WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Radio Airplay & Musicians: Guest Post From The Future Of Music Coalition's Artist Revenue Streams Project

This is a guest post by Kristin Thomson, a social researcher, musician and co-director of Future of Music Coalition’s Artist Revenue Streams project. We'll discuss this groundbreaking project on the next episode of WFMU's Radio Free Culture, Monday 6-7pm ET. 

The changing relationship between radio airplay, record sales, musicians and income

For at least fifty years of the 20th century, the relationship between music and radio airplay was fairly well understood. Record executives knew that if they wanted a hit record, they needed that song to get played on the radio, preferably as many times as possible. In fact, until 2000, radio airplay was essentially a prerequisite to selling significant amounts of recorded music.

Clearly, radio airplay is still critical – especially for genres like pop, country and urban/R&B – but in recent years both radio and the mechanisms for selling music have been upended. Traditional commercial radio, with its limited playlists and regional reach, has been challenged by new forms of radio: webcast versions of existing stations (including WFMU), pureplay webcast stations like Soma-FM or Pandora, and Sirius XM satellite radio. Then there are the interactive services like Spotify, Rhapsody, Last.fm, and Rdio, many of which mimic radio through playlist options or pre-programmed channels. And there's YouTube, now considered one of the most widely used sources of music discovery in the world.

The sale of recorded music has also changed. Prior to about 2000, the money that a musician could make from the sale or license of a sound recording was pretty simple: you could sell physical copies of an album or a single in a retail setting like a record shop, you could sell them via mailorder, or at shows/gigs. If you were lucky and your music was placed in a movie or TV show, you could make money from the synch license on the master recording. But that was about it. Since about 2000, these options have expanded to include digital sales on stores like iTunes and Amazon, digital performance royalties when sound recordings are streams on non-interactive services like Pandora or Sirius XM, and interactive service payments for streams on Spotify/Rhapsody. And there are more.

The average US consumer now has dozens of low-cost or free ways to listen to and discover new music. What has this done to the relationship between radio airplay and music sales? And, more to the point, are musicians benefiting from this changing landscape?

In 2010, the nonprofit Future of Music Coalition launched Artist Revenue Streams, a multi-method, cross-genre examination of musicians' revenue streams, how they are changing over time, and why. We used three methods to collect data: in-person interviews with over 80 hard-working musicians and composers; an online survey that was completed by over 5,300 US-based musicians and composers, and financial case studies that allowed us to fully examine musicians' income and expenses over time.

Can Open Source Technology Save Music? — guest post by Jesse von Doom & Maggie Vail

We are now more than a decade into the technological revolution that turned the music industry upside down. Initially, it felt like there was so much possibility, that the internet might be the great democratizer, that it could empower artists to take more control over their careers, and ultimately allow them to see more of a percentage of income from their music. There have been some success stories, but it seems the vast majority of artists today are struggling even more, making less money yet paying more middlemen. 

Recently musicians have begun to be more open about discussing their shrinking percentages in this music industry food chain. There’s been articles in the past few months about major indie artists that are unable to pay for their own health insurance, bands frustrated with payments they receive via streaming services, and apparently now Cat Power is even facing bankruptcy.  When artists are willing to publicly talk about money it means that things are definitely taking a turn for the worse.  

People often like to talk about disruption when discussing the music industry but the initial disruption was the easy part, think of it like screaming fire in a crowded theater, it’s actually putting something together after that chaos that is the difficult and interesting work. Every few years we see a different solution touted as the answer. First it was mp3 downloads, then it was internet radio, and now that the cloud is here it’s streaming on demand. This sort of technological determinism is market driven and frankly isn’t necessarily what most artists need or even want.

Greetings from the Motor City! 34-track Detroit Mixtape from The Beehive Recording Co. (MP3s)

The Beehive Recording Company is an incredible resource for quality, hand-crafted music from Detroit. They call it pop cuz it's damn good music, but Beehive is out to preserve a contemporary snapshot of everything from R&B to Russian folk, instrumental jazz to abstract hip-hop, electro-punk rock to the best kinds of avant weirdness.

Detroit really sounds like a city where artists can pursue their vision, and Beehive is the singular vision of Stephen Nawara, a lifelong musician who's played in bands like the Detroit Cobras and Electric Six. He founded Beehive after going through the major label system, finding that it wasn't fair to artists, and deciding to start something that could really make a difference for Detroit's vibrant local music community. Beehive offers in-kind recording sessions at "Studio Bee," then gives each artist a platform to a wider audience through beehiverecording.com where you'll find many more free mp3s by each of the artists featured on this sampler mixtape.

We're pleased to welcome The Beehive Recording Company to the Free Music Archive with this 34-track Detroit Mixtape! I'll let Beehive's "King Bee" Stephen Nawara take it from here:

Greetings from the Motor City! Here in beautiful Detroit, Mi., a new direction for the music industry has taken root and what you are about to experience is but a small sample of work from the countless musicians found here within the city limits. The Beehive Recording Company opened its doors on the Fourth of July, 2010, allowing bands and songwriters to come into our studio and record up to 3 songs for free. When the recordings are completed, artwork is provided to turn their compostions into digital singles complete with an A and B side. Afterwards, the singles are posted on our website, free for our members to download. Any genre of music is welcomed and encouraged, though bands that try to imitate the Top 40 sound, void of colloquialisms, are never welcomed. It is our mission to find what is unique and different about the environment that surrounds us and the more we look; the more we find. After 2 years, over 50 singles have been released, our membership has risen to over 3,000 people from around the world, and our songs have been downloaded over 10,000 times. This has been done with no advertising, exhibiting the raw demand from both performers and audience alike, to find relief from the antiquated ways of the current music industry. Through the practice of 'in-sourcing', Beehive acts as a magnifying glass to Detroit's intricate culture. Not only do musicians benefit from the exposure we are able to provide, but local painters, photographers, and designers have also gained larger audiences by contributing their work to Beehive. From generation to generation, Detroit has been a source of boundless creativity from jazz to blues, Motown to punk, and funk to techno. A town that has been the birthplace of many genres of music as well as the source of a persistent flow of musical stardom like Madonna, Alice Cooper, Bob Seger, Jack White, Iggy Pop, Eminem, Aretha Franklin, and so many others. Though the attention of the press comes and goes, the energy and determination that belongs to our artists is relentless and it is the duty of Beehive to capture as many of these sounds as possible. As this idea continues to grow, we hope to have new Hives pop up in other cities across America, encapsulating what makes their city unique. So please become a member today and help encourage the growth of this new idea. It costs nothing, it is easy to do, and the only notifications that we send out is to show our gratitude when one donates to our cause. Now sit back, relax, and enjoy the free sounds of The Beehive Recording Company, "Detroit's Hand Crafted, Quality, Pop Music!"   - beehiverecording.com

The Rise & Fall of MP3 Blogs — guest post by Casey Rae

The history of the MP3 is one of technological innovation, consumer demand and all-too-persistent litigation, often against those very consumers who embraced the format in the heady post-Napster days. The story of this resilient digital audio file has been recounted many times — from the recording industry’s early wars of attrition to the MP3s role in the filesharing explosion to the bloggers who help curate an oversaturated music marketplace.

What doesn’t garner as much discussion is how the MP3 format — celebrated, reviled or somewhere in-between — has come to define the digital music experience, both for millions of listeners, and for those who help drive discovery. At one point, not so long ago, music bloggers sat near the top of the curatorial heap, using MP3s to help create overnight stars out of teenage indie rockers. Others highlighted niche genres and aural nuggets from decades past.

At first, MP3 bloggers were seen by the industry as freeloading pariahs, but eventually even the major labels came to embrace this segment of the online music community. Seeking a promotional fast track, the PR flaks hit the blogosphere hard, cultivating relationships with known tastemakers. Eventually, the pursuit of musical passion became a business concern, or at worse, a hassle.

I was a full-time music writer back when CDs were the promotional norm. Over the course of time, the padded envelopes slowed to a trickle and my inbox was flooded with MP3s from labels and publicists. It was frankly hard to keep up. The annoyance factor eventually contributed to my decision to do something different with my life.

I know I’m not alone. Looking around these days, you could be forgiven for thinking the “music blogger bubble” has popped. There are likely several reasons beyond inbox fatigue. The rise of “social music” — where friend networks replace curation via instant “recommendations” on platforms like Facebook — surely has something to do with it. But listening habits are also changing. No longer is downloading necessarily the fastest and most convenient way to get your musical fix.

When thinking about the future for MP3 blogging, it’s instructive to consider how younger generations discover and access music. The listening behaviors of those under 20 can tell us a lot about how aspects of our networked world might evolve. A new Nielsen survey suggests that YouTube has overtaken radio and CDs as the primary way American teens listen to music. At 64 percent, YouTube listening is even ahead of iTunes, which comes in at just over 50 percent. YouTube, is of course, a “streaming” platform, which presents a potential challenge to downloading culture.

In other words, streaming access is rapidly becoming a norm. Recent reports show that Warner Music now counts streaming as 25 percent of its overall digital music revenue. This is certainly significant for a sector that has struggled for more than a decade with the implications of online music.

Bones, Drums & Bass: CRAWL is 1-Man Blackened Doom from Texas [MP3s, Video]

Crawl is a one-man experimental sludge project from San Antonio TX. With his vocal mic shrouded in a parastacoidean mask, Emperor Crawl drums with one hand while. With the other, he controls a home-built bass string instrument made of actual bones. He likes to build things, he says, and to run sound through a wall of amps. The result is eloquently blackened doom with nods to Khanate's Things Viral and Sunn O)))'s Black One.

I stumbled into Crawl's incredible live performance at Sux by SuxWest, Austin's second-annual anti-sxsw noise festival. I'd originally biked to way out Bernadette's for Rat Bastard and the supremely funky Olneyville Sound System, who were at the top of their game in duo form. Crawl's set was an unexpected highlight of my time in Austin, and left the entire room stunned. After our applause faded into an uncomfortable silence (yo where's the DJ?), Emperor Crawl removed his mask to let us know that he does not have any merch— but! There is this demo recorded in 2010 that you encouraged to download and share:

A photo of Crawl's bass string instrument and video of an earlier Crawl performance after the jump...

2012 Marathon Underway! Daily DJ Premium MP3 Samples & More At *New WFMU Tumblr*

WFMU's 2012 Marathon is officially underway! Tune in now through March 4th to hear all your favorite DJs doing their thing to the utmost with special co-hosts, swag, and prizes galore.

We've also put together a fine batch of DJ Premiums. Any of these handcrafted CDs are available for a pledge of $75 or more.

Unlike in previous years, we won't be posting DJ Premium samples to this blog.

Instead, you can sip on daily mp3 teasers at the shiny new WFMU Marathon Tumblr. There, you'll also find a freeform mix of music, animated gifs, hyperlinks and mixed up media from throughout WFMU's extended universe. We're using this fluid format to highlight the many layers of WFMU's annual radio party without overwhelming our regular blog readers.

We hope you'll tune in to the tumblr, and help spread the word!

pictured: WFMU's Flexi-Disc Postcard || Swag

Brian Chippendale's Black Pus Live on WFMU (MP3s, Video, T-Shirt)

Black Pus is the many-armed beast of a solo project from Brian Chippendale, one of the most distinct musicians and visual artists of our time. If you're not already familiar with the sounds of Black Pus, you may recognize Chippendale's many-armed drumming style and masked mic-in-mouth vox from his duos Mindflayer and Lightning Bolt. A co-founder of the storied Fort Thunder artist collective, Chippendale still lives in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence, in a former mill building where lately he seems to be writing a new Black Pus song almost every night. So while we're wrapping our heads around 2011's Primordial Pus (Load Records) -- not to mention the limited edition CD-R series of Black Pus 1, 2, 3, 4 and 0 -- there's already a seventh Black Pus album ready to pop.

This live set on Marty McSorely's WFMU program is a special treat because, though he is a prolific musician, Black Pus doesn't tour nearly enough to quench our thirst for Pus. The set was expertly engineered by Ernie Indradat, and the interview covers recent collaborations with Björk and the Flaming Lips. Chippendale also talks about how he assembled such a unique setup, including an oscillator pedal that was originally a gift from Shinji Masuko of DMBQ. When Marty McSorely asks "What is Brian Chippendale's Black Pus?" Chippendale responds that it's reggaeton. He goes on to elaborate on a range of influences from the free jazz assault of Peter Brötzmann's Machine Gun to the unpredictable rhythms of Sightings and Black Dice (who started out as a hardcore band in Providence around the same time as Lightning Bolt).

In some circles, Brian Chippendale is known as much for his fine art, comics and graphic novels as for his music. His visual style can be experienced as part of every Black Pus and Lightning Bolt release. And, as those of you who are on the WFMU swag mailing list may have heard, Brian Chippendale designed an awesome Biker T-shirt for WFMU's marathon which begins later this month!

For more, check out the Black Pus blog, which just debuted this trippy surrealist video for "I'll Come When I Can," off Primordial Pus:

Music Blogs React to Megaupload Seizure & Cyberlocker Lockdowns

The day after last week's inspiring protest against overreaching anti-piracy laws, the US Department of Justice demonstrated that they don't need those laws, anyway.  They just went ahead and unilaterally shut down Megaupload, the world's most popular cyberlocker.  Rumor has it that similar sites like MediaFire and 4shared are under investigation and have been deleting files, while FileSonic preemptively disabled all sharing features.

As a result, much of the history of recorded sound has been made inaccessible to the public.  I'm talking, of course, about the music blogosphere.  The best music blogs aren't pirates.  They are libraries, sound archivists and music preservationists sharing recordings that would not otherwise be available.  And now sites like Global Groove, Mutant Sounds, and Holy Warbles have lost large swaths of the material they'd salvaged from obscurity.

Megaupload's Star-Powered Music Video/Endorsement Won't Censor Itself

You know Megaupload. It's one of those sites you sometimes encounter en route to download stuff. Ads pop up, and you try to avoid purchasing a Premium account, even though if you'd just give in then your download would be done by now.

Megaupload is different from Rapidshare, Hulkshare, and other similar sites because they have this new song w/ video endorsements from P Diddy, Lil John (pictured), Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Chris Brown, The Game, Mary J Blige, Kim Kardashian, Floyd Mayweather, Jamie Foxx, Russel Simmons...

 

It's a video that the participating artists' labels don't want you to see, because it doesn't fit with their depiction of Megaupload as a "rogue site". The RIAA and MPAA have already convinced Google to censor "Megaupload" searches, and if SOPA and Protect IP pass they'll banish megaupload from the web once and for all. Since this video seems to imply that some of the world's best selling musicians think differently, the major labels tried to censor it under the guise of a DMCA copyright infringement notice. They did not succeed. So go ahead and let the soothing sounds of this song-length mega-mercial wash over your brain, and/or check out the additional celebrity endorsements at Megaupload's website (which looks to have been purged clean in anticipation of this viral campaign).

Some of us may remember earlier incarnations of Megaupload with more obtrusive ads and general sleaziness. In fact, the site was founded by Kim "Dotcom" Schmitz, a notorious sleaze. After his convictions for credit card fraud, computer fraud, insider trading, and embezzlement, Dotcom procured a fake Finnish passport under the name "Kim Tim Jim Vestor" and took up shop in Hong Kong as director of several "Mega-" companies. These include not just Megaupload but also Megavideo, MegaLive, MegaPix, Megabox, and Megaporn.

Job Opening: Freelance Web Developer at the Free Music Archive

The Free Music Archive is looking for a freelance eveloper experienced with PHP, MySQL, Javascript and HTML/CSS. If you have the serious web dev chops, bring them to our headquarters in the magic factory that is WFMU. It would be great if you’re local to NYC, but we will consider remote applicants, too.

Please drop a line to dev -at- freemusicarchive -dot- org and give us some idea of your best work with urls, including your github account if you have one. If there are any music sites or apps that you like to use on a regular basis that might inform your work on the FMA, please be sure to let us know.

ABOUT THE FMA: Inspired by Creative Commons and the open source software movement, the FMA launched in 2009 with support from the New York State Music Fund, and has been covered by Billboard, Pitchfork, The Wire, New York Times, Spin, CNET, Mashable and many others. 

We’ve come a long way, but we have even bigger plans on our roadmap including implementing a recommendation engine, mobile-friendly players, social network integration and lots more.

Free Music Archive Radio & more from Music Hack Day

One of the 50+ projects to spring from this weekend's Music Hack Day, Free Music Archive Radio is essentially the template for a Creative Commons Pandora. Enter the name of any artist, and FMA Radio taps into the Echo Nest's musical brain to generate a similar playlist from the FMA's curated library of 40,000+ legal mp3s. Tweak your station further with Mood and Style parameters, and/or Creative Commons license filters.

Despite the fact that it's just a demo (works best on Chrome, not so well on Firefox) FMA Radio has already been written up in evolver.fm, the Dutch blog Muziek & de bibliotheek, and Germany's Progolog. Its awesomeness is enhanced by the fact that it's html5 (plays nice with iPhone/iPad), it's open source, and it was built over the course of 24-hours (whoa!). I spent much of the weekend hanging out with FMA Radio's creators Jeremy Sawruk, Robby Grodin (ConductiveIO) and Julie Vera, the Music Hack Day veterans whose previous projects include Sawruk's Feedtunes (turns Twitter trends into playlists based on song lyrics) and Grodin's Toscanini gestural interface. In addition to releasing open source code, Sawruk and Grodin are Creative Commons musicians, and they've really done an incredible service to the community via FMA Radio.

Music Hack Day is a series of music/tech gatherings fueled in large part by APIs. After the big news last month that FMA's API had been revamped and mapped to the Echo Nest's Rosetta Stone leading up to WFMU's Radiovision Festival, this weekend introduced the FMA to the mother of all music hacking events. It was fantastic to take part -- some highlights after the jump:

Radiovision Hack Day Oct 30th: Demo a similarity-based HTML5 Free Music Archive player, powered by The Echo Nest

Following up on last week's announcement that The Echo Nest has indexed the Free Music Archive catalog, Mike Adler put together an open source hack to demonstrate one of the myriad possibilities when this most incredible music intelligence platform is applied to the finest collection of free music.

The demo lets you search for any artist in the universe that Echo Nest knows about, and returns similar results from within the Free Music Archive's catalog in an HTML5 audio player. Go ahead and try it out. This is an incredibly powerful music discovery tool, though it's just the start of what we can build together. Sign up for API keys at the FMA and The Echo Nest to begin tinkering with our demo hack.

Next week, we're holding a Hack Day as part of WFMU's Radiovision Festival: Sunday October 30th we will "Re-invent Radio" with The Echo Nest, the Free Music Archive, and Zeega's new HTML5 platform for digital storytellers. There'll be workshops on Musical Timelines, Hacking Physical Spaces, and Multimedia Mash-ups, so plenty of opportunity to participate in the hands-on making of stuff whether or not you've got the proverbial coder's neckbeard. The Radiovision Festival takes place atop WFMU's annual Record Fair at NYC's Metropolitan Pavilion (125 W. 18th St), and Hack Day is free with RecFair admission as long as you reserve a spot in advance.

Excavated Shellac: Guest DJ Set & "Africa at 78 RPM" Box

Now available as a podcast: Jonathan Ward of of Excavated Shellac swung by Talk's Cheap / WFMU to share gems from his personal collection of international 78 RPM records.

The 90-min guest DJ set features tracks that have never been posted online, and also debuts selections from Opika Pende: Africa at 78 RPM. Compiled and edited by Jonathan Ward, the 4-disc set of 100+ previously unissued recordings also includes a 112-page softcover book.

Opika Pende will be released next week by Dust-to-Digital, just in time to stock the label's booth at WFMU's Record Fair, Oct 28th-30th.

WFMU's Free Music Archive presents Grey Area with Jason Sigal from 10/17/2011

>> playlist / mp3 / iTunes / xml/rss

originally aired on Talk's Cheap // Support Talk's Cheap on WFMU!!

RadioVision: Free Music Archive Melds w/ Echo Nest's Musical Brain

The Echo Nest has indexed the Free Music Archive catalog, integrating the most incredible music intelligence platform with the finest collection of free music.

The Echo Nest has been called "the most important music company on Earth" for good reason: 12 years of research at UC Berkeley, Columbia and MIT factored into the development of their "musical brain." The platform combines large-scale data mining, natural language processing, acoustic analysis and machine learning to automatically understand how the online world describes every artist, extract musical attributes like tempo and time signature, learn about music trends (see: "hotttnesss"), and a whole lot more. Echo Nest then shares all of this data through a free and open API. [read more here]

FMA's library of 40,000 free & legal music files have now been analyzed by the Echo Nest and made easily accessible to the developer community through a common Artist, Track, and Album ID system. Licensing information is included as part of the API, and so developers working in the Creative Commons sphere now have an incredible pool of curated audio to draw from for their noncommercial music applications.

Combining The Echo Nest's music intelligence tools with the FMA's curated approach opens up exciting possibilities for interactive music applications and new music discovery. For example, the Echo Nest's sandbox documentation describes how to query for artists who share music via the FMA and are similar to Radiohead

>> Read More About FMA + Echo Nest

The Echo Nest presents as part of WFMU's RadioVision Festival NYC, as part of the October 30th "Reinventing Radio" Hack Day along with the FMA and Zeega, an open-source html5 platform for digital storytellers -- RSVP here

Vimeo's new service connects videomakers w/ video-safe Creative Commons music from Free Music Archive

The classy video-hosting site Vimeo launched a new service to connect their noncommerical community of creative independent video producers with quality legal music options. The Music Store utilizes the Free Music Archive API to index the portion of the FMA library that can be used in video projects under the Creative Commons framework (i.e. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike; about 11,000 tracks) and offers these curated jams as its free options. This is an exciting moment for those of us who share our music under open licenses to inspire new collaborations and expand our reach.

From Vimeo's announcement:

As many of you know, finding music for your videos can be somewhat... well, painful. Licensing music on your own can be confusing and finding good free music can take forever. Many of us here at Vimeo are video creators or filmmakers as well and we experience these frustrations on a regular basis. So, we decided to do something about it.

The majority of FMA's library is pre-cleared for noncommercial use only, so it might seem strange at first that free music is included in something called a Music "Store" alongside paid music from a company called Audiosocket. But for many artists, allowing for hands-on engagement with their work in the noncommercial sphere plays into a broader promotional strategy, and even leads to lucrative commercial licensing opportunities. We always love to hear about the collaborations that result when producers who actually have a budget discover one of the many great artists who share their work via the Free Music Archive, about artists being commissioned to score new documentary films, mobile app soundtracks, and viral videos that reach 2 million views.

Vimeo introduced Creative Commons licensing for video last summer, and we've already seen a flurry of videos powered by CC music from the FMA -- everything from educational projects, travelogues, time lapses, recipe-sharing, and science videos to the immensely popular cute animal videos (although I guess that's more a YouTube thing). I'm including one example after the jump, along with the latest in FMA's series of mixes curated with the online video producer in mind. Vimeo's Music Store seems is totally new, so it's sure to be refined over the course of time. If you have feedback you can leave a comment here, and we look forward to the new collaborations that this bridge between the CC Music Community and the CC Video Community will inspire!

Silent Barn Robbed / Party Lab Lives On (mp3)

Terrible news this weekend, as Silent Barn -- the one-of-a-kind venue/laboratory/gallery/space/place in Ridgewood, Queens -- was robbed of $15k-worth of gear/equipment (read the note here or after the jump | UPDATE THERE IS NOW A KICKSTARTER).

Among the many amazing components of Silent Barn -- the Baby Castles video game installations + hacker meetups, murals and art everywhere, live performances booked by some of the city's best curators -- here's one of my favorites:

http://partylab.swillchildren.org/

Party Lab hosts straight-to-cassette mixes of not just the live performances, but everything that's going on in and around the entire space at that moment in time. Just look at the diagram -- there were microphones everywhere, even outside! It's all part of G Lucas Crane's vision of a "Center For Non-Amoral Surveillance," which he explains with this manifesto. I remember this one show, being so stunned by Grasshopper's set, I went over to the Party Lab booth to ask James (who'd been doing some mixing while hanging by the door) how he thought the recording turned out. "Great!" he said, "An ambulance came by, got some of that in the mix, plus a fight broke out so that's in there too..."

These tapes survive to document an environment which is sure to be reincarnated before long. We're all eager for an opportunity to show support for Silent Barn, because we need a space like this now more than ever, what with the shutdown of CoCo66 and this rumor of a gigantic Whole Foods coming to bulldoze some of Williamsburg's finest venues... So, stay tuned to Silent Barn (fbook/twitter/email) and read their note after the jump:

Primavera Sound 2011 New Adds: Aias, Glenn Branca, Fresh & Onlys, Moon Duo, No Joy, Soft Moon (mp3s)

Last week, we kicked off a collection of recordings from WFMU's two days of Primavera Sound coverage with Prince Rama, Swans, Oneohtrix Point Never, Suicide, Pissed Jeans, The Monochrome Set, Ducktails, and Half Japanese.

This week, we bring you six more from Barcelona's incredible multi-day / multi-stage music festival! Check out free artist-approved mp3s by...

Aias  ::  Glenn Branca Ensemble  ::  The Fresh & Onlys  ::  Moon Duo  ::  No Joy  ::  The Soft Moon

(( click for mp3s or listen after the jump... ))

Primavera Sound 2011 MP3 collection kickoff (mp3s)

Primavera Sound held its eleventh-annual festival in Barcelona Spain last month, and we are proud to present mp3 highlights from what is truly one of the world's most incredible live music events. This year, a record-setting 120,000+ attendees were treated to several stages'-worth of top-notch headliners, special reunion performances, and many up-and-coming artists who you might not expect to see in the festival setting.

For the third year in a row, the freeform-inspired folks at Primavera invited WFMU to broadcast live [playlists here and here], and we are kicking off the PS11 Free Music Archive collection with sets from...

Prince Rama  ::  Swans  ::  Oneohtrix Point Never  ::  Suicide  ::  Pissed Jeans  ::  The Monochrome Set  ::  Ducktails  :: Half Japanese

Sun Araw live at WFMU: improv / Crown Shell / Hive Burner (mp3s)

Fresh off appearances at Montreal's Mutek and the 2011 WFMU+FMA SXSW Showcase, Sun Araw took a first-ever trip to the WFMU studios for a live session that aired yesterday on Talk's Cheap.

Originally envisioned as a solo project from Magic Lanterns' Cameron Stallones (also ex-Pocahaunted), Sun Araw has evolved into a full band live performance experience alongside a flood of releases from labels like Not Not Fun, Woodsist, Leaving Records, and Araw's own Sun Ark.

The Sun Araw band features Cameron Stallones on guitar/synth/vocals, backed by two equally awesome players: Barrett Avner (also of Sadistic Candle) on the Shahi Baaja (pictured at left) & Monotron, and Alex Gray (Deep Magic / Deep Tapes) on extra guitar + MPC.

The session commenced with a 30+ minute improv to get in the zone for one new song, and one old song. The studio version of "Crown Shell" will be available on Ancient Romans, the forthcoming Sun Araw 2xLP due out on Sun Ark via Drag City August 23rd 2011. Ancient Romans will be Sun Araw's fifth full-length in three years, and "Crown Shell" provides a staggered, spacious, aquatic, and deeply hypnotic glimpse at what's to come. The band closed out with "Hive Burner," a psych-rock comet that originally appeared on Sun Araw's 2008 debut, The Phynx.

Sun Araw's WFMU session was rec'd on June 7th and aired on June 9th [playlist for Talk's Cheap/WFMU, June 9th 2011]. If you like what you hear, dig deeper into the Sun Araw universe here on the FMA and at sunaraw.com.

S.S. Records 10 Anniversary in SF May 20-22 // mp3 mix

The great Sacramento CA label S.S. Records celebrates their 10th Anniversary this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with three shows in San Francisco (details).

"Over the last ten years, the label has built a reputation for discovering great unknown bands, finding hidden underground music scenes throughout the world, and digging up obscure and forgotten recordings." (-ssten.com)

It's true! In welcoming SS Records to the FMA, WFMU's Music Director hailed Mr. SS himself Scott Soriano's "full understanding of what made esoteric independent weirdo/garage/artpunk labels of the 80s and 90s so beloved." Soriano's been carrying on the torch not just through the label itself, but through a well-curated mailorder/distro and the essential Z-Gun print zine, which Brian calls "the greatest print-media gift to the scene since the halcion days of Forced Exposure" (-Brian Turner).

Though they specialize in vinyl, the SS Records downloads page offers a great batch of high-quality paid downloads, as well as a link to the SS Records Free Music Archive portal, which houses some real gems too.

The SS 10th Anniversary shows include label staples like Nothing People, Charles Albright, Lamps, Wounded Lion, and Liquorball (memb Monoshock!), plus special guests like Hank IV and the Mantles, a Sunday afternoon record swap, and renion performances by Nar, feedtime (first & only North American appearance), and the A Frames' original lineup (feat Lars Finberg of The Intelligence, A Frames were the first band to be released on SS, and this is their last show ever!).

SSten.com   //  SS Records Home Page  //  SS Records on the Free Music Archive