remedial thoughts

War or gaming fun? Spotting the difference

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:01:00 +0000

A week ago I wrote a piece about ITV's blunder in which video game footage taken from YouTube found it's way into a documentary about Gaddafi. Ofcom were less than pleased with the lack of due process and compliance breaches on display. A few days ago, a BBC picture editor (Phil Coomes) wrote a playful piece in which he stressed the blurring of real and virtual worlds given the popularity and success of increasingly photorealistic video games depicting war or conflicts.

I only came across this article after a colleague of mine forwarded me the URL devoid of context. I think he knew it would wind me up and the gist of my response to the article can be found below.

Photo/realism

I get pretty confused about these kinds of posts from journalists, in which they attempt to link the digital representations of (usually) fictional war-based games with real world combat. I get that still images can look similar but there's a world of difference between experiencing war first hand and picking up a controller or a mouse and playing in a virtual world with strangers on the Internet (as in Battlefield 3 or Modern Warfare 3). Granted, Coomes was responding to a point raised by the photographer John Cantile, who claimed that the level of realism was such that the "next sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may not even have left their bedrooms". The rest of the article seems to give way to Cantile's experiences rather than being the work of Coomes.

What irks me about these kinds of claims is the easy at which the impacts of one experience (war) are neatly overlaid onto that of another (gaming) at the level of photorealism. You'd think that there's never been a thing called cinema in which actors depict realistic events a la vérite. When reading through the Ofcom report into the ITV blunder it's almost understandable how the game footage form ArmA 2 made it's way into a documentary - a failure of basic fact-checking before running with something grabbed from the internet, but it's another thing entirely to compare gaming to the real experience of warfare. This should be apparent to Cantile as he has photographed battalions in Sirte, Libya.

Fatigue

I'm sure Cantile felt "drained" after playing Battlefield 3 for many hours - I do too, but I also feel really drained after playing FIFA or Fat Princess online for large periods of time. However, I don't make the mistake of thinking that I am at the Bernabéu of that I've ever really played there, setting up goals for Lionel Messi and basking in the cheers or boos from fans and oppositional supporters alike.

The sound mix for Battlefield 3 is phenomenal - you can get incredibly disoriented with rockets and explosions erupting all around your character. This really can be a "hellish cacophony"as Cantile claims. It sounds even better with an expensive pair of headphones but that can break the verisimilitude - it's not often soldiers storm battlefields with big headphones, a games controller or a mouse and keyboard. I note he was a playing on PC - the only real injury the contemporary digital soldier will experience is Repetitive Strain Injury?

I know what happens when a player gets gets shot in Battlefield 3 as I've been killed several thousand times. You get a kill-cam of the player who shot you, overlaid with stats about your 'nemesis' (eg their weapon, their class, their personal kill/death ratio) before being dumped to a character load-out screen to do it all again. Very real. And let's not even go into how bad the texture 'pop-in' is on the PS3, further heightening the supposed reality effect! The texture mapping and frame-rate hardly contributes to the replication of reality (neither does having an on screen radar or ammo count). Just witness the realistic text effects below:

Anxiety

Cantile has spent some time attempting to match real world images to those taken in-game saying: "In some cases it is actually quite hard to tell the difference between my photographs and the computer version, which is deeply worrying. The level of detail is so precise that the virtual war zone is as convincing as the real thing". I'm not sure how worrying it is. As I've alluded to earlier, there are many other media forms that "look" real, but are not - they are representational or, in the case of games, simulational (see Gonzalo Frasca on this point). I think this is the underlying anxiety in the article - a point that is hinted at rather than explicitly addressed, and one which has connections with other moral panics about media forms and their supposed effects.

So the essence of the piece can be summarised thusly: still images taken from some war-based video games look like real combat environments. And rightly so given that vast swathes of research money has been vested in making these products look similar to the actions they depict in order to ramp up the dramatic experiences of gameplay. But it's somewhat disingenuous to claim that we should be worried about the similarities between static images of two completely different experiences

MAC281 Cyberculture 2012 - module taster

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:32:00 +0000

I've been putting together the module guide for this semester's module guide for MAC281 - Cybercultures. I'm currently tweaking the document and finalising a special guest for Week 6 but this is how it's looking at the moment:

Week 1: Introduction to the module & a short history of Cyberculture – An overview of the module content and assessment

Week 2: Copyright in the Digital Age – This session will establish some of the major arguments that inform the current copyright climate in the UK, and the West more generally. In particular it will look at the ways in which recent legislative changes have developed to ‘support’ content creators in the face of filesharing by exploring the Digital Economy Act and its impacts. (Rob Jewitt)

Week 3: The Music Industry and the Net Part 1: Producers, Profits, Pirates & Peers - This session will consider the crisis facing the music industry posed by recent changes in the organisation and distribution of music in the age of the Internet. The primary focus will be on the industry. It will consider claims made by the industry about sales and will consider business models for the music industry. (Rob Jewitt)

Week 4: The Music Industry and the Net Part 2: The Suits vs The Scene – This session will consider the opportunities presented to music consumers provided by the Internet. It will reassess some of the claims made by the music industry in context of actual audience members and analyse some of the reasons "pirates" give regarding “sharing” music via the Internet. (Rob Jewitt)

Week 5: Openness, Crowdsourcing & Participatory Culture

– The knowledge and resources of millions of people can now be harnessed through self-organising groups via blogs, wikis, chat rooms, forums, peer-to-peer networks, and personal broadcasting platforms, etc. This session will consider the impact of low-cost online collaborative production tools and the importance of open data and free culture to the participatory nature on the Web. (Rob Jewitt)

~~Week 6: Weblogs and the Rise of Citizen Journalism -~~ Today, thanks to weblogs and mobile phones that can send photographs, anyone can be a journalist. New media evangelists claim traditional structures are crumbling as digital technology breaks down barriers and heralds a new age of transparency and participatory democracy. Will citizen journalists change our view of the world? I'm expecting to have a guest speaker here to cover all things journalism and data. Will reprot back tomorrow

Week 7: Video Games, Narrative and ‘Play’ – The history of digital games stretches back over the best part of half a century yet academia has been slow to engage with this interactive form beyond offering moral objections. This session will consider the ways game scholars have attempted to situate and explain this ‘new’ medium by discussing narrative design and “play” mechanics. (Rob Jewitt)

Week 8: Game Music, Design and User Experience – This session will build upon contemporary discussion of game design and user experience by focussing on the frequently overlooked aural experience. It will consider the various ways in which music features within gaming experiences by touching upon the licencing of game soundtracks, incidental music through to a consideration of rhythm-based gaming experiences. (Rob Jewitt)

Week 9: The 'Actualities' of Virtual Realities - An exploration into the history, application and cultural and social impact and implications of virtual reality. The lecture will draw on key examples of VR from popular culture and industry as well as its use as an actual technology. (John-Paul Green)

Week 10: ‘Getting around’ in online environments - How do we come to know and explore our way around online places? This session will seek to define and explore more deeply our relationship with different online places and sites and ask how we come to habitually know and navigate around them. It will examine a variety of different places including virtual and gaming worlds as well as social networks, thinking about the ways that we know and interact with these different but very familiar environments. Using the work of Ingold and Shinkle, the session will also look to uncover the different roles of the body and sensoriality when we browse around, interact with and inhabit various online places. (Eve Forrest)

Week 11: Digital Photographic Cultures Online – Are we all photographers now? With photographic technology becoming cheaper and more accessible we can capture, store, print, upload and distribute our images like never before. This session will examine the explosion of amateur photography, looking at the different impacts and varying aesthetics of the photograph online. (Eve Forrest)

Week 12: ‘Net Neutrality’ and the Future of the Internet -

Network neutrality is a complex issue that has generated intense levels of political discussion in the United States in recent years, and attention has turned to regulation in the UK. This session will consider the whether network operators should be prevented from blocking or prioritising certain network traffic or traffic from particular sources – effectively creating a two-tiered Internet – and who stands to gain from this (Rob Jewitt)

Miro Video Converter dimension settings explained

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:14:00 +0000

Anyone who has used the great Miro Video Converter (ver 2.6) tool for transcoding video into a format that can be viewed in any browser you may care to use might find the encoder settings a little opaque. There's no intuitive way of finding out exactly what dimensions the video you want to process will come out at other than by being familiar with the encoder settings.

The encoder settings are handily listed under the following categories:

Android Devices

Nexus One

Dream / G1

Magic / myTouch

Droid

Eris / Desire

Hero

Cliq / DEXT

Behold II

Apple Devices
iPhone
iPod Touch
iPod Nano
iPod Classic
iPhone 4 / iPod Touch 4
iPad
Apple Universal

Other Devices and Formats
Playstation Portable (PSP)
Theora
WebM (vp8)
MP4
MP3 (Audio only)

For some people, these settings may be fairly self explanatory. However, it's still not exactly clear which of the settings will give the best quality output. What I intend to do in this post is explain what these settings equate to when using a real world example. I'm going to take a piece of video freely available and run it through each of these presets and then post the details of the file size and the dimensions. The video I have chosen is to use is entitled Liquid Skies by Annis Naeem:

The reason I have chosen this video is mainly due to its relatively short length (1 minute 36 seconds) - encoding video files can take a long time especially when the original file is long and necessarily large as a consequence.

Annis has enabled downloading of the video from his Vimeo page and it comes out as 29.1 MB Flash (.f4v) file. Using the Inspector tool within Quicktime we can see that the actual video dimensions of the file are 960 x 540 pixels, and it is encoded with the AVC Coding codec. We can also see other pieces of information such as the audio codec, frame rate and data rate. This file will be used as the starting point when trying all of the different presets.

Helpfully, when converting the files Miro appends the name of the preset to the new file name. However, there are times when this goes wrong - the Apple presets for the various iPod models all omit the specific device they are intended for so if you want to make multiple copies for different platforms it is advised that you add "nano" or "touch" to the file name to help distinguish between the conversions.

The Android Settings

Below is a list of the video conversion presets followed by the resulting file size of the newly converted video as well as the video dimensions

Android Devices

Nexus One - 17.5 MB - 800 x 480 (853 x 480 actual)

Dream / G1 - 8.9 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)

Magic / myTouch - 8.9 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)

Droid - 18.8 MB - 854 x 480 (853 x 480 actual)

Eris / Desire - 8.9 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)

Hero - 8.9 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)

Cliq / DEXT - 8.9 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)

Behold II - 8.9 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)

All of the Android presets came out as .mp4 files using the H.264 video codec, but the audio codec remained unchanged along with the frame rate (29.97). There appears to minimal (if any) difference between the settings for Dream / G1, Magic / myTouch, Eris / Desire, Hero, Cliq / DEXT, and Behold II.

The Apple Settings

Again, below is a list of the video conversion presets for Apple devices followed by the resulting file size of the newly converted video as well as the video dimensions

Apple Devices
iPhone - 15 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)
iPod Touch - 15 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)
iPod Nano - 15 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)
iPod Classic - 15 MB - 480 x 320 (568 x 320 actual)
iPhone 4 / iPod Touch 4 - 15.1 MB - 640 x 480 (853 x 480 actual)
iPad - 15.1 MB - 1024 x 768 (1365 x 768 actual)
Apple Universal - 15.1 MB - 1280 x 720 (1280 x 720 actual)

As with the Android presets, all the Apple conversions came out as .mp4 files using the H.264 video codec, with the frame rate and audio codec remaining unchanged. The iPhone, iPod Touch, Nano and Classic all outputted the same video file. However the iPhone 4 and iPad outputs varied in video dimensions whilst the file size was slightly larger than the older Apple devices. It looks like the iPhone and iPad presets are optimised for those individual devices (the 'Retina Display'?) whilst the Apple Universal setting seems more geared towards an Apple TV device with its 720 output.

The Other Settings

As above, here's a list of the video conversion presets for the non-Apple/non-Android outputs. Not all the presets were able to convert the original file and the audio and video codecs were sometimes converted to fit the platforms they were expected to work on

Other Devices and Formats
Playstation Portable (PSP) - file could not be converted
Theora - 31.7 MB - 960 x 540 - video codec: Theora - audio codec: Vorbis
WebM (vp8) - 4.4 MB - 960 x 540 - video codec: V_VP8 - audio codec: Vorbis
MP4 - 17.3 MB - 960 x 540 - video codec: AVC - audio codec: AAC
MP3 (Audio only) - 1.47 MB

Screengrab of WebM conversion

These presets produced a mixed bag of results. The Theora preset produced the biggest file out of all the presets available and the video footage looked sharp. The opposite can be said for the WebM conversion which produced a blocky and pixelated image, but it did compress the file down to 4.4 MB - the smallest size on test. It was truly awful when dealing with any onscreen motion. The Playstation Portable preset simply refused to work with any video I've thrown at it to date.

Conclusion

It certainly seems that Miro Video Converter contains a number of presets that do much the same thing as others. This is most likely due to the diversity of users with different platforms looking to make video specifically for their device (as in the case of the Android and Apple settings). Given that the generic Android and Apple presets put out video at 480 x 320 it's fair to say that the smaller file sizes reduce the amount of visible detail available, but then they are nearly half the size. This is an expected trade-off in quality.

Miro Video Convertor is a free tool with a tidy interface. If you are looking for a quick and simple drag-and-drop tool then it will more than likely meet your needs. Just don't expect much in the way of control over the conversions you run through it. For that, you'll want to use something like Handbrake

Ofcom slaps ITV's wrists over game footage

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:11:00 +0000

Back in September of 2011 ITV dropped a bit of a clanger when they unwittingly included some footage from the video game ArmA 2 in a documentary about Colonel Gaddafi's links with the IRA. "Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA" aired on ITV1 on Monday the 26th of September and purported to feature footage labelled as "IRA film 1988" (see video below).

This footage appeared within the opening minutes of the programme and matches similar footage posted earlier in 2011 which claimed the video was footage of the Provisional IRA shooting down a British helicopter near Silverbridge in 1988. Clearly this was a case of ITV's fact-checking processes falling well short of something approaching acceptability especially given that the last time I checked, real life doesn't feature texture pop-ins.

Nevertheless ITV admitted that the mistake was a result of human error but that hasn't stopped them from having their wrists slapped by the British broadcast media regulator, Ofcom. Broadcast Bulletin, Issue 198 (23rd Jan 2012) found ITV to be in breach of standards following 26 viewer complaints about the game footage and other footage purporting to feature a riot in the Ardoyne area of Belfast in July 2011. Ofcom investigated the documentary under Rule 2.2 the Broadcasting Code which states:

“Factual programmes or items or portrayals of factual matters must not materially mislead the audience”.

ITV responded to the complaints by saying they had intended to portray two real events but that in each case the 'wrong footage' was used to illustrate them:

“mistakes were the result of human error and not an intention to mislead viewers. In both cases, steps were taken to verify the content of the footage used but unfortunately these did not reveal the errors”

In attempting to explain how ITV could have used the wrong footage (from the game) they said they were aiming to use material that had featured in an episode of The Cook Report entitled "Blood Money" that was broadcast on 12th June 1989. However, this footage was heavily edited and production staff sought to source "a fuller and better version" of The Cook Report material. Nearly two months later the programe director discovered the footage from the internet which “he mistakenly believed...to be a fuller version of the footage used in the Cook Report”. It was ITVs claim that:

“Although there were clear differences between the two pieces of footage, his memory over the ensuing period of time let him down and led him to believe it was the same footage”

The programme director included this footage in the mistaken belief that it was the full material taken from The Cook Report - without having viewed the internet footage themselves.

Compliance?

Now all of this would be bad enough if it wasn't for the fact that a member of the ITV Compliance team also had doubts about the authenticity of the material during the production process, even asking questions of the producer about the veracity of the sound effects and pictures. The assurances given by the production staff to the ITV Compliance team member were accepted in 'good faith' despite neither the producer nor the director checking the footage.

ITV has since made improvements to its compliance processes - a case of lesson learned in order nto to make similar mistakes again. These include keeping a list of archive sources used, extra guidance issued to news, factual and current affairs staff, as well as compliance training changes for production teams.

Nevertheless, given that factual content should not mislead the public and that Ofcom has a duty under the Communications Act 2003 to set standards, the regulator has criticised ITV for breaching the rules and for damaging the trust relationship between viewer and broadcaster saying:

"breaches of the Code that resulted in the audience being misled have always been considered by Ofcom to be amongst the most serious that can be committed by a broadcaster, because they go to the heart of the relationship of trust between a broadcaster and its audience."

This is a serious charge indeed. In fact, from the report Ofcom can scarcely believe that the programme makers could have been misled as there were "significant and easily identifiable differences" between the game footage and that material from the 1989 episode of The Cook Report pointing to "clear deficiencies"in the steps taken by both the production team and the compliance team to verify the content.

Oh dear. I guess ITV will have cancelled any plans to investigate the systematic slaying of dragons in Tamriel

CENSORED

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:15:00 +0000

Today's the day that a number of high profile websites are demonstrating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA bills currently pending in Congress. The upshot of these bills passing into law is that they are tantamount to giving powerful content industry groups the power to cut-off from the internet or censor websites that are accused of hosting material that doesn't belong to them. Bear in mind that these bills have been sponsored and co-written by representatives of the entertainment industry (eg the MPAA) and it's plain to see whose interests are being served here.

Under the proposed legislation the US Attorney General would have the power to demand ISPS so block access to foreign websites suspected of dealing in pirated content, as well as making search engines delist such istes from the search indexes. Other powers include the blocking of payement services to accused sites too (and we all know what happened to Wikileaks when its funding services where blocked). If these standards were applied to several prominent US-based sites many of them would be in trouble (eg Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, Google, etc).

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

There have been some last minute amendments to the proposed bills but they haven't removed the threat to free speech entirely. That's why it's good to see several prominent sites doing their bit to raise public awareness of the threats involved.

Over at TorrentFreak you can find a compilation of websites that are participating in a self-imposed censorship/black-out campaign. I'm going to add links or images to those already covered by TorrentFreak as I come across them. Please feel free to contact me either in the comments, via Twitter or email with any more.

Those sites known to be taking part are in today's black-out are:

Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the student's friend, will be down for 24 hours (except for the pages about SOPA and PIPA)

Minecraft

Insanely addictive browser-based game Minecraft is down

Reddit

The community-powered news site, reddit, is down

Open Rights Group

The Open Rights Group are UK digital activists and they are making sure people know about these heinous bills

Wordpress

The creators of the blogging content management system of choice, Wordpress, are censored.

TorrentFreak

Even TorrentFreak themselves are making a stand. Lord knows, they've been inaccurately accused of being pirates enough times

Wired

Ever-popular tech site Wired are in self-imposed blackout mode

Craigslist

The classifieds service, Craigslist, is also making a stand

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The video game review site Rock, Paper, Shotgun is down

The Oatmeal

Satirical comedy site The Oatmeal is down

Humble Bundle

Online independent games retailer HumbleBundle have gone dark

Wikia

The alternate pop-culture wiki-based encyclopaedia, Wikia, is protesting

XBMC

Makers of the free media centre resource, XBMC, have gone dark

Zeropaid

Piracy-based news site Zeropaid has blacked out

Demonoid

Long-running torrent site Demonoid is blacked out

Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow's Boing Boing site has gone offline

UKNova

UK-based TV catch-up torrent site UKNova had an interesting message for its users

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg kinda supports the anti SOPA business but Facebook isn't quite going dark

Absolute Punk

The punks over at Absolute Punk are against SOPA

Liberal Conspiracy

Those good folks on the Left at Liberal Conspiracy are blacking out their homepage

Destructoid

The gaming site for gamers, by gamers, Destructoid is dark

Know Your Meme

Not to be outdone by a spreading meme, Know Your Meme actually became part of what they normally document

This Isn't Happiness

The photography/art-based propaganda site This Isn't Happiness embraced the darkness

imgur

As the easy way to share images, imgur was keen to protest

XKCD

Popular online comic site, XKCD, ran a blacked-out sketch

The Verge

The technology-focussed site, The Verge, voiced their opposition

TechCrunch

The AOL-owned technology blog TechCrunch had a colour make-over

Fark

Home to all things satirical, Fark went for a white out

4chan

The home of weirdness (and haters of censorship!) saw some weird things happen, but hey, that's 4chan for you

Funny or Die

Funny or Die's comedy site got serious about the censorship

GoDaddy

Sometime supporters of the bills, GoDaddy, demonstrated their (customer's !?!) commitment to the opposition

More to follow. Maybe...

Merry Christmas Music Industry

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 13:10:00 +0000

It's been a while since I last posted (work has been intense!), but I thought I'd get a festive post in before the new year. As the year ends there have been many things related to music and the copyright industry for people to get their teeth into: the MegaUpload video controversy; the safe harbours provision debate for Grooveshark; the ongoing arguments around SOPA and the threat to Domain Name Servers accused of hosting content protected by copyright...

On top of this though, there are some positive steps being taken by the music industry to give internet users what they want when they want it (competing with piracy?). I found myself becoming a fully paid up subscriber to Spotify Premium this year (£9.99 per month) and am now enjoying it on my Macbook, iPhone and Tivo box. I'm also waiting for Apple's iTunes Match (£21.99 annually) to filter the first 25,000 tracks in my library before seeing if I can add the other 15,000. Then there's Google Music, but I guess I'll wait and see what the UK provision is like before committing myself to another digital service.

That I've paid for these services may not be a surprise to anyone who read my series of posts in which I tracked my expenditure on music products and services for a year. However, I have found myself being a little conflicted about the value of these services - £10 per month is the same price you can pay for a seedbox and VPN package by which you can download, store and access all manner of torrented materials.

Guilty relief?

Nevertheless, I've come to think of these subscriptions as a form of mild guilt-relief for any form of consumption that might be viewed by others as not strictly legal. I'm not sure I get the full £9.99 per month use out of my Spotify subscription as there are many artists that I love that are missing from the service. Similarly in the filmic consumption space, my £14.99 per month subscription to CineWorld's Unlimited Card hasn't been great value for money when I go less than twice per month as they don't usually get the more obscure weekly releases. I also pay for Virgin Media's most expensive TV package (£24.50 per month) despite never watching any live TV.

I've found myself spending more money this month on second-hand vinyl albums including the spinning wheel version of Led Zeppelin's III album (£25!) than I have on digital services. I guess I should feel guilty in this consumption too, as none of that cash will find it's way back to the struggling artists - at least this is the rhetoric of the games industry about resales. However, I don't. I shall never feel guilty about purchasing tangible objects, even if they are old Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground or Crosby, Stills and Nash records (I feel older than I am!).

In the brave digital future physical music might be dead but at least, for now, I can hang it on my wall.

Merry Christmas music industry!

Blogging case study: a site map

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 10:36:00 +0000

Back in September Andrea Wren started a series in Guardian Money about how to build and monetise a successful blog. She drew on expert advice from 22 year old blogging genius, Glenn Allsopp, from Newcastle. He is the owner of ViperChill and a successful web-entrepreneur who earns £10,000 per month from his online activities.

Every fortnight, Wren has been updating readers with her progress as she tries to carve out a successful niche (check out her progress here). Allsopp has also been providing excellent advice on how to take the plunge into the murky waters of successful blogging over on his Blogging: Case Study site and plans to update readers over the next 6 months as to the progress.

Readers have also been encouraged to sign up for a news letter to the site to get more detailed help on 'how to' make their own sites - indeed Neil Perryman recommended that our students on MED102 and MAC195 to sign up and follow the progress given that we've been encouraging the students to setup their own sites.

One of the problems I've found will Allsopp's otherwise excellent site is it's lack of obvious navigation for those readers coming in a little late. There is some navigation on the site, but it only seems to be available from within one of the sections. This post is an attempt to rectify that issue as well as make it easy for me (and my students) to jump in and out

Niche
Point One: Deciding on your blog niche
Point One: We're not trying to attract everyone

Domain
Point Two: Deciding on a domain name
Point Two: Setting up hosting

Design
Point Three: Your blog design
Point Three: Theme and design resources

Plug-ins
Point Four: Getting your blog ready for visitors
Point Four: Final blog tweaks and recommended services

Strategy
Point Five: Your blogging strategy
Point Five: Standing out

Post Ideas
Point Six: Generating content ideas
Point Six: Examples of popular blog posts

More to follow...

Cheap CD tax loophole to close

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:54:00 +0000

Reports that the Treasury is to close the loophole that some online retailers have exploited in order to import CDs into the UK without having to pay VAT have been greeted with cheers from some quarters of the music industry this week. But I can't help feel that it's not something to feel that positive about.

Mail order businesses (like Play.com, CD-Wow, The Hut, etc) who can afford to setup in the Channel Islands have been able to circumvent the requirement to pay Low Value Consignment Relief (LVCR) on items that used to cost under £18 will, as of April 1st 2012, no longer be able to undercut businesses based on the mainland. Apparently, this costs the UK £140m a year in lost tax and receipts.

Over the years many current high-street stores have established bases in the Channel Islands, allowing them to ship their goods to there for repackaging purposes in order to escape paying the tax. Indeed, even HMV does this, allowing them to undercut the process in their own high street stores, many of which are under threat due to the supposed slowing demand for expensive physical products in an era of free music via piracy or legal streaming services like Spotify, We7 or Napster.

There have been active campaigns to cut out the VAT-free loophole by groups like the Retailers Against Tax Abuse Scheme. Their spokesperson, Richard Allen has claimed

"This round tripping mail order industry, whilst popular with consumers, has destroyed or damaged scores of viable job-creating businesses on the UK mainland ... The removal of this major market distortion should be welcomed by all UK businesses that wish to trade online"

And here is the rub - I fail to see how beneficial it is to render the cost of CDs to a sum 20% greater than that which can be currently paid? It certainly means that customers might buy less music in a given period if there are additional pressures on their purse strings. This would have a knock-on effect for some artists and labels in that more tax equals less purchases and therefore less money finding its way up the royalty chain.

I understand the argument about taxes going back into the Treasury coffers - I'm assuming their economic analysis has predicted the fall in total sales of physical units. I don't see how Allan's argument will hold up though. Businesses that want to sell CDs online will still have to charge the extra task to the consumer, who will in all likelihood spend less. Even if Tesco has to pay tax on their goods they will have the economic klout available to undercut independent music stores via cross-subsidising.

In the mean time, quite a few employees in the Channel Islands will be made unemployed.

The colourful history of video games [infographic]

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 10:58:00 +0000

Over at COLOURlovers there's a very attractive infographic which ties in nicely with some of the issues I was talking about in one of our undergraduate modules last week (MAC129 and MED102), when we looked at the historical representations within video games. I thought some readers might like the infographic too. The artists responsible for this is Darius A Monsef IV. For the best view, click here:

10 ideas for the future of digital music

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 17:28:00 +0000

A few days back Bobby Owsinksi, musician and author of the book Music 3.0 - A Survival Guide for Making Music in the Internet Age, posted a series of ideas regarding the future of digital music. These ideas came from some slides prepared by the J. Walter Thompson ad agency (see the slides below):

Things to Watch: Music Edition (October 2011)

Some of the major claims in the original slides have been summarised by Owsinski:

1. Access Over Ownership: The tide has turned on subscription music and we will all soon prefer to stream our music from a subscription service rather than buy it and download it.
2. Capturing Over Collecting: Instead of collecting records, CDs and digital downloads of our favorite music as we did in the past, we'll now capture where we can find the music online instead.
3. The Celestial Jukebox Is Here: Services like Spotify and MOG have captured our musical imaginations thanks to instant access to millions of songs and a new way to discover new music.
4. The Battle Of Personalized Radio: We're at a tipping point of how we consume music, especially via the radio. Personalization of what we listen to is the key to the future of music consumption.
5. The MP3 Player- RIP: With the massive shift to streaming subscription music, the days of the MP3 player are numbered.
6. Coming Soon To A Device Near You: Internet music access will soon be commonplace in the car and home entertainment gear.
7. Sharing Your Playlists Will Reach A Tipping Point: While personalization from a service like Pandora is getting better, it still can't beat what a human can come up with. Soon all companies will make available our playlists so that we can see what our friends are listening to.
8. The Facebook Effect: Listeners connected via Facebook have initially been found to be a lot more engaged, therefore Facebook can actually amplify the effects and popularity of a song or artist, becoming a new avenue for breaking an artist or for promo.
9. They'll Be A New Set Of Influencers: Bloggers have held sway over the popularity of an artist or blog until now, but that influence will be decreased thanks to a new set of music experts, thanks in part to Google's new "Magnifier."
10. Aggregators Help Music Discovery: New aggregator services like WeAreHunted.com or TheHypeMachine.com will collect data from around the web to help consumers discover what's new.

Most of these points I can agree with but there are a couple of issues that could do with being further clarified or reconsidered. In a series of Generator events I've attended over the last couple of years, the issue of paying for access to music rather than paying to own music (CD, mp3, etc) has been well covered by prominent figures in the business of providing such services.

My gripe with the first point is mainly with the sweeping claim that "we will all soon prefer to stream our music from a subscription service rather than buy it and download it" - there will always be a market for purchases or downloads (ie ownership). Streaming services like Spotify and We7 are great at what they do but they are inevitably incomplete and frequently disappointing when you can't access the content you want.

There are several instances where ownership is preferable to access:

If you want to make a home video of your holidays for personal consumption featuring some background music that reminds you of that trip, then naturally, a streaming service is wholly inadequate. It's not like you can drop a live stream into your video editing software.
If you remotely interested in making digital music or performing digital music (DJ, VJ, etc) then you will need to own the music you play. It's not so easy to pitch up or down a streaming track, or beat match a stream for cross-fading.
Streaming content is great in areas of universal wifi and fast-paced mobile data networks, but glitches in the network or coverage black spots can be frustrating. The next generation of 4G, Wimax, LTE, etc networks are a while off yet. Even when they do arrive, they need to be competitively priced or streaming whilst being mobile will struggle to replace tracks stored on the portable device. This issues feeds directly into the seventh point too.

The final two points suggest that sites like the HypeM and aggregation services will replace the influence of bloggers. The problem with this assertion is that the HypeM is a service that aggregates what music bloggers are talking about - without the bloggers there will be no aggregation, unless the service morphs into something else entirely.

Angry Bird Addiction [infographic]

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:07:00 +0000

Anyone with a smart phone since 2009 has a good chance to have played the Rovio game Angry Birds. There's also a very good chance that if you have played it once, then you'll have played it again. This is the game that has been downloaded more than 300 million times and is one of the world's favorite time-killers. If you've found yourself staring and prodding at a small screen into the late hours then you might be addicted (in a good way, as opposed to the silly "media-effects" tradition whereby we play GTA and go car-jacking).

The infographic, based on consultation with psychologists, by AYTM below might help you with your addiction. 1000 people were asked about their spending habits with regards to the game and it was revealed that young men aged 18-24 were more likely to convert from a free version of the game to a costed version.

Infographic by: AYTM Market Research

The sound of inevitability

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:09:00 +0000

Documents (.pdf) from the Council of the European Union released today have announced what many copyright, copyleft and copyfight activists had long expected - namely that the protection given to the owners of musical productions has been extended from 50 years to 70 years. This has the ring of inevitability as there is an established precedent for extending copyright terms whenever they come close to expiring. More often than not theses extension terms are dressed up in the rhetoric of protecting artists, but more often than not, the term 'artists' is little short of being synonymous with 'multinational corporations'.

Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group says of the matter:

Despite the rhetoric, small artists will gain very little from this, while our cultural heritage takes a massive blow by denying us full access to these recordings for another generation.

Two recent reviews by British governments (Gowers, December 2006 and Hargreaves, May 2011) have examined the support for such protection and have been highly skeptical regarding the supposed benefits further extensions offer smaller artists. The more recent of the two reviews was very clear on this point:

Copyright Term Extension

Economic evidence is clear that the likely deadweight loss to the economy exceeds any additional incentivising effect which might result from the extension of copyright term beyond its present levels. This is doubly clear for retrospective extension to copyright term, given the impossibility of incentivising the creation of already existing works, or work from artists already dead.

Despite this, there are frequent proposals to increase term, such as the current proposal to extend protection for sound recordings in Europe from 50 to 70 or even 95 years. The UK Government assessment found it to be economically detrimental. An international study found term extension to have no impact on output.

Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth, Chapter 2, Section 2.16, page 19

PJ Harvey, 2008
© Phil King, Flickr

Whether a creative artist contemplates the economic benefit of copyright duration before they embark upon making music is hard to believe. It's unlikely that the likes of King Creosote, James Blake or PJ Harvey (Mercury Music Prize nominees and winner respectively) contemplate creating music before deciding against it on the basis that 50 years worth of music protection is insufficient, and that they require 70 years of protection in order to ensure their creativity is realised.

Additionally, how does retroactively extending the duration of copyright terms help to incentivise musicians who have already made music? Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jeff Buckley, etc all made music that many people found inspirational under very different contexts, and now that they are deceased the duration of the protections afforded to the owners of their copyrighted work has been extended further - most likely to benefit the interests of bloated publishers and distributers.

The new extension does offer more protection to those musicians working in groups. The new terms state that the "term of protection will expire 70 years after the death of the last person to survive: the author of the lyrics or the composer of the music". Given that 2012 was the year that many seminal pieces of music from the 1960s (ie The Beatles and The Rolling Stones) were due thought to be about to enter the public domain, it's perhaps inevitable that copyright protection has been extended ever further. Ringo and Paul might breathe a sigh of relief as their individual longevity benefits them both. It's a fairly safe prediction that around 2030 there will be highly vocal lobbying on behalf of the recording industry to extend the new terms to 95 years, or forever less one day.

What is worth noting from the EU Council minutes is that a number of countries did vote against the proposals (ie, Belgium, Sweden, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Slovakia and Slovenia) while a couple abstained from the vote (Estonia and Austria). This hardly reads like a unanimous vote - Directive 2006/116/EC seems to have scraped through. More than 17000 signatories also constituted a vocal part of the call to reject the extension term via the Sound Copyright campaign, but it seems like the industry has won yet another pyrrhic victory.

Downloading videos from YouTube tutorial [video]

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:28:00 +0000

Every now and then, when making presentations I like to use video material from YouTube. Usually I tend to stream the footage live online, but there are occasions when the Internet fails and you want a hard copy of the footage so you can embed it in your presentation. There's a great little browser extension called FastestTube that works with Safari, Firefox, Chrome, IE and Opera. Check out the tutorial video below which shows you how it works

The seldom told tale of software piracy [infographic]

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 07:25:00 +0000

While browsing the web I came across the following infographic put together by Starmedia which tells ~~the~~ a story of software piracy (it's difficult to gauge how accurate the stats are given they are taken from a select number of sources). The historical overview is pretty useful for newcomers (or people born after the late 1980s).

Who'd have thought Windows XP would be more popular to download than Vista or Windows 7? Having said that, it's not as popular as Mac OSX Snow Leopard (no serial code required) or Lion. Photoshop still rules the nest as the most sought-after software (see my earlier caveat) despite being a jewel in the Adobe crown. They themselves refer to the 'Photoshop trademark is [being] one of Adobe's most valuable trademarks'. Despite rampant piracy (because of?!) its position as the desktop image manipulation software for professionals and aspiring designers is entrenched and must make Adobe a tidy sum.

How much is your silence worth?

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 09:19:00 +0000

Copyright is a funny old thing - it's meant to protect creative works and provide incentive to creativity by virtue of guaranteeing some form of property rights over works so that people will make new and original pieces of music, literature, art, etc. Every now and then the dogged pursuit of those people thought to be exploiting or violating copyright by virtue of taking something that isn't theirs and sharing it without the consent of the rights holder(s) results in some rather bizarre events.

Take for instance the strange case of John Cage's piece of experimental 'music' 4'33" - a 3-movement piece of music composed for any instrument during which the score instructs the musician to not play any music so that the audience can take in the ambient sounds of their environment. More often than not this results in silence, or at the very least, near silence. The track is well-known in the UK and was even the subject of an attempt to thwart the domination of the Christmas No. 1 slot by X-Factor contestants in 2010, catchily entitled Cage Against The Machine (after the success of the Rage Against The Machine campaign the year prior).

No doubt, some people may appreciate the artistic significance of the break in instrumentation (some of Cage's works prior to this piece feature silence prominently) while many will think of this silence as little more than an artistic prank. Nevertheless, the track has been written, recorded and performed by Cage, thus enshrining it's position within the realm of copyright. Strangely, the iTunes single version of the track is 4'39" and features some noise in the first 5 seconds, perhaps to alert purchasers to the fact the silence is 'playing'

So it was with some amusement that I stumbled across this post which points to a copyright infringement claim by Warner Music Group against a YouTube user AdamLore who posted the Cage track to the videosharing site on the 8th of November 2009. In cases whereby rights holders dispute that users of YouTube are not entitled to share such works they can go through a series of procedures to notify the site that a violation has occurred - this tends to result in the audio being stripped from the video and oftentimes replaced with something different. This is what happened in the case of the AdamLore video - see below:

This is not the first time that Cage's silence has been the centre of a copyright dispute. In 2002, the British composer Mike Batt (best known in the UK as the creator of the children's TV series The Wombles) found himself at the centre of a legal dispute over the track "A One Minute Silence" on an album by his band, The Planets. Strangely enough, there was a remarkable similarity between Batt's silence and Cage's silence. This eventually led to an out-of-court settlement in which Batt handed over an undisclosed six-figure settlement to the John Cage Trust, as well as Cage being co-credited as writer of the track. At the time Batt gave a cheque to representatives of Cage's publishers Edition Peters on the steps of the High Court in London, who stated that:

We had been prepared to make our point more strongly on behalf of Mr Cage's estate, because we do feel that the concept of a silent piece -- particularly as it was credited by Mr Batt as being co-written by "Cage" -- is a valuable artistic concept in which there is a copyright ... We are nevertheless very pleased to have reached agreement with Mr Batt over this dispute, and we accept his donation in good spirit.

The point here is that Edition Peters own the publishing rights to Cage's work, not Warner Music Group, so how is it that the latter firm were able to get unofficially posted videos silenced under the guise of copyright violations? It's not as if the AdamLore video is the only one to be silenced - there are others too (see ServeTheBeaver), suggesting that this instance might be more of a case of people poking fun at overbearing copyright. However, the notion of silence being owned is still an intriguing one. Is this a case of copyright going too far or does it represent the justifiable rights of a copyright holder protecting their estate?

NB: it's worth reading through a few of the comments on AdamLore's video as they suggest that if someone was to upload a legally purchased version of 4'33" to YouTube the track is not automatically flagged as violating the ToS. I don't intend to do so myself but if you can confirm this I'd be happy to hear from you. AdamLore himself states that the WMG notice is a prank, serving to highlight the rather heavy-handed powers of copyright enforcement

How to back-up OSX Lion to USB tutorial [video]

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:37:00 +0000

In an earlier tutorial I showed how to make a bootable version of OSX Lion (10.7) on DVD for fresh installs. It's also possible to do this via a USB drive for those machines that don't have an optical drive (the Macbook Air and the most recent Mac Mini). It's a little more laboured than burning to disk. You can find the video tutorial below:

How to back-up OSX Lion to DVD tutorial [video]

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 12:11:00 +0000

Much of the discussions surrounding the most recent Apple software upgrade (OS X 10.7) refers to the fact that Apple are no longer shipping their product on physical media. Well, that's not strictly true - they will be producing a $70 USB version sometime in August. Most people will access the software after having purchased it from the App Store and downloading more than 3.5 GB of data. This is great in that it makes for a smaller environmental footprint as there'll be less packaging and less fuel-related costs but it does have it's downsides in that you can't reformat or install without an Internet connection.

Never fear, as there is a way to make a backup copy of the software without having to upgrade from OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) first. In the video below I show you how to make a bootable backup up copy of OSX Lion via DVD. It's quite easy. Click through to YouTube for the HD video.

Rebekah Brooks at the select committee [visualisation]

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 10:12:00 +0000

The Guardian Data Blog has been playing around with ways to make sense of the text data that came out of the Select Committee this week, including uploading the transcripts of the three main protagonists to the Many Eyes web app. You should be able to get their data and see what they've done with it here (spreadsheet data) and here (Many Eyes).

In this post I've played around with the Rebekah Brooks' transcript in order to see if there are any interesting patterns. If anything, this was more of a personal tutorial on how to use Many Eyes than it was an attempt at any great analysis, but here's the results. It seems like the Java powering the web app might not be working via the embedded visualisations but readers should be able to click through to the source and see the ways in which the data can be interacted with.

Word Cloud

Tag Cloud (single word)

Tag Cloud (two words)

Phrase Net

Total Word Frequency (courtesy of the Guardian)

Guess how Google makes megabucks [infographic]

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:25:00 +0000

I found this interesting infographic over on Wired today and thought I'd share it here. Google makes around $3 billion per month on the strength of its advertising business - here are the top 20 words that make Google rich:

Virgin Spotify users?

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 12:24:00 +0000

While the US tech/media/music press is getting excited about the imminent arrival of Spotify in the US (register your interest here), back in the UK there are plans afoot to integrate the music streaming service into Virgin Media customers subscription plans. Given that Virgin have obvious links with the music content industry, and already provides a number of on-demand music video services to customers on the more expensive television packages, then this deal (or something akin to it) is long overdue. If this Spotfiy deal materialises it will be a welcome addition to the Virgin Media family, but there is a history of false starts and delayed promises with regards to Virgin being able to deliver.

Back in early June 2009 a number of premature announcements were made regarding a deal between Virgin and Universal Music. Geoff Taylor of the BPI even so far as to claim the deal would help curb illegal file-sharing (although it doesn't take a genius to see how well-managed and reasonably-priced subscription deal might be beneficial to the industry more generally):

“It is very encouraging to see an ISP and a record label working together as creative partners. At the same time, the fact that Virgin Media will apply a graduated response system to tackle persistent illegal downloaders demonstrates that graduated response is a proportionate and workable way forward."

However, after 2 years this deal had very little impact or clear outputs at the consumer level. So, it's at this juncture that some kind of deal might finally materialise. Mark Sweeney has noted that the reason for this protracted business is because Virgin Media also had to separately agree terms with Universal Music, EMI, Sony Music and Warner Music as they have the power to veto any deal Spotify does.

It would seem that a final deal is still some way off and that it the music package won't be available to all customers. The Register claim Virgin are planning on centring this service around their new TiVo PVR box (as opposed to their V+ HD and standard boxes). Virgin Media have announced that box will include a Spotfiy app. The TiVo service has gotten off to a shaky start if the number of price cuts are anything to go by. The service was originally launched at a premium price of £199, but has been slashed down to £99 for the 1TB version and £49 for the 500GB box (with free installation). Virgin Media have even took the unusual measure of refunding existing TiVo users the price difference.

The deal does present a number of questions:

Will customers with existing Spotify accounts be able to connect this to their TiVo box?
Will the TiVo Spotify app be restricted to just one box per household/customer or will it include multiple accounts (nobody wants to lose all those carefully crafted playlists do they)?
What kind of pricing difference (if any) will there be between the TiVo app and the standalone versions?

So, the Spotify + Virgin deal is one with the usual caveats but there's no doubting that this is a great deal for Virgin Media customers. It also helps to challenge the market domination of players like Apple and Amazon. This could be the start of a new phase of Spotify growth in the UK, and it'll be interesting to see how Apple responds to this (if at all) - if this partnership is successful in the UK, there's no doubt that other deals like it will be brokered in other territories.

"Read all about it... News of the World"

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 19:13:00 +0000

The phone hacking scandal that the Guardian has been campaigning on for around 2 years (see Nick Davies investigative efforts from this point on) finally reached some kind of conclusion today with the announcement from News International that the paper is to close after its final edition this Sunday. In addition to this former editor, Andy Coulson, is expected to be arrested tomorrow in relation to his knowledge of the paper's phone-hacking.

The paper has a long 168-year history, but it seems this is the end of the line, as Rupert Murdoch seems willing to sacrifice the best selling paper in the UK in a desperate bid to ensure that News Corp can make good on the purchase of the controlling stake in BSkyB (worth around $70 billion). For many people, the position of the News of the World management had become untenable as more details continued to emerge regarding the hacking of phones belonging to child-murder victims (Milly Dowler), the families of the deceased 7/7 bombing victims, senior police officers as well as several high profile public figures. The stench of corruption might be too much for even this paper to come back from.

The cynic in me is still not convinced that the closure of the paper is being done for the right (moral) reasons. It reads more like an attempt to draw a line under the affair in order to satisfy Hunt and the regulator that Murdoch and co are fit and proper people, capable of being responsible enough to own one of the crown jewels of broadcasting in Britain. By closing down a profitable business, Murdoch is attempting to take control of the situation via a preemptive strike - drawing a line in the sand and praying that the accusations of corruption don't spread to his other UK-based publications (The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times). Murdoch's US publications seem rather restrained with regards to the detail they are going into on this matter (see the New York Post here and the Washington Post here)

This last ditch attempt to ensure the BSkyB deal can go ahead is typical of Murdoch - he has never been afraid of taking major risks in order to get what he wants. The investment in Sky back in its early days was almost a risk too far, potentially jeopardising his entire empire. However, that was a gamble that paid off in the long run. Will this one work in his favour? Can the chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks', position remain tenable given that she has been found culpable of 'editorial blindness and managerial ineptitude'?

Jeremy Hunt needs to take a good long look at the ethics that underpin the News International business model before arriving at his decision. This goes further than a concern about media plurality - the issue is now more about whether or not News Corp are fit to dominate so much of the British media landscape when they've been found wanting when it comes to telling the truth.

Glastonbury 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 09:27:00 +0000

This year it felt like I saw the least amount of acts at Glastonbury than ever before. Below is a list of those that I recall catching some of:

Thursday

Ms Dynamite
A Guy Called Gerald

Friday

Metronomy
Two Door Cinema Club
Wu-Tang Clan
Katy B
Bright Eyes
Radiohead
U2

Saturday

Tame Impala
DJ Yoda
Eva (Dub Mafia)
Battles
Chemical Brothers
Orbital (DJ Set)
Dirty Menez

Sunday

Foster The People
Paul Simon
Joker
Skream & Benga
Kool & The Gang

Posted via email from robjewitt's posterous

Cory Doctorow: all new media is accused of piracy by the mainstream ... until it becomes mainstream

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 15:38:00 +0000

The Know How #2: Who Develops Our Artists?

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Wed, 25 May 2011 12:24:00 +0000

In the second seminar hosted by Generator as part of ‘The Know How’ series the attention shifted away from the first event’s emphasis on platforms and getting noticed to a focus on answering the question ‘who develops our artists?’. The underlying context for this session was to consider some of the difficulties facing the UK music industry in the current economic climate. There is no doubt that the UK is rich in new musical talent, however, record labels no longer have the resources to develop talent as they did historically forcing the us to question who the primary representatives of artists these days.

The panel for this event represented a number of different intersecting interests. The session was chaired by Jim Mawdsley, the CEO of Generator and the person responsible for organising the annual Evolution music festival in Gateshead and Newcastle. The remaining guest panellists included the lead singer of the North-East band Maximo Park, Paul Smith as well as Cerne Canning of Supervision Management (the manager of Franz Ferdinand and The Vaccines) and Jim Chancellor who is the Managing Director of Fiction Records. Together they considered some of the changing roles played by artists, managers, labels, lawyers and publishers.

Artistic Development

The session opened with a discussion of what artist development means in the current climate. Canning made the point that the industry is ‘changing very rapidly’ – the advent of digital downloading has transformed the industry and brought back an emphasis on the single. Whereas the 1980s and 1990s were marked by an emphasis on albums as a means of artistic development and management, the current period is one wherein the demographic is driven by singles and this is making it hard to develop artists over the long term. There’s a sense of stasis amongst the labels. The threat of a format shift to streaming with an emphasis on revenue driven by subscription services has led to a situation in which nobody wants to invest in long term contracts for fear of a lack of sustainability.

This current climate is one permeated by uncertainty in the context of artistic development. There is no end to the supply of talent and bands will always need varying degrees of development or guidance, but how that transpires depends partly on labels and partly on the artists themselves. As labels are investing less in promotion there has to be a more going on around the band, often in the social space in order to generate interest. Smith noted that Maximo Park were relatively fortunate with the support they received from their label, Warp, when they signed and started touring. As a band they had no money but Warp were happy for the band to follow their artistic vision and paid for the initial ‘leg-ups’ llke the tour van and initial recording sessions, but this was mainly due to the success of their first self-released 7” single. Other labels had wanted to get involved, and “some of the bigger record companies had wanted to manipulate” them into being something they didn’t want to be – Warp were happy for them to carry on being who they were. According to Smith, artist development should come from the artists who should have the songs that form the basis of a great album otherwise it becomes a struggle when they find themselves in the spotlight. The message here is that it’s crucial to have management and record companies who know what to do with the music and that it’s not wise to engage with the media process until artists are ready

Maximo Park clearly embraced a DiY approach to artistic development which can give artists a certain amount of freedom. Chancellor concurred stating that the “wise labels” will let artists develop the way they need to. In some regards A&R is a often thought of “as a bit of a dirty word” and that if an artist is savvy enough then there is often no need to tamper too much. However, pop bands tend to require more A&R support than the indie bands. Canning claims that the best artists are not subject to excessive A&R interference, citing the recent success of artists like Florence + the Machine, Adele and James Blake. He also cited the example of Radiohead whose first album was subject to A&R guidance which enabled them to break through – the famous guitar riff in “Creep” came about due to Johnny Greenwood’s annoyance with the label’s guidance regarding their development.

Managers

Labels like artist to have an established manger these days as this minimises the risks they face when investing in artists. Canning made the point that the experimentation of artists like Tom Whaite or John Cale in the 1980s, many of which who went on to sell very few records, would never happen today as labels are too afraid of letting artists loose in amazing studios with top producers. Smith noted that a good manager is invaluable early on – you need to be able to trust them to tell you that the song you’ve written is good enough for everyone else:

“You end up investing a lot of trust in these people [managers] you’ve only just met… They’ve helped us do the right thing … I just write songs that I think are good and want somebody else to tell me whether they are the right ones to release as singles…
To me they all sound like singles except in an alternate reality where I’m the DJ selecting them on the radio. A lot of my favourite records never made it to the top 10 so I’m not really the best judge of that”

When asked about the importance the role managers play in building visibility for artists Chancellor suggested that they can be “massive” or they can do “nothing”. Canning suggested that some managers drive the artist while sometimes it’s the artist that drives the situation, as in the case of Crystal Castles – they didn’t have a manger until well after they'd created a significant presence. There appears to be a dearth of excellent managers currently as it’s so difficult to survive or make a living in the industry, to the point that many lawyers are starting to multitask and do the role traditionally associated with managers. Chancellor noted that one of the key skills a good manager needs is to be “in tune” with the band. He cited the example of the manager of the band, Brother, who is doing an excellent job at the tender age of 21. He has “sniffed out” some good connections and worked his way around the business quickly.

Promotion

The discussion considered the various forms of effective promotion. Playing live is a significant part of promoting emergent talent – trying to get onto the line-ups for some of the smaller festivals is possible but its much more difficult to break into the larger ones due to the established networks and relationships which determine these. Mawdsley suggested that artists only need to invest in PR when they are ready to release a single. However, many artists might find it more cost effective to do their own promotional work, as Smith did with Maximo Park’s first album (he wrote the press release). Chancellor said that a lot of music bloggers are now filling the void left behind by the lack of label investment and they are doing the A&R work for artists. The requirement for recording demo tapes has been replaced by uploading tracks to SoundCloud and distributing them that way. Canning noted that labels are expecting bands to do their own marketing now and this has produced a culture of ubiquity in which a lot of the mystique of the artist has been ruined as a consequence of oversharing information. Many bands don’t want to blog all day long, especially if it distracts them from being creative, but it can help establish a presence

Overall, the panel painted a rather pessimistic picture of the situation facing artists who want to break through into the wider public consciousness. There were glimpses of hope in terms of what artists can do to take control of the situation but the overall take-home point is that emergent artists need to work hard and be prepared to work for nothing for a long time – it’s not feasible to expect to make it big overnight

You can find a rather poor quality audio recording of the seminar here:
The Know How: Who develops our artists by robjewitt

The Know How #1: Transmission

noreply@blogger.com (Rob) — Tue, 24 May 2011 16:22:00 +0000

Radio, live transmission (Joy Division, 1979)

Yesterday saw the first in a series of public seminars ran by Generator, one of the leading music development agencies in the UK, entitled ‘The Know How’ in which a panel of industry experts discuss the latest developments within the industry. The first panel, subtitled ‘Transmission’ was focussed on a consideration of the present and future role of music broadcasting, specifically as it applies to radio in its various forms (analogue, digital, online, etc) and how the platforms can be employed in such a way that emerging artists can get themselves noticed.

The panel comprised a high profile selection of guests from across the audio spectrum including Trevor Dann (former Head of BBC Music, writer and independent radio producer), Jeff Smith (Head of Programming at BBC Radio 2 and 6), Huw Stephens (DJ/Presenter BBC Radio 1) and Dave Haynes (Vice President of Business Development at SoundCloud). While the first three panellists all have an obvious connection with radio, Haynes was quick to admit to feeling like somewhat of a charlatan amongst the others. However, as many online music streaming services are opting for radio licences like We7 and Last.FM, it made sense to include the service that is increasingly being used by artists, producers and consumers alike to discover new music. Indeed, this point was one of the first to be considered by the panel when Dann asked the audience how many of them used Radio 1 or 2 as their primary ways to discover new music (the answer: very few). When asked how many people used Radio 6 the audience response was slightly higher, but when asked how important the internet was for discovering new music the results were as expected – a unanimous sea of arms.

One of the key questions at the start of the debate involved a consideration of radio’s enduring importance as a means of connecting music lovers with new artists, something Radio 1 has been focussed on heavily in recent years ever since their ‘In New Music We Trust’ campaign began, and more recently with ‘Introducing’. In some ways the BBC has played a large part in bringing new music to the attention of the public, especially across Radio 1, 1Xtra and 6 Music. There is much needed promotion of emerging talent across the public service broadcaster as commercial radio, according to Smith, is ‘not bothered on a whole by new music’ – their focus is driven by hits and familiarity, which audience and advertisers alike appreciate. For Smith the BBC ‘like to lead taste’ not follow it.

In many ways presenters like Stephens act like taste makers or gate-keepers akin to John Peel, listening to all the music, both good and band, so the audience don’t have to. Stephens’ popular Wednesday night slot on Radio 1 gives him free reign to play what he likes and enables listeners to discover something new. He admitted to playing music that he personally doesn’t like, but that he knows the listeners might. There was an acknowledgment that services like Spotify offer music consumers to create their own bespoke playlists to share amongst friends, enabling people to come in contact with things they’ve never heard before – radio has to compete with these trends. He regularly gets sent music from emergent artists via email, MySpace, SoundCloud, Twitter, etc like many consumers do, many of which he will play if they are interesting enough. Stephens sees his show as a ‘filter’ for the masses of music we come in contact with now – it has to be a varied mix otherwise people would never find new stuff they didn’t know they like.

Much of what Stephens had to say chimed with what Haynes said about SoundCloud. The aim of the service is to push audio to people and enable people to share music. If presenters like Stephens represent a certain type of quality filter (ie new music good enough to reach a large audience), it was suggested by Dann that services like SoundCloud are devoid of quality control yet they must have detailed information about what is popular on the site. It was put to Haynes that this must lead to a temptation to exploit that knowledge to provide a commercially driven product to the SoundCloud user base. However, this idea was rejected by Haynes as not being in keeping with SoundCloud’s desire to enable artists to ‘reach their audience no matter how big or small’. Other digital services might do this already, but SoundCloud doesn’t have a ‘big discovery push’ on their service and only occasionally promoting content – mainly from small acts or undiscovered artists.

The panel spent some time discussing the merits and pitfalls for emerging artists in trying to get themselves heard. The option to hire a plugger to promote content to presenters like Stephens or those in control of playlists, like Smith, can either be very beneficial or beset with unscrupulous people looking to make some quick money from the uninitiated. This is where tools like SoundCloud come into their own – Haynes suggested that the amount of free or cheap digital platforms online has enabled artists to build a presence like never before, and with this presence comes an audience. It makes very little sense to try and charge people for digital singles if you haven’t built up a loyal or interested audience.

Ultimately, the message coming out of this seminar for emerging artists is that it pays to think and act smart when it comes to trying to break through and gain attentions. There are many ways of building and maintaining interest in new music but being creative and determined to succeed are crucial – from shooting video diaries on YouTube to doing novel cover versions of familiar tunes. Artists have to think strategically and network with as many people as possible to build a buzz around their content