SoliderSound release S Doubler Available as a free download, S Doubler generates four additional voices based on its input and offers a range of stereo placement options.

This weekend, trailblazing UK producer James Blake addressed this, too: “If we want quality music somebody is gonna have to pay for it. Streaming services don’t pay properly, labels want a bigger cut than ever and just sit and wait for you to go viral, TikTok doesn’t pay properly, and touring is getting prohibitively expensive for most artists. The brainwashing worked and now people think music is free.”
“And by the way,” Blake continued, “since it’s cheaper to produce fast, synthetic music to drop on streaming every week to capitalize on the strengths of the model, watch how the model is preparing you for AI-generated music that pays musicians nothing at all.” #MusicIndustry #MusicBusiness #Spotify #majorlabels

Sampling tips and tricks for your next beat
Veteran producer and beat maker Isaac Duarte shares tips, techniques, and resources for leveling up your sampling chops.

Streamer Deezer cheers Apple antitrust fine but calls tech giant’s DMA response ‘deceptive’Streaming music service Deezer is joining Spotify in cheering the European Union’s €1.84 billion fine imposed on Apple for breaking antitrust rules in the streaming music market. However, the company urges the EU Commission to assess Apple’s response to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which it says is “deceptive” and “an attempt to bypass European […]
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Hipgnosis Songs Fund’s assets are now valued at $690 million less than they were before. Blackstone must be licking its lips.JP Morgan analyst says the likelihood of a Blackstone takeover just increased, thanks to Shot Tower's re-valuation of HSF
Source

Arjun Pulijal exits role as President of Capitol Music GroupThe news follows the departure of Michelle Jubelirer as Chair & CEO of Capitol Music Group at the beginning of February
Source

Optical Guitar Pickup Works With Nylon StringsElectric guitar pickups rely on steel strings interfering with a magnetic field, the changes in which are picked up with coils of wire. That doesn’t work with nylon strings, because they don’t tend to perturb magnetic fields nearly as much, beyond some infinitesimal level that some quantum physicist could explain. So what do you do? You follow [Simon]’s example, and build an optical pickup instead.
The concept is simple. You place an LED and a phototransistor in a U-shaped channel, and place it so that the string runs through it. You repeat this for each string. Thus, as a string vibrates, it interrupts the light travelling from the LED to the phototransistor. This generates a voltage that varies with the frequency of the string’s vibration. Funnily enough, this type of pickup will work just fine on both nylon and steel strings, if you were so inclined to try it.
[Simon] designed a nifty PCB with six LED-phototransistor pairs (using off-the-shelf interruptor sensors) for use with a nylon-stringed guitar. He reports that sound from the strings comes through clearly, but that there is some noise that is evident in the pickup’s output, too. Listening to the demo, it seems to capture the sound of the nylon strings well, it’s just a shame that the noise floor is so high.
If you prefer your guitar pickups to be the regular magnetic kind, you can always wind your own from scrap. Demo after the break.

https://codeberg.org/Luno/KlimperLux/raw/branch/main/media/demo1.0.flac

EastWest 36th Anniversary Sale In celebration of their 36th anniversary, EastWest have announced the launch of a sale that will run throughout March 2024.

Pager Lives Again Thanks to Python And MastodonPagers were a big deal for a while there, even if they never quite made it into the pantheon of excellent sitcom plot devices like answering machines did. Anyway, [Finnley Dolfin] had some pagers and gave them a refresh for the modern era, using them to receive message alerts from Mastodon.
The project is laced together with a bunch of Python code. It uses the Mastodon library for interacting with the social media website. When it detects an incoming direct message, it hooks into DAPNET – the Decentralized Amateur Paging Network.  Via this network, a message is sent out over the airwaves to [Finnley’s] pager, serving as a notification that someone’s reached out to chat on Mastodon.
It’s neat that the amateur radio world is keeping pagers alive, using distributed base stations to share messages. Unfortunately, given the existence of smartphones, we don’t quite see pagers catching on again any time soon. And yet, [Finnley’s] setup has a certain level of old-school cool that no modern phone could match.
We’ve seen only a handful of pager hacks over the years, but they’re still pretty neat. If you’ve got your own cooking up in the workshop, drop us a line, yeah?

Composing & Arranging for Voice: From Pop to OperaThe original instrument! Join us for a deep dive into techniques, strategies, and philosophies for crafting compelling vocal music and accompaniments. We'll explore arranging and orchestrating preexisting songs, as well as composing original material. In addition, we'll take some time to break down specific voice types and discuss setting words to music, syllable by syllable.

Adding an element of text to music creates wonderfully unique opportunities to evoke emotions, storytelling, and world building. If time permits, we'll also discuss working in arts administration as a creative.

Presenter: Spencer Edgers

Spencer Edgers (class of 2020-'21) is a multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Juneau, AK who has lived, studied, and been steeped in music in both Philadelphia and Seattle. His most recent film credit as composer is Poison Crue, which premiered at the 2022 El Paso Film Festival. Spencer has premiered two short operas; The Dust Gets in Your Eyes and Everything After with Seattle Opera, and has orchestrated & arranged two songs in collaboration with Taylor Vidic for The Juneau Symphony.

Register here!

All Alummination talks are free, online, and open to everyone!

No, Daniel Ek, the music industry isn’t like professional footballI’m sure Daniel Ek has a better grasp on the inner workings of the music industry than I do. The Spotify CEO probably has immense access to listener statistics and data, and a deeper understanding of the company’s royalties and revenue systems than most. But his apparent inability to empathise with artists, of all levels, is on frequent display and his input to the music industry’s discourse is often perceived by musicians as tone-deaf.
Ek’s latest gaffe came last week in the form of a selfie video posted to social media. In it, he boasted that Spotify “paid out more than $9 billion to the music industry in 2023” and then compared the music industry to professional sports. “The best analogy that I would have is that the music industry… is like professional sports,” said the Swedish CEO, who once tried to purchase Premier League club Arsenal.
READ MORE: “Football is played by millions of people – but there’s a very small number that can live off playing full time”: Daniel Ek addresses Spotify’s low royalty payments
“If you take football, it’s played by hundreds of millions of people around the world. But there’s a very, very small number of people that can live off of playing soccer full-time. FIFA tells us that there are about 100,000 people who can make it in football or soccer. [And there are also] hundreds of millions of people that are trying to make it in the music industry.”
He’s essentially saying that not all musicians will turn a profit. That’s not news – music-making is a rewarding hobby for many who accept that they’ll never reach superstar status. That’s been true for as long as people have been paid to write and perform music.

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A post shared by Daniel Ek (@eldsjal)

But by comparing music-making to professional football, Ek has presented a flawed analogy that hobbyists and professionals alike are queuing up to correct in the most robust terms.
Why? Because the statement leans harder into a competitive ‘tech bro’ mindset than into the core values shared by most artists. The music industry might be competitive but art should not be a competition.
But let’s humour this analogy for a moment. There may well be only 100,000 professional footballers, but the average player in the lowest UK professional division reportedly earns £750 a week, or £39,000 a year, before any potential sponsorship deals. Meanwhile, on Spotify in 2023, there were around 200,000 “professional or professionally aspiring artists,” and in 2022, the top 50,000th artist on the platform earned $12,584 annually.
So I dunno, Dan, it feels like I’d be better off trying to get a regular paycheck out of Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds at Wrexham than I would be trying to make a living from Spotify streaming revenue.
Daniel Ek speaks onstage during Spotify Investor Day at Spring Studios on March 15, 2018 in New York City.Image: Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Spotify
The true aggravation for musicians, though, is that Ek’s statement follows other claims and blunders that seem to further distance him from the platform’s musicians – the people whose creative labour Daniel Ek’s company relied on to get where it is today.
Notably, in late 2023 — a few years after claiming that fast-produced albums will trump thoughtful, considered albums made over several years — he confirmed that Spotify would not ban music made by AI. At a time when OpenAI is giving media creators a glimpse of their potential demise with ChatGPT, DALL-E and Sora AI, Ek’s Spotify is teetering on doing the same.
It feels like Spotify cares about audio but not about music. I have no doubts that Ek and Spotify’s employees are avid music lovers and find deep value in sonic art. I’m sure that Ek’s dream is for all artists to be paid better for their artistic efforts. But the streaming model has changed the way artists are expected to release music, and Spotify’s pivot to podcasts and audiobooks felt like a kick in the teeth for the artists without whom Spotify wouldn’t exist. After all, who can explain giving $100 million to Joe Rogan when musicians who have worked their whole lives to build small but previously sustainable careers are told their labour is only worth $0.004 per stream?
Daniel Ek, Founder & CEO, Spotify, at The Future of Audiobooks Event with Spotify 2023 on October 03, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Spotify)
Music creators are worried that Ek’s Spotify is preparing us for AI-generated music to infiltrate our libraries; where ‘mood’ playlists aren’t made by a collection of lo-fi hip-hop makers and ambient artists, but by algorithms that are trained on those genres. Ek and Spotify might not be thinking of doing that, but you can’t help but feel that’s where we’re heading.
This weekend, trailblazing UK producer James Blake addressed this, too: “If we want quality music somebody is gonna have to pay for it. Streaming services don’t pay properly, labels want a bigger cut than ever and just sit and wait for you to go viral, TikTok doesn’t pay properly, and touring is getting prohibitively expensive for most artists. The brainwashing worked and now people think music is free.”
“And by the way,” Blake continued, “since it’s cheaper to produce fast, synthetic music to drop on streaming every week to capitalize on the strengths of the model, watch how the model is preparing you for AI-generated music that pays musicians nothing at all.”

And by the way, since it’s cheaper to produce fast, synthetic music to drop on streaming every week to capitalize on the strengths of the model, watch how the model is preparing you for AI generated music that pays musicians nothing at all.
— James Blake (@jamesblake) March 3, 2024

Can you think of any football players, amateur or professional, who are expressing concerns about being replaced by AI? I don’t think Boston Dynamics robots are going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with Erling Haaland or Mo Salah anytime soon.
On top of this, Spotify is said to have enabled some practices that further create an unfavourable climate for many musicians. In 2023, Benn Jordan spoke at length about the alleged money laundering schemes that centre around Spotify and the royalty model the company runs. In fairness, Spotify has responded in The Guardian that such streaming exploitations are “an industry-wide challenge and Spotify has been working hard to address this issue…Less than 1 per cent of all streams on Spotify have been determined to be artificial and those are promptly mitigated prior to any payouts”
Still, Jordan asks: “How much of your money as a musician is giving a money launderer or con artist a 3 to 1 return?”
Meanwhile, by the way, Ek sold $57.5 million worth of his Spotify shares last month. Cool.
The wider streaming landscape and the modern music industry in general is a flawed environment that makes it harder than ever for artists to make a living from their art. But Spotify has driven this race to the bottom – the company has never turned an annual profit while globalising a business model that has completely changed the way we consume music, likely forever.
Photo by Sebastian Reuter/Getty Images for Spotify
Obviously, the concept of music streaming is amazing and it has generated opportunities for many that would have perhaps been unheard of in a pre-streaming era. But by telling the world that you can have the entirety of recorded music for what was initially five bucks a month, the company’s backed itself into a corner.
Because it wants to offer all music, rather than a curated selection like Netflix or HBO, it’s forced to cooperate with major labels who are far more corporately combative than Spotify tends to be — at least, according to ex-Spotify employee Tony Lashley, who went on to found Marine Snow. That results in too much revenue being diverted away from independent artists and into the deep pockets of major labels.
Making a sustainable income from music should be more accessible than ever but, instead, it’s never felt so far away.
So, yes, Daniel Ek. The music industry might well be like football in the sense that it has professionals and amateurs. But when it comes to fair payouts, grassroots schemes, and a pay-to-win model, the only likeness is that you’d have more chance of scoring with five Alisson Beckers on the goal line.
The post No, Daniel Ek, the music industry isn’t like professional football appeared first on MusicTech.

Live Nation to continue $1500 per show On The Road subsidies in 2024Live Nation will continue its On The Road Again tour subsidies well into 2024, multiple sources tell Hypebot.....
The post Live Nation to continue $1500 per show On The Road subsidies in 2024 appeared first on Hypebot.

un:hurd expands automated Music Marketing Toolkit, adds fundingMusic marketing platform un:hurd has raised a new funding round to expand its suite of data and AI-led features to help artists build, nurture, and monetize their audiences.....
The post un:hurd expands automated Music Marketing Toolkit, adds funding appeared first on Hypebot.

Concert Strings Adaptive from Kirk Hunter Studios The latest string library from Kirk Hunter Studios promises to provide users with the world’s most playable and flexible symphonic string library.

An updated guide to YouTube’s best practices in 2024YouTube is essential to the ever-evolving digital music landscape, and The Orchard shares their 2024 YouTube Best Practices, where to learn about new features, branding tips, and how to reach goals successfully.....
The post An updated guide to YouTube’s best practices in 2024 appeared first on Hypebot.