Posts filed under ‘DJ Wesley Personal’
Spotify spotting
Music service Spotify’s long-awaited US launch finally happened in the past week, and courtesy of Bob Lefsetz, I was afforded an invitation to use the service. After spending a few days tinkering with it, I thought I’d record my thoughts.
For those who are blissfully unaware, Spotify is a new streaming music service. They boast of having “all the world’s music” in their catalog* available for listening anytime, anywhere. Want to relive your youth to that Aldo Nova track you’ve not heard since back in the day? Search for “Aldo Nova,” and bathe in the ability to queue-up any of his releases on-demand. With a paid subscription, you gain the ability to load-up your mobile device with a bunch of music, and enjoy it on-the-go without the need for a data connection. It sounds like nirvana for most music lovers, and indeed, the service has been wildly successful in its home country of Europe. (Read more on their web site if you’re still confused.)
So what are the ups and downs? (more…)
Is anybody listening?
Yeah, I know. It’s been ages since since I’ve written anything in this blog. And now we’re a whole month into 2011, and I’ve still not written anything in this blog. Until today, when I figured, “Hey! Why not blog about something?” So here we go. Anybody listening?
I suspended my dance music blogging for a pretty simple reason, really… I’m a bit disenchanted with the music industry at the moment. There, I said it. It’s not that I don’t like dance music; I listen to it pretty much from the time I wake-up to the time I go to bed. And there’s a lot of it that’s good. Some is quite good. But broadly, I’m not really seeing any innovation. Dance music today sounds pretty much exactly how it did five years ago. And about the same as it did five years before that.
Sure, we have lots of styles. We have lots of variations and sub-genres and everything else. We have largely east coast peeps (like Sirius/XM’s The Beat) spinning crummy cuts of non-melodic looped noise every-other-song, all day long, that used to be the exclusive purview of 2:30AM high-on-E-crowd-filled club sets. We have annoying trash like “Barbra Streisand” from Duck Sauce that sounds like it was made, start-to-finish, over the course of a lunch hour, and the video for it still fetches 35,000,000 views on YouTube.
Quite honestly, if this is the (dance) music people really want, I’m pretty much over it. Maybe I need to switch to country music.
Anyway, mom always told me if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. As a result, I’ve not said much lately. But truly, as a producer and musician myself, it’s really not helpful to hear comments like, “That sucks ass.” Or, “That’s crap, and I don’t listen to (or play) crap.” There’s a real difference between constructive criticism and just being an arrogant prick, and frankly, the world has too much of the latter already. Just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s shit, any more than if you don’t like something, it also doesn’t make it shit. (Although this news will surely come as a shock to some people, and honestly, I still think the Duck Sauce track really is crap.)
But when it comes to the arts, it really is subjective. There’s just a whole lot not to like about a lot of the music that comes across my desk, and whether what mom said was right or wrong, if I can’t say something constructive about it, or at least articulate why I dislike something, everyone really is better off with me just keeping my mouth shut. So I have been.
I am still doing my DJ and dance music stuff. You can still hear my mixshows every weekend. I’m still doing the occasional remix, in a way and a style that pleases me, and I’m still picking the music that gets played on iDanceRadio.fm to a worlwide audience who can choose to agree with my choices by tuning-in—or not, by tuning-out.
But I’m more than a little bit ready for someone to come-up with something truly new. Truly innovative. Something that elevates the art of dance music in a new and creative way. Something that’s respectful of music as an art form. Something that’s not just quick-fix fodder that titillates or stimulates or dominates for a few weeks, before fading out and never being thought about or played again. I suspect it’s going to be a long wait.
In the mean time, I’m working on several tracks of my own. Are they innovative in the way I just described? I highly doubt it. But I’ll enjoy creating it, and hopefully if you don’t like it, you’ll be charitable and give me a better critique than, “That’s crap.” If you don’t, I suppose I deserve it after my Duck Sauce comment. 
Look for more regular musings here in the coming weeks, and as always, leave a comment with any thoughts you might have.
Of charts and playlists
Last week, I had what I might refer to as an “minor incident” over my most recent music chart. This is not an appropriate place to talk about the situation or the details, but I will say that it distilled down to someone begin frustrated with me that I had not charted their music recently. But in responding to it, I did sort of think through charting… Why I keep one, and why I pick the things I pick. It also made me think a bit about the state of the dance music industry. Following are my thoughts on all of this.
To start with, my ego isn’t anywhere near super-sized enough to believe that my chart is very important in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, I play the occasional club set, although I’ve been far more focused on production in the past year (for a reason). And yeah, I do play parties, and special events, and that sort of thing. And yes, I reliably produce a weekly mixshow that airs on three different Internet radio stations. But none of that makes me a big “name” in this industry, and even if it did, I keep my sense of self-importance well in-check.
So why do I bother making a chart, then? I do it as a service to the industry, and for those fans (and there are some) who look to me for keep them aware of great new dance music.
- For industry, while my chart may or may not mean much by itself, if a song shows-up in my chart and that of 100 other DJs, that might be an indication that the song is gaining traction.
- As for my fans, I sort of see this as the role of a DJ, at least historically. I find out about great new music, perhaps new trends in music, and I turn my listeners onto it. I can’t do that if I don’t prepare and publish playlists (which I do, for my mixshows anyway), and if I don’t prepare and publish a chart that details how I’m seeing music at the moment.
Obviously, if you’re a musician, or a producer, or a remixer, or a record label, or a music promoter, your aim is to see your music get traction. It’s an ego trip to see a song of yours show-up in a playlist or a chart. Promoters, in particular, are paid to help ensure that happens. And when you start talking about things like Billboard charts, a lot of money changes hands to help ensure that songs appear on the chart. But even with DJs of my stature, I get hounded by promoters to listen to (and chart or list) their music. It’s just the way things work.
But what was bothersome for me about this recent “minor incident” is the expectation that I might chart a song because I “owe” someone… Whether they’re a friend, or a colleague, or they did me a favor, or whatever else, that somehow, the relationship warrants my playing-out a song, or putting it on my chart, because of that. I’m sure that’s the way a lot of (perhaps most) DJs work, but I don’t.
This goes back to the question, “What’s the role of a DJ?” Of course, it’s to play music. But if I wanted a DJ to play only the music I know, I wouldn’t need a DJ—I’d need only my iPod. It’s true, some fans just want the stuff they know. But my fans largely want me to tell them about cool new music that they can fall in love with and purchase to put on their iPods to play when I’m not around. (How do I know that? I hear from fans all the time who tell me exactly that.)
And quite frankly, I think that best serves the music industry. Turn me onto your new music, and I’ll spread the word.
However, I don’t do that because you (artist, producer, label, promoter) think I should—I do it because you’ve turned me onto product (music) that I truly believe in, am truly charged-up about, and truly want to turn other onto. And therein lies the rub; I’m not going to pretend to get excited about something, I’m going to get excited if I get excited. And if I don’t, I’m not playing the song, and I’m not charting it. It’s really that simple.
I suppose if that makes me “not a team player,” so be it. But if I don’t like the music, and if I’m not excited by it, I’m not going to pretend just because someone thinks I should.
Now, do promoters and other relationships I have influence me? Somewhat, yes, because if an industry colleague brings me a track, I’ll probably listen to it before I listen to things I get from people I don’t know. (But I’m still not playing it if I don’t like it.)
Do I show a preference in my playlists and charts for tracks I’ve personally remixed? Hell yes I do, and I’d be an idiot not to. I believe in the work that I do, I’m proud of it, and yeah, it goes on my chart in positions that reflect how I feel about my work compared to other stuff I’m playing.
My chart used to be based solely on spin counts—how often I played each track. Unless I played a ton of sets, the numbers were sort of all over the place, and not very meaningful. These days, my chart is based partially on that, but more on my personal impressions of the song relative to other things I’m playing. It’s not very complicated.
So, is my chart all that important? No, probably not. But to the extent anyone’s paying attention, and wonders why “their” stuff is or isn’t on it, or wonders how I put it together, you have your answer. And no, I don’t chart stuff just because someone thinks I should. It’s my chart, in every sense of the word. If you find it useful, great; if you don’t, then unsubscribe from my mailing list, or don’t go to my web site, and don’t bother yourself with it. It’s really quite simple in the end.
Interesting observations
I’ve been conversing recently with Kyle Ward, who is 1/2 of the dance/electronic act, Oscillator X, and I had some interesting revelations this morning.
But first… Kyle is the sort of guy I’d like to be if I had my life to do over again. Well, at least from high school onward. I don’t claim to know Kyle all that well, but from the outside looking in, he strikes me as the sort of person who knows what he wants out of life, and just sorta goes and makes it happen.
I’m not the sort of person who has a lot of regrets, and I don’t regret the paths I’ve taken in life. But I do wish from time-to-time that I’d had the… Something… To have started my musical endeavors a little earlier in life. Like Kyle, when I know what I want out of life, I go and make it happen. My issue was figuring out what I wanted. But c’est la vie.
Kyle recently listened to some of my remixes for the first time, and forwarded back a surgically accurate set of reactions to them that sort of amazed me. (I still have no idea how he was able to listen to one of my tracks, and discern that I’d used a 707 drum kit on it, but anyway.)
It got me thinking about how I approach composing music—whether in the typical sense (my own songs), or when composing arrangements while remixing someone else’s track.
Here’s how I described it to Kyle in e-mail:
I dunno, to use a painting metaphor, it always feels like I’m slopping musical paint on a palette sorta willy nilly, and then sorta taking that and slapping it on a canvas. Sometimes I get lucky, and other times, the red blends with the green and you end-up with this shit-colored blob of “what the HELL was I thinking?” Then I scrape it off, throw it away, grab more paint, and hope for the best a second time. Maybe that’s how creativity works for every musician in a way, but I wish it was more deliberate, more planned, more intelligent and more informed. But perhaps I shouldn’t try and make music and creativity work like every other part of my life… It’s really not a binary, logical exercise, is it?
The point I was making is that I tend to want to make everything nice and tidy and logical and binary. DJ’ing has a nice logic to it. Computer programming has that nice binary aspect. And computer graphics strikes me as more logic-driven than creative (although of course it has creative elements too). But music?
Yeah, I work electronically. There is logic. There is a certain binary-ness to the effort. But at the end of the day (someone please make me stop saying that), it’s music, and it either works or it doesn’t. And it doesn’t matter if the beats line-up or not, or the measure counts in a block are in tidy units of 8 each, or the chord progression follows the “rules”—if it doesn’t work when your ear hears it, none of that matters. In fact, one could make the case that some of the greatest compositions by the greatest composers (the Gershwins come to mind) broke a lot of rules, and yet, not only worked, they exemplify some of the best music even written.
Interesting things to bear in mind, I suppose. Maybe I shouldn’t be so afraid of occasionally make shit-colored blobs after all.
New mailing list! Sign-up now! ;-)
In this age of Facebooking and Twittering, maybe it seems a little passé to roll-out a new mailing list, but that’s just what I’ve done. I’ve had a ton of requests from fans who’d like to get my weekly chart in their e-mail in-box (vs. getting a tweet and clicking to the web site), and with the number of new remixes I’ve been doing lately (not to mention the very first of my own tracks coming this quarter), perhaps many of you would like to get notifications by e-mail as soon as things are available.
So, I’m pleased to accommodate… Sign-up now! It takes a few seconds; you get to pick what you want to know about; and you can easily unsubscribe or manage your preferences at any time (there are instructions inside each mailing).
The mailing list is powered by my friends at MailChimp, so everything is compliant with industry best-practices for spam control. (To that end, you’ll need to confirm your subscription by e-mail; after sign-up, check your in-box for instructions.)
Weekly charts will start going out to this list next week, and as for the first newsletter, that’ll happen soon, too. I look forward to keeping you up-to-date the old fashioned way. (Well, I guess that would be a hand-written letter mailed to you in an envelope, but I’m not going quite that far…)
Facebook enhancements for DJ Wesley
OK, so I’m a little slow with some things, but I finally got around to enhancing the old Facebook page for DJ Wesley.
- You can now get to my Facebook page and become a DJ Wesley fan there by going simply to:
http://www.facebook.com/djwesleymusicThis is the same “shortcut” as I use on MySpace.
- For all you texting nuts who have Facebook on your smartphone, you can also become a DJ Wesley fan by texting the message “fan djwesleymusic” to FBOOK (32665).
I’ll be using my Facebook presence more and more to keep people abreast of the exciting things happening in the months ahead, including numerous new remix and production projects (I have no less than four projects underway right now), as well as gig dates and the like, so become a fan today so you can keep up-to-date.
Have a great weekend,
Wes
Mixshow changes starting this week
For nearly a year now, I’ve been doing a live, two-hour mixshow on iDanceRadio.fm. While I enjoy doing it live, it takes a valuable weekend night away from me. It’s also largely prevented me from syndicating the show to other outlets.
Beginning this Friday, October 2nd, the DJ Wesley Friday Night House Party will be trimmed back to one hour (a customary length for mixshows), and I’ll be pre-recording it sometime during the week. I’m sure that most listeners to iDanceRadio.fm will hardly notice the change, but I wanted to give everyone a head’s-up.
Thanks for listening, and I hope you continue to catch the new, shortened show each Friday night, starting at the same time—10 Eastern, 7 Pacific.
Necessary evil
I really do try and keep off-topic posts in this blog to a minimum. The purpose here is to talk about dance music, the dance music industry, DJ stuff, production stuff, and related… Stuff. But hopefully you’ll permit me this opportunity to rant. I promise it won’t happen again. Soon.
These days, social media is a necessary evil. Just like e-mail, just like instant messaging, when your friends, colleagues, fans, associates, family members, neighbors, and others are all Twittering and Facebooking and whatever-else-ing, you feel like a bit of a dork when you’re odd one out, like some sort of technology curmudgeon stuck in the rotary phone era.
So, like many others, I Twitter, I Facebook, and I even still MySpace despite MySpace being the stinky armpit of social networking these days.
Facebook is arguably the most useful of the various social networking services. It’s nowhere near as ugly as MySpace, for a start. And it has some actually somewhat useful features and capabilities. Plus it seems that even my most reluctant friends have caved to peer pressure and have Facebook accounts now.
But all that said, I’m beginning to hate to Facebook. MySpace might well be a metric f*ck ton of ugly right out there on the surface, but Facebook tucks it all away under the hood where you don’t see it at first. Facebook’s “ugly” are the so-called “apps” that are reproducing like rabbits, it seems, along with all the other dingleberries aplenty that go along with them.
It’s all so ugly that if I get one more invitation to from some stupid “app” a friend thought I might find as cute as they did, or one more wall posting from an “app” a friend just interacted with, I think I’m going to go postal.
Dear Facebook friends, let me be clear:
- If you want to kiss me, just kiss me for real, and don’t bother sending me some digital Facebook app version of one.
- I don’t care what city my friends are most suited to live in, based on a test they took, and I don’t want to see it on my wall.
- I don’t care what five actors my friends most look like, based on a test they took, and I don’t want to see it on my wall.
- I don’t care which Harry Potter character my friends are most similar to, based on a test they took, and I don’t want to see it on my wall.
- I don’t care which ______ my friends most ______, based on a test they took, and I don’t want to see it on my wall.
- I don’t collect hearts, lollipops, Peeps, or any other form of digital tchotchke. (I got over digital tchotchke when my Tamagotchi died.)
- I don’t want to be “poked.” If you want to say hello, say, “Hello!” Really; it’s just six keystrokes and a couple of clicks more effort.
- I don’t want to be a fan of anything or anyone I don’t choose myself, and no, I don’t want to be a part of a group that I haven’t already joined.
Oh, and while I’m at it…
Dear Facebook,
- I do not know why you think I’m interested in being friends with friends of friends, friends of friends I defriended (yes, that happens), fans of people I’m a fan of, other people in a group I belong to, or people in some sort of affiliation I’m in. Just because I share one interest or contact with someone doesn’t mean I know them—or want to.
- Just because a friend became a fan of someone or something, or joined a group, doesn’t mean I want or need to know about it, nor does it mean that I have even potential interest in doing the same, so stop telling me about it. Really. Stop. Please stop.
I like Facebook. I do. Mostly. Sort of.
But all the rest of the crap that comes with it is just a new version of spam. Instead of communicating, or communicating something useful, let’s just send a bunch of digital detritus around and call it communication.
It isn’t.
Just to be very clear as well, if my friends love all this stuff? That’s awesome! Great! Have at it! I’m glad you’re enjoying it, and part of me wishes I did too, but I don’t. But it’s not unlike other areas of life; for example, just because you enjoy eating balut eggs or escamole tacos doesn’t mean I should have to choke them down.
It’ll never happen, but I sorta wish there was a “Block All” button or a “Hide All” button for Facebook apps. They need to get off my wall, out of my “Highlights,” and they need to stay off.
I guess if all this makes me a social networking curmudgeon… Well… I’ve been called worse. Earlier today, in fact.
Rant complete. The next posting I make will be about dance music. I promise.
Taking the wraps off
I’ve alluded for the past few months about a remix project I’ve been doing, but it’s been a little premature to talk much about it. But today, it’s time to take the wraps off.
Back in May, I started working with Carol Hahn on a new track titled Let Me Go. The remix was pretty well completed, but for a number of reasons, Carol decided in June not to release Let Me Go right now. While I was pleased with my mix, the song is a bit “dark,” and the mix itself ended-up being a bit dark as well. In any case, it’s been shelved for now. Hopefully at some point it’ll see the light of day.
The good news is that last month, Carol wrote a different new song, Take Me and Dance. When I heard her own rough of the track, I fell in love with it immediately, and started work on a remix of the song. It came together quickly, and I think, very nicely. It has a nice sort of grungy element to it that, as Carol said, “has good energy, power, and attitude.” I hope everyone likes it when they hear it.
Also providing remixes on the release are the renowned Lenny B., who I think has remixed just about everyone under the planet, and my British-expat friends from Spain, Jamie Exley and Peter Hayward who are better known as VisionX, and who also did a really strong remix. Between the three mixes, Take Me and Dance covers some broad sonic territory, and I’m stoked about the release. I believe it’s going to be a successful track, so thanks in advance for keeping your eyes open for it and snagging a copy on iTunes or AmazonMP3 once it’s available (sometime in August).
For those anxious to hear, you expect it to show-up in this week’s DJ Wesley Friday Night House Party, and I’ll be posting it to my Facebook and MySpace pages as well soon.
Now that this track is in the can, I’ll be starting a new project here in the next week or so for another artist. I’ll post details about that as soon as I have them.
