MUSIC BUZZ: Ibeyi // Mothxr // Emika // Tidal // More
This weekend Ibeyi wraps up their North America tour before they set over to Europe. I’m sure they will be back later this year, but in the meantime, there’s a live video of their show in Paris.
Ever thought about forming a band? New York’s Mothxr tells how they did it:
“The beat and vibe come first, and then we sit down and talk about it,” Oscroft says. “One night we went out partying and we heard a couple songs on the dance floor and we were like, ‘Fuck, this vibe, we should do this vibe tomorrow,’ and we woke up being on the same page.”
It all seems easy in this expletive-laced interview. What is not easy for them, is the scheduling, because most band members are entangled in other projects.
Electronic singer/songwriter Emika will self-release her third album Drei (which means “Three” in German) on May 4th. She also created a 42 minutes long mix with some cuts from the album. I hope she will deliver it personally to New York again like she did it with her first two albums.
Jay-Z finally launched his on-demand streaming service Tidal, which is not owned by some technology company, but by the artists themselves, all 16 of them. For the other 99.99% there is hope that Tidal somehow manages to squeeze out better payouts from the same $10/month than Spotify & Co. Owen Williams is skeptical:
It’s still entirely unclear how Tidal can make streaming more viable for artists than Spotify can, at the exact same $9.99 per month price point. We got no answers about that today. The company also touts a $19.99 per month plan for lossless sound, but how many people out there can even tell the difference? I’m going to guess that it won’t be enough to move the needle.
Aside from a more expensive high fidelity tier, Tidal promises to grant early access to new work of its co-owners. It remains to be seen, how attractive this is. Courtney Harding writes:
Artificial scarcity in a world of unlimited content makes no sense at all.
Agreed. Also, the music industry already struggles to have people accept that it’s not right to download music for free, just because it’s available. It will be even more difficult to explain to a paying Spotify subscriber that she or he cannot download music while the industry plays their silly windowing games. Surly nobody can expect fans to maintain multiple subscriptions just to get their hand on the music they want as early as possible.
But Tidal and other streaming services could try to create something new. Stuart Dredge gives some ideas on MusicAlly. Among them:
Tidal could try to become an artist-to-fan communications platform that delivers what Facebook used to before it started squeezing organic reach of people’s page posts.
I think there is an opportunity.
Musical Albums are under fire since iTunes broke them up and sold tracks separately. I’m a big fan of the album format, so I’m enjoying this:
And a surprise, leak-free release is much easier to pull off without brick-and-mortar retailers. It’s slightly ironic that the entity that killed the album — iTunes — will likely be a main factor in its revival. Apple is going after more exclusive album releases like the deal it had for Beyoncé, and it wouldn’t be surprising if it got more of them.
There were lots of new albums released this week. Smallpools’Lovetap! inspired Elke to a review (Spotify Link). I found myself listing a lot to the Lower Dens’s third album Esacpe From Evil (Spotify link and Hannah Cohen’sPleasure Boy (Spotify link).
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