Available from Friday, it’s an ebook that brings together a whole bunch of great advice for people just starting out on their life in music. Proceeds to a wonderful music charity in India.

Have a listen.

Also – check out Monkey on the Roof.

We ask the question ‘What is music for?’ and then go off in many “well, it’s complicated…” tangents – in our usual way, as you’d expect.

I spent last week at Vallekilde, about an hour outside of Copenhagen, at an annual event called Summer Session.

It’s an intensive retreat for jazz musicians hosted by national agency Jazz Danmark. They invite world-class artists to come along and work with the musicians, do workshops, stage concerts and jam together. It’s a fantastic week for all concerned.

With my New Music Strategies hat on, my role at the event was simply to try and be helpful where possible, talk to the musicians about their own digital strategies, and help them think through what they’re doing online and how that could be refined.

I thought I’d share some of the advice I gave and my answers to the most common questions and problems I encountered.

Can you have a look at my website?

Over the course of the week, I had a bunch of informal conversations and maybe about a dozen ‘consultancies’ where I sat down and listened to what people were doing and made some suggestions. Most of these requests for consultancies were essentially “can you have a look at my website?”.

While that’s often a good starting point, it’s never the whole picture. What musicians do online is everything from their email to Facebook, their own website to the online services that they use – and, more importantly, how they manage that strategically and holistically in the service of the communication goals they have with their different constituencies.

In other words, while I was able to say “why is that bit there and not here?” – my main message was more about thinking about the way in which they communicate online, rather than about making their internet brochure a bit shinier.

The importance of what gets left out

Many of them were surprised (some horrified) that I do not have a Facebook account. I explained that while Facebook is often a really useful tool for a musician trying to get gigs, connect with fans or sell records – I had decided that it was something that was more negative than positive in my life.

There’s a reason I bring this up.

I’m really keen that musicians think about the sorts of tools that they use and what it means that they use those tools – everything from whether they’re comfortable about being used as a place to advertise things that they don’t get any veto over through to whether their site uses Flash (and many do) which often means that people with disabilities are unable to navigate their page and get to their music.

But of course, it’s also about user interface and interaction. Thinking more about what people are looking for when they come to them online, rather than what they want to simply broadcast at their audience.

The point of all this is to understand the technologies and their affordances, and then having some control over what you want to use for what purpose. This is not about ‘doing more stuff on the internet’ any more than it’s about selling t-shirts. It’s about figuring out what’s useful and what isn’t, and knowing why.

Top tips

It’s worth saying that most of the websites I saw were beautiful. Really lovely design. But there were lots of things that didn’t make sense – or that got in the way of usefulness. And while I think design is important, it needs to be in the service of utility when you’re trying to do something like make a sustainable career in music, and your plan is to use the internet as part of that.

I said I’d put together a selection of the advice I gave most often to the musicians I spoke with so that Jazz Danmark can share them around the other people who didn’t get a chance (or didn’t want) to come and have a chat with me. It’s also here for anyone else who wants to read it.

So for what it’s worth, here’s a distillation of the most common advice I gave these professional jazz musicians.

Get your own website

If you’re still using Myspace as your main web profile (and I did encounter this), then you need to start again. Nobody else is on MySpace. It’s just you. It’s broken. Let it die in peace.

Apart from anything else, it screams “hobby”, it confirms that you haven’t thought about your audience in over 5 years, and it holds up a big sign that you’re not serious enough about your music to give it its own place online.

It’s poison. Shut it down and walk away. Do not link to it on your website.

Read this article (from two years ago!) if you need further convincing.

Even if you’re not using Myspace – if your account still exists, go and kill it now. If people Google your name, it will come up, they’ll go there, and they’ll think you must have died in 2007.

If your website is something like “mybandname.freehostingservice.com” then you need to get out of there and get your own web domain and hosting. For the sake of US$50 a year, give or take, you can have something that is yourname.dk or yourname.com – and you get to control what it looks like, how it works, and what goes on it.

Apart from the ads you don’t get any say over that tend to come with free hosting platforms, you also never know when the service is going to suddenly get bought out, close down, or change their terms and conditions on you.

Buy a domain. Get hosting. Get WordPress installed on it (it’s free). If you don’t have the technical skills to do that, then buy someone a couple of beers to do it for you. It’s not difficult or particularly time consuming. Once it’s done, you can probably take it from there.

If you can use Facebook, you can run your own hosted WordPress website on your own domain.

Think about who it’s for

Most people put things on their website because “that’s what you put on websites”.

In fact, I spoke to some people who had simply looked at the sites of other, similar musicians, and had simply done more or less the same thing – without considering whether it was a good thing to do or not.

The fact is that your website is a piece of communication. So as with all pieces of communication, you need to know who you are communicating with and for what purpose. And it needs to be you that’s communicating – not someone who’s a bit like you.

Are the people coming to your website going to buy your record? Give you a gig? Write about you in the newspaper? All of the above?

Chances are the piece of communication they want is not some corporate annual report. Nor are they particularly interested that you were 11 years old when you started playing the piano. Also – nobody wants to sign a guestbook. Get rid of it. You have a Facebook page they can write on (you do have a Facebook page, right? It’s not just your personal profile?).

Your bio is currently too long, and filled with stuff that may well be part of your biography, but is not helpful in the context of what your website is for. Most likely, the reason you have a bio is so that someone can write interesting things about you on their Festival programme or in their newspaper.

Write it so they can simply cut and paste it. Add a link to a high-res (300dpi) image of you. Journalists are often lazy (or too busy to bother re-writing your content for you). Indulge their laziness. Give them something they can use as-is. 50-100 words is usually plenty. If you want to include your whole life story, add a ‘click to read more’ link.

When people arrive at your site, the answers to their most common questions should be answered immediately. Front page. Usually, those questions are “What does this artist look and sound like, and will I like them?” People checking out your music on a recommendation or thinking about booking you will appreciate finding out the answers to this stuff right up front. A video is often a good way to do that.

Also, you might want to think about whether what you’ve been up to is really “News” or whether you could simply have a blog in which you talk about what you’ve been up to. That makes it far more of an ongoing conversation with your audience.

Besides — “Musician Plays Gig in Music Venue” is hardly news, is it?

Make sure I can listen, share and buy

Can I hear your music? Can I hear the whole thing? If I like it, can I buy it easily? Is there a way for me to share that on my Facebook page or Twitter so I can tell my friends to “check this out”?

Generally speaking, you need a play button, a buy button and a share button for your recordings.

Having your music on Bandcamp is a great way to do that, because they do all the difficult stuff with the e-commerce side of things and you can sell both physical and digital stuff that way. The player embeds on your website as easily as a YouTube video does – and there’s a share link as well as a buy link right under the play button.

That way, if Niels from JazzNyt decides to review your record, he can embed the album right there in the review so people can have a listen as they read, and instantly click the buy button if they agree with his evaluation that you have created a masterpiece…

Another way to share music with your audience is via Soundcloud. That’s particularly good for music that isn’t for sale – live music, new tracks, etc. Again, easily embeddable and ideal to include on your site.

However – the music on your website should never automatically start playing. Let people press the play button themselves. These days, lots of people have a whole bunch of tabs open on their browser and trying to find which of them is making the noise is incredibly irritating.

Worse, the most common immediate reaction to opening a webpage that has music playing automatically is to close the browser and never go back to that artist’s website again. You probably don’t want that.

While you’re looking at these useful external sites, you might want to check out Flickr for your photos, Vimeo for your videos, and Songkick for your concert listings and festival appearances.

Lots of other advice

The people I spoke with at Summer Session all had some specific questions about their career, their web presence, their social networking and how to communicate what they do in a way that helps create meaning for their audience. Hopefully I was helpful in also addressing some stuff that they may not have thought to ask about.

But the practice of going through the artist websites one at a time, step by step — asking “What’s this doing here? Do we need this? Is this the right thing to have here? Who is this for?” and so on — was a really useful process to go through. It revealed some dead links, some shortcomings and some possibilities that you might not stumble across any other way.

Perhaps you should sit down with a friend and ask those sorts of questions of your own site…

But lots of advice like this – as well as a much deeper explanation of my approach and thoughts about online music can be found in my book Music in the Digital Age, which I’d encourage you to download and have a look at. It’s free, if you’d like it to be. More if you prefer.

This is what we do

If you’d like for me, or the team from New Music Strategies, to come to your music event and sit down with artists to go through their website, their career strategy, their approach to the music business and how it works, or how they can do the things they do in a sustainable way — that’s definitely something we can help with.

And because we all have different experiences and expertise, bringing several of us at a time allows us to give a range of perspectives from technical audio production advice through to advice about dealing with media.

While we usually get asked to give speeches, host workshops, talk at conferences and talk to large groups at a time, I think there are ways to be even more effective and helpful when you talk on a one-to-one basis with people about where they’re at, what they’re struggling with or just to get an outside perspective on what they’re doing.

Everyone’s different and generalised advice will only get you so far.

If this sounds like something that would be helpful for you (or your national music agency) then by all means, get in touch.

Thanks once again to Jazz Danmark for the opportunity to meet so many great musicians, hear so much great music, and for the chance to feel helpful along the way.

Or rather – their approaches, as there seem to be three main ones.

It’s useful to break these approaches down so that you can recognise them when you see them – but also in order to get a sense of how these kinds of information sources can be interpreted and used in a practical way in your own music industry practice.

You can probably think of other ways to slice this, but here are the three main ways in which I interpret the approaches of music industry bloggers.

The reporter

The approach of the reporter can be summed up simply by the phrase “this thing happened”. The reporter will keep you up to date with the changes going on in the music industry.

When new technologies are introduced, record labels or artists try a seemingly radical new strategy, companies are bought or sold, and governments change their copyright legislation, you can rely on the reporter (sometimes a publication – but often an individual) to let you know that it happened the moment that it happened.

Reporters prioritise the currency of their information, and will most often relay what can be thought of as ‘facts’.

Depth of analysis is (generally speaking) less important to a reporter than what’s going on right now — though the reportage will often come from a particular consistent perspective, and the news will be framed as part of a series of ongoing pieces of evidence to support that perspective.

The analyst-advocate

The role of the analyst is to step back and make sense of what it means that something happened. Often the analysis will take place at the point of that event occurring, but more often than not, the analyst will wait around for data to turn up. Timeliness is not as much of the essence as insight.

The advocate part of the role is to align that analysis in support of a world view about how the music industry should work and how people should behave in the light of that view. The analyst-advocate will often tell you not only what something means, but whether that’s a good or a bad thing for musicians, the music industry, consumers, the market, society – or whatever the perceived constituency might be.

Analysts are often fond of infographics, which communicate often complex data in a form that can be interpreted as a simple narrative.

The mystic

A further step of abstraction away from the day to day occurrences and intrigues relayed to us by the reporters are the prognostications, predictions and aphorisms of the mystic.

There are several flavours of mystic: the fortune teller, the self-help guru and the charismatic leader are probably the three most common – but they share characteristics and can be broadly grouped together.

The mystic is less concerned with what has happened, and what that means – and more with what will happen and how you should act. The mystic borrows – at least stylistically – from “wisdom literature”, and often speaks in catchy bumper sticker phrases that distill a philosophy (or the semblance of one) into a sentence.

The mystic will often take a big picture view of ‘what is going on’ and talk about the music industry not as a series of events, but in terms of historical trends, tides and long-term phenomena.

Orientations, rather than categories

This is not an attempt to divide the world of music industry and music tech bloggers up into distinct, compartmentalised categories of writer. In fact, most ‘new music biz’ bloggers do aspects of all three. However, each of them, I would argue, has a particular orientation toward just one of those modes.

We can all think of examples, I’m sure, of blogs or bloggers that fit under each one of those headings – but also instances in which a reporter has acted as a mystic, or an analyst as a reporter of breaking news.

For the record, I’ve attempted all three in some measure or another, and I don’t happen to think I’m a particularly good example of any one of them. And neither are these descriptions meant to be interpreted as derogatory, either. I can think of both excellent and terrible examples of all three. The point here is not to favour one approach over another – but simply to shine a light on the fact that these three approaches exist so that you know what you’re reading when you encounter it.

What to do with this information

The purpose of this blog post is simply to point out that these are the primary modes of online music business information. And while each approach is useful, each is limited. Arguably – even all three together would be a limited source of information without one more useful ingredient: self-reflection.

Because while this wealth of blogging can keep you informed, inspired, and up to date with what’s going on, and while your own ideas about ethics, economics and technology may be mirrored, supported or challenged by these blog posts, what they will almost never do is talk about you and your music.

The critical question to ask yourself in the face of all this information and opinion is not “is this true?” or “do I agree with this?” or even “why is this person telling me this information?” (all important questions, of course) – but “how can I use this?”.

And not just “how can I use this today?” but, more importantly “how does this fit into my long-term view of my life, my music, my understanding of my audience, my career trajectory, my values and aspirations, my interactions with the other human beings that I deal with on a day to day basis, and my conception of myself as both a producer and consumer of music?”

Being informed is only step one

All three sources of information and advice are as potentially useful as they are potentially distracting. But without considering them in the light of where it is you’re trying to go, what your own values are in relation to that and an understanding of how you’ll know when you’re doing this stuff successfully – then it’s mostly just noise.

Entertaining, informative, amusing and full of intrigue, perhaps – but noise all the same.

You know your music. You know your audience. You know the culture within which your music fits. You know the market that relates to your music. You know the meanings that people bring to it, and what it is they value about it. You know your own political, moral, economic and musical world view. You know your social, technological and geographic context.

It’s through these frames that the information and wisdom (in all its variety of quality of insight and its degrees of nonsense) should be weighed and implemented. And that will come with an understanding that your conclusions may not apply universally.

So when you learn that Universal has or hasn’t bought EMI, or that Spotify is good or bad for musicians, or that in the future all music will or won’t be in The Cloud, having a good sense of what, pragmatically, is useful to you about that – and what, if anything, should be your practical response to that information – is a great place to start.

Not “what should musicians do?”, “what should record labels do?”, “what should audiences do?”, or even “what should legislators do?” but “what shall I do?”

In this episode we mention: Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Flickr, Vimeo, Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and we should have mentioned WordPress.

Mentioned are Any And All Records, Green Leaf Records, Babel Label, Debt Records, Calamateur, Will Worth, Pillow Mountain Records, and Bella Union.

Also, here’s Steve’s blogpost about “unsigned artists”.

Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson
13 Aug. 1813 Writings 13:333–35

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.

Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured.

The Founders’ Constitution
Volume 3, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8, Document 12
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html
The University of Chicago Press

The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh. 20 vols. Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905.

Three years ago, Steve & Dubber talked about Twitter as a conversational medium, how it had been misrepresented in the mainstream press, and what its potential was for independent music.

Recently, we revisited that conversation, and thought we’d try and bring it up to date. So we did. Only, we forgot to share that with you. Apologies for the oversight. Here it is now.

Follow @solobasssteve
Follow @dubber
Follow @thisisnms

If you’re not signed to a record label, you’re an independent artist. Simple as that. It’s no reflection on the quality of your music, your artistic integrity or your consumer appeal. You just don’t happen to have a business relationship with people who do that sort of work.

And in a lot of cases, that’s a good thing. We’ve all heard horror stories of working with record labels.

But we know that despite widespread changes to the industry that have opened up all sorts of opportunities to independent artists, people are still very attached to the notion of being ‘signed’ or ‘unsigned’ – and to the various meanings that are often associated with those concepts.

For many, being an ‘unsigned’ artist carries a stigma. So we thought we’d do away with the concept entirely by starting a record label that will sign EVERYONE. Literally everyone.

Unsigned? Don’t be.

We want to sign you to our record label