Hi. How’s it going?
I’ve been getting some emails recently from worried New Music Strategies readers. Some of them asking after my health (there’s nothing wrong with my health – but people assume the worst), and others prompting for a return to the blog so they can read more content.
It’s been a good couple of months since I wrote anything at all here – and longer since I did so with any regularity.
Well, I have some good news, and some other good news.
Islet live. Photo by @edhombre
I’m at Un-Convention in Swansea this weekend. Lots of talk with lots of interesting people about the independent and grassroots DIY music sector. It’s held in a cafe/bar called Monkey in the central city, and in the evening, bands play.
I’m here with a bunch of people I know from these sorts of things – and I’ve been spending a fair bit of time hanging with the very clever Ben Walker (@ihatemornings), who you know as the guy who wrote the Twitter song.
One band played last night that blew me away. And I don’t just mean I liked them, or really loved their gig. They BLEW. ME. AWAY. I can’t remember being this excited by a band in years. Possibly decades.
Ben was excited too. We came back downstairs, had a beer, and raved about how amazing they are. We were instant fans. So we went straight online and looked them up.
We Googled: “Islet band Cardiff” and various other combinations of the band name and their city of origin. Nothing. They’d played one support gig for Shonen Knife (how cool is that?!) – but no website, no MySpace, no nothing.
And we were stuck. They had no CDs for sale. Nothing we could do. We just didn’t know how to be Islet fans.
So we made them a fan site…
Goldsmith University MA students Nicolle Smith and Stefan Peters have just finished work on a short web-documentary series called Broken Record.
They interviewed me for the series, and there’s a lot of stuff in here that is pertains to my Music As Culture interests and the Deleting Music book as much as it does to the general tone of what I research and discuss as part of the Interactive Cultures team at BCU, and what I usually write about on New Music Strategies.
The series is definitely worth watching, and features some good insight from some interesting people from different parts of the British digital music world – and it’s presented for your entertainment below.
Share and enjoy.
This great data visualisation from the NY Times comes to us via a really fascinating website called Information is Beautiful. It represents the sales in billions of today’s dollars of the various music formats over time.
They claim it represents the dwindling death knell of the music industry. That’s not quite right (even leaving aside the nonsense assertion that the record business = the music industry). While put together in aggregate, the overall graph would show a larger, fatter, longer increase and decline, what this graph does not show is equally interesting.
The university I work at has put together a series of videos about my free e-book The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online.
This is not a video version of the book per se, but rather me talking briefly about each of the different sections of the book in turn.
Because these video podcasts are eventually destined for the iTunesU site that the university is putting together, they are in a particular (and very nice) video format, which doesn’t lend itself well to embedding and distributing, which I think is a shame, really.
So as soon as I get a chance, I’m going to grab the files and stick them up on YouTube and Vimeo, etc. Feel free to do the same. In the meantime though – these are as they appear on the BCU website, where you can also get the files as mp3s.
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