People are People by Depache Mode is one of their iconic songs that dominated the US market in mid 1980s. Its slow but has a very neat beat that just wants to make you dance. They use sytheziser, percussions and other material that I do not know on top of my head. The form is ABABAC where A is the Chrous, B is the verse and C is the bridge/finale of the song. The melody of the song is founded in the chrous while the harmony is found in the finale. Overall this is song is a classic and I would recommend it to someone who loves 80s music.

This is a draft of my final project, the song is called Tone: Light Vs Dark. The reason why I titled this is to show the tonality of music and identity of the story weather to go for Light (Happiness and Postive Energy) or Dark (Anger, Savage and War).

Halo by Depeche Mode is a classic dark tone song from their hit album titled Violator. The format uses AABABB where A is the verse is B is the the chrous. Unlike the other songs I talked about, this one doesn’t have a bridge as it automacally skips to the final Chours. The instruments that are uses are Vocals, Syntheziers, Drums and Bass. The syntheziers are used in multiple ways but it does good with the melody. The harmony lies with the chrous part as everything comes together like the finale of the song. Overall, this is one of my favoritre songs to listen to and I reccomended to anyone that would like to get into Electronic Music.

This is my first time EQ-ing a song, hopefully you guys enjoy it.

Crown by TXT is a lighter tone song which happens to be their debut song. However, this is the Japanese Version of the song. The original Korean Version was released in March 2019, and the Japanese version was release in early 2020. The song structure they is ABABCB, where A is the verse, B is the chorus, and C is the bridge. Comparing both versions, the Japanese version has more harmony in the vocals when the second verse takes place then its original counterpart. Besides vocals and background, bass, drums and synthesizers were use this song. The Melody are mostly use in the synthesizers for the beginning of the song and within the chorus. Overall this is a very upbeat song and I recommended to anyone regardless if they know Japanese. 

This song is called Random

Alva Noto’s U_03 is very weird since I never listen to this type of music before. It has a pretty good beat but not that type that wants to makes you dance. The structure is basically ABCD as A starts off with little instruments/sounds and D being the finale as things gets intense. The beats and bass in this songs comes together to make a bass line. The sounds that you hear is melody while the rest is the harmony coming together in the finale as you listen to the song. Overall its a pretty interesting piece but not my cup of tea.

Pop/Stars by K/DA is very upbeat pop song which you can dance to. The Musical form that’s used in this song is called verse-chorus, which is the most popular form that is use in music today. If you go by letter, it would be ABABCB, where A is the verse, B is chorus and C is the bridge/climax of the song. The Melody is of the song is a combination of the members vocals/raps and the synthesizers that are use to lead to section B (chorus) of the song. The Harmony of the song is found in the chorus where all members are singing which occurs three times throughout the song. As mentioned before, this song is very upbeat and a combination of dance pop with hip-hop thrown into the mix to spice the song up. The instruments that were use based on listening besides the vocals are synthesizers/keyboard and a drum machine for the beat of the music. As a K-pop fan, I enjoy listening to this song as to keep my motivation going to achieve my goal on who I want to be in life. Overall, I would recommend it to someone who also listen to K-pop and for someone who wants to motivated.

The song that I created is to show positive energy, cause you always got to be positive

This review written by Jaron Lewis gives you an idea of which music distribution company is best for you when you published your song or album for the first time. In the article, he compares five distributors which are Distrokid, CD Baby, Tunecore, Awal, and Ditto, and gives his opinions about them. He first starts with Tunecore and states that it “doesn’t take any commissions. You get to keep 100% of the royalties and their reports are some of the best around, allowing you to get a really good insight into how well your music is doing.” (Lewis 2) What he means by that is if you published your song through there, you still own 100% of the song which is a positive point. The next distributor he discusses is Distrokid which in my opinion is popular because I know a band who used it when they released their first full-length album. Like Tunecore, he states that whenever you release an album or song, “ you keep 100% of the royalties.” (Lewis 4) The third company he talks about is CD Baby. However, unlike the first two, he explains that “ they do charge 9% commission for music streaming and 30% for YouTube distribution. If you’re looking to go down the YouTube route, then it is worth taking this into consideration. “ (Lewis 5) This implies that you don’t get to keep it all as some of it goes to music platforms while almost half of it goes to YouTube. This means that by using CD Baby, your royalties are 61% which isn’t good if it's not 100%. For the last two which are Awal and Ditto, he didn’t have much to say but those two have problems on their own problems. for Awal, he explains that “The biggest downfall of this platform however is that it is invite only, so if you don’t know someone on the inside, you can strike this one off the list.” (Lewis 5) Besides the fact, the Awal is the only company that doesn’t have fees when distributing albums, the fact that you can only invite some people is a red flag since you want more people to listen to your song. As for Ditto, he explains that “there are a lot of hidden costs with Ditto, it is worth reading the small print before signing up to anything.” (Lewis 5) Lewis is basically giving you a heads up before signing up for distributing. Based on his reviews, if I had to pick a distributor to publish my music, I would go for Distrokid because it’s the only common one that I know, and it is easy to use.

The Original Work is Bach Work #7

The music industry in the United States is a tough business to get into as a musician. One of the things that’s complicated is music production itself. In an article titled “How Musicians Make Money -- Or Don’t at All -- in 2018″, Amy X. Wang goes into details on music production and explains who gets paid in this industry. A chart is provided so we have an idea of what goes on in music publishing and sound recording. However, the interesting part of this chart is who gets paid. For instance, on the music publishing side, two groups are getting paid and they are the publishers themselves and the songwriters. For sound recording, there are three groups that are getting paid, they are the record label, performers, and musicians themselves. What’s interesting about this chart alone is the artist gets paid in one aspect of production which is recording the songs themselves but not when the song gets published. On top of that, there are other groups of people that also get paid in different aspects like advertising it, performing it live, the people who listen to it and buys it’s in stores or streams it, fashion, and merchandising. In the final section of the article, Wang states that “All of the above is by no means a comprehensive list of ways that modern artists make money; keep in mind that it’s also now easier than ever to switch lanes and become a producer or writer for someone else’s music, as is the case with Bebe Rexha’s journey from songwriting to recording or American R&B hitmakers’ move to South Korea’s K-Pop Industry (which complicates the royalties splits a bit by involving copyright law from overseas, but nonetheless brings back significant money).” (Wang 6) This indicates that getting paid in an industry like this is complicated and no possible way as there are many factors in music production altogether.

This is the modified version of Bach work #7

This is the original version of Bach Work #7

MacBook Pro 13-inch Vs Dell Inspiron 15 3000 Laptop

When looking for a laptop for your home studio for music making, The MacBook Pro and a Dell Inspiron has a huge difference in all of the criteria needed for an individual musician like myself. For the MacBook Pro 13-inch, its software is the OS Big Sur, which is the latest OS for all Apple Products. It’s processor is Apple M1 chip. Inside the chip it has a 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, an 8-core GPU, and a 16-core Neural Engine. In addition, it has 2 USB ports and Thunderbolt for charging the laptop and can import stuff to your computer. However, it does not have firewire port on the laptop. For the Dell Inspiron 15 3000 Laptop, the software is Windows 10 as its the current one for all PC products. It’s processor is Intel Celeron Processor N4020. This Laptop has 3 USB ports, but it does not have a Thunderbolt port nor a Firewire port. Out of those two laptops, I would purchase the MacBook Pro 13-inch as my Laptop for my home made studio because the laptop has a built-in virus protection so that the laptop doesn’t get infected while producing an album or a song. 

My Response to “The Success of Streaming Has Been Great for Some, But Is There A Better Way?”

Streaming has become a modern way for everyone in the world as they can listen to music on their mobile devices. However, since streaming music has become a thing in our society, it plays a crucial role in the music industry as it makes it more complicated for musicians who want to be big, music stores, and music production altogether. In one part of the article, the author Paula Mejia states, “As a consequence, streaming isn't just changing consumption habits, but how people write music altogether — with songs becoming shorter and shorter...” What that means is the structure of music production and making/writing a song drastically changes the workflow and if musicians and bands want to put their music on those streaming sites, they have to change their song structure so it can engage their fans. All of that alone can cause a halt in production and can delay an album release. In my opinion, streaming music isn’t that bad but, it does take away the novelty of music stores. Since most of the music is digital, the stores themselves aren’t making money and can possibly shut down. Streaming companies like Apple, Spotify, Bandcamp, and Soundcloud just to name a few, are in fact making money as people continuously stream music, it becomes the biggest factor on why music stores close down as we don’t see a lot of music stores today. Overall, is there a better way? The answer is no, in my opinion, streaming music has made an impact but also made it impossible to go backwards as many music charts have made streaming one of the criteria's of getting your album to the number one spot and makes it more complex to fellow musicians who want to make it big in the industry.