www.stevelawson.net

I Can Make More Money For You Than I Can For Me

2010-03-08T00:06:04Z

Last week, spent a fascinating day in a room full of people who make a living (or part of their living) from music. It was facilitated by Andrew Dubber, as part of a research project for Birmingham City University.

One of the things that came up was a two-part conversation about how we define ‘success’ and how much we earn. Which prompted me to raise the question about how much I earn ‘from’ music and how much I generate in earnings ‘for’ music.

Dubber differentiated years ago (in a slightly different context) between ‘music’ and ‘my music’. And I now use that distinction in considering where the value is in my online music endeavours. I’m as happy to make money ‘for’ music as I am to make money ‘from’ music. The reason being that ‘my music’ is a sub-set of ‘music’ not the other way round. So if ‘music’ does well, I can do well. It’s also true that my opinion about other people’s music is more valuable to the people I’m talking to online than my opinion about my own music. It stands to reason that I think the music I make is awesome – otherwise I wouldn’t release it. I’m not in the habit of putting out music that I don’t love. It’d be pretty much impossible for me to promote it if I wasn’t 100% behind it.

But there are only so many times I can tell people about what I’m up to – if I just keep posting links to my own stuff endlessly, it starts to look like I have some kind of narcissistic delusional disorder, believing that all the great citizens of the internet are interested in is MeMeMeMe. Clearly not.

So instead, I talk about things I think are awesome. I blog about music I think is awesome and gigs I’ve been to that are fab, I put on gigs for other people, I point anyone who cares to follow the link towards the great music that I find floating around the web. There’s a preponderance of music online, but it’s not a ‘flooded’ market, because there isn’t one ‘market’. I act as a filter for the things that I think are great. I don’t do reciprochal swaps with people, I don’t expect the people I write about to also write about me, though I hope that they get the idea and start writing about the things that they thing are wonderful.

The bottom line is that because of the value of my recommendation, I can make more money for ‘you’, collectively, than I can for me. And vice versa. Those of you who really like my music are in a stronger position to get people to listen to it than I am. The raw numbers are less interesting than the percentages – if you’ve got 40 followers on twitter, a higher percentage of those will follow a link to a recommendation than a link to your own stuff. Especially if you’ve already posted that link before.

I occasionally get emails from the people whose music I write about on my Posterous blog, indicating sales spikes, new listeners, collaborative projects and all kinds of other goodness that has happened because I took 3 minutes to write ‘listen to this, I love it’ and email it. It’s not hard, it takes me no time at all to do, and it generates lots of new listeners and no small amount of sales for the music that my awesomely talents friends make.

So, go, do it. Stop telling me about you, starting telling me about what you love – and the great knock-on effect is that I’m MUCH more likely to trust your own music if I love the music you love. If you point me to great music, that becomes the internet DNA chain that makes sense of your music. I like what you like, therefor I’m more likely to like you. It’s not rocket-science.

And here, as per usual, is something awesome – Laura Rossi’s wonderful score for ‘The Battle Of The Somme’ – it’s on Bandcamp, and you can pay *anything* for it. So have a listen, and if you like it, give her five quid. You get a bargain, she gets paid. Everyone wins:

Is It Good? Yes, It’s Good. Can I Make It Better? (New tune with Mike Outram)

2010-03-01T19:02:36Z

…That’s what my brain is asking when I’m improvising.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the great pleasure and good fortune to spend a day recording with Mike Outram – guitarist extraordinaire. I’ve been a fan of Mike’s for a long time, having heard him in a couple of different settings with Singer/Songwriter Rebecca Hollweg, and more recently with Theo Travis’ Doubletalk quartet.

We were able to snag a day recording in the rather lovely studios at Leicester College, giving the students there something to record, and a very different type of project to work on.

We went in having NEVER played together at all. In fact, we didn’t even soundcheck together on the day – the first thing we recorded was the first time we’d played together. We just hit record, started playing and carried on playing for the rest of the day, with a short break for lunch.

The extend of the conversations prior to each recording included ‘OK, this time I’ll just loop you’ on one tune, ‘let’s play some weird shit’ on another, ‘shall we try for something a little shorter?’ on more than one occasion… For the most part, one of us started playing, the other joined in and it unfolded from there. And that’s where the question above came in – what was happening? was it good? yes (the answer every time, thank God) – what could I do to make it even better? do that.

For those kind of questions to work and not be hi-jacked by other questions like ‘is what I’m playing OK?’ ‘I hope he’s OK with where this is going’, ‘is this jazz enough? I think I’m supposed to be more jazz’ requires a level of mutual trust that allows you both to just get on with it. I needed to not be worrying about what Mike might play, or what he thought of what I was playing. Naturally, I wanted him to like it, but being unable to ask him in the moment, I just assumed that my own taste would work as a reasonable benchmark for that which is good, and worked from there.

I also did my best (by smiling a lot) to let him know that I loved what he was playing (he’s amazing), in order to foster more of that trust.

At that point, when you’re both playing and digital tape is rolling, there’s no time to think about what you can’t do, what you should do, what you wish you could do if only you’d brought your other bass with you… it’s all about that initial question? Is this good? what can I do to make it better? And being prepared for the answer to part b) to be either ‘stop playing’ or ‘just keep doing what you’re doing, and let him be awesome’.

In the event, we ended up with a lot of music that I’m more proud of that anything I’ve been involved in for a long time. It’s fun, it’s refreshing, it’s very tuneful, it’s spacey, extravagant exciting music. We’ve got a couple of hours of it from which to choose and mix the bestest bits for an album release. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

For now, here’s one of the VERY rough mixes – the first bit of the project to be made public – pretty much as it came out of the computer in the studio…

Rough Mix of 1st Track from forthcoming Steve Lawson/Mike Outram album by solobasssteve

New Live Solo Tunes!

2010-02-23T13:29:19Z

Recorded at Friday night’s gig at the Islwyn Guitar Club in Crosskeys, Gwent, South Wales, here are two new tunes that ‘emerged’ – they’re both improvs, but I like ‘em, so will probably have a bash at something like them for the new album…

The recordings are remarkably good considering they’re just on a little Tascam digital recorder thingie (recorded by Andrew Buckton – fab singer/songwriter who came with me, and sang beautifully on the gig too).

here they are – enjoy!

New Tunes from Islwyn Guitar Club by solobasssteve

Solo Bass Word Association – Help, Please!

2010-02-22T14:14:38Z

As y’all know, I’m a big big fan of Bandcamp - it is, at the moment, the best self-service MP3 sales platform on the entire internetz.

They’ve just implemented the option to have artists, albums and tracks tagged with genre, location and associated words… Making it searchable.

So, this is where you come in – I’m interested in what you associate with my music when you listen to it. It can be a genre description, or a feeling, or something far more random. The floor is wide open.

So, if you would be so kind as to have a listen via the MP3s page, or Spotify, or last.fm (or indeed your own MP3 collection, if you’ve already demonstrated your cool, your exquisite taste and your generosity by downloading them all ) and let me know what comes to mind. Please either post it here in the comments on this post, or on Twitter with the hashtag #SBStags

(of course, if you’re a last.fm user, you’re most welcome to cross-post the tags over there…)

So, let your imagination run – let’s see if we come up with a mental map of the music that means something.. or just a load of random stuff that helps no-one… It’s over to you

Warner’s Mistakes

2010-02-10T22:50:46Z

So apparently Warner have decided that streaming services aren’t part of the future of music online after all.

From the BBC website article:

” Warner chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr said: “Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed.
“The ‘get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price’ strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.” “

Now, that’s not a lot to go on, so please bear that in mind as I write.

However, here are a few mistakes that seem apparent from Warner’s position as expressed in the article.

‘Listen to all the music you want for free’ is not the same as ‘get all the music you want for free’ – streaming ≠ ownership, and portability is a chargeable commodity. Hence the reason I describe Spotify Lite as on-demand radio.
‘Net positive for the industry’ is an utterly spurious metric. Why should any one way of accessing music be ‘net positive for the industry?’ especially one that is an awesome discovery platform that costs neither side much at all. Spotify is all about discovery. And people can only be fans and therefor financially invested in music they listen to. If getting them to listen is free, the world is a much better place than it was when advertising dollars ruled the discovery game.
Warner are talking about Warner, not as Carl Morris pointed out on Twitter, what is best for artists, genres or regions. If streaming services could be proved to be having a detrimental effect on a particular artist’s career, then pulling their music from the service would perhaps be a decision worth discussing. Blanket judgements for an entire media empire – without considering how many artists are themselves active supporters of streaming as a concept, and who are able to directly attribute an increase in new listeners to the ability of their fans to share links to free streams with their friends – are worse than useless. They’re reckless.
There’s no mention here of whether or not sales have dropped across the board out of line with any projections of how the curve would be without streaming services. If streaming is a discovery mechanism, then the revenue would naturally be found elsewhere, as we saw with the Lady GaGa story of small payouts from Spotify, but still being able to sell 20 MILLION paid downloads in the same time-period.

People paying a tenner for Spotify is no better or worse for the industry than them paying a tenner to eMusic to buy the things they’ve found using Spotify, or spending ten quid a month on CDs or other downloads. And lets not forget that statistically, those who spend £120 a year on music are a pretty small minority of music consumers. They always have been. A tenner a month is a lot for yer average listener to fork out to rent some streams (if you stop paying, all the content and stored playlists you’ve created on your mobile device is lost. Any downloads happening via the Spotify interface are happening at 79p a track, via 7digital (more big industry stupidity – make them cheaper, you eejits!)

When I listen to music, whether free or paid, I’m not thinking about ‘the industry’. I’m not supporting ‘the industry’ when I buy music, I’m giving it to artists in exchange for them being awesome. Awesomeness is something I’m willing to put a cash value on. As are lots of people.

Discovery is something that benefits the person being discovered at least as much as the one doing the discovery – that’s the foundational principle of advertising, and is why record labels pay for adverts. They’re even willing to illegally pay for airtime.

Here, Warner are being retrogressive, making blanket decisions based on ‘the industry’ not artists, have no idea what streaming services actually provide to their users, and don’t appear considered how awesome free discovery mechanisms are for everyone along the chain outside of their old industry metrics that placed cash (from both sides) in front of the discovery process.

Another Major Label FAIL.

Meanwhile, here’s some awesome music you can have for free, or pay for if you want to thank Ben Walker for his awesomeness:

Interview With Me For The Unconventional Guide To Art And Money

2010-02-01T00:18:55Z

Last week I was interviewed by Zoë Westof for the Unconventional Guide To Art and Money – it was a really fun interview to do (anybody surprised that I love talking about art, vocation, creativity, business and stuff like that??)

The eBook itself is a really interesting idea, in that with it you get a bunch of audio interviews, and then updates – more interviews as they come along. It’s a great way of fairly easily ‘adding value’ to a digital product. Much harder to do if you have to mail out hard copies of extra chapters to a real book, but for digital services like this, it makes a lot of sense to continue updating them (I know that a lot of authors continue blogging on the same subject to update the info in their physical books. that works too!)

So, check out the book by clicking here - it’s interesting that so much of the advice in it is about visual art, rather than music or writing, but that actually makes it more fun (and perhaps easier?) to abstract principles from it rather than getting caught up in the details of someone else’s execution of their ideas.

Anyway, here’s the interview with me – it’s an hour long, so set aside a little time, or download it and listen to it on the bus on the way to work

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or download it here.

I don’t have a transcript of the interview, but if you want to pull out the quotes from it that connect with you the most and add them to the comments, we can put together ‘edited’ highlights.

Music Plans for 2010

2010-01-27T14:56:08Z

2009 was a fairly easy-going year, music-wise for Lobelia and I. We played a load of US shows in January, and a handful of other shows across the year, but it was mainly pretty low-key stuff.

Gigs:

2010 is already shaping up to be a much more musically-focussed year. I’m in the process of booking some solo house-concerts for the end of March/Beginning of April – the open dates are

March 29th (near Birmingham),
31st (near Exeter) and
April 1st (near Swindon) -
the 30th already has a gig booked in Southampton (more details ASAP).

If you want to host a house-gig on any of those dates, and are near (or between) those places, please drop me a line.

Then Lo and I are doing some duo shows at the beginning of May - on the 6th we’re in Leeds and the 8th in Surrey (more deets soon) – if you’re anywhere between those two, we’d be happy to come and play on the 7th, or either side of those dates. Do drop us a line.

And at the end of May we go out to the US, mainly to take Flapjack to meet the family, but we’ll be doing some house concerts and ‘house consulting’ as well – if you’re interested in hosting something (or putting us in touch with a music school/university) please drop us a line.

Recording:

It’s now nearly 4 years since I released Behind Every Word, and while it’s currently selling REALLY well thanks to Bandcamp’s wonderful download sales platform, it really is time for a new album. So I’ll be working on that very soon – just need to get the tech side worked out. Hopefully will have that available for the US shows.

In a couple of weeks time, I’m going into a studio for a day with Mike Outram – guitar-monkey extraordinaire. No idea what we’ll come up with, but if its releasable, that’ll be out sometime soonish as well.

And then there’s the archive - I’ve got a whole load of fascinating music languishing on hard-drives. There’s a duo album with Italian guitarist Luca Formentini, a strange-yet-beautiful experimental duo album with free improv trumpeter Jeff Kaiser, a quartet live recording with Jeff, saxophonist Andrew Pask and bassist Steuart Liebig. (that last one is really interesting cos I thought the gig had gone pretty badly, then listened to the recording and really liked it )

And there’s also a double album’s worth of live stuff with Theo Travis, recorded on the tour we did after For The Love Of Open Spaces came out. That really needs to be heard. So maybe I should work on that first.

Suffice to say, there’ll be lots of cool music from me this year, if something else doesn’t get in the way.

For now, here’s the album with Theo Travis – have a listen, and then pay whatever you like for it if you want to download it.

Quick Thoughts On “Obscurity”

2010-01-21T15:27:28Z

A few days ago, MusicThinkTank published this post in response to this post, pulling out the ‘headline’ that “in 2008, 1,500 releases broke the “obscurity line” (sold over 10,000 albums).”

The context for the quote is this (it’s from some bloke who works for TommyBoy Entertainment):

“So in the whole year only 227 of the artists were artists that had broken what we call the “obscurity line.” When you sell 10,000 albums, you’re no longer an obscure artist; people know about you.”

So this is a made-up measurement - it’s what ‘we’ (no mention of who ‘we’ are), arbitrarily decided, that selling 10,000 records makes you not obscure. Why? How? Nope, nothing. Just that ‘people know about you’. Very scientific and verifiable. ‘People’.

It’s also based on ‘Soundscan’ statistics. By Soundscan’s reckoning, I’ve sold about 3% of my actual sales across my career – that’s how many have gone through the Soundscan system. Not a single one of my gig sales, my own website sales, bandcamp sales, CDbaby sales have gone through Soundscan. So this tells us that 1500 artists have reported 10K sales to Soundscan. And that’s apparently a story about obscurity?

No it’s not. Not even close:

Are there only 1500 acts in the world playing music professionally? No. There are hundreds of thousands. Possibly millions.
Are there only 1500 acts in the world making awesome music, and continuing to be able to make awesome music? No. There are tens of thousands for each of us. And tastes differs so much around the world. There are millions of artists that are awesome to someone and keep being awesome to someone.
How many outlets are there for music that don’t report to Soundscan? Thousands.
Where do most indie artists make the vast majority of their sales? Their gigs, then their own website.
So just how specious is it to whack a label as pejorative as ‘the obscurity line‘ onto a statistic that just proves itself to be utterly meaningless if you, y’know, listen to music because you love it rather than make money from ‘breaking artists’.

So, the whole notion of an ‘obscurity line‘ is so bogus as to hardly be worth responding to.

If the figure here is that only 1500 reported more than 10,000 album sales to Soundscan, the REAL story is the hundreds of thousands of bands who make awesome music and are able to keep making awesome music without selling that many records through the mainstream. The old industry. The ‘established path’. That it’s quite possible to have a sustainable, successful, fulfilling, enjoyable, liberated, creative career in music without selling 10K ‘albums’ a year through those outlets. That, my friends, is proper awesome!

So why ‘Obscurity’?

Obscurity is an utterly meaningless word in this context – obscure to who? Where? Obscure meaning unheard of?

There are a lot of artists in the world who are known to millions but couldn’t sell 10K copies of a new album if they released one. Not obscure, but certainly not ‘current’.

And there are others who are selling hundreds of thousands of records, and feel like abject failures because their label promised them more and spent as though they were going to sell millions. (in the same article, the TommyBoy bloke says that of the 112 albums that sold more than 250K, HALF DIDN’T BREAK EVEN! What industry, after 50 years of experimenting, of statistics or measuring trends, or gauging audience reaction, still can’t make money on a product that sells 250,000 units?? A broken, insane industry, that’s what.)

All these two statistics prove is that some people still equate industry success with ‘gross’ figures rather than ‘net’ figures. Gimme a 300 grand marketing budget and I could fairly easily sell 20K+ albums in a year. The problem would be that that would only gross, at best, 200 grand. Net would be a lot lower. So I’d be selling WAY more records than I am now, would no longer be ‘obscure‘ (ha!) but I’d be a failure in every other sense because I’d be a hundred grand in debt, and my self esteem would be shot. Or if someone else paid for it, I’d be beholden to them for what happens next to try and get that 100K back.

Forget obscurity metrics and think about what matters - making the music you love, finding the people who share that passion, and not killing yourself with unrealistic expectations of how much money it’s going to make you.

Here’s a suggestion – 10,000 listeners is a much more creatively inspiring target than 10,000 sales. How would you get 10K listeners without spending a penny, OR worrying about earning anything. Cos 10,000 listeners and no money is a really great problem to have to try and solve… Answers in the comments

Dear Rock Stars…

2010-01-10T15:42:01Z

2010 is – rather tragically – shaping up to be the year when Rock Stars (and old-industry millionaires) complain about the state of music on behalf of ‘the little people’.

Here are three examples:

Peter Waterman, in an interview with The Times, said that Spotify was a terrible thing. It, he says

“devalue[s] our artists, they damage this country economically, culturally and morally”

Why’s that then, Pete?

“The big stars are a tiny percentage; the rest are broke, including a lot of well-known faces. Who is developing new talent? Without money, new acts are strangled before they mature. We all suffer.”

This, from the man who made a multi-million pound career of writing and producing ‘hits’ for soap stars – his company were ‘The Hit Factory’, FFS. It was he who, in the land before autotune, realised that multitracking someone with a then-really-crappy voice like Kylie would make it passable, enough to sell mediocre music off the back of a TV career anyway… (notice how good she got when she stopped working with SAW?). Yup, he’s been a bastion of the process to find new talent. A fine supporter of grass-roots music. No double standard there.

And to answer his question, ‘Who is developing new talent?‘ – the talented people are, you idiot! We don’t need ‘developing’, we can just get on with it, without you, and services like Spotify remove the gatekeepers and friction from people hearing us. It HELPS us. Stop speaking on our behalf.

Case-study #2, is DJ Shadow, who, in a rant on his website, suggests that the lack of perceived money in music has removed the incentive to create art (any of you who play music as amateurs, feel free to be MASSIVELY offended by this patronising bollocks now). As an example, he says

“how many young rap artists are grinding away these days in New York, trying to get a deal? Not too many, certainly compared to the ‘80s and ‘90s. There’s no allure, no pot at the end of the rainbow.”

Perhaps it’s because no-one needs to ‘grind away’ any more? You can make music at home, release it, find interesting places to play without the ‘grind’? What was the ‘grind’ for anyway? A record deal? Screw that. Gigs? Do them yourself. And has he actually looked at the relationship between the history of hip-hop and the political climate? It changes, it shifts. And post-bling, if rappers have become cash-obsessed, they’ve only themselves to blame. Long gone are the days when Hip-hop was ‘CNN for Black People’ as Chuck D called it, and it’s ain’t the fault of Bit Torrent.

Finally, Here’s Bono claiming that the world needs to learn from China about the joys of internet snooping, if Hollywood is to be saved the fate of Big Music. He says this, on the same day that it’s announced that Avatar is the ‘Fastest film to ever gross a billion dollars.’ Yup, Hollywood is REALLY hurting right now. Any INDUSTRY that grosses a billion dollars in 3 weeks is doing fine, let alone a SINGLE FILM.

And what does he say has happened in music?

“A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators..”

Despite sales this year breaking records,
Despite Lady Gaga SELLING 20 million downloads,
Despite Lily Allen shifting 4 million albums in a career that started long after BitTorrent rounded the curve of its growth spurt,
Despite U2s’ own planet-raping biggest-tour-of-all-time selling out around the globe.

So, dear Rock Stars – the problem here is not with the internet. It’s not with how it ‘hurts’ the little people. WE LOVE IT! It’s you. You and your expectations of wealth-beyond-measure are screwed. And I don’t care.

Here’s a headline for you – in the 3 weeks since I made ‘Behind Every Word’ available for free download, I’ve sold more CDs and downloads that in any one month since 6 months after it first came out.

This a four year old album. I’ve done no gigs in that time, I’ve taken out no ads, I’ve not given away a single bit of physical anything that cost me money. I’ve just talked about it, and invited people to listen to it. And guess what? They listened, and those who really liked it THEN PAID. And they paid more for the ‘free’ download they they do on iTunes.

I couldn’t possibly have done it without ‘free music’, without the internet, without sharing, without streaming. Nor could I have done it within the insanely restrictive copyright terms of a standard recording contract.

Headline number 2 – Indie Cellist is so successful, the mainstream industry don’t believe her when she tells them:

On Twitter yesterday I was chatting to Zoe Keating – awesome cellist, composer, looper, and massive indie success. So successful that ‘the industry’ don’t believe her when she says how successful she is! They only believe their own statistics – so only report her sales figures as measured by Soundscan. They don’t like that Zoe has done it all without them, so aren’t interested in developing newer more flexible ways of measuring success. But as I pointed out to Zoe, who has 1.3 MILLION twitter followers, she has a bigger audience than Billboard Magazine. So screw them and their outdated measurements, just do your music cos you love it, and bypass the nonsense of pre-millenial bullshit notions of success. (I also wonder just how influential people like Zoe can be in promoting other indie artists – using their platform as a discovery source… we’ll see, in time, I guess )

So, Rock Stars – stop it, let go. Your half a century in the sun is done. Pete, Bono, Joshua, you’ve got more than enough to live on for the rest of your lives. If you’re struggling, downsize. Maybe you’d get something out of reading the greatest blog post of 2009 about the music industry, by Danny Barnes.

Move over, and let those of us who value sustainability, artistic freedom and a conversational relationship with our audience over fame, celebrity and selling-millions-of-records-while-still-losing-money get on with what we do, using the tools that make it possible.

And if any of you three want a copy of Behind Every Word, please, download it for free, here – I promise I won’t spam the email address you have to give me in order to get the free version. Alternatively, pay what you can for it. If you’re strapped for cash, just drop in a tenner like you would for one of your much lamented CDs.

Lawson/Dodds/Wood Album Available On Bandcamp.com

2010-01-03T14:19:27Z

I’ve got loads of End of year/start of a new decade type blogging to do over the next week, but for now, here’s the Lawson/Dodds/Wood album, freshly uploaded to Bandcamp.com, for download sale, pay-what-you-like.

If you weren’t around here when it came out, feel free to watch the documentary on the making of the album that’s on Youtube – I’ll embed part 1 below, then click through the links. (the sound on the first one’s a bit rough, but it gets much better as they go on!)