Daniel Biro

Been trying to work out if being on Spotify (free music streaming software) is a good thing for artists and labels. On the one hand being on there makes one’s music AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE  for free, on the other hand being on there makes one’s music available to everyone FOR FREE! Where’s the income going to come from? It’s like a radio station where you choose what you want to listen to with no restrictions apart from the occasional adverts. Spotify’s current hope is that people are going to pay £10 a month to get rid of the adverts interrupting the musical flow, but this is optimistic at best. And even if some do, how much of that is going to end up in the artist’s pocket? Pennies.

I’ve been using Spotify for a while now and I have certainly discovered a lot of new music that I wouldn’t otherwise have listened to. But I haven’t gone out to buy more CDs or downloads. On the contrary, even some of the artists whose latest works I would have automatically purchased in the past, I have been content in listening to a few times and then thinking: “Well, I’ve heard it now. No need to buy it”. I suspect that’s what most people are doing.

The other problem is once you get used to Spotify it’s very hard to revert back to buying things first and listening to them afterwards. The 30 seconds extracts found on iTunes seem inadequate and mean now.

Spotify’s catalogue is growing exponentially and now includes the majority of currently available and new releases. Only more obscure musics (Sargasso is not there yet…) seem to be absent. It’s popularity has sent shivers down the spines of all the people who so far have been making money from music sales.

So what kind of viable business model can Spotify offer? That’s the big question that all artists and record companies are asking themselves, while income is slipping through their fingers. Spotify is trying to reassure them to that investing in them will eventually pay dividends, but this is very far from certain at the moment. So unless the majors decide to suddenly pull out of Spotify altogether, everyone is waiting to see what will happen. Seems like the dotcom bubble all over again…

Are we seeing the beginning of the future of the music industry: giving it away for free?

Daniel Biro

Just read about a new book on Henry Ford who, not content with populating the world with his ubiquitous ‘Model T’ automobile in the 1920s, was apparently also keen to keep American civilisation on the right track. In his eyes this meant getting rid of ‘corrupting’ Jewish influences. Ford was a well known anti-semite and, this being the beginning of the jazz age, jazz music was anathema to him. Polkas, quadrilles and square dances reflected ‘proper American values’ but jazz was ’sex dancing’.

Interestingly, he hated the ‘abandoned sensuousness of jazz’s sliding notes’ that he claimed ‘are of Jewish origins’. Was he referring to Klezmer music and its clarinet glissandi? What about the black origins of jazz? Who influenced who?

If sliding notes were a shocking new element in Western music, it would be ironic that the poor little Jewish immigrant escaping a life of poverty and pogroms from a his Eastern European shtetl with only his clarinet under his arm would end up corrupting the ‘clean’ straight attacks of Western musical tradition with his filthy suggestive glissandi and their sensual/sexual connotations, thus changing American music forever…

This reminds me of a funny episode from my past life as a studio session musician. I was called in to play some piano on what was to be the soundtrack to a video sex-guide. In those days buying porn videos in the UK was illegal so the only way to sell sex videos over the counter was to disguise them as ‘educational’… The producers carefully explained to me that in no way could they put any electric guitars or saxophones on the soundtrack as these instruments would be seen as too raunchy and too reminiscent or ‘real’ porn films soundtracks. So there I was tinkling away new-age-type stuff while on screen these two people were humping away like rabbits.

So there you have it: to avoid any sexual suggestions in your music remove all guitars, saxophones and, above all, glissandi.

(My historical knowledge about who influenced who in the early jazz age is limited and would need clarification. A fascinating subject. Comments please.)

Daniel Biro

Just saw an OK BBC documentary on Brian Eno. Must say I’ve always been a big fan of his and the whole Ambient philosophy.

And yet it’s interesting to note that very little of his ideas have had much effect in the real world. What has become the ‘ambient’ music of our lives (shops, restaurants, cars, lobbies etc) is the restless beat of dance music, and not the slow ever-changing soundscapes that Eno advocated more than 20 years ago. ‘Music For Airports’ never ended up in airports or anywhere else apart from art galleries and installations.

Nevertheless I believe there is still a huge untapped potential for intelligent tailored sound-design for public spaces that would truly reflect the nature and functionality of each individual environment. It’s just that designers still have no or very little understanding of sound and what it can do. Architects rarely think acoustically which why so many buildings and rooms sound awful when you’re in them. Sound is always an afterthought and usually means putting up a few speakers and buying the latest compilation CDs.

So many bold architectural concepts have materialised in our cityscapes but sonically nobody seems to want to push the boat out. Why don’t famous architects like Foster, Liebeskind, etc ever include sound sculptures or some of the generative methods developed by Eno into their work? Is it lack of understanding or is it they fear it would impose too much on the users? Maybe sound is ultimately too ‘penetrative’, too disturbing if different from the completely mundane. Maybe the reason we have so much dance music in our public environments is because it is so dull we don’t really notice or care about it anymore.

Daniel Biro

… and I am about to become a Dad for the first time (better late than never) so my recent concerns have been more about potential first names and the great breastfeeding vs. bottle debate than music. You know you’ve been caught up in the whole ‘baby thing’ when you start looking at what model buggies people are pushing in the street… Which, by the way, are as numerous as Tony Blair’s excuses to justify the Iraqi war. Some friends generously gave us one ahead of time: four wheels and a metal frame plus endless accessories to clip on, unfold, strap under, bend over, hook on… we’ve had this thing for a month now and we still can’t figure out how to open it or close it. Maybe the baby will work it out…

Anyway, as a prelude to the long sleep depravation season that awaits me, I’ve been reading ‘Miles Beyond’, Paul Tingen’s excellent biography of Miles Davis’ electric period, as well as re-listening to all that fabulous music. Albums like ‘Agartha’, ‘Dark Magus’, ‘Jack Johnson’ amaze me more and more. But why? After all, one could argue that they are just a bunch of good improvisors who got together under Miles’ authority and ‘played stuff’ that was later edited by Teo Macero into more or less coherent tracks. That may well be true but would be completely missing the point. Or points. Three points in particular: the phenomenal grooves those guys played*, the textural approach (rather than harmonic/melodic), and the ‘on the spot’ creative energy between whoever happened to be in the room at the time.

Miles was trying to capture those elusive and the unpredictable precious moments when ‘it all comes together’. Call it alchemy, chemistry, Miles was constantly searching for an ephemeral state of grace. For this he was prepared to sacrifice the certainty of the written score and to risk for the whole experiment to fail or to be boring. He also wanted the listener to join in with the search. Eventually the search became almost more important than ‘getting there’.

Very little was said or prepared. Miles channelled and squeezed each individual musician’s experience and background with just a few signposts. He knew what to do get them to react, often by purposely creating tension in the band (there are some hilarious examples of this in the book) so that, no matter what, things would never be comfortable. Risk, risk, risk.

Miles’ music of that period is not only still relevant today but it is vital! A lot of people still don’t get it. Misguided criticism of those recordings still abound usually by those who think it all went terribly wrong after ‘Kind of Blue’. As always, purists are the death of creativity. I therefore urge any musician/artist to read this book, invest time to listen to the music and try to understand and learn some of the creative methods that Davis used to bring these thrilling sounds into existence.

Why is any of this important? The past decade’s key word has been ’security’. Airport security, banking security, internet security and, the way things are going, we can look forward to more and more of it. Everything around us is being used against us ‘for our own safety’. Fear has become the weapon of choice for the arrogant, the greedy and the incompetent. Life has become more and more secure and less and less free.

Have music and art gone the same way? How safe are artists today? Even what looks dangerous is more often than not just superficial sensationalism. Trying hard to upset people is in itself not very interesting. The real shock today would be for a musician to play a C Major chord for a couple of hours**. To reclaim the humanity and integrity of the creative act. To risk everything for one moment of pure beauty. To accept to be an outsider for the sake of truth. That’s what Miles did. That’s all true artists should do. More than ever today we need to be reminded of what it’s like. Risk, risk, risk is the only place for an artist to be.

Happy new year.

* why so many contemporary composers are so averse to/scared of /unable to play real grooves is a topic for another post…

** my late jazz teacher Roger Grosjean used to say about musicians who played over-complicatedly: “If you dropped a C Major chord on that guy’s foot he’d be a cripple for the rest of his life”.