A recent swedish study shows some interesting datas about the effect the swedish company Spotify had among Swedes. Since Spotify started, back in 2009, the decline of illegal downloads has been of 25 %! In fact, Spotify users had outnumbered in 3 months the amount of people recognizing they were illegaly downloading music.

This said, the big picture isn't that pretty: the moment Spotify started to put limitation on his original streaming offer going from free illimited time to seriously reduced offer of "free" music, one can immediately see 15% of the Spotify users went to pay for a full subscription while 31% were going to go back to other streaming services, or file-sharing services...

The problem seems to be that people accept to have some amount of ads when using a streaming music system but it has to be easy to use, and free.
From the moment it slopes into a paid mode, an overwhelming % of users will go back to wherever they can find what they're looking for: free music. Now, more and more people are used to have free music/free movies/free tv shows: it is impossible to go back unless the Industries find a way to have the end-consumer have free...

Damon Albarn, singer of famous english 90's band Blur and also main prime suspect in the excellent Gorillaz, has recently been to Congo where he recorded "Kinshasa One Two", an album done in 5 days with local musicians (among them Nelly Liyemge, Jupiter Bokondji and Bokatola System) plus Dan The Automator, Richard Russel and others. All benefits of the operation will go to Oxfam as part as the DRC music initiative.

This isn't the first time Damon Albarn works outside of the "occidental pop music" confort zone as he did the music for a chinese opera and already released an album called Mali Music in 2002.
At Kollector, we're very aware of the cultural diversity ingredients forming this world's radio broadcasts and we're happy to have people from South Africa, Chile, Samoa islands or Jamaïca (for example) joining us and following their tracks with Kollector.

Listen to the full Kinshasa One Two album: http://hypem.com/search/DRC%20Music
Damon Albarn on Mali Music: http://youtu.be/5lGRQVkXEts
Damon Albarn's Monkey - 'Journey To The West trailer...

"You Instead", from english director David Mackenzie, is a movie shot in only 5 days during the "T in the Park festival" which is the background/motive/albi for a love story filmed guerilla-like...
The end result seems like an exhilirating movie, powerful and immersive, rather magical at times, all happening within that short amount of time adding tension and ambiance to the plot. And the fact it's based around these new tribal gatherings that are festivals is no mistake: can we detect a social theme there ?
Can this be the start of a new Rave revival as we're also encountering a movie shot in the US around a massive festival: "Electric Daisy"?. Raves, rather underground back in the 90's, are coming back big time and now it's all happening in stadiums and huge fields with tens of thousands of electro fans. And dollars. At the same time, more and more festivals are experimenting financial troubles...Are festivals the penduluum opposite to the virtual world: the body-against-body experience versus the me-in-front-of-my-screen status ? It'll be very interesting to see how 2012 shapes up...or down.

interview of David McKenzie...

There are a few people out there who have shaped music history by being themselves and go thru with their dreams: it eventually grew to become big, then huge, then history....

Daniel Miller is one of those unique gifted individuals whose talent was to actually follow his heart and assemble with musicians he loved.

In an industry where most things take months and 10 lawyers, Daniel Miller, head of legendary record label Mute (house of Depeche Mode, Erasure, Moby, Fad Gadget, Nick Cave, Diamonda Galas, but also new signings Beth Jeans Houghton, Josh T. Pearson, Big Deal and S.C.U.M.) makes a deal by just talking true and shake hands and actually starting a relatiionship with an artist or a band.

This is what happened when he signed Depeche Mode (without any doubt one of the biggest band in the history of pop) and this is what will happen if Daniel sees a band he loves in a pub...

Here's the man talking in this 2011 video. Very interesting.

http://mute.com/

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Few instruments have been as groundbreaking as the synthesizer as it opened up an entire new music world. And one synthesizer can be seen as the originator (besides the AKS/VCS3 synth): the Minimoog.

This documentary is fun and interesting and comes up with a few laughs as we discover how the Minimoog actually had a flaw in the filter design and how Bill Hemsath, its inventor alonside Robert A. Moog, designed it during his lunch breaks from parts that were laying around...Bill is the inventor of the dreaded pitch wheel, responsible for thousands of really annoying moog solos but it's ok as he didn't know at the time ;))))

It also comes from clips showing Kraftwerk using Minimoogs on Radioactivity and we even have a glimpse of Florian operating his ARP Odyssey, pictures of the first designs that, with a 40 years bumper, don't they look funny :)

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Dame Evelyn Glennie (Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, yes !) is an internationally known and respected Scottish virtuoso percussion player of great talent and equally great humour. She has a few trademarks that distinguish her from most musicians, one of them is that she plays barefoot, be it in the recording studio or on stage, and she also appears to come to the Ted talks with a motorbike bag filled with musical sheets and diverse paraphranelia which is a long way from your common Diva holding up a Vuitton leather bag.

She has played with a lot of respected musicians like Björk or Bobby Mc Ferrin and has a longlife stand for musical education.
She also composes music for films, does lots of conferences and talks and even has her own line of jewelry. Her talks concentrates on how to REALLY listen to music thru your entire body. She replaces music its real place in our human experience.

Oh, yes, by the way, she's been deaf since she's 12.

a movie about her: http://youtu.be/Edkx6ovQ9YM
her website: http://www.evelyn.co.uk

We tend to forget music as we know it now wasn't always the aural background to a car advert (Eminem and Chrysler, Peugeot and Universal) or hymn to a luxurious perfume, nor were rebel looking Hollywood actors like Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt cream of the cream of the Hollywood chain food.

There was a time, children, where John Wayne and Charlon Heston were the top of the iceberg and anything left of them was deemed anti-establishement and DANGEROUS. Rock music was starting to grow but it was mainly all nice and satinized until some decided to sing about politics and changes and how things really were beneath the surface of well-oiled western civilisations.

Some songs have been mirrors of that. Time Out, the London magazine, has a long article about 100 songs that changed history but we will narrow that countdown to 5 songs. 5 only. But 5 songs that scared The Man a lot...

PUBLIC ENEMY: "Fight The Power" the 1989 song was an undestructable element of Spike Jones's amazing movie Do The Right Thing and it has that drive that will last forever. It was all about the Ghetto and not two years later was the background sound to the LA Riots...

FELA: "Zombie...

The theremin is nothing new, it was invented back in the 20's by Leon Theremin, but there's something so magical about making music with an instrument you actually never touch. I don't mean the stacks of violins one can control thru a midi software, I mean a real, genuine and physical instrument you can use and make sounds with.

The theremin is rather simple: you control the oscillator's frequency with one hand while the other one controls loundness. Very handy when you want to make creepy sci-fi sounds, but if you get to be a virtuose like Pamelia_Kurstin it takes the instrument to new highs. See her using the theremin like a double bass, or a violin, it's quite amazing. She also gives some explanation from 5'30" and her freshness/enthusiasm is energizing!

Moog has come up with a very reliable and reasonably priced theremin: check it here in this perky video: http://youtu.be/stobfk1Mfjk

Abbey Road, the famous London studio who has been home to The Beatles, Radiohead, Oasis and that NY lady who wears meat dresses on stage, offers new online services to all: you can now have them mix your songs or master your album for rather reasonable prices !

You can upload your songs audiotrack per audiotrack, no fx, no timing issues to be revolved and no midi channels, and world famous engineers will use their, experience and the outboard at Abbey Road's studios to give that extra ooomph your own recording may need. Price go from £550 for 1 to 24 multi-tracks and £750 for 25 to 48 tracks extravaganza. You can also have Abbey Road to do the mastering (£90 per track and as low as £250 for an album)

This is an interesting development: an amazing studio offering highly skilled and experienced engineers (altho don't expect Georges Martin - unfortunately he's totally deaf now - to turn up) and great outboard equipment a musician on its own can't afford. Prices are reasonable for the kind of quality one might expect and you can even credit Abbey Road on your cover !

http://www.abbeyroadonlinemixing....

If there's one musician who has paid a high price for his political actions and social stands, it surely is Nigeria's child Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Beaten in his flesh by soldiers, harrassed by Police forces, his family and friends subjects of pressure and physical violence (his mother was thrown out the second floor by the Army when they raided Fela's Kalakuti Republic in Lagos!), Fela paid in cash his strong, proud and vital comments about Africa, Colonialism, Panafricanism, Music, Weed, Women, Politics. He was an educated and witty man. And an astounding musician who has inspired many, many musicians.

Born from an educated Yorouba middle-class parents (sugar on the cake: Fela's grand-father was the first ever African musician to record - it was for EMI in the 1920s), Fela Ransome Kuti was always involved in politics and his journeys to Europe and the USA gave him a unique perspective on an Africa he dreamed being strong, independant and proud of its roots. Not a Muslim nor a Christian, Fela was seen as a rebel and a iconoclast: he was a free spirit always fighting for his ideas and, man, were they offensive for the Nigerian governements, too hastily ready to bend over...

At first, we didn't know if this video from France24 (a french news tv station) was a set-up or not as it's so...easy-going.
We scrabbed a little bit, learned or re-learned a few things along the way until we stroke genious at 6'05 in the videoreportage: BINGE LISTENING is the new matte black :)
Naaah, only kidding, this video is interesting and fun as it shows you a violinist going under surgery while still playing the violin, yes sir. Then a jazzman telling you about music enhancing the protein values of your cells, yessss, the benefits of music for the alzheimer patients and finally an australian doctor urging kids to stay away from louspeakers as BINGE LISTENING IS BAD FOR YOU. He's right!

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Very interesting numbers from a small indie band which has no label and therefore no distribution in stores. Uniform Motion can only count on himself for promotion and sales and they have been counting exactly what comes down to them after sales.

What the numbers shows is that, as felt by many, streaming doesn't make you a dime unless you are a Spotify/Deezer/Itunes boardmember or shareholder, a band with many, many followers or a label of some size: you do need thousands of thousands of streams (0,002€ a stream is not a number, it's an insult to artists and producers) to make it a valid option. Century Media, a US label, has decided to take away all his acts from Spotify, and very rightly so !

Digital sales thru portals are quite allright altho the 70/30 deal + starting fee of 35 € takes off quite a bite off the final price. Of course, selling a physical product is more interesting, but since non-signed bands can't get distribution we're back at step zero...

In this era, there's little money a band can make unless he tours, sells merch and has radioplays (where Kollector can come in to help you manage the audio works).
Many will be/are broken by...

Some of you may know that a band's rider is a document given to concert promoters and stating what the band wants/needs to have as for sounds and lights, stage set up and all.
An important part of the rider is about food and backtage accomodation, towels and drinks, everything that can make the band confortable while waiting to perform in the club/venue/arena/festival/etc...

Seems like the Foo Fighters have come up with the best rider, ever. It actually reads like a cartoon, and maybe it's for the best :)

http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/music/foo-fighters-go-colouring

The Dave Grohl band may have beaten Iggy Pop who's rider is, well, we don't exactly know how to categorize it, it's weird and funny at the same time, very rock n' roll, man, and definitively a great read :)
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/lust-laughs

Inthe video, a great reaction from Dave Grohl about a "fan" looking for troubles at a Foo Fighter show...

There's something uneasy about rockumentaries as they are called: you have a director trying to get into the musicians brains and very often he's a fan and rather limits himself by being subdued and too sentimental when he should go for a more analytical approach, a factual scenario and in search of something to show, more than pretty faces switching on Orange amps and sitting in front of a mixing desk. Or maybe not ?

U2 has a movie coming out about themselves ("From The Sky Down") and word is it wasn't that easy for them to accept what director Guggenheim had edit. The movie revisits "Achtung Baby", the legendary U2 album recorded in Berlin, but it also sees the musicians sitting in and talking. And, gee, can Bono talk and talk and talk :)

Another famous rockumentary is Scorcese's "Shine Of Light", a movie he did around The Rolling Stones. It's glossy, charming, huge but really only scratches the surface.
http://youtu.be/lg5FWw5AXIQ
"Some Kind Of Monster" is a famous award-winning movie about metal band Metallica and all we can do is stare at that rather incredible documentary: it shows the band at a all-...

We have installed a live demo of Kollector : you can simply log in and watch in realtime the latest radiobroadcasts of about 20 songs we are tracking with Kollector.

We uploaded Move Like Jagger on the 6th and it has since then enjoyed 1880 radio trackings and that song was played 686 times in the latest 24 hours alone! It was played 234 times in Germany alone and, mind you, 16 times in Brazil and South Africa.

That's a lot of good promo to follow up on, tours to put together and royalties to track down indeed. And they may even want to know what other songs from the album would work by uploading that record in Kollector and have a global view on what's been playing most by the radios and in which countries. They may even decide to push up some more promo in some countries if they see the song bubbles up but doesn't quite make it yet...

I can write for sure what were the last songs (we follow) played:

1 09-09-2011 @ 7:59:51 Ya! Fm , La Radio Impactante Mexico Maroon 5 - Move Like Jagger
2 09-09-2011 @ 7:58:26 Radio Top 40 Germany Maroon 5 - Move Like Jagger
3 09-09-2011 @ 7:57:55 CIHT Hot...

Let's stay in the movie industry for a while as there are interesting parallels that can be build between movies and musics. And what happened to music since 1999 (the ever going down spiral of sales) has started to hit the movie industry as well. And if you think it cost a label (and the band, and the publishers, managers, producers, etc...) a lot when a 50.000 € album is being pirated, leaked, stolen, shared, etc...(use the word you want, result is the same: people buy now less music than ever), wait till this happens to a 500.000 € movie (and that's a cheap C serie movie): ROI is dead...We're now entering an era where budgets have to be cut by double digits numbers and the only ones to come out alive will be the one dealing cleverly and accordingly with the situation...

So, it's interesting to see how the new situation inspires people to do MORE with LESS. Take this clever little movie ( by Dan Trachtenberg) based around Portal, that amazing videogame (and the amazing brilliant song on Portal 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ljFaKRTrI). It immediately has an mood, a feel, a look, a sound, a plot that starts...

We at Kollector really enjoy it when Peter Travers from Rolling Stone gets going about how bad some Hollywood movies are and we cherish those moments when a little bit of truth is being spilled in this enjoyable un-political form. Yes ! Peter Travers, YOU RULE ! These are Peter's awards for the worst pile of garbage that came out of Hollywood this summer. Not our words, his :)

(sorry about the little advert before the actual movie...http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/blogs/the-travers-take/peter-travers-...)

What's the connection with music ? Well, look at how some labels decide to push artist "A" into the limelight with a big name producer "B" and guest singer "C" and often end up with a really really bad album and a couple of singles that are terribly mainstreamed, worked to the line to be self-digested for target niches of listeners but at the end of the day it will just flop cos people don't like albums filled with leftover songs of an uninspired session and no guts or no desire to go into exciting territories and...

I don't know about you, but I have sometimes felt really dumb reading a synth's manual and not being able to pass page three without wondering what the heck they are talking about as some manuals seem to be put together by scientists communicating to fellow members of their Uni and not good communication people trying to teach how to use that piece of equipment without checking if you're aware of quantic physics and fluids dynamics.

Well, i'm sure you'll be happy to know i passed that stage now :) In the meantime, some musicians are indeed smart scholars and this article tells us a bit more about some of the smarter musicians out there.
We can add to that list Frank Spinath from Seabound/Edge Of Dawn/Ghost And Writer who's a world known Phd in Psychology, Ryan Leslie the rap producer who came out at Harvard at 19 (there's a lesson to be taught from that !), Mick Jagger (degree in Economics) and Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine) went to Harvard...

http://www.spinner.com/2011/09/01/phd-musicians/

A few weeks ago, the Kollector Blog had an entry about Loudness and Compression, the two headed monsters that are destroying music even before it's been released ! In this interesting Quietus article (http://thequietus.com/articles/06872-loudness-wars-dynamic-range-compres...), more exemples and reasons why musicians, producers and labels should stay away from the damn big knobs and concentrate on having dynamics and subtleties rather than a big large wall like waveform that once was well-crafted piece of music...

The video is a short intro from Bob Ludwig, the american sound engineer which is to mastering what salt is to french fries !
And kids, remember: DIGITAL DISTORTION IS THE ANTICHRIST ! ;-)

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KOLLECTOR: track your songs on radios in real time. worldwide.
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Time : 07 September at 9am till 09 September at 4pm
Location: Popkomm Media_Gate Gate A1-05, Airport Tempelhof, Berlin
Platz der Luftbrücke
Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany

Kollector is presenting its airplay tracking application on Popkomm and we are looking forward to many interesting contacts.
If you also going to be in Berlin for Popkomm, let's meet up: you can find us at the Media_Gate on Gate A1-05 (yes, it's a former airport ;).

Popkomm is the internationally established meeting place of the music and entertainment industry and will take place from September 7th to 9th on the former main airport Berlin Tempelhof. More information on http://www.popkomm.com/

Kollector is present in the "Popkomm Media_Gate" which is a new innovative event format where representatives of forward-looking digital music services will meet.

Popkomm is embedded in Berlin Music Week which ends with Berlin Festival on the following weekend. http://www.berlinfestival.de/line-up-2011/