more on filtering out 'junk-music' in a digital age…

In this post from a couple of days ago, commenting on the need to find ways to filter for quality at a time when it seems financial constraints may end up providing less of an incentive to seek out great music to buy, I finished by saying,

“Which only goes to say that we need filters. It doesn’t prove the monetary filters are the only ones, or even the best ones, but it does suggest that we need a way of making sure we doing overdose on junk-music.

And of course, those filters are already there, and I use them. The two i use are Last.Fm and Emusic. Last.fm offers a few different services that can help you discover new music, as well as the option to listen before spending money… firstly, there’s the radio stations, stations that are digitally programmed according to your taste, the tastes of people who like similar things to you, or by the taste of people who happen to also be fans of a particular band, or use a particular tag, so the level of randomness in relation to your own recorded playlists is affected by which of those radio options you choose, and how much listening time you’ve logged. Still, it’s an amazing site, which provides purchasing links with all the artists, data for tracking live music details, tools for blogging about music, forums for connecting with music fans connected by musical or extra-musical interests and a host of other things to make researching music fun.

Emusic is a very different formula, in that it is primarily a shop. The difference being that you ‘subscribe’ for a certain amount per month, and get a certain number of fairly high quality DRM free downloads for your fee. In my case, I get 50 tracks a month for £11.99 – which is about the standard price of a single CD in a specialist music shop. If you happen to like styles of music where the artists record long songs, you can get a heck of a lot of mileage for your money (for example, you could get almost all of the Jonas Hellborg back catalogue with 50 downloads, as few of his albums feature more than 5 or 6 tracks).

This month, I’ve just downloaded John Patitucci’s latest album, ‘Line By Line‘ (which is playing as I write, and is excellent), Gary Willis’ newest project, ‘Slaughterhouse 3‘ (marvellous heavy avant-fusion), and a glorious Kenny Wheeler record called ‘It Takes Two!‘, which I can already tell is going to be become a huge favourite. 3 amazing albums I would have been unlikely to buy on CD, but which I found on emusic via review and recommendation. You see, every artist and album has links next to it to things listened to by people who like that. You also get recommendations via friends and again via digitally compiled lists of users with similar data to your own. The option is there to listen (though the M3U playlist system used to preview music is clumsy and a pain in the arse), or you can just download a couple of tracks and see how you get on.

Both great filters, highly recommended. if you want to find me on either of them, at last.fm my listener page is here and my artist page is here. For emusic, my listener page is here and the place for downloading my music is here.

I really like the emusic model for downloading and paying for music – you’re paying a fraction of the cost of what you would for a CD, but you’re also committing to a certain level of investment each month in the ongoing success of recorded music. Everybody Wins!

New Joni album out yesterday…

Just found out this evening that Joni Mitchell‘s new album, Shine, was released yesterday. So a quick scout around the interwebs revealed that it was on iTunes, but only in those grisly low res DRM’d M4Ps that they sell on there, so balls to that. amazon.com now have a download store, and so long as you use a US billing address, it’s fine to buy from it with a UK CC/debit card. Hurrah! How smug was I feeling to get the album for the equiv of £4.50 ? very smug indeed until I found out that the album is also on Emusic!!! Balls, I could’ve had it even cheaper… Ah well, it’s lovely – I is listening to it now. Stripped down affair, with very little guitar, lots of piano, pedal steel and words about how we’re all screwed – environmentally, politically, globally. Cheerful stuff, and utterly gorgeous. Proper review will arrive when I’ve had a chance to fully digest its majesty.

The one question though, is: what the hell is Joni doing on Starbucks label? After her quitting the industry over its inherent venal nastiness, it’s contempt for creativity and slave wages, she signs for a company who have a very chequered track record on workers rights, and see music as the background to coffee drinking… But it’s a minor quibble, given that SHE’S BACK! WITH A GREAT ALBUM! HURRAH!

Geekery update…

Well, the blog is all now viewable – hurrah! And ALMOST all my website is validated – I’ve learnt loads about code-monkey-ness in the last three days, with lots of help from sarda, Lovely G, Matt and Drew – Drew was particularly interesting as the validator told me my code was nonsense, and sent me over to an article about geek things, that Drew had written, and I know Drew through Greenbelt-y things – he’s another of the lovely Greenbelt Geeks.

So, where I’m at now is that it all ‘works’, and I’ve given up trying to get everything to validate, because I was having to completely rewrite java files and bits of code to try and get round the code generated by the widget-creators at last.fm, Jaiku. I’ve managed to edit all the last.fm player widgets – the one on the front page, and the ones on the MP3s page – here’s the code for the one on the front page, should you use last.fm plug-ins and want to get round the ’embed’ stuff that doesn’t validate –


<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://panther1.
last.fm/webclient/55/defaultEmbedPlayer.swf" width="540" height="123"&rt;
<param name="movie" value="http://panther1.last.fm/webclient/55/
defaultEmbedPlayer.swf"&rt;<param name="FlashVars"
value="viral=true&lfmMode=playlist&resourceID=464639
&resourceType=10&restTitle=Best of Steve Lawson&albumArt
=http://cdn.last.fm/coverart/130x130/2420746.jpg&labelName=
Pillow+Mountain"&rt;<param name="wmode" value="transparent"&rt;
</object&rt;

the key to it is the data= bit, taken from the article by Drew. there you go, geeks!

More ways to download… hurrah!

Those magical wonderful peoples at cdbaby.com have started doing download sales direct from their site – hurrah! If you want to get mine, you can go to my main page at cdbaby.com and if you click on any of the solo albums, you can get them there for just $10 downloaded (and the files are 200k MP3s, so considerably higher quality than iTunes.

The duo albums aren’t up there yet, but I’m going to look into sorting that out fairly soon…

And don’t forget that you can get the 3 Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline albums from my online shop for just £2.50 (that’s $5!) each… Go on, you know you want to!

OK, how does this work??

So last night I was importing ‘Stranger’s World’ by the wonderful Patty Larkin from CD into iTunes. For some reason the CD wouldn’t read on my iBook (about 1 CD in 4 doesn’t…), so I hooked up my external drive to my desktop PC (now safely installed in new house) and burnt it on there. took external drive, hooked it back up to iBook, sync’d iPod, and listened to said album… now here’s the inexplicable weirdness – for some reason there are bits of one or two of my tunes scattered in amongst the MP3s – you get 30 seconds of ‘Dear Diary’ by Patty, followed by a load of something off one of the Lessons Learned albums… then back to Dear Diary… WTF??? How the hell does that happen? How have I managed, by sheer force of narcissistic will, to pollute other people’s lovely music with chunks of my own lovely bass noises??? that surely doesn’t make sense?? Geeks? Bueller? Anyone?

Cottage Industry…

I’m in the middle of doing what’s often referred to as a ‘remote session’ – an artist or producer sends a MP3 of a master track to a musician to get that musician to record their parts in their home studio. They then send high res WAV or AIFF files back via FTP or burnt to CD in the post, and everyone’s happy. The benefits of this system are obvious – it means that projects that couldn’t afford to either hire big studios or fly musicians around the world are able to get the musicians they really want to play on it, and the musician doesn’t have to leave home, and has access to all their favourite gear, records into their program of choice and can spend some time experimenting in a way that would probably scare the producer if they were to do it in a studio.

This project (the LeeSun session I referred to here yesterday) is a particularly fun one because I get to play ‘bass’ bass and then do all the other StevieStuff on top – I REALLY enjoy playing normal bass, and am rather good at it, and these days I don’t get asked all that often to play normal bass (this coming month I’ve got a fair bit of it, what with playing with Sarah Masen and Monk at Greenbelt), so to get to do that stuff and then overdub ebow loveliness and crazy big slide guitar parts, tremolo baritone guitar-esque stuff and fretless melodies is a real joy.

The other recent change in what I’ve been doing work-wise has been house concerts – as mentioned before, these are gigs in people’s living rooms, conservatories, gardens, even garages for lovely audiences of music lovers and supporters of the arts. Sometimes is just a gig, sometimes is a garden party, sometimes it’s a charity thing… Whichever, they are really enjoyable shows, pay much better than trying to play in a pub or most little music clubs and invariably result in a better time for audience and musician. All Good Nothing Bad.

It really is a cottage industry – small-scale, mobile, flexible, personal, enjoyable, creative and all built on relationships between real people for the mutual benefit of all concerned. Like the teaching I’ve been doing for so long, it’s my dream job because I get to meet so many fascinating and wonderful people, play great music, learn loads about music myself from the whole process and somehow in the middle of it all actually pay the bills… I am blessed.

I guess I ought to add at this point, that I’m available for all of the above – playing on records, playing in your house, or teaching you bass… just drop me an email and we’ll get the process started on any of those! :o)

But for now, I’ve got LeeSun’s songs to finish off…

session day…

After collecting my car this morning, most of today has been spent recording. Having turned the living room into a remote studio, I spent the day recording tracks for an album by LeeSun – a lovely quirky singer/songwriter from Leeds. She initially invited me to go and record with her in Canada back in June, but it was slap bang in the middle of my US tour with L, so sadly I couldn’t do it (how much fun would that have been??), but I offered to do the tracks remotely when she got back, so that’s what I’m doing, in my lil’ studio here. It’s a fun way to work, being engineer and tea-boy as well as musician, and it means I can quickly do multiple versions of a line and send them over to be checked out. This evening I was able to send some MP3 roughs of what I’d been up to over to LeeSun and chat via MSN about what she wanted – very useful. The wonders of the internet. Fortunately, she really likes what I’ve done with the songs – they’re lovely songs, and right up my street – so we’ll go ahead with the rest of the album.

I’m hoping to do more of this kind of work – it’s a great way to be involved in projects that normally couldn’t afford to a) get me to where the recording is happening or b) even afford time in a big studio anyway. This way, I can do it in my studio in a way that suits the budget of the artist/producer, and everyone’s happy. Good for keeping my carbon footprint down as well, i guess, not driving to studios all over the place…

If you’re reading this and you’ve got a project you want me to play on, please do send me an email with some details about the project and you’re budget, and we’ll sort something out.

My Music on EMusic…

If you’re an Emusic user, you can now get my solo albums on there – head over to the Emusic page with my stuff on it for more info, and to download them…

If you’re not an Emusic subscriber, you really ought to check it out – you get a certain number of downloads a month for your subscription fee – in my case, I pay £8.99 a month and get 30 downloads, though it gets cheaper per track the more you pay, obviously… lots of great music on there, fo’ sho’.

We’re in Dallas now, and I’ll hopefully blog tomorrow about what we’ve been up to…

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