Music-tech entrepreneur Aviv Eyal, who's behind the excellent Livekick concert-tracking site, has a new project: a DJ app for the iPhone and iPod Touch called DJ Mixer Pro. (It was formerly known as DJ Player Pro, but the name has changed to avoid a conflict with another app.)
DJ Mixer Pro lets you manually adjust the BPM on each channel, or sync them automatically with one touch of a button.
The concept is similar to Touch DJ, an Amidio app that I wrote about last month. While the iPhone naturally restricts you to playing one song at a time, these apps function like a virtual DJ booth, letting you play two tracks simultaneously, jump to any point in either track with a touch of your finger, crossfade between them, match beats, adjust tempos, and add various effects.
I was impressed by Touch DJ's technical capabilities, but DJ Mixer Pro is even more extensive. Amateurs like me will love the sync button: as you're playing one track, the sync button will adjust the speed of the second track and place the downbeats in the right place so they're synchronized. You can also adjust beats per minute (BPM), and DJ Mixer can change tempo without changing pitch, so your sped-up tracks don't sound like the Chipmunks. (If you want the Chipmunks, you can turn the pitch correction off.) The loop function is easier to use as well--you can select a specific number of beats in the song, rather than having to start and stop the loop with finger touches. This made it really easy for me to create a couple different loops of the gunshot chorus in MIA's "Paper Planes" (four and eight beats long). You can also do some interesting things bouncing between tracks--I created two separate loops of Nirvana's "All Apologies" and played them over each other. Finally, DJ Mixer offers more indicators about each track, including volume levels and colored bars to match each drumbeat. This video shows you more. Best of all, it's only half the price of Touch DJ--$9.99.
But there's one nagging usability issue: uploading music to the app is complicated. Apple currently does not allow other apps to access the iTunes playback app, and tracks need to be electronically manipulated before you can mix them. This means that users have to upload their music separately into DJ Mixer. This was also the case with Touch DJ, but where that app used a piece of desktop software to accomplish the task, DJ Mixer uses a Web server.
And therein lies the problem. According to Eyal, when DJ Mixer launched in late November (as DJ Player), the company's servers were inundated with users trying to upload songs to pirated versions of the app--he estimates that between 90 percent and 99 percent of the uploads were from users who didn't pay for the app. This created a lot of load on the servers, and hampered legitimate users.
So now, to upload your music to DJ Mixer, first you need to e-mail customer support with a copy of your receipt from the iTunes store or a screenshot showing your purchase history with the DJ Mixer app on it. Then you must go through a Web interface to perform the uploads. The company e-mails you back for each upload as it becomes ready, after which you have to open the app, hit "downloads," and enter your personal numeric code. Finally, you have to wait as the app downloads each song from the Web server and performs the necessary conversion--a process that takes about 15 or 20 seconds per song.
It's a pain, but the app is good enough that it's probably worth going through this process. You'll only have to do it once, and then you'll be set up for some pretty serious DJ'ing.
Star 6 is a fun beat-making iPhone and iPod Touch app from Agile Partners--makers of the incredibly useful Guitar Toolkit and Tab Toolkit for guitarists. First introduced last August, Star 6 offers five families of electronic drum beats in categories like Drum and Bass and Electro. You can also download many more free beats from the Star 6 Web site, or upload your own through your Web browser. (Your device has to be on the same wireless network as the computer you're uploading through.)
The six triangles at the top of the screen let you switch between beats. The six triangles below them let you control various tonal qualities by tilting your iPhone or iPod Touch toward and away from you.
Once you've picked a family of beats, you can switch among six individual beats, control the speed, and add wacked-out effects like delay and reverse by touching various icons on the screen. It also lets you manipulate tonal qualities such as pitch and gate by tilting the device backward and forward--it uses the iPhone's built-in accelerometer. (The "speed" setting controls the playback speed of the individual sample, not the beats per minute, or BPM, of the entire track.) You can create and name sessions to recall later, and all sessions are automatically saved in the state you left them.
It's a lot of fun to play with, and could be useful in certain professional situations: you could plug your device into an amp or a PA and use it as a simple drum machine, or to fill the gaps between songs in a live or DJ gig, or simply as an audio backdrop for a party.
Version 1.1. of the app, which became available last Friday in the iTunes App Store, adds a number of important usability improvements. First and foremost is something called "quantizing," which helps you switch between rhythms directly on the beat. Before, you had to hit the button at the exact right time, which could be pretty hard when playing a rave track at 170 BPM, otherwise you'd get an awkward transition. The BPM controller is now on the main screen, and has a new feature that lets you slide the rate quickly up and down. You can also have the BPM affect the pitch, in case you want your samples to sound like they've been inhaling helium as you increase the speed of the track.
It's currently available for an introductory price of $6.99, but will go up to $9.99 on January 18, 2010. So if you're interested, jump on it now. For what it's worth, I get a lot of iPhone apps to test out, and this is one of the few that I'll be keeping.
Amidio makes some heavy-duty musical apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch; I was particularly impressed with StarGuitar, which gives you a virtual guitar with a bunch of preset rhythms, letting songwriters create quick sketches of ideas when they're nowhere near a guitar.
I created a nice vocal loop from the new Beach House single, then dropped it into Pink Floyd's "Astronomy Domine." It took me about five minutes.
On Tuesday, Apple approved a new Amidio app, called TouchDJ, for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and it's both very impressive from a technical standpoint and a heck of a lot of fun. The iPhone can only play one audio track at a time, but TouchDJ essentially fools it into placing two MP3s side by side for simultaneous, real-time manipulation and playback. It's like a two-track digital DJ setup right on your iPhone.
You get a crossfader to control the balance between the two tracks, plus individual controls for each track's volume, pitch/speed (which aren't independent from one another, unfortunately), equalization (three bands), and effects (the built-in real-time effect sounds like a kind of flanger, and there are several lame samples of a low-pitched robot voice, but you can upload your own). Each track is represented by simple waveform images that use a different color for the bass, which helps you match beats more effectively. A tempobend effect, which lets you quickly bend the speed up or down on either track, also helps you get in sync.
The looping functions were most impressive--you can create a cue and loop mark at any point in either track, then return to the cue with the rewind button, move to the loop mark with the fast forward button, or create an endless loop between the two points. All of this is in real time. If you've got an audio splitter, you can even create a separate cue track for your headphones--for example, to set up a loop in your second track while the first one is playing, without exposing your experimentation to your audience--although this requires some serious processing power, and is recommended only for an iPhone 3GS.
There are a couple caveats.... Read more
If you work in the music business, you probably already know the name Donald Passman. For the uninitiated, his book "All You Need to Know About the Music Business," which was first released in 1991 and comes out in a seventh edition today, is the book on how the music industry works. If you ever wanted to know how major and indie label deals are structured, the different types of royalties that musicians can earn and how they're calculated, what a personal manager does for a band, how much money artists make on tour, where your ticket fees go, or any of countless other nitty-gritty details, this is the book. Music industry people sometimes call it the bible, and they're not joking.
The seventh edition contains numerous updates since the last release in 2006, including the final resolution of the battle over Internet radio royalties, details of how royalties are calculated for iTunes and YouTube, and the latest developments in label deals. I had a chance to talk to Passman on the phone on Tuesday morning about the changes he sees in the music industry and where he thinks it's going.
Q: Since the last edition of the book was published in 2006, what's the biggest change to the industry?
Donald Passman: 360 deals [in which record labels get a cut of the artist's revenue from touring, merchandise, and other sources apart from record sales] are a tectonic shift in the way record deals get done. There was a smattering of them three years ago, but now it's become the norm. Early deals with Madonna and other established artists were really banking deals, where everybody knew the artist's track record and they were making a bet on what the future would be. Deals with new artists are quite different. The labels are saying that they're the only ones really willing to spend money on a new artist's career, and they can no longer make money just in the record business, so they need a cut of this other income.
We're also starting to see some industry patterns in how royalties and payments are calculated for digital music. So far, none of the business models have made a lot of money. Even iTunes doesn't make a huge profit. But part of the problem three years ago was that if you started a streaming music service, you had no idea what you were paying. Now we're starting to see industry patterns.
Do you still think it's worth an artist's time to pay or find funding for a professionally recorded demo in a big studio? Or would you recommend that artists invest that time and money in buying a computer and other home recording gear and learning how to record themselves?
Passman: There's no one-size-fits-all answer. The software that's available now is better than what professional studios used to be like 10 years ago. You can create an extraordinarily good demo in your house. The key is to create a demo that sounds like a hit so they don't have to use their imagination to hear it. People will tell you they can hear a diamond in the rough; they can't.
Do you think the rise of do-it-yourself online services like CDBaby, Tunecore, and Sonicbids will lead to a new thriving "middle class" of musicians--folks that aren't signed to a label, but spend most of their time recording and touring and make a decent living doing it?
Passman: It's a reality today. If you're a niche-type artist and you don't mind staying in your niche, you can make a perfectly good middle-class living that way. If you're more mainstream, you can use those techniques to build buzz and attract a label. Nobody's yet had a major career without a label behind them. I'm certain that's going to change, but for bands that want to be truly international and mainstream, they still need a label.
In your book, you mention that you favor unlimited music-streaming--the "celestial jukebox"--as the most likely future business model to succeed. Do you think ad-supported free services (like Imeem or Grooveshark) will ever be viable?
Passman: I'm skeptical that ad-supported music services will work in a major way. People have had a hard time monetizing music to advertisers because the music is so diverse. Advertisers don't know what type of music they're going to be associated with, so it's hard for these services to get high enough CPMs [impression-based advertising rates]. YouTube's had the same problem: you don't know what kind of video's going to pop up next to your advertisement. Free services will probably be a model, but I don't think they'll be the model.
Why do you think subscription-based services (such as Rhapsody) haven't really taken off?
Passman: They're not convenient enough, they're not truly cross-platform. For me, the ultimate would be anytime-anywhere access to any music for one subscription. On my computer, in my car, on a connected device, whether it's an iPod or something else, on an airplane when I don't have an Internet connection. Not just tied to one or two devices. I'm personally a believer in subscription services. People don't think twice about paying for cable, and when you stop paying it goes away. But with music, there's a kneejerk reaction because we're used to owning it.
We hear a lot of doom and gloom about the death of the music industry. Are you still optimistic?
Passman: I'm optimistic in the longer term. Not for the next few years. I think it'll probably get a little worse, and then we'll bump along the bottom for a while. I don't think we've hit bottom, and that's because I see the trends that are happening now. CD sales are declining and will eventually disappear, and retailers are making it happen. They're cutting back the floor space they devote to CDs, which means less CD sales, which makes them cut back more.
But the digital opportunity is huge. We can sell music to people who've never gone into a record store, people who never listen to music because they stopped listening to the radio at a certain age will now have access. Unfortunately, we're not there, technically or legally. The more pain the industry feels, the easier the legal side gets. The better the technology gets, the closer we get to delivering an experience people want.
Wolfgang's Vault, which offers high-quality digital recordings of rock concerts, has been trickling out updates since I wrote about its new iPhone app last month. On Tuesday, the site will begin to offer a new optional membership model where $48 a year gets you $50 worth of merchandise, plus discounted downloads and other benefits.
Wolfgang's Vault offers free streams, and downloads that cost up to $12, of professionally recorded concerts, in various formats up to and including lossless FLAC files. The Vault got its start by buying the recorded archives from San Francisco concert promotion company Bill Graham Presents, and added to that with the King Biscuit Flower Hour, a live concert radio show popular in the 1970s and '80s. That means the vault is pretty heavy on music from the classic rock era. However, the same company also owns Daytrotter, which invites touring bands into a studio in Illinois to record a session, which adds nearly 800 sessions from modern, mostly independent acts to the archive.
Starting last week, the company began releasing hundreds of new recordings under a promotion called Cracking the Vault. It expects to add more than 1,000 new concerts over the next three months, including 150 shows by the Grateful Dead that have never been officially released. (Although, knowing the Dead, bootlegs probably exist.)
The new membership model allows true fans of the site to show their colors and become WVIPs. It's strictly optional--this isn't a new subscription service, but more of a fan club. An annual fee of $48 nets you $50 in merchandise (including posters, T-shirts, and other memorabilia) from the Vault Store, plus 10 percent off on all merchandise (you can take the 10 percent before you reach $50), 30 percent off on all downloads, unlimited streaming access from the iPhone app (non-members are limited to 10 hours a month), special offers, and exclusive download packages. Perhaps most interesting: if you're ever in San Francisco, you can arrange a tour of Wolfgang's Vault headquarters, which the company claims contains the world's largest collection of concert memorabilia.
Whenever the band Phish plays on Halloween, they pretend to be another famous rock band and do an entire album by that band. This year, they did one of my all-time favorite records, "Exile on Main Street" by the Rolling Stones. It's a double album, 18 songs worth of blues boogie, and I was very curious to hear whether they pulled it off.
Friday morning, a relative who knows of my fixation with that record sent me a link to the show, but the link--as is so often the case--wasn't working. Of course I could have purchased the entire set for 99 cents a song from the LivePhish.com site, but the samples on that site are only 30 seconds long, and I wanted to try it out before committing with a credit card. So I did a little hunting on my own. Lala didn't have it. Imeem didn't have it. I couldn't find it on a Google search.
I used Grooveshark's playlist feature to arrange the songs from Phish's cover of "Exile" in order.
So I turned to old reliable Grooveshark. Sure enough, a search on "Phish Ventilator Blues" (one of the song names from "Exile") turned up a hit. From that result, I saw that the name in the "Album" column included the date, 2009/10/31. I ran another search, "Phish 2009/10/31" and there it was, the entire show. I took all the songs from "Exile" and arranged them in order on my playlist, and soon I was enjoying the band's faithfulness to the original recording, down to the horn parts and backup gospel singers, mixed with some very extended jam sections. The bit between "Ventilator Blues" and "Just Want to See His Face" is miraculous.
One of my complaints about Phish is that they often sound too perfect and clean, especially the singing. But in this particular case, it was great because Phish obviously studied the lyrics very carefully, and I could finally understand whole lyrical sections ("there's fever in the forecast now") that I've never been able to figure out despite hundreds of listens. (Mick mumbles, and he's buried pretty deeply in the mix on the original.)
I have no idea whether the recording was posted with the permission of the band. Probably not. But the beauty of Grooveshark is that users post the content themselves, in a similar fashion to YouTube, so you're not reliant on content owners.
Correction 2:22 p.m. PDT, Nov. 13: This post mischaracterized how Grooveshark gets content. All content on Grooveshark is uploaded by users. Grooveshark says it complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and pays appropriate royalties for live and other types of recordings.
Tuesday's post on using Craigslist to buy secondhand concert tickets drew a response from a company called FanSnap, which uses live feeds to aggregate ticket listings from online marketplaces and broker sites (such as StubHub and TicketNetwork) and eBay auctions.
FanSnap would argue Craigslist is fine for price-sensitive fans who don't need to go to a particular show and who are willing to meet and negotiate with other individuals, pay cash where necessary, and run the risk of buying a fake ticket. (Although the only time I've ever seen a fake concert ticket was in 1989 on the streets of Manhattan, when I bought a very realistic counterfeit to a Jane's Addiction show at the Ritz.)
Fans who want a slightly more convenient buying experience might go with eBay, where they can use PayPal and rely on seller ratings, while fans who absolutely need a guaranteed ticket can go with a marketplace like StubHub, which offers a toll-free customer service line, money-back guarantee, and other benefits. FanSnap operates on an affiliate-oriented revenue model, so it gets a commission from sites on which sales are made.
FanSnap shows you where tickets are located in a seating chart of the venue.
I ran a search on FanSnap for Pixies tickets, and it found more than 70 listings for the sold-out show this Friday, compared with about 30 listings on Craigslist. (The Craigslist screenshot in Tuesday's post showed only listings that had been added on that day.) Prices were similar to Craigslist--lower in a few cases--and the site has some great design touches, like a seating chart of the venue that maps tickets to particular locations. Craigslist, of course, is purposely and resolutely lo-fi. I still think there's something refreshing about dealing with a real fan, face to face, but I can see reasons why others wouldn't want to.
Correction at 8:00 a.m. PDT, Nov. 12: This post mischaracterized how FanSnap aggregates ticket listings. The site uses live feeds from its sources, which allows ticket listings to be updated immediately as prices change.
Ticket scalping has been a hot topic in the music industry for years, causing a lot of uproar and complaints among music fans.
The sad fact of the matter is that lots of parties in the music industry try to sell secondhand tickets for a markup. Ticketmaster owns a premium resale service called TicketsNow. It also owns a resale exchange, TicketExchange, which lets any individual (including scalpers) buy or sell a ticket. Even artists and managers frequently take their allotments and sell them on broker sites for a markup, as The Wall Street Journal has reported.
Worst of all is the fan club scam, where fans pay for the right to get in line for presale tickets--but joining the club doesn't necessarily get you a ticket before the scalpers have snapped them all up, as Keith Urban fans in Nashville recently discovered.
I can't get too angry, though. I haven't bought a ticket from a scalper in years, and I've never gone through a ticket broker. I get good seats well after they go on sale and can usually get into sold-out shows. And they almost never cost me more than the original retail price.
It's not magic: it's Craigslist. I wait until a few days before the show, then run a search for the band I want to see. Inevitably, I find a few people who bought a ticket then had an irresolvable conflict. These are normal people--not scalpers, just fans like you and me--and they almost always settle for what they paid, or even less. If I'm not happy with the price, I move on--there always seem to be more sellers, especially the on day of the show.
You can't get tickets to this Friday's Pixies show through the official site for the venue, STG Presents, but there are plenty of tickets at fair prices on Craigslist.
This month alone, I've scored floor seats to Steely Dan well after they were gone from Ticketmaster's site, and a pit ticket to Friday's Pixies show, which is entirely sold out. I've had such good luck that I'm considering abandoning Ticketmaster and other ticket sellers completely. The seats are better, they're the same price or cheaper, and I'm usually helping a fellow fan out of a jam.
There are ticket brokers and other professionals gumming up the ads on Craigslist, but you can scope them out pretty quickly--they often list ticket prices as $1 (because they're actually selling lots of tickets at different prices) or have some other giveaway like an overly generic headline ("Great seats") or obviously inflated prices. Regular fans tend to list the exact seat number in the ad and a price that's pretty close to what they paid.
There will always be some demand for professional ticket brokers; people who want to impress an important business client with great seats don't want to wait until the last minute and risk striking out. And for some shows, fans would rather sacrifice a body part than sell their tickets--I'm thinking of the early shows on the 2007 reunion tour by The Police, for instance. But for many shows, Craigslist is a far better deal than the professional sites. Which makes me wonder how long they'll last.
Record label EMI this week announced that it will begin selling on-the-spot recordings of concerts.
The name of the initiative, Abbey Road Live, is a bit misleading--it doesn't have anything to do with the Beatles album or the recording studio after which it was named.
Rather, EMI is using its Abbey Road brand to indicate that these aren't low-quality bootlegs but professional multitrack recordings, mixed and mastered on the spot, and sold on CDs, DVDs, or flash drives to fans at the venue. EMI also said on Wednesday that it plans to make the recordings available as streams or downloads, so fans can access them from home.
Instant concert recording isn't new: EMI sub-label Mute Records has had a similar program in place since 2004--according to the press release, 10 percent of fans at a recent Blur concert downloaded the show afterward--and Willie Nelson has been selling flash drives with on-the-spot concert recordings for several years.
But having a large record label like EMI on board legitimizes the practice. It's a no-brainer way for live acts to earn some extra cash--and great for fans as well. I can think of many concerts I've attended, after which I would gladly have paid another $20 for a recording. This should become standard operating practice in the next couple of years.
In 2008, the Council for Research Excellence, a research group funded primarily by Nielsen and staffed by researchers from various media and advertising organizations, studied the media consumption habits of U.S. adults. Researchers followed about 300 people around for two days, in the spring and the fall, using a handheld device to track every single 10-second interval of media that they consumed. The study was mainly focused on video, with the unsurprising result that we watch a lot of TV (more than five hours a day on average).
On Tuesday, the group released a follow-up analysis focused exclusively on audio. The results are somewhat surprising for those of us who have been steeped in digital music for the last decade: the most popular form of media for audio is good old broadcast radio.
In fact, it's not even close. About 77 percent of U.S. adults listen to some broadcast radio on any given day--much more than listen to a CD or tape (37 percent). Satellite radio came in third with 15 percent. And the vaunted digital music revolution? About 12 percent of users listen to portable MP3 players on any given day, about 10 percent listen to digital media files stored on a computer, and only about 9 percent listen to streamed audio (including online radio). The study has tons of other data about age groups and time spent listening to each form of audio and so on, but an important point is that even digital music consumers still listen to the radio: nearly 82 percent of people who listen to MP3 players on a given day also listened to the radio. (This 38-page PDF has all the details.)
Now, the caveats. The study had a small sample size--300 people in only five cities. It didn't try to adjust for demographic differences between the sample audience and the population at large. And it didn't measure the type of audio content being consumed. So while we know that nearly 80 percent of U.S. adults listen to the radio, it's harder to know how many are listening to music. My suspicion is that people with MP3 players are turning to radio primarily for news and sports and other talk formats, and sticking primarily with their own collections for music.
