4

MAKING BEAUTIFUL
MUSIC, TOGETHER

The popular media are obsessed with news about how technologies like Napster, Grokster, and BitTorrent are making life hard for musicians. But what they rarely report is how technology affecting everything from the latest equipment to file swapping and podcasting is also empowering ordinary people to create, not simply to copy.

That’s certainly been my experience. Back in college I had a band. It wasn’t a great band, but it was good enough to get gigs in all the local clubs. We recorded a couple of demo tapes, but to do that we had to rent time in a studio, pay an engineer, and then produce copies on cassettes. If I remember correctly, a demo cost about five hundred bucks, which was real money back in the Reagan years.

The studio had a big Tascam mixing board, which cost thousands of dollars, and a big Tascam reel-to-reel deck that tracks were recorded on. It cost thousands of dollars too. The recording heads had to be cleaned, demagnetized, and aligned regularly. The tapes were very expensive—a hundred bucks apiece for the good ones.

MUSIC BOXES

Things are different today. You can buy a “studio-on-a-shelf ” (Tascam’s trademark for its compact all-in-one recording devices) with infinitely more capability, and it costs you about a thousand bucks. And where Terry Hill’s Camel Studios, the studio that we used, had eight tracks, the do-it-yourself model will have sixteen or twenty-four. I had to look hard to find a do-it-yourself-recording device limited only to what Camel Studios offered. The Musician’s Friend website does list a Fostex 8-track all-in-one studio for $399, but it still does things that Camel Studios couldn’t, like emulate different expensive microphones and guitar amplifiers using built-in computer models. Unlike Camel Studios, you can’t get Terry Hill to sit in on guitars or offer unsolicited (and usually good) production advice, but on the other hand, the Fostex doesn’t produce endless clouds of cigarette smoke either.

And the Fostex lets you burn CDs and transfer .wav files to a computer so that you can convert them to MP3s and upload them to the Internet. Despite his technical sophistication (Terry Hill was buddies with guitar gadget geniuses like Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, and Alvin Lee), mentioning any of those capabilities would probably have elicited a “Huh?” from Terry.

I’ve taken advantage of all of these kinds of capabilities myself. With some friends, I have a genuine studio with an eight-track digital tape deck, an impressive mixing console, and racks of effects boxes. I use the studio sometimes, but most of my recording is done at my house, on a computer, using an interface box by Echo audio; software like Cubase, Acid, and Audition; and various pieces of software that emulate actual instruments—programs that take the place of the old effect boxes with wires and glowing lights. My ReBirth RB-338, for example, emulates the old Roland TB-303 synthesizer that produces the sounds associated with classic techno—and it sounds cleaner than the real thing, which was originally designed as a cheesy accompaniment to lounge bands, not a studio instrument. My Native Instruments Pro-52 emulates a Prophet 5, a classic ’70s-’80s synthesizer. And Cubase comes with all sorts of virtual instruments, including a surprisingly good electric guitar. Propellerhead’s Reason is an entire studio and collection of virtual instruments aimed at producing trance and hip-hop; it costs about $400. Many of these software emulations do a surprisingly good job of capturing the sound and feel of the original instruments, often even offering graphic recreations of bakelite control knobs and analog meters on the computer screen.

These things let you make music easily and cheaply— although you still have to be able to make it sound good. When my wife made a documentary recently, I did the soundtrack entirely on the computer. I licensed a handful of loops (about ten seconds each) from Brian Transeau, a musician and sound designer I like a lot (he did the soundtrack to Monster), assembled them with some stuff I recorded myself, and created a soundtrack in a couple of weeks. Doing it the old-fashioned way would have cost thousands of dollars.

What’s more, the new music often sounds better, if it’s done right. I’ve always been a big fan of vintage equipment—my favorite keyboard is a Roland Juno—but the fact is that music recorded on computers often sounds cleaner and richer than music recorded on tape in studios. And software comes to the rescue there too—in my case, in a way that offers some broader lessons.

Polish software engineers are making me very happy. I know, I know: this sounds like some sort of punch line. But it’s not, and here’s why.

My brother and I have a small record label. It’s not a non-profit, though it might as well be, but we have fun, and we’re able to release things that a bigger record company—one whose share-holders actually cared about making money—might not touch, from Nebraska tractor-punk to native Ugandan music.

I’m the main sound engineer, and one of my tasks is to “master” everything. That means performing a variety of transformations to the finished mixes before they’re turned into CDs: adding compression, adjusting the stereo image, normalizing levels, applying frequency equalization, etc. Mastering is more of an art than a science. When it’s done right, everything on the song sounds just like it did before, only more so: “As if somebody cleaned the wax out of your ears” is a standard definition.

Nowadays there’s even more to mastering. People object to what they judge to be the cold and harsh sound of digital recording. But the coldness isn’t really caused by unpleasant digital distortion; rather, it’s just the opposite: analog tape recording actually distorts the sound in ways that people like. Recording to tape adds even-numbered harmonics, smoothly rolls off the extreme highs, and because it doesn’t respond linearly to increased volume it produces what’s called “tape compression.” All these distortions result in a feeling of warmth, fullness, and general ear-pleasing goodness. The harshness that people blame on digital technology actually comes from the absence of pleasant artifacts, not from any new quality that the digital recording process injects.

When mastering was done with rooms of equipment driven by racks of glowing vacuum tubes, printing to half-inch-wide magnetic tape, this wasn’t an issue. But now that we master on computers it is, and all sorts of software has appeared to generate the kind of warmth previously supplied by huge racks of vintage gear.

My favorite software—one of the many good programs of this kind—is produced by a Polish company called PSP Audioware. The sound is great, the software is very intuitive to use, and it’s dirt cheap.

The cheapness comes from the way PSP does business: it’s two guys, in Poland, who write the software themselves and distribute it via downloads from their website. They also provide tech support themselves (at least they’ve answered the few questions I’ve had), and since they’re also the guys who wrote the software, they do a better job providing support than most computer users get from behemoth companies.

TRADING IN ELECTRONS

This is a mode of doing business that was impossible until recently, and it’s one that’s wonderfully suited to countries like Poland (and India) that have lots of smart people but suffer from mediocre infrastructure and a shortage of investment capital. I’m sure that shipping the software, on disks, from Poland to the rest of the world could be a much bigger headache, and produce far fewer sales, but Internet downloads solve these problems.

What’s news about this is that it isn’t news. Ten years ago, the notion of quality software from Poland would have been a joke to most people, and the idea of selling it to consumers over the Internet would have seemed equally far-fetched. Yet now such ventures are commonplace. In the audio software field alone, there are literally dozens of companies like this—small shops, selling excellent software via download at very attractive prices, often from places not generally associated with computer leadership.

Twenty years ago, the guys at PSP would have been miserable drones in some horribly run state software enterprise, if they were able to work in software at all. Ten years ago, they would have been wondering how to sell their skills to the West without emigrating. Now they’re earning hard currency from buyers around the world without having to manufacture or ship any tangible goods at all.

Remember this when people tell you that the whole Internet thing was just a bubble. But the impact doesn’t stop there. With that software, I mastered some recordings by a Ugandan band called Afrigo. My brother is an African historian and travels to Africa regularly. He found out about Afrigo, the most popular band in Uganda, and offered to help them get some broader exposure.

Internet access was lousy in Kampala then, so they mailed us some CDs (they record their music on one of those studio-on-the-shelf setups). I mastered it using the PSP software and uploaded their songs to the MP3.com website. Back then, before it was destroyed by music-industry lawsuits, MP3.com was the place to go for interesting independent music. (There’s still an MP3.com site, but it’s nothing like what used to exist.) What’s more, bands got paid based on how much their songs were downloaded. Afrigo’s music turned out to be pretty popular, and it earned a few hundred dollars a month. That’s not a lot of money to an American band, but it’s a pretty good chunk of change in Uganda.

What’s more, their exposure on the site got their music noticed elsewhere. If MP3.com had lasted longer, I think it would have helped more African bands, but the Internet will do the job anyway, given time. Perhaps the world’s greatest reservoir of wasted human talent—that is, ability that was never developed and recognized to the degree it deserves—is Africa. And, because of that, Africa may have the most to gain from the communications revolution.

Africa has been exporting music to the world for centuries, of course. Almost every musical form of the past century—from gospel, to ragtime, to blues, to jazz, to rock and roll, to reggae, to techno—has its roots in African musical styles. And African art has influenced Western artists from Picasso to Modigliani to Renee Stout.

The world has gotten a lot from Africa. Africa, however, has gotten much less from the world. But that may change now that Africans are working in media that can make money with the Internet and other communications technologies, making it easier to get work out and other people’s money in. It’s not just Afrigo. Other bands like Ilay Izy from Madagascar (playing a mixture of tribal vocals and hip hop), Ras Shaheema from Namibia (reggae), or Co. Operative from Zimbabwe are taking advantage of new technologies. We get the benefit of the diversity of African music today while their chance of financial viability greatly increases.

It’s not just music. Awhile back I watched a Nigerian movie called To Rise Again: an enterprising mixture of Scarface, Sliding Doors, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Nigeria’s film industry is booming and is now a regional threat to India’s third-world film capital of Bollywood.

To Rise Again is a well-done and interesting picture, with a budget probably in the neighborhood of $20,000. Africans, Nigerian expatriates around the world, and American film buffs in the States have all been able to participate in its success. Thanks to DVD and Video CD technology, distributing a movie is nothing like the challenge it was a couple of decades ago. And film-making— thanks to digital video cameras and PC-based editing— is not nearly as expensive as it was even a few years ago.

Given that Africans have as much talent and ambition as you’ll find anywhere else, these lowered barriers are likely to mean that African musicians, actors, producers, and directors will enter the global market at a growing rate. And given that, historically, African culture has been very intriguing, even appealing, to the world at large, the growth of inexpensive communications technologies is likely to mean a greater Africanization of world culture in general.

African culture has taken the world by storm even in the face of drastic economic and transportation barriers. Imagine what it may accomplish now that those barriers are falling. While it may be a long time, if ever, before Africa becomes an entertainment center to rival, say, California, its share of the world market seems likely to grow dramatically, while California’s influence shrinks.

The consequences are likely to be interesting. Antiglobalization types accuse American culture of spreading Western ideas that corrupt “traditional” cultures. Yet, if you listen to African songs, you find more religious influence than you find on the American charts, including many Christian-influenced songs.

Likewise, the Nigerian film industry, based in Christian southern Nigeria, is heavily Christian-influenced, producing works that make the “Left Behind” films look downright secular by comparison. Its continental rival, the Ghanaian film industry, has a similar orientation, with a heavy inclination toward Pentecostalism.

If these industries grow, the result could well be a far more Christianized Third World. What will the antiglobalization folks say if the growth of Third World entertainment industries leads to a far more conservative media climate around the world?

Regardless, new technologies have created jobs and prospects in Africa that were almost unimaginable back in 1985. Which raises a question: While the rock stars who gave of their time to perform at Live Aid and Live 8 received much public praise for their selflessness, what of the engineers and scientists whose work made these new technologies possible? Will they get similar praise? Probably not, though reportedly Bill Gates was cheered like a rock star at the Live 8 concerts.¹

APPLE STARTED IN A GARAGE, TOO

MP3.com is gone, but its successor, in many ways, is a company called GarageBand.com. GarageBand, like MP3.com, provides a website that hosts music for bands and allows bands and their fans to connect in various ways. GarageBand draws about 150,000 bands—a pretty large fraction of the million or so bands in the United States—especially when you allow for the fact that GarageBand’s artists are all writing and recording original music. These aren’t the bands that play “Proud Mary” at weddings.

I spoke with GarageBand’s CEO, Ali Partovi, about where all this is going.² Partovi is an open-faced entrepreneur whose previous venture, LinkExchange Inc., wound up being bought by Microsoft for $265 million. (It’s still around as bCentral.) Partovi spoke so rapidly that I had to ask him to slow down, but it seemed like the excitement of an enthusiast, not the fast talk of a salesman. And there’s a lot to be excited about.

The key to GarageBand’s approach is filtering, but with a human touch. Lots of people listen to the music and review it. Every band gets a chance: musicians upload music, then review each other’s work. You don’t know much about the artist until after you’ve done your review; and unlike certain MTV stars, you can’t make it on looks alone. A song can rise on the charts very rapidly if people like it; or it can languish for a long time, with no help from big-label payola, if they don’t.

Partovi says that this appeals to two things that motivate musicians. “It’s both money and a desire to be heard. An increasing number just want to be recognized. There’s a mixture of both on our site.” The most serious people, he says, usually want to make money: “Music production is time consuming, even with the best technology, so if you’re serious you want a payoff. On the other hand, there are lots of people just below the top level who just want to have fans.”

GarageBand has already had some success in moving its stars off the Internet and into the wider world. Geoff Byrd’s pop-rock songs, which topped the GarageBand charts, were getting enough radio airplay to drive them, at the time of my Partovi interview, to the top 40 on Billboard’s radio charts. Another artist, Jenna Drey, was number 23 on the Billboard dance chart. Both made it without the big promotional investments that record companies usually make to get artists on the charts.

What’s the secret? Partovi says that it’s simple: people tend to like what other people like. The GarageBand songs are pretested on a lot more people than the songs of unknown artists who are signed by record labels. “The role that GarageBand is increasingly playing is as a filter that can predict radio success. That’s a very important role. Instead of ‘invest first,’ the Internet allows us to ‘test first’ before a big investment. That changes things for both artists and labels.”

This probably doesn’t mean doomsday for record labels, but it certainly does change things. Partovi thinks that record companies will have less to offer musicians, and consumers, in the future. “Twenty years ago there was no alternative [to the record-label route], because production and distribution were so capital-intensive. Those aren’t anymore, but promotion has become much more capital-intensive because there’s so much more music out there. Major labels have been reduced to providing the capital for promotion, and the Internet will cut into that too.” Record labels’ days of holding the whip hand are over. Contrary to what the record industry people thought, Napster wasn’t the threat; it’s outfits like GarageBand.com that provide rival services to musicians and listeners alike that pose a real problem for their industry.

The same may be true for radio. Partovi is very enthusiastic about podcasting, which lets pretty much anyone get into the Internet “radio” business by recording broadcasts that are automatically downloaded and copied onto people’s iPods and other portable music players. Podcasters, he says, are becoming a new route for people to discover music they like. “It’s the cultural trend of amateur DJs discovering new music—performing the role that radio DJs should have performed for the last twenty years but haven’t. A regular FM DJ could get fired for playing a song by a new artist. Podcasting unlocks that.”

Interestingly, he thinks that DJs may thrive in this new atmosphere: “DJs play an important role. Consumers want new music, but most don’t want to take the trouble to find it on their own. They want someone else to do the filtering, and the human touch is key.”

What’s more, podcasting is a better promotional tool than radio in some ways. If you hear a song you like on the radio, you have to figure out what it is, then go find out about the artist. With podcasting it’s different: “Once you discover an artist you like via a podcast, the technology makes it easy to find out more about the artist. You can find a band via a DJ’s podcast, follow a link to subscribe to the band’s podcast, and then the band doesn’t need a middleman to get in touch with you. You’ll know when they have something new.”

That’s not only important for the little guy, but for established artists like Paul McCartney who are no longer darlings of the radio. All musicians benefit from a way to reach their fans that doesn’t depend on the radio business; the Internet provides one. And it’s not just GarageBand or podcasting getting in on the act—another site, CDBaby.com, has sold 1.7 million CDs and made over $16 million for its artists.

GarageBand offers a lot of podcasting tools on its website, allowing bands to communicate with their fans—and allowing anyone else who wants to set up a podcast, musical or otherwise, to do so. The Wall Street Journal’s technology columnist, Walt Mossberg, tried it and found it easier than most other systems for creating podcasts; there’s even a feature that lets you create a podcast by telephone. Still, he concluded (and I agree) that creating podcasts remains a lot harder than creating text-based blog entries.³ That’s likely to change soon, though.

On the receiving side, podcasts have gotten a lot more user-friendly. Apple has upgraded its iTunes to let users subscribe to podcasts via a point-and-click interface, so that anyone who owns an iPod will find it easy to subscribe. Once that’s done, iTunes will check for new podcasts from that source and then download them every time a user plugs in the iPod. And GarageBand is thinking of creating a podcasting site that specializes in nonmusical subjects, like interviews and news reporting.

THE FCC WON’T LET ME BE

One of the biggest things holding podcasting back—and protecting commercial radio—is the copyright barrier. Radio stations operate under so-called “blanket licenses.” By paying an annual fee to clearinghouse organizations like ASCAP or BMI, they can play songs without having to get permission for each one. The clearinghouses then divide the money according to a formula and forward payments to artists. (Nothing wrong with that; I’m an ASCAP member myself and occasionally get a check when some-body uses one of my songs.)

On the Internet, however, things are much harder. In a recent column in Wired magazine, Larry Lessig reports on how copyright concerns made it effectively impossible for a nonprofit he works with to put a recording of “Happy Birthday” (yes, it’s still under copyright and will be until 2030) on the Web. At first, they thought they could purchase a “mechanical license” (which operates under a similar sort of clearinghouse arrangement). But then the lawyers decided that they needed a separate permission from Warner/Chappell Music, which manages the rights to “Happy Birthday.” Warner first agreed to grant them a license for $800, but then changed its mind. By that time, the lawyers were worried that people would take Lessig’s performance and remix it, making him an accessory to copyright infringement. Lessig concludes: “The existing system is just workfare for lawyers.”⁴

Yes, it is. And it’s likely that commercial broadcasters—who are seeing their audiences shrink because, not to put too fine a point on it, their programming stinks—will oppose any legal changes that might eliminate this sort of barrier. Anything that makes life easier for podcasters, and Web music in general, is likely to make things worse for them. At this point, their comparative advantage isn’t technological or creative: it’s the advantage conferred by a friendlier legal environment.

Of course, radio stations are relying on such legal protection, even from their old-media competitors, in the form of low-power radio. Because as things stand now, the Federal Communications Commission is a major barrier to free speech, and the only justification for its position has been exploded.

How big a barrier? This big, where radio is concerned:

Freedom to create means more than that: not just the right to choose among 500 TV stations instead of three, but fewer barriers to setting up a station of your own; not just greater ease in joining the officially licensed elite, but the right to operate outside it. Like the freedom to choose, the freedom to create is being withheld by an alliance of policymakers and professionals. The technical cost of starting a station has been within most Americans’ reach for years. The legal cost, however, is much higher: thousands of dollars to purchase an existing license, thousands more to cross various regulatory hurdles. With very few exceptions, the FCC won’t even issue licenses to noncommercial stations of less than 100 watts. Class A commercial stations require at least 6,000 watts of power.⁵

Some years ago, the FCC decided to license low-power radio as a separate category. Powerful broadcasting interests—including, ironically, National Public Radio—responded to the threat of competition by lobbying successfully for legislation that made the licensing of low-power stations far more difficult. In particular, the spacing between stations that the bill required made the creation of low-power stations in urban areas very difficult. One of the requirements of the bill, however, was a technical study on interference, with a provision for removing the spacing requirement if the study showed that interference wouldn’t be a problem.

Now the study, done by the MITRE Corporation, has been released with little fanfare and only after the threat of a Freedom of Information Act demand. Such reluctance suggests that the FCC didn’t much want to hear the study’s results. And that may be because the study finds that low-power FM radio doesn’t pose a significant interference problem. Here’s an excerpt from the study:

Based on the measurements and analysis reported herein, existing third-adjacent channel distance restrictions should be waived to allow LPFM operation at locations that meet all other FCC requirements [after four small revisions]. . . . Perceptible interference caused during the tests by temporary LPFM stations operating on third-adjacent channels occurred too seldom . . . to warrant the additional expense that those follow-on activities would entail.⁶

Here’s the question a lot of people have been raising lately: Is the FCC really devoted to efficient and diverse communications, or is it just a bureaucratic flunky for the big broadcasting companies? The FCC’s response to the MITRE report—which was buried in the comment section of the FCC’s website and not publicly announced—suggests that the cynics may be right. But it’s not too late for the FCC to prove them wrong.

Former FCC Chair Michael Powell’s justification for relaxing the rules on broadcast media concentration was that new media— the Internet, satellite broadcasting, etc.—would ensure that concentration in commercial broadcasting would be offset by new sources of information. As James Plummer wrote awhile back, ending the suppression of microradio is a better way of promoting diversity than more regulation.⁷ If the FCC really believes in broadcast diversity, then now that the bogus interference concerns raised by NPR and the National Association of Broadcasters have turned out to be, well, bogus, it should endorse the growth of low-power FM stations. Sure, Clear Channel and NPR don’t want to face the competition. But protecting fat cats from competition isn’t what the FCC is all about, is it?

Or maybe it is. But as more and more people get access to the tools of creation and distribution, it’s more likely that politicians will recognize that there are more voters who want to create than voters who want to stand in their way. The FCC has made some moves of late to make low-power FM stations easier to establish, but it is still treating them as second- or third-class citizens: unprotected from interference and often overridden by “translators” used to extend the range of big commercial and public stations. Legislation before Congress might change that, but it’s strongly resisted by broadcasters, as you might expect.

Anxious to hold on to its piece of the pie, Big Media encourages restrictions that make the field—movies, music, broadcasting, whatever—less attractive to consumers.⁸ So customers leave the field entirely or substitute goods that are less regulated. Unable to get permission to use commercial music on the Internet, people often turn to independent bands that license their music freely. Radio gets duller and more boring, so people turn to podcasts. Movies are more restricted so people turn to videogames or independent films. As Princess Leia said to Grand Moff Tarkin: “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will trickle through your fingers.” That’s a lesson—taken from one of its own products, no less—that the entertainment industry would do well to learn.