Finding music online is no effort and less rewarding. You don’t even get to play outside.

Music has lost a lot of its 20th century associations, ones that gave it extra value but weren’t necessarily ‘noticed’.

The apple store is a church with toys. A mecca for iTwats. I knock it but it works, even I want to go in sometimes. It looks fun and kinda pretty, ethereal even.

The pub is a social church, a fun place, rich with rewards. Activities or people entice you in and offer things for free; entertainment, shelter, company, they’d like to sell you stuff too. It used to be rude not to buy, but not so in starbucks – the new church in town, they know what’s important to us there.

I walked past an empty pub on Saturday afternoon, the barman didn’t look stressed or poor, he did look lonely though.

These aren’t places of purchase that’s not what they’re about to us. Trade is the owners reward for creating the experience and enticing the people.

"puuurchiiiissss"

Supermarkets are a place of purchase. You’re not here for the atmosphere, you’re lucky if you can take a piss. Low prices beat experience here. And everything is about making you buy. You’re not supposed to talk to people in a supermarket, I used to get to interact at the checkout but not anymore, I’ve got to ‘bus my own shit’ now apparently. I get to interact with a machine. Is that a reward? No, but it’s kind of like a game. Fun shopping.

I once took one of those little bags you get for veg and passed it to the lady waiting politely beside me, she looked confused and offered a surprised ‘thanks’. I similarly picked up a basket more recently and gave it to the guy behind, again – dumbfounded. I felt happier though, nicer. Good shopping. Better shopping. Nice shopping.

Winning creates losers; don’t tell me that negativity isn’t felt by all involved.

Sharing and giving means I may lose product, but I gain spirit.

Winning distances people. Sharing brings us together.

A thing is itself but more it’s relationships.

Winning strengthens thing.

Sharing strengthens relationship.

In the record store music was the reward and the effort to find it gave deeper value, sharing was not an option, if you got a rarity you won. Music cred.

Gotta catch em all

That rare product symbolised this. Nowadays what’s a rarity?

If the music turned out to be rubbish you’d not listen to it again, you certainly wouldn’t share it.

Today’s rarity.

Would you happily play the record store game again?

Well it’s getting lonelier.

Effortless music creation bears little reward

Effortless music discovery bears little reward

Or does it? Where’s the new game.

We’ve lost our church.

I just spent time thinking. And scrabbling into the computer what I thought.

Here’s something taken straight from the disorganised notes i found last week. It’s messy and a bit random but interesting (to me at least) and makes me think more about what’s going on around me at the moment and what music is worth.

“Network Credit

If you can make material money in the material world then you can make knowledge money in the knowledge world. Depending on what you want to buy and in which world it resides would define which world you have to work for in order to be paid in their currency. Material work would earn you material money and knowledge work would earn you knowledge dollars.

If you start to class the knowledge dollars by genre and have say music pounds and art francs etc then supplying the world with art could earn you the francs and making music could earn you the pounds. These would hold the most worth in the respective networking communities as money gets you respect in the material world. But when traded for other products in other networks the value would shift, as material money doesn’t feel comfortable being spent on non material items, but because musicians value art less than music (theoretically, as business men value music less than cars) the symbolic value of the art franc is recognised less in the music network and will therefore buy you less music or influence over the network. (Steven Speilberg holds a latrge influence within the film industry as he posseses such a large qualntity of knowledge on the subject, has worked hard for the industry and has therefore ammased a lot of credits and respect. But this would count for nothing (or much less) in the music industry). But the music pound would be highly respected in this network and having a large amount of music pounds would mean you had done more ‘work’ for the network and could therefore reap more rewards.

A crossing over of the networks could also be theorised as software networks that consist of developers making software could earn music pounds by developing music software and providing for that network therefore receiving their networks currency as payment allowing them to buy music. There’s

Knowledge Networks (countries)

A global split based not on state or country or physical anything but on knowledge. Countries not forced together through physical proximity but mental proximity. The ability to exist in more that one country at a time though your societal standing and power within the network is governed by your strength of knowledge in the network’s subject matter which is symbolised by the amount of Network Credit you have earned through your work. Indeed nowadays if you work on a film, no matter how small you’re role, you get a credit in the form of your name and job listed on the end credits, this get you no money, but instead nets you respect within the film industry, this respect mean less and less the further away from the film network you move and obviously has the most worth in the network of film makers because your knowledge is valuable to them and they’re content. Also on an indi film network your success is ‘rated’ not by the amount of money you have but by the number of film credits you have ammased, proof not only that you are proficiaent in your role(s) but that the film director or producer has been happy enough with your work or potential to work that they have given or gave you the credit. It’s a little confusing because technically in this example the credit is given before the product is realised.

Providing for the knowledge industries gets you knowledge credit.

Not a business built on money but a network built on knowledge.

The knowledge creators rule the networks for without them the networks wouldn’t exist but only if their content has value to the people of the network. Steven Speilberg has a major power in the film industry not because of physical strength or money but because of the knowledge he has tht forms the foundations of the industry.

Less and less money is being offered to the content creators in the networks that are forming now, instead people say things like “All I can offer you is a credit and a copy of the finished film.” A copy of the film means little but the credit means network respect.

The material world isn’t going anywhere it’s just loosing it’s significance.”

‘for the music’ i should probably have put there.

Anyway… “quack”

If a Chicken makes an egg, it will create 1 more chicken.

But if an egg makes a chicken, that will make many more eggs.

Does this system work in favour of the egg or the chicken?

Of course this is a cyclic system and so both possibilities co-exist.

But what I find interesting is that if you view the egg as the primary creation then the system suddenly becomes more powerful.

The system’s ultimate goal is theoretically one of 2 and it’s the less conventional one which is offered the greatest reward.

Nothing much more to say.

I was just wondering if Apple uses iTunes to sell mp3s

Or if they use mp3s to sell iTunes?

Who does that system work in favour of?

The relationships between 2 single elements of a project are important and easy to overlook.

When it comes to the achievement of a project, to focus and shape one element with disregard for its relationships to others could weaken the project as a whole.

When seen as part of the project, elements are not just defined as themselves, but themselves and their relationships to other parts of the project.

If you alter one element, you alter its relationships and therefore the context that the other project elements are seen in.

With sound or music, if you increase the volume of one instrument, the others will sound quieter in relation.

Their relationship to the louder sound is part of what defines them.

Strengthening one element for its own sake can weaken another by comparison, but strengthening a relationship will strengthen 2 elements together.

So to shape elements for the sake of their relationships can strengthen the project as a whole.

If a band tries to add interest to a guitar riff through jazz embellishments but the guitarist only plays chugging rock, the relationship between the guitarist and the riff will suffer and the two are both weakened – the riff sounds bad and the guitarist looks second-rate.

The resulting mistakes and fumbles will in turn become part of the drummer’s context (via the relationship between him and the guitarist). He could sound better in relation to his band-mate’s blunders, but their musical relationship is weakened if the guitarist is out of time.

The band though is ALL the elements AND their relationships.

Guitarist, Drummer, Relationship = 3 things.

The project overall suffers 2 negatives but only one positive.

Overall the project suffers.

The band sounds  worse.

The diagram is rubbish. But more importantly it also shows how the physical shift of one element affects the appearance of the others. Not when taken separately – then, for example,  the green dot still looks the same colour and size and its position doesn’t change etc – but when the 5 dots are seen as a group the green dot’s context has altered. Its position in relation to the blue dot is part of its state and so when the blue dot moves, the green dot’s wider physical attributions also change. There is no way to prevent this from happening and so depending on what these dots may represent the outcome of the context change could be anything from insignificant to disastrous.

e.g. If the blue dot were a smelly person and the other dots were non smelly people, the red and black people-dots would likely take a great interest in this context change.

Visual relationships similar to those in the diagram would also impact on art and photography, altering visual balance of colour or tone and affecting the strength of relationship between the viewer and various elements. Precision colour choices and placements can be utilised to create optical illusions too.

If you look at an object, then move to see it from another angle, the object will often look different.

But neither you nor the object as elements have changed, it’s your position in relation to the object that’s altered – your relationship.

The change in appearance is a consequence of that change in the relationship.

When setting the stage for a concert how can you maintain visual satisfaction for the largest proportion of the audience?

Where does the audience’s relationship with the visual experience weaken?

If you were surrounded by nothing could you move?

In a room with no light, everything is black.

Visually you are reduced to a single unchanging relationship.

Instead you define other elements through touch and sound and smell.

These become the relationships that define movement.

These are generally weaker relationships.

Movement suffers.

How will stage lighting effect dancers or enthusiastic band members?

——-

UPDATE -09/02/10 – Digital Music News

The Who frontman Roger Daltrey was less-than-thrilled following his Super Bowl halftime performance, according to comments surfacing today.  “I thought it went OK,” Daltrey told ESPN.  “I understand.  It’s a TV show. Cameras were everywhere.  I was so blinded that I couldn’t see.”

It continues -

The post-performance assessment follows rather lukewarm reviews by critics, though the staging, lighting and general production was incredible.

Do the relationships between staging and performer remain the same as a person gets older? How do you maintain a strong relationship? Should the artist’s context ‘grow’ with them, or can they ‘rock’ the same experience time after time?Do you associate ‘incredible’ levels of visual production with older people or is this a surprising context; funny even, like your granny in a hummer? Maybe the comedic relationship was strengthened here, but I doubt that was the intention.

——-

If you cast a shadow on an object, you’re altering its relationship to the light source and it seems darker, but only through the relationship between it and your eyes.

Neither you, the object or the light source have changed, just relationships.

Contrast isn’t necessarily a bad thing;  shadows make brightness brighter – masking can direct attention away or towards.

This whole relationship thing could of course go further with a wider or more detailed context. I’m not just a single element; body parts, bones, internal organs will each have their own definable relationships to each other and everything around me and even they can be broken down to biological cells and other microscopic bits-n-bats. If you break me down into my smallest possible constituent parts I probably consist of billions (that’s a guess) of elements, all existing on their own AND in relation to each other AND in relation to my wider context.

3d cinema treats our eyes as 2 separate elements and utilises this more detailed context of 2 separate relationships to enhance the experience it provides.

The relationships around us are too complex and multi levelled to define all encompassing rules to strengthen them or avoid producing weaknesses or complete disconnections. With numerous relationships co-existing between the same elements each situation will be unique in its ‘relationship structure’. But the simple awareness that ‘things’ are defined by themselves AND their context can help when balancing elements in any situation – Music or otherwise.

What I haven’t really touched on here is the relationship that sits alongside sensory relationships, the forming of which goes a long way to defining us as humans.

Emotion.

How are you working that again?

Tip of the post – Strengthen the relationships between your listeners and the music

My ultimate aim (i always have one but assume it’ll mostly just power the enthusiasm) is to write shorter posts with a little more focus; that’s what I prefer to read after all.

Lets start with thinking……

Done.

Here’s my thinking-

quick thinking then some colouring in

Problem – there’s no planning when I start writing. This is how I like to undertake creative things, on natural impulse; creativity that feels right will flow. Too much thinking at the output stage ruins the emotion, the planning I do needs to be more of a learning process so natural technical instincts guide my emotional word splurge in a subconsciously ‘planned’ manner. If I ask ‘who is this for’ or ‘why am I doing this’ I need to be able to answer myself in an instant, ‘know’ the answer but not need ‘think’ it – feel like I know it’s right.

That’s a splurge right there. I’m literally 24% happier after that. Unfortunately although it made emotional sense, it has dubious levels or ‘word’ sense. This is why I write music by the way.

In my experience text is notoriously bad for conveying emotion, actually no, this is more of a global point about influencing or complimenting the emotions of the audience and applies to anything from text to music. I can’t be bothered to think about that right now. But how is your emotion affecting your response to what you’re reading and how is everything around you affecting your emotions? Now imagine you’re me and you’re trying to factor all those possibilities into what you’re writing so you can ‘please’ everyone. I find myself doing that. I mean trying to, it is of course unbelievably impossible! it would though be the ultimate escapism. Total immersion, the 3d cinema thing Avatar has caused elements of depression in some viewers apparently, that’s a fairly immersive experience. Text isn’t.

Anyway, the above ‘thinking’-

I never know who I’m writing for when I splurge my words randomly into the stream, different people will be interested in different things and the level of detail on different subjects will interest some people while turning others away. So I decided to list out the different types of people that I may point this direction for one reason or another and list out the things they may take interest in. This appears to be more succinctly labelled ‘the things we have in common’ and for different types of people read ‘different relationships’. The relationships are shaped by strength and the strength defined by the amount we have a common interest in. The weakest relationship being with someone who comes here randomly and knows absolutely nothing about me, and the strongest being with the people closest to me who know the most (though they’d probably argue they know very little).

It’s not exact, there are better and similar diagrams out there on similar topics of relationship strength, but I’m not aiming for academic precision here, just a decent shaping of my understanding towards what I’m doing so I can do it easier. The musician, director, sound guy and writer columns could all move into the fans and friends section of course, bringing they’re respective topics of ‘have in common’ with them. But until that time I doubt they’d be very interested in this post. Anyone already a friend may be reconsidering their position at this very point.

The main separating lines seem to be between personal life and work activities (work-life integration is something I’m actively trying to increase at the moment), and then topics of work activities between different ‘team members’.

I’ll think about this more because the above provides few answers, but then this isn’t a ‘shorter post with a little more focus’ either.

End of words.

The final mark for the piece will ultimately be for her benefit but the journey of its creation was rich in rewards for students on at least 3 educational roads. Liz was at Salford University, there was an engineering contribution from Manchester’s School of Sound and I myself was approaching the end of a distance learning course in Music for the Media.

It was great to be involved with a project at this level and be able to participate with other young idealists, all eager to learn and find our creative feet. Student projects are an opportunity to be reminded of the diversity of rewards offered through creative endeavours and are a rare time when creators are encouraged to work on their passions for personal development and subjective fulfilment. It’s an experience that’s rarely repeated and there’s so much to be gained at this stage. Empowered by positivity and freedom every mistake becomes a learning opportunity, failure on one level can be overshadowed by growth on another. Learning can make failure acceptable.

What scares me is that once the protective embrace of education falls away, there’s a potentially judgemental ‘real’ world out there, ready to pounce on mistakes, shortfalls or differences of approach and exaggerate them in a negative light.

What excites me is that once the protective embrace of education falls away, there’s a potentially judgemental ‘real’ world out there, ready to embrace achievements, realization or new ideas and exaggerate them in a positive light.

What’s got me by the nuts though is that now the protective embrace of education has fallen away, it feels like nobody’s paying attention.

It’s hard to write or compose for no-one. It feels sometimes like you’re writing for everyone, but you all want something different and it’s rare for people to think about what that is. When I ask people what music they like, there’s never any passion for the music alone (I don’t know if that would be possible). People give their answers with an attachment and it’s as if the music we like is always linked to something else. Even when there’s a strong interest in an artist (themselves an addition to the music), it’s what the artist is linked to that often proves the (sub)conscious decider and draws our attention – technical ability, growing up, rebellion, conformity, club culture, gangsta culture, grandeur, story, emotion – it all covers the parts of the experience that music doesn’t. We don’t stop thinking or feeling or cut off our other senses when we listen to music, so information beyond the sound itself is always being processed in chorus. I once heard a much missed friend and colleague exclaim that the bagels in Canada tasted better than bagels at home, but I couldn’t help thinking that what changed were not the bagels but her experience around them. Sitting on the deck of a log cabin without a care in the world watching moose or osprey or something equally grandiose would surely affect the ‘taste’ of a bagel, especially when compared to that same taste experienced in the office of a waste water treatment works in drizzly Eccles looking out of a barred window at massive buckets of shit.

As a more relevant example – adding classical music to gangster films gives the gangsters a certain image, it alters our experience of them. But what is often overlooked is that adding gangsters to classical music drastically alters our experience of that music too and can even make old music by dead people appear cool in the eyes of the trendiest youth. When they hear that music, they’ll see gangsters, not cellists.

As artists we share the music we create and are at times blessed with a certain level of control over our listener’s wider experience, but its importance is easily forgotten. Some of us argue that the music is ours (I don’t), but the experience will always be their’s. Music comes as part of a package and the sum of its surroundings will always be greater – it is the whole experience that counts. So when we are given the opportunity to affect and control our listener’s experience, it’s important that we do this with them in mind. We owe them that moose view, that technical splendour or that ability to rebel; a collective embrace, warm reminiscence or pumping jumping bassline massive. Because without that experience the music is soulless – and when it comes to experience, your fans hold all their cards.

Tip of the post – Treat your fans as more than just ears.

Advice from Bob Lefsetz to Lily Allen.

Lily probably sits in the middle ground of today’s music industry, she’s hardly a ‘global superstar’ but she’s a damn site more popular than me with my ‘0’ fans and 23 twitter followers (24! I just got a 24th). But what has been seen over the past few years is that the gap between big media and small media is getting larger and larger. And emptier.

Now listen up at the back – The more money you use to create a product, the more you’ll need to sell to break even or the more you’ll have to charge. But digital media is cheaper nowadays (often zero value) and so there’s less money to be made per customer. Therefore if you’ve put a lot of money into a product (Hollywood & Major labels etc) then to make profit your audience will have to be big, REALLY BIG. But the amount of work required to generate vast audiences itself requires a lot of money to the point where Hollywood blockbusters actually cost more money to market than make. It’s a catch 22 situation that requires big business teams of business people with business brains and ties and stuff, to business the shit out of things till their graphs go up and everyone gets their cheque. whoop.

But what do they sacrifice in order to get that cheque?

This drop in the financial value of media as product means the middle ground of medium scale budgets and average popularity is becoming an inhabitable market. The amount of money required to sustain product at this level is practically impossible to recoup as the paying audience is too small and to increase it would incur those extra marketing costs, pushing the project further into the red. Unless you become ‘legendary’, as Bob puts it, and reach that tipping point where the extra initial costs generate the popularity necessary you’re fooked.

It’s important to note that legendary is only a measurement of popularity or indeed notoriety, Crazy Frog achieved this status for a short period, Simon Cowell and Staus Quo are also good examples of this market’s lack of concern for being good, nice or …erm…no, I can’t do it! I just can’t knock The Quo!… Anyway you get my point; you can be a bit shit and still be popular and therefore potentially rich – in money at least.

So in one way good old Bob’s right. But he fails (constantly) to acknowledge the other option for creators, that of moving in the opposite direction and shrinking back from the mass collaborative projects to the small scale – the micro budget or niche productions, the solo/small team projects that exist in a world of more personal relationships and face to face gratitude. The money in = money out equation is much more achievable here, the financial capital required is small and any payment offered is certainly not going to make you rich, but then that’s not the point, because it’s the human capital that drives this market. What you acquire instead of the material wealth is personal contact and realistic emotional exchanges not just with peers, but with fans, fans who are more like(y) friends offering a more sentient response to your creative gifts than any stadium swarm could ever provide.

Anyway, Lilly says she’s quit, her publisher says she hasn’t and Bob doesn’t care either way cos he only has time for the legendary.

Someone point him towards mr Crazy Frog.

Tip of the Post – Expand your definition of riches.