So maybe the Cloud for music streaming won't suck so bad after all.

Two weeks ago Aderra recorded the 2nd Annual SESAC bootcamp in Los Angeles at the Skirball Center. The leadoff key note was by Ted Cohen of TAG Strategic

Now I have made it clear that overall I think the unlimited Cloud access concept for music SUCKS for a few specific reasons: 1) Access is inherently limited by licensing, 2) Access is inherently limited by technology (can't call from my iPhone in most places let alone stream music) and 3)Psychology. People LIKE TO OWN STUFF. Access does NOT = OWNERSHIP.

BUT, Access does = CONVENIENCE.

We have recorded Ted 5 or 6 times in panel discussions but this was the first time I personally watched as he laid out his take on the history of digital music and the impending future. I have to say he made a very, very compelling case for the Cloud. You can gloss over connectivity as a barrier by assuming that technology will improve in the near future to allow of unlimited access but you cannot escape the psychology of ownership.

We have seen this in Aderra's business, downloads seem ephemeral to fans but a flash drive with the files is more than solid, it is in fact "real".

So after listening to Ted's insights I started to be swayed that the Cloud might be an exciting idea even if I had some misgivings about the primal instinct for ownership of something so emotionally resonant as music. But then I went camping.

Yes, camping with 23 of my neighbors and 22 of their kids.

Some interesting initial observations: 23 Adults aged 35-45, people brought 3 BOSE Sounddocks for their iPods/iPhones, 1 brought a similar JBL dock. NO ONE brought a CD player. No one brought CDs, no one brought a radio, boombox or other way to access, playback or stream music.

Next interesting observation: Music was playing loudly for the majority of the trip.
Powered mostly buy iTunes playlists.

The campground provided free broadband wifi access

Which meant constant access to Pandora.
Whether it was blues tinged evenings by the campfire or a dance party for the kids, it was all powered by Pandora. So at one point my neighbor Josh (who I have complained about his barking dog in my podcast...) asks me,

"Damn Ed, how many songs do you have on your iPod? Uh, not many, we've been listening to Pandora."

At that moment sitting in front of a campfire 20 minutes north of Santa Barbara I suddenly realized just how cool the Cloud could be. I have tried Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio in Beta and even Waltzo but I have never been satisfied. But Pandora has always been cool. I have to say I miss the good old days in 2004 or so when I could type in my friends indie acts and create a station around them (Joe and Tim, please open up your submission policy once again to create a TRUE discovery experience for those of us who do not rely on labels to filter for us.)

So maybe the Cloud for music streaming won't suck so bad after all.

Tweet for free music

This is pretty cool.   CashMusic has created a couple of open source tools to promote your new release.   We are using them as part of the campaign for The Cult's "Capsule" release.


Fans who Tweet from THIS page about The Cult get a free download of their classic hit, LOVE REMOVAL MACHINE that Aderra recorded last year on the LOVE LIVE tour.   In addition any fan that convinces 25 friends to Tweet gets a free, unreleased full concert recording of The Cult.

You can try it yourself at http://emawias.com/Tweet/

Tweet for free music

The CULT's new single Available exclusively at iTunes

The Cult - New Single Released by New Wilderness/ Aderra

The Cult return with their first studio recording in three years, “Everyman and Woman is a Star”. Produced by Chris Goss (Masters of Reality, Queens of the Stone Age), the track captures the thunder of their live show and the fire of their classic hits such as “She Sells Sanctuary” and “Wildflower”.

Location, Los Angeles, CA – As fans anticipate The Cult’s upcoming performance at The Sonisphere Festival at Knebworth on August 1, 2010, the band has announced the release of their first new studio recording since 2007, “Everyman and Woman is a Star”. The new single is being released as a two-week exclusive through the iTunes store.

Rock fans worldwide will immediately recognize Billy Duffy’s blistering guitars and Ian Astbury’s powerful vocals soaring over a relentless beat. This is the lead off track of a four song “Capsule” scheduled to be released in fall of 2010. As a thank you to fans for their support, limited edition “Cult Destroy Knebworth” shirts will be distributed as the band take the stage at Sonisphere on August 1st.
http://thecult.us

"The latest recordings from The Cult, guided by Legendary producer Chris Goss, are a mixture of violent guitars, emotive vocal performances with high melody and driving beats. Textured metaphysical rock music for the contemporary music head.” - Ian Astbury, Singer, The Cult

Rather than revisit the traditional method of releasing a long form CD, The Cult is getting new material to fans in the form of a “Capsule” a collection of not just new music, but film, art and fashion. The “Capsule” will span across multiple media formats including vinyl, digital, USB, CD and DVD formats. The first opportunity fans will get to hear “Everyman and Woman is a Star”, outside of seeing the band live, is through an exclusive distribution through Apple’s iTunes store.

This new release is a partnership between the band’s New Wilderness label and media pioneers Aderra. In 2009, Aderra recorded several live shows on the band’s U.S. and European tours including a sold out appearance at The Royal Albert Hall in London. The live recordings were released exclusively through a USB flash drive housed in a dog tag necklace. The success of this initial project lead to this partnership to release the new Capsule material on multiple formats. http://aderra.net

For More About The Cult

http://thecult.us




About Aderra
Aderra Inc. provides an innovative way to capture the "once in a lifetime" experience of live shows and immediately deliver it to fans or attendees after the event. Aderra is on the cutting edge of content delivery with the use of their "All you need is Live”® USB technology. For more information, visit http://www.aderra.net.

The CULT's new single Available exclusively at iTunes

So that went pretty well.

This past Thursday evening my company, Aderra, and our friends, Killola, made a little bit of history.

The Aderra office in Los Angeles, prepping for a live video stream direct to USB thumb drive using PushOvr™

Last December I posted about how I thought the folks in Killola were doing exactly all the right things that a new band should be doing. Since then they have released a new record, gone on a national tour, appeared on TV in Dallas and Salt Lake City, completed filming of a new feature length movie, opened an online store and released the K)) USB Dog Tag. Here a video that explains what fans get when they buy a K)) USB.

The USB is enabled with our new PushOvr™ Technology. PushOvr™ allows us to update content on the USB, provides a gateway to send downloads, exclusive streams, merch offers and live video streaming to inside the USB. And this is where the history part comes in. For the first time EVER we streamed a live video performance to the inside of an album.

First on June 24th then again on July 22nd we shot Killola performing and streamed it directly to the USB. This video was not viewable on the internet, it went directly to flash drive dog tags.  Here is a screen shot a fan took during the performance.

And you can read more about it HERE.
So while making claims about "making history" may seem a bit cheeky, this is a tech development I have been working on for three years now and it is personally rewarding to see it grow from idea to actuality. back in mid-2007 I began developing the idea of a User Interface that could be embedded on the USB drives we were selling at concerts.

First Major concert we recorded was Big Head Todd at Red Rocks.

At the time we loaded a single, continuous MP3 of a concert onto thumb drives at the end of a show. We were rapidly building first generation of the CapApp™ software platform for real-time encode, edit, meta-tag and burn and I wanted to find a way to make not just edited separate tracks available but also a cool way to present them to the fan. I began working on code for a stand alone desktop application and pretty quickly got discouraged by the daunting task of making something simple that would be easy to install and use for fans as well as work cross platform. I began to explore other options and looked into a browser based solution. The first UI that we built was for an artist named Kim Kline It was fairly rudimentary compared to what we are doing now but I hid my first attempt at content Pushing in the code. There was a static image on the background that had a server call to the exact same image. This way no one would notice if my experiment didn't work because the image was "missing". It worked but it was a bit clunky.

So fast forward 3 years, we're now able to create a secure tunnel directly to the browser or flash player based UI. The pinnacle of which is streaming video in real-time directly to the jump drive.

Next up: a two way portal system we call Wurmhole™.

So that went pretty well.

DRM - We're still talking about this in 2010? (Geek Challenge below)

Just got off the phone with a manager that we are working with on an upcoming tour. He wanted to know what Aderra does to "Lock Down" the music we record at live concerts. I told him we use the same exact thing that Universal (the artist's label) uses for DRM on their CDs. This mollified him for a moment until he caught on that I meant "nothing". Then is mind reeled. He hadn't ever considered before that DRM on digital music files was ridiculous given that CDs are wide open to be ripped and shared.


So then I told him about Rhapsody. I have a friend with Rhapsody who was annoyed with the restrictions on where and how he could listen to the tracks they supplied by subscription. I sent him to Radio Shack to pick up an 1/8" stereo to 1/8" stereo cable (I'm, guessing that ran him less than $5). Then I told him to run from his mp3 player out to a laptop and record everything he wanted to unlock into garageband. Ta da. Unlocked music.

Then I told him about the iTunes trick. Make a playlist of locked AAC files in iTunes. Burn it to an audio CD then rip the tracks from the CD as MP3s. Ta da. Unlocked music.

Then I told him about "secure" streams on NPR and other sites. Same old 1/8" stereo cable trick.

There is no way to create a file that you can listen to or watch and not have it vulnerable to being copied. (Here is my challenge, I'll provide 100 USBs, custom imprinted and loaded for anyone that can send me a digital media file that I cannot make shareable.)(and yes, your content will be on torrent sites) This is not about what a wicked hacker I am or or implied support of sites like the Pirate Bay, the point is that "locking" digital media content is senseless.

So as the manager I was speaking with began to realize that the fight against file sharing is futile he asked what why they had been wasting time on it for so many years.

The reality is that the people who will pay for your music will and those who won't, won't.

So really the only thing to do is make music people will invest themselves in both emotionally and financially. Worry about file sharing is a waste of time and energy. Finding a way to use file sharing to further awareness of your artist's music is well worth some thought.

DRM - We're still talking about this in 2010? (Geek Challenge below)

Shooter Jennings - Black Ribbons The Living Album

So I try not to post too much about what my company Aderra is doing but seeing as it pretty much has taken over my life its hard not to include some of the overflow here. But this isn't a post about something the company is doing per se but is about my personal experience while working on a recent project with Shooter Jennings and his band Hierophant.

Last year Tom Morello hired us to record the Axis of Justice benefit show in Los Angeles. As we were setting up the multitrack gear Shooter showed up for soundcheck to run through a song. He got about half way through the first verse and I exchanged glances with the guys who work with me; holy shit this guy is the real deal. The voice booming out of him was soulful and yet very southern. He was singing Bob Dylan's "Isis" with Tom Morello on guitar. Really cool.

So we had a good night at the show, Corey Taylor from Slipknot (a complete revelation when he steps out from under the fright mask), Sen Dog (Singing Paradise City!), Brother Wayne Kramer, Jerry Cantrell singing "Wish You were Here", Eugene Hutz, Lemmy and more. I walked away pretty amazed by everyone but most of all by Shooter. Spoke with him for a few minutes after the concert. Didn't realize he had a radio show on Sirius until he mentioned it (I am woefully unaware of most of what is happening in subscription driven media platforms..)

Fast forward a year. I had seen a brief glimpse of Shooter in Streetsweeper Social Club's "100 Little Curses" video but heard nothing since the Morello show. Then I read an L.A. Times review review of Shooter's new "Black Ribbons" album featuring Stephen King. The album sounded ominous an imposing, a concept on par with The Wall or the challenging theories of David Icke I had recorded back in October of 2008 when he had appeared live in downtown L.A.(The man spoke on stage alone for four hours o an overflow capacity house with only a 3 minute break .)

I made a note and bought the album on Amazon the day it was released. Whoa. This was a mix of Heavy Soundgarden-esque riffs, Floydian-Rick Wright style Moog solos, Wall/Operation Mind Crime narrative, and more than just a touch of the South. And some GREAT songs, "Black Ribbons", "God Bless Alabama" leaped out of the speakers.

A few weeks later we ended up out on the road multi-tracking several of Shooter's shows in the south. Reports from our folks on the road were that everything went smoothly and the crew and band were cool.

Then I got the hard drive with the first show on it.

The first thing that I noticed was the organ. An honest to god B-3 through a smokin' Leslie speaker. Not just a nice emulation but the real deal. (Found out later it a Hammond Spinet model not a B-3 but still spinning tone wheels). Then I started to notice how the band, Hierophant had taken the textures of the album and made them their own. And the songs while strong on the record, are amazing live; the guitar tone "Triskaidekaphobia" is stunning, the groove of "Summer of Rage", the sorrow of "All of this could have been yours", the Allmanesque"The Breaking Point" and the opening salvo of "Wake Up!"; all mind blowing.

Now granted, I have spent a lot of time in the studio mixing these shows and have heard these songs dozens of times each (if not more). But I have to testify that this band, with Bobby Emmett on keyboards, The Schreffman on lead guitar, with Ted Russell Kamp and Bryan Keeling on drums is one of the best on stage these days. And if you are in any way a fan of sophisticated yet soulful classic rock you must get Black Ribbons, go see this band live and be sure to listen to "Black Ribbons: The Living Album" the collection of live show recordings Shooter has released on USB drive. (Yes, that sounds like a plug to buy a product we produced but it was really meant as the most sincere endorsement of these songs, this band and this album I could make.)

Shooter Jennings - Black Ribbons The Living Album

Album Sales Plummet To Lowest Total In Decades

Is this really a surprise to anyone?

Album Sales Plummet To Lowest Total In Decades

Album Sales Plummet To Lowest Total In Decades