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BonsaiK

Music Industry Corporate Whore
Nov 14, 2007
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kds said:
Hi again! I submitted my songs for a competition for this label looking for an artist to develop, publish and basically 'sell to the world'. I just entered it on a whim and didn't expect to hear anything about it again.

The ceo of the company however emailed me and is extremely interested in me and wants to meet with me etc. I googled him and stuff and have found info on him but have also found that, of all of the artists that are on his various labels, there's not one I've actually heard of.

Basically he's promising pretty big things like me going o/s and keeps plugging himself to me and telling me I'll be working with the 'right people'. I am planning to meet with him face-to-face and see what he's like but there's something about it I'm unsure about and I'm desperate for advice!

Do you have any suggestions for questions I should ask, what I should look for when researching him and his companies and just in general any red flags I should look out for?

My main concern is that none of his actual websites work, only the myspaces work and the artist photos and general look of the pages look quite tacky to me. More than anything though, it's the fact that none of the artists on his rosters are people I've heard of- it's just not very reassuring. I want to take advantage of opportunities but I don't want to just take them blinded. HELP PLEASE!!!!
Sounds dodgy as hell. Anybody running label signing as a "competition prize" - watch out.

Please send me a PM with the links to their MySpace, etc. and I'll tell you more privately.
 

BonsaiK

Music Industry Corporate Whore
Nov 14, 2007
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As an addendum to all that, besides the stuff I told you privately, here's some things for anyone reading this to generally keep in mind:

* Avoid competitions of all types in relation to music. The only one worth a damn for exposure is Eurovision, seriously (and maybe even that's dodgy at the lower levels - I wouldn't know). From small-time "Battle Of The Bands" type stuff, to "win a tour/win a festival show in Europe" multinational competitions, to well-known TV music competition shows featuring panels of three judges - don't do any of it. I've talked about it all at length many pages back and the list of horror stories people who've been down these routes have is a mile long.

* Anyone who seems really enthusiastic to do stuff with you on a business level - watch out. They may be just really enthusiastic to line their pockets with your money. People in the music business are a notoriously jaded, cynical bunch of people who generally are not slick "business-talk" types so if some guys pitches you something and it sounds more like he's coming from a marketing background than a music background (i.e the hype just sounds a little too good especially from a guy representing some organisation you've never heard of) then be really careful and read between the lines.

* If any business deal regarding music involves you putting in cash upfront, including but not limited to: paying for airplay (illegal in most countries), paying for tickets to your own show, paying to be on a compilation CD, paying suspiciously high "entrance/sign-up fees"... just say no. Think about how Nigerian 419 scams work - making you pay a little money upfront for fees so you can access more money later, that never materialises... a lot of music industry scams work very much like this, except instead of the scammers disappearing, they just promise you that the money is eventually coming and then they often try to fleece you a second time.
 

BonsaiK

Music Industry Corporate Whore
Nov 14, 2007
5,635
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Shivarage said:
Do you personally consider the majority of pop music to be "art"?
That really isn't strictly a music industry question but I'll answer it anyway.

I personally subscribe to Frank Zappa's idea of what constitutes "art" vs "not art". He says that if you throw a tomato against a wall, the resulting splat on its own is not art. However, if you then put a frame around that splat, and say "within the frame lies my art", then it is in fact now art. Art needs the "frame" to exist, otherwise how can someone tell where the art ends and the real world begins?

The frame can exist in space (a physical frame, actual or implied) or in the case of music, a frame can exist in time. A frame might even be time + space, such as in the case of a performance art piece that goes for a set duration (or it might continue, being a "work in progress").

Within these boundaries, anything is art if you want it to be. Consider a factory worker who goes to work in a noisy factory with clanking machines. He hears the machines every day and to him it's just noise. It's not art to him. But what about a musician who walks into that factory, and who instead of hearing a jumble of clanking, she perceives musical rhythms within the repetition of the machines? She might perceive the factory as a big instrument, and might even start making a song based off it...


So the short answer is "yes, all music is art, simply by definition".

The reason why people get all fucked up about this and refuse to believe it is because they don't actually understand what art IS. They think "art" as a word has some kind of "quality value", and that by assigning this word to things they don't happen to like, they're assigning quality to things that they perceive as lacking in quality. However art does not require quality and the proof of this is that art can be perceived as either good or bad, and we know this because without it art competitions couldn't exist. If you don't like something that doesn't mean it's "not art", that's like saying that because an apple is kind of rotten and moldy it's not an apple. It's obviously still an apple - just a bad apple. Likewise, if you don't like certain art, that just means it's "bad art" or "art you don't happen to like" - no more or less. Lady Gaga is art as is Slayer as is Justin Bieber as is Beethoven. Whether any of it is good, bad or indifferent art depends on the kinds of qualities you prefer in your art, but it's still art.
 

Kadir

New member
Nov 20, 2009
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This might not be an industry question, but: Whatever happened to bass guitar? I seem to remember it being more... prominent in years gone by than it has been recently. Am I imagining this?
 

BonsaiK

Music Industry Corporate Whore
Nov 14, 2007
5,635
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Guest said:
This might not be an industry question, but: Whatever happened to bass guitar? I seem to remember it being more... prominent in years gone by than it has been recently. Am I imagining this?
Depending on the music style bass guitar may be more prominent or less prominent than other instruments. I have a feeling that you're referring to something specific here, like changes within a specific genre. Can you give examples of what you mean?
 

Shivarage

New member
Apr 9, 2010
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Ham_authority95 said:
Why do DJs have two turntables as opposed to one?
I'm gonna have a guess and say it's to play two tracks at once to either mix them or so one can be played on the end of the other...
 

BonsaiK

Music Industry Corporate Whore
Nov 14, 2007
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Ham_authority95 said:
Why do DJs have two turntables as opposed to one?
In the early days all DJing was with turntables. Nobody on a dancefloor or at an event where DJing was happening wanted to wait for the guy with the vinyl to stop the record, remove the needle, take the record off the platter, put a new record on, cue up the needle and then play the next track. A lengthy process even for a skilled DJ. It made sense to have two turntables so you could cue up one track whiile the other was playing so it was ready to go as soon as the other track finished. That's the initial reason why DJs always had two turntables.

It didn't take long before DJs started getting more creative, mixing things together, playing two things on top of each other at the same speed, crossfading, and then there's scratching... after a while the turntables started to blur the line between a music playback device and a music-making machine in its own right...
 

Kadir

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Nov 20, 2009
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BonsaiK said:
Depending on the music style bass guitar may be more prominent or less prominent than other instruments. I have a feeling that you're referring to something specific here, like changes within a specific genre. Can you give examples of what you mean?
Off the top of my head, rap:

1980:
1987:
2010:

Most rap uses sampled basslines (I think), but giving them a place of prominence seems to have become unfashionable. Am I delusional? If not, is there any particular reason for the change?
 

BonsaiK

Music Industry Corporate Whore
Nov 14, 2007
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Kadir said:
Most rap uses sampled basslines (I think), but giving them a place of prominence seems to have become unfashionable. Am I delusional? If not, is there any particular reason for the change?
Most rap these days uses synthesised sub-bass triggered from either keyboards or gated tone generators. You can hear this in the Kanye West track AND the Eric B/Rakim track (it's right at the start, that massive low "bmmmmmmmm" noise that plays with the sampled beat, way before the "real" bassline even starts). They may sometimes use (sampled or actually played) bass guitar as well (or, in the case of rap, double-bass is actually more common because it's lower) but synthesised subs are huge in rap music and started appearing from mid 80s onward. By 1995 subs were in everything.

The increasing popularity of sub-bass in music in general is due to increases in the fidelity and availability and decreasing price of the audio technology that allow that sub-bass to be reproduced by the average listener. In the old days you'd need a BIG PA to get that sub-bass, nowadays we can recreate it with a little subwoofer box. Speakers have been around for many decades but the subwoofer is a relatively recent invention. Normal bass guitar doesn't really benefit from a sub-woofer because the instrument just doesn't go that low - even downtuned or 5-string basses don't really get that deep into your average subwoofer range of operation. Now that everyone has one of those boxes, producers like to put them to work, especially with any style of music where rhythm is the primary element (rap, techno, etc), and with a tone generator or keyboard the producer can just dial in the ultra-low frequency they want and trigger it at a certain time, without having to worry about things like "oh, but the instrument can't go that low".

That's not to say there's no place for the humble bass guitar, it's used more often than you might think, in very commercial pop styles where regular guitars are generally not seen, a bass guitar in the studio still sometimes played the initial bassline, which is then pitch-shift doubled down an octave, and sometimes sampled and looped too, or digitally edited. It doesn't really sound much like a bass guitar though once you do all that to it:


I honestly don't know if that's a bass guitar or not but it certainly could be. The bassline in the chorus certainly has some flourishes in it that sound very "live bass guitar player", even though sonically the instrument sounds nothing like it. The flourishes are the same each time so if it is a live player they probably just looped the best take each time. But this is the typical bass guitar sound in commercial pop music - tone-neutral, almost like a sine wave, and very deep (an octave down, actually double-bass register) to trigger the subs.

Also the bass guitar in a more natural untarnished form is as present in more "organic" popular music styles as it ever was. For every White Stripes style band with no bass, there's about ten bands with a bass guitar but no regular guitar. But you're right, the nature of bass in some styles of music has changed. It's become lower, lower than the traditional bass guitar can reproduce, hence why you now hear that instrument less in those styles.
 

Chefodeath

New member
Dec 31, 2009
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Do you have any tips for self-publishing?

Right now I'm working on an album that I would like to make and promote by myself. I can manage the actual music, but I don't know where to start when it comes to marketing and advertising. Any tips on how to get the music out there and make yourself known?

Edit: I should also add that the style I'm playing in is a folksy kind of thing including multi-part vocals, fiddle, and acoustic guitar.
 

Shivarage

New member
Apr 9, 2010
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You saw this one coming -

What effect will SOPA and ACTA really have on the music industry?
 

uneek

New member
Sep 4, 2011
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My Questions:

Aside from rap, are artists discouraged from bad-mouthing other artists?

How related are regular music to other types like movie and video game score, theme music for TV shows, commercial jingles, etc....