I should probably sit down and write one of those long, probing, reflections on what has happened in the last year, or the last decade… Maybe I’ll get to that later. Right now all I can think about is crawling into bed like an old, tired man. Bob Dylan said that “He not busy being born is busy dying.” So that’s me, not busy being born, but busy dying.

Mostly, I think that “choir people” annoy me. If you have ever sung in a choir you either 1) know exactly what I am talking about, or 2) are a choir person. These “choir people” love to point out the subtleties of how everyone else is singing this section wrong, or how the director needs to do a better job of cueing such-and-such section. “Choir people” love to chat while the director isn’t dealing with them/their section, or, they insist on singing along, even though the director has specifically asked to hear another section. “Choir people” seem to always have an opinion about where to breath, or how to pronounce a word, and, best of all, they like to raise their hand and inform the director that this is what should be happening.

And then there is the whole “commas = breaths” thing. Ugh, let’s not even go there.

In preparation for the upgrade that’ll happen over the summer, and to pique my curiosity, I downloaded the Sibelius 7 demo the other night. Let’s just say I hope something changes in the incremental upgrades or, at worst, in version 8. This “upgrade” is pretty awful.

I know that this is totally superficial, but first, have a look at what they have done to the icon. Here is the icon from version 6:  It’s nice; a little abstract, but pleasant to view. Now, here is the icon for version 7:  Agh! Hideous! Plus, it totally changes the visual brand that Sibelius has built over the last 6 versions. (Sibelius was acquired by Avid a few years ago [along with Digidesign {Pro Tools}, and M-Audio], which is a whole other thing…more on that later, perhaps.) Now, the user interface has also changed drastically. The UI in version 6 wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty sleek and un-distracting:  In version 7, they’ve opted for an entirely new, entirely less attractive UI:  Again, not only is it quite ugly, but it is drastically different from the workflow and branding Sibelius has built over the last 14 years.  To me, it doesn’t really look like a professional tool, it looks like something else.

I know that this is pretty esoteric stuff, and that I am really just being a design snob here, but I am really, really not excited about this “upgrade.” Like everything, I am sure we’ll all get used to how this stuff works, and we’ll learn to like it…It almost (almost) makes me want to trying going back to Finale…almost.

Basically, it goes something like this. Spotify/Rdio are some relatively new developments in the world of music distribution. Both of them became available (in the US) last summer. Essentially, these services allow you to listen to pretty much anything you want, anytime you want; it is kind of like owning every song ever released. As long as you are willing to sit through ads every so often, you get this privilege for free, and if you don’t want ads, or you want to be able to listen to music away from your computer (ie. on your phone/iPod), you can pay a small monthly fee and have those privileges added in as well. Best of all, this is all totally legal. Pretty cool, yes? Absolutely!

It gets kind of complicated when you turn this around and look at this from the perspective of the artist, however. Spotify is constantly justifying its existence as a legal alternative to piracy. They often cite a statistic that illegal file-sharing has declined dramatically, almost disappeared, in Sweden (Spotify’s first market) since Spotify came along; even more enthusiastically, they tout the fact that Spotify is a way to monetize what feels like illegal file-sharing. And that is true, Spotify pays artists and record labels on a per-play basis—the more people listen to your music on Spotify, the more money you can make. When you look at the details, though, it becomes apparent that artists aren’t really any better off, financially, through this arrangement than they were when folks were outright stealing their music.

There is a pretty revealing info graphic that really illustrates just how paltry the Spotify payout system is. (What makes it worse is that the payout scale is variable, so the more popular you are, the better represented you are [ie. on a major, “Big Four” label] the higher your per-play payout is, but nobody knows, exactly, how this is all calculated, and who is making what.) Essentially, an average, Joe Schmoe artist will make approximately $0.00029 for each time someone listens to one of their songs on Spotify. Yes, you saw that correctly, it wasn’t a typo: .029¢ for each time someone listens to your song (in its entirety). So, in order for an artist to make the federal monthly minimum wage ($1,160/month) through Spotify’s payout system, they would need to round up over 4,000,000 plays/month…and that is assuming that we are speaking about a solo artist; if he/she were in a band they’d need three or four times that amount in order to garner the same amount of income per person.

Now, it is misleading to assume that a recording artist would/should rely solely upon Spotify plays as their source of income. Certainly, Spotify plays are only one piece of the artist’s financial income; income from playing live concerts, income from selling merchandise, and income from selling old-fashioned CDs are also among the artist’s revenue streams.

As you might remember, I was quite excited about Spotify. I got myself an “add code” before it went completely public. I then upgraded my account to a Premium account ($10/month) and used that as my sole music-listening portal for several months. I promised my wife that, while I had an active Spotify subscription, I would not buy any music (as a way to defray the subscription cost). Plus, why would I need to? For $10/month, I could listen to pretty much anything and everything I wanted to, so why would I buy any music?

And that leads me to one of the points I wanted to make. I think that Spotify is a bad deal for artists. It is super convenient for the consumer, and ridiculously cheap (as in free), and has all sorts of advantages for consumers and record labels (to whom Spotify is paying huge licensing fees in exchange for access to their catalogs), but I think it is a pretty raw deal for artists. The biggest reason I have changed my mind about Spotify is that I think it brings about a pretty fundamental devaluing of music in general. Essentially, what Spotify does is makes music into something that is valueless; it makes music into something that is not worth any sort of sacrifice on behalf of the consumer.

I recognize that people have been trying to access as much music, for as little money as possible, for a long, long time. This became especially prevalent in the late–1990s when stuff like Napster popped up all over the internet. I would be lying if I said that I have never filled my cup at the bottomless well of less-than-legal file-sharing sites; I think just about everyone would. Spotify often bills itself as an alternative to piracy, and one that actually “pays” content creators while they’re at it. But, in some ways, I wonder if Spotify is actually worse in the long run. Basically, because Spotify is legal, it makes the devaluation of music mainstream, rather than relegating it to some dark corner of the internet. Everyone knows that stuff like Napster/Kazaa/Limewire/Pirate Bay are illegal, that they are shady, scary places where ill things are waiting around to reek havoc. Spotify changes that whole paradigm; now you can access anything you want totally guilt-free, and you can do so with the record label’s blessing.

There is a philosophy about the “future of music” that has been floating around the industry for the past seven or eight years; it is often referred to as “Music like water.” Essentially, it says that, someday (which is now, basically) music will flow freely, the way water does. Technically, water isn’t free, as you, and I know, but, we tend to think of water as free, since it is so ubiquitous, and its “price” is so negligible. When someone comes over to visit, we don’t think of billing them for the extra water they have caused us to access, neither do we expect to pay for water when we order a glass at a restaurant; water’s cost is absorbed into the costs of everything else. But, water is still a profitable commodity, there are whole industries dedicated to it. Industries that guarantee (and make a profit doing so) the cleanliness, tastefulness, and overall quality of the water we drink. There are industries that make a killing selling “deluxe” varieties of water (think Evian, Pellegrino, or Sparklets). Someday, they say, music will be like that; it will be available everywhere, and we won’t really think much about where it comes from, or how much it costs. There will still be folks who make money off of making music available (like they do with water), and there will be some who make a killing selling “deluxe” versions of music. Gavin Cestleton makes a pretty good argument against that philosophy, if you are interested. It is my own, personal stance that the biggest danger of this “future” will be the perception that music is (and should be) free (although it will technically, not be free…just like Spotify or Rdio). I think that music, as an art form, as an academic pursuit, as a form of “entertainment” has already been beaten down pretty far, and making it “free” will only make matters worse.

Here is an example of what I am trying to say, I think: Every year, the college has this huge fundraiser dinner where they invite out all of the A-list folks, charge them $100/plate and hold an auction in order to try and muster up some additional funds for the college. They often want live music, as many of these events do. But, they never want to pay for the music. While I understand that they have a tight budget, and that it would be generous of the musicians to donate their time/talents since it is a fundraiser, it is quite another thing to expect the musicians to play for three hours for free. They don’t expect the caterers to donate their wares, nor do they expect the folks who set up the logistics of the event (tables, chairs, lighting, etc) to do that for free…the music, though, is expected to be free. One argument that I hear from time to time is that music is fun, so that should be payment enough. First of all, I can think of a whole lot of things that are more fun than practicing scales for hours on end for years in a row, and, secondly, it is pretty hard to pay your bills in “fun units” (or, as one of the writers at the CDBaby blog calls them, “F-Us”). When music becomes “free,” like water, it will make that attitude even harder to dissuade.

There is a whole other direction that this conversation leads, toward music piracy, but (as this post is now reaching upwards of 1625 words) I’ll leave that for a future post.

I hope you haven’t got the same issues I do.

One of the really exciting events in the world of “indie” music is the annual South By Southwest (SxSW) festival, held in Austin, TX each March. I have never been, and I probably never will go (large-scale social situations make me really anxious), but SxSW is the place to be for folks interested in up-an-coming music. (The really hardcore hipsters will probably say that all of the bands playing at SxSW are way too popular, that they are far from obscure enough for their tastes—How could anyone big enough to get a slot at SxSW be any good?)

Anyway, the point of all of this was to direct you to NPR’s “The Austin 100: A SXSW Mix” where you can find a sampling of 100 (of the over 2,000) artists playing at this year’s SxSW. An extra special bonus is that over ⅔ of the tracks are (legally!) downloadable! That just made yours and my search for awesome new music a whole lot easier! Hopefully we’ll find something in there that we’ll like.

That is both good news and bad news. The good news is that I won’t have to figure out how I am going to pay for roundtrip airfare to and from New York, and I won’t have to stress about writing the paper, or stress out about how I am going to give the presentation without making myself looking like an idiot. The bad news is that I don’t have a definite deadline (any time soon) to get something toward my dissertation done, I don’t get to take a quick trip to NYC with my wife; it also never feels very good to get rejected.

This is only the second conference to which I have submitted an abstract related to my dissertation, but it is also the second one that hasn’t been accepted. I know that folks often submit to dozens of conferences a year, and that you get a lot more rejections than you get acceptances, but this all kind of makes me wonder: Is this topic only interesting and exciting to me?

One of the things that she taught us, and most of us ignored (I think) was that The Enlightenment and the advent of the “Scientific Method” really screwed a lot of things up. It threw all of our priorities into places they had never been before. Essentially, what she was getting at is that it is since The Enlightenment that we’ve started distrusting things we can’t see; our sense of sight has taken precedence over all of our other faculties. The Scientific Method teaches us that data is what is important, that physical “proof” is what should govern our thoughts. If we cannot provide proof, if something isn’t visible in the physical realm, then it should be disregarded, or at least made extremely suspect. We often discussed how this type of thinking affected music, or, more specifically, thinking about music. Among other things, this mindset put us into an environment wherein music was something that needed to be measured, classified, and described using physical analogs. What follows from that type of thinking is things like Schenkerian analysis, and obsession with musical “form” and harmonic “function.”

I started (re)thinking about this earlier in the week, though it wasn’t related to music as much as it was to religion. The idea carries through, however, and I found it interesting. I (sometimes) like to think of myself as something of an intellectual; my academic accolades speak something toward that end. To that end, I have had this data-collecting, hypothesis-verifying way of thinking presented to me as the only valid way to arrive at any sort of a conclusion. Insomuch that I am an “intellectual,” or have at least been trained as one, some find it odd, I think, that I hold to un-provable religious beliefs, or that, worse, I believe in things despite the “proof” that exists to contradict said belief. This is something that I have though about a lot, and I can’t say that it is an easy discussion to have. But, I think I am coming toward an understanding of what this old professor of mine was trying express: there are lots of things that exist, lots of things that are very real but that leave no physical “evidence.” And, while my professor was using this discussion to talk about that certain a Medieval concept regarding spiritual “material” as something of actual substance, the implications of this belief are pretty far-reaching.

Seven years later, I think I finally see what my nutty professor was trying to get me to understand. Maybe she wasn’t so crazy after all.

Anyway, here is the abstract:

Composing Those Good Vibrations: Brian Wilson at Gold Star, Sunset, and Western

The recording studio is an integral part of modern musical experience. In the mid-1960s, Brian Wilson proved to be one of its most virtuosic operators. Wilson utilized the studio space as a forum for composition and experimentation, not simply as a space for capturing pre-existent music. Through the use of the recording studio, Brian Wilson developed a “modular” approach to songwriting, wherein he would record disparate musical events, which where later edited and compiled into coherent compositions. In 1966, Wilson expanded this modular approach to songwriting by including the recording space as part of the composition. While recording what would later become the ill-fated SMiLE album, Brain Wilson frequently moved between studios, harnessing each studio’s unique spatial environment in order to achieve specific sonic effects. Wilson was considering not only what notes should be played by what instruments, but which acoustical space he would use for each section of his composition—the physical space became part of the composition, part of its orchestration. This paper examines Brian Wilson’s use of physical space as a musical-compositional component through an analysis of the song “Good Vibrations,” which was recorded and composed at three different Los Angeles studios: Gold Star Studios, Western Recorders, and Sunset Sound. Special attention is given to the sonic and compositional differences between the song’s sections and how these relate to their respective recording studios.

Now I just wait around for their committee to make their decisions. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

I am proud to say that, this far, I have only missed one day (and that was because I simply fell asleep before I meant to, and didn’t wake up until the next morning)! That diligence, however, has come at a cost, which is that I rarely post anything to this blog anymore. I know that there are really only a handful of people who read this thing, and that most of you don’t care if I post or not, but I am feeling like I need to “come clean” as to why it is so silent around here nowadays.

Here is a view of my journal’s calendar: