Tracking the Music
MARIANI, ANTHONY
Tracking the Music Every man his own composer. BY ANTHONY MARIANI One indication that the phenomenon of music over the Internet will soon be completely corporatized is the note on the Napster...
...Out there in cyberspace, however, in the pockets between the fee-based, corporate-backed file-sharing services, and the few remaining free services, a new breed of Internet music thrives...
...If no music is truly alternative any-more—what with every conceivable niche having been neatly categorized by program directors and Billboard editors around the globe—then tracking may represent the next best thing...
...The lack of corporate presence still makes it enough to attract a hip-enough, young, disaffected crowd...
...The sound of choice among trackers is mostly one techno strain or another...
...Napster has been non-operational since July 1.) The desperation in Napster's note is sad almost to the point of being cute...
...Awesome's "The Chase" revolves around a theme from Aaron Copland, tinkering with a dramatic progression that almost completely transforms the mood of the song by the end...
...And a tracker who calls himself Vantage-The Real One has an interesting tune called "Duet of the Ritual," a thundering heavy-metal piece...
...It's called "tracking music," and it's a computer-centric oddity in which amateur musicians create and arrange music with the letters on their computer's QWERTY keyboards...
...And PPH's "The Cowboy's Walk" would make a nice accompaniment to a movie about Tijuana in the 1950s...
...Shah wants to turn tracking into an everyday utility, likening "desktop composing" to desktop publishing: something everyone can do to make their quarterly reports more catchy...
...This isn't to say there aren't a few talented trackers who want to make making music their full-time occupation...
...Although tracking attracts computer nerds cum musicians from across the globe, you probably won't read about it in any serious music magazines...
...Russian Boy's "Let the Blues" is a fine, gospel-tinged piano number...
...Shah is the founder of Trax in Space, possibly the largest website devoted to tracking...
...Shah's burgeoning empire includes a record label (Infinity), a tracking magazine (Digital Music Revolution), and a retail business (MODplug), which plans on packaging, marketing, and selling the specialized software that trackers have grown accustomed to downloading for free...
...What you find at a tracking website like www.traxin-space.com or www.united-trackers.org is often not much different from the latest BT record or what you would hear at a local dance club or rave—which is to say that trackers put too much stock in their independence from everyday pop music making...
...What commercialized desktop composing is more likely to do is kill off tracking by turning it into a form of clip art...
...And there's also the added benefit of tracking's truly egalitarian nature: Everyone, with the right software, can be a star (kind of...
...What's more American dreamy than that...
...it sounds like the promise, made decades ago, that the creation of the Fortran programming language would make every businessman his own programmer...
...Hackers then moved on to cracking PCs and began "composing" music in earnest, competing with one another on bulletin-board systems to see who could compose the most proficient piece of music that would fit on a floppy disk...
...From there, the Internet in the early 1990s seemed a natural progression...
...Still, a few of the songs are genuinely successful...
...Contact Congress by email to let them know how you feel...
...The tracker builds a song layer by layer, recording rhythms, then adding on melodic accents as needed...
...The content is typically anthemic dance music, with everything digitized except the human voice (trackers have to employ real singers or rip real, prerecorded vocal tracks for their sung parts...
...That's possible, of course, although unlikely...
...they then passed around their handiwork like proud science-fair winners with their neato projects...
...BY ANTHONY MARIANI One indication that the phenomenon of music over the Internet will soon be completely corporatized is the note on the Napster website: "You have the power to keep file-sharing over the Internet alive...
...Tracking is sustained by only a few websites (none with recognizable corporate backing or fashionable endorsements...
...back in December 1999...
...You can make a difference...
...Among their own, outstanding trackers—whose successes are determined by downloads, not record sales—are Springsteen-sized pin-ups...
...There is, in fact, a surprising amount of solid material in the tracking universe...
...It's a fascinating phenomenon—and perhaps the last gasp of the old computer culture...
...Washington insiders should never win out over the will of the people...
...In the mid-1980s, hackers cracked early Atari and Commodore video games and inserted their own binary music inside...
...One of the most prominent figures in the current scene is Saurin Shah, a Gen-Xer from Houston by way of Toronto...
...Tracking predates the Internet...
...Even the flower children at Napster must know that this isn't going to stop the Recording Industry Association of America, the music-industry trade organization that filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Napster Anthony Mariani writes about popular music for the Village Voice and Vibe...
...Some cut CDs, lots promote their singles or albums on MP3.com, and one band, TbO & Vega, was picked up by a record label...
Vol. 7 • December 2001 • No. 13
