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Riot Gear!: Opening the Book
Being a musician is not the noblest of pursuits. It’s not a career path by any stretch of the imagination—more of a career escape plan than anything else. Why, if Holden Caulfield picked up a goddamn guitar half way through The Catcher in the Rye, he would have beaten both Nirvana and the Clash to the punch. My next sentence was going to be something like, “and then maybe John Lennon would never have been murdered.” But that is probably bullshit. Lennon’s murderer would merely have had some other book in his pocket when he pulled the trigger, killing much more than a husband and a father. The book could have just as easily been Lord of the fucking Rings if it would fit in a pocket. Or Goodnight Moon.
But it was The Catcher in the Rye, which has since become a memento reminding us of the murder of one of the great songwriters in all of rock ‘n’ roll. One of the architects of rock music, working class heroes, and revolution through art. I fucking hate that.
It’s just a book.
Had J.D. Salinger not been such a devout and angry recluse, clinging to his art in a way that is just unheard of in today’s 360 deal world, the book would have a lot less mystique behind it. Mystique is what makes something seem greater than it really is. I don’t watch television hardly ever, yet I had to stop listening to the Who’s Next, once one of my favorite Who albums, because now it sounds like a bunch of teasers for CBS. The mystique of those songs is gone for me now, sold off to pay the fucking bills. How sad is that? Or is that just me romanticizing some moment when those songs saved me or made me pump my fist or shotgun a tall boy with a mouth full of reefer smoke? I don’t own those songs. They are not mine, never were, never will be. They’re just chords and words and Keith Moon bashing away, right? Why should I give a damn what Pete Townshend does with them? They’re his songs, sell them to Glenn Beck for all I should care.
Riot Gear! The Games of Music Go Indie
It is no secret that new bands are having a hard time of it when it comes to making a living. Unless you are willing to live in a gear-loaded van jamming down the freeway in the middle of the night, your choices involve cash drips, not cash flow. Record labels remain wholly dysfunctional—they are the Microsoft Vista of the entertainment industry. They sign bands easily enough, but then they charge the hopeful for every flyer, every meeting, every damn fruit roll-up, and every guitar string so that, if the band doesn’t generate revenue, the label still does—off the musicians. As covered in a recent Riot Gear! post, it’s great that internet radio is an increasingly viable option to get your band heard. The revenue associated with internet radio can be as high as six figures; unfortunately they are all to the right of the decimal point. Going direct is totally doable but the competition is fierce as talented unknowns are legion. And don’t get me started on CDs, except to beg my fellow music lovers to start buying them weekly in the name of saving rock ‘n’ roll. So what’s left? Rock Band and Guitar Hero, of course.
As a guitar player, I hate Rock Band and Guitar Hero, but as a kid who missed all the cool toys, I secretly want one so I can act out my fantasies of being Ace Frehley and George Harrison. Now I can be myself on Rock Band, or at least I can try.
Harmonix, the company behind both Rock Band and Guitar Hero announced back in August that it is opening up Rock Band 2 to anyone with a song to sing and play. That announcement seems to be moving from promise to reality with guitar shredder speed. The Rock Band Network’s (RBN) beta program, which allows music makers to create, submit, test, and approve content is now in full swing. The tools are free; they even use the popular shareware audio recording software Reaper as the foundation for converting your tune into a fully-fledged Rock Band game-song-thingy. Submitting your songs does, however, require an Xbox and a computer running Windows. Of course, gaming platforms, Microsoft, and Harmonix are far from open source entities, so users have to pay 99 bucks for a premium RBN account to participate as an artist or music reviewer. Once the songs are game-ready, they will be available exclusively on the Xbox, with PS3 and Wii to follow. Artists can set their own prices for their music, which will be made available on the Xbox Shop, and other similar stores for the Sony and Nintendo platforms. Artists also get 30 percent of the retail price back as royalties. That’s probably more than what a label would give a new band for their sweat and toil.
Riot Gear!: Wi-Tube and Fat Dock—Amp Up Your iPod with Tubes
The sound quality argument surrounding digital music (CDs, mp3s, 4s and 5s (it’s coming), AAC, lossless, lossy, etc.) has all but talked itself out. They all have their plusses and minuses, and when listening on the subway or at a cafe table, no one gives a damn anyway because whatever is pumping through the buds is better than the hacking cotties or annoying mobile phone half-conversation coming from the human sitting too close to you.
Ear buds are like blinders (or, depending on the track, LSD)—stick them in and the world is personally yours again. Quality of the audio matters little in the environment unless it’s a party, or your home, and you want to move all the air, not just the molecules in your auditory canal. Dozens of cheesy media player docking stations (from Velveeta to Brie) have cropped up across the world of retail, and many seem to leverage this notion that sound quality does not matter. I can’t think of a more insulting attitude to the artist and to what music can do for us. It is completely upside down when you look at the technology and markets on the music production side where high resolution rules the bullet points.
Since media players, smart phones, and iTunes are where our records now live, owning a proper media player listening system beyond the ear bud makes sense. TL Audio, a British audiophile company, has been making high-end products designed specifically for the iPod since 2006 under the brand Fatman. Fatman’s new Wi-Tube and Fat Dock combo, scheduled to launch mid-spring is a much needed and interesting addition to the docking station market. read more
Riot Gear!: Spotify vs. Warner
Spotify cannot seem to keep out of the headlines as they gain momentum for their US launch. Though ironically, they would probably like to. In case you’re not aware, Spotify is hugely popular streaming radio service out of Sweden. It uses a peer-to-peer delivery model underneath a fully licensed, revenue driven business model where artists and labels actually get paid when they are played, though that has become a controversy in itself. (See this post in Riot Gear! for more info.) What makes Spotify so damn popular in Europe is its on demand functionality which most players lack, and, of course, the fact that it is free as long as you’re willing to put up with a few ads. Spotify’s revenue model is based heavily on converting free users to paid ones to make those ads go away. So for about 10 Euro a month, users essentially get iTunes flexibility and a catalog of over 6 million songs without jingles (unless you count Blink 182). But conversion rates are low (about 3.5 percent according to the LA Times), and that is cause for concern.
So while Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek is making the rounds in the US in preparation for their launch, Warner Music Group’s CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. spilled a big old bag of waitaminute! all over Ek’s iTunes-killer parade. Bronfman, heir to the Seagram’s hooch fortune is to peer-to-peer what Avatar’s Colonel Quaritch is to massive trees and their blue warrior huggers. Which begs the question: why would a p2p proponent get hammered off a Seagram’s owned libation? (Answer: Because White Russians suck without Kahlua!) Bronfman’s gauntlet-throwing quote on the matter is: “Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed.” Dude has a point. Dude also has a contradiction since Warner is currently licensing its music to Spotify in Europe and sources say it has no plans of ending that agreement. read more
Riot Gear!: Beatles Edition PowerPoint
The Beatles charts for info-junkies seem to be satisfying a need Beatles video games, anthologies, and remasters simply cannot. If you treat Beatles trivia as anthropology, and believe that knowing which Mop Top really did get blisters on his fingers isn’t just a great icebreaker but a responsibility (those who forget their music history are doomed to loop it), then chartingthebeatles.com is for you.
Well, technically it’s not a site just yet, just a couple redirects to the kind of charts, graphs, and statistics you’d expect to find in a PowerPoint presentation.
Interested in a Venn diagram of “I Am the Walrus”? (The Eggman overlap is both I and They—Goo Goo Goo Joob!) Or, for the musos out there, how about a pictograph of scale types (major, minor, diatonic) by album (lots of minors in the White Album).
Currently, the collection is user-driven, and based heavily on the catalog of Beatle books that have broken down to quantum levels all the musical harmonies and arguments between the lads. Most of the content exists in a Flicker group where users have posted images of their lovingly detailed graphs. (What, not a single web programmer who is also a die-hard Beatles fan?) Many of the charts delve past science into works of art, using geeky statistical reporting methodologies as the style, and granular Beatles factoids as the palette. And each tell a story if you look at them long enough. The chart that quantifies authorship and collaboration is perhaps the most revealing at first glance. In a single snapshot, you can track the band’s demise via a timeline that shows collaboration withering after 1967’s Baby, You’re a Rich Man (Magical Mystery Tour). read more
Riot Gear!: Internet Radio and the Sound Salvation
Remember how the internet was supposed to be a magic bullet to good bands passed over by major labels? It was the promise of direct distribution, control over your fate, and best of all, no jerk in a suit telling you how to rock and how to roll. Depending on the web tools you use, that still holds true unless revenue is your measuring stick. Suddenly lame looking MySpace is still a viable option, though it is in decline. Facebook lacks proper music-related tools but musicians are finding ways to make it happen, using sites like Reverb Nation, which tie in okay to the Facebook universe. But what about radio?
We lost terrestrial radio to corporate Clear Channel and their stupid Aerosmith fetish. Satellite Radio is an option, but don’t expect to break there if you are a new band. Internet radio—makes total sense—has an indie edge and a feel for the new and emerging generations of both listeners and musicians. In the land of internet radio, Europe’s Spotify is quite hot, and for good reason—it is like iTunes, only the songs stream from a server instead of your hard drive. That means songs are on demand and free (with ads, which you make go away for a few quid). On demand tune-age is something Slacker and Pandora and most of the others lack unless you go to the contaminated waters of peer-to-peer. Spotify is gearing up to launch in the States, and it will be big, no doubt. read more
Riot Gear! Gets Its Award Show Freak On
2009 is mostly done. It was a weird year in gear and music. Weird is good—not always, but it can be. Approaching the end of the double aught decade, I have drowned but survived under a sea of technology in music marketing, music delivery, music creation, and especially over the last 10 years, music correction. Now more than ever, the technology intertwined with rock ‘n’ roll has made much of it nothing more than a pretty face with a tabloid drama. And I’m a fish trying not to get wrapped in it. Only, instead of swimming, breathing, and eating in H2O, I’m doing it in megabytes, or better yet, Si, the symbol for Silicon. Maybe it’s the tree in the room, but man, I am ready for something besides 0’s and 1’s.
I remember no huge changes in both the production and consumption sides of the industry, I just remember there being too much of it. Overpriced guitars are here to stay in spite of the economy, and every female pop star has at least one of her nipples blasted all over the worldwide web. Since I’m wearing a tuxedo (except for the pants—more on that later), I feel like giving out a couple awards for 2009: The Year of Too Much Stuff. Being that it’s my first award show, I only have two categories. They are: Pop Music (Nipple of the Year Award), and Pro Audio (Biggest MI Tool). Enjoy, and see you in 2010—hopefully somewhere where there’s music without autotune, and normalizing, and digital harmonization, and hi-res anything except the whisky!
Biggest MI Tool
This award goes to the MI (Music Industry) manufacturer whose arrogance and greed has served to screw the typical low wage-earning Cratchit-musician, and/or their rich shareholders. The runner-up for this award is Digidesign, oops, I mean Avid Audio. What Google is to search engines, Digidesign’s Pro Tools is to pro audio recording. So why not change your company identity to something else entirely? One Friday, not too long ago, all the Digidesign employees went home and had a nice weekend. Then Monday, they walked into work to find their company is now called Avid Audio and cubicles have gone missing. The next thing you know, resumes are flying around the wee little music-tech industry from hotshot engineers and marketeers long established at Digi. The bad news here is they may be taking Digi’s infamous corporate arrogance (shared by their parent company, Avid) with them. And you thought American media was over consolidated and unchecked.
Avid is the Disney of our business. They own a large amount of what you find in the way of recording in most music stores today and no one dare fuck with them. They own the low end with the M-Audio brand, and they own the high end with Digidesign/Avid Audio. And if you have Pro Tools, they own you. Expect no forgiveness.
The reason Digi/Avid are only a runner up is because (ALLEGEDLY), like Disney (ALLEGEDLY), they are fond of (ALLEGEDLY) sending lawyers into your bedroom in the middle of the night to (ALLEGEDLY) scare the crap out of you. So this year’s Biggest MI Tool award goes to Gibson Guitars. Those guys are way too incompetent to send out scary lawyers in the dead of night—at least to the right house, and I live in the woods. But that is not the only reason I give Gibson this award. It’s also because I want a Les Paul Custom but they are amazingly overpriced. Like Fender, Gibson went nutso with their price gun over the past few years, and instant karma is getting them where it hurts via a Fed raid of their facility in Nashville, Tennessee. Gibson is currently being investigated for violating the Lacey Act through the alleged illegal, importation of exotic and endangered rosewood from Madagascar. I wonder what King Julien has to say about that! I love rosewood; it is a great wood for a guitar neck—fast, smooth, makes your fingers smell nice… there are supposedly good quantities of sustainable rosewood available from Brazil. So why get illegal precious woods from Madagascar? I’m guessing because it was cheaper.
That’s not Gibson’s only cock-up this year that earned them this faux award. They also announced a Jimi Hendrix “Inspired By” electric guitar due out in 2010. Okay, Hendrix did play a Gibson Flying V on occasion, but the man and his legacy revolves around the pain and joy he exorcised from a Fender Stratocaster. Needless to say, Hendrix fans threatened to do something nasty to Gibson headquarters. But since Tennessee has really tough drug laws, nobody showed up. For those of you not terribly familiar with Hendrix, Fender, or Gibson, imagine Microsoft releasing a Steve Jobs commemorative version of Windows. It’s that bad. In fact, it’s so bad, shortly after the announcement and ensuing fallout, Gibson removed almost all mention of the Hendrix Strat-o-Paul (or whatever it was to be) from their website. Maybe it was going to be an all-endangered rosewood model that comes with its own signature lighter fluid.
Nipple of the Year
I was going to give this award to Amy Winehouse—sultry, beautifully voiced, and the sexiest bedhead beehive since this lady named Carol went wading in my uncle’s pool when I was just a kid. But alas, we have lost Winehouse to the dark side. Drugs, paparazzi brawls, more drugs, questionable taste in tattoos, court dates, topless Zumba sessions on the balcony—what’s missing? Oh yeah, music. Back to Black was a fine album, but it is over three years old and Winehouse’s last to date. Rock’s Backpages recently polled 100 writers from Rolling Stone to young bloggers, and Back to Black received enough votes to claim Album of the Decade. The thing is, you only need one or two songs every 18 months to stay artistically relevant in the digital age and Winehouse can’t seem to manage even that. Sadly, you need far less to remain relevant as a pop star—chuck the self-esteem for a nice public throwing up and you are golden in the United States of Celebrity.
So with Winehouse and her many problems wandering loose among the streets of London, or possibly Saint-Tropez, Nipple of the Year goes to Lady Gaga. Yeah, I know, I dissed Lady Gaga in a column earlier this year, and know better than to listen to any radio station that would play her. Then I saw her perform on Saturday Night Live. Now everything’s changed and we’ll be married one day unless Chrissie Hynde finally gives in. (A lifetime ban on Disco Stick has to be in the prenup.) My attraction and this faux award have nothing to do with her inability to keep pants on—a habit we happen to share. And while her song “Paparazzi” is a good pop ditty, what won me over was seeing her imperfect self trapped inside a massive ’70s space mobile while playing a grand piano and singing from a place called Germanotta. Surprisingly, underneath the eye shadow, bubbles, and wax, she’s a real musician. More than that, it was how she maneuvered (you could hardly call it walking) over to the piano, sat down rather clunkily, and let in silence. How many pop stars have the balls to do that? On stage, silence is preternatural and so powerful, few artists and pop stars can let it exist longer than a few seconds. I mean, when’s the last time you heard Bono be quiet in between songs? And I love flaws—flaws are what rock ‘n’ roll are all about, right Mick? Flaws are a sign of the truth. Nice legs and sexy curves are everywhere, but show me a pop star unafraid to show her imperfections and you have my attention. Looking like she fell through an office lobby sculpture in her underwear, Gaga led with her flaws the moment she stopped singing that god-awful Disco Stick song and showed us she could easily follow Elton’s footsteps instead of Madonna’s. If only she would…
Other Nipple of the Year
Well, since nipples come in pairs, it only seems fair to give out two faux awards in this category. I give this second but equally important Nipple of the Year award to Adam Lambert. This is along the lines of the Nobel commission giving our wartime president who seems to have forgotten who elected him the Nobel Peace Prize. It is meant to encourage Lambert as much as reward him. Okay, I’ll be honest, I have no idea what Adam Lambert sounds like, let alone the color of his nipples, I am just pissed off at the double standard shown by the media in the aftermath of some recent awards ceremony where Lambert kissed a dude, and maybe face-humped another dude. Actually, I’m not sure what he did, and I have no interest in Googling it either. All I know is that after this awards show all everyone talked about was how Lambert was a bad boy on network television and was now being ostracized by the media to whom he gave a ton of free advertising. (No one mentioned his music.) The final straw was some vapid news program that cancelled his appearance and used the time to “cover” the faux outrage by showing Britney making out with Madonna followed by Adam making out with, I dunno, Tiger Woods or somebody. The only difference was, while they showed a clear video of the two women making out, they pixelated Lambert’s same-sex make-out so all you saw were a bunch of flickery flesh-colored squares. And that, my friends, is why my old drummer moved to Norway. Two women kiss and millions masturbate watching it; two dudes kiss and it’s a social apocalypse. Christ, America, must ye be so homophobic and hypocritically unctuous? It’s almost 2010 for crying out loud! Besides, I hear he’s pretty cute…
Opening Act Boos
My nearest civic auditorium belonged to another town. I was lucky enough to play to a packed house there before I turned 13. Unfortunately, I played bad trombone, or as my mom liked to call it, second trombone (there were only two of us). Hosting bad music events is the duty and function of every town’s civic auditorium. Fortunately, rock concerts regularly come through to smudge the place with smoke, Fresnels, and big loud music. So the civic auditorium I stunk up with some spitty tromboning (amongst an otherwise fine ensemble) was also the place where I saw my first real rock concert. I was a child and the band was Rush—this is as close as I will ever get to explaining why I act like a kid whenever I hear a Rush song.
Like many concertgoers, the first thing I did when I entered the venue was check out the gear on stage. As a guitar player, I can say with great authority that on stage, the drums remain the most intriguing instrument to look at. Of course, it is rare that guitars are even visible before the show, and, well, you see one Marshall stack, you’ve pretty much seen them all. Of all the drum kits on all the concert stages over the history of rock music, Rush drummer Neil Peart’s kits are perhaps consistently the most intriguing (even the pink one). To be fair, Stewart Copeland, Billy Cobham, the late Keith Moon, and Danny Carey (Tool), are close seconds.
So thanks to festival seating and my mom dropping me off three hours before the concert started, I was able to run right to the front of the stage to see Mr. Peart’s drums. The only problem was someone else’s drums were in the way.
There, shoved up against Peart’s riser, was another double bass kit blocking my view. Thankfully, I could still make out the tops of the orchestral bells standing tall on my horizon like neatly ordered silver prog Alps. This confirmed that I was at the right civic auditorium on the right night (I guess the plethora of Rush t-shirts and mullets would have been my second and third clues). The drums in the way belonged to one Andy Parker, drummer for the influential British metal band UFO. So while Rush was my very first rock concert, UFO was the first band I saw at my first rock concert. As openers go, we were lucky that night, let me tell you. In fact, UFO was on the cusp of headlining themselves had their lead guitarist virtuoso nutlog Michael Schenker not gone rogue on them. Pity, that. It remains the best opener I have ever witnessed.
Being an opening act is like having an incredibly hot date with someone who clearly has an STD. Okay, maybe not.
Being an opening act is like being the annoying, younger sibling accompanying your incredibly hot date with or without an STD—closer, but not quite.
Being an opening act is like getting a free trip to an amazing travel destination only to realize you can’t leave the airport and the locals want nothing to do with you—nailed it!
Occasionally, openers can blow your mind and in some rare instances steal the thunder from the headliner—though a brief chat between band manager and sound engineer can often put the kybosh on the latter. More often, if an opener is memorable, it is because they were awful or you pitied them.
Awful: AC/DC Highway to Hell Tour (five months before singer Bon Scott would choke to death on his own vomit). The opener was a prancing new wave band with bad makeup—the singer kind of looked like Johnny Cougar in drag—they did two and a half songs (one and a half too many) and they barely escaped with their lives. They were good dodgers though…
Pity: Peter Gabriel tours the US so infrequently and has such an amazing body of work he should have long ago accepted the mantle of “an evening with” instead of giving his fans a measly 90 minutes of brilliant music and an excellent opener you are guaranteed to have never heard of. On his shed (amphitheater) tour of a few years ago, he brought with him a beautiful world music band from a struggling country with bad infrastructure. For the band (whose name I sadly do not remember), it was the opportunity of a lifetime. But being the opening act on a summer amphitheater tour means you hit the stage in broad daylight while loud Americans carrying nachos and large plastic cups of beer find their seats. So there I was watching these colorfully dressed musicians play folk instruments from their country while their beautiful and exotic female singer tried to get the small clots of crowd to set down their two beers each and clap in 5/4 (clap, clap, clap, [break] clap-clap). Redemption came when the band returned to the stage to join in the joyful “In Your Eyes” encore.
At the level of Peter Gabriel and AC/DC (there’s a double bill for you…), the job of opening act is a fine one in spite of any harsh reactions or pity claps you get while on stage. Hey, you’re on stage, playing music. Isn’t that 80 percent of the dream? (The rest is legal fees and gear problems.)
Where opening acts really pay a heady price for their visions of paradise (thank you Mr. P.) is at the working musician level where the stages are far smaller, the crews far surlier, and in some instances, the headlining act has kissed fame briefly and gotten drunk from the smooch. These are the kind of gigs where you have to sit the drummer down and tell him to leave 35 percent of his kit in the van if he wants his bandmates to join him onstage. It is also where you have a choice of no sound check or a sound check while the crowd is filing in. This choice is not as easy as it sounds—while a fast sound check in front of a few hundred people is not that bad, the soundman already hates you because you’re there and now you want him to do his job? I have suffered the consequences of choosing poorly in these instances. The punishment is usually a combination of no guitar or bass in the mix, no monitors for the singer, and half of the PA being turned off during your set.
I have seen countless others suffer the same fate. The most recent encounter was just a few weeks ago when I went to see, as a headliner on the club circuit, the first band I saw as an opener—UFO. As I sat in judgment while watching UFO’s opening act, who were truly dreadful on so many levels, I saw them gleefully commit all the offenses that make soundmen, headliners, and house crews hate opening acts. While their set was quite bad from a rock ‘n’ roll point of view, it was quite good as a tutorial on what not to do to survive the opening slot intact.
For example: If you, the lead singer, are going to drink on stage, make sure you know your band’s gear from the headliner’s gear so you do not struggle with the many choices of where to set your beer down.
Headgear is strictly forbidden (Lady Gaga notwithstanding). Don’t blame me, blame Slash and Buckethead.
Contrary to what you’ve learned on VH1’s Behind the Music and those horrible rock ‘n’ roll schools where you meet drug-addled has-beens with tax problems, never pretend you are playing to a full house when everyone in the room knows you are not. In fact, if the audience to band member ratio is 4:1 or less, ask them their names, thank them kindly, and do not yell anything about having a good time.
That loud squeal you hear is from you pointing the mic at the monitors. STOP IT!
Just walk on stage like everybody else, okay? If your singer mentions the words “make an entrance,” hit him really hard (probably not in the face, but I’ll leave that up to you).
Do not act proud when your girlfriend disappears for 15 minutes or more with a member of the headlining band or someone from their crew. But when she returns, go ahead, kiss her fully on the mouth—I dare ya.
It doesn’t matter that your guitarist is Asian, Samurai headbands look totally lame unless you’re being ironic, sardonic, or Rudy Sarzo from Quiet Riot circa 1983.
Unless you are illiterate and prepared to talk about your plight in between songs, never ever say, “Thank you, Crowd!”
Admittedly, I give opening acts a few extra claps and whistles if they do not suck because too often they are in a no-win situation—there in the name of destiny and no control over any of it except in how they respond to the challenge. (Hopefully with grace under pressure, eh?) If they sound like crap, it may not necessarily be their fault. When it is, it’s usually pretty obvious. And if I got the call to open for someone coming through town—I’d take it in a second. Think of the exposure!
Tripping Wire: PIPEline Answers the Cable Problem
The wires. Keyboards have them, guitars and basses need them, and even drums have them (the snare). Everyone but the singer, who gets to be wireless, is at the mercy of them. Some singers keep the wire as a prop. I cannot imagine Roger Daltrey with a wireless mic. For some reason, we musicians hate our wires except for the ones we tune then strum and bend. They are a pain, frankly—an awkward tether when trying to be free.
I remember one of my first high-end guitar cables (wires) seemed to be the last coiled cable ever made. I say that because I was the last person to be seen playing one outside a vintage rock documentary. My coiled cable was heavy and only about two-feet long. But when I plugged it in to my amp and guitar, I could stretch it out a good 25 feet—of which not a single inch ever touched the ground. It almost killed the singer on more than one occasion and eventually the band sat me down and gave me an ultimatum—get a proper straight cable or get out (though we can still borrow your PA, right mate?).
Needless to say, I bought a straight cable, and after years of lugging around as a backup the six or seven pounds of tightly wound, thickly insulated copper wire with telephone jacks on either end, the coiled cable was finally abandoned. I think it was at a bar outside Gustine. It was so ruggedly industrial I bet it’s still in use somewhere as a makeshift thingy. Towns like Gustine thrive on makeshift thingies.
Riot Gear!: Slacker Opens Up to Unsigned Bands, Offers On Demand Music
by: Max Mobley
Just in time for SXSW, interactive radio service Slacker has made two very significant announcements that could steal large amounts of thunder from Spotify’s Daniel Ek, this year’s SXSW Interactive keynote speaker. Spotify is the popular European interactive radio site boasting unlimited on demand music for free, and Ek has been in the States generating buzz and controversy over an impending US launch. Meanwhile, Slacker Radio continues its push to become the gold standard in streaming radio; its elegantly customizable station has jumped from the web to the major smartphone platforms, as well as several digital music services including Sony and RCA.
Last week, Slacker confirmed reports that it is expanding its services to include unlimited on demand music, something Ek and Spotify have been working to deliver to the US for quite some time. Given Slacker is US based and already has a very large audience, this news cannot be well received in the Spotify camp, nor Rhapsody, Napster, or Pandora camps. Slacker’s level of customization, coupled with its new on demand music service, could seriously change the landscape of streaming radio. Imagine creating your own radio station with just two bands, and having their songs play on demand. Imagine playing your favorites exactly when you want to hear them, instead of inside the equivalent of a multi-song rock block. Imagine artists getting paid for their music outside of iTunes. That is just some of what Slacker brings to the table.
Covered recently here in Riot Gear, Warner Music Group and others have made a strong case that free, on demand music does not work for labels or artists. Slacker is already one step ahead of that with its very successful and affordable subscription service, which will no doubt be tied heavily to its upcoming on demand offerings. It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out over the next few months.
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by: Max Mobley
published: March 15, 2010
in column: Riot Gear!, What Goes On
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