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Electronic Explorations Show 87 Mike Paradinas – Planet Mu
An hour long mix by Planet Mu label boss to celebrate the 2nd anniversary of EE – nuff said!
Audiophyla – life in the oxbow
Audiophyla continues to craft intricate sultry moodscapes on this new 6-track album. Innovative, measured compositions further Audiophyla’s excursion into serene alien realms.
Listen and download free for a limited time:
http://audiophyla.bandcamp.com/
What is DUB? What is Nonplace?
Burnt Friedman: Dub is a method! It allows me to obtain constantly different results on the basis of the same material. The more pronounced the level of improvisation during the mix, the more the raw material, the original, is forced into the background and sometimes even maltreated to the point of being unrecognizable. The procedure allows me to highlight certain musical features of a song while wholly ignoring other ingredients – most likely components such as vocals or instrumental solos. The resultant numbers (tracks) come closer to my own perspective: they´re de-cored, to put it figuratively, no longer have a centre. From this point of view neither Dub nor Jazz are styles. They are tags made up to avoid the artist´s name, to give them a commonplace, opposed to a Nonplace! Yet, many many musicians play Jazz and Dub as if it was a style.
Trent Reznor and Another Way of Thinking About Pay-What-You-Want
If there’s an equivalent in the music tech world to the Oprah Book Club Seal of Magnificence, it would have to be an endorsement from Trent Reznor. Woop:
“Bandcamp: This looks excellent to me. I have not used it but it appears to be great. This would cover your digital distribution of files and the collecting / amassing of your database.” link
But a little later in the post, he says:
“Pay-what-you-want model: I hate this concept…Asking people what they think music is worth devalues music…This is your art! This is your life! It has a value and you the artist are not putting that power in the hands of the audience – doing so creates a dangerous perception issue…Don’t be misled by Radiohead’s In Rainbows stunt. That works one time for one band once – and you are not Radiohead.”
When Trent says “pay-what-you-want” here, I believe what he’s more specifically referring to is “pay-what-you-want where the minimum is zero.” Whether such a model devalues music is an interesting question, but the point we want to make is that there’s another form of pay-what-you-want, and it does more or less the exact opposite of devaluing music.
On Bandcamp, you can set up your tunes to be pay-what-you-want, but with a minimum price of your choosing. This model allows the artist to set the price they believe represents the fair value of their work, and it gives fans who feel the value is even higher the opportunity to say so. And it completely works. For one of the best-selling albums on Bandcamp, nearly half (47%) of fans have paidmore than its minimum price, raising the average price paid to nearly 1.5 times the minimum. For one track by another artist, a fan paid six hundred dollars when the minimum price was just $1 (thanks mom!).
So why does this approach work so well? Our guess is that whereas a set price does nothing to engage a fan, pay-what-you-want-with-a-non-zero-minimum invites fans to ask themselves a question. And that question goes something like “OK, given what he put into it, Trent has decided that this is worth at least $8, but is it worth even more than that to me?” On paper, you might think this would turn some off, but for plenty of people, the answer to the question turns out to be a resounding “Yes.”
The actual point of this post is to say HOLY CRAP TRENT REZNOR THINKS BANDCAMP LOOKS EXCELLENT. Thank you.
Local Artists on Band Camp:
Surgeon – Shanghai May 09
Void nights are at the centre of the largely ex-pat Shanghai techno scene. There were techno fans from all over the world at The Shelter that night, including a couple of enthusiastic Brummies (who I played The House Of God track for)
Tracklist:
(Read the full article)
Comments(1)The Best Futurism Money Can’t Buy: Kodwo Eshun and Steve Goodman (aka Kode 9)
Listen here: http://backyardradio.de/blog/?p=87
Audio Poverty guests Kodwo Eshun and Steve Goodman unravel the complicated global knots of post-economic music and slum productions on Hausradio. The two discuss micro-economies, the conditions of production in the periphery and the dreams of another way of doing things. They tear apart the notions that the existential and the economic are now converged or that money and the psyche are fused into one. They question the inherent sharability of music and a communism of one. The discussion follows on their talk at Audio Poverty (listen here). The discussion goes on to talk about different models of production, pious Gurus and a sustained crisis.Kodwo Eshun is a lecturer, writer and filmmaker. He is a founder of The Otolith Group. Steve Goodman/Aka Kode9 teaches media and sonic culture. He owns the hyperdub record label. Both are based in London.