Pirated & Shared Music and the Artist Who Wants To Make it Big

I would like to begin this post with the following video, by the Canadian rock band Shocore. The video accompanies their single, 'Bonecracker':



I discovered this song ages ago; back when people still used KaZaA to share poorly encoded mp3 files of popular music with millions of other people around the world- the golden age of extremely compressed and muddy sounding mp3 files. It all started when a friend of mine asked me if I could burn for him a CD with music he liked and eventually that led me to finding out new and interesting music by myself through Kazaa initially.

Without the internet, I would say that there's no way I'd be listening to the music I'm listening to now, there's just no way ever I'd find out I like an album such as Tough Guys Don't Dance, or Blood Sugar Sex Magik. So through Kazaa I was able to discover Shocore's rather infectious breed of disco beats, funky basslines, hypercrushed guitar riffs and aggressive rhymes- and for a couple years I really really wanted to find another band playing a rap-metal as well made as this (I liked Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit a bit for a while but nowadays I can't really stand them... gack!), and I guess that desire to see people getting two very different genres and sticking them in a blender and making something one part each really shaped me as a musician, and that's why my music hops between musical styles and blends them.

Now, without going off topic, I also introduced with this video because I rediscovered it a few months ago, and commented on the video, wondering what happened to those dudes and their catchy music and why they stopped making music (I heard some other songs by them and Shocore seemed pretty varied to be honest). I wasn't expecting an answer, but a fellow user left me this comment:

Simple . Downloading. Everyone bitches about how there's no good music anymore, well thats why. It actually costs money for someone to get a song out and you get ZERO back, so FUCK IT! I write music for myself, and I wont release it as long as people expect it for free. And I had a hand in writing this song. Just the truth. People are going to get more and more crap because they wont pay the damn 99 cents a song.

Underfunded bands and artists have it tough. Making it big means extraordinary work. I appreciated the answer he gave me (although I was somewhat sceptic of him actually having been involved in the songwriting of Bonecracker, you can't take anyone on the web seriously often), so I left him the following personal message:

Hey mate, thanks for answering. Did you really have a hand in the writing of that song? Kudos (although because, you know, the whole internet anonymity I can't be 100% sure). I can certainly imagine how the band felt, investing hard money and work into the music just so that it doesn't sell, ripped across the internet. I'm sorry to find that they stopped playing because of that.

I compose and record music independently and so far, I've just been giving it away for free. I don't know, maybe it's because my circumstances allow me to, even though I'd really love to make a living out of it one day, and because I genuinely believe that getting the message out, with or without cash in return is better than locking away great music and not letting the world ever hear it. I know you will probably disagree, but hey, it's just my opinion.

Anyway, thanks dude. Keep rockin'!"

I had been thinking for a while before writing that message, there was a lot he gave me to think about. Also, since I've been giving away my music for free in Bandcamp and now in SoundCloud for a while now and spreading the word of it (without much attention from the web so far) I've had to consider this myself too; I worked my ass off on most tracks and being still a newbie in the world of recording and music in general, I'm probably not gonna get many sales in the short term.

I didn't expect him to answer again, and I totally forgot I wrote him that message for a few months, until one random day I decided to check my inbox in Youtube and find the following by him:

Hey thanks! Yeah, I wrote the bass line and then they added guitars and the synth and the rap. And I ended up getting pretty much dick all for it. Pretty frustrating when it was on Ford commercials and Xbox games and I wasnt getting a dime.

Back then the primary source of income was still CDs, and the label was charging 25 bucks EACH for one! I was like, who is going to pay that for on song they can get off Napster? The label was not smart.

I dont know what to tell you about your situation, except make sure you love what your doing, because doing it for money or fame never works out. I still write all the time, but I think the only decent chance of making a little money is at scoring or jingles. They pay, you only have to play it once, and the company you sell it to cant download it from you for free.

I went back to being a carpenter, which is fine. And I play now what I want (there were a LOT of compromises in being in a band, and if you get any success, the compromises pile up even more).

I wish you luck, send me some of your stuff if you want- [insert email address here].

Regardless of him actually having a hand in the writing of that song, I thought, I still felt guilty for contributing in a way to the band's downfall, somehow, even if it's to an infinitesimally small degree, by downloading the song illegally more than 5 years or so ago.

Also, I never considered that; writing jingles and scoring certainly seem to be safer and better at giving you a chance to earn a buck (although when I think of jingles I imagine Charlie Harper stitting next to his grand piano, getting drunk).

But more importantly, I'm grateful for the kind words there and the advice and experience. I better watch out and make sure I get my royalties if I ever do!

Apart from that, I'd like to link the notion of harm through illegal distribution. I am NOT saying that the unauthorised distribution of copyrighted music does not harm the artist in any way, but I have here two articles I'd like to quote on how it can actually help:

New Music Strategies: Should I be worried about piracy?

The distinction between distribution and piracy is made and then these (in my opinion) important points are made, among others:

"2) The fluidity with which your music can pass from hand to hand is not an impediment to your success, but a technological advantage that you can leverage to your own ends. The overwhelming cry from the independent musician twenty years ago was ‘How can I just get my music out there?’ Problem solved. Now what are you going to do?

Now, of course, this raises more questions than it answers — and of course, things are far more complicated than I’ve laid out here — but as a general principle, it’s worth considering that rather than fret about unauthorised copying and expend time and energy in the fruitless task of preventing people from engaging in it, that time and energy can be better spent elsewhere....

...And here are three more things to consider:

1) People who share your music are recommending you to people who respect their taste and opinion;

2) The vast majority of people who have unauthorised copies of your music would not have ordinarily paid for it anyway;

3) Do you really want for people who cannot afford your music to be prevented from ever hearing it?"

1,000 True Fans

"A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans."

Ultimately, I think, the way technological, social and human developments are going, information of any kind, when stored is bound to end in the big collective knowledge of humankind (unless a massive disaster occurs that could bring about the information age to an end). A person who truly appreciates what you do will buy what you do at least once. I understand where this guy who was involved with Shocore comes from, but I have to say that I would have never even known who Shocore were if it not were for people distributing a song by them that they considered great and catchy and worth the time putting there for everybody else to hear. What does the person who shares it get in return anyway? He's giving away bandwidth anyway. It's people who sell someone's work without permission who are the real pirates and the music industry needs to wake up.

Musical Maps

Last time I mentioned a musical map, I brought up the wonderful example of Ishkur's Guide To Electronic Music, set in rings akin to those indicating the age in a tree. I was inspired by that map to get on terms with what western music has been up to for the last 100 years (not just electronic music), and truly, there was and still is SO MUCH going on. Really, it's like, if you've just been listening to what's on the radio and MTV, you're missing a whole damn universe of musical colours- and as I began mapping it out realised that with each decade, this musical explosion increases exponentially.

So I based my take on musical history on Ishkur's model, big, concentric rings that mark each decade, beginning with everything before the 40's, extending into the end of this decade. Music's a fuzzy business, you can't create clear-cut boundaries between genres and the labels given to a genre can change over the decades when people look back to older music. Also, I wanted to show music more or less like a web of influences; just like disco got it's flavours from funk, soul and apparently a bit of salsa, funk roots itself in psychedelic rock, soul (again) and jazz. I knew though that I'd have to work on the layout, otherwise it'd be so messy and hard to read that nobody would bother. It's tricky, specially when after the sixties, music exploded into a myriad of styles.

Perhaps too I should have looked at some other examples before embarking on a journey only a few nutty people embark. I looked around the web and found some pretty interesting ways other people have been doing similar things. How does one represent something fuzzy, subjective and ever-changing like music? Maybe the Information Is Beautiful blog has a few things to teach us about clearly visualising information. Here are a few maps from around the web (click on images) :

So, to begin, I found this one here focusing on the relationships between different kinds of electronic dance music. It leans heavily on the artistic side, but that's not bad at all. Sadly, it's an image I found aaages ago and kept it because I found it pretty, but I never knew out who made it or where I could find it again. But for the meantime, we can marvel at the psychedelic colour mixtures and funky lines linking each genre-bubble.

INTONE, a music-based marketing company has this particularly interesting layout, genres are like stops on the London underground system, connected to each other by colours representing a similar sound or evolution. I quite like it because of its simplicity; it's easy to read and make immediate connections, some dating to thousands of years (see ''The Drum'', the big black circle bottom-left). Definitely, a good deal of research and careful design planning went into this. It's good for those making the most evident connections, but if you're deep into music connections, it might be a bit too simplistic.

On a very similar approach, the blokes at The Guardian attempted to map out 100 years of musical evolution, again on a London-tube underground map. This one differs on its approach in that it has artist names instead of styles of music, but the different 'paths' in different colours carry different styles of music. This one focuses solely on western music, particularly Anglo-American music, so don't go looking for merengue, salsa, shibuya-kei or kwaito. Allegedly, this focus was to prevent the editor's head from exploding. Yes, it would look awful with so much. I found it linked here.

This next, the ''Tourist Map of Music'', impressed me. Unlike all the previous ones, it's actually interactive. You type the name of a band/artist, and in a minimalist blue screen the name you typed appears, and around it the names of similar artists will gravitate and organise themselves, the closer they are to the central name, the bigger the likelihood that fans of the artist/band you typed listen to that too. Pretty awesome! How do they do that?!? I think that with a bit of streamlining, this could definitely be the tool of future music consumers helping them to discover new sounds, because of its ease of use. In the words of the creator, Marek Gibney, ''Gnod'', the system on which this monster thing works, ''is my experiment in the field of artificial intelligence. Its a self-adapting system, living on this server and 'talking' to everyone who comes along. Gnods intention is to learn about the outer world and to learn 'understanding' its visitors. This enables gnod to share all its wisdom with you in an intuitive and efficient way. You might call it a search-engine to find things you don't know about.''

These following two are also interactive and actually let you listen to music in an interactive map-like way. The first one, Musicovery, is everything Yahoo! Radio wasn't. In a deceptively simple set of controls (shown to the left), you can navigate through the emotional and energetic spectrum that is music, through mood (positive to negative) and amount of energy in the music. You can also browse through decades and select genres to be more nit-picky. There are a few other features (like a search bar which doesn't actually show what you're looking for) and other things which you'll have to figure out :D. This last 'map' on the right, the SOM-enhanced JukeBox system (SOMeJB) analyses your mp3 files and interprets their sonic properties, namely dynamic range and yeah, how it sounds. Then as seen here, it plots different areas for each style, arranging them according to sound related to each other. That's why classical music and heavy metal are on opposite extremes. See how you can make playlists interactively, taking these paths through different soundscapes!

(Click for higher resolution and all that nice stuff)

Finally, I could have probably learned a few lessons from the examples above before embarking on the fuzzy history of western music and its genres, but I was trying to be a bit 'different'. Yes, lot's o' nodes and lines connecting stuff, like neurones in a brain, though both frighteningly complicated and somehow organised. Also, I marked all I saw fit into large categories into different colours. Red for rock music, green for jazz. the usual stuff. Yellow for break-beat (that kind of music that was born when hip-hop artists stringed different drum breaks from old funk records and gave birth to a billion things, and blue for 4-to-the-floor, which is simply that basic rhythm where the kick marks the 4 beats in a bar, which was popular in rock but really took off when disco music became the bomb. Also, you might be wondering why in my map, punk (in red) gave birth to this thing I call ''Oh no, you didn't!''. Yeah, I'm being biased there, but I don't think any serious person thinks great things about crunkcore and emo... I'll leave that for a future post on punk music.

''Out on the edges they're mixin' the colors some they don't like it but me, I don' t mind in every city they' re mixing the colors different shades for the whole countryside''
Mixin' The Colors - Iggy Pop

Edit:
Apparently this cool map here escaped my search: Map of Metal
A really cool flash-based map of the history of heavy metal and it's different genres, loaded with tons of music samples and descriptons. Also, it looks like jeans, leather, badass buttons and chains. What else could you ask for?

Road Art WIP

Last time I showed the making of one of a painting I made, it was terrible. I had to redo the damn thing like three times. Here, I present you all two other digital works that I made quite a while ago now, of outdoor scenes in summer and fall respectively:


Looking Out The Door by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART

And here's a little GIF file showing the step-by-step (unfortunately though I forgot a few times to save and take a snapshot, so it begins when I already laid down a bunch of stuff):



You can tell it's autumn in this one:


Roady by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART

This one took a lot longer, and if you look closely comparing the two, at least I already had bought myself a Wacom tablet when I began painting this one. However, it still took much longer since the amount of detail was much much larger.

Information Is Beautiful

Information might seem unwieldy, ugly, sterile and unreadable if there's tons of it and we don't know how to tackle it. Data crunching is a hard, arduous task and so is data mining. While that might be true, it also might be true that they are labours that are becoming increasingly important as technology becomes more powerful and all that jingodingo. So, what can we do with cumbersome spreadsheets and gigabytes of 'raw data'? We can either sift through it and try to represent it in the old-fashioned ways or try to hook up our visual interest, making it visually understandable and therefore something we can relate to on a more primal level. We need to since there's just so much information out there and it keeps multiplying at exponential rates (for more about this, an article called Jumping Jesus sheds more light).

Here we have David McCandless (from the site Information is Beautiful), talking to us about his passion of data, and how to make it actually fun:



Another approach he hasn't touched in the video is a bit more artistic; Seed Magazine has a slideshow called ''The Age of Impossible Numbers''. Can you guess how many containers pass through American ports every 12 hours? You might be really surprised by the answer, and how it looks!

Barnbrock studios

I ran into this creative studio based in the UK a while back. Works for book covers, fonts, posters, CD covers (including David Bowie's ''Heathen'') and all sorts of stuff. Some heavy political messages, succinctly and subtly expressed?

http://www.barnbrook.net/

http://www.barnbrook.net/archive/

Scott McCloud's Awesome Infinite Canvass

Paper, a cloth canvass, a wall, 140 characters on Twitter, they are all restraints on dimensions. Price/advertising space on newspapers force comic strips to be usually just 3 small panels for this reason. And of course computers and that sort of stuff has been eroding these size restrictions gradually on the web, cartoonists tend to forget that really, a comic strip can be pretty much any size!

Reading through genius comic artist Scott McCloud's website, an article precisely about the infinite canvass (a must-read for comic artists!), he gives us a few examples of ways in which we can elegantly defy size. Because size matters, yo.

This one by McCloud himself: (click on the images)

Pup: Heat Death - by Drew Weing

So, as Tool say in a song of theirs

And following our will and wind,

we may just go where no one's been.

We'll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one's been.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Alexa Meade: Realism turned upside down!

Recently I posted an entry on an upcoming Chilean artist Nicolás Radic who is awesome because his hyperrealistic paintings are at the same time, abstractions of the things portrayed in real life. This time, I found Alexa Meade, who challenges the definition of what a canvass is. I'd say her approach is maybe the inverse to Nicolás'; she paints on her subjects and turns the real thing into wonderful paintings:

Mediation 2

alexameade.com
24x15 Chromira Print. Limited Edition of 7. For pricing information, please contact lauren@irvinecontemporary.com

Amazing, eh? From afar you could actually believe it's an oil-on-canvass, only the hair seems to give away the true reality of the piece of art.

Blake

24x18" Chromira print. Limited Edition of 7. For pricing information, please contact lauren@irvinecontemporary.com.

Seems like tons of fun, and probably a lot easier than it really is. Now, I wonder how would it feel to be there in person and walk around the 'painting' (as a photograph we no longer perceive depth, hence our illusion of it being flat), and if it would be equally convincing.

Probably not but that's maybe not the point. If only, then we'd be able to one day achieve amazing effects... remember that Robin Williams movie 'What dreams may come'?

Alexa Meade's official Page

Another person who blogged about her art (more pictures! And stuff she says about her own work)

Scene from What Dreams May Come

Wordle and How Easy It Gets To Do Things

A few years ago, this might have taken ages to do, since nobody had programmed anything that would be able to arrange words from a text this way, and size each of them up proportionally to the frequency they appeared in the text. Then colour and change their fonts. But now, it's fun and quick:


(I know it looks crappy low-resolution, just click on it to see it better)

Wordle is quite fun. Here I got some text from a website talking about the basics of turntablism, and made this fun little thing out of it. Fun fun fun.

Superflat Takashi Murakami

Somehow Japan is really good at taking English words, combining them in unlikely ways and exporting them back to the West as a brand new thing. Think about the Walkman, for instance. The term I'm bringing up here however is ''superflat''. Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is a pioneer. His art screams in wild colours and outrageous characters with roots in anime and pop art (like Warhol's). He creates things in many media and he's able to merge all of them into one unified entity, hence the ''flattening'' (not 'flat' as in lacking). Truly something I'd like to try.

Anyway, this video provides some insight into his art and how the new wave of Japanese art owes to his particularly crazy and colourful mindview:

Warning: if you get offended by strange things, then don't watch this. Open your mind a little and maybe you won't get offended =P



And here I have the two adverts which he made for Louis Viutton. I say the first one was a mixture of crazy awesome music by the Fantastic Plastic Machine with Murakami's distinctively seizure-inducing colour explosion. The second one looks like a continuation a few years later, but it lacks the bang of the first loco one.



And



Seen enough? Kaikai Kiki Co., an artists' collective founded by Murakami himself. Apparently, they are working on a film called Kaikai & Kiki, to be released this year, featuring many of Murakami's brainchildren. More of this infectious stuff:



Now let's see, what will this mean outside of Japan?

Weaving Goddamn Webs

Do you use Twitter? Perhaps, if you have the time to indulge in such things. Facebook? Probably unless you're worried about privacy and well, you realise that nobody really needs one. A blog? Like this one or something else (even if it's the lame Fotolog)? If you have more than one account on anything in the web it probably means you have the time for that. I am sick of it, I don't want to sift through Facebook messages, or in any other social website (I have Multiply and it's the same story...). There's a lot more important work outside to do.

''But dude, then what are you doing posting on this blog then?''

Takes less time. Nobody else needs to have an account to comment. No hassle. Dunno, I thought it was a cool idea when I started it. I thought the same out of this stupid Formspring account but it seems it's dead. You can ask me something but who are we kidding, eh? The Multiply account I mentioned before, also. It was a nice place where to post random things, a lot like this place too. I befriended a couple of people there from all over the world and share things about anything. Really nice and fun people. Although we're all just online identities here, it's a shame maybe. I feel clogged up with all this stuff.

But then, Google Sites came in handy. It's like my own portable bookmarks page with anything I find useful. So that's more personal.

But then things mount up! For instance, my music project at Reverbnation, and then I'm releasing the music in Bandcamp too! Aaargh! It seems like it may save some time or be helpful promoting the music, but this is maybe a bit too much.

Then there's DeviantArt. I'm okay with it... I won't complain...
*coughlotsofmessagescoughcough*


However, there's an even more pressing issue here; if you've everywhere, it may be good when you're trying to promote something (so far my music and art provide me zero income), but it also makes you vulnerable to being found, um, and many other things. Here's Juanelo (in Spanish and translated below) summing up an important idea!


Juanelo belongs to Marco Canepa. All rights reserved. Vida larga a Juanelo.