We Need To Talk About Daniel

Over the last year or two a lot of people in the music industry (mainly the so-called “content creators”) have started to get a bit nervous about digital streaming services. These services aren’t particularly new - Napster, Last.FM and many others have been around for a while now - but the one that seems to be getting the most (mainly bad) press is Spotify. Recently I had a friend on twitter basically tell me that I was behind the times for expressing the opinion that the logical conclusion of everyone using services like Spotify was that the “content creators” would no longer be able to afford to create the content. The main thrust of his and many other peoples pro-Spotify argument is that it is a great way to get publicity for your music and you will discover stuff that you may otherwise not have ever heard of. This is not an entirely inaccurate observation. Ditto Music, the company I use to distribute our Hot Donkey stuff, has a page telling you how you can use Spotify to get wider exposure. It includes tips like giving your song or album the same name as something released by one of those big popular artists - then you will turn up in search results and there is a chance that the searchee will erroneously click on your track instead of the one just above it by Lady DuhDuh (or whoever) and will discover, presumably accompanied by a fanfare and a shaft of blinding heavenly light, that your music is much more original and interesting than whatever bilge is still being spewed out of the increasingly irrelevant bumhole of whichever major labels still exist at the time you’re reading this.

Statistically this might not be wrong. I agree that there is a small chance of this happening. I also agree that the newly elucidated listener could be so wowed with your staggeringly original blend of skiffle and dubstep that he or she might nip over to iTunes or Amazon or wherever and buy your whole back catalogue. Or maybe they won’t. Maybe they will just carry on streaming your stuff from their service of choice and you can sit back safe in the knowledge that your pension just went up by 0.001 pence. Unless that streaming service is Grooveshark. I think Grooveshark take money out of your bank account and then come round and punch your granny in the tit. Think that’s right...

Anyway, to illustrate this point a company called Information Is Beautiful recently posted a graph showing roughly how much an artist needed to sell each month to earn a minimum wage. I will give you the short version.

A self pressed, self distributed CD - 143 copies

An allbum download from iTunes (or similar online store) - 1,229 copies

Track downloads form iTunes, Amazon, etc. - 12,399

Rhapsody stream - 849,817

Last.FM stream - 1,546,667

Spotify stream - 4,053,110

Now the first thing you will notice is that it is extremely difficult to make money from music. This is not news. The second thing you will notice is how much the figure jumps from actual downloads to streaming. The third thing you will notice is how staggeringly bad the royalties must be from Spotify. Last.FM pays you two and a half times more than Spotify. Rhapsody pays you nearly five times more than Spotify.

So here we come to the crux of my argument. Spotify has recently joined up and integrated with Facebook and Virgin Media and several other platforms. They would like to be the way we all consume music. They have services and App’s that provide a very flexible, easy and friendly way for people to listen to music. They don’t do anything to push or even highlight new artists in the way that other services do, however. And they struggle to make money. They lost money for a long time, in fact. But in 2010 their revenue shot up, as they did deals and spread out, by around 450% to roughly £50 million. Their losses during the same year were roughly £27 million... Most of the other streaming services are still making losses. And on some levels Spotify are no better than the major labels as they continually refuse to enter into a decent and informative discussion about how the revenue is shared out. As usual the artists get the shitty end of the stick. Some things never change... And this is my main problem with them. It’s not the idea of streaming services that I have an issue with. I just have an issue with the old-skool arrogance and seeming intransigence of the people that run the company.

And a lot of artists quite rightly use things like Spotify as another tool to get people to their gigs. In the US and UK the live music scene has expanded significantly over the last few years despite the closure of many small venues. This is generally a good thing although it is incredibly difficult to make a profit from a gig unless you already have a decent following. But you do it because you hope that people will toddle off home with a Hot Donkey t-shirt and will go buy your latest album. But if most people are consuming their music via streaming services then you will just get another couple of 0.001p’s which you can soon make into a whole penny which you can then frame and hang on the wall and stare at as you sit wrapped in blankets eating Lidl own-brand potato flavoured soup.

So anyone still think the Spotify digital streaming business model, as it stands, is a good idea? It seems that an increasing amount of labels and distributors don’t. The recent big headline was from one distributor who pulled over 200 labels off Spotify. Of course most of these labels are tiny one man operations - much like our very own Donkey Werks - so you can argue that this won’t have much impact. But it will if this trend continues and I hope it does because it’s the only power we have over such companies. And it isn’t just digital distributors pulling stuff from Spotify. The “content creators” are doing the same thing. Here are some of the bands who have pulled their stuff from Spotify recently and also a few that refuse to have their stuff on there.

Arcade Fire, Blink 182, Bob Dylan, Gronibard, IAMX, Justice, La Roux, Paul McCartney, The Postal Service, Mistabishi, Rammstein, Spandau Ballet, Speech Debelle, Suede, AC/DC, The Beatles, Cardiacs, The Eagles, Feeder, Robert Fripp, Peter Gabriel, Intermix, King Crimson, Led Zeppelin, Mad Caddies, John Maus, Metallica, Momus, Joanna Newsom... It’s actually quite a long list and it seems to change on an almost daily basis so you might find an innacuracy or two here.

Now I know there are a lot of old bands in that list and you might just say, as my friend so tactfully did, that they need to “keep up or get left behind”. And on some level he is right. We all need to keep up or get left behind. Since iTunes was launched the music industry has changed beyond recognition. Some of this change has been good - most people have a much more diverse music collection than they would have done in the 80’s or 90’s and the stranglehold that the major labels had has all but crumbled to dust. But some of this change has been bad - nobody, apart from people like that pretentious fuck-ball Bono, knows how to make any money from it anymore. We’re all scrabbling around trying to figure out which of the hundreds of music sites we should sign up to. Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Last.FM, Reverbnation, The Brick Effect, Next Big Sound, etc etc etc. Or do we earn from gigging? Or do we earn from trying to place music with licensing companies so we can end up as the anthem to Tiddle’s Happy Cat Food (*now with macerated horse leg!) Do we earn from limited edition vinyl? Do we earn from iPhone App’s? Of course it has to be a combination of all these outlets. And it seems unlikely that piracy will ever be stamped out. I don’t think it should be or can be either but that’s another blog for another day. I will stress that my argument and problem is with Spotify.

So, is digital streaming the future of music consumption? Probably, in some form or another. In the short term services like Spotify are another way to get your music out into the world at very little cost to yourself - although the fees that digital distributors charge, no matter how small, are basically impossible to recoup. We all need to be creative about how we spread the word and make use of the freedom that new technology generally brings. I do think there will always be a niche market for vinyl and CD and what ever other physical formats might pop up (datacube, amorphous audio-blob, MiniDisc - hahaha, ok not MiniDisc) because people inherently like collecting and surrounding themselves with stuff. This is certainly true of people who would consider themselves music fans. It is not true of the large percentage of the population who just buy Now That’s What I Call Some Auto-Tuned Slapper Volume 73 from Tesco. I have the misfortune to know some people like this and a couple of them have stopped buying music at all and are now subscribing to streaming services where they listen to the same old shite that they would have done if they’d bought the aforementioned compilation album...

Is Spotify the future of music consumption? I hope not otherwise all that will be left will be a bunch of “hobbyists”, Lady PooPoo and whatever vapid turd the brain-in-a-jar of Simon Cowell decides to exploit. Again I say that I don’t have a problem with the idea of digital distribution - it makes a massive amount of sense. Just please not Spotify.

As an artist (or “content creator” if you frigging prefer, you nu-speak wank-wipe) we have to be clever about this. Instead of the rampant short-termism that has so merrily fucked the rest of society, we should be thinking about ways to protect what I believe is the most valuable art form that humans have created. And we most certainly do not do that by pricing the creators out of business or refusing transparency or making back-room deals that cheer up the investors whilst pissing on the very people that create the product they sell. That way we end up with a music industry as broken and unfair as the one we’re just killing off.

Where Did It All Go Wrong - Part 27b Stroke 6

One of the organisations I work for just asked me to help them out with their social media presence. I figured they asked me because I'm "down with the kids" despite the fact that someone who uses the phrase "down with the kids" is most certainly not. So I helped them out and connected them with several members of staff and all was fine. Then I was asked, after pointing out a funny and er... slightly inappropriate picture on someone's profile, to see if any other "career-threatening" posts existed on other profiles. This, to me, seemed like snooping. It's none of my business what they get up to in their own time. I felt slightly seedy sifting through people's posts and trying to spot dodgy stuff. I made a few notes and presented them - as requested - to the manager. This manager is a very nice chap with just two obvious character flaws. Firstly his taste in purchases is a little iffy. He just bought a lovely car which he seems to think is a deep mysterious colour but is in fact throbbing-cock-vein blue... He still owns a Nokia. He recommends Toshiba laptops.

Secondly, he thinks you can't fight the world.

I understand that it is almost impossible for one person to change the world, although lots of people through history would disagree and there are examples of these people all over the place. I think it's altogether more possible for groups of people to change the world. Social networks demonstrate people power all the time. Ok, maybe getting an apology out of a badly behaved corporation or highlighting a social injustice or annoying Keith Chegwin isn't exactly "changing the world" but it surely helps move us in the right direction? The Arab Spring was not, as my nan thought, a new sexual deviancy but a jaw dropping example of the power of technology in the hands of the common man. You might argue that not a lot has changed but that would only be if you hadn't done your research properly.

Anyway, I explained the issue I had to the manager and I closed down the account I had created - mainly because I had it in my own name and didn't want to be associated with being a snitch. They can set up their own account and do their own dirty work, thank you very much. The main thrust of the issue seems to be that posting a photo of, say, someone being drunk at a party or someone visiting the sex museum in Amsterdam could damage the career of the person who was in the image. Even if they hadn't taken the photo themselves! Also, it is possible to have the wrong type of friends or followers. Somebody might see something that brings the company into disrepute! Yes!! Somebody might see that a normal flawed human being doing something that has nothing to do with work and which almost all of us would probably do at some point or other exists in the company! Such displays of flagrant individualism must be crushed by the mighty boot of lowest-common-denominator-corporate-policy-making!

We're all familiar with these sorts of policies. I used to work at a popular high street book retailer. A handful of the staff (out of a few of several hundred branches) had been caught stealing books. A new policy quickly came into force whereby your bag, locker, pockets, pants, inside leg, arsehole, hamster cage and mother's under-stair cupboard could be searched in case you had nicked a copy of Dan Brown's latest masterpiece or Katie Price's latest execrable children's book. So... you want to look through my personal belongings because you assume that I would probably steal from you? Firstly, fuck you. Secondly, and your mother.

That's just a small example. There are countless others. But if enough people complain, you can change the situation. From this you get trade unions which, when they work properly, are a great idea. Unfortunately they also lead to people like Bob Crowe. That's not a good thing. But generally I stand by my argument. I may have slightly undermined myself here...

Anyway, the result of the snooping I mentioned, is that this will all go towards helping form a policy to protect the company from public ridicule and it will do so by sitting heavily on a majority of entirely blameless people. This will be backed up by a whole raft of cases currently going through the courts across the land where somebody has posted a booby or friended the wrong person or made a flippant comment about the boss's hairpiece and got themselves into hot water. I understand why these sweeping policies and laws get made. I just wish they'd stop doing it and properly think things through. Banning people from using Facebook or a newsgroup isn't going to stop pedophilia, for example.

Part of the problem is the fact that social network sites are a relatively recent thing. We haven't had time to think through and experience the many outcomes and consequences that an inappropriate post could lead to. Governments are shocked, confused and a little worried by this new voice for the masses. They aren't sure generally what to do with the internet, as the Digital Economy Bill showed. There is a classic example of broad-brush bullshit if I ever saw one. It'll carry on getting refined as successive politicians realise what a half-baked pile of cack it was until eventually - in 20 years time maybe - we'll have something that works. In the meantime the rest of the music industry will collapse and nobody will realise that the reason a lot of people download films for free is that almost all films are initially released without bonus material anymore. A digital copy is not a bonus. At best it's a timesaver for people like me who store a lot of films on a server. Most people will never use it...

Now I appreciate that we need to think about how all this stuff we post online could be viewed. You may have noticed that several bits of this blog are carefully written so as not to expose myself to a corporate kick in the nuts. It is entirely reasonable to suppose that companies will employ data-miners to round up all this virtual info about you and use it to decide whether you are going to have a career or not. And you can't trust Facebook to not suddenly change its terms and conditions and open up everything you've ever posted to the whole world. And it isn't really that hard to get at privately stored photos or hack into an account. It's only a matter of time before the contents of your DropBox are splashed across the web. An online life is risky. It's like sex with a tramp only not under a bridge and there's computers and stuff... and... er...

But the vast huge enormous majority of people are not online to groom young girls or exchange pictures of stomach churning sexual violence or to incite riots or to undermine their employers or themselves. Most people are just staying in touch with people who they don't see that often, because they spend so much of their life working and then blobbing out in front of some brightly coloured singing morons or prodding at a touch screen in a desperate attempt to numb their minds against the hopeless futility of it all, or looking for funny videos of cute kittens sitting on robot vacuum cleaners or figuring out where to meet in town or making silly comments to amuse people or playing a word game or pissing me off by filling up my timeline with some auto-post from one of the seemingly infinite variations on apparently endless farm games...

Most people are just being human. Sometimes stupid, sometimes wonderful, sometimes depressing. A world in which people are discouraged as much as possible from being human would end up as a very dull world indeed.

A bit like always eating vanilla ice cream or white bread or anything at all from Iceland. A bit like a damp Thursday in Stoke. A bit like a conversation with an audiophile - y'know when they claim that a gold plated HDMI cable will be better quality? Look, it's digital, you penis. You either hear sound or you don't... Geez... A bit like a letter from your mortgage company. A bit like a cardigan from Marks and Spencers.

You get the idea.

A Quick Holiday

So, the first Hot Donkey gig went well! The back room of The Half Moon in sunny Bishop's Stortford filled up with people and our noisy sweaty gig got underway. I played a couple of duff notes but that was drowned out by the thousands of screaming girls clamouring for our attention. By thousands of screaming girls, I actually mean our respective partners and a couple of generous friends. I'm not even sure I could cope with screaming girls at my age. They would just annoy me and probably drown out the sound of John Humphreys shaking his fist at the sky on Radio 4.

So, now that we have our first gig done, it is probably time to get a bit more recording done. We've got at least an albums worth of material sitting on my hard drive...

But before any of that I figured it was time for a well earned rest. Unfortunately we are a bit skint so the well earned rest consisted of a trip to the in-laws in Devon - usually a time of wine, which is welcome, and lie-ins, which are rare. This will be the first time that we've all gone down on the train (since the car recently started making funny groaning noises and bits of it keep exploding or dropping off) so you can probably imagine my joy at dragging a 2 year old on a 3 hour train journey. As we got on the train, I noticed the looks on the faces of the people around us. It seems we have become the "people you don't want to sit next to". It's perfectly understandable. I don't like being near other people's children. They're always horrible little monsters with strange habits and even stranger smells. My own little monster is perfect, of course. Apart from when faced with a journey consisting of 2 cabs and 2 trains and hundreds of shuffling people all desperately trying to figure out which direction to walk in. Most of these people are dragging those little cases on wheels. Big cases on wheels are brilliant. Little cases on wheels are stupid and make the owner look like a pathetic feeble prat. Carry it, you lazy fuck.

But I needn't have worried. My young terror was very well behaved and it all tickled along nicely. A few days later and a big birthday thing occurred. I don't like to talk about it.

And now I have a few days to myself and I'm getting stuck back into the music again. Got a few new ones lined up and, as I said before, we have quite a few completed tracks ready to go. And work has already begun on this years Xmas giveaway track!

So this is my last evening of no work, no responsibility and no end to this pile of chocolate and booze I got given... To that end I am sitting on my sofa, watching crap telly with a Dr Who scarf on (a total genius present from Daryl) and a lovely glass of Shiraz. Shortly I will slap the PlayStation on and get stuck into L.A. Noire for a bit. Yeah, this is how I roll. Actually I don't roll any more. It hurts my knees. These days I get a cab if I'm going anywhere further than my fridge. Rather than thinking of it as abject laziness mixed with an enfeebled under-exercised body, I look on it as putting something back into the local economy. I'm practically fixing the deficit on my own. No thankyou's are needed. Just send me your vodka and your better looking younger sister. Ta.

And that's what I did on my holiday.

How To Be A Rock Star - Part 27

It's been a few weeks since the last blog. This is because Hot Donkey has its first ever gig on Friday 12th August in the enormous stadium-like back room of The Half Moon in Bishop's Stortford. It's all gonna be fine. How do I know this? Because we've been rehearsing!

Now, I haven't had to rehearse with a band for more years than I care to mention. This is partly because I'm not really a performer and partly because most of my noise making machines aren't exactly what you'd call portable. But gigging used to be fun, if my poor addled memory serves. I used to play drums in an awful covers band that, thankfully, only ever had a handful of gigs - one particular highlight was having to play a gig with an old toilet bowl jammed in front of the kit to stop my bass drum from creeping forwards. Stylish and practical! We once played a charity gig for Mencap - giving back to the community, y'know - but all I remember about that is the sight of the carer's rushing around trying desperately to calm down a room full of distressed "clients" as our guitarist shitted his way through the opening bars of "Sweet Child O' Mine".

Anyway, I'm older and wiser now. Definitely older. If I was wiser I probably wouldn't still find bum-trumps funny. So this whole gigging thing should be a doddle now. Right?

I'm not so good with the nervousness leading up to the gig but I do enjoy the idea of rehearsal. I say "idea" because in practice doing a rehearsal is noisy and hot and frequently smelly - depending on your drummer. I used to run a studio that had a rehearsal room and that was... er... interesting. Most of the bands seemed to bash happily away on whichever instruments they were using with gay abandon in the sure knowledge that at no point would it be obvious that they were meant to be playing the same song. I used to sit in the office playing SNES and quietly wishing my evening would end. After an average session I would have £40 and a headache. All my clothes would smell of weed and beer to the extent that I worried about either being rolled up and set on fire by some nefarious youth or being licked by a tramp on my way back to the car park.

So after all this time I would get to be the one making the noise!

With very little notice, we managed to book into a charming set of rooms based on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhere. The ambience said "Eastern Block Mafia" and the smell said "dead cat in chimney". We were booked into the best room. The most expensive room. The room where all 3 of the mic stands were guaranteed to be able to stand up to more than a gentle breeze. The PA seemed to have most of it's knobs and there was even an air-con unit that, when initiated, filled the immediate few inches in front of it with a slightly tepid fart. Yes, I have finally hit the big time people. This, I imagine, is both rock AND roll.

So I plugged my Mac and my desk and my whatnots together. I panicked momentarily until I realised I'd forgotten to plug it all into the mains. I tested my sound levels and faffed around with the EQ hoping to be able to get something out of the PA that resembled music. Drums got assembled and hit. Guitars got plugged in and tuned. Vocalists sat around in the smug knowledge that they only had to carry something the size of a pencil case around. Eventually we were ready to make some noise...

Four hours later, and with a generous dose of tinitus and mild concussion, we emerged from our carpeted shoe box drenched in sweat and glory and several previously unknown strains of bacteria. It had been a success! I'm fortunate enough to have people around me that display enormous talent, when they're not farting or drawing pictures of cocks. I'm sure that, thanks largely to them, when Friday 12th comes around, they will all know what they're doing and I will be able to hide behind a stack of equipment, twiddling knobs, occasionally pressing keys and desperately trying not to forget when the chorus comes in. But that is a worry for another day. This day we calmed nerves, soothed feathers and managed to produce a coherent version of our tunes. We grinned sweatily at each other and started dismantling all the gubbins.

This feeling of elation - this Rock Star high - was a little tempered by the fact that we then couldn't get out of the car park until the band in the next room had finished what sounded like a 37 minute jazz-funk epic with a keyboard solo by a player who had yet to discover the excitement that can be had from sometimes using the black keys. Oh, and on the journey home I was unable to keep the drivers-side window closed (thanks to a snapped cable) and I got a really cold right ear.

I bet Bono never gets a cold right ear.

Ugly Bastards

News outlets the world over (well, the so-called civilised western world) have been reporting that the dating website Beautiful People dot com has been hacked by a virus allowing thousands of "ugly" people on to their site.

For the few of you who may not know, this site only allows you access to it if their members rate you as good looking enough. They employ a staggeringly offensive traffic light system so you can narrow it down a bit... You are also expected to show that you have a bit of money (owning a house is a plus, for example) and that you believe in Astrology. Do people still base major relationship choices on a star sign..? It seems so, sadly, but that's nothing. A few years ago a bunch of members got booted off for putting weight on over Christmas - this shows you the quality of the people involved.

Now there are suggestions that the story is a publicity stunt and the media are being criticised for getting sucked in and there have been several quotes from the guy who runs the site clearly demonstrating what a monumental dick brain he must be. This is not what worries me - the news is full of publicity stunts, like the vicious rumour going around at the moment that Lady Gaga has any discernible talent or that anyone should give a left-handed corkscrew about whatever tv show Cheryl Cole may or may not be on.

No, what worries me is that something as vile, cretinous, obnoxious and odious as this site even exists in the first place. Even more worrying is the claim that they have over seven hundred thousand members. That is seven hundred thousand shallow, moronic, small-minded, vomit-inducing, resource-consuming twat-ends. Or, in today's money, one Donald Trump.

I mean, does this not strike you as smacking very slightly of eugenics? The purpose of this site is for "beautiful" people to meet other "beautiful" people and for them to breed tiny "beautiful" people who will grow up and meet other "beautiful" people and eventually the whole world will be filled with "beautiful" people and a new age of peace and high class nail treatments will be ushered in. What will actually happen is a bunch of people who think a haircut is more important than treating people with decency and humanity will get together with a bunch of people who place more emphasis on choosing the right dress designer than they do on rational thought and together they will bray hideously at dinner parties about how "Simon wore the wrong cuff-links and it was sooooo embarrassing" and then they'll go home and breed another bunch of vacuous oxygen thieves and the whole sorry bag of shite will carry on.

I'm hoping that, within a generation or two, they will suffer horrendous genetic disfigurements leaving them with two heads, no chin, a fatal blood disorder and the sort of teeth you'd find in Steve Pemberton's dress-up box. Y'know. Like the royal family. And then they'll die out.

If that is what happens then not only will the collective IQ of humanity jump several points but future generations stand a chance of being able to exist in a society where what you contribute and how you treat your fellow man are considered to be of greater importance than where you bought your shirt from or how recently you had your nasal hair coiffured.

This sort of thing really makes me angry... Can you tell? I hope that I'm never ever considered to be a "beautiful" person. I hope nobody I know is ever considered to be "beautiful". I hope we're all proud of being hairy walking goo-sacks with the ability to produce weird smells, vomit, toe nails, pubes, bogies, puss, piss, earwax and poo.

I know I am.

iPoones

A brief rant...

If you've got an iPhone and a few thousand songs and a few dozen app's and some photo's and bits and bobs then iTunes is great. It's easy to use, easy to buy stuff, easy to sync your devices, etc.

If you have thousands of songs, a couple hundred app's for your various Apple devices, photo's, films and tv shows then you'd think Apple would love you for spending so much money with them and your library software would work a treat. Unfortunately this seems not to be the case. Since the introduction of iTunes 10 we've seen an already fairly hefty piece of software become even more bloated with useless additions like the execrable Ping (I don't care what tunes my mates bought over the last few days. I am not a sheep.) and the only slightly less invasive Genius. Apple's predilection for using the word genius is annoying enough without them adding something into iTunes that sifts through your library and recommends related stuff. Marketing dude! Get out of my library! Nosy git...

I'm one of the increasing number of people who have some kind of network storage device for all their music, films, etc. My various computers, phones, games machines, gadgets, gizmos and related shiny toys are connected to this device so I can stream my library all over the house. I buy a lot of gadgets and I buy a lot of content. I'm exactly the sort of person that big companies like Apple should adore. Forget saving for my infant sons education! That little box is shiny and it has a little light on it and it goes blip! Sold.

So why is it that iTunes fails so dismally when it comes to what the industry so hatefully refers to as the "power user"? Now that I have so much stuff, iTunes takes an age to load. When it does load it sits there like a grumpy child for five minutes before it let's me do anything. When I try to do anything, it spams my network with a series of massive data transfers for no obvious reason. Any other machine in the house trying to use the network grinds to a halt. If, heaven forbid, you get an entire series of some telly show or other and load it into your library then iTunes will sit and think and grunt and moan and use half your CPU cycles and network bandwidth and piss about some more and display either an hourglass on Windows or a happy spinning beach ball thing on the Mac. I can go and make a sandwich, eat the sandwich, have a cup of tea, digest the food, excrete the food, draw a picture of an elk, talk to a relative, masturbate, practice throwing a teabag into a mug and design a totally new kind of scarf and still iTunes is sitting there with this innocent look on it's face and a fat lot of nothing in it's head.

This is annoying. It doesn't have any data to transfer. The data is all stored on the network drive. All iTunes has to do is add the file to the database and show a pretty little icon of it in the library view. What the hell is it playing at?

After a brief hunt around the net, it seems that I am not alone. iTunes 10 seems to piss off a lot of people - particularly those with a similar setup to me. There is a little link on the Apple website where you can give feedback about their products. I know for a fact that this feedback is looked at. So I think we should moan. I think we should stamp our feet. I think we should whine. Twitter and Facebook have shown themselves time and again to be a major factor in getting companies and countries to think again...

I realise that this cause isn't exactly overthrowing a powerful dictator or tumbling an oppressive regime or highlighting appalling abuse but I still think that when big companies expect you to part with large sums of money with the slickly advertised glossy promise of a life made easier and more fulfilling with the latest shiny toy then they should be held as accountable as anyone else who's making our world a more annoying place.

Or to put it another way, a powerful person can fix stuff and make things better providing everybody else is kicking him in the nuts until he does it. And I'm not being sexist. We can just as easily kick a woman in the flaps.

Get to it, world. Revolt!

Music making on the go

If you're anything like me then you'll be incredibly handsome and popular. And quite hairy. Why not congratulate yourself now? Also, if you do music and stuff then you'll probably have several failed relationships behind you or an incredibly patient partner. So you have two options as far as I see it. Number one is that you settle for being single for your entire life until you eventually die (probably due to malnutrition or excessive caffeine intake) and your body will be discovered weeks later, prone across the mixing desk with an edit window still open on your monitor. Number two is that you make sure your partner is incredibly ugly so he or she is unlikely to meet somebody else and leave you. You'll still probably die alone but this time because of a heart attack brought on by excessive masturbation. Number three is that you pop down the local gadget emporium and pick up an iPad 2 (If you're reading this a couple of years from now then you'll want to ask for an iPad 37gs and probably for an anaesthetic from the surgeon who is about to remove and sell your kidneys so you can afford to buy it in the first place...) so you can create music wherever you are even though you won't be able to afford to go anywhere because you just bought an iPad.

Now I wasn't a big fan of the first iPad. It was an interesting diversion (mainly for your cash) but it didn't have the power to do anything too complicated. You can get some great app's to run on it but a lot of the more powerful sound creating stuff was laggy and the output quality was frequently iffy at best. The iPad 2 is significantly faster and some of the more complex synths run happily - barely tickling the CPU meter. Plus they added a camera. A crap one. Go Apple!

There's quite a few bits of info like this around the net but if I don't add my tuppence worth then I won't be popular or sexy so here is a brief look at some of the iPhone and iPad apps I'm using for making funny noises. Actually this will be mainly iPad app's because it's a much better device for creating stuff on.

1) Garage Band - Apple released this at the same time as the iPad 2 launch to great acclaim. It's a stripped down 8-track version of their desktop app and features some clever Smart Instruments to help you sound like you know what you're doing. You can export files to use in your main music machine and you can use Apple Loops and all that usual stuff. It's got some great noises but not very much flexibility. I've used it a few times for creating a brief outline of an idea and I might cheat some guitar stuff using the Smart Guitar. Also you can plug your real guitar into the iPad's headphone socket and use a few amp sims, which is nice. The major downside is that, for now at least, there is no piano-roll editor for fine tuning your recordings. If you're anything like me then you need that piano-roll to clean up all the mistakes... Having said that it is definitely worth £2.99.

2) MorphWiz - This is one of those strange instruments that benefits from having such a big touch screen. It's great for making those weird 1950's Forbidden Planet type sci-fi noises and it's great for bashing out great solo's and lead lines. There are several similar app's available but this is one of the best not least because you can use the AudioCopy thing to share noises between apps.

3) iMS-20, iElectribe and the other variations from Korg - Although a little more expensive (£4 - £5 so it's all relative) they can make some amazing noises and the output quality is excellent. These also make use of the AudioCopy function that you find on a lot of music making app's which enables you to export audio (a loop or phrase, for example) directly into another app. This is a very handy function. I made a 4 bar loop in iElectribe and then pasted it into MixTikl and added some of their procedural chords and it sounded pretty good. Great for getting inspiration on those days when you've got time to make music but your brain won't cooperate.

4) ReBirth - Now I loved this when it came out on the PC all those years ago. Simple to use, sounds great, useful FX and AudioCopy compatible. Not the most versatile app but one of the most fun to use.

5) SampleLab - load, paste or record a noise. Select the bit of the noise you want. Drag it to a track. Press play. A great app for sticking your loops from other AudioCopy stuff and triggering them all together. The edit is a bit of a pain and you can't pitch a sample longer than 3 sec's because of Apple deciding that the iPad didn't really need RAM... Duh. Despite this it has some fun FX and can easily make your samples sound a bit bonkers.

6) Jasuto Pro - I love this. It makes really weird noises using nodes that you connect together to emulate different types of synthesis. After a week or two of fiddling with it I still haven't managed to make it produce anything particularly usable but I think that's more down to User Error than anything else... Complicated, clever, weird.

7) iSequence - This is one of several sequencers available but I prefer this to a couple of the others I've tried. Could just be a personal preference thing... At least most of the sequencers have a lite version you can try before you chuck your pocket money away. It has some nice presets and making your own seems relatively easy.

So that's it. Hopefully there is some useful info here. I realise there are all sorts of app's I missed, ableton controllers and various other clever things, but I wanted to concentrate on more general app's and particularly stuff that uses the AudioCopy thing because without being able to transfer stuff between apps you'll end up severely limiting your creative splurges.

And also there is an argument for just having stuff like this on your laptop if you want to be portable. Quite right. I've also got Garage Band and Reason and various bits and bobs on mine but it's quite a bit easier to chuck an iPad in your bag than a laptop and the battery life beats most laptops by a mile. Plus these app's are particularly good for sketching ideas out quickly without some of the distractions of full software.

So, probably time to pop out and pick up one of those "second mortgages" I keep hearing about.

A Quick Test...

I know, I know... I've not blogged for a while because I suddenly got a bit busy without any warning. It's nothing terribly exciting or interesting so don't bother wearing a suit or a special hat or anything. Just work stuff and the odd bit of real life intruding. So I thought I'd write a quick blog using some new app thingy or other that I just got. It's meant to streamline my workflow or something. So far it's taken me twenty minutes to figure out how to enter my account details. It's entirely possible that the large glass of wine I just had isn't helping...

The only real news is that the last couple of Hot Donkey EP's are selling nicely (I mean we're not quite up there with Lady Doo-Dah or Jazzy Geoff or any of those other hot new youngsters but it's a start) and I've met a few nice chaps through that old twittery doofer that are helping to spread the word. We've had a few weeks break from doing too much music stuff. I figure we deserve it after so much recording last year - and recording is strenuous like building a bridge or curing cancer.

It's probably time that we see a little bit of our families and those other types that hang around. This is especially important now that my son just turned two and I can take part in riveting conversations like the following:

"Daddy! Table!"
"Yes, what about the table?"
"It's a table!"
"Yes it is."
"Yay!"

Be honest, you could feel a few braincells keeling over just reading that so spare a thought for all parents of two year old children who are essentially spending every day with a tiny drunk surrealist. I mean that with love, of course. I'm sure I was a tiny drunk surrealist endlessly experimenting with the bizarre gaudy world around me. These days, what with my advancing years and hatred of all exercise, I'm an exceptionally lazy drunk so there's less chance of me smacking my head into the garden table as I whizz around it on a blue plastic tractor or inserting custard into a Fisher-Price telephone. I will take great comfort in that. So should you. Particularly if you're in the same pub as me.

Anyway, I shall get back to my current task which is uploading enormous video files onto a NAS box for no good reason, and leave you all to your dinner, breakfast, toilet trip, sexytime or whatever it was you were doing before I so rudely interrupted.

Oh, we stuck a new videogram up on our YouTube channel. Go on, click on it. When I'm a multi-billionaire, living the high life in my solid gold hot tub surrounded by solid gold women, I'll remember you all fondly.

Do Musicians Need The Internet?

The BBC had a story on their site asking the above question. The answer, as pretty much anyone knows, is yes. Of course we do. The major labels are pretty stuffed - apart from a couple of old fashioned big and stupid examples of the bad old days (Lady GooGoo, to name but one) - and most people seem to have given up buying CD’s and so on. I still know a few people who buy those little shiny discs but the vast majority are downloading their stuff from various legal and illegal sources. The upside of this is the democratising of music. Anyone can plug their laptop in, bash a tune out and have it available for download from iTunes in a couple of days. The downside of this is that there is a massive amount of stuff available. Bands from all over the world can distribute their music globally for a tiny amount of money and some of them reap the rewards. Not many of them do because very few artists have the spare cash or time to be able to promote themselves properly.

So, as the sun rises on Hot Donkey’s fourth EP (entitled ‘Rides Again’ - available now from iTunes and all good download stores and so on…), I thought I’d try to figure out a couple of ways to spread the word.

The first idea is to stuff this blog full of things that are in the Top 20 search terms on Google in the vain and pointless hope that this blog will turn up in a search result. The problem with this is that I’d have to write a blog that included such things as corned beef, cabbage, St. Patrick’s day, Sean William Scott, Raymond Davis, The Lincoln Lawyer, clemson, discovery education and Guinness. This information (correct as of 6pm Wednesday 16th March) might be useful but not if you consider I don’t know who Raymond Davis is. Or what a clemson might be. I’ve heard of The Lincoln Lawyer but I can’t bring myself to write about it because it involves Matthew McConaughey and I don’t want to vomit all over my Mac.

The second idea is to get some gigs booked. Daryl, my esteemed colleague and Donkey Brother, is currently working on this and we have a window in our hectic schedule that should be enough to fit at least one gig in. Unfortunately this gig will be mainly for people that already know us so I can’t see it bringing much in the way of extra revenue in… Somebody recently said that they used their music as an advert for their gigs. This would probably have come from a person that had a) free time and b) a burning desire to stand on a stage. I have neither. Instead I have a) no time and b) indigestion.

The third idea was to run naked through the streets of London waving a flag with the Hot Donkey logo and web address on it but apparently the police would frown on this. Plus it’s cold and I have the awful feeling that I’d end up looking like a shaved Macaque with a Chipolata amateurishly glued to the front.

The fourth idea is to get my extended network of friends to post links to our EP on their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. I am not convinced this would help much either. Most of our friends already do this and, without wanting to sound in any way ungrateful, I still don’t have a Ferrari or a custom built musical gold toilet. I’m thrilled that so many of our friends like our stuff and want to help spread it about and I hope they carry on doing so. I’m less thrilled by my overdraft and would like to find new and exciting ways to make it go away.

We just need to get our stuff heard by people that don’t already know us. We need ordinary humans to find and love our stuff. This could be tricky since a lot of ordinary humans clearly have the music taste of a demented ocelot with tinitus. How else do you explain the charts? Or Susan Boyle? I mean, the massive sales of her album can’t all just be down to the fact that a lot of people still seem to find it amazing that a woman who looks like a fire-damaged carpet remnant can actually sing in tune.

So, if anyone out there has any ideas of how to spread the word then please do leave a message or get in touch via our website or Twitter accounts. One of you might actually be a marketing and publicity genius but you just don’t know it yet! Anyone who comes up with a great idea will get a special present. I’ll figure out what that is later...

In the meantime I’ll get back to my head scratching and hope that somebody accidentally orders 12,000 copies of our EP.

Stuff Not To Be Talked About

Those of us who are terribly cultured and handsome know that there are a few things that should never be discussed over dinner.

1) Religion. There is no quicker way to alienate people than challenging their belief system. Most people cling to their beliefs in the face of all available evidence and should you suggest that they are either misguided or just plain wrong then your whole friendship could come crashing down around your ears. I think the reasons for this are that secretly most of us realise that life is a chaotic mix of happiness and disaster with very little actual point to the whole thing. Some people choose to believe that an almighty bearded bloke is sitting up in the clouds watching over us with love in his heart and that if you are nice and friendly and don’t kick small animals then you will be able to join him and all the other dead people for the rest of eternity in what must be like some kind of heavenly Big Brother house. I don’t like most people when they’re alive and I only have to spend a few minutes with them. I can’t imagine what eternity surrounded by an infinite number of buffoons must be like. Plus it seems like we can’t have pets.

2) Sex. A quick glance around the internets will reveal that a staggering amount of perversion and variations of perversions exist. I find discussions about sex to be quite amusing, mainly because I try to prod people (figuratively speaking) until they reveal a little bit too much about their own particular kinks. It seems to me that not doing this would stop you from picking up new ideas and prolonging your own sex life. I think the reason people don’t want to talk about it is that they don’t like the idea that anyone else does those weird depraved fleshy wet things that they do. To imagine a friend of yours, naked, bent over an occasional table with a spoon between his or her teeth, scooping triple-choc ice cream off the thighs of an immigrant welder from Minsk is probably more than your minds eye can cope with - particularly if you have ugly friends. All my friends are gorgeous so I don’t mind too much but I can see why it is a subject to be avoided. Plus I like having conversations that cause you to wake up at 3am a few weeks later and go, “fuck… why did I tell him that?”

3) Politics. I’m not sure that this subject is to be avoided any more mainly because all politicians seem to be feckless shit heads who are more interested in personal gain than improving the lives of “ordinary” people. I struggle to think of a person from any of the political parties who I wouldn’t happily beat to death with my own severed leg. This could be different in other countries, of course. Not all those ones with tyrannical idiots who are currently being ousted by their loyal subjects. Maybe there is a politician or two from Holland, say, who actually still believes in changing things for the better. I’m prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. Our current Prime Minister would be better suited as the regional manager of a BMW dealership than as the PM. Not that we have much choice in the matter…

So perhaps we can now talk about politics over dinner. However, I think there is another one to be added to the list. Computers.

4) Computers. No matter whether you love PC’s or Mac’s, if you love them to the point that you hate anything else then you are acting in the same way as a religious fundamentalist who spouts self-serving nonsense with a total absence of facts or rational thought. I’ve said before that I use both but for different reasons. I get just as annoyed by Apple fanboys as I do by Microsoft fanboys. Let us be clear - Both companies are interested in taking your money and that’s it. They don’t care if you love Bill Gates or Steve Jobs more. They just want to empty your bank account and put it into theirs. Most of the people I know who work in IT (technicians, programmers, whatever) recognise the benefits in both platforms. They have plusses and minuses. They are tools to accomplish a task. They are not designer handbags or life-changing joy-bringing problem-solving ecstasy bringers. I saw some prick in a coffee shop swanning around with a MacBook Air open in one hand and a triple-decaff soya mocha chocca espresso with cream whip and hundreds and thousands in the other. I wanted him to drop the MacBook and then spill the stupid drink on it. I’m sure some PC owners would do the same thing in coffee shops if it wasn’t for the fact that their machines look so damn ugly. At the end of the day I must refer you back to point 1. If you love or hate a PC, Mac, PlayStation, X-Box, iPhone, Android phone, whatever, to the point that your brow crinkles and you start waving your arms about then you are simply arguing the toss about a belief system. Even if you think you’re right, you’re probably not. See every war ever for arguments to back up my reasoning.

As for me, well, over dinner I would happily discuss any of the things above. I would take pleasure in disagreeing about things, raising points, listening to opposing arguments, challenging my own views and the views of those around me. Surely real friends are able to do this without resorting to angry rhetoric and point-scoring. Surely the world is a more interesting place because lots of people have different opinions. It would be weird if everyone agreed with everything I said. It would usher in a new age of enlightenment and harmony, of course, but it would be weird...

Old and Cold

Hello! Hope you had an excellent ending to 2010. It seems like ages ago... I’ve had a couple of weeks off blog writing because it turned out that online moaning was taking up all the time I should have spent doing bits and bobs around the house, tidying the studio and stopping my in-tray from collapsing in on itself like a papery dying star.

One of the jobs I had to do was sort out my bed. You may (or probably won’t) remember a blog I did about the kind of crap people talk about when they get old. Y’know... Sofa’s and the pro’s and con’s of taking B-roads over A-roads. So imagine my surprise when the way I kicked in my 2011 was by researching and buying a mattress. Turns out it’s all quite complicated. I have ended up with something that cost about as much as my car. I could have bought a reasonably nice computer instead...

Anyway, it has arrived (delivered by two shouty burly men who managed to nearly rip a speaker off the wall as they forced the thing up the stairs) and I’ve now had the pleasure of sleeping on it a few times. Turns out that getting a decent nights kip without waking up every hour with bits of metal poking you jovially in the spine makes an amazing difference to your outlook on the world. It puts a spring in your step rather than up your arse - a crucial difference.

Previously to what I shall start calling M-Day, I would wake up quite grumpy and this would carry on well into the afternoon. By the time that I considered opening a bottle of wine and sticking the telly on in the evening I was normally right side out again and feeling relatively chipper.

Now I’ve had a few nights sleep on this new super-mattress, I wake up feeling slightly less grumpy and am able to talk to other human beings in a civil way and without wanting to punch them in the face by as early as 9:30am! This has been a revelation for the people around me. When I say “revelation” I mean that they haven’t really noticed. But I have.

I’m able to get through the few hours of “normal” work I have to do to actually earn some money before wiring my head into the studio and making weird noises for the rest of the day. I even smiled at someone recently! No idea who they were but I hope that it made them feel all warm and fuzzy and slightly more connected to the human race than they otherwise might have. Perhaps that person will also smile at a stranger. Perhaps the smile will quickly travel around the country... then the world! I could be on to something here! This might change everything... Mankind saved by a smile from a stranger!

So you can see how important a good quality mattress is. I urge you to consider spending a ridiculous amount of money you don’t have on some springs and a bit of space foam. You just might save the planet.

Now I’m off to go and find things to moan about for the next blog. Happy belated New Year!