This music is uncopyrighted. That means you may play, use, re-use, sample, remix and mash up the music at your own discretion. The only thing I would like is to be credited as the creator of this music. For the rationale behind uncopyright, see . For information, please use the comments.
If you want to pay for the music, please give microloans to third-world entrepreneurs at . If you want, drop a mention in the comments.
It’s the new gold according to many experts and pundits.
Why? Data simply helps you make better decisions.
Example 1
Let’s say you put up 3 different songs on YouTube. After you’ve promoted them all for 6 months you notice that one song has way more hits than the other. You now know that song has “single” potential. If you spend some money/time doing a better recording or making more creative videos for that song, there’s a higher likelihood that more people will want that song and thus, discover you as an artist. That’s data decision making at work. Example 2
Let’s say you’re really wanting to tour but you’re not sure where. You think it makes more sense to tour close to home but you’re not sure anyone will come out to those shows. You also have several videos on youtube that are all getting good hits. You look at the analytics and notice there’s a intense amount of people from France who have viewed your vids. France seems far away so you start doing some facebook ads to make new fans to see if there’s other places to go. After a few months you notice that the majority of facebook fans are coming from France.
The data tells you to go France ’cause the likelihood of a good tour with good shows is pretty positive. Now, you can just google around to find promoters and venues (or go to ) who’ll take you on. You can also use your data to let them know that putting you on a bill makes sense.
Paying attention to data makes sense. It’s key when you don’t have much money since making a bad decision that involves money can set you back. It’s worth noting that data isn’t everything, but there’s no doubt that it helps.
So, MusicDNA has arrived and it’s designed to make people start paying for digital file formats.
The record industry has realised that people aren’t that inclined to pay for a computer file that they can easily (if illegally) get for free if they can use a computer. As much as they have tried, the quality, ease of portability/transfer and quickness of transfer of the humble MP3 file was always going to mean that trying to monetise it was going to be tricky, or at least monetise it enough to sustain an industry.
MusicDNA is being promoted as a kind of a “super MP3″. The idea is that extra stuff comes along with the song, like the lyrics, the video, artwork and blog posts and extra stuff will be added later – so the idea is you kind of “sign up” to the band. And pirated copies of the file won’t update.
This is a noble effort to get people to start spending on music again and recognises that you need to offer a lot more than the music file these days. Will it work? I think probably not. The thing is that at the end of the day most people just fundamentally want the song – apart from proper fans of an artist, most people hear a tune, like the tune and want to get a way of hearing it as and when they want. As readers of this blog will know, I’m very much an advocate of the whole music experience (or what it once was).
People have always liked music. From the first time that man could bang out rhythms people have liked music. In the last hundred years or so we’ve had the privilege of being able to own recorded versions of music, from wax cylinder, through shellac, to vinyl, tape, CD and now digital file. Cassette tape was the first time when people could realistically copy “records” in the 1970’s. You did have bootleg vinyl, but it was so prohibitively costly that only live gigs and rare mixes/versions were illicitly pressed up. I remember working on record stalls in the late 80’s and bootleg LPs were a good £12 upwards (some of the Beatles bootlegs were £25-£30 and this was 1988). The real issues for the record companies and music industry as a whole was the advent of the CD – “perfect” digital sound – no hiss, crackle or pop (unless it was on the master tape). This meant that people could copy CDs onto cassette tape and it was as good as the cassette tape you bought in the shop – the beginning of the end. When recordable CD became affordable around 1997, things got really bad for the recording industry. Not only could perfect copies be reproduced with no loss of sound quality, but they could be made very quickly indeed. Around the same time, MP3 emerged. Double whammy time.
Realistically the record industry must have realised it was the end of the gravy train then. So the persecution of internet pirates began. But if a kid has a few quid pocket money and has the choice of ripping off a few music tracks or buy the digital files – identical files – what is he going to do? Say to his mates that he can’t afford to pop down the pub on Saturday because he’s given EMI a few quid for exactly the same files he could go to a torrent site to get illegally? What do you reckon? Do you think music fans in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s really bought music to keep the bands in their limos and private jets? Or because that vinyl/tape/CD were the only way they could get hold of the music?
Put it this way, it beer flowed through taps for free, straight into the home, would you go to the pub to pay for the stuff?
So, music will survive. It was around for years before “the buying years” and will be around for years more. And people will always want new music and associated artwork, videos and image of their favourite stars. It will be different – because the digital world has made getting music (and the videos, lyrics, artwork etc) too easy. There really is no going back.
Ed.: Make no mistake about it: digital sound tech, from mixing to processing, has evolved to a fidelity on par with its analog predecessors and opening possibilities well beyond what they offered. But the making of that evolution wasn’t easy, and it was more than a technical challenge. You can thank the creative spirit of people like Paul Frindle. As contributor Primus Luta explains to CDM, his work is about more than just engineering or tools – it’s driven by creative, musical energy. -PK
Author’s note: I wanted to bring this piece to the CDM audience because, whether we know it or not, if we Create Digital Music, we are indebted to people like Paul Frindle. While this piece is on the technical side, one of the things that I hope readers will pull away is his creative spirit. May Paul inspire you to bring that same energy to the work that you produce in the digital realm. You can read the full interview, with war stories from Virgin Records, Trident Studios, SSL and more at .
In the world of audio, Paul Frindle is a legend. During his tenure at Solid State Logic, he was responsible for the channel electronics of the SSL G Series Console. He was also a part of the team that broke the “damnable black art” of digital conversion. He went on to cofound the (pre-dot=com) startup Oxford Digital Ltd. Their first contract was with Sony (who would eventually take over the company), developing the application design of Sony’s flagship digital mixing console. The result of this work was the OXF-R3, to this day regarded as the pinnacle of digital mixing consoles, not only in music, but also in film. Like everything Paul has worked on, as much of a landmark as the OXF-R3 was, it proved to be but merely a stepping stone. Where it was leading, however, could have been much different.
Sony’s legendary OXF-R3 console.
“I think there was a fantastic opportunity to revive the large studio concept, by integrating non-linear storage and editing into the OXF-R3,” Paul says. “It was already a massively-powerful workstation, wide open [enough] to accept it. This would have been amazingly powerful and creative, and would have knocked underpowered workstations off the map for many years to come, restoring a much-needed differential to the elite studios against the upcoming project studios.”
The OXF-R3 has only continued to blur that line in favor of the project studios. Strapped for the kind of clients who could appreciate — let alone could afford — high-end studios, the great studios of their time have faded away one by one. If those studios could have stayed on the leading edge of digital tech, would it have been enough to halt those closures? We may never know. Fortunately for all studio buffs, high-end and project alike, there was another avenue of exploration left for Paul that would give his work the broadest audience to date.
“The design of the OXF-R3 was amazingly ahead of time. It was a great big, highly flexible processor with a whole load of software running on it, which was restricted and presented on a panel just for conformity and convenience. It was already ‘software in a box’. It could even be controlled remotely. All of the design systems and debugging tools I was using on it consisted of on-screen GUIs.” This was a dramatic, yet understated shift from the way technical engineers had previously worked. It was a physical product, but the brains of it was moving into the virtual space.
“I was warning that the OXF-R3 product concept was obsolete even before we finished it. The large digital tape recorder was nothing more than a very costly and highly delicate ‘bit bucket’ organised like an analogue machine. With the meteoric rise in performance of digital technology, it was fairly easy to envisage a time when a unit bought for £1000 would be capable of doing a large chuck of what a mixer needed. In the near future, we would be able to make art without all this paraphernalia, at a miniscule fraction of the cost. I was far more excited about this than doggedly hanging onto established formats and design constraints.”
Paul’s work for Sony Oxford was a new high water mark for digital audio processing in software.
Not one to let this excitement lay dormant, Paul and a few others started their own pursuit. “The plug-ins project was initially hatched from humble beginnings, almost by us working in our spare time and at nights. My colleague actually did the first proof of concept EQ plug-in over the Christmas break and it all grew from that.
“What people needed most were high-quality, refined and indispensable applications; the EQ and Dynamics were adapted to provide that. Making them identical to the OXF-R3 applications was a link to our existing reputation. Of course running these in 48bits for TDM or double float in RTAS actually provided better performance than was available in the OXF-R3 32-bit, fixed-point environment. And it has to be said that we ironed out a few bugs along the way too, so these were actually better than the applications in the large format console.”
For users, this resulted in what are still being called the best equalizer and dynamics processing plug-ins on the market. For Sony, however, the greatest deliverable was the system they built to create both the OXF-R3 and the plugins. “It was a complete hierarchical graphic design system running on a specially-designed processor, which allowed real-time interaction and analysis of the action for almost every instruction in your processing design!” If this description sounds familiar, it is because what Paul is describing is a modular environment for signal processing, much like tools like Max/MSP, AudioMulch and Plogue Bidule.
“Not only did it allow engineers without formal programming skills to build highly complex applications, it also very crucially allowed us to experiment freely and actually listen to what was happening in real time! It was this system that enabled me to delve so deeply into what we could hear and why, exploit that knowledge and realise the applications for the OXF-R3 console and subsequently the Sony Oxford plug-ins. Quite simply, I was able to ‘play around’ with all sorts of wacky processing models to get the behaviour that matched the all-important sounds in my head.”
This freedom of experimentation allowed Paul to move from traditional audio utilities like EQ’s and dynamics processors into more creative arenas. “The Transmod was something that I have always wanted since the mid-1970s, and over the decades had tried on several occasions to make out of analogue technology. But it was doomed to failure because of the relatively poor accuracy and stability of [analogue] components. During a lunchtime, I knocked up a digital version of my old idea as proof of concept, and it just worked!
“The Inflator came about because I received a late night call from a friend who had been doing high-profile sessions in L.A. with Eric Clapton and BB King. He had slogged away for months doing recordings and mixes, but had been beaten into production by another engineer who managed to make it louder. He wanted to know if there was anything he could possibly do to make it louder without wrecking the sound completely. I was reminded that I had to make my first transistor power amp design in 1970 twice as powerful as the previous tube amp design to get the same volume and impact. All I had to do was to apply all this old knowledge into a digital process and the same effect would be available. I used a combination of math packages and the OX-R3 design system to experiment and extract the salient details of what made the tube amp louder. This was definitely a walk on the wild side, since for the first time in this employment I was making something whose sole purpose was to generate a heap of distortion!”
After leaving Sony Oxford, Paul set out on his own again to further explore the creative possibilities opening up through digital audio. The result is his latest venture . “This initiative was conceived as a way of getting this stuff done without too much interference from marketing executives and sales infrastructures.”
The first product is the plugin. “It was yet another object I had always wanted to have, but the idea was given greater urgency from listening to what people were trying to achieve in their productions using greater amounts of compression, the kinds of character they were trying to produce, and the difficulties they were battling with along the way. This, and a deep personal dislike for the artefacts produced in conventional multi-band designs, gave impetus for the design of the DSM. Digital processing seemed to provide the possibility of actually making it at last.
from on .
“I am particularly pleased with the DSM because it’s exactly the sort of thing I want to bring to the marketplace – serious processes that have groundbreaking practical purpose and facility. They are, at the same time, artistically capable and great fun! Such things excite me because they bring genuinely new capabilities and artistic power to the production process.”
If there is a theme to be found throughout Paul’s career it is a continuous effort to push forward this idea of the technology as art.: “I don’t want to waste the rich experience of the past in some manic push for ‘newness,’” says Paul. “Neither do I want to simply try and blindly copy what was there, in the hope that it does the same ‘kind of thing’. I want to understand it and use that understanding to produce new stuff, which is truly creative and actually advances our art. We should be carrying the past forward with us in a continuous process of advancement, not writing it off to history, or reverting to it in a religious search for past success.”
Speaking with Paul, his mind is so focused on the present or even the future, it’s easy to forget his historical relevance. Working dilligently to realize the ’sounds in his head’ and put them out into the world, he is not only an inspiration for the work he produces, but for the creative ethic it exemplifies.
In arguments for or against subscription music it is consistently argued that people wish to own music not rent it.
The most vocal opponent of subscription music is Apple founder Steve Jobs. He argued in a Rollingstone interview back in 2003: “These [music subscription] services that are out there now are going to fail. Music Net’s gonna fail, Press Play’s gonna fail. Here’s why: People don’t want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45’s; then they bought LP’s; then they bought cassettes; then they bought 8-tracks; then they bought CD’s. They’re going to want to buy downloads. People want to own their music. You don’t want to rent your music — and then, one day, if you stop paying, all your music goes away”.
Technological advancements are now making such an argument is increasingly irrelevant. People in the days of 45’s and LP’s did not purchase the record for the tangible object, the success of iTunes proves this. Rather they purchased 45’s, CD’s, etc. for the convenience of being able to listen to the recordings they desired, when they desired. This being opposed to waiting for the song they enjoyed to be played on the radio. However such records are usually, and still are priced to the extent that an extremely limited amount of music could be accessed each month. People desire to listen to far more music than this. Even 99c singles on iTunes do not satisfy my appetite for music before I run out of money. This is why people are turning to file sharing and will turn to subscription music if it is set up properly.
This desire to listen to more than say, one album a month is evident in youth culture. Teenagers today, the primary music market have access to a far wider variety of music and they choose to access it. This is evident as in the 1980’s for instance, due to economic limitations kids would only buy around one record a month, and strongly identify with it. High schools were filled with subcultures of Hip-Hop fans, Metal heads, and many other groups. Where as today, while there may be some identification with an artist that strongly resonates with an individual, kids do not form subcultures as strongly based on music any more.
A large scale subscription music model becoming the primary means by which people obtain their music also creates the issue that it would drive most record stores out of business. Speciality retailers that sell merchandise and nostalgia items such as vinyl may still exist, but chain stores such as Virgin, and even CD’s at Walmart would probably be a thing of the past. People consistently argue the loss of such stores to argue against digital music. To me this is a non issue. Such businesses will fade and die unless they change their model. It isn’t tragic or sad, it is capitalism. Public Enemy rapper Chuck D stated something along the lines of those that want to own music as a tangible physical product need to get with the times.
I personally take pride in my huge CD collection, the music I own. However I hope that one day my children will look at it the same way I look at my father’s vinyl collection, as a relic of the past.
Reuters - Reclusive funk musician Sly Stone filed a $50 million lawsuit against his former manager on Thursday, alleging fraud and 20 years of stolen royalties.
AFP - At its annual French Riviera gathering this week, the ailing music industry considered whether legal streaming services that offer millions of tracks via the Internet might offer a breakthrough.
Texture from Weaponizer released an EP last week, the first of a trilogy. They’re apparently all going to be named after neurological disorder. This 4 song digital EP deems itself as:
Aphasia-
–noun. Pathology. The loss of a previously held ability to speak or understand spoken or written language, due to disease or injury of the brain.
Aphasia starts with a patient, steady track that pushes the mind to floating spaces. Cyberpunk/chopped lyrics and droning musicality present themselves over an ambiance of paranoid futurism. There’s really nothing happy about it, and that can be a good thing. “Distance”, and the entire album really, measures itself against the listeners wandering mind. This is especially true with the unbelievable instrumental tracks on this album, starting with track 2, “Vilnius Colony” (which, surely, reminds me of my ex co-worker from Lithuania). The song builds steadily, adding little piece after piece like a skyscraper, until it reaches a crescendo that climaxes into the clouds. There’s scratching, guitars, electronics, and artibeats that work very well together. The falling action — or denouement; if Dwyer-French taught me anything — caps off “Vilnius Colony” well. “Impact” features a guy dubbed Harlequinade, who sounds whacked out of his mind insane. The horns of the track come straight out of “The Maltese Falcon”; Sam Spade would be proud. They’re basically looped over a beat (with a bit of reverb). This track’s a bit more of a head-nodder, but still features that “ambiance” I spoke of. The end track is another instrumental, “Ram Dass”. There’s a bit of a Thom Yorke solo shit weaving in and out: the quick and almost constant beeps and clicks, the lack of your standard artibeats. But it’s certainly unique (I can’t even really imagine Yorke’s voice over it), and the echoey samples of the “psychedelic experience” give it a great dimension beyond “second instrumental track”.
This stuff’s FREE, so if you’re curious you have absolutely NO excuse not to check it out. Linkage:
AP - A trade group representing the major music labels said Wednesday it will reject a reduced penalty for a central Minnesota woman found guilty of sharing 24 songs over the Internet, and will instead begin preparing for another trial to determine new damages.
