It was an amazing day (see the liveblog at amplified11.com/ArtWorksPHF ) and certain themes emerged, particularly as they relate to support structures for artists. The themes of sustainability and cross-disciplinary learning/practice came up a few times, which inspired me to think about how they relate to pop/rock musicians.

It seems that a lot of the infrastructural role that (often centrally funded) arts organisations play in the (broadly) non-commercial arts (dance/theatre/fine art) worlds are deferred in music to record labels – at least in the perception of the artists. When I asked on Twitter about where musicians get their support/encouragement/teaching/motivation from (all things that an arts organisation structure would supply in most other art environments), and whether it was ever distinct from the commercialisation of the end product, I got some really interesting responses from Mike Scott of the Waterboys, (@mickpuck on twitter), archived over on ExquisiteTweets. Click here to read that.

The conversation brings into focus some of the role of the Auteur in popular music – it’s great to read Mike’s response, he has clearly had a self-fed drive to produce music that is ‘great’ from an early age, taking the emotional inspiration of the great rock records of his youth and channeling the desire to connect in the same way into making his own music. (this article by Richard Curtis suggests he’s succeeded) – and the degree of success that Mike has had over the last 25 years shows that in his case, that innate drive was more than enough to produce great work.

But popular musicians in general have no culture – or indeed language – for ‘incubator’ spaces. Supported, mentored environments in which to make their art and think about what it means in the context of their own lives and their culture. We rarely consider what it would mean to do that, to do anything other than respond to that which we are most instinctively, viscerally drawn to in the music of our youth… Our incubator is the bedroom, the band practice room, and those who manage to introduce genuine innovation into their own practice are those who can self-motivate, whose innate artistic vision is already iconoclastic enough to push them to those ends.

What about the rest? What about the potential for such experimentation, for exploring what being human means through our music, that gets ignored because it’s never presented as a possible path, because the environment to do it in doesn’t exist? Because the words to describe it aren’t part of our music-learning experience. We’re either playing our instrument as a reaction to an unsatisfactory classical education, or via a handful of guitar/bass/drum lessons with a teacher that shows us how to play rock classics which most often stays in the realm of playing other people’s music, without much interpretation or recontexualisation, and certainly with little focus on creating something new and meaningful…

And of course, the converse is also, to some extent, true – there are entire fields of artistic endeavour where the creative iconoclast is seen as a maverick, a ‘threat’ to whatever establishment may exist. Rather than being resourced to share their experiences in self-motivation, in self-exploration, they are gently sidelined, often subservient to an easier-to-accredit educational path. Instead of becoming leaders, they are the exception that proves the institutional rule.

In his talk at the ArtWorks Launch, Sean Gregory, the director of creative learning at the Barbican and Guildhall School, highlighted a couple of things that feed into this. The need for cross-disciplinary work – both artistic practice and a project to find a shared language for what we do as artists, and it’s importance to our humanity, and our culture. The other was the importance of funding projects like ArtWorks. He highlighted the rarity of these opportunities particularly as they relate to cross-disciplinary work.

Fortunately, ArtWorks is – as we’ve seen from so many of the arts sector projects that Amplified has been involved with over the last couple of years – an expression of a shift in the perception of many arts organisations and funding bodies, towards a greater realisation that the combination of reduced government support for the arts and a vastly accelerated pace of change in art and technology points to an ever stronger need for spaces where artists can develop and explore their own practice, to learn from each other and to make sense of the world that we’re in. It’s not for nothing that the French government pledged an extra €100M of funding for the arts in response to the economic downturn, Sarkozy vowing to “make culture our response to the global economic crisis”.

I’m eager to see what kind of thinking and practice the ArtWorks project brings into being, but also anxious to see popular music pedagogy ‘grow up’ and start to absorb something of the spirit of open-ended research from projects like this, and see where that takes us…

want to be a part of something fun that may make life a little easier for all of us? 

I’ve been working with the genius digi-gnomes at the Imperial College Dept Of Social Computing for over a year on a music sharing app/platform. It’s been through a few revisions, and we want to give it a trial now.

If you’re up for being involved, all that would happen is you’d get to download the app, and could then upload your music. There won’t be any financial transactions in the trial version of the app (though it will be a really interesting proof of concept to see if anyone who hears you chooses to go outside of the app in order to pay you for your music!) – so there’s no money in it, but there is some potential audience, and the chance to play with something very cool before anyone else. You need to have the rights to all your music – if you’re legally allowed to put it on bandcamp, you can put it here as well.

So, if you’ve got at least one album you’re happy to upload into the system (you’ll have the option to remove it again before any properly live version of the app goes out to the general publique.) let me know and I’ll send you an invite as soon as the app’s available (in the next couple of days)

 Sound good? of course it sounds good. Call me, m’kay? 

A 7-year-old of my acquaintance is soon to receive the exciting present of an MP3 player, and I have been co-opted to the organisation of this great event.

I feel sure it would be a much more satisfactory present if it arrived with some music already on.

He loves rock music, so I’m looking for some. I’m thinking say 3 to 10 tracks, depending on what I find.

Here’s my spec:

• Legitimate free versions available… or, at a pinch, very cheap. I don’t want to spend a small fortune on something he may not take to. (But if ever there were a situation fitting the profile of “win future fans by letting them hear the music”, this surely must be one )
• Lyrics encompassing a healthy world view. So none of ye olde “My woman done me wrong”, and preferably (though I know this is a tall order) none of the “You made me feel/do X”.
• Rock music of some description. Can’t be much more descriptive here as I don’t know exactly where his tastes lie, but hey, why not expand them while we’re at it, anyway
• Or orchestral music! as he likes that as well.

I tried looking on Bandcamp, but ran out of time/energy before finding anything within my parameters. There are some tags relating to ideology – like “feminist” or “queercore” – but can you search on “all of several tags/criteria” on their site, like you can on say a shopping site? I couldn’t figure out how. I wanted to ask it for the intersection of ideologically sound and free/cheap and rock. And the ones I did find with promising tags, most didn’t have the lyrics written down for me to quickly scope out… and I ended up quailing at the amount of music I’d apparently have to listen through to (if I could even make out all the words) to check out whether something really met my standards on the “acceptable messages for a 7 year old” front!

So I thought this was a case for consulting some actual humans (probably ones who listen to more new music than I do). Hence posting here

Any recommendations?

(of course feel free too to riff on the general nature of using words to search for music, etc…)

August Bank Holiday Weekend IS Greenbel

• soaking up great music
• encountering some life changing thinking
• playing as many gigs as I can possibly find over the weekend.
• hanging out with the most inspiring people I’ve ever met.

The proportion of my Greenbelt time spent on each of those three things has changed over the years – in 1990, I went to 63 different gigs over the weekend (and thanks to the commensurate lack of sleep, dozed off at the wheel of the car before I’d even got off the campsite, leaving my mum to tackle the 300 mile drive home).

Then I gravitated towards the talks - as my view of the world expanded into my 20s, so my appetite for the challenging, inspiring, heady mix of politics, theology and justice issues shook me from whatever complacency the other 361 days of the year tried so hard to force upon me.

Having played at the festival with a range of artists in the 90s, the turn of the millennium brought with it an insane schedule of shows that seemed to increase year on year – Greenbelt was the place where I launched my first album (10 years ago this week), where the Recycle Collective first played a show, where many amazing and fun collaborations have been birthed and found a home. I think my record was 13 performances in a weekend…!

But this year – our first year festivalling with the baby, we have no gigs and have largely ignored the program (despite downloading the iPhone app to see what we’re missing) – so the question was ‘can you go to Greenbelt, do nothing, and still have that Greenbelt experience?’

The answer is – of course - ‘of course’. Greenbelt has always been about people. Whether those people are on a stage, or sat on the grass, in a band, writers, thinkers, politicians, vicars, believers, doubters, old, young… none of it matters. Greenbelt is a place where people mingle and mix, sharing ideas, lives and a constitution-rattling amount of caffeine (and organic beer) in the pursuit of the possible. We collectively breathe a sigh of relief that the Daily Mailification of the world has yet to breech Greenbelt’s fiercely guarded space to be excited and optimistic about the future while taking seriously the challenges that face anyone who chooses not to be complacent in the face of injustice.

So Lobelia, Baby Flapjack and I have wandered around, guided by serendipity into a never-ending series of life-affirming conversations with amazing people. It’s impossible to leave this place feeling like the world is screwed – there’s just way too much here to get excited about. To much, passion, hope and wisdom emanating from a field in Gloucestershire that has the potential to change everything. Again.

Right, time for coffee…

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?

• Ever had money from the Arts Council, the PRS, any other grant body, in order to do your art?
• Ever been on a grant funded tour?
• What was your experience?
• Ever felt like you missed out on funding due to a lack of communication about where it was available?
• Ever been helped out by the Musicians Union in finding funding?

Would be great to hear your experiences, the good the bad and the ugly, and how things could’ve been done better…

Over to you, arty types:

Much has been made of

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.

The situation is similar in the UK, with the PRS collecting from venues as well as keeping data on radio plays based on the sample day idea (though I know that with the PRS, at least in some cases, it’s possible to call them, tell them where and when your music was played, and get paid even if it didn’t land on a sample day…)

I ended up on the list of artists that got paid after my tour opening for Level 42 round the UK. I got paid a LOT of money for playing my own music, and then got a series of top-up payments (which were either money that was missed from the tour, or based on the assumption that tours like that rarely happen in isolation so I was probably missing out on money elsewhere… which I was, however uncomfortable I am with the ‘success breeds success’ approach to allocating where the extra cash goes)

So, I have two suggestions that it’d be interesting to have batted around on here:

Idea a) There are numerous ways to report exact playlists these days – last.fm being the most obvious. Why aren’t businesses allowed to use such a service (an extra-verified last.fm account, especially for the business, that draws metadata from an approved source, for example) to report exactly what they play, so that the actual writers of those songs get paid.

And b) why not have an opt-out and a ‘free to use in cafes’ Creative Commons-style license that requires the licensee to display a list of the music that is currently being played along with contact details for the artist. The terms could be defined by business size or type (not valid for any establishment charging entry, or using a DJ, for example), so only for places that have background music, but it would mean that those artists who are currently not getting paid even when they do get played can opt out and instead of their non-existent pay-outs, can have some exposure. I know that a number of times in my life I’ve heard background music in cafes and bars that I REALLY wanted to buy, under this license, the music would’ve been displayed, and Sting wouldn’t be getting paid for the privilege. Their playlists could be public via the last.fm option in Idea A too, or they could even pull the music from a specific web-based central pool (would work well if something like Spotify was available in the country where the venue operated, but only if Spotify had a more open submission process for music…)

It would mean that bars that thrive on playing top 40 music could still do so, and play the license that means those people get paid, but bars that play jazz, blues, folk, indie etc. who still have to pay but who are understandably pissed off that the royalties they pay DON’T go to the artists they are playing, they get to do something INSTEAD of paying a meaningless license, something that is pro-music. It would encourage small, struggling businesses by removing a burdensome license fee that may otherwise mean they don’t play *any* music (which clearly none of us want).

Question 1 – Any further suggestions? Any modifications needed to make it work?

Question 2 – would you as an artist sign up for such a scheme? What terms would you want added to the license?

Thinking caps *ON*:

One of the wonders of the ‘tearable web’

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…

For bandcamp, all you need to do is go to the bandcamp page for any album or track, click ‘share’ and grab the embed code for your kind of blog.

You could even, if you have one album you really love, add it (via a different shaped embed – all tweakable after you’ve clicked the share button on bandcamp) to the side bar on your blog for your readers to listen to each time they come – a theme tune, if you will

It’s a great way to add interest to your blog, and become a positive link in the chain of discovery that forms this marvellous brave new world of online music.

like this:

[and if you want a list of albums that are available like this from people in some way connected with this blog, check out the bandcamp directory post and of course my own music page at http://music.stevelawson.net]

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 ‘

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.

I don’t, truth be told, think the blog post sets out a particularly convincing case for it being a fix. It’s all good conspiracy stuff, but a bit thrown together. Not particularly good journalism, for sure, and at worst is just a piece of willfully opportunistic nonsense drummed up as link-bait for the blogger concerned.

But, the weird thing is how many people seem to be really bothered by the implication that it’s a fix.

If this is a set up, a Sony campaign, it changes nothing. Whether it is or it isn’t, a bunch of internet nerds hyped back into the charts an 18 year old massive rock hit (it’s on Rock Band) – the biggest hit by one of the world’s biggest rock bands, a band known to millions as rock’s voice of discontent – as a ‘protest’ at X-Factor songs getting to the Christmas number 1 position in the UK singles chart. Both songs were released on record labels that were part of the Sony group, so either way Sony win, no one in the whole world chose between the two when deciding what to buy, so all it did was add more sales to the charts, not actively dissuade anyone from buying music deemed ‘unacceptable’.

No, it was an act of lazy cultural snobbery targeted at an institution (the UK singles chart) that ceased to mean anything years ago. As an act of musical defiance it was lazy – ‘yeah, let’s pick a massive selling rock classic that everyone knows that has swearing in it!’ As an attempt to prove that the internet is a force for good in changing the world of music it did exactly the opposite and proved that even on the internet, people resort to the same tired old bullshit of thinking that meaning comes from volume, and the vehicle for mass action is stuff-that’s-already-massively-successful-via-the-old-model.

It was still one song picked as the lottery winner, it was one act – already rich beyond our imagining – who got the golden ticket, the wave of support of indignant web-users, angry that kids and old people could possibly watch XFactor and then want to buy the single that the entire story had led up to over the last few weeks. No-one thinks it’s great – the people who bought it are the same ones who made Pure And Simple by Hear’Say the fastest selling single of all time, but now can’t even remember the name of the band, just that one of them looked like Shrek and that other one debased herself in the jungle… It’s not about music. It’s not about culture, or convincing people that shouty sweary rock music is somehow intrisically better than manufactured pop.

500,000 sales of one song says that the people on the internet are still more interested in being involved in something big than they are in something good.

• Thank your mum for dinner,
• smile at a Big Issue vendor as you buy a copy,
• volunteer for Crisis,
• buy fairtrade,
• recycle,
• and yes, buy indie music from artists whose lives are impacted by every single sale, then thank them and tell your friends.

But do it cos you love it, because it’s good, not because you need to be in mass-opposition to something for it to have meaning.

If Sony fixed this or if it really was grass-roots, the outcome is the same and nothing has changed. Joe will be number one next week, the charts will still never be a reflection of music that I – or anyone else for that matter – really loves. They’ll still be the 40 least offensive, most expensively marketed, best hyped tracks that are around today, and they’ll have nothing to do with what any of us actually listen to.

And I’ll keep telling everyone about the great music I come across on the web – not because I want to start a movement, but because it’s good. Because it soundtracks my life, it’s my music, my story, and I don’t need to hate some X-Factor kid whose surname I don’t even know and whose music I’ve never knowingly listened to for it to be important. It’s important because it’s good, because it’s a sustainable practice that helps the music I love to keep existing, and it’s an act of gratitude to the people who keep making music that makes me feel like the world is a good place to be.

Fix or no fix, nothing has changed.

So for now, have a listen to Miriam Jones – she’s great, relatively unknown, lovely, and waiting to hear from you about how much you love what she does:

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.

Date vs version numbers

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.

Similar but better

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.

Where to put the label

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).

In which I note my ignorance

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.

Key questions

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…