The Death of MySpace

A couple of years ago and everyone who was anyone (or wanted to be anyone) had a MySpace page. We all logged in, posted comments, listened to new and interesting (and new and dreadful) music, tweaked our layouts, probably wrote our first ever blog, agonised for ages over who to list in the ”influences” section… It was all very jolly, like a glass of digital Pimm’s on a summers day on a proper British lawn - a pretty girl in a slightly see-through flowery dress is optional of course but no bloody children! These days you’re almost looked down upon if your band has a MySpace page - particularly if it’s your primary online portal. This change seemed to happen over a very short time. I know things fall out of fashion quickly but why should something so fundamentally useful and popular suddenly become the online equivalent of kissing your gran?

It doesn’t help that the nice people who run MySpace (Er… I think it’s that awful News Corp actually…) tried to turn it into a Facebook type site with lots of really badly implemented social networking stuff tacked on so that the whole site now looks and feels like a mentally deficient Giant Panda with Quality Street wrappers stuck to its stupid head. It also doesn’t help that the site quickly became overrun with boxes, windows, buttons, games, adverts targeted about as accurately as the BBC3 commissioning editor chooses new comedy shows and more layout choices than anyone without ADHD could shake a stick at.

Instead of trying to beat Facebook - which we all know is impossible because it’s run by the modern equivalent of the Catholic Church crossed with an advertising agency and a fascist regime - they should have thought the following:

“What do we do best? What do most of our users want? What is the one thing we’re known for in most circles?”

The answer used to be that they where great at offering bands and fans a place to post songs, blogs and messages to each other. You could easily upload a few pictures, see how many times your page and songs had been checked out, check to see if anyone had thanked you for the add… If you talked about MySpace to most people - even people so technically outdated they still think Ceefax is a bit whizzy - they would tell you about the Arctic Monkeys and the Lilly Allen’s of the world who had used the site to help generate interest in their tunes. Most people who signed up to MySpace (not counting the brief few months where teenage girls thought it might be a good thing to try before trundling off to the now also defunct Bebo to talk about how they’ve been going out with Kev for almost three weeks and was it time to let him finger her behind Boots at lunchtime?) went to look at the music stuff.

Instead of being content with that and expanding on the services that could be useful to a band or a fan, they decided to encourage painters, writers, film companies and, heaven forbid, the ruddy general public to get a MySpace page so they could all share their half-baked cack-handed attempts at artistry with the world. This diluted the concept more than that awful orange juice you get at church fetes. They quickly lost out to all the other music sites springing up offering more specific tools for artists and as we all know the number of sites that do this is gimungous, both in the extreme and to the max.

So now when you visit MySpace and look at somebody’s page, you will see that they haven’t logged in for months. You can almost hear the tumbleweeds blowing through their servers. Blogs sit crying by themselves in the corner. Links lie dead and scattered about like so many broken dreams. Videos are shot on Super8 and only subtitled in Polish. Songs are staring listlessly into the distance. You get the idea...

And you know what? I think it’s a shame. But it serves them right for being money grubbing little corporate whores. I wonder when people like this will figure out that you can’t expand and grow forever. It just isn’t physically possible - unless we are suddenly contacted by aliens who have a love for badly produced guitar bands. Those short-sighted morons that call themselves shareholders are only interested in ramming another Porsche in the garage and not in whether or not a service is useful and practical for the long term. They don’t even understand the long term. Most of them will be dead in a few years from some heart condition or other as a result of working like a cretin for their entire adult life - it’s not my fault you married an awful harridan and you can’t bear to be in the same room as your own children. As long as they can afford to have a bigger summer home than that bloody awful Fenlington-Smythe next door then who cares if MySpace disappears up its own bumhole? They can just move on and invest in and ruin the next big thing. And the people who have their companies invested in by these shareholder types quickly throw all their morals in the air faster than an Essex Girl at Mardi Gras.

I’m getting sidetracked… Anyway, RIP MySpace. You could have been fantastic. You briefly shone so brightly but of course we all know that, “he who shines twice as bright shines half as long… and you have shined so very very brightly Roy.”

And by Roy I mean MySpace. It’s possibly time for my meds.

An Uplifting Blog - Things I Love

I was accused of being a “hater” over my last blog by several members of the helpful, amusing and not at all pointless web service 4square. I can only deeply apologise to them and all the people who hang on to their every movement like half of Harlow hangs on to the bottom of the gene pool. It must be very hard to think that some people in the world have no interest whatsoever in whether you’ve just bought a sandwich or used a public restroom or arrived at a train station. I am in the minority, of course. Everybody I’ve spoken to loves receiving this information via their otherwise totally useless twitter and Facebook feeds. Mind you, the straw poll I conducted was at the local Stalker Rehabilitation And Feed Spamming Society so there may be some bias.

Anyway, in order to bring some balance to the universe and to appease all those whose feelings I’ve dented, I have decided to write a blog about all the things I love.

1) Unhealthy food. We all know how important it is to have a balanced diet. I have tested this to make sure. A sausage perfectly balances with one egg and two pieces of bacon.

2) More unhealthy food. I keep getting cravings for the kind of food that is brought round to your house by a person with a pocket full of small change and a resigned expression on his/her greasy face. It could be pizza, kebabs, burgers, fish & chips or any other kind of filth that can be ordered by phone. Recently I’ve been getting cravings for KFC and I find this deeply distressing. I’m sure their food is about as filthy as any other fast food - it’s not that I have a problem with. The problem is I have to drive to the KFC and pick the food up in person. Rubbish.

3) Drink. Several years ago I was teetotal for about a year. It was one of the worst and longest years of my life. I did it as a reaction to the excessive drinking habits of a former girlfriend, not because of any altruistic tendencies on my part but because she was a nightmare when she was pissed. After we split up I rediscovered the joys of beer, wine and vodka. Particularly vodka. And wine and beer. I am now firmly of the opinion that people who are teetotal should get themselves checked out for mental illness. I might let you off if you’re an alcoholic. Or religious, which some people contend is a mental illness anyway.

4) Films. I have lost count of the number of films I own. Actually this isn’t true. All my films are carefully categorised and entered into a database that provides cover art, a brief synopsis, ratings, cast and crew, reviews and all sorts of other bits of information. Even as I write that I can feel several internal organs writhing in shame. If you asked me to list my favourite films I would probably umm and ahh for a while before giving you a long winded and ultimately pointless rant on the merits of all films - good and bad. Or I might just say things like, “Bladerunner”, “Brazil”, “The Vengeance Trilogy”, “Star Wars”, “Princess Bride”, “Ringu”, “Ghost In The Shell” and so on. This list would also be long and ultimately pointless as it tends to change quite frequently...

5) Music. This probably goes without saying but I will anyway. I genuinely like pretty much all forms of music - apart from dubstep which is mind-numbingly tedious. And Elvis was crap. As was John Lennon (don’t hate all the Beatles stuff but, I’m sorry to say, Lennon was a dick - look it up if you don’t believe me). And most of the stuff in the charts. And anything that appears on one of those “Now That’s What I Call People With No Musical Taste Whatsoever - vol. 347”. These albums exist purely for the kind of person who doesn’t know how to listen to music. Doesn’t have any idea what it’s for. Has a really tedious sex life. Thinks a Prawn Cocktail is a bit exotic. Has an opinion on wallpaper and coving. I genuinely can’t understand people who don’t like music. Or people who say they like music before proudly displaying their collection of compilation CD’s picked up from the bargain bin at the petrol station that all have titles like, “Krakow Oom-Pah Band Perform The Best Of Craig David”.

6) Games. I have too many of these. On the phone, consoles of various description, handhelds, PC, Mac, small plastic boxes that contain 50 Sega Classics, etc. I seem to mainly play them on the PC these days but that’s probably because the rest of the house is full of noise, plastic renderings of cheerful farm animals, a small mewling human and a smoking ban. I’m currently trying to justify getting a PS3. Still working on that…

7) All The Ladies. Well, not all of them. Most of them. OK, some of them. A few. In fact, since moving to a small town to try and escape the madness of city life and the staggeringly mental house prices, it seems that I’ve been put off a large swathe of “the fairer sex” by the hordes of day-glo orange moronettes clip-clopping up and down the high street like wailing empty-headed banshees clutching bottles of WKD or Bacardi Breezer, on the prowl for some equally pin brained gel haired gonk to get them up against the side of Gregg’s for a half-baked fumble. I now like roughly seven ladies. And two of those are idiots. My excessively gentlemanly upbringing forbids me from saying who those two are. Even if I did mention them it wouldn’t matter. I don’t think they can read.

8) All The Men. Er… I refer the honourable reader to my previous answer.

9) The BBC. I don’t think it produces much decent stuff anymore, sadly. But I still think it’s one of the better sources of news - ok so they aren’t completely unbiased but they have much less of an agenda than any other news gathering organisation in this country. The website is brilliant. iPlayer is very handy. Doctor Who still gives me goose bumps and reminds me of the one time I was happy in my childhood - Saturday 26th of February 1977 between 6:30pm and 7:00pm.

10) Hmmm. Completely run out of stuff I love. Unless you include sarcastic humour, foam banana sweets, cars, the inventiveness of the Human Race (not including their unswerving ability to destroy themselves and each other or “people” who work in advertising), sleeping, hot baths, gadgets, selfless behaviour, laughter, friends, the internet, remote controlled Daleks, Twitter, brown Dolly Mixtures, Cinder Toffee, my studio, well designed furniture, people who understand the difference between and the need for both Mac and PC, people who can hug without it being awkward, pets, smelly cheese, restaurants, air-con, large discounts, large backup devices, long summer evenings in the garden, that smell you get after heavy rain, books, hot strong sweet black tea, hot strong sweet black coffee, giggling until your sides hurt, dark chocolate, wide parking spaces, sneezing, ducks, juicy steak, kindness, clean bed linen, Steam, surround sound and pudding.

So there you go. I’m definitely not a hater. Apart from some stuff that I hate. Actually, it’s quite a long list - starting with tabloid journalism - but I’m not going into all that now… Don’t get me started…

Being Funny

This is quite hard. One of the most exciting days I've had recently is when I got three new Twitter followers in one afternoon! On closer inspection it turned out that two of these were trying to sell me face-cream and the other one was a Tory. What am I doing wrong? I try to avoid posting complete inanities about the filling of my sandwich (peanut butter, onion and cucumber) or the state of the weather (crack-chaffingly warm). I try to avoid telling people exactly where I am because I'm paranoid about somebody with a grudge (probably a jealous boyfriend… y'know… I can't help my rugged good looks and raw animal magnetism) coming round and stealing my collection of rare Jackie Chan films - new services like 4square that perform this kind of location based thing are really tedious for anyone not actually meeting up with whoever is now “the mayor of pointless-ville, Woking”. Here’s a thought. If you are meeting up with someone then text, message or call them directly. The rest of us really don’t care if you are in the pub, sandwich bar or local massage parlour. Unless we’re a burglar. Which we’re not. Apart from Shifty Dave who likes to do a bit of robin’ from time to time.

Anyway, getting sidetracked… I think I was rambling on about being funny and interesting. You’d never believe it but I actually spend a bit of time trying to make these blogs funny, useful or interesting. I try to post stuff that has a nice turn of phrase and isn't just an excuse to have a dig at somebody or promote my latest release (The Stick EP - available now from all good download stores).

If you are the sort of person who enjoys having a dig at people then there are plenty of places for you to vent your spleen but it’s not really my bag of tea - apart from the above thinly veiled attack on the couple of mates I have that use the execrable 4skin. Of course some people deserve to be pooped on from a great height (Max Clifford, for example, although I can’t think of a height high enough) but even if you do this kind of thing, you can still do it in a way that's funny. Some people think being funny is posting a really long swear word in capitals. Some people think being funny is posting a faked photo onto the Facebook group of a recently deceased child - seriously what is wrong with these people? Some people think being funny is what the people are in Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. I don't think any of these things are funny. But then I don't find practical jokes or being pointlessly callous funny either. I get bored very quickly when I'm in a group of people (men, usually) who find it hilarious to endlessly take the piss out of each other. We all know this is just a way of covering up the fact that you want to get frisky with each others willy and bum parts, you repressed man fiddler, you. I like stuff that has been well written, observed, thought through. I like people who can have a conversation without resorting to name-calling - a much lower form of wit than sarcasm.

This was why I got so angry recently when I was forced to watch Angels & Demons, the recent Dan Brown waste-of-a-tree turned into a film thereby squandering some more of our Earth’s precious resources on pointless brain killing time wasting clap-trap. Y'know, like Accessorize or Clinton's Cards. Anyway, the whole plot seemed to rest on them wandering around various churches because every hour or so a new murder would be committed and at the end of it all the Vatican would be blown up. At no point did anyone think about skipping, say, the second priest and just going straight for the third chap - thereby standing a better chance of preventing the potential massacre and saving us all at least three quarters of an hour of Tom Hanks being an action hero with about the same effectiveness as a hamster learning origami in a wind tunnel. Although it does have to be said that I would personally enjoy seeing the Vatican destroyed by anti-matter - it would greatly improve the prospects of the human race.

The point is, before I get arrested by the FBI for threatening to destroy a building with a device that doesn’t exist and made to wear orange overalls and have my genitals humiliated by a marine (some people pay for that, right?), that the story only worked if you didn't think more than five minutes ahead. When I'm watching a film I don't really want to think five minutes ahead - I assume that the author or scriptwriter has done that for me and when I arrive five minutes later on that the bloody story will make sense and not have more holes in it than an argument by BP PR’s head of Swiss Cheese.

It's the same with anything really - doesn't matter if it's music or art or a book or a film or a mildly amusing e-rant. I want the person who has created it to have at least spent some time thinking about what he or she is doing. I don't think Facebook or Twitter, or any of these other new fangled ways of having your personal information abused, are really helping us much in this regard. Most of my friends are clever, erudite, sexy people who tend to post funny, useful or interesting stuff. Some of the people who I've tried following on Twitter or who have become my incredibly real and very precious Facebook “friends” are clearly half-wits. Not even that. Quarter-wits. Who cares if you've just seen the best expensive watch or handbag in the world ever and felt it necessary to take a picture of yourself grinning up at the camera-phone whilst displaying said watch/handbag in a style that one assumes you think is meant to make you look fun, sexy and interesting. You actually look like your head is way too big for your body and the only useful thing you can do for society is probably to carry on doing this kind of shallow, pointless thing so that the rest of us know what you look like and can avoid you in the street.

When an artist paints a picture or a musician writes a song, they spend time going over it again and again, refining it. An author will rewrite his story several times before submitting it to an editor who will then help the author weed out any remaining issues. I’m excluding Dan Brown’s editor in this - I suspect his books are edited by a dead stick with a little bit of dried poo on one end. For the most part they put some real effort in to make the end result satisfying and complete. Tweak it. Massage it. Leave it for a bit and then go back to it to make sure you made the right decisions. It’s the equivalent of thinking before you open your mouth…

Also, for lunch today I had some left-over squid and I've just seen a great advert for a hair product that claims to make me irresistible to people of either sex. Me - 1, the evolution of the human race - 0. Yeah!

Making Money From Music - Part 2

I've been doing a lot of trawling to try and find some magical ways to suddenly make a pile of cash from this music lark. Most sites and bloggers will tell you a variation on the following: Stop now. Get a real job. The music industry is dead, etc etc.

Now, if you're reading this and you're not a member of my family then I'm assuming you have an interest in music. You may even have an interest in making money from music. Well, I'm fed up of reading about how hard and pointless and miserable it all is so I've tried to collect a few useful ideas that might actually contribute to your (and my) musical financial success. Or at least stop you spiralling backwards into debt like an Apple fan with a gold card… The following (long blog, sorry) is just the tip of the iceberg.

1) The Interwebnet

Ok, so this is fairly obvious. You can go after that dream deal with a major label if you like but there is little point in doing so. They have always been set up and run so that the few make money from the many. This is a business model that has been undermined by the technology around us. I mean, you can even make a half decent sounding noise with your phone these days. And anyone with an internet connection and a few quid can release a "record". So stuff the majors. I don't want to work my arse off so that I end up still owing a bucketload of money to some guy in a smart suit who is to creativity what couscous is to flavour. He wants some fluffy, sexy guy/girl who can play piano/guitar earnestly whilst walking along a deserted beach in bare feet showing his/her wobbly bits and/or six packs. I've been in the business a long time (and I don’t mean a bath of poo) and the vast majority of six packs are the metal ones in the fridge. Scruffy, over-tired, over-worked, OCD casualties are the mainstay of the artistic world. A friend recently remarked that you had to be extremely anal to be good at sitting in front of a monitor spending three hours tweaking some automation just so that the reverb on the snare drum goes "whoosh" in exactly the right way. The average listener doesn't even notice the difference but this isn't the point. You probably have to be really anal to be any good at anything… Anyway, as far as the web goes there are a ridiculous number of tools to use. Choose your distributor - it'll take 3 or 4 weeks to get your release out so this should give you time to sign up to YouTube, MySpace (I know it's basically dead but it's still quite a useful place to chuck some tunes and a blog up), ReverbNation, Last FM, PureVolume, Blogspot (or similar blogging site), The Hype Machine, SoundCloud, Pledge Music, Twitter, Music Freedom, Overplay, Unsigned and lots and lots and lots of other similar sites. Look for ones specific to your genre as well as the more broad, generic sites. Sign up to as many as possible. As many as sensible. Bear in mind that you'll have to update them regularly, manage mailing lists, post comments on other peoples pages, be interesting and amusing, etc etc. By the time you’ve read this paragraph, forty-seven new websites have been set up to “help” musicians…

After a while you will start building up a small collection of people who are vaguely interested in what you do. Some of those will become genuine fans. Lots won't. It's time consuming stuff but it's worth doing. In much the same way as breathing is worth doing.

2) The Real World - where the little people live

You probably have a couple of local music magazines or societies. Go talk to them, for goodness sakes. Don't imagine for a moment that it's beneath you to play in local bars or appear at local festivals or be interviewed by the "Scrotely and Deathtown Fortnightly Gazettette”. If you think this is beneath you then piss off now. This blog is for decent people who love their art - not you, you silly big head. Gigs won’t make you a packet of cash but it all helps contribute and if your stuff goes down well then you have probably got yourself a couple of new fans. You will need to have a decent sized catalogue of songs if you plan to gig often…

3) Look at successful examples - even if you don't like the band.

We all know about the one or two MySpace superstars like Arctic Monkeys or that… er… girl… y’know… erm… well… that's the problem, isn't it? Thousands of struggling bands on there and maybe one or two break through. Even though it wasn't just down to them being on poor old almost dead MySpace. And what about the recent example of somebody like Tina Dico? The Danish warbling wetwang claims she makes a half decent living from around 5000 fairly loyal fans. She does this by a combination of clever marketing ideas (getting people to pledge £9 to get exclusive tunes, videos, blogs, unreleased material, etc. Or if you pledged £250 you got personalised video messages, signed stuff, a tune dedicated to you, a Christmas card… etc. It took her 24 hours to get nearly £30,000 from this little event. Her manager claims that all you need is for each one of these 5000 fans to spend £40 a year on you and you can have a long and healthy career. Of course, you need to find 5000 fans first.

4) Games, Films, TV, Radio

This is trickier. You need to either know some people in the industry - preferably producers, directors, music supervisors, etc. Basically anyone who isn't an actor. Or you need to find an agent who will then take a nice 20% of your fee. However, 20% of anything up to $500,000 is better than 20% of bugger all. Ok, so you may not command such high prices for your first few tracks but you can see that it is a potentially lucrative area. You will probably end up doing quite a few things for free, however. I've done several musical freebies for people but now have a slowly growing list of contacts who are very well aware that they owe me a favour! (If any of you are reading this then please bear in mind that little Timmy needs his expensive medication and last night we ate the cat for dinner.)

5) Physical stuff

CD's, Vinyl, T-Shirts. You can make a T-shirt for around £2 and flog it for £10. You won't sell lots but if it's got a good design (a whole other problem area…) and it's a good quality shirt then you might like to add this to your line-up of physical stuff. Probably best to look at it as little more than advertising rather than as a mass money making venture. As for CD's and vinyl. Well… this is more down to your target market. Most people aren't bothered about holding a shiny disc in their hands any more - apart from collectors and those people who still insist that vinyl sounds better than digital. I call these people "twats". What they actually mean is that stuff that was made for vinyl and hasn’t been properly mastered for digital sounds better on vinyl. I have a friend who releases limited edition vinyl and he seems to do quite nicely from it. I suspect that when you have a following then producing a physical version of your music is probably a nice thing to do for your die-hard fans but those people you've roped into your mailing list via MySpace probably won't splash out £15 on something they can only play round their dads house. It can be a nice promotional thing but little more.

6) Having another person do all this for you

Yup, if you can get a manager or a promoter to believe in you then all the better. Most musicians are better at talking to inanimate objects than other humans. You can still do a lot of the above without a manager/promoter but when it comes to knocking on doors and ranting about how great the latest EP from Saffron Walden's very own "Norbert Temple’s Thrash Monster Experience” is, you probably can't do that on your own without looking a total dick.

7) Remixes

I hope you have made some connections with other like minded souls? If not then get out there and do that. Even the smallest dingiest town-hole will be bursting with people doing interesting stuff - this is a simultaneously uplifting and depressing fact. If you can make friends with the ones you like and maybe exchange a few tracks for remix then there's another way of getting an EP together quite quickly. Plus it's quite interesting to see what somebody else does with your funny noises and it broadens your network of listeners without taking you too much out of your comfort zone (for “comfort zone” read “studio”).

One thing is certain, and that is the music industry is in turmoil and has been for ages but it's not all doom and gloom. It's simply that there are a lot more people writing and releasing stuff than ever before and nobody has quite figured out the best way to reach a large audience without simultaneously pissing people off. I'm on Soundcloud and I keep getting tracks sent to me privately. Me and 2736 other people - how special I felt. I listened to the first track and didn't like it. I haven't got the time to go and figure out how to stop this person sending me his boring bass-heavy bedroom bum burps. I will sort it out at some point. It's on a very very long list of websites I have to update, tweak, sort out, sign up to… etc etc etc. And the other main point is that it seems that people want to connect with the bands/artists they're interested in. They want to see blogs, vlogs, tweets, etc. They want to get the odd personalised comment or product. This makes more work for us poor struggling musician types but I'd still rather be doing this than flogging badly made tat to inbred chimps in a shopping centre designed by people whose sole purpose seems to be speeding up the destruction of civilization.

Oh, and if I've missed anything out (and I’m sure I have) then please add your comments to this blog - this area is complicated and stuffed with companies and sites that have varying chances of helping you get where you want. New ones pop up all the time, old ones fall by the wayside and it’s tricky to weed out the gold from the shite.

Whilst compiling this ramble, I noticed a couple of sites (they will remain nameless - it's just my luck that I'll get sued and then have to whore myself out to local bored housewives… Hang on, think I've thought of a money making scheme…) who have music players and/or other functions that don't work properly on a Mac. To the designers of these sites - Dear Sir, you are a bloody idiot.