May roundup

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
Tim Bennett of Civilized Tears announced on one of his UStream shows that he has been talking to Sellaband about starting up a new funding project to produce another album using a significantly lower budget than the last one he raised on there. He was talking about it starting on June 1st, but has yet to make any official announcement on Twitter or elsewhere as to whether that will be going ahead. I seriously wish he'd tried elsewhere, as going back to Sellaband means I definitely won't be buying into it for reasons you'll hopefully understand by the time I've finished this post. If he does indeed go back to Sellaband I'll be interested to see what kind of support he gets, and whether the old guard will resurface in the same way they did for Ellie Williams.

Brad Cox has been posting a number of acoustic videos on the Skitzo Calypso Youtube channel over the past few months from his various projects as well as some covers. Well worth keeping an eye on to see what he posts next.

I've been listening to more of  Fox Amoore's work recently since I discovered that here seems to be the best place to find a back catalog of things to listen to. His new album "Legends of Valanor" only came out this month, yet the last info I saw says the physical copies are already pretty much sold out! There's some incredible cinematic stuff here, and I'm already starting to think about upping my rating again based on my travels through his earlier work. I'm starting to find quite a few things I really like.

Matthew Ebel is in the process of making more full length previews of his tracks available to listen to on his website. So far this includes the whole of his new album (The Lives of Dexter Peterson) as well as the whole of a couple of earlier releases (Goodbye Planet Earth and Beer and Coffee). Head on over to the music section of his site, choose an album and click on the play button next to the track you want to listen to.  It also looks like he'll be increasing his offer of five free songs just for signing up to his mailing list soon as he's been running a series of polls in order to create a "best of" album to give away instead.  I'm also pleased he's decided to restart the weekly streaming concerts despite their much shorter half hour form. You can catch them on Wednesdays (assuming he's not travelling to perform) at 7pm Eastern US time (that's midnight in the UK or 1am on Thursday for most of the rest of Europe) via this link. The concerts themselves are also being released free to his subscribers (either in audio or video form depending on subscription level) for those who can't make it to view the live stream. Probably the most fascinating and interesting thing for me this month though has been watching the subscriber-only rehearsal streams and listening to him build up new arrangements for songs (particularly those from his new album which haven't been played live before).

You can also grab yourself a free track from another of my favourite artists this month without any need to supply any contact or email info. One of the tracks that Poets of the Fall did for the game "Alan Wake's American Nightmare" under their in-game name of "Old Gods of Asgard" is currently downloadable from a German gaming website. The link I'm giving you is to an English translation of the page (the original is obviously in German), where you'll find a link to the song "Balance Slays the Demon", which kind of reminds me of a lot of 80s stadium rock. I happen to think it's a stronger track than some of the ones on their recent album so well worth a listen, particularly if you've never heard any of their music before.

I've found myself disappearing off to Soundcloud ever more frequently recently as a result of links artists have been leaving. In particular this month, Remi Miles has posted new recordings of some of his tracks, Francis Rodino has posted an excellent brand new track, and I also discovered Daniel Ward-Murphy's "rough tracks" profile containing (as well as some covers) some very raw recordings of songs I hadn't heard before, a couple of which sound quite interesting and are likely to lead to me visiting his direction a little more frequently than I have been, at least in the short term.

On Twitter, I've run across a few interesting artists this month, in particular two of whom found me and a third that I fell over by accident while looking at something else. The first of these was a member of  The Fortunes who read my "1000 true friends" post, seemingly as a result of a comment I left on another blog.  Whilst their peak of popularity was a little before my time (being more like Beatles and Hollies era), I do remember some of their songs on the radio when I was a youngster as being quite listenable. Seems they are still touring and currently on the seaside/holiday resort circuit.

The second artist that found me that caught my interest is Matt Saunders who (slightly confusingly) seems to also go under the names Matt Clearing and A Clearing based on the info I've dragged up from the web so far. I haven't been overly impressed with the tracks I've heard, but the blog entries on the front page of his site giving a "behind-the-scenes insight" into trying to record as a one man operation were definitely interesting. Though perhaps not as interesting as the rather bizarre recent tweet he made that I'm still trying to wrap my head around - "I won't sell lossy music, produce physical media, or set up a lossless store. Can't be bothered, and don't want music to be my job." That really confuses me. Why go to all the effort of recording something and go through the whole process of making it sound as good as you feel you can make it without using any autotune etc. and then state you don't want music as a job? Just when I thought I was getting to understand musicians, this situation leaves me scratching my head and wondering what I'm missing here.

I tripped over John Anealio as a result of following a link from one of the people I follow on Twitter. All the music I've found so far can be downloaded for free from the links on his site. His instruments of choice seem to be guitar or bouzouki and he seems to write purely sci-fi/fantasy/geek themed music, rather than the much wider range someone like Matthew Ebel covers. I haven't had any of the tracks I've listened to so far grab my attention, but I'll probably keep an eye on him for a while in case something does, as he seems to be putting out new material fairly frequently.

Now I have a confession to make. I should have mentioned Sarah's Blue Dress and their monthly "monster mask" competition in last month's post which is when I first spotted it, but by the time I'd finished typing up the majority of the post I'd completely forgotten. Anyway, if you fancy winning a copy of their album, the link I've just given you should take you to the details of how to do so. There are still two more draws for two more album copies to go, so you should still have plenty of time.

It's been one of those months when I've come away disappointed when looking for artists. The main case in question is Marc Supsic who I originally encountered on Sellaband. I've been past his site a couple of times since he left and I decided to take another look this month to see if anything had changed since my last visit. Sadly it hasn't and as the site seemingly hasn't changed since 2009, I'm left wondering whether he's still writing music or not.

Whatever happened to Wetwerks? I remember the controversy when they were in the competition to play at Sellabration and looked like they were going to win until they announced they had parted from their vocalist. Whilst they subsequently put a couple of tracks up using a new vocalist, I remember I wasn't as impressed with him based on the couple of tracks they had recorded. I noticed a while back that their website had disappeared and had wondered whether it was being redone, but another check this month shows it still hasn't resurfaced. Nor have I found any obvious trace of a new band name in its place, or the members I remember being involved with new projects. To say they've disappeared into thin air would seem to be the understatement of the year.

I also went on the trail of Tiffany Gow whose website is over a year out of date on the news front but with no joy as her Facebook profile also appears to be completely inaccessible unless you're a Facebook user. Her Myspace profile was logged into in May though, which suggests she may still be out there somewhere.

The sites I've been looking at

Sellaband
Time for the update I promised you in my previous post and I find myself wondering about coincidental timing as a number of issues have miraculously updated themselves since my last regular post, and mostly within the past couple of weeks. Firstly I'm still waiting on two albums, both of which completed funding a long time ago. We're now only about a couple of months away before Lori Greco will become the second artist I bought parts in to pass three years since funding completion without releasing an album. The last news on her site is from March which says the album will be coming "this year" and even her Twitter feed has been mostly quiet since that. But incredibly within the last couple of weeks, a sample of each of the (still unfinished) tracks from the album got uploaded to her Sellaband page and a message was sent via Sellaband to all her believers apologising for the continued delay but giving no information on when the album is likely to be seen, only that it will be "some months". At this point, I wouldn't like to bet whether she takes longer than Natalia Safran to produce an album or not, but one thing is for sure, the fact that BOTH these ladies have been supported by the same group of believers isn't just giving that group a bad name, as far as I'm concerned it's giving the OTHER artists they have been (and still are) promoting a bad name as well, purely by their association with the group. It's making me a lot less likely to consider supporting any of them in future, irrespective of how they've behaved as individual artists.

Cubworld is the other artist I'm still waiting on, though it seems possible this one may be on its way soon as he tweeted at the beginning of May that he was under pressure from Sellaband to get finished and was hoping to "wrap things up" in the next month. In the meantime, this video is a great preview of one of the album tracks, though it's unclear from the information given as to whether it will be on the album in the same form or not. His three years since completing funding will be up in December.

However, overdue albums aren't the only problem I've had with the site. I had the same sum of money stuck on my "waiting to be transferred" balance for more than a year, although money added on top of it every quarter was getting credited properly a couple of weeks later, and I'd even mailed Sellaband a couple of times about this with no joy. Whether the support ticket I left on their support system in April finally did the trick (though I never received an answer, just the automated reply mail you get back when you raise a ticket), or (once again) whether it was me mentioning the fact I'd be updating the situation with Sellaband in this post that sped things along, I have no idea, but the "waiting" money has finally been transferred.

Several months after their album was released, Sellaband have finally got around to making the Radio Orange tracks available for download by believers, along with a number of other artists where albums had been released (in some cases more than a year ago) but no downloads were showing on the site. However, although Katie Thompson has had her tracks available for download from Sellaband for a while, the "Investments" tab still shows her in the "projects that reached their target" section rather than the "projects that released an album" section. So although some things are getting sorted, the process still seems to be painfully slow with some obvious problems still to be fixed.

Tim Bennett said he'd chosen to go back to Sellaband rather than another funding platform because he reckoned the new management had got their game in order. I can only hope for his sake that they have on the artist side, because everything I'm seeing says it's going to be at least Christmas 2012 before I stand any chance of being convinced that applies to the believer side as well. So I still have no plans to buy parts on the site for the forseeable future, however tempting the artist that signs up - I don't have trust in the site and at the rate things are still moving, it's obviously going to be a long time before I might.

The site itself continues to "slim down", with the number of artists slowly reducing over time. There are now around 650 artists currently fundraising on the site, despite the fact the Sellaband newsletters still mention "thousands of artists" in their text. But the number of artists who manage to reach at least 1% of their budget before being deleted is slowly increasing and finally passed 50 concurrent signups a month or so ago. It will be interesting to see at what point these two figures stop converging as it seems currently only about 1 in 13 signups is capable of raising at least 30 - 100 euros (the typical 1% figure depending on their budget) and not all of those who reach 1% currently go on to reach target.

Soundcloud
I've noticed more and more artists seem to be linking content from here recently and as a result I've decided to come out of the shadows and start becoming more active on the site. You'll find my profile here, although there's not much to see at the moment as I've only linked to a few artists and not left any comments at present.

MusicHype
Currently still in private beta, but reported as due to become public in June, this site promises to be able to identify and track top fans of an artist to make it easier to reward those fans and also identify exactly where in the world fan activity is occurring e.g. to make it easier to know where you ought to be booking a tour. According to the limited information currently available it seems that artists will be able to try the site for free, but will need to pay a (currently undisclosed) sum of money to use the site longer term. I'll be interested to see how exactly they plan to make this work, as initial thoughts are that they will either need the fans to sign up to the site as well, or they must be using automated search technology to identify the artist name being mentioned in twitter feeds, blogs, streaming services "favourite artist" listings, facebook pages etc. and scraping the user identity involved from that. In the first case I'd have to question the worth of a site that requires your fans to sign up too before they can be tracked - after all, that's what your own website and email list should already be for. In the second case, the only real argument I can see for an artist to be using the service is the fact they don't have the time to do the tracking themselves. If artists haven't yet worked out how to search for their own name in a search engine or Twitter or how to find the list of "people talking about this" on Facebook, then perhaps there is a market, but as yet I remain unconvinced that this site will offer anything it's not already possible for an artist to easily achieve for free via their own social profiles and site/mailing lists. No doubt I'll be writing some more about this when the site has more information publicly available, but for now it looks like it will turn into just another attempt to part artists from their money.


Slowbizz
Slowbizz has decided to reinvent itself. I received an email at the beginning of the month on the subject. In a nutshell, what I expected appears to have happened, with people looking at the artists roster but not actually booking concerts. So it seems the person who started the site has decided to change the concept. The site with the revised concept isn't yet live, but is expected to be towards the end of Summer. That is, if it ever goes live at all, given it's currently been converted into a Pinterest board. To quote from the email

We will offer a special role to some of you as the great curators of the Slowbizz ecosystem. There will be 1000 curators all over the world. Their task will be to act as the "gatekeepers" of the BIG exposure that we will offer, free of charge, once a week, to one artist/band. Just one per week, featured on our website and other social properties. One artist that will have the privilege to be discovered by the eyes & ears of thousands of people on a global scale, without any competition. A real privilege. The curators will also be in charge of finding local ambassadors who will enhance the Slowbizz exposure within their proximity network.

What I deeply want is to offer to completely unknown artists the chance to get the exposure they wouldn't be able to afford despite their talent. I want us to become together a "break maker". A kind of label but without any strings attached.

And I want all of this to happen in a simple way, through a network of music lovers, bypassing the usual media.

And so I now am really confused. First off, the email mentions a figure of 7812 people signed to the mailing list. Yet with 65 artists accepted on the roster and most (if not all) of those providing at least 100 of those EACH, not to mention a number of others who will have signed up some of the 100 fans needed by the original concept to be accepted onto the roster (before the change to 50 votes required), it seems to me that the vast majority of that figure will be fans who have limited interest outside of the week that "their" artist is promoted, rather than the site having attracted the "network of music lovers" it needs. I'm also wondering about the size of this promotion, given that thousands of people is basically nothing on a global scale, the site is now supposed to be a non-profit (so where are the promotion funds going to come from) and it's not exactly any more well known than the artists it's supposed to be helping. To attract music lovers a site needs a variety of quality artists in a variety of genres, so to only ever be looking at one artist doesn't strike me as a site people will visit to look for music. i.e. how on earth does promoting one artist a week create a network of music lovers?  I'll be interested to see if the site's founder can change my mind when the new concept goes live, but the whole idea progression looks to me something like an original idea with potential that is taking a series of ever larger wrong turns (and looks ill thought out as a result of the huge shifts). But I guess one more "Look at me" site is hardly going to upset the status quo if/when it arrives.

In the meantime, the shift to a Pinterest board also makes very little sense given that it's pretty much impossible to discover anything on that site that you're not already following (or aware of) unless the board owner constantly makes pins so that they maintain a presence on the (ever-changing) recently pinned stuff. I'll be genuinely surprised if the board starts attracting hordes of followers, interest and comments as a result. Give it a few more months and I'm guessing the concept will change again.

And Finally..
If you haven't seen the post I made just before this one offering you a free QR code for you or your band to help with promotion then you might want to click on this link in order to read about that offer.