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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Here are the latest couple of videos I’ve put up. The first is another of the experimental ideas I’m working on for the new album - this time I wanted to try something a little more solidly rhythmic, just to see how the replace functions interact with a percussive track. (the part is played by [...]

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I’m finally making some headway on ideas for a new solo album (or whatever a collection of music that used to be called an album is now called). I’m still not sure whether it’s going to be all completely solo, have a few special guests, be all collaborative, or what, but at least some musical [...]

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Last Friday (April 17th) Lobelia and I played our first house concert in a couple of months in Leith, Edinburgh.
It was a great demonstration of everything that’s cool about house concerts:

It was organised very much at the last minute (wasn’t even advertised at all until 2 weeks before the gig),
It was booked by someone who’d [...]

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After the new tune I posted on Audioboo a few days ago, I’ve got the bug for uploading new tunes. Hopefully it’ll finally kick me into action to make some decisions about the kind of record (or whatever passes for a ‘record’ these days ) I want to make.

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One of the biggest “music on the web” stories in recent months has been the breakdown in relationship between the UK Performing Right Society (PRS) and Youtube (owned by Google). It’s over the share of Google’s ad revenue that should go to the writers of the songs in ‘premium content’ videos on Youtube. (for some background, here’s An article from The Guardian, and the PRS’s latest statement).

So, who’s in the wrong? We’ll, not surprisingly, both are, at least partly.

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Here’s a second video from 2005, with Michael Manring - this one was filmed the day after the last one, at the Brookdale Lodge, a rather freaky venue in the Santa-Cruz mountains that actually as a creek running through it… and a swimming pool with all kinds of weird tales attached to it - apparently [...]

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In the process of clearing out my CDs before moving house at the end of this week (BTW, I’m selling of a lot of CDs, if you want a copy of the list of what I’m selling, email me!) I found a few CDRs of photos from past gigs. One of those CDs contained a [...]

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OK, let’s jump straight into part 2 with a few of the fears musicians have when making ourselves available to talk directly with our audience.
We’ll look at 3 areas we often get wrong when interacting with our audience, which are:

How to treat your audience like friends rather than your ‘target market’. (notice I keep [...]

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I’ve been telling you a lot about what I’m up to musically of late, but I’ve got some rather talented friends who’ve been busy too, so here’s a quick and incomplete round-up of what a few of them have been doing:
First up there’s Ben Walker - fellow Tuttlist and fab singer-songwriter. He was writing 50 [...]

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