I found you via Dubber and, in one of those synchronicity things, you, Dubber and my pal from the Order of the Fez all recommended Twitter on the same day.

So I’m following you there and have enjoyed your take on music and life in general.

This is a great post. I’ll be pointing to it from my own blog.

Be well!

Linda – definitely the same ideas for artists, the format just needs tweaking for the way that your work is shown. I’m wondering if there’s room for digital ‘viewing rooms’ – where people can get in and see your work, watch videos of you talking about it, details – a series of mini documentaries that make the most of the small screen to show off the bits of the art that work in 2D – nothing’s going to be as ‘good’ as seeing it in real life, but there are things you can do with art on a screen that you can’t do in real life… Worth thinking about! x

Really interesting.

What an intelligent lot

What’s being discussed is just as relevant to artists as to musicians, (Artists don’t usually perform in the same way as musicians, neither do they have “fans” or followers in quite the same sense as that discussed above.) however we all need to find the best ways of getting out things out there and sharing ideas.

(How Twitter develops is going to be the possible wonk in the wheel for I can’t quite get how the numbers will pan out. I.e.Things will have to break into smaller units, but that’s maybe not a bad thing.)

You write extremely well Steve, seems to me you’re a natural communicator. Many thanks for all the ideas and interpretations of new situations and data.

I think there is a huge continuum here from people who you meet and chat with frequently to people you have occasional interaction with (as you pointed out) – I guess at least it’s still interaction as opposed to the one sided fan-celebrity interaction.

One can tell that some people are into Twitter just for the celebrity watching aspect and seem to be kind of missing the point – I hope Twitter continues to develop a culture that values real, honest interaction and community based on ideas but I guess like all organic things, it may develop in other directions.

Thanks Steve for your insightful writing – if I didn’t follow it I probably wouldn’t have begun to use Twitter – and if I had I probably would have used it less productively.

I’m going to have to rethink how this all affects my music – working mostly as a sideman I am having an influence on this kind of thing but am still stuck in the clubowner/agent/bars type world and I need to plot my own escape strategy.

The promise of huge audiences is what has kept record companies going for decades, and before the web, they were the ones who had the ear of all the gatekeepers to reaching an audience… They were massively inconsistent in fulfilling that promise back then, and now they have very little to endear me to them.

With sites like youtube, it is possible to land a gargantuan audience without a label (x-ref Jean Baudin, Andy McKee etc. etc.) – the deeper questions are all about the costs involved in reaching that audience, the expectations they put on your music, and the way you keep them interested beyond your one single/album.

If you’re a blogger, please feel free to expand on what you see as the limitations of social media, and post the link here. I’m going be writing a post about what happens to large ensemble music in this kind of environment in response to a great email I had from an orchestral music fan…

thanks again!

Life, for me, is about building and maintaining good relationships with others. That the others can now be people we admire who, in the past, were out of our ‘reach’ can only be a good thing.

Now if only I could get BiL tweeting!

Today I bought a Flip Mino HD pocket hi-def video camera for just over $200. Five years ago a hi-def was only an option on pro cameras costing $12,000 or more.

It’s not necessarily that there are more content creators, but the tools to create quality content are in a lot more hands today. Likewise, the distribution models have changed to the point where anyone who has anything to say, be it in words, music, video or other stimuli can upload something, somewhere for free.

So we’ve got content. We’ve got distribution. Now it’s simply a matter of curating all the new stuff that’s available. Social networks, friends’ recommendations, iLike, Last.fm and the like are just a few ways for us to sort through it all.

It’s overwhelming, but it’s invigorating at the same time.

I always grab little sentences from your posts and write them in my journal. “Amplify the story…” was today’s takeaway.

Cheers,

Bruce