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You’ll remember a few weeks ago I was on a panel, chaired by the lovely Andrew Dubber, at UnConvention in Manchester. The panel was titled ‘Outside The Box’, and the aim was to address some of the unique issues that face musicians and bands that don’t fall into the ‘guitar/bass/drums/vox’ indie band format. So there [...]

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I have a friend who works in Marketing for Sungard - they’re a huge, multi-national, multi-billion dollar IT Services/financial information/Software company. Massive. Bigger than big.
What interesting for us musical types is their response to the financial crisis. A situation which, naturally, they took very seriously indeed, partly because they were deeply affected, but also because [...]

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Following on from yesterday’s post about the anachronistic nature of the term ‘label’, I’ve been having a think about the actual format that music is released in.
It’s amazing how containers can make us lazy about content. The assumptions we make about the nature of music, collections of music, what constitutes a ‘complete work’ etc.
There’s [...]

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One of the most interesting things about UnConvention this weekend was the chance to listen to some people from a number of record labels talk about what they do.
The thought that struck me from the discussion was that, while a lot of the work they do is still very much important and of value, [...]

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As you know, I was at Unconvention in Manchester at the weekend, on a panel titled Outside The Box.
On the way up there, on my epically crap train journey, I wrote down a load of ideas for the session, some of which I shared, some of which there wasn’t time for - so here’s that [...]

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This is my live blog of the ‘Music As Culture’ session at Unconvention in Manchester - it was a discussion hosted by Andrew Dubber and Jez Collins of Birmingham School Of Media. It was a great discussion, and my precis of it is here:
[6:00]Featured Artist’s Coalition (FAC) - policy decisions driving by people with the [...]

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This came up the yesterday in a couple of discussions on solobasssteve.com, the idea that random things can often provide the impetus to think about what we do in a more focused way. Particularly in this post by Mike, which this post is basically a very long response to…
One example of [...]

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…AKA, What’s Important about your Music… To You?

Following on from the discussion about ‘what makes you interesting?’, I’ve been thinking about the other ‘value metrics’ for what we do as musicians, and the directions they flow in.
Interestingness is one bi-directional value:

What you think is interesting, or find interesting about what you do
What your audience [...]

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[This post was originally posted as a comment on my "What Makes Your Music Interesting?", but was far too wonderful, and involved, to leave as a comment. So please do read the other post first, and Jennifer's earlier comments. Jennifer Moore is, as I said in the comments there, the first person I ever saw [...]

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These last couple of weeks, I’ve been SO busy with geek-things, that I’ve had little time for picking up a bass and making noises. It feels like a bit of a shame to have lost the momentum I picked up whilst posting my series of new video experiments to vimeo, but it also feels like [...]

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