Aaron Carey

The other night I got to go to a really cool music event hosted by Wired magazine at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden.

I hadn’t realised quite how ‘exclusive’ the event was until I got there. I entered through a non-descript door in a brick wall with a heavy looking man in a suit outside, I’d only realised it was the entrance when some people around me started talking about the event and asked the suited man-guard if they were in the right place. The door opened onto a smart reception area and I was ushered upstairs and into a mood-lit bar, half full of men in suits sipping intriguingly coloured cocktails. I felt like I’d accidentally stumbled into a scene from a Dan Brown novel.

As I walked in the first thing I noticed was a stereo system hooked up to one of those build-your-own LED controlled ‘synth in a box’ kits. I was immediately drawn to it, as was a distinguished looking business-type in an expensive looking suit. We both struggled with the kit for a while and shared a friendly exchange, failing to make any cool noises, before realising something wasn’t connected properly and moving on to the next toy. I must wonder what he thought of me with my jeans and tshirt and cheap rucksack!

I played with a few more of the exhibits: a Korg mini-piano (surprisingly responsive and easy to play!), the wired app for ipad and so on, and picked up the first (of many) free cocktails from the bar. There were also some really cool music gadgets that I got to play with. I’ve been really interested in Human Computer Interaction and how it relates to new musical control interfaces since my degree, and I got to play with two devices which I’d read several papers on already. The eigenharp was the first: a kind of everything in one musical controller: it’s a long stick with about 200 tiny keys on, all of which respond to touch, direction and gesture, ribbon controllers on the side and an optional breath controller on the top. As a concept it’s very cool, you can literally set it up any way you want and do pretty much anything with it. I kind of wonder if adding in some limitations might make it more musically useful or interesting. The very fact that you can’t blow a violin, or pluck a piano make those instruments what they are. I think in a way, limitation forces you to innovate within the confines of the instrument and pushes expressive development. I guess in the Eigenharp’s case it’s up to the user to impose their own limitations (in the form of scales for the buttons, synth patches, assigning the ribbon controller to effects and so on).

Next up I tried out a Reactable: basically a multi-touch tabletop surface on which you can place physical blocks which represent different synthesis components such as oscillators, filters, sample players and so on. It was really cool.. especially after a few cocktails! The step sequencers and samplers actually allowed you to build up fairly complex musical compositions, the demo we had really blew me away: the Reactable has become a real serious musical tool, hopefully something more mainstream DJs will start experimenting with!

The best musical toy of the night was ably demonstrated by Imogen Heap. She gave a performance of a song from her upcoming album, performed and manipulated entirely with a pair of gloves. They included some wrist mounted microphones, gyros and accelerometers and allowed her to throw the sound around the stereo field, control effects, volume and even virtual instruments. The performance was spectacular, even in a tiny room, and had the audience captivated. I had a chat to her about it afterwards and it seems the data handling was done via Max/MSP, and she performed to a click which allowed the gloves to change modes at pre-determined intervals. Still, it was awesome!

Probably one of the nicest co-incidences of the night was having someone notice my Aquabats t-shirt. It turns out the guy is a writer for Kerrang magazine and also used to play in a ska/punk band in Bradford! Amazingly we’d both seen each others bands and knew lots of the same people on the ‘scene’. It was really great catching up and reliving old times, hopefully a friendship was born..

I’m trying to force myself to blog a bit more regularly.. lets see how that works out!

So recently I quit my job.

In January I stopped working freelance and took up an internship at EMI. I’ve always been passionate about music and I figured this would be an amazing opportunity to work in the industry. I started off managing competitions and customer relationship management (CRM). In the darker moments I had to participate in ‘seeding’ (you don’t want to know), but I was quickly promoted to a Digital Marketing Assistant and worked in several different teams, creating digital content for obscure frontline artists up to bands like the Beatles. I devised and built white-lableable facebook applications for competitions so on which were used by everyone from Eliza Doolittle to Now That’s What I Call Music.

Soon I was moved to the company’s Central Team which deals with overall digital strategy for EMI, digital marketing best practices and revitalising the digital revenues of core catalogue artists. Currently I’ve been working on initiatives around Amazon, Facebook, YouTube and more. I’ve been in meetings with Google execs, privy to deals with Apple.. it’s all been very exciting, kind of.

I love music because I love music. Now that might sound like a strange thing to say, but when people tell you the music business is just that: a music Business, it’s true. I was transported back to my business modules at university: vaguely interesting, but ultimately not very challenging. (I nearly wrote something here about a monkey with a textbook, which I think probably would have been a little unfair: I do understand that there is some skill involved in ‘business’, but a lot of it does boil down to common sense, some people skills, and some knowledge of corporate structure or the area in which you’re working)

As my initial contract at EMI started to draw to an end I was looking for other employment and was offered a position in Research and Development at Double Negative (a special effects company, know for their work on Harry Potter, Inception and more). On announcing this, I was offered a £10k pay rise and the chance to pick my own job title (within reason ;)) to stay with EMI. Needless to say I had a pretty tough decision to make!

In the end I’ve decided to go with the R&D job. I just think it’s more ‘me’. I realised if I continued at EMI I could end up (possibly) as another record label executive, which sounds cool, but in reality really isn’t that exciting. I know eventually I might end up being another suit somewhere making decisions about strategy and planning and how we can squeeze that last bit of revenue out of another YouTube channel; but for now, while I’m still young(ish),  want to actually DO the cool stuff that the managers are talking about: I want to be CREATING the content (or blowing stuff up in special effects ;)) that they’re trying to increase the revenue on. I want my job to challenge me, I want it to be fun, and.. most importantly of all..

I want to work in an office where people aren’t all into ‘cool’ music.

Eurgh.

I had a really awesome time last weekend introducing lots of kids to music. Cara teaches at a music school on Saturday mornings and they were having an open day for children and parents to come in and try out instruments and things. The only problem was, all the teachers were teaching at the time, so they had to drag in me and a couple of other hardy volunteers to demonstrate everything and answer questions.

On Friday evening I was really panicked, I thought I was going to have to stand up in front of groups of parents and demo a range of random instruments that I’m barely qualified to play, let alone teach. I dashed around the flat looking for my trumpet and french horn, and desperately tried to remember where I’d hidden my last unbroken oboe reed. I hastily printed off fingering charts for flute, oboe, horn and trumpet and lamented at my awful tone and limited grasp of C major. What kind of impression was I going to give to all the prospective parents? Eventually I decided our neighbours had probably had enough of my squawking and gave up for the evening.

In the morning we got to the school early so Cara could start her teaching and I was thrown into setting up. We were presented with a classroom littered with half-sized (and some grownup sized!) instruments, oboes, a flute, trombone, trumpet, cornet, saxophones, clarinet and so on.. panic set in as we arranged the tables and I tried to swat up using my badly drawn brass fingering chart.

Soon people started to arrive, and it became clear that I needn’t have worried too much(!) Rather than big groups of parents, most came in dribs and drabs and thankfully nobody expected any mozart out of me!

It was really great fun basically telling kids to blow a raspberry and then shoving a trumpet in their face, the look of startled achievement on some of their faces was priceless! It was also quite funny watching the parents too, a lot of them you could tell desperately wanted a sneaky go, and many of them tried it.. although a lot of the time the kids did a lot better than they did!

I also noticed I’d missed playing the sax quite a lot, I really should get it out and practice more. Also getting a flute might be fun.. I hadn’t played one in a while and you can make some cool noises on them! (check out this beatboxing flute guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59ZX5qdIEB0 )

Also playing the oboe is a bitch.

So the other day I was in a meeting at work with the IFPI (International Federation for the Phonographic Industry), these are the guys who work on behalf of the record industry to put pressure on governments to block piracy and who sue the crap out of Metallica fans and so on. After the meeting I was angry and pissed off, phrases like ‘the carrot doesn’t work, you need the stick’ were used and this irritated me.

I was all ready to write about how the major labels are completely missing the point but I thought I’d do a bit of research first.

As I now work for a major label, it’s in my interests for the company to be profitable and this bugs me. It seems music piracy has been around for a long time now and I wasn’t sure that the stick was the answer. Even if it was, I think it’s come about a bit late. Firstly just to be clear, when I talk about piracy I’m referring to what they call ‘domestic piracy’: that’s when you or I go and download a song without paying for it, or copy a CD from a friend, or copy a tape (remember those?), I’m very much against the organised counterfeiting of tapes, CDs and DVDs (although you could probably argue that I’m being a massive hypocrite here but I don’t care!).

The introduction of the affordable tape dubbing machine allowed people to quickly and easily copy albums, make mix tapes, record the radio and so on. The industry didn’t seem too worried, but it looks like they should’ve been, at the height of their sales in 1989: 83 million pre-recorded tapes (albums and so on, made by the major labels) were sold in the UK. One year later in 1990, 95 million blank tapes were sold. Now considering they had pretty much only one use: recording music onto; this cannot have been a good thing for the music industry, so where was the stick back then? If you wanted to nip piracy in the bud (or in fact in full flower it would seem), this would have seemed like a good time to do it. Get it into people’s heads that copying music is not cool and could results in fines. If this had happened at the time, perhaps now copying a CD or downloading the latest Lady Gaga album without paying for it would actually feel like a crime. http://www.dixonsretail.com/layout.aspx?ID=e0b40890-459b-4e35-a2e8-16fe9 a8781c7&CatID=c7b3b0f4-c2c8-4c48-994f-1e57e444b9a9 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wBAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA52&lpg=PA52&dq=blan k+tapes+sold+1990&source=bl&ots=RqM06EzuI4&sig=dCluKm2O_pu7Znf1zgcaaYK1M rY&hl=en&ei=gVDWTfiEFo2cOpaJwbEH&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6& ved=0CGsQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=blank%20tapes%20sold%201990&f=false

Now around the same time, the carrot was invented: the Compact Disc. CDs were high quality, durable, you didn’t have to turn them over and, importantly: difficult to copy. The industry revelled in sales of the new format, reversing the decline it had been in since the peak of vinyl sales in the late 70s. By 1994 things were looking good, but CD-Rs were just starting to get affordable to a home consumer and began to take off in a big way towards the end of the 90s. No longer did you have to make low quality copies on a tape machine, now you could record whole albums in pristine quality on your own computer. By 1999 CD-R sales were at half a billion and rose to over 1 billion in 2000. Memorex alone was forecasting selling 1.46 Billion CD-Rs in 2001. Now admittedly not all of these CDs were being used to record music onto, but now the industry was catching on.

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-charts-explain-the-real-death-of-th e-music-industry-2011-2 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/copying-albums-for-free- on-cd-burners-cuts-worldwide-music-sales-629961.html http://www.geek.com/articles/news/sales-of-blank-cds-are-soaring-2001032 /

Just on queue the IFPI jumped in with lots of swashbuckling and anti-piracy enforcement, and some scary reports on how much revenue was being lost. Now the war really began. http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_news/20010928.html Along came Napster and Kazaa and all the others, and the lawsuits began. Interestingly (as a side note) there were several lawsuits against ‘link sites’ and sites ‘which had provided links to infringing MP3 files’ which were upheld and the sites were ordered to pay damages - Compare this to today’s battle with DMCA requests on Google, and the rulings of several courts in Google’s favour. Also the cases against mininova, isoHunt and of course The Pirate Bay.

http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/Piracy2000.pdf Google weighs in on copyright infringement: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110221/01523213181/google-finally-get s-involved-torrent-search-engine-lawsuit-just-to-reject-red-flag-dmca-vi olations.shtml < ts-involved-torrent-search-engine-lawsuit-just-to-reject-red-flag-dmca-v iolations> Google counter-sues a Blues label over linking to copyright infringement: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/why-google-sued-a-tiny-b lues-music-label.ars < blues-music-label>

But despite the lawsuits, shut downs, DMCAs and so on the trend was there, people had been copying music since the 80s and weren’t going to stop. The problem is that so far the industry has seemed more interested in the stick than the carrot and we’re only just starting to see a shift towards embracing licensing of streaming and other innovative digital services. Traditionally all the money has been made on album sales, with singles being used mainly as promotional tools. But as consumer behaviour has changed, business models have been slow to adapt and so the industry has seen a massive slowdown. Now the focus is much more on buying or listening to single tracks, compiling playlists (mix tapes anyone?) and not so much on listening to a whole album in one sitting. We are bombarded with music all the time, in advertising, films, TV shows and on the radio, across the internet and so on. We don’t directly pay for any of this music, so it’s understandable that people might come to the conclusion that music SHOULD be free, or at least priced accordingly.

The CD carrot seemed to work well for the industry at the time but it needs to keep innovating in order to stay ahead. It looks like affordable, easy to use streaming and download music services might be the lifeboat floating on the pirate infested sea. Revenues are building in other areas such as sync, licensing deals, touring and merchandise, video streams and so on. So lets embrace our carrots, and let the sticks rest a little.

-

On Sunday Cara and I went to (amongst other places) the Mayfair Hotel to have Cocktails and Cupcakes for a treat. It’s surprisingly good value, under £20 for a coktail and 3 delicious freshly baked cupcakes, soon it became even better value: We ordered our delicious tea-themed cocktails which were delivered fairly promptly, however we were told that as the cupcakes were being freshly baked we may have to wait a little longer. If we had to wait more than 20 minutes, we would be given ‘something complimentary’. So, excitedly, we waited and sipped, and watched the spoilt rich kids and business lunches happening around us.

Fifteen minutes passed, still no cupcakes.

The tension mounted, would we get our ‘something complimentary’? What would it be? Extra cupcakes? Cake? Who knew.. Eventually the waitress arrived to announce that as we had been waiting so long we could choose any cocktail we wanted for free. I eagerly asked for a cocktail menu and poured over the pages and pages of combinations.

Eventually the ‘May Fair Martini’ caught my eye: ‘Cognac from the 19th Century combined with the finest blah blah..’ (I can’t remember what it said exactly, but it sounded pretty good), and I saw the price: £150 a glass. Nice. A drink in the hotel bar could set you back more than a week in Ibiza.

When the waitress came back I asked whether the offer extended to the May Fair Martini (assuming she would instantly say no), she wasn’t sure and went to check with the manager. A minute or so later she came back, and to our surprise said ‘Yes we can do that for you, would you both like one?’

After a short pause in disbelief we quickly re-grouped and replied: ‘er, yes, ok?’

Immediately I got nervous, we were about to drink £150. What does £150 taste like? And more importantly: what happens if we had understood wrong and the waitress just thought we were ordering the drinks, and would expect us to cough up £300 afterwards!

After a few minutes of nervous anticipation the waitress re-appeared and we held our breathe as she announced: ‘I’m really sorry, actually we can’t do that, the manager has changed his mind.’ We breathed a sigh of relief and re-ordered some equally delicious Moet and Chandon cocktails with a much lower price-tag, but it got me wondering: what WOULD £150 have tasted like?

As we whiled away the afternoon I watched some rather snooty ‘rich types’ complaining about all sorts of minor things and being given free food and drinks and so on. I wonder if we had put up more of a fight if in fact we COULD have tasted the cocktail holy grail? I don’t know how I’d actually feel drinking something that costs more than I used to be paid for a week’s wages. What must it be like to earn so much that you could order such a drink without a second thought? I think even if I was in a position to afford it I’d still think twice before guzzling the 19th century cognac. Maybe not though, who knows? -

Over the weekend it was my friend James’ birthday and we went over to his house to celebrate before heading into town. Whilst we were there he had the football on (on a TV which was larger than the land mass of Belgium, but that’s not crucial to the story), turns out it was a really important match in the premier league. Now I know nothing about football, I don’t have anything against it, but I just don’t really care about it (sorry), so this was a bit of an education for me.

Turns out football is mostly about men falling over, clutching their leg/head/face where it ‘hurts’, shouting at the referee, then when the referee ignores them or rules against them suddenly forgetting about the previous leg/head/face injury and running off ready to fall over all over again. Thrilling stuff.

After 90 odd minutes of men falling over and one whole goal the match was over and the presenters readied themselves to talk non-sense for another hour or so about the match to fill up some more air time. But then… we changed the channel… and THERE WAS ANOTHER GAME ON! Turns out THIS game was the FA cup final (it seems it was a pretty awesome weekend for football fans).

I enquired about this, apparently not all networks are allowed to show all the games, so different games go out on different networks. Makes sense. Also, there are 3 games a day usually on TV, 1pm, 3pm and then another one in the evening. I asked if this meant you can watch constant football all day on Saturdays all through the season. I was informed that yes, sometimes you can, and ocasionally on Sundays too, but not always, some matches can’t be shown on UK TV. ‘So you can’t just waste your whole weekend watching men falling over?’ I asked,

‘Oh no, if the matches can’t be shown on Sky, then they have this show where the presenters watch the matches for you and you watch them.’

I paused for a moment in disbelief.

‘So you watch people, watching football?’

‘Yeah, sometimes the presenters are at the game itself too, but they can’t show you the action so the cameras point off to the side towards the wall.’

This is truly amazing, football is SO popular that people will PAY (it’s on Sky sports, an expensive subscription channel), to watch people watching football.

I wonder what this would be like in any other entertainment format:

Remember ‘This program was filmed in front of a live studio audience’? Well how about watching: ‘This program IS the live studio audience.’

Do you like music on the radio? How about instead of the DJ fading up a song for broadcast, he simply faded it up in his headphones, maybe sang along a little (actually I think Chris Moyles would probably love to do this..).

Or what about in the cinema? You could have a row at the front, facing away from the screen so you could watch the rest of the audience’s reaction. No? No one else think this’ll work? Guess it’s just football then. -

So I’m going to force myself to post here. I don’t have anything particularly interesting to report, I haven’t been doing much interesting, but I’m going to do it. That’s what this blogging thing is all about right? The inordinarily dull, the mundane, the snapshot into someone else’s existence?

Whatever.

Anyway, last night I was super super tired, the new South Park barely passed me by. It was the royal wedding episode.. I’ve not been super thrilled by the new series but I think I might need to give them another viewing to really get the hidden nuances? The Human centiPad did make me want to vomit though, I think that’s possibly their most disgusting episode yet. Bravo. Nice memories of hosting a TV on Comedy Central with that comedian guy, I forget his name. Maybe I could blog about that some day. That’d be interesting.

At work I’ve hopefully (FINALLY) finished this tag generation software I’ve been working on, it’s taken about 2 weeks and today I got the first ‘OK’ from one of the product managers. Basically it means my algorithm is ok and knows it’s Beatles from its David Bowie.

Also I thought I got retweeted by Chris Martin yesterday. Turned out I didn’t. Was exciting for a few minutes though.

This is good. I feel like by writing down all these boring things I’ve achieved something. Nothing particularly useful but still. 

a guitar

I keep meaning to blog. I’ve even set one up before and written in it a few times, but I always start and never finish. There’s too much pressure: write about something interesting, write often, make a statement, share your ideas. I start off with all these great plans but it soon becomes unmanageable.

So I’ve turned to this. Apparently tumblr is a ‘mixed media’ blog, so there’s no pressure to write anything interesting and I can just update with pictures of cats if it all gets too overwhelming.

I’ve been wanting to blog for a few reasons. Occasionally I do do interesting things, not walking on the moon interesting or curing cancer interesting, but mildly interesting and entertaining. I’d like to share that with the world, with you, dear reader.

Also I’d like to share it with myself. I have a really really bad memory for stuff that happens, people I meet, places I go. I think if I start writing it all down then in years to come I can read it, look at the pictures and (hopefully) remember.

So I guess this is like a diary, but open to the world, and open to you dear reader.