GRollins

I'm sensing that there's a disconnect here...the simple observation that Person X has a YouTube channel or perhaps only a couple of videos is not the same as being able to say--of certain knowledge, not guesswork--that they're making anything like the money they would be making if they were gigging regularly and bringing in, say...pick a figure...$500 a week? $200 a week? Are you guys really saying there are that many people bringing in that sort of money streaming? Really? I'm not talking about Pat Metheny (who YouTube's AI seems to think I want to see*). I'm talking about the dozen local bands in Your Town, USA. Are they making even $50 each per week online? Is there anything like a realistic possibility that all the members of all the bands in all the towns in all the world will even make $1 this week? How about next week? The week after? It ain't happening and it ain't gonna happen. The money stays in the streaming companies. It doesn't make it to the bands. To be brutal about it, the vast majority of those bands aren't good enough to make it out in the world anyway. They're fine in their element, meaning the local bar scene, where they play loud music that people can dance and drink to, but the world doesn't want or need to see a video of them performing the four billionth interpretation of Free Bird, because that's what they've put out there. I'm not saying they don't have a right to post that (let's leave the legal-beagle copyright stuff out of this for now), I'm just saying that the sheer volume of mundane posted material makes it difficult...nay, impossible to find anything of greater import. And if there's another Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones out there, we'll never know it because they're buried under the dross. And more to the point, that hypothetical Great Band won't make any money because: a) They're not going to find their audience, so they'll get some views, but not enough b) To the extent that they're able to gain some momentum, the streaming company keeps the money the band would otherwise rightfully earn in a fair world Which means the members of the Great Band can't even buy a meal, much less new gear. Which just plain sucks. Grey *I want to make clear that I have nothing against Pat Metheny. In fact, I like some of his stuff. But dayuuuum, YouTube's AI is friggin' obsessed with Metheny--thinks I need to mainline his stuff 24/7. Uh, no thanks. There are several observations to be made, but I'll restrict myself to one for the moment--Google (YouTube's owner) has vast amounts of money with which to hire very smart programmers, and yet they still can't quite get me hooked up with the kind of thing I want to see/hear. How much longer will it take to get the AI thing sorted out? One year? Five years? Ten? I'm thinking five to ten and wouldn't be surprised if it was longer. AI has been "almost there" for twenty years or more. Progress is being made, but it's slow. Neural networks may be the ticket. Or maybe this could all turn into some sort of dystopian hell by the year 2025. Let's make a date to start a thread in 2025 and have a retrospective as to how things turned out, looking back to 2021.

Streaming is essentially musical masturbation that you're desperately hoping someone will pay to watch. Just as sex is more fun with a real, live human, a band on stage with a crowd on the floor is a whole 'nother level from watching a band cavort in an empty room, pretending to have fun. Maybe they could put a bunch of inflatable sex dolls in the seats, watching the band...no?...I didn't think so, either. That would only serve to emphasize the unreality of it all. Not to mention being tasteless. Yes, you can record a song as a studio recording--an ordinary music video--but lacking an MTV-like platform to push the video it will be lost amongst all the other music videos that other earnest bands are releasing in hopes that their band will be the one that magically floats to the top of the heap. Meanwhile, there are a thousand other bands that are also releasing their music videos. The end result is that no one gets heard sufficiently to generate momentum. As I said elsewhere, the only way out of the morass is to have a curated stream where one or more people separate the wheat from the chaff and promote it, even if only passively. It could, in theory, be done by John Q. Public, but it would take a lot of time and work. A company could do it more easily, simply because they have more resources. A good AI algorithm would be a godsend, but the oddities that YouTube coughs up show that it's pretty hard to get that to work. Honestly, my bet's on the AI approach in the long run, but it's going to be a while before that's "radio ready," so to speak. Grey

Ran across this and thought I'd throw it in: Slashdot digest of the state of streaming income For those who aren't familiar with Slashdot, they're a sort of feeder for news of a geeky/nerdy nature. They provide links to the original articles or you can just read their synopsis of whatever's going on. Grey

Seems PayPal is getting shunted aside. Maybe some of their employees should dust off their resumes. Grey

Sadly Chris is gone, so that's one important perspective that's been lost already. Grey

I can't see why that should be al that difficult. Granted the AI's performance might be a little stilted, but you should be able to grant it a percentage of leeway in interpretation of note durations, etc. Hell, I've got a Eurorack sequencer that allows for note and timing variations--you assign percentage probabilities that it will vary and establish parameters as to how much variation is allowed. Should be a cinch. Make allowances for optical recognition of a handwritten score, though. Grey

I agree with what timwat said. Don't obsess over who knows what (or doesn't). It's the music that matters, not how you get there. Grey

The "your music sucks" possibility probability was why I was saying that there is a need for people to curate the vast quantities of stuff that has been uploaded to date. I have no doubt that there's worthwhile music out there, but finding it is a vexing problem. YouTube's suggestion algorithm is an example of what's needed, but the fact that it's notorious for bad suggestions shows that AIs have a way to go before they're up to the task. Humans can still do the job better--at least for the time being. And as for soi disant experts: My ex dragged me to a Christmas party years ago, sponsored by her boss. Not having much in common with her coworkers or their spouses, I was wandering about looking for a bookshelf to scan in order to get an X-ray of her boss's mentality. The search for books was in vain, which was an X-ray result of its own, in a manner of speaking. The boss, perhaps sensing that I was up to no good, apprehended me, saying, "You're an author, right? You need to come over here and meet so-and-so. You'll have so much to talk about!" The tone of her voice didn't bode well, but I didn't get much choice in the matter as she seized me by the collar and dragged me bodily across the room, feet skipping to retain my balance. The guy in question sure looked the part: Sweater with patched elbows, unkempt hair, etc. I shrugged and said, "Hi. Boss-lady says you're an author. What do you write?" He launched into a description of his writing, but his monologue soon began to drift away from writing, trending more towards what a genius he was at the business end of things. That seemed a little odd, so thinking that perhaps he also dabbled in editing or agenting, I asked him a few questions to clarify. Well, no, he wasn't an editor or an agent, he was an author. Okay, fine, but...and before I could get in another word he started in, telling me how he had it all figured out. Er, okay, but...and he was off and running again, telling me he was an expert at the business, that he had a foolproof plan, and so forth. By this point, I was getting the impression that maybe something was off, so I asked him where he'd been published. Nowhere, it turned out. All his stories were in the bottom of a drawer...but he knew everything about the industry and.... I told him I had to go to the bathroom and carefully avoided being in his proximity for the rest of the evening. Grey

While I agree that there's a lot of rancor in the air, I'm not clear how the improv opening to Smoke On The Water qualifies as a turf war or political litmus test...? Did I miss a post or two? Grey

Musicians with personality always do the best, regardless of the venue or format. Someone who goes on stage and stares at their shoes for the entire show isn't going to engage the audience nearly to the extent that someone who talks to the audience, makes eye contact, or tells a funny story can. That's not unique in any way to YouTube. I was talking to a guy this past weekend about some guitars. He's splitting time between this area and Austin, TX. The splitting consists of getting his house here ready to sell so he can relocate to Austin. One of his reasons for moving is that there's close to zero music here. I know I'd like to move up to the Asheville, NC area: One-tenth the population/five times the music scene. Unbelievable difference. But there's this reality thing that my wife's job is here and the kids are locked into this area, etc. It's fine to talk about moving to someplace hotter in the abstract, but the realities of the matter tend to take precedence. I just applied my Craig's List test--Asheville has roughly twice the musical instruments for sale (remember: ~1/10 the population) as the Columbia, SC CL does. Charlotte has vastly more, of course. Charleston is roughly the same, though they're smaller population-wise. Atlanta, like Charlotte, is huge by comparison. Etc. For some reason, central SC is a vacuum. I've been here 40 years and never been able to come up with a logical explanation why. In theory, the Internet should render that moot. In practice, it doesn't work that way. The point about the returns of selling a single CD vs. revenue from streaming underscores what I've been saying. It's not a matter of "hustle," it's that the current streaming system doesn't work for the musician. You can get online and promote until you're blue in the face, but if no one is watching your channel you're just masturbating your ego in front of a camera. If you're getting one-gazillionth of a cent per download, there's no real difference between one download and ten thousand downloads--a nickel's worth of income per month isn't going to pay for the electricity you burned to make the music in the first place. You're spending more electricity posting your promotion than you'll make back. That's a pretty extreme mismatch in return on investment. Yes, the record companies have always made money off the artists--that's a trivial observation--but even a small artist got to buy a meal with their check, maybe even a used guitar or something. A nickel or even a (gasp!) dime per month just isn't a paying proposition (pun intended). Yeah, I know, Covid doesn't help either, but that should recede into the background once enough people get vaccinated. However, if the online system worked problems like Covid would be irrelevant anyway. Grey

Playing live is not an option in my area. It's damned slim pickin's for a copy band and there are absolutely zero options for original material. Viewing live performances as a way to sort the weak from the strong in a Darwinian sense simply will not work--at least in this neck of the woods (the nearest reasonable music markets are over two hours away, so that's over four hours on the road, minimum, and likely hotel charges unless you expect to get home, unpack, and go to bed at dawn--that burns both time and money). If you want to do original material it's traditional demo-to-the-record-company, Internet, or die. Period. But the current Internet strategy isn't workable, either. There's no money to be made. I keep reading stories about established bands who make ten cents a month because all the profits keep getting Hoovered up by Spotify, et. al. That's all well and fine for the CEO of the company, but it doesn't do anything for the artists fueling the engine. And when there's no profit for the band, there's no effective feedback to tell them what's working and what's not working because if a good song makes zilch and a bad song makes zilch, how do they know where to direct their energy? In a live setting, you can gauge what's working by the audience's reaction, but when there's a plastic wall between you and your listener, their reaction doesn't make it back through your monitor. For that matter, they might not even listen when you're awake, or at home. There's a complete disconnect between the listener and you. They might go so far as to type in "You rock, man!" in a comments section, but then again...they might not. You don't even know if they're there the way you would in a concert venue. You can't make eye contact. You can't make any sort of real time connection. If they type a note to you at 4 AM and you type a response at 7:30 PM, then there's no momentum. You might as well snail mail letters to each other for all the heat you'll generate. There's no substitute for real, live sweaty music that's happening in front of real, starry-eyed listeners. Or, failing that, album sales. "Views" are thin gruel. You can't pay bills with views and you can't tell how people feel about what they heard. And in the background, the CEO buys a new Mercedes. You, on the other hand, might make enough to buy a stick of gum. Maybe. Grey

What is missing from the equation is a workable system for editing (being an author, I think of magazine editors), or to use today's parlance, "curating." You need someone with a consistent view and with taste to filter the wheat from the chaff. NOT someone with an "it's all good" mindset. That's stupid. It's not "all good." A lot of it's terrible. Actually, it would require dozens of editor/curators, each specializing in a genre or sub-genre. There's a market there. People would pay to have someone they could trust to find things they liked. Imagine the Internet without Google. There's a lot of information out there, but finding it without a search engine would be next to impossible. We need a Google for music. It might be too big a job for humans; might take an AI, but then you'd have to train it and that would be a bear. It's not for lack of material. It's for lack of finding stuff that's actually worth your time to listen to. The times that I've dipped a toe in those waters, I consistently found myself drowning in a sea of mediocrity. It simply wasn't worth my time to listen to hours and hours and hours of uninspired crap in the hopes of finding something I actually could get excited about. I don't doubt that it's out there, but getting to it...that's another question. Yes, what I'm describing is essentially parallel to the recording industry as it exists today, but with a side channel. You'd have a choice--pay someone to locate the good stuff, or (and this is where the difference lies) if you have the time and patience (I don't) you could access the raw data representing the incoming music from the hopefuls and make your own choices. We're drowning in music, but if you're honest you'll have to admit that a lot of it isn't worth the bits it's recorded on. Weed out the worst and discard it entirely. Put the mid-level stuff out on one channel and the top-flight stuff on another channel and you might have a workable system. The way things are now, it's only going to get worse and worse and worse... Grey

What would be good would be an inset off in the corner showing the movie action so we could see what the cat's seeing. Grey

This was a new experience for me: Logged on normally, then tagged a thread and discovered that I'd been logged off. Must have caught the logoff thing right on the cusp. Grey

I can't speak for others, but the eLicenser has been nothing but trouble and annoyance for me, Idiot that I am, I tried to crank up my copy of Cubase the other day for the first time in a couple of years and it wouldn't go. Not only was the code thingy out of date, eLicenser itself was out of date. What a kludge. I've been meaning to uninstall Cubase and haven't gotten around to it. I think it's time. Grey

To me, this is the musical equivalent of casting the wrong actor/actress for a part in a movie. You don't hire Arnold Schwarzenegger to play the lead in a teen romance. He's too old and that's not his skill set. He can do action and a wry sort of humor. That's his thing and he's good at it. Don't try to get him out of that range. Hiring Cory Henry to play Jon Lord was a wrong move on the part of those in charge of "casting" the part and it shows. Or, conversely, if the objective was to hire Cory Henry come hell or high water, then they should have chosen material compatible with his strengths. Either way I see it as a fail, at least for that one song. I'm sure the rest of the gig was magical, but that one transition was just wrong. Grey

What the...? Grey

Beware of the foam in fabric stores--the stuff around here is nowhere near dense enough to offer the support a piece of electronics needs in order to be safe. Grey

For that matter, you could make a pretty interesting documentary just on the support people who helped Yes on their way: Eddie Offord and Roger Dean would be the obvious starting points, but there were other names--managers and such--who kept cropping up in YesYears. Grey

Eddie Offord fascinates me in that he was at the helm for both Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. He definitely had an ear for prog. Grey

In the inimitable way that YouTube does, it bores you to tears with a bunch of utterly inane suggestions, then, just when you've given up hope that their algorithm will ever work out who you are and what's important to you, it manages to redeem itself: It's about two hours long and covers the history of the band from the very earliest beginnings up through the early '90s when this was filmed. Interviews with the guys. Concert footage. Stills. People being serious. People being absolutely goofy. The works. For those who are key-centric, it varies widely. On one end of the scale, there's a LOT of Rick Wakeman. On the other, Patrick Moraz barely gets mentioned, so if you're a Moraz fan, don't expect much. I'm still in it, and it's got other links that YouTube thinks I need to look at that (for once) look promising. I'll say this, though...it's one of those things that makes me want to turn around and pick up an instrument and play something...amazing,..you know? Not that I'll ever be worthy to dust Chris Squire's shoes (or Steve Howe's, for that matter), but there's that desire to do something and see if it works out. For those of us who can't seem to find musicians who think beyond 4/4, it's a vicarious visit with some wacky, demented, oddly talented guys who thought that music could be more than just the ordinary--and made it happen. I'll give it four out of five stars. Grey

Surely you're not taking the man seriously! He's using an X-stand. Grey

Thanks...I'd always wondered about that. Grey

Looks as though the self-tapping screws go into channels in the extruded aluminum back. The machine screws, I imagine, go into nuts in the sheet metal part of the enclosure. I don't see what the fuss is about--completely normal. No, I've never taken my Phatty apart; I'm working from the pictures above and could be wrong. For all the fact that I've expressed concerns about some things I've seen/heard regarding Moog, this is not one of them. Normal engineering solution for electronics gear. Yes, you could go to the trouble to tap the channels in the extruded aluminum and use machine screws, but the self-tapping screws will be just fine. Grey

The last time I looked, the Yamaha Motif rack units were still available new, even though they're not in production (got mine used). I've found mine easy to live with and the sounds are good. Yes, it might have been better if they'd gone for a 2U format and designed it to be a bit more knobby, but I find the menus more workable than certain other companies'. It's one of those things where your idea of what's intuitive will determine how you react to a given unit. Grey