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Victor Stone's personal site. It's just a tonal thing. |
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.
John from Magnatune recently reworked sampling royalties. A few days before this was announced John bounced the idea off me in roughly this way in a set of two emails:
JB: I’ve been thinking about redoing the way we do sampling royalties. The new way would give more to the artist being sampled.
VS: I think that’s absolutely the right thing, I always thought it was too heavily weighed toward the sampler and not the samplee.
JB: Glad to hear you say that. I’m making it retro-active.
VS:….
JB: You owe us $84.
All of sudden I’m in debt to my record company!! Doh! Please won’t you help me pay off my debt. lol.
But if anybody ever wondered what it is that Magnatune does for its artists over and above just hoisting your CDs on a website with a PayPal button, there’s yet another push for the groovy on line licensing that professional music consumers (film makers, etc.) can feel very confident about. I mean it’s all businessy and stuff.
Coming soon: “fill you iPod for $150” which will gives people access to the entire Magnatune catalog in high quality VBR MP3s for that one price ($0.35 per album — if you can handle all 30Gb.)
Magnatune has re-calibrated its sampling royalties payments which means a lot less money for me (whatever) and whole lot more for those artists I sampled (wahoo). I think there are still some kinks to work out to make sure it’s fair for everybody but it is great to see remixing so deeply embedded into the label’s accounting system. John explains in details here.
I’ve noticed through posting on the web that 100% of the time a non-zero amount of people will take what you say and interpret it EXACTLY the opposite, no matter how forcefully you say it. If I write “my dog is black” I will have at least one link back to me saying “Who knew Stone had a white dog?” In general I’d like to think I make my contribution to those statistics, somewhere, somehow.
Although not in the press release, John did say in the blog entry:
Bottom line: this is an alternative way for people to buy Magnatune music, in a scheme where they can themselves make money by sharing their bought files with other people, in what is typically referred to as an “affiliate network.” We absolutely will continue to sell DRM- free music through the magnatune web site, but for those who wish to make money by sharing their files, that option is now there.
In my defense: If you WERE evil, wouldn’t the best possible strategy be to deny up front that you’re evil !?!?!
In a big splashy fashion Weedshare & Magnatune announced a distribution partnership (that link has the press release, John’s explanation and nice ranting thread growing).
It seems Magnatune music will be made available for sale on a song-by-song basis as part of the Weed share network. Weed is trying to be the pyramid scheme of P2P music sharing. You actually get money for sharing music. The Big Stink is that Weed uses a form of DRM to pull this off. After three listens of a song it “shuts off.”
Lest we forget, Magnatune is the label that says “no DRM ever” prominently on the web site.
John says he thought he would “hit the DRM issue head on” in the press release but a quick perusal of the growing thread makes it pretty obvious that the hammer wasn’t big enough. Nowhere in the press release does it state that Magnatune music will always be available on magnatune.com without DRM before of after purchase (forever).
I’m a little concerned about this because Magnatune has pretty much survived on the ‘good will’ factor — or at least to my mind it has. But the percentage of times that I’ve successfully second guessed John is approximately 0%. (This is just the latest episode I got wrong — if you read the last message in that thread you’ll see he comes out smelling like roses.) So I’m going to continue assuming he knows what he’s doing.
You know, most Magnatune records on are iTunes. Aren’t they all DRM’d up the ass?
All of a sudden Buckman doesn’t know what to do with his time.
A few months ago John from Magnatune pointed out that half of the label’s income comes from music licensing (e.g. film directors, websites, presentations, etc.) and suggested that I submit an instrumental album to capitalize on that trend. Magnatune’s appeal to film makers is critical for the future health of open music. Until a Sony rootkit virus infects his PC, the average music consumer will miss the intricate, arcane, integral corruption a film producer experiences trying to secure eight seconds of music rights for her film. Even enlightened music consumers (i.e. people who have bought my albums) might not realize that for every innovation Magnatune has made in the way it serves its customers and treats its artists, there is an even bigger breakthrough in the way it licenses music — from the on line licensing form to a fair pricing scheme that is based on the film’s budget, not a fanciful exorbitant flat price. I’ve heard John often say “Why would you out price any film project?” I’m not an economist so I don’t know. I’m just a musician who wants the entire world to hear my music and I’m for whatever makes that happen. The magnificent part of the Magnatune solution is that if the project does have a decent budget, then the musician is immediately compensated in dollars, not just exposure.
On my way to delivering the afore requested instrumental album I discovered that, in fact, Magnatune has standards. Of course John has talked about their single digit acceptance rates quite publicly but at the end the day he is a music label executive and I am genetically wired to assume the opposite of anything a music label executive says publicly or otherwise.
After a fair amount of churn we came up with 45 minutes of music that he felt comfortable releasing and that I felt makes no artistic sacrifices. This is kind of important for me because, looking the bull in the eye, I’m pretty sure I’m more qualified to work in fields other than making music if ever so slightly, even there. If I’m going to struggle with a music career it has to be 100% on my terms, which of course is the pedantic way of saying I need to rationalize the results 100%. Why? Well, in the spirit of two mangled quotable sayings “Never mistake passion for talent” and “Sometimes it isn’t enough to be Hungarian,” being true to myself (a priori lethal) is just one of the many, many ways I compensate.
The resultant compensatory album is “La Vie Chill” and it’s dedicated to my new favorite place to hang out on the web, where else, ccMixter. One of the emergent stars of the site, Eric teru Ohara (think Nordic Irish Asian Canadian brilliant), gave me a fantastic remix that I used “as is” thank you very much. For the rest of the album I made extensive use of samples from Magnatune (for which I pay royalties per sale) and ccMixter (for which I got permission to pillage), but I really feel as though these are original compositions — by the way: does anybody else recognize the oxymoron in the term “original composition” or is it just me?
This was the first time I actively avoided using vocals. I’ve been told forever that having singers means the music is more “accessible” (which I gather has nothing to do with larger bathroom stalls). But it seems the all-time best selling artist on Magnatune does 100% instrumental music so I’m ready to make some adjustments in my expectations of how this album will do compared to my other efforts.
If you get a chance, listen to the whole album (stream), if you like it then by all means do the right thing, not because you feel guilty for all the free music you’ve listened to from Magnatune, not because you want to screw with Sony’s head and pocketbook, not because you want to support open music, artist rights, birds singing and flowers growing. But because today, Dec. 6th is, donchano, my birthday.
I’m genuinely psyched: Lisa DeBenedictis: Mixter One is the official name of the Magnatune Lisa Debenedictis Remix album.
Reasons to buy this album:
This is a big deal.
A little while ago Magnatune started tagging the audio streams with a robotic voice at the end of every track reminding listeners what track, artist and label they were listening to.
You could still download all the MP3s of their catalog for free and they even point to a simple MP3 trimmer to slice off the ad-blips.
However, folks were complaining because of the, well, awful sounding voice that often mispronounced the artists names.
John has just announced that the robots have been replaced with a real human voice.
Of course, as a listener, I would prefer not to hear any ads, but I think I understand where the label is coming from, especially if the ads not as invasive and jarring as the original fake voice was. For example for Chronic Dreams it doesn’t really break up the mood all that much and I think it’s possible a listener might be inspired (or reminded) to make a purchase by the end of the album. Might.
But for something like Magnatune Remixed: Ridin’ the Faders I have to say it is somewhat disasterous. The entire album is a mega-mix that flows together, cut-to-cut with some cuts being less than a minute. It’s really a pain in the ass to have that interrupted. I can not imagine that someone just kicking back, streaming the album will be anything but annoyed at the ads. It should be noted that the word ‘Magnatune’ is mentioned about 20 times in the course of the mega-mix already — at the time I released the album, my kid was asked “What does your father do?” he said “He makes ads for Magnatune.” (Is sardonic wit genetic?)
[UPDATE] So Magnatune just released a bunch of new albums yesterday — including Lisa’s remix album and (as of this moment) a wrongly-bio’d “La Vie Chill” — all of these releases are still using the robotoid voices.
According to my page at Magnatune, “Chronic Dreams is the 4th best selling Pop album of all time” — presumably at Magnatune, not the universe.
Either way that’s another way of saying Pop albums don’t sell very well at Magnatune.
I can say confidently that sales for my Magnatune albums have covered all costs for making the albums.
Which is another way of saying my albums don’t cost a whole hell of a lot to produce.
