The knifelady

What I saw in the bar

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 19:59:00 +0000

If you've been following my Twitter feed, you'll know that I recently went to see Casee Wilson perform. It's the first time I've seen her live and it was also the first gig I'd been to in quite a while, as the financial crash meant gig attendance was the first thing I'd cut off as part of the drive to save money.

The gig itself was a free entry and in a pub bar. There were 4 acts in total over the evening, each with a half hour set. I'm not familiar with the pub in question, but given the price of the drinks, its location and the vast majority of its clientele, I'd say it was a student bar catering to the university, as pretty much everyone in the place including the bar staff appeared to be about 20 years younger than me.

Maybe it's the age difference. Maybe it's the thought that not so long back, what I saw in that bar... how I would have reacted..well, that would have been me. And maybe it's the fact that I've just come to the end of a month where I've been absolutely bombarded emotionally by encountering artists still suffering a combination of the financial crisis and just the music industry in general that's made me that bit more sensitive than normal. And this is what makes the observations I made that night a story worth telling.

So picture the setup. I'd got there early and scrunched myself into one of the tables opposite the bar and about halfway along its length, sitting on one of the most uncomfortable bar stools I've sat on in quite a while. I was also maybe halfway down in terms of table layout and the pub itself was quite small, certainly with seats for less than 50 and probably closer to 30 people, although you might squeeze around 100 in the space if most were willing to stand. If you look at me, I'm actually sat more facing the bar, so to my left are tables and the door outside and on my right there are tables and the performance area which in reality is little more than a microphone and temporary sound board/computer set up in a corner.

By the time it was decided the music should start (about 10 minutes later than I'd originally been told), the seats were pretty much occupied and there were a handful of people stood at the bar. From where I'm sat it quickly becomes obvious that there is a pub of two halves here and I am apparently sat on the dividing line. The tables and bar to my left are all sat with their noses in their pints, staring at their mobiles and/or deep in conversation with their respective groups. When the first song ends, only the more attentive group to my right clap while those to my left stay doing whatever they were doing. The applause is polite, expected rather than being through any genuine enthusiasm. The PA system is enough to carry the music over the conversation to my left but what the young guitarist says in between the songs he is playing is much more difficult to fathom because of the conversation in the room.

He finishes his set, there is more polite applause and he actually heads to the table immediately to my right as Casee attempts to get organised for her set. He realises there's an unoccupied stool on my table, asks if anyone is sitting there and I get the expected strange look when I tell him no, go on ahead and take it because I'm in there on my own. (A female on her own nursing a pint of coke in a pub is always something that gets people wondering, hence why I can be sure artists will usually find me even if they don't know me when I've told them I'll be there - I always stand out purely through looking out of place). One of his friends has gone to the bar to get a round in and once their table settles back down, I become aware of the change starting.

Casee attempts a bit more of an introduction and attempt to get some audience engagement than Chris (the previous act), but she's basically already got about all she's going to get. The pub is still effectively the same pub of two halves it was for the first act, only the table to my right is now much less attentive than when their friend was the one in the spotlight. They still somehow manage to applaud despite having only 50% attention at best on the music, but they're as much, if not more engrossed in their pints, mobiles and conversation as they are in the music.

Act three of the four is a couple, and the first noticeable thing is the fact they weren't actually in the room when the music started. They turned up about 15 minutes into the first set and were easy to spot arriving due to the guitar slung over his back. It seems he just plays the guitar while she sings, only she's singing so quietly that you'd think the microphone isn't actually plugged in. The pub itself is also at its peak of customers at this point, meaning that even from where I am halfway down the pub they are just turning into background noise rather than being music that people have any chance of listening to.

It's a couple of songs into their set that Casee's table makes a move. She's never laid eyes on me before, but due to my ability to stand out like a sore thumb I've already worked out that she decided a while back that either I must be me, or she's about to make a fool of herself because I didn't turn up after all. She makes the nervous enquiry and I confirm and she tells me that she has to go because she has a ride home. Whilst most of her group have wandered off, we manage to exchange a few words while one hovers with a definite "come on, COME ON we HAVE to go" aura. It's not much past 10pm and the music only started at more like a quarter to nine. She asks if I'm staying and I say yes and I try and fail to work out how much that is surprising her. What I don't say is what is flashing through my head, and that's something along the lines of "Why would it even cross your mind to ask if I'm staying? I may have specifically come out to this pub in this city on this night to watch YOU perform, but there are also OTHER MUSICIANS performing. What do you think I'm going to do? Show them the same RESPECT I showed you by staying and listening, or leave just because you are?"

The couple are now on a cover of "Bridge over troubled water" and the table to my right have just finished the round of drinks that I mentioned earlier. It's now a quarter past ten and lo and behold, they are off as well just a mere 10 minutes or so after Casee and her group of friends. The table is quickly gobbled up by a group who arrived maybe 20 minutes ago at best. They're not here for the music, so I'm now sat in my own little bubble and there isn't even any point in me applauding any more, because the few left who still are are all sat past the end of the bar right near the performers. I can still count them though - there's the host/sound engineer for the evening, a gentleman leaning on the end of the bar who, like me, looks out of place through being older than nearly everyone else in the pub and the group with the 4th performer. Who knows, there might be one or two lurking where I can't see because of the other groups in the bar area but that's pretty much it.

The couple finish their set and the last performer starts to set up for his turn. I'm no expert on instruments, but he's carrying some kind of ukulele or similar other small guitar. A guitar case swings past my view and I realise that the couple who arrived late have stayed until they have performed and they're on their way out already. This is getting truly depressing. So depressing in fact that as it becomes obvious the last performer is now essentially background music (and barely audible at that) left playing to a bar that has no interest other than the couple of friends he brought with him and the curious out-of-place oldsters, I make a decision.

And so to the confession I have. I did something I wouldn't normally do. I left before he had finished his set. Despite the fact half past ten wasn't that long back, I'd seen enough and to stay was just going to depress me further. And whilst I know it's not entirely fair to pass judgement based on the first gig I've been to in a while, maybe this was a one off, maybe because it was free entry and maybe this was the case or that was the case, I have still found myself coming up with rather a lot of maybes to dismiss what my eyes believe they've seen as just a series of coincidences.

Is there really going to come a time when I find myself suggesting to an artist that maybe most of the answer as to why nobody is listening to their music can be found by looking in the mirror? If young musicians are losing (or have lost) the ability to realise that they need to be out there supporting each other first and foremost and teaching their friends the same, then we really are on a slippery downward slope.

And by supporting, I mean listening to and talking to each other, not sitting cooped up in your own safe little friend bubbles that come and go with you and are only there for the spotlight moment. Sure, I'm willing to bet that over 90% of the people you encounter by connecting with those outside your bubble will land up as dead ends, but who knows what you'll find if people remember you further down the line? Fans? Your bandmates? Someone who went on to work in marketing? The guy who has the tip for mixing or creating that sound you've never been quite able to get your head around? Or any one of another hundred reasons I can think of that will help you if you're nuts enough to want to continue with this idea of a career in music.

And that brings me to the friends who get to see you tired, stressed, grumpy and whatever other side effects the attempt to create a career in music at the same time as having money to pay the bills and something approaching a social/family life leaves you with. If you can't make them see the importance of why you're supporting other musicians and what it could really mean for you and your career, even though none of you can quite see how that might work yet, then what on earth makes you think all those other people out there like me who DON'T get to see any of the stuff your friends do are going to pay any attention to you? And are your friends ever going to understand and support you when you really need it if you don't start teaching them now?

And when you finally wake up to the fact that actually, nobody is really listening to your music, how many wasted years and opportunities will have passed while you've been oblivious in your bubble? I've seen this age group of musician do much better than this before. So much so that they actually expanded the area of interested people in the room! It certainly doesn't always happen, but it never will when musicians don't stick together.

As a whole the evening reminded me why I climbed out of the consumer pile in the first place. But when that same cry of "because nobody else is listening" means I'm left wanting to rattle some sense into the musicians themselves (and I can't because they already left), it's not a good reminder. The result is one of those times where I'm left wondering why on earth I bother and why on earth I should still care.

The pain continues

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Sat, 03 May 2014 21:20:00 +0000

I really don't seem to be having much luck. The house hunt is continuing after our second attempt at a purchase also fell through. In the meantime the housing market appears to be picking up in our price bracket and we've been struggling to view houses as a result (they keep getting sold and the viewing we had booked gets cancelled by the estate agent). Then on top of that the fact Easter and the first bank holiday in May have fallen so close together this year appears to have meant the number of new houses coming on the market in the first place has been rather slow for the last 2-3 weeks.

The pain continues - all our stuff is still in storage and we're still living in a combination of hotels and staying with friends/relatives with currently no end in sight. Limited availability of internet time (and in some cases speed) is also proving a pain as it is disrupting not only my leisure time and things like this blog, but also my ability to work and even communicate when an email I feel is important comes up.

As a result this is only another brief update with the hopes that our luck will finally turn and I can bring you some more positive news some time in June/July. I am however going to give you a bit of an update on what I have been up to since January as it seems rather unfair to have left you hanging quite this long, when I have somehow managed to at least do something about music despite all the problems.

Incredibly I'm STILL waiting on the actual physical CD from Cubworld, despite the fact these were released more than 6 months ago in August last year. I am now officially regretting buying the parts I spent here, as his funding completion date was well over 4 years ago. I thought his first project with Sellaband would have been a great learning exercise. Obviously I was wrong. I also passed the message about him needing to find funds in order to send the albums onto another of his believers who had contacted me to see if I knew anything, and I don't think they'll mind me copying their response to that information.

Those excuses are a bit lame! What happened to "honor", "responsibility", etc., etc. We traveled from New York to Utah last fall and it seriously crossed my mind to see if he was still a resident of that state .... and track him down! BUT, we were having too much fun exploring the amazing national parks spread across the west to bother .... We've given up - if Jake's CD ever shows up - it will just be a surprise!

The lack of communication and information here has been... disappointing... to say the least, and it's clear I'm not alone and that there are others out there feeling the same way who, like me, will probably now never fund him again even if those albums ever do show up.

Ironically I've recently run into what could be described as a similar situation involving overdue items with another artist but my response to that one has been very different thanks to the reaction of the artist and what is overdue in this second case, shouldn't be for too much longer as a result. I'm basically waiting for them to get back from the holiday I interrupted, which should be within the next few days, so I'm not going to say any more about this one at this point.

Fox Amoore has announced that the "Come Find Me" album I funded last year on Indiegogo will officially be released on July 4th when he'll have copies available to buy at a convention he's attending. Copies for funders are due to be shipped out about a week before, but if you missed the funding you can also pre-order a copy from him now. He's been releasing snippets of the mixed but not yet mastered material and I already have goosebumps. This one is shaping up to be well worth it.

I have even managed to successfully buy music for the first time using my phone in the form of the EP from Nobody Likes Neville. Whilst it's not something I intend to be doing much of (at least at present) it was still nice to know that I can buy stuff when that's my only source of internet access. Although Brad is the vocalist and lyricist here, it seems this particular project is not one of his but rather is Eric's baby (so to speak). I obviously made someone's day based on the contents of the unexpected handwritten note that came in the package, and that note in turn made mine.

Matthew Ebel finally made the transition of his subscription service to Ziibra. The site itself still feels very beta, although I do find myself loving the high quality of the "meet me" videos (both in terms of the video itself and the content) they contain. Sadly the service seems to be only concentrating on the Seattle area at the moment, despite the website stating artists and creatives from around the world and it's also currently impossible to subscribe to anyone on the site (except Matthew) if you live outside of the USA. So much for the internet being global, and there's already one artist on there who has missed out on me spending money on them as a result. I'm told they may add international support later for (at least) digital goods, but at the moment I'm not holding my breath although it's likely I'll continue to take a listen to new artists in their music section.

I've been taking a read of Casee Wilson's blog whenever I get the chance recently. Whilst there's some stuff aimed directly at musicians, there's also quite a lot of interesting other stuff about her life as crew, individual track stories and her views on the music industry amongst other things. For recommended reading I'd start with this post on paid vs. free music but there's plenty you can spend your time with, whatever your interest in music and knowledge of the music industry.

And finally for this brief update, BONNIE are back seeking funding for their second full length album, this time on Indiegogo. You'll find their project here. I'm seeing a handful of names I recognise from Sellaband already on board and I've joined them. Whilst their music was never something I was that into when they originally signed up on Sellaband, it's clear they have grown musically since I last took a real listen and their sound is developing into something that actually, I might be a lot more interested in. It may only be a lyric video, but take a listen to one of their recent tracks called "Paradise".

Service suspension

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 11:21:00 +0000

If you've been following my blog, you should recall I've been mentioning a house move for some time now. As you'll probably gather from the large pause since my last post, things haven't gone entirely to plan.

Well, if I'm being accurate they haven't gone to plan at all.

The upshot is that the house we were planning to buy fell through, but the house we were selling didn't. As a result this is now officially my third week without a house! And I have no idea how long this is going to continue. We have put in an offer on another property, but it's likely to be at least another month (and probably longer) before we're living somewhere other than a hotel and I can actually get some decent internet access, rather than a stolen half hour here and there from family and friends, or attempting to do anything with my rather old/slow smartphone in the local shopping centre.

As a result I've dropped by to give you this update, in the hopes I'll be able to start blogging again in April. If not, expect another update around then. I haven't forgotten about the blog post I promised you and that will be my first on resumption, but until we get settled with a new house, I'm not going to have enough access to internet available to finish off that post from the notes I'd started.

In the meantime I'm left waiting to see if my Cubworld CD ever arrives, seeing as it's well over 6 months since the album was released.

And if you're sending me anything, don't worry if the address is care of a solicitor - I haven't died (yet), it's just our current forwarding address for mail for anything the redirection isn't taking care of.

Wish me luck on getting a new house sorted. It's beginning to feel like I really need it.

Review of the year 2013

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 04:24:00 +0000

It's time once again for my review of the year post where I share with you my favourite tracks and albums of 2013 as well as bring you up to date with various stories from the year.

Favourite Video of the year

As I usually start my posts with video of the month, it's only fair that I start you off with video of the year. Some may call this one a bit of a cheat as it actually uses a Walt Disney short as its basis rather than being something created from scratch, but something about it reminds me of the Tom Petty video for "Running Down A Dream". Enjoy "Matter of Time" by Dommin, which you'll also find in my favourite track listing for the year.

Favourite Songs of the year

You'll find most of these in the attached soundcloud track listing at the bottom of this section of post along with a few that didn't quite make the cut. With over 70 minutes of music in the playlist, it should give you more than enough to listen to while you finish the rest of this post. As usual, I have allowed no more than one track per artist and whilst the vast majority were actually released in the last 12 months, there is the odd track that was released earlier but which I've only come across in the last year.

1. All of Me - John Legend
2. Song For Someone - Vertical Horizon
3. Should've Said No - Katie Thompson
4. Hot Damn - Ivy Levan
5. Everything I Love - Katey Laurel
6. Carnival of Kings - Matthew Ebel
7. 'Til Infinity - IYES
8. A Night In Hell and a Sunday Morning - Skitzo Calypso
9. The Shore - Fox Amoore
10. Time to Live - Remi Miles
11. Bullet for a Broken Heart - Dillon Hodges
12. Matter of Time - Dommin
13. River Runs Dry - GD Allan
14. Heads Will Roll - Mary at Midnight
15. Broken Record - Little Boots
16. I Like Flowers - Reluctant Dragon
17 My Sky - Jaani Peuhu
18. Down Like Hip-Hop - Fiction 20 Down
19. Medikation Nation - Future User
20. The Call of Mektoub (Secrets of The Book) - Dirk Maassen with Sleepingenius

I was all poised to give the title to Vertical Horizon this year when I ran across the video from John Legend that I posted in my last blog post. Whether it's a consequence of getting older or what has happened to me over the past year, I don't really know, but in general it seems I've been heading more towards a mellower choice both in terms of songs, and more particularly favourite albums this year. In terms of some of the more unusual and unexpected choices, the two main standouts that made the list would have to be "I like flowers" by Reluctant Dragon and more particularly "Down Like Hip-Hop" by Fiction 20 Down which those who know me would have expected would be one of those tracks I'd run a mile from.

Favourite Albums of the year

1. Echoes from the Underground - Vertical Horizon
2. Calypso - The Traps
3. The Diving Board - Elton John
4. Nocturnes - Little Boots
5. Colours in the Dark - Tarja Turunen

Despite being overdue, the Vertical Horizon album definitely proved it's possible to get a place in my heart if the music still manages to hit the spot. A long time favourite of mine, Elton John also just failed to hit second spot from a fairly recent discovery in the form of The Traps. I'm not sure how the newcomers will stack up longer term though as I felt they had already released their strongest tracks from the album before I got hold of a copy.

In terms of what I'm looking forward to next year, there are only two albums I'm currently aware of at the moment. The first will be the new Poets of the Fall album, which won't be along until later in the year as they only just finished touring and so still have to decide which tracks they'll be finishing off and recording for the new album from all the scraps of ideas they've come up with since the last one. As they operate on a one year touring, one year recording basis there's even a chance it will be more like Christmas or early next year before it actually gets released.

The second album I'm waiting for will be "Come Find Me" by Fox Amoore. This got pushed back for release into next year as, after he blasted through his original IndieGoGo target and got nearly 4 times the initial funding request, the recording dates moved to the end of January due to the extra enquiries and arrangements required to get a real orchestra and guest vocalists involved. He has the English Chamber Orchestra on board for the album and I've been watching him stream live as he sets up the actual orchestral arrangements for songs ready for when they record in January.

Heroes and Villains
Given the movement with Sellaband this year, I was really hoping I'd be able to say in this post that I finally have what I paid for, more than 4 years down the line both from when I last bought a part on Sellaband and from when the last artist I bought parts in actually hit their target. Unfortunately that's not quite the case. I'm finally down to waiting for just the one CD. Whilst Cubworld released his album in the summer and it was made available for download on Sellaband back in August, the physical copies have still not been shipped. The last contact I had with Cubworld on the issue said that he'd run out of money and couldn't afford to send the CDs out until he'd saved some up. He's now officially become the second artist I bought parts in to have passed the 4 year mark since funding completion but where the CD hasn't arrived.yet. Ironically, I'm willing to bet it would have been possible to get a physical copy from somewhere by now if I hadn't funded on Sellaband, but instead bought the finished product when it was released in August. I believe I said in a previous blog post that I thought he'd been left to fend for himself as an artist too soon (as a result of the changes to Sellaband putting the artist in control rather than them controlling the budget etc.) and this situation looks to be confirmation of that fact.

Revenue from Sellaband has also basically dried up this year. Some of that is down to the fact that a lot of the artists I bought parts in are now out of the 5 year agreement, but there's been no revenue seen either for any of the late artists whose releases have been turning up slowly in the interim. In total, I've had just 2 sets of revenue credited to my account this year, the first in April and the second in the middle of December. This second one was a mere one eurocent, and both payouts combined wouldn't even be enough to buy half a chocolate bar. I suspect this is probably close to (if not THE) last revenue I'll see from the site.

With Sellaband now down to around one artist signed up for every day of the year, only around 10% of those with at least 1% in budget raised and when adding up the visible money on the site and coming up with a figure of less than 25,000 euros, I'll be pretty surprised if the site makes it to 2015 in its current form. It's definitely now not far from the point where the little remaining money could land up being moved to just the top few artists to clean up and close the site with very little adverse effect or reaction.

It hasn't all been bad news though. The rest of the items I'd been waiting for from Sellaband finally arrived, including the Lori Greco album which was the other one that took more than 4 years. I also finally got the Vertical Horizon album I'd been waiting for for well over a year from Pledge Music. But the whole experience with crowdfunding to date has left me somewhat more reluctant to spend compared to my early Sellaband days.

It was therefore somewhat of a relief to find that my faith in Poets of the Fall was rewarded. Whilst their live DVD was released a month later than originally planned, they still managed the shortest turnaround time of any artist I've crowdfunded to date, from the time the project went live for funding to receipt of the goods. And whilst I think there's a little too much chopping and changing of camera on the finished product (it feels like the director thinks the camera needs to be in at least 2 places gathering action at the same time), I'd say this still feels like the best music purchase I've made in the last 12 months. Definitely the heroes of 2013 where it feels like so many others have been villains.

Late Stories
As you can imagine there have been a few stories and discoveries that have happened since my last blog post.

Firstly 3-Dimensional People for which very little information is available at present except that it appears to be a side-project involving at least one member of Dommin. I'll be keeping an eye out for them and what music gets released under this project name over the next year.

It feels like a lot of musicians I follow have been the target of thieves this year. There have been some good outcomes for a few though. NRG Rising got a laptop back, although their bass guitar is still missing, and Dillon Hodges tracked his stolen guitar down to an ebay listing and has subsequently got it back. Unfortunately these haven't been the only victims and based on this seemingly sudden spike in thefts compared to previous years, I'd suggest that the main New Years resolution for all musicians ought to be to keep a very good eye on their stuff over the coming year in case it too goes missing.

Bambi Monroe of Civilized Tears announced she is expecting a baby. Hopefully they will get the video recording that was crowdfunded done before the birth needs to take centre stage.

Matthew Ebel's move of his subscription service to Ziibra still hasn't taken place. As he is apparently the artist with the largest fanbase to sign up with them so far, those smaller artists already there have found a number of bugs in the system that everyone would rather were fixed before he makes the move. This means that whilst he has been planning to get rid of the Entourage subscription and reduce it to the same level as the Robot Army subscription when the move happens, he's in for a shock next time he checks his mail, as he should have a mail from Paypal telling him I've renewed at Entourage level. I've done this on the principle that the move hasn't happened yet, so I therefore don't consider the change to subscription tiers to have come into effect yet (also not my problem if his system lets me renew anyway). I'll be interested to see how/whether he reacts to this, particularly as it marks my 5th year of Entourage subscription. I know he's busy tearing his hair out over his main website at the moment due to the hosting provider making a mess of things and breaking his site, so hopefully this will come as a pleasant surprise.

In terms of site discoveries, I've been taking a look at Pitchmystuff. On the surface it appears to be yet another site for musicians to upload their music to. What its true purpose is seems to be pretty much unknown though all the indications I've seen present the site as a way to try and get musicians to part with their own cash. How you listen to the music that has been uploaded is far from obvious, and I found the search options for finding music in the first place to be rather poor, rendering it too much hassle for the average listener to figure out compared to other sites out there. Instead the site tries to tempt you to log in and has a habit of annoying you with popups trying to get you to buy advertising on the site, copyright your music or persuade you to use their music uploading service to push your music onto Itunes, Spotify etc. which seems somewhat more expensive than other similar services I've encountered. And whilst their Twitter feed seems to suggest it's possible to connect with other fans and artists on there, I haven't seen anything resembling any community features in my trawl of the site other than a section of user images on the main page.

Whatever happened to...?

As is traditional at this time of year, I always mention one or more people or artists I've been thinking about and wondering what happened to them. This year's "I wonder what happened to..." came about as a result of the fact I've actually been listening to Talentcast a lot more than I used to in the days when they were only promoting Sellaband artists. I met Missy briefly at Sellebration in 2007, but after the changes and subsequent mess made by Sellaband to their site, she pretty much disappeared from Talentcast after getting disillusioned with the situation. So wherever you are now and whatever you're doing Missy, I wish you well.

In the meantime, if you are an artist, you may be interested in the fact that Talentcast has expanded from when I first knew them and now broadcasts their program on four different radio stations instead of just one. They are also always on the lookout for independent artists to upload music for them to play on their radio program, so if getting your music played on radio is of interest, you should check out their site as they don't charge you.

And finally... To the Future
I promised you a developing story in my last regular blog post of the year and here it is. Except that you could say it's still developing. You almost certainly won't have been aware, but I've actually had a pretty bad year health wise and as yet, I don't know how much further the story is going to unfold in 2014 or what its effects on me are going to be in the longer term.

It all started with me needing to go to the doctor back in March because I had a period that wasn't just heavy, but in fact just wouldn't stop. It is early for me to be hitting the menopause, but not overly early and it was thought I could be going into the pre-menopausal stage a few years earlier than expected. I got given some tablets and was told to come back either if they didn't work or the problem repeated. I took them and after a break (somewhat reasonable given the volume of blood I'd lost) everything seemed to be back on track. But in the summer, the problem came back only worse. I got given another course of tablets which thankfully also worked and sent to the hospital for 2 different sets of blood tests and a scan. The blood tests came back fine (or at least as fine as they could be under the circumstances) but the scan proved a different matter. Whilst I can't feel a thing, I apparently have a cyst on one of my ovaries, irregular in shape with the dimensions they have given me being 8cm x 4cm x 3cm. They don't think it's cancer, but apparently it's impossible to say for sure unless they actually remove it (and the associated plumbing). As a result it's currently "under observation", which basically means I'm having to undergo regular scans to see how it changes. If it doesn't go away on its own, the tablets stop working, or I start to develop any other symptoms I may have to have an operation, but in the meantime I'm left trying to cope on tablets and supplements for the 2 weeks of hell out of every 4-6 weeks I'm experiencing while they decide whether an operation is the only option. I'm hoping that the next scan due at the end of January will prove to be either make or break on what they decide to do as it's affecting my work, my ability to do things in general and the preparations for our imminent house move due to the side effects which result from high blood loss as things stand at present.

My next planned post is the one I promised you about what draws me to becoming a fan, which I'm hoping to get done before we have an actual moving date set (current expectation is late January - early February for that), as it's unlikely I'm going to be looking for much in the way of music until after the house move now. Until then, I wish you all the best for 2014.

Calm before the storm

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 02:39:00 +0000

Who I've been looking at

With the house move likely to take place some time between January and March as things are moving very slowly at the solicitors, I'm effectively now in the calm before the storm in the run up to Christmas. As a result I started looking around more for new music and artists again than I had originally been planning - I was thinking the move would be underway by now and would get in the way. As a result, I've got a bumper crop for you - more than I've mentioned in one post for quite a while.

But before I get to them, here's an update from my previous post.

Incredibly the CD from Lori Greco has actually arrived. That now means I'm only waiting on the Cubworld CD and I'll finally be up to date with Sellaband, even though I haven't actually spent a penny on the site for nearly 4 years. Will it manage to arrive before its 4 year anniversary of funding completion, meaning only Lori has managed to take over 4 years, or will Cubworld become the second of those I funded to make it past the 4 year mark? With just over a month to go, Christmas approaching and a potential postal strike looming in the UK, this one could be close if it doesn't arrive here really soon.

I got my Poets of the Fall DVD shortly after my last post, making this the shortest turnaround to date of any crowdfunding project from the time I spent money to the goods arriving.

My Vertical Horizon CD arrived just as I was starting this post, something like 6 weeks after the quoted shipping date. Given it is usually 2-4 weeks maximum from the USA and sometimes as little as 7-10 days based on the large number of CDs I've ordered to date, this one was starting to get to the point I was considering chasing up about it. Their Pledge music page is also starting to fill up with people asking when they're going to receive items so it seems I'm not the only one who was expecting to see something before now given they were supposed to be shipped on 1st October. I do have one confession to make though, and that's the fact that what arrived from Vertical Horizon isn't what I ordered. I didn't order the signed version which cost more than an unsigned one, but it seems I got one anyway. With 11 tracks all over 4 minutes in length (longest is over 7 minutes) there's nearly an hour of music making it well worthy of a purchase, so it's a real shame the crowdfunding has been such a mess. They're so close to a 4 star rating in terms of how much I like what I've heard of them to date that I'll probably buy their next album, but I can't see me joining in with another crowdfunding project until I can see the lessons have been learned.

Fox Amoore's funding completed recently with over 26,000 euros raised. He's aiming to record before Christmas and release the CD a month or two before the download version. I'll be interested to see what this incredible young talent comes up with now it looks like not only will he be recording in Abbey Road, but will also have most if not all of a full orchestra along too. Not bad for an unknown artist who set a 7,500 euro funding target on just a 2 month timescale. John Williams, watch out.

As so often happens when I start looking for artists after a break, I tend to land up with rather a mixed bag which includes pretty much something for everyone and usually provides a number of leads to other artists (which I may or may not land up getting the time to look at, despite always planning to look at them at a later date). This latest batch of artists seems to have left me with a bad case of suffering from foreign language sites though, making them particularly hard work.

Poets' Corner are one of those hidden musical gems that I found on Sellaband which aren't likely to reach funding through setting a high budget and having both a lack of a decent plan and a seeming lack of fans. I actually think the first track on the Sellaband player is the weakest one they've uploaded and both Hidden Love and the instrumental track Kołysanka being much stronger than this. The only site links I've been able to find for them so far happen to be in Polish, making it very difficult to find out anything more about them.

Dark Princess is a Russian band which belongs firmly in the female fronted metal arena. It seems they have some songs in English and some in Russian, which makes it a real shame that their website appears to be Russian only and hence particularly hard to navigate. Their lead singer Olga Romanova appears to have a page on a Russian metal site and it's there I found music to listen to. You'll find a player with over 20 full tracks about halfway down the page underneath the pictures, and it's possible to download each of the tracks (albeit individually rather than as a zip file) by clicking on the icon for each track which looks a bit like a floppy disk.

Thankfully not all the artists I've wandered past in the past few weeks have non-English sites. Jeffery Straker is a piano based singer-songwriter from Canada and whilst the front page of his website looks rather crowded, in all other respects it's one of those seemingly rare places these days of being an artist website where I can actually spend a few hours and find out a lot (including watching videos and listening to music) rather than playing hunt the needle with the entire internet as the haystack. I haven't found anything that's really grabbed me yet, but this is an artist website definitely well worth a visit.

Emm Gryner is another Canadian singer-songwriter who has apparently released at least 10 albums. You'll be hard pressed to find out much about her though as there's pretty much nothing on her website except a news article about her "best of" album, the Facebook link goes to a private page (i.e. you need both to have a Facebook account and be logged into Facebook to see it) and the only music visible on her site is basically a link to iTunes. Tracking down her soundcloud page is really what you need to do if you want to listen to music. I did notice that she's now part of a female folk trio called Trent Severn, who have a very different sound to the solo tracks I've heard, though there's no actual link from her website to theirs. At least when you finally track down this trio's website you get something a lot more useful to the music lover than the rather poor effort I started at.

Lilly Rouge are a rock band from Australia and don't seem to have a website. Instead, the link I've given you goes to their Reverbnation page where the biography will link you off to various other places such as Facebook and Soundcloud if you want to find out more. The track that initially caught my interest "Switchblade" reminds me somewhat of Girlschool, if you're old enough to remember them, but I'm hearing a different artist in every track I've listened to so far.

A warning for this next artist. If you suffer from epilepsy you might want to avoid the link to the artist's own website and instead head straight to their soundcloud page, as the animated pictures once you get past the intro video on their site are most definitely flashing. Rain Diary are from Finland which seems to be producing a lot of new darkwave artists at the moment. Bizarrely their website seems to merely be a portal to everywhere else, with the music page being their Soundcloud page, the news page being a Facebook page, video being a Youtube page and even the community page being a Tumblr page, meaning you'll be hitting the back button on your browser a lot in order to find your way around.

If you don't mind heavy metal comedy that comes with a definite language warning, then Psychostick are an interesting if somewhat bizarre diversion. They're also currently trying to raise funds on Indiegogo in order to build their own studio and release a new album and are already over halfway to their $30,000 target when they've only set funding to last a month. You'll find a link to the project here.

Finally Koobra is the last of the picks I have for you this time around. Another artist from Finland but this time in the electronic/dance/remix sector. Seemingly has no website so I'm directing you to his Facebook page. Even so I've been able to find out very little information to date other than the music on his Soundcloud page.

The sites I've been looking at

With so much music floating past, I haven't been looking at much in the way of music sites themselves. A news article on my Twitter feed did manage to send me in the direction of Band Of The Day though, as this is an app which will suggest an artist for you to listen to every day. Its current main flaw seems to be the fact you can't tailor it to the genres of music you listen to as every single user of the app will get suggested the same artist to listen to on any given day. Possibly a useful discovery tool if you listen to a wide range of music, but not quite so useful if you're only really interested in one or two different styles of music.

And finally...

I'm already making preparations for my review of the year post due in its usual spot some time over the Christmas and New Year period, when (amongst other things) you'll be able to find out my favourite tracks and albums of the year along with a story that's developing as I write this post, the impact of which I'll hopefully know more about by then. I'm aiming to try and make the post I mentioned in my previous one about what draws me towards particular artists by looking at some of those I've been a fan of for a while before Christmas, but it depends how the developing story develops over the next couple of weeks as to whether that will happen or not.

Finally forward

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 01:04:00 +0000

Who I've been looking at

It feels like forever but I'm finally more or less down to waiting for actual hard copies of overdue items. There's been no sign of the CD from Lori Greco yet and I'm now waiting for the Cubworld one as well, though Sellaband did finally get the digital version of his album up for people to download. On the one hand I'm slightly disappointed with the release, as it didn't appeal quite as much as I thought it might after hearing some of the tracks - mostly because I think some of the better tracks are those that saw the light of day before the album. On the other, it turned out no worse than I expected with just the (seeming obligatory) one rap track to send me screaming in terror. In addition to the tracks "Shaka Laka" and "Life is Music" that I've mentioned before, the obvious standout is "I Found Love". I could quite see some of the tracks here turning up in the TV series "Hawaii Five-O" if the right people were looking.

I also now have the soundtrack from the Poets of the Fall DVD, so am just waiting for the DVD itself to arrive. The latest update has duplication happening on 7th October with it being shipped from local less than a week later. Because the duplication is happening later than the last update had planned, they have also made the video of the concert itself available for download already - all 2.5Gb of it, though not the extras as that would have about doubled the size. So 2 weeks overdue for the digital download and more like a month for the physical copy (by the time it gets here) is certainly something I can live with, particularly given how communicative they've been. No prizes for guessing my experience here has done nothing but strengthen the 5 star rating and convince me I'd definitely fund again.

Even Vertical Horizon turned up with an update.Their album "Echoes from the Underground" was finally made available for digital download on October 1st with the physical CDs starting to be shipped a week later. I'm enjoying the album as much as I thought I would so it's a real shame it's taken them this long to get organised. It sounds like they'd do another fan funded project in the future, but I'd be interested to see how many people get put off from funding another based on the experience with this. I know I'm one.

I never thought I'd be saying this but at this rate there's actually a chance I'll have all my overdue stuff by Christmas (this year)!

Elsewhere, I was wondering how much longer the Civilized Tears funding would still be up, given they'd been stuck on about half budget for well over a month. Seems something gave with their announcement that the funding would only be open a few more days and they wouldn't be able to make the video they'd planned if it failed, as the project gained the other half of its 1000 euro budget within 24 hours of that and with less than 3 days to spare.

I found myself doing a double take at my Twitter feed this month when I found some tweets from someone I didn't remember following. At the moment I have no idea if a marriage or a stage name is responsible but it seems Julia Johnson, who some may remember from Second Person is now going by the name Julia Gray. The link from her Twitter feed to iTunes for her album shows Julia Gray on that page, although anyone reading the reviews posted before the name change is going to get extremely confused. In the meantime her website is still hosted under her old name and gives no indication of what might be responsible for the name change, or even when it happened.

Probably one of the more unusual pieces of music I've run across recently is in Estonian by an artist called Priit Jääger on Soundcloud. My first thought was whether or not it was Catself as the song "Kassi Lugu" (cat story in English) is certainly unusual enough to fit her repertoire.

I think I'm spent up for the year now as far as music is concerned - there's nothing else I've been looking out for since The Traps released their debut album "Calypso" on 30th September and there's the house move costs to think of, not to mention Christmas in there somewhere. I just have the 30th anniversary Howard Jones concert on the live front left and though I would have liked to get down to London to see Caiyo's new material (amongst others) there was no way the budget was going to stretch that far. Might be time to start working out my favourite tracks of the year, though there's always the chance something I'm not expecting will find me in the last 2 months of this.

The sites I've been looking at

Ziibra
There isn't much to see here yet as they haven't officially launched, but the reason I've taken an interest is because Matthew Ebel has been working with them with the aim of moving his subscription site to their platform rather than trying to run it himself at the same time as trying to make music. On the one hand I understand his reasons for wanting to get more away from maintenance and more into actually making music, but the cynical side of my brain is only seeing a problem for the future here. If you saw the video of Matt speaking at the 140 characters conference in 2012, you'd know that he's no stranger to the idea of sites popping up for musicians, hanging round a while and then either disappearing or completely changing what they offer anything from a few months to a couple of years down the line (and the fact he hates getting so many emails asking him to sign up to the "latest greatest" new music service that has barely been launched when he knows they are pretty much all going to nosedive within a few months), so the fact he's looking to make such a big move of an entire website to a startup that isn't even public yet is a little surprising in itself.

Whilst he's been sharing his experiences of running a subscription service with them, so in theory it should work for him, there are a couple of things that stand out. First is the point that in order to keep going long term, the site is going to need to be profitable and for that it will need other artists to take up the service. Yet the question remains as to who these artists will be. Many larger artists are adding subscription services to their own websites (and even some smaller independents) rather than using a third party site. Artists that are too small aren't going to have enough fanbase for a subscription service in the first place. So it seems to me there's going to be a very niche market out there. And there are already other subscription based platforms out there as well so there will be no shortage of competition. I've mentioned Patreon before, but there is also Drip.fm which has aimed itself at small (and often independent) music labels and already has at least one well known name on board in Franz Ferdinand. And that's probably only the tip of the iceberg as this isn't an area I've been actively looking at to date.

The second point is the fact that not every artist is the same. Just because the subscription model that Matt has works for him, it doesn't mean it's going to work for other artists out there. In fact I'd be very surprised if it did unless there was already a similarly committed (and probably in the same demographic) fanbase involved. Whilst I can't help but hope it'll work for him, or at worst he finds some new fans from any publicity they give him, this still feels like a wrong move he'll both regret and find himself having to sort out later. I really hope I'm the one who's wrong here, because this has the potential to get messy if I'm not.

Tastemakerx
The updated website that I mentioned in my last post finally went live and has turned out to be a big disappointment so far. For starters all links between the user profile and an artist profile disappeared, meaning you were faced with the task of starting from scratch as far as linking artists to your profile was concerned. It also seems they were using an old database copy as well, seeing as several artists that had been added to the old version had mysteriously vanished from the new one. I fiddled around with the new site a bit to see how it worked, but I've found that every time I've gone back since I've found it removes artists I added to my profile claiming I'm not following any, yet bizarrely lists me in their charts as following some artists that I probably wouldn't bother with based on the new direction of the site. That's only the start of the list of things I'm not liking.

The "game" aspect is also gone. Instead you get presented with a Facebook style feed which basically just consists of whatever the artists you follow have posted on their social media pages recently. On the one hand you could say it's convenient to have the information together rather than buried within an entire set of social media feeds. On the other it's pretty pointless as all it's doing is regurgitating information I'm already getting from elsewhere, whether that be the artist's own mailing list, website, Twitter feed or indeed other music sites I visit such as last.fm. And with a whole load of artists that they either don't have at all or no longer have since the update which I am already getting information from these other channels for, it means the site now has absolutely no purpose that isn't already being done better elsewhere. I may drop in from time to time to see if they add anything new worth a look (and have fixed any of the problems), but with nothing now to make it stand out from everything else out there, it's certainly no longer a site I'll be visiting regularly.

And finally...
I'm thinking of making just the one more regular post before my review of the year, given where we're likely to be with the house move, but if I get the time I'll drop in one of my specials as well - this time on some of the questions I've been asking myself to try and understand what it is that draws me towards particular artists in the first place by looking at some of those I've been liking for a very long time. If not, that'll be a post for early next year

Positive signs?

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 02:07:00 +0000

Who I've been looking at

With the passing of the 4th anniversary since funding completion, finally some news on Lori Greco's album. Firstly I've had not one, but two mails from Sellaband asking me to check that my address is correct so the album can be sent. Of course, this isn't the first time this has happened - it must be a year or two ago now that I was asked to double check my address for Lori and as we know that message was supposedly sent in mistake. This time there is a second positive sign though in as much as it's possible to download some rather dodgy mp3s from your believer dashboard for the album. And I say rather dodgy because it appears (yet again) that someone needs a lesson in creating tracks with proper metadata. All the tracks are apparently coded as track 1 and the artist name swaps between "Lori Greco" and "Loredana Greco" depending on which song you're listening to. Looks like I'll be creating my own copies if/when the CD finally gets here as it'll be quicker than sorting out the mess that's the tracks provided on Sellaband. At the moment I'd be expecting it to arrive by the end of September assuming it actually gets posted in August.

As for the tracks themselves, initial impression is that the music has a habit of drowning out the vocals (though whether this is down to poor mp3 encoding or the reality of the mixing on the disc is something I'm going to have to wait to find out). Songwise the overall album feel is somewhat chilled out and quite a pleasant listen otherwise so "Get Out of My Life" is a rather unexpected change which actually feels out of place compared to surrounding tracks as a result. (Incidentally that track has potential single written all over it). The album is a decent length as well with 13 tracks mainly between 3 and 4 minutes in length. So far I'm liking this much more than I have with many other overdue albums - there are a few tracks which have particularly caught my interest though I think the album as a whole isn't likely to land up as a favourite. I am however, not convinced that this is so earth shatteringly good as to have been worth a 4 year wait (or more like 6 if you consider when I originally bought into the project).

Elsewhere Cubworld's album release party is showing on his Twitter feed as 30th August and on his Facebook page it says the tracks should be available to download for Sellaband believers before then. He actually posted an update on his Sellaband page a few days ago saying he'd sent them the information, however nothing has actually appeared as of yet and there are only a few days to go before the release party.

As I mentioned last post, the Poets of The Fall DVD I'm waiting on from Pledge Music is behind schedule, though hopefully not too far based on the updates. It was originally due for release at the end of August, but much in the same way a CD goes off to be mixed and mastered, the raw material is currently booked in to have its final editing, colour correction and audio mixing etc. done starting on 10th September. There looks to be about an hour and a half of extras included on the DVD from the latest information provided. It also looks like the copies for pledgers are going to be even more exclusive as the plan is to manufacture and ship them from Finland rather than waiting for the original plan of getting duplication done in Germany (which will still happen for the shop copies) as that would take longer. In the meantime there's a rough version of video for one of the tracks available to pledgers only. And it's not often I get to say this, but if the rest of it is even half as good as the rough version when completely finished, this is definitely going to be the best music purchase I've made this year. And like I said when the project was first announced, I was expecting it might not quite come out on time, so I have no worries about the delay so far.

If you were thinking of getting your hands on one of these, you're unfortunately too late as funding recently finished with nearly 300% of target reached so you will just have to wait until it hits retail. It looks like it's going to be well worth your money based on what I've seen so far.

Once again, it's more than 2 months since the last update from Vertical Horizon on how that album is coming along and that particular project is STILL open for pledging nearly 18 months after I made my pledge (when they'd already reached target completion several months before that). Comparing this project to the Poets of The Fall one has been like chalk and cheese to date.

I'm still waiting on news about when exactly Fox Amoore's project for an album recorded at Abbey Road studios will go live, mostly because it seems he's still on the tour circuit at the moment. It does appear that it's likely to happen on IndieGoGo, will be called "Come Find Me" and some time in September though, so hopefully I'll have more information for you in my next post.

Coincidence or did someone read my last post? Aly Cook dropped her project total to the 18,000 euros I suggested in my last post and managed to complete the project before its deletion deadline as a result. Given she managed it with several days to go, I actually wondered if a 18,500 or maybe even a 19,000 target would have been possible or whether that would have been considered too much for a last minute rush.

Civilized Tears haven't been so lucky. Their project still appears stuck around the halfway funded mark, though it did move very slightly since my previous post. I did see a Facebook post from them asking what incentives people would like to encourage them to spend money on the project but at the time I looked it hadn't had any replies and I haven't been back to check up on it since.

With the main set of funding projects that I've been keeping an eye on dealt with, it's time to move onto the artists who have caught my attention for other reasons.

In terms of the "blast from the past" category, there have been a few names from the early days of Sellaband that have managed to catch my attention in one form or another recently. First on the list is Darren J Claxton who signed up on Sellaband once again recently. Whilst I think the songs have improved both in terms of quality and songwriting since his last failed attempt, it's clear the fanbase is still missing which means he's had even less attention on the site than the last time. He even sent me a message asking how to get more followers, believers and plays on the site, so it seems he hasn't realised the site is a very different place to when he originally signed up.

Next is SupermassiveQuazar who still seems to be putting out music left right and centre and according to the odds ought to have made something I really like by now but somehow still seems to be failing on that score.

The other name on the list is Mike Nealis who some of you may also remember from Sellaband as being part of the band Private Nation. It seems that he's currently involved with a new band called Martian Soul, but there doesn't appear to be any music online to listen to yet. So far all I've been able to find is a Facebook page and a very recent and barely used Twitter profile but no website. Their debut album is apparently supposed to be out some time in the Autumn.

On the new discoveries front, Christopher Battles caught my attention with his rather interesting mailing list offer. At first glance you'd think he's offering the standard "sign up to my mailing list and get a song in return" deal, however there appears to be what can be best described as an affiliate offer available as well. In essence you get a spreadsheet to download and fill in with contact details of others you've passed his music onto and in return for the number of different people you send back as willing to join his mailing list you can get various different incentives such as personalised notes, free skype concert or even a free house concert (amongst others). You'll find the full details of the deal here.

In one of my rare trawls of the new signups on Sellaband I came across an artist called #22 who are from Poland and the rather catchy track they have posted caught my attention. Unfortunately it looks like they're using the site as a promotional tool rather than being serious about any kind of funding attempt. I'd quite like to hear more from them based on what I've heard so far, but it seems they're not the easiest of artists to find music or indeed much other information for.

The sites I've been looking at

Tastemakerx
The web version of this site has had a number of bugs for a few months now and there has been no sign of when they might be fixed. As a result I haven't been using the site much, thinking they'd be fixed in the "August update" , which now appears to be happening mid-end September instead. However I'm now left wondering on whether there's going to be a lot more than just an update given a Twitter conversation between a fellow user and the site itself, where it's being described as a "2.0 version". He's assuming that means a complete rewrite (possibly even a pivot) so it looks like it will be a case of watch this space to see what exactly happens with the site.

Plumspotter
Following on from the conversation about Tastemakerx, I landed up looking at this website which appears to also be heading down the "music discovery as a game" route but which is still in beta. The "how it works" video on the site makes it seem rather interesting, however there's no way to see how any of it works in practice without signing up and currently that's only available via Facebook (which I don't have and wouldn't use to sign in anyway even if you paid me). I may revisit the site if they make it more accessible than it is at present.

Sellaband
It's been over a year since I last requested a payout from the site, so I decided I'd drag out the current balance (what little of it there is, given there have been only 3 small eurocent revenue payments added in that time). And it seems that the message about Sellaband updating the payment system that's been in the automated withdrawal messages since the previous management is (you guessed it) still there. This is the smallest amount I've requested from the site to date, so I'll be interested to see what happens with it.

The number of artists on the site itself continues to drop slowly although the number of artists with at least 1% of budget does appear to be remaining stable or possibly creeping slowly up. It will be interesting to see what effect the changes to the terms and conditions have on the figures as it's too soon since their introduction for anything much to have been done yet and only a small fraction of the artists currently on there would appear to fit with the activity required by the new terms.

Pledge Music
I've recently been asked to take part in a survey about the site so the ad agency they have employed can obviously issue some recommendations and help them promote it.. I'd kind of like to be a fly on the wall when someone reads what I've sent in as it includes both the good and the bad (much of which you've read at least something about on this blog), and I'm half expecting some more questions to come my way on the subject based on what I've sent. I've also been offered a free download of any artist on the site for my help, so the next problem is going to be who to pick.

And finally
Looks like the house move is going to take longer than originally planned, so I should get at least one more post in before things get really hectic. You can therefore expect the next one in about a month.

Pre-move blues

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 00:40:00 +0000

Who I've been looking at

Music is being forced to take more of a back seat at the moment. As I mentioned in my previous post there's a house move on the cards which means I've been spending a lot of time recently doing all the stuff necessary to get it on the market and sold rather than looking round for music.

Priority one on the music front has therefore been to try and get an updated status on things I'm waiting for. As all of these are coming from abroad, I obviously need to be keeping a close eye on dates etc. in order to coordinate with an address change. This type of mail can't always be redirected to a new address (depending on a number of things) and could land up getting returned to sender a month or two later as a result.

Cubworld's second single release before the album was supposed to be out in June, but I landed up tweeting him late on 30th as there was no sign of anything on Sellaband. A few days later I got a reply which said "I decided to take another 5 years to release all the tracks. Wish me luck :)". On the one hand seemingly a joke, on the other not really the kind of joke I want to see given my sense of humour circuits have been pretty much disconnected for a number of months where the last few overdue Sellaband albums are concerned - this is a subject which just isn't funny any more. A second track "Good Morning Love" has since appeared on his Bandcamp page and his website which appears to be one of the more "chilled out" tracks he mentioned, but if it is the second single release before the album, it hasn't shown up for Sellaband believers on their dashboards yet.

Elsewhere on overdue albums, Lori Greco's twitter feed contained a couple of interesting tweets over the past few weeks, suggesting in the first that the album would be finished in July ready for a digital release in August and in a more recent second one that it would be finished "next week" , which at time of discovery equated to the first week in July. Not long after this an email came through from Lori via the Sellaband system saying the album would be available for download by the end of July. Could it really be that I might actually see an album in my hands before the "4 years since funding completion" deadline hits in mid-August? And will the album actually appear on Sellaband before the end of July in the first place based on what I've been seeing with Cubworld? Watch this space.

Finally another update from Vertical Horizon on their overdue album. Apparently they are looking at releasing it in the Autumn but have no firm date set yet. It's looking more likely that this will appear after the move rather than before as a result, but is currently the item I need to keep the closest eye on based on the information I currently have.

Poets of the Fall are currently spending most time on getting together bonus material for the DVD. August release date is therefore still looking good at this point. Couldn't be happier with the way they are keeping people updated on the project either, and it's probably no surprise that they have passed the 250% funding mark and are still going as a result (albeit slowly but steadily) despite many incentives now being sold out.

The last item on my current list of outstanding items is in the more-or-less "on its way" category. This is Matthew Ebel's "Best Of" album which you can get a digital copy of completely for free just by signing up to his mailing list, as he's now sending this out instead of the 5 free songs he was sending previously. This contains tracks taken from all of the albums he has released via his website to date, but in many cases (particularly tracks from earlier albums) they have been remixed and enhanced compared to the recording you'll find on the original CD. As an Entourage membership, I'm obviously expecting something a little more physical in addition to the digital release going to his mailing list, though whether or not he's close to sending this yet or whether it will hang around until the annual goody bag (most likely due in the Autumn) to help save on postage is something I don't know. Based on how the house move is going, I may still need to get some coordination sorted here at a later date.

My most recent music purchase has been the new We Love The Underground album "Mouthful of Graffiti" which I've been a little hesitant about as the preview tracks Brad posted didn't exactly grab me in the same way as those from the first album and I was left wondering whether it would find itself in the traditional "difficult second album" category as a result. The biggest surprise when the album arrived was probably the fact that it included a couple of tracks he had originally released under the Niki Thunders name. Overall, after listening some more, I don't think it's as good an album as the first, mostly because there's nothing that immediately grabs your attention, but I am finding a few of the tracks are starting to grow on me more than I originally thought they would. I've actually cooled slightly from the 4 star rating I felt the project warranted after the first album to more like 3 to 3 and a half as a result.

And I've already got my next album purchase planned. Even if anything comes out beforehand that I'm interested in, it's likely it will get left until after the move and most likely behind this one in the queue if I'm short of cash, given how much I like this particular artist. Elton John's new album "The Diving Board" is the album in question, due for release in September and you can already view a lyric video of one of the tracks from this album on his official website.

Keeping watch on some of the crowdfunding projects I mentioned in the last post has also been interesting. Initially I was rather worried about Gayle Skidmore's effort to raise $8000 given it didn't seem to be moving much despite what I thought were some pretty tempting incentives on offer (e.g. digital download of the new album along with a PDF of the colouring book for just $1, or digital download of her entire back catalog of albums on bandcamp for just $10) , but after she started going overboard with the tweets and retweets it accelerated into a last minute frenzy I haven't seen since the early days on Sellaband with over half of the money raised arriving in the last couple of days of the project. In the end she actually finished with over $10,000 and 460 people on board.

The Civilized Tears video funding by contrast seems to have been a much more painful affair given they have only been looking for 1000 euros and trying to get this for longer than Gayle's project was up. (and in fact are still only around the halfway mark at time of writing) Whilst it's obvious from some of the comments going around that some people are being put off by the fact the funding is in euros and not dollars, I'm still left wondering how much of a problem the "Sellaband Effect" is having. I've stated many times before that I won't even contemplate going near any project being funded on Sellaband while I'm still waiting for albums from the "old era" (which were due years ago), irrespective of who asks so it seems hard to say how many others are being put off by the mere fact Sellaband is involved and how many just aren't that interested in the range of incentives on offer (something I consider quite a poor selection in the first place).

Fox Amoore's project isn't currently up, but he does have the funding video recorded now and the title of the project appears to be "Come Find Me", so I'm expecting to see this appear soon - probably after he gets back from the mini tour of the USA he's currently on.

It will be interesting to see what Aly Cook does. She already dropped her budget from 40,000 to 25,000 euros a while back but there is less than a month to go before this project will fail for the second time to raise its budget in a year, and she still has over a third of the way to go. A change to somewhere around the 18K mark might see her through, but I'm not yet convinced anything higher will unless there really is a last minute rush.

On the discoveries side, Galia Arad is the main artist to grab my attention recently, though she could really do with a proper website than her current blog-style affair which attempts to cram the entire site on one page and hence takes a while to load as well as being a bit of an information overload (whilst in many cases explaining nothing e.g. what the heck is the "how to exploit your grandfather" set of links even about in the first place??).

As you can probably guess, I haven't really been looking for new artists in general this month but instead spent my limited time in a bit of a "Whatever Happened To...?" mode by checking up on some old familiar names. Bulletproof Messenger still seem to be procrastinating on their next album, and in fact seem to have pretty much disappeared off the face of the earth given the fact their website hasn't been updated in ages and there have been very few social media postings since their April Fool's joke that a new album was about to be released. Trail have also been very quiet this year since their post in January that they were listening to the final mix for the first track off their new album - I had been expecting to see some more information about this before. Radius are another one who seem to have done a disappearing act with the last information on their website (from months ago) seeming to suggest a search for a new bass player was underway. I'm particularly struck by the irony of their most recent tweet (which was posted on New Year's Day) "Happy New Year!!!! We'll be back on track in 2013!!!!"

The sites I've been looking at

Sellaband
It's been a while since I took an overall picture on how things are changing at Sellaband. The number of artists on the site appears to still be on a general downward trend, despite there still being at least two where both the "Active since" and "Last seen" dates are over a year old, one of which where both these dates are even both over 2 years old. Suffice it to say, Sellaband obviously still haven't fixed the problem which has been round for over a year now with some projects not being deleted even after they exceed their supposed 1 year of active life mentioned in the T&C.

Maybe that's about to change though? Sellaband have announced some forthcoming changes to their terms and conditions which could well result in artist profiles being deleted if the artist hasn't visited them in the past month. At the same time, it appears that a change on the believer side with believers needing to be active every 2 months or their profile will be deleted is also coming into effect at the same time. Which gets me to thinking... just how many believer profiles are there out there with just a few eurocents in them (basically hardly worth a withdrawal) and how much money would Sellaband therefore stand to gain by claiming all these unused funds? Enough to keep the site limping along for a few more months perhaps?

The number of artists on the site at time of writing has been dropping for a while now on its own. Whilst the current number of these is below 500 at time of writing, both the percentage and number of artists with at least 1% of their budget raised does appear to be increasing (having finally passed the 60 mark for the first time since I started checking), though the number on a "significant" percentage of budget raised does appear to be remaining fairly static - only a handful are over halfway to target and indeed only around 10 artists are currently over 25% of budget raised. The increase in 1% raised is at least partly due to most artists now signing up with much lower budgets than previously - the larger number of artists with 5000 euro or less budgets obviously makes it much easier to get 1% raised compared to the 50K budget of the original site concept. How much longer is the site going to limp along at this rate? Many would say it's already way past the date they were expecting it to fold for the second time.

But one interesting thing I recently discovered on the site is the "Artist Academy" pages obviously designed to help artists set up their Sellaband project, but I can't help but wonder how many artists actually even read them as you don't see any mention of them on the site until you actually hit the artist signup page. At which point it's probably too late as I can see way more people just filling in the signup boxes rather than clicking a link that goes away from the page to another site area entirely. Amongst the more interesting information on these pages is the statement that Sellaband sees the average believer donation as being around 20 euros, a project page needs to be viewed on average 208 times for every believer you get and that 42 is not only the answer to life, the universe and everything, but also the key to how many believers you need to succeed on Sellaband once you know your budget. Well worth a read but way more information is presented in this guide than the majority are going to bother with once they got as far as the signup form - it's pretty much the equivalent of people reading the instruction manual for their new appliance when they've already opened the box and got the appliance out. If Sellaband really want people to be reading these, they ought to make them do so before presenting them with a page of boxes about their project to fill in.

Patreon
The basic idea behind this website is that you agree to give an artist a tip every time they come up with a new piece of content. The minimum amount is $1 which gives you the ability to post on their wall and follow their updates, however if you decide you want to give a higher amount every time the artist produces a new piece of content, you'll get whatever extras that artist provides for each tier that the artist sets. For instance, one artist I looked at had a $3 and a $10 a tier where the $3 got you a download of the song as well and for the $10 you got the song download and a customised thankyou drawing.

In terms of how the payments work, it seems they currently only take payments using a system called Stipe, which appears to be a Paypal-a-like but something which I'd never heard of before, and hence it feels a bit restrictive if you were thinking of becoming a patron compared to other sites which take much more common options for payment. You don't get charged immediately that the artist creates the content, but instead get charged once a month based on all the content that all of the artists you support on the site have released that month. Patreon takes 5% of that to cover their own costs and the Stipe system eats up about another 3% in transaction charges. As a patron, if you're worried about getting a huge bill one month if artists go nuts producing content, you can apparently set a maximum amount that you'll pay out, however it's unclear from the T&C if you can then go back and buy the content you missed out on in a quieter month or whether you're forced to miss out on that entirely.

The site doesn't just support musicians, but also video producers, short film makers, bloggers and indeed anything along these lines that you can think of. But it's unclear just how many content creators are using the site at present as it's really only possible to see the list of featured artists on the home page before you're forced to resort to using the search function. Not great as a potential patron browsing to see who you might be interested in, but once again only really a site for those with people already interested in them rather than something you could use as a discovery tool. And for me that limits its potential and brings us back to the point that as an artist you could get a similar system set up on your own website for your existing fans and hence save yourself the 5% middleman. If this were more of a discovery tool that allowed you to more easily find and connect with new potential fans it would look much more attractive - as you can't even use the site to talk to an artist until you've already agreed to tip them, I'm left failing to see how useful this could actually be.

And finally...
That's all for this post. Once again there's likely to be a longer than normal gap to the next post due to the house move taking up a lot of time over the next few months.

The crowdfunding update

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 03:16:00 +0000

Who I've been looking at

In my travels this month looking for artists, the vast majority seem to have come with attached crowdfunding stories.

First on the list has got to be updates on the items I'm currently waiting on. The biggest update seems to be from Cubworld who made the first track from his album available for download - Sellaband believers in his second project should check their dashboards for the free download (if they didn't get the email) as the track is already released. Much like "Rocked Out" from his first album, "Life is Music" has turned out to be pretty much a grower on me and with what I've previously heard of "Shaka Laka" on his website, I'm now interested to see whether the rest of the album can manage to grab me where the first pretty much failed. The second single from the album is supposed to be released this month with the full album release due in July. Fingers crossed this is one overdue project I can finally cross off the list soon.

Elsewhere on the overdue list, there's been no update from Vertical Horizon for nearly 3 months now. Whilst I know there is no such thing as a fixed length of time for mastering an album, this still seems rather a long time for this stage of the process - I was expecting to hear it was back by now and that maybe physical production and/or artwork was basically all that was left holding things up. Meanwhile, whilst the dates on the articles on Lori Greco's website homepage have changed, the articles themselves are still the same ones I read back in March. So no new news on this seemingly non-existent album which has been "coming soon" for nearly 4 years now. But news on her Twitter page about how excited she is to have submitted 6 new songs to a songwriting competition. Go figure what's going on here, because I obviously got lost a while back.

In better news the Poets of the Fall DVD is looking on target for its projected August release (though it's still too early to tell whether it will make it on time or not) and is slowly creeping towards 250% funded on Pledge Music even though somewhat more than half of the incentive levels have sold out completely and at least one more is getting low on numbers.

In terms of other projects which I'm not funding (yet) but am keeping an eye on the following interesting list of things has popped up.

The fund for Daniel Ward Murphy's second album on Fundrazr hasn't moved in months but I recently spotted something on his Facebook page which says he is considering private funding and asking if anyone knows anyone out there who might be interested. So much for his open letter claiming crowdfunding as the last roll of the dice but rather chalk another one up for what I see as the "artist's soul" and its inability to let go of music. I'll be keeping a watch out to see if this story has any more twists and turns and he does manage to get another album out or not.

Civilized Tears finally set up their video funding project on Sellaband, although you won't find this under the main listings but rather it is one of the new style pledge-a-like pages. But in typical Sellaband facepalm-inducing fashion the project page itself is open to being misinterpreted as it initially states the project is to fund a video for their song "Stars", when in actual fact (as you'll find further through the description) a poll is running on their Facebook page to decide whether the video should be for "Stars" or "Antidote". And despite pointing this howler out to Tim on Twitter, (yes I bet you've guessed what I'm about to say) the project page still has this conflicting information on it. Add to that the fact the links on the project page lead to a Facebook login prompt rather than allowing you to see the Facebook content (even though this is visible if you navigate to it on Facebook itself irrespective of whether you have an account or not) and it's not the kind of page to fill you with confidence if you were looking at it wondering whether or not to fund an artist.

One to watch for some time in July is going to be Fox Amoore attempting to take his first foray into crowdfunding in order to try and raise enough money to record an album at Abbey Road studios. Given the already good quality of his home releases, I'll be interested to see just how much this can add to his cinematic style if he can make it work - the result ought to be an amazing sounding release. I've been watching him get to grips with the preparations for this by asking his fans what they'd like to see as incentive levels and for general feedback on the project and the last I saw he was making preparations to film the funding video. I've seen a couple of different funding platforms mentioned but I'm not yet sure which one he's settled on. Watch this space to see where it actually appears.

Gayle Skidmore is on Kickstarter with a very short funding project for marketing a new album. As with her Sellaband one, this once again comes with a colouring book for some of the incentive levels. But you'll have to be fast as there's only a couple of weeks to fund it.

Moving away from the crowdfunding side of things, I seem to be undergoing a bit of a music explosion at the moment based on the absolute flood of artists that have caught my attention for the first time in the past few weeks. Most notable of these seems to be Fiction 20 Down (also known as f20d) who should really be something I run away screaming from given (as I've stated many times before) I don't like rap. But whether it's their more melodic style fused with reggae and rock or whether it's something else entirely, somehow they not only manage to get away with it, but in actual fact have a couple of songs I actually quite like. Whilst there are others which do fit the expected "can't stand", I expect I might find the further odd track I like popping up from time to time so will probably keep an occasional eye on them. You can currently download their latest EP for free in exchange for an email address via their website.

If you like drinking as well as music then Ali Spagnola could be well up your street. She is currently touring her 2012 album which is based on a drinking game. The "Power Hour" experience basically consists of 60 one minute songs with the idea that you take a shot of beer every time the song changes. Obviously it depends on the size of your shot glass, but if you were in the UK that's roughly 3 pints of beer in an hour. As well as being able to experience this as a live concert, she also sells her album on a USB stick built into a shot glass for those who prefer to get drunk with their mates at home. There's also quite a story involving the 3 year legal battle over this album and concert which you can read on her own website. If you like art as well as music, then she's also making and sending paintings all over the world for free (though with a current backlog she encourages you to donate to move further up the queue given she's made over 1900 already) so there's plenty of things of (unusual) interest to find on her website.

Reverbnation provided a find in the form of Stirling from Australia. This seems to be (mostly) a family affair given the surname of most of the band members. The rather haunting track "Mind Control" is the one that initially got my attention, although there's something about the piano in "Writing's on the Wall" which has a definite ability to get stuck in your head.

Alexandria Maillot is another artist that I got pointed towards as a result of following another artist on Twitter. You can download her EP from Bandcamp on a "pay what you want" basis. For me the stand out track is "Just Another Girl" but the whole of the 7 track EP is well worth a listen.

Most interesting of artists that followed me on Twitter recently has got to be Space March whose retro electronic sound should definitely be up your street if you were fans of 80s acts such as Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys or Erasure etc. One of the more unusual tracks is a version of the classical music track by Grieg "In the Hall of the Mountain King" with added lyrics. But it must be said that whilst I like the music, this is another artist where the videos are making me cringe. If you were thinking of heading off to check them out, don't say I didn't warn you.

Somehow between all the crowdfunding artists and new artists, I did manage to fall over a couple of old faces that didn't fit into either of these categories. Firstly Cavali Jay is moving to Dubai with the aim of trying to get his music to take off in the Middle East and use that region as a launch pad for getting heard in the rest of the world. If it succeeds this will be a rather unusual direction for music to come from seeing as the vast majority still seems to come via the UK, USA, Germany, Australia or Japan and he's actually moving from the UK.

GD Allan looks like he's putting together a new CD which appears to be called "Beats and Pieces" if I've been following the breadcrumb trail round the internet correctly. It seems he is remixing some of the tracks he posted while he was on Sellaband as part of this as well as including some music from more recent times. He seems to be mostly using Soundcloud for posting tracks at the moment and recently managed to grab me with a song called "River Runs Dry" which is the first song of his in ages to properly do so - in fact since "Bitter Pill".

The sites I've been looking at

Soundcloud
If you hadn't noticed it yet, you should have seen I've now got a soundcloud playlist over on the right of this blog which contains music I've recently discovered (irrespective of whether it's recently released or something I only just picked up on) and am enjoying a lot. I'm aiming to keep the playtime around a half hour in length, so expect the featured songs on here to start changing as I find more music that catches my interest.

Underground Music FM
If you liked thesixtyone before their redesign of a number of years ago, I'd describe this site as the best replacement I've seen so far. Whilst it lacks community features for listeners, it follows a similar principle of artists being able to upload as little or as much of their music at once in the hopes of getting it trending on the site. This is the site I originally found Fiction 20 Down on, but like thesixtyone it can require a lot of work to find the diamonds you like in amongst the rough that you don't. Particularly due to the lack of real community features. And whilst there is a blog featuring artists on the site it is set up in such a way that it feels like a whole separate site rather than part of the site you're listening to music on. I'm not sure how much I'll land up using it to find music as a result because it seems to eat up too much time just to find even one artist you like.

Adsy.me
Remember the site called Slowbizz which was aimed at getting a network of music lovers to set up house concerts? Well I went to have a look and see how things were going there as there hadn't been any updates in ages, only to find the site redirected to something called adsy.me. After a bit of research I discovered that the Slowbizz site owner had undergone a "pivot". Or to put it in English, it looks like he has completely ditched the Slowbizz idea because it wasn't working and come up with a completely unrelated idea instead. But because he doesn't want to lose web traffic, he's redirected all the Slowbizz links to his new site, despite the fact the new project has nothing to do with the old.

In actual fact the new project appears to be a way of letting people create simple mobile applications without needing to know any of the code that a programmer would normally need. Not something I'd normally cover in a music blog, but in this particular case it could turn out to be something of use for musicians to create their own apps for fans without needing a deep understanding of technology. It's worthwhile checking out the video in which he creates an app for The Boxer Rebellion to get an idea of just how easy this is. On the downside the system is currently only available to those.users with Apple products (e.g. an iPhone), although an Android version is in development which should give it a much wider mobile phone userbase. The other interesting point is that it seems the apps apparently are stored on the adsy.me site rather than being something made available in the app store your phone would normally link to. As a result it might be worth considering the site terms and conditions a lot more seriously than the humorous way they are presented before deciding whether this is something that would really be of interest. Personally I'm going to wait until the Android version comes out before taking a better look at how the whole thing works in practice.

And finally...
I'm hoping things are going to quieten down on the music front over the next couple of months as it looks like we'll be moving house at some point soon. There's no firm date set yet though, so hopefully I'll get at least one more post out before I need to worry about taking a break from this blog.

How much streaming revenue you should really be making

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:30:00 +0000

Unless you've been living in a cave recently, you should be aware that a large debate has been raging about streaming revenues on the Internet and how much artists should actually be making from streaming. I've been busy looking at numbers available from various places on the internet in order to try and calculate an answer to that question for you.

The revenue calculations

There are two possible ways we can come up with an average. One is to look on a per artist basis, the other to look on a per stream basis. Either way, there are a number of figures we need to try and get hold of, which leads to the following questions.

1. How many internet users are there?
According to Internetworldstats, there were just under 2.5 billion internet users in June 2012. Obviously not all of them will listen to music via the internet, but as a starting point for calculations, let's assume they do.

2. How much music does the average person listen to in a day?
Not a particularly clear answer on this one as it depends on many factors such as where you live and whether you work. I've seen figures between 1 and 13hrs a day quoted. For the purposes of this experiment, I'm going to go towards the generous end of the spectrum and use a figure of 10 hrs a day as a starting point.

3. So how many tracks is that in a year?
If we assume a track is 5 minutes in length, in theory you'd be able to listen to 12 tracks an hour. In practice, thanks to things like news bulletins and advertising it probably makes more sense to drop this to 10 tracks in an hour. Using our figures from above this means a person can listen to 100 tracks in a day or around 36500 in a year.

4. How many artists are there?
Hard to say. The best figure I have comes from the current front page of last.fm which mentions tracks from 54 million artists. It would be pretty safe to say there are probably a lot more who aren't currently on the service.

5. How many available tracks are there?
Again, hard to say for the same kind of reasons as number of artists. Once again, I'm using the figure from last fm which states 640 million

6. How many listeners to an artist?
2.5 billion = 2500 million, so we can say that each of our 54 million artists should have around 46 listeners in an ideal world where every artist is created equal. The true figure is almost certainly less for the majority. "But people listen to more than one artist" you might say. Correct, but each of those artists would then only get a percentage of the revenue i.e. if one listener listens to 10 different artists equally, each artist effectively gets 1/10 of the listening hours and revenue that listener can provide. We're just making the calculations simpler here.

7. So on an artist basis, how much revenue?
I'm going to use UK pounds here, but as UK streaming services are looking at charging around £10 a month, EU ones 10 euros a month and US ones $10 a month, you could probably just ignore the currency sign wherever I use it and consider the numbers in terms of whichever of the 3 currencies makes most sense to you.

46 listeners paying £10 a month = £460 a month in revenue. However this assumes that all of your 46 listeners can both afford to pay and are prepared to pay £10 a month, which is unlikely given they need to come from the total world population. Even if all 46 can afford it, you're still not going to see all of that £460 as some of it is going to get eaten up by sales taxes and the cut that the streaming service itself takes. Plus, if you have a label then they may well take a cut before you see any of that money. Assuming that about 25% of the money actually makes its way to you, this means the average artist would get a mere £115 a month

8. So on a track basis, how much revenue?
Just like the lottery, not all artists are created equal in terms of the number of tracks they have available, so in many ways this figure may make more sense than going from the number of artists themselves i.e. having more tracks gives you more chance at getting revenue.

We already know that our 2.5 billion people are going to listen to 36500 x 2.5 billion tracks in a year. That's a total of 91250000000000 plays. If each of our 2.5 billion people is paying £120 a year (£10 a month), that means those plays are generating £300000000000 which is roughly equivalent to £0.003 a play.

And if there are 460 million tracks, this means that on average each one will be played around 198,000 times a year or 16,500 a month. At £0.003 a play this means a track would generate less than £50 of revenue a month.

However, once again if we assume that only 25% of the revenue generated by plays actually reaches you the artist, that means each track is capable of generating you around £12 a month

What does this really mean?

On the one hand it's hardly great money, but on the other it doesn't sound like the streaming situation is quite as bad as many artists are making out.

But on the other, if you consider the questions again carefully, you should see that I have generally erred towards the generous side as far as you, the artist is concerned. If there were more artists or more tracks out there, you'd have more competition and hence less revenue. If people are actually listening to less hours of music than I've suggested, once again you'll have less revenue. If (as is likely) not all internet users listen to music on the internet in the first place, you'll have less revenue. In other words the figures of £115 (artist) and £12 (track) for an average artist are likely to be close to absolute best figures that streaming could provide.

But wait... it gets WORSE.

The most obvious point here is that the music industry as a whole is currently not worth anything like £300 billion a year (2.5 billion people paying £120 a year). Even if we consider all sources of revenue such as concerts, merchandising, advertising and sales of things like CDs and players, the best estimate I've seen is $168 billion. And currently streaming is only a small fraction of that - something like 10%. So if we base on 16.8 billion instead of 300 billion (and assume £=$ as per question 6 above), the average artist should currently be earning less than £6.50 a month (artist) or £0.70 a month (track) from streaming. Is it really any wonder that artists are worried about streaming revenues and the income they might receive if CD sales disappear?

Even if the whole of the $168 billion was to come from streaming in the future we've still got to more or less halve the absolute best figures I came up with earlier. Or to put it another way, current spending on all areas of music needs to both double and come from streaming alone if an artist is to see anything close to the absolute best figures I've quoted.

Also the internet is still fairly new in terms of the average age a human lives to. That means there are independent artists who died before the internet was around and it's likely their music isn't anywhere to be found on it as a result. In a world where every artist is created equal, that means you're up against not just your current peers but also every other artist whose music has either hit the internet in the past or will do so in the future. In other words we can expect the number of artists on the internet to go up. So thinking 5, 10 or more years down the line, your music will likely be up against the music from all the new artists that appeared in that time as well as new music from artists currently on there and most of/all the music currently on there.from artists who are already dead or who died in that time. If the competition goes up, your share of the music revenues goes down.

Of course this in turn raises some interesting questions with regard to both the present and the future of music licensing. We can already say with certainty that the 54 million artists contains artists from tens or even hundreds of years ago (think Bach, Mozart etc. for starters) so not all of the tracks out there are likely to be due revenue under current conditions. If independent artists say things should be on an equal footing, what should this really mean for the future in terms of how and when revenues should be paid to artists? Should revenues only be paid while an artist is alive? And what happens to the revenues generated by someone listening to a track by an artist who has died if so? Should there be a "lifetime" for a track in terms of revenues being paid for it or should it still count towards revenue calculations whether played now, or in 10/20/50/more years time? What would happen to revenues after a track's "lifetime" was up? i.e. if a listener was paying £10 a month but only ever listened to tracks whose "lifetime" was up, where would the money they paid go? Just a few of the questions to be considered.

Some other statistics you might find interesting.
1. With 54 million artists available and the ability to listen to 36500 tracks a year (based on the information above), it would take me nearly 1480 YEARS to listen to just one track (and then only once) from each of the artists currently available. That's more than 15 lifetimes to listen to every artist currently out there if I listen for 10 hours a day every day of the year. If you wanted the ultimate proof of why finding your music is like looking for a needle in a haystack and why so few people are listening to you, then this is surely it.

2. It might be hard to fathom where the RIAA is coming from when it is deciding that streaming 100 tracks = 1 sale. As sales are generally £0.99, this would make one play equal to £0.0099 rather than the "best possible" of £0.003 I quoted earlier, particularly when you remember that this figure is derived from streaming revenues of 300 billion a year rather than the industry current of more like 17 billion of streaming revenues. Even with some income from advertising on top, if there are indeed at least 640 million tracks out there, then one sale should currently be worth more like 2% of the "best possible" figure if all artists are to be treated equally. (i.e. more like 5000 plays = 1 sale = £0.99).

3. The figure of 100 streams = 1 sale is also interesting based on our previous calculations. You should remember from earlier that I stated a figure of 10 hours listening a day or 100 tracks being played in a day as the basis for calculations. This would mean the average user was effectively buying a track a day or more like 3 albums in a month if they streamed music for 10 hours a day. It also means that to buy the equivalent of one album a month, you'd actually need to be streaming music for only something like 3 hours a day, if 100 streams = 1 sale. Interestingly if 5000 streams were equal to one sale, then our 10 hour a day listener would be buying the equivalent of just over 3 tracks a month with a 3 hour a day listener purchasing just the one.

This is really getting to the root of the problem the industry faces. When presented with "all available music" even hardcore music lovers tend to become casual purchasers, yet to accurately filter out something like 90% of this before it ever gets played to make it seem worthwhile to buy leads us back to a situation where we have a "music elite". When you can buy only the tracks you like (compared to a single or CD where you may land up with "padding tracks" that you wouldn't normally buy but which just happened to come free with it), even without piracy it leads to the general behaviour of people buying a lower number of tracks at once.

In summary
After running the numbers, I was actually quite shocked at how bad some of them turned out compared to what I'd thought they might be. It seems clear to me that the miniscule figures per play that streaming services quote are actually quite realistic in a world where artists want equal treatment (if a figure of at least 54 million of them is to be believed). It's also clear that something is going to have to give somewhere for artists to be able to make the same living from music streaming that was possible from CD sales because of the increased competition - instead of a case where only a CD could be sold before (and not every artist would get to make one) now anyone has the potential to make money just by uploading a track. But clearly, if you're currently receiving at least £7 / $7 /7 euros a month from all streaming services combined I'd say congratulations - you're already a successful artist.

Although independent artists say they want equal treatment, there are clearly way too many artists and tracks out there for the streaming income available. Unless music revenues as a whole make a significant leap in a very short period of time, the future could be a case of the "money pie" being split far too many ways to give anyone enough of an income to live on if the figures I've found and calculated are any indication. The top end artists don't make enough of a difference to everyone else when their money is shared out and would merely increase the number of artists receiving a fraction not much above nothing in an equal streaming world. (compared to a world where the vast majority of artists used to receive nothing at all and a few could break even or maybe turn a profit). We're already seeing the start of this shift with so few long term "superstars of music" being created these days as the money is already being spread more widely than it was before the internet.

Clearly something is needed to lessen the impact of the move towards streaming as there is way too much supply compared to demand. Whether that means the number of artists making music just needs to drop dramatically or whether the reality is such that the "music elite" that so many independents complain about needs to remain in some form (e.g. where only the top 2% of played songs would actually receive revenues) to enable at least some artists to make a proper living from music is unclear. If music sales get completely replaced by streaming at some point in the future it looks to me like artists will still lose out unless consumers are prepared to spend a lot more (basically to take over covering the loss makers the labels have traditionally had) The myth that you can make money as an artist by using the increased audience on the internet will remain just that - with luck a few may, but the vast majority still won't.

Now that you've seen the numbers, how much do you agree or disagree with my analysis, and what do you think needs to change to enable artists to make a living?

Visiting the familiar and new

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Mon, 13 May 2013 00:29:00 +0000

Who I've been looking at

It's not often I win something, so it was quite a nice surprise to get an Amazon gift voucher from the music discovery panel I was invited to a couple of months back as a thankyou for responding to their artist surveys. While I was trying to decide what to spend it on, I landed up looking through the latest recommendations the site had for me and ran across a rather interesting artist as a result of my interest in Nemesea. Issa is from Norway and the samples I listened to immediately caught my interest, as they seemed to fall in a range of music I quite like with some tracks reminding me more of Roxette and others stretching closer to a lot of the Scandinavian rock and metal I listen to. It's therefore something of a shame that her website is a) an extremely poor one page item and b) was so extremely difficult to track down in the first place. There's potential here, but her online presence is pretty much non-existent which is the worst possible thing to be in this day and age, and the videos also seem to be pretty cringeworthy affairs more suited to the 1980s, particularly on the choreography front. In other words, nice music, shame about the rest if you're a potential fan.

For other new discoveries this month, Soundcloud provided one in the form of the electronic act Future User. The track posted caught my interest, however everything I've seen so far looks like a failed attempt to go viral with it, given their site has no information on the artist and no clues are given in their social profiles (which mostly look to have been started just this year) either. The inference is that "future user" may be more well known under another name and the idea was to get people trying to guess who it is/was, but despite the rather spammy Twitter account attempting to direct people to listen to the track it seems this idea has fallen pretty flat (if indeed that was its original intention).

I also picked up on a 15 year old artist on Reverbnation called Brandon Vitale who has some pretty catchy tracks and writes his own music. His biography on there states he is looking for major label and publishing support. The biggest problem for me is that there appears to be no website or plan of attack here. There's no doubting potential but with no visible track record and just a series of recordings it seems rather hard to understand why any label would take a chance on a youngster who seemingly has no performance experience behind them and who is obviously struggling to get people to listen to the music in the first place as he hasn't really formed any connections with people either.

Brad Cox has announced that the new We Love the Underground album is going to be titled "Mouthful of Graffiti", and whilst there's still no firm release date announced it is supposed to be released this Summer. I can't help but feel the irony here - at the rate things are going, this is looking like I'll have seen one album and one EP from Skitzo Calypso and two We Love the Underground albums all from an artist who failed to raise funding on Sellaband before I even see one album from the successfully funded project of Lori Greco who I bought parts in on Sellaband over a year before I'd even heard of Brad and his band projects.

The Pledgemusic project of Poets of the Fall passed the 200% funded mark this month and many of the items available are once again running low on numbers left. It will be interesting to see if the DVD (due August) does arrive before the album from Vertical Horizon, as things are still quieter on their side than I'd like despite the fact the Vertical Horizon album is supposed to have gone off for mixing and mastering already.

Poets of the Fall also directed me to a new artist in the form of Ima, as they had produced her new song. For non-Finnish speakers, whilst you can click on the play icon on the main page of the site, I'd actually recommend clicking on the "Nyt" link at the top of the page instead as this "latest (news)" page currently gives you the soundcloud player, and if you like what you hear, you can download the track in question. Once again, I find myself somewhat underwhelmed by the artist's own site though, as there's actually very little useful information on there once you get past the language barrier.

Things are undergoing a bit of an upheaval in the Matthew Ebel camp at the moment. For starters he's attempting to finish the book portion of the "Lives of Dexter Peterson" project, seeing as the album was out a year ago, meaning it will be something like 3 years from his original announcement of trying to get a 3 part project done in a year that we'll be seeing the end of what has turned into a 2 part project along the way. With only the first couple of chapters illustrated, the graphic novel portion got cancelled a few months ago due to personal problems for the illustrator making it unclear when, if ever, it would get finished. In addition he's behind on writing the custom songs that are due to those who have paid Entourage subscriptions and has stated he's actually thinking about removing the Entourage level as a result because he doesn't want to keep falling behind on the custom song commitment (and I know he has no real idea of what else he could offer in its place and doesn't like accepting money for nothing either). It may therefore be that I won't even be needing to consider whether to stay at Entourage level when my renewal comes due, but rather the question may be what subscription I take instead if this change goes ahead.

Personally, I'm not convinced the removal of this subscription level would be a good idea if there are people willing to pay that amount of money - there's a big difference between 5 people paying $500 a year and those 5 people most likely dropping back to $149 a year when it comes to income - it essentially means you need more than 10 extra fans to appear from nowhere to make up the difference which is not the easiest of things to achieve in a still faltering economy when it's already hard enough for existing fans to keep on supporting you in the first place.

And if that little lot wasn't enough to be working on, he's decided he needs to get more of an "angle" to his shows to try and convince people to book him rather than being just another guy playing a piano. This means he isn't running his weekly show streams at the moment, but instead has been building a set for his basement studio and is working on costumes and storylines as well with the idea of relaunching as a sci-fi themed weekly show similar to the High Orbit podcasts he used to do. However this change is also going to have an impact on his subscription model as he wants to put the resulting videos up on Youtube so potential bookers for live shows can see what they would be getting, which means they are then publicly available rather than exclusive subscriber content. In other words the question then becomes what subscribers will get for their monthly subscription money instead (particularly at the entry level). At the rate things are going, I'm therefore left wondering whether or not his entire subscription model is going to need a reworking as a result of all the changes in progress which seem to impact on it.

I find myself rather in two minds about Aly Cook's latest endeavour. She's still attempting to raise funds on Sellaband for her second album and still has over halfway to go for her current target, yet at the same time has started up an IndieGoGo project for her band the Sou'Westers to raise funds for a video for their first single. On the plus side, an IndieGoGo campaign does at least ensure she will get whatever money it manages to raise and I can see the idea was to treat it as an album presale campaign, but on the minus side there's the thought that having this second project running at the same time as the first isn't really such a good idea as people have limited money and can't put it in two places at once.

The sites I've been looking at
Interestingly I haven't been looking at any sites in particular recently as it seems more like I've been on a random wander between a lot of my usual haunts to see if any new artists pop up during my listening time on them.

The only thing I did pay some attention to was the finish of the "Bandcontest" on Sellaband. Interestingly not only did one artist actually meet the target (despite this looking very unlikely to happen for most of the month the contest was running), it seems they exceeded it by a rather round looking 20%. With three hours to go, this same artist was on 80% of funds raised and as little as 24 hours before the end of the contest they had still been stuck on somewhat less than 20% of funds raised. Interestingly, the second artist in the competition also made a rather round looking 80% of their total budget by the end of the contest, despite having been in single digits of funds raised with 24hrs to go. The third of the 3 artists barely moved in the last 24hrs, finishing the contest on 5% of budget. I'll leave it to the conspiracy theorists (and you) to decide whether we actually saw an old style last minute rush to buy as with the Sellaband of times past or whether some convenient number fixing took place to avoid the embarrassment the contest was looking likely to turn into if you'd been following its progress from the start.

And finally...
I've been crunching some numbers recently from data freely available on the internet as a result of the debate on whether artists are actually being paid enough for streaming music and the RIAA's recent announcement that 100 streams should count as one sale. I'm in the process of writing up the rather interesting looking results of that into what should form my next blog post (hopefully within the next week). Suffice it to say that at best the results should give you something to think about and at worst may actually scare you. Irrespective of whether you're a listener or a musician, this is one post I think you definitely won't want to miss.

Updates and Changes

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 01:51:00 +0000

Who I've been looking at

Finally another update from Vertical Horizon at the end of March saying the album was off for mastering and they are now working on trying to get distribution for its release. The latest information given on that release date is "hopefully before the Summer". In other words, still pretty much no idea when it will be seen.

Wonders will apparently never cease when it comes to Sellaband albums. I was recently tweeted by a Sellaband believer who said that his Nearfield CD had finally turned up over 4 years after funding completed. Here's hoping one of my regular readers who was also still waiting when I last knew gets theirs as well. Meantime, I'm still waiting on my two albums from Cubworld and Lori Greco which are more than 3 years since funding completion.

I wish every Sellaband artist were as good as Aly Cook when it somes to letting believers know when revenue should have been credited to their accounts. Though having said that, she is the only artist I seem to have been receiving anything from for a while now, despite a number of artists agreeing to 5 years of revenue after release. As I've said before, she is one of the artists I would consider funding again, and this is just one of the reasons why. But there's also no way that's going to happen at the moment, as I'm most certainly not going to break my original statement that I won't even consider funding anyone on Sellaband until the issues with my overdue albums are satisfactorily resolved.

Francis Rodino is dropping his name for performances and instead will be performing in future under the name Caiyo. He's pulled together an album based on tracks from his most recent EP and the "Circles and Squares" album he made at Sellaband and is releasing this as his debut album under the Caiyo name. You can currently buy the download from Bandcamp, although there's a May 2013 date associated with it which seems to suggest that a physical copy might be seen around then.

Back towards the end of March there were indications from Civilzed Tears that they might be back again for another funding round at Sellaband soon, but I haven't seen anything about this since.

The 10th Anniversary DVD from Poets of the Fall reached 100% of its funding target in just 2 days at Pledge music (even before the concert was actually recorded) and pledges are still arriving. So much so that both the signed DVD and signed DVD with dedication completely sold out shortly after the 100% was reached and the second batch added as a result also look to be in danger of selling out - possibly even in the next couple of weeks. Whilst the overall speed of funding even took me slightly by surprise, it must be said that this is crowdfunding as it should be, providing you have a fanbase. There's no video asking for money here and no real introduction to the band or their music unless you care to read the profile page. One forum member posted the following meme in the thread talking about the funding which pretty much says it all.

Or to state it simply - if you have already made a strong enough connection with enough people, this is the response you'll get from them. You don't need fancy gimmicks to hit a sensible budget in rather a short time frame. If people aren't throwing money at you, yet are connecting with you otherwise, maybe it's time to find out why.

As far as the rest of it goes, it's then up to you (the artist) to deliver. This is really the part of the process I'm now most interested in based on my experiences with artists on more than one crowdfunding site, and I'm hoping some of my lost faith in crowdfunding can be restored by an artist I've been trusting for nearly 10 years now.

In the update posted after they reached the 100% Poets of the Fall have stated the "time till release" is planned as a maximum timeframe. However they've also stated that the further over the budget they go, the more special additions to it they may manage, even to the extent of being able to afford to produce a bluray as well if they get enough. So on that score, if they still make the timeframe then awesome, but I'm not going to worry if it slips a bit to fit some of those extra features in, providing we're talking something reasonable rather than measured in years.

As a fan, I'm still waiting for the website on crowdfunding that nobody seems to have produced yet. With all the crowdfunding websites out there and the number of projects/sites now around, isn't it about time we got to rate artists on their so-called "successful" crowdfunding endeavours? As far as the crowdfunding sites are concerned it seems a project is successful if it merely raises the budget in the timeframe, whereas successful to a fan is when they actually receive their goods and I'm therefore not convinced by the news articles I read about the percentage of successful projects on various sites when this is clearly only looking at it from the site rather than fan perspective. Imagine how useful it would be when considering whether to fund a project if you could see how the artist had performed on past crowdfunding projects in terms of keeping people updated and how long it actually took to deliver compared to the original expectation/promise. (Think of it a bit like being able to read a review on Amazon to see what others thought of it when you have different things to choose from). Fans have limited money, yet actions (or lack of) of some artists on crowdfunding websites are enough to make piracy even more attractive. Crowdfunding is no baby any more, it's growing up. So why not give us the tools and hence incentive to put our limited cash in the direction of artists we like who actually deserve it? Who is going to be first to take up this challenge?

Every so often I get a "How-in-the-hell-did-I-miss-that" moment where an artist is concerned. In this particular case, I think I know what happened as their first album came out in 2007 around the time I was heavily into Sellaband, and it's taken this long for me to pick up on this particular project. Blaqk Audio is actually a side project of a couple of the members of AFI, one of those artists where I've never really got into the whole of their back catalogue but drop into their site from time to time to see what's happening. I have a feeling I may be taking more interest in this side project than the main band, even though they have only released 2 albums in the past 6 years. If you're into electronic music (particularly 80's), the best way I can describe the sound is a fusion of Depeche Mode and a trance version of The Sisters of Mercy.

The sites I've been looking at

Sellaband
Could we be seeing a last-ditch attempt to restart interest in the site? One thing is for sure, the competition pages for the 3 bands have rather a pledgemusic-like feel to them what with the video placement and incentive lists as well as only percentage of funds raised being displayed rather than actual numbers and the promise that money will not be taken up-front. There has also been a "special funding project page" for one particular artist appear which appears to follow a similar form (the page itself is in German with no translation available so I'm a bit limited in just how much I understand). It certainly looks like they may be testing this format out as a potential thing to swap to for the site in general based on these pages.

So at first glance, I'm seeing a too-little-too-late Pledge clone, but on looking deeper, there are a number of things about this new format that worry me over and above this when it comes to considering whether it's trustworthy even for anyone who is not familiar with past history.

First up for scrutiny is the payment system. This states that funds will be reserved on your Paypal account and only taken if the project reaches target which is rather contrary to the way the Paypal system operates (at least in the UK, where I could find nothing about using it to reserve funds to be taken at a later date anywhere in the site or FAQ). Even Pledge take the money up front if Paypal is used and refund if the project doesn't reach target. The fact is that by only taking Paypal and not credit or debit card payments, there's both less choice and less consumer protection for potential believers. The whole payment side looks rather dodgy as a result particularly when you consider section 3.4 in the T&C which states:

"The financing for a music project can be stopped at any time prior to reaching the project funding target by the artist or by SellaBand. In this case, all reserved funds will be canceled in connection with the deleted project on Paypal and returned to the believers’ accounts, as long as the project still lies below 100% of the selected funding goal"

So is the money actually being taken from your Paypal account and then refunded if the project doesn't reach its target or does it stay on your own account in some "reserved" status and is only taken from it at the point the project reaches 100%? As we've come to expect of Sellaband, the T&C actually seems to contradict both itself and the other information displayed on the site. Not a good situation to give you confidence.

Selecting of incentives is also rather inflexible. Unlike the Pledge system which takes more of a "shopping cart" approach where you can add more than one incentive at the same time and make one single payment, it appears only possible to select one incentive on this Sellaband contest before you're immediately directed to a payment page. There also doesn't seem to be a limit with Pledge as to how many times you can go back and make further payments for other incentives before the project is shipped, whereas the maximum number of incentives you can ever purchase for a Sellaband contest page is 4.

Pledge is very good at displaying estimates of how much something will cost in your local currency - whilst I've found it to be off by up to a few percent, it does provide a broad benchmark if you really have no idea how much something costs in another currency. This is another place where the contest pages fail as it seems you can only find that out once you log into Paypal to fill in the payment process. The other main fail that could put off some potential users is the fact that the contest pages display in German by default and it wasn't particularly easy to spot the fact an English version is available and how to switch to it. Definitely a handicap for one of the bands in the race where I'd be expecting the majority of their supporters to have English as a first language.

There's also the rather unfortunate situation of calling this a contest, when in fact no prizes will be awarded to believers if none of the 3 artists in the competition manages to reach 100% of their budget. You won't find that information in the FAQ section of the site though (or indeed anywhere else on the site that I could spot), but rather it's hiding right at the end of section 6.4 in the T&C. I'll be busy waiting to see if anyone gets misled as a result of not reading the small print given that the band currently in the lead is only on 13% of budget with less than 2 weeks remaining. It should be noted that it doesn't seem to state whether the winning artist will still receive a prize, even if they don't make 100% of budget. Given Sellaband's history with contests (as a way of raising money) gone bad, this whole thing looks like an accident waiting to happen. Complicating a simple funding idea by plastering a competition of this nature on top definitely isn't the way to go.

All-in-all, colour me unimpressed with this inferior Pledge clone.

Magnet
I forget exactly what linked me out to this online magazine originally, but the real interest here is on their free mp3s page as it seems to feature an mp3 to download for free virtually every day. Even better you can actually listen to the songs from within the site itself to find out if you're interested enough to want to download them in the first place.

And finally
That's all for this edition. Watch this space to see how my wait for overdue albums is going and how the progress on the DVD is shaping up compared to my past experiences.

New year discoveries

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 01:17:00 +0000

The reason I found out about this in January was that Matthew did this live at a concert convention - the convention had licensed the film to be shown and he played the entire album LIVE as the film was playing. It's at times like this I wish I lived in America, as they didn't have a license to broadcast the film over the internet. As a result I don't know exactly how well the audio and visual worked together on the day, but it's definitely an experience I would have liked to have seen in full. I guess I'll be trying the next best thing of the "home version" next time the film is on.

I said back in August last year that I'd received an email from Markus Nylund saying he was done with music and it had left me wondering about what I call "the artist's soul" as a result. However it would appear I've been proved right on what I thought of both him and "the artist's soul" in general - that music will not let an "artist's soul" go. Since quitting the university course he'd started and moving to Estonia about six months ago, he's now starting up a band under the Sunlight Heart name he'd posted on Soundcloud and they've made their first EP. And if you're curious to understand more about what I mean by "the artist's soul" then this post from Markus is the nearest I can get to describing the essence of what I see yet can't explain or fully understand - if what he says here truly resonates with you, then the likelihood is you have an artist's soul as well.

We're into March now, and no surprises that I've still not seen the albums from Lori Greco, Cubworld or Vertical Horizon. In Cubworld's case, the last information I saw was a tweet from him asking people to check that Sellaband had their addresses as addresses appeared to be missing for a number of believers. That was back in January though and I've seen nothing since, despite the fact it inferred that a release might actually be pretty imminent. In the case of Vertical Horizon, I'm wondering if I've seen an amusing coincidence or whether my review of the year post actually gave someone a well-deserved kick up the rear end. Less than 24hrs after someone from the USA visited my blog by searching for the rather interesting term "vertical horizon steals crowdfunded money", an update finally appeared on their Pledgemusic page. The good news is that they thanked everyone for being patient and said that "We are extremely close to the completion of the album, and that means it will be coming your way very soon". The bad news is that that's as exact as things have got i.e. there has still been no date given and more than a month has passed since that last update. I haven't seen anything new from Lori Greco either - the "album coming soon" message still seems to be the only thing it's possible to find and the 4th anniversary of when she completed her funding on Sellaband continues to creep ever closer.

Crowdfunded music and my relationship with it has just taken a make-or-break turn. Poets of the Fall literally signed up with Pledge Music as I was writing this post in order to try and make their first live DVD. Given the poor experiences I've had with other artists, you could say the pressure is now on. If one of my absolute favourite artists manages to reach their target and let me down sufficiently at this point in time, it's quite likely I'll never crowdfund another project again. Within 24hrs the project has made well over half of its target and is currently due to run for another 3 months with the incentives promised for a September date. Watch this space over the next few months to find out if an artist who has never, ever let me down can restore or completely destroy my faith in crowdfunding.

The most interesting new finds since my last post have once again come via either Soundcloud or Twitter. On the Twitter side, the one that's mostly caught my interest is a band called Spaceship Days as a result of a track called "Hanging from the Satellites" that I found when I visited their Reverbnation page.

I also got followed by an artist who appears to be working a similar angle to Matthew Ebel in as much as he is offering one monthly music track as well as giving out free tracks in exchange for your email address. You'll find Corey Koehler's music site here. Scroll right the way to the bottom of the "Music" page to find out about his "one song a month indefinitely". Sadly I haven't been particularly impressed with what I heard on there, but I may revisit from time to time to see if anything does manage to connect.

Meanwhile on Soundcloud the most interesting new finds have been a Japanese band called Rocky Monster Room (who incidentally have one one of the worst websites I've seen in a while) and a Swedish artist called Benjamin Gustafsson. The information I've been able to find on both of these has been fairly limited so far.

I don't often unfollow people on Twitter once I've followed them, but there are some scenarios where I'm prepared to make an exception. One of these caused me to stop following an artist recently that I did actually have some interest in keeping up to date with. So if you want to know one way to really put someone off, here's what this particular artist was doing - they were retweeting EVERY SINGLE TWEET that mentioned them. So every time someone replied to one of their tweets, they'd retweet the reply, irrespective of whether it had any relevance or was even just a one word reply from their best friend. By the time I'd had every single one of their conversations clogging up my own feed for a couple of weeks, I was starting to get rather annoyed, hence the unfollow.

The sites I've been looking at

The good news about Sellaband is that instead of approximately 1 in 12 artists reaching at least 1% of budget, the odds are getting better as this has now increased to approximately 1 in 10. The bad news is that this is due to the total number of artists on the site dropping rather than artists with more active fanbases signing up. When I compare how things are going here compared with Pledge, I'm starting to wonder just how much longer the site can manage to stick around.

Tastemakerx has undergone a bit of a redesign and now shows the artists you have invested their virtual currency in in pictorial form. They've also added some features which will be useful to some, but not everyone as they require you to have Spotify installed. For each player, the artists they have added can now be played like a radio station. It's also possible to select an artist and listen to their "artist station" . Overall the site is still a little quiet and it seems to be mostly the same group of players playing on a regular basis. they are making a presentation at SWSX again though, so maybe some new blood will come in over the next few weeks.

And finally...
That's all for this edition. It's looking likely that I won't get around to writing the next edition until May due to some real life issues that are going to be taking up my time in the near future.

Questions I think artists shouldn't be asking

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 03:28:00 +0000

In this post I'm going to go through some of the most common questions I get asked as a fan either directly or indirectly by musicians, explain why I think you're asking the wrong thing and what I'd suggest as an alternative.

1. Who do I sound like?
I'm guessing you're asking this one because you think that people will be more likely to listen to your music if they think you sound like a particular (well known) artist they already listen to. Or so you can try and target fans of that artist because they are bound to like you too. Wrong approach. Why? One word - rivalry.

When I was a teenager fans of artist A were always rivals of fans of artist B, whose music happened to sound very similar and both camps were always convinced that "their" artist was the best and the other was more of a pale imitation. This has evolved through such rivalries being discussed on forums, and more recently more visibly on places like Twitter and Facebook. Approaching fans (in particular of an established artist) purely on the basis that you sound like them means YOU are more likely to be the "pale imitiation".

Take a lesson from the fans and go for the same approach you often see on forum threads. Instead of asking "Who do I sound like?" ask "Who else do you listen to (a lot)?". Not only are you changing the question so it becomes about them and not about you, but you may also pick up on some interesting artist names you hadn't even thought about before.

If your audience is young, the likelihood is that they like your music because they like what they hear, rather than the fact they like it because it sounds like something they already heard. As your audience gets older, their musical taste is influenced based on what they have already been exposed to musically - think of it as the equivalent of your musical influences influencing the music you have decided to make and you're more likely to get some meaningful answers if you then probe more fully about those artists and your fan's background.

Let me give you an example of one particular artist I listen to. When I listen to their music, what I hear in a number of their songs is the playing style of Elton John (whose music I like), the lyrical ability to connect with me both in my past and present as well as ability and lack of fear when it comes to experimentation in different musical styles that I get from being a long time fan of Howard Jones, the same intelligent wit and ability to weave political themes I see in the humour of Flanders and Swann combined with the storytelling of Chris de Burgh. If you were able to ask your fans the right questions to get that kind of level of information back about what they see in you, wouldn't it be a whole lot more interesting and give you better clues as to who you "sound like" anyway?

And in reality, the sooner you get to grips with the fact that you "sound like" you and not someone else, the better. Look back at my example above and consider just how similar or different to each other does the music from that list of artists sound in practice? Different people will hear different things in your music based on what else they've listened to - the interesting thing is what common ground comes up, particularly from fans of different backgrounds/ages/countries etc.

2. Tell all your friends...
If I'm that into you, most of my friends are probably sick of hearing about you anyway. My friends aren't going to vote for you or give you money just because I tell them to. (though you may sometimes see an exception to this with teenage fans) If I think whatever it is you're up to is really that great or cool, I'm going to be telling people automatically. Seriously, all you need to do is tell ME whatever it is you're up to and let me cherrypick what might be of interest to pass on. Chances are my friends aren't going to be as deeply into you as I am - even if they do like at least some of your music, they'll have their own favourites that they're trying to get me to listen to instead. Let's face it, who knows MY friends better - you or me?

3. Sign up to my mailing list (and get something free)
Just... no. I seriously don't care what the experts say you should be doing on this one. As a fan who initially thought this sounded like a good idea, what I've found happens in practice doesn't do me or artists any favours. I've fallen for this sucker rather badly in the past (usually in exchange for free music) only to find one of two results further down the line. Either I get a torrent of mail because of the amount of music I like (oh look I got an email from 30 different artists today, I must be turning into an A&R), or a couple of years pass and suddenly a "regular" (i.e. the first one they sent since I signed up) newsletter from an artist I haven't seen or thought much about in that time suddenly appears. And like a lot of others, I'm probably too lazy to unsubscribe even if I can find that option. Experience has taught me that I'd rather wait until I have enough interest in an artist to want to sign of my own free will. Even then, there are some artists that never seem to send newsletters or even update their websites with news until their next release comes out.

Stop inflating your numbers. Make it easy for me to find and sign up to your mailing list if and when I want to. And if you do have a mailing list, then actually USE it to send something every 1-2 months. Experience tells me that a mailing list isn't worth either the artist's or my time in the majority of cases. Let's face it, wouldn't YOU rather have people who are genuinely interested enough in you, rather than a list of people who only really signed for the incentive and who might only be taking a passing interest at best otherwise?

4. Here's this month's challenge
Ah yes, the good old "call to action". Seriously, it really depends what exactly you're asking. Some of these work as intended and very occasionally one of them might get me off my lazy butt and do what I'd been planning to do anyway but somehow never quite got around to. e.g. write a review of a purchase. Others are a case of something which works much better as an open-ended request rather than something which can be done "to order/by a certain date" because they need thinking about, or require being in the right place at the right time.e.g. take a picture of something that fits with a song title. And yet others can be things that some of your fans wouldn't really want to do or in some cases know how to do anyway e.g. post a video of you dancing or singing along to a song.

Unless you've got a lot of teenage fans, you might not actually get a lot of response to some (or most) of the things you ask, particularly if there appears to be a time limit. People have got to both remember and find the time in their schedules to do what you're asking if it's something they can't (or have the time to) do there and then. And if it can't be done there and then, a lot of the time they'll never get around to it before your deadline is up.

What would I suggest? Well, that 1-2 monthly newsletter I mentioned earlier is something you can add a nice little section to. Remind people that you always like to see/hear/receive the kinds of things you've been asking them to do. Maybe feature something recent from a fan. Hardcore fans have a habit of doing things anyway without you asking. Often all you need to do is present them with the facts e.g. "We're up for a vote at this website link to win this opportunity" and they'll automatically go and vote. Sometimes a group of fans will even get together on their own to prepare a surprise to present to you. Make it easy for them to know what you want/like and let them know when other fans have done something you like and it's more likely others will start to try and find "cool stuff to do" all on their own in the hopes you'll feature them. Encourage creative spontaneity as a continuous/regular thing, not something that sounds more like a work deadline and you may just find your fans can surprise you with what they'll come up with. But just like creating music, don't expect there to be a regular flow - things are going to appear randomly just like your inspiration when writing songs.

In summary
A lot of the things you're asking are things that hardcore fans are going to do anyway, irrespective of whether you ask or not. And they are only a very small percentage of fans in your fanbase - the rest you'll only get to join in occasionally at best. There really is no substitute or shortcut for the good old one-on-one connection to build relationships and create those hardcore fans so they will do things for you both automatically and willingly. And you'll discover a lot more than you can by asking what in reality are simple questions which have complicated responses.

One of the things I do in real life is "cold calling" door-to-door research. Whilst no selling is involved with this role, it is getting ever harder to get people to even talk to the strange person that arrived on their doorstep because they are being bombarded with an ever increasing number of requests for sales/advice/help and all they see is yet another person who wants something when they open the door. Yet in those cases where the door doesn't get slammed in my face, the participants quite often get a lot more from the experience than they were expecting. Build a rapport and you don't even need to ask (as often) because people will help you just on that basis.

As a fan I see the same thing happening in music - people are being bombarded too much with direct requests and are tuning out as a result. Form connections and let natural discovery happen so the laws of supply and demand can take over, or there is going to come a point when the music industry is going to be not just more broken than it is at present, but rather in an unfixable state where people in general don't feel enough of a connection to anyone to realise they need to support musicians.

Review of the year 2012

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 03:51:00 +0000

Welcome to my review of the year post. Probably shorter than some you've had in recent years, mainly because my spending has once again been limited for financial reasons and I haven't spent as much time chasing around after music as a result. I do however have an update on the albums I've been waiting for (some of which have already been mentioned in more blog posts than I care to think about) and I've also pulled together some conclusions I've reached on fanfunding as a result of my experiences, which I think you'll find will make for very interesting reading. But before we get to that, it's time to look at this year's charts which produced an unexpected result I wouldn't have predicted if you'd asked me as I was writing my review of the year last year.

Album of the Year

1. Matthew Ebel - The Lives of Dexter Peterson
2. Poets of the Fall - Temple of Thought
3. Howling Dollhouse - Howling Dollhouse
4. Nightwish - Imaginaerum
5. Fox Amoore - Legends of Valanor

Wow. If I had placed a bet at the beginning of the year as to what I thought would land up as my favourite album of the year based on the albums I already knew would be released, I would have been completely and utterly wrong. I was fully expecting Poets of the Fall to take the honours, based on past experience but as you can see it appears it wasn't meant to be. At the end of the day a very tight title was decided on the basis of instant likes vs. growers. Unlike previous albums, nothing particularly grabbed me on first listen from the POTF album and although I did find many of the tracks have grown on me, I didn't feel it was enough to beat Matthew's album which hit me with 2 straight away and landed up with a similar percentage of likes after the "growers" came through.

Another album I was expecting when I wrote my review of the year post last year was from "Into the Night" who actually changed their name to "Howling Dollhouse" before its release and released the album with the same title. It's a pretty solid album although I didn't find anything really outstanding within it. The two most notably different tracks on the album are "Part 2" (basically just vocals and piano) and "World on Fire" which, whilst not really my thing, does a pretty good job of blending rap and rock.

Although the album I've selected from Nightwish was originally released in late 2011, I waited for the tour edition which also has orchestral versions of the tracks. Having splashed out on an album with the tracks as instrumentals from them in the past (as well as containing the versions with full vocals) I actually found these made good background music when I didn't want to be distracted from work, and the orchestral versions of the tracks on this particular album seem even better than those albums I've had previously for this.

Fox Amoore seems to get better and better and this particular soundtrack effort made for a very worthy 5th place, shaking off competition from other artists such as Sonata Arctica that I've been buying for years.

One artist did lose out on selling music to me this year. I had been looking forward to buying the album "The Unforgiving" from Within Temptation which I'd also been forced to put off buying the previous year, but with both the album itself and the mp3 downloads available being riddled with DRM, I made the decision not to purchase.

As for albums I'm contemplating for the coming year, the main one currently on my radar is a new one from We Love The Underground as most of the artists I listen to frequently only released an album in the past 12 months. I have no release date or title for this one as yet and unlike the debut album, I'm actually finding myself contemplating whether or not to buy as (unlike last time) not a single track released so far has managed to take my interest past the take-it-or-leave-it category. The other album I'm aware of and currently contemplating is "Dark Dog Days" by Dr Scardo which is currently at mixing stage and due to be released in April. It will be interesting to see if Simon Scardanelli manages to get any of the other projects outside of this band effort finished as his last newsletter has stated he's interested in finishing the solo album he started writing in 2010 and may also be releasing an instrumental guitar album and an EP of waltzes and foxtrots as well. So it sounds like I'll have plenty to look out for here to see what catches enough of my interest in the coming year.

Song of the Year

It should be noted that (as usual) as far as I'm aware, every single artist in this particular chart is an independent. You'll find most of the tracks here available to stream on Soundcloud and I've carefully collected the ones available there into a playlist which you'll find here.

1. Poets of the Fall - Signs Of Life
2. Matthew Ebel - Who I Am
3. Katy Vachon - I Got Style
4. Francis Rodino - Higher Ground
5. Iced Blade - Chiru Hana
6. Skitzo Calypso - Ready or Not
7. Howling Dollhouse - This Is Who You Are
8. Iconcrash - We Are The Night
9. Karena Kelly - Midnight Walk
10. Saintsaviour - Woman Scorned
11. Remi Miles - Perfection (YOLO)
12. Fox Amoore - Lord and Lady
13. Dr Scardo - Leave Us Alone
14. Matchbox Twenty - She's So Mean
15. Miranda Shvangiradze - How The Idea Of Rainy Thoughts Was Made
16. Fabrizio Paterlini - If Melancholy Were Music
17. Brianna Gaither - Let It Go
18. The Traps - Moving Pictures
19. Stickboy - Pirouette
20. Admiral Fallow - Squealing Pigs

As usual I'm limiting my favourite song chart to one song per artist with tracks I've heard for the first time in the past year (even though the track itself could be older), although at the end of the day I could probably have found more than one for a couple of the artists in question. Particularly difficult was the choice for Poets of the Fall, where the missing title track from their first album was released as a bonus track on the German edition and managed to snatch the honours away from the haunting "Skin" (a track about a love where one half of the relationship can't let go) and the Spaghetti Western styled "The Ballad of Jeremiah Peacekeeper" by a very narrow margin. In the end, "Signs of Life" even edged out my favourite from Matthew Ebel to gain the top spot in the chart, although "Who I Am" did win the honour of becoming the ringtone on my new mobile phone. I can't see me changing that one for a while, as I find its opening ideal for alerting without annoying an entire room.

Although I'm not spending money on Sellaband, I am still listening to the odd artist who signs up on there now and again and a couple of these artists made my charts as a result. Whilst she never made her budget and the profile has since been deleted as a result, Katy Vachon managed to grab enough of my interest that I may well go check out what she's up to in the near future with the rather sassy song and video for "I Got Style". Iced Blade from Japan were another easy choice due to both my love of the Scandinavian music scene and a couple of rather ancient cassettes of manga music owned by my husband, as this artist sounds like they'd fit right at home in either.

Soundcloud has overtaken Last FM this year in terms of its ability to provide me with new artists to listen to. The ease of being able to listen to all the tracks an artist has posted, not just the one that originally caught your interest is something I'm a big fan of, and with Songza (who were offering a similar service last time I could access them) still cut off for the UK, it's looking likely that this will become my main source of listening over the next year if it remains in its current form. Miranda Shvangiradze and Saintsaviour both made the list as a result of being played by the soundcloud radio app.

Of the 20 artists in the list, 9 of them are artists I've heard for the first time in the last 12 months, and of these it's looking like The Traps are probably going to be the artist I'm most likely to follow up on over the next 12 months. Not just because they appear to be fairly local, but also because both of the tracks I've heard to date have managed to catch a decent amount of my attention whereas other artists have fared less well when it has come to listening to tracks other than the original attention grabber.

Near misses for the top 20 go to the Wily Bo Walker track "Jawbreaker", cis minor with "The Story of Rose and Klaus" and The Hundred in the Hands track "Commotion" - all artists brought to my attention by the Soundcloud radio app and also included on the playlist I linked earlier.

Video Playlist of the Year

And a new section this time around to showcase the best songs/videos that I've come across for the first time this year. As with the songs section, the tracks in question may be older than a year but this is the first time I've come across the video in question. The most notable thing here is the fact that as far as I'm aware, I'm only showcasing artists here that are independent and it therefore shows the variety and quality that independents are capable of putting out these days. Particular standouts come in the form of the "trailer" video for Fox Amoore's "Legends of Valanor" album and "Weird Green" which Left Step Band animated themselves.

Last minute news
As usual there have been a few things that caught my attention but didn't manage to make it into a blog post during the year. Firstly there's the news that Francis Rodino is leaving London with his band and moving to Nashville. In the newsletter describing his move it sounds like he's disappointed with the UK music scene in general, but whilst I wish him the best, I'm not convinced he's going to find the grass any greener on the other side of the Atlantic.

Howard Jones released a set of 4 tracks on Soundcloud for free download over Christmas, including his take on the well known Elton John track "Your Song". You'll find them available for streaming or download here.

The other big piece of news is probably the changes to Last FM happening on 15th January. Whilst they don't affect me as I only use the web app anyway, I do find them a rather disappointing move in the wrong direction which feels like one of the last nails being driven into the coffin of that particular site. Firstly, they're cutting off streaming access entirely for most countries in the world, citing music licensing arrangements as the reason. For the remaining few countries, only the US, UK and Germany (traditionally the big 3 for music sales/listening) remain mostly unchanged with others such as Ireland and Brazil having their free streaming removed and listening only available if you pay money and subscribe. It honestly wouldn't surprise me to hear the site is being closed and/or they are being bought/merging with Spotify or another service over the next couple of years. Restricting or removing services seems like a sure-fire site killer to me and even more so when consumers have a range of methods (including sites like youtube and soundcloud) where it's also possible to stream music for free.

Moment of the year
Considering I started this blog as a way of relaying my own experiences (initially with Sellaband artists and later with music in general) as a fan rather than having any kind of expertise or knowledge on the subject, so I was quite chuffed when one of the bloggers who regularly writes posts on social media and music for well known sites such as Hypebot decided my 1000 true friends post of a couple of years ago was both worth tweeting to his followers and linking to from his own blog. So this is my tip of the hat back in his direction. You can follow Chris Rockett as @MusicMarketingX on twitter or visit his blog on promoting your music here.

Disappointment of the year
No prizes for guessing that the title of biggest disappointment of the year is taken by three artists - Lori Greco, Cubworld and Vertical Horizon. I'm still waiting for albums from all three of these artists. In the case of the first two, they both completed their funding on Sellaband more than three years ago yet no album has been seen. In the case of Vertical Horizon, I used Pledge back in April when their project was funded but was showing "Release date TBC". Since then the updates to the project have dried up and, as with Sellaband and overdue projects there, it looks like the complaints are starting as this status doesn't appear to have changed 9 months down the line. It looks like I'll be contacting Pledge about this one in the New Year, as I'm obviously far from impressed with my foray into what life is like on the other side of the crowdfunding fence. And it probably goes without saying that Vertical Horizon have shot themselves in the foot when it comes to seeing any money from me for a similar project in future. With more than 6 years of experience on the "money-spending" side of the crowdfunding fence, I've been forced to draw some conclusions which will sound rather harsh (and indeed some artists in particular may even find upsetting) but which I think represent the true situation with crowdfunding as it stands today. You'll find them in the next section.

Crowdfunding: The conclusions so far

Whilst collecting money from fans is still a relatively new industry, there are a number of conclusions I've already come to about the current state of fan funding in music based on my experiences of spending several thousand pounds on more than 40 different projects covering over 30 artists in the past 6 years.

1. 1000 true fans? Try 100.
Let's face it. If you are an independent musician who has never had a record deal or even a song in your own country's top 100 charts, how many people will actually have heard you? With the demise of the community on Sellaband, I'm not currently aware of any funding site which has people who are actively looking to form a fan connection with you and your music. So if you want to crowdfund then you need to look to the size of your own crowd. Established names with that previous label (or even current label deal) are the only ones I've seen hitting the thousands (or often even the several hundreds) mark. The average artist I've seen on Sellaband since the site changed has been needing at least 100 people to fund them in order to make their target (even the minimum of 3000 euros). Unless you can make a list of 100 people that you know for sure will spend money on you (even if it's just buy a download of the album), you do not have a crowd and you cannot/should not be even thinking of crowdfunding. Facebook likes don't count. Number of Twitter or Facebook friends or number of people on your mailing list don't count either - not all of these will support you. If you want a good chance at a successful crowdfunding campaign the first step you need is to both acknowledge and make that actual list of 100 names.

Yes, more guaranteed names is obviously better. Yes, more names = more money, but how much? It will vary from fanbase to fanbase, but as a ballpark figure, I'd rate 100 names as worth 3000-5000 if your base incentive level is 10 of whatever currency you're raising in (e.g. $10 minimum incentive would get you $3000-5000 when 100 people have agreed to give you money). If your expectations are bigger than that, you better know (or hope) you've got some rich backers and/or you'd better be prepared to be disappointed if you can't make a long enough list of names to scale up that initial 100 name list.

If you can't make that list of 100 names, you should definitely be considering your music as still being a hobby. You don't yet have a fanbase so stop calling it a career until you can pass at least this basic check.

2. Your budget needs to represent the 1% of the 10%
Chances are that only around 10% of those that follow you on Twitter or Facebook (not including existing friends and family) are taking any active interest in you. And of that 10% only 1% are likely to look at supporting you in advance unless you have a good and immediately obvious track record of communication and delivery on a similar project in the past. If going on pure fans alone rather than the friends and family connections, that means you're going to need somewhere in the order of 100,000 followers to find your 100 names. Hence why friends and family are so important to reduce the followers you need and help you create that initial track record.

3. You need a track record that is easy to find
Both established and unestablished names are screwing up badly on this one. Both Public Enemy and Jonathan Davis fans were up in arms on Sellaband and my experiences with a number of unknowns over there have been no better. Over 50% of artists I have supported via crowdfunding have not delivered on time. Even worse, over 40% of artists I have supported have been more than a year late compared to their original statement of timescale. More than 10% of artists I have supported have been over two years late. And as previously mentioned I even have a few artists who have already broken the three year barrier.

With seemingly little or no protection offered by crowdfunding websites and these horrifying statistics in mind, it has led me to the conclusion that even I am no longer willing to take a chance on a crowdfunding artist unless I can easily find how they've performed in the past - in terms of being able to raise money, how their delivery time has compared to their original statement and what their communication has been like.

If you cannot convince a music lover like me who is open to both new technology and experiences that you are worth supporting, then how in the hell do you expect to ever be able to convince the average person in the street?

Be honest. Would you support a product or service that failed this badly on communication and delivery? So would you support an artist given these statistics?

Musicians, Labels, Managers
Get
Your
Act
Together

Can I be any more clear?

4. There are too many musicians
I still don't understand how the music industry operates because to me it attempts to break every rule of the laws of supply and demand. There are only so many hours in the day. There are only so many of those hours in which people are able to listen to music. It should not be possible for so many to be out there making music and claiming they are musicians rather than just doing it as a hobby.

The biggest shift that the music industry needs to undergo in the current era is to ditch the deadweight. And unfortunately a lot of the power in that resides in the hands of fans. There are too many musicians out there and all the internet is doing is spreading the existing money pot much more thinly compared to the old days when the average person was aware of a much lower number of artists due to only knowing about what was placed in front of them. The danger is that although more musicians are getting money, it's more a case everyone will land up getting pocket money rather than anyone getting career money. Is it really any wonder that free music is seen as the norm given the laws of supply and demand in this case?

We are also too forgiving of the artists we love. Just like best friends we let them off. Again. And again. And again. Eventually we might get fed up of being given the runaround, but in general emotion drags us back even when we feel let down. Just like in business, we need to put money into the hands of the reliable and force the unreliable out of music. The big question is whether us emotional humans can break the cycle and realise that somewhere out there is a much more reliable artist who is just as good and making exactly the same music as the unreliable one we may feel connected to at the moment.

Fans showing the big money spenders (investors, labels etc.) who the reliable are is something I see as the way forward to put money back into the music equation. Without a reduction in the number of artists, music will remain undervalued (or free). And we'll lose a lot of the artists we shouldn't unless we learn to step away from our emotions and put some logic back in.

My experiences show that artists need to become a lot more reliable than they are at present if funding direct is to become a truly viable mainstream alternative to a label deal for any artist, but I'm not convinced we'll see the shift the music industry needs until/unless fans noticeably start acting less on emotion and hence force the issue.

And finally...
As January is usually both a short and quiet month for me on the finding music front, it's unlikely you'll see a standard post before February. But to keep you going in the meantime I'll be writing a special post for all you musicians out there in a couple of weeks which contains some questions that you ask fans (and sometimes even potential fans) which I happen to think are wrong. And I'll be letting you in on what I think you should be asking instead to get the information I think you were really looking for.

The past couple of months

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 23:21:00 +0000

If you already know about my rating system then skip on down to the next header, otherwise here's the lowdown.

The rating system
The rating system I use for this blog is somewhat unique. It's not a reflection of how much I like the music itself as much as it is of how far I am along the process of conversion from consumer to fan. So, over time you may well see some of these ratings go up if I mention an artist again. And indeed go down, as musical changes of direction or failure to keep my interest are just some of the reasons that may affect a rating.

Congratulations, you've made a temporary blip of interest on my radar. Now how are you going to keep it?

I've seen enough of you to recognise and remember you, but I'm undecided so I'm not really following you (yet). I may make a spur of the moment decision to check in on what you're up to once in a while, but even that's no guarantee. May also apply to artists I am aware of, but whose music I've decided I don't have enough interest in to want to pursue further based on what I've heard.

I'm liking what I hear in general, but I still wouldn't describe myself as a fan. I will be wandering past your site occasionally, and there is something like a 50% chance I'll be buying your next offering once I find out about it, providing I have the money available.

Now I am a fan, so the chances are I'll be past your site once every month or two at least. There's a 90%+ chance your next offering is already sold, and occasionally I might even be going for something more than the basic package (if you have one)

Reserved for very few, this is about as close to internet stalker as you can get. I am actively watching because I do not want to miss your next release date, tour in my area etc. etc. You may not always be aware of the fact I'm looking over your shoulder to see what you're up to, but trust me, I'm there on a weekly if not more like a daily basis. Depending on how you tend to release your information, I may well be signed to your mailing list as well.

Video of the month
Well, not one but TWO this month, seeing as work has meant I've been slacking on writing a blog post. First up is Francis Rodino with his video for "Higher ground", which features a lady who ought to be very cold.

The second is a video from one of the artists who have managed to find me, rather than vice versa. Interestingly, I'm not that big a fan of rap, but this is one of the few that manages to slide past because it's only a part . So enjoy Left Step Band and "Weird Green" - a video which incidentally has been made by the band using some free animation software called Muvizu.

Who I've been looking at

Stickboy
I don't often rate artists with more than one star if it's the first time I've heard anything from them, but it's quite obvious from what I've heard of Stickboy so far that there's a potential four star plus on offer and likely quickly too. Given the number of tracks he has up on soundcloud and the fact I haven't found a single one I dislike in the couple of hours I've spent listening so far, I'm already hovering on the border of three stars, never mind the two I just gave. I'd describe the music as guitar based folk, but it's particularly outstanding for its production qualities (for a home-based artist) and the lyrics which are a great reminder of why I think we still have the best songwriters in the UK. So if you only listen to one new artist this month, make it this one, I promise you won't regret it.

Derek Webb
Matthew Ebel is always mentioning this artist, so when he decided to do a very rare public live internet show, I thought I'd check him out. Wasn't overly impressed myself - nothing he played made any real impact on me, though it was a pleasant enough listen and the guy can sing for sure.

Daniel Ward-Murphy
Daniel has decided to try to get a second album recorded, but instead of using a third party fundraising site, he's decided to try and collect the money himself using a Fundrazr widget. There's no official timelimit set, but Dan has said if it doesn't look like it will reach target he'll refund the money raised (minus Paypal fees). So far so good - I've got absolutely no problem with this idea in this case based on my past experience with him as he's never given me any reason to doubt that he'll do what he says.

But I find myself torn.

Why? The answer is twofold.

Firstly there's the knowledge of what I've experienced over the past six years.

The second reason is perhaps best explained if you've read his open letter about the project. The ultimatum is contains may be unintentional, but the knowledge it's there in the first place still grates. My head really can't get past the "give me the money to make this album or I'll stop making music" idea.

So on the one hand I have one of the "good guys" that I'd love to see make a second album, but given the budget set and the fact that only a digital album seems to be on offer, I'd be expecting it might well take at least a couple of years to raise that kind of money based not only on the last time, but also what I've seen of other artists and their fanbases since. Which means that on the other I'm left wondering about the commitment level and patience based on the contents of his open letter and his response to my question of how long the fundraising would be open for. Is he really up for the timescale I'm thinking? (assuming no miracle huge level funders in the current economic climate). The timing and subject matter of a recent blog post I read, couldn't have been more appropriate or relevant on this subject.

So my current plan is to wait. My finances are planned out for the next few months already, meaning it would almost certainly be late spring before I could consider spending money on this anyway. I'm concerned at the size of the target he's set based on what I know, but I'll also be keeping an eye on how things develop.

Cheryl has released her first full album "Mermaid", under the name Jade Diary since splitting off from her band and deciding to go solo. Whilst I've not heard enough to convince me into a purchase, I'd highly recommend getting the physical album if you're interested, as it's got some of the most beautiful artwork I've seen in a while, particularly on the CD itself.

I don't know much about saintsaviour, except that I found them as a result of Soundcloud radio and was immediately attracted to the track I'd heard "Woman Scorned". And I haven't yet had time to try and chase up any further information,

I've joined the mailing list for The Traps, though they're fairly quiet on the mailing front. But I did receive a notification of their second video through this which says the song is available for free download on 19th November. Now I really ought to find the time to get out and see if they are any good live, seeing as they appear to be a fairly local band.

Yes, someone out there did it. They created a mashup of Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" and PSY's "Gangnam Style". And it's rather catchy in a one-hit-wonder kind of way. You can check it out here - if you think you can cope.

Lily Brooke is another find from Soundcloud. There haven't been any updates to the profile for a year, but if indeed she was 14 at the time of the uploads then that would make her only 15 now, yet she already has quite a voice. If you don't believe me, then check out her Youtube channel, which does have some more recent material. I'll be interested to see how her songwriting develops and whether she decides to pursue a career in music.

The sites I've been looking at

ONErpm
From an artist point of view, this site appears to be an alternative to CD Baby, claiming to be able to distribute your album to a wider range of sites (iTunes, Amazon etc.) for a lower setup cost. The FAQ shows the prices in dollars, but I'm seeing the same data in GBP i.e. where it says 10 dollars it shows me 10 pounds, which does lead me to question that information as the exchange rate definitely isn't anywhere near 1:1. As a result, I'm going to quote from here on using numbers rather than currency. The artist can set an album price at 8.99, 6.99 or 4.99 with individual tracks being set as 0.89, 0.69 or 0.49 accordingly. The artist will then receive 85% of the revenues for tracks sold from the ONErpm site itself or via their Facebook widget. For all other sites that ONErpm distribute the music to, they give the artist 85% of the money they receive from those sites. There is a one-time setup cost of 10.00 per track or 34.99 per album for distribution to more than 30 global music services, or you can specify individually at 1.99 per service. Pricings for distribution to premium services, mobile services and DJ services are also available on the site. The site can also supply UPC codes for albums and ISRC codes for tracks if you don't have them already.

In addition to the three pricing tiers previously mentioned the site supports "name your price" downloads and "free track in exchange for email" options. Money is paid to an artist via Paypal.

From the fan point of view, purchases from the ONErpm site mean you get BOTH the original wav file and the mp3 with unlimited streaming and streaming before purchase available on the site itself. On the minus side, not every album on the site is available for purchase in every country, and so far I'm finding it's the names I tend to recognise as being more well-known (rather than completely obscure) where this seems most likely to apply. I'm also not convinced on the information given about the Facebook widget, which seems to suggest that someone has to "Like" before they are allowed to play the track from the Facebook widget - this seems rather back-to-front i.e. how do you know if you like something until you've actually heard it?

All in all, a site which seems potentially worth a look whether you be artist or music lover, but with a lot of the pricing information seemingly in conflict between the FAQ and what is actually displayed and the reputation of CD Baby, I'm not entirely convinced by the idea that this is a better option.

Sellaband
There's still no sign of the "new website" at time of writing. Likewise no surprise there's no sign of albums from the 2 artists from here I'm still waiting on. In fact, Lori Greco seems to be expecting yet another 4-6 months before she releases, meaning the bets are on as to whether she can even manage to release an album before 4 years after fundraising has passed, seeing as the 3 year mark passed a few months ago. There are hints that Cubworld might actually be getting close to release as he recently tweeted that 8 of 10 tracks were mixed. Who knows - maybe I'll get a birthday present.

In the meantime, I got to watch some bending of the rules in October, when an artist had their budget reduced by 300 euros on the last day before their profile was due to be deleted, only for them to fail to meet this deadline too. Seems someone then tweaked the numbers behind the scenes, as we went through several hours with the artist showing a signup date in the main listing of 24hrs after that found on their own profile, not only in terms of the signup timestamp but also comments and blog postings left too. The extra 24hrs given by the tweaked times meant the artist did reach the reduced budget (which was then left to run the normal 2 week grace for a budget change) and the dates were tweaked back to make it look as if nothing had happened. Which left me wondering if they'd have done the same for a non-featured artist or not.

Also, a couple of artists who had failed to meet their budgets the first time, failed in their second attempt. It seems one has resigned for a third try, but currently only has a fraction of the money they had when their profile got deleted for the second time. The numbers on the site are also heading back further apart again i.e. instead of less artists signing up but getting a higher percentage of budget, the number of artists is increasing slowly again but the number on at least 1% of budget is struggling to stay at the 50 mark. But one piece of good news was John C Fraser returning to the site under his new name of Please Be Frank and raising a budget in just a couple of weeks, proving it's perfectly possible to raise your budget on Sellaband if you bring your fanbase with you.

And finally...
My review of the year post will be along next. Hopefully in the next couple of days. As well as my top songs and albums of the year, this time you'll be able to discover who managed to upset a result I was originally expecting and some of the conclusions I've drawn as a result of the fan funding I've been doing since I last funded on Sellaband.

Why I'm spending less on music

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 00:34:00 +0000

It looks like we'll be moving and the house is currently being tidied as a result. I realised during this process that a lot of the CDs I've bought aren't actually in shelves where you might expect them to be, but instead are lurking around the computer. And that got me to thinking. I do have music only in digital form, most usually when a physical copy isn't available, but how exactly does my physical music collection so far shape up? And what might it tell me about my buying habits and how they would evolve in a digital only world?

The results are interesting and may add another piece to the jigsaw of why music sales are on the decline.

This doesn't cover digital-only artists in my collection, nor does it cover artists whose CDs are elsewhere, but from the number of CDs I've packed, I believe it to be a significant enough sample of the music I own. Singles are not included (in fact I own very few of those in physical form) but the figures are obtained from adding together the number of albums and EPs I own for each artist.

The rating system
The first thing I had to do was come up with a rating system for the music I own. Whilst this is based loosely around the rating system I use for my main blog posts, I've also weighted it towards the likelihood of a purchase of more music from that artist, based on the purchases previously made.

Bit of a disaster really. Seems the only tracks I liked were whatever I'd heard before I got the album. Doesn't rule out buying singles in future, but it will probably take a lot to convince me into an album.

Not bad, not great. Maybe the odd track I like, maybe the odd track I dislike, but in the main it's nice background take-it-or-leave-it music. Probably not going to go out of my way for a new purchase here, but when I've got spare money there's a chance I might buy something (but it will have to grab my attention first).

Liking about half, with most (if not all) of the rest as take-it-or-leave-it. Likely to buy more but might not. Depends on the mood I'm in, the money available and what I hear in advance of the release.

A few tracks here and there I'm not so fond of, but I'm in love with the majority. Unless there's a change of musical direction, I'll be looking to buy more.

Struggling to find anything that fits the take-it-or-leave-it category, never mind tracks I dislike. This is pure love - give me more!

The breakdown
Having decided on a rating system, I then proceeded to assign each artist to a rating. I also counted the number of CDs I own for each of the artists in question and applied some ranges. Here's what I found

One star artists

Cds Owned           Number of artists
1                                19
2-4                              2
5-9                              0
10+                             0

Two star artists

Cds Owned           Number of artists
1                                29
2-4                              8
5-9                              0
10+                             0

Three star artists

Cds Owned           Number of artists
1                                5
2-4                           14
5-9                             6
10+                            1

Four star artists

Cds Owned           Number of artists
1                                2
2-4                             4
5-9                             1
10+                            1

Five star artists

Cds Owned           Number of artists
1                                0
2-4                             0
5-9                             2
10+                            1

In addition to the above I found 4 compilation albums, but I'm obviously not including these in the main count as they cover multiple artists.

The conclusions
First of all, wow. I've found CDs from nearly 100 different artists lurking in the vicinity of my computer rather than with the rest. I'd make a guess there's nearly the same again in the CD rack. I've only been collecting music in CD format for about 15 years, though I obviously have some that were originally released earlier than this due to getting back catalog items. As a rough estimate, that means I've been buying an average of 2 CDs a month over the past 15 years, which puts me firmly in music lover territory.

As might be expected, in general I only own one CD for any artist I've rated as one star, whereas the more stars, the more CDs I'm likely to own for an artist. It's also not unreasonable to expect that some of the 3 star artists may gain a star (or two?) over time, particularly if I don't own more than one or two of their albums at present. (also possible for other artists, though less likely if they have less than 3 stars at present)

But for the rather shocking conclusion of why it looks like even a music lover like me will be spending much less on music in future, you need to understand the change that the swap to digital is having on me.

My digital future
When I start to look at some of the dates on the CDs, it's clear that my buying habits have already started to change. For starters, I'm actually quite shocked at the percentage of artists I rated at 1-2 stars out of the total artist CDs owned, but sorted by date I'm seeing a noticeable decrease in my purchases of these over time. Some of that is due to the financial crisis of the past few years, but not all. The internet is clearly having the effect of making me more picky about the albums I actually buy, because I'm now using the likes of streaming services and Youtube when I haven't already rated an artist as 4 stars or more to listen to what's on offer first.

Based on the above information, if the CD were to vanish tomorrow, I predict the following would happen in my case.

1. I'll only be buying full albums for about 10% of the artists where I'd have considered buying an album in the past. (4-5 star artists)
2. About 25% of the artists where I would have considered an album purchase in the past, will likely land up selling about half the tracks on that album to me instead. (3 stars)
3. Approximately 40% of the artists where I would have considered an album purchase in the past will likely land up selling only one or two tracks from that album to me. (2 stars)
4. The remaining 25% will likely only sell the occasional track that I've heard and hence know I like. (1 star)
5. I'll almost certainly start buying the occasional track I hear and like from other artists where I haven't considered a CD before.

This is bad news for artists. Here in the UK most artist albums can be bought for £6.99-8.99, but single tracks are usually 99p each. Assuming 10 tracks per album, it looks like my money won't stretch as far if I move to a track based rather than album based purchase system, doesn't it? But it turns out that's not the real problem.

Leaning towards the generous end of the spectrum, my album spend would be around £200 a year (24 albums at £8-9 each). Given the 10:25:40:25 split my new spend for a year on digital only would be as follows

£20-25 on full albums (2-3 artists)
£30 for half album sales (6 artists at 99p a track for 5 tracks)
£20-30 for a few tracks (~10 artists at 99p a track for 2-3 tracks)
£6 for occasional tracks ( 6 artists at 99p a track for 1 track)
Total: £76-91

Yes, you're seeing right. By switching to digital I'm automatically spending half or less of what I do currently. Even without taking aspects such as piracy or shared files from friends into account as ways of obtaining music instead.

But as stated above, digital opens up the possibilities for artists to sell tracks to me where they wouldn't have stood a chance of selling an album before. But to make up the difference, that means I need to be buying tracks from something like another 100 artists a year. (assuming I buy 1 track at 99p per artist). That means I need to hear another 2 new tracks every week that I like enough to want to buy (think of it as the track needing to hit the equivalent of a 4 or 5 star rating on my scale before I'll consider buying). And at the moment I can say for a fact that doesn't happen.

So it looks like I'm heading towards spending maybe 75% of what I do currently if I completely switch away from buying music on a physical album basis. And then only if I can find an average of one extra track a week

But instead of looking for more new tracks to buy, I could spend the difference on something like a £10 a month streaming service instead. But if I were to have an "all I could eat" stream that played exactly what I asked it to, what would be the point in buying anything? Going with this model, I'd still only be spending about 60% of that £200.

And another problem? I'm splitting my money 5 times as many ways as before, if I'm now supporting 124 artists a year rather than just 24. If I were spending the full £200, that means an artist getting more like £1.60 compared to the £8-9 before (minus overheads in both cases). On average an artist would need 5 times as many people to buy their music for the same income under these rules. And if I'm only spending half what I used to, the reality is 10 times the number of people as before. Artists may now have a better chance at getting a share of a pot of money under digital, but equally there are only so many ways the pot can be divided before everyone essentially gets nothing. Basic result: the number of successful artists drops (as do the complete failures) but we increase the number of starving ones more or less tenfold.

Final thoughts
I'd be extremely interested to see the results of anyone else doing a similar experiment as I may not be typical of a music lover. I'd also be interested in the thoughts of the average consumer (Do you buy one CD a month or less, for starters?) as the idea of £10 a month streaming may actually mean these people paying more than before and picking up some of my slack. One thing is for sure, I need to be discovering a lot more music that I really, really like every single week, or I am clearly going to be spending a lot less on music than I have done previously. Clearly a very bad statement for a music lover to be making.

Selling music as non-music

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 04:00:00 +0000

If you already know about my rating system then skip on down to the next header, otherwise here's the lowdown.

The rating system
The rating system I use for this blog is somewhat unique. It's not a reflection of how much I like the music itself as much as it is of how far I am along the process of conversion from consumer to fan. So, over time you may well see some of these ratings go up if I mention an artist again. And indeed go down, as musical changes of direction or failure to keep my interest are just some of the reasons that may affect a rating.

Congratulations, you've made a temporary blip of interest on my radar. Now how are you going to keep it?

I've seen enough of you to recognise and remember you, but I'm undecided so I'm not really following you (yet). I may make a spur of the moment decision to check in on what you're up to once in a while, but even that's no guarantee. May also apply to artists I am aware of, but whose music I've decided I don't have enough interest in to want to pursue further based on what I've heard.

I'm liking what I hear in general, but I still wouldn't describe myself as a fan. I will be wandering past your site occasionally, and there is something like a 50% chance I'll be buying your next offering once I find out about it, providing I have the money available.

Now I am a fan, so the chances are I'll be past your site once every month or two at least. There's a 90%+ chance your next offering is already sold, and occasionally I might even be going for something more than the basic package (if you have one)

Reserved for very few, this is about as close to internet stalker as you can get. I am actively watching because I do not want to miss your next release date, tour in my area etc. etc. You may not always be aware of the fact I'm looking over your shoulder to see what you're up to, but trust me, I'm there on a weekly if not more like a daily basis. Depending on how you tend to release your information, I may well be signed to your mailing list as well.

Video of the month
I have UK comedian Dave Gorman to thank for this month's video from an artist I'd never heard of before I caught his tweeted link. So without further ado, take a listen to Scottish artist Admiral Fallow and a track they released last year called Squealing Pigs.

And if you're in the USA this September/October and you like what you hear, you have the chance to catch them live on their first North American tour.

Who I've been looking at
I got an email from Markus Nylund, a young artist from Finland I first encountered nearly 10 years ago. Well, not quite so young now perhaps if we consider that timescale. Anyway it said he is going to university in the Autumn and is done with music and has uploaded some of his more recent recordings (all as free download) on Soundcloud - I guess as a leaving present if you like. You'll find them under the name Sunlight Heart. I'm left wondering by this announcement - is it possible to "grow up" past what I describe as "the artist's soul", or will he be back at some point? It may be possible to be "done with music" if you have "the artist's soul" but that doesn't mean the music is done with you. And as I saw that spark of "artist's soul" when we met several years ago, I'm not yet convinced he has indeed let go

Ironically a couple of days before that email, I found a business card from Ruth Angell, a young violinist I'd met at one of the gigs I saw Markus play at when he was in England a very long time ago. She'd just started experimenting with adding vocals to her music and was still rather nervous about performing in public (despite the fact the audience in this case happened to be an audience of 3 and then only if you included the barman) . I took her card at the time and didn't really think anything more of it until I ran across it this month and decided to check out whether she was still out there making music. Well wow, what a difference a few years can make. She recorded her first album as part of acoustic duo Peacock Angell last year, is part of the folk group The Rainbow Chasers, put together by Fairport Convention founding member Ashley Hutchings and also performs with a number of other artists.

And perhaps a lesson to learn from this experience if you are an artist. Just because a contact or business card doesn't lead to something within a few weeks or months, it doesn't mean it's a failure. Rather if I hadn't taken her card at the time (or hadn't been offered it), I would probably have completely forgotten about her and not looked again. Always remember this - you never know if or when something will bear fruit.

Francis Rodino's track "Higher ground" was used for a video on the British Armed forces news website celebrating the armed services involvement with the 2012 Olympics. You can see the video here.

A couple of artists I've encountered this month have the common theme of approaching music as non-music. The first of these that got my attention Beck is selling an album that isn't recorded. Instead, what you get for your money is the sheet music for all twenty of the songs on the album, and it's up to you and/or your musical friends to come up with the musical interpretation. This article from Forbes and its follow-on explains why this is an innovative idea which may inspire the user-generated content generation.

The second music as non-music idea is by a gentleman called Jeff Boller, who goes by the name The Simple Carnival. Rather than recording an album, he's recording an animated movie in stereoscopic 3D. The songs and associated video clips are being released on the internet as they are mostly finished, but the final product will only be available as digital tracks or as a bluray video disc - there will be no CD. It's currently possible to download the mp3s he's uploaded so far for free in exchange for a tweet or facebook like, but as Jeff is doing all the work on both the recording and the animation (with a few exceptions) by himself, the projected finishing date is currently 2014. If you're interested in the project, keep an eye on him because he may start up a Kickstarter (or similar) project to collect funds when he gets more work done and gets closer to working out a more accurate end date for the project. You'll find a video on his website (approx 25min) showing how he's creating the animation, and for music aficionados, not only does he play nearly all of the wide range of instruments himself, but he also claims to be mostly ignoring modern recording techniques and restricting himself to techniques used before 1980 where possible, so it's well worth a visit. Just remember to take your red-green glasses with you if you want to get the full 3D experience. (You can also get a pair for free if you order his previous album "Girls Aliens Food")

Look Left caught my attention through being mentioned in the text of a Matthew Ebel concert download (apparently one or more of them are particularly noticeable in the audience vocals of the recording). This young band has recorded an impressive 4 full length albums in the past 2 years. Their website is basically their bandcamp page, so there isn't really much information available about them, but you can download all of the aforementioned albums for $8 each. The music seems mainly Americana/folk rock, but there are a diverse range of musical styles in play often within the same song, and particularly in their earlier albums, so it's well worth a stop off to listen to what they have to offer for that fact alone.

I'm not sure which existing artist originally caused this one to pop on my Last FM station but after hearing a couple of different songs over the past few months, I decided to get around to checking out Brianna Gaither. She has an entire album of songs available to stream for free on her site, but disappointingly the only obvious purchase option is iTunes and her site also contains very little information about her or her music. Although the blog page was updated in the last month, her shows page only contains dates for past shows from the last 3 months.

Katie Thompson has just started up a new funding project for an EP on Indiegogo. You can find the details of what she's offering here.

The sites I've been looking at

Tastemakerx
They say that imitation is the best form of flattery and the continuation of last month's story about this site turned out to be someone imitating me. If you recall, I'd posted about a number of artists increasing in price in a short period, all boosted by pretty much the same group of user ids and it was unclear if this was a group of people joining or if someone had created some fake accounts. And that I'd joined in on the buying spree. Well it so happens I'd left a comment on one of the artist pages saying that I thought the price was on its way up fast before I'd worked out this was happening to a number of artists. Another user had also spotted the increases and started leaving a comment on many of the fast movers that the price was being inflated by false accounts. Then it seems he got into an argument with some of the other users on the site involved with buying parts in the artists in question and was told off by one of them for bullying. At which point I can only guess he decided I was creating fake accounts (as a result of the comment I'd left) and tastemakerx weren't doing anything about it and decided to make it look as if I was exactly the same user as him by modifying his profile to use my knifelady avatar. Given the number of users then starting to question if we were the same person and if indeed we had been creating fake accounts, I contacted tastemakerx to step in. After a couple of emails, they reset his avatar to the default one, but not before I'd had to get into a conversation with some of the users involved to try and convince them we were indeed different people, leaving me more than a little irritated, rather than flattered at his stunt. The user in question does still appear to have some kind of a sense of humour though, as the new profile picture they've uploaded is the default tastemakerx one with an added pair of devil horns. It's not the first time I've had problems on a "young" site that I've used heavily (Sellaband and the unofficial forum anyone?) and somehow I doubt it will be the last. Meantime, I now seem to be officially entrenched within the top 10 tastemakers on the site but am not really expecting to get all the way to number one given I've been mixing it with the serious gameplayers for the past couple of weeks and things don't shuffle round that much at the top as a result.

Sellaband
Most notable this month has been the rather strange looking decision of Unter Null to reduce their budget twice despite only being on the site a month or so. First it was reduced to 8000 euros, and then more recently to 7000 which was reached rather rapidly after this and just left to complete its 2 week grace period. Someone who only wanted a month-long fundraiser, or someone who wanted to get out before the "new website"? Your guess is as good as mine. In the meantime, I've heard a rumour that the "new website" due this autumn is basically going to extend fundraising to projects other than music. Hopefully it won't be too much longer now before fact confirms or denies that. In the meantime it's noticeable that the majority of the "promoted artists" on the Sellaband frontpage are now German, but likewise it's the German signups in general that seem to be bringing some believers in the first place. (10 of the current top 50 sorted by % raised are from Germany, with 6 of those on the first page of the site). It's currently looking like the site will evolve into a niche for fundraising for German projects based on the way things seem to be going, rather than the global music fundraising platform originally intended.

And as promised, here's the update on the albums I'm (still) waiting for. Lori Greco passed her 3 year anniversary since reaching target, yet there's still no news on when (if ever) the album will be seen. In the meantime, it seems she's off to Italy, as that trip is pretty much all her tweets have been about recently. Things are also rather quiet in the Cubworld camp despite his three year anniversary getting ever closer as well. He did tweet that he's set a pretty firm release date, but I haven't seen any mention of when that's likely to be.

Pledge
The other artist I'm waiting for is on Pledge Music. After some comments on their profile asking what was going on because there had been no update for over 2 months Vertical Horizon finally posted a video update just a few days ago (ironically the day after I left a comment - coincidence or the knifelady power back at work?) of one of the new songs and showing the individual layers making up the track. However the question of when the album is coming out still remains unanswered despite that being one of the main questions they were asked in the comments.

As a result of this, I'm now watching Ginger Wildheart's new project very closely on there, as it's the first project of his that I'll have been watching from start to finish. Given he raised his budget in less than two hours (it would have been less than one, if Pledge's servers had been able to cope with the load) and last I looked was about to hit 400% of his total, I'm interested to analyse how this project goes on Pledge and see if it confirms the current ideas I have about crowdfunding music in general.

Last FM
Last FM may be about to lose quite a bunch of subscribers. About a week ago it introduced a 6 skip limit for all users, not just non-subscribers. This means you can't skip more than 6 songs before you need to change the station you're listening to, whereas before it was unlimited. This makes the process of music discovery through the site even more time consuming and a lot of users aren't happy with the change. Particularly as the algorithm they use isn't particularly friendly as it tends to offer you the same track for a given artist and/or keeps playing things you've listened to recently, rather than offering tracks in your library that you haven't listened to in a while (hence the nightmare I've been having this past year trying to "train it" to understand what I listen to). Last FM say they can't change their policy due to their licensing agreements, even though several users have offered to pay MORE to have the facility to skip whatever they want. With music licensing being cited more and more often as the reason why people can't listen to what they want, I'm beginning to think the sooner this idea is banned, the better. Otherwise, we'll definitely reach a stage where nobody will want to pay for music at all (several of those who have stated they are cancelling their subscriptions because of this change have said publicly they will go back to sites which are known not to pay musicians). The current system of music licensing is clearly broken and needs to disappear as soon as possible.

The not-pop Jukebox
Not a site, but rather a blog with the subheading "Ignored, Maligned and Forgotten Music". Which pretty much says it all. The blog is updated daily with at least one track embedded into each post. So if you want to listen to music you may not have heard before which comes from a wide range of musical styles, this is a very good place to look.

Rekiosk
Seemingly originally started as a way to sell digital books, the site has now expanded into selling other things digitally as well. The basic idea is that for anything sold from your kiosk (store) on the site, the original creator will get 70% of the cash and you will get about 25% (with the remainder obviously going in site fees) which makes it an interesting looking affliate scheme.

On the plus side, you can add and sell 15 items to your kiosk without attracting a fee for your kiosk. On the minus side, you can only add products already on the site to your kiosk in the first place, unless you can prove you are the original content creator. And at the moment there seems to be very little content available on the site to choose from. Additionally, the payments to you are made using dwolla, rather than one of the better known payment methods such as Paypal and you're required to fill in IRS forms when you open your kiosk. What this means for non-USA citizens is unclear, and their FAQ section doesn't cover that either. However, Pledge Music already have a kiosk on the site, so I'll be keeping an eye on it to see whether it starts to become a more attractive prospect in future.

Current verdict is that it seems an interesting idea but too mired in red tape to attract users. Also without offering an obviously better % to content creators (say 85-90%) than well known services such as iTunes or Amazon, there's very little reason for independents to add their content to the site, as it's unlikely to generate sales without users.

That's all for this month. Hopefully next month's post will come out on time, but with some real life issues needing resolution, I'm likely to become busy around the time I'm due to post.

A Lazy Summer Update

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:22:00 +0000

If you already know about my rating system then skip on down to the next header, otherwise here's the lowdown.

The rating system
The rating system I use for this blog is somewhat unique. It's not a reflection of how much I like the music itself as much as it is of how far I am along the process of conversion from consumer to fan. So, over time you may well see some of these ratings go up if I mention an artist again. And indeed go down, as musical changes of direction or failure to keep my interest are just some of the reasons that may affect a rating.

Congratulations, you've made a temporary blip of interest on my radar. Now how are you going to keep it?

I've seen enough of you to recognise and remember you, but I'm undecided so I'm not really following you (yet). I may make a spur of the moment decision to check in on what you're up to once in a while, but even that's no guarantee. May also apply to artists I am aware of, but whose music I've decided I don't have enough interest in to want to pursue further based on what I've heard.

I'm liking what I hear in general, but I still wouldn't describe myself as a fan. I will be wandering past your site occasionally, and there is something like a 50% chance I'll be buying your next offering once I find out about it, providing I have the money available.

Now I am a fan, so the chances are I'll be past your site once every month or two at least. There's a 90%+ chance your next offering is already sold, and occasionally I might even be going for something more than the basic package (if you have one)

Reserved for very few, this is about as close to internet stalker as you can get. I am actively watching because I do not want to miss your next release date, tour in my area etc. etc. You may not always be aware of the fact I'm looking over your shoulder to see what you're up to, but trust me, I'm there on a weekly if not more like a daily basis. Depending on how you tend to release your information, I may well be signed to your mailing list as well.

Video of the month
I've decided to restart a section I briefly toyed with back when this was my hatchet day blog by including a video I've come across over the past month. Some will be from artists I already know and in other cases it will be the video that might have led me to their discovery.

This month's video is from Remi Miles, an artist I originally discovered on Myspace (and who still doesn't seem to have a website). Enjoy this video from a track he's newly posted this month called "Perfection (YOLO)"

Who I've been looking at
I've had another fairly quiet month in terms of actually looking for artists, but it seems my lazy Summer hasn't been as lazy as I was expecting because once again a number of artists have found me in various ways.

For all those who remember Luckyhorse from their Sellaband days, it seems they've either changed their name or are starting up a different sound. I haven't heard any of their new material yet, but thanks to a tweet from Hogdaddee, I now know they're called The Criminal Hand and have a link to their new Facebook page.

And talking of Sellaband, the fastest moving artist we've seen on there in a long time signed up only about a fortnight ago and is already over a third of her 9000 euro budget, proving it's still possible to make serious headway if you bring your fans in the first place. Unter Null is essentially an electronic project, but including a wide range of elements that make it sound gothic, industrial and trance almost by turns. If I'd still been buying parts there, I'd have been tempted to join in with this one based on what I've heard. No prizes for guessing that unlike many other acts that join Sellaband, this is one that is actually advertising their fundraising effort on the front page of their own website as well as talking to people about it on their social media.

Meanwhile Kabul Dreams have slashed their target from 100,000 euros to a mere 5,000 and will probably complete their funding by the time this post publishes as a result of this change, having less than 100 euros to go the last time I looked. I'm not going to provide a link to their website as it's apparently using a javascript exploit and has sent several different anti-virus products nuts as a result every time I've tried to access it. Not a great advert for an artist.

The big question for the next month is what Aly Cook will do. With less than 7,000 of a 40,000 budget raised on Sellaband and about a fortnight to go before her year is up when I last checked it will be interesting to see whether she decides to make a budget change or not.

Elsewhere Poets of the Fall have been announced as a support act for the Red Hot Chili Peppers on August 1st. Whilst I'd be happier to see them announced as a support act outside of their own country, the fact it seems they're now being considered for major artist support in the first place gives me a little more hope they might actually make it to the UK one day. They've also released an extended version of their recent cd "Temple of Thought" containing 3 extra tracks - 2 live versions of tracks on the album and the "missing" track from their debut album. If you're familiar with their work you'll know the album title for each of their releases has either been a title track for a song on the album, or a key line in one of the songs. The exception to this was their first album, hence the "missing" track they've just released on the extended version called "Signs of Life". However this release has caused some concern and exposed the fact they appear to be following some antiquated practices which really ought to be stamped out in a modern music industry. The first problem is the obvious one that this extended release comes less than 6 months after the original. Whilst designed as a "new release" for German speaking territories, it's led some fans to question why there's a different release in the first place and whether they can buy the extra tracks separately as they're not bottomless pits of money. The second one is the rather bizarre situation that this extended release is available to buy from the artist's own webshop, unless you live in one of the German speaking territories where it is being released, in which case you CAN'T buy it from the artist's own webshop.

Huh? Or rather, how stupid can you get.

The lessons to be learned here, irrespective of whether you are artist or music industry. 1) There is only ONE WORLDWIDE release date for your song (or album of songs) and no such thing as different versions for different territories. Any other option is just encouraging people to go pirate it. 2) If a song/album is available for purchase direct from your own website, it should be available irrespective of where the buyer is coming from.

GD Allan has been putting some more tracks up on his Soundcloud page recently. It's prompted me to start following him on there as a result.

Mysti Mayhem has been posting some new material on Reverbnation recently. "How do you know" has a bit of an R'n'B vibe going on, whereas the acoustic "Mary don't you weep" is much more of a blues track. Both songs (along with others) are downloadable from Reverbnation, so why not check them out. She's also got some shows coming up in North Carolina, the area she's now living.

Vertical Horizon are busy proving that life isn't really any greener on the other side of the fence as far as crowdfunding is concerned. There's still no sign of or release date for the CD I paid for on Pledge Music back at the beginning of the year and their last update was at the beginning of June. Considering Ben Folds has signed up, raised funds AND announced a September release all in the time after my money was actually taken for this one, it really does seem to prove that artists are going to have to get it together if they want to take a publicly funded route. Crowdfunding is still in its infancy, but if it's to become mainstream then artists are going to have to start being a lot more reliable rather than leaving people hanging for months or even years after their money has been taken. Bet you wouldn't get to treat a label who'd financed you like this, so why such disregard for fans? There are plenty of other artists out there wanting funds and I'm hoping the crowdfunding industry will move towards supporting those artists with proven reliability and adding more protection for fans against those untried or just plain unreliable rather than standing by and wanting nothing to do with it as the case is at present. It may sound harsh, but enforced penalty clauses are something I'd really like to see adopted for crowdfunding based on my experiences to date, given artists in general seem to be incapable of doing anything in a timely manner unless they've been through the wringer at a label first (and even then I'm seeing exceptions). Seems the lesson that being independent means that YOU are the one accountable for the money you've just taken is something which artists are currently not being taught strongly enough. And that's a situation that really needs to change (and urgently) if you want to stand any chance of convincing people to pay for music, particularly up front.

As a statistic for you. Of the 36 artists whose projects reached funding on Sellaband where I was involved there are only 6 I would definitely consider funding again based on my experience there. A further 19 I might consider funding. That means there are 11 artists I probably wouldn't or definitely wouldn't consider funding again. On Pledge Music I don't have a wide enough sample to compare (just the 2 artists to date, one of which I'd funded before on Sellaband), but with my feelings currently starting to lean in a negative direction on an artist I've funded on Pledge as well, is it really any wonder I think crowdfunding platforms need to be taking a more active role with artists and communicating the results to their funders rather than leaving them to their own devices?

So I now consider that's a "late" album from Pledge Music (given the email when I funded them stated a March 2012 release date) as well as the two (much longer) overdue from Sellaband. Of the two Sellaband ones, Lori Greco will become the second artist I bought parts in to pass 3 years since funding completion during August, so bets are now officially on as to whether she will take longer than Natalia Safran's current record (All the evidence I see suggests she will). It's also worth noting that it will soon be 5 years since Lori first signed up on Sellaband, so I really am beginning to wonder now what on earth she's been doing in all that time, and can only assume she was nowhere near ready to make an album when she signed up. I'm willing to bet that if her funding had been label based she'd have been hit with a penalty clause for non-delivery by now. If further evidence were needed that crowdfunding sites need to start protecting consumers against artists, as far as I'm concerned you can't get a better example than this.

It's not often I pick up an album I'd decided to avoid, but a combination of some Amazon funds and the fact a song from it came round on my Last FM station made me change my mind. I've been a Chris Rea fan for a long time but after the illness he only recovered from after they'd removed rather a lot of internal organs he'd announced he was going to be going back to his roots and start writing blues. I'd given the resulting 12-disc behemoth he'd come up with based round the history and development of blues music a try when it came out and it turned out to be too much of a change in musical direction for me. So when he'd released "another blues album" a couple of years after, I decided to give it a miss at the time. However the album in question "Santo Spirito Blues" is the one I've now picked up because, well, it may be blues influenced but unlike the previous 12-disc it's actually back to sounding like the Chris Rea I know and love. Looks like I may land up looking out for his next album on its release after all.

Miranda Shvangiradze is an artist I've picked up on as a result of Soundcloud radio and in my first listening session on it too. More about what that is under the sites section, but what you'll find here is mainly instrumental electronic music with a classical influence. The recommendation came about as a result of the fact I listen to Fabrizio Paterlini. You'll find lots of music you can download for free from her Soundcloud page but I haven't seen any mention of a website for her.

This month's "whatever happened to" moment happened when I decided to take a look and see what Pete Strobl was up to these days. Hadn't seen anything of him in a while, so the most obvious thing to do was stop by his music blog. Sadly things are looking rather quiet over there as it seems his last post was made in January 2011 but after leaving a comment over there I got an email from him. Apparently he's been writing a book and working with Van Halen as well as wishing he had a lot more hours in the day (amongst other things). Here's hoping we'll see some more articles from him soon.

Meanwhile on Twitter a familiar face appeared in the list of people following me. Fred, or Meo (as more may remember him) of Meo and the Alternative Preachers is the familiar face in question, but I've not got around to checking out what he's currently up to yet.

The Sites I've been looking at

Sellaband
I spent the first couple of weeks this month fighting Sellaband's support system as it seems their server migration managed to break my Sellaband profile in a rather large way. I've heard of sites sending you an email asking you to verify your signup before, but never a site sending an email asking you to verify that you've asked for support before your support request actually gets sent. As a result, the problems with my profile took about a week longer to fix than they ought to have done, as that's how long it took me to figure out what the situation was. Things did get fixed quite rapidly when the request actually reached Sellaband and I decided to withdraw the money on my profile when things got back to normal due to the uncertainty over what the "new concept" will be and hence to minimise any impact due to changes in what will happen with revenue and/or payouts. On that score, Sellaband have sent a link to a questionnaire round by email. Whether it asks you different questions if you're an artist, I obviously don't know (one of the first questions is whether you're on Sellaband as artist or believer), but it does ask some interesting questions such as whether you want revenue option to be available, whether you think Sellaband should hold live performances and whether you want a CD for your investment. However, it's hard to understand exactly what Sellaband want to get from the answers to these questions - if they've already decided on their new concept/new direction and that it will be launched in the Autumn, this seems to be asking relevant questions too late to be of any worth for that. They've also announced a concert in Berlin to celebrate their 6th anniversary, but I won't be attending as it doesn't seem appropriate, given the only thing I'm currently capable of "celebrating" is the fact I'm still waiting for albums I should have received a couple of years ago (one of the reasons I've refused to buy parts in artists on there since.)

TastemakerX
After only my second month using the site, I seem to have already worked myself into the top 20 players (and have gained a shedload of followers as a result), helped at least in part by investing in some very well known names who were at or near minimum price when they certainly shouldn't have been. But moment of the month on what is still a very young site came just over a week ago when a number of profiles started buying into the same group of about a half dozen artists, leading one player to comment on many of these that someone was cheating by setting up multiple accounts to inflate artist prices. On the one hand, a possibility, on the other you would get the same effect with a group of friends signing up, or even potentially fans of an artist. Whatever the case, I did dive into the buying spree and stand to make a decent profit on a couple of the artists involved if I decide to sell in the near future. So far, the profiles that went on a mass buying spree haven't gone on a mass selling spree to reap their profits, nor does it seem the site creators have taken any action. I'm watching closely to see what (if anything) happens next on this one.

Soundcloud
Someone has created a Soundcloud radio app. Essentially it plays tracks you have favourited on the site, tracks that people you follow have favourited and also tracks that people they follow have favourited. As a result I've already picked up on one interesting artist (as stated earlier) so I might start using this a bit more to see what other discoveries it will lead to. In the meantime, I'm probably the one responsible if I'm following you on Soundcloud and you've seen a sudden jump in your Soundcloud plays as I've had a few hours listening to the app already.

That's all for this month. Stay tuned for next month when I'll let you know if there's been any further news on the three overdue crowdfunded albums I'm waiting for (two from Sellaband and one from Pledge).

The Taste Test

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 14:28:00 +0000

If you already know about my rating system then skip on down to the next header, otherwise here's the lowdown.

The rating system
The rating system I use for this blog is somewhat unique. It's not a reflection of how much I like the music itself as much as it is of how far I am along the process of conversion from consumer to fan. So, over time you may well see some of these ratings go up if I mention an artist again. And indeed go down, as musical changes of direction or failure to keep my interest are just some of the reasons that may affect a rating.

Congratulations, you've made a temporary blip of interest on my radar. Now how are you going to keep it?

I've seen enough of you to recognise and remember you, but I'm undecided so I'm not really following you (yet). I may make a spur of the moment decision to check in on what you're up to once in a while, but even that's no guarantee. May also apply to artists I am aware of, but whose music I've decided I don't have enough interest in to want to pursue further based on what I've heard.

I'm liking what I hear in general, but I still wouldn't describe myself as a fan. I will be wandering past your site occasionally, and there is something like a 50% chance I'll be buying your next offering once I find out about it, providing I have the money available.

Now I am a fan, so the chances are I'll be past your site once every month or two at least. There's a 90%+ chance your next offering is already sold, and occasionally I might even be going for something more than the basic package (if you have one)

Reserved for very few, this is about as close to internet stalker as you can get. I am actively watching because I do not want to miss your next release date, tour in my area etc. etc. You may not always be aware of the fact I'm looking over your shoulder to see what you're up to, but trust me, I'm there on a weekly if not more like a daily basis. Depending on how you tend to release your information, I may well be signed to your mailing list as well.

Who I've been looking at

A combination of being the summer and the fact I looked at rather a lot last month has meant I've had a fairly quiet month this time around as far as looking for artists is concerned.

I did buy Civilized Tears old album "Autobiography of a Nobody" when Tim Bennett mentioned on Twitter that he was making some available for sale again. What arrived when I finally found my way into the bright pink metallic Jiffy bag was a completely personalised CD copy with handwritten note as well. The CD itself contains 11 different tracks, some demos, some live and a couple of which you'll find were re-recorded on "Miseducated", the album he raised funds for at Sellaband. If you're interested in getting your own copy, contact him.

I gained my first follower on Last FM in the form of Ellhelios who doesn't appear to have his own website but instead is present on various other sites including Reverbnation. The music he writes seems to be a combination of gothic, electronic and new wave elements giving a musical style he therefore describes as "dark wave". I much prefer the pure instrumental tracks of what I've heard so far.
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Now I don't know whether you're familiar with a song that's been around the charts recently called "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepson, but this next artist link came about as a result of a few bizarre looking tweets from a friend and the conversation which followed. Be warned this is not for those easily offended or upset, as not only is this a parody of the aforementioned song but given what happened in Miami about a month ago could be viewed in somewhat bad taste. MC Chris has released the zombie-themed "Tasty Face" in aid of an American cancer charity. You can check out and buy a copy here, or visit Youtube for the "Dawn of the Dead" themed video that goes with the song.

Ginger Wildheart released the album he had funded through Pledge Music this month. Pledgers got a triple album (called 555%) but the high street release (called 100%) which contains a selection of the tracks from the triple album chosen by those who funded it was released this week. In the mid-week UK charts it is listed at number 9, above some much more well known and record label funded artists. Its official first chart position will happen on Sunday, and whilst there's no guarantee of how long it will stay in the charts, this is still looking like it will be fairly impressive for a fan-funded artist with no major label money behind them.

The sites I've been looking at

Sellaband
So just when I felt like I was starting to tick boxes saying the site was improving, what happened this month meant it was more like the calm before the storm. Sellaband moved its servers and pages on the site were only randomly accessible for more than a fortnight as a result. Needless to say, the disruption means it has shed something like another 50 artists in terms of the number of current fundraisers, although it does appear to have returned to a stable state in the second half of the month.

Towards the end of the disruption period, Sellaband sent out a newsletter with an apology for the disruption, but explaining that now the server move has been done, we can expect a new website and a change to the business model in the Autumn. Given past site history has made things worse for (potential) believers every time such changes have taken place, it's fair to say this news fills me with trepidation and leaves me wondering what on earth is going to get screwed up this time. Not to mention the fact it annoys me somewhat that believers are still being left hanging on albums funded well over 2 years ago.

Tastemakerx
Billed as a social media game for music discovery, you can either play this on the website, or download it as an iPhone app. There's currently no version for Android or other phone types. I've spent some time this month on the web version which is completely free to play. Essentially you get given 25,000 of the in-game currency (called notes) and then use it to buy shares in artists. The game then consists of trading i.e. buying and selling shares in artists in order to increase your rating, with factors involving your total portfolio worth and your portfolio value relative to other players taken into account as well. So just like the stock exchange the general idea is to buy low and sell high to give you more virtual currency to play with. Buying shares in an artist is free, but 5% of a sale is taken as commission. The site is still fairly new out of beta and so currently seems to have around 4000 players. There are obviously a number of ways to play - do you buy shares in artists you actually like, do you buy shares in a popular (but probably expensive) artist aiming to hold them until (or if) the site becomes popular and their thousands/millions of fans turn up, do you buy shares in artists that are currently making steady gains, do you buy shares in artists that look underpriced relative to their popularity, or do you buy shares in really cheap artists in the hopes of making a significant profit? All I'll say of my own strategy is that it involves elements of the short, medium, long and jurassic, but you might struggle more than you think to work out the right category for all concerned. It does seem to be having some success though, as I've been slowly crawling upwards in the player charts and may even crack the top 100 in the next week or so at the rate things are going.

Having played steadily for a couple of weeks, it's allowed me to see the good, the bad and the ugly that's been present. Whilst the "game" itself can be addictive, I hadn't been on the site long when someone worked out how to use a flaw in the trading system to rapidly increase both their available notes and their rating without needing others to trade. I sent an email to Tastemakerx the first time I spotted it in play and the player in question got suspended for a whole couple of hours, but not before others had also worked out how they had been doing it and started to do the same themselves - some in an obvious way and some in a less obvious way. Suffice it to say it took a couple of days of this before someone decided to step in and this time a number of accounts have disappeared and for a much longer period than the previous one (although whether this is a permanent deletion or merely another round of suspensions is currently unclear). In addition, the most recent set of changes also means it needs a larger number of players to affect short term trading than before. Not necessarily a bad thing at the moment due to the low number of players and the fact it mostly counters the flaw, but without a regular influx of new players, there is a danger that trading could stagnate altogether longer term.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for the first artist fanbase to show up en masse to get some exposure for an artist, as even an unknown with as little as 20 odd fans showing up to buy shares the same day would almost certainly cause a riot of trading which would leave the artist in the charts on the site for a few days or weeks, based on how easily I've seen one or two players alone were able to influence them. (if you're on 50-100+ fans spread over a few days, then even better)

At the moment, I'm currently feeling that the site is more about "the game" than it is about actual music discovery. This is further compounded by the information on the site itself. Oddly for most artists a wikipedia link and a myspace link is provided, yet no twitter or facebook link, even though those icons are available. And the big thing missing from the links part is the obvious one of a link to the artist's own website. The site also appears too tightly linked to Apple for my liking. As well as the obvious fact that the app is for iPhone only, there is no music to listen to on individual artist pages, but just a big "download from iTunes" button. This leads me to suspect that music might appear on artist pages, but only if you have iTunes installed. And if that isn't the case and installing iTunes has no effect, then the "music discovery" part is basically missing. It's also been interesting to try searching for different artists I've encountered in the past 6 or so years, as the site claims it will add any artist who can prove they have released music. The majority of their existing artist base and info seems to have been taken from Last FM and their other partners, but I already know of artists who have profiles on Last FM that don't appear on Tastemakerx - some of whom have released multiple albums. Of the artists I've searched for, who is included and who isn't (and what your share price is, if you are included) is therefore quite revealing in aspects of how your promotion/exposure on sites in general (and in the USA in particular) is working.

There's also a distinct lack of "social" about the game as it currently stands. Sure it's possible to "follow" someone, but all that really does is give you a link to get to their profile page quickly. Whilst each player profile shows icons for Facebook and Twitter, there's nothing on your settings page to allow you to add these if you wish and there's no forum or discussion area for players to chat and get to know each other either. That said, there are obviously features in development as I've seen a few rounds of obvious changes appear with the daily chart update, and I'm guessing the site was created more with mobile phone than Internet users in mind in the first place.

And coming back to Internet users, that also leads me to mention that if you're still on XP, then your best bet is probably to use Firefox to access the site as it doesn't work properly with IE8 (the latest version of Internet Explorer that XP users are able to download). Hopefully not so much of a problem when Windows 8 comes out, as remaining XP users will mostly upgrade to 7 or 8 then, but definitely an issue to be aware of in the short term.

Overall, I'm enjoying the site, but I have yet to be convinced it can (or will) be used for music discovery. Something to bear in mind perhaps, but a site well worth a look for some free entertainment otherwise. If you want to find out what I'm up to, you'll find my profile here

That's all for this time around. I'm expecting another quiet month in July, so I might even get around to finishing one of the extra posts I've been contemplating for a while now.

May roundup

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:41:00 +0000

The second artist that found me that caught my interest is Matt Saunders who (slightly confusingly) seems to also go under the names Matt Clearing and A Clearing based on the info I've dragged up from the web so far. I haven't been overly impressed with the tracks I've heard, but the blog entries on the front page of his site giving a "behind-the-scenes insight" into trying to record as a one man operation were definitely interesting. Though perhaps not as interesting as the rather bizarre recent tweet he made that I'm still trying to wrap my head around - "I won't sell lossy music, produce physical media, or set up a lossless store. Can't be bothered, and don't want music to be my job." That really confuses me. Why go to all the effort of recording something and go through the whole process of making it sound as good as you feel you can make it without using any autotune etc. and then state you don't want music as a job? Just when I thought I was getting to understand musicians, this situation leaves me scratching my head and wondering what I'm missing here.

I tripped over John Anealio as a result of following a link from one of the people I follow on Twitter. All the music I've found so far can be downloaded for free from the links on his site. His instruments of choice seem to be guitar or bouzouki and he seems to write purely sci-fi/fantasy/geek themed music, rather than the much wider range someone like Matthew Ebel covers. I haven't had any of the tracks I've listened to so far grab my attention, but I'll probably keep an eye on him for a while in case something does, as he seems to be putting out new material fairly frequently.

Now I have a confession to make. I should have mentioned Sarah's Blue Dress and their monthly "monster mask" competition in last month's post which is when I first spotted it, but by the time I'd finished typing up the majority of the post I'd completely forgotten. Anyway, if you fancy winning a copy of their album, the link I've just given you should take you to the details of how to do so. There are still two more draws for two more album copies to go, so you should still have plenty of time.

It's been one of those months when I've come away disappointed when looking for artists. The main case in question is Marc Supsic who I originally encountered on Sellaband. I've been past his site a couple of times since he left and I decided to take another look this month to see if anything had changed since my last visit. Sadly it hasn't and as the site seemingly hasn't changed since 2009, I'm left wondering whether he's still writing music or not.

Whatever happened to Wetwerks? I remember the controversy when they were in the competition to play at Sellabration and looked like they were going to win until they announced they had parted from their vocalist. Whilst they subsequently put a couple of tracks up using a new vocalist, I remember I wasn't as impressed with him based on the couple of tracks they had recorded. I noticed a while back that their website had disappeared and had wondered whether it was being redone, but another check this month shows it still hasn't resurfaced. Nor have I found any obvious trace of a new band name in its place, or the members I remember being involved with new projects. To say they've disappeared into thin air would seem to be the understatement of the year.

I also went on the trail of Tiffany Gow whose website is over a year out of date on the news front but with no joy as her Facebook profile also appears to be completely inaccessible unless you're a Facebook user. Her Myspace profile was logged into in May though, which suggests she may still be out there somewhere.

The sites I've been looking at

Sellaband
Time for the update I promised you in my previous post and I find myself wondering about coincidental timing as a number of issues have miraculously updated themselves since my last regular post, and mostly within the past couple of weeks. Firstly I'm still waiting on two albums, both of which completed funding a long time ago. We're now only about a couple of months away before Lori Greco will become the second artist I bought parts in to pass three years since funding completion without releasing an album. The last news on her site is from March which says the album will be coming "this year" and even her Twitter feed has been mostly quiet since that. But incredibly within the last couple of weeks, a sample of each of the (still unfinished) tracks from the album got uploaded to her Sellaband page and a message was sent via Sellaband to all her believers apologising for the continued delay but giving no information on when the album is likely to be seen, only that it will be "some months". At this point, I wouldn't like to bet whether she takes longer than Natalia Safran to produce an album or not, but one thing is for sure, the fact that BOTH these ladies have been supported by the same group of believers isn't just giving that group a bad name, as far as I'm concerned it's giving the OTHER artists they have been (and still are) promoting a bad name as well, purely by their association with the group. It's making me a lot less likely to consider supporting any of them in future, irrespective of how they've behaved as individual artists.

Cubworld is the other artist I'm still waiting on, though it seems possible this one may be on its way soon as he tweeted at the beginning of May that he was under pressure from Sellaband to get finished and was hoping to "wrap things up" in the next month. In the meantime, this video is a great preview of one of the album tracks, though it's unclear from the information given as to whether it will be on the album in the same form or not. His three years since completing funding will be up in December.

However, overdue albums aren't the only problem I've had with the site. I had the same sum of money stuck on my "waiting to be transferred" balance for more than a year, although money added on top of it every quarter was getting credited properly a couple of weeks later, and I'd even mailed Sellaband a couple of times about this with no joy. Whether the support ticket I left on their support system in April finally did the trick (though I never received an answer, just the automated reply mail you get back when you raise a ticket), or (once again) whether it was me mentioning the fact I'd be updating the situation with Sellaband in this post that sped things along, I have no idea, but the "waiting" money has finally been transferred.

Several months after their album was released, Sellaband have finally got around to making the Radio Orange tracks available for download by believers, along with a number of other artists where albums had been released (in some cases more than a year ago) but no downloads were showing on the site. However, although Katie Thompson has had her tracks available for download from Sellaband for a while, the "Investments" tab still shows her in the "projects that reached their target" section rather than the "projects that released an album" section. So although some things are getting sorted, the process still seems to be painfully slow with some obvious problems still to be fixed.

Tim Bennett said he'd chosen to go back to Sellaband rather than another funding platform because he reckoned the new management had got their game in order. I can only hope for his sake that they have on the artist side, because everything I'm seeing says it's going to be at least Christmas 2012 before I stand any chance of being convinced that applies to the believer side as well. So I still have no plans to buy parts on the site for the forseeable future, however tempting the artist that signs up - I don't have trust in the site and at the rate things are still moving, it's obviously going to be a long time before I might.

The site itself continues to "slim down", with the number of artists slowly reducing over time. There are now around 650 artists currently fundraising on the site, despite the fact the Sellaband newsletters still mention "thousands of artists" in their text. But the number of artists who manage to reach at least 1% of their budget before being deleted is slowly increasing and finally passed 50 concurrent signups a month or so ago. It will be interesting to see at what point these two figures stop converging as it seems currently only about 1 in 13 signups is capable of raising at least 30 - 100 euros (the typical 1% figure depending on their budget) and not all of those who reach 1% currently go on to reach target.

Soundcloud
I've noticed more and more artists seem to be linking content from here recently and as a result I've decided to come out of the shadows and start becoming more active on the site. You'll find my profile here, although there's not much to see at the moment as I've only linked to a few artists and not left any comments at present.

MusicHype
Currently still in private beta, but reported as due to become public in June, this site promises to be able to identify and track top fans of an artist to make it easier to reward those fans and also identify exactly where in the world fan activity is occurring e.g. to make it easier to know where you ought to be booking a tour. According to the limited information currently available it seems that artists will be able to try the site for free, but will need to pay a (currently undisclosed) sum of money to use the site longer term. I'll be interested to see how exactly they plan to make this work, as initial thoughts are that they will either need the fans to sign up to the site as well, or they must be using automated search technology to identify the artist name being mentioned in twitter feeds, blogs, streaming services "favourite artist" listings, facebook pages etc. and scraping the user identity involved from that. In the first case I'd have to question the worth of a site that requires your fans to sign up too before they can be tracked - after all, that's what your own website and email list should already be for. In the second case, the only real argument I can see for an artist to be using the service is the fact they don't have the time to do the tracking themselves. If artists haven't yet worked out how to search for their own name in a search engine or Twitter or how to find the list of "people talking about this" on Facebook, then perhaps there is a market, but as yet I remain unconvinced that this site will offer anything it's not already possible for an artist to easily achieve for free via their own social profiles and site/mailing lists. No doubt I'll be writing some more about this when the site has more information publicly available, but for now it looks like it will turn into just another attempt to part artists from their money.

Slowbizz
Slowbizz has decided to reinvent itself. I received an email at the beginning of the month on the subject. In a nutshell, what I expected appears to have happened, with people looking at the artists roster but not actually booking concerts. So it seems the person who started the site has decided to change the concept. The site with the revised concept isn't yet live, but is expected to be towards the end of Summer. That is, if it ever goes live at all, given it's currently been converted into a Pinterest board. To quote from the email

We will offer a special role to some of you as the great curators of the Slowbizz ecosystem. There will be 1000 curators all over the world. Their task will be to act as the "gatekeepers" of the BIG exposure that we will offer, free of charge, once a week, to one artist/band. Just one per week, featured on our website and other social properties. One artist that will have the privilege to be discovered by the eyes & ears of thousands of people on a global scale, without any competition. A real privilege. The curators will also be in charge of finding local ambassadors who will enhance the Slowbizz exposure within their proximity network.

What I deeply want is to offer to completely unknown artists the chance to get the exposure they wouldn't be able to afford despite their talent. I want us to become together a "break maker". A kind of label but without any strings attached.

And I want all of this to happen in a simple way, through a network of music lovers, bypassing the usual media.

And so I now am really confused. First off, the email mentions a figure of 7812 people signed to the mailing list. Yet with 65 artists accepted on the roster and most (if not all) of those providing at least 100 of those EACH, not to mention a number of others who will have signed up some of the 100 fans needed by the original concept to be accepted onto the roster (before the change to 50 votes required), it seems to me that the vast majority of that figure will be fans who have limited interest outside of the week that "their" artist is promoted, rather than the site having attracted the "network of music lovers" it needs. I'm also wondering about the size of this promotion, given that thousands of people is basically nothing on a global scale, the site is now supposed to be a non-profit (so where are the promotion funds going to come from) and it's not exactly any more well known than the artists it's supposed to be helping. To attract music lovers a site needs a variety of quality artists in a variety of genres, so to only ever be looking at one artist doesn't strike me as a site people will visit to look for music. i.e. how on earth does promoting one artist a week create a network of music lovers? I'll be interested to see if the site's founder can change my mind when the new concept goes live, but the whole idea progression looks to me something like an original idea with potential that is taking a series of ever larger wrong turns (and looks ill thought out as a result of the huge shifts). But I guess one more "Look at me" site is hardly going to upset the status quo if/when it arrives.

In the meantime, the shift to a Pinterest board also makes very little sense given that it's pretty much impossible to discover anything on that site that you're not already following (or aware of) unless the board owner constantly makes pins so that they maintain a presence on the (ever-changing) recently pinned stuff. I'll be genuinely surprised if the board starts attracting hordes of followers, interest and comments as a result. Give it a few more months and I'm guessing the concept will change again.

And Finally..
If you haven't seen the post I made just before this one offering you a free QR code for you or your band to help with promotion then you might want to click on this link in order to read about that offer.

Want a free QR Code to promote your band?

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Thu, 31 May 2012 17:34:00 +0000

This post was originally meant to be part of one of my regular posts, but due to the size of the one that's imminent and the amount of info I'm about to share, I decided this was worthy of a post on its own.

Essentially I want to try an experiment. So I have an offer for all you musicians/bands out there. I've been playing around with QR code generation recently and I'm wondering if any of you would like one done for free for you to use on your promotional materials.

But let's backtrack a second and answer a few questions.

What the heck is a QR Code and why would I want one?
A QR Code is essentially a 2D barcode which can link to a webpage, some text or an image (amongst other things). If you have a mobile phone which has Internet access, a camera and can download apps, you can basically take a picture of this code and it will take you to whatever is encoded within that barcode (On Android I use an app called Codee Reader, but you'll also find many other QR code reader apps to download, even if you have an iPhone or Windows phone). Here's the wikipedia link if you want to read a more detailed description of QR Codes.

As for why you'd want one as a musician? Well for starters, you know those phones all your (especially younger) fans are carrying around and probably recording your concert on as well as taking pictures while they're there? How about using the fact those phones are there to help you get useful information and interest from (and about) the people using them in order to help convert them into fans? How about rewarding fans who turned up?

So here's a few ideas of what you could do, but I'm sure you can think of more once I've given you the idea. And if you have a phone with a QR Code reader installed, then the example codes I've provided should give you an even better idea of how things work in practice and could apply to you and your existing sites/profiles as they all link to real, live web content.

1. You currently have either a sheet of paper or a computer sitting on your merch table so that people can sign up to your mailing list. And maybe you've got a queue of people who want to use it (some of whom maybe don't bother because they get fed up with the wait). Wouldn't it be much easier if people could just point their phones at a poster and were automatically directed to the mailing list signup form on your website so that they could fill it in at their leisure on their own phones? No queue and/or you don't have to cope with their appalling handwriting! Even better, because they're signing up in the same way as if they had browsed to your website on a computer, they'll get any auto-responder/greeting messages your site sends. Whilst you shouldn't throw away the pen and paper just yet, a QR Code could still make life a bit easier.

2. Get someone handing out flyers with a QR Code on during your gig. The QR code links to a free track or some other exclusive content they can download - obviously make sure your flyer contains that statement!

a) Direct download example

b) Same thing but via webpage

3. Provide a link to a page which contains a short summary of information about you and a player with some of your music for people to listen to, in order to serve as an introduction to people who are hearing you for the first time and want to find out more. They can do so there and then without having to remember (or find) the information when they get home.

Obviously, for many cases, if what you're linking to has been set up in a mobile-friendly site/page, then it will make it even easier for the user.

Sounds interesting. What do I need to provide and what do I get?
Well for starters you'll need to email me the following info, so that I have an address to mail the finished code back to. You'll need to give me:

a) The link to what the person scanning the code will see. Ideally this should be accessible. i.e. the last thing anyone will want to see when they scan your code will be a login prompt, whether that be for your website or an external site like facebook. And yes, that means it doesn't have to be your own website, but could be your profile on soundcloud, facebook, youtube (pretty much you name it really) for wherever you want to send people.

b) An idea of your size requirements depending on where you're thinking of using it.
i) small e.g. suitable for business card/postcard/CD liner
ii) medium e.g. suitable for A4/A5/flyers
iii) large e.g. suitable for larger posters

c) If you have a preferred graphics format for the code image to make it easier to add into your other graphics e.g. BMP, JPG, PNG etc. (I should be able to provide most formats you or your graphic artist can think of)

You may need to provide some additional data if one of the options I mention elsewhere in this post interests you, but in the majority of cases the above is all that's needed.

Obviously, what you'll get back by email will be an image of the QR Code at a size that should be appropriate to use (and will work as-is without having to worry too much about scaling) where you're aiming to use it.

How soon will I get my QR code?
In theory the same day and usually within an hour or so of me picking the message up, providing I can test the code against the link so I can be happy it works before I send it to you. In practice, it's going to depend on how many requests I get and what else I'm doing (allowing for timezone as I'm in the UK), but they're not that difficult to create. I'm working on the assumption here that most of you would rather spend time creating music than learning how to do this yourself using one of the free tools or programs available, and you either have no access to someone who can create these, or someone wants to charge you for the privilege.

And you'll create that for free and send it to me? Seriously, you must want something?
Well actually I do. I'm thinking of starting a "QR Code of the month" section on my blog in which I'll feature one of the codes I've created for an artist, along with any other relevant info/background story as part of the post. Obviously whether I can will depend on whether there's any demand out there in the first place, both for the codes and for the chance of that little bit of extra free promotion. If you land up surprising me and overwhelming my inbox with requests on a month by month basis, I do have a backup plan which will allow me to feature more than the planned one per post, but I'll cross that bridge if it happens. If you are planning to use the code for something which is time sensitive (e.g. a free download to coincide with a launch party for a new album) then just let me know the earliest date you'd be happy for me to display your code when you email me the rest of the information. If that still isn't enough for you and you still want to give me something for my time, then I'm the kind of person who appreciates the unexpected in that case, so do what you do best and get creative in solving that problem.

Can I only have one code?
At the moment, the plan would be a maximum of one free code per artist per month. If demand is such that not many artists are interested, but they'd be happy with more frequent codes than this, then I'll probably relax the restriction. Likewise if my inbox goes seriously nuts, I may have to reduce the frequency with which I can offer codes to artists, as I'm only human and do need to do other important things like eat and sleep occasionally! At the end of the day, it's really up to you people out there to show me whether there's any demand for this offer and what exactly that level of demand is.

Does the QR Code have to be black and white?
Actually no. Providing the two colours involved have enough contrast between them, a QR code reader can still pick them up. My husband used a red and white QR code on the posters for his recent sponsored haircut. You can also potentially have one colour on top of an image - take a look at Bill Cosby's Twitter page icon for an example of that (white is the overlay colour and scanning the icon leads to the ability to download his free app) - but it will obviously depend on the image as to whether there's enough contrast for the overlaying colour to work. So if you're interested in something other than the standard black and white code, let me know. I don't have enough experience yet to be able to say straight off whether a particular combination will work or not, but if you don't mind helping me find out where the limits are, I can almost certainly sort you out with something either pretty close or spot on to your original idea.

I've got another question
If there's anything else you want to know first (the good old "Can I do this?" type requests come to mind for starters) then either email me or leave a comment on this post (depending on how useful you think the answer to your question would be to others) and I'll get back to you.

Let the filling of my inbox commence, and I'll see you back in my next regular update..

Experiments

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Tue, 01 May 2012 00:39:00 +0000

If you already know about my rating system then skip on down to the next header, otherwise here's the lowdown.

The rating system
The rating system I use for this blog is somewhat unique. It's not a reflection of how much I like the music itself as much as it is of how far I am along the process of conversion from consumer to fan. So, over time you may well see some of these ratings go up if I mention an artist again. And indeed go down, as musical changes of direction or failure to keep my interest are just some of the reasons that may affect a rating.

Congratulations, you've made a temporary blip of interest on my radar. Now how are you going to keep it?

I've seen enough of you to recognise and remember you, but I'm undecided so I'm not really following you (yet). I may make a spur of the moment decision to check in on what you're up to once in a while, but even that's no guarantee. May also apply to artists I am aware of, but whose music I've decided I don't have enough interest in to want to pursue further based on what I've heard.

I'm liking what I hear in general, but I still wouldn't describe myself as a fan. I will be wandering past your site occasionally, and there is something like a 50% chance I'll be buying your next offering once I find out about it, providing I have the money available.

Now I am a fan, so the chances are I'll be past your site once every month or two at least. There's a 90%+ chance your next offering is already sold, and occasionally I might even be going for something more than the basic package (if you have one)

Reserved for very few, this is about as close to internet stalker as you can get. I am actively watching because I do not want to miss your next release date, tour in my area etc. etc. You may not always be aware of the fact I'm looking over your shoulder to see what you're up to, but trust me, I'm there on a weekly if not more like a daily basis. Depending on how you tend to release your information, I may well be signed to your mailing list as well.

Who I've been looking at
Ellie Williams returned to Sellaband for some additional promotion funds for her second album. I would have funded her again, but I decided on 2 basic requirements back when the bankruptcy happened that the new management would need to fulfil before I'd even consider spending money on the site again. And as I'm still unsatisfied on both counts more than 2 years down the line, I'm sticking to my principles. Her return reanimated a number of believers who had left the site to come back and buy parts in her, though it's unclear how much of the money they've spent is "new" money, and how much was "old" money that had been trapped in the site. If you didn't realise she was back, then you've missed the boat, as she successfully raised her target in a little over a fortnight. A welcome change from the slow or non-moving artists the site has at the moment.

Ironically on the same day as Ellie's return, I'd just decided to spend some money on Pledge Music. Vertical Horizon are an artist I became aware of a couple of years ago, and over a period of time I've been realising that I like most of what I've been hearing from them. They had already reached the 100% target on Pledge, but because the album/incentives weren't yet ready it was still possible to buy into their project. It seems they're currently still recording in-between touring, although the automated "thankyou for buying" message states the incentives were due to be delivered by March 10th 2012. Their page on Pledge now has TBC for a release date though, so we'll see how long it takes the CD to get here. It will also be interesting to compare the fan patience level here to that I've previously seen with other artists, particularly as their project updates seem to have slowed to a crawl and I've already seen one complaint about that. Looks like I could even be facing an experiment to determine just how green the grass is on the Pledge side of the fence, and how it handles complaints about overdue artists as a result.

But one thing that buying into a Pledge project reminded me was how much clearer it is spending money on there compared to Sellaband. The "what you see is what you pay" is something I consider preferable to Sellaband's strange deposit system that charges "hidden" fees on top of the displayed part price that you only get to see just before you hit the confirmation button. $12 for the album and a further $3 towards postage as I'm outside the US comes to a grand total of $15 and that's what my credit card was charged, rather than the price being inflated with "admin fees".

Brad Cox has released the new Niki Thunders and the Temperamentals track (called "Take me") for sale on CD Baby. In the blurb on the download page for the track it states a new album is planned for 2013 so I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for that.

Aly Cook is currently driving me nuts. I don't know whether it's a management change meaning someone else is looking after her twitter feed or whether there's an automated program involved, but something has obviously changed recently because she's now putting out the same message a large number of times in a row (just with a different @ tacked on the end) and essentially filling up my twitter feed with spam (often a couple of times a day or more) as a result. It's actually getting to the point where I'm thinking of stopping following her on there because all the pointless repeating within a few seconds is starting to annoy me. I'll be looking to see if things settle down over the next month or not on this front.

A rather large box arrived from Matthew Ebel. This contained the overdue framed album from 2010 and the overdue goody bags from 2011 as well as the new album, so he's finally caught up to where I was expecting him to be. I'm feeling much happier than I was when I wrote my 2011 review of the year post as a result. Episodes of the comic that go with the album are now being posted on his website every day or two, along with comments from Genesis Whitmore (the artist who is drawing it) about that particular strip. Check it out here.

In amongst the items in the box were a number of cards (business card sized), each containing a website link and QR Code for a different artist to download one track for free. An interesting touch to introduce you to a number of other indie musicians, and interestingly they weren't all based in the USA either. Whilst I've downloaded and listened to the tracks, none of them particularly got my interest, although I might wander off to their sites at some point and see what else I can find.

Additionally his "chartbombing" experiment has provided some very interesting data (at least from Amazon) on what it is possible for an indie artist with zero promotional budget to achieve. I've spent nearly a week watching the numbers, despite the fact the experiment itself lasted just one day. Essentially Matthew asked all his fans to hold off on buying the album, and instead asked them to purchase one particular track from it (or the whole album if they wanted) on one specific day via either iTunes or Amazon. iTunes doesn't offer realtime data, but the net result was that the album briefly cracked the 100 bestselling albums in their Rock chart. On Amazon where the charts are updated hourly it was possible to more easily track the progress with both the album and song hitting the top of the respective Adult Alternative charts, cracking the top 40 in the Alternative Rock chart and the album itself even briefly broke into the top 200 overall by sales rank on Amazon. You'll find more of my analysis of the experiment further down this post in the "sites" section.

John C Fraser sent a message to all his believers on Sellaband saying he was no longer going to be performing under that name, but instead was splitting from the the band, management, promoters etc. and going back to writing and performing as a solo artist as "Please be Frank", a title which uses his real name. As a result no further CDs would be sold and as the 2 projects he had on Sellaband have apparently not broken even, this means that believers will never see any revenue either.

The sites I've been looking at

Amazon.com
As stated earlier, I've spent about a week tracking the "chartbombing" results of Matthew Ebel's new album "The Lives of Dexter Peterson". The track he chose for this "I wish I were" isn't the one I would have chosen to try and get attention as it has more niche fanbase appeal than some of the others on the album, but it's been an interesting experiment to follow anyway.

Before the experiment started, the Amazon sales rank of the album was in the 45,000s. As I've already said, it hit top 200 in the 24hrs set aside when fans were asked to buy the album. As you can probably guess, it has slipped back since, but not as fast as you might think. Two days after the experiment, the album was still at no 1 for the Adult Alternative category and in the "new releases" section for individual tracks in Adult Alternative, not only was "I wish I were" at number one, there were 5 other songs from the album in the top 100, 3 of which were in the top twenty. And the album was still in the 600s for overall ranking. Both the track and the album have since slipped further (back down past artists like The Fray and Coldplay), but last I looked both were still in the top 100 Adult Alternative charts with the album down in the mid 5000s for overall sales rank (five days after the chartbombing). Because of Amazon's regional restrictions, these results have been achieved purely from digital only sales for the US fanbase, which makes me wonder how much further would have been possible if other countries could have affected that US chart too.

The obvious conclusion is that it's a lot easier than you might think to make a temporary dent in Amazon's rankings, but just because you can make a dent it doesn't mean you're going to make any lasting impression. In a competitive chart such as Alternative Rock, it seems you'll disappear out faster than it took you to get there, unless your sales volume keeps up, but in a category I can't see that many people actively looking in, there is a chance you might hang round long enough to be spotted. But from the realities of a consumer, I have to admit I've NEVER browsed the Amazon charts looking for music to buy. When I visit Amazon, I already know what I want to buy, and all I'm usually doing is checking out their price compared to other options I have available before buying from there or somewhere else. I'd be interested to hear if Matthew Ebel did pick up any new fans purely from a presence on the charts due to his experiment, but I think there's a pretty high chance the answer to that is going to be no.

And that also brings me to what I really don't like. Whilst interested in this "chartbombing" idea from the experimental point of view, the realities of what tends to be involved is something I'd much rather avoid. People are getting really turned off by advertising these days, yet it seems musicians are relying on the emotional approach (a set of "virtual puppy-dog eyes" if you like) to convince people to advertise for them. I kind of share the sentiment of the person who left a review during the experiment which basically said "This doesn't deserve to be on the charts and the only reason it's there is because the artist organised a chartbombing" - not from the point of view of the music, but from the "advertising/publicity stunt" point of view. The whole "hey check this out", "buy this now", "tell everyone today" is something that's going on far, far too much (and not just in music) , and the whole "popularity contest" that results cheapens things as far as I'm concerned. I supported the attempt this time, as you can tell from my previous post (for experimental reasons), but I'm still of the opinion there's enough spam out there without me adding to it, and it's unlikely you'll see me support this kind of thing very often as a result.

And so I have to wonder just how useful this experiment has really been. With only a temporary dent and seemingly little or no chance of fans resulting from that, is a "chartbombing" really worth the return? Particularly if the "spamminess" associated with carrying it out actually runs a risk of you losing some of your existing support.

Snacktracks.co.uk
If you're in the UK, United Biscuits are currently running a promotion on their snacks to allow you to download tracks for free from the Universal Music catalog. Think Hula Hoops, Skips, Mini Cheddars etc. (i.e. pretty much anything popular that doesn't have a Walkers logo). Seems simple enough. Each packet contains a code and a timestamp which you need to enter into the site along with an email address and you can download one of the tracks on offer. There's also a limit of 30 tracks per email address stated and no DRM involved. Bound to be something you want to download, right?

However as we've found out, things aren't anywhere near as straightforward as this. My husband had the bright idea to buy 2 boxes from our local wholesaler - one hula hoops and one mini cheddars. The promotion runs till the end of the year and the crisp bags had a few months to run before they were out of code, plus we have a monthly board games meeting anyway. We were bound to get through the 48 bags in each box, and our guests would get some codes to take away too. This situation led to the first problem.

The codes on each pack are NOT unique. The box of hula hoops contained exactly the same code on every packet, and there were only 2 different codes in the box of mini cheddars. And as you can imagine, when my husband attempted to download tracks it pulled a big fat red flag in the system. Net result of this one is that we are going to need to send a photo of every empty crisp packet we've still got and then mail them back to the promoter and we SHOULD get a working list of codes to use.

However, I had a little more luck and managed to download one track. That's when I found the second problem. So let's stop and think logically. With the length of the promotion and/or the fact you might land up having a packet of crisps in your lunchbox every day, it would be reasonable to assume you'll land up with more than one packet. Under these circumstances it might make an awful lot of sense to save up your packets and enter all the codes and download all the tracks at once, rather than have to keep visiting the site. Guess what. Even though there's a limit of 30 tracks per email address, there's also a limit of one download PER DAY. And they don't tell you that until you attempt to download a second track!

I'm still trying to decide whether this free music promotion is going to be worth the hassle it's turning out to be. So if you run across the snacktracks.co.uk free music download promotion, then it might be worth keeping our experience in mind. One thing is for sure, it's proving that downloading music for free illegally is an awful lot easier than a free legal version. Definitely a case of a promotion gone bad.

Slowbizz
Slowbizz held their first "concert as an app" recently. I've talked about them hosting house concerts in the past, but the email I got from them on this subject actually sounded interesting, as you might find from the following excerpt

Harnessing a unique timeline concept, the software will enables various audio and video layers to be played simultaneously vastly enriching the concert experience. And in an unprecedented technological advancement, the upgraded App will feature 360 degree video layers, allowing the viewer to experience the concert from the perspective of the musician creating the feeling of being right there on stage with the musicians.

The concert in question was an artist called Fink playing with the Royal Concert Orchestra in the Netherlands for their "Queen's Night" celebration. I was tempted to see what this was like, but it was when I clicked on the link to download the app that I got put off the idea. First the app in question was for iPad only (and I don't have one) and second they were charging nearly $4 for it. On the one hand, not a great sum of money, on the other it seemed a lot for a one-off experience/experiment on an artist I wasn't familiar with, even if I had had the hardware to use the app. It still sounds interesting, just it would either need an artist I was actually interested in at that price or would need to be somewhat cheaper (or free) for me to consider an experiment on something similar if it ever comes round on Android.

That's all for this time. Stay tuned for the next post when I'll be giving you an update on the things I'm still waiting for on Sellaband amongst other things.

Will you fight for an independent?

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 02:36:00 +0000

I'm not the kind of person who usually passes on follow requests, voting requests, buy requests or indeed any other type of request from music artists. God knows I encounter tens if not hundreds of these every single week on my travels round the Internet, and I take the view that with everyone else in the same position, the last thing I want to be doing is adding to their spam level by passing even more requests on. Seems every artist on this planet is in a permanent state of wanting something shared with the world.

I often find myself facing an internal conflict on this though. As someone who has been actively looking for music outside of whatever the current song/artist of the moment is for the past ten years, I know how difficult it is to sort through the mass out there and hence why artists try to convince others to spread the word.

So on the few occasions I do step forward on this, it's usually because I think they've got a genuine chance and/or I'm convinced I'm looking at one of the "good guys" and I'm in the sort of mood where I'd really like to see them stick a metaphorical finger up the music establishment.

Today is one of those occasions. I'm stepping forward and asking for your help.

If you've been following my blog, you'll know I've been mentioning Matthew Ebel's new album "The Lives of Dexter Peterson" in a number of my posts. Well the album is now out, but he's aiming to see if he can get either the album, or a specific song from it into the charts on Amazon, iTunes or both by getting people to purchase on 25th April. If it hits the top 10 on either, he'll send everyone who signed up to help a copy of the album commentary that has only been available to some of his subscribers. And I'm in the kind of mood where it would really make my day to see this happen.

So if Matthew Ebel succeeds in this, I will give a free VIP matthewebel.net subscription for an entire year to one of those who helped. That's something that Matthew would normally charge $149 for. If you want the full details of what one of those contains, then you'll need to read this (look for the section VIP Pass), but essentially it includes live concert recordings, music and behind the scenes material as well as an invite to his annual beer bash, after-show parties, goodie bag and 2 chances to win your own custom song during the year.

There are only two conditions
1. You have to have signed up using the form here. If you're not on Matthew Ebel's list of names then obviously you won't be eligible for the chance to get this in the first place.
2. This is in addition to the free commentary track (which is nearly an hour in length btw) being offered. i.e. Matthew's conditions state that he needs to hit the top 10 on either Amazon or iTunes for those on his list to get the free commentary track, so this extra of the free VIP subscription for a year for one person will only apply if he gives out the free commentary track to everyone on the list he has.

As you ought to realise from this, Matthew is aware I'm putting this on the table as the winner would need to be chosen at random from his list (which is something I don't have access to)

So what do you say? Will you help me fight for an independent artist with no promotional budget or team by buying the song (or indeed the entire album) he has listed here on 25th April? I'm willing to give away a full year subscription so someone can have a free taste of the kind of thing I've been subscribing to for the past three years because I believe he's doing things people need to hear. Will you spend just 99c for me (and him)?

And can I also count on you to pass the information in this blog post on?

Either way, you have my thanks for reading.

P.S. If you want to hear what's on the album first, then this is the link you need.

Musical March

noreply@blogger.com (The knifelady) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:33:00 +0000

If you already know about my rating system then skip on down to the next header, otherwise here's the lowdown.

The rating system
The rating system I use for this blog is somewhat unique. It's not a reflection of how much I like the music itself as much as it is of how far I am along the process of conversion from consumer to fan. So, over time you may well see some of these ratings go up if I mention an artist again. And indeed go down, as musical changes of direction or failure to keep my interest are just some of the reasons that may affect a rating.

Congratulations, you've made a temporary blip of interest on my radar. Now how are you going to keep it?

I've seen enough of you to recognise and remember you, but I'm undecided so I'm not really following you (yet). I may make a spur of the moment decision to check in on what you're up to once in a while, but even that's no guarantee. May also apply to artists I am aware of, but whose music I've decided I don't have enough interest in to want to pursue further based on what I've heard.

I'm liking what I hear in general, but I still wouldn't describe myself as a fan. I will be wandering past your site occasionally, and there is something like a 50% chance I'll be buying your next offering once I find out about it, providing I have the money available.

Now I am a fan, so the chances are I'll be past your site once every month or two at least. There's a 90%+ chance your next offering is already sold, and occasionally I might even be going for something more than the basic package (if you have one)

Reserved for very few, this is about as close to internet stalker as you can get. I am actively watching because I do not want to miss your next release date, tour in my area etc. etc. You may not always be aware of the fact I'm looking over your shoulder to see what you're up to, but trust me, I'm there on a weekly if not more like a daily basis. Depending on how you tend to release your information, I may well be signed to your mailing list as well.

Who I've been looking at

Epyllion are no longer playing live. They say they are aiming to stay as a recording project, but in the meantime three of the members have created a cover band called "The Art Vandelays" and their keyboard player is about to release a solo album. Here's hoping they don't run into trouble with the unsigned Florida band of the same name!

Brad Cox has been posting a number of acoustic videos for various songs from his various projects on Youtube recently. There's also a new song from his "Niki Thunders and the Temperamentals" project coming soon.

Francis Rodino tweeted recently that he'll be hitting the studio again soon, so I'm wondering if that means new music is in the works. I'll be keeping my eyes out on his website and my inbox for any further info on that - it's been a while since either have been updated with news.

Katy Vachon caught my interest when Talentcast played her on their weekly radio show. She currently has a profile on Sellaband, but like most other artists there it seems she's forgotten to bring her fans and is waiting for people to appear from nowhere to give her money as the only people who have bought into her project are names I recognise. The only currently finished song off the album she is trying to fund for "I got style" does have hit potential, so I'll be interested to see what else she comes up with.

March has been an explosion of music that I've been waiting for being released. I strongly suspect my album of the year for 2012 is already known as a result, but with only a quarter of the year over, there is a small chance someone could still surprise me. The only clue I'll give you at this point is that it belongs to one of the next three artists I'm going to mention in this post - you'll just have to wait until the end of the year to find out which, assuming I get no surprises in the meantime.

Matthew Ebel released the mp3s for the new album "The Lives of Dexter Peterson" to those due them around the same time as the masters went for duplication. A number of other artists I've funded in the past would do well to learn a lot from this, given the number of cases where CDs have been on sale to the general public weeks or even months before those who had pre-paid got access to the downloads (let alone their CDs). The first of the physical CDs have therefore been produced and should be on their way soon, with distribution into the likes of CDBaby/Amazon etc. for the general public expected in April. As for the album itself, it has lived up to expectations and I can't wait to slap an actual CD in something with a decent set of speakers. Even from the 320k mp3s through my headphones, I can hear "A Million Miles Away" calling out for surround sound.

I've now got my Poets of the Fall album "Temple of Thought". I eventually got the price down a lot closer to £20 than the £30 I started at, thanks to a combination of shopping around and the exchange rate being semi-cooperative. At double the going rate of a CD in the UK, it's still a price which pains me though (anything much over 50% extra does) and as you can probably guess, the star rating is the only reason that's made me break my normal price rules in the first place. Initial impression has been that it's not their best album to date but not their worst either. This one appears to be an album of "growers" rather than having any tracks that immediately leap out and demand to be listened to - the only exception is "The Happy Song" which was written for the "Alan Wake's American Nightmare" soundtrack and really does sound like a bonus track, rather than fitting with the feel of the rest of the album as a result. The lyrics are as powerful as ever ("Skin" has to be one of their best to date for its imagery on this score, and as for "The Ballad of Jeremiah Peacekeeper" what can I say but "wow"), and interestingly the signature of this album seems to be based mainly round prose rather than rhyme. Like every POTF album, this one is therefore going to take a while to sort out my real favourites, although I already have a few ideas of which those will be.

Howling Dollhouse have now released previews of the rest of their self-titled 13 song album on their youtube channel, ("All the Pieces" and "Note to Self" had already been released as official videos), so if you want to take a listen to the whole album before deciding whether you want to buy, this is now the ideal place to do it.

Iconcrash also released a new album this month, containing the track they were hoping to get into the Eurovision Song Contest with as Finland's entry (that honour has gone to a lady singing in Swedish). The track in question (We Are The Night) is a lot more commercial than many of the other songs on the album which follow their more usual industrial-sounding electronic music style. Amazingly their special edition album was half the price of the Poets of the Fall album, leading me to a combination of head scratching and further price pain. With such a stupid range of prices for new release albums out there, it doesn't surprise me when there is piracy. Music industry - wake up and SORT IT OUT ALREADY!

Liz Menezes became this month's first Twitter artist of interest, not through following me, but rather through tweeting at me about her music. Have to admit I don't normally wander off to links sent at me seemingly at random, particularly if the profile picture is a pretty female, but I was in the right mood and a quick scout of her twitter account didn't pull up any red flags so I wandered off to take a listen. That's when the fun started, because she had an intro page up (since removed) in front of the website promoting her new album with a large "click here to buy" button. Yet it was impossible to get to her site from this page, and hence impossible to find anything of use to someone discovering an artist for the first time. She did send me a link to the actual homepage when I brought the subject up, so I did find out she would probably be of interest to people who like Lily Vasquez, as she appears to be another latino singer with a mix of Spanish and English songs.

Josh Bunce is the first musician follower on Twitter that I've had appear seemingly from nowhere that's gathered enough of my interest to follow back and see what happens over a more extended period. This young guitar player reminds me at times of Acoustic Jim and at others of Daniel Ward-Murphy and seems to have released just a couple of EPs (albeit long ones at 6-7 songs each) to date. Not the best I've heard, but well worth a listen even so if you're into the similar artists I've mentioned. I'm interested to see what, if anything, he can make of the potential I can hear hiding in there.

The sites I've been looking at
To cut a long story short, I've now got my husband's previous Android phone. I won't say old, because the Dell Streak Five he's using now is discontinued, whereas this LG isn't. Whilst I'd used this phone a few times while it was in his possession, now that it's in mine I've been spending some time at looking at getting it set up to use the things I want to use it for. As you can imagine, a major part of that is music, but so far it's not been living up to expectations.

After the hell of getting the ability to download apps working (It refused point blank to work with my existing Google account, yet was quite happy to work with a newly created one), one of the first things on my list was the Last.fm app. However I'm already thinking about getting rid of it, as it seems the only use it would have is to work as a scrobbler for tracks I had uploaded to the phone. The big problem is the fact you can only stream 50 tracks via the app before you have to pay. Somewhat daft when there's no limit when I access the site via a browser. I wouldn't mind if the only option you could listen to was tracks already in your library rather than the whole Last fm catalog, but to lock it down so completely means there's little point me using it for music streaming on the move. Chalk yet another one up for the idea of ownership - seems the best way to take music with you is still to upload it to your own phone from your own collection yourself rather than rely on a cloud. And you don't need an Android to do that.

No doubt I'll land up exploring the idea of app development a bit further as a reason for using it, but for the moment the laptop appears to be winning for ease of use despite its lower portability over the idea of a smartphone for the things I want to do on a mobile basis. I hadn't expected that, so this is proving an interesting experiment.

Slowbizz
I mentioned Slowbizz a few posts ago as being a service aiming to aid artists with booking tours. Whilst quite liking the idea in principle, the costs involved for hosts didn't make it look attractive for something you'd want to do as a regular event, and I also had a number of concerns about how it could work in practice. Seems there have been a few critical changes since that post, making it worthwhile for me to post some more thoughts as a result.

Firstly, Slowbizz itself has gone non-profit. This essentially means that they no longer take any money and they no longer set the fee that hosts pay to artists. On this score, they've therefore removed themselves so completely from the equation that there's absolutely no reason for existing fans of an artist to use the service at all - as all they're really doing is providing an initial point of contact between host and artist and you sort out all the details between you, you might as well go direct in the first place.

Secondly the changes from the artist side don't make things particularly easy either. Firstly the rules for new artists getting added to the list of those available have changed. Instead of getting a minimum of 100 fans to sign up in order to get added to the roster, you now need to get the approval of at least 75% of the hosts on the system instead. Add to this the fact that you're now essentially doing all the booking arrangements for a tour instead of that falling on Slowbizz and from the artist point of view it's starting to look like you've got a lot of work again.

Thirdly, the new Slowbizz stance of acting as a "social meeting point" between artists and potential hosts is currently unfulfilled. There's no forum or other way to interact on the site itself - the best you can do is fill in a form to state you're interested in booking an artist. Yet to be a useful meeting point there needs to be visible communication. Artists and hosts need to have the social features to allow them to communicate and get to know each other, even before an artist attempts to get added to the Slowbizz roster. There needs to be the possibility of feedback and advice so that both artists and hosts have information on what's going right and wrong with the process and can share that with others who may be hesitating or in order to improve things for the future. None of that exists on the site at the moment. Rather the order of the day currently seems to be mails from Slowbizz that are ultimately just marketing. i.e. the "Please tell everyone else you know about us" sort and that approach isn't going to win any fans of the site or even the idea in general. And a similar problem appears on the new site homepage, where links to the registration forms are prominent, yet you have to go scrolling down the page in order to stand any chance of finding the links to the artists rosters (available and pending) - in fact it's not even obvious the useful stuff is down there, and it's way too easy to think the links will take you back to one of the registration forms you encountered earlier based on the wording.

So overall, my impression hasn't changed that much. I think there may still be some potential there for artists to get additional dates on top of ones they're able to arrange directly with their existing fans, but it looks like the site is still a long way from the chance of making that potential a reality, except for maybe a very few.

Amazon
Given the rise of digital, I decided to spend my latest electronic voucher in their mp3 shop for a change. I've been an Amazon customer for years, buying both books and CDs both in the past and currently and never had any problem. I've shied away from the idea of mp3s, but given the huge discrepancies between CD and digital for some artists, I decided I was long overdue on giving them a try.

My biggest problem with the big players like Amazon and Itunes is the idea of a software download (I'm here to buy MUSIC, not a DRM solution or software I don't need for gods sake), but given the ability to take the downloaded files from the Amazon software and put them wherever you want seemed easy as pie, I thought it was worth a try. Who knows, maybe I'd actually get used to the idea and turn into an mp3 buyer rather than a CD buyer if I could get used to buying them from a name I've trusted for years?

Well the software went on easy enough, I hit the pay button and I got a nice shiny new one telling me to click on it and it would download my tracks. So I clicked and got the response that my card payment had been rejected. This was despite the fact, I'd received the email confirmation from Amazon that my payment had completed successfully! So, I went back into the order details and yes, everything was paid for, but could I find that download button again? Nope. Nowhere to be seen. So I fired off an email to customer support. Within a couple of hours they responded saying they'd reactivated the download button for me (apparently if you miss that one opportunity to download, that's it you won't get another) and this time when I clicked on it, it did actually start to download tracks.

However it didn't download all of them, and yes, you guessed it. There was no way to retry downloading the tracks that the software had failed on. To add insult to injury, whilst it told me "one or more tracks failed to download" it didn't tell me which those were, meaning I had to manually check an order list of about 30 tracks to confirm what was missing. That's when the second email went off to Amazon.

On the plus side, someone from Amazon did actually phone me after that second mail and tried to fix the problem with downloading tracks over the phone. On the minus side he failed. And whilst they were good enough to give me my money back on the tracks that failed despite the fact they have a "no-money-back" policy on digital downloads, the experience has done enough to convince me I won't be buying digital from them again. And confirmed my previous stance about not wanting to buy digital from anywhere that insists you download software in order to be able to download or listen to music. Looks like you'll have to pry the CD out of my cold dead hands after all.

That's all for now. I'm expecting April to be somewhat quieter on the music front, given it seems to have all happened in March, but expect an update on my ongoing Sellaband problems as part of that post as a minimum.