Catch a falling mag and put it in your pocket

[imomus]

It's amazing how quickly iPhone / iPod Touch apps are evolving. It reminds me of the early days of Macintosh, when everyone was coming up with new extensions and control panels (they'd load across your screen with app-like icons, or billboards popping up on a highway), or the early days of the web, when there seemed to be a new gimmick for loading a webpage every week (for a while we were all making our pages flash like lightning as they loaded up). Apps, though, have the potential to be much more useful than either.



Already, musician friends are thinking in terms of iPod apps the way they once might have thought of releasing albums on labels. Who needs a label when an app could be a worldwide delivery system for people interested in your music? Or how about keeping up with Japanese magazines? I've already mentioned Nakatree Viewer, a free app that lets you look at the paper ads for magazines that hang in Japanese subway cars.



Nakatree Viewer began as the ad sheets themselves (typically showing a modified version of the mag's latest cover), then added pop-up QR codes allowing you to access some of the content of the magazines. Now there's talk of the Viewer actually taking you to online versions of the magazines, either reduced versions (like Courrier Lite, a standalone application for one mag) or full ones.



At a time when magazines are dropping like flies, giving them a new distribution platform is giving them the chance of new life. Whether the iPhone is the ideal reading environment for magazines is another matter. I have a digital subscription to The Wire, but prefer to read it on my big computer, or on paper. But when Apple releases its iPhone-OS tablet computer -- rumoured either for next month or early next year, depending on who you believe -- who knows?



Now Nakatree Viewer is joined by a similar app, Pick-Up Museum Cafe, which allows you to see posters for the art, design and museum shows currently on in Japan. The shows themselves, of course, will never be shrunk down to pocket-size. Or will they?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Who needs a label when an app could be a worldwide delivery system for people interested in your music?

So much new music sounds like shite because it's been poorly recorded - and/or mastered to be played on a phone. The craft of making records (and the ability to listen to music) has been lost.

[(Anonymous)]

“Who needs a label?” has been on the cards for 15 years (?) or so. And as false as it is true.

False - because the notion that you can get the audience (or the fun) bands had when labels existed has never been achieved. You need marketing, cash for hotel bills and parking tickets. Arctic Monkeys had a quarter of a million pounds spent turning them into “MySpace success stories”. But if you want the dole and to be a name on a playlist on iPhone, you got it!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, but you'd probably be better off, pound for pound, doing your own promotion with a bank loan -- which is what a record label is anyway, but you also have to pay rent for their offices and subsidize their other artists.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Record labels are essentially just banks with music distribution connections. They don't perform any ultra-special function that the average person, with enough time and some extra resources, couldn't do him/herself.

[(Anonymous)]

But does the bank loan culture produce music that is less commercially driven, or more? Will spotty 17 year olds dressed like the Jesus and Mary Chain get them - or just some Simon Cowell character? And can bands be bothered to fill tax returns. They whole point of the maligned music industry was to let artists get on with their thing!

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

I think artists have only gotten more involved, generally speaking, in all of the various processes (songwriting, production, recording, promoting, distribution) that were once farmed out to agents working behind the scenes. So yeah, I think that artists can fill out their tax returns, or at least hire a proper accountant on their own to do it for them.

[(Anonymous)]

I was talking less about recordings, which have been homemade and web distributed for years (where did "Peoplesound" go?) than about live tours, promotion and marketing, becoming a household name, affecting the national or global culture - the stuff that traditionally prevented people needing a second job.

I'm possibly suggesting that the punk ethos is reversed now - we have TOO MUCH do-it-yourself and not enough svengalis who want to effect national or global culture.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

So independent music hasn't affected global culture at all? That's a laugh. It doesn't need to be one guy working out of his garage to be DIY. All the tiny indie labels around the globe are part of that ethic too. And to argue that nobody coming off an indie label has had an effect on global culture would be asinine at best.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes it often happens when they come off the indie label! Did indies shock, get talked about, spread new ethics as much as glam, punk, new romantic or hippy movements? Certain artists at certain times maybe. Even acid house depended to some extent on the publicity of the national newspapers.

I guess I've always been fascinated at the point where an inclusive movement catches on and affects 'the public'. I get the feeling that someone like Momus might disown a movement precisely at that point; try to stay aloof from it or ahead of it. But it is an important emblem of the national mood, which uncountable independent creators all in their little cells might not be able to paint. It takes artists and journalists too. And even, yes, weasly business people.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

You're right, the largest portion of an indie label's "success" will tend to be regional. The proliferation of indie labels in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. is a great example. I would argue that there exists a proud aesthetic tradition of rock in that region (though not one that I personally find very alluring), and it doesn't come directly out of anybody "breaking" on a major label (though several bands have broken out to a larger audience over the decades).

I think the problem with your line of thought is that it still takes the linear progression model of success as a given, i.e. you start local, then become regional, then national, then international, etc. But it's entirely possible now, more than ever, for a person in Japan to be listening to American bands that most Americans have never heard of before. I saw a band here in Korea that mixed several Teenage Fanclub covers in with its originals, and seemed to be particularly influenced by them. Who knows what that influence can lead to, and the kind of non-linear audience building it could do for a band in an entirely different part of the world?

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

So I guess the point is that the definition of "breaking big" will likely change for the lion's share of musical acts in the future. But honestly, who cares? Why does there always have to be a big wave?

I think one of the larger problems with the "big wave" idea of popular music is that it forces us at once to conceive of something fresh and new, but also to recreate that which we already know to have happened (like the "rock renaissance" of the late 60s, or whatever). We're always asking the question "What is this generation's such-and-such moment?" But at the same time, we want everything to be original and surprising. The "big wave" notion just pushes us into this troublesome contradiction, and one which rarely has interesting results.

[(Anonymous)]

"The craft of making records (and the ability to listen to music) has been lost."

I think you are confusing two seperate issues. The fact that we have access to more music, means that of course some of it is going to be dreadful. But there is still plenty of beautifully conceived, recorded & produced records being made, and if you arent hearing them then perhaps the problem lies with you?

[(Anonymous)]

Not so sure about that. Please list some beautifully conceived, recorded & produced records released in 2009. Most new releases have been compressed to death and have no dynamic range to speak of.