Sean Patrick Cooper

The Brief Histories & Modern Journey of a Vinyl Record

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:15:35 -0500

The Brief Histories & Modern Journey of a Vinyl Record:

See: A record being made in Brooklyn, from the recording studio to the store

An essay on music and people

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 20:10:00 -0400

With so many options for control and power over our music, we run the risk of falling prey to a fantasy of what Baudrillard calls “potentialitites linked to usage.” Instead of employing our music and mp3 players as conduits to our “psychological” sanctuaries, we fascinate ourselves with the mechanics of music curating.

...Two parts bourgeois museum gathering and one part carnival.

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 21:25:23 -0400

...Two parts bourgeois museum gathering and one part carnival.:

“Attendants guided the line through a disorienting path of back doors and service hallways before corralling us into the bottom level of the Guggenheim’s famous rotunda. Here the scene became generally bizarre–funny to see, disorienting to be in–three parts rave, two parts bourgeois museum gathering and one part carnival.”

So what kind of music is this? It’s obviously music,...

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

So what kind of music is this? It’s obviously music, right?—it sounds like it at least—but I don’t think it can be identified by the normal labels we would have given it in the past. Or, more specifically, it can’t be identified by only what it sounds like. Its type or essence is as much about how its presented and made as it is by the singing proper. The broad category under which this falls would have to be something like Video Music, or Online Music (or something much more clever than that, lest people mistake it for a menu tab in a new release of iTunes).

What’s interesting is that it relates to a traditional music performance in multiple ways. There’s a performer here who felt compelled to share his creation with an audience. His goal or at least one of his goals isn’t to monetize his creative output—his desire is to just put out his stuff. That’s one. Another is that he’s using a relatively crude tool—his webcam—to make a more complex sound. Musicians have been doing this for centuries. Obvious examples abound. A kitchen spoon, a washboard, a casette recorder for field loops (hello The Books). And yet, it still doesn’t look or register in my mind as anything like traditional music.

So what is it?

Some General Instructions

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:17:50 -0400

Some General Instructions:

This is good:

Do not bake bread in an oven that is not made of stone
Or you risk having imperfect bread. Byron wrote,
“The greatest pleasure in life is drinking hock
And soda water the morning after, when one has
A hangover,” or words to that effect. It is a
Pleasure, for me, of the past. I do not drink so much
Any more. And when I do, I am not in sufficiently good
Shape to enjoy the hock and seltzer in the morning.
I am envious of this pleasure as I think of it. Do not
You be envious. In fact I cannot tell envy
From wish and desire and sharing imperfectly
What others have got and not got. But envy is a good word
To use, as hate is, and lust, because they make their point
In the worst and most direct way, so that as a
Result one is able to deal with them and go on one’s way.

more….

(via antonyhare) Very glad to have rediscovered Antony Hare,...

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:57:50 -0400

(via antonyhare)

Very glad to have rediscovered Antony Hare, after missing him in my Google Reader from an old blog he ran years ago.

Oxymoron: Classy GIFs

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 15:54:42 -0400

Oxymoron: Classy GIFs:

It's an experience--not a message

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 21:20:11 -0400

It's an experience--not a message:

I really enjoyed the Samuel Delany interview, for a variety of reasons. Top one being this right here:

This was the major thing I took away from the interview—the major thing I found a great amount of truth in: that the greatest gift from literature isn’t some message you can bottle into a line or two and treat as a transferable commodity, a message you can quote and insert into a paper or notebook or at the bottom of an email signature, but rather an actual living experience. An experience defined by that moment when you take possession of another person’s view of the world and re-examine your own world view from this new perspective. It’s these transformative experiences that are the bedrock of every great encounter I’ve had with literature. When I get to experience what it means to be a living human being from an entirely different set of senses and perceptions—from the unique senses and perceptions owned and operated and ideally honestly distilled into the text by the author—this is when I truely experience literature. Try to capture that experience in a quote or message or witty “take away” you can toss into your Facebook status message. Try to distill the experience of great literature into 140 characters and you will then understand, perhaps, what it’s like when a parent is asked to articulate in a sentence or two why, exactly, she loves her children.

pitchfork: This carefully narcotized James Drake mashup mix...

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 23:01:52 -0400

pitchfork:

This carefully narcotized James Drake mashup mix almost makes too much sense.

This will do quite well, download + hype wise. I’ve never heard of the remix artists, Bombé and Mr. Caribbean. I wonder if this will do for their career what the Grey Album did for Danger Mouse.

But Is Anyone Looking?

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 22:29:46 -0400

But Is Anyone Looking?:

In the commercial sphere, marketers are also looking beyond facts and bits of information, in order to determine not just what you have bought, but what kinds of pitches appealed to you when you did. Once they have compiled your “persuasion profile,” they will refine those targeted ads even further. And if marketing companies can do this, why not political candidates, the government, or companies that want to sway public opinion?

That’s from Sue Halpern’s interesting piece on the state and future of the internet and online marketing, in the NYRB. One thought I had while reading this was that if a moderate internet user is anything like me, then that user is pretty much oblivious to website advertisements. Pop ups, banner ads, side bar ads—ads within the text, hyperlink ads, even the Gmail/Google result ads—I have blinders up that either allow me to ignore them completely or zero in on the little x-box that makes the really annoying ones go away. And even when I’m X’ing boxes, I’m not reading the ad, I’m just realizing for that split second that something is blocking me from seeing the text or video I wanted to see. If I’m registering anything about the ad, it’s the fact that this particular website has now reached that unfortunate status of Annoying Advertisement Enabler.

“The song’s title refers to a 1880s...

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:51:32 -0400

“The song’s title refers to a 1880s colloquialism for a partner or friend. The phrase has a number of etymologies; two Cockney rhyming slang explanations identify the phrase as coming from “dutch plate” (“mate”) or “Duchess of Fife” (“wife”). Chevalier, however, claimed that his wife’s face reminded him of the clock face of a Dutch clock.”

The New Music Industry Blueprint

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 10:58:57 -0400

The New Music Industry Blueprint :

I’m still under the impression that the new music industry has yet to be designed.

No one yet has figured out how to blueprint the post iPod marketplace.

With the announcement of iCloud, I believe we’re getting a glimpse of what at least part of the marketplace foundation will look like. Spotify’s stateside release is another significant piece of that foundation. The missing and unknown pieces? The pieces that need to solidify before anything resembling a new marketplace can be built? (1) Critical Mass adoption and (2) artist’s entrepreneurial efforts.

(1) Critical Mass

It is unlikely that the music listening masses’ sense of entitlement about digital music will ever go away. Piracy is rampant and the expectation that most music will be either instantly or eventually free is nearly impossible to combat. Yes, some people pay for music, but the majority of people only pay for a portion of their libraries and that’s something the industry will have to work with, not against.

What can possibly change is the way that people listen to their music.

The thing that makes me skeptical about the streaming services and cloud lockers is their dependence on an internet connection. Broadband is not universally available and not universally free. What happens to a listener in a subway or driving on a remote road sans internet? Why would that user abandon their iPod/iPhone that works all the time for a service that works most of the time?

(2) The artists

There’s a phenomenal opportunity for artists right now to dictate the terms of their own careers. Direct to audience communication via web/online channels is enough on its own to negate the need for an artist’s involvement with a major label’s marketing department. The iTunes store and Bandcamp methods of delivery negate the need for a label’s distribution arm. The low cost of computer-based production negate the need for a label’s studio.

I get the impression that there’s a lot of testing of the waters going on right now and no one has taken the full plunge. Jonathan Coulton might be the first one into the pool, sort of speak, but I’m surprised that there haven’t been more success stories like his. That there hasn’t been an artist or a collective of artists dominating the spotlight for their creative use of technology to create careers. Odd Future has received some attention for how they built a post-iPod fan base. However, their apathy and reluctance to position themselves as anything other than ant-establishment everything undermines their opportunity to really lead a new generation of artists.

The thing that I find curious is that there hasn’t been an artist-led redesign. The efforts have been individual, cowboy-like, with musicians making it up as they go, creating their own methods for survival. Does the new marketplace have to be corporation-designed? Can’t it be designed by a company of like-minded artists?

There’s something missing still from the new marketplace. We haven’t seen yet the smart set of musicians who will crack the design from the inside out. I think this is in part because the expectation that the industry is label-driven still lingers, even though it’s obvious that the labels have no idea what their doing right now.

Money in the Streams?

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:02:00 -0400

Money in the Streams?:

Most interesting thing here is (1) Parker’s involvement w/ Spotify and his interest in the catalogue of the label. How valuable will the catalogues become once the streaming services take off? WIll the streaming services have traction? It’s going to be a battle b/w the streamers and the lockers, Spotify vs. ICloud and the others. The field is wide open right now.

“In the last 10 years we have presided over the greatest destruction in value in the history of the music industry,” he said, with a formerly $45bn industry “brought to its knees” to today’s $12bn worth. “Assuming we can stabilise things and restore growth, it shouldn’t be that difficult to preside over the greatest increase in value in the history of the recorded music industry.”

(Parker quoted in a FT blog post)

The subscription services will have be super slick, easy to use, and most importantly, iPod level popular for music listeners to put effort into building playlists online instead of with their stolen and legally acquired music on their desktops.

As people build libraries and playlists, they start subscribing to take that music on the move. Many are still sceptical about Spotify’s business model, but Mr Parker believes it’s a “dramatic paradigm shift” in consumption that “implies the traditional music companies are undervalued”.

Instagram Band Photos, Pre-iPhone

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:00:06 -0400

Instagram Band Photos, Pre-iPhone:

The woman on the left, Alma Gluck, sold 1 million records of her 1916 hit, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.”

One has to think that, if this photo was in wide circulation, her success was as much a result of her stylish branding & image as it was her talent. Check out that hat.

Call it Indie and call it a day

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 09:25:27 -0400

Call it Indie and call it a day:

Yet according to Adam Klein, its chief executive, eMusic has stayed strong and stuck to its indie roots by serving a niche clientele with sophisticated tastes and a tendency to buy more music than the average pop consumer.

“Everyone wanted to see if we were going to become a puppet for pop-culture music,” Mr. Klein said. “We said we never would, and we will continue to service this segment of the market, which is a very sizable segment of music connoisseurs.”

This article is a lazy examination of eMusic, the online “indie music” digital retailer. Lazy b/c the word ‘indie’ is used 8-times as a sort of cultural signifier, like hip-hop kids or skaters. Whatever, picking on the use of the word ‘indie’ is an easy target. Not worth delving deeply into.

What’s actually worth pointing out is how the company seeks to re-position itself in the digital distribution marketplace.

Take this quote again:

Mr. Klein said. “We said we never would, and we will continue to service this segment of the market, which is a very sizable segment of music connoisseurs.”

Klein is obviously trying to not abandon the customers who brought to his company a level of cultural clout and allowed eMusic to be seen as something like the local record store with good taste. However, he’s also trying to break into the segment of the market not frequented by ‘music connoisseurs,’ as he identifies it. This is strange, to me, to say that the quote unquote mainstream market is basically a bunch of fans with unrefined palates. I’d venture to say there’s a healthy segment of Lady Gaga’s fanbase that consider themselves to be sharply developed curators of their own preferences. Why, really, can’t a company be a curator of the below the radar fare along with the stuff that’s all over the radio and internet? The separation seems artificial, entirely arbitrary. Just make sure the music is good—service those who have a developed palette, and the revenue will accumulate.

Joan Didion & The Managerial Elite

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 09:30:25 -0400

Joan Didion & The Managerial Elite:

I’m enjoying this line immensely.

“The process today gives everyone a chance to participate,” Tom Hayden, by way of explaining “the difference” between 1968 and 1988, said to Bryant Gumbel on NBC at 7:50 AM on the day after Jesse Jackson spoke at the Democratic convention in Atlanta. This statement was, at a convention which had as its controlling principle the notably non-participatory idea of “unity,” demonstrably not true, but people inside the process, constituting as they do a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is. They tend to prefer the theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which might be learned empirically as “anecdotal.”

This is from a 68’ NYRB piece, “Insider Baseball.”

I’m most drawn to her characterization of this managerial elite—not because of who it represented when she wrote it, but because of how it might describe factions of our media and even business entities today. The media’s managerial elite is more noticeable, higher profile than their strictly business counterparts, but both operate themselves with the same aloofness and disregard for the way the world intersects the people who live in that world.

Modern Musician =Musician+CEO

Fri, 20 May 2011 20:17:00 -0400

Modern Musician =Musician+CEO:

One third of Radiohead’s management team on the new music biz:

“Under the new way of doing things, you’re a chief executive of an artist’s business with multiple revenue streams that go across multiple countries.”

Every musician who’s not @ Jay-z’s level has to hustle a living (oddly enough, sort of like the character Jay-z himself created in his raps). The current commercial landscape is one where a musician must always keep his eyes open for opportunity and know how to do honest business at every opportunity—or else he will fail. Who’s going to crack the code and figure it out? Who’s figured it out already?

New Kid on the Block: Byliner

Thu, 19 May 2011 13:54:28 -0400

New Kid on the Block: Byliner:

Tayman took issue with the idea that people have too much to read. “I don’t think readers ever suffer from having too many *great* stories to read,” he wrote. “The idea is to save readers from wasting their time on reading that might not be satisfying — to steer them away from unsatisfying stories, and point them to stories that not only are great reads, but great reads that will resonate with them. We think that people don’t suffer from having *too* much to read, but from not being able to easily find stories they know that they’ll enjoy.”

They’re banking their reputation on their ability to churn out and be the curator for super high-quality work. It will be interesting to see what their tastes are like. More importantly, though, will be how the market and the market’s money replies.

DJ, What's That Tune?

Mon, 16 May 2011 09:42:31 -0400

DJ, What's That Tune?:

Jamaican DJs, to prevent rival DJs from learning what hot new record they recently acquired and played, would scratch off the record label and rename the disc w/ something related to their DJ name or club:

By the time tunes came into Jamaica their original US release date was pretty much irrelevant. Their exclusivity was what was valuable, thus the most important piece of equipment for a sound man bringing in American records was a coin. Any coin, the edge of it being used to remove any information printed on the records’ labels. This needed to be done quickly, too, because industrial espionage, employee bribery and all manner of coercion would be brought into play to discover a disc’s identity, so thefewer people who knew a killer tune’s actual name the lower the likelihood of a rival getting hold of a copy. After all the label copy had been erased, it wasn’t uncommon for a newly anonymous tune to be renamed, usually with a title glorifying the sound man or sound system that was playing it—‘Count Smith Shuffle’, ‘Goodies’ Boogie’, ‘On Beat Street’, and so on (Bradley 2001: 16–17).

Via R. Osborne’s sharp “The Record and Its Label”

This technology (internet) is ruining civilization

Sun, 15 May 2011 10:00:06 -0400

This technology (internet) is ruining civilization:

One of the things that John Brockman’s collection on the Internet and the mind illustrates is that when people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. Life was once whole, continuous, stable; now it is fragmented, multi-part, shimmering around us, unstable and impossible to fix. The world becomes Keats’s “waking dream,” as the writer Kevin Kelly puts it.

The odd thing is that this complaint, though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965. When department stores had Christmas windows with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart.

The claim ”the internet is ruining civilization” almost sounds repetitive when put into a certain kind of historical perspective.