Blog seems to be back – server problems took it away for a few hours. All seems to be working fine again… finger’s crossed.
Soundtrack – King Crimson, ‘In The Wake Of Poseidon’.
Some indie solidarity…
BDB just sent me a link to a band called The Books – two blokes from the states who make odd noises with samples and one of them plays cello and bass (can’t work out what the other one plays) – they make their own samples, release their own records, and have a very odd website. All fine stuff.
A quick look at their stats on Last.fm reveals that they have over 74,000 listeners on there!! A truly remarkable statistic.
Which made it all the more sad to find the following notice on their website –
We feel the need to dispel any notions that we are financially sitting pretty because of the acclaim our music has enjoyed. It’s true, we’ve released a couple of records and we’re grateful to all of the writers who have taken the time to write about them, but unfortunately our record sales do not reflect this. Our work, although deeply satisfying to us, has left us both on the brink of financial collapse since we began, so we are asking you: Please, do not steal our music thinking that we can afford it. We barely get by, and aren’t able to afford basic things like health insurance, let alone raising a family, etc. We love what we do, and we love that people listen, but if you would like to see our work continue, please support us, and all of the artists you enjoy, as directly as possible. The sad fact is, we can make a much better living selling t-shirts than we can selling music, so please help us keep this going.
Thanks!
Paul and Nick
Sad reading but I know exactly what they mean – I get way more interest, and have way more people who know my music than my CD sales would suggest. I remember a stat pre-internet that said that for every album sold, two copies were made. I’m guessing that’s at least doubled now. But it’s tricky – we all want people to listen to our music, and don’t want to have to go the route of disabling CDs from being copied onto iPods, or only having really shitty quality MP3s available. But it can be tough to make it all pay. One argument suggests that if people are swapping your MP3s then they’ll turn up to your gigs, and I’m sure there’s some truth in that, but on a week by week basis, it’s still tough to keep a record label functioning at the ‘profile’ level that the artists have when the sales don’t neccesarily reflect that.
From their statement, compared to their listening figures on last.fm, I’m in nothing like the dire situation that The Books appear to be in, but then I also haven’t got every track of every CD of mine available for download (all of theirs are on their site, I’m not sure if you can actually download them all).
The sales of the download versions of my CDs are doing well, and like the Books, I can see t-shirts being a good earner as time goes on.
I was talking at one point about doing a CDR amnesty – that anyone who sent me their copied version of one of the albums, or a signed statement that they’d just made MP3 copies off their friends could have a replacement for it for a fiver… I still quite like the idea but it was pointed out that it was in effect rewarding piracy and penalising those people who bought the CDs in the first place. I like to see it in more pragmatic terms than that, but I’ll hold off for now.
Still, you do have the opportunity to head over to the online shop and buy a CD/download/T-shirt/gig ticket if you like! There’s even a paypal tip-jar on the MP3s page (though I’m not sure if that just a way of absolving people’s conciences for downloading over an album’s worth of material but only giving me £2 for it!)
Either way, I feel sorry for The Books if things are really as bad for them as the statement above suggests, and I’m glad that my fan base is generally more forthcoming with the money for Cds!
Soundtrack – Eric Roche, ‘With These Hands’; The Cure’, ‘Greatest Hits’; Cathy Burton, ‘Speed Your Love’.
Are we living in a police state??
I just read this article in the guardian, thanks to a post on Jyoti’s Blog – it’s the story of a guy that was arrested on the tube under the ‘prevention of terrorism act’, had his flat searched, DNA and fingerprints taken and has now been landed with what looks like it may be a permanent police record despite being found innocent, just because he was carrying a rucksack and wearing a coat.
This is some seriously fucked up stuff. Really really scary – if it had gone another way he might have ended up with a bullet in his head like that poor Brazillian lad. He’s done nothing, is entirely innocent, and yet is now ‘on file’.
Why is London turning into some crap version of a Judge Dread cartoon? This doesn’t make us safer from terrorism. It makes all of us more distrustful of the police – surely that’s a really bad policy at this time, when trust in the police is already pretty damned low. It’s not going to put terrorists off, just make them more determined to beat the system that has presented them with this challenge.
If they need to stop people, surely the least they can do is wipe records clean when a person is proven to be utterly innocent, to treat them and their possessions with respect. Instead, he’s treated with suspicion all along, has his privacy violated in a number of ways, his girlfriend is terrified, and his chances of ever getting a work visa in the US are now utterly buggered.
It’s nice to know that the people that are supposed to be looking after us are doing such a damn fine job of breeding fear.
Once again, I feel sorry for those police officers who entered the force to actually protect and help people. They are going to be labeled along with the muppets that arrested David Mery as some kind of Miliitia.
Very scary stuff. Way way scarier than the threat of a terrorist attack, seriously.
Soundtrack – my last.fm ‘neighbours’ radio station. (no, that doesn’t mean I spend all day listening to tracks by Kylie Jason and Stefan Dennis)
OK I take it all back… well most of it
Aha, serves me right for basing a rant on something written in the Mail – apparently Cliff hasn’t given up recording at all – it was down to crossed wires. Or as it’s the Mail, probably just a load of made up lies, as that seems to be their stock and trade. Still it’ll spoil Simon Heffer’s column, where he was no doubt going to blame asylum seekers and single mums for ruining Cliff’s career.
So in fact, what started as him seeming like a churlish fool has actually turned into Cliff’s best bit of publicity for years. I mean, how many blog posts are there out there about Cliff, in general?
Soundtrack – The Cure, ‘Greatest Hits’.
A top comedy night out.
Having missed their show in Edinburgh, TSP and I were most pleased to discover that Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden were playing at our local arts centre, The Arts Depot in Finchley. It’s a new place that we’ve tried to get to a few times before, but each time the show has been sold out.
This time we were on the guest-list, so no selling out woes for us.
However, when we got there, and went upstairs to get to our seats, there was what looked like a civic reception in full swing – various people dressed like local dignitaries (no idea who the local dignitaries are, so not sure if they were just imposters), many peoples with ‘arts depot’ badges on, and a handful of local celebs (Robert Powell, the lovely Linda Bellingham etc.) Our first thought was that we were in completely the wrong place and something very odd had happened. Then the woman giving the speech (speech!?!?) mentioned tonght’s gig that everyone was about to go into, and we realised it was just a do that happened to coincide with the gig.
The gig was, as expected, marvellous – very funny indeed (I think TSP was laughing louder than anyone else there, but largely because we knew what the songs were going to be from their intros, as many of them were also in the ‘Men In Beige’ show we saw at Edinburgh last year). The larger venue didn’t really work in Barry and Ronnie’s favour – the intimacy of an Edinburgh-style venue was perfect for their style of musical comedy, and the bigger stage meant that those of us in the balcony didn’t get such a great line of sight for some of the facial expressions, but it was still a marvellous night’s comedy.
The party afterwards was lots of fun, given that we now knew what was going on, and would actually know two people at this bit of the party (they’d obviously been getting ready to go on stage when we got there at the start). Surreal moment of the day goes to Jeremy Beadle, who wandered up while I was chatting with Ronnie, and started to compliment him on his marvellous country singing (Ronnie is indeed a fantastic singer in just about any style he turns his hand – or larynx – to) – Beadle was as pissed as anyone I’ve seen for quite a while, and told us of his extensive country music collection. I’m sure if I’d had the forsight to video it on my phone it would’ve earned me £250 on ‘You’ve Been Framed’.
Also met the director of the arts centre who is, by the look of their programme, doing a marvellous job. Must follow up the contact – the main hall there is a beautiful performance space, and one I’d love to play in.
Today was a housework day, interrupted by coffee with the v. talented Photographer Steve, who has one of his shoots in the current issue of RockSound magazine, and is clearly going to be the most in-demand photographer in the country within the year. His latest shots are astounding. It’s always nice to sit and chat with other freelancers about the world of work and the state of the world. Also very nice to talk to one who’s doing so well, and deservedly so. Not only that, but his equally talented wife Lorna gave me her old minidisc player to record gigs with, as mine is broken. Talented lovely peoples. gives you faith in the world.
soundtrack – still the Rise Kagona tracks for the gig in October.
TAGS =Barry Cryer, Ronnie Golden, Arts Depot; Steve Brown, comedy.
New things at last.fm
First there was audioscrobbler. then they added last.fm, a sister internet radio station that chose tracks based on your audioscrobbler profile.
Hang on Steve, what the hell is audioscrobbler in the first place? Oh sorry. You see how at the bottom of most blog posts, I have a list of what I’ve been listening to, and the word ‘soundtrack’ next to it is in bold. Well that’s because it’s a link. if you click that link you get taken to a page that gives you details of every bit of music I’ve played in itunes over the last year or so. It has charts of who I’ve listened to the most, and for each artist it has charts of how many people are listening to them, what tracks are being played the most, etc.
Anyway, that was the scrob. And they also had last.fm, which had much the same information available on it as the scrob, but in a slightly crappier format.
So the whizkidz behind it decided to combine the two sites, and give the new site a bit of an overhaul. and it’s now last.fm. go and have a look. Do a search on an artist or two. then check out my page – the one that’s always linked from the bottom of the blogs. You’ll see what I’ve been listening to. How clever is that?
Anyway, they’ve also made it much easier for record companies to upload their music for the radio stations. So I’ve just been uploading the Pillow Mountain catalogue. check out the pages there for Grace And Gratitude and for For The Love Of Open Spaces. From there you can preview the CDs, or add them to your last.fm radio station (personalised radio, for free, with no adverts. Oh yes).
All in, last.fm is a music geek’s paradise – head over there, sign up and geek out!
Soundtrack – last.fm solobasssteve radio (you need the Last.fm player and a last.fm account for this link to work)
Bye-bye, little blue car
Having bought Gareth and Jane’s car from them last week, it was incumbent on me to dispense with my old – and now rather knackered – Ford Fiesta.
It was not without some sadness that TSP and I took it down to a local scrap-yard to head off into a new life as bits for other cars. I wonder if it was carrying a donor card? I’m slightly disappointed to have had to scrap it so soon, given that it’s only done 110,000 miles, which compared to the 196,000 of my last Fiesta is still middle-aged. the bodywork was pretty rusty, and the water-system had developed a fate-sealing leak – it was said leak that lead to the car’s demise as, though fixable, it would’ve cost more than the car was worth to sort out. Not a good investment on a car where just about anything else could’ve gone wrong at any moment.
So after a week of middle classness, we’re back to being a one car family. The insurance has been moved over (with a fairly major hike in the monthly payments! Time to investigate alternatives to the Co-Op for car insurance, methinks…)
Farwell, little blue car – we’ve been through a lot together; speeding fines, driving in bus-lane fines, congestion-charge-flouting fines… hang on, you’ve been nothing but trouble! Good riddance, you rust-bound-dollop of scrap. The £15 I got for you at the scrappies is more than you’re worth!
Blogging infidelities…
Oh yes, I’ve been unfaithful to my lovely blog – I’ve just registered a MySpace.com page under the name ‘solobassstevelawson’ – it should have been under the name solobasssteve, like so many other things I do, but I registered that, then realised that I’d registered it as a general account and couldn’t see a way to transfer it to a band account… so for now, it’s solobassstevelawson.
The interface at MySpace is unfeasibly complex to navigate – it looks like it was designed as someone’s GCSE project. no obvious link to an ‘edit me’ bit of the site, you just have to bookmark things as you stumble across them, and hope they have static URLs and you can get back there.
There does seem to be a heck of a lot of music stuff on there which is good, and some bands seem to have done v. well out of it. It’s nice to have a shop window beyond my own site, so we’ll see if it extends my reach.
It’s purely a marketing thing – I’m not about to start blogging there instead of here (it doesn’t look as nice as this anyway), so we’ll see how it goes.
Soundtrack – Talking Heads, ‘Stop Making Sense’; Talk Talk, ‘Spirit Of Eden’; Seth Lakeman, Kitty Jay’; Renaud Garcia-Fons, ‘Entremundo’.
London Bloggers site
thanks to this entry on Wulf’s blog, I found the London Bloggers website, where blogs are listed by nearest tube station, so you can find out who’s blogging in your corner of London!
Here’s the listing for Southgate tube – if you’re in London, head over there and add your listing!
Back so soon?
So I’m back in Edinburgh, and it hardly feels like I’ve been away! Back with the lovely Rev G and Jane. Bizarrely, having stayed here for over two weeks in august, tonight was the first time I’ve actually had a meal here with G and J!! the madness of the festival meant that TSP and I were eating out each evening, and though we took the lovely G and J out to Henderson’s, we didn’t get to have a meal in with them at all. How nuts is that?
Anyway, I’m back to buy the Rev G’s car off him – after me slightly facetiously blogging about my car needs, I get an MSN message from everyone’s favourite sweary clergyman saying that they are getting rid of their cars and getting a new one, and did I want the old one? Much haggling ensued, with TSP and I wanting to pay more than G and J wanted to receive for the car (ah, trying to out-nice eachother is such a fun problem to have), but we settled on a figure, and I’m here to pick it up.
i’m also getting to meet up with Duncan and Rise from the Greenbelt gig while i’m here, to catch up and hopefully talk about some gig opportunities – all being well, I’ll have Rise playing in London for John Peel Day on October the 13th (you heard it here first, peoples!) I’ll confirm that on Thursday!