The RIAA Armageddon has begun

lucifer's hammer taught me to keep a copy of 'the way things work' in a ziplock bag

― mookieproof, Wednesday, June 20, 2012 3:25 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Love that fkin book (TWTW that is)

i don't think spotify is evil!

i don't see why the amount that spotify pays to artists should matter to me? like, i guess in a collective sense we should be concerned about how much ppl in our creative classes are making. however what i am doing is a) legal and b) agreed to by the artists i'm supposedly stiffing!

they "agreed" to it because they have no option because piracy has driven down the value of music to the point where most artists can no longer make a living at it.

Looking right now, there's a bunch of Zorn -- Filmworks mostly, some game pieces, 50th birthday stuff, etc.

Yeah, my hemming and hawing stops at spotify. It's legal, it's negotiated, and labels don't have to participate. Obviously the ones who participate see it as a better deal than not participating. Little money per play with a greater universe of potential listeners, I guess. I added 15 albums already this month to my "playlists" meaning I play them somewhat regularly. I would never have bought 15 retail-price albums in a month.

in a collective sense, no one is concerned with how much ppl in our creative classes are making because the market has determined that the creative classes output is essentially worthless. just like your teachers used to tell you in school!

xp

nothing from the rjc imprint as far as i can tell xxp

I'm into taxes being used to fix roads, pay for academic instutions and pay for citizens' health care

― Victory Chainsaw! (DJP), Wednesday, June 20, 2012 3:50 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You can't dance to roads or listen to healthcare in your car, gtfo.

Dancing about roads is like listening to healthcare.

our society has collectively agreed that art, specifically music but other media aren't far behind, isn't worth anything

which, you know, okay whatever, I am into a lot of things produced by folk culture (ie by poor people for their own edification with no expectation of renumeration) but let's not pretend that anyone's going to be making monumental magnum opuses in such a scenario. otoh you can end up with tunes like "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" so it's not all bad.

xp

I've purchased all 12 of the albums I've added to my "faves of 2012" playlist except for Dawn Richard's "Armor On EP", mostly because I haven't seen where I can actually buy it

in a collective sense, no one is concerned with how much ppl in our creative classes are making because the market has determined that the creative classes output is essentially worthless. just like your teachers used to tell you in school!

otoh, when you were in school did you think that people would regularly buy $10 sandwiches?

itunes.apple.com/us/album/armor-on-ep/id513094513

nothing from the rjc imprint as far as i can tell xxp

― Mordy, Wednesday, June 20, 2012 2:58 PM (5 minutes ago)

Not much, but there's Coleman's Sephardic Tinge...

bc magnum opuses can only thrive in a culture of abundance + wealth? i disagree. lots of great art has come out of impoverished circumstances. which isn't to say artists should be poor, just that them being poor doesn't mean the end of great art.

lol of course it's on iTunes now, it wasn't when I last looked

bc magnum opuses can only thrive in a culture of abundance + wealth? i disagree.

I dunno most of the large-scale, technically complex cultural achievements I can think of were created when cultures (if not the artists themselves) were at their economic peak

I mean to extend my original point of comparison, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" is a deep, utterly classic fucking song that you only need like two strings and a voice to play/sing, but it is nowhere near the scale of, say, "Abbey Road", which is a distinctly different kind of artistic achievement. Which is "better"? I dunno. But expect more of the former and less of the latter when there's no money around.

bc magnum opuses can only thrive in a culture of abundance + wealth? i disagree. lots of great art has come out of impoverished circumstances. which isn't to say artists should be poor, just that them being poor doesn't mean the end of great art.

in the realm of classical music, practically every lionized piece of music we have that has survived the centuries was composed at the behest of a king's or church's patronage

in modern times, with pop and rock music, this patronage model shifted to record labels both large and small

now that that model is slowly dying, where will the resources come from?

music more and more is operating like folk art. whether it's good or bad depends on what you want out of music, for most of us here, we like a lot of different kinds of music, so it's a mixture of good and bad.

but i feel like i finally figured out the strange phenomenon of under-employed 20 somethings in the mission regularly buying $10 sandwiches -- they can afford it because they get most of their entertainment for free, unlike people of my generation.

Also easier to produce a magnum opus now than probably ever before. Who needs an orchestra these days?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Hunger_first_edition.jpg

Also easier to produce a magnum opus now than probably ever before. Who needs an orchestra these days?

Someone looking for the sound of an orchestra playing live rather than synth patches? There are certain phrasing things you're never going to get from a keyboard approximating a stringed or wind instrument, which can make a difference to the piece you're trying to create.

something that's easy to do is by definition not going to impress anybody, and won't really be considered a magnum opus

I've heard the state of the art and they're nowhere near simulating an orchestra yet. Not to say it can't be done.

Samples are more appropriate for many productions

Whoops, accidental click. Samples are more appropriate for many productions, but hiring an orchestra or even just a quartet is cheaper and easier than you'd think. Building an orchestra w/ friends doing overdubs, too. afaic the major price-sink in album-making that is more deeply shaping the, uh, meta-sound is the expense of recording to tape, recording live drums in nice rooms.

"Someone looking for the sound of an orchestra playing live rather than synth patches?"

Not even just talking about synth patches though. There are so many ways to create sounds now (sampling other obvious).

"something that's easy to do is by definition not going to impress anybody, and won't really be considered a magnum opus"

Yes if you don't suffer your art it's not really art, right.

no that's not really what I mean - I'm referring more to the resources marshalled for a work, ie, writing out the actual score and having it performed by an orchestra is more impressive in terms of the scale of effort involved and the resource required than playing some string patches by yourself through a laptop. suffering doesn't really have anything to do with it.

Scale of effort does not seem to me to have much to do with the quality of a work.

I sold 2 12"s ans 2 cds I paid a sum of £6.50 for £11 (store credit) today. Buying physical music makes you money! (which you inevitably just piss away on more records anyways...)

Owen makes an excellent point, we do stuff at our church concerts with pickup chamber groups made up of up to 6 string players and it's always surprising to me that ppl are as cheap as they are; we even did one concert with 4 BSO brass players playing archaic instruments and I don't think they got paid more than $500 apiece

not discussing quality

xp

So you were talking about low-quality magnum opi?

I'm just addressing how the shifting economics of music means different kinds of work are going to get produced. Large scale works involving the dedicated efforts of large numbers of professional musicians marshalling expensive, cutting-edge technology and operating at the height of their powers are going to become rarer - small-scale works by small groups of people working with whatever cheap shit is around in their spare time are going to become the norm. This is not a qualitative assessment.

I think most people understand the term "magnum opus" to refer to a work that is complex, dense, and took a lot of time, effort and resources to complete. without money to prop up this kind of effort, these kinds of works will become less common.

A couple real-life examples-- though your definition of "magnum opus" may be tested-- a record such as "Ys" would've had its orchestra graft accomplished with 5-15 days of scoring by VDP and maximum six hours of studio time. A record such as Parenthetical Girls' "Entanglements" took the arranger and the producer about six months of on-and-off tracking friends playing different instruments, piecemeal, into an MBox.

And price wise, it'd cost about the same to record four days at a good studio with a Studer 24-track and purchase tape for it than it would to hire a 21-piece string section for a four-hour session-- which is enough to track 20-30 minutes of well-scored music.

Furthermore it's problematic to describe anything with an orchestra as being more or less magnum an opus than shit without an orchestra but that's my own problem

Yes, I get what you're saying. table is the table had a great post about this very thing about a year ago

Owen these anecdotes are super fkin interesting to me.

I assume all this stuff changes like crazy when it's a film score and has to involve union players?

The classic Band That Couldn't Exist Today example I like to use is Steely Dan -- didn't tour much in their day, relied on expensive production and expensive, well-trained musicians. Of course the disappearance of the class of studio musicians that played on their records is as much due to the advent of sequenced electronic production as it is to anything else. But a band like that today could never get a sufficient advance to make their records in the first place and could probably never earn enough on album sales and radio play alone to make a living. But w/e. Bach couldn't have existed in the 1970s either.

xp I wouldn't know. None of my clients hire union players. AFM requires all members of the orchestra to be paid residuals, which is too much administration for any label (or film studio, for that matter) to want to take on. Even Disney/Pixar will plonk down $1m to buy out a session.

There are people at AFM who want to reform this system to reflect current realities, but it hasn't happened yet. Until then, you have to hire off contract. I always check film credits to see who got the work and it's usually one of six or seven contractors.

Where is that table post it was so good, I didn't 100% agree with it but it was a Good Read

I've kind of already said this to the point of turning blue in various threads like these, but there are certain kinds of music that you're just not going to get, for the most part, from people who record in their bedrooms after coming home from their dayjobs. You need sufficient time and energy to develop, and that's something a large record label advance did afford. I actually think the "scam" of it all was overblown in fact -- you would basically get a big chunk of upfront cash and not have to guarantee anything in return. Yes, there were sleazy abuses of the "recouping" system but the mere idea of recouping is really not unreasonable at all. Maybe the scam was taking naive young people with no financial understanding whatsoever, handing them a pile of cash looking the other way as they blew it.

Touring is overstated as an alternative -- the pie is smaller with more people competing, and it's pretty unrealistic to expect to even break even in your first couple years on the road (again, that's why an advance is useful).

Furthermore it's problematic to describe anything with an orchestra as being more or less magnum an opus than shit without an orchestra but that's my own problem

I want to you to know that witty remark this did not pass unlol'd

xxpost I have become, over the past several years, a big film score geek so I like hearing abt this shit.

"eh, I only dig their first EP where they had the Royal Philharmonic..."

@ Hurting, I'd agree that "no advance equals different recording dynamic" but I'd disagree that it means a tangible change in the quality or content of the music recorded. I do think Steely Dan could exist today, recording-wise, no question.

What can't be duplicated imo is the phenomenon of the artist supergroup. A band such as Radiohead, who hit their stride at the height of CD sales and received both financial independence and a devoted following to sustain it. A band that can continue to tour big and record big for ten-plus albums, that's the phenomenon that we'll more likely see disappearing, for better or for worse.

Other similar examples would be [redacted redacted redacted I'm not getting into more detail]

I mean Kanye comes close in that regard but he's had SALES

[redacted redacted redacted I'm not getting into more detail]

;_;

Kanye doesn't sell nearly as much as people assume iirc