Congratulations to Adam Brown for correctly guessing that the soundwave in the picture was created by a TAMBOURINE. Adam wins 50% off a days recording at The Fold Studios plus we will fire up the charcoals and cook him a lovely BBQ on the day (weather permitting!!!)

Commiserations to everyone else that entered, better luck next time!

The Fold Team are involved in a 55 mile sponsored bike ride around the Isle Of Wight next weekend in aid of The Wessex Cancer Trust.

If you would like to help the cause follow the link: www.justgiving.com/Ride-for-Ros. All contributions will be much welcome and appreciated.

Thank you

The summer has arrived and brought with it the 2nd ‘Guess The Sound Wave Competition’ for the chance to win:

50% off a days recording at The Fold Studios PLUS lunch is on us!!!

If you think you can guess what instrument made the waveform in the picture, simply leave a comment with your answer.

Closing date for the competition is 30th June so start stroking those thinking beards.

We’ve all heard of format wars. How could we forget the battle of the titans that was VHS vs Betamax, the embarrassing mismatch of Laser-disc vs DVD or the neat knockout blow struck by Blu-ray against the perpetually flagging and unimaginatively monikered HD-DVD. Of course these are all video related skirmishes, but what of the audio world? Well there is an audiophile scrap going on between SACD (super-audio CD) and DVD-Audio, but due to the current trends of consumers caring less and less about audio fidelity and more and more about how many people they can annoy on the bus by playing music directly out of their phone speakers, both these formats are looking set to fizzle out with a whimper, receiving less press attention than somebody doing something of worldwide significance who isn’t a celebrity!

So what about “business model wars”? Granted, it’s not such a snappy title, but it may be dominating music industry distribution for the next few years. So, what’s the craik? Who are the contenders? And, crucially, what does it mean for musicians at grass roots level? Well…

A boxing ring – To illustrate the analogy, see?

In the red corner, weighing in at $18bn, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world since the birth of recorded music, the one and only, Ownership Model (cue rapturous applause…)

And in the blue corner, weighing in at, well lots and lots of, err… listens, the challenger, the wild card, the new kid on the block, The Subscription Model.

For the purposes of simplicity, I’m going to be assuming that physical distribution is dead and buried. An unromantic statement perhaps. Premature maybe, and certainly inaccurate, but what I’m interested in really is the battle between two different methods of digital distribution. Let’s start with a brief explanation of the two models:

Despite the shakeups and turmoil caused to the music industry by the explosion of mp3 onto the scene, the basic business model remains the same. You may not have to go to the shops anymore, but you pay a retailer some money, and in exchange they give you a copy of a piece (or pieces) of recorded music. It’s now your copy – you own it. That money is then split up accordingly, the retailer keeping a share, the distributer taking their cut, record label, manager and eventually some 10-20% should filter down to the artist and producer (priorities, eh?). As a passing point, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the digital distributor is a phantom invented to defraud hard working bands of some well-deserved revenue. Think about it – back in the heady days of full physical distribution a distributer sorted out the logistics of getting your records all around the country, or even the world, as well as negotiating your way into the best retailers with extremely limited and highly competitive shelf space. Nowadays the distributer acts on your behalf (as a small or unsigned band at least) to circumnavigate the made-up, arbitrary, unnecessary and frankly unfair rules imposed by the main digital retailers – but that’s beside the point.

So let’s talk about the current alternative. The Subscription model does exactly what it says on the tin. Users subscribe to a service, for various monthly costs (including nothing), and are given access to the full database of songs offered by the company. You don’t own the music, any more than when you listen to the radio, but crucially, you can listen to what you want, when you want.

Let’s take Spotify as an example. The listener is offered unlimited access to 8 million songs for no charge. So where does the money come from? There are two main revenue streams. Firstly advertising and secondly a monthly subscription fee of £9.99 for those who want higher quality audio and no adverts. Now it doesn’t take a genius to see that this represents excellent value for the listener, but what about the artist? The spin from those championing the subscription model runs along the lines of how wonderful it is for unsigned acts and small labels; that they are able to “get their songs out there”. What’s more, because the data basing is so straightforward artists can be paid for the exact amount of listens they generate, something which compares very well against the archaic system of sampling radio and tv broadcast output currently favoured by the PRS – a system which intrinsically overlooks smaller artists and disproportionally rewards uber-selling major label acts. So we’re heading in the right direction, oui? Well let’s look a little more closely…

The actual deals done between labels (or aggregators) and spotify remain secret, but I personally know many people who have songs on Spotify with thousands of plays who have received no more than a couple of pence in total. You’d be forgiven for thinking that, as usual when there’s a change in the market, it’s the little guy that suffers, but you’d be wrong – in a way. Lady Gaga was reportedly paid $167 for 1million plays of “Poker Face” in a 5 month period. So, in the eyes of Spotify at least, it seems we are all equally worthless (to paraphrase Gunnery Sergeant Hartman).

Gunnary Sgt. Hartman – recently appointed the new CEO of Spotify

This year isn’t going too well for the subscription model with only one company in the world (Pandora) making a profit, raising questions about the sustainability of the model as it stands. So surely iTunes et al. needn’t be quaking in their boots? But perhaps they should? Let’s not forget how the major labels dismissed digital distribution as a flash in the pan back in the ‘90s, and how meteorically it came back to bite them in the proverbial. The explosion of digital piracy was really down to the music industry’s lack of foresight, a massive 80’s cokeover and a desperate but doomed desire to maintain the status quo. They failed comprehensively to take the bull by the horns and develop a legal download system when the technology was first made available to them. The fact that it took a computer technology company to step in and calm the waters while the music industry flailed around in a panic-induced seizure of litigation and deflated lethargy should be an eternal source of humiliation.

Surely Apple have their wits about them and won’t let the same thing happen to them. They have the brand power and capital to take on anyone slyly encroaching on their territory, but they appear a little slow off the blocks. Despite the massive losses made in the burgeoning subscription sector, there are a few telltale signals that things could brighten up for those companies able to ride out the storm. We don’t need to look too far into the future (in fact we only need to look a few thousand miles away, to Japan) to see where mobile phone technology is headed. Phones are starting to look and feel increasingly like genuine complete media centres and with mobile WiFi getting faster, better and more affordable it doesn’t take much to imagine 8million songs in your pocket for £10 a month looking like a pretty tempting for the consumer. Spotify, who most certainly haven’t been napping, released Spotify Mobile in September ‘09, and surely it won’t be long before we are offered the first music subscription service as part of a standard mobile phone contract. As we saw with mp3, it only takes a small leap in technology to bring the incumbent system to its knees. At the turn of the millennium, it was cheap broadband. At the start this decade, will the new breed of media-phones be the game-changer?

Recording and arranging live strings is a pipe dream for most musically minded people. But it needn’t be that way. The great Marty McFly once said:

“If you set your mind to it, you can accomplish anything”.

With this in mind Rich Thomas, MD of “Brother And Bones” arranged the parts, got the players together and headed for the studio. I think the results speak for themselves…

So BBC 6 music is to be axed and cool folk all around the country are temporarily enraged. But is it all down to the evil BBC monster? And who are we to tell the Beeb how to run its business anyway?

Well, we’re the licence payers and the BBC is obliged to provide us with quality and varied programming. In fact the BBC’s Public Service Mandate requires the corporation to “provide properly balanced services consisting of a wide range of subject matters” and crucially, to “serve the tastes and needs of different audiences”.

The wording here is all pretty vague and impossible to quantify. But fear not, good citizens! The BBC Trust (a small collection of investment bankers, solicitors and ex-Beeb cronies) is here to speak for YOU, the people. To look after your interests and ensure the BBC sticks to every flimsily worded sentence in the mandate. So… we can all sleep easy knowing that our tastes, no matter how left field, will be catered for.

But a huge number of people feel let down by this decision. You could be forgiven for thinking that without 6 Music, the BBC fails to provide for those interested in a varied mix of contemporary music from established acts and up and coming artists. My rare forays into Radio 1’s daytime programming have always uncovered the same truth – A tedious cycle of the same dozen or so songs on loop all week. The “listener requests” are quite simply incredulous – “Please could you play Scouting For Girls? I’ve only heard it 400 times this week!”. Do these people really exist, for whom 10 plays of the same song in a day is so inadequate that they actually feel the need to phone the station?

It seems topical to maintain impartiallity so I will say that I’ve always been impressed by Radio 1’s nightime programming, with Gilles Peterson, Rob Da Bank and Huw Stephens all championing a deliciously spicy mix of emerging talent and unsung heroes. But why should these tangy treats be reserved for jetlag sufferers and night shift workers?

People understand that the BBC is not recession-proof and at a time when the word “cut” has never seen so much action in the press, it’s inevitable that even the most swollen, bloated waistlines will be looking to tighten their belts. What’s proving very bothersome for the BBC to justify comes down to a numbers game. 6 Music’s budget is simply so small, relatively, that many feel that savings could be made by a collection of smaller cuts elsewhere. Here’s a few numbers that go a long way towards justifying those feelings:

£9m – The annual budget of BBC 6 Music
£109m – The annual budget of BBC Radio 4
£1.2bn – The annual budget of BBC 1
£6m – Annual salary of Jonathon Ross
£2m – Annual salary of Jeremy Clarkson
£1m – Cost of the 2010 world cup studio
1.98m – Weekly listeners of Radio 3 (with an annual budget of £36.6m)
800,000 – Weekly listeners of 6 Music (with an annual budget of £9m)

So it’s all the Beeb’s fault for failing to understand its audiences needs, right? Wrong! It’s our own stupid faults! That’s right ladies and gentlemen, as a public we’re just too happy to be spoon-fed turd until it starts sweating out of our pores. The major labels and Radio 1 conspire to serve up a limited menu of bland, unpalatable mush that the general public fill their faces with until they puke.

We, as a public, simply haven’t created enough demand for varied, eclectic music and emerging talent. On the whole, nobody cares about a band or artist until Jo bloody Wiley (apparently Britain’s foremost musicologist) has officially confirmed that they’re cool. It’s up to all of us to prove that Britain’s taste in music hasn’t putrefied. E-Petitions and facebook campaigns won’t save 6 Music, but tuning in en masse and leaving the Beeb no viable excuse to axe the station almost certainly will.

You know what to do…

Genuine human greatness doesn’t happen often, but recently in Forest Hill, Sri, our friendly local shopkeeper ordered in Drifter bars especailly for us and the clients of The Fold Studios. Who says London is a cold and faceless place!

Autotune, Vocalign, re-triggering, quantise, even the simple copy and paste function. To some, they’re vital tools of the trade. To others, they are responsible for an invasion of sterile, diluted and de-humanised music across our airwaves.

So where to begin? First thing’s first, how do we define cheating? And what exactly is pure and free from technical tampering? It was once widely opined that compression was “cheating”. When it was first used, it was often referred to as “lazy man’s faders” – the inattentive engineer’s easy way of reducing peak levels in order to optimise the signal level going to tape. Nowadays, compression is one of the most basic and requisite tools in any recording studio.

After the advent of multitrack recording, the age the overdub dawned. George Martin and The Beatles famously stretched the technology to its extremes in the ’60s, even arguably giving birth to dance music by running reels of tape out of the room, down the corridor, round another tape machine and back again on Revolver’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” thereby creating the first ever drum loops. In 1969, Abbey Road was recorded almost completely separately, with the Beatles rarely in the studio at the same time. Is this a magical feat of audiological illusion, or is it just a con? After all, it’s recorded to sound like an ensemble project. Of course, building up a track separately is now the most common form of recording bands.

In 1975, Queen were the latest in a long line of notable dirty cheats, using bounces on newly available 24-track tape to create 180 separate overdubs for the vocals of Bohemian Rhapsody (“but that’s not possible in real life!” I hear you cry).

These days it seems studio engineers have almost God-like powers when it comes to manipulating music. And perhaps more importantly, having access to this kind of power no longer comes with its own mortgage! But, getting back to the original topic, is it a good thing, or is it going to be the ever-anticipated “Death Of Music”? Well, just like police brutality, doesn’t it all come down to what’s appropriate? I would argue that the use of autotune and other pitchshifting effects on “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” by Daft Punk is progressive and innovative, whereas its use to keep Katie Price’s vocals palatable to enough people to make a few quick bucks for a major label is shameful and reprehensible. Still, at least it’ll keep Britain’s silicon and botox industries thriving.

As the mildly inspirational Toby Maguire once said: “With great power comes great responsibility”. I have to say, I know exactly how that crazy little spider feels. Some genres of music are almost defined by their use of technology. That’s why many pop producers reach for the autotune even with the best singers. Is it even possible any more to produce a current-sounding, slick pop/R&B track without outrageous use of vocal processing and rhythmic quantising? Not unless you manage to successfully reinvent the genre. But by unthinkingly and automatically applying the same mindset to an young rock band with all the palpable energy and excitement of a group of young musicians driven by passion and self belief, I certainly believe you risk losing something special.

It’s worth remembering that Nina Simone sometimes fell slightly flat, Miles Davis occasionally split a note and Bob Dylan, well, let’s be honest, nobody in their right minds would even sign him these days.

Well done to Naz Adamson for correctly identifying that a ‘Moogerfooger’ was the instrument that created the sound wave in the picture. Naz wins 50% off a days recording at The Fold Studios, not bad hey! The next ‘Guess the Soundwave’ competition will be coming soon, watch this space.

Guess what musical instrument made the waveform below and YOU could win 50% off a days studio hire at The Fold Studios.

Can you work it out?

To enter all you have to do is leave a reply to this blog with your: Name, Email and Answer. We will only except the first answer you give so make it count!

The closing date for this competetion is Sunday 28th March. All correct answers will be put into a hat and the winner will be annonced at the end of the month.

Good luck!