Category: Music

It’s pretty simple: no music producer, artist can live off music streaming. Music streaming is the worst possible way to get paid for creating music, it’s worse than the past 40 years of labels royalties fuckups.

We soon are going to be left with a couple of choices, all controlled by a few companies: YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify and the rest (iTunes and Amazon). Just because you’re lazy. Yes music listener, you are part of the equation.

You don’t have nothing with your subscription except when you’re a fan and are willing to pay 45 bucks for a vinyl of your new music crush. Everybody is making more money off music than the musician, when the digital era was supposed to liberate us, creators.

If you love music and don’t have a problem with that, you should.

Thinking that those services are going to be nice and friendly is so ridiculous. Beats/Apple are some of the most ruthless companies in the world, they are not about creating an ecosystem for musicians to grow. Music doesn’t sell, music sells headphones and gadgets. When you see how Beats started, I just don’t believe they are all about connecting artists and you, they’re about selling overpriced stuff for your ears and be at a place where they have control all over us.

YouTube isn’t trustworthy either. SoundCloud plays it cool for now but once they really want to make money, we know what will happen. Here’s an article super confident that things are looking great. They are not if you make music.

The counter argument was that I left out “losers,” and that content producers were at the top of that list. But I’m not convinced that has to be the case with streams. The reason I spoke of opportunities was not that I’m necessarily optimistic, but that I think, faced with an irreversible trend, it’s worth seeking out the light and finding success as the landscape shifts. And many artists are doing just that. There’s a reason artists and labels are so quick to upload their work to SoundCloud and YouTube, even without revenue: there’s some value there, when they have control.

There’s some value but it’s quite ridiculous: we’re giving freebies, that’s sad as hell and not a solution. And soon, we will not have any control once those companies start doing whatever they want. They are smart, you will not see it.

Y’all already hooked on streaming, in two years we’re totally fucked.

Music consumption is at the forefront of entertainment consumption. Because it’s the oldest entertainment. Soon you will have accounts for everything and will not own anything. Convenience is great but what happens if you don’t have the choice you want? What if tomorrow that band that was available on that service is deleted from Spotify databases? It will happen and you will never have an answer.

It’s fucking crazy to me that people don’t react to the pattern of free service that becomes ubiquitous then does whatever the fuck it wants.

We’re losing and I just hate it.

The godfather of house passed away last week. I didn’t talk about Don Blackman and George Duke who passed last year and who are such huge giants and influences over music and myself.

But Frankie is different. I started to listen to house music early 2000s, kind of part of me discovering any type of music and electronic music was still quite obscure. I didn’t even know it was noted as gay music. I had listened to some early house, far in the night on the radio station (1991’s Crystal Waters’ Gypsy Woman had been huge here in Europe)  but I thought it was kind of repetitive.

Ha! That’s the thing. You repeat. You forget. You vibrate. And then you dance.

I hadn’t been into dancing before that I just knew mosh pits, the opposite of synchronizing your body. House music made me learn to take my time and not care, just groove until the morning or until my pasta is ready. It’s an important message, still.

Later on mid 2000s I learned about the disco demolition night, the refuge that house music provided to minorities, especially homosexuals who needed some love in a world that just couldn’t stand one of them. In that, to me house music was democratic, bringing together my straight ass, girls booty and gay dudes and lesbians on the dance floor, how many music genre can do that that well? Only one.

RIP Frankie, and thank you for pioneering an entire world. Also please fellow black people, lay off the damn sugars y’all dying from this shit.

Now that I have made over a hundred tracks, both for clients or personal I’m starting to understand more what albums mean.

They don’t mean anything.

Kidding! Not really, let me explain: we have for some reason a fond memory of listening to music albums this way

Or this way:

But it never happened to us.

The truth is an album is a collection of songs, which means that they can be re-arranged in no particular order. Order meant something when we could not skip, repeat or shuffle as we are now. I remember the Judgment Night OST track list to be perfect on tape, they changed it on the CD which I never listened to for that reason. 

If I dissect albums I listened to heavily, I can tell today which track lasted which one was just some fill up, which one was definitely a drag for the band etc. Artists don’t really like making albums, it makes more sense to focus on one track. Multitasking is bullshit, remember? And making one, excellent track is heavy work: pissing 8 minutes of ambient is one thing, calibrating the perfect 4:00 minutes song is maddening but oh so satisfying when you figure it out.

A band like Zapp for example has pretty shitty (that is, weird and experimental songs) albums but stellar, timeless singles.

Anyway it doesn’t matter today, albums don’t sell. There’s too much good music out there, people focus on tracks for that reason. I think it’s cool as it leaves artists more freedom to explore styles without freaking out and listeners can choose and do their own albums through streaming services or files (files! privacy! freedom!).

And yet, we still value music albums as the ultimate accomplishment for artists. We weird.