music Archives

What’s New: September 18th

Music

Over the last week I’ve decided to cancel my subscription to iTunes Music and revert back to my local music collection. It’s around 7,000 songs and just barely fits onto a 64gb USB key. The main reason why is because iTunes Music does not do well streaming over 4G in China, which is disappointing but not a shock. Going back to working on my own music collection also benefits my DJ gigs, giving me a larger pool of new music to draw from.

With that said, I’ve been listening to some fantastic DJ mixes on Soundcloud:

Elsewhere DJ Mix by Tyco, Recorded at Burning Man

New music from one of my favorite artists, Tycho. Recorded earlier this month on the playa at Burning Man.

Odesza “No Sleep” Mix.01

The first in a long series of DJ mixes recorded by Odesza and available on Soundcloud. As with everything else released by Odesza, this is outstanding.

Articles

The roof of China’s economic troubles? It’s politics, stupid – This article beautifully crystalizes my thoughts on the real trouble that China faces. The economic challenges are significant, but China is experiencing significant turbulence right now while still having one of the best economic growth rates in the world (experts estimate around 4-5% instead of the officially-reported 7%). The real problem is not a lagging economy, it is how the Party will respond to conditions which are increasingly making it clear that perpetual growth is not possible. And then, of course, how the people of China react to those actions.
The future of communication is the .gif – Well written article written by a good friend on a fantastic topic. The title is a bit sensational, but the crux of the piece – that WeChat has something special with its unique sticker system, built on the concept of artificial scarcity, is wonderful. It’s great to see Chinese software companies become innovators. And with regard to WeChat, China seems to be far ahead of the competition in more ways than one.
Baidu and Cloudflare Boost Users Over China’s Great Firewall – I can’t wait to see how this pans out. It is essentially the story of China’s internet overlords helping Baidu (the Google of China) and an American company overcome architectural limitations of the internet system of checks and controls that they themselves created. I hope this doesn’t end badly, but I fear that it may. As described in the article by a Cloudflare director: “We’re both pointing guns at one another, to some extent.” If it sounds precarious, that’s because it is. But Cloudflare is smart enough to know that doing business in China without insisting on having leverage is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Kickstarter Campaigns

I’ve been doing some exploration on Kickstarter over the past few weeks while helping colleagues get their own projects onto the website. And through that process I’ve discovered and contributed to some inspiring projects:

Most fun Desktop 3D Printer – An inspiring project developed in Chengdu. The campaign has not yet concluded yet it’s already reached over 200% of its funding goal. Already a remarkable success and the campaign still has time to raise more capital. I am interviewing the creators and will publish the article on Chengdu Living
12 is Better than 6 – A hand-drawn top-down shooting game that takes place in the Wild West.
OmniBus – An independent game with a premise similar to the movie Speed. Navigate a bus with no brakes as it slams through obstacles in a colorful PS1-styled world.
Tacopalypse – Grind, flip, and do tricks in this completely wacky taco delivery game.

One Video

This week an amazing 3-minute long video of Youtube was uploaded by a single person who shot and edited this epic piece: Chengdu Style on Youtube. Unfortunately embedding this clip has been disallowed by the author, which is why it does not automatically appear here.

Transitioning from Music Hoarding to Streaming

While I was in Bangkok, iTunes 11 was released, over a month after it was originally scheduled for release. This was a highly anticipated update that dramatically updated the interface change to the program which I use to manage my multiple-hundred gigabyte music collection. Now it more closely mirrors the music player on iPhones and iPads. I updated to this version and it looks great (see the screenshot I took below) but I can’t help but think that we are all nearing the conclusion of our local music stockpiles.

Spotify

Spotify on a 30-day Premium trial, which is ad-free. The service is outstanding but the ads drive me crazy.

A Lifetime of Collecting

Do you remember your first compact disc? I do. It was Flood, by They Might Be Giants, released in 1990 when I was 9 years old.

I grew up the son of an audiophile. My Dad collected vinyl, tapes, and then compact discs, and could speak for an hour about speaker amps. His stereo was a coveted and custom extension of his love of music. I ended up inheriting this attribute, and spent a decade collecting thousands of vinyl records before moving onto a digital collection in 2005. Seven years later and I have a collection that would take decades to fully absorb. But I think we’re reaching the end of this era of music, as our music collections are becoming fully decentralized.

Stream Every Song Ever Recorded

Cut Copy – Zonoscope, from my iTunes library

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod, he boasted about the number of albums that you could store onto a handheld device. And it was stunning.

No more changing tapes or discs! As capacity increased, it became ordinary to walk around with more music in your pocket than someone 40 years ago would hear in their lifetime. But now we’re reaching the era where we can’t even be bothered with that, because virtually everything ever released is available within a moment using streaming services like Spotify and Pandora.

I visited a friend last week who recently switched to Spotify, opting to pay $16 a month to stream almost anything, anywhere. No more music collecting. “I don’t have interest in the hassle of collecting music, I just want to stream everything”, he says. And why wouldn’t you?

The Streaming DJ

After spending so much of my life collecting music, it’s hard to imagine stopping completely. Even over the last year, my collection has been refined considerably, as I tag and organize everything for accessibility in DJ sets or sampling for music production. There isn’t currently anything like Spotify for DJ’s, but when that is realized, look out because then the end is really near. I can picture it now: it’s a vinyl control system like Serato Scratch Live or Traktor that charges a monthly licensing fee to stream any song and control it with a digital control record. There would be problems to solve (latency, internet accessibility, reliability) but these would be figured out before long.

We’re already said goodbye to collecting music in the form of physical media in many forms, now we collect it digitally. But when the advantages of collecting digital files and organizing them locally competes with an all-knowing, always-accessible cloud of every song ever recorded, it’s no-contest.