From: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org (alloy-digest) To: alloy-digest@smoe.org Subject: alloy-digest V10 #12 Reply-To: alloy@smoe.org Sender: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "alloy-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. alloy-digest Thursday, March 10 2005 Volume 10 : Number 012 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Alloy: New Thomas interview on ...the Onion? [Paul Baily ] Re: Alloy: Another Thomas interview ["Keith Stansell" Subject: Alloy: New Thomas interview on ...the Onion? The Onion AV club to be exact: Noel Murray starts with: "To the generally pop-literate, Thomas Dolby is best known for his 1983 novelty hit "She Blinded Me With Science." But that reputation bothers Dolby diehards, who know his contributions to music in the '80s reach beyond one silly technopop single." I like it already. :-) P. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 23:33:08 -0800 From: Patrick McMillan Subject: Re: Alloy: New Thomas interview on ...the Onion? Wow. 10 or so songs in his head!!....looks forward to getting back to it!!!!!!!! Thanks Paul, made my day! Patrick McMillan On Mar 8, 2005, at 10:32 PM, Paul Baily wrote: > > The Onion AV club to be exact: > > > > Noel Murray starts with: > > "To the generally pop-literate, Thomas Dolby is best known for his > 1983 novelty hit "She Blinded Me With Science." But that reputation > bothers Dolby diehards, who know his contributions to music in the > '80s reach beyond one silly technopop single." > > I like it already. :-) > > P. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2005 05:11:26 -0500 From: "Andy Venables" Subject: Re: Alloy: Thomas on the wireless Hi all I forgot about this, to be honest, but managed to stumble across it by sheer fluke last night on Sky 870. Flicking through the radio channels, all of a sudden I sat up with a jolt on hearing a live Dissidents at about 10:15pm. Interesting performance, but will never replace the album version for me. It was from the Dominion back in '84. I dipped back to the channel here and there, and finally heard I Scare Myself at 11:13ish. The trombone part was different enough to what I was expecting that it was a bit of a let down, but other parts were still very enjoyable. I gave up there and went to bed, so I don't know what the other Flat Earth track they played was. Click the link Tom gave, folks, to hear the show - which was a good load of stuff, I liked The Modern's track - from an EP called Eastern Bloc by coincidence! Cheers everyone, best wishes from Jersey in the English Channel. Andy - ----- Original Message ----- Subject: Alloy: Thomas on the wireless It looks as though there will be an archived Thomas Dolby live performance (or extracts from it) on the BBC 6 "Dream Ticket" radio programme on 8th March (and available for listening for a week afterwards via the web-site). http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/shows/dream_ticket/ Tom - -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 10:13:40 -0500 From: "Crackers" Subject: Re: Alloy: New Thomas interview on ...the Onion? Freaking awsome interview! >> It was never supposed to take me 10 or 12 years to do this Silicon Valley entrepreneur thing. It's just that one thing's led to another, and it's been hard to turn my back on it. When every year starts, I hope it'll be the year that I get back to making some serious music. >> Yeah, I think every one of your fans hope that too. Man, 12 years is way too long. Way too long. Oh and speaking of interviews.... http://www.viewmag.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2758&page=3 Starts the second paragraph down. We had a radio interview that night too (and a show). Plus a show this weekend that should be fun and if all goes according to plan I'll be playing "THE DOLBY AZ-1" for this show. http://www.ghastlycomic.com/promotional/snbt-mar12.jpg The show is the Not So Silent Film Festival where they get bands and musicians to perform in front of silent movies that fit the band. Originally Nash The Slash was going to be playing before us to Nofuratu (how cool would that be) but saddly health issues have sidelined Nash (get well soon!). We're playing two episodes of Cowboy BeBop. (Toys in the Attic and Mushroom Samba). Up until now I've been using this behemoth of a rig with Science Ninja Big Ten (formerly Big Fake Heart Attack). I use a Hohner Pianet-T which itself is extremely heavy on top of a chopped up Viscount home console organ from 1974. I chopped the bottom cabinet off the organ, moved the crucial electronics into the manual, gave it a line out and wired in a new power supply. It made it far more portable than it's original configuration. It was still far too heavy for a regular keyboard stand. So we used the bottom of a drafting table to hold the rig. http://www.ghastlycomic.com/BFHA/bfha-12.html It's getting kind of annoying to transport this massive rig to and from gigs, especially since the drafting table will not collapse. Everything is rusted in place on it. I've been wanting to replace the Viscount with a midi module that's full of extra cheesy goodness. This weekend I think I found the module. I bought a Yamaha PSS 480 porta keyboard at a flea market for $15. It had MIDI so I couldn't turn it up. Got it home and discovered the circuit board was pulverized where the power adaptor plugged in. Wired up a new power adapter plug to where the batteries connect, powered it on and it worked just fine. Very very very cheesy. It should be a perfect replacement for the Viscount which will mean I'll get to do a lot more live shows with Thomas's AZ-1. The Hohner will sit on a normal keyboard stand just fine so I hacked the PSS 480 down in size so it would fit on top of the Hohner. Chopped that wee keyboard right off it (I hate those mini keys anyways). I was a little dissapointed to discover that the main circuit board is just a little too big to fit into a rack mount case. Bummer. But I might build a better box for it later. Here you can see the chopped 480 sitting on top of my last functioning Ensoniq Mirage (behind me new Edirol MIDI controller keyboard which I bought for the geekroom). http://www.ghastlycomic.com/promotional/bfha/hacked480.jpg Can't wait to try it out live. And in other news. I will be in London England very breifly on the 15th and 16th. If any of the London Alloy gang would like to head out for another night of drinking drop me an e-mail with contract details. Sorry for the last minute notice but some recent family matters have been pushing the dates around for this trip and it just now looks like we've finally got everything finalized. What's a real bummer is I'm leaving London a few days before a big webcomics convention. Curses! Foiled again! Crackers Ghastly's Ghastly Comic http://ghastlycomic.com ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 12:51:43 -0500 From: "Crackers" Subject: Re: Alloy: New Thomas interview on ...the Onion? - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Crackers" > And in other news. I will be in London England very breifly on the 15th and > 16th. If any of the London Alloy gang would like to head out for another > night of drinking drop me an e-mail with contract details. Awww crappity crap. Sorry gang. Just got off the phone. Seems my mother-in-law has taken a turn for the worse. England is being taken off the trip schedule and we're going straight to India. Maybe next time. Crackers Ghastly's Ghastly Comic http://ghastlycomic.com ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 10:15:30 -0800 (PST) From: Elaine Subject: Alloy: Another Thomas interview Muscling Out Music's Middlemen http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=7954_0_1_0_C Martin Pichinson, a former music manager who now restructures and liquidates companies (including many Silicon Valley startups), moderates a Churchill Club panel on technology, IP, and copyright in the music industry. Martin Pichinson: Thomas, you're on the cutting edge, figuring out where technology is going and using it and pushing it. In your eyes, with the musicians you talk to, the people you work with, where do you see everything going? Thomas Dolby: (Mr. Dolby is a musician and technologist.) The first thing is I'm very optimistic about where it's going. Ultimately, I don't really care very much about the business, about the technology in and of itself. What's important is the music and the fans. What's incredible about what's happening is that the line between connecting the musician and the fans has been shortened. Everything has gotten much simpler. And yes, if you go back to 1790 and the [copyright clause], in those days you had to incentivize the middleman because otherwise the artist, the writer would not have gotten heard, would not have had an audience. He would have had an audience as big as the number of people you could get within earshot. Technologies over the years, be it recording broadcasting technology, be it piano-rolls, jukeboxes, cable TV, MTV, cassettes, 8-tracks, CDs, etcetera, have all effectively widened the audience that an artist could talk to, could sing to. This has come full circle, because now the same machine that I have in my back room which I can use to record my music is the same exact machine that my audience has got on their desk. I can hit a button and I can connect the dots immediately. Suddenly, we don't need to incentivize the middleman anymore?there is a way for me to get heard without giving control of everything that I do over to the middleman. So it's all very well to talk about the founding fathers, but I think you have to keep a little perspective on the historical progress of copyright acts and so on. One thing is that they can't possibly keep in step with the advances in technology. I mean, technology and the business around technology?which we're in the center of right here in Silicon Valley?moves so much faster than legislation can move, than politics can move. We have to take for granted that that is going to be the case, and that there will always be a lag every time a new technology changes the rules again. There is going to be a lag before the whole infrastructure around it catches up. And that means that we're on this kind of cusp right now, because we're going over to this massive digital distribution in music, where the middleman is no longer there to control the distribution. They are there to perhaps help artists and the audience find each other in a more constructive way. Helping the audience sift through all of the tens of thousands of tracks out there to find the ones that you like, that's going to be the roles of the middlemen. They don't want to be controlling it anymore. The cusp that we're on at the moment is one. For example, I would love to have a personal flying car like the Jetsons. But the thing is, if a guy who is an inventor calls tomorrow and says, 'I've got it, I've built the flying car,' that doesn't mean I can just hop in it and fly around. A lot of other things have to fall into place before that becomes a reality. There is air traffic control, terrorism, pollution, and those other things have to be figured out. The existence of the technology, the invention of the technology is not it, in and of itself. What has happened since Napster and since Internet distribution is that a bunch of musicians like myself, who signed deals and created music in a period where the only way to go was find a major label that would get us on the radio, press our records, get us in the stores?put out these pieces of plastic and there was a copyright notice in every one of them. If somebody took my record out of its folder and put it in their computer and ripped a file and shared it with all of their friends and now it's gone, it's out of the door. You can't get the toothpaste back in the tube. Years and years of music, a perfect snapshot of that music now exists on millions of hard drives all around the world and we're never going to get that back under our control again. That's the music industry. What does this mean going forward? A couple of things. Firstly, a lot of people get very pissed off. Not only the ones who feel like they've been looted as I sometimes do, but also the intermediaries who used to control that and now no longer have a grip on it. They have no control over this or where it is going. But on the positive side, creative people like myself feel this huge weight lifted by the fact that we're no longer going to have to live our lives based on the way the music industry ha us live our lives. That's fantastic, that's so empowering as an artist, the idea that tonight when I get home, I can go and finish up a song, maybe write a new second verse for that thing I've been working on. Three o'clock in the morning, that sounds pretty good, hit a button, boom, it's on iTunes. Get some sleep, wake up in the morning, I've got 399 sales on iTunes. That's fantastic, to live like that is a dream for an artist. I even believe that giving away a certain amount of my music and letting people distribute it freely is actually ultimately good for me as well. What I don't want is to have somebody else tell me what terms I should do it on. I don't want a Sean Fanning or any other innovator who creates something and puts it out there that allows people to steal the stuff that I did back when I was signed to Capitol/EMI records for everything I did. So that I'm not comfortable with, but I am very, very optimistic about how this is going to be going forward. I think of a kid in high school now doing this stuff, the range of possibilities that's open to them if they want to make a living as a musician is really very good. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 13:21:30 -0700 From: "Keith Stansell" Subject: Re: Alloy: Another Thomas interview This reminds me of something I heard about the recent Grammy winner. I forgot the artists' name, but they were saying the extraordinary thing about her Grammy win was that it was the first Grammy winner that was completely self-produced and promoted without a major label. Her album was only sold online (I'm guessing CD Baby or something like that). I'll have to look that up - it was an interesting tidbit and reflects the changing nature of the industry. - -Keith ----- Original Message ----- From: Elaine To: alloy@smoe.org Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 11:15 AM Subject: Alloy: Another Thomas interview Muscling Out Music's Middlemen http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=7954_0_1_0_C Martin Pichinson, a former music manager who now restructures and liquidates companies (including many Silicon Valley startups), moderates a Churchill Club panel on technology, IP, and copyright in the music industry. Martin Pichinson: Thomas, you're on the cutting edge, figuring out where technology is going and using it and pushing it. In your eyes, with the musicians you talk to, the people you work with, where do you see everything going? Thomas Dolby: (Mr. Dolby is a musician and technologist.) The first thing is I'm very optimistic about where it's going. Ultimately, I don't really care very much about the business, about the technology in and of itself. What's important is the music and the fans. What's incredible about what's happening is that the line between connecting the musician and the fans has been shortened. Everything has gotten much simpler. And yes, if you go back to 1790 and the [copyright clause], in those days you had to incentivize the middleman because otherwise the artist, the writer would not have gotten heard, would not have had an audience. He would have had an audience as big as the number of people you could get within earshot. Technologies over the years, be it recording broadcasting technology, be it piano-rolls, jukeboxes, cable TV, MTV, cassettes, 8-tracks, CDs, etcetera, have all effectively widened the audience that an artist could talk to, could sing to. This has come full circle, because now the same machine that I have in my back room which I can use to record my music is the same exact machine that my audience has got on their desk. I can hit a button and I can connect the dots immediately. Suddenly, we don't need to incentivize the middleman anymore?there is a way for me to get heard without giving control of everything that I do over to the middleman. So it's all very well to talk about the founding fathers, but I think you have to keep a little perspective on the historical progress of copyright acts and so on. One thing is that they can't possibly keep in step with the advances in technology. I mean, technology and the business around technology?which we're in the center of right here in Silicon Valley?moves so much faster than legislation can move, than politics can move. We have to take for granted that that is going to be the case, and that there will always be a lag every time a new technology changes the rules again. There is going to be a lag before the whole infrastructure around it catches up. And that means that we're on this kind of cusp right now, because we're going over to this massive digital distribution in music, where the middleman is no longer there to control the distribution. They are there to perhaps help artists and the audience find each other in a more constructive way. Helping the audience sift through all of the tens of thousands of tracks out there to find the ones that you like, that's going to be the roles of the middlemen. They don't want to be controlling it anymore. The cusp that we're on at the moment is one. For example, I would love to have a personal flying car like the Jetsons. But the thing is, if a guy who is an inventor calls tomorrow and says, 'I've got it, I've built the flying car,' that doesn't mean I can just hop in it and fly around. A lot of other things have to fall into place before that becomes a reality. There is air traffic control, terrorism, pollution, and those other things have to be figured out. The existence of the technology, the invention of the technology is not it, in and of itself. What has happened since Napster and since Internet distribution is that a bunch of musicians like myself, who signed deals and created music in a period where the only way to go was find a major label that would get us on the radio, press our records, get us in the stores?put out these pieces of plastic and there was a copyright notice in every one of them. If somebody took my record out of its folder and put it in their computer and ripped a file and shared it with all of their friends and now it's gone, it's out of the door. You can't get the toothpaste back in the tube. Years and years of music, a perfect snapshot of that music now exists on millions of hard drives all around the world and we're never going to get that back under our control again. That's the music industry. What does this mean going forward? A couple of things. Firstly, a lot of people get very pissed off. Not only the ones who feel like they've been looted as I sometimes do, but also the intermediaries who used to control that and now no longer have a grip on it. They have no control over this or where it is going. But on the positive side, creative people like myself feel this huge weight lifted by the fact that we're no longer going to have to live our lives based on the way the music industry ha us live our lives. That's fantastic, that's so empowering as an artist, the idea that tonight when I get home, I can go and finish up a song, maybe write a new second verse for that thing I've been working on. Three o'clock in the morning, that sounds pretty good, hit a button, boom, it's on iTunes. Get some sleep, wake up in the morning, I've got 399 sales on iTunes. That's fantastic, to live like that is a dream for an artist. I even believe that giving away a certain amount of my music and letting people distribute it freely is actually ultimately good for me as well. What I don't want is to have somebody else tell me what terms I should do it on. I don't want a Sean Fanning or any other innovator who creates something and puts it out there that allows people to steal the stuff that I did back when I was signed to Capitol/EMI records for everything I did. So that I'm not comfortable with, but I am very, very optimistic about how this is going to be going forward. I think of a kid in high school now doing this stuff, the range of possibilities that's open to them if they want to make a living as a musician is really very good. ------------------------------ End of alloy-digest V10 #12 ***************************