From: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org (ecto-digest) To: ecto-digest@smoe.org Subject: ecto-digest V6 #159 Reply-To: ecto@smoe.org Sender: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk ecto-digest Tuesday, June 6 2000 Volume 06 : Number 159 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: Napster [Ted ] Re: Napster ["Marcel Rijs" ] RE: erin mckeown west coast tour (B&P Trade offer) ["Drew Harrington" ] Napster: a blessing for live music? [burp@mindspring.com (Scott Burger)] Re: Toyah [Terra Incognita ] Re: Napster [Joseph Zitt ] If you like Dead Can Dance... ["Craig Gidney" ] Re: If you like Dead Can Dance... [Neal Copperman ] attn toronto folks: kym brown [Steve I ] Re: Napster ["Scott S. Zimmerman" ] long thoughts about napster and music and money [dmw ] RE: long thoughts about napster and music and money ["Sampson,Christopher] p.s., incidentally... [dmw ] Re: long thoughts about napster and music and money [Joseph Zitt ] Basque. Self-titled ["Craig Gidney" ] re: Utterly off-topic - Lathe of Heaven ["Tom Ditto" ] A few responses to some Napster points [dave ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2000 02:15:25 -0400 From: Ted Subject: Re: Napster Just a couple of counter points in the lively debate that has been taking place lately: Dave Williamson wrote: > I took one browse through it to see what all the fuss was about and found > nothing but entire album and catalogue ripoffs, and bootlegs. The cassette tape argument just > does not fly - quality and longevity of medium put that to bed immediately. Some artists encourage bootlegs to be distributed via napster, and some artists encourage album tracks to be distributed. Theft is not a binary issue here, there are lots of shades of gray. btw- does anybody know why the RIAA has abandoned their "MP3 is inferior to CDA" campaign? > Sorry folks, but I want good music to continue to exist - it will do so if we pay for it. > Proliferation and continuation of Napster-like technology will destroy everything but commercial > radio pap. Not if you continue to support your local listener supported radio station! Remember that Happy got her break from WXPN, a bunch of RIAA hating hippy DJs if there ever were (At least I think they were in their heyday. I can't say I listen to XPN a lot these days, they got a little toooooo Hee Haw for my taste the last few years, but I digress) I have not seen any premise that has been laid out in the Napster debate that leads to this particular "doomsday" conclusion. I can induce these facts however: A. Music pre-dates recording and radio technology by at least a few years. B. "Commercial radio pap" has only been around since the invention of radio .(Oh ok, that's not really a valid premise for this argument, just a swipe at radio in general) I think that it's safe to believe that music will survive any "worst case" napster scenario. So will pap, unfortunately, and it will be leaner and meaner pap. Really, those who will be hit the hardest in the next few years will be the pap mongers and the play list. Oh, and the "bricks and mortar" distributors of course, but Walmart can always recover their losses by upping the price of Flo-bees. Ted (the artist formerly known as "Napster of Puppets") np: Elvis_Costello_ Radio_Radio.mp3 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2000 09:15:08 +0200 From: "Marcel Rijs" Subject: Re: Napster Hi, Regarding the recent Napster debate here on ecto, I must say that I am surprised at how many of you have been taken in by the music industry propaganda. I don'tknow about the american situation, but here in the Netherlands you will pay up to $21 for a single album CD, and up to $8 for a CDsingle. These prices, which are the same all around the country, are defended by the argument that 'this is a free market and shops decide their own prices'. Any new technology that will break the monopoly of record companies is immediately condemned and put into a dark corner by these companies. It's often been said that if CD's were cheaper less people would resort to hometaping, cloning of CD's, downloading MP3's and everything else. These arguments are dismissed by the same old argument: CD's aren't expensive, and stealing is wrong. The comparisons made on this forum between downloading MP3's and rape / murder, are, frankly, beyond ridiculousness. I might even feel offended if I didn't realise just how dumb the comparison was. MP3's are not the source of evil, they're just "the new radio": plenty of people download songs just to listen to them, and buying the album later. There will always be a group of people downloading whole albums and sleeves from the Internet, but these were not going to buy the CD's anyway, so why bother writing a new policy for these people? The worst thing that will happen is that they might actually want to have the 'real' album if the product is beautiful enough. I know someone who bought a Taiwanese edition of Britney's first CD because of the free mousemat and CD-ROM provided with it. And this person doesn't buy CD's _at_all_! (Funny that he should buy, of all things, a Britney album but I'll put that aside for now.... ) Joseph Zitt wrote: > Two relevant quotes: > 1. "Home taping is killing music." Indeed, indeed, indeed..... A slogan used by that very same record industry some 20-odd years ago. People are still hometaping, and music is far from dead. How can this be???? > 2. "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Hands off Napster, that's what I say. But then again, I'm biased... :) Marcel Rijs afd. Communicatie marcel.rijs@konbib.nl ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 03:28:53 -0700 From: "Drew Harrington" Subject: RE: erin mckeown west coast tour (B&P Trade offer) I just got back from a late night at Cafe' du Nord where I caught Erin McKeown for the first time. Emily Shore (I think I've seen her mentioned here) said to make sure not to miss her, and boy was she right - Erin was great. She is very dynamic, subtley playful, and short. Her promotional material: "...a guitar style somewhere between Django and G. Love." I think Django is right on the money. If you can make any of these shows, you should. If you're near enough emeryville to catch a show there and don't know about strings, it's a great venue and a perfect place to see her. (Wish I could make it.) Erin gave me permission to tape her performance and permission to share copies with anyone who might want to check her out. I know it seems low tech with all this talk of MP3s and Napster, but if anyone would like a CDR copy, let me know and we can work something out (probably a B&P). Drew > Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 19:44:45 EDT > From: Jess913@aol.com > Subject: erin mckeown west coast tour > > Erin McKeown June/July dates: > > 5 june cafe du nord, san francisco CA 9:30pm $5 415.282.8876 w/MADIGAN > 6 june strings, emeryville CA 8pm $5 suggested donation 510.653.5700 > 7 june KAZU-90.3 FM, pacific grove CA 11am > 9 june rose st. house of music, berkeley CA 8pm $10 510-594-4000 ext. MUS > 10 june kuumbwa jazz center, santa cruz CA 8pm 877.340.3458 > 16 june dante's, portland OR 10pm $5 503.226.6630 w/NANCY HESS > 17 june wild buffalo, bellingham WA 8.30pm 360.733.7464 > 18 june tractor tavern, seattle WA 7.30pm 877.340.3458 > 20 june temple bar, santa monica CA 9pm $5 310.393.6611 > 22 june linnaea's cafe, san luis obispo CA 8pm 805.541.2463 > 23 june jolly tiger lounge/the roy, santa barbara CA 9.30pm 805.966.5636 > (probably w/ Rose Polenzani) > 24 june exile books and music, sherman oaks CA 9pm $8 818.986.6409 > 25 june claire delune's, san diego CA 8pm 619.688.9845 > 30 june uncommon ground, chicago IL 8pm $6 773.929.3680 > 1 july cafe assisi, madison WI 8pm w/ CHRIS PARSLEY > 2 july house concert, indianapolis IN 7pm $10 w/ROSE POLENZANI > 11 july IOTA, arlington VA 8pm > > please call about which shows are 21+ > as always, for a complete tour listing: www.erinmckeown.com/tour.html > ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 07:21:31 -0400 (EDT) From: jason and jill Subject: Re: Napster On Tue, 6 Jun 2000, WretchAwry wrote: > > I feel just the opposite, that Napster-like technology can, if used by > people like us (ectophiles, people who care about good music) help > good artists sell more CDs. > I'd really like to know how. If you send someone a tape with a bunch of different music, sure, people will go out and buy CDs of the music they like to have the full CD, a full quality recording, and the convenience of being able to hear what they want without fast-forwarding through the tape. With napster, though, you can just d/l the rest of the album, store it, and do whatever you want with it. There's no reason to buy the CD. Sure, for the moment there are storage limitations capping how much music someone can keep without buying the CDs, but that's only temporary. Napster is particularly well-positioned to kill off people like Happy. The party line for Napster supporters is that artists won't make any income from recordings anymore, but will make money from concerts, t-shirts, merchandise, etc. H/e, then you have someone like Happy who doesn't want to spend her life touring, has never shown much interest in selling merchandise, and just wants to make recordings and sell the recordings. Things like napster have the potential to destroy her music career--there's nothing about napster that would stop someone from downloading every track she's made for free, keeping it for no cost, and thus having a Happy collection without her ever getting a cent. The only limitations on someone doing that are the temporary limits of bandwith and storage. I wonder how napster-lovers would react if told that they were now expected to do their jobs for free, and if they want any income they should start selling t-shirts. Jason ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 07:41:14 -0500 From: burp@mindspring.com (Scott Burger) Subject: Napster: a blessing for live music? Personally, I am not going to cry if people buy less cds. I am hoping that Napster and other programs will eventually help make music available to anyone, anywhere. And even if that is being naieve, I hope this stuff forces people to put a premium on live shows. Maybe that will help touring artists make more of a living, open more clubs, take the emphasis off looks and videos, etc. - -Scott P.O. Box 14738 Richmond, VA 23221 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2000 11:15:55 +0000 From: Terra Incognita Subject: Re: Toyah I have several Toyah albums: "The Blue Meaning" and "Prostitute." The latter is among my favorite CDs of all time. She is a total freak. Gotta love it. Sharon Terra Incognita http://www.geocities.com/runly/terra.html ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 10:47:40 -0400 From: Joseph Zitt Subject: Re: Napster One thing we'e running into is a clash of metaphors: if you view Napster as like radio, one set of behaviours seems appropriate; if you view it as piracy, another set makes sense; if you view it as home taping, there are others. As with most new technologies, it's not exactly like any of these, and everyone differs as to which is the most appropriate comparison. Here's a post I made to Slashdot a little while back in response to their rather good interview with Lars of Metallica: - - - - Begin Quote - - - Lars comes across pretty well, all told. He looks like he's been doing some thinking -- this could turn into something useful like the Bezos/O'Reilly dialogue. One interesting point that he makes: Metallica has supported and thrived on the free distribution and trading of certain of its materials (live tapes, etc), but requests (forcefully) that other of its materials, those released on commercial albums, not be distributed. This makes sense: for example, my ensembles, Comma and Gray Code, have ltsa MP3s up for free download ( http://www.metatronpress.com/mp3/ ). OTOH, I would prefer that our studio tracks, which are or will be released on for-sale CDs, not be distributed in this way. Unfortunately, AFAIK, there is no way to indicate in an MP3 whether it's artist-authorised. It seems to me that some combination of an ID3 field and a PGP-like signature could somehow indicate that an MP3 was authorised by the musicians. A Gnutella-like client could then check that field and alert the fan, who would then be free to choose whether to download it or not based on that person's moral sense of whether the artist's wishes are to be honored. (I recognize that it would be up to the listener whether to use a client which would honor that field, and whether to act upon that information.) I'm just a good enough programmer to be pretty sure that it's possible, but not how to implement it. But if such a project would happen, I'd eagerly participate. (And if it already exists, I'd love to know about it.) Any takers? - - - - End Quote - - - - -- |> ~The only thing that is not art is inattention~ --- Marcel Duchamp <| | jzitt@metatronpress.com http://www.metatronpress.com/jzitt | | Latest CD: Jerusaklyn http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt | | Comma: Voices of New Music Silence: the John Cage Discussion List | ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 11:45:37 -0400 From: "Craig Gidney" Subject: If you like Dead Can Dance... - --0__=dqY6bGi6Qf7V6PMIgUCPAc7Kz6yhJsTHyXVR2vu9YRpPipmgjVbO8pCv Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Vas, - --0__=dqY6bGi6Qf7V6PMIgUCPAc7Kz6yhJsTHyXVR2vu9YRpPipmgjVbO8pCv Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable ?In the Garden of Souls.? Ali Azam and Greg Ellis have produced anothe= r hours worth of tranquil, Eastern-influenced music. This new work, thei= r third, skirts the edges of New Age, but the music possesses a dark beauty that= transcends that genre. This is bought out in no small part by the weep= ing cello passages provided by Cameron Stone. It competes and compliments Azam?s= soaring vocals perfectly. Azam?s voice utilizes several singing styles, not di= ssimilar to techniques used by Lisa Gerrard or Sheila Chandra?melismatic Arabic inflections that mutate into operatic sighs. This is sad music; I glea= n from some of the titles that grief and sorrow is the subtext for some the so= ngs. Ellis?s percussion comes to the forefront on this recording?sonorous go= ngs float through the mist sounds of voice, dulcimer and cello. There?s one piec= e that?s wonderful showcase for his talents?but it fits perfectly within the the= matic framework of the CD. - --Craig = - --0__=dqY6bGi6Qf7V6PMIgUCPAc7Kz6yhJsTHyXVR2vu9YRpPipmgjVbO8pCv-- ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 10:00:47 -0600 (MDT) From: Neal Copperman Subject: Re: If you like Dead Can Dance... On Tue, 6 Jun 2000, Craig Gidney wrote: > Vas, I've been listening to the first 2 Vas CD's since Jeff picked them up a month or so ago. I even ran across one myself that I picked up. Their music is marvelous. While I'm usually worried about clone bands, they manage to raise themselves above being just a DCD sound alike. The comparisons are apt, (if you like DCD, you are almost guaranteed to like Vas), but the music did not strike me at all as derivitive. It's beautiful and haunting, and personally, I find it a bit catchier than DCD. neal np: Desolation (mp3 demo album) - Shellyz Raven ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 12:00:09 -0400 From: Steve I Subject: attn toronto folks: kym brown Hey 'philes... REALLY behind on my digests... has anyone mentioned that Kym Brown and Lily Frost will be playing back-to-back at NXNE in Toronto this week? 9 and 10pm at Ted's. Looking forward to it. Kym said she'll be performing solo, it will be interesting to see her play solo. Would anyone be interested in seeing Kym play a small dinner type show from 4-7pm this Sunday? If we get enough interest and Kym is into it we could set something up. Please let me know ASAP if you are interested in coming, we need to get some idea of numbers before we commit to anything. Steve ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 09:19:13 -0700 (PDT) From: "Scott S. Zimmerman" Subject: Re: Napster > Some artists encourage bootlegs to be distributed via napster, > and some artists encourage album tracks to be distributed. Theft is not a > binary issue here, there are lots of shades of gray. Curiously, even anti-napster Metallica has always encouraged trade of live-music bootlegs. And they continue to support that. They are only fighting to protect their studio recordings. Hey, how come new major label CDs aren't selling for $7 yet? I seem to remember the Federal Trade Commission promising $5 drops a couple weeks ago.... Scott ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 13:33:02 -0400 (EDT) From: dmw Subject: long thoughts about napster and music and money On Tue, 6 Jun 2000, Ted wrote: > btw- does anybody know why the RIAA has abandoned their "MP3 is inferior > to CDA" campaign? dunno for sure, but my guess is someone clued them in to the fact that many music consumers don't have the equipment or the ears to be able to tell the difference and/or simply don't care. Joe: there is the Secure Digital Music Initiative, but i don't know if it's the sort of thing you'd be interested in joining or not. for the record: my position on my music is virtually the same as Joe's: freely share the stuff we make available electronically; please don't pirate the record. i'm going to give y'all some data about the two recording projects i'm currently involved with, and why i feel a little bit threatened by napster, not because i'm whining or looking for handouts, but because i think the general population lacks an understanding of what it takes, financially, to make a record at an independent artist level. you hear a lot of reportage of absurd advances and six figure producer's fees in the major label world, you hear a lot about how vastly more accessible to the independent artist quality recording technology is than it was even ten years ago (which is very true). but it still isn't necessarily cheap. when feckless beast started recording our cd, we hoped to do it for about six grand, inclusive of tape media ($900 of two inch tape, or enough to keep three takes of each song) studio time (budget studio at about $250 a day, including an engineer), producer fees (a steal at $120/day, or $15/hr; he's a good friend and is charging us far less than would be commensurate with his expertise), film transfers at about $500 (we're doing our own art) and duplication at about $1500 for 1000 copies (we are spending a bit of extra money there to use eco-friendly packaging rather than jewelboxes, which is important to us). we've found that we spent rather more time doing basic tracks than we expected, and both overdubs and mixes are going a little more slowly than we thought; current estimate-to-complete for the project is about nine thousand, in out-of-pocket, upfront expenses (exclusive of any gear-related expenses not directly related to recording). if we sell them for $9 each (1$/song), given that about 10% of our stock will be used for promotional purposes, and sell out the run, we will lose a thousand bucks or so (and be very happy). if the thing is on napster three days after the release party and everyone downloads it, we'll be delighted that people are enjoying the music, but we will be disappointed that we have less opportunity to recoup some of the investment we made. some of you are going to point out that we are using a professional studio, 2" reel tape, etc. can't the independent artist make a recording in his or her house these days without those expenses? my other band is currently in the middle of that approach. it still ain't cheap by a long shot: i think we're currently recording using about $8,000 of gear, we're at the outside limit of what the hardware can handle, buying more harddrives, RAM, etc to avoid compromising the recording (and there's a lot of compromise already inherent given that we're mixing in a 16bit digital environment, with all sorts of nasty digital artifacts lurking in the wings). and the physical duplication costs are going to be roughly the same as feckless's. (granted, over the long run, the investment in gear could be amortized over mutliple recordings) can we make money touring? if we get paid $75 or $100 for a show, we've had a good night. we frequently spend that much promoting a show to start with. without more name recognition and a larger fanbase (which we are hoping the cds will help with, obviously) the answer is no. i'm sure Happy is in position to demand a more substantive guarantee, but i'd be very surprised if there were much more than an order-of-magnitude difference. i think it's a major misconception that it's easy to make a living playing live; big tours are often underwritten by corporate sponsorship, club shows are hand-to-mouth affairs that hardly do more than cover expenses (i'm not just generalizing from my experience, i know bands with label deals on national tours getting $400-700 a night...split 4 or 5 ways...and sometimes being stiffed of 25-30% of the guarantee by the club. bands on labels frequently receive a per diem for expenses -- all of which comes out of the big pile of money that has to be paid back to the label before you start to see any mechanical royalties (publishing royalties may not be attached in the same way, if the band was savvy...but that only benefits members with songwriting credits). when i brought some of this up on another mailing list, i was promptly accused of being money-grubbing, and told that i should make music for the love of it, not to make money. so let me be very clear: i ain't in this to be a rich rock star. i make music because not making music makes me crazy, and i will play my songs for any audience that'll listen whether we get paid or not, and at some level, i'll keep recording them, too. i do have enough hubris, though, to think that some of the songs are fairly decent, and deserve a wider audience. would i like to make enough money from music that i didn't need a day job to pay rent? hell, yeah! but i'm not expecting that, nor asking for it. if i could afford to put my share of the nine grand into making cd's and then give them all away, i would. but i can't, or anyway, not easily, and i wouldn't expect anyone else to necessarily make that choice either. - -- d. np v/a _edges from the postcard 2_ nr banks _excession_ upcoming opportunities to see the whiny artist ranting above live: sat 24 june velvet lounge wash dc - 1st perf. w/ semi lunar valve, also the patsies & 555 (CD release) sun 2 july black cat wash dc feckless beast w/lesbian boy - - oh no, you've just read mail from doug = dmw@radix.net - get yr pathos - - www.pathetic-caverns.com -- books, flicks, tunes, etc. = reviews - - www.fecklessbeast.com -- angst, guilt, fear, betrayal! = guitar pop ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 13:45:57 -0400 From: "Sampson,Christopher" Subject: RE: long thoughts about napster and music and money Wow... I am impressed by the thoroughness of your argument. What falls out as obvious is that whoever accused you of being money-grubbing was... ahem... ill-informed. Thanks for the insight. Chris ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 13:46:33 -0400 (EDT) From: dmw Subject: p.s., incidentally... i know there are a number of other independent artists here, as well as independent label folks. i'd be especially interested in your thoughts. maybe my expectations are totally out of line, i dunno... - -- d. - - oh no, you've just read mail from doug = dmw@radix.net - get yr pathos - - www.pathetic-caverns.com -- books, flicks, tunes, etc. = reviews - - www.fecklessbeast.com -- angst, guilt, fear, betrayal! = guitar pop ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 13:09:56 -0400 From: Joseph Zitt Subject: Re: long thoughts about napster and music and money On Tue, Jun 06, 2000 at 01:33:02PM -0400, dmw wrote: > Joe: there is the Secure Digital Music Initiative, but i don't know if > it's the sort of thing you'd be interested in joining or not. The SDMI strikes me as nasty stuff, preventing some devices from playing its recordings. I'd rather not do that; as the saying goes, "the Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it". While it's not really censorship, people who would really want the recording could still record it going in and out of the soundcard, leaving a lousier sounding version of the original, which isn't what we want. Your numbers on your recording projects strike me as accurate. While our recording situation is a bit different, since we won't be doing overdubs or much after-the-fact processing, but when you put it all together, the numbers add up to more than one might expect. And the numbers on touring seem about right, too. We're lucky if we gross $100 total for one of the rare performances for which we get paid at all. I note that the members of King Crimson, a fairly popular band, are earning nothing up front on their current tour. They may make some back in album sales and merchandise. Which points us to the classic paradox: musicians are told to tour for free and live off recordings, which they're told to supply for free to live off touring. And I suspect we wouldn't have much of a market for Comma T-Shirts :-) > when i brought some of this up on another mailing list, i was promptly > accused of being money-grubbing, and told that i should make music for the > love of it, not to make money. so let me be very clear: i ain't in this > to be a rich rock star. i make music because not making music makes me > crazy, and i will play my songs for any audience that'll listen whether we > get paid or not, and at some level, i'll keep recording them, too. i do > have enough hubris, though, to think that some of the songs are fairly > decent, and deserve a wider audience. would i like to make enough money > from music that i didn't need a day job to pay rent? hell, yeah! but i'm > not expecting that, nor asking for it. if i could afford to put my share > of the nine grand into making cd's and then give them all away, i would. > but i can't, or anyway, not easily, and i wouldn't expect anyone else to > necessarily make that choice either. Well said. n.p. Christian Wolff: Exercises n.r. Jef Raskin: The Humane Interface - -- |> ~The only thing that is not art is inattention~ --- Marcel Duchamp <| | jzitt@metatronpress.com http://www.metatronpress.com/jzitt | | Latest CD: Jerusaklyn http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt | | Comma: Voices of New Music Silence: the John Cage Discussion List | ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 11:53:20 -0700 (PDT) From: "Scott S. Zimmerman" Subject: Re: long thoughts about napster and music and money a few other notes.... Recording budgets can soar into the million dollar range for some artists, and I doubt anybody is going to want to shell out that sort of cash if studio recordings are only supposed to serve as slick-advertisement for live shows... Also, if an artist is supposed to make a living by touring extensively, that doesn't leave any time for writing songs to begin with. A lot of musicians just want to write and record in solitude... Scott ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 14:19:49 -0500 (CDT) From: kerrywhite@webtv.net (kerry white) Subject: Re: Napster Neal said, in part: >>Seems to me Happy would be one of the first people to be anti-napster. If she knows the value of sharing music, it certainly isn't evident in her support of distributing things like bootlegs of her shows or the prism tape. I've always been amazed that her fan base is so strong given her opposition to sharing. neal<< The Prism Tape is the exception: HR didn't like the quality, lack of creative control, etc, of that show and has asked that no one pass it around. Bootlegs of her shows are fine with her, as long as she gets a copy. She has always been this way about it. Where did you get the idea that she had, "..oppositon to sharing"? bye, KrW I'm Peter Pan! I'm perpetually young!! OW!! What's wrong with my back? ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 13:44:47 -0600 (MDT) From: Neal Copperman Subject: Re: Napster On Tue, 6 Jun 2000, kerry white wrote: > The Prism Tape is the exception: HR didn't like the quality, lack of > creative control, etc, of that show and has asked that no one pass it > around. Bootlegs of her shows are fine with her, as long as she gets a > copy. She has always been this way about it. Where did you get the > idea that she had, "..oppositon to sharing"? bye, My impression comes from the number of times that she has provided negative feedback that has prevented live stuff of hers from being shared on this list. Prism and ectofest are two specific examples. The fact that there are people who have excellent boots and will not put them out to be tree'd on the list because they believe Happy would not approve is another example. If you watch the Prism show, you will immediately see that it is of far better quality than most bootlegs. (After all, it was professionally recorded and broadcast on local television.) If Happy was disatisfied with the quality and lack of creative control she had on that tape, what is she going to think about all other boots, in which she also has no creative control and the quality is probably worse. I would be glad to learn that I am mistaken about this. I have just seen little evidence that she is eager to see that side of her music shared, and a lot of evidence that she'd rather it wasn't shared. neal np: E-Bow the Letter (single) - R.E.M. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 16:23:10 -0400 From: "Craig Gidney" Subject: Basque. Self-titled - --0__=DsGgjCO5Jh0IxId84Xc9XOgE4xVqHnb3OSQlheVQzuEgsw8gdY34BCxb Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline The NYC-based group Basque is a duo made up of Maryasque on vocals and Brandt on bass. It - --0__=DsGgjCO5Jh0IxId84Xc9XOgE4xVqHnb3OSQlheVQzuEgsw8gdY34BCxb Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable ?s very open, airy music, with lots of silence written into the tracks.= Maryasque has a beautiful, strident voice, highly reminiscent to Sinead= O?Connors?. She slurs and mangles her lyrics until they don?t quite so= und like English?though you can make out bits and pieces. It?s a technique that= ?s closer in spirit to Rickie Lee Jones than to Liz Fraser. Brandt?s bass-playin= g is incredibly expressive; he bends and twists the notes, pounds percussive= ly on the instrument, creating evocative shades of sound. The songs are precise = and haunting?I couldn?t get the song ?Swollen Stranger? out of my head for = days. Basque sounds like a cross between Tuck and Patti and Hugo Largo, with = a bit of Low thrown in for good measure. www.basquemusic.com - --Craig = - --0__=DsGgjCO5Jh0IxId84Xc9XOgE4xVqHnb3OSQlheVQzuEgsw8gdY34BCxb-- ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 16:47:23 -0400 From: "Tom Ditto" Subject: re: Utterly off-topic - Lathe of Heaven Laurie Spiegel dropped me a line: > I don't know if you guys can pick up WMHT, the Schenectady public TV station, but this eve (Tuesday at 9 pm) they are going to be broadcasting the Lathe of Heaven - that 2-hour sci fi film that David Loxton directed about 20 years ago, and not aired since, for which I did the audio special effects (meaning most of the non-verbal soundtrack, though they hired a "real" composer to do the orchestra score). It even has a website: www.thirteen.org/lathe > > Amazing, the ghosts of selves past that do resurface! For those who wonder who Spiegel is you can check her web site: http://retiary.org/ls/index.html Dr. Tom ditto@taconic.net np npr ATC ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2000 15:48:34 -0500 From: WretchAwry Subject: Re: Napster At 07:21 AM 6/6/2000 -0400, jason wrote: >On Tue, 6 Jun 2000, WretchAwry wrote: > > I feel just the opposite, that Napster-like technology can, if used by > > people like us (ectophiles, people who care about good music) help > > good artists sell more CDs. >With napster, though, you can just d/l the rest of the album, >store it, and do whatever you want with it. There's no reason to buy >the CD. I can't believe how cynical you are, ascribing the worst to fellow Ectophiles and all the other like-minded true music lovers out there. Do you really believe that *all* of us feel that our CD-buying days are over now? >Napster is particularly well-positioned to kill off people like Happy. That is such bunk. Happy won't sell a thing unless her music is heard, and it's heard pretty damn rarely these days. I've been a Happy fan since 1988, and the one thing I've found out is that "distributing" her music, be it playing it on my radio show, sending and giving out tapes of her music, or handing someone a whole CD and saying "here, if you don't like it, please pass it on to someone who might" is a *GOOD* thing. I guess I'm just an old-fashioned fuddy duddy. I have this obviously out-of-touch belief that people will want to buy music that they like, after they've heard it and their interest is sparked. I have a basic belief in people who love music that they will support artists who make music they love. I grew up in the age of radio (which would NEVER be allowed to exist today if it were just now being invented). I'd love a song from the radio and, even though I taped it off the radio so I could listen to it anytime (I had tons of tapes full of music that I'd taped off the radio) I still went out and bought the single. Sometimes even the album. At one time I had hundreds of singles. I came of age and spent a good amount of my grown-up years in the age of cassette tape, where it was easy to tape an album from a friend and listen to it. That didn't stop me from spending a lot of time in record stores looking for the actual album, and other albums by the same group. Somehow over the years I've amassed over a thousand LPs. When I amazingly got my own radio show I was in hog heaven. Finally I had a means to play my favorite music to like-minded people, who for the most part (or so they told me) went out and bought the music they liked, based on what they heard on my show. When I became a part of gaffa and then, especially, Ecto, I experienced first-hand how making sampler tapes and trading them around could only be good for an artist. I'm confused as to how my wanting to share some sample tunes via Napster makes me so much more of a bad person than wanting to share some sample tunes via the old tape dubbing project. The fact that it's a wider audience seems like a good thing to me. At the very least it will keep some names out there for people to see, even if they don't download the music. Happy Rhodes might be an obscure artist, known only to a bunch of Ectophiles, those who listened to WXPN in Philly in 1991 & 1992, and a smattering of others here and there, but hey, anyone looking at my list is going to see a *lot* of Happy Rhodes. And maybe they might just keep that name in mind. and check her out some other time. And anyway, I have no intention of ever offering an entire album by anybody unless it's out-of-print or extremely hard to find. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2000 18:45:43 -0400 From: dave Subject: A few responses to some Napster points Point #1 >> Offspring Turn Tables On Napster, Selling T-Shirts Without Permission >> ^^^^^^^^ > Yes, but the difference is that Napster makes NO money from > the people who use Napster or any of the MP3s that get traded > using the Napster program. Well, they're supporting an expensive CEO and a bunch of employees somehow.. oh yeah, advertising. So they're not making any profit the same way NBC doesn't make any profit from the Tonight Show. Point #2 >> More to the point, what difference does it make if Napster doesn't profit off the >> mp3s? If it's theft, whether or not there's a profit is irrelevant. To make it >> relevant would be as if helping plan a murder is OK as long as you don't >> do it on your own behalf, or abetting rape is fine as long as you don't enjoy it. > Just because someone can use the telephone to plan a murder or > use e-mail to set up a rape doesn't mean that telephones and e-mail > should be banned. But if you were to give someone a gun knowing they meant to use it to commit a murder then you would be an accessory. And let's face it, the people at Napster and the like know exactly what people are using their software for.. if not, the newer ones such as Gnutella wouldn't be taking such pains to make it harder to trace. Point #3 > I take it you didn't find out about Happy through a tape someone > made for you. Well, I did, and I'm pretty glad about it, actually. I heard her first on the radio, but even so, did you or the person who made the tape send copies to dozens of other people, who each sent it to dozens more, and so on.. and so on..? Everyone seems to want to compare taping with mp3s, the difference is quality, effort involved, scale of distribution, and the intent of the people receiving the copies. Someone gave you a tape of an artist you weren't familiar with, to expose you to some music they enjoyed. Most people using napster are seeking out music they already know about just for the purpose of getting it for free. I keep seeing the comparison between home taping, video taping, and mp3. They are NOT the same. This is more like someone coming to your house with a pile of blank tapes, and sitting there going through your music collection taping whichever songs they wanted but didn't feel like paying for. Point #4 > Napster *CAN* be used to distribute entire Britney Spears, Ricky > Martin and Metallica albums, but frankly, the people who want those > albums for free aren't worth the energy it takes to have a thought > process about them. I keep seeing this sentiment come up.. people seem to think that if it's a popular artist that THEY don't like, it's alright for everyone to steal copies of the artists songs. It's alright as long as it only happens to THOSE types of artists I suppose.. no one's gonna take away any profits from artists WE like, right? Lastly, I have to totally agree with the other Dave. I want good music to continue. I have clips on my website, but only short ones. If someone wants to hear an artist that's new to them, they can get enough of a sample to judge, without giving the cow away with the milk. I've also downloaded a few mp3s, but nothing that I didn't intend to buy (and did when it became available) or things that aren't available otherwise. I'm sure in the near future, I too will be forced to store all of my music on my hard drive (and pray it doesn't crash) and listen to it as poor quality mp3s through dinky little computer speakers, but I won't be happy about it. - -- +-----------------------------------------------+ + dave + + Sideshow Bob's House of Wax and Waffles + + Female vocalists, Christian, and Polish music + + http://www.magpage.com/~sspan/ + +-----------------------------------------------+ + irc.dal.net #tori #ecto + +-----------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------ End of ecto-digest V6 #159 **************************