By now I would assume that most of you have discovered Pandora Internet Radio. What makes Pandora so cool is that you “program” your own radio stations by providing an artist or even a song and Pandora plays that artist and then will play selections that you should enjoy based on that artist. You can continue to “fine tune” your radio station by commenting on songs with a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down”, and Pandora makes the adjustments in continued programming to play more of what you will like (and less of what you don’t like). From an indie artist viewpoint, this becomes very exciting if you can get your songs in rotation on Pandora and you can introduce a new audience to your material. Their submission instructions are sort of hidden in the FAQ section, so click here on the Pandora Submission Instructions.

The Music Genome Project®

Pandora calls this ability the Music Genome Project, and here is how they describe it, “On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever. Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it’s about what each individual song sounds like.”

Pandora Podcasts Provide Info To Energize Your Song

So that was all preamble to sharing the discovery of a Pandora resource page of fantastic podcasts. Pandora Presents is the title of this page of podcasts and it is aimed at listeners who might want to learn a little bit more about the criteria for their Music Genome Project of song analysis. The podcast presentations are straightforward and easy to understand, contain a bit of music theory, and tons of musical examples to illustrate the points being made.

I found the podcast on vocal harmonies very interesting and immediately started reworking some of my harmonies based on their examples. Although in some ways this is a back to basics series of programs, I found that the information being shared and the way it was being shared was really inspiring for the composition and song-writing process. Not only do I highly recommend these podcasts, but if you are ever stuck for composition ideas or looking for ways to energize a song, spend a little time on this page. Good stuff.

READ RELATED ARTICLES: Musician’s Resources

Get Your NAMBA GEAR

Share This

When can you actually claim ownership of your new song? The legal definition is that you own the song  the moment that you have finished writing the lyrics and playing the final note. The real question is, when can you prove ownership? Not to be paranoid, but with digital distribution to the masses available for independent artists, independent films and TV looking for a low cost alternatives to the big budget film score, it wouldn’t be difficult for the unscrupulous to take advantage of the independent artist and steal their work, or even for another artist to incorporate your work within their song. Of course this plagiarism comes to the surface once the movie becomes a hit or the plagiarised song makes a dent on the charts. You look up one day and say, “Wait a minute, that sounds like my song.”

Jackson Browne tells a great story about licensing “These Days” to Nico from Velvet Underground that was being produced by Andy Warhol, and even playing electric guitar on the new version of the song. Many years go by, Jackson has pretty much forgotten this as nothing ever came of it,  and as he is sitting in a movie theater about to watch a new film, a guitar intro begins and Jackson thought, “Man, I used to play guitar just like that.” Sure enough, it is the remake of “These Days” with Jackson on electric guitar.

In this case, everything was legal and above board. Only Jackson’s memory seemed faulty. But as you can see, it would be easy enough for a song to be appropriated, especially from an independent artist, and show up years later. Fortunately, we have ways to protect your ownership claim which are relatively inexpensive and will give you some proof and confidence if you ever get into a dispute over the ownership of a song. In the U.S. it’s called getting a Certificate of Registration with the United States Copyright Office.

There are several types of works that can be registered; you will want to register a Sound Recording using Form SR. You only need Form CON if you don’t have enough room on Form SR to complete the registration, otherwise just ignore it. Fill out this form online and print it out (print two copies so that you can have one for yourself). I will usually wait until I have instrumentation and arrangement completed on my song and send in a rough mix to the Copyright Office, however you could also either send a simple demo or a final mix & mastered version. The more complete the song is, the stronger your claim for arrangement (in addition to sound recording, words, & music). Now you are ready to send off Form SR and an audio CD or cassette tape copy of the song, right? Not so fast monkey boy, here is where it gets interesting.

Tip #1 - Register Each Song Separately, Not As A Collection

There is a $45 registration fee per submission and it is allowable that you can submit a ton of songs under one fee, which is of course what I was going to do before I spoke with my friend and patent/copyright attorney, Tom Turner. Tom advised me that it is easier to prove a claim for a single song submission than for a collection of songs of which any one song is simply part of the collection. If a single song is submitted for registration you hold a much stronger claim of ownership. I was going to do the collection registration even with Tom’s advice to the contrary, and when I told him Tom said that he would pay the $45 per song if I didn’t have the money, and that’s how important it is to register them separately. No, I didn’t make Tom pay… No, I won’t give you Tom’s phone number so that you can ask him to pay for your songs…

(more…)

Share This

Tanacun, The Crocodile Man

My son, Jacob, recently turned me on to a couple of amazing guitarists from the region of Ixtapa, Mexico, who go by Rodrigo y Gabriela. As I was totally blown away by their music, they will be happy to know that I have personally purchased at least ten of their CDs as gifts for friends.

Evidently in the early 90’s, Rodrigo and Gabriela played in a heavy metal band in Mexico City and later abandoned the band concept to just work with two acoustic guitars. They even do awesome covers of Zepplin’s Stairway to Heaven and Metallica’s Orion on this recording.

One of the first things that I noticed when I examined their CD is that their individual song album notes look like a blog for each song. As a result, you really start to get a sense of them as human beings. The human awareness and impact that each of us can raise in others, even through something as simple as communicating our thoughts and comments on our albums or our web pages, is phenomenal. The first song off of their self-titled album is Tanacun. So, I would just like to present you with their words, from their album notes of Tanacun.

Tanacun

In the South Pacific of Mexico, there is a town called Ixtapa, it’s in Zihuatanejo. This place had diverse and vast numbers of wild-life species in the early ’80s. Construction companies, along with the governnment of the State of Guerrero, contributed to destroy their natural habitat here. Like in many other parts of the country, the coastal slaughter of animals continues nowadays. There are just under 90 crocodiles left in the region, but one man, Erroberto Piza, AKA Tamacun, takes care of them as if they were his children and they love him like he was their croc father. The little reserve where they live sometimes collapses when heavy rain hits and they escape, scaring the shit out of a few tourists just for the laugh… (well, it’s not that bad).

But before long Tamacun is there to take them back home. The Mexican government doesn’t fund his work, and he makes little or no money. We promised him to tell people of his dedication and love for nature.

Pretty powerful stuff. All I can say is that I highly recommend Rodrigo & Gabriela’s  CD for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is their sense of ethics and world citizenship. Yes, we can make a change.

READ RELATED ARTICLES: Artists

READ RELATED ARTICLES: Tribal Drums

Get Your NAMBA GEAR

Share This