the dotmatrix project

Following in the “label darlings gone independent” heals of Radiohead, Trent Reznor is releasing his latest project — the production of Saul Williams’ album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, straight to the internet tonight, sans the middlemen label people clogging up the mix and taking their cut.

To that particular end, here’s Saul Williams message to the people:

My Dearest Friends and Fans,

It is my greatest honor to present to you The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, my new album produced by Trent Reznor and mixed by Alan Moulder.

The wall of sound that we’ve created is tagged with such graffiti that a passerby would seek out doors and ways to ENTER. Once inside a world defined by dreams come true they’d find aligned with the simplest act of sharing what we treasure. Most people aren’t aware of the world of art and commerce where exploitation strips each artist down to nigger. Each label, like apartheid, multiplies us by our divide and whips us ’til we conform to lesser figures. What falls between the cracks is a pile of records stacked to the heights of talents hidden from the sun. Yet the energy they put into popularizing smut makes a star of a shiny polished gun. The ballot or the bullet for Mohawk or the mullet is a choice between new times and dying days. And the only way to choose is to jump ship from old truths and trust dolphins as we swim through changing ways.

The ways of middlemen proves to be just a passing trend. We need no priests to talk to God. No phone to call her. And when you click the link below, i think it fair that you should know that your purchase will make middlemen much poorer…

NiggyTardust!

love,
Saul

No doubt a creative and eloquent way to pitch the download of an album while riding the wave of the anti-label froth that has developed in the mouths of music lovers everywhere. The last line is a bit overstated at this point in time — middlemen will continue to find their nut to squirrel away — but the optimism is fresh and well taken.

Here’s the jist of the release approach:

• Download the album for free and receive it in 192Kbps MP3 format
• Download the album for a $5 donation and receive it in one of multiple formats — 192Kbps MP3, 320Kbps MP3, FLAC lossless audio
• All versions include a PDF with artwork and lyrics
• All files are 100% DRM free, and can be played on any device. MP3s are encoded with LAME v3.97

I heard Saul Williams first drop his style in a track called Ohm on Lyricist Lounge, Vol. 1 in 1998 and his Buddhist / kung-fu inspired cut stuck with me for years. I rediscovered him in my iTunes catalog this past week, so I was already planning on supporting this release before Reznor “leaked” three tracks from the NiggyTardust album.

Check them out for yourself:

Ohm (Lyricist Lounge Vol 1)

Tr(n)igger (NiggyTardust)

Break (NiggyTardust)

Banged And Blown Through (NiggyTardust)

While I’m psyched to see artists use the guts of the internet to promote and distribute their craft, this model isn’t necessarily the savior for indie artists everywhere. I mean, it wouldn’t hurt for any artist to develop a site like the NiggyTardust site — chock full of free and donation driven download options, embedded widgets for viral promotion, etc. — but Trent Reznor is already Trent Reznor.

Would this work for him (and Saul Williams) if Reznor hadn’t gone the label route first?

As I see it, the future of independent music isn’t relying on massive shifts in the online distribution model. If Amazon.com and iTunes were as lax as Amie Street regarding entry into their catalog, distribution success would then be simply a question of the right price point — and that’ll work itself out through competition over time as the average kid’s perception of a music track moves farther and farther away from something one pays money to own.

The RIAA is doing their best to fight that losing battle.

So the question that’s popping off in my noggin’ is: What exactly is the draw for an artist or band to sign their lives away with a traditional label?

• Their hold on distribution has slipped away
• Online promotion is open to all with a clue
• Radio is no longer a huge draw to potential fans
• Music videos are probably watched more on YouTube than the reality show driven MTV

What’s the “sell your soul” pitch from a big label in 2007? Seriously, what angles of distribution and promotion do they still have a death grasp on? Big media connections?

How are successful smaller labels working with artists and differentiating themselves from the machine?

What are successful independent bands doing (aside from making great music) that can be replicated by other independents?

Will services like Facebook Music be the answer? Or can a walled garden truly provide that degree of change?

Anyone?

Where to begin?

Ten days have passed since ConvergeSouth Music and things are starting to get back to normal once again. It’s not as though the event was so unmanageable that it completely drained me or took up all of my spare time in the planning, it’s just that I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that it was a great experience for everyone involved — from the performers to the photographers to the audience.

Along those lines, I’ve received great feedback from all involved, which is extremely satisfying, but there’s still one event experience nut to crack: to draw an audience size that both the performers and the venue deserves. Well, that’s not entirely true; a number of the performers told me that they dug playing an intimate crowd — one that listened, danced and grooved without loud chatter — which is great, but the bottom line is that I need to ensure that the venue draws the numbers they expected heading into the event.

That’s the reality of promoting shows.

So, as I start to gear up for the planning of The Verge — a semi-monthly showcase of local musicians with artist and audience media collaboration — I’m still processing lessons learned from putting on my first music event (particularly during a ConvergeSouth weekend in downtown Greensboro). Here are a few of the more obvious ones:

• Don’t charge a cover: Well, at least not $10. Greensboro residents as a whole don’t seem to be big time supporters of local music and college kids (there are five colleges in this city of 220,000 strong) aren’t about “wasting” perfectly good beer money on a cover. Post-college grads here love it when a Pat Benatar or Van Halen comes to town and seem more than willing to pay exorbitant prices for a ticket at the downtown clubs or the Coliseum to see them live. They’ll also show up in droves to see a great cover band, but for high-quality, local acts with less of a reputation and a propensity to play their own music? Fuggetaboutit.
• Don’t overlap other conference events: We charged $10 at the door last week because I honestly believed at least 50 badges would show up from ConvergeSouth. With a 99 person headcount limit (including staff and performers) at the venue, I figured we’d do fine with even an average outside draw. Unfortunately, only 15 or so made it out that night — the rest of the 150 or so were enjoying Q at Hoggard’s house, along with acoustic music provided by the Radials. Moral of the story? Always go cheaper at the door and never compete with Q.
• Establish relationships with people within mainstream media: I did everything I possibly could in getting the word out online (blogged about it here, on the ConvergeSouth blog, posted the event info to Eventful, 336Events & Facebook, posted images to flickr, etc.) and even created a bunch of posters that I stapled up around town and as far away as Chapel Hill. And while we did get some play in the local media (a great article by Jeri Rowe, a little blurb in Yes! Weekly, a few mentions by J’s Indie/Rock Mayhem), I didn’t spend a second to reach out and connect with any of the local radio programs in town. Chalk that one up to inexperience.

Okay, so those are a few of the promotion related elements that I need to work on. Thankfully, a bunch of things also went right last week, from the killer lineup to audience participation in creating media, so the foundation is in place. Now I just need to build upon it to create more of an event than a one-off show.

The first thing I plan on doing is to invite local filmmakers and photographers to join the mix.

(originally uploaded by jdubfudge)

The filmmaker contingency last week consisted solely of me and my bro’, but we had a great time shooting and can’t wait to start editing the music videos for each of the bands. So if we’re excited, I’m hoping that a good number of local filmmakers and film students would be geeked to have full access to a band and venue — including straight from the board audio — to shoot a live music video or two.

Not a bad portfolio piece, right?

As for photography, Michael Dunn and Stephen Charles are two of Greensboro’s finest pro/am photographers, and their work the other night resulted in more than a handful of amazing moments captured in pixels.

(shot by CharlesMedia™ at ConvergeSouth Music 2007)

(shot by Mikey aka DaSkinnyBlackMan at ConvergeSouth Music 2007)

If we can get consistent participation from talented photogs such as these guys, we’ll have an amazing set of media for the bands to use as they will.

And in a nutshell, that’s what’s driving me to put on The Verge.

Greensboro has an interesting creative community, but so much of the art scene is relatively underground; the film community raises it’s head every year during the 48 Hour Film Festival and then is unheard of again the rest of the year; local photographers have public shows once in a while, but nowhere near what I’m used to seeing when living in NYC; and local music, well, I’ve already expressed my $.02 along those lines.

As someone who doesn’t particularly belong to any of these communities, but longs for a greater influence of such communities on the culture of Greensboro (A.K.A. Khakitown, USA), this is my experience.

So the idea of creating a repeatable event where these disparate creative communities can overlap for one evening every month or so, producing media that not only showcases their talents live, but provides each other with promotional and portfolio pieces that can work for them into perpetuity on the internet… well, that truly excites me.

I’m not sure when the first event will take place, but I’ll keep posting ideas and inspiration as time goes by.

That’s Jessie Derusha, Chris Micca, Melissa Micca, Max Diablo and Toaster of Little Mascara dropping one of their favorite songs last Friday at ConvergeSouth Music held at The Green Burro in downtown Greensboro.

This is a sample of the many raw files that Andy and I will be working from sometime next week as we begin post-production editing on a music video for each of the bands that participated the other night. In addition to the video shot that night, we have music recorded straight from the board and a bunch of amazing pictures uploaded by our talented event photogs and audience.

Keep an eye out, kids.

(shot by Lenslinger)

Man, if Jason McCabe Calacanis is nothing else, he sure as hell is one smooth-talking dude.

Ever since Silicon Alley Reporter shut down due to the crash of the web agency industry he’s been stitching together the work of other people into something ripe for purchase. Funny how a business (SAR) that pimped those very same web agencies, driving up their visibility & rates and SAR’s advertising dollars, died the same death.

I heard a lot about Calacanis’ latest project, Mahalo, over the past 6 months, primarily through friends conversations out on the left coast and the occasional Scoble / Techcrunch / Winer ruminations. But when listening to Calacanis present Mahalo to Ed Cone and the audience this past weekend at ConvergeSouth, I have to admit I was a bit taken aback by some of the claims in his elevator pitch.

When contextualizing the features of Mahalo in the search world, Calacanis spoke of Google’s search algorithm (PageRank) in the past tense. He continued on, bloviating about the old way of presenting search results, where a machine based relevancy off of explicit criteria found within the markup, such as keyword matches with domain names and titles and the number of links to individual domains. This, Calacanis argued, creates relevancy that cannot be trusted as valuable, because SEO is a game and results are flattened out without any consideration of quality.

Mahalo is apparently different because Calacanis has hired a team of employees experts to create result pages that enhance the results of the zeitgeist of society (through the top 25,000 search queries). Forget the subjective argument surrounding “expertise” and answer this one question for me:

How does this make Mahalo a search engine?

The way I see it, Calacanis has created a super-collaborative link blog. Sure, there are community elements to it and there is a search box up top, but authors (or “guides”) are simply culling together their top link choices to give further context to an idea, issue, topic, place, etc. Mahalo isn’t a destination search engine; Mahalo pages are built to show up high in… you guessed it, Google search results.

None of this is bad, but it doesn’t make Mahalo a search engine. Or at least one attempting to compete with Google.

See, the vibe of the pitch keynote leaned pretty heavily in the direction of Mahalo being the future and Google being the past. Being that Mahalo is human in a miscellaneous fashion, I won’t compare it to Yahoo! back in the day — a site that attempted to categorize every known site into a master ontology. This is much smarter, as the well structured page titles, super-relevant links and structured data makes Mahalo pages ultra-ripe for a Google crawl and a well placed search result.

Calling a spade a spade — an SEO optimized link blog, trying to gain top spots in Google to cash in eventually on AdSense or similar — isn’t what CEOs do in this world.

To front like Mahalo is revolutionary in redefining search or that it will become a destination search engine — particularly, one that can marginalize Google’s PageRank algorithm through human expertise (btw, this very same algorithm is the one exposing these secondary result pages to the general public in the first place) — is a bit of crazy talk.

For shits and giggles, say that Mahalo succeeds in creating result pages for the top 25,000 search queries from Google and Yahoo!. Then what? How many “expert” monkeys are needed to not only scale to meet the demand of the ever shifting zeitgeist, but to maintain pre-existing hand-linked search result pages?

How long can Calacanis’ pet example, “Paris hotel,” stay relevant as the months and years creep on by?

Or is that the phase in Mahalo’s strategic plan where the real crowdsourcing kicks in?

Interesting stuff to ruminate over, but to lead off a conference hyped as “Creativity online for all people”…?

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

So far I’ve received nothing but great feedback from the other night (I had a great time, but I’m more than a bit biased).

There’s no way it could’ve happened without the effort of a bunch of people. A big shout of thanks goes out to:

• Simonne McClinton, Matt Bennett, Mikey Tourek and the entire staff over at The Green Burro: Thanks so much for hosting us. If you’re up for doing this again next year, I promise there will be no BBQ overlap to screw with head count. Thanks again for your hospitality and understanding
• The Wigg Report (Ben Riseling, Christine Fantini and Stephen Mullaney): You guys represent Durham like champs. Thanks again for trekking out. I’ll definitely take you up on the offer to hit up your neck of the woods the next time I’m in town.
• Little Mascara (Jessie Derusha, Chris Micca, Melissa Micca, Toaster and Max Diablo): Killer, rockin’ set; you guys brought it, put it on the table, unwrapped it and whipped our asses with it! Thanks again for putting your hiatus on hold for the show.
• Thacker Dairy Road (Molly McGinn, Chris Lord, Rebecca Stevens, Jonathan McMillan, James Harris and Jeff Yetter): What can I say? It’s been a fun time this summer watching you grow into such a dynamic sounding band. Thanks for holding down the late night segment. From what I’ve heard since Friday, you have a bunch of new fans out there.
• Sue Polinsky: Thank you for the trust you showed in me to do this right and for providing the budget for the bands. There’s no way I could’ve raised the money myself this year with my schedule. I’m still pissed about the BBQ scheduling overlap which cost us at least 40 people turning out, but I can file that experience under “Shit Not To Do Again” if you can.
• Mike Dunn (Mikey aka DaSkinnyBlackMan) and Stephen Charles (CharlesMedia): Man, you guys are seriously talented. Seriously. Fer real. Thanks again for making it last minute and producing such amazing shots!
• Andy Coon: My brother from the same mother. I’m really looking forward to collaborating on editing these music videos together. Thanks so much for all your work and support (and filming pointers).
• Desmond Sharpe via Carey Sound: Great job with the setup, on-the-fly sound checks and mixing. I’m looking forward to hearing the audio tracks!
• Jeri Rowe: I know for a fact that your timely article on Andy, myself and ConvergeSouth influenced at least than a handful of people to come out to the conference to learn how to publish their voice online. Thanks again for the well written story and your shared passion for a more creative Greensboro.
• Jordan Green: Thanks for pushing the music details over to Dave and the be there! section at Yes! Weekly. I’m sure we got at least a few folk to attend just because of that little promo. I’ll catch you at a nearby show soon, I’m sure.
• Bob Lefsetz: I got turned onto Bob’s rants a few months back and he’s greatly influenced my approach to promoting independent talent. He had nothing tangible to do with the event, but everything to do with unfurling my creativity. Thanks, Bob!

I’ve got a bunch of plans for local music promotion in the works, but still have a few conversations ahead prior to committing running a bigger and better event (read: a real music festival) next year.

To the folks who made it out this year — particularly those of you who plan to upload media of the event to the web per our fliers — thank you! (If I missed linking to you, let me know who you are in the comments)

While we put on this event primarily for these reasons…:

1. Provide talented, local, independent acts a platform to shine
2. Involve the local film and photography communities in making media (music videos to come; the stills look great)
3. Expose less known musicians and artists to the residents of Greensboro (and ConvergeSouth participants)
4. Give local venues a top-notch event to hang their hats on while developing return customers

… giving the gift of music to people sits squarely at the top of the list.

Thanks again for showing up.

Thank you, Michael Wesch.

(via Joho)

UPDATE: Doc Searls touches upon information, meaning and knowledge in next gen search via a conversation with Jeremie Miller. For some reason, data is left out of the conversation.

I know data and information appear to be identical twins in the eyes of computer science, but I swear data has a distinguishable birthmark behind its left ear.

Early yesterday evening, Andy and I plunked ourselves on the patio of M’Coul’s Pub and spent a few hours rapping with Jeri Rowe, the former A&E guru for goTriad and current Metro Section columnist for the News & Record. Jerry wanted to talk shop about ConvergeSouth, the Film and Music extensions that Andy and I are running, respectively, and how it came to pass that two brothers from Jersey ended up collaborating on numerous creative and community centered projects in Greensboro, NC.

Based on our conversation, Jeri’s piece (it’ll be in the paper tomorrow morning; God knows how long it’ll take to find its way online over there) seems like it’ll be just as much about our evolving relationship as brothers, as it will be about the festivals we’re attempting to give life to.

I gotta admit, at times the discussion felt like some form of sibling therapy. Here and there, when discussing the consumption culture we’re immersed in, our voices collectively crept up to a decibel most people would consider to be either argumentative or hostile. It’s funny how that happens with us both; we get really passionate about an idea or concept and seem to lose all sense of the presentation emanating from our vocal chords.

Jeri seemed to enjoy the boisterous brotherly banter, pausing to ask if we were Irish after the first crescendo or two. Shit, is it that obvious?

As Jeri drove the conversation from topic to topic, he paused for a few minutes to ask me about the concept behind the dotmatrix project — what I plan to do with it in the near future; if I plan to infuse music into it; will it affect community beyond the internet, etc. Man, I have so many ideas on the matter — some in motion, some still marinating — I can’t keep them straight from one day to the next. Hopefully, Jeri latched onto one of the more tangible notions in the bunch.

I guess we’ll see in the morning.

UPDATE: The article.