Music for Nothing and Your Kicks for Free
Giving Away Masters in the Digital Age
originally published March 26, 2008
The Dexateens
On March 11th, 2008, Alabama-based rockers the Dexateens placed a link on their website offering free downloads of their new album, Lost and Found. Though the Dexateens’ previous efforts - including the Patterson Hood-co-produced Hardwire Healing (2007) - all were critically acclaimed and sold strongly, the band and their label, Skybucket Records, decided to try something different this time around: giving away an album of original music for nothing.
Travis Morgan, founder and president of Skybucket Records, believes labels must evolve if they hope to avoid capsizing in the sea change currently reshaping the music industry.
“Providing electronic media is one of the things labels and bands have to do to function in the new music market,” says Morgan. “And because we didn’t have the money to do a full-scale promotional campaign and release Lost and Found on vinyl or compact disc, giving it away for free was a way to get the music heard and potentially establish a broader fan base.”
Singer and guitarist Elliott McPherson of the Dexateens agrees. “I feel like we’re throwing the dice a little bit in giving away an album for free, but at the same time, we don’t really have a lot to lose,” says McPherson. “It just seemed like an experiment worth doing.”
Though artists have been giving away their masters for decades now, of late the movement has taken on new significance. In October of 2007, Radiohead offered their critically acclaimed album In Rainbows via an Internet fire sale that allowed downloaders to name their price. Also in October of last year, Nine Inch Nails provided free downloads of their new album. In a message on the band’s website, singer Trent Reznor said that after 18 years of being under contract with record labels, it gave him “great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience.”
The fact of the matter is that the Old Grey Mare qua record industry ain’t what she used to be.
John P. Strohm is an entertainment lawyer and musician. As former guitarist for Blake Babies and The Lemonheads, Strohm witnessed both the music industry boom in the ‘90s and the bust that occurred around the turn of the century. He believes that the decision to give away masters is sound from a business perspective, and he regularly posts his own masters for free download on his website.
“The vast majority of bands in recording contracts don’t make money selling albums, so it’s not devastating for them to give away their music,” says Strohm. “The album can be a loss leader to generate revenue through merchandise, live performances, etc. For a band like the Dexateens, giving away an album as a free download would potentially negatively impact the bottom line, but it would put them in comparatively the same position as most recording artists under contracts with big labels - who make no money in artist royalties anyway. The independent artist is in a position to make money from masters if they want to.”
Printing and distributing records is an expensive venture, and if the idea is to build a fan base likely to purchase other records, merchandise and concert tickets, then offering free music might actually save a band money, if not even increase its earning potential. McPherson acknowledged that the changing musical climate factored into the Dexateens’ decision to give away Lost and Found.
“People say nobody knows what the new model is for putting out a record,” he says. “Everything is changing in the music industry. We might as well change with it.”
However, in order to understand what the new model might be, it is important to understand how the old model worked. Traditionally, record labels made money by controlling the resources necessary to record, produce and distribute music. In the ‘40s and ‘50s, the high price of recording equipment meant that record labels controlled access to recording studios. After an artist recorded a song or album, record labels would use revenue generated by other artists to buy radio promotion and place the singles, or albums, in stores all over the country.
But as technology developed, the price of recording equipment dropped, and more artists began recording themselves. The advent of the Internet allowed artists to self-promote, as well as to sell their music in a relatively new digital format not requiring a physical product. Consequently, an aspiring musician in his basement in Athens, GA could use his computer to record a professional-sounding album, self-promote it on a variety of websites, and then distribute and sell his songs in electronic formats. Transaction costs were sliced, and record companies no longer were necessary parties, at least not to the extent that they were in the industry’s heydays.
Says Strohm, “The result of all of this is that now the ultimate goal for a band is not signing with a major label. The ultimate goal is building a career, and labels aren’t necessarily the best way to do that anymore.”
Not surprisingly, smaller labels have been quicker to alter business practices to suit the changing musical climate than have bigger labels. Smaller labels typically also allow bands more leeway to experiment with different marketing techniques, including - as in the case of Skybucket Records and the Dexateens - offering their music for free.
Once a skeptic of the new system, Morgan is now sold on the idea.
“I resisted this ‘future of music’ download thing for a while,” he says. “But I have finally come to accept that it’s not all bad. Sure, I want people to buy the records we put out, but I cannot prevent thousands of people from downloading them illegally. By offering an album for free, we’re inviting people to get involved in the hopes that our overall revenue will increase.”
Adds Morgan, “An unintended consequence of this project is that my perspective on releasing and promoting records has changed forever. My mind won’t stop thinking about how else we can amplify the listenership of the records we release.”
Though the death knell signifying the demise of major labels may have sounded prematurely, few would deny that the record industry must evolve if it wants to remain viable. The successful ventures of superstar acts such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails - as well as smaller bands such as the Dexateens - have shown that musicians are fully capable of recording, promoting and distributing their music themselves, absent the paternal - if avaricious - hands of major labels. The Dexateens, however, are not making a political statement with their album giveaway, nor do they wish to be seen as standard bearers for the digital music revolution.
Says McPherson, “For us, it is just about getting our music heard.”
Hibernation Is Over
Elf Power Reemerges with In a Cave
originally published March 26, 2008
Though never as high-profile as luminaries Olivia Tremor Control or Neutral Milk Hotel during the Elephant 6 heyday of the late ‘90s, Elf Power has shown that unlike those now-departed groups, it’s got staying power. This week the local band celebrates the release of its new album In a Cave, the latest in a series of records to showcase frontman Andrew Rieger’s reliable literacy in psychedelicized, ‘60s- and ‘70s-informed rock. In a Cave also introduces former Olivia Tremor Control drummer Eric Harris to the band’s lineup, and he shares songwriting credit with Rieger on a number of mind-warping tracks.
The current lineup of Elf Power features Rieger on vocals and rhythm guitar, Jimmy Hughes on guitar, Derek Almstead on bass, Laura Carter on accordion and keys and Heather McIntosh on cello (though Carter and McIntosh are not heading out on tour with the band).
In a Cave is a rich and suitably layered release, as rewarding both on the headphones as its songs are in a live setting. Rieger credits sound engineer Derek Almstead - also Elf Power’s current bassist - with the quality of the recordings. "Derek’s real easy to work with, and since he’s in the band it’s, y’know, that much easier," he says. "I think it sounds really great.”
Clocking in at just under 40 minutes, it’s a brisk runthrough touching on the vibrant guitar rock of Elf Power’s often-cited T. Rex influence.
And while a few of the songs don’t change the Rieger template too much, (“Paralyzed,” “The New Mythology” and “Quiver and Quake” in particular share moods, melodies and guitar riffs with past Elf Power songs), others signpost possible directions of exploration for the band. So while one foot remains in familiar territories, the band’s stepping forward into new sounds (dig the aural experimentation on tracks like “Heads of Dust, Hearts of Lust” or the woozy mechanizations on “Window to Mars”). Much of that experimentation comes via Harris’ contributions, and his employment of his tape organ, an instrument he invented back in the ‘90s for his album The Frosted Ambassador and for use in the band Music Tapes. It’s a keyboard that’s linked to a number of pre-recorded tapes that play a recording of an instrument - a cello drone, or a trumpet note, for instance. When triggered, the tape organ sends out a warbly, otherworldly and distinctly psychedelic sound.
Rieger says he was always a fan of The Frosted Ambassador, and so once Harris settled into the drummer’s seat (after the departure last year of drummer Josh Lott) Rieger approached him to see if he’d want to contribute some sounds. “I always loved that record,” says Rieger, “and I knew that he recorded stuff at home all the time, but he hadn’t released anything since then. So I asked him if there was anything he’d been working on that he was willing to share with the band, and he made me a CD of instrumentals. I picked out like four of them.”
The tape organ won’t show up in the band’s live set, though, says Elf Power guitarist Jimmy Hughes. “We’ve stepped around that,” he says. “We have a lot of different sounds that we need to encompass into one instrument, so that’s something that’ll get put into the keyboard setup.”
Harris’s tape organ compositions also allowed Rieger to experiment with a different style of songwriting. On a 12-hour drive to his mother’s house in Louisiana last summer, Rieger says, he listened to almost nothing but Harris’s tracks, coming up with vocal melodies and lyrics as he sped down the highway. “It probably wasn’t the safest thing, but I was scrawling down lyrics as I was driving,” he says. “That was definitely a different way for me to approach songwriting, ‘cause I usually just write by myself on acoustic [guitar].”
One of In a Cave’s most gripping songs is “Fried Out,” a lament for a friend whose potential seems to have withered under the pressure of... drugs? life? stress? The specifics aren’t mapped out, though it’s a story that shouldn’t be unfamiliar to too many Athenians, where it’s far too easy for people to fade into a stoned background rather than push themselves forward. “It’s not really an anti-drug song or anything. It’s more just an observation and a concern over certain behaviors that you see in friends or people you know,” says Rieger. The song is also representative of Rieger’s shift over the past few albums to incorporate more overtly personal writing into his lyrics, rather than relying solely on fantastic imagery.
The band ventured out to Texas two weeks ago to perform a number of sets at the South By Southwest festival, but this 40 Watt show officially kicks off the band’s first national tour in support of In a Cave. “Once we start the tour it’ll have been about a year since we’ve done something big,” says Rieger. “It’s always nice to take some time off, but I definitely feel like it’s time to do something big and get back on the road.”
Elf Power’s current tour runs through the end of April, with the band heading up the Eastern Seaboard, shooting across the northern part of the States, hitting Seattle and Portland, heading south to California and then back eastward. A tour of Europe this summer is in the works, and then Elf Power has plans to tour as Vic Chesnutt's backing band this fall - the band recently recorded an album with the Athens songwriting legend, but it won’t be out for several months.
Saturday’s 40 Watt show is a later one - The Moldy Peaches’ Kimya Dawson headlines a separate, all-ages 6 p.m. show the same day, so things won’t start until about 10:30 or 11 p.m. Ham 1 and Madeline open.
Shut Up and Dance
The Clipped Phrases of the Cut-and-Paste King
originally published March 26, 2008
- Flagpole
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There's a concept called "DJ's disease." It's the condition that DJs get into wherein they can't sit back and listen to music - their brains are trained to pick it apart and mine it for possible samples - and it wears them out. Do you have this? If so, can you describe, in your own words, what it's like?
- Gregg Gillis
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I'm not a DJ and am disease-free.
Gregg Gillis
Gregg Gillis introduced “Girl Talk,” a restless, clever, obsessive pop collage project, six years ago. The first Girl Talk LP, 2002’s comparatively primitive Secret Diary, manipulated several decades’ worth of hits through digital signal processing (DSP), adding a few new grunts, glitches and hums. That album had little rhythm, often sounded like a wounded CD, and was about as danceable as Frank Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy. More accurately, it echoed John Oswald’s headache-inducing Plunderphonics, and although it lacked Oswald’s precision and grandiosity, it bore a unique sense of humor, soaked in pop culture and sensitive to revealing juxtaposition.
That sense of humor has served Gillis well, as his more recent output (2004’s Unstoppable and 2006’s Night Ripper) has grown heavier, more propulsive and about a billion times catchier. A dizzying, attention-deficient dial-scan that welds Ying Yang Twins to The Verve, puts the Notorious B.I.G.’s vocals over a sped-up “Tiny Dancer,” and changes the subject before your foot can start tapping, Night Ripper became the ubiquitous party record of ’06, beloved by spastic club kids and jaded ironists alike. By cutting pop songs to their hooks, Girl Talk provides a fleeting, disorienting rush. By throwing lewd rap choruses on top of sappy AM gold and running R&B ballads into walls of digital distortion, he somehow makes all of his source material more approachable. If pop music is cocaine, Girl Talk is crack.
His most pronounced critics generally don’t care for pop music much. But even to those who find little of lasting value in his continuity-impaired mixes, Gillis is, technically, one of the leaders in his field.
Now that he’s thickened his beats and found his niche, Gillis is releasing more Girl Talk material than ever. His label, Illegal Art, provides an exclusive download service, offering new GT tracks upon completion. He shares the series with established labelmates such as Evolution Control Committee, who’ve been engaged in creative aural piracy for decades and may find a new audience through Girl Talk’s crossover success. Gillis tours and collaborates regularly.
When Girl Talk hit the scene, music-making software had become so user-friendly and affordable that hundreds of “laptop musicians,” nasal G4 balladeers with no hooks and no charisma, were boring audiences to conniptions across the nation. Girl Talk’s live shows are, in part, a reaction to the diffident pathos of desktop indie pop. Along with Gillis’ brainy dance music, they provide the decadent excitement of glam rock – Gillis dances like a maniac, often removes his shirt and has been said to strip entirely, and his audience often does likewise. Even if it’s sometimes taken as a postmodern joke, Gillis is excited about what he does, more excited than most straight-up rockers. And a few of his fans have discovered that the exaggerated theatrics that they’ve been conditioned to “appreciate” with a smirk can just as easily be loved for real. The stats are unreliable, but Girl Talk has certainly gotten nerds laid.
Considering he creates new music from copyrighted material, and his work exists in an intriguing legal limbo, you might expect Gregg Gillis to have some heavy opinions on artistic appropriation, intellectual property, or something. After all, most of the remarkable innovation in the last two decades’ worth of pop music has involved sampling, and it’s increasingly demonized by a fear-driven recording industry. Negativland, Girl Talk’s forebears in cheeky recycling, spend as much time talking about their work as they do producing it. Crate-diggers are the dominant cultural force, dominating sales, culture and critical discourse. Surely Gillis has something to say about all this.
He doesn’t. And, if I may project, he would probably think you were a hopeless dork if you asked. As an interview subject, Gillis is a laconic ass-pain, a blunt, high-status joker who half-assed Flagpole’s emailed inquiries with nonchalant hipster detachment.
"Where do you think the music business is headed?" I ask. "No more mystery," is his short response. "How would you describe your sense of humor?" I ask. "Perfect," says Gillis.
Perhaps he was distracted – he was in Europe at the time, and couldn’t/ wouldn’t schedule a phoner, and email interviews are always the pits, anyway, for people who’ve never traded on their writing ability. Perhaps he considers his own work more “fun” than “interesting” - he insists that he works from a sincere love for pop, not from Negativland-ish anti-capitalist revenge fantasies. But he’s no one’s public intellectual, that’s for damned sure. And if you expect artists to serve as public intellectuals, then maybe you are kind of a dork.
Girl Talk emerged over time, through a series of aggressive pranks. Gillis formed his vision in Pittsburgh, and participated in that hilly hamlet’s noise underground for years before he made his name. He once played in an extremist improv outfit called The Joysticks (neglected in his official bio, but memorialized on a ghetto-ass Tripod site for the long-defunct OOBS Records). According to his contemporaries, Gillis set things on fire. He antagonized his audiences and threw chairs at them. He blasted Enya tapes on stage. He was a performance artist. He hosted a slumber party where he subjected guests to the entire Olsen Twins oeuvre.
At some point, he released a damaged copy of Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy through OOBS, and the future came into focus. His interest shifted toward electronic music. “He started Girl Talk,” says one erstwhile collaborator, “which was sort of equivalent to the earlier performance stuff, except inverted. Instead of throwing stuff, we worked on choreographing dances. He didn't really know dozens of attractive women at the time.” Under his new name (for which he offers journalists a battery of bullshit explanations), he distanced himself from the rest of the gossipy, claustrophobic Pittsburgh scene. A lot of his ex-associates don’t want to go on the record about him, and cop to their bitter envy.
“The truth of the matter is that he was always a laconic ass-pain,” says one old friend, “but it felt pretty good to be on the inside of that, laughing at everyone else. As he got more successful, I got pushed to the outside.”
- Flagpole
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What is your motivation?/p>
- Gregg Gillis
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I like music.
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