If you purchase one album this year by my recommendation, make it this one. Ravens & Chimes have had what you might call a hard time: their tremendous debut earned comparisons to the Arcade Fire and the attention of Leonard Cohen but didn’t quite make them a buzz band. Or a touring band. Sophomore album Holiday Life became an ordeal, slowed by writer’s block, day jobs, a handful of recording sessions, a label hunt and a second, final mix before its release this April. It is, in short, an urgent, gorgeous album. It reminds me a little of Shearwater, if that band was more dorky and approachable. Frontman Asher Lack’s lyrics are at turns hopeful and desperate, decrying the “so very few hours in the day” before calling out later, “It’s not too late/to be with me again.” Everyone wants a second chance; sometimes it never comes. Let’s not let that happen.
(Source: Spotify)
When I say “That Miles Davis Bitches Brew, that ‘biaytch’ said by playboy Too” — when you catch that line, it’s significant. Usually, people who are music aficionado are kind of elite, and they never gonna put Too Short next to Miles Davis. But saying the word ‘biaytch’ and bringing that to the forefront the way Too Short did in the nineties — that’s significant to hip hop. My whole life, I’ve seen hip hop be an outside child of the black music experience. But the black music experience has pushed all of America forward, and I’m tired of being the child by the other woman. We deserve our place.
Already sold.
Turquoise Jeep’s short film/Kanye homage. It’s incredible.
Footnotes in the pay-per-stream and viral discussions: Goldroom, a Los Angeles producer you’ve probably never heard of, had over 200,000 streams of his new single this week, with those numbers including a No. 1 Hype Machine spot. By contrast, Kitty Pryde’s “Okay Cupid” sits at 199,000 today. One of them is a viral star. But both numbers are far, far below the millions of streams that YouTube cover acts (a phenomenon now entering its heavily corporatized, second-wave grunge period) get in the same period merely for singing popular songs by Bieber or Carly Rae Jepsen.
The point being: getting 5,000 Spotify streams in a month, as one artist discussed the other day, is a number so low as to be basically irrelevant. Or a number that might actually proportional to its $20 payout. After all, at YouTube’s $1 CPM, he would’ve made $5 — Spotify might actually be paying a premium.
To go one step further: you could make a decent middle-class living entirely on Spotify with 1 million streams per month, or 100,000 streams of a 10-track album. Or you could sell 400 copies of a $10 album every month. In 2012, which is harder? (All numbers disregard recording costs and so on.)
So eMusic (which I write for) is doing these “Sound Minds” blogger/journalist panels. This is the first I’ve watched, and it addresses an important question: are bands being rushed into success? The answer is “absolutely,” but I think everyone but the bands are to blame. Which is not to say they’re not responsible for their actions, but if you have an opportunity to, say, play SNL or headline Bowery Ballroom off the strength of a blog single, you’re not going to say no. And given the speed of current trends, you’d be foolish to. (Ms. Del Rey herself can be partially blamed for not being prepared and credited for making a rapid course correction on Letterman.)
But look at someone like Kitty Pryde. She’s released a handful of promising but clearly amateurish tracks and within 48 hours of releasing a single YouTube video, she’s a media darling. Blogs caught a whiff of buzz, real or imagined, and rushed to it like sharks chasing blood: now she has an outsize media presence that correlates with neither her experience/talent level (no offense!) nor her actual audience. I mentioned before that she’s the first viral star to not actually go viral: jury’s still out.
Kitty will probably turn out fine, but there’s a moral component to this: 1) that blogs/sites are in effect inaccurate at best and lying at worst by positioning her as a viral star/rising rapper to boost their own tastemaking/temperature-taking credibility and 2) she’s essentially a newborn puppy being thrown out into the woods, rather than being gently led at a pace that will result in better things for everyone involved. Even the Backstreet Boys were a band for years before they became instant bubblegum stars.
On the other hand, the old system — where indie bands toured forever and maybe found a following and sold enough records to get by — was hardly optimal. The best of both worlds is the arc of bands like the National, who were able to be a band without attention for long enough to be prepared and great by the time people started noticing. But they were also stable, wealthy adults who could devote the energy to that without a timeline.
(Discussing this in terms of major label acts is a different animal: the trend there seems more in line with delaying albums, trying to find a single, industry showcases and generally babying artists or being less willing to take a chance on them than indie acts who are largely at the arbitrary mercy of a Best New Music/Track rating.)
I don’t think bands are being victimized by the current process, but they are being exploited. To some degree, they’re losing control of their careers instead of mapping them out stage by stage — one can see why Beach House or Arcade Fire keep such a tight grasp on what happens to their music, though I’d argue those bands’ choices are old-fashioned, even extreme. It would behoove everyone, listeners included, to turn the hype volume down and try to actually absorb music on its own terms instead of using exaggerated opinions on it as a wedge for pageviews or cred.
Related: I wish this video was 10 minutes longer. Hi, Amrit!
I detest voice mail. Answer your goddamn phone or don’t have a phone. We have an answering machine at the studio for when everybody’s gone, but otherwise I answer the phone and I expect other people to. I detest the whole system of using the phone to manage/frustrate callers with menus and voice mail and all that. It’s a copout and it sucks and if you do that to people you’re an asshole. Answer your phone
All of it is this awesome.
We seem to be on the verge of having the complete architecture for bands to sell and distribute songs, license them out, monitor their listening and usage stats and collect a reasonable portion of the profits. It’s exciting: it means bands can spend more time making music and making fans.
Related: I wish Spotify would make their streaming numbers public.
