PureVolume, the website that appeared to fill the void left by the demise of mp3.com, has in the past few months begun posting acoustic sessions with various artists, including among them Eisley, Portugal. The Man, Piebald and I Am the Avalanche.
This kind of exclusive content along with exlcusive material provided by Pitchfork.tv may be leaning towards a new alternative to MTV and FUSE, as both channels become less and less focused on the music end of Music Television.
[Full disclosure: I freelance and do reviews for Wonka Vision. But what kind of blogger would I be if I wasn't a tad self-servient here and there?]
Wonka Vision, the Philadelphia-based magazine, record label and music promoter is now looking to expand its website to include a variety of web exclusives. This started with the launch of the new Wonka Vision Reviews page, which so far includes reviews of albums by artists including Microphones, Jason Collett (formerly of Broken Social Scene) and Colin Meloy (of The Decemberists) among others. In coming months the magazine is hoping to expand this to include even more web exclusives and to have the web site be its own separate magazine wholly independent of the print arm of the Wonka Vision family.
[A Place To Bury Strangers, one of the bands prominently featured on Pitchfork.tv]
Not too long ago I made a post about Pitchfork.tv, the indie rock taste-maker PitchforkMedia.com’s attempt to create an online music channel to provide an alternative to channels such as MTV and FUSE who have lost focus on the music aspect of music television. The first week showed some impressive exclusives, including plenty of music videos, a live performance and exclusive tour of Death By Audio, the studio of A Place To Bury Strangers (and also the moniker the band’s frontman uses for his company that produces custom made effects pedals) and an exclusive live performance by the kings of the alt/indie rock world, Radiohead, that even featured (get this!) frontman Thom Yorke playing the drums. Oh yeah, and an exclusive basement performance by weirdo noise rock band (and close friends of the afromentioned Radiohead) Liars. In addition there were documentaries about The Pixies and Man Man and there will be new exclusives every week. Kill your TV and allocate some some bandwith; long live Pitchfork!
New London Fire (who are actually from New Jersey, not the small city in Connecitcut where their moniker comes from) have announced plans to release all their material digitally from now on and to forgeo physical releases for the time being.
From a MySpace bulletin posted earlier today under the title “awesome announcement (sic) - “After a year of struggling through the turmoil of doing a physical commercial release of our music we’ve decided to go down a different road. In the future our intentions will be to put together digital EP’s and singles or what we would like to call digital 45’s.
This will give us the ability to release our songs when we finish them so we can provide a good amount of content. We’ll spend most of our time writing and recording and far less time worrying about retail, deadlines, long pointless tours, and the other headaches that go along with releasing physical commercial copies of our music. Let’s face it no one is buying CD’s…retail sales for most labels have plummeted over the years and the industry is changing in ways no one person can seem to follow or understand.
This is not to say we won’t do it in the future but we will concentrate on doing it this way for as long as we can. The freedom to release things when we see fit is very liberating.”
New London Fire - “Different” from their latest LP, I Sing the Body Holographic
Despite the scare tactics used by the RIAA, 95% of 18-24 year olds still pirate some form of music, according to this article from The Guardian, and in addition about 95% of all music downloaded is done so illegaly, versus the other 5% which is paid for using services such as iTunes or Amazon.com’s MP3 service and about half of all music that makes up most of the demograph’s library is unpaid for. The study was conduced by the lobby group known as British Music Rights. Here’s what their chief executive (and former lead singer of UK band The Undertones) Feargal Sharkey had to say -
“”For somebody who has spent 30 years in the music industry, you instinctively know this stuff is going on. But when you actually sit looking at your computer and see a number that says 95% of people are copying music at home, you suddenly go, ‘Bloody hell’,” he said.”
Sharkey also pointed out that he is not taking the RIAA stance of trying to punish these people, but rather wants to figure out how to change the industry so that musicians can still make a living doing what they do.
According to this press release from the University of Rochester, researchers there have discovered how to reproduce music in a format that is close to 1000 times smaller than an mp3. The researchers built a virtual clarinet, making it as accurate as possible by painstakingly researching all the details that make the instrument sound the way it sounds, as well as making a virtual musician to play it, conducting similar tests on how different variables in the musicians such as how hard they blow affect the sound.
Although if you listen to them back to back (and don’t cheat and look at the URLs) it’s fairly easy to tell which is the real and which is the reproduction, it’s still a fairly impressive recreation.
From the press release - “”We are still working on including ‘tonguing,’ or how the player strikes the reed with the tongue to start notes in staccato passages,” says Bocko. “But in music with more sustained and connected notes the method works quite well and it’s difficult to tell the synthesized sound from the original.”
As the method is refined the researchers imagine that it may give computer musicians more intuitive ways to create expressive music by including the actions of a virtual musician in computer synthesizers. And although the human vocal tract is highly complex, Bocko says the method may in principle be extended to vocals as well. “
[The custom stage for the tour; Image courtesy of Pitchforkmedia.com]
Kanye West already caught all kinds of attention for his upcoming Glow In the Dark Tour featuring Rihanna, the newly reunited N*E*R*D and Lupe Fiasco based on the amazing line-up alone, however this week come new announcements about the tour. It turns out that Jim Henson’s Muppet Studios will be contributing to the stage set up, Sam Spiegal (brother of Spike Jonez) has done remix tracks for the tour, and still more about the staging have all been revealed in Kanye’s oft-updated blog.
If that’s not enough, Kanye has also just launched his very own travel website. The site allows airfare, hotel and various other travelling accomodations, as well as information on what to do once you get to where you’re going. Is there anything Kanye West can’t do? Well, besides stand still, apparently.
[Apple's DRM technology restricts users' abilities to use files they purchase immensely]
There has been a lot of talk about DRM over the past year or so, especially since it has often been cast in such a negative light. Amazon.com listed its strictly non-DRM MP3s as one of their catalog of MP3s’ main selling points, especially when contrasted with iTunes, who only sell non-DRM MP3s for an extra 30 cents, (60 cents extra for videos and a 30% mark up for albums) that they market as “iTunes Plus”. Amazon, on the other hand, sells 256kbps (compared to the 128kpbs of most iTunes mp3s) non-DRM mp3s for 99 cents. But what exactly is DRM and why is it so bad? From our good friends at Wikipedia -
“Digital rights management (DRM) is an umbrella term that refers to access control technologies used by publishers and copyright holders to limit usage of digital media or devices. It may also refer to restrictions associated with specific instances of digital works or devices. To some extent, DRM overlaps with copy protection, but DRM is usually applied to creative media (music, films, etc.) whereas copy protection typically refers to software.”
Also worth reading -the Wikipedia Page on FairPlay, the brand of DRM used by iTunes.
In summary - iTunes rips you off in terms of quality, use and often iTunes Store mp3s won’t play in anything other than an iPod, among various other restrictions.
A recent post on the Matador Records Blog discusses why it is that people are buying vinyl more frequently even though at one point it was considered more or less a “dead” format and that analog versions of digital recordings make no difference in quality. Transferring something recording digitally onto an analog format will still result in digital quality. However this post discusses that the sale is due to trends - now vinyls come in limited edition colors, expensive picture discs and many bands will press vinyl exclusives for especially dedicated fans. Time wrote this article which further explains the phenomenon and why it’s taking place. Reasons listed include poor quality of sound on iPods and the increase of the practice of including free download cards with vinyl, eliminating the “choice” of owning digital or physical copies for people who buy LPs.
One of the best and most recent examples of this was by the Brookyln based Red Leader Records. The picture disc features four of their most popular bands featuring covers of songs by bands such as Built To Spill, Superchunk, The Carter Family, and The Mountain Goats.
Wired.com is currently running a poll about who are the more innovative musicians - Trent Reznor, the mastermind behind Nine Inch Nails or Thom Yorke and the rest of the boys in Radiohead. The poll is part of an article which showcases each artist’s strengths and weaknesses as innovators with tags ranging from “History of innovation” to “Punk-rock Factor.” At the time of this publishing Trent Reznor has a healthy lead, winning in 6 of the 10 categories. Several parallels between recent decisions by the bands, including fan video contests and the decision to release albums online and without record labels led to the discussion.
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