News
Audiobook Streaming
Spotify’s new audiobook streaming could have ‘devastating effect’, says Society of Authors
The industry body says the music giant’s move to make more than 150,000 titles available has not been discussed with authors and may compete with sales.
May compete with sales…. that’s quaint. Of course it will. It will crash sales of audio books.
Already, Bandcamp?
I am on a flight to Boston to start the tour in Rockport tomorrow. Just read this, from Ted Gioia
Bandcamp’s new owner has locked out workers from company systems. Layoffs are anticipated. https://cdm.link/2023/10/bandcamp-union-on-songtradr-acquisition/
These are ominous developments at a web platform that indie musicians rely on—both for income and connecting with fans.
End of the Week
I am reading The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk. Not loving it but it’s a big book and perhaps I need to persevere a little longer. Also reading Time of the Magicians, by Wolfram Eilenberger, with the subtitle The Decade that Reinvented Philosophy.
Last night I watched Lakota Nation vs United States. Amazing people and amazing documentary film. Highly recommended.
Uploaded a new hybrid mix to Backstage. I call it a hybrid mix because only a few of the tracks were encoded binaurally and the majority of the tracks were in stereo. I like the sound of it and will do more such hybrid mixes.
Uploaded the last entry I wrote during my cave retreat. I’m already contemplating my next visit. :-)
Reasons to be Cheerful posted about the Miyawaki Method. Brilliant!
Founded in 2017, Boomforest is taking an approach to reforestation known as the Miyawaki method. Developed by the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki in the 1970s, the concept is to plant tree species that are native to the area in a very dense and layered manner — three per square meter — in order to recreate the richly fertile conditions of the natural primitive forests that once covered the planet. It is in contrast to the slower, more orderly and homogeneous processes of traditional reforestation.
Ted Gioia wrote about a new study of music and well being:
So I was intrigued by a new study from the British Academy of Sound Therapy—which looked at how people use music to improve their mood and physical well being.
They studied 7,581 people and learned that:
- 89% of people believe music supports health and well-being.
- Music creates an optimal state of relaxation in about 13 minutes.
- The best music for relaxation has a “slow tempo, simple melody and no lyrics.”
- Music can alleviate sadness, and 13 minutes is an optimum time for achieving this.
All these results converged on a time frame of 9-13 minutes before music demonstrates desired levels of efficacy.
Maybe I should make some extended versions of slow pieces. Which ones should I work on?
Binaural
Last week I posted track number 6 from the new album, dreamy afternoon (Lo Fi Flam), to Backstage, and today I posted a first Binaural mix of another new piece. There are a few things I will have to figure out. The mix ends up much softer than the regular Stereo mix and I have to normalize it up. The software also doesn’t seem to perfectly automate some of the moves. Well, it’s a learning curve. Next I might try to see whether it is possible to only use the Binaural effect on *some* of the tracks and not all.
Move Smart
But LLM training? I don’t feel the same sense of creative commonality. Although I tend to see scientific and technological work as creative as much as rational, I don’t think ChatGPT is itself an artwork. I think it’s a technology which wears a simulation of creativity, and how that simulation is achieved governs its meaning. In this case, that seems to be via a straightforward systematic appropriation; yet another instance of a big tech outfit saying that the legislative environment (that is, the world everyone else inhabits and makes a living in) doesn’t suit them and restricts their power to make money and do good by… doing what, exactly? Generating a machine that can create horrible internet content and break search for all of us? Causing a strike in Hollywood? We’re all past the point where you can wave a wand and say “we created this amazing digital thing and it’s going to make everyone’s lives SO much better, so you have to let us burn the newspaper industry to the ground.” It ain’t that simple, tech bro. And if OpenAI and the rest really believed in the accessibility they think society requires from writers and artists, they’d be, well, open with their code. Which they are not.
LLM = Large Language Model
Bandcamp
Epic Games is selling Bandcamp for an undisclosed sum, 18 months after acquiring the platform. Bandcamp’s new owner is the music marketing company Songtradr, which, according to its blog on the acquisition, will “continue to operate Bandcamp as a marketplace and music community with an artist-first revenue share.”
I never thought that Bandcamp was a good fit with Epic Games. 18 months later Bandcamp is sold to Songtradr. The name is terrible and ominous. Thousands of musicians buying the platform together would have been amazing. A coop. Perhaps musicians should start a new Bandcamp-like platform…
Instead Bandcamp is now owned by a company that will likely try to push everyone into licensing their music for pennies to everything from commercials to games.
Songtradr, which describes itself as a music licensing platform and marketplace company, framed the acquisition as an opportunity for Bandcamp artists to secure licensing deals, including with Epic Games itself, which will continue to collaborate with Bandcamp on projects like Fortnite Radio.
How long will it last? All of the huge Investment Fund purchases of artist catalogs are being sold again.
Back in 2021, investors spent more than $5 billion buying the rights to old songs. Never before in history had musicians over the age of 75 received such big paydays.
Give this Bandcamp owner three years?
Hm, somebody should talk to Neil Young et al… Bandcamp-like platform, legacy, future of music… :-)
Rain Poems
Burned a CD of the album and am listening on an old and familiar system to check the relative volume of the tracks. Plus it’s a habit that is decades old. An album is done (or kinda done) when I have a CD of it. I remember listening to albums on DAT (digital audio tape), a prehistoric recording format, at home. In my car I would listen to Mini-Discs (a rather brilliant idea that was terribly executed by Sony) until we got a CD burner in my studio in the late 90’s.
The other day I thought it would be cool to have a 12×12 inch cardboard, which is the size of vinyl LPs, with the cover image on the front. On the back there would be credits and titles and a little foam button that holds a CD. Mailing this might be a pain but there should be LP mailers available that it could be shipped in.
Spotify
Saw this on Ted Gioia’s latest newsletter. The lines are very very clear now.
Please read the comments 👇🏻. Steve makes a very good case.
Winners Gallery
Nature TTL POTY 2023: Winners Gallery
Breathtaking nature photography. (via Colossal)
Trees
Humanity has coexisted with forests.
Where forests have collapsed,
civilizations have perished.
Now, forests are collapsing all over the world.
Is this not a warning of the demise of human civilization.
Let’s at least plant trees.
– Ryuichi Sakamoto (excerpted from “more trees” website , 2007)
I love that image. The ability to remain still and observant was something I greatly admired about Ryuichi Sakamoto. While performing with other artists, he would often remain still and listen, allowing things to grow until he added something. This video of his performance with Alva Noto inside the Glasshouse by Philip Johnson is a good example, but I’ve noticed it in many videos of his performances. The image above shows that same stillness.
Backstage Open
Gia asked
Is there any sort of ode to petrichor on this album?
Yes. Bossa de Petricor is the title.
Mark asked
Around when will these songs be released?
I released the first one today. It’s the 6th track of the album and I think it’s a great first single. We performed this piece live last week and really enjoyed playing it. It’ll be on the setlist for a while. :-)
Songs from Rain Poems will be released over time, only on Backstage. In some cases there will be different versions available, some binaural mixes for example. I am working on a limited edition CD version but that will probably happen in the first quarter of the new year.
You can find the link to Backstage in the menu (above left) or follow this link. I added the first single dreamy afternoon (Lo Fi Flam) and FLAC and ALAC files are available for download.
Uncle Al
My friend, and product manager at Epic Records, Al Masocco, had a birthday recently and I called him to wish him a happy birthday. He will be inducted into the Niagara Falls Music Hall of Fame on 15. November. Niagara Falls this year and surely Cleveland next. Congrats Al.
Mr. Masocco’s 28-plus years in the music/marketing world at CBS/Sony Music have given him a unique opportunity and the rare creative experience of working on strategies for artists such as The Rolling Stones, The Clash, Jeff Beck, Pink Floyd, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson, Tammy Wynette, Bruce Springsteen, Korn, Ottmar Liebert, Oasis and festival and tour compilations such as Woodstock 99 and The Family Values releases to name a few.
Over the last five years with The Firm, Mr. Masocco has been given the opportunity to explore and broaden his marketing and promotional playing field through working on development strategies for Enrique Iglesias, Limp Bizkit, Dixie Chicks, Michelle Branch, Linkin Park, Jennifer Lopez, Audioslave, Puddle of Mudd, Kelly Clarkson, Snoop Dogg, Dean Martin and The Doors estates, etc.
What’s New
I have been listening to the 18 tracks I recorded for Rain Poems and love the way it sounds. Recording is done and mixing may be done as well, as I don’t hear anything that wants to be changed. Some of the tracks have been mixed a number of times while others remain an early version.
(It used to be quite the occasion to switch from recording to mixing because analog tape recorders have two separate heads for reading the tape. One is a recording/monitoring head and the other is for listening only. The listening-only head reproduces sound in a higher quality.)
We performed one of the new pieces in Seattle and in Beaver Creek this past week and it was fun to play. We may try to arrange other new pieces for the live show.
Hunters
While there has been evidence of women hunting, these historical discoveries have been treated more as the exception than the rule. But it seems women not only actively hunted in most societies, but their involvement in that role among the society was on par with their male counterparts.
Researchers have analyzed data dating back 100 years on 63 different and diverse foraging societies around the world and found that in 50 of the groups (79%), women were active hunters regardless of whether they were mothers or even grandmothers.
The study out of Seattle Pacific University looked at 19 North American, 15 Australian, 12 African, six South American, six Oceanic and five Asian societies and found that recorded data backs archeological discoveries from the Holocene that women from diverse cultures participated in hunting.
The ‘gatherers’ myth: Women have been skilled hunters in most societies
Tár
Owen Gleiberman in his Venice Film Festival Daily Variety review wrote:
“Let me say right up front: It’s the work of a master filmmaker… Field’s script is dazzling in its conversational flow, its insider dexterity, its perception of how power in the world actually works… Tár is not a judgement so much as a statement you can make your own judgment about. The statement is: We’re in a new world.”
A. O. Scott of The New York Times writing from the Telluride Film Festival and later from the New York Film Festival stated:
“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie quite like Tár. Field balances Apollonian restraint with Dionysian frenzy. Tár is meticulously controlled and also scarily wild. Field finds a new way of posing the perennial question about separating the artist from the art, a question that he suggests can only be answered by another question: are you crazy? We don’t care about Tár because she’s an artist. We care about her because she’s art.”
Two very concise and well expressed quotes about the movie Tár.
I have watched the movie twice now and suspect that there are at least two movies hiding in Tár. It’s a movie about a conductor and about social media and all that, but it is also a ghost story. A movie about a person who gets canceled and also a horror film.
Spoiler alert… the metronome that starts ticking inside her cabinet, the noises she hears, the book and the mark she finds inside. I am even wondering whether everything after her fall happens to her or is a dream, perhaps in a hospital bed. The movie definitely merits a third viewing. I like it a lot. :-)
Rain Music
one good thing about music
when it hits
you feel no rain
Upside Down
Within a couple of years the travel industry will change a lot. People with the means and the time used to get away from winter by flying to warm destinations: Mexico, South America, Bali, Thailand. In the middle of a Santa Fe winter I know I was usually happy to get an offer to perform in a warm location.
I think people with means will spend their summers in places that remain relatively cool. Finland, Norway, Sweden, they all seem to be in the upper 60’s right now, Iceland is in the upper 50’s. So instead of hearing people go on about the warm destinations they visited during the winter, we will hear them talk about the cool destinations they visited during the summer.
The Online Review
One night he sat next to a couple and observed them as they ordered the most expensive dishes, drank the wonderful wine, and left, after paying, thanking the staff for the amazing evening. The next day, they emailed the restaurant detailing how they had been rudely treated by the staff, saying that the food had been vile, and asking, before they wrote a review online, how they might be compensated. My friend suggested a free glass of wine on their next visit, so they posted a scathing online review. He’s also had people eat a sandwich but return the last bite saying that it tastes off and could they please have their money back – or else. The online review is the preferred weapon of the modern extortionist.
The Food and Beverage business is hard. I don’t think I have ever written to a restaurant. If the food is great, I will be back often. If the food isn’t good, I won’t go back. Unless it seemed like an off night, in which case I would always give the restaurant a second chance. All of us have a bad night now and then.
We have had to learn how to read online reviews, especially how to ignore the stupid ones.
Kindness
Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true: the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.
I know nothing about the person who said it, but there is a lot of truth in that – click on the link to read more. Cruelty is not a sign of intelligence.
Compliments
A green salad with dukkah. Dukkah is on my list of perfect food compliments. I use the word compliments because they aren’t condiments. My short list contains pesto (Italian), hummus (Arabian), gomashio (Japanese), guacamole (Mexican), and dukkah. My dukkah recipe is Egyptian. Last week I made an Indian-Californian pesto, w peanuts instead of pine nuts and cilantro and toasted coriander seeds. So funny when European or Asian friends find out that Americans use two different names for the same herb, depending on whether it is fresh or dried!!
