Band Changes, Brand Changes

Posted by on June 24, 2015 No comments

To expand a bit on a former post where I was noticing that when a musician or band changes recording labels, their sound changes, sometimes dramatically.  I wanted to make up a list of cases where I find this to be true.

Band Album>Album Label>Label
Asia Astra>Aqua Geffen>IRS
Belinda Carlisle Live Your Life Be Free>Real MCA>Virgin
Boston Don’t Look Back>Third Stage Epic>MCA
Boston Walk On>Corporate America MCA>Artemis
Bruce Dickenson Pretty much Any>Any Mercury>Castle>CMC>Sanctuary
Emerson/Lake/Palmer Love Beach>Black Moon Atlantic>Victory
Kansas Monolith>Audio-Visions Kirshner>Epic
Kansas Drastic Measures>Power Epic>MCA
Kansas Spirit of Things>Freaks of Nature MCA>Intersound
Rancid Life Won’t Wait>Rancid (2000) Epitaph>Hellcat
Rush Hold Your Fire>Presto Mercury>Atlantic
They Might Be Giants Factory Showroom>Mink Car Elektra>Restless
XTC Nonsuch>Apple Venus V1 Geffen/Virgin>TVT
Steve Morse Coast to Coast>Structural Damage MCA>High Street
Genesis Selling England>Trick of the Tail Virgin>ATCO/Atlantic
Dream Theater Most Any>Any ATCO>EastWest>Elektra>Atlantic>Roadrunner

Contrast that with some other artists that never changed labels and their sound/quality remained consistent:

Billy Joel: CBS/Columbia
David Lee Roth: Warner Bros (although his sound changed between Skyscraper and A Little Ain’t Enough)
Heart: Capitol
Ozzy Osborne: Jet/Epic
Queen: Hollywood Records

Sometimes the changes coincided with personnel changes, which could make sense.  Sometimes, it was a turning point in the band’s popularity.

Overanalyzing

Posted by on June 23, 2015 No comments

Today is Tuesday – Tie Tuesday – and I’m doing the tie thing.  If you’ve seen Mai Ties, today is “The Distinctive” against a grey shirt.  At lunch, the waitress asks me if I’m a car salesman.  No, why?  The tie.  So, I shut her up by stating that it’s Tie Tuesday so you have to wear a tie.  Duh, everyone knows that.

Why a car salesman?  I mean, it could have been lawyer, banker, real estate agent, store manager, or anything else.  Why was that the first and more logical thought?  Yeah, there’s a car dealership nearby, but there’s dealerships everywhere.

Does wearing a tie make you seem dishonest?  Wait a minute, does being a car salesperson make you seem dishonest?  Where was I going with that… Do I look dishonest wearing a tie?  No, not dishonest, do I look like I’m trying to impress someone?  That’s not it.  Why do car salespeople wear ties?  What is that purpose, then I can figure out why I looked like I had that purpose because I was wearing a tie.  Maybe.

But I’m wearing jeans.  She didn’t notice that; it was just the tie.  Is it the style of the tie?  Maybe because it’s trendy and not traditional that made it seem car salesperson-y?  Is it because I had a tie clip?  My impression would be that not wearing a tie clip would be more casual and more salesperson-like.  What exactly am I trying to figure out here?

The waitress was old.  Maybe that’s a generational thing?  She grew up always seeing car salespeople wearing ties?  But back then, people would wear suit jackets as well.  If I wore a jacket now, I would probably look more like a banker, except for the jeans, again.  Maybe it’s my age.  If a young guy was wearing a tie, she wouldn’t ask if he was selling cars.  She’d just think he was a hipster. Or something.

Or maybe, she just sucks at conversation and commented on something that made me stand out from the crowd.  There were a bunch of grungy people there.  So…. car salespeople are not grungy.  Check.  I think I’ve got it now.

Finding The Unexpected

Posted by on June 23, 2015 No comments

My new section here on my blog for the MCA Master Series has all its images backed by my Flickr account.  I’m keeping an album on Flickr for any CD covers that are particularly rare or aren’t available in high quality.  Like I semi-mentioned in my previous post, albums can be re-released by different labels or even by the same label and they may change or update the artwork.  This is rather true for some of the MCA Master Series albums where the artist wants to break free from the consistent design imposed by the label.  So in that case, I feel it’s important to preserve the album art consistent with the version I have, because whenever I search online for the artwork, I get the newest revision.

So, on Flickr, I have all my MCA Master Series covers, along with some others as I’ve been scanning them.  As I was scrolling through the album, I noticed one of the covers had an abnormally high view count relative to my others.  Like a 100:1 difference.  The cover was Albert Lee – Gagged But Not Bound:

So I started to do some research.  I wanted to know who found my scan and what they thought of it, good or bad.  I looked for any Albert Lee fan sites/forums.  I looked for album art blogs, I couldn’t find anything.  I thought maybe it had ended up in Flickr’s Interesting list or maybe a group there.  Nope.

I didn’t have a Flickr Pro account, so I couldn’t see any advanced statistics, like where the traffic was coming from.  After a couple days of searching in vain, I broke down and paid for a Flickr Pro account.  And of course, the stats weren’t historical.  I had to wait for more people to view the image.

A couple days later, I checked up on it and sure enough, I had stats – useful stats.  The cover was being found through Flickr search, not from an external website or search engine.  That’s odd.  Why would they find that image and not any of my others.  Then I drilled in deeper and looked at the keywords being searched.  Oh.

I guess people use Flickr to search for erotic bondage pictures.  Photos involving people being “gagged” and “bound”.  And, among their expected search results, my CD cover scan is in there, and it’s intriguing enough for them to click on.  On one hand, I’m disappointed my stuff is being found in a search for a fetish, and on the other hand, I think it’s surprising that my stuff is actually interesting enough to be viewed in that context.

The Music Biz

Posted by on June 23, 2015 No comments

The last few days, I’ve been adding additional metadata from my CDs into my ripped files so I can identify them better when logging them in Discogs.  As I was going through each of my CDs, I was logging the record label, the barcode and the catalog number.  As I was doing this, I had a few thoughts.

The first thought I had was noticing that when an artist or band would change record labels, their defining sound would usually radically change, and usually for the worse.  Most cases where this happened would be leaving a major label like Geffen and going to a tiny label like Ray’s Music Records.  There are some cases where an artist would change from a megalabel to a boutique label, like from EMI to Relativity or Magna Carta and although their sound would change, it would still be recognizable.

This got me thinking about how much influence a label has over an album.  Maybe it’s because the larger labels have a stable of high-quality producers that mold the artist’s sound with a heavier hand?  When the band leaves, they either self-produce or are provided a producer from their new label that has a different concept, so maybe that is the reason for the drastic change?

So maybe there is a distinct advantage to being signed on a big label, despite the massive disadvantages that go along with it.  And that was my second thought.  When I look up an album on Discogs and I see there are over 100 different releases of it, I get angry.  I can understand that there may be reasons for an album to be released on different labels in different countries.  I also can understand if a label gets bought out by a different one.  But when I see the album sold by multiple companies, that irks me.  That comes down to who owns the rights to the music.

One time, I picked up a book written by a musician about her story and experiences as an artist.  I didn’t read much of it, but I happened on a passage saying that if a contract ever uses the phrase “in perpetuity” to run away and don’t look back.  The meaning of that term is that the record label owns your work forever.  They can do whatever they want with it: sell it off, license it (whore it out to multiple people), or keep it locked away in spite of huge demand.  Whatever they want.  And that’s what really angers me about the music industry – the idea that the artists and their work belong to them.

It’s not an arrangement like, “You make your music, we’ll help sell it and we’ll take a percentage of the sales for doing that for you.”  It’s more like, “You make music for us, we’ll sell it and give you a percentage of the sales for your efforts.”  And for some long-running acts, you see this terrible situation where they’ve been released from their contract on one label, moved on to another, and the original label starts rehashing all their old songs into different compilations and collector’s editions.  That ends up cheapening the artist’s  image.  I’ve seen artists that have 10 albums and 40 compilations.  How fair is that to the artist?

Nice

Posted by on June 16, 2015 No comments

Today at lunch, I parked my car and was walking to the restaurant and a women heading the other way called to me, “I like your car!”  I turned and said “thank you” and kept going.  Now, after a short reflection, there’s a lot I have to say about this.

The first reaction I suppose people would have is, “She was totally into you!” or in a more modern phraseology, “She wants the D!”  Or even at a more simple level, my car was an icebreaker.  Let me share a story.  This is from my last dating experience (and I expect it to be my last since I have an awesome GF and I’m not going through that hell again in these modern times).  The dating site I was using had a feature that would anonymously poll users to find the best picture from your collection that you could use as your profile picture.  Of the ones I had uploaded, the highest-rated photo was of my car.  Isn’t that a crushing bit of knowledge to have?  The best picture of me is not a picture of me.

So excuse me if I’m a little sensitive on this particular matter.  There’s a huge difference between saying “Nice car!” and “Cute baby!”  The latter is something that you made.  It’s unique.  The former is something you bought.  Anyone can buy it.  There’s also a difference between a pedestrian person saying “nice car!” and an enthusiast saying “nice rims” or “nice mods”.  The enthusiast’s knowledge and expertise lend credibility to his compliment and makes the compliment more directed at you.

Finally, there’s a huge difference between “I like your car” and “I like your taste in cars.”  Is the difference that obvious?  If I hear the first, I don’t even give it a second thought.  If I heard the second, it would be a conversation-starter.  So, here’s a quick tip for you single and searching people out there.  If you see someone you are interested in, don’t compliment the things they have, compliment them on their choice of things they have.  After all, you want to be one of the things they choose, right?

Filling In The Cracks In The Collection

Posted by on June 15, 2015 No comments

As I’ve previously noted, I have finished the acquisition phase of my CD collection.  I have also completed the scanning of the cover art.  The results of this have been added to Flickr and also as a series of pages for other’s benefit.  To increase the benefits, I decided to contribute to a music metadata website.

I think I’d been through this before, and I had a big internal debate as to whether to use MusicBrainz or Discogs.  Initially, I chose Musicbrainz, but something didn’t sit well with me during that experience and I gave it up pretty quickly.  Recently, I submitted some missing information to Discogs and it went a lot smoother.  So I think I’ve found my home, there.  History shows I’ve said that before and ended up disappointed.  We’ll see.

Discogs seems to be more of what I want anyway, because they focus on collectors, which is more and more how I view myself and my CDs.  So, not only do you simply submit information, you also consume that information by tracking which CDs you own.  I started doing that sporadically.  I’m about half-way through with over 300 of my 600+ albums logged.

The problem is, when you are logging a collectable, you have to be very specific as to which collectible you have.  In the case of albums, each album can be released under different labels in different countries under different catalog numbers.  So as I was logging my collection on the website, I was pretty much choosing the most likely candidate from the multiple choices.

To be the most accurate (and there is a benefit to being accurate), I would have to have the CD in front of me to make sure I was choosing the right one, with the right label and catalog number.  Instead of doing that, I decided I should record the Label, Barcode, and Catalog Number in the files’ metadata, so I can refer to them as needed.  So, for a little while each day, I sit in font of my CD rack with my laptop and record that data into the files.

I had previously used Windows Media Player’s metadata feature to try and add all missing info using their metadata services.  As I was going through and adding the actual info from my CDs, I discovered how inaccurate the results really were.  How could an application determine what label the CD was on, when all it has is a ripped audio file?  For every album I had to change from Sony to Columbia or anything else, I got really irritated.  Not so much that it was wrong, because I understand how it could be wrong, but more because I could have been put in a position of giving bad information.  I insist on being as truthful and accurate as possible.

One of the benefits of being accurate is that Discogs can value your collection based on prior sales of the same item.  Of course, if you have a common or a rare release of an album, that can make a big difference in its value, so accuracy is important.  Being about half-way through my collection, and with moderate accuracy, my collection has a median value of $1500.  I have some CDs worth $60 and some worth $.75.

FML (Failure: My Learning)

Posted by on June 2, 2015 No comments

I read a book recently: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams.  It’s a good book and has made me think about things I do and has led to some behavioral changes already.

One of the things it made me think about was how I learn.  There’s a common saying when discussing different teaching methods that people learn in different ways.  They say some learn by hearing, some by reading, and some by doing.  In my particular case, I learn by doing.  But more importantly, I learn by failing.

For a very common personal example, when I am learning programming, it’s not enough for me to duplicate an example from a book and see it in action.  I will usually make the example my own – renaming variables, eliminating some pieces I feel are extraneous, and so on.  If it doesn’t work, great!  If it still works, I keep tweaking it until it breaks.  Then I begin the process of understanding why it doesn’t work.

To me, the how isn’t as important as the why.  I have the need to understand what the important parts are, so when I am creating my own version, I know what is flexible and what is not.  Or when I am looking at other’s broken code, I can focus on the important parts.  I think this is an important part of understanding.  I say many times that if something works perfectly the first time, you haven’t learned anything from the exercise.  Failing is a very important part of my learning process.

This sort of means I am suited to do more creative work.  I mean, I would be a pretty poor doctor (even though I am a great troubleshooter).  More like Dr. House, I would have to nearly kill each patient until I figured out what the proper solution was.  It also means I’m pretty damn poor at math.  My approach to solving a math problem is to start with a formula with known working inputs and output, then test it with many different inputs and verify that the output is as I want.  This is why I don’t do game programming.

Check, Please

Posted by on May 29, 2015 No comments

There’s a recently-born phase that is cast about as an insult, “Check yourself” which is meant to convey to the target that they are essentially, out of touch.  There’s a whole deeper meaning to the phrase that involves class warfare and the modern caste system, so using this phrase is really a lot harsher than it may initially sound.

“Check yourself” infuriates me.  And when I get mad, I get very mocking.  And when I get really mocking, I go redneck.  Think of an exaggerated version of Larry the Cable Guy (if that’s possible).  I don’t do stand-up comedy, but if I did, I would totally do this routine, despite the fact that it absolutely destroys my voice when I’m doing it.

Anyway, the idea that a person must tell another to “check their privilege” is reserved for people who a) have privilege and b) know what privilege is and c) know who should have it and d) believe they know who is affected by it.  None of these apply to rednecks (in the Blue Collar comedy definition).  They’re just simple folk who don’t want to get involved in the business of telling other people what they should be doing. 

So I came up with a Blue Collar routine, in the format of “Git ‘er dun”, “Here’s your sign” and “You might be a redneck”.  The premise being, what if a redneck heard about the phrase “Check yourself” and didn’t understand it (because they don’t have that concept), but wanted to make use of it because it was hip.  Thus we get:

Check yerself!
You might have shit yourself with that fart.

Check yerself!
Your shoelaces are untied!

Check yerself!
Make sure your balls aren’t stuck to the inside of your leg.

Check yerself!
Your hat is on backwards.

Check yerself!
You’re walking where the dog likes to shit.

Check yerself!
You got boogers hangin’.

Check yerself!
Your truck ain’t high enough for that road.

And that’s all I could come up with on my drive home.  It’s enough to start with, and it’s enough to take my mind off the stupidity of people trying to shame other people for what they have, either through their own work or worse, by simply being born that way.

Dining Philosophy As Work Philosophy

Posted by on May 18, 2015 No comments

Some time ago, I had written about a blog post about my dining out habits, or more so, about how I just eat out every meal.  Lately, I’ve gotten a little better about that and started cooking some stuff at home.  I got to the point where I said, “I can cook a damn hamburger seven days a week” and started doing it.

But anyway, one of the guidelines I lived by when eating out was, “Eat the expensive parts.”  Get your money’s worth is what I was trying to express.  When discussing job duties with the GF recently, especially when faced with overwhelming amounts of work to be done, I brought up the common phrase, “How do you eat an elephant?  (One bite at a time.)”  The convergence of these two bits of guidance was immediately obvious.

So, if you have an elephant to eat, where do you start?  You eat the most expensive pieces first.  So when consuming, make sure to get your money’s worth.  When providing, make sure your efforts have the greatest impact.

Completion

Posted by on May 18, 2015 No comments

Today, I purchased the remaining CDs to complete my collection of the entire MCA Master Series catalog: 44 CDs released between 1986 and 1990, including one album with vocals and a rare special issue compilation included with BMW vehicles from that era. 

I thought I was done at 42 CDs. I knew about the country/vocal album put out at the very end of the MCA Master Series label’s life and I wanted to purposely disregard it because it has no interest to me.  I never had any hope of finding the BMW CD, since it was made so long ago in probably an incredibly small quantity and who would keep something like a promo CD with a new car?  However, as fate would have it, the completion of my collection came in a fortunate wave.  The two expensive holdouts became available for less than I’d seen before, a search for the rare BMW CD returned a hit, and the vocals album was available for a penny.  In a flurry of purchases, I was done, and done more than I even expected.  That is the completion of Phase 1 of my music plan. 

The status of Phase 2 – the scanning of all CD covers – is pretty sad.  I have a LOT of CDs and little free time and even less time where I am motivated to work on them, especially when a batch of scans came out poorly and I have to rescan them.  So I think I will reprioritize the scanning to focus on only the MCA Master Series covers so I can move on to Phase 3.

Phase 3 is the printing and framing of the CD artwork.  I don’t exactly have a plan for this just yet.  More on this to come…