Category: Music

I’ve had satellite radio for over a year now, and even they don’t play XTC. Once seen as one of the UK most vital independent pop bands, XTC first rose to popularity and now seems to have fallen out of both indie and pop markets.

To be sure, the group had its problems. They don’t have a single album you can listen to straight through without wincing at least occasionally [Black Sea comes closest, though English Settlement has their highest peaks], the fey Britishisms can be offputting, and the vocals are sometimes monotonous [have I sold you on them yet?]. Plus they don’t have a truly convincing greatest hits collection. But their very best songs are among the most significant achievements of rock and roll. Andy Partridge’s songwriting, polyrhythms and studio sense have given me some of my most treasured musical moments. Let’s hope they stand the test of time.

I don’t do iPod (I can’t stand the poor sound quality), but buy the following if you can: 1) No Language in our Lungs [Partridge’s favorite song from the group], 2) Helicopter, 3) Ladybird, 4) Snowman [my favorite], 5) No Thugs in Our House, 6) Senses Working Overtime, 7) I’d Like That, 8) Crocodile, 9) Rocket from a Bottle, 10) Yacht Dance, 11) Brainiac’s Daughter [technically by the “Dukes of Stratosphere”], and 12) Holly up on Poppy, just to name a few. Those songs are my nomination for what belongs in the canon but isn’t yet there.

Addendum: Economist Dan Klein, who first turned me on to XTC, adds the following:

“I liked Tyler’s post on the British rock band XTC. But there is something about XTC he didn’t mention. Not sure how to describe it. Something like the soul wrenching sound of focus and determination. In Led Zeppelin and NWA you also get a pure sense of masculine being, but there’s something special about it in XTC. The self as a team of men in a boiler room making a machine serve an over-riding purpose. I think of songs like “Paper and Iron,” “Travels in Nihilon,” “Heaven is Paved with Broken Glass,” “Tissue Tigers,” and, above all, “Roads Girdle the Globe.” I’d say the peaks come on the albums Go 2, Drums and Wires, and Black Sea.”

“Hail mother motor!
Hail piston rotor!
Hail wheel!””

It can work for you, read here, courtesy of Wired magazine. Here’s just one bit:

Radio@Netscape offers more than 175 free stations with fixed genres. In addition to the standard pop, rock and jazz categories, there’s a great mix of less-common genres including Hawaiian, klezmer, Bollywood, doo-wop, Motown and baroque. The single-minded fan can catch channels devoted to Ray Charles, Prince or the Doors. The WB channel features music from its various television shows.

Here is more on the service. I am especially fond of the Dancehall channel.

Internet radio, of course, is a substitute for downloading music. In the limiting case (if population were much, much larger), you could have a radio station for every song. Mandatory licensing would then apply, which is how the law ought to have treated music downloads in the first place (though here is a Cato critique of the idea). You can offer the song, you simply have to pay royalties, at some legally fixed rate, after the fact. We would have a more competitive market for downloads and a much greater selection of music. On the downside, we probably wouldn’t have those neat iPod device designs, as profit margins for Apple would be lower.

The law, of course, is keen to maintain the distinction between Internet radio and downloads. But how about a station that played the “requested song” with a probability of 0.4? Here is an article about “customizable” Internet raio, and why it might prove more useful than downloads. Here is readable information about the legal status of Internet radio. On a different but related front, now the RIAA is worred about digital radio too.

I’ve been listening lately to Jeff Tweedy’s group Wilco, a group with a very high “critical praise to sales ratio”. Here is the Coase theorem in operation:

[Jeff] Tweedy’s canonization doesn’t actually happen until 2001, when he records “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel,” an ambitious, often gorgeous album that is famously rejected as too obscure by Warner/Reprise. Tweedy buys back the album for $50,000, sells it to the far smaller Nonesuch Records and becomes a folk hero, especially to major-label haters, when critics decide that “YFH” is pretty much a masterpiece. (Never mind that Nonesuch is actually another subsidiary of Warner. )

Here is the full story.

Museum goers love to wear headphones during special art exhibitions and hear special commentary. Perhaps classical music should take a cue from this experience:

…subscribers to the orchestra’s e-mail list have been invited to try another technological advance: this time a screen small enough to fit into your hand. The device will provide a play-by-play analysis of the music as the concertgoer listens. No pictures (so far), only words: the text changes every 15 to 20 seconds. Think sports patter, only highbrow, musical and blessedly mute.

“Curious about what Charles Ives is up to in his `Three Places in New England?,’ ” the e-mail message asked, inviting subscribers on Wednesday to a performance of the Philharmonic’s Charles Ives Festival next week. “Concert Companion will tell you as the music unfolds before you.”

Viewers had already rejected large movie screens of the performers, a’ la rock concert. Many found it “distracting.”

Here is the full story. Many American orchestras are experiencing fiscal troubles, and London’s low cost, commercial Savoy Opera just closed. So perhaps some innovation is in order.

What would I want?: I’d like to check my email during the concert; I’d also like to discuss the proceedings with my companions, perhaps through silent Instant Messaging of some kind. But I won’t predict any of these will happen. In the time of Beethoven people ate and drank during classical concerts. They played cards and sometimes brought their animals. A contemporary non-profit, dependent on donations and government grants, is unlikely to take such steps. For another solution, read this article on classical crossover. Until classical music makes a comeback in the home, it won’t be self-financing in the outside world. Perhaps the future of the genre lies in Korea.

That’s cell phone ringers. I doubt if the estimated numbers measure the true “world” market, but the point remains that this is an important and growing revenue source.

And how is this for a marketing question?

The rise of the ringtone throws up some puzzling questions for the music industry. “One of the things we have to look at is why kids are perfectly happy to spend £3.99 on a ringtone, but they think a similar amount is too much to pay for a single,”

Phone users will buy different ringers and change their ringer, depending on the time of day or their social circle. And did you know that there is a Ringtone magazine.

Check them out. I’ll disagree with 2, 5, 8, and 9. Nonetheless the list is a useful corrective designed to jolt your thinking. I’ll add that Benjamin Britten, and indeed most other British composers besides Elgar, is simply boring. Thanks to Marc Poitras for the pointer.

A new study by two researchers at Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, finds that sharing digital music files has no effect on CD sales. This is the first study that directly compares actual downloads of music files and store sales of CDs.

The authors, Associate Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard Business School in Boston and Professor Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, conclude that “File sharing had no effect on the sale of popular CDs in the second half of 2002. While downloads occurred on a vast scale during this period – 3 million simultaneous users shared 500 million files on the popular network FastTrack/KaZaA alone – most people who shared files appear to be individuals who would not have bought the albums that they downloaded,” say the authors…

Even in the professors’ most pessimistic statistical model, it takes 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by a single copy. If this worst-case scenario were true, file sharing would have reduced CD sales by 2 million copies in 2002. To provide a point of reference, CD sales actually declined by 139 million copies from 2000 to 2002.

Here is another interesting tidbit:

31 percent of all individuals who download music live in the United States. Other important countries are Germany with a 13 percent share of worldwide users, Italy with 11 percent, Japan with 8 percent and France with 7 percent. File sharers in the United States are particularly active. While they represent 31 percent of worldwide users, they download 36 percent of all files.

U.S. file sharers download files from all over the world. Only 45 percent of the files downloaded in the United States come from computers in the U.S. 16 percent of music files are downloaded from computers in Germany, 7 percent from Canada, 6 percent from Italy, 4 percent from the U.K. A legal strategy that focuses mostly on the United States is unlikely to change the supply of music files.

In other words, going after domestic uploaders, as the RCAA is doing, won’t cut off supply.

Here is one summary. Here is the original research.

My take: Yes I believe the result. Most downloaders are young or just sampling songs for kicks. But I doubt if this, legal developments aside, would be true five years from now. Over time I expect more people to forgo buying the CD, unless of course the law intervenes.

Addendum: Newmark’s Door offers some additional links. Larry Lessig argues for complementarity. Here is an article that copyright is too strict more generally, and yes The Grey Album is wonderful.

Alison Krauss has the voice of an angel. You probably heard her on the Academy Awards singing a track from Cold Mountain or on the wonderful soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou? where she sings the heart-breakingly beautiful Down to the River to Pray. She plays with the versatile Union Station whose I am a Man of Constant Sorrow was also featured in O Brother. For more, Alison Kraus + Union Station Live is an excellent place to begin.