Whoo Whoomp!

As if anybody watches the content posted here...



At least this makes me feel better about the state of the fan base in America...

No more record stores? : (

Since we've been on a music biz/physical media kick lately, I thought I'd direct your attention to this cheesy/predictable documentary I Need That Record** about the demise of record stores. It takes the standard tack of 'record stores saved my life', 'it's all about the community maaan', which at least from this record-addict's perspective, is a load of B.S. Most record stores went out of business because most record stores suck, plain & simple. They make you drive out of your way to crawl on some filthy floor, digging through a box to find some overpriced, shopworn 7-inch that's not what you really want because they don't have what you came for, while some totally jaded, glazed-eye clerk stares off into indiespace if you're naive enough to ask him for a 'recommendation', or you try to put in a special order for something and they're all "idk, bro. it might take like, 14 weeks for it to come in. we'll call you." 'Community' is also much overused term; who in their right mind would want to hang out at a store like I just described?

The best store I've ever been to, Camp Zama records in Norfolk, VA, within walking distance of my parents house, never had a single customer in it while I was there. Go figure. Usually though, good record stores like Amoeba in LA and the amazing collectors shops in SoHo are doing well, even in the face of probably-sky-high rents. As long as records/cds/whatever sound better than mp3s there will be record stores. If you're opening one, just follow this simple business strategy: stock plenty of cool, rare shit, sell online, hire just one helpful employee, don't waste people's time, and you'll do fine. The only store in the area currently following this model is All Day Records in Carrboro. Visit them. To all the half-ass shops who think they deserve to be in business b/c ppl just ♥ physical formats, hope ya'll have a sweet liquidation sale.

**the film does feature some cool bits, like Ian Mackaye alleging that he's never heard a Guns N' Roses song!

Come meet the TNRR Crew!

A quick heads up about a little virtual workshop I'm holding over at Turntable.fm - I'll be in channel Indie While You Work while I work on a lab report this evening. As the name suggests, it's populated by a lot of corporate indie types that probably watch Jimmy Fallon. Come by and help me smash their heads on the punk rock!

I'm under the temporary moniker EZ$ until I find the poser who is pretending to be The Truth...

Must See TV

If you have even a passing interest in the music biz, you should watch this video:

http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-music/al-teller-former-head-of-cbs-columbia-and-mca-records/

Very cool Charlie Rose type format, a rare substantial tête-à-tête with an major label honcho.

An Ode to the Old Ways

Ok, so maybe the Counting Crows didn't fetch quite the $400 price tag I was projecting, but we're still in a bubble. And what should you do when you're in a bubble? Well, buy some lim. edyy vinyl of course! Like this, latest War On Drugs album:

One of the best albums (as in, a musical statement designed to be listened to as a whole) of the year so far, pressed on glorious 45 RPM translucent red wax, and yes it sounds divine. [Pro tip: translucent vinyl (of any color) is usually the best sounding. It's the 'marbled' colored stuff you kinda wanna be wary of. Good black vinyl is actually somewhat translucent if you shine a light on it.] There's only 75 of these puppies available worldwide, and you could put stuff like this in your daughter's dowry, so get like me h8rz!

I was just listening to an interview with Steve Albini where he talks about the heard-it-a-million-times-now 'shift in the music industry' away from records and towards live performance. This is significant for him, being a producer/engineer n' all. He seems positive about it, saying that records are now a 'service' for bands used to promote their live show. I'm of a totally different mind about this: I kind of hate live music, and always have. Sure, I've been to some unforgettable shows, but it's a completely different sort of sensation from experiencing recorded music. Occasionally you'll hear live versions that trump the recorded ones in some way, and rarely you may hear some mysterious unreleased song that never makes it to record. But mostly live shows are bland social affairs where you're scanning the room for single hauties and wondering what'll be at the merch table. I used to go see bands because because I wondered what the people making the cool sounds I heard on an album looked like, wondered what kind of personal vibes they were putting out, but now I can find all that kind of info on Fader TV, Facebook, etc. while I listen to their records. So what's the point of going to a show? I can't even scan for hauties anymore, I'm in a relaissh.

This is not my beautiful music industry. I miss the days when the shows were the promotional tool for the product. An infrequent, whimsical affair that was affordable (because tours usually broke even or lost money) and gave one some context about the making of the record, sorta like a book-signing. Will people stop buying books and instead opt for the 'experience' of listening to authors read them aloud? Maybe I feel that music doesn't deserve to be foregrounded. I know the few times I've played live I felt uncomfortable being scrutinized while playing my 2-note part on a synthesizer. Maybe I find the notion of 'watching music' to be vaguely ridiculous [just like I hate being forced by audiophiles to sit and watch the stereo while they emote along with the lyrics next to me on the couch]. That's what music videos are for! Maybe, in the end, I'm just selfish - I want music to be my soundtrack, something to accompany me while I explore drugs/sexuality/car rides, something to listen to at parties with my clique. I want recordings to be well-crafted sonic universes, with their own internal logic and aesthetic laws. And in most cases, I don't want to see the performers of the music, because they won't live up to my imaginary constructions that are the privilege of the listener.

Perhaps one day this will change course. Recordings will seem lame and live music will become some kind of virtuosic, improvisatory cabaret that I can't even imagine yet. But as far performance goes, musicians have some pretty big shoes to fill:

Are these dudes on bandcamp?

The corollary is that as people take recordings less seriously, demote them to the status of promotional devices, they start to take on a slipshoddy quality (to say nothing of the derivative, unfocused songwriting these days) that really distances me from the music, harshes my buzz, and basically forces me to live in the past. Am I gonna end up like this bro?

"The 1920's were the zenith of Western civilization."

Living in my basement, never having had a real job, just visiting random folk's houses demanding to let me buy their records? I hope not. I want a real life, one that involves quality recorded media. It's weird, because at the turn of last century, when the teenagers were making out by the gramophone, dudes like me were saying 'it'll never be like the live show'. But I'm a product of the hypermedia environment of the late 20th century and for me, the recorded sound captures the mystery, the eros, the ethos, the pathos of music. A magical displacement of time and space, experiencing sound far from its original creators and their intentions. Seeing dudes strap on outmoded instruments or push keys on a laptop in my presence usually leaves me flat.

That said, and vis-à-vis Hopscotch, I will be at the party AFTER the show. See you there.

Remember that time that Counting Crows record went for $400 USD?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/300593401676

The record is one of many currently being sold by 'depakh7' - who looks to be one of those very special Japanese dudes who obsessively collect every pseudo-mainstream record you kinda wish you had bought (that one James Iha solo LP on vinyl? check. the lead 12" single from that one James Iha solo LP? he's got that too), and keeps them all in great shape. These loyal and diligent acolytes of MTV culture are and have always been important archivists of Western ephemera, but this historic set of auctions unfolding over the next 2 weeks or so comes at a unique time for recorded music, and highlights the interesting turn record collecting in particular has taken in the last few years or so.

You probably remember the 'Housing Bubble', right? Well, it seems we've entered a Vinyl Bubble, wherein prices for used or even almost-new records take on exponential -even asymptotic- behavior. Here is a graphic that will familiarize you with the concept of bubbles:

Where are we on this curve? Seems like we're past 'Media attention' and well into 'Enthusiasm', no? Following auctions like the one above will give you an idea, but perhaps it's not representative, perhaps the vinyl copy of August and Everything After, the album that soundtracked my drive to middle-school (on CD, natch) every other day for 3 years, is actually the El Dorado of records. There is some merit to this idea - the record seems to only have been pressed in Europe, it's unequivocally their best album by a wide margin, and it looks tasty - full color inner sleeve with lyrics and that big photo of the band smiling and playing their brand of R.E.M-meets-Rusted Root in a dingy alley.

Did this photo ever =Music, for you?

The only thing better would've been a limited first run press on translucent yellow vinyl with one of Adam Duritz-bro's dreadlocks thrown in for good measure. Is it $400 tasty though?

This seems to be a good place to introduce my concept of the 'Danger Zone' of collecting anything. I'm sure sociologists have another term for it, but I call it the Danger Zone because it occurs after that interval of time between when someone was most likely to have positive associations with said media (in the case of pop-rock, we can safely assume 'teenager') and when they were most likely to have sold it because they were ashamed/needed money (college) and when they were first flush with both discretionary cash and free time (late 30's). So the Danger Zone is breached anywhere from 15-35 years after the item was first popular, and it causes significant upward price momentum on the most valuable of whatever the collected asset class happens to be. In the case of the Counting Crows, I imagine it's due to some middle manager at First Citizens bank who heard on NPR that "Vinyl is Back!!" and decided to spend some of his six-figure income on reclaiming misspent youth...

...which is an old story, and it's why sports cars and cosmetic surgery exist, but it's not the whole story. Vinyl itself going through something of an appreciation 'mania' lately. Presumably, people are realizing that the world and music especially are being qualitatively debased by digital technology and are in a mad scramble to grab the last 'authentic' experiences available, very accessible in neatly indexed form of course by same digital technology. Of course, getting a record by the Counting Crows on vinyl in NC in 1993 would've been quite a task in the first place, because the format was basically being dug a mass grave by the RIAA from the years '92 - 97, so that gives it a little added value. But why are new records being 'flipped', within 2 years of their release for 4-5x their purchase price, when they're still widely available on multiple formats? Should I save vinyl to pay for my children's college, or a down payment on a house?

No. I think there's a finite limit to the price people will pay for records and we're rapidly reaching that point. The only advantage that vinyl confers over modern, infinitely more convenient streamable, playlistable formats (besides its textural artifact qualities, kewl colors and the not-insignificant matter of terrible remastering jobs) is its undeniably superior sound quality, even for music that was recorded digitally, on a shitty laptop with a $12 mic. But here's another fact: 32-bit, 192 khz digital audio sounds indistinguishably as-good (better if you consider the zero noise and better dynamic range) as analog records. They only told you CDs sounded as good, but seriously, I'm a vinyl purist and I'm telling you, 2-channel 32/192 audio is perfect**. Why oh why can't we have Perfect Sound Now and Forever?

**this represents a drastic, irresponsible/delusional over-simplification. see this, this and this.

a) a 3 minute song in 32/192 format takes about 1 GB of space. (that means my iTunes library would currently take up about 100 TB in high-fidelity files. most people have access to 5-10 TB storage, tops)

fun fact: iTunes supports 24 bit/96 khz playback (but won't stream it via AirTunes). if you input a 32/192 file it will 'down-sample' (I have no idea how this works) to 24/96. still though, what a difference it makes. try it for yourself!

b) to disseminate (i.e. stream) such a song via the internet requires a ~50 Mbps connection (at the time of this writing, I am sucking wind on a 3 Mbps, although some parts of the country are getting 15-20 Mbps regularly)

c) at the rate things are going, we should see the necessary storage/transmission requirements met by decade's end.

That's right, 2020. By 2030, physical formats are going to seem seriously old-hat and I feel sorry for people laying down 3-4 figures for records that won't fetch that much even in inflation-adjusted dollars 20 years from now.

Is it time to sell, Sell, SELL? I think 'depakh7' is being a bit premature. Enjoy your records/tapes/cd's for another 5-7 years. We'll still be in the Danger Zone for people like me who sold their emo records only to see them appreciate 10x not even 10 years later, and would like to pretend they didn't. At which point, you can take their money and invest in S/S action figures from the 80's (the smart money's on Dino Riders and Boglins) or maybe a Jensen Healey.