Posted by Matt Dunn on Sat, Feb 19, 2011 @ 12:28 PM
There are many ways of planning your musical itinirary for a wedding reception or other celebration, but one that can be tremendously successful is to create a stylistic theme for the event. There are tons of genres and moods that can inform the overall feel of the party and that will appeal to guests of all ages and interests. By focusing on a particular musical thread, all sorts of songs may be suggested that might otherwise never come up. Spending more time with one type of music or lyric plot can allow you to see old songs in a new light. You might even be surprised to find yourself enjoying some tracks that you thought you would never get into.
One of the fun things about creating the soundtrack for special events such as a wedding is that, because the occasion is not specifically about the music, people are open to enjoying a much wider variety of sounds than they might normally be. Urban club kids who might never listen to a swing tune in their daily life can find themselves going wild for a Louis Prima number. Folks from a generation that typically finds hip hop to be annoying noise might enjoy bumping to the latest Kanye joint. You can take advantage of this temporary open-mindedness by being adventurous in your musical selections.
There are several different ways you can go in picking a theme for your playlist. You can build around a genre such as disco, reggae or swing, but you can also concentrate on lyric content to pick songs about love, geography or some other topic. Picking a theme can stimulate the thought process and suggest songs that might otherwise be neglected. Certain themes might also contribute to choices of decoration and wardrobe. Encouraging guests to come in 70's disco clothes or 30's zoot suits can be great fun and lend to the sense of it being a special occasion.
There can be a fine line between trying to cater to all of the diverse tastes that guests might bring to a party and trying to get people to step outside of themselves to enjoy new and different styles. No one way of addressing this issue is necessarily better than another, but a creative theme can be great way of encouraging people to lose themselves in the moment of a really fun occasion.
Posted by Matt Dunn on Sat, Dec 11, 2010 @ 04:46 PM
It's been a real big week up here at the little station that can. We had our first meeting of the Board of Directors with the new and expanded membership, and we put a bow on a wildly successful fund raising campaign. I would also qualify the Board meeting as a rousing success, although tensions were raised a bit at times. I think it's a good thing that folks can get worked up about taking care of the business of the station, as long as no one gets mortally wounded in the process. There may have been a few flesh wounds incurred at the meeting, but I am fairly confident that the undertaker's services were not required.
I don't know the exact numbers on the pedge drive, although I will have a better idea once I get to the office tonight. I know that we were very close to maintaining a pace that would have us achieving our goal of around $45,000 within the appointed time. This is fantabulous given that the fall drive from a year ago fell far short of fulfilling our needs, and our expenses have gone up significantly with the establishment of our new transmitter at 91.3 FM in Orleans. In all of my years at the station, I have never seen the volunteers work so hard as a team to make this thing happen. I really could not be prouder of everyone's effort, from the first light DJ's to the late night crew, and all of the listeners and community members who dropped by to lend their support. I hope that we keep this energy and momentum as we move boldly into the future.
The energy manifest in the effort that everyone put into the pledge drive was likewise in evidence at the Board meeting of December 5. There were many in our constituency who had concerns about the recent Board election, and a good number of them attended the meeting. The energy and excitement came close to boiling over, but in the end everyone maintained their cool. Given the desire on the part of some in the gallery to go into more depth on the inquiry, I was a little surprised that no one accepted President Yingling's offer to schedule a special session on the topics of interest.
While I am deeply appreciative of the effort that everyone made to attend the Board meeting, it is nevertheless true that the public comment portion of the session is not the place to have a back and forth discussion. This was highlighted by Lady Di making a motion to formally recognize that fact. President Yingling did make an attempt to address people's concerns as best he could given the venue, although the necessary brevity of his responses likely did little to assuage the anxiety that some felt about the process.
Despite the obvious tension in the room at the time, I think that some good did come out of the meeting. First and foremost, the Board has made significant steps to opening up their membership to a wider consituency than ever before. We now have five new members, only one of whom is from Provincetown, and three of whom have had relatively little previous business with the station. Furthermore, this commitment to openness was confirmed by an agreement to make the minutes of the meetings available in draft form in a timely manner after each meeting, and to have a few words about the Board's activities included in the station newsletter. I am fully committed to this move towards inclusiveness as I have been its benficiary by my very election to the Board.
By writing this post, I hope to stimulate interest in and discussion of the activities of the Board. Democracy can certainly be messy sometimes, but I am convinced that it can make us stronger. The more ideas we can entertain and the more people we can rely on to help us do our work, the more effective and significant that work is likely to be. Please contact me with your concerns through the comment section, my facebook page or direct email.
Posted by Matt Dunn on Thu, Nov 18, 2010 @ 05:06 PM
This is part two of my rant to vent my frustration at the music industry and their failure to adapt to the internet as a venue for marketing their product. I am an avid music collector, wedding dj, and radio host. I am whole-heartedly committed to music as a hobby and as a profession. It is disappointing that the business world has not figured out how to effectively use technology to suit the needs of the consumer. I want a wide selection of high quality recordings made readily available at a reasonable price. I admit that these might be construed as somewhat demanding standards, but they are goals that are within the reach of the tools at hand. Being a realist, I am willing to compromise on some of these vectors in order to make gains in other areas. Given the current landscape of online retailing, I feel as though virtually none of the goals are being met, and so I am ready to revert back to a previous mode of collecting.
In addition to the problems with eMusic I noted in my previous post, it was recently announced that several groups of "indie" labels will be withdrawing their products from the site. These labels represent such interesting acts as Arcade Fire, Cat Power, Belle & Sebastian, and many others. This comes as the result of changing wholesale terms so that eMu can add the Universal Group to their catalog which means we get such acts as U2 and Jay-Z. Blecchh. Admittedly, there are many great artists represented by the Universal Music Group, including those on the Motown label, but this move on the part of eMusic to accomodate a centralized music industry is a step in the wrong direction.
Given the rapidly multiplying venues for distribution, there has been and will continue to be less and less reason to rely on powerful middlemen to control the flow of product. Artists can now produce their work much more affordably than in the past, and they can reach out to their fans in more creative and effective ways than anything envisioned by the suits in corporate offices. The internet allows consumers and producers to make direct contact with one another, eliminating the need for agents and promoters. This is not a loss that will not be mourned by many outside of the industry as these folks were mostly viewed as leeches anyway. It may be that new roles are created in social network management and the like, but the dinosaurs have not proved to be useful in these areas. By paying attention to other enthusiasts and collectors, I can get tips on artists and even acquire the tracks themselves. Many artists and collectors give away some tracks that folks can legally get for free.
Free seems about the right price for the technical quality of many of the things available on the internet. When file sharing on the net was a new idea in the late '90's, it was done for free and the pirate nature of the environment at that time meant that many tracks had bad file names and the sound quality was often sketchy. This activity was quashed by the record industry before there was any viable alternative in place. After a while we had iTunes, and then a few other mp3 outlets. Unfortunately, many of these outlets were only marginally better than the pirate sources of material. So now we are being asked to pay for poor product.
Without getting into heavy technicalities, the bitrates and file types typically available on the mass market download sites are significantly inferior to CDs which themselves are worse sound quality than mint condition vinyl. CDs have improved dramatically since their introduction in the '80s, so one can only hope that the same will happen with the latest formats. As it is, many enthusiasts have gone back to vinyl as their primary format, and I am ready to step away from downloads after an initial infatuation. I can maintain the advantages of digital storage and get high quality copies by buying CDs and records and making .wav files out of them myself. The used marketplace will provide these items at prices which are comparable to what it costs to download them. I will still rely on downloads from the sites which make rare and hard to find recordings available. I look forward to the day that bandwidth and storage becomes cheap enough to make lossless file formats a viable option for downloading.
Image by aussiegall
Image by DJKamelion
Posted by Matt Dunn on Thu, Nov 18, 2010 @ 02:03 PM
The digital landscape changes faster than the shape of the outer beaches of Cape Cod. The service that I have used as my primary source for mp3 downloads for the last few years has announced a new pricing plan which is quite likely to change my buying habits.
Up to now, eMusic has used a subscription model which converted a fee into credits which could be spent on products which were variably priced. In my time as a subscriber, the price per credit has gradually increased from around 30 cents to my current rate of slightly over 40 cents. Percentage-wise this is a rather hefty increase, but it still leaves me paying significantly less per track than is available through other sites. This lower price was made possible by the fact that I was committed to spending a certain amount each month, and the fact that the major label acts with their bloated budgets and greedy entourages were not available. The site prided itself on presenting "indie" artists not generally available elsewhere and catering to aficionados who wanted to dig deeper than the top 40. All of this is in the past tense.
Over the last year or so, the site has made great efforts and achieved some progress in adding "major" labels to the stable. The latest addition to the catalog has inspired a drastic change in the price structure. This change has not been well received by the vocal members of the forums. Given the poor communications on the subject from the company itself, I think the best anyone can recommend is to take a wait and see approach. Roughly a month ago, eMusic made an announcement that they would be switching to a currency-based pricing system. Without going into the gritty details of the new plan, suffice it to say that it will result in a more than 20% price increase for me. Despite the switch to a currency system where prices are listed in dollars and cents as opposed to credits, they will be staying with a subscription model for membership.
There are a number of lessons to be drawn from my experience with this situation to date. First of all, the company has had poor communication on the upcoming change which seems to indicate poor planning. Despite the fact that the proposed changes represent a major difference in the way the site operates, they have been vague at best as to when the changes will become effective. The original announcemnt, dated October 11, stated that the change will come "sometime in November". Five weeks later, we are now in November, and no further update has been given. Due in large part to the fact that I do not know what products will be available and what the price for those products will be, I have been forced to put my subscription on hold.
In the material that the company has made available regarding the changes, there is repeated reference to iTunes and how eMusic is price competitive with that 8000 pound gorilla. My initial reaction to these comparisons is that I was attracted to eMusic because of its substantive differences from iTunes, not because it was cheaper. Cheap is nice, but it doesn't mean a thing if the product isn't worth having. Now that there is significantly less price difference between the two services, the shortcomings of eMusic become magnified. I have never used iTunes. At first this was because of their DRM copy protection and their draconian insistence on exclusivity deals with artists. In recent times, artists and labels came to realize that these things were not helping their sales, and so were largely dropped. The fact remains that the iTunes user interface and functionality are awkward at best. I am not alone in these sentiments. Given their focus on marketing "indie" artists, much of eMusic's customer base was constituted by people that had no use for iTunes. The new management has lost sight of this in their effort to be competitive with iTunes.
There are all sorts of problems with the eMusic site that I was willing to overlook as long as I was getting a very low price. There are more than a few tracks that are mislabeled, there are too many tracks that are re-recordings of old tunes to get around licensing issues, awful cover versions for the same reason, and technically horrible transcriptions of vinyl recordings or bad masters. If I am paying for a cut, I expect to get the artist and version of note at a playable quality. If I am paying retail, these expectations are only stronger.
Photo by roland
Posted by Matt Dunn on Fri, Oct 01, 2010 @ 03:43 PM
I was reminded recently of the rather dismissive attitude some people take to the work of the DJ. I don't want to sound defensive about it, but I am very proud of the work I do. Through the use of sound and accompanying devices, I can make myself and others very happy. I understand why some people might think that it is not "real" art when compared to the works of musicians or painters. Because the DJ uses music, it is natural to compare the DJ to a musician and notice that the DJ is using the product of others to create their art, while the musician is ostensibly creating something from nothing. While there is some truth in that analysis, a few remarks are in order.
First, it is silly to think that a musician, or any artist for that matter, is producing their work from whole cloth. Any artist worthy of respect will be glad to speak of their influences, and those influences will be more or less evident in the work itself. A good deal of what makes art great is how it fits into the context of what has preceded it. A really good artist can take themes that are familiar to the audience and reassemble them in new and interesting ways. That sounds a lot like what a good DJ can do.
One may argue that there is a big difference between the way that a painter may use familiar images and the way that a DJ directly relies upon the creative work of others. In this sense the DJ has more in common with a collage artist, or one who makes overt references to items from pop culture. While this certainly marks a difference in tone, and perhaps requires a different set of standards when evaluating the quality of the work, I don't think that it necessarily makes the product any less of an art form. The ready availability of the constituent parts of such works makes it relatively easy to throw something together, but it is not difficult to throw some paint on a canvas either. Everyone may think that they can be a DJ or a collage artist, but there is a noticeable difference between those that can do it well and those who cannot.
I don't want to sound too grandiose about what I do. The fact of the matter is that I take singles and string them together in a way that fits a mood or, on a good day, creates an emotional response. There are DJs who do much more to create original works of aural art using remixes and mashups. I am fascinated by what those folks do, and maybe I will dabble in that art form someday myself. I would compare what I do to the work of an actor in that I take someone else's words and try to make them meaningful on a given occasion. There is also the element of a director in that I am picking which songs to play. I would also note the aspect of technical knowledge that is required. I had no idea when I started DJing how much engineering I would have to learn to create the desired effect. I now know a fair bit about sound systems and computers in the way that any artist or craftsperson must know about the tools of their trade.
I love music. I got into DJing because I love music. I realized fairly early on that I was not going to be a musician. I would not be so bold as to compare what I do to being a musician. The kind of art I create is importantly different from that of the musician. Given my immense respect for those who do create music, I hope that what I do can help to promote what they do. If you are hosting an event, and what you want is a live band, a DJ is likely to be a poor substitute. On the other hand, if you want a DJ, a live band is not likely to fit the bill either. If you like landscape photography, then an impressionist painting may not be your cup of tea and vice-versa. DJing may not always be good art, but it should not be dismissed entirely either. I'm an artist, dammit. On some days I may even be a good one.
I leave you with a little snippit of an artist at work.
Image by ilmungo
Posted by Matt Dunn on Wed, Sep 29, 2010 @ 07:43 PM
Wedding receptions are often built around signature moments like the introductions, toasts, cutting of the cake, etc. I recommend that people sort through these various traditions to use what they like and don't be afraid to skip the ones that just don't feel right. One of the moments of importance that almost everyone goes through is the ceremonial first dance. This is the time that the happy couple gets out on the floor under the watchful gaze of the entire congregation and has to perform like they are on the latest reality tv program. The only problem is that most people don't actually know how to dance, never mind dance with a partner to a slow romantic song.
There are a few ways to avoid feeling entirely uncomfortable if you decide to engage in this aspect of the traitional wedding reception. One way would be to hire a dance instructor to teach you how to rip it up like you know what you're doing. Not impossible, but given the rest of the madness surrounding wedding preparation, unlikely for most normal people. Another way to make this moment less clumsy is to just skip it altogether. Start with an uptempo tune, and have the DJ or band invite everyone out to whoop it up with you. Depending on how long the cocktails have been flowing, people are likely to be ready to get it on anyway.
If you instead really want to share the precious moment on the floor alone with your betrothed, but are unable to actually learn to samba on short notice, I recommend keeping the song short. With everyone watching you, the dance will seem to go on for an eternity. Four minutes will be waaaay more than enough for the photographer to document the occasion, and for you to get your public display of affection on the record. Realistically, a three minute song will be plenty long enough for any normal person to develop a full-on flop sweat while trying to look good while doing something they are not used to doing. Of course you want the selection to convey the proper emotion, but I am sure that you can find the appropriate sentimentality without having to rely on a song of five minutes or more.
You may argue that you love your honey, and slow dancing together could never get old. That's very romantic, but this is not that kind of thing. Holding each other tight may be great, and you may be very proud to be seen together on a very public occasion such as this, but I guarantee that you will be ready to move on by the time the song ends. If you have not thought about how long four minutes can be, try this little experiment. Stick your finger in your ear for four mintues. If you're like me, you love sticking your finger in your ear. It gets the itches out. After about 14 seconds, it's time to get on with some other activity. After four minutes, you may feel like you've lost a year of your life. It's quite possible that your first dance may feel the same way if you choose the wrong song. If you are capable of being completely oblivious to everyone watching you do something on stage that you are not really good at, then this advice will not apply to you.
Image by The Toad
Posted by Matt Dunn on Wed, Sep 08, 2010 @ 03:17 PM
As we come to the end of another busy summer season here on Cape Cod, I thought it might be useful to share with you one of the rants I inflict on my friends from time to time. That is, why it really isn't a good idea to plan to have your big event on the weekend of a national holiday. As romantic or patriotic as it might initially seem to have your wedding on the Fourth of July or Labor Day, a quick review of the facts may persuade you otherwise.
Perhaps the most important reason for avoiding holiday weddings is that it is inconvenient for your guests. As much as you may want the day to be all about you, a really good wedding is just as much about the congregation as it is about the betrothed. Weddings are a chance for long lost parts of the family to get together and have a good time. The only other time that such distant parts of the clan are likely to be united is at funerals, and they are usually not as much fun. Having your event on a holiday weekend makes everything more difficult for out of town guests. Travel and accomodations are harder to come by, and many folks are likely to have other things planned for the holiday. It is best to avoid any resentment that might accrue as a result of asking people to skip the big picnic they were looking forward to.
Another reason to avoid holiday weekends when planning your wedding is that finding and booking vendors may be complicated. Just as your family wants to go to the annual picnic, so does the caterer, photographer, musician, etc. Beyond that, some vendors will likely be in very high demand for those dates, resulting in higher rates for their services. Weddings can be expensive enough without having to outbid a large field of competition for the best vendors. Venues, too, are likely to be more expensive for major dates, if they are available at all.
Assuming that your guests have set aside their scheduling conflicts and braved the highways to get to your wedding, and that you have secured all of the service providers that you'll need, there is one other set of reasons why a holiday wedding is making things more difficult than they need to be. This is the fact that simply getting around town will be more difficult on a big travel weekend. Cape Cod is a beautiful place to have a wedding (or do anything else, for that matter). That's why people come here, or to any other picturesque setting. Such places are less romantic when they are overflowing with tourists. Trust me on this one. The beautiful locations are much more romantic when you can have them to yourself. It's tough enough to keep everything on schedule during a complex event like a wedding without having gridlock to deal with. Everything is going to take twice as long when you are trying to do it on a holiday in a resort town. Why bother?
Posted by Matt Dunn on Tue, Aug 31, 2010 @ 09:08 AM
With the advance of technology over recent years, it has become ever easier for folks to program playlists ahead of time to allow them to DJ their own wedding without having to babysit the equipment. It may be tempting to think that you can do a better job than anyone else at picking songs that you and your guests will want to hear. While it is certainly true that you know your taste in music better than anyone else, I am here to tell you that there is still a role for the live human DJ in the production of a quality soundtrack for your event. Advance planning cannot account for all the variables one might encounter through the course of a really good party.
If your parties are anything like the ones that I have been to, the surprising and spontaneous moments make for the best memories. Considering that music is an important part of any occasion, it would be nice if the songs being played could at least try to keep up with the goings on in the room. The biggest drawback of not having a DJ is that it is much more difficult to change the music on the fly. Someone will try to do this, and what typically ends up happening is that songs get interrupted, or there is dead air all together as someone unfamiliar with the equipment tries to fiddle with the knobs. This can be a complete buzz-kill.
There are a few technical problems with a pre-set source of music. One subtle but important issue has to do with the continuous flow of the music. Most ipods or even laptops are going to have trouble cross fading from one song to the next. Some music players will have the ability to do this, but it involves setting the same amount of fade for each transition. This may be good enough for most songs, but there is a great degree of variation. Some songs will have long slow fade outs while others may go right up to the end of the track and end hard on a beat. The former will result in a long silence between songs. while the latter may result in sonic overlap if a crossfade has been set. Neither result is good for a dance floor. It may sound a bit trite to say that timing is everything when it comes to dancing, but small things like getting one song to seamlessly merge into another can make the difference between a non-stop party and an empty room.
Another possible problem with a do-it-yourself approach to the music at a function is the equipment. You may have spent a ton of money on your living room stereo, and it may be loud enough to shatter your neighbor's windows, but it is almost certainly not appropriate to fill a dance hall. There is a big difference between home audio and professional sound reinforcement. A good DJ will have top-notch gear to make the music heard above the din of a good party without making anyone's ears bleed. Finding the right volume can be difficult, and that task is more difficult if you are using equipment that is not designed for the task at hand. I made the mistake years ago of showing up for my first gig with my home system thinking that it would be more than enough only to find that you could barely hear it in a big room full of people. If you are going to go the route of providing your own entertainment, at least make sure that you have the right system for the job.
The biggest reason, other than saving money, that somebody might want an ipod instead of an actual DJ is that they know their own taste better than any stranger could. While there is no doubt that this is true, a good DJ will do the advance planning necessary to consult with the client on an appropriate song list. The more extensive the list, the better the DJ will be able to construct a show to the client's taste. Given the same songs, a professional DJ will be able to create a much better mix for a variety of purposes than any novice or machine. Reading the mood of the room, knowing how one song will fit with another, and knowing how to use the equipment are all skills that come with experience and years of practice. DJing is one of those jobs that many people think they can do, but few people can actually pull off. It doesn't take too many mistakes before no one wants to be in the same room with a bad DJ, and a machine can be a very bad DJ.
Posted by Matt Dunn on Mon, Jul 26, 2010 @ 10:30 PM
A question that I get asked all the time regards where I find the material that I use in my shows. On one hand the answer is short and easy, while on the other it's a matter of putting in the time and following my nose where it leads me. It's no secret that the internet is a wonderful tool for learning about all kinds of stuff, including music both new and old. There are all kinds of blogs about music, some of which are linked on this very blog. These DJs and enthusiasts willingly share the fruits of their research and even provide some free downloads of songs that are not copyright-protected. This is really just an extension of how we used to find stuff before the internet age -- talk to people whose taste and judgment you respect and find out what they're listening to. The other aspect of internet music-hunting, and one which is particular to that forum, is to use the automated suggestion generators available on a variety of sites. These come in slightly different forms on different sites, but they all use the input provided by you the user to connect you to other things which may interest you. As you can probably guess, these robots do not always get it right, but they do give you a slew of leads to investigate. In the end, whether you are using the suggestions of humans or robots, fruitful research takes time. Casting a wide net means collecting a whole bunch of stuff that may end up being useless, but it also means that there is a greater chance that you may catch something beautiful and unexpected.
Before the internet became so prevalent, many of my greatest finds came from simply going to record stores (remember them?) and digging through the crates. I used various heuristics in judging what I might want to buy. First and foremost was looking for artists I recognized and following the thread of their work through solo projects, collaborations and compilations. It may go without saying, but compilations involving artists you already like are a great way to find new music. Comps can be organized around record labels, genres or charitable causes, among other things, and they can help to put music in a context that leads to further discoveries. Brick and mortar record stores were useful because they often specialized in particular genres themselves. One store might be stocked by someone who liked punk, or jam bands, or jazz, and so you knew that when you went digging in that store you were likely to find leads of a certain kind. This kind of specificity is often lost on the internet, where retailers like amazon.com don't have to restrict themselves in any such way. One major exception that I have found is dustygroove.com, which specializes in funk, rare groove, and jazz of just the sort I find interesting. I know that when I go aimlessly browsing on that site that I am going to find stuff with a certain bent. Also, Dusty Groove has great little editorial reviews on most of their titles which help pin down the sound even though they do not offer listening samples the way many sites do these days. The general feel of the site is very similar to what it used to be like to physically browse in a store, probably due in part to the fact that they still run an actual brick and mortar retail outlet in Chicago.
I mentioned Amazon, and they are an easy first step into the world of automated recommendation systems. Most people are already familiar with the site, so using it will not involve a very steep learning curve. First of all, use the recommendations list that the site generates. When appropriate, use the "fix this" button to fine tune your recommendations. You can tell them when you aren't interested in an item, or that you already own it. These features, combined with the rating system, will help the site create suggestions that have a better chance of being useful. In general, all of the sites with automated lead generating devices require a fair bit of input from the user before they can really hone in on the good stuff.
Another site that is a lot of fun and that a lot of people have heard of is Pandora. Pandora is a radio station that you tailor to your own taste. Tell it a few artists that you like and the site will play those artists plus others that it deems to be similar. Every time it picks a song, you can tell the site whether you like the song or not. That feedback further influences the choices the site makes for you. The up side of this is that you can create a radio station that only plays songs you like. You can skip any song you don't like. Genius. Also, you will get to hear songs that you have never heard that are in the same musical family as songs that you like. The downside is that it is not a very efficient way to get new tips. After all, you can only listen to one song at a time, and the site doesn't give you advance notice of the things it is likely to pick out for you. One of the ways that Pandora has been allowed to exist by the powers that hold copyright is that the user has no direct control over the playlist. For a time, it looked as if the major labels and their henchmen were going to try to extract an inordinately large rights fee for playing music on the internet, but thankfully that dispute was resolved in a way that allowed Pandora to rock on. One more instance where the rights holders thought that the best way to promote their product was to make it inaccessible to potential consumers, but that is a rant for another day.
A site that allows much more user control over the play list along with a bunch of social networking features is last.fm. I found this site a couple of years ago and I have become absolutely addicted to it. By downloading a piece of their software, the site tracks what you play on any of a variety of music players. It automatically generates a history of your listening and calculates charts of your top plays. You can see how often you listen to a given artist or song. That's nifty, but it also comes up with recommendations based on your history that you can scroll through and stream off of the site itself. The streaming capabilities of the site are also useful if you just want to listen to a tune that you don't have in your own library. The online library is not as complete as you might want, but there is definitely enough there to keep you entertained for quite a while. Furthermore, the site will build a radio station based on your library or one based on the site's recommendations for you. Because the site knows what you have been playing off of your own sources, it can use that information to play things from that list that also exist in the cloud. You don't need to have your hard drive with you to listen to the stuff that you have already logged on last.fm. Very cool. Unlike Pandora, you do have the ability to directly control the song being played. Like Pandora, you can always skip any song you don't want to hear. Last.fm is often the first place I go when trying to fill a request on WOMR that I don't have on my hard drive. You can find me on last.fm as username mattycdread.
The other main resource that I use for finding new music these days is emusic.com. This is a music retailer of mp3's based on a subscription model. For a variety of reasons, I avoid iTunes as much as possible (although my new iPhone has broken that resistance a bit). emusic has a recommendation generator very similar to amazon's, but their catalog is much more limited. In some ways this limitation is a positive, because the site started out with strictly independent, non-major label releases. This suits the majority of my musical taste just fine, although I have to go elsewhere if I'm looking for a specific title likely to be on a so-called major label. As with other online retailers, you can listen to a sample before deciding to download. One bonus of the subscription model is that I end up paying less than 50 cents per song.
So that's how I use the web for research these days. Last.fm, emusic, amazon, pandora and blogs. I also subscribe to many of the artist and label newsletters that I find appealing. In the end, there is really no substitute for spending time on one's hobby and simply following the links where they will take you. It's relatively easy to find out what others are listening to and to see if it fits your taste. If you have any tips for me, I am always open to suggestions. Happy hunting!
Posted by Matt Dunn on Fri, Jul 02, 2010 @ 10:29 PM
Hello, sports fans. Thought I'd whip off a post while I sit here in front of the Netherlands-Brazil World Cup match. Among the many things that I love about soccer is that it does not demand one's undivided attention and provides the perfect wallpaper for other activities. It is not entirely unlike baseball in this respect, and the tone of the crowd and the announcers lets one know when it is time to look up. The theme here is one that I spend some time contemplating, and one that comes up from time to time with people I meet when DJing. The question is: What are the advantages and disadvantages of the various formats available to music lovers these days, and what, ultimately, drives the choice of one over the others?
First, let's enumerate the options. There may be others of which I am unaware, but the basic possibilities are vinyl, CD and mp3 or other digital recording. For the time being, I will use "mp3" to refer to any of a variety of types of files for digital storage. In fact, there are many different ways of putting music on your hard drive which are importantly different from one another, but we'll save that discussion for later. I am not giving too much away to say that I am of an age such that my first collecting was done on vinyl. In the 70's, there were other choices, but none was close to being able to provide the fidelity and flexibility of pressed wax. Some real audiophiles that I knew at the time were committed to reel-to-reel for their high-end listening experience, but this was far too delicate and complicated for the average use. Eight tracks were a novelty in that they allowed us to listen to music of our choosing in the car, which had never been possible to that point, but the interface was clumsy and playback was like listening in a mud puddle with a head cold. Unless you were actually in the car, there was no good reason to put up with that nonsense. Not too much later, we saw the emergence of the cassette. For a great good while, cassettes were my format of choice. They provided the portability of eight-tracks (and then some), with much better sound quality (when treated properly) and the added benefit of being able record and re-record at will. Much of my collecting in the 80's consisted of making copies of my friend's libraries and looking for bootlegs of live shows by bands that tickled my fancy. Somewhere in cold storage I still have several crates of cassettes that are slowly degenerating into uselessness. There are more than a few that are irreplaceable, and I should really get around to transcribing them to digital, but what are the chances of that? (A little confession - my first DJ job in public was hard-wired in cassette format. I was prepared to do a live mix, but I couldn't figure out how to get the CD players plugged in to the PA, so I just let my back-up tapes roll.) There was never any doubt in my mind that well-cared for vinyl provided a much purer quality of sound, but cassettes did some things that vinyl just couldn't do.
It was roughly 1984 when my parents first got a CD player. They were new, rare and expensive at the time. As I recall, they didn't work all that well at first either. The laser would often have trouble focusing on the disc, and the sound quality on the first discs to come out was frankly atrocious. Furthermore, I was personally offended by the manipulations of the industry to make obsolete the stacks and stacks of vinyl I had collected. By the time I got to college in the late 80's, I saw the first retail outlet devoted strictly to CD's, and I wanted to burn it down. Having invested thousands of dollars and as many hours into my record collection, I wanted no part of having to start at zero with a new format. It was clear to me from early days that the capitalistic momentum was to force me to replace all of the titles in my library. Had the original product been slightly more affordable and of a slightly higher quality, it might just have put the other formats down decisively. Luckily for all of us, that did not happen, because despite the fact that the digital realm has improved greatly in the last 30 years, the analog still has some advantages that computers just can't match.
Fast forward to 2000. Vinyl has nearly died entirely and Napster is in full effect. My DJ career has become well-established and I am regularly working in clubs and private parties. Although mp3's are a fascinating way to discover and share music, there is no realistic way to obtain them legally, and they were not useful for public use. Sound quality was sketchy at best, and tracks were often mislabeled, but the novelty of being to search and find virtually any tune was enchanting. Vinyl is still the standard for professional DJ's and hip-hoppers deserve all credit for keeping the format alive for the rest of us. The only place a collector can find vinyl for sale is at small independent retailers who specialize in used merchandise and garage sales. There are a very few bands and labels releasing new vinyl, but it is widely viewed as a gimmick to appeal to a highly specialized geek crowd. It would be a few years yet before the format would start to make a significant comeback in the retail market. CD's are the dominant player, but digital storage is not yet practical enough to rip one's entire collection to hard drive. It doesn't get a lot of attention, but the vast increases in storage capacity over the last ten years have had as much to do with the shift from CD's to mp3 as almost any other factor. That, and the powers that be actually making the product legally available. What a concept.
All of which brings us to the present day. I still have a pile of vinyl in my office with a turntable ready to rip them to my hard drive. I love vinyl. I use my hard drive as my primary library. The convenience of having the entire collection at my fingertips at all times generally trumps any advantages that vinyl may have over the digital. Records are heavy. CD's are heavy, too, when compared with a little old external hard drive. I used to carry a couple of hundred CD's to any given DJ job. Many of these CD's have several tracks that would never be of any use to me. As the computer became more functional to me, I would burn mix CD's that helped me consolidate the collection. This was a tremendous advantage compared to actually lugging all the LP's that had tracks that I might want, but still a time consuming and somewhat clumsy process. About 5 years ago I made the commitment to going fully digital with my DJing. Initially, I just ripped all of my CD's to the hard drive, and used the computer as a way of increasing the convenience of my pre-existing recordings. I was very much not into using iTunes for a variety of reasons. Without going into the full scale anti-iTunes rant, the DRM copy-protection made the files useless to me. The way I was working, I would move tracks from one storage medium to another and burn copies all the time. Since iTunes made this impossible, I had no use for it. The exclusive nature of the marketing deals that Apple made with the artists was also repulsive to me, antithetical to the independent nature of the art and artists I was trying to support. Some time later, iTunes and other industry giants have backed off on their use of DRM, and there are more and more legitimate competitors in the mp3 retail marketplace. I now have a subscription to emusic.com and regularly use Amazon for major label acquisitions unavailable on the primarily indie-label emusic. I still buy CD's, but at an extremely reduced rate. Mostly, I buy CD's for rare and out-of-print titles that I can't find through any of my standard digital retail outlets. I also buy a CD occasionally when I find myself in an independent retail outlet that I want to throw some money at. There are a couple of local stores that are fighting the good fight to stay in the retail music business such as Instant Karma in Orleans and Spinnakers in Hyannis, and I want to do what I can to maintain their viability, such as it is.
A lot of the music I play is from an era when there was really only one way to record and playback music. A lot of the music I play has been produced in a way that harkens back to that era. Many of the musicians and DJ's that I look up to are seriously committed to the analog format in all that they do. Tube amps and turntables are quite common at some of my favorite shows. In many ways this is not a mere affectation or glamorization of a time gone by, but a genuine preference for the kind of sound that these tools create. If I had all of the time and money I needed, I would also convert entirely back to vinyl for my work. As it is, when I get in the thick of a DJ set, I do prefer to work with CD's as opposed to mp3's because I have more control over the interface and I think they sound better when pumped over a loud system. While it is true that vinyl is a bit more fragile than CD's, making proper care and maintenance very important, I think that pristine vinyl sounds that much better again than CD's. Given the practical limitations of carrying tons of vinyl around, switching to vinyl would require me to do a level of set-planning to which I am unaccustomed. If we forget about the practical world, maybe I would hire a roadie to lug around thousands of records so I could go on playing by the seat of my pants. I have always enjoyed making my sets up as I go along, and this is how I have done it from early days. In the end, I am willing to sacrifice a little fidelity in the name of convenience. I don't think that the vast majority of listeners can actually hear the difference, and it allows me to share an incredibly wide variety of titles with anyone who cares to listen.