Sometimes being an artist who makes electronic music is more trouble than it's worth.  Sure, I usually have the wide world of sound at my fingertips with every tool imaginable no more than a few clicks away.  I could never do what I do without technology--I never had the discipline or dexterity to be good at a regular instrument.  I never wanted to take lessons.  I usually had trouble working with bands.  So the computer/synth studio has always been my only 'in' to the world of making music.  Without the technology, I'd probably be a painter.  But sometimes, like when the computer needs to be replaced, I wonder if it's all worth it.

I started making music in 1991 with a couple of drum machines and synth modules all connected with MIDI cables.  The closest thing we had to a computer was some kind of rack-mounted storage device that would record and save our patches and midi sequences.  By 1993 I was working with a DOS version of Cakewalk and I was amazed that the computer could actually record the sequences and play them back on the hardware.  That machine didn't even boot up into Windows, but it worked.

I used the first Windows-based version of Cakewalk from late 1993 until 2001 when I was writing the songs for Monster Music.  When it was time to mix, I took my sequences and my hardware down to a studio, plugged it all in and loaded up the MIDI files from a floppy disc and went to town.  Around that time I was toying around with the idea of a new sequencer, something that could take advantage of some of my newer computer's speed and power.  I settled on Cubase, but all the way through the recording of Fashion Victim, I still never used my computer for anything other than a MIDI sequencer.  I did all of the sample editing in a hardware sampler, and just like I had 10 years earlier, I saved all of my patches with the sequence data and initialized the hardware each time I pressed play.

While I was mixing Kelvin with Genetic at his home studio, he asked why I wasn't rendering the tracks down to audio.  Of course it had occurred to me to do this, but never until the mixing phase.  I always assumed I would have the most flexibility and control over the sound if I kept everything MIDI up until the time I was ready to lay it down.  This came from the older days of working with tape and not wanting to commit anything until it was completely ready--after all, you don't want to waste tape.  When I started working on new tracks after the Fashion Victim tour, I decided I would start playing around with  computer audio.

The first thing to go was the sampler--I replaced the Akai hardware sampler with Native Instruments' software equivalent, Kontakt.  It took a little getting used to but before long I realized how nice it was not to worry about how long a sample was, or how much memory it took up.  I didn't have to edit and trim and save everything with the cuts to save space--I could load a whole beat into Kontakt, virtually trim it down to a single snare drum, then copy the beat again and pull out a kick, without ever hacking the actual audio file down.  Nice!  I started looking for a way to replace my trusty synths next.

Each time I bought something new in the virtual instrument world, I would get rid of something on ebay in the real world.  The Emu Vintage Keys, Yamaha CS1x, TX81z, and the Novation A-Station were all replaced with software.  Before I knew it, I was looking at my 14 channel mixer and wondering why I needed something so big.  My hardware effects units were collecting dust and everything was just firing off in Cubase.  I didn't even use a MIDI controller much anymore--it was all point and click and virtual on-screen knobs.  But there were trade-offs, too.

For one thing, I used an Ensoniq EPS 16+ sampler keyboard for 12 years without a glitch but since I moved to the world of computer audio, I have gone through five different computers.  Each computer has had a different set up (live vs. studio) and every time I change of course there's a new operating system, new plugins and patches, new things to learn, and old things to reinstall.  Drivers, registration codes, unlock keys, challenge/response strings, service packs--it can all be a little maddening.  The old hardware wasn't too expandable and it didn't get a new set of features every couple of years, but it also didn't ever change.  I never had to update the firmware on a keyboard or install new drivers--I just flipped a switch and those things worked.  With software, even to get the same device to perform the same function on a different system, sometimes it requires a whole new set of patches and code.  Sometimes it won't work at all!

My latest computer upgrade was necessitated by the fact that all those fancy audio programs just wouldn't run smoothly anymore on my old beast of a desktop.  That machine still exceeds recommended qualifiactions for every piece of software that I use, but somehow when they all work together, they are just too much.  Years of internet browsing, defragging, photoshopping, and other non-music activities took their toll.  Since Microsoft has released two more major OS upgrades since the last time I bought a computer, and since I wasn't going to build my own machine this time, I finally hit a wall.

After several hours of futzing around with install discs and registration codes, I finally got most of my core products to work.  Cubase and the Native Instruments products all work and there's a noticable lack of processor strain on this new quad core machine.  Still, not everything is perfect.  The Antares Filter VST does not play with Vista and Antares is making too much money from AutoTune to be bothered to look into it.  They've simply stopped supporting Filter which is a real shame since it's a fantastic piece of software and it does something unique.  Pluggo needs a new authorization code so that means an email to Cycling 74 who are no longer selling Pluggo but claim to still support existing users (I hope!)   My trusty and 10+ year old sound card won't even fit in the new computer so I've resorted to using some Firewire breakout box that isn't quite as good and is going to need to be replaced.  I haven't used the new setup long enough to know if that's it, but I get the feeling that's NOT it. 

For all the ease and availability that this technology offers, it all comes with a price.  Sometimes that price is just a reboot and walkaway kind of thing, but other times, it's more like weeks and weeks of not doing anything because it's impossible to be productive when there are nagging software registrations and drivers and other shit to deal with.  Sometimes the price is too high, and I wish that I made music with a distortion pedal and a rock or something--but even then I'd still have to record it into something and I'm sure that just when I'd find that perfect tone, I'd look over to my computer screen and see a prompt to install a newer driver.

I'm pretty sure that when you have to name your myspace page Larvaeband because someone else has already got a page with your band name, it's time to look for another thing to call your group.  I mean, in the age of digital downloads, MP3 sales, Myspace, Twitter, Facebook, and Google, how do you really pick a band name that someone is clearly already using?  I can see two bands stumbling upon the same idea or catchphrase or misquote at the same time and both trying to rush to put it to good use, but when someone's been using a name publicly and professionally for over a decade, I think it's fair to say that name is taken.

Now to be fair, Larvae isn't the most original name in the book.  While I did choose it in 1997 (and played shows that year with flyers and the whole nine,) there are other bands that have used that name or a variation.  There's a group called Larva, of course, and there's a punk band called Larvae that pops up in all the same places that I do, even though their first record appears to have come out after ours and they haven't done anything else that I can see since then.  I think I've got a pretty fair claim on this verbal territory, but then I'm sure the Charlatans UK thought the same thing.  I remember the Tampa band The Catherine Wheel opening for the much bigger and better-known UK band of the same name and the awkwardness that proceeded.  The lead singer from the Catherine Wheel that got to keep the name said "yeah, there's a Catherine Wheel in every town where we play."  Oops.

When I picked Larvae, it meant something to me and it sounded adequately weird, but I was never in love with it.  To me, it was a good name for a new project that was just being birthed, out from under the other band I was in at the time.  It was also inspired by Godflesh's use of "Mothra" as a song title--something that I always appreciated and something that pointed at what I initially wanted to do.  Larvae in fact started as me trying to make purely electronic music that had the kind of grit and anger as Godflesh.

Now, years and several albums later, I look back and realize that I probably could have picked a better name.  It's a little silly if it's just referencing a giant monster and it's a little grotesque if it's supposed to conjure a real bug.  It's no surprise really that the other bands I've seen using it are a metal act and a punk group.  It's not like some couple making folktronica somewhere in the midwest is going to come up with Larvae and think 'wow, that really fits our pastoral sound!'  I'm not sure it really fits MY sound anymore, but at this point I think I'm stuck with it.

The new Larvae record, Loss Leader is out now on Ad Noiseam and it's the first record we've made that is available for digital download. Those who might be interested can buy a high quality MP3 version of the record from the label itself, from Beatport, and from Amazon.com where it can actually be purchased with Pepsi Points! That's right, we are now trading our music for Pepsi, though I assume that Amazon will pay us in cash rather than soda.

This new step forward is exciting, and I've already been delving into all of the mechanics of it. I've been looking at and for data. I've been comparing the different sites and the way they work to sell the tracks and it's all very eye opening. I was pushing for independent musicians to embrace new markets for their music in a previous post and now that it's my turn, I'm finding that there is a lot to think and probably write about.

For instance, I never thought that anyone would be able to trade Pepsi caps for my work. I'm not happy or sad about it, just a little amused at the thought that I've taken such an anti-consumerist stance in previous Larvae work and that I am now the unwitting promotional partner for Pepsi. It's good, I think; it means that more people will be able to listen to Larvae and see what the music is all about. How Pepsi and Amazon work their payment out is really up to them. Ultimately, it's just amusing to be a part of that large corporate cycle, and it raises certain questions about the potential content of the music.

I'm sure that the disclaimers buried in all of Amazon's legal mumbo jumbo make this very clear, but I can imagine something like the following: a band puts out some sort of violently anti-semitic record that gets picked up by a distributor who happens to work with Amazon, the tracks get loaded for sale on Amazon.com and some 14 year old uses his Mountain Dew caps to download the songs. Of course the parents are ultimately responsible for what the kid is getting into, but can't you just see the headline: "Pepsi gives away hateful music to teens." It's a weird world, and stranger things happen all the time.

I am finding it increasingly frustrating lately that everything can be easily blamed on our troubled economy. A company has to lay off workers because they aren't hitting sales projections? Blame the economy. Another company has to cancel a holiday party? Blame the economy. Someone down the street can't sell his house? Blame the economy. Everyone seems to be acting like 'the economy' is this thing that exists in some tangible way--like it can be personified and then pegged as the scapegoat when people aren't making as much money as they'd like.

I realize that the economy in the United States is a complicated thing, but it's more like a gigantic system of behaviors than it is like a single entity. We have all kinds of ways of measuring the economy's health as if it were a person with a cold or a tree trying to bounce back from an unforgiving winter, but those are just shorthands and ways to describe something that is ultimately intangible.

We can measure certain economic indicators and then make predictions about people's behaviors, but beyond that. there's no actual thing that we can really pin all of this blame on. And yet we do it anyway.

When a company has to lay people off, why don't we blame the company's management who didn't have a business model that was flexible enough and sustainable enough to weather hard times? When an organization cancels Christmas and blames these hard times, why don't we blame THEM for not selling their widgets at a more attractive price or for not finding some other way to provide perks for their employees? It hits hard with layoffs and reports about missed profit goals, but when the CEOs and CFOs of these companies can just point to the diseased behemoth that we are told every day is the root of our troubles, how do those folks ever get held accountable?

Is the solution always to lay people off or ask for government bailout money? Are companies fretting not because they are losing money but just because they aren't making AS MUCH money as they had hoped? This kind of thing always drives me up a wall because for profit companies hang their hat on the model of the free market so that they can charge 190 dollars for 4 dollars worth of raw materials sewn up into a shoe by someone making a dollar a day in Malaysia, but they are quick to blame "the economy" when all of those profits aren't enough to keep gas in the Lexuses and BMWs. I'm going to stop letting companies and the media that report on them tell me that the economy is the reason that unemployment is shooting up and that we may all have to tighten our belts to keep big corporations from filing for bankruptcy. Let's call the people out who make products that people don't want or need, and who provide services that are grossly over-valued in the good times to the extent that they collapse when there's pressure.

One of my neighbors has a sign in his yard that says "Neither for President 2008". I would have gladly thrown this sign up in my own yard during the last election, but I was struggling to figure out who wouldn't be able to stomach either of the current candidates. The only possibilities that I could come up with were 1.)People so far to the right of McCain that they see him as a wimp and 2.)People who are so ruggedly anti-government that they will only support a Libertarian.

Over the last four years, I've had the privilege to travel around and see some of the venom that the Bush administration has inspired. People outside of the States are growing to hate us more and more. Even people here seem to have forgotten what it was that once made them proud to be Americans. Displaying any kind of patriotism in many circles is tantamount to supporting the cultural and economic imperialism that has come to characterize the role of the US in this decade. This has all got to stop.

I want to be proud of what this country is and what it offers again. I don't want to be proud that I can find a Big Mac or a Double Whopper in 150 countries, or that American films play more frequently than German ones IN GERMANY. I don't want to travel abroad and feel like I have to apologize for the way my country is acting, and I don't want to feel like there is some huge divide between "blue states" and "red states" as if the country itself is on the verge of some sort of political silver war. If you don't feel like there's a candidate in this election that really has your number, I can understand that--I've felt that for most of my adult life. If you don't feel like the polemic of a two-party system represents our diversity adequately, I can definitely feel that too. But if you can't find a way with the current choice between Obama and McCain that will at least make you start to feel better about this country, then I don't know what to say.

This is a pretty minor grievance, but I can't stand it when someone sends me a business form to complete and the lines on the page where I am supposed to enter text are just a series of underline characters. I realize that not everyone knows how to make forms in Word, or how to work with table properties to make certain edges of a table cell transparent, but when I get a form that's been approved for use throughout the company from an IT department and it uses the underline technique, I just have to wonder what people are doing with their time. I figured out how to make a form in Word years ago because I got frustrated having to look at forms that had fields like _____Matt____ ____Jeanes______. How is it that people who've been in the business world a lot longer than I have still deal with this stuff and think that these kinds of practices are OK?

There's a Thai restaurant in Sandy Springs that is rather unceremoniously named Thai Restaurant of Sandy Springs that I used to eat at a lot when I worked on that side of town. It was always a good place for a quick Thai lunch and they had a deal where you could get a free entree on your birthday, so I've always remembered it, even if I have very little occasion to be up in that area any more.

Tonight though, Leigh and I planned part of our evening around the Thai Restaurant of Sandy Springs, and more specifically, around the fried ice cream that they serve. We drove all the way up there to eat authentic sushi and ramen at Sushi Mio, then we caught Burn After Reading at the Lefont before heading back to the Thai place for the fried ice cream. I'm not joking when I say that they used to have some fried ice cream that was worth the trip on its own. It's not something I'd usually expect from a Thai restaurant, but whatever they do to make that dish, it's something special.

So we got there about 10 minutes after 9 PM and walked in past a sign that said "under new management." We checked the desert menu and sure enough, they still had the fried ice cream so we started to sit down. When I told the woman who was running the dining room that we only needed dessert menus, she quickly snatched up the dinner menus and the following exchange took place:

Lady: This is not a cafe. This is a restaurant. We don't sell just dessert.
Leigh and I look incredulous: Huh?
Lady: This is not a cafe.
Leigh (standing up): Did you say 'this is not a cafe?'
Lady: This is a restaurant, this is not a cafe. We have a 10 dollar minimum. You can't have just dessert.
Leigh: Well you just lost some business.
Lady: I'm sorry, we are a restaurant.

OK, so we got it, the aptly named Thai Restaurant of Sandy Springs is not the Thai Cafe of Sandy Springs, and the new owners don't take kindly to folks coming in for just dessert. Given the fact that there was exactly one table in the whole place (a two-top) that was occupied, I can only imagine that whatever money we might have spent there would have been helpful. Instead, that lady made enemies for life out of us, and I can say with certainty that I'll never go back to that place, ever.

What made this sad and frustrating were the facts that I had looked forward to and talked up this damn ice cream, and that instead of the lady being apologetic and kindly telling us that we'd need to spend at least 10 dollars, she snatched up the menus and told us that the place was not a cafe. There are a lot more customer-friendly ways to tell a potential customer that you don't typically serve just dessert if that's really going to be your stance. But why should it be? We went somewhere else instead, got dessert, drinks, and an appetizer and we spent 17 dollars and left a good tip. Some other restaurant (that was also not a cafe) got our business because this lady was too short sighted and too rude to see that we might be good paying customers. I've bitched about customer service in this blog before, and I am always still astonished that I get treated this way anywhere. With food prices going up, gas through the roof, people going out less, and a generally shitty economy, I would think that the Thai Restaurant of Sandy Springs would be happy to sell anything to anyone who walked in their door. Oh well, they won't ever sell me anything ever again.

I went to my first ever fencing competition today. It all seemed very complicated. What I know about fencing rivals what I know about fixing X-ray machines, so this was a good introduction.

The contestant we were with was having some sword trouble so she had dropped her weapons off at the shop (humorously named the Sword Masters) early in the morning. This reminded me a bit of going to the magic and weapon shop in a video game, so it was not surprising that the guy who appeared to be the customer servive face of the shop had longish hair with a dye job, facial piercings, and that he was wearing headphones and was glued to Myspace. For all I know, homeboy is on my friends list--he clearly fits the profile!

Except I hope that people on my friends list who work in service jobs have a keener sense for good customer service than this guy. After dropping the swords off at 8, my girlfriend started checking on them around 10:45. When I showed up at about 11:15, our fencer was in need of some weapons and her swords were still sitting in the queue. Captain LARP asked if we had a number and when we showed it to him, he said we were next in line.

Now, I'm a fairly reasonable guy and I know that customers can sometimes seem demanding. We all get frustrated when we feel like our needs aren't being met, and it's likewise reasonable to get frustrated when someone you are dealing with seems focused on that need that isn't being addressed. But you know, that is the art of customer service: being able to at least appease the customer when you have no real way to accomplish what they want you yo accomplish.

The sword master had apparently thrown a -8 against charisma because he was not interested in settling his customer's anxiety over the busted swords. When Amber told him that she'd heard the 'you are next in line' bit half an hour earlier, he put on his best condescending tone and threw out this gem: 'There's nothing I can do... Do you want to take the sword back and forfeit your place in line?' Not only was I not in the mood to be talked down to by a punk who was more interested in his Myspace profile than in working with his customers, but I got pretty incensed that he felt like he could be so cavalier when we were just trying to get an honest display of empathy. So I made sure he heard me when I said 'That's a shitty attitude!'

This was apparently the last straw. Maybe he'd had a long day of people interrupting his Myspace messaging already, or maybe I just reminded him a little too much of a wizard who gave him a beat down in D&D at some point, but he couldn't take it anymore so he stormed off. When he got back, he had a fencing buddy with him, so he took the guy behind a curtain and proceeded to explain (with a prop) how he'd like to crack my skull with a hammer and how I told him he had a shitty attitude and the nerve of me and whatever. This was strike two for the guy in my book, because if there's a second rule after 'don't treat the customer like shit' it is 'don't complain about the customer in a self-righteous way in a place where he can both see and hear you.' At this point, I felt a little more confrontation might get the guy to strike three, and I was curious what that looked like.

I realize that I was at this point antagonizing the guy for not much reason other than 'he started it,' but I wanted to sort of get my point across that providing good customer service, especially in a trying situation, is not really that hard if you just have a shred of kindness and if you take your job seriously. After a couple threats that I was 'really pushing him,' the guy used the hammer that he had demonstrated his skull cracking fantasy with to try and true up the blade on his pocket knife. He clearly wasn't thinking straight, as even I know from watching the Food Network that you don't fix a knife blade with a motherfucking hammer. Anyway, a couple of good whacks and the tip of his knife cracked right off, and I guess this was all he could bear. He stormed off again (strike three!) and the other guy who was working/talking during all of this asked me to leave his table.

In the end, I'm sure that the people at Sword Masters are not terrible people (though at least one of them is not too handy with fixing a blade apparently--so 'Masters' they may not all be,) but they could probably stand to learn a lesson from this. As it seems like they are just about the only game in town at fixing fencing weapons at the tournament, it's likely that they'll be able to continue to treat customers with disdain, and that's a shame. I would have loved to have grabbed the swords and taken them somewhere else, but that wasn't really an option. The woman who actually worked on the swords was nice and perfectly professional and she gave us a very understanding "we're working as fast as we can" type of response that was all anyone really wanted. What we didn't want was to see a guy checking his fucking email on the clock, who appeared bothered that we were running out of time.

The only reason any of us were even there was to make sure that some kids could go out on a strip, put on a mask, raise a sword and stab each other as anxious parents, coaches, and friends looked on. From what I could see, that happened a lot and the short time I spent at the competition was a lot of fun... especially watching that dude break his knife.

An Open Letter to Independent Artists and Record Labels

In the last decade, we've all watched in awe as the digital world has transformed nearly every facet of our lives, often in unanticipated ways. We take the portability and omnipresence of information for granted in so many ways that its difficult to remember a time when we had to wait days for someone to receive our stamped letter. People just a few years younger than me (I'm 32) have already grown up in a world so radically changed from the world that existed when I was a teen that the great divide between generations that keeps every old one from understanding every new one has gotten shorter. We don't have to wait to have children that we can't understand; our younger siblings are just as likely to to think about the world in ways that seem foreign to us as we did to our parents.

Though the digital revolution has touched everything from cars and clocks to health care, the development of language, and the very basic pillars of our economy, perhaps the area where the change is most visible is in the world of music. Digital technology quickly brought music production to the unwashed masses so that anyone with a computer could record a song, and the internet was right behind that wave, offering each artist a worldwide distribution network for everything he ever created (no matter how good or bad.) For those of us who grew up on Vinyl, Cassettes, and CDs, we probably all remember the thrill of the first time we downloaded an MP3 of a song we just couldn't find any other way. It might have been a new artist we'd never heard of before, or a long out-of-print record by our favorite band, or a demo track from someone screaming out into the vast digital wilderness just begging to be heard. We all have that experience and we may have had different feelings about how that experience would shape the music industry in the years ahead, but I think we all realized that MP3s represented a turning point.

Of course, with that thrill came the realization that something wasn't quite right. One MP3 quickly led to another and eventually we all stumbled upon something that an artist or label wasn't intending to offer to us for free: but there it was anyway. Debating the ethical decisions we were confronted with at that point will result in little useful dialog. We've turned the corner now and there's no looking back. We live in a world where the primary format for music distrbution will soon be non-physical. For those of us who have worked for a significant portion of our lives to make music and see it released on a plastic disc, suddenly our whole approach is being called into question.

We have to look at the reality of this new world and find in it the opportunities that it brings that outweigh the limitations. For a boutique or small indie record label, the Compact Disc is appealing because the media is cheap and until very recently, it was the clear format of choice with nearly all consumers. A small label can invest relatively little in a short run of 300 - 2000 CDs and have a product that looks and feels as professional, presentable, and sellable as anything from a major. These products can be primed for retail with barcodes and shrinkwrap, and they can be everything that their mass-produced counterparts are with one major exception: availability.

The boutique or micro-indie label that is pressing no more than 2000 copies of any single release has to deal with the gross inequity of retail distribution, and often no amount of quality, art direction, or passion for good music can make any difference there. Look at the major retailers of Compact Discs in the United States, and it quickly becomes obvious why small labels don't have a share in the game. Best Buy operates over 1,100 retail stores in the United States, Canada and China; Circuit City has 650 locations; the dreaded Wal-Mart runs more than 6,700 locations; even a small competitor that focuses on counter-cultural product like Hot Topic has 690 retail stores. It's important to understand that these chains deal with distributors of goods on a large scale--they want products that they can merchandize and sell in all of their locations, or at least in entire regions, and small labels clearly aren't even up to the task of creating the volume of product to meet demand if that demand was even created. A label that releases 500 copies of a disc has no chance at all of working with these retailers because stores don't order individually from their distributors.

A network of smaller, independently owned and minded stores exists in the US, but even that network works with a particular set of distributors and with some major label product. All of this leads to a near-hopeless retail situation for small labels. Even in the best of cases, a small label that can get CDs into some of these stores in a limited number of markets still fails to have any real market penetration or recognition. The lack of a national or international retail presence reglegates these small releases to specialty sections in the few stores that will carry their records, or to boutique and often closed-ended retail locations that have no reach outside of an established niche customer base.

Indie bands have long known that touring and selling merchandise is far more lucrative than selling CDs in stores, and yet our historical model for the whole industry has been one where a band released a CD, the CD showed up in the store, the song was played in a club or on the radio, and we then went to a show when the band came to town and bought a ticket and a t-shirt. If the first part of that process (retail) presents an often insurmountable obstacle, how do we expect the remaining steps to work at all? Radio promotion without retail support leads to potential customers who cannot find the record when they go out shopping--these are often customers who are permanently lost because their retail experience offers them myriad alternatives. Touring without radio/club support and press leads to bands showing up in towns where no one has the faintest idea of who they are or why paying $7 to see them would be worthwhile. Online promotion has changed some of this dynamic, but even artists who are able to build a following through Myspace pages and online word-of-mouth have to work within the traditional Retail-Promotion-Performance-Merchandise model if they expect their music to reach potential consumers. Having a popular viral video or Myspace page can augment your success within that traditional model, but it won't replace any of those key components.

Just when the elements of promoting and selling a record (the sole reason that record labels exist,) appear to consipre against the indie record label, the answer begins to emerge from the haze. The move to a non-physical method of distribution is not without its challenges for a small label, but it offers a great chance to remove some of the obstacles that the historical model of record-selling presents. Since small labels have in many cases been reluctant to move towards this solution, let's look at a few of the common reasons that folks site about why dowloads as a release method aren't viable.

Lack of Perceived Quality
The thing that kept me from jumping feet first into the MP3 game was this nagging suspicion that the great ease with which an MP3 could be created, uploaded, traded, and copied meant that MP3 tracks would be less valuable than tracks found on physical media. To a certain extent, this fear is founded as anyone who lived through the mp3.com era of self-promotion should be well-aware. There's a near infinite supply of MP3 tracks available to potential consumers, and as Barry Schwartz explains in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, this creates a new kind of problem where having too many choices leads to people who can't make decisions. At the very least, it leads people towards new systems for weeding out the tracks that are worth investigating from those that are not. Anytime there's an artificial filter like that put on the wide world of choices, its necessarily going to funnel people to similar decisions, but that may not always be a bad thing. There is a long enough tail that the funnelling effect can still help people to make decisions when faced with the prospect of downloading terabytes of MP3s to find the handful of tracks that will be appealing.

But in the last few years with the rise of the iPod, we've seen this concern diminish. We're learning that people are gravitating towards these filters, and that they are surprisingly capable of doing their own filtering and at finding things that they like in the digital domain. The fact that a track is available only as an MP3 no longer has quite the stigma it once did, and in fact in a few more years (if it even takes that long,) most new consumers won't even consider the physical media as anything other than a memento or relic. Any cursory look around will tell the observer that the CD is no longer the center of the music universe. Portable CD players are becoming increasingly rare in public, and most new CD players are now fitted with a feature to play discs of MP3s to help keep the technology from being completely wiped out by progress. The MP3 is quickly becoming the defacto standard for music, so we shouldn't worry that releasing music for download will kill off interest. Small labels should just apply the same standards they would to physical CD production to MP3 releases so that the MP3 does not become an easy way to release substandard records.

Lack of Fidelity
Someone is getting red in the face trying to convince a friend or colleague that vinyl is better than CD right this minute. Someone else is explaining the mechanics of human hearing and dynamic range to justify the CD medium instead. And still someone else is probably chiming in that everyone is wrong--that anyone who listens to music not in Ogg Vorbis format on pig bladder loudspeakers is a fool. To all of this, I say that to the vast majority of consumers, none of this matters. Fidelity and sound quality are not the things that drive purchasing decisions. If they were, all of us who love music would have $6,000 CD players that don't have any more than a 2 digit LED display.

Clearly, the mass market is interested in price, portability, and preference. Price will always be the easiest driver for purchasing decisions. I don't know how many times friends have told me that they can't make it to a movie because they are broke. One of the things that continues to drive CD sales into the ground (losing sales at a rate of something like %10 a year!) is the fact that CDs require a $15 investment for a usually unknown quantity or reward. Will I like every track on the new Dixie Chicks album? Probably not, but with a CD, I will have paid for all of them regardless. While CDs remain portable, they are easily damaged and still nowhere near as portable as an MP3 player that can be no bigger than a single 6-sided die or a couple of credit cards stuck together. People want to take their music with them, and there are now entire industries popping up to support that desire from companies making an endless supply of iPod accessories, to companies that incorporate MP3 players into jackets, stuffed animals, phones, and watches. Yet in the face of all of this, there are still people making and distributing music who have not tapped into that shift in the market. The sad irony is that the company that makes MP3 playing sunglasses will make more money from me than the companies who release the MP3s that I fill those glasses up with in many cases!

Artists and labels must recognize that the average consumer is willing to sacrifice fidelity for portability and price. It's still noble to create truly great sounding records and to make those somehow available to the consumers who demand them, but such an endeavor should not come at the expense of reaching the majority of consumers who would rather have a digital file that they can play on their egg timer.

Loss of Control
It can't be argued that labels and artists won't lose control when their work enters the digital domain: they certainly will. No DRM scheme will survive the hackers and no work of any value will survive the thieves, cheapskates, and lazy enthusiasts who would rather not pay for things that they enjoy. By offering tracks for download, a label or artist may have to grant that they are losing some degree of control over how the work is distributed or used, but let's look at the alternative.

Any CD can be ripped, encoded, tagged, and uploaded to the web in less time than it takes to actually play the disc from start to finish. While it may amaze many of us that people are motivated to do this (and to turn CDs into downloads so quickly,) we all have to understand that this does and will continue to happen. Labels with deep pockets have begun to experiment with value-added components for CDs that can't be easily replicated or distributed online: interactive CD features, bonus artwork, subscriptions and the like. This kind of approach might help to keep a disc from losing some of its sales to MP3, but such features are usually only appealing to invested fans who want to collect those additional artifacts. For the casual listener who is not yet sold on the idea of buying an album he hasn't yet heard, the inclusion of a DVD with live footage of the same songs is not likely to be a great selling point.

Even vinyl-only releases aren't immune to the terror of being ripped and traded, since many DJs now prefer to spin from a laptop rather than a crate of records. The bottom line here is that whether we like it or not, we can't stop the work from being publically traded by refusing to play game with legitimate download services.

Who Will Know What This Is?
Much like the inital concern about quality and choice, the concern that consumers will be funnelled away from indie product towards more common sellers is a legitimate one. However, understanding the online habits of people who purchase music downloads can shed some light on how MP3s might work for indie labels and artists.

The digital store is fast replacing its physical counterpart. With myriad services like music blogs, last.fm, review websites and so on, potential customers can have a direct link to a purchase option for songs that they like immediately. The days of reading about a band in a magazine then clipping out that article and taking it to the store are all but over. While we can be fairly sure that small, niche artists are not going to go toe-to-toe with U2 and Jay-Z for download supremacy just because tracks are available on iTunes, we can be absolutely sure that they won't make a sale at all if the songs are not even available. The cost of submitting an album to pay download services is dropping and submitting to multiple services is getting easier. The default question from people I talk to about my own music has shifted since 2002 from "where can I find your CDs" to "do you have anything online?" I expect this to continue, and I think that the answer "yes, you can try out some tracks for $.99 a piece on [service x]" sounds better than "try a Bit Torrent, but realize you are stealing from me."

So where do we go from here?

Artists and labels have a legitimate cause for concern, but it seems clear that the world is leaving those who hesitate behind. We all need the Retail portion of the equation to work in order to make creating this music that we love any sort of viable business model. How then can we overcome some of these obstacles without completely jettisoning the work we've put in up to this point? I have a few ideas.

1. Release More Vinyl - Vinyl sales are on the rise, and not just among the dance scene. Sure, good old fashioned wax is not available at those big retailers I rattled off before (except Hot Topic,) but it is becoming more of a presence at specialty shops. For consumers who want a physical product, vinyl has great appeal and it flies in the face of the price and portability constraints that usually drive people towards downloads. Meeting those customers demands by offering high quality vinyl releases is one way to keep the physical medium of music releases alive and to preserve that old paradigm to which we all cling.


2. Pay Attention to Merchandise - Products that can't be downloaded and are ancillary to the music itself still have a place and can in fact be far more profitable than the music itself. While we may never stop many people from downloading tracks for free, we can offer them products that they cannot download to which they may gravitate instead. Remember that artists have always banked on concert ticket and t-shirt sales, and in the face of music that can be had for free, these other products start to look even more attractive. Of course there's no guarantee that an artist will be able to push caps, posters, and hoodies, but knowing that these kinds of objects are a serious additional revenue stream may help labels to make the right decisions about which releases to back in the first place.


3. Be Everywhere - The limitations of traditional retail don't exist in the digital world, so why not exploit that fact? Instead of using one distributor to handle physical product sales in a region, why not use five or ten reputable download services to handle sales worldwide? Sure, this will require some additional legwork from the label, but in the end, the more available the work is from places that people already frequent (and there are lots of sales numbers to tell us which places those are,) the more likely an artist is to sell units.


4. Go Granular - With the physical medium, a label is limited to a fixed number of products that it can physically manufacture. This limitation doesn't exist in the digital world, and the increased granularity allows for all kinds of new revenue streams. While a label or artist will likely lose out on some money when a consumer purchases only one track instead of an entire album, those sales can be augmented more easily online. Using the granularity of track-at-a-time vs. album-at-a-time sales, a label should be able to offer a wider array of quality work without having to force music into formats. Does an artist have a great single without enough material you love to make an album? Release the good stuff and send her back to work on the rest! Does one song get played more frequently than others? Convert it to a ringtone and sell that too! Does someone have a handful of remixes or alternate versions lying around that are interesting to die-hard fans but don't warrant a separate CD or vinyl record alone? Release them online at the same places that sell the original tracks!


5. Work With Artists - It's important for small artists to understand the economics of the music industry. Those artists who aren't at all interested in the money side of things should be easy to negotiate with--pay them nothing but make their music avaialable! With reduced manufacturing costs, label budgets can be diverted into promotional activities and tour support--the things that make Retail successful in the first place! Even an artist who has copies of his album in every store in the nation won't sell many if no one who goes to those stores knows what the album is. Artits and labels should work to find new ways to make releasing records profitable, and this might mean changing the way royalties and advances are handled. Be creative, and don't be afraid to give up a little in the beginning to potentially gain a lot in the long run.

There's an exciting future ahead of us. We can see it. We're already immersed in it. It's already shaping the way we make music, the way we think about commerce, and the way we interact with other fans of the things we like. We all need to learn to leverage that future to make our voices heard and to bring new music and art into the world that is worthwhile. In my mind, the independent labels and artists have been the only things worth following for the last ten or fifteen years. Let's all make sure that the business end of what supports those enterprises can be viable so that we'll all have better, more exciting and inspiring music to look forward to downloading tomorrow.

Return to the Cinema
And... we're back. After a long hiatus, the Zeroplate THINK page is back and I'm bringing the Movie thoughts back from the dead and incorporating them here instead. In case you missed those, peep the link: Film Thoughts by Zeroplate With no futher Adu (who gets the nod for a hat trick against Poland--take that Poland!)
Transformers
I did not cry when Optimus Prime handed the Matrix over to Hot Rod in 1986. This is likely due to the fact that I thought Rodimus Prime (name notwithstanding) was a much cooler design/toy than the boxy 18 wheeler Prime in the first place. It's probably also helped by the fact that the animated Transformers movie just wasn't worth getting too emotional about. I had plenty of Transformers like most kids I knew, but I never had most of the ones I really wanted--Soundwave, Megatron, Jetfire, Omega Supreme, Grimlock--those just never found their way to my house. I will always be grateful to my grandmother who somehow had Bluestreak and Jazz waiting for me under the tree in 1984 despite the fact that the toys were nowhere to be found on shelves--I still don't know how she did that.

I moved to Japan in the late 80's and found out quickly that Transformers was a little different over there. There were Battle Beasts and Micro Masters and lots of things that looked more and more dubious over time. Around then, just about the only Transformers being made anymore were sets of bots that built bigger bots that somehow never managed to be as cool as the original Devastator. As I got more into soccer, music, and fretting over girls, the Transformers took their rightful place in yard sales and trash bins. When I got old enough to start collecting toys again, I never really considered going back to get Transformers because they just didn't hold the magic for me that something like Star Wars or even X-Men comics did.

I point all of that out only to say that I'm not the world's biggest TransFan and in fact, I have no particular love for the property aside from memories of those toys that were waiting so unexpectedly for me in 1984. So, when I heard that Michael Bay was making a Transformers movie, my immediate reaction was 'that might be cool but it will probably be very dumb.' It took a while for info about the project to leak out but when the robot designs and casting rumors started hitting the web, the fan uproar was something I hadn't expected. So they were making Bumblebee a Camero instead of a Beetle--who cares? A lot of people, apparently, I just wasn't one of them.

There was a scene in the Japanese film The Returner where a commercial jumbo jet transformed into a robot looking thing and that was the first time I had seen an effect in a film that made me think "you know, the idea of transforming vehicle/robots in a live action movie might be really fun." In fact, it seemed like a no-brainer once CGI technology caught up to the ideas, but what threatened to ruin such a movie was the backstory of a glorified toy commercial cum cultural phenomenon that people were apparently far more attached to than I knew.

I'm happy to say that Michael Bay's Transformers is neither as stupid as I thought it would be, nor as beholden to the toy's shaky mythology as some fans wanted, meaning that in the end, it manages to be a hell of a fun movie. I don't know Blackout from a hole in the ground, but watching that thing transform and rip shit up was a lot of fun. The human characters (even though there were too many) didn't get in the way of the film's mammoth momentum, which was probably my biggest concern with the Michael Bay credit on the film. Bay manages to throw in a little something for everyone--there's a goofy boy who's the film's cipher; a hot (though somewhat plastic looking) love interest who actually does something more than just look pretty and need saving; there are the clueless but often funny parents that most parents who accompany 10 year olds will identify with; there are the macho and tough talking Army guys who don't steal the show from the robots but do give people like my dad someone to shout "hoo haa" to; there are funny black characters, a latino soldier who apparently said some funny stuff in Spanish without subtitles, and there's a voice from the original cartoon in Optimus Prime. I mean, this sort of thing almost sounds like it was focus-grouped together--the only thing missing is an Asian straight man who knows kung-fu and a laughably queeny fashion designer turned arms dealer. And as calculated as all of that sounds, it somehow works pretty well without really feeling like it's pandering (though the stepped off of MTV into the world of advanced cryptology crew was a stretch.)

What I hope this film does is show people in Hollywood that you can blow a lot of shit up without insulting everyone's intelligence (too much). While Bay's version of the military is a bit idealistic and fetishized, it's better than the usually hapless, one-dimensional military portrayed in so many other films. The utterly unbelievable computer hackers are silly, but for the 13 year olds in the audience, they are probably relatable and I'd rather them be cool and smart than completely socially inept, greasy, and taping their glasses together to prove they know how to work a computer. I hope that people realize you need human characters with some charisma to carry all of the battling ones and zeros, but you don't have to make them overly cute or bring all of the action in the film to a stop long enough for them to drop a one-liner in order to entertain. It's very unlikely that anyone in Hollywood will learn anything from the success of Transformers beyond "lets greenlight He-Man, Sectaurs, and Thundercats triolgies right now!" but I can always hope.