Knobs, Buttons, and Wood Grain
What Problem Does This Solve?
Mark Rushton’s Perseverance in the Arts is a weekly email on Substack where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist.
This week’s topics:
Getting Into A Library
Buying a Moog Labyrinth
The Difficult Position of Streamyard
The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Getting Into A Library
I’m surprised my blood pressure and pulse aren’t higher. It sure was an exciting week.
After a long journey, I got some of my music licensed with an exclusive library. We’ll see if it lands anywhere.
My wife Ann has been saying for nearly 20 years that my music ought to be in films, TV shows, or whatever. She said she first noticed something that sounded like me while watching “that Jennifer Garner TV show” (Alias). I’ll take her word for it.
To dive into the world of film and TV music (colloquially known as “sync” or “synchronization licensing”) I joined DISCO.AC in 2021 to upload my music to a base location for querying libraries and agencies, but I found the interface a little confusing. In my tech day jobs, over the decades, I’ve worked on some rather insanely complex user interfaces and backends. It’s taken a few years, but I’ve figured out DISCO’s interfaces to a certain extent, although I still think it’s “overbaked”.
Ann helped me build an Airtable database of over a hundred companies to consider querying. They had to be researched, ranked, and reviewed. I know enough to treat every company’s submissions guidelines as a rubric. I have to customize everything. I have to send what I think is my best music. And I have to be patient.
Queries started last spring. Only a handful. I sent about one a month until August. The company I signed with was ranked high, first by my wife, and then by me, but they were the last one I emailed. After August, I slacked off a month. Then my dad died in early October.
March 2024, I get an email from the company saying they like my music and want to do a deal. What? Huh? Oh!
Then I ran into that problem with my now-former publishing administrator. They couldn’t be part of the deal, so I had to leave the admin to self-manage my catalog. Then I discovered that the admin hadn’t been registering my tracks with ASCAP and everywhere else in over a year. And other things. I had to cancel my contract with the admin, and that ended on June 30th. While I’ve gotten that company’s name off my titles as a publishing admin, I’m still cleaning up the mess.
Long story short, I’m very happy to be in a library. We’ll see where it goes.
Buying A Moog Labyrinth
I bought a Moog Labyrinth on Friday - from Sweetwater, of course - always support businesses with personal service. It'll be here next week.
What interested me the most was seeing the word "generative" in the subtitle: "Labyrinth: Parallel Generative Analog Synthesizer". Generative = RANDOM. Combine that with a lot of knobs, buttons, and wood grain, and I'm interested - tell me more.
Most product demo videos, even by the YouTubers, are beyond annoying. But a couple minutes into one video, the presenter warned everybody that you can't program notes into this synth, and the sequencer may randomly change the pattern.
I'm like, oooh - must have - where can I buy this?
Then I watched a few more minutes of them making the most god-awful noises imaginable.
I still bought it, but it'll be paired up with the chain of effect boxes I've been iterating for the past 5 or 6 years. I guarantee that what comes out of my Moog Labyrinth will not sound like anybody else's.
The Difficult Position of Streamyard
For the past few years, I’ve been live streaming video and audio using the Streamyard software to places like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and (briefly) Twitter. I pay for one of the paid tiers on Streamyard. It’s about $200 a year.
Not long ago, Facebook created a threshold for live streaming to groups or channels or whatever it is. While one of my channels qualified, I thought this was a good time to abandon my Facebook groups. They’re all throttled and held for ransom by Zuckerborg.
Then Elon Muss, one of the many billionaires who always needs more money, decided to outlaw video live streaming to X/Twitter unless I paid $3 a month for a Premium+ account. Forget that.
(Yes, I intentionally spelled Musk’s last name wrong - it’s an inside joke…)
I don’t have a LinkedIn account anymore, and I wouldn’t live stream there anyway, so that leaves just YouTube and Twitch.
I have no problem throwing Twitch overboard.
At this point, why am I paying $200 a year to Streamyard? I can live stream direct to YouTube from YouTube.
Wasn’t the internet more fun when the oligarchs weren’t warring over APIs, thresholds, and $3 a month tariffs?
I actually like Streamyard, but I think I must (muss) downgrade my account to “free” prior to the renewal date later this year.
The Surrender of Culture to Technology
In the past year, I happened across one of the most prescient books of our modern tech age: the late Neil Postman’s 1993 book, “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology”. Here is Postman talking about it in 1996 at DuPage University. I think this book deserves more readers today.
Postman’s monologue about “What problem does this solve?” is rather brilliant. Maybe we need to ask that question a little more often about anything new that shows up on the scene.
What problem does the Moog Labyrinth solve? For me, it’s not having to program notes and being able to let the sequencers become “corrupt” and randomly change. I really don’t care about notes anymore. They don’t matter. The sequencer will still play a scale, but I can’t play a specific scale of my choice. These sorts of “features” dovetail rather spectacularly with my "no menus” and “randomized” aesthetic when it comes to creative sound-making and processing devices.