DJ /rupture end of set @ Telefónica in Lima, Perú. December 5, 2008. thanks to Sonido Martines for the video!
In the green player below, an enchantingly beautiful new song, “Fitnah”, from Filastine’s upcoming album debuts on the Pitchfork-cast! Stu ups another new Filastine track over at Discontent.
and if you want more, Maga Bo did a piece on me as part of his mini doc series (check Bo’s youtube channel for chats with Diplo, Xuman of Pee Froiss, etc)
and if you want more (of everything), try the Extra Music blog [via]. Dubstep, techno, grime, etc. Pirates stuffing our stockings, bellies, ears.
Now let’s talk about value in a post-scarcity music environment.
O that mini-documentary is great.
let’s talk about value, YES, but when was it a scarcity music environment?
for me, what i call post-scarcity occurred sometime around the time i discovered the Smoking Section blog. that’s the 1st blog i remember that was primarily a massive archive of music (hiphop & r&b mostly). Extra Music is impressive b/c its the same idea but with a very Boomkatty selection. I remember shelling out $20, 25 in them mid-90s for import CDs of music i wanted to hear that i couldnt find anywhere else… scarcity for me… nowadays so much obscure stuff is online, somewhere, for free.
I’d be interested to know how you feel about this as a producer – rather than consumer – of music, though. The Extra Music intro blurb (“All links posted on this site are for evaluation purposes and result of our research on other web sites. Support the artists buying original material and erasing the files here downloaded within 24 hours!”) would be well and good if they were offering music at 96 kps or something, but when I can get a 320 kps MP3 rip of the new Neil Landstrumm album for free, my motivation to pay $11.99 for the same thing on Beatport diminishes somewhat.
The post-scarcity concept is an interesting one both in economiscs. Unprecedented access has been a disaster for quality control. DRM has done nothing to help the situation.
Labels need to start better branding their product, and artists fees for live shows should go up about 200%. Maybe bands/Djs should unionize.
It amazes me that MP3’s are sought after at all. Even at 320 kbps there is a a marked difference in quality compared to wax or other lossless formats. To me, an MP3 is a ‘preview’, to allow the listener to decide to buy/not. Unfortunately, Nyquist isn’t exactly a household name. When most listen to music on shit speakers or headphones, the compressed ‘MP free’ becomes the standard.
“both in economics and music” that should say…
as a producer, i feel something like resignation – how can it be any other way, now? the Jahdan EP is on Extra Music (in the sidebar no less!) and Uproot was (i think) until the label it’s own emailed them asking to take it down. After the Pitchfork review of Uproot, at least a dozen blogs posted the entire mix in the next few days.
it as a problem, though, since I believe it’s getting harder for performance fees to rise in any sort of compensation to amounts lost via folks downloading who would have otherwise purchased, and there are always artists who can’t or don’t want to tour, and there are the many albums that honestly require a fair amount of money to make which become less and less viable as labels can’t see themselves recouping expenses…
on a related note, here is a quote from Odalisqued:
http://odalisqued.blogspot.com/2008/12/i-get-jumpy-buying-lentils.html
“So what is this when education, real estate, and health care are almost impossible to afford, but art and information are free to take? Does anyone have a name for this? It can’t be post-scarcity when we are living in such material inequality, at least not in the Marcusian sense. Or rather it is a particular type of post-scarcity, when books and music and films seem to appear to us as easily as food from a star-trek-replicator (leaving behind, in so many ways, the traces of the labor involved in their production — no maker’s hand on this machine), but our basic stuff of life is now so difficult to get. I’m nervous all the time, aware of what happens to the least of us. I still believe that the material conditions of one’s life influence one’s work in equal measure with all else, but once I thought freedom in one’s art only came from wealth or poverty: both in some way release us from the machine. Lately this is just anxiety as control.”
H.U.D.: Damn, I just had to Google “Nyquist”… I guess there shouldn’t be anything surprising about consumers picking convenience over quality. Depressing, though, that this is happening at a time when record companies are getting ever more compression-happy in the mastering stage, obliterating the last traces of dynamic range in the name of “punchiness” and effectively making the end product unlistenable on anything other than shit speakers or headphones.
Jace: Do you think there’s any way of pulling things back from the brink? Adding Lawrence Lessig to school reading lists? Government bailouts for record companies? Something’s really amiss when a blogger’s first response on hearing good music (or reading about good music on Pitchfork) is to encourage everyone else to rip it off for free. Then again, they’d probably see it differently. I doubt that many (if any) of the bloggers who posted Uproot had actually paid for a copy of the album, and if all you’re doing is passing along a Rapidshare link that was already out there, where’s the harm done? (“No maker’s hand on this machine,” as Odalisqued puts it.)
F#ck a MP3.
two more for the holidays = bottom of the map and glowing raw. more dirt and absurdity…