An Idea, a new music-business model, a profit factory, and the RIAA's potential demise(?):
Snapster is all about ownership. Snapster will be a company that buys at retail one copy of every CD on the market. Figure 100,000 CDs at $14 each requires $1.4 million. Snapster will also be a download service with central servers capable of millions of transactions per day. Figure $100,000 for the download system and bandwidth for one year. Throw in $100,000 for marketing and $400,000 for legal fees and the startup capital required for the business is $2 million....What I have described is legal, it just leverages technology in a way that has never been done before. There are precedents for group ownership of recordings and certainly the law of mutual funds is very clear.
Wonder if this will happen. It doesn't really matter too much to me, because I'm sure none of the music that interests me will be on file, but anything that bothers the RIAA is alright by me.
The erudite and benificent Herb Levy, formerly of Mappings radio show, has exchanged emails with me about my inaccurate classification of Boulezet al., below. I wrote:
Esteamed Mr. L,
Fair enough! I'll forward your correction to the taxonomy department for consideration.
To be honest, Herb, I don't know shit about music, so I'm sure I frequently say/write basic errors. My whole approach (to both playing and listening) stems from my approach to poetry and literature when I was in elementary and middle school: I'm "unqualified," but fuck it. My ears work and my eyes, but when I talk and write about this stuff my feeblemindedness is revealed.
I don't really love any of those recordings, although I've had some fine moments listening to each of them. That kind of "epiphany"-style experience is what I'm looking for, and, sadly, it's much more a function of me than it is of the music itself. It's almost the only way I know to judge music, but I'll admit that it's an abject failure as a judgement criterion.
Speaking of New Music, I'm listening to Xenakis' "Kraanerg," does that count? (not a facetious question).
Thanks for checking in and setting me straighter, at any rate. Appreciated.
Glovingly yourn,
James Taylor
And he wrote, among other things:
As a listener & reader, I wish you'd blogged more along the lines of the above. It's not only more honest, it's more informative, more useful. Though people frequently get into pissing contests about what music is better or best, we're all (except maybe for some musicologists, who want to check out the formal structures of a score, performance practice or whatever so they can maintain their academic chops) looking for moments of illumination from music. Acknowledging that would be a much more powerful statement than simply listing what's been in your CD player lately.
So, as you can see above, I've complied with his request. I disavow criticism of art in virtually any capacity except visceral individual reaction, which is unpredictable, mutable, and amorphous. Why, just this morning I thought to myself: wow, that Luc Ferrari disc sounds like shit. Lo and behold, I spent the rest of the afternoon shirking in Sincheon with Presque Rien tickling my timpana. The highlight of the listening experience? An absurdly beautiful and ingenious blending of Ferrari's crowd noise and NWA's Fuck The Police, which was blasting out of a nearby sidewalk speaker. Now that's the poor-man's musique concrete [scroll down]. The recording is also remarkably well-suited to headphone play while in public. The mingling French-language and French-accented English on the disc sound great when accompanied by a coffee-shop full of people speaking Korean. By the way, the AMG review linked above is very funny. Brian Olewnick, the critic, astonishingly recognizes that the title means "almost nothing." Well, Ferrari was referring to what he did to the field recordings used in the piece: almost nothing. Olewnick took the title to refer to the music itself, and says, ironically, "Though one knows he must have engaged in substantial manipulation, Ferrari's touch is virtually invisible." Hilarious. Incidentally, I get a little extra pleasure picking on this critic because he's the one who did the hatchet-job to John Tilbury in The Wire, and he later wrote some remarkably presumptious and dismissive comments about Tilbury's politics to an email list on which I lurk. [Update: This post was too harsh on Mr. Olewnick, who does good deeds by turning people on to good music, and, as I've written before, "these hairs ain't gonna just up and split themselves." After some emails and research, I realize that I'd conflated Brian's political stance with those of other list contributors, which rather affected my snotty attitude in the above post. Furthermore, the critic himself has informed me that his editors were responsible for the offending excision in the Tilbury/Wire article. I still think the Ferrari mistake is funny, and I still think B.O. is making some basic socio-economic oversights, but hey, not as bad as I'd thought. I've written this weblog for a long time without being snide, and lo and behold, it doesn't become me.]
Furthermore, I really wish I had a different version of Kraanerg for comparison with the Asphodel.
posted by Brad Larcen 7/25/2003[edit]
So, as you can see above, I've complied with his request. I disavow criticism of art in virtually any capacity except visceral individual reaction, which is unpredictable, mutable, and amorphous. Why, just this morning I thought to myself: wow, that Luc Ferrari disc sounds like shit. Lo and behold, I spent the rest of the afternoon shirking in Sincheon with Presque Rien tickling my timpana. The highlight of the listening experience? An absurdly beautiful and ingenious blending of Ferrari's crowd noise and NWA's Fuck The Police, which was blasting out of a nearby sidewalk speaker. Now that's the poor-man's musique concrete [scroll down]. The recording is also remarkably well-suited to headphone play while in public. The mingling French-language and French-accented English on the disc sound great when accompanied by a coffee-shop full of people speaking Korean. By the way, the AMG review linked above is very funny. Brian Olewnick, the critic, astonishingly recognizes that the title means "almost nothing." Well, Ferrari was referring to what he did to the field recordings used in the piece: almost nothing. Olewnick took the title to refer to the music itself, and says, ironically, "Though one knows he must have engaged in substantial manipulation, Ferrari's touch is virtually invisible." Hilarious. Incidentally, I get a little extra pleasure picking on this critic because he's the one who did the hatchet-job to John Tilbury in The Wire, and he later wrote some remarkably presumptious and dismissive comments about Tilbury's politics to an email list on which I lurk. [Update: This post was too harsh on Mr. Olewnick, who does good deeds by turning people on to good music, and, as I've written before, "these hairs ain't gonna just up and split themselves." After some emails and research, I realize that I'd conflated Brian's political stance with those of other list contributors, which rather affected my snotty attitude in the above post. Furthermore, the critic himself has informed me that his editors were responsible for the offending excision in the Tilbury/Wire article. I still think the Ferrari mistake is funny, and I still think B.O. is making some basic socio-economic oversights, but hey, not as bad as I'd thought. I've written this weblog for a long time without being snide, and lo and behold, it doesn't become me.]
