2008 in review – Blog posts for musicians, Pt 1

It’s been an amazing year for me – a proper round-up of the year will be coming soon. But I thought that first I’d pull together some of the things I’ve blogged about this year. So this is part 1 of a compilation of links to my blog posts for musicians this year –

Back in May/June, I did a series of posts about Social Media for Musicians:

• Social Media thoughts Pt 1 – my background and history.
• Social Media Thoughts Pt 2 – The Playground Of The Curious.
• Social Media thoughts Pt 3 – the ongoing conversation…
• Social Media thoughts Pt 4 – the podcast!
• Social Media Thoughts 5: Sharing the Love pt 1 – fans.

…ah, clearly i didn’t finish that last one… 🙂

Then in July, I did a series on my thoughts on bass teaching, and music teaching in general:

• Teaching ideas part 1. There’s no electric bass in most orchestras.
• Teaching Ideas Pt 2 – There’s no syllabus for punk and reggae.
• Teaching Ideas Pt 3 – Teaching is therapy
• Teaching Thoughts Pt 4 – Pleasing parents is bad for the student.

These had some really great comments off the back of them…

And here, in roughly chronological order, are my favourite posts from Jan – August:

• where youtube fits in the new music economy
• The Steve ‘n’ Jeff Show – podcast available now…
• Critical, pragmatic, self-belief – an artist’s life-blood…
• the ecosystem is wrong… why facebook for music still doesn’t beat Myspace…
• perception trumps design – why Myspace still works…
• Creativity and Socially Networked Marketing – the good and the bad.
• The dangers of technodarwinian web 2.0 marketing for musicians
• One True Fan – thoughts on Street Teams.
• Two jobs in one – the perils of being artist and label.
• The Musical Mechanics of ‘Feeling’: Wordless Story Telling
• Some thoughts on ‘Free’ methodology and practice…
• Thoughts and Questions on Originality.
• Interaction, Conversation, Respect: the death of broadcast marketing on the web…
• “Nobody owes you their attention” – thoughts on multi-act gigs and audiences…
• Paradigm is no measure of quality – what to do when you’re ‘different’…
• It pains me to say it, but Billy Bragg couldn’t be more wrong…
• Working Class Musicians
• The foolishness of Copying Radiohead (or ‘why poor people vote for lower taxes’)

There you go, that lot would make a pretty good e-book, if I ever get round to editing out the typos, and shortening some of my more overly-verbose entries 🙂

Next entry will cover Sept – Dec, and then the rest of what’s happened this year! If I don’t get to it til tomorrow, have a great new year, see you in ’09!

If you particularly like any of the posts, please share the links around, either via the ‘share this’ option below, or just by forwarding the URL to people who think might like to read them.