Girl Talk live in Detroit. Photo - Christos/Detroitartist.org

Gregg Gillis is more well known as the musician Girl Talk. And he believes very strongly that he is a musician and not, as many people have called him, a DJ. If you haven’t heard his work you might wonder why there would be any issue for Gillis but upon hearing his craftily designed songs you will notice that each track is made up of many short snippets of samples of songs that you know you’ve heard somewhere else. On his recent album, Feed The Animals, that he released online Radiohead-style on Illegal Art he told the New York Times that it includes more than 300 samples and that he estimates that each minute of “Feed the Animals” took him about a day to create. That’s a lot of days.

More importantly though his preferred method of “song writing,” i.e. using riffs borrowed from other people’s work puts him front and centre in the debate over copyright law and fair use. His stance is that he is using such tiny samples of other people’s work that he argues his actions are protected under fair use. Not all legal experts agree but so far he has avoided the threat of litigation.

As a musician [I am a founding member of the UK post-punk band, Gang of Four] with my own copyrights I share his stance as I believe that copyright laws have become far too stringent and are now limiting artists’ abilities to be creative. Many people would like to see the law relaxed in certain areas to allow more creativity to spring forth. One area that definitely falls under the term known as gray is the practice of creating mashups. A Mashup in the musical form is exactly what Gillis is doing, literally intermingling or layering beats and samples from various songs on top of and into each other. The end result is surely a completely new work. As Wikipedia puts it - a mashup is a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work.

Any digital media is open to the process of mashing, and just like a collage, where found images are most commonly rendered onto a canvas, the end result of this creative process should be considered a new original work. There should be no threat of litigation for artists such as Gregg Gillis who create these new works of musical digital art. Go here to hear Gillis in action as Girl Talk and see how many songs you recognize.

In that spirit I post here a mashup that I recently created in collaboration with the musician Jon Ragel who goes by the moniker Boy Eats Drum Machine. Rather than sampling we decided to actually perform the mashup by playing live in the studio on top of sampled drums. The song borrows parts from the artists Talking Heads, Aaliyah, Van Halen and The Cure.

BEDM feat. Dave Allen - Talking Heads/Aaliyah/Van Halen/Cure Mashup [MP3] Click to play, right click to download.

John Mellencamp, free songs via Vanity Fair

Thinking about social advertising and targeted marketing perhaps we should take a leaf out of the book of the rock stars. The biggest story last year in the music world was how Radiohead bucked the recording industry’s distribution and marketing system and gave away their new album. The short story is that they simply told their fans that they could go to a Radiohead web site and pay whatever they liked to download the album, with $0.00 being an acceptable amount. It was an extremely successful campaign - not only did most people pay for the files but the band received unprecedented amounts of positive media coverage around the globe.

Other bands have followed the model not least Trent Reznor and his band Nine Inch Nails. The band released a limited edition 2,500 units of a coffee table book that included multiple CDs and DVDs. It was exquisitely packaged, signed and numbered and cost $300.00. It sold out in two days.

I believe this form of social marketing could serve as a model for companies that have customers who are literally fans of their products. And I don’t mean Apple.

If we think of the bands mentioned above as companies that sell product then we can take a look at what these companies have been doing to increase sales of their product. Here’s what they do online:

01. They have blogs to which actual band members [think executives] post regular updates.
02. They ensure that the blogosphere is alerted to any new and breaking news or important posts.
03. They offer early access to special offers and discounts for their customers loyalty.
04. They give away free samples of their product.
05. They are active in their customers communities.
06. They never push unwanted messages to their customers.
07. They ask their customers to interact directly with their product through competitions.
[Both Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails had remixing competitions where they made tracks available to their fans for that purpose.]
08. They allow sharing of their products amongst a community.
09. They work closely with influencers.
10. They openly discuss their problems with their customers and allow negative comments to remain on their blogs.

Number 11 in my list would include the fact that they have dedicated staff working on this online communication 24/7.

These “companies” also use printed media to their advantage too. John Mellencamp has hooked up with Vanity Fair magazine to get two free song downloads into the hands of his fans. This is a win-win for both parties. Here’s the link if you fancy grabbing the songs.

The back cover of the Damaged Goods EP

On June 18 I spent an afternoon with the University of Oregon’s philosophy department class presenting a talk on Gang of Four and our place in the “creative, potentially transformative popular music pantheon.” It was fun. As a band our achievements are well known, mainly in critical circles, but also from the few thousand passionate hard core fans who continue to hang on dearly to their vinyl copies of ‘Entertainment!’ For a band that didn’t sell very many albums we continue to draw new listeners and thought leaders to our music. Hence the invite to speak today.

It was fun taking questions from the students, and very good questions too, about our lyrics, our political stance, how we messaged through our music. We also discussed where music is going and how will musicians be able to make a living. The students appeared to take to heart my idea that musicians are no longer in the music business, they are in the T-shirt business.

As I researched for the talk I came across the Damage Goods EP ripped from vinyl and made available as a download along with a hi-res file of the back cover. 30 years ago, on June 28th and 29th 1978, in Cargo Studios just outside Manchester England, the original Gang of Four line-up recorded the EP. Two days, live recording, minimal overdubs, recorded and mixed. Three songs - Damaged Goods, Armalite Rifle, (Love Like) Anthrax.

It’s amazing to listen to today [the students loved it.] The disarming, sprawling charm of the non-production stands out. Performed basically live this version of Damaged Goods seems now perfect - unhurried, raw, prickly guitar, Jon sounding like he’s just yelling in a room. I’m glad I never trust my memory.

Dave Allen, Director, Insights & Digital Media, Nemo Design

Gang of Four - Damaged Goods (EP version 1978)

Damaged Goods 3 song EP Click, right click or control click to download. It’s a 12mb zip file and it includes a hi-res back cover image.

Click on the tape and have a listen to what we are listening to this week.

Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay aka Justice the French ‘band,’ if you can call two electronic DJ/Musicians a band, have hooked up with Surface to Air to create a clothing line. Justice are now the biggest band on Ed Banger Records and it appears that they are extending the brand…now you too can dress like a French DJ.

Surface to Air was born out of a beat up old loft in Union Square, NY in 1996. Its initial members began to work together as artists, and the space quickly transformed itself into a cultural breeding ground for other new and emerging artists to come and create and exhibit their work in an environment that supported them. This was the birthplace for a new underground movement. With the recognition of the talent that was being displayed by the various members, the interest of the public was piqued, and various characters began coming to the space as a place to witness the new avant-garde in its formation. From Harmony Korine to Donald Baechler to Alfredo Martinez, you never knew who was going to stop by and what would happen when they did. [From their website.]

Daft Punk - Human After All [Justice Remix] [MP3]