Archive for May, 2009
Dualing “Clothes Off” follow-up
Last week, I blogged about the song We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off, which has been recently released by both Miami Starfish and Chocolate Party.
One of the commenters of the entry was Billy Mead, and I thought I’d follow-up the post with some revisions.
First, I was pleased to hear that Mead and Simon Langford were still collaborating:
For the record, Simon and I are still *brothers* in almost every sense of the word, and he did a mix of ‘our’ version as the Soul Seekerz.
Great to hear, and I’d missed the Soul Seekerz remix when I was listening to these dualing releases before. As a big fan of Soul Seekerz, I did of course like it, and I’m reconsidering my selection of which version of Clothes Off to play. 
As for replacing the MySpace presence of Avalon Superstar with Miami Starfish? Well, that’s simple enough too:
I’m getting lazy in my old age and since I am producing music less than part-time i just couldn’t be bothered to build a new MS page, promote it and find new ‘friends’.
Admittedly, that is a great big “PITA” and understandable. And easy enough to change back when Avalon Superstar have another release.
As for how the track came about:
I really did this as a laugh for my wife who has always loved the original track. I gave it to a few DJs, and got good reactions… so had a few mixes done and are just now getting promos out. I had no idea there was even another version out and really like what they have done. But yeah, you pick one or the other.. not both.
Interesting background, and funny how projects end-up coming together sometimes.
Thanks to Billy Mead for setting the record straight.
More country crossover
On the heels of country artist Taylor Swift’s recent success with Love Story, and the release from Plasco of a nice remake of the Sugarland hit Stay, Wynonna finds her way to the dance music scene with some nice remixes of her new single, Sing.
As I’ve written before, at least some people who manage these country artists understand that one way to expand awareness and the potential market for the material is to commission a few dance remixes and get them out there.
Curb Records, Wynonna’s label, seems to understand this better than some. In addition to Wynonna, they’ve ensured that every pop-friendly song from LeAnn Rimes has been accompanied by a suite of remixes as well. Perhaps it’s because, oddly, in addition to all the country artists on the label, they also are home to the decidedly dancey Kaci Battaglia, Nemesis Rising, and Kimberley Locke.
In any case, Wynonna’s Sing makes for a nice, pleasant, mainstream-friendly dance track. The Jody den Broeder mix is predictable but good, as is the treatment from the UK’s Almighty. The duo Digital Dog (UK producers Stephen Cornish and Nick Mace) give it what I think it my favorite take, but then, I’m a real fan of these guys of late.
As always, give it a listen and see what you think.
Dualing “Clothes Off”
Yes, this is another post about cover songs, I’ll forewarn you.
Back in 1986, the late Jermaine Stewart released his second hit and what would ultimately become his most recognizable song: We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off. With a nice groove and some lyrical innuendo, it was no doubt ripe for a dance cover treatment (and I vaguely recall it was already done at one point).
I’ve seen it happen a few times before, but once again, we’re presented with a pair of dance covers of the same song that appear on the landscape at roughly the same time. Released under the full title, anonymous producers Chocolate Party have one version, a true cover, and released under the shortened Clothes Off, Miami Starfish give us a remake with Stewart’s own vocals (somewhat creepily to me) used posthumously.
Chocolate Party have so far defied all my efforts to find out more about who they are. As I blogged just last week, all the secrecy boggles my mind. I’m wagering they’re from the UK (empirically, it seems UK producers are the most famous for this “pick a name for each release” nonsense), and I’m further wagering I’ll never find out because they’re more interested in the keyword cashout than lasting recognition, charting, or anything else.
Miami Starfish is Boston’s Billy Mead, one half of Avalon Superstar, who have released a pair of great tracks. Considering that the Avalon Superstar MySpace page has been taken over and reconstituted as Miami Starfish, I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps Mead had a falling-out with his Avalon Superstar partner, Simon Langford.
In any case, while the Miami Starfish version of the song uses the original vocal, I frankly liked Chocolate Party’s treatment of the song over theirs.
Regardless, I suspect like most DJs, program directors, etc., I only have room for one of each song. Multiple mixes? Maybe. Multiple artists doing the same song? Not so much.
All the other arguments for or against dance covers aside, this scenario is clearly one of the risks of doing covers at all.
Can’t you people just release the *@&#^$%! song?
I posted the latest update to my dance chart the other day. For the second week in a row, Danny Saucedo is in the #1 position with All On You.
For those not following closely, Saucedo’s a former Swedish Idol contestant, signed to Sony, who is apparently enjoying a fair amount of success in his homeland and nearby Poland. In his early 20s, his voice belies his age, with a strength and emotion that works well with a song like All On You.
The problem? Go try and buy the song. If you’re in the U.S., you can’t. No doubt, you can get a Torrent, or use a P2P network and snag copies of it all day long. But you want to take a buck out of your wallet and get it the right way, good luck. I’ve been asked repeatedly by people who’ve heard this track in my mixshows, “Where can I get that track?” I don’t know; fly to Europe and use iTunes there?
I got my copy of the track through legitimate promotional channels. Sony, why are you asking me to play this song when your staff can’t seem to be bothered to take the 30 minutes or so required to make it available to consumers in the U.S. on iTunes?
And while I’ve certainly not read Saucedo’s recording contract, don’t give me some B.S. about territories and rights and what-not. Come on; new, young artist. Major worldwide label. Tell me they didn’t option the entire globe with this kid.
But whether we’re talking about this artist, or any other, this is one of the things that continues to blow my mind about the music industry, in dance and well beyond, and mostly with major labels, but minor ones too:
- Getting hooked-up with iTunes is hardly difficult or burdensome. It takes time, but most of that time is waiting for iTunes staff to process things—not the actual mechanics of posting content. So why so many indie artists don’t seem to think this is important is beyond me.
- To the major labels, if you own the rights, post the content. These days of timing releases to special moments? Making sure music goes out only on Tuesdays? Making sure releases coincide with some sort of press release or marketing effort? It’s history. Nobody gives a crap. There’s a lot of product, and not putting it out for some stupid reason that might have made sense 20 years ago is just insanity. Post it now, and figure out if and when you’re going to promote it later. You can always “re-release it” anyway… This happens all the time with indie dance music. Consumers do not care if it’s new to them now, or (again) six months from now. Release dates mean nothing.
This is really quite simple. The music business is hard. There’s lots of product. Consumers are fickle and have short attention spans. If you hope to make any money at all from your music, and you want to reduce piracy, how about actually offering said music for sale?
Such a novel concept for the 21st century.
So, Sony. Here’s a thought. Get around to having that intern in the digital department click a few web links and make Danny Saucedo’s track magically appear in iTunes, won’t you? I have a few fans who’d love to buy a copy. If they only could.
Some upcoming events
There are many different types of DJ’ing, and I find myself doing a lot of different kinds of DJ’ing. In the next few weeks, I’ll be showing-up in some unusual places around Denver.
Next week, for the second year in a row, I’ll be providing the music for a private customer event at Murray Motors, Denver’s premier BMW and Mercedes dealerships. I love working with the Murray team, and I’m hoping this year that the weather cooperates better than last.
In June, I’ll be working a pair of benefits.
The first is June 6th, with Concerts for Kids. The “Denver Day of Rock” is CFK’s big annual fundraising event, and the proceeds allow them to help fund a number of children’s health and educational organizations. The main event, at Denver’s Fillmore Auditorium, features a concert by the Flobots. Ahead of the Flobots’ concert, I’ll be providing the music with an 80′s theme, and along the way, the impersonators and dancers from Denver’s Borrillo Entertainment will be doing an incredible dance routine to the sounds of Madonna and Michael Jackson.
Also in June, I’ll be working the annual Janet’s Camp benefit event for YMCA of Denver. Each year, local celeb Janet Elway hosts this great day camp for grown-ups to raise funds that allow YMCA to open its summer camps to kids that might otherwise not have the opportunity to participate. So in addition to the great camp food, games and fun for the attendees, there’ll be dancing and great music from yours truly. I’m really looking forward to this one!
I have some additional events in the pipeline, so it’s going to be a busy summer for DJ Wesley. As always, I’ll keep everyone posted here.
A unique sound returns
One of the more unique sounding dance songs of recent years was You Promised Me (Tu Es Foutu) from Italy’s In-Grid (Ingrid Alberini). While it didn’t become a dance hit in the U.S. until 2004, it was recorded two years prior, and cut through the musical noise at the time with its interesting use of the accordian… A sound you certainly don’t hear every day in contemporary music, let alone dance music.
One has to look no farther than In-Grid’s own web site to know her body of work is far more extensive than we’ve seen here, but I’ve certainly not seen anything new from her here since Foutu. Hence my sense of pleasant surprise when I got the new In-Grid release, Le Dragueur.
Like her smash hit, the bi-lingual Dragueur is peppered liberally with the trademark accordian sound that feels like something more out of the stereotypical French café than something from Alberini’s native Italy. But be that as it may, it gives the song a fun twist that as before makes it stand out from the pack in serious way.
It’s a fun song, that I think due to the accordian, doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously. I’ve not paid too much attention to the lyrics yet (I don’t understand half of them since they’re not in English), but it’s just a bouncy sort of track that puts a smile on your face and makes you want to head to the dance floor. (I hope I don’t find out later that it’s got downer lyrics that prove all that wrong.)
In any event, give it a listen at her web site (link above) and see what you think.
Supply and demand
I think about a lot of things music, and much of it comes out in blog entries in one from or another. What’s it take to get a song on the Billboard charts? How do I deal with the flood of music I receive around here each week? Why do I like and play (and chart) so many songs that I never see anyone else playing? Why do I get tired of some songs in about a day, when others last for months?
A classic bell curve plot.
This morning it hit me. I think all of it can be explained with a classic bell curve, coupled with simple supply and demand. (For those bell curve challenged, picture the worst songs on the left, and the very best on the right.)
To be sure, there’s a lot of good music out there. I hear it every day, I play it, I get more of it all the time.
There’s also a lot of crap. I hear that every day too, I don’t play it, and I get more of it all the time.
The really, really good stuff is not that common. I’m lucky if I get one new track that I consider “really, really good”—let’s call it the top 5% of the material—every couple of weeks (if it’s that often).
In any case, a good 65% or more of the music flow being pretty listenable; the left-most 35% of the music probably isn’t. Regardless, some is better than others. But as the bell curve tells us, the bulk of the music is pretty average… In the middle of the curve.
There is a huge amount of supply, judging from the amount of music I get each week, and the amount I see showing-up on the various digital music stores. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of new songs each and every week. Month after month. (I’m talking only dance music here, by the way.) It’s more music than any one DJ can possibly digest. More than any radio programmer can deal with. And certainly way more than any music consumer can even know about, let alone sift through, let alone buy much of. With the proliferation of decent software for making electronic music, the barrier to entry is very, very low, adding to the supply.
Of course, the stuff on the extreme right side of the bell curve tends to get noticed… Stands out from the noise level in the background (literally). Looking back on my annual top charts, it’s songs like Matt Darey’s Beautiful Day and Filo & Peri’s Anthem. A little farther to the left on the curve, popular choices like Lady GaGa’s Poker Face. The good stuff; the better-than-average to outstanding tracks.
As I enter more deeply the world of production, obviously this sort of thing concerns me if I hope to get anyone’s attention with my music. But whether for myself, or anyone else with similar aspirations, one thing is really clear: There’s a damned high bar, and you better put your game on, because the middle of the bell curve is a really crowded place.
Why so secret?
I was originally planning to write a blog entry today about a great track that I’ve had for awhile, but only recently started taking to. It’s from a producer out of the UK that goes by the name The One Hundred, and the track is Still & Fine. It’s a sweet track, especially the Bellatrax remix.
I was going to write about it—until I could find absolutely nothing about the producer, the song, or the vocalist who sings on it.
So instead, and not to pick on The One Hundred specifically by any means, this is now going to be a mini-rant about some issues I see in the dance music industry that are among many that prevent it from commercializing much of anywhere, especially in the U.S.
The Web (it’s about the brand)
You really can’t do much of anything these days that involves reaching consumers of any kind without having a web presence. When someone wants to find you, or learn about you, or buy your product, where do they go? The web. And usually Google on the web. It’s literally the first look many people have of “an entity” (company, artist, individual, product, service, etc.).
It seems a lot of artists and producers (heck, even “record labels”) are content with their only web presence being a garish page on MySpace, with a crappy looking template generated by one of the hundreds of “crappy looking MySpace template” sources that are a mere Google search away. (And yes, my own MySpace page uses one of those crappy templates because it’s such a pain to customize MySpace otherwise.)
The web is hard for a lot of people, so fair enough. But if you can register a domain name and point it at a MySpace page, you probably have enough sense and skill to do better than letting your “brand” be represented by the ugliest web site on the planet (MySpace, in case you’re not following along here).
But be that as it may, let’s accept for the moment that MySpace actually makes sense, and that it’s a good thing, etc. Then why would you set-up your MySpace page, and then do nothing with it other than drop your music into the player and start making and accepting friends? MySpace has space for a bio. Pictures. It even has a blog feature (the world’s crappiest blog, but it’s there). But these things are hard too, I guess, and allowing other MySpace users to spam your comments with their new release banners and YouTube videos is easy, so there you go. But I wouldn’t call it “putting your best foot forward.”
Hiding the Details (it’s still about the brand)
It is truly beyond me why so many producers and artists (and DJs too for that matter) go completely out of their way to hide their own identities and/or the identities of those they work with:
- Pictures taken with strong backlighting so all you see is a silhouette; oddly-cropped pictures where you see nothing clearly; pictures taken from the back; or no pictures at all.
- Missing or first-name-only vocalist credits. (What, you want to make sure nobody else records with him or her? Give me a break.)
- Missing or first-name-only producer credits.
- No information of any kind about where to purchase the music, or which label(s) a song or artist has been signed to. (If this isn’t an invitation to piracy, I don’t know what is.)
This is, frankly, nuts. Promoting music is little different than promoting anything else, and that’s why people like Coca-Cola and Nike spend so much time and money building and protecting their “brand.” I think it’s even more important with music than shoes and soda, because there’s so much music out there, when a fan finds something they like, they probably would like more from the people who made the track they liked.
When you hide the vocalist’s name, it becomes impossible to find more music he or she has sung. When you hide the producer’s name, likewise on production. When you hide pictures, there’s nothing for a fan to relate to other than the music.
Part of this, I believe, is because in many cases, popular producers work under multiple names for record deal purposes. One producer I’m thinking of in the UK who’s a favorite of mine works under around 12 different names, and the explanation he gave at one point was just that… Some track under some name gets signed for release, and he picks a new one. Sounds like a weird set of contract terms to me, but whatever. It’s not a great way to build a reputation in my view, at least not among consumers. (If people in the industry know who you are, I guess that’s all that matters to some.)
Missed Opportunities
I think the bottom line here is that this is all about missed opportunities. To pick on The One Hundred a little bit here, whoever they are, is that I would have loved to write a blog piece about the song. Talk about what I like, and why I like it. Who’s behind the song. What other work they’ve done. Essentially, help spread the word and promote the track. But I didn’t, because there’s nothing to say. And there’s nothing to say because the artist hasn’t chosen to say anything; at least not anywhere Google can seem to find it.
Music, to me, is more than the music itself. It’s interesting people, with interesting backgrounds, from interesting places, with personal stories. Not unlike the way we feed off of Britney’s dysfunction, but hopefully in a more positive way, many people (myself included) like hearing about all that when we bond with a song’s great production, or insightful lyric, or smooth vocal. It’s part of the experience, frankly. So why deprive an audience of that? It makes no sense.
But then, many things don’t make sense. But I still like Still & Fine from The One Hundred. Whoever they are.
Amazing new Guetta track
I’ll start by saying that I’m not really a huge fan of producer and DJ David Guetta. Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of his work, but he’s just not one of those artists whose every release I hotly anticipate. But when he gets it right, he gets it really right. Take Delirious for example, a song he did with Tara McDonald. It’s just massive.
So is When Love Takes Over, his new track with the vocals of Kelly Rowland.
David Guetta feat. Kelly Rowland - When Love Takes Over
Truly, I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s one of the best dance tracks I’ve heard in a long time. Guetta got it right on every level. The songwriting is solid. Rowland’s vocals are amazing, energetic, well-engineered and very crisp. The energy builds and decays are perfect. And the arrangement is equally crisp, deliberate and polished.
(I’m referring to the original extended mix in these comments, for the record.)
There’s a lot of good dance music out there, no question. There’s a lot of dance music that’s well put together. But it’s not every day you get a track that’s so well balanced, so perfected, as When Love Takes Over.
Enough superlatives; just check it out and see if you agree.
Playlist for Friday Night House Party Mixshow #27 (5/1/2009)
Here’s the playlist from last Friday’s mixshow, my 27th installment:
- Ashley Tisdale – Its Alright, Its Ok (Jason Nevins Extended Mix)
- Steve Forest vs. Chriss Ortega – Modern Times (Nicola Fasano & Steve Forest Mix)
- Jan Wayne vs. RainDropz! – Numb (Re-Fuge Electro Club Remix)
- David Guetta feat. Kelly Roland – When Love Takes Over (Original Extended Mix)
- Kelly Clarkson – My Life Would Suck Without You (Chriss Ortega Club Mix)
- The One Hundred – Still & Fine (Bellatrax Club Mix)
- Erika Jayne – Give You Everything (Dave Aude Club Mix)
- Martijn ten Velden – I Wish U Would (Bermudez & Preve Club Mix)
- A.R. Rahman feat. The Pussycat Dolls – Jai Ho (Soul Seekerz Vocal Mix)
- Gathania – Get It Out (2009 Extended Mix)
- Boom – How Do You Do (Kanikuli Extended Mix)
- Plasco – Stay (Maxi Mix)
- Filo & Peri with Eric Lumiere – Shine On (Club Mix)
- Andrew Spencer – To Be With You (2-4 Grooves Extended Elektro Club Remix)
- Lesley Roy – Unbeautiful (Jason Nevins Extended Mix)
- Lisa Law – Wicked Ways (Soul Seekerz Remix)
- Carol Hahn – I Can Stop the Rain (Twisted Dee Club)
- Kate Ryan – Ella Elle L’a (Original Mix)
- Mike Bordes pres. Angela Severiano – Don’t Know What U Got (Original Extended Mix)
- Britney Spears – If You Seek Amy (Mike Rizzo Funk Generation Club Mix)
- Mischa Daniels vs. De Nuit – All That Mattered (Extended Radio Mix)
- Danny Saucedo – All On You (Extended Version)
I also send this playlist out each Monday night by e-mail. If you’d like to be on the mailing list, just let me know.
See you this Friday at 7:00 West, 10:00 East.
