Label:Life

Recently in an email discussion regarding the musical career of an up and coming song writer, it was made known that he (the song writer) had uploaded his tunes to hitsongscience to have his tracks appraised for pop success…

He writes:

My scores were at an average of 6.2 with a few 7s and 7.15s. The site says that a score higher than 7.3 has a high hit potential.

Which is great, but then after a few other replies in the discussion an email from another contributor to the list, Nicholas McRoberts, bounded in with a very elegant reply…

In full:

This is an interesting and long standing debate about what makes music pleasing! And it’s not just with internet that these questions have arisen. In 1722, Rameau wrote “Traité de l’harmonie”, discussing in detail how to make a hit song for the 18th century and this was by no means the first discussion of the subject – there are traces of similar philosophical debates going back at least to Greek antiquity.

However, despite what they teach us at the conservatorium – “Pop music is easy to write. It’s all formular based” – the reality is quite the opposite and the music that becomes legendary tends to change the way we hear all music by shifting subtlely AWAY from actual trends. For example:

Nowegian Wood – The Beatles
Stairway to Heaven – Led Zep
Nothing else matters – Metallica
Come away with me – Norah Jones
Yellow – Coldplay
The Bends (the whole album) – Radiohead
Smile – Lily Allen
Rehab – Amy Winehouse
Relax, take it easy – Mika
Whenever, wherever – Shakira

etc. etc.

And while there is an element of structure that is often similar (or the same) this only lets us guess what will happen when and not whether or not it will be exciting, agreeable etc.

I think of this as a recipe. If you set out to make a complicated french dish (like Fillet de lotte enrobé de noix et contisé à l’andouille de Guéméné) and you don’t heed a recipe, you may succeed or fail. If you use a recipe, you may get closer but you may also burn, overcook, undercook, oversalt, overspice, mash or generally mess up the dish. If you don’t have fresh produce to begin with it’ll never taste any good!

Regarding the hit song science site – this has been the holy grail of music researchers since IT allowed us to dabble. Algorithms that allow us to understand and predict why and how we like music. It sounds sexy but the state of the art is actually pretty rudimentary. No website offers to “read” your novel and tell you whether it will be a best seller or not because it’s not possible – simply because computers can’t “understand” what they’re reading. The same is true of music.

I (naughtily) uploaded a real hit song to HSS to see how it scored.

In 2005, the single “Vertigo” by U2 won in all three categories in which it was nominated: Best Rock Song, Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, and Best Short Form Music Video. The single, which topped the charts in several countries, including the UK. It reached #31 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and topped the Modern Rock Tracks chart, and it topped the digital downloads chart in both the US and the UK, becoming U2’s best-selling single ever in the US with 2x Platinum status.

Vertigo scored only 7.12 on HSS (pdf attached). Take heart Betinho! You’re right up there!

This is so great on so many levels…

Personally I think the service is great, but as we know there is far more to a hit song than just musical ability…

Well speaking of which (and not to put too fine a point on it) Trent Reznor’s
carefully crafted foray into the Pirate Bay looks like an absolute no-brainer to me… regardless of the corporate strings being pulled/cut etc…

If you get a bit of this :

“Before we look at full-fledged CROWD CLOUT, let’s start with one of its prerequisites, and a huge business opportunity waiting to happen in its own right: getting consumers to reveal their intentions”

With this :

http://digg.com/music/RIAA_claims_rights_to_all_artists_royalties

“I release some of my work under the CC license so sites like soma.fm and other people making videos can use my material without hunting me down to get my permission. But it seems SoundExchange is playing the job of the heavy here whether I like or not. Well, I don’t like it. How can this compulsory license override my free and open CC license. this crap just blows me away.”

the distillation of which is overwhelmingly:

“Fuck the RIAA.”

Which on Digg is pretty unusual – normally they can’t agree on anything.

Is Digg market research?... any kind of social barometer at all?

Dunno. It is to me.

What NIN are doing may just be paying cynical lip-service to one of the more enduring aspects of teen-spirit… but to be honest, at this point, for someone like NIN to NOT be positioning themselves in diametric opposition to the RIAA would be to be blindly, suicidally out of touch with their own culture.

exhibit 1)

This is John Dee – a leading 16th C intellectual, astronomer, astrologer, devout Christian and prolific occultist. He is probably the originator of archetypal wizard “He was tall and slender. He wore a gown like an artist’s gown, with hanging sleeves, and a slit…. A very fair, clear sanguine complexion… a long beard as white as milk. A very handsome man”. He was also (occasionally) in the pay of Queen Elizabeth the first, and I’ve heard rumours that he was also a spy, who’s code was 007.

Interesting guy – the occult side is what fascinates people the most of course… he went through a phase of Angelic communication, through a medium (and quite possibly charlatan) named Edward Kelley… angels dictating long passages (enough to fill several books) in Enochian (the angelic language) which were dutifully transcribed, collected, collated.

I came across some of these a couple of years back – page after page after page of incredible detail – intricate symbols and diagrams like sudokus on acid, and immediately the computer programmer in me kicked in with something approaching recognition, and I thought “Oh my god, you poor bastard. What have you done?”

exhibit 2)

The modern Eula. Every time you buy a piece of music, a movie, software etc etc you are apparently entering into a contract… hundreds of lines of densely worded legalese will be secreted away somewhere, sometimes prominent, sometimes not. These artifacts are quite unique in the sphere of creative writing in that they’re specifically designed NOT to be read by the people who are supposed to read them.

AND NO ONE EVER READS THEM

They are still about communication though, at a different level. Here’s what I think: they are a veiled threat. They are the curse over the pharaoh’s tomb… they say “Tremble ye, for thou art bound by that which is beyonde thy reckoning, and if it is HIS will, ye shall render unto Satan that which is Satan’s”. There as been a bit of fuss recently over a report that Eulas are An epidemic of lawsuits waiting to happen... and really this should come as no surprise, if you have hundreds of millions of people regularly signing contracts that they’ve never read.

So.

Welcome to Nick Taylor’s Law of the Minimum: “Complexity arises from flawed assumptions”.

If an answer to a question is complicated, then you’re probably asking the wrong question. Poor old John Dee went off on (what was almost certainly) a wrong tangent, and having one of the most powerful minds of his era, was able to pursue it down blind alleys to an extent that would have floored a more conventional intellect far, far earlier. Today we have the collective wisdom of the most powerful legal minds that money can buy, constructing elaborate legal artifacts that no one ever reads, committing people to terms that they consistently break, and really don’t give a flying fuck about in any case.

Complexity has a fractal-like way of generating more complexity, and there is no end-point. Nothing resolves, you just wind up with endless self-generating caveats. As a programmer, you develop an instinct for this – whenever you see a mad bit of code, you generally know that in the long run you’ll need to stop asking “how?” and start asking “why?”

I think that Eulas (like DRM) are (probably) the right answer to the wrong question. The question is, what’s the right question.

The answer to that one I suspect is “do we need the copyright cartels?”

Sorry.

Oh dear god, I do hope not, but all the signs are there.

Every ten years or so, at the end of every decade, there seems to be this new wave of destructive creativity, widely derided by the old guard (where’s the skill? where’s the substance? that’s not music, it’s just a noise etc) but very popular among the next generation, basically because it short-cuts the learning curve and well… anyone can do it. And it’s their’s.

So we had acid-rock in the 60s, punk in the 70s, rave-music in the 80s… I once heard Tony Wilson say that every ten years there’s a new wave of music… and right now the music business is worse than it was at the worst part of the 80s, so we’re due for another revolution right now.

That was 1998 and unfortunately nothing happened.

We skipped a decade. However (checks watch) it’s that time again. Time for this decade’s flooding of the Nile, time for the longbows at Agincourt… Time for something new.

So. Take a look around, what do you see? Millions of kids on Myspace each with their own 15 pixels of fame, and more importantly, on youtube making their own videos out of other people’s music. It isn’t about money – it’s about getting as many other kids as possible going (like) OMG, WTF, LOL – check this out!!!.

But where’s the skill? Where’s the substance? That’s not music etc.

Actually, some them are pretty good
I think this girl managed to get some sort of TV deal off the back of her Youtube activities, but like, whatever.

Is this it? Must be incredibly exciting if you’re 17… and like, Doing It. If you’re not – if you’re still getting up to speed with your pre-CBS Strat, doing your umpteenth rehearsal for your umpteenth gig, you probably don’t quite get it – even though (and this tends to be the way with all these things) everyone’s invited.

Actually, I have a confession to make.

All of the above was just an elaborate roundabout way of leading into…

OMG, WTF, LOL… Check this out!!!

This guy takes lip-syncing into whole new dimensions of weirdness. This is the double-album, gate-fold, rock-opera concept-project… it takes the pinnacle of David Lynch’s art… the narrowed the gap between cosy and creepy, and refines it about 1000 times..

Fast forward to the 7th minute or so… Arrrghhhh!!! Holy Fuck.

Attention attention-seekers! The Great Web Mother has seen fit to cast one of her millions of eyes approvingly in your direction, and she has spawned a number of sites designed to make it even easier for you to debase yourself for the attention you’re not getting from those closest to you. YouTube, Google Video and related sites have revived vaudeville, then stabbed it in the neck with the razor-sharp shards of a torn can of energy drink, kicked it in the ribs, and left it onstage to writhe for the amusement of millions. And you can be part of it!

More@wired

British music mogul Alan McGee says increased reliance on Internet downloads has likely signaled the end of the singles era of music.

The Creation records founder added that the increasingly technologically based world of music has grown beyond the control of major labels and will likely make the once popular musical format obsolete, The Guardian reported.

“Downloads will be king within the next couple of years,” McGee said on his Web site. “The majors have lost the football.”

While McGee believes the decline in singles’ popularity to be inevitable and indicative of a change in power in favor of musicians and smaller labels, the British Phonographic Industry rejects that view.

“It depends how you define the single,” a BPI spokesman told the paper. “In terms of the volume of single tracks that have been sold, the market has doubled in just over a year. What has happened is that the singles market has accommodated a new format, the download.”

Source:upi

On a recent Monday, six people — soon enough four, then two — were browsing the bins of compact discs at Norman’s Sound and Vision, a music store on Cooper Square in Manhattan, around 6 p.m., a time that once constituted the daily rush hour. A decade ago, the number of shoppers might have been 20 or 30, said Norman Isaacs, the owner. Six people? He would have had that many working in the store.

“I used to make more in a day than I probably make in a week now,” said the shaven-headed Mr. Isaacs, 59, whose largely empty aisles brimming with punk, jazz, Latin music, and lots and lots of classic rock have left him, many afternoons, looking like a rock ’n’ roll version of the Maytag repairman. Just as troubling to Mr. Isaacs is the age of his clientele.

“It’s much grayer,” he said mournfully.

The neighborhood record store was once a clubhouse for teenagers, a place to escape parents, burn allowances and absorb the latest trends in fashion as well as music. But these days it is fast becoming a temple of nostalgia for shoppers old enough to remember “Frampton Comes Alive!’’

In the era of iTunes and MySpace, the customer base that still thinks of recorded music as a physical commodity (that is, a CD), as opposed to a digital file to be downloaded, is shrinking and aging, further imperiling record stores already under pressure from mass-market discounters like Best Buy and Wal-Mart.

More@nytimes

A new research study shows that the digital music market has experienced remarkable growth in the past year with women aged 15-49 emerging as the hottest growth demographic and the iPod maintaining a 10-to-1 margin over its nearest competitor. The survey, conducted by Digital Life America in the U.S. and Fast ForwardTM in Canada, found that 28 percent of Americans aged 12 and older—an estimated 67 million—now own a digital music player, more than double the 12 percent figure in 2005. Remarkably, it appears that strongest growth demographic is women. According to the data, ownership of digital music players tripled among women from a mere 8 percent in 2005 to 27 percent in 2006. The survey also found signficant growth among men with over 28 percent owning a digital music player—up from 18 percent in 2005.

More@ipodnn

So, is anyone besides the RIAA making money with music online? Absolutely.

The widespread idea that popular music is popular due to its quality is incredibly misguided. Sure, independent music varies widely in artist ability and talent but, in an Internet connected world its becoming increasingly easy to find amazing independent musicians to listen to and love.

If you’re a music fan, listen up, cause I’m about to let you know how to find great new music from artists who actually get a fair cut of their online sales.

If your a musician looking to expand your audience, and maybe find a way to buy groceries with the proceeds of your talent, put down that guitar and take out a notebook, ‘cause I’m about to show you a few people who are doing just that.One reason popular artists are making little from online sales are the middlemen involved (Apple | Napster | etc), the record labels, and the digital distribution houses that lease the master quality recordings to the online vendor. It’s as if someone took the arcane structure of the physical world record business and tried to make it even more complicated and less transparent on-line. (Now, who do you think might have caused all that?)

The secret is, Apple, Napster, URGE, Yahoo Music and Real aren’t the only games in town. There are other alternatives out there with completely different formulas and designs for how your digital music landscape should look.

More@digitalmusic

An interesting post on the money spent lobbying the US government by the RIAA and the MPAA over the last few years. L:L is not sure how accurate this is but interesting none the less.

More@paladine