Jarome Matthew

Author: jarome

  • Where is the music industry going?

    I’ve been hinting at a big venture I’ve been involved in and working hard on with my partner Roshena Huang for some time now, even though haven’t said much lately, but i’m ready to start talking more about it. It’s the relaunch of my record label, Pro Soul as a totally reinvented company… more on that later. First though, why exactly did we have to reinvent the company? Because the music industry is drastically changing as is more than evident these days.

    So where is it going? Well, no one can really predict the future, so we can really only guess. As Andrew Dubber has said, Anyone who says that they know where the music industry is going is either a liar or a fool. Either way, ignore them.

    We DO know what the future of the music industry WON’T be. The future will not be the past.

    That means if you’re doing what you were doing ten or even five years ago, you are simply not relevant in the music business! If you are not undergoing an aggressive period of radical change, completely redesigning your business from scratch in this industry right now considering where things are going, then your in trouble, just like the big guys.

    So that is what were doing with Pro Soul Alliance – aggressive, radical change and complete redesign. And it’s a lot of work, but it’s also very exciting and different, stay tuned!

  • The irrelevant news media

    For years now, I’ve been racking my brain as to why the media seems to have no interest in even attempting to explain what is really going on in the music industry rather than spread PR driven hype from major corporations…
    This quote really says it all:

    “That’s what’s wrong with newspapers.  Writing articles so neutral as to be uninformative.  What’s that cliche?  If tomorrow Dick Cheney said the earth was flat, even the “New York Times” would write: “Roundness of the Earth in question.”   – Bob Lefsetz

    I have two essential things to say of my own regarding this problem in our society that you will ‘get’ in terms of their source depending on who you are: “independent investigation of truth”, and “Don’t believe the hype”

  • New royalty for music played online

    On September 23, 2008, songwriters, publishers, record labels and digital music services announced they had finally reached an agreement on mechanical royalties for songs played on online music services. It only took about 8 years for them to figure it out…

    Called a “breakthrough that will facilitate new ways to offer music to consumers online,” the voluntary agreement crafted by the Digital Media Association (DiMA), the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), the RIAA, the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI) and the Songwriters Guild of America (SGA) ended the longstanding dispute about mechanical royalties for interactive streaming and limited downloads.

    The agreement must be still be approved by the Copyright Royalty Board to take effect, and states that limited download and interactive streaming services will pay a mechanical royalty of 10.5 percent of revenue, less any amounts owed for performance royalties. In certain instances, royalty-free promotional streaming is allowed.
    The agreement tries to solve the dispute about what invokes a mechanical royalty in the digital environment, and permits certain kinds of promotional streams without payment, and agrees that webcasters will not owe mechanical royalties for non-interactive, audio-only streams.

    The statutory mechanical royalty rate is currently 9.1¢ per song, unless you negotiate with the publisher directly and come up with a different rate.
    With physical product, calculating the mechanical royalty using the statutory rate calculated by: # of songs on CD x # CDs manufactured x 9.1¢. But calculating mechanical royalties in the digital environment is more complicated because of considerations like what type of use (download, live stream, etc.) and how each is determined online.
    The agreement states that all parties agreed to a “percentage of revenue” calculation so interactive audio-only webcasters and subscription services will pay 10.5 percent of their revenue to songwriters and publishers, minus any performance royalties already being paid to labels.
    If a songwriter has a publishing deal with a publisher who’s a member of Harry Fox, the royalties should go from the music service to the publisher through HFA, then be passed along to the songwriter/composer as per their deal. For self-published musicians the royalties should go from the music service to a digital aggregator, which then would pass them on to either the musicians’ indie label, or directly to the musician.
    The agreement primarily affects Rhapsody and Napster, for both their on-demand streaming services and their “to-go” services that allow subscribers to put music on portable players. But it will also affect other major services like MySpace, imeem, iLike and others for their interactive streaming options they want to provide.

    However, this agreement is not the answer to the ongoing digital performance royalty fight between SoundExchange and webcasters like Pandora and soma.fm. That’s another issue, related to a different copyright. As i’ve mentioned many times, the music industry is unequaled when it comes to beauracracy… According to the press release, the parties agreed that non-interactive, audio-only streaming services like Pandora and soma.fm do not require a mechanical license. This means webcasters no longer have to worry about paying the publishers both for a performance and again for the cache and buffer copies made to enable that performance.
    However, this agreement does not solve the debate between webcasters and sound recording rightsholders, which has to do with the non-interactive public performance of a recording on a digital platform. To keep it simple, I’ll just say that the disagreement about this digital performance royalty rate is ongoing. Hopefully a settlement will be reached soon, before it kills internet radio and brilliant musical innovations like Pandora.com

    There are many parts of this agreement, like the acceptance of a percentage of revenue calculation that make a lot of sense. Hopefully it will influence and allow new business models to continue and flourish and allow musicians to benefit from increased access, exposure and revenue, and let music fans discover more music.

  • Has fear made you the walking dead?

    Many who know me know I have no problem taking risks, and strongly stating my opinions and beliefs. In fact, right now i’m taking one of the biggest risks I ever have with a new venture that I’ll be blogging about in detail soon…

    That’s mainly because I feel that if you have to live on this insane, corrupt, self obsessed planet, you have to make the most out of it, and live it to it’s fullest. Not because this is ‘it’, far from it! This life is just to get us warmed up and prepared for the worlds beyond. I take risks because as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr said, if you live life in fear, your not really living at all, your already dead:

    “I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.
    You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.
    You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.
    Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.
    And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.
    You died when you refused to stand up for right.
    You died when you refused to stand up for truth.
    You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”

    -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
    From the sermon “But, If Not” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on November 5, 1967.

  • Feature film ‘Sweet Amerika’ featuring my sound design released

    A feature film I worked on last year, ‘Sweet Amerika‘ was released last week in theatres across Canada. It will further be released in the UK and across Asia, then on DVD in a few months. It’s a multi cultural drama  based on real events about a Sikh grocery store owner who is kidnapped and tortured by four Americans who mistake him for a Muslim.

    We went to see it in the theatre over the weekend, and although I was pleased with how the sound came out, the sound in the old theatre we saw it in was so bad that it ruined the experience. 2 Channels instead of one, terrible old speakers, weird, compressed audio with a lack of dynamics, and a dark, dingy screen made it a disappointing experience. I have blogged before about how I’ve been doing more film work because of the declining quality of music playback devices, so it was kind of ironic that it sounded so bad. I heard it’s playing in a good theatre now, so I’m tempted to find out what it really sounds like.

    I could go on with all kinds of stories about the massive amount of work and trials involved during the process of doing sound design on this film, how Maria’s screams and non dialog audio had to be done in my studio despite ADR being done previously, and how other location audio had to be used because ADR was never done for other key scenes, but I would have to write a novel to talk about all that.
    And even though it was a very impactful experience in many ways, It’s a year later, and I’m done with this chapter of my life, so check out the many decent reviews of the movie out there, and see it if you can.

    I look forward to the next film project being a better production, and playing in theatres with great sound.

  • Latest Production, remake of an 80’s classic, ‘Fascination’

    So after dusting off some 80’s analog synth hardware, and researching licensing internationally for digitally released cover songs, Heather Doré’s new song is finally released and available online! Listen here!

    She is a great lover of 80’s music, so it seemed fitting to remake an almost forgotten 80’s classic, so we chose The Human League, ‘(Keep Feeling) Fascination’ which I have always loved since I was a teen. I wasn’t sure how I could do justice to the fantastic original production, unique sounds used, and great male and female vocal tracks, but a little ‘future disco’ treatment, and Darryl Kromm of Strange Advance on background vocals turned out to be a winning combination in my biased opinion!

    We have some very exciting things in progress for Heather‘s next songs, so look forward to more soon!

  • eWaste: Ever wonder what happens to your electronic devices when your done with them?

    Ever wonder what happens to your electronic devices when your done with them, and they no longer work, and it costs too much to fix them? Well, I did, and was excited that someone finally did a documentary about it to expose the secret life of dead electronics!

    Michael Zhao is a graduate from the Berkley school of journalism, and for his thesis did a documentary about what happens to all our computers, mobile phones, audio visual components, and gadgets,when they either break down, or become obsolete, and we replace them with the latest hottest technology. It’s called ‘eDump’, and it’s pretty shocking. Here is a preview, watch the full 20 min. version from his website.

    Here’s an article about it as well:
    Time Magazine: Your laptop’s dirty little secret

    I love technology and the latest gadgets, because I love the future, and progress, and efficiency, in fact, in my field of audio visual work, ideally computers should be upgraded every two years. But when materialism and excess leads to environmental disaster, and illness and suffering for human beings, something has to change. I always imagined the ton of electronic components we get rid of, and wondered what happened to them, I didn’t realise how neglegent and serious the situation was.

    I remember the time I could finally unload my pockets from a phone, a PDA, and a music player by combining them with one Treo Palm phone! Awesome! I got such a mobile phone that was working fine and meeting my needs a couple years ago, I figured I would get another few more years out of it, then upgrade, and I could wait until then for the latest greatest technology. But it started malfunctioning years before it should have, becoming useless last year, and now i have had it in a bag, waiting to somehow recycle it.
    After seeing the movie, I looked into it and found that enCorp now recycles a lot more than bottles in Canada and may be able to do something with it. There are also other companies that recycle electronics, fixing them so others worldwide who don’t need the latest technology can use them.

    The eDump documentary really illustrated strongly for me how everything we do affects others, and how we should be responsible for our every action and understand the implications and consequences.
    I encourage you to make some effort to sell, use, or recycle your electronic components as much as possible because there are literally tons of this stuff out there, and companies keep making more!

    the future of eWaste? From the awesome Speilberg/Kubrick movie, ‘A.I.‘

  • New $10 billion Particle Accelerator intends to reveal secrets behind the birth of the universe

    Something incredible happened yesterday that barely made news (cause no one died…), A new $10 billion Particle Accelerator near Geneva on the Swiss/Franch border went live, firing it’s first protons.

    Hadron Collidor
    Here’s a bit more about it:

    Large Hadron Collidor – Wikipedia

    It’s the largest particle accelerator ever built and took 3 decades to create. By colliding opposing beams of protons with very high kinetic energy at the speed of light, scientists intend to amongst other things, prove how the universe was created, and the existence of God!
    And as if that isn’t cool enough, many scientists and the media believe that the LHC is so powerful that it is too dangerous because it’s experiments have the potential to create low velocity micro black holes that could grow in mass or release dangerous radiation leading to doomsday scenarios, such as the destruction of the Earth!

    Now that is what I call exciting news.

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/10/2361197.htm

  • Much Music VMA TV broadcast screw up

    Felisha was watching the MTV Video Music Awards yesterday, broadcast in Canada by Much Music, who censored a lot of dumb things, like the song ‘I kissed a girl‘, and the word ‘balls’. She called me for help because she was getting some weird audio problems…

    I avoid awards shows and other such drivel like the plauge, and the VMA’s are no exception, it’s just one big ad for the dying MTV channel, and artists with a ton of money behind them to compensate for their minimal talent. Do you know that they don’t show a single video during the ‘Video Music Awards’? What a joke.

    Anyway, I went to investigate and found there were two audio tracks playing when Felisha was watching the show. She had recorded it with our PVR, a digital video recorder that is also a DVD player with an optical 6 channel cable feeding into a surround amplifier. Boring technical mumbo jumbo aside, I found out that when the Amp dvd input was in auto rather than analog, it was getting TWO audio feeds from the TV station, and one of them wasn’t supposed to be broadcast, and had nothing to do with the show we were watching!
    Here’s a sample of what we heard in the left speaker:

    [Audio:Much_Music_secret_broadcast.mp3]

    We found out that this was a behind the scenes feed from a video shoot in progress at the Much Music studios during the airing of the VMA’s for a show called ‘Fashion File’, according to Felisha. It was complete with personal comments of the event film crew, cussing and all, and this was being broadcast with the regular cable signal! We have also had the same thing happen with other TV stations like CTV. Seems kind of careless and unprofessional that this stuff gets broadcast to the public, but not so surprising  from a slowly dying medium, a lot like the blunders we’re seeing in the music industry…

    Death Of TV

  • Whitewater rafting adventure on the Nahatlatch river

    Last weekend I went on a whitewater rafting adventure on the Nahatlatch river with my nephew. I felt the need to get away from the crap that bogs down our lives and really experience life and nature the way we should be, and have been meaning to do this for many years as it was an incredible experience the last time I went rafting on the Nahatlatch river at the awesome REO resort in Boston Bar, BC.
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    The reason this river is so fantastic for rafting is it’s like it was perfectly designed as a natural amusement park, gradually building in excitement with more intense sections of rapids and natural obstacles… I can’t really describe it more than that, you just have to escape and do it for yourself!

    We had a little more adventure than planned this time on the river though, being that the river water levels are starting to drop. There are a lot of rocks showing in the river, but the rafts usually slide around them or over. But in a section of particularly rapid whitewater, we slid sideways up a large rock, and instead of sliding down, the raft stayed on the rock and the right side began filling with water rapidly. The rafts have a brilliant water drainage system preventing them from filling, but the river was so fast in this part, 50 tons of water coming at the boat, that it was totally pinned against the rock. As soon as this happened, the guide told us to jump left, which in this case meant hanging off the side of the boat so as not to be swept away by the river. Our guide, Cody, suggested people either get in the front of the boat, or get up onto the rock which I did somehow. He couldn’t latch his line onto the side of the boat in the water though to pull it back out, and it was looking bleak. All the other rafts had passed us by now, so there weren’t many rescue options. Suddenly, he was able to move the front of the raft enough for the rapids to grab the front of the boat, and we had a split second to jump into the boat, or be left in the middle of the rapids on a rock, having to later float down, bouncing in between rocks! I opted for jumping, but neither of us made it into the boat, and ended up hanging on the side as it went down the river. Luckily, safety training paid off and one of my crew mates pulled me in, and we were off again, but with only half of our paddles!

    The other 5 rafts said we put on quite a show, and all were talking about, including the guides. This kind of thing doesn’t happen very often usually in rafting, and I was glad to have had the experience and come out of a situation that in the moment, I could see no easy outcome for.

    I highly recommend next summer you take a whitewater rafting trip, on the right river, it is the most fun and exciting thing I can say I have ever experienced. I’m committing to go more regularly, so if your game, get in touch.