A few weeks back, Andrew Dubber and I recorded a podcast, in which we talked about Spotify. A lot. I outlined in that some of the reasons why I’m taking my music off the service, and now that I’ve finally got round to it, I’ll write about them too.

It’s become de rigueur for labels and artists to take their music off the service, citing the low payout per stream as their primary reason. That’s not my reason.

Neither is it to do with their often eff-up metadata or the lack of control over artist bios and weblinks (though all three of those are massive issues they need to address).

No, my argument is simply a fair trade one, not a ‘this is best for my career’ one. In fact, I think I’ll probably, to some degree, lessen the chances of some listeners finding me. I’ve made it harder for those who share Spotify links to their favourite music to share my music (though not physically much harder, given that ultimately Bandcamp links are way more useful, in that they’re cross-platform, don’t require an app, never play you ads and will even create embeddable players when you drop them into Facebook, with integral ‘download/buy’ links.)

No, I have two main complaints:

• One, the service is at least part owned by the Major labels, who have a controlling say in how it all works, how the payments work, and who gets what.
• Two, As far as I can see, Spotify have just attempted to stay inside the law with regards to artist/writer payments, involving protracted negotiations with the rights orgs. At no point have they, as far as I can tell, made any offer to musicians over and above the absolute minimum. The reason it’s ‘as far as I can see’ is that Spotify won’t tell anyone what they pay. Their payments are obscured, and they defer to the labels saying that artists only get paid by the labels and collection agencies anyway. It’s bollocks. If they are paying x-amount per stream to the PRS, we should be told that. If there’s any more that goes straight to the distributors/labels, we should be told that too. To claim it’s ‘commercially sensitive’ just means ‘we’ve done a deal with the Majors that makes indie artists look like goons, and we don’t want them to know’.

This may well be because, as this article claims, the majors have it rigged anyway. It’s certainly true that anyone paying Spotify to listen to my music is also funding the Major record labels. Labels that I hope will cease to exist before too long.

So, I’ve pulled my music off there. Being there was doing me no harm, I’m not expecting to see an upsurge in sales, though thanks to the total absence of tracking data, I’ve never been able to see whether anyone bought my music after hearing it on Spotify.

IF you have been listening to my music on Spotify up until now, please feel free to go and download it from http://music.stevelawson.net- there’s loads more there than was ever on Spotify, with the correct titles and everything – it’s got artwork, sleevenotes, and your Spotify app will play it anyway once you’ve downloaded it. It just won’t be giving any money to the bastards who are trying to force insane legislation through the UK and US courts to ruin the internet.

(if at the time of reading you check Spotify and my music is still there, it just means they haven’t pulled it from their system yet. No need to tell me in the comments ) 

Hejira – here 1976 album that introduced so many people to the playing of Jaco Pastorius, is my most enduring desert island disc. The list changes almost daily, but that’s been in the top 2 for over 20 years.

So, what to do to mark her birthday? Tell yet more people to listen to Joni? It hardly seems necessary. I mean, I hope you all find Joni’s music at some point, but it’s not really the best use of the energy required to point people towards new music…

Instead, I suggest we let our friends know about singer/songwriters (or any other music for that matter) that they’ve probably never heard of before. On twitter, I’ve been using the #10000Jonis tag for this – the idea being that if we support independent music in a much broader way, we’re all far more likely to find a ‘Joni’ that helps makes sense of our lives. The days of expecting one heavily promoted musician to be the voice of a generation are thankfully behind us – what we can now have is thousands of musicians telling stories in a shareable way, and those that connect can find a home. But it can only happen if we actively seek new places and ways to share the great stuff we find.

I am so dependent on people choosing to share my music with their friends, it’s not even funny. If you who dig it don’t talk about it, I don’t really have a plan B for getting the music out there. I mean, I *could* buy ads in magazines and somehow hope to make back the investment by bucking every known trend in music advertising and actually making money through it, but that’s a pretty major ask for a solo bassist who really struggles to describe what he does to people who haven’t heard it. Best solution? You who dig it play it to your friends. Deal? Thanks! x

So, please, use the comments here to share great music (PLEASE not your own – I’m OK with self-promotion, there’s just a time and a place for it, and this isn’t it.) And then take that great music and talk about it on Facebook, twitter, forums. If you want to talk about my stuff, that’s great – share the Bandcamp links, copy it onto your friends phones, email them tracks. Whatever, I’m grateful for the support

A few days ago, CDBaby launched a Facebook Music Store, that integrates with Facebook pages, so you can sell your music there (assuming it’s also on CDBaby).

The store has its own tab and is basically an embedded version of your music page at CD baby. So people can buy CDs and downloads, with just a few quick clicks.

I’m not going to add it.

I’ll stick with Bandcamp.

Here’s why:

1: the usefulness of it assumes that the potential music sales traffic on Facebook is people coming to your page, rather than seeing a status update in their feed. If I post a bandcamp link in a status, it sticks an embedded player right there in their feed. They see it as often as I choose to post it. And I can embed any of my albums at any time…

2. CdBaby have yet to introduce variable pricing – I can change what the fixed price is, but I can’t do ‘pay what you think is fair/what you think it’s worth’. So I’d suddenly have to switch from the system I like at the moment that allows people who want to dip their toe in and find out what I’m about to download things without paying up front, but also allows those who see far greater value to them in what I do than anything my conscience would ever let me set the price at (which in turn provides me with a huge jolt of encouragement and gratitude towards those people. Always a good thing when you’re trying to create art.)

3: The shop would only stock my music. Of the last 15 Bandcamp embeds on my Facebook page, 8 are of my albums, 7 are of other people’s. It’s just as important and useful for me to be able to introduce those who choose to read what I’m posting over there to great new music that I find, as it is for me to be able to post about my own stuff. That we can do that in the same Bandcamp-y format also helps normalise the Bandcamp process, making it a natural place for people to look for music, and the indies win again. I like generating sales for the people who make the music that I love. Bandcamp embeds on Facebook allow me to do that.

4: It’s not just me that can share bandcamp embedded players like that. ANYONE CAN. You can, right now, copy the URL to any of my albums, paste it into your FB status update, type ‘check out this guy, he’s the greatest musical genius that ever lived!’ and all your friends can click play right there on the site. They don’t have to come to my page, they can do it from the comfort of their own feed. And they can share it and do the same. They don’t have to ‘like’ my page to get there, there’s no further transaction necessary, despite it then being VERY easy indeed for anyone who wants to to buy my album in that environment.

So, I’ll stick with bandcamp, and if you want to help prove me right, you keep sharing the music you love, OK?

A couple of @bandcamp stats for you. The average price of a paid download of mine on bandcamp is £6.49 – for something available ‘free’.
10:02pm Jul 28th 2011

[that one's self-explanatory - a quick conversion online shows me that £6.49 is currently $10.63]

AND that stat INCLUDES single track downloads. So the album stat is even higher. That’s WAY more than I make on iTunes or Amazon.
10:02pm Jul 28th 2011

[if I sell music on iTunes, they take a cut, and CDBaby who I use to get my music onto iTunes take a cut. A quick look at my latest statement from CDBaby shows that I made $7.49 from a download of '11 Reasons...' on US iTunes]

It’s also more than I’d make selling a CD at a gig for £10, if the venue took their 15-25% and I had paid for pressing.
10:03pm Jul 28th 2011

[as it is, I rarely do gigs where the venue takes a cut - house concerts tend to be less cut-throat than that! Then, if I sell 'em for a tenner, I get the tenner. the amount that most people calculate in pressing cost is usually slightly out as they don't factor in the number they give away for promo or to friends... it's pretty rare, in my experience, for someone pressing a 1000 CDs to sell more than 800 of them. In some cases, artists actually get paid for less than half of them. Online sales need to be posted, which means stamps and envelopes as well, which you can recoup if you charge postage on top...]

the average amount I make per download, INCLUDING FREE DOWNLOADS, on bandcamp, is £2.21 – that’s more than I’d make on a CD sale in HMV.
10:04pm Jul 28th 2011

[...actually, if you gave me 1p for a CD or download, you'd be giving me more than I made on my sales through HMV. Largely because I got them in there through a friend of a friend who then left, and I was never able to find out who knew about the CDs. They must've sold though, cos they aren't on the shelves any more... BUT, if they'd got there the usual route, through a distributor, they'd be paying me a wholesale price for them - roughly half of retail - and I'd have to ship them to them, and pay for pressing, and make sure that they were shrink-wrapped and had barcodes etc... Given that I was advised to price my CDs at £8 by the distributor I talked to, that's not much at all...]

…And that again includes single track downloads. That’s people paying what they think it’s worth. What THEY think it’s WORTH. To THEM.
10:05pm Jul 28th 2011

[contrary to supposed web-trends, I have VERY few one track downloads. Why would you? you can have the whole album for the same amount. I get a few, and people far more often pay for single track downloads than for albums... But they naturally don't pay large amounts for them - but it still stands that anything people pay for them is voluntary. It's perfectly legal for them to download everything of mine for free...]

I often see people who’ve downloaded one album for free come back and pay for others. Try before you buy, then pay based on perceived value.
10:06pm Jul 28th 2011

[I see this because I see everyone's email address who buys stuff. This isn't going to some faceless record label dude. I upload the tunes, it's my paypal account the money goes in, my rent that gets paid with it. That's why I'm so grateful ]

It doesn’t happen by accident. I treat my listeners as adults, I know they care about art, about music, I give them the chance to be awesome
10:07pm Jul 28th 2011

[I'm sure people have far more impressive self-generated opportunities to be awesome in their lives - helping old ladies across the street, prosecuting media magnates for defiling our national press etc. But the fact remains that when people choose to support the art they care about, when they voluntarily join me in this negotiation about the value of the music I make to them, and their part in making it possible for me to spend time doing it without panicking about rent, they are doing something very awesome. Perhaps even revolutionary. Certainly something that flies in the face of the doomsday bullshit coming from the big record labels]

how many people have ever been to music.stevelawson.net and downloaded everything for free? about 5. Yeah, they’re killing me…
10:08pm Jul 28th 2011

[...actually I think it's 6 now, cos someone else just did it. Perhaps in response to this tweet. Whatever, they are clearly not people who if they'd had to would be buying CDs in large quantities. One of the people who did it now has the music available on his shitty little website in Germany, where you have to fill in crappy surveys to get access to his stash of MP3s. He's clearly a scumbag (any claims that he's doing it 'for the music' are dead the moment he a) puts a paywall in place for people to get the music, and b) doesn't just point to the artist's site where you can get this stuff. But he's clearly a buffoon and not worth worrying about.]

How many people go from here to music.stevelawson.net, listen & find it’s not their thing? loads. I’m OK with that.
10:10pm Jul 28th 2011

[I'm actually more than OK with it, I'm glad it happens. Statistically, there are VERY few people who spend time listening to instrumental music. Even fewer who go around consciously looking for the kind of thing I do. What the hell is the kind of thing I do? Who knows. What happens is, people find me interesting then go and check out the music. The ones looking for solo bass loopy goodness will find it anyway, and everyone else will have a chance to experience and then download stuff they would never have thought to listen to. It stands to reason that a large number of them are going to say 'it's not my thing'. But many others have found it, and now listen to me a lot. For a fair number of them (I'm told, by them) I'm pretty much the only instrumental music they listen to, and certainly the only solo bassist. Massive mounds of WIN, then]

For the last 70 years, popular music has been utterly dominated by singing and drumming. I’m a solo bassist, making a living. #thefuture
10:11pm Jul 28th 2011

[Same again - I make VERY niche music, and sneak it into people's lives. And - shock! horror! - a fair few of them dig it and pay for it. All good, nothing bad]

I don’t make enough from digital sales to live off them. That would be amazing, also would put me in the top 0.000001 of musicians ever.
10:11pm Jul 28th 2011

…it’s not even close to that. But I’ve found a way to make the music I love in a cottage industry way, & share it with likeminded friends
10:12pm Jul 28th 2011

[I'm stunned at how few people have any idea just how tiny the number of musicians is who make enough from selling their own music to live on. It has always been thus. Only now, we don't have to pile up debt to get there. We can maintain fascinating portfolio careers and make the music we love, without needing to 'Dance For Chicken' in order to make ends meet. Bands have always made money from gigs, sales, merch, licensing. It's easier now to do it on your own than it has ever been, and FAR cheaper than ever to produce and market recorded music. Hurrah!]

Add up digi-sales, CD sales, USB stick sales, gigs, teaching and the geek stuff that has happened because of my music stuff, I pay the bills
10:13pm Jul 28th 2011

[I have, as I mentioned, a portfolio career. And I wouldn't have it any other way. I LOVE all the things that being a musician has led me to. I love teaching, I love the social media tomfoolery that I get to do to help other people understand the democratising nature of the web that we musicians have been messing with for longer than most, I love writing... it's all fab, and it's all what it is because of music. #grateful]

..or rather, WE pay the bills – you and I. You, the people willing to express your sense of worth & gratitude for the music by paying for it

10:14pm Jul 28th 2011

[yeah, you play a big part in it, whenever you pay for music or come to a show. It really doesn't mean shit without you]

If you haven’t heard what I (we – @lobelia and I) do, please feel free to visit http://music.stevelawson.net & http://lobelia.bandcamp.com
10:16pm Jul 28th 2011

[the inclusion of Lo here is kinda key. We are a team. Our solo records are team efforts, our careers are intertwined. I can only do what I do because of our shared parenting of Baby Flapjack. Also, her new record is effing awesome. I love it SO much. You quite possibly will too.]

At gigs, I often suggest that friends buy different albums, so they can swap and each get a copy of them both. Share it around! It helps
10:20pm Jul 28th 2011

[this is what people have been doing for decades. Give them permission to do it, they think you're awesome. Tell them off for it, they think you're a dick. Don't ever get into a position where your audience thinks you're a dick. That's rule number 1]

however, more often that not, people share links to my stuff on bandcamp cos it’s easier than dropboxing whole albums. #gamechanger
10:21pm Jul 28th 2011

[The genius of Bandcamp is that it gives an infinitely superior experience to torrenting music. It's actually easier, it's more transparent, the economics of it adapt to whatever country you're selling to, it's not DRM, it's great quality, it's personalised. Everything about it is better than iTunes, Amazon, Spotify or PirateBay. That's the key. Beat them by making it better.]

over the last week or two, I’ve been watching a band I gave some advice to about music online start to act on it. It’s fabulous to see…
10:36pm Jul 28th 2011

[I do a fair bit of this. I love it. If you want some help, drop me a line]

One thing I suggested to them was to look at all the possible numbers relating to what they did, and then consider what they all mean.
10:36pm Jul 28th 2011

[numbers like - number of listeners, number of historic sales, number of radio stations reaching how many people, converting to how many concert goers/fans/music buyers, how many people know the name, how many t-shirt sales, how much made per audience member per gig, how many great people you get to meet at small gigs vs big gigs, how much help you get from people who see you as indie, vs those who see you as megastars, marketing spend on a tour, marketing spend on a record, how many free records you could give away before it equalled the market spend in 'lost' revenue, how many people that would reach... there are hundreds of them, all worth considering, and all influencing each other]

It’s a huge task to go from the old record company model, to one where things you do have meaning. That approach was such a clusterfuck.
10:37pm Jul 28th 2011

…record companies spending the artist’s money to a level that was almost never recoupable. Insanely wasteful. Chasing what? Fame? ha!
10:38pm Jul 28th 2011

[the record company model never made sense. At all. There was so little understanding of normal business practicing, normal marketing principles at work, in most labels, that it's terrifying. Add to that the even worse situation for the artists that they end up paying for everything twice (how on earth do you think that a business in which 9/10 albums never recouped the advance kept going? by paying itself out of those advances, then recouping it again). Like I said, clusterfuck. Not something we want to hang on to. At all. Ever.]

.@dubber once said ‘you don’t have the right to make money off your music, you have the opportunity’ <–best advice ever. srsly.
10:41pm Jul 28th 2011

[I have a massive bug-bear about entitlement. I don't deserve an audience. I'm grateful when people take time to listen to what I do, whether or not they end up liking it. The web gives me the opportunity to tell the story about the music and its part in my life, and invite people to be part of the ongoing sustainability of that. Not a right, a privilege. Dubber's phrase is pure distilled genius]

my best advice? ‘trends’ in digi music don’t mean shit. There’s you the listener, & there’s the artist. What you going to do? What matters?
10:42pm Jul 28th 2011

[I see it all the time, people telling me that no-one values digital music any more, that Spotify will kill it, that we're all doomed, that iTunes is the only model that works, that blahdiblahdifuckingblah. Droning on and on about what the 'trends' suggest. You know what? When I'm listening to music, I'm not thinking about trends. If I am, the music isn't doing its job. I'm grateful for it, and if I can be a part of more of it coming into my life, I'm lucky to be able to be a part of that. That's not about trends, it's about me loving the music I love, and by extension wanting to grovel at the feet of the people who gave birth to it in gratitude. So yeah, I'm going to pay for it. I don't want or need CDs. They were never where the value was for me. I fell in love with music. Yeah, I love LP covers, and reading sleeve notes, but that's not what I paid for. That came with the music. What are YOU going to do to show you're grateful for the music you love? How are your actions going to encourage the people who are capable of making the art you love to make more of it? It's not hard. Anyone who spends their life working out what they can get away with is a selfish fuck and needs to grow up. If that's the case, file-sharing is the least of our worries. But we're not like that. We are stardust, we are golden. And music makes us more fully human. Amaze people with your humanity.]

Over the last few days, a lot of people have been talking about the arrival of Spotify in the US

Now I’m tidying them up here (fixing the wayward numbering in the process), and will maybe expand on them a little as time goes on. I’ve left the original links in place in case you want to retweet any of the tweets on Twitter…

—o0o—

• Couple of thoughts on legal vs moral/ethical WRT to the current music landscape.
  1) Just because something is legal, doesn’t make it useful.
  9:00pm Jul 14th 2011
• 2) It’s quite possible to do things that are very much pro-music but technically wholly illegal under current copyright law.
  9:00pm Jul 14th 2011
• 3) It’s ‘legal’ for a record label to spend your money for you without telling you, pay themselves with it, then hold your art to randsom…
  9:01pm Jul 14th 2011
• 4) You are free to pay for anything you’ve torrented. If in doubt, ask the artist. If you’re scared to ask the artist, question yourself.
  9:02pm Jul 14th 2011
• 5) Whether Spotify is legal or not is moot. It is what it is. No-one is ever going to make enough to ‘fund’ their art/life from it…
  9:02pm Jul 14th 2011
• 6) If that doesn’t bother you, you have nothing to worry about for now. If it does, you are a grown up, be the change you want to see.
  9:03pm Jul 14th 2011
• 7) When Lady Gaga was reported to have made pennies from spotify, she had sold 20 MILLION downloads. These are not unconnected.
  9:05pm Jul 14th 2011
• 8 ) Spotify isn’t the future of music. Music is the future of music. Rock stardom is a smile on a dog.
  9:07pm Jul 14th 2011
• 9) By far the worst enemies of musicians making music are the RIAA/BPI – trade bodies that couldn’t give a flying fuck about art or artists
  9:08pm Jul 14th 2011
• 10) Torrenting is not a ‘moral act’. It’s not sticking it to the man. You get music. That’s it. If you’re grateful for it, say thank you.
  9:09pm Jul 14th 2011
• 11) There are many ways to express gratitude. Paying for someone’s art is as good as any. As is sharing it around. Get excited about art.
  9:10pm Jul 14th 2011
• 12) Making a living as a musician has never been easy. The last 50 years of music press has been a giant smoke screen. A billion tons of bullshit
  9:11pm Jul 14th 2011
• 13) The reality of being a musician is way more interesting on Twitter than it is in the NME. Offer some encouragement to the minstrels.
  9:12pm Jul 14th 2011
• 14) Art makes your life better. Bad art eats away at the soul. Bad art is easy to sell than good art. Feed your soul.
  9:13pm Jul 14th 2011
• 15) It’s unfashionable to give a shit about people. What are you, 12? Screw fashion. Build karma. Ignore nonsense about copyright legality.
  9:16pm Jul 14th 2011
• 16) DEAct or no DEAct music isn’t going back behind a firewall. You’re a grown up. Do what is right, not just what you can get away with.
  9:17pm Jul 14th 2011
• 17) Downloading music isn’t “stealing” nor is it equivalent to forcing someone to fix your heating. Ignore pretty much everything Lars Ulrich ever says
  9:19pm Jul 14th 2011
• 18 ) …But neither is torrenting ‘helpful’. It’s neutral, at best. For me, until you come and say hi, you don’t exist, neither do the MP3s.
  9:22pm Jul 14th 2011
• 19) I’m very grateful to anyone who bothers to listen to me. Even more so if they buy it/share it. Telling your friends is the new advertising
  9:23pm Jul 14th 2011
• 20) There are no ‘entitlements’ here. I don’t have a ‘right’ to make a living from music, and you don’t have a ‘right’ to hear it.
  9:24pm Jul 14th 2011
• 21) Art is a gift. A gift to the artist and a gift to those who experience it. Treat is as such, do what you can to make the art flourish.
  9:25pm Jul 14th 2011
• 22) Here endeth the rant. Namaste.
  9:25pm Jul 14th 2011
• 23) If you’re new here thanks to the rant (lots o’ new followers.. yay!) here’s what I akchuamully sound like – http://bit.ly/jeA1pS
  9:43pm Jul 14th 2011
• 24) BTW, there’s no such thing as ‘The Music Industry’. There are many music industries. Many of them are not in the same business as me…
  10:00pm Jul 14th 2011

–o0o–

…as an addendum to the story, the original ExquisiteTweets list was retweeted a LOT of times, largely thanks to Emily Goodhand (AKA @copyrightgirl) tweeting it, and her tweet being retweeted by Graham Linehan (AKA @glinner ) – which resulted in not only a whole lot of web-traffic, but also a large number of people firstly going to my site and listening to the music (bandcamp gives you stats on how much of each song listeners are playing, and that ‘engagement’ statistic is currently the highest it’s ever been) and then, in the case of a few of them, buying the downloads. So that’s people going from ‘no knowledge’ of who I am, to reading some tweets, to listening, to buying in the space of just a few minutes. Wonderful, heartening stuff.

It hadn’t really struck me until listening back to “11 Reasons” on the plane over here to the US that I’ve shifted away from ABAB form on this record.

Unlike on Behind Every Word (the title track and Scott Peck in particular), none of the tunes have a verse and a chorus. They all evolve and morph the way all my music did before I got the Looperlative.

What has changed to make possible this kind of ‘step forward into an old method’ is the degree of subtlety and complexity with which I can manipulate multiple unsynced loops of different lengths – there’s a LOT of that going on on this album, whether in the big ambient passages or while playing with multiple melodic lines and post processing them in real time (and, in some instances, adding some filter-delay afterwards – the privilege of having multiple outputs on the looperlative, and therefor being able to mix things quite specifically once they’ve been recorded). I’m also using more and more synced loops of different lengths (multiples of whatever the original loop is – Travelling North is a prime example)

It’s interesting for me to note this unconscious shift back to the evolutionary model rather than the more traditional “Lamarckist” jumping back and forth between distinct sections. Perhaps in noting the change, I’m setting myself up to do a project of highly complex multiple section loop tunes … you heard the rumour here first

This post was inspired by

What it doesn’t do (though he assures me it’s in the research that his post was excerpted from) is talk about the definitions and parameters of pop music, and whether or not the death of pop is as much a function of its limiting etymology as it is a profound cultural shift.

Here’s what I mean: Pop music obviously derives from ‘popular music’ – a self-selecting classification – music that is popular. By the original definition, the success of the music was integral to the classification. And in a world when record labels released – and then radio, TV and magazines curated – the music we were allowed to find out about, the characteristics were defined in a 3-way shifting relationship between the public, the labels and the mediators. The fact that music that didn’t get signed was rarely documented means that we’ll never have an accurate music map of what was happening outside of that axis…

But as is so often the way when the primary impetuses are money and fame, a certain consensus formed around what would sell, what would become popular. And ‘pop’ became a style. A style dominated by singing, drumming, and volume. The three things that defined it. Guitars were key to a lot – but not all – of it, keyboards were prevalent but not ubiquitous. But very little of the music we think of as ‘pop’ was without drums and/or singing.

But as with any classification, the things that we recognised as ‘not pop’ were as interesting as the things that fit. Pop is, bizarrely, a sub-category of itself: the ‘pop’ charts are the catch-all, while the genre based charts define rock, soul, hip-hop, country etc. as elements in pop. But ‘pop’ would also be a way of differentiating a Pet Shop Boys record from a Led Zeppelin record, despite both being pop…

So now, where are we? We’re in a place, where as pop was claimed and disowned by various groups of music-makers, it is in it’s broadest sense an exclusionary definition – pop is music that isn’t ‘classical’, folk, jazz or anything that gets lumped under the clumsy and racist banner of ‘world music’. Pop has come full circle, in an age when nothing of value is popular, to be about an orientation towards music making.

It’s music that is

• either performance or recording-based (as differentiated from the community/social focus of folk music),
• far more reliant on pre-written songs than on improv,
• sold via the personality of the performer regardless of the writer,
• generally without any requirement to be academically significant…

One of the greatest disruptors in the history of popular music has been the role of music in Film and TV drama - people who would usually spend their time listening to Elton John and Celine Dion suddenly come into contact with all kinds of music from across the spectrum via its association with particular cinematic moods. From death metal to atonal chamber music, drum and bass to work songs, the music supervisors on films and TV shows often seek to define the cultural parameters of the show by the breadth – or focus – of the music they use. Not to mention their role in breaking new artists…

So pop in the old sense is dead, but as Derrida reminded us, all language is metaphorical, and the use of the word pop will go on, and be defined by its usage within a community.

For my part, I see ‘pop’ as a distinct musical form, within contemporary music – with a different set of audience-facing goals. It’s a form that has context, history, syntax and requires a respect for all of that to really ‘work’. If one’s notion of ‘pop’ is any way pejorative or dismissive, forget trying to make great pop. It’s a labour of love.

I define my own music as ‘pop’, some of the time, largely to move it away from the idea that it requires specialist knowledge to ‘get it’, and also as an acknowledgement of where so many of my influences come from. But still find that talking about the soundtrack, cinematic quality of it makes more sense to most people… it leaves it open to sounding like anything, but feeling like images.

Human beings seem to have an innate gravitational pull towards labels of belonging. Music fans are no different – we cluster around genre and sub-genre, around function (music for dancing, music for relaxation, political music, music that evokes a particular emotion), and the fractal formation of ever more specific sub genres does more to negate their necessity than reinforce their relevance, when the sub-genres become specific to a single band, no fan will ever exist purely within them again. So “Trans-Genre-ism” becomes a necessity if one is to own more than one band’s music, and it ceases to be ‘trans’ at all – there’s nothing out-of-the-ordinary about liking more than one band!

So, over to you. What is pop? ‘Why’ is pop? In an age when music that is nationally or internationally popular is largely (but certainly not exclusively) about its attachment to some other entertainment medium (reality TV, X-Factor-style karoake nostalgia/schadenfreude mash-ups, US drama-series soundtracks…), what does it mean to make niche pop music? And can a bass player who doesn’t sing or work with drums still make pop music?

The basic idea is this – a looper is an effect that allows the musician to record what they are playing and then loop it while they play over the top. Almost all looping devices allow you to do multiple layers on that loop, and some of them allow you to do fun things to the loop once it’s recorded – reverse it, slow it down, speed it up, stop it, restart it, remove some or all of the layers…

My own looping device of choice – the Looperlative LP1 – gives me 8 stereo channels (although at the moment I’m running it in mono) which can be played back through any of three stereo pairs of outputs. This allows me to record in a way that means I can mix and edit things more easily, but also allows me to ‘post process’ individual loops – I can run whatever is on that loop through another effects unit to change the sound again after I’ve recorded it. It also allows me to replace bits of the loop, scramble it, and chop bits out of it to make smaller loops from the big ones.

Anyway, just in case you’re unfamiliar with who else is trying this (I certainly didn’t invent it, though I did have fairly major hand in the development of the Looperlative, from a feature list/inspiration point of view) here’s a few other people doing good looping things, starting with one of my favourite ever live performances, and ending with a clip of Lobelia and I live in Dallas:

This Imogen Heap video is spectacular - she’s using an Electrix Repeater, which means that she can have a visual click track to keep those loops in time with each other, but nothing here is pre-recorded. Genius:

Here’s KT Tunstall squeezing everything possible out of an Akai Headrush:

Here’s Michael Manring – he was the initial influence on me to experiment with looping, and here he’s using the same looper I started out with – the Lexicon JamMan:

And here’s Zoe Keating, using a software looper, with a lot of the start/stop of the recording process automated before hand, but no pre-recorded cello parts:

And finally, the video of Lobelia and I that I mentioned, with me looping my bass and her voice:

Enjoy!

John Peel past away 6 years ago today

I miss him more than any other person that I never met. I’ve written many, many times about the live-changing impact he had on me, growing up in Berwick Upon Tweed, pre-internet, starved of pretty much all other access to boundary-less music.

So to celebrate, here are a few albums I think you should hear – great music, by great people.

Honour the memory of John Peel by hearing something brand new today:

[edit - adding this an hour after the rest of the post]

Peel and the internet. Here’s the thing. When I was listening to John Peel back in the late 80s/early 90s, it was him, or magazines or TV. And friends. And friends had to have the recording there and then.

We had listening parties. We’d get together before going to the pub and listen to LPs. We’d share what we’d bought. Between the 4 or 5 of us that were actively looking for new music.

There really wasn’t any way to get recommendations outside of that mediated world. Hence the vitality of Peel’s place in the history of music and broadcast.

But now, the role that John Peel played is played by a cast of hundreds, if not thousands in my life. People digging out great music, obscure music, unexpected music. People telling stories about music, sharing music, contextualising music. None of them have Peel’s encyclopedic knowledge, and as far as I can tell, none of the music sharing sites are prone to putting on records at the wrong speed, but the combined effect of passionate experts in large numbers, with access to the sharing tools we now have is a vibrant, awesome ecosystem for music discovery. Where discovery, gratitude, passing-it-on and talking to the artist now happen in the same place.

That’s John’s legacy. As much as any radio person attempts to fill the gap – and long may they keep taking the inspiration to go outside the mainstream – his role is one that all of us play. To be mini-Peels, Peelettes, engines of discovery and passionate advocates for the music we love.

Go, make disciples.

Aside from the fact that I’m REALLY proud of the music on both albums

Here they are, side by side, have a listen:

It’s rare that you get the indulgence of doing two records under identical technical constraints, as a ‘test case’ for those methodologies. Which made the experience of playing with Trip even more enjoyable than it would’ve been if we’d just been doing an album the old fashioned way with, y’know, written songs and shit…

Instead, we got to see what happens when he gets pulled into my world of playing everything as though it’s the only take, as though it’s a gig with intense listeners. I did do some edits (some bits where it took Trip a little longer to pick up on the harmonic world I’d established, and some bits where my own melodic meanderings went on journeys that were a little to long to warrant repeated scrutiny), but there’s no overdubs, and only one place where I took a line from one place and used it elsewhere (to create a ‘hook’ at the start of one of the tunes, can’t remember which one…)

Beyond that, it’s as we played it, with all the conversational questioning, searching, answering, back ‘n’ forth, uncertainty and discovery that that entails. My favourite kind of music.

For Trip’s part, he pulled up a handful sketched out ideas – some samples, some harmonic frameworks, bits of stuff he’d been messing with in Reason at various states of completion and had me play over them. Often playing a number of passes, making suggestions about the sounds I was using. It’s a common studio technique, but it’s not often that once that bit is done the tunes get *rewritten* around those lines. So he took the bits I’d played, and wrote tunes to fit them into. Amazing. Sometimes it’s all about me (the 2nd tune on the album, “While I’m Here, Remind Me of Forgiveness“), for the most part, it’s more about the inspiration that my one line gave him, or more accurately, it seems to me, the permission that line – and this way of working – gave him.

There’s one of the lines on the EP that I recorded for Trip 3 years ago – he’s been working on this kind of project for a long time. This just gave him the permission to go nuts and the deadline to finish it. And it’s awesome. His playing on this is genuinely some of my favourite ‘bass plus’ playing I’ve ever heard. (bass plus being a clumsy term for using bass outside of its more common role/sonic space).

I think the two albums make a really interesting set. Even the fact that Slow Food is much longer than Infrablab makes a whole lot of sense. Slow Food is the audiobook, Infrablab is the TED talk. Slow Food is a slow ramble though some unfamiliar shrubland, Infrablab is a GPS-directed journey to somewhere fabulous, with no getting lost on the way.

Two methods, two sets of music, two entirely complimentary approaches to making weird shit happen on the bass guitar.

I’m happy.