Archive for January, 2012

Happy feats: Music innovations that will make your life better

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

From pedal bicycles to ATMs, from telephones to TVs, from fridges to, er, flushable toilets… Scotland has a proud history of invention and innovation. This long and distinguished heritage even extends to music. It was a Scot (John Broadwood) who gave the world the first piano footpedal, you know.

Let’s look at a few new projects that could shape how music in this country and beyond is commercialised for tourism, heard at gigs and purchased.

MUSICAL MYSTERY TOUR THAT PUTS A CITY ON THE MAP

Glasgow’s music pedigree is enviably rich and ceaselessly wonderful, yet the one detail its natives are most reminded about is that Oasis were “discovered” at King Tut’s. Whatever.

Thankfully this piece of neuro-numbing trivia only makes up a teeny-tiny segment of Walking Heads’ Glasgow Music Tour.

The 4½ hour audio walking tour, which is split into 60 chapters, is presented by Jim Gellatly and features interviews with the likes of Vic Galloway, Billy Sloan, Stuart Braithwaite and Emma Pollock to keep you entertained and informed as you navigate the city’s gum-addled streets on a culture-quenching mission.

The venture is the brainchild of Radio Magnetic parent company Inner Ear, who have already produced an Edinburgh Comedy Tour.

The Glasgow Music Tour will be available to download for just £1.99 from January 30 as an audio-only mp3 and as smartphone apps for iPhone and Android. Check out these previews:

Glasgow Music Tour: Teaser Route 1 by Walkingheads

Glasgow Music Tour: Teaser Route 2 by Walkingheads

Glasgow Music Tour: Teaser Route 3 by Walkingheads

Glasgow Music Tour: Teaser Route 4 by Walkingheads

The Walking Heads team will be giving a talk at Glasgow’s Citizen M Hotel at 8.30am on January 26 to mark the Scottish Music Industry Association’s first Monthly Music Meet Up.

ROCK CONCERTS THAT WON’T UPSET THE NEIGHBOURS

Silent discos are a common sight at summer music festivals, providing a party for headphone-wearing clubbers without the need to worry about noise disturbance or curfew restrictions.

Silent concerts which feature the combined sound of live instruments being transmitted into headphones would surely be a much more complicated feat to pull off. However, Falkirk-based Silentgig are fast changing that perception.

Run by Chris McCarron, a former touring sound engineer, Silentgig came into being in April 2011. After a few successful trial events they decided to test the market by persuading The View to play a gig to 200 fans at the Overgate shopping centre car park in Dundee in July 2011.

They have had major support and endorsements from Sennheiser, Allen & Heath, Marshall and Gibson, which culminated in Silentgig securing a contract with AEG Live for the December Sessions – the world’s largest free music festival – at The 02 in London in December 2011. Silentgig catered for 100 bands over 20 nights.

Director McCarron uses a team of about 10 freelancers – audio and lighting engineers, production managers, stage managers, back-line technicians, IT and graphics technicians, and financial and administration consultants.

Their next job will see them take care of a run of silent opera performances of La Boheme in London’s Old Vic Tunnels in February as part of a documentary being filmed for Sky Arts.

Silentgig have had approaches from Live Nation and other promoters, and there is interest from the corporate sector regarding specialised events around the London Olympics. They are also in the final stages of securing research partners for further developments in the fields of rehabilitation and medical research.

Look out for an April launch in Glasgow, as well as showcase events at the Apple Store and Glasgow Science Centre.

SELLING DIGITAL IN A PHYSICAL WORLD

There’s no better place for a band to persuade a fan to part with hard cash than at a gig. Emotions are running high, folded notes are only a pocket or handbag away.

The problem is that physical formats such as CDs aren’t cheap to produce and most fans who do buy them will probably end up ripping the tracks into mp3s for digital consumption.

So how can an artist combine the opportunity to sell their music in a physical world with a fan’s preference for non-physical music? Simple: sell them a more desirable piece of merch that does both jobs.

Glasgow-based T-shirt company Jetpace Industries have created Inklink, which puts a unique and secure digital download code onto every piece of memorabilia such as T-shirts, hoodies, belts, bags and hats.

The initiative means bands now have an alternative format for releasing their music: a band T-shirt, with a screen-printed Inklink to their latest track(s), album or video.

Jetpace director Tim Pearson said: “The Inklink idea arose as we pondered two factors. First, how hard it is for bands to sell their music on CD. And second, how increasingly reliant bands are on T-shirt and other merchandise sales. Integrating download codes into T-shirt designs seemed an inspired, cool and natural solution.”

RM Hubbert’s Inklink merch will go on sale for the first time at the launch show for his new album Thirteen Lost & Found at Glasgow’s Stereo on January 27.

I Build Collapsible Mountains’ Inklink T-shirts are due to go on sale soon and will link to two exclusive tracks, Song From That Never Scene and Double Dare.

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The best Scottish music photo of 2011

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Thanks to everyone who showed an interest in The Pop Cop’s fourth annual competition to find the Best Scottish live music photograph of the past year.

There were 72 entries and these are the ones judge Harry Benson picked out as his favourites, with the winner bagging a pair of tickets to three different music festivals – Belladrum, Loopallu and Insider – plus two Golden Tickets to all the King Tut’s Summer Nights gigs, not to mention their photograph displayed on this website’s sidebar for 12 months.

(Click on the individual photos to enlarge them)

WINNER

Photographer: Bob Mather (Broxburn) (website)
Subject: Joe Elliott, Def Leppard
Location: SECC, Glasgow; December 9, 2011

Bob Mather: “I was shooting freelance for Universal News & Sport and was a last-minute stand-in for this gig (I only usually shoot in Edinburgh). I was looking forward to it as I’m a secret Def Leppard fan and bit of a rocker myself. There was a runway coming out into the middle of the crowd and I already had the bread and butter press shots so decided to try and get a bit of atmosphere into the shot. I ran round the side of the runway as Joe Elliott walked down it and put his arms straight out, so I shot backwards towards the crowd. This was taken with my back-up Nikon D7000 and Sigma 18-50mm manually exposed f2.8 at iso500 f3.2 1/320. I’ve never seen this amount of light at a gig before and found it difficult for that reason.”
Harry Benson: “There is energy and yet there is a calmness about the photograph as well. Of course, there’s the ruler/subject or preacher/flock that can be read into the photograph. I like the fact that the audience is in the photograph as I like to see as much of the environment of a photo as possible. It gives a sense of place and time.”

2ND PLACE

Photographer: Euan Robertson (Glasgow) (website)
Subject: Flavor Flav, Public Enemy
Location: ABC1, Glasgow; September 6, 2011

Euan Robertson: “I had been asked to go along to the Public Enemy gig for a magazine I sometimes shoot for. At that point I wasn’t typically a big hip-hop fan, but knowing what a massive band they are, and that they would inevitably have a great show to photograph, going along was a bit of a no-brainer. Straight from the off it was difficult to know where to point the lens with so much happening on stage, those guys definitely know how to work the crowd. They were great to all of the many, many photographers in the pit as well with Flavor Flav getting right down to the front of the stage and playing to the cameras. He got right into my camera for a couple of seconds – I managed to fire a couple of shots, missed focus on the first, and nailed the second. I’m pretty delighted with how it came out. It’s one of my personal favourites from 2011, and probably the shot that has had the most attention over the year as well.”
Harry Benson: “Despite what I said earlier about showing the environment in a photograph, I chose this one because even though it is a close-up, so much information about the subject is included in the photograph. It is a striking portrait.”

JOINT 3RD PLACE

Photographer: Jessica Newell (Oldham) (website)
Subject: Murray, Macleod, The Xcerts
Location: Cafe Drummond, Aberdeen; April 6, 2011

Jessica Newell: “I love to see bands play hometown gigs and I’m a huge Xcerts fan so I decided to travel the 300 or so miles up to Aberdeen to see them at Cafe Drummond. As it’s a smaller venue I chanced taking my camera along for fun. The venue was heaving and in between getting crushed and falling onto the stage I got some photos I was proud of. I chose to enter this shot as I really like it (I rarely really like my own photos) and it brings back memories of a fantastic gig.”
Harry Benson: “The photographer did not hold back, but got in a good position to take a dramatic photograph without letting the crowd interfere with her work.”

JOINT 3RD PLACE

Photographer: George Mackie (Aberdeenshire) (website)
Subject: Tinie Tempah
Location: AECC, Aberdeen; November 13, 2011

George Mackie: “I’ve been photographing live music for over a year and a half now so it’s good to make progress to get to shoot the ‘big gigs’ but I still enjoy the smaller venue stuff just as much. The bigger shows do (usually) have better lighting and so on which makes the photographer’s mission that little easier, however I’d like to think I’d have entered this pic even if it was a local, unknown band. I enjoy trying to capture jump shots but managing to do so whilst the singer is still singing is a little unusual. I think so anyway. The lighting going on behind Tinie also did me a favour.”
Harry Benson: “Good clear shot of the singer suspended in air like he was floating down from the sky. You stop to look at this photograph.”

Honourable mentions

Jade Esson - Twin Atlantic (The Forum, Aberdeen; December 11, 2011)

Thomas Slack - Ghostface Killah (The Liquid Room, Edinburgh; November 9, 2011)

Al Donnelly - Texas (Belladrum Festival, Inverness; August 5, 2011)

Emily Wylde – The Seventeenth Century (Bloc, Glasgow; November 25, 2011)

George Mackie - Les Savy Fav (The Tunnels, Aberdeen; March 1, 2011)

Chelsea Cochrane - Twin Atlantic (HMV, Glasgow; May 6, 2011)

Thanks to the following competition sponsors, who supplied the prizes for the winner:

Check out the previous winning photographs from John Lewis (2008), Su Anderson (2009) and Steve Perks (2010).

About our judge: Glasgow-born Harry Benson has photographed every US president from Eisenhower to Obama, as well as musicians such as The Beatles, Michael Jackson, The Rolling Stones, James Brown and Amy Winehouse. He was awarded the CBE in 2009 for his services to photography. Now living in New York, Harry has had 40 gallery and museum solo exhibitions, while 16 books of his photographs have been published. His photographs are in the permanent collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

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Why SOPA + PIPA spell trouble

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Look at their cute wee faces. That’s the Music Alliance Pact team in the montage. I co-ordinate this lot, and each and every one of them are as passionate about the music scene in their countries as I am about mine.

The Music Alliance Pact (MAP) shares free music on the internet once a month through a network of blogs in more than 35 different nations. What we do is 100% legal. All the blogs obtain written permission from the copyright holder before they submit a track for inclusion in MAP and the mp3s are hosted by individual bloggers, which gives us full control over the links we upload. For each month’s edition, I collate these tracks into one zip file which is uploaded to MediaFire, giving readers the choice of downloading MAP songs individually or collectively.

This is a wholly transparent and legitimate process, yet three Music Alliance Pact compilations fell foul of a United States copyright law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) last year.

The compilation for the March 2011 edition was removed by MediaFire under instruction from Seattle-based independent record label Tooth & Nail Records, who filed a DMCA takedown notice and complained that the copyright of Underoath, one of the acts (a “Christian metalcore band” according to Wikipedia) on their roster, had been infringed.

I checked the United States entry for that month’s MAP and was left puzzled when I saw that they had not chosen a song by them or any other Christian metalcore band. In fact, the only mention of Underoath was in the text that accompanied the Singapore submission, in which they were cited as an influence of Caracal, the Singaporean band chosen for March 2011.

Easy mistake to make…. IF YOU HAVE NOT BOTHERED TO LOOK AT WHAT IT IS YOU ARE ACCUSING OF BREAKING THE LAW.

Tooth & Nail Records ignored my email reply.

A few months later, two more MAP compilations were removed after MediaFire received DMCA takedown notices from a sinister-sounding company called DtecNet (“a market leader in supplying our customers with specialized software solutions to track and prevent piracy on their digital content and online business”), operating on behalf of CBS Corporation.

“We have a good faith belief that this material is not authorized by the Rights Owner, its agents or the law,” they warned MediaFire. So MediaFire removed the links. Hmmm, that’s strange, I could have sworn the Music Alliance Pact had permission from all the rights owners.

Here’s how it happened: the June 2011 compilation was removed because DtecNet thought the Danish band Why Don’t We Love Lucy was actually the CBS-distributed TV show I Love Lucy; the August 2011 compilation was also deleted because DtecNet figured that South African band MacGyver Knife must in fact be the CBS television series MacGyver.

Easy mistake to make…. IF YOU HAVE NOT BOTHERED TO LOOK AT WHAT IT IS YOU ARE ACCUSING OF BREAKING THE LAW.

DtecNet also ignored my email reply.

Spot the difference #1

Spot the difference #2

If you think the furore about SOPA and PIPA is just a lot of fuss being made by piracy sympathisers then you couldn’t be more wrong.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) are effectively souped-up versions of the DMCA copyright law, which was originally passed by Bill Clinton’s administration in 1998. DMCA has been abused to the extent that it’s now standard practice for companies to use robot algorithms to identify what it reckons are copyright-infringing links then send out thousands (there were 1,757 MediaFire links in the CBS complaint) of takedown threats at a time, safe in the knowledge that MediaFire, Blogger et al will instantly delete them, no questions asked.

In case you need reminding, it was a DMCA takedown notice filed by Columbia Records that caused The Pop Cop website to be taken offline and deleted in 2010 by Google’s Blogger service, its previous host. That DMCA complaint concerned an mp3 link that hadn’t been active for more than two years. Google, who have been vocal in their anti-SOPA stance, didn’t give a damn.

If you think the power of DMCA has been exploited, just remember that SOPA and PIPA – the two United States congressional bills intended to thwart the online piracy of copyrighted music, films and TV shows – will be a hundred times worse. This video explains why: