I don’t publish books, but, as I hope you know, I do release music. Whatever the medium through which someone is disseminating ideas into the world (whether it be writing, music, dance etc…), things usually shared in common by their creators are the toil that’s put into the piece, the excitement that comes as the piece is nearing completion, the anticipation of sharing the work with the world, and the complex emotions one experiences as the work makes its hopefully long, unpredictable, and exciting journey through the world. Rabin’s post mostly touches on this last item.

Also, as I can rarely take anything in the media at face value, I’ll point out here that in addition to giving advice, two other motives seem to be behind the blog post. One is to promote the book to A.V. Club readers, obviously. The other, and I think this might be the main reason he wrote this piece, is to address what Rabin characterizes as a particularly nasty review made by a Washington Post reviewer. This redemption of credibility, honor, morale etc… enhances the article, I think, because it’s interesting to see a critic qua memoirist responding to an allegedly mean critic in a way that doesn’t come across as overly defensive or whiney (the usual rule of thumb is to ignore the writers of bad reviews, no matter how ignorant they seem to be of the facts), and it does serve as a lesson in general for aspiring creative types.

The overriding message: when you’re selling something that is important to you like a memoir, you are unavoidably engaging in cold, hard, bottom line-oriented business; the real reward is the interaction with people who appreciate what you are doing as a feeling, thinking, creative person, not as a business person. (However, I would add here the caveat that this sort of appreciation – or admiration - is generally directed towards the image and idea people have of the person who created the work as well as the work itself, not at the actual person; that’s what friends and family are for.)

Want people to discover your great new work? Learn how to publish an eBook and share your writings with the world.

Things changed a few years ago, however, when MySpace blew up. At that point, there were already lots of ways for musicians to make their music available online, but nothing compared to what MySpace made possible. Non-musician MySpace users were actually open to, and even excited by, the prospect of being able to hear the bands that, as the thinking went, record labels were too safe to sign. But in the short span of a couple of years, those users learned that most unsung bands sound more or less the same (i.e., not good), and that there are seemingly millions of them (most of which were also sending demos to record labels; as a result, most labels no longer accept unsolicited demos).

Now, in the wake of the lost cause that is MySpace, audiences have become jaded about the prospect of checking out DIY musicians. Audiences once again look to filters to help them decide what music to give a chance. Podcasts and broadcasts (All Songs Considered, Morning Becomes Eclectic), streaming sites (Last.fm, Jango, Pandora), review sites (Pitchfork, Onion AV Club, MP3 blogs), and vendors (iTunes, Amazon.com) all employ filters that make it harder for musicians – even those with label affiliation – to get heard. But the good news is that once you get heard, you’re taken more seriously than you would be as one of millions of self-promoting unknown bands on some social networking site that does not discriminate between “serious” and “I have a computer so why not?” musicians. True, the latter sometimes has better music than the former, but that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that most people are not willing to be at the first stage of the filtering system. Rare are the people with the time and psychological fortitude and endurance to search through a thousand musicians of wildly varying levels of quality to find that one with whom they’d like to spend more time.

What made me want to write about this topic was an email I got recently from IAC, a streaming site that pays artists on a per-play basis and is funded by advertisers and artist subscriptions. IAC features artists ranging from hobbyists to professionals. Their email announced that they are going to start removing artists whose presentation doesn’t hold up to some standard of quality and might therefore scare away potential listeners. I’m all for it, and would expect that anyone who takes their music career seriously would be all for it.

I should point out that I respect and encourage people’s desire to record music and post it online. There are plenty of avenues for that, such as MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. What I have a harder time with is seeing avenues through which serious artists can distribute their music becoming clogged with lazy, half-finished, amateurishly presented work that scares away potential listeners. It’s in all of our best interests to have a more stringent filtering system at places like iTunes, eMusic, Amazon.com, and IAC. Actually, IAC is the least strict of these. To be at those other places, you at least have to have an album, though recently this has just come to mean meeting certain requirements that no longer include having a physical CD (and only one song is needed to qualify as an “album”). As a vendor, iTunes doesn’t have to worry about a reputation for quality so much as quantity (though I assure you not just anyone will be included on their homepage), so we’ll have to see where an increasingly open-door policy takes them. Will they institute even stricter filtering systems like CDBaby (an exclusively “unsigned artist” vendor) has with their podcasts and newsletters?

Pandora, in contrast with iTunes, is a site that doesn’t sell music, but instead streams songs in full. It’s a place for discovering music, and, once you know how to use it, Pandora works really well to that end. Because they’re all about you discovering great music based on artists whom you already love, they have to cultivate a reputation for quality in order to succeed. To ensure quality, they have a listening committee that evaluates submissions. They rejected my first two albums, in fact, and, although I do think it’s their loss, I’m really ok with it. My third album (REATTACHMENT) was accepted, and I know that their users will give it more of a chance because they know there is a filter in place.

To be clear, musicians are not to blame for the situation I’m describing here. It’s the accumulation that’s causing the congestion, not the actions of any one individual. Musicians need to take this accumulation into consideration when planning their promotions and when being rejected by a filter like Pandora, or when being completely ignored by critics and the online public in general. I think what IAC has come to terms with is the fact that they are better off (i.e., better able to avoid bankruptcy) having fewer musicians selling a-little-to-a-lot of music to a loyal and potentially expanding fan base rather than having thousands of musicians selling zero-to-a-little music to a small circle of friends. In this way, a difficult filtering process makes us work harder as artists as well as marketers (an inextricable part of being a working musician).

The slippery slope argument against stringent filtering is that we would end up with only a small selection of new music to choose from, all of which has been selected based on the taste of a class of self-proclaimed elitists. I believe that this would happen even less than it did before the digital age. In fact, now that the options are greater than ever, filtering could just be a way to help balance the scale to a more even slant in terms of which label-affiliated and “homemade” bands are being offered to the public at large for consideration.

In conclusion, it’s clear that the digital age has affected the music industry in more ways than making it easier to get a library of music for free and to carry that library around on an iPod. We have also seen an incredible decrease in what it costs to record and distribute music, which has resulted in an immeasurable increase in the amount of bands pushing their demos to record labels, reviewers, live venues, and the public in general. This increase, especially when coupled with technology itself, has resulted in a pickier than ever, jaded listening public with a short attention span (see my previous blog about the Slow Listening Movement). With this in mind, it seems it would be in the best interest of any serious musician to be in favor of stringent filtering processes that would attract audiences as opposed to repelling them.

New Music Updates

First of all, I’m nearing completion of the new album. This is something I’ve been working on here and there over the last few months (and I got a couple of songs done during summer school!). I’m planning to release it in January, possibly with a single during the winter holiday season.

Also, I’ve resumed work on a string quartet I started a couple of months ago, and plan to soon resume composition lessons with Patricia Morehead (I have some exercises and the string quartet to finish before the next lesson). My plan is to finally get my degree (masters, possibly doctorate) in music composition. Partly because there are some ideas I think it’ll help me pursue, such as this opera-like movie thing I’ve been sketching ideas for… more on that later.

Another thing still in the works is music for the latest movie by Adam Payne’s latest movie, which has picked back up. Hope to have that done soon as well.

Arnold Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony and Other Texts, a.k.a. Learning Is Fun!

I also need to finish studying Arnold Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, a wonderfully longwinded book that is more of a philosophical inquiry into the nature and development (or nurture, perhaps) of western tertiary harmony within the context of an increasingly modernist musical climate than it is a treatise on how to compose. In other words, I wouldn’t recommend it for newcomers to harmonic theory (Walter Piston’s book would be better for that, especially for the autodidact).

After Theory of Harmony, I have a few other great books to finish up, which I may or may not mention here again at some point: Story by Robert McKee, The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, The Art Question by Nigel Warburton, and 20th Century Harmony by Vincent Persichetti.

Let the Right One In

Also this summer I saw the movie and read the novel Let the Right One In (or, originally: Låt den rätte komma in). Fantastic!! I especially loved the movie, the screenplay for which was written by the same guy who wrote the book, John Ajvide Lindqvist. The movie was directed by Tomas Alfredson. The cinematography (by Hoyte Van Hoytema… cool name… like if I were Dante Van Dantema) is gorgeous, and the sound design (by “Sound Department”, heh heh) is some of the best I’ve ever heard in a movie, ever.

It’s an oversimplification to call it a vampire story… I’ll just add that the vampire in question was turned at the age of about 12 (awesomely portrayed by Lina Leandersson), and that there are archetypal themes explored for which the setting of the film provides a backdrop and context. Most of these themes deal with relationships between children, and children and adults, but with a twist, considering that one of the children is about 200 years old. Also, I liked what the Onion AV Club said: “…the film makes it impossible to judge whether we’re watching tender scenes of puppy love or unholy union.”

Also, note that the DVD I watched has the controversial (reportedly cheaper to produce) “dumbed-down” subtitles. Here’s the statement on that from Magnet Releasing (Magnolia Pictures DVD distribution arm:)

“We’ve been made aware that there are several fans that don’t like the version of the subtitles on the DVD/BR. We had an alternate translation that we went with. Obviously a lot of fans thought we should have stuck with the original theatrical version. We are listening to the fans feedback, and going forward we will be manufacturing the discs with the subtitles from the theatrical version.”

I’ll be waiting for the new DVD’s to come out before purchasing, which will indicate: “SUBTITLES: ENGLISH (Theatrical), SPANISH.”

Oh, and one more thought, regarding the novel vs. the movie: I saw the movie first. I enjoyed the book quite a lot and can recommend it, but recommend seeing the movie first because it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. I enjoyed contemplating those questions as a viewer. If I’d read the book, I’d have known too much. Also, the book still has plenty of surprises after seeing the movie, but not vice versa. When reading the book, I was still able to keep my personal version of the story in my head as a sort of alternate telling which I could now re-watch the movie in order to experience.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel

Speaking of the Onion AV Club (and, I guess, vampires), Noel Murray has been blogging in bursts about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and – now that he’s up to Season 4 – has added a bit of Angel into the mix. It’s an insightful, candid, entertaining, and interactive (thanks to the comments section) series of writings that any Buffy fan should enjoy.

Pandora: The Music Genome Project

Next up in Dan News: Pandora. They have included Reattachment in their library, aka “The Music Genome Project”. They opted not to include my first two albums, however. While I feel that this is an error and a loss to them, it does at least show that they are being picky and applying a strict filtering process (at least with un-ubiquitously hyped acts) in an age where anybody with a computer can get their music up at iTunes and and the like. Speaking of which, I’ve noticed a spike in sales lately. Could this be related to Pandora? I don’t know, but thank you to whomever out there is buying, and thank you slowly improving economy!

Anywayz, cliquez sur this link to head on over to Pandora and make a Dan Wallace Station: www.pandora.com/music/artist/dan+wallace

Vesna Jovanovic: Pareidolia

Finally, but far from leastily, my partner Vesna Jovanovic recently had another great exhibition opening reception. This one was held last Friday at the International Museum of Surgical Sciences and was a blast, with loads of interesting people in attendance. The work on display is a series of drawings entitled Pareidolia, which you can learn more about at Vesna’s website: www.vesnaonline.com/news.html . The show runs from 7/31/09 to 10/16/09.

That’s the update, more to come…