Visiting the familiar and new

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

In one of those "Whatever happened to...?" moments, I found myself wandering past Dommin's website for the first time in a while. The first album had been publicised on TV over here and I'd liked what I'd heard, but that was a number of years ago and I'd never seen or heard about a followup. From what I read on this visit, it looks like this is yet another case of an artist being bitten by the traditional music industry. Read for yourself as the story goes with the video ("Not Afraid") I've chosen for this month. One thing is for sure, I expect I'll be dropping in from time to time in the near future to see if anything does get released once the label hassles have been sorted. Whilst Kickstarter has been mentioned, I can't help but get the gut feeling that this is something that might do much better with the involvement of Pledgemusic instead, despite the fact I'm not sure if Kristofer has even heard of the site.

Who I've been looking at

It's not often I win something, so it was quite a nice surprise to get an Amazon gift voucher from the music discovery panel I was invited to a couple of months back as a thankyou for responding to their artist surveys. While I was trying to decide what to spend it on, I landed up looking through the latest recommendations the site had for me and ran across a rather interesting artist as a result of my interest in Nemesea. Issa is from Norway and the samples I listened to immediately caught my interest, as they seemed to fall in a range of music I quite like with some tracks reminding me more of  Roxette and others stretching closer to a lot of the Scandinavian rock and metal I listen to. It's therefore something of a shame that her website is a) an extremely poor one page item and b) was so extremely difficult to track down in the first place. There's potential here, but her online presence is pretty much non-existent which is the worst possible thing to be in this day and age, and the videos also seem to be pretty cringeworthy affairs more suited to the 1980s, particularly on the choreography front. In other words, nice music, shame about the rest if you're a potential fan.

For other new discoveries this month, Soundcloud provided one in the form of the electronic act Future User. The track posted caught my interest, however everything I've seen so far looks like a failed attempt to go viral with it, given their site has no information on the artist and no clues are given in their social profiles (which mostly look to have been started just this year) either. The inference is that "future user" may be more well known under another name and the idea was to get people trying to guess who it is/was, but despite the rather spammy Twitter account attempting to direct people to listen to the track it seems this idea has fallen pretty flat (if indeed that was its original intention).

I also picked up on a 15 year old artist on Reverbnation called Brandon Vitale who has some pretty catchy tracks and writes his own music. His biography on there states he is looking for major label and publishing support. The biggest problem for me is that there appears to be no website or plan of attack here. There's no doubting potential but with no visible track record and just a series of recordings it seems rather hard to understand why any label would take a chance on a youngster who seemingly has no performance experience behind them and who is obviously struggling to get people to listen to the music in the first place as he hasn't really formed any connections with people either.

Brad Cox has announced that the new We Love the Underground album is going to be titled "Mouthful of Graffiti", and whilst there's still no firm release date announced it is supposed to be released this Summer. I can't help but feel the irony here - at the rate things are going, this is looking like I'll have seen one album and one EP from Skitzo Calypso and two We Love the Underground albums all from an artist who failed to raise funding on Sellaband before I even see one album from the successfully funded project of Lori Greco who I bought parts in on Sellaband over a year before I'd even heard of Brad and his band projects.

The Pledgemusic project of Poets of the Fall passed the 200% funded mark this month and many of the items available are once again running low on numbers left. It will be interesting to see if the DVD (due August) does arrive before the album from Vertical Horizon, as things are still quieter on their side than I'd like despite the fact the Vertical Horizon album is supposed to have gone off for mixing and mastering already.

Poets of the Fall also directed me to a new artist in the form of Ima, as they had produced her new song. For non-Finnish speakers, whilst you can click on the play icon on the main page of the site, I'd actually recommend clicking on the "Nyt" link at the top of the page instead as this "latest (news)" page currently gives you the soundcloud player, and if you like what you hear, you can download the track in question. Once again, I find myself somewhat underwhelmed by the artist's own site though, as there's actually very little useful information on there once you get past the language barrier.

Things are undergoing a bit of an upheaval in the Matthew Ebel camp at the moment. For starters he's attempting to finish the book portion of the "Lives of Dexter Peterson" project, seeing as the album was out a year ago, meaning it will be something like 3 years from his original announcement of trying to get a 3 part project done in a year that we'll be seeing the end of what has turned into a 2 part project along the way. With only the first couple of chapters illustrated, the graphic novel portion got cancelled a few months ago due to personal problems for the illustrator making it unclear when, if ever, it would get finished. In addition he's behind on writing the custom songs that are due to those who have paid Entourage subscriptions and has stated he's actually thinking about removing the Entourage level as a result because he doesn't want to keep falling behind on the custom song commitment (and I know he has no real idea of what else he could offer in its place and doesn't like accepting money for nothing either). It may therefore be that I won't even be needing to consider whether to stay at Entourage level when my renewal comes due, but rather the question may be what subscription I take instead if this change goes ahead.

Personally, I'm not convinced the removal of this subscription level would be a good idea if there are people willing to pay that amount of money - there's a big difference between 5 people paying $500 a year and those 5 people most likely dropping back to $149 a year when it comes to income - it essentially means you need more than 10 extra fans to appear from nowhere to make up the difference which is not the easiest of things to achieve in a still faltering economy when it's already hard enough for existing fans to keep on supporting you in the first place.

And if that little lot wasn't enough to be working on, he's decided he needs to get more of an "angle" to his shows to try and convince people to book him rather than being just another guy playing a piano. This means he isn't running his weekly show streams at the moment, but instead has been building a set for his basement studio and is working on costumes and storylines as well with the idea of relaunching as a sci-fi themed weekly show similar to the High Orbit podcasts he used to do. However this change is also going to have an impact on his subscription model as he wants to put the resulting videos up on Youtube so potential bookers for live shows can see what they would be getting, which means they are then publicly available rather than exclusive subscriber content. In other words the question then becomes what subscribers will get for their monthly subscription money instead (particularly at the entry level). At the rate things are going, I'm therefore left wondering whether or not his entire subscription model is going to need a reworking as a result of all the changes in progress which seem to impact on it.

I find myself rather in two minds about Aly Cook's latest endeavour. She's still attempting to raise funds on Sellaband for her second album and still has over halfway to go for her current target, yet at the same time has started up an IndieGoGo project for her band the Sou'Westers to raise funds for a video for their first single. On the plus side, an IndieGoGo campaign does at least ensure she will get whatever money it manages to raise and I can see the idea was to treat it as an album presale campaign, but on the minus side there's the thought that having this second project running at the same time as the first isn't really such a good idea as people have limited money and can't put it in two places at once.

The sites I've been looking at
 Interestingly I haven't been looking at any sites in particular recently as it seems more like I've been on a random wander between a lot of my usual haunts to see if any new artists pop up during my listening time on them.

The only thing I did pay some attention to was the finish of the "Bandcontest" on Sellaband. Interestingly not only did one artist actually meet the target (despite this looking very unlikely to happen for most of the month the contest was running), it seems they exceeded it by a rather round looking 20%. With three hours to go, this same artist was on 80% of funds raised and as little as 24 hours before the end of the contest they had still been stuck on somewhat less than 20% of funds raised. Interestingly, the second artist in the competition also made a rather round looking 80% of their total budget by the end of the contest, despite having been in single digits of funds raised with 24hrs to go. The third of the 3 artists barely moved in the last 24hrs, finishing the contest on 5% of budget. I'll leave it to the conspiracy theorists (and you) to decide whether we actually saw an old style last minute rush to buy as with the Sellaband of times past or whether some convenient number fixing took place to avoid the embarrassment the contest was looking likely to turn into if you'd been following its progress from the start.

And finally...
I've been crunching some numbers recently from data freely available on the internet as a result of the debate on whether artists are actually being paid enough for streaming music and the RIAA's recent announcement that 100 streams should count as one sale. I'm in the process of writing up the rather interesting looking results of that into what should form my next blog post (hopefully within the next week). Suffice it to say that at best the results should give you something to think about and at worst may actually scare you. Irrespective of whether you're a listener or a musician, this is one post I think you definitely won't want to miss.