Collaborating on "Creative Things"

The post below was originally the last half of this post, The Rise of the "Creative Thing," but to keep the amount of reading to a manageable level, I moved it into its own post.

___________

Of the three ways to create multimedia productions (do it yourself, hire someone, or collaborate) collaboration is the most complex because establishing how everyone gets paid can be tricky. Payment can be based on:

everyone's individual contribution, or

an equal distribution, no matter who does what, or

an unequal distribution based on what everyone brings to the table in terms power/influence/prestige.

Denver-based John Common reached out to artists while working on his most recent album. They were invited to decorate wooden boxes which, in addition to serving as fancy CD packages, would be displayed and sold in an art gallery. The band, the artist, and the gallery would each share equally from the sale.

Completed boxes will be returned to the Bailey/Common team where they will be prepared for exhibition/sale. All boxes will be exhibited from July 9 -17 at Abecedarian Gallery. Base prices for each artwork will be mutually agreed on by the artist and Bailey/Common team. Once sold each artist receives 35% of the sale price, along with a copy of the new CD. Common Box Project: Prospectus

Amanda Palmer has done multiple collaborations. In most cases she hasn't said who gets paid what, but she did go on record in this case, involving a troupe of performance artists who went on tour with her.

Lisa: Is it true The Danger Ensemble perform with you for free?

Amanda: I can’t afford to pay them, so we have been touring for five months cutting costs wherever we can, staying with fans and handing out donation baskets after the show, sometimes the fans even bring food in. This system has been working well, if it didn’t they wouldn’t be here, so far they have been making more money from tips than their regular jobs. "Who Killed Amanda Palmer? An Interview with the Queen of Punk Cabaret," LifeMusicMedia, 2/26/09.

Here is what she says in general about collaborations.

Having done a long career with the Dresden Dolls and a couple of years with a solo career, I've really been able to divine what's important to me. And it's not money. It's not commercial success. What I really want to do is make art with my friends. And if possible make people happy by doing that. ...

That being said, I've also seen enough friendships destroyed by creative collaboration that you have to choose very carefully what you're doing and who you're doing it with. There was once in this collaboration -- not creatively, because we work creatively and business-wise really well together -- but when it got to the point that some people got upset about the project, that really strained our relationship. Because all of a sudden -- our intentions are completely good, we were loving our recording and loving planning our tour and playing this wonderful game with our fans. But as soon as critics from the outside came and rained on our parade, we had different recactions to it. And that was a challenge for us. We're wise enough people and good enough friends that it only lasted a day. "Interview: Amanda Palmer on Neil Gaiman, Frances Bean Cobain, and why her people think Evelyn Evelyn is career suicide," The Phoenix, 4/12/10.

Denver-based photographer Lucia De Giovanni told me her collaborations are often friend-based projects as well.

It's usually a mutual interest - a lot of friendships are born out of photoshoots for which I get approached, and then people get interested in what else I have cooking up and start collaborating, usually over dinner or drinks! I would say that people are very respectful of certain artistic boundaries - for example, I usually have carte blanche for a photoshoot, but I don't think of that as my project, it's something I do to promote them. And vice versa - when I select music for a slideshow, it's certainly a collaborative project, but the composer is providing a piece of the big project... they're a part of it, under my umbrella. And it works because we're all friends and supportive of each other's creative outlets - I don't know if it would have the same "feel" if we didn't know each other. Then, I guess, it reverts to a service provider, you hire me. But that doesn't mean it's not their project as well, they're a HUGE part of it... it works because creatively we are on the same wave length.

And here is what David Byrne has to say on collaborations.

I have done a number of collaborations myself – with designers, other musicians, theatre directors and choreographers. It’s always a little bit different one project from another, but the collaborative process has certain similarities. I find someone has to be boss. Though we might claim open source, no censorship and willingness to listen, veto power resides somewhere, and has to be acknowledged as such. Someone, as subtly as possible, has to keep things on track and focused. There are ways to do this that are dictatorial and other ways that are benign, subtle, almost invisible – but the guiding hand needs to be there. In my experience I sometimes choose to defer to the other collaborator, and I make that clear from the start; other times it’s the other way around. "Interview: Bruce Mau and David Byrne," Contemporary, Issue #69, 2004.

Here are three resources which might be of use if you are thinking of collaborations.

Building a Collaborative Entertainment Property

Small-Scale Network Modeling for Interdisciplinary Art Collaborations (Powerpoint presentation)

Dividing Ownership in a Group Project (Added 10/4/10.)

Palmer's latest project, Evelyn Evelyn, is also a collaboration.

“It was really a wonderful, true collaboration,” Palmer says of Evelyn Evelyn’s origins, on the line from a Prague tour stop. “Jason [Webley] and I, looking back on having written some of these songs two years ago, can’t remember who did what. We can’t remember who wrote which line, who came up with which melody idea. And I think that’s actually a really good sign that our minds really melded during the songwriting process.

“It was like playing a really manic game of songwriter Ping-Pong,” she continues, “where one of us would come up with a concept and we would just bat ideas back and forth over Thai food, cracking each other up. It’s so funny—you can come up with all sorts of artsy, highfalutin ideas and reasons why we did this project, but really, we just wanted to hang out together.” "Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley make Evelyn Evelyn twice as fun," Straight.com, 5/13/10.

I think it’s important to point at that this record never had a “message”. But in that Malcolm McLuhan way, the record itself is the message. We are two artists who love games, theater and dark humor. In giving ourselves permission to do a project this ridiculous, we’re probably saying something that we’ve never said with our more self-serious solo records. "An interview with Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley on Evelyn Evelyn," NewBeats, 5/10/10.

In addition to the album, there will be a graphic novel, a concept that has been embraced by other musicians as well.

Is the pairing up of the graphic novel and the album the future? Palmer isn’t so sure. “As artists are getting cleverer about capitalising on their releases, some will do some groundbreaking stuff with graphic novels. But for others, it won’t make sense. Sure you may see the pop star du jour putting one out but that doesn’t mean it’s this great new thing. I’d love to read what a brilliant mind like Robyn Hitchcock would do in the genre but, to be honest, I don’t know if I’d want to see the Beyonce graphic novel.” "Pop stars branch out into graphic novels," Financial Times, 4/16/10.

Cynthia Von Buhler, who will do the artwork for the Evelyn Evelyn graphic novel, is herself a multimedia artist and frequent collaborator.

Cynthia von Buhler is an internationally exhibiting visual artist, illustrator, children's book author, and performer living in New York City. Von Buhler uses traditional as well as unconventional media: painting, sculpture, performance, video projection, installation, living fauna, collage, photography, human detritus, and electronic audio.

... Von Buhler's paintings have appeared in more than a thousand magazines, books, publications, billboards, and CDs. ...

Von Buhler is also involved in the music industry and performance art, and has performed at museums, galleries, and nightclubs in major cities around the country. Von Buhler's seminal, underground performance troupe, “Women of Sodom” won a Best Music Poll Award from The Boston Phoenix and paved the way for the revival of burlesque and cabaret acts in Boston such as the Dresden Dolls. ... Von Buhler also formed and managed the band Splashdown, who were for a time signed to Capitol Records. She also co-owned Castle von Buhler Records with her ex-husband and Splashdown member, Adam Buhler and Clifford Stoltze. Castle von Buhler released a series of three art and music CD compilations which won many art and design awards. The Curriculum Vitae of Von Buhler

Some of her projects are more lucrative than others.

Cynthia von Buhler entered the field in the mid-1980s but found it slow going at first. In fact, she contemplated being a stripper so she could work on illustrations during the day. “I got two jobs my first year, but then it picked up and I quit my day job.

... "Through the years, I have tried other fields like band management, record label ownership, and running my own band, and in all I was disadvantaged due to my sex, but in illustration I have always felt that it doesn’t matter what I look like and it doesn’t matter that I’m a woman.” "What Inequality?" Step Inside Design, Nov/Dec 2005.

I’m getting royalties from my books now and it is a nice surprise to receive unexpected money in the mail. It isn’t enough to live on yet but I’m working on it. I do fine art, illustration and run my own gallery/event space so I make my money from various sources. I see my book royalties as my retirement fund. "Getting Published—Myth or Reality?" Communication Arts, 7/5/07.

I have found nothing specific about how she gets paid on her collaborations, but I did find this, which suggests she doesn't expect everything to make money.

Illustration is her bread and butter; von Buhler's works have appeared in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, Atlantic Monthly, and Vogue, on the cover of the Juilliard String Quartet's ''Intimate Letters'' CD, and in countless periodicals. But her immediate focus is on creating an exhibition space for ''artists who want to do things that aren't market-driven, that aren't necessarily for sale, that are cutting-edge. Art that you probably wouldn't want to put in your house but is really interesting to view, and opens your mind to new ideas.'' "Original Cynthia." Boston Globe, 3/30/2000.

Another musician/designer is Nathan Johnson. He does film scores, produces visual art, and is a member of a design studio. He also created The Cinematic Underground, a performance ensemble, which included multiple siblings and a sister-in-law.

Imagine this: a film composer, a classically-trained piano instructor, a log-cabin builder, a high-school student, a dancer, a grade-school teacher, an actor, an architect, a struggling novelist, an illustrator and a landscape gardener all move together under one Boston roof. "Interview w/ The Cinematic Underground," Sounds Good, 11/9/05.

Their big project was Annasthesia.

We wrote basically a literal concept narrative album, which is quite different from your standard concept album because . . . it actually is a literal story with exterior characters. It's called Annasthesia. The story is about love and escape and risk. And kind of the choice you make that either has to do with numbing yourself or engaging with life . . . it's sort of an anti-love story, and that's the album we're touring. . . The album comes with a 24 page color graphic novella that my brother Zach did all the illustrations for. So you actually read it like a comic book as you listen to the album. And what we're doing this year is we're taking that and putting it on the stage, so the show becomes a mash-up between a concert and a graphic novel, and kind of a weird narrative storytelling form.

It's not acting 'as such,' but I'm in character on the show and my sister is as well . . . So the way that we do it is we actually play all the songs live, but we project all of the graphic novel onto the stage on this big screen behind us. I'm kind of the [lead character.] So it's not acting in the sense that . . . well, we don't have lines but we definitely perform it as an abstract theater piece, a concert, and a comic book. It's really fun.

The thing that really drives it is the storytelling aspect of it. And that's something that I think is apparent in the way we made the album. We wrote the story before the music. I recorded it in my brother's bedroom in my parents' house. We had these massive charts up all over the wall where I was madly working out how to structure this story and what was drawn. That really laid the groundwork and the restrictions for the music. The music came out of that and filled the different parts we needed in the story. "Interview w/ The Cinematic Underground," Sounds Good, 11/9/05.

The Past, Present, and Future of "The Creative Thing" Musical Production

Creating a story and then writing music to fit has long been part of opera, operettas, and musical theater. And perhaps that's the way it should be done. Green Day's American Idiot was turned into a musical after the fact. But as one critic pointed out, you'll get a more cohesive production if you coordinate a story with the songs from the beginning.

... the qualities that can make an indie-rock album so compelling — attitude, mood, grit — are probably not going to be able to sustain a theatrical journey. Drama needs more connective tissue. "Critic's Notebook: 'American Idiot' and the fate of the contemporary musical," Los Angeles Times, 5/20/10.

Aside from the fact that most bands don't have the talent to write a rock musical/opera, there are at least two challenges which may limit the popularity of this format: not all fans want to follow a linear story line at a concert and not all music venues can accommodate a stage production.

Still, Byrne's latest release, Here Lies Love, about Imelda Marcos, appears to be headed that direction.

The package contains a small illustrated book, with notes and lyrics by Byrne, plus an additional DVD of documentary footage. If he can secure the financial backing, Byrne hopes to present this in future as a sort of club-based musical.

“Some people may feel it’s a bit too close to Evita, but I’ve made a point not to see that show, so I don’t really know,” says Byrne. In truth, he says, he’s not that keen on straight musicals, but he accepts that this is what Here Lies Love will probably end up being. He prefers to see it as a drama set to music, a portrait of a flawed and needy attention-seeker. "Imelda Marcos gets the Evita treatment," Times Online, 2/21/10.

To put today's musical into context, here's a good overview of music combined with theater down through the ages.

And for fun, here's a big list of concept albums, the vast majority of which will never be turned into musical theater or movies.

At this point, I'd like to expand into a discussion of transmedia, but I'll save that for the next blog post: An Overview of Transmedia

More Examples of Multimedia Projects or Collectives that Involve Music

Ride, Rise, Roar

The songwriter essentially invited three choreographers to wrap him up within their sometimes faux-naive, sometimes sexy, often transfixing compositions, and even fans who hang on [David] Byrne's every gesture may have a hard time keeping their attention off the dancers who leap over him, dart between him and his microphone, coast by him on office chairs and cavort abstractly around the stage.

Color performance footage is intercut with black-and-white behind-the-scenes material that offers some insight into the choreographers' creative agendas and hints at the collaborative process that led to the latest Byrne/Eno record, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today." "Ride, Rise, Roar," The Hollywood Reporter, 3/16/10.

77 Million Paintings

Hard to say what this Brian Eno invention is. Part book, part screen saver, part gallery painting, part DVD video, part music, part software. It slices and dices your perceptions! The accompanying book in this package makes it clear that this an art piece that is normally exhibited in a large room. Here it comes disguised as DVD that you load onto your computer (Windows or Mac). "Cool Tools: 77 Million Paintings," kk.org, 12/19/06.

Ghostly International

Ghostly International is a multi-platform cultural curator, a tightly knit aesthetic universe fulfilling the roles of art gallery, design house, clothing designer, technology innovator, music-publishing company—and, yes, record label—in one. In the years since its birth in 1999, Ghostly has grown from a boutique label known for its experimental-pop and -techno acumen to an internationally recognized platform for the work of the world's best visual artists, designers, technologists, and musicians.

Alligator Mouth Improv

Drawing on theater, movement, vocals, music, storytelling, and video, and using audience stories, themes and ideas as inspiration, we offer one-of-a-kind performances created in the moment.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE 6/6/10

Here's a very good overview of how new American musicals are differing from older forms and the fact that traditional forms still sell better. My take is that the newer forms are going to be more popular with audiences that never attend Broadway-style shows. That means reaching those audiences elsewhere. But to do that means staging productions which are much cheaper to produce and can be offered in a bigger variety of venues. "New York 2010: Out with the old American musical"

And here's a piece on Jim Lewis, who collaborated on Fela!, one of those new musicals.

The idea that [choreographer Bill T. Jones] and I could create a new kind of show that would appeal to a really diverse audience, more accustomed to MTV than a well-made play, fueled our work over the next five years. How could something closer to the energy of a concert also tell a story and inspire young people to strive to change the world? ...

... our dreams of that alternate space were replaced by a new reality: to do the show we’d created would cost too much to run anywhere but Broadway. "Fela! Scribe Jim Lewis on the Show's Wild Ride to 11 Tony Nominations," Broadway.com, 5/25/10.

Here's an essay that discusses the Internet and collaboration and how "art" is no longer a fixed object anymore.

... where art is concerned the single most important effect of Wiki-culture may be what it portends for the very idea of a tangible art object like a book or painting and what this would portend for industries dedicated to art. Take the Johnny Cash Project again. Like much Wiki-Art, it is organic and ever-changing. The work may reside on the Internet, but, in truth, there is no work — no single art object. It is an ongoing, dynamic series, potentially infinite. "Technology changes how art is created and perceived," LA Times, 6/6/10.

UPDATE 6/13/10
An exploration of where today's music is headed.
Broadway rocks, conclude The Times' theater and pop critics

UPDATE 6/15/10
I had been waiting for more information about this project before posting it, and now I have it. What looked like a good music/graphic novel/theater presentation isn't.

Gorillaz' planned opera with Watchmen and V For Vendetta creator Alan Moore has been ditched....

Going on to explain he had already "wrote a third of it", the writer added that "nobody had done anything else upon the opera" and that other commitments from both parties had decided the fate of the collaboration.

"I had too many commitments as well," Moore admitted. "And since I had never received any money or a contract, I was alright saying, 'Yeah, I'm pulling out of this. You can do your own opera about Dr Dee, I don't own Dr Dee, I don't own the concept of opera'." "Gorillaz ditch opera project with 'Watchman''s Alan Moore," NME.COM, 6/14/10.

UPDATE 6/21/10
Here's another resource on collaborative projects.
Co-creating Value through Collaborative Entertainment

UPDATE 6/27/10
Here's a story about Cirque du Soleil's attempt at creating a scripted show which didn't fare well.

The show struck executives as a little of everything (vaudeville, theater, clowning, acrobatics) but neither entrancing nor memorable by the standards of Cirque — whose popular shows include “Ka” (a gravity-defying production, inspired by martial arts performers) and “O” (a water show). ...

“The reality is, people have very specific expectations with Cirque shows, and ‘Banana Shpeel’ turned out to be neither fish nor fowl — neither circus act nor theatrical vaudeville entertainment,” [Paul Binder, the founding artistic director of Big Apple Circus] said. “So I think it was probably difficult to get a large audience excited about a show when many didn’t really understand what it was.” "When Cirque du Soleil Met Theater - ‘Shpeel’ Failure," New York Times, 6/26/10.

The Rise of the "Creative Thing"

The Devaluation of Music

A number of people have embraced the idea that since it costs nothing, or nearly nothing, to make unlimited digital copies of your music, you should freely give it away for the exposure and then sell limited objects and experiences to those who want more and are willing to pay for it.

What recorded music becomes, then, is the promotional or marketing vehicle for something else. Increasingly it can't be sold as a standalone product because people expect it to be free. Our perceptions of recorded music have changed.

For example, consider these two scenarios:

1. Buy the CD and get the T-shirt for free.
2. Buy the T-shirt and get the CD for free.

If getting music for free has conditioned people to think it has no monetary value, then whatever monetary value they assign to the bundle will be for the T-shirt.

(In contrast to how music is being presented these days, the infomercial trick is to assign a value to the bundle by telling people that all the items in the bundle have a value.

For $20 you get a $15 CD AND $15 T-shirt. A $30 value!!

A smart infomercial person would never say, "Hey, we're not losing any money if you download our music for free, so please do.")

Once we come to accept that recorded music isn't much of a standalone product, we start looking for what we can couple it with to enhance its value. Even Justin Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, says as much.

... he was willing to admit that, “music has to become a multimedia business.” The product is no longer the music in and of itself. The product is the musician’s story and the experience of being a part of it. "TechCrunch Disrupt - Day 3," SoundCtrl, 5/27/10.

One of the most obvious shifts in music presentation has been the move from just recording a song to including it in a video. That's increasingly how we consume music.

[Comparing the same one-week period] the ten most-played music videos on YouTube racked 57.3 million views, while the top ten on MySpace Music generated 7.5 million. "YouTube v. MySpace Music: What a Difference Two Years Makes..." Digital Music News, 5/12/10.

Another example to illustrate that the video can be more important than the music is OK Go.

Their new video for This Too Shall Pass is another viral smash (8m views and counting), but their record sales have been nothing short of a disaster. It hasn't even sold 25,000 copies in the US. ...

[This Too Shall Pass is] endlessly watchable, using a panoply of junk to create a colourful, impossibly complex Rube Goldberg machine. [The video is] certainly popular, but might be just as viral if it contained no sound at all. "OK Go find more viral success – but not real success," The Guardian, 3/18/10.

Thus, combining music with video appears to be good for exposure, but you still need to find something to sell. That leads us to a point where musicians are looking for even more stuff to tack onto the music.

Speaking at Twitter's first-ever developers' conference, Black Eyed Peas frontman, Will.i.am outlined a vision of the music industry of the future where developers will be just as important to a band as the musicians that play on the record. He claimed:

"A band's going to be a singer, a guitar player, a bass player, a code writer, a guy who makes applications, a guy who does computer animation; that is a group. It's going to be self-contained content providers and digital distributers." "Why musicians need digital creatives," StrategyEye, 5/27/10.

Explaining the "Creative Thing"

I'll take it a step further than Will.i.am. I envision a day in the near future where music will be so intertwined with additional forms of media and experiences that it may become nearly meaningless to speak of it as a distinct entity. It will become an inseparable part of a bigger concept, which I will call a "creative thing." There won't be a discernible line between the music and what it is bundled with, which will mean the music business as such will no longer exist. There will be people who continue to specialize in creating music, but since the packaging of music (in whatever form: sound, performance, products) will involve more than just music, music becomes an adjunct of a bigger whole.

You can find good examples of "creative things" on Kickstarter. Artists are trying to raise money for all manner of creative projects. To entice people to contribute money, the project creators offer a variety of premiums. Often neither the projects nor the premiums fall into any sort of neatly defined box. (Examples: A musician offered home-cooked meals. A performance artist offered lip prints. A magazine publisher offered handmade quilts.) The creativity of the project, the offerings, and the presentation/communication of it all blur into a gestalt. Every aspect of each Kickstarter "creative thing" is connected to and reinforces the concept as a whole.

The publisher who offered quilts on Kickstarter is Lee Tusman. One of his music-related activities is serving as a traveling art/music show host.

For Lee, “Running with the Night” is only moonlighting: his day job is curator of the Riverside Art Museum, but his list of artistic extracurriculars is extensive. He created the quilts (or “quiltz” as he likes to call them) that spill out of the Vanagon, as well as many others; he runs a micro-record label called Jewish Noise, which combines abstract electronica/noise with traditional chanting and singing; he sews one-armed cloth dolls; he operates an occasional pizza delivery service out of the Vanagon—people call him, and he makes a gourmet pie from scratch, puts it into a hand-painted pizza box and drives it to the door; he curates the Vanagallery, a mobile art space that’s housed a carousel of artistic works; and most recently, he’s producing a magazine called JANKY. "Behind the Zine," Inland Empire Weekly, 3/11/10.

Not associated with Kickstarter, but one of the best examples of someone in music thinking three-dimensionally is Amanda Palmer.

The wonderful thing about rock is that it's a truly multimedia forum. There's the album artwork, the posters, the live shows, the stage design, the costumes, the videos....it's perfect for a gesamtkunstwerk hound like myself. "Art Space Talk: Amanda Palmer," myartspace> blog, 1/6/09.

In the above interview she also talks about her experience as a performance artist, living in a building housing artists from a variety of media, and having painters creating art during some of her shows.

Who Does the Creating?

To function in this world of "creative things," musicians will need at least one of three approaches:

Personally be able to create more than just music.

Hire people or work with a team who can supplement what they don't/can't do.

Collaborate with artists in other media so that together they create multi-dimensional packages/experiences.

There are a variety of economic and creative ramifications to each arrangement (e.g., Who is going to generate the creative vision? Is everyone going to be paid for their efforts and if so, how?).

The Multidimensional Musician

When the musicians can do everything by themselves, it keeps the economics simple. Whether the music leads to an art sale or the art leads to a music sale, it's all going to the same creator.

Jeffrey Hoover creates works that include both music and visual art.

People sometimes wonder whether the music or the art comes first. It can be either way, and sometimes the work develops simultaneously. In the case of Peacock Blue and An American Toccata the music was written first, then the paintings were created. I wrestled with the idea of how to best represent the music. Would a graphic score be appropriate, or some type of freely conceived representation? I resolved this dilemma by the majority of the painting being an intuitive representation of the music, inserting a graphic score/sonic representation as an entablature on the bottom of the painting. "new work for the eye and ear," Composer NewsUpdate, Vol. 3, No. 1, January, 1999.

Brian Eno has always done art and music together.

Neither my visual nor my musical directions would have taken the shape they did without each other. I make no distinction between the development of my visual and musical output as the two have been growing together, feeding and informing the other. "Brian Eno: The life of Brian," The Independent, 7/25/06.

Another example: A Denver-based band, Lil' Slugger, is putting out a series of comic books they have created themselves.

[Band members] Martin and Couch wrote the books, and Martin’s girlfriend, Beth Link, drew all the pictures, which Martin himself then manipulated in Photoshop. “All credit goes to her,” he says, “and all blame goes to me. It was a totally nightmarish process and no one should ever do it.” "Lil' Slugger's art rock and comic books," The Denver Post, 5/21/10.

Using Specialists to Fill in the Blanks

More typical is the musician/band/label paying creative contractors to do the non-music art. Generally this is a work-for-hire arrangement where the contractor is paid a fee and whoever commissions the art owns it outright and can do whatever he/she/they want with it. A work-for-hire arrangement usually costs more money upfront, but if the musician/band/label think they can sell a lot of copies, it's probably a better deal in the long run because they don't have to share any revenues with the contractor.

Do you ever approach bands you would like to design for?

Sometimes, but mostly they approach me... I prefer working on assignment. ... I need a frame for my work. ... there is a message to be sent to the audience. By looking at my poster, people should be able to see what to expect from a band or gig. An interview with graphics designer Wytse, FuryRocks, 10/4/08.

However, as music is declining as a standalone product, I anticipate we'll see more visual artists realizing what they create is what actually sells. Therefore they may not relinquish their rights so quickly.

The self-supporting graphic-art scene that's flowering now has its own back-story. It was the music business that first really allowed graphic artists off the creative leash; from Milton Glaser's kaleidoscope-haired Bob Dylan poster for CBS in 1966 through to Peter Saville's emotive imagery for Factory Records in the early 1980s, by way of some far-out Pink Floyd gatefolds. As King notes, "Even at the end of the 1980s people went into graphic design because they wanted to produce record sleeves, and that link sadly faded away when vinyl disappeared."

With this avenue of free expression shut down, graphic artists moved over into the rag trade. During the 1990s, the likes of James Jarvis and Fergus Purcell helped create a new trend for limited-run printed T-shirts. At the same time, bookshops such as Magma had started selling monographed design products, and a new breed of graphic-design nerds and collectors was soon multiplying. Once the internet arrived, there was no stopping them. "Warning: graphic content - how a new wave of illustrators is blowing the art world apart," The Independent, 5/16/10.

If designers anticipate more income down the road rather than upfront, they might start asking for a percentage of each sale (often in the form of a licensing fee) rather than a one-time payment. Or, for that matter, leverage might shift entirely. We may find designers commissioning music to go with the art and paying the musicians a fixed, work-for-hire fee. (It's less likely that we'd see the designer creating the art, finding music to go with it, and then giving the musician a percentage of each sale because music has already established itself as the marketing vehicle, not the product itself.)

On to Collaborations

Since this blog post has grown rather long, I'll discuss collaborations in my next post, Collaborating on "Creative Things."

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE 8/3/10

We used to give many of these tchotchke items away for free in an effort to entice people to pay for the music, but we're considering flipping our strategy so that people pay for the toy and receive the music for free. Just a thought. "Sub Pop's Considering Selling Band Merch and Giving the Music Away For Free," Seattle Weekly, 7/30/10.

UPDATE 10/23/10
I knew Liz Clark awhile back when she was still living in Denver. Now she spends part of her time in NYC, part in Ireland (where her bandmate/partner is from), and part of the time on the road. According to their bio:

Liz and Tessa’s philosophy of simplicity manifests itself by spending part of their year as homeless troubadours, touring the USA and sharing their love of music. The rest of the year is spent in Ireland, working a 10 acre organic garden and running an award-winning cafe on the Emerald Island’s West Coast.

They have developed this idea which is a nice variation on the usual house concert.

... we are starting a new concert series to raise money for the album and we are calling it "Beat Roots". It is going to be a food and music series. ... So the idea is that we, L & the M, will come to your house and cook a 3 course gourmet meal for you and your friends, using the finest produce from your locality and while you are eating your dessert we will treat you to an acousic house concert of our L & the M songs. There is a price of course and for the works (which includes a glass of wine or 2) it is $50 a head but we are flexible. Maybe you just want appetizers and wine and we could probably do that for about $30. "Beat Roots," Lonely and the Moose, 10/23/10.

But Is It Art?

Recently Tod Machover, whose work I discussed in a recent blog post, wrote a guest editorial for The New York Times.

It fits in with a topic I have been wanting to cover anyway, the increasing use of electronic tools to easily create music.

As a point of reference, let me say my personal tastes skew toward acoustic music with minimal production. Give me a solo voice or a solo instrument, as unadulterated as possible, and I'll savor the purity of it. I'm partial to warm, uncompressed sounds. Here are two examples:

Danielle Ate the Sandwich She has recorded herself in her apartment playing either guitar or ukulele. It's her voice that I love.

Chet Baker A great example of emotive jazz.

However, I've been reading some very thought-provoking discussions about how new technologies are or aren't good for music and decided the topic was worth exploring. Let me start with this:

Gary Jarman, singer and bassist for UK indie rockers the Cribs, believes some of the passion has gone missing now that anyone can record and release a song.

"It shouldn't be easy [to be a musician], you know? Nowadays it's just like everyone's got a laptop, everyone's got GarageBand, everyone's got a MySpace page," Jarman tells Spinner. "People can have a band or do a song as if it's a vanity project." "The Cribs Think It's Too Easy to Make Music," Spinner, 1/11/10.

In contrast, the people pushing the technology think the ease of creating music is what is valuable.

Most of the skeptics I talk to aren’t upset by the use of computer software or programming in and of itself; in fact, many of them are artists and composers who use technology in their own work as well. What upsets them about my work is the way I give up control over the creative process to people who are not necessarily trained musicians and are often complete strangers.

My response to these critics is to clarify my focus in many of these works: the creative process rather than the creative product. Many of the most exciting, fulfilling, and spiritual experiences of my life have been about creating and performing music. I am trying to share the experience of those moments, not the music that resulted from them, in my own works. "Interview: Jason Freeman," Networked Music Review, 3/11/07.

A lot of singers I know don’t like Auto-tune. They grumble that they shouldn’t have bothered to do all that practicing and studying. Auto-tune makes things easier in the studio, and increasingly on stage, no doubt about it. This bothers people who care about how difficult music is to make. Auto-tune threatens some of the myths we have about musicality: that it’s a special talent possessed only by an exceptional few, and that there’s something noble and admirable in the lifetime of discipline it requires. When Lil Wayne goes into a recording studio, smokes a blunt or three and freestyles an Auto-tuned melody off the top of his head, it calls our European-descended assumptions about romantic musical heroism into question.

In my opinion, this is all for the best. Music isn’t fundamentally about technique. It’s a transmission medium for emotions. A confident and definite performance comes across, accurate pitch or no. When you have a singer do take after take after take in search of technical perfection, you often end up with the sound of a bored and annoyed singer. ...

It’s way too late in the history of technology to be worrying about authenticity. What’s so authentic about recorded sound to begin with? ... What’s so authentic about multitrack recording, compression, EQ, pop filters, artificial reverb, or selecting from multiple takes to find the best one? All that matters to me when I listen is how the music makes me feel. "In praise of Auto-tune," Ethan Hein's Blog, 12/3/08.

Music Creativity Through Technology is dedicated to music educators working with the "Other 80%" of students in our schools who do not participate in the traditional performing ensembles and music classes. With the latest tools in music technology, these educators are finding ways to unleash the creative potential of many of these students....

The impact that GarageBand had can be seen in the overnight emergence of virtual composers sharing their GarageBand creations on the web and reaching out for comment and guidance. As a music educator, I found this especially exciting as it renewed my interest in finding ways to reach those students in our schools that drop out of the traditional music programs as they progress up through the grades, the traditional programs where more and more emphasis is place on traditional performing ensembles and performance expertise of selected repertoire (see Williams 1987). Through lectures, presentations and keynotes, and the work of my graduate students, I began to focus on what I termed the "non-traditional music student (NTMs)," the other 80 percent of students in our school programs that are disenfranchised from music education in one way or another. "The Other 80% Music Home," Music Creativity Through Technology (www.musicCreativity.org).

I watched people go through the same dilemma with online writing. Back in 1998 or so, (a few) people had elaborate personal sites built by hand that would update once a month or so. Then blog software came along and they all thought it was the death of online publishing because anyone could do it, and update not just daily but several times a day.

And that attitude has been shown to be pretty much total bunk.

There are now millions of people writing online and if you know where to look, you can find plenty of great things. That also means there are millions of sites that one might call "crap" that don't interest them, but it's worth it to increase that 1% of really good stuff.

I see the same parallel with music and movies. It's great that things are getting easier. I wish anyone with an idea would write down the idea and have software completely form that into action. I know people invest years in learning tools and they kind of hate it deep down when some kid can pick up the same techniques in ten minutes that took them ten years, but get over yourselves.

Seriously, the mass democratization of everything is one of the crowning achievements of the Internet. In the long run it will mean tons of great music and tons of great short movies and tons of great writing. Don't worry about the problems of millions of people making music -- there are already tools in place to filter out just the best music (like garageband.com's rating system).

posted by mathowie at 8:28 AM on December 4, 2004 "Is Reason and other programs making music production too easy?" Ask MetaFilter.

Finally, to wrap up the pro-technology folks, let me cite a reader comment on Tod Machover's editorial.

... think about musical instruments. How much time does a violin student spend learning to play in tune? Imagine a digital violin that always plays in tune. That frees up hours and hours of time the student can then devote to higher-level exploration of musical expression. (And, yes, the intonation of the instrument can be made contextually 'aware' - q.v. Hermode tuning, an algorithm that tunes digital instruments on the fly according to the harmonic context they are in). ...

So this is the future I hope we see: digital instruments imbued with context-aware, programmable and customizable musical intelligence. Having tools like that will free people to create music we can't even imagine.
Paul Henry Smith

Smith's comment led me to his website where he posted an interview he did.

This is one of the most exciting and important contributions digital orchestras can make in our musical life. They enable composers to get their music played without the cost and resistance of an acoustic orchestra. My hope is that this new-found avenue for orchestral composition will result in a flowering of activity supporting innovation and refinement in orchestral music, necessary to keep this mode of expression alive and thriving for both acoustic and digital orchestras. In my view, then, acoustic orchestras ultimately benefit from the emergence of very good digital orchestras. Just as interest in acoustic guitar music has been immeasurably increased by the emergence of the electric guitar. "Paul Henry Smith Interview in Beat Magazine," Paul Henry Smith, 9/23/09.

And this:

Which brings us to now. The digital instruments are still limited, but they’ve gotten much better than they were even in 2003, and they’re still improving. They are improving faster than acoustic instruments. My five-year investment in learning how to play them, how to master them, is paying off. And within the next ten years there is no question that I will be able to follow my musical imagination anywhere it leads with more suppleness, expression and ease than the current generation of digital musical instruments allows. "Can digital orchestra instruments be musically compelling?" Paul Henry Smith, 8/10/09.

Among those who do accept technology, they sometimes make a distinction between technology used creatively versus technology used in a banal manner. Here's what Machover said in his editorial.

Technology has democratized music in ways that are surprising even to me, revolutionizing access to any music anytime with iPod and iTunes, opening interactive musicmaking to amateurs with Guitar Hero and Rock Band (which both grew out of a group I lead at the M.I.T. Media Lab), providing digital production and recording facilities on any laptop that surpass what the Beatles used at Abbey Road, and redefining the performance ensemble with initiatives like the Stanford iPhone Orchestra and YouTube Symphony. ...

But we can’t take such freshness for granted. Musical technology is so ever-present in our culture, and we are all so very aware of it, that techno-clichés and techno-banalities are never far away and have become ever more difficult to identify and root out. It is deceptively challenging these days to apply technology to music in ways that explode our imaginations, deepen our personal insights, shake us out of boring routine and accepted belief, and pull us ever closer to one another. "On Future Performance," Opinionator Blog, NYTimes.com, 1/13/10.

Influential musician/producer Brian Eno says that the reason we don't always get great music from technological tools is that, unlike the piano or violin, we haven't worked with them long enough yet.

On the synthesiser: 1

"One of the important things about the synthesiser was that it came without any baggage. A piano comes with a whole history of music. There are all sorts of cultural conventions built into traditional instruments that tell you where and when that instrument comes from. When you play an instrument that does not have any such historical background you are designing sound basically. You're designing a new instrument. That's what a synthesiser is essentially. It's a constantly unfinished instrument. You finish it when you tweak it, and play around with it, and decide how to use it. You can combine a number of cultural references into one new thing."

On the synthesiser: 2

"Instruments sound interesting not because of their sound but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments which is what you like and respond to. If you were sitting down now to design an instrument you would not dream of coming up with something as ridiculous as an acoustic guitar. It's a strange instrument, it's very limited and it doesn't sound good. You would come up with something much better. But what we like about acoustic guitars is players who have had long relationships with them and know how to do something beautiful with them. You don't have that with synthesisers yet. They are a very new instrument. They are constantly renewing so people do not have time to build long relationships with them. So you tend to hear more of the technology and less of the rapport. It can sound less human. However ! That is changing. And there is a prediction that I made a few years ago that I'm very pleased to see is coming true – synthesisers that have inconsistency built into them. I have always wanted them to be less consistent. I like it that one note can be louder than the note next to it." "On gospel, Abba and the death of the record: an audience with Brian Eno,", The Observer, 1/17/10.

Musician Jonathan Coulton says that new technologies allow for more experimentation.

I’ve recently become very interested in all sorts of electronic gizmos and gadgets and composition and performance tools because you can only do so much with a guitar. And I love to play the guitar. I love to listen to the guitar, but there’s really something satisfying about putting it down and picking up a ridiculous piece of equipment with a lot of buttons that’s going to make a lot of noise and also inject a lot of chaos and randomness into what happens. The Zendrum in particular, when I play that, it’s always a little bit different. That’s because I make mistakes and some of the buttons go off by themselves, but you can feel the audience getting sort of excited when that happens. That’s what live performances are about: that process by which you accidentally find something awesome. So for me that’s what I love about those devices and that’s what I love about technology and music: the potential to sort of shake things up and bring you to places you wouldn’t otherwise get to. "Jonathan Coulton Talks Music, Technology and uPlaya.com," The Blogs at HowStuffWorks, 10/28/09.

In this blog post, producer/composer Spencer Critchley explains why he likes one musician's use of technology, but not another's.

Thomas' use of technology was creative, taking things apart and reusing them in imaginative ways. His music presented technology through an emotional filter, such as affectionate parody, as in 'She Blinded Me With Science', or a haunting nostalgia, as in much of The Golden Age of Wireless. ...

The Rhinestone Cowboy's use of technology wasn't creative, just productive. He was simply saving himself the expense of hiring background singers. The harmonizer didn't add anything new to his music, apart from the slightly creepy effect of hearing two perfect clones of the Rhinestone Cowboy. "More Creativity in a Can: When Thomas Dolby Met the Rhinestone Cowboy,"
O'Reilly, 3/4/09.

Ethan Hein, who I already quoted above, had this to say about sampling.

DJs are to traditional instrumentalists as photographers are to painters. You can’t make blanket statements about the validity of the entire medium; you need to go on a case-by-case basis. DJs and photographers have a lower barrier to entry than cellists or painters but the path to mastery is every bit as long.

We’ve become accustomed to lavish production values in our recorded music, and that comes at a steep price tag if you want live instruments and analog tape. The expensiveness of lavish, dense live recordings forces conservative choices. The effortlessness of sampling leads to more risk taking, more experimentation, more innovation. Also more amateurish nonsense, but that’s the nature of the beast. A low penalty for failure is a necessary precondition for success. "Copyright Criminals," Ethan Hein's Blog, 1/25/10.

In summary, music technology appears to be either a positive (allowing more people to create music) or, at worst, a neutral (delivering music that may not be artistic, but isn't the fault of the technology).

Is it bad that technology enables people who might not have talents in the traditional sense to make music? No. If "untalented" people create musical careers because the technology provides a "crutch," then so be it. If the quality of music has gone down as a result of production tricks, then perhaps the solution is to provide exposure to a broader range of musical influences, which does appear to be happening.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE, 1/30/10
Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny is going to tour with an orchestra of 40 musical robots. They are specially created musical machines which he programmed to play.

Not only does the visual spectacle of robots playing along with Metheny’s always-impressive guitar work hypnotize the viewer, but it sounds great for the same reason live orchestras sound so much better than CDs: They’re essentially 100-point surround sound speaker systems housed in a massive acoustic space with its own resonances, and no home theater (well, no home theater without robot or human performers) can duplicate that sound. ...

These musicians may be machines, but their performance varies significantly each time. “Even if you wanted it to be exactly the same every time, it’s not,” said Metheny, adding that subtle variations are caused by the robots’ mechanics, timing and the room in which the machines are playing — and that he can toggle musical parts between the players to switch things up. "Robot Band Backs Pat Metheny on Orchestrion Tour," wired.com, 1/28/10

The Potential iPhone Musical Revolution

I've been following along some of the developments concerning iPhones and music. Not as in "the iPhone as a device to play of other people's music," but as in "the iPhone as a tool to create one's own music." This very much reinforces my idea that focusing too much on people as consumers of music and not enough on them as creators of and participants in music will prove to be shortsighted. Some of the consumer money and time that music business types and artists are counting on to sustain themselves via fan purchases may instead be directed to more user-generated content.

Here are a couple of quotes which illustrate how iPhone tools are opening up music creation to more people.

There’s something about an iPhone music app. For musicians, it’s like having an instrument in your pocket. For nonmusicians, it’s a way to coax sounds -- often programmed to stay on key no matter what note one actually plays -- out of what may be the only instrumentlike device they ever pick up.

A main goal for many of these apps’ developers is to introduce nonmusical people to music, and musical people to different kinds of music. And when taken less as a serious instrument and more as a sampler for the wide world of music, these devices are wildly successful. "Music Apps Blur the Gap Between You and Clapton," New York Times, 10/1/09.

Ge Wang, the assistant professor of music who leads [the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra] says the iPhone may be the first instrument — electronic or acoustic — that millions of people will carry in their pockets. “I can’t bring my guitar or my piano or my cello wherever I go, but I do have my iPhone at all times,” he said.

Professor Wang said he would like to democratize the process of making music, so that anyone with a cellphone could become a musician. “Part of my philosophy is people are inherently creative,” he said. “It’s not just people who think of themselves as artists.” "From Pocket to Stage, Music in the Key of iPhone," New York Times, 12/5/09.

In this article Wang talks about how he has has used a sense of fun and portability, combined with marketing via YouTube and sharing via iPhone, to engage users.

Now, to give you something of an overview of iPhone music creation applications, I've organized them into five categories:

1. Applications that turn iPhones into instruments.
The one cited most often is the Ocarina, which is the digital version of a simple wind instrument. It is made by Smule, a software company co-founded by Stanford professor Ge Wang.

Said Wang, "We at Smule are really trying to bring this idea of unlocking creativity to as many people as possible."

He thinks the Ocarina encourages amatures who might not otherwise pick up an instrument. "App turns iPhone into musical instrument," Public Radio International, 9/1/09.

Here are two other articles on the application.

"Is That Ocarina Music Coming from Your iPhone?"

"Enthusiasts keep pushing Smule’s Ocarina iPhone app to higher numbers"

Smule (which just received an additional $8 million in VC funding) also offers other musical applications including I Am T-Pain, which allows you to Auto-Tune your own singing. Recently Apple named two of Smule's applications (I Am T-Pain and Leaf Trombone: World Stage) among its 10 Best iPhone Applications of 2009.

Another company that makes a variety of instrument applications is MooCowMusic.

And here's more:

The universe of mobile guitar software can be split roughly into three categories: those that replace traditional guitar accessories like tuners and metronomes; practice apps that simulate a fretboard; and apps that contain chords, scales and tablature. There’s even dedicated hardware for attaching your phone to your guitar, but more on that later. "For Real Guitar Players, New Ways to Rock on a Phone," New York Times, 12/3/09.

"10 cool videos of the iPhone as a music instrument."

"10 Best Musical Instrument Apps for the iPhone for Under $1."

2. Groups of people performing together using iPhones.
More ambitious than playing music on an iPhone by yourself is doing it in a group.

A group called iBand (www.iband.at) is using the iPhone and iPod Touch to write and perform music live. Their website currently has two songs available for download, “Vitality” and “Life Is Greater Than the Internet,” both made with instruments available in the App Store. "Music Made With iPhone Musical Instrument Apps," Art of the iPhone, 2/5/09.

Here's another article about the band. "With Software and an iBand, There’s No Need for Roadies."

Here's a video of the group The Mentalists covering MGMT's “Kids."

And here's a video of song played by using a variety of different iPhone musical instrument applications and then spliced together using Final Cut Pro.

More elaborate than these YouTube performances are orchestras being organized to advance the cause of mobile music applications. Here are sites for some of them.

Stanford iPhone Orchestra

Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble

Helsinki MoPhO

3. Looping and mixing applications.
For some, iPhone becomes a mobile editing tool.

Plenty of programs over the years have promised the non-musically-inclined the magical ability to play music, but few deliver. Judging from the songs people are already uploading to MyZoozBeat, this app one really does let people from anywhere in the musical experience spectrum make 'beats,' as they call rhythm and melody loops these days, then sing, rap or talk on top of them — and, with this latest release, share the resulting recordings.

With all of the sharing of other people’s music that goes on, it’s refreshing to see that this app encourages people to share their own creations — and puts such easy tools in their hands that they have a decent chance at making something worth listening to, if only by themselves and their friends and family. (If you make your recordings public, other MyZoozBeat users will be able to hear them too.) "Anyone, Really, Can Make and Share Music with ZoozMobile’s iPhone App," Wired, 4/22/09.

... an iPhone application called ZOOZbeat, which helps anyone -- regardless of musical talent or lack thereof -- create songs by selecting instruments from a list and then waving his or her phone around.

"You don't have to know anything. You go in there and click on it, and it's playing guitar chords," Sheridan said. "It's pretty neat, actually."

A quick flick of the wrist produces a high note. A gentler movement belches out a lower tone. The app loops the sounds and lets users edit their tracks on the fly or afterwards. "The new musical instrument: Your phone," CNN, 10/28/09.

If you want to learn more about ZOOZBeat, go here.

Another product is Bebot.

The major advancement of the iPhone is the multi-touch screen, Rudess said. It opens up the possibility of sliding between notes and playing several at one time. It's more akin to a violin or cello than a keyboard or drum pad, the standard tools for electronic instruments and music software.

This is the very feature that Bebot exploits to produce its unique, sliding sounds.

"It makes the iPhone potentially one of the most versatile musical instruments, and it fits right in your pocket," said Russell Black, the Melbourne inventor of the product. "Musicians flex creative muscles on iPhones," San Francisco Chronicle, 9/8/09.

Here's a overview of more mixing/looping applications: "Best Ways to Produce Music on an iPhone."

4. Interactive music programs.
Some music creators are providing applications which are more artistic experiences than they are music-making tools. Ambient pioneer Brian Eno and musician/software designer Peter Chilvers have created three which you can find here.

5. Music-related games.
There are also music games which, in many cases, function just like their non-game music-application equivalents.

... I found “Beaterator” absolutely absorbing. Layering track upon track, building drumbeats and various instrumental sounds, crafting my own songs and hearing them played back — for someone who’s never done anything like this before, it was a thrilling and eye-opening experience. And though “Beaterator” can get pretty deep pretty quickly, it did a reasonably good job of holding my hand and walking me through the meticulous music-making process....

And that’s the great thing about games like “Beaterator” ... They encourage us to think about music and, more importantly, to imagine ourselves at the center of it. They encourage us to do something we might not otherwise do — to try our hand at music making when perhaps making music seems like something only other people do. And as much as they may seem like trifling and sometimes silly little toys, they put modern music making within reach of us all.

As Timbaland says, “I tried to give people a game but I also tried to give people who love music hope of making their own music.” "Gaming our way to musical genius," Citizen Gamer, 10/12/09.

The Muppets Animal Drummer [is] a rhythm game that lets you drum along with Animal, as well as a free play mode where you (and he) “rock out” to the songs in your iTunes music library." "Disney launches Muppets Animal Drummer for iPhone," Music Ally, 12/16/09.

"10 Free Music Based Games for the iPhone & iPod Touch"

Although iPhone musical applications haven't yet transformed music creation, I think they have the potential to do so. Just as other recent technologies (e.g., Pro Tools, Auto-Tune, YouTube) have encouraged more people to express themselves creatively, I think the fact that companies are developing applications specifically to enable people (often with little or no musical training) to make music easily and quickly will have a major impact. As technology reduces the barriers of entry to music, we have seen that the pool of people recording, uploading, and promoting their music has greatly expanded. And I think the economics of the music industry will continue to reflect these technological developments.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE, 12/27/09
Best of 2009: 10 iPhone/iPod Touch Music/Sound Apps

UPDATE, 1/10/10

Apple has given Mix Me In a spot in the latest New & Noteworthy section of its App Store. The application enables users to mix existing songs into their own versions. So, if they want to hear, say, a rock song as an acoustic ballad, then Mix It In does the business.

The app, from Fried Green Apps, also allows consumers to mix themselves into tracks, adding vocals, guitar riffs, drums, or whatever takes their fancy. "Adding to mix tech to the tune," brand-m.biz, 1/8/10.

VoiceBand transforms your voice in real time into almost a dozen instruments. You can lay down tracks, layer new performances one at a time, and build up an audio performance that you can then e-mail to yourself or friends. "VoiceBand: Personal music artistry gone wild," TUAW, 1/8/10.

UPDATE, 1/18/10

Sprite has teamed with Zooz Mobile Inc., developers of a mobile music studio application, to launch Zoozbeat Sprite, the first iPhone application to be offered through Sprite’s ongoing Under the Cap promotion....

Zoozbeat Sprite transforms iPhones into mobile music studios, letting users create their own tracks with downloadable beats and samples from music producers and artists such as Dallas Austin.

Zoozbeat Sprite works by shaking, tilting or tapping the iPhone screen to create and combine rhythmic and melodic tracks that can be uploaded to the Web for listening and sharing in mp3 format with friends.

Users can unlock additional beats within the application by twisting the cap off any Sprite or Sprite Zero bottle and texting in the keyword ZOOZ followed by the code under the cap.

Sprite will then provide consumers with a Zoozbeat Sprite code that can use be used to unlock more beats. "Coca-Cola: Mobile integral to 360-degree marketing strategy," Mobile Marketer, 12/24/09.

UPDATE, 3/4/10
Here's a blog that is all about mobile music making: Palm Sounds.
You'll find info on many applications.

UPDATE, 3/19/10
"SXSW: LaDiDa iPhone App Lets Anyone With a Voice Make Music in Seconds"