Magnatune turned on playlists (A.K.A. “favorites”) today. Long on my wishlist. It’s at the album level (not per song) but this a big step toward the ‘music anywhere’ features that modern labels should all have as part of their services.

I’m not sure why (and I’m hard pressed to think about it too much) but my last two Magnatune project, “Riding the Faders 2″ and “Chronic Dreams 2″ have flatlined in sales - and at a very low place at that. Chronic 1 and La Vie Chill still pop a sale occasionally and along with RTF 1 I can’t complain, which is to say I’m really grateful that plenty of people think they are worth paying for.

I seriously doubt this is a reflection on Magnatune or even tip-jar-fatigue because the music on the follow-ups is different than the first editions and it might just be that the newer ones don’t connect with people like the first ones did. There is the possibility that Magnatune’s new subscription mode which debuted a week after CD 2 went on sale has absorbed my album sales. (Album sales are posted nightly to Magnatune artists, but the accumulation of royalties from subscription streaming is only calculated a few times a year so it’s possible I’ll see big numbers for my music then - but I’m assuming not.)

Whatever the reason, I’m using the dead sales figures as a rationale for seriously focusing my music on a relatively narrow target. I recently compiled a playlist on ccMixter of the “Undiscovered fourstones” and especially when held up against artists who have actually mastered many genres (I’m thinking now of Loveshadow) I couldn’t help noticing that my attempts at the various styles seem less convincing than ever, even to me. I can only imagine what potential customers might be hearing. I’m definitely over that.

So while it may all sound very contrived from an artistic perspective, the fact is I’ve been leaning toward this kind of thing anyway (note the drastic and consistent increase in ccMixter uploads using my Cry Baby wha-wha pedal).

For better or worse, this is all you’re going to get out of me a while. Maybe, you know, forever.

Niels (aka spinmeister) at eMXR is a real sweet guy who has turned out to be a great resource at ccMixter bringing hoards of great musicians to the site, doing great interviews with Trifonicand Calendar Girl and posting some superb mixes. Probably the most important thing he brings to the site is his inviting charm and grace. This is good for any community site, but especially ccM because for whatever else I do for the site, this is one area where I need others to pick up my slack.

This feature of his is in full view in a longish conversation we had in which we covered everything fourstones and ccMixter. I managed to keep it together and got ranty (moi??) only at the very end.

The full transcript is here:

eMXR: Fourstones of Magnatune and ccMixter fame gives rare interview

Here are two probable truths:

1. If I am honest about it I think it’s groovy that Chronic Dreams 2 is in the Magnatune Top 10 two days after it was released.

2. If I am really honest I have to admit that this is at least partially due to the fact that overall albums sales are down at Magnatune - but that’s a good thing as John explains the Magnatune business shifted almost exactly the day CD2 was released.

Unlike album sales, the tracking system for subscription based royalties are not calculated daily so I won’t know for a while exactly how well the album is actually doing but I’m stoked by it all.

First off, special thanks to narva9 for this very furry and cool alternative cover to Ridin the Faders 2.

Speaking of which: The album is doing well at #16 on the Magnatune charts (not that I notice, er more often than every 8 minutes anyway) — c’mon buds! It’s GOT to crack the Top 10 and make the front page. Won’t you help a few dozen starving musicians get their 15 seconds of faux glory??

[UPDATE 1/18] OH MAN, we’re at #11 — just a couple more sales will do it… do it… lol

[UPDATE (2) 1/19] Bingo — outrageous, thanks everyone… now, we start the climb to #1 ;)

I’m not a particularly energetic digger. I’ve been playing acoustic instruments and analog electric instruments from when the instruments were bigger than I was (parents: don’t let your 2nd grader talk you into dragging a cello around school) and at a certain point I stop scraping my sampling resources and pick up the bass or guitar and just play the damn part as I hear it in my head. Such was the process three years ago when I put together Magnatune Remixed: Riding the Faders (1) mainly because, while deep, the Magnatune catalog was a fraction of what it is today.

Flash forward to last summer: while starting to work on RTF 2 I got so overwhelmed with digging and cutting samples and a cappellas I had to accept that I wasn’t going to get to the whole catalog. It was hard. The samples were so cool I just knew an even better one was sitting around the corner… a few clicks away… but I finally jumped in and started mixing, and the first cut I made was a statement about one the self-imposed imperatives of the album called “There is No Brad Sucks.”

The other embarrassment of riches were the list of potential collaborators. I don’t want to over hype this, let me just say it was exactly as cool as you can imagine to work with Pat Chilla, lo tag blanco and Clarance Boddyker. We had a couple of logistical bumps (NEVER about the music) but I want to publicly thank these guys for hanging in there with me while I go through my various flip outs.

So under the cover of darkness, late last night Magnatune Remixed: Ridin the Faders 2 went online for download, streaming, purchase or license. About %5 of the proceeds for RTF2 album will go to me, the rest goes to Magnatune, the artists I sampled and my collaborators. This is how I want it and why I’m involved in the Magnatune Remixed project: to help support the business folks and artists who have acknowledged the new fundamental truth of the music industry that “giving away your music is good for your career.” That’s my agenda and I’m sticking to it.

I don’t claim the right to pontificate but if you indulge me I will. It’s in that spirit that I share my evolving thoughts on the open music scene because I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. I’ve been led to notice a potentially large shift in open music. This shift seems to be inspired by the You-ification of the Web (see Time Person of the Year for the mainstream media’s interpretation).

Professor Lessig’s talk in Germany last week discusses the dearth (if not death) of the participatory aspect of music forecast by J. P. Sousa (the guy who wrote the theme to Monty Python’s Flying Circus) at the turn of the 20th century and facilitated by the industrialization and commidization of music. The introduction of technology such as the phonograph and radio was a fundamental shift in way humans thought about music — the idea of music had suddenly shifted after tens of thousands of years from participation to mass consumption. Note that we are talking about very recent events. I doubt either the term ‘music business’ or ‘music industry’ were in wide use when my father was born in 1916.

While Professor Lessig is careful not to predict or even express a desire to return to a participatory era I can’t help thinking that sites like Splice Music and Jam Glue, by capitalizing on Flash ™ plus broadband ubiquity, reverberate with echoes of the pre-phonograph era. Instead of sitting around the parlor piano or on the porch with a banjo, jug and washboard, the modern day “musician” is parked in the campus cafeteria with a wireless laptop and headphones using audio samples (made by folks they’ve never met and know nothing about) into their own creative works and by default posting the results back into the community. Of course the result is, in turn, available for reuse both others.

I put the word musician in quotes above because the people participating at these sites do not meet our definition of the term in the post industrial sense. We’ve come to think of musicians as people who take lessons, own an instrument, spent money on (or stole) music software or a DJ mixer and turntable. But I suspect that a lot of the people congregating at Jam Glue and Splice Music do not have any those materials or have invested any money or time in activity we used to call ‘playing music.’ At the very least these sites make this scenario possible and I guarantee these sites pitched their investors on the hopes of attracting people exactly in that category.

At this point it is worth mentioning (and to slide in a plug of my benefactors) Flash and broadband are not the only tools that make these community online remix sites possible. They both heavily rely on Creative Commons licenses to free everybody involved from the nightmare that is ‘fair use’ and other irrelevant legal instruments. (To be honest I just take that for granted at this point because I don’t know of a music site that has started up in the last year or two that doesn’t employ CC. So we are all benefactors from a really wonderful idea.)

On the other side of the open music world, we have Magnatune. The key to their success has been the discretion involved in hand picking a tiny fraction of the the submissions. The result is a far cry from Splice Music and Jam Glue where the emphasis is on the righteous goals of spreading community and commodization of the tools, not necessarily a source of reliably world-class quality music.

Having laid out this landscape I’ll say loudly it is very important that commodity remix sites exists and I’m grateful for CC making them possible. I would love to see a world where everybody tries their hand at music and remixing samples in a Flash web page is a glorious way to get that to happen. But that alone is not what gets me up in the morning and it’s not why I wanted to get involved with CC and the open music movement.

My focus has been and will continue to be to enable folks who have the right combination of talent, passion and discipline to make a living making music, because for some reason we’ve all accepted it is impossible to do so without selling your soul for the chance.

I take it for granted that anybody who wants to make and share music for fun and community (you know, cultcha stuff) will find ways in the next 100 years to readily do so. What I’m waiting for is a community of CC musicians to quit their day jobs because they are each making $40,000 a year in online sales and licensing. (Group health insurance to come in phase two.)

I believe there is a viable argument to make that the participatory You-culture and Magnatune style sharing ecomony are not mutually exclusive. And perhaps ccMixter is the start of the thing that sits in the middle. A hybrid, or more precisely a bridge: A community site where quality is emphasized. Two shining examples of the results are the Lisa remix album and Colin’s PreMixed. Both of these represent what can happen when a community of quality musicians hang out and trade talents.

I could easily imagine the site following the Motown model. In the early 1960’s Barry Gordy conceived of a music label that worked like a movie studio in which a pool of songwriters, producers, studio musicians and performers all used each other’s services producing only winning combinations. In an even more organic way, the ccM community has proven, without a doubt, that by emphasizing a cappellas by talented singers and songwriters, we have attracted some of the best producer talents on the Web, which, in turn, attract great singers, on and on. producing some great, some would say winning combinations. All of which feeds the reputation of the site as being a reliable source of good music.

At ccM we have always emphasized quality over quantity and that, like Magnatune, combined with the openness of a community oriented site will be the key to the success moving forward.

Is it just me or does the new Magnatune promo video look like a dating service video?

myspace kills me but I can rationalize finally setting up a real page there because of what I said about the page and it’s relation to “Ridin the Faders 2″, the soon to be released Magnatune Remixed project:

About %5 of the proceeds for RTF2 album will go to me, the rest goes to Magnatune, the artists I sampled and my collaborators. This is how I want it and why I’m involved in the Magnatune Remixed project: to reward the business folks and artists who have acknowledged the new fundamental truth of the music industry that “giving away your music is good for your career.” I’m hoping that by setting up this myspace account I can help promote the project, sell lots more albums and support open musicians and businesses. That’s my agenda and I’m sticking to it.

Of all the screwed up things about the site (and here’s a groovy ASP.NET error I got today) it is ubiquitous and I’ve tried to make to best of it by requesting adds to some far flung personalities. Most folks associated with CC, Magnatune and ccMixter have been quick to acknowledge me as a ‘friend’ and I’m starting to realize the proper space-iquette is to ack-back with a “thank you” message. Sorry didn’t mean to be rude about it, I’ll be getting to that soon enough.

Meanwhile, here’s a short list of some of that folks that have not replied to my requests:

Mick Jagger
Richard Dawkins [UPDATE: It’s an add! ;)]
Paul (he’s dead to me now)
Food (Kev)

here’s me: www.myspace.com/fourstones

Sweet. I just sold a mega license to the French Renault web site (no link yet) for using fourstones’ instrumental “Not Even Alone” (stream here) from “Chronic Dreams“. That cut used samples supplied to me directly from Drop Trio’s Big Dipper recording session from “Lefty’s Alone” (stream here).

This is more than enough to pay off my debt to my so-called-non-evil label.

Who knows, maybe this open music thing will work out.