Stinky Jim has been playing a rather engaging cumbia version of New Order's 'Blue Monday' on his 95bFM radio show. Having tracked down the Soundcloud stream, I thought that I would quite like, in my old-fashioned way to, you know, buy a copy to keep.
So I clicked the 'Buy on Legtimix' button on the Soundcloud player. The idea of Legitimix is that it directs you to paid downloads of the constituent tracks of a remix or mash-up, which you legally acquire and therefore obtain at least a moral right to enjoy the unlicensed derivative work in which they appear. Nice idea.
I tried Legitimix when it first launched and soon decided that it actually didn't work. I tried it again this week and discovered that although the service has become considerably more sophisticated, it still basically doesn't work.
So I clicked the button and landed here, to be told that I needed to obtain the license for the original New Order track: specifically, the original 12" mix. The Pernett version is a straight cover and doesn't include any audio elements of the original, but, sure, if that's what I needed to confirm, fine. By my count, I own five instances of that track -- two copies of the vinyl and three digital copies, from three different compilation albums.
Legitimix required me to download its separate desktop app, which would search my music library, confirm I owned the track and let me go ahead and get the cover version. But it didn't. None of the three versions I owned were, apparently, good enough. It had to be the exact same iTunes Store retail instance of 'Blue Monday'.
Okay, fine, I thought. I'll buy a fourth (sixth) version of 'Blue Monday' in order to get the cover version. But when I atempted to make that purchase, I got this message:
The item you've requested is not currently available in the New Zealand Store, but it is available in the U.S. Store. Click Change Store to view this item.
So I not only needed a stand-alone version of the track, it had to be one that I couldn't even buy in New Zealand. I gave up. The whole area of derivative works is difficult to incorporate in a traditional music rights structure. And all this experience did was confirmed to me that it's generally better left to the market of free stuff.
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Another decent idea that doesn't work. Apple's iTunes Match. The idea of iTunes Match is that you pay a modest fee -- $40 a year -- and Apple will match its own gaint library of songs against your own personal iTunes library, and give you access to all those songs from the Cloud. If there are songs it can't match (ie: if, like me you get a lot of odd shit from Souncloud), you can actually upload them to the Cloud. So you have access to your whole music library without filling up your iPhone.
I'd actually forgotten I had iTunes Match. I paid for it two or three years ago in order to do the trick where you can make it replace old, very low bitrate versions of your music (in my case, a legacy of of several years with an eMusic account) with 256k AAC verions.
Turns out, it the annual fee had just rolled over, as I discovered when I updated my new iPad to iOS 8 and my iMac to Yosemite. In the process of both, Apple practically begs you to engage with iCloud. In the case of of the iPad, which I hadn't loaded any music on, the updates turned on Match and suddenly I could see my whole library there. Sweet, I thought, I'm just about to spend a couple of weeks travelling.
Not so sweet. Chunks were inexplicably missing. Jakob's Sines, an album that had been out for weeks, was represented by just two pre-release tracks.
It got worse when I updated my ageing iPhone 4S to 8.1.1 on return. The update not only sucked me into the Cloud, it turned on iTunes Match again. And when I connected my phone to my computer to back it up, the system thought it would be a good idea to delete 600 tracks from my phone, given it was all supposedly in the Cloud anyway.
Fixing it was just a matter of finding the off-switches again and waiting around while 600 songs got reloaded back onto my phone -- but I'm left thinking that iTunes Match is one of the most striking examples of a basically okay idea being subject to utterly abysmal execution that I've ever seen.
This is, of couse, the same basic set-up that Apple was so keen to show off at the iPhone 6 launch by making it appear that everyone in the world had a copy of the new U2 album on every damn iDevice they owned. It's not funny and it's not clever, Apple. Until you can work this stuff out, please keep me and my music well clear of your goddamn Cloud.
Grrr.
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There were a number of sectors in which the New Zealand of the early 1970s achieved the double of suffocating regulation and thumping market failure, and one of them was the pub trade. Booze barns operated by one of the two companies that sold beer dominated the landscape -- and literally shaped the culture.
Lion Breweries, the more powerful side of the duopoly, had firm ideas about what musical entertainment in its pubs should sound like, and how it should be organised. Agents in Lion's employ would book cover bands and shuttle them around local, regional and national circuits as essentially interchangeable pub entertainment. Bands who insisted on playing their own songs were generally not welcome.
That's the environment John Dix recalls in his new Audioculture profile of Mike Corless and the company Corless founded, New Music Management. If I didn't have a lot of affinity as a kid with some of the acts NMM set on the road in the early 1980s -- swiping the "Party Boys" concept from Australia was a bit of a low point -- Corless played a key role in breaking the Lion stranglehold. And the national pub circuit that resulted had some pretty substantial economic benefits for the bands who played it. As Dix notes, some national tours were seven weeks long.
Before Playstation and Game of Thrones, people had less to spend their time and money on, and the pubs closed at 10pm on weekdays, so you could see a band and be home in time for the late news on TV. Ironically, this sounds quite like what Ian 'Blink' Jorgensen proposed this year in his book The Problem With Music in New Zealand and How to Fix It. It wasn't really an idyll, but it is worth recalling quite how many people could be convinced to pay a cover charge to see a band play back then.
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Tunes ...
Leroy Clampitt, who has offered guitar and production services to various other local artists in recent years, and who currently plays bass in Strange Babes, turns out to have a slinky electropop sideline as Taste Nasa. Check this:
A new remix from Auckland's The Basement Tapes:
At TheAudience, a taster from the about-to-drop new album from Bobby Brazuka's Latinaotearoa. Coolio:
A nice house track from a teenage Auckland production duo:
And food-based rap sass from Heavy:
From elsewhere, a short, sleek Leftside Wobble dub of Toots and the Maytals' 'What's My Number':
And finally, this week's funky Friday kitchen-dancer from Karim:
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PS: Check out Golden Dawn. Tonight, She's So Rad launch their thoroughly awesome single 'Cool It' and tomorrow night Lawrence Arabia plays The Hits of the 60s. Something for everyone!
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