thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

As a music fan, I love it when I get to work with musicians on their websites.

I like it even better when I find a service that really helps musicians in practical ways. Bandcamp is that service.

The music industry business model which was really a distribution service has now been displaced by a huge increase in digital media and social technologies.

Musicians still need marketing and promotion but it is now possible to do much of this at a more of a grass roots organic level.

Most everyone knows about iTunes and if you are a musician I think you still need to be there. The real value of iTunes though is really that it is linked to a payment system that most people have access to so that is very convenient for music consumers.

However if you are an artist – it takes quite a while for payments and sales data to come through, pricing is locked and this doesn’t suit everyone.

So how does Bandcamp help with some of this?

” On Bandcamp, albums outsell tracks 5 to 1 (in the rest of the music buying world, tracks outsell albums 16 to 1).

On name-your-price albums, fans pay an average of 50% more than whatever you set as your minimum.”

I recently uploaded up 6 albums on Bandcamp for Luke Hurley and here is what we found out.

Bandcamp has a variable pricing system that is easy to use. The very first album that sold on Bandcamp sold for more than double the minimum price which is a big win if you are the musician.

For example you can still buy individual tracks at $US1 or equivalent but for an album we have set most prices at $USD8 or the equivalent of $NZ10. You may also choose to pay more. This makes it less expensive to buy albums when that suits.

1. Bandcamp also makes it easier to offer special pricing as it is more direct to the artist.
2. The share / social media embedded players are easy to use.
3. Another advantage of bandcamp is that it allows you to download other higher quality sound file types such as 320k Mp3′s, FLAC, AAC, MP3 VBR (VO), Ogg Vorbis and ALAC (so far.)  I don’t expect many people want those file types but it is a nice to have feature.

Bandcamp is very good for  sharing the music on facebook and your own websites.The Facebook share allows you to play a song in that page without taking you away from thre stream you are viewing.

Best of all though listening to the whole song before you buy beats 30 or 90 second previews on other sites.

Listen to the live Luke Hurley album Limited Liability

The stats off Bandcamp are also very useful for musicicans. There is even a stat for partial plays where the full track is not played.

And perhaps best of all – when there is a sale that $ is transferred directly to the musicians PayPal ( at the time of sale) and this makes them very happy.

There are also other complementary musiciaian services that you may use and I’d be happy to compare notes if you are looking for help.

This video clip is from Plum Jungle: Pete Longworth (photography), Michael K. Chin (music), Christopher Baron (film). @PlumJungle are coming across to Auckland and presenting at TEDxAuckland on 26th of Sept. I’m looking forward to this. Music, film, photography, media and more. Michael is @TokyoLoveIn Genres:Electronic, Music, Jazz

‘Life on Top of Hyde Park’ project – the genesis for other works like, ‘Another Time, Another Pace’. Music: ‘Crosstown’ – from the album, ‘Life on top of Hyde Park’ by Michael K. Chin (Tokyo Love-In)

Available on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/au/album/

I like the work but also spotted that @FundBreak is partly behind some of this creative work. Their tagline is FundBreaker, Crowd funding platform for your projects & ideas.

I don’t believe we have anything like this in NZ . The fundbreak business model looks like a great way to lend a hand up. I have written here before about peer to peer banking and development aid. This looks like a start-up waiting to happen here. The Big Idea New Zealand creative community meets Give a Little.

Apparently there is some $ available The New Zealand Venture Investment Fund says $50 million has become available to establish new funds targeting innovative local companies …not strictly for creative companies (The deadline for proposals for new funds is 5pm Monday, 27 September 2010.)

What is Fundbreak?
Fundbreak is a new crowdfunding platform and community for creative projects and ideas. Developed for artists, musicians, filmmakers, journalists, designers, entrepreneurs, inventors, event organisers, software developers and all other creative’s, to raise funds and give project creators the break they need to realise their goals and aspirations.

How does Fundbreak work?
Fundbreak provides project creators with a platform to present their ideas to a worldwide audience. If anyone likes the idea, they can support it by pledging money to the creator’s project. In return for support, the project creators will offer rewards depending on the level of funding; essentially differentiating itself from the normal funding process.

Who is the Fundbreak team?
The Fundbreak team is made up of four energetic, tech-savvy, eccentric team members, situated in Sydney.

Whether you are a part-time photographer or an inspiring xylophone musician, Fundbreak is here with a capable platform in helping you find your funds.

As beings it seems to me that  - we are all wired to look for patterns partly to decipher meaning but also because the sheer amount of information we get can be so overwhelming.

We are also constantly comparing the “news” to our own reference points and expectations to  weight the content and relevance to our own situations.

Now the media stories seems to overshoot much of these expectations with so much coverage splashing over the metaphorical sides of the tea cup that we actively discount “news” when it gets too saturated.

One example is swine flu coverage. It is definitely an important story but the way in which it is being covered paradoxically switches many of us off the full significance of the event. There are two key facts about previous pandemics we should be picking up on (key patterns?.)

1. In 1918 and other pandemics it was the second and repeat waves that were more lethal once the virus has been through larger numbers of humans and mutated a bit more.
2. The secondary story on swine flu is how disorganised we have been  with group planning on previous disasters with very fragmented responses.

In 2007 Laurie Garrett: What can we learn from the 1918 flu pandemic? presented this talk at TED based on real analysis of earlier pandemics and global health planning.  Most of use can point to more local health issues to see that not much has changed.

Moving right along – Does this thinking apply to other “news” stories and events like the global financial crisis for example?

In recent weeks I have been fascinated to see surveys of business confidence go lower and lower and last week they have suddenly topped out at the highest for some time.

“(NZ) Business sentiment has perked up this month – the National Bank’s survey has recorded its biggest monthly gain since December 2000.“

We want to see better news after months of coverage fatigue about the global financial crisis and so expectations appear to be over shooting again.

Two weeks earlier we had Aust economic index at 26-year low New Zealand is not more resilient than Australia although I’m beginning to think that we all have outrageous optimism partly because most local business markets are shallow and tough.

We could argue that Australia’s commodity boom has slowed them into the slide andc so NZ is ahead of the cycle and our primary commodities and huge fall in exchange rates has provided an early upswing of confidence that differentiates the NZ economy.

Translation NZ business sectors and local markets are small, highly developed and very demanding and so any glimmer of hope from export markets or the “weighless economy” has us revving our economic engines.

Central banks are aware of this tendency and so the Reserve Bank Governor Bollard was at pains to signal interest rates should stay low for at least a year to 18 month longer.

The lag between recovery of some market segments / indicators and actual local recovery can still be long enough to cause serious medium term issues for many of us.

The March exports number was way higher than the imports number and that has boosted confidence as have changes to housing and employment markets. (Trade deficit melts as imports shrink)

“In the same article economist Bagrie notes Structural imbalances, like negative household savings rates and a large current account deficit, needed to be corrected and that would not be quick or easy..” and we know rationally that is true but still the survey overshoots the hope index.

In today’s TED talk videos is a new 7 minute  presentation by Sean Gourley: The mathematics of war

“By pulling raw data from the news and plotting it onto a graph, Sean Gourley and his team have come up with a stunning conclusion about the nature of modern war — and perhaps a model for resolving conflicts.”

I won’t pretend to understand what Sean is saying in this 7 minute clip but I know the patterns he is discovering appear everywhere and deciphering the economic news is every bit as mathmatical as it is for any major human induced crisis.

The group dynamic does plot patterns and we can use some of that to make sense of the overall trendlines.

Sean does a good job of explaining the “so what” part of this analysis but at 7 minutes this is really a teaser and we need to go deeper.

For example I’d like to see the analysis of Iraq right as the end compared with  Irelands history and the transformation of the IRA into a more credible polticla rather than military force.

I think with maths the risk is that we can describe events much better but unless we go compare with other histories we can still miss the underlying out takes.

In the “Fog of War” did a much more personal analysis which we seem to have forgotten.

Now I’d like to see Robert (b 1916) make some personal sense of Sean’s math but for now I’m pleased that we have a chance to think about clustering information and media through some new filters.

I also caught part of a radio dicussion yesterday which described “belief” as a recessive gene. The idea being that as a society we have become much more evidence based but that is not something we see on the actual regular news.

For me Jon Stewarts satirical Daily show makes far more sense of the news than regular media as it acknowledges the bizarreness of the human condition.

So a recap formula might look like this

Sean Gourley + Robert McNamara – Jon Stewart  = many a true word is spoken in jest – we just need to know which ones and if our math/model makes sense.