Editorial | REVIEW STALKER

Post-Mordem Record Store Day 2011

by admin | Apr 17, 2011 | 7 Inch, editorial, Record Collecting, Uncategorized

Behold the RSD 2011 Bounty!

EDITORIAL: Over-all I feel Record Store Day was a smashing success all over the world and as I watched the tweets and the enthussiam eb and flow it’s apparent the fans sort of loosely fall into a few categories. 1) Ebay swindlers 2) Rabid Early Bird fans 3) Slackers. I fit into category 2 & 3 for the most part. I’ve only bought the occasional item on ebay all of which were implements for making noise as I prefer the hunt. Anyway, a lot of what the stores get depends mostly on what they can afford to buy from their regular stock purchases. The store with the deeper pockets received more of what they requested for their particular clientele at least what my understanding is. So until they opened their boxes of goodies they could not even begin to hold stuff for their preferred customers. I don’t think a RSD point system would work but perhaps a lottery for entry might be better? Which would allow for the frequent customer to get a edge over the shysters. Also, not to mention Record Store Day is about celebrating commerce with your local merchant instead of cowardly downloading gobs of music you’ll never appreciate. For me it’s about the interchange of art but at the end of the day first come first server is pretty damn fair.

The bigger picture is really centered around the indie retailer staying alive and re-engaging music fans to take part in celebrating and re-discovering music not just one time a year but all year around. Us oldsters knows there is just too much music to consume in any given day; which is why we’re addicted to every part of the pleasure of listening. Sure we’re all going to download stuff to see if you like it (em-hem this music blog) but what happens when you hard-drive crashes? Isn’t it nice to be able to go to your own “record” library and reload the CD? Of course collectible vinyl is little bit harder to do and it’s an expensive habit to keep up – Trust me I’m a bandito with not enough time to even listen. I know I’m being really rightious but I’ve paid my dues and know it takes money to keep the good stuff coming. I see it as a re-investment into something I care about. All this schwagg I bought also reminds me personally of just sharing and spinning music for the shear enjoyment of it and a little bit is the music snob in me or sucker – however you want to look at it but damn is this new to me FELA 45 Morning in Lagos Part I & II awesome. When I find the time it’s bliss. Which is the point. Musicians and artists need to make a living so fans should PAY tribute every once in awhile not just every 364 days. Anyway enjoy some of the spoils that were available. What did you get?

Out of Print Again!
D-7 MP3 by Nirvana covering The Wipers from the Hormaoning EP
Pay To Cum MP3 by Bad Brains from their 1st 7″
Black Grease MP3 by The Black Angels EP from Light in the Attic which sounds amazing on vinyl like if a orgasm were like hot melting thick chocolate to yours ears. Crank to 11.

Related Music Articles:
Innovation: Roving Record Store by Jack White
Record Store Day at Jersey’s Sound Station
Psychedelic funk and standard finds
Sound Station: Groove & Collectibles
ALBUM REVIEW: If only you were lonely Black Angels

Emusic’s New deal with the Devil is not Fan friendly

by admin | Nov 22, 2010 | 2010, editorial, Matador, Merge Records

I’ve been on eMusic since they began and have dealt with their changes and growth throughout the years. Always linking to them for almost every post in hopes of inspiring a purchase for other rabid music fans. This new deal with Universal Music Group is not a great one. Although the numbers sound good(250,000 addition to catalog) the fall-out is bad for fans of what got the digital music club there in first place.
Emusic was always been the one place you could get a true read on what was being offered in Indie music land. Now with Merge Records gone a whole slew of awesome labels
under the Beggars Group which includes Rough Trade, 4AD, Matador, XL, among others there is little in a way of choice.
It will be interesting to watch the Emusic charts for sure but One of the key things(ok actually there are several) with emusic was that the cost of entry was low so you could sample several new bands all the time.
I loved it. They also did a great job of championing new bands that were not part of any of the aforementioned labels who otherwise would never be on their radar unless Emusic bubbled them up and gave them a chance.

Now songs are anywhere from 79 cents to 49cents! Where they used to be half that and then half that before. Still cheaper than iTunes standard 99cent or 1.29! but man have they made up the difference. I’m not going to get into a long cost analysis but the analogy is consitent with the target crushing your local mom and pop shop. Imagine if your cool local indie suddenly started charging you more suddenly unilaterally for everything. No more nice price. And even more if it was popular! WTF. Should you not pay less if something is popular? Not more. We obviously are not privy to the exact offer that the indies rejected if any. Their statements reference terms but that is the confidential stuff.

Another disturbing thing is that because it’s a download site and you went back to grab a copy of something because it got corrupted the prices you see are the new ones. Does this mean I have to rebuy? Well it seems that is the case. The whole advantage of having a download site like emusic is that you could go and get a copy of your file in case you wanted to post some of your work computer vs your home machine.

So basically as of Nov 18th some of the cooler independent labels won’t be available for some time. Emusic will need to do some serious price-point re-tinkering with their system to bring back the labels that have said no thanks. Hell even create a different set of charts because lord knows I don’t want to see Kenya competing against Matt and Kim or whatever.

On the other hand this is great news for insound and the other independent download hotspots and maybe make other cool shops like ubiquity records update their cart system or if amoeba music expanded theirs? It creates an opportunity for music fans to utilize the blogs and go direct if possible but where do we send them? Merge Records right now has a great online store but that’s just one label. So they umbrella an pool their resources? Ironically, the one band I always wanted to get some tunes from was Sonic Youth and now their awesome back catalog is part of the defection. So now what?

If mog.com were smart they’d add a ecommerce layer so if somebody really wanted to own something they could; but lets see if their new app is cool enough. Last.fm can’t because of the sheer conflict using itunes data scrobbler and who knows what is in store for ping.fm.

Emusic is going to obscure indies

Sony BMG screws the emusic pooch

Emusic is going to obscure the indies with Sony BMG

by admin | Jun 11, 2009 | Bongwater, editorial, emusic, SonyBMG

So I opined on my tech/life blog the other day about SonyBMG screwing the Emusic pooch with the coming of a mostly lame catalog from the behemoth label that has such great chart topping artists like Jefferson Airplane, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Faithless, Kelly Clarkson, Dolly Parton, Judas Priest according to last.fm. Ok I of course like Cash and sorta is like blasphemy or communism not like Elvis but C’mon. Really?

Which if you take a close peak at the metrics on last.fm there it equals 420 Million unique listeners for the combined fans of those groups who scrobble their music from iTunes alone! Holy F*ck batman! That is a lot of freaking band equity. There will invariable be a few issues they will have to deal with this marketing conundrum.
(1) They might start crashing because of the boon of new subscribers. Which in most cases is a good problem to have but much better to grow steadily than over night.
(2) They will or in process of obscuring the indies and fans who have helped build up emusic for the past 7-8 years (see the thread). New music fans take risks with on all these artists because of the low entry cost. Angry user will need to appeased one way or another.
(3) Financially, sorta supporting point above, the indie 00′ band hey day is in serious jeopardy. There is huge set of emerging artists that will be competing with releases older than 2 years. You know that will change once the price point start to turn over fast there could be roll back. These are just mp3s in the over-all scheme of dismal cd sales there are lessons to be learned from the past. Remember the beta and VHS war? Lower quality always wins for mass distribution with right price point (So markety i know). Slowly emusic may (hopefully not) start to obscure these artists for moving volume. If I were them my immediate course of action would be to segregate the “Majors” in the charts like they do in record stores sometimes (remember those?).

Personally, I am going to be on pins in needles as this fiasco unfolds PR nightwares get sorted out. I’m not going to up my emusic subscription and I’m not going to cancel it either. I’ve been a loyal customer since Jan05. It’s still the best deal out there these days and people gotta eat. It will slow my support and consumption of the indies since I’ll only be able to afford on average 3 albums a month as opposed to 5 and half a month in previous plan in this new budget. I would have preferred a subtle 10-20% rent increase but oh’well. Quite a slow down in my music consumption. Again, not that I always downloaded my whole 65 tune subscription previously. Emusic secretly loves that kind of customer with their use it or loose it rule. Which was a great revenue stream for them. Lets see what happens for now there was a Alice Cooper song I wanted to buy… Seriouly it’s bit of sell-out but somebody had to give my only hope is that it benefits all the little guys in the long run or short run. Somehow.