So here you go, new music from Goddakk & Plumerai available for $5 album download.
In other news Ben Link Collins (former Silber intern) has his first release on his new label Silent Media coming out. It’s called Coupling & is a tribute to Stan Brakhage. It includes exclusive tracks from Small Life Form & Electric Bird Noise & Promute & a bunch of other folks. You can order it here. I was talking to him about a bunch of things about the release & running a label today & he said he needed to stop talking to me about label stuff as I’m too jaded & he’s still excited about things. Of course he’s right. I need to let people be happy with what they do rather than discouraging them because I haven’t been too successful with what I am doing.
So my music computer I replaced the power supply on & it still is not working properly. I think the battery that is used to hold the bios info went bad when the power supply went out & I need to reset the bios. But for some reason it isn’t recognizing my keyboard in the first wave of startup so I can’t do that. So I am supposed to meet up with the guy who built the thing for me in the next couple of days to see if he can figure out what is up with it. But I might need to buy a new machine. Kinda sucks.
So when I talked to my computer guy he was telling me (somewhat embarrassed about it) that he’s broken down & started running bit torrents for music. He has the same story as I’ve heard from a lot of people, he had his music library that he’d spent a lot of time & money on & someone swiped the external hard drive he had all his music on. So I can understand where the people with that story are coming from. As someone with sympathy for the situation I think he’s in the moral right to get the music he paid for back, but I think we all know that once someone starts getting their music this way it doesn’t stop so I’m torn about it as a label owner. All I want to be able to do is pay musicians enough for them to be able to have access to equipment & free time to get better at their craft. I was talking about musicians & money to CJ Boyd the other day about what an artist earns & he was saying that music naturally comes out of him & the idea that he is entitled a living for it is no more valid than him being owed a living for farting. Which is interesting & I think sometimes a valid argument, but I think the idea of a professional artist class is something I want to continue & I plan to continue to do what I can to help people get to that level by both releasing & buying their music.
Irata was going in their home studio to record some demos today & this fall they are planning on going to a bigger studio as Jason Ward isn’t happy with drum sounds he can get at home (a common problem I’m sure). We’ll see what happens about if their upcoming releases end up with a Silber logo on them or if they are going to move up to the next level.
I updated the review pages of a bunch of the release on the website to have the reviews from the past month. I wonder sometimes if anyone looks through the reviews before deciding on a release.
I’ve been thinking about doing something where I have a featured release every month that the whole release is available streaming as a way to promote sales of items in the back catalog & encourage people to come to the site once a month.
So I’m kinda into this new show called Falling Skies on TNT about an alien invasion. Sunday they are having a marathon ending with the season finale (& since no one seems to watch the show, I’m guessing series finale for all intent & purposes, even though they say it’s been picked up for a second season for next summer). So check it out if you want & let me know what you think of it. In general I’d say it has too large of a cast because it has a dozen characters, but somehow it works for me in that only one or two characters matter anyway. Oh, & it stars Noah Wyle of ER/Donnie Darko fame.
CJBoyd’s argument is a flawed. Nobody sneaks in to sniff his farts nor do they pitch in to buy him bean burritos.
He isn’t entitled to money to create music, however neither is someone entitled to hear/listen/own/download any of the music he created which is more the issue I think than the fact that a musician feels like a public is obligated to give him money to do so. It’s more that the public feels like it’s their right to hear the music and not the artist’s right to expect some token of gratitude in return.
I’m not willing to pay for a new Guns n Roses but then i don’t think i really should be able to have the songs for free either. Not really anything to do with a musician’s entitlement any moreso than Charmin expects something in return if i decide to wipe my arse with their product. The worth of music, the practice of commerce those are the topics at play not a musician’s self-worth or ego, those exist independently of the issue.
Yeah, there’s definitely a problem with people feeling entitled to free everything here in the first world. & at times it seems like not only do people feel like they should have free music, but should be paid to do the artist the favor of listening to it. Which is perhaps related to the fact that now that everyone is a musician the quality of music has lowered to the point where maybe we should get paid to listen to some of it.
most of it you mean.
I think there’s a disconnect between consumers of music and makers of music.
The consumer doesn’t consider all the mundane financial and logistical details of what it takes to get that music to their ears.
Music costs money to make. Especially music recorded in studios with all the costs that entails.
Your average listener would never have reason to think about tracking, travel, mixing or mastering costs. Nor should they. They just download and (hopefully) appreciate the result.
For an artist, posting music as a youtube video or in any other myriad ways available now online costs basically nothing. It’s possible to make and distribute music more or less for free this way now.
What we’re going to lose though, is music that cost any time and money to make.
There won’t be a new Black Sabbath, Cure, Bowie, Joy Division, MBV, Neil Young, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, Velvets, etc.
These are all musics that cannot be made, much less performed, by some dude sitting alone at a computer.
Whether or not that’s a good or bad thing is up to you I guess.
Anyway, this guy has some good points:
http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/6715
That Collateral Damage series in The Wire is really good. One of the thing that has always been funny to me about The Wire is probably 95% of the musicians they cover don’t sell as many units as the magazine does. Maybe that’s true of Rolling Stone too when I think about it.