Ramkumar's Log

Ask a real musician: 5 classic male metal singers

An interesting ‘outsider’ opinion on 5 well known male metal singers. I concur with her assessment. Also, seeing as I’ve been hooked to the Iron Maiden album nowadays, it’s good to see Bruce Dickinson scoring very highly according to her. To an extent, it also helped me understand why and how some singers are able to command such presence.

Meet the Napster - TIME

Interesting account of Napster and its creator.

But there was a huge leap of faith involved. Nearly everyone he mentioned the idea to believed it wasn’t workable. “It’s a selfish world, and nobody wants to share,” snorted his older, more experienced buddies from the IRC chat rooms. Fanning, an inarticulate teenager at the time, couldn’t adequately explain himself. He insisted that people would do it, because, like… just because.

We talk so much about social media and sharing these days. There are social networks to share pretty much anything. Which makes that previous paragraph especially striking.

We could all become music pirates because it was just so damn easy to do—easier even than ordering a CD online. And once that happened, would we ever be able to go back to getting into our car, driving to the mall and buying a shrink-wrapped piece of plastic with a little silver disc inside? “I don’t know how to stop it,” says Atlantic Records Group co-chairman Val Azzoli, of the problems created by Napster. “It’s not just music I’m worried about. It’s all intellectual properties. If you can take music, you can take everything else too.”

Back then, he thought he would just write the application and set it free—his name would be embedded deep in the source code and known only to the other hackers and programmers who care about such things. He misses that simple time, before magazine covers and TV interviews and Britney Spears and having to put on a goofy black suit and necktie to appear in court.

Six Things Not To Write If You Write About Music

4. If you love music, you should promote it. If you hate music, I suggest you try a different vocation. Of course you shouldn’t blindly love everything that comes your way, but you should realize everything that you hear takes time and effort and deserves some time and effort in return. Nothing except shit is pure shit. And even then, you can always find a kernel of corn in the offal. A purely negative review means you’re lazy—or squeamish. Your dainty little fingers didn’t want to get themselves dirty by sifting through the shit. Your verbal pooper-scooper packs away the whole kit and caboodle, weeks—maybe even months—of work, and just dumps it in the nearest litter bin (it should happen to your writing). Find something to like in everything.

This is a great post. (via Catbird and Chain of Knives)

On music journalism

Criticism isn’t dying because we made an aggregator — it’s dying because people don’t exercise their critical thinking. It’s dying because they’re tired of having some guy in a baseball cap scream in their face about what they should and shouldn’t appreciate, because now that all of their friends and their mom, too, have a blog, they can’t see why they should listen to him instead.

Spot on.

How Much do Music Artists Earn Online? [INFOGRAPHIC]

This doesn’t look good. Most numbers here look way off than what smaller bands/artists will be able to achieve, and that’s a shame. To get an idea, in order to make the minimum US monthly wage of $1,160, the solo artist must sell 143 self-pressed CDs or 1,161 retail album CDs. That last number more than doubles if you’re in a low end royalty deal.

Online streaming services such as Last.fm and Spotify don’t seem to help much either. If you thought they’ll save the music world, think again. The artist will need over 1.5 million and over 4.5 million plays per month respectively to earn as much.

That puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? It shows how hard life is these days for most music artists. So please support your favourite musicians. Buy direct from them (I still feel 143 self-pressed CDs is the most achievable target in there), go to their shows and buy some of their merchandise.