New scientific study confirms the obvious: Freddie Mercury had an unparalleled singing voice
A group of Austrian, Czech, and Swedish researchers sought out to examine the Queen singer's incredible vocals
Regardless of what they might think personally about Queen, most rock critics and music fans alike recognize the immense vocal talent that was the great Freddie Mercury. Still, in case there was ever any doubt, new analysis of both Mercury’s singing and speaking voices has shed fresh light on just how special his pipes really were.
A group of Austrian, Czech, and Swedish researchers conducted the research, the results of which were published on Friday in Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology (via AlphaGalileo). While they couldn’t confirm the long-held belief that Mercury’s range spanned four full octaves, they did discover some interesting tidbits about the expanse of his voice. For one, despite being known largely as a tenor, he was more likely a baritone. They based this assumption off analysis of six interviews that revealed a median speaking fundamental frequency of 117.3 Hz. That, coupled with anecdotal evidence that Mercury once turned down an opera duet because he was afraid fans wouldn’t recognize his baritone voice, led the conclusion that the singer was talented enough to jump out of his base range.
It’s true that without a living test subject, the researchers’ conclusions are largely unconformable. To get closer to the truth, however, the team brought in professional rock singer Daniel Zangger-Borch to imitate Mercury’s voice. They filmed his larynx at 4,000 frames per second in order to look at exactly how the Queen frontman created those iconic rough growls and jaw-dropping vibratos. What they discovered was that he likely employed subharmonics, a singing style where the ventricular folds vibrate along with the vocal folds. Most humans never speak or sing with their ventricular folds unless they’re Tuvan throat singers, so the fact that this popular rock vocalist was probably dealing with subharmonics is pretty incredible.
What’s more, Mercury’s vocal cords just moved faster than other people’s. While a typical vibrato will fluctuate between 5.4 Hz and 6.9 Hz, Mercury’s was 7.04 Hz. To look at that in a more scientific way, a perfect sine wave for vibrato assumes the value of 1, which is pretty close to where famous opera singer Luciano Pavarotti sat. Mercury, on the other hand, averaged a value of 0.57, meaning he was vibrating something in his throat even Pavarotti couldn’t move.
There’s a lot of scientific and analytical music terminology in the full study (which can be read here), but the conclusion was clear from the beginning: Freddie Mercury had a voice unlike anyone else in rock ‘n’ roll, and that led to one of the most unique singers and stage performers of all time.
Listen to the Isolated Vocal Tracks of 10 Popular Songs
If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite singer’s voice sounds like in its purest form, the musical sub-genre of isolated vocal tracks can offer a clue. Here are 12 videos of popular songs stripped of everything but the vocals—some of them strange, others eerily beautiful.
1. “HELLO” // ADELE
2. “SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT” // NIRVANA
3. “BEAT IT” // MICHAEL JACKSON
4. “FELL IN LOVE WITH A GIRL” // THE WHITE STRIPES
A Conversation With Apple's Rockstar Executive Bozoma Saint John
Apple Music’s Marketing Executive Bozoma Saint John.Photograph by Kendrick Brinson for Fortune Magazine
Meet the company’s pop music guru.
Bozoma Saint John’s ascension into the realm of internet sensation began when she walked onstage at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference June, wearing in a bright-pink dress, to talk about the company’s new music services. It was complete by the time she asked the audience to sing along to the classic, “Rapper’s Delight.” Outlets from the Business Insider to Der Spiegel gushed about the “badass” (Wired) “true star of the event” (New York Magazine) with headlines like “Bozoma Saint John is my Hero” (The Verge). A auctioned charity lunch with her is now going for more than $2,000 dollars.
But while the internet may have just discovered her, Saint John has been making waves in the entertainment and tech worlds for a long time.
She moved nearly 7,000 miles from Ghana to Colorado Springs at age 13. In her new city, she quickly found that the only way she could make friends with her fellow high school classmates was to bond over pop culture—in 1990, it was Bon Jovi, Madonna, and Michael Jackson who helped her break the ice with students at Liberty High School.
What was a teenage survival method quickly became a passion, and then career, for the now 39-year-old St. John, who is known as “Boz,” and currently heads global marketing for Apple’s streaming music service, AppleMusic, and iTunes.
The work is important, Saint John says, just like it was at Liberty High. “Pop culture and entertainment can be dismissed as surface but it’s not,” Saint John said in an interview with Fortune. “It’s the language we all speak and it’s the connection point between people all over the world.”
Music is the thread that ties together her nearly 20-year career in marketing and brand management. She credits her success with landing a temp job as an New York-based assistant for Spike Lee’s ad agency, SpikeDDB, out of college. As the firm’s fourth hire, she worked with several of the agency’s celebrity clients, including Janet Jackson and Beyonce’s first commercial with Pepsi in 2002, directed by Lee himself.
Saint John was then plucked by PepsiCo’s PEP0.08%marketing machine, where she ultimately became head of music and entertainment marketing. While at Pepsi, St. John helped ink five separate marketing deals with Beyonce, culminating in a $50 million deal with Pepsi sponsoring the artist’s 2012 tour and 2013 Super Bowl halftime performance.
After that career high, though, came personal tragedy. In late 2013, her husband passed away from cancer. Soon after, she left Pepsi for Beats, then a startup headed by Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, who had been impressed by Saint John’s successes with Beyonce at Pepsi. Saint John took the job to start a new life, moving herself and her young daughter to Los Angeles to head marketing for the startup.
She started her career at Apple almost unwittingly. Four months after St. John joined, Apple acquired Beats for $3 billion in cash and stock in May of 2014. From there, she climbed the ranks to become global marketing for all things Apple Music, charged with how to sell the $531 billion company’s latest streaming service, Apple Music, to the world. It’s no easy feat, considering the competitive space filled with companies with a head start, including Silicon Valley darling Spotify.
To help, she’s enlisted some of the world’s hottest stars. Last fall, Saint John’s vision came to life with a commercial that aired during the Emmy Awards, depicting actresses Kerry Washington and Taraji P. Henson, and music artist Mary J. Blige jamming to mixtapes created by Apple Music in Blige’s home. Earlier this year, St. John was able to turn megastar and streaming music critic Taylor Swift into a believer, debuting a number of ads with the star listening to Apple Music on her phone.
The power of pop is real, Saint John says, if you can harness it. “I love pop culture, I know where Angelina’s third child was born,” Saint John says. “And the fact that I get to use it in my work—I love it.” Not all work, after all, has to feel like it. “Passion should meet your professional life, and I’m a living, breathing testament to that.”
A version of this article appears in the August 1, 2016 issue of Fortune.
Here’s a very interesting video from The Economist that looks at the new dynamics of the record business and whether an artist really needs a record label these days. It’s a veiled advert for Kobalt, but frankly, that company is way ahead of the game when it comes to not only collecting artist royalties, but reporting them as well.
I had a personal demonstration from founder Willard Ahdritz a few years ago and it was indeed impressive in that an artist could see in real time how much he was making. This, of course, beats have to wait until the end of the quarter or even the end of the year to see a statement to see how much you’ve earned.
As the video correctly points out, Kobalt is perfect for an established artist, but the company has yet to break a new artist, and this is where record labels traditionally excel. Major labels are also able to take a successful artist and boost her to superstar status because of the infrastructure they have in place, something that can’t be easily replicated.
So there is a place for the record label in today’s Music 4.0 world, but there’s also a place for a rights management firm like Kobalt. Check out the video as well as this interesting article to learn a lot more.
Beetles Do Beatles: Music Coup for an Animated Netflix Show
Josh Wakely is working on an animated children’s series for Netflix that is based on Beatles songs.
If Josh Wakely was feeling a little fried, it was understandable: He had quickly become one of the busiest young writers and producers in television — with a little help from the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Motown.
Jet-lagged from repeated trips between New York, Los Angeles and his native Australia, Mr. Wakely, 35, sported a dark stubble and had an errant shirt button undone one afternoon last week at his publicist’s office in Lower Manhattan. But he excitedly tripped over his own syllables as he talked about his three new shows, each of which uses classic pop songs as inspiration, raw material and organizing theme.
“Beat Bugs,” an animated children’s series on Netflix based on Beatles songs, begins its first season on Aug. 3. The show features performances of songs like “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “Help!” by Eddie Vedder, Pink and Regina Spector.
Also on the way, with air dates yet to be set, are two other shows Mr. Wakely created: “Time Out of Mind,” a dark drama for Amazon with characters based on songs by Mr. Dylan; and another animated show for Netflix, still untitled, that makes use of the Motown catalog. Smokey Robinson is its executive music producer.
As Mr. Wakely described it, his template began with “Beat Bugs,” which he conceived of as a way to extend the current “golden age of television” into children’s programming. He created the show and also has directing, writing and producing credits.
“I realized that these extraordinary melodies would make sense for children, but also the full level of imagination and visual imagery that the Beatles had in their songs,” he said. “What is it to go into a strawberry field forever? What would it be like to actually be inside that yellow submarine?”
So far, the buzz around Mr. Wakely’s shows has centered on the licensing deals he struck to draw on iconic — and closely guarded — song collections in unusually extensive ways. For each show, Mr. Wakely and his team have access to vast catalogs not only for musical performances but also for plot devices and characters, extending the reach of the shows into the songs’ most fundamental elements.
Mr. Wakely said he chose the music catalogs partly for their storytelling potential, but beyond “Beat Bugs” he provided scant details. “Time Out of Mind,” he said, would feature characters from Mr. Dylan’s songs “colliding” in 1960s America. The Motown show follows an 8-year-old African-American boy named Ben who discovers magical powers that let him bring graffiti to life.
“Banksy for children as done by Pixar,” Mr. Wakely said of the Motown show. “That was my pitch.”
Music licensing in film and television is nothing new, and the jukebox musical has been a Broadway standby for years. (For instance, “Motown: The Musical” debuted on Broadway in 2013.) But the kind of rights that Mr. Wakely sought are rarely granted, and the deals were all the more remarkable given his relative inexperience. He had just a handful of credits to his name as a writer and director when he began the process half a decade ago. Securing rights to the Beatles works — including more than 250 songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney — took three years; the deal is estimated at nearly $10 million.
“I had no idea how complicated or how ambitious an idea it was,” Mr. Wakely said. “I’m glad I was so naïve, because I wouldn’t have pursued it otherwise.”
Mr. Wakely grew up in Newcastle, Australia, an industrial hub north of Sydney. He said he had been struggling for years as a screenwriter, working on scripts that often went nowhere, before he decided to set up his own production house, Grace: A Storytelling Company.
Among his earlier work was “My Mind’s Own Melody,” a short musical film in 2012 in which he worked with Daniel Johns of the Australian rock band Silverchair. Yet Mr. Wakely remained well below the radar of the Hollywood press until making the Beatles deal two years ago for “Beat Bugs,” which features five childlike insects living in the tall grass of an overgrown backyard who learn a valuable life lesson — and a catchy Beatles tune — in each 11-minute episode.
Like the most enduring animation series, the writing in “Beat Bugs” is crafted to appeal to children as well as to their parents, with plenty of allusions to lyrics. In the “Help!” episode, Jay, a headstrong beetle, gets trapped in a glass jar and needs his friends to come to his rescue.
“I thought you never needed anybody’s help in any way,” says Kumi, a ladybug.
“I’m sorry,” Jay replies, “but those days are gone, and now I’ve changed my mind.”
For Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which represents both the Beatles and Motown songwriting catalogs, the shows are a way to reach a generation of very young potential listeners. Still, Sony/ATV was typically cautious in approving the deal for “Beat Bugs.”
“As a company, we say no more than we say yes,” said Damian Trotter, managing director of Sony/ATV in Australia, who said he has known Mr. Wakely since the beginning of his career and encouraged him to develop ideas for projects using music. After an initial meeting, Mr. Wakely began to sketch out “Beat Bugs” in detail, and Mr. Trotter said the result impressed Sony/ATV enough to give the green light.
“He demonstrated the power of a great idea,” Mr. Trotter said. (Sony/ATV also controls the Motown catalog, and administers Mr. Dylan’s songs in Australia; the Beatles themselves were not involved in the “Beat Bugs” deal.)
Mr. Wakely, who splits his time between Los Angeles and Sydney, said at the time the Beatles deal was finally signed in January 2014, his funds were nearly exhausted. He could afford just six weeks of rent in Los Angeles and was prepared to return to Australia. “I would say to my wife, ‘I don’t want to be the guy that nearly got the Beatles rights,’” he said.
On Wednesday, Netflix announced that “Beat Bugs” had been confirmed for a second season, to begin Nov. 18, with Beatles songs to be sung by Jennifer Hudson, Rod Stewart and Tori Kelly, among others. Mr. Wakely has his hands full, but he said he was already thinking of more music-focused shows.
“It feels like beautifully uncharted territory,” he said.
Jazz musicians Liang Ying, Nathaniel Gao and Zhang Ke (left to right) perform at East Shore Jazz Cafe, in Beijing. Source: Terence Hsieh
Beijing’s underground music scene has been heralded as an epicenter of creativity in China: you can find everything, from dark noise, to grunge, rock, hip hop and avant garde jazz. Lately, however, I’ve been getting the impression that people believe that the Beijing music scene is dying, for lack of a better word. Jonathan Kaiman at the LA Times accredits the closure of venues and festivals, and denial of visas to President Xi Jinping’s anti-foreigner campaign, citing reports of increased pressure by local artists and venue owners to affirm the pro-socialist movement being carried out by the state.
I’ve been a jazz musician in Beijing for nearly four years now, and it’s hard for me to see the scene as “dying” here. In fact, I’ve had the privilege of seeing and even sometimes performing with some of the most amazing jazz headliners in Beijing, over the past few years: The Yellowjackets, Herbie Hancock, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Robin Eubanks, Jaleel Shaw, Snarky Puppy, Richard Susan just to name a few.
Ami Lee, managing editor at City Weekend Beijing recently posted an op-ed in which she criticises this “decline narrative” that’s been used to describe the arts scene in Beijing– that is, it’s convenient to wrap up all the venue and festival closures, arrested artists, deportations and canceled concerts within this simple idea that political forces have it out for Beijing’s music scene.
This notion of a convenient narrative is important to better understanding of Chinese society. First of all, it highlights a double standard leveled against Chinese artists: that they are (or should be) eternally locked in a black-and-white struggle against the iron fist of the Communist Party, although this expectation doesn’t exist for western artists. Second, this narrative doesn’t account for the increasing financial pressures on venues and artists in 2016: rising rents, an ageing artist demographic and skyrocketing back-of-the-house costs like beverages and food.
That aside, political forces have always played a role in determining how large shows or festivals with international acts are allowed to play out, here in China. In 2008, Bjork got herself famously banned for performing her song “Declare Independence” and shouting “Tibet! Tibet!” and even jazz icon Harry Connick, Jr. wasn’t allowed to play with his band due to an unapproved set list.
“The main difference now I think is just that music festivals are getting harder to operate, and I guess more and more bands coming from abroad are getting cancelled, but that’s different from the local scene,” says Nathaniel Gao, a jazz saxophonist who’s been in Beijing on and off for 10 years now. Indeed, it’s important that one separates the politics involved with booking international acts, which ARE decidedly political; and the local scene, made up of primarily musicians living and working in Beijing, who perform their own art, mostly independently. For the most part, the politics of art have largely stayed out of the local scene with a few notable exceptions. There’s crossover, especially when it comes to these large festivals, but for the most part, artists are free to do what they want. I recently saw an album released by a rapper known as MC Da Wei in which I heard him drop some of the most scathing political criticisms to date, at a club called DaDa.
Let me bring this back to what I’m most familiar with: jazz. Jazz musicians are privy to a special seat at the table of music in Beijing: we’re largely ignored by both the expat and the greater music community. Maybe it’s the lack of accessibility to the music we play: listening to jazz shows is hard, especially if you’re not familiar with the conventions of the music.
Maybe it’s the lack of stereotypical behaviors that people expect from jazz musicians: you won’t find the musicians here doing drugs, getting rowdy or doing crazy performance art on stage, like historical tropes of jazz. But maybe it’s also the lack of exposure: while the gigs we play are advertised in magazines and websites, they’re not easily found, often tucked away in the back section of weekly events, if at all in print. My point is not that we are neglected, but rather, that the jazz scene here is comprised of a small, but growing group of both Chinese and international instrumentalists who are dedicated to producing creative instrumental music in the jazz tradition despite being paid the equivalent of $50 a night or less.
There’s creative jazz music nearly every night of the week in Beijing: from jam sessions, where musicians congregate to play jazz standards and talk shop and network, to international headlining acts, where world famous musicians come to share their craft with the community. Last week, New York saxophone legend Antonio Hart, who spends time in China every year, quipped, after a workshop at Beijing’s East Shore Jazz Cafe: “Beijing cats don’t mess around!”
Scott Sawyer has been playing drums in Beijing for nearly as long as rock and jazz music has existed here. “From the jazz scene perspective, it’s far from dying,” he says. “I’d say if anything, it’s thriving more than it ever has: we’ve got these new venues that are opening, though some of them come and go, and I’m not aware of any political pressures that are placed on the jazz scene. If anything, the scene is thriving and growing more than it ever has but it just doesn’t get the attention that a lot of that other stuff does.”
Zhang Ke, Source: Terence Hsieh
There’s also a sense of authenticity that resonates with many of the musicians here: “There’s a strong sense of Chinese culture and authenticity in Beijing, being a foreigner here you really experience that,” says Anthony Vanacore, a drummer from New York who’s been in Beijing for just a year. Traditional Chinese melodies infiltrate into the jazz idiom: musicians like guitarist Liu Yue and pianist Xia Jia have written modern jazz arrangements that include such melodies, reharmonizing and reworking them for piano trio with bass and drums, and even with horns and traditional Chinese instruments.
But most importantly (and concretely), there seems to be a community in Beijing that forms around jazz music– one that doesn’t necessarily exist in other music scenes in other places in China. On any given Tuesday, a crowd of jazz musicians descend on the jam session at Jiang Hu bar, an old traditional courtyard house that’s been converted to a performance space. It doesn’t feel like a New York session where the musicians are there to prove a point and call each other out, but a place where people are trying new ideas, patterns and concepts they’ve been practicing on their own, over jazz standards with a live band. Sometimes there’s a great crowd. Other times, the house is practically empty, but the band plays just the same.
Despite the fact that they make about $30 a night, you’ll find the same guys coming back week after week. Do they need the money? Probably, but they’re also in it for the musical work out. Perhaps it suggests that a creative music scene can exist not just in spite of, but because of a lack of mainstream support. When you can make a lot of money playing a particular style or even song, it can affect your aesthetic judgment. In other words, it allows us to keep the main thing–theart–the main thing.
The YouTube-Music Feud, Part 1: Why '$3 Billion To Rights Holders' Means Nothing
AUSTIN, TX – MARCH 17: A view of the stage at YouTube At Coppertank during the 2016 SXSW Music, Film + Interactive Festival on March 17, 2016 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for SXSW)
This is part one of a series that discusses missing narratives from the music industry’s fight against YouTube. The posts are meant to be objective–siding neither with YouTube nor with artists, but rather highlighting and unpacking important data points that both sides of the debate are leaving out.
Today marks the one-month anniversary of over 180 musicians signing an open letter to Congress, protesting Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). According to the letter, Section 512 directly diminishes songwriters’ and artists’ earnings by allowing “major tech companies to grow and generate huge profits by creating ease of use for consumers to carry almost every recorded song in history in their pocket via a smartphone.” While not mentioned by name, YouTube is the dominant scapegoat in this complaint.
Today also marks the ten-day anniversary of GoogleGOOGL -0.02%’s response to these complaints, in the form of an update to “How Google Fights Piracy.” The 62-page report highlights how Google has actually enabled creators to build more sustainable careers, from using SEO techniques to hide piracy websites to helping artists gain insight into their ever more distributed audiences.
Both stances remain impassioned, yet unconvincing. The music industry’s larger argument of “pay us more” is vastly oversimplified, and has prompted a similarly oversimplified response from Google.
For instance, YouTube often cites how it has paid out over $3 billion to music rights holders to date, 50% of which has been monetized through ad placement with Content ID (a proprietary technology that identifies copyrighted work in user-generated content). Both of these statistics are weak because they give no clarity to how that money is distributed, nor to whether that distribution is fair—questions that should stand at the center of discussions around YouTube’s utility to the music industry.
Yes, the larger music value chain is partly to blame for why artists receive pennies for their YouTube streams. Unlike with native YouTube creators like Pewdiepie or Michelle Phan, a vast and complex ecosystem of labels, publishers, songwriters and other stakeholders often engulfs a musician’s work, leading to a similarly fragmented split of revenues.
However, YouTube’s Content ID seems inherently biased toward celebrities and against independent and emerging artists. Only around 8,000 rights holders currently have access to the technology, a portion of whom work in the music industry; this leaves hundreds of thousands of musicians unable to monetize their work. While qualifying for Content ID sounds simple—based on an “evaluation of each applicant’s actual need for the tools”—the service seems to have been reserved for a lucky and unrepresentative few, many of whom are probably associated with major labels.
Furthermore, contrary to the minimum rates that audio streaming services like Spotify are required to pay, Content ID’s value fluctuates over time in tandem with the value of the host channel, the health of the larger global ad market and other factors. YouTube is a fundamentally ad-driven business that interprets play count as a proxy for value, so the cost of ad inventory decreases for most user-generated videos. Unfortunately, these videos account for a small percentage of YouTube consumption: according to MIDiA Research’s recent report “The State of the YouTube Music Economy,” 91% of music video views are concentrated on the first page of results, usually dominated by verified channels like Vevo.
These fluctuations and winner-take-all dynamics give much-needed context to Google’s claims that the music industry chooses to monetize 95% of videos identified with Content ID, and that accuracy rates are as high as 99.7% (which in itself has been disputed, as the IFPI recently claimed that Content ID fails to identify as much as 20-40% of songs on YouTube). Regardless of what the correct numbers are, Content ID is only as valuable as the videos it identifies, and the technology is still unavailable to an alarming number of musicians.
Monetizing user uploads is a costly endeavor—Google has invested over $60 million in Content ID—and the $3 billion figure at least suggests that the technology is working. However, a gap still prevails in which most independent creators cannot monetize their content on YouTube. An artist’s ability to send a DMCA takedown notice seems more and more dependent on relationships with corporate third parties; ironically, the fact that only Taylor Swift-level stars are speaking out in this debate further silences the independent sector. Both Google and the music industry need to look beyond public spectacle, realize who is missing from the discussion, and take them into account when building a sustainable strategy for distributing their resources.
