Princess Stomper answers your dilemmas (more seriously this time)

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With only five days left until Reinspired closes its little internet doors, I figured it was time to impart some wisdom (whether you like it or not).

1. I feel like everyone’s ignoring me

Are you talking about Facebook here? Because the very tool that promised to connect you is actively keeping you apart from your friends! You’ve heard it many times by now – if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product, and Facebook is cashing us in. After getting practically everyone in the world to sign up, it’s now actively hiding our posts from each other – and I’m not just talking about the 30% or so of your friends that you’ve stuck on ignore. 

Thom Yorke spells out the downside of pay-what-you-will

This is a very interesting post from The Trichordist, which eloquently sums up my feelings on how music is treated. Yes, it’s always been a business, but, ironically, at least Sony et al actually cared.

‘”We were so into the net around the time of Kid A,” he says. “Really thought it might be an amazing way of connecting and communicating. And then very quickly we started having meetings where people started talking about what we did as ‘content’.’

– Thom Yorke talking to the Guardian

>> Read on >>

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Harlem Shake: could it kill sampling?

Here’s a fascinating article on the history of sampling – probably of more interest to those who don’t already broadly know about it, but good reading in either case.

#musicmonday : Nick Cave and the Stool Pigeon’s guide to music journalism

Bugger! Is that the time already? Sorry, I have been too busy laughing my assorted menagerie off at this piece from The Stool Pigeon someone’s just passed to me:

Bastard lovechild — Is sex out of wedlock still considered edgy? So why would anyone still be writing that albums ‘sound like the bastard lovechild of X and Y musicians’? I mean, there’s a good chance your parents hadn’t gotten round to tying the knot by the time you were conceived. But so what? It doesn’t make you a latter-day Edmund from King Lear. Hell, it doesn’t even make you Jon Snow off Game Of Thrones. And he’s f***ing boring.

Nobody gives a crap about your stupid little project: 5 strategies for surviving the internet

It was just about the rudest comment I’d ever seen: “Give up, mate … no-one gives a s*** about your stupid label and the s*** music you release…”. It wasn’t quite true: many, including me, cared quite a bit about this brave little indie, but it is a Have Not in the digital world, and with that, I can sympathize.

It’s very difficult to gauge hierarchy because it changes so fast: one week this little blog has more readers than the biggest magazine I wrote for; the following week, almost none. White Swan Events, I call them – unpredictable storms of traffic activity, but it’s dangerous to read too much into them, either way, because

Rule 1: Visibility does not equal engagement

I just watched this wonderful documentary about my favourite label

5 things we learnt this week from Amanda Palmer

As the fallout from the Kickstarter fiasco starts to cool down, a number of valuable lessons have come to the fore.

1. If you’re not ON a label, you ARE the label

A record ‘label’ is just a corporate identity for a series of functions – the funding of the recording process, manufacturing, arranging distribution, publicity, and numerous other business transactions. If you want to have your record available to buy by the general public and are not releasing it through a label, you have to assume responsibility for all of those functions yourself. You’re not so much “sticking it to The Man” as becoming The Man. This will inevitably mean hiring help to deal with these things, which makes you a manager in the business sense. The more you can understand about business and marketing processes, the more likely you are to succeed at what you’re doing. Being able to budget effectively is at least as important as writing a nice tune.

The best blog post I’ve ever read

Like most bloggers, I find myself repeating myself on certain pet issues because I’m not doing my job well enough – I can’t fully articulate in a single post the highly important information I’m trying to convey. This is as frustrating for me the writer as it is for you the reader. Thankfully, sometimes another blogger steps in with something that perfectly sums up the arguments in a witty, entertaining and informative post.

How to destroy your career in one easy step

I got a message from someone I hadn’t heard from in a while, and it annoyed me, because it’s someone I used to have a lot of time for – someone I had a lot of loyalty towards – and they broke the cardinal rule of being alive: Don’t Be A Dick. Really, just don’t. 

The Man 2.0 – Why technology’s brave new world is more evil than the last

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It has never been easier to find music (even if most of it is awful), and you can buy an album with one click of a mouse. Proponents of our download culture will tell you that life has never been better – information wants to be free, after all – but as I’ve said many times before on this site, the problem with the Wild West of the web is that cowboy movies tend to end up with everyone dead.

Until a few months ago, I believed that it was a matter of consumers versus musicians, and that it was just a matter of educating people that illegally sharing files is wrong and nagging people to pay for the content that they use. I now see I was misinformed.