No surprises here. Rolling Stone reports a 7.6 percent drop in CD sales over the past 12 months.
All signs point to a music industry that’s increasingly about participation rather than the standard participation by purchase. Downhill Battle is all about those moves. Pretty fascinating site.

So legal downloads are up, tripled in fact, over the past year.
Lobbyists for the record industry have had a field day, touting their battle against file-sharers as the reason paid downloads have finally started to make a return.
Here are several reasons why it is not so cut and dried.
Online music sales have come of age in the past year. As paid downloads have tripled, so have the number of online music sellers, up from 100 last year to around 300 now, and especially, Apple’s triumphant run from iTunes shop to iTunes software to everyone’s favourite Christmas present last year, the iPod.
Paid downloads have increased – 180 million single tracks downloaded in the US, Britain, Germany and France between January and June this year, compared to 57 million last year – but file-sharing still dwarfs its respectable sibling, there are at least 900 million files available on sites around the world.
Three years ago, researchers said that “active usage of online music content is one of the best predictors of increased consumer purchasing.” Parallel research found that 81 percent of music downloaders reported that their CD purchasing remained the same or increased. Many people reported they would like to pay for downloads but couldn’t do it simply enough. In fact, there’s been a constant stream of evidence that file-sharing is a positive tool for the music industry. See articles in USA Today and Wired.
Although big record industry litigation claims to have successfully sued thousands of infringing music copyrights, it’s fair to say in practice they’ve been primarily about fear. RIAA president Cary Sherman said as much, “The lawsuits are an essential educational tool.” Most (all?) of the people sued by the music industry have settled before appearing in court, they barely have a choice, either settle for a small slap on the wrist or fight against the big labels in court.
Certainly some people are scared of litigation, but most are paying for their downloads because (a) it’s easier to do and (b) there’s wider range of music and (c) possibly most importantly, broadband take up means a wider demographic is getting their music from the Internet.

I was thinking about singing Martika’s classic last night at our farewell karaoke session, but I wasn’t really expecting an earthquake. Still, a fairly big one hit just 30 km out of Tokyo this afternoon. As always different sizes are coming from different media outlets – radio was calling it 6.1, Japan Today, the first website to report, called it 5.7. Definitely the biggest earthquake I’ve felt since being here anyway.
It’s been called an intensity 4 earthquake, which sounds right. (4: Most people indoors feel movement. Hanging objects swing. Dishes, windows, and doors rattle. The earthquake feels like a heavy truck hitting the walls. A few people outdoors may feel movement. Parked cars rock.) I was inside wondering whether the roof would fall in or the fridge might start to tip and a guy walked by outside the house, trucker cap a little askew, but otherwise looking quite relaxed.
The Australian reports that 5 people were injured in a shopping centre in Saitama, sirens went off and the lifts stopped in tall buildings. Still, pretty mild effects for such a big earthquake.

I was already a regular at Simon’s Friday night sessions at the Cricketer’s Arms in Sydney, when one Easter long weekend he converted this through and through indie kid to house music.
Raw jacking beats to the most soulful funk, hip hop and dub, there’s always a weird contrast between the stark beauty and this kernel of sleazy sexiness. His radio sets are actually even better… I’ve long since worn through my Caldwell mixtapes from 2SER’s annual Mosaic Mix. Anyway, a three hour mix set from Hi Jinks in Sydney prompted me to dig up some comments from an old interview with him.

How important is your eclectic taste in music to your enthusiasm for DJing?
SC: Well I’ve always had eclectic tastes, originating from my love for ’60s and ’70s soul, jazz and funk, which is still the binding thread of all dance music in my opinion. Dance music is almost built on its own genres and sub-genres now. Producers and DJs are quick to jump on a “new sound” (usually one record which sounds a bit different) and within a month or two you have a whole bunch of copycat tracks and a whole bunch of DJs flogging the same tunes for a little while until the next “sound” comes along. That, for me, leads to lots of boring music. Once you listen to a few bars you know what a track is going to do, which is not very fun. I can’t really understand people who say they love “breaks” (whatever that sounds like this month) but hate “house” or “hip hop”. They all used to be the same thing, or at least played side by side in a club. The narrow definitions of dance music are a marketing tool more than anything reflecting musical reality. It’s all just an arrangement of noise… That said, I’ve never really been a great lover of “rave” music, much of which seems to be an exercise in messing with people’s minds in a fairly mindless way. It’s effects for the sake of effect if you know what I mean. I think psychedelic trance is the ultimate as far as this goes. I can appreciate that it’s clever to be able to do that, but personally I don’t like being under mind control.
So, what I guess I mean about my music is that I try to play music which has an emotional effect on me, not just a physiological one. Hopefully that emotion carries over to people who are listening. I buy and listen to and play music which I like, whatever the “style”, and try and fit it into a situation.

You’re best known for DJing clubs, but from my experience you seem to really gel best on radio?
SC: Club sets offer the challenge of playing to a dance floor and give you instant response, which can be exciting and instantly satisfying. Radio gives me a chance to play more of a soundscape of different old and new music and incorporating spoken word and other weird stuff to hopefully end up with a 90 minute sound journey. Strange juxtapositions can be interesting. I don’t talk much because I want people to concentrate on the music.

With international politics and Australia’s position getting more and more cliched, how do you see the role of the DJ or music maker?
SC: I am interested in politics on many levels, but I see a distinct lack of ethics in much of this industry, being as it is, based on money, ego and drugs. There is less and less talk about dance music as an “alternative culture” and more about it as a “lifestyle choice” or “emergent market”. I think that the horse has long bolted in many ways, though, and that people (punters) generally have themselves to blame. People burn themselves out while they are still new to a scene, so how can that scene develop over time? I think hip hop is an exception, and the recent renaissance of Sydney’s scene is a great thing. I think DJs have something of a responsibility to encourage scenes to develop and push things forward. Unfortunately, most DJs seem to be more interested in the size of their fees and other less altruistic things. It’s easier that way.

Simon Caldwell – Mixed live in a fucking pub, Part 1 (hosted by Mad Racket)

Simon Caldwell – Mixed live in a fucking pub, Part 2 (hosted by Mad Racket)

Simon Caldwell – Mixed live in a fucking pub, Part 3 (hosted by Mad Racket)

Listening to Simon play is a smooth rush of excitement that starts with hearing Disco D, Bola, Bobbi Humphries, Eugene McDaniels or McFadden & Whitehead and ends with me hunched over crates of records for days on end. Beautiful.

There’s a job going for experienced community radio broadcasters to whip up audio packages about Australian music – artist profiles, live sets, local reports and features – to be played around the CBAA‘s national network.
I used to do a weekly show on the network and it’s a pretty good opportunity. The job would be based at your local community radio station around Australia. If you’re interested, apply before August 15. Check out reports from previous AMRAP music correspondents at their site.

The internet is built around the loose mesh of hyperlinks. But the results of a long-running Australian case could put that in jeopardy. The Sydney Morning Herald reported today that MP3 blogger, mp3s4free.net, was found to have infringed copyright by linking to pirated material.
The result raises all sorts of questions. And not just for MP3 bloggers, the suggestion that linking to copyright material is illegal, could affect search engines and a wide range of websites.
Even more concerning is the fact that the internet service provider, Com-Cen was also named in the case. The SMH says, “the court found that the companies, director and staff member had had the power to stop the infringement and did not do so, and so had also infringed copyright.”
The case was brought by 31 applicants, including multinational music labels Universal Music Australia, EMI Music Australia, Sony Music Entertainment (Australia), Warner Music Australia, BMG Australia, and Festival Mushroom Records, who claim that the site cost the music industry hundreds of millions of dollars. It has been running since lawyers acting for the music labels raided the home of Stephen Cooper, operator of mp3sfree.net, and the offices of Cooper’s ISP on October 17 2003, with orders authorising them to seize information on the site and logs of internet users accessing the site.
So, under Australian law, linking to pirated material, not just downloading it, is an infringement of copyright and internet service providers may be held responsible for the activities of sites they host.
This is cross posted at Morph.

I was hugely disappointed by the first two new Star Wars movies. Not that they were so much worse than the originals, just I was a kid when they first came out. Nostalgia made them gold in my memory. The latest one came out in Japan on the weekend, it wasn’t any better than the others, but despite the shoddy lines and wooden acting, for some reason I loved it. I think my standards have dropped!

The people at Morph blog asked me to post there for the next month or so. It’s a great site, the other contributors come from pretty wild backgrounds – the guys who made EPIC for example – so it’s a chance to stir up some discussion. This is cross-posted at Morph.

If you’re involved – labels, music-making, blogger, podcaster, DJ, technology, writer, whatever – I’m interested in your opinions on where technology is affecting music business.

I listened my way through many happy hours and stacks of records while I was at university. Every week, probably far more than I should have. Carefully avoiding the glare of shop assistants, who rumour had it held the best records from any imported vinyl shipment for their friends. If you didn’t dig out the music, you didn’t hear it.
Technology has democratised the process of finding music. Digital downloads, blogs, podcasts, netlabels, MP3 blogs, file-sharing, online communities, radio streams, message boards, messaging, ezines, moblogging, wireless. Probably many more, that neither my dictionary nor I have heard of yet. They make a space for people to give and receive comments on new, old, obscure and mainstream music, they even let you download it.
But that democracy has resulted in reserves of music, many times bigger than the huge record libraries at HMV or Tower Records here in Tokyo. Where 20 or 30 years ago, you could be abreast of popular music, it’s near impossible to keep track of it all these days. Not only that, but popular culture itself is changing as a result of technology.
The whole music business is slanted towards the old model of Participation via Purchase. That’s purchase of music, but the vestiges of the previous order, when sheet music ruled the industry, are still apparent in the huge power of music publishers. But the explosion of bloggers (text, multimedia), podcasts and streams, zines, indie labels and DJs (that’s right, not just limited to the tech domain), all seem to suggest that popular culture is moving towards participation by, well, Participation.
The choice of where to go next is a difficult problem, complicated and intertwined. It gets even more twisted when you get into the inertia-bound interests of major labels, so I’m going to stick to the coalface of independent labels and artists.
Should the music industry consider a new business model? It may seem crazy, but the Digital Rights Management battle being waged by the majors seems like patching up pressure-leaks on a boat that’s sinking because it’s overloaded. Not only that, it’s alienating their core customers, record buyers.
A new cottage industry? Independent acts, who rarely do more than break even on record sales, are offering free/cheap downloads, which ideally result in exposure and income from touring and merchandise sales. International networks of like-minded labels and artists could easily spring out of the indie network to give this kind of movement real clout.
As now, the biggest issue is how to filter the mass of music.
Change could be as simple as online jukeboxes, since broadband’s market penetration makes this kind of database quite feasible. Especially since GRID programming lets websites, servers and databases weave into one another. New music formats, like Weed, which allows free download and a number of free plays before the user is prompted to purchase the piece of music, also offer a way to structure music sharing online.
The explosion of podcasting in the past few months, since iTunes 4.9 simplified the process of downloading them, coupled with the iTunes shop and the iPod’s phemonenal success, Apple seems set to be a major player in the music business, but this kind of monopoly won’t be positive! Can smaller players work together to form serious competition, like British label Warp‘s Bleep initiative?
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Bec Paton doesn’t have management. She’s never put out a press release, and even struggles to promote herself in interviews. Still she’s one of Canberra’s best loved DJs and since moving to Sydney has rapidly moved up the ranks to play several high profile gigs (Cockatoo Island, Wired for Sound) as well as picking up a couple of residencies.

I first met Bec 3 years ago. I had just breezed in from Sydney and was struggling to find my feet in a new city. As I worked out who was who in Canberra, I kept seeing her name on flyers and posters. Every time she played it would be a different set, from house to slamming drum’n’bass.

Since then, her musical knowledge and technical wizardry behind the turntables (and increasingly CD players) has matured, to the point where now rather than playing a multitude of different sounds in discrete sets, she is now able to blend them all into an intoxicating rhythm.

She’s a phenomenonally hard worker. At the same time as DJing, she studied full time (first as an engineer, and later degrees in graphic design and economics in parallel at UC and ANU respectively), worked flat out as a tax agent. A true renaissance woman of the noughties then. Now she’s designing covers for books.

I interviewed her last year for the Canberra Times (don’t bother looking there, it’s hard to see why they bother with the site! It was also published in 3D World), check a favourite tracks rundown at Cyclic Defrost too. But here’s the transcript, I think it was interesting enough to put online.

Why’d you get into music?

BP: Always a been a music head. Like I played classical piano as a young girl. And I was just discovering electronic and deciding it was cool after thinking it was incredibly heinous and was living with a guy who had two belt-driven decks and they were awful, but I just got caught up in it all I guess through him. But since then the more I learn the more I love it, because your perception of what’s out there is shifting and expanding, it just gets better and better.

What keeps you going?

BP: I don’t know, I really don’t. it’s cool like in the public sphere, like I’d always listen to music there’s nothing that could stop that, but probably the only thing that keeps me going, playing in front of people is when you see people just react in an amazing way to what you’re playing, like you’re sharing all these sounds with them and you’re putting them in a new context for them by the way you superimpose the sounds. And you know when someone gets switched on as a result of that, comes up raves, hands in the air, that’s cool.

For such a small city, Canberra has a lot of people doing interesting stuff (and they’re good at what they do).

BP: It’s got a high education level, so people are a little more switched on. But also the place is incredibly sterile, especially in its design and I think to humanise everything, it needs, like people make that themselves, people need to make their own culture and because it’s relatively isolated, I mean Sydney’s fairly close, but you have to make an effort to go there, you’re always working in a vacuum, so stuff that comes out of here is innovative and is fresh, because it’s created fairly much from scratch.

How has DJing affected the way you listen to music?

BP: Playing records does change the way you listen to music in a sense. Because you go what can I do with this. Whereas you’re not just absorbing for your own sake, you’re actually like how can I do something cool with this to communicate it to other people and I’d be really sad to not have that anymore. Because it has been rewarding. I’m scared about that and not finding a job down there! But I’m also excited because I’m comfortable here and I need to be put out of my element, I want to be surprised, shocked and feel a little nervous every now and then.

You never describe music by genre or style, it’s always colour or movement. Rather than just listening, how do you approach records?

BP: Any track, no matter how stunning it is, there’s always something you’d want to change or add, and you do it in the mix. It is musical collage. You go I’m going to take this bassline and rip it in with this crazy synth line coming out of this track, or I’m going to use the texture of this track, but fill it out with the melody of this or the sentiment of this. Tracks have different feels, so you go this is the kind of emotional space you’re in with this, but we can shift it just slightly and it just puts a whole different tweak on everything, so it’s really about recognising where each track’s coming from, how it feels, also the musical elements that you can use and pick up on and do stuff with and yeah.

How do you do that?

BP: I just dissect it. I’ll be listening to a track and first do the really scientific, the beat structure’s like this, the key change’s going like this it’s got a transition to a bridge section that does this and is different to this bit. But then I’ll think, it’s got a wistful feeling as though you’re wandering through a park in autumn or it makes me feel like I’m in a dirty dingy underground club with red lighting and smoke in the air.

As well there’ll be a pure overall feeling to any track, it’s like if you’ve got two fabrics sitting next to each other and you touch one and you touch the other it’s kind of like that overall kind of thing. So all those different parts and you can pick out which parts you want to interact with the next track or whatever sample you’re messing about with.

You seem to be all about colours and texture, the cover art rather than the name of the artist or the label, and especially ornate, layered sounds?

BP: Yeah totally. Like I’ll pick up on artists if I totally admire them and I want to seek out more, but otherwise I don’t really care who wrote it, because it’s a personal thing, it’s not about me saying oh you’re so great, it’s about me going cool this is this experience for me and these other people.

I get bored really easily. I can get caught up in an aesthetic, especially with house music, like if it’s incredibly dubbed out and the beats are really solid with the pure house feel, yeah I can get caught up in that. But most of the time I like to have variation and change and something a bit interesting happening that you weren’t quite expecting. Also like it when people push the sounds they’ve chosen instead of the default sound libraries and normal electronic music instruments, actually going and sampling a gamelan from Indonesia and doing something with that, and making it into something new. That’s exciting, and that’s cool.

Tell me when you first realised there was something special about music?

BP: Probably the first time that I actually gave it credit as a true legitimate form of music and creative expression, was at a Sabotage party up at Heaven. Up until then all I’d heard was trance, which I’d never liked, found it really jarring and full on and kind of ugly in its synthetic-ness. I’d heard funky house, it was cool, inoffensive, bit of a beat you could have a bit of a wiggle. Other than that I hadn’t really been exposed to much else. Went to this tweakin party and it was all sort of chunky tech house. It was ken cloud and simon Caldwell actually, yeah I heard all the sounds kind of sifting past me and I was having kind of an animal reaction to it. Like it was resonant on some level, I just went hang on, I can see a possibility for this to be awesome stuff. That’s when I really started actually going out and going so what else is there.

Before I was really into bands, I mean I still am. The thing about electronic music is that anyone can be involved as long as they’ve got an idea. You don’t need a whole band to make something amazing and it’s so accessible now, like if you’ve got a pc you can do anything, so for the first time you don’t need musical training you’ve just got to have the ear and a really good idea and the patience to make it. That’s awesome, that’s the first time in history, that I’m aware of, that people can so easily express their ideas and so fluently express them, it’s empowering.

Before the blues, people felt the same way, and then the blues really revolutionised things, just sitting there with a guitar and singing. Things have changed again in the last little while where you really need to make CDs and produce, etc.

BP: You can make something that sounds like there might be 20 musicians jamming if you want to and it’s your idea. Whereas if you were actually to orchestrate that , everyone would have their own interpretation even if you gave them the exact music to play they’d put their own timbre and spin on it. That’s great, but there’s something really lovely about you going this is my world, this is what I wish was real, and brnging that out. The Ammoncontact album is like that. He’s just gone this is my concept and made it, it’s so fresh because before hearing it you would expect that was possible.

Big faith no more fan, beastie boys. Sepultura. I was into metal, it was pretty dark stuff, bordering on industrial a lot of it, but also stuff like, I love Primus – les claypool is the best bass player I’ve ever heard, I love that stuff. Also I was really into local bands as well, we were really lucky at that point in time, we had some really fantastic local bands like Befuddle and Three. Three were really the best. That’s Ben Green, who lives in Melbourne now, and is part of High Pass Filter. That stuff is really fresh, it’s got a hip hop edge bringing electronic edge in and even folk and rock sentiments. It’s a mish mash of sound, but he brings it together in a really cool way.

They sound like comparisons to the music you’re playing now. Obviously the music is made differently but fundamentally the ways of describing it sound similar.

BP: I think a lot of musicians and electronic producers kind of go I’m going to make a track in this genre, in this style, and it’s almost like a synthesis problem where they’ve gotta get the right sound, gotta put it together with the right song structure. Whereas I’m more interested in stuff that’s like OK so previous to this here’s what’s gone down, maybe we can take elements of this and that and make something new. It’s like the art world, it’s constantly evolving according to what people have been exposed to and filtered in their own way, and the new materials and things that are available to them.

What do you think of Canberra at the moment?

BP: It’s so commercialised now. I think the sense of community has really suffered. If you go back two to four years ago, the way things worked was that the artists initiated most of the things that happened. So bands or DJs would say, we’ll get our mates and put on a night. Whereas now promoters actually orchestrate a lot of it, and because they’re not musicians, cause they want to make their money back, it’s become commercialised and things are branded really strongly and it’s been almost reduced to a consumer choice. What will I consume tonight. Rather than based on the experience.

How do you reconcile your commercial possibilities as a designer/economics grad with your creative aims as a musician/DJ?

BP: With music I pretty much let it all go, I don’t need to be the biggest most famous DJ in the world. I’m happy to play and share my music with people on the terms that that happens. But at the same time that’s not the way it works at all. You do have to make the effort to project yourself with an image and everything, you have to be consistent. The way you get gigs in this town isn’t by playing really well, it’s by talking to people and going ‘Yeah, you should get me for your night’which I find really strange because I think if I was a promoter I’d just pick the coolest music that was out there rather than thinking ‘oh this person has talked to me and they really want the gig’ so I find it all a bit confusing and I’m not very good at dealing with it all, but I guess to some extent I am managing somehow and I’m not sure how. That’s the thing I’m worst at. I have big ethical issues with the way things work, I just don’t understand how it can be like that. Music’s good or it’s not. I don’t see how you can just pick people on the basis that they seem nice or they bought you a beer or something.

There’s a serious amount of people who really dig music, and listen to music and seek it out. Most people just want background music, something with a beat, something with a beat to dance to, something they recognise so they can sing along to it, it’s a totally different world to the one I’m operating in. I’m not anti-popular music at all. If it’s great, that’s fantastic. But at the same time, I can’t imagine wanting to get the latest compilation of ‘What’s hot now’ because that’ll do.

There’s two different purposes for music. There’s really soulful, fulfilling human interaction experience. But then there’s also this is an entertainment experience that I’ll consume and it’s not that important to me so I am willing to let other people decide what I am going to listen to.
It’s so emotive, you can hear a track that you haven’t heard for five years, but you’ll remember exactly where you were when you heard it last, how you felt, your state of mind at the time, you might even get a waft of the smell that was on the wind that day. It’s emotive stuff. My record collection is more like a photo album than my photo albums, because I have such better recall of what was going on at that time from that than I would from looking at a photo.

Bec Paton – Broken Beat Brat (hosted by Southern Steppa)

Bec Paton – Mixed for ITM (hosted by inthemix.com.au)

Bec’s current top 10:

Tipper – Ruck (Just Music)
Luke Vibert – Gwithian (Planet Mu)
Bruno Pronsato – Live in Cascadia (Orac)
Si Begg – Muchacha (Noodles)
Idjut Boys – Easy Amigo (Bearfunk)
I:Cube – Tokyo Uno (Versatile)
Stephen Robinson – Lord Lucan is Still Missing (12 Apostles)
Funkstorung – AP1105 (!K7)
Slope – Want’Choo Longa (Sonar Kollectiv)
Tomboy – Player, Playon (Gomma)

If you’re in Sydney you can catch Bec playing Saturdays at @Newtown and at plenty of other nights around town including the upcoming Amnesty fundraisers in Canberra and Sydney. at various parties around town.

The new TV On The Radio record is done. Not on the shelves done quite yet, but there’s a full tracklisting and short interview at Pitchfork. Their last album was one of the best of the year, I can’t wait.
Jason Sweeney from Prettyboy Crossover and Vince from Underground Lovers are working on a new album. Perfect. Lovers were one of my favourite ’90s indie groups, their hazy shoegazer pop still gets me through just about anything. Though when the started getting into drum’n'bass later on in the decade they kinda lost momentum. Teaming up with PBXO is perfect, his melancholy electronic soundscapes will complement Vince’s voice to a t.
Architecture In Helsinki have to be one of the busiest twee pop, nine member bands around right now. Attention stalkers, follow them right around the world on their blog.
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