Keep The Noise Down

All I want for Christmas is…

All I want for Christmas is a decent Christmas Number One single.

The X Factor has a festive stranglehold over the charts with Simon Cowell’s manufactured mob bagging the last 4 Christmas Number One’s.  Yet this year sees a protest against the dominance of such manufactured music.  Hosted on the social networking site, Facebook, a group titled Rage Against the Machine for Christmas No.1  is campaigning to take the Christmas spot away from the eventual X Factor winner. 

Last year saw similar groups rally for Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley's version of Hallejuah to beat Alexandra Burke's version to number one spot.  These were spirited campaigns but in the end the manufactured pop princess held on to take the coveted Christmas No.1 spot by some margin; Alexandra Burke sold 576,000 and Jeff Buckley just 80,000.

But the past 12 months has seen Twitter continue its staggering growth and this might just be the tipping point as a growing army of people who want to celebrate authentic & genuine musical talent now have greater reach. 

More people will be exposed to this campaign. More people will tell their friends.  More people will buy the Rage Against the Machine single.  And hopefully more people will have a better Christmas.

 

Pledge your support to 'Rage Against the Machine for Christmas No.1'

If you want to support this protest against manufactured music then become a fan of the Facebook group Rage Against the Machine for Christmas No.1 and purchase a copy of Rage Against the Machine's ‘Killing In The Name’ between Sunday Dec 13^th & Saturday Dec 19^th.

ONLY buy the track from 7Digital, iTunes or Play.com between .

At the time of writing over 163,000 have joined the Facebook Group & pledged their support for this campaign.

And here’s the interesting bit ...

William Hill’s Odds for Christmas Number One are as follows:  1/10 X Factor Winner, 16/1 Susan Boyle, 16/1 Leona Lewis, 16/1 Rage Against The Machine, 20/1 Vera Lynn, 25/1 Boyzone, 25/1 Cheryl Cole, 25/1 The Soildiers, 33/1 Michael Jackson, 33/1 Peter Kay …

So here are 3 simple steps for a better Christmas:

1: Put a £10 bet on at William Hill for Rage Against the Machine to be Christmas Number One.

2: Wait until Sunday Dec 13^th  then go to  7Digital, iTunes or Play.com and buy your copy of 'Killing In The Name' by Rage Against the Machine. 

3: Tweet, Facebook, email, WOM or whatever….just go tell everyone you know to do the same. 

Make yourself a little Christmas earner, with the added knowledge that you’ve done your bit for decent music.  Remember piracy isn’t killing the industry, crap manufactured music is.

Digital downloads challenge the album cover artform

As one of the vinyl generation brought up on a diet 7” and 12” records I never thought the day would come where my stylus would no longer work those grooves.  But in the early 80’s the Compact Disc emerged claiming superior sound quality, a more compact size and increased durability. The vinyl junkies pledged their eternal allegiance to the pvc discs, shouting from the rooftops that CD’s would never take off.  It did and the audio evolution continued.  The CD offered a cheaper and easier way to produce and distribute audio and soon even the vinyl die-hards couldn’t resist.  Looking back, the transition from vinyl to CD was not as sensational as it seemed at the time, as the vinyl sat sulking on the top shelf gathering dust.  It may have felt like I was throwing away my youth and replacing it with a more efficient but less emotive substitute. But all things considered it was still a packaged disc of some sort.

 

The next evolution is upon us and this time it’s more extreme – the physical disc is being replaced by digital files.  I can download music legally from online stores such as Bleep, emusic, Napster, iTunes, HMV, Wippit etc directly to my storage device.  This requires a complete shift in my mindset.  The music that I once held, touched and even caressed is now a load of binary digits.

 

So why the mindset change?  Your ears are the privileged recipients of the aural pleasures but to say that your other senses are deprived of these pleasures does the packaging and artwork a disservice.  To many of us the CD packaging is an essential part of the total experience. If the masses didn’t demand sleeve design then music companies could reduce their production costs significantly by distributing the CD’s in clear plastic sleeves.

 

The recording package is a reflection of the drama, the genre and the artist. Consider how the black and white checkered design (see the Specials album covers) became the trademark for Ska. These often inspirational artforms captured the futurism of electronica, the defiance of punk, the authenticy of Blues etc  For decades the artists have pushed the boundaries and the record cover is no longer performing a functional duty but is another slice of art that sit’s hand in hand with the audio pleasures.

 

In the 70’s the album cover became an artform.  Designers experimented with design styles, materials (cardboard, plastic and even cement); there were gatefold, foldouts, booklets.  The record sleeve was a blank canvas for artists to experiment. I have fond memories of many packages: - the interactive spinning cover of Spectrum, the bizarre fold-out poster that accompanied Aphex Twin's ‘Selected Ambient Works’, Volume 2, or ‘On the Blink’ by Wauvenfold where you press a lever to eject the CD...

 

The challenge for the music industry is to get me onboard the download generation.  To achieve this they need to create a digital equivalent to the tangible record/ CD sleeve.

So in 2006 it’s time for the album cover to evolve. Don’t insult me by offering a digital reproduction of the record or CD sleeve design.  With a medium that offers such rich interactivity and endless opportunities to innovate how can the music industry be content with a lazy digital rendering of the artwork. 

 

There has been significant progress in recent years in the application of touch sensation to human interaction with computers.  But I’m not asking for anything that sophisticated, after all this again is merely an attempt to replicate the physical sleeve.  This is time to think outside the box and be more experimental. 

 

When I get this then I’ll join the download generation.  In the meantime I’ll buy the CD or Vinyl and rip it to my portable device. This way I get the best of both worlds.

Wisdom of the Masses

Back in my student days, the younger brother of a good friend would ask me to recommend new music to buy.  Those days my tastes were going through an awkward transition from the underground  lo-fi movement of the early 1990's to the darker electronic beats of the dance scene.  The lad didn’t know where to find the records I listened to and liked what he heard me play.  He’d ask me to recommend 3 or 4 records every month and bought them on the strength of my recommendation.  I adopted the role of Music Mentor and took pride in recommending records I knew he would like. 

 

2006 and I’ve been replaced by so-called sophisticated recommendation engines such as Last.fm and Pandora. These engines recommend songs based on what I like or don’t like.  They do this by looking at what members of the community with similar tastes are listening to. It could be seen as a naivety and arrogance about recommendation engines that they ignore the complexities and uniqueness of the human personality in recommending what we should listen to.  How can recommendation engines be so blasé about our complex psychological processes?

 

Before recommendation engines arrived I was already happy to stand down from my role as music mentor, as the Internet began to offer a rich toolkit for users to explore the musical horizon: - streaming audio, online radio, p2p file sharing, free downloads, online reviews forums etc supported by the ever-increasing bandwidth.

 

But when a recommendation engine suggests Elton John based on a Sheep on Drugs record then I’m concerned – a random artist generator could make a more relevant recommendation. 

 

'When there is a lot of choice, you need recommendations,' says Martin Stiksel, the brains behind Last.fm

That is true.  But how accurate are recommendations based on social familiarities?

I am a complex & unique psychological being – a collection of emotional, thought and behavioural patterns. Social recommendation sidesteps the delicate issue of humanistic personality theories.  Decades of research by psychologists and philosophers who have studied personality are being ignored as I become a number, a statistic.

 

If social networks make no attempt to encapsulate our personal intricacies then should I be insulted that I am no longer regarded as an individual.  Maybe, but Recommendation Engines are not claiming to be the saviour but merely an avenue to explore music.  They’re not claiming to be the real deal and get it right every time but merely an aid to filter our choices.

 

In that case how can recommendation engines become more intelligent? 

Did anyone see How Music Works on Channel 4 on Saturday, where Howard Goodall deconstructs music and looks at the elements?  It was a sort of Music Uncovered.  Howard Goodall got me thinking again - are recommendation engines missing a trick and getting to caught up in the hype surrounding social networks whereas the answer may lay in the science of music. 

 

It’s simple – we can deconstruct music to its basic elements.  By breaking down the components in the appreciation of music; individual notes, beat, melody, lyrics, tempo, repetition, verse, chorus, instruments, time sequence, environmental sounds etc we are putting a song under the microscope to construct a mathematical formula which describes the track.  We can extract all this information from the waveform.  We can extract not only the tangible components but also the emotion?  Researchers have attempted this before but until now we haven’t had the algorithms and computational powers to execute it. We do now.

 

‘Personality is a collection of emotional, thought and behavioural patterns unique to a person’ (Wikipedia). It’s about ‘that face that we put on in different situations’.

If we can then devise a formula to define our individual musical preferences at a point in time, taking in to account any environmental or emotional factors, then surely we make more accurate recommendations.  Not all the elements that make up our preferences are tangible and ‘image’ or ‘the cool factor’ are difficult to define but we should still be able to get more relevant results than recommendations based solely on social communities.

 

This disjointed rambling has holes galore, but I suppose where I’m going with this is to raise the issue of Collective intelligence, otherwise referred to as Wisdom of the Masses.  How much intelligence is there really in using social networks to make recommendations? 

There are many critics of the Wisdom of Masses (WOM) theory. There are times when groups make better decisions than individuals but this requires certain conditions to be met.  When the decision is dependent on your personality then group decisions are inevitably inferior. In such an emotive subject as music the WOM ignores my individuality. 

 

These are early days and hopefully the intelligence will follow as we embrace the uniqueness of the human personality and include the human psyche in constructing more relevant recommendations.

 

The next evolution should begin when we stand up and say ‘what the hell happened to my individuality?’

 

In the meantime I’ll leave my recommendations to the expert reviews that I trust and can apply my own judgement to based on my personal preferences.  If only someone could have bottled John Peel’s musical mind and produced a JP Recommendation Engine!

Anyone seen Barry White?

As the candles flicker and the sweet smell of lemongrass fills the room, you reach for the silky tones of Barry White to drop on your CD player and complete the 10 steps to seduction. Crap! Where’s Barry White? As you frantically finger your way through Snoop Doggy Dog and Eminem, the realisation that the classification of your CDs could be the downfall of your libido slowly dawns.

Facetted navigation is a no-brainer. No longer is Barry White sat firmly at the end a single navigation path though the information space but the multidimensional man himself can be found by the many dimensions of his music: - Soul, 1970’s, Love, Music for the Bachelor.

Faceted navigation is yesterday’s news but as I go through the agonizing process of classifying 1000+ physical CD’s, and reclassifying, and reclassifying, I’m insulted that some e-retailers don’t embrace the advantages of the information space and stumble at the first hurdle in making their products findable.

I propose Endeca and Autonomy patrol the web and enforce law and order amongst those who violate such a basic principle. Crimes against findability are not acceptable.