Mperia-l Legacy

Pay the Piper

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:42:00 +0000

Following on from my earlier post concerning the viability of the net as a means of distributing your artistic output for profit this recent report from the PRS seems to suggest that getting out and playing has now become more profitable than selling recordings of your work.

Then again, this could be skewed by the fact that some of the Major artists command a rather sizeable ticket price for their performances......

MP3 to Vinyl

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:24:00 +0000

There is a plethora of ways to covert your cherished vinyl recordings to MP3's but, in light of the recent campaign by Jarvis Cocker & friends to support independant record stores in the UK, what about the reverse? Is it possible to reverse the process and create the beautiful tactile discs that were once the staple of the music industry?

Perhaps this may point the way!

Seriously, though, if you really want to go the whole route of putting your artistic endevours onto a peice of black plastic then, as this article points out the only way seems to be to pay someone else....unless of course you have 10k burning a whole in your pocket

Songs in the key of Shakespeare

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:25:00 +0000

Whilst searching the web for some form of online musical composition programme (look I don't get access to Reason from work okay) I came across literature2music.com.

It strikes me that this is a similar concept to the one that Pete Townsend wanted to use for the Baba o'Reilly track, insofar as it is data being input to generate a musical sequence.

Unfortunately I've also forgotten my earphones to plug into my works PC, so guess I'll have to wait until later to try this little gadget out - it would be interesting to compare whether the Bard or Barbara Cartland produces a better composition when the text of their work is input!

Jukebox Jive

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:49:00 +0000

Okay, so you've accepted that you've got to give stuff away to get attention but where do you put it? Something that springs to mind, especially if you are a gigging ensemble is to get yourselves on the various sites of the venues that your outfit has performed at. Take for example the London venue of the Bull & Gate . Now in the dark distant past one of my old outfits played there, and as is the norm, we asked the sound guy to record the live performance. This was before the net had really impacted on every day live & recording to a CD was the height of technology

Now, what if you played that venue today and agreed to make such recordings available to the venue to put on their web presence in a sort of jukebox of bands that have played there?

You would get increased exposure, and the venue would have a growing showcase to pull in the punters.

The band plays “live” at the venue which supplies a soundman to record the performance and let the band have a copy.

The venue itself may not have the hosting capabilities to store all the mp3's that would invariably end up on the proposed jukebox, so why not put your recordings in the Internet Archive with a Creative Commons license attached. In return for giving the venue the right to broadcast the tracks free of charge, the band could then have them featured on the venues on-line jukebox.

The venue gets to show its credentials in terms of the past acts it has hosted, and the acts get further exposure.

Extrapolating from this the venue could use this as a means of gauging which bands to re-book by capturing the hits each act gets via the jukebox. If they are so inclined it should also be feasible to produce charts – let’s face it we all like our names in lights.

Likewise with a little clever meta-tagging the bands could exploit the “showcase” to point punters in the direction of their material and/or website- naturally it would only be right to include reciprocal links back to the venues site.

Cafepress - Outsource your merchandising

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:38:00 +0000

And why not? Can you really afford to pay for a run of 500 T-shirts and then have to sell them at a loss when the band splits? Basically, if you haven't somebody else's money to play with why should you risk your own when others can do it a lot easier than you?

Okay, so the Cafepress thing has been around for a while and is possibly only really viable if you live in the USA, but there are sites that offer similar services whatever your geographical impairment.

It will cost you nothing and may even give you a little bit of exposure in a field that you wouldn't normal venture into - it's worth a try isn't it?

GotSeen.com

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:26:00 +0000

After what seems to be await of eternity there finally appears to be a site that offers what Mperia used to do all those years ago
GotSeeN is a new UK music discovery site that allows artists to sell their mercahandsise on line as well as allowing listeners to stream and download material.

At the tiome of writing it is only acouple of weeks old, but the site appears to have gone down the payments via PayPal route to get the moula to the artist

Interestingly enough, the site also seems to be geared up to allow bands to sell merchandise, though quite how thias works needs further investigation.

The site is primarily UK based, but given the trans-border nature of the internet there should be no reason why artists outside the UK cannot benefit from the service

New Music Strategies

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 12:32:00 +0000

Just a quick nod towards an excellent reference site that may be of interest, namely New Music Strategies, which contains a bit of advice that may (or may not) be of use to you when trying to negotiate your way through the minefield of trying to market yourself & your material via the wonders of the worldwide web .

Tunesquare falters

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:47:00 +0000

Over the weekend we received a rather polite, but sad, e-mail from the Tunesquare team
"We created TuneSquare with the hope to see artists getting paid for making their musical works available for free download through our site. While the overall response from artists and members has been positive, there are some aspects of this service that haven't worked out quite as well as we had hoped.

So why have we temporarily stopped making payments to artists on TuneSquare? The short answer is that the continued operation of this ad-supported music download service is a very expensive enterprise that requires an emormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide at the moment. Traffic stats at this point are simply not high enough to generate sufficient advertising revenue. This, in addition to high developing costs has resulted in slow website development which has resulted in delayed press releases which has resulted in...well, you get it...

So, instead of saying farewell, completely shutting down and cease to exist, we have decided to spend our remaining assets on further developing this website -- something that we unfortunately have been unable to focus on for a very long time. And we apologize for that.

The killer line is that one about traffic stats - to rely on advertising revenue to finance a site you really have to have, and maintain, a high profile

Give it away, give it away, give it away now!

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:17:00 +0000

In this speech author Paulo Coelho talks about the positive effect that allowing freedowloads of his book has had on sales of hard copies

Now I realise that there is no longer the need to obtain a "hard" copy of an audio file, but maybe if somebody really likes a track they will buy it given the option?

"let's see art and content from a different perspective. We cannot control. You close Napster they open BitTorrent,they open Emule"

PS, the relevant bit is contained within the first 17,minutes but its worth listening to his finish (around 22 minutes) to get a feel good buzz

Link: sevenload.com

"Art for arts sake, money for Gods sake"

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:00:00 +0000

If you are interested in distributing your work via the miricle of the internet then David Gratton's blog should be required reading
amongst other things he has posed the question "What if music were free?"

Okay, so he was referring to the audio file in the context of the "new musical experience" and the need to put together a media package that would enhance and support the purchase of music, but let's pre-suppose that, in the current climate, the audio file has reached the point of negligible monetary value, what will happen if "music" is free?

Well for a start the artists would vanish.
It’s simple economics. If there is no financial incentive, or perhaps more importantly no potential for monetary gain, then we will see the demise of the audio artist.

Now I expect to be taken to task about the above statement.
Surely, you will argue, the accessibility of the new delivery systems via the internet & associated technologies will only encourage the blossoming of talent, and that would be a fair conclusion.

You can argue that any emerging artist needs exposure, and “giving away” audio files is an accepted marketing tactic. However, there will come a point when the artist will crequire some recompense for their efforts.

This is a perfectly logical progression. How many of us aspire to become professionals, to make a living out of doing what we enjoy, namely making music?
In order to advance our skills (we all know practice makes perfect)it is almost a pre-requisite that we devote more and more time to the art.

However, unless you are someone of independant means,the real world impinges on your quality creative time and somehow or other you have to find the lucre from more mundane pursuits to keep body & soul together.

If,and this may have already happened, the music is going to be increasingly dependant on the window dressing to sell, then you have to question the value of creating that music in the first place - it may sound awful but its delivered in such a pretty box wrapped in ribbons that it will sell by the boatload. Is that really what we want?

Alternatively, the other option is that the musician will have to take on the production role for the packaging and associated bells and whistles.
Now many of us are quite able and keen to take on creative control of our "product" but wouldn't wearing many such hats by very definition detract from the time we could devote to the core of any offering, the song itself?

However, take a look at the quality of some of that “user generated content” currently available. I don’t even pretend to be a taste guru, but even the most open minded listener would have to concede that the majority of it is, frankly, below standard.

Can Clapton paint? (its a rhetorical question)

Buddy can you spare a dime?

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 20:07:00 +0000

Amongst all the flashy gizmos & widgets that seem to plague the internet these days (c'mon, do you really NEED to pretend you're a zombie?, karmafan.com stands out for its simplicity.

The FAQ will give you all the info you need but basically this allows the artists the opportunity to generate some revenue based on the goodwill of their audience - the "fan" can donate as much or as little as they deem fit as a token of their appreciation of the work, be it a blog, a peice of music or any other artistic endevour.

As an artist you can put the "tip jar" widget on any site where you feel folk might reward you, which in itself is handy, but, and here's the sweet part, you can put the same jar on more than one site - so if you are a renaisance artist,with songs artwork and a blog you can channel tips from all three into one account.

Quite apt with all the talk of the credit crunch.

Links for 2007-12-17 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:00:00 PST

Media article relating to Mperia

Links for 2007-12-12 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:00:00 PST

Mperia-l Legacy
SOS Home
Sound On Sound web presence tips hints etc

Links for 2007-12-11 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:00:00 PST

Springtime for Indies and Oh Emm Dees

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 16:08:00 +0000

Consider this:

You can carefully craft a tune in the luxury of your own bedroom and, with a little skill (and maybe even a little talent?), you have the power at your fingertips to create a piece that is technically and artistically as good as anything that any signed artist is producing.

Before you “acoustic” artists berate me saying “that’s fine for an electronic musician but what about me” just reflect on the fact that for the cost of a few rehearsal sessions you could probably turn your own PC/laptop into a passable mixing desk and, using the skills honed on a portastudio (whaddyamean you’ve never heard of them?), produce a decent recording of a “live” session.

If you are reading this there is also a strong probability that you also have access to a virtually free method of distribution, via the various on line hosting sites, some of whom even provide a way to get paid.

For a minimal outlay (i.e. the cost of your equipment) you have a product, the means of distribution, and even a potential income –so why aren’t you as big as the Stones?

The traditional answer is that you are lacking promotion, but even THAT is questionable these days.

Even with the backing of major corporations musical tastes have now become so fragmented that major advertising campaigns no longer translate to major sales.

It may be a socialists dream come true that, at least in the musical field, the workers now hold the means of production and have been freed from the shackles of the Music Moguls exploitation, but now that we are all Producers who is going to peddle our wares to an increasingly shattered and fragmented market?

Preaching to the converted

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:22:00 +0000

Sometimes promoting your music via modern technology can seem a bit like the search for extra terrestrial life.

Take a look at Mashables 90+ On Line Music and Audio Websites along with this guide to OMD's and its no wonder, as an independant artist, that it must get frustrating trying to get heard.

The internet has the POTENTIAL to get your material beamed directly into the ears of millions of people who, if they only knew it, are your most ardent fans, but how in hells name do you get them to listen?

Type your own bands name into your search engine of choice and I'll warrrant that top of the list will inevitably be your MySpace profile, and therein lies the rub.

Despite its apparent brilliant manipulation by the likes of the Artic Monkeys and Lily Allen (I remain skeptical partly because of Miss Allen's showbiz links and partly because I refuse to conceed that anyone could ever seriously suggest that the Artic Monkeys are anything other than sub-medoicre) , the accompanying gold rush by every unsigned artist (myself included)to attempt to emulate them has merely swamped the social networking site.

Ask youself where YOU would go to listen to new music - note the word listen- to new music? Is it the same place that you host your own material on? And if it is, other than fellow users of the site, do you share this place and recommend it to your MySpace friends?

Its all very well wanting people to listen to your stuff amnd recommend it to others but ask yourself how often do YOU recommend something to others?

Karma dude, do unto others and all that.

Radio Mperia at IAC

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 13:06:00 +0000

The Independant Artist Company is still a viable option if you want to sell tracks.

However,as the limit on the free option is two tracks it will probably not net you that much unless you plan releases the way they used to plan single releases (anyone remember the Blur/Oasis "battle" back in the nineties)

There is another use for this site, namely for exposure. Embedded in this blog is the Radio Mperia playlist streaming through the XSFP player via IAC

If you want to be included on the playlist and get exposure via this blog, and the Radio Mperia Myspace profile,and anywhwere else that I can find to paste it, then simply open an account at IAC, upload two songs & let me know where they are so I can add them to the playlist.

Yes,I wish that you could just upload them and they'd be automatically added, but at the moment this is the only way until someone fulfills the wish list outlined on the Mperia Legacy post

I'll leave it up to you whether you sell them via IAC

Tunesquare

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:43:00 +0000

Another tack perhaps to be taken is that offered via TuneSquare.

The listener is offered the chance to download MP3’s for free and in return the artist gets a share of the revenue generated from the advertisement that fund the site.

One criticism that is levelled is that the tracks are from bands that folk have never heard of but hey, isn’t that the point? Okay so the artist is technically giving away the tracks, but if this is above board and you can generate enough plays there could be some financial reward in participating

Soundstation Music store solution for the independent

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:23:00 +0000

On the ongoing quest to find a suitable replacement for Mperia I’ve stumbled across the SoundLoud/SoundStation online music store.

Alright, so the sight has no social networking facility, no forum and no Collabarative Filtering that is aaparent, but it does provide a player (which appears to be based on the XSPF Web Music Player)with the functionality of being able to sell tracks directly whilst still remaining on the mother site so to speak.

You’ll see Kick Asteroid's player at the bottom of this post and although its not a total solution as discussed in the Mperia Legacy post it seems to be a fairly good site to use as a store.

Mperia legacy

noreply@blogger.com (Carlito & The Strawberry Express) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 13:26:00 +0000

In 2006, in an act to preserve the meagre outpourings of my creativity over my lifetime, I digitally remastered a number of recordings. (Digitally remastered in this instance merely means transforming the recordings from old ferrous oxide tape cassettes to MP3's)

It was during this process that I learnt that there was a plethora of sites that offered to host MP3's! Some even offered the possibility of being able to sell the stuff! After much deliberation the prefered site ended up being the now defunct Mperia.com

The site allowed anyone to upload their masterpeices, regardless of quality, and sell them for whatever price they chose. Mperia took 30% of the selling price to run the cost of hosting and processing of any transactions. Now that may sound like a hell of a lot, but it cost the artist nothing. That's right, nada, neinte, nix, zilch sweet Fanny Adams. (Pay attention to this because I'll come back to it in a while).

The site also had fairly developed social networking functionality, playlist creation, and even the ability to embed MP3 players on other websites.

However, even though it became my chosen online repository, there was always one thing that I felt let the site down, namely that for all the wealth of talent that was hosted there it was awkward at best to really discover new music.

Sure it had search facilities so you could pull up lists of bands or tracks that were similar, or influenced by, or in the genre of, the usual thing that has become commonplace.
But they were lists.
To hear a particular track you would have to click on it.
Then, to hear the next track on the list you would have to click on that, so it was a very passive system, there was no functionality to stream a whole bunch of tracks by visiting the site.

Compare that with other sites such as IACmusic.com , which seem to revel in the notion of playlists.
The mechanics of it are very similar to Mperia, inso far as you can create a"Radio Station"(effectively a playlist) and add favourite tracks to create your personalised sound track.
Naturally the player, with its associated playlist can be exported and added to your website, MySpace profile etc.
There are differences (each IAC"Station" can host up to 100 tracks whereas Mperia "playlists" only held 12) but both use(d) the excellent XSPF Web Music Player.

However, the IAC site allows the listener to search these "stations" by genre, and these can then be streamed in their entirety.

For the artist IAC only offers the possibility of hosting two tracks on their free package, anymore than that and you have to start paying .
I'm not picking on IAC by the way, this model seems to be the norm, and the artist does keep 100% of any sales- if you are confident that you can attract enough online sales via the site to recoup your initial outlay then it, or any of the other myriad sites offering similar services, is worth investing in.

The financing of Mperia was reliant on micropayments via BitPass.com When BitPass closed so did Mperia, with all the love, sweat and tears that had gone into it's creation, not only from the Mperia team, but for the artists/listeners that had participated in the adventure.

The subscription model as used by IAC & others seems to be the safer bet, at least for the operators of the sites.

For me however there is one major gripe.

Once you are signed up, none of the sites that offer these facilities seems to actively promote the material they are hosting.

In the real world when you go into a record store invariably there is some track blasting out of the speakers- it may be the clerks favourite band, and it may not be to your liking, but that particular track is being broadcast.

You head towards the section that contains the genre or artist that you have a predeliction to listen to.

In the real world, the clerk continues to play his favourite music, and there’s almost negligible chance that you might actually like any of it.

Now, just imagine that the clerk notices which section you’re headed to and changes what’s playing to a track from that area.

The chances of you liking the new piece are still not certain, but the likelihood that you will has gone up.

Now imagine that you indicate to our friendly clerk that actually you do like it and would like some more of the same.

He puts on another track, but this one is not going down well – sure, you like metal, but Slipknot is one of your pet hates – and you ask him to put something else on.

This is the silver bullet offered by collaborative filtering. It’s already up and running on sites like Last.FM, Pandora and of course Yahoo’s Launchcast streaming system. Yet for the independent artist each of these has drawbacks.

The one that seems to offer the most promise is Last.FM.
However, the audioscrobbler device by it’s very nature means that independent/obscure stuff is swamped by the major/established artists – the amount of folk out there still listening to the Beatles is always going to outnumber those listening to Jet Silver and the Dolls of Venus- thus negating the idea of it being a site to discover new or unsigned bands/artists.

On the plus side, they will accept your material no matter what the recording quality/artistic merit, and it can’t do any harm to your ego to have material on there vying with the big boys.

There is also the option of linking to an online store, although you can’t actually sell the tracks you host on Last.FM direct from their servers, so in effect you’ve got to put your stuff on two servers – Last FM for exposure, Somewhereelse.com for sales.

Pandora requires you to submit your stuff for approval (quality control more than censorship issues), and getting onto Launchcast seems nigh on impossible unless you are signed to one of the major labels with whom they have agreements.

inDiscover.net, a Canadian site, seems to have a system that could be a good model; it has CF functionality & the material is uploaded to their server. (The site is paid for by advertising) Their player downloads MP3’s from their catalogue and the listener rates them and/or adds them to their playlist, with this behaviour forming the basis for the recommendations. At the moment the MP3 is downloaded (ie given away) & at the moment there appears to be no functionality in the player to link to the artists website/store.

Now, I don't have the technical knowhow but it strikes me that IAC et all already have access to the data required to drive some form of colloborative filtering engine - after all there must be some data mining going on to generate the charts .

If the music hosting facilities that such sites offer could be coupled with the CF machines used by the likes of inDiscover then we are getting close to the Holy Grail - for artists a place to host material, showcase and gain exposure and maybe even sell some stuff, for the listener a place that feeds new music based on their preferences.

That clerk is now a virtual recomendation machine that gradually builds up an idea of what you would like to listen to and your visits to the store become more frequent to the point where you actually start making your purchases there.

And if your "store" is where units are moving then every artist is going to want to be represented in it

That's the theory I'll leave it to the techies and the financial wizards to sort out the machinery