It seems that one of the many obstructions to the balanced discussion about resourcing talent development is the semantic gulf between the (perfectly understandable) sense of entitlement that some artists have about their art, and their art-practice and the impartiality that has to be built into the structure of any resource body (whether its an arts centre, educational facility, funding body, collective or festival). The outworking of that impartiality can often seem like a personal affront to the artist’s sense that their own work is of huge significance (More …)
Updates from August, 2010
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Talent Development And 'The Space Of The Talkaboutable'
Steve
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Have You Ever Been Funded?
Steve
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 …)
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Adding A Soundtrack To Your Blog
Steve
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 …)
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Why Collaborate? A Chat with a Computer Music Geek from Goldsmiths College
Steve
Mick Grierson is Co-Director of the Masters in Fine Art – Computational Studio Arts, BSE program in Creative Computing at Goldsmiths College in London. He’s also very interesting indeed. Here’s an audioboo from my chat with him this morning about the Centre For Creative Collaboration Website:Goldsmiths are an ideal early partner in the Centre For Creative Collaboration as they’re already fairly focussed on interdisciplinary work, and as you’ll hear Mick explain as you listen to the Audioboo, they are already working on projects with some of the other colleges within the University Of London and with UCL
Mick highlights the need for collaborative work, given the focus on delivering measurable output for the public funding that the department is receiving, which often just doesn’t happen without collaboration.
Also, computing of the kind that Mick and his department do lends itself to modular work – where different teams can share the load and do what they’re great at.
The limitations of funding are what makes a project like the Centre For Creative Collaboration so vital in the current climate – as Mick says, the relationship between tiny-but-deeply-significant ideas and observable outcomes that the funding bodies need to see to be able to measure the value are often found when people have time and space to throw ideas around, to experiment, collaborate and see what’s possible.
The neutrality of the Centre For Creative Collaboration makes it an ideal place for that kind of idea-development to happen. The range of interested parties will allow for cross-disciplinary involvement in a way that may rarely happen if left to the departments within the various colleges to organise.
Have a listen to the whole conversation with Mick for more of his thoughts on this.
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The Power Of Play (Ada Lovelace Day)
Steve
Ada Lovelace Day has rolled round again – a day to celebrate women in technology. Always a good thing to do, given the disparity STILL present in the tech world in terms of opportunity, representation and credit for what they do.This year, I’m going to write about the power of playful tech usage. Jamillah Knowles works at the Beeb, and makes Pods And Blogs – the only podcast I listen to regularly (that in and of itself is worthy of note). She spends her time single-handedly making awesome broadcast journalism about the social web and the fun things that happen therein. She’s an advocate for it, and an incredibly sharp and savvy user of the things she write about. (More …)
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Connect4: A Twitter-Twist On Follow-Friday.
Steve
For those of you that are familiar with Twitter, you’ll know all about Follow Friday already – the idea is that on a Friday, you post a tweet or two recommending a few of the people that you follow to the people who follow you – ‘hey check out ***’s tweets, she’s funny/clever/whatever’ – that kind of thing, and use the hashtag #followfriday or #ff.It’s a fairly fun Friday ritual, and certain names crop up time and time again and eventually I check ‘em out. But the volume of possible Follow Friday recommendations is so high as to be functionally useless to me.
So I came up with a twist: #Connect4
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Cloud Culture - The Obvious Obstacle?
Steve
The tendency for people to shift their computing life into ‘the cloud’ is rolling on at great pace. More and more people are trusting• their email to Gmail,
• their photos to Flickr,
• their back-up to Amazon or Dropbox,
• their documents to Google Docsand are using collaborative platforms for sharing data, from Soundcloud for music files to Google Docs for spreadsheets and text.
This has been matched by a corresponding conversation about the impact of ‘Cloud’ ideas, technolgy and infrastructure on our ideas of culture and creativity. There are wonderful conversations happening about notions of ownership, what happens when a cultural entity can be made freely available to all, when people can actually build on the work of artists in every field, remix and mash-up other people’s work… (More …)
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Open Letter to Lib-Dem Lord Clement-Jones re: Web Blocking.
Steve
[I just sent this in response to the Open Rights Group's call to contact the Lib-Dem and Conservative Lords over their proposed amendment to the Digital Economy bill allowing sites to be blocked under suspicion of enabling the transfer of copyright materials.]
Dear Lord Clement-Jones,
Along with everyone I know who works in IT/the internet and the music industry (yes, ‘everyone’), I am entirely opposed to the digital economy bill – the assumptions it makes about the relationship between people making a living online and the rights of media conglomorates to continue peddling an outmoded understanding of how digital assets are best exploited in a world where distribution and even marketing can be done for free and revenue gathered at many different stages of the process.
As a musician, writer, teacher, university lecturer and owner of an independent record label, I have found the free flow of information online to be utterly vital in freeing me from the inethical, counter-creative and monopolistic practices of the big media entities (such as major record labels) and allowing me to build a SME, to partner with other SMEs in broadening the base of the UK online economy.
The web is enabling a switch in the recording industry away from a state where a tiny percentage of ‘lottery winners’ sell millions of records and everyone else remains hopelessly in debt to a label who lend them money, spend it on themselves and hold onto copyright beyond the point where the loans have been paid back. It’s unsustainable and the wonder of the digital economy is that artists are able to manage that themselves – that we’ve moved from hundreds of people selling millions of records to thousands upon thousands of individuals selling hundreds or thousands of recordings, but more importantly, doing so in a creatively and economically sustainable way without giving away their rights.
For those people, the distribution networks on the web that the Digitial Economy Bill with either explicitly or inadvertently shut down are a vital resource for connecting with an audience at a time when the cost of conventional marketing channels (often owned by those same media giants that were acting in such an anti-creative way under the old model) are prohibitively high, enough so to guarantee that all projects beyond those with outside leverage (read: big media backing) will lose money.
In the new economy that doesn’t need to happen. I and my peers can make the music we love, find and audience and allow a range of entry points for them to contribute financially to the ongoing production and performance of that music, and it works. It works time and time again.
At a time when major label entities who are fighting the internet are falling apart (look at EMI’s current crisis), independent musicians are thriving. No-one is making millions, but no-one needs to. The right to become insanely rich by exploiting the intellectual property of others is not something that should be enshrined in law to the detriment of the sustainability of the tens of thousands of people making a healthy, legal, creative and culturally significant living through the internet.
The Digital Economy Bill threatens tens of thousands of people’s livelihoods, while protecting the interests of a handful of very rich people at the top of the big media food-chain, while peddling a series of falsehoods and misused statistics about the state of play for Britain’s creative industries. Please, withdraw the nonsensical amendment with regard to ‘web blocking’ – it’s counter to the good of Britain’s digital economy,
Yours sincerely,
Steve Lawson
http://www.stevelawson.net -
iPad - Why Bad Marketing Is Worse Than Bad Product Design.
Steve
Of course I’m going to write a post about the iPad – isn’t it obligatory if you’re a blogger?First up, I need to say that I don’t really get the way that people feel affronted when a product falls short of their expectations. Crap products are made all the time, and in a supply and demand environment, we’re all free not to buy them. If the iPad turns out to be a pile of crap, we don’t have to buy it, Apple will be left with loads of them unsold and will have to go back, do some better market research and make something we want.
That said, I do take issue with the way things are marketed – marketing is a very powerful force, and not generally held as a conversation. So when someone makes statements about something that are patently untrue, and does it with the weight of a multi-million dollar marketing budget behind them, I get a little antsy.
So, the iPad – what don’t I like about it? (More …)
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2009: The Year Of The Blog Commenter
Steve
This post is by way of a massive THANKS! to everyone who contributed on my various blogs – stevelawson.net, beyondbasscamp.com and here on solobasssteve.com – 2009 was the year that the comments on my blog became the main reason for blogging. More often that not, the real value in what I was writing came from the discussion that ensued - I’d throw an idea or two out (some better formed than others) and the amazing people that took the time to comment, discuss, disagree, encourage, expand and generally riff on my ideas were the ones who took those ideas into a more useful place.
When speaking in Universities about the changes in the music industry, no small number of my main points are ideas that were first germinated as comments on the blog. Some of the smartest insights into the big music industry stories of the year came via those comments, and much of the smarter blogging towards the end of the year was shaped by the melding of ideas and comments earlier on in the year.
As I wander around the web, like anyone, I find that comments on blogs are a curates egg. On most of the national papers, the comments are a battle-ground for ill-conceived fundamentalisms of all stripes, with no-one seeking consensus or respecting difference. Such that any wisdom gets lost in the noise.
And on many ‘pro’ blogs, the ad-revenue-driven need for ‘hits’ above all else means that posts are often written as ‘link-bait’, and any notion of a sensible discussion disappears out of the window in a gust of sensationalism and crass over-statement.
Contrast that with the gracious disagreements that have happened here, the questioning, probing and quest for some kind of middle ground, understanding and learning that has happened across these blogs, and I feel SO grateful to you. It’s not like I did anything special to deserve it.
I always have it in my mind that I have no fear in moderating out angry, insulting or malicious comments. But I’ve done so little of it this year as to not be able to recall any instances. I’m guessing I must’ve done it once or twice, but I can’t remember!
So here’s to 2010, more discussions, more learning, and here on solobasssteve.com, lots more guest writers – a huge thanks to:
Hannah Nicklin, Tom Alves, Wulf F-B, John Sargent, Steve Uccello, Lisa Harding, Jennifer Moore, Sam Hallam, Anders Faerch and Jemimah Knight,
who wrote guest posts either here or, in the case of Jennifer, Anders and Jemimah, over on stevelawson.net – your contributions were a huge help, and greatly appreciated.
Hurrah!