New Monday #109
Happy Monday!
So, there's a joke about the record business: a long time ago, when a baby was born, the people of the village would lay it in the middle of a blanket. On one side, beside the baby, they would place a violin; on the other side, a bag of gold. If the baby reached for the violin, they became a musician. If they reached for the bag of gold, they became a thief. If they reached for both... they became a record label executive.
I know a bunch of "record label guys" and most of them are lovely, but the biz has been tilted against artists since its inception. Yes, some artists have done extremely well, and that trend will continue perhaps, but for the giant majority, a major label record deal was a dream from which you prayed to wake up.
The record label model has been dying for decades, and morphing into different shapes as it bleeds out, like the creature from The Thing. I've had a hard time following the thread of the changes, and more than that, getting the label paradigm out of my head so that I could think about what is next for musicians and music production.
This might be all old news to some of you. To others, it might have no bearing. I hope it is of some use regardless.
Joel Gouveia
Joel Gouveia is a music supervisor for film and brands in Toronto. He has a cogent view on the past, and on the future.
His Substack, The Artist Economy, is worth reading: https://substack.com/@joelgouveia. He writes about everything music biz, from scalpers to Spotify. He's painting a picture of the future that seems reasonable, and perhaps even healthy.
https://joelgouveia.substack.com/p/the-death-of-spotify-why-streaming
https://joelgouveia.substack.com/p/the-death-of-spotify-part-ii
I talk with a lot of young bands, and they're basically working in a manner similar to what Joel lays out in the articles.
The formula is simple, albeit a lot of work, and not without its difficulties.
Velvet Daydream
These guys are a rock band from Colorado.
Really, they’re a rock band from the late 1960s, early 70s, and it’s not just songwriting that harkens back to that time, the recording techniques and gear are analog: live in the studio all at once, wearing bell bottoms.
https://youtu.be/Dn4zUUXYJpk?si=nHQasVJD3b1w470s
Oh my... that sounds a bit like Jim Morrison back by the Between the Buttons-era Rolling Stones. Whatever, I dig it.
Listen for the very wide mono drums, and the guitar sounds tucked back in the speakers. This recording sounds like I’m standing in the room about ten feet back. Distant mic’d things going on. Guitars sound like amps with mics on them. I think these guys are recording at Far and Away in Colorado, and I don’t think there’s a real room reverb chamber there, so I’m guessing the ‘verb on the vocals and whatnot is a clever digital simulation. I read that they're mixing down to two track analog.
What sounds modern, though, is the bass. And there's something about the drums that sounds individually mic'd and then mixed together and panned weirdly, rather than cut with three or four mics a la Glynn Johns.
Some more Velvet Daydream—even more fun!
https://youtu.be/y5bcrj7sfIk?si=e5MBxUpq3-abzPqD
Oh god! Could it get any more psychedelic??? A sitar!
I love the drums panned over to the left, the vocals a little to the right, the lack of bottom end... the lack of high end... and the general mess that this recording is. I like it a lot. But it doesn't quite sound authentic, like this:
https://youtu.be/uIZhiBu2JLc?si=HGDu09ofIvX2-m7e
There is such a distinctive quality to mid-late 60s recordings. They're somehow clear and yet muddy. Wonderful and yet terrible. The way the piano comes in at 1:58 and all the other tracks vanish—I would steal this for a production. The silence on the left is as compelling as the piano on the right.
https://youtu.be/7D-emsQP6tU?si=o_hpLUkpNrNwzfzJ&t=63
The Small Faces broke up and became two blues rock bands—The Faces, with Rod Stewart, and Humble Pie. The Small Faces had a tinge of the blues but were daringly experimental. There is so much panning and noise and sounds on this!
Much of the sounds of a time is the equipment and the way the engineering staff learned to work with it and around it. The Small Faces track, by the way, was cut at Trident Studios on a Sound Techniques A-Range console... more on that later in the Spring as we get our Sound Techniques channel strip plug-in together...
Velvet Daydream is tiny at the moment. They’re on an unknown record label, Flagstaff (can’t find any information), they have a three page website, not even 700 followers on YouTube, about 24,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, and 33,000 on IG, and somehow they popped up on my feed.
This reminds me of how things were when I was a kid. You’d know about a band because someone else knew about them, you heard a record in a record store, or they were mentioned in a local Zine. Velvet Daydream is releasing singles consistently and personally answering every email or comment.
Will they get anywhere? Make any money? I don’t know. I’m not even sure they care. But I like these guys. I like the songs. I'm interested in their story and following their adventures.
But PEOPLE SUCK. Velvet Daydream is currently making legal moves to shut down an Ai group named THE Velvet Daydream. THE VD look a lot like that other Ai band, Velvet Sundown. Repulsive.
I suppose this is what happens if you lay a violin, a sack of gold, and a laptop beside the baby, and it grabs them all.
Until next week, my fellow humans!
Warm regards,
Luke