Category: New Music Strategies

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Is This Unique? Every Note We’ve Ever Played Will Be Released

Here’s a list of facts about Daniel Berkman and I:

  • We met at the sound-check to our first gig together.
  • The idea to play only improvised duo music came about while setting up for that gig.
  • We’ve now done 10 shows together, resulting in somewhere around 11-12 hours of music (I think).
  • We’ve never played together NOT in front of an audience. Never “jammed”, never even properly sound-checked together.
  • Every note we’ve ever played together is recorded – multi-track proper hi-res recording of every gig we’ve done.
  • It will all be released soon. Every minute of it.

I’ve no idea if this is something that has ever happened before. I’ve certainly never come across a band that were able to commercially release every note they’d ever played together. These aren’t ‘board tapes’ that serial bootleggers are dumping on Archive.org. This properly mixed, mastered and released. Continue reading “Is This Unique? Every Note We’ve Ever Played Will Be Released”

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How To Send Bandcamp D/L codes via Mailchimp…

Here’s a thing I’ve been mentally wrestling with for a few days – I really want to be able to do a Bandcamp download code for each member of my mailing list, which is hosted with Mailchimp. I looked through the documentation for the site, but couldn’t immediately see how to do it.

So I did what I always do when I need a problem solved. I asked Twitter.

And my clever friend Lee told me how to make a custom field in the list database.

 

He tweeted:

 

So I did that, but there’s no import option for a single field… I then noticed that there is the option to ‘auto-update‘ your current list when importing data – which means I can export the list from Mailchimp to Excel, generate the codes in Bandcamp, add them to the newly created column in excel, then reimport the list to Mailchimp using the auto-update function.

Then just add the short-code merge tag for the code in your actual email template. Hey presto, unique Bandcamp code for every list member…

It’s worth noting that this is only advisable if you either have

a) massively higher than average open rates on your mailing list or
b) shedloads of spare download codes that you haven’t used with bandcamp.

I’m in the latter camp, so can afford to give them away and see what happens…

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The Glorious Dilemma – How To Release A Huge Amount Of Music?

It’s been a long time since the traditional recording release cycle of ‘make a CD, do 3 months of promo, release the album, sell enough to recoup, tour off the back of it, take some time off, do it all again 12-18 months later’ made much sense to me. I’ve been making too much music for that kind of approach for a few years now… So I’m trying to work out what the best way forward is. Let me fill you in…

Here’s the glorious dilemma Daniel Berkman and I find ourselves in right now – we have 8 shows recorded from our January tour, as well as one still-unreleased show from the previous January (and of course the gig that became Accidentally (On Purpose) ) which is all worthy of release. Continue reading “The Glorious Dilemma – How To Release A Huge Amount Of Music?”

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Rock And Roll Is Dead Gets A Proper Release!

So, only about three years late, I’ve finally put my novel, Rock And Roll Is Dead, up for proper download. You can get it by clicking here:

Previously it was a free PDF and an ePub version that a friend put together for me. Now, via Leanpub, I’ve done it properly, and you can get it in PDF/EPUB/MOBI versions, for Kindle, iBooks and everything else.

So what’s the story? It’s about a band, playing pub gigs, who decide to get out of the rut they’re in. And it’s quite a journey.

It ends up being a bit of a fictional music manifesto. Like condensing all the New Music Strategies blog stuff here into a book and adding loads of swearing (they get quite angry at various times through the book…)

Here’s a lil’ promo video about the book:

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The 360 Deal – A Book Of Very Useful Music Advice

I’m in a new book!

It’s called The 360 Deal, and was conceived and assembled by Andrew Dubber (my colleague in New Music Strategies). A few months back he shared the idea with me and we started to assemble a list of possible contributors and in this first digital release are about 100 of the eventual 360 contributions. If you buy it now, you’ll get all the future updates for free!

The book costs $3.60 (or more, and some people have paid LOTS more) and ALL the money is going to Music Basti – an amazing charity that works with at-risk children, using music to strengthen and empower them.

You can buy the book on Leanpub here. Go to the 360 Deal website here.
Listen to the podcast that Dubber and I recorded about it here.
Read what Hypebot had to say about it here.

Then go and tell ALL your friends about it. Let’s all get wise, get educated, and help kids in poverty in India while we’re at it, yes?

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New Video Pt 2 – Me Talking About Music-Things!

Right, part 2 of the new videos round-up. Firstly, here are two fairly long videos of a panel discussion I was involved in as part of a UKTI (UK Trade & Industry) event about music and enterprise, put on by Chinwag. I was on a fabulous panel with the ever-so-clever Laura Kidd, Rich Huxley and Paul Bay, excellently moderated by Lisa Holloway. A good time was had by all. And it was followed by an ‘ask the experts’ session, which has some wisdom in it too. Here they are :: Continue reading “New Video Pt 2 – Me Talking About Music-Things!”

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Charts, Million Selling Singles, And Why They Probably Don’t Matter

Someone on Twitter just linked to this article about million selling singles.

A couple of quotes jumped out at me:

“Last year some 178m singles were sold in the UK, while the projected figure for this year is 190m. At that rate, this decade will eclipse the 90s as the most successful ever for sales.”

yeah, so that shit about file sharing killing music? Sounding a little tenuous, right?

Another choice quote from the article:

“There’s been a disproportionately huge increase of million-sellers – over 60% within the last 10 years,”

Again, WTF is all that ‘the death of recorded music’ stuff about?

The stats we most often see represented in graphs are so selective as to be entirely meaningless. Continue reading “Charts, Million Selling Singles, And Why They Probably Don’t Matter”

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Indie Or Not, Who Gets The Money?

picture of money by Alejandro Jopia from Flickr, used under a CC license. Via Twitter, I just saw this article from The Atlantic Wire.

The headline reads “There’s No Money in Indie Music: Cat Power Is Broke”

As a pair of statements, the former supposedly being proved by the latter, it’s disingenuous nonsense – there’s clearly LOADS of money to be made from an indie record landing in the top 10… But there are some massive questions over why the artist who made the record isn’t getting enough of it to live on. This article answers pretty much none of those, so the ‘sky is falling’ conclusion encapsulated in the title is nonsense. Continue reading “Indie Or Not, Who Gets The Money?”

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A Few Thoughts On Paying For Downloads

This was originally posted as a mini essay on my Facebook music page, but someone on there suggested it’d be helpful to post it here too so it could be shared wider. And I’m happy to oblige 🙂

A few thoughts on paying for downloads, that you’re welcome to share around:

That thing where you ‘fund‘ music via Kickstarter/Pledge Music, and pay more so the artist can make a new record without going into debt? Every time you buy music from an independent artist on Bandcamp, you’re doing exactly the same thing. EXACTLY.

Every time someone buys my music, it means I can spend more time making music. I spend less time worrying about how the hell to pay the bills, or how I’m going to afford the train fare to wherever my next collaborator lives. It changes the way I think when booking a tour, cos if I’ve got a little cushion from music sales, I can book more gigs speculatively and not have to make sure that every single gig has a guarantee just so I don’t end up going over my credit card limit in order to play shows… Continue reading “A Few Thoughts On Paying For Downloads”

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Warner vs James Taylor – Everything Is Broken

Blimey, where do we start with this one?

Right, this is a LONG post. You’re going to need a soundtrack. If you haven’t got anything playing already, try this – it’s lovely:

Onwards – heres a #Protip for Warners, and ever other major label: if you’re going to take the moral high-ground and claim that file-sharing screws your artists out of money and people shouldn’t be downloading the music you’ve released over the years for free or sharing it with their friends, because those works are the livelihood of those artists and they need to be paid for it etc. etc etc… it REALLY helps your case if you’re not habitually shitting on them and doing everything in your power to not pay them. Continue reading “Warner vs James Taylor – Everything Is Broken”

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