No Dice

Caught School of Seven Bells opening for Fujiya & Miyagi the other night at the 9:30 Club. I can't remember the last time I commented on a lack of musicianship, but 2/3 of School of Seven Bells seems to need lessons in playing their instruments and in stage presence. They sounded like the same beautiful, noisy, dreamy pop from their debut record Alpinisms, but I might as well have watched my ipod since there was nothing to watch on stage...except their guitarist Ben Curtis who played and fiddled with enough sampling gear for a couple of people. The mix didn't do them any favors either since it buried the interesting bits and contributed to the sameness factor of a lot of their set. *Sigh* Baby bands...they get better and then they get their own soundperson.

Fujiya & Miyagi weren't overly endowed with stage presence either, but they were pros and they could play and had this cool animated backdrop. So I liked them, if only because they were so much better than their openers. They'd be ripe for remixing, too, so I want to see what I can dig up.

In other news: Muxtape is back and not like it was. Wish I'd gotten a chance to talk shop with Justin Ouellette when he was a panelist last week.

Comeuppance, please come in. Why should my rinky-dink non-profit have to bear all the burdens of accurate and transparent accounting?

Need more ways to make your cassettes obsolete? Options include converting and recycling.

Speaking of obsolescence, John Strohm explains the legal issues surrounding selling used MP3s. Legalities aside, I doubt Bopaboo has a viable business model - you'd need such massive buy-in from the public to have a database of used MP3s worth searching - but the issues around the concept are sadly evergreen...which is why I dug it out of the old starred items.

Move over, Charm City Cakes for this really cool Darth Vader cake. I love you still though because you would never unintentionally do this.

Carousel

A few months ago, one of our summer legal interns, Jenny, and I were talking about interesting, fun, law-student-worthy projects she could do. At the time, a friend had sent me a link to yet another fabulous mix that was distributed illegally. That got me thinking and I posed the following problem to Jenny: how do I legally post a streaming mix "tape" to this blog that includes any song I want?

Jenny very diligently started researching and took all our ideas of websites that exist in some quasi-legal realm and started piecing the whole thing together. She quickly ran into all sorts of legal bogs and the post is still in mothballs.

Anyway, I thought of it the other day when I saw that muxtape was planning a revival as a completely different service from the online mixtape service it started as. Muxtape's founder Justin Ouellette writes eloquently about his experiences with the four major label groups and the RIAA when he was trying to negotiate a licensing agreement that might have kept Muxtape alive in its former form.

Muxtape is only the latest instance of the mainstream music industry biting the hand that feeds it by refusing to embrace and enable the new and then laying blame when those services are popular. They seem to enjoy crying poor. And now that venture capital is getting harder to come by, there will be fewer services for major labels to try to squeeze for cash. Digital Music News takes a good look at the possible venture capital lessons learned from muxtape as well.

So, inevitable new, cool illegal services + industry reluctant to work with emerging tech = more music available to music fans but less money getting back to the artist and the record company. After a while, artists realize the majors aren't helping their careers and they find more visionary people to help them build music careers. If history is any guide, the major four will hold progressively tighter to their declining revenues and be less likely to work with emerging tech...

Around the merry-go-round they go...you'd think they'd recognize the view after seeing it a few times?