the merlin beggars copyright wars part 1

Every month I create a youtube playlist of songs I listened to and favourited the previous month. This is a weird hangover from when I was in a mixtape-swap  community (yes I know) earlier this century, when I cracked a methodology for making mixtapes with pretty much zero effort. The methodology is as follows:

1. Carry a personal listening device with a favorite or add to playlist function (I use a banana yellow ipod nano which barely holds any battery life any more).
2. Refresh the personal listening device content monthly according to any criteria you please (I use recently added + random from entire collection).
3. At the end of each month extract favourited tracks and order them into a compilation.

And there you go, a monthly playlist with pretty much no effort on your part. Naturally I complicate things by drawing a cover, writing a bit of blurb and agonising over song order, but these are all things I enjoy doing.   Draw a picture? I'm in.

Once upon a time I'd print them onto a CD, but last year this started to feel wasteful, and maybe a touch morbid - what was I creating all these artefacts for? Was I expecting them to be handed out at my funeral or something? So I switched to Youtube playlists.

This created issues. Mainly this issue:

Song videos like this are often described as "merlin beggared" after a music rights group that was very, very active with location-specific take-downs at one time. They seem to have calmed down a bit, and most music has moved onto the automatic recognition treadmill, so I'm not having to do as many substitutions as I used to. But they're still there, and still happen, and sometimes very big names are caught in a flash of Youtube refusenikdom - I remember one month I couldn't find any Prince on Youtube, for example. How much effort must that have cost someone?

The other main irritation for the Youtube mixtaper is those artists who feel a stream of their full album is good, but not individual tracks. Preciousness? Profits protection? I'm no more able to understand it than the habit of putting tracks with significant chunks of silence and/or random noise onto albums - leaving the user inexpertly completing what the producer should have done (and probably spent a long time arguing with the artist over).

Recently I've found an odd phenomenon of tracks with a snatch of unrelated track/movie footage attached. Which is a way of hacking Youtube's automatic content recognition software, maybe, as below.

Where it's well chosen and brief, I sometimes take the lumps and put it in the mixtape anyway. But when it's a large chunk of something not well aligned, it's got to go. It's another substitution.

Over the years, there's a steady trickle of takedowns, channel deletions, rebrandings, label changes and other entropic processes which steadily fillet the playlists. At one time Youtube would leave the removed video in the playlist, a grey thumbnail like a dead tooth in the grinning mouth of your playlist.

They don't do that any more. All that remains of the music that has been disappeared is a single alert message: one of more of the tracks has been deleted and removed from your playlist. The older the playlist, the shorter it becomes. In the end, I suppose, every playlist will empty.

thinking of setting up a myspace again

I'm in a band (woo-hoo) and we have of course done the usual of setting up an Instagram and a Twitter and a Facebook and a Bandcamp but in the way of these things I'm struggling to engage. It's not that the band doesn't have a voice and aesthetic (it does) or that I don't like it (it's awesome; everything about it is awesome) but something deep in the architecture of the platforms. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Bandcamp. Pictures, words, people, stuff. Where is the music?

Music-first social networking sites struggle. I remember the giddy delight at Soundcloud, but it's struggled to move with the times or feel properly social, and we haven't even set up one for this band. The last band, for which I provided various services over the years, had one. That was during its high years.  Whatever became of Audioboo? I used to fill it with snippets of found sound and birdsong. Now it's Audioboom and just another small scale online publisher. Last FM, RCRDLBL, emusic, there was even a DJ-ing one where you played at being a radio host and I actually managed to make never-met network-buddies through its delicious combination of blunt track-matching algorithms, and I-love-this interaction formats. All gone.

So of course I got to thinking about the first great social networking site that got music right. Myspace. Like so many, my data echo is still sat there in the empty halls, waiting for the winds of fashion and legislation to let in a shaft of light, to crack the door once more. I imagine Myspace Tom, grizzled and sat on his dusty throne, looking up confused as the music fans come flooding back, looking for their home online, that they still don't have, not really.

But of course, Myspace isn't what it once was, and Tom is doing other things now. We could do it though, couldn't we? Set up a Myspace for the band, like it's 2005 all over again?

Yeah, probably not.

jam yesterday

This is my Jam announced its closure late last night. I came late to it (a long time after I gave up on my previous semi-social music recommendation randomiser, blip.fm, which went during the early days of Flash instability, following one too many terrifying jackhammer soundcard lean-on-the-power-button errors) and I'm intermittent on everything nowadays, so I'd barely cracked 20 jams. I feel like I just arrived in time to see the closing down signs.

The reasons boil down to three -- fast evolution in its feeder services, creating a need for impossibly constant development of the interface tools; an increase in these services denying sharing (which sometimes seems to be down the artist wanting that, as in the case of Prince; but in the case of artists trying to get their songs up the charts, seems more likely to be as a result of the administrative burden of enabling sharing in a world where the companies involved are beginning to set sharing to "off" as standard);  and the lack of enthusiasm, time, legislative force and money to do it again for mobile.

Sat as I am, right at the end of development on a mobile-first, social-integrated website, this chills me a little. Of course, in my sector, there's no venture capital or straining to be the next big thing; but is the approach of trying to integrate with Social Networking Sites (because that's where people are™) and designing "mobile first" (with the full awareness that the fast and divergent development of the different operating systems  means that you can only really design for a few mobiles first, and they probably won't be the ones next year's users will be using) a fool's game?

Not much to do about it, I suppose. It's the game we're in.

While I was writing this, I listened through my latest jam-list. Halfway down, I spotted a track off the new Chemical Brothers album (I'm considering purchase, and being both old fashioned and keen to support a local indie record store, do sometimes buy physical CDs, especially when there are added inducements) which I made a mental note to listen out for.

Alas, the playlist skipped straight from



to


which I struggled to feel sad about, as the degradation occurred without fuss or stutter, and both tracks were a lovely listen.

A quick visit to Youtube confirmed that the Chemical Brothers track had been scrubbed off Youtube, and the video labelled with the track name was instead a small random video of a snippet of music you could mistake for the beginning of a track, with many ads appended (hooray the internet).

creative output/traumatic insemination

There's been some very innovative music release actions this year. First there was Beyoncé's 17 videos vs Bowie's secret album and oh the world was full of delights and mysteries, and any morning might bring an unexpected creative explosion in the most unexpected places. What joy!

Then, of course, it had to get creepy. I'm looking at you, Thom Yorke. The decision to release via Bittorrent doubtless felt very right and now as it was happening. Perhaps he had been advised that everyone with a computer had Bittorrent, but that's not exactly true, is it? Perhaps he had also reflected on those old early-days CD releases which would install some bit of crapware on your computer and thought, this isn't unbroken territory! Perhaps there was some thought that only people who were able/willing to install a piece of 3rd party software on their computer should be able to purchase the album - a sort of initiation test, the music hidden behind a technical tiger. So we had Bittorrent. Briefly. And felt slightly violated.

But worse was to come. Itunes is of course WAY more ubiquitous than Bittorrent. There are three iterations of it running in this household alone (if you don't count the ones on the i-pods, and if you do, there are five*) and that meant potentially THREE copies of a U2 album we never ordered parachuting into the household. Alas, I'd lost my iTunes log-in in a password reset fiasco about four years ago and never got round to fixing it**, so it was only my dearly beloved suddenly exploding in a pile of swears. "Violated!" he choked, "By Bono!"

Unusual. But it got me thinking. Why are we staring at Beyoncé and Bowie going ooooh! aaaaah! like kids looking at fireworks, and going uuugghh aaaaaah at Yorke and Bono waving our hands like teenagers startled by a creep at the busstop? There's the obvious difference of course (the former being glorious edifices of alien glamour and the latter being essentially middle aged men with ponytails) but there's something more going on I think; and I think that we must reach for gender studies.

We choose what entertainment we let into our homes (and our computers are our homes, or at any rate an important part of them). We choose the providers and tools and methods and programmes that make up our own individual technical support zone. This area holds our memories, creative output, social group and task lists. Our body doesn't end at the skin, it extends outward, into our household and its echo, in the remote servers of the cloud; and for most adults*** access routes to that body-echo is as carefully monitored and controlled as access to our actual body.

What then of the music release that requests that you download and install a programme that you are fully aware of but consider a risky access route? It strips choice away from the receiving partner. There's a power shift, a power imbalance. Consent is compromised, or at least carries an unwanted freight, and one which exposes you to further risk. The act of receiving the music requires an act of self-compromise. Like certain encounters with gentlemen (or ladies) you might have had in your early twenties, it's not technically what you'd call .... awful ... but it leaves you feeling nasty and desperately scrubbing the programme from your computer, thinking, I didn't want this.

Bono, of course, went rather further. The traumatic penetration of iTunes libraries resonated around the world. Of course, it made a bigger splash than Bowie and  Beyoncé. He'll have made more money (does he need more money? do any of them?) and got more media coverage. But he's also joined that long list of powerful men in the entertainment industry who feel you should be grateful for (you may insert pretty much anything here) . Last I heard, Bono was being chased down the street by angry Germans, and I laughed, along with the person telling me the story, because I have been (like many people of all genders and ages) a powerless girl, and, oh, wished for that, or something like that.

*The extra ipod is fully functional bar the sound chip which got fried in a tragic headphone jack/power lead confusion incident.
**As I already have a surfeit of entertainment channels and music acquisition routes.
***Children's access is moderated by their parents/carers/schools.

developing backwards

At the moment I'm typing this while flicking back and forth to the tab containing emusic, where I'm previewing a random pile of notes, recommendations and more. I have to keep flicking back and forth because unless you have their overly needy tab at the front, the volume of their preview player reduces to an irritating whisper. So, in order to multitask, I have to keep on flipping back to it, each click-back accompanied by a little stab of complex disappointment, which ranges from irritation at how dark and gloomy the site is since the redesign, to musings on how bugs get sold to site owners as features, to a slight sadness at how this is a literal performance of the myth of multitasking. I'm  very fond of emusic (and frequently recommend it -- their long tail is very long, and they have a great selection of rarities, and most labels remember to put their singles up on it, but if you are signing up be aware that their album releases run a little later than other providers and there's typically no album discounts) but...

Music sites in particular seem to be prone to developing backwards. As legitimacy and commercial interest catch up with the bleeding edge the sites get more strewn with logos and disclaimers, the supply of downloads dries up, and sweet deals (that are perhaps more sweet for the owners than the customers) begin to clutter the original offer.

I'm currently wavering over RCRDLBL, for example, originally a hot daily download that has mutated over a few years, sometimes offering more, sometimes less (the buggy Bing-branded music player a particular nadir) but often the place to find sweet remixes that for some reason were not making commercial release. They've shaken off Bing, but recently it's gone a bit streamy (enabled by Spotify and Soudcloud) and expanded their recommendations. But other people's lists of things they like are not that much more exciting than your own, and the more third-party systems involved and the longer the list, the bigger the administrative task. On the other hand, they have lead me to treasures and precious jewels in the past, and still do with a bit of careful trawling - if I ever find the time.

day 12 : the music scene

I'm already a member of a music community site, although I didn't join it to meet people. Emusic is a subscriber downloads site which takes advantage of the enormous enthusiasm people have for recommending music to each other. New, old, obscure, you name it, they have a (certain subsection of) it, although being both DRM free and 100% legal leaves their product prone to winking on and off like solar lights in the rain. Another friend on the service finds this intensely aggravating, but I'm more amused; with the amount of music available I'm never going to run out of new, interesting things to download, so the only loss is to the labels. And to emusic, of course -- who should really rename their "save for later" function to "you can save it for later but it may not be available then, are you sure?".

Two, if you count myspace. I suppose that I should. But actually, I'm hitting LastFM today. A site so oldschool, you have to download software for full functionality. No hitches with that, though, so all's good. I figure out scrobbling, build a profile, and set up a suitable soundtrack to go looking for people I already know by. Here, though, is where I hit a snag. It defaults to stealing my address book and spamming all my friends with an "invite". Nah, I don't think so. So I mince through my own address book and pick out the LastFM users by hand, and it's tricky enough that they clearly just want me to give up and just do the spam thing. I also skip over the people who I've drifted out of touch with, those whose email addresses don't instantly recall their name and those who are just a bit too famous. Nah, I'm not going to meet anyone here.

That said, though, it does the music stuff really sweetly. Right now it's pissing down with rain, I'm feeling kind of grim and playing artists similar to Radiohead. I've already had to express my love for tracks twice.

Verdict : It's about the music, not the socialising. Which is fine.