It was late summer 1992 and the Lollapalooza tour was in town for three nights at Irvine Meadows. I'd had enough depravity for one day and didn't want to see how Saturday Night Fever In Hell ended, so I went to my room to go to bed. My flight back to New York was early, and I was hoping to get about four hours of air-conditioned sleep. But there was a bad dream still to come.
If you're not creating great content and engaging with your fans consistently, no analytics tool, no matter how amazing it is, will advance your career. Period. The key to forming and nurturing fan relationships is NOT data - it's YOU. Your music. Your thoughts. Your humanity. Put your efforts into these areas and people will transact with you.
I tried to create a sonic travelogue with this playlist that takes the listener on a journey. All of the music on this playlist was released prior to 1984, so listen and bathe in the analogue glory of it all. There really is a warmth and fatness to the sounds of all these tracks - even the ones that are trying to sound as thin as possible!
To work in the digital music business is to be in an ongoing Rashomon Effect. For over 20 years now, artists, labels and the music tech industry have been stumbling along, seeing things very differently, all sides believing our own truths. So I’m going to share a few thoughts with you today, fully understanding that these are only my truths.
Why? Why did the labels “bury” so many digital music startups? Perhaps it is because most of these startups did either not know or not care about how the music business worked, and were more interested in a big IPO and payday for themselves and their investors than building sustainable businesses.
The unflattering name "Krautrock" acted as a catch-all for progressive German music of the late 60's through the early 80's, ignoring the fact that bands in this genre had very different sounds and intents (how anyone could lump Harmonia and Kraftwerk together is beyond me!) To illustrate the point, I've compiled a pastoral view of Krautrock in this Spotify playlist.
We are cursed captains, adrift in the vast sea of digital distraction. Our sails are full with windy possibilities, blowing us about while we struggle at the rudder. Peering through our spyglass, we seek a place of final landing, an equitable music economy. But these hopes remain at a constant distance, ever out of reach.
This backdrop of 60's nostalgia set the stage for my first experience with LSD. I was looking for the inner universe, chasing the weird. Little did I know, but reality had an ironic twist in store for me.
I've put together some very basic Eurorack Tips For Beginners below which hopefully are useful to neophytes. A willingness to self-educate is a requirement for any eurorack user; the process never stops as new modules are always being introduced. Don't be intimidated if you feel overwhelmed - we all do!
With the ongoing advances in artificial intelligence, recommendation engines and "big data", are human beings of less value than machines in the curation of content on music streaming services?
In a recent BBC New Editorial about intelligent machines, Google Alphabet Eric Schmidt stooped to comment about digital music services. My dystopian nightmare is not one where androids dream of electric sheep, it's one where people like Eric Schmidt create a machine to tell me what music I will listen to.
Recently my friend Cory Llewellyn and I were catching up about our various artist projects when he said something that really stuck with me: "Email Is The New Vinyl."
Moderating fan posts on an artist or celebrity Facebook page sometimes feels like being in a downtown bus station; it can be sleazy and rank with scammers and crazy people. But you've got to be there to get somewhere desirable.
I am a grown up geek. I was unfit, but I lived. I am grateful that at such an early age, I heard Devo’s “Wiggly World” and realized that things are never straight up and down.
Time spent in the world of modular synthesis will upgrade your operating system. The voltage and vibrations you send traveling over the rainbow of patch cables, those currents stay with you, always. I have learned to speak a new language. The machine taught it to me.
There has already been plenty of discussion online about the pricing, about the presenters, about Drake's vintage Apple jacket - but what interested me most were the effect Apple's entry into streaming music would have on the overall market, and whether their efforts to bring a human element into music programming would be effective. Here are some thoughts on both.
I had the pleasure of being a guest on Kyle Bylin'sMusic Business Podcast, and we discussed the current craving for "exclusive content" by streaming services like Apple (Beats Music), Tidal and Spotify in this segment "Do Music Exclusives Matter?" We get into why exclusives are so appealing to these services, and a bit of history about how they've worked in practice with the labels.
It would be great if Spotify's new features hailed the beginning of a new trend in streaming music, where the listening experience has increased value and meaning, and creativity is where the competition is, not the price point.
