Author: Jeff Albert

Legitimate music downloading enjoys dream week | CNET News.com

Legitimate music downloading enjoys dream week | CNET News.com

…a dramatic rise in the tide of authorized download sales in recent weeks suggests that changes may be afoot in the consumer’s relationship to digital music.

The important question for the music business is whether 20 million downloads represents the new baseline for digital track sales. A year ago, a 33 percent pop in download sales in the week following Christmas permanently raised the bar on weekly download volume by 2 million tracks.

The future continues to arrive.

Day jobs, or kids say the darndest things

Today, in the car, my four year old daughter told me that she is going to be an artist because she likes to paint and draw and make stuff. She figures if she becomes an artist she can continue to paint and draw and make stuff. Then she tells me that she is going to “go to work” too. She’s four and she knows that artists often need day jobs. This is comforting in that it means I am less likely to have to give her rent money when she is 40.

A few months ago I was working on a piece on arts financing. I never got it off the ground, but her comment today spurred me on. Let’s discuss this. There are generally two types of artists (in the financial sense). One is the artist that is totally art driven in artistic pursuits and usually does sometthing else to pay for living expenses (or has a very supportive spouse). The other is the artist that wants to do only their art (and its associated crafts), and ends up doing a lot of work that is in their field, but not necessarily in their artistic vision. Much of my career I have fallen into the latter category, and have the memorized horn parts to “Brickhouse” to prove it (although the therapy s helping).

Is one better than the other? Does one allow freer art? Do you have different perceptions of one’s work over the other? Please comment.

cc365: Remixing Pop Culture » Day 7: Jeff Albert – Lunch is the Question

I had been meaning to post again and remind everyone about the very cool cc:365 project from indieish.com. Every day in 2006 they are posting a new Creative Commons licensed song. January 7th’s tune is one of mine, from my recent CD One.

Indieish: Remixing Pop Culture » Day 7: Jeff Albert – Lunch is the Question

Subscribe to the feed and get a free tune every day this year. Pretty cool, eh?

Guardian Unlimited |’What? You call this music?’

This is an interesting article in which 8 UK artists swapped iPods, and then were asked to comment on the music and guess whose player they had.

Guardian Unlimited | Film & Music | ‘What? You call this music?’

The interesting tell in it for me was that the three that made references to whether or not they would acquire the type of music on the iPod they got, all used the word “download” instead of “buy”. “That’s not the sort of thing I would download” or “I would download that.”

Interesting…

Bagatellen: It Will Never Happen Again

Bagatellen: It Will Never Happen Again

Often enough, free improvisors play in a configuration more than once. If a person or group makes this sort of thing happen and we attend another performance by them sometime, we want it to happen again, but we have to be content expecting something sort of in the ballpark to happen, because plainly the incalculably large odds are that it will never happen again. It’s intrinsic to free improvisation. This knowledge may even feel like a faint blemish on that repeat encounter.

So here’s what actually happens on rare and memorable occasions. It happens again. The same people and sound tools making different sound events, but once again, it.

Married Couple Looks Like A Pie To Me

Any band that would call their album Looks Like A Pie To Me is all right in my book. Married Couple make great music as well. The San Francisco based quartet have eclectic influences that appear in both subtle and blatant guises. The trombone, tenor sax, acoustic bass, and drums instrumentation lends itself well to the freer side of jazz, which is where most of this music begins. There is some pretty overt grooving on the CD as well, and the starkness of the quartet setting is filled out by a wonderful ensemble concept that Married Couple maintains in both composed and improvised sections of the music.

It is obvious that improvisation is the focus of the music, but the compositions integrate seamlessly into the improvisations, and the improvisations are so coherent, that it can be difficult to tell the two apart. The music searches and stretches, but never really becomes noisy. It is easy to listen to, especially since every track is under 7 minutes. Some of my favorite moments include “Fold You Under” which features collective blowing from the horns with a nice relaxed yet crisp groove. “The Field” is interesting in that there are about three minutes of introspective and sparse improvisations before the melody (which is quite catchy) comes in to end the track. This is definitely music that deserves to be heard by a wider audience.

The band’s website seems to be dead, but you can hear clips and buy the CD at CD Baby.