Recommended Media:
August Bank Holiday Weekend IS Greenbelt. Sometimes it feels like the banks are closed in honour of it. For 19 of the last 21 last-weekend-in-Augusts I’ve spent my time in a field (til ‘99) or racecourse (the fest has been in Cheltenham for 11 years) engaged in four simple pleasures:
Today I’m in Edinburgh with Amplified, at the ‘Talent Development Symposium’, co-sponsored by Festivals Edinburgh and The Arts Council. The Amp stuff will be posted at http://www.amplified10.com/tds10/, and there’s already a post I’ve put up there with a series of questions that face The Arts Sector.
So one thing I thought it’d be good to chat about is funding, and experiences with funding thus far. So, as the title says, have you ever been funded? (More …)
Much has been made of this article in the New York Times about the work of the BMI in enforcing the law that any business in the US playing music (radio, CDs, spotify, live etc.) needs to pay a public performance license, the cost of which is based on the size of the business.
There’s much in the article that has been attacked - the suggestion that they take money from struggling businesses, the idea that their ‘enforcers’ are referred to as ‘sales people’, and of course, the much bigger problem that very little of what gets played ever gets paid for thanks to the reporting process using ‘sample data’ – from local TV and radio – to decide what’s likely to have been played. (More …)
One of the wonders of the ‘tearable web’ (cf. David Jennings book, Net Blogs and Rock n Roll) is that we can put our music and video up in sharable, widgetized formats that allow them to become elements in any site that wants to help us spread the word.
So, for you bloggers, here’s a suggestion - add a Bandcamp album embed or Soundcloud widget to each post. Assuming that your blog readers are predominantly desktop readers, it’s a great way for people to discover new music while reading about a wholly unrelated subject. the player is pretty lightweight in terms of load-time, and any time soon they’ll be adding an HTML5 embed so that it’ll work on iPhone/iPad as well… (More …)
I had an email from an MP earlier today, asking for some background info on my position on the Digital Economy Bill.
So I sent him this list of links (it’s far from complete, but the poor guy’s got a lot on, so 50-odd links weren’t going to help!):
http://www.stevelawson.net/2010/01/quick-thoughts-on-obscurity/
http://www.stevelawson.net/2010/02/warners-mistakes/
http://www.stevelawson.net/2010/01/dear-rock-stars/ (particularly the bit about Bono claiming Hollywood is screwed on the same day that Avatar became the first movie to gross a billion dollars)
http://www.stevelawson.net/2009/12/transformative-vs-incremental-change/
http://www.stevelawson.net/2009/04/art-first-why-the-present-of-music-is-the-best-its-ever-been-for-musicians/
and the one I sent last night,
http://www.stevelawson.net/2009/09/independent-music-manifesto/
oh, and the point in this one about spending on Entertainment Media being WAY up, is vital…
http://www.stevelawson.net/2009/11/online-music-balancing-the-scales-of-free/
Enjoy – please do share the link around to this page, or to whichever of the individual posts resonates best with you.
I’ve started mentally drafting this a few times, but almost all of them just ended up with me reiterating everything I said in my ‘Futility Of Fighting Fire With Fire‘ post over on stevelawson.net.
However, this evening, someone linked on Twitter to This blog post claiming that it was a campaign masterminded by Sony. And now the process of saying ‘is it?’ and ‘if it is, how dare they!‘ has started. I’ve been asked my opinion on it, both the veracity and the meaning of it, so I thought I’d scribble down some thoughts.
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A possibly rather geeky, but ultimately practical, question, for people who make &/or listen to music in digital formats.
Hello all – my first post here. Thanks to Steve for the opportunity!
One of the things that’s very appealing to me about the new era of music on the net is the idea of beta releases. I really like the idea that as soon as a song’s ready I could upload some reasonable version of it, without committing myself to that as “the definitive version”.
But then I’m wondering how those song files would best be named and tagged. Because wouldn’t it be a bit confusing for the listener to end up with multiple different versions of the same song, that all had the same name?
OK, I’m thinking ahead here, as I’m still tinkering around with recordings at the moment. I’m just very aware that once a file goes out into the world, it’s out there forever. If I decide later on a better tagging convention, I can’t miraculously get back all the copies so I can upgrade the tags. So it seems like a thing to invent & think through before I start.
In an earlier round of thinking about this, I already decided that for me, the date is going to be the best way to identify the different iterations.
I considered extending the software analogy and using some kind of version numbers instead. But I’m pretty sure that nearly every recording I released would be v1.x (one point something). Less than one would imply it didn’t have all its bits yet, in which case I wouldn’t release it. And only rarely would a song reach v2.0, implying a major evolution or reworking. (Though, for other people, that might well be more likely than it is for me.)
So I’m not sure that version numbers really add much over and above using the date – whereas they do have a disadvantage: the extra thinking! to decide “how big a fraction” was justified by each new version. (In any case, using the date has precedent in software versioning – Ubuntu, for example.)
I don’t think I’m likely to release more than one version of the same song in a day, unless there were some kind of big mistake or malfunction which I needed to correct immediately. So the date should usually be sufficient to identify a particular release.
It’s also worth noting that in my case, all the iterations are likely to be pretty similar – so much so that even I might need to look at the date to know which was which quickly. I’m not usually trying to invent different versions of a song; for me usually it’s more like aspiring to an ideal version, which I never quite reach but try to get closer and closer to. The differences might only be the quality of emotion in the singing, or the fact that it was a few bpm faster or slower and that suits the song better, or that in the intervening time I practised the bassline some more with a metronome 
So I don’t think it’s all that likely that people will prefer an older version and deliberately want to keep it – though I’m not ruling that out. What I’m more thinking of is the scenario where people are unwittingly listening to, and propagating to their friends, a not-quite-as-good version which according to me has been superseded. So I see it as very much in my interest to make it easy for people to see which is which.
Well, but I’m not convinced that I want the actual song title to sprout a date. I mean, obviously that’s a fall-back position, one way to handle it, but it doesn’t seem very elegant to me. What belongs in the name space is the name.
Now I know that the ID3v2 standard includes TDAT = Date. But I’m not sure if that gets displayed on a typical MP3 player – or, more generally, which tags do usually get displayed, that would enable the listener to see which version they were about to listen to. Or how easy it would typically be for the listener to choose to access that other tag data, especially on small portable players. I know that some display artwork, so I could include the date in the artwork – but not all do.
I see there exists “TIT3 = Subtitle/Description refinement”… and there’s also the option of naming the actual file to include the date. But, again, I’m not sure how common it is to display either of those for the listener to see while listening (either optionally or by default).
I’m a bit hampered in thinking this through by lack of experience of relevant tech. Inconveniently in this context, the MP3 player I’ve used most is the Zen Stone, which doesn’t have a display at all!
Also, the investigations I’ve done so far have been about MP3 tags in particular. But I’ll probably start using BandCamp shortly, and I know there you upload a high quality original and they auto-port it to other formats, putting in tags as they go. I’m imagining perhaps it keeps the basic filename and adds text to the filename to show the format, e.g. [songname]192kHz.mp3 or whatever – but I don’t know if all the other formats it uses have equivalent tag fields, or what.
So…
Am I stuck with including dates in my song titles if I want the versions to be reliably differentiable on playback, do you think?
And if I didn’t do that… for you as a listener, given your typical/favourite gear, how easy would it be for you to find out the date if you wanted to? Can you easily access the official date field? Is there a more convenient place for the date to be repeated, such as the artwork? If it were in the artwork, what percentage of the artwork square would it have to take up in order to be readable on your size of screen?
Or, to come at the whole thing from another angle… people who have done beta releases already, how did you name and tag them?
All clues and ponderings very welcome…
You may or may not have seen my post this morning about Bandcamp over at stevelawson.net.
Since posting it, I’ve had lots of tweets from friends whose music is on it, so let’s start a directory of entries – post a link to your bandcamp page in the comments, with a little bit of info about you and your connection to me (just so it doesn’t become a music-spam-fest – there’s no special criteria for being included, other than some kind of link – twitter-friends, gig buddies, blog readers etc… all are fine ) and I’ll grab the embed code from your site and add it here, creating a little online shop
here are my 3 bandcamp albums so far:
and here are the first of the embeds from the comments:
(while all this has been going on, I’ve uploaded my first album to bandcamp as well: )
Ever been to something so great that mere words always felt inadequate to convey to those who hadn’t been there just how cool it was? Or had so many great experiences in a weekend that you bored the arse off anyone who dared to ask how it went?
If you have, you’re on the way to understanding the importance of social media in the context of an event like Greenbelt. Greenbelt’s strength and weakness are largely the same thing – it’s an utterly unique event. Unlike anything else that I’ve ever been to, and as such, impossibly difficult to do justice to when explaining it.
It’s also such a varied experience – from the program to the people, the food to the weather, the music to the art, the politics to the comedy… and the many overlaps between them…
So how does a story like that get told?
The more media we can throw out there that is in and of itself interesting, inspiring, funny, creative, the easier it is for people looking at that stuff to assemble a version of the Greenbelt story that makes sense to them. I can use other people’s photos and video to tell my story, and they can use my blog posts and audioboo recordings to tell theirs. We share, we talk about what interests us, we capture what we can, however we can, by being there and playing with gadgets.
It’s a wonderful addition to the festival experience, and will in coming years become an ever more vital part of the public face of Greenbelt – an event I can’t even begin to sum up adequately in a way that everyone who reads this will relate to. And now I don’t have to. I can point to specific things for specific people, I can tag the media to make it findable to those who might look for it, we can filter, stream, aggregate, embed, share and contextualise. And Greenbelt can aggregate it all to the front page of the website.
[EDIT] – here’s me talking to Jon Bounds (@ on twitter) about these same themes. He’s a very smart man:
Jon Bounds & Steve Lawson on social media, web technology & conversational psycho-geography from Greenbelt Festival on Vimeo.
I love living now.
Here’s a present from Lloyd for anyone who missed his set at Darbucka last night. Or indeed anyone who was there, and wanted to relive it (or send it to their friends to let them know not to miss him next time).
We love Lloyd – it’s always such a treat to have him come and play with us on gigs. Long may it continue.
We’re you at the gig? Did you enjoy it? Let us know your thoughts below
