I Can Make More Money For You Than I Can For Me

Last week, spent a fascinating day in a room full of people who make a living (or part of their living) from music. It was facilitated by Andrew Dubber, as part of a research project for Birmingham City University.

One of the things that came up was a two-part conversation about how we define ‘success‘ and how much we earn. Which prompted me to raise the question about how much I earn ‘from‘ music and how much I generate in earnings ‘for‘ music.

Dubber differentiated years ago (in a slightly different context) between ‘music‘ and ‘my music‘. And I now use that distinction in considering where the value is in my online music endeavours. I’m as happy to make money ‘for’ music as I am to make money ‘from’ music. The reason being that ‘my music’ is a sub-set of ‘music’ not the other way round. So if ‘music’ does well, I can do well. It’s also true that my opinion about other people’s music is more valuable to the people I’m talking to online than my opinion about my own music. It stands to reason that I think the music I make is awesome – otherwise I wouldn’t release it. I’m not in the habit of putting out music that I don’t love. It’d be pretty much impossible for me to promote it if I wasn’t 100% behind it. Continue reading “I Can Make More Money For You Than I Can For Me”

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?”

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”

“Art First” – Why the ‘Present of Music’ is the Best it’s Ever Been for Musicians

photo of clown art from the Urban Scrawl ExhibitionFrom Thursday to Saturday last week I was following Andrew Dubber’s tweets from a music industry conference in Finland called Is This It?

The premise of the conference is that it’s a ‘music seminar about music‘, though there was a baffling and conspicuous absence of actual musicians speaking at it. The overall tone, it seemed – as drawn from the various tweeted quotes – was that it was a bunch of music industry people desperately trying to come up with a way to continue ‘business as usual’ – marketing strategies, ways to feed more data to collection agencies to get paid, and the usual crop of should’ve-been-left-in-the-70s ideas involving scantily clad women as a marketing draw. So far, so heinous.
Continue reading ““Art First” – Why the ‘Present of Music’ is the Best it’s Ever Been for Musicians”

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