Jill Bolte Taylor: Creativity and the Brain

Artists sometimes lament their inability to isolate the creative impulse.  If only they could captivate the Muse, they reason, they could accomplish so much more.  Maybe if they had a deeper understanding of how they do what they do, they could repeat it more efficiently, more easily.

Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor gained special insight into this when she suffered a massive brain hemorrhage.  Enduring the loss of cognition in her left brain, where practical work is performed, she found herself existing mostly in her right brain, where creativity resides.  There she had a ringside seat to her own stroke.  Banished from her left brain, she found creativity unimpeded by thoughts of physical reality.

Imagine.

Watch Jill.

MySpace Music Goes to the Mat for the Major Labels

More details are emerging on MySpace Music.  They aren’t pretty.

Despite MySpace’s indie bona fides – dude, can we sleep on your floor? – the new MySpace Music is not independent.  It is, rather, a play to limit access to distribution.  Unlike the egalitarian iTunes, MySpace Music excludes independents from the table while granting the major labels an equity stake.

That’s right, ownership.  Although Amit Kapur, COO of MySpace, wouldn’t confirm it yesterday, independent distributor The Orchard let it slip in a blast email this morning.

Sound familiar?  Shut out challengers, marginalize competition, control the flow of music to the consumer. 

A strength of the Internet is, of course, its unfettered access to things large and small.  Apple knows it, Amazon knows it.  Yet the major labels still see independents as barbarians at their gate.  What they don’t seem to understand is that the gate has been open for ten years now, and it’s not in their power to close it.

Whether or not the major labels MySpace Music will operate (and compensate) transparently remains to be seen.  However, by excluding independents from active participation – and controlling their access to the channel — we can only ask:

Haven’t we seen this movie before?

Yep.  And it was crummy the first time.

MySpace Music: Beware?

MySpace Music launched this morning.  It offers some intriguing features, such as allowing artists and labels to upload their entire catalogs for streaming.  And to get paid for it.  Great, right?  Maybe.

As is sometimes the case when the major labels get involved, the MySpace Music model for remuneration lacks detail.  In a nutshell, it is a subscription model paid for by site advertising rather than user fees.  In this arrangement, artists and labels make their tracks available for free streaming.  MySpace Music in turn sells ads on every blank spot they can cover.  Then MySpace Music identifies a percentage of their ad revenue, divvies it up among the participating artists and labels, and pays each of them per an as-yet unspecified metric.

In other words, the retailer — or, in this case, the monolith giving the music away — pays not what they agree to pay, but what they choose to pay.  And what compensation, specifically, will an artist or independent label receive per streaming play?  That part is missing from the media campaign.

In fairness to MySpace Music, this once-relevant grassroots juggernaut now servicing the major labels, maybe they will pay the artists and independent labels, who have no leverage in this arrangement, fairly and generously. 

Then again, nothing is forcing them to.

Note to MySpace Music: artists expect transparency from you.  Announce a range of what you plan to pay per streaming play.  Otherwise, rumor has it that iTunes is readying its own streaming service.  And we already trust them.

New tvfordogs Disc Out Today

Say hello to Starling (free stream, c’mon), the third CD from London-based modern-rock trio tvfordogs.

Devoid of Weezeresque irony, singer-guitarist Neil Luckett mines a classic, idiosyncratic vein, advancing the go-for-broke assault of Heavy Denver (2002) and brass-ring target-shooting of Roller (2005) with a knowing blend of retro styles and rock archetypes. On Starling, classic rock drenched in early-’70s guitar tones meets the immediacy of modern hi-fi.

Restless in its introspection, Starling calls to mind Jimi Hendrix and even Neil Young. The disarming “Frozen Friend,” with its storming guitar intro and plaintive lead vocal, is one of the most infectious, impassioned tracks of this or any year.

We think you’ll love Starling.  That’s why we’re spinning it free.  Have a listen?

http://starlingthealbum.com

Social Media Abhors a Vacuum

Artists, time to get a little sun.  Draw a breath of fresh air.  Wear a jacket and use sunscreen, but open yourself to the elements.  Social networks on the Internet — now a greater draw than porn — are where the audience lives.  These denizens do not wait to be told what to like or who to listen to.  They decide.  And they are accessible.

There is nothing more quaint than magazines or TV.  Somebody crafts a message, packages it, and distributes it — and we simply receive it.  Without responding.  Without engaging the source of the message in a conversation.

It’s so 20th century.

The tools of social media are maybe the most egalitarian ever devised.  They are expanding social circles, challenging perspectives.  They are changing the nature of relationships.

The role of the artist is to communicate, to inform, and sometimes to amuse.  As it turns out, those go better with friends than with strangers.

You care about your friends.  They care about you.  Maybe you have something for them today.

Free Music? Sure.

This fall’s roster is the most appealing we’ve had, and we’re not just saying so because we have a dog in that fight.  It’s as if these artists matured at the exact same moment and did their most compelling work as a collective. 

After watching CD sales die on the vine the last few years, we decided: hey, screw it, let’s just spin the tunes for free.  If people want to buy CDs or downloads, they will.  Otherwise they’ve got a freebie.  In the last few weeks, we’ve launched three streaming sites:

• tvfordogs / Starling (starlingthealbum.com)
• the matthew show / february (februarythealbum.com)
• The Crowd Scene / With Complete Glossary for Squares (forsquares.com)

All three CDs are available by special presale at those URLs, straight from Wampus. Soon they’ll be available in stores, too.

After that, we’ll reload with new discs from Venus Flytrap, Kowtow Popof, and Arms of Kismet.

Wampus News Feed Moves to WordPress

Greetings!  Word(Press) up.  Ditching our contrarian attitude, we admit WordPress is a thousand times better than our simplistic interface.  So here we are.  Fret not, you can still rummage through the archives of the old Wampus News Feed any time you want to kick it old-school.