Do I know anyone with working (or semi-working – appearing to work is fine) versions of:

• 8-track cassette player
• wire recorder (as in, records sound onto metal wires) (oh I would love this)
• “cart” player (a.k.a. 2-track, used mostly in radio stations, or 4-track, the home version – either will do)
• Vintage 78-RPM phonograph
• Edison cylinder player (please please please)
• Reel-to-reel player (any audio type)
• Other old hopefully-obscure audio technologies

If this is you, and you can shoot video reasonably stably (horizontal phone video will do), and are interested in a mildly silly project this week, contact me via the contact page.

The old record label system isn’t stupid. It’s surviving only on artificial scarcity at this point, but it isn’t stupid. Never forget that.

They’ve been working with Google/YouTube over their new music streaming service. It’s a big change, and there’s a lot going on – and it was negotiated with the Big Four labels on their terms. That’s never good. Zoë Keating‘s post is going around, and is well worth reading. SJ Tucker – in our release show on Sunday – is looking for ideas. Hell, so am I.

But for now, what you need to know is that Google is telling indie musicians that they have one of two options:

1. Take their new deal, which includes things like “ads always on every video,” “YouTube is a required point of first release” (not exclusive first release, but no more crowdfunding rewards going out first), “complete catalogue required,” “five year contract,” and so on, or
2. Have your channel blocked and all your music deleted from the service.

Now, there is a caveat here: this refers to artists who participate in the ContentID programme, which gets them a share of royalties for uses of their music, as is more or less required by law. If you want to forfeit that money, then you can continue to be Some Random Youtuber, but at that point you’re just handing YouTube all that money that’s owed to you, and none of the infrastructure that’s built up around YouTube music will work for you. That’s not really a bonus.

For the record, even with all those downsides, that’s how I’m currently set up. I have been thinking of changing that, however. But to do that, I have to deal with this new ring of hell, and it’s a pretty good strike against crowdfunding and indie/self-funded artists. And against anyone who wants control over their how their work is released and to whom.

One thing I’m seeing is a lot of people commenting with variations on, “Fuck ’em! They aren’t worth your time!” Except that the last numbers I saw had YouTube at about 70% of online music plays. That data is a few years old now, but Pandora was already huge, and even with that, it was still All About YouTube.

I’m sure that number has moved around a bit. Soundcloud wasn’t as big then, for example. But I don’t imagine it’s an overwhelming shift – and there are all these newer music streaming and DJ systems which use YouTube as their infrastructure, to balance it. It’s why Google are pushing this new system: to make money off of all of that.

So yes, you absolutely can ignore 70% of the online market or whatever it is. But that’s a serious decision, and not even a little bit the “no-brainer” that people seem to think. It’s just not.

Honestly, I don’t have a good answer. There’s a suggested hack floating around in comment sections – starting a little company that is separate to but controlled by the artist, having that company sign up for the service, and only leasing some of your work to that company, and then that company leases all of its music to YouTube. It’s clever. It might be legally viable. It’s certainly an extra layer of expense, trouble, and time, and having to do that kind of hack is certainly yet another barrier to entry to new musicians.

Which is, of course, exactly what the labels want.
 
 

This is Part Ten of Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, a series of essays about, well, what it says on the tin. In the digital era, duplication is essentially free and there are no natural supply constraints which support scarcity, and therefore, prices. What the hell does a recording musician do then?

I finally realised: books are merch. And while Anna’s books are mostly ebooks, Faerie Blood and Bone Walker both have print editions, and they’re hard to find and mostly have to be ordered directly from her. And she can’t take credit cards and stuff like that.

But I can take credit cards and PayPal and all that, through Bandcamp. And Bandcamp lets you sell merchandise, as long as it’s related to your music. Which these are. So now BOOKS ARE OFFICIALLY MERCH, and Faerie Blood and Bone Walker finally have places you can actually buy the paper copies.

Yay, fixed! I like it when longstanding problems finally get sorted out. ^_^

holy hell, check out what’s up to number 80 on the weekly Alternative chart on Bandcamp.

Yeah, that’s right. Bone Walker.

I know it’s not a huge pond but it is the pond we are in and it is a chart we are on and with a nontrival number, and we’re still in pre-orders mode. o/

Talking of, if you prefer AmazonMP3 to Bandcamp for some reason, Bone Walker is up for pre-orders on Amazon now, too.

i’m just like “what?” at number 80. we entered the weekly chart yesterday at 129. today we’re number 80. at least as I type this. I guess I need a @wilw flail gif or something now because that’s what it feels like. 😀

So remember the guest post that Jeff Bohnhoff wrote for the Studio Buildout Series of articles I posted while building out my studio?

Jeff has his own blog now for his own studio, and yesterday he put up a really good and extensive build report on his latest round of studio room conditioning, including a lot of details on building really large and pro-style sound baffles. They look spectacular and if you have any interest in home recording or sound control in a room, you should go look at it. It’s great.

Advance Review Copies of Bone Walker went out last night and we already have an awesome surprise that I can’t talk about yet. But I will, later. so exciting

It’s been a problematic year, in a lot of ways; started out with the third round of eye surgery and recovery from all three initial rounds, and ended on a fourth round which will hopefully be the last. In between, despite everything, we managed to produce a new album (which I certainly hope you will preorder) and even tour a little.

But in terms of public exposure, it’s mostly been… about the blog. And that’s really not how to do things as a musician. I haven’t even started booking much for 2015 yet, because I’ve been waiting for this last go-round with the eye, afraid it’d explode again making me cancel anything I set up.

Hopefully we can move past that now.

Still, most of the visible action has been at the blog! So here’re the 2014 Top Ten Posts. Four of them are actually posts from 2013, so I’ll also add on the four that would’ve made it without those holdovers.

1. Gatekeeping and Recourse: something only men can do about sexism in geek culture. (A perennial favourite, from 2013)
2. Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, part 8: The Intrinsic Fraud of the Prestigious Internship. See above. Also 2013.
3. An Embarrassing Stumble Towards Irrelevancy – comments on the SFWA petition flap and sexism.
4. Mozilla and Firefox Careen Into a Ditch – comments on The Open Standard’s endorsement of Gamergate. This got me mentioned in The Daily Dot, so that was pretty cool.
5. A Horrible Group of People – more on the SFWA petitioners, and specifically, on petition author Dave Truesdale’s “five furry pussies on the ballot” comment.
6. What is Being Lost – the SFWA petitioners and failure to envision the present, much less the future. I sense a theme here; lots on sexism.
7. Pushback and Misandry – sexism in geek culture and two case studies of sexist pushback against science. Another 2013 post in this year’s top 10.
8. A Friday of Followups – Sarah Kellington of Pinniped comes in for recording, and more on the SFWA flap. Yay, something about music!
9. Ribbon Mic Buildout – I built a ribbon microphone, and took pictures. The last of the 2013 posts in the top 10.
10. Way Too Much to Dislike: my highly critical review of Doctor Who: The Caretaker. This was before “Kill the Moon” and my breakup of Moffat’s Who.

It reflects the controversies of 2014 geek culture pretty solidly, I’m afraid. But that’s not the whole story.

The difficult thing about this blog is that it’s echoed a lot of places. Some places, in entirety. Some comments come back here, and others are linked, but I’m not making any attempt to include views on those other sites in my numbers. I still have three-digits worth of views per post on Livejournal, and this year, Tumblr started mattering. In some cases, mattering a lot.

And by “a lot,” well – the biggest post in this list got over 17,000 views at the home site this year. That is a lot for me, and it’s totally awesome. Most of them aren’t nearly that popular, at least, not here.

Let’s take a look 2014’s 7, 8, 9, and 10th most popular posts, because one of them is a Tumblr example:

7. Insects of the Writing World – on the contempt for the new shown by the SFWA old guard. Essentially tied are:

8. A Quiet Night at the Lair: Korrasami is Canon and Nothing Hurts, and,

8. GamerGate True Believes are the Anti-Vaxxers of the Online World, and finally:

10. If One of the Bottles Should Happen to Fall – more SFWA sexism, specifically, Sean Fodera’s arguably questionable apology to Mary Robinette Kowal

Number eight there? A Quiet Night at the Lair: Korrasami is Canon and Nothing Hurts? Here, it has a couple of hundred views. Plus another couple of hundred at Livejournal, and a few other places. All combined, over 400 views, which actually isn’t all that far above average.

On Tumblr, though? It rocketshot. I can only get an estimate of the views, but the data I have puts it at around 35,000-45,000, mostly for the addendum commentary at the end. It nearly triples the number one post’s total count actually on crimeandtheforcesofevil.com.

That’s not the only post I’ve had do that. Rock candy geode did that too. And a post I made of some of the Kitsune at War sheet music (a bass-clef transposition actually left labelled “flute”) is nearing six digits.

In the past, I’ve questioned my “echo everything everywhere” strategy, of letting people read whatever they want wherever they want. It didn’t seem to have been getting me much, and certainly, things like Facebook are a total bust. (And given how Facebook Destroys Everything, I’m kind of okay with that.)

But having had a year which has, by necessity, been mostly about being online… it may have started to catch. This strategy may vindicate itself after all. That would be nice.

An addendum: None of these lists include compilation posts, which are nexus posts for specific topics, like, the sexism and racism in geek culture collection, the studio buildout series on how to build your own recording space, and Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment. Those would all be in the top ten, but obviously shouldn’t count.

The soundtrack album is still at the mastering engineer – these things take a while, particularly since we’re having the same people do the replication. We’re using the same people that SJ Tucker uses for her CDs (thanks for the rec, Sooj) and I know their work, it’s quality. We’ll be getting it back in time for the release show at Conflikt, and there’s still time to pre-order it and help us pay for all these things.

Here’s the disc label graphic, as sent to the printer. It’s Kiri Moth’s art. Pretty, no?

All these pre-orders will be signed, and one of them will get a small special present included. Remember that test CD I was carrying around for a while? I posted about it back in October, and talked about carrying it around to places here.

One pre-orderer will also get that test actual CD. There are differences, too – we made mix changes on three tracks. I’ll sign that, too, and include a little note certifying that yep: it’s the one in the picture. It’s unique, a one-off, and if you find those sorts of things interesting, well, this is how you can get a legit shot at one. It’s not super-fancy or anything – it’s a CD-R with sharpie writing on it, I mean, go look at the picture. But it’s the only copy of that exists, and there won’t be another.

You can pre-order here. The pre-order ends when the CDs get here, and I don’t know exactly when that’ll be. So if you want a shot at the bonus stuff, now is the time. Clickie!

Google is blocking a piece of mail from me as spam. It’s individual mail directly from me to directly one other person. It has no images or links and is plaintext. I’m asking someone I know for recommendations for a fill-in slot at a music festival.

Any ideas? The page linked in the bounce is pretty much useless, and I’m worried they’re trying to force everybody to adopt DKIM, which is a tremendously broken standard I’ve addressed before.

  ----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.:
DATA
<<< 550-5.7.1 [2601:8:9740:1300:da50:e6ff:fe55:2303      12] Our system has detected
<<< 550-5.7.1 that this message is likely unsolicited mail. To reduce the amount of
<<< 550-5.7.1 spam sent to Gmail, this message has been blocked. Please visit
<<< 550-5.7.1 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188131 for
<<< 550 5.7.1 more information. g5si6986243pdc.141 - gsmtp
554 5.0.0 Service unavailable
Reporting-MTA: dns; murkworks.net
Received-From-MTA: DNS; murkworks.net
Arrival-Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 11:46:08 -0800

I tried a shorter one, and it's bounced as spam too:

From: "Dara Korra'ti (public)" <[deleted]@murkworks.net>
Subject: how about this one?
Date: December 17, 26 Heisei at 11:46:07 AM PST
To: (account withheld}

does it like this short one? If so, check your FB, Google is blocking email from me to you. :(

We have an SPF record, and this is a new trick we've only detected today. Some mail can get through to other people, but none to this recipient. But the original mail which triggered the first bounce can get through to no one. Thoughts?

Wow, this is quite the op-ed in The New York Times yesterday: Elegy for the ‘Suits’ – The Internet, Not the Labels, Hurt the Music Industry.

It’s everything you despise about The New York Times and The New Yorker rolled up into one! Paean to power and old authority? CHECK! Unchecked nostalgia for the prime of the Baby Boom era? CHECK! Slavish worship of corporate culture? CHECK! Fear of agency resting outside the hands of white guys in suits? CHECK! “What an asshole!” working just fine as a punchline? CHECK!

Really, it’s terrible and hilarious. And just wrong, of course – as I’ve written, the labels – via their industry group, the RIAA – destroyed the industry just fine on their own by making music ownership a negative value. Not to mention that they also drove the more aware musicians out through their ruinous strip-mining of artist value. It’s been almost 15 years since Courtney Love did the math, and the sharecropper approach wasn’t new then. If you signed with a label, you were giving them all the value and keeping something below minimum wage – if that. And they owned everything you made.

So no, “the Internet” didn’t “hurt the music industry.” The labels are the ones who set up the teetering edifice. The internet just let musicians break out and tear it down.

ps: talking of, pre-order the new album! We have a mastering engineer to pay. 😀

If the forecast is right, we have about, I dunno, a 60% chance of losing power this afternoon, so this is LAST SURE CALL for creators and makers to post about their things! Do you make a thing or things and want to tell people about it? GO COMMENT HERE Some of the things people make are for sale, some aren’t, that’s okay. Go put it in comments here and it’ll be in the megapost on Monday!

Do it now, too. If we go down they’re saying it could be a couple of days before we’re back up. Of course, now that I’ve posted all this, it’ll breeze right over – BREEZE! HA! – and we’ll be fine.

We’ll be back for sure by Monday, of course, so that post should go up fine.