Sidetrack

Even though I'll be spending the majority of this week locked in my basement while I finish up some Fringe work, I'm still making time for Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

www.drhorrible.com/

If this isn't one of the best things of 2008, I'll be rather surprised.

Just sayin'.

HafenGeist

Violent murder on holy ground gives rise to a possessing spirit of evil. When a brother and sister are trapped in the ruins, can they break the curse? Do they want to?

My band Invocatio is performing original music for HafenGeist, a gothic ballet based on Hansel & Gretel, at the Minnesota Fringe Festival. It'd be great to see you there!

The official Minnesota Fringe page for our show is here: www.fringefestival.org/2008/show/

If you'd like to follow what we're doing a bit more closely, we have a Tribe here: tribes.tribe.net/invocatio

And now, back to my previously scheduled madness, already in progress.

So tell me...

A call out to the dancers that will be performing at or attending Djinn Hardcore next week...

It'd be great to hear your feedback on the song Invocatio will be playing toward the end of the show. Interesting? Something you could dance to? Decent length?

One of my goals for the group is to keep providing music (albeit nontraditional music) to the dance community, which was one of the reasons I enjoyed playing with Felahi so much. Just checking in to see if we're on the right track.

For anyone wondering what Djinn Hardcore is, details are here: www.mischievousdjinn.com/

Thanks!

Invocatio

I've set up a tribe for my new musical group, Invocatio: tribes.tribe.net/invocatio

It's a bit empty at the moment, so feel free to drop in and liven things up.

Why the Recording Industry is Doomed

About a month ago, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced the release of the 2006 Year End Shipments report, which incidentally includes about 10 years of history. I took a look at the numbers and made a couple of graphs, which served to highlight some of the trends people have been watching for the last few years.

The short summary: It's a good time to be a musician if you want a lot of people to be able to hear your music. It's a bad time to be a recording industry if you're trying to make money by selling music. If you're a musician trying to make money by selling music... well, that's a bit more complex.

To get an idea of how the last ten years have been, here are a couple of graphs based on the RIAA sales data. Sales are broken down into five categories:

* Singles - Digital: The now-ubiquitous MP3/iTunes download of one song.
* Albums - Digital: Download of an entire album.
* Singles - Physical: This covers mini-CD singles, vinyl 45s, and other variations on the theme.
* Albums - CD: The professional pressed CD that replaced tapes and vinyl.
* Albums - Other: Tapes, vinyl, 8-tracks, and other relics.

The RIAA numbers reflect about 90% of the total (legal) market.

UNITS: It was the best of times...

First, a look at how many items were sold, and a few observations based on the graph.

undercrypt.com/nightshade/riaaunits.png

1. Vinyl is dead.

In case there was any doubt, there's the confirmation. Tapes too. Sorry.

2. 1999 to 2003.

In 1999, total unit sales were 1,160.6 million. In 2003, total unit sales were 798.4 million. That's a 31% drop. Based on casual observation, I don't think people were listening to less music, and I don't think less music was being produced and sold. I suspect that the great majority of that 31% drop is due to piracy; over the course of those four years, the ability to rip and burn CDs (combined with peer-to-peer file sharing) went from an obscure geek activity to a normal mainstream practice. That part of the graph created the Digital Rights Management scene as we know it today. It's easy to imagine that in 2003, people in the recording industry were looking at that graph and saying, "We're going to be out of business in ten years if we don't do something real soon."

3. 2004, the Year of the Lie.

"Look, digital singles increase CD sales. It's effective promotion! We're saved! Open the floodgates!"

4. The Rise of Digital Singles.

The number of one-song digital download purchases went from zero (reported) in 2003 to 580.6 million in 2006. Digital singles will most likely surpass CDs in unit sales for 2007. This is what makes life good if you're a musician primarily trying to get your music into more peoples' ears. Thanks to digital singles, total sales units (physical and digital combined) are the highest they've been in the past 10 years.

What happened to make 2004 so significant? Digital download providers had been available for years, but it wasn't until October 2003 that iTunes was available for Windows.

Put those two things together -- digital single sales greater than CD sales in 2007, and nearly all of those sales happening in a Windows environment -- and you reach the interesting observation that over half of the recording industry's items selling in 2007 are just files in a Windows OS. The recording industry's ethics-blurring DRM strategies and Microsoft's byzantine Protected Media Path in Vista suddenly have a context in which they seem, if not completely sensible, somewhat understandable.

Still, it appears that people are more than willing to buy music in the format they prefer when it's made easily available. Total unit sales have been growing very well for three years now, reaching a new ten-year high in 2006. What's the problem?

DOLLARS: ...it was the worst of times.

The problem (for the recording industry, at least) is that people are buying a few 99 cent songs instead of a $14.90 CD (2006 average prices).

undercrypt.com/nightshade...dollars.png

1. Why buy the cow?

Digital single sales have taken off dramatically, but digital albums are comparatively negligible in sales and growth while CD sales steadily drop. With every song on an album readily available for individual purchase -- a dramatic change from the previous offering of just the "hit singles" -- a few good songs no longer justify the purchase of an entire album, regardless of format.

There are other justifications for album purchases, certainly; many artists produce strong albums that are more than a collection of good songs, for example, and some albums (particularly in classical music) don't break down into songs at all. For the most part, though, it seems that people really were buying the album for just a few of the tracks... and now they don't need to.

2. Why *sell* the cow?

Right about now, artists and industry professionals should probably be asking themselves if producing, packaging, and promoting music in terms of albums is a smart choice going forward, given that the audience is increasingly purchasing music in terms other than albums. Should there be a much stronger focus on a different level, such as the artist level or the song level? Are albums still cost-effective?

The album, we're being reminded, is an artificial construct originating in the material distribution of music in the 20th century. Over time, it has become an accepted and expected form of popular music, not unlike the classical forms of symphony and sonata, with certain rules to be followed. Over time, other forms will develop as the presentation and distribution of music changes. The album, like the symphony and the sonata, will continue to exist, but something else may become the accepted and expected form of popular music.

3. What did that cow ever do for me, anyway?

Traditionally, the album's advantage lies in economies of scale: it's cheaper to press one long CD than a dozen short CDs, one album is cheaper to promote than a dozen songs, an album takes up less space in a truck or on a shelf than a dozen singles. When distribution and delivery occur in the digital realm, however, much of that advantage goes away - in particular, advantage important to the consumer.

It could be argued that currently, from the consumer's point of view, the CD album's biggest advantage over the digital song collection is twofold. First, uncompressed 16-bit sound has the potential to provide better sound quality than compressed sound, which is what's typically offered for download. Second, the CD is more portable (playable on a greater number of machines) since there are more CD players and the discs may be played freely on any of them.

These advantages will not last. The first advantage may be overcome with lossless compression schemes, the ability to provide downloads with higher bit-rate sound than CDs, and other technical advances; we also know how well the "better sound quality" argument worked for vinyl. The second advantage is reduced by increasing the number of players for downloaded media (by simply creating more machines or by making it easier to transfer the media between players) or decreasing the portability of CDs (by having fewer CD players available or by increasing DRM on playing CDs). In the not-too-distant future, the advantages of the CD -- and with it the advantages of the album -- will be minimal.

SUMMARY: Why is the Recording Industry doomed?

Taking all of these changes into consideration, it seems likely that album sales, physical or digital, will continue to decrease steadily, taking total dollar sales down with it: in 2003, albums were 98% of unit sales and 99% of dollar sales; in 2006, albums were only 52% of unit sales but still 94% of dollar sales.

The Recording Industry is doomed because it is primarily in the business of selling albums. It's not a recording industry, it's an album industry.

What's an artist to do?

Take advantage of this period of change to redefine the form of popular music. Experiment with digital media that's free of the limitations required by compact discs. Don't rely on album sales for your income. Most importantly, keep writing great music, because people want more of it than ever and they're going through great pains trying to get it.

The Fog of 2007

There are wonderful opportunities for some fun performances in some great venues coming up this year. Sadly, I don't know much about them yet. Let's call it "the planning stage."

For example, it's extremely likely that I'll be playing a piece or two for the Guild of Oriental Dance's Annual Guild Show... one of the days, or perhaps another, probably.

For something a little more conservative, I'll be playing the first of Shostakovich's Three Fantastic Dances at a recital in April. Sometime. Or will it be May?

New atmospheric trance-dance music in June? Could happen. Depends.

It's quite possible that I'll be presenting a song or two for the first Djinn Hardcore in July with persons yet to be identified.

You might see me on Mid-East Mirage weekend at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival this September. Or you might not.

Will I be playing anywhere for Halloween? Maybe.

Oh, and there's this great thing happening in November that's going to be amazing. Sworn to secrecy, sorry.

So at this point, I don't invite anyone to catch one of my performances in 2007. I dare them.

The New Culture

We've been an oral culture for the bulk of our history ("we" being the humans). Oral transmission of myth, story, culture, knowledge, science, etc., faces a bandwidth problem: you can only talk/listen so fast, no matter how skilled the orator, and so in the course of a human lifetime there's a cap on how much information you can receive, process, and transmit. In addition, the time period from being a receiver (youth) to being a good transmitter (elder) might be measured in decades, and some people never become good transmitters for a variety of reasons (die young, poor communicators, didn't learn the material well enough, etc.). You can expand the information available at any given time by having different groups of people focus specifically on different areas (e.g., Men's Mysteries vs. Women's Mysteries), but you need to maintain a minimum number of people in each area to minimize the risks of losing all of the information due to, say, a bad disease outbreak. You can also do some clever things with compressing the information (myths in general, layers of meaning). Nonetheless, there's an upper limit to what can be reliably passed on to the third generation (sans reincarnation), and I suspect it was that limit which kept humanity in roughly the same place for ~70,000+ years.

Enter the written record: symbolic art, hieroglyphs, alphabets. Literal (in the literal sense) transmission of information has a much, much higher bandwidth cap than oral transmission. Reading is faster than listening, a larger audience can be addressed at a single point in time with duplication of the written record, and - a key feature - the information can survive even if its keepers do not, so the minimum number of people needed to maintain a line of knowledge goes down dramatically. Also, in addition to the previous tricks of compressing data (layers of meaning, Hindu deity art comes to mind), new ones present themselves (qabala). Literate culture leads to specialists, a broader and deeper knowledge base, and in general what I'll call "modern" civilization. (The oral culture doesn't go away, though; it remains in some geographic areas, and with certain groups of people, and in certain traditions that can't be passed along entirely with written records, such as music and dance. If you run into something that's keeping track of its lineage, like certain martial arts schools or yoga instructors, you're probably running into oral culture or a remnant thereof.)

Literate culture has served us well for several thousand years, but in the past century or so I believe something interesting has happened: in at least some areas of knowledge, we're once again bumping into the bandwidth cap. I don't know what areas these are, but my first guesses would be pure mathematics, some specialized areas of medicine, quantum physics, or similar fields requiring deep knowledge. Whatever those fields are, the time between receiving all of the information and becoming a good transmitter of the information (even disregarding work done to advance knowledge in the field) is once again measured in decades, and likewise susceptible to the sorts of problems that oral transmission faces (needing a minimum number of people active in the field to keep the knowledge useful and applicable, specialist teachers, etc.). Add to this the observation that what we know, our collective knowledge base, seems to be growing at an exponential rate, and it's conceivable that we're approaching our limit.

It seems to me that, much like the leap from oral to literate, we need a new kind of culture if we're going to advance as humanity. We need faster and more reliable data transmission, better learning, a way to reduce the time it takes from being a receiver to being a transmitter. We need to be able to learn more, personally, than seems possible.

I don't know exactly what this new culture will be, but I have a guess. I'll call it the Intuitive culture. Similar to the ability to glance at a page of symbols for a minute (literate) and somehow know what took someone 10 minutes to say (oral) when they're not even there - which surely baffled people who knew only oral culture - we require an ability to participate with something (complex multimedia symbols? group mind empathy? electromagnetic webs of minds? akashic records? Matrix-style kung-fu skill dumps? demons in triangles? gnosis?) that will make the act of reading similar to attending a lecture - a very useful way to learn some things, but most of the time not very practical or efficient since you've got a better option.

This new Intuitive culture will transform human relationships (much as literature did) and radically reduce the time it takes to solve certain types of problems (much as written math did). It will provide solutions long thought impossible and reveal problems we don't even know we have. It will change what we call civilization, and its creations will be to our glass-steel cities what the stone cathedral is to a yurt.

The Intuitive culture will also lead to a different kind of knowledge-worker, not quite a generalist who's working with a bit of everything, not quite the deep specialist who's pushing the edge of knowledge, but something connected to both: a sort of multidisciplinary specialist who serves as a line of communication between different specializations and also as a developer in the areas where those specializations overlap, finding practical application in otherwise unexpected places of synergy. More than that, as inconceivable as it may seem right now, we may once again have those rare people whose knowledge spans human knowing.

We've had glimpses of this in the past hundred years, but it will become widespread this century.

Site Launch!

After much futzing about and digging into the esoteric lore of CSS, I've got my newly redesigned web site up. Let me know what you think!

undercrypt.com/

On Spiritual Bondage

Assume for the moment the existence of individualized noncorporeal entities - call them spirits, or demons, or stable patterns in the greater mind, or aeons, or what have you. The essence of the idea is they have identity and volition but no physical form, and they're not just a construct of a person's vivid imagination.

Something that occurred to me is this: It's really, really difficult to have any effect on the material world without a physical body. It may be possible to cause the equivalent of little ripples in a still pond, but anyone with a body is tossing two ton boulders into that same pond. This is why Secret Masters haven't mysteriously morphed the world into a New Shambhalla, why the Eon Jesus needed a necromancer to start the Church of the Paraclete, and why people aren't spontaneously dying of putrified wounds from wandering goetic demons.

For similar reasons, it's also passably difficult to influence people's minds from a noncorporeal state. Again, you can get some subtle effects and generally prod people in certain mental directions, but there's a big difference between making someone a bit edgy and "Careful with that Axe, Eugene." Part of this, again, is because physical things affect the mind much more easily than nonphysical things. Disembodied entities may be whispering in your ear, but the guy next to you on the bus is screaming in your face. This is why Knowledge & Coversation of the Holy Guardian Angel is a lot of hard work, Abramelin takes six months, and people everywhere aren't spontaneously enlightened every other day.

Thus we find magic, religion, meditation, mysticism, the hundred paths that attempt to either (yin) minimize the influence of the physical so the subtle messages can come through more clearly, or (yang) shape the physical/mental environment to better reinforce the messenger and/or the messages that it transmits. Minimize the noise, boost the signal. Historically, both of these approaches achieve some measure of success, particularly when used conjunctively.

A question arises, though: Why do we bother? If these disembodied entities have little to no power in shaping the world directly, and can only strongly influence those people who make a special effort to reach them, they make poor executors of our will.

We, however, make excellent executors of their will.

It would seem then that the most likely, if not the only likely, outcome of what I'll call "trafficking with the spirit world" is physical, mental, and/or spiritual change in the corporeal person such that they become more aligned with the noncorporeal entity - in effect, they become an agent of that entity's will to a greater or lesser degree. An avatar, if you think of it in the positive sense; a slave, in the negative sense; an agent in a more neutral sense.

Historically, this seems to be precisely what happens. Crowley establishes contact with Aiwass and, despite his initial negative reaction to the material received, effectively becomes the agent of Aiwass and spends the rest of his life promoting that material. Joseph Smith talks to an angel and founds a church. Jules Doinel talks to an aeon and some discarnate bishops and founds a different church. Kenneth Grant... well, read his books. Channelers from Jane Roberts to Elizabeth Claire Prophet, hundreds of contactees with messages from the Space Brothers, those who speak with the tongues of angels and those possessed by demons, the pattern continues - the incarnate being becomes the mouthpiece and primary actor of the discarnate being; often, it seems, to the exclusion of whatever the incarnate being had been doing previously.

While that sounds rather severe, it's worth pointing out that this may not necessarily be a bad thing. Great works of art have been created through the inspirational touches of muses and angels. Many channeled works contain valuable insights regarding humanity and the world in which we live. It has even been argued that many of the negative traits of "demons" are important human attributes that a controlling hierarchical society has attempted to eliminate as subversive, and that by working with these "demons" we reclaim the full scope of our human heritage.

At the same time, it's worth pointing out that many channeled works appear to be quite the opposite, nothing other than self-serving bids for personal power (on the part of the either the corporeal or the noncorporeal entity) which encourage the complete surrender of individual freedoms.

Identifying where on this wide spectrum any specific entity's purpose or message may fall becomes an important task if we value the liberty of the individual.

If these observations are valid, two important guidelines may be extrapolated if we wish to avoid spiritual bondage:

1. Invoke only that which you wish to become.

2. Banish often.

[Slightly edited from Ex Tenebris.]

Since it would be funny...

Tagged by Deb, who in so doing reminded me that I have a Tribe account and perhaps I should check it occasionally. I'd completely forgotten. So, let's see...

GAME RULES - Once you've been tagged, you have to write a blog with 8 facts/things/habits about yourself, saying who tagged you. In the end you need to choose the 6 people to be tagged and list their names. No tag backs.

1. Par for the course, I'm in my second marriage ("the real one"). I see my ex occasionally at events, and we're politely friendly. My first marriage was more or less a disaster of my own making, and it took me a while to recover from it. Hint: When you're looking for symbolism for your wedding, the Three of Swords isn't a good choice.

2. When it comes to representational systems, I'm a lot more kinesthetic than most people. I think that's one of the reasons I enjoy playing the instruments that I do (piano and hand percussion).

3. My very first instrument was accordian. I was four. It was larger than my torso. That didn't last very long before my parents switched me to piano. I don't know what they were thinking with the whole accordian thing.

4. One of my goals is to be a regularly performing musician. This year has helped a lot with that, so if I keep things up, I'll reach that goal relatively soon. Next is figuring out how to pay some bills doing it.

5. I'm the poster child for all of those religious fundamentalists who say that roleplaying games lead to the Dark Arts. I was just starting high school when I picked up D&D. I didn't think the magic system made a lot of sense, so being the young geek that I was, I went to the local library and looked up "Magic." How the Anoka Public Library acquired any of Aleister Crowley's books I'll never know.

6. Despite all of the "booga booga" symbolism I enjoy, I believe that our purpose here involves joy and beauty (or as another group puts it, Light, Life, Love and Liberty). What I think gets missed sometimes is that there's joy and beauty in the darkness too.

7. Thanks to my day job, I know more about feminine hygiene products than any man rightly should.

8. I hardly ever drink anything alcoholic - a rare glass of wine with a meal, or a taste of something stronger once in a blue moon. No particular reason, I've just tended to avoid it. Of the few things that I've tried, my favorite has been mead (although Celtic Crossing is a strong second).

Tagging... hmm. My friends list is really short, and I think everyone's been tagged. If you're reading this and you haven't been tagged, consider it done.