WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Radiovision Festival: How To Pay For It

As much as the word "monetize" makes me reach for my revolver - artists, musicians, writers, and radio stations are now competing for fewer and fewer dollars, as dinosaurs like the music industry and the publishing industry shuffle off the world stage. There is plenty of great work being made right now, but until new funding models emerge its difficult to imagine how creative types can sustain the output.

October 28th - 30th, WFMU is holding its first ever Radiovision festival. On Saturday the 29th (Symposium Saturday) we will examine three possible funding models of the future:

There are plenty of crowd-funding websites and platforms but there is only one Kickstarter. This month the company announced that they just hit one million backers, that's one million backers of comics, albums, books, video games, urban farms, documentaries, exhibits, performances, and thousands of other creative works. Yancey Strickler is one of the co-founders of Kickstarter and he will be on stage to talk about why Kickstarter campaigns are so successful, and what the future of crowdfunding will be.

While most foundations have long lists of requirements you need to meet before they will consider writing you a check, The Awesome Foundation has only one prerequisite: that you be awesome. Christina Xu is one of the founders of The Awesome Foundation and she is going to talk about how her organization is regularly passing out no-strings-attached $1,000 grants to people doing awesome things like documentaries, public art projects, even interactive community notice boards. Awesome Foundation does not have a very complicated formula - every month a group of trustees get together and award a grant to a project they like best. New chapters are opening in cities all over the world, and they were just awarded a Knight News Challenge grant, this is a model with a future.

The music and publishing industries may be in free-fall but the advertising indusry is doing great. Jeff Tammes is the EVP, Creative & Strategy at Cornerstone of Cornerstone a marketing agency that pairs artists with lifestyle brands.  Cornerstone also helped set up Converse's recording studio, Rubber Tracks, in Williamsburg. Jeff's message for creators is that lifestyle brands can help artists and musicians realize their dreams.

Our moderator for this panel is Rebecca Gates. who as a member of The Spinanes can remember both the bad and the good of the old model, as a working musician has awareness of the complexity of the current scene and as a member of the Future of Music Coalition wonders: “How are all these shifts affecting working musicians? What are the implications for a musician’s practice? And what do these new models mean for the shape of arts culture in the future?

Tickets are on sale, but they are going fast. We already sold out the Radiovision Opening Night performance with Joe Frank! Don't miss out.

Radiovision Festival: Internet Culture and Community (Anonymous, Makers, and Memes)

What can Internet Communities teach us about the future of Radio audiences?

On October 28th - 30th, WFMU is holding its first ever Radiovision festival. And on Saturday the 29th (Symposium Saturday) we have a session focusing on three of the fastest growing online epicenters of community activity: Anonymous, Makers and Meme culture. we've lined up four amazing individuals to help us better understand the values of these communities and to learn how they are driving the evolution of the internet:

Bre Pettis doesn't just make things, he can make things that make things. He is a founder of Makerbot (a company that produces robots that make things), and NYC Resistor (a Brooklyn hacker collective).

Kenyatta Cheese may be famous for playing a Meme scientist on the internet (Know Your Meme), but he is one in real life as well.  Kenyatta is one of the leading experts of online media, culture and technology. He advises NGOs and is also on the board of the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology.

Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist and the author of the forthcoming book "Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking." She is currently working on a new book on Anonymous and digital activism.

Tim Hwang is one of the co-founders of ROFLcon (a conference dedicated to Internet Culture). Tim not only helped us program this panel but he will be leading the discussion as well.

Tickets are on sale, and they are going fast. We already sold out the Radiovision Opening Night performance with Joe Frank! Get yours now.

WKCR Launches Online Live Archives

Just yesterday, Columbia Uni's radio station WKCR made available some notable past archives from the treasure trove of live music and interviews the station's been broadcasting for years.  Click here to find the list of what's up so far - seems like a long term project that'd be worth checking back with over the course of the coming months.  Right now I'm listening to an hour long live session from Necking, recorded on Live Constructions with Narine Atamian, who also blogged earlier today for WFMU!  Apparently Phil Schaap's archives are not considered live poetry readings, you'll have to find his rants on his own site...

Download Ten Secs of Every Hit Song of the '60s

Here we are, reading the first sentence of the second installment of a column where I'll give you a chartsweep of every hit song from 1956 to 1997.  If you're wondering where this all comes from, I applied a shell script I wrote (that finds the maximum amplitude of an mp3 and cuts 10 seconds from that point) to one of the great treasures of WFMU's music library - that magical folder of mp3s called "Top 100 By Year".  For this week, I will not wax philosophical on why I find these cutups so beautiful...they speak for themselves!

Also, check out these related bits of compilation/traversal art!  Listener Fred sent me a video of Noe Soulier perform several dance pieces - among them are every ballet step in alphabetical order and (!!!) an exerpt from every 19th century ballet taken in chronological order.  Fred also sent me a link to a Max/MSP patch called CataRT, which cuts up sound into tiny "grains", graphs them, and allows you to reconfigure those "grains" creatively.  In the comments to my last post, listener Robert showed me his awesome blog that makes a statistical analysis of the most popular keys of pop songs throughout the decades.  One major work that I should also mention is R Luke Dubois' piece Billboard, which finds the spectral "average" of every #1 billboard song and then plays each distilled hit in chronological order.

1960 | 1961 | 1962 | 1963 | 1964 | 1965 | 1966 | 1967 | 1968 | 1969

If you like all this nonsense, please support my radio show.  Follow this link to my playlist where you can make a pledge to WFMU, which misguidedly allows me to cutup and reconfigure pop shlock for the entertainment of nincompoops such as yourself!

Find the complete tracklist of these songs below the fold!

Ten Secs from Every Top 100 Song 1956-1959

Here's an hour long teaser of the datadump I'll be unloading on this blog in the next few weeks.  Listeners of my radio show know I've been obsessed with Hugo Keesing's Chartsweep of every #1 hit for too long now.  After I made an homage to his work with a sweep of every #1 easy listening hit, I really saw the need in our society to have every large database of music cutup into tiny, bite sized pieces, but realized I didn't have the time to do it.  So now that unix has turned 42 (happy b-day, big guy!!), I wrote a little patch using SoX to grab the hook from every mp3 in a folder and stich em together.

While pretty much everybody can identify and appreciate the hook from any individual song (it's the one part you remember of that song you hadn't heard in years!), definining the hook concretely is a tricky problem.  It's usually the title of the song, but not always.  It's usually at the beginning or end of the chorus, but not always.  So when I wanted to teach a computer to grab the hook of a song I had to ask the deep question, what is the hookiness of these hooks?

With no real answer, my cheapskate workaround is that the hook of the song is almost always simply the LOUDEST part of the song.  Super easy to teach a computer to do that, since an mp3 is nothing but a list of how loud sound is at a given time.

Yes, it's true, in this Darwinian yelling match that births the concept of a "hit song", there's no room for saving the hook for a quiet, subtle moment in the song.  I'd go so far to say that any song that DOESN'T put the hook at the loudest part of the song is possibly communist.  So even though these chartsweeps aren't nearly as pristine as Hugo Keesings, but they do get the point across pretty well.  And as an added bonus, this program weeds out those songs that are immoral and unamerican.

I'll be posting a decade of chartsweeps every...eh, week or so, in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned!

Top 100 of 1956

Top 100 of 1957

Top 100 of 1958

Top 100 of 1959

Vimeo's new service connects videomakers w/ video-safe Creative Commons music from Free Music Archive

The classy video-hosting site Vimeo launched a new service to connect their noncommerical community of creative independent video producers with quality legal music options. The Music Store utilizes the Free Music Archive API to index the portion of the FMA library that can be used in video projects under the Creative Commons framework (i.e. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike; about 11,000 tracks) and offers these curated jams as its free options. This is an exciting moment for those of us who share our music under open licenses to inspire new collaborations and expand our reach.

From Vimeo's announcement:

As many of you know, finding music for your videos can be somewhat... well, painful. Licensing music on your own can be confusing and finding good free music can take forever. Many of us here at Vimeo are video creators or filmmakers as well and we experience these frustrations on a regular basis. So, we decided to do something about it.

The majority of FMA's library is pre-cleared for noncommercial use only, so it might seem strange at first that free music is included in something called a Music "Store" alongside paid music from a company called Audiosocket. But for many artists, allowing for hands-on engagement with their work in the noncommercial sphere plays into a broader promotional strategy, and even leads to lucrative commercial licensing opportunities. We always love to hear about the collaborations that result when producers who actually have a budget discover one of the many great artists who share their work via the Free Music Archive, about artists being commissioned to score new documentary films, mobile app soundtracks, and viral videos that reach 2 million views.

Vimeo introduced Creative Commons licensing for video last summer, and we've already seen a flurry of videos powered by CC music from the FMA -- everything from educational projects, travelogues, time lapses, recipe-sharing, and science videos to the immensely popular cute animal videos (although I guess that's more a YouTube thing). I'm including one example after the jump, along with the latest in FMA's series of mixes curated with the online video producer in mind. Vimeo's Music Store seems is totally new, so it's sure to be refined over the course of time. If you have feedback you can leave a comment here, and we look forward to the new collaborations that this bridge between the CC Music Community and the CC Video Community will inspire!

[Excerpt from e-flux Journal] Hans Ulrich Obrist, In Conversation With Julian Assange, Part I

HUO: Do you have dreams for the future?

JA: Yes, many. I’ll tell you about one, which is interesting. Orwell’s dictum, “He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future,” was never truer than it is now. With digital archives, with these digital repositories of our intellectual record, control over the present allows one to perform an absolutely untraceable removal of the past. More than ever before, the past can be made to completely, utterly, and irrevocably disappear in an undetectable way. Orwell’s dictum came about as result of what happened in 1953 to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. That year, Stalin died and Beria fell out of favor. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia had a page and a half on Beria from before he fell out of favor, and it was decided that the positive description of Beria had to go. So, an addendum page was made and sent to all registered holders of this encyclopedia with instructions specifying that the previous page should be pasted over with the new page, which was an expanded section on the Bering Straight. However, users of the encyclopedia would later see that the page had been pasted over or ripped out—everyone became aware of the replacement or omission, and so we know about it today. That’s what Orwell was getting at. In 2008, one of the richest men in the UK, Nadhmi Auchi—an Iraqi who grew rich under one of Saddam Husain’s oil ministries and left to settle in the UK in the early 1980s—engaged in a series of libel threats against newspapers and blogs. He had been convicted of corruption in France in 2003 by the then magistrate Eva Joly in relation to the Elf Aquitaine scandal.

(read the rest...)

WFMU Webcasts The BLIP FESTIVAL live from Eyebeam, May 19-21st (mp3s)

THURSDAY NIGHT >> PLAYLIST // STREAM (.pls)

The world's premier international chipmusic event event, the Blip Festival returns to NY May 19-21. WFMU will be there live streaming direct from Eyebeam to your home computer!

Produced by 8bitpeoples & The Tank, the Blip Festival celebrates the best and brightest from the realm of chipmusic and its related discilplines. This year, artists from all over the world will converge at Eyebeam, the leading not-for-profit art and technology center in the USA, for three days of arresting music and visual art utilizing former heavyweights of computing like the Commodore 64 and Amiga, the  Atari ST and 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy.

WFMU will once again be webcasting live from the Blip Festival! So if you’re not able to make it to Eyebeam in the flesh, you can surf on over to wfmu.org each night for the live stream, Accu-Playlist, photos and a realtime comments board. WFMU DJs Bennett4Senate, Marty McSorely, and Jason Sigal will be joined by special guest DJ XC3N from Montreal CISM | 89.3FM to host and DJ between sets both on the stream and in-person at Eyebeam.

Highlights from these performances will be available from the Free Music Archive, where you can also enjoy a vast collection of mp3s from the 2009 Blip Festival at the Bell House in Brooklyn! After the jump, True Chip Till Death's Peter Swimm (who is also a 2011 Blip Festival performer!) made a mix of highlights from the artists who performed at the most recent NYC edition of the Blip Festival...

Stephanie Davidson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Stephanie Davidson lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

New Podcast from the Free Music Archive: Grey Area

I'm spinning off the podsafe portion of my regular ol' WFMU radio show into a Free Culture-themed podcast called Grey Area. Each week I'll deliver "all the hits that fit" straight outta the Free Music Archive, plus conversations with guests about the grey area surrounding music and free culture in digital era.

The first episode features Eric Steuer from Creative Commons (also of Wired Magazine and the electronic/hip-hop group Meanest Man Contest). We talk about the licenses that facilitate sharing, openness and innovation everywhere from The White House to Al Jazeera to the Free Music Archive to this very podcast.  We also talk about CBC Radio's recent decision to stop using Creative Commons music -- once a prominent feature of programs like Spark -- due to the usage restrictions of CC's more popular noncommercial licenses. To gain a better understanding of the situation, we crack open CC's recent Study of How the Online Population Understands “Noncommercial Use” and discuss how this might play into the future of Creative Commons. And speaking of The Future, the nonprofit organization is currently in the midst of their Superhero campaign, so we talk about some of the exciting things on the horizon.

Next week, we'll talk with Sam Brylawski, the co-author of The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States. It's a new congressionally-mandated study, and it's subtitled "A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age"...but wait, wasn't the digital revolution supposed to solve this problem? The former executive director of the National Recording Preservation Board will outline some of the hurdles that stand in the way of our utopian digital archive.

This podcast is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and features selected sounds from the ~25,000+ high-quality pod-safe mp3's available at http://freemusicarchive.org. The artwork remixes some sweet Greg Harrison designs.

  << subscribe!

NEW on the Free Music Archive: Message Board, Scrobbling & more!

This week the Free Music Archive rolled out a bunch of site tweaks + improvements, including Recent Activity Feeds for user profiles, the oft requested last.fm scrobbling, and the long-awaited Message Board (aka "the Forum")!

With 26,473 26,525 curated mp3s and counting, the FMA has many web pages, which means a lot of different spaces where conversations can take place. Up until now these discussions have been kind of decentralized, so I'm excited to see what happens to the FMA community now that we have a centralized Discussion Forum for announcements and conversation.

We're a pretty unique global network of musicians, label-owners, industry folk, multimedia artists, bloggers, podcasters, video producers, radio storytellers, documentarians, archivists, people who love music, free culture advocates, copyright/left-ies, open source hackers. Most of us actually seem to wear quite a few of these hats. And we've all come together in the midst of this extremely disruptive yet incredibly innovative moment for music. To share music, of course. But also to talk about the tech and legal currents that surround us. And maybe to start the world's raddest animated gif thread, and share homebrewing recipes for Free Beer.

There is so much potential in the FMA Forum, and it's entirely up to you where it goes from here...so c'mon and introduce yourself!

Shamantis' slowed-down Justin Bieber: a glacial victory for fair use?

It's the first and probably last time the Free Music Archive will ever tweet about Justin Bieber (though he is the preeminent trending topic). But I just had to this week on the occasion that multiple major labels have lent their support to a hugely popular (and quite excellent) 800-x-slowed-down remix of Beiber's song "U Smile". This, despite the fact that it is arguably "an infringement of both the sound recording (owned by Universal’s Island Records) and the musical composition (owned by both UMG and EMI)" (Billboard). I mean, with the same free open source program that producer Nick Pittsinger aka Shamantis used to create this 30-minute glacial epic, it could just as easily be shrunk back into the actual song.

If you just listen, clearly this is a transformative work that meets the conditions for Fair Use. But Fair Use has yet to reconcile with US laws pertaining to sound recordings, and the influential Bridgeport ruling seems to imply that there is no such thing. Meanwhile, Soundcloud who are hosting the file are based, one of many countries where "fair use" doesn't even exist (though a court in Germany did recently reverse their decision and declare that a 2-second sound recording twisted beyond all recognition and not used as the basis of a new composition, is legal [BBC / Techdirt]).

Fortunately, there was no need for the law i this scenario as it clearly stood to benefit all parties. Beiber's tweeted about it (link) and this new form of public announcement from our young king of tweet-pop declared it to be good, it shined an interesting light on Bieber's own music for new fans (and twitter followers) who now have a much deeper appreciation for his music. All of which is invaluable in our increasingly fragmented Attention Economy.

In cases like these (#musicblogocide, for example) I often think of Lawrence Lessig's chart describing the Law as one of four forces that impact reality. Our society and the structures of the music industry are changing rapidly. Soon -- with any luck -- remixes like this which clearly just draw attention to the artist in a purely noncommcercial environment may even be declared legal! Or at the very least, we should be able to publicly acknowledge that there are certain noncommercial forums for shared creativity where the law need not interfere. Transformative remixes are already kind of impossible to stop, and seem to stand to everyone's benefit. Quite an artistic and politicized cultural statement by our friend Shamantis.

Maybe even Prince will come around to this. Or -- since he's already declared the end of the Internet -- maybe he'll simply sit back and let his music (and the people who love it) take care of spreading the word on his behalf.

TONIGHT! Electric Videos Show / Chemical Brothers / Free Beer / DJ Trent / Solar-powered

Hey y'all!!!  Won't you come out and join us for this thing tonight?

Join Solar One, Astralwerks Records, and DJ Trent for a 100% solar-powered evening of electronic music videos of every vintage. Solar One is located on 23rd Street @ the East River in Manhattan.

If you can't make it in person, tune in to live audio and video streams at 91.1 in NYC, 90.1FM in the Catskills, and WFMU.org all over this planet.

See you there!

New Aerial View Website!

Aerial View II is back on the air TONIGHT, 8 PM. Chris T. asks, "Which is worse: banks or insurance companies?" Share your horror stories. AND: Friggin' Fireworks! BUT WAIT - THERE'S MORE! You can now  follow Chris T.'s Tweets AND leave comments if you can't make it to the phone (201-232-8932) during the show by visiting the new Aerial View website: http://aerialview.me/

 

Megapolis Audio Festival hits Baltimore, May 14-16

It's no secret that the art and music scene in Baltimore is out-of-control amazing these days, but if you needed an excuse to visit the city aside from Dan Deacon, Lexie Mountain Boys, Nautical Almanac, Ian Nagoski, Ponytail, Double Dagger, Teeth Mountain, Lo Moda, Ecstatic Sunshine, GDFX, John Waters, and and and... the Megapolis Audio Art Festival hits Baltimore May 14-16.

Jason Sigal and I hosted a session about the Free Music Archive during Megapolis last year (when it was in Boston) and we had a blast. This year, WFMU's Trent will be bringing his cointastic DJ skillz to Megapolis, and Benjamen Walker will be hosting a session about oversharing on the radio.

Other artists involved in Megapolis this year include WFMU faves Felix Kubin, Lucky Dragons, Arrington de Dionyso, Lexie Mountain, and many other creative folks. Workshops will teach everything from how to build noise generators, contact mics, and mini transmitters, while other sessions will involve interactive audio experiments, an instructional for how to make music using free software, and even Nelson's electric chaircuts.

More info on Megapolis workshops and presenters | ticket info

Don't forget to order "The Elvis" or a chicken box while you're in Baltimore!

(Photo of Sam Garner and Amy Waller performing McYoga in Bmore, snatched from Lexie Mountain's Human Pyramids blog)

New Facebook app

The WFMU Marathon is into its second and final week, and you can help us meet our goal by making a pledge!

Be sure to add our new Facebook App to your profile to help us spread the word.

Attend our Marathon Event on Facebook, add #wfmuthon to any Twitter posts about the Marathon, or visit wfmu.org/2010 for a wealth of embeddable code available for you to post on your blog or website.

We can do it with your help! The Marathon ends on Sunday...

reflections on #musicblogocide2k10

The law has pretty much steered clear of the grey area surrounding mp3 blogs since their rise to prominence ~7 years ago. Meanwhile, other regulatory forces have helped the blogosphere develop an organic code of conduct that benefits the interests of the music industry and our society as a whole.

Last week, in what's been called #musicblogocide2k10, Google's Blogger service shut down several popular blogs accused by the IFPI and RIAA of copyright infringement. Due to a bug in Google's system (for which Blogger later apologized), at least one of the bloggers (the amazing Masala blog, which has since been restored) did not receive notification until after the blog's deletion.

Sure, you can blame Google for that error. But you can't really blame them for following the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to remove allegedly infringing content. As part of Bloggers' DMCA policy Google forwards their takedown notices to ChillingEffects.org where they are available for all to see. Chilling Effects is an incredibly useful resource conceived by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society (who also advise our work on the Free Music Archive) in collaboration with a group of university law clinics and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Check it out, and you'll find myriad DMCA copyright complaints like this one, each listing hundreds of allegedly infringing Google-powered blogs, and claiming that Google may be liable. Google has no choice but to remove this infringing content, and from there the alleged infringer can file a counter-notification.

This back-and-forth DMCA procedure is far from perfect. But it's designed to protect online service providers like Blogger, who can't possibly be expected to look into each and every one of these claims. It's up to bloggers to defend themselves, and (as long as they are properly informed) there's a relatively clear way to go about it. This way, the inevitability of infringing content doesn't have to take the entire blogging service and all its non-infringing treasures down with it.

Let's leave Google alone for a second (they've got other problems right now) to consider "the inevitability of infringing content." There is still a great disparity between the law and the other codes/norms that govern the blogosphere, and musicblogocide is a great example of how this plays out. Before you read on, take a look at the above diagram from Free Culture, in which Lawrence Lessig describes the law as one of four regulatory/enabling forces acting on...let's say...the blogosphere.

CBC Radio 3 on the Free Music Archive (mp3)

Please welcome CBC Radio 3 to the Free Music Archive!

CBC Radio 3 is a service of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation with a focus on emerging Canadian music. Alongside their pioneering efforts in webcasting, podcasting, and satellite broadcasting, CBC Radio 3's website offers a free on-demand library of streaming music from over 20,000 Canadian artists. With a unique curatorial focus, CBC Radio 3 is expanding the definition of radio. We're proud to welcome them to the Free Music Archive alongside WFMU and fellow radio innovators like KEXP and dublab.

CBC Radio 3 kicks things off with a great batch of live tracks from Caribou, Destroyer, Arcade Fire, New Pornographers, Feist, K'naan, Neko Case, Islands, Thunderheist, Do Make Say Think, The Sadies, Sloan, and many more. Check out their "Additive Free Canadian Blend" mix after the jump, and dig in to CBC Radio 3's FMA portal for more, or subscribe to their RSS feed to keep up w/ new adds.

New on the Free Music Archive: Tagging and more

We've been testing out some new features and slight changes to the Free Music Archive, this month, and we'd love your feedback.

The big #1 is Tagging. Any registered user can tag a track, artist, or album. This will help create community-generated tag pages like this one for Banjo and this one for Baltimore.

Your tags'll now pop up in a new Recent Activity Feed (on the homepage), along with user-generated blog posts, mixes, and comments. Soon, these feeds will also be available on your own profile, as well as on Artist, Curator, and Label pages to track discussion and help users collaborate

Other recent changes include .zip downloads for Albums and Mixes, and the embeddable player (which you may have already seen in action on this here blog). Like the embedded mix over there <-- which was something I made for warm, rainy weather when you'd least expect it. One of our next steps is a Free Music Archive message board, where we'll be able to discuss these site improvements, share free legal music resources, and bring our worldwide userbase together to share knowledge and wisdom. We all hold high expectations for the FMA, and user feedback is our guide, so let us know what you think of these changes by leaving a comment or by emailing. Read more about what's in store on the Free Music Archive's new donate page, where you can help this project reach its full potential.

Just Released: WFMU's iPhone App

Hot off the presses, it's WFMU's very own iPhone app! Not so long ago, WFMU became the first radio station to offer streams for the iPhone, way before the app craze took off. We've finally joined the teeming masses...

Click here to get the free WFMU Radio app via iTunes (or go to the iPhone app store, and search for "WFMU"). The app is complete with song title, artist and show info as well as two, count 'em, two streaming options - 32k and 128k MP3. It's the easiest way yet to listen to WFMU from anywhere on a phone!

You can of course still use the Public Radio Player app, which is also free. Many thanks to Webhamster Henry, tech Czar Doron and DJ Frangry for help with the new free WFMU iPhone app.