As you’re aware, I’ve had the rights to my last two albums kindly returned to me since the closure of Benbecula, and have since sought to distribute my music directly. Through Bandcamp, this has been working remarkably well so far, even on a ‘name your price’ basis. Certainly, I’ve no doubt that my profile has been momentarily raised following the release of LBP2, yet I’ve been pleased to see the purchase-to-freeload ratio remain a steady 10-11%. For me, this is highly encouraging, and gives me hope for future releases, offered directly to fans through my site via Bandcamp. Bandcamp’s 15% slice of each sale, plus PayPal fees (which end up being about 5-6%), is perfectly manageable and a realistic compromise as far as I’m concerned — certainly worth the services provided.

When it comes to digital distribution outside the cosy sphere of Bandcamp, things have been decidedly trickier. This is not down to the actions of my own chosen aggregator/distributor; Emubands have provided a sterling service for me so far, and I can give them an emphatic recommendation without hesitation. Instead, it’s the changeover from one aggregator to the next that reminds me of just how cumbersome our distribution system remains.

In a similar manner to physical distribution, you can’t have multiple aggregators supplying the same stores, so your only choice is to wait for your releases to be removed by one aggregator, before going ahead and re-uploading them with another. Which means losing all your reviews, ratings etc. (though I’m hoping Amazon’s will persist because of the physical versions available), along with a certain amount of unavoidable downtime. For the stores that had direct relationships with Benbecula, take-down was swift and painless. iTunes, for example, had Lemodie off the site within days (and has since been re-uploaded by me). However, for the stores supplied through a larger chain of mediation via the label’s distribution network, things appear to have stalled. Not so much dropping the baton, more losing it completely.

I’d like to think I’m a patient chap, but I can’t pretend to understand why it can take months for some stores to remove an album; why some chains of command can be so inefficient as to impede the seemingly simple action of removing a database entry (I don’t know what the actual process entails, I admit). Is it simply a case of too many mediators leading to diminished individual responsibility? Perhaps. It’s just a job, after all, and tending to the incessant stream of new music can probably result in the occasional overlooking of secondary requests such as release amendments and take-down requests.

But we could be a little more cynical and presume the processing delay allows the distribution network to squeeze a little more money out of us. If the contract between label and distributor has been terminated, then what’s the rush in removing music? It’s a little cream you don’t have to pass on, isn’t it? It’s unfortunately not an uncommon occurrence — distributors delaying or withholding payment to indie labels, which they may or may not ever see. While I am not accusing anyone of such practice in this instance, I can certainly think of a few labels that have been hung out to dry by their distribution network, causing their release schedules to stall.

So to cut to the chase, this is what irks me: a fan buys music through a store, thinking that they’re supporting the artist. They don’t know how much of their purchase reaches the artist, but they’ll assume an arbitrary slice will be taken off for the store’s ‘overheads’, with the remainder reaching the label, to be split between label and artist. But at present I have no idea what happens if you buy ‘Like Dust’ from Amazon mp3, for example, as Benbecula’s affairs are all tied up in a bow. Does the customer’s cash simply end up in a digital limbo while the distribution network catches on? So much for nimble disintermediation. The more things change…

This month is basically the culmination of the past four years of work towards a music PhD, so I’m very much in thrall to completing my thesis, which sits alongside the musical component of my submission. I always felt a little self-conscious about doing a practical music PhD, as I was unsure whether my music was original enough, or my writing quality good enough, to be of any use at such an academic level. Although it’s a bit late now (to say the least) to worry about these things, typically, these fears have helpfully bubbled up at the least opportune moment. Great.

Anyway, I’ll be quietly having a nervous breakdown here while I write this thing up. In true testament to my procrastinatory prowess, I’ve managed to fiddle with my site some more, moving the physical music releases that I had for sale, over from the shop to the music page. Didn’t seem much point in keeping the two separate, really, seeing as they only link to my Bandcamp page, and especially when I had third-party store links on the music page anyway. So that just leaves merch on the shop page.

Which reminds me: does the number of shirts on offer induce a bit of choice paralysis, or is having that many to choose from just fine? I think I originally went along and explicitly specified several shirt colours and styles through an overblown sense of my own stylistic judgement, pairing design colours with suitable shirt colours. Would it have been better if I simply did a white design, a black design, and let you choose what colour shirt you want yourself? See, these are the kind of dilemmas solitary musicians have to deal with.

I also helped Facebook take over the internets, in my own very small way, by installing some ‘like’ buttons on these posts, as well as a ‘recommend’ button on the music page. You’re probably thinking why I’m bothering, as don’t I already have a ‘like’ thingy at the top right of my site? Aren’t I getting a little like-happy? Perhaps a little, though there is a different between the new buttons I’ve added and the ‘like’ box in the top corner. While the box pertains to my Ochre Facebook page (which I’m sure you’re aware of, being a fan and all), these new buttons will actually allow you to share these posts and pages easily to your friends on Facebook; each time you click on it, it’ll show up in your activity feed. Much easier than faffing around with ‘add to’ widgets (which I’ve only kept as I’m starting to get nostalgic about the early optimistic days of Web 2.0, before Facebook made it clear that it intends to own it).

Anywho, there’s a thesis I need to get back to, as well as some pizza dough that needs making, so I’ll have to wrap this up. Sorry for the lack of activity; hopefully I’ll be back on the map this time next month.

Here’s a quick review of 5 online services and tools I’ve made use of and felt most helpful to me as an independent online musician, during the past year or so:

1. WordPress

As if you hadn’t already noticed, my site’s based on the excellent open source blog/CMS platform, WordPress, which continues to impress me with every update. It runs on PHP with a MySQL database, which allows me, as a non-programmer, to get a fairly complex site up and running without having to know much about the actual programming-side of things. Yet, it’s flexible enough that if you want to change the look of your site, you can do so without much more than a rudimentary knowledge of CSS—simply tweak your theme however you see fit, blissfully ignorant of the more complex inner workings going on behind the curtain. Even if you can’t be fussed editing your own theme, there are plenty of ready-made themes available to download and activate, from within the WP admin area itself.

Another great aspect to WordPress is its extensibility—there exists a veritable plethora of handy plugins written by charitable geeks, provided for free, affording your site some very handy bolt-on features. As with the themes, you can browse and install plugins from within the admin area—no tedious download/install needed.

Here’s a quick list of key plugins I’m currently running:

Akismet: This comes with WP by default and offers mean anti-spam measures, by comparing spam comments with a central database of comments. Essential, and very effective.

All in One SEO Pack: Provides a simple means of getting the most Google-friendly titles and descriptions on each post/page on your site, so search results come up with meaningful titles and descriptions. (SEO = Search Engine Optimisation.)

Contact Form 7: A simple but flexible contact form, so folks can get in touch with you without having to fire up their own email client. Also features built-in Akismet link to check for spammy email addresses and URLs. Does what it says on the tin.

Gigs Calendar: Well, I’m not actually running this at the moment as I’m not currently gigging, but it is one of the most thorough calendars actually catering specifically to the gigging musician that I’ve found, so if you’re running WP and haven’t checked this out yet, then give it a shot.

PHPlist: Simply adds a field somewhere on your site allowing folks to easily join your PHPlist-based mailing list while on your site. Simple and handy!

There are about eight gazillion more plugins out there, some no doubt handier and more frequently updated than others, but such is the nature of open-source—it’s always a moving project, and is sometimes a challenge keeping up with updates, solving the odd incompatibility between plugins and the latest WP version. The good thing about such a popular platform is that if you do encounter problems, chances are someone somewhere has also encountered the same problem, and can offer a solution—WP has a huge help community.

2. Bandcamp

Every indie artist should get their music up at Bandcamp, pronto. Not only is it a stellar music hosting service, but it also provides the means to share Flash player widgets of your music, allowing fans to embed your music on their own sites and blogs. You can also sell downloads directly from Bandcamp in an assortment of relevant formats, from lossless FLAC to iPod-friendly AAC and open-source OGG (provide a PayPal micropayments address and you’ll save on PayPal fees too!). All the format conversion is completely automated, handled by Bandcamp’s servers—simply upload a FLAC and sit back while it’s transcoded.

Other extremely handy features include the ability to collect email addresses in return for giving away music (to be added to your mailing list), create download codes (which I’ve been including with vinyl sales as a value-added extra), and even have sales logged and passed on to SoundScan for charting purposes (though you do need a UPC/barcode, and optionally ISRC codes for each track). I don’t expect the last option to be of much use to me, but still, it’s an inventive feature few music services have implemented so far.

Bandcamp does seem to be getting more and more popular, and justifiably so, so it will be interesting to see how it copes with this sustained growth. At present the transcoding queues do seem to be growing a little longer, but it’s still a very snappy and reliable host for your back-catalogue. In my opinion, it deserves to eclipse MySpace as the premier destination for sampling artists’ work; it’s certainly leaps and bounds ahead of MySpace in ideology, for functionality and usability.

3. SoundCloud

Like Bandcamp, SoundCloud is another stellar indie music host, with one of the sleekest and most innovative interfaces I’ve seen. Unlike Bandcamp, SoundCloud brings a whole host of networking tools to the table, with the usual befriending, messaging and commenting facilities. As such, it seems to be emerging as the de facto platform for hosting remix competitions and other such community-oriented projects. It has a free component to it, in addition to pay-only packages that up the amount of storage you have etc. A handy dropbox is also implemented for every member, allowing you to easily send and receive music (I’ve been testing this for my mastering service, for instance, as an alternative to FTP, though I found it handiest for sending/receiving the odd single track rather than whole albums).

SoundCloud also has arguably the prettiest player widget on offer, displaying the actual track waveform within the player, and allows you to make timed comments, referring to specific moments in the track (good for private collaborative projects to easily pinpoint areas that need work, for example, or just to say “this bit rocks, woo!”). Like Bandcamp, SoundCloud allows widget-sharing, so you can deploy your music across the net. I’ve been using SoundCloud to present demos, works in progress and live sets—the timed comments really work well for live sets and mixes in particular.

4. thesixtyone

On the face of it, thesixtyone could be just another faceless social networking site, but it’s actually rather novel. By recognising hierarchical social music listening habits (i.e. we tend to turn to the tastemakers who have an informed and varied music taste for our musical tip-offs) and by incentivising listening within the t61 community, you have a rich network of music fans eager to listen to new music. Sure, it provides charts of all the most popular artists in a particular genre, all the new submissions, the current movers and shakers, much like any other social music network site. But, it also motivates listeners to get involved by creating a levelling, RPG-like structure, whereby you have to complete a variety of tasks and challenges to increase your level, and therefore increase your subcultural capital—your respect and standing within the community.

As a listener, your aim is to discover great new music as soon as possible, and then ‘heart’ it (though you have a limited supply of hearts, so you can’t simply go round ‘hearting’ things willy-nilly and hope to thrive—spend your love wisely!). As far as I can gather, by carefully ‘discovering’ new tunes and hearting it, you will then receive points as other people listen to and also enjoy/heart it too. Your good taste stock rises, effectively. So the earlier you can find good new—and prospectively successful—music, the greater your chances of rising through the rank, gaining points and eventually subscribers (people who recognise and respect your musical taste). The extra challenges are provided to supply you with bonus hearts, as well as unlocking features on the site, such as access to individual genres, for instance.

I haven’t seen anything that works this well at motivating listeners to discover music rather than simply listen to the top of the charts (and thus only sustain the chart-topper’s hegemony) this successfully before—it really does get seem to manage to expose the majority of the music submitted. There’s much more movement, much stronger currents that reach down into the site’s murky depths of the Long Tail, dredging up new music. The only criticism I can level at the site at the moment would be the classification of the music—the genres tend to be rather hit and miss, relying on the artists to correctly classify the music, which perhaps seems strange for a site that relies on so much community action. Perhaps Last FM-style tagging should play a greater role in dividing music accurately into genres.

But what about artists, I hear you ask? There’s little information on the site about how artists level-up, but I’ve discovered that it’s very much a simple case of earning hearts to progress up a level and thereby unlock more upload slots (you’re stuck with just three track uploads by default—so choose your best tracks!). It’s been quite an eye-opener for me, discovering which tracks work and which don’t. Bluebottles didn’t do so well, it seems, which suggests that tracks with a more digestible immediacy to them will work best, while the slow burners will reflect that in their heart count.

5. FatFreeCart

After using E-Junkie for selling downloads for a short while, I since transferred downloads to Bandcamp, and moved over to E-Junkie’s free version, the FatFreeCart, for selling physical music formats in my site’s shop. There are a countless options available when considering site stores, but I settled on FFC as it uses the same cool cart as the non-free version, complete with support for both PayPal and Google Checkout, wrapped up in a neat, minimal and customisable interface. The downside to using this is that the core javascript running the cart is still hosted by E-Junkie, so if that goes down for any reason, your shop does too. Still, it’s worked well for me so far, so I see no need to change this any time soon.

A few WordPress store plugins also exist, but for my purposes, selling just a single release or two, they tend to be overkill, packed with too many unnecessary options.

Anyway, hope that sheds light on some of the tools I’ve made use of—please feel free to fire away with any questions or requests for other topics, or share/retweet if you’ve found this useful.

Of course, it’s still a free service though, so perhaps I shouldn’t grumble too much about its numerous shortcomings (though once its Google trust fund runs out next year, it’ll be interesting to see how it pays for itself). It does provide a familiar interface for those wishing to pop by and hear an artist’s music, without too much fuss. But unfortunately for MySpace, it’s no longer 2006, and there are much better alternatives for showcasing your music on the net. There’s Bandcamp and SoundCloud, for starters, both of which provide many more options and forward-thinking features, music widget-sharing facilities and greater general flexibility than MySpace ever could. They’re independently run, have no shareholders to appease, and appear to be run by genuine enthusiasts rather than advertisers and marketers. I don’t know how long that will last, or how both site’s growth will affect their continued operations, but for now things seem good.

But, as we’ve seen with countless other music showcase sites over the past decade, the online environment progresses swiftly, and if they don’t adapt and progress to meet the expectations of their users, these sites will quickly fall by the wayside. As soon as MySpace proves to be more of an unprofitable millstone around the necks of its parent companies, it’ll be discarded just like the rest before it. If there’s one thing we’ve learnt about the online economy, huge page views and users don’t equate with profitability, and as soon as one free service bites the dust, another will pop up, until it too realises it can’t squeeze money from users expecting a free service, and so on.

I’m getting fed up with hopping from site to site, keeping up with the latest ‘social’ trends, so I figure it’s perhaps best for me, at the end of the day, to concentrate on my own site, rather than spread myself thinly across various social outposts. I’m not earning a living from this (not by a long shot), and have never drawn much of a crowd regardless of how much I plaster myself over the net, so I don’t feel the need to advertise my ‘brand’ the way as a more… radio-friendly act might.

I do find it ironic given the continued fanfare we read weekly about the net’s ‘empowering’ or ‘democratising’ effects on indie musicians, only for us to end up having to connect through the mediation of a huge site like MySpace or Facebook in order to stand a chance of being heard, even if that chance pales against, say, winning the lottery. As for networking and communication—what’s wrong with email? At least we can control our communications that way, rather than relying on infrastructure set up for us by MySpace and Facebook, according to their own whims and advertising needs. Twitter has shown us that our networking online selves can essentially be boiled down to efficient sound bites, necessarily so in order to keep on top of the endless communications torrent (insofar as we ever can), and for that it does do a very good job. It goes to show though, just how far we can quite happily pare down our online selves to the bare minimum required, when needed.

Anyway, I’ll stop there. Hopefully, somewhere within that ranting, there’s some insight as to why I pulled the plug. Thanks for hanging in there.

Up until this point I’ve been playing live with a laptop, a copy of Ableton Live, and three small Faderfox controllers. They do their job nicely enough; Live allows me to recreate and remix tracks to a fair competency, without (so far) glitching and crashing all over the place (even on my aging IBM R40). The controllers afford a decent degree of flexibility with effects, recording and loop-launching. Yet it’s not the greatest visual spectacle ever bestowed upon the stage—that holy pulpit of ritual communication and adoring/abhorring feedback. Plus, it’s increasingly dull for me—never mind those unfortunate to have to stand there gazing at the back of my laptop, while their arm aches with the weight of a slowly-warming plastic pint. But as a one-man act it’s all I’ve got, all I can currently muster, and certainly all I can carry.

But it’s not good enough, so I’m putting live gigs on hold for the time being. The kind of music I write these days doesn’t especially lend itself to live performance anyway; refreshingly hype-free it may be, but ‘downtempo electronica’ is never going set hipsters’ diaries alight for the weekend. What’s becoming clear is I need some sort of ensemble to help me perform, and something that I can actually be a part of, rather than uncomfortably knob-twiddle, hunched behind a laptop or similar techo-fetishised contraption (I’m thinking bass guitar, perhaps). And as a side note, since when did ‘all-hardware’ set-ups become some sort of audience draw anyway? Pressing play on your Machine Drum can’t be that much more exciting than eliciting a MIDI start command from your controller, can it? Or am I missing the all-important blinking LED factor?

I was pleased to go and see Stars of the Lid play, quite a while back now, when they toured a limited number of venues in the UK—all of them churches, I think. This careful decision to tailor their environment to suit the music was probably the most crucial part of the gig. Not to suggest that the music wasn’t great—it was brilliant—but actually being able to sit down and listen to music in an environment not built for the sole-purpose of drinking and wildly flailing limbs (itself a problematic combination at the best of times), was what made the event essential, rather than merely worthwhile. Clearly aware of the incompatibility of performing ambient music in a bar or club, their decision to use the natural reverb in a church, unfettered by beats, was a masterstroke.

So to continue this public musing a little more, what should I do? I can either attempt to put together a small ensemble of people who are willing to do this with little-to-zero financial incentive (it was just about worthwhile on my own), in a venue that actually suits the music, or I could take the route others have taken, and realise it’s just not worth playing this live.

For the uninitiated, Gravatars are ‘Globally Recognised Avatars’, and exist to make it easier for us to have a uniform identity across the net (the avatar equivalent of OpenID, if you will). It will become quickly apparent, by the dearth of avatars in my comments section, that this is very much A New Thing, and has yet to catch on within the online world (although I have noticed one or two commenters have caught on already).

So, if you fancy procuring a Gravatar, all you need is an email address to sign up and associate an avatar with and you’re all set (you can assign multiple emails with different avatars).

Continuing the theme of updates, I’ve tweaked and tinkered with the download store, mainly to a) reduce the number of tracks I have to tend to, and b) by popular request, arrange the downloads into more manageable album-sized chunks, with the option of buying individual albums separately.

The previously ‘orphaned’ tracks are now separated into three volumes, imaginatively titled I, II and III (yes, I did take a pinch of inspiration from the recent NIN release), and are now approximately grouped chronologically (by completion date, rather than upload date). Each album is about 45 mins long, and will cost you just £2 (~$4—yep, I’ve switched currencies, allowing me to accept Google Checkout now too!).

Finally, I’ve also provided each release in 320kbps and FLAC formats, as a single purchase, to save you having to pick which format when buying. You’ll get links to separate zips of each format emailed to you—just choose which you’d like to download.

Coincidentally, making use of the boutique-approach discussed by Wilder, Trent Reznor just released some new NIN, entitled Ghosts I-IV, directly available through his site (or at least, it will be available once the server-crushing traffic wanes—I ended up getting the free release through a NIN-authorised torrent). There’s an almost bewildering variety of products and prices available in addition to the free version, right up to the $300 Ultra-Mega-3000 Edition.

It’s interesting to see these special editions increasingly being offered alongside standard releases, to subsidise the mp3 and basic CD releases. Giving away part of the release for free also makes a lot of sense, especially when there are so many tracks on offer anyway; Ghosts I clocks in at almost half an hour of music, free for familiarisation, to become lodged in the mind of listeners, who’ll then hopefully be back for more. Assuming I get enough material written, I can see myself utilising a similar method. After all, why limit a release to a single CD or 74 minutes of music if you’ve written the equivalent of two CDs? Package it all together as a single release, and give away 30–40% of it as mp3s to get people listening straight away before you’re eclipsed by next week’s news. Little use saving it for a separate release if no-one will give either release a chance.

This year the symposium shared the AV Festival’s theme of Broadcast, featuring a variety of lectures, presentations and interventions by various key writers, artists and musicians. In between the scheduled presentations, artists from Newcastle University presented a series of installations and performance pieces taking inspiration from Jeffrey Sconce’s notion of Haunted Media, using sample material sourced from Antonin Artaud‘s Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu, a recording originally commissioned by Radio France sixty years ago for a broadcast that never was (unsurprising, given the blasphemous and and somewhat scatological subject matter).

Other highlights of the weekend for me were Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec’s Reality Soundtrack and Tetsuo Kogawa’s Deconstructing Broadcasting.

Yorke stressed that Radiohead’s pay-what-you-will release campaign for In Rainbows was right for their band at that particular moment, and was not suggested as some sort of industry-wide panacea. They had just fulfilled their contractual obligations with EMI, using their new-found freedom to record their latest album in their own studio (with their own money, rather than EMI’s) and fancied trying out a fun little experiment. This, as way of a bonus, happened to subsequently create feverish media coverage and debate the like of which would be difficult to buy at any cost. Well done Radiohead.

While I’m sure it’s not a solution in itself, and was probably more of a marketing tactic borne out of curiosity to find out how much customers would actually pay for an mp3 release given the choice, it hopefully starts the ball rolling towards an eventual pricing equilibrium within retail downloads. Then hopefully we might see downloads coexist peacefully alongside CDs and other music formats, all of which reasonably priced accordingly. It is funny how we’re so ready to proclaim the death of one music format at first glance of the next – why is it so difficult to fathom a coexistence rather than linear supersedence? Especially when there are still clear pros and cons with each format; one could think of a Venn diagram when considering the strengths of mp3s, CDs and vinyl.

Now, the debates have raged and settled, the media coverage turning towards Radiohead’s latest and more conventional deal to release In Rainbows through XL Recordings. The band has taken a little criticism for removing the album’s download option, though an understandable action given the signing over of the material to XL (and of course, the experiment has run its course, yielded its results and profit, the media interest abating). Further criticism levelled at the band accused the release of In Rainbows as ‘devaluing music’, a criticism countered by Yorke, arguing that the music industry as a whole is to blame for devaluing music, suggesting we’ve been paying over the odds for our music for far too long, resulting in widespread pirating (indeed the profit margins made on the sale of CDs over the past couple of decades will be difficult to beat – even with mp3s!). While this brings to mind memories of spending an eye-watering amount of pocket money for an album perhaps fifteen years ago as a teenager, I certainly made sure I got my money’s worth by playing these overpriced treasures endlessly (though I wouldn’t want to buy or release a twelve quid-plus CD these days; it’s simply too expensive, and consumers now know this). On the other end of the scale and on the other end of the equation as a producer, I’d rather not release a download album for under £3, which brings me on to the next article, reading about Trent Reznor’s adventures pricing the latest Saul Williams album.

In a slight variation of the same recipe, Reznor and Williams decided to offer the download of Williams latest LP in two main flavours: a free 192kbps mp3 version and a five dollar version presenting an additional choice of higher quality downloads, namely 320kbps mp3 and yummy lossless FLAC. Three months after its initial release, Reznor released the sales/download statistics for the release, apparently disheartened. The results showed just under twenty percent of those who downloaded the album paid for it, almost equalling the sales of William’s last album two years ago, in just three months. Reznor appears to view this as failure, or at least underwhelming, which is surprising to me. A purchase made for every one in five listeners strikes me as a remarkably good hit ratio, especially for a product offered for free, no strings attached. Plus, those odds look better assuming the buyers first downloaded the release for free before proceeding with a purchase for higher fidelity versions, surely (though it isn’t clear whether the figures account for this). We have to factor in the hype surrounding the release (still a novelty), plus having Reznor’s name attached to the project mustn’t hurt (I primarily listened because of this, as an admirer or Reznor’s production), but even so, without any form of traditional promotion, the record has done relatively well. But how could it have done better?

Assuming objectively for a moment that the release is strong – and I don’t mean to imply it isn’t – garnering positive blog and forum reviews (being the primary form of word-of-mouth attention it would garner), then why wouldn’t more people pay the five bucks for a pristine FLAC copy? Five dollars equates to about £2.50 – a steal as far as I’m concerned, again leaving out the admittedly difficult factor of subjective judgement. I’d happily pay up to four quid for a good download album (double that for a CD).

Personally, I think the encoding quality of the free download is too high, and not to make too much an assumption, but 192kbps is surely more than adequate for listening on an iPod, so why would we need anything more if we can have that for free? (Here is a sobering article on perceived mp3 sound quality at different bit rates). What would be a more fitting encoding quality? 96kbps or 128kbps, so you can clearly hear the encoding artefacts to remind you what you’re missing? What about 160kbps, as settled on by Radiohead? For reasons I’ll explain in a moment, I felt 160kbps wasn’t high enough a quality for Radiohead’s release, but for Williams’ pay scheme, that should be more than enough to give you a taster of the full-quality versions offered for less than you’d spend on a Pret a Manger sandwich or a Starbucks Vente.

Whereas 192kbps was probably too generous a quality for Saul Williams and the five-dollar album, 160kbps was too low for Radiohead’s offering, with the band taking pre-orders without disclosing the quality of the encoding. I assumed, like many others I expect, that the album would be offered at a decent VBR encoding at the very least, especially as there was initially no talk of a CD release (other than the £40 box set), hence the subsequent ‘revolution’ hyperbole (such comments now seem rather flippant in light of Radiohead’s traditional CD release, prompting disgruntled fan comments here and here). I paid three pounds for the download, a sum I deem pretty fair when you don’t know what you’re getting.

In any event, we paid Radiohead handsomely to leak their own album on their own terms, before the CD was manufactured and had a chance to slip out of their hands – certainly a shrewd ploy by the Oxford boys. Netting more money from this download than all their previous retail downloads combined, in the space of just three months, and to then reassume a traditional outlet for the album (jumping straight to the top of the CD album charts) isn’t bad going when the rest of the industry appears to be crumbling.

As you’ve probably surmised already, we can’t really prescribe a single solution to this download pricing conundrum, as there are too many variables. We want to make it as easy as possible for listeners to become engrossed and involved with our music, given all the distractions and competition from ever-increasing media alternatives, musical or otherwise. So we should offer as much of our releases as we can for free, at a suitably mid-to-low quality level that will allow enough enjoyment and familiarisation with the music, but not deter potential buyers from wanting the high quality versions. The price of the high quality versions shouldn’t impinge on the price of a CD, nor should they be priced too low to undersell the artist’s time and effort in producing the music in the first place.

Anyway, as Reznor says, Saul Williams is now on more iPods than ever before thanks to this unique, if imperfect retail model, allowing the album to be heard by 150 thousand listeners without spending money on marketing. Plus of course, Williams may yet reap the rewards of offering the album for free further down the line in the form of gig attendance, CD sales and licensing opportunities.

Admittedly, these methods won’t do much to help the no-names like myself, but they do illustrate the importance of making your music available for comment; no-one will talk about something they can’t hear. Asking someone to pay for anything they can’t evaluate beforehand with little to no track record won’t get emerging artists very far, and in this respect press reviews will only get you so far. It may take a little longer than the instant recoup the impatient record industry insists upon, but if your music is worth hearing, I’d like to think you’ll get what you give, ultimately. Or is that a little too naïve of me?

But just to let you know I haven’t been completely idle, as apart from the Ed Chamberlain remix, I’ve also been collaborating with the industrious multi-instrumentalist Benet Walsh, whose name you may recognise in electronica circles from his work with Plaid (providing guitar for the tracks Ralome and Eyen, among others). Hopefully we’ll have penned a couple more tracks together, in addition to those we’ve already completed, for release at some point this year.

On the mastering side of business, I’ve been enjoying some rich and varied projects ranging from Gaelic laments to experimental ambient, house and metal—hopefully this will continue through 2008!

The first site is New Music Strategies, run by Andrew Dubber, who provides a list of twenty tidbits of information regarding how to present and promote yourself as an online musician. Admittedly it’s not rocket science — most of the posts are pretty much common sense and should be reflexive for any musician with their head screwed on. But it’s great to see all these ideas bundled up in a neat list, though not complete or at all definitive — Andrew has already begun to expand upon the initial ideas present in greater detail, and also presented them in an essential free pdf.

The second site that has caught my eye and made it on to my newly-created blogroll, is Hometracked, a site dedicated to, as the name suggests, all things DIY music production, from production hints and tips to industry news and commentary. Quite a lot of material already exists on the site, but for now I’ll continue the theme and link to a follow-up interview with Andrew Dubber, discussing some of the points put forward in his ’20 things…’ list.

It’s nice to see Andrew reflect my personal irk of 30 second track snippets — it does nobody any favours, and in my experience makes the listener feel short-changed when the full track doesn’t live up to the potential suggested by the snippet. (iTunes take note, and congratulations Bleep for showing how it should be done.) Also, it’s nice to read about the value of giving away music for free, provided in addition to that for sale.

Both sites are a goldmine for indie musicians. Feel free to discuss below or in the forum.

Source: BBC News

Quoted from a speech by Jacques Attali, the author of Noise: The Political Economy of Music, given at a Cybersalon Net.Music conference at the ICA, London, May 2001.

Given we accept mp3s as information rather than treating them as material commodities, existing outside traditional economic theory, how do we go about selling them? Using traditional models of scarcity, supply and demand, clearly won’t help us price music downloads, being freely copyable and distributable (despite music industry attempts to model mp3s as physical products by implementing DRM copy protection etc.). We can’t price them according to the time and energy that went into them (is an album that took three years to create more expensive than one that took six months to create?) or rely on manufacturing costs to set a base price. So instead the likes of iTunes and other stores price mp3s how they see fit, in comparison to good old CDs. Is that fair? Isn’t paying almost a quid a track a bit steep, seeing as though you’re paying for something that doesn’t exist? We can buy the proper CD for just a couple of quid more. Should we be paying much less for mp3s, or do we pay for the privilege and convenience of near instant delivery? After all, it’s not as though we can sell them on once we’re no longer interested in listening to them, as we can with our old CDs, tapes, vinyl etc., is it?

What do you think? I’d hope that we all still see it fit that we remunerate artists for their hard work in putting together an album, but as I see it, selling mp3s short-changes both the artist and listener. Surely the music industry wins once again if we accept the purchase of mp3s as just another media format (except a more disposable, ephemeral , lower quality format at that). I’d personally rather not create music that only exists in the fragile state as data on somebody’s hard disk, but would want to produce a physical document of my music. Isn’t selling mp3s simply a stopgap ‘fight fire with fire’ measure by the music industry to force a habit of purchasing mp3s onto consumers, clawing back mp3 sales to make up for the deficit in single sales, or is it the way all music will be sold in the future? I kind of feel as though illegal music file-trading has forced us down this avenue, and rather than celebrate mp3s as a novel, liberating future music format, it’s managed to turn music into something meaningless, like sand falling between our fingers while we scratch our heads and try and put a price on it.

Perhaps in the future we’ll enjoy ‘free’ music subscribed to as part of our internet connection service price, with a small fee trickling back to labels and artists (though this approach could be very dangerous, negating the need of innovation within the industry as labels continue to rely on the big names to rake it in). We might conclude that music downloads should be free and legal, and artists rely on performances alone to make money, relying on the scarcity and uniqueness of a live performance spectacle to create value. Or do we simply need to make mp3s a lot cheaper, and hope that listeners will find it just as convenient to buy music downloads as to head to the nearest torrent site?

But back to the question: do you pay for mp3s?