www.stevelawson.net

Curating a Live Event: Never Settle For Less Than Greatness.

2010-03-15T00:55:25Z

Following up my last post about recommending awesome things, I want to tie the same ideas into putting on events. The trigger for this was the Antwerp Looping Festival which I played last Saturday night.

A bit of background – the ‘festival’ was one night, 6 artists, in a gorgeous little theatre venue in Antwerp, organised by one of the performers – Sjaak Overgaauw.

The whole idea of a ‘looping festival’ or any other non-genre- or personality-specific festival is fraught with possible marketing pitfalls – if there’s no inherent style of music, or artistic/culturally-thematic link, how on earth do you make it work? What are people coming to, and why? Who are you going to market it to?

If your target audience for such an event is other practitioners, it’s easy. People come to check out what’s happening, encourage each other, swap ideas, check out new toys and hang out. No problem, if it’s marketed as such. We’re far more forgiving when we see it as part of a community…

If you’re putting on as a public facing concert, you need to apply the same criteria as any other gig: ‘Never Settle For Anything Less Than Greatness’. The music world is full of events that are booked by programmers desperate to fill a bill with anyone promising to bring 20 mates to the gig. London pubs are overflowing with REALLY bad acoustic nights, where talented people are buried under an avalanche of mediocrity, in a sub-open-mic-night environment, where the audience are in no way prepared to listen out for the awesome.

The problem with this for the event is that no-one is ever going to turn up unless they know one of the artists. And even then are unlikely to willingly stay and watch the other people that are on. Why on earth should they, if the likelihood is that the stuff that’s on is going to be #balls?

There are exceptions – both Tony Moore at the Bedford and Amity Hill who used to book the Big Secret night at the Ginglik curated a roster of at-the-very-least-rather-good singer/songwriters. I don’t think I ever heard anyone ‘bad’ at the Ginglik. Rarely at the Kashmir or Bedford. I regularly heard people who were actually brilliant. Often before they then broke big (I saw Seth Lakeman play at the Bedford a month or so before Kitty Jay broke out and was nominated for the Mercury. He was amazing. And I first heard Emily Baker, Dori Jackson and Alice Shaw at the Ginglik. Geniuses one and all.)

Both those venues are places that people go (or went) for ‘music’. Not to see their mate Dave play a few tunes, but to see *anything* with the expectation that it would be WAY better than staying in and watching TV.

That’s the job of putting on a gig. It’s what I did with the Recycle Collective, it’s what smart venue bookers do with regards to support acts, and it’s what Sjaak did for the Antwerp Looping Festival. The looping festival idea is a smile on a dog – it a hook to get people asking questions, but it doesn’t mean anything if the music doesn’t work without knowing it’s looping. Music that requires an essay of explanation for us to ‘get it’ works best in academia or trade shows. Public facing events don’t thrive on that kind of ‘subservient sound’ (music that serves a non-musical, technical purpose).

So Sjaak put together an evening of really great performers. A lot of it was fairly dark ambient, experimental stuff. But the venue was comfortable, the lighting was lovely and the PA/soundman combo was pretty much perfect. So the audiophile geeks (of which there were many – two of the artists only had their music available on vinyl!) got a real treat, and the uninitiated got to hear some beautiful soundscapes in a deeply sympathetic setting, as well as being thrown a bone by getting to hear Louis Angelou – a singer/guitarist – and me, playing big tunes. And in my case, talking weird bollocks between songs.

The upshot? Near-unanimous praise, the acknowledgement that the bill was consistent, the event a success, and the distinct likelihood that pretty much everyone in attendance would be back next year, probably bringing friends.

The gig was great in an of itself, great for the artists (I got to hear 5 acts I’d never heard before, greatly enjoyed all of them and made a whole load of lovely new friends), but perhaps most importantly was good enough to spring board into new things, with the expectation in the audience’s mind that whatever Sjaak does next will be worth seeing. That doesn’t come by booking people who’ll bring a few mates. It doesn’t happen by putting on too many acts in the hope of making the posters look like loads is going on. It doesn’t happen by booking a crappy venue – if that’s the case, do it in your house and spend your venue budget on renting an awesome PA. It doesn’t happen by telling people that things are great that patently aren’t great. An artist being your mate is not a good enough reason to expect your audience to sit through their bogus set. Neither, sadly, is the thought they might offer you a gig where they live in return. By all means do gig swaps, but make sure that the reciprocal deal is based on a shared sense of awesomeness.

By all means give me a gig if you think what I do is fab. If you think your friends/audience/whoever will enjoy it, appreciate it and be grateful to you for finding me for them. But do it because that’s good, not because you think I might be able to get you a gig in London. If I think you’re amazing, I may well be able to get you a gig in London. But don’t make our friendship dependent on me watering down my reputation by telling people you’re amazing when I don’t think you are. I’ll book my awesome, you book your awesome, and more people will see more music in more great places and be more grateful for it. That’s good for everyone. For the Microgigs series that Lobelia and I are hosting, there’s nothing required of the artists other than their fabulousness. They may or may not like what I do as a musician. I don’t choose my friends or the musicians I listen to based how much they dig my wikkid bass skillz. That would be very weird indeed.

So keep practicing. I’ll do the same. We’ll all keep chasing the awesome.

In keeping with that, here’s one of the other artists from the looping festival – Ricky Graham. His EP here is fabulous:

More on Favours And Recommendations

2010-03-10T23:53:06Z

I’ve mentioned a few times on here that I’m not a big fan of reciprocation-dependent deals between musicians to plug each other’s stuff. Let me expand on that a bit.

One of the most valuable currencies that anyone (music-person or otherwise) has online is their recommendation. Loads of people have written about this (Chris Brogan wrote a book about it called ‘Trust Agents’ …that I haven’t read.), but basically, if you talk about things you believe in, the people who hear those recommendations are going to find things that are awesome to someone. They won’t necessarily agree, but that’s not the point – you’re not pandering to an audience, you’re getting excited about greatness.

So, how does this work in a world where we’re all meant to help each other out? I mean, I also talk a lot about the way that collectives and coalitions can work in favour of musicians…

The workable reality is as always somewhere in the middle – there’s nothing wrong with feeling grateful and acting on that. To take your impetus to finally get round to blogging about a band from the fact that their drummer just tweeted about how awesome you are is perfectly natural and fine. Contrast that with the ‘if you put us in your top friends on MySpace, we’ll do the same…’ mentality. ‘Do this for me then I’ll do this for you’ is a recipe for the survival of the pushiest, not the awesomest. And it also overstates the value of a recommendation, link or ‘top friend’ in and of itself. The existential value of such a thing is negligible. It just being there means next to nothing. It’s only real value is in the energy that’s behind it. And that energy is cumulative, but can also be diminished by dilution.

If I get an endless stream of links from someone about lame-assed music, it doesn’t suddenly make me like rubbish music. It makes me think that either

their taste and mine really don’t match, or
they’re not to be trusted cos they link to any old shit that may lead to them getting a link back.

That’s the death of value.

Same goes for only ever linking to stuff in which you have a vested interest – if the only bands you ever plug are people you’re working with, it looks like you just want more people at your shows. It stands to reason that you’re going to want to work with musicians you think are awesome, so this isn’t some unworkable call to never draw any benefit from the stuff you put out there – of course not, almost all of us want to have more listeners, more gigs, more people to play to. (Or at least, have more people wanting to see us so we can pick and choose the gigs we do!) It’s all about finding the balance, and building a social DNA chain that points to you being not just a producer of great music, but a curator of great everything.

The principle is one of ‘value-added’: how many extra ways can you make your story – and the media, events and supporting cast that surround it – compelling to the people who are discovering it? You can be exciting, funny, sexy, distracting, educational, passionate, inspiring, consoling, wise, dangerous, scary.. you can be a node-point for finding great things, a recommender of great books or films or food, a philosopher, theologian, comedian, curator, historian, essayist, guitar-ninja, recording advisor, producer, svengali…

When I hear musicians saying ‘I just want to make music, I don’t want to have to be a social networker or marketer’, I do have to wonder what they really want to fill their days with. The big question becomes, ‘yes, but what do you want to make music about??’ Great music – world-changing, awesome music – never exists in a vacuum. It’s always part of a story, and its inspiration is very often a big part of the value in it. Don’t try and tell me that the success of the Beatles wasn’t down to their personalities, stories, controversies and cultural experimentation/boundary-pushing as much as it was the notes on the record… Whether the music was the gateway to the story or vice versa is largely moot – they feed one another in a loop. Story leads to music about the story when leads back to the music.

And the music you talk about is part of that story ‘check out my friend, cos he wants you to check out me’ is a really really shitty story. ‘Check out this amazing film, it changed my life’ is a far more compelling story, and one that will make me want to hear your music. Srsly.

In Pt II, I’ll talk about this with live gigs.

For now though, have a listen to Premonition Factory’s album – pure, gorgeous ambient goodness. Got this at the weekend in Antwerp. Fabulous stuff:

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