Peter Gabriel Wants You to Re-Shock the Monkey

PreacherTom writes "The party line for the music industry has been clear: discourage music downloads at all cost. However, singer Peter Gabriel is taking things in a different direction. In order to promote his own label, he is actually encouraging people to not only download his music, but also adapt it into something more modern. In doing so, he actually posted a sample pack of Shock the Monkey consisting of vocals and other pieces of the original multitrack recording. Some in the music business would call this the commercial equivalent of hiring kidnappers to babysit. In actuality, Gabriel is pleased with the results."

HIM!

So HE'S the one behind those insipid "shock the monkey" banner ads that inspired me to write AdBlock! I am calling upon all wise men to boycott Peter Gabriel. It shouldn't be hard, considering he's just some stupid blogger.

Re:HIM!

Apparently hitting a moving target in a little box was too difficult for some users, so they switched to a wide-angle taser or something with "Shock the monkey". One click, one kill.

I pwned that game with my l33t aimbot and wallhacks, n00b.

Been done by NIN already.....

Nine inch Nails put out a track and allowed it to be remixed..

see

http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/05/04/16/1417205.s html?tid=141&tid=3 [slashdot.org]

Re:Been done by NIN already.....

NIN is also mentioned in TFA, but this is slashdot so you're excused for not actually reading it.

Re:Been done by NIN already.....

NIN was late to the game. Peter Gabriel put out two CD-ROMs in the mid-90s that allowed for remixing of his tracks. Even before that, I remember that when The Shaman released the CD-single for their "Move Any Mountain" track, it included all of the tracks and samples that made up the recording.

i'm going

to remix Peter Gabriel and Paris Hilton's new song and call it Shock the Junkie

If I shock the monkey...

... do I "win $20"?

Someone help me out here..

If you compress a single track of a song into an mp3 (or ogg or whatever) does it compress better than compressing multiple tracks mixed together? It's my understanding that the first step of compressing a wav to mp3 is to seperate out all the sound tracks. This being an imprecise process, wouldn't you get better results if the sound tracks were already seperated? So when musicians are making mp3s do they do it with seperate tracks or do they mix the tracks together and then encode an mp3 from the resulting mix, which immediately goes and tries to seperate the tracks again?

Re:Someone help me out here..

Actually the Fairlight was 8-bit, as were the Emulator, Emulator II and Ensoniq Mirage (among others). The latter is quite interesting in that the DOC chip (which handled the sample playback) found its way into other Ensoniq synths (where short waveform loops were held in ROM) as well as the Apple IIgs. In the Mirage and Ensoniq ESQ and SQ range it fed into rather nice 24dB/octave analogue filters, giving a very rich and warm sound from the fairly low-quality samples. The PPG Wave series of wavetable synths also used 8-bit samples, again fed through a 24dB/octave filter. It was only a little later that 12-bit sampling became common, with Akai, Casio, Emu, Sequential Circuits and Ensoniq brought out 12-bit samplers (again, Ensoniq at least also used the voice chips in wavetable-based synths), then ultimately on to 16 bits.

Oh, and let's not forget the many 8-bit parallel port sound devices in the early 90s like the Covox Speech Thing, Disney Sound Source and others.

Re:Someone help me out here..

If you really want the real deal, you distribute non-lossy formats like .wav or shn.

Somebody just spoke of losless audio on Slashdot without mentioning Ogg FLAC. What is this world coming to?

A real answer for people curious about MP3's

They are facinating in how they work, but let me provide a quick laymen explanation:

First off, your idea that tracks are "seperated" is an understandable mistake! But, the deal is that it's not the tracks that are seperated, it's the component audio frequencies that compose the sound that make up the song that are.

Let's skip the boring stuff and get right to it. If this interests you, i'm sure that wikipedia will have a full explanation. Imagine three people are whistling (and that this makes up the whole, if somewhat boring, song. Person 1 is whistling at 700hz (hertz, or cycles per second. Human hearing is approx 20-20000 hz, rather like the specs you see on headphones, no coincidence). Person 2 is whistling at 703 hz (NOTE this is close to person 1 on purpose) and person 3 is whistling at 900 hz. So you hear, uncompressed three whistles. There are two things that happen to make an mp3:

1) If I can analyze this sound to find it's frequency components for a given "window" (or in mp3 speak, frame) of time, i can just record that. It would be easier (smaller) to say Persons 1, 2, 3 are whistling at 700, 703, and 900 then it would be to record the full sound of them doing it (think about that)

Still, music can be complex, and there are different qualities of MP3 you can make too (usually refered to as bitrate, like 128, 160, 192 Kbps (kilo bits per second) so we have

2) A principal not unlike optical illusions called Psychoacoustics. It basically says that if you have two signals A and B, and A is louder then B, and A and B are close enough in frequency, a person will only tend to hear A. Common sense time, if a headphone speaker is making a sound, and a big loudspeaker is making the same sound, you'll only hear the big loudspeaker. The question is, how much different will the headphone have to be before you hear it?

This is the science of psychoacoustics. Basically, the more compressed an mp3 is, the more will be "stripped" out - that is as the bitrate gets lower, the amount seperating A and B is allowed to increase. On the flip side, if the bitrate is high enough, there is no practical difference to the human ear, because you just can't hear such a small difference anyway That's why a high bitrate mp3 is STILL five times smaller then a .wav file with equivalent (for most humans -some one might disagree - i don't) quality.

Check on fourier transforms, psychoacoustics, and mp3 on wikipedia for more (and if anyone has a better example, well, typed this pretty quick, go for it!)

.j.

Re:More accurate explanation

You are all complete idiots and do not know how MP3 compression works. I cannot belive this trash got modded up.
You in particular have just mixed up HZ and KHZ and injected more bullshit like "It essentially tries to fit a curve to the master waveform".

Perceptual encoding is much more complicated than that.
It actually performs an FFT analysis and split the sound up into it's component sine waves.
Then, two methods are used to discard data.
Both known as perceptual masking. The first method deals with frequency masking, the second with time.
Human auditory perception cannot hear a quiet frequency when there is a louder one within a few hz of it.
So, you can discard all of them.
Humans cannot hear a quiet sound when a louder one immediately follows it. (Think of a bass drum, you do not hear the squeak of the pedal just before the beater hits.)
So you can discard all those too.

The watery effect of heavy MP3 compression is from too many transients being discarded by the second method, so the transients appear spread over time. The thin lack of depth is due to too many frequencies being discarded.

"the net result of a sound around 701.5 Hz coming in and out every 1/3rd of a second. It would basically sound like 3 beeps a second, though more like a siren than a beep. If the waves were at different amplitudes, the same phenomenon would still exist but there would not be complete silence during the destructive phases."

This is crap. The cancellation has ALREADY HAPPENED when the waveforms were mixed before you do the MP3 compression. So you just need to compress the result, not the individual tones.
Also, it will sound like an amplitude tremelo, not a siren which would imply pitch modulation.

Re:Someone help me out here..

Others have provided useful aspects of the answer to your question but I don't think anyone has boiled it down yet.

In short - No. A single track compressed will work better in mp3 than individual tracks mixed together.

The reason is that mp3 is designed precisely to compress single multi-instrument tracks and makes use of psychoacoustics to do this. The gist of which is, the more complicated a sound is (multiple instruments/frequencies) the less of each individual instrument (frequency) you are likely to be able to perceive. Thus, with all the instruments together in the one track, the mp3 algorithm can work better to strip out the subtler elements you don't perceive. If you are just compressing a single instrument there is less of that compression that can be done because, for example, it doesn't know that the rhythm guitar is being drowned by the kick drum at that point in time. Or as a corollary, compressing a single instrument will have to remove stuff you can hear just to hit the same bitrate as the compressed single track. So, combining individual tracks will lead to a worse outcome, all other things being equal, than compressing the already mixed track.

Monkey cruelty?

Where's PETA when you really need them?

Shock the monkey?

I really don't like the visual [urbandictionary.com] that's giving me.

(NSFW link)

Minding the "P"'s.

"The party line for the music industry has been clear: discourage music downloads at all cost. However, singer Peter Gabriel is taking things in a different direction. In order to promote his own label, he is actually encouraging people to not only download his music"

In other words the copyright holder is giving others permission to do something. Well that certainly beats digitally knocking him over the head, and taking the goods.

Never thought of it that way...

I'm not downloading pirated music... I'm babysitting kidnapped music!

I feel better already.

So?

Real musicians (ie not Britney etc) love having their music remixed & worked on by other musicians. If you listen to hiphop, you'll know that everyone lets everyone else play with their beats, lyrics, etc. Honestly, BFD.

Re:So?

Sure some artists love it, because they often get paid when the music is used, or at least get credit for the riff/sample. The courts have ruled multiple times that unlicensed sampling is a violate of copyright (for example: Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Demsion Films, 2004 [findlaw.com]). Plus, I don't think most artists have access to all the master tracks when sampling "illegally" ... which is partly why contests/experiments like those of Peter Gabriel and Nine Inch Nails were so interesting.

Claiming that all "Real" musicians love having the music sampled is a bit overstated ... particularly since the practice seems most common in Rap and Hip Hop.

Results have some merits

While I agree with most commentors that Peter Gabriel didn't exactly pick his shining accomplishment for the amateur mixers to work with, there were a few "gems" amongst the entries. Here was one of my personal favorites [realworldremixed.com] ... who would have thought Carmen and Shock the Monkey would go together so well?

Whatever

It's a well-known song by a well-released artist. Sure, the RIAA could dig some plain-old selling-CDs value out of it, but they've gone to that well plenty of times. So this is as much publicity stunt as artistic endeavor, and it's reaffirming exactly what the RIAA does: promote big acts.

What the major labels provide to an artist is massive promotion, and this artist has already been promoted. If you want to take down the RIAA, find some ways to connect to brilliant-but-obscure bands that don't have the money for radio air play, posters in Virgin Megastores, etc.

Re:Whatever

Sure, the RIAA could dig some plain-old selling-CDs value out of it, but they've gone to that well plenty of times. So this is as much publicity stunt as artistic endeavor, and it's reaffirming exactly what the RIAA does: promote big acts.

Peter Gabriel is British. He has converted a garden shed on his own property into a recording studio where he produces for his own label. He actually runs his own website.

Yes, he's a big act, but since leaving Genesis he's been as much as possible an independent big act publicly at the forefront of not paying too much mind to copyright issues.

When his "people" came to him all upset that people in India were pirating his records his response was (paraphrasing):

"You idiots, book me. If they're not paying for what we're trying to sell they're at least demonstrating a demand for what we can sell that they can't pirate."

He has a long, personal history of being the good anti-Metallica.

KFG

Stupidest phrase ever...

..the commercial equivalent of hiring kidnappers to babysit...

Uh, no. It just letting listeners remix already recorded segments into something they like.

Really.

Journalists are stupid. Sometimes.

Not the first

As much as I love Peter Gabriel, he isn't the first to release tracks for fans to mix. Barenaked Ladies [barenakedladies.com] have also been offering songs from their newest album for people to mix (some of the newly-mixed songs will go on an EP, the proceeds going to charity). Anyways, I think it's great that more popular artists are sticking it to the man, so to speak, and disregarding everything the RIAA wants you to believe. More power to 'em, and if it means rehashing old songs in order to get attention, then so be it. At least they're starting to clue in on the fact that free music does more good than harm (most of the time).

Music + Video?

When I think Peter Gabriel my mind is instantly driven to the video for "Sledgehammer" with the stop motion animated food. With all of the Photoshopping talent online, why should the remix project stop with music alone? Music videos would likely be impressive as well.

Maybe, just maybe...

You can see that the actual artists -- the people the RIAA pretend to be protecting -- have repeatedly fallen on our side, supporting file sharing and music communities. They are above the petty business interests and sheer greed that has driven the RIAA to attempt to destroy the music industry.

With any luck, more artists will start taking these kinds of steps, and eventually the RIAA will not be watching their own dinner from last night being digested.

Re:Maybe, just maybe...

If you download music without paying for it, you are breaching copyright, end of story.

Mostly true.

All the "file sharers" and "music communities" do is make it worse for honest customers like me who have to put up with copy-protection and over-priced CDs that subsidise your theft.

Untrue. DRM is something the companies want in order to force you to pay for the same thing multiple times and filesharing is just the excuse.

This is how it should be

Freedom to create derivative works. Freedom to distribute. Freedom to use as you see fit. No copyright nonsense.

The good thing: it is inevitable that we deal away with copyright. Modern exchange of information demands it (read, networking in the sense of distributing information based on the network model, as opposed to the broadcast model). The information exchange is much more powerful than the copyright law, and it is only bound to get stronger as networking is more and more part of everyday life. The first signs are already apparent. We've got a company called Google who is most likely among the biggest copyright infringers on the world, operating freely. Why? Because Google provides an essential service. To index information, thus make information accessible. Furthermore not only it is an essential service, but it is _good_ for content creators aswell. The fundamental clash is this: copyright and networking is incompatible. Networking/nature is not aware of copyright and can't be made aware of, because copyright itself is a fuzzy, arbitary and ultimately conflicting view on information. Copyright is the 8 ton gorilla. Networking is the 8000 ton meteorite. Networking is simply so useful that we're not going to give it up and networking cannot be fixed to obey copyright law. Copyright is not only detrimental to an information society, it is not needed and ultimately incompatible with future technological advancement. Networking implies free flow of information and creating derivative works. So like it or not: copyright goes away.

The bad thing: it is likely to be a long, slow process and change is only going to come when the situation becomes really, really unworkable.

The outcome: content creators will get paid for creating the given work, but won't be given a tax and monopoly on distribution for x amount of time. This is how most people would expect to get paid for a job. After all, why is it that while creating and printing a book in the 18th century was much more expensive and longer, the copyright law guaranteed less benefits for the authors than it does now. We're simply rewarding content creators too much for too little work.

Of course you could argue that copyright provides incentive. But this is a false argument. The correct way to phrase that is: copyright provides income, which is the incentive. Now, you might argue that in the 18th century, copyright was the most straightforward way to provide that income to content creators, but today it ain't so. Again, our wonderful networking age obsoleted copyright on that field. It is now possible to setup a worldwide micropayment system on the internet (it is just a matter of time until someone implements it), to sponsor the creation of most works. Still, you could say, what about big budget movies? Well, what about them. There will be companies willing to finance the creation of the movie just like now (of course actors would be paid fixed sums of money as royalties won't exist) and they'd make profit not from the copyright fees coming from distributing the work, but from using the given content to sell their product. Tv stations already do this, they give away movies for no financial compensation so that you watch the advertisements their income is from. Just from now on, your movies ticket would pay for the experience you're given in the cinema, not the copyright fees. People would still go to the cinema, but cinemas would actually have to compete on the best viewing experience, not at what you're actually able to view.

It might sound strange, but from a certain viewpoint, advertisements have it right: they are the means, not the end. As in, they exist as means for companies to influence you, not because they want to make a profit on advertisements. The profit is indirect. If all content would be used like that commercially: to help sell a product (cinema seets, a book, etc), as in not as advertisement, but as a necessary component, then we wouldn't have to pay outrageous profits to media cartells, just what they des

Eno & Byrne - My life in the bush of ghosts

Same on the dedicated website http://bush-of-ghosts.com/remix/bush_of_ghosts.htm [bush-of-ghosts.com] ; you can upload your remixes, which are then made available inline with the Creative Commons licenses.

Afro-Celts

The Afro-Celt Sound System - also on Real World records - did something similar several years ago, although the tracks were distributed with a Flash remixer so I'm not sure how open they actually were.

Could this be...

Open Source Music? It might sound like...
"... you know you've gotta SHOCK the monkey, yeah yeah, shock the monkey, shock shock shock..."
"This song is distributed under the mGPL, and may be freely redistributed subject to the following conditions..."
(Or would it be more like a BSD-ish license?)
;-)
hallux-s

Leave it!

In my day, they mixed the music right the *FIRST TIME* without having to constantly remix it...

Look, I'm a big Genesis and Peter Gabriel fan, and I raise my hat to him for doing the "Open Source thing" with his music.

But I *REALLY AM* getting sick and tired of these idiots who constantly think they can do a better job than the original artist in making his/her/their songs sound better - either through making some plasticized dance-beat cover version or just cutting the original into bits and having some rap bloke talk all over it.

And don't even talk to me about "tribute bands" - if they're clever enough to copy the original artist that well, they're clever enough to write their own original music and work their way up from playing pubs and clubs - just like The Rolling Stones and The Beatles had to do.

Please, go and mess about with your modern music as much as you like and do it with my blessing. But with regard to the stuff I've been listening to now for anything up to 35 years, *LEAVE IT ALONE*!!! It didn't need some kid calling himself a "DJ" messing about with it then so it doesn't need it now.

Better business sense than you might think

I know it's been said before, but Gabriel and other artists who opt to do this are smarter than it might initially look.

As in the terminology of the open source software market, in this context Gabriel's music constitutes what they call a "loss leader."

He puts his entire discography online, free for the taking. He doesn't make a cracker from that, and presumably he wouldn't plan to. He also lets people do the mashy thing as Bowie did. This generates enormous positive PR for him that he supposedly "gets the open source revolution." Then after a while, he either decides he's got bored sitting at home, or he wants to make some additional revenue...so he decides he wants to do a comeback series of concerts. He'd use his site with the free music as a point of sale for the concert tickets. Let's also say hypothetically that in the meanwhile, a particular one of the mashies of his music has become unusually popular. So he arranges for the author of this particular mashy to play at the concerts with him as a supporting act...Mashy Kid either does his thing solo, or better yet, he and Gabriel do a duet of sorts. Gabriel could also do something like a "very limited" run of autographed photos or CDs to sell at the concerts...which given the infinitely replicable nature of the music files, would hold particular appeal as unique objects.

Mashy Kid gets professionally discovered, so he's very happy...Gabriel's positive public image would be through the roof by this point...and he could also more or less surf home after the concerts on the tidal wave of cash that would have been forthcoming. (Assuming he still has a large fanbase of course, which I'm assuming he does...not to mention the additional demand that would have been raised by the chance of seeing Mashy Kid play)

This of course is only one of an infinite number of possible scenarios by which he could make a fortune with this.

So...yep, it's a crazy move, all right. Crazy like a fox. ;-)

Holy crap, this rules.

Holy crap. All I have to say is: fuck yes.

It's all about "a nice cup of tea"

At the grand old age of 44, I believe that I have finally discovered what is missing from the lives of the 16-25 year old crowd...

...they don't have "a nice cup of tea" anywhere near as frequently as they should.

For example:

1. Interactivity - Why does those youngsters need a plethora of widesceen/surround sound/commentary/frappuchino options on every bloody DVD that comes out? By the time you've worked out what bleeding settings you want, you've changed your mind about what you wanted to watch in the first place! BUT, make a nice hot strong cup of tea first, sit down in your favourite chair, take a sip of your tea and it *DOESN'T MATTER* what sound/screen/moccachino options are set, you WILL just relax and enjoy your movie whatever way the screen or sound is!

2. Remixing - What's this constant need to "fiddle about" with music with that lot? Why have they got to take "this bit from that track, that bit from this track" and then, *WHEN THEY'VE FINISHED* fiddling with it, they get some big black American bloke to do so much talking over it that you can't hear it anyway! BUT, if they just had a sip of a nice strong hot cup of tea first, they'd put all the CDs they want to listen to in a little pile next to their comfy chair and just *PLAY EACH ONE IN ORDER* while listening intently in a relaxed mood.

3. Coffee - What's all this business about "iced mocha laccamaccachino with marshmallows and little umbrella in the top" in, for example, Starbucks? You get a coffee because you are thirsty, you stand in a queue for 30 minutes and when you finally get to the end of the queue, you order something that takes a further two days to manufacture from start to finish... and then you wonder why you're miserable??? How simple is a nice hot cup of tea to make - teabag, hot water and milk and sugar if you want it, what's the big deal? And you can put it in a thermos flask and carry it about with you so you can have a nice, hot cup of tea whenever you want one.

4. Fashion - What's all this business about wearing jeans where the gusset is dangling down round by your knees? If we'd have worn those in my day, friends would have laughed at you for looking like you'd dropped a "brown trout" or two in the back of your Levi's! And how do you run??? Is this planet eventually going to be entirely inhabited by people in "sensible, cheap, elasticated waist jeans" because all the fashionable ones weren't able to run away quick enough from falling buildings, crashing airliners and raging infernos? BUT, before making those clothing choices, have a nice, hot, strong cup of tea and the caffeine entering your system combined with the warmth from the hot liquid, and "terminal clothing" will be a thing of the past!

Tea, nice and hot... that's the answer.

Re:It's all about "a nice cup of tea"

I get that "tea" is your code for marijuana, but what are "milk" and "sugar" supposed to be?

Jim's Big Ego

Did you know that Jim's Big Ego [bigego.com] did that ages ago with their song Mix Tape [creativecommons.org]?

Remixomatosis, or been there done that

Marillion did the same thing to a whole album (Anoraknophobia) as a competition [marillion.com] a few years back and released the best remixes as the CD Remixomatosis [marillion.com] (and the nearly-best-remixes as a "free" fan club CD). Winners also got cash prices, and many of the remixes sound really, really excellent.

This actually is not that new...

...as Marillion had a successful project like this a few years ago which given the scope was much more ambitious: http://www.marillion.com/remix/index.htm [marillion.com]

And there is always Plunderphonics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plunderphonics [wikipedia.org] which does not exactly apply here, but does bear some mention in terms of principle motivations.

It's been done already

Marillion allowed people to download (for a small fee, 'cause it was an expensive proposition) the separate tracks (and alternates), including unprocessed vocals, for their Anaraknophobia album back in 2000, and took the best remixes from the fans and released them as Remixomatosis [marillion.com] a couple of years later.

some musicians like file trading too.

Other bands have done similar things for a long time. The earliest example I remember is Pitchshifter (pitchshifter.com) putting their samples on CDs and making use of remixes they're sent. They even made their own label so that they could put a free mix CD with their live album, which their previous label wouldn't allow. As someone else has said, true hip-hop has done similar for ages, where it has been tolerated. Some other bands have gone the whole hog by allowing sharing of live bootlegs, or tolerating sharing of new content (some still feeling free to comment on lack of sales at gigs I have been to). One rather big rock/indie group I have worked for even distributed soundboard recordings of their live shows through p2p and forums under pseudonyms made up at a rehearsal. We were a bit wasted, and later watch a pirate copy of Scream 3 months before it released where we were.

What NIN, Peter Gabriel, and others have done by allowing users to mix their stuff is nothing new but does allow for people to see use of the technology for promotion - although how this relates to sales and actually making any stand against RIAA tactics and to try to work with the filesharing public is beyond me, and is probably short lived.

148.6 BPM?!?!

Am I the only one who thinks that this is a completely unreasonable BPM to work with? 148.5 I could understand. Ah well... perhaps I can hack up a remix in spite of that.

Quite handy for the educators

This is very cool.

I love giving these sorts of things to my digital media classes to play with when they're learning about digital audio.

This time Peter Gabriel has gone too far

I told you!!!!!

Peter Gabriel's version sucks anyway

The cover by Ozzie and Coal Chamber was vastly superior.

open source concepts in music business

Releasing individual tracks of a song is similar to releasing the source code of a program (from a musician's point of view). I wish more people would do that. I'd love to buy a DVD containing all the studio tracks of recordings of Bjoerk songs, for example, and remove the "singing", keeping the songs as instrumentals. But I don't have the freedom to do this, so I my only option is to not listen to it at all because I can't stand Bjoerk stuff the way it's been released :(

EVE cd-rom

Peter Gabriel is a real pioneer in thinking about how music, technology and communities come together. And this action is just the latest step in a long road. He realized early on the power that labels had over his music, so in the '80s and early 90's he bought back the rights to his catalog from the labels that had originally published it. (It is standard practice in contracts for the musician to sign over copyright to their songs to the label). Once those rights were secured he began to explore new ways of using his music. Two very early efforts were the Xplora and EVE cd-roms (see the site here [realworldmultimedia.com].
In the summer of 1994 I was hired by the Starwave Corporation in Seattle to be part of a small team developing EVE. The idea was pretty interesting -- pair the work of different contemporary visual artists up with songs from Gabriel, treating each as raw material, then create a framework in which people can explore, share and remix that material to create an integrated audio/video hybrid that is greater than the sum of its parts. I had just finished a graduate art program [rpi.edu] that had similar ideas, so I felt right at home.
We used the work of artists Helen Chadwick , Yayoi Kusama , Cathy de Monchaux , and Nils-Udo -- using high rez scans of their work as starting points. They were paired up with Gabriel's songs 'Come Talk To Me' , 'Shaking The Tree' , and 'In Your Eyes'. We had the equivalent of the sample packs that he has made available on-line for Shock the Monkey. These were professionally produced loops from the multi-track masters. Gabriel's recording process usually involves dozens and dozens of tracks, so these samples weren't mix-downs, but elements from a single track.
We created something called the Interactive Musical Xperience to bring these elements together. It was a kind of audio/video sampler that you could play with your keyboard, triggering sound and animation loops against a rendered landscape background. The software quantized everything so you would always be in time and you could work improvisationally or with a simple graphical timeline. The team developing it had a diverse background in software development, fine art and filmmaking. My job eventually became to create functional mockups of the interaction using Director 4....! The production team eventually relocated to the Real World studios in Box, UK which was an incredibly intense creative environment -- musicians, engineers, filmmakers, photographers, designers all working together in a bucolic 'campus' made from an old mill complex.
Although I eventually left Real World and Starwave to pursue my own artwork, it was a really great experience. The fact that the rest of the world has started to catch up to the ideas Peter Gabriel has been thinking about since the early 90's only reaffirms how resonant those ideas continue to be.

Open-sourcing end-of-lifed abandonware

This is similar to what some companies have done with software that's reached its commercial end of life - they open-sourced it. This gets them out of the costs of stocking, distributing, and maintaining the product, while making them look good.

Back when you had to renew copyrights, that routinely happened to movies and music; the Internet Archive has an archive of about a hundred feature films and serials whose copyright wasn't renewed. Since the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, we don't have that happening in the US any more. But distributors still do have some costs associated with keeping content in the catalog.

So now we're seeing a new way for content owners to get some last publicity benefit out of music that's reached its end of life. We might see more of this from the rap/hip hop business, where careers tend to be short and few artists have long-term hits.

Duncan Sheik just did this too on White Limousine

...though you had to purchase the album to get the DVD that contains the discrete tracks.

See http://www.limoremix.com/ [limoremix.com] to listen to what others have remixed and posted.

FWIW, White Limousine is IMO his best work since "Barely Breathing" and his second album as well.

Duncan and Peter have it right...forget record sales...when you've got fan mindshare, the money will inevitably come.

Old News - June 2006!

PG's 'Shock the Monkey' remix competition was started in June 2006. The competition is over now.

OK, here's a question

This is something to make you think. I am actually considering doing this. Some people might not think it was very funny.

Around in the 80's there was a song released by Neil Diamond called "Heartlight". It was an ET-theme "turn on your heart light..." I recently moved into a new house where they assumed you would be replacing all of the overhead lights with ceiling fans, so they put in really ugly lights that were very, very cheap. These lights are very breast-shaped and everyone seeing them calls them "nipple lights" or "tit lights".

So, how about if I make a nice music video of the lights being turned on and off with Neil Diamond's music in the background... except the word "heart" is replaced by a very different voice saying "tit"?

Would this be fair use? Would Neil Diamond (or his agents, distribution company, etc.) be within reason for suing should I post this video on the Internet for all to download? Clearly, this oversteps the line of simply a parody - it is using his original material in a way that he did not intend in a way that devalues the original material.

Just think about "Turn on your ... TIT ... light..." with a video of a ceiling light being turned on. Some people might think this was pretty funny. Might be pretty popular on YouTube.

Because we can do this now, easily, should we be able to? What about a re-rub of the movie Mary Poppins with Mary's voice replaced by a trash-talkin' African American girl where about every fifth word was "muthr-fuckin"? Do you think Disney would find this flattering?

How about taking a Boston Pops recording and adding some off-key "mistakes" just to make it more "accessible"? All in good fun, I assure you.

Kidnappers?

Some in the music business would call this the commercial equivalent of hiring kidnappers to babysit.

Based on the age of Peter Gabriel's music and the maturity of the people who would remix it, I'd call it the commercial equivalent of "Trusting your 35-year old child to babysit his own ass, even if he wants to have some friends over for beer."

Re:Put your publishing where your mouth is...

That's a great song, but potentially more difficult to remix into something catchy that Shock the Monkey. Not that I was ever really into that song. I have found that a lot of his best stuff was done with African musicians and that most people never hear any of it.

Re:suck 2.0

and that my friend, is the beauty of innovation. if people willingly choose to give him money when he is giving his stuff away for free, than he's doing what we all try to achieve. profit. If thats not what "earning" your money is about, then I'm not sure I know what is.

Re:I was actually thinking about this a while back

O/T: I still do not understand the obsession people have with anime. What do the Japanese know about making shitty cartoons that we don't?

Oh, I agree. We know about as more (I'd say even more) about making shitty cartoons than the japanese.

It's in the area of good ones we need catching up.

(BTW, the answer here begins in the attitude. Here, it's cartoons, as in primarily for kids, there it is an accepted medium for all kinds of entertainment.)

Re:suck 2.0

my good sir you could not begin to appriciate good music if you heard it.
i will send you a copy of Paris Hilton's greatest hits

Re:News for Nerds

dude, Peter Gabriel performs with Zorb balls and Segways on stage.
He's as much a nerd as the rest of us!

Some may not like his music, but he's a shrewd musician and his performances are always spectacular.

The best idea I've ever seen in the music business as well, was that he released the audio from the concert on CD. So for each concert, in each major city, there's a CD recording the night. It's not edited clips or 'the best bits' - it's local hecklers and the bits where he gets his tongue tied doing a link to his next song recorded directly from the mixing desk - it helps you recall the night you experienced in your local arena/city hall, not the night someone else experienced in the Texas Dome, or whatever.

Re:suck 2.0

We recently read about something quite similar here in Sweden. An artist had found out that someone had downloaded a bootleg copy of a song he mostly performed live, remixed it and released it onto the internet crowds. When said artist found the song, he released it as his own on his new album. This was an excellent way to show how piracy _really_ works. It's not destructive. It's not anti-artistic. It won't hurt anyone if you don't take it so bloody damn serious!

Re:I was actually thinking about this a while back

Anime is for people who like lots of cartoons of Cthuloid tentacles raping schoolgirls. That's it.

Re:Put your publishing where your mouth is...

Hmmmmm... I'm not sure if 'Troll' is the appropriate moderation, but I guess the moderator was trying to find something fairly close to "-1 Asshole".

-chris

Re:Put your publishing where your mouth is...

"Don't dump your crap into the marketplace and expect the best talent to do your bidding for free."

Because a song that charts at #29 is "crap?" I mean, it ain't like he's releasing some no-name b-side that nobody's heard of.

Re:Put your publishing where your mouth is...

release "In Your Eyes" and then... Don't dump your crap into the marketplace

I would suggest that "In Your Eyes" is not one of Gabriel's stronger songs, unless maybe you're an angsty teenage girl.

Re:I was actually thinking about this a while back

Don't do it. I wondered what the fuss was about anime and now I've
got gigabytes of the stuff. It's kind of addicted.

Some of the stories have surprising depth and inventiveness.

I'd say many of the american movie studios could learn a thing
or two about depth of story and character development from the
anime writers.

Oh yeah, and there's tentacles if you want them but it's not true
to say that every anime production has tentacles.

Although, it would be rather amusing if some sweet innocent love
story all of a sudden turned into a tentacle battle.

Re:Put your publishing where your mouth is...

Oh, yeah. We really need to hear more versions of that. No thanks. I used to like that song before I heard it 10,000 times including remixes and covers.