Selling music as non-music

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.

Video of the month
I have UK comedian Dave Gorman to thank for this month's video from an artist I'd never heard of before I caught his tweeted link. So without further ado, take a listen to Scottish artist Admiral Fallow and a track they released last year called Squealing Pigs.

And if you're in the USA this September/October and you like what you hear, you have the chance to catch them live on their first North American tour.





Who I've been looking at
I got an email from Markus Nylund, a young artist from Finland I first encountered nearly 10 years ago. Well, not quite so young now perhaps if we consider that timescale. Anyway it said he is going to university in the Autumn and is done with music and has uploaded some of his more recent recordings (all as free download) on Soundcloud - I guess as a leaving present if you like. You'll find them under the name Sunlight Heart. I'm left wondering by this announcement - is it possible to "grow up" past what I describe as "the artist's soul", or will he be back at some point? It may be possible to be "done with music" if you have "the artist's soul" but that doesn't mean the music is done with you. And as I saw that spark of "artist's soul" when we met several years ago, I'm not yet convinced he has indeed let go

Ironically a couple of days before that email, I found a business card from Ruth Angell, a young violinist I'd met at one of the gigs I saw Markus play at when he was in England a very long time ago. She'd just started experimenting with adding vocals to her music and was still rather nervous about performing in public (despite the fact the audience in this case happened to be an audience of 3 and then only if you included the barman) . I took her card at the time and didn't really think anything more of it until I ran across it this month and decided to check out whether she was still out there making music. Well wow, what a difference a few years can make. She recorded her first album as part of acoustic duo Peacock Angell last year, is part of the folk group The Rainbow Chasers, put together by Fairport Convention founding member Ashley Hutchings and also performs with a number of other artists.

And perhaps a lesson to learn from this experience if you are an artist. Just because a contact or business card doesn't lead to something within a few weeks or months, it doesn't mean it's a failure. Rather if I hadn't taken her card at the time (or hadn't been offered it), I would probably have completely forgotten about her and not looked again.  Always remember this - you never know if or when something will bear fruit.

Francis Rodino's track "Higher ground"  was used for a video on the British Armed forces news website celebrating the armed services involvement with the 2012 Olympics. You can see the video here.

A couple of artists I've encountered this month have the common theme of approaching music as non-music. The first of these that got my attention Beck is selling an album that isn't recorded. Instead, what you get for your money is the sheet music for all twenty of the songs on the album, and it's up to you and/or your musical friends to come up with the musical interpretation. This article from Forbes and its follow-on explains why this is an innovative idea which may inspire the user-generated content generation.

The second music as non-music idea is by a gentleman called Jeff Boller, who goes by the name The Simple Carnival. Rather than recording an album, he's recording an animated movie in stereoscopic 3D. The songs and associated video clips are being released on the internet as they are mostly finished, but the final product will only be available as digital tracks or as a bluray video disc - there will be no CD. It's currently possible to download the mp3s he's uploaded so far for free in exchange for a tweet or facebook like, but as Jeff is doing all the work on both the recording and the animation (with a few exceptions) by himself, the projected finishing date is currently 2014. If you're interested in the project, keep an eye on him because he may start up a Kickstarter (or similar) project to collect funds when he gets more work done and gets closer to working out a more accurate end date for the project. You'll find a video on his website (approx 25min)  showing how he's creating the animation, and for music aficionados, not only does he play nearly all of the wide range of instruments himself, but he also claims to be mostly ignoring modern recording techniques and restricting himself to techniques used before 1980 where possible, so it's well worth a visit. Just remember to take your red-green glasses with you if you want to get the full 3D experience. (You can also get a pair for free if you order his previous album "Girls Aliens Food")

Look Left caught my attention through being mentioned in the text of a Matthew Ebel concert download (apparently one or more of them are particularly noticeable in the audience vocals of the recording). This young band has recorded an impressive 4 full length albums in the past 2 years. Their website is basically their bandcamp page, so there isn't really much information available about them, but you can download all of the aforementioned albums for $8 each. The music seems mainly Americana/folk rock, but there are a diverse range of musical styles in play often within the same song, and particularly in their earlier albums, so it's well worth a stop off to listen to what they have to offer for that fact alone.

I'm not sure which existing artist originally caused this one to pop on my Last FM station but after hearing a couple of different songs over the past few months, I decided to get around to checking out Brianna Gaither. She has an entire album of songs available to stream for free on her site, but disappointingly the only obvious purchase option is iTunes and her site also contains very little information about her or her music. Although the blog page was updated in the last month, her shows page only contains dates for past shows from the last 3 months.

Katie Thompson has just started up a new funding project for an EP on Indiegogo. You can find the details of what she's offering here.

The sites I've been looking at

Tastemakerx
They say that imitation is the best form of flattery and the continuation of last month's story about this site turned out to be someone imitating me. If you recall, I'd posted about a number of artists increasing in price in a short period, all boosted by pretty much the same group of user ids and it was unclear if this was a group of people joining or if someone had created some fake accounts. And that I'd joined in on the buying spree. Well it so happens I'd left a comment on one of the artist pages saying that I thought the price was on its way up fast before I'd worked out this was happening to a number of artists. Another user had also spotted the increases and started leaving a comment on many of the fast movers that the price was being inflated by false accounts. Then it seems he got into an argument with some of the other users on the site involved with buying parts in the artists in question and was told off by one of them for bullying. At which point I can only guess he decided I was creating fake accounts (as a result of the comment I'd left) and tastemakerx weren't doing anything about it and decided to make it look as if I was exactly the same user as him by modifying his profile to use my knifelady avatar. Given the number of users then starting to question if we were the same person and if indeed we had been creating fake accounts, I contacted tastemakerx to step in. After a couple of emails, they reset his avatar to the default one, but not before I'd had to get into a conversation with some of the users involved to try and convince them we were indeed different people, leaving me more than a little irritated, rather than flattered at his stunt. The user in question does still appear to have some kind of a sense of humour though, as the new profile picture they've uploaded is the default tastemakerx one with an added pair of devil horns. It's not the first time I've had problems on a "young" site that I've used heavily (Sellaband and the unofficial forum anyone?) and somehow I doubt it will be the last. Meantime, I now seem to be officially entrenched within the top 10 tastemakers on the site but am not really expecting to get all the way to number one given I've been mixing it with the serious gameplayers for the past couple of weeks and things don't shuffle round that much at the top as a result.

Sellaband
Most notable this month has been the rather strange looking decision of Unter Null to reduce their budget twice despite only being on the site a month or so. First it was reduced to 8000 euros, and then more recently to 7000 which was reached rather rapidly after this and just left to complete its 2 week grace period. Someone who only wanted a month-long fundraiser, or someone who wanted to get out before the "new website"? Your guess is as good as mine. In the meantime, I've heard a rumour that the "new website" due this autumn is basically going to extend fundraising to projects other than music. Hopefully it won't be too much longer now before fact confirms or denies that. In the meantime it's noticeable that the majority of the "promoted artists" on the Sellaband frontpage are now German, but likewise it's the German signups in general that seem to be bringing some believers in the first place. (10 of the current top 50 sorted by % raised are from Germany, with 6 of those on the first page of the site). It's currently looking like the site will evolve into a niche for fundraising for German projects based on the way things seem to be going, rather than the global music fundraising platform originally intended.

And as promised, here's the update on the albums I'm (still) waiting for. Lori Greco passed her 3 year anniversary since reaching target, yet there's still no news on when (if ever) the album will be seen. In the meantime, it seems she's off to Italy, as that trip is pretty much all her tweets have been about recently. Things are also rather quiet in the Cubworld camp despite his three year anniversary getting ever closer as well. He did tweet that he's set a pretty firm release date, but I haven't seen any mention of when that's likely to be.

Pledge
The other artist I'm waiting for is on Pledge Music. After some comments on their profile asking what was going on because there had been no update for over 2 months Vertical Horizon finally posted a video update just a few days ago (ironically the day after I left a comment - coincidence or the knifelady power back at work?) of one of the new songs and showing the individual layers making up the track. However the question of when the album is coming out still remains unanswered despite that being one of the main questions they were asked in the comments.

As a result of this, I'm now watching Ginger Wildheart's new project very closely on there, as it's the first project of his that I'll have been watching from start to finish. Given he raised his budget in less than two hours (it would have been less than one, if Pledge's servers had been able to cope with the load) and last I looked was about to hit 400% of his total, I'm interested to analyse how this project goes on Pledge and see if it confirms the current ideas I have about crowdfunding music in general.

Last FM
Last FM may be about to lose quite a bunch of subscribers. About a week ago it introduced a 6 skip limit for all users, not just non-subscribers. This means you can't skip more than 6 songs before you need to change the station you're listening to, whereas before it was unlimited. This makes the process of music discovery through the site even more time consuming and a lot of users aren't happy with the change. Particularly as the algorithm they use isn't particularly friendly as it tends to offer you the same track for a given artist and/or keeps playing things you've listened to recently, rather than offering tracks in your library that you haven't listened to in a while (hence the nightmare I've been having this past year trying to "train it" to understand what I listen to). Last FM say they can't change their policy due to their licensing agreements, even though several users have offered to pay MORE to have the facility to skip whatever they want. With music licensing being cited more and more often as the reason why people can't listen to what they want, I'm beginning to think the sooner this idea is banned, the better. Otherwise, we'll definitely reach a stage where nobody will want to pay for music at all (several of those who have stated they are cancelling their subscriptions because of this change have said publicly they will go back to sites which are known not to pay musicians). The current system of music licensing is clearly broken and needs to disappear as soon as possible.

The not-pop Jukebox 
Not a site, but rather a blog with the subheading "Ignored, Maligned and Forgotten Music". Which pretty much says it all. The blog is updated daily with at least one track embedded into each post. So if you want to listen to music you may not have heard before which comes from a wide range of musical styles, this is a very good place to look.

Rekiosk
Seemingly originally started as a way to sell digital books, the site has now expanded into selling other things digitally as well. The basic idea is that for anything sold from your kiosk (store) on the site, the original creator will get 70% of the cash and you will get about 25% (with the remainder obviously going in site fees) which makes it an interesting looking affliate scheme.

On the plus side, you can add and sell 15 items to your kiosk without attracting a fee for your kiosk. On the minus side, you can only add products already on the site to your kiosk in the first place, unless you can prove you are the original content creator. And at the moment there seems to be very little content available on the site to choose from. Additionally, the payments to you are made using dwolla, rather than one of the better known payment methods such as Paypal and you're required to fill in IRS forms when you open your kiosk. What this means for non-USA citizens is unclear, and their FAQ section doesn't cover that either. However, Pledge Music already have a kiosk on the site, so I'll be keeping an eye on it to see whether it starts to become a more attractive prospect in future.

Current verdict is that it seems an interesting idea but too mired in red tape to attract users. Also without offering an obviously better % to content creators (say 85-90%) than well known services such as iTunes or Amazon, there's very little reason for independents to add their content to the site, as it's unlikely to generate sales without users.

That's all for this month. Hopefully next month's post will come out on time, but with some real life issues needing resolution, I'm likely to become busy around the time I'm due to post.