Posts tagged music
Bob Marley, February 6, 1945 - May 11, 1981
Video: War, from the 1979 Amandla Concert at Harvard University.
Oh, Canada: Music Publishers Target the CBC Over its Streaming Music Site
Head over to CBC Music and you’ll find a streaming music site run by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Canadian media companies aren’t happy about the on-demand, Web-based service and are taking steps to block the country’s national broadcaster from providing the tunes for free.
At issue is the lower royalty rates the CBC — as a public broadcaster — pays for the music compared to what private companies pay.
Via the Globe and Mail:
The companies argue they must charge customers to offset royalty costs which are triggered every time a song is played, while the CBC gets around the pay-per-click problem because it is considered a non-profit corporation.
They want Ottawa to intervene and they’ve offered Federal Heritage Minister James Moore some alternatives: Shut the site down, force it to play only Canadian music, or insist that it charge for access in the same way private broadcasters do.
“The only music that you can hear for free is when the birds sing,” Eric Boyko, CEO of Stingray, a company that has a subscription-based music app on the market, tells the Globe and Mail.
Let’s hope that remains true. In February, a YouTube user had his videos removed for violating a copyright claim by Rumblefish, a music licensing company. The offending audio: birds chirping in the background as the video creator walked about outside.
Soundcloud explores the four effects sound has on us – physiological, psychological, cognitive, and behavioral – in a concrete complement to their wonderful abstract short film, Sound.
FJP: Related and heartwarming is the documentary Alive Inside about how music can awaken people suffering from degenerative memory loss. Watch a clip here.
Snoop Dogg’s Smokable Book
Filed under publishing innovation: Snoop Dogg is releasing Rolling Words: A Smokable Songbook.
The book contains Snoop’s lyrics printed on rolling paper and has a twine cover with a spine you can light a match on.
H/T: Time.
If you have downloaded music using this website you may have committed a criminal offence which carries a maximum penalty of up to 10 years imprisonment and an unlimited fine under UK law.
And we thought the $150,000 per infringement fine under US copyright law was steep.
Via Ars Technica:
The 70,000 daily visitors to popular music site RnBXclusive.com were met with a purposely terrifying message on Tuesday and part of Wednesday. The UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) took the site down, arrested its operator, and threw up a splash page that warned downloaders of “up to 10 years imprisonment.” Thought statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement in the US were ludicrous? SOCA warns that downloaders from the site could face an “unlimited fine under UK law.”…
…While RnBxclusive.com might have been a hive a scum and villainy, SOCA agents hardly give the impression of acting as neutral agents of justice. The takedown was clearly pushed by the recording industry, which in itself is fine; all sorts of private parties complain to police when laws have been broken. But the SOCA warning page on RnBxclusive.com went well beyond a mere legal statement and warning.
“As a result of illegal downloads young, emerging artists may have had their careers damaged,” it said. “If you have illegally downloaded music you will have damaged the future of the music industry.”
Random aside: The Serious Organized Crime Agency? That’s a Monty Python skit waiting to happen.
Entire Lomax Library to Come Online
To celebrate what would have been the folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax’s 97th birthday, the Global Jukebox label is releasing a 16-track sampler called “The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center.”
This is part of a larger effort to bring the entire Lomax archive online.
Via the New York Times:
A decade after his death technology has finally caught up to Lomax’s imagination. Just as he dreamed, his vast archive — some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners — is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online. About 17,000 music tracks will be available for free streaming by the end of February, and later some of that music may be for sale as CDs or digital downloads…
…Starting in the mid-1930s, when he made his first field recordings in the South, Lomax was the foremost music folklorist in the United States. He was the first to record Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, and much of what Americans have learned about folk and traditional music stems from his efforts, which were also directly responsible for the folk music and skiffle booms in the United States and Britain that shaped the pop-music revolution of the 1960s and beyond.
Lomax worked both in academic and popular circles, and increased awareness of traditional music by doing radio and television programs, organizing concerts and festivals, and writing books, articles and essays prodigiously. At a time when there was a strict divide between high and low in American culture, and Afro-American and hillbilly music were especially scorned, Lomax argued that such vernacular styles were America’s greatest contribution to music.
Image: Woody Guthrie, Lilly Mae Ledford, Alan Lomax, New York, 1944, via The American Folklife Center.
The Musical Roller Coaster
Via Virtual Republic:
Visualization of the 1st violin of the 2nd symphony, 4th movement by Ferdinand Ries in the shape of a roller coaster. The camera starts by showing a close-up of the score, then focuses on the notes of the first violin turning the staves into the winding rail tracks of the rollercoaster. The notes and bars were exactly synchronized with the progression in the animation so that the typical movements of a rollercoaster ride match the dramatic composition of the music.
Created for the Zurich Chamber Orchestra.
Run Time: 1:00
H/T: The Society Pages.
For a Solo Artist to Earn US Monthly Minimum Wage
Interesting numbers to know if you’re a musician and want to go/stay independent.
Detail from The World of Online Music by Grovo Labs.
Visualizing Bach
Alexander Chen’s Baroque.me captures and visualizes the first prelude from JS Bach’s Cello Suites.
As Chen explains:
I created eight strings, as the Prelude’s natural phrasing is in groups of eight notes. The orbiting nodes pluck the strings, like a rotating music box. You can also grab and throw the nodes off track, and watch the system slowly regain its rhythm.
A harp is built around string length, with strings shortening as they ascend in pitch. This piece behaves like an impossible harp, as strings morph to the needed lengths.
The looping, eight-note pattern is something we see all the time in grid-based drum sequencers. Bach’s Prelude is actually very grid-like as well. At every moment, the piece shows a visual snapshot of an arpeggio. It shows which notes change from bar to bar, and which stay the same.
Classical notation is convenient and concise code. But visually, it’s completely disconnected from any actual physical characteristics of sound. String lengths, on the other hand, are visual representations of the frequencies they produce.
Baroque.me isn’t just a video though. Visit the site and you can interact with the strings and play something yourself.
H/T: O’Reilly Radar.
Music — and chart — junkies rejoice: Billboard releases its back issues all the way to the 1940s.
Via Billboard:
We’ve partnered with Google to offer digital versions of more than 1000 classic issues of Billboard magazine for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. Look at charts dating back to the ’40s, read reviews of iconic ’60s albums, revisit cover stories through the 2000s and relive music history, exactly as it happened.
Nothing “Appealing” About This: Court Reinstates $675K File Sharing Verdict
Re-blogging or “curating” originally reported news articles in full, anywhere, everywhere, remains an un-fineable offense. But promoting some tunes among a highly desirable consumer group—college kids— that’s illegal, and worth somethin’ like a couple few grand per track. Music doesn’t grow on trees! (But then again neither does good, investigative reporting, does it?)
FROM WIRED’S David Kravets @dmkravets:
“A federal appeals court on Friday reinstated a whopping $675,000 file sharing verdict that a jury levied against a Boston college student for making 30 tracks of music available.
The decision by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reverses a federal judge who slashed the award as “unconstitutionally excessive.” U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner of Boston reduced the verdict to $67,500, or $2,250 for each of the 30 tracks defendant Joel Tenenbaum unlawfully downloaded and shared on Kazaa. The Recording Industry Association of America and Tenenbaum appealed in what has been the nation’s second RIAA file sharing case to ever reach a jury.
The Obama administration argued in support of the original award, and said the judge went too far when addressing the constitutionality of the Copyright Act’s damages provisions. The act allows damages of up to $150,000 a track.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/09/file-sharing-verdict-reinstated/
The Google Doodle in honor of Freddie Mercury’s 65th birthday is quite awesome.
Journalists need music too.
To celebrate today’s launch of the Green Album, OK Go do the Muppets Show Theme Song.
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