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Dean View Drop Down
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 30 2010 at 08:06
Originally posted by tamijo tamijo wrote:

First of all i will admit that i havent read trough all 9 pages, so this may allready have been noted.
 
What i want to say is :
I dont belive many bands can survive without going live. And i think the ability to do great live shows have allways been a key-stone in rock. So the critics will still be able to pick out the great live stuff.
This just to comfort those that think it will all drown in a flood of selfmade amaturism.
Doomed, we're all doooomed!  (see my other Blog: Live Prog-rock is Dying)
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 30 2010 at 08:27
Maybe you should reopen your old blog, Dean? Time has passed and we now how many new members who maybe would like to express their thoughts on the issue.

After one year of intensively attending to concerts in one of the busiest places in the world (I can't really keep up with the amount of awesome concerts happening in Paris), I can definitely say that live music performance is here to stay. Of course, some things have changed. One of the things I've learned is that progressive music is going to survive but not because of proggers (for the exact same reasons you pointed out in your inaugural post in the other blog).
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 30 2010 at 08:35

I have not read these 9 pages too. But my view is very much that we are back to year 1880 again where the bands earned their living by playing live. Today or probably in five years time; gramophones can only be regarded as promo material for their live performances. 

The genie (ie illegal downloads) has left the bottle forever. The clock will never be turned back to 1995. There is a new law coming into force next month here in the UK. But it is technically so easy to bypass that this law is totally without teeth. Neither will the telecommunication industry abide by this law either. People are not paying for broadband just to send each other emails. 

I am very glad I left the music industry. An industry not half as ducked as the film industry. That industry is in big danger of being wiped out due to relying heavily on investors who want returns. Not with hundreds of millions of illegal downloads, you will........ 

Mark my words; in five years time, we will be back to 1880.

 

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 30 2010 at 11:57
Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by tamijo tamijo wrote:

First of all i will admit that i havent read trough all 9 pages, so this may allready have been noted.
 
What i want to say is :
I dont belive many bands can survive without going live. And i think the ability to do great live shows have allways been a key-stone in rock. So the critics will still be able to pick out the great live stuff.
This just to comfort those that think it will all drown in a flood of selfmade amaturism.
Doomed, we're all doooomed!  (see my other Blog: Live Prog-rock is Dying)
In my place (Denmark) live music is def. not dying, and i go watch live music, nearly as much as i did in my young days, even though I admit to getting a bit old, missing out on festivals and other uncomfortable events. But im not sure that the development is the same all over the world.  
 
 
Prog is whatevey you want it to be. So dont diss other peoples prog, and they wont diss yours
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 31 2010 at 20:55
Very well written post! 
 
A similar set of circumstances can be seen in today's workplace.  We find ourselves flooded with much more data than ever before yet still enjoying less meaningful information than ever before...   As a result, economists predict that Database Administrators capable of  efficiently creating access to truly meaningful information from the virtual chaos will thrive in the 21st Century economy.
 
In the same way, as the exponential increase in self-released music overwhelms the casual consumer, new voluntary gatekeepers are entering the scene, providing a vetting service.  Indeed the Prog Archives website is a good example of avid volunteer gatekeepers of quality for Progressive Rock music.  (Admittedly not all gatekeepers are of equal quality and to some extent we have an overabundance of gatekeepers as well - but there *are* mechanisms to aid the consumer's choice of which gatekeepers to follow - and even some measure of financial rewards available for those who provide this service particularly well (as the increased advertising presence on this website attests!)
 
Suffice it to say that I agree with idea that the "cost" of new music is no longer measured merely by the currency which one pays for access.  Rather, the most significant "cost" of new music is increasingly being measured as the time and attention which must invest in an "indie" product.
 
For another example of a quality gatekeeper in the new economy, look no further than Paste "magazine".  One could argue that Paste has made a niche industry out of being a voluntary gatekeeper for adult-alternative music and are now attempting to branch out into similar film and print services.
  
I worked in commercial broadcast radio in the 1980's and I can honestly say that, despite the overwhelming exhaustion associated with the genuine plethora of self-released music online today, I still would *not* ever want to "go back" to those "good old days" of very few distribution channels guarded by gatekeepers interested in wide-audience commercial return on investment. 
 
No.  I' much rather have a million choices of songs of varied style and quality.  Then give me 50,000 choices of gatekeepers!  I'll gladly select 'authorities' that serve *my* tastes and interests rather than being forced to live with the result of industry insiders focused on general purpose demographics far different from myself.
 
With so much competing noise in today's marketplace, it is tempting to fall prey to the notion that wide open distribution channels have resulted in only a vast increase in the amount of sub-standard product available.  My experience tells me, however, that the quantity of high-quality product has also increased.  We just need a little help finding it!
 
For my time and money, today's narrowcasting is doing a much better job of reaching out to me than yesterdays broadcasting ever did.  Keep up the good work at ProgArchives! 
 
Prog On!
Mark Stephens
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 24 2010 at 20:11
Since the issue of the digital & the internet as a long term support for data storage and dissemination was touched here, I'll link to this interesting article:

Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 24 2010 at 20:17
Torodd: A good point about the broadband industry supporting illegal downloads. Well of course they don't actively support them but a huge part of the demand for bandwidth is for grabbing music and movies and games illegally. Without it we'd probably all be able to get by on 1 or 2 gigs a month. Maybe it's the physical matter thing again, that you can break down one industry but it will always be replaced by another, that there'll never actually be greater or fewer transactions occurring than there previously were.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 29 2010 at 18:54
I like their way of releasing albums: www.1099band.com

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: April 27 2011 at 09:19
Dean's predictions about the Internet's reliability as a "global library" / storage space of information are getting confirmation at an allarming rate. Just got this:


Dear Google Video User,


Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re removing the remaining hosted content. We've always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: April 27 2011 at 10:13
Originally posted by harmonium.ro harmonium.ro wrote:

Dean's predictions about the Internet's reliability as a "global library" / storage space of information are getting confirmation at an allarming rate. Just got this:


Dear Google Video User,


Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re removing the remaining hosted content. We've always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.


Angry
I have no wish to be a doomsayer, but as someone who works in the "technology" industry I tend to look at where things can develop rather than where I would like them to develop. Not that I always get it right - in 1984 I had a letter published in The Guardian predicting the demise of the mouse as a peripheral ... Of course I was right, just 26 years too early LOL. Having said that, with the Internet things can move a lot faster, as the past 12 months since my last post in this Blog has shown, take for instance this post from the New decade, end of the CD? thread:
Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by Mr ProgFreak Mr ProgFreak wrote:

Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by harmonium.ro harmonium.ro wrote:

So have you guys decided on the new format (if any)? I need to know if I should keep buying CDs, as I have a few planned purchases ahead. And we're quite ahead in the new decade. 
Hmm. Flipancy and irreverence... I like it, if you can dice up some sarcasm I'll take a kilo.
 
I don't think there will be another hardcopy media to replace CD - solidstate was tried and never caught on - it's going to be download and stream - local "storage" will be much like the Kindle model - temporary licence only and managed by the vendor not the buyer. The big push for *cloud* computing (or the Internet as I still like to call it) is heading everyone down this path whether we want it or not - we will dumbly handover control of our data to one of the three or four major megacorps that own the software we will need to listen to it and the concept of "owning" copies of any album or film will be but a memory.

Currently the music format of choice remains to be mp3 ... without any digital rights management. I think we'll see a similar change for ebooks, eventually.


I don't think so - various ebook and ereader formats have been around for many years, yet it is the Kindle and its somewhat primative HTML format that is dominating. There is no impetuous for ebooks to go the way of mp3s - it is in neither the publishers nor the retailers interest to allow it to happen, which is why the Amazon model is so attractive to them.
 
It is not so much the format that has "won" but the delivery system and I predict that music delivery will follow that. By limiting the transfer of files from a controlled source to a controlled receptor all DRM is unnecessary. The majority of music-buyers (who are technologically illiterate) will receive their music from Amazon or ITunes direct to their wifi music player, (or *cloud bubble* or whatever they'll call your remote storage facility) then stream that locally by wifi, 3G or bluetooth to where ever they want to hear it, be that their hi-fi, pc, portable mp3 player, car-head unit or smart-phone. Since the supplier will own and control the software on the receptor it will not be possible to copy this file without hacking into the stream, but without a means of playback for that hacked data there wouldn't be much point anyway. Of course this won't deter the determined, but the megacorps don't need to - all they need to deter is the masses.
 
The technology of this system is already here, and the "mentality" to adopt it is already with us. The speed at which the wide-eyed public is willing to accept a piece of hardware with no external I/O is bewildering, and the headlong rush to *the cloud* will be equally as stagering once that killer App that renders *the cloud* as indispensible has been produced/invented/discovered. By the time people realise they don't actually own anything they've paid for it will be too late.
Quite where this leaves the budding musician who self-releases their own music I'm not wholly certain. A colloquialism that rhymes with "lucked" springs to mind because as the Internet heads ever commercially oriented, places where you can deposit your mp3's for free will shrink as they become blocked or subscription only sites. Rebranding of The Internet as *The Cloud* is not a good move in my opinion because eventhough the content may be still present, its means of access and delivery is not controlled by the user. That is a strong contender for the killer-App I mentioned above, once the current method of downloading (ftp) is removed (they use the euphemism "deprecated") by the people who control the OS (Microsoft & Apple) - and I believe that is "when" not "if" - then free access to free downloads on free storage will be impossible.
 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: May 24 2011 at 11:40
This nice documentary about the (apparently now thriving) "garage" subculture touches the issue of releasing music in the Internet era:



Recommended.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: May 24 2011 at 17:58
I am a "like, cynical older people" ... every generation does this crap like it's never been done before, but I must confess this awful mess is such a crashing bore... resurgency. (with apologies to 999).
 
Anyway, an irritating documentary that was 1 hour too long and the brief section on self-release and the internet was the diametric opposite of everything I've been trying to say here, but for garage and punk that's pretty much the entire ethos of what "the scene" is all about so that's hardly surprising. However, my original point some 18 months ago is that this garage style blueprint is not what self-release should be aspiring to when the style of music that self-release artists are trying to promote isn't "garage" - it works for punk and garage bands because the music they are making does not benefit from a more polished and professional approach in the recording, production, packaging or marketing, if anything those would actually be detrimental. For Prog (regardless of subgenre) it does not work - the quality of the product should equal the quality of the content.
 
 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: May 24 2011 at 18:45
Sorry for posting random stuff that doesn't contribute to the initial blog, I use this thread like a normal conversation thread. I don't know other better places to post such things and I'm not a fan of opening too many threads either. 

As for your comment, I don't see the opposition. I don't think a garage band's MySpace/Bandcamp/Facebook is any less "quality" than a prog band's. Or their discs. Actually most prog CDs I usually see in music shops are conventional jewel-cases with boring booklets; I'd rather have a more DIY approach/ethos instead of that. 

I genuinely enjoyed the documentary very much, if I knew that's just me I would have specified where exactly do they start talking about their promotion. LOL
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: May 24 2011 at 20:01
Originally posted by harmonium.ro harmonium.ro wrote:


As for your comment, I don't see the opposition. I don't think a garage band's MySpace/Bandcamp/Facebook is any less "quality" than a prog band's. Or their discs. Actually most prog CDs I usually see in music shops are conventional jewel-cases with boring booklets; I'd rather have a more DIY approach/ethos instead of that. 

I see I failed to express the point that this blog is trying to convey once again. Ouch I don't know how I can get the thoughts in my head out onto the page in a way that I can be understood more clearly.
 
Anyway,
 
The quality of a generic web page is the quality of a generic web page, following on from the Facebook template even MySpace now has become homogenised generic background radiation such that all band pages look the same so they fit in with the corporate image of whoever owns MySpace/Bandcamp/Facebook this week. Whatever MySpace/Bandcamp/Facebook is now-a-days is no longer in the creative domain of the artist and the content of the page is merely an excuse to sell advertising space to some other corporate selling machine so they can peddle their wares to you.
 
DIY Is good, but it does not have to be lazy half-arsed generic stereotypical crap - every single disc sleeve in that video was more boring and more conventional than any shop-bought Prog CD because they required zero thought and zero effort to make them. They conformed to a well-trodden stereotype of what a punk sleeve should look like and they could have been produced at anytime in the past 30 years for any one of a million punk bands across the globe. Garage and Punk as music, as an image and as an art-form became DIY-by-numbers 30 years ago and nothing has changed and nothing is new.
 


Edited by Dean - May 24 2011 at 20:03
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: May 24 2011 at 20:14
I think you just dislike garage and their style. On the contrary I like what I saw in the documentary much more than prog CDs, so I'm convinced this is an issue of taste.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: May 24 2011 at 20:24
Originally posted by harmonium.ro harmonium.ro wrote:

I think you just dislike garage and their style. On the contrary I like what I saw in the documentary much more than prog CDs, so I'm convinced this is an issue of taste.

I don't dislike garage, it's just that I've seen it before so many times over the past 30+ years and frankly it hasn't got that much to offer that can sustain it for that length of time. It's a short lived novelty, which is why every generation has their own garage bands that will be boring and derivative to all the previous generations. However, none of that has anything to do with any comment I have made regarding DIY self-release, so taste is immaterial
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 09 2011 at 15:46

As one of the self-releasing composer/musicians that this posting rants about, I’d like to compliment Epignosis as being one of the few here who “gets it.”  Insisting that a musician’s validity hinges on an obsolete business model (contract, label, publicist, ad nau$eam) has nothing to do with being a music listener, but a product consumer.  I do understand having certain standards for quality, which is why my prog listening habits lean toward the instrumental, and preclude almost any band without a world-class vocalist.  But I find it very, very difficult to take seriously the “criticism” of fans/bloggers who are only interested in clichéd, formulaic (albeit officially produced!) product of the sort that gets advertised on forums like this one: pseudo-Nordic nonsense-named metal bands populated by scowling pale dudes with mullets.  Or the equally-anonymous Porcupine Theatre clones.

I do what I do because it’s more productive than posting blog comments, and because I enjoy it.  Don’t lecture me as a self-releasing artist because my production values differ from Robert Fripp’s (anyone remember “Earthbound”, btw?), or because you only listen to music you review on your ½” computer speakers.  I do what I do because I enjoy the creative process, and because us creative types no longer have to jump through yesterday’s hoops to get our efforts out, free or not.  I do what I do because I’m not compelled by my label to sound like Porcupine Theatre, or anyone else for that matter: the same open fields of possibility that were open to the pioneering musicians of prog’s creative heyday still exist. If one or two people stumble upon it and get it, then maybe they’ll tell a friend. 

I’d say roughly half of the cds I’ve purchased in the past few years were self-released by the artists, because that’s the root source of true creativity: not labels, not critics, not massive voting blocs of fans.  Most of the latter-day Big Names of prog bore me to tears, even if they were once unique, and so as a music consumer I’ve now turned away from mainstream progressive rock for the very same reasons I turned to it thirty-nine years ago—boredom.



Edited by GrayMortuary - August 09 2011 at 16:29
http://musaphonic.bandcamp.com, http://powerofprog.com/profile/TonyArnold, http://www.myspace.com/graymortuary
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 09 2011 at 16:41
Hi Gray!  It is nice to see Dean's blog thread still kicking up a little reactionary dust even after all this time.  It certainly pulled me in the first time I read it - and I see it has proven a bit provocative for you too!
 
I've now come to the conclusion that it was originally written from a viewpoint of exhausted disillusionment the likes of which typically befalls only individuals who review albums or films as a vocation. 
 
Imagine a scenario in which, despite having already recently reviewed hundreds of CD's, you glance over at an ever-growing tower of jewel cases in your "to do" stack at your work-desk.  (I know, most press kits are digital these days but I don't think that was as much the case back when Dean originally wrote the post...)
 
If I'm correct, his frustration was probably exacerbated by a nagging suspicion that in many cases, he could arguably have been investing more substantive time and effort into the process of reviewing some of these CD's than the bands had invested in the creation of a professional product.  While I don't think that is quite accurate, I can certainly see how one could get that feeling...) 
 
With monetary and qualitative barriers to self-released entry to the marketplace all but obliterated, many artists rush to market with at least some aspect of their "album" less carefully crafted than ever before.  Composers are not always the best performers.  Neither of them are the best visual artists, none of which are the best marketers and packagers.  Furthermore, considering that objectively distancing oneself from your own work is a notoriously difficult undertaking, is it really any surprise that many self-released artists overlook or even neglect at least some aspect of the "entire product package"?
 
There are - of course - tremendous benefits to having broken down conventional barriers to the release of a new album.  We now have a lot more choices available to us at much lower prices than ever before.  Personally, I would never want to go back to the days of fewer gatekeepers serving only the largest target markets. 
 
I understand that the typical prog-entries bore you.  Here are a few questions designed to test whether you and Dean may - in fact - have more in common than you had at first suspected...
 
Might it be highly likely that - were you were to undertake the task of reviewing a few hundred randomly selected self-released "prog" CD's - that many of those CD would "bore you to tears"?  Might not some of them seem to fall into the category of "Porcupine Tree clones"?  Might some even strike you as raggedly packaged, poorly mastered, less coherent versions of Porcupine Tree clones?  Is it possible that you might begin to wonder how many of these albums had been mixed on 2 inch computer speakers?  
 
Sorry to sound so negative.  I actually love the new independent music marketplace.  I'm just "seeing both sides" of the coin - so to speak.
 
Mark Stephens


Edited by progpositivity - August 09 2011 at 17:16
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 09 2011 at 16:41
Originally posted by GrayMortuary GrayMortuary wrote:

As one of the self-releasing composer/musicians that this posting rants about, I’d like to compliment Epignosis as being one of the few here who “gets it.”  Insisting that a musician’s validity hinges on an obsolete business model (contract, label, publicist, ad nau$eam) has nothing to do with being a music listener, but a product consumer.  I do understand having certain standards for quality, which is why my prog listening habits preclude almost any band without a world-class vocalist.  But I find it very, very difficult to take seriously the “criticism” of fans/bloggers who are only interested in clichéd, formulaic (albeit officially produced!) product of the sort that gets advertised on forums like this one: pseudo-Nordic nonsense-named metal bands populated by scowling pale dudes with mullets.  Or the equally-anonymous Porcupine Theatre clones.

I do what I do because it’s more productive than posting blog comments, and because I enjoy it.  Don’t lecture me as a self-releasing artist because my production values differ from Robert Fripp’s (anyone remember “Earthbound”, btw?), or because you only listen to music you review on your ½” computer speakers.  I do what I do because I enjoy the creative process, and because us creative types no longer have to jump through yesterday’s hoops to get our efforts out, free or not.  I do what I do because I’m not compelled by my label to sound like Porcupine Theatre, or anyone else for that matter: the same open fields of possibility that were open to the pioneering musicians of prog’s creative heyday still exist. If one or two people stumble upon it and get it, then maybe they’ll tell a friend. 

I’d say roughly half of the cds I’ve purchased in the past few years were self-released by the artists, because that’s the root source of true creativity: not labels, not critics, not massive voting blocs of fans.  Most of the latter-day Big Names of prog bore me to tears, even if they were once unique, and so as a music consumer I’ve now turned away from mainstream progressive rock for the very same reasons I turned to it thirty-nine years ago—boredom.

Thanks for dropping by. My rant (and I accept that is what it is) is not a cry for bland homogeneous products, for I am a self-released artist myself and I firmly believe that if you really truly love what you are doing then you should put every gram of effort into creating a piece of art that from the first note through to the final mix, the final artwork and the final shrink-wrap of the jewel case (if hard-copy is your thing) is as perfect as your abilities can muster. As someone who does this to the best of their abilities I don't think it's that much of an ask to expect it from other committed artists. All too often what I hear and see is artist who think that what they do begins and ends with the music, and that's fine if that's what you want; I don't, I want 2¢ more because I know how simple and easy it is to go that extra step and actually finish what you start and produce something to be proud of, and I'm not one of those tight-fists who want it for nothing, I'm more than willing to pay extra for the finished product if I beleive the finshed product is worth that extra cash.
 
We are in an era of a renaissance in music production and distribution, this should be a period of change and progression away from the restrictions and constraints of the big labels without sacrificing the integrity and value of what is being produced.
 
So yes, I too probably have more than half of my recent purchases from self-released artists, and all of those I have paid for, or donated to, because I believe in the products, the artists and the methods they use, and without an audience, and without a platform to annouce their arrival and without a body of internet fans to endorse and praise them, they might just as well record their music onto a single C90 cassette, seal it in a shoe box with duct tape and hide it in the back of the wardrobe in their spare bedroom for all the good it will do.
 
btw my computer speakers are 10" since I stream my PC through my hi-fi when listening to music, but hey-ho.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 09 2011 at 16:58

<I do what I do because I enjoy the creative process, and because us creative types no longer have to jump through yesterday’s hoops to get our efforts out, free or not.  I do what I do because I’m not compelled by my label to sound like Porcupine Theatre, or anyone else for that matter: the same open fields of possibility that were open to the pioneering musicians of prog’s creative heyday still exist. If one or two people stumble upon it and get it, then maybe they’ll tell a friend.>

I hope nothing I wrote sounded like a wholesale indictment of the independent artist. 
 
I look forward to checking out your music when I have time to give it my undivided attention. 
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