www.stevelawson.net

Online Music: Balancing The Scales Of ‘Free’

2009-11-12T19:40:47Z

I’ve just been reading Helienne Lindvall’s latest blog post on the Guardian site, entitled, ”
Behind the music: Can we ever measure the impact of downloading?“

It’s well worth a read, as it talks about vested interests on either side (though doesn’t mention that Helienne herself was a signatory on the patently loony pro-Mandelson AIR statement from the Featured Artist Coalition – she probably has mentioned it in previous posts). It does contains a couple of interesting points that I thought I’d throw out for discussion.

The first is that it talks a lot about spending on music without considering that spending on ‘entertainment media‘ is up. Way, way up.

20 years ago, music ruled the roost. For films, we either went to the cinema or rented videos when the eventually hit the shelves. Computer games were an industry, but the big players – the Sega Megadrive and the early Nintendo couldn’t hold a candle to the kind of rock ‘n’ roll image, sales and marketing that the big platforms are commanding today. Despite Bit Torrent, a heck of a lot of people seem more than happy to drop £30/£40/£50 on DVD boxed sets or computer games, as well as the tech to play them.

Contrast that with music, whether one survey I heard quoted recently suggested that over 50% of teenagers owned no speakers that weren’t built into a phone, tv or a computer. Music, as a mass-consumer entertainment commodity, has lost its dominance, and that ever-growing slice of people’s disposable income is being shared between it and all the other myriad forms of home entertainment…

Good or bad? What does it mean for music? For serious music? for Musicians? ideas, please…

Point 2 is concerned with the following quote from Eric Garland, who works for an online media measurement company (you can have a company that does that?? Damn, new industries are springing up all over the place off the back of online media!!)

“Piracy was/is only one expression of a much more fundamental problem: the customer can choose to pay or choose not to pay. You could call it An Inconvenient Music Truth.”

OK, so after talking in the article about biases, he

a) calls ‘currently illegal downloading’ piracy (it’s an activity that has nothing to do with anything that has historically been associated with the term – a term that does no favours to the nutters in the Pirate Party who claim it for themselves either – but which is way too loaded for someone impartial to employ)
b) only talks about generating money and what the consumer chooses, not the massive new array of distribution methods that an artist has available to them.

Let’s be straight about this, the music industry has ALWAYS given away massive amounts of music in order to get people to buy it. Only previously, it cost the artist for every copy that was given away:

If you wanted to do a promo give-away, you had to print vinyl/CDs/tapes.
If you wanted someone to distribute them for you, you had to pay them,
If you wanted to get them on a cover disc on a magazine, all kinds of deals were struck – some where the artist got paid, many where the space was for sale…

And endless promo copies ended up going to radio, precious few of which ever got played, most of which actually ended up getting sold in local second hand record shops (with no money going to the artist, and as they were promo copies, not even any money going to the songwriters, like Helienne, as you don’t pay MCPS royalties on promo copies). So the lottery of trying to get people to listen to you was prohibitively expensive, and was in large part a factor in 9 out of 10 albums released on big labels never recouping.

Now, promotional distribution costs me nothing. I can make music available at no cost to me! That is a hugely transformative thing. I can put videos online, of me playing and talking about playing, and doing multiple versions of tunes. FOR FREE. Gone are the days when a promo campaign required an artist to spend twice as much on the first video as they did on the album, in the vain hope that it’d end up on MTV or VH1. Once.

I – as a solo bassist – have had 120,000 views of my videos on youtube, at zero cost to me. That’s a transformative fact. It’s not an incremental change in either direction. The zero cost of distribution is the single most empowering element in the new music environment, and the impact of it cannot be underestimated.

How do we make money? Loads of ways, but probably not by trying to compete with Games and DVDs for ‘entertainment’ money, or by speculating massively on expensive and risky promo campaigns that cost a fortune. How about being real, reducing needless cost, talking to our audiences, trusting them and treating the web like radio, where someone listening to me was better than someone not listening to me (even if that radio play didn’t land on a sample day and I wasn’t paid for it.).

So every time someone takes the music that I make freely playable online and embeds is in a posterous recommendations blog (of which there are now LOADS, thanks to you lot taking up the challenge!), it’s like radio play, but I didn’t even have to send a CD to the station.

Thoughts?

(P.S. I’ve been meaning to say for ages that I think Helienne’s voice in all this is a really vital one – even when I disagree with her vehemently, as a songwriter in the midst of all this her’s is the most under-represented voice. People who write songs for a living are in a really really tricky position. It may end up that it’s just no longer viable as a career – I hope not – but she’s one of the few people with a high profile blog who is attempting to deal with those questions, and I greatly value her opinion, even when, as I said, mine differs from it – it’s why there’s been a link to her blog from this site for years.)

Meet My Imaginary Friends

2009-11-06T22:39:08Z

Well, I’m now well over twelve thousand words into my NaNoWriMo novel, which is called ‘Rock And Roll Is Dead’.

As I said in my last post, I’m setting up twitter accounts for the characters as I go along, and two of them are now on there: @Drum_Monkey_ and @TheDistanceMeg. They’ve been chatting to each other and with other twitterers, and some of those tweets are ending up either in or influencing the story. Drum Monkey even got a string of really smart direct messages giving him some advice on a guerilla marketing campaign! It’s turning into all kinds of fun.

Meg’s twitter name stems from their improv band being called Verfremdungseffekt, AKA Brecht’s concept of ‘The Distancing Effect‘ – she thought she was being REALLY clever with that one

So please do have a chat with them, and if you want to read the book as it goes along, there’s a PDF version that gets updated every day or so out there… if you email me or send me a message on twitter, I’ll probably/possibly send you the link and the password

I’m having all kinds of fun writing this – it’s a really helpful creative exercise to

tackle something without any expectation that I’ll be good at it
have a set ‘volume’ of writing to do but no other ‘aim’.
have a way of weaving bits of real life into it, and through the characters tastes and interactions, give some other bands a bit of promo…
have something to do while we wait for the baby to be born

Try it!

NaNoWriMo – Steve Writes A Novel (possibly)

2009-11-01T19:16:16Z

For the last couple of Novembers I’ve been aware of friends of mine being a part of ‘National Novel Writing Month‘, more often referred to (at least, on twitter) as NaNoWriMo.

So this afternoon, on a whim, I thought ‘I wonder if I can write a novel about some musicians who in some imaginary world start a cultural revolution, accidentally’ – I realised that it would be fun to have a go at writing a long-form hypothetical case study on how the world of music might work out. After all, it’s how a lot of novels work – either romantic or dystopic visions of an imaginary future for people and planet.

And of course, with one of the pithy descriptions of the project on the NaNoWriMo site being “Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.” there’s no pressure for it to be any good. I can focus on it being fun, let my imagination run wild without the constraints of a blog, or the compulsion to finish it/publish it/whatever.

And of course, I can mess with the format. And with that in mind, I’ve registered a twitter account for the only one of my characters so far that would be on Twitter - he’s @drum_monkey_ and is there to be talked to. I’d LOVE it if you chatted to him as the novel went on. The other characters will get onto Twitter too, as soon as it’s conceivable within their characters that they’d be on it, and I may even write a chapter or two on twitter as they talk to each other.

For now, if you’re doing NaNoWriMo, please feel free to follow my progress, on Twitter, or on the NaNoWriMo site.

“Piracy” And The 3 Strikes Law – A Few Thoughts From A Working Musician

2009-10-30T20:21:35Z

Right, so “Lord” Mandelson has announced that the Government is indeed going to go ahead with their unenforceable nonsensical plans to “cripple the internet bandwidth of persistent file sharers“. Here’s a few highlights of the plans:

the cut-off is a ‘last resort‘, used if people don’t comply with requests.
the cost of monitoring will be “shared between ISPs and content providers” – that means that the labels that are already incapable of making money for the musicians signed to them are now going to fund this Wile E. Coyote-esque plan to catch people sharing files.
The ‘trade-off’ is that copyright ‘law’ will be rejigged so that now – WOW – “someone who has bought a CD would be able to copy it to their iPod or share it with family members without acting unlawfully.” (does he not remember listening to tapes made from his mum’s record collection in the car in the 80s??)

So, let’s recap what’s already been said about this -

statistics from the BPI and the Govt already suggest that the cost of implementing it are going to be higher than the potential ‘losses’ from people downloading free-stuff-that-the-people-who-administer-the-copyright-say-shouldn’t-be-available-without-paying-for-it.
It’s ONLY being supported by the muppets who want the untenable version of the ‘old music industry’ (a statistical blip in the timeline of humanity’s relationship with music that stretches back tens of thousands of years…) to continue in its unsustainable lottery-esque way.
EVEN the jewell in the pro-3strikes camp’s crown – support from the FAC – was, as Billy Bragg has said, unrepresentative.

So, what’s new?

Well, how does it work? Let’s have a look at that.

First up, let’s consider what can be measured to determine ‘illegal filesharing’? Well, the ways to identify the file itself would be through metadata – it being labeled as the music track, film, document, home movie, whatever. Or there’s the file size - you know when you put a CD into iTunes and it recognises what it is via the gracenote database, but it doesn’t if you put in a compilation CD of tracks you did yourself? That’s because it’s recognising files-size. or, more specifically for music, track-length as represented by file size. Quite often with CD singles of only 2 or 3 tracks, there’ll be multiple possibilities.

So, if you change the size of a file and mislabel it, it’s identity is completely impossible to determine.

So, your other alternatives for discerning ’suspicious’ usage are based on tools or volume of traffic – ergo, “if you use Bit Torrent, you’re probably up to no good” (no mention of the myriad possible legal uses that are going to balloon over the next 5 years – let’s not forget that the iPlayer is [EDIT 'was' - see comments] P2P!), or “if you are downloading and uploading loads of massive files, you’re probably up to no good”. So when Lily Allen is swapping files with her producer for her next album (assuming she’s not too depressed by all this to bother making music), she’ll be flagged as a potential abuser based on the amount of traffic, and then what? A sampling of your files get diverted for analysis? Yeah, we’re all in favour of that. Mandelson’s Brave New World vision is complete. We’re living in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Awesome!

So, let’s have a look at what’s being reported about the problem of file-sharing…

There seem to be a lot of statistics about how many tracks are being downloaded outside of the terms of the current legislative framework, without money changing hands (sorry for the overly-long-winded terminology, but the notion of ‘piracy’ is ludicrous, and even illegality is often tenuous). Those statistics are collected because of the metadata that helps us find the stuff we want to download (that’s an all-inclusive collective ‘we’, not restricted to people I know or even agree with )

If I knew that 100,000 copies of my album had been downloaded without anyone paying for it, I’d be SO excited – what an incredible potential there is in that! 100 THOUSAND people wanting to listen to me enough to wait for the download, and I didn’t even need to advertise it for that to happen. It didn’t COST ME ANYTHING!! If it’s happening, I want to know about it. I REALLY REALLY don’t want that data disappearing. I need to know it, it’s part of my business strategy to be able to track that stuff. If a legal framework like the one Mandelson suggests is in place, I’ll no longer have that data. I’ll be robbed of the knowledge of who’s sharing my music, so I won’t be able to get the benefit from that.

Why won’t I have that metadata? Because filesharing will just become a different process – text-based private chat rooms will appear, files wanted will be discussed and then shared between individuals. It’s so easy, and it already happens. Some twitter DMs someone else, ‘have you got such and such a film/track/document, I need it for XYZ’ file gets sent via dropbox/IM/email/whatever. That + added encryption or file + metadata alternations = untrackable data. You don’t even need any new ‘IP hiding’ tech to do it. There’s nothing scary about it, it’s just networks of people connected by a shared interest in a particular cultural area swapping things related to it.

And in the meantime, they offer up a collective ‘fuck you’ to the government and the mainstream record labels and film companies, and see beating the draconian measures as a morally-driven act of defiance. And those agents lose the access to the massive potential well of magical goodness that is the data around file-sharing. Lose/Lose.

So, Mandelson is a behaving for all the world like a supreme bellend and his “law” is untenable, useless and massively counter-productive, as well as obstructive to the business practices of anyone attempting to embrace the opportunities of 21st century content distribution mechanisms, rather than drag us back to a world CD and DVD hegemony. Anyone got his phone number so I can have a chat?

Posterous: Blogging For Everyone Else

2009-10-26T07:25:34Z

OK, so the thought of maintaining a blog full of pontifications on the state of the world, the web, music, whatever is a bit daunting. The self-imposed expectation that there needs to be loads of amazing stuff to read about on your awesome blog is just too much…

…So what do we do? Clearly, the web these days – and in particular, music on the web – is ALL about sharing. Without sharing, we’re all screwed.

Enter Posterous – it’s a blogging platform that’s been around for a while, but seems to be really gaining in traction of late for a whole host of reasons. I’m going to focus on what an awesome service it is for embedding, and posting links to, things you really like online.

“but, isn’t that what Twitter’s for?” you say. Well, yes, but Twitter’s so much more than that – by that token, I’d stop talking to people cos Twitter’s about conversation as well, and stop reading the news, because Twitter tells me about it. No, the cool thing about Twitter is that everything’s bigger than Twitter – it’s a distribution mechanism, not a closed ecosystem.

So Posterous – amongst all kinds of other possible uses – is where you can collect together all the things that you dig. A great place to tell the world about the music your talented friends are making. About proper awesome things you find on YouTube, with links to find out more.

It’s a bigger deal than updating your Facebook status, and helps to keep it all in one place, as social DNA, and will act as an excellent gateway drug to the world of blogging, sharing, and building that social DNA into something coherent. Because, of course, if people like the things you link to, they are far more likely to be interested in the art that you yourself make. Infintely more likely to.

After all, people don’t find you because you’re ‘good’, they find you cos you’re ‘interesting‘. They keep sharing you because you’re ‘good’, but the people that respond to that sharing do so because the person makes you look ‘interesting‘. etc. etc. it’s a chain that never ends, if you’re actually any good

So, how do you start your Posterous blog? well, that’s the truly awesomely amazing bit about it – just send an email to post@posterous.com. That’s it. Email your first post to that address, and they’ll email you back with a link to it. Click it, go in, set up the name and URL for the blog, and start emailing more stuff to it.

I’ll write more, probably on solobasssteve.com, about the kind of sharing that posterous makes possible for live events. But for now, you’d need to give me a seriously good reason for not setting an account up to start sharing cool things for me to not think you just don’t care about ‘music online’.

How do you post stuff to Posterous? Well, if it’s youtube, just send the URL (not the embed code), via email, with a few words about it, and it’ll cleverly be embedded in the blog. Srsly.

For BandCamp, just click on share, grab the embed code (the one for ‘wordpress.org’ works great), copy it into an email, write a few words recommending whatever it is you’re embedding and send it. Then, post a link to the Posterous URL to Twitter/Facebook/email/whatever, and away you go. That’s a screengrab of an email sent to posterous, that created this post.

Sow some Karma, start a blog.

Oh, and if you want some starter material, have a look at the SoloBassSteve.com post ‘Bandcamp directory for the Stevie-Connected’, or indeed to my Posterous account. There’s loads of fantastic stuff there.

Here’s a few cool Posterous accounts to check out: Andrew Dubber, Neil Alexander, Hannah Nicklin, Linda Palmer.

Marketing By Accident

2009-10-19T13:47:04Z

I’ve written a lot over the years about the power of curiosity – that most of my own best disoveries have just happened because I was interested in something and decided to investigate it without waiting for any kind external confirmation that that was ‘OK’ or ‘wise’.

So yesterday when a link from a friend landed me at xtranormal.com and I saw that there was a ‘create’ button, I set to work writing a comedy script for two people talking about a solo bass house concert.

Since then it’s had about a thousand views (pretty good going for overnight on a Sunday!), and I’m sure has quite a journey to go on yet… All because I saw a link, clicked it and played around.

Try it, sometimes it can really help

Anyway, here it is. “Solo Bass. It’s The Future.”

Feel free to share it around, or make your own videos. It’s pretty time consuming, but well worth it

[EDIT] it’s worth noting that the first place I shared this was Posterous. An awesome blogging platform, that I’ll write more about v. soon!

Convergence Pt II – Room To Make The Music That Matters

2009-10-14T08:25:48Z

Over on the Beyond Bass Camp blog, I wrote a post about ‘The Convergence Pyramid’ – the idea that the higher up/deeper you go into any endeavour (in that case, learning bass), the less distinguishable the various fragmented elements are from one another. So theory, technique and equipment for musicians all merge in the service of an intention; practice and performance both just become the process of making music and musical awareness is deeply connected to self knowledge.

It’s also vital for those of us who are making music – and trying to make it discoverable to people who may like it - to seek convergence in the purpose and the method.

One old music industry model was to see a manager as doing the dirty business of ‘monetizing the assets’ of the artists, while the musicians were able to make music in an unsullied fashion, with little concern for the business side of things.

The problem arises when the manager and artist are working at cross purposes. It is quite possible, even likely, that the business strategy within which an artist operates will affect the music. In fact, the more effective, efficient and useful a manager you have, the more likely it is that the outworking of their industriousness will shape the creative environment for the band.

And that kind of fragmentation is a clumsy tension at best.

The first positive step is just recognising it. I had a fairly lively encounter with Peter Jenner at a Musictank event I spoke at. Peter is Billy Bragg’s manager, and a very bright man. He was asking the usual questions about ‘where the money is’ in the new music economy, not realising what an insignificant statistical blip those people who actually make money from record deals are. (the amount of money earned is not insignificant, it’s just piled up at one end of the curve, and 9/10 albums end up costing more than they earn).

But at the end of our conversation, Peter said ‘I’m glad you’re passionate about this, it’s what you’re meant to do. And my job is to make sure that the artists I represent make enough money not to have to worry about how to keep doing it.’ Or words to that effect. It was a very astute assessment of where music managers can position themselves as both business-heads and creative altruists.

It made a lot of business sense in the context of the someone like Billy Bragg’s career. There are a large number of valuable assets in Billy’s business – both tangible (songs, recordings, trademarks etc.) and ephemeral (the ‘Billy Bragg brand’, if you will) – both of which require a fair amount of clever thinking to be maintained and maximised.

But for the rest of us, who don’t already have that, we can afford to be way more imaginative in defining the space in which we want to create music. And far from impeding our success due to our lack of ‘business savvy’, the end result is that we *should* be making much better music, and hopefully doing it in a way that invites people to be a part of the process of letting the rest of the world know about it. In business terms, that’s called ‘buzz’.

If you’re not reliant on it as your measure of success, noticing when there’s a localised ‘buzz’ about your music is a lovely experience.

And the wonder of organic buzz is that it translates into options for the artist. You have the option to respond to the opportunities that interest in your music from the wider industry brings up. Or not. It’s quite OK to recognise the freedom in doing it all yourself, keeping it small and personal, on a cottage industry level, but being aware that that additional interest in you acts as a fantastic ‘safety zone’ around your business model. It gives you headroom.

So, what does convergence mean for us? It means focussing on the things that matter, setting our goals based on creative freedom, on what matters in the context of the music.

Music is way too important to waste the creative opportunities on trying to make a living out of it over and above our creative aspirations. There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with making money from it. It’s rather nice when it happens, but if music becomes your ‘day job’ to pay for ‘your music’, you may find that it’s a pain in the arse because the gigs you do for money are happening at the same time as the invites to play the music that means so much more.

Only you can really decide what’s important to you. There are no hard and fast right answers to this, beyond the observation that ‘fame’ rarely leads to increased creative freedom, and if your own creative process is valuable to you, you’re going to have to carve out a work space conducive to allowing that to flourish.

(two other posts on the Beyond Bass Camp blog are worth reading for further thoughts on this:
“Why Settle For More And Miss The Best”
“What’s Important?“

SoundCloud – Audio Online, Your Way.

2009-10-11T23:43:22Z

So, Part II is about Soundcloud:

Soundcloud is SUCH a great compliment to BandCamp. While BandCamp is all about the curated artifact of music, Soundcloud is all about malleable audio – there’s no restriction on file-size, or resolution, so you can put MP3s up, podcasts, entire gigs as a single embeddable file…

It works great as a sketchbook, and again, you can control whether the stuff is streamable, downloadable or whatever else… There’s also a nice social side to SoundCloud, with the usual 2.0 follower/followee relationship, as well as the option to have ‘private’ files, for sharing music amongst collaborators before making it public. Very useful. It’s got a host of other fantastic features, which you can check out here, and to see it in action, here’s the EP that Michael Manring and I made available a few weeks ago, exclusively via SoundCloud:

Steve Lawson and Michael Manring live at Don Quixotes by solobasssteve

The pairing of Bandcamp and Soundcloud is a pretty much unbeatable combo for distributing audio files online. And Bandcamp gives you to option to charge for them as well.

What is as yet un-mapped is the actual relationship between how we value music, and how artists can price their work relating to that value. Donations, like the pay what you want option in Bandcamp, work really well – we the audience get the chance to be generous if we want, and people with no money can still get the music (and if they want to ‘pay’ something, can just share it around – after all, that’s ultimately what it’s all about!) but it still the case that you either pay before you listen (in which case the donation is a guess) OR the listener has to come back and make a donation after (which requires a level of commitment to the ideal that few of us are capable of…)

One of the projects I’m working on is a platform that seeks to work out that value and allow listeners to pay based on it, and I’ll write more about that very soon…

Bandcamp, Soundcloud And The Portability Of Music

2009-10-11T23:37:43Z

For many years, musicians have been looking for decent ways of hosting, embedding, distributing and selling music online. The shops that sell MP3s, on the back of iTunes success, are myriad. As are the sites that let you upload a few tunes and put them on your profile, ala Myspace, Reverbnation etc.

But two services are now becoming essential in the web-savvy musicians tool-kit – BandCamp and Soundcloud.

I’ll blog about Soundcloud tomorrow, but let’s start withBandCamp:

BandCamp is largely designed for distributing what used to be thought of as ‘albums‘, ‘EPs‘, ‘singles‘ – the look of the site says ‘finished music‘ to me. You upload your tunes in CD-quality audio format, and then they make all the different resolutions of file that people might want, and let you decide what to do with them, which ones to charge for, how to licence the music, and then redesign the page. The results are then embeddable, sharable and sellable. It’s brilliant. If you’re selling MP3s online, you need BandCamp. Simple As.

Here are the Bandcamp embeds for my 3 albums up there so far (my entire solo back catalogue will be there ASAP):

Please feel free to take them and embed them on your site – you can download the 128kbps versions for free, or if you feel so disposed, download the higher res versions and pay what you like.

The higher res files will sound clearer, fuller, deeper (advisable with solo bass), but do grab the 128k versions first, or listen to the embeds, to make sure you like what you’re getting – I’d rather you didn’t end up paying for music you don’t like

Any help sharing the word about these albums being out there is always appreciated, so if you download them, please tell your friends.

Here are three more records that are on Bandcamp that I love, and think you might really enjoy too:

…the last one, Gustaf’s album, is out this week, and is available completely free. He’s going to be selling a limited edition CD version too, which given Gustaf’s awesome design/art skillz is surely going to be a thing of great beauty. But for now, it’s free. Get it, it’s beautiful.

Second Lot Of Video – Solo and Duo – From the Gig with Michael Manring

2009-10-10T07:16:41Z

I’m processing the video I’ve got from the gig as fast as I can – two more are now up for your delectation and delight. Firstly, the second of the duet improvisations:

And then a new solo tune from me – an arrangement of ‘One Of The Best Ones’ by Bruce Cockburn:

Enjoy! Please feel free to take the videos and embed them, share the link, comment, favourite, do all those things that the clever social web makes so easy these days in order to let other people know about them, if you’ve enjoyed them. It’d be very much appreciated