Amie Street, share music of every genre

I was surfing the net, trying to find a good website to discover and share music of every genre. I was tired of the common names, so I found this website that, well, seems really new and innovative.

Amie Street, share music of every genre

Amie Street is a place to discover, download and share music of every genre, from all over the world.

It is innovative: it uses a new approach to selling music. On Amie Street, the community determines the price. Every song starts free, or very cheap, and increases in price, up to 98 cents, as more and more people purchase it.

This variable pricing system ensures that the public gets music at a fair, community-driven price point, and makes it easy for you to find the type of music you want. It’s literally free to download new music on Amie Street, and you know when you pay 98 cents for a song a lot of people think it’s really good.

It’s a social music store, as it’s no secret that friends are one of the best ways to find out about new artists. To encourage members to share and talk about the music they love, Amie Street gives you money to spend on more music when you recommend your favorite songs.

On Amie Street, you are rewarded with cash for more music downloads when you recommend a song that continues to rise in price. For example, if you find a great new song when it’s free and recommend it to your friends, and that song eventually increases to 98 cents, you get that difference of 98 cents back into your account to spend on more music.

Posted in Ideas, Music | No Comments »

Walk Hard: a Retro-Styled Philosophy?

Yesterday I’ve seen Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story with a great John C. Reilly. It is a parody movie, a spoof of every musical biopic where John as music star Dewey Cox covers every musical style from Elvis to the Beach Boys over five decades. Dialogue and sequences are funny and goofy and the jokes never are boring. Since this is not exactly a review, I won’t tell more about the movie. What I would like to focus on is the philosophy behind the movie.

Walk Hard: a Retro-Styled Philosophy?

Dewey Cox kills his brother and begins an impressive quest to become a legendary artist. All is based on the “feeling guilty” system. He feels guilty, so he swear he’ll become big to please his brother soul (that was a talented young pianist). Feelings of guilt occur because deep down in your subconscious you have become emotionally attached to an event that you feel in some way responsible for, either you feel that you did something wrong, feel that you didn’t do enough or feel that you should have done something.

Of course, he killed his brother! Yes, but can we say he is punishing himself trying to become a legend? In the end of the movie there is the answer to this question.

Another philosophy behind the movie is the “Walk Hard” philosophy. It’s also the first song of the movie (and of the soundtrack album, a must!) and I really love it. Dewey say, that even if you’ve been told time and time again that you’re always gonna lose, life’s a race, and he is in it to win it. Some kind of people always try to control us, making us obedient. It’s a kind of psychological war out there! Dewey says no to this system and wants to free himself and walk hard up to the top of the mountain high. He still got a dream and a burning rage to live.

This is everything about being artists, about artists goals and principles. Probably also a retro-styled philosophy of the past, maybe also modern someway. But it is connected also to the “feel guilty” issue.

He has a dream, becoming a legend. Is it a real dream? Or he just wants to please his brother soul? He is not strong enough to resist to temptations. Sex, drugs are part of his everyday’s life. Is he really happy while pursuing his dream? Are we able to really understand what is our personal dream and life’s goal? I think that happiness is all about this, to really understand our goals. This is what Dewey finds at the end of his long and troubled life. I wish us all to discover this before the end of our lifes :)

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The Emperor’s New Clothes

Ananda Sukarlan is an Indonesian composer and pianist living in Spain. This is an article he wrote for a magazine which has been published a few years ago in Spanish. We are very proud to have the original in English which has never been published anywhere, so this is an exclusive writing for ManuelMarino.com. Read his Blog and visit Jakarta New Year Concert page (he is the founder and director). Also, you can listen to some of his music compositions on YouTube.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

“It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the
Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.” — (Pierre Boulez)

“I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate
and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this
public world to one of private performance and electronic media.“ – (Milton
Babbitt)

“What happened there is (…) the biggest artwork of all times. That spirits
achieve in a single act what we in music cannot dream of, that people rehearse
ten years long like mad, totally fanatical for a concert and then die.
This is the biggest artwork that exists at all in the whole universe…
I couldn’t match it.” (K. Stockhausen, on the 9/11 attack ) . — All quotes
are from The New York Times.

Those three composers are supposedly “great” composers of the 20th century. Their piano works (in fact, ALL their works) were written “for the future” in the 1950s and 60s, when they were (and still are) a tough nut to crack for both the pianist and the audience. Now, if they were indeed “great”, as Chopin or Bach undoubtedly were, why are their works still not in the repertory of most pianists or other instrumentalists ? And why don’t we members of humanity, no matter how “retarded” we are according to those “great” artists, respect them now as we respect Schumann or even their contemporaries such as Shostakovich or Stravinsky ? When is the “future” they were talking about ? Is 2007 not “future” enough for those works created half a century ago?

The answer is simple. Boulez, Babbitt and Stockhausen are (or were) “great”, because they rely on, and receive huge government subsidies and were leaders of a very small but controlling establishment consisting of academics, critics and art politicians. They are “great” according to their colleagues in this group, but not according to musicians and the public. In fact, their “avantgarde” music is mostly written against musicians and the public. It even goes so far as calling the 9/11 event “the greatest artwork” (see Stockhausen’s quote above) , not only creating a work against people, but even more, killing (how can one be more against people ?) them all, “artists” and audience.

In other words, they write music to gain, and only to gain, government subsidy. What Walt Whitman said, that “Para tener grandes poetas, es necesario además grandes audiencias” is not valid anymore for this kind of “art”. In principle, government subsidies are supposed to be given to marginal artistic activities, and the more “minority oriented” that art is, the more it deserves subsidy ; this subsidy has enabled those artists to stay in their ivory towers without making any contributions at all to the public. Which is alright if one doesn’t think of the amount of taxpayers’ money that is used to subsidize those “artistic” works.

Let’s take one example: the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique Musique) who was built by Pierre Boulez in Paris. It was kitted out with equipment to Boulez’s own specification to compose music for the future. IRCAM also swallowed 80% of the national subsidy for contemporary music of France. It was built at a cost of 90 million francs and thereafter at a cost of 15 million a year to the French taxpayer for its concerts, staff and upkeep. It happened that in 1969 Boulez got Georges Pompidou to build for him a huge high tech underground bunker , beside the site of what was to become the Pompidou Centre. Now, in 2007, shall we look back and reflect on how many masterpieces have been created out of this building ? What I mean by masterpieces are works that the general public recognise as such, like Britten’s War Requiem, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms or, coming from the other continent, Copland’s Third Symphony. I don’t have to answer this question.

When I was living in Holland in the 1990s I had several encounters with “ex”avant-garde turned real composers, such as Toru Takemitsu, John Adams or Louis Andriessen. And it was in Holland that I met for the first time my amazing Spanish composer friends Jesus Rueda or David del Puerto (both winners of Premio Nacional de Musica, in 2004 and 2005 respectively). At that time, they were in a “transitional” period after getting out from the heavy influence of their avantgarde teacher, Paco Guerrero. All of them realized then, that our older colleagues had achieved their goals to “impress” the public by presenting them with uncommunicative works, and certainly they have gained a lot by doing that, but that we the younger generations have to pay for it. There have been composers at every corner of the street ever since, given that avantgarde music was designed to give jobs to many who could not compose in the sense of writing “traditional” music. Good or bad quality is not the criteria anymore. But there are simply not enough subsidy for all of them , whose works sound more or less the same.

Fortunately we are in a state of transition to a more audience-friendly kind of music. The avantgardists had achieved in emptying the concert halls, and now we will have to work harder to gain them back and convince them that the word “contemporary” is not equal to “avantgarde” ; on the contrary, “avantgarde” was a thing very much in the past, and not con (”with”) temporary (our time) anymore.

This situation reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen’s story, about an Emperor who is very fond of clothes. One day came 2 tailors, saying that they can make very special clothes that only good people can see. Naturally the emperor cannot see those clothes, but afraid of being called a bad person, he praises the beauty of the clothes. And if the emperor can see it, everybody in the whole country should do as well. Until comes a very young kid, much too young to be called a bad person, during the festive celebration of those clothes , shouting innocently, “Look, the Emperor is naked!”

Posted in Arts, Culture, Music | 2 Comments »

The State of Music Business

Marcos Marado wrote this exclusive article. Is the situation really so dramatic as he explains? Leave your comments, this could be our first really important debate on ManuelMarino.com.

The State of Music Business

I’m, first of all, a passionate for music. My passion for music before I can recall it, and grew with the fact that I had the luck to have older brother and sisters whose music collection was wide enough to feed my music interests. Also since a little kid I was interested in technology, and started programming at the age of four. Being nowadays a music lover and also a musician, and at the same time graduated and working as a Computer Science Engineer, I feel myself lucky to have some ground bases to analyse the state of music business.

The music business is in a chaotic state. The record industry is declining, and is throwing the guilt of it to what they like to call “piracy” - the unauthorised downloading of music. While they blame it, the truth is the fault is from the music industry itself. Doug Morris, Universal Music CEO, recently admitted he knows nothing about the music industry of nowadays. They decided to sue their customers by suing music fans that do unauthorised downloads instead of suing those who really make money out of copyrighted works, and restricting their clients’ rights with technologies like DRM.

It is surely true that it’s hard to find a completely fair way of compensating musicians while promoting the access to culture, but there are efforts to design market models that work - at least better than the actual one. The biggest problem is that the music industry - defined by the four major labels - doesn’t get it. The music market has changed, music, musicians and music lovers adapted themselves to new trends and technologies, but the music industry decided to ignore all the signs, refusing to see the big elephant in the room, and kept doing business in an obsolete way. The proof that they simply don’t understand what’s going on is right in front of everyone wanting to see it, when we get news that Elton John wants the Internet shut’ed down, or when countries try to impose Internet Services Providers to “filter illegal downloads“, even if that’s technicly impossible to do (illegal stuff surely don’t have an evil bit), and the music industry does political pressure that even makes countries change their laws. They spend tons of money implementing DRM systems, and others sell the rights that were restricted to listeners back, making money from what they first took, even if it’s known that DRM systems cause sales losses, music artists and fans are against such systems and new businesses are arising just by the fact that they don’t adopt DRM technologies, radio stations create petitions against DRM. Now, it’s too late for them - but what’s going to happen to the music market?

Well, we’re also seeing a lot of emergent business models. First of all, we have to realize that while CD sales are decreasing, music consumption is rising twice as fast. Also, if you open your eyes and start considering the music business as everything around music and not just music sales, then you’ll see that, for instance, in North America, the music business will total $26.5 billion in 2011, growing at an average annual rate of 2.8% from $23.1 billion in 2006. Recorded music revenues will still declining as declining CD sales cancel out the sharp gains in digital sales. Music publishing and live music will grow. Norway has a party that wants to free file sharing and sampling, shorten the commercial copyright and ban DRM. The number of web services for bands is wildly growing. Artists have now the means of making money while giving music for free, for instance. Musicians are finding new ways of doing their work by themselves, even if sometimes things aren’t simple. While there’s no formula on how to create the perfect record label, there are some labels and distributors that understand nowadays music market and know how to do business in it.

The future is smiling at us - we just have to let obsolete formulas and vices die.

Of course, new issues to be solved will appear. New fights have to be fought and won, or we’ll end like citizens of a dystopian world.

But soon enough it is going to be a great time to live - as a musician, a music lover or even a technologist.

Posted in Business, Music, Technology | 47 Comments »

A sweet lady

The first person, very creative person (and also a very sweet lady) I want to talk about in this Weblog, is Ms. Kirstin Elaine Myers.

Ms. Myers is the owner of the company named Globond. Globond serves a community of globe-trotting entrepreneurs, executives, investors, politicians, journalists, artists and other professionals as they live and work around the world. Consider it like a big international gathering of very creative minds.

The first question I asked her was very simple: do you know there’s an artist inside yourself?

She answered:
“Is that a trick question? LOL”, “Of course” I replied smiling.

She continued: “I do think that much of what we do at Globond is more of an art than a science yes. We mix and match people and make new patterns and outcomes that I might consider to be a work of art but which might be difficult for others to see in that way.”

MM: “I read that there is place for artists in Globond, what are your goals for them?”

KEM: “Our goals for our artists, musicians and actors is that they get an opportunity for many people around the world to enjoy their art and to help them get paid well for it so that they do not have to do something else besides their true passion to make a living.”

MM: “That’s amazing, Miss Myers. Let me ask you another tricky question, a mom is an artist?”

KEM: “Depends on what kind of mom she is, if she is a good mom yes, if not, no.”

MM: “Good answer” I smile, “I know you are a mom, besides being a good entrepreneur, what is the next step in your life and career?”

KEM: “Make Globond a well-known name all over the world, get married to my soulmate and business partner Chris Lawson, buy a new house with lots of land in Gloucester and have my kids succeed in their new schools.”

MM: “And I wish you to succeed! thank you for your time”.

Posted in People | No Comments »