Category: Music

All matters musical

Border guards and copyright enforcement

According to Boing Boing, Canadian border guards may soon be in charge of checking iPods and other devices for copyright infringement. If true, the plan is absurd for several reasons. For one, it would be impossible for them to determine whether a DRM-free song on your iPod was legitimately ripped from a CD you own or downloaded from the web. For another, this is a serious misuse of their time. It would be a distraction from decidedly more important tasks, like looking for illegal weapons, and probably a significant irritant to both those being scrutinized and those waiting at border crossings.

Hopefully these rumours of secret plans – also picked up by the Vancouver Sun are simply false.

NIN’s The Slip available for download

Following in the footsteps of Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails is giving listeners the option of downloading their latest album for free. Their approach differs from that of Radiohead in two ways: whereas Radiohead asked people to pay whatever they felt was fair, NIN is just sending the files for free. Also, while Radiohead offered their music in the form of DRM-free MP3 files, NIN is offering the choice of “high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE.”

Like this blog, the album is available under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share alike license.

Illinois

Emily Horn playing pool

Ever since my brother Sasha gave it to me for Christmas, I have been listening to this album several times a day. My plane ride between Vancouver and Ottawa consisted of drifting in and out of sleep, to its accompaniment.

It generally takes me a really long time to understand and appreciate music that is both complex and intuitively appealing to me (the best example of this trend in the past being the months I spent getting acquainted with Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood). I have an active policy of ignoring everything about musical artists aside from their music (avoiding interviews, books, etc). Musicians are virtually always dramatically less interesting as people than as creators of sounds. These Sufjan Stevens sounds are the most intriguing I have found to wander about in recently.

P.S. Today’s photo is a neat visual demonstration of Newtonian dynamics – taken during a game of pool between Emily and Neal, during my last night in Vancouver.

Rejecting Canada’s new copyright act

As a student, I was constantly being called upon to support various causes, through means ranging from making donations to attending rallies. Usually, such activities have a very indirect effect; sometimes, they cannot be reasonably expected to have any effect at all. Not so, recent protest activities around Canada’s new copyright act: a draconian piece of legislation that would have criminalized all sorts of things that people have legitimate rights to do, such as copying a CD they own onto an iPod they own.

Defending the fair use of intellectual property has become a rallying point for those who don’t want to see the best fruits of the information revolution destroyed by corporate greed or ham-fisted lawmaking in the vein of the much-derided American Digital Millennium Copyright Act. At their most controversial, such acts criminalize even talking about ways to circumvent copyright-enforcement technology, even when such technology is being mistakenly applied to non-copyrighted sources: such as those covered by the excellent Creative Commons initiative or those where fair use is permissive for consumers. Watching a DVD you own using a non-approved operating system (like Linux) could become a criminal offence.

For now, the protests seem to have been successful. Of course, the temptation for anyone trying to pass a controversial law is to hold off until attention dissipates, then pass it when relatively few people are watching. Hopefully, that will not prove the ultimate consequence of this welcome tactical victory for consumer rights.

Related prior posts:

Feel free to link other related matter in comments.

Death, drugs, and rock and roll

A recent study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health confirms the hazards of musical stardom. The study examined the lives of 1,064 successful musicians in the rock, punk, rap, R&B, electronica, and new age genres. All became famous between 1956 and 1999 and all had records that were included in a ‘Top 1000 records of all time’ list from 2000.

It found that the median age of death for North American celebrities was an unimpressive 41.78. Europeans do even worse, at just 35.18. All told, successful musicians are nearly twice as likely to die early as members of the normal population.

The regional breakdown by cause of death is also interesting:

Cause – % in the US – % in Europe
Suicide – 2.8% – 3.6%
Drug or alcohol overdose – 15.3% – 28.6%
Chronic drug or alcohol disorder – 9.7% – 3.6%
Drug or alcohol related accident – 2.8% – 7.1%
Cancer – 19.4% – 21.4%
Heart disease – 18.0% – 3.6%
Accidents – 13.9% – 21.4%
Violence – 6.9% – 3.6%
Other – 11.1% – 7.1%

The largest single discrepancy is the probability of dying of a drug overdose, but lots of other significant differences exist. Neither regional profile suggests that music is a healthy profession: at least for those at the top.

Source:

Yorke asks you to name your price

In a publicity stunt / experiment in the changing climate of the music business, Radiohead is selling their new album “In Rainbows” online, for whatever the buyer wishes to pay. The website where this is done looks so ugly that it made me initially suspect that the thing is a scam (reading about it here doesn’t mean for certain that it isn’t). The mainstream media seem to have bought it, so it is probably genuine. No matter when you pay, they won’t send you the download link for the album until October 10th.

For my part, I paid the mean price of an Oxford pint. That is more than they would have gotten from me in the alternative, as I stopped buying their albums long ago, during the long slide from the brilliance of “OK Computer” into the mediocrity of their later work.

[Update: 10 October 2007] I received my copy of the album. It arrived in the form of ten DRM-free 160 kbps MP3 files. I will comment on the quality of the music once I have had more time to absorb it.

Dear Apple: please quit it with the sabotage

One of the worst things about Apple is how they sabotage their own products with software updates. The update for wrecking unlocked iPhones is a recent example, but there are plenty of others. I remember when they restricted iTunes so that only five people could access your library every time you booted up. That made sharing music on big local area networks (like university residences) a lot less effective. Also, I remember when they forced a volume limitation on my iPod Shuffle by means of an update. I don’t think there has been a useful feature added to iTunes for years, except maybe the automatic downloading of album art for songs in your existing libraries.

Now, I only install security updates on my Mac. Anything promising new features is just too risky.

Musical introduction

111 Sussex

For many years now, I have wanted to know more about the history and details of music. Other than listening, my musical experience is all more than a decade old, and consists of (badly) playing the recorder and autoharp in elementary school. From time to time, various friends with musical knowledge have given me some informal background information, but I would appreciate something more comprehensive.

Can anyone suggest a book that does a good job of laying out what things like chords, octaves, syncopation, fugue, etc, etc actually mean? I tend to appreciate books that combine technical with historical elements best. Something that covers the evolution of music may be ideal.

Lonely Evening competition

My brother Mica is in yet another music video competition. The ‘Lonely Evening’ video is his first based on original music. It was mentioned here previously. Voting continues until August 10th. If he wins this grand final, it will be his fifth victory in a row.

You can see all of his previous films on his website: papaflyfilms.com.