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Speaking of self-plugs, gosh, been away for a few days, come back to a huge lot of posts on new music, and not one mentions...

• Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar
  http://kalvos.org/

...and the coalition it spawned...

• The Nonpop International Network
  http://nonpopradio.com/

Dennis aka Kalvos

Cage's 4'33" (4 minutes, 33 seconds) was mostly an experiment into the nature of silence.

Cage actually spent a lot of time researching Zen teachings. His research into silence eventually led him to Harvard University and a visit to its Anechoic Chamber - a closed environment supposedly complete free of noise.

"While he literally expected to hear nothing, after leaving the chamber, Cage explained to a nearby engineer that he had heard two sounds in the chamber, one high, and one low. The engineer told Cage that the high sound was his nervous system in operation, and that the low sound was his blood circulating"

The point of 4'33" was to state that there is no such thing as silence. For more info, check out this paper by Andrew Schulze on the subject.

what's the big deal? Can't a log parser do this in no time? Just track unique hosts or something like that. If they just needed numbers it should be a no brainer, even something like webalizer can give you those numbers if you set it up right.

Not everybody's a newcomer. We've been doing this since September 1995 at Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar -- three years before the DMCA and more than seven years before the CARP proposal.

During that time we have gone through six different servers, four of which are long gone along with their logs -- including one which carried web logs during the retroactive CARP period.

Furthermore, we archive shows that contain upwards of 15 compositions per show. We don't stream using a streaming server, but via HTTP. A cable connection would download most or all of a show, even though a listener might click off after our opening 10-minute essay. The logs would report 15 songs, even though none would actually be listened to.

And what of listeners that skipped through the show for one piece? The logs still report 15-25 compositions.

The CARP rules were unworkable. A blanket and reasonable license is a much better approach. The industry was really shaking down the cybercasting scene to consolidate power; the royalties were cream.

Dennis

Our show, Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar begins its 8th year on Saturday. We've been on line since September of 1995, with RealAudio 1.0.

We've been both broadcast and cybercast (archived, not streamed, for the first few years), and were there three years before the DMCA.

Yes, we were opposed to the CARP rules and gave them our Golden Bruce Award this year, but we also opposed the DMCA and praised the Dutch rights agency BUMA (which allows imperfect cybercasts with simple licensing, and none at all at low streaming rates.

Our problem has been living through all these issues. We began operating with the understanding that we were a niche program (new nonpop) working as a research site as well as a music site (we won the year 2000 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, even after the DMCA).

But the DMCA contained no grandfathering and had no exceptions for educational/research use. In 1998, before the passage of the law, we started getting releases from composers and labels (which you can read about here) as a pre-emptive measure. We didn't receive all of them, which still meant, with the advent of the retroactive CARP rules (see the abbreviated list in a previous post), the impossible requirement to research all our logs, including on computers long out of service and whose logs were long gone.

On average, by my guesswork calculation (where Britney's "I'm a Slave 4 U" and Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" are both considered "songs") our yearly payment to the RIAA (which does

not

So the Librarian of Congress's rejection of CARP is good news, if only for the interim. True commercial cybercasts are another issue, and the DMCA and CARP rules are a burden for them as well; we broadcast and cybercast within the nonprofit/educational arena (on a community station with volunteer staff) and also provide a true research site, but CARP swept us in with the rest.

I don't offer any new insights here, only a sense of relief, and a place to say them.

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
"Kalvos" of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar

Our show, Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar begins its 8th year on Saturday. We've been on line since September of 1995, with RealAudio 1.0.

We've been both broadcast and cybercast (archived, not streamed, for the first few years), and were there three years before the DMCA.

Yes, we were opposed to the CARP rules and gave them our Golden Bruce Award this year, but we also opposed the DMCA and praised the Dutch rights agency BUMA (which allows imperfect cybercasts with simple licensing, and none at all at low streaming rates.

Our problem has been living through all these issues. We began operating with the understanding that we were a niche program (new nonpop) working as a research site as well as a music site (we won the year 2000 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, even after the DMCA).

But the DMCA contained no grandfathering and had no exceptions for educational/research use. In 1998, before the passage of the law, we started getting releases from composers and labels (which you can read about here) as a pre-emptive measure. We didn't receive all of them, which still meant, with the advent of the retroactive CARP rules (see the abbreviated list in a previous post), the impossible requirement to research all our logs, including on computers long out of service and whose logs were long gone.

On average, by my guesswork calculation (where Britney's "I'm a Slave 4 U" and Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" are both considered "songs") our yearly payment to the RIAA (which does

not

So the Librarian of Congress's rejection of CARP is good news, if only for the interim. True commercial cybercasts are another issue, and the DMCA and CARP rules are a burden for them as well; we broadcast and cybercast within the nonprofit/educational arena (on a community station with volunteer staff) and also provide a true research site, but CARP swept us in with the rest.

I don't offer any new insights here, only a sense of relief, and a place to say them.

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
"Kalvos" of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar

Our show, Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar begins its 8th year on Saturday. We've been on line since September of 1995, with RealAudio 1.0.

We've been both broadcast and cybercast (archived, not streamed, for the first few years), and were there three years before the DMCA.

Yes, we were opposed to the CARP rules and gave them our Golden Bruce Award this year, but we also opposed the DMCA and praised the Dutch rights agency BUMA (which allows imperfect cybercasts with simple licensing, and none at all at low streaming rates.

Our problem has been living through all these issues. We began operating with the understanding that we were a niche program (new nonpop) working as a research site as well as a music site (we won the year 2000 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, even after the DMCA).

But the DMCA contained no grandfathering and had no exceptions for educational/research use. In 1998, before the passage of the law, we started getting releases from composers and labels (which you can read about here) as a pre-emptive measure. We didn't receive all of them, which still meant, with the advent of the retroactive CARP rules (see the abbreviated list in a previous post), the impossible requirement to research all our logs, including on computers long out of service and whose logs were long gone.

On average, by my guesswork calculation (where Britney's "I'm a Slave 4 U" and Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" are both considered "songs") our yearly payment to the RIAA (which does

not

So the Librarian of Congress's rejection of CARP is good news, if only for the interim. True commercial cybercasts are another issue, and the DMCA and CARP rules are a burden for them as well; we broadcast and cybercast within the nonprofit/educational arena (on a community station with volunteer staff) and also provide a true research site, but CARP swept us in with the rest.

I don't offer any new insights here, only a sense of relief, and a place to say them.

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
"Kalvos" of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar

Our show, Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar begins its 8th year on Saturday. We've been on line since September of 1995, with RealAudio 1.0.

We've been both broadcast and cybercast (archived, not streamed, for the first few years), and were there three years before the DMCA.

Yes, we were opposed to the CARP rules and gave them our Golden Bruce Award this year, but we also opposed the DMCA and praised the Dutch rights agency BUMA (which allows imperfect cybercasts with simple licensing, and none at all at low streaming rates.

Our problem has been living through all these issues. We began operating with the understanding that we were a niche program (new nonpop) working as a research site as well as a music site (we won the year 2000 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, even after the DMCA).

But the DMCA contained no grandfathering and had no exceptions for educational/research use. In 1998, before the passage of the law, we started getting releases from composers and labels (which you can read about here) as a pre-emptive measure. We didn't receive all of them, which still meant, with the advent of the retroactive CARP rules (see the abbreviated list in a previous post), the impossible requirement to research all our logs, including on computers long out of service and whose logs were long gone.

On average, by my guesswork calculation (where Britney's "I'm a Slave 4 U" and Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" are both considered "songs") our yearly payment to the RIAA (which does

not

So the Librarian of Congress's rejection of CARP is good news, if only for the interim. True commercial cybercasts are another issue, and the DMCA and CARP rules are a burden for them as well; we broadcast and cybercast within the nonprofit/educational arena (on a community station with volunteer staff) and also provide a true research site, but CARP swept us in with the rest.

I don't offer any new insights here, only a sense of relief, and a place to say them.

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
"Kalvos" of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar

I can only speak to my own sites, particularly Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, which is dedicated to contemporary nonpop (read "classical new music and electronia").

We started in September 1995 (using RealAudio 1.0, if anyone's old enough to remember that), have won awards (real ones, with money, such as the Deems Taylor Award for Internet journalism presented by ASCAP (yes, I know /. loves to hate ASCAP) at Lincoln Center), and have had nearly 330,000 visitors and 130,000,000 hits since we started counting in 1997.

Those aren't big numbers, and they're also not big money. When you have a kind of 'mission' -- i.e., bringing nonpop to a wider audience -- it takes a lot of time. A lot of time. And folks always want something new, which means even more time. (Even the process of editing, converting and uploading our two-hour radio shows -- real radio, not Internet bitcasts -- for posting takes big chunks of time.)

Like any content-rich site, it's also expensive -- bandwidth, storage (our site is nearly 6GB), software purchases, licenses, travel for interviews, etc. -- even if we (there are two of us) don't get paid. In fact, 80% of the site's cost is paid by us, and fundraising icons and even fundraising sales are ignored. We've had to answer inquiries from licensing agencies, negotiate agreements with composers (are remember we started three years before the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and had lots of stuff to 'grandfather'. When the New York Times print and online editions featured us at the end of October, we were hit will 11GB of bandwidth overcharges.

We've eschewed the banner ad, kept the site focused on content and not design, and maintained near-complete Section 508 accessibility. As web expectations have grown, so have we, even though we're not a design-happy site.

It's a lot of work, and we're halfway through our seventh year of doing it. People, I think, just tire of 'labors of love' after a while. We're a first-hand case of a site that has received accolades from visitors and media, and as two aging professional composers (both in our fifties) who also have day jobs, it's a pretty exhausting task. To have to pay $5,000+ a year for the privilege of doing it is even more tiring.

Will we go away? Of course we will, either when we've completed our mission (unlikely) or when we're just unable to face another day of watching hundreds of visitors suck down the contents of our site without so much as a dollar sent in via Paypal.

Dennis
http://kalvos.org/

I can only speak to my own sites, particularly Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, which is dedicated to contemporary nonpop (read "classical new music and electronia").

We started in September 1995 (using RealAudio 1.0, if anyone's old enough to remember that), have won awards (real ones, with money, such as the Deems Taylor Award for Internet journalism presented by ASCAP (yes, I know /. loves to hate ASCAP) at Lincoln Center), and have had nearly 330,000 visitors and 130,000,000 hits since we started counting in 1997.

Those aren't big numbers, and they're also not big money. When you have a kind of 'mission' -- i.e., bringing nonpop to a wider audience -- it takes a lot of time. A lot of time. And folks always want something new, which means even more time. (Even the process of editing, converting and uploading our two-hour radio shows -- real radio, not Internet bitcasts -- for posting takes big chunks of time.)

Like any content-rich site, it's also expensive -- bandwidth, storage (our site is nearly 6GB), software purchases, licenses, travel for interviews, etc. -- even if we (there are two of us) don't get paid. In fact, 80% of the site's cost is paid by us, and fundraising icons and even fundraising sales are ignored. We've had to answer inquiries from licensing agencies, negotiate agreements with composers (are remember we started three years before the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and had lots of stuff to 'grandfather'. When the New York Times print and online editions featured us at the end of October, we were hit will 11GB of bandwidth overcharges.

We've eschewed the banner ad, kept the site focused on content and not design, and maintained near-complete Section 508 accessibility. As web expectations have grown, so have we, even though we're not a design-happy site.

It's a lot of work, and we're halfway through our seventh year of doing it. People, I think, just tire of 'labors of love' after a while. We're a first-hand case of a site that has received accolades from visitors and media, and as two aging professional composers (both in our fifties) who also have day jobs, it's a pretty exhausting task. To have to pay $5,000+ a year for the privilege of doing it is even more tiring.

Will we go away? Of course we will, either when we've completed our mission (unlikely) or when we're just unable to face another day of watching hundreds of visitors suck down the contents of our site without so much as a dollar sent in via Paypal.

Dennis
http://kalvos.org/

Good grief. I suppose I should stay out of this, but I've been a professional composer using orchestral and electronic media for more than 30 years, and the PC has always provided the breadth of tools and configurability that I need, especially if I need to quickly build up a control device of some kind.

Look, I know those who started with Macs are happy with their stuff. That's fine. But I can't be tied to an Apple corporate stamp of approval for a product. For example, I'd not likely see an AudioMulch for Mac -- unless you consider Max, priced at 10 times the cost for similar functionality (and with Max lacking the ability to produce techno quickly, for example). And Sound Forge, Cool Edit Pro, Cakewalk, Finale, Graphire Music Press ... all (and hundreds of other programs and advanced plugins) are wonderful and flexible PC software. Finale and Graphire both started on Macs, and Finale's first PC port was terrible. But once they started writing from the ground up for PC, the results were stunning. And according to users on both platforms, the Graphire PC version leaves the Mac version behind for ease and speed of use.

As for professional results, legacy studios with Mac equipment do not a case for Macs make. My CD was produced with PCs alone, as have been thousands of others. Likewise, as an editor and book designer, I have had no trouble accommodating the needs of legacy print houses who still use Macs.

I have no problem with Macs and those who love them, but you are presenting a bogus argument from the computer world of a decade past.

Dennis

MaltedMedia
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar
Erzsébet the Vampire

went out and got the IBM HomePage Reader

Well done. That's one of our first accessibility tests ... in fact, I started doing accessibility testing when blind and deaf users started complaining about my Kalvos & Damian site. We hardly miss an ALT now and are transcribing our interviews as fast as we can!

Dennis

http://orbitaccess.com/presidential/

2RockStars said that RIAA are middlemen and dinosaurs

Can we back up just a little to understand why these organizations had to exist?

Schizophrenic disclaimer: I'm a member of ASCAP opposed to blank-media fees, the latest copyright extension, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and institutionally-driven arbitrary protections.

A century ago music existed two ways: live and in scores. Musicians played and got paid, composers composed/performed and were published and got paid. Copyright, with its long common history, made it feasible to distribute printed copies of books and music. Early in this century, new forms of replication and distribution arose, especially photographs. Copyright was extended to those. Recorded music came later, as did software in myriad forms. No need to repeat the history.

But copyright protection was unhelpful -- almost meaningless -- without some way of acting on the protection afforded. How was a composer in Vermont to earn a few pennies from a performance in San Diego? How was a retired performer in Memphis to ear royalties on a jukebox play in Sault Ste Marie?

The answer was to form licensing agencies -- ASCAP, BMI, RIAA, SESAC, etc. -- to act as the artists' agent. This was a difficult court battle involving strikes and actions. It was not easily won, but it's hard to remember the days when a few dollars were all one earned ... even if a recording went on to sell a million copies. Even as recently as the 1970s, film composers had to strike for the right to the music they wrote. Ever see Dr. Zhivago? The music for this film was thrown out. Gone.

The intellectual property concept didn't come about for no reason. It was a construct devised to bridge the differences between tangible and intangible replication, to equate in some way the idea that 1,000 copies of a record weren't merely 1,000 pieces of plastic any more than 1,000 copies of Barbie were merely 1,000 pieces of plastic. The plastic isn't the issue; the human thought is.

The agencies were aggressive, and still are. Ugly, even. Some of you may recall ASCAP hitting up the Girl Scouts for royalties a few years ago, and getting laughed out of town. The licensing agencies are called "thugs" by restaurants who created an ambiance through background music, but refused to pay the fees. In fact, the retaurateurs finally got their legislation ... free background music in exchange for an extension of the copyright period.

It really went bad when the RIAA secured its tape tax in 1992. It was one of the first times government was collecting taxes and turning them over to a private corporation. The real thugs were unleashed. They slathered over the WTO and its U.S. progeny, the DMCA.

Many of us who depend on our agencies collecting royalties for us -- I make a pitiful $600 or so each year -- are ashamed by this behavior, and we've said so. I wrote to oppose the tape tax and the DMCA (my own Senator was a co-sponsor of both).

On the other hand, many compromises have been effected over the years on behalf of the listener (the 'consumer', these days). One of them is the survey. In case you've never heard of this process, it works like this: music airplays (and now netplays) are surveyed at random. Get found in a survey, and you get pro-rated royalties. I've had hundreds of airplays, but no survey ever found me. So every composition of mine has been given free to listeners. That's one of the bargains struck in order to make the licensing system work. With computers, it may no longer be necessary.

But the agencies -- my agency, ASCAP, among them -- are running scared, and they react irrationally. I was on ASCAP's first Internet committee five years ago, and even then, way before mp3 and at the very beginning of RealAudio, they saw a change coming. Their worry was not lining their pockets, but representing their composers effectively in a new world.

Likewise, the RIAA represents the performers, and in this world where commerce is now apparently king, those who sell more get more. Those who sell little get less than less -- for they pay the same tape tax that you do. The situation isn't equitable. Positions harden. Internet culture (information wants to be free) has not cohabited well with the results of a 75-year fight to identify and respect the creators of artistic 'information'. And a rising right-wing style of commercialism has further poisoned the atmosphere.

I host a broadcast and netcast with archived shows called Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar. Our raison-d'être was to widen listenership for new concert and electroacoustic music. And yet in our success, we now face the tribulations of the DMCA, which does not grandfather archived material. Our two-person volunteer gig is now obtaining clearances for 4,400 individual compositions -- or else comply with the RIAA's astoundingly bizarre rules of allowing only 5-hour show rotations for 2 weeks without playlists.

The understood relationships, not the middlemen, are being killed off. Not merely taking material without payment, but taking it without credit (all the creative participants relegated to unpaid anonymity), has become widespread.

Any experienced web site creator understands the feeling of seeing layouts and graphics and text and even complete pages and sites pop up elsewhere. Imagine if you were a lifelong artist whose survival was being compromised through similar ignorance and disrespect. I believe we have lost the ability to understand each other, and the agencies and legislators have actively participated -- encouraged -- that misunderstanding.

Dennis