For those looking for gear talk, please check out my lengthy Geartalk blog about NAMM.  This is more just musings on the show itself.

This year, I had a lot of work to do there for the publishing company I work for, so there wasn’t as much time to just wander and enjoy.  But as ever, I love NAMM as a social event, meeting exhibitors that I really only get to see at these trade shows.  And it is fun to walk around and feel the enthusiasm—and I don’t mean the manufactured enthusiasm of the exhibitors (although, to be fair, some of manufacturer enthusiasm is quite real), but the enthusiasm of full- and part-time musicians and users of these great tools and toys, who have that “kid in a candy store” joy at being there.

I have gone to so many NAMM shows at this point that the novelty of it is mostly gone.  That’s not to say it’s “just a job” at this point, I still enjoy going, both for the reasons above and just to keep up to date with the latest and greatest.  But I’ve been going long enough to judge each NAMM against previous NAMMs.  And this one was noticeably smaller than previous shows.  That makes sense for a number of reasons.  First, the economy wasn’t good.  I’m sure many exhibitors who wanted to go, couldn’t.  And it was impossible not to be surprised at how much empty exhibitor space there was this year.

But there’s something else in effect as well.  As time marches on, trade shows themselves aren’t nearly the focal points they used to be.  The original point of the NAMM show is that the organization’s buyers would invite the organizations sellers (manufacturers, developers, distributors) to show their wares, so that the buyers could see them and then make agreements to purchase them.  These days, the Internet serves as a more immediate, and usually more thorough, way to check out what a company is selling.  Not only that, but many companies tend to have online purchase order systems as well, so there may not be the need to go to Anaheim to sign a physical purchase order.  Due to these factor, many companies that weren’t there—Apple, Adobe, Native Instruments, etc—simply gave up on trade shows altogether, not just NAMM (and not just this year).

On the other hand, for smaller companies, sales reps, etc, there is still quite an advantage to being able to network, and that requires meeting in person.  And especially for smaller companies, having so many bloggers and media reps running around can result in attention that your product might not receive otherwise.  So trade shows like NAMM aren’t quite redundant yet.  But clearly, times are changing.

For now, however, I’ll continue to enjoy going, to meet business contacts and associates, to meet up with friends from far away…and yes, to look at the cool toys, too.

I didn’t get to post nearly as much as I’d hoped.  I’ve been busy with my editing duties, writing (both in the pro audio world and my own speculative fiction…look for orrenmerton.com to get online sometime in Q1 2010), and of course writing Ember After songs.  There is another song in progress, and it’s pretty good.  In fact, the song, “Shallow” began as an extra track to help fill out the Misery EP that is nearly finished.  I like the new song so much that now the EP itself will be called the Shallow EP!  So things are definitely happening, although it may not look like it from here.

Work on the EP is on hold for a while, as you might have gathered if you read the most recent posting in the News blog.  Ember Member Barry and myself will be at the NAMM show, so that will mean we won’t be at our respective studios.  Nonetheless, the hope is that this song will be completely by early February, the whole EP finished in February, and new music to share and purchase in March.

Okay, back to NAMM preparations!

As an artist with an album selling on iTunes, one of the more interesting developments was the new iTunes LP format.  Hypebot has an article explaining what the iTunes LP format offers (and shows the video, also available on www.apple.com).  To make a long story short, when you double-click your deluxe iTunes album, the entire iTunes browser window becomes a home screen for your album, and you get access to the songs, lyrics, commentary, photos, video, you name it, depending on what the artist (and label, more on that below) wants on it.

My initial reaction is that this is a great idea.  I am old enough to have bought “records” back in the days where the vinyl LP was king, and cassettes the next most popular.  I grew up right on that cusp around the mid-80s when CDs started coming out, and like many I bemoaned the loss of the beautiful cover art and gatefolds and all that great stuff that some albums had.  I still have my copy of Led Zeppelin III with it’s spinning psychedelic wheel inside the cover, etc.  If the iTunes LP can bring some of that back, that would be fantastic.

However, a few things gave me pause:

• To date, while all the major labels were given whatever SDK was necessary to sell music in iTunes LP format, no indie labels or artists are.  This makes good marketing sense—of course they’d want to kick off the iTunes LPs with some very popular artists.  But there’s always the anxiety if this will really trickle down to the rest of us.

• The current iTunes LPs are all more expensive than their non-LP counterpart.  This may not be Apple’s fault.  I’ve noticed that the prices of iTunes LPs are quite variable, so that implies that Apple isn’t controlling prices, unless they are simply taking more of the sales so that companies have to charge more (which I doubt, Apple hasn’t gouged any format yet).  Certainly, if the labels expect to use iTunes LPs to increase sales, raising prices is not the way to do it.  But then, if major labels have shown anything, it is the ability to not understand how to take advantage of any given situation.

• iTunes LPs are compatible only with iTunes 9 and greater.  Now, I can tell you that with Ember After, probably 90% of our digital sales come from iTunes (the rest mostly from subscriptions services).  So I don’t think being iTunes exclusive means everyone will be leaving tons of money on the the table.  But still, it is something to think about.  Also, I wonder if you could buy the iTunes LP, but then move the unprotected AAC files to another device.  So if I use iTunes on my Mac but my smartphone were a Blackberry, if I could enjoy the full iTunes LP on iTunes on my Mac but still transfer the audio files themselves to the Blackberry (of course, I don’t know if Blackberry’s can play AAC files anyway, I have an iPhone…)

Nonetheless, I still think anything that helps bring back the artistry of the “album” is a fun thing.  Even as I see releasing mostly EPs in the future, I can absolutely see compiling the EPs, adding some new songs and information/video/etc and compiling all of it into an iTunes LP.  If possible…

As reported by CNN, Senator Edward Kennedy has finally succumbed to his long bout with brain cancer.  A true old school liberal lion, he was the champion of the downtrodden and the voice of the voiceless.  As far to the left as he was, he was beloved on both sides of the isle.  When they made him (and his brothers and sister), they broke the mold.  He will be dearly missed.

I just ran across this article about Mariah Carey’s forthcoming CD.  I don’t pay attention to that style of music (she has a lovely voice, it’s just not my preference for songwriting), but this article wasn’t about the music: it’s called The Monetization of Mimi and it’s about how Island/Def Jam is paying for the CD by putting advertisements in the CD booklet.

Art and commerce are sometimes uneasy bedfellows, sometimes nearly indistinguishable.  Obviously, this is more the latter—nothing uneasy about this paring, everyone is gung ho about it.  And frankly, I don’t know enough about Carey’s career to know if at this point she is as much a “product pitchwoman” as a singer.  But somehow, this novel way of making money leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I understand that CDs aren’t as profitable as they once were.  But this “ad-booklet” is also the downloadable booklet, so it’s everyone gets it.  I understand that huge, big studio records have a lot of overhead.  And I’m guessing that pop music doesn’t have loyal fans like Nine Inch Nails that will buy expensive boxed sets, offsetting the losses from those who download the album for nothing.

But still, this smells funny to me.  Yes, all music sold in the market place becomes “content for sale,” but this feels like the music is truly secondary to advertising the products.  And the record company is trying to pass this off as a great “lifestyle” thing that fans will like, I guess to take some of the sting out of it.

I guess I always looked at the CD booklet as art…something special for the fans who wanted to buy something physical, not just download the music. I understand that you need to cover your costs.  And maybe I’d feel different if Gillette offered Ember After $50,000 to put a razor ad in our CD booklet.  But it still smells like cheapening the art.  And that makes me sad.

My musings on this began by reading an incredibly helpful, intelligent, and insightful forum post by Trent Reznor in the Nine Inch Nails forums titled my thoughts on what to do as a new / unknown artist.  Mr. Reznor gives his honest advice, neither moralizing about the state of the industry nor blowing marketing smoke up the ass of wide eyed aspiring musicians.  Since Ember After is fairly unknown, I read his missive with interest, looking for any gems I can use.  There was nothing particularly “controversial” in his remarks, but one quote did get me thinking:

…music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact – it sucks as the musician BUT THAT’S THE WAY IT IS (for now).

Needless to say, as a musician this is quite disheartening.  Even those of us who build our own capable home studios still incur many thousands in costs when we release even an “under the radar” indie album: incidental costs, mastering costs, artwork, manufacturing, distribution/shipping, and so on.  Even those of us who have no illusions of stardom hope to at least cover our costs—our goal is to keep making music, but if the choice is making an album or making the rent…well…

But while what Trent says makes sense for known artists, what about truly unknown artists?  We have sold less than a few hundred CDs at this point…surely there is no demand for illegal downloads of our album Grasping At Straws, is there?  So I did a search for Ember After on some sites that facilitate illegal downloading.  Here’s a snapshot of what I found:

Needless to say, I was shocked.  I had to do a double-take, and a triple take.  At no point had anyone in Ember After ever packaged our album as a .rar file even to give to each other, this was clearly packaged up by someone else, and distributed at large.  My thoughts jumped between various implications of this:

• First of all, I wondered if this truly meant that rather than hundreds, over fifteen thousand people had listened to the album.  Realistically, probably not.  Some downloads may have been automated, people who just collect anything new and trade it for movies, games, porn, whatever. Some was probably downloaded just to host on other pirate sites.  I’m sure the same person/group had multiple downloads, etc.  Never the less, if only half of that number heard the music, that’s an immense amount more than I ever anticipated.

• If as few as ten percent of those downloaders (either number, the full 15,000+ or 7,500+) had actually purchased the album instead of copied it illegally, that would have covered our costs.  But they didn’t…and we didn’t.

• Should I take this personally?  When you’ve put years of your life, creativity, blood, sweat, and tears, strained relationships and pinned hopes on your art, its hard not to…

• Does that mean that there’s a market out there for Ember After merchandise, live performance, etc?  Unfortunately, since the downloads are anonymous and random, I have no idea.  Even if only a few thousand of those people actually enjoyed the music enough to consider paying for a t-shirt or club show, they are very likely spread all over the world.  But I can’t know for sure.

Trent Reznor was right.  No matter how unknown you are, if you have music out there on iTunes, Amazon, etc. then it’s been distributed illegally.  We did a fair amount of promotion, and were disappointed with the sales, but it seems the number of downloads may suggest we were more successful than we thought…The listeners we attracted, however, didn’t pay us for our music.

So what is the logical next step?  It’s very tempting to get extremely disheartened, to feel robbed.  But another way to look at it is that the potential audience is larger than we’d thought.  Rather than focus on the fact that they won’t pay for music, there is an opportunity to brainstorm about what they might be willing to pay for, and how we can deliver that.

The Misery EP that we’ve been working on for most of a year now is finally only a couple recording sessions from being finished.  And with it will come a total website revamp, and a new promotional push.  Now is a good moment to really take stock of the current climate for selling and distributing music, and try and figure out how best to make use of our limited resources to give—and maybe even sell—people the fruits of our creativity and labor in a form that will be meaningful to them, and hopefully rewarding enough to us to keep going.

This was a wake up call for us.  But now we’re fully awake…

The press is filled with complaints from major labels like Universal about how difficult it is these days for them to sell music.  So you’d think that given their troubles, they’d want to make it extremely easy for willing customers to purchase songs and albums from their artists.  And yet Universal Music made it impossible for me to pay for a song from one of their German artists when I tried to.

A German musician I am friendly with, knowing my taste in music, linked me to a YouTube video for a remixed song he thought I’d really like.  The song is called “Eisblumen,” by German artist Eisblume.  The song was written by German folk/goth-metal band Subway for Sally in 2005, covered by Eisblume in 2008, and then remixed by Derek Von Krogh.  I like the original, the cover, but I think the remix is truly excellent:

I loved the remix so much, I wanted to buy it.  So my first port of call was the iTunes Music Store.  Being signed to Universal Music, I figured this would be an easy song to find there.  Well…I was wrong.  The song is not in the US iTunes Music store (perhaps ironically Subway to Sally’s original version of Eisblumen which is on German indie metal label Nuclear Blast is available in the US iTunes Store…)  I switch to the Deutschland iTunes Music Store, but it won’t let me purchase the song from my US iTunes account.

Next stop, Amazon.com.  I look for the physical CD of the Eisblumen EP, but it’s import only, and not available anyway.  (Besides, importing a physical disc to the USA because I like a single song is really cost prohibative).  So I then try the Amazon.com MP3 download store, and like the US iTunes, they don’t have it.  Now as luck would have it, the day I happened to be looking for Eisenblume Remix is the same day Amazon announced that there was a brand spanking new MP3 downloads store available in Germany.  Perfect!  So I head over to amazon.de, head to the downloads store, and click to buy the song…once again, no luck.  I can barely read the German-language message it throws me, but clearly I’m in the wrong geographic location.

At this point, I ask an Austrian friend who has some similar taste in music if he woud mind buying it for me.  Since there is no Amazon store in Austria, I assumed that they’d sell him the MP3…once again, apparently Austria doesn’t count either for Amazon.de downloads, and he couldn’t buy it either!

The story gets even zanier.  The German musician above decided to buy me the Eisblumen EP via iTunes.  I received an email telling me that the gift was waiting for me, so I changed my iTunes store once again to Deutschland, clicked the link, only to be told that not only would they not sell to an American iTunes account, I couldn’t even redeem a gift card!

It would be easy to place the blame at Apple and Amazon’s feet (and yes, the gift card thing is pretty screwy if you ask me), but I’m guessing that the retailer’s hands are tied.  I’m guessing they have to keep the stores separate various local taxes and national regulations, and other things I probably don’t realize.  I’m sure they’re doing what they’re told.

Ultimately, the blame lies squarely with Universal Music.  It is easily within their power to put all of their artists on every iTunes/Amazon MP3 download store. Digital media is not like physical media, where there are warehouse and shipping costs.  Sure, the Universal Music marketing machine isn’t trying to sell Eisblume in the USA but so what?  It does’t reduce shelf space for other Universal artists if Eisblume’s digital files can be purchased in every country in the world, and they might actually sell a few.   It doesn’t cost Universal Music anything extra.  Obviously, Universal does put some German language music in the US iTunes store (Rammstein, for example).  Ember After’s album Grasping At Straws is available for download from every iTunes store in the world, and it didn’t cost an extra dime or take any extra effort.  What could possibly be Universal’s incentive to not allow paid downloads in every possible store?  Is Universal afraid that Eisblume might sell a record or two outside Germany?

In my case, I have German friends and a fair amount of FTP space, because the end result is that the German musician who purchased the EP for me was able to download and send it to me.  So in the end, I’ve got the music, and Universal got paid.

I can’t help but wonder how many people outside Germany find music they like by German artists, want to buy the digital download legally, but are thwarted by Universal’s insistance on treating digital downloads with the same regional restrictions as physical media. I’m sure Universal Music would be the first to scream and wave their corporate fist in the air at anyone who didn’t legally pay for the song…but what other options do they give a music fan without an international network?  If Universal wants to complain about how difficult it is to sell music these days, why don’t they at least take advantage of the opportunities they have.

It’s been a while since I posted a blog entry here. One of the reasons is I’ve actually been working. I’ve been working both on getting the new Logic Users Group platform up and running, and finally on more Ember After songs.  Towards that end, I finally took possession of a fantastic new guitar, which I detail here in the geartalk blog.   I also have just ordered a Dave Smith Instrumens Mopho, a fantastic analog monosynth based off the Prophet 08, but with some special editions just perfect for grinding mean industrial music: sub-oscillators, feedback, audio input.  Tasty treats, all!

Dave Smith Instruments Mopho

But all this has got me thinking about this whole Interweb, and how much time can be spent communicating on it.  Ember After has a web page, a Myspace page, an iLike page, a Facebook page, a Bebo page…I’ve almost lost track.  And of course Ember After is on Twitter.  To keep up to date on all of these would leave no time to be creative!   (Let alone do a full time job, if recording and performing music isn’t paying the bills).

And it’s not just typing to your huge (ha…) fanbase, it’s keeping up with other people—the whole point of this communication is that it’s supposed to be two-way, to bring people together, and not simply be another one-way announcement system.  But it all eats into what limited time there is to write music, which ultimately is the reason that people are following/friending with Ember After to begin with, right?

Somewhere in there is a balance.  More successful acts have discussed hiring a marketing company to take care of the mailing list/updating news/blog aspect of their “music business.”  That can really help free the artist to both communicate and create…if you’re successful enough to afford it, or have a record company willing to pay for it.  As long as the updates and blogs and tweets come from the artist, if they are propogated and managed by hired help shouldn’t mean the communication is less authentic.

But for those of us who don’t have the means or the success yet to hire a team, we’re left trying to figure out how to keep these dozens of sites and networks up to date while at the same time finding the time to make the music that you are communicating about.  And it’s a double edged sword—without communicating, nobody knows that you’ve got the music out, and without the music, there’s nothing to communicate.

For now, I’m shifting the balance towards creating.  I’ll still try and actively post whenever I have a moment, but that’s proving to be not as frequent as I wish.  I hope that makes sense.

Ah, the glorious march of technology. When we filmed the video for “Lost,” the first song we released from the album Grasping At Straws, our director Kenn Michael filmed it in HD. Of course, the main avenues for video promotion open to a band who doesn’t have a major label budget is online, and at the time, YouTube didn’t really allow high res video.

Thankfully, that has changed. So I have dutifully uploaded the high definition version of the Lost video, viewable on the Ember After YouTube channel, or below:

Friday was a new guitar day for me—always a fun day! My current main guitar is a custom guitar by Koll Guitars, and this new guitar is also a custom guitar.

Read all about it over on the Geartalk blog!