I Hate Mornings

That’s the subject line of an email I just sent to my MP (Andrew Smith, Labour, East Oxford) urging him not to allow the bill to be rushed through Parliament on Tuesday, when the election is likely to be announced.

The Digital Economy Bill gives government the power to cut off internet connections (from homes, schools, libraries) if they suspect anyone there of copyright infringement. That’s insane, and its only possible use is for major record labels to inflict or threaten disconnection in an effort to weigh down their trousers with as much gold as possible as they sink into the quicksand.

If you’re at all interested, go and read Ben Werdmuller’s post about the Digital Economy Bill. He makes some smart points.

Here’s the rest of the email:

Dear Andrew,

I am a musician and a web professional. I use the internet to publish my music, to share it and to sell it. I use file sharing services and sites legitimately and legally to distribute and download music that is produced and consumed outside of what the government sees as “the music industry”.

Threatening to disconnect citizens from the Internet for copyright infringement is a ham-fisted approach to regulation that benefits nobody except the major record labels and publishers, and completely ignores the subtleties of our online interactions and behaviour.

I am amazed that the Digital Economy Bill has got this far with a huge majority of both the music and the tech communities vocally disagreeing with it, and I believe that if it is allowed to be rushed through on April 6th it will strike a crippling blow to our digital society and economy which we will be unable to reverse for years to come.

This is why, as your constituent, I will not be voting for you or for your party if the Bill is passed.

People like me, who are concerned about this issue, will be looking to see who has done everything they can to make sure this Bill is not crashed through on the last day before an election.

I would very much appreciate it if you could do everything you can to raise this issue with ministers and party managers to make sure that these provisions receive proper debate and scrutiny in a new Parliament.

Ben Walker

I believe that music is artistically valuable, culturally necessary, beautiful, joyous, human and magical. I believe that the music I make brings happiness and light to the people around me, the people who engage with it online, and of course to me.

I also believe that when people are grateful for music they will thank the musician. That might be a pat on the back after a gig, a quid in a hat, or a slice of cake. It might be a fan club subscription, a £200 gig ticket, or a yacht. But when people aren’t grateful for music there is no reason why they would thank the musician.

I don’t believe that I have a right to earn money from my music. When people are grateful for my music they offer me stuff.

Rather than leave argumentative comments all over the internet, I’m going to offer you links to some different viewpoints on the matter. All are well-argued and interesting. I don’t agree with all of them, but I think it’s important to try to see this issue from a few different perspectives.

• “To eliminate or to throttle file sharing is an assault on your rights as an artists.”, Just Say NO To Putting An End To Illegal Music Sharing. by Bruce Warila
• “In this day and age, of course, it’s particularly hard to persuade anyone to buy music, when they can just get it for free, anonymously, on the internet.”: Releasing a new album! Tell me your thoughts! by Nick Gill
• “This is like what happened when we moved from sheet music to recorded music. Only more so.”, Thing 20: Forget product – sell relationship by Andrew Dubber
• “Having an audience of 500,000 that aren’t currently making you any money would be an INCREDIBLELY WONDERFUL problem to have to solve.”, Promotion Is A Numbers Game (Get Heard!) by Steve Lawson
• “If it still sounds petulant to some people for me to say that I “expect” some reward when other people enjoy the fruits of my art, time and money, I can only respond that it sounds petulant to me when people say they expect it for free.”, Short Replies by Frank Turner

If I work out the answer I’ll let you know. ;)

There’s a lively discussion happening in the comments to Steve Lawson’s article After CDs. What’s Next?. Steve reckons we should be excited about the artistic freedom we’re afforded by abandoning the format of The Album:

It’s amazing how containers can make us lazy about content. The assumptions we make about the nature of music, collections of music, what constitutes a ‘complete work’ etc.

I absolutely agree, and I’ve come across a wonderful example of a post-Album project that not only breaks the boundaries by being 185 songs long, but is delivered as a podcast, features 185 different artists and provides better sleeve notes than I ever saw on a CD.

I’m not going to miss the album that much.

Seriously. I never thought the day would come when I would be happy to leave my record collection (and my 1983 direct drive turntable) languishing in a barn. But that’s where they are. If I feel sentimental about my dog-eared 12″ of Deep Purple’s Burn (like I did last week), I grab the torrent and ten minutes later it’s on my iPod as I stroll down the street grinning and brandishing the air guitar.

Musicians get quite precious about The Album as an artistic form, and there are loads of albums that are so much more than a simple playlist of songs. Sleeve notes and artwork also help to create a listening experience around the music. That’s great, and there’s nothing to stop musicians creating 45-minute collections of songs for download if that’s what they want to do. They can even separate them into Side A and Side B if they like. Two ZIP files instead of one. And sleeve notes work really well online – check out David Jennings’ wonderful 69 Love Songs companion piece.

When you think about it, the album was good for a few things:

• It gave musicians a form within which to create music.
• It gave the audience an easy and understandable way of supporting an artist.
• It gave the record company a product.
• It was a carrier for sleeve notes and artwork (aka. context).

Now the record industry is concerning itself with collapse, profits and Britain’s Got Talent. The audience has a new easy, understandable way of supporting an artist (iTunes etc.). The musicians are starting to realise that it’s not very difficult to replace the creative limitations of the album format with limitations of their own devising. Being creative is, after all, what they are supposed to be good at.

So now we can create whatever musical projects we like to catch people’s attention, it’s the really creative artists who are making waves. Roger and Dave are a pair of musicians, artists and producers who work in New York. They have come up with the best idea I have heard in, well, ever.

The Beatles Complete On Ukulele

It sounds like the kind of project I would find scrawled in my Moleskine the morning after a party. On finding this message from my enlightened self, I would chuckle and cross it neatly out. Because I’m not as brilliant and visionary as Roger and Dave.

The concept is simple (and it’s all about the concept):

Roger and Dave will….

1. Record & perform on ukulele all 185 original compositions by The Beatles with 185 guest artists.
2. Write essays to coincide with each release.
3. Make available for download one new recording and essay every Tuesday for 185 weeks, beginning January 20, 2009 (Inauguration Day) and climaxing July 24, 2012 (The eve of the London Olympics).

Each song is posted on a simple Blogger website, and there’s an RSS feed so you can subscribe to the project as a podcast in iTunes. And that’s where it becomes really interesting, and where Roger and Dave have created something new and beautiful.

It’s all about the experience

When you listen to the latest Beatles cover on your iPod, the accompanying essay (aka. sleeve notes) is displayed on your iPod screen. So you read it as you’re listening. They give you an amusing but incredibly well researched insight into the writing and recording of the original, including anecdotes and rambles about what John and Paul were up to at that point in their songwriting career. They critique the song and the recording as songwriters, producers, curators and archivists. Then they introduce you to whoever is covering the song (a different musician sings each week, and they provide the ukulele and produce the rest of the track).

By the time you’re half way through reading the sleeve notes the song has finished, so you put it on again to get the rest of the essay. And maybe again. You listen to the song two or three times through while reading about it and immersing yourself in the details and the stories. Does this sound familiar? Isn’t this the mythical value of The Album? Didn’t you used to sit on your bed listening to the album all the way through two or three times while scouring the sleeve notes and the artwork for context, reassurance and trivia?

That’s how I felt when I sat on the train listening to Emily Zuzik singing Hold Me Tight (one of the most exhiliratingly cool tracks I’ve heard for years) and reading the essay. Try it. Right now. Press play and read the quote:

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The tune features an incredibly precocious vocal melody over a swinging American Rhythm and Blues form. Fabulous harmony. But critically, Hold Me Tight is marred by insipid innocuous non-threatening male expressions of affection, designed to elicit the slightest of squeals from a twittering Tween. Lyrically typical of the songs Lennon and McCartney were writing at the time, our Hero is not even getting to first base. Hold Me Tight. I Wanna Hold Your Hand. I’m Happy Just To Dance With You. Young girls like to be liked. But not too much. Don’t go too far. Musically this song is a success. Lyrically, embarrassing. What’s going on here? The contrast between the Beatles STD-riddled, licentious and voluptuous pill popping real lives, and the lyrics of their early teenage puppy love songs, was vast. I believe this cognitive dissonance was a central facet of their initial appeal.

I don’t know about you, but that’s what I’m looking for in a listening experience. An experience. I want my music to arrive with this much context built in. We’ve been doing it with video, with live shows and with websites of vaguely interesting writing. And now Roger and Dave are doing it with a podcast. And a ukulele.

It Won’t Be Long

When you come across a project like this, you would be insane not to get involved. So when Roger and Dave asked me to record a song for TBCOU, I dug out my old Beatles records and searched for a song to cover. I didn’t have to look far. It Won’t Be Long is the first track on With The Beatles, which is the first Beatles album I ever heard while digging through my dad’s collection back in the late eighties. The song is fun, cheesy, and energetic. Ideal.

I recorded a quirky but authentic version with a simple guitar track, the main riff on piano and sixteen tracks of harmonies, and emailed it to New York. Having heard the spotless production and impeccable wit of the first 21 tracks of the project, I have a feeling this is going to be incredible.

If you want my musical recommendation for 2009 (and a podcast that will keep delivering amazing versions of songs you already love until 2012!) I suggest you subscribe to TBCOU right now. And in case you need any more persuasion, here’s the latest episode. A dub reggae version of Blackbird. Un. Fucking. Believeable. ;)

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UPDATE: My cover of It Won’t Be Long is up on the TBCOU site, and it’s better than I could have imagined!

I am as guilty as most webheads of assuming that the rest of the world knows as much about new web technologies as I do. I often find myself being astounded by talk of CD players and record companies as if these were relics of a lost era. Eventually I turn to tell this story to my friends and realise I’m alone with a laptop. Again.

I was getting carried away with the enchanting world of Social Media and reading a little too much into the Twitter song’s meteoric rise to Youtube’s bargain bin. I needed to find out what I was supposed to be doing in the real world. So I asked. My wonderful newsletter readers took time out of their busy days to fill out a survey for me, and I present the results to you here, as a reminder that most of the world doesn’t give a fig that you have just signed up to twenty three more websites and figured out how to watch yourself recording demos in the future live on your phone.

You’re smart people, and you can read your own interpretations into the data. I will only point out that the top answers feature words like CD, shop, radio, and friends. So let’s not get carried away with our web-savvy muso selves.

UPDATE: The best way to look at this is to view the full screen slideshow on Flickr. Or just click on a graph below.

Of the last ten songs I’ve written, recorded, blogged, YouTubed and/or played to people, the “Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall song”:http://5090.fawm.org/songs.php?id=556 has had the biggest response. About ten times the response of any other song. Why? I’ll give you a clue. It’s not because I’ve written and produced a masterpiece that will live on to inspire future generations. It’s because it has a story. It’s about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (whom everybody either acknowledges as a living legend or pretends to ignore ;o), and everybody can relate to that without actually having to listen to the song. The fact that I made a “video”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGIeSQ_PkBs means that another large slice of the audience pie were motivated to check it out.

This isn’t news. But it is interesting. And it’s not just me who thinks so. Nick Gill talked about it in a “review of the Bon Iver album”:http://www.themonroetransfer.co.uk/wordpress/?p=60 earlier in the week:

bq.. …the lesson for people like me is that people like stories; not just in their music & lyrics, but as related to the artist him/herself. Marketing people have known this for years, and have been extending and stretching the truth to sell more ever since they realised (see yesterday’s little rant about Lily Allen, Sandi Thom et al. for all the associated horseshit that that record-buying public was fed). People like us, making music unsolicited and undemanded, need to have actual, real stories behind our records.

And, importantly- stories are all in the telling. The story of How I Recorded My Album isn’t going to rival Ulysses but, told well enough, it might be enough to persuade people to listen to your creation. It worked for Bon Iver, it can work for us.

p. And Steve Lawson just wrote a post on “Telling Stories…”:http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/server.php?show=ConBlogEntry.147 at the Creative Choices blog yesterday:

bq.. What’s important to realise is that there’s always a story told – if you don’t tell it, someone else will. I had this conversation recently with some band-mates about a forthcoming album, explaining to them that they could frame the release of the album with their own story of how they got involved with the project, how the music came together, what it meant for them to be playing this kind of music (it’s an album of freely-improvised music that still sounds like well crafted songs…). The response from one of my fellow musos was that he wants to let the music speak for itself.

The problem here is that it never does get to speak for itself – there’s almost always a descriptive context in which people first hear music, or decide to watch a film, or visit a website – whether it be a review or a recommendation from a friend. For music especially, it can be a random encounter via radio or film, which provides a framework that may well be misleading, depending on what the DJ says about it on the radio, or the kind of images your music accompanies!

p. Wise words indeed. Check out both articles for more info and insight into the need for narrative.