Category: tips for musicians

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Collaborating super-heroes part II

super-hero tools. Capes not includedSo, following up my thoughts about the ‘future of business‘, where I touched on this idea of collaboration between groups of experts as the way forward, where everyone has an investment in what goes on, everyone has a say within their group etc…

The first example I talked about was the Lawson/Dodds/Wood trio – 3 musicians, 3 different approaches and skill sets, lots of great skills to throw into the mix (and far too many toys to fit on the stage at Darbucka!)

The second is JFDI (our soon-to-be web-home is www.socialtakeaway.com) – this is a collective of social media thinkers and practitioners, looking at ways of pooling our skills and resources to provide social media-led solutions to whoever wants to hire our expertise. The four amigos are me, Nik Butler aka LoudMouthMan, Mike Atherton aka Sizemore and Christian Payne aka Documentally. Each of us brings different skills and spheres of expertise to the mix, but all have done a serious amount of thinking and doing in the whole area of social media, of communicating honestly and effectively with one’s audience/clients/customers/friends/competitors via the wonders of conversation-based internet tools.

We’re good at it on our own, and we’re even better when we can call on each other to fill in the blanks. No-one is the ‘boss’, no-one is calling the shots, it’s not a sealed group, in as much as we all have huge extended circles of talented people to draw on when we need other skills – it’s just that four people is a nice number for this kind of venture, and we seem to have a lot of bases (and basses) covered.

It feels slightly A-team-ish (only, this is probably a whole team of Murdochs), in that we’re for hire, we’ll make a splash and bizarrely no-one will die no matter how many pyros we set off… uhm, not sure about that last bit. (well, I’m sure we won’t kill anyone, but I’m not sure we’ll be using pyrotechnics… though with Christian involved, anything’s possible)

But still, it’s a loose collective, one that I feel pretty good about being a part of – I really like the guys I’m working with, like the things they do, and enjoy bouncing ideas and strategies around with them. We’re all still doing things on our own (it’s not like the bands and solo artists that I talk to about how to use social media to communicate with their audience are going to be able to afford to bring the four of us in), and I’ve got other collaborators in other fields, but that’s the beauty of this kind of working. I feel deeply invested in it without being chained to it. I’m there because of what I have to give, and because these are people I want to work with… Much like being in a band, really 🙂

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Nokia Open Labs Pt 3 – The future of Entertainment…

Steve Lawson at Nokia Open Lab 08 by http://www.flickr.com/photos/gisuser/Session 3 (session 2 for me) was the Entertainment one outlined in this post. The discussion about games was actually rather interesting – it can be very illuminating when you get people to think outside of their chosen specialism, throw in some friction and see what comes out. I was scribe for the first part, but handed over to the very lovely Phil Campbell to talk a bit about the social aspect of games that Sleepydog are involved in, and some of the advances in technology that they are working with to make the world of games less insular (sleepydog are the developers and inventors of the ‘Buzz’ games – quiz-show type group games. About the only things I can ever imagine playing on a games console.)

We talked a fair bit about what makes up ‘a game’

  • the competition,
  • the chance,
  • the risk,
  • the skill,
  • the rewards,
  • the adrenalin edge

…and how those manifest themselves in a lot of our other online interactions. How many of us use social media platforms in a very game-ish way. So we looked at how we can mash-up gaming and social interaction… Someone (possibly Rob Evans? not sure…) talked about some really interesting stuff to do with using ‘games’ of a sort to ‘teach’ computers to recognise certain things – labelling and tagging-based games, with a social payoff in that you get matched up with people with whom you share a lot of results… (one of the recurring themes was that the dating side of social media – from the gentile to the deepy seedy – was clearly one of the avenues where money could be made.)
The last question posed to us in the session was about coming up with new business models where money could be made, but we really didn’t give it much thought… it seemed like an out of place question, given the kind of discussion we’d had. So we left it.

Meanwhile, as mentioned before, a whole discussion was going on about the music industry that I missed out on. One of the interesting things about the weekend was the degree to which just being in at atmosphere of ‘thinking about mobile’ helped me to pull a whole load of thoughts together about how independent musicians can use mobile technology. I’ll report back on all that later

Til then, if you feel like commenting, do chip in on what you think are the ‘game aspects’ to the indie music biz, as it pertains to recording, marketing, selling music, doing gigs, entertaining people, maintaining integrity/autonomy, networking with other musicians, dipping into the ‘mainstream’ to our advantage?

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Nokia Open Lab Pt 2 – the geo-location workshop.

Steve Lawson and Phil Campbell at Nokia Open Lab, by http://www.flickr.com/photos/ekaiSo the format of the Friday was intro, followed by four sessions –

  • Join the Community.
  • Join the Journey
  • Join the Fun
  • Join and Collaborate.

Each session had a ‘facilitator’ who did a lil’ intro spiel and the set-up to the group time. I’m slightly embarrassed to say that I’ve no idea how the first session went, as I slept straight through it! I’d set my alarm early, but after getting to bed late the night before, struggling to get to sleep even then, I managed to miss it. The last 10 minutes of the discussion were interesting, but I can’t really comment further.

So the first full session I was in was Join the Journey – thinking about location-based services, concepts and uses. What was most interesting was how few people in this group of early adopting tech-pimped-out uber-geeks were regularly using geo-services other than geo-tagging flickr photos and using SatNav to not get lost (as one person commented, ours is the last generation that will ever get lost – more on that in a bit…)

This was the first point at which the blue-sky techno-utopians and the more cautious person-centred practo-geeks divided – the utopians were talking about the possibility of RFIDing everything from you fridge to your car keys, embedding chips, tracking your kids – loads of stuff that sounded like a sci-fi writer in the late 60s describing the year 2001. Some of it clearly already happening.

On the flip side, you had every Brit there freaking out at the civil liberties implications of all this, given that we’re already the most surveilled nation on earth, and wondering about how effective measures to limit access to the tracking data could be.

It was also the first point at which I threw in the idea that maybe removing trouble, problems, obstacles and the like from the mundane might not be a good thing. I slightly facetiously said ‘but what about all the good serendipitous stuff that can happen when you lose your keys?’ or words to that effect. It was a serious point, but I didn’t really follow it up til Adam Greenfield’s excellent session the next day.

So some cool discussion, some great ideas that got lost in the mass of un-filtered un-sorted suggestions, and for me the first chance to get a handle on where people were coming from… I don’t think I knew anyone in my group at this point, so was slightly unsure how to pitch my usual mixture of ‘things that are possible useful to the discussion’ and ‘things that are clearly random bollocks but might be either funny or illuminating in their absurdity… or perhaps best ignored’.

So one thing that we didn’t get onto was the use of Geo-locational services for musicians. The uses are HUGE. Most of them musicians I know have already got SatNavs – getting lost on the way to a gig is too costly a mistake for them to miss the chance to avoid it.

But the ability to map a tour, plot any media captured on it onto it, group crowd-sourced flickr-photos by location and date, and even to network a street team by geo-tagged data are the stuff that every band in the world should be jumping on. It’s the kind of stuff that a company like Nokia ought to be all over, given the branding potential, and the way they can produce THE ubiquitous device for such a service. (more on this in an N95 for musicians review, coming soon!) Some of the stuff that came up in the group was really inspirational with regard to seeing the possibilities of all this. For some of what’s possible, and what’s coming, check out Sportstracker and Nokiavine.

Some bands are already using it, like the NIN stunt with the geo-cached tickets.

Location based services don’t appear to be the kind of thing that in and of themselves will make millions for anyone beyond TomTom and Garmin. But they are things that musicians and media producers can use to filter their own or their audiences content by location, and that can make it more interesting, more relevant and more sexy. All fine qualities.

Sessions 3 and 4 coming soon…

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Nokia Open Lab 08. The write-up. part 1

Nokia Open Lab - photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/ekaiI’ve just spent 3 days geeking out in Helsinki, at the Nokia Open Lab 08. The idea was to bring together 40 social media/mobile tech/blogging geeks in Helsinki for a series of workshops, discussions, talks and brainy mash-ups. The attendees were from all kinds of backgrounds, from corporate bloggers writing about tech stuff or financial markets, to sub-cultural social media conduits, using mobile technology to bring communities together and subvert standard media channels.

The format was really interesting, in that we were kind of thrown together with very little context, and left to work out what people’s areas of expertise were based on what they were willing/pushy enough to say in each of the discussions. So those of us who are extroverts naturally spoke at greater length than our respective knowledge bases necessarily warranted. Still, much value came out of the discussions, and a lot of people seem to have been fired up to use social media applications that they’d signed up for months ago but never really found a use for.

From Nokia’s side, they got

  • a massive amount of internal and external marketing footage from the conference
  • a load of online content bigging up their products
  • some quality, focussed expert product and service feedback
  • a whole bunch of enthusiastic interaction with some of their technology’s most progressive early adopters.

I’ll hopefully write up a lot of what I thought about the conference, but I think I’ll actually start at the end, with what the whole thing meant for musicians:

It was really interesting to be brought in by a mega transnational corporation to discuss mobile technology, given that my focus is largely empowering creatives to create without recourse to the corporate world – I’m not a fan of ad-sponsored music promotion streams and clearly not into the big record label model of yore. So in a sense there was some bravery in Nokia inviting people like me in without any kind of NDA/Contractual obligation not to slam their very existence (like anyone would really give a shit if I did… but anyway…).

As a pragmatist, I liked being in a place where for a weekend, I could largely think about ‘the best we can do within this kind of corporate framework’ – what does a company like Nokia have to offer the world of creativity and progressive political interaction by way of infrastructure and support? How can we as creatives use this technology, and perhaps even work with Nokia, in promoting a culture of un-fettered art. What can they do to help?

In approaching it from that angle, there were quite a few frustrations – the biggest being the session on the ‘future of entertainment’ – the scene was set by Anne Toole, talking from her background as a very experienced ‘old media’ writer (TV/film), now moved into the games industry. She talked a lot about her notion of what ‘film’ is – I think the idea was to get us thinking conceptually about the future of ‘The Industry’ in whatever our group were going to be discussing.

However, for me, the start point would have been the antithesis of what she was saying – I would have blown the doors off any attempt to define ‘film’ beyond it being ‘a series of pictures projected as a fast enough rate as to give the appearance of motion’, and then got people to think about the deep stuff of how we can make the world of film – both that which is designed to ‘entertain’ but also the information/pure art end of the spectrum – more interesting, more engaging, more productive, more subversive, more enjoyable, through social media and mobile technology.

But the big problem wasn’t that I disagreed with what I thought she was saying, it’s that she had no way of knowing I was thinking that and therefor couldn’t clarify whether or not I’d got completely the wrong end of the stick. So problem #1 was the format of the ‘presentation’ part, not the content (disagreement is vital to progressive discussion, but it has to be open and ‘real time’…)

Problem #2 was the way we were divided up. There were four groups – music, film, games and ‘me media’ (me media being cleverly named, given Nokia’s latest ad campaign… 😉 ) – and we were arbitrarily assigned to them. We could have swapped. I could’ve just wandered over to the music camp, but I didn’t. I was stuck in the games group. I don’t think it’s any surprise to anyone that I effing hate games. Actually no, not games, I hate Games. I play games all the time – twitter, facebook, myspace, who’s going to fill the dishwasher. All fun, exciting, enjoyable games. I just couldn’t give a shit about the Games Industry.

I am however innately curious, and fairly good at conceptual abstraction, so we managed to have a cool discussion about games, gaming, and game principles abstracted from game culture. But still, there was a discussion about the future of the music industry and its relationship with social media/mob-tech, and I WASN’T IN IT.

W. T. F?

Yup, my fault for not getting up and moving. But their fault for not facilitating a coming together of people with expertise in the area. I would have LOVED to bang heads with the guys from the Nokia music store (not launched yet), to chat with people who see music as part of the ‘entertainment industry’, to people who favour ad-revenue models for ‘feels like free’ music. I’ve got about 150,000 words of stuff written on the subject 🙂

And we did have those conversations – that was the strength of the conference. As with all conferences, the conversations after the sessions were the main course. the sessions were largely high-functioning ice-breakers. The magic of Nokia Open Lab 08 started at 3pm on Saturday after the closing speech.

So post #2 will start to look at what we covered in the rest of the sessions, and where we go from here. Or maybe that’ll be post #3. Or #4… 😉

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New posts up on Creative Choices…

The Creative Choices blogging job is producing some really excellent articles. Christian Payne and Lloyd Davis both posted things today about the more spiritual/metaphysical side of creativity –

Christian’s post is here and Lloyd’s is here

My own latest couple of posts have been fairly disparate in their inspiration – last week I wrote about Creative Copying – the way that channeling influences creatively can be a vital part in us learning the craft of what we do, and circumventing the ruts we get stuck in.

Then today I added a post about The Joy Of Fragmentation – contrasting old media broadcast models for the arts and media (whether that’s releasing records, writing newspapers or telling a story) and the new model that involves breaking things up into chunks that can be discussed and shared. So for me, whether it’s comments on the blog (every one of which I treasure – it’s always so good to hear from you lovely readers) or people sharing links to my tunes on last.fm or reverbnation, I benefit greatly and cherish the discussion around what I put out.

There’s a whole load of great stuff on the Creative Choices blog. Read it all here and if you want to find the archive of my posts on there, click here

More coming soon. (and yes, I still owe y’all a proper round-up of Greenbelt – it’s on the way)

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Interview with singer/songwriter Martyn Joseph…

Another lil’ interview, that brings together so many of my interests 🙂 Martyn’s an amazing singer/songwriter, and has been running his own label for over a decade. He’s recently been opening for Ani DiFranco in the States, and has been through so many different parts to his career, from churchy-singer-dude in the 80s, to Sony-signed almost-pop-star, to political, social poetic acoustic troubadour. Here’s a really lovely interview with Martyn about all of those things 🙂

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Telling Stories (new post on Creative-Choices.co.uk )

I’ve put another post up at Creative-Choices.co.uk, titled “Telling Stories…”

The premise behind it is that everything we do as musicians has a story attached, and if you’re not telling it, someone else is. It’s a theme I hope to develop more here, or there, but for now, head over to the Creative Choices site to read it. And feel free to comment – you’ll have to log in there, but it doesn’t take long 🙂

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It pains me to say it, but Billy Bragg couldn't be more wrong…

…And here was me hoping that the arguments over ‘flat license fees’ for music online were going away and people realised it was largely unworkable. Gerd Leonhard has been pushing this for a while as the answer – Gerd is a futurist, and as I’ve said before, he approaches the industry with the characteristic fatalism of a futurist – the trends all point in a certain way, so let’s not try and change the culture or wish for a better world, but instead just bend with the wind and squeeze some money from the listeners before they just steal it all.

And now my favourite living Englishman (OK, joint fave with Tony Benn), Billy Bragg has piled in on the discussion putting his weight behind the idea that music should be either license fee driven or ad-revenue driven.

And I, perhaps not surprisingly, disagree with him. Rather strongly. Here’s a few reasons why:

  • the cost of administrating such a scheme would be prohibitively high – the per-track margins involved in such a scheme would mean that the people who currently make a few hundred or a few thousand pounds a year in revenue from their recorded output would be likely driven out of the game, or forced to opt out of the scheme, and in order to ‘compete’ at all, would have to just give their stuff away without any come-back. There is a healthy music-world that operates outside even the spread of the MCPS/PRS licensing scheme for recorded music, where bands record their own original music, press their own CDs and sell them, because audiences are still aware of the financial value of recorded music. Destroy that, and those people are left high and dry – it would be fine if recorded music were genuinely ‘free’, but recording music takes time, resources, skills, all of which are costed on a scale – you want a better drum sound, you better go to a decent studio with great mics… That’s not going to happen if music for band start-ups is designed to be given away. So we end up back with the home-demo production values of the mid 80s, and hand the record labels another way of holding artists to hostage just because they own a studio and have access to advertising revenue…
  • how hard it would be to police – without getting deeper into a ‘big brother’ monitoring situation, it’d be damn near impossible to bring all music under that licensed umbrella.
  • how difficult it would be for smaller bands to build a ‘brand’ if their music is lost in some massive licensed distribution package – it’s hard enough for bands to carve out their own space online as it is, with most of the current retail options being centralized – iTunes, eMusic etc – they can be linked into, but it’s vital in the current climate that bands can manage their own sales. In the license-era, CDs (or whatever other new format has arrived) could still be sold online as ‘premium product’, but download sales would vanish, and download traffic, in order to fit within the license, will be moved away from the band’s site. I’m sure the widgets will be skinnable, but it’s still shifting the powerbase to whoever gets charged with handling the database (a database of ALL music??? who the hell would we trust with that, to not be gamable by the big labels???)
  • what’s the potential for growth within such a system – the Long Tail, as a concept, only works if an artist/content producer is ‘pushing’ traffic into the long tail – very little of my audience passively lands on my music – last.fm is probably the only significant traffic source for people finding me ‘by accident’. Maybe Myspace, to an extent. But I’m still pushing the traffic that way, and the idea of pushing people away from my site, into the license area (however that becomes administered) for miniscule return, just doesn’t work for me as a relatively marginal artist. It’s bloody marvellous for Madonna, Radiohead and even Billy Bragg – for artists with what I think of as an ‘ambient legacy’, a large general awareness of what they do amongst listeners, it’s a great deal – for people to be able to go and download all of Billy’s back catalogue for ‘free’, LOADS of people would do it, but even charge them £2 per album, and they’d think twice… He gets to capitalize on years of record company expenditure and media exposure…
  • what it psychologically does to the listener to perceive record music as having no value. This, for me is the crux of it – this approach actively ruins the relationship between listener and music – not listener and band, but listener and music. In order to give people the experience of learning from music, of being changed by it, of learning to love it, we need to be building better filters for discovery, not broadening access to 100,000 song archives. I know teenage kids with 10s of thousands of tracks on their computers. Most of it they’ll never ever listen to. You can’t. They have it because it’s there. It’s consumer-gluttony and benefits no-one. If they were ‘paying’ fractions of a penny per track via a license scheme for those tracks, it’s not going to make that track any more valuable for them. In fact, the value of downloading it illegally is probably higher because they need to step outside of ‘the mainstream’ to do it, there’s a frisson of excitement as doing something illegal (if they even know it’s illegal), and that adds value!

I LOVE Billy Bragg, I think he’s great, and I’m really glad he’s thinking through this stuff, but on this one, he’s many shades of wrong…

So what’s the alternative? i’ll write more later, but feel free to add your thoughts in the comments!

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Paradigm is no measure of quality – what to do when you're 'different'…

This post is inspired by two things – firstly, a conversation I had recently with the very lovely Laura Kidd. We’d known each other quite a few weeks before she finally bothered to listen to any of the music I did, assuming that because it was solo bass it would be a load of techno-wank bass cleverness and therefor not something she’d be interested in. She eventually listened to it, probably as much out of politeness as anything, and said with a large degree of surprise the next time I saw her how much she liked it.

She was quite embarrassed, but actually her response is pretty much mine whenever I get an email or get given a CD and told ‘you’ll really like this, it’s solo bass’.

The problem is that solo bass is neither a style of music, not does it carry any indication of quality. And, for the most part, I’m not hugely into what happens on solo bass. There are some very notable exceptions to this, and some of my favourite musicians in the world are indeed solo bassists, but as a ‘draw’, solo bass doesn’t really work for me without some evidence that there’s more to it than the tools of the trade.

Same goes for ‘loop music’, ‘ambient music’, or any other vague classification I might fit into. It’s one of the reasons I find it so tricky to accurately sum up what I do in a single sentence…

The 2nd thing that inspired this as a topic was thinking about mine and Lobelia‘s upcoming gig at Darbucka. Going out to live shows in a city as big as London can be such a chore, and venues are, by and large, becoming less and less pleasant places to hang out. I don’t want to stand around in a dark smelly hall surrounded by drunk people shouting waiting for a band to come on only to find that I can’t hear them play anyway… I’m immediately wary of any gig in a venue I haven’t heard of, and I’m guessing that most of the people who would enjoy my gigs feel similarly.

So how do you get it across to people that a night out at Darbucka is ‘not like other gigs’? That the venue is cool enough to be worth a night out on its own, that the food is great, the ambience is really mellow, the sound is always cracking, it’s a fun night, people listen, the audience are generally lovely, and there’ll be the return of the lovely bloke playing Ukulele and singing, as well as all the usual Steve ‘n’ Lobelia loveliness.

That, dear readers, is where you lot come in. Cos nothing at all beats word of mouth in spreading that kind of info. I can rant til I’m blue in the face about how fab my own gigs are, but hey, they’re my gigs, I’m bound to say that. Why should anyone believe me when I have a vested interest in them being there?

…I hope that for most of you reading this, that last bit is rhetorical, that it’s clear I do try to be honest about what I’m doing, and definitely go out of my way to put on the best gig I can (despite Darbucka having it’s own PA, and me not owning a car, I still take my own PA down there cos the sound is better, for example 🙂 )

So, if you’ve been to see us before, take the next couple of mins to tell someone about it – post a comment on last.fm or Myspace, or hey, just post a comment on here! Tweet about it, blog about it, or call up some friends if you’re in London and bring ’em along. If you’re bringing loads, email me for a group discount 🙂

Hope to see you at Darbucka on Tuesday 29th July – it’ll be a really lovely mellow, fun night out, I promise!

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Teaching Thoughts Pt 4 – Pleasing parents is bad for the student.

One of the things I most like about teaching electric bass is that very few kids are ever told by their parents to play it. ‘You need to learn piano/violin/clarinet because I never had the chance’ is the bane of so many teacher’s lives and one of the main driving forces behind kids giving up playing an instrument as soon as they are afford a degree of self determination by their parents.

In all my time teaching bass (15 years) I think I’ve had 3 students ask to do graded exams. In the same time over half the parents that have brought their kids to me have asked whether or not it would be a good idea. There’s an assumption in education these days that people a) need some kind of external certificated validation in order to measure where they are up to and b) that without that, students will lack motivation and will just slack off because no-one’s telling them what to do.

For me as a teacher it’s imperative to get across to my students – especially the younger ones – that them not practicing has no impact on me whatsoever. I can just pick up where we left off in the last lesson as though the time were continuous. The point of practice is never to placate me. Practice serves two purposes – it’s enjoyable (if done right) and you get better – the two are clearly deeply linked. The idea that practice has to be torturous is another crap hang-over from the music education of the early 20th century, where suffering was a signal of how serious you were about what you’re doing. That’s clearly bollocks, especially for people with families, friends, jobs, school work and other interests. Practice time should be valued time in and of itself not just for the pay-off. The pay-off makes it even better, but playing an instrument should be fun!

That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require a large degree of self-discipline, commitment and focus, it’s just that we’re selling kids short by telling them that those things can’t be enjoyable!

These are all elements in my reasoning for not following a syllabus. If a students comes into a lesson, tells me about a gig they just went to, and I then teach them something the band they’ve just seen – whether it be an actual song by them, or something that can be drawn from that music – they can pulled a little closer to the magic at the heart of music. The gap between them and the music they love is lessened and the feeling that the magic is in their reach is heightened.

At the heart of what I teach is a desire to help the student write and play music that can change the world. It might not, but the desire to play the songs that have soundtracked their life – whether that’s Mozart or Metallica, Stockhausen or Stock, Aitken And Waterman – and to then create their own music is what drives individuals to learn an instrument, and pandering to the wishes of pushy parents who want lil’ Tommy to get certificates so they can brag to the other mums and dads about the distinction he scored in his grade 3 exam is the death-knell of lil’ Tommy’s musical aspiration.

Parental encouragement is often an utterly vital and energising force in the music-life of a student. I still take inspiration from my mum’s on going encouragement of what I do, and am thankfully big enough to ignore the distain with which my dad views my musical endeavours. Channeled in the right way, parents can be integral to the musical growth of a student. But if pushy parents are allowed to ride roughshod over what Tommy actually wants to do with music, he’ll end up as one of the 95% who give up before they are 18, and may resent it for decades to come.

We’re your parents an encouragement or a hindrance to your creative path? Comments pleeeeeze

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