Rest In Peace, Pekka Pohjola

One of the greatest and most known Finnish composer-basists, Pekka Pohjola has died. He has been one of my inspiring musicians. He got known in the 70s as a bass player in Finnish progressive rock band called Wigwam and he has also released numerous solo albums. Best known of those are Harakka Bialoipokku, Keesojen lehto and Pihkasilmä kaarnakorva. Material from his solo career can be categorized as fusion jazz. Pohjola might have been gone, but his legend lives ever after.

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 2: Mellon Moon

Another track resurrected! This one is from year 1999 and it is another Assembly music competition participant; Pop electro with mellow TV show jingle kind of theme. This track needed a little more work, because the original mix was so muffled and everything sounded so booming and muddy. Now it is a little better I think so!

Download: New version and/or original version.

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 1: Melonapplet Beautiful / Bottleneckmelon

When I started making music over a decade ago, I used so called trackers. For those unfamiliar with concept, trackers are a piece of software, which can be thought as a combined sampler and sequencer. Effects were limited to most basic ones like bending the pitch. I started with Scream Tracker 3, followed by FastTracker 2 and then Impulse Tracker. I stopped using trackers as my main tool somewhere in year 2001. A big pile of songs from that era is lost forever or buried in various places in Internet and BBS boxes.

Some of my tracker songs are available in scene.org. Some of them are a little embarassing, some of them are quite good even today. If you want to listen to them, I recommend to try a player like XMPlay to play those songs, because they are not MP3s but native tracker project files (also known as modules)!

I've been thinking of going through these songs, exporting the best songs and remastering/remixing them. I call this project "Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster". As a proof of concept I exported tonight a melodic IDM song with two names: Melonapplet Beautiful / Bottleneckmelon. It is from 2000 and participated in Assembly music competition. I used XMPlay to export each instrument separately to a wav file, imported each track to FL Studio, added some reverb and compression and exported a MP3 file.

It was easy and fun! I will continue tomorrow with some other tracks.

You can download the song from here and the original module from here.

I Hate MySpace

For years MySpace has been the de facto music social network. I wonder why, because it sucks like a super massive black hole. That statement may not surprise you, but for me it is a surprise that MySpace still gathers more and more bands to promote their music.

To be honest I had a MySpace profile. I don't really remember why did I register. Maybe I was doing it because everybody else was doing it and people usually search for music samples from MySpace. But I know well why I don't want to use it anymore:

It is slow

The pages download creepingly slowly. Of course one page can be a bandwidth nightmare when it is full of videos, photos and a background image size of a football stadium - and it is the profile administrator's fault that the page is like that. But it is interesting how much rope MySpace gives to its users to allow them hang themselves.

Of course I shouldn't care - I kept my own profile clean and simple - but all the other pages generating a massive load for the whole service caused that the single most important thing on my profile was slow as well: The music player.

Bad music streams

MySpace renewed their player few months ago and the player is quite ok now, but the streams are still sluggish. Sometimes it takes so long time before the song starts that I have left the page already. Not good for me, not good for the artist which could have been The Next Big Thing. Not only that but also the sound quality is weak. And you can't put very many songs to your profile, let alone organize them as albums.

Awful user interface

The profile layout is not very appealing, but the whole mess to upkeep your profile is something that even MySpace Tom can't be its friend.

Inflation of friendship

Friends, friends, friends... and almost all of them people I have never heard before. Do I need to say more?

Lack of plays

MySpace by itself does not very much improve your promotion. You have to advertise your music actively everywhere to gain attention. Social networking via so called friends does not generate very much good traffic. And by good I don't mean only quantity but also quality.

Last.fm does it better

I simply like last.fm. You have unlimited space for your songs, bitrate is not limited, it has numerous way to promote your music, there are radio channels, tags, groups and recommendations derived from its users' listening habits. I am not very known, still my songs get played once in a while. And what is more interesting: They also pay royalties also for the independent artists. I have earned only pennies and cents, but the principle is right.

Because last.fm does the job so well and I don't want to double my workload by keeping two profiles in separate services the choice was easy: I left MySpace.

The Ground Quits... Oh It Does Not!

The Ground was announced last summer with a buzz in Finnish IT and music media as it was the first Finnish net shop selling DRM free music also by the big records companies. The Ground had its roots in Levyvirasto, which was selling music by small record companies and independent artists as CDs and later also as MP3s. At same time Equal Dreams announced a MP3 shop with some interesting concepts to independent artists and bands. It felt like something was finally happening in the music business!

Few months later, 14th of November, The Ground announced that they are quitting the competition and shutting down their service at the end of the year. This caused a flood of feedback from artists and The Ground reconsidered: A little more than a week later they announced that they will continue their service at least until the next summer, but they will only sell music MP3s - no CDs anymore.

The reasons for these shifts of direction are clear: There are already big CD retailers in the market and they are not easy to challenge. Also the continuously dropping numbers of CD selling made the business concept based on not very firm soil. By dropping the CD selling they streamlined their concept to the point which actually made The Ground known in the first place, but it also cut the most laborous tasks: Receiving CD's, storage upkeep and sending packets all over the world.

The Ground is still unsure about its future. The selection of music by big record companies was a disappointment for many customers as the only big player there was EMI and the problem with independent artists is the cruel fact that over the half of releases never sell a single copy or only a few ones. This is not only The Ground's problem: For example TDC’s Play offering has had 60 million downloads, but three million out of the catalogue of 4.5 million songs have never been played. Not even once. I have also found it to be hard to be part of the so called long tail: I released my album All of a Sudden I Am Full of Scars for free just few days ago, because so little number of people actually bought it (it was sold in The Ground and Equal Dreams).

The Ground is developing now their service in peace without commercial pressure and I hope they find a durable concept for their business model. We don't need more DRM to a world like this.

For more information I recommend to read thoughts at http://www.monoliitti.com/2008/11/17/levyvirasto-kuilun-partaalla/ (in Finnish).

Violetear

This is an incoming Jean Nine release for Kahvi Collective named Violetear. It is a five track release containing some sort of dubstep: Dark but mellow mood, sparse rhythms mixed with strings and things. You can already download and listen to these beats now at last.fm if you can't wait for the official release, which will happen some time next year (Kahvi has a new policy of releasing only one album/ep a month to gain more attention for individual releases thus delaying the release of this EP).

You can listen to this at http://last.fm/music/jean+nine/violetear

All of a Sudden I Am Full of Scars

I have released my new album All of a Sudden I Am Full of Scars under my netlabel Kyoto Republic. It is a trip into dark downtempo, triphop and dubstep which beautifully sparks glimmer of hope here and there - only to collapse into the depths... Music for the armchair travellers of the darkening nights.

Here is a brief description of each track:

1. Landfills and Eternal Fall - The oldest track on this album. A triphop track from the pile of song ideas for an independent movie called Tiina. The name of the song refers to Leea Klemola's quote about my home town: Landfills, eternal fall and rebelling of teenagers.

2. Asphalt Ocean Lights - One of my first dubstep tracks. Does not try to push the boundaries too much and therefore succeeds well.

3. Sudden Disappearance - Melodic, melancholic dubstep downtempo whatever. Rhodes and violins forever!

4. Haunting Shadows - Slow, slow dive into despair. Beautiful, beautiful despair.

5. Premiere of The Night - Slowly progressing looming triphop. Tremolo violins and synths for the win!

6. Dedicated Thunder - This song was so much inspired by Portishead's Machine Gun, but comparing these two songs is so unfair.

7. Empathy Locks - There is always hope. And there is always scars. Locks for the open minded, locks for the empathy!

8. Sailor and The Star Burst - Periodically growing cinematic triphop. This song got the first place in Stream 2007 listening music competition.

Download album
Stream album online (at last.fm)

Prolog

It is a long time since I had a blog/net diary and now I'm back. I am 25 years old mobile software designer from Finland. I like music... No, I love it! I listen to it, I collect it and I produce it - and I release it for free in the Internet. I have been releasing stuff for free since the 90's when I uploaded my music created with trackers to old good BBSes. Nowadays I continue making mostly electronic music from side to side. I don't make (much) money with my creativity, but I have composed music to numerous theater plays, indie movies and multimedia presentations.

So it may not be a surprise the focus of this blog is music (especially free music): I want to share my thoughts about music culture and business, tell about my projects and promote the netlabels and music gems I find.

May the future be tomorrow!