Posts Tagged With "Streaming"

Brain Fuzz: The Podcast

September 15, 2016 By Matthew White Leave a Comment

I’m lucky to call Joe Camoosa a friend. He’s also a great painter. I would say artist, but he doesn’t like being called an artist. (You’ll have to ask him.) So, I’m almost always at a loss as to how I can best describe him.

If you love Tokens From The Well, you’ll at least really like Brain Fuzz. Maybe you’ll love it. And vice versa.

Going back almost a year, and at the urging of more than one other person, he and I started thinking about a podcast. We started recording conversations with no agenda or outline. They were surprisingly cogent. They were also surprisingly coherent and relevant (at least to us).

Then, we started to structure our conversations a bit more. We still allowed for the randomness and variety that makes like interesting, and it all works somehow.

Topics include the creative life, studios, exhibitions, galleries, art travel, music, books, bands, various audiophiliac concerns, and related (or unrelated) minutiae. We typically avoid politics, religion, and sports.

Listen to Brain Fuzz sometime. And better yet, subscribe.

If you like Tokens From The Well, you’ll love Brain Fuzz – the new art, music, and culture podcast. I take that back. Regardless of whether you love Tokens From The Well or not, you’ll probably like Brain Fuzz.

Either way, give it a listen.

Gimme The Sound, Man

February 6, 2015 By Matthew White Leave a Comment

Contemporary Art - Matthew White - I want the sound injectly directed into my head. (2015)

Detail from I want the sound injectly directed into my head. (2015)

Sales of song downloads last year suddenly dropped, dramatically. The recent music industry sales numbers, as covered here in “Streaming Is Killing the MP3 Industry,” illustrate the broad cultural shifts underway:

What we expect as music listeners (consumers) is changing.
How we consume music is changing.
The nature of music delivery – now, as packets of data – is changing.

I want the sound injectly directed into my head. is an exploration of these ideas and related questions. It is an industrial style guitar fitted with black iron pipe as a neck, which also acts as conduit. The guitar is restrung with cat 5e cable (I now routinely enjoy working with it, by the way), exploding in a bouquet from its non-existent headstock.

Fitted for wall mounting, the piece displays much as a guitar would on a musician’s studio wall.

What Next?

For links to upcoming Tokens From the Well blog articles, follow @mwgallery on Twitter or “like” artist Matthew White on Facebook.

Updated February 25, 2016.

Streaming Is Killing the MP3 Industry

January 6, 2015 By Matthew White Leave a Comment

Nope. 2014 was not a great year for the MP3 industry. According to reports in The Wall Street Journal, sales of downloaded songs and albums “plummeted” while the use of streaming grew “sharply.”

And, for the icing on the cake: Vinyl sales are up significantly.

The Who and What By Numbers

Streaming is killing the MP3 industry, and hipsters should note the numbers on vinyl.

Let’s briefly review 2014:

Downloaded album sales dropped 9%.
Downloaded song sales dropped 12%.
Streaming grew by a whopping 54%.

Total album consumption was 257 million units. Downloaded albums represent 106.5 million of that total.

Hipsters should note that while vinyl sales are up, it’s only 9.2 million units in all. That’s about 4% of total (“new”) album sales across formats. Despite the saber rattling across posts and shares – as well as my own wishes for our culture – that’s not enough to spill a PBR (or Genessee) over.

To put a face on some of these numbers, Taylor Swift had the biggest album sales of the year with more than 3.66 million copies of her 1989.

So . . .

On the surface, the significant movement of these numbers in such a short period of time is what is most impressive. And, even more importantly, it’s interesting to put these numbers in perspective among broader trending across decades (RIAA offers a lot of data available via subscription). For example, notice how cycles in format adoption have sped up.

What would Rob and Barry think about streaming? High Fidelity is also a book by Nick Hornby that may or may not be available on Kindle.

The assumption that consumers are purchasing and downloading single songs while abandoning whole albums is wrong. The data backs this up. Among us enlightened music consumers, we may not like who they download or how they download it, but they still value the “album” as a collection of songs. In fact, since 2013, single song downloads declined more than album downloads.

The impact to what remains of an always clueless “music industry” is clear. People are listening to more music while they – and the artists – make less money.

. . . And In The End

These numbers tell us more about how our culture’s consumption habits and brains are evolving than they do about our music tastes.

The free market can be a real bitch. Music makers have greater access to instruments, collaboration, and distribution. Consumers have access to more music, more artists, and more formats. Are the sheeple engaging with albums and album tracks in ways that the enlightened would prefer? Who knows? They probably never will anyway.

These shifts in trends raise an interesting question about how artists integrate the distribution format into their work. For example, in 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hears Club Band, The Beatles mixed several seconds of sound for the record’s run-out groove. This was followed by a 15 kilocycle pitch that was included especially for dogs. Interestingly, use of the run-out groove actually dates back to recordings for 78s.

For most, the uncomfortable fact of the matter is that music now – like sales charts – is mostly data. That fact is not inherently good or bad. The real question is, what next?