When I were a Rocknrolla this is how I looked.

This picture was taken round a bout 1989 I think (from what I can recall).

The band was called The Liberty and we played a mixture of Punk and Goth style rampant melodic anthems where the gigs were always very lively and often slightly riotous affairs. We conquered quite a significant following around the South West and went so far as to turn down a contract. Clearly youthful arrogance afforded us the choice to fuck the system and of course eventually we split up, in true differences of opinion style.

The band members though, all these years later, continue to be great friends and we meet up from time to time.

When I look at this picture the memories come flooding back and I do recall being utterly wasted at many points around those years. Of course I consider those years to be highly informative and instructive for me which shaped me somewhat, but I do look proper "rocknrolla".

There are a bunch more from a similar time fond here in The Liberty set.

Technorati Tags: bands fashion goth look music punk rocknrolla style wasted rocknrolla style wasted look fashion bands music goth punk

Blip reminds me of Twitter a fair amount, although it's not really a conversational platform like Twitter can be. Blip is touted as a DJ platform, though I must admit, for me it's even more personal than that, I'm not that bothered about what you are listening to, if you catch my drift?

The thing is with Blip, you can search for singular songs, which once found are able to be streamed immediately, which does gives instant gratification, no doubt.

I've not come up with that many empty requests or "not founds" yet either, pretty impressive. The "Songs are hosted all over the internet by different servers and websites" which basically means you'll find just about everything.

I have found that a few songs I have "Blipped" have been removed a day later or so, more than likely that the website from where it has been streamed from noticed some leaching going on and removed it, or blocked access from Blip, I guess.

Each "Blipped" song contains a "Buy Now" link which is a standard Amazon affiliate link. It's a noble gesture to want to go off and buy a track, but I have to say many of the buy now options lead to something which is not what I am hearing. This may be due to some of my more varied musical tastes mind you.

I've not found a mobile portal for this yet, but then again, it is a Flash based interface which isn't going to cut the moby world, but if they or a similar service gets the moby market sorted this could be golden golden!

I do wonder how long this service will last, unless there is some hand shaking done between vested interests, as essentially we can listen to all the music we need to with a few clicks of a button, who needs to "own" music any more anyway?

Here is me Blip embed code, by all means "friend" me up, but I'll probably not friend you back, I'm too busy listening to my favourite songs.

Let me know what you think of the service.

Technorati Tags: amazon blip blip fm fm mobile music streaming blip fm fm blip music streaming mobile amazon

I'm just in the mood to post a few pics that you might enjoy.

I think this was 2003 ish, covers band with gigs about 5 times a week, was a busy busy few years, but stupendous fun!

Technorati Tags: band concert funky gig guitar music funky guitar music gig band concert

We are living in a changing dynamic, probably the rate of change is faster than ever, we can experience and witness mass convergence regularly. We can find ourselves exposed to more and more content from a variety of channels and mediums.

Some of us enjoy being part of a “tight-knit” community defended with furious passion, some of us enjoy only obtaining independent music, some of us only enjoying watching web TV, some of us only enjoy open source software and many of us stick to one vendor with impressive loyalty.

In all of this choice and preference this very weekend we saw Apple release their new operating system Leopard, and I’ve personally seen a frenzy take place, a buzz, a rush to the store.

Now what I find interesting in this (and I’m struggling with the conflict so need your thoughts), is that I’d call Apple a MAINSTREAM provider, nothing independent, and in fact they mostly choose mainstream channels for advertising for their product, nothing particularly social going on, from what I can see, I may be wrong.

But I’m digressing slightly this post is not about Apple it is an attempt to get to the core reasons about why YOU choose your music, where do you hear about new music, what makes you buy it, what makes you purchase a new game, a new download, what media or advertising works for you?

I want total honesty here from you, does the TV work for you, does the weekly magazine work for you, does the X-Factor, do you buy a new single cause you hear it on mainstream radio, do you buy a film because it is in the box office charts, the billboard charts, what penetrates your buying decision?

How do you choose your media?

Technorati Tags: apple buying games independant leopard mainstream marketing media movies music purchasing radio music games media movies buying mainstream apple leopard purchasing marketing independant radio

This passed week has been an absolute milestone for the music business in a bad way, well actually it’s a milestone for music and musicians in a positive way, once fully embraced. I would also argue that progressive record companies, with appropriate visionaries at the top could do very well also.

A report written by Michael Arrington published on TechCrunch called The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free basically paints a very gloomy picture for the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) and indeed many music Industry bodies.

In the same week we saw RadioHead offering their newly created album for free, well actually that’s not technically correct, they have offered the album to be purchased on YOUR grounds, YOU are able to decide what you wish to donate/pay for an mp3 copy of the album. Incidentally I grabbed a copy myself and paid 5 quid.

Probably the first time in a long time I have personally bought a digital clone of music, and aside from buying it to make a point, it is actually a cracking album, which I’m listening to as I write this.

Digital Clone?

Yes digital clone is exactly what you are buying, possibly stealing, obtaining from a peer to peer (p2p) network, sent from friends, gleaned at a LAN party. However, you are not technically stealing anything nor copying, you are actually cloning information, which is the point in this argument, the clone reproduction costs nothing, hence the drop in the value of music distribution.

Distribution version

The other thing to mention here, and something which some people miss, is that they are giving away the mp3 version of the album. Now I don’t know about you, but I think mp3 sound sucks major ass. Ok so I have audio engineer ears and I work with mp3s every day and continually publish mp3s, but let’s remember the full story here.

The average mp3 has a significant reduction in quality when you compare that to what comes out of the recording studio and onto a 16bit CD. And beyond comparison when discussing DVD audio and other higher sampling and bit rate formats. Yes, mp3 are handy for distributing around the net, and putting on your izunepodriver but they ain’t the “Full Monty”.

Why am I mentioning this?

Well of course Tom York of RadioHead knows full well that he can release his limited edition box-set in a month or two just before xmas, which will contain the “Full Monty”, along with tidy artwork and other bits and piece of merchandise at a whopping 20 quid! – very nice work if you can get it.

Many people still hold dearly the notion of owning something tangible, and of high quality, and people will continue to pay for that. Some people love the tangibility of a signed CD, a limited t-shirt. I have no doubts RadioHead will shift buckets loads of the special box-set, especially during the xmas lead-in, smart marketing indeed.

Of course the other thing that nobody is mentioning is that RadioHead gain LOTS of money for their mp3s which to be honest anyone will be able to get within hours on a p2p network anyway!

RIAA Bastards

Now in the same week, I have been really upset and shocked at the paranoid behaviour of the RIAA who have come down incredibly hard on the single mother caught file-sharing with her mates. Now I know full well that YOU (if I consider a cross section of my readers here and do a rough hands-in-the-air count for an average) have done the same. In fact in this very week I carried out three separate polls each with about 30 students in a room, and guess what? .. around 98% have downloaded music in what possibly could be construed as illegally.

It’s not surprising then that certain formats of music distribution are destined to become free. And it is with this knowledge that the RIAA are fully aware of and carried out a shocking public shaming campaign on one poor woman.

Truth is, the “war is over” as Todd Wachtel mentions. There is no battle anymore, the industry so called “experts” are frankly “pissing into the wind” and getting seriously wet, and the longer they fight against the tide the more mistrust they invoke in us mere mortals, they are not building bridges here in order to embrace the new mechanisms and emerging model.

Days after the RadioHead news Oasis and Nine Inch Nails have also stated their intention to give away their newest work thus fueling the fire to the inevitable. Personally I can see these acts doing well out of enticing more listeners to buy tickets to large concerts, thus in essence not loosing money but gaining a wider audience.

The music as an mp3 is the new banner ad, the new vehicle for viral marketing…..

Embrace and gain

I’ve heard many voices with tones of fear, mainly from musicians about lost revenue, mostly from so called “struggling” artists, but, really? I mean really?

As an artist surely the point is about getting as many people as possible to listen to your music, surely that is exactly what it is about isn’t it? It is about building a fan base and buzz, so isn’t giving your music away for free and encouraging copying/cloning and distribution, actually a good thing?

What are you concerned with then, making money?

As an artist there are countless way to re-coup money, so many I’ll save them for a future blog post, but all that is required is a slightly different mind-set on how you build your audience and what you offer in terms of merchandise.

As my friend Rich Palmer says “Why chain yourself to the old model when there are successful new systems coming into place?”.

Nobody is actually saying they do not value music, they do, I do, I’m a musician! But the voices are saying, share it with us and we’ll tell all our friends and probably come and see you live and probably buy a t-shirt maybe even a box-set with some shwag in to hang on the wall..

And of course I’ve not even mentioned mainstream play-out and royalties, which do not seem to be going away, I can’t see that happening in the short term either. Of course this is exactly why the PRS want a piece of the pie regarding netcasts and internet radio, they see it coming.

Are you pissing into the wind, what do you feel about all this?

A big thanks to the Music Technology Facebook soliders who inspired some of my words here, thanks.

UPDATE: This link just came in: Madonna ditches traditional record label

UPDATE: Month Old, thanks to Ben for sending: What's the future of the music industry

Technorati Tags: business directors labels law marketing model mp3 music record industry recording records revenue riaa sales viral riaa music radiohead oasis bands free mp3 distribution industry

Animoto is a new service which CC Chapman indirectly turned me on to. CC fired over a video he created using this service into his Facbook profile which I saw was immediately re-posted by Mark Foreman. So it took my interest, and it turns out the service takes a selection of your photographs and turns them into a very slick slideshow montage movie, neat!

The site has numerous features which include being able to leach your pics directly from urls or your Flickr account, as well as being able to directly “share” the finished output to a variety of your social networks.

I see the service as being a hit personally, certainly a gap in the market here.

How are they making money?

Well two services are currently offered, one of which is a free service which limits the images to I think 15 and a short final movie length, where as the "3 dollar a go" service give you a full featured length.

I consider it good value considering the output, I was particularly impressed with the way the whole montage maps into the length of your desired music (which can be selected from a library or uploaded yourself).

As it was my daughter’s first birthday this weekend I felt compelled to try the service out, with a heart touching song, and some images from the last 12 months.

Ok, sure, the song is NOT podsafe, but in some instances only certain songs, which are the "theme tunes of our lives", will do.

What do you think, is there a market for this type of service, would you use it?

Technorati Tags: animoto flickr montage movie music pictures slideshow slideshow pictures animoto movie montage music flickr

I’ve recently be spending a few moments here and there getting the schedule ready for The Summer Of Love Festival 07 in SecondLife, of course not entirely alone, I must extend gratitude to some wonderful helpers too.

What I have found during these couple of weeks is that there seems to be a number of musicians in need of some help when it comes to streaming music into SecondLife.

I thought that a posted video here on my blog would be the best place for that help, for those people who want a free solution who use the windows operating system.

The set up I use is Windows XP, Winamp and a Shoutcast Plugin, all free of charge, which of course is wonderful!

The concept is surprisingly simple, you simply capture the sound on your machine through Winamp, which sends the data (using the plugin) to a streaming server (you need to borrow one), and then that streaming server information is broadcast into a land parcel in SecondLife – simple eh?

Hope the video helps.

Technorati Tags: dsp land music musicians parcel secondlife shoutcast SL streaming tutorial winamp shoutcast secondlife streaming music

Today I felt like playing some guitar again and capturing it, as a few people had requested that recently, and I seem to be falling into love with playing again, having not for years.

So here I am playing one of my favourite pieces written for classical guitar, Dee by Randy Rhodes.

The late Randy Rhodes was a strong motivation for me a number of years ago when I was into some serious guitar shredding.

Randy was one of the guitarists for The Ozzy Ozborne band and some of his playing on the likes of Crazy Train and Mr Crowley is quite franky amazing.

Dee was on The Tribute album as, well a tribute to the amazing talent of Randy who sadly died very early in his life, a great loss to the guitar world.

Technorati Tags: classical dee guitar music ozbourne ozzy playing randy rhodes shredding tribute randy rhodes ozzy ozbourne dee classical guitar shredding playing music tribute

The other day a friend said they'd like to see me strumming, and well, I had to think for a sec if I had any footage of me doing that. It turns out I don't really, I have some older tunes from various bands I've been in laying around but no video, well some very old VHS video with me oozing in my tight leather trousers!

However, I did find this recent clip which I shot with my phone a few months back when I was testing out the phone to blog service on The Phone Cam.

It's an E Major shredding moment, with a bluesy twist on the end.

It has now dawned on me I should make a few video clips of me playing a tune or two, I might make some classical ones, which is what my heart feels like playing these days, well maybe I do love shredding too, but I'm starting to love my nylon strings again.

Technorati Tags: blusey e emaj guitar maj music playing shredding guitar

Net casting (in recent years known as podcasting), started for me, way back in the 90s.

I first had a web domain back in the 90s which was an audio service catering for musicians, classical and jazz mostly, I used to record a variety of performances and make them available on the internet for download, and some of these were to “show-off” new violin builds for example, by way of comparative recordings, kind of like A/B recordings. Of course back then this was a fairly time-consuming process due to restrictive speed connections.

Around 2000 I started Audiocourses.com as a post-graduate research project, as distance learning school for music production, sound engineering, and immediately made recorded voice content avaliable for download and streaming. Most of this audio was me giving tutorials in the RealAudio format, on topics such as music production, mixing etc. Being RealAudio format meant listeners could stream fairly easily from the site, RealAudio would select the bandwidth setting automatically for the user. Incidentally these early streams are still available on the Audiocourses.com downloads section and are dated to autumn 2002!

Throughout the early 90’s I uploaded more and more audio content, including such things as drum samples, sound effects and complete 24 track recording studio sessions. I then started audio blogging, which saw me using the telephone as an audio-blogging tool, I also rolled this service out for students, which enabled them to blog their thoughts simply by using a telephone, this was very popular, was quite a buzz chatting into a cell phone back in 2003 and having the content appear on a site as an audio file.

It is since the addition of the enclosure tag in RSS feeds that the concept of “podcasting” (a misguided name, in my opinion) somewhat “popularised” the concept of internet audio and video, but in essence the only thing that had changed (albeit an excellent change) was that content could be downloaded automatically. The fact is that audio/video content had been cast over the net for many years before this.

Having been “waist-deep” in audio content over the web for a number of years I had always toyed with the idea of a “radio show” for sometime (I did a number of radio style streams back in 98/99), but it wasn’t until 2006 that I decided that perhaps a regular show might be damn good therapy for myself and provide added value to the Audiocourses.com site visitors. I’ve always been very keen to ensure clients and students have plenty of virtual community building tools, a distance learning school is all about a sense of something virtually powered, so AC Radio (formally AC Podcast) was born.

Since then I have also introduced some other audio casting services including a text to speech service on SLEDucating, and a soon to be active cast on Audana (both called podcasts, but yes I have issues with that). I also have pro-audio news converted to aggregated audio on AC.

Whilst Podcasting seems to be a current popular term I have now decided to come full circle and reject it, basically just using net cast, or radio, or stream, as to be frank 50% of my current listener’s just stream right off the websites, as they have for years. The other issue is that the word Podcasting is very confusing for non-tech people, (no pod needed). I'm not alone in thinking the term podcasting will be dropped in the future, I of course may be wrong, but Radio, or cast, is far more widespread and understandable which is my excuse for sticking with it, plus I may also actually broadcast some of my shows live, which gives some more validity to using the term radio, even though technically I'll probably not use radio waves, in the electromagnetic sense.

Recently I have been capturing sound in my car and calling these Car Casts, as well as a new fun brain dump called the Running Man Radio show, where I take a portable recorder out on my road roads.

Technorati Tags: audio broadcast casting casts ipod music podcasts radio recording streaming