Hi. How’s it going?

I’ve been getting some emails recently from worried New Music Strategies readers. Some of them asking after my health (there’s nothing wrong with my health – but people assume the worst), and others prompting for a return to the blog so they can read more content.

It’s been a good couple of months since I wrote anything at all here – and longer since I did so with any regularity.

Well, I have some good news, and some other good news.

The good news
The good news is that I’m fine. Very busy, of course, and working on some really interesting stuff that’s taking a lot of my attention at present. There’s the Music As Culture initiative, which we’ve kicked off with a really fantastic project with the band UB40.

I’m also co-writing a textbook about the music industries for undergraduate students. That’s taking a lot of my mental space.

I’m teaching classes, researching stuff and writing articles as I do from time to time. University stuff.

And I’m travelling a lot. Since last I blogged here, I’ve been to Brussels, Berlin (twice), Marseille, Scarborough, Manchester and London doing seminars, consultancies, making radio documentaries, working on Nitin Sawhney’s Aftershock Project, being interviewed, capturing jazz festivals and putting them online and having meetings about all sorts of stuff – some of it interesting.

The other good news
The other good news is that I’ve started blogging about the music industry online again. But I’m doing it in a place where it’s surrounded by other people also blogging about the music industry online.

If you go to Music Think Tank (which I expect you already do – but just in case, here’s a prompt to do so), then you’ll notice that I’ve had a couple of things to say already.

For a start, I said ‘Let’s all ditch MySpace‘ and then I went on to say ‘Everybody’s wrong about filesharing‘. I’m sure I’ll have other things to say there in due course. But chances are it’ll be there, rather than here.

Music Think Tank is great. You’ll like it.

More good news
I still have some plans for New Music Strategies. I haven’t abandoned it completely, and there’s some good stuff on the way soon – not the least of which is an audiobook version of the 20 Things ebook.

There’s also a long toiled-over new ebook on the way. This one updates and addresses the original, and gives a whole new spin on the Things You Must Know About Music Online. And without wanting to give the game away – there aren’t 20 things anymore. There’s just one.

I haven’t finished it – but announcing it here should (theoretically) provide me the incentive and urgency required to get to work on polishing it off. I’m off to India this week, so perhaps some time on a plane will give me the opportunity to address that.

So – changes for New Music Strategies (and more changes to come) – but the important thing to note is that the kind of thing I used to do here on New Music Strategies, I now do at Music Think Tank. I’m surrounded by a group of clever, interesting, insightful and incredibly helpful individuals who do the same, giving a much broader and much more indepth bunch of information and advice than I could ever hope to give on a solo blog.

But of course, we haven’t seen the end of New Music Strategies. It’s just not ready to come out of its cocoon quite yet. In the meantime, I thought I’d pop my head up and say hi.

So yeah… “Hi”.

Places to check for other instances of good news
If you’re interested in my own day-to-day activities and adventures, there’s always my personal blog.

There’s stuff I do with the team at the Interactive Cultures Research Unit, where I work.

There’s the Music As Culture project.

I mentioned Music Think Tank, of course.

I’m always on Twitter.

And I have a Facebook Page.

So it’s not like I’ve fallen completely off the internet.

I’ve just been kind of quiet over here.

I’m at Un-Convention in Swansea this weekend. Lots of talk with lots of interesting people about the independent and grassroots DIY music sector. It’s held in a cafe/bar called Monkey in the central city, and in the evening, bands play.

I’m here with a bunch of people I know from these sorts of things – and I’ve been spending a fair bit of time hanging with the very clever Ben Walker (@ihatemornings), who you know as the guy who wrote the Twitter song.

One band played last night that blew me away. And I don’t just mean I liked them, or really loved their gig. They BLEW. ME. AWAY. I can’t remember being this excited by a band in years. Possibly decades.

Ben was excited too. We came back downstairs, had a beer, and raved about how amazing they are. We were instant fans. So we went straight online and looked them up.

We Googled: “Islet band Cardiff” and various other combinations of the band name and their city of origin. Nothing. They’d played one support gig for Shonen Knife (how cool is that?!) – but no website, no MySpace, no nothing.

And we were stuck. They had no CDs for sale. Nothing we could do. We just didn’t know how to be Islet fans.

So we made them a fan site…

What we did
In fact, what we did was very simple – and we’d encourage anybody else with an internet connection who has the same Road to Damascus experience with a band that we had to try something along these lines.

1) Posterous
We set up a Posterous account. It’s really simple – and it means that anything we want to put up on the blog, anything the band wants to put up on the blog, or anything that any other fan wants to put up on the blog can be done with a simple email.

2) Domain
We found a domain name (http://thisisislet.com) that we thought was good, and paid pretty much exactly what it would have cost to buy their CD, had they had one for sale. By following some very simple instructions on the domain provider’s site, and on the Posterous site, we made the URL point at the Posterous page.

3) YouTube
I had my Flip camera handy, and had shot some footage of the gig. We also collared the band on their way out the door, asked them to sit down on the stairs and introduce themselves. Upload the video to Youtube, email the link to Posterous – and Bob’s your uncle.

4) Flickr
Someone else at the gig had a flash looking camera, and he’d been taking some shots. We asked him to send us the photos, and he tweeted us a link to the Flickr set he’d made. So we used FlickrSlidr.com to make a nice, compatible version of the slideshow, and emailed that to Posterous. Job done.

5) Words
I wrote a quick review of the gig, and emailed it to the Posterous email account. Again – very simple, and there it is.

Really simple stuff. We made it, tweeted about it and got excited about it. Less than 24 hours later, close to 1000 people have visited, checked out the band and have, at least, now heard of the amazing band that is Islet.

The band were a bit bewildered, and possibly a little bit frightened by it all as it happened. They thought we were from the future. But we’re not. This is what can happen now, and it can happen easily.

So the big question is… are YOU amazing enough for your fans to be inspired to do something simple and thankful like that?

UPDATE: We just made them a t-shirt on Spreadshirt. Buy it here – all profits go straight to the band! (and of course, you could do the same yourself – it’s really simple).

Goldsmith University MA students Nicolle Smith and Stefan Peters have just finished work on a short web-documentary series called Broken Record.

They interviewed me for the series, and there’s a lot of stuff in here that is pertains to my Music As Culture interests and the Deleting Music book as much as it does to the general tone of what I research and discuss as part of the Interactive Cultures team at BCU, and what I usually write about on New Music Strategies.

The series is definitely worth watching, and features some good insight from some interesting people from different parts of the British digital music world – and it’s presented for your entertainment below.

Share and enjoy.

Broken Record Part 1: Introduction

An introduction to our panel of experts, up and coming indie act Shuffle, and Nicolle and Stefan, your fearless guides to the contemporary state of digital music culture. We briefly look at the history of the recording industry and how it got to be where it is today.

Broken Record Part 2: Commerce

Do people really download? Nicolle and Stefan go to the streets to ask how people get their music. Business-type people tell us about the current state of the music industry, why it is the way it is and how they can capitalize on the new digital culture model.

Broken Record Part 3: Culture

What is the new music culture? How do artists and music consumers navigate the choppy waters of copyright and creativity? What sort of art will surface from the way music is consumed today? We grapple with these issues in Episode Three.

Broken Record Part 4: The Future of Digital Music Culture

Our experts weigh in on what the future will look like in terms of music and what we should avoid so creativity isn’t stifled in the digitalized wild west.

Visit the Broken Record official site.

They claim it represents the dwindling death knell of the music industry. That’s not quite right (even leaving aside the nonsense assertion that the record business = the music industry). While put together in aggregate, the overall graph would show a larger, fatter, longer increase and decline, what this graph does not show is equally interesting.

The trailing tail to the right of the graph seems to indicate the death of music business. But look to the left. This graph does not start at the beginning of the music business. And nor does it start only a short while after the beginning of the music business.

It starts in 1973.

I don’t know about you, but I was around in 1973. I wasn’t very old, but I was old enough to be aware of music. It had been around long before I had. And even though the graph would have been tiny – at least in comparison to the uncharacteristically massive spike in CD sales around 1999 – there was no crisis in the music business then.

My guess, in fact, was that there was opportunity. In 1973, the small numbers meant that people who sought to do new and interesting things were able to do those new and interesting things. Less was at stake (at least, in aggregate) and so people took risks.

New and innovative kinds of music flourished in the margins. Funk, disco, punk, psychedelic, metal, and reggae all started to emerge as significant forces from that decade. Lots of tiny labels did amazing and sometimes incredibly profitable things. Risk-takers were sometimes massively rewarded. Those who kicked at the edges often flourished.

Skip forward to 1999 – ten years ago now – and you witness the height of corporatism in the recorded music business. A world of a few stars selling millions of copies of safe and frequently dull music. But most importantly, the business people who were teens in 1973 were able to take the music they loved from their youth and turn it into a multi-billion dollar industry.

And while the interesting new genres have been created in the margins all through that history, it’s the forms (and their often watered-down derivatives) loved by those execs that have massively prospered through the recorded music boom era.

Of course, music didn’t start in 1973. Or 1923 for that matter – and nor did the ability to make money from it. The last 35 years provides us with an interesting historical anomaly as far as that graph is concerned.

The boom and bust pattern of each recorded music format adds up to an overall rise and decline of corporatism in the recorded music industries. Culturally, this could well be something to celebrate.

Personally, I’m hopeful for new and interesting musical forms and genres coming from the margins and being able to reach a significant audience.

It’s cheaper to experiment now. It’s easier to reach an audience than ever before, and the economics are such that you don’t need for corporations to be making billions in profit in order to make a decent living at it.

I’m not saying that this is the best time in history for music. I’m actually hopeful that we haven’t yet seen the best time for music. It’s even possible that the biggest selling record of all time hasn’t been made yet.

My point is that the graph above only represents a crisis for a particular way of organising music business, and not for music business itself – and certainly not for music.

In fact, if we’re clever about it, this might be one of those golden ages for musical culture that seem to coincide with the skinny bits of that graph.

The university I work at has put together a series of videos about my free e-book The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online.

This is not a video version of the book per se, but rather me talking briefly about each of the different sections of the book in turn.

Because these video podcasts are eventually destined for the iTunesU site that the university is putting together, they are in a particular (and very nice) video format, which doesn’t lend itself well to embedding and distributing, which I think is a shame, really.

So as soon as I get a chance, I’m going to grab the files and stick them up on YouTube and Vimeo, etc. Feel free to do the same. In the meantime though – these are as they appear on the BCU website, where you can also get the files as mp3s.

This is the audio recording of the panel session I chaired at Un-Convention in Manchester last month. It was about music that falls outside the indie rock band tradition you’d normally expect represented at these sorts of events. I wanted to know if there were any lessons that could be drawn from outside the margins.

Some really amazing and insightful stuff from Stef Lewandowski, Steve Lawson, Amran Ellahi, Abigail Seabrook, and Caroline Churchill.

I actually posted this on my personal blog first, which is kind of telling. I think of these people as my friends, so that’s where it seemed to make sense. But then, of course, I realised (duh…) that it might be of interest to the sort of people who read New Music Strategies.

Hope you find it helpful and interesting.

You can listen to all of the panel sessions at the Un-Convention Soundcloud page… and you can follow the panellists (other than Abi, who I can’t find) on Twitter:

Stef Lewandowski: @stef
Steve Lawson: @solobasssteve
Amran Ellahi: @aashiqalrasul
Caroline Churchill:@carosnatch

and of course, I’m @dubber.

Martin Atkins, drummer from Public Image, Killing Joke and Nine Inch Nails wrote a book called Tour Smart. He does a good bit of public speaking, and we’re on the same wavelength about a lot of stuff. In fact, people have described him to me as “New Music Strategies with swearing.”

He was on a panel at Un-Convention and I grabbed him for a quick moment for a chat. I put him on the spot a bit, but got him to do a top 5 Tour Smart tips.

Un-Convention Salford was, of course, a great experience. All the more so because it brought together some of my favourite people from all over.

In fact – there were so many cool people at Un-Convention, it was hard to get around them all and spend as much time as I’d like to with each of them.

One of the people I was lucky enough to get to spend a reasonable amount of time with was Steve Lawson (otherwise known as SoloBassSteve). He’d been on my ‘Outside the Box‘ panel – which was amazing, entirely because of the brilliant insight of the amazing people on the panel (I was merely moderating – they provided all the awesome).

After lunch today, he grabbed my Flip camera and turned it on me for my impromptu roundup of the weekend.

I’m in Manchester at a music industry conference called Un-Convention. It’s one of those events where you know quite a few of the people involved, and the ones you don’t, you get to know quite quickly.

After the last band played last night, a bunch of us went across to the pizzeria / chip shop across the road for a bite to eat. My Belfast cousin Tracy, and Brad from Bolton band Merchandise were talking about Brad’s album and how that was coming along.

‘Nearly done – just have some mastering to do. Finished a video for the first single, but we’re not going to do any more. Don’t have the budget for it.’

‘Let’s make one right now,’ I said.

So, armed with my digital camera (a still camera, actually, but with a video setting) and with the song on Brad’s ipod, we just did a one-take shot. No rehearsal. Not even any discussion about what the two of them would do.

The only real shame was that it’s hard to see what Tracy wrote on the base of the pizza box at the end of the video. It reads ‘You suck.’

An hour later, I went to bed while this was uploading to Vimeo.

Music video budget? We don’t need no music video budget…

Find Merchandise on iTunes.

Unconsultancy in Manchester went well, I think. I certainly had a good time meeting some amazing people. Thanks to Andy from Indielab for organising it, taking me out for dinner, and letting me sleep in his house. Brilliant job all round.