Wednesday, November 26, 2003
The Death of the AlbumWith all the recent hoo-ha and excitement about the growth of online digital music sales, there's an increasing number of commentators who are postulating that the album format is just about past its use by date. With consumers able to buy the specific tracks (ie. the singles) that they want from an album, they can avoid forking out extra cash (and, admit it, even with recent price-cutting, CD albums still are pretty expensive) for what is essentially a jewel case, a couple more listenable tracks, and a whole lot of filler. A lot of this is due, no doubt, to the fact that the big record companies have, for the best part of a couple of decades now, been churning out albums (and recording artists) that are, by most anyone's standards, total crap. The current formula seems to be: two or three hit singles, get a top-name producer (or producer team) in to record enough tracks to fill up and album, throw a shit-load of marketing and promotion the public's way to get them to hand over the cash for the three songs they want (and the artwork), and voila: a modern, disposable pop album (and, theoretically, fantastic profit-margins for the majors). However, with the advent of p2p and online music stores, this business model is obviously failing the majors pretty quickly, to the point that sales figures are substantially down (a 15% decline in album shipments over the last three years), and online sales are expected to grow to the point where they make up 33% of US music retail figures by 2008. What to do? What to do? Make some decent albums, for a start. There is talk of the labels backing off from their current money-making schemes that revolve around one-hit wonders and short-term stars, and investing in acts for the long-term. Bands like Radiohead and Blur (Metallica and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers are also thrown up as examples in this CSM article) have shown that it is possible to still release 'proper' albums - that is, albums that have a sense of start, middle and finish (or even just a sense of being a 'whole'), as opposed to a collection of disjointed tracks (or, in the case of so many hip-hop releases, held together by an interminable procession of 'interludes'. End. It. Now. Please. Outkast are excepted from this rule. Missy Elliot is not). And the CD doesn't have to be an album. It's always amazed me that you can buy a CD single for a few bucks, but a new release CD album from a major label will set you back NZ$35 or so. I mean, what's the difference in the manufacturing process? Is there really $25-$30 dollars more manufacturing cost involved for the 6 or 7 extra (filler) tracks that have to be burned onto the album? Why not just release the good stuff, however many tracks that may be, and price it accordingly? So yes, the 'Death of the Album' may just mean the death of the hastily constructed pop padder. 'Real' albums will live on, no doubt, and I suspect that shorter-formats (4-8 song EPs) will increase in popularity as well, as consumers become more wary of forking out extra cash for those not-so-good tracks. # | Thursday, November 13, 2003
Every UK Top 40 Hit. Ever.So, this is a cool website. Every song and album to ever get into the UK Top 40 since the charts' inception in January 1952 is now part of a database at everyhit.com, where you can search by song, artist, date, format and various combinations thereof. So, I can quickly ascertain that the Datsun's have reached #25 and #33 on the singles' chart with 'In Love' and 'Harmonic Generator' respectively, and that their self-titled debut album got to #17 on the albums' chart. There's also a nice trivia/records section. For example... Most Siblings In One GroupMoana Wolfgramm? Cool. And my old favourite band - A-Ha - get the nod for... Longest Note Held In A HitWhen I was younger I was amazed at the number of songs called 'The Power of Love' that were floating around, but, thanks to everyhit.com, I now discover that other song titles are even more ubiquitous ... Most Popular Title For A Top 40 SingleAnswers in the comment box please. # | Tuesday, November 11, 2003
Radio Active 89FM NZ Music Show Playlist 11 November, 2003 Had the lovely Ms. Hill back in the co-host's seat this week (after her winter migration to the warmer climes of 'Nam), which meant we could return to our old habits of flubbed voice-breaks, asking too-hard questions for the giveaways, and generally sounding a bit chaotic. All good fun. Here's one of the questions (asked after the Tokey Tones 'The Beach' had just played). "OK, the name of that song by the Tokey Tones shares the same name as an excellent Alex Garland novel that was later turned into a not-so-good movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio - what was the name of that song, book and film?" "Titanic!" was the first, and as it turned out, only call we got on that one. Luckily, someone did know the answer to the next question: "What popular early evening NZ TV soap does one of the Tokey Tones act in?" Not too many options there, you'd have thought. But the pause from the question being asked to the phone going was disconcertingly long. After the listening public had obviously spent some times discounting any of the other popular NZ soaps that get played in the early evening, we eventually got a (correct!) call. Anyway, we'd turned up at 9pm having been told there was a live-to-air until about 9:30pm - I'd been rung and asked if it was ok that the live-to-air impinged on our show - 'No worries,' I said. Julie got the same call, but came out of it under the impression that we were expected to handle the desk during the performance (by new local act Cue the Sun, by the way). This suitably freaked us both out, with my desk-handling skills still at the 'adequate' stage, and Ju's being (only very slightly) worse than that. A fully-fledged live mixing job was going to see us cruelly exposed as the feckless technical hacks we actually are. Fortunately everything was set to go -- all we had to do was listen to the music which was all being fed through one channel on the main desk from Marmalade Studios downstairs. Just had to click 'em off after their 'thanks, good night', and we were in action. Phew. * LIVE TO AIR - Cue the Sun Pretty good these guys, in a very Jakob way. Keep an ear out if that's your sort of thing. Because of this, and the usual un-chart-ed show eating up another quarter of an hour of the show, the playlist was pretty short tonight... * Pitch Black - Speech * Phoenix Foundation - Let me die a woman * HDU - Lull * Shaynie & Fifie - Name of the Game * JPSE - Up In The Sky * Tokey Tones - The Beach * Kold Kut - Repect 2 Welli * Stylus77 - Goodbye * Bilge Festival - Buried [your head] * Fur Patrol - Beautiful * The Chills - Look for the good in others and they'll find the good in you * Baitercell - Prototype * Phelps & Munro - Comeuppance * Plasticene - My Imagined Nursery * Dark Tower - Sons of the South * Poultice - Slap Mit Fish * Wing - You'll Never Walk Alone # |
The Political Compass
 On the Political Compass test, I sit at just about the same spot as Nelson Mandela (left-of-centre, libertarian). Various other NZ-based (mostly political) bloggers have sent their results to NoRightTurn, in an effort to 'map the New Zealand blogosphere'.It seems kiwis are generally a pretty liberal bunch: only NZPundit pokes its head above the 'Authoritarian/Libertarian' divide, although I was surprised to see the majority of pundits were right-of-centre in their political leanings. Although, after reading some of them, maybe not. Is Russell Brown the only left-wing political blogger currently posting in NZ? Update 1. Of course, had I read the blog that the results were being compiled on, I would have noticed that (duh) norightturn is itself a left-wing blog, and since my last browse, he's also added leto the left hand side of the graph. So, us lefties aren't as rare in the blogosphere as I had initially suspected. Phew. Update 2. Ah yes, all the lefties are crawling out of the woodwork now, and the left/right split is now ever-so-slightly more balanced. Fellow lefties now include nzmusic mate Joe Mahoney and the excellent named Sock Thief. Still, there's no-one as far to the left as DPF and Darkness are to the right # |
Roadies
NZ acts don't go in for the big roadie crew -- they tend to be the preserve of larger, richer international acts that can afford that sort of help. NZ bands tend to rely more on mates who just want to pop along for the trip, and will lug a bit of gear in return for a share of the rider, and the reflected glory of being associated with the musicians (hah!). Nevertheless, many bands do get to play gigs at which roadies are in attendance, and some do get to the point of being able to hire their own crew. So, to help out the inexperienced roadie and/or band who has little knowledge of this particular dark art, this excellent website is a treasure-trove of information for potential and current roadies, and those who may have to work with them. It's got a lingo glossary (and UK equivalents), roadie rules and band rules (very important: "The Band should not mangle well known Rock Standards at sound check, as this simply depresses EVERYONE!!"), amongst many other bits'n'pieces. The site also has a pic of the Justin Timberlake/Christine Aguilera lighting rig (otherwise known as a truss, wouldn't you know), after it collapsed on their recent US tour. Incredibly, despite the fact there were over 30 people working on and underneath it at the time, only three people suffered minor injuries. Roadies! They're tough! # | Monday, November 10, 2003
Would you like a song with those fries?American uber-food corporations McDonalds and Pepsi seem set to add a fair whack of momentum to the pay-per-download online music market by forking out for over 1 billion tracks from iTunes to use in their own promotional giveaways. McDonalds are doing the big buy, with a cap of 1 billion tunes for an upcoming promotion (it's suspected that they won't actually have to fork out for the tracks that will be available to the public, but, even so, they're expecting to hand over 'hundreds of millions' of dollars for the campaign). To this extent, the burger makers have somewhat stolen the thunder of the fizzy drink company, who announced last month they were going to give away 100 million tunes as part of a campaign they're running in February and March of 2004.It might just become the norm that, rather than being a product unto itself, that songs become a regular 'super-sizer' for other consumer purchases. It's already been revealed that the entire iTunes store is a loss-leader (despite the US$0.99 per-track price-tag) for getting people to buy the slightly more expensive iPod. So, further down the track, 'Buy a new Sony stereo, and get 100 iTune downloads for free!!', 'Specially marked Colgate Fluroguard toothpastes will entitle you to three free downloads from BuyMusic.com'. That kinda thing. I envision a day when companies even pay for tracks en masse for promotional use - I, for one, would be keen for my employees (MetService) to pay for a few thousand copies of Bic Runga's 'Listening for the Weather' for example, to make available to people who register on our website (when we start asking people to register to use our website, of course). Companies like Air New Zealand and Telecom who have recently been using NZ music to promote their own brands (which some see as parasitic, others as useful free promotion), could actually make the relationship seem more than just band-wagon jumping by doing something similar to McDonalds, and buying a few thousand downloads - from the home of NZ MP3: amplifier.co.nz - to use as part of their promotions. Wouldn't it be nice if you could get a free song from each of the artists featured in that Telecom 'pass-the-parcel' ad, just by paying your bill on time? # | Thursday, November 06, 2003
Paid digital downloads gain momentum.iTunes has started the revolution. There's growing confidence amongst record companies and artists that the pay-per-track download scheme popularised by iTunes earlier this year, and now being used by similar sites and applications like BuyMusic, Musicmatch and Napster 2.0 (and which has been the model at the site I help admin - amplifier.co.nz - for over a couple of years) might actually be the way forward for retail music. Although kazaa, soulseek and their ilk still offer up much the same catalogue (in fact, probably more tunes than all the legitimate stores put together, and then some), the legality of the online stores, the fact that they're relatively easy-to-use, and the good karma that comes from knowing that some of the US$0.99 you pay for any given track might actually work its way back to the artist, should see the pay services start to snaffle away at least the more respectable and mature users of the free p2p networks. Particularly as the growth of p2p virii on kazaa becomes more rampant, and parents with music downloading kids make a vague attempt at keeping their offspring away from the truckloads of porn that infest that and most other similar free p2p apps (try doing a general search for Britney on Kazaa - not the sort of thing you want your 14yo daughter to be downloading, really). And hopefully the US$0.99 'standard' price-per-track that seems to have sprung up will become a bit more flexible over time. Really, if you want to download a 12-track album, it's gonna cost you US$11.88 (about NZ$20). For NZ$24 I can probably get the same album from smokecds.com, with jewel-case, artwork and in the full hi-fi format, not some 'good-but-not-perfect' mp3. And if it's really popular, it's probably even cheaper down at the Warehouse. Paul Boutin over at Slate has investigated the various issues around the pricing of tracks. It's interesting what conclusions he comes to: his original thought was that charging more for popular tracks and less for 'the crap' (William Shatner and Milli Vanilli are dragged out as wholly suitable examples of the latter genre) would be the way to go. Turns out the opposite is more likely true: using hit tracks as a loss leader to get people into the store, and then charging 'normal' prices for everything else - just like the traditional bricks'n'mortar store. Although, he does point out that Rhapsody's sales tripled when the store slashed its burn-to-disc price to 49 cents (for all tracks) as a test run, so, perhaps, online stores won't quite follow the same business models as their real-world counterparts. No doubt these issues will be resolved over the next couple of years, as the big record companies crunch the numbers that (they hope) will see them selling their tracks for the optimum return. The problem seems to be, at present, that the major labels are still charging US$0.70 to US$0.80 cents per song wholesale to the online stores. That's just insane, really, and the catalyst for change may actually come from the infamously exploited artists, who are starting to see how cutting out some of the middle-men might benefit everyone (except the middle-men, obviously). Moby's got it sussed, in this article from the Economist he asks "Why is a record company any more qualified to send an MP3 to iTunes than I am?" # | Wednesday, November 05, 2003
Worst Album Covers. EverAlthough, I quite like the Orleans cover, with the naked hairy lads. # | |
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