Mass Produced Music

(Special Thanks to LMF for having triggered this one off)

Once upon a time, music was a creative 'art'. An expression of what the person was feeling in a way. If you were happy, you sang something cheerful or whatever. Bards would sing tales and add their own special touch to them. Artists would compose music in the form of musical scores, which other people could play and add their own feel to things.

But then music turned into a business, and it all went downhill from there. When i say "Business" I mean it turned into an enterprise for which extracting money is the only goal. While beforehand it was primarily a creative and entertaining process, now it is literally mass produced. Scores of people work on a single 'song', which is crafted in such a way as to earn the most money.

Previously, when you had an artist, the artist would have been the song's creator. Nowadays, when you say that you like a song by [artist/band], the person in front of the camera probably has very little to do with the actual song. In order to prove this point, I attempted to see the credits for particular famous songs. Unfortunatly this proved difficult - so i picked up the last Mainstream cd I own, and looked at the credits. By the way its a 1997 "Aqua" album. So lets look at who wrote the very famous "Barbie Girl" song.

So, according to this it is "Produced Arranged and Mixed" by 4 people.None of them are the band members by the way. Turning to the back page credits we have the 4 member band. That's 8 so far. "All tracks mastered by..." is another person. There are 7 backing vocals and 3 "Guitar" (not the band members either). If we also add the "Styling", "Hair and Makeup" to the group - that gives us the grant total of... 20 people. There is also a page of "Thanks and Special Thanks". I didn't count Management either. Lets compare this to the very famous "Beethoven Symphony No 6." which is a 4 hour symphony written by 1 person. See what I mean?

What an artist adds to the whole thing is simply the "Image". Its the friendly face in front of the mechanical process. There aren't too many things this person must have, since autotune and editing has removed most prerequisites. They simply need to look attractive or attempt to put a sensual touch into things. An alternative (especially for males) is to be eccentric or otherwise infamous - such as taking microphones off people who have won an award. Note that this is mostly relevant for 'pop' music.


Lets look at the top 10 songs at this present moment. The Source is this site here, and its for the week ending 26th March.

So lets gauge the appearance of this people in the charts shall we?


1. Lady Gaga
2. Cee Lo Green - Exception?
3. Katy Perry , Kayne West
4. Rihanna
5. Jennifer Lopez
6. P!nk
7. Bruno Mars
8. Enrique Iglesias
9. Britney Spears
10. Ke-dollar-ha


Theres an image of each in the link, which can help to clarify and prove my hypothesis.


In conclusion - music isn't a creative process, or an art anymore. It is simply an Assembly Line kind of thing, where the product itself is a mixture of the talents of many people who you probably never heard of, and the packaging is the artist itself.


Money is the goal, it is both the sinews, the means and the end.


The Llama

I Predict....

A few days ago I was checking the maltese Times website for updates to the war in Libya. As always, the most entertaining part is the comments, which triggered off this blogpost.

For those who aren't familiar with the quality of the comments on that website, imagine this - You put 1000 monkeys with typewriters in a room, however 33% of the monkeys are political zealots, 33% of them are religious xor anti-religious zealots, and 33% are uninformed or just plain stupid. The rest are normal. Note that these sets are not disjoint.

Anyhoo, on an article about the War in Libya, two different people posted two different Nostradamus prophecies which appeared to predict what would happen. Now this gave me some thought, why are there still people around that believe him?

This raises a number of problems with believing predictions or prophesies -

1. You are assuming that the predictor has enough cosmic knowledge to simulate/model the cosmos enough to make the prediction
1b. You are asserting a fatalist universe and denying the existance of free will
2. You don't know anything about probabilities
3. Prophesies can be interpreted in different ways generally - this adds onto 2.

So, I'm not going to go into 1 and 1b too much, I will leave that for a future blogpost.

2 is quite the kicker really. I did some wikipedia research on Nostradamus. Apparently he died in 1556, and predicted what I understand to be around 950 units. So you would assume the probability that he was right in at least 1 of them over the past 450 years should surprise no-one. Even if there was only one way of interpreting each prophecy, the probability of a particular event happening is very large, especially over 450 years.

Now 3 I decided to show using a slightly humorous method. I thought of some text I could bring up which is written in a 'prophetic' style and which has no predictions or nothing to do with current events. After some thought I decided upon the Book of Mozilla. For those who don't know what that is, its a humorous long-term joke which the firefox developers put quotes from in their software (about:mozilla), it details events about Firefox in an elaborate manner.

Anyhow, I chose this interesting quote:

"Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children"

I will now proceed to interpret this piece as having to do with the current Libyan civil war.

Mammon is personification for Greed. Being a dictator for 40 years in an oil rich country is greedy. Since the libyan people were using the old flag which gaddafi had removed, its 'the beast reborn'. Its spreading over the Earth through the UN resolution, and the numbers are large enough. They cunningly took over half of Libya. The rest of the prediction is the future, where the 'sacred words' are the promises of freedom.

See? And you throught that that piece was about Netscape, IE6 and Microsoft. Foolish Mortals.

Llama

Bloaty Software

So, was updating my Yahoo messenger just today (yes I still use it). So I downloaded the installation file and ran it. Now, just to be clear - the installation file is just for the messenger, and not like the Windows Live Essentials one which has a bunch of stuff you can install. So anyway. Here's the first page.

Yes, I just want to install the IM client. So, lets see what happens if I choose "Next". I get an add-on to my browser, my homepage changes, my default search engine changes and.. oh look, there's actually some Search Protection which will stop me from changing the search back to what it was before.


Woah. Oh look, hidden behind there is another link - "Custom". Lets see what happens when I click it.

Oh look, Yahoo Toolbar was going to be installed as well. I didn't want that either. Good thing I spotted the custom link at the top, because even if I was careful enough to uncheck all the junk, I'd still the Toolbar.


So, what do we learn from this, aside from Yahoo trying to sneak a ton of rubbish on my PC? If you're installing something, DON'T press NEXT, NEXT NEXT. Lots of idiots people do this, and this is the reason why a company tries to sneak in as much rubbish as possible when you want something else.


Now certain companies do this because they get sponsored - but Yahoo doesn't need a sponsor, I wonder why its doing it. Maybe it likes splashing itself over your PC.

Llama

First!

Was going to write a blog on the evils or DRM software, but while thinking about it in me head, I reached an interesting, separate state conclusion, so I'm going to blog about this instead.

Namely - what's all this fuss about being the first to own the latest technological device or software?

This happens frequently when something is truly hyped up. There were people standing outside for hours to get themselves an iPhone 4, and the same thing happened with the latest iProducts.


The problem with this, is that you could just be buying yourself something less than perfect. Shouldn't you at least wait until reviews come out which properly describe the product you're buying?


You could be disappointed, even if the earlier products were great. Lets take a proper example - DragonAge 2 came out last week.


Metacritic gives it an 84, with a 4.1 User Score
Its the top selling game in the UK at the moment, no doubt bolstered by pre-orders or people who lined up early. (To compare, Dragon Age Origins had a 91/8.3 score).


This sort of 'everyone buying at the beginning' is the norm in software (Hi there Zipf). However if you rush out and buy it before everyone else, there are additional problems with software:


1. Software has a tendancy to become cheaper as time goes by, so you're paying extra for nothing
2. The thing you rushed out and bought could be a load of crap, or less good than you would have expected from the trailer which had 0 gameplay in it.
3. The thing you bought could be buggy as 'ell. Yes this happens. Isn't that right Rockstar?
4. There is no real 'bonus' for you having played the game earlier. Sure you get some extra trigger-time if you're going to play online I guess.

(Added:) Just remembered something else. Some games are now even offering to give you the ability to beta test them if you pre-order or buy another game (DoW2:R and DNF respectively did that recently). This especially highlights the concerns up there. We are now so directed to wanting to play the game as soon as it comes out (or even earlier as is this case) - that we are offering to beta test the game for free (or rather you pay for that). Forget wanting stability, latest patches or whatever. Alright granted, in Beta most bugs would already have been cleared out - but really... Of course you will pay a price larger than those who buy it after a few weeks, so you don't get any discounts for helping them do their job.

Feel sort of silly now don't you? I'm only recently playing the Half-Life series because one of them was on sale a while ago. I didn't have to pay 60 euros to be one of the first to have this experience - because its still a fun experience now - and at least if it had any bugs in it, they're all patched by now.


The Llama

Democrazy Part 2: Represent This.

So, last Democrazy post (which is here by the way), I complained how the entire process of asking the mob what the best decision is, is flawed.

Now today I'll be speaking about how Representative Democracies (the most common type in use today) are an even worse case.

So lets start with some basic background. A Representative Democracy is one where the people elect 'representatives' in order to take the decisions for them. So you have a parliament, or an important individual - and the people choose who gets the very important position of taking care of them.


Now this has a huge amount of problems, most of them stemming from the fact that the Representatives are human and may have ulterior motives. So lets start enumerating the problem shall we?


1. People are Sheep

This is a fundamental problem especially with political parties. You generally have a number of 'die-hard' voters who will always vote for a particular political party, even if the party leader was caught eating puppies and drinking the blood of orphans. This happens ALL the time and EVERYWHERE. For US readers think about "Red States" and "Blue States", for Maltese readers you should all know what I'm talking about.


Now this generally isn't much of a problem, these values even out and then its all up to the 'floating voters' to decide. However, this ends up forcing a two-party political system, which is horrible. Think about it, with many votes always guaranteed for a particular party, in certain cases, floating voters won't have enough number to get a seat for a member who isn't one of the parties. Malta has never had a parliamentary seat which wasn't given to one of the two main parties. Having two parties makes things stagnant and it always turns into "At least THEY'RE not in power".


2. Doing it for the vote


Alright, in theory its allright. You serve a term, and then if people liked what you did, you get more votes and get another term (or whatever). Unfortunately this then turns into a tactical decision to determine what gives you the most votes - and not by making the majority happen. Lets give an example. Hunting in Malta is all about shooting small birds as they fly over the island - we don't have any large game and you're not expected to eat what you shoot. Now its practiced by a subset of the population. However, the amount of people who find hunting offensive, brutal or just plain unsporting is larger than the amount of people who enjoy hunting. So you would expect that hunting is heavily regulated - since the will of the majority dictates it.


However, the hunting 'group' and their families and friends are worth quite a bit of votes, no politician wants to lose this amount of votes, so nobody will touch this issue with a standard 5 foot pole. There would be a net voting loss if hunting was regulated, as the people who think hunting is brutal are still going to vote for the party if it continues. Note I'm not making an argument against hunting here - I'm using it as an example of how 'tactical vote collecting' works.


3. Lobbying, Bribes and the Puppet Masters


I could talk about this topic until I turn blue in the face. Since these people take important decisions, its a good idea to target them, since if you get one of these people on your side, you can shift decisions and laws.


And its done (totally legally) through the use of lobbies. And in many cases, the lobbying will be all in favour of a small subset, and all against the general public. I can bring up tons upon tons of laws which only came into play because some large company wanted them to be implemented. Most overly-active copyright laws for example, animal testing for cosmetics still legal in Europe, the fact that the new Maltese Power-Station will pollute the crap out of the island...


4. They may have ulterior motives. This happens especially in countries with a large corporate presence. These people have a tendency to be rich, and so they buy stocks/shares in companies or in resources. Nobody wants their s/s to lose money, so better ensure that since you're in a position of power - you give little pushes to ensure that your money keeps growing.


5. They play dirty. I will give two examples of this - Secrecy and Riders.


Secrecy is pretty much censoring or withholding information which they know would cause an outcry (and loss of votes) if they became public. Tons of examples of this, wikileaks is one example of hiding information which can cause a ton of damage. And for the latter, the ACTA agreement is a perfect example of it. Few people knew what was going to be about exactly - simply because it had so many clauses which the public would hate if they knew about it. So better hide it away, then bully smaller countries to adopt it (yes that was the plan).


Riders are another example of a mess which is actually legal in certain countries. They work like this: Lets say you have an idea which will be shot down in parliament - lets say you want a law which "Forces Llamas to be shaved twice weekly". So, you wait until someone else is writing a bill for something important or time critical say - "Giving more money to the people in region X who have been hit by an earthquake". You know that this bill will pass quickly, and urgently, so you add your little clause to the main bill, even though it has nothing to do with llamas or shaving. However the main bill will have to pass, since its urgent and if its rejected you waste more time - so the whole thing passes, and you get your clause put in. No I am not joking about it, this childish act is actually legal in certain countries. 


Meh. If you don't agree, feel free to discuss.

Llama

Status Symbols

Imagine you have some leather, or leatherlike material. Not too expensive in small quantities. You give this leatherlike material to a person living in a third world country (could even be a child), and you ask him to produce a shoe from it. In fact you can have an entire bank of these workers churning out shoes - lowering costs.

How much will this shoe cost? The production costs are low, so you assume its worth very little indeed. Now lets add something to our shoe. Lets add the insignia for a very prestigious and expensive brand. Lets add the Alpaca Symbol to the shoe. It is now no longer a piece of cheap shoe-shaped material produced by kiddies in a third-world country, now its Alpaca Brand shoe! And therefore worth 50-150 euros depending on what 'magical technology' it's using.

So the difference between "5 euro shoe you bought at a flea market" and "150 euro shoe which you bought at a specialty store" isn't that one was technologically crafted, or hand made in a traditional method by some rare people. Its simply the brand. When globalisation was still spreading its evil tentacles around the globe, large companies would buy off smaller 'industries' and set them to work producing their goods.


In fact, the reason we'd buy "Alpaca Brand" instead of any other brand is because it's expensive. And its expensive because people buy it because it's expensive. If AlpacaBrand reduced its prices, it would lose its 'specialness' and therefore stop being so wanted. The reason people buy it is simply because not everyone can get it. You're paying for the 'status' of having something not everyone can have.


Lets take another example. You have a yellow-coloured substance which comes from the ground. It is chemically slightly interesting, it's not very reactive and it has a good conductivity. However we wear it on our fingers, around our necks. And the only reason that we do so is because its rare. We're not wearing it because we like yellow (we could buy paint for that), we're not wearing it for the conductivity or to bombard it with alpha particles. We do so because we have an object that few other people can afford.


To give a brilliant example of this phenomenon. Aluminium. Once upon a time it was very very hard to produce, and was therefore rare. The apex of the Washington monument has Alumninium in it, so does the statue on the tip of Piccadilly circus. It wasn't chosen because of its amazing scientific properties - it was chosen because it was expensive.


Then a cheap and easy way of obtaining this magical substance was discovered - and now we make drinking cans from it. We no longer show it off.

Now does this make any sense? We like to show off our superiority by wasting money and resources to get items which are either useless, or as useful as an exact same item without the branding. But we just feel the need to show off our superiority by showing our very poor buying habits.

And we wonder why we have poor people and the economy is unfair.

ADDED: I have stumbled upon a technical word for this. Velben Goods.


The Llama

Love

Well since today is valentine's day, and since Ian did remind me of my ideas about this (by claiming love does not follow a logical pattern), I will be blogging about this topic now.

Many people make claims that love can't really be defined, that you must 'feel it in your heart' (by extension, that its an emotion), and that it does not follow a logical process. So time to prove those people wrong.

So first step would be defining it, so that we may make conclusions upon it.

So, I will be defining love as:

"A measure of the ratio between what X a person is willing to lose, in order for another person to gain Y." Obviously X and Y both need to be 'measured' by some sort of pseudo-metric, which will be dependent on the situation and the person in question.

The point however remains that if A loves B, then A is willing to lose some sort of advantage to surviving/superiority in life, in order to give this advantage to someone else.

This definition can easily be extended for any sort of love (love for a country, love for a philosophy), and it can easily be extended to hatred (losing something to give someone else a disadvantage). Now if you have any problems, or mismatches with particular exemplars, please feel free to comment. Friendship isn't really love, its symbiosis, as you are expecting something in return.

Having said that, lets see the point of love. Its really quite simple actually. You recognise a person as being worthy of your love - generally you will love someone who is 'superior' to you, and by doing so, you are increasing their chance of survival at the cost of your own. (Remember, these things are primitive). If a person is loved by multiple people, then this person will have more chance of survival. If a person is rather inferior, nobody will ever love them - less chance of survival.


Of course, the mating part is the icing on the cake - remember, nature does not bother with individuals, it only cares about the species. If a superior creature can survive for as long as possible, and spread their genes - evolution will work faster. Hooray for the Inductive Bias of Nature!


On a personal note, I would like to declare my love for my Lady Gabriella and wish her a happy Valentine's Day.


The Llama