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- Behind the music: Will Tunited bring artists and fans together?
Ultravox's Midge Ure thinks he can help struggling musicans with a site that merges social networking and downloads
The advent of the world wide web promised to give artists a more level playing field, with the opportunity to bypass the record label system and have their music reach fans directly. Yet many artists still find the task of carving out a music career on their own daunting at best. Midge Ure, the frontman of 1970s and 80s act Ultravox, thinks he's come up with a solution for these struggling musicians: his recently launched website, Tunited.
"I've accrued information over 35 years in the music industry, yet the music industry seems uninterested in tapping into that information," says Ure. "If I was a car designer I'd be headhunted." So, since the labels haven't come knocking, he decided to set up a site that would self-filter via music recommendations, provide artists with tools to market themselves and their own personalised shops, and allow them to take a fairer share of revenue from downloads and streams than they get from other music services.
As soon as you sign up to Tunited, you get recommendations on your dashboard. Every genre – there are about 60 of them – has its own chart based on downloads, streams and how many times the track has been recommended. There's a magazine section, which reviews tracks that come top of the charts. You get 50 free streaming credits that are used every time you listen to a track for more than a minute. But you can up your credits by buying downloads or promoting music: a 79p download gets you 25 streaming credits. This enables Tunited to pay the artists for the streams, as well as planting a tree for every download bought.
There's also a collaborative element to the site. "I wanted part of the site to be like a pinboard at a music store, like 'Bassplayer looking for a singer'," says Ure. That part is called the "rehearsal room", and it operates according to an honour structure. People can post a track that needs guitar, for example, and instead of paying the guitarist the poster can pay them back by donating drum programming or vocals in return.
Ure believes the fact that Tunited is driven by a musician is a bonus. "This isn't a business to me, it's a need," he says. "You don't hear a lot of great quotes from major record companies, but this guy once said to me: 'I can imagine a world without shoes, but I can't imagine a world without music.' I thought: that's profound."
Ure signed his first record deal in the mid-70s but found himself "washed-up" six months after having a number one single when punk came along and blew the pop music he was making out of the water. So, he decided to begin afresh. "Starting again is even harder than starting. I was already tarred with a brush," sighs Ure. It was a hard climb that resulted in him joining Ultravox in 1979. The following year, they had a worldwide hit with Vienna.
"It's a cold hard fact that you can't just be a Pete Doherty and stagger about saying: 'I'm a brilliant artist. Everyone should get me, but nobody understands me.' It doesn't work anymore," he says. At the same time, he acknowledges that knowing how to market yourself is not enough. "If I wasn't in the right place at the right time all the way through my career, I'd be driving a bus in Glasgow. But [today] you can help make your own luck by just being proactive about it."
Ure believes the internet has eliminated factors that have been important to labels. "You had to be the right age, the right demographic, have the right hair, the right look – and if you were over 21, you were too old," he says. With Tunited, he's trying to help create a more egalitarian environment for artists.
The site's success, however, will depend on how many users it gets. It has entered a pretty crowded market that has already seen many casualties. Mflow, which also rewards users for downloading and recommending tracks, is still struggling to gain traction. Tunited currently has around 6,000 artist profiles on the site and around 15,000 on the books, according to its managing director. Granted, they've only been live for a couple of months.
While Tunited deserves kudos for being transparent and fair in its payment structure (it doesn't make a profit from downloads but deducts the VAT, merchant fee and a 3p cost for hosting and streaming, with the rest going to the artist), it will still rely on music fans wanting to hand over their cash.
"It's a tall order to get people to pay for music, but without people paying all music will be old as artists will not have the wherewithal to generate new music – even if they're doing it out of their bedrooms," says Ure. "Illegal downloading is stealing, and all you're doing is shooting yourself in the foot."
He thinks Tunited provides a palatable way of compensating artists, comparing it to Band Aid (Ure co-wrote Do They Know It's Christmas and helped organise Live Aid and Live 8). That enterprise gave fans a record in return for donating a pound for charity.
"You buy a download here and we'll give you free streams to listen to other records," explains Ure. "With Spotify, artists don't get paid – they get nothing. If streaming becomes the norm, the music industry won't be around for long. It has to be fair. Without the artists, there would be nothing to download for free."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Desert discs: how mobile phones are at the root of Saharan music
Christopher Kirkley went to Mali to make field recordings, but returned with a mixtape of music taken from Saharan Sim cards
However eclectic your music collection, it would still need to go some way to match the sheer range of tracks shared by villagers swapping songs via Bluetooth and Sim card in the Sahara. Bollywood classics, Algerian Rai, Kuduro, French ballads – this is just a sample grab of the kind of sounds doing the rounds there, many of which can be found on Music from Saharan Cellphones, a mixtape put together by Portland-based blogger Christopher Kirkley.
"The cellphone is such a fixture of west Africa. Everyone has a phone even in villages lacking reception," explained Kirkley, who collected MP3 memory cards in the Tuareg city of Kidal in northern Mali. "They're not just phones, they're all purpose media devices. In the west we maintain a repository of data on hard drives, in Sahel, the cellphone does the same thing."
Kirkley originally travelled to Mali to make field recordings, but soon took to trading tunes with the locals: "I'd carry my netbook while walking down the promenade in the evening and offer to trade songs, filling excess space on the cards with albums on my own hard drive – Townes Van Zandt, John Vanderslice, Elliott Smith …"
Despite claims on some blogs, his collection came from trading alone and not collecting discarded memory cards. "It's a funny notion," he laughs. "The idea of discarded unused memory cards laying around in west Africa."
Returning to Portland, Kirkley teamed up with Mississippi Records to put out a vinyl release of his field recordings (Ishilan n-Tenere: Guitar music from the Western Sahel) but also wanted to do something with the mobile phone MP3s. He says: "I chose some of the more DIY, electronic, modern recordings and put them together on a cassette. It ended up being ripped online, back to MP3. It's a weird chain of analogue to digital to analogue to digital."
Music from Saharan Cellphones begins with local heroes Tinariwen, who are swiftly followed by the song Desert Blues, a solo track from Tinariwen songwriter and guitarist Abdallah.
The third track on side A is a sharp gear change from Abdallah's twanging guitar and a reminder of just how all-conquering Auto-Tune has been. Slathered on the oeuvre of artists from T-Pain to Bon Iver, it's found its way to the desert, too; an unattributed track (apparently from Niger) features a singer crooning in French beneath heavy layers of the pitch-tweaking effect. Kirkley only has scant information on the song: "It's by a Tamashek band from Niger. Apparently their name is Emsikta. I'm doing my best to find the band. I'd love to do a proper release with the group."
Listening to the mixtape is like sitting beside a desert radio controlled by a restless herdsman. The second side has twitchy guitar and biscuit tin drums, an unidentified Touareg musician noodling on an 80s synth and French hip-hop coming together in a mesmerising mix of sounds.
Kirkley says he'd like his next project to be a tape of non-African music from Saharan cellphones but fears it might have less appeal: "It would probably only be interesting in the ethnographic sense, I can't imagine a lot of people wanting to buy a cassette of Le Bouche and the Scorpions."
Listen to Music From Saharan Cellphones
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Deerhoof: Super Duper Rescue Heads ! – exclusive stream
Your first glimpse of music from the 10th Deerhoof album is a riot of riffs and psychedelic pop
Deerhoof are back! Which is good news for fans of crayon-scrawled psychedelic indie rock and even better news for fans of things like entire albums based around the concept of a child-catching milkman. Deerhoof vs. Evil is the Californian band's 10th album (out in the UK on ATP Recordings) and Super Duper Rescue Heads ! (apparently the space before the exclamation mark is vitally important here) is the first track to be taken from it, a giddy blur of fuzzy riffs, organ stabs and haywire percussion.Like all the best Deerhoof tracks it leaves you dazed and confused, so here's the band's Satomi Matsuzaki to explain the track: "I love this song! Rave pop rock! Reminds me of 80s neo romantic music ... 'Me to the rescue!' I am gonna come to rescue you! 'You to the rescue!' Please rescue your friends who are lonely."
So now you know.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Music Weekly: Swans
Hello podders, and welcome to this week's edition of Music Weekly. To kick off proceedings, we begin with a word in your collective ears from the inimitable Michael Gira. Here with the recently "reactivated" Swans, Gira tells Louis Pattison why he gets so annoyed with the British press and what he wants to do to cooler than thou bloggers (clue: it ain't pretty).
In Singles Club, Alexis and Rosie Swash are joined by Louis to discuss Wild Beasts' Two Dancers remix EP featuring Oneohtrix Point Never, Clinic's new single I'm Aware and Gayngs' cover of Sade's By Your Side.
Finally, Emma Warren was dispatched to greet New York's one-woman orchestra Glasser, real name Cameron Mesirow, and to hear about her gigantic tandem organ and why she wants to collaborate with Chevy Chase.
That's your lot this week. Please let us know your thoughts on this week's show. As always, you can find us on Twitter and Facebook. Until next time, adieu!
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