Kniteforce Revolution

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About Kniteforce Revolution!

Dec 10, 09:59 PM

I would like to make a few observations about the Kniteforce Revolution project and about putting the entire back catalogue online for free!

Firstly, I have been lucky enough to have a great deal of support from many people over the years who have paid for my releases, firstly on vinyl back in the day, right up to when I was selling CDs and the complete collection as MP3s.

In some ways, it could be seen as a betrayal for me to give away the music that people had spent money on. But the truth is, the industry has changed, and I have decided to change with it rather than fight the inevitable. Its little comfort to those who paid for the back catalogue, I know. But if those people hadn’t done that at that time, I wouldn’t have been able to reach this point in the first place. And I am forever grateful to those who paid. Sadly, though, it is the nature of things to lose value, and the music business is no exception.

The music industry is damaged beyond repair in my humble opinion. This doesn’t mean its time to give up – rather, it means its time to look at the whole industry from a different perspective. To wax lyrical, the phoenix rises from the ashes – but first, you have to have the ashes. The whole music scene has been burning itself to death for years, as many cling to an old way that no longer works. Right now, we are all kicking the last embers of an old fire that has burned the same way for nearly 100 years. Change has come.

I would love for music to still be on vinyl. I would love for selling MP3’s to be as exciting and profitable as vinyl used to be. It would be excellent if people didn’t file share.

But I choose to live with what is, not what I wish for. And so, I choose to move forward in a riskier direction. And its a big risk – I can’t take this back or change my mind, even if I wanted to (which I don’t). On the other hand, with things being the way they are, the value of music has dropped in a very large way. This is simply the truth. People who argue it are clinging to the old model of the music industry, hiding from reality, and are in for a rude awakening eventually.

And its okay that things have changed. In this, there is freedom. The very fact that the old way is dead means that a new way can live. No longer is the record label the king of the artist. Acts like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead have already dispensed with the need for a record label, and they are just a few of many. These 2 examples may be world famous acts, but the facts remain the same regardless of the size of the artist.

We are at a turning point, the past and the future balanced. But the weight is moving in one direction only.

It used to be that the Dj or the live performance promoted the music. Bands and Djs would tour the country promoting their music in their sets, to get high sales of their albums and singles.
Now, the music promotes the live performance. The live performance cannot be copied, or shared, except by the people that paid to see it. This is why Nine Inch Nails can give away an album for free, yet charge $100.00 for a ticket to see them live.

For the last few years, I have seen this in shift in value in my own tiny sphere of influence. KFA vinyl sales are okay – but they barely cover costs. I am not the only one. A big tune is, what? 1000 units? When I started Kniteforce, a big tune was 20,000. Kniteforce pressed 5000 units as a first run from KF025 (Piano Progression) up to around KF040. And before Kniteforce, the sales were even higher.

Now, 300 units is to be expected. In the meantime, Supaset 7 had tens of thousands downloads in the year or so it was up on my Kniteforce Revolution holder page. How can that many people download my set, and record sales be 300 copies? Think about that. Thats a lot of people listening to me, and not buying my records ha ha.

For years, like many in the industry, I moaned and cried about file sharing. I tried to enhance record sales. I was as protective of my music as I could be. The results were that..err…well, nothing changed. Record sales continued to drop, and will continue to do so. I meet Djs who have never owned a record. Djs who mix on laptops.
I love vinyl, but vinyl is dead. I will still release vinyl, but I will do so because I like releasing vinyl. Its a selfish act, done for my own pleasure and for the pleasure of those that love vinyl as much as I do.

However, I recognise that things have changed, and I am moving to embrace those changes instead of fighting what cannot be fought, or burying my head in the sand.

I intend Kniteforcerevolution to become a hub for the legal sharing of hardcore music, both Kniteforce related and other labels. Not just the music either – I am already putting up the samples from my tunes as well. A time will come when I can work on a projects, get halfway, then post it for others to finish. And vice versa.

These are just possibilities, just a few thoughts as I sit here and type. But its exciting to think of what could happen, rather than what is not working.

The internet has levelled the playing field. Making and releasing music is not about who you know, its about what you know. And about what you will do. I don’t know what I will do yet, or what the future holds for Kniteforce or Hardcore in general. But I know it wont be what I did before – its new, exciting, and there are endless possibilities. And that, my friends, is a very good thing.

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Comment

Nice read Luna-C, and thanks for the inclusion in Podcast #2. On that note, I think that there’s something to be said for an artist who’s never made a dime on my music, but experienced more joy in being included in your podcast than any “sales” ever could have given me. Perhaps it’s nice to think that success will be measured in how many downloads are completed versus how much money is generated. Which one really holds more “power” – a wide reach, or a few more dollars?

It is a shame that art is a money losing industry in our culture when it contributes so much, but in some ways historically that’s always been the case, particularly with good art. Van Gogh comes to mind.

But perhaps even with the free economics of digital music there’s more of a money making opportunity now than there ever has been – from live performance, to <sigh> google ad sense, amazon affiliates, itunes/beatport/etc, and on and on. Now that the distribution lines have been opened up so that you don’t have to have a major label getting you into the big stores, perhaps there’s potentials that just haven’t been realized yet.

I have to believe that resistance is futile, and the only hardcore artists that will move into the future will follow your lead. But damn, it takes a lot of courage to be the label to really embrace the future. Mad props to you!

—phatmann (littleboy’s partner in crime)

— Phatmann · Dec 11, 07:19 PM

Let me, one of the “new class” of audiophiles/DJs (meaning I can’t remember a time before computers were everywhere) comment.
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My main point of criticism here was when you said “I love vinyl, but vinyl is dead”. That’s absolutely not true. A correct statement would’ve been “CDs are dead.” The amazing truth is that vinyl is making a resurgence within traditional and “new” audiophile/DJing communities (not so much with DJing yet, but it hasn’t been gone as much with DJing as it has with the audiophiles).
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The truth is that people simply became fed up with the mastering processes, among other things, when buying a CD. One can easily get an exact copy of a CD online (and I mean exact: with measures taken to check it), however a person cannot in any way get an actual record for free. The records have the smell, the warmth, the artwork, the feel… all of which CDs and mp3s lack.
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From a technical standpoint, the idea is that the analog mastering and engineering processes used to create a finished record record frequencies at a much higher range than with a CD. CDs are dithered to 44.1 upon release, but that’s not true with records. They can contain frequencies (without aliasing XD) up to almost infinity, since it’s an analog recording. The piracy scene has responded to this (using 24-bit 96-kHz lossless files), but it cannot a. the exact frequency response (it goes higher than 48 kHz in some instances. Rare, though), and b. it cannot duplicate the feel.
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As a result of this, many audiophile communities are starting to transition back to vinyl. My great-uncle, who’s at least 80 years old, is one of the traditional audiophiles. He’s got a massive shelf of audiophile amp gear, a 7.1 speaker system along with his massive LCD, and catalogs and magazines piled in his garage. Inside those new issues, from just this year and a few before, he was really surprised to see vinyl making a comeback. He had forgotten he even had a turntable in the first place! It was from the 70s, and it worked like a charm. Old Technics SL-2. When I listened to a record on it that I had previously heard on CD (Weird Al, if you must know), it sounded incredibly warm and simply had some indescribable feeling to that… I can’t explain it, but I’m sure you know what I mean.
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Of course, he let me borrow it so I could listen to a small “inherited” record collection (I can spin disco now :P). From that point on, after listening to some Kraftwerk and some Drum N Bass I picked up in San Francisco earlier (BREED001, Insideinfo / Katharsys – Skyhook / The Scraper. Epic stuff!)… I realized that my mp3-DJing would not continue forever.
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In other words, I’d buy vinyl if I could afford it. I’m 15 at the moment, and I’m absolutely sure that there are other people my age who feel the same way: our parents thought that CDs were amazing. They became enamored with the new ways. We, being the next generation, pillage the good of the old generation to create the new advances in our own. It happened with acid, disco, synthpop, and now, vinyl.
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When I get older and am able to get a job legally through New York State law, hopefully one of my first purchases will be a pair of turntables and a mixer. Thanks to the internet, rare vinyl is only a click away, but I’m also blessed enough to have 2 local record stores within biking distance (neither of which carries a sizable amount of electronic music, though :S).
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In other words, vinyl is coming back. Don’t get depressed. Keep on pressing! My friends and I buy it, when we can afford it.
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(On a related note, never license ANY of your music to be used on Apace compilation CDs. They’re ripoffs. They cut the track lengths to get 20 to fit on a disc. Worst album I’ve ever purchased. Hopefully the record store will take the bait and pay a sizable amount for a “rare 5 disc UK import”.)

— Nav · Dec 18, 12:46 AM