Ignored By Dinosaurs 🦕

Alright! I finally have some time here. I apologize for the dearth of interesting verbiage from this blog over the last week or so. I'm still getting the hang of this whole thing, of course.

One thing that I've realized on reflecting over the past week is that the whole method that I have of getting all fired to write and then putting out four things at a time is probably not the most effective means of running this blog. I guess that's why none of the blogs that I've been reading do it that way. So, I'm going to try and keep this to a more or less daily occurrence. We'll all see how well that works out.

So to catch up -

I've picked up a second job here that has been working for me very well. I more or less started last fall and it started as a one-off consulting gig that snowballed into more or less a full time thing. The consulting gig was to help this marketing company/call center up in NJ get set up with a computer recording system. They wanted to be able to do hold music or messaging for their clients for whom they provide an answering service. It went well. Spending other peoples money on recording gear and computers is the perfect job for me, but alas, they only needed one system to get the job done. That led into another freelance gig rebuilding some old crappy computers that they had laying around into Citrix clients, which led into some more involved networking and pretty much whatever they need, which is alot. The head of IT at this place is a friend and fan of the band who keeps throwing me random jobs that I either already know how to do or can figure out with less babysitting than expected. Their network guy is completely swamped at this place, so I've been learning a lot from him about Windows networking. This is what has kept me away from the computer for 2 weeks now. I've been pulling the 6am-3pm shift, and on my feet basically the whole time, so it hasn't left much time for writing, even if I did have something interesting to say. I haven't though.

In the few in between times that I have had time to screw around, I've been doing some tinkering around with RRE's web presence. Check out our Facebook Page, specifically the Boxes page, as that's the place where I've found the first foothold on the mountain that I've been sizing up for the last 9 months as far as this whole software/web development journey goes.

I also got the codes to RRE's web page and promptly learned why you don't do direct work on a live web page! That was fun! I got the site back up, fortunately, but there are a few broken links that I'll be fixing, on the local copy of the website, of course. Stay tuned for those as well. Now that I have the access, I intend to see what I can do with the RRE site as it is before I launch into my wet dream of a band website.

Got a good Dummies book on a website framework called Joomla, which seems very, very interesting. It's what's known as a Content Management System, or CMS for short. Joomla is an open source framework which is supposed to make it really easy to do exactly what I had the big idea about a few months ago. It's a modular system for building, updating, and maintaining your web site with new content, new features, etc. It's a cool idea, but also pretty mature and full featured. This is good because it means that many of the bugs have been worked out for several years now. This is bad because it means learning a LOT of stuff that I probably don't really need in the context of doing what I want to do. I guess it's not so bad, since I like learning new stuff.

Learned a little how LiveDownloads runs their operation from a content management standpoint. I'm not gonna say, though, that'd probably be rude.

Found another framework called Drupal, which is actually what led me to Joomla. It's another CMS, with a different paradigm. We'll see which one I figure out first.

Started grasping the concept of web servers and managed to get Apache up and running on my system. I'd suggest if you're a brand newby to web design and aren't working in a Windows VB environment, you might want to check out Xxamp, as it bundles together basically every single open source gadget you're going to need to build and maintain a web site.

Bought a domain, which will be the place I launch the early versions of all of this stuff to submit for your tinkering and inspection. I'll let you know where it is when there's something there to look at.

Sooooo, it's been a busy week. Fortunately I'm back on the road now, in the sense that now I can catch up a bit on everything I have to do. I only wish that I'd had this idea a few years ago. I feel like I have an absurd amount of catching up to do. Last night's show kicked ass, by the way...

So where was I? Oh yeah:

I am not an expert. I will spout endlessly as though I am, and often I will be right in my own mind, but often I will also be full of crap. Never has this made me more uncomfortable than now, since I just followed a link trail over to the website of a UK music website called the Guardian. I'm quoted over there, courtesy of a new buddy named Tim who is apparently in a kindred band to my own. So I felt excited and frightened as one must feel the first time that he realizes people are reading (and propagating) his drivel.

I am a musician. I have had a full and remarkably balanced set of life experiences so far, but everything that I write on this blog is an opinion, unless otherwise stated. Quote me at our mutual peril. If I write about perceived stupidity in the music business, odds are good that I can back it up. If I write about software, I don't have much of an idea what I'm actually talking about. That's the point of this blog for me – the exploration of new methods and ideas. So carry on...

So Eminem's old producers sued Universal over royalties. For those of you who have never been signed to a record contract, they are shadier (pardon the pun) than you probably imagine. The whole point of getting a record deal is to try and make some money off of selling your recording, right? Well, over the last decades, the industry (and by industry, I mean the lawyers and label heads in charge of finding ever more inventive ways of scamming inattentive rock stars (which is generally easier than shooting fish in a barrel)) has come up with some novel ideas about how your royalty rate should be calculated. They subtract the cost of all manner of promotional charges for the posters you see in the window of the record store, and then things like “breakage” (which hasn't been a real issue since records were made of shellac), and then just arbitrarily lop off another 10% for this, and 10% for that, until by the end you're not getting paid for the 1 million records you sold, you're getting paid for maybe 500k of them, if you're very lucky. Then they charge you back for some more (usually bogus) stuff. The whole game is to keep you, the artist, in the hole. It's easy. Oh, the label is sending a limo to pick you up at the airport and take you to the Grammy's! Great! Do I need to tip the driver?

Add into this that their lawyers have seen fit to jump on digital distribution by making your royalty rate 75% (again, if you're lucky) of what it would be if there were a physical medium being sold through a store (and this is in addition to subtracting for “Breakage”, etc.), and the margins for the artist get even lower. It's pathetic, honestly. Even more pathetic is that artists are usually in a big hurry to sign these pieces of shit.

So, when I read things like this, it really makes me wonder. To sum up, Em's old producers sued over the fact that there were so many absurdly non-justifiable, pre-royalty charges added up before they got their cut. They argue, and rightly so in my mind, that since you can't “break” a digital download, and the distribution costs are virtually nil, and that the labels aren't paying for in-store promotional material to market the download, that those charges shouldn't apply to their royalties. They argued that the deals should work more like commercial and movie licensing agreements work. That'd bring their cut up, as producers. It'd also bring down the labels' cut, obviously. The jury found for Universal, unfortunately...

So when I read articles like the one that I posted earlier today, I wonder why music label execs think we're all so stupid. By “we”, I don't just mean artists because there's plenty of empirical evidence that we are in fact, but the entire music listening populace. Why do we want to consume the crap that they sell, ripping off artists in the process, ignoring or suppressing good music along the way?

Time to get back on my musicTech thread...

#music #business

This cannot be allowed. There is a definite whiff of opportunity here...

If not one more good thing happens during Obama's presidency, and I am an eternal optimist, the Data.Gov project sounds like a ball, and a huge step forward pretty much any way that I look at it.

Link.

Here's a band with the resources to do something cooler than they are. Is it just me or is this front page totally overstuffed with info, rendering it almost impossible to glean the useful bits at a glance? Are the links at the top of the page really 2003 looking? Are there an obscene amount of links on the right border that take forever to load?

Or is it just me?

Edit: I count 16 banners of equal size and flashiness (90% of which point to the same merchandise page) on the right margin and 30 or so news items. I'm all about having interesting content on the front page, but this looks like our shoe closet. And we don't wear most of the shoes that we own....

Another edit: I wrote this post the week before the Hampton victory frothing ceremony. They've obviously had a recent injection of motivation capital and have gotten their web game back together a bit.

#theidea

At least these guys get the clean thing. There's a raft of interesting content up there, and all you have to do is sign up on their page to get access to it all. “Inbound marketing” I believe the savvy would call it. Applause, please..

#theidea

So RRE finally signed up on Twitter, right about the same time I succumbed to my curiosity on the same subject. In case you could tell by this blog, I'm completely fascinated by Web stuff like this. I mean, what a stupid concept, right? A micro-blog so that people can talk about what they're doing at that moment. As if I need to know what Scotty Baron had for lunch today! But wait...

The tech media is positively foaming at the mouth over this thing. Every marketing site I go to is praising it, every music business blog is blathering about how to use it, in 10 parts no less. So what is going on over here? I see this journalist over here mentioned that when the plane went down in the Hudson the first place he heard about it was on Twitter. He cruises around to some of the blogs he follows and none of them mentioned it until much later (in journalism time). Okay, so this could be a journalism tool. Outblog the bloggers. But wait...

Part of what I personally find so thrilling about technology like this is the potential that it has to become, at it's furthest extension, a tool for shining a light on the kind of evil that can only take place in the shadows. North Korean gulags, Egyptian or Saudi repression, Israeli actions against the Palistinians, Darfur, Kenya, Afghanistan, China, not to mention whatever the American gov't has been up to over the past hundred years in terms of shady foreign policy wherever.

I firmly believe that world harmony is at hand, and that once everyone has a cell phone and access to Twitter (or something like it), evil will have nowhere left to hide.

Now, this part won't be any news to anyone, but will mainly serve to help organize the thoughts in my brain. First, the old way:

The old way involved the “record industry”. The record industry used to exist because recording was very expensive. It was expensive to record a song, it was expensive to reproduce the recording of the song, and it was really expensive to warehouse, distribute, and sell the recording of that song. Thus a whole industry cropped up to take advantage of the fact that the barrier to entry for your average recording artist, say Ma Carter out of the hills around Bristol VA, was so astronomically high that nobody really thought about releasing their own music. Show up, play my tunes, get paid for them? Okay! This worked great for long enough for the basic oligarchic framework of the major label system to rise to power.

A moment now to reflect. It's extremely popular to bash record labels, and with good reason. Let us now take a moment, however, to reflect on the cultural purpose that they've served...

I take it for granted that America is, on balance, the coolest nation on the face of the earth, in the history of humanity. Citizens from other countries would doubtless dispute this claim, but I would submit to you that even those societies that profess to hate everything America stands for only hate so strongly because they don't enjoy the liberties and luxuries that Americans have long grown accustomed to. Now, imagine if the record business never existed, that there was no such thing as an LP or a CD, and the only way to enjoy music was to go listen to it live. There were no Beatles, except for those of you lucky enough to be in the Cavern Club, no Elvis, unless you went down to the BBQ shack to see him in Memphis, no Chuck Berry, no Led Zeppelin, no Pink Floyd, no Eagles, no Neil Young, no Bob Dylan, no Coldplay, no U2. I know, a lot of these bands are from the UK, but I consider the give and take of the UK and the USA to be part of the competitive exchange that has pushed the limits of musical creativity for the better. And we can safely lump all these bands into the category of Western Music. Now, imagine if Western Music never existed. How would we export our culture abroad? At gunpoint, probably. How would generations of kids be incited to stand up and make change happen? At gunpoint, probably. My point is that exactly at the moment in human events that the USA and the UK became 2 of the dominant political powers in the world (1946 or so), rock and roll made an appearance. It moved legions of Japanese kids just like it did American kids. The cultural service that the major label system provided these kids and us to come later is therefore immeasurable. And the world danced together...

Now, back to the point, to be covered in another blog, because really long blogs are fucking boring...

#music #business #the-idea

When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters everywhere requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to dream of a better way....

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all websites are not created equal, yet they are endowed by their creators with the potential to be entertaining, informative, and even useful in a utilitarian sense. That to secure these ideals, most bands stumble blindly about with no technical idea of what's involved in actually building a modern website, that the layout and information contained in your average band website has been virtually untouched for several years in a field where technology is changing every day. That the potential for truly democratizing the music industry has never been more at hand than it is today. That nobody in the business of selling records is interested in seeing a better system devised. That the only way forward for the record industry is via the ubiquitous distribution system present in every one of your homes. That the only way to achieve such independence is to fight for change, to take up development tools, and to learn what bands and the music business are doing wrong, and to right these wrongs.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that those of us yearning for change learn as much as we can about the technologies available, so that we may make best use of them and not stumble where so many of our brethren have before. This blog shall henceforth detail my quest to overhaul the sorry state of affairs that is the music recording industry, so that it may brighten all of our lives forevermore...

#theidea #music #business