Twitter has made an investment in SoundCloud for a reported $70 million and if you’ve been following the story between the companies, you have to ask yourself “Why now?”
About two years ago Twitter almost acquired SoundCloud before walking away at the last minute, and an acquisition certainly would have made a lot more sense at the time, even though it might not have changed the futures of either company.
Back then Twitter wanted to capitalize on its high profile music users like Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, who had massive followings on the service (and still do) but weren’t able to take advantage by directly serving up their music to them. SoundCloud was struggling with both monetization issues (which still exist) and licensing problems, and theoretically could have provided the infrastructure for Twitter to transition to at least a partial music service.
Many think that Twitter was better off for walking away from the deal and keeping the focus on its core business, which in theory worked fine except for the fact that the company’s user base has plateaued in the meantime even with a focused agenda not diluted with delivering music.
SoundCloud has actually come a long way in that it now has signed licenses with the three major record labels, and has since worked hard to roll out its $9.99 monthly subscription service called SoundCloud Go. Still, it’s a cash-starved company and needs another round of funding to stay alive, so having Twitter as an investor in this round is most welcome.
That said, the benefit for Twitter isn’t as apparent. It’s not getting any of the technical goodies that come with an acquisition, and it’s buying a piece of a company that essentially hasn’t grown in valuation since its last go around.
In fact, out of all the music streaming companies currently in the space, SoundCloud may be the most baffling. It’s long been a boon to artists, bands and songwriters as a tool for free music distribution, and at that it may very well be #1 in the space. That market isn’t large enough to add enough subscribers to make the platform go however, and may be tapped out already. Attracting regular music consumers to its paid Go service may be limited to electronic music fans, since the platform is a favorite of DJs, but that genre seems to have plateaued as well.
The world’s most amazing acoustic phenomena: interview with prof. Trevor Cox
Trevor Cox is the professor of Acoustic Engineering at the Salford University. In his amazing book Sonic Wonderland, A Scientific Odyssey of Sound, the sound is the main actor on the stage and we can follow it through the voice of Cox who says: “a compelling tour of the world’s most amazing acoustic phenomena and a passionate plea for a deeper appreciation of and respect for our shared sonic landscapes”.
A scientific book about sound finally written in a simple and clear language able to amplify the common interest about this theme, where prof. Cox invites us not to be passive listeners but to open our ears and our mind to the majestic cacophony that surrounds us.
In this interview, Cox talks with us about his point of view on old and new techniques of buildings concerning acoustic effects or the use of reverberation in some specific places or again the change in global soundscape over the centuries.
At the beginning of your book, you talk about acoustic problems related to indoor environments such as schools, illustrated by the example of the Business Academy Bexley. How much are more architecture and sound far apart in the planning stages?
Trevor Cox: Most architects receive little training in sound, and so are reliant on advice from an acoustic consultant. For this reason, a good relationship between architect and acoustician is vital. A big change in design methods is happening now, where acoustic engineers play architects examples of how their building will sound. This is transforming the acoustic design of buildings because listening to examples allows architects to make better informed decisions.
About the use of reverberation, you quote many examples ranging from classical music to Brian Eno and the evocative experience of the most reverberant site in the world but I was particularly impressed by your considerations about the acoustic of prehistoric sites such as the burial chambers. How important it is for contemporary man rediscover how our ancestors were listening?
TC: Visitors to prehistoric site such as a burial chamber or stone circle should think about how places sounded to our ancestors if they want to better understand these precious sites. Rituals would have taken place in or around these places, and nearly all human rituals involve sound. The acoustic, whether good or bad, would have influenced how these places were used.
Animals show a variety of ways and an amazing adaptive ability, you describe numerous examples such as real dialects in the case of birds. Men, unlike animals, also seem to need an evocative component in relation to sound, what do you think? How we evaluate the sounds based on what they remember us and not according to what they are from an acoustic point of view?
TC: For much of what we hear, our reaction is first determined by what we think is causing the sound. If you hear a car, you don’t think vroom, you think car. Then our reactions to the sound have a lot to do with how we react to the car. Of course, cars make different sounds, so a sports car might have a particular bass throb conveying a sense of power. In this case, some of our response are about the character of the noise rather than what is making it. Bass sounds are generally associated with larger, more powerful things.
The change in the global soundscape over the centuries is evident, in the ninth chapter of your book you deals with the topic by mentioning the introduction of the typical sounds of the industrial age. Do you consider as positive this soundscape’s evolution?
TC: It is hard to think positively about industrial noise as this can be responsible for noiseinduced hearing loss or aircraft noise that causes sleep deprivation and harms attainment by pupils in schools. But this is the soundscape of progress that has lead to longer and healthier lives. What we need to get better at is at managing the noise so it causes less problems.
In a very beautiful excerpt of your book, you talk about the need to pass on to posterity an auditory documentation of the places that means preserving the soundmarks so to not lose the tracks of sound pictures of places that otherwise would be forgotten. What can we do to stimulate the sensibility on this argument?
Fortunately, this preservation is beginning to happen almost by chance. We’re now carrying out mobile phones that record video with soundtracks. So many special sounds are being captured.
About musical productions of last years, do you think is there a trend in the use of sound?
The biggest change in music productions in my lifetime is the shift from analogue to digital that contributed to overly loud music that lacked dynamics. There are some hopeful signs that this loudness war may be over and we can return to better-produced music.
If anyone would like to know more about the world of sounds, what kind of readings or albums do you recommend?
I would recommend just listening. Nothing special is needed, just spend some of the day listening to what is around you. The Soundscape by R. Murray Schafer is the seminal book on listening and acoustic ecology. Or you could go back to old authors like Thomas Hardy who had a beautiful way of writing about sound. In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise by George Prochnik is the best of the recent books on silence.
INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE - THOMAS WANDER & HARALD KLOSER
What You Will Hear: A watered down version of the original film’s score.
Full orchestra and brass for the big cues and piano/bells for some smaller moments.
Standout Tracks: More Stimulation, The Only Family I Got, What Goes Up, Worth Fighting For, Bus Chase
Will You Be Humming Along? Yes, and hating yourself for it.
Composed by my 15 year old self.
The album this makes me want to dust off: Independence Day – David Arnold
Will I come back to it? Let’s get one thing straight: this is not a poorly scored adventure. Don't give into the skeptics. Some of the action cues are quite enjoyable, and the quieter moments manage to install a sense of family and wonder. Additionally, the string writing is sufficiently dark to be considered a true successor to the first film. But, ID4: Resurgence has one major flaw from which it just cannot recover. Following in David Arnold’s footsteps is a tall order. His theme from the original film is one of the most joyous adventure themes ever composed. Wander’s & Kloser’s new main theme is beyond generically forgettable. It sounds like it belongs to some 5th sequel of a C-level franchise. It works well when it is (rarely) used as part of an action cue, but it is cringe worthy when attempting to convey pride or honor. Adding insult to injury, Arnold’s theme inexplicably shows up towards the end of the album. It’s a total head scratcher; the finale uses recycled statements of Arnold’s material. One cue sounds like they didn’t even re-record it. Why would you remind us of what is missing? The majority of this score is a fun ride. But, each use of the new theme just takes away from the experience. A more respectable theme could have saved this attempt at following a classic. Instead, this one will chase me away from an otherwise enjoyable score.Independence Day: Resurgence was provided courtesy of The Krakow Group and Sony Music Masterworks.
These Ice Instruments Look as Beautiful as They Sound
First of all thanks to DJ Pangburn for this article.
Half a world away, in the winter wilds of Luleå, Sweden, American ice sculptor Tim Linhart hand-carves ice instruments. He’s made guitars, drums, banjos, violins and even invented a couple new musical devices. One, the Rolandophone, is giant percussion tool that looks like a pan flute, and another is the Gravaton, a massive 37-string instrument sculpted from 2.2 tons of frozen water.
Linhart’s Ice Music concert series presents around 20 of these instruments to audiences each year. The Ice Music orchestra explores genres ranging from traditional folk to Hawaiian music to rock & roll and classical. It’s avant garde sonic tools draw crowds to Luleåeach year, which is no small feat considering the concert season runs through the city’s subarctic winter.
Image by Karin Aberg
But Linhart hasn’t always made ice instruments. Before getting into music, he was an ice sculptor who had worked at villages and ski resorts in Colorado for 16 years. Always pushing the boundaries of what could structurally be done with ice, Linhart would venture out onto the edge of a cliff, sitting atop a sculpture as he chiseled away. Precariously perched, Linhart spent a lot of time thinking about the properties of his chosen media—particularly areas of weakness and strength. One wrong move and he was dead. This critical thinking opened up other possibilities for Linhart’s artistic and, eventually, musical expression through ice.
“I had a friend who was building guitars, and the two ideas — the ice sculpture and guitarmaking— got close enough together, and we asked the question if we could build an instrument that was made of ice,” Linhart says. “At that point I had no knowledge of anyone else doing it. So I tried building a ten-foot high bass, like a giant violin, and put strings on it from a piano, tightened the strings, plucked them and heard the voice of the instrument come out.”
Image by Karin Aberg
Linhart, having no formal training in creating musical tools, thought if he just tightened the wires some more it would be louder. Instead, the frozen bass exploded into “a thousand small pieces.” That was the inauspicious beginning of his now 20-year journey into “ice music.” But he’s come a long way in the past two decades. “I’m quite uneducated, at least unofficially, as far as musical instruments,” Linhart said. “Now I’ve built 17 or 18 orchestras and well over 100 instruments, and played them through many hundred concerts, so I’m very familiar with how instruments work.”
To make an ice guitar, Linhart lays out a piece of plastic on a tabletop that has a drawing of the guitar body’s shape. Linhart then builds the guitar’s front and back plates with white ice, which is a mixture of snow and water. After letting it freeze overnight, Linhart carves the plates, then adds some finer details like f-holes before gradually building up the space between the plates with ice until they are sealed. From there, he adds a traditional neck, bridge and strings to complete the ice axe. “You start with the proportions that you’ve copied off of a standard instrument, and then you begin modifying those proportions in different ways to see how it affects the ice,” Linhard explains.
Considering Linhart’s pieces are made of solid H2O instead of resonant instrument materials like wood and metal, some can be a bit quieter than their traditional counterparts. But what they might lack in volume, Linhart insists they make up for in sonic beauty, “They have a more detailed sound—a brighter, richer sound,” he says. “The ice is volatile. It’s always moving. When it’s first formed, the ice is 10 percent bigger than it was as water, so there are all these crystals growing from different directions and there’s a lot of tension in them. But when you send vibrations through, all of those molecules that are under stress begin to release and the ice becomes more of an evenly-spaced and tensioned material. It changes the physical structure of the ice and more friendly to making music.”
Image by Graeme Richardson
As for the performance space, Linhart’s team builds a “cosmic igloo” for their ice orchestra. Each winter they construct a domed concert hill using snowblowers. “The concert hall that we’ve been playing in this year has two domes, and when you walk in the door the seating leads downward toward the stage, which sits between those two domes about 15 feet below the doorway,” Linhart explains. “The domes have holes in the roof to ventilate the heat from the bodies, while the instruments stay at the bottom in the pool of cold air.”
Concert season ends with spring, and a stage piece that requires six weeks to create simply begins to melt. The hall itself is disassembled in late March, and the musical instruments are stored in freezers for the summer. Come next January, the team will once again construct the concert hall and, if necessary, the instruments to entertain the audiences with their ice music.
Get Ready For The Amazon Streaming Music Disruption
First of all thanks to my friend Bobby Owsinski for this article.
With the battle over streaming music leadership raging on between Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube, there’s one major company that’s been lying silently in the weeds waiting for the right time to pounce on an industry increasingly ripe for the picking. Don’t look now, but it may be Amazon that may soon be the one causing the disruption in the music business, and not the other popular contenders.
Amazon’s already a major, but low-profile, mover and shaker in the industry, with reportedly somewhere between 75 million and 90 million yearly subscribers (the company doesn’t release such information, so this is just informed speculation) to its Prime service, and although most of that centers around 2 day merchandise shipping and video delivery, the different types of offerings coming from the Prime Music portion of its service have been growing by the month.
This slow roll-out is happening at a controlled pace, but you get the feeling that the company is learning what works best with each move while not intentionally making a lot of waves as it positions itself to enter the online streaming market full-force.
One recent example of this is when Amazon Music was added to T-Mobile’s Music Freedom data-free music streaming program, which is the first instance of Prime Music being available to off-the-platform users. The move didn’t cause a lot of headlines, but gives the company some experience in rolling out a service beyond its own closed ecosystem.
Step By Step
What might be more an indicator of the ultimate bigger picture is the fact that Amazon recently made it’s PrimeVideo service available as a stand-alone product for $9 a month. Just adding the ability to purchase the service on a monthly basis is a break from the traditional yearly membership required in the past. Another foreshadowing of the future perhaps?
Then Amazon Launched what amounted to a YouTube Rival with its Amazon Video Direct (AVD), which although it launched with only publishing heavyweights and no record labels, provides an interesting outline of how it will pay content partners, as well as how it will take down videos if copyright infringement occurs. AVD gives partners the option to upload their content to Amazon PrimeVideo (available to tens of millions of premium tier subscribers), make it available as an add-on subscription through its Streaming Partners Program, offer it as a one-time rental or a one-time purchase, or make it available to all Amazon customers, which is ad-supported like YouTube.
According to Variety, the PrimeVideo option pays video owners a 15 cents per-hour royalty fee in the US and 6 cents per-hour in other territories, but that appears to cap at $75,000 per year. On top of that, Amazon will also pay partners a 50% royalty of the retail price from one-off purchases and rentals. As with YouTube, Amazon will pay the partner 55% from any ad revenue received. Amazon will also distribute $1 million a month to the makers of the 100 most popular programs viewed by Prime members each month. Regardless of the percentages, providing a roadmap for how content contributors get paid sure looks like Amazon is setting up for something bigger down the road. [Read more on Forbes…]
One of the hopes that digital music brought was for a faster and more accurate way for everyone in the food chain to get paid. That sounds good on paper, but unfortunately hasn’t quite panned out the way anyone in the industry expected. While it’s true that it’s easy to count online sales and downloads in the digital realm as well as streams and views, digital accounting lags far behind the expectations of artist, label or publisher alike. But now, music’s big data problem is beginning to be changed thanks to the efforts of companies like Kobalt Music and DistroKid, a trend that hopefully will be adopted by the rest of the industry at some point.
One of the major problems in the current world of music big data has been that although the streaming services could provide accurate info to labels and publishers, it came in a format that was incompatible with their accounting systems. That meant that all those reams of data (more than ever, thanks to the services ability to granularly collect everything) was delivered in stacks of hard copy, which then had to be manually input into the label or publisher’s system. And of course, the problem was that the person doing the inputting was often an intern or a low-on-the-totem pole employee who was not equipped to deal with some of the more complex decisions that would come up in the course of inputing, which lead to inaccurate statements for artists and songwriters. And let’s not forget the inevitable human error that goes along with manual data entry that didn’t help matters.
This is a problem that continues to plague the majority of the industry every quarter, and in some cases, every month. In fact, many publishers secretly complain that the cost of the manual labor involved exceeds their revenue in many cases. Still, it’s their fiduciary duty to carry on despite these difficulties.
Now to be fair, accounting software systems are expensive, usually custom designed, and take a very long time to both implement and overcome their inevitable growing pains. While changing to something that’s more digitally compatible is in everyone’s best interest, it’s still a painful process, both financially and morale-wise. It’s not a remodel, it’s almost a full tear-down and rebuild.
However there is a light at the end of the tunnel. A few years ago Kobalt Music, lead by Swedish entrepreneur Willard Ahdritz, launched the Kobalt Portal, the first online dashboard that Kobalt artists and songwriters could use to discover their earnings in a timely fashion. In fact, the portal has now been turbocharged so it can even report in real-time, an innovation that has attracted over 8,000 artists and songwriters to the service, including such heavyweights as Paul McCartney, Prince, Gwen Stefani, Bob Dylan, Tiestoand Kelly Clarkson, among many others. [Read more on Forbes…]
About the Author: Angelina Panozzo is a Jack of all music, and a master of Netflix and video games. Composer, performer, and journalist, she wanders around lost a lot of the time. You can catch her on her website or on her blog, Musically Notable. She’s also on Twitter and Instagram.
Digital composition is a land of endless possibility, filled with electro-acoustic marvels, more samples than you can ever own, and the ability to create just about anything with the right equipment, a fast processor, and some patience. As the video gaming community continues to grow and expand, more companies will need composers for their games, and that’s great news for us.
Still, even with buttons, knobs, and filters galore, there are some essential things to know about the orchestration and arranging of music, even when it goes from birth to completion in a digital format, never leaving your studio (or half-baked music desk in the bedroom, in my case).
The Pyramid of Sound
Just because you had 47 flutes and one trombone in your middle school band doesn’t mean that’s the best way to do things, (said one of those 47 flute players). With the way that acoustics and ears work, higher frequencies are much easier to discern. They float over the top of ensembles, and these instruments (flutes, violins, etc) can be extremely pervasive in a piece of music. If you think in terms of food like I do, your bass instruments are your grains, vegetables, and fruits. Your mid range instruments like tenor saxophones, violas and the like are your dairy and your protein, and the oils, sugar, and fat are the highest of the high. You need them all to have a thick, beefy sound.
Some techniques will always sound comical
I think we’ve all learned this the hard way at some point. About 8 years ago, I wrote a percussion piece with a xylophone and 12 other pitched and non-pitched percussive instruments. The piece focused on texture rather than melody, and at one point I decided to use quick running notes on the xylophone.
It sounded like Bugs Bunny was running from Elmer Fudd. (Or like this clip.)
Strings can do more than just sustain
Composers love strings, because they never need to take a breath. They can also provide stunningly gorgeous soundscapes, full of righteous swells and lonely, solitary, pining melodies. With the advent of decent sound libraries, anyone can have the sound of an orchestra without leaving their half-baked music desk in the bedroom.
It’s important to remember the enormous amount of sounds that a string instrument can produce. No, not all of them have been successfully replicated into sound libraries, but the more common techniques like pizzicato (plucking the strings like a guitar) have, and you should use them, because it will sound awesome.
Budget permitting, you could always snag a string player for an hour’s worth of recording – or if you have friends that play for fun, bribe them with pizza and beer.
Um, maybe wait until after the recording to break out the beer.
If you ever want this music to be played live, keep the humans in mind
Basically, if you want your music to be performed by actual living, breathing humans, you should read up on some orchestration texts to become familiar with the limitations of the instruments you’ll be using. I love my copy of Alfred Blatter’s Instrumentation and Orchestration – I’ve had it for 6 years and not a week goes by that I don’t flip it open to check something or remind myself of something. It’s way more user friendly than the Rimsky-Korsakov (for non-classically trained musicians), and it has pretty much any instrument you’d want to use, including things like brake drums, guitars, and jaw harps.
If you’re using woodwinds (or voices, for that matter), remember that they have to breathe sometimes.
Horns are really picky about ranges and jumps, and piano players only have 5 fingers on each hand (unless they come from Gattaca).
Right now you’re writing some loops for a small mobile game, but if it blows up and goes viral, you might (will definitely) have musicians hammering your inbox asking for the sheet music. Video game music is relatable and people love it – why do you think Lindsey Stirling’s rendition of the Zelda theme has over 26 million views?
Sometimes, less is more
With the pyramid of sound firmly in mind, consider that an ensemble of flutes and violins might not sound as full as you’d like it to. Doubling up melodies in the bass can make them sound muddy, and adding 142 kinds of snare drum might not be effective.
Of course, there’s always an argument for intent and musicality – maybe you want those flutes and violins to sound shrill because there’s a murderous ghost on the loose. Maybe you doubled the melody in the bass because the character is wandering around in a swamp. Maybe the drums are meant to scare the bejeezus out of you – that’s all fine.
Learning orchestration and arranging is like learning what the “rules” are, specifically so you can break them. If you know what to expect, you’ll never be surprised when you hit playback, and you’ll waste a lot less time reworking stuff to sound the way you want it to.
Onward, fellow composers, and make music for the gamers of the world!
