stevelawson.net

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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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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So today I’m in Belfast, at an Amplified event called PICamp - Political Innovation Camp. It’s an ‘unconference‘ style event, with the added Amp-twist of us hopefully taking the great stuff that comes up here and sharing it beyond the walls of the discussion, and running a session or two that invites you to contribute. [...]

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One of the common mistakes made by people considering the ‘usefulness’ of social media is that value measurements are somehow detached from any acknowledgement of just how much of what human beings do is really screwed up.

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Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, I found out at about 12 o’clock today that Andrew Dubber, author of New Music Strategies, was in London for a conference. Andrew and I met at BrumTwestival, a Twitter-organised charity event, got on great, and so I tweeted him to see what he was up to. 30 mins later, we were having lunch together at the British Library. Such is the immediacy and flexibility of the twittering life

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It’s a while since I blogged anything about Twitter, so maybe it’s time for a response to a couple of the prevailing misconceptions about the micro-blogging service that has substantially improved my life over the last year.

There are three broad themes coming out in the Twitter critique:

• That it’s full of trivial rubbish
• That’s it’s reality TV without pictures
• That is for narcissists and fosters mental ill-health (WTF??)

To which I, not surprisingly, say ‘Bollocks’.

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So, we’ve been back in England a few weeks. I’ve even had time to do my busiest week of masterclasses ever! (more on that later, I promise)
For now, it’s time to round up some of the lessons and tips from our house-concert-based, social-media-driven jaunt to the US over christmas/january.
A few salient points to start with:

most [...]

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So, as I outlined in Pt 1, Social networks can be a really tough place to inhabit as a musician, because you’re going to get a LOT of artists sending you friend requests expecting you to check out their music.

The idea for the artist, in that case, is that numbers mean everything. If I have 80,000 Myspace friends I must be doing something right, right? Surely that means that a percentage of them are going to become fans, tell their friends and then go and buy my CDs. Surely those kind of numbers will land me a record deal? Any label that knows I’ve got 80,000 devoted Myspace ‘fans’ will surely snap me up?

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So, context: I’m on Myspace, ReverbNation, Last.fm, Facebook and Twitter. Oh, and Youtube, Vimeo, Seesmic, Phreadz…etc. etc.

All of them are social networks. On all of them, not surprisingly, I get followed/added/friended by a lot of musicians and bands.

Which is all well and good, except that I can’t listen to them. Not ‘won’t‘, ‘can’t‘ - the numbers don’t add up. Even if we ignore the 8000 myspace friends I deleted before christmas, we’re still looking and thousands of interactions. Even if I only listened to one song from each, that’s upwards of 4000 minutes of listening time, just to grant each of them a cursory ear. And given that a handful of them will really catch my imagination, I’ll probably end up listening to them a lot over time.

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Finally, the details have been nailed down, and thanks to the wikkid organisational skillz of the wonderful Geoff Hickman, I’ll be doing a ‘future of social media for music makers’ masterclass in Santa Ana, the night before NAMM starts.

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