It's all about Bob (Dylan)... or is it?

if you're trying to get a handle on just how much the Music Industry doesn't get people who love music, "About Bob" is a good place to start.

it is a site devoted to the music of Bob Dylan and no,
this doesn't mean you can go there and download all Bob's albums. what you will find there is an encyclopedia of Bob.

it's a place where people who really, and i mean really, care about Bob Dylan and his music. Bob doesn't know this much about his own life.

It is an amazing collection of information, assembled over i don't know how long...
No flash graphics, no fancy designs or annoying splash pages, just the skinny, collected and organized in ways that make sense and are easy to find.

What he did in any given year- the songs he wrote,
where he performed them for the first time, how many official and unofficial versions of each song there are in the world...

...when he recorded what song and who played on it... how many takes were laid down of that song...

it is amazing.

***

are you interested in transcriptions of the interviews Bob did, sorted by decade and available as PDFs? free?

ever wonder about what other artists have covered a song by Bob, or written one that referred to him, or even made fun of him? it's here...
there are listings of 5870 covers of 350 different Dylan songs by 2791 artists!

alphabetized.

now i'm not a Bob freak. i like a lot of his music, and i'm still listening 40 years later. i saw him perform in Toronto with the Band in '74. a minute on this site, and i'm looking at the setlist for that night.

Maple Leaf Gardens,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada,

10th Jan 1974

1. Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I‟ll Go Mine)

2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)

3. As I Went Out One Morning

4. Lay Lady Lay

5. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

6. Ballad Of A Thin Man

7. Stage Fright (The Band)

8. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (The Band)

9. King Harvest (Has Surely Come) (The Band)

10. This Wheel's On Fire (The Band)

11. I Shall Be Released (The Band)

12. Up On Cripple Creek (The Band)

13. All Along The Watchtower

14. Ballad Of Hollis Brown

15. Knockin' On Heaven's Door

16. The Times They Are A-Changin' – (solo)

17. Don't Think Twice, It‟s All Right – (solo)

18. Gates Of Eden - (solo)

19. Love Minus Zero/No Limit – (solo)

20. It's Alright Ma (I‟m Only Bleeding) – (solo)

21. Rag Mama Rag (The Band)

22. When You Awake (The Band)

23. The Shape I'm In (The Band)

24. The Weight (The Band)

25. Forever Young

26. Something There Is About You

27. Like A Rolling Stone

28. Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I‟ll Go Mine)

Tapes: There is an Ex stereo tape of the show.

CD: Phantoms of my Youth (3, 19)

of course, like any good website, it has links to all sorts of variations on the theme of Bob. Dylan Stubs, for instance

here's what the tickets to the Gardens to see Bob and the Band that night looked like....

there's more information there, like posters
from over the years, set lists from his 2010 shows and of course more links.

if i wanted to know more about my night with Bob,
it would probably be in  Bob Dylan Live in Canada A Concert History, 1962-2000 by Brady J. Leyser and Olof Bjšrner

but I probably won't. Like I say, I'm not hardcore.

if you want to really get your Bob on, there's also a bibliography of Bob, listing the titles of books about him, in 27 languages right here.

http://michel.pomarede.pagesperso-orange.fr/CW&C/pages/books.htm

or how about an interactive database of Bob Dylan albums, official and bootlegs?
that's right over here...


if you want to stay current with Bob, and with what people are thinking and writing about Bob, the site you want is Expecting Rain.

every day, there are upwards of 20 posts with links covering Bob and where he fits in to history and the bigger world. there are hundreds of thumbnails
and links to art about Bob.

there is an atlas of places mentioned in Bob's songs,
a message board where you can discuss himself with other interested parties, and it's all carefully archived back to 1995, when the site started, i presume.

all of which is free. all you have to do is be interested...

***

Bob, of course, is a singular artist, with a music career spanning 50 years of activity...but there are all kinds of sites like this out there, for all kinds of artists and musicians.

there are people who could do PhDs in Lou Reed, or Trent Reznor or Britney Spears or Lee Scratch Perry. the list, like the beat, goes on, but what it speaks to is a profound level of interest in and engagement with the lives and work of musicians that is pretty special and unique.

***

these sites are worthy of mention and praise simply for what they are - incredible community-based scholarship. they are passionate testaments to how much music and musicians can mean to people around the world.

these are the kinds of gifts only true love inspires the giving thereof. only an idiot or a complete cynic could spend any time at all on sites like these and think that anyone involved would do harm to the subject of their fascination.

the people who pour so much time into creating sites like About Bob do so because they are profoundly moved by his music. they are not thieves, or pirates or anything as simple or as childish as 'fans'.

- tbc -

About Bob

Dylan Stubs



http://www.dylansongs.org/


Expecting Rain

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Mastering is killing music

music...do you sometimes feel like
you're listening more, and enjoying it less?

you might be a victim of:
a) bad mastering
b) brickwall limiting
c) bad equalization
d) trendy bullshit
e) all of the above


the correct answer is probably (e).

music has been getting louder and louder since
the days of the jukebox, but there have been
some quantum leaps...

the introduction of the CD saw a big jump in volume, the rise of grunge pushed it up a notch
and as in so many other instances*, a new piece
of gear known as the digital brickwall limiter,
which had the ability of adjusting volume levels in advance to max out the sound without going completely over the top... 

soon, it became a kind of db warfare- instead of Mutually Assured Destruction, we got Mutually Assured Distortion- ie - everyone is doing it, so nobody felt they could be the first to turn it down.

how dumb is that?

***

what it adds up to is less 'space' in the music,
aka less dynamic range. no more quiet parts and louder parts. no more can you hear the 'sound of the room' that the recording was done in.

it's one of the lost acoustics in most music there days. it's Spector's Wall of Sound on steroids.

it's yet another one of those ironies in the the 'decline of the Music Industry', because as Brian Eno noted when CDs were introduced, one of the capabilities that came with digital was the possibility of having actual silence become part
of any recording...

was anybody listening?

***

it's too bad. we seem to be stuck in a world of music now where everything is turned up to 11, all the time. it's literally exhausting for the eardrums- they can only sustain a given volume level for so long before self-preservation sets in and they tune out... you can either stop listening, or turn it up a little more.

enjoy the hearing loss.

***

we're close to a point where you literally
can't hear the music for all the processing.

how weird is that?

* see also auto-tuner, etc

LEARN MORE

a musician and producer reacts


the Loudness Wars


the Loudness Wars explained

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Who are the real pirates?

it was many years ago that Bertolt Brecht
asked the eternal question...

"what is the crime of robbing a bank,
next to the crime of owning one?"

one might ask the same question
of the music industry these days,
when it comes to 'pirates'...

Edgar Bronfman Jr convicted
in Vivendi case

The Warner Music Group chairman, Edgar Bronfman Jr, was convicted today of insider
trading and fined €5m (£4.2m) over his conduct
as vice-chairman of French company Vivendi nearly a decade ago.


it seems that shareholders in Vivendi feel they were misled about the financial health of the company after an acquisition buying spree by  the former Vivendi chief executive Jean-Marie Messier...


With Vivendi Universal SA on the edge of financial turmoil in 2002, Edgar Bronfman Jr. began selling shares in the company using inside knowledge that the business was in shambles, according to allegations made in a French court.



Mr. Bronfman is appealing the judgment
but in the meantime, he can take comfort
in the knowledge that it could have been much worse.

While $6.7 million US might seem like a lot of money, his fine would have been much larger
if he was guilty of downloading 100 songs from the internet...




read the whole story at The Guardian

and for more background, try the Globe and Mail

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Mulve - a musician's response

the 'piracy' issue often attracts lots of comments on sites around the web... far too much of which boils down to "oh yeah?", followed "yeah!", provoking yet another "oh yeah?", and so on ad infinitum...

here's one of the more intelligent responses i've come across, by a working musician...

Oct 09, 2010 at 05:37 by dg100

    Hi. I’m from a family of UK musicians. Some of you might be vaguely interested in how the “average” musician actually views all this and I have insomnia, so here’s another short novel. :)

    I’m basing this info on what I know of around 100 or so people’s views (mostly family and friends). Most of this isn’t from any formal polling or anything, just general recollection from the last few years of conversations.

    In case thinks this is the politics of envy, I should point out that – barring a few proper nutters convinced that rich people or the law can never be wrong – the consensus view of piracy is shared by almost everyone I know in the industry, including performing artists, studio professionals and a number of our music publishers’ own workers. This also includes some who have gained real money and fame from the current status quo.

    Piracy

    Very few musicians make any money worth the name from the studios, so it doesn’t make the slightest difference to most of us. So long as it’s not for profit, hardly anyone cares. On the other hand, we think pirates who do make money out of our work without paying us deserve to have their legs broken. Note the complete absence of a smiley at the end of that sentence.

    Most of us grew up copying tapes and have no problem with the idea. Most have no knowledge of bit-torrent, but those of us who are aware of it divide neatly into those who unquestioningly believe what the PRS, the newspapers, etc, have told them and those of us who use bit-torrent ourselves to keep up-to-date with the music scene.

    The division is (very roughly):
    60% don’t know and don’t care;
    30% think it’s a great idea;
    10% think the sky is falling.

    The few people I know who aren’t mental and do really object (about half a dozen in all) are all staunch right-wingers who resent piracy as a matter of moral principle, rather than because they believe it’s actually causing any financial harm.

    The studios and radio stations

    No-one thinks much of the studios, not even the people who work for them. Claims of studios being the cornerstone of music have no real basis in reality – it’s just PR puff. They’ve been saying the same things for years and it’s complete rubbish.

    The industry’s profits fill the pockets of it’s shareholders and of a few artists lucky and/or talented enough to reach the top and stay there. Everyone else gets shafted and everyone knows it.

    For all their self-promotion, their “investment” consists of loans made to artists which have to be paid back – and even then, it’s only if you fit the type they want to make money from – it’s very rare to find a label that has any interest in anything other than the latest formulaic tat.

    What they do want is the next-big-hit-that-sounds-exactly-like-the-last-big-hit and don’t care whether it’s any good or not. Support for whoever fits neatly into the most profitable niches (boybands, for example) is fantastic (if brief), but everyone else can sod off.

    It’s no accident that the top-rated radio-programmes in the UK are for “golden-oldies”. The studios learned a long time ago that they can and do make a lot of profit from talentless-but-marketable newcomers who can be given the worst deals and then instantly kicked to the curb when the novelty wears off.

    There’s much less profit to be had from talented performers who can become successful and then go on to make unreasonable demands, such as sleep or royalties or having some artistic input into their own music.

    It’s not a coincidence that the UK’s studios and industry bodies are so heavily in favour of a deliberately overpriced copyright-licensing regime that has forced vast numbers of live music venues to close their doors.

    All independent music, all talent is seen as a competitive threat.

    It’s only a matter of time before they look to stop public libraries from lending CDs, either by changing the law or going to download-only – and probably pay-per-play DRM’d downloads at that.

    They hope to make even more from piracy. If they can make it fly, they won’t even have to have any artists at all, they can just sell lawsuit-rights to the likes of ACS: Law, over and over, in perpetuity.

    No expenditure, just pure profit. The perfect publishing company for the people who own and run it. If they can do it, then they will do it. You just watch.

    Music

    The general consensus is that the studios and radio stations are mostly crap and have been killing music themselves for many decades, by swamping every outlet with over-hyped garbage aimed at increasingly undiscriminating audiences – that’s where the easiest, laziest money is, so that’s where they all go, to the detriment of any other consideration.

    What should be our country’s most thriving and diverse art-form is increasingly marginalised and irrelevant to everyone who isn’t fourteen years old. We don’t have a music scene, we have a small set of narrow, unchallenging music ghettos, all too often dominated by Britain’s least talented artists.

    There’s no consensus on what should be done to resolve music’s collective problems. But no-one I know with a trace of sanity thinks that stopping piracy has anything at all to do with it.

    Last word

    Regarding the post @118 by Anonymous:

    My family have been musicians for decades. Between us, we have over 150 years of experience, variously as studio- and independent-artists. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any musician anywhere actually quitting because of piracy.

    Making music is a calling and a pleasure and a human need. You quit because of family commitments, because you need a regular full-time mortgage-paying job, because of health or because your heart’s just not in it any more. None of these things have been changed by file-sharing.

    As listener’s, we don’t buy CDs or official DLs because we can’t “steal” them, we buy them because we want to support the artist – that hasn’t changed since the invention of home audio tapes and it’s not changing now.

    Home taping did not kill music and bit-torrent is not killing music.

pretty much covers the bases... one can only wish that thoughtful, experienced voices like this were more a part of the discussions, especially when it comes to creating legislation.

i wish i'd kept the link to this- if i can find it again, i'll post it...

and the beat goes on...

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Bad Labels! No biscuit!

Oh dear... it seems those music lovers at Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and the EMI Group may have gone a toke or two over the line. Again.


"The U.S. Supreme Court has decided that a lawsuit, filed by a group of online music buyers who allege the four largest record companies conspired nearly a decade ago to fix prices of songs sold online, can now move forward.

The high court on Monday declined to hear an appeal by the labels--Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI Group--to block the suit, according to reports by Bloomberg and Reuters. Instead, the decision by a federal appeals court that the plaintiffs had supplied enough evidence to sue the labels will stand.

The lawsuit by the music buyers alleged that the record labels agreed to set a wholesale price floor of about 70 cents per song when competitors were offering songs on the Web for less.

A spokeswoman for Warner Music declined to comment. Representatives from the other labels and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) did not immediately respond to interview requests."

Read the rest of the story at CNET

and at p2p net...

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Ring, ring, Cha-ching!

Did you know that next to texting, ringtones have been the second most popular data service among cel phone users?

It's one kind of music downloading that the Music Industry is highly in favour of, and what's not to love? In 2006 alone, the revenues from ring tones were nearly $5 billion dollars, with people paying anywhere up to $3 for what is usually a 15 second clip of music.

According to Martin Bandier, CEO of EMI Music Publishing, his company collects about 10% of the retail price of ringtones. The songwriter gets paid a royalty from that.

Ironically, the increasing popularity of texting has seen the ring tone business decline in recent years. It seems people are phoning each other less and texting each other more- if your phone doesn't ring so often, it stands to reason that hearing a snippet of one's fave tune might decline in importance.

Ringtone revenues reached in $881 million in 2007, and peaked at $1 billion in 2008... but by 2010 had declined to about $750 million. Some feel that the market will have dropped to $0 by 2016.

Fortunately, just as the earnings from ringtones were declining, along came the ringback. A ringback tone is a song, voice message or a series of digitized sounds heard by callers as they wait for the call to be answered.

Ba da bing!

The ringback is a real upgrade on the original ringtone - unlike ringtones, which 'live' on your phone, ringbacks are delivered over the phone network, which makes ringback music much harder to pirate.

Ringback revenue has more than doubled since 2005, and it brought in almost $200 million for music labels in 2009. It's the kind of easy new money that the Music Industry usually fails to mention when they talk about how dire their situation is these days...

Here's BMI's perspective:
Ringback tones are sold by all major carriers and retail at prices between $1.99 and $2.50 per tone with the vast majority of tones selling at $1.99. The fee allows the subscriber to use the tone for anywhere from 90 days to 12 months. With only one exception, all major carriers require a monthly recurring subscription fee to the service, which is required before a subscriber can purchase a tone. The monthly recurring charge ranges from $.99 to $5.00. Carriers representing more than 75% of U.S. wireless subscribers offer the monthly subscription services at $.99 or less.

FYI - here are the most popular ringtones of 2010

1)   Run This Town ~ Jay-Z, Kanye and Rihanna
2)   One ~ Metallica
3)   Stickwitu ~ Pussycat Dolls
4)   Way of Life ~ Lil Wayne
5)   Fast and Furious (Theme Song) ~ BT
6)   Party Like a Rockstar ~ Shop Boyz
7)   Miss Independent ~ Ne-Yo
8)   I'm Yours ~ Jason Mraz
9)   Ride ~ Ace Hood
10) Remix of 007 Theme
11) Nokia Dying Ringtone
12) My Heart Will Go On - Remixed
13) Waka Waka ~ Shakira
14) Theme of Harry Potter
15) You're Beautiful ~ James Blunt
16) Airplanes ~ B.O.B
17) Not Afraid ~ Eminem
18) Find Your Love ~ Drake
19) OMG ~ Usher
20) I Like It ~ Enrique Iglesias

SOURCES

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/most-popular-ringtones2010.html


http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_17/b3930012.htm


http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/01/18/ringtones-requiem/


http://www.mobileddl.com/search/cricket%20ringtones/1.html


http://www.bmi.com/news/entry/538252

- 30 -

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Free Music... that's not free

Here's an interesting
moment in music!

THE MOMENT

The Universal Music Group has donated
over 200,000 master recordings
to the Library of Congress.

Coming in at more than 5,000 linear feet of shelf space (over a mile), it includes metal and lacquer discs, as well as master mono tapes of released and unreleased versions of recordings by an amazing collection of American artists, including Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday, the Andrews Sisters, Connee Boswell, Jimmy Dorsey, the Mills Brothers, Guy Lombardo, Ella Fitzgerald, Fred Waring, Judy Garland, and Dinah Washington, among others.

Among the tracks are songs like Louis Armstrong singing "Ain’t Misbehavin’", the Mills Brothers’ doing "Paper Doll", Les Paul’s "Guitar Boogie"
and der Bingles 1947 version of "White Christmas".

THE PLAYERS

The Universal Music Group is a unit
of Vivendi, a global media and communications company. UMG owns the most extensive catalog
of music in the industry, which includes the last 100 years of the world's most popular artists
and their recordings.

It is the world’s largest music company,
responsible for roughly 29 percent
of album sales in the U.S. alone.

Among their current sub-contractors are musicians like U2, Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Black Eyed Peas, Rihanna, Eminem and Lil Wayne.

The Library of Congress is the oldest
federal cultural institution in the United States.
It currently has more than 3 million sound recordings in its collections.

 WHY IS THIS A GOOD THING?

I'm glad that this has happened. This music is important. It should be preserved, and in the best possible ways, so that people who are interested can find it, and hear it.

> The fact that the Library of Congress will archive this collection. and care for this music, and make it available - albeit in a very limited form - is a good thing.

It's a subject close to my heart, every since I learned that in Canada, our musical heritage is being left to rot. An awful situation, which at one point, I even tried to interest other people in: The Old Weird Canada.

Whatever.

> This action by Universal may inspire other corporations who own priceless collections of master recordings to also pass them along to the Library of Congress. With this precedent, and what should be a boilerplate template in place, it should be easy for other corporations to do the same thing.
Indeed, they may have a real incentive to do so.

> However imperfect the understanding under which the Library receive these treasures, the fact that they will be preserved and be available to listeners is a good thing in the world.

WHAT RESERVATIONS COULD YOU
POSSIBLY HAVE ABOUT THIS?

 

i'm so glad you asked.

like all good press releases, this one leaves
a few things out:

> it fails to mention that the Universal Music Group retains the copyright on all of these songs.

like this...

Under the agreement negotiated during discussions that began two years ago the Library
of Congress has been granted ownership of the physical discs and plans to preserve and digitize them. But Universal, a subsidiary of the French media conglomerate Vivendi that was formerly known as the Music Corporation of America, or MCA, retains both the copyright to the music recorded on the discs and the right to commercialize that music after it has been digitized. 


and this...



The collection bequeathed to the Library of Congress does not, however, include recordings from the vaults of some of the important blues and soul labels that MCA acquired on its way to becoming the largest of the “big four” record companies. For example master recordings of both Chess Records (and its subsidiary Checker, Cadet and Aristocrat labels) and Motown Records (and its Tamla and Gordy subsidiaries) are excluded from the agreement, at least initially. 

and this...

The exact monetary value of the collection is not known, and a formal assessment has not yet been made. But in addition to the savings that will be gained from no longer having to store the discs, Universal could be in line for a substantial tax write-off as a result of the donation.

***

like any good press release, this one conjures more questions than it answers.

? what are the costs of digitizing/archiving this collection?

? what cost sharing arrangements are in place vis-a-vis the commercialization of these archives post-digitalization? can the Library of Congress recoup expenses?

NOTE ALSO:

The Library will be able to stream these tracks from a website it is constructing for that purpose so people will be able to hear them... which is important, because as the press release notes:

"only an estimated 14 percent of pre-1965 commercially released recordings were currently available from rights holders. The study also found that of the music released in the U.S. in the 1930s, only about 10 percent of it could be readily accessed by the public."  

How does this tie in with other problems of accessibility mentioned elsewhere on this blog?

Is it reasonable to bitch people out for downloading music that the Industry is not making available?




and if I had nothing but time, and/or was getting paid to do this thinking, the question i would put on the final would be:

"how does this agreement differ from the agreement between the Smithsonian Institute and Folkways Records? Discuss.

this and a number of other ugly truths can be found at the original source of this article on the New York Times

Folkways and the Smithsonian

the source

the source of the source

the view from tech crunch

the view from Tech Dirt

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