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SurfGuitar101 Forums » The Shallow End »

Permalink Spotify coming to the U.S. (and Grooveshark?)

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In another thread, aqualadius asked for opinions, thoughts about Grooveshark.

The name sounded vaguely familiar to me. I checked out the website, read the T's & C's and wondered how much it was just trying to be a spin on Pandora except you name only what you want to hear, not get pushed "sounds like" stuff... or if it was a variant of old Napster, Limewire and the like where I understand you'd find duplicates and varying quality (minus the ability download.)

They (Grooveshark) outline their liabilities ...basically none. Users are fully liable for anything they upload, and the host site is not responsible for anything other than locking out users who are repeat offenders to, um, irresponsible uploading. Besides, I didn't find any Aqualads tracks on Grooveshark, so it must not be that groovy. Big Grin

Anywho, looks like the discussion about Grooveshark and just about any other streaming music site might quickly get lost in the shuffle. Appears after much anticipation, it's official; Spotify is coming to the US.

I'd welcome any Euro members comments... Seems the Spotify service has been available there for a good while now. How's the surf?

Fady

El Mirage @ ReverbNation

I had Spotify. It was pretty good. I didn't use it for much other than classical music but the breadth of selection and recordings were amazing. It changed, however. It use to be what internet based streaming music should be. That isn't Spotify anymore.

I fear the digital paradigm. It could seriously damage the idea of the album.

JakeDobner wrote:

I fear the digital paradigm. It could seriously damage
the idea of the album.

I really don't. For one, the album's established itself well enough now that album art is etched into people's ideas of bands, and artists best work are still referenced by "which album to get". People will probably continue to talk about My Bloody Valentine as the band that released Loveless, not Only Shallow.

And on the flipside, I love singles. We're posting on a board of music that started out VERY single-based. If a band can be brought to my attention because they made one great song, that's one great song I'd never heard, rather than have it buried amidst an album of otherwise mediocre filler.

We have enough information, experience and diversity at our fingertips now that people can enjoy music in SO many ways. A lot of people seem to think that trends are coming and going at breakneck speeds, but that's their time in the spotlight: new types of music bubble up and people keep listening, choose the ones they like rather than riding the wave of indie popular.

edit: to extrapolate and ramble a bit, I think a big reason there are a lot of surf bands playing right now is that we can find this stuff so easily on boards like this, on youtube, what have you. I don't think there will be another "wave" of surf rock, and if there is it'll be pretty quick, because nobody needs Jon & the Nightriders to come and remind them about it, it's right there on the internet so you don't forget.

Storm Surge of Reverb: Surf & Instro Radio

Last edited: Jul 06, 2011 22:45:41

Has anyone tried out Spotify? I've heard good things. It is finally in the US now. I believe it's been available in Europe for 2-3 years.

Site dude - S3 Agent #202
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Last edited: Jul 15, 2011 13:07:34

I had spotify for a year and a half. Actually I enjoyed it. There was not too much surf music to listen to, but some classic surf songs. Sometimes originals and sometimes covers played in VA albums (not too good - sometimes they sounded like elevator music). But there were a wide range of music to listen to. I do not know how it can be now.

https://lospipelines.es/
Find us on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and all other music platforms.
https://www.youtube.com/@LosPipelines
https://www.instagram.com/los_pipelines/?next=%2F
Los Pipelines - Facebook

Being regular user of Grooveshark.

It is good for sampling the artists you have never heard of, but what is available is only what people have uploaded.

I checked it out for SoCal surf at one point and there wasn't muchonit.

But for new artists and new mainstream music it is useful.

Freshwater Surfin'

The Murray Basin
Australia

Got my invite to Spotify, created my account a few minutes ago. Did a number of searches off the top of my head and have been pleasantly surprised so far.

In no particular order - more just a check for old, new, domestic, international...

<disclaimer>
Ever try to think of a list of bands without your CD or MP3 collection at your finger tips?
</disclaimer>

Bambi's? Yep
Tomorrowmen? Yep
Space Rangers? Yep
Bradipos IV? Yep
Sentinals? Yep
Thunderchiefs? No
Aqualads? Yep
The Madeira? Yep
The Atlantics? Yep
The Lively Ones? Yep
The Ghastly Ones? Yep
Dick Dale? Yep
El Supernaut? Yep
Jon & the Nightriders? Yep
Slacktone? limited, but yes
The Astronauts? very limited
Satan's Pilgrims? Yep
The Torquays? Yep
The Vanduras? No...
The Birth of Surf comps on Ace Records? No
The Bitch Boys? limited, but yes
Jackie & the Cedricks? limited, but yes (tracks from a full comp: Japanese Groupsound among others)
Secret Samurai? Yep
Surf Coasters? No...
Meshugga Beach Party? Yep
The Challengers? Yep
Jim Messina & His Jesters? Yep (under "...And The")
Eddie & The Showmen? ...one track on a Comp "Ultra-Surf Presents: Hang Ten!"

... there are probably dozens upon dozens of more searches I can (and will) do eventually, but this is just a super fast cursory list. Seems promising so far!

If you're curious about a band (or a list of bands within reason), post and I'll gladly search and report back.

Fady

El Mirage @ ReverbNation

Last edited: Jul 19, 2011 14:28:49

Oh, oh, oh!!! It seems that there are much more surf music now. Good for you!!!

https://lospipelines.es/
Find us on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and all other music platforms.
https://www.youtube.com/@LosPipelines
https://www.instagram.com/los_pipelines/?next=%2F
Los Pipelines - Facebook

Here's a very interesting six-minute video about Spotify, including some less enthusiastic perspectives on it. It's from Wall Street Journal's site, and it's titled "Can Spotify save the music industry?"

http://on.wsj.com/14ZlgbF

Ivan
Lords of Atlantis on Facebook
The Madeira Official Website
The Madeira on Facebook
The Blair-Pongracic Band on Facebook
The Space Cossacks on Facebook
The Madeira Channel on YouTube

Nice update, Ivan.

In the long run, I've gotten nearly zero value with these guys. Between my generational preference to hold a booklet or album jacket while listening, and the ever more integrated-total-life-on-Facebook integrated account requirements implemented some time back, I might have logged on once more after the initial posts above. I wish I were less tactile at times.

Anyhow, was thinking about sharing this article when I read it this morning (grabbed printed copy while out and about yesterday), and your update on this thread seems oh so fitting.

So here you go, from the other end of that spectrum. Enjoy!

Carrboro musician Wesley Wolfe has catalyzed the lathe-to-turntable movement of local music by Brian Howe / The Indy Weekly

image

There were wax cylinders and cassette tapes, compact discs and (at the very end) MP3s, but the 20th century's music belonged to the vinyl record. Despite more portable formats and vast technological advancements, that romance continues and grows: Americans bought 4.6 million records last year, up from 3.9 million in 2011, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

At a time when music feels intangible and oversupplied through the Internet, satellite and streaming radio and through the speakers above the grocery store aisle, LPs maintain a tangible link between artists and collectors. The archaic crackle of a stylus dragging dust through a spiral groove supplies a resonance of its own, unlike translucent and pristine digital formats. It's the difference between a silk purse and a Ziploc bag.

But like any other mass-consumed product, most records are duplicated in remote factories by the thousand, rolling from a large warehouse onto record shelves. But for locavores and similar connoisseurs, area musician Wesley Wolfe has a more rarified option. For the last three years, Wolfe's one-person business, Tangible Formats, has cut 7-, 10- and 12-inch records in runs as small as one. It's part of an obscure but evolving culture based around small-batch hand-lathed records, a laborious but potentially viable alternative to mass production in a fragmented music market.

Wolfe, a musician, initially came to the idea of hand-lathing in 2009, when he released his first solo album on Odessa Records. A distant plant pressed 250 vinyl LPs, the smallest order most manufacturers will accept, at a cost of more than $2,000. Through researching the terms of art in order to speak knowledgably to the mastering engineer, Wolfe realized he was more interested in the process of making records than selling them.

"The reality is that I can sell 50 records and I don't have the closet space for the other 200," he explains in his Carrboro apartment. "By the time I sell 50, I'm bored of it and working on something else anyway. I'm not going to do the big promotion and tour, tour, tour."

To understand what Wolfe does at home, it helps to first understand what he doesn't do, or how the plastic-wrapped vinyl you might pick up at a record shop is made. Step one in mass-producing an LP is to lathe-cut the music into a manageably soft, lacquer-coated aluminum disc. This fragile master is electroplated in a nickel bath. The metal forms a negative-image mold, or a father. The fathers are electroplated to produce mothers, metal records that are again electroplated to produce more durable negatives—the sons of the fathers and mothers, or the stampers.

This plating and cutting happens twice, once for each side of the record. At last, using a hydraulic press, the stampers punch out retail discs from vinyl pucks, replicating the original thousands of times. The process requires a lot of space and an army of heavy machinery.

When Wolfe cuts a record, he eliminates every step except the first one. Instead of a copy of a master, you get the master itself, perhaps still warm from the lathe. Each record is cut individually: If you order 30 copies, Wolfe hears your music in full 30 times. Again and again, the lathe's diamond stylus traces the white thread of the music over the record's creamy blackness. Minute variations, from the music's peak volume level to the width of the groove that comes when the music has finished playing, ensure that no two are just alike.

This personal touch comes at considerable cost, with a single 12-inch going for as much as $50 and a 7-inch for as much as $25, with discounts for larger orders. But Wolfe isn't interested in listening to the same song for days on end, and the largest run of 7-inches he'll cut is 50, as he did for the local band Bombadil. More often, his services are employed for personal or novelty records.

The concept of the hand-lathed record isn't new: Listeners widely used lacquer discs, or "acetates," before magnetic tape became the format of choice for semi-disposable storage. The dubplates of Jamaican sound systems are so-called acetates. DJs still get tracks cut on them for short-lived used, as their soft grooves degrade after a few dozen plays.

But the low sound quality and poor durability can be deal-breakers, even for record labels focusing on "small-run, intentionally collector's edition-type stuff," as Cory Rayborn recently described his label. If any local imprint seems like it should work with the sort of hand-lathed albums Wolfe makes, it's Rayborn's Three Lobed Recordings, based near High Point. But Rayborn said he could never get it to add up.

"It's been four or five years since I've really looked into lathed stuff," he explains, "and I haven't heard what Wesley Wolfe is doing. But I own some lathe cuts, and historically, I don't like how they sound, all glitchy and poppy. And they wear out. I thought about doing a Bardo Pond [a psychedelic rock band from Philadelphia] one years ago. At the time, it was really only Peter King over in New Zealand. Dealing with cross-continental shipping, it just didn't make sense."

Peter King is a legend among lathers, a scattered community that haunts online forums such as Lathe Trolls. In the town of Ashburton, New Zealand, King uses four tandem lathes to cut into polycarbonate plastic, not lacquer; the records are strong but lo-fi and monophonic. People lathe music into all kinds of plastics, including picnic plates, but cutting directly into sturdy, luxurious vinyl is the holy grail. And of the handful of lathes capable of doing so in the United States, two live and work in Wolfe's apartment.

When Wolfe was researching record manufacturing online ahead of his release, he found Souri's Vinyl Recorder website. Not only did this lathe cut straight to vinyl, but it was the only one Wolfe found that also cut in stereo. Because it cut deeper, wider grooves into the vinyl, this lathe produced slightly short LPs at 18 minutes per side. But the loss in space came with a boost in volume and fidelity.

Wolfe was sold; now, however, he had to convince its creator, an enigmatic German known only as Souri, to sell one to him.

Souri's lathe costs €3,200, or a little more than $4,000, and you can't just drop one in your online shopping cart. It has no instruction manual. Prospective buyers who persuade Souri that they are serious must travel to Germany for a training course. Souri is very protective of his lathe, but Wolfe says what might sound like paranoia is justified: Souri had been pitching his lathe to DJs since the early 2000s, only to reportedly have it shoddily knocked-off by nefarious Russians and abused by feckless Americans. So in 2010, Wolfe flew to an obscure German village with more than $8,000 of cash, as Souri requested, in his pocket for his training and, he hoped, his equipment.

Wolfe is cheerful and earnest, with boyish hat-hair and friendly eyes that sparkle; it's not hard to imagine what Souri saw in him. He returned from Germany with one lathe and convinced Souri to visit America to attend South by Southwest in 2012, where the pair led a record-cutting demonstration booth. A second visit to Germany cemented Wolfe's role as Souri's U.S. liaison and technician (and earned him spare parts to restore a second lathe he'd bought in Arizona). In March, the unlikely transcontinental pair will reprise their SXSW demonstration.

Meanwhile, Wolfe has turned his machines into a thriving cottage industry. He used Souri's lathe to cut records for locals including Spider Bags, The Toddlers and The Rosebuds. And when the amphitheater-filling folk-rockers Mumford & Sons needed to cut a special song to vinyl for a member's wedding, United Record Pressing, a large plant in Nashville, sent the job to Wolfe.

But Wolfe's most frequent and enthusiastic client is John Harrison, a local songwriter, bandleader and visual artist who sees applications for lathe-cuts in all of his media.

"I didn't even really know this existed until I heard about Wes doing it," Harrison remembers. "I went to his apartment to check it out, and I was blown away. The fact that he had to go through so much to get the lathe impressed me even more."

For Harrison, Wolfe first cut a 7-inch record on transparent vinyl, with a unique demo from his band, jphono1, on one side. He left the other side blank, so Harrison screen-printed the image of a cassette tape on it in neon green. Matted and framed, the piece sold for $60 at a Minus Sound Research gallery show, proving that the high cost of Wolfe's one-by-one manufacturing doesn't rule out profit for the creative and resourceful.

"You can hardly twist people's arms to buy one 7-inch for $5 when your band plays," Harrison says. "It would take me multiple shows to make that much on sales with the band. And you can't even get a blank side pressed from a plant—I've called. They can do etchings and stuff, but they won't print a blank. That could only happen for me because of Wes."

Now Harrison likes to get demos of songs from all his albums and EPs cut by Wolfe, in very small quantities, creating unique artifacts for his supporters. He briskly sold through a preorder run of 10 lathe-made records for jphono1's new album.

Record lathes were once so large and expensive that only major companies owned them. As they get lighter, cheaper and more accessible, Wolfe won't be alone in finding ways to use them practically and even profitably.

The innovative company Lathe Cuts, for instance, recently carved an R. Stevie Moore/Ariel Pink split onto mirrored acrylic that was gradually collected from the bins of a plastic supplier, and the first run of 66 sold out quickly with prices topping $80. Meanwhile, old-school lathe aficionados still use the bulky, hard-to-maintain Prestos, tooling replacement parts from washing machines and Victrola needles. The trade's lingo alone summons images of artisanal elves with jeweler's loupes and tiny chisels.If the mystique of the mass-manufactured record is strong (and sales trends indicate as much), the mystique of the hand-lathed one is weaponized.

This article appeared in print with the headline "For the record."

More photo's of the direct to vinyl pressing process here.

Fady

El Mirage @ ReverbNation

Last edited: Feb 10, 2013 11:38:27

Onslow_Beach wrote:

In the long run, I've gotten nearly zero value with these guys. Between my generational preference to hold a booklet or album jacket while listening, and the ever more integrated-total-life-on-Facebook integrated account requirements implemented some time back, I might have logged on once more after the initial posts above. I wish I were less tactile at times.

Well, I gotta have my physical copies, too, but I've found Spotify extremely useful over the past couple of years. I usually only listen to it at work, but it's really nice to check out stuff before I buy it. It's led me to buy CDs from bands that I probably wouldn't have, and vice versa. And it's also nice to give a listen to some stuff from my younger years that I may have a bit of nostalgia about, but after one or two listens realize isn't all that good, and if I bought it on CD, it would have been basically a waste of money. So, I give it a big thumbs up just for the ability to check out new music which then can be bought on CD - though I'm sure very few Spotify listeners actually do that. Sad

Ivan
Lords of Atlantis on Facebook
The Madeira Official Website
The Madeira on Facebook
The Blair-Pongracic Band on Facebook
The Space Cossacks on Facebook
The Madeira Channel on YouTube

I'm not a Spotify fan, but if it can save people from Pandora than I am all up for that. I hate Pandora...

Spotify, is an incredibly powerful musical discovery tool, especially when paired with an intelligent google search. I love that you can play entire albums, that it is easy to use, and it has a good library.

I don't like the pricing. I understand people like Ivan use it as a catalyst, but too many people use it as their only form of listening. And even worse, people pick and choose songs into playlists while ignoring albums. This is probably not Spotify's fault, save for the pricing, but just how the consumer is. Would these people even be listening to/buying music if it weren't for spotify? I find this likely.

Piracy is no longer a problem, but it has been replaced by things like spotify, having to put free promos on the web, youtube. The major labels have been able to capitalize on this new paradigm, but not everyone has found their way. There are successful smaller labels, but then there are the ones that are going away. In many ways spotify is worse than piracy, because it is legal and easy to do.

Music should be cheap, easy to find, and to the vision of the artist/band. The easy to find is brilliant these days, perhaps too an extreme. Cheap... too cheap for things like spotify, too expensive for vinyl, good price for a digital download but the file format is not worth the price with today's technology. And the vision of the artist/band... I just wish there was less focus on buying/listening to single tracks.

I'm a paid Spotify subscriber, I love the access to a pretty decent selection of music without having to take up all my laptop disk space! I think it is a better solution than piracy myself. I really think it's a better solution than iTunes or anything else at this point, but it does have some issues IMO.

I dislike the fact that they don't encrypt the logins and you are forced to use it with a Facebook account, I created a Facebook account just for Spotify use. Their app has gotten better but their search engine still kind of sucks. They need better support options.

Last edited: Feb 28, 2013 08:11:16

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