Arab Strap’s first two albums, 1996′s The Week Never Starts Around Here and 1998′s Philophobia, get the deluxe reissue treatment courtesy of label Chemikal Underground. Both are being released as double-CDs, with the original album backed with a contemporary Peel Session and a live set (their first show for Week Never Starts and a 1998 T in the Park appearance for Philophobia).

Street date is August 17th. I suggest that you load up on sunshine, hugs, and possibly antidepressants before buying.

MP3: Arab Strap – The First Big Weekend [from The Week Never Starts Around Here]

MP3: Arab Strap – Packs of Three [from Philophobia]

A recent Guardian Music article discussed the evolution of payola for the social media age: companies who promise Facebook friends or Twitter followers to musicians in exchange for cash, or pay people to download songs:

One of the worst examples of a company taking advantage of desperate artists is a new Australian venture called Chartfixer (the clue is in the name). For $6,000, Chartfixer will crowd-source 1,000 downloaders to each buy a digital copy of an artist’s track from iTunes. After purchasing the track, the downloader can claim the cost back and obtain a reward of one dollar. In Australia, 1,000 sales can get you into the top 80, whereas 5,000 sales (which would cost $25,000) can buy you a potential top 20 hit.

While this makes any music lover fume, here’s the problem: it might work.

Earlier this year, Clive Thompson wrote an article for Wired describing the work of Duncan Watts and Matthew Salganik, at Yahoo Research, who performed a series of elegant experiments to address the question of whether songs in a social environment become popular due to their intrinsic merits, or due to luck. Briefly, they created a pocket universe: a music site to which they uploaded 48 songs by unknown bands, which participants in the study could rate and download. They ran the experiment repeatedly, with new groups of people (nearly 13,000 in total) listening, rating and downloading the songs. Watts and Salganik found that certain songs would often rise to the top, and certain would fall to the bottom, but for most songs, their final ranking was unpredictable: the swirl and flow of ratings and social pressures would deposit them high for one test run, and low for another. They concluded that about half of a song’s success could be attributed to its intrinsic appeal, but the other half was due to it randomly quirking up or down, which was then amplified by the social environment into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Where does this leave Chartfixer and a band who hires them? Well, for a market as small as Australia,  a relatively modest amount of money might be enough to nudge the song upwards. Assuming the song isn’t completely terrible, this kind of pay-for-download scheme might bring it to the attention of listeners, at which point the self-fulfilling prophecy of success can take over. Whether this is the case in practice, of course, has yet to be shown. And the body behind the Australian charts has, unsurprisingly, already come out against the scheme.

Interestingly, Watts and Salganik followed this study with an even cleverer one that suggests that manipulating the ‘charts’ in this way does kind of work, but results in fewer downloads in total. As Clive put it: “If you lie about the merits of your product, you might suppress demand across your entire sector.” Gee, I wonder if that’s ever happened in music…?

Go read Clive’s full (and fascinating!) article on the Watts and Salganik studies here. Or download the research papers here and here.

Image: Australian Currency by Flickr user Krug6, reposted here under its Creative Commons license.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard of something called “The Swinger.” It’s a piece of Python code that debuted at the San Francisco Music Hack Day a few weeks ago, which uses The Echo Nest‘s remix software to automagically stretch and shorten beats in a song to give it that swing. It went massively viral—over the last few days, somewhere north of a million people listened to these “swing” versions.

Naturally, I decided to get in on the fun – you can hear my contribution to the meme, a swing version of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows,” below. I uploaded it to SoundCloud, which asks you what kind of licensing you want to use – all rights reserved, a Creative Commons license, or no rights reserved – and it stopped me cold.

The legal status of remixes and sampling is grey, to say the least, with differing rulings on whether it constitutes, for example, transformative use. One solution would be compulsory licensing for remixing and sampling, similar to what currently exists for covers (this is why the Sex Pistols were Sid Vicious was able to cover “My Way” – unhappy though he was, Paul Anka had no legal recourse).

Calls to address this aren’t new, of course (Lawrence Lessig is the most vocal advocate). But what really struck me over the last few days is how urgent the need for legislation is getting, given the rapid rise of tools that let even musical and programming ignoramuses like me create remixes. The next iTunes is probably going to look a lot more like Google Picasa, since the tools that are the musical equivalent of crop, resize, or ‘remove redeye’ are pretty much on our doorstep—simple, painless and requiring no special skills or expensive software. It’s past time for the laws to catch up.

EDIT: Sid Vicious, not the Sex Pistols. Thanks to Martin Packer for the correction.

Thanks to Quinn Norton and Ethan Hein for excellent discussions on the legal issues surrounding remixing. And a very mild disclaimer of a collaborative relationship with the fine folks at The Echo Nest.

Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows” (The Swing Version) by debcha

It doesn’t look very good. But figure that each album contains about ten tracks. Here’s a graph of songs bought as singles versus songs bought as part of album:

Doesn’t look quite so apocalyptic now, does it?

Another metric of the album’s not-quite-so-imminent demise comes from Spotify founder Daniel Ek, who noted during his SXSW interview this year that fully 30% of playlists on the music streaming service are albums.

Of course, none of this is really meaningful without longitudinal data. And if we’re going to go that route, we might want to consider that the 1990s were an aberration in single sales: since CD singles (unlike 45s) were barely supported by record companies, consumers had little choice but to buy whole albums. But as digital downloads (both legal and illegal) made acquiring tracks à la carte possible again, music lovers were quick to take advantage of it.

Of course, albums themselves are an artifact of a technological system, governed by the difficulty of distributing music-as-atoms, and how many minutes you could fit on long-playing record (the rationale behind the duration of audio on a CD is a little more involved). Given digital distribution, there’s no reason why artists can’t release singles, EPs, LPs, double albums, sextuple albums…whatever works best with their artistic vision. There’s nothing magical about an 80 minute set.

New Yorkers! Feeling left out because the previous two zed equals zee happy hours were in Cambridge? It’s your turn! Join me and host of like-minded people to talk music, technology and culture. We’re meeting on Sunday, May 23rd at Radegast Hall in Williamsburg, from 4-6 pm. Feel free to RSVP in the comments or via e-mail so we know to expect you, but just showing up is fine too. Hope to see you there!

EDITED TO ADD: I’ve gotten a bunch of RSVPs via e-mail, and it’s shaping up to be a fun conversation with cool people!

Image: NYC – Brooklyn – Williamsburg: Radegast Hall & Biergarten by Flickr user wallyg, used here under its Creative Commons license.

Processor power increases exponentially. Hard drive storage increases exponentially. And the energy density in batteries? Decidedly not exponential. Lithium ion batteries are thought to be nearing their technical limits, and alternatives are still probably a few years away.

I thought about this the other day when I was working at my local coffee shop. On the table in front of me I had both my fancy smartphone and my ancient MP3 player, which is what I was listening to. Because, frankly, I don’t trust my phone to have enough juice to make it through the day if I use it for frivolous things like playing Plants vs Zombies. Or listening to music.

Streaming music over the 3G network, is incredibly energy-intensive – like talking on the phone constantly. Rhapsody and Spotify have figured this out, unsurprisingly, and their iPhone apps enable you to download playlists of music to your phone over WiFi. (With an average speed of 22 Mbit/s for an 802.11g network, you can download a 5 min song at a bitrate of 128 kbit/s in just a couple of seconds, so you don’t need to spend long in a hotspot.) But having a bunch of playlists on tap is still pretty far from true streaming music.

Given a constant energy density, of course, one option is just to make the battery bigger. And my coder friends tell me that clever programming can help a lot with battery life. But for smartphones, we really just need much better power sources before the promise of whatever you want to listen to, whenever you want it, wherever you are, can become a reality. Dear materials scientists and electrical engineers, please get right on that, will you?

Thanks to Mark Chang for some technical background to this post; any misapprehensions are entirely my fault, not his.

Image: New Battery Generations, from the Argonne National Laboratory, posted here under its Creative Commons license. How freaking cool is that?

My very first musical mentor was my sister, V, and she’s probably the person who bears the most responsibility for my taste in music. When we were both barely teenagers, she turned me away from the dark side that was Top 40 radio, and set me on the path that I’ve followed for the rest of my life.

V’s only a year older than me, but she was infinitely cooler. When we were in middle school, I wore nondescript black clothes. She got in trouble for wearing a hot-pink minidress she designed and sewed herself. She talked to boys; I didn’t talk to anyone. She performed in the school musical; I was a library helper.

Both of us spent our childhood watching Casey Kasem and waiting eagerly for the Top 40 countdown on our local radio station so we could tape our favourite songs. Then, her musical tastes evolved. I remember her staying up late to listen to Brave New Waves, the CBC‘s groundbreaking indie/alternative music show, while I was still listening to Def Leppard. She was probably the first person in her school to become a Smiths fan. To this day, “How Soon Is Now?”  is like Proust’s proverbial madeleines—when I hear it, I’m instantly transported back to the streets around the house we lived in where we were kids, where V and I shared a paper route. She started listening to David Bowie when Let’s Dance came out and, because she was older and cooler, so did I, thus beginning a relationship with an artist that’s endured my entire life. We discovered that the Toronto Public Library had a fantastic collection of records and started working our way through his entire discography. And, most importantly, she started listening to our local alternative radio station, in lieu of Top 40 radio—and so, of course, did I.

If you’re reading this, you probably have one or more people who introduced you to the wider world of music, either as a kid or an adult. Today’s a good day to thank them.

Thanks, V.

MP3: The Smiths – How Soon Is Now? [buy]

What happens when music fans go to the ballpark? Well, if you’re me, you get instantly distracted by the ‘rally songs’ that come over the PA as players run onto the field (and by how weirdly inappropriate they are) and start thinking about what your own personal theme song would be. I asked this question on Twitter yesterday, and received answers ranging from the Imperial March from Star Wars through Sheryl Crow’s “Every Day is a Winding Road” through MOP’s “Ante Up.”

Me? I have two candidates. On good days, Cake’s “Short Skirt, Long Jacket.” And on most days, “Girl Anachronism” by the Dresden Dolls. What’s yours, and why?

MP3: Cake – Short Skirt/Long Jacket [buy]

MP3: The Dresden Dolls – Girl Anachronism [buy]

Image: Fenway Park (on top of the Green Monster) by (Alex), used here under its Creative Commons license.

Guest blogger Scott writes:

In an earlier post about Kickstarter, I gave the example of how the producers of a documentary about The Kinks were funding its editing through small donations. That movie, Do It Again, premiered in March at the Cleveland International Film Festival to positive reviews, and will be showing in Somerville at the Independent Film Festival Boston on Saturday, April 24th. I haven’t seen it yet, but it looks to be less of a music documentary and more of a Nick Hornby/Studs Terkel mash-up, in that it isn’t so much about The Kinks as it is about how people (creator/star Geoff Edgers in particular, but also the people he enlists in his quest) think, or even obsess, about the band. And while the Hornbyish narrative story of a quest to reunite The Kinks is intimately tied a single band, it can be seen as a lens for thinking about the Terkel-ish question of why people love the bands they love and how that love shapes them. In that sense, it seems like a good pairing for The Heart is a Drum Machine — One asks “What is music?”; the other asks “What does music mean?”.

Previously on z=z: Watch: Music docs at IFF Boston, Apr 23-25

Image: Photo of Ray Davies from the Wikimedia Commons, used here under its Creative Commons license.

Boston indie music and movie lovers, rejoice! There is a hat trick of music-related documentaries next weekend as part of Independent Film Festival Boston. All three screenings are at the Somerville Theatre at 7:30 pm. The italicized excerpts are from the IFF Boston site, and you can get more info and buy tickets there.

Searching for Elliott Smith:

Friday Monday, April 23rd 26th, 7:30 pm, Somerville Theatre

An icon defined by his music’s emotional accessibility and the detached enigma of his public persona, Smith is as quietly compelling in the accounts of his friends and fans as his life and lyrics were….Balancing his darkest depressions and greatest achievements, SEARCHING FOR ELLIOTT SMITH reveals its subject’s kindness, subtle humor, and reserved brilliance, as well as the perfect imperfections of his prolific output—and it testifies to the overwhelming effect his visceral truths had on his closest friends and anonymous admirers alike. [D. Barnum-Swett]

Do It Again

Saturday, April 24th, 8:00 pm, Somerville Theatre

Every real music fan has a favorite band—but it’s a very rare fan who single-handedly attempts to reunite them years after they’ve packed it in. In director Robert Patton Spruill’s DO IT AGAIN, that rare fan is Geoff Edgers, a Boston Globe staff writer and dedicated follower of the Kinks. Edgers was driven to embark on a risky and time-consuming quest to get the Davies brothers and their old bandmates back in the same room to play some songs…. [B. Searles]

Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields

Sunday, April 25th, 7:30 pm, Brattle Theatre

…Directors Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara provide us with comfortable, homey access to Merritt and the most important, grounding influence in his life: his decades-long friendship with his chipper musical collaborator Claudia Gonson. On his home turf, in the apartment that has doubled as the studio for the lion’s share of his recordings, Merritt is anything but prickly or uncooperative. He is a reflective, passionate, and even playful artist who is producing many of the great songs of his generation. [SL Frey/K Aikens]

EDIT: Factcheck fail. Dates, times, and venues have been corrected. Thanks to Brad for the heads-up!

MP3: Elliott Smith – Waterloo Sunset (Kinks cover) [via Rawkblog]