Working Title

Month: June 2012

  • New demo and love for SoundCloud

    Hi there, check out this demo:

    It’s the first finished song for an album concept I’m working on and the first thing I’ve published on SoundCloud.

    I’ve been shilling SoundCloud to my friends a lot lately because I’m so impressed with it. When I first heard about SC I tried to ignore it — I figured it was yet another way to do music stuff on the web, among hundreds, probably to be short-lived, and didn’t want to bother with it. It’s a couple of years later now so I’m late to the game, but after trying it out I think it’s great. The interface is intuitive, a bit crowded with some redundant elements but still easy to use. I like that you can keep tracks private and share them with other SC users (or email a link to someone outside SC) before you make them public. I like how it keeps stats and gives you lots of options for downloads vs. streaming, etc. The iPhone app is very good.

    Their dashboard “stream” is interesting philosophically — you see new tracks by the people you befriend as they share them. It’s like the old days of trading CDRs or tapes, only instant, less tactile, and more single-oriented as opposed to collections of related songs. So, it tracks with how music is now experienced in the mp3 age, which makes sense. People go back and forth as to whether that’s good or not, but in any case their developers have done a great job and I like it.

  • The New Boss

    Here’s an excellent article by David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker that totally explodes the premise (and promise) of how artists can expect to benefit from digital distribution. His arguments underscore my lately festering opinion that we’re moving to a patronage model of artist compensation, where entities like Kickstarter are going to play a bigger role in funding recordings and tours than album and ticket and shirt sales. The Renaissance is new again, though instead of having single wealthy patron families funding art we’ll have pledge drives from our fans. I’m not sure this is a good model.

    On a related, petulant note, I was having this conversation with a friend recently about how Web technology has pushed past the place where it was fun. That is, in 1999 or so he and I were both inspired by DIY indie pop artists and labels, where the technological barrier to entry (recording, making CDs, websites, zines, etc) was pretty low but was high enough that not everybody did it. It felt more special. Is there anything more pointless in 2012 than making a website?

    At the same time, some of the best music is being made now, precisely because the tech is so ubiquitous. Then again, an album like Rumours would probably never get made today. It’s all very complicated.