Category: New Music Strategies

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Promotion Is A Numbers Game (Get Heard!)

I’ve run across a few situations recently where people have been limiting the amount of their music that can be heard online. So here’s a few thoughts about free streaming music, and the business model involved:

Most of the research I’ve seen – as well as the conversations I’ve had – tell us that a reasonable percentage of people still buy CDs. They still want music on CD, and are going to buy the music they like.

Nothing that I’ve seen or heard tells me that music fans will pay money for a CD in order to hear music they’re restricted from hearing online – just so they can find out if it’s good or not – or that people who buy CDs are happy to sit and click ‘play’ over and over again on last.fm instead of buying music… Continue reading “Promotion Is A Numbers Game (Get Heard!)”

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Podcast of the Outside The Box Panel from UnConvention

You’ll remember a few weeks ago I was on a panel, chaired by the lovely Andrew Dubber, at UnConvention in Manchester. The panel was titled ‘Outside The Box’, and the aim was to address some of the unique issues that face musicians and bands that don’t fall into the ‘guitar/bass/drums/vox’ indie band format. So there was me, a few electronica people, an Islamic devotional music artist, and a 17th century folk music artist… all kinds of fun and games!

And here is the audio recording of it – it’s just over an hour long, and contains a lot of great discussion. (there’s some fairly grown up language in the recording, in case that kind of thing is a concern for you).

Enjoy – it’s well worth a listen! Here’s my blog post from the time, with a lot of my brain-stormed ideas from thinking about the session – there are loads more in the recording, from the other amazing people I was on the panel with.

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How To Respond To A Crisis. A Lesson From Sungard.

I have a friend who works in Marketing for Sungard – they’re a huge, multi-national, multi-billion dollar IT Services/financial information/Software company. Massive. Bigger than big.

What interesting for us musical types is their response to the financial crisis. A situation which, naturally, they took very seriously indeed, partly because they were deeply affected, but also because it was a time when all the big finance companies were being shaken up, and previously held notions of who were the ‘big players’ could be re-jigged. It was a chance for companies to rebrand, reposition, and use the recession as a chance to do some fairly risky thinking, and ask some massive questions. Continue reading “How To Respond To A Crisis. A Lesson From Sungard.”

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After CDs. What’s next?

Following on from yesterday’s post about the anachronistic nature of the term ‘label’, I’ve been having a think about the actual format that music is released in.

It’s amazing how containers can make us lazy about content. The assumptions we make about the nature of music, collections of music, what constitutes a ‘complete work’ etc.

There’s a great thread over on solobasssteve.com about this, where Tom asks about the way that downloads are allowing classical music to be consumed in the way it was intended – in mixed programmes of individual movements, or of complete works without the weird filler stuff that’s used to make up the empty bit on the CD. Continue reading “After CDs. What’s next?”

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The End Of Record Labels?

One of the most interesting things about UnConvention this weekend was the chance to listen to some people from a number of record labels talk about what they do.

The thought that struck me from the discussion was that, while a lot of the work they do is still very much important and of value, the notion of ‘a label’ is stifling the reinvention of ‘companies that support the spread of music’ in the lives of musicians.

See, the term “label” suggests that there’s something physical to print a label on – that the biggest part of what they do is provide the funds and resources to record music in a studio and then release it in various containers, be they CD, vinyl, DVD or whatever… Continue reading “The End Of Record Labels?”

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Brainstorming New Models for Music Careers

As you know, I was at Unconvention in Manchester at the weekend, on a panel titled Outside The Box.

On the way up there, on my epically crap train journey, I wrote down a load of ideas for the session, some of which I shared, some of which there wasn’t time for – so here’s that post, as a log of some of what was said, and a bit more besides. Feel free to add your own suggestions at the end, and DEFINITELY visit Martin Atkins’ site Tour Smart website.
Continue reading “Brainstorming New Models for Music Careers”

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Music As Culture, at UnConvention

This is my live blog of the ‘Music As Culture’ session at Unconvention in Manchester – it was a discussion hosted by Andrew Dubber and Jez Collins of Birmingham School Of Media. It was a great discussion, and my precis of it is here:

[6:00]Featured Artist’s Coalition (FAC) – policy decisions driving by people with the loudest voices. BPI/big music etc.
FAC says there’s another agenda here – that of the artists. Important for Policy.
The problem is that they’re all coming at it from the point of view that ‘music is something through which money is made”

We asked ‘is there a way of engaging with people who do things with music as culture rather than commerce? do they have a voice?’ ‘is there a will – partic. with indies, to say that culture is important.’
Deleting music – because there’s no imperative to release back catalogue, 90% isn’t currently available. No-one even knows who owns it.
problem with blanket extension of copyright is that that legacy music gets left to rot in the archives.
So let’s have a conversation about it. Continue reading “Music As Culture, at UnConvention”

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The Importance of Accountability In the Creative Process.

This came up the yesterday in a couple of discussions on solobasssteve.com, the idea that random things can often provide the impetus to think about what we do in a more focused way. Particularly in this post by Mike, which this post is basically a very long response to…

One example of this random accountability was the way that record companies – even if their input was unhelpful – provided a degree of focus to the creative process that disappears if you’re not answerable to anyone. Continue reading “The Importance of Accountability In the Creative Process.”

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The Earnestness of Being Important

…AKA, What’s Important about your Music… To You?


Following on from the discussion about ‘what makes you interesting?’, I’ve been thinking about the other ‘value metrics’ for what we do as musicians, and the directions they flow in.

Interestingness is one bi-directional value:

  • What you think is interesting, or find interesting about what you do
  • What your audience find interesting about you AND about what you do.

The important element being that YOU being interesting isn’t a prerequisite to making great music, it just provides additional context for the music. It’s why we all bought music magazines – we didn’t buy them for dry descriptors of new music by people we’d never heard. We bought them to read stories, thoughts and opinions from the people whose music we love already, and to discover in the taste of the journalists some new music that they get excited about. Continue reading “The Earnestness of Being Important”

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Guest Post II – Jennifer Moore on 'Interestingness'

[This post was originally posted as a comment on my “What Makes Your Music Interesting?“, but was far too wonderful, and involved, to leave as a comment. So please do read the other post first, and Jennifer’s earlier comments. Jennifer Moore is, as I said in the comments there, the first person I ever saw play a whole set of solo bass. A fabulous musician, and a regular commenter here, she always brings clarity and insight to whatever she comments on.]

::ponder ponder ponder::

I’ve been thinking more about all these comments, esp John G‘s use of the word “engaging”.

I’m thinking that “what’s good” vs “what’s interesting” (in the hooky/intriguing/initial-engagement sense of “interesting”) leaves something out.

“I was found by being interesting, not by being good” – Partly true, but you were partly just found by being there. That is both “there” at the event, and “there” on Flickr. Continue reading “Guest Post II – Jennifer Moore on 'Interestingness'”

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