the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
This is one of those weird stories that often results from me spending more than about 2 minutes in Andrew Dubber’s company. I think we bring out the tangentialist in each other.
We were sat chatting by the canal in Birmingham, and a boat went past, with a couple of little kids on it, waving at everyone on the bank, and getting ever so delighted when anyone waved back. Continue reading “Puppet Show in A Traffic Jam”
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.
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 madeâ€
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”
Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, I found out at about 12 o’clock today that Andrew Dubber, author of New Music Strategies, was in London for a conference. Andrew and I met at BrumTwestival, a Twitter-organised charity event, got on great, and so I tweeted him to see what he was up to. 30 mins later, we were having lunch together at the British Library. Such is the immediacy and flexibility of the twittering life 🙂
Continue reading “In Defense Of Twitter… The video!”