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ch-scene - Re: If the Indy award posed with a gun, would you vote anyway?

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Subject: RTP-area local music and culture

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  • From: grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: If the Indy award posed with a gun, would you vote anyway?
  • Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 17:13:37 -0400

I would've gone had it not been scheduled on the same day as the NC Green Buildings Tour (hey, didja know that at least one house in the Apex area is selling PV-generated electricity back to Progress Energy as an NC GreenPower supplier? I didn't see it firsthand, but I've heard it's happening, which is a huge step forward, even if they're requiring two separate electric meters rather than one that can spin both ways) *and* the wedding of 2 friends of mine.

Looking back through a.m.c-h, was the first mention of the thing really on 9/27, which would've been, um, what, 5 or 6 days before the thing? And was there really then only one reminder, the day before, at 4:53 in the afternoon, when a lot of a.m.c-h at-work-only readers (and there are a lot of those) had already packed up to go home?

Please, feel free to spam us in more depth and at different intervals next time; I suspect at least a few people who would've wanted to go didn't see the announcements in time to change their plans, or didn't see them at all.

Of course, on the other hand, some folks might argue that if such a topic is of interest to folks on this list, then it's not really necessary to schedule a time and rent a room and have a roundtable in meatspace; we're all here, more or less "all the time" in some sense. A lot easier to get around scheduling conflicts, too.

So: if the "album format" as a marketing/profit tool is dead, then the "album format" as an artistic medium is as alive as it ever was, or at least as alive as record companies will allow it to be. The real question is: what albums have you bought over the past year which took advantage of the format as an artistic medium?

In my world, the EP is the dominant medium; 4-7 songs in around 20 minutes seems to be the current optimal release quantity for a lot of local bands, at least judging from the number of local EPs which have come through my hands and onto my personal top-10 list over the past year or so.

And yes, I still believe that album sequencing is an art unto itself, at least when approached as such by an artist, and if I'm going to listen to X number of songs by an artist I'll usually choose to adhere to their sequence, unless said artist has proved through the release of vast quantities of filler over the years to not be an "album" artist at all.

But when I'm using my HD-based digital-audio-playback device, that shit's on shuffle all the time. And yes, I'm constantly being surprised by stuff I didn't know/remember I had. It's the first time I can honestly say that this absurd huge "investment" in CD buying over the past 20 years has actually paid off. Of course, that was not without another huge "investment" in sticking fucking CDs into the computer & clicking "grab." X 1000.

Re: labels: I'm consistently amazed at the number of musicians I meet/encounter who're still actively looking for a label to put out their music. I can't quite figure out whether it's just a lack of time to deal with CD pressing plants & artwork & then the giant question of what the fruck to do with 500 CDs once you've got them, or whether the band doesn't have the capital to roll-yr-own, and are thus looking for some mysterious person with money to burn, or whether their expectations are still stuck back in the 80s (those who're looking for a major-label deal, like that dude who wrote a letter to Tape Op saying that he'd jump on a major-label contract if one were offered--WTF?) or in the 90s (those who're looking for a nice indie label to offer to help pay for recording, pay to press the things, do all the nasty radio servicing & etc, and still split the profits 50-50).

All of this without any clear vision as to what they want out of the deal -- do they want the "chance" to tour 9 months out of the year? Do they seriously cling to dreams of CMJ top20 status while maintaining their day jobs & their comparatively comfy home lives? Surely they don't want superstardom.

Which leads me to think that most of them just want a souvenir of their artistic youth, which is a perfectly valid desire--probably one of the better reasons to record & release music--but record labels aren't really designed to provide that.

Or they just want some vague method to share their music with other people with good taste, out there in the world somewhere. To them I say: meet the Internet.

Or, if you like packaging (and lord knows I love it), burn yr own, 20 or 30 at a time, and make your own packages. Most of my fave CDs from the past 2 years are burnt with homemade covers. I'm so used to that milieu at this point that I've gotten sort of weirdly obtusely skeptical of bands on well-known indies, even. Of course, that's partly just good sense--Interpol don't make much sense to me, and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't make any more sense if they'd burnt their CD & sold it to me for $3.

Anyway. I gotta go pretend to work for a while. Anybody else?

Ross

Fiona Morgan wrote:

The discussion was great. We talked about the sampling decision and its
impact on hip-hop and other genres (even Cantwell, Gomez and Jordan use
samples -- who knew?); debated the possible decline of the album format
in the face of personalized playlists; discussed the role of record
labels, particularly independent ones, as they begin to aggressively use
the Web; talked about Creative Commons licensing and other alternatives
to traditional copyright; and discussed ways that musicians could turn
the power dynamic around to their favor when dealing with the industry.
We generally agreed that the cooperative nature of the local music scene
insulates it from a lot of the changes at the top -- playing live and
going to see bands play live, that won't change.

Paul Jones blogged about it a little here:
http://ibiblio.org/pjones/wordpress/index.php?p=63
And I'll write a wrap-up in my next colum, which will probably run in a
couple of weeks. We taped it on DV so hopefully we can get it online at
some point.

But yes, turnout was very low. I wish more of you had taken advantage of
this non-competitive forum, which included the insight of two IP
attorneys who were off the clock. Is that something that interests
people on this list?




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