Posts filed under ‘Dance Music Industry’
It’s about the music (and quality shines)
I’ve blogged about and mentioned cover songs more times than I can count (search the blog for “cover song” sometime, and you’ll see). And here’s another one, but I think it sums-up the matter pretty well. Stay with me on this.
Among the many things I do in this life, I’m the media and technology director for CAPP Records, an independent dance record label out of San Francisco. What that means is that I’m a web geek. And while I do some other things too, I have little to do with promotion, and absolutely nothing to do with production. (In fact, my producing ambitions live in a sphere quite apart from CAPP.) But I do converse with Dom, CAPP’s president, on a wide range of issues and among them is the fact that CAPP releases a lot of cover songs.
There are many sound [bad pun] reasons to put out covers, and CAPP doesn’t only do covers to start with. But with CAPP’s recent release of Andrew Spencer and Lazard’s Here Without You (a remake of a 3 Doors Down song), talking to Dom about the response has been enlightening.
Most people really dig the track, and as was the case with Spencer’s other releases, it’s well-produced, and there are a number of great remixes in the release package. But one of the radio stations to receive the promo indicated that they wouldn’t play it because, as a cover song, it violated their station policy.
I was sort of dumbfounded at that reaction, but I “get” that a P.D. can set whatever rules she wants when programming her station.
Dom was relating a conversation that he had with the incredible Chris “the Greek” Panaghi, a terrific DJ, producer and record label owner out of New York, where this station’s reaction was mentioned.
Chris got it right, so very right, when he said (and I’m paraphrasing here, since the quote is second-hand), ‘It’s about the music. Good music is good music, period.’
It sure as hell is. Of course, what constitutes “good music” is still somewhat subjective, and you’re never going to please everyone. Nor am I going to get my mom to warm-up to jumpstyle techno (although she does seem enjoy trance, actually). But things like the quality of a track’s production are fairly subjective, and that often seems to get lost in this discussion.
But expanding on what Chris said, I think we tend to over-categorize things. Is this track progressive house? No? Then I won’t play it. Or, Is this track around 130 BPM? No? Too fast, I won’t play it. And now, apparently, Is this a cover song? No? I won’t play it.
Everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion. But if we spent a little more time focusing on the music rather than trying to shove things into arbitrary buckets, it’s possible that dance music would be a little more mainstream than it is at present in the U.S.
Cool DJ toys
I don’t really write this blog for other DJs, so I guess this post is a little off-topic. But I was struck in an e-mail conversation I had yesterday about how many cool toys there are for DJs these days. I have no idea how big an audience DJs compose as a consumer group, and in this economy, I am even more clueless how many DJs are spending money. But DJs, like musicians, tend to have big aspirations (which is a good thing), and I don’t know about yours, but my local Guitar Center (where both musicians and DJs tend to frequent) still seems to be pretty busy these days.
Anyway, I recently had the chance to play with the Hercules DJ Control Steel pretty extensively so I could write a review of it for it DJ Times. It’s a USB-based DJ controller (i.e., “MIDI control surface” to use the typical parlance) that provides a variety of knobs and sliders and LED indicators to enable better, more accurate control of your DJ software. It has enough of those knobs and sliders to provide direct access to the key aspects of digital DJ’ing, thus freeing you from having to use your computer mouse to manipulate the software. And at around $300, and bundled with DJ software (Virtual DJ), it’s ready-to-use and a steal (bad pun).
You’ll have to wait until the May issue of DJ Times hits the streets to see what else I had to say about it.
As I told the person I was corresponding with by e-mail yesterday, I think what’s cool is that things like the DJ Control Steel even exist. When I started DJ’ing, I started out all-digital, and there were perhaps one or two choices for DJ-specific MIDI controllers at that time. After trying the M-Audio X-Session Pro (which I found to be an overly limited choice, not to mention its cheap, plastic feel; it was truly a toy, not a serious solution), I eventually settled onto using (of all things) an M-Audio Trigger Finger which is actually intended to be a MIDI drum controller. But it served me well for quite some time until my Allen & Heath Xone:3D (and later the 4D) came into my life.
But I digress. The point is that today, there are an increasing number of dedicated controllers already on, or coming onto the market, from Behringer, Vestax, Stanton, and Hercules (among others) at the affordable end that are great for mobile jocks and within reach of even aspiring DJs. And at the higher-end, pro goodies (with price tags to match) from people like the aforementioned Allen & Heath as well as interesting entries from places like Finland’s EKS.
In short, there’s no better time for a DJ to move from the traditional turntable-based approach to the art to the all-digital realm. Great controllers and increasingly great software choices make it way easier, and way more fun, than it was when I started out.
Some people still don’t get it
I was reading the New York Times online this morning, as I usually do each morning over my first cupper, focusing (also as usual) on business and technology. One of the articles that got my attention was one with the headline, Europe’s Twisted Path Away From AM Radio.
It was interesting reading enough, but I was struck by how most of what I read about radio (whether terrestrial or satellite, analog or digital) simply overlooks what I feel is the real trend, the real threat to traditional radio, and it received one sentence at the bottom of the article: “Many radio stations are streamed over the Internet.”
To that sentence, I’d like to add a few points:
- Yes, many radio stations (in this context, conventional radio stations) are in fact streamed over the Internet. There are thousands of such stations from around the world doing just that, and along with them are thousands more Internet-only radio stations. (I have a vested interest here, since I’m program director at one of them, iDanceRadio.fm.)
- Together, conventional and Internet-only radio stations streaming their content provide something that Sirius XM, terrestrial (AM and FM) radio, and digital radio don’t, and frankly never can: a “radio band” (the Internet) with tens of thousands of “channels,” with every conceivable format, genre of music, and nature, from talk radio to bagpipe music.
- It is possible today to listen to Internet radio, easily and conveniently, with mobile smartphone devices like the BlackBerry and iPhone, and as mobile devices get smarter and more capable, and cellular networks continues to offer greater bandwidth, it’s not unreasonable to expect that this method of listening to “radio” will only expand in the years to come.
It’s true that mobile Internet streaming is a geeky thing at present. You have to have an unlimited data plan to go with your smartphone, and you have to be geeky enough to figure out how to find, install and use the sometimes cumbersome software. But it’s not by any means difficult, and as I can personally attest—I listen to iDanceRadio.fm on my BlackBerry for hours and hours each week during commutes and errands—the experience is quite good. (Yes, the connection drops occasionally, but it’s easily restarted, and it’s a surprisingly rare event on my Sprint network powered BlackBerry Curve.)
In any case, I have yet to see a single article from a major news outlet that even mentions this way of listening to radio. The New York Times article I referenced merely talks about how Apple hasn’t put a radio receiver in the iPod; well, in a manner of speaking, they did put one in the iPhone. And Sprint put one in my BlackBerry, too, in the form of the semi-tolerable “Sprint TV” application (which also does radio).
I truly believe that this is the future of radio, even if nobody quite sees it yet. Consumers want choice, and Internet radio gives choice. Consumer want mobility, and mobile Internet radio gives mobility. With improvements in hardware and software, mobile Internet radio could also easily deliver what the DVR has brought to cable and satellite television; program buffering to allow pausing and rewinding, and maybe even scheduled recording of programs (the RIAA would love that—not).
But alas, I think sometimes I’m the only one who “gets it.”
Keep listening.
Wes
SIRIUS still sucks
Back in March, I wrote a blog posting titled SIRIUS sucks where I laid bare my gripes about the SIRIUS satellite radio service, which are many, and still quite applicable.
This morning, I heard by e-mail from DJ JC Simon, one of the mixshow jocks whose work aired on SIRIUS. I happened to notice JC’s e-mail before the one I received from SIRIUS announcing a new channel line-up, and his e-mail prompted me to go investigate what had changed.
The bottom line is that SIRIUS, following their recent merger with XM, finally got around to realigning their programming and eliminating a lot of duplication. Fair enough; it’s precisely this sort of consolidation that delivers value (in theory) to stockholders in a merger situation. Several XM channels have been eliminated and replaced by existing programming from SIRIUS, and some SIRIUS channels were cut in favor of programming originating from XM.
Of note to JC is what’s happened with dance. The Beat, SIRIUS’ primary mainstream dance channel, got the axe, being replaced with (what I feel to be the superior) BPM, a channel originating out of XM. Frankly, I’m not shedding any tears about The Beat’s elimination. While the mixshow content was good, the day-to-day radio programming was never satisfactory to me, and as I noted in my last posting, hosts like Mr. Seth made as much sense being a radio personality, as Tabasco sauce makes sense being used as frosting for a lemon cake.
While I feel badly for DJ JC Simon, and I sure don’t like opportunities for fellow DJs being eliminated, frankly, I was “over” SIRIUS a year ago, and nothing about the new channel line-up is likely to change my mind. While I’m apt to give a listen to BPM in the office at my day job, to see if it’s as good as I remember from listening to it on the net, chances are excellent I won’t bother for long.
What I think is the real next wave here is streaming Internet radio. Sure, Internet radio has been around for years. First, it was a free-for-all, with thousands of kids in their basement playing whatever they wanted to whoever would listen. Then came the onerous royalty requirements from SoundExchange, and things are still in an uproar. Internet radio may not yet have a financial model that makes sense in most cases, but I have tremendous faith that it’ll all be sorted out, and that Internet radio is really the Next Big Thing (even as it seems old hat to many of us).
But who wants to be tethered to their PCs? You don’t have to be. I listen to streaming Internet radio on my BlackBerry every day. In my car. At the office. At home. At the gym. Sure, unlike SIRIUS I can’t listen to streams on my BlackBerry while tooling down I-70 in the middle of Kansas, but I have an iPod for that. iPhone users have the same capability, and the software to do it is free. That’s why we’re emphasizing this mode of listening at iDanceRadio.fm, the fledgling online radio station I’m a part of.
Honestly, I think THAT is where the future is headed. In another couple of years, G3 (or G4 or WiMax or whatever) mobile broadband is going to be so widespread that I probably will be able to listen to iDanceRadio.fm in the middle of Kansas.
So who really needs SIRIUS anyway? Not me, and frankly, I don’t want it.
Groovin’ with the Factory
One bit of weirdness when it comes to the dance music industry is that artist and track names seem to have less relevance than they did at one point, or even today with other genres. My theory is that it’s due to the relative unimportance of the long-form album in dance (few produce them these days, though there are notable exceptions with artists like Moby, ATB, DJ Encore, etc.), and beyond that, that singles tend not only to be the focus, but that they are islands—projects with a start, and a defined end, at which point they’re released, promoted (or not), and the producers and/or vocalists move-on to the next project. Finally, it think it has something to do with the fact that in dance, the original producer, the vocalist (if applicable), and the remixers on a specific project are all islands too… Often times, they come together, they do something, they move-on to other collaborations.
Whatever the cause, it has the rather strange side-effect that talented producers end-up working under numerous aliases, project names, group names and so on much of the time. If you are a fan of a specific individual, it becomes a bit of a challenge to figure out what they’re actually working on at any given moment. (That dance artists in general don’t seem to understand even the most basic aspects of marketing or building brand contributes greatly to this too.)
One of the more talented production teams in my view is UK-based Soul Seekerz, consisting of Simon Langford, Julian Napolitano and Andrew Galea. Napolitano in particular goes under numerous monikers, including One Hit Wonder (with Soul Seekerz partner Simon Langford), Ruff Loaderz (with Sheryl Deane), and Perpetual Motion (with Andy Manston). Langford also has a number of names, including Avalon Superstar (with Billy Mead), and Koishii & Hush (with Alex Sowyrda). I’m sure I could go on… You get the point.
Along with each single being an island, it’s not unusual in dance for an artist to work with several different record labels. Many so-called “record deals” in dance are informal, and usually it’s a singles-focused deal. Gone are the days that many people still think exist, where associating one’s self with a record label is some sort of sweet high-dollar deal with big advances, slick parties, limos and all that. Not anymore. Not in dance anyway, and probably not in today’s broader music industry. And seemingly way more often than not, artists create their own “record labels” to release their tracks, bypassing established labels in an effort to keep as much of the limited take that exists these days as possible.
Which brings me to the real subject of this post: Groove Factory Records.
Scant information is actually available, but as near as I’m able to piece together, this Boston and UK-based record label was started by Simon Langford and Billy Mead for their joint project, Avalon Superstar (which features the vocals of the talented Rita Campbell).
These days, they’ve been taking-on some additional projects that for all I know are just other names for Langford and Mead. This summer, in particular, Groove Factory released a pair of incredibly strong dance tracks.
Loveless feat. Amanda Wilson with Found a Miracle is the one of the pair of songs that’s gained some traction in radio and club play. Wilson’s vocals are, as usual, very strong (she’s a staple of dance, having worked extensively with Freemasons), matched with good songwriting and some sweet production work from the remixers on the project.
The other track I’ve grown attached to is Lisa Law’s Wicked Ways, which was distributed to promotion several weeks ago, but which I haven’t heard being played or seen being charted anywhere outside of my own sets and my own chart. Law is a UK singer-songwriter, and the sole club-length mix is from Soul Seekerz (Langford/Napolitano/Galea again), and is perhaps one of the catchiest pieces of production work I’ve heard in the past few months. The rhythm track is driving and razor-sharp, typical of Soul Seekerz, and the samples and instrumentation used in the arrangement are very well thought out, and well chosen. As a complete track, it represents some of the very best of today’s house music in my view, and it baffles me why this track hasn’t been more widely picked-up. Much to the chagrin of some of my audience, it’s also not available for sale yet through any of the usual suspects; so many people are clamoring to get this song, it’s a shame that Groove Factory are keeping it under wraps for whatever reason.
In any case, it’s clear that Langford and Mead are a very talented, very capable duo. I have no idea what their plans are for Groove Factory, but if they keep cranking out work like their own Avalon Superstar project, Loveless, and the Lisa Law release, I can guarantee they’ll continue to find a strong audience.
Finding “America’s Best DJ”
Once again this year, the good folks at DJ Times will be endeavoring to name “America’s Best DJ.” While it’s only in its third year and perhaps doesn’t have a hugely long track record, I appreciate one of the key motivators of the effort: to celebrate the DJ talents of US-based DJs, since it seems our brethren in Europe get most of the global recognition (Tiësto, Paul van Dyk, Armin van Buuren, etc.).
The contest comes with its own summer tour, featuring many of the DJs up for the award. Everything culminates in Las Vegas in September for a blow-out closing party and the hand-out of the award itself. Voting apparently opens on May 1st at http://www.americasbestdj.net.
I certainly applaud DJ Times’ work on promoting dance music and the DJ art in the US, and I’ll be watching the contest with interest. But searching for the best DJ is a little like searching for the best motorized vehicle; from the tiny Smart ForTwo to the sensible Corolla to the extravagant Hummer to those monstrous dump trucks you see on obscure television shows on the Science Channel, “best” sort of changes contextually depending on who you are, what you’re trying to accomplish, and myriad other factors.
Similarly, “DJ” has way too many meanings. Are you a radio DJ? A dance DJ? A hip-hop DJ? A producing DJ? A wedding DJ? That of course isn’t DJ Times’ fault, but it does point to the difficulty in naming one, singular “best” in a category that has a dozen very different shades of meaning.
At the end of the day, it probably doesn’t matter much. Like any awards show, there are the people who get nominated, and there are those that don’t. There are those who win, and those that don’t. And there’s likely to be a lot of overlooked and perhaps unhappy people in DJ circles. (I hasten to point out I’m not one of them.) But anything that shines more light on an art form that seems in my mind to be a little too underground than it probably should be is a good thing.
I’ll keep you posted as this unfolds over the course of the summer months.
Label chic
As a designer wannabe, I’m a bit of a sucker for good visual design and well-executed branding. Such is the case with System Recordings, a dance label out of New York.
Honestly, I know next to nothing about these people aside from getting their promos and that I like some of the songs their artists are releasing these days. But one thing for sure: They have their design and branding act together. From their web site to their MySpace page to their online store, they sure seem to “got it going on.”
What prompted this post, frankly, is their t-shirt line-up in their online store here. They’ve taken their cool logo and done-up a couple of brand shirts that use it to good effect, especially the black one… What looks like a tire track across the front of the shirt is actually a mosaic of their logo. Pretty clever, and yeah, I ordered one just because I think it’s hot looking.
It’s sort of gotten me thinking that I need some DJ Wesley shirts once my new web site is up (speaking of branding and all that). Might be fun. 
And speaking of branding, look for my all-new web site to be launched in the next week or two. I’m pretty stoked, but still a lot of work remains before it’s ready. Stay tuned…
The ins and outs of timing and charting
A blog reader named Mykael posted a comment to my most recent chart entry (thank you, by the way) and pointed out that my remark about Donna Summer’s I’m a Fire seems at odds with what’s happening in the greater chart universe, and in particular, with Billboard. There’s two responses I have to that, and I’ll save one of them for a later blog article I’m working on. But one I’d like to talk about one of them now.
Virtually every professional DJ receives promotional copies of music. There are a lot of ways that happens, and broadly speaking, the higher your stature in the industry, the more likely you are to receive promos, and the less you’re likely to pay for them (if you pay anything at all). For someone like myself, I subscribe to (and pay for) three different promotional distribution services for DJs, and I receive a large portion of my music that way. (I also buy a lot of it the same way any consumer does.) A lot of DJs I know, especially those work in Second Life, can’t be inconvenienced by actually paying for music, so they use Limewire, but I’ve already spoken about that enough I suspect.
In any case, what tracks get sent through promotional channels to DJs and through which channels is entirely up to the record labels (or the artists for most indie releases). Some labels, like Robbins, my own affiliate label CAPP, and even Warner, Sony BMG, and Universal all go out of their way to service most of their releases to DJs through any and all available channels under the belief that the more play the song gets, and the more grass roots support it gets, the better. Others (I’ll refrain from naming names here) make sure the leading DJs in the country get their product, and use maybe one or two of the usual channels, viewing the rest as customers—not a promotional vehicle. So, a DJ like me is unlikely to ever get anything as a promo in this case, and if I do, it’s usually a single mix of a single track, weeks or even months after its initial release.
I should mention that the labels do this differently with different artists and songs, by the way. For example, not every song a label puts out will get promoted the same way. What accounts for the difference I don’t know.
In any case, like any DJ, I don’t play music I don’t have, and I don’t have music I haven’t heard about. And with the approaches I just mentioned, and in light of the fact that I don’t steal music, one of three things happens:
- I get a track way before the general public starts hearing it or it starts charting. (Rarely)
- I get a track about the same time as everyone else. (Often)
- I get a track weeks after it already appears on radio, Billboard charts, etc. (Frequently)
Mykael, in the case of the Donna Summer track, her record label, Sony BMG, serviced I’m a Fire to DJs several weeks ago. I fell in love with the track immediately, and played the hell out of it. I am, in fact, personally a bit tired of hearing it. But now, weeks after I got it, it finally starts to chart on Billboard, although I still haven’t heard it on dance radio yet. And I fully expect that now, since it’s getting broader coverage, I’ll start getting requests for it during my sets, and it’ll likely start to rise in my chart again as a result. (I’m predicting here.)
I find this pretty strange, because it’s the exact opposite of what normally happens, especially with an artist with the stature of Donna Summer. I would have expected that her record label went after Billboard reporting DJs with everything they had, and would not have worried about the rest of us until much later on. That is, in fact, what happened with Celine Dion’s most recent single dance remix… It made #1 on
the Billboard dance charts before some of the industry folks I know even heard of the record, and I didn’t get a copy of the track until several weeks after it had already started falling from #1.
Charting is not a science, so the timing of how it unfolds can’t really be predicted. But it’s very strongly driven by promo channels, who the labels choose to go after and when, and, I suppose, how aggressively dance promoters (like Carey Vance, Bobby Shaw, Harry Towers and others) have been engaged to do a hand-to-hand assault on behalf of the label who’s contracting with them.
In any case, as Mykael pointed out, Donna Summer’s track is starting to gain some traction if Billboard is any indication, and even if I did burnout on it early, I’m betting I’ll come back around. This was, as I explained, a surprising anomaly for a DJ at my level in the food chain.
One other comment on this subject that’s particular pertinent to the Donna Summer track is the attention span of DJs (and the public). Some tracks just have better staying power than others, which is a factor of the strength of the production, the songwriting, and to some extent the availability of a range of remixes to keep it fresher, longer. But the other factor here is that new music is coming out all the time, and in the ramp-up to the annual Winter Music Conference, it seems the labels were all working overtime or something. There’s been a ton of new releases, and some of them are really strong. That also tends to make people (me) focus less on last week’s tracks, and more on this week’s tracks.
In any case, thanks again for the comment.
SIRIUS sucks
Several years ago, Christmas 2003 to be exact, I received a SIRIUS satellite radio receiver as a gift. For a time, I used it in my truck, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I enjoyed it enough that I fitted my brand new Mazda Tribute with a factory satellite radio in 2005. Since then, let’s just say that the gloss has faded on my love for SIRIUS.
When I drive the Tribute these days, my iPod is the primary source of music. And as for my old truck, yes, I still drive it daily to and from work, but the SIRIUS receiver now sits atop the fridge in the small office where I do the work of my day job. It’s connected to speakers, and our small troupe takes turns selecting the station du jour.
What prompted this posting was a promotional spot on one of SIRIUS’ radio stations promoting another channel, E Street Radio. Now, no offense to Bruce Springsteen or his fans, but does anyone in the world actually need a radio station that plays nothing but Bruce Springsteen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Or Elvis Radio, which does precisely the same thing for Elvis music? Or Radio Margaritaville with non-stop Jimmy Buffet? (more…)
Another take at the epic album
Someone recently posted a link to my blog entry about epic albums on another web site, which resulted in a bunch of hits and a couple of comments (click here to read them). I also added a couple of additional thoughts in response.
One of the things Santa brought this past December was a Stanton T.90 turntable. It’s designed for DJ’s, I suppose, but what makes it of interest to many consumers as well is that it’s one of a generation of new USB turntables. Connect it to your PC, and it shows-up as an audio device. Use the bundled software, or your own audio recording software, and you can easily digitize your old record collection.
The T.90 can also be used conventionally, and has a range of output types on it. So far, I’ve not even connected the USB cable, and given my other audio gear, I probably won’t.
In any case, I’ve not digitized any vinyl at all since getting it. Instead, I’ve been using it to take an interesting walk down memory lane, and along the way, I noticed a few things.
- As I mentioned in my epic albums post, dropping the needle at the start of an LP, and listening through to the end of the side, is something most of us just don’t do with CDs, or with our iPods (by choosing an album from the menu vs. tracks or shuffling). There’s something emotional on some level to be derived from that, and while not many of the vinyl albums I’ve been listening to are epic albums, it really does bring a different character to the music listening experience that went away somewhat with CD, and definitely vanished with iPod.
- For all that people have said about audio quality, there’s a reason for the resurgence of vinyl (I’ve been reading articles about this, and if I can find some links, I’ll add them to this posting later)… The sound is better than you remember. I believe, now anyway, that CD sounded so great because we (well, I anyway) were using crap gear. My turntables and cartridges were never very high quality. But the Stanton T.90, with its good quality cartridge included in the bundle, hooked-up to decent gear (most notably playing through my studio monitors)? Well, let’s just say vinyl never, ever sounded so good. It’s incredible.
- Finally, I forgot how good some of the music in my collection was. (Yeah, some of it’s crap, too.) I probably will end-up digitizing some of it for my iPod, but I don’t think it’s going to be the same experience listening to it that way.
If you’re of the generation like I am where vinyl was king at some point in your memory, and if you still have vinyl taking-up valuable storage space in your back closet like I did, let me make a suggestion: Consider spending a few hundred bucks on a turntable, and revisiting your collection. The experience has been, and continues to be, amazing.
NOTE: Since you won’t find any of it at your local Best Buy, know that Guitar Center is a great source of turntables, and seemingly oddball items like record cleaning supplies. Thankfully DJs have managed to help keep the vinyl-supporting hardware market alive a bit, and Guitar Center is one of the only places offering this stuff readily at retail.
