Do Fees Rationalize/Incentivize Communal-Culture Ecommerce?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The recent decision by bandcamp.com, the music-hosting service, to charge for free downloads has been met with understandable rancor. The site had situated itself as a constituent part of the Internet’s music ecology. Musicians and labels had made it part of their tech infrastructure, especially netlabels, which give away their music for free.

The relationship between Bandcamp and netlabels makes this development of particular concern for this website. A search on this site for “bandcamp” suggests how thoroughly the service has become part of the Creative Commons community, notably in the case of musicians like Diego Bernal and Y?arcka, and deeply non-commercial enterprises such as the multi-artist One Minute for the Sun compilation.

Bandcamp secured a certain elevation in the crowded field of music-hosting services, and then it went and changed the rules — and not one of those semi-cursory mutual-agreement notices, like when Apple changes its iTunes Store terms of services what seems like several times a week.

A September 9 post on its blog (blog.bandcamp.com) introduced a new system in which only a set number of free downloads would be available per user, this in stark contrast with what had been the case, a system that allowed unlimited downloads. The decision wasn’t surprising. Downloads require bandwidth and infrastructure, and bandwidth and infrastructure cost money.

What was a surprise was Bandcamp’s surprise. This is the opening graph of that notice:

Our hope was that free downloading might be highest amongst the artists who were also selling the most ”“ for example, a band giving away a track or two in promotion of a paid album. That way, the revenue share on the artist’s sales would naturally cover the costs associated with the streaming, support and storage of their freebies.

Given the preponderance of free on the Internet, from YouTube to the Internet Archive (aka archive.org), it seems peculiar that the people who put together Bandcamp expected free solely to be used as a kind of loss-leading promotional opportunity.

David Dufresne (of bandzoogle.com, a “band website platform” whose business is not dissimilar to that of Bandcamp) summed up the issue well in a response to a story at hypebot.com:

I think the major grudge that some people hold against their latest announcements is that they built their customer base of tens of thousands around a VC-money-fueled free service, offering little transparency as to how they would end up monetizing (probably wasn’t clear to the founders either, as they got started). Only after people had invested time and resources in building and promoting their Bandcamp page do they find out how much it will cost them.

In other words, it seems like the real loss-leader here was Bandcamp’s own: allow the free downloads for a long time, build a participatory audience, and then begin charging a fee. Before and after the Bandcamp decision, musicians host files on Bandcamp, collect them as albums, and charge what they want for downloads, along a sliding scale (a la Radiohead’s milestone release, In Rainbows) from zero to whatever the consumer’s heart desired and wallet allowed. The difference is that members now have a set number of free downloads, after which they have to pay to allow additional free downloads, pricing ranging from three cents (U.S.) to half that, depending on how many credits are purchased.

On Twitter, musician @joshwoodward noted:

WTG, BandCamp – with your new pricing, it’d only have cost me $39,000 to give my music away for free through you.

A commenter on Jason Sigal’s freemusicarchive.org writeup said:

Blaming us for using what they offered. I just thought that was unfair

The comment was in response to this section of the Bandcamp announcement:

It’s obviously unfair to burden every Bandcamp artist with the costs of a few outliers giving away hundreds of thousands of free downloads, so we’re making some changes to button that up.

And musician Phil Wilkerson over at his blog (philwilkerson.wordpress.com) wrote:

The romance with Bandcamp is over for me. I won’t be recommending Bandcamp to my friends or to other artists. In fact, I will have nothing positive to say about Bandcamp henceforth.

You have to wonder about their business acumen as well. Bandcamp has denied themselves an important way of generating site traffic and positive vibes and goodwill from the Creative Commons community. They have virtually spit in the face of the Creative Commons artists and netlabels who have driven traffic to their site.

The situation is unfortunate, to the extent that Bandcamp even revised its revision; instead of 200 free downloads, each account will get 200 free downloads per month (in addition, there are incentives).

What happens next at Bandcamp will be interesting to observe. Will pageviews and usage drop significantly? If they do, will the decrease in free-related traffic offset such drops? Will someone finally, as musician and netlabel administrator @hecanjog suggested, “[build] a front-end to archive.org as wonderful and slick as bandcamp.com”?

One of the issues with Bandcamp’s switch is how it treats all accounts equally, even though 200 free downloads for an individual artist’s page doesn’t correlate with 200 free downloads for a label’s page. There’s also no apparent easy way for users to offset an artist’s (or label’s) free-related debt. Bandcamp has, all these gripes aside, proved itself responsive to the input of its users. After capping a maximum upload size, the following addendum was posted on September 8: “Some Serious Ambient Artists have helped us realize that our thinking on this issue was very uptight, so we’ve modified our policy: once you’ve made a few sales through Bandcamp (totaling $20 USD or more), we’ll increase your upload limit to 600 megs (that’s like, one whole LaserDisc!).”

Anyhow, just as the Internet has introduced a wealth of micro-cultures in place of long-running Top 40 mono-cultures, I wonder if the same will be the case for financial interactions. Different people shop differently, consume differently, store their possessions differently. (I don’t know the background of those Serious Ambient Artists’ input, but it might have had to do with the fact that much ambient music is significantly longer than the average pop song.) Bandcamp’s system has many things to its credit, among them an easy “trade an email address for a download” interface, and the sliding-scaled, multiple-format (MP3s at various compression rates, Ogg, etc.) download system.

I wonder if the next best step for Bandcamp is to figure out how to provide a broader range of financial alternatives. For example, if I enjoy a recording, I might be inclined to, after the fact, donate a small amount of funds to allow for future listeners to themselves experience a free download of the same track or album. This is along the lines of Cory Doctorow’s manner with the free versions of his ebooks; he says that if you enjoy the book, rather than paying him after the fact, buy a copy for a library (“Cory Doctorow Aids Libraries with Donations-for-Downloads Program”).

As Wilkerson himself put it, the issue of what it costs to promote one’s music on Bandcamp is largely an issue of framing: “I will pay what amounts to a hosting fee. I am not opposed to that at all. I suppose I could look at Bandcamp’s fee as a hosting fee.”

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • The @nytimes Today's Paper page is a great thing, even if article titles (when separated from articles themselves) read like crossword clues #
  • Outmoded retail = video game (that's a McLuhan paraphrase). Recordshop Tycoon more Farmville than Paperboy http://is.gd/fr5FF via @appscout #
  • #ff @audiobaum @clinicalarchive @thecentrifuge @rec72 @publicspaceslab @luvsound @stasisfield all post adventurous free music #netlabel #
  • Fave recent bioacoustics-L list entry: "Yesterday a Shark ( a bull) eated my Hydrophone." Email titled "Hydrophone bait" http://is.gd/fqTWU #
  • RIP, Frederick Jelinek (b. 1932), who helped "make it possible for computers to decipher and translate human speech" http://is.gd/fqJfr #
  • Cage's 4'33" now the name of a London literary magazine that's audio-only, @433mag http://www.fourthirtythree.com/ (via @saraivry @weegee) #
  • If you have the time, would you please mash up the terse piano of Chilly Gonzales' "Never Stop" & the terse piano of Bad Plus' "Never Stop"? #
  • Clooney's The American would make for an interesting double feature with Swinton's I Am Love. #
  • Recent Disquiet.com null searches: Big Daddy Kane, Alberto Caeiro, Cesar Mesa, Mackintosh Braun, Valentino Kanziani. #
  • Morning sounds: whirring hard drive, nursing child, passing buses, rumbling heater. #
  • Morning sounds: a deep rich white noise comprised of traffic (land and air), heating, plumbing, and domestic electronics. #
  • Many thanks to Thorsten Sideb0ard (@sideb0ard) for drawing my new Twitter background. More info on him at http://is.gd/flXiY #
  • Tuesday noon siren: drone distended today, like Kid Koala's scratching it; the voice especially loud, like it's my neighbor in the yard. #
  • 4G is reportedly on in San Francisco. Does the air feel different? http://is.gd/flA5c #
  • 11 amazing and generous ambient musicians put together this compilation of baby-friendly music (a la @_raymond_scott_) http://is.gd/fltDp #
  • Morning sounds: heater, hard drive, bus, post-feeding child rustling in her swaddle. #
  • RIP, Buddy Collette (b. 1921), personification of Los Angeles jazz. http://is.gd/flufG #
  • So, @emusic only lists two artists as being "similar to" Keith Fullerton Whitman: Christopher Bissonnette with two "n"s (correct) & one "n" #
  • So quiet. Mother & child sleeping; cars slip pass outside; speakers off; one headphone earpiece on, other left open to keep an ear on kid. #
  • #np An amazing new 11-track compilation of quiet music, about which I'll be saying more in the next day or so, when it goes live. #
  • Insane @yoshisjazz month: Charles Lloyd, Logic/Wasserman, Geri Allen does Dolphy (w/ Lake), Ayers, Liebman — and George Wein conversation. #
  • ♪ Afternoon tune: MOSS (Berg, Block, Roden, Vitiello) performance excerpt from this past weekend in San Jose http://is.gd/fkb00 #
  • Autohotkey + Readability. Thank you, @autohotkey + @arc90 #
  • Guitar picks depict floppy disk, boombox, MP3 controls, more; look under Objects at http://bit.ly/12kpicks — by @mapmap & @taylordeupree #
  • Geek trio in Terriers the best of its kind since the Lone Gunmen of X-Files days. #
  • Whenever I watch Mad Men, I wonder which character is closest to what Don DeLillo would have been like at the time. #
  • Still adjusting to expanded @wsj culture coverage. Keith Fullerton Whitman interview: "very bad-looking algebra problem" http://is.gd/fijat #
  • It Might Get Loud documentary worth it just for Jimmy Page revisiting where Zeppelin broke the levee, and playing a quick theremin solo. #
  • #♪ Afternoon listen: various KFW activities (modular and otherwise) from his website, http://keithfullertonwhitman.com #
  • C64 BASIC emulator has been approved for iOS app store. Any chance someone could skin it for those of us reared on the TRS-80? #tapedrive #
  • Apparently Four Tet has been on @twitter since 12:25pm on September 13: @fourtet #
  • N.E.R.D. on their favorite hip-hop producers. DJ Premiere? "Primo deserves his own pyramid. He's a pharaoh." http://is.gd/fgKia #
  • "Sound of Shadows module… [is] like the Boss DD-3 the way that a Panther is like my cat" / Brian Biggs gets delay-ed http://is.gd/fgJ5Z #
  • Somehow in my dream a song off the new album by the 88 was a song by Alex Chilton and Eric Carmen. #sleeplogic #

Fluid Movement Between Technological Generations (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This sneak peek of a forthcoming video game says a lot about generational iterations in digital entertainment and culture. In the game, Mimeo and the Kleptopus King, the player leaps between not only those standard signifiers of gaming progress in platformers (i.e., levels), but also between degrees of video-tech sophistication, from 2-bit through 16-bit, and potentially onward.

Generations of audio development are less easily trackable than those in gaming, which is more clear-cut in its platform-dependency, but I wonder if there’s a music out there that can not only glide as easily between worlds as this game does, but that does so with the sort of emotional meaning packed in here — retro Pong samples and off-the-rack vocoding do not count.

Up above are the hero at various bit levels — note that they’re not just the same drawing with higher levels of resolution. And here are two sample stages of the game, showing how color and shading are depicted:

You need to watch the video below to appreciate the fluidity with which the game addresses these generations of technology. You aren’t just playing the same video game at with varying degrees of visual sophistication; certain moves require you to consider which bit level is the best way to proceed.

 

Here are examples of four degrees of audio, as represented in the Mimeo score — a 2-bit bass line (MP3), a 4-bit hi-hat (MP3), an 8-bit melody (MP3), and a 16-bit counter melody (MP3):

[audio:http://www.shauninman.com/assets/music/mimeo/Fortress%20(2-bit%20NSF).mp3|titles=”2-bit bass”|artists=Shaun Inman] [audio:http://www.shauninman.com/assets/music/mimeo/Fortress%20(4-bit%20NSF).mp3|titles=”4-bit hi-hat”|artists=Shaun Inman] [audio:http://www.shauninman.com/assets/music/mimeo/Fortress%20(8-bit%20NSF).mp3|titles=”8-bit melody”|artists=Shaun Inman] [audio:http://www.shauninman.com/assets/music/mimeo/Fortress%20(16-bit%20NSF).mp3|titles=”16-bit counter melody”|artists=Shaun Inman]

Original video post at vimeo.com. More on the development of Mimeo at the website of its creator, Shaun Inman, who also wrote the game’s music: shauninman.com (there’s an update explaining the development slowdown). Additional game footage at
youtube.com/user/shauninman. Inman is also the developer of the game Horror Vacui (apple.com, creativeapplications.net).

Generative Experiment (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The blog of musician Alec Vance, aleatoric.backporchrevolution.com, takes its name — ale{atori}c, as he displays it in the site’s header — from a useful expansion of his given name. He’s Alex, his blog aleatoric, which Webster’s defines as “characterized by chance or indeterminate elements,” both of which words (chance, indeterminate) are closely associated with the work of John Cage. In a recent post, Vance dug into his exploration of aleatoric music, specifically “generative” music, and his attempts to, as he put it, “start simple.” Of course, as anyone who’s played with Conway’s Game of Life knows, the idea of a simple start is a meaningful one, for from simple starts complex structures may grow. Vance titled the 16th in his series of investigations into generative music “Opalize” (MP3), perhaps after Opal, the former record label of Brian Eno, whom he lists as one of his inspirations.

[audio:http://aleatoric.backporchrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/16-Opalize.mp3|titles=”Opalize”|artists=Alec Vance]

Vance’s vision here of generative music — that is, of music that is the result of a system set in motion, rather than of a hard-coded (aka “deterministic”) score that is interpreted — involves setting layers of randomized events atop each other. In this regard, he notes Eno’s Bloom app for Apple iOS, which involved “random ambient music based on a handful of parameters the user defines.” He also credits Terry Riley’s “In C,” whose structure of ambient counterpoint informs “Opalize.” Writes Vance:

I was able to take a simple 2-note passage (that forms the main drone) — playing only very long notes of C and F alternating which you can here, below — then separately for each of 2 additional “solo”synths, repitches randomly and remaps to a note on the C major pentatonic scale. These come and go randomly based on probabilities I set up and on multiples of 8 bars.

Then I added a drum machine loop, which also comes in based on random probabilities.

Finally, I added … some random feedback to the main drone and the drum machine at unexpected moments.

The result is very much as described, a series of shifting plates that provide a kind of doubled randomness: first, the structure of the individual lines, which are often interrupted by sudden variations (a rupture generally softened by the tonality Vance has employed), and second, the manner in which those varied plates interact. “Might be too jarring for the effect I was originally going for though,” he writes of his placement of the drum machine part, but overall the work, which is heard here in a 20-minute example, is only chaotic to the extent that it is lively — which is to say, full of life.

Original post at aleatoric.backporchrevolution.com.

These Guitar Picks Kill Genre Isolationists

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Don’t mistake these recent guitar picks as ironic.

They were produced recently by the 12k label, whose logo adorns the one in the upper right corner. Continuing counter-clockwise, another features the icon from that logo, itself derived from the 5¼ inch floppy disk of days gone by. A third is a closeup of the data-accessible regions of the floppy, and (in the upper right corner of the pick) the write-protection tab. Those three were designed by the 12k label’s owner, musician Taylor Deupree, who is also a talented photographer.

The other two picks were designed by Marcus Fischer, whose music is a frequent presence on this site. One (continuing counter-clockwise) shows a tape-loop machine, and the final one shows the standard digital-audio controls (“record, play, pause and repeat,” as Fischer lists them on his site, unrecnow.com). I initially mistook the tape-loop picture for a boombox, when it was reproduced at a small size. Fischer has a particular interest in the intersection of design and tape loops, having produced a lovely cassette-loop device whose image was widely circulated after he made it public in March of this year (see: disquiet.com).

On first glance, it’s potentially tempting for some to mistake these items as a collective pun. The 12k label traffics largely in music that would be called “electronic,” so the idea of a pick, let alone one emblazoned with tape-loop machines and ancient digital-data devices, suggests a certain amount of ironic distance. But the opposite is the case. For one thing, the tape-loop machine taps into the tradition associated with Robert Fripp of live sonic layering (on Twitter.com, @compactrobot tweeted “Frippertronics!” a minute after @taylordeupree admonished me for my boombox misreading). For another, a lot of 12k artists, notably Christopher Willits, use the guitar as one of their primary instruments. The label released its guitronic collection EADGBE (featuring Willits, along with Fonica, Keith Fullerton Whitman, and Sébastian Roux) back in 2003. Fischer is currently finishing an album for 12k.

The picks are available as a set in the 12k.com store, filed under “Objects.”