Jeffrey McManus

Link: Bebel Gilberto Set for New Tour

"The daughter of Bossa Nova legend Joao Gilberto broke her foot a few weeks ago in New York. She faces a second round of surgery in Rio de Janeiro this week before embarking on a tour U.S. and Canadian tour starting in Miami on May 19. The injury has forced Gilberto and her band to use Internet technology to polish the arrangements for the songs they will perform for the tour which starts in Miami on May 19. ‘The band and I had to finish our rehearsals by Skype but hopefully everything will be fine,’ Gilberto said referring to the Internet telephone network in an interview from her apartment in Rio de Janeiro."

It was most excellent to find this Reuters piece on Bebel Gilberto today, and quite interesting to hear about how she used Skype to rehearse with her band after her foot injury. We have tickets to see her play in San Francisco in May (although this article implies that that show may be cancelled, mega bummer).

I just downloaded her new record, Momento, from eMusic today. I’ve only listened to it once and it sounds terrific, although a little mellower than her previous records. I’m looking forward to the inevitable remixes that always seem to follow a Bebel release.

Link: Patent Fights Are a Legacy of MP3’s Tangled Origins

Microsoft says it was doing the right thing: paying a German rights holder $16 million to license the MP3 audio format, the foundation of the digital music boom. Then an American jury ruled that Microsoft had failed to pay another MP3 patent holder, and slapped it with a $1.52 billion judgment.
But the MP3 toll gates do not end there.

The confusion stems from the number of companies and institutions — including Thomson, Royal Philips Electronics and AT&T (through Bell Labs, now part of Alcatel-Lucent) — that worked to create the MP3 standard almost two decades ago. The patent claims of those and others are increasingly being backed up by aggressive enforcement efforts, including lawsuits and even seizures of music players by customs authorities.

This situation is a mess but the story completely biffs it by failing to mention that there’s a free alternative to MP3. The fact that only twelve people use it is beside the point — It’s as if the reporter did a story on a mass-suicide without asking why all the nice people killed themselves.

The situation with MP3 patents is a very interesting counterpoint to the way that Microsoft has attempted to taint open-source over the years. In the past Microsoft argued (speciously) that there was huge risk for businesses that permitted to let open source anything come within 100 miles of their code base. Now we find that the real threat is not open source but software patents, and, ironically, the biggest victim may be Microsoft itself.

Interesting open letter by Steve Jobs posted over on Apple.com. It’s neat that Steve is coming out so forcefully against DRM since he sells most of it; he lays the blame on record companies, which is sort of like the car dealer blaming the factory for selling you a lemon car. He may not be the prime mover behind iTunes DRM, but his hands are smudged for sure.

Also, this bit struck me as a little off:

"[The big four major labels] control the distribution of over 70% of the
world’s music. When Apple approached these companies to license their
music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely
cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally
copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each
song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so
that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices….

"However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is
that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable
on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix
the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our
iTunes store."

I’m not going to call this statement "disingenuous" but it sure seems fishy to me. Burning DRM music to CD then re-importing it as MP3 (presumably so you can play it on other devices) has been a supported mode of operation for iTunes since the beginning. Why, then, haven’t the music labels lowered the hammer?

It’s almost as if the objective wasn’t to prevent piracy, but instead to cause pain for paying customers. It sure isn’t stopping "music pirates," who presumably have figured out that with five minutes and a CD-RW you can legally unprotect any song ever sold on iTunes. But then there’s this:

"Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no
longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four
music companies."

That may be true, but since Fairplay is easily and legally circumvented today, keeping Fairplay proprietary seems more than anything like a method of defending an oligopoly (as many, including European regulators, have alleged).

"Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded
in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music
purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is
playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for
consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four
music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement
that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only
DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this
DRM-free music."

This sounds like a far-out utopian vision, but we actually don’t have to imagine. We can just look at eMusic, which competes against iTunes as the #2 online music retailer and just happens to be 100% DRM-free. Of course, there is also the venerable DRM-free CD, as Steve points out next:

"In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by
online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely
DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The
music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and
show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming
majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD
players that support no DRM system.

"So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music
DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small
percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to
be none."

This is an excellent point, although the pain-in-the-ass factor associated with ripping a CD is more or less the same as the pain-in-the-ass factor associated burning some DRM music to a CD-RW and ripping it back in some sensible format.

"Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their
energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music
DRM-free."

Which is to say, the Norwegians are going to outlaw your product if you don’t fix it. This is the money shot of Steve’s piece. He’s not talking to his customers — he’s not even talking to record companies (who have undoubtedly heard this message from him and every other seller of DRM-disabled music for years now). Jobs is really talking to European regulators.

I wonder if they actually give a hoot?

Update: Tonight’s NY Times story on this has a hilarious quote from an unnamed music industry executive who says "we’re not going to broadly license our content for unprotected digital distribution." Hello! Ninety percent of the music you sell is licensed for unprotected digital distribution, in the form of compact discs. Which is a fact that Jobs actually pointed out in his letter today. Jeez.

Link: Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music

"As even digital music revenue growth falters because of rampant file-sharing by consumers, the major record labels are moving closer to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions — a step they once vowed never to take.

"Executives of several technology companies meeting here at Midem, the annual global trade fair for the music industry, said over the weekend that at least one of the four major record companies could move toward the sale of unrestricted digital files in the MP3 format within months.

"Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in the MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, cellphones, portable music players and compact discs without limit.

"The independents see providing songs in MP3 partly as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales."

First off, shame on the writer, Victoria Shannon of the NY Times, for mindlessly parroting the music industry coan that any dropoff in music sales must necessarily be a function of evil internet pirates. There are lots of possible reasons for diminishing sales: it could be crappy product, marketing that can’t tear itself away from the playbook written in 1955, or an inability to catch up to the realities of the internet sales channel. (I suspect it’s a combination of all of these.)

The notion of releasing "promotional" singles as MP3s leaves something important unsaid — are they planning on releasing one or two songs as unprotected and leaving DRM on the others? Because if that’s the plan, then no thanks.

As a corollary to all this, I have to say I’m getting a lot of mileage out of my eMusic subscription after signing up a few months ago. Not only is being able to download unprotected MP3s a joy, but their site is extremely well thought out, with lots of bookmarking and discovery features that make browsing for new music a joy.

I’ve been obsessing over this band for the past month after discovering one of their videos on YouTube.

I was all about the punk rock in high school and college, but these days I am listening to a lot less rock than I used to, and I’m not sure how I feel about this. (I’m not sure if it’s my fault or punk rock’s fault.) But when I heard this tune, it basically made my jaw drop open. Here’s another one of their videos from YouTube I just unearthed tonight.

We’ve been giving a lot of airtime at home to this Swedish jazz/poptronica duo lately. They just released a new album; here’s a clip from it. The singer is Yukimi Nagano, who started singing for them when she was just 15 (she must be 18 or 19 now since their first album came out in 2002 — pretty amazing).

I haven’t posted anything to the Music category of the old blog-a-rino lately, not for lack of good stuff (we’ve been spinning Brazilian Girls nonstop in the living room after the kids go to bed and we’re planning on seeing them live in San Francisco in November.)

But! Today it is all about The Baldwin Brothers. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the sophomore effort by this Chicago duo for more than a year. It was released today and what I’ve heard of it so far does not disappoint. Their stuff is fun jazzy poptronica with lots of interesting guest vocalists and the occasional bit of turntablism dropped in for good measure.

Here’s Thievery Corporation’s "Warning Shots" video from YouTube.

As I mentioned the other day we went to see Thievery Corporation play in San Francisco last night. Great show.

One of the things that you see at concerts and dance clubs these days are people who whip out their phones and take photos and shoot video of the action to send on to their friends who couldn’t be there. The room full of thousands of camera phones basically turns the traditional "no cameras" admonition into a huge joke. I know a guy who will dial up a friend’s voice mail and hold up his phone in the direction of the DJ so his friend can get a taste of the music.

So as we were acting like the cool kids and taking cameraphone shots of each other and the band, a dialog I’d never seen before popped up on my phone. It was a file transfer dialog; somebody was trying to send a file to my phone. It was content related to the band we were watching at that moment — an image of their album cover (included a right), an excerpt of one of their songs, and an chunk of a video of the band (sans audio).

Anyone could have been sending this data around, but I’m assuming that it was some kind of organized thing put on by the band or the concert promoters? If so, wacky. But fun wacky. Maybe we’ll see more of this kind of thing as more people adopt broadband wireless.

Best tune EVAR.

D.C.’s heroes of downtempo dub will be rocking San Francisco next week and we’ll be there. My sister will be in from NYC so we’re going to take advantage of our standing Thursday night babysitter date and make an evening of it.

I thought these dudes were a one-hit wonder until we started listening to their album last year; it became our commute soundtrack for a few months. They also acquitted themselves quite well when they performed on Saturday Night Live.

They have a new record coming out soon (thanks for Fred for the tip). The single is streaming on their web site.. These guys kind of remind me of The Cure (maybe after they’ve had a few Prozacs). You could also compare them to The Cars when they were at their peak, maybe in ‘82 or ‘83 (pre-MTV).

Story in today’s SF Chron about the raucous Stanford marching band. This is an unusual group of youngsters who are all about being aggressively non-conformist in an otherwise moribund discipline. (They don’t wear uniforms; they have allegedly urinated on a playing field; and, gasp, they’ve been known to drink at games.)

Needless to say, this is the kind of thing that a Silicon Valley institution should be encouraging, not reining in. I actually see a terrific screenplay in this — Animal House meets Drumline, maybe?

This is the group that got me started on a long love affair with "acid jazz" (which is neither acidic nor particularly jazzy). The Heavies are rhythmic and repetitive yet fun with a blazing horn section and smoking vocals courtesy of the lovely N’Dea Davenport.

Y! Music has most of their discography. I recommend their self-titled debut release, but I emphatically dis-recommend their 1997 Swan Song "Shelter" which I seem to recall somehow getting for free back in the day and discarding after listening to it twice. However, I can assure you, that with the exception of this record, the rest of their stuff is terrific, excellent, top-notch.

N’Dea Davenport released a solo album in the 90s that I really liked (but sadly isn’t available on Y! Music).

I haven’t posted any oldies-but-goodies yet, but I should mention what I’m listening to at the moment, the most excellent Psychedelic Furs. It looks like we have most if not all of their catalog on YME. If you’re a teeny bopper surfing the New Wave revival, I’d recommend starting with "Love My Way" and then move on to their 2001 greatest hits compilation if that suits your fancy.

This is one of the two bands that I discovered because of mad crushes on girls in my high school, proving what anyone who saw Pretty In Pink already knows — cute high school girls were the primary disease vector for New Wave music. (The other band was The English Beat, which isn’t really new wave but you get the picture.)

Richard Butler, the Furs’ lead singer, will be doing a gig in San Francisco on April 3, so sayeth Upcoming.org.

After I posted last week about seeing "We Jam Econo" I looked into what we have from the Minutemen catalog in Yahoo! Music Unlimited. I was pleasantly surprised; I figured we’d have their classic 1984 release Double Nickles on the Dime, but it looks like we have pretty much everything else they’ve ever released, including their debut EP, "Paranoid Time". Excellent, I am rocking out at my desk now.

Another discovery from the vaults of Y! Music Unlimited: Dubstar plays perky Brit 80s-style poptronica, but updated for the, um, late 90s. Like New Order, but poppier and peppier and a strong vocalist of the female persuasion. The big radio hit here would have been "Stars," had the big radio hit ship not sailed like ten years earlier.

Excellent, there’s a screening of the Minutemen documentary tonight in SF. I’m going to try to make the 9PM showing.

Update: I was able to catch this and it was really good. If you like the Minutemen’s music you’ll probably like it too, although it’s less of a documentatary and more of a collection of vintage live clips with some very brief interviews, and very light on facts and information and a little too long on fanboy worship of the band. So if you’re not familiar with them, you might be a little lost. I feel a special connection with the band because I lived in San Pedro for a little while in high school (long story) and I interviewed Mike Watt briefly in college. I felt really lucky to have met him; it was one of the high points of my brief journalism career.

Unfortunately, there isn’t enough of Kevin Yost’s work on Y! Music Unlimited, but you can find his excellent 1999 Small Town Underground. I’d put his stuff more in the category of acid jazz — not quite like the loopy, turntable-ish stuff I’ve been reviewing the past few weeks, but it’s got a good beat and it’s nice to work to, so there you go. Check out "Set Me Free" for a taste.

They just released a new version of Y! Music engine today. I’ve been using this for about a month on an internal beta and it’s a huge improvement over the first version, especially in the area of queueing up and downloading songs and managing playlists.

The list of new and updated features is here. (I am pretty sure you’ll get the new version automatically if you have an older version installed.) Update: No auto-update for this one, my bad. You gotta download by clicking the link. But it is well worth it! Ian reminds me that there’s a blog post with lots of detailed info on what’s new in the new version here.