Apple Music – A Failure At the Outset

 “APPLE BETS BIG THAT YOU’LL
START PAYING TO STREAM MUSIC”

So proclaimed last night’s headline on NPR Music.  But most music consumers know full-well that this is a losing wager on the part of Apple.

Apple Music will be the latest in a line of failures from the media giant.  They’re coming into the streaming service market far too late in the game. The world has had 100% free music for over a decade and Apple’s branded service is too little, too late to matter.

 

Certainly, it will appeal to a specific niche audience – Apple fans with no active interest in music, who will use the service on their iPhones much in the way transistor radios were used in past… but with an even smaller base of popular song.

 

A hundred years of great music – works by the world’s greatest conductors and orchestras, big band, classical, and opera, legends of jazz, funk, rare groove, and 20th century avant-garde… works which defied and defined the musical philosophies of their era – none of these will have a place in Apple’s expensive, shiny box.

 

This will be Beats Music all over again. (And we all saw how well that worked out.) Poster-boy flavor-of-the-week artists can have their contracts of exclusivity with Apple Music. The rest of the world will barely notice when the service closes in the year ahead.

 

And for the millions in the middle – the casual music consumers of the world – Colin Barrett (interviewed in the NPR article) has already spoken for them. 55 million listeners have free accounts with Spotify, and the rest are happy with the similarly free services offered by YouTube or any of the dozen other available services.

All of this while the world’s more discerning listeners will continue on as they always have, whether crate digging or file sharing to uncover rare and elusive sounds not available from any of the commercial markets.

Apple, you had a good run. It’s time to hang it up.

32 Hours of Cool Jazz and Soul Jazz Classics

I was in a jazzy mood when I got home from the office so I compiled a list of the top-rated albums where %GENRE%=”cool jazz” and a second list of %GENRE%=”soul jazz” on RateYourMusic.com.

After about an hour I’d successfully constructed two 16-hour playlists from the selections I’d compiled.  Below are the resulting album playlists.

THE COOL JAZZ SET

[1958] Miles Davis – Ascenseur pour l’échafaud
[1957] Miles Davis – ‘Round About Midnight
[1958] Miles Davis – Milestones
[1959] Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
[1958] Bill Evans – Everybody Digs Bill Evans
[1960] Bill Evans – Portrait in Jazz
[1961] Bill Evans – Explorations
[1963] Bill Evans – Undercurrent (w Jim Hall)
[1977] Bill Evans – You Must Believe in Spring
[1961] Gil Evans Orchestra – Out Of The Cool
[1975] Jim Hall – Concierto
[1962] John Coltrane – Ballads
[1956] Art Tatum meets Ben Webster
[1963] Oscar Peterson Trio – Night Train
[1955] Dave Brubeck – Jazz Red Hot & Cool
[1959] Dave Brubeck – Time Out
[1961] Stan Getz – Focus
[1976] Bernard Herrmann – Taxi Driver OST

THE SOUL JAZZ SET

[1958] Jimmy Smith – The Sermon
[1960] Jimmy Smith – Back at the Chicken Shack
[1963] Jimmy Smith – Prayer Meetin’
[1964] Jimmy Smith – The Cat
[1965] Jimmy Smith – Organ Grinder Swing
[1966] Jimmy Smith – Jimmy & Wes The Dynamic Duo
[1973] Clifford Jordon – Glass Bead Games
[1974] Gil Scott Heron – Winter in America
[1967] Pat Martino – El Hombre
[1963] Donald Byrd – A New Perspective
[1972] Archie Shepp – Attica Blues
[1960] Bobby Timmons – This Here is Bobby Timmons
[1965] Big John Patton – Let ’em Roll
[1961] Ray Charles – Genius + Soul = Jazz
[1962] Grant Green – Feelin’ the Spirit
[1970] Freddie Hubbard – Red Clay

What do you think?  Are there any glaring omissions?

I have a number of these albums on vinyl, but there are several LPs on the list I’ve never heard – and some by artists who are completely absent from my library.

I’m looking forward to 32 hours of outstanding jazz music, and all of the new favorites I’ll find along the way.

It was NPR’s feature on the cocktail jazz duo, Twin Danger that got me in the mood for these mixes, so have a listen to them below.

The Complete Guide to Music Discovery

Over the last eight months I’ve conducted a multi-tiered experiment to develop a complete system of music discovery on the web.

The first stage of the experiment analyzed the top aggregate metadata websites to see which yielded the most productive media recommendations.

The test began with one of the longest-established contenders –

STAGE ONE – LAST.FM

I provided 25,367 scrobbled tracks between March 20th and November 22nd, (an average of 102 tracks per day) to build a viable sample set of my listening preferences.

The case study –

LastFm breaks your recommendations into genre tabs, which is a plus-3 for organization.

The resulting artists, however are far from enlightening.  Nearly every result was either an artist already in my play history, or a token “poster-boy” artist for their genre.

For electronica (a terrible term we’re still trying to bury,) the top suggested artists were Faithless and Orbital.

For jazz, it suggested Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, Lee Morgan, Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor (appealing to the free and avant-garde jazz trends of my listening)

And for modern classical avant-garde, Pierre Schaeffer, Terry Riley, Kronos Quartet, Pierre Boulez, Michael Nyman and Arvo Pärt.

There were no surprises among them, which I suppose is to be expected from a popularity-contest recommendation system.  I don’t fault LastFm for using this method; it’s simply not a resource I would utilize to find anything new.

STAGE TWO – STREAMING SERVICES

Sites evaluated:

RDIO – http://www.rdio.com

SPOTIFY – https://www.spotify.com

RHAPSODY – http://www.rhapsody.com/start

SOUNDCLOUD – https://soundcloud.com

GROOVESHARK – http://grooveshark.com

8TRACKS – http://8tracks.com

After repeatedly giving these sites a try over this past year, I’ve been disappointed every time by the lack of user control, the low bitrate of their streams, the advertisements, and most of all the universally abysmal selection of available tracks.  The fundamental flaw with these services is that if the rightsholder(s) of any particular record haven’t worked out a deal with these services, you won’t likely find their content any time soon.

And furthermore, there’s an excellent editorial from this user who gave up on Spotify after 400 days of compounding problems.

STAGE THREE – MUSIC BLOGS

A few years ago, I subscribed to a handful of absolutely exceptional music blogs.  But one after another, these sites were taken off the web for claims of copyright violation.  Most were sharing massively obscure content not available for purchase anywhere on the web, but by the end of the last year all of my favorite blogs had been taken down.

Still, new blogs are born every day, and sites like Hypemachine and NPR track the most active and best-ranked blogs at the links below.

Hypemachine’s searchable index of 800 blogs – http://hypem.com/blogs

NPR’s most-recommended blogs – http://www.npr.org/music/blogs

And the ever-popular http://www.gorillavsbear.net/

But if you’re more interested in a daily, up-to-the-minute feed of new and interesting tracks, perhaps this guide is more your style.

STAGE FOUR – A GUIDE TO GENRE SUBREDDITS

This list organizes the most active and most popular subreddits for every genre you can think of.  It also includes composite lists grouping related subreddits together into a single stream.

One of the better subs is r/vintageobscura which has strict policies for its users –

– Under 30K Views on Youtube video and related videos by the same artist.

– Under 50K listeners on Last.fm.

– Recording dates ranging between 1930 and 1980

They’re looking for space age bachelor pad music, early electronic, proto-punk, library music, jazz, chamber pop, exotica, krautrock, ambient, and space rock – all of my favorite things.

Vintage Obscura also has a web radio station on radd.it – http://radd.it/r/vintageobscura

STAGE FIVE – RATEYOURMUSIC

But if you want simple, hands-down, best-of-the-year/decade/genre/artist/etc lists – rateyourmusic.com is the answer.

The rateyourmusic site is an  online collaborative metadata database cataloging 1,026,663 artists,  3,065,684 releases, and 37,955,810 user-contributed ratings as of April 2015.

Search their index here – http://rateyourmusic.com/lists

(Or browse by category at the right of your screen at the link above)

Custom user-defined charts – http://rateyourmusic.com/customchart

Or start from scratch here – http://rateyourmusic.com/find/

And The GNOD Engine

Or if you prefer a down-and-dirty text-based artist cloud, mapping related artists by proximity, check out http://www.music-map.com/.

They also have a recommendation engine called http://www.gnoosic.com/.

These just scratch the surface, but will introduce you to more music than you could hear in several lifetimes.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
PUTTING ALL THIS DATA TO WORK

From pp35-46 of
The Innerspace Library Reboot Manual
2014 Ed. v2.75

All right, so you’ve found a new microgenre or an artist you really dig.  What do you do with all this data?

Here is the official Innerspace Guide.

1. Discover something which would be of value to the archive.

2. Research the history of genre, historical/social context, etc.

3. Read the Wikipedia entry for the genre and log all relevant artists.

4. Read related literature (e.g. Mark Pendergast’s The Ambient Century in the case of ambient music, The Penguin Guide to Jazz, all related manifestos, the Rough Guides series, biographical texts, etc.)

5. Check for essentials Collages of the genre on the world’s largest private tracker.  Download all as reference material.

6. Generate a Custom Chart at rateyourmusic.com with the following parameters:

TOP + ALBUMS + ALL-TIME + ONLY INCLUDE GENRES: + [GENRE] + SUB-GENRES + AS RATED BY RYM USERS

7. Log the top 20 entries / albums with a score of 3.5 or higher.

8. Cross-reference Collages, Wiki recommendations, literature highlights, and RYM Top 20 to find recordings named in 3 or more sources.   These are the albums you should pursue first.

9. Obtain all box sets and compilations related to genre.

10. If there is a label directly associated with the genre, pick up a complete label archive (such as Ninja Tune, Warp, Ohr, Nonesuch, Deutsche Grammophon Avant Garde, Command, Chess, Philips Prospective 21e siecle, FAX +49-69450464, et al.

11. Pick up all albums, EPs and singles from the artists within the top 20 release map.

12. Structure %album% tags and folders chronologically by date of release: “[%year%] %album%” and uniformly tag the %genre% value to populate as a chronological autoplaylist of the genre as a whole in MediaMonkey or a similar player with dynamic playlist support.

13. Construct a tier of standard playlists:

A. ~60-100 disc map of albums best-representing the genre.

B. Record label playlists (if applicable.)

C. A top 10 essential albums set (as determined by metascore.)

D. Separate playlist for featured artists with 50 or more albums in their discography.

14. Listen to recordings, beginning with albums from step 6, followed by the top 10 essentials list, and then first 2 LPs from each artist, and so on.

15. As most of these recordings will likely be decades out of print or have never been produced in a digital format, you will not be able to purchase (or even preview) these albums from commercial sources like iTunes.  Utilize other resources to acquire these albums, explore and discover the ones which resonate most with you, and purchase original issues via Discogs and your local shops specializing in rare and import vinyl.

 

CLOSING THOUGHTS

While this methodical and systematic approach to musical discovery may appear somewhat “clinical,” it is an efficient and refined means of employing the rich systems of metadata available and the largest assembled music databases in the history of recorded sound.  This should prove particularly advantageous for the music scholar faced with the daunting challenge of poring over decades of rare recordings.

By no means do I intend to downplay the critical role your local used record shop owner plays in the search for new music – no amount of metadata can match his or her years of experience living the sounds you seek.  But for the eager listeners who do not have access to such a shop, there are multiple resources like those described above which return a wealth of information you will never find on popular streaming services like Spotify, Rhapsody, or Rdio.

Through this system of discovery, you can combine the available information from blogs, literature, RYM, the Wikipedia, trackers, box sets, label archives and your local record gurus and organize the resulting data in an accessible fashion which will inspire many rewarding purchases for your library.

Happy hunting!