Category: cool links

Posted on

photos from last night's house concert in Anstruther

steve lawson playing a house concert

Once again, I haven’t really got time to blog extensively, thanks to my lappy now being on, but being wedged in a drawer to keep it on (I think there’s a dry joint or loose connection that requires it to be suspended from one corner in order to work!!)

So, instead, for your viewing pleasure, here are some photos from last night’s most enjoyable house concert at lovely G and J’s. A select gathering of very lovely people, and a fine time was had by all.

The two days of masterclasses in Perth and Salford were a lot of fun too – lots of talk about the future of the industry, about creativity, finding your voice, marketing, myspace, downloading, looping, practising… some good questions, and a lovely response at the end of each session (not to mention a few bassists walking out cos It was bassy enough for them – one choice comment ‘he’s more like a singer’… which I’m sure was meant as an insult, somehow, but I’m definitely taking that as a compliment!)

If you were there, please drop by the forum or the myspace page and say hi (I think I accidentally deleted one or two myspace comments, thanks to the broken lappy, so if I deleted your very nice comment, please feel free to repost it!)

more on the future of music v. soon – I’ve been getting some thoughts down via voice notes on my phone whilst driving around, so need to get time, space and a working computer in order to write those up… some good stuff coming up! :o)

Posted on

web ubiquity – web 2.0 smarts for musicians

I don’t know if you ever look at the stats for your website, but a HUGE amount of the traffic that my site and my blog get are from search engines. Google is the heart of the way most people use the web. This is no bad thing, but it does mean that presenting a website that’s designed to trap information within it in the vain hope that people will love you enough to type your URL into their address bar every morning only to find that you’ve added nothing, or maybe one gig on another continent to them isn’t going to work.

No, one of the most important aspects of the shift from scarcity to ubiquity is that it’s not just about proliferation of recorded music. In fact, i’d go s far as to say that information about you, and the proliferation of your brand over and above the music is even more important, as it generates interest in the music before people have even iistened, and helps to frame their listening in some way.

This is why being everywhere is vital in web-world. So here’s vol. I of a short list of tasks you can do yourselves, without needing a webmaster to sort it out for you:

  • Get a Flickr account – free photohosting and a whole lot more. Flickr is a huge community of visually minded web people, who love seeing well-taken pictures of bands and gigs and touring and all the interesting stuff in your life. Start a second unpaid career as a photojournalist, link to it from your website, and let your audience into a little of the visual side of your world.
  • Sign up for a last.fm user account – your music is already on there, right? Well, there are two ways to use last.fm – one is uploading music, the other is logging what you listen to. it’s a great way to give your audience a handle on the music that makes you tick, and also to give props and some publicity to the great stuff that you’re listening to. Add one of the last.fm widgets to your site so people can see at a glance what you’re listening to this week. Last.fm also has a journal section, so you can post reviews of what your friends and heroes are up to – share the love!
  • Youtube – start your own channel, and get some videos up on there. Don’t just leave it to people with phone-cams to post crap, get some footage up there, and preferably something of you talking too. For some reason people are fascinated by what musicians’ voices sound like when they talk. Weird, but true.
  • Sign up for facebook – yeah, I know, it’s for college kids trying to pick up hotties and tragic 30 somethings who think it’s the cooler version of friends reunited for hooking up with your childhood sweetheart. Right, but it’s also got a whole shedload of useful things for connecting with your friends, peers and audience who are also probably on there. You can put your myspace player on there, your last.fm profile, your reverb nation widget so people can listen to you, and RSS feeds of whatever other information you are generating. Which brings us to our last one…
  • start a blog! You’re reading this, that proves they work. You can blog about all kinds of things – when you’re working a lot, just short updates on tour highlights, or excitement in the studio – post links to your flickr pics and youtube vids for the full interactive experience. When you’re not so busy, or have a little bit of time, use it to big up the people you play with. Musicians can be so damned self-obsessed that they never bother to give back the kind of recognition they so readily crave and grasp at for themselves. Come on, if you’ve got a platform, use it to help everyone out. It’s good for all of us.

when you do, make sure you get accurate stats about what’s going on with your blog and site, and do the same for any RSS feeds you’ve got going on. And don’t be disheartened if you have 10 readers a week for the first while. Blog proliferation is often slow and steady, just keep blogging about interesting stuff, get it registered with Technorati so that they get updates from it and people can find you on searches, add social bookmarking tags (pretty easy to do in Moveable Type and WordPress at least, or addable to your feed via Feedburner), so people can share the love, and link back to all your favourite reads, so they get some of the love too…

I often get asked how it is that i seem to be everywhere in the online bass and looping world, and the truth is that it’s just been through constant involvement in those online communities for over 10 years. For a couple of years, I was the only bass teacher in europe with his own website, was one of the first solo bassists to get music up online, was one of the first featured pros on talkbass, a regular contributor to loopers-delight, and crucially, had some fine music for people to check out when they cam back to my site… i was a little late in the game on MySpace, pretty early at last.fm, very slow to get with flickr and stumbleupon… I also for years kept an archive of all the articles i’d written for bassist magazine on my site, which brings us full circle back to Google at the heart of the web – I used to get SOOO much traffic via that. I only took it down cos I changed servers and the Database that it was running in was incompatible with the new server. That’s why I’m reposting the best of the interviews here…

Regardless on your feelings about the proliferation of digital recordings, ubiquity online is unquestionably a good thing for a musician. But it takes time and effort, and isn’t the kind of thing that happens over night. If you’re savvy, it shouldn’t take 10 years of online geeking like it did for me, but it will take some time. The alternative is to pay some web designer somewhere £25 an hour to do it all for you, and if that’s your preferred route, I know a couple of lovely friendly geeks who will happily take your money from you. :o)

Posted on

A couple of alternate views from people who think giving music away is a good idea…

Jeff Schmidt just posted a link on his blog to this article on AlterNet by Bob Ostertag, an experimental musician in the San Francisco scene, explaining why he’s made his entire back catalogue (or all of it that he has the rights for available online for free.)

The Long Tail blog (by Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Editor In Chief of Wired mag) features a post about the perils of thinking about the music industry as being solely about the sale of CDs, and says that it’s actually really healthy if you look at a load of other indicators – Gigs and Merch, Download sales, Licencing for TV/Film/Ads, Vinyl Sales (which I’d group with other ‘premium product’, generally – bought by DJs because there’s still kudos in vinyl DJing, but also largely by fans who often don’t even own record players – single sales are half about how great a medium vinyl is for DJs, and half an anachronistic throw-back for fans who don’t see the actual ‘music’ but need to be even more of a music fan. It strikes me as a way of classifying your allegiance – I like this band enough to download, this band enough to buy the CD, and this band so much that I’ll even buy their singles despite as yet having nothing to play them on…)

Anyway, both posts are interesting, though as Jeff points out, Bob does descend into a rant about the mendacity of big corporations, record labels etc. I’d love to see some figures for what Bob’s doing, as he says in the article that making records has always been a ‘break even at best’ exercise for small labels. I’m assuming he’s talking about the labels that put his stuff out. It never has been for me. My solo Cds have always made money (less so on the duo CDs, but they have made some) and their sale, especially at gigs has been really important to my income stream. That doesn’t automatically mean that I ‘deserve’ that in the long run, but it does give the lie to the idea that ‘nobody’s making money out of releasing music on indie labels’ or whatever other myths are abound…

Anyway, have a read of them both – Chris’ position is vey similar to that of Gerd – the music industry is healthy, it’s just the process of charging per-unit for recorded music that’s on the way out…

Posted on

The End Of Control…?

Here’s some vital reading for anyone who’s interested in all this new media 2.0 file sharing web commerce stuffs I’ve been blogging about – The End Of Control – it’s a free e-book that’s been blogged chapter by chapter by its author, Gerd Leonhard (who was featured in the media megatrends video I linked to the other day)

Anyway, he’s a very astute man, but as with most futures analysts speaks with a degree of knowing fatalism… at least it would be fatalism if he hadn’t bought into the idea that this is how the future’s going to be, so hey get used to it. It’s a position common to all futurists that I’ve come across (I guess because the ones who do the research and then try to resist what they then see as the inevitable shifts in whatever area they are looking at end up suffering from severe depression…)

But the book makes some great points about how we deal with the shifts from scarcity to ubiquity, and I’m going to be following the chapters with great eagerness – I’m hoping that somewhere between his brilliantly researched and observed but fatalistic eagerness to embrace the hypermodernity of a global subscription service and my idealism and experience within the more specialist music market (and their heightened sense of the social contract), I can come up with something of enduring value to contribute to the discussion!

He’s still largely talking from the assumption that all artists should want their music everywhere, regardless of the context, arguing that ubiquity is better for your ultimate income stream. But there are big problems with that when you start considering works of art to have innate integrity that can be damaged (by, for example, distributing it via low-res edited MP3…) – his stuff in Chapter 2 about copyright comes dangerously close to saying ‘well, we’re fucked if we think we can own anything any more, so we might as well settle for whatever crumbs a globalised license will drop into our begging bowl.

There are a couple of really pernicious assumptions at the heart of this – a) that because the technology is there to steal all the content now, we might as well roll with it and see if we can surreptitiously extract some meagre revenue further down the line and b) all artists should accept that their art is there to be engaged with largely on an entirely peripheral level, as a disposable binary file where the terms of engagement are entirely defined by the makers of portable computer technology, rather than by any artists at all… As someone who aspires to make music that is important, real, and part of me over and above music that is profitable, popular and marketable, i find those assumptions difficult to stomach, but they do give me some kind of distance from his model which is helpful for formulating an alternative (if there ends up being one…)

But for now, go and grab the RSS feed from EndOfControl.com, it’s going to be a really interesting ongoing discussion…

Posted on

HiRes, good price BritJazz downloads from Babel…

The Babel Label now have their own download store – Babel have been at the vanguard of what’s interesting and important in UK Jazz for many years, and have one hell of a catalogue – Polar Bear, Acoustic Ladyland, Partisans, Huw Warren, Ingrid Laubrock, Christine Tobin, Billy Jenkins… loads of really fantastic music.

The MP3s are 320kbps, DRM free, and the whole album price ranges from about a fiver to about seven quid. Not bad at all! head over there and have a browse!

Posted on

Let's play catch-up!!

OK, I know a few of you lovely readers are a little behind on your StevieTunes collection, so now you can catch up on all the solo stuff, by getting all 7 solo albums for £17.50!! – that’s a serious bargain, £2.50 an album for some of the finest music you’ll ever hear anywhere. Honest. :o)

Anyway, please do head over to the shop, if you want to fill in the blanks, and give yourself a lovely soundtrack to your daily blog-read.

Which, BTW, you can do to a lesser degree via the ReverbNation player that’s now embedded on the front page of the blog. (don’t worry it doesn’t auto-play – I’ve actually unsubscribed from some people’s blog feeds in the past because you couldn’t go to their page without being bombarded with unwanted music). But still, plenty of opportunities to listen to me – what more could you want?

© 2008 Steve Lawson and developed by Pretentia. | login

Top