Albums added in June: 13,347

RIP George Carlin

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Anything pertaining to the Guitar Hero/Rock Band duopoly garners exhaustive attention nowadays. So it’s no surprise that Neversoft’s major follow-up to Guitar Hero III is bigger in most every way in a bid to unseat Rock Band with its immersive group play.

IGN: Guitar Hero World Tour Preview

But under the face-melting surface, World Tour’s greater influence may ultimately be in the steady march towards unifying simulation (pretend you’re a rock star!) and emulation (make actual music!). In the past we’ve come to this junction from the other direction, using game platforms as engines for music production: MTV Music Generator series on the Playstation 2 (used by artists like Boomkat to sketch out songs), Nanaloop on the Game Boy (part of the 8-bit music movement), and upcoming touch-studio offerings for the iPhone like MooCowMusic’s Band and Intua’s BeatMaker. Meanwhile, rhythm games by the likes of Harmonix (Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero) and Konami’s Bemani division (Beatmania, Dance Dance Revolution, GuitarFreaks) have gradually introduced ever more elaborate interactions between players and underlying musical performances. In FreQuency, for example, a secondary mode allowed players to ‘remix’ songs in freeform fashion after unlocking them through normal play.

Based on this early preview, World Tour is even more ambitious with its Music Creator mode. While normal gameplay will center around the established note-matching mechanism for various instruments, the proposed editor supports multi-track note creation for each of the supported instruments (minus vocals, evidently for legal reasons—cross apply the perversities that abound in most online smack talk and this makes regrettable sense). Premade loops, tempo control, and beat quantizing are provided within a wizard interface to simplify the learning curve. For laying down tracks, the guitar controller provides extensive options: you can program drum machines through the new touch-sensitive fret strip on the guitar controller, trigger samples by fret buttons, change pitch with the strum bar and sample speed through the Star Power tilt control. Need more crunch? Licensed Pod modeling technology from Line 6 lets you can choose your amplifier. Want to generate notes algorithmically? Use the built-in arpeggiator. Once you’ve finished laying down tracks, a separate mix mode is available for looping and editing. Finally, you publish your creation (complete with custom cover art) to an online community store where others can download and play it within the game. User ratings will drive online charts. Voilá, you’re a published musician.

One of the most common comment-thread trolls since the release of Guitar Hero has been purist backlash: "why not play a real guitar?" Up to now, the typical answer is along the lines of, "because this [playing a simplified game]  is more fun than learning the real thing." And certainly, to remain successful, World Tour will need to retain that sense of rock star power at mere mortal effort levels. But the potential for the Creator mode, and whatever follows it, to create a new level of musical expression suggests an exciting future of entertainment all its own.

Albums added in May: 13,572

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Albums added in April: 10,769

I hope you got your Rolling Stones fix last month, since they’ve now been stripped out of the catalog for “events outside of our control” according to eMusic. This reversal is part of a larger issue affecting eMusic’s catalogue, which invisibly loses some portion of its releases even as it publicly reveals all of new additions. Just among the artists I note below, at least one is a repost of an album by Future Sound of London that had previously been offered and then removed at some point, plus all of Ladytron’s albums apart from the new “Ghosts” single have likewise vanished. The unfortunate lesson is that you can’t assume that your “Save for Later” selections will actually still be there when you have the downloads to spare.

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Steven Poole is one of many to engage in that promotion du jour, giving away a digital copy of a product—in his case, a book called Trigger Happy about the aesthetics of videogames, a topic which would naturally appeal to an online audience. Six months and 31,100 downloads later, he follows up the experiment with a compelling review of the state of media online and what the future may hold for various creators, notably musicians and writers.

His response is noteworthy for encapsulating many of the issues facing creators who wish (or face pressure) to distribute their works online, especially unfettered by Digital Rights Management (DRM) and preferably free. In the giveaway economy, as with the dotcom bubble before it, how exactly does that lead to sustainable income? Not all doom and gloom, Poole notes the promotional upsides in terms of wider distribution and thus ’seeding the market’ for possible hard-copy sales and future endeavors. However, the Paypal tip jar approach as attempted by many donation-supported software projects, Stephen King’s abortive The Plant, and Radiohead’s experiment with In Rainbows bears out the online form of tragedy of the commons where free access to a resource cannibalizes paid support for it. Without adequate volunteered funds as recompense, Poole summarizes the stark options remaining:

“If the breathless advocates of “the free distribution of ideas” are serious, they need either a) to come up with a realistic proposal as to how I am to keep feeding myself while giving the fruits of my labours away for free; or b) come out and say honestly that they don’t think any such thing as a “professional writer” ought to exist, and that I should just get a job like anyone else.”

He goes on to describe the common rejoinder (termed the “Slashdot argument”) that free content can be subsidized by correlative sales, like live shows, T-shirts, and service contracts. While his reaction to this position is somewhat kneejerk (essentially “you try working for free!”) it does underscore the difficult proposition facing anyone who sees the future purely as online free distribution: just how do you offset the production of an album, a book, a videogame if the audience demands that the primary work be free while you try to make up the difference in low attach-rate items like T-shirts and strategy guides? He also outlines the difficulty facing anyone trying to follow in the footsteps of the Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails offerings, namely that both earned their fanbase “through the nasty old music-industry business model” while the possibility of an unknown band reaping the same rewards still begs the question on opt-in payment. Plus, how many other bands will garner the same level of press coverage that in turn drives the traffic once the novelty wears off?

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The March selections are a bit delayed as I decided to switch from a mid-month to end-of-month posting schedule, which meant going over 6 weeks of additions in total since February’s picks. March alone had 12,312 new albums posted. So, took a little while.

One helpful addition is the album page’s conversion of sound samples for all tracks from m3u files - which required playback in a separate program like iTunes, cluttering the library - to an inline player that lets you listen to the 30-second samples individually or together in sequence. This is diverting enough that I’m almost tempted to script a background player that chains together groups of albums for ambience, like an audio screensaver.

Last month was also the introduction of eMusic’s Test Your Music IQ. Despite missing a few I should have known and guessing a few I shouldn’t, I was satisfied with an honest score of 120/180 along with its rather hyperbolic assessment: (more…)

With all the hoopla surrounding the recent experiments with online distribution by Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, the videogame Rock Band’s store expansion may represent a less heralded future venue. In contrast with the aforementioned big names which can trade on years of old-industry promotion, the Rock Band store has already provided a way to break new artists such as Paramore. Individual songs featured in the related title Guitar Hero 3 also showed sales spikes after the game’s release, similar to the Apple halo effect provided to Feist and Yael Naim after featuring their tracks in commercials. The game’s very name and history under the Guitar Hero franchise may suggest that the potential is limited to strictly rock acts, yet prior GH games have already highlighted alternative, electronic, indie, and pop artists including unsigned bands offered as unlockables.

The question remains, however - how exactly does a band get a song programmed for the game and loaded into the Rock Band store, and who are the gatekeepers? 

Rock Band meets iTunes, opens built-in music store

Simultaneously an epic undertaking, a staggering display of wit and craft (and patience), a useful reference to the huge collection of featured bands, and a paragon of flash reviewing as featured in Kevin Kelly’s "short is in". Earlier examples included the oft-hysterical Movie-A-Minute and Book-A-Minute reviews and the experimental "Mad Ape Den" three-letter-word writing project by an earlier GeekLife. Also, don’t miss Albert Eistein’s Theory of Relativity in Words of Four Letters or Less. 

Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s by Paul Ford - The Morning News

As you might expect, the snarky comments ("Someone’s been eating Hall and Oatesmeal.", "Five seconds of music 120 times.") are much more entertaining than the complimentary. And yet when someone who has taken the time to listen and encapsulate 763 songs in a row then says "I’ve listened to this thirty times" it speaks volumes.

You can also grab the torrents and grade them yourself, but just like college radio, be prepared to swim through a lot of Meh to find the Awesome.

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