Guest David
GuestForum Replies Created
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I’m glad to see “Destination Sunrise” get some love! It’s one of my top three from WHY? but it seems to be overshadowed in the discussions here.
I see it as the next step after “Make Show.” If that song is about the twins’ disillusionment with the music industry, then “Destination” is their declaration that they are going to do things their way, as independent artists. Leaving the old way of signing with a label, doing what they say, and hoping for the best, they’re “jumping ship” as it were and heading out to “see if [they] can go all the way.” The younger generation is doing this across the board, giving up the security of a career working for “The Man” in exchange for more freedom and control in the “gig economy.”
The whole song reminds me of the movie, “Thelma and Louise,” except in this version the heroines don’t drive off a cliff, they drive off to amazing commercial and critical success.
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Colorizing sure has come a long way since the early days of bands of blue and green to represent sky and ground. I liked that website. Thanks for the link. It illustrates an important point: two things can have the same value (light or darkness) without having the same hue. So we can’t reliably say what colors would map onto a black and white photo. Take Clara Bow’s hair. Was it really red? In the original of that photo, did her lipstick really match her hair like that? Was her blouse green or maybe blue? Or gray?
Years ago I worked as a graphic designer in the U.S. federal govt. When contracting for printing, we could specify whether the colors had to be accurate or just “pleasing.” “Pleasing” meant that they may not be quite right but they still looked good. That was of course less expensive and in most cases was still pretty close to what was intended.
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Sad news that Gordon Lightfoot had passed away. His “Summertime Dream” album, with The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, was one of the first two or three albums I ever bought. I still have it, as a matter of fact, so I’ll have to give it a listen once I get a turntable set up to play my recently acquired MLT vinyls.
I think it would be great if Mona and Lisa covered some of his songbook. One of his would be a natural for a Duo Session.
I know some of you are Rick Beato fans, so you might want to see the Gordon Lightfoot tribute he posted a few hours ago: https://www.youtube.com/live/4Iw7Jei8XOo?feature=share
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Hi Jung, I tend to agree about the Bach, though I’ve not heard it on the Hammond. Somewhere I have a “direct to disc” recording of Virgil Fox on some big old pipe organ playing the Toccata and Fugue. As a teenager and a bit of a weirdo, on Halloween I used to put my stereo speakers in the window, facing the street, and crank up the sound as I played the Bach LP.
Okay, this isn’t exactly “popular” music, but I can’t resist:
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Hi David and everyone. I’ve been away from the Forum for a bit. I hope everyone’s been well. David, since you mention “The Winner Takes It All,” I’d like to add a second ABBA song from late in their catalogue: https://youtu.be/AtjFLUx-a5M?si=r4r48hfGCxIqL-Ll
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Hmm, I’ve thought about that. Certainly it seems likely that if a new video comes out that’s immediately popular it would have some kind of spillover in the channel as a whole. Okay, I have an idea of how I could do this for the time I’ve been tracking. I’ll go do some math and come back with the results.
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Hi David H.,
Yes, it looks like May was not a strong month for channel views. In fact, it was the slowest month since last October, with an average 27,955 daily views. Maybe it was a case of reversion to the mean, as April daily views were strong at 39,209. “Sugar Man” is not nearly as well known as “Tell Me Why” and couldn’t contribute to views in May the way the Beatles song did in April.
Here’s an interesting tidbit: “If Your Raise Your Head,” released a month later than “Junk,” has almost as many views and more likes than the McCartney tune. “Any Other Day,” released a month after “If You Raise Your Head,” is about 20,000 views behind that and “Junk” but has more likes than either.
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Hi Tim, you got me wondering. I’ve been recording daily views since last August 9, which gives me 289 days of numbers through May 26. Total views during that period was 9,630,563, for a daily average of 33,323.75. I don’t have a full year, so I don’t know how much seasonal variation the channel gets–lately it’s been a bit lower, but I’m sure it will bounce back soon.
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Hi Tim. I don’t know if it’s seasonal or what–I just started tracking daily numbers last August–but 27K is actually below longer-term average, which is more like 30,000. There’s a site called “socialblade.com” that gathers stats and makes predictions. I can’t vouch for their accuracy, but they are predicting the channel will hit 100 million views in December. Imagine that news breaking just in time for the Livestream!
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Hi Tomás,
Thanks for doing this! I’m glad to see all those numbers I’ve been capturing being put to good use. I’m motivated to do better at marking the date a video launched (I sometimes had to go back to Twitter for the MLT announcement) and see if there’s other data I could be capturing.
Lots to think about after this graph. And thanks to David H. for the idea of adjusting the covered period so that launch is shown in the middle. It really isolates the new video’s impact.
One thing I am going to start to try to track are individual video views and likes as the videos get rolled out. It seems to me that one measure of popularity would be the early likes-to-views ratio as people see the video for the first time and immediately respond. Since you can’t “like” a video more than once, over time views will grow faster than likes. But early on, views and likes would be more closely aligned. I know YT isn’t exact in reporting some of these numbers, so we’ll see how it goes.
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Here’s a chart of views for the MLT Youtube channel each month since my first full month of tracking, September 2022.
I’m a novice at Google Sheets, so it’s pretty simple. I’ve also tracked when the subscriber count ticked up 1,000; but I haven’t figured out how to add that. I’d like to go back and add in when new items were posted. I only have some of that recorded, so I’ll need to check Twitter for announcements of new videos so I can fill in the gaps.
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Hi David,
Speaking of April, the MLT channel had a total 1,176,258 views for the month, an increase of 177,404 over March. With a daily average of 33,925 new subscribers so far in 2023, April did 5,284 better, averaging 39,208 per day.
Since early last August (about the time YT gave the channel the checkmark), I’ve been tracking daily channel growth and noting whenever YT ticks up the subscriber number by 1,000. It’s all in a Google spreadsheet if anyone wants to dig into the numbers.
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Hi David,
Thanks for doing the research on all of this. These are the kind of questions I scratch my head about, curious but without the statistical background to pursue properly. No doubt there’s a lot of factors involved, some clear and others very murky. For instance, is the song one that more Youtubers are going to search for, driving new views faster than repeats?
We can’t tell (I don’t think) whether a view is new or a repeat, but we have sort of a proxy in likes, since you can only like a video once. Have you looked into the relation between views and likes? I wonder if there’s a correlation early on that can presage views over the longer term. For instance, Any Other Day currently has something like 25K fewer views than Junk, released around the same time. But Any Other Day has more likes than Junk, so a greater percentage of viewers are liking it over Junk.
Does this ratio of likes to views suggest that over time Any Other Day will get more views than Junk? Will Junk continue to outpace in views because it’s a McCartney song and people will always be searching for Macca? Beats me, but I think likes would be an interesting additional variable to fold into the analytical mix.
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Hi Daryl, sorry I’m a little late getting back to the conversation. I loved your story of hanging out in the stereo shop. It definitely brought back memories when, after high school and before college I finally had a full-time job and a few bucks to spend. So of course I went stereo shopping!
The speakers you describe are almost certainly electrostatic speakers, possibly Magnepans. Electrostatics have a charged film that vibrates between two screens as they pull or repel the screen. Because the film is so light weight, they do great with high frequencies. But they don’t push much air, so you’ll see them paired with subwoofers a lot. It’s also why electrostatics tend to be quite large.
Back then, a lot of cymbals in recordings sounded to me like hissing. It wasn’t until I got some electrostatic/woofer hybrid speakers that I thought I could actually hear the metalic sound of cymbals as they were supposed to sound. Now my hearing is so lousy I doubt I could hear the difference anymore.
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Hi Chris, I’ve been out of the conversations here for a bit, but I just saw your comment about Cage. I think he’s the kind of artist that people don’t really listen to as much as they talk about. For instance, one of his best known “compositions” is “4’33” and is four minutes, 33 seconds of a pianist at a piano doing nothing. The idea is for the audience to become atuned to the little sounds all around them and to think about what makes a musical performance anyway (after all, it had a musician at a piano, so doesn’t that count?) He had another one that is currently being performed, apparently, and won’t be done until the year 2640! Ridiculous, in a sense, but also opening doors for more mainstream composers to explore in areas they might not otherwise.
