5-Minute Expert: Sorting through streaming music services

SOUND GARDENS

MUSIC STREAMING SERVICES CAN CONNECT YOU TO YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC WHEREVER YOU GO. WHICH ONE’S BEST FOR YOU?

BY GEOFF CARTER

Swedish music streaming service Spotify launched in the United States in July 2011. Before that, the amount of music you could carry with you was limited to the memory of your iPod—and, coincidentally, to you remembering to take your iPod out of your gym clothes before dropping them in the wash. Spotify, with its millions of songs (50 million, at last count), completely changed all that. It not only negated consumer need to purchase music players like iPods, but the need to purchase music itself. Seconds after signing up, Spotify spills an avalanche of songs into your lap. Just as soon as you learn of the existence of a new Haim record, you can listen to it—without commercials even, if you pay a monthly fee. ¶ The long-term impact of services like Spotify on the business of recorded music is still unfolding. (There’s an ongoing question of artist compensation, for one thing, but we won’t go into all that now, except to say that all artists deserve to earn at least a living wage from their work.) And from a consumer standpoint, these streaming services aren’t yet perfect. They compress audio  les, skimp on liner notes and album art, and, in some cases— due to licensing issues, label disputes or the reticence of individual artists—omit songs, albums or entire label catalogs. ¶ Still, we’re very close to a sonic utopia. How can a music fan hope to build a complete sound library in the cloud, one that not only includes otherwise omitted tracks but also favorite bootlegs and rarities? Amazingly, certain streaming services are taking steps to help realize that crazy dream. Here’s the current breakdown.

(Shutterstock/Photo Illustration)

AMAZON MUSIC UNLIMITED

■ Cost? $9.99/month; $7.99/month or $79.99/year for Amazon Prime members ■ How many songs? 60 million ■ Can you upload music you own? No. But music purchased through Amazon is added to your library, so if Prince’s estate has second thoughts, you can just buy Sign ‘O’ the Times and get the MP3s back that way. Yeah, it’s not ideal. ■ Why bother? When you factor in the Amazon Prime member discount, it’s the cheapest service out there. And hi-def streaming is available at $12.99/month for Prime members or $14.99/month—a big savings over HD champ Tidal.

APPLE MUSIC

■ Cost? $9.99/month; $99/year ■ How many songs? 60 million ■ Can you upload music you own? Yes, up to 100,000 songs. ■ Why bother? Service-only exclusive albums and tracks. Beats 1 radio and iHeart Radio streaming channels. And if you’re deep into Apple’s walled garden, you’re probably already a subscriber.

IBROADCAST

■ Cost? Free ■ How many songs? Nothing but what you bring to it. ■ Can you upload music you own? Yes. That’s the whole point of iBroadcast; it’s a streaming music locker that’s just for music you personally own. ■ Why bother? Again, it’s free. (A premium version, with adjustable stream quality, is in the works, but iBroadcast says the core service will remain free.) And if you have qualms about supporting multibillionaires, this Seattle-based upstart is the way to go.

TIDAL

■ Cost? $9.99/month for standard audio, $19.99 for hi-def audio ■ How many songs? 60 million, with more than 250,00 music videos. ■ Can you upload music you own? No. ■ Why bother? Lossless audio. Tidal’s standard audio songs stream at 320 kbps—the same as Spotify, Apple and most everyone else—but its acclaimed hi-def option offers master-quality recording streams, a must for devoted audiophiles.

SPOTIFY

■ Cost? $9.99/month; $99/year ■ How many songs? “Over 50 million.” Probably closer to 60, like everyone else. ■ Can you upload music you own? No. But you can use Spotify to listen to audio fi les stored locally on your device. ■ Why bother? With its easy-to-use interface and surprisingly intuitive artist recommendation algorithms, it remains the gold standard. There’s a good reason practically every new phone or smart device comes with Spotify baked in.

YOUTUBE MUSIC

■ Cost? $11.99/month ■ How many songs? Google hasn’t released a fi gure, but it’s surmised to be comparable to other services. ■ Can you upload music you own? Yes, up to 100,000 songs. And if you’re using the soon-to-be inactivated Google Play Music, you can transfer all your music fi les to YouTube Music at once. ■ Why bother? The “YouTube” part of the equation. All mixes, bootlegs, mashups and live recordings uploaded to the video service are playable as audio tracks; you can add them to playlists. Plus: Membership includes adfree YouTube viewing.

Guiding light Black Camaro’s latest album plays like a channel-surfing ‘daydream’

By Lesl ie Ventura

o hear singer, guitarist and enT gineer Brian Garth explain it, Black Camaro’s 16th LP, Daydream Delphi, was “loosely” conceived as a soap opera.

Back in 2016, the longtime Las Vegas indie band—comprising Garth and Tom Miller (vocals, guitar and keyboards)—was preparing for a fourday mini-residency inside the Bunkhouse. The pair wrote and recorded a theme song and hatched a “grandiose plan” for a soap opera concept, Garth says, but that vision wasn’t truly realized. “We rarely play live, and when we do, we spend so much of our headspace rehearsing,” he says. The concept was shelved.

It stayed with Black Camaro, however. “We had this very Dallas-esque theme song laying around,” Garth says, plus “a bunch of leftovers” from the sessions that produced 2019 release Protocol of Dreams. Garth began assembling them into a B-sides collection when he had a realization. “I started thinking, ‘There’s a lot of great sh*t on here’,” Garth says. “‘What if this album is the soap opera?’”

Once he cut the fat from those old tracks, Garth was left with eight shiny new songs. “Nobody had heard them,” he says. “On a B-sides album, we would have just [released it as is], but once we decided this was cool as an album, we started long-distance working on them and adding new lyrics.”

Telling the tale of “the last summer ever recorded in modern history,” Daydream Delphi encompasses “desolation, power, greed and war,” not to mention “hope, reconciliation and redemption,” according to its Bandcamp description. Sonically, the album—released digitally on July 4— harkens back to Black Camaro projects like 2008’s Pistachio Moustachio and 2009’s Radio Capricorn.

Back when Black Camaro intended its Bunkhouse shows to include acting and dialogue, the band had written scripts for each “episode” and made flyers with an episode “synopsis” to accompany each performance. Those back-burnered scripts became the foundations of Daydream Delphi.

And the cast? “We couldn’t have a lot of people hanging out,” Garth says of recording during quarantine. “I couldn’t just call over an entire cast of characters.” So Garth and Miller enlisted a few close friends to record the old dialogue, turning the snippets of audio into four different “acts.”

Featured on the album are the voices of local musician Ted Rader — “he was along for the whole thing and was like, ‘You guys are weird’,”—Garth says. “But he did two of my favorite voices.” Vegas guitarist Kevin Kilfeather is also featured.

How does it all come together? Strangely. It’s not exactly clear what’s happening on first listen … or a second. Garth likens the experience to channel surfing during the 1990s. “You’re flipping through the channels, and every time you hit one of these acts, it’s like you came back

NOISE

around to that channel,” he says.

How did Miller feel about it? “He might deny this, but I basically forced this on him,” he laughs.

“I didn’t put up too much resistance,” Miller insists. “I composed the segues and closing theme, and that was a blast. I dig all the soap opera stuff.”

Garth created an animated intro to accompany the album, viewable at youtu.be/C2UfPuzDslE. “I was going to animate the whole thing, but making that little intro was so time-consuming,” he says.

Plus, he adds, it felt disingenuous promoting a new album during a global pandemic and growing civil rights movement. “We were supposed to drop this in the beginning of June … but self-promotion was just out of the question at that point. There were people getting tear-gassed, and they still are today.”

Garth and Miller agreed to donate all profits from the album to two organizations: Fair Fight, a voting rights group founded by former Georgia Representative Stacey Abrams, and the West Las Vegas Arts Center, a local community art center Garth says “has been hit hard by budget shortfalls.”

“We’re not asking [people] to buy a digital release. We’re asking them to donate to two causes,” he says. “[Daydream Delphi] is just the consolation prize. You get a TV show on an album from a band that you like ... albeit a really weird one.”

Black Camaro’s Garth (left) and Miller (Courtesy)

Doubling Down

AEG rea ffirms its Vega

By Brock Radke

s commitment with the Thea tre at Re sorts World

he latest announcement from Resorts T World, the Las Vegas Strip’s next megaresort slated to open in summer 2021, wasn’t at all surprising: It has partnered with AEG Presents and its Concerts West division to develop and operate the Theatre at Resorts World.

The 5,000-seat concert and entertainment venue is being designed to host superstar residencies and limited engagements from other acts, along with other special events. AEG pioneered this style of venue with the creation of the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in 2003 and helped usher in the era of the modern headlining residency with Celine Dion’s A New Day production.

“In this business, things change rapidly when it comes to technology. We needed to find the right partner to make sure we are creating the most high-end, technical theater you can build today and set up for [concerts], but also for other events,” Resorts World Las Vegas President Scott Sibella said. “It’s not just a theater where we can only do concerts; there’s also sporting events. Convention guest groups can do a lot of different things in there.”

The first Vegas project from Malaysian corporation Genting Berhad, Resorts World first announced plans for the theater and other nightlife and entertainment offerings in November. Sibella said the partnership with AEG includes the facility design, event programming and the eventual booking of artists and residencies, describing a comprehensive collaboration.

Those plans demonstrate the resort’s intent to become a prominent entertainment destination on the Strip, but the ideas coming from AEG’s side are a bit more bold. John Meglen, president and co-CEO of Concerts West, said that while the new theater hasn’t locked down any headliners yet, he believes the room will compete with the Colosseum, Planet Hollywood’s Zappos Theater and Park MGM’s Park Theater. And residencies are only the beginning of the venue’s potential.

“The only thing we know today is we still don’t know when live entertainment will be back,” Meglen said. “But there’s no way it goes away. What

Theatre at Resorts World renderings (Sceno Plus/Courtesy)

THE STRIP

we need to be doing now is planning for that [comeback] and be ready when it’s ready. But it’s got to be the best in class.

“Remember how the [Vegas] residencies just became a sort of 'stop by and play for a week or tour while you’re touring'? We’re going the other way again. We’re going all the way back to what made it, that first [show] with [director] Franco [Dragone] and Celine together. We’ve got to go back to creating incredible productions, whether it comes from an artist, a Broadway type of show or a production show. We’ve got to get creative again.”

Meglen said AEG, one of the country’s largest concert touring promoters, is still big on bringing headliners to the Strip. Once the partnership with Resorts World went public on July 16, Dion’s name rocketed to the top of the rumor list for a new residency at the theater.

The veteran entertainment executive also believes Las Vegas could accumulate even more superstar acts when pandemic circumstances subside because of the city’s many top-notch venues and the convenience for artists to sign up for residencies instead of trying to tour soon.

“In my opinion, we’re going to go through a bit of a bumpy road getting live [entertainment] back on track, but Vegas does sit in a unique situation because you can set things up in a protected situation you maintain every day,” Meglen said. That’s why AEG and Resorts World are building “the coolest place we can build … that has all the latest tech bells and whistles. That’s the best thing for us to focus on right now.”

AEG’s long partnership with Caesars Palace to run the Colosseum ran its course when competitor Live Nation took over last year. But with the Resorts World deal and a similar partnership in place with the upcoming Virgin Las Vegas resort—to run what was the Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel—AEG is in prime position to continue to shape Las Vegas entertainment in the future.

“Our timing is really good. If you look at the overall commitment to Las Vegas today, it’s pretty significant,” Meglen said. “I’ve got to give a lot of credit to [owner] Phil Anschutz for being there in the very beginning and sticking with it, and the team in Las Vegas, a lot of whom have been there almost 20 years and they’re the pros. I just hope to keep their fire going.”