Musical March

If you already know about my rating system then skip on down to the next header, otherwise here's the lowdown.

The rating system
The rating system I use for this blog 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.

Who I've been looking at

Epyllion are no longer playing live. They say they are aiming to stay as a recording project, but in the meantime three of the members have created a cover band called "The Art Vandelays" and their keyboard player is about to release a solo album. Here's hoping they don't run into trouble with the unsigned Florida band of the same name!

Brad Cox has been posting a number of acoustic videos for various songs from his various projects on Youtube recently. There's also a new song from his "Niki Thunders and the Temperamentals" project coming soon.

Francis Rodino tweeted recently that he'll be hitting the studio again soon, so I'm wondering if that means new music is in the works. I'll be keeping my eyes out on his website and my inbox for any further info on that - it's been a while since either have been updated with news.

Katy Vachon caught my interest when Talentcast played her on their weekly radio show. She currently has a profile on Sellaband, but like most other artists there it seems she's forgotten to bring her fans and is waiting for people to appear from nowhere to give her money as the only people who have bought into her project are names I recognise. The only currently finished song off the album she is trying to fund for "I got style" does have hit potential, so I'll be interested to see what else she comes up with.

March has been an explosion of music that I've been waiting for being released. I strongly suspect my album of the year for 2012 is already known as a result, but with only a quarter of the year over, there is a small chance someone could still surprise me. The only clue I'll give you at this point is that it belongs to one of the next three artists I'm going to mention in this post - you'll just have to wait until the end of the year to find out which, assuming I get no surprises in the meantime.

Matthew Ebel released the mp3s for the new album "The Lives of Dexter Peterson" to those due them around the same time as the masters went for duplication. A number of other artists I've funded in the past would do well to learn a lot from this, given the number of cases where CDs have been on sale to the general public weeks or even months before those who had pre-paid got access to the downloads (let alone their CDs). The first of the physical CDs have therefore been produced and should be on their way soon, with distribution into the likes of CDBaby/Amazon etc. for the general public expected in April. As for the album itself, it has lived up to expectations and I can't wait to slap an actual CD in something with a decent set of speakers. Even from the 320k mp3s through my headphones, I can hear "A Million Miles Away" calling out for surround sound.

I've now got my Poets of the Fall album "Temple of Thought". I eventually got the price down a lot closer to £20 than the £30 I started at, thanks to a combination of shopping around and the exchange rate being semi-cooperative. At double the going rate of a CD in the UK, it's still a price which pains me though (anything much over 50% extra does) and as you can probably guess, the star rating is the only reason that's made me break my normal price rules in the first place. Initial impression has been that it's not their best album to date but not their worst either. This one appears to be an album of "growers" rather than having any tracks that immediately leap out and demand to be listened to - the only exception is "The Happy Song" which was written for the "Alan Wake's American Nightmare" soundtrack and really does sound like a bonus track, rather than fitting with the feel of the rest of the album as a result. The lyrics are as powerful as ever ("Skin" has to be one of their best to date for its imagery on this score, and as for "The Ballad of Jeremiah Peacekeeper" what can I say but "wow"), and interestingly the signature of this album seems to be based mainly round prose rather than rhyme. Like every POTF album, this one is therefore going to take a while to sort out my real favourites, although I already have a few ideas of which those will be.

Howling Dollhouse have now released previews of the rest of their self-titled 13 song album on their youtube channel, ("All the Pieces" and "Note to Self" had already been released as official videos), so if you want to take a listen to the whole album before deciding whether you want to buy, this is now the ideal place to do it.

Iconcrash also released a new album this month, containing the track they were hoping to get into the Eurovision Song Contest with as Finland's entry (that honour has gone to a lady singing in Swedish). The track in question (We Are The Night) is a lot more commercial than many of the other songs on the album which follow their more usual industrial-sounding electronic music style. Amazingly their special edition album was half the price of the Poets of the Fall album, leading me to a combination of head scratching and further price pain. With such a stupid range of prices for new release albums out there, it doesn't surprise me when there is piracy. Music industry - wake up and SORT IT OUT ALREADY!

Liz Menezes became this month's first Twitter artist of interest, not through following me, but rather through tweeting at me about her music. Have to admit I don't normally wander off to links sent at me seemingly at random, particularly if the profile picture is a pretty female, but I was in the right mood and a quick scout of her twitter account didn't pull up any red flags so I wandered off to take a listen. That's when the fun started, because she had an intro page up (since removed) in front of the website promoting her new album with a large "click here to buy" button. Yet it was impossible to get to her site from this page, and hence impossible to find anything of use to someone discovering an artist for the first time. She did send me a link to the actual homepage when I brought the subject up, so I did find out she would probably be of interest to people who like Lily Vasquez, as she appears to be another latino singer with a mix of Spanish and English songs.

Josh Bunce is the first musician follower on Twitter that I've had appear seemingly from nowhere that's gathered enough of my interest to follow back and see what happens over a more extended period. This young guitar player reminds me at times of Acoustic Jim and at others of Daniel Ward-Murphy and seems to have released just a couple of EPs (albeit long ones at 6-7 songs each) to date. Not the best I've heard, but well worth a listen even so if you're into the similar artists I've mentioned. I'm interested to see what, if anything, he can make of the potential I can hear hiding in there.

The sites I've been looking at
To cut a long story short, I've now got my husband's previous Android phone. I won't say old, because the Dell Streak Five he's using now is discontinued, whereas this LG isn't. Whilst I'd used this phone a few times while it was in his possession, now that it's in mine I've been spending some time at looking at getting it set up to use the things I want to use it for. As you can imagine, a major part of that is music, but so far it's not been living up to expectations.

After the hell of getting the ability to download apps working (It refused point blank to work with my existing Google account, yet was quite happy to work with a newly created one), one of the first things on my list was the Last.fm app. However I'm already thinking about getting rid of it, as it seems the only use it would have is to work as a scrobbler for tracks I had uploaded to the phone. The big problem is the fact you can only stream 50 tracks via the app before you have to pay. Somewhat daft when there's no limit when I access the site via a browser. I wouldn't mind if the only option you could listen to was tracks already in your library rather than the whole Last fm catalog, but to lock it down so completely means there's little point me using it for music streaming on the move. Chalk yet another one up for the idea of ownership - seems the best way to take music with you is still to upload it to your own phone from your own collection yourself rather than rely on a cloud. And you don't need an Android to do that.

No doubt I'll land up exploring the idea of app development a bit further as a reason for using it, but for the moment the laptop appears to be winning for ease of use despite its lower portability over the idea of a smartphone for the things I want to do on a mobile basis. I hadn't expected that, so this is proving an interesting experiment.

Slowbizz
I mentioned Slowbizz a few posts ago as being a service aiming to aid artists with booking tours. Whilst quite liking the idea in principle, the costs involved for hosts didn't make it look attractive for something you'd want to do as a regular event, and I also had a number of concerns about how it could work in practice. Seems there have been a few critical changes since that post, making it worthwhile for me to post some more thoughts as a result.

Firstly, Slowbizz itself has gone non-profit. This essentially means that they no longer take any money and they no longer set the fee that hosts pay to artists. On this score, they've therefore removed themselves so completely from the equation that there's absolutely no reason for existing fans of an artist to use the service at all - as all they're really doing is providing an initial point of contact between host and artist and you sort out all the details between you, you might as well go direct in the first place.

Secondly the changes from the artist side don't make things particularly easy either. Firstly the rules for new artists getting added to the list of those available have changed. Instead of getting a minimum of 100 fans to sign up in order to get added to the roster, you now need to get the approval of at least 75% of the hosts on the system instead. Add to this the fact that you're now essentially doing all the booking arrangements for a tour instead of that falling on Slowbizz and from the artist point of view it's starting to look like you've got a lot of work again.

Thirdly, the new Slowbizz stance of acting as a "social meeting point" between artists and potential hosts is currently unfulfilled. There's no forum or other way to interact on the site itself - the best you can do is fill in a form to state you're interested in booking an artist. Yet to be a useful meeting point there needs to be visible communication. Artists and hosts need to have the social features to allow them to communicate and get to know each other, even before an artist attempts to get added to the Slowbizz roster. There needs to be the possibility of feedback and advice so that both artists and hosts have information on what's going right and wrong with the process and can share that with others who may be hesitating or in order to improve things for the future. None of that exists on the site at the moment. Rather the order of the day currently seems to be mails from Slowbizz that are ultimately just marketing. i.e. the "Please tell everyone else you know about us" sort and that approach isn't going to win any fans of the site or even the idea in general. And a similar problem appears on the new site homepage, where links to the registration forms are prominent, yet you have to go scrolling down the page in order to stand any chance of finding the links to the artists rosters (available and pending) - in fact it's not even obvious the useful stuff is down there, and it's way too easy to think the links will take you back to one of the registration forms you encountered earlier based on the wording.

So overall, my impression hasn't changed that much. I think there may still be some potential there for artists to get additional dates on top of ones they're able to arrange directly with their existing fans, but it looks like the site is still a long way from the chance of making that potential a reality, except for maybe a very few.

Amazon
Given the rise of digital, I decided to spend my latest electronic voucher in their mp3 shop for a change. I've been an Amazon customer for years, buying both books and CDs both in the past and currently and never had any problem. I've shied away from the idea of mp3s, but given the huge discrepancies between CD and digital for some artists, I decided I was long overdue on giving them a try.

My biggest problem with the big players like Amazon and Itunes is the idea of a software download (I'm here to buy MUSIC, not a DRM solution or software I don't need for gods sake), but given the ability to take the downloaded files from the Amazon software and put them wherever you want seemed easy as pie, I thought it was worth a try. Who knows, maybe I'd actually get used to the idea and turn into an mp3 buyer rather than a CD buyer if I could get used to buying them from a name I've trusted for years?

Well the software went on easy enough, I hit the pay button and I got a nice shiny new one telling me to click on it and it would download my tracks. So I clicked and got the response that my card payment had been rejected. This was despite the fact, I'd received the email confirmation from Amazon that my payment had completed successfully! So, I went back into the order details and yes, everything was paid for, but could I find that download button again? Nope. Nowhere to be seen. So I fired off an email to customer support. Within a couple of hours they responded saying they'd reactivated the download button for me (apparently if you miss that one opportunity to download, that's it you won't get another) and this time when I clicked on it, it did actually start to download tracks.

However it didn't download all of them, and yes, you guessed it. There was no way to retry downloading the tracks that the software had failed on. To add insult to injury, whilst it told me "one or more tracks failed to download" it didn't tell me which those were, meaning I had to manually check an order list of about 30 tracks to confirm what was missing. That's when the second email went off to Amazon.

On the plus side, someone from Amazon did actually phone me after that second mail and tried to fix the problem with downloading tracks over the phone. On the minus side he failed. And whilst they were good enough to give me my money back on the tracks that failed despite the fact they have a "no-money-back" policy on digital downloads, the experience has done enough to convince me I won't be buying digital from them again. And confirmed my previous stance about not wanting to buy digital from anywhere that insists you download software in order to be able to download or listen to music. Looks like you'll have to pry the CD out of my cold dead hands after all.

That's all for now. I'm expecting April to be somewhat quieter on the music front, given it seems to have all happened in March, but expect an update on my ongoing Sellaband problems as part of that post as a minimum.