Musician’s Notebook

Edward Hatton of the Intellectual Musician has a great article on dealing with singers. Singers tend to be the most egotistical band members, though I think that some singers’ need for ego-stroking comes from a place of deep insecurity and not always from a self-obsessed ego. It is, after all, the most personal of all instruments.

Click through to Edward’s article for more.

There’s one industry on earth that seeks to engage all your senses. It offers more than anyone could ever need to sate the ears; there are all kinds of glittery film clips and artsy pictures; its spokesmen pose on the labels of Pepsi bottles and various other sugar-infused tastes, and you can reach out and touch them at a live appearance, amidst the crowd jumping up and down and grinding against you.

And everyone remembers the smell of their first brand new album, the one that escapes when you open the case and turn the first page of the booklet (and it’s a much better association than mentioning the smell of sweat at a concert).

Of course, I’m talking about the music industry, and with all their fingers in dozens of pies, you’d think they’d be the first to adopt new technology, and the new cultures that form from it. The music industry is the slowest industry of the arts to move forward, and this has happened again and again over the decades, from piano rolls to vinyl to cassettes to compact discs all the way to the MP3. Not only do they resist the technology, but they resist the culture.

The music industry is starting to catch up on digital distribution, and it’s possible to find the majority of popular artists’ catalogues in iTunes or any of the other online music stores. These distributors are all struggling with the record companies who have begun the process of adopting new technology, but have not yet bothered to adopt the culture. Instead, they bring their typically capitalistic and Western attitude with them, and it seems to say something like this: guard this intellectual property obsessively with flimsy, breakable security devices, or we might lose all of our money and go out of business!

These crippled files are intended to stop piracy. Look at the internet! Piracy is still rife. Legitimate consumers are the only ones affected by this plague of DRM, and it’s such a flimsy and easily broken method of protection that it will never stop piracy, but only fan its flames on. The people who pirate an album are not the ones who would have bought it in the first place, so DRM not only cripples legitimate users, but in fact loses album sales through the growing culture of people who are opposed to purchasing albums for ethical reasons.

The digital culture, provoked into existence by these new technologies, needs an entirely different approach from the music industry to work effectively. The approach that is needed demands unprotected releases, because DRM can be broken easily, but trust is much harder to tear apart. You can go further - release some, or even all, of your songs for free download, and see how that improves your credibility and album sales.

DRM is killing sales, it’s killing artists and it’s killing consumers. If DRM doesn’t go, it will only be a matter of time before independent artists, with unprotected albums and free songs for download, are taking the big audiences, the big money, and the big satisfaction. That might not be such a bad thing, and that’s the power of the internet. The music industry has a big lesson to learn from the literary industry and its luminaries such as Cory Doctorow, where some pockets are readily adopting less restrictive policies.

It’s important that you do not send your intellectual property over instant messenger at any time. AOL/AIM, for instance, claims the following rights over anything you send through:

“irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt, and promote this Content in any medium.”

Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger doesn’t make things any better - you grant it permission to:

“use, copy, distribute, display, publish and modify your submission, each in connection with the service; publish your name in connection with your submission; and grant these permissions to other persons.”

If you send a file through any of these programs, you lose your exclusive rights to it (if you owned the intellectual property to begin with). If you discuss sensitive plans, ideas or campaigns for your project, these can be used or published. It’s scary enough that they can monitor your discussions to begin with.

What should you use? Use Skype. It’s peer to peer, it’s secure and it doesn’t claim any rights in your intellectual property. Steer clear of using standard instant messengers to discuss or share your material, because if someone’s watching, you might not get it back.

There’s a new tuneback out by Midnight.Haulkerton called Eastern Standard Tribe over on the official Midnight.Haulkerton blog, Alfadir’s Piercing. Go check it out. You like free music, right?

This tuneback is based on Cory Doctorow’s book by the same name and tackles issues such as the blurring distinctions between your place of residence and your time of residence thanks to the internet, artistic and intellectual betrayal, and more… check it out at Alfadir’s Piercing.

Unsigned Bands Promotion is great resource by Marc Gunn for independent musicians and bands who are slogging it out to promote and market themselves on a tight budget. The site is full of great tips to pull you out of a promo rut - here’s just a few:

• Boost traffic to your band website
• Building a mailing list with minimal expenditure
• This may be the most important characteristic of your band’s behavior if you’re to develop an audience!

Check out Unsigned Bands Promotion today and thank Marc for his contribution!

Recently, Arjun Muralidharan of The Good Musician recommended a system of organization using a supply drawer so that musicians could ensure their songwriting materials were always handy. His system is a good one, but as I thought about the way I work with my band Midnight.Haulkerton, and when songwriting alone, I realized that over time I’ve become an almost exclusively digital writer, and a bit of an embodiment of “the paperless office” in practice.

1. Prepare a system of organization that is scalable

Organization is still important - if not more so - in the digital realms, so I have a folder system set up that keeps recording project files, lyrics, biographies and various promotional copy, images, tabs and notation all separate and highly organized. Over time, any creative person generates a mass of material so it’s vital that intellectual property be organized stringently from the outset.

For instance, my music folder is split like this:

• Music
  • Albums
    • Album 1, 2, etc
      • Lyrics
      • Recording Projects (Logic files, etc)
      • Notation
      • Promotional Material
        • Copy
        • Graphics
      • Marketing Plan
  • Various
    • Lyrics
    • Recording Projects
    • Notation
  • Music Marketing Campaign (General)

This structure accomplishes several things:

1. It keeps material from various albums separate. If there are many songs in your collection, this is invaluable.
2. It keeps “Various” unsorted songs in one place, out of the way of your albums.
3. It keeps lyrics, recording projects, and notation separate so that you can find each component more easily and as your collection expands, files are not permanently lost.
4. It keeps paramusical elements organized by project so you don’t use the wrong art for the wrong album or website.
5. It keeps the overarching master marketing campaign separate from the marketing campaigns from each album.

I have a friend with several thousand songs on his hard drive, but he hasn’t even implemented alphabetical folder organization - it’s impossible for him to locate anything he’s written unless he knows the exact title already.

2. Keep the best applications handy to capture ideas quickly

Of course, Arjun didn’t only discuss the method of organization, but the tools for the job. Ideas disappear as quickly as they come, so the best applications are needed to capture them. Here’s what I use:

• Pages or Word are great for writing lyrics.
• Keep a good tabbed browser such as Firefox handy so you can look for inspiration or use a good rhyming dictionary.
• Reason and Melodyne for capturing musical ideas quickly in notated/midi form.
• Logic Express to quickly arrange a song structure and have it ready to come back to for further writing and recording.
• Skype - I love collaboration, and many of my collaborators are in various places far from here. Skype solves this problem.
• iTunes, because sometimes that melodic idea is just out of reach and some musical inspiration from your favorites can help.

3. Keep logs of your communications

Like I said, I use Skype a great deal for international collaborations on lyrics and sometimes, melodies. While it’s a good idea to send copies of those collaborations by email after the session for backup (and, of course, as a courtesy) it’s also important to keep chat logs. You might want to go back for a line or verse you didn’t like at the time, or you might just lose the lyric in your Word document. Either way, logs of both your collaborative chats and emails are essential.

4. Don’t unwittingly relinquish your intellectual property rights

According to Tom’s Hardware, instant messaging programs like Windows Live Messenger and AIM stipulate that anything transmitted on their network becomes their intellectual property. This is why I specifically mentioned Skype above - you get to keep what you create! This is important, so let me repeat for you skimmers:

DO NOT USE ANYTHING BUT SKYPE TO COLLABORATE OR SHARE YOUR SONGS, EVER.

As a musician, there is nothing more valuable to you than your intellectual property. It may sound horrible to the idealist hobby musicians of the world, but the intellectual property rights to the song are more important than the song itself.

5. If you haven’t shown everybody, don’t show anybody.

Okay, so that may be a bit of an exaggeration. As a matter of principle, when working in the digital world, only share unreleased songs with your trusted collaborators or people who have signed a non-disclosure agreement with you. Preferably, those who are your trusted collaborators will have signed non-disclosures too. It takes two minutes to do this by email and protects you. Don’t make the mistake of trusting too much, because I promise you that it WILL bite you in the ass at some point or another. Get an NDA, no matter how much you trust the person you are dealing with.

Sounds draconian, huh? No - it’s just a standard industry practice for professional musicians. If you don’t do this, you’re crazy. If you don’t do this, you WILL get your intellectual property stolen, trampled on and will miss out on all the profits of your own work. Don’t wait until you have been screwed over to start protecting yourself. Every musician with a career does this, so if you want a career, you need to do it too.

These tips may save your career one day, from all kinds of catastrophes: good organization may prevent the loss of a hit song, and good protection stops some charlatan from running away with your song and making money off it for themselves. Commit them to memory, write them on your skull with a tattoo needle - just make sure you don’t lose your career to digital mishaps now that you’re working in a digital environment.

The role of Business Manager is a very important one, and requires someone with both a strong imagination, and a thorough, realistic knowledge of business practice within the art & entertainment industry. How can a manager set you apart from the crowd without an imagination? How can they help you create a stable income and career without business knowledge? Too often, good managerial skills are overlooked for the sake of ‘having a manager’. Young independent bands don’t know what a manager is really for.

What should you look for? Perhaps one of the greatest qualities, and the one I find most important in my own business manager, is that they could be another member of the band. They grok the band and its philosophy, they grok the humor and relationships and get along well with each member. You’ve hit the money when it wouldn’t feel right to go on tour without them.

This is reflected in your financial agreements, too. Like band members, the manager or management company receives a certain percentage of the band’s income. The manager is an equal participant in the business of being a band.

So, when you’re scouting for a manager or get a management offer, ask yourself - no matter the qualifications of that individual - if they’d be a welcome addition to the band, too.

From the IHT:

A music industry group Thursday said it would cap “per channel” fees for major Internet radio companies streaming music on multiple channels.

SoundExchange, which collects royalties from Webcasters and distributes them to artists and record labels, said it would limit fees — at $50,000 a year — for online radio station companies that offer more than 100 channels to customers.

A decision made earlier this year by copyright judges meant that webcasters had to pay higher royalty fees and $500 per channel. Of course, with the power of web, many startups and small companies can provide hundreds of channels for consumer’s benefit. The decision these judges made could have brought down any internet radio revolution.

SoundExchange’s decision is a step in the right direction, which will allow small companies more room to grow and place fewer economic restrictions on the development of multiple channels. This is great for musicians who are building a career, as it means more mediums for promotion across the board. Bringing down internet radio is not good for the small bands who are working their asses off to get some promotion going, so we should all thank SoundExchange.

Throughout my life as a musician I’ve never much dedicated myself to learning music theory. It always seemed to me that I just needed to know enough to put together a melody or chord progression by noodling around on the guitar or keyboard, but along the way, like every musician, I’ve picked up tidbits here and there. Of course, there’s a very basic level of theory required in order to play anything. But after that is the point where it becomes enabling for the songwriter.

Learning some musical theory may be seem like a pain in the ass and a dry job, but it liberates you by expanding your capabilities as a songwriter. It may allow you to capture the melody in your head with your instrument, or even allow you to come up with melodies that never even entered the realm of your imagination. Either way, it’s worth at least going through some tutorials and making yourself a better composer.

Amy Winehouse’s mother, Janis, has made statements where she accuses the music industry for her daughter’s state of mind and health. I agree with her. I am not a personal friend or acquaintance of Ms Winehouse - in fact, I haven’t listened to her music, even. But I do know that the music industry shows an intrinsic disregard for the well-being of the artists it “supports” so long as there is a short-term buck to be made. Forget nurturing the artist and planning for a long and immensely profitable career and sustainable brand; just rip ‘em for all they’re worth and throw em to the side when you’re done, just like you’d do with a whore in the street.

That’s the way this corrupt industry works, though there are exceptional companies.

So what do you do? If you’re facing involvement with the industry, then check all contracts and negotiate them. Have a lawyer and a business manager, both of whom care for your career and your rights, and understand those rights, at any conferences. Stipulate conditions: you don’t tour for more than x amount of time (select an amount of time you think you can handle without burning out, destroying your family, etc), clauses that let you step out of a performance if you’re ill, that provide recovery time, and so on.

If they don’t agree to your conditions, do not give in. It only means they will rape your talents until you can’t do what they want anymore, and you’re going to wish you never signed that deal. So don’t take it, even if the carrot is dangling in your face.

While I’m posting a couple of links, here’s a fun one I just came across: a site that tells you which song was number one in the charts on any day you specify.

Apparently on the day of my wedding, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy - Bobby McFerrin” was number one in Australia. I don’t know what to make of that, but you can’t find deeper meaning in everything!

Take a look for yourself - link.

Musicians, I’ve come across something you really should check out - the Future of Music Coalition’s website.

According to their mission statement:

 The Future of Music Coalition is a not-for-profit collaboration between members of the music, technology, public policy and intellectual property law communities. The FMC seeks to educate the media, policymakers, and the public about music / technology issues, while also bringing together diverse voices in an effort to come up with creative solutions to some of the challenges in this space. The FMC also aims to identify and promote innovative business models that will help musicians and citizens to benefit from new technologies.

Head on over and educate yourself on various issues incredibly important to working musicians, and keep abreast of the latest news in those areas.

Link

A few days ago we posted our contest regarding the five copyrights. Today, for the benefit of all, we’re publishing the answer to the question. Almost no musicians understand intellectual property law, but it’s the bread and butter of a musical career.

What’s more important than the songs themselves? The copyrights attached to them!

And here are the five exclusive copyrights of the creator/copyright holder:

1. To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;
2. To prepare derivative works based upon the work;
3. To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
4. To publicly perform the work, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
5. To publicly display the work, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.

Learn them by heart. If you refuse, prepare for failure. Simple as that.

Apple quietly slipped out the latest jam pack after the latest version of Garageband was released a few days back. This jam pack focuses on the human voice, providing soloists, choral ensembles, and even human percussion (beat-boxing and the like).

Jam Pack: Voices gives you over 1,500 Apple Loops featuring professional soloists and choirs in multiple genres and styles. It also provides more than 20 software instruments, including voices, choral ensembles, and amazing drum kits built on the human voice and body. From the Apple website

I suspect that what makes this jam pack useful are the choral ensembles that allow garage-bound artists to fill out their songs with rich vocal backings. I don’t think anyone expects to use a jam pack to replace the role of lead vocalist, though!

The Jam Pack: Voices retails for US$99 from the Apple store.

Apple has just released iLife 08, which features an updated Garageband. I’ve yet to play with it, but when I do, I’ll let you know what it’s like (I prefer Logic at home).

The main new feature that caught my eye was the Magic Garageband feature (pictured above), that allows you to assemble a backing band and play the instrument of your choice over the top. This seems to be a good thing for musicians needing to practice more regularly, especially in the area of improvisation.

The downside seems to be a lack of customization. From the videos I have seen, there’s no way to change the melodies or chords played by the backing band, and no way to override the genre settings which define a limited number of instruments for your use. Having not used it, I can only speculate, but this seems to be the case. And if it is true, the usefulness of this feature will be quite restricted.

More news coming when I can get my hands on a copy of iLife 08.

A week ago, I conducted a brief survey in a room full of musicians: what are the five copyrights?

Mind you, these aren’t just musicians. These are students of a university degree that is supposed to teach more about studio engineering, production, and the business of art and entertainment than theory and technical proficiency with an instrument.

I got blank stares. I wasn’t surprised, but it is sad to see that musicians don’t really understand something that is more important than anything else to their career. I’ve known musicians who sucked, but knew their copyrights well and exploited them to forge a career.

Only once you know the rules, can you break them, they say. And only when you know the copyrights, can you benefit from them. Your mission: find out what the five copyrights are. If you’re the first person to tell me what they are in the comments, you’ll get one free constructive critique of a set of lyrics.

Research away!

Since we started looking at our bands as businesses back in one of the first Musician’s Notebook posts, we have to remember that every business has a public relations department. This means some part of your paradigm for building and promoting your band has to come from a point of view that puts the emphasis on relationships.

Many musicians and bands see the media as an indefeasible enemy to attack and hound. But the smart ones see it is an ally; the media might not know about you yet, but this perspective will help you. In public relations speak, the media is another public. No longer is it just your audience you need to manage relations with, but the media just the same - or more importantly. Never forget your audience, but leveraging well-developed media relationships will take you far.

The other common perspective is perhaps more dangerous, as it leaves no room for a challenge; the concept of the media being an impersonal entity. The fact is, the media is comprised of human beings, people like you and me, people with tastes, interests, strengths and weaknesses. You are not out to build relationships with robots. You’re out to build them with people, and every part of your approach needs to bear this in mind.

You can change your perspective, or, on the other hand, you can keep seeing the media as an impersonal entity or an indefeasible enemy, and you’ll never get anywhere with them.

When I heard the Spice Girls were reuniting for a ‘world tour’ (consisting of only eight dates, which is a comfort), I was worried for humanity. I thought that the horrible days of this so-called band’s repetitively blasted crap on the radio were over. And when I heard that they were each getting paid $25 million to cause brain damage, I scoffed even more. Then I heard that these pathetic performers were going to have pitch correctors installed between microphone and speakers for every show - may as well put a bunch of models from a local fashion agency on the stage and let the machines do the work. Wait: they did. Pity they didn’t choose the good looking ones.

The nail in the coffin: each member of the band will be traveling with their own jet. Yup, five stinkin’ jets will be used on this horrid excuse for modern show business. Well, nobody ever heard of a carbon neutral tour, but this on the other hand, is just plain irresponsible.

And let me tell you this: celebrity, no matter how ill-deserved, is no excuse for irresponsibility.

Let me go further: celebrity brings the dire need for responsibility. It is art that creates culture, and that has created the pitiful culture we live in, and the key to rectifying the sordid state of this civilization. So it is artists who must pave the way not only with their works, but the public actions that send clear messages regarding their beliefs and intentions and attitudes regarding the world and the many issues debated herein. Even if you are ignorant enough to doubt the veracity of climate change, five jets is still irresponsible, stupid, and ultimately damaging.

The Spice Girls show themselves for what they are; pathetically unintelligent little beasts who care for nothing more but their creature comforts and snobbishly immature vices. Not quite the shaker of fresh cinnamon finely ground after being collected from eight different exotic countries, but the little tin of cayenne pepper that got lost somewhere in the back of the cupboard in 1986 and now forms one unbreakable mass of terrorist-resistant building grade brick.

Should celebrities be responsible? The answer is, according to every decently honest and respectable source around the world, yes. And if we weed out the celebrities-for-nothing and leave ourselves with the artists, then there is a Code for those artists. Read especially point three of The Code of a Creative Artist and remember that it is far more than a piece of work that must show responsibility, but every word and action that stands behind that work, to give it strength and integrity in a world lacking both.

Here’s a tip for you: with band blogging, more than many other forms of blogging, it’s important to build a sense of loyalty and relationship with your readers. In the early days, you’ll want to email new commenters and maybe have a round of friendly email conversation. Developing this personal relationship means you retain their friendship for the long term, translating into ‘band brand loyalty’.

Music, like all art, is a form of communication, and thus, especially in the early phases of the blog, it is important to reinforce the fact you have important things to communicate paramusically, through communication with commenters and readers, and through writing about those opinions on the blog.

Even once you’re pretty well established, make sure you send out an email once in a while. It helps!

In the last post on Band Blogging on the PodPress plugin, we were setting up an infrastructure so we could go on to discussing strategies for releasing music online, through the blog.

There are three factors to consider in releasing music:

1. Timing
2. Audience
3. Situation

Timing

If you have ten songs you want to release on your blog, don’t do it all at once, and not on the first day you launch the blog, either. Again, strategy is required! Consider these things. I stress this because most musicians are all about throwing stuff out there without a plan or a care to thought, and then wonder why nobody’s listening.

Only ever release one song at a time is a golden rule in this situation. This is not like releasing an album to retailers. This is using an asset to build a loyal audience. So if you have a finished recording and three demos, release the finished recording, and if that particular song builds a following of its own, you can leak a demo every few months to keep the enthusiasm going. Same goes for remixes and varying versions of the same song.

If you set a schedule of release that listeners expect you to keep, stick with it. I promise my listeners a tuneback a week. When unforeseen circumstances get in the way of this, my listener count suffers a bit of a drop.

Audience

Unfortunately, not everyone remembers to come back and check the site all the time. Make sure you collect email addresses from anyone you come into contact with, and offer a mailing list subscription service on the blog. The most important thing you can have is a mailing list. Also, let interested parties know. One of my early tunebacks was inspired by Cory Doctorow’s work. I let him know as a gesture of goodwill, and he linked back. Got some good traffic from that experience, and some stuck around to listen.

Situation

Using the first two factors will give you a pretty good release strategy. However, there’s the more variable ’situational’ factor that comes into it. You need to consider what else in the environment may influence your releases. Midnight.Haulkerton is going to be releasing an official website soon, and we’re holding back blog-wise and in terms of tunebacks while we prepare for that. At one time, I had severe family problems. They weren’t the usual kind; in fact, they were problems that meant I had more time on my hands than I wanted. But that meant I couldn’t create tunebacks and hence had nothing to release.

Other situations may warrant a quicker pace of release, particularly when you have two songs ready around the same theme and the first catches some public interest. This was the case with Overclocked and World Ending.

The main lesson is this: don’t treat releases flippantly. You need to have a plan and live by it. Throw all your songs out there at the same time and you’re throwing a whole bunch of assets to the wind.

The 2007 Digital Media Survey, carried out by Entertainment Media Research, indicates that social networking sites have democratized the way many people listen to music. This is great news for independent artists. Why? Because if people are choosing their music via social networking - by nature a social process - then big corporations are not picking and choosing the music people can or cannot listen to.

Undoubtedly, the likes of MySpace, which is owned by Murdoch and friends, rigs the system to promote the musicians and labels they have commercial relationships with - but it’s still an improvement for independent artists, going from no exposure on big media platforms (that is what MySpace has become, after all) to some exposure.

The internet as a whole has really opened the world up for artists, and social networking is just one part of that. There are plenty of ways to get exposure online that don’t even involve MySpace and other corporate properties, but it can still help. Every listener counts.