Wired's Epicenter blog has the skinny on why MySpace Music failed to create any big waves when it launched. A lot of mistakes were made, including an unclear Web address and lack of any independent music. But I think it boils down to something fairly simple: the designers of the service were focused on the wrong audience. MySpace envisioned the site as an online showcase for major acts on major labels. The labels, anxious for any help navigating the file-trading era, were excited. But nobody bothered to consider why users visit MySpace, and what they might want from a music service on the site. Consequently, playlists were hard to create and share. There was only a superficial connection between pre-existing artists' pages and the new Music pages. Instead of a community of music fans, MySpace Music looked suspiciously like a bunch of billboards.
Listen to the title track to hear what Neil thinks of digital downloads...and bloggers.
(Credit: Neil Young via MySpace Music)MySpace Music has apparently moved to fix a lot of these problems, and when I checked the site today for the new Neil Young album "Fork in the Road"--available there as an exclusive until April 7--I found it to be fine for the task at hand. Then again, why couldn't Neil have posted these songs on his own Web site? If it weren't an exclusive, I'm not sure I'd think to check MySpace first, or at all, to hear these songs.
I think a similar problem hampered Microsoft's September 2006 launch of the first Zune player. Its most interesting differentiating factor from the market-leading iPod was its built in Wi-Fi connection. But the only thing users could do with it was transfer songs to one another, and those songs could only be played three times or for three days before they expired. In other words, Microsoft gave up too much control over its one differentiating feature to content owners. Better to go back to the drawing board and launch stronger with things like Wi-Fi connectivity to the Marketplace than to draw the ire of customers and scorn of reviewers and end up stuck with a tainted brand for the next few years. (The latest Zune software and service are pretty cool, but nobody knows it--just check out the comments every time I post about Zune.)
Like I told an entrepreneur I met at South by Southwest who was asking me for guidelines for the next big music start-up: concentrate on helping music listeners solve a problem, or do something they couldn't do before. Frame your company around listeners, not artists, not venues, not managers, not promoters, not labels. Listeners.
iPod: lets you carry thousands of songs with you. iTunes: makes it easy to get songs from CDs onto your computer and iPod. Pandora: gives you the "surprise" element of radio, but tuned more to your taste. Shazam: figures out what song's playing right now. Yes, it's possible to build a viable business catering to artists, particularly the emerging "middle class" who would be happy to to sell tens of thousands instead of tens of millions of albums. But there are a lot more listeners than artists, and they're willing to spend money--or at least look at advertisements--if you help them do something they couldn't do before.
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I'm sure it's just a lucky coincidence, but one day after the brilliantly profane George Carlin passed away, Slate published an article on profane band names.
I haven't heard any of these bands--I tend to avoid bands that appear to have put too much time into their names, thinking that they're trying to cover up bad music--but Psychedelic Horse**** intrigues me, especially since I've seen so many bands whose music fits that description perfectly. (Note: I have no idea what CNET's policy on swear words is, but I don't want to create extra work for the copy editors in case I guess wrong, so the asterisks are mine.)
This brings to mind a problem I've had with a particular Neil Young song, the third track on his 1990 album Ragged Glory, which also appears on the live record Weld. On the back of both albums, the title appears as "F*!#in' Up." That's also the official title in the CDDB (formerly Gracenote) database that lets programs such as iTunes automatically populate fields with song information when you rip a CD.
I imagine Neil or his record company was trying to prevent underage listeners from stumbling across this word on the CD when flipping through the Neil Young section in record stores. But this creates a problem in the digital era: if you really want to hear that song, and you try to search by title, you have to remember the precise sequence of characters used to replace the letters--if you search on "F***in' Up" or use the real word, you'll get no results. The solution, of course, is to go into iTunes and change the file information so the real word is included.
The lesson: if you're going to use profanity in a band or song name, do it proudly.
Having spent some time in recording studios, I was aware that automatic pitch-correction software exists and is used by nearly every singer to smooth out the occasional off note. (Neko Case claims she doesn't use it, but she's the rare exception.) But I don't sing, so haven't spent a lot of time with it myself.
When pushed to the limit, pitch-correction software can sound like a vocoder, such as this device built in the 70s by German band Kraftwerk.
(Credit: Public domain via Wikipedia)So I was fascinated to hear New Yorker music editor Sasha Frere-Jones, who wrote about pitch-correction this week, give an audio demonstration of Antares' AutoTune software in the magazine's Out Loud podcast. He sings a version of Kelly Clarkson's inescapable "Since You've Been Gone," sounding a bit like Lou Reed until he gets to the chorus, which he actually comes close to hitting. (Try it. It's hard.) He and the audio engineer pitch-correct a few off notes and it's almost undetectable.
Then they go extreme with the effect, creating the "warbling" effect that is best known from Cher's "Believe." In the podcast, they cover the misconception--which I shared--that "Believe" was recorded with a different device called a vocoder, which is enjoying a small resurgence among some electronic bands and was used to great effect by Neil Young on his 1982 album Trans. It's hard to tell the difference, but vocoders can be used for much more extremely distorted sounds--demonic robots on a rampage--while pitch-correction always sounds musical, if a little bit artificial.
A quick recap of Neil Young's recent announcement at the Sun JavaOne conference, as reported by CNET's Dan Farber. The long-awaited (by fans) Neil Young Archive project is coming out this year. It'll be on Blu-ray, which is the first digital format to satisfy Mr. Young's needs (with a regular DVD, you couldn't watch high-resolution video and listen to music at the same time). He recommends buying a Sony PS3 as a Blu-ray player because the PS3 has an Internet connection and a fat hard drive, and he wants to update the content over time. And he hates the sound of MP3s. (No surprise from the man who's been speaking out against the CD from the time it was introduced.)
At recent shows, Neil Young's been dusting off "The Sultan" as a final encore, introduced by this gentleman banging a gong.
Now, there's a new promotional video on YouTube, which apparently replaces the old one from his Archives Web site. The compilation looks exhaustive, the optional update feature is shown, and his sense of humor is apparently intact judging from his decision to include the very Spinal Tap video of him singing in a buckskin jacket with sideburns.
Best of all is the backing music: Neil Young's first single, a surf-guitar instrumental called "The Sultan" from his band The Squires.
Jello Biafra likes short songs, but there's an undeniable pleasure in long songs. "Hey Jude" (7:11) was groundbreaking at the time, especially for a 45rpm single, but it's really a typical three-minute Beatles song with a four-minute outro. To me, the first true rock epic was Pink Floyd's 1971 opus "Echoes" (23:25). Unlike their 1970 record-breaker, "Atom Heart Mother" (23:44), which was four instrumental sections stitched together into a single track, "Echoes" was a real unified song with a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure--along with a really long instrumental mid-section including several minutes of whale sounds. Like all great long songs, the individual parts seem relevant and necessary to the whole, although the funk jam/guitar solo that precedes the whale sounds is a bit overdone and could be used as a bathroom break.
Rick Wakeman eat your heart out: Neil Young's latest studio album has two tracks that top 14 minutes.
Instrumental "post rock" bands like Tortoise, Sigur Ros, and Godspeed You Black Emperor specialize in 10-minute-plus epics, and Fantomas purposely tracked their 2004 album Delirium Cordia as a single 74-minute track, although it consists almost entirely of broken fragmented bits of music (as all Fantomas albums do), plus a 15-minute outro of near-silence.
I picked up Neil Young's latest studio CD, Chrome Dreams II, for a bargain price a couple weeks ago in New York, and finally sat down to give it a straight through attentive listen last night. It's a mixed bag--I liked it a lot better than Pitchfork did, but I'm a big fan of his mid-'70s and early-'90s stuff, which this resembles. But the reason I bought it was the long songs. Neil's never been afraid of stretching a song out to six, seven, even ten minutes, but this one has two all-time stemwinders on it: "No Hidden Path" at 14:26 and "Ordinary People," which clocks in at a Neil-record 18:12. Neither is as strong as his last epic, 1994's "Change Your Mind" (14:39)--the long bent guitar note in the middle of that song is the pivotal point where the entire album (the excellent Sleeps with Angels) changes. But both of the new epics have a nice effect--they're slow and repetitive enough to have a hypnotic or meditative effect, but varying enough to capture your continuing attention. In this random-shuffle quick-twitch short-attention-span world, it's nice to sit in one place and just listen to somebody perform variations on the same theme for fifteen or twenty minutes.
Unfortunately, the music industry is inevitably moving back to a singles-driven business model, enabled by iTunes and other download services, which allow users to buy only the songs they know they like. I'm as guilty as any fan--whenever a long song comes up on random shuffle, I almost always skip to the next track. Long songs just don't fit into the shuffle paradigm--I want to be surprised, to have my mood shifted rapidly between heavy metal and 70's R&B, not sit down and listen to an artistic statement from start to finish. (I collect records for that.)
In this world, I wonder how many artists will feel encouraged to stretch a song beyond the typical three-to-five minutes that most listeners will tolerate in the middle of a playlist. It's sad, but apart from live jams, the long rock epic is probably as dated as a wanking guitar solo and paisley. Of course, there's always classical music.
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