Showing all posts about music
Jacoténe wins Triple J Unearthed High with I Need Therapy
12 August 2022
Talking of Triple J… Emerging Melbourne based Australian soul and pop singer Jacoténe has won the radio station’s Unearthed High for 2022, with her demo single I Need Therapy. Those vocals though…
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Triple J losing listeners to commercial radio, go figure
12 August 2022
Government funded, alternative music Australian radio station, Triple J has been losing listeners for sometime among their target demographic of 18 to 24 year olds, but recent surveys show the decline has picked up pace, as Tim Burrows at Unmade writes:
However, the fall for average listening to Triple J is much worse. Now, a much bigger proportion of that young listening audience is choosing commercial radio. In 2014, there were an average of 22,000 members of Triple J’s target audience listening at any given time. In the most recent survey in 2022, that had fallen to 10,000 – a fall of 55%.
What puzzles me is the migration to commercial radio though. Listeners haven’t gone to TikTok to discover and listen to music — at least not all of them — instead they’re tuning into commercial radio stations. Surely the ads that choke commercial radio broadcasts don’t have some sort of hitherto unrealised appeal to Generation Z?
I’m somewhat outside Triple J’s target audience, but one reason I still tune in (stream in) is precisely because there are no cheesy commercial jingles. There are ads of sorts on Triple J, but usually for other shows, and music related events and happenings. Certainly not the kind you encounter on commercial channels though.
And surely 18 to 24 year olds aren’t being turned off by Triple J’s focus on new Australian music? Interestingly, radio listenership in general is down some seventeen percent among those aged 18 to 24, so while the jays are losing audience share, they’re not the only ones.
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Vale Judith Durham, lead singer of the Seekers
8 August 2022
Judith Durham, lead singer of Australian folk/pop band the Seekers died last Friday, 5 August 2022, aged 79. Formed in 1962, the Seekers, along with Durham, who joined the group a year later, were among the first Australian music acts to achieve international success.
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Australian music, Judith Durham, music
Michael Spitzer: 40000 years of music history in 8 minutes
6 August 2022
Because music is so accessible today we’re drowning in it, says Michael Spitzer, professor of music at the University of Liverpool. That’s a far cry from a few hundred years ago when people attended, at best, two recitals in their lifetime, and music went unrecorded until 1877 when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.
But the arrival of the phonograph is only a small part in the story of music. Changes in the way music was performed, and the instruments created to make that possible, evolved as we moved away from our hunter-gatherer roots, and eventually began living in towns. Spitzer’s recounting of forty-thousand years of musical development, in the space of eight minutes, is fascinating.
If you’re looking at the broad picture of the evolution of sapiens, then the epochs are hunter-gatherer, farming community, and then the founding of cities and city-states. Each of these epochs is associated with mentalities. So, hunter-gatherers tended to be nomadic. And if you’re essentially journeying through a landscape, what you don’t do is carry heavy instruments. Music has to be portable, ideally, just a voice or if not, a very light flute or a small percussive instrument. And if you look at the music that is played by the Cameroon Pygmies, every time they play a piece, it sounds different. It’s very much music of the moment.
Now, what changes when you invent farming? You settle down. And your whole mindset becomes fixed on the circle of the seasons, the circle of life. And you invent repeatable work. And the structure of the work becomes as cyclical as life itself. You invent a circle in music, invent musical rituals. And once music migrates from the farm to the town, certain changes happen. Instruments can become heavy because you start to set quite permanent roots into the town. You create heavy instruments like bells and gongs, but also very delicate ones like harps and lutes which would be damaged over a journey.
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Spotify has bought music trivia game Heardle
19 July 2022
Heardle, the invention of a web and app designer based in London, who last I read wished not to reveal his identity, has been bought by music streamer Spotify. That’s probably not a surprise to too many people.
Spotify announced Tuesday that it has purchased Heardle, one of the many themed trivia games that cropped up in the wake of Wordle’s blockbuster success. Heardle is Spotify’s first game acquisition, and the company hopes it will play a dual role: in addition to keeping music nerds engaged, it can act as a music discovery tool.
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NSW Police attempt to remove OneFour music from steaming
19 July 2022
In 1988 California based hip hop act NWA released a protest song called Fuck the Police. Written as a reaction to police brutality and racial profiling, the song raised the hackles of the FBI, who believed the single incited violence against law enforcement agencies. Although the Bureau made life difficult for the group, they ultimately failed to stymie NWA’s music, partly because the first amendment to the constitution of the United States protects freedom of speech.
Today in Australia, Sydney based hip hop group OneFour, are facing similar pressure from the NSW Police Force. Police claim the group have links to banned bikie gangs, and that some of their lyrics incite violence. Unlike the United States though, freedom of speech here is not explicitly protected by the Australian constitution. Meanwhile, in an unusual step, police are trying to remove certain OneFour songs from streaming services such as Spotify and YouTube.
This week the NSW Police Force confirmed it would attempt to remove certain songs from streaming platforms such as Spotify and YouTube if they believed the lyrics incited violence. Police don’t actually have the power to force those companies to remove songs, but the fact they believe it’s within their remit to deplatform music they believe poses a danger to the community is quite extraordinary.
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The Global Music Vault, saving music for 10000 years
15 July 2022
Image courtesy of the Global Music Vault.
Much like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault which is intended to preserve plant seed specimens in the event of happenings such as natural disasters, wars, sabotage, or disease, the Global Music Vault, an initiative being supported by Microsoft, will safeguard and preserve the sonic arts for up to ten thousand years.
With the abundance of music in a variety of formats, vinyl, digital optical disc data storage (i.e. compact disc), and digital audio for instance, why is there a need take such a step in the first place? The thing is, none of these storage formats last all that long:
By Microsoft’s estimation, hard drives protect data for five years before they can go bad. Tape lasts about a decade, while CDs and DVDs can make it as long as 15 years before their contents are at risk of becoming illegible. While we seem to live in an age of progress — the iPhone can store thousands of songs in your pocket and stream countless more from the cloud — even in the best of cases, those songs will deteriorate millennia earlier than hieroglyphics carved into stone by the ancient Egyptians.
To conserve the music stored in the music vault — which incidentally will be located not far from the Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen — compositions may be etched into quartz glass, using technology developed by Microsoft to store data as 3D patterns in a glass platter:
Microsoft begins with quartz glass, a high-quality glass that features a symmetrical molecular structure, which makes it far more resilient to high temperature and pressure than the glass in your home’s windows (and, like all glass, it’s immune to the electromagnetic scrambling of nuclear weapons). Then, using a femtosecond laser — a laser that can fire for one quadrillionth of a second — Microsoft etches information as 3D patterns into the glass. Once this data is stored, another laser reads the quartz, as machine learning algorithms translate the pattern back into music, movies, or any other digital information.
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SXSW is coming to Sydney Australia in October 2022
1 July 2022
Long running Austin, Texas, based American music, film, and interactive conference and festival South by Southwest, better known as SXSW, is hosting a week-long event in Sydney, from Saturday 15 October 2022 until Saturday 22 October.
While SXSW has held a number of spin-off events in the past, usually in North America, this is the first time the festival is being replicated outside of the United States. While details are yet to be finalised, most events will be taking place at the International Convention Centre (ICC), in Darling Harbour.
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events, film, music, technology
Elvis Presley’s Edge of Reality remixed by Tame Impala
28 June 2022
Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis bio-pic has a lot of talking points. But then again what films by Baz Luhrmann don’t? The near three hour runtime (four for the director’s cut apparently), and the accent Tom Hanks uses in his portrayal of Colonel Tom Parker, for starters.
Then there’s the contemporary remixes of Presley’s classic hits, including Edge of Reality, reimagined by Perth based Australian one-person act Tame Impala. Plenty to talk about here.
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Baz Luhrmann, film, music, Tame Impala
Ringo Starr, maybe not a drumming genius, but a drumming genius
28 June 2022
One for fans of the Beatles, and in particular, the drumming of Ringo Starr, here’s their 1966 track She Said, She Said, with isolated bass and drum lines. Compared to the likes of John Bonham, Hannah Welton, Charlie Watts, or Dave Grohl, Starr may not have been a master keeper of time, but he could sure play a fill.
Via Far Out Magazine.
And on a related note, footage of Paul McCartney performing at the Glastonbury Festival last week with John Lennon. Yes, indeed.
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