Beat marketplaces, watch your mouth, VR Sundance, usual suspects, and Grand Theft Audio
February 5, 2021 Edition (#41)
Happy February to all. I’m currently indulging a (likely short-lived) moment of nostalgia for the snowy, charmingly hostile part of the country otherwise known as the East Coast.
(Re)making Music’s Marketplace
A couple weeks ago, we wrote about collaborative music-making app Endlesss: an endless(s)ly addictive product—👀 @Reader BB—that enables users to contribute short riffs to a collective project, remixing in real-time. [Ed.: I will confess to making novelty theme music to a retro Sonic The Hedgehog videogame that exists solely in my mind.]
One of my primary takeaways from the experience was how much better the app’s music creation tools were than the state of the art a few years ago. This is both a question of the range of options available within the app—drums, bass, synths, and more—and the quality of the computer instruments. Most of the phone-centric music products that I’ve used previously have been fun but gimmicky, and certainly not something that seemed likely to lead to “professional-quality” original work. [Ed.: one need only listen to Gorillaz’s excruciatingly bad iPad album, The Fall, for a tangible manifestation of this reality.]
I think that these amateur-enabling, game-like creation tools are just beginning to have their moment, with more mainstream successes to come. We’ve already talked about Splash—the AI music app that players use to DJ inside of Roblox—as one example of a 3rd party developed experience that relies upon Roblox as a platform for distribution. Indeed, a recent Tech Crunch article by Sarah Perez & Lucas Matney describes, at length, a creator accelerator program that Roblox has run since 2015, partially to ensure that novel experiences along these lines get built.
Programs like this accelerator are central to the narrative around Roblox-as-a-platform and, thus, its generous valuation ($29.5bn at last count). The ecosystem is growing; 7M creators and developers are active on the platform today. While some focus on more traditional “game” experiences (e.g., Tank Warfare), others are experimenting with how Roblox’s familiar user experience might make it easier for novice users & in-game creators to experiment with forms of creative expression.
A good example of this intersection of gaming, creation, and augmented reality—albeit outside of Roblox’s platform—is Vidiyo: a recent initiative from Lego & Universal Music group. (Engadget) This Lego set consists of “figures and blocks” that “when scanned into the app [will] burst into song and dance through the power of AR.” Universal Music Group’s roster of artists provided 60-second samples that soundtrack clips that kids—or adults, sure—can “make and edit themselves.” There’s even a way to remix the clips with special effects, all within the Vidiyo app. This being 2021, you then have the ability to upload your masterpiece into Vidiyo’s social feed, where it will doubtless become the vector for some sort of deepfake dark web attack. Until then, it sounds like a good time (and a TikTok gateway drug FWIW).
There’s an interesting throughline, I think, from these sorts of products—which clearly emphasize fun, but also teach creative behaviors—to the booming online marketplace for digital goods & creator products. One specific corner of this world is the realm of “original samples and sonic plugins” for music producers. (Rolling Stone, h/t to Reader MM) In his piece, Rolling Stone’s Tim Ingham talks about the vast (but still relatively niche) landscape of companies that enables creators to produce & sell sample packs that others can use to create music inside of software tools like Ableton, Pro Tools, and Logic. There used to be a cottage industry of people who would build presets or electronic “drum kits” that had a specific sound and that would help the buyer to emulate a favorite producer (Knxwledge, for example). [Ed.: your humble author may once have spent nearly $50 on a synthesizer bundle and a digital plugin called “Crap Cassette” that simply emulated the wobble and hiss of an old-school cassette player.]
Thanks to marketplaces like Beatport (which recently acquired Loopmasters), the roughly 20M “hobby DJs” worldwide can use their hard-earned cash to broaden their sonic palettes. And, a whole host of creators can generate income by selling musical “inputs,” as they were, to these willing buyers. The best plugin marketplace example, in this space, is Splice: a company that has raised $100M+ and continues to solidify its dominant position in the market. But, as Ingham notes, others are coming, including BeatStars—$100M in payouts to beatmakers, to date—and Canada’s LANDR.
What I find most interesting about this world is that the digital goods bought and sold are explicitly meant to enable more DIY creation. Sometimes, yes, you’ll get Lil Nas X buying the “Old Town Road” beat (off BeatStars). But, it’s just as possible for a hobbyist anywhere in the world to get access to top-quality ingredients, and to learn the craft of at-home music production from free videos on YouTube. This is a market that is still in its early days, and that, I believe, will be extrapolated beyond music into other creative industries.
Voice of the people
Just in case you were starting to relax, Spotify has been granted a patent that enables it to “make observations about a user’s environment and emotions using speech recognition technology,” and to recommend music accordingly. (BBC) Variables would include “emotional state, gender, age, or accent” (emphasis mine). Sounds pretty innocuous. I envision a world in which I scream incessantly at my phone to play “Toss It Up” while Spotify alerts me that I’m feeling “saucy.”
While this (potential) feature might seem straight out of Minority Report and nothing but a party trick, it continues a trend of increasingly sophisticated recommendation systems that reduce a listener’s control over what music they discover. Playlists on streaming services already have a significant impact on what artists & songs get heard—and thus, how royalty payouts are distributed. The more control that an invisible brain has over content consumption, whether for music streaming or something else entirely, the less leverage any given artist has over their mass-market fate. Yet again, this is partially where the desire to go “direct-to-consumer” (e.g., Bandcamp) comes into play (👏).
In related but less disturbing voice-related news, Google’s Magenta team—which focuses on generative AI/ML creation tools—released a new product called Maestro: an AI-powered vocal coach. It’s a cool piece of software that provides singing lessons through a visual interface, with automated pitch detection and note generation (for singer testing) under the hood. The product generates a random sequence of notes and then takes input from the human singer, subsequently providing feedback on performance and pitch correction. Worth a spin, particularly if your self-confidence needs to be brought back down to earth.
Sundance in a headset
Desperate times call for virtual reality measures, as the traditional saying goes. This year, Sundance not only moved to an “online-only” mode, but also created a full-fledged virtual reality experience for all attendees. (Engadget) [Ed.: no word yet on whether the VR companion encompasses an ill-advised evening at the High West Distillery followed by the stomach-churning morning-after experience of paying $13.99 for a “golden mylk latte” in an attempt to restore balance.] Sundance has had a tradition of experimental showcases under the “New Frontier” umbrella since 2007, including a VR-heavy slate in 2015, but this year’s is the most full-featured yet.
The experience included common areas for avatar-chatting with other festival-goers, and the ability to watch “five special features in the Cinema House, a fully realized VR theater.” While the trailer for this year’s “New Frontier” experience doesn’t look especially different from a garden-variety VR activation, it’s interesting to see Sundance continuing to experiment as a means of both reaching a broader online audience and deepening the screen-centric interaction with its content. This feels like another instance of a digitally delivered art/creative experiment that became more urgent due to Covid-19. While still rough around the edges, it’s likely to be with us, in one form another, for the foreseeable future.
Enough already
I’m toying with a dedicated space for the stories that I’m tired of but that insist upon following me throughout my days. Think: SPACs, Gamestop, TikTok bans, and any news story that involves the word “unprecedented.” Everything is precedented at this point.
This week, it’s Clubhouse & paid newsletters. My weekly Clubhouse update is that the only thing I’ve done so far in the app is invite other poor unfortunate souls to use it, and occasionally open it, gaze upon the room names, and rapidly close it as if I’d opened my sock drawer and found a large spider. I am committed to making this week the one in which I actually give the app a fair shake. For more incisive analysis of Clubhouse, I recommend Casey Newton’s excellent Platformer article on the company and Elon Musk’s recent appearance therein (interviewing the Robinhood CEO, for reasons that escape me).
I won’t spoil Newton’s work, but he presents a compelling analysis that looks at the convergence of two trends: Clubhouse’s live audio boom and Andreessen Horowitz (an investor in Clubhouse) announcing its desire to build “a new and separate media property about the future.” Newton describes the ways in which Clubhouse has managed to create a sense of “serendipity” through its “drop-in” paradigm, and how the company has cleared the quality bar for audio user-generated content in a way that many amateur podcasters have not. I personally still find podcasts compelling for their on-demand nature and the fact that I tend to know what I’m getting into with any particular show and thus don’t have to wonder overly much about the quality of a given piece of content.
Clubhouse’s model works today given that the company is at a stage when buzzy names are populating the app and many popular rooms will reliably feature these personalities. How that dynamic scales as the user-base grows is a question that I lack the conviction to answer. It does seem, though, that some magic would be lost in going from a more intimate room where it’s plausible for anyone to come “on stage” to a cavernous setting that feels less like a dialogue and more like an unproduced audio livestream.
Meanwhile, on the paid newsletter front, Facebook is apparently “planning newsletter tools to court independent writers.” (NYT) The relationship between Facebook & the media has always been fantastic, so this promises to be a drama-free development... Elsewhere, Twitter continues to actively integrate Revue into its core offering: building out infrastructure for publication and audience discovery, lowering the platform fee to 5%, and providing various entry-points across the Twitter appscape. (Tech Crunch)
Grand Theft Audio (👏👏👏)
I had to share this fantastic video from Genius, featuring Rockstar Games’ Director of Music (Ivan Pavlovich) and cataloguing the franchise’s unmatched history of using music to transform its games into cinematic experiences. I can’t embed the video (#Brightcove), but recommend it to those who have found themselves zipping around in a stolen car, casually committing vehicular manslaughter while blasting FlyLo FM. You can still spin the game-station’s playlist on Spotify.
For your ears only
My aural chamomile tea remains ambient pedal steel guitar music. I wrote about pedal steel way back in the halcyon days of May 2020—when WFH discussions were borderline quaint and I couldn’t yet recognize the sound of the wine delivery truck from its exhaust notes—and my appreciation has only intensified since. The guitar-ish instrument is more commonly found in country music, approximating fluid Hawaiian slack key guitar tones, and typically carries the unfairly marginal brand of “instrumental accent.”
Deployed as the primary tool for ambient music, pedal steel is surprisingly flexible and wholeheartedly endorsed by the extensive Trillium staff. It can generate chords, single note melodies, texture, and eastern “drone” patterns with equal ease. Writing about it is a poor substitute for listening to it, so I’ll simply point you to an amazing Aquarium Drunkard article summarizing some of this past year’s so-called “Cosmic Pedal Steel” releases. Recommended for driving, focused listening, or the backdrop to whatever work you have on deck. I especially like the North Americans’ album, Roped In.
See you all next week.
N