Miami & The Beaches Photo Blog

In today’s fickle musicscape, it’s no longer enough to
release an album and pray that your fans download it on iTunes or shell out
thirty bucks or more to see you on tour. Twitter missives about the In-and-Out
burger you’re munching while stopped for gas in Reno and what movie you saw on
the plane en route to NYC are as essential to publicizing your band as a
Myspace profile and playing shows 250 days a year. Facebook fan pages have
forged faux personal connections with people who just ten years ago would have
spent hours curating with almost religious fervor cassette and VHS libraries of
music videos, performances and interviews, their index finger hovering over the
‘Record’ button like a hungry lion stalking a particularly plump zebra. With
pop culture blogs capturing and commenting on celebrities’ every move, we’ve
become accustomed to holding an all access pass to every area of an artist’s
life, except for one; the artistic process. Ironically, it’s been Radiohead, a
notoriously press-shy band that almost broke the Internet in 2007 when they
released In Rainbows as a pay-what-you-want download, that has led the charge in
bringing music to the masses in the form of the remix contest.

It’s an astoundingly simple idea that speaks volumes about
the technological advances we’ve quickly absorbed into our society. A band
releases digital files of the individual instrumental tracks and lets users
download them to reconceptualize the original work. Many groups still
commission high-profle artists and producers for bonus tracks and B-sides, but
Radiohead was one of the first artists to turn songs over to their audience
with separate contests for ‘Nude’ and ‘Reckoner,’ the first two singles off In
Rainbows. Working with Apple to make the tracks, or stems, available through
iTunes and Garageband, users paid a small fee for each stem and uploaded the
completed work to the Radiohead website. Being above such trivial matters as
prizes and winners, Radiohead announced the only reward would be that they
would listen to the best remixes.

Following the enormous response and success of Radiohead’s
project, artists like Passion Pit, Depeche Mode and even the Black Eyed Peas
turned to their fans for a unique take on their material. Indie darlings
Passion Pit made the stems for ‘Little Secret’ available for the price of an
email address a month before the May release of their debut album Manners, and
let fans trade back and forth to collect all the snippets. They then had fans
vote on the best ten submissions, and chose five of those for inclusion on a
limited edition vinyl-only single. Depeche Mode teamed up in April with
electronic music website Beatport to announce the remix competition for
‘Peace,’ the first single from their twelfth studio album Sounds of the
Universe. In addition to releasing the winning entry through Mute Records,
their longtime label home, Depeche Mode also gifted the lucky producer with
thousands of dollars worth of studio equipment.  And if you aren’t already sick of hearing their ubiquitous single
(and  current Target jingle) ‘I’ve Gotta
Feeling,’ this month the Black Eyed Peas will feature the ten best remixes on
Dipdive.com, the online home for all things BEP, and shower the winner with
Korg syntheizers, Moog effects pedals and a $500 Beatport giftcard.