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Sudo kids hit pop record with the writers group

by Romy Ilano

Wouldn't it be cute if the writers group could write a hit album with Sudo kids radio like all the top 40 pop factories do with their manufactured stars? It's Sudo room additive music engineering !!! --- Romy Ilano Founder of Snowyla http://www.snowyla.com romy(a)snowyla.com Begin forwarded message: > From: Romy Ilano <romy.ilano(a)gmail.com> > Date: June 16, 2013, 3:00:32 PDT > To: Romy Ilano <romy(a)snowyla.com> > Subject: How Much Does It Cost To Make A Hit Song? :… [View More] Planet Money : NPR > > http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/05/137530847/how-much-does-it-cost-t… > > How Much Does It Cost To Make A Hit Song? > > > Courtesy Universal > Getting a song on the pop charts takes big money. > > Def Jam started paying for Rihanna's recent single, "Man Down," more than a year ago. In March of 2010, the label held a writing camp in L.A. to create the songs for Rihanna's album, Loud. > > At a writing camp, a record label hires the best music writers in the country and drops them into the nicest recording studios in town for about two weeks. It's a temporary version of the old music-industry hit factories, where writers and producers cranked out pop songs. > > "It's like an all-star game," says Ray Daniels, who was at the writing camp for Rihanna. > > Daniels manages a songwriting team of two brothers, Timothy and Theron Thomas, who work under the name Rock City. "You got all the best people, you're gonna make the best records," he says. > > > Notes > > These are rough estimates based on interviews with industry insiders. The figures have not been confirmed by Rihanna’s label, Def Jam. > Here's who shows up at a writing camp: songwriters with no music, and producers toting music tracks with no words. > > The Thomas brothers knew producer Shama "Sham" Joseph, but they had never heard his Caribbean-flavored track that became "Man Down." > > According to Daniels, the brothers listened to the track and said, "Let's give Rihanna a one-drop! Like, a response to 'I shot the sheriff!" > > They wrote the lyrics to "Man Down" in about 12 minutes, Daniels says. > > To get that twelve minutes of inspiration from a top songwriting team is expensive — even before you take into account the fee for the songwriters. > > At a typical writing camp, the label might rent out 10 studios, at a total cost of about $25,000 a day, Daniels says. > > The writing camp for Rihanna's album "had to cost at least 200 grand," Daniels says. "It was at least forty guys out there. I was shocked at how much money they were spending! But, guess what? They got the whole album out of that one camp." > > A writing camp is like a reality show, where top chefs who have never met are forced to cook together. At the end, Rihanna shows up like the celebrity judge and picks her favorites. > > Her new album has 11 songs on it. So figure that the writing camp cost about $18,000 per song. > > The songwriter and the producer each got a fee for their services. Rock City got $15,000 for Man Down, and the producer got around $20,000, according to Daniels. > > That's about $53,000.00 spent on the song so far— before Rihanna even steps into the studio with her vocal producer. > > The vocal producer's job is to make sure Rihanna sings the song right. > > Makeba Riddick didn't produce Rihanna's vocals on "Man Down," but she's one of the industry's top producers, and has worked with the singer on many songs, including the two number one hits in 2010: "Rude Boy" and "Love the Way You Lie." > > When Riddick works with a singer, she'll say, "I need you to belt this out, I need you to scream this, as if you're on one end of the block and you're trying to talk to somebody three blocks away." > > Or maybe: "Sing with your lips a little more closed, a little more pursed together, so we can get that low, melancholy sound." > > Not only that, the vocal producer has to deal with the artist's rider. The rider is whatever the artist needs to get them in the mood to get into the booth and sing. > > "They'll have strobe lights, incense burning, doves flying around the studio," she says. (Yes, Riddick has had doves circling her head while she's working.) > > Rihanna is "very focused" Riddick says. So no doves. > > Riddick's fee starts at $10,000 to $15,000 per song, she says. > > The last step is mixing and mastering the song, which costs another $10,000 to $15,000, according to Daniels. > > So, our rough tally to create one pop song comes to: > > The cost of the writing camp, plus fees for the songwriter, producer, vocal producer and the mix comes to $78,000. > > But it's not a hit until everybody hears it. How much does that cost? > > About $1 million, according to Daniels, Riddick and other industry insiders. > > "The reason it costs so much," Daniels says, "is because I need everything to click at once. You want them to turn on the radio and hear Rihanna, turn on BET and see Rihanna, walk down the street and see a poster of Rihanna, look on Billboard, the iTunes chart, I want you to see Rihanna first. All of that costs." > > That's what a hit song is: It's everywhere you look. To get it there, the label pays. > > Every song is different. Some songs have a momentum all their own, some songs just break out out of the blue. But the record industry depends on hits for sales. Having hits is the business plan. The majority of songs that are hits — that chart high, that sell big, that blast out of cars in the summertime— cost a million bucks to get them heard and played and bought. > > Daniels breaks down the expenses roughly into thirds: a third for marketing, a third to fly the artist everywhere, and a third for radio. > > "Marketing and radio are totally different," he says. "Marketing is street teams, commercials and ads." > > Radio is? > > "Radio you're talking about . . ." he pauses. "Treating the radio guys nice." > > 'Treating the radio guys nice' is a very fuzzy cost. It can mean taking the program directors of major market stations to nice dinners. It can mean flying your artist in to do a free show at a station in order to generate more spots on a radio playlist. > > Former program director Paul Porter, who co-founded the media watchdog group Industry Ears, says it's not that record labels pay outright for a song. They pay to establish relationships so that when they are pushing a record, they will come first. > > Porter says shortly after he started working as a programmer for BET about 10 years ago, he received $40,000.00 in hundred-dollar bills in a Fed-Ex envelope. > > Current program directors told me this isn't happening anymore. They say their playlists are made through market research on what their listeners want to hear. > > In any case, to return to our approximate tally: After $78,000 to make the song, and another $1 million to roll it out, Rihanna's "Man Down" gets added to radio playlists across the country, gets a banner ad on iTunes ... and may still not be a hit. > > As it happens, "Man Down" has not sold that well, and radio play has been minimal. > > But Def Jam makes up the shortfall by releasing other singles. And only then— if the label recoups what it spent on the album — will Rihanna herself get paid. > > > > --- > > Romy Ilano > Founder of Snowyla > http://www.snowyla.com > romy(a)snowyla.com [View Less]

11 years, 10 months

Re: [sudo-discuss] workshop weekend

by Hilary Naylor

Hi all, Enclosed is a flyer for the workshop that you may post or email to friends. The below message came from the Noisebridge list, and is very closely related to what we are trying to do in our workshop. It might be seen as the next step for those who participate in our workshop. cheers Hilary ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Glen Jarvis <glen(a)glenjarvis.com> To: NoiseBridge Discuss <noisebridge-discuss(a)lists.noisebridge.net> Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 12:07:53 -… [View More]

11 years, 10 months

Fwd: BBC News - Why are female record producers so rare?

by Romy Ilano

In addition to Sudo kids in the radio this is a good one... There are very few female producers in the industry. Famous female pop stars rarely write the words or produce their own music. They're chosen for their looks and are creations of mostly men ... It's be cool to get more women into audio engineering and djing at the sudoroom radio --- Romy Ilano Founder of Snowyla http://www.snowyla.com romy(a)snowyla.com Begin forwarded message: > From: Romy Ilano <romy.ilano(a)gmail.com&… [View More]gt; > Date: June 16, 2013, 9:46:33 PDT > To: Romy Ilano <romy(a)snowyla.com> > Subject: BBC News - Why are female record producers so rare? > > http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19284058 > > Why are female record producers so rare? > > By Mark Savage BBC News entertainment reporter > > 29 August 2012 Last updated at 02:47 > > > More than 95% of record producers and sound engineers are men > Over the last few years, it seems women have dominated the music industry, from Adele to Lady Gaga, via Rihanna, who apparently can't leave the house without recording a hit single. > > But the story is not being replicated on the other side of the sound desk. > > While George Martin or Pharrell Williams are household names, only three women have ever been nominated for best producer at the Brits or the Grammys. None of them went home with the prize. > > Recording artist Regina Spektor, promoting her album Far in 2009, admitted to the BBC she had "never even seen the names" of female producers on her record company shortlist. > > "It didn't enter my mind to to look for one," she said. > > "I should put out a call and say, 'Where are you?'" > > She must not have found any - because when her follow-up album What We Saw From The Cheap Seats came out this year, she was the sole woman with a production credit. > > "It is a sad case," says Steve Levine, chairman of the UK's Music Producer's Guild. "I've only ever worked with one female studio engineer." > > "Oddly enough, there are a lot of quite powerful, high position females in record companies - my wife included - but less in the technical arena." > > > Trina Shoemaker won a Grammy for her work on Sheryl Crow's Globe Sessions album > They do exist, however. Trina Shoemaker is one of them. > > "The light bulb went off as a child," she says. "I would put albums on and I would just study their jackets. > > "I didn't actually care about the musicians, I cared about how it happened. Why did it come out of the speakers like that? Why does the needle go into that groove and make music come out of those cones? And who does that?" > > Inspired by The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and her headphones, she left home at 18, skipping college to go to LA. She worked as a record company receptionist and a maid in a recording studio for seven years before finally getting a job operating tape machines in New Orleans. > > "My family didn't know what I was doing," she says. "They thought I was repairing stereos!" > > Eventually, Shoemaker became an apprentice to Daniel Lanois, who helped shape the sound of U2 and Brian Eno, and, in 1998, was the first woman to win a Grammy for sound engineering. > > Swagger > > These days, Shoemaker is in constant demand as a producer. So why isn't her story more common? > > "It's a renegade profession, it's an outlaw profession," says Susan Rogers - one-time studio engineer for Prince, and now an associate professor at the Berklee College Of Music in Boston. > > Women who want to enter the field face "a boys' club, or a guild mentality", she says. > > "You have to have a lot of swagger. A lot of swagger. If you don't, you won't be successful." > > > The BBC started training female sound technicians in 1941 > Even the successful ones face challenges, says Shoemaker. > > "A producer has to turn into the person that fits in with the band," she says. > > "If they're a bunch of guys and they're young and they're funny and they tell rude jokes, you have to be a woman who isn't shocked by that and can, as a matter of fact, crush them all with three words." > > Sexism may be one factor, but Prof Rogers believes the problem is more basic. > > "The bottom line is, women aren't interested," she says. > > "Right now, I currently teach engineering and production; and I also teach psychoacoustics and music cognition. In the psychology topics, the students are half women and half men. But in production and engineering, maybe one out of every 10 students is a young woman." > > > In the UK the situation is the same. The Music Producers' Guild says less than 4% of its members are women. And the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts says only 6% of the students enrolled on its sound technology course are female. That figure hasn't changed for three years. > > Yet the problem seems to be restricted to rock and pop. In the theatre, in Hollywood, in radio there are dozens of female sound engineers. Roughly one-quarter of the BBC's sound mixers are women. > > "There are no social barriers to a woman becoming a record producer," says Prof Rogers. > > "The more stringent and insurmountable constraint is the biological one. A man can, technically speaking, reproduce on his coffee break. It doesn't take all that long, and biologically it doesn't take much of a toll. For a woman, the opposite is true. > > "The typical lifestyle of a record producer is very intensive, very competitive, all-consuming. In order to be able to maintain that level of focus and attention and dedication to your craft, it has to come at the expense of reproduction." > > "The women who do get into it will do really well... until they reach that point in their late 20s where they say, 'Now its time to have a family'. I tell my female students it's going to come for them. It came for me, and I opted not to have children, to not get married." > > Shoemaker, a mother herself, can attest to that. > > "Having a baby was a big deal, a game changer," she says. "I was 39 when I got pregnant, so I was already well established, but it did change everything. It took me out of the running for a lot of jobs." > > "It's not about being the equivalent of men. It's just that I don't want to raise some weirdo son that ends up being a psycho because I was too busy making records to be a mama." > > Prof Rogers says some of her colleagues have tried to artificially boost the number of girls studying production, but its a practice she fights. > > > Susan Rogers now teaches students about production and engineering > "The last thing I want to see - because I have seen it - is to get young women into the programme who are less dedicated, less motivated and less capable of being good producers. All it does is make things worse for us. They do poorly, they're apathetic, they're not interested and it furthers the stereotype that women can't do this." > > Still, Mr Levine hopes more women do see the light. His theory is that they could bring new dimensions to recorded music. > > "If I have an observation, it's that a lot of the female engineers have a greater allegiance to the sort of passion a singer-songwriter has, and that comes out in their work. > > "They're much more sensitive to the delicacies of sound balancing. I think that's quite an important role." > > And Shoemaker, who can reel off the names of several female contemporaries, says she sees things improving. > > "Women are entering the field in drives now. There's maybe a 20-year curve before they're fully recognised. But look at doctors - they're pretty much equal now. > > "I don't know about pay scales, but if a surgeon walks in and it's a woman on her 800th cardiac surgery, I want her, not the young dude who just walked out of medical school. > > "So I think about the time I retire, we'll see a very level playing field." > > > > --- > > Romy Ilano > Founder of Snowyla > http://www.snowyla.com > romy(a)snowyla.com [View Less]

11 years, 10 months

Sudo Kids this Tues 6/11: 6PM - ?? (Any 3D printer folks available?)

by Marina Kukso

Hi everyone, Sudo Kids is resuming once again this Tuesady evening from around 6-6:30PM to whenever kids have to leave. We will once again have food, radio, clay/art, and this week, we would like to offer 3D printing. Would any of you be interested in demoing 3D printing for a few kids this Tuesday? If so, please let me know. Finally, if you have children in your life who would like to participate in Sudo Room in a child-safe environment with supportive adults - bring them! And if you're an … [View More]

11 years, 10 months

door wouldn't open - 500 internal server error

by Jake

i tried to get in by going to the URL (from my phone) and entering the password i have been using, and i got a 500 Internal Server Error. does anyone know why that is? I ended up giving up and pressing the intercom button, and someone actually came down the stairs to actually let me in. do we know what is causing this?

11 years, 10 months

Hacking cloth/fiber :)

by Eddie Che

Hi there folks + fam, Does anyone know where one might find a needle and thread around Sudo Room? slightly ahead of the curve <3, Eddie Che

11 years, 10 months

Big banner or button on front site page fof mesh network

by Romy Ilano

Is there a way to put a very obvious large link or banner from the front sudoroom page and our wiki leading to the mesh network project ... With its donation page? I think it would be appropriate ... It's an internal sudoroom project not something run by an outside company university or non profit --- Romy Ilano Founder of Snowyla http://www.snowyla.com romy(a)snowyla.com

11 years, 10 months

Car available until end of day

by Marina Kukso

Hi everyone, I have a car available all day so if we have things to bring to or remove from sudo room, email or text/call me and I'll be happy to help. I'm thinking any time this afternoon until the end of the day. Marina

11 years, 10 months

Circuit Hacking Monday June 17th at Noisebridge‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏

by Mitch Altman

Although Circuit Hacking Monday happens every week, this upcoming workshop will be the last one I will be leading for a few months, since I'll be traveling all over the world to teach soldering at hackerspaces and hacker conferences on several continents! -- Mitch. You are invited to Circuit Hacking Monday, at Noisebridge! Monday, June 17th, 7:30pm All ages, All skill levels, All welcome! Circuit Hacking Monday is a great chance to learn how to solder, … [View More]learn about electronics, and/or learn about Noisebridge. It is perfectly fine if you've never soldered before!It is perfectly fine to bring in your projects in progress -- it's a great place to get help with your project!It is perfectly fine to bring in something you'd like help fixing!It is perfectly fine to just come and hang out with other hardware geeks!Circuit Hacking Monday is all this, and more.You are welcome to come to Circuit Hacking Monday to learn how to make cool kits (listed below), but you are also welcome to come and work on your own project, fix something, or get familiar with the Noisebridge and its electronics lab. You can use our tools, get help, or give help with others playing with and making projects. It's a great community. Come and meet some new friends!Where: Noisebridge, 3rd floor of 2169 Mission, San Francisco, 94110 One and a half blocks South of 16th St. Mission BART Station.When: Monday, June 17th, 7:30pm till ?? (it is totally OK to come late!) Just show up! No reservation is needed. Most projects take a bout 1 to 2 hours.Who: You! It is fun to make things in the friendly community of Noisebridge. All ages. All skill levels. All welcome!Cost: Instruction is Free! If you want one of the following kits, reimbursement for the kit price is requested. (kit prices are $10 to $35, depending on kit)All kits are designed for total beginners to complete successfully. Some of the kits available:TV-B-Gone-- (turn off any TV in public places!)Diavolino -- (make your own shield-compatible Arduino!)OpenHeart -- (animate fun patterns in the shape of a heart!) LoL Shield -- (Lots of LEDs! for your Arduino!)"Hi My Name Is" badge -- (you may have seen me wearing mine) Brain Machine -- (Meditate, Hallucinate, and Trip Out!)Mignonette Game -- (build your own handheld game console!) Trippy RGB Waves -- (interactive blinky lights!) LEDcube -- (animated 3D cube of LEDs!) MiniPOV -- (write messages in the air!)BoArduino -- (make your own fully functional Arduino -- for solderless breadboards!)Atari Punk Console -- (Make noise!)Microcontroller programmer (USBtinyISP) -- (program all your AVR family chips!) And more! More info is available on the above kits at:http://www.CornfieldElectronics.comhttp://www.adafruit.comhttp://www.app… Mitch. [View Less]

11 years, 10 months

Community actions and structure that helps resist sexual violence

by Liz Henry

Dear Noisebridge!! (And sudo-discuss, and Praxis) I have invited representatives from SF-WAR to come speak at Noisebridge some time in July on the topics of resisting sexual harassment and sexual assault. Will keep you all updated as to when this will happen! These training talks may give us good common ground for further discussion and action. I was also chatting with folks from Camp Tipsy, an event run by people in the Bay Area, that last year had a sexual assault reported. I asked … [View More]

11 years, 10 months

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