Something new!

[pseydtonne]

I was reading a discussion at plastic.com about the RIAA's plans to ream everyone with an MP3 file. Most of the talk was basic:

1. Downloading MP3s is stealing;
2. ...but the most interesting stuff isn't available any other way;
3. so we hope they'll just go after the Britney Spears traders;
4. Say, whatever happened to the Fair Use laws?
5. Oh yeah, deregulation.

Then someone posted a useful point: MP3s are how a lot of people discover new bands. I wanted to scream "fah king duh! That was my buddy Scudder's point back in 1998 when he asked me to review MP3s for his new web site but he couldn't tell me where to find MP3s and I only had dial-up."

The real point was that you download a random track from a random band since the original methods of sampling new music (radio, MTV...) have stopped playing new music. If you dig it, you buy the album straight from the artist's web site. Then you go to a show and buy more crap, cuz the band's broke and you have a day job.

This one guy mentioned a band called Dismemberment Plan, which I'd never heard of before. So I went to the web site. The first visuals were two guys that looked like Phish fans on Segways. Eeek, right? I clicked on and looked for sample tracks. I grabbed the track "What Do You Want Me To Say?" because it had a sufficiently non-jam-band title. Jam bands don't offer ego or confrontation. Either way, it's a free sample.

I was hooked right away. I haven't dug a track so fast in years! It felt good to hear a rock band with a skinny but tight rhythm section, a singer with some nasal annoyance but just enough to get you to listen to the lyrics, lyrics that weren't purely insulin nor insolent. Check 'em out if you want.

It felt good to get something good out of a message board. Heck, I'm shocked I'd never heard of this band before (they seem to be from Boston; too many publicity photos from Logan Airport; however, one photo is underneath a school in DC). I gotta get out more.

-carving up boxes, Dante

Comments

[epanastatis.livejournal.com]

I went to see a Dismemberment Plan show at Maxwell's a while ago because they were playing a double bill with Enon, a Brooklyn group that does some interesting post-Mission of Burma electro-analog noodling. Though I had heard good things about DP, I wasn't impressed. Perhaps they're tighter on the studio tracks than playing live.

the continuing argument

[(Anonymous)]

Had a very long, very heated argument about this on a list between a musician and a programmer. The musician, while not himself making any money from his music, could not see how MP3s could do anything other than harm his chances. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I read an interesting paper on the economics of intellectual property, (but of course I can't find the link now) that showed how music sharing did not hurt the creators. It would seem, however, to hurt the major corporations, and that's what the real issue is.

-Teru
http://teru.blogspot.com

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Personally, I don't find the "I find new music through MP3s" argument very compelling, at least for [insert arbitrarily large percentage] of music listeners who don't really *want* to find stuff that is very new. Most folks, and I put myself in this category most of the time, don't want to "experience" music; we treat it as background, and other than the occasional new music that is pretty much like what we like, or the very occasional really cool new thing, we don't want to spend time scavenging nor effort in learning new musical paradigms.

Now, when Napster was up, the search engine was (IMO) broken, because it only let you look for stuff you knew about, so you couldn't download "A random song from a random band"; and that may have been just a technology issue, but the fact that it was so popular puts the lie to people who claim that folks don't download REAMS of free music that they would otherwise buy. Of course we do! Sheesh! If someone offers you stuff you like for free, you take it. *Maybe*, if you feel guilty, do you go buy the album, but anyone who talks about buying as much music as they downloaded is a chump or didn't download enough. ;-)

Nowadays my "new" music mostly comes from streaming broadcasts like Live365, but it's not *all* that new, really. I'd say most of the stations play about 25% new-to-me music; again, personal preference.

I've been taking the "long view" for a while now on Music, and Musicians, and trying to look at how it worked in the days before mass media (which seems to really be what changed how we think about music)...basically, throwing off the mindset that "Radio Playlists are where music was invented". Lots of interesting thoughts in there if you follow it through, and some conclusions if music becomes highly non-centralized (e.g., Rock Gods become really, really rare - a true power law curve). But I'm procrastinating a paper right now so I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

TMH