A musical interlude

Whilst I'm on Sellaband sabbatical, watching the latest fun of a hacker having a go at the site, waiting for the (finally and hopefully correct) calculated revenues to be credited and wondering both where that part that came back to my balance came from and whether I ought to start bets on how many years it will be before the housekeeping is back to where it was before the site update in June, I've been spending most of my music listening time round thesixtyone as one of the commenters on my last blog post successfully managed to work out.

Impressions of thesixtyone so far are that it provides the first stage that Sellaband is missing. I've mentioned before that part of what I see as the future of music is that artists need to be able to get enough people interested before they go ahead for that album, and one of the ideas I came up with was a 2-tier system where artists could build up a certain degree of popularity before converting their account into a "raise 50K" one. Thesixtyone provides a popularity index by means of voting on songs and some complex wizardry in the background which determines what is popular enough to hit the homepage. Additionally there is the feature for users to download existing songs (whether for free or a nominal fee) or even to just donate some cents to an artist - the kind of thing that both believers and artists have been asking for on Sellaband for a while. All you'd have to do is come up with some wizard formula based on number of hearts given and number of different people giving the hearts, and bingo you'd have the basis for deciding whether someone was ready to head up to the "tier2" of trying to raise the 50K. Food for thought?

So in celebration of more than 2600 plays over there since the sabbatical started, here's a roundup of some of the must-listen music I've discovered in my time away.

First on the list are Paul and Storm. A kind of guilty pleasure and a modern day Flanders and Swann, both in terms of the storytelling and the often "interesting" (for want of a better word) lyrics. A couple of tunes to watch out for are "The captain's wife's lament" which simultaneously features both an amusing and potentially embarassing play on words and "Cruel, cruel moon" in which a young man describes the dilemma he's going to be facing come sundown. Having a bad day? This is just the place to stop off for a listen and a laugh.

Back to the more conventional we have Kate Tucker and the Sons of Sweden. Every so often an artist comes along where you just go "wow" on first listen and this is no exception. Plenty to discover here, but for me the pick of the tracks is still the haunting "In Your Dreams". I challenge you to listen to this one and not get goosebumps.

There's also been a number of signups hiding in with the large quantities of junk on the site where I've either managed to get in on the ground floor and discover a tune, or very shortly after. Most noticeable of these is probably Annie Brooks, who has some charming little tunes and a very distinctive voice to boot.

Shannon Corey provides what's probably my best discovery to date of those who have just signed up to the site, and is currently looking likely to provide the second of my discoveries (or first blood, as the site calls it) to hit the front page.

Hot off the press for you, being brand new on the site today, is an Icelandic folk band called Árstíðir. They have one song in English and one in Icelandic on their page at the moment and both are well worth a listen.

And if you don't mind covers, there's an absolutely awesome acapella group called Duke Out of the Blue. My favourite is their cover of "Black horse and the cherry tree"

Finally, we hit the headscratching section. It's quite true that country isn't a very popular genre on the site, but I'm still at a loss to explain why "Something to do with you" by Patrick Brealey still has so few hearts, given some of the other country music others rate highly. The only explanation I have so far is that he's male.

I also piled in early to the first song of Aussie rock band Into the Night. Not a hard decision given the production quality and my liking for rock to start with. Like most of the other rock acts on the site though things have ground to a halt as far as getting new listeners seems to be concerned. Just like Sellaband it appears thesixtyone is populated mostly by lovers of the poppy/folky styles of music and/or female fronted acts. A real shame to be honest as these guys have quite a varied style, and a definite quality feel compared to most artists on the site so it's well worth checking out their other tracks even if the first one you listen to doesn't appeal.

In addition to these artists, there have been some very interesting songs which grabbed me though the artists providing them haven't done so (yet?). here's a few for you to check out.
Morgan Page - Fight for You
Yonder Mountain Studio - Complicated
Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers - Shady Esperanto and the Young Hearts
Santiago - A place and a face
Andrew Morris - Dust
At the Stars - When words won't come

If you haven't visited me on the sixtyone yet, then here's a few interesting bits of information for you. Firstly, I pick out 3 tracks and feature them on my page every Monday. Generally these are songs which a) haven't hit the front page yet b) the artist is fairly new to the site and c) I've searched through everything I've hearted to try and bring you what I consider some of the best (not always easy considering I try to provide a range in musical genres every week!). So if you've only got 15 minutes a week to spare, late Monday (or any other day of the week) is probably the best time to find out some new music. Since I started the 3 songs every week feature, at least one of the 3 songs I've picked has hit the homepage within a couple of days (last week 2 out of 3 of my featured songs went to the homepage during the week I featured them), so if you want to be just ahead of the popularity push, maybe I'm one to watch?

Secondly, keep an eye on my tags. "Discovery" hosts every song I've managed to get a first heart on. "Favourite" contains only those songs I've genuinely fallen in love with, so it should make it easier for you to pick them out from all those I have a moderate liking for or where I've hearted because I think they show potential. And you know, a couple of people may just get an unexpected surprise from that list. "sellaband" should be pretty obvious, but I've been a bit of a slacker there and may not yet have every song from a Sellaband artist that I've hearted on that list yet. So when you've got a spare hour or two, click on a tag to get that playlist up and then take a listen to what I've got there, if you want a wider selection than just my 3 featured songs.

Thirdly, if you listen to my radio, it should contain every song I've hearted to date (as well as a few I haven't got around to yet) so you really can expect a mixed bag there (though pretty much rap/hip-hop-free due to my own music taste) that'll keep you occupied for days already should you so choose.

Away from thesixtyone, musically I find myself still waiting to hear Phil Tweed's new tune. There was originally meant to be a rough version up back at the end of June, but like so much else the Sellaband website got in the way. He has however uploaded a few more tracks that have been up before but were swapped out as a result of the old 3 song limit.

I also am looking out for the new Skitzo Calypso track on 27th September. Don't know if my dropping a kudos on Brad's blog was what prompted him to wake up and post about this on Sellaband, but I'm also wishing he'd post a new "We love the underground" track on Sellaband. The curses of sideprojects though I guess.

And finally as late breaking news - just as I'm writing this blog, one of my 3 featured songs for this week hits the homepage on thesixtyone, keeping my record intact for another week.

Whatever happened to hatchet day?

I expect by now, many of you are wondering what happened to my hatchet day post which was due last week. Well one thing I always do before actually posting is go back and read what I've written. I like to hope that in general I provide a post which both reflects my own opinions whilst attempting to provide a balanced view at the same time, so the reader can make up their own mind. And I found that what I'd written didn't pass the test, nor could I write it in a way that would make it pass the test, because I'd been beaten by circumstances.

Let me explain.

My time on Sellaband has been progressively getting less and less since the website changes back at the end of June. As a result, a week or so into August I migrated and started listening to music elsewhere, because it was taking too long to track down the new artist signups on the Sellaband site. And whilst that problem has been fixed with the recently re-introduced artist search, the other problem is still there. Yes folks, we're back to the bad old days of "inactive" profiles. I haven't done an exact calculation over a period of time (though I'm sure someone will manage that for me), but I'd guess there's roughly a 60% chance that when you do find a newly signed up artist, the profile in question will have no music or information, even if you wait at least a week for it to appear. In fact, of signups in the last 7 days, only 10 out of 27 had any music on their page when I last did a check. So with so much wasted time trying to find new music on Sellaband and still no indication of when the situation might be improved, I'm now listening elsewhere for the forseeable future.

A couple of people from the Sellaband userbase have already spotted where I've migrated to, and left comments on my profile there, so they'll also be able to confirm I've listened to over 1700 tracks in the time since I migrated. A feat not possible in the same length of time on Sellaband at present.

Whilst some problems have been fixed, and indeed continue to be fixed, I still regard the Sellaband website as in a worse state than when I originally signed up to it in 2006 from a listener point of view. Couple this with the fact a number of artists on the site are leaving through various reasons (including getting signed - the latest of those is Chupacabra, if you hadn't spotted, even though like many "left" artists the profile hasn't gone yet) and it's getting to the point I'm getting more parts returned to my profile than I've seen an equivalent value return in revenue from 50K artists via the site. It doesn't help that we're now heading into the 3rd month when no revenue of any kind has been paid into believer profiles. Forget that we're overdue for the values assigned to one quarter of third party sales and that a second will be coming due soon - we're also talking that no revenue through the site itself has been paid, including the compensation for stopping the advertising.

Profiles are still a mess. As someone who has been on the site for the vast majority of its life, I noticed that one of the "upgrades" brought back all old profile comments that had been deleted, whether manually by the user or as a result of the artist profiles being removed. It appears a rather selective fix has been applied to that particular problem - or maybe the data is as screwed as my comments section would suggest. Seems that somewhere in the process, a number of artists managed a name change, even though they didn't have a profile on the site any longer. For instance, Elleanore comments have gone again while comments from The Super Dead remain and Luna Assassins are now called Noname157. All deleted artists and all treated differently, and that's just one example of a much wider problem (there's a lot of Noname lurking around for starters). Add to that the expanded "artists I like" section (though mysteriously the similar "friends" section remains as it was) and the whole thing still looks a bit of a joke once you go deeper than the (mostly surface) changes which have been happening. Some serious housekeeping needs to be done to sort out this complete mess, but I'm thinking it'll be months before we see it.

In short, it's not a site I'm happy with as a believer at the moment. I'm not planning to buy any new parts at present as a result (exception would be if someone looks like hitting 50K, I fancy a CD and I don't have a part) and therefore any "hatchet day" would be removals back into my balance only. As I'm not really visiting or listening to any new music on Sellaband either, it's kind of reached the point where a "hatchet day" post is going to turn into one big long whinge about Sellaband and have very little musical content, which is exactly the reverse of its original intent to perhaps introduce you to music on the site you might have missed.

So for the moment, my hatchet day postings are effectively suspended. Maybe they'll return and maybe they won't. Much of that depends on whether this new web team can actually return the site to the condition it was in before the update in June. And how quickly. As I've already said on my profile page, if my balance starts getting too large I will start removing money from the system, and I'm just about to request a payout that will mean I've removed more than has been credited in revenue. No parts have been removed from artists to do this, rather this is all money returned through artists leaving as my normal "hatchet day" has always reassigned money where I've done the removal. So much for re-investing. I'm also getting very inclined to start withdrawing parts back into my balance from some of the low budget and long time inactive, as well as those stating on their profile that they've left the site, so keep your eyes out, because next "hatchet day" might actually be a "half-a-hatchet day". And who knows what the status will be if this debacle is still going on come Christmas.