Category: tips for musicians

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Brainstorming New Models for Music Careers

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 post, as a log of some of what was said, and a bit more besides. Feel free to add your own suggestions at the end, and DEFINITELY visit Martin Atkins’ site Tour Smart website.
Continue reading “Brainstorming New Models for Music Careers”

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The Earnestness of Being Important

…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 find interesting about you AND about what you do.

The important element being that YOU being interesting isn’t a prerequisite to making great music, it just provides additional context for the music. It’s why we all bought music magazines – we didn’t buy them for dry descriptors of new music by people we’d never heard. We bought them to read stories, thoughts and opinions from the people whose music we love already, and to discover in the taste of the journalists some new music that they get excited about. Continue reading “The Earnestness of Being Important”

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Guest Post II – Jennifer Moore on 'Interestingness'

[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 play a whole set of solo bass. A fabulous musician, and a regular commenter here, she always brings clarity and insight to whatever she comments on.]

::ponder ponder ponder::

I’ve been thinking more about all these comments, esp John G‘s use of the word “engaging”.

I’m thinking that “what’s good” vs “what’s interesting” (in the hooky/intriguing/initial-engagement sense of “interesting”) leaves something out.

“I was found by being interesting, not by being good” – Partly true, but you were partly just found by being there. That is both “there” at the event, and “there” on Flickr. Continue reading “Guest Post II – Jennifer Moore on 'Interestingness'”

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What Makes Your Music Interesting?

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 a good break, time to think.

The 3 ‘live blogging’ events I’ve done have all been very different, but have all contained lessons for the discerning social-media-monkey-muso. Continue reading “What Makes Your Music Interesting?”

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London Songwriting Week seminar with Andrew Dubber and Tom Robinson

I’m going to be live blogging this today – here’s a link to the page about it

[12:41] It’s going to be a group seminar/workshop on collaboration in a digital age, but the sounds of things. Just had a chat with Tom and Andrew about the whole thing. Let’s see how it goes.

[12:51] Just tried to grab the feed of the Twitter search for #freshnet and embed it here, but feedburner won’t let me! How nuts is that? Anyway, if you want to follow other twitterings from today, head over to the #freshnet search. Continue reading “London Songwriting Week seminar with Andrew Dubber and Tom Robinson”

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iCould.com Pt 2 – Careers In Music.

So, following on from my first post about careers advice, what are we to do with careers in a music industry that’s entirely in flux? Where no-one can categorically say where the ‘jobs’ will be in a year’s time, let alone 3 or 5 years time.

I think this question needs to be looked at on many levels. The obvious one for me is the thing I say over and over again here – the best you’ll ever be as a musician is when you are pursuing your own vision for what music should be and can be, soundtracking the world as you see it. Continue reading “iCould.com Pt 2 – Careers In Music.”

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iCould.com – Real Life Inspirational Careers Advice. (Pt 1)

photo of solo bassist Steve Lawson soundchecking at the Royal Albert Hall, opening for Level 42 in 2002How did what you were advised to do at school connect with what you ended up doing?

I don’t know about you, but our careers advisory service back then was woeful to the point of being hilarious. There was a tick-box questionnaire that then made recommendations for what kind of jobs you should do. If you ticked yes to ‘do you like being outside?’, you invariably had ‘forestry commission’ suggested as a potential job on the dot matrix print-out you received. Continue reading “iCould.com – Real Life Inspirational Careers Advice. (Pt 1)”

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Open Letter To The UK Jazz Community Pt V – Blogging.

photo of Corey Mwamba at the BarbicanAt the end of Pt IV, I said that band leaders could consider not hiring musicians who don’t blog to help promote the music. A few of you didn’t like that idea, suggesting that it’s all about the music, and why should someone have to be a writer in order to play music?

To which my answer is twofold:

  • Firstly, I did say ‘it’s not a hard and fast rule’ – you don’t want to, you don’t have to. But…
  • Secondly, you don’t have to be a writer to have a blog. You just have to want to tell people about cool stuff that’s going on around you. Some of the best blogs are a collection of really short posts – they’re a little bit of information, and some kind of embedded media. If you feel inspired to elaborate, or to write in the kind of long form article-based way that I do, that’s great, but that’s not why musicians should be blogging.

Continue reading “Open Letter To The UK Jazz Community Pt V – Blogging.”

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Open Letter to the UK Jazz Community Pt IV – No More Sidemen!

photo of Steve Lawson and Michael Manring on stage together at the Brookdale LodgeAnother thing I touched on in part II was the issue of ‘sidemen’ who have no sense of ownership of a project. This is a big problem when a large part of the cost of any particular gig is paying the musicians. If only one of you is doing the work to get an audience, but four of you are getting paid for playing the gig, something’s wrong.

So, my suggestion is that band leaders need to stop thinking in terms of ‘sidemen’ when booking players – stop hiring people just to play on the gig. This works well all round – when we start thinking like this, we end up having the opportunity to bring a whole lot more to a gig than just playing – we bring with us an audience, some marketing ideas and a whole load of enthusiasm. Continue reading “Open Letter to the UK Jazz Community Pt IV – No More Sidemen!”

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Open Letter to the UK Jazz Community Pt III – recordings continued…

picture of Beth Rowley live at the Troubadour in LondonOne of the weird ways that a lot of the UK jazz players have been corrupted in their thinking by the pop world is the infrequency of their recorded output. As I said in my last post, cost has a fair bit to do with that. But the reason that cost has become a factor is that we’ve lost much of the spontaneity that made jazz so interesting, and instead have tried to match the production values of the pop world, where the life of a performance is wrung out of it, and then dropped back in by the ProTools surgeons… Continue reading “Open Letter to the UK Jazz Community Pt III – recordings continued…”

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