Vinyl junkies - I’m one of them. Possessing an opiate-like addiction for our preferred musical format, we tolerate, no we embrace it's inherent limitations and inconveniences. Pulling a treasure from our Ikea Expedit shelves (actually Kallax is the new thing), we cross apartment room floors that sag from the weight of our collections to put a record on the turntable. But first comes the romance of arcane cleaning and calibration rituals, the Holy Trinity of tracking weight, azimuth, and overhang, and then the battle with the Four Horsemen of the vinyl apocalypse: surface noise, orange peel, non-fill, and off center pressings. After 20, 22 minutes maximum of blissful immersion, the stylus bumps against the end groove, vup, vup, vup, and its time to get out of the chair, somnambulant, and flip over the record. 

Straight people observe this behavior and say, “umm, wouldn’t it be easier to just listen to this stuff for free on your phone?” 

So what does an archaic physical format and the weirdos who are obsessed with it have to do with fixing the music business? We’ve been told again and again that music has little or no value as a product, that access to it is easy and free, that the days of record stores and physical collections are a quaint notion of the past. And yet, at the most unlikely of times for a rebirth, these old things, these pieces of art, have stirred passion and a connectivity to music and the artists across age brackets. Why? Is it a hipster trend? Foolish nostalgia? Or does listening to vinyl awaken a musical mindfulness that downloads and streaming don’t deliver? 

My guest on the show today is Billy Fields of WEA Distribution - that’s Warner, Electra Atlantic in case you didn’t know. Billy is the “vinyl guy” at WEA and certainly qualifies as a record junkie. When I walked into his office at 50th and Broadway in NYC, he was spinning a Siouxsie & The Banshees record, and it was loud. And when his boss came in for a minute to chat, he didn’t turn it down, not even a little. Billy shares his thoughts on the business realities of vinyl, how labels choose what to release, the challenges facing record stores, and the tangible passions that music on wax inspires. So, welcome Billy Fields! 

Links for this episode: 

Billy Fields on Twitter: http://twitter.com/billysezvinyl 

Darkside Records: http://www.darksiderecordsandgallery.com/ 

Fantastic Negrito: http://www.fantasticnegrito.com/heritage/ 

The Revenge Of Analog: https://www.amazon.com/Revenge-Analog-Real-Things-Matter/dp/1610395719 

Benjamin Clementine: http://benjaminclementine.com/ 

Jim Campilongo: http://jimcampilongo.com/ 

Ellen's Stardust Diner: http://www.ellensstardustdiner.com/

Peak Vinyl or Peak Stupid With Billy Fields of WEA

My guest today is Benji Rogers, the Founder of Pledgemusic and Co-Founder of the Dot Blockchain Music Project. 

Digital music is a mutation. Like a virus, it adapts, looking for new ways to be consumed, defying efforts to be fixed in some predictable context. Zeros and ones phantasmagorically appear and recede across networks, bought, sold, streamed and shared. Artists have little control over where their creations travel, how they’re used, how they are mutated by others. Rights, ownership information, sales data and payment are managed by multiple entities in the music business who often have competing agendas. Releasing music into the digital world can be a bit like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into a vast, wild sea. 

So how can this all be made more transparent? How can permanance and mutability co-exist? Enter the Blockchain. The .BC Music Project is the first attempt to use Blockchain technology to create a global, decentralized database of music rights wherein a song cannot be separated from its usage rights and still be played. There’s the transparency and permanence. 

If you haven’t heard of Blockchain, it is basically a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of ordered records called blocks. So you write a song, and create a block with data about the authors, who played on it, who the publisher and record company is. Once data is entered, it cannot be altered retroactively - BUT as rights or usage rules evolve over time, the information can appended, and there’s a record of who changed it, and a validation process to make sure the changes are true. So along with permanence and truth, you get mutability. 

There is huge enthusiasm around .BC Music, and the project recently announced partnerships with its first industry partners: Canadian Music Rights organization SOCAN, CD Baby, MediaNet, Songtrust, and FUGA. But Benji and his partners at the Dot BC Music project are not the first people to try to fix the morass of problems in digital music. There have been many other industry initiatives going back nearly 20 years that have tried and failed to solve these issues - so in our chat, I pressed Rogers to outline exactly why Blockchain technology and his initiative are different and why they might finally be the beginning of a very bright future indeed for the music business. Benji and I sat down at Ludlow House on the Lower East Side for this chat. So pull up a chair with us and listen! 

Dot Blockchain Music: http://dotblockchainmusic.com 

PledgeMusic: http://www.pledgemusic.com 

Open Music Initiative: http://open-music.org 

Imogen Heap Mycelia: http://myceliaformusic.org 

The Failure Of The GRD (Global Rights DataBase):  http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2015/08/the-failure-of-the-global-repertoire-database-effort-draft.html 

The Secure Digital Music Initiative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital_Music_Initiative 

Benji Rogers on Twitter: @BenjiKRogers

Benji Rogers: Blockchain Music Without BS

The music business is in trouble. Or is it? It depends on your perspective. Let's talk about it.

How To Fix The Music Business

Popular tracks