Damian Kulash Jr., the lead singer of OK Go - a band probably most famous for its music videos like this and this– has a piece in the New York Times, in which he says that their label, EMI, no longer allows people to embed their video clips on websites.
Interestingly, he gives a pretty convincing argument that not only are these sort of restrictions bad for his band because fewer people see their clips, it's actually financially detrimental also. He also points out that the video clip for "Here it Goes Again" was made "without telling EMI... and posted... [on] YouTube without EMI’s permission."
A few years ago, one of my bands was playing a support slot for an international band, at a good venue in Melbourne. The gig had been organised through our manager, who knew the promoter. I can't remember how we got the gig exactly, but I suspect it was because our manager spoke to this promoter about potential international supports, and this was the one we were given. As far as we could tell, everything was great. We showed up to play, we met the band and their manager and everything was still good. But then it came down to a detail about the night, where we had been told we'd be doing one thing, and they thought we'd be doing another. It turned out that our manager had made a demand that the promoter was now suggesting was unreasonable, and was going to make the night run less smoothly. We didn't particularly care, except that out manager had led us to believe that it was an important detail, and that he'd helped us out by getting this term agreed to. Things actually got a little bit tense, because we were dealing with phone conversations with different people involved, who all had different opinions on who was being demanding and who was getting a raw deal.
In the end, everything was fine, largely because we were happy to go along with the new arrangements, and most of us were in the room together: we could all talk, and we knew that there wasn't any attitude. I suspect, however, that the relationship between the promoter and our manage became a little strained as a result though. Part of the problem was because the promoter felt like he was doing our manager a favour in the first place by even having us on the bill, so it irked him to have to go along with demands that he though were detrimental to the way the night would run. This happens all the time in the music industry. All the time. Mostly, people work it out, but often it ends badly.
Closure In Moscow - an Australian band who've been living in the US recently - have just been dropped from the lineup of the 2010 Soundwave festival. Here is the post on the Soundwave website announcing the decision, and here is Closure in Moscow's response, from their Myspace blog.
Firstly, I have to assume that both parties are being honest, from their point of view. I don't know any of the people involved, and there's no way to tell if anyone is deliberately lying in their statements. Obviously though, people have different interpretations of events. Here are a couple of points:
• The organiser of Soundwave claims that he only booked Closure in Moscow as "a favour to their manager", which the band is happy to accept as true. Aside from anything else, this is almost certainly a big part of the problem. Doing things like this as a favour leads to resentment from both sides. Also, the fact of the manager's involvement makes it likely that Closure in Moscow weren't entirely aware of how the deal was made. AJ (the Soundwave organiser) suggests that Closure in Moscow were being paid "10 times above what they are worth", while the band states that "nobody asked him to offer us as much as he did". I wouldn't be surprised to find that the band were kept somewhat in the dark when it came to the financial arrangements between AJ and their manager. So, while they may be telling the truth, AJ may have already fostered some resentment towards them for negotiating a deal that he considered extravagant.
• It's quite common for people to have conversations over the phone that leads one party to think that everything went fine and the other to feel like they were treated rudely. AJ claims that the Soundwave worker who took their call was treated aggressively, while the band denies having even raised their voices. They do, however, suggest that they didn't have any information about their flights or accommodation, and were calling in regards to that. It's easy to imagine that they may have been frustrated at having to leave such arrangements so late, and it's equally easy to imagine that the person they spoke to would interpret this as them being aggressive.
Is there anything to learn from this? I think the main thing is that if you have someone acting on your behalf, like a manager or booking agent, let them handle all of the arrangements that relate to their field. If you're on your own, then good communication with the people who book you is crucial, but if someone else handles that side of your affairs, let them deal with all of it. Stepping in at the last minute, without knowing the people involved, and without a good understanding of the agreement you have with them is a sure way to put people's noses out of joint, which is probably what happened here. It could be that this problem was a result of one side simply behaving badly, but I doubt it.
18 February 2010 —
Ruby
Sad news about Ruby Hunter, who died last night of a heart attack. She was only 54. As Sophie Cunningham writes at Meanjin, her "voice was so deep that listening to her was sometimes like listening to the low rumbles of an earthquake. Moving and powerful."
She will be missed.
Peter Mclan wrote a piece for The Australian, on the ruling about Men at Work's "Down Under". He's completely right.
I wrote a couple of things about art and the public domain here (and a followup here). My initial entry point into discussing intellectual property was different, but likely gives you an idea about what I think about this whole thing.
One of the things I remember saying to one of my bandmates when I first heard about this case, when I was in Brisbane recording, was that I thought it unsightly that Colin Hay should have to bother pretending that the flute riff wasn't ripped from "Kookaburra". I'm not saying I think they definitely did consciously take it, but that, if they did, they should be able to be proud of that. It disgusts me to think that this sort of quotation should be discouraged.
Mclan nails it when he talks about the danger of the term "recognisability". Every musician is influenced by others who came before, and as they work on their music they will inevitably incorporate aspects of those songs that have influenced them. As anyone with musician friends could probably attest, it can sometimes become a game to listen to a new album and find parents: "that drum pattern's the same as that Shadow song on Endtroducing", or "Hear how that string line's basically playing the riff from "She Said, She Said"?". That's a good thing. It's how it's supposed to work.
And there's another issue, that Colin Hay brought up in his statement about the ruling, which you can read here. Solos aren't usually thought of as being part of the "composed" song. I've played any number of solos on songs in which I'm not credited as a writer: that's how it's done. And in live performance particularly, it's incredibly common to quote other works during solos. Charlie Parker famously quoted a line from The Rite of Spring at a gig when Stravinsky was in the audience. I remember attending a Bob Dylan concert in 2001 in which he played the melody for "Waltzing Matilda" during a guitar solo. The crowd exploded. It would be a pretty big shame if musicians felt like this was no longer something they were allowed to do.
According to this article from the Guardian, Google has been deleting music blogs for infringing on copyrights, without bothering to confirm that such infringements have really occurred.
The comments are informative, as it seems that a lot of people think it's not an issue, or that if they'd really cared about their content they shouldn't have been hosting their sites on a free web-hosting service. Aside from the troubling nature of the report, I'm always unpleasantly surprised to see how much some internet-savvy people hold their less knowledgeable peers in contempt.
Also a little disappointed to see the Guardian resort to the cheap move of featuring a screen-grab of the popular blog Gorilla Vs. Bear, even though it hasn't been affected by the crackdown.
On the Friday afternoon, before taking the evening bus to Campus A Low Hum, I was lucky enough to go and see the Yayoi Kusama exhibition: The Mirrored Years, at Wellington's City Gallery. Included in this collection was a work from 2000 called Fireflies on the Water: an installation consisting of a small room in which the ceiling and all the walls were mirrored, and the floor - except for a small section for the viewer to stand on - was a pool of water. Filling the room were many coloured light bulbs hanging from their wires: the fireflies. Despite all the lights, the room was very dark, as it was otherwise unlit, so the effect was akin to nighttime, or space. It felt as if a "perfect" imagining of such a scene would consist of seeing nothing but the lights, the water and the blackness, but of course this couldn't be, for no matter where I looked, there I was, from all angles. If I looked straight ahead I was staring back, and if I turned my head in any other direction I could see the top of my head, my back or my profile. In one way, it felt like my own body was getting in the way of the artwork, but it was clearly no accident. The mirrors weren't there just to extend the space of the room, but to anchor my body within it. Unlike other installations in the same exhibition, in which I was able to stand in particular places and see nothing but the works themselves, Fireflies forced me to be constantly aware of myself as a body within the space. I was forced to reflect.
The label "independent" is becoming increasingly meaningless when used to describe musicians who have albums released outside of the major labels, but it is also difficult to claim that such a label is a genre of its own. Campus A Low Hum (formerly Camp A Low Hum, but this year it was at an old agricultural college, and was slightly school-themed) is, loosely, a small-scale music festival of independent bands and musicians, but the lineup features music from all sorts of genres (read about it all here, if you want to get a better idea of the festival itself). Nearly all of the bands that played there would be categorised as "indie", but it didn't have anything to do with their label, and it doesn't adequately sum up the range of genres that could be heard. There was something that tied the bands together though: perfection wasn't a priority.
Perfection in art is a myth because perfection in humanity is a myth, but some artists have had different relationships to the idea. Many artists have dealt with the notion of perfection in quite philosophical ways, but the mainstream music industry mainly approaches perfection in the same way that fast food companies do: by trying to remove as much that is organic about a product as is possible. All mistakes are removed in the recording process, and most secondary sounds (I may be inventing this term, by the way) are taken out also: the squeak of a drummer's chair; the sound of a finger sliding on a guitar string; the tapping of the keys of a saxophone. The sound of the singer breathing in is one of the few secondary sounds that are kept in many recordings, likely because it's more closely related to the primary sound in the listener's head. Even if perfection is impossible, most pop records at least aspire to it - forever chasing the perfect realisation of a perfect song. I don't think this is a good or a bad thing necessarily, it's just the way that studio recordings on pop records have evolved. Indie musicians not only don't seem to care about perfection much, they don't even seem to believe in it as a worthy pursuit, in anything tied to their music. No song is perfectly formed, no delivery is perfectly executed, and no sound is perfectly realised. And there is little distinction between the primary and secondary sounds. You know all the crackles and hums and screams of equipment malfunctions you get at indie performances? They're there because - whether they admit it or not - the musicians are happy for them to happen. If they really cared about such things they would ensure that their equipment was in better shape: it's really not as hard as it may seem. This is true of mistakes as well. Very few indie musicians play songs that they find particularly challenging to perform, yet they make mistakes all the time. It would be easy to criticise a band for not playing well enough, but it would be misguided. I'm not trying to be harsh when I say that if a musician truly cared about not making any mistakes during a performance, they wouldn't make any. But in indie music, accidents of all sorts happen, and it's why so many people love it so much.
Most of the bands I heard at Campus A Low Hum shared these traits. People made mistakes. Instruments didn't work. Arrangements were sketchy. The degree of competence at their instruments that many bands had would be seen as laughable in other genres. And all of this somehow added up to a music festival that, from what I heard over the weekend, was the highlight of many people's lives.
I'm going to New Zealand for ten days, with Potential Falcon. I hope there are still some live-music venues left in Melbourne when we get back.
The Tote, one of the most loved music venues in Melbourne, is closing this weekend (you can read the statement put out by them on many sites, including Mess and Noise).
It's always sad when a venue like this shuts down - it wasn't too long ago that local musicians were mourning the loss of Sydney's Hopetoun Hotel, a similar sort of venue in terms of its status in the music scene.
New venues keep popping up in Melbourne, a fact that a lot of people conveniently ignore when they talk about things like this being the beginning of the end of the live-music scene, but they never really fill the gap. I always had a good time when I played at The Tote, and the staff always treated the bands well, which is not as common as you might expect. As this is its last weekend, I encourage anyone to go down and have a last drink if you're in the area.
UPDATE: There's a good article at The Enthusiast, which covers the problems that live-music venues have as a result of changes in liquor licensing laws.
Largely due to Rupert Murdoch, the past year has seen more and more people talking about the idea of making newspapers charge for access to online content. I think that there are many reasonable points to be made on both sides, and I'm not really here to weigh in on the issue as a whole, but there are a couple of points I've been thinking about.
To me, the concept of free really breaks down into two separate ideas: something that doesn't charge for use, but uses adverstising to help pay for the running of the website (or newspaper or whatever); versus something that, for lack of a better description, hides its costs from the user. That is, a website that doesn't ask anything of the reader in return. As much as we are used to saying that ad-supported content is free, I think that it's fair to make the distinction, as really the reader is having to pay a price - just a different sort.
Traditional newspapers have always been semi-free, in that the vast majority of the money required to print them comes from advertising, rather than the price the reader has to pay. At the moment, online newspapers are ad-supported, but otherwise free, though this may change. On the other hand, most blogs are completely free, though most very popular blogs have a small advertising presence. As great as they are, would anyone pay directly just to access, say, Kottke, or Daringfireball (two blogs that aren't entirely free, as they feature some advertising)?
The reason why I'm asking this is because newspapers, in their attempt to make their online versions more appealing to an internet audience, tend to feature a lot of blogs themselves, with articles like this one, from the New York Times, about the similarities between Jazz and Metal. As soon as I read this piece it made me angry, but it took me a while to really work out why. It's a reasonable piece, albeit fairly small in scope, and its angle is one that, while not surprising to many Jazz or Metal fans, may be interesting to the casual reader. But it disappointed me, largely because the author seemed uninterested in any sort of research. I wish that he'd interviewed some of the artists he'd mentioned, because he would no doubt have found that, while the audiences may be very different, Jazz artists are often big fans of Metal (possibly vice-versa, but I don't know nearly as many Metal musicians to make a judgement). To me, this sort of light research would have turned the article into something genuinely interesting, and much more insightful.
However, as a blog post, it was no more lightweight than anything on any other blog, such as this. So why the anger? I think because it was a blog attached to the New York Times. It made me wonder, if readers are going to have to start paying to access newspaper content, aren't they going to expect to be of a higher calibre than that found in free - or mostly free - blogs? Or is this the kind of stuff that will always be free, and we'll just have to pay for actual journalism? If that's the case, is that another nail in the coffin of quality arts journalism?
152.7 million singles last year. And, as reported in The Guardian, 98% of those were downloaded.