🔗 Darcy James Argue on Spotify, Artist Compensation, and User-Centric Payment System's

I hesitate to post links to content on Facebook, but Darcy James Argue wrote an excellent post on his Facebook page regarding Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek's, recent claim that musicians may no longer be able to release music only "once every three to four years."

Excerpt below. Read the entire post here.

There’s been a lot of talk about Daniel Ek telling the artists whose creative work has made him a multi-billionaire that if we want to be paid a living wage, we just need to “work harder.” It’s infuriating, of course, but whenever this conversation comes up, people also tend to be extremely defeatist — yes, Spotify is horrible for artists, but it’s also the future, so what are you going to to do? Well, there are actually a lot of things you can do, including supporting the artists you care about directly by purchasing their music via Bandcamp and supporting the crowdfunding campaigns that allow them to actually make records. But even within the streaming world, there’s a model that is much more equitable than Spotify’s. It’s called a User-Centric Payment System, and essentially what it does is make sure the money that you pay for your monthly subscription fee actually goes to the artists you listen to.

By the way, if you are not familiar with the music of Darcy James Argue, get on it! Brooklyn Babylon is one of the most astounding records I have heard in the past 10 years.

🔗 Using Jamboard in the Music Classroom

UPDATE: Listen to Theresa’s appearance on my podcast and subscribe below…

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Theresa Hoover Ducassoux is a band director in Virginia doing awesome work ensuring that her students are engaged and empowered in her band classes, online and in person. She is especially savvy with a lot of the web-based tech tools that are popular in education right now.

Her post, which I have linked and quoted below, explains some ways you might use Google's Jamboard app in the music classroom to engage students.

Getting Started with Google Jamboard - Off the Beaten Path:

Jamboard is one of the newer and lesser-known G Suite tools, but it’s one that I love and am excited to use this school year! Jamboard is a collaborative whiteboard that be accessed by an app or web browser. The simplicity of the tool makes it great for education. Jamboard is a great way to have all students in your class share their voices.

Jamboard is indeed excellent. I used it for a number of things last spring. One way we used it was to communicate and share what we had been up to in our free time when school started online.

I used this Jamboard our first day of online learning to ask students how they had been spending their extra time at home. Each section of the band had a page of the digital whiteboard to edit.

Another way we used it was as an adjudication tool for providing ourselves feedback on our virtual ensemble video progress. You can see a brief snippet of that process in the middle of my How to Make a Virtual Band video, below.

Go and check out Theresa's post, and all of her fine work at Off The Beaten Path Music. Spoiler: She is my podcast guest this week. Jamboard is just one of the many awesome tools and online teaching strategies we talk about. I learned a ton from her. That episode should be published tomorrow. Stay tuned!

🔗 Rhiannon Giddens to Lead Silkroad's Musical Explorations (The New York Times)

From the New York Times...

Rhiannon Giddens to Lead Silkroad’s Musical Explorations - The New York Times:

Trained as an opera singer, Rhiannon Giddens was a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the acclaimed folk group. With the Chocolate Drops and as a solo artist, a virtuoso fiddler and banjo player with a soulful voice, she has delved into African-American and old-time traditions. She won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2017 and wrote an opera based on the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim man from Africa who was enslaved in South Carolina. (Its planned premiere has been delayed until next year by the coronavirus pandemic.)

Now she will have a new, global curatorial canvas for her genre-skipping ideas. On Tuesday, Silkroad, the cross-cultural music organization created by Yo-Yo Ma in 1998, announced that Ms. Giddens would be its next artistic director.

Awesome news! If you haven't heard Rhiannon Gidden's music, you owe it to yourself. Her music has a wide appeal, and regardless of your musical tastes, I think you will find something to love about it.

🔗 Choir Creator: All-in-One Virtual Ensemble Maker App, Shipping Next Month on iOS

New app for creating virtual ensembles coming next month. Click the link to read more information directly from the developer’s website and sign up to be notified when it is released.

Choir Creator: The All-in-One Virtual Choir Builder:

Choir Creator is the easiest way to organize and produce a virtual choir video. Releasing to the United States and Canada in August 2020 for iPhone and iPad running iOS 12.4 or later.

From the YouTube demo on the developer’s website, it looks like the workflow solves nearly all of the friction of this process. The business model of charging the teacher a considerable (but reasonable) amount of money and nothing to the student is solid.

That said, this process does not leave a lot of room for control. I would like to be able to, for example, turn up the tuba if it isn’t loud enough. I can think of numerous other ways that I would want to exercise more control than the output of this app would allow. That said, there is a strong market for software that makes it this easy. I think it may do well.

It’s iOS only at launch, which is not a surprise, but will limit school systems where students are using Chromebooks.

Edit: I have spoken with the developers of this app. They informed me that Choir Creator will support basic audio editing features at launch, like changing the volume and panning of each track. They said they have more audio editing features to come. Good to know!

🔗 Business Chat Now Available to All Zendesk Customers

From MacRumors:

Apple Business Chat Now Available to All Zendesk Customers:

Apple and Zendesk today made Business Chat generally available for all businesses that use Zendesk Support, over two years since the service first went into beta.

Business chat is a really useful feature that lets you connect with customer support right in the Apple Messages app.

The feature takes email out of the equation and improves the entire user experience to where contacting support feels as simple as texting a friend.

I have used it to get a hold of Apple and Home Depot and it's a dream. By Zendesk integrating it, it will become easy for the numerous large and small companies to take advantage of it. The more widespread this becomes, the less often you will need to search Google for the exact page of a companies website you are looking for, fill out a web form, get tons of confirmation responses, and wait forever.

🔗 MuseScore Announces Version 4, and Transition from Notation Software to Composition Software

In case you didn’t see it, MuseScore made a big announcement last month.

MuseScore 4. Moving from notation software to composition software. | MuseScore:

Although notation is always of paramount importance to MuseScore, we want to expand our capabilities to include other areas of modern composition: experimentation, sharing & collaboration, working with mixed media, sophisticated organisation and being able to produce high-quality audio. MuseScore 4 is the first step in achieving this expanded focus.

However, this does not mean that we are going to start adding new features at the expense of existing ones. In order to achieve our goals, we need to look ‘inwards’ first. Armed with two years of user feedback on MuseScore 3, we have begun the process of making significant improvements to almost all aspects of the application: improved engraving defaults, simplification of the interface, more powerful functionality and an overhaul of its appearance, to name a few.

I don’t use MuseScore often, but I know it is widely respected as a lightweight and accessible notation editor. It really resonates with a lot of the teachers in my district, particularly those who are comfortable with using apps over web browsers to compose, and who don’t want something over the top and expensive like Sibelius or Finale.

This is exciting news for MuseScore and I am curious to see where their development goes.

Some of the folks from MuseScore appeared on a recently released episode of the Scoring Notes podcast, which I haven’t listened to yet, but suspect they go into more detail about the transition to version 4.

🔗 Noteflight Announces Soundcheck, Bringing New Pitch and Rhythm Analysis Features You Can Add to Your Assignments

Web based music notation editor, Noteflight, recently launched a new feature called SoundCheck. It works with Noteflight Learn to add the same pitch and rhythm analysis to your assignments that services like Smartmusic and PracticeFirst are capable of.

My understanding is that it works like this: Noteflight is still a standalone service for writing notation, publishing it, and sharing it within the Noteflight community. Noteflight Learn is the service that can be added to your Noteflight subscription which gives you access to content libraries and some LMS features like managing students and assigning work. SoundCheck is a third offering that can be added to your existing Noteflight Learn subscription, that adds the practice and analysis tools to your assignments.

It seems like it should be very easy to make assignments out of your Noteflight scores, which can be imported via the XML format.

John Mlynczak, Managing Director of Noteflight, is coming on the podcast this week to discuss more. Stay tuned.

SoundCheck Check One Two - Noteflight Notes:

We are so excited to announce our partnership with MatchMySound™ technology to bring SoundCheck™ to Noteflight! This proven solution for performance assessment will be available for use with any Noteflight score, and provide ratings and feedback for pitch, rhythm, and intonation – which can be used for assessment. All Noteflight scores will be available in SoundCheck with just the click of a button. All current Noteflight Learn integrations with Google Classroom and LTI tools such as Canvas, Schoology, Moodle, etc, will still be supported for creating and turning in SoundCheck assignments. We are actively integrating this feature now and are committed to having the first version available for use in June.

🔗 Apple honors StaffPad with annual Apple Design Award - Apple

Old news now but I just wanted to give a shout-out to StaffPad for winning an Apple Design Award this year. It is so completely deserved in every way. If you want to hear more of my thoughts on StaffPad, try one of the following posts:

First Impressions of StaffPad

StaffPad Comes to iOS (Reflections on App Store Pricing and Touch Screen Operating Systems)

Music Ed Tech Talk Podcast #7 - Working with StaffPad

Read more about Design Award winners below. They are very focused on pro apps for the iPad this year.

Apple honors eight developers with annual Apple Design Awards:

StaffPad, from StaffPad Ltd., brilliantly converts handwritten musical notations into digital sheet music. Designed for composers who want an easy solution for writing and composing music digitally, the app uses Apple technologies such as Apple Pencil, drag and drop, and Core ML to transform each bar into beautifully typeset music notation that can be edited using intuitive touch or Apple Pencil tools.

🔗 Institute for Composer Diversity: State Repertoire Lists (Wind Band)

The Institute for Composer Diversity is curating special lists from their database, and their first one features wind band music! I am especially excited that this list includes works for beginners, an area that I find it typically challenging to program for. There is a lot of beginning music on this list to pick from.

State Lists — Institute for Composer Diversity:

Required state repertoire lists exist differently in every state in the U.S. and ICD, along with our partners in On The List and many others, wants to help to make sure those solo, chamber, and large ensemble lists appropriately provide students with music from many diverse voices. We’re starting with wind band works, but will grow this project to include choir, orchestra, jazz ensembles, and chamber works!

The lists below comprise a growing list of works for wind band composed or arranged by either a woman composer or a composer/arranger from an underrepresented heritage which have been selected by one or more U.S. state for repertoire lists. K-12 schools are required to perform works from these lists at district-and state-wide band festivals and competitions. Most of these works are in our Works Diversity Database (and those that aren’t will soon be)!

🔗 Gizmodo: 6 Free Final Cut Pro Alternatives for Making Your Own MoVies

While Final Cut Pro still gets my vote, this list will probably be useful to my music teaching friends looking to make virtual ensemble videos.

6 Free Final Cut Pro Alternatives for Making Your Own Movies

Video editing is easier than it’s ever been, with the barrier to entry becoming less pricey every year. As long as you have some decent footage to work with, you can turn it into something presentable—and dare we say professional—using programs that won’t cost you anything. Here are six of the best free video editors to help you unleash your inner Oscar-winning director.