The amplified champions

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Bluebeard, its protagonist Rabo Karabekian muses on the origin of special talents and the diminished opportunities in modern societies: “I think that could go back in time when people had to live in small groups of relatives – maybe fifty or hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on. […] of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communication has put him or her in daily competition with nothing but the world’s champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness.”^[1]

Science has had a thought on this subject, too. This development has been named the Superstar Effect^[2], in which presumably only minuscule differences in talent or slight advantages in competitive situations snowball into the domination of a whole market by one or a few performers. If you want to buy a recording by a soprano opera singer, you’ll most likely want to buy one by the best — the number two soprano will have a hard time moving any CDs, since the presumably slightly better number one will have preempted the market. The CDs cost about the same, so why spend any second thought on lesser talent?

The superstars obtain what I’d like to call a “first call” position: it is not just about income, but mainly about opportunities. That’s where things strike culturally. Everybody prefers the top performers. A festival wants to present and a label wants to sign the best artists, a movie producer wants to hire the best actors and playwrights, someone who goes to court wants the best lawyer, and so forth. Only affordability and availability seem to give the rest of the list any chance. That’s why the superstar gets the greatest choice to pick from the best opportunities, earning disproportionately more rewards and spreading out to even wider recognition, while the other contestants service whatever is left over.

This cumulative aspect of superstardom has been described by sociologist Robert K. Merton as the Matthew Effect, named after the verse from the Gospel of Matthew: “For unto every one that hath, more shall be given, and he shall have abundance, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” In other words, the rich get richer, the poorer get poorer and success breeds success.

What are rewards?

An artist feels rewarded when she receives the attention of the audience and of those mediating between artist and audience. Rewards are people coming to hear a performance, spending time listening to recordings, learning the specific style, recommending the music to others and following the further offerings of the artist. Rewards are receiving critical acclaim by experts and peers, finding followers who copy the style, getting the aesthetic message distributed with the help of those who service the media or manage the venues where artists meet the audience. In short, the more social interactions the artist’s efforts produce, the more those efforts have been rewarded. That’s the way society views an artist to be “excelling.”

On the economic side, all these interactions produce fees, royalties and other sorts of material exchanges. People pay to attend concerts, to listen to recordings or to consume media coverage. In varying shares, these payments eventually reach the artist. Usually income will develop in parallel with these social interactions. Respectively some economists have argued that social relevance and monetary rewards match, i.e. whoever ends up earning more is also the better artist, offering the higher quality works of art. Such reasoning makes most of us cringe simply because we don’t trust the market to be a good judge on matters of quality and relevance. Investigating this assumption, in what follows I’ll discuss some theories that separate quality, relevance and the rewards system and examine how they interact.

Birth of the star

But how do we decide who is “best”? Even experts often disagree on the qualities and talents of top performers. And we all have encountered the notorious prevalence of some cultural product that no one we know in person seems to consider even “good,” yet it is inescapably all over the place. It’s not as if we’re all listening to the Rolling Stones or whoever dominates the stadium act category in music. There are many artists who comfortably occupy a place of their own without having the reach of a stadium act. So there must be something else going on as well.

Reasons given for the emergence of superstars range from differences in talent, amplified by mass media^[5], to the need to communicate about the same topics when socializing with others^[6]. I don’t think these models match what we experience in reality. I’d like to offer a different explanation based on the effects of mental shelf space limitation and social proof. The concept of mental shelf space is analogous to the shelf space limitations in retail: a shop can store only so many CDs, books or brands of cereal. In any given category our minds only comfortably deal with between three and seven items and zone out on the Long Tail, limiting the number of names we can memorize^[7].

Most people will not bother to regularly follow more than a few novelists, musicians or movie actors. There are simply not the psychological capacity, enough time and funds to compare thousands of contestants in order to figure out who should receive our limited attention. The search costs would be too high. Therefore we try to minimize them by employing shortcuts. Sticking with the best is one of those shortcuts. And in order to quickly identify the best we look out for social proof. Social proof is a psychological principle that states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct^[8]. We assume that enough of the others have gone through the search process and have identified the best when choosing one over the others. Whenever we are uncertain of what to look for, we’ll try to figure it out by looking at the choices of others.

This can go to bizarre lengths: Participants in an experiment were told that two shown, obviously different geometrical objects were the same. Astonishingly, when social proof is overwhelming (actors pretending to be other participants identified the objects as being identical), an MR imaging of the brain indicated that the objects were actually seen as being identical^[9]. In other words: In the right social context, we override our own judgments and rewire our brains to see, feel or hear what’s actually not there^[10].

Music is a means of social distinction, too. We actually do want to associate with certain groups of people and disassociate with others. With social proof we can figure out what others do and match our behavior accordingly. Social proof is so attractive because it helps us socialize, identify our group and save a whole lot of time, too. We might end up watching a mediocre movie, but we’ll enjoy the company of like-minded friends. In cultural contexts we rarely ever experience severe pain from following that strategy. Well, unless the movie was “Cowboys & Aliens” of course. In the bigger picture, social proof and limited mental shelf space promote diversity of categories and monoculture within categories at the same time.

These psychosocial factors are the reasons why the Long Tail doesn’t work (within one category) and people flock to the upper end of the scale. Against what a lot of propaganda claims, no distribution model or technological measure has ever changed this. Only a few geeks and professionals will ever bother to check out more than a few alternatives, and we all end up with the superstars. In a self-fulfilling prophecy these eventually do get better than the rest since they are exposed to better opportunities, get more funds to reinvest in their work and education, as well as better access to and allocation of other supportive means.

Quality is overrated

A nineteenth-century French novelist named Arsène Houssaye coined the phrase “the 41st chair” to describe the plight of talented individuals, deserving of rewards or recognition, who are nevertheless bypassed as these rewards are garnered by a select few. Houssaye’s phrase was inspired by the Académie Francaise. This elite institution, founded in 1635 during the rule of Louis XIII, was designed to identify and reward the nation’s greatest talents. If you are elected to one of the 40 seats you retain your position for life.

These positions are so important to French society that the members of the Académie are called the “immortals.” The immortals that have held seats include some of France’s most famous citizens, from Dumas to Poincairé to Voltaire. It is intriguing though that the likes of Descartes, Molière, Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Diderot, Stendahl, Flaubert, Zola and Proust never got in. It was not that they lacked the ability. It was just that the limitation in numbers made them inhabitants of the “forty-first chair.”^[11]

Houssaye’s phrase is a good analogy to what happens to the other contestants within one category. Once the shelf is full, they are relegated to the forty-first chair no matter how great or valuable their actual contributions are. Mental shelf space has two varieties though, a vertical and a horizontal one. Vertically, within one category there are a few superstars and many inhabitants of the 41st chair. Horizontally though there are many more individual categories, each with its own superstar structure. That’s why we don’t all listen to the Rolling Stones exclusive, but also Theo Parrish, Carsten Nikolai, Pierre Boulez, Meshuggah or Fred Frith.

This is intriguing, since horizontal mental shelf space for anything seems to allow for the coexistence of much more items than vertical: we know more separate supermarket product categories than brands of ketchup for instance. In marketing theory the according strategy is known as category positioning: if you can’t be number one in an existing category, create a new category. That might be a good explanation why culture is always changing. The contestants’ determination to reach “first call” status (and the impossibility to get ahead on crowded paths) makes them invent categories. Whoever creates a new category into people’s minds is likely to be associated with it due to social proof snowballing effects.

The horizontal dimension is a social one in the first place. Individuals don’t follow all categories available, but have preferences of a few, becoming “fans” of a style and its representatives respectively. Still, whenever we decide to engage with something less familiar (“let’s go to the opera tonight”), we consult social proof again. Then we join the already existing fans and skyrocket the chosen superstars’ social exposure. That is why the artist who is considered best by the public is not defined by talent or social chatter, but by category leadership, which is usually obtained when the category receives its initial public recognition (“Oh, that’s interesting — who does this?”).

That’s why the actual quality, say of works in a new style of music, doesn’t matter much for success. This explains why often artists creating great works later on receive seemingly unjustly little recognition, while others reap the rewards. Some had their names identified with the category earlier on. Deepening a category is an activity that leverages those already on top. It is a paradoxical situation in which increased competition actually helps the predetermined winners by inflating the category’s rewards (more attention and funds flowing in).

This failure of readjusting the “class” structure within a category once the positions have been distributed is also named the Ratchet Effect^[12]: those on top do not fall much behind. It would cost the audience too much brainpower to readjust regularly. If you wonder why someone is still around artistically despite failing to keep up the quality that’s the reason. “Once a Nobel laureate, always a Nobel laureate” as Merton put it.

That effect is not always obvious. For instance, I recognize that virtually all techno superstars of the last decade now seem to lose their grip on dominating the distribution of recorded music. Their singles and albums don’t move that much anymore and their labels are shrinking to levels where they have to be cross-subsidized (even if that’s through the cheap labor of and endless supply of new interns). Still, their touring schedules are packed to the max. They do lose some ground, but no one replaces them. The Ratchet Effect applies to the internal hierarchy, not to the category itself. Categories often decline or get repositioned by other (sub-) categories, but even the captain of a sinking ship is still its captain.

Categorical morphology

In music, categories are often defined by but not limited to styles. One might be the leader of post-minimal technocumbia, but acting in a movie or wearing a mouse mask might do the job, too. “Gimmick categories” like these are usually exactly one artist deep, but at the same time they are subcategories of wider styles of music, too.

Things often get mixed up and attributes from outside music often define what artists stand for. A lot of pop has been highly influential with unimpressive musical foundations and inflated political, social or other agendas. Eventually such agendas help to break new aesthetics, too. Punk’s social and political relevance was probably earlier understood than its groundbreaking musical implications.

An initially small stylistic category might grow big and then split up into subcategories. Think of rock, having branched out in tree-like fashion with countless levels of subcategorization. It is sometimes hard to draw the line whether contestants happen to be in the same or in separate categories. Each of the 40 members of the Académie has his own story, and so have the artists on top in a bigger category. They share an audience, but develop individual profile in order to make it worthwhile for the audience to engage with more than one artist (even if that means putting on the mouse mask). The clearer the differences are the more likely we look at separate categories.

At a higher level, a subcategory might grow to become so enormous that entire other subcategories get repositioned. Once minimal outgrew loop techno (you know, the stuff Adam Beyer used to do), the leaders of minimal automatically became “bigger” than those of loop techno. The personnel’s structure within the subcategories didn’t change, but the metacategory (“techno”) found itself being transformed.

Stefan Goldmann is an electronic music artist, DJ and owner of the Macro label. stefangoldmann.com

http://www.littlewhiteearbuds.com/feature/quality-is-overrated-the-mechanics-of-excellence-in-music-pt-1/

Footnotes:

Here’s a little primer..

Interview with Waacking Legend Tyrone Proctor

Willi Ninja clip from Paris is Burning. *required viewing*

Electronic music. What we believed for a long time was that anyone with a bit of talent had a chance at a career of about ten years before eventually retiring from the circuit. Of course there are exceptions for whom this does not seem to apply. Francois Kevorkian has probably had the longest career here (unless we count Kraftwerk as part of our little world); and it’s hard to imagine techno or house without Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills or Laurent Garnier.

That’s the good news: it does not necessarily have to meet a predetermined end. On the other hand, artists emerging now face the hardest times ever to establish themselves. The lifespan between breaking through and being laid off seems to have reached a historic low point of half a year. The reasons behind this “haircut” to artistic longevity are the radically lowered barriers to participation, as well as the hectic marketplace discovering today’s new talent and abandoning yesterday’s new talent.

Let’s clarify “barriers”: in the old days of the music business, which was basically before the end of the 1970s, the main barriers to “making it in music” were studio time and access to distribution. Whoever wanted to be heard adequately needed well distributed releases. That is, having recorded material in the first place. The means for producing such recordings were so expensive that at some point only big corporations could spare the funds to pay for the required studio time and personnel.

The effect of this economic barrier to resources was that a couple of hundred artists and bands gained access to an audience of millions. Once a recording was produced it enjoyed a long life in the market due to the lack of competition that otherwise would have pushed it off the store shelves. Only under these conditions did the huge, continuous investments in promotion and distribution actually make economic sense in those times and circumstances.

This model experienced a serious challenge with the advent of the affordable 4-track recorder, which enabled home recording that could deliver marketable results for the first time ever. For instance, the whole late ’70s/early ’80s New York downtown scene can be pretty much explained by this piece of technology. Progress in affordable music equipment in the form of synthesizers, drum machines and samplers gave birth to a plethora of innovative styles in music, including hip hop, house, techno and drum ‘n’ bass.

At the same time independent distribution was born, conquering channels previously serviced exclusively by major corporations. The new distributors were capable of connecting with ever smaller target groups. Fueled by enthusiasm, small businesses could survive on small quantities of product previously considered not to be worth the effort. Tango from Finland and death metal from anywhere found comfortable niches with worldwide followings.

These enabled artists and the people around them to become professionals, i.e. to make a living on the music instead of funding a hobby through an undesirable day job. That was the core economic feature of the independent music culture: no riches, but still sufficient funds to avoid wasting time on activities not related to music. Anyone busy generating income from 9 to 5 wouldn’t be able to gain the deep skills necessary to sustain a career in music and hold an audience for long.

By the way, this comfortable indie-constellation was never really threatened by the majors, who only occasionally dropped by to sign away the most successful artists of any niche. Working within your own artistic preferences became a pretty comfortable thing to do back in the ’80s.

The next level was reached when it took nothing but a standard PC and a microphone (if required) to render an entire production. The software that emulated the previously needed pieces of gear came mostly for free thanks to piracy. Therefore, production costs practically hit zero and the record sales you needed in order to sustain a release fell almost to the cost of the manufacturing of the records themselves (with a few bucks for promotion).

At that point, at least in dance music, sales figures of just around 5,000 physical units were considered a “hit,” whereas a bit earlier it would’ve required a few hundred thousand units. Many soon realized that even the expense of pressing up records or CDs was not really necessary. A digital download has no costs at all. The logical outcome was distribution that granted any piece of music total availability, with the downside of being the most inefficient way of distribution ever: what should I download when there are five billion files to choose from? Whom should I bless with my attention? Do I have any attention to spare?

Contrary to public perception, this didn’t affect the majors all that much. Their problems were mostly in their inability to maximize the advantages they already had instead of wasting resources on trying to revive an overthrown order. Soon enough it dawned on them that big artists (i.e. those with the biggest turnover) can generate reasonable income through so called 360-degree-deals, covering live gigs, publishing rights, merchandise, etc. all under the control of one company.

Even the smallest labels engage in a similar policy nowadays. But the required resources to participate in the game of filling stadiums, really cashing in on movie and advertising deals today are almost exclusively in the hands of majors. Interestingly, the so called “democratization” of music production and distribution didn’t change this allocation of relevant income to the majors’ detriment at all.

Others fell victim to it. Absurdly, the complete disappearance of economic barriers to distribution (offering a free download doesn’t cost more than the time to upload the file) hit the wallets of the “indies” first, stripping a substantial part of their income. This mostly affected the artists and the personnel around them: designers, engineers, studio musicians, promotion and label professionals, music journalists, et al. The mass of competition they encountered meant anyone with a limited marketing budget had a difficult time surviving in the market.

With the same promotional tools available to almost anyone, they lost their efficiency. The professionals listed above basically lost their income. In 2000, an average vinyl single generated a return of a couple of thousand Euros, while in 2011 the same single generates a loss of a couple of hundred Euros, even without what were formerly known as “production costs.” Anything on top, like a bigger production, a decent mastering, or proper sleeve design became factors of deepening material loss. That area of the craft gets subsequently cut off and replaced by an undiscriminating routine of two-step-distribution: “save as” and “upload to.”

Fleeing to a purely digital distribution doesn’t look that much better in general: only an established artist backed by a strong physical release experiences significant digital sales. The overwhelming majority goes by unnoticed. The average “digital only” dance single generates around 100 Euros of profit, for both artist and label, now most often being the same person. And these figures go down, too. Today a couple millions artists try to reach a few hundred people. Or like the contemporary pun puts it, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 people.”

The result is a wide spread de-professionalization. If an artist regularly loses money on her efforts, she faces an economic end to her endeavors sooner or later. Being a “musician” is increasingly becoming a profession for those coming from inherited wealth or being mercantily exceptionally clever. It’s less then ever a question of the intrinsic quality of the music. What used to be done by professional enthusiasts now becomes the domain of the artists — turning them into designer, PR dude and distributor.

It all subtracts from the time spent actually creating music. This puts additional pressure on the remaining professional environment. Nowadays it is increasingly harder to get hold of well executed services. Mastering, manufacturing vinyl, music PR — no one qualified enough is willing to tolerate the miserable working conditions and hilarious paychecks of these jobs for an extended time. Whoever has the chance seems to flee the music industry for something more prosperous. The error rate in manufacturing and distribution grows exponentially and actually feeds the market with ever shabbier products in content and execution.

There’s this die-hard belief that income, at least for the musicians (but not for the professional environment), will come from the fees for live performances instead. But how do you get live performances in the first place? Well, press helps. The problem encountered there is that the media has adapted to the state of the music industry. In electronic music that means whoever succeeds in producing two singles may find himself covered by all relevant press and booked throughout the club circuit, just to be replaced by the next “lucky fool” (a term from stock speculation) about three months later.

New artists get “pumped and dumped.” What about a year old break, a production that takes longer, or time for having a baby? Two weeks without a release are perceived as a career flaw for those who had their breakthrough in the last three years. A longer shelf life in the media and on the circuit seems to be granted only to artists who started before the big flood came, which is pre-2005 approximately (if I were to spend a year on the beach, most likely I’ll be able to continue exactly where I had stopped). Or to those who buy their coverage — although that only works over a longer period of time on a five-figure budget. Most others face the high probability of approaching music as something you do between college and some dull job.

The artists’ disillusionment leads to ever lamer results in music — why bother? A single produced hastily in two hours work sells 500 units, while a delicate masterwork moves 800 (plus a bit of beer money from Beatport). These figures are in constant decline, too. The market average first pressing of a vinyl 12″ is 300 units now, which regularly indicated sales below this figure (deduct records given away as “promotion” and to friends).

What have we learned here? The so called “democratization” didn’t work. Everyone did believe they gained access. This access by itself is stripped of value, though, because no one cares that DJ XY from Z has that new record out. Through any available channel I get dozens of requests per day to listen to somebody’s track. That’s after a spam filter and a disclaimer that I don’t want to receive files. The result is that I don’t listen to files at all — I do buy vinyl regularly. DJ XY doesn’t get the gig.

If he does by accident, that’s for the cab fare. In Berlin, with its conspicuous population of 50,000 DJs, promoters and club owners don’t have to try hard. There’s always someone who will play for free if asked. Hey, that’s free promotion for the new DJ XY record. Meanwhile in the provincial town of Z, the locals “practice” for free, so they develop the skills they’ll need to “make it” in Berlin one day. That’s where things come full circle. No proper gigs, no record sales, no income. Anyone who is not already “there” doesn’t seem to arrive anymore.

The propaganda that the future will have us all giving away music for free in order to make a living on gigs has been proven wrong by reality. Because basically everybody does exactly this and still doesn’t get booked all over (or not often enough, as with most “mid career” artists). The exception being Radiohead, of course, but only after a decade on the million-dollar budget of a major. The only profiteers here (and biggest fans of piracy and Creative Commons) are the stock holders of the Nasdaq 100. If you want to make a living on music, buy the relevant stock and live off the dividends.

That’s where all the money goes that used to pay musicians and music professionals some time ago. It says a lot about the other side of “democratization,” too: the individual in search for music experiences no upside. He pays for the returns of Apple, Google, Beatport and the speaker fees of Larry Lessig and Chris Anderson by being lost in a flood of irrelevant, crappy music and the feeling that others had more fun before (hence the retro obsession in today’s music). The total de-motivation doesn’t manifest itself only in the musicians’ under achievements, but also in the annoyance of everybody else.

A frustrated DJ plays lame tunes in front of people bored to tears. That’s the average event out there. Alternatively, a collective nostalgia for some era of “old days” prevails. Everyone keeps doing the same thing out of the fear that the slightest deviation from the norm will scare away the small remaining, yet patient audience who goes along because of a lack of alternatives (we dance either because we paid or because the drugs kicked in).

Did that depress you? Now, here comes the good news: exactly because everyone seemingly performs to the lowest still acceptable standards, all you have to do as an artist is to unleash disproportional waves of creativity. Since nothing promises secure success anymore, all considerations to what “works in the marketplace” can be freely dumped and forgotten. The more out there you get, the better. It’s the only way to stand out in a totally dull environment.

The advantage is, put cynically, that the old channels are jammed. Whoever tries to break through them following “proven” old ways (which usually means emulating other people’s career paths) is wasting time and energy. We can’t learn much from studying the careers of Carl Craig or Ricardo Villalobos anymore because the conditions that enabled them don’t exist any more. The channels that do work are found elsewhere and are open to those who possess endurance, individuality and substance — the values that are disappearing most rapidly now.

To an extreme extent, success in the arts is subject to random factors (we see many successful people who have no clue how they got there, how to stay there or how to repeat it). The more radically and frequently you stand out, the more often you get exposure to those factors, thus increasing the probability of channels opening up for you. That is not spamming the Internet but creating radically individual great music in the first place. Once you enter the channel, you allow more factors to work for you, since these tend to add up (path dependency).

Art always had to be great (whatever that is) and move people in order to succeed, too. But now there’s that third dimension of having to create a wide gap between you and the competition, even if that’s just within one genre. If you can implement this idea in your work, the flood is not threatening at all anymore since it works against itself. “Unique” is the most valuable word in a crowded environment of generic ideas and overwhelming redundancy. Striving for this quality is also exactly what is most rewarding artistically. Besides screaming fans and free drinks, that is.

A very odd example for creating stand out events: I had that funny experience when I recorded an album for cassette last year. No one involved expected anything more than to have some fun with it. Still, I spent a lot of effort on this one, specifically on getting my head around the question why to use a cassette at all. No one else would have put more work than necessary into such an obsolete format. And just that brought in a lot of attention, which any file on Beatport, regardless how good it is, wouldn’t have done at all. And there was no free lunch involved.

On the contrary, distribution was severely cut down to a very few sources. Today it’s actually so much easier again as long as you can get your head around the notion that “anything popular is wrong.” Especially in mainstream media like Germany’s Der Spiegel or UK’s BBC (in features, not the usual playlists), I’ve only been covered because of totally odd projects. For the same reason new opportunities follow, which artists who cling to functionality and marketplace consensus never encounter.

I don’t play techno clubs exclusively now, but also find myself scoring a ballet, performing in museums or getting calls from classical performers for collaboration — my techno background makes me stand out in these settings as well. In return, crossover encounters of this kind add that edge to the artist’s profile which feeds back into the club scene. It’s definitely more rewarding than spamming the internet with “listen to this track” emails.

Highly individualized, lightly advertised work is way more attractive nowadays than consensus-style work, advertised to death (short, unsustainable hype is the most one can hope for there). People are starting to realize this. Many top labels stopped promoting their new singles for instance. It just appears in the shops and that’s it. It’s not unlikely that artists will increasingly lose their interest in having their output available all over and seek for a more intimate exchange with the audience.

Why plaster the Internet with files? Who finds that valuable anymore? Imagine an incredible piece of music available only once — on dubplate. Or let’s consider falling back in history — music only in the presence of its creator. No release. Come to the concert. Enthusiasm will be back when you get this feeling of attending something really special. How to create this feeling for the audience is the core task of the creatives, if they deserve that name.

That said, it still takes a huge amount of time and dedication for an artist to develop a standout profile. This raises the issue of financing a career in music. Since the indies mostly lost their capacity to fund musicians, the artist’s required initial investment has become higher again. Usually people argue there will have to be some sort of day job then.

As aforementioned, that would be perfectly fine if being occupied all day with something not relevant to music didn’t actively hinder you from devoting yourself to developing your artistic edge. Your mind will be occupied with other stuff instead of exploring the areas of sound where it gets deep. To be able to create stuff that outlasts two weeks, you’ll need to go full time at some point.

Even after tolerable initial periods of day job-cross-finance, those who succeed are never safe. Since the available funds (those remaining after the Nasdaqs sucked out what they could) get distributed to more and more people, even electronic music’s top and near-top level artists’ income drops rapidly. Periods of sufficient remuneration are followed by periods of economic frustration.

Therefore there is a need to have sources of income that are independent from your own music’s direct returns. That is, any income that can be obtained with spending very little time on it — no day jobs allowed unless you are a grossly overpaid consultant for a few hours a month, like I am occasionally. One may consider the pros and cons (there are such) of grants and fellowships, commissions from the industry or institutions, as well as sources of passive income.

The latter means that once set up, a scheme generates income without investing further time — interest, the concepts of arbitrage and leverage, or exploiting details of copyright law may serve as rather abstract examples here. How to make them work for you would be a topic of it’s own. Separating income and music in your head can be deeply rewarding. The freedom experienced in creating music to your own criteria first and even “against the market” if necessary is way more elegant than trying to squeeze as much as possible out of music that has to produce your paycheck. That is another factor contributing to an artist’s longevity in the market — having guts and principles. Get your head around it, do your homework and you’ll quickly see solutions that work for you.

http://www.littlewhiteearbuds.com/feature/everything-popular-is-wrong-making-it-in-electronic-music-despite-democratization/

Stefan Goldmann is an electronic music artist, DJ and owner of the Macro label. This article, which first ran in Silo magazine, is translated from the German.

http://letsnerd.com/

TERJE
First question is, how do you record your drums? Can you teach me? I wanna set up a kick/snare/hihat/2tom set in a small room, it´s got wooden floor and no damping on the walls. How do I get this to sound ok? I´ve read somewhere that you have a quite basic approach to this. Please do tell, o oracle of nice sounding drums. Preamps?

JAMES
For some DFA drums:
It’s simple, but not so simple. Firstly, I like to “deaden” the room quite a bit. I put blankets up on the walls and stuff. And maybe something blocking the drums from the rest of the room with a big duvet on it, to make the reflections less. Then, listen standing in front of the drums when someone plays… Is there a lot of “low mid range”? If so, put something like a plush chair near the kit. Then, I like to make a “kick drum hut”. My favorite thing is to put a piano bench right in front of the kick. That way i can keep the mic on the kick outside the drum while still getting less bleed. Then, take the bottom heads off the toms and deaden them with some fabric gaffer’s tape and small squares of neoprene mouse pad. So they go “thud” instead of “booooongggg”.

For mics, I like to use nice nice nice mics. Me? Kick and snare are Neuman TLM 193s. Medium sized condensors. You can get away with an Equitek e100 for a cheap alternative. Snare top and bottom (with the bottom out of phase). Toms, I use very fast medium diaphragm mics – -EV RE2000s. With a slow pre-amp, like the built in pres on my Otari MX5050Bll 2-track. Overheads, I like something nice, like some Schoepps, or AKG 451s, more over the snare than the cymbals. Then, I make a “beatle sound” as well…  which is a pair of old ribbon mics…  RCA bk5s or Coles 4038s…  One, mono, just over the kit — between the overheads. The other in front of the kick. I get a tape measure and make them both the same distance from where the beater hits the kick drum head. Those 2 mics I mix together as an “image” of the kit. The other mics are like the “disco” sound — tight and dead — and the ribbons are like the “soul” sound. And you can mix them together.
Setting the mic pres….  I run drum pres VERY VERY cold… Low input. As low as possible. So that there’s tons of un-distorted headroom. That way the ring and room and cymbal noise isn’t too loud. People tend to record drums “hot”, which is why they suck. If you record drums “hot”, they should be one or 2 mics at most. You can cook the ribbons, for example, but nothing else. I like UA 610s with the eq on them, no compression. I tend to lift the highs a bit when I print so that they have a nice disco snap. The ribbons I run thru an old Altec tube mixer.
That’s the drums, I guess…

TERJE
Can you please explain to me what a “word clock” is? You showed me at least 3 boxes of word clocks in your word clock closet the last time. Is this something I need to worry about, or can I be happy without knowing?

JAMES
Oh…  Right…  It’s the thing that makes sure the digital info all lines up. Each bit of sound info is like a picture. If you think of an image as
pixels, and the image you look at has 300 pixels, and so does the screen you’re using, it’s very critical that the pixels line up… otherwise, each screen pixel will be an averaging of 4 other pixels, making the resolution much shittier. That’s what happens on cheap digital audio. There’s a noticeable “flatness” that you don’t get with analog. No “depth”. That’s from the digital info being translated sloppily. The word clock is the thing that, 48,000 times a second, in 24 places, lines up all those little samples. Not a sexy job, but a critical and difficult one. So WCs tend to be both expensive and ignored. But that’s why so many tracks you get sent in MP3 form as promo sound “good” on your laptop, but then you get the vinyl, and they basically sound the same. Not very deep or interesting. They just sit there, like MP3s, Even though it’s vinyl. And so you say to yourself “well, why bother playing the vinyl”. It’s the in-the-computer-mix disease.

TERJE
What´s the best compression setting EVAR? Would life be easier if I studied lots of compression theory?

JAMES
Shit — that depends. I like playing with stuff that sounds awesome. I have some invisible compressors that are amazing, but not exciting, and I have ones with real “sound”. I use a DBX 165 VU (old, black faced VCA
compressor) and an original Teletronix LA2A for vocals. Also Purple Audio copy of an 1176 on tons of other shit. Fuck around.

TERJE
I hear you´re no enemy of VSTs, anything recommendable?

JAMES
Not a single thing. Though that shitty “mic modeller” thing was good. Not for “modelling mics”, but it had a “proximity” setting that I thought was great for bass guitar. There’s a logarithm for the curve and shape of low frequencies based on proximity that you can’t replicate with a typical eq (and it’s often the thing that “fixes” low end) that this plug in did quite well. Otherwise I use the gates on the computer (because they can look ahead) and that’s about it.

TERJE
Have you thought of constructing your own gear? If so, what?

JAMES
Yes! We make monitors now, which I use in the studio. We’re working on a pre-amp and a DJ mixer (that’s almost done…  totally amazing sounding… really).

TERJE
What are your 5 most favorite synths?

JAMES
Shit.

EMS synthi A or VCS3

Yamaha CS60 (or 50, or 80)

Moog Taurus ll

Korg Poly Ensemble

TERJE
Synth/effects/thing that´s highest on your wantlist?

JAMES
Some big Oberheim.

TERJE
Who should I interview next?

JAMES
Hmm… Morgan Geist?

TERJE
Okley dokley. Thanks!

Cynicism, realism or just plain codgery – where you stand on the retromania debate boils down to your own experiences and tastes, of course. All the same, Reynolds’ rhetoric has drawn as much controversy as it has praise. The aim of this Wreath Lecture isn’t to add fuel to the ongoing dissection of Retromania’s argument. My own feeling is that Reynolds puts paid to his critics’ misgivings within the book itself, if not in further interviews. As a history of pop it’s a fascinating read whichever side of the fence you sit and sceptics are more than encouraged to give it a try. The book does make one unassailable point, however: the first decade of the 21st century was largely characterised by revivalist scenes based on the repackaging of old ideas. But more recent developments this year suggest that Retromania could well represent a closing chapter in pop’s history. I’m of the opinion that 2011 will be remembered as a pivotal year in which our love affair with retro began to fade and a resurging interest in the new and now was rekindled.

Taking a look through the 2011 end of year lists, there’s an overall sense of purging, of rejuvenation and indeed progress that hasn’t been present for quite some time. And while we’re not quite speeding away from it just yet, the decade that brought us electroclash, nu-rave, emo, freak-folk and the ‘New Rock Revolution’ (certainly the biggest music journo oxymoron in history) doesn’t feel so recent anymore. Nobody asked for a nineties guitar-pop revival this year, but the call was answered all the same and met with all-round indifference. Oh hey, Viva Brother – how’s conquering the world going for you?

With a whole generation of young musicians now having been raised around club and dance music, electronica is no longer seen as a futuristic frontier. Today’s listeners are as familiar with synthesisers and beats as they are guitars, and blending these is now fairly standard practice rather than a novelty. The rock acts thriving best today are comfortable with this fact, harnessing electronic sounds and ideas when it suits them rather than trying to force a loveless marriage. This means that artists like St. Vincent or Battles can hone their unique styles through mixed media, incorporating drums that sound like samples and guitars that sound like synths (and vice versa, of course). Rock isn’t dead at all – it’s simply adapting to new ears.

The retro-fetishism of ‘80s synth pop and electro-house in the 2000s helped in some way to make electronic sounds more saleable to distrusting rock audiences. We’re past that point now. Rockism is an old man’s sport, the internet age having pretty much dissolved the tribal boundaries that once existed between rock, pop, dance, hip-hop, commercial and underground music. With access to an iPod and an internet connection, there’s no reason you can’t listen to any style of music. We’ve never felt more at ease with eclecticism. It was with open-arms that Glastonbury welcomed Beyoncé on opening her headline set, not with the question ‘Are you ready to rock?’, but rather ‘Are you ready to be entertained?’ Skrillex’s brand of buzzsaw mosh-dance has seen US hardcore and metal fans donning day-glo for the first time and raving it up to purely synthetic music in packed-out stadiums. The UK has always boasted a much longer-standing history of rock-friendly electronic bands, like the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers. But in 2011 it’s no longer necessary for DJs and dance acts to meet such prescribed criteria in order to make that crossover. Today’s audiences are no longer defined by their allegiance to the gig or the club venue – one typically leading to the other on a night out.

Today’s young vanguard are equally at ease with the internet as a musical tool and medium. The playlist at house parties can now be dictated by live streams beamed directly from multiple guests’ smartphones, spelling an end to stereo-squabbles and increased exposure to others’ tastes and influences. The multi-disciplined teen-hydra Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All transcend mere rap collectivism with their internet-savvy and idiosyncratic approach to music and media. A case in point would be the video for Tyler’s ‘Yonkers’, which managed to do in three minutes what the whole of his album tried to in 74, and whose viral distribution via internet channels was largely responsible for the masses of hype surrounding Odd Future at the start of this year. The likes of Skrillex or even Odd Future may not be to everyone’s tastes, but at least their detractors can’t complain about them being derivative. This new eclecticism isn’t the same bland melting pot of past influences, plucked, stewed and regurgitated as per Retromania. It’s a vivid technicolour tapestry of ideas. You can’t even call it genre-hopping any more, it just is. And so long as it keeps moving in the right direction, this will continue to be a positive force for future music.

The extant UK dance scene has been central to spurring on new music. It’s been fascinating to watch the exponential rise and mutation of dubstep over the last decade. From its beginnings as a humble offshoot of 2-step and grime, dubstep evolved into the huge, ubiquitous force we know today. Who would have thought that the dark, ebbing frequencies first heard at specialist nights like FWD>> would eventually have found their place at the top of the charts? Reynolds upholds dubstep as an exception to the rule in Retromania, but dismisses efforts from Magnetic Man and Tinchy Stryder as “watered-down crossovers into chart-pop terrain”. In the short time since this passage was written however, we’ve witnessed the emergence of dubstep across the pop board. The best example of this can be found on Katy B’s On A Mission – the definition of a UK bass-pop gem and one of the first successful crossover records of its kind. She is at once well respected by the underground and adored by pop’s mainstream. And although elements of trance, rave and breakbeat feature prominently, Katy’s mission in question is clearly to accelerate away from the past – influences absorbed, but never flouted. Unlike the preceding Magnetic Man album on which she featured, it doesn’t feel like a token attempt to cut & shut dubstep with pop music. It’s a celebration of UK bass from the bottom-up, harnessing that heavy modern sound to fit her own unique songwriting talents.

Far from slowing down, dubstep and its bass music offshoots are still evolving and reinventing themselves at an alarming rate. Labels like Night Slugs and Hessle Audio are continuing to release records that defy categorisation, the loose, sub-bass heavy template a seemingly bottomless well of inspiration. Bass music now incorporates a spectrum ranging from Shackleton’s atmospheric sound-sculptures to the punchy, synth-laden maximalism of Rustie and Damu.

But those looking to explore even wilder frontiers need only look to the US, and the rise of footwork – a great-grandchild of the original Chicago house scene which, like dubstep, started life as a subterranean version of a more popular style. It may have been in incubation since at least the late nineties, but to most ears the genre’s herky-jerk rhythms, lo-tech production and competitive dancing culture are at odds with pretty much anything we’ve come to see in dance music so far. The recent attention brought on by a series of albums and the influential Bangs & Works compilations on the British Planet Mu label (as well as by dubstep-footwork hybrid man Addison Groove) has seen high praise from commentators such as Reynolds, who speaks in interviews about its “jaw-drop” effect.

Listening – and dancing – to footwork feels like discovering a remote Galápagoan species that has evolved in a vacuum since the early days of house and techno, away from the influence of other dance trends. Named after the freestyle breaky-legged dance performed in Chicago basements and gym-spaces, footwork eschews kickdrums (one of the key percussive elements in house/techno derived dance music), opting for a flurry of erratic snares, toms and rapidfire samples, underpinned by booming sub-bass. Scene stalwarts including DJs Spinn and Rashad are now making waves in Europe – at high volume, away from its comparative strangeness on headphones, footwork has been delighting rather than baffling clubbers. Relative newcomers such as Young Smoke, T-Why and Jlin are pushing the style into even stranger territories. Footwork has proven to be unlike anything we’ve really seen in dance music before. The fact that this once very isolated scene is now infecting outwards bodes well for the future. With a number of albums this year influenced by the genre, by global adopters including Machinedrum, Sully and Africa Hitech, it’s only a matter of time until footwork gains much wider currency.

The world has seen an immeasurable amount of change in only the last twelve months – from the rise of the Tory-led government, the Arab spring, student protests, the Fukushima disaster, the killing of Bin-Laden and Gadaffi, the phone-hacking scandal and subsequent collapse of the News of the World, the England riots, the Occupy movement, not to mention the growing concerns over global economic collapse – there’s no denying we’re far from the pre-credit crunch era of housing booms and relative social stability. Art, music and youth culture are directly affected. There is no longer the same space for the privileged, vintage-toting, apolitical, hipster figure that came to define youth culture in the last decade. Music, as a reflection of public mood, has to galvanise itself in order to fit the changing perspectives of its audience. This doesn’t necessarily mean a return to protest music in the sixties sense of the word (God knows we don’t need any more Frank Turners), but maybe a sense of progress, of movement and action is required in these new, visceral times. Sassy post-modernism comes off as a rather shallow aesthetic when the rent’s overdue and all the shops down the road have had their windows smashed in. No wonder it was PJ Harvey’s topical Let England Shake that made the most impact on critical lists this year.

As long as there’s comfort to be gained and money to be made from nostalgia, retro will always exist. It would be dangerous to abandon the past altogether – pop history is far too rich and plentiful to be ignored outright. But pop is far from eating itself. It would be impossible to cover all the ways in which new music is thriving in 2011. I haven’t even had the chance to touch on the innovations in hip-hop and R&B this year, with Death Grips and Shabazz Palaces representing only a pinch of what’s new and exciting in this arena. It may be some time before we see the kind of seismic movement yearned for by Simon Reynolds in Retromania – but if there is one, it may already be here: we just haven’t realised yet. Rave music wasn’t the product of someone taking a pill and inventing the TB303 one night while everyone else sat about listening to The Smiths. Similarly, post-punk came from a large number of permutations and external influences over a very disparate range of scenes and subcultures, with kids reworking disco and funk licks to suit their own art-school tendencies.

The fact that there are now so many avenues to explore, (or as The Quietus’s Luke Turner puts it in his Wreath Lecture: “the continued shattering of our culture”), means a unified paradigm shift is even less likely to happen in 2011. But with the kind of impact that can come out of the slow development and subsequent explosion of original styles like dubstep and footwork, it’s clear we can still achieve enough momentum to push through those retromanic tendencies and use these new ideas to fuel and define the future.

- Charlie Frame , December 20th, 2011 03:51

http://thequietus.com/articles/07610-futuremania-retro-goes-cold-turkey-in-2011