going to apologize for it and you're not going to take it anymore.
Michael Viner, the head of the tabloid publisher Phoenix Books, passed away at his home in Beverly Hills on August 8, 2009. Most obituaries have focused on his prickly personality and his rather disposable books (his star titles include The Price: My Rise and Fall as Natalia, New York's #1 Escort and he recently took to the web to defend passing a book contract to Rod Blagojevich).
But history is a funny thing. What made for the most notoriety for Viner isn't what he'll ultimately be remembered for. It was a project for music by a band that wasn't really a band, for a movie that no one has ever seen, and turned out to become one of the most influential records of all time: "Apache" by Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band.
Even if you think you don't know this - you know it. Though surely there's someone, somewhere in the ranks of anal retentive musicologists who keeps track of such things, it'd be a fair guess that the Bongo Band's cover of the Shadows' "Apache" is the most sampled record of all time:
How serious the project was, no one now can say - by all accounts, it appears that none of the particulars involved with Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band (his name was part of the band's name in true impressario fashion) looked at it as more than just another gig. Most of the tracks are covers of surf anthems from the 1950s, including "Apache" (originally by The Shadows), and surf classic "Pipeline" (released in 1963 by The Chantays). The players in the Incredible Bongo Band were session musicians (images of the "band" often featured people who hadn't even played on the recordings), and the band was created for the studio, not for the road. And sales for their debut LP Bongo Rock and follow-up The Return of the Incredible Bongo Band were so poor that hardly anyone would have asked to see them live, anyway. Many years later, after a new generation had taken a now middle-aged publisher's long-forgotten dream and made it into one of the most recognizable beats on Planet Earth, Viner would attempt to "reform" the Incredible Bongo Band, but again, there usually aren't return performances for acts that never existed in the first place.
Viner himself was a bongo player, though he never made a living at it or apparently even tried. A former foot soldier for the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, Viner found himself working on the business side of the entertainment industry as a talent scout and A&R rep for the music division of MGM. Some have said that the Incredible Bongo Band was created like so many other "studio" bands, to fill a few minutes of tape in the long-forgotten 1972 exploitation film The Thing With Two Heads (plot: a white bigot's head is fused onto a black man's body. No, seriously.)
Others claim that Viner used his connections to place the already-completed music on the movie's soundtrack to get his pet project more exposure. Whatever the case, the fruit of late night sessions recorded during unused studio time failed to make any kind of dent in public consciousness.
And then something wonderful happened. The large Jamaican community in New York was pushing a style that we'd later call Dub, taking bits and pieces of different records and making them their own (Dimitri from Paris, House Music's foremost musicologist, explains the process in exquisite detail in an interview I did with him in June). One Jamaican DJ, Kool Herc, couldn't get enough of these two records that seemed to be made for dub and turntablism, with their endless breaks and loopable beats stripped bare of all other musical accompaniment. Grandmaster Flash made a similar discovery in the back crates of somebody's momma's record collection. The Sugarhill Gang released a song called "Apache" which drew heavily on the Incredible Bongo Band's version (a cover of a cover, you could say), and as DJ culture took hold, getting a copy of this unbelievably funky track put together by a pretty straight-laced white guy (and performed in large part by the tour drummer for Neil Diamond) became an obsession.
Of course, demand far outstripped supply, and for many years it wasn't even clear who owned the rights to the Incredible Bongo Band recordings. Possibly hundreds of bootlegged releases were issued in the 1980s, and the influence spread well beyond the nascent New York hip-hop scene. Massive Attack, Moby, Missy Elliot and literally hundreds of other artists from a wide gamut of genres lifted that roll from "Apache" and, to a lesser extent, "Bongo Rock", "Let There Be Drums" and other tracks from the Bongo Band's two albums.
By the early 1990s, Viner had navigated the tangled roots of corporate mergers, spin-offs and buy-outs and secured his rights to the Incredible Bongo Band's recordings. The low-quality bootlegs became scarce (though they're still being produced). In typical PT Barnum fashion, he announced all sorts of future projects around his come-from-nowhere hit, but none of them really got off the ground. Most of the "original" band that never was - the session musicians - had moved on with their lives. King Errisson, one of the original percussionists, had spent more than 20 years on the road with Neil Diamond, banging out a quiet rhythm for "Heartlight" and "Coming to America". Another, Jim Gordon, was in a psychiatric hospital after stabbing his mother.
And that's where it ends. Viner seemed, to an outsider at least, both immensely proud and completely uncertain about his baby. And it shouldn't be any surprise. He spent his life pushing rather low-brow books and probably achieved a more enduring fame from a lark from his youth.
Some months ago, a web publication that shall remain nameless (eh, nevermind) did one of those kooky "Where Are They Now?" features, focusing exclusively on Chicago House Music producers from the first and second wave. While pondering the fate of Robert Armani (he's doing fine, by the way, as anyone relying on more than 5 seconds of Googling could tell you), they also threw in a jab at Ralphi Rosario. They knew where he was, of course - Ralphi has been a fixture in this seedy lil town for more than 20 years - but threw a hip-check at his current predilection for the more progressive aspects of House and asked instead "where it had all gone wrong".
Again, spend a few months with your ear to the ground and you'll know that Ralphi hasn't gone anywhere. And it's proven with his newest release, "Everybody Shake It" on Blueplate Global. On the vocals is legendary diva Shawn Christopher (is the singer from the vocal mixes of "French Kiss" real enough for you?), and lest you wonder about the sound, the two or three progressive-ish tracks are offset nicely by mixes from Légo of Poontin Muzik and Jay-J of Shifted Music.
First of all, a link back. Back in March, I wrote in "Death of the Mixtape" that:
As a music fan, I can tell you that I've spent exactly 1 second worrying about how the DJ playing that slammin' track got ahold of it. I expect labels and producers worry about that all the time, but the only thing the dancefloor worries about is whether or not the tune is good - not if someone downloaded it off RapidShare or got it from his buddy.
I'm quoting that here because I have hell all idea where the hell DJ Sneak's The Lost DAT Tapes Vol 1 came from. It's purportedly the first and only release on "Lost Dats US", which could be a clever name Sneak came up with to, well, sneak this one up on you. It could also be the alias of someone releasing these without his consent, knowledge or permission.
It might be a bootleg. It might be something shoved under the door. I know it can be seen as not polite to ask some established recording artists about edits so I won't... But in the hoopla that's sure to surround Sneak's brand new artist album The House of House, we can't lose track of this awesome little EP of beat tracks and simple sample jackin' House that's snaking through the underground.
As you'd guess from the title, the tracks of The Lost DAT Tapes Vol 1 are probably at least a decade old and maybe they sound like it, and maybe that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Whether you have any nostalgia for those times or not, you'd have to be six feet under not to feel the shake from this amazing package of tracks. The only one here that (I think) has been previously released is "Feelin' Freaky" which appeared on 1996's Rice and Beans, Please! double 12" release on Cajual. The rest appear to be truly undiscovered gems from one of the most highly underrated beatmakers of Chicago House Music's second wave.
PIRACY IS SERIOUS BUSINESS
FROM THE CREW TO YOU
THE BOYS IN THE WAREHOUSE
Michael Viner, the head of the tabloid publisher Phoenix Books, passed away at his home in Beverly Hills on August 8, 2009. Most 
Some months ago, a web publication that shall remain nameless (eh, 
First of all, a link back. 
