Jemima contacted me via Twitter after I told her about ‘Quit Myspace Day’, and asked me a whole pile of really good questions. As is always the way with such things, she could only use a tiny fraction of what I wrote, so I’ll put the rest of it here. Enjoy! (I’ve paraphrased her questions, for the most part)
J: How useful was MySpace in the early days? How did you use it?
In the mid 2000s, MySpace accidentally filled a gap – the whole idea of adding a band as a ‘friend’ was revolutionary, and all of a sudden you had artists talking to their audience. For a whole load of tech-shy musos, the basics were there – music player, photo upload, gig list and a blog that acted as a newsletter. That it was happening at the heart of a youth social network was a double bonus – the sharing potential of that was massive, as kids put their favourite bands in their ‘top friends’ as a status symbol. Continue reading “Quoted In The Observer – More On the Myspace Redesign”
This guy is Young Guru. No, I’d never heard if him either. Mainly cos precious little of my time is spent reading hip-hop/R ‘n’ B sleevenotes, but he’s worked on a lot of big records for Jay-Z, Kanye, Mariah etc…
Anyway, here he’s talking about the recording industry, the relationship between artists and labels and the irrelevance of the majors in the current musical climate.
He’s brilliant – eloquent, insightful, experienced – it’s the best speech I’ve heard on the subject in a very long time.
Today, in case you were unaware, is ‘Quit Myspace Day‘. It’s an entirely voluntary, rather mischievous and unexpectedly cathartic thing to be a part of. A year ago, Andrew Dubber proposed the idea, suggesting that MySpace had one year to become useful, meaningful, helpful, music-ful again or we should all bail out en masse. Continue reading “Why I Quit MySpace.”
This post started out as a comment on my previous post, in reply to one from Jeff Schmidt. But it’s too long for that, so it’s now its own post.
Here’s Jeff’s comment:
4 years ago – I could have said this exact thing -probably word for word.
Today – not so much.
If I was on the cutting edge of music market thinking then, maybe I’m on the cutting edge now with the complete opposite opinion. Is the tide is turning that much? I think so.
The BBC have an article today, in which they report on Rob Dickins, former head of Warner Music UK, saying that albums should cost a £1.
It’s a fairly radical step, and there’s some merit in what he says, as a response to currently-illegal downloading, within a fixed price market.
However, what’s missing from this is the simple fact that music is worthless. ‘Music’ as in noises that fit within the ‘organised sound’ definition that most of us recognise as music, has no inherent value at all. All the value is contextual. It can be invested, it can be enhanced, it can even be manufactured counter to any previously measured notions of ‘quality’ with a particular idiom, but it’s not innate. Noise is not a saleable commodity. Continue reading “Music Is Worthless”
GQ Magazine has an interview up with Steve Albini. I’ve been a fan of Steve’s thinking since I first read his rant about the state of the music industry, over a decade ago. This interview is pure gold. Every musician should read this. The whole thing is fabulous, but this quote stood out as supporting my statement that the mainstream music industry is in the business of feeding and celebrating the mental ill-health of its “stars”:
GQ:Â Shellac is known as a band that has a hard line regarding what kind of shows you will play, and how your music is commoditized. What other bands do you consider to be ethical?
SA : Most people in their daily lives are pretty reasonable. A lot of people that end up being in bands give themselves license to act like assholes because they’re involved in music. If they didn’t see the music world as separate from the real world, most people would continue to behave honorably in their interactions with the music scene. I don’t think that what Shellac does is remarkable, really. I feel like it’s just normal. There’s a perversion of normal ethical standards, indulged and encouraged by a music industry that feels more important the more it is removed from regular life. For those of us in Shellac and the other bands we admire, being in a band is just part of normal, regular life. You don’t act like an asshole when you go to the barber. So why act like an asshole when you’re in a band?
Tonight, I clocked up my 50,000th tweet. It looked like this:
It’s no secret that I REALLY dig Twitter. It solved a whole lot of online communication questions for me when I found it. I cut back on my posting on forums, and eventually even deleted the forum on my own site in favour of encouraging the regular posters there to head over to Twitter and talk in a more democratic environment.
I loved the fact that I was no longer stuck in a subject-specific space, or one where I people had to sign up to be in my gang before joining the conversation. It’s not my conversation, after all, it’s a global free-for-all.
Except it isn’t. I mean, technically it is, but actually the only bit of Twitter that concerns me at all is the people I follow and the people who follow me. And occasionally the people who tweet using a hashtag I happen to be following.
I am, as the 50K Tweets would suggest, a power-user. I document my life in this way. I use it to:
Talk with my audience in a way that has replaced my email list,
Talk with musicians in way that has replaced myspace,
Talk with my family in a way that has replaced email,
Talk with my colleagues in Amplified in a way that has replaced wikis
Talk with anyone who’s interested in a way that’s replaced chatrooms/generic forums.
…and by ‘talk with’ I mean all the myriad forms of communication that go on there – chat, debate, encourage, learn from, teach, swap links, post news… anything that’ll fit in 140 characters.
It’s clearly an open, messy, FUN way of communicating that I love. I don’t have to keep track of loads of different websites – I do have 10 different twitter accounts, but most of them lie dormant at the moment. SoloBassSteve is where pretty much everything happens, and for some unknown reason there are (currently) 4836 people who have seen fit to follow me. Some may be spammers, but I’ve blocked and deleted AT LEAST 3 times as many followers as I’ve allowed to stay. Any spam accounts I cleared out… I’ve definitely had well in excess of 12-13,000 follow notifications, I just didn’t want either a misleading amount of followers, or to leave those accounts without some registering a ‘spam’ click next to them…
But, in the last 3 years, most of the good things that have happened for Lobelia and I have happened through Twitter.
We’ve met some of our best friends
We’ve planned tours
We’ve organised recordings
We gleaned information
We had support and congratulations on the birth of our baby
We shared our holidays
We found people to help us move house
and We had LOADS of work, new listeners, and – crucially – amazing people willing to talk about what we do as musicians time and time again.
I spend a lot – most – of my time on Twitter talking about other people’s music, encouraging and connection musicians to eachother, helping people get their heads around this brave, heady new disintermediated world we’re in. I’m trying to model the way I think the distruptive awesome internet of the future should work. Cos the future is now. We’re in it, it’s great, and Twitter is quite possibly THE game changer.
Youtube was big, Myspace was big. WordPress was big. Bandcamp is HUGE. Soundcloud is awesome. But as the glue that makes all of them workable, manageable and connected, Twitter for me is THE killer app. The reason the internets was invented.
So, 50 Thousand Tweets on, I’m still all about it. Here, if you’re interested, is my twitter-list of people I chat to, day in, day out: The Awesome Squad.
-o0o-
This evening someone asked me (on Twitter) which was the classic Steve Lawson album. So I asked my friends (on Twitter) to answer. So far the answer has come back, overwhelmingly, Grace And Gratitude. Which is fitting. Because I’m hugely grateful for all the good things that have happened through the amazing people I’m connected to on there. Please have a listen, and feel free to download it – don’t feel obliged to pay for it, but if you want to pay whatever you think it’s worth, that would also be hugely appreciated:
In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Radiohead’s manager talked about a change in the way ‘the music industry’ managed its business model. As quoted in the piece:
“We’re trying to get away from a copyright trading model more towards a venture capitalist approach with artists,†says Message. Think of it as Dragons’ Den with guitars – with Message as the thoughtful-looking entrepreneur sitting with fingers interlocked while some young beat combo pitch their wares (“So, we’re kind of like The Smiths meet Funkadelic…â€).
OK, I’m going to interrupt my ‘track by track’ breakdown of my own new album to tell you about a GREAT record by my lovely friend Laura Kidd, AKA She Makes War.
Here it is, in its entirety, on bandcamp (naturally) – hit play while you’re reading this (and then hit the ‘buy’ button when you’ve finished):
Laura is a true renaissance woman – singer/songwriter/producer/videographer/session bassist/blogger/social tech ninja/web designer… A huge skill set, all of which has come into play on the process of making the album and telling stories around it. Continue reading “Great New Album From She Makes War”
Over the years, I’ve sent literally hundreds of CDs to magazines and radio, in the hope of reviews and airplay. And I’ve had a quite large amount of both:
But, what is evident to anyone who experiences these things first hand, is that word of mouth – my listeners telling their friends and family about the wonderful music they’ve just discovered – is worth more than all that mainstream press put together. Continue reading “It’s The Little Things That Count – You Are The Press.”
I was quoted in yesterday’s Observer, in an article by Jemima Kiss about the Myspace redesign.
