Initial meanderings

Welcome to the first of what is going to form the main theme for my blog posts from now on. This is where I'm going to take you more inside the process I go through when discovering new music to show you just how difficult it is to create a fan. And even if you succeed, how difficult it is to keep them. This process is something which largely remains hidden from the artist - it's often only as a person starts to approach the 4th level of the rating system I have that an artist stands any chance of becoming aware there's an interested person, rather than just another number in the list of album sales.

Apart from this rather long initial post, the nature of the music discovery beast means that I can go through extremely quiet periods and then some very busy ones. As a result, I probably won't be posting on a regular schedule, but you'll likely get shorter and more frequent posts on average, compared to the monthly posting schedule I've used in the past.

The rating system
The rating system I'm using for this is somewhat unique. It's not a reflection of how much I like the music itself as much as it is of how far I am along the process of conversion from consumer to fan. So, over time you may well see some of these ratings go up if I mention an artist again. And indeed go down, as musical changes of direction or failure to keep my interest are just some of the reasons that may affect a rating.


Congratulations, you've made a temporary blip of interest on my radar. Now how are you going to keep it?


I've seen enough of you to recognise and remember you, but I'm undecided so I'm not really following you (yet). I may make a spur of the moment decision to check in on what you're up to once in a while, but even that's no guarantee. May also apply to artists I am aware of, but whose music I've decided I don't have enough interest in to want to pursue further based on what I've heard.


I'm liking what I hear in general, but I still wouldn't describe myself as a fan. I will be wandering past your site occasionally, and there is something like a 50% chance I'll be buying your next offering once I find out about it, providing I have the money available.


Now I am a fan, so the chances are I'll be past your site once every month or two at least. There's a 90%+ chance your next offering is already sold, and occasionally I might even be going for something more than the basic package (if you have one)


Reserved for very few, this is about as close to internet stalker as you can get. I am actively watching because I do not want to miss your next release date, tour in my area etc. etc. You may not always be aware of the fact I'm looking over your shoulder to see what you're up to, but trust me, I'm there on a weekly if not more like a daily basis. Depending on how you tend to release your information, I may well be signed to your mailing list as well.

Where I've been
Traditionally the first couple of months after Christmas is often when I take a look at a number of artists I haven't been in touch with for a while to see what they're up to. I don't often go out looking for new music in this period - rather anything out there tends to find me.

One place I really hadn't been for a long while was to visit L-60, and I'd been feeling really guilty about it because Olli is one of those really open and friendly artists who absolutely loves meeting and talking to people and getting to know them. Even if you're a complete stranger. That's a fan creator. Anyway, I had a bit of a shock when I got there because the band has split up. Well... sort of... What's actually happened is that a second band Fivestar Prophet has been created with the 4 members from L-60, plus a new guitarist. And their sound seems to have gone heavier and less mainstream. And quite a lot of both of those. There are only three tracks currently available to listen to online, and as a result I have to admit I'm not quite sure what I think of this new direction. So i'm still considering whether or not to add the album they just released to the queue to buy or not.

Nemesea are getting ready to release their third studio album entitled TQR (The Quiet Revolution). Amongst the guests appearing on the album are a couple of the guys from Bulletproof Messenger, which has only served to make me keep even more of an eye on the progress of the album.

It's only taken 25 years, but Warner have finally let go of the masters for Howard Jones. As a result he's had the lot remastered and the results are now available to buy from his own site.

It seems I wasn't the only one slightly disappointed by Francis Rodino's EP release in comparison to the quality of his album (Remember what I said last year?). Seems that Francis himself actually had similar feelings, as he has subsequently had the lot remastered and released for free to all his mailing list subscribers.

Matthew Ebel is continuing work on "The Lives of Dexter Peterson" (the project I told you about last year). So far, subscribers have been treated to a full early draft copy of the book as well as sketches from the graphic novel and songs from the album as they're being developed. Matthew has even already played one of the songs "The Last Pirate" on a couple of his Ustream shows. The release date for the project was originally set for 17th September 2011 to coincide with his annual fan meetup, but he's recently admitted that it looks like it won't be ready in time. A new date has yet to be mentioned, so I'm expecting the meetup will provide more info on that score. This means he will indeed exceed a year since he originally announced the idea ( as I suspected in this post), but given the complexity of the project and the fact we're hopefully only talking a couple of months, this can still only put a large number of artists on Sellaband to shame, seeing as they can't seem to make just an album in a year after reaching target, despite having had all the fundraising time on top in order to get prepared. (But more about those Sellaband artists later). In the meantime, there's an opportunity to win a free download of the album and novella on its release, by entering the competition he currently has running here. It's open to anyone, not just his subscribers, so why not check it out? You may also be interested to know you can also listen to one of the tracks from the album "I wish I were" in full in its pre-mastered version by visiting this page.

Interest grabbers
Here's the people that have caught my attention without me going looking for them.

In the course of trying to catch up with people I haven't been near for a while, I usually find myself on some interesting diversions. One such discovery is Charetta. If you like strong female vocals in your rock and metal, this is definitely worth a look. As to how I landed up finding their website, well some of you should recognise a familiar name in their lineup. I'd actually started off looking for information on Conflict in the Sky, seeing as their website is way out of date (last updated middle of 2010), and it turns out Chris from there is now playing guitar in this band.

Gayle Skidmore was one of the artists I had money in on Sellaband when the site went bankrupt. Due to the terms and conditions the site came back up with and the fact that she was nowhere near target at the time (none of the artists I had money in were) I pulled my cash. However she was subsequently one of the first to finish raising budget and also release after this, and it just so happens you can listen to the entire thing here on bandcamp. Having spotted the announcement of this and listened to it, she has officially become the first (and so far only) artist on Sellaband where I genuinely wish I'd stayed put, as I would rate this well within the top half of all the albums I've received from Sellaband artists. You could say I have a situation I need to put right here.

I spotted Kris Searle as a result of his Sellaband promotional video. There was a time on Sellaband not so long back where not only would believers have jumped on this, but it would have also garnered attention in the Tribune as well as a good example of a pro-active artist. So you could say this is an artist which clearly demonstrates just how much things have changed on Sellaband, and why it has become a site where you raise money with your existing fans alone, as the vast majority of the ordinary music lovers have given up on the place and certainly won't be tempted by the unrealistic sales revenue he seems to be touting - the knowledge of what has happened with existing artists is well known. Whilst a lot of his music isn't something I'd listen to, it's clear from what I've heard on my travels, there's actually quite a decent songwriter lurking underneath. From a musical point of view it's therefore a shame to see the complete ghost town of interest in him.

My interest in Tim Bennett has increased quite a lot recently. Not only has his album been proving to be one of my favourites, the fact he has continued to keep his Sellaband page updated with what he's doing, despite the seeming lack of interest in the site these days is something which hasn't escaped me. As a result, it's looking likely I may land up following him a little more closely than some of the other artists I initially found on Sellaband.

It had to happen eventually that one of the Finnish artists I already both knew and listened to would sign up on Sellaband. I already own all four Naked albums and they are one of the artists where I usually buy direct from Finland as no UK option is available. So although I already own the albums and although I am not currently planning to buy any parts on Sellaband due to the T&C, I obviously had a great interest in how they'd do. Indeed had I been buying parts, I'd almost certainly have supported them despite already owning the album they were offering. But a couple of weeks later I discovered they were also on Pledge Music trying to fund the same project with the same incentives and they were offering them at a much cheaper price over there. When combined with the fact I know Sellaband lock money into their site, this makes me even angrier about the situation. I wouldn't want to be a fan who funds them on Sellaband only to find out that not only were the incentives offered cheaper elsewhere but that they also couldn't remove their money from Sellaband to get the better deal once they found this out. I think it's fair to say that this is one artist where I'll probably still buy albums after they are released (I do like the music after all), but given what I've seen I definitely won't be funding any project of theirs in advance that I come across either now or in the future.

As a result I also think that fan-funding sites should be insisting on a certain amount of exclusivity within their T&C in order to avoid getting a bad name, rather than the existing practice where the same project can be signed up in as many places as you like at the same time. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with artists trying out different sites. I just think they shouldn't be trying to fund the exact same thing at the exact same time from the general public in more than one place.

Scott Bull was another Sellaband signup that managed to grab some of my attention, though for reasons very different to his music. I get the impression he thought the site was something very different to what it currently is, given his arrival in a blaze of forum postings and the circumstances surrounding his departure. Given the lack of his own believers signing up, it certainly gave the impression he was expecting existing people on the site to be falling over themselves to fund him if he made himself unmissable. Unfortunately the "spam the forum to death" approach has been used so many times before by artists in order to try and gain attention that it tends to have the opposite effect. Add to that the general lack of old believers taking an interest in the site and expecting a project to be funded entirely by existing people is pretty much expecting the impossible. I have to admit I did stop by his page and take a listen to the music he had there, but wasn't overly impressed, and with none of the believers that I know are still spending money on the site seemingly taking an interest in his page either, I suspected he was talking to a brick wall. A couple of weeks after he signed up, I found a rather long mail in my inbox, and given what happened next, I now find myself wondering how many of the other "visible" people on the site landed up with one too. It seems he wasn't very happy with the lack of interest in his page and left a few messages on the forum when he then asked Sellaband for his profile to be deleted. Whilst his artist profile was initially converted to a believer profile (as with all artists who have left the site), it looks like the contents of the forum posts may have caused Sellaband to delete his profile entirely, seeing as you get a 404 error if you try and visit it from the forum link. If they have indeed deleted it, this has to be the fastest response from Sellaband seen to date, as the lot (with the exception of the forum posts) disappeared in less than 24hrs after he put the request in.

The websites
The music sites I've been spending time on

Songza
Whilst not very good for new music discovery, this site had been proving itself as an excellent source to find and listen to artists I was already aware of, both from the mainstream and indie markets, even if I didn't already own a copy of their music. Therefore a very good "try before you buy" method that has directly led to a sale for 3 different artists in question already. With no software to download and no need to login to listen (you only need to login to create playlists, or as they call them "stations") it had therefore become my preferred streaming service. Indeed the playlist I linked to for my last review of the year post is hosted on there. However, in the spring, they pulled the plug on all non-US listeners without any warning.

So I'm back to the search for a streaming service that fulfils the criteria I'm after (no software download required, no country limits on songs and the same quality or better that I normally rip my own mp3s at). Until then, I'm mostly back listening to my own collection and chalking one more score up for the idea of having my own copy of music rather than following "the future of music" and the idea of cloud streaming.

I have one basic rule as far as streaming services are concerned - if I can listen to a song just by visiting the artist's own webpage, then I want to be able to listen to it on a streaming service too. It shouldn't matter what country I'm in - if I can listen to it by visiting the artist's own webpage/bandcamp page (etc), why can't I listen to it on your streaming service? Until the industry sorts this out I won't be paying any streaming service - it's bad enough to be building up a collection of music on a free one and have the rug pulled from under you without paying someone a monthly fee, only for them to suddenly do the same one day. And from a consumer point of view, I'm already fed up of disappearing rugs on music sites meaning I have to restart from scratch elsewhere. As someone who had made over 200,000 ratings on Launchcast before that service got pulled, that's just one of many examples of past experience and should give you some idea of why I look at things the way I do.

No doubt if/when Songza comes back up outside the USA it will have restrictions on what you can listen to (the same problem that was starting to put me off Amie St before they sold the site to Amazon) and if that's the case then it will probably have lost my interest for good. Just like other sites before it, such as Pandora, who still are restricted to the US only.

The site most likely to get my interest for streaming music discovery at the moment would therefore seem to be Last FM. Whilst I originally signed up to the site in 2006, I never used it back then because I'm not interested in downloading the scrobbler software. However, as it's now possible to stream quite a lot of music direct from the site I decided to give it another tryout at the beginning of August. The big downside of course is the fact I have to teach it about my music collection first, and whilst I've started that process, it's looking likely it will take until at least Christmas at my current rate of progress. Additionally, I've already encountered a number of problems, so whilst I'm not going to give up on it just yet, it's proving to be a lot more hands-on requirement for the training process than I'd been hoping. If you want to catch up with me on Last FM while I'm still adding and shuffling artists around, you can find me here or by clicking on the "recently played tracks" widget you should have seen over on the right of this page. And yes, I am streaming music at some very odd times of the day at present.

Free albums galore
I stumbled on this while starting to look at the current state of streaming music sites. Not a site in itself, it's basically a blog with links to download music legally for free, most usually the sites of the artists themselves. You can find out more about the criteria the author uses for deciding to include an album by reading their welcome message, but with over 2000 albums listed since the blog was created in a large variety of genres and the number still growing, it's likely I'll be taking a better look at this soon.

Strummerville
Another case of being sent off in a different direction than intended came when I was looking to see what The Lights were up to. Whilst I discovered they have played at the Glastonbury festival this year, it appears they got the opportunity as a result of their association with Strummerville. I wandered onto the site to get the free download The Lights were advertising and landed up checking out a number of other bands as well. The site is actually a charity set up on the death of Joe Strummer (The Clash) to help unsigned bands. Currently inclusion is by invitation only and requires that an artist be unsigned and will make one track available for free download. As might be expected, a lot of bands on the site currently seem to fit within the punk, rock or ska themes, and are also very British, both in origin and sound. From the listener point of view though the site oozes quality music for the most part and it will definitely take you a few days to get through listening to all the artists currently on there. I'll definitely be checking back to see what other bands they add, as this is serving as a nice "taster" starting point to decide if you want to wander off to the artist's own site to find out more about them. The ones that have particularly caught my interest to follow up on so far are The Popes of Chilitown, Bastille, Molotov Jukebox and The Penny Black Remedy

Sellaband
Since my review of the year post, a number of the albums I am waiting for have now appeared, however these have been almost exclusively from those artists who were keeping their believers regularly updated. Here's what little I know about those I'm still waiting for, more than 8 months down the line from my last update.

Natalia Safran
The big fat sound of silence on the artist I've been waiting the longest for continues. I've seen several mentions on her Facebook and Twitter about an album release being "soon", but those messages have been the case for months now. One existing believer has said that the albums are supposed to be in the process of printing, but I'm beginning to think a copy of this album will never be seen.

Radio Orange
Like Natalia Safran, there have seemingly been no updates and no information as to when (if ever) this album will actually be seen. Their Sellaband page claimed in a blog on 13th Nov 2010 that they were only waiting on final artwork but they haven't been seen or heard from since March.

Lori Greco
Last known to still be in the recording studio, although most of the way through the process. I currently have no information as to when the album can be expected though.

Cubworld
Finally reported that he has just started recording in June, more than 18 months after hitting his target. With a DVD to film on top of this, I don't even want to put a guess on the year it will be released.

Sellaband itself is proving to be a real shocker in general under its new management though. Communication with believers has now basically stopped (except for mails/articles trying to get people to buy more parts). Even the re-incarnated "pay and we'll send your CDs home, otherwise we'll keep them and use them as we see fit" which had people up in arms the first time around doesn't seem to have had any proper communication behind it now that it's back, as people who paid back in May landed up waiting a good couple of months before anything actually appeared, and indeed several were even sent the wrong CDs.

Add to this all the comments and complaints on the Jonathan Davis page from people upset because the 24hr viewing of the DVD didn't work properly and/or the fact they haven't received anything just a few months after he completed funding (in comparison those of us who have been waiting years for other artists have been much less noisy about it!). In particular what they'd bought on Sellaband was already available on Amazon at a much cheaper price too (and, well, Kornspace news page from 25th August says it all really). Add the fact that it would appear artists aren't giving believers any of the revenues promised by their projects, generally citing the fact they're recovering expenses that believers weren't made aware of at any point (Aly Cook and Inge are known to be the 2 main exceptions to this complaint) and Sellaband aren't doing anything to rectify the situation. Add the fact that a large number of believers in Nearfield are complaining they still haven't received their CDs and nobody seems interested in doing anything about it, and the fact that Sellaband do not chase up and relay information to believers about what is happening regarding CDs we have been waiting years for and the result is a site which I certainly can't trust, never mind recommend to others. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

In addition various parts of the site seem to be broken or out of date and nobody seems to bother fixing them.

A lot of the solutions are quite simple - Get those long overdue CDs sent out. Get promised revenues paid. And actually do some management and communication, rather than leaving the paying customers (i.e. the believers) in the dark and left to attempt to discover information themselves. Until some definite progress in a positive direction is made on this score, I'm officially slapping an "avoid like the plague" verdict on the site for anyone who might have been thinking about using it. Some issues have been outstanding for way too long now, and the complete apathy from Sellaband management when it comes to sorting them out (and even communicating why they haven't been sorted yet) means I have no confidence in the site or its management at present. A middleman with no clout is useless to say the least, and there's no incentive or reason to fund artists (unknown or otherwise) on such a site.

The developments on the Jonathan Davis story in particular have now led me to request a payout of revenues earned, rather than saving them up with the intention of buying parts in future if things settled down. With both Aly Cook and Inge back for a second funding round and both quite obviously keeping up their end of the agreement with believers (unlike many other artists), they would have potentially been some of the first in the queue to get parts without me adding new money to the site if I could have regained my trust in Sellaband itself. But I'd say Sellaband now have at least twice the work to do to regain my trust compared with how things stood when the new management took over after the bankruptcy.

Albums
I'm at a point where I can't actually afford to buy much in the way of music at the moment, due to lack of income, so I currently have a queue of music building that I'd like to buy but where the funds just aren't available at present.

Currently in the queue (in no particular order)
Come to Dust - Second Person
I Am Not The Night - Julia Johnson
Make Believe - Gayle Skidmore

The one exception I did make was to buy what has probably been my most eagerly anticipated album of the year "The Day The Devil Fooled The World" by We Love the Underground and I definitely wasn't disappointed. I'd heard roughly half of this before of course, as versions of some of the songs had been up on Sellaband, Myspace or Facebook, but Brad still managed to pull off something a little surprising within the rest. There is actually quite a diverse selection of tracks here, with particular standouts being "Transmissions" which is more than a shade reminiscent of David Bowie and my new favourite "We Love The Underground" which sounds like it might even be quite at home in a Tarantino film. I hope he does more with this project, as listening to the album has definitely left me craving more.

However that's not the whole story with this album, because I had a bit of a surprise when I opened the package - it contained two copies of the album, not one. Given I know what the cost of postage from the States to here is like, he can only be making a loss off such generosity. And as a music lover, this gives me even more incentive to find that extra copy a home where it will be genuinely appreciated.

In terms of "expected soon" albums, which will likely either get bought or join the queue above, the list is thankfully quite short at the moment. No doubt it will start to grow as I start wandering past some more artists I haven't been near in a while though.

Album title and release date TBC - Into the Night
The Quiet Revolution (Nov 18th 2011) - Nemesea

So if you're still with me after that extremely long summary of highlights of the past 8 months, I hope to see you for some of my much shorter posts in future (promise!), as well as a few special posts from the fan view of the music industry that, as always, get inspired by what and who I come across.