Hello again.

I have to hand it to Martyn. Last week, he posted a thread on Twitter that he surely knew was going to rile up the Twitter brigade.

I recommend reading the whole thread, but he basically took issue with a notion that had been advanced in Resident Advisor’s “The Changing Economics of Electronic Music: Part 2” feature. The idea wasn’t new, per se – especially for those of us who have been following the work, or even just the Twitter feed, of Mat Dryhurst – but it’s still the sort of issue that stirs up a lot of emotions and opinions amongst supporters and opponents alike.

Without being too reductive, the idea is rooted in the fact that producers have seen their income shrink to increasingly minuscule levels in the streaming era. At the same time, DJs are making higher fees than ever while (usually) playing music that was made by other people. Even worse, in many environments – festivals in particular – DJs are often being booked for slots that once went to live acts, which means there are fewer opportunities for actual music creators to earn money from performing their own music. Given this discrepancy, the argument goes, something should be done to rectify the situation, and the “something” most frequently cited is the implementation of a new system where a portion of DJs’ fees (ideally over a certain threshold) goes back to the artists whose music they play in their sets. In theory, that would restore at least some of producers’ lost income streams and help sustain a healthier balance in the electronic music world, one in which producers – you know, the people who actually make the music - will more easily be able to sustain their craft without feeling like they have to become a touring DJ to survive.

I don’t want to speak for Martyn, but his Twitter thread took issue with this argument along the following lines:

This analysis undervalues what it is that DJs do. DJing is an actual craft, and doing it well takes skill and years of hard work. There already is a system in place for compensating producers when their music is played by DJs. Royalties are being collected by performance rights organizations (PROs), but they’re not being distributed properly for a myriad of reasons. Shouldn’t we focus on fixing/improving that system instead? Once a DJ buys a piece of music, they own it, just like any other consumer. As such, they have the right to do what they want with it, including playing it in a DJ set.

So… who’s right? I have to admit, when I first came across Mat Dryhurst’s thoughts on this topic (many months ago), I reacted in the exact same way that Martyn did. I think it’s partially a function of age (sorry Martyn, but I’m also grouping myself with the “olds” here), but as someone who’s been involved in this culture for more than 20 years (yikes), I do inherently place a lot of value – some of it admittedly sentimental – on what DJs do. It’s easy to say that “anyone can be a DJ,” but while technology and the proliferation of digital formats has made that idea more true now than it was in, say, 1995 or even 2005, the fact is that being a good DJ is absolutely not something that anyone can do. While it is true that the current dynamic between industry hype and booking patterns does frequently propel inexperienced DJs onto the international club and festival circuit, even if their DJ skills don’t necessarily merit the level of fees that they’re earning, staying on that circuit isn’t so easy. Unless an artist is capable of dropping an endless series of hot records or figure out another way to maintain their level of hype, they’re going to have to be a good DJ to keep getting booked, and that involves actual talent, artistic vision and a whole lot of hard work.

Moreover, there’s a basic logic to the argument that once someone buys a record, it’s theirs to do with as they wish. Perhaps it’s a result of growing up in a capitalist society, but most of us don’t think collectively about our possessions, not even the digital ones. I don’t know about everyone else, but I think of the songs on my iTunes as “my music,” even though it’s all been created by other people. Hell, I think of it as “my music” even though a huge portion of that music has been sent to me for free as promos.

Speaking of promos, I’ve rarely seen them brought up in these discussions, but they are something that definitely clouds the issue. Although it varies from one DJ to another, it’s a safe assumption that a significant portion of music being played by the average touring DJ was sent to them for free in the form of promos. And at the most basic level, a DJ promo is an invitation to play the music, is it not? It may not involve a specific spelling out of rights, but I think most DJs see promos (whether they’re coming from an official PR campaign or an informal email from a producer or label head they know) as a message that says, “I think you might like this, go ahead and play it in your sets if you do.” Beyond that, there haven’t been any clauses attached, other than the usual “don’t share this link with anyone else,” and even that gets broken. There’s certainly no stipulation that says, “If you do play this, I expect you to pay me a percentage of your DJ fee for that set.”

In the past, clauses like that wouldn’t have even been considered, because the DJ world (like most creative industries) bought into the idea of exposure. The logic of exposure basically says that if a creator (e.g. an electronic music producer) provides something for cheap or free to an entity (e.g. another artist, a media outlet, a giant corporation) with a larger platform, the attention that the “something” will receive will trickle down to said creator, supposedly leading to more attention for them, more gigs, more income, etc. This argument is still used today, frequently in reference to artists like Aphex Twin, and goes something like this: “If Aphex Twin plays your track, you’re going to sell a bunch of copies of that song (and probably other music from your catalog too), and it might even lead to you getting booked for gigs yourself.” And in truth, this has actually happened for certain artists; the Twitter anecdotes about the blessed hand of Aphex Twin are numerous.

That being said, can we all just agree that the idea of exposure is bullshit? I’m not saying that artists should never do work for free or cheap – hell, I do it myself sometimes – and I do believe in the idea of people “paying their dues” (at least to a certain degree), but the entire exposure system is built atop the same logic that brought us trickle-down economics. Admittedly, I’m not an economist, but we’re basically talking about a system in which economic actors with more wealth and resources quite literally convince those with fewer resources to do work at below market value, in hopes that it might lead to an eventual move up the economic ladder. I know that exploitation is a loaded word, but still, all of this sounds an awful lot like exploitation to me.

What really boggles the mind is that even though most people in the electronic music world consider themselves to be progressive or at least left-of-center, we’ve somehow adopted (and continue to perpetuate) a conservative economic system that’s actually more capitalistic and, yes, exploitative than the ones being executed by our own governments. There has to be a better way, no? Or at least a more equitable one?

Going back to the DJ booth, it’s true that some of this inequity could be solved by PROs. Now, I don’t want to get too bogged down in what PROs are and how they work, but these organizations (which vary from one country to the next, only complicating matters further) are already collecting royalties from festivals, clubs and other venues where music is played. The problem is that the data that they use to then distribute those royalties to copyright holders is woefully incomplete. (For a deeper dive into the issue, I’d recommend checking this article that surfaced in DJ Mag a few months back.)

Can the data provided to PROs be improved? Yes. Absolutely. Will it actually be improved? I don’t know. At present, the PROs don’t have a whole lot of incentive to fix things. As a group, electronic music artists represent a small (and generally unorganized) portion of PRO membership. Many artists are unaware how PROs even work, and it’s safe to safe that many people running PROs have a limited understanding of DJ culture and how even the basics of the electronic music industry work. (At the extreme, I’m talking about people who don’t necessarily understand what mixing is, or even that DJs are playing other people’s music.)

Technology could help, but the truth is that things aren’t yet at a level where the music being played at venues can be automatically monitored, let alone trusted to accurately record what is being played. At some point, perhaps Blockchain technology will allow exact track information to be encoded into every tune a DJ plays (at least the digital ones) and then tracked, but for now, we’re still relying on a Shazam-like piece of software to figure out what a DJ is playing, even if they’re playing three songs at once and running the mixer signal through an FX unit. Based on my iPhone’s usual success rate when I try to Shazam something, I think we’re a long ways off from technology solving this problem. And even if the perfect technology does come into existence, there’s also the issue of getting it into every club and convincing everyone to use it. It’s not impossible to imagine, but again, I think we have a ways to go.

In the meantime, the only real hope for accurate reporting is that DJs will do it themselves. And the good news is that yes, this is actually possible, at least in most places. Although reporting a tracklist for an illegal warehouse rave probably won’t help anyone, if a DJ performs at a licensed club or festival, they can usually go online and input their tracklists, leading to some sort of payout for every artist whose music was played. In truth, however, it’s not every artist – only the ones who are registered with said PRO. And this participation issue is the main problem I have with the idea that PROs are going to save electronic music producers. These organizations have been around for decades, their operations are nebulous and their accountability is low. They suffer no real penalties if the money they collect isn’t distributed fairly, and changing that will likely require either a major surge of altruism on their part or large-scale organization on the part of the members they’re not serving properly.

In my opinion, both are unlikely. For all the jokes about “business techno,” the fact is that most people in electronic music aren’t particularly business savvy, nor do they want to be. Furthermore, there aren’t a ton of incentives to really change that when the benefits are abstract (e.g. “helping the scene”) and the economic bonus for many of us would be small or nonexistent. For instance, what motivation does a DJ (who’s not also a producer or label owner) really have to report their tracklist to a PRO, other than their desire to do the right thing? That should be enough, but as good as “doing the right thing” sounds, it becomes a lot less desirable when it involves a bunch of data entry after a weekend full of travel, late nights, little sleep and who knows what else. On a more basic level, how many DJs can even remember exactly what they played?

So no, I don’t have a whole lot of faith in the PRO system. The truth is, I don’t know how to “fix” this problem, but having looked at the status quo, I have to admit that I’ve increasingly come around to the logic of what folks like Mat Dryhurst are saying. As much as I love and value the art / craft of DJing, it’s pretty clear that DJs are making their money – and sometimes it’s a lot of money – using the work of other people who are not being fairly compensated. And once streaming comes to the DJ booth (and yes, that’s sadly already in the works), this income disparity will become even more unfair.

At the same time, I’m also extremely dubious about the prospect of setting up some sort of new profit-sharing regime between DJs and producers. It sounds good in theory, but barring some kind of international government regulations making it mandatory for everyone, how many DJs are going to voluntarily sign up to give a portion of their income to other artists? Given our scene’s intensely competitive and capitalistic nature, I’m afraid that the answer would be a lot fewer than we’d like to think.

Beyond that, even if such a regime were put in place, how would it be enforced? Where would the income threshold be before DJs are charged? Should a DJ making $500 a gig be forced to hand over a percentage of their fee? $1000? $5000? Is the percentage flat, or does it increase as DJ fees rise? Who’s going to collect the money and ensure that the figures are accurate? What happens to money collected for artists who aren’t registered with the new regime? What’s to stop DJs from trying to avoid these payments by demanding that their DJ fees (or portions of their DJ fees) be paid in cash, off the books? Alternately, what’s to stop DJs from avoiding these payments by instead just playing sets of only their own music, or maybe just music from their own label? How would labels figure into this? Are they going to start demanding a cut of this new income stream? Will it become part of contracts when someone is signed to a label?

I could go on, but I imagine that you’re getting the idea.

I’m not opposed to change. The status quo is fucked and is getting worse. Producers need to actually make money, or electronic music is going to wind up in a shitty place. DJs, on the other hand, are making a lot of money, but those profits aren’t trickling down to the people whose music they’re playing. At the same time, pitting DJs and producers against one another feels counterproductive, especially when there are other parties who are also making a killing out there: festival promoters, certain clubs, massive tech companies, etc. A lot of the problems electronic music is facing are just a microcosm of what all creative industries our facing in the era of platform capitalism, and things are looking grim.

So yes, DJs are probably exploiting producers. But they’re not the only ones, and they’re not doing it on purpose. Change is needed, but it’s not going to happen without our entire community getting its act together, organizing and doing a lot of work. DJs and producers should be allies; if they can’t work together to tackle these issues, then we can all be sure that someone else will, and none of us is likely to be happy with the result.

p.s. Martyn recently started a newsletter called Four Things, which centers around recommendations and is something I’ve found to be quite good.

MORE THINGS I WROTE

In the past few days, Pitchfork has published a couple of album reviews that I wrote.

First up was my review of Call for Location, the new album from Jubilee . It’s not often that I have the chance (or the desire) to write about anything pop, or even pop-adjacent, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the vocal tunes on this record were some of my favorite tracks on the LP. Regardless, there’s a lot to enjoy here, including Jubilee’s many nods to her South Florida upbringing and her days as a teenage raver. In a time when electronic music artists are often encouraged to find their “lane” and stuck to it, it’s really refreshing to see someone like Jubilee find success; although she’s always dabbled in a lot of a different sounds, she’s managed to do so without losing herself in the process.

Just this morning, my review of Hiro Kone’s A Fossil Begins to Bray went live. In all honesty, this is one of my favorite albums of the year. The LP is just SO GOOD, and after months of flipping out about it in private, I’m hoping the delirium will spread beyond my house now that the record has been officially released. (In case anyone is wondering, even my wife Dania, who generally has zero faith in my taste in music, is fully on board with this album.) Check the review for more details, but anyone who likes their electronic music dark and menacing will very much appreciate this LP.

REAL QUICK

A lot of new albums came out during the last week, which isn’t all that surprising given that it’s November (a.k.a. the music industry’s last chance to get LPs out before the holidays). Due to time constraints and the fact that, well, I didn’t like some of them very much, I won’t be able to highlight them all in the “NEW THIS WEEK” section of the newsletter, but given the big names involved, I figured it was worth mentioning here that there are now new full-lengths out from Floorplan , Giant Swan , FKA Twigs, rRose , Lapalux , Black Jazz Consortium , Pan American , Shapednoise , Roland Tings , Solitary Dancer , Kreidler , Kamaal Williams and probably some other folks I missed. It’s a lot.

Following more than three years of relative quiet, Andy Stott surprised everyone last week with a new double EP, It Should Be Us, which is out via Modern Love. The UK producer has never been known for churning out techno screamers, but even by his usual moody standards, this new record is a collection of tunes that smolder more than they burn – “lurching” is the word that kept coming to mind as I gave it a listen. (This is not a bad thing.) Sadly, the EP isn’t on Bandcamp, which is something I’ve noticed about a lot of releases coming out of the Boomkat / Modern Love universe (what gives you guys?), so you’ll have to find it elsewhere. However, one track, “Versi,” has been shared on SoundCloud.

Long one of Detroit’s best DJs, Andrés (who’s also a skilled percussionist and an excellent producer) has announced the imminent release of a new album, Andrés IV. Scheduled to arrive on November 25 via Moodymann’s Mahogani Music label, it’s his first full-length since 2011. Ahead of the official release, he’s shared a boom-bapping track off the LP, “What’s Ur Name Again.”

IDM fans will be happy to know that German veteran Oval has a new album on the way for Thrill Jockey. It’s called Scis and will be released in January. In the meantime though, he’s offered up a new EP, Eksploio, which came out on Friday.

The name Sign Libra is likely new to most of you (don’t worry, it was new to me as well until very recently), but this Latvian artist has signed to RVNG Intl. and will be releasing a new LP called Sea to Sea in February. I’ve been digging the playful first single, “Sea of Islands,” which hints at vintage Japanese electronic music.

NEW THIS WEEK

As always, here are some of my favorite tunes that came out during the past week. Click the track titles to hear each song individually, or you can also just head over to this Buy Music Club list to find them all in one place.

Obviously I already declared my love for this album, both in Pitchfork and earlier in today’s newsletter, but I also wanted to highlight one of its songs here. I honestly could have selected pretty much any one of the eight tracks on the LP, but I feel like “Fabrication of Silence” perfectly captures the album’s ominous spirit, along with the intimidating precision of Hiro Kone’s craft. Having clearly sharpened her modular synth skills, the music combines sharp sound design with slithering tendrils of static and distortion, not to mention the sort of thunderous low-end boom that’s usually only found in big-budget Hollywood films (and maybe the DMZ catalog).

How are Sinjin Hawke and Zora Jones not absurdly famous by now? I’m not even the biggest fan of “club music” these days, but these two have been making some downright magical tunes for years now. Here, we have their take on “End of the Road” from Murlo’s recent Dolos LP. (It’s the latest installment of the UK producer’s Dolos: Flashbacks series, which has already seen remixes of his tunes from Object Blue and Yamaneko.) I like Murlo a lot, but it’s Sinjin Hawke and Zora Jones doing the heavy lifting here, infusing the track with wild vocal acrobatics, hyperactive rhythms and a bit of symphonic flair, which all comes together to create a highly pleasurable retro-futuristic R&B vibe. Why can’t more pop music sound like this?

This one also has a something of a pop feel, as long as your definition of pop includes late ’90s UK garage. (Mine most definitely does.) In truth, I don’t really like the original version of “Tell Me,” but I think Smokey Bubblin’ B might be one of my new favorite producers. With his cracking beats and sticky vocal cut-ups, he just has a knack for rekindling the swinging UK sound of the late ’90s / early ’00s, and this rework even throws in a big, distorted bassline that brings to mind speed garage at its most raw. Tunes like this have been made thousands of times before, but it’s been a while since they were in heavy rotation, and sometimes it’s a good idea to just hop in a virtual time machine and have a bit of fun.

For years, I didn’t pay much attention to Tommy Four Seven, in part because a lot of the techno on CLR isn’t really my cup of tea, but mostly because I didn’t like his artist name. (I’m not big on puns. We all have our biases.) However, ever since he started up the 47 label, it seems that his music has become a bit darker, a bit more experimental and (at least to me) way more interesting. Back in April he dropped Veer, a growling, industrial-tinged LP that largely avoided standard techno formulas, and now he’s followed it up with Veer Remixed, an all-star collection that includes reworks from Silent Servant, Parrish Smith, Machine Woman, Pessimist and lots of other great artists. Many of these remixes are worthy of your attention, but this version of “X Threat” from Ilian Tape mainstay Stenny is a relentless breakbeat techno monster. (Side note: Stenny’s debut album Upsurge is coming out on November 19 and I am excited about it.)

Speaking of techno monsters, Blawan and Pariah have been making storming tunes together as Karenn for the better part of a decade. Last Friday, the UK duo released their long-awaited debut album, the curiously titled Grapefruit Regret. Dispensing with the usual routine in which artists pad their first full-length with ambient tracks and genre experiments, the Karenn boys have basically stuck to what they do best, delivering eight tracks of hard-charging, rough-around-the-edges machine techno. In fairness, the LP does offer variations in tempo and mood, but for the most part, the vibe here is “we’re not fucking around,” which is great. “Taste Yourself” certainly packs plenty of punch – that kick drum is not about to quit – but it’s also one of the album’s moodier selections, blending in a bit of hovering dread with its Berghain-ready churn.

Another tune for the nosebleed techno crowd, even though this one technically isn’t a techno track. Taken from the new Fifth Monarchy EP, the song finds Bristol bass manipulator Ossia – who last week also released a new record of his own called The Marzahn Versions – transforming the lumbering menace of Logos’ original into something much more fleet of foot. Although my brain tells me that pairing a snarling, Benga-esque wobble bassline with a driving four-on-the-floor kick shouldn’t work, the combination somehow works like a charm here, ultimately giving us something like an EBM-meets-Croydon mash-up, which I promise is much better than it sounds.

Buttechno is another producer whose artist name initially prompted me to keep my distance, but this Moscow prankster has been on a hot streak that’s simply impossible to ignore. Back in January, he did a solid record for Incienso, and now he’s put together a double EP, badtrip, for Nina Kraviz’s трип imprint. “pkds” is one of the more manic tunes on the record, a mischievous piece of rave-ready techno powered by bleepy synths, a crunchy bassline and a robot vocal straight out of NASA’s mission control center.

It happened again. Fresh off my big essay a couple of weeks ago about how we’re being overrun with unnecessary compilations, another label has put together a great collection of music. Even worse, they haven’t really done it for any big reason. (Yes, I’ll take another slice of humble pie. Make it a big one.) The compilation in question is Thousands of Eyes in the Dark, a release that’s loosely tied to Ghostly International’s ongoing 20th anniversary celebrations and is also meant to recognize the label’s SMM (i.e. slow-moving music) tag, which has been discreetly circulating since 2003 in conjunction with the imprint’s more laid-back and ambient releases. This new collection continues in that same vein, putting together quality tunes from Emily A. Sprague, Sarah Davachi, Yosi Horikawa and other like-minded masters of chill. Given that Thousands of Eyes in the Dark was smartly curated/designed for continuous listening, I could have chosen pretty much any of the tracks to highlight here, but in the end, I went with these two twinkling gems from Khotin and Tadd Mullinix (a.k.a. Dabrye a.k.a. JTC a.k.a. many other rad projects).

Max Cooper is not “cool.” I don’t mean the man. (I actually met him before and he was perfectly nice.) But his music… I don’t know, it just doesn’t pass whatever “cool” test is required to get love from the tastemaker RA crowd. Maybe it’s too clean, too safe, too commercial or something else. I honestly don’t know, but it’s always seemed like the kind of stuff that gets bigged up by people who would say that the find Four Tet and Floating Points to be a bit too edgy. All that being said, I… think… I… kind of… like(?) the new Max Cooper album. (Maybe?) Born out of a special commission by the Barbican, who asked Cooper to create music for an audio-visual show, the album isn’t particularly avant-garde, and it’s not a wholesale change from his past work, but something feels different. Perhaps it’s a bit more cinematic, or a bit less concerned with the dancefloor. Once again, I just don’t know. Somehow, Max Cooper has left me at a loss for words, but I just found this tune in particular to be quite pleasant. Sometimes, that’s enough.

And after all that, we have come to the end of another newsletter. I say this every week, but really, thanks so much for reading and I hope you liked the tunes.

Until next week.

Shawn

Shawn Reynaldo is a freelance writer, editor, presenter and project manager. Find him on LinkedIn or drop him an email to get in touch about projects, collaborations or potential work opportunities.