Yes, there’s now a decent guitar app for the iPhone: PocketGuitar, available for download from the Apple iPhone AppStore. It’s been around for a while, but only recently made available via the store.

As long as you’re not particularly finicky or pedantic about your music, it’s pretty good and a really enjoyable app. If you want to understand the possibilities take a look at this video of Every Breath You Take. It’s been put together using an iPod Touch, PocketGuitar, DigiLite, MiniPiano, GarageBand and iMovie.

How did I find this app? Via Twitter. Here’s the tweet that sent me haring off to check the app out:

Yes, it’s that Roger McGuinn. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Incidentally, I’ve really loved writing this post, because it helps me understand the sheer power and simplicity of the web for sharing information in a useful manner. The tools available, the magic of being able to link, the ease with which multimedia collateral can be added.

There’s mosquitoes on the river

Fish are rising up like birds

It’s been hot for seven weeks now,

Too hot to even speak now,

Did you hear what I just heard?

The Music Never Stopped: The Grateful Dead

There’s a fascinating study out in the latest First Monday, the “peer-reviewed journal on the internet”. Marko Rodriguez, Vadas Gintautas and Alberto Pepe have analysed the relationship between “concert and listening behaviour analysis”, using the Grateful Dead as the basis for their research.

What the researchers have done is simple and elegant: they’ve sought to build a framework to look at what people listen to online in comparison to what people had the opportunity to hear “live”. And, as I hope you would expect, there is a direct correlation.

The Dead didn’t feature much on radio. So the listening patterns of their fan base related much more to live performances than anything else. And the Dead were a performing band. As far as I can make out, the study does not look at the correlation between online listening and online purchasing, but my assumption is that the correlation is direct and high. So what we have is a simple model along the lines of “live performances drive listening habits drive purchases”.

As against this, the model that has been imposed on us for some time now is closer to  “we choose the songs, purchase the airtime, advertise the songs and you buy them from us  when and how we tell you to”. Maybe I’m being unfair, but that’s the way it felt to me.

There’s a big Because Effect coming along in music. Artists are going to make more money because of music rather than with music, although they will continue to make money with music.

Bands and artists that play live will make more money than those who don’t; live performances will become more and more important, as people recognise that digital is abundant and physical is scarce. Bands and artists who allow people to reuse and mix and mash their music will make more money than those who don’t allow it, as they get their share of sheet music sales and lyrics books sales. As the number of physical performances grow, so will musical instrument sales, and artists will be able to make money through instrument endorsements. And of course we will continue to have the T-shirt/book/video/merchandising explosion.

When was the last time you went to a concert? Did you notice the queues for people buying merchandise? Think about it. People now go to concerts early so that they can get the merchandise without queueing quite as much.

Live performances. Sheet music. Endorsements. Merchandise. None of this is new. It’s just stuff that a dying segment of the industry prefers to gloss over. Gloss over in order to try and enforce the continuance of a dead model. Rather than the Dead model.

There was a time when the only way to listen to music was by going to see someone live. In fact that was the way people listened to music for hundreds of years. For a short time someone tried to change that, tried to convince us that the way to listen to music was to listen to it on mousetraps, giving them the chance to ask us to pay again and again and again for different formats that would play on different faster-better mousetraps. That day is over.

The return of live music is a rebirth, a renaissance. And it’s happening. The last throes of DRM will see an end to the mousetrap generation, and we will go back to a time when live performances become important again. The value chain is changing, and attempts to retain the lock-ins of the past in order to preserve older value chains and distribution models are bound to fail. Artists will make money. In fact they will make more money, but this money will come from a number of sources rather than just physical format music sales.

Even vinyl can and will make a comeback. For performing bands.

In the end it’s all about performance.

A coda: I’ve made no secret of the fact that I like the Grateful Dead. A lot. Which is why this photograph is one I cherish, the opportunity to meet a boyhood hero in the flesh:

Doc Searls, who introduced me to the Because Effect, was responsible for getting me to meet John Perry Barlow, who wrote the lyrics for The Music Never Stopped, quoted at the start of this post.

One of the Raj “traditions” that used to make me laugh was the insistence that the First Secretary of the Bengal Government could not see visitors until after he’d fiinished the day’s Times crossword. Never proven, but fun to think about, particularly if you were in a queue in Writers’ Building.

There were many apocryphal stories; one set (of three stories) in particular was of considerable interest to me, given my passion for words and puzzles.

• Charles Napier, when capturing the province of Sindh in 1843, was meant to have sent a telegram with just one word on it: Peccavi.
• Colin Campbell, similarly, is meant to have sent one that just said Nunc Fortunatus Sum when he arrived in Lucknow.
• And, to complete the set, Lord Dalhousie is credited with sending just Vovi when annexing Oudh.

Peccavi. I have sinned. Nunc Fortunatus Sum. I am in luck now. Vovi. I have vowed.

There are many arguments as to whether any of these events actually happened, with people focusing on particular angels and particular pins. For example, it is said that a 17-year old girl named Catherine Winkworth wrote in to Punch to say that Napier should have said Peccavi, and that the Punch cartoon published in May 1844 was directly as a result of the letter, that Napier never said it.

I don’t know the answer, there is no evidence that Napier actually sent the telegram. But there is evidence that Napier was born in Whitehall, that he went to school in Celbridge in Eire, a place with a history of 5000 years of habitation, a place that had a school since 1709, that “Ireland’s richest man” then, William “Speaker” Conolly, built his mansion there at the turn of the 18th century. So there is some likelihood that Napier was educated enough to have said it. As I study the other pronouncements attributed to Napier, I tend to have some sympathy with the view that he actually sent the message, even if Miss Winkworth did write a letter a year later.

For the purposes of this post, it doesn’t actually matter whether Napier said it or not. What matters is the accessibility of the story.

In the past, the Peccavi story would only have made sense to people who understood Latin and who had a facility with Empire history and geography. A limited set of people.

Today, if Napier were alive and he used Twitter to send his message, he could have sent one that looked like this:

This ability to compress context and associate it with communication is critical. It is an example of what David Weinberger was referring to when he said “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies”.

The implications for accessibility should not be underestimated. In the past, Peccavi was an “in” joke amongst well-read people. Now, it can be shared by all, with links providing the context and background required to “understand the joke”.

I think this is a big deal. It is one of the reasons why the web is different, the ability to associate content and communication with compressed context.

It is with some sadness that I note the passing of Delaney Bramlett, who died last Saturday. For many of us he was just Delaney, as in Delaney and Bonnie and Friends. Friends who played regularly with Delaney and Bonnie, friends who included Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, George Harrison, Dave Mason, Leon Russell and Rita Coolidge. Here’s the full line-up as shown in Wikipedia:

Delaney Bramlett
Bonnie Bramlett
Eric Clapton
Duane Allman
Gregg Allman
George Harrison
Leon Russell
Carl Radle
Jim Gordon
Jim Price
Dave Mason
Rita Coolidge
King Curtis
Bobby Whitlock
Jim Keltner
Jerry Scheff

Oh yes, and he also mentored JJ Cale, amongst others. He encouraged Clapton to sing, taught Harrison how to play slide guitar, both Duane Allman and Leon Russell counted themselves as proteges of his. Some CV.

Most of us of a certain age remember many of the people listed above, some as sessions musicians, many as stars in their own right. Readers of this blog would know that the song many consider to be the rock classic, Layla, was performed by Derek and the Dominoes. But not many would know that all four of the members of Derek and the Dominoes were “friends” of Delaney and Bonnie: Eric Clapton, Bobby Whitlock, Carl Radle and Jim Gordon. There is enough evidence to suggest that without Delaney and Bonnie, there wouldn’t have been a Derek and the Dominoes.

I first came across Delaney somewhat indirectly; I was watching a film called Vanishing Point which, to people of my generation, defined car chase films along with the incomparable Bullitt. And stuck in the middle of this classic Seventies film was a pair of musicians. Delaney and Bonnie. I had to know more.

There wasn’t an internet in those days, but what I did find out was enough. Delaney and Bonnie had formed the touring support act for a small group called Blind Faith.

I was hooked, and I continue to be hooked. Delaney Bramlett, thank you for all you’ve done, the enjoyment you’ve provided to a whole generation.

Today I “met” someone via Twitter. Dallas W.Taylor. The Dallas Taylor, as in “Crosby Stills Nash and Young Dallas Taylor and Greg Reeves“. The Dallas Taylor who played drums on that album shown above (Deja Vu),  on the first album Crosby Stills and Nash, on the first Stephen Stills album, and on the two Manassas albums.

[And not the Dallas Taylor who was on the FBI's Most Wanted list for a short while in 1953. Or any other Dallas Taylor.]

I’m delighted to learn that there’s a new band in the works and that there’s new music to come. For sure I will be buying it, I want to support a childhood legend. My wish to support him grew even stronger when I found out what Dallas has been doing in the decades since. Go here if you want more information on the work he’s been doing on addiction intervention.

An aside I can’t resist, germane to this discussion. I read an article in the Times today trashing the Long Tail, referring to a study I studiously avoided mentioning till now; it smelt of trolling. But now I can’t resist. The headline was, believe it or not, Long Tail Theory Contradicted As Study Reveals 10m Digital Music Tracks Unsold.

Turns out the study was done by Will Page, Chief Economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance. Yes, as in the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society and the Performing Right Society.

Now I shall resist the temptation to say that it’s a bit like reading a report on why cigarettes don’t cause cancer written and published by Philip Morris, or maybe on why gas guzzlers have no impact on climate change written and published by General Motors. I won’t say that. Having successfully resisted that temptation, I will state that what I can glean about the study looks quite reasonable. Except for a couple of points. A couple of big points.

First, Long Tail actually requires you to make the right Long Tail things searchable, findable, sellable, buyable. Not just any old things hanging around in inventory like elephants-without-colour. The right things. Too much of past inventory management focused on what was sold, what wasn’t sold. Whereas what should be measured is intent, not sale or purchase. How many things, Long Tail things, didn’t get sold despite the intentions of buyers? Mary Modahl, in Now or Never, a worthwhile book written at the turn of the century, makes that point very well. Nowadays, understanding buying intentions is at the heart of VRM, particularly unfulfilled intentions.

The Long Tail may not always be visible in a business environment that has been Hit Culture dominated, at least partly because industries in such environments are so far away from the customer and her intentions. How else can we explain the fact that it would appear no one considered that it would be worth while to re-release the Jeff Buckley and Leonard Cohen versions of Hallelujah as physical CD singles last week?

Long Tail is about what happens when the costs of discovery and contracting drop in an environment where inventory can be managed flexibly and dynamically, making the case that there’s a lot of people wanting to buy a lot of things that they can’t buy because of unavailability, high search costs, high fulfilment costs and so on.

Second, even if the study’s conclusions were right, they will not continue to be right. Because people like me will buy the songs and albums of people like Dallas Taylor, even more so if he starts connecting up with the Greg Reeves and Chris Hillmans and Joe Lalas and Al Perkins and Paul Harris and Fuzzy Samuels.

You see, these people are part of the Long Tail. Many today have not heard of them. But enough have. Even measured in readers of this blog, there are enough. Even measured in Facebook friends, there are enough. Even measured in Twitter followers, there are enough. Enough to form a Long Tail.

So people will buy their music. And not necessarily through traditional routes either.

In the meantime, I will continue to relish the sensation of being in touch with someone whose name used to adorn my wall as a teenager.

• The Alexandra Burke version, the X Factor winner’s single (likely to be No 1)
• The Jeff Buckley version, the one that people my age think is the best version (likely to be No 3)
• The original Leonard Cohen version, which I still stay loyal to (likely to be No 30 or so)

Three versions of the same song in the charts, twenty-four years after the original was released. Who’da thunk it?

Why was I smiling? Because an imp of mischief got to me. I began to wonder. Shall we use the web to make the Jeff Buckley version number 1? Against all odds? Wouldn’t it be a fitting posthumous tribute to a master musician? Wouldn’t it be more of a good thing for the songwriter? And wouldn’t it be a fun thing to try?

So. Are we up for it? Can we make the Jeff Buckley version number 1?

Incidentally, there have only been two instances where number 1 and number 2 were by the same artists (the Beatles in 1964 and Usher in 2004). There has never been an instance where No 1 and No 2 are the same song, by two different people. We have the chance to help make history while having some fun across different generations: I cannot imagine anyone buying both versions next week….

Recommendation 4: (film)

Electra Glide in Blue. Great movie, great soundtrack, great style. Every now and then, a movie comes along, and the critics say “that one’s going straight to video”. Well, when I saw this film, my immediate reaction was ‘this one’s going straight to cult classic”.

Music fans shouldn’t be surprised. The firm was produced and directed by James William Guercio. Now why does that name appear familiar? Because it was he who produced Blood Sweat and Tears and Chicago. That will give you an idea of what the music is like, and what the pace of the film is, its atmosphere and ambience. Oh, and by the way, Pete Cetera and Terry Kath have roles in the film, as also Walter Parazaider and Lee Loughnane. What’s that make, 25% of Chicago, they were such a large band….

Electra Glide in Blue. A must-see if you like Chicago or even BS&T; if you like motorcycles; if you like good-cop-befriends-hippie plots; if you like your suspense seventies-style. Oddly enough, you should think about seeing it if you were a Hill Street Blues fan: Frank Furillo has the movie poster adorning his office wall.

So, today:

Recommendation 3: (Album)

On The Road to Freedom. Alvin Lee and Mylon Lefevre and some very interesting sessions men.

When I was in my mid-to-late teens, one of my favourite pastimes was to take a gentle wander down Free School St, stopping at the second-hand shops, loitering with intent and going through each shop’s stock of used books, comics and, occasionally, vinyl.

An aside. For people like me, “Western” music was limited in supply those days: there were only four ways of getting it. One, you waited for the then local monopoly, Gramophone Company of India, to issue it. Because they believed in traditional forms of marketing and distribution, they were driven towards a hit culture, which meant I could buy Boney M but not Blind Faith. So if you waited for them you could be waiting a long time. A second route was to go to the Kidderpore Docks, where there was an active and open smuggler’s market straight out of Dickens. Dark and dank, ill-lit and illicit. There, amongst the t-shirts and the watches and colognes, you would occasionally come across a “Japanese” or “Singapore” copy: these had covers which were obvious photocopies of the originals, with a poor cut-and-paste of the vernacular titles over the English original, laminated in thin polythene. A third way was “taping”, when you made a copy of someone else’s album (something I didn’t like doing even then). And the fourth was the most productive: you waited for some passing hippie to sell his stash of records for drugs, and, if you were lucky, you had first dibs on his erstwhile possessions….. the Calcutta 1970s variant of the pawnshop.

Actually there was a fifth way: you had someone go abroad and bring something back for you. But in those days this was so rare it wasn’t worth counting: the number of people you knew who were going abroad roughly equalled the number of divorced people you knew. Counted on the fingers of one hand.

I digress. On the Road to Freedom. An album I bought in a second-hand store, probably as a result of hippie bartering. Absolutely fantastic. A soft and gentle album, one that grows on you the first time you listen to it. Guest musicians include Steve Winwood, George Harrison, Jim Capaldi, “Rebop” Kwaku Baah, Mick Fleetwood, Ron Wood and Boz Burrell.

By the time I heard the first four tracks I was toast. This is such a one-off album; it’s not a supergroup, it’s not cult, it’s not anything I can describe easily. Alvin Love-Like-A-Man Ten Years After Lee meets Mylon Holy Smoke Doo Dah Lefevre; friends join in, and some wonderful music was made.

It’s only recently been released on CD, four or five years ago. One of my favourite albums.

I’m currently reading a 1938 Gregg pamphlet titled What is The Matter With Money? It’s a reprint from the Modern Review for May and June 1938. In it, Gregg spends a lot of time looking at trust, and some of the things he says jell with me.
I quote from Gregg:

…A money economy makes security depend on individual selfish acquisitiveness instead of on trust. Trust grows when men serve first and foremost the community and the common purpose. There has sometimes been an element of service and community purpose in the making of private fortunes, but it has not often been predominant. Money splits up community security and plays upon men’s fears, — fears of the future and of each other’s motives, fears that compel them to compete with one another to a harmful degree.

Gregg concludes the paragraph with an interesting assertion:

Money has worked on us so long that it is now hampering the further development of science, art and technology.

At reboot last year I spoke about the things that had to die before we can regain some of the things we’ve lost, in keeping with the conference theme of renaissance and rebirth. [Hey Thomas, what's happening with reboot this year?]
Gregg’s words have served to remind me that concepts like identity and trust are fundamental parts of community and not individuality; culture too is a community concept, be it about arts or sciences or even forms of expression; community itself is a construct of relationships at multiple levels. Maybe the reason why much of what is now termed IPR (and its cater-cousin DRM) is abhorrent to me is that these things focus on the individual and not the community.

I am all for making sure that creativity is rewarded, in fact I believe that any form of real value generation should be rewarded; but not at the price of stifling the growth of culture and of community. This, I believe, is at the heart of what Larry Lessig speaks of, what Rishab Aiyer Ghosh speaks of, what Jerry Garcia believed in, what opensource communities believe in, what democratised innovation is about.

Culture and community before cash.

I recently bought a book by Gregg called The Power Of Nonviolence. When describing the book, the bookseller noted that it [the particular copy I was buying] was signed by Gregg; unusually, the recipient’s name had been erased and carefully at that; the bookseller surmised that it may have had to do with fears about McCarthyism.

You know something? At the rate we’re going, the battles about IPR and DRM are going to get uglier, to a point where we’re going to see something none of us wants. Digital McCarthyism. What we’re seeing in the software and music and film spaces already begins to feel like that.

We need to find a better way to work it out. And it makes me wonder. What’s the digital equivalent of Gandhian Nonviolence?

One of the things I’ve decided to do is “desk research” into a murky area. That dark and gloomy space where copyright meets “content” and chains the strangest bedfellows together.

I want to do this by researching an event I know very little about. When I was around ten years old, one of the more esoteric topics in “cocktail party” conversations in Calcutta was a particular Satyajit Ray Hollywood episode. Definitely not something a schoolboy would get deeply into, but it stuck somewhere in my head anyway.
Apparently he went to Hollywood in 1967 on a mission, to sell a particular project. He wanted to direct a film called The Alien, based on a script he’d written. By the time he got to Hollywood, he found that his script had already (a) done the rounds (b) been copyrighted by someone else and (c) already been acquired by the studio he was dealing with.

a saga of calamity
happenstance
and hard luckHe found all this hard to believe. He left Hollywood, naturally, in very high dudgeon. That particular Calcuttan’s first experience of creativity meeting copyright was, shall we say, less than good.

Here’s an extract from his wikipedia entry, touching on this subject:

In 1967, Ray wrote a script for a movie to be entitled The Alien, based on his short story Bankubabur Bandhu (‘Banku Babu’s Friend’) which he wrote in 1962 for Sandesh, the Ray family magazine. The Alien had Columbia Pictures as producer for this planned US-India co-production, and Peter Sellers and Marlon Brando as the leading actors. However Ray was surprised to find that the script he had written had already been copyrighted and the fee appropriated. Marlon Brando later dropped out of the project and though an attempt was made to bring James Coburn in his place, Ray became disillusioned and returned to Kolkata.^{[27] [28]} Columbia expressed interest in reviving the project several times in the 70s and 80s but nothing came of it. When E.T. was released in 1982, many saw striking similarities in the movie to Ray’s earlier script – Ray discussed the collapse of the project in a 1980 Sight & Sound feature, with further details revealed by Ray’s biographer Andrew Robinson (in The Inner Eye, 1989). Ray believed that Spielberg‘s movie would not have been possible without his script of The Alien being available throughout America in mimeographed copies.

If he were alive today, his views on Hollywood and copyright may have been interesting to hear. Who knows, he may even have made a film about it. Opensource.

Notwithstanding his experiences of Hollywood, he may have had more positive views about the digital world we live in. The state of the Satyajit Ray film archives seems deplorable despite the best efforts of a bunch of people, a saga of calamity and happenstance and hard luck. Just stuff that I found while digging around for the Alien script story.

Such tales of person A claiming person B’s copyright, and being paid for it in good faith by person C, still continue. The most recent I can remember is that of the cover illustration for Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. The publishers did their bit, found the copyright holder and paid their dues. Wrong copyright holder, apparently. So the books were recalled and new covers issued.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere for all of us. When we finally figure out who gains from all this DRM guff. It’s not the creative guys. It’s not the consumers.