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.
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.
Fatdrop
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.
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.
The Filing Frenzy
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.)
Back in the 1990s, when the Chicago Bulls were a dynasty rather than a laughingstock, I remember overhearing a conversation at a diner between two twenty-something women. Apparently, one of them had bumped into Scottie Pippen at a restaurant and asked him for an autograph. As the guy was sucking down a plateful of pasta, he declined. "And you know what I said to him?" the lady telling the story said. "I said, 'I don't care about yo' autograph anyway. You'll never be Michael Jordan.'"
Welcome to Chicago, where Playa Hating is elevated to an artform that only crusty pimps and musical vagabonds just one week of radioplay away from being Bigger Than Kanye can appreciate.
Reading and listening the triumphant but ultimately shallow posts about the "comeback of vinyl records" has turned my stomach in knots and now it's inside out. This is nothing to celebrate and if you read the very statistics you're posting with a critical eye, you'd file this one not under WOOT but WTF.
In one of the more cryptic pre-launch announcements in recent months, the makers of Ableton Live and Serato Scratch Live have issued a press release, launched a website and are throwing a party to let the world know that they're doing... something.
Reading between the lines from the sparse (and extremely old) statement issued at ableton-serato.com, it appears that Ableton has vinyl-emulation envy and Serato has event-trigger envy. How to mix these two aspirations together - well, it's not hard to use your imagination to think up some potentially wonderful and some potentially disastrous mash-ups here.
Scouring my sources, it appears that the two companies will be launching a joint product this week (yes, that much was obvious). Seriously though, a hat-tip to corporate security because no one seems to be clear on the details or what this will mean for existing users of Serato and Ableton Live. Some interesting speculation at the excellent dv247 blog though.
Unless you work for a hedge fund or a bookie, predictions for the coming year don't add up to squat. It's a useful way to fill copy, though, so as a relentless copywhore I'm going to list some of mine.
I've got to admit that these are an equal shot of glorious optimism and black pessimism, but it's all about the pith. You might be interested in reading Dave Clarke's for something thoughtful (though I'd say that his are just as much wishful thinking as mine).
We publish a music magazine. Though the industry has changed quite a bit over the years, over the transom submissions are still the lifeblood of any music rag. You want to write about what's new, what's interesting, what's groundbreaking or just what's good to groove to.
Just about all music submissions these days are MP3s. Digital files were supposed to make things easier, yet I spent about 3 hours on Tuesday hunting down artist and label info for releases we've gotten in the last two weeks. Despite repeated complaints from DJs and reviewers, many labels still fail to embed ID3 information in their tracks.
Here we are in 2010, a decade into the MP3 revolution that replaced vinyl, CD and cassette tapes, and people still can't get this.
This is something that my 12 year old niece knows how to do, but apparently a great number of House Music labels do not. Since I'm the helpful sort, here's a breakdown of things that my 12 year old niece knows how to do (with an explanation of how to do them!)
Imported beer tastes better. Microbrews, as a rule, taste better. Yet Budweiser and Miller sell billions of bottles a year and it's not because they brainwash us by carpet-bombing advertising all over the place, but because millions and millions of people (yeah, I know!) like them.
The argument of hi-fi vs. lo-fi has been around for at least 25 years - really since CDs began replacing vinyl as the packaging of choice among consumers. And actually, there isn't an argument at all: hi-fi is better. Many DJs I've spoken to feel almost as if they've been railroaded into a vinyl-less world, and it's true - if you want to stay up on music these days, you're going to have to deal with MP3s even if you think they are (and they are!) clearly inferior.
Now we're starting to see a new phenomenon. People brought up listening to MP3s, whose primary stereo is an iPod and computer, actually prefer the sound of lo-fi over hi-fi... when they can even tell the difference. From PC World:
The Professor found over time the preference was for MP3 encoded songs, with those listening failing to establish any loss in audio quality normally associated with compressed digital music.
"I found not only that MP3s were not thought of as low quality, but over time there was a rise in preference for MP3s," said the Professor who suggests the digitising process leaves music with a 'sizzle' or a metallic sound.
As with a previous generation's debate over the pros and cons of vinyl and CD, the study suggests young ears at least prefer the tinnier and flatter sound of some digital music over CDs and vinyl.
This of course goes hand-in-hand with the fact that more music is being produced to sound better through crappy speakers - to say nothing of the proliferation of Auto-tune which makes just about everything on radio sound like a Sprite commercial with rockin' guitars and multicultural yet inoffensive beautiful people partying on the beach.
Two days ago, Apple purchased popular music streaming sight LaLa (it's a rule these days that any technology that aims to be popular must have a name close to the sound a baby makes throwing up on itself). Socialmediatards fell into a frenzy that this meant that Apple was going to launch a free streaming version of iTunes. Now there are indications that this isn't even close to the truth. Apple is a notoriously secretive company, but it appears they purchased LaLa for the right to employ a couple of their engineers. They've done this many times before, either to secure access to a certain component or simply to expand their devious little hive mind for a product launching way, way down the road.
Lala was only the latest music streaming company to get swallowed up by a gigantic corporation. Back in August, MySpace (owned by Rupert Murdoch, not "Tom") purchased iLike. And just yesterday, MySpace consummated its black widow ingestion of iMeem.
These were more or less the cream of the crop as far as music streaming sites went. Pandora, Spotify and a few others are still out there, but as they say in the newspaper business: two incidents is a coincidence, three makes a trend. And the trend here should freak everyone the fuck out.
Do you know what Apple paid for LaLa? Rumor has it, about $17 million dollars. Sounds like a lot of money until you realize that LaLa had about $14 million in cash in the bank, which makes the actual price around $3 million.
That's all that's left from the estimated $35 million Lala received from investors (including Warner Music). And that gives LaLa a return on investment of -50%, which makes the real estate industry look damn lucrative right about now.
Back in August, iLike was sold to MySpace for $20 million. And iMeem - probably the most popular of all streaming sites - was picked up for somewhere around $1 million.
These sites have millions of users between them. Why are these services going so cheap?
Because they're losing money, and a lot of it.
LaLa was in the red about half a million bucks a month, meaning they could float for maybe a little more than a year before going broke. iMeem nearly went out of business over the summer because it was (and presumably still is) drastically far behind on its payments to music industry labels for licensing their fees. The price here might very well just be a deal to cover iMeem's outstanding debt.
This is another dirty little secret of the "Music 2.0" that web gurus at conferences and workshops and seminars like to shove down your throat. Nobody is making money at it. Streaming is all great but it's just another promotional tool, not a goldmine. And there are quite enough promotional tools already that don't make any money.
The reason why nobody talks about this - or rarely does, anyway - is that most of the writing about these companies is from tech-oriented sites and publications. They're writing from the perspective of users, not musicians (and certainly not as investors). They love a service and declare it a success - and it is, as far as pleasing many people goes.
Walking around and stuffing envelopes full of money into the hands of strangers is successful as well, but, like music streaming sites, is not really a growth industry.
This profound disconnection between users on the one hand and content producers and investors on the other has led to some surreal episodes in the wake of the new ownership of these sites taking over. There was a bit of an uproar when the first thing MySpace did after taking over iMeem today was to shut off access to iMeem's API, which developers can use to spray a site's content around like a firehose.
Developers immediately freaked the fuck out - many had built websites around those APIs (presumably with as solid a business plan as iMeem had in the first place, which is to say none at all.)
Lee Martin, developer of twt.fm (a "mash up" of iMeem and Twitter, presumably pronounced TWATFOOM!) cried foul as his service built upon iMeem's API went dark:
If this is MySpace's idea of how to run a successful music tech company, they have truly lost their way. Imeem was leagues ahead of their competition (MySpace, iLike, and Lala) in terms of technology and openness. They represented the music business of the future. Now they are a forced hyperlink to a cold, un-innovative, MySpace landing page (http://myspace.com/imeem) making false promises and giving no guidance or help for the developer community they just destroyed.
In truth, Rupert Murdoch is sick of MySpace losing money. Every day, every user is costing iMeem money. Rupert's hand-picked minions at MySpace undoubtedly read the writing on the wall and put a stop to bleeding bales of money for neat little hacks that nearly led iMeem to shut down before Rupert picked up the company for a song.
Martin is right, though: iMeem truly was the music business of the future. No future.
Traxsource has published their list of the top 100 and except for screaming at each other over the order, it's... pretty much about right. Granted, this is what you'd expect from a sales list (which not even the Grammies, the ultimate beauty contest for industry pinheads, is about), and I'm guessing that's what this is because there's no explanation whatsoever attached to it.
(Perhaps an issue to discuss at another time is how it came to be that two of the largest commercial vendors of dance music on the 'net (Beatportal and to a lesser extent Traxsource itself) came to also dabble in journalism, which to my mind no healthy industry has tolerated at any time in history.)
But! The top ten:
01: Mr.V - Tales From The Deepside 2 - SOLE Channel
02: Mishal Moore - Oh Lord (Incl. Kenny Dope + MuthaFunkaz Mixes) - Ill Friction
03: Blackcoffee feat. Bucie - Turn Me On (Incl. Raw Artistic Soul Mixes) - Gogo
04: Kerri Chandler - Track 1 Revisited - Max Trax
05: John 'Julius' Knight + Roland Clark - This Is House (Incl. Jask, Luis Radio + Raffa Mixes) - Soulfuric Trax
06: Various - MN2S WMC Miami Sampler 09 - MN2S
07: Mr. V - Strictly Rhythms Vol. 2 Sampler (Compiled by Mr V) - Strictly Rhythm
08: Yass Presents Jay + Tahira - All I'm Asking For - Grei Matter
09: Dennis Ferrer - Sinfonia Della Notte - Strictly Rhythm
10: Soulsearcher - Can't Get Enough (Incl. Henrik B, Hy2rogen + Nikola Remix, Guy Robin, Layabouts, Original Jazz-N-Groove Mixes) - Defected
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.
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!
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 by 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.
If you can't tell, things slow to a crawl in 5 Mag land the third week of every month. That's when this terribly understaffed magazine gathers up our precious human resources and puts out another installment of the only magazine Stateside that's devoted exclusively to true, genuine, uncompromising House Music.
We'll be picking up the momentum again next week, but here are a few things piling up in my tray:
Andy Ward ft. Sofia Rubina's Streets of the Sun is the hottest track I've heard this summer. Seriously - I'm starting to get bored of superduper deep shit but the Heavyweight Mix (a collaboration with my absolute hero Phil Asher) just kills.
Our friends at Stompy are giving away just a slew of tunes as part of a summer sampler, including tracks from House stalwarts Matthew Bandy, Lars behrenroth, Jay Tripwire and 1200 Warriors.
Yet another House Music mini-doc focusing on Chicago (embedded below). I imagine that ultra-hip video stores are beginning to clear out old copies of Laser Mission to devote a shelf to Chicago House Music documentaries:
And finally, before I pass out for the weekend, Cz's in fine form in the latest 5 Magazine Radio Show:
Every few years, Wired editor and would-be visionary Chris Anderson crawls out from the Conde Nast slush pile and releases a book based around his latest, "groundbreaking" big idea. He's at it again with his latest tome which many media watchers and twitchy record industry types are abuzz about, called Free: The Future of a Radical Price.
Anderson is famous for popularizing the economic theory of "The Long Tail". Even if you know nothing about economics, you're familiar with The Long Tail. It's why, in theory at least, you prefer to shop at Amazon.com (and why that last link went to Amazon.com!) rather than your local bookstore. The basic notion is that people like variety, and businesses can be rewarded by stocking a huge array of products and selling "less of more" - that is, more books that sell 100 copies in addition to the handful of bestsellers.
You see, in the past, many businesses functioned on the concept of selling you, the consumer, "more of less". For every person asking their local record clerk for an album by Spencer Kincy, there were 5000 looking for the latest Spice Girls drek. For brick-and-mortar stores, it would cost to much to house one of everything you would possibly want to buy, and thus appealed to the masses by stocking many copies of just a few titles.
Some companies had always done this, making their living by specialization and serving niche markets. But with The Long Tail, Anderson made it a religion. That's the thing about his big, bookworthy ideas: they're concepts that have been around for awhile in one form or another but which take on an almost messianic force in his hands.
So in theory, Amazon or iTunes - which, thanks to digital delivery, don't need enormous warehouses to stock physical copies of every record they carry - could offer an inventory of billions of songs, and make more money by selling one Spencer Kincy record to a handful of customers, in addition to one Spice Girls record to millions. Esoteric or niche artists could finally make a living, bypassing the old record store chains with their restrictive inventory. Fans of less popular artists could get their music. Start-up companies could make millions tapping into a market that the big companies shrugged off as inconsequential. Everyone would win.
Except that it's not true.
According to the curmudgeonly Andrew Orlowski of The Register, "there are 13 million songs on iTunes and nine million have never been downloaded once." iTunes built it, but the customers have failed to come. That's right: nearly 70% of all music on iTunes has never had one single person plunk down $0.99 to own it.
And in addition to the legitimate economy, the failure of The Long Tail is obvious in the black market too. The most pirated songs on file sharing services are not obscure tunes that are difficult to come by. It's not Spencer Kincy - it's the Spice Girls. Media tracking firm BigChampagne released a study back in May which noted that "Much of the volume (sales or swaps) is concentrated amongst a small proportion of the available tracks." Most people log on to file sharing services to download the pop song they just heard on the radio, not to find new music by artists they've never heard of before.
Despite the apparent failure of his theory of The Long Tail, Chris Anderson has a new book out based on a Wired cover story from about a year ago called Free: The Future of a Radical Price. In Free, Anderson stakes out the claim that businesses should be in the... uh... business... of giving away things for free, building staggering user bases and then making money on the back end. For a music artist, the theory of Free goes like this: make your music, give it away, and make money on concert sales/live performances/exclusive bits and pieces, similar to what Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails did. Again, it's not a revolutionary idea, but when it's screaming across the cover in 150 point type, FREE! sure sounds like it (Reznor, for that matter, seems to endorse the ideas in Free - which he should, since Anderson's basically creating a theory around what Reznor already practices.)
Much like The Long Tail, Anderson's Theory of Free works in some ways, and is absolute nonsense in others. In a nutshell, it works well for someone like Reznor that already has worldwide exposure - in other words, a tiny speck of all artists in the world.
In an ultra-nutshell: unless your name is Sporty Spice, the Theory of Free isn't going to do shit for you.
The Spice Girls and other mass media artists are probably always going to be able to burn their music to a 5" compact disc and charge someone $15.99 for the pleasure of listening to it. They may sell fewer units today than a few years ago, and they may have to work harder to even establish that smaller number, but the sheer size of a mass media artist's fanbase ensures that some commerce will take place, in some form, over anything they produce. If they give away the music and charge for "premium editions", as Reznor did, that seems to be a viable strategy, but it's certainly not the only one. They're already famous: the argument here is what particular product they want to sell, not their ability to sell any at all.
But for the new artist hoping to break in or the obscure artist hoping to breakthrough, "free" really doesn't do anything. It doesn't stimulate demand and in most cases, making music available to everyone is still a long way from getting it heard by anyone. Can you introduce yourself to a new audience by uploading your tracks somewhere for free? Probably. Is it more effective promotion than pricing it at $2.99, paying for killer artwork, listing feedback from better-known industry peers and uploading it for purchase on Traxsource, Stompy, or Juno? That remains to be seen.
In other words - "free" can work well if you already have a massive base of fans to work with. For less famous artists, it's still the same unhappy slog of recording, releasing, and praying someone notices, whether you offer it for free or not. For a decade now, from Napster to BitTorrent, anyone could download damn near anything for "free" - and most of them chose to download the Spice Girls and other acts they already knew about, instead of Spencer Kincy and acts they didn't. The promotional advantage of "free" for the vast majority of artists is still murky, to say the least.
And yet, for the actual recording industry (to which the ideas of Free are often being applied), Anderson argues that it's not just preferable to sell music for nothing - it's inevitable. And on this point I have to say that I think he's right, but not for the reasons stated.
He states that the cost of production, packaging, storage and retail are declining, and this is true - there's really no good reason why an album costs as much (or more) as a digital download as it did when you were buying a 12" slab of vinyl.
But that's not why music prices are in free fall. It has little to do with standardized iTunes prices. It has even less to do with the higher pricing that many niche dance music sites assign to releases. It has to do with the sheer, unfathomable, incomprehensible glut of new music being churned out these days.
And we'll get to those economics of doom in the next post.
The upshot: these were conversations I've never forgotten. What began as just a quick hello evolved into some deep discussions of the industry, the community and beyond that a discourse on the peculiarities of human nature. Aside from having one of the strongest voices ever etched into acetate, Keith has some of the strongest, mostly deeply held convictions of anyone I've met, and is certainly one of the most well-rounded folks I've had the pleasure to meet, in the industry or out.
During our first conversation some two or three years ago, Keith mentioned a book he was working on. It wasn't yet another "Who Was House Music's Daddy?" diatribe, the likes of which have come and go without ever having decided anything. No, what he was working on was nothing less than a meditation on the modern African-American family.
During our second conversation, he told me the book was finished, and I can't wait to read this. You can pick it up at Amazon here or, if you're in the Chicago area, meet the author on July 19th from 2pm-5pm at Sonoma Cafe (2845 W. 95th St. in Evergreen Park) - RSVP or get in touch with Keith at keithkimonialexander@yahoo.com.
Cash just makes people deliriously happy. So does free stuff. And so we're back like Don LePre, positively orgasmic over the very idea of giving you free House Music downloads that pass through our radar.
You might think of Planet E or the veritable Underground Resistance when it comes to Detroit Techno, but Eddie Fowlkes has surrounded himself with a talented cadre of up and comers that veer off to the more soulful side of House. Here is another one from Le El (and check out the 3 part mix from Eddie, plus goodness from Tyree and others while you're dropping by).
Frank Broughton & Co. at djhistory.com are releasing another book - a huge bounty of photos called Raving '89. The book won't be available until August, but in anticipation of pre-orders coming next week, they've released a 32 page sample of the final product.
Finally, someone's created this handy guide to becoming a DJ. Because chicks dig it when dudes stand in front of people and do things:
We're a little light on the tracks this week, which doesn't make us happy but not even this can besmirch Don LePre's smile. If you have something you think we should check out for Free House, drop me a line.
There's no other country in the world in which not just dance, not just House, but deep house is the country's "most dominant genre". Yes, this is another attempt to get everyone to pay proper attention to what's going on half a world away, where Black Coffee - South African House Music's first identifiable, worldwide superstar - is one but just one of a dozen incredibly talented cats and where not just House Music but good House Music is becoming the anthem of a new generation.
Enter one of the crucial founding fathers - the so-called "Godfather of South African House Music," DJ Christos. And he's every bit as important in his own country and times as Frankie Knuckles is to House Music in Chicago, New York and Europe. From the Daily South African:
When the house music scene became popular in South Africa, over two decades ago, there were only a few DJs, and DJ Christos was one of them. Looking at how many talented DJ's the country has produced over the years, one has to give credit to this legendary Godfather of house music.
"I am always on fire, it's in my blood." says DJ Christos. The self proclaimed 'Mafia of house music' influenced and provided platforms for numerous DJs and producers and he's been credited for the current flourish in the South African House music scene...
When DJ Christos met his long time friend and partner Vinny Da Vinci back in 1995 in Johannesburg, when Christos used to be a resident at Caesar's Palace, the roots of what is now one of South Africa's most dominant genre, deep house music, was formed.
Here's an interview with DJ Christos (discogs, bio) from the Mzansi show from June 2nd. The interview starts around 37:00 in, and if you want to really know what South African House is all about, I highly recommend a listen. And here's a fittingly grainy video:
sorry..and thanks to all who visited during the 8 months but enough is enough
ive been threatened with law suits...family threatened.....pc hacked......email hijacked....
links removed blacklisted from pay music sites...so i cant buy legitimately... and all i wanted to do was try and promote deep soulful vibes as progressive and electro is all over the place
but hey i tried..... all links will be removed within 72 hours
peace...Keisha
A word of explanation: for some time, "Keisha" has run one of those blogs that consists of nothing but links to pirated music. The hilarious thing is that next to a few hundred dollars worth of pilfered downloads, she has a little image that read "Please Support the Artists". Apparently, the best way to do that is to pirate their music.
She posted the above message apparently in response to getting legal takedown notices. And the funny thing is, she sounds twice as whiny as the million dollar artist claiming he can't feed his 50 illegitimate children because some kid dumped his stuff on bittorrent.
Few people have railed against the backwards thinking of the dance music - and specifically House Music - community than I have. I've actually confronted artists when they spin out some antiquated notion that House Music will be a-okay if people "buy more music".
But Keisha? You were not fucking helping artists. You say you were giving them exposure? People die of exposure. And the fact is that you knew what you were doing was wrong the entire time, otherwise you would have happily hosted the downloads on your own site called www.keisha-yourlastname.com rather than posting RapidShare links, which are notoriously difficult to have removed.
I seriously doubt anyone in the industry "hacked" your PC (most people at labels barely understand the internet - and I'm only half-joking about that). And I'm very sorry you had "links removed" - I'm sure you deserve to be compensated for the few minutes you spent uploading someone else's music (and we'll leave alone the hypocrisy that the artists don't deserve it for the days, weeks and months they spent creating it).
But the fact is, you're not a person "promot[ing] deep soulful vibes". You are what Andrew Orlowski at The Register has popularized as a "freetard" - one who "nobly refuse to pay creators for music, TV and film as a point of principle". You posted more music than most people could even listen to simply because you could, and because it gave you a bit of a rush to have that kind of power as someone in the know, someone in control.
My advice on where you go from here is to run to the back alley behind an audio shop, hijack the delivery truck and steal a pair of turntables. At least then you'd be able to have some sort of skill at the end of the day. And you could even use your real name!
Here's a pleasant surprise this morning. The New York Times has an extensive write up in their arts section on New York city DJ wunderkinds The Martinez Brothers:
The smell coming off the dance floor of Le Poisson Rouge on Sunday night, that was the baby powder.
Dropped by a handful of people, who disseminated it in Lebron James-like clouds, it minimized friction on the floor, making it possible for a certain strain of dancer to spin and slide and twist with ease.
Such is the sort of fan attracted to the house-music prodigies the Martinez Brothers ‹ Stevie Jr., 20, and Christian, 17 ‹ who began a summer residency at the club with a three-hour D.J. set that treated dance music as an actual breathing, kinesthetic experience.
In recent years dance music has survived rave and electro revivals, the persistence of mash-ups and incursions into hip-hop and pop. But too often it has become merely a trigger for the collective memory of a room of hipsters. Dance music, in the classic nightclub sense, has become almost old-fashioned.
But the Martinez Brothers ‹ Puerto Ricans raised in the Bronx and now living in Monroe, N.Y. ‹ are firm traditionalists, playing what has become by and large an old-timer's game.
Is the most valuable back catalog in dance music - an empire of sounds sampled every single day, from KTel-type compilations to hot new tracks - on the trading block?
Question marks abound. I'm not too pleased to make speculative conclusions but a little investigation reveals that something strange is going on.
It started a few months ago, when I noticed that mail being sent to West End was being returned. This happens - to everybody - now and then, but after a few issues and a few months, I realized it wasn't a fluke.
I haven't heard anything from anyone at West End since Mel Cheren died in December 2007. Nobody's logged into their myspace page, per myspace's public display counter, since January 2, 2008 - just a few weeks after Mel Cheren passed and the news first broke. The company's main telephone phone number - 212.367.3737 - is now answered by a message indicating that the owner has not yet activated their voicemail. The fax number - 212.367.3738 - has been disconnected.
So I went to their website to get a phone number. That was when I noticed this, under their contact information:
West End Records C/o Reiss Eisenpress LLP 425 Madison Avenue, 11th Floor New York, NY 10017
(The link for the above is now dead - see below - but Google has it cached here.)
And looking up info for "Reiss Eisenpress LLP" indicates that the company is a New York firm which was responsible - and here's the key point - for Mel Cheren's estate after his passing (NY Times link here). The firm was also quoted as recently as February 2009 in connection with the sale of another of Mel Cheren's assets, the Colonial House Inn.
And now for the kicker: I made repeated attempts to contact both West End as well as individuals that I knew worked there at one time, as well as Reiss Eisenpress. I received no direct response, but there has been what appears to be an indirect one: within a week of beginning my inquiries, the website (or at least the main version of it) was taken down. You can no longer access anything from westendrecords.com. However, Google has picked up an older version which appears to date from at least three or four years ago.
So these are the facts: the business operating West End Records has no address where they do business, no working phone number, attempts were made to delete their website and the firm responsible for Mel Cheren's estate was listed as the contact person on the website.
It appears, though it is not certain, that the most valuable back catalog in dance music is either on the block or in a state of transition to something else.
We're back from the dead - aka the usual monthly production grind that our staff of 3 (in the fashion of Nigerian scamsters, that's "three") performs each month to get 5 Magazine on the street. And this is a good one. Frankie Knuckles steps out from behind the booth to explain his sentiments to his fans (as well as sounding off on classics parties, the cult of the superstar DJ and more). And then Dimitri from Paris, quite unexpectedly, explains just about the entire history of Dub, from the dawn of multitrack recording to Jamaican reggae and New York's disco scene.
In other words, it's a good 'un and we hope you'll get the chance to check it out in June.
And now it's back to work. Amuse yourself for a moment with Stevie Wonder rockin' out on Sesame Street:
Tonight we're holding the official launch party for this here site. If you're in Chicago, stop by Betty's Blue Star Lounge (1600 W. Grand) for our good friends Paul Johnson and Gene Hunt with resident DJ Rees Urban. It's free and goes until 4am.
I don't think you'll find anyone that cares less what's playing on the radio, but the passing of the Performance Rights Act by Congress last week by the US Congress' House Judiciary Committee might lead to more changes to the audio spectrum than anything in our lifetime.
In theory, it's a good thing. Terrestrial radio (what you can pick up with an antenna) has long been exempt from paying for performance rights (though they did have to pay the songwriters). To simplify: when you heard the 10,000th daily rotation of Beyonce on your local urban station, she received nothing for being the singer on the track - only if she was also the writer of it. Obviously, when it comes to pop music, the performer and the writer are often two different entities.
There was a gauntlet of pop stars that walked before the Judiciary Committee, as there always are when it comes to these things. In theory, people making money from their music is always a good thing.
But why then did a group of minority broadcasting lobbyists and the like protest the decision?
Arguing that the passage of the bill into law (it has yet to pass both houses of Congress and receive the president's signature) was a bad thing for their bosses, these folks wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the bill "would lead to severe reductions in sustaining and public service programming" and even "the bankruptcies of at least a third of minority radio stations."
It's pretty hard to stand on the side of ClearChannel and the other megaconglomerates that rule the radio spectrum these days, and those are most of the folks who have been lobbying hard against this bill. It's also hard to stand against the idea of a singer getting a few fractions of a penny every time his or her song is played. But with those megaconglomerates running the show, the prohibitive cost of paying for performance rights might lead to something else: the end of music radio altogether. It won't take much for a few stations to test more all-talk formats, weigh the balance and figure out that it's simply cheaper to syndicate Rush or some other windbag in another town than cut into profits with music. These folks love cheaper. It's what they do.
Maybe music radio is doomed, and maybe that's not a bad thing. The status quo certainly sucks and maybe it doesn't deserve to be saved. But it seems highly unlikely that the singer, drummer or the guy that strummed the guitar on a 1958 Bluenote Records release is going to get anything from this, which is supposeldy what this whole thing was about.
The line-up for the two day Electric Zoo Festival to be held September 5th and 6th, 2009 (that's Labor Day weekend) has been announced. This is supposedly preliminary, with more to come, but outside of Frankie Knuckles on Sunday and possibly Kaskade and Danny Tenaglia on Saturday, House Music isn't terribly well represented. It's $100 for General Admission to both days of what's being billed as "New York's Electronic Music Festival" held at Randall's Island Park, New York. The list so far:
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5th
Armin van Buuren
Benny Benassi
Danny Tenaglia
Roger Sanchez
Luciano
Robbie Rivera
Marco Carola
Chus & Ceballos
Kaskade
Paco Osuna
Chris Lake
Speedy J
Martin Buttrich
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6th
David Guetta
Ferry Corsten
Richie Hawtin
Markus Schulz
Special Disco Version featuring
James Murphy & Pat Mahoney (LCD Soundsystem/DFA)
Frankie Knuckles
Steve Bug
Josh Gabriel
James Holden
Audion
Menno De Jong
What's actually kinda funny about this isn't the poor representation of House Music, but how few of the DJs at "New York's Electronic Music Festival" are actually from New York. More info, if you're so inclined, is at electroniczoofestival.com.
When the Lord made Heaven He was happy. When the Lord made the platypus He was high. When the Lord made this 30+ page thread of Peven Everett's friend/protege/business partner hurling abuse from on high at the lowly people below... I hope the good Lord realizes He's made a huge mistake and sends a flood to bury it all.
I highly recommend checking this out. It has that certain talent for outrage that Richard Pryor refined in his comedy routine, of heightening anticipation by constantly topping himself, pushing it further and further beyond where you thought good taste would stop. Oh, she did not just threaten to sue a DJ who made an edit of one of her bossman's songs! She definitely didn't mean that. She'll definitely take it back in this next post when she... threatens a DJ for including a Peven song on a mix. Or when she somehow claims credit for building the House Music scene, then says it's dead and that she's moving back to London where true House Music lives.
Before you know it, it's a mass orgy. Or a riot. Or maybe both. I don't know anymore. The words sometimes come from Peven, sometimes from his friend/protege/business partner. And sometimes it sounds like a two year old bashing on a keyboard with a TeleTubbie.
It's hard to take this seriously. It's been my impression for awhile that Peven has never been comfortable as a "House Music artist". He said as much in an interview with 5 Mag more than three years ago. And the stories about a breakdown with Unified Records have been circulating for awhile too (Note that some posts from "StudioConfessionsEnt" have either been deleted or edited - including the ones in which "StudioConfessionsEnt" suggests that bringing heat in public will get their back invoices paid - but the originals are still contained in quotes from other posters. I have no evidence at all that the allegations are true. But the accusation is now in print and it's silly to pretend it's not out there.)
What I'm saying is that this has been a long time coming. The sentiments expressed here - fragmented, disjointed, twisted by seething resentment and bitterness and just plain old fucking bizarre - have been expressed before by Peven, more succinctly here:
"We have to take the House connotation off of [the music] because it cheapens it, quite frankly, to me. It cheapens it. I'm going to use that word. It's a very deadly word to use in this particular piece here, but it cheapens it. It doesn't make it worth what it really means to people like me.
"But the people who read this magazine, who actually care about the history of it, and who really want to know what really went down, what really went down is DJs have always played records. The House scene isn't made of DJs, it's made of the records they play. It's all for the DJ, but let's get off of that. Let's get more into who produced the record. If you DJ too, that's a good talent to have, it's not an easy thing to do. But it's about the record."
You know what? It took a certain set of balls to say that in the pages of a magazine zealously devoted to promoting soulful House Music. And those words have been out there in print since February 2006 and on the web since around March of the same year. If people didn't really want to believe them, I'm afraid that this will all come as a nasty surprise. That's what Peven thinks, and it's not a recent change-of-heart on his part.
That's the best that can be said. These posts? Highly inflammatory, hardly coherent, utterly futile. "Self destructive" comes to mind. And hopeless. Dennis Ferrer chimes into that clusterfuck of a thread somewhere around the 20 page mark. Pay attention to the last paragraph to see why:
This is such a small niche genre. Anything an artist can do to get his work noticed is a plus. If this means someone doing an edit of your work...so be it. I'm honored when someone thinks enough of a record of mine to edit it. If they think they can make it better..then ..Please..by all means do it!! In these modern times your records are now seen as business cards. There is not a whole lot of revenue to be made from sales. So whatever you can have done to expand your profile whether it's in a printable or audible format is a good thing. As your other forms of earning potential revenue depend on that. Long gone are the days of worrying. You just kinda keep it moving and you don't dwell. Doesn't mean someone won't catch a beatdown for booting an original. But a bootleg rmx? Fuk it....go and make me more money son!
This has to be one of the craziest things i've read. Woulda made sense in the early nineties where a different business model was being employed. Nowadays? Kinda like cutting off your own nose to spite ya face if you ask me.
UPDATE:It's still going on. Peven/Billie/StudioConfessionsEnt have started a whole new thread, apparently to paint a larger target on their big toe. Will someone call Comcast and beg them to take Peven Everett's internet away?
SECOND UPDATE: I've gotten a number of emails about this, a few of which contained links to even more incendiary comments from Peven's friend/protege/business partner accusing others of stealing Peven's music. I found more on my own. I'm not referring to the Pharrell Williams situation, which has been fairly well publicized, but accusations against individuals - solid people, all of them - in the House Music scene, not mentioned in any of the commentary I've seen about this. The fact is, as Dennis Ferrer mentioned in one of his posts, a lot of people are watching this with a whole different sort of shock and awe.
We're back like Matthew Lesko, just violently happy to give you free stuff for your House Music pleasure.
Start off with your birthday present, whenever it is. House DJ, producer and remixer extraordinaire Scott Wozniak is giving away a zip of 30 unreleased tracks. You read that right: 30 free tracks from one of the best beatmakers working today. Happy birthday!
If you're not hip yet, get hip now: every Thursday, OM Records is giving away a free bootleg track from their working artists and producers. Past freebies include remixes of J-Boogie, Mike Monday and more.
That masked man is your friend: Mad Mike Banks of Detroit's seminal Underground Resistance outfit (see a short documentary here) informs us that Strom Radio in Sweden is airing a special "celebration of Underground Resistance" today, May 13th at 9:30pm (GMT +2), and it'll be streamed online for four weeks after the initial broadcast. It's all in Swedish and I'm an ignorant American but it seems the link will appear here.
Everything good: Fred Everything's latest Lazy Days Podcast is so hot that I've actually seen it pirated. Yes, people are downloading it, uploading it again and posting it as RapidShare links on blogs. In a comment, Fred told us the more the merrier when it comes to his podcast - just please don't boot the new releases, okay? Featured here are tracks from AtJazz, Joey Negro, DJ Dealer, Kerry Chandler, and Fred's joint with Olivier Desmet, "Think About It" on Amenti.
Spreadin far and wide: King Britt is another producer/DJ that likes to reward you for your attention. His latest free download on his site is his remix of Anne by Santigold.
If you've got something you want featured in Free House, drop me a line.
Every year, producers and industry-types I talk to lament the lack of meaningful business conducted in Miami at the Winter Music Conference. You'd think that getting most of the top people in all facets of the dance industry together would result in more than douchemusic DJs complaining about doucheculture heiresses disrespecting their craft, but outside of a few below-market bookings and the chance to seed promos to the right people, the only ones who seem to do a killing are the hotels and clubs.
But years ago, there used to be something called the New Music Seminar, and industry legends from Terry Hunter (and here) to Tyree Cooper to Farley Jackmaster Funk have told us in interviews how crucial the New Music Seminar was in their respective careers.
Now, Tommy Silverman of Tommy Boy Entertainment and Dave Lory of Worldwide Entertainment Group are bringing it back. And unlike the party vibe of Miami, the "new"-New Music Seminar is focusing like a laser beam on the question on everyone's mind: how are we supposed to make a living these days?
Helpfully, their promo package indicates what this incarnation of the New Music Seminar is not about, which seems determined to limit or eliminate the navel-gazing that plagues industry conferences altogether:
What the New Music Seminar is NOT about:
• A debate about DRM
• How to get signed
• Getting your songs on the radio
• The politics of the music business
• Fitting In
What the New Music Seminar IS about:
• Seeing the music business and your opportunities a new way
• Learning to create the music and content you need to succeed
• Standing out from your competition
• Legal and business basics that you must know
• Keeping up with the latest technology to put you in front
• Managing and monetizing your relationship with your fans
• Networking with others to build your own music business foundation
In response to an email, Mr. Silverman tells us more about the approach they're taking this time around:
The New Music Seminar is launching on July 21 in New York as a one day event with a focused goal of introducing the new music business and its demands and requirements so artists of all types, from house to hip hop can learn how to become successful in the years ahead. NMS will not have 48 panels as the old seminar did. It will have a keynote and four consecutive sessions aimed at changing the way we think about the music business and our own art and businesses.
Just last week, some guy peddling hilariously generic "HOW TO BECOME A MUSIC SUPERSTAR" ebooks enquired about advertising with us. The whole thing smelled of scam and, while providing some amusement in the office, I was still amazed that people will actually buy this kind of junk. Anything you're likely to read - even if it was produced by someone you've actually heard of instead of a two-bit internet spammer - is likely to be out of date by the time you read it, especially now. Frankly, if you want insight into how this mess just might be sorted out, ignore all of the gurus and aggregators and hypemen for services you probably don't need. This is it.
Registration is currently open for the New Music Seminar's first date, this July 21, 2009 at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (566 LaGuardia Place) in New York. You can find out more info and details about the sessions here.
Last month, when I was putting together the strands of information that would go into 5's story on Spencer Kincy, I happened across a lengthy profile from a UK magazine on the "new House sound of Chicago" - circa 1994. For the Brits making the sojourn to what they considered the "House Mecca", they were in for a pretty grim disappointment.
Far from dominating the local airwaves, they could hardly find a couple of minutes of real Chicago House on local radio. Clubs like the Warehouse on Randolph weren't hard to find but a bit in the shadow of the megaplexes dishing out commoditized commercial nonsense. And to local media, it was like this beautiful thing then transforming local culture didn't exist at all.
That's been the name of the game in Chicago. It's not just that Mark Farina, DJ Sneak, DJ Rush and many others of that generation blew up into full-blown stars when they left Chicago, but hilariously enough were only deemed worth of "local coverage" by the press after they moved away. If you think that's an unfair characterization, compare them with two DJ/producers of the same stature - say, Mike Dunn and Mark Grant - who remained in Chicago, and compare the coverage between them. The fact that these guys are in this city making music that's played all around the world and can be seen almost weekly is deemed less important in column-inches compared to someone who used to live here releasing a new compilation and appearing for one night only.
So it was with some shock that I opened this week's Chicago Reader - the local "alt-weekly", though it's owned by a conglomerate based in the South and is, like the other major newspapers in the city, in bankruptcy - and learned that Hip House, a genre of music pushed hard by Chicago's Tyree Cooper, Fast Eddie, Kool Rock Steady and others and all but ignored by the local Chicago press in its heyday, is suddenly popular:
Given all that dramatic irony, as well as the broad targets presented by the wardrobes on display, it's surprising that "Chicago Hip House Documentary 1989" didn't attract more snark when it propagated across the Internet. Chicago hip-hop blog Fake Shore Drive, which covers nu-gangsta rap alongside relatively dance-friendly "hipster-hop," posted it with the one-word commentary "Dope," and the site's pool of hard-line commenters‹who can usually be counted on to savage anything that doesn't meet their impossible standards‹barely raised an eyebrow.
I credit this to the present-day crossover between hip-hop and dance music, which has blurred the distinction between the two - and against all odds redeemed the reputation of hip-house. What seemed corny just a couple years ago now looks prescient‹maybe hip-house's problem was that it arrived 20 years ahead of its time.
Putting aside the issue that a couple of blogs posting a video with the "one-word commentary 'Dope'" makes for wide critical acceptance, I'm going to guess that the irony of a newspaper wallowing in nostalgia for a video they probably took no notice of when it came out 20 years ago shot about four miles over the head of the Reader.
There's actually a really interesting story about the rise and fall of Hip House in this, and it has nothing to do with jaded Hip Hop aficionados doing a 180 and praising what they condemned as "crazy ass fag shit" back in the day, or nostalgia for something that the media damn near murdered by negligence back when it mattered. This is from Rees Urban's interview just seven months ago with Tyree Cooper, about his encounter with the pimps of commercial Hip-Hop at the New Music Seminar:
BET used to have a show called "Rap City." There was a guy called Prime. Prime and I were in New York during the New Music Seminar. Prime says, "Let's go to this rap unity conference and talk about the unity in rap music and why they don't play Hip House videos. Ask why BET plays Fast Eddie and Mr. Lee but MTV was bigger and they (Ed Lover and Dr. Dre) were getting the same videos but weren't playing them."
The panel was Prince Paul, MC Lyte, Ice-T, Ed Lover and a couple others. Prime said, "Why don't you go to the mic and say something about why they don't play any Hip House videos if you're about unity?" So I did. I said my name and they recognized me because Ed Lover tried to do a Hip House record and said it didn't work. I said you should have got me to do the production. So he asked me why, when Rappin' Duke did "Da Ha Da Ha," they didn't call it "Country Hop."
I said, "Well that's cause it was B-Boy Music, it wasn't even Hip Hop then."
So we got into an argument and the panel kind of closed after that. It was getting heated. A Tribe Called Quest, Brand Nubian - all these Hip Hop heads, and lot of them didn't even have deals then, they we're just young guns. A lot of them were like, "Fuck all that dance music, all that crazy ass fag shit."
I'm like, "You don't know that shit was born and bred in Chicago on the South and Westside. Just as hard as y'all think y'all are, MFs in Chicago is just as hard." Twenty years ago, Hip House would have been the Down South rap of the time, it was the next big thing.
When Dr. Dre from NWA got in contact with Benji asking for me or Fast Eddie to do House mixes or a House track for a new artist they were producing, that's when that shit got big. The artist was The D.O.C. "Portrait of a Masterpiece" came out, and that was the same thing. Then you had Daddy-O from Stetsasonic openly dissing House Music but "Talkin' All That Jazz" was just that. Big Daddy Kane, KRS-One - no one liked Hip House but everyone knew it. New York on their own were still trying to get their respect. For another sub-genre to come along was threatening to them. If that didn't do it, all the shit that came after it did it. All the records from Europe that were getting played in America that were called Hip House or had a Hip House mix and it wasn't anything to do with Hip House. But commercial stations like B96 were playing and it and there were too many sub-genres for the stations to keep up with it.
The future they told us about has arrived: the world's greatest online radio station is here, and it's free. It's this site I found called "YouTube" and it might have slipped under your radar until now.
The beautiful thing about uploading music to YouTube is that fans can hear the complete song without the label fearing that it'll be ripped. It is possible for the enterprising unemployed basement-dweller to rip the audio from the FLV file that YouTube streams, but it's of such poor quality that it would hardly be useful for anything. In House Music, most record sales are made by DJs - people who want to play this music, and presumably audiophiles. I've gotten so much stress about 160kps releases that there's really no question in my mind at least that anyone who would go through the insane amount of trouble to extract what will probably be a sub-100kps audio track from a video file was almost religiously determined to never buy your music in the first place.
Now I remember a conversation I had with someone in the tech industry a year or so ago about the troubles of streaming music online. The Big 4 Music Labels hold so much power that they repeatedly give their blessing to certain projects (usually headed or funded by veteran industry insiders) while keeping royalty rates so high that truly innovative start-ups can't manage to break even. You might think sites like imeem.com and pandora.com are successful because you and your friends use it, but both sites are in dire straits financially, to the point where more users actually means less money. (iMeem was actually in extreme peril before a small tranche of investor money last week helped keep them afloat.)
So it was to my surprise that my friend said this "YouTube.com" thing, and not any of the specific music stream sites that are having such a tough go of it, was the real "celestial jukebox" that could play damn near any tune in the world on a user's whim. Everything's there in some form or another. Artist's aren't getting performance or publishing royalties for it, but there's a pretty good chance they're not getting jack right now to begin with. We're talking about House Music here, not Beyonce or the Hipster Suicide Machine or whatever the hot band is nowadays. We're a small and dispersed market that doesn't represent a drop in the bucket of the overall music industry's revenue. Our hit songs sell thousands, not millions.
But now that sites like traxsource and stompy and others have placed a cash register in the living room of every House Music fan in the world, you're now talking about creating a marketing campaign that by default is global in nature. If you can sell a record to 100 people in Alaska, why leave the money on the table? And uploading your music to YouTube is a risk-free proposition. It's is free for the listener and for you (though it can cost a little to make a real professional "channel", it's not necessary). It hosts the video for free. It's owned by Google, so it actually seeks out listeners for you by placing YouTube videos in Google's search results (and usually pretty high up in the rankings, too). You pay exactly the same if your video reaches 100 or 100,000,000 people: nothing. It is, without a doubt, the greatest weapon in the guerrilla marketing handbook for independent artists and labels today.
So you have a vehicle that can promote songs in a virtually unpirateable format. Beautiful thing that you'd think our beloved but perpetually broke House Music superstars would jump all over, right? Wrong. I'd have to guess that 95% of the House related uploads to YouTube are by fans - cats who love their records and want to share them. They're not professional videos - just album covers or hokey CGI that looks like a screensaver out of 1987 Macintosh ads. And they rarely contain much release information, much less a simple link connecting the music you're listening to with the cash register that's just a single click away.
Until recently, in fact, just about all of the House-related uploads were by fans, with the notable exception of smart businesspeople such as Ultra Nate who already make professional videos for other markets anyway. She clearly understood the value of YouTube in promoting her music. And because she did the gruntwork ("gruntwork" that a hundred thousand teenagers do every single day, it should be noted), she's got links to her official site and makes a tiny bit of scratch from the ads that appear on her pages. And she's reaching people who want to hear her music, fans who want to play her music on their site, without losing anything.
And yet, just this morning I received a link to a promo video for a song by a producer I truly respect, with a vocalist I adore, on a label with a consistent track record of releasing good music. It's on YouTube, so congratulations are in order for catching up to 2006! But then - the inexplicable. Right in the middle, the very meat of a good song, the label ripped out an entire 3 minute stretch - just gutted it and made the entire thing unlistenable.
Why would someone mutilate the "official video" for their new release? If Flash videos are unpirateable, what's the point of that? The only thing I can figure out is that the label is so paranoid about the admittedly rampant and obnoxious degree of file sharing these days that releasing any version of their music in a playable public format fills them with clenching terror. And it's their loss: some fan is going to upload their own version, probably with cheesy graphics and almost certainly with no information pointing to where the track can be purchased.
It amazes me sometimes, this incredible gift the House Music community has for snatching failure from the jaws of success. I know it shouldn't, but it does.
I'm not a fan of trendwatching in newspapers, but I think it's about time we call this one: Serato has taken all of the art, all of the skill and all of the poetry out of DJing forever and nothing will ever be the same again.
I mean, it was bad enough when Tommy Lee decided that DJing was a better career move than beating drums. I could almost tolerate it when a former pop singer bragged in the pages of 5 Magazine about her complete inability to blend two records together - while on a DJ tour. But when a newspaper in godforsaken Tennessee is talking about struggling musicians with no merit other than a need to make a few bucks and a large collection of pirated MP3s becoming DJs, well, we're doomed.
These are a few of the artists and bands whose members have stopped into Nashville clubs in recent months to play sets for late-night patrons ‹ but they weren't singing or playing instruments. They were playing records.
Those artists are part of a wave of known musicians taking disc jockey gigs, and the mass moonlighting is just one of many signs of the rise in popularity of dance music - especially electronic music - and DJ-centered events.
How things work in other cities, I don't know, but in Chicago at least there's been a recent trend of big-time promoters who long ago left the House Music scene (or were never involved in the first place) throwing "reunion" shows. Others have compared them those obscene "Monsters of Rock" concert tours that roll through auditoriums and stadiums every summer, featuring artists about 20 years past their prime. They're big ticket events far in excess of what most House Music events cost, usually with some sort of radio station sponsorship.
None of this is bad, but some people are taking exception to radio stations being involved. Why? Because radio in Chicago (and elsewhere, but especially here) long ago abandoned the pretense of featuring any kind of dance music, much less House. And the people filing their complaints aren't one of the multitude of has-been DJs or producers with a chip on their shoulder about something that went down during the Reagan Administration, but Maurice Joshua - someone who could headline just about any of these events if he wanted to.
I'd heard that Maurice had gone so far as to call for a boycott of the latest "reunion" show this month, and asked him to explain his reasoning. He replied via email:
I just wanted to stand up for Chicago. I'm tired of everyone saying things but I really wanted to show the Station that Househeads do listen to the radio and we make Chicago what this city is about!
I wanted a boycott because Power [92, the sponsor of this particular event] had the audacity to take Boolu's House mixes off and then promote a HOUSE party as the biggest party of 2009 while not playing House Music of the radio... so I decided to write to Jay Allen and tell him I will NOT support this party until he plays or puts the House mixes on air. I know what there are doing is only playin' the mixes until the party on May 15th but WE as a city need to call up, email, and tell Power 92 as well as the rest of these stations to play what MADE Chicago the birth place of HOUSE!
That's Maurice's reasoning, and quite honestly I'm glad to see someone of his stature take a stand for what he believes in.
...Or, perhaps, how taxis brought South Africans to House.
The phenomenon of House Music in Southern Africa can no longer be considered underground - at least after CNN covered it. In a story today, CNN gives the "House in South Africa" narrative a twist by relating how taxi drivers led to the House sound of South Africa to popularity:
For discerning clubbers around the world the hottest sound in dance music right now is coming not from New York or London, but from the townships of Pretoria, South Africa...
But its improbable journey to glitzy superclubs around the world may never have happened without the help of South Africa's taxi drivers.
South Africa has long been a voracious consumer of imported European House music, but over the last few years a small group of producers in Pretoria have begun experimenting with their own sound, more representative of the music of the townships they live in...
DJ Qness writes for South African dance music magazine BPM and works for Mujava's record label, Sheer Music. "In South Africa, the easiest way to the people is through the taxis," he told CNN.
South African taxis are actually small mini buses and are by far the most popular mode of public transport in a country where car ownership is limited. A Pretoria University study estimates that between five and 10 million South Africans use taxis every day.
The Township House pioneers began to give CDs of their tracks to taxi drivers. The drivers played the CDs to a captive audience of commuters and the response was incredible.
Passengers wanted to know where they could buy the tracks they were hearing, and with no record stores stocking the music, taxi drivers began selling CDs directly from taxi ranks and roadside stalls.
Qness said that even without radio play the township sound began outselling imported dance music and the record labels began to take notice. "These people created a demand," he said. "Then Mujava's 'Township Funk' blew up on the streets and everything went crazy."
We're scouring the web 24/7 to find that free shit that is somehow not illegal. This includes record label and artist-uploaded tracks, podcasts, mix sets and all of the rest.
Will it be a regular feature? Depends on if the rest of the House Music industry catches up the folks below and figures out that a fan base is more than just an ATM machine providing cash-on-demand.
Mike Monday - "What Canto Is It?" [om records] - A free 320 kps track from OM Records' recording artist Mike Monday taking 3rd Face's 2002 track "Canto Della Liberta" and Monday's "What Day is It?". Honestly this makes my skull throb like a jackhammer's doing disco on my temples but maybe there's enough of a hipster in you that you'll find this enjoyable.
Strictly Rhythm Podcast [strictly rhythm] - Strictly makes great music and their back catalog is without peer. A controversy erupted a year ago when a PR flak working for the company accosted a DJ with a blogspot site that was using a Strictly Rhythm song in his mix (for clarity, let me repeat: using a Strictly track in his mix. Not offering it up for download by itself, but incorporated in a low 160 bitrate mix.) The fall-out from that incident is here. Suffice to say, Strictly's argument was that promo is alright as long as they're the one's controlling it, which is entirely understandable from the creator and/or owner of music but highly unrealistic in this day and age. Perhaps they're thawing a bit - I mean, subscribe to the Strictly Rhythm podcast here and you're getting every single mix of new Strictly tunes downloaded directly onto your computer. Perhaps it was just one of those situations in which a label guy hunts down dozens of Rapidshare links all day and just blows his top. But they still release good music and their podcast is well worth your time.
The Saturday Afternoon Jam Session [seed recordings] - Seed is on the cutting edge of Deep House and keeps getting better. This is a rebroadcast of their April 18 show with DJ Bradford James.
Deep House Cat Show [ssradiouk.com] - DJ PhilE is a supporter of 5 Magazine and also happens to do a great show on UK-based SSRadio. His sets vary in sound and are well worth checking out. This show goes live just a few minutes from now; you can get to the archives here.
Bunchlox Radio [chicagohousefm.com] - Karl Almaria hosts the Bunchlox Radio Show every Tuesday from 8pm to 9pm central. Don't let the low-tech website fool you - ChicagoHouseFM is coming up with some terrific shows and really filling a gap in solid internet radio programming on a local level.
If the DJ in your life has a few million dollars burning in his pocket and a blind fury at being limited by just two turntables, the compactdecks (very chic, very lowercase) are for you. Manufactured by compactlab of Geneva, Switzerland, this all-in-one features a moulded table form, 3 turntables and built-in two way speaker system.
The price? Priceless. So far at least. Just 10 have been manufactured by designer Oliver Rubli in a special limited edition run. In what is turning out to be the theme for the day, you can get more shots of the compactdecks by navigating around the wonderfully linkless and Flash-based site compactlab.com.
This was just too cool to bury in an unrelated post. This is a promo clip of Giorgio Moroder, electronic music pioneer and Italo legend, bemusing the squares with his ultra high-tech studio (takeaway: "Reporting from a recording studio that even NASA can't match!")
Every promoter has some nightmare story about damn near being devoured by some douchebag "superstar" DJ's massive ego. Want one? How about bringing out a DJ/producer that hadn't been in the country in years, only to have him show up stoned out of his mind, demanding bottles of champagne while throwing the opening DJs off the tables? It happened, and it wasn't the fault of two turntables in the shape of a number 8. He was simply a douchebag whose reputation - unfortunately - hadn't preceded him.
The Ibiza culture that the music press worships and sucks blood from hasn't helped - it wouldn't trouble me greatly if that entire island fell into the sea and DJs would worry about their blends rather than table service and which hot Spanish chick is going to leave more than a mint on their pillow.
Good DJs with an international profile and a good attitude - people like Miguel Migs, Frankie, Marques Wyatt, etc. - are always going to get booked. They may take a pay cut (or they may not - I'm not privy to what they're making but I'd be surprised if it were otherwise) in this economy, but they have people that want to see them and, I'm confident, always will. That's what a career of playing consistently good music, consistently well and with a minimum amount of bullshit attached will do.
A lot of things probably won't survive this recession/depression - newspapers, General Motors, and, if there's a God in Heaven, Soulja Boy. The era of hurling huge sums of money at a guy who shows up wasted, trainwrecks his way through a set and vomits on the people who paid to see him probably won't last either.
And the astronomical fees for an hour or two of beatmatching never quite measured up to reality, either - particularly on the more commercial side. Are you seriously going to tell me that blending the same 50 Star 69 tracks with Serato is worth five figures?
That's almost as bad as a guy hedging that a stock is going to decline in price making six.
When papers talk about "the dance music scene" they usually mean "the trance scene" and the trance scene was about forty times as predicated on hype as the House Music scene at its peak. No one but club owners, the makers of Cristal and the divas that never realized how good they had it will miss it all that much.
For several years, the recording industry has been fighting tooth and nail to cut just about any media delivery format that they don't own down to size. What started with Napster quickly became confused, in a classic case of mission creep, with an all-out war on MP3s in general. In the years since the original Napster shut down in July 2001, MP3s have become grudgingly accepted even while the industry continues to war on sites like seeqpod.com and other services that are, to the end user, little more than delivery vehicles. The recording industry's favored sites - like the clusterfuck called Lala.com - continue to sputter, not grabbing taking much of the digital market and in such a straight-jacket by their licensing deals with their big mammas that they'll never be able to. Within a couple of years it'll surely be closed just like its industry-favored predecessors.
Apple has always pissed the recording industry off, largely because iTunes grew so fast and so unexpectedly and the major labels found themselves locked into Apple's 99 cent pricing scheme. For Apple it was a marketing slogan - get whatever you want for a flat price that never changes. And it worked. Wonderfully. In fact, it created the entire (legitimate) digital marketplace. Prior to iTunes, the only people who had ever made money with music online were bizarre pirate sites that asked you to click ad banners and make them a few bucks. And if you're a cat at his computer, are you seriously going to hunt through a thousand weird Russian and Hungarian black spammer sites to find a copy of "Shadowdancing", or just shell out a buck for the pleasure of reliving Andy Gibb's finest hour?
But naturally, if you liked it, you can be sure the industry hated it. The industry believed that iTunes was cannibalizing the market for recorded music. Without those annoying 99 cent downloads, they reason, more consumers would have bought $19.99 albums.
Now they get some of it back. As first announced in January, iTunes is now selling MP3s for as much as $1.29 - a 30% increase over the flat 99 cent price point.
I don't know any business guru who would advise a struggling industry that the best reaction to dwindling sales is to jack up prices. I don't think it'll be terribly original to observe that the recording industry is not run by business gurus.
But as a flipside to the price hike - you've met the stick, are you ready for the carrot? - it was also announced that some downloads would be sold for less than 99 cents. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of tracks from a century of recorded music could now be sold for as little as 69 cents (ahuh-huh-huh, get it?)
It's pretty clear at this point that the price decrease though was just a marketing gimmick (as was the claim that tracks purchased through iTunes would now be sold without Digital Rights Management restrictions. DRM was dead in the water a year ago and its abolition represents no concession at all from the recording industry, particularly after the first large download shops using DRM went bust, leaving their customers with music they had purchased but might not be able to play.)
The Register had trouble finding many tracks at all selling for 69 cents (their article is subtitled "Vanilla Ice. Still 99 cents"). I went ahead and searched through a couple dozen artists whose work is either mostly back catalog or niche enough that you'd think it'd qualify for this new discounted price. I didn't find any stamped at the rock'n'roll price of 69 cents at all.
I found no tracks by Frankie Knuckles or Ten City selling for less than 99 cents. So too with Ron Carroll. The holy grail of crossover House Music, Cajmere, whose classic tracks are popular enough to appear on damn near every download or streaming service in existence, has no tracks selling for 69 cents at all.
Maybe it's just House Music, though. After all, you rarely see tracks on niche-specific download sites selling for as little as 99 cents, much less the giggle-inducing 69.
So I went into the roots. Giorgio Moroder's back catalog work is experiencing renewed interest from Italo-loving hipster kids. And they're still paying 99 cents for each track. (None of which went to fund this awesome retro promo video. Seriously, check it out.)
Nearly all of Gil Scott Heron's work is back catalog now. And still priced at 99 cents.
Well, Gil and Giorgio are still alive and no one will begrudge them making a living, after all they've been through.
So let's go deep into the roots. I know some distant relative of Robert Johnson - his half-sister's granddaughter or some such - as well as his grandchildren collect something from his publishing rights, but the man himself has been dead for 71 years. If there's such a thing as back catalog, surely his single album worth of material is back catalog.
Nope. 99 cents.
How about Reverend Gary Davis? This was a man whose music was meant to preach. The champions of his music and those who recorded it were altruistic hippies who just wanted to preserve it for posterity. And blind gospel guitar bluesmen have been pretty damn unfashionable for at least a quarter century.
Do you need to ask?
In light of the shrinking profits of the recording industry (and even downloads are slowing - from 45% growth in 2007 to 27% in 2008 according to Nielsen SoundScan), you'd think the industry would be on a slash-and-burn campaign to stem the tide. They desperately need to do two things: stop the bleeding as overall prices continue to fall (iTunes major competitor, Amazon's MP3 service, is aggressively pricing items to wrest some of Apple's market share and is totally unaffected by this decision), and come up with unique and tangible products that people don't mind paying for when the free options are more plentiful than ever. (And note: a "unique and tangible product" is not yet another replacement for the compact disc like tacky USB flash drives). Trent Reznor has no problem getting his fans to not just buy his music when they could get it for free (from him!), but even sells out his stock of vinyl, for Christ's sake.
So it's basically a gimmick - an attempt to squeeze a little more blood from the stone. Somebody will pay for it (after all, if you clicked that link earlier, you'd see that people actually bought MP3s from Wal-Mart.) And the industry will continue it's self-destructive dive into oblivion, the licensing arm of industry, existing to sell Red Hot Chili Peppers' and Moby's songs to Sprite and Mitsubishi and not much else.
There's always been a problem with Billboard's dance charts, going back 20 years. Primarily due to lack of radio play, their charts rely on reporters without the obvious check ("Why is this song #1 when I've never heard it before?") that hours of national radio play can provide.
Today's Billboard charts are so removed from reality that few people pay attention to them. But because marketers need hype, people have begun to use the lists of top downloads on digital music sites as some kind of replacement.
"Top download" charts have some minor uses, but can hardly tell you anything you don't already know. Terisa Griffin's song "Wonderful" (Soul Heaven) was a smash and that was plainly obvious to anyone with their ear to the ground - we even did an interview with Terisa and Terry Hunter based entirely around the success of that one song, which is something you rarely see with recorded music these days. But then "Wonderful" was at the top of the Traxsource charts for several weeks, not days. That's what's unprecedented in this day and age.
Day after day, my inbox and yours are bursting with mass emails inviting us to give in to peer pressure, be like the cool kids and click on a link to check out yet another "best selling #1 track" (here are the top 4,800 results on Google for the phrase "#1 on Beatport", which should give you an idea of where I'm going with this). I don't mean to pick on anyone, but nine times out of ten, this utterly unknown (and truthfully not very good) "best selling #1 track" is on Beatport. And there's no better way to lose my attention, because Beatport's charts are completely and utterly useless for anything other than hype.
Let's do some math to find out how special a "#1 on Beatport" track really is. Beatport publishes about 20 different "top download" charts (two for each genre: "all releases" and "classics" which are reissues or old releases just released in digital format for the first time). Due to the glut of new material and generally lower sales, the top spot on each chart usually fluctuates every day. That means more than 700 tracks can be considered "best sellers" each year. No person on this planet (except maybe Dustin Hoffman in Rainman) has a list of his or her favorite 700 songs of the year. I live and breathe this stuff and I don't think I could name more than 100 tracks released in a year.
So that's what "#1 on Beatport" means. The quality of the music that makes it into the Top 700 of the Year hardly distinguishes itself, either. In Chicago, a somewhat obscure producer from the 1990s - a handful of releases on some well-known labels, none of which could really be considered classics or especially well-known - has carved out a career for himself as a Beatport entrepreneur. Every time I see this guy, he tells me about his latest hits, pulling out his iPhone to punch up his labels' remarkable chart success. And you know what? I don't know a single person who has bought any of these tracks. They may have hit #1, but they're completely and utterly disposable. These aren't good songs that get worn out through repetitive play (like, for instance, "Change for Me" or "Mirror Dance" or, going back, "Brighter Days" or Paperclip People's "Throw"). Their best-selling status is based on not thousands but a few hundred or even a few dozen purchases. This is why a track can become "#1 on Beatport" without anyone having ever heard it played in a single club a single time.
Would it be possible to compute a "new" dance chart based on online sales aggregated from the various download sites? Maybe a few years down the line, but not now. Sales figures used to be published - bragged about - as a matter of course: everyone knew a record from Lil Louis or Ten City was popular, and the number of units shipped just reinforced what everyone already knew.
Today there's very little to brag about. Many labels and artists appear, well, embarrassed by the modest sales of even a truly popular hit single. Nothing will ever sell as many units as "French Kiss" again - it's apples and oranges to compare a hit song to then and now. It may wind up twenty times or a hundred times as popular, but the sales figures won't reflect it. And until people open up about how many units they're really selling these days and there's some manner of certification for it, there's no hope of creating a meaningful dance music chart based on sales.
And that's why I don't care about your Beatport chart: it tells us nothing, or no more than any other random list of new releases. I don't expect that this will make anyone stop hyping their releases as one of the 700+ "Beatport Best Sellers". It's just useful, from time to time, to do the math and foil the marketers.
Vibe and Pepper, a European management agency, has posted a pretty nice mix from Hip House innovator Tyree Cooper. It clocks in at nearly 80 minutes and is titled "At the Crib".
The mix loads as some kind of Quicktime file that never played for me, but you can right-click and save the link provided.
Vibe and Pepper represent quite a few international artists on a non-exclusive basis; you can check out their full roster here.
Chris Gray has had a pretty successful career in House Music. The Mississippi-born producer and remixer moved to Chicago in the early 1990s and was a fixture at Red Dog and other nightlife spots while releasing some sweet beats, including the full length Emotional Distortion LP and the Trippy Fingers EP, both on Track Mode. His music has taken him overseas, allowed him to rub shoulders with some of the giants of the dance music industry and, it seems, given him a good vantage point to describe that segment of Chicago House Music history that hasn't yet found its way into books and DVDs. The 1990s were a fantastically creative time, with the rebirth of the Chicago sound via Cajual and Relief, Dancemania and a dozen other cutting edge labels and the producers and DJs of the Second Wave.
Quite by accident, I stumbled upon a book Chris has written, called Mechanics of Me, offered as a free download on his website. It's a pretty good read.
Who is Chris Gray to write a book about House Music? If that's the first question you asked, you've missed the point entirely. Beginning with Maestro and Chip E.'s The UnUsual Suspects, there's been a groundswell of documentaries about House Music - hardly a month goes by that we aren't asked about a new one. Some focus on the early days in New York, some on Chicago, some on the notion of a "House Music culture".
What you don't often see is simply a personal story - a life in music. At this point, anybody can put out a casting call and interview a few dozen people who made, played or stole a hit record (this is the music industry we're talking about, after all). And with some exceptions, the resulting film will probably be seen by largely the same people who have seen all of the previous ones.
"This is another similarity between music and video. When we started doing House Music, myself and other people, it wasn't just a way to make money. We wanted people to embrace it, and realize that they could make music too. Everyone has it inside of them if they want to. I'm starting to see that in the video industry. You're seeing a lot more people come out to parties with cameras. We're hoping that they're not just going to be documenting the House scene, because it can only be documented so many times, but there's so much out there that needs to be documented organically."
Well, this has happened, in a way: there's now no shortage of House Music documentaries, but few that are turning over new ground. What they're missing is the story - the personal connection that extends beyond the DJs and the records and the club. House Music history, as a subject, has been done to death. What we need are the compelling personal stories that happen to take place in the context of House Music but are universal enough to be of interest to the rest of the world.
That's why I'm really enjoying this book. It's not just that Chris is a good writer or tells a good tale - it's that this is about a person, not a thing. He tells his own story and you can learn a good deal about House Music in the 1990s when he came on the scene. It's a story about being a young kid that lives and breathes music. And that's what makes this universal. Because while Marge in Peoria might not be able to easily identify with the message of liberation, love and freedom contained in a 4/4 beat, she can definitely understand a young person trying to live out his dream.
There's a short piece up today on the Orange County Weekly's website on DJ Kaskade. He's released a new mixed CD, The Grand, on Ultra Records. I haven't really been a fan since he began tinkering with his sound, but that's a different argument we can have another time. The interesting thing to me was that, with the quantity of free mixes available on the Internet, he finds himself justifying the act of even attempting to sell a mixed CD in today's market:
"It's so easy to find mixes online," the 36-year-old, born Ryan Raddon, says. "But if they're putting it out in the marketplace as opposed to a podcast, it seems a little more thought goes into it. With The Grand, 10 years from now, you can take it off the bookshelf and put it into the CD player."
This is a fascinating subject for me, and one I don't hear discussed very often. I've written about in passing before but thought about quite a bit more.
House Music (and most other forms of modern music) used to have a splendid underground economy. I don't mean drug dealing or illegal parties in abandoned industrial death traps, but something that is, by some in the industry's views just as bad.
I'm talking about the economy of underground mix tapes. If you were around in the 1990s, you probably remember buying dubbed Maxell cassette tapes from record stores or the DJ himself. There were international networks of mix tape traders, and even a few backyard mail order companies.
None of it was legal then and it's not legal now. It was, however, regarded as a sign of the health of House Music. Outside of a few shows here and there, House Music hasn't been on the radio in most US markets - certainly not in a 24 hour format - in years. The recording industry for its part has almost always been focused on selling music to DJs. This left a huge, untapped market filled by the underground mix tape economy.
It didn't make anyone tons and tons money, but here's the thing: everyone did it. Mark Farina and Derrick Carter are international stars now, but at the time they were working at Gramaphone Records in Chicago and their mixes always sold well. I should know: I still have some of them.
The underground mix tape economy worked like this:
1. The DJ bought the music from the record store and made a mix tape.
2. The record store sold the mix tape to the non-DJ music junkie on consignment.
3. The DJ was usually offered either cash or a higher equivalent in in store credit, which he then used to buy more music to make another mix tape.
4. Go back to Step 1.
Who was the loser here? The record store sold vinyl, the DJ was able to buy more music and maybe have a hundred bucks or so left over and the only person not making bank was the non-DJ music junkie, who for his ten bucks got 60 minutes of music that even then you couldn't hear on the radio. Buying more music meant the labels and artists made sales they wouldn't have otherwise had, too.
But something happened which utterly destroyed the underground mix tape economy. It's the same thing that happened to newspaper publishers and the rest of the music industry. The Internet made the production costs of distributing a mix non-existent, the perfect duplication of the original music possible and the record store (though not Gramaphone or another Chicago vinyl shop we love, Kstarke) has gone the way of the spotted owl and Crystal Pepsi. The new non-economy of underground mix tapes works like this:
1. The DJ buys a digital file of (or downloads on the side) new music and makes a mix tape.
2. He offers it for free.
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
As you can see, NOBODY is making bank anymore - except for that non-DJ music junkie, who in a few hours can now grab enough mixes to last for weeks.
In the final analysis, two losers emerge from this. The DJ used to make tapes for promotion and to pay for still more new music, and maybe the tiniest bit of scratch left over. He can no longer buy as much music as he used to, which filters down to lower sales for the record label releasing the music and the artists producing it as well.
But the real loser is the record store. I know for a fact that shops that cater to House Music still have people that wander in wanting to buy mixed CDs (though they're more likely to want to buy something from a Lego or a Rahaan or whoever your local hero is than Kaskade, who they probably have never heard of), but there's no doubt that the culture has declined. There's still a market for film projectors too, but not enough to justify calling it an economy.
How much money was the underground mix tape economy worth in the 1990s in a city like Chicago, which has far more DJs than clubs that can support them? Individually not much, but collectively it's nothing to sneeze at. When a hundred DJs made a hundred copies of a mix every month, that's a sizable amount of cash sloshing around through the House Music scene (back of the envelope math: 100 x 100 x $10 = $100,000 per month, or $1.2 million per year). That money's gone.
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.
Fully licensed and legal mixed CDs are still out there, though they're struggling for existence - OM Records is still putting stuff out, and Mark Farina is not likely to stop making Mushroom Jazz anytime soon.
But that underground area is dead and gone and won't come back unless we wake up one day and an angry Jehovah has taken the Internet away.
Shocking news: New York City dance music legend Nicky Siano is retiring. Siano is playing his very last New York gig on March 28th at Love (179 MacDougal St. - tickets available at his site.)
Nicky was the owner and resident DJ at The Gallery, one of a tiny handful of underground disco palaces (with the Garage and The Loft) in New York in the 1970s. Here's a clip from the documentary Love Saves the Day:
Also check out the interview transcript from Bill Brewseter and Frank Broughton's site.
The Miami press is working overtime on WMC this year - a marked difference from previous years, when the editorial and advertising dollars seemed geared more to Spring Break hedonism rather than the goings-on from the soulful side of the Winter Music Conference. Among the nice finds is the Miami New Times write up of Rich Medina, who we interviewed last year in 5 Magazine.
Dedicated to the spirit of Afrobeat king Fela Kuti and his ideals of social freedom, it's the kind of party where you show up with your crew, but by night's end, you have connected with people from other continents solely based on the language of music and vibes.
Powered by one of the busiest DJs in the nation ‹ Philly's own and new Rocksteady Crew member DJ Rich Medina ‹ Jump n Funk first hit WMC in 2002. It's back now after a two-year break, during which Medina had renamed the party "Afro Disco" after a split with his original partner.
"The response to the party since its return has been fantastic," Medina says. "I don't do the monthly in New York anymore, since I've been focusing on touring it around the country. Through what we've been able to do at Conference the past seven years, I've been able to develop relationships with folks in other cities and other countries who really enjoy the sound and want to get involved in the party." By phone after a weekend jam in San Francisco, Medina cites Atlanta, D.C., Boston, and Chicago as a few locations for recent and upcoming Jump n Funk sessions.
This year's Afro Disco (formerly Jump N Funk) party at WMC will be held Saturday, March 28 at Skybar at the Shore Club (1901 Collins Ave, 6pm, $20).
Posted on Current.TV, is this amazing 9 minute documentary on Detroit's seminal Underground Resistance collective, tracing the roots of Detroit techno via Jeff Mills, Mad Mike Banks and Robert Hood's early days. UR is still going strong - call this another successful infiltration:
In less than an hour, Sista Stroke (aka Oktober Davila) resurfaces on our sonar with the debut of her new show "Brick City House" on ChicagoHouseFM.com The new show will be going on every Wednesday at 7pm GMT (that's 8pm CET, 3pm Eastern in the United States, 2pm Central, noon Pacific).
Sista Stroke was one of our favorite DJs and producers when she lived in Chicago, so this is certainly not to be missed. I don't know much about ChicagoHouseFM - none of the names ring a bell to me yet - though the domain at least seems to go back to late 2007. There's a pretty crowded internet radio presence here catering to just about every flavor of House Music, from the guys at cyberjamz to chicagohouseradio and some locally-produced shows on other stations, like the Deep House Cat Show.
Over at soundrevolt.com is an article outlining 10 steps to establishing a digital label. Just like in Spinal Tap, this list should have gone to 11, and that cherished 11th step would have been: "Ask yourself: are you really doing anything different than anyone else?" Everyone I speak to is irritated by the suffocating glut of material released these days. The freedom brought about by the decline of vinyl and the high production costs associated with producing it hasn't lead to better music - just more of it.
What's most interesting about the listicle is what's only implied, down in step #10, in regard to the economics of digital labels. And it explains why so much of the music being released today is, in the words of Edward G. Robinson, "tasteless, odorless crud":
10. Draw up the balance. Let's begin at profits. If you manage to fall into Beatport, then 80% of your profit will flow from there. A good track should easily reach 100 downloads, which will generate the store income on the level of $150-$200, out of which Beatport collects 40% (Juno takes 50%). That means $90-120 goes to your pocket. If you put up 5 numbers a month, then you can expect a profit of $500-600. Obviously you will share the profit among yourself and the authors of the music, which is usually 50-50, which means that there is still $250-300 on the label's bank account, but don't forget there are still unpaid bills on your desk. Pay the copywriting, sound mastering, web hosting fees, not to mention taxes and health insurance (let's hope your dad runs a business).
You read that right, and based on conversations with producers who are taking full advantage of the digital sphere, these numbers are legit. A good track these days will reach about 100 downloads, requiring producers to release a barrage of half-finished or rather defective tracks that never would have seen the light of day when labels were restricted by the burdensome production costs of vinyl. Some of the producers I've talked to seem slightly embarassed by that fact - no one, after all, wants to make an impression based on a product they shoved out the door to make a measly hundred bucks.
Based on these numbers, is it any surprise that fewer and fewer producers seem to be making the jump to "superstar" level these days? Those who have worked in record stores know that there used to be fans that would buy anything with certain producers' names on it. They weren't blind or undiscriminating fans - you just knew that anything they released had a certain threshold of quality else it never would have seen the light of day. But when the producer drops his standards, and the label is run by the same producer, is there really any wonder that so much generic crap is circulating around out there - and fans of this music put a lower and lower value on it?
You can read the extended cut of 5 Mag's interview with Lars, which touches on aspects of marketing in the digital age and what happened with the radio show and satellite radio over at 5chicago.com.
Update: Download link for the show now available here.
The Chosen Few DJs have announced the date and location for this year's Chosen Few Picnic: July 11, 2009 at 63rd and Hayes Drive (same location as last year). This year's guest DJs including Grammy Award Winning producer Maurice Joshua, Laurie Branch (profiled in The UnUsual Suspects) and DJ FLX of 3Degrees Global.
The Chosen Few Picnic, now in its 19th year, is a free annual outdoor event typically held 4th of July weekend in Chicago. The Chosen Few DJs are Wayne Williams, Alan King, Andre and Tony Hatchett, Terry Hunter and Jesse Saunders. More information is at chosenfewdjs.com.
Photo: Wayne Williams at the Chosen Few Picnic 2009, courtesy chosenfewdjs.com.
When Keith Richards first visited Chicago's legendary Chess Records in the early 1960s, he was greeted by a shocking sight. The Blues, which was the rage among British youth, was all but forgotten in the United States, and Muddy Waters was making ends meet by doing odd jobs around the Chess studios. "There was the King of the Blues, and he was painting the ceiling."
Europe has gone through an infatuation with Chicago House as well as Chicago Blues, but you never know where the seeds thrown about will land or what kind of creation will sprout. Case in point: South Africa. House Music is undergoing a renaissance in a place all but forgotten by American artists and audiences. It doesn't sound exactly like something that fell off the Cajual or Strictly Rhythm delivery truck - just like no one would confuse a Rolling Stones record with Muddy Waters - but this is natural as South African producers and DJs have added their own cultural influences and vibes. And some of this is, in the words of Dr. Bob Jones, so soulful it hurts...
The music press in Europe and the United States has been slow to acknowledge South Africa's new generation of House artists, though a few (such as Black Coffee) are starting to break through. The local press however is full of interesting stories (ironically enough, many emerging South African producers and DJs began working in House Music after starting out in Hip-Hop and R&B, which is a reversal of how it's evolved in the United States). A story posted today in The South African, an expatriate paper for South Africans living abroad, features a short profile of DJ Qness:
Born in Zimbabwe as Qhubani Ndlovu, he started his career as an RnB singer before experimenting with Rap and now finally a House DJ and producer. "It happened when I listened to Oskido Church Groove, the very first one, that's when I just went crazy and started experimenting with dance music. "It's amazing, the response is big and the track is big. It played on Yfm before and now on Oskido's show."
The song features Oluhle, born as Sukoluhle Ncube, who is based in the UK. "I listened to one of her tracks on 'MySpace'... the voice just did it man...she sounded like Brenda Fassie to me. Oluhle's voice is just electrifying."
Like many established DJ's Dennis Ferrer has toured South Africa for quite some time now so when DJ Qness heard his reaction about South African house music he was more than pleased. "Dennis Ferrer was so amazed, he said; he is actually bigger in South Africa than his home town. They acknowledge that house [music] is so big in South Africa."
Check out DJ Qness' hot new track "Uzongilinda" featuring vocalist Malehloka at his myspace page here.
A few days ago, I posted on twitter what a tragedy it was that the best House Music album I'd heard in years - Lil' Louis' new double CD Two Sides to Every Story - had been passing through so many hands via forums and email links. Just prior to the weekend, this letter made the rounds from Louis himself. It's reproduced here in full.
This is Lil Louis. As you may have heard, I have released my album, an album that, along with the book, has taken me 13 years to complete, and the best album I feel I've ever created. To show my appreciation to my fans that came to my Christmas party in Chicago, I decided to give a copy of the book and new album with paid admission. I sent the download specifically to the people that paid for and attended the event. But it has now come to my attention that there are people who have illegally uploaded and downloaded my album, and it is being distributed across the internet, particularly on Deep House Page. I have friends and business affiliates who are enraged by this act, and I share in their sentiment, but it goes further.
In 1992, seventeen years ago, before Napster, burning, iTunes or the digital world, I released a song called "New Dance Beat." In the song I wrote, "They used to laugh at me, but I saw the future. Record company recession, dance floor boredom, and copy machines spit out song after song."
By then, my song French Kiss had been sampled and covered over 2,000 times by other artists. From a financial standpoint that was cool. But I knew if we didn't get back to being original artists, like Stevie, Donnie and Marvin, we would all eventually suffer. Now if the average dance artist sells a 1,000 copies, it's a phenomenon. A bigger problem looming now is downloading and stealing which, if not solved, will soon make dance artists as extinct as jazz. That is what has transpired with my new album.
Let me be clear, unless you paid admission into the party on Xmas night, you stole the album from me. And, combined with complacency and unoriginality, stealing, burning and downloading illegally will kill the industry. The quality of the music, as I'm sure you know, is the worst that it's ever been. That said, I put everything I had in making this album. I lived in the studio and slept three hours on average every day. I did that, to provide you with another classic that you could play forever. Most artists I have spoken with have said they don't put that kind of time in or hire all the live musicians and pay for the studio time like I did, because people are just going to steal it anyway.
This reminds me of the Martin Luther King riots. I was six years old and I watched how we destroyed our own neighborhoods. Whether you realize it or not, stealing this music is no different than black people looting their own stores and tearing up their own communities. You are only killing yourselves, and creating your own musical ghettos. We are a few downloads away from living in the Album projects. How many great albums have you heard lately?
Where most people might look at this as an adversity, I see an opportunity. An opportunity for us to band together and support each other. For the fans to support the artist who bleed, like I did, to make special music. And for the Artist, to up their standard of music, like I have, like Stevie and Marvin did. I ask every DJ and every fan to take part in saving this music. I would ask you to support my thirty-five years of being your musical servant and buy my CD. You can purchase my album at www.lil-louis.com.
I would also ask you to be my eyes and ears. If anyone steals my music, I would like for that person to be reported to my website. For the record, absolutely no one, besides myself, has any right to distribute my music in any way. They are breaking the law.
I saved my pennies for a rainy day, and God created the sun, so I will be fine. Music is as vital as water. Don't let your well run dry.
It's been a little more than a year since Mike Dunn [myspace] made his way back after a brief foray producing exclusively hip-hop tracks. The Chicago born-and-raised Dunn has been making up for lost time ever since with an amazing array of tracks without the slightest trace of rust.
The Congregation EP Vol. 3 is his third release on Defected. Like Volumes 1 and 2, it's centered around one truly great track - in this case, "Get Cho House On (Children)". Few producers have their own sound in the same way Mike does, and "Get Cho House On" fits pretty squarely with "God Made Me Phunky", "Freaky Muthafucka" and last year's "This Here is House Music" in the treasury of classic MD tunes. The other tracks ("Deep Down" and "Let The Groove (Drive Yo Phunky Soul)" are good enough to stand on their own as singles, too.
Check out the preview for yourself at defected.com.
Photo: Mike Dunn with Jive Records' Wayne Williams, Chicago 2008.
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 
If you can't tell, things slow to a crawl in 
Every few years, Wired editor and would-be visionary Chris Anderson crawls out from the Conde Nast slush pile and releases a book based around his latest, "groundbreaking" big idea. He's at it again with his latest tome which many media watchers and twitchy record industry types are 
Despite the apparent failure of his theory of The Long Tail, Chris Anderson has a new book out based on a Wired cover story from about a year ago called Free: The Future of a Radical Price. In Free, Anderson stakes out the claim that businesses should be in the... uh... business... of giving away things for free, building staggering user bases and then making money on the back end. For a music artist, the theory of Free goes like this: make your music, give it away, and make money on concert sales/live performances/exclusive bits and pieces, similar to what 
I think I've had a grand total of two conversations with 
Cash just makes people deliriously happy. So does free stuff. And so we're back like 
A word of explanation: for some time, "Keisha" has run one of those blogs that consists of nothing but links to pirated music. The hilarious thing is that next to a few hundred dollars worth of pilfered downloads, she has a little image that read "Please Support the Artists". Apparently, the best way to do that is to pirate their music.
Is the most valuable back catalog in dance music - an empire of sounds sampled every single day, from KTel-type compilations to hot new tracks - on the trading block?
I don't think you'll find anyone that cares less what's playing on the radio, but the passing of the Performance Rights Act by Congress last week by the US Congress' House Judiciary Committee might lead to more changes to the audio spectrum than anything in our lifetime.
When the Lord made Heaven He was happy. When the Lord made the platypus He was high. When the Lord made 
We're back like 
Last month, when I was putting together the strands of information that would go into 5's 
The future they told us about has arrived: the world's greatest online radio station is here, and it's free. It's this site I found called "
I'm not a fan of trendwatching in newspapers, but I think it's about time we call this one: 
How things work in other cities, I don't know, but in Chicago at least there's been a recent trend of big-time promoters who long ago left the House Music scene (or were never involved in the first place) throwing "reunion" shows. Others have compared them those obscene "Monsters of Rock" concert tours that roll through auditoriums and stadiums every summer, featuring artists about 20 years past their prime. They're big ticket events far in excess of what most House Music events cost, usually with some sort of radio station sponsorship.
We're scouring the web 24/7 to find that free shit that is somehow not illegal. This includes record label and artist-uploaded tracks, podcasts, mix sets and all of the rest.
The 
There's always been a problem with Billboard's dance charts, going back 20 years. Primarily due to lack of radio play, their charts rely on reporters without the obvious check ("Why is this song #1 when I've never heard it before?") that hours of national radio play can provide.
Vibe and Pepper, a European management agency, has posted a 
There's a 
When Keith Richards first visited Chicago's legendary Chess Records in the early 1960s, he was greeted by a shocking sight. The Blues, which was the rage among British youth, was all but forgotten in the United States, and Muddy Waters was making ends meet by doing odd jobs around the Chess studios. "There was the King of the Blues, and he was painting the ceiling."
It's been a little more than a year since 
