Greetings from NAMM 2013: diving into a wild world of mixers, faders, and endless customization
Trent Wolbe explores the floors of the music merchant industry’s biggest convention
Every year around this time the National Association of Music Merchants hosts an “industry-only” exposition at the Anaheim Convention Center. While other conferences maintain an air of stuffy exclusivity, NAMM prides itself on bringing its end users into the fold. Sure, there are regional sales representatives all over the place, but they look more like Jimmy Buffett than his square bro Warren. The majority of NAMM’s attendees in 2013 seem to be the humbly iconic riff-raff with “artist” badges: leather-clad axe gods, pimply gauged-lobed So-Cal post-pop-punk skins slayers, and aspiring divas in distressed graphic tees from the Juniors section at Target. I love them all: it’s a portrait of a passionate and un-jaded America that I rarely see anywhere else. Especially not on the internet.
PSY has become the first K-Pop star to top the UK singles chart. Looks like Gangnam Style is here to stay… that indeed escalated quickly!
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Streaming Music May Be Worse for the Environment Than CDs
[Dagfinn] Bach forecasts global data traffic hitting 1 yottabyte by 2027could require more than a fifth of the planet’s 2010 electricity consumption – something which “depends on sprawling server farms and a complex, energy- sapping network infrastructure”.
Read more. [Image: Shutterstock]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_maannyCTwN1qcokc4o1_250.jpg)
Streaming Music May Be Worse for the Environment Than CDs
[Dagfinn] Bach forecasts global data traffic hitting 1 yottabyte by 2027could require more than a fifth of the planet’s 2010 electricity consumption – something which “depends on sprawling server farms and a complex, energy- sapping network infrastructure”.
Read more. [Image: Shutterstock]
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Remember all those awesome cassette tapes you had in the 80s and 90s? Now you can convert them to mp3s you can store on your phone.
Wilson Phillips, I’m talking about you!
According to Nielsen’s latest “Music 360” report, 48% of consumers in the U.S. still see radio as the dominant way to discover new music. For almost two-thirds of U.S. teenagers, however, Google’s YouTube is now a more important source of music than radio (54%), iTunes (53%) and CDs (50%).
Despite the growing popularity of Internet music services among teens, about a third of them still bought a CD in the last year and among all respondents, 55% said physical CDs are still a very or fairly good value.
» via TechCrunch
Winamp’s woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself
Ars Technica on Winamp’s history:
MP3s are so natural to the Internet now that it’s almost hard to imagine a time before high-quality compressed music. But there was such a time—and even after “MP3” entered the mainstream, organizing, ripping, and playing back one’s music collection remained a clunky and frustrating experience.
The SMS to mobile music platform means that fans can text a song’s name with a short code to connect to a mobile music store and tracks can then be downloaded for a price determined by the label or artist that owns it. (via Music2Text Launches Publicly to Spread Music Via SMS)
Make music on your smartphone by ‘DRAWING’ the sound »
A new Android app turns your smartphone into a musical instrument using a virtually limitless array of finger gestures.
(via infoneer-pulse)
Music to Our Ears: How Headphones Changed Our World
If you are reading this on a computer, there is a 50% chance that you are wearing, or are within arm’s reach of, a pair of headphones or earbuds.
To visit a modern office place is to walk into a room with a dozen songs playing simultaneously but to hear none of them. Up to half of workers listen to music on their headphones, and the vast majority thinks it makes us better at our jobs. In survey after survey, we report with confidence that music makes us happier, better at concentrating, and more productive.
Science says we’re full of it. Listening to music hurts our ability to recall other stimuli, and any pop song — loud or soft — reduces overall performance for both extraverts and introverts. A Taiwanese study linked music with lyrics to lower scores on concentration tests for college students, and other research have shown music with words scrambles our brains’ verbal-processing skills. “As silence had the best overall performance it would still be advisable that people work in silence,” one report dryly concluded.
If headphones are so bad for productivity, why do so many people at work have headphones? And why are our bosses letting us drive ourselves to distraction?
