I was playing with my amazing new Android phone today and the thought occurred to me… Do people still buy ringtones as ringtones, or do they just buy songs or albums and use those as ringtones? I know my friend Geoff Smith over at RingToneFeeder.com has plenty of customers who love their steady stream of new jingles, but I don’t think I’ve ever asked you guys about them. Please tell me…
Loading ...I am so very excited about the fact that I have a drummer now. If you missed our big debut show at FWA in March, here’s a little taste of what happened. I’ll be posting some video clips from that show as we get them edited, and Matthew Ebel dot net All-Access and higher members can actually download the full-quality versions as they come out.
The audio was graciously engineered by Keith Lesinski (same guy that made us sound awesome at the live event), the video was shot and edited by Aaron Zschau.
If you haven’t been paying attention, I’ve been working on a book called The Lives of Dexter Peterson for a while now. It’s my first attempt at publishing a novel and the first complete draft has been released today. If you’re a Matthew Ebel dot net All-Access or higher subscriber, you’ll be able to download this draft for the next month or so, at least until I upload something to replace it.
More details and an audio introduction can be found over at Matthew Ebel dot net.
UPDATE: Holycrap, you guys filled this need in under 24 hours? Damn. I’m speechless! Thanks for the support, I’ll be sure to send video/photos of the sound panels when I start putting them together.
The dirty little secret of recording studios is that 90% of the work is done by the room. If the room sounds good, the recording sounds a whole lot better. I’m in a new studio now, complete with granite walls, low ceilings, and a furnace. You can help me prepare for The Lives of Dexter Peterson recording sessions, though, by helping me treat the studio walls!
Of course, there are always other ways to help listed over at http://matthewebel.com/help/
For all the work I put into designing and decorating this website, it kinda annoys me that people can get away with zero-frills bare-bones websites. Steve Nutt’s show, Our Place, lives on the barest of bare-bones sites I’ve ever seen… but if you’re a podcaster, who cares?
It’s the show that matters, and this guy has a lot of fun producing it. I had a lot of fun being interviewed. Hopefully, you can tell we’re both having fun!
You can download/listen to the show (120 MB of it) right here:
Download MP3
Or subscribe to the show here.
Photo courtesy of Char, the official FWA photo bug.
payola |pāˈōlə|
noun
the practice of bribing someone to use their influence or position to promote a particular product or interest : if a record company spends enough money on payola, it can make any record a hit.
A tweet-link from the prolific, intelligent, and fine-looking independent music revolutionary Ariel Hyatt caught my attention today, linking to an article by Bobby Owsinski about Payola. In a nutshell, the fact that 60 million people have watched that godawful Rebecca Black “Friday” music video and yet radio stations aren’t running with that ball into the endzone pretty much proves how out of touch they are with what music consumers actually consume.
Owsinski also links to (and quotes) another article where a radio Program Director admits that a song doesn’t make it to radio unless a major record label “brings all of its resources to get it played.” Having interned at a well-known label, I heard all kinds of stories about non-payola payola. Even a decade ago the industry was rife with “this big-screen TV is totally just a gift and has nothing to do with the new single we just sent you (*wink wink*).”
Slimy? Of course. Illegal? Nope. Promotional expenses are as tricky to control as campaign financing; the line between legitimate contribution and vote-buying is purely subjective. Payola is still alive and well despite the laws against it.
And I’m all for it.
Payola might have been bad when no competition existed for music radio. Now we have terrestrial radio, satellite radio, podcasts, internet streams, and the vial of liquid awesome that is Pandora. Rumor has it iTunes and Amazon will be duking it out for market share in this field soon.
With all these venues gaining traction to compete with terrestrial radio, record labels could go broke bribing (or totally-not-a-bribing) all of them, if they even can. Pandora’s playlists are picked by algorithm, not by meat-based decision makers. It’s hard to bribe a robot, I’ve tried. At the end of the day it will be the consumers that drive the industry, not the program directors. The days of dictating taste from on high are over.
I say Payola should not only be legal, it should be encouraged. Let the stupid record labels funnel so much money into radio that they bankrupt themselves and flood the airwaves with mediocre over-compressed crap (*cough* Nickleback *cough*). People have options now- I can listen to Pandora through my refrigerator, for shit’s sake. I’ve already abandoned everything but NPR on the airwaves because half the artists I’ve fallen in love with lately (see my recommendations below) don’t get played.
The smart record labels (yes, they exist, somewhere) will focus on helping good artists develop their craft into music that stands on its own. Or they’ll spend money outside the music stream, promoting the artists where it makes more sense. Who knows, they may even come up with creative marketing ideas. If the airwaves are a known paid-for entity, the public at large will gravitate towards the organic sources of good ideas.
Oh yeah, and it’s not like Payola isn’t thriving on the internet either. A new music site seems to pop up, function, and die about every month or so, nearly all of them taking bribes- sorry, Premium Artist Payments -for better playlist positioning. Nothing ever changes.
Anyone remember MP3.com? Anyone? Beuller? At the turn of the millennium they were big- so big, in fact, they couldn’t cover their bandwidth costs. So they opened up a pay-for-a-promoted-chart-position system that didn’t actually move your songs up in the charts, but placed your song just below the legitimate #1 spot. Payola? Maybe, but as you can imagine it guaranteed that the people with the most money got more plays.
A decade later we have the shitty music service Jango. If you’re a consumer, it’s totally free. If you’re a band, you have to pay for guaranteed plays on their service. Wait, let me get this straight… musicians that are most likely barely paying their bills are providing your website with thousands of hours of content and not only are you not paying them anything for it, you’re asking them to pay you? Count me out.
With the explosion of new media, the signal-to-noise ratio of bad music versus shining stars has grown almost unbearable. Radio once functioned as the sole taste-maker, but everyone knew the system was corrupt. As the industry’s adolescence catches up with it, two new taste-makers will arise: Robots and humans.
Like I said, robots can’t be bribed. Services like Pandora force the listeners to decide what they like based on a complex algorithm. It also forces musicians to produce material that can survive on its own merit. On the human side, there are disc jockeys everywhere. Not the talking heads that sit in broadcast booths playing a pre-set playlist, I’m talking about your BFF on Facebook that puts up a link to a track. That podcaster whose show you like and whose taste you trust. That artist you’re already listening to that recommends another artist she’s fond of.
I believe that opening the floodgates of Payola will simply accelerate a process that’s already happening: Corporate douchebags will blow all their money promoting tepid product while smart consumers move on to greener pastures. The situation’s like a boil that needs to be lanced.
Let the money flow, let the system devour itself, and let the music live or die on more level playing fields.
Holy crap, it’s April? I was just coming to terms with the fact that it was February.
As I sit here caffeinating I’m very conscious of the passage of time. The last three months flew by in a whirlwind of technology and meat. The former because I’ve spent a nauseating amount of time redesigning both my dot com and dot net sites. Seriously, that task alone took up the better portion of… well, honestly, all of January. With some of it spilling over into February.
The latter is a reference to my new partner in crime, Runtt. Moving from a robot to a meat-based drummer was a lot more work than I’d anticipated. Sure, I knew I’d have to rehearse with someone else for once, but I didn’t realize I’d have to re-learn all my own tunes. You just can’t play the same way as a band that you can when you’re solo. A lot of piano subtlety gets lost under the flying lumber and you have to simplify your arrangements to avoid stepping on each other’s toes. With FWA as our debut deadline, we had a lot of work to do and very little time to do it.
And now it’s frickin’ April. And there’s snow on the ground. Dammit, there is fresh snow. All over my van.
Anyway, now that my website is in order and I have a 90-minute show worked out with Runtt, I have nothing planned for April except working on The Lives of Dexter Peterson. No concerts booked, no appearances, no speaking gigs, no road trips, nothing. If I can do this without going broke, I’d like to sit in my studio all month long and finally get the novel up to draft three. And while I’m at it, start releasing full draft-one songs to my hardcore fans. Since I just signed with a booking agent, I’m hoping I can rely on her team to make me busy this summer while I stay busy in the studio.
Don’t know where that relationship will go just yet, but it’s off to a slow start. Maybe that’s a good thing, I’m not sure, but anyone who knows me knows I’m perpetually impatient. Having just survived another birthday, I’m reminded of how fast time can slip by.
Holy crap, it’s April already? I better get back to work.
