John Summit receives cease and desist over Off The Grid Records nameElectronic producer, DJ and label owner John Summit is facing a trademark dispute over the name of his record label, Off the Grid with the owner of dance festival, Off the Grid Campout.

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Mikey Cromie, who runs Off the Grid Campout, has reportedly sent Summit a cease and desist order after attempting to contact the artist and label owner for a year.
It was only when Cromie and his legal team finally decided to send the order that Summit responded, according to the festival organiser. At this point, Summit and his team tried purportedly to come to an agreement where the two names could coexist.
After this was refused, Summit and his team also allegedly offered to buy the name for an undisclosed sum, to which Cromie said it would have to be a “life-changing amount of money”, he says in a Facebook post.
Summit will not pay this vast sum, he says in a tweet, and claims is now being sued for, what he says is a “7+ figure” sum of money unless he changes the name of his record label, which is home to releases by the likes of Max Styler, Mau P and Kyle Walker. Meanwhile, Cromie has responded via a Facebook post, writing that at no point did he or his team demand a seven-figure sum.
In the Facebook post, Cromie goes on to say that Summit’s fans have since started to bully him:
“They said they weren’t willing to spend that type of money and that was that. Again, no threats or demands of seven figures. If you know me, you know my intentions have been pure from day one.
“His community is attempting to bully me and already has one of my account taken down. With too many hateful message[s] to count. I’m going dark for a bit to let this all blow over. But this is 100% what happened!”

This is a developing story. We’ll be providing more information as more facts come to light.
Find out more about Off The Grid Records. Find out more about Off The Grid Campout.
The post John Summit receives cease and desist over Off The Grid Records name appeared first on MusicTech.

The Importance Of Being Loud: Ohma is here to change the microphone as you know itIn December 2022, an inaugural blog post appeared on Ohma World’s website titled: Say Goodbye To Imposter Syndrome. The piece, written by Ohma’s co-founder Charlene Gibbs, implores audio creatives to stave off that debilitating inner voice by acknowledging their accomplishments, communing with supportive allies and accepting help.
Gibbs, you might say, has skin in the game.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
The microphone market is one of the hardest corners of music technology to break into. With a century-spanning heritage of iconic designs, industry heavyweights like Neumann, AEA and Telefunken have built their names over decades, characterising entire albums and becoming talismanic to revered studios everywhere. If there’s one place a new developer is likely to find themselves with imposter syndrome on the brain, it’s here.
This is due, in part, to it being an inhospitable environment for novel ideas. The design ethos and the aesthetic of studio mics have changed relatively little since early innovations – not least demonstrated by clone after clone of famous designs hitting the market every year. This, if nothing else, only shores up a seemingly prevalent view that success in the mic business is about looking back more than it is about looking forward. Even Teenage Engineering’s recently released CM-15 microphone looks relatively quiet next to the company’s otherwise maverick line of products.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
It’s a little like Scotch whisky or cigars, whose branding and culture remain stubbornly traditional, to the extent that fresh designs are perhaps more likely to elicit scepticism than excitement. We put this to Gibbs and fellow Ohma co-founder Sammy Rothman, speaking from San Francisco and Los Angeles respectively, who share a laugh.
“To be honest, this was a no-brainer for us,” Gibbs explains. “Sammy and I love art and we love design; we love fashion. And this innate part of our personality and our interests is always going to lend itself to the products that we make, no matter what. We couldn’t just deny ourselves. That’s not healthy.
“We’ve worked at microphone companies that have some of the most striking-looking microphones. So we’re used to people saying, ‘Whoa, I’ve never seen a microphone that looks like this before!’ And then they put it up and they’re like, ‘Wow, that sounds even better than it looks!’
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
“It’s an uncomfortable [position] to sit in,” they continue, “especially in an industry that’s so anachronistic. But the thing is, we were so confident that we could package our technical abilities into a design far beyond the way the industry has been; the way it clutches its pearls.
“We thought, ‘This really can be a kind of tabula rasa project. A fresh start.’ And being loud about identifying as queer played a large part, too. In the world of audio, that’s just not a thing.”
You could say that Ohma offers two microphones or that it offers a near-limitless number of microphones. The company currently offers one ribbon mic and one large-diaphragm condenser mic, both presented in exactly the same body design. However, Ohma’s range of patterned magnetic mic screens are fully interchangeable; each designed to impart its own distinct sonic character to the two otherwise all-rounder designs.
The current range of five available screen designs was purportedly whittled down from dozens of candidates, and the result is a bold arsenal of physical tonal tools. Simply named Motif, Holes, Stripes, Scales and Windows, the screens promise the most tonal responses you could hope for from these two microphone types.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
The Holes screen rolls off the low end and accentuates brightness, for example, while Stripes is best suited for mid-range work such as electric guitar. Scales imparts a more dynamic mic-like response for near-field recording.
These are all charmingly named, meticulously well-built and make for one drop-dead gorgeous-looking microphone. But does it make any real sonic difference? The answer to that question begins with Gibbs’ and Rothman’s experience – along with Ohma co-founder Nathan Bowers – working for legendary mic manufacturer AEA; the company responsible for such vaunted microphones as the R84, R92 and formidable stereo R88.
“We learned a lot there,” explains Rothman. “Our first real project was the N8, which is still one of my favourite mics in the world. But our real baby was the KU5A. After we left, we thought, ‘We want to make our own stuff. And we want to look at our mics and feel like this is fun, that this is cool.’ We wanted it to have the look of something like a nice guitar. People can be obsessed with their guitar colour, and we feel the same way about microphones. So we wanted to do something different.”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Variety wasn’t initially high on the agenda. With more standard mesh being worked into early designs, a simple gesture to try and aesthetically rework this aspect of the mic led to interchanging screens.
Rothman continues: “Charlene was like, ‘Dude, I’m so sick of looking at wire metal. Do you think we could try some different designs? Let’s try some vector packs. Let’s see if we can find just one thing that sounds good, that doesn’t look like everything else.’ So we made up 40 designs and did listening tests. They all sounded different – 30 of them sounded like trash.”
It was a distaste for fiddly repair jobs that subsequently gave way to the idea to use magnets. “I hate screws,” confesses Rothman. “I hate how screws look. We all hated servicing mics at AEA, especially the RCA mics, because opening them was just such a pain in the ass!
“So with magnets, we wouldn’t have to unscrew things. It would just go together. And then that’s when the idea came: ‘Oh, wait, with no screws we don’t have to just commit to just one of these. We could have five of them. There are things we love about all of these! It’s basically polyamory for microphones! [laughs]”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
The company could therefore retain focus on a single-body design with just two transducer types. But surely, we ask, for the kind of versatility promised by Ohma, further variety was needed under the hood? Not so, we’re told.
“Coming from AEA, our ribbon is the same ribbon that you’ll find in a R44,” says Rothman. “So many different companies use the same few capsules, and it’s similar with the ribbon industry. But every mic sounds so different because of all the different materials in front of it. And yet they vary in price so much. The AEA R84, the R92, the N8, the N22, the R88, the R44 – they all have exactly the same ribbon.”
Key parts are just as ubiquitous in the world of condenser microphones, if not more so. “There are so many [Neumann] U47 clones out there, and half of them are using the same capsule,” explains Rothman. “All these companies are literally buying capsules from the same, like, six factories. And the main difference is the mesh that they’re using, or the body that they’re using, or the circuit that they’re using. The transducer does have an impact on the sound, but it’s the mesh. More so even than the body shape.”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
These tenets are important, to say the least, and surprisingly little-known. We suggest that it’s as if having interchangeable screens is another way of teaching users what to look for in a mic, as well as about how much the physical properties of a mic impact its sound. Is education close to Ohma’s heart?
“Absolutely,” replies Rothman. “Think of it like a tiny room for your capsule, or a tiny room for your ribbon. A room might be really reverberant. But if you put up panels, you’re going to change that. It’s the same exact thing with a microphone, I like to say: ‘the sound goes through one side of the screen and comes out sounding different on the other.’ That’s how simple it is. I mean, having swappable screens is really cool but I think the coolest part about this is that nobody has used these designs on microphones before. They’re 100 per cent unique.”
“The micro-acoustical structure of a microphone impacts the sound,” adds Gibbs. “People see mics and ask, ‘Why is it like this? Why is there so much of it?’ It’s because that actually changes the sound of the microphone. How it looks is how it sounds. So we wanted to take that information and put it into a slimmer, more manageable package. And also bring that mindset into condenser mic land.
“It’s also an homage to our younger selves, who just couldn’t afford a lot of microphones,” they continue. “There were times when we had just one microphone and had to record everything with it. It was obnoxious: everything turned out the same and had the same layering of frequencies. And we didn’t really recognise that back then. With these screens, you can have one microphone, but with all these different options.”
Ohma’s condenser mic’s edge-terminated, single backplate capsule, affectionately dubbed ‘The Debby’, is an original design – a rare thing in the microphone world. With its leads attached to the edge of the capsule and without a centre chamber, it promises to mitigate unwanted harshness and deliver a smoother response than you might expect from a large diaphragm condenser of the Ohma’s type. Rothman is keen to convey the significance of a microphone company designing and manufacturing its own capsules, and it’s soon easy to see why.

“There are essentially three capsule designs being used by almost 95 per cent of microphones in the world,” says Rothman. “When we started doing capsules, we knew we wanted to do something different and original.”
After years of tweaking a design sparked, of all things, by a mid-century trade magazine article with hand-drawn schematics, a capsule design was finally ready for testing.
“We spent about a week recording over 50 microphones – from vintage all the way to modern – and comparing them to our capsule,” recalls Rothman. “And the coolest part was that it was so different to every vintage microphone. But it stood up. It was just different. And that’s when we were like, ‘Fuck. I guess we are making our own capsules for this company.’
“The reason most companies aren’t making their own capsules is because they don’t know how,” he continues.
“It’s not something that you can just look up online and find, you have to be taught how to do it. And for years, we did our own research trying to figure this out. And it wasn’t until I found a couple of mentors who really taught me that I learned how to do this. One of them, Tim, makes the CK12, which is what they use in Flea microphones. He is one of the kindest, most amazing human beings in the world. This is one reason why we’re able to sell our mics for less than you’d think they would cost is because we know how to do it and we’re doing it in-house.”
Key to the Ohma manifesto, as you may have noticed, is a rather strong persuasion towards colour.
Ohma microphones are hand-painted in a vast variety of ceramic-based finishes and the company frequently announces ‘drops’ of limited-run colour schemes, as well as fully customisable colour schemes. You can even bear your Ohma with a logo of your choice if desired.
“Full of colour, full of life,” proclaims Gibbs on the Ohma website. “That’s why we offer customisable colour options for our microphones – it allows people to make a statement about who they are and what they stand for.”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Proudly wearing its LGBT-owned status on its sleeve, the company sees visual customisation and self-expression not as peripheral to its products, but essential.
Just last month at LA’s Pride Parade, American artist Janelle Monae was spotted singing into an ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)-themed Ohma microphone sporting the bright blue, pink and white colours of the Trans flag, and Ohma now has its own performance video series spotlighting the music of queer artists.
“We want our customers to feel like they are creating something that is truly special and reflects their values and identity,” Gibbs continues. “As someone who identifies as non-binary, the rewarding sense of fluidity the Ohma microphone offers is something I take tremendous joy in.”
It’s refreshing to witness: Ohma is a company as focused on making a positive contribution to the culture of recording as it is to the mic cabinets of studios. It even has a side-business upcycling off-cuts from the manufacturing process into jewellery – something we can safely say we’ve not seen from a microphone company before.
Ohma is a step into the unknown, but if this is the shape of things to come, the future of microphones may just prove every bit as venerable as its past.
Check out Ohma’s microphone-creating experience at ohmaworld.com 
The post The Importance Of Being Loud: Ohma is here to change the microphone as you know it appeared first on MusicTech.

Witch Pig Dungeon Synth The Dungeon Synth Kontakt instrument was inspired by the dark underground lofi ambient synth based sounds that grew out of the early 90s black metal scene. It is designed for the full paid... Read More

Spotify is raising its price in the US and 52 other markets. How much money will that make the music industry?Whether you take a punchy or conservative view, Spotify is about to make a load more money
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Utopia axes 5% of staff as company shuts down R&D operations in the UK and FinlandA spokesperson told MBW that, 'Utopia is currently streamlining its organization to increase efficiency'.
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Spitfire Audio’s Summer Selects Spitfire Audio have announced the start of their Summer Selects sale, with savings of up to 50% available on bundles, and selected individual products subject to reductions of up to 40%.

Female* Producer Prize winners announced by Sony Music Entertainment Germany and Music Women* GermanySony Music Entertainment Germany and Music Women* Germany, a non-profit artist association, have announced the winners of this year’s Female* Producer Prize.
Now in its second year, the prize aims to support the music careers of female-identifying producers across Germany.

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The seven winners from the 2023 cohort will receive production grants, vouchers for music equipment and a producer workshop at Sony Music Germany’s Circle Studios, as reported by Billboard.
They will also be added to the female producer register at Sony Music and NEUBAU Music Management, providing them with access to various labels and artists. As well as this, partners Sony Music Publishing and the Female Producer Collective will offer coaching sessions for the winners too.
This year’s winners are as follows:

Mimski
Evîn
Kota No Uta
Mona Yim
Aufmischen
Sheyda Minia
Just Honest

Credit: Sony Music Entertainment Germany
The seven winners were selected by a jury of five, and came out on top from a total of 150 applicants. In addition to the seven selected applicants, a shortlist of 20 applicants will also be added to Sony Music and NEUBAU’s female producer register.
“The great response and the enormously high level of over 150 applications this year have not only shown how overdue the Female Producer Prize was, but above all, how many highly competent and visionary female music producers there are out there,” says Jovanka v. Wilsdorf, jury member and initiator of the Female* Producer Prize, in a statement. “Visibility develops a radiance that creates measurable success.”
Sony Music Columbia Records Germany head of A&R Sarah Schneider, who also served on the jury, also adds: “More female and non-binary producers means more perspectives! This is again demonstrated by the outstanding quality of the many applications received. As a record label, we want to apply industry-wide approaches and tools to actively move forward to effect a change in the status quo.”
An award ceremony will take place on 14 September.
You can also read the full press release for more information.
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Spotify increases Premium subscription price for the first timeAfter 12 years, Spotify is increasing the monthly price of Premium for the first time.
Since the streaming platform first launched Premium in the US in 2011, it kept the monthly price at $9.99. However, it’s increasing the price by one dollar to $10.99, the company says in a new statement.
“So that we can keep innovating, we are changing our Premium prices across a number of markets around the world,” Spotify says. “These updates will help us continue to deliver value to fans and artists on our platform.”
In the UK, not only will the price of an individual Spotify Premium subscription go up from £9.99 to £10.99, but the cost of a Duo membership is also rising from £13.99 to £14.99, and a Family membership will now set you back £17.99 rather than £16.99. Student memberships are remaining the same at £5.99.
Prices are also increasing in France, too, at similar rates to the UK and US.
While it might not be welcome news, it’s not exactly unexpected. Over the last few months, most of Spotify’s streaming rivals have also announced price increases. Apple first rose prices in October last year, while Amazon followed suit in January.
Tidal and YouTube Music then announced increases this month, before Spotify. For all platforms, the main price increase in the US is the same. A single monthly membership has increased from $9.99 to $10.99.
Meanwhile, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek hinted at an increase during an earnings call in April, saying that the streaming platform was “ready to raise prices”. The Wall Street Journal reported last week (21 July) that a price rise was thought to be imminent. That turns out to have been the case.
As of 31 March, Spotify had 210 million paying subscribers globally – a 15% increase year on year – and 515 million monthly active users.
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Get Paid Guide for UK musicians launched to help artists understand data and royaltiesA Get Paid Guide has been launched for UK musicians to help those self-releasing music better understand metadata and royalties.

READ MORE:  UK music industry to start improving streaming services’ metadata

Created as a partnership between PRS for Music, The Ivors Academy, the Music Publishers Association (MPA), and the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), the Get Paid Guide helps to explain complex data and recording codes.
The guide features short explainer videos on International Standard Musical Work (ISWC), and International Standard Recording (ISRC) codes, and it also offers a “one-stop checklist” for managing music data. You can also take part in a quiz to check if you are “royalties ready”.
The guide also includes help with frequently asked questions, including the use of pseudonyms and what to do when covering another artist’s song.
Fiona Bevan, acclaimed artist and Board Director at The Ivors Academy, says of the guide (via DJ mag): “Without accurate song data you won’t get paid. It is so important that creators get this right from the beginning.
“This guide simplifies what seems complex by helping songwriters, composers, managers, and publishers understand what they need to know and what they need to do to make sure they aren’t missing out on royalties. I hope it puts more money in songwriters’ pockets by taking some of the mystery out of data.”
Michelle Escoffery, award-winning songwriter and President of the PRS Members’ Council, also adds: “The Get Paid Guide is a crucial handbook for songwriters. Getting the data right at the point of works registration is vitally important and is often the difference between being paid or not.
“This guide brings us closer to achieving a healthier metadata ecosystem overall. I encourage all music creators to use this guide, get fluent with the relevant codes and empower themselves to get paid accurately and quickly.”
Find out more on how you can utilise your metadata on the Get Paid Guide website. You can also read the full press release over at The Ivors Academy.
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Free Touring for Musicians Berklee course launches on CourseraLearn the basics of successful touring with a new free course created by Hypebot Editor and longtime booking agent Bruce Houghton for Berklee and Coursera. This short four-lesson Berklee Coursera. Continue reading
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Have all of Daft Punk’s Face To Face samples finally been discovered?Daft Punk’s 2001 track Face To Face features a lot of samples. Over the years, musicians and producers have been trying to track down all of the original sources for each one – has the plunderphonic puzzle finally been solved?

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One YouTube user under the name of undrtune may have finally pieced all of the samples together, having shared a final update video of the journey to tracking each sample used. “Thanks to all sample hunters and Le Phunk for the sample breakdown,” reads the video’s description.
Todd Edwards, the famed producer and vocalist who worked with Daft Punk on the 2001 track, as well as 2013’s Fragments Of Time, has previously said that there were 70 samples used across the song and fans have struggled to locate all of them.
In undrtune’s videos, the user plays through each sample in Ableton Live, sharing its source next to it. Undrtune’s most recent sample tracking update of Face To Face before this recent instalment came three years ago.
You can check out the “Final Update” video below.

Another YouTube user, known as ‘the’, has uploaded a video showing you how to recreate the Discovery deep cut in 32 minutes. It, too, is an impressively close recreation of Daft Punk’s original.

In 2016, Todd Edwards gave fans a helping hand by showcasing some of the samples in isolation, followed by their positions in the final sequence. Posting to Instagram, he said that he was “re-creating the sample arrangement of Daft Punk’s and my collab of Face To Face for a discussion about their album Discovery…”

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A post shared by Todd Edwards (@toddedwards3000)

Edwards had previously branded his collaboration with Daft Punk for Fragments Of Time as “life-changing.”
“And I’m not being dramatic,” he explained on Apple Music 1 with Zane Lowe. “It started a new journey in my life and it wasn’t intentionally like, ‘oh, they saved me!’ but it definitely had a major impact.”
He later added that he had foreseen the band’s split in 2021: “I wasn’t shocked by the news because it’s again, I know them on a personal level, so I know the inner workings of… There’s the friendships there. It’s almost like when you think about it, it’s like a partnership can be like a marriage to a certain extent.
“And you have your ups and downs, and it’s just like if the chemistry isn’t there anymore, if it’s just not that you’re not melding together the way you used to, that it’s better to not force something and then come out with something that you feel is sub-par, than to just make it finite.”
The post Have all of Daft Punk’s Face To Face samples finally been discovered? appeared first on MusicTech.

New report predicts 51% increase in music trade revenues by 2030Midia Research, an entertainment industry analytics company, has revealed its forecasts for the music industry’s growth until 2030.

READ MORE: The music production industry has a gender problem – here’s how we can fix it

The most notable predictions from its Global Market Music Forecasts report, which was published in June, are a 51% increase in global recorded music trade revenues, reaching $42.4 billion by the end of the decade.
Additionally, retail spending is projected to grow to $87.1 billion. Midia also predicts that the number of paid music subscribers worldwide will reach a whopping 1.1 billion by 2030, with the majority of growth coming from Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Rest of World regions. In 2022, according to Statista, this number sat at just 616 million.
The Midia report follows a similar prediction by Goldman Sachs. The investment banking company, in its Music In The Air June report, instead projected a slightly higher rise to $50.1 billion of recorded music trade revenues in 2030 and a similar figure of 1.2 billion paid subscribers.
While these reports focus on consumer revenue, we recently were given the predictions of the music tech industry by musician, content creator and analyst, Benn Jordan. He gravely envisioned layoffs for Moog, Apple and Spitfire Audio, saying, “I honestly hope I’m wrong.”
In his findings, he saw that Native Instruments was acquired by Francisco Partners along with other music companies for around €773 million, raising doubts about its long-term success. Speculations suggest that Native Instruments may acquire Spitfire Audio and incorporate it into a subscription service, possibly leading to layoffs. Even Apple is predicted to face layoffs, Jordan predicts, which would be the first since 1997.
Access Midia Research’s Global Market Music Forecasts report via midiaresearch.com.
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A Beginner’s Guide to Threads for MusiciansThreads is growing in popularity by the day, so now is the time to get familiar and involved with Meta and Instagram’s social media platform. by CRISTINA CANO from DIY Musician. Continue reading
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Warner Music, TikTok cut deal that all artists should be interested inWarner Music Group and TikTok have teamed up to ensure that musicians get the compensation they deserve for having their music used on the app. Here are the details… by. Continue reading
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