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Zombeat

From:: Germany
Joined:: over 3 years ago

Bio

Dear buyer,

Thank you for paying for this album. That really wasn’t necessary. I’m not doing this for the money.

This is bigger than a couple of tracks recorded in a home studio. Anybody can do what I did. And that’s what I want you to do when listening to this album.

When did musicians come to expect to be millionaires? Before the invention of the long player the only way for an artist to make a living was by means of sponsoring or by giving a concert. Through the invention of mass distribution, music became a consumable product. And people kept wanting more and more.

All through history, from Bach to Elvis to the Nine Inch Nails, musicians have built upon their peers work to recombine and create new art. I am convinced that is the only way for the evolution of music to continue. And yet I have roughly 30 gigs of music on the computer that I’m writing this on that I’m not allowed to legally use. Why am I required to pay licensing fees for a cymbal out of a Neptunes track? Why does it have to be so hard that getting the cymbal out of the track takes as long as making the entire track? The Neptunes have unlimited funds to pay whatever any sample costs that they want, and get it as part of a sample library that makes it as convenient as possible to use it. Anyone should have that freedom.

That won’t happen of course. The politics of the current distribution scheme prevent that from happening. CDs come premixed without access to the source files. I am forced to put out my album on a physical medium because all the review and PR mechanisms of the industry are geared towards it. Luckily that is about to change.

The introduction and continued success of iTunes is a first step. In a society that criminalizes the biggest part of its youth for downloading music a legal alternative has finally become available. That doesn’t make it right to ask for money though. The socialist dream of culture as a common good is close to reality. Music will be first, movies and books after that as the virtualization of their content continues. This will happen regardless of whatever measures the current industry associations might devise. Grey Tuesday gives me hope. (www.greytuesday.org) Danger Mouse’s Grey Album is combination of Jay-Z’s Black Album and The Beatles’ White Album. Due to prohibitive licensing costs it cannot be legally bought. In spite of lawsuits from the respective record companies, on February the 24th 2004 it was being offered for download free of charge on several hundred websites. This is genuinely a grass roots movement that works in the same way as the networks it uses to gain access: distributed, democratic, and anonymous.

Virtuosity doesn’t matter anymore. Much in the same way that the content has become virtualized, so has the music creation process. You don’t have to be able to play guitar anymore to have some guitars in your track (or a didgeridoo for that matter). Just use a sample out of any library you happen to have. Want it faster, slower, in a different pitch or have the notes in a different order? The possibilities are truly unlimited. Samples can be changed to make them completely unrecognizable, thereby becoming an instrument unto themselves. And when I say that virtuosity doesn’t matter anymore, I specifically mean that anything can be corrected in postproduction. When I hear a Metallica album from the early eighties, I know that they had to repeat the hard parts of their solos at least a couple of times, because they actually played it. Today that is no longer necessary. I am completely unable to perform any of my material live, because the creation process has virtually nothing in common with the traditional way of making music. And let’s say I want a guitar solo or a fast keyboard riff in one of my songs, I don’t have to nail it anymore. It just makes it easier. Any pitch can be corrected in a MIDI-Editor, the timing can be quantized, the speed increased. It’s all the same now, just samples.

I am convinced that an opening of the back catalog of the big music labels would almost immediately usher into a new era of creative expression. The best indicator of this is the song The Hand That Feeds, for which Trent Reznor of the Nine Inch Nails should be lauded for being one of the first to grant anyone the right to rearrange the source files in any way they see fit (http://boss.streamos.com/download/interscope/nin/with_teeth/nin_garageband.sit). Apart from the remix I did myself and the Ghostbusters version I heard I am sure there are many more that never would have seen the light of day were it not for that step.

Again, that won’t happen. The only way to pressure the labels into doing that would be to create a parallel community that defies the very foundations on which their multi-billion dollar business rests. So I guess I’m gonna start that. The second CD of this album contains all the samples I used in their original form, and due to the lack of a universal format the source files for Ableton’s Live and Propellerhead’s Reason, since these were the tools that I used and are available for both Mac and Windows. You are free to do whatever you want with them, even cash in on them if you want. They are licensed under the Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/). Although I wouldn’t like you to buy yourself a Ferrari from the fruits of my work, it is this very freedom that I don’t have. I am not allowed to use any parts of other people’s music, or even from freely available sample libraries, as they also don’t allow for redistribution. I REALLY would have liked to use one of those, as their convenience largely enabled the creation of my first album. So this is not the best album I could have made. But it is the best I could do whilst giving you the freedom to make a better one. And sometime in the future I hope to be able to come back to making music and create an album similar to the Grey Album legally, as I believe this is the only way forward. But even if it turns out that my idealism is nothing but a dead end and no one follows my example, I know that the ball is already rolling. It might be harder, it might take longer, but what the Grey Album has started cannot be stopped, legally or illegally. So the only thing that really concerns me is convenience. I want to make it easy for you to use my music, so that you actually do it.

So stop reading and do it!

All this is largely similar to what Richard Stallmann has started with the GNU project about 20 years ago. Since software is created and used on computers, it can be copied without any physical transfer taking place. Yet the source files had been kept secret and thereby hindered free combination and improvement for the common good. This situation led to the creation of the GPL, of which the Creative Commons license is largely our equivalent, requiring anyone using any software source files licensed under it to also use it. The success of Linux is a testament to the possibility of success for my analogous endeavor. For anyone with further interest in the matter, I recommend reading the GNU definition of free software: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I want free music.

http://www.myspace.com/zombeat

http://unfunrecords.com/zombeat/