Creative Caffeine: Nashville Recording Studio

BSODs (blue screen of death)  have been plaguing NIN on their current tour. In fact, one has been popping up on the giant display behind them at just about every concert. So what’s the deal? Will Trent be forced to fire his tech guy? Hardly. The truth is that it is all part of the act. The BSOD pops up for a split second near the end of the song The Great Destroyer, and there are videos after the break from two separate concerts to prove it. We all know Trent is a Mac man—so this is obviously a subliminal jab at Windows. I’m sure the nerds in the audience get a kick out of it.

Full Article with video:
Fake Fail: BSOD Repeatedly Strikes Nine Inch Nails Concerts

 While the niche may still be small measured against overall sales of recorded music, the surge of interest in vinyl — and, particularly, its rising cachet among young listeners — is providing a rare glimmer of hope in a hemorrhaging industry.

“Even if the industry doesn’t do all that well going forward, we could really carve this out to be a nice profitable niche,” said Bill Gagnon, a senior vice president at EMI Catalog Marketing, who is in charge of vinyl releases. He said that people who buy vinyl nowadays are charmed by the format’s earthy authenticity.

Link to Article:

Digg – Another Spin for Vinyl Records

Online music sales continue to skyrocket at the expense of CDs. iTunes continues to be the leader of the pack, too, not only in online sales, but music sales overall. But a small rebellion is brewing against iTunes as artists become disgruntled with the hit they’re taking on overall album sales thanks to the now-wildly-popular method of cherry-picking favorite tracks for download.

Full Article:

Album-loving artists blame iTunes for changed music tastes

Another birthday for the CD has come and gone and yet the damn things just won’t die. On Aug. 17th, 1982, the Compact Disc was born into an age of rampant consumerism that was the 1980s. Big hair was in, big vinyl and the big snarls of tape from cassettes was out.

Full Article:
CD Turns 26 and It Still Won’t Die | Maximum PC

July has been a busy month for transferring old recordings to Pro Tools.  The sooner the better with these old tapes… if you wait too long they have to be baked due to excessive oxide shedding.  Creative Caffeine is one of the few studios setup to transfer 24 track analog tapes straight into Pro Tools HD with pristine Apogee converters.

Early this month John Mills transferred a number of 24 track tapes to Pro Tools for the highly respected John Anderson.  Chief engineer Collin Peterson has been working with Dave Shipley to transfer recordings for the Del McCoury Band, some of which may be featured on an upcoming release,  as well has some early recordings from John Hartford,  some of which featuring the Aereoplane band with Tut Taylor, Norman Blake, and Randy Scruggs!  Most of the McCoury tapes were 16 track 2″ recorded at Ricky Skaggs’ studio in Hendersonville. We were able to rent a 16 track head for our JH-24 and make that option available to clients at an extra charge.

The music industry is suffering, and it’s all because of those darn fans. Er, what? It turns out that KISS member Gene Simmons believes exactly that. He claims that piracy is to blame for the industry’s woes, and KISS is apparently taking its ball and going home until the situation gets under control.

“The record industry is dead. It’s six feet underground and unfortunately the fans have done this,” Simmons said, according to AOL News. “They’ve decided to download and file share. There is no record industry around so we’re going to wait until everybody settles down and becomes civilized. As soon as the record industry pops its head up we’ll record new material.”

It’s never a smart move to blame your loyal and devoted fans for the injustices of the world, but Simmons seems to think that his fans (unlike everyone else’s) would rather steal from the band than continue paying for music they enjoy. Simmons also thinks bands that encourage the public to download their music for free (such as Radiohead with its famed In Rainbows experiment) are only making the situation worse, despite the fact that Radiohead has made a nice chunk of change from the In Rainbows release so far.

Simmons’ latest comments come just over six months after his previous rant about the music industry, wherein he told Billboard, “Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid’s face should have been sued off the face of the earth.” At that time, he blamed the record industry for letting foxes into the henhouse (presumably by allowing DRM-free music to be sold online, or perhaps any music at all to be sold online). “Doesn’t affect me. But imagine being a new band with dreams of getting on stage and putting out your own record. Forget it,” he said.

So, does this apparently rampant piracy problem affect Simmons or not? His comments between last November and now seem to contradict each other a bit, although they clearly share the same underlying sentiment: anger. Simmons might want to reconsider speaking for anyone but himself, though. Many young and independent bands are able to enjoy success on and off the stage, all while selling their music online. As part of an upcoming feature we’re doing on indie bands and online music, one band told us that its members believe that P2P is all part of the ecosystem, and that they even saw increased sales after their album showed up on Bit Torrent.

The sad part is that Simmons’ continued comments aren’t going to cause anyone (fans or not) to have an epiphany and quit their P2P-slingin’ ways. In fact, it may have the opposite effect—the clear disdain in his words may well drive some of KISS’ fans away. The only thing Simmons is doing by lashing out at fans is earning him a reputation as a curmudgeonly artist unwilling to adapt to a changing music landscape.

Original Article:
Gene Simmons blames fans, P2P for killing music industry

Upgrades at Creative Caffeine have commenced as we just installed an Apogee AD-16x and Rosetta 800 192, giving us 24 channels of Apogee analog to digital conversion at 24-bit 192kHz for our new Pro Tools HD2 Accel rig. Apogee makes some of the best converters in the business and we are anxious to get these up and running. We’ve been very fond of the radar 24 Nyquist converters we’ve been using for the past few years, so the Apogee units have pretty large shoes to fill. When combined with our analog tape machine, fabulous rooms, and vintage mic collection, we believe you’ll be hard pressed to find a better combo.

Major musicians are exploring the market potential for directly interacting with their fans and releasing music independently. Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead both made headlines recently for experimenting with Internet-based releases, but NIN frontman Trent Reznor has just called Radiohead’s effort “insincere.”

“I think the way [Radiohead] parlayed it into a marketing gimmick has certainly been shrewd,” Reznor said when speaking to Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Michael Atkin. “But if you look at what they did, though, it was very much a bait and switch to get you to pay for a MySpace-quality stream as a way to promote a very traditional record sale.”

link to full article:
Reznor: Radiohead offering was insincere, industry is inept

A week after releasing his four-volume instrumental work “Ghosts I-IV” through his Web site, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor is reporting that he amassed more than $1.6 million in orders and downloads.

Reznor made the albums available at five different prices, including a free download, without any advance publicity. His marketing campaign, such as it is, consisted of a terse announcement on his nin.com Web site. On Wednesday, he reported 781,917 transactions, including free and paid downloads and orders of physical product. A $300 box set sold out of 2,500 copies within a day. Nine of the 36 songs were made available as a free download. The complete set also was available as a $5 download, a $10 double-CD and a $75 set with bonus visual content.

A few months ago, Radiohead adopted a similar strategy in releasing its latest album, “In Rainbows.” Fans were allowed to name their price for the album, but the U.K. band did not release sales statistics.

link to original article:
http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2008/03/reznors-one-wee.html

From turning down the Beatles to stomping Napster— the most ill-advised, foolhardy and downright idiotic decisions ever made by The Man.

By Jon Dolan, Josh Eells, Fred Goodman

Original Article:
http://www.blender.com/articles/default.aspx?key=18696&pg=0

Blender March 11 2008

They Never Even Recouped Their Aqua Net Expenses

#20 As grunge dawns, one label bets on hair metal

In 1989, with hair metal reaching its zenith, the A&R department at MCA Records finally decided to get in on the act—by tossing a rumored $1 million at L.A. band Pretty Boy Floyd, who at the time had played only eight shows. The band’s debut, Leather Boyz With Electric Toyz, peaked at No. 130 on the Billboard charts, and the Floyd blew another mil or so of MCA’s money before the label finally dropped them in 1991 … right around the time the suits blew a chance to sign a fledgling Seattle outfit called Nirvana.
Unintended consequence Around 1992, the Sunset Strip pizza-delivery scene gets a fresh infusion of talent.

The Vinyl Solution

#19 The industry kills the single—and begins its own slow demise

In the early ’80s, the music industry began to phase out vinyl singles in favor of cassettes and later, CDs. Then, since it costs the same to manufacture a CD single as a full album, they ditched the format almost altogether. But they forgot that singles were how fans got into the music-buying habit before they had enough money to spend on albums. The end result? Kids who expect music for free. “Greed to force consumers to buy an album [resulted] in the loss of an entire generation of record consumers,” says Billboard charts expert Joel Whitburn. “People who could only afford to buy their favorite hit of the week were told it wasn’t available as a single. Instead, they stopped going to record shops and turned their attention to illegally downloading songs.”
Unintended consequence The Eagles still top the album charts.

(more…)