From the unusual to the downright bizarre, the BBC has opened up its vast sound archive to the public. Thanks to the new BBC Sound Effects website, you can freely download over 16,000 sound effects in WAV format for “personal, educational or research purposes”. The database is tagged and searchable, so you can easily find…
HOW STREAMING WILL CONTINUE TO CHANGE EVERYTHING IN THE MUSIC BUSINESS
In the backdrop of Spotify becoming a publicly traded company, streaming is working for a majority of stakeholders in today’s music industry. After over a decade of being ravaged by piracy, the industry as a whole has finally returned to growth, as shown by upward trends across local trade body data globally. Like any entity…
Massive Attack Encoding Album Into DNA
Today marks the 20-year anniversary of Massive Attack’s beloved album Mezzanine. To celebrate, the band has announced they’re putting it on a new format: DNA. According to a press release, this marks the first time an entire album has been encoded into DNA and it’s “an acknowledgement that it could be an answer to the…
Gibson Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection
Gibson Brands of Nashville, Tennessee, issued a statement this morning outlining its plan to restructure its core business and reorganize under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. As outlined in the statement “… [Gibson] and its U.S. subsidiaries today filed pre-negotiated reorganization cases under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. The filings will…
The rest is surface noise: What is HD Vinyl and is it really a good idea?
There was a lot of hype and excitement around the news that “High-Definition Vinyl” would be available as early as 2019, but not a lot of explanation about what that actually means. It’s Hi-Definitely not as simple as it sounds. Back in 2016, we reported that Austrian company Rebeat Innovation had filed a patent to…
How Philip Glass went from driving taxis to becoming one of the most celebrated composers of our time
At age 12, Philip Glass started working in a Baltimore record store owned by a man he called Ben. Ben was, in fact, Glass’s father, but he and his brother, Marty, both referred to him by his first name because they didn’t want anyone to know they were his children. Of course everyone still knew…
FACEBOOK SIGNS MUSIC LICENSING DEALS WITH MERLIN, BEGGARS GROUP, [PIAS] AND INGROOVES
Facebook has announced new multi-territory licensing deals with some of the most influential independent companies in the music industry. The key agreement, naturally, is with Merlin – the commercial agency which represents more than 20,000 independent record labels and distributors, and says this membership commands over 12% of the global digital recorded music market. Earlier this…
Why are pop songs 3 minutes long?
It turns out the reason most pop songs have wound up at just over three minutes in length is a) really interesting, and b) reveals some important facts about the history of recorded music. How did this 3 minute length come about? Around the 1920s shellac records replaced the phonograph cylinder as the technology of…
The Year “Indie Rock” Meant Something Different
This was supposed to be the year indie rock came back. Or at least that’s what the release calendar suggested. In 2017, a number of acts that defined the mid-to-late-2000s indie-rock boom I came up in—Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Grizzly Bear, Spoon, Dirty Projectors, Broken Social Scene, Feist, the National, Fleet Foxes, and Wolf Parade—released…
What’s actually going on when people talk about digital vs. analogue masters
It’s been 10 years since vinyl sales began taking off again, and for the first time in a decade this summer saw the incredible growth in sales begin to slow down. In the US, that has meant a decline from 38% growth in 2015, to 12% in 2016, to just 2% so far this year….
