Tags: Snark
10Mar2010
(Ableton) Masturbation and You
So you're a youngblood, you're living in the city. You play a weekly residency and some gigs here and there. You're not the first guy on the flyer but you're not the last. You've played some big clubs, more often in the smaller room of a large venue, and you've been invited to some cities and even had people pay to bring you there.
You usually open up for the big name DJ and you think it's about time that some of them start opening up for you.
So you fire up BitTorrent, find a copy of Ableton Live, Google your way through cracking the copy protection and get ready to launch the next phase in your career. It's not very intuitive at first, but after working with it for a few weeks you're able to put together some sounds that aren't altogether displeasing. You don't have a vocalist, you can't afford a band and your engineer is your roommate Clarence who used to do the sound at raves.
Listening to the finished product, it's not much of a "song" - but really who cares? Nobody makes any money off records in House Music anymore anyway. It's all promotion, baby! And you looked through Beatport and saw these guys who throw out dozens of these instrumental beat tracks a year. They're big names and they have fans and when you opened for them last month at Le Club, it didn't seem that attaching their name to unmitigated shit did their careers much harm.
So you post it up and wait for the marquee gigs to roll in. Your friends (you've been in the game for awhile now, so you've got lots of those) say it's the greatest fucking track since they first heard "Phreaky Muthafucka" on a big system. Or that's what they say, because the last four times you went to see them, they told you apologetically that your 6 minute piece of McHouse Music didn't fit with the "vibe" on the floor. It's "jackin'" but the crowd was more "laid back". You nod your veteran (some say "legendary" but you - humbly - wouldn't go that far) head, because man, you know the psychic connection between a DJ and his audience. It's tight like that, bro.
The funny thing is that your friends all love it, but no one else does. Or at least the sales suggest that this is the case. But it's not that bad for a first effort. For the next release, you'll budget free drink tickets to Clarence, who in addition to being your engineer and roommate also has a cracked copy of Photoshop and can do some flashy artwork. Something with a chick, like an Effen Vodka ad. And you already have your next 14 releases completed. You've really got the hang of jerking off Ableton now, and your loops are so mental, your beats so crunchy, so chunky, so funky, that you kick yourself for not getting in on this racket years ago.
Flash forward a couple of years. You've now got 20 releases on your label, which in a spark of enlightenment you decided to call DeepSoulGasm Records. You've made new friends, and now you trade gigs with these guys in other cities. They remix your records, you remix theirs and you both praise each other like you're giving an oration at a fucking funeral.
You keep thinking that you're just ONE record from really breaking through. On Twitter and Facebook, you're constantly hitting up the big boys with your tracks, hoping to wind up on some comp record from OM or Agave or whatever. Sometimes they throw you a bone and say it's "nice", which, with your years of hard-earned marketing savvy, you now put on all of your releases as:
"Nice."
-- Some Big Name Guy
And yet, when you look at it, nothing's really changed. The gigs you've gotten barely account for the massive timesink of sending a quota of 50,000 private messages a month on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to "promote" yourself. Your releases barely make a dent. Some publishing company (whatever the fuck that is) is sending you threatening letters about a 6 second sample off a disco record you found at a flea market. They don't get it: you're just trying to PROMOTE them. And fuck, it's not like you made more than a hundred bucks on any of these pieces of shit anyway.
For one month, you miss a release date (it's for your highly-anticipated opus called "FUCK ON THE DANCEFLOOR NAKED LIKE YOUR MOMMA SAID TO"). Surprisingly, nobody seems to notice. You read a site called House Music Daily and some fucking dork is criticizing "Ableton Masturbation" like he invented the term (holy shit, it looks like he did!) and you think, "That's not me. I've got a hundred quotes from legendary people saying it's 'nice' and 'great beat' and 'loved the energy!'"
But it IS you. YOU'RE the douche ruining this. Let's be charitable: most people's first attempts at something - whether it's building a birdfeeder or making music - sucks. It's terrible. But in the Good Ole Days, when this music was somewhat popular, there was a barrier to entry which prevented the Anti-Hero of our story from shoving his bullshit into the marketplace. Would he be willing to spend several hundred or several thousand dollars pressing vinyl in quantities large enough to stock the key dance music shops in the United States, plus promo copies to Big Name DJs who will say it's "nice"? Not unless he thought he could make it back, or come damn close.
Ultimately though - and this is the main point right here - those records shoved off this mortal coil into closets, attics or the trash, where bad music goes to die (and die quietly). They weren't preserved forever on a site, on someone's harddrive, and most importantly in the memory of those 50,000 people you spammed every month to promote this quick-and-dirty spit-lubed fit of Ableton Masturbation. It's an unwritten rule that self-promotion involves putting your best foot forward. Probably half of all releases every month (and that's a conservative estimate) are the equivalent of FedExing someone a box of dogshit.
Maybe you're really gifted and have a great song ready to burst forth after a few years of seasoning. Unfortunately, your name is now associated with the musical equivalent of a ricecake: totally lacking in substance, weight and good taste. And it's not even a heartfelt piece of garbage. You did it in 30 minutes. Anyone who knows music also knows this. DeepSoulGasm Records has anything but soul. It exists to shove crappy loops into a crappy market to make someone famous.
I sometimes wonder if this hasn't already happened - the final act of this era of McHouse Music and Ableton Masturbation, where anyone who ever had the misguided notion that "Hey, I could do that too!" went ahead and did (and had his friends proclaim it the best fucking record in the history of percussion). I have no doubt that sheer persistence and will can make someone a name, and repetition and effort can make even the unskilled competent craftsmen. But when they finally release their hit - when they finally got all their ducks in a row and wrote a real song, with real hooks, and real feeling rather than slamming some beats together in an afternoon and pushing it on to Beatport - will anyone notice? Will anyone other than their BFFs still care? Or will the promo sheet still be littered with big name DJs saying it's "nice"?
I Beat It shirt from cottonfactory; Happy Bunny from lovehappybunny.com.
11Jan2010
When Peven Everett Was Right
We've written in the past about Peven Everett (or his collaborators, it's never entirely clear to me who is doing the typing) and his adventures and misadventures on the internet.
In this case, however, he has a point. Long story short: a promoter in the UK put something out for a neo-soul event "featuring the music of" about twenty of the biggest names in neo-soul, including one Peven Everett.
This is straight-out ghetto promoting and frankly you can't blame Peven (or his collaborators) for calling them out on it. Nobody books Frankie Knuckles "playing the music of" someone else. You use names like this when you're afraid your booked talent can't draw. Simple and easy.
The promoter (who appears to be this company) leaves a lulzworthy comment to the post, demanding Peven "remove this liable" (sic). Protip from your pal: it's usually not the best idea to sue people for things you can't pronounce, like libel. Here you go, Promoter Guy, let me Google that for you.
08Jan2010
Electro is Like Eating a Bag of Candy
Tasty but without substance, and you feel guilty and maybe the urge to vomit afterwards.
Example:
 Ripping off Daft Punk's imagery?
Ripping off their name from well-known artists?
Unwarranted self-reverence?
Entirely derivative?
 Originality?
By all means, gorge if you like (we all have guilty pleasures).
But that empty feeling you get afterwards?
Yeah.
25Sep2009
ASCAP Jumps the Shark
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.
15Sep2009
Remix My Song. Spread the Word. Get Paid (Maybe)
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.
Someone Has to Scream Say It
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.
(With apologies to Peter Finch.)
The Sound a Pirate Makes When It Dies
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!
Dear Erick
Promo photos with naked chick in background? Check. Chest open like John Holmes despite being a couple years shy of joining AARP? Check.
"Private planes, own[ing] homes and really living the dream?" Check, check, check.
Dear Erick, I'm pretty sure you crossed that "fine line between what is commercial and what's underground" a long time ago.
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