Barbershop thoughts

I'd be surprised if something like this didn't already exist, but if it doesn't, it'd be a great feature for Spotify (or another of the streaming services).

I was sitting in the barber's chair yesterday when something that sounded a lot like Spotify's 80s New Wave collection came on. It was rather good. It was almost what Spotify's Daily Mixes might recommend for me some days. I was mildly proud of myself for finally remembering, two songs later, that the one that had been bugging me was by Echo and the Bunnymen.

Imagine a barbershop with some staff with musical preferences and customers who also have musical preferences. If clients with scheduled appointments have their Spotify handles loaded into the shoppe's roster, there'd have to be a way for Spotify to run an adaptive playlist that takes some least-distance measure across all the liked songs by the people currently in the room, filtered through some basic parameters the shoppe might set. The shoppe might wish to rule out songs with explicit lyrics, for example - or it might not. Or it might have an upbeat or relaxed or whatever vibe that it tries to go for - and the algorithm could then pull appropriate tunes from the customers' playlists.

It should have applications beyond barbershops though. House parties without a DJ could just let Spotify configure things after the host says who's there. Heading out on a road trip with friends? It would pull from the favourite tunes of those in the car without anybody having to muck about.

And having the feature would increase the value of network effects in the player with the feature - if your friends are using it and you want your tunes to start showing up when you're at your friend's house, you'll want to be on the same player.

I'd be surprised if one of the streaming services weren't already doing something like this though.

Big data beats

This is amazing. Big data identification of all the musical genres and where they sit relative to each other. Here's the project description:

This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1536 genres by Spotify. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.

Click anything to hear an example of what it sounds like.

Click the » on a genre to see a map of its artists.

Be calmly aware that this may periodically expand, contract or combust.

Just hit the link to see what it means. It also has an associated Spotify playlist. Just look at how amazing this thing is, and how it's all free, and how you can listen to all of the music with a (ad-ridden) free Spotify account or for a cheap-as-chips monthly subscription.

We live in an age of freaking wonders. Discover new realms of music you never knew you'd like, get a ton of surplus, and not a dime of the increased value of the Spotify subscription shows up in the GDP stats except if it gets more subscribers as consequence.

Wellington bleg: good high schools for music

The staggered move of Offsetting Behaviour to Wellington will soon be completed. I will be following Eric to the capital having taken a position at the School of Government at Victoria University, starting in the new year.

When Eric was about to make his move, he blegged on real estate in Wellington. I shall free load off the intelligence that he gathered then, but now I have a different request: What are the good high schools for children with a strong interest in classical (orchestral) music? Considerations here are whether they have music options as a classroom subject that group together people who already know how to read music and have the rudiments of theory, and whether they have school ensembles (not necessarily an orchestra) of a reasonable standard. We have a preference for co-ed over single-sex and state over private, but are looking at all options. All suggestions welcome.

Antarctica

I've been listening to this album just about non-stop since hearing it on KiwiFM yesterday afternoon.

I'd listened to a bit of death metal in my teens. Egads but this is more affecting. A whole album of the tragic heroism of the Antarctic expeditions.

Tracks 4 and 3 are particularly recommended.

You can catch them on Spotify too.

Would that I hadn't a prior engagement the night they'll be hitting Christchurch. Go on my behalf.

Boffin fun

Suppose you're the boffin in the Minister of Culture's office who's handed the letter from some European heavy metal website asking about how heavy metal is supported in your country.* You could send back a boring form letter saying nothing. Or you could include this in your reply:

There is no official government support for young people to learn instruments for use in metal music. The government does fund an initiative called Sistema Aotearoa, which enables primary-aged children from disadvantaged communities to learn classical music under the instruction of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. It is not inconceivable that these young players may one day end up accompanying power metal groups such as Nightwish as part of a full orchestra, or providing ominous strings and horns on a black metal record by the likes of Cradle of Filth or Dimmu Borgir".

A chocolate fish for the person in the office of NZ Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage, Chris Finlayson, who cited Dimmu Borgir and Nightwish.

HT: Kiwiblog, who got it from DimPost

* That seemed to be the gist of the request, but the site didn't include the original request letter, so it's hard to tell just what was asked.

Earworm: Sherlock vs Final Fantasy IV

The BBC's Sherlock is great. But it's been bugging me since I first watched it. Now I know why.

Sherlock main theme:



Final Fantasy IV Main Theme:


I can't be the first person to have noticed this. I hope this helps solve other folks' earworm problems. Update 9 January 2014: I replaced the original embed of the FF4 theme with a new one as YouTube had since pulled the original.

Small delights [updated2]

Wandering downtown Christchurch last weekend, we found a wooden shipping container on the pedestrian mall just outside of Alice in Videoland. Two men were prying the front open with crowbars. We of course stopped to see what was going on. When the front of the container opened, a three-man alt-country band inside started playing. After a couple of tunes, they slowly moved outside of the box, using the box-front as an impromptu stage (the acoustics were, unfortunately, better when they were playing from inside of the box). After a half-hour or so, they retreated inside the box, played one more song, and the same men again nailed shut the front of the box.

Ira danced enthusiastically through much of the performance.

They never announced themselves, explained anything, or even spoke a word to the audience. Just music.

I love Christchurch....

Update: Apparently it was an art project. Sue sends me the link. Ira sits appreciating the show on the right hand side of this picture.

Update2: The band is "The Unfaithful Ways". Their debut video is here. Their MySpace page is here. I rather like "I Can't Get Your Cruel Love Off My Mind".

Palmer on CWF-RTB

I like TechDirt's Mike Masnick's take on how artists can make money in effectively a post-copyright regime.

Amanda Palmer also gets it.

One Friday night earlier this year, Palmer says she was bored, and so she accidentally started a tee-shirt project with her fans on Twitter. Just two hours of work earned her a whopping 11,000 dollars. It’s just one of the many ways Palmer has made a living by tapping into her fans’ goodwill. The key, Palmer says, is trying out lots of different ways of making money.

AMANDA PALMER: Everyone has to stop thinking there is an answer. The answer is, there’s an infinite number of answers.

RICK KARR: You've done some fairly unusual things to raise some money from your fans.

AMANDA PALMER: I've done free webcasts in which I've auctioned off props from the videos that I've shot and handwritten song lyrics and weird stuff from my apartment. People have bid hundreds and hundreds of dollars on this stuff. But a lot of it is not even really so much about the stuff itself as it is about their willingness to, to connect with me and support me.

And I've also done a lot of sort of flash mob shows using Twitter and my blog to get a bunch of people in a public space, and literally put a hat out and said, I gave you this show for free, I'm really glad you came. If you can afford to give me some money, do it. If you’re too poor, don't.

If you go to Palmer's website, you'll see her store offering all kinds of interesting bundles of products with lots of exclusive, non-replicable content: ordering the CD pre-release can get you a "pre-release only" t-shirt; you can pay more for bundles including a custom ukulele. Higher end bundles include dinner with Palmer, 11-week around-the-world trips with Palmer, and even a moon launch for the low low price of $11 billion.

Artists ought to be building their business models on an assumption of copyright not really being there. It's the non-digital, hard to reproduce complements to the music that'll be earning the money going forward: experiences with the artist, artifacts associated with the artist. The music builds the market for the artifacts and the experiences. And, of course, CWF makes folks at least feel a bit guilty about ripping off music.

Susan and I are of course greatly looking forward to tonight's Amanda Palmer show at Al's Bar in Christchurch! We hope that Ira's young sister, due to arrive end-April, also enjoys. Hope to see some of you there!

Update: Lots of other folks have covered this in more depth: here here here...

Punk

Nick Gillespie at Reason posts on Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys and all the libertarian punks come out of the woodwork to post in the comments. I think Gillespie misread the original piece at Daily Beast: Biafra called Jerry Brown's record "mixed at best", not Pol Pot's. But he's certainly right overall:

You got that? He's deflatin' the great pols of the day, but not Lord Obama, because...well, it's just not Barry O's fault. Cue up the Mary Magdalene bit from Jesus Christ Superstar and hum along: "...he's a man, he's just a man..."

Read the whole thing, including Jello Biafra's middle-aged worries about those Tea Party types ("Some of them are even talking in terms of guns and Obama and whatnot and you know that if anyone said that on radio or TV about Bush they'd be in jail for the next 30 years,”) and then remember one of the foundational truths of punk by way of D.H. Lawrence: Never trust the singer, trust the song. The icons of our youth exist to disappoint us in their (and our) old age and in that sense, Biafra has indeed managed to cough up a second act, however predictable and uninteresting it might be. The madcap fella who closed out one of the greatest albums of all time with an ironic version of "Viva Las Vegas" has become far more cringe-inducing in life than Elvis Presley did while dying on the crapper.

Recommended listening from Gillespie's comments thread:

• Jello Biafra with DOA: "Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors", especially "Power is Boring", "Wish I was in El Salvador" and "Full Metal Jackoff" (ok, I recommended that set)
• Minutemen, "Double Nickels on the Dime"
• The Bats - Kiwi punk from Flying Nun
• The Chills, "Pink Frost" and "Heavenly Pop Hit" - more Kiwi music from Dunedin
• Melvins with Hank Williams III, "Ramblin' Man" [I second; saw Hank III at 9:30 in DC, was excellent]; whole "Crybaby" album looks very good
• Bad Religion recommended over Dead Kennedys
• Pixies "I've been Tired"
• Dread Zepplin, Viva Los Vegas

Again, stupid fixed costs...I'd have picked up a dozen albums out of the recommended list were I in a low fixed cost environment.