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.

All aboard the sample train, this is going to be a long ride.

Let’s start in 1948. Roebuck Staples forms a gospel group with his family called The Staple Singers. Not even mentioned in their Wikipedia-page is the fact that in 1955 they released a recording of the traditional gospel song This May be the Last Time in a blues style.

Ten years later in 1965, The Rolling Stones ‘borrowed’ most of the lyrics for their single The Last Time. This was not uncommon in those days (see: When the Levee Breaks). On a side note: also not uncommon was for the big bands of that era (The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Who) to cover each other’s songs. So when half of the Rolling Stones were sentenced to prison for drug charges in 1967, The Who recorded their cover version of the song out of support and a bit of irony.

Back on track, in 1966 Andrew Oldham, former manager/producer of the Rolling Stones created an orchestrated version of the Last Time and released it on the 1966 album The Rolling Stones Songbook. Even though the song barely resembles the original, copyrights were attributed to the Stones. This became an important issue decades later in 1997 when The Verve released their song Bitter Sweet Symphony. It clearly uses a sample of the Oldham version, which they licensed. Strangely enough however they got sued by The Rolling Stones, because according to them they used a lot more of their own song than the license had specified. Eventually, the Verve also got sued by Andrew Oldham. The result was that all of the credits on Bitter Sweet Symphony now point to Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, writers of the Rolling Stones song The Last Time. Which in itself is ‘stolen’ from a 1955 song. An irony also pointed out in the sample-documentary RIP, a Remix Manifesto.

The Verve’s song has led to many other artists sampling their track again. Our last stop on this long ride ends with just one of them: Mark van Dale’s Water Verve. Although it’s arguable that this track was probably sampled from the Oldham version, the fact that it was released just a year after Bitter Sweet Symphony should be proof enough that it was riding The Verve’s popularity wave. Oh and the title Water Verve is a play on words, since  the word waterverf not only sounds like Water Verve, it means “water paint” in Dutch.

After all the music that was inspired by each other, here’s the place where we started: The Staple Singers – This May be the Last Time:

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.

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:

In this week’s Origin of Samples-post a classic case of who’s stealing from who. In 1991 a relatively unknown Seattle band Pearl Jam released an album entitled ‘Ten‘. One track from that album would go on to be one of the anthems of its generation at the explosion of the grunge hype: ‘Alive‘.

Only a year later, on a proverbial attic, some guys got together and made hardcore gabber under the name Neophyte. Eventually a rock guitarist named Jarno Butter (whom I’ve shared some classes with in highschool, but that is a different story) joined their ranks to play with them during live sets. They released many tracks that gained international fame in an underground scene. One of the tracks, released in 1996 under their happy hardcore artist name Bodylotion, was entitled Always Harcore. Although in entirely different genre and not directly sampled from the original, it’s clear the vocal melody from Always Harcore comes directly from Alive.

It’s not uncommon in the hardcore gabber scene to use tons of samples from other music and film quotes (especially if they contain the word ‘fuck’). What isn’t very common however to sample from their own ranks. And that’s basically what German Europop-band Scooter did in 2004 when they ripped the chorus from Always Hardcore and crammed it into their own hit single One (Always Hardcore). Even though pretty much every Scooter song is based on another song, you can still wonder if they knew the original original.

To what extent Neophyte stole/were inspired by Pearl Jam and Scooter stole/were inspired by Neophyte or Pearl Jam, I leave you to judge. Here’s the original Alive:

Tristan Jehan created an interesting bit of python code during Music Hack Day SF. It turns any song into a swing version. Example:
Sweet Child O’ Mine (Swing Version) by plamere

Read and listen to many more ‘swing remixes’  @ Music Machinery.

Today 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.

There’s a number of drum samples that are have become the grand daddy’s of entire genres and have been extensively used in hiphop, dance and such. I could talk about the Amen break, but luckily there’s an excellent documentary on that. There’s a more peculiar history surrounding the drum loop from Led Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks. Or more specifically, an old blues song called When the Levee Breaks.

In 1927 the levee did break and cause the Great Mississippi Flood. Two years after, Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie wrote, performed and recorded a song entitled When the Levee Breaks. The lyrics deal with losing everything in the flood and having to move from South to the North (Chicago), thus also exporting many blues musicians and blues lovers there.

More than 40 years later in 1971, Led Zeppelin dusts off the original and makes their own reworked cover version, in essence ‘sampling’ it and making it into something new. On drums as always is legendary drummer John Bonham. The track opens with just a few seconds of his drums.

The fact that it’s just the drums however makes it ideal for sampling and when sampling takes a rise starting in the late 80’s Bonham’s drums end up on many, many records. Not just whole but cut up as a breakbeat as well. Just to name a few where the drum loop is intact: Eminem’s Kim, Coldcut & Steinski’s Beats & Pieces and Enigma’s Gravity of Love.

The ultimate bit of irony is that while all the music I linked above is on YouTube, the YouTube video containing the original 1929 version of When the Levee Breaks has been pulled due to copyright claims by Sony, despite it being way pas it copyright date. So for now, here’s the sampled ‘original’ by Led Zeppelin:

David Bowie’s instrumental track Crystal Japan has a rather odd history of how it slipped into the public attention. When it was written and recorded in 1979 and still had the title Fuje Moto San, it was intended for the album Scary Monsters, but was discarded. Instead it was used in a Japanese commercial for the sake Crystal Jun Rock which also featured Bowie himself.  As a result, the track was released as a single in Japan and mostly forgotten about afterwards.

Then in 1994, Nine Inch Nails’ ground-breaking album The Downward Spiral comes out. On it is a beautifully haunting instrumental track titled A Warm Place. The main keyboard motive isn’t just similar (as Wikipedia puts it), it’s identical to parts of Crystal Japan. And even though it’s not a direct sample from the original track, it’s clear where the melody came from.

So is this blatant stealing? No, it turns out, Trent Reznor (the man behind NIN) is quite the David Bowie fan. So much that he doesn’t just sample Bowie’s voice for a remix of that album (at 4:29), Bowie and Reznor were working together on multiple projects. Nine Inch Nails goes on tour with David Bowie. There’s multiple tracks floating on the web of Bowie and Reznor playing songs of both Bowie and NIN together live. Reznor remixed the track I’m afraid of Americans. Ironically for the video, Reznor plays a creepy stalker who follows Bowie. To top  it off in 1997 Reznor puts a track of Bowie on the soundtrack of the 1997 film Lynch film Lost Highway. If you want to know more about the influence and their views on how everything’s connected there’s a 4-part interview with Bowie and Reznor on YouTube that starts here.

David Bowie’s Crystal Japan can be heard here:

You may have noticed the “buy me a drink”  link that shows  below every post (also in all the places besides b-sting.com where it is crossposted, like Livejournal and Facebook). Two people now have asked me what that’s about. I’ll explain in case it leads to misunderstandings.

B-sting.com is my music website where I not only talk about music, but also plan to release my own stuff some day soon. A lot of the music will probably be given away for free (partially at least, with an option to ‘support the artist’), so as a business model for my ‘internet venture’ that’s kinda sucky.

“Buy me a drink” is basically nothing more than a donate button. The cap a street musician puts in front of him where you can toss in a coin if you like it. But “donating” sounds like I’m a starving artist, a charity in need of financial help. I don’t need money, I have a well-paid day-job and this is blogging/musician thing is what I do because I love doing it. Any artist with stars in his eyes dreams of one day ‘living off art alone’, but I’m realistic, so for now happy with just a complimentary drink. And who knows, maybe one day all the drinks combined make up for a bit of the expenses I make to do what I love doing.

So I liked the idea of the “buy me a beer“-plugin for WordPress (except that I don’t like beer, but luckily you can customize the plugin). It’s like saying “hey, I like what you’re onto there, let me buy you drink, my friend!”. Just like in real life. For those familiar with Facebook, it’s sort of the ‘like’-button of my website.With the difference that you can buy a drink and you decide what you pay. Two cents, 2 euro’s, doesn’t matter, you can toss a Zimbabwean dollar in the hat if you like. You can even buy me a drink irl, if you want.

Let it be clear no one needs to press that button and buy me drinks. It is completely optional. It’s not like when every one buys a round and you have to too. And even though I do admit I greatly appreciate the gesture if you do, I won’t like you any less if you don’t. To be quite honest, so far no one has bought me a drink at all. So no, I’m not raking in big dough. But that’s to be expected since there’s no music yet, only blog posts for one and a half months. And if you don’t want to give money, a “great post!”-reply or a “Like” on Facebook every now and then suffices too. Not that lack of replies has ever stopped me from blogging either though.

P.S. Has any one ever spotted a street musician who plays Gimme Some Money? They totally should.