Archive for October, 2008
Crystal Castles
Back in March I was on the West Coast. One day I went to Amoeba and bought a bunch of new albums. I’d been hearing about Crystal Castles through the music blog community. The background is mildly interesting. You can read about them here.
It’s 8-bit “chip music” with the good tunes being dependent on glitchy-propulsive rhythms and insidiously melodic keyboard lines that float through the glassy atmosphere like monorails through some futuristic city. Shiny. Metallic. Heartbreaking. All of that. You know, dance music. Dance music for the modern age. 7.8 is how good.
It was sort of a strange juxtaposition to then have the Crystal Castles album be the soundtrack for a trip up north to the country with E. Through the redwoods, over the hills and mountains of northern California. Through the pass you catch a glimpse of the great blue Pacific. Immense and imposing. Remember those old stories of Ansel Adams trudging up the hills of Yosemite and catching a sliver of the moon over the rocks? Something like that.
Over the course of the next few days, we listened to those beautiful monorail beats and melodies as we cruised back and forth across the valley from the Russian River Valley to St. Helena and caught a nice rich jammy buzz. The sun rose up high and baked us from the high altitude. We sat on patios and verandas and pretended to be of a higher society, etc, knowing smiles on our faces.
We stopped at the market and got some of that good cheese and that good salami and the whole time Crystal Castles were there and there’s something about a great sunny day with the good beats and the good feeling in the sun. Again, I’ll say “etc.” and we’ll all nod knowingly.
For example, and furthermore, listen to this tune, Vanished, and consider going for a drive in the country.
Gladwell on late bloomers
One of the more influential and thought provoking things I’ve read in awhile came out of the New Yorker this week. Malcolm Gladwell writes about how our society seems to inextricably link genius with precocity. He then goes into an exploration of the reality that there is no real youth-weighting to genius when it comes to the arts, comparing Ben Fountain to Jonathan Safran Foer and Cezanne to Picasso.
Given that I didn’t formally complete the “writing” of a song until my late 20′s and only recently have hit my groove in my early 30′s I, for obvious self-serving reasons, found the article exhilirating and inspiring. Here’s a relevant quote:
Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.
I have a lot of thoughts about this idea and, again, most of them will tend towards the transparently self-serving. Regardless, take a read.
50 true fans
Kevin Kelly wrote a groundbreaking post saying that you need 1,000 true fans to make a living if you’re an artist. He rightfully points out that the long tail is a dismal and bleak place where nobody comforts you and the only people enjoying themselves are the aggregators like Netflix, Google, CD Baby, etc.
I think about that a lot. And realize how long, how very long, it may take to get there.
Kevin defines a true fan as someone willing to buy anything you create or produce. Willing to go to any show. Willing to click on any link.
Jesus christ that’s a tough order. I’ll take 50 true fans at this point. I guess I’m small potatoes. It’s true. Small little new potatoes drenched in butter. You can eat a lot of me. But that’s neither hither nor yon.
Based on the expressions of interest I’m able to measure and evaluate it’s going to take a few years or a great Pitchfork review before I’m anywhere close to the 1,000 true fan measure.
Take the monthly emails I send out. They’re pretty cool. About 20% of the people I send them out to, open them. That’s just open them. From there, about 20% of those people click on anything and/or listen to the free song I’m depositing in their mailbox. Say 20% of those are sufficiently interested to legitimately be called “true fans”. Say they actually care. That means to get to get 1,000 true fans, essentially, you need a mailing list of 125,000 people, based on current attention spans of people that are on my mailing list now. Without revealing too much personal information, I’m sure you won’t be surprised that my mailing list isn’t anywhere close to that big.
Of course, if you increase conversion rates on the initial batch of people, you don’t need as many. Meaning if the people you’re emailing are actually fans. But the relationship of 125,000 to 1,000 is useful as a measurement of energy output and intensity of effort, if nothing else.
To expend the energy required to reach out and touch 125,000 mildly interested people is an effort and a feat that takes many many years. My guess is anywhere from 10-15 unless you get lucky.
So the bottom line is that if you want to make money making art best get a day job and buckle up for a long long ride. It’s going to take awhile.
iTunes didn’t kill the album, we did
Guy Garvey, lead singer of Elbow and a talented dude, recently was quoted saying that “iTunes killed the album.” How quickly we become our parents, eh? Young people become old and we’re left talking about the good old days, lecturing the little ones and receiving blank glassy stares in return.
We’re so goddamned sentimental.
iTunes did not kill the album. And neither did Napster. To ascribe the demise of the album to a software platform, to the diabolical machinations of a young Shawn Fanning, is simply naivete.
Here’s the reality: We killed the album. Humans. iTunes is not the originator of the demise of the album but merely the natural expression of human interest. To think otherwise is to an anti-humanist stance and, as such, essentially immoral. And backwards looking. And boring.
People, in general, don’t want the album. People want to digest songs. In fact, people may actually only want the first 60 seconds of a song. We may be moving towards a redefinition of the concept of the song. The simplest little bite that we can consume a quick hit of melody.
For now, though, we’re stuck with songs. And people are going to get them where they want them. Music fans and audiophiles love the album. We’re collectors. We’re sentimental. We love the mythology. But most people aren’t like that and most people want what they want and shouldn’t have to feel guilty about it.
The evolution of digital technology, in most ways that count, is not some the diabolical aim of a cadre of sinister-minded anarchists sitting in a basement somewhere plotting the destruction of long-form artistic expression. It’s much more banal than that. It’s lots of people tinkering away, doing what they can to get along, hearing a snippet of something and going to the Web to put it somewhere they can consume it quickly and easily. Video. Audio. Whatever.
Music is the most easily digitally commodified art-form and with the advancement of digitalism and the internet we were inevitably going to see a dissolution of totalitarian distribution formats that imposed their vision on the listener without a care or concern for the interests of the audience.
Let’s stop with the lecturing. If you want to record an album, go for it. If you want to record a series of 45 second blasts of sugary melody, go for it. If you want to record a 2 hour opus of tones inspired by the Fibonacci sequence. Well, do that too. But nobody owes you anything. And it’s not Steve Jobs fault. The people that like that sort of thing will find you. And the rest. Well, just ask Guy Garvey.
Deflationary pressure
Markets are falling. The world is heading for a global recession. And, meanwhile, the professional music industry has continued to erode and distingrate towards a new model that is about the empowerment of hobbyists and non-professionals but the weakening of the established hiearchy.
So far, I’ve seen a few single-unit operators (so to speak) recognizing the impact of these pressures but I still hear from friends about the high prices that top notch engineers and producers are charging for their time.
Just to be totally honest: those days are numbered too. If you’re a big name producer and used to charging something like $2-$3K a day for recording and engineering work, my sense is that your pricing power is eroding and that you might have to consider lowering those prices. I’ve already heard of one friend that dropped such a producer to record in the Middle West and it sounded like a big piece of the dispute was about price.
Companies that still have some money are film and TV. So composers have more pricing power in this day and age than indie producers or indie studios.
Peep the new image
Take a look at the promo for the show that’s in the left-hand column of the site today. I like the way it looks. I made it. But still. It’s nice.
