Since the sad news that Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch passed away at 47 after a battle with cancer, I’ve been delving back into the Beasties’ back catalogue pretty frequently. The New York trio were my first musical obsession when I was a teenager. I still remember vividly the copied cassette of the group’s 1994 album Ill Communication I borrowed from my sister that led me into a new world of exciting musical possibilities.
The Beastie Boys taught me that music didn’t have to be boxed off into definable genres, that any source was fair game for inspiration whether that’s a flute loop from a jazz track, punk and hardcore, funk, rap or even, a Tibetan monk chant, which was inspired by Yauch’s conversion to Buddhism. The band took these sources and formed their own identity that was completely unique to them.
It was the band’s 1989 classic album Paul’s Boutique that best exemplifies the “good artists borrow, great artists steal” sentiment. The album supposedly features anything between 100 and 300 different samples. The record is so littered with them that there’s a website, paulsboutique.info, dedicated to the album’s samples and its myriad of pop culture references.
Contrary to popular belief, the Beastie Boys actually cleared the majority of the samples on the album. According to Mario Caldato Jr., the band’s producer, they spent around $250,000 on sample clearances.
Nowadays, restrictive and expensive copyright licensing laws mean that a record like Paul’s Boutique would costs something in the region of $20 million to clear (according to bit.ly/beastiebreakdown) making the album impossible to release and subsequently influence so many people it has done in the last 23 years. The Beastie Boys were pioneers. Rest in peace Adam Yauch.
We can probably just anoint Amanda Palmer as the Queen of Crowdfunding and be done with it. The New York-based Dresden Dolls independent singer has demonstrated clever usage of new media tools more than once. Having previously persuaded her Twitter followers to participate in a web auction in which she sold $19,000 worth of merchandise and special once-off gigs, she ran two successful Kickstarter projects one to pay for an EP that raised over $8,000 dollars and another to pay for a US tour with her husband, the writer Neil Gaiman, which raised over $133,000.
Her latest crowdfunding project which aims to pay for a new studio album, an art book and a tour isn’t even over yet but it’s already surpassed the $100,000 target and is well over $700,000 at time of writing with a full 13 days to go. Over 9,000 people have put down money to help fund what Palmer has dubbed The Grand Theft Kickstarter Project. The incentives for funding include regular once-off vinyl mail packages, local art gallery shows in six international cities and an initiative known as The Loanspark Collective, where a fan can offer Palmer an interest-free loan that will be paid back after the album along private charity performances or art.
It’s easy to see why Palmer has had success. She has over 550,000 Twitter followers and has formed an affable relationship with them. She communicates with fans on a one to one level, no ego, just human connections being made every day. Much like Lady Gaga. As the most followed Twitter user on the planet (23 million plus), Gaga isn’t letting her major label do all the work. Along with her manager Troy Carter she has developed a social community platform called Backplane which powers her community site Littlemonsters.com which she will use to sell direct to fans and roll out to other artist communities in future.
Good news Irish music fans. It looks like we’ll be finally joining the 10 million active users and three million paying subscribers on Spotify soon. The service is said to be officially launching in Ireland this year soon as its held meetings with Irish ISPs about offering bundled deals upon launch.
Meanwhile, the company has made significant inroads into becoming the defacto streaming music site of choice. Its recently launched Spotify Play Button means that embedded tracks from Spotify can now appear anywhere on the web.
In an effort to accelerate launches in other terroritories, Spotify has formed a partnership with Coca Cola. The news was revealed at a press briefing last week in New York with Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek saying “Coca-Cola is partnering with us to bring free music to the world.”
That’s a big vision and shows just where Ek wants Spotify to be. If other streaming services teamed with a major brand like this, the partnership be considered incongruous but for Spotify, battling outmoded terroritorial licensing laws that inhibit the platform from launching in every country of the world, the partnership makes sense. Coca Cola can underwrite Spotify’s expansion in countries it could not previously afford to launch in, setting it on its way to becoming the defacto global subscription service as well as gaining visibility in world events like the Olympics.
In return, Coca Cola will harness Spotify APIs in all of their apps, sites and social network sites citing that the partnership is “the opportunity to create a truly global music network.” The company will also be working with other major brands like Intel, McDonalds and Reebok on branded apps.
Spotify’s big gamble is to integrate itself into every fabric of life where music can exist. The service is attempting to make itself indispensable and everywhere. If it can do that then future partnerships will mean the company will be able to turn a profit while covering the costs of streaming royalties for the entire world of music makers.
You’re never a few clicks away from discovering something new in the world of music these days. Do you feel like hearing what your recently-settled cousins and friends in Australia are listening to? Tune in the online radio stream of Triple J. Need some warm tones on a wintry day? Listen to a Trinidadian calypso band covering Michael Jackson on Spotify. Want to know what’s blaring from speakers in Ohio? Click to a local Cleveland music blog to find out.
Doing that kind of work in the past required dedication, travel and a lot of recording tape. Which is exactly why field-recordist Alan Lomax is so revered and important to the history of music. For most of his lifetime, Lomax travelled around the US to the UK, Ireland, the Caribbean and mainland Europe archiving and recording folk music of the world. He was the first man to capture Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie to tape. When he died in 2002, he left 5000 hours of audio recordings behind (along with 3000 videotape and 5000 photographs) and a trail of invaluable ethnomusicology.
In February, 17,400 songs from the Alan Lomax archive were published online for all to hear at research.culturalequity.org. Every false start, every interview, ambient recording, mic checks and abandoned performance is available. Dating from 1946 up to the ’90s, there’s a lifetime of exploration. Chicago blues man Big Bill Bronzy performing in Paris, calypso concerts captured in New York, West Indies folk, English children’s lullabies, chain gang songs recorded in Mississippi State Penitentiary, New Orleans jazz, Soviet wedding songs, Transylvanian funeral laments and Moroccan courtship music.
Of particular interest to Irish listeners is the collection of music recorded here in 1951 and 1953. Made in co-operation with the BBC, Radió Éireann and the Irish Folklore Commission, it includes performances captured in Donegal, Galway, Kerry, Cork, Dublin as well as renditions of songs from Seamus Ennis, singer Margaret Barry and Brendan Behan in London. The world is now an instant global jukebox but Lomax was the originator.
SXSW Interactive’s hotbed of ideas, networking and conversations is the ideal place for new technology to emerge. The conference’s geek-heavy attendees are interested in the future of the web, in apps and new platforms. While Twitter and Foursquare caused a stir in Austin, Texas in previous years, 2012′s hot new apps fill the void between cool new social platforms and y’know, genuine usefulness.
Sure, the constant infostream of Twitter or the geo-tour guide of Foursquare are cool but there’s always been a gap between the fabricated reality of social networks and actual real life. The latest apps at SXSW in 2012 addressed this issue. This year’s buzzwords were “social discovery” and “ambient location”. Most people have used social networks have had that awkward moment where “someone they know from the internet” has introduced themselves in the flesh. You know who the person is but they look different to their online picture or avatar.
Highlight is an “ambient location” app for iPhone that will prepare you for such situations. Bridging the gap between networking application and conversation enabler, Highlight sits on the background of your phone and alerts you when you’re in the near vicinity of a friend of yours on Twitter or a person with likeminded interests from Facebook. It’s a conversation starter, an excuse for new genuine, real-life friendships or conversations.
After installing Highlight on my iPhone a few weeks before SXSW, I promptly forgot about it. When I was in Austin, my phone buzzed a few times with a message telling me that a blogger I had long admired was in my immediate vicinity and the shared interests we had. Perfect. We finally said hello after a few years of Twitter talk and it wasn’t weird at all.
Highlight isn’t the only hot new location-aware connection app, there’s also Sonar, Banjo, Gauss, Glancee and of course, Grindr, the geolocating app for gay men that was ahead of the curve in 2009. It looks like 2012 may be the year of “ambient location”, a next generation of apps, ones that are location-aware, people-aware and socially-aware.
You don’t have to be in Texas this week to follow the action at the 26th annual South By Southwest Festival in Austin. There are plenty of other ways to experience the same set of new music drawn from over 2,000 bands playing the festival thanks to hundreds of previews, mixes and downloads. Here are the pick of the bunch. Discover your own favourite new band.
A good place to start as ever is the American radio network NPR and their always excellent home for music on the web. Their SXSW microsite (npr.org/sxsw) features a handpicked list of 100 of the best bands playing the festival playing as a continuous 7 hour mix that you can tune into at any time. It features tracks from Alabama Shakes, Cults, Hospitality, The Men, Young Prisms and more. 71 of the songs are available for free download too. Not only that but NPR’s own showcases featuring Sharon Van Etten, Dan Deacon, Magnetic Fields and Andrew Bird are being webcast for a limited time. It’s expected that Fiona Apple’s return to live music as a headliner will be available too, as long as Ms. Apple is happy with it. What a diva.
If volume is what you want SxswTorrent.com is back with BitTorrent files featuring a whopping 1,219 song downloads taken from each official band playing the festival from the SXSW website.
The long standing Stereogum blog keeps it trimmed to 25 songs from bands who they’ve championed in the past including Candy Walls from the Austra side-project TRUST and the Whigfield-sounding I’ll Never Know bounce pop from Londoner Charli XCX.
Highly recommended from the newly formed Portals Music blog collective is their SXSW 2012 sampler available for free from Bandcamp featuring some of the smaller, more underground names at the festival from the skittery dreaminess of Florida’s Hundred Waters to the catchy acoustic folk pop of You Won’t. More from SXSW 2012 next week.
Every March, over 2000 bands head to Austin, Texas for the South By South West (SXSW) music festival in the hope that they can turn their passion into their career. But with so many acts poring into the American city over one week, how do you stand out from the rest? Minneapolis band Howler are hoping they have the answer: hire an ad agency.
The five-piece band, signed to revered indie label Rough Trade are already doing quite well in the UK thanks to the blessing of NME. They’ve garnered comparisons to The Strokes and have been hailed as the latest saviours of guitar music (snore). Back home however, it’s a different story for Howler and to increase their visibility in the US they have enlisted the services of Mono, an advertising and branding company from their hometown to help them make an impact in the lead up to SXSW. Mono have worked on campaigns for Apple, MSNBC, NBA and Sesame Street. So how are they approaching advertising a rock ‘n’ roll band?
Rather than spending money on one big budget video, the band, or specifically their North American independent label Beggars Group spent the money on a campaign based on the title of the band’s debut album – ‘America Give Up’.
The americagiveup.com campaign features an elderly black man passing commentary on all things that could be attributed to the decline of American civilization from canned cheese to the Kardashians to social networks. The hope is that enough chatter will be created around the campaign that it will work positively for the band going into the festival but it’s hard to see how the an elderly man will appeal to kids looking for some genuine rebellion or energy.
Of course, lots of bands using marketing or branding to stand out these days so this is really nothing new. If anything, authentic indie artists need only look at the reaction to Lana Del Rey to see how manufactured authenticity can backfire. We’ll know post-SXSW, just how successful this campaign was.
Death Grips
Last year’s Ex Military free download album introduced the aggressive noise rap of Death Grips. The Sacramento band are now inexplicably on a major label deal. How Epic plan to make money out of these guys is beyond me but new song Get Got is some thrilling raucous noise.
Kid A
This Virginia musician released an imaginary movie soundtracks last year with lyrics mostly in Japanese. That may sounds pretentious but the English-sung BB Bleu sounds like something Massive Attack might have made if they were still making Blue Lines material.
Nite Jewel
Ramona Gonzalez has been releasing lo-fi pop-funk for four years now but her new and second album One Second Of Love has seen her add some bite and swerve to her sound.
Amanda Mair
At just 17, this young Swede has eschewed the reality music TV route and signed with the cool Scandanavian label Labrador. Popjustice hailed her previous single as one their favourites of 2011 and Sense, her new song finds the middleground between radio-friendly and indie-appeal.
