Digital Noise: Music and Tech

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.

JamBase, one of the first and certainly most famous online concert-listing services, released its free iPhone app last October. It was a simple affair: you entered your ZIP code and the app returned a list of live music shows in your area over the next few days. If you had a list of favorite artists stored at the JamBase Web site, it would track those artists for you. Since then, competing apps like Bandloop and iConcertCal have upped the ante with more sophisticated interfaces and GPS targeting, which lets them find nearby shows without forcing you to enter any data.

JamBase's updated iPhone app lets you track favorite artists and add their shows to your JamBase calendar.

Version 2 of the JamBase iPhone app, which was released on Thursday, brings JamBase up to speed with its own GPS feature--you don't have to enter a ZIP code unless you're searching for results in another location. You can limit search results to shows within a certain distance of your current location, or within the city limits of your town. Plus, it's much better integrated with the JamBase site: you can sign up for a free JamBase account right from the app, then add favorite bands to keep track of and even add particular shows to your calendar; all changes are synced between the iPhone app and the JamBase site.

The one place it lags is in synchronization with other apps. Here, I prefer iConcertCal because it uses your iTunes library to build a list of artists you're interested in. JamBase makes you enter them manually. iConcertCal's app has a "Listen" feature that launches the iTunes Mobile app to let you listen to 30-second samples and, if you like them, buy the tracks. JamBase features audio samples from LaLa on its Web site, but no equivalent on the iPhone app.

In its typical stately and slightly behind fashion, The New Yorker magazine this week published a piece (subscription required) about big changes in the live music industry. The article used as its grounding point a recent dispute between Bruce Springsteen and Ticketmaster over scalping and ticket withholding by artists, but the larger point was that the concert industry may be following the recording industry down the tubes--a prediction I made more than a year ago. The article has reams of supporting statistics and quotes, but the simple point is that the big acts aren't selling as many tickets as they used to, and some industry insiders are worried that there are no young bands today who will be able to fill stadiums in 20 years.

iLike Local Concerts has a wealth of information about local shows, plus crisp little images for each one.

But I was struck most by the optimism of Irving Azoff, who's currently the CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment, but who's better known as a long-time big shot in music management--he handled The Eagles, among many other acts. As he put it: "The performer on stage receiving the adulation of the fans--there's nothing like it, and that's never going away."

He's absolutely right, but I still think the days of paying more than a hundred bucks for the right to be herded into a stadium where they charge $8 for a beer and the ushers don't allow dancing and the other "fans" yell if you stand up and the sound sucks and the performers can't play their instruments and they look like tiny ants--that is, the big stadium concert experience--is becoming a relic like corded telephones and huge microwave ovens. It's too expensive, it's not fun enough, and there are far more opportunities for collective entertainment today than when I was a teenager back in the dark (pre-online) ages. Where are kids going to spend their allowance--on Xbox Live for $50 a year, or the latest enormo-tour for $50 (or more) an hour?

That's bad news for Ticketmaster, but good news for smaller venues. The only trouble with these smaller shows is that you might not hear about them unless you've got a good local weekly paper and are willing to scan the club listings regularly. That's where a new crop of Web and mobile applications come into play. I'm still enjoying iConcertCal for iPhone, which I've only had for a week, but has already guided me to one amazing band (Garaj Mahal) I had no idea was in town until I opened the app.

Today, Seattle social-music company iLike upped the ante with a update to iLike Local Concerts, a very attractive iPhone app that was originally released in May. It downloads and caches a bunch of local concert information on first connection to reduce wait times in the future, and features a slick user interface with images for each listed artist. The updated version, which should be in the iTunes store shortly, will match iConcertCal's ability to build a list of favorite artists based on your iTunes library, and will add notifications when one of your favorites announces a show in your town. Best of all, while iConcertCal costs $2.99, iLike Local Concerts is free.

Live music's far from dead. You just have to know where to look.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

It's been a couple years since iConcertCal introduced its iTunes plug-in, which scans your iTunes library and creates a personalized concert calendar for your city.

The Butthole Surfers and Yo La Tengo? It's going to be a busy birthday month for me....

Now, Apple has accepted an iPhone version of iConcertCal into the App Store. The concept is the same: it scans songs stored on your iPhone, then uses the iPhone's GPS to create a list of shows by those artists in your area. If you install the iConcertCal plug-in to iTunes, the app can also create a list of artists from your entire iTunes library (which is probably larger than the number of artists stored on your phone). In my quick test it worked flawlessly, alerting me that Yo La Tengo--who put on one of the best club shows I've ever seen a couple years ago--has just announced a show right around my birthday. You can even click a link to buy tickets, although it launches Safari and takes you to the difficult Ticketmaster site--it would be cooler if you could actually buy tickets from within the app.

The iConcertCal app also has a more traditional listing of all shows going on in your area tonight. It's similar to what JamBase offers, and what Bandloop promised (I've found Bandloop's listings to be so incomplete lately that I actually deleted it from my iPhone the other day--that's the hazard of user-contributed content). But I like the iConcertCal interface better than either of these competing apps--in particular, I like the way you can list shows by venue, and it automatically divides them into categories by how far away the venues are.

Future versions will also incorporate a calendar with album release dates and a way to track concerts by your friends' bands. A very worthy download for live music fans, iConcertCal costs $2.99.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

The recording industry is increasingly looking at live-music revenue as one way to make up for falling sales of recorded music, and as a consequence, concert-listing sites are sprouting like mushrooms. I've been a longtime customer of Jambase, and have been impressed with Bandloop's iPhone application enough to keep it installed long past my usual testing time, but Wednesday I added a new one to my bookmarks: Livekick.

Founded last year by Aviv Eyal, who helped found video-sharing site Grouper and sell it to Sony in 2006, and his partner Yarden Tadmor, Livekick's been in public beta testing since last fall. The process is familiar from other concert-finding sites: enter your favorite artists, and it'll return a list of concerts by those artists in your area, complete with links to buy tickets.

But there's one huge difference: instead of forcing you to enter artist names manually, Livekick lets you import them directly from iTunes, as well as online music services such as iLike, Pandora, and Last.fm. (Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET News.) This not only saves hours of time--the import took about 10 seconds for more than 600 artists--but it also helps you remember artists you wouldn't have thought to follow. In my case, I seldom listen to Lyle Lovett (except when driving my daughter around--she loves "the song about the hat") or the Reverend Horton Heat, but I know that both are fantastic in concert. And thanks to the iTunes import feature in Livekick, I just found out that both are stopping near Seattle in the next month.

The Orb? I haven't thought about them since 1991. They're playing Seattle on June 15.

Livekick goes deeper than the "Artist" column, reading other song data to help refine its suggestions. For instance, I don't have any solo music from John Doe, but Livekick saw all my X songs, recognized Doe as a songwriter and member of the band, and recommended a nearby show. It also recommended Merle Haggard based on the fact that I have a Dick's Pick selection of the Grateful Dead doing "Mama Tried," written by the Okie from Muskogee. And once you've got your list of artists, you can click any of them to find related artists--and Livekick does an excellent job with the suggestions.

Finally, if you see anything you're interested in, Livekick shows you ticket prices from Ticketmaster and other outlets, then lets you click through to buy. And Wednesday's a perfect day to try it out: concert promoter Live Nation is running a promotion called No Service Fee Wednesdays where it's waiving some of its customary fees for some seats at some shows. (You knew the name was too good to be true, didn't you?)

The site's not perfect--I got excited when I saw that The The had a show in my area, imagining a small club gig, only to find out that the band is actually The Them. The concert listing for art-rock band The Church showed a video of guitar shredder Steve Vai playing "Entering The Church" live. Livekick also focuses on well-known acts, whereas Bandloop is better for finding obscure local acts or answering the question, "Is there any live music happening in this neighborhood right now?" But for keeping track of old favorites on tour, Livekick beats any other site I've seen so far.

Follow Matt on Twitter

Correction 5:35 p.m. PST: This blog gave an incorrect last name for the head of EMI Music's digital business. He is Barney Wragg.

Because I had to leave Las Vegas on Wednesday, I was only able to catch the first two sessions of the one-day Digital Music Live conference, a conference about technology and the music industry co-sponsored by Billboard and the Consumer Electronics Association (who's behind CES). Nonetheless, the morning speakers had some interesting thoughts.

(Credit: CEA/Billboard)

First up was Gregg Latterman, president of Aware Records, whose company manages multimillion-selling artists The Fray (which had already been signed to Epic by the time Latterman began managing them) and John Mayer.

Despite the rejection of traditional promotion and distribution by everybody from the youngest MySpace bands to the most-established rockers, Latterman argued that the old ways--terrestrial radio and major label marketing and distribution--are still necessary for artists to sell more than a million records. He acknowledged that it's harder to create million-sellers from scratch--a few years ago, he claimed, a label could put $1 million into promotion and radio and almost guarantee a million album sales--but he noted that many critically acclaimed independent acts just aren't selling in big numbers, citing Bright Eyes (whose last album sold 189,000 copies, according to Latterman) as an example.

He also pointed out something I noted when Radiohead first revealed its tip-jar pre-release download plan for In Rainbows: without EMI, the band might never have built the huge global audience that allowed it to perform this experiment and sign distribution-only deals for the actual full CD.

My favorite insight, however, came in a discussion of how digital downloads are becoming a larger proportion of sales:"it's not fun to buy a record anymore." He didn't expand, but I imagine he was thinking of big-box stores and $18 retail prices.

The next session was a five-person panel on the current state of the industry. EMI Music's head of digital business, Barney Wragg, claimed that moving to DRM-free downloads revitalized the label's sales of digital full albums, as opposed to singles, contradicting the industry's fear that users would cherry-pick fewer tracks in the iTunes age, leading to less revenue per sale. (He didn't reveal exact numbers, but hinted they were significant enough to change top executives' thinking on the subject.)

He also acknowledged that many executives at the majors have had their heads in the sand regarding digital downloads and combating file trading, but pleaded for some tolerance, noting that a lot of artists and publishers refuse to participate in newer forms of distribution for fear it'll hurt their own bottom lines. I'd be crying crocodile tears if I pretended to be too sympathetic, but it was a good reminder that the majors aren't monolithic corporations, but actually must represent lots of parties with conflicting interests and levels of comfort with digital distribution.

There were a few other interesting points in the panel discussion, although 45 minutes seemed hurried.

Ian Rogers, VP of Video and Media Applications for Yahoo, praised the impending end of DRM, claiming that Yahoo Music had been unable to sign many deals--such as one with home automation company Control 4--because of the expense of supporting DRM-protected audio files.

Matthew DeFilippis of publishing rights clearinghouse ASCAP talked about how the organization was never interested in DRM, but cares much more about tracking usage--watermarking could be a useful technology here--and mentioned a system ASCAP is using to monitor songs playing in public places.

Finally, well-known music lawyer Fred Goldring summed up the problem nicely: empowered consumers with an unlimited supply of music directly contradicts the old industry basis of enforced scarcity. The trick is figuring out how to monetize what consumers are already doing. Unfortunately, there are no jaw-droppingly obvious or brilliant solutions at hand, although he and Nettwerk Music Group CEO Terry McBride seemed to lean toward some sort of blanket license applied on ISP fees.

They're called Battles, they're from New York, and after seeing them live for the first time on Saturday, I believe I've heard the future.

Battles Live

(Credit: Battles)

I'm not a huge fan of performances that rely heavily on turntables or samples or loops--I much prefer the interplay between musicians who are forced to pick out each note on their instruments, forced to listen and communicate and adjust almost continuously. But a lot of traditional "indie" rock bands play it safe, channeling the same dozen pop or punk influences into a predictable blend of three-to-five minute songs with verses and choruses and maybe a solo if they're feeling edgy.

Battles cross the bridge between these two worlds. On stage, their songs usually begin with a few notes played on bass or keyboards or guitar and fed into a sampler. Additional samples or loops follow, usually in slightly different time signatures or tempos, creating fascinating polyrhythms and shifting beats, like windshield wipers out of sync or a more percussive version of Steve Reich. Somehow, the drummer, John Stanier (formerly from Helmet and currently with Tomahawk, a Mike Patton metal project) always finds the seam and lays down a beat, adjusting to the tempo and shifting rhythms on the fly. The other three play looping combinations of guitar, bass, and keyboards, all while adding and subtracting and adjusting the existing samples.

Sometimes it sounds like jazz, only with fewer solos and chord changes. Sometimes it sounds like early prog-rock, Yes or King Crimson or Genesis, but without the high-flying lyrical pretentiousness. Sometimes it sounds like the Butthole Surfers (especially the vocals, which are fed through a tape echo or the digital equivalent). Sometimes it sounds like a digital drum circle.

But most of the time, it doesn't sound like anything you've heard before, but like the music your kids (or their kids) will be listening to in 20 years' time.

U.K. newspaper the Telegraph has been giving lots of coverage to Radiohead's recent decision to offer its next album on a bid-for-download basis, with lots of breathless headlines. Some of the paper's analysis seems overly simplistic to me--the labels were in trouble before Radiohead's move, and younger kids buy plenty of CDs and downloads, just not from flavor-of-the-minute pop artists like they did five years ago. But the coverage emphasizes how much Radiohead's move is shaking up the music industry.

Today, the paper reports rumors that Oasis (who have the #3 all-time seller in the U.K.), Jamiroquai, and the Charlatans (known as Charlatans UK in the States) plan to follow in Radiohead's steps and release their next albums as free digital downloads. I doubt Jamiroquai or the Charlatans could sell enough discs to recoup the promotional and recording costs that a label would presumably impose, so they might as well give their music away as a promotional device. Oasis probably still has enough die-hard fans to recoup, but the publicity could help them recapture some folks who tuned out back when Liam's antics still made the headlines.

But look ahead a year or two, after 15, 20, or 50 high-profile artists have done the same thing. What happens when giving it away is no longer news? If artists don't reap free positive publicity from giving free downloads, will it still be worthwhile? Sure, it might deepen the connection between these artists and their existing fans, but how do these acts find new fans? Superfan #1 might forward the Web link to all his friends, but how many of them will clear a date in their calendar for the show? Especially since bands that sound good on record may suck live, and great live bands often put out mediocre records.

Free recorded music could also hurt artists who are just starting out. Touring's necessary to build a reputation. But there's a lot of up-front expense involved--who pays for all that merch they're selling at the table?--not to mention gas, repairs to the van, and the occasional night with a bed and shower. A label could help defray these costs, but if the label no longer has anything to sell, how does that work? Will every band need a designated yuppie or Trustafarian to front these costs?

I hate the whole experience of arena rock shows today: the security staff who assume you're a criminal, the overpriced food and drink, the "down in front" screamers who always seem to be seated behind me (it's a $100 rock concert, not your daughter's piano recital). Consequently, I don't go to many big shows--one or two a year.

So I was a little surprised when I first encountered the "fan club" charge when the Stones rolled through Seattle's Key Arena in October 2005. The ticket prices were painful enough--$200+ for floor seats--but that's what scalpers were getting (more, actually), and Mick was a student at the London School of Economics at one time, so he surely understands supply and demand.

But the $100 fan club membership felt like an added insult. I understand that longtime Rolling Stones fans who joined the club eons ago might have a right to better tickets than the unwashed masses. And the ticket-buying process honored these fans by giving early access to anybody who'd joined before the tour was announced. But then there was second tier of sales--anybody could become a one-year member of the club for "only" $100, and they'd get second crack. Public ticket sales were saved for last. In other words, if you wanted any chance at halfway decent seats, you have to pay the extra $100--it was like a ticket to buy a ticket. (They threw in some other stuff like access to online video of past shows, but I doubt anybody would have paid more than a couple bucks for these privileges.)

The Police also used the fan club charge for their reunion tour this year. They haven't been an active band in 23 years, so there's really no "fairness" involved, although members of the individual members' fan clubs did get an early shot. (And they actually gave first crack to people who'd previously joined a Best Buy frequent buyers' club--so much for the fans.) At least with the Police, in addition to assuring me seats (bad seats--the good ones were all gone by the time the "new fan" tickets went on sale), I got a $5 poster and the right to peruse online message boards where I could read decidedly mixed reviews of the show.

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article about fans scamming these fan clubs by selling the codes used for purchases on Craigslist and eBay. I'm not sorry. This kind of trading exposes fan club memberships for what they really are--a sleazy way to hide the true cost of tickets. Perhaps once the "fairness" argument's been debunked, artists and promoters will have to display the true ticket price. (Yeah, right. And maybe they'll get rid of all those "service fees" as well.)

For the record, the Stones were way better than I expected them to be--both loose and tight, and Mick Jagger's amazing even at his advanced age, although they played better setlists on other nights. The Police were surprisingly underrehearsed, but I appreciated the risks they were willing to take with their new arrangements of the hits we've all heard a million times, and their unwillingness to use backing tracks or extra musicians. Neither show gave me as much musicial fun as my iPod, which cost less than two tickets.