Speakers UP! Creaky Boards

There are now only four days left to this blog.

I’m in the mood for something triumphant yet melancholic.

This Creaky Boards song fits: The Songs I Didn’t Write.

Amp up your speakers!

Creaky Boards MySpace

They Keep Trying To Kill The Long Tail

Long Tail theory contradicted as study reveals 10m digital music tracks unsold

The internet was supposed to bring vast choice for customers, access to obscure and forgotten products – and a fortune for sellers who focused on niche markets.

But a study of digital music sales has posed the first big challenge to this “long tail” theory: more than 10 million of the 13 million tracks available on the internet failed to find a single buyer last year.

Emphasis added by me.

And:

However, a new study by Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, the not-for-profit royalty collection society, suggests that the niche market is not an untapped goldmine and that online sales success still relies on big hits. They found that, for the online singles market, 80 per cent of all revenue came from around 52,000 tracks. For albums, the figures were even more stark. Of the 1.23 million available, only 173,000 were ever bought, meaning 85 per cent did not sell a single copy all year.

Emphasis added by me.

On the face of it, those figures are devastating and disheartening.

But I wondered: Was any marketing done for the unsold portion? Did anyone know they were there to be had?

And: What services were measured? I’d like someone to do a study of how much music is sold via MySpace and compare those bands against, say, the iTunes Store and Amazon’s MP3 Store.

All this is directly applicable to writers.

Any writer, for example, who direct publishes an eBook and expects people to find out about it without any marketing is just asking for a bagful of disappointment.

Previously here:

The Long Tail: Not Entirely Discredited
Google Book Search: Medialoper FTW
More Long Tail Debate
The Long Tail: A Lie?

Dying Dinosaurs Of Print: CHOOSE!

Over at Kung-Fu Monkey, Leverage co-creator/producer John Rogers posted: Streaming Mac to 360: Rivet.

It’s all about how on-demand streaming video via the Net is not the future — it’s right now.

This coincidentally dovetails nicely with my recent DVD epiphany.

And there’s one paragraph that I must quote:

The tone of voice when I talk about these things tend to be a disdainful “Well, sure but how are we supposed to monetize this?” Right question, wrong tone. We. Don’t. Have. A. Choice.

Emphasis added by me.

The music industry has been usurped by technology. Now television has been too. And movies.

The one remaining industry is book publishing.

Google has already stolen all of the historical backlist.

All that’s left is recent and not yet published.

It’s as if the book publishing industry was situated on a giant iceberg — which suddenly cracked apart, leaving publishers on a precarious floe.

Over there in a big rescue ship are eBook readers screaming, “We’ll save you! Just publish eBooks quickly and at reasonable prices!!!”

On the other side are the pirates on a self-built makeshift archipelago in international waters free from all law enforcement. They don’t care what book publishers do. They have worldwide distributed teams with scanners and free proofreaders ready to “set everything free.”

And on the horizon are writers themselves in small boats trying to figure out how to best survive on their own, liberated from the constraints of ink-and-paper publishing.

Book publishing — unlike music, unlike TV, unlike movies — Still. Has. A. Choice.

Will it allow eBook readers to rescue it?

Must Read: Lili Marlene

Lili Marlene: The Soldiers’ Song of World War II by Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller

“Lili Marlene,” the unlikely anthem of World War II, cut across front lines and ideological divides, uniting soldiers across the globe. This love song, telling the story of a young woman waiting for her lover to return from the battlefield, began as a poem written by a German solider during World War I. The soldier-poet’s words found their way to Berlin’s decadent cabaret scene in the 1930s, where they were set to music by one of Hitler’s favored composers. The song’s singer, however, soon found herself torn between her desire for fame and a personal hatred of the Nazi regime. In a gripping and suspenseful narrative, the three artists’ remarkable stories of arrests and close calls intertwine with the recollections of soldiers on all sides who fought their way through deserts and towns, seeking solace and finding hope in “Lili Marlene.”

I happened to tune into The John Batchelor Show last night on WABC-AM in NYC and heard the authors. It’s an absolutely fascinating story.

This is the direct download link to the MP3 file (right-click Save As…). The interview begins at 1:36:32.

There’s also The Official Lili Marleen Page which has a ton of MP3 versions of the song, including the originals from that time.

Update: In a Comment, the authors reveal there is an entire site for the book. It has a great excerpt plus several versions of the song to stream. Go look!

Barry Gray: Immortal Music

The Fireballs – Fireball

The Fireballs theme tune. Originally recorded in 1962 in the UK on the HMV label and played at the end of each episode of the fondly rememebered Gerry Anderson children`s TV show “Fireball XL5”. This is always a popular number at Fireballs gigs.

Forty-six years later, his music is still alive.

He couldn’t have imagined that, doing the closing credits song for a children’s TV series.

Too bad he did not live to see this.

Speakers UP! Barry Gray Pop Music

I know the title ascribes this to Captain Scarlet, but that’s incorrect.

The original was done for the White as Snow episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, but all anyone has to do is watch that episode on DVD to be greatly disappointed. It’s not the same music and the tempo is shockingly slow too.

This is actually from an episode of UFO (which one, escapes me at the moment). It’s played as incidental background music on, if I recall correctly, a car radio. Barry Gray recycled the music, increasing the tempo and somewhat tinkering with the instrumentation.

The result is this piece, which I must have played into my head several hundred gazillion times. This is best listened to with headphones. Really get into it. It’s one of the best pieces Barry Gray ever did.

captain scarlet pop theme

Speakers UP! Happy Halloween!

My final October post. Speakers up to dig this:

Nocturnal Depression – Nostalgia

Just two more months left to this blog.

Free MP3 Song: Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen website

A NIGHT WITH THE JERSEY DEVIL

Dear Friends and Fans,

If you grew up in central or south Jersey, you grew up with the “Jersey Devil.” Here’s a little musical Halloween treat. Have fun!

Bruce Springsteen

Thanks, Bruce! Happy Halloween!

Does The Internet Make Reviews Obsolete?

I think so.

This is something I’ve been meaning to write about for some time.

I could never read a music review. It was like encountering a foreign language that looked like English, but was some sort of bizarre code.

Today, is there any need for music reviewing? Anyone can pop over to their favorite online music store or even a band website and immediately listen to samples. Would a bad review matter if you listened on your own and liked the music?

Book reviews usually set my teeth on edge, as mentioned in an earlier post.

Is there any need for book reviews today? Anyone can pop over to a publisher’s site, or an eBookstore, or a writer’s website and immediately read a free excerpt or an entire free chapter. Would any review — good or bad — have an effect if you personally liked or didn’t like what you read?

What inspired this post today was this review: The Swap

But what works against the novel most is Moore’s maddeningly elliptical prose style. He seems to take forever to get a point across. As a result, all attempts at humor — be they bone-dry or over-the-top — are completely lost in verbiage. The same goes for most plot developments, including the relationship that results when the wife of one Harvey’s schoolmates leaves her husband during a post-reunion party and takes up with Harvey. Then there’s the murder investigation, which ought to add suspense, but instead reads like a distraction. And, as if all this weren’t disappointing enough, the novel doesn’t end so much as it simply … stops.

What exactly does any of that really mean? Especially when it begins with an expectation on part of the reviewer:

With its Roy Lichtenstein-inspired cover illustration and graphic title design, Antony Moore’s THE SWAP looks promising. And the back cover synopsis makes it sound like a Donald E. Westlake-like comedic romp of murder, misunderstandings and related mishaps in the world of comic book dealers and readers. Would that it were! Sadly, this debut novel is a clumsy, ill-conceived work that never really delivers on any such promises.

So how can I believe anything that proceeds from that premise?

I did some investigation and it seems the publisher of this book has spent a bit of money to give it a shiny website.

That tells me this book isn’t the disposable thing the reviewer considered it to be. It also hints loudly that he missed the entire point.

I went on to Random House’s site to read an excerpt.

I liked what I read. So what did that review actually accomplish?

The most that can be said for it is that it inspired this post.

The worst that can be said is so obvious, I won’t state it.

Reviews of music and books: obsolete.

Gerry Anderson: Not UFO Season 2

Trawling through YouTube for some posting inspiration today, I found this:

U.F.O. II – TV Show Opening Sequence

Music to a never realised second season of the very famous SciFi-Series from England, named “UFO (1970)”.

I’ve made this music in 1993 with Korg-DSS1 and Roland-Pro E, but without any computer sequencers freely after the UFO-Melody, but strictely after the composition-method by Barry Gray.
Also my tribute to this awesome TV-Series by Gerry Anderson.

I’ve “stretched” the following video-opening sequence a little with scenes from the episode “Identified”.

It’s those tubular bells that raise it above the level of Neil Norman.