How to break the Top40 – 2010 style

It used to be that in order to get into the UK top 40 singles chart, you needed to sell tens of thousands of copies of your record, which generally need the marketing muscle and budget of a big record company.

These days, you don’t need to sell that many – about 4000 will get you into the top 40. And you don’t need a big record company either, as Rage Against The Machine have shown, you just need a lot of people on Facebook to get behind you.

My hometown, Shrewsbury, hasn’t had a band go top 40 in years since T’Pau, except in 2006 when Sunshine Underground scraped a 39 placing. A local band called The Insults are hoping to change that using Facebook – - see their facebook page – by motivating the locals (and anyone else) to spend 80p. I pre-ordered back in December and my £1.50 got me the 4-track EP, which counts 4 times as they are all version of the same song (radio edit and 2 remixes).

All purchases between now and Sunday 17th of January will count towards the chart position. I don’t expect you to go out and buy a copy – but you could! – but it would be cool if this bunch of 19 year olds could get into the charts on the basis of a Facebook campaign, and even cooler if T’Pau wasn’t the only Shrewsbury band to make it big.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

I Love NPR

What am I doing writing about a radio station you only get in the United States? (I think it stands for ‘National Public Radio’ although it doesn’t actually say)

Why do I love it? I love it because they often broadcast concerts by alternative rock bands, and folky bands, bands I like basically,  and let you download them as podcast for free. There are currently 209 concerts to download.

Some of these are big acts too – Tom Waits, Radiohead, Fleet Foxes.

You’ll need a feed reader or iTunes on your computer – iTunes is probably slightly easier, you can resume interrupted downloads. These are 128kb/s mp3, so the quality isn’t amazing, but for free I’m not complaining at all.

I’m listening to:

• Dave Rawlings Machine
• Gillian Welch
• Konono no.1
• Fleet Foxes
• Richard Thompson
• Spoon
• Neko Case
• Death Cab For Cutie

… obviously not all at the same time. That would be silly.

Fans Pay Up-front

This is one of the better ideas thrown up by the internet – smaller label-less acts can afford to record a new album and get it to market by their fans paying up-front. I’m not too sure who it was who started it, maybe Aimee Mann. Marillion have been doing it for year, with great success.

The latest artist to have a crack at it is Lloyd Cole. Many people are slightly surprised that he is still going, more to the point he hasn’t ever really stopped.

Since leaving the Commotions, he’s released loads – off the top of my head I could name 9, not including the Commotions stuff – and it’s all good stuff. I went with a couple of my friends to see him play – just him and his acoustic – about 6 months ago.

He’s trying to scrape together about $60,000 and he’s about a quarter of the way there. It’s early days yet. Come next payday, I think I’ll be pre-ordering. This time he’s going for a ‘band’ sound, more like the Negatives album, hopefully. That’ll be nice.

You can pre-order the next Lloyd Cole CD here.

So Many Websites…

You can do lots of things on the web these days if you have a band. Maybe too many things. I am in a couple of bands, and am trying to maintain a presence on the internet for these bands. This turns out to require quite a lot of work. These are the sites I’m currently using for my band Far Black Furlong:

• Myspace – obviously. Even though the design is pretty much broken and many sites are illegible, your band must be seen here.
• Facebook – not a lot going on, but I need to keep adding new stories so it looks like we are still going.
• Last.Fm – mp3s of all releases need to go here, and a biography, and album covers and so on. Quite handy, in that it shows you how often your tracks got listened to in the last week. By Last.fm users, obviously.
• Bandcamp – All songs go here too, and you can use it to sell your tracks (and physical product if you have it). You can embed the player widget for any track or album pretty much anywhere. Nice graphs to show you listen/visit/download stats.
• Stereofame – This site is truly annoying, and is a hell of a system hog. It does get your music heard, though. There is a surprising amount of decent music on here.
• ReverbNation - slightly annoying but very useful site. It keeps trying to get me to add live dates for the band, and we don’t (can’t, really) play live.
• Blog – I’m using WordPress (the free version). Very useful indeed, very easy to use. Can embed widgets easily.
• Soundcloud – another place to put MP3s for download or widgetting. Even the free version is very useful.
• Jango - an on-line radio service. You can get your music played on there (for a price) and get access to the people who liked what they heard. Only just started this, don’t know how well it will work for my band. Seems to be working well so far.
• Next Big Sound – gives you the stats for your band throughout the interwebiverse. They’re still coding the back end as far as I can tell, but it could be handy once it’s fully operational.
• Artist Data – takes your blogs and tweets and re-posts them to all the other places. Slightly useful.
• Twitter – I know it’s supposed to be the future of everything, but it’s pretty much impossible to generate new fans, or make money or do anything other than see what Stephen Fry had for breakfast. Can be entertaining – yesterday someone from Word Magazine thought I was a famous photographer. For about 3 seconds.
• Youtube – so many sites do a video search for each artist page, so it pays to have some kind of video out there, just in case.

I don’t even know if that’s all of them, but I’ve got to keep on top of it all, keep them updated with stuff, talk to your fans. It’s good fun.

Resolutions

I don’t normally do new year resolutions, but am thinking there are a few things I could do this year. I am compiling a long-list.

1. Practise the saxophone at least once a week. I’m not going to get any good playing every 6 months.

2. Play the guitar at least twice a week. Shouldn’t be problem.

3. Read some books, like I used to. There are loads of unread books on my shelves.

4. Listen to the radio. This is related to #5. BBC 6Music for preference.

5. Have at least 2 evenings per week where I don’t turn my PC on at all.

6. Shave every day not twice a week. This is mostly just to see what it’s like.

7. Tidy my room, and keep it tidy. partly connected to #8.

8. Throw some stuff out. Clothes, crap, stuff. I don’t need it all.

9. Plan meals, and stick to the plan. This should save money, and I might get vitamins or something.

10. …

This is just a starter, I could do all of these. I should do all of these. Number 8 is a one-off, so it’s not even something I have to do all year, just the once.

Rap: Slightly disappointing live experience?

I went to see Goldie Lookin Chain a couple of days ago – fun is hard to come by here in Shrewsbury, grab it where you can – and it was pretty good fun. (And the beer was cheap – £2 for Grolsch.)

But… the live experience of seeing rappers isn’t nearly as exciting as seeing a band. This is mostly a visual thing: talking/shouting into a mic doesn’t look nearly as dynamic as someone playing drums, or as interesting as someone playing a particularly tasty guitar solo.

Rappers can do the following: Wave arm(s) about / Jump up and down / jump up and down while waving arm(s). That’s about it. If the PA isn’t clear enough for you to hear every word – it wasn’t here, although it was pretty good – you’re really not going to be getting the optimum experience.

GLC try to get around this by having a lot of people on stage at once, all jumping up and down and waving their arm(s) about.

If you love somebody, send them FREE (things)

I find it quite distressing that many software companies have special offers on at this time of year – where do they think I’m going to get the money from? – on products that I really, really want. One company is offering a buy one-get-one-free on sampled instruments, and I’d rather like both the Gamelan and the E-bow sample sets. Except they’re £50 each. I don’t have £50 right at the moment. Don’t they know there’s a Christmas on?

I much prefer the other approach: Give things away. There’s some pretty good, or at least interesting, software being given away this year. Ohm Force have given away a weird synth instrument that I don’t seem to be able to control properly, if indeed you are meant to be able to. I nearly bought this several times of the past couple of years, so I am quite pleased. East/West are giving away a cut-down version of their orchestra plug-in, which normally costs hundreds of pounds. Wasn’t expecting that, am almost giddy with excitement waiting for that to download*. Cakewalk have made some of their more elderly VST effects freeware. Native Instruments have given us more presets for the free Kore player, and I will overlook that one of the patches crashes Ableton Live every time I try to load it; it’s the thought that counts.

That’s what we want at this time of year – free things.

*This may not actually be true

Far Black Furlong: Lost Stars

A short film to go with the first minute of Far Black Furlong’s ‘Lost Stars’, the first track on their new album, which will hopefully be released early 2010.

Playing on this track are: Mark Baigent, Andy Cotterill, Ian Tengwall, richard Moult and Anne Marie Summers.

more about "Lost Stars", posted with vodpod

Dice Society: There you go – Perfect

Rich is wondering whether they should change direction and maybe pretend to be French robots, or something.

I’m pretty sure they’re not going to leave it sounding like that.

more about "Dice Society: There you go – Perfect …", posted with vodpod

Why is everything so LOUD

This post was not prompted by me getting old and thinking everything is too loud, it’s prompted by the fact that every other time I go to the pub, I have to shout to make myself heard.

They might be doing for the following reason: People who are talking can’t actually be drinking, so if the music is so loud they can’t talk we’ll sell more beer. Which sort of makes sense, with the flaw that if the music wasn’t so loud I would be in the pub more often and they’d sell more drink that way.

They whole point of going out with your friends is to chat with them, not just stand in the same room as them while drinking. If you take that away, I might as well look at a photo of my friends while drinking tins from the off-license.