Podcasts are back!
Since June 1st, the podcasts are functional again. Sorry for the hassle. I notice there are no comments at all about the latest podcast. Do you really all hate it or have you not listened to it ?
Podcast Hosting Issues
I've been screwed over by my hosting company (OVH, not to name them...) who encouraged me to change hosting plans just to slap me with excessive bandwidth charges the next day. I am very much p*ssed off about this and have decided not to play into their nasty little game if I can avoid it. Unfortunately, they have retaliated by blocking my hosting. This is why some of you have not been able to access the podcasts in recent days. I don't know how long this will take to be resolved, but at the very latest, all should go back to normal on June 1st. I apologise for the inconvenience...
May 2008 Podcast: The Jam Rock Show
This new Rambling Podcast is The Jam Rock Show. I've been exploring the jam rock genre for a decade or so, and I regularly find new and exciting bands in that field, so it was time to share!
Here is the setlist:
- Grateful Dead – Eyes of the World (02:20-14:50)
- Gov't Mule – Thorazine Shuffle (16:10-24:45)
- moe. – Rebubula (26:00-42:10)
- Jason Ricci – Deliver Us (43:10-50:00)
- Umphrey's McGee – Front Porch>Norwegian Wood>Kashmir>Jazz Odyssey>Front Porch (51:45-01:08:35)
- Derek Trucks Band – For My Brother (01:10:10-01:24:00)
I want to thank Garry Hodgson for helping me with the track selection. And as always, thanks to Greg Szlapczynski for the intro/outro soundbyte and to Amélie for the gorgeous banner!
December 2008 Podcast: The Moriarty Show
This new Rambling Podcast is The Moriarty Show. It's based on an interview done with the band Moriarty back in June last year that took a little more time than expected to get edited. The song selection is a mix of Moriarty, some of their influences, and stuff I think fits in the same broad genre that they're in (whether they like it or not!)
Here is the setlist:
- Moriarty – Jimmy (02:15-06:35)
- Johnny Cash – Don't Take Your Guns to Town (10:40-13:35)
- Suzanne Vega – The Queen and the Soldier (14:15-18:30)
- Mark Graham – Their Brains Were Small and They Died (19:20-22:20)
- 16 Horsepower – Low Estate (22:45-22:50)
- Elvis Presley – Nothin' but a Hounddog (29:35-31:00)
- Wood Brothers – Tried and Tempted (31:35-35:20)
- Danyel Waro – Po Ema (36:30-43:10)
- Moriarty – Private Lily (45:35-49:15)
I want to thank Moriarty wholeheartedly for spending the time with me and allowing me to use the tracks in the Podcast. Thanks to Mark Graham for allowing me to use Their Brains were Small and they Died. And finally, thanks also to Greg Szlapczynski for the intro/outro soundbyte and to Amélie for the gorgeous banner!
If you're one of my US readers / listeners and enjoyed this show, Moriarty is in NYC in the coming days: they're playing Zebulon Cafe in Brooklyn on the 10th and Joe's Pub on the 13th.
May 2008 Podcast: the New Orleans Show
This new Rambling Podcast is The New Orleans Show, about the musical tradition of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. If you care as much about these issues as I do, here are two charities I recommend contributing to: Habitat for Humanity has specific projects to rebuild homes in the Ninth Ward. The Tipitina's Foundation collects and donates instruments for disenfrenchised schools to preserve and nurture the New Orleans musical tradition.
Here is the setlist:
- Johnny Dodd’s Washboard Band – Bucktown Stomp (02:50-5:55)
- Fats Domino – No No Baby (06:50-09:10)
- The Meters – Cissy Strut (10:05-13:50)
- Snooks Eaglin – Hello Josephine (15:00-18:30)
- Professor Longhair – Big Chief (19:05-22:50)
- Dr. John – Walk on Guilded Splinters (24:00-29:10)
- Guitar Slim – The Things that I Used to Do (29:30-32:30)
- Jelly Roll Morton – Sweet Substitute (33:35-36:30)
- Louis Armstrong – Basin Street Blues (36:50-43:35)
- Rebirth Brass Band – Tubaluba (44:40-50-25)
- Galactic – Crazyhorse Mongoose (50-55:58:55)
- John Butler Trio – Gov’ did Nothing (01.00.15-01:07:45)
- Dirty Dozen Brass Band – What’s Going On (01:08:45-01:13:10)
- Bob Brozman – Look at New Orleans (01:13:10-01:18:55)
- Stanton Moore – When the Levee Breaks (01:20:05-01:25:40)
I'm afraid I don't have the guts and time to do a full write-up anymore, so you'll have to make do with the setlist. Let me just take the time to thank Rebirth Brass Band, John Butler Trio, Bob Brozman, Stanton Moore and/or their management for allowing me to use commercially released material. Thanks also to Greg Szlapczynski for the intro/outro soundbyte and to Amélie for the gorgeous banner!
The Long Tail of the 1950s
This is the first time (and very possibly the last) that I cross-post on my two blogs Fiberevolution and Musical Ramblings, but for once there was a topic that fit both at the same time, so why not ?
I have in the past written about the Long Tail, a trend in media consumption created by digitization of content. In a nutshell, the Long Tail is a representation of the proportion of non-hits vs. hits that people purchase. It used to be that 80% if music sales were done by roughly 20% of releases. With digitization that is no longer true, and increasingly people widen their cultural horizons.
From the point of view of the guy who sells the music, this can be good news (if, like Amazon he has very low logistics cost and a huge catalog or even better, like Rhapsody he has no logistics cost and a catalog limited only by the rights he can negotiate.) It is undoubtedly bad news for the retail shop who has huge logictics costs and a limited catalog since people looking for their particular taste in obscure stuff will never find what they want there. It's also bad news for a music industry whose only talent is to produce hits. Since these don't sell as much because a part of the sales transfer to more obscure stuff, they struggle to adapt to this new environment.
Anyway, this was all described in detail in Chris Anderson's excellent book The Long Tail, a recommended read for all who are interested in understanding these trends in media and content consumption. This book was released in 2006, but the reason I'm posting about this now, is that I found a reference to what may be a precursor of this phenomenon... in the 1950s!
Last week as I was flying to Barcelona I listened to the Folkways Collection Podcast, a series of 24 one-hour long podcasts that retrace the story of the Folkways music label and delve deep into its archive. The Folkways label was founded in the late 40s by Moses Asch, recording all sorts of music, folk, blues, jazz and what would now be called world music, but also political commentary, children stories and educational material. More relevant to this post, it was run like no other music labels. Let me quote a few sentences from the podcast to explain this:
"So he developed the business practice of service small previously neglected markets, and developed a production practice that would enable him to press small numbers of records at a time and then repress them also in very small batches when the demand came in. He had agreements with pressing plants so he could press as few as fifty copies of a given title."
This is a key enabler of the Long Tail phenomenon in that it lowers down the logistics cost to next to nothing. Of course, in Moe Asch's case, it wasn't nothing, as digitization has now allowed, but it was very close to that, basically producing to demand and reducing logistic and warehousing costs to the maximum.
Another characteristic of Moe Asch's operation is that he never deleted a master or got rid of back catalog the way traditional record firms would. When Moe Asch passed away in 1985, Folkways, a one man operation for over 35 years, had over 2000 references in catalog, all alive. This is another crucial component of the long tail: for it to work, you need to have enough material that you are addressing multiple niche markets. By today's standards, 2000+ references sounds puny (although it's still way more than the average supermarket or local record store carry) but on the scale of the operation and back in those days, it was no mean feat.
Finally, let me quote again the one paragraph that made me realise how close this was to an early Long Tail operation:
"The practical problem with the star system, the big hit system is that you have to put out so much money into the recording, into the product before it hits the market and it’s such a big guess, that you could really be stuck if it didn’t work. And if you didn’t have the product there in Cleveland on the very day that they needed it to sell it, it would no longer be a hit because the next thing would come along and would replace it. He said, look at Folkways differently: take all of my recordings and add up all their sales, and all of them together equal one hit. And that’s the way you have to think about Folkways."
And this is the crux of the Long Tail success: you don't have hits, you have a little bit of sales on a multitude of titles, and an occasional mini-hit, and that's what makes it work financially. Modern examples of the Long Tail abound in the digital world, but who would have thought that, by sheer business instinct, someone was doing it in the early 50s? Moe Asch didn't dy a rich man, but he died the proud owner of a 30 year old music label that had recorded hundreds of artists, talented yet obscure, and he left a legacy in culture that is unique and magnificent.
Go listen to these Folkways Podcasts, they are literally a journey in 20th century musical history. Superb stuff. And while you're at it, check out the Long Tail Blog for a full multimedia experience!
It's gonna be a tough one...
I finally finished doing the track selection for the New Orleans podcast tonight, and it was hard. There's so much music, so much good music from N'awlins that I had to make choices and still it's likely to be the longest Rambling Podcast yet. And despite that I'm sure I'll dissapoint some of you because there's so much I can't put in there...
Oh well.
Hopefully i'll finish it by the week-end, but it's not so sure and I'm out of town all week next week, so unless you have it here on Monday, it'll be the week-end after!
It's looking like N'awlins
Only 38 voters last night, should I wait or should I go ?
Well, in any case, it's looking like New Orleans will be the theme, unless we have a last minute voter's surprise. I won't be able to produce the podcast before my Boston trip next week, so chances are it'll be a late January or early February release.
In the meantime, I'd like to have some suggestions in the comments here about artists that you would like me to feature. I have some ideas, of course, but I could always use some requests !
Shoot away!
VOTE, VOTE, VOTE !
The rambling podcast poll is a tie, and in a few days at the latest, I need to start working on the next podcast. Plus there's only 14 voters, which is really lame compared to the 47 who voted last time and the nearly 500 who listened to the latest podcast. So do your music duty and...
VOTE!!!
Vote for the next Rambling Podcast!
I've set up a vote (see on the left had side bar) for you to choose the theme for the next Rambling Podcast. Last time we had 47 votes, let's try and beat that, shall we?
