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  • Something old is new again

    These things are related, maybe:

    Low power FM is a thing.

    Apple Music is set to surpass Spotify in US subscribers.

    I view these as tiny (miniscule) glimmers of almost-good news for musicians, premised on the contention that tech has been very very bad for musicians this century, where musicians are defined as a class of professional laborers whose work is to compose original material and/or to perform live and on recordings, and bad is defined as a state in which music making by artists with established audiences can’t sustain their livelihood.

    If LPFM is growing in popularity (a big if, since there’s not much evidence of there being any actual listeners) it would suggest that listeners are feeling a lack of shared experience and human interaction in algorithmic music programming and on-demand streaming. Shared experience is one of those things musicians trade in.

    This article/polemic makes an argument for what’s wrong with Spotify. The same argument would apply to Apple Music, except for one difference: Apple’s main business is selling the devices through which one listens to the music. The recording industry itself was born out of phonograph manufacturers partnering with artists to sell Victrolas, not to sell records.

    I’ve been observing in the last decade how the most effective way to have a career in the music business is not to make music. It’s far more lucrative to sell services to musicians, as with Tunecore or Distrokid or Reverb or renting out practice spaces, or to sell instruments, effects pedals or recording software, or as a developer or marketer or whatever at a service that essentially gives music away to listeners (i.e. Spotify) — than to actually make music.

    Obviously tons has been written about this and I don’t have much to add, other than to observe that as Apple increases market share of streaming I would argue it begins to assume some moral responsibility for helping to solve this problem. As Victrola engaged Enrico Caruso in the 20th Century, Apple should sponsor and develop artists, not just take their cut and assume “they were gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay.”

    Just consider:

    Could companies like Apple pick up where labels left off? I think they can afford it.

    Update: this article goes farther to answer that question.

  • Old Haunts Volume 1

    Somehow I neglected to mention on my own blog that I released an EP of music. This EP here in fact:

     
    I posted about the first song already, and I’ll be posting about the rest of them over time. I’ve been busy lately for reasons I mostly keep off the internet (I became a dad!), so things take a while.

    The story of this EP is outlined on its Bandcamp page, but in short I have a lot of old songs in various states of completion. As I finish them I’m piping them into EPs under the heading Old Haunts. It’s been really fun.

    The concept has a lot of parts to it that appeal to the way I think about and remember things. It’s what I’ve done instead of keeping a diary.

    First there’s the music, which has its own set of facets I like to look at: when and where I came up with the melodies, the words, the recordings; when and where I continued working on them and eventually finished them. I try to keep track of that stuff, and some of it is captured in the computer files of the recordings themselves.

    These first sets of songs all represent many years in the making. Like “Saturday,” I wrote it in 2000/2001, started the recording in 2005, worked on it every few years and finally finished it Fall 2017. That’s insane.

    Next there’s the artwork, taking a similar approach to images. This first EP includes a photo collage (in the Bandcamp download) of my home recording spaces, and myself in those spaces, since 2002. I can see creating similar collages cohering to other ideas, and if I don’t have a picture of some particular place from the time of recording, I can go to that place and take it now.

    The cover photo is the view of downtown Seattle from the apartment where I rented a room, in Wallingford, taken I think Spring or Summer 2001. That same view would look really different now. I left the image slightly rotated by mistake.. I’m not sure if that will bug me forever or if that’s somehow better that way.

    Then there’s the remembering of things. I once wrote a song called “Nostalgia” and this is not that. I wrote “Nostalgia” in my early 20s while thinking about high school, around very specific emotions and impressions that maybe you could call nostalgic but that I don’t really have anymore.

    This is more of an accounting, some kind of framing. Not really to draw any meaning from a set of sounds and images connected across time but to arrange them in a way I like to look at. Having a few levels to work with makes it that much more fun to work on. Hopefully other people will at least like the music!

  • Arduino Morse – pt. 3 – then no more

    I’ve been meaning to write something about this for a long time, but didn’t, so let’s do it now. My last iteration of the Morseo project (on Github) includes an example that works with an LOL Shield to write out alphanumeric characters and blink visual representations of Morse code dots or dashes at the same time, to display a message. It’s completely useless but was kind of fun to do at the time, here’s a video of it in action:


    I’m starting to work on some more useful Arduino projects, I’ll try to write about those.

  • My town rules

  • What they have done is a desecration

    “What they have done is a desecration, a foolish and vindictive act of vandalism, by which they betrayed all the best and most valiant labors of our ancestors. We don’t want to accept this, because we cannot accept that the people, at least in the long run of things, can be wrong in our American democracy. But they can be wrong, just like any people, anywhere. And until we do accept this abject failure of both our system and ourselves, there is no hope for our redemption.” — Kevin Baker