thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

One of the most fascinating chapters in Daniel Levitin’s book “This is Your Brain on Music” is about how musical tastes are often set early in life and become quite hard to change later on.

It has been a while since I read the book but Levitin goes into much more detail on why we like what we like. The question I was looking to answer though was “Is there a Way to flip people back into music Explorer mode?

It turns out that short answer is “no- not really”. The music that we like is very much connected to our own culture and identity and often from a particular time like our teenage years. I’m over simplifying here but we develop our own schemas which are like a musical map or filter that becomes part of our music processing brain.

Levitin also has this idea that we might be able to tune our music systems like tuning to a new radio station. In real life though many people go with what they are comfortable with and this extends to our expectations about new music from our favourite bands.

I’d say that Elvis Costello fans will be on the high adventure end of the scale since Elvis is clearly an explorer and new styles, sounds, ideas and reinvention is part of his brief.

OTH many bands almost get trapped into a particular “sound signature” where new songs often reference their earlier work. The art is to make new music but take your listeners with you on that journey.

I was struck by this when local faves ELEMNO P released a new song “Slow Down” which sounds very much like an old song (not a bad thing at all), much more like their 1st and second albums than their 3rd album. Listen for yourself as you can download it for a tweet from http://weareelemenop.tumblr.com/ But I digress

In the same chapter about musical likes Daniel muses about the possibility of an

“adventuresomeness knob …that will control the mix of old and new etc.”

In this time of sharing and socialising our likes and activities it is no surprise that Spotify is launching in NZ soonish. Spotify socialises the sharing of musical playlists with your friends. It is very closely tied to facebook as there are some common shareholders.

For more background read – Spotify’s Daniel Ek: The Most Important Man In Music – Forbes

For a alternative service check out LetsListen and their site is http://letslisten.com/

However I tend to think that most people know someone in their extended group who is a tastemaker of sorts and for those who like to explore new music there are many that are very well established now.

The Hype Machine is one of the better ones and as the PBS video below shows there are many other great “tastemaker” sites out there. Maybe this is the real “adventuresome” music button?

Off Book: The Evolution of Music Online from PBS Arts on Vimeo.

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.

Working online in the marketing arena in NZ I’d say that I got got hit by the US global financial crisis up to one year before many other local businesses.

The only good thing about that; was experiencing an upturn a bit sooner than other local businesses. But it has been a fragile recovery in many respects.

In talking with experienced business people (with long memories) there has been a deep sense that our whole system is quite unstable and all those references to great depression are apposite.

The reasons for the great depression are still being debated as are theories on the global financial crisis that we are still working through.

Despite local (NZ) surveys of business confidence picking 2011 as a much better year ( and I think they are right) there is still an underlying unease that our business foundations have been very much shaken to the core and found wanting.

I’ve written before about the need for new business models and more sustainability thinking.

This time, however it is our entire cultural ecosystem that is at fault and we are in uncharted waters to the extent that a whole new paradigm is needed.

Raf Manji over on his excellent Sustento site makes similar points every month. Even when he is commenting on entertainment ..Gekko movie

The disconnect between the financial markets and the real world has grown so wide that a chasm has been created, a big black monetary hole which is dragging us all in. This film has much more impact than Mike Moore’s recent treatise on capitalism because it paints a truer picture: the excess, the egos, the glamour….and the frailties of us all.

There has been a film about some of the wider issues quietily clocking up internet views for the past 3 years – it is called Zeitgeist: Moving Forward and is about “system disorder”.

We are suffering from major structural system problems in our society. The values that we claim and like to support have been supplanted by more mercenary and life threatening behaviour.

“the main threat to human survival was nature – today it is culture”

SYNOPSIS: Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, by director Peter Joseph, is a feature length documentary work which will present a case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society.

This subject matter will transcend the issues of cultural relativism and traditional ideology and move to relate the core, empirical “life ground” attributes of human and social survival, extrapolating those immutable natural laws into a new sustainable social paradigm called a “Resource-Based Economy”.

Having seen this movie I do like that it underlines the finite resources and systemic failure of our current economic systems. These are important questions – often obscured by too much theory.

The answers; as it turns out are not so easy to arrive at.

In that sense it is not much different than say Triple Crunch – Economics as if People & the planet Mattered, Transition Towns, The Oil Drum and others seeking to address our rampart out-of-control consumerism and headlong rush to the next economic crash. In NZ the good people at Grey Lynn 2030 as part of transition towns should show an interest in this movie.

I also liked the reference to the Equality Trust and their work on the “social determinants of health and on the societal effects of income inequality”.

Some of the talking heads would have been better introduced if we knew a bit more about them and current roles. Those talking head academic experts should be listed over here on the IMDB entry but as at post time they are not although Richard Wilkinson of Equality Trust looks to be one of them.

Dr James Gilligan is one of the experts (strangely Gilligan is not even listed in the credits) – he mis-pronounces Dunedin and refers to a longitudinal health study there but without giving credit to the Otago Med School. I mention this because it is useful to check sources and that is much harder to do if they are glossed over or not listed.

I would have thought Theodore Dalrymple (Dr Anthony Daniels might have been better in this part but I suspect that Dr Daniels views on causes and solutions would have been in conflict with the overall thesis.

I also found the soundtrack a little obtrusive at times especially in the first 40 mins – but a bit of a remix there would solve that. At one point I thought there may have been a party next door but that was an attemt at ambient drumming.

What makes it film a bit different is its blind faith in rational pure science and over reliance on altruistic technology as the answer to a broken system. There is a fair amount of coverage of the Venus Project and ideas of engineer Jacque Fresco in the last part of the film.

That thinking owes a great deal to the Technocracy movement of the 1920-1930′s and is perhaps the weakest point of the film.

There have been 2 earlier films in the series and robust set of discussions called an earlier version of the Venus Project a hoax. (I note that the arcosanti project in progress for 40 years had similar ideas but seems to be a bit stuck.) It also appears that the 2 earlier films may have been a bit out there with conspiracy theories so that is thankfully gone in this – the 3rd film of the series.

The interesting point about all of these different groups (transition towns etc.)  is that many of them are beginning to understand that our current monetary systems are just not working out and something must be done – urgently.

The frustrating part is that, yet again we have another bunch of people looking to be a movement who don’t appear to be talking to others already active in a similar space.

If the zeitgeist people want to build a movement they need to lose the wacky science and concentrate on clearly defined themes and messages that are supported by environmental activists, monetary reformers and concerned citizens.

I’m hopeful that the Zeitgeist movement as they like to be called actually has some economists on the payroll somewhere and can make better sense of this because we do need better outcomes for all.

I had higher hopes for this film, but for now Triple Crunch and Transistion towns make way more sense to me.