Category: notes of interest

  • Diego Stocco – Bassoforte

    Some people mistake musical perfection for having musically perfect instruments, perfect arrangements and perfect recordings. Despite all that, it’s usually the imperfections, the grainy, the raw sound that stands out. At the end of the day it’s about the sound that is created, not how it is created.

    A perfect example of imperfect instruments creating something marvellous is Diego Stocco’s Bassoforte. Take an old piano, a guitar neck, some DIY and wood and record samples from this bizarre instrument and you end up with something like this:

    Diego Stocco – Bassoforte from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.

    Read the whole article on createdigitalmusic.com . Buy the track at Bandcamp.

  • Thom Yorke: just say no to majors

    According to Thom Yorke, the music industry is on the brink of collaps “within months” and signing with a a major record label is like going sailing with a sinking ship. Not only that Thom, you also forgot to mention the fact they throw you into huge debts with the only possibility to get out of unless you become a huge star (which every one always thinks of themselves, but a lot rarely accomplish) and that at the end of the day, the own most of the stuff you made.

  • Frauding your way to fame

    A lot of clever websites help you as a musician increase your reach to fans. But there’s also a site that will promise to fraud your way to the top or at least make you very poor.

    Meet Chartfixer.com.  A website currently being trialled in Australia “before being unleashed upon the world“. It takes something that has been going on for decades into the 2.0 era. It’s principle is simple. If you are musician, you can ask the website to buy up a large volume of your download singles. As a result, the single rockets into the charts.  The website promises that will give you instant fame and people will start buying the track all by themselves, because as a chart hit it gets automatic airplay. This of course comes at a price. A lot of dollars. And your soul.

    How does the site generate those downloads? Simple: they lure in people to subscribe to the site and get paid to download the requested tracks. Chartfixer basically uses part of the money paid by the artist to finance the downloaders. Musicadium has done the math to see how $30000 wil get you 5000 downloads and a chart topper. And it seems the only one getting really rich of the scam is the website itself.

    The practice, as shocking as it may seem, is not at all new. In pre-download times it wasn’t so hard to send a few people to various stores and simply buy all the physical singles. This would require a lot of money (of which part of the revenue would obviously flow back to the frauders). Especially in smaller markets, like the Netherlands, it was possible to do this with little effort since it takes less sold items then say in the US. The companies that manage the charts are aware of this, so for instance when one or a few shops in a city or region sell out all the singles while over the rest of the country virtually none are sold, that’s marked as suspicious. Recently in 2002 Dutch singer Gerard Joling’s single was taken out of the charts for this very reason. It had sold a suspicious lot of singles in a very short time. The record company defended itself that they had a lot of internet sales of the physical single and bought the singles from official retail channels to ship them to internet buyers. A rather weak defence.

    In 2007 NLpop.blog.nl explained how to score a hit in an ironically meant series of articles. To their shock however they received a load of mails from anonymous sources from within the record industry. They stated that what they had written wasn’t fiction, but something the big labels actually do, but in much more covert ways that go unnoticed.

    Truth be told, if you want to be a famous musician, it’s all about getting noticed. You can either give away free music, put up posters every where, buy advertising or somehow persuade DJ’s to play your song a lot. I can imagine to a record company, investing money in buying their own single is as much a marketing tool as buying advertising. And getting airplay is a really good way to get noticed. But in the end the music itself has to be good. Shitty music with great marketing still doesn’t sell.

    And the integrity of a musician goes a long way  too. IF you were a musician who bought your way to the top with money, could you ever respect what you do and the music you make? And do you think your fans would? Or are they just consumer drones to you? Chartfixer stresses its legal, but it certainly isn’t moral.

  • How To Destroy Angels

    In case all the hype had completely slipped past you on just about every social media, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, Mariqueen Maandig (also Trent’s wife) and Atticus Ross have been working together in a project called How To Destroy Angels. As of June 1st 2010, their first EP together has been released for free on their website. For an additional fee you can get even higher quality versions. Though fans of NIN are still in debate on whether this is a truely awesome release or a disappointing one, I’m in the first camp. I can recommend to just download it and give it a listen. It’s free.

    You can also check out the rather graphic video for The Space In Between:

  • Brick-wallers in Disguise

    Brickwallers in disguiseToday at the subway station I was greeted by a poster of the band Di-rect. After the departure of the lead-singer, their record company art-director probably decided to change their image from “rock ‘n roll boyband” to “serious musicians”. Of course they had to do a photo shoot to stress this.

    On the surface they seem to have done an okay job. ‘Clever’ photography effect (holding up signs with their own face), trendy contrasting lighting and a style consultant fitted them colour-coordinated clothing. But as far as I’m concerned they violated one big rule of band photography.

    Do. Not. Ever. Stand in front of a brick wall. Even if it’s subtly painted white. Rock ‘n Roll Confidential has Hall of Shame of band photography and one thing that’s very common is the “brick-wallers”. People without any imagination in desperate need of a backdrop, who decide to ‘casually’ lean against a brick wall. Granted, most of the photography itself is far worse than this album shoot, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a deadly sin to ever pose in front of a brick wall. Click though the gallery linked above to understand why.

  • Even the Zombie Dance Parade is dead

    Even the Dance Parade 360 has been killed off now. A press release was issued stating that the due to disappointing pre-sales the event was cancelled. In other press releases it was made clear that the event will no longer be held in Rotterdam. Though it’s not clear whether they mean “ever at all”, it also implies they’re thinking of organising it elsewhere. The question is: who will have them? Then again, the North Sea Jazz festival was once persuaded to leave The Hague and come to Rotterdam, so who knows.

    Still, my previous statement still stands: there’s no use keeping it on life support. The Dance Parade is dead.

  • Quit MySpace Day

    Quit MySpaceIt’s not just time to not log into MySpace any more, it’s time you delete your account.

    Let’s be honest. Despite MySpace having just about every band you’d ever like on there, the website itself is a piece of crap. Always has been. And so is it’s functioning as a social website. Nevermind that the design still looks like someone hand-coded it in his mom’s basement, nevermind the fact that whoever designed it missed Interface Design class 101, nevermind that there’s better social sites and music related sites to be on. Those are not the reasons to leave MySpace and never have been, else you would have done so long ago.

    Let’s look at the reason you are on there. All your friends are on there and so are all your favourite band, sharing their scoops and music. That’s about it. So you are there too. Understandable. You can handle the  add-requests from random idiots you never met before who then continue to spam your list with their new releases and parties you’re never goin to attend. But there’s something bigger going on. And it affects you.

    Obviously already knew that media mogul Ruport Murdoch (also launched Fox News, just saying) bought MySpace years ago for $580 million and he intended to make billions with it. And you’ve probably already experiencing that you’re Facebook account is more active and interesting than your old Myspace account you hardly ever log into. And you’d be right, several sources already made pretty graphs of the steady decline in MySpace’s market share and user base. Despite them desperately launching new gizmo’s like a ticketing service and a music subscription service (not yet, but ‘soon’). Also, MySpace has made a $150 million loss and Rupert Murdoch calls it a big mistake. But that’s business, that doesn’t affect you, the user, right? Wrong.

    A Financial Times article from December last year entitled The Rise and Fall of MySpace, though lengthy, paints the picture clearly. Behind the scenes, the ‘financial people’ and the people who created MySpace (Tom, you probably know him cause you never deleted that first friend who automatically added you) have always argued. But MySpace is on a short leash from its owners and they are not interested in rolling out new features and improvements. They are interested in profit, or at the moment, not making a loss. Which means ad revenues need to go up and spending on ‘hip new features’ down. They’ve already admitted defeat in the race against Facebook and in June last year fired 30% of its staff. My prediction: more ads on MySpace and stuff you need to click through and don’t want. In short, it’s not going to get better, not on the user-side any way.

    And that’s exactly what Andrew Dubber demanded in his post Happy ‘Quit MySpace’ Day. In October 2009 he summed up what was wrong with MySpace and demanded it would be remade from the ground up to utilize its ace card: the fact that the website has every band in the known universe on it. Although he is in no position as a single user to make demands, he declared the 24th of October ‘Quit MySpace’ Day. If MySpace is the same piece of crap by then as it was a year ago, he (and I) would like to ask you to quit your account on Myspace. Because that would take away MySpace’s biggest asset: you, the user, the customer. All your favourite bands and friends won’t die, they’ll just go elsewhere. To some place better.

    Don’t just stop logging into MySpace, but delete your account completely. Of course, you’re completely free to do that right now if you have no hope left, but if you have a flair for the dramatic do it on the 24th of October. Mark your calender, don’t forget to celebrate Quit MySpace Day.  Even if you have already quit.

  • the Zombie Dance Parade

    In my personal blog I already noted the demise of the FFWD Dance Parade in Rotterdam. The annual clone of the Love Parade in Berlin was Rotterdam’s annual party in the city centre, until the city government decided it was a security risk and could no longer take place in this form.

    The organisers now whipped together The Dance Parade 360, what seems to be on paper a pathetic display. Instead of trucks driving through the city centre, the Zuiderpark in the South of the city will be fenced off, tickets will be sold (only pre-sale) and the trucks will basically drive around in circles in the park with ‘crowds’ behind them, from what I can tell from the website.

    Most noteworthy to mention is that the most popular truck, the B2S, will not be present, nor will any form of harcore dance music. I can see why, since they don’t want any hooligan incidents, but effectively with the already poor location and strategy, it will make the FFWD just another small dance festival, hardly worth mentioning. It would be best for the organisation to call it quits for 2011, because this will be a pathetic charade. There’s no use keeping it on life support.

  • Things to be excited about

    EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP

    Not specifically music related, but certainly DYI: Graffiti artists Banksy’s film project. When will this be realeased in the Netherlands? Interesting story about this film is that he offered a piece of art to a band named Exit Through The Gift Shop Door to change their name so he could use the title. They accepted.

    HOW TO DESTROY ANGELS
    Rumour has it, that’s the new pet project of Trent Reznor and his wife. The sound samples on the page seem to confirm that Trent at least has to have a minor hand in this.

  • Sharing only kills a broken industry

    There’s a few interesting posts on other blogs and sites I’d like to point out for further reading. The Cult’s Ian Astbury said that he thinks what Radiohead did with their release of In Rainbows was irresponsible. Nathan Harden posts that he thinks people who share music are killing rock ‘n roll. All this criticism is based on an incorrect assumption that a restructuring of the music scene, the distribution and industry as a whole equates to killing it. Kyle Bylin has written a very good column explaining that it’s the industry that is broken.

    The fact that sharing is free, doesn’t mean there is no money that can be made by honest individuals and companies. Also, at the end of the day it’s art, not a consumer product. You can sell it, but it selling it is not its purpose in life.  If any thing, it is not a bad time for rock ‘n roll at all. Unless you’re a corporate rock band.