It’s no secret that I REALLY dig Twitter. It solved a whole lot of online communication questions for me when I found it. I cut back on my posting on forums, and eventually even deleted the forum on my own site in favour of encouraging the regular posters there to head over to Twitter and talk in a more democratic environment.

I loved the fact that I was no longer stuck in a subject-specific space, or one where I people had to sign up to be in my gang before joining the conversation. It’s not my conversation, after all, it’s a global free-for-all.

Except it isn’t. I mean, technically it is, but actually the only bit of Twitter that concerns me at all is the people I follow and the people who follow me. And occasionally the people who tweet using a hashtag I happen to be following.

I am, as the 50K Tweets would suggest, a power-user. I document my life in this way. I use it to:

• Talk with my audience in a way that has replaced my email list,
• Talk with musicians in way that has replaced myspace,
• Talk with my family in a way that has replaced email,
• Talk with my colleagues in Amplified in a way that has replaced wikis
• Talk with anyone who’s interested in a way that’s replaced chatrooms/generic forums.

…and by ‘talk with’ I mean all the myriad forms of communication that go on there – chat, debate, encourage, learn from, teach, swap links, post news… anything that’ll fit in 140 characters.

It’s clearly an open, messy, FUN way of communicating that I love. I don’t have to keep track of loads of different websites – I do have 10 different twitter accounts, but most of them lie dormant at the moment. SoloBassSteve is where pretty much everything happens, and for some unknown reason there are (currently) 4836 people who have seen fit to follow me. Some may be spammers, but I’ve blocked and deleted AT LEAST 3 times as many followers as I’ve allowed to stay. Any spam accounts I cleared out… I’ve definitely had well in excess of 12-13,000 follow notifications, I just didn’t want either a misleading amount of followers, or to leave those accounts without some registering a ‘spam’ click next to them…

But, in the last 3 years, most of the good things that have happened for Lobelia and I have happened through Twitter.

• We’ve met some of our best friends
• We’ve planned tours
• We’ve organised recordings
• We gleaned information
• We had support and congratulations on the birth of our baby
• We shared our holidays
• We found people to help us move house
• and We had LOADS of work, new listeners, and – crucially – amazing people willing to talk about what we do as musicians time and time again.

I spend a lot – most – of my time on Twitter talking about other people’s music, encouraging and connection musicians to eachother, helping people get their heads around this brave, heady new disintermediated world we’re in. I’m trying to model the way I think the distruptive awesome internet of the future should work. Cos the future is now. We’re in it, it’s great, and Twitter is quite possibly THE game changer.

Youtube was big, Myspace was big. WordPress was big. Bandcamp is HUGE. Soundcloud is awesome. But as the glue that makes all of them workable, manageable and connected, Twitter for me is THE killer app. The reason the internets was invented.

So, 50 Thousand Tweets on, I’m still all about it. Here, if you’re interested, is my twitter-list of people I chat to, day in, day out: The Awesome Squad.

-o0o-

This evening someone asked me (on Twitter) which was the classic Steve Lawson album. So I asked my friends (on Twitter) to answer. So far the answer has come back, overwhelmingly, Grace And Gratitude. Which is fitting. Because I’m hugely grateful for all the good things that have happened through the amazing people I’m connected to on there. Please have a listen, and feel free to download it – don’t feel obliged to pay for it, but if you want to pay whatever you think it’s worth, that would also be hugely appreciated:

It was a privilege to be invited, and most heartening to see the highly questionable reasoning of the BPI position that ‘illegal file-sharing is doing immeasurable damage to the music industry and we need legislation to stop it’ [my paraphrase] challenged. Particularly as I had a chance to say on record at such a meeting that there has never been a better time to be a musician than now. That the tools, platforms and services that they are so angry with for ‘breach of copyright’ are the same ones that are allowing musicians to release music in a sustainable, debt-free way, rather than in the speculative, debt-burdened, anti-creative, monopolistic (the effective monopoly being one of access to the old gate-keepers of distribution, media and manufacture, as well as a business environment in which accurate financial reporting and accountability is unheard of) mess that is the mainstream recording industry.

The challenges also came in from the perspective of software companies, ISPs, libraries and museums, the Open Rights Group, consumer groups… It’s a crying shame than these voices weren’t heard properly during what passed for ‘consultation’ before the bill was rushed through. There were great contributions from Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group, Hadley Beaman, Terence Eden, and others. It was wonderful listening to the range of intelligent arguments against the nonsense of the bill.

The conversation will continue, and I’m deeply grateful to the MPs who took the time to listen, from across the political spectrum – Eric Joyce, Stella Creasy, David Davis, Julian Huppert and others…

The next step is to put together a representation of people from the other music industries – the ones not concerned with propping up a CD selling and marketing racket that has never been operated in the best interests of musicians or music listeners – to talk to the MPs about where our concerns lie with the bill itself, and with the bogus statistics and interpretation of those statistics that formed the basis of the process of rushing it through at ht end of the last parliament.

More on that soon.

There are a number of reasons for this -

• Firstly, it’s need and tidy, and when I get the right cables (need to place an order with Evidence Audio!) it’ll be able to stay in place
• Secondly, it’s incredibly clean/quiet
• Thirdly, it has onboard DSP so I can EQ every in and out separately, and route anything I want to any of the outs (makes turning the vocal mic send to the looperlative on and off a synch.)
• Fourthly, it means we can take a firewire/USB cable out of the back of it into my laptop and record a perfect hi-res multitrack of every gig. Which means all those fun spontaneous moments that happen at Steve ‘n’ Lo gigs can now be captured. It means more live recordings, maybe even a live album from every tour… Proper magique.

Of course, I’m already thinking about just how many more inputs I could make use of, and what else I want it to do (I REALLY wish MOTU would make it so that you can use a MIDI CC controller with it without the laptop hooked up, so I could attach a fader-box), but it’s so much smaller, lighter, neater and cooler than any set up I’ve had before. Really looking forward to taking it to the US.

Anyway, to test I, I did a recording the other night, just using the free AudioDesk software that came with it. It came out rather well – here it is:

First New Experiment April 2010 by solobasssteve

So, you’ve taken the advice and started blogging

Almost all web-hosting comes with some kind of statistics option for tracking how many people are visiting your website, and what they are doing. The most widely used 3rd party option is Google Analytics, which is available to be added to any website (and particularly easily integrates with publishing packages like WordPress and Moveable Type).

But two things seem to confuse people with stats – one is the language used and the other is what they mean.

The most confusing generic term seems to be ‘hits’ – used by many to mean any number relating to web traffic.

Hits is actually a specific term relating to the number of independent actions on your site – so if someone opens your front page, and your site has 4 pictures and a self-hosted embedded audio file on it, that’s 6 hits – 1 for the page, 4 for pictures and 1 for music.

Hits counts can fairly soon reach the millions-per-year stage if your site has a lot of images per page (E.G. .gif buttons for clickable links) even with a modest number of visitors. If someone else has embedded the pictures hosted on your server elsewhere, that’s also a ‘hit’, without the person even having visited your site.

Below hits, the next biggest stat will be ‘page views’ - that’s the number of times your pages have been accessed. So if someone visits and reads the front page, your blog and the MP3s page, that’s 3 page views.

Next stat is ‘visits’ – how many times have people been to your site? if someone comes in, looks at 20 pages without leaving, that’s only 1 visit.

Last meaningful big number is ‘vistors’ – how many people in any given period have visited your site – so one of your friends comes to your site every day to see if there’s anything new, or to listen to the music – they are still only one visitor per month (assuming they visit on the same machine, via the same IP) – if they visit via their phone, laptop and desktop, they’ll register as three visitors – Google’s not run by wizards, whatever they try and make us believe

So what does all this mean to us? how do we use them? And how do we avoid chasing meaningless stats?

One thing worth noting is that most of what you read about online stats is written with the assumption that your primary concern is masses of page views.

The reason for this is that a large number of bloggers/website owners are still labouring under the (patently absurd) delusion that the future of ‘website monetisation’ (itself a stupid term) is through advertising revenue.

If you are paid per click, or paid per ‘impression’ by the ads placed on your site, then the stat that will mean most to you is page views. Cos that is what translates into money.

However, in simple terms, the kind of traffic required – and the kind of web activity needed to get it – to make even a modest income from ad revenue is so insanely high that pursuing it will almost certainly render your website useless as a resource for people looking for your music. You’ll end up writing ‘link bait’ articles – inflammatory nonsense designed to get people to share it (the blogging bits of most national newspaper sites are full of this kind of sensationalist bullshit) – it’s also why so many articles on ad-funded sites involve you clicking on about 6 different links to actually read the whole thing. A total pain in the arse.

No, to us as musicians, the useful metrics are actually a mash-up of the stats above – page views per visit and the number of times that people return to our site, both of which are easy to find in Google Analytics.

Being interesting is way more important than being popular. Because being interesting is likely to make you popular, while being popular doesn’t make you interesting. It’s simple cause and effect. So any stat that helps you measure your interestingness is useful, while any one that gives you some arbitrary measure of popularity is pretty much pointless.

That’s not to say that it’s not good to watch and see how your site traffic is growing month to month, just don’t be side-tracked by the occasional spike in traffic due to a particular article. Sustained growth isn’t just through one-off blogging home-runs. It’s through the building of an interactive community who care about what you do.

The biggest thing to know about stats for a musician is that all the most important stuff can be seen and measured without looking at statistics.

• Are people commenting?
• Are the people who visit your site talking to you?
• Are people sharing the information you put out there with their friends?

This is stuff that doesn’t require analytics, it requires you being conversationally involved with the community around your music, not aloof and firmly fixed in broadcast mode.

The stats relevant to Ad revenue – and the SEO (search engine optimisation) voodoo that follows it round the web – are a massive distraction from the task of creating a site that’s meaningful and useful to the people who are part of your community of listeners. So keep an eye on your stats, but don’t be controlled by them.

As you’ll remember if you’re an even semi-regular visitor to this site, in November I took part in

Big, big thanks to the people who were reading it as we went along - you’ll see some of their tweets in the book from when they replied to the characters on there. Your encouragement and willingness to talk made-up nonsense to imaginary people was invaluable in shaping the direction of the book and providing the motivation to keep writing. Nuff respect.

The PDF as it was going along was behind a password-protected link, just so I could keep track of who had it. But now it’s available as a free download by clicking on the book cover below. Sadly, the links in the PDF aren’t clickable – I’m hoping that the eventual version of it will be fully interactive (the .rtfd version of it that I’ve got is fully clickable, I just can’t get a version that looks good AND is clickable. One or the other but not both… I’ll get there.)

There will, in due course, be a paper version of it available on Lulu for you to buy, should you want to, as well as some band t-shirts…

So, if you want to read the PDF of the novel, feel free to click on the book cover below, or right-click (cntrl+click on a Mac) and save it to your desktop. It’s worth mentioning that it does have a lot of strong language in it. If that bothers you, probably best not to download, or get someone else to edit it for you first

I’m already thinking about what happens next for the characters, so the two Twitter accounts and one of the blogs will be ongoing – feel free to join in the fun – @Drum_Monkey_ and @TheDistanceMeg are the Twitter accounts, and http://verfremdungseffekt.posterous.com is their blog…

Well, I’m now well over twelve thousand words into my

As I said in my last post, I’m setting up twitter accounts for the characters as I go along, and two of them are now on there: @Drum_Monkey_ and @TheDistanceMeg. They’ve been chatting to each other and with other twitterers, and some of those tweets are ending up either in or influencing the story. Drum Monkey even got a string of really smart direct messages giving him some advice on a guerilla marketing campaign! It’s turning into all kinds of fun.

Meg’s twitter name stems from their improv band being called Verfremdungseffekt, AKA Brecht’s concept of ‘The Distancing Effect‘ – she thought she was being REALLY clever with that one

So please do have a chat with them, and if you want to read the book as it goes along, there’s a PDF version that gets updated every day or so out there… if you email me or send me a message on twitter, I’ll probably/possibly send you the link and the password

I’m having all kinds of fun writing this – it’s a really helpful creative exercise to

• tackle something without any expectation that I’ll be good at it
• have  a set ‘volume’ of writing to do but no other ‘aim’.
• have a way of weaving bits of real life into it, and through the characters tastes and interactions, give some other bands a bit of promo…
• have something to do while we wait for the baby to be born

Try it!

So this afternoon, on a whim, I thought ‘I wonder if I can write a novel about some musicians who in some imaginary world start a cultural revolution, accidentally’ – I realised that it would be fun to have a go at writing a long-form hypothetical case study on how the world of music might work out. After all, it’s how a lot of novels work – either romantic or dystopic visions of an imaginary future for people and planet.

And of course, with one of the pithy descriptions of the project on the NaNoWriMo site being “Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.” there’s no pressure for it to be any good. I can focus on it being fun, let my imagination run wild without the constraints of a blog, or the compulsion to finish it/publish it/whatever.

And of course, I can mess with the format. And with that in mind, I’ve registered a twitter account for the only one of my characters so far that would be on Twitter - he’s @drum_monkey_ and is there to be talked to. I’d LOVE it if you chatted to him as the novel went on. The other characters will get onto Twitter too, as soon as it’s conceivable within their characters that they’d be on it, and I may even write a chapter or two on twitter as they talk to each other.

For now, if you’re doing NaNoWriMo, please feel free to follow my progress, on Twitter, or on the NaNoWriMo site.

OK, so the thought of maintaining a blog full of pontifications on the state of the world, the web, music, whatever is a bit daunting

…So what do we do? Clearly, the web these days – and in particular, music on the web – is ALL about sharing. Without sharing, we’re all screwed.

Enter Posterous – it’s a blogging platform that’s been around for a while, but seems to be really gaining in traction of late for a whole host of reasons. I’m going to focus on what an awesome service it is for embedding, and posting links to, things you really like online.

“but, isn’t that what Twitter’s for?” you say. Well, yes, but Twitter’s so much more than that – by that token, I’d stop talking to people cos Twitter’s about conversation as well, and stop reading the news, because Twitter tells me about it. No, the cool thing about Twitter is that everything’s bigger than Twitter – it’s a distribution mechanism, not a closed ecosystem.

So Posterous – amongst all kinds of other possible uses – is where you can collect together all the things that you dig. A great place to tell the world about the music your talented friends are making. About proper awesome things you find on YouTube, with links to find out more.

It’s a bigger deal than updating your Facebook status, and helps to keep it all in one place, as social DNA, and will act as an excellent gateway drug to the world of blogging, sharing, and building that social DNA into something coherent. Because, of course, if people like the things you link to, they are far more likely to be interested in the art that you yourself make. Infintely more likely to.

After all, people don’t find you because you’re ‘good’, they find you cos you’re ‘interesting‘. They keep sharing you because you’re ‘good’, but the people that respond to that sharing do so because the person makes you look ‘interesting‘. etc. etc. it’s a chain that never ends, if you’re actually any good

So, how do you start your Posterous blog? well, that’s the truly awesomely amazing bit about it – just send an email to post@posterous.com. That’s it. Email your first post to that address, and they’ll email you back with a link to it. Click it, go in, set up the name and URL for the blog, and start emailing more stuff to it.

I’ll write more, probably on solobasssteve.com, about the kind of sharing that posterous makes possible for live events. But for now, you’d need to give me a seriously good reason for not setting an account up to start sharing cool things for me to not think you just don’t care about ‘music online’.

How do you post stuff to Posterous? Well, if it’s youtube, just send the URL (not the embed code), via email, with a few words about it, and it’ll cleverly be embedded in the blog. Srsly.

For BandCamp, just click on share, grab the embed code (the one for ‘wordpress.org’ works great), copy it into an email, write a few words recommending whatever it is you’re embedding and send it. Then, post a link to the Posterous URL to Twitter/Facebook/email/whatever, and away you go. That’s a screengrab of an email sent to posterous, that created this post.

Sow some Karma, start a blog.

Oh, and if you want some starter material, have a look at the SoloBassSteve.com post ‘Bandcamp directory for the Stevie-Connected’, or indeed to my Posterous account. There’s loads of fantastic stuff there.

Here’s a few cool Posterous accounts to check out: Andrew Dubber, Neil Alexander, Hannah Nicklin, Linda Palmer.

I’ve written a lot over the years about the power of curiosity

So yesterday when a link from a friend landed me at xtranormal.com and I saw that there was a ‘create’ button, I set to work writing a comedy script for two people talking about a solo bass house concert.

Since then it’s had about a thousand views (pretty good going for overnight on a Sunday!), and I’m sure has quite a journey to go on yet… All because I saw a link, clicked it and played around.

Try it, sometimes it can really help

Anyway, here it is. “Solo Bass. It’s The Future.”

Feel free to share it around, or make your own videos. It’s pretty time consuming, but well worth it

[EDIT] it’s worth noting that the first place I shared this was Posterous. An awesome blogging platform, that I’ll write more about v. soon!

After the huge success of the last ‘Singers Of Twitter’ gig at Darbucka last month, we’ve got another one coming up! Yay!

We’ll be back at Darbucka, and this time, it’ll feature Ben Walker AKA @ihatemornings out of Twitter, as the musical sandwich filling in between the gluten-free bread slices of the ever-wonderful Lloyd Davis on first and lovely Lobelia and I on at the end! Hurrah! It’s on Tuesday Oct 6th, doors at 7pm, music from 7.30, at Darbucka World Music Bar, on St John’s Street in Clerkenwell, London.

Ben Walker, in case the name sounds familiar, wrote ‘The Twitter Song‘ AKA, ‘you’re no-one if you’re not on twitter‘. Here it is:

He’s amazing, funny, and recently sang a song called ‘Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall‘ to… Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall! Truly a magical achievement. Go and have a listen to more of him at ihatemornings.com

Just before the first ‘singers of twitter‘ gig (but unbeknownst to me), Lloyd uploaded a lovely lil’ collection of him singing some of his fabulous 30s/40s songs to his website, so I blogged about it over at solobasssteve.com – you can see his post about them on Lloyd’s website.

And then Lobelia and I – this will, pretty much without a shadow of a doubt – be Lo’s last gig before @baby_flapjack arrives on the scene. So bring your friends, for an unmissable night out.

Tickets are £7 and £5 concessions again (and if you’re coming to see Michael Manring and I the night after, you count as a concession!)  - put it in your diary and tell your friends!