Tiny Tunes
Forget the drum solo - Radio SASS pares songs down to the bone.
Why climb the "Stairway to Heaven" when you can take the elevator? That's the logic behind Radio SASS (Short Attention Span System), an experimental radio protocol currently in development that takes classic tunes and whittles them down to about two minutes. "People's patience for music - even the stuff they like - is thin," says founder George Gimarc, a veteran programmer and former DJ from Dallas. "Twelve songs per hour won't cut it." Gimarc and his team of editor-musicians use what he calls "intuitive editing" to trim pop songs to their catchiest crux, pruning seconds from a guitar solo here, lopping off a chorus there.
Musicians are crying foul. "It's heinous," says Andrew Whiteman, lead guitarist of Broken Social Scene, a Canadian group known for songs that run more than 10 minutes. "Music is not meant to be hook after hook." But Gimarc says most listeners don't miss the snipped bits. You decide: Check out the SASS versions of popular songs here.
- Eric Steuer
14 minute mix of Radio Sass: Listen
14 minute mix of full-length originals: Listen
Music hosted by RadioSass.com.
For more Radio Sass visit High Energy ACCURADIO and RadioSass.com.
403 Ways to Slice a CD
An album isn't just an album anymore - it's an opportunity to dice a dozen songs into ringtones, downloads, blog skins, and more. Warner Music found 23 ways to market one South Korean pop star's 16-track album - for a total of 403 SKUs (stock keeping units). And that doesn't include the extended dance remix.
- Joanna Pearlstein
Music Form (# of SKUs)
• CD (standard release) (1)
• CD (bonus features) (2)
• Full track download (2)
• Full track rental (limited use) (16)
• Full track streaming (á la carte) (16)
• Full track streaming (subscription) (16)
• Album download (permanent) (14)
• Online video download (3)
• Blog skin (music plays on blog with images) (15)
• Digital karaoke (16)
• Music letter (ecard with tunes) (16)
• Full track download (16)
• Full track streaming (16)
• My bell (ringtone melody) (16)
• Live bell (ringtone melody with remixes) (48)
• Mix ring (snippets of 3 songs combined into 1 track) (16)
• Mix bell (same as mix ring, but outgoing) (16)
• Live bell plus screensaver (downloads ringtone with images) (12)
• Color call (plays in background during a call) (16)
• Ringback tone (112)
• Video screensaver (12)
• Mobile video downloads (3)
• Mobile video-on-demand (3)
The Death of the Album
For years, the album embodied the concept of rock as art; the single symbolized the notion that pop, its less respected sibling, was disposable. Other than, say, Thom Yorke, few would make that claim anymore. In an MP3 era, albums are getting the Apocalypto treatment: They're attacked, disemboweled, then discarded.
The album format peaked during the '60s and '70s. The compact disc was supposed to herald a new era for the album. Instead, it proved to be the undoing of the long form: CDs made it easier to skip past inferior songs, of which there were plenty, now that record companies could pack a whopping 22 songs on one piece of plastic. Later, MP3s further sliced and diced albums into scattered chunks.
Coming to terms with the singles scene is tough if you cling to the idea of a unified, long-form piece of music-making. But you have to admit, except for Radiohead's OK Computer, there's hardly a perfect CD out there. JoJo's "Too Little, Too Late" is a far more pleasurable experience than a bloated double disc by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. As iTunes chart-topper Beyonce might put it: Now it's the single that's irreplaceable.
- David Browne
Solid Gold Bits
The typical cell phone ring lasts only about five seconds, but around that slice of sound a booming industry has emerged: Last year, Americans spent an estimated $600 million on ringtones, thanks to the popularity of realtones - those 10- to 30-second snippets of popular songs. But with tinny sound and abrupt edits, they're a sorry substitute for the real thing. Now preeminent indie rockers They Might Be Giants have embraced the ringtone as a stand-alone medium. The Brooklyn-based band, which was an early short-form innovator with "Dial-a-Song" - an answering machine that played a different tune each day for callers - has started composing original songlettes as an alternative to the canned loop. "We take a little sketch of a lyric or idea and make it as intense as possible," says singer-songwriter John Flansburgh. "These songs are built for repeated listens." To prove it, TMBG composed several original "snacktones" just for Wired readers.
- Steven Leckart
Download Exclusive They Might Be Giants "Snacktones"
"Bite Size" | MP3
"Untangle the Phone Cord" | MP3
"Devil Spawn" | MP3
"Friend or Foe?" | MP3
"My Other Phone Is a Boom Car" | MP3
Also Available: Three TMBG Classics!
"Call Connected Thru the NSA" | MP3
"Phone Phone Phone" | MP3
"Ring Ring" | MP3
Need help? Read this story from Wired News: Stop Paying for Ring Tones
Just One Hook
Music company Pump Audio peddles song bites on the cheap.
When MTV launched Pimp My Ride, music supervisor Joe Cuello had a problem. "We needed at least 40 bits of music per episode," he says. But pulling in that many tunes from big-name producers would've cost more than platinum rims on a Bentley.
Cuello's solution: Pump Audio. The online licensing outfit sends music supes a hard drive loaded with nearly 20,000 tracks written and recorded by talented - but unknown - artists.
Since 2001, Pump has been providing song snippets for TV, film, Web content, and videogames that need short sonic blasts on the cheap. Fees run from a couple hundred bucks for a few seconds of made-for-TV muzak to several grand for a one-minute tune in a recent Nike ad.
Bibi Farber, a New York songwriter and one of Pump's most requested artists, says she now thinks in snippets when composing. "Pop music has always been about hooks and concise melodic content," she says. "Now it's the 30-second pop song."
- Sean Cooper
Snack Attack!
>
An Epic History of Snack Culture
Music
