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Peter Gabriel Wants You to Re-Shock the Monkey
PreacherTom writes "The party line for the music industry has been clear: discourage music downloads at all cost. However, singer Peter Gabriel is taking things in a different direction. In order to promote his own label, he is actually encouraging people to not only download his music, but also adapt it into something more modern. In doing so, he actually posted a sample pack of Shock the Monkey consisting of vocals and other pieces of the original multitrack recording. Some in the music business would call this the commercial equivalent of hiring kidnappers to babysit. In actuality, Gabriel is pleased with the results."
If you compress a single track of a song into an mp3 (or ogg or whatever) does it compress better than compressing multiple tracks mixed together? It's my understanding that the first step of compressing a wav to mp3 is to seperate out all the sound tracks. This being an imprecise process, wouldn't you get better results if the sound tracks were already seperated? So when musicians are making mp3s do they do it with seperate tracks or do they mix the tracks together and then encode an mp3 from the resulting mix, which immediately goes and tries to seperate the tracks again?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Real musicians (ie not Britney etc) love having their music remixed & worked on by other musicians. If you listen to hiphop, you'll know that everyone lets everyone else play with their beats, lyrics, etc. Honestly, BFD.
When I think Peter Gabriel my mind is instantly driven to the video for "Sledgehammer" with the stop motion animated food. With all of the Photoshopping talent online, why should the remix project stop with music alone? Music videos would likely be impressive as well.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
You can see that the actual artists -- the people the RIAA pretend to be protecting -- have repeatedly fallen on our side, supporting file sharing and music communities. They are above the petty business interests and sheer greed that has driven the RIAA to attempt to destroy the music industry.
With any luck, more artists will start taking these kinds of steps, and eventually the RIAA will not be watching their own dinner from last night being digested.
Freedom to create derivative works. Freedom to distribute. Freedom to use as you see fit. No copyright nonsense.
The good thing: it is inevitable that we deal away with copyright. Modern exchange of information demands it (read, networking in the sense of distributing information based on the network model, as opposed to the broadcast model). The information exchange is much more powerful than the copyright law, and it is only bound to get stronger as networking is more and more part of everyday life. The first signs are already apparent. We've got a company called Google who is most likely among the biggest copyright infringers on the world, operating freely. Why? Because Google provides an essential service. To index information, thus make information accessible. Furthermore not only it is an essential service, but it is _good_ for content creators aswell. The fundamental clash is this: copyright and networking is incompatible. Networking/nature is not aware of copyright and can't be made aware of, because copyright itself is a fuzzy, arbitary and ultimately conflicting view on information. Copyright is the 8 ton gorilla. Networking is the 8000 ton meteorite. Networking is simply so useful that we're not going to give it up and networking cannot be fixed to obey copyright law. Copyright is not only detrimental to an information society, it is not needed and ultimately incompatible with future technological advancement. Networking implies free flow of information and creating derivative works. So like it or not: copyright goes away.
The bad thing: it is likely to be a long, slow process and change is only going to come when the situation becomes really, really unworkable.
The outcome: content creators will get paid for creating the given work, but won't be given a tax and monopoly on distribution for x amount of time. This is how most people would expect to get paid for a job. After all, why is it that while creating and printing a book in the 18th century was much more expensive and longer, the copyright law guaranteed less benefits for the authors than it does now. We're simply rewarding content creators too much for too little work.
Of course you could argue that copyright provides incentive. But this is a false argument. The correct way to phrase that is: copyright provides income, which is the incentive. Now, you might argue that in the 18th century, copyright was the most straightforward way to provide that income to content creators, but today it ain't so. Again, our wonderful networking age obsoleted copyright on that field. It is now possible to setup a worldwide micropayment system on the internet (it is just a matter of time until someone implements it), to sponsor the creation of most works. Still, you could say, what about big budget movies? Well, what about them. There will be companies willing to finance the creation of the movie just like now (of course actors would be paid fixed sums of money as royalties won't exist) and they'd make profit not from the copyright fees coming from distributing the work, but from using the given content to sell their product. Tv stations already do this, they give away movies for no financial compensation so that you watch the advertisements their income is from. Just from now on, your movies ticket would pay for the experience you're given in the cinema, not the copyright fees. People would still go to the cinema, but cinemas would actually have to compete on the best viewing experience, not at what you're actually able to view.
It might sound strange, but from a certain viewpoint, advertisements have it right: they are the means, not the end. As in, they exist as means for companies to influence you, not because they want to make a profit on advertisements. The profit is indirect. If all content would be used like that commercially: to help sell a product (cinema seets, a book, etc), as in not as advertisement, but as a necessary component, then we wouldn't have to pay outrageous profits to media cartells, just what they des
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
In the 1990s Todd Rundgren released a disc for the CD-I system called "TR-1" that allowed you to modify the mix. You could choose change the producer, the mix, and the speed of the album on the fly.
I sincerely wish that this was something which could be solved so easily.
Your argument is interesting, but after further examination, somewhat akin to early Communist and Socialist economic models. It looks good on paper, but might not really manage to create a situation where many content creators would be motivated to do so, or even in a position where they could make the commitment of both time and resources necessary for them to come up with the music at the level of sophistication that a Peter Gabriel album does when it is conceived, written, played, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered. This in turn could lead to the kind of long-term and endemic paucity of outstanding creative works in a similar fashion to that which ended happening in the former Soviet Union with their economic policies.
There are far many more complex and entertwined issues to this dilemna, and while I wholeheartedly agree that current copyright issues are increasingly antiquated and will likely slowly disappear in their present form, there are many reasons why this particular approach will probably not be adopted as law. Mind you, the 'de facto' result at the street level today is already so completely out of hand, that it may make less and less of a difference anyway, as it has proven utterly impossible to police and regulate. Major Hip-Hop artists make no bones about selling bootleg 'mixtapes' by the bucketload as part of their viral marketing strategies, everyone and their sister can create instant mashups which besides being difficult to even recognize, make it utterly impossible for anyone to try and collect royalties from, so in a sense the result is pretty much the same. But consequently and already noticeable, many contemporary artists have reduced the amount of time they can afford to spend in the studio crafting recording masterpieces which no one will buy in great numbers, choosing to instead put out slighty more 'average' albums and dedicate their time and energies to performing live, which for many has proven to be a reliable way to help to pay the bills...
As a whole, it is quite flattering to see that someone like Peter Gabriel (who besides being a legendary performer, also has consistently tried to further his participation to the global music community, with his World Music festival (WOMAD), Real World recording studio complex, as well as through his record label which is supporting many great, unknown but talented artists.) doing something that few have dared to try in order to stay relevant. Kudos all the way!!
Z.
We recently read about something quite similar here in Sweden. An artist had found out that someone had downloaded a bootleg copy of a song he mostly performed live, remixed it and released it onto the internet crowds. When said artist found the song, he released it as his own on his new album. This was an excellent way to show how piracy _really_ works. It's not destructive. It's not anti-artistic. It won't hurt anyone if you don't take it so bloody damn serious!
Blog -
In the long lost times of 1996 Pitch Shifter released Infotainment?, which shipped with all the samples used in the album's songs. So it isn't that uncommon.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Marillion did the same thing to a whole album (Anoraknophobia) as a competition a few years back and released the best remixes as the CD Remixomatosis (and the nearly-best-remixes as a "free" fan club CD). Winners also got cash prices, and many of the remixes sound really, really excellent.
Parent is broadly correct, the only comment I'd make is on the budget for movies, where I wonder about whether it's possible for cinema showings/movie theaters to act as "live performance" as it were for films they show, i.e. for theaters to organise themselves in advance and under contract/by subscription to fund new movies, paid for at the box office. In other words, in a post-copyright world, to serve the same sort of function for movies that live performance concerts and touring would provide for musicians.
Comments that this model is like Socialism or Communism are wrong; there is a similarity, but the difference is that we are not talking about tangible property in limited supply. We are talking about intangibles which cost nothing to replicate or distribute, and which are therefore in infinite supply, which is why this model can work. This wasn't previously the case, content was always tied to physical expression in tangible/scarce media in the past, which is why 18th/19th century copyright made a kind of sense it doesn't any more.
Think about this; if physical goods was instantly replicable, Star-Trek style, at zero cost, then you might find not only that our ideas about property would be forced to change, but also that Socialist/Communist ideals might suddenly work in that context, whereas in a real world of scarce goods they do not. For digital content, however, there is no scarcity, and copyright is a wholly artificial scarcity imposed on that which makes our society poorer than it need be, as well as supporting a wholly artificial "industry" that does not in fact add value or generate wealth at all, however much money it handles.
Remember, "a nice cup of tea" should always link to: http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/
Peter Gabriel is a real pioneer in thinking about how music, technology and communities come together. And this action is just the latest step in a long road. He realized early on the power that labels had over his music, so in the '80s and early 90's he bought back the rights to his catalog from the labels that had originally published it. (It is standard practice in contracts for the musician to sign over copyright to their songs to the label). Once those rights were secured he began to explore new ways of using his music. Two very early efforts were the Xplora and EVE cd-roms (see the site here .
In the summer of 1994 I was hired by the Starwave Corporation in Seattle to be part of a small team developing EVE. The idea was pretty interesting -- pair the work of different contemporary visual artists up with songs from Gabriel, treating each as raw material, then create a framework in which people can explore, share and remix that material to create an integrated audio/video hybrid that is greater than the sum of its parts. I had just finished a graduate art program that had similar ideas, so I felt right at home.
We used the work of artists Helen Chadwick , Yayoi Kusama , Cathy de Monchaux , and Nils-Udo -- using high rez scans of their work as starting points. They were paired up with Gabriel's songs 'Come Talk To Me' , 'Shaking The Tree' , and 'In Your Eyes'. We had the equivalent of the sample packs that he has made available on-line for Shock the Monkey. These were professionally produced loops from the multi-track masters. Gabriel's recording process usually involves dozens and dozens of tracks, so these samples weren't mix-downs, but elements from a single track.
We created something called the Interactive Musical Xperience to bring these elements together. It was a kind of audio/video sampler that you could play with your keyboard, triggering sound and animation loops against a rendered landscape background. The software quantized everything so you would always be in time and you could work improvisationally or with a simple graphical timeline. The team developing it had a diverse background in software development, fine art and filmmaking. My job eventually became to create functional mockups of the interaction using Director 4....! The production team eventually relocated to the Real World studios in Box, UK which was an incredibly intense creative environment -- musicians, engineers, filmmakers, photographers, designers all working together in a bucolic 'campus' made from an old mill complex.
Although I eventually left Real World and Starwave to pursue my own artwork, it was a really great experience. The fact that the rest of the world has started to catch up to the ideas Peter Gabriel has been thinking about since the early 90's only reaffirms how resonant those ideas continue to be.