Music For the People

Photo: Tallie Roinson/ Unsplash

Let’s compare the names of the musicians we currently listen to. Here are some of the recent names on my list: Approaching Nirvana (USA), Frode Fjellheim (Norway), Front 242 (Belgium), Front Line Assembly (Canada), The KLF (England), Lebanon Hanover (Germany & England), Madis (Poland), Melodicka Bros (Italy), Molchat Doma (Belarus), PettyRock (Thailand), Rockmina (Romania), Spetsnaz (Sweden), Violet Orlandi (Brazil), VNV Nation (Ireland), Zahara (South Africa) and Zodiac (Latvia).

If you have any noteworthy alternative musicians that you enjoy, please comment on them.

Mainstream media does not offer much choice in music. It is no longer music for the people. Almost everything is commercial, provided by a music industry, where each company has a vested interest in promoting its particular – to use their word – artists. Why not musicians? While this situation have been the case since mid-twentieth century, the situation today is compounded by corporate consolidation. Rick Beato (1962 – ) refers to this decrease in availability as the Y2k Curse. He attributes this to the American Telecommunications Act of 1996, that consolidated American media. In 1983, 90% of American media was owned by 50 companies. By 2011, this had been reduced to 6 companies. This significantly reduced the number of music gatekeepers. These consolidated their playlists, so that the American public (and beyond) were exposed to a narrower band of musical products.

To avoid music gatekeepers and consolidated playlists, one could use online services that have developed since the start of the millennium. This weblogger has experienced Bandcamp, Chosic, Discogs, Jamendo, Last.fm, MySpace, SoundCloud and Spotify but to varying degrees and in different time periods. He has not experienced WiMP or Tidal directly, and has no intention to do so, but comments on them as well.

Discogs is the oldest, but smallest social networking platform discussed in this weblog post. Discogs (short for discographies) is a website and crowdsourced database of information about audio recordings. Located in Portland, Oregon, it was started in 2000. Its initial goal was to become the largest online database in the electronic music genre. Currently, rock music is the dominant genre. According to Wikipedia as of 2019-08-28 “Discogs contained over 11.6 million releases, by over 6 million artists, across over 1.3 million labels, contributed from over 456,000 contributor user accounts”. In addition to its main database, there were six specialty databases, all of which have closed down except Vinylhub, which provided information on record stores, and has been integrated into the main database. The others were Filmogs, Gearogs, Bookogs, Comicogs and Posterogs, which provided marketplaces for products associated with the database name. Discogs data is contributed by registered users. For people with a special interest in music, either as producers or consumers, this is an important information source.

Audioscrobbler was started by Richard Jones as a computer science project in 2002. He defined the term scrobbling as the finding, processing, and distribution of information involving people, music and other data. Audioscrobbler was a music recommender system that used plugins, and an application program interface (API) to keep track of songs its users played on a registered computer. This allowed charting and collaborative filtering.

Last.fm was also founded in 2002, by German and Austrian enthusiasts, as an an Internet radio station and music community site, using similar music profiles to generate dynamic playlists. In 2003, Audioscrobbler and Last.fm started to merge, by co-locating their offices in Whitechapel, London. Later, Last.fm was fully integrated with Audioscrobbler profiles, so that input could come through an Audioscrobbler plugin or a Last.fm station. The two organizations were fully merged on 2003-08-09.

Started in 2003, MySpace, is an American social networking site with a focus on music. It was, from 2005 to 2008, the largest in the world, reaching more than 100 million users per month. MySpace served as an inexpensive distribution hub for Black musical artists. Yet, in many respects MySpace was second-rate. Users experienced their products and features as slow and bug prone, often due to testing issues. Gradually, users drifted away from MySpace to other platforms such as Facebook. On 2019-03-18, Ars Technica revealed that MySpace in 2015 had botched server migration. This resulted in a permanent loss of over 50 million songs and 12 years’ of user content. In 2019-04, the Internet Archive recovered 490 000 MP3s or 1.3 TB. The songs, uploaded between 2008 and 2010, are known as the MySpace Dragon Hoard.

Spotify AB, the Swedish audio streaming service was started in 2003. It offers about 60 million recordings/ tracks for consumers to choose from. Listeners can either listen for free, and be subjected to advertisements, or pay a monthly fee, to avoid these. There are about 345 million monthly active users, including 155 million paying subscribers. Users can create, edit and share playlists. Currently, there are about 3 billion playlists available. Unbelievably, this amounts to 8.7 playlists per active user.

A Follow tab lets users follow friends to see what they are listening to. A Discover tab provides users with new releases, music, reviews and concert recommendations based on listening history. Tracks can be added to a Collection section of the app as well as to specific user-generated playlists.

Of particular interest was Spotify’s 2017 acquisition of Niland, a French artificial intelligence (AI) technology company, started in 2013. It offers high performance music search & recommendation engines, accessible by an API that allows music catalog owners and music providers (such as Spotify) to build intelligent music applications. Spotify has used this to improve user personalisation and recommendation features. As with many other aspects of AI, its internal workings are undoubtedly non-trivial and opaque. This means that users face uncertainty as to why specific recommendations are made.

Jamendo is a Luxembourg-based music website that has been a subsidiary of Belgian company Audio Valley and Independent Management Entity (IME) since 2019. It started as a music platform using Creative Commons licenses. From 2015-10, Jamendo described itself as a free streaming service for personal use. In addition it provides opportunities for artists to earn money through its licensing services to commercial clients.

Another similar site is the Berlin, Germany based SoundCloud, that was also started in Sweden in 2007. It has 175 million monthly users worldwide. In particular, it is noted for influencing the music industry through artists who have used the service to launch/ advance careers.

Bandcamp is yet another Internet-based music company, founded 2008-09-16 in Oakland, California by Ethan Diamond, Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt and Neal Tucker. Artists/ labels upload music for free, set prices, but with an option for consumers to pay more. They can also sell merchandise. Music can be streamed once for free. Purchasers can download music or stream it unlimited times, if they retain their purchase voucher. There are options to purchase music for a gift, view lyrics, and save individual songs/ albums to a wish list. Bandcamp initially takes a 15% cut of sales along with payment processing fees. This drops to 10% after an artist’s sales surpass $5,000. Downloads are available in various formats, including CD and vinyl physical media.

Aspiro was founded in 1998 by Swedes Jörgen Adolfsson, Christer Månsson and Klas Hallqvist, who had working together at Europolitan, a Swedish mobile phone operator. When Adolfsson and Månsson moved to Oslo, to work for Telenor Mobil they realized that changes in the Wireless Application Protocol could have significant implications for mobile communications. They contacted Hallqvist, who had remained in Sweden at Europolitan, and founded Aspiro. Between 2000 and 2008, Aspiro acquired 13 communications related companies. In 2009 they developed their a music streaming service that became their core business.

WiMP was a music streaming service developed by Aspiro AS and the Norwegian music store chain Platekompaniet AS and was first launched in Norway 2010-02. It was available on mobiles, tablets, network players and computers and provided a music library of some 25 million tracks. As WiMP expanded into new countries, local editors were engaged to present the local and international music, in-app magazines and some music videos. Last.fm was integrated into it. On 2015-01-30 it was announced that Aspiro had been acquired by Project Panther Bidco Ltd, a company controlled by Shawn Corey Carter (1969 – ), better known by his stage name Jay-Z.

In 2014, Tidal emerged from WiMP as a subscription-based music, podcast and video streaming service that combines lossless audio and high-definition music videos with exclusive content and special features on music. While the company claims to be owned by a number of high profile artists seeking to be independent of the commercial recorded music industry, it is still controlled by Shawn Corey Carter. In a digital forensics report, Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Center for Cyber and Information Security concludes: “We have through advanced statistical analysis determined that there has in fact been a manipulation of the data at particular times. The manipulation appears targeted towards a very specific set of track IDs, related to two distinct albums.” These are Beyoncé’s (1981 – ) Lemonade (2016) and Kanye West’s (1977 – ) The Life of Pablo (2016). Jem Aswad, writing in Variety, presented information from the Norwegian business newspaper, Dagens Næringsliv, that claimed that: “listener numbers on Tidal have been manipulated to the tune of several hundred million false plays… which has generated massive royalty payouts at the expense of other artists.” Note that Beyoncé is married to Tidal’s majority owner, Shawn Corey Carter. Tidal denies this manipulation.

It has been difficult to find out much about Chosic. It offers Arabic and English as site languages, and provides a number of tools that aid in the discovery of new music. One of these is a playlist generator. Their Facebook page refers to itself as All Chosen Music, which indicates that there is some degree of censorship. Their site motto is, Listening is a Skill.

Aptera

Aptera 3 in 2021. (Photo: Aptera)

In the twenty-first century, the ancient Greek word, aptera = wingless, has been reused, this time to refer to a brand of extremely aerodynamic vehicles. Perhaps, it can best be regarded as reassurance that this vehicle will remain flightless, and not ascend into the skies. An equally appropriate name for the vehicle would be Phoenix, for the Aptera brand and vehicle was born in 2006, died in 2011, but was resurrected in 2019.

The original Aptera Motors, Inc., was founded by Steve Fambro (1968 – ) in 2006 and was originally named Accelerated Composites. Fambro was educated as an electrical engineer at the University of Utah, where he studied electo-magnets and antennas. Immediately before starting Aptera, he worked as a senior electrical engineer at Illumina, designing robots that make DNA, and vision systems to inspect that DNA. On LinkedIn, he writes, “Embracing efficiency as an ethos for a car company means we endeavour to do more with less. More range, more performance, more safety, more fun- with fewer batteries, less mining, less energy, less carbon. Doing more with less.”

Fambro initially worked as chief executive officer (CEO) at Aptera. He hired Chris Anthony to be the chief operating officer (COO) shortly after the founding. Thirty million dollars was raised in three rounds of funding, and Aptera grew from 3 to 50 employees. Aptera launched a prototype, the Typ-1, in 2007.

The design of the Aptera Typ-1 was futuristic, but due in large part to Jason C. Hill, president/ owner/ designer at Eleven, a transportation, automotive and mobility design consultancy, started 2003-11. Hill describes himself and his company on LinkedIn as “Specializing in design and product development as well as strategic design, advanced design, and design DNA creation. Currently working with a top New Energy Vehicle Company. Worked on AV solutions regarding the integration of sensor technology for the leading company of LiDAR tech. Recently worked with a MAAS start-up defining the design DNA and UX/UI for their unique urban mobility solution.”

The Aptera 2 Series, was a rebadged Typ-1, to be made available in two variants, a battery electric 2e, and a plug-in hybrid 2h. These could accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in about 6.3 seconds. Their top speed was 140 km/h. About 5 000 pre-orders for the vehicles were made by California residents.

In 2008, Fambro relinquished his CEO position to Paul Wilbur, and became chief technical officer (CTO) for the company. When Wilbur joined Aptera he had 20 years of experience with Ford and Chrysler, and over 10 years experience as CEO of American Specialty Cars Incorporated, a tier 1 supplier. My thought on reading this, is that he was too integrated into the conservative automotive industry to function as a CEO of a venture capital financed startup.

Because of assorted production challenges that made it difficult to receive government financing for a three wheeled vehicle classified as a motorcycle, instead of a four wheeled vehicle classified as a car, the design was changed to that of a four wheel vehicle. This added immensely to the cost, and the original company was liquidated in 2011. Various reasons are cited for this, but one is the enormous amount of capital needed to actually produce a car.

After several years working with vertical farming, Steve Fambro and Chris Anthony, once again found an opportunity to relaunch the Aptera in 2019. This time it was Chris Anthony who was given the role of CEO. He had gained experience working as founder and chairperson at Flux Power, an energy storage technology company, for ten years from 2009-10 to 2019-12. Another major differences was that this new Aptera relied on crowd funding from enthusiasts, rather than venture capital from impatient capitalists. During the course of the intervening nine years, electric cars had matured. Batteries were larger and cheaper, motors were more powerful, and there was a better understanding of how everything worked.

Dimensions of the Aptera 2e and 3 respectively

Wheelbase2 819 / 2 743 mm
Length4 394 /4 369 mm
Width2 311 / 2 235 mm
Height1 346 / 1 448 mm
Kerb weight680 / 800 kg
Dimensions of the Aptera 2e & Aptera 3.

The Aptera 2e used an A123 Systems for the 20 kWh lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) battery pack, and Remy International for the 82 kW HVH250 electric motor. This was mated to a BorgWarner 31-03 eGearDrive transmission. A SAE J1772 compatible charging system at either 110 or 220 V was to be provided. The range was about 190 km.

The hybrid version also had a small, water-cooled electronic fuel injection (EFI) gasoline engine with closed loop oxygen feedback and catalytic converter that was connected to a 12 kW generator/starter. It is similar in approach to the range extender found on the BMW i3. With a 20 litre fuel tank and fully charged battery, the 2h could offer a range of 970 – 1130 km.

Aptera 3 evokes deja vu. It repeats the basic Jason C. Hill design, but modernized for the 2020s. Like many other smaller manufacturers of electric vehicles, Aptera has engaged the services of Munro & Associates, a company established in 1988. Munro & Associates, Inc., focuses attention on profit improvement through design innovation; not financial trickery or outsourcing. He claims that they use their 3 000 m2 facility to benchmark and redesign products using purpose built software, and an internal search engine to remove 20% to 60% of the cost while improving the product’s function and quality. Sandy Munro has his origins, like this weblog writer, in Windsor, Ontario, where he started working as a toolmaker at the Valiant Machine Tool Company.

The resin composite skin contains microfluidic channels filled with a coolant to transfer heat from the batteries, motors and solar panels to the underbelly and sides of the vehicle.

Technically, the Aptera 3 will come with either two or three wheel hub motors for front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive. Each motor provides 50 kW, and is provided by Elaphe Ltd, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Multiple solar panel, motor and battery configurations are planned, with ranges from 400 to 1 600 km provided by 25, 40, 60 or 100 kW·h lithium-ion battery packs. Embedded solar cells will contribute up to an additional 65 km per day from sunlight alone under ideal conditions. With average daily commute distances estimated to be about less than 50 km per day, this allows Aptera to claim that they are producing a never charge vehicle. Prices vary from US$ 25 900 to over US$ 47 000. The all-wheel-drive version will accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in 3.5 s. The two-wheel-drive versions have a 0 to 100 km/h time of 5.5 s.

A number of details for the Aptera 3 are missing. This includes the charging technology to be used. Several enhancements/ options are offered: SafetyPilot adds Level 2 autonomy capability, including facial tracking, lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, and emergency braking; Enhanced audio provides three more channels of audio including an added lightweight transmission-line subwoofer; Off-road kit increases ground clearance and provides tougher wheel covers; Camping kit provides an integrated tent and rear awning; and, Pet kit adds a pet divider, a way to secure a pet, a rear ladder and other assessories for an animal.

From other sources, it appears that Aptera will use batch processing (rather than an assembly line) to produce its products. A batch could consist of between 100 to 200 units that have highly similar characteristics. Batch production would reduce capital investment.

Two new front-wheel drive (FWD) limited editions will be available. The Paradigm Edition is described as “The Most Efficient Vehicle on the Road” with a 640 km range, 100 kW drive system, with solar panels. The Paradigm + is “The Most Efficient Long Range Vehicle on the Road” with a full 1 600 km range, 100 kW drive system, and solar panels.

Another Aptera 3, showing off its solar panels (Photo: Aptera)

Notes: 1. The noun Aptera, has a long history. It was the name of an ancient city in Crete, as well as the name of another ancient city in Turkey. Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) classified Aptera as the seventh and last order of Insecta. It included many diverse creatures without wings, including crustaceans (crabs/ lobsters/ shrimp/ woodlice/ barnacles, etc.), arachnidans (spiders), myriapods (terrestrial creatures having anywhere from about 10 to 750 legs), and more. In 1795 Pierre André Latreille (1762 – 1833) divided it into seven orders: Suctoria, Thysanura, Parasita, Acephala, Entomostraca, Crustacea, and Myriapoda.

2. Wikipedia claims that the 2e was (going to be) assembled in Canada. Canada is a big place, and I haven’t been able to find out where, specifically, this was going to happen. If anyone knows, please advise and the text will be modified appropriately, with an acknowledgement.

Glass Molding: A tidbit

Glassomer GmbH has created intricate shapes using injection molding. Photo: Glassomer.

A new approach to glassmaking treats the material like plastic, allowing scientists to injection mold vaccine vials, sinuous channels for carrying out lab chemistry, and other complex shapes.

Glass was first produced in Egypt and eastern Mesopotamia around 3500 B.C.E. Silicon dioxide (silica) is heated to about 2000°C, then shaped using a variety of techniques. Current mass production techniques can easily produce many shapes, including glass sheets and bottles, but less successfully reproduce more intricate designs.

Since 2017, Frederik Kotz, a microsystems engineer, group leader at the Laboratory of Process Technology at Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg and Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at Glassomer, and associates have reworked a 3D printer to forge glass.

They create a printable powder by mixing silica nanoparticles with a polymer. After 3D-printing the desired shapes, they cure the mix with ultraviolet (UV) light. This ensures it holds its shape, until they fire the mix in an oven to burn off the polymer and fuse the silica particles into a continuous glass structure.

Unfortunately the procedure is slow, and unsuitable for mass production. Thus, the process has been modified to include injection molding. Silica is mixed with two polymers, polyethylene glycol (PEG) and polyvinyl butyral (PVB). This creates a dry powder that can be fed into an extruder that presses it into a preformed mold with the desired shape.

Once released from the mold, the fragile parts retain their shape because of weak attractive bonds, called van der Waals interactions, that form between neighbouring silica particles. Water is used to wash away the PEG. Then the remaining material is fired in two stages: First at 600°C to burn away the PVB, and then a second firing at 1300°C to fuse the silica particles into the final piece.

The final products are transparent, chemical inert, and stable, even at high temperatures. This makes them ideal for numerous products including telecommunications equipment, packaging for pharmaceuticals, and solar cells.

Mass producing glass parts still faces one bottleneck. The washing away of the PEG must be done slowly, over days, to ensure the glass parts don’t crack.

For further information see the Science article by Robert F. Service, and the Neptun Lab website.

Anouk: A tidbit

One Track: Nobody’s Wife (1997)

One Quotation: “These days adoption is a hot thing / You can get a child for nearly nothing / You take them home to a nanny / Buy off you’re guilt with toys and candy”

One Comment: Anouk Teeuwe was born 1975-04-08 in The Hague, Netherlands. Nobody’s Wife was written by Anouk, Satindra Kalpoe and Bart van Veen. The song was especially popular in the Netherlands and the Nordic countries, but was less successful elsewhere. It reached a peak position of #1 in Iceland, #2 in the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, #5 in Flanders, #6 in Denmark, #9 in Finland. With respect to the track as well as the quotation, Anouk has been married (2004) and divorced (2008) once, and given birth to six children, between 2002 and 2016.

Andrei Cerbu’s Garage

At The Smokin’ Dudes Records inside Adrei Cerbu’s garage, Strada Aurora 21, Iași, 700474 Romania. Clockwise from left to right, videographer Teodor Cusnir, public relations specialist Bader Maria, audio engineer and guitarist Andrei Cerbu and videographer Robert Ciubotaru. Here is how they describe themselves. “The Smokin’ Dudes is a group of talented young people, which besides the fact that they are passionate about music, they want to bring to the attention of the public also other talented young people. So they formed their own recording and filming studio, where they work passionately with young artists willing to show their talent.” Photo: The Smokin’ Dudes.

Yes, Andrei Cerbu will be presented as a solution, but first the problem …

For many years, I listened to modern classical music, with Henryk Górecki (1933 – 2010) being a favourite, along with Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 – 1958). Most of this was purchased as Naxos CDs, at monthly intervals. My last CD was purchased in 2008. As I approached 60, something strange happened. I reduced my listening to classical music and started listening to other genres. This included a renewed interest in electronic music and synthesizers, exemplified by Brian Eno (1948 – ), Here Come the Warm Jets (1973). More surprisingly, I started listening to industrial music and its offshoot electronic body music (EBM), electronic dance music (EDM) as well as some more metallic and harder rock.

One of the difficulties with rock/ metal is that so many of the musicians/ artists/ performers promote values that are an antithesis to mine. Thus, I have no interest in financially supporting groups promoting drugs and/ or violence, such as Guns N’ Roses. Even the name of their debut album, Appetite for Destruction (1987), is an antithesis to my belief system.

Copyright

Some of the earliest music to which I am attracted was released in the 1960s but more of it came from the 1970s, or later. Take the United Kingdom, where Eno originates. Under their 1988 Copyright Act, copyright in a sound recording expires after 50 years. However, on 2013-11-01, the UK copyright on sound recordings, not yet in the public domain, was extended from 50 to 70 years. Somewhat simplified, this means that recordings made in 1962 or earlier are in the public domain. Those made in 1963 will first come into the public domain on 2034-01-01. Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets, released in 1973, will not enter the public domain on 2024-01-01 as Eno could have expect when he made the track, but on 2044-01-01. A similar situation applies in other jurisdictions, including member states of the European Union.

Note: Further details about copyright law, are provided in the last paragraph of this weblog post, after The Smokin’ Dudes Records logo.

Canada extended its copyright for recorded music to 70 years on 2015-06-23. Ottawa law professor Michael Geist criticised the copyright term extension in a weblog post: “Experience elsewhere suggests that the extension is a windfall for record companies, with little benefit to artists or the public. In fact, many countries that have implemented the extension have been forced to do so through trade or political agreements, while signalling their opposition along the way. Canada will extend term without any public discussion or consultation, yet other studies have found that retroactive extension does not lead to increased creation and that the optimal term length should enable performers and record labels to recoup their investment, not extend into near-unlimited terms to the detriment of the public. For Canadian consumers, the extension could cost millions of dollars as works that were scheduled to come into the public domain will now remain locked down for decades.”

Solutions

With twenty years of windfall profits to look forward to, the music industry has little or no incentive to invest in younger musicians. What should younger musicians do?

Andrei Cerbu (2002 – ) has found a solution to this challenge. Despite his young age, he has been a guitarist since he was seven, coming third in a Romanian national music competition at the age of eleven. Now, he has a website that promotes young, Romanian musicians. His garage at Strada Aurora 21, in Iasi, Romania functions as a recording studio, featuring The Smokin’ Dudes Records, The Smokin’ Dudes TV, two bands: Andrei Cerbu and the Rockin’ Groove, and The Iron Cross, as well as several soloists. Music is freely available, but he also provides many ways for people to support him, and other musicians, financially. These include merchandise sales, and donations through Patreon and PayPal. His YouTube channel has over 400 tracks, that are freely available for everyone to enjoy.

I sent a link to a cover of Deep Purple’s Highway Star (1972) by Cerbu’s band, The Iron Cross, to my young (under 40) nephew. He replied, “I’m not familiar with the original, but I don’t think it could be better than this version.”

Copyright details. In the United Kingdom there were relevant copyright acts in 1911, 1956 and 1988. According to this last iteration, copyright in a sound recording expires after 50 years.either (a) 50 years after the recording is made, or (b) if the recording is published during that period then 50 years from the publication, or (c) if during the initial 50 years the recording is played in public or communicated to the public then 50 years from that communication or playing to the public, provided the author of the broadcast is an European economic area (EEA) citizen. Copyright is supposed to balance the rights of creators with the rights of users/ consumers. Thus, creators are given a monopoly to profit from their recording for a specified period of time. Under this arrangement, all of the music made in Britain in the 1960s would be freely available as of 2021-01-01. As stated previously, above, on 2013-11-01, the UK copyright on sound recordings, not yet in the public domain, was extended from 50 to 70 years. This means that only recordings made in 1962 or earlier are currently in the public domain. Those made in 1963 will first come into the public domain on 2034-01-01; those made in 1973, on 2044-01-01.