Jesse Cannon
Review: Falling In Reverse / ‘Fashionably Late’

jadedpunk:

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Falling In Reverse / Fashionably Late / Epitaph Records

How many albums do you estimate you’ve heard in your lifetime? I own something like 1,000-1,200 physical albums. Plus a couple thousand more that I own digitally. Plus all the press copies people have sent me. Plus all the albums I’ve lost, sold, or thrown out over the years. Plus everything I’ve borrowed or heard playing in friends’ cars. I guess we’re talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000+ albums. I only mention this because Falling In Reverse’s Fashionably Late is the worst album I’ve ever heard.

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curtislaraque:

All Access

I just read one of the most tone-deaf critiques coming out of Google I/O so far.

PropertyOfZack posted a response from producer and author Jesse Cannon following the launch of Google Play Music All Access. Beyond being critical, the early review of the service was full of…

First, off I really appreciate the pushback to my opinion’s, it’s very important to get a discourse going about these issues so that everyone can see other perspectives on these subjects. With that said, implying I am tone deaf to what I saw I think is a bit ridiculous. Instead, I would counter by saying it seems you bought the hype of a charismatic presentation. 

Your first point—that isn’t just a name-calling jab—is that because Google+ has 190 million users it isn’t a failure. This is more of Google’s bullshit spin. They essentially rope Gmail users into having to occasionally click on the site and drive up their numbers here’s a real fact— Google+ doesn’t have 1 percent of the time spent on the site that Facebook or Twitter have. Getting people to accidentally click a page or occasionally update their SEO or blog settings isn’t a success, success is getting your service to be a part of people’s lives. Google+ has failed at this. 
As well the characterization that because I didn’t adress the fact that Google will increase their price isn’t “insightful critique” is pretty ridiculous. I discussed what I see as reasons, one may want to use the service. That’s a reason, even if Google will drop it in about 6 weeks. You also argue that this isn’t a move Google isn’t doing just because they can, while pretty much making my argument for me. They want to unite their services but by doing that they’ve made a lackluster product that does nearly nothing new.
It is then argued that Google’s All Access “touches on all the areas of the digital music experience we care about: radio, playlists, recommendation, cloud streaming, cloud storage, local storage, and purchasing (though purchases do take you to the Play Store), in a way that no existing service does currently. ”
 
Spotify, MOG and Rdio all do all of these services except one which is cloud storage. Which you are correct, I missed that part of the story. But to me that seems to be a minimal feature. But the rest of those services can be done on most of the other services (another exception is Spotify doesn’t allow purchases, but Rdio does), but to characterize this service as something no other service does is more Google hype. It has tiny, tiny feature tweaks, I feel barely help it be anything more than a lackluster product, especially in comparison to Spotify and all the Apps they have that can do far better and more interesting recommendations (see thisismyjam or BandsInTown)
 
You say:
“The radio feature was announced as “radio without rules,” a concept that is clearly highlighted for its uniqueness among the competition, and relies heavily on Play’s new levels of integration. While it’s very interesting that Google allows you to skip though as many songs as you want, as often as you want, in a radio station, even more intriguing is the customization that’s possible. Services like Spotify and Pandora are somewhat prohibitively skeuomorphic in their user experience design: just like a classic radio, they don’t tell you what’s next, and you can’t change what you’re going to hear, except in the (limited) linear fashion of skipping. With All Access, you can view upcoming songs in a radio station like a playlist, and rearrange or even remove songs from the queue. Definitely a competitive feature, and one that shows a focus on user experience. 
 
More Google Hype! Have you tried this yet? Yes it is great that you can rearrange the order of what plays next but both MOG and Rdio have similar radio functions. I can never, ever defend Spotify’s user experience, but that is precisely why I don’t use it. It’s great that Google will harvest information about your listening needs, but yet again this has been tried by so many other services, I have very little faith that they will crack the code, the only person who has come close to cracking this is Pandora and until you get into the hard work of really distinguishing characteristics of music, I dont think recommendation radio is going to be rewarding for you, even if you can re-order the poor recommendations the service makes. I would love to be wrong about this but years of observing and testing these services ha led me to believe this isn’t the way to go down, just ask the many failures in this environment that haven happened so far. 
 
The rest of your argument centers around faith that Google is good at what they do and being impressed with a charismatic speech and faith in them. I think that is the core difference in how we see this. Not facts, but faith. I have none, you have a lot. None of this is fact. Almost like an Atheist arguing with a Christian. I have zero faith that this service is anything special and will be just like Google’s other music endeavors, nothing that anyone really cares about. If you think a service that does basic functions, lacks an app environment or any of the interaction Daisy seems poised to employ will be the least bit disruptive. But I would love to be wrong, I just don’t see it happening
POZ Special: The Industry With Jesse Cannon - On RIAA Certification Changes

propertyofzack:

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The RIAA announced towards the end of last week that streaming services (i.e., Spotify, Rdio, Pandora) would begin to count towards the certification of gold and platinum records. The topic of the switch has been growing over the past few days among music industry individuals and fans alike, so we thought it’d be great to have Jesse Cannon (Cannon Found Soundation Recording Studiosdo a special Industry feature today on the switch. If you want any more education on the switch or just more commentary on it, make sure to read all up on it below!

Getting a gold or platinum record has long been the way we recognize a tangible achievement in the music business. It’s reserved for only about 20-50 artists in a given year, since selling 500,000 (gold record) or 1,000,000 records isn’t easy to do these days (keep in mind in 2012, The Black Keys were the only band in the “rock” category to score a platinum record). Especially when you can be the number one selling record in a week with a measly 62,000 records. The fact is, in the last few years there have been far less gold and platinum records handed out, especially in comparison to the 90’s and early-00s when they were pretty much party favors for getting on DIAL MTV or TRL. This, celebrated age of success in the music business got so ridiculous that the RIAA had to step up their game and make a Diamond rating for those who crossed the 10,000,000 sales mark and just look at this chart if you want to see how rare those have gotten. Back then, band’s were “going diamond” about as often as a record goes platinum these days and diamond records are now as rare as finding a diamond in an Indiana Jones movie (oh wait, isn’t that the premise of all of them?). 


Because of this slowing down of sales compared to consumption from streams, the RIAA has apparently gotten bored and realized they serve little purpose aside from hunting down teenagers who do illegal downloads and giving away these sales-number-party-favors and decided to change up their certification methods. In an announcement that has shocked just about everyone, they have announced that they will now include streams in their certification. This means YouTube, Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, Slacker and MTV.com streams will all count towards record sales. But how much do they count? For every 100 sales it will count as the equivalent to one download/sale. 

The first alarm this sounds throughout the Internet is a concern about how much this will degrade the system? The most common complaint you hear about counting streams in sales figures is it allows those who make “meme-music” to have huge sales as opposed to artists making more “serious” music (see “Harlem Shake” topping the charts for weeks on end). With this new system Rebecca Black “Friday” would be a gold record on streams alone, without any other sales or streaming factor figured in. Tay Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain” is getting pretty close to Platinum using the same factor. 

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POZ Perspective: Musformation And The DIY Guide To Get More Fans

propertyofzack:

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Jesse Cannon has been a great friend to PropertyOfZack over the years with general guidance and his Industry feature. And that’s why we were stoked to finally see Jesse publish his new book Get More Fans: The DIY Guide To The Music Business. It’s an informative book to all young bands, individuals in the music industry, and anyone interested. To promote the book, we thought it’d be a great idea for editor Erik van Rheenen to do a new Perspective on Get More Fans with Jesse himself included on commentary. Purchase the book here and check out the Perspective below!

Four years ago, in the throes of a hazy hangover on New Year’s Day, Jesse Cannon first found his muse to start Musformation. It was going to be the music industry gospel according to Cannon: a DIY blogosphere handbook for the music business.

Cannon’s mind was jam-packed with theories and ideas, but it wasn’t until he met a band of young pop-punkers who called themselves Man Overboard around the same point when he started blogging. “I knew a lot of it,” Cannon recalls, “But I didn’t ‘know’ know it. I had to prove some things.”

Flash forward to 2013: Man Overboard’s popularity is stratospheric, and Cannon ‘know’ knows a lot of things. His book, “Get More Fans: The DIY Guide to the New Music Business,” co-written with Todd Thomas, tackles more than 600 pages of Cannon’s go-to advice for bands looking to, well, get more fans.

“We actually cut out about a third of the book,” Cannon says, “We wanted to write it so it’s easy to flip through. I won’t cry if you skip a paragraph. It’s the same as when you listen to an album and skip around for the songs you like.”

“Get More Fans” has been a worth in progress for years, but Cannon says the advent of streaming sites really strung the book together in the past year. Cannon’s no stranger to the life of a scribe — he’s cut his teeth writing for zines like Punk Planet — and pulled together three years worth of notes when he started letting people read it.

Cannon didn’t dream up Musformation until New Years Day, 2009, but the problems the scene’s battled long outlast his site. “I used to work at Go-Kart Records,” Cannon reminisces, “And it really sucked because there was an era of bands who were pretty boys who looked good. I grew up on a really genuine pop–punk scene — I worked with bands that worked hard, like Race the Sun and Northstar, who just couldn’t get ahead.”

“Get More Fans” adapted with the digital age, and some of Cannon’s sagest advice — releasing music for free and making sure your band’s music is available on streaming sites — comes from his spin on the strange tango the Internet and music industry dance. 

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Jesse Cannon Publishes New Book ‘Get More Fans: The DIY Guide To The Music Business’

propertyofzack:

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Jesse Cannon, who you may know from his PropertyOfZack Industry feature, has published a brand new book titled Get More Fans: The DIY Guide To The Music Business. Jesse has been working on the book for years, and we’re incredibly excited to see it finally hit the shelves, both digitally and physically. Purchase the book here and check out a press release and details on the book below.

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Colleen Green totally bad ass

Colleen Green totally bad ass

Gah! Copy #1! One of the happiest moments of my life.  (at Cannon Found Soundation Recording Studios)

Gah! Copy #1! One of the happiest moments of my life. (at Cannon Found Soundation Recording Studios)

PropertyOfZack Special : : The Industry With Jesse Cannon

propertyofzack:

Jesse Cannon has been a great friend to PropertyOfZack for years now and has produced bands like Man Overboard, Transit, and Lifetime out of his Cannon Found Soundation. Jesse also has a great website called Musformation, which fueled the fire to reboot his Contributor Blog feature into a special series of blogs called The Industry With Jesse Cannon. In the bi-weekly column, Jesse will talk about select stories that have been floating around the music industry for the past few weeks. We cover music news every day on the site, but it’s important to us to highlight some of the happenings in the industry as well, and we’re stoked to have Jesse put his own spin on it. Check out the first feature below and be sure to come back every two weeks for more!

Kickstarter now funds more projects than the National Endowment of the Arts. A huge turning point for people and an immense statement on the growing power of crowdfunding. This is also a relief for those of us who worried our tax dollars only go to supporting Opera instead of bribing bands into reunion shows, maybe the NEA will take the hint and start funding all those experimental iPhone cases all over Kickstarter. 

Adele is the first artist to go double platinum on iTunes. Considering this is the only record that has shown major record sales in years, it isn’t a shock. What is shocking is I thought the only place people bought her music was online at Starbucks?

iTunes has announced a new section entitled Mastered for iTunes. As you probably guessed, this is another major label scam to try to get people to buy their favorite albums again and pretend they can hear a difference in them as they listen out of laptop speakers. 

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing websites in the history of the Internet. If you have not come across it yet, it is basically a place where you can make “pinboards” of everything you are interested in. This could be YouTubes of your favorite songs or a bunch of pictures of band T-Shirts you like. Bands can also use it to bond with their fans.

Shockingly, major labels are still trying to screw artists out of as much money as possible. EMI records has been pushing a new work for hire law that will lock its artists into an even more gruesome royalty and payment plan. A great move by fat cats who still don’t get that they need to rehabilitate their image if they want people to pay for music ever again. 

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My favorite crazed conspiracy theorist neighbor (Taken with instagram)

My favorite crazed conspiracy theorist neighbor (Taken with instagram)