Tag: links

  • Techdirt: Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales

    Techdirt posts about the accounting done in the music industry. The article comes to a not-so-surprising conclusion and explains in detail:

    Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales

    Shortly summarised, the artist already gets a small slice of the pie to begin with, but thanks to all sorts of contract obligations, the artist is left with very little because advances and loans need to be paid back to the record company. If that doesn’t make you follow Thom Yorke’s advice, I don’t know what will. Do it yourself or sign with a small label you know you can trust. And read the fine print.

  • Tubeway Army – Are Friends Electric?

    Halfway through the Seventies, Gary Numan formed the band Tubeway Army, which would later change its name to simply Gary Numan. In 1979 a track they released as a single would become a massive hit: Are Friends Electric? As a result, the track has later been covered by countless bands who were inspired by the synhtpop track, such as Republica (which features Gary Numan’s vocals), Moloko, Information Society and even Weezer. There is however also a track that takes its cues from the original in a rather bizarre history. To track that back we need to jump back a bit.

    In 1995 Adina Howard released the song Freak Like Me. That song itself is almost worth an entry since it leans heavily on Bootsy Collins 1976 song I’d Rather Be With You, without actually directly sampling it. What the Adina Howard song did sample was a drumloop from Sly and the Family Stone’s 1968 song Sing A Simple Song.

    In the early years of the 21st century, producer/remixer Richard X made a mashup of Are Friends Electric by Tubeway Army and Freak Like Me by Adina Howard. The song circled the underground bootleg scene for a while. At some point either cause Richard X wanted to release the song officially but couldn’t get the sample from Adina Howard cleared or cause Island Records requested it (history is not clear on this one), Richard X got involved in something that can only be described as a mashup-sample-cover-remix. Richard X produced a song for the Sugababes in 2002. The then popular girl-group recorded the vocals of Freak Like Me, but on top of a remix with samples of Are Friends Electric. The result is amazing: Sugababes – Freak Like Me.

    Though arguably there are ton of tracks that deserve mention here as ‘the original’, I’m gonna go with my personal favourite: Tubeway Army – Are Friends Electric? (And there’s an interesting live version here.)

  • Simple Minds – New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)

    The Simple Minds released their album New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) in 1982. Apart from a few successful singles, there have also been two songs that over the years been sampled and used in dance tracks. The title track New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) has been sampled in 1992 by the Italian one hit wonder (at least outside Italy) U.S.U.R.A. in their track Open your Mind. It received the usual 90’s cgi video and voilá: a dance hit. Interestingly, the ’97 remix of Open your Mind tossed the Simple Minds sample out the window completely. The intro from another track from the Simple Minds album, Someone, Somewhere In Summertime, popped up as a sample in 2004 in David Guetta’s The World is Mine.

    Here’s the title track New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84):

  • Max Romeo – I Chase the Devil

    In 1976 reggae stars Max Romeo & the Upsetters released the album War ina Babylon. On it is a song entitled I Chase the Devil, which was penned by Max Romeo and legendary dub/reggae artist & producer Lee “Scratch” Perry. The fact that The Upsetters are on the album with Max Romeo isn’t surprising, since they are Lee “Scratch” Perry’s backing band (and Perry himself is also know under the pseudonym The Upsetter).

    Some decades later around 1992 a young Liam Howlett picked up the album and added a sample of the Max Romeo track to the first album Experience by his own band The Prodigy. While a string of singles was released from this album in the middle of the rave explosion, there was one that became the defining single for the Prodigy that blew them into international fame. That track, which hinges on the Max Romeo sample, is Out of Space. And it’s safe to say that it became famous despite of it’s low budget video, which was only slightly less seizure inducing as Stakker Humanoid (but I’m getting off-topic now).

    For completeness sake, Jay-Z has also sampled the Max Romeo track in the crappy track Lucifer and Madness has made a cover of I Chase the Devil. But let’s listen to where it all began: the original Max Romeo and the Upsetters – I Chase the Devil:

  • Is an algorithm better than a human DJ?

    Many radio stations play compulsory playlists of the same repetitive pop crap. The alternative is listening to your own custom playlist on your computer or mp3-player or if you want to be suprised, use shuffle. There are however still radio independent DJ’s that pride themselves in making perfect playlists for you to listen to. But are they better than the shuffle button, because they introduce you to new things?

    Music Machinery is having a semi-scientific study as to whether a radio DJ, a shuffled playlist or an algorithmically composed playlist is better, according to listeners. You can read more about it and participate here. Their study results so far: the algorithmic DJ is best, the human worst. The study is far from over, so please participate.

    The interesting notion of this Turing test is that maybe computers, machines, AI, call it what you like, can make music just a well as humans can. This scares many people. They believe it will put them out of business. But that inevitably pops up the question: are you in it for the money or for the love of music? Humans will keep making music for the love of music, even if machines make better/different music. In then end machines are an extension of ourselves, so I’d rather have a machine help me make better music, then me by myself making shitty music.

    It’s like complaining about people using electric guitars and effects to make impossible music. It’s like people complaining about synthesisers , arpeggiators and all sorts of electronic aids to make impossible sounds and music. In the end, it’s tools to make better music. And if even human creativity can be emulated, why not? Ask Emmy and Emily Howell

  • Radiohead – Karma Police

    So far I’ve talked about covers, songs that have lifted parts of the lyrics or tune from other songs or songs that literally sampled a bit from another song. There is however another category of song: the clone. The clone is an almost literal, purposely made imitation of the original, to feel and sound the same as the original, but without using the exact same notes and lyrics to prevent copyright infringement.

    Meet the song Save my Soul by a band called Superglue from 2000. You probably never heard of them, mainly because this was their only hit and only in the Netherlands. And even here it’s forgotten. It was used in an advertisement, for what, no one even remembers. Clones are often made especially for advertisements. All I can tell you it was sung by a guy called Edwin Meijster (who?) and it was written by him and a guy called Frank Pels in affiliation with EMI Music.

    By now I hope you’ve listened to the link above (if not: do so) and recognised this song sounds a suspicious lot like a song from another band that used to be signed to EMI: Radiohead. In fact, if you put Karma Police (1997) next to it, the likeness is uncanny. And that was exactly the intention of Save my Soul. Less royalties to pay, same song. Even the band’s name might fool you into thinking it was Supergrass if you hadn’t paid attention.

    By the way, if you want to hear a truly magnificent, but honest cover of Karma Police, I must again recommend The Easy Star All-Stars version of Karma Police from their Radiodread album. Besides making a full album of reggae Radiohead covers, they’ve also tackled Pink Floyd’s Dark side of the Moon and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But that’s another story.

    Since EMI has disallowed embedding of the YouTube video for Radiohead’s Karma Police, instead I give you the Superglue song:

  • 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.

  • Gloria Jones – Tainted Love

    In 1964 Gloria Jones released a single My Bad Boy’s Coming Home. Since the single was not a commercial success, it’s B-side Tainted Love went unnoticed too. That song got a rematch in 1976 went it was re-recorded and re-released as a single of its own, but again failed to gain any commercial success.

    Soft Cell made their own version of Tainted Love. When it was released in 1981 it became a huge international hit This is the reason why a lot of people still think the Soft Cell-version is the original, even when they hear the Gloria Jones version, which is not locked into the collective memory of the general public.

    Over the years there have been dozens of covers (mostly of the Soft Cell version), the most popular being the Marilyn Manson’s version. Eventually the Soft Cell version itself got sampled for a track by Rihanna, which effectively destroys the connection the song had to its original.

    That original is the 1964 Gloria Jones version of Tainted Love:

  • The Staple Singers – This May be the Last Time

    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:

    Keith Richards and Mick Jagger

  • 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.