Summertime WAVs
a.k.a. My unending battle against the tyranny of a flawed file format.
It’s hot. Granted, the summer is always hot in Barcelona, but after two months of relatively reasonable temperatures, it hit 34°C yesterday. (That’s 93°F for the Americans reading this.) Add in 80% humidity, and it’s been hard to do much of anything.
Personally speaking, it doesn’t help that I spent the past weekend at Dekmantel in Amsterdam. As you may know already, First Floor hosted the first two days of the festival’s annual conference, and it was great, but after hosting five talks and panels in two days, and then sticking around to watch a bunch of music, I was a bit fried by the time I got on the plane yesterday morning. Nevertheless, I fully intended to come home, sit down at my laptop and crank out one of my usual First Floor pieces, but that didn’t happen. The heat zapped what little energy I had left.
I did, however, manage to at least go through my inbox and start catching up on some of the releases that dropped during the past week. And after a few hours of combing through emails, clicking links and checking promos that had been sent my way, something dawned on me:
So many people are still sending out WAV files, and many of those files are either incompletely labeled or not labeled at all.
This is infuriating! Loyal First Floor readers already know that I have spent years banging this particular drum, and while it may seem like a niche complaint, my crusade against WAV files is rooted in more than just the inconvenience they cause me personally. It’s a flawed format, and those flaws can directly impact artists’ ability to get recognized and, more importantly, paid for their work.
Given that, today I’ve decided to pull one of my favorite pieces out from behind the First Floor paywall. Although it was first published more than two years ago, its contents still very much apply, and if you’re an artist, label head, publicist or anyone who deals with music files on a regular basis, I sincerely hope you’ll give it a read. WAVs might be the closest thing the industry has to a default file format, but there are other, better options out there.
This piece will be free and open to everyone through the rest of the week.
As for me, I’ll likely be doing quite a bit of sweating in the days ahead—most of Spain is currently under some sort of excessive heat warning, and the temperatures aren’t expected to drop in the days ahead—but I won’t be shirking my duties entirely. The usual First Floor digest will be sent out on Thursday, so keep an eye out for that. Otherwise, just try to stay cool, wherever you are.
Shawn Reynaldo is a freelance writer, editor, presenter and project manager. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter, or you can just drop him an email to get in touch about projects, collaborations or potential work opportunities.