Music | Solveig Whittle

Music Has Gone From Snow To Grass

December 4, 2012 8 Comments

Something great happened to me last week. It was the kind of thing that made me realize (yet again) why I like making music so much more than doing corporate marketing for a large company (my prior life). I got this email in my inbox:

Sent: Tue 11/27/12 4:21 PM
Subject: Shades of Red [that’s my old band]

Message Body:

Hello. A few months ago, someone who had attended the Folk Alliance Festival in Memphis gave me your Shades of Red CD. I connected with your music immediately. The lyrics, the melodies, the rhythm, your voice. It moves my soul, for some reason. I would like to sing Bowl of Seconds and Dream 99 if I can replicate the sound at all with just my guitar and voice. I do sometimes play at coffee houses and other small events. Would you give me permission to sing those songs? Also, I was in an the Nashville airport a few weeks ago and saw a sign for an art exhibit called “Encalmo in Shades of Red.” I took a photo which you might like to see, but I can’t attach it here.

Thanks for making some great music.

[signed TB – the sender asked me not to use her name in this post]

—
This mail is sent via contact form on Solveig Whittle
https://www.shadesofsolveig.com

Music

Streaming Music: A 5 Horse Race?

November 12, 2012 2 Comments

***UPDATE: Google To Launch Music-Streaming Service (Market Watch, May 14, 2013). This could be a game-changer, as Google is a major infrastructure challenger to Apple. Also missing from my analysis below is Amazon, who could also become a major player, and does have a cloud-based music storage system today.

On the eve of the Future of Music Coalition’s Summit, where music licensing is prominent on the agenda, it appears that the horses in the streaming music race are finally lining up. Now, I could be totally off base on this, I’m just an indie musician with a software background and not a lot of insight into the behind-the-scenes happenings, but I think it’s shaping up to be an interesting race. I believe there are some silent bettors, the major music labels and Google, and it’s not really clear (yet) whom exactly is betting on whom. These players are listed in no particular order:

First, we have the apparent favorite, Spotify (16 million active users, 4 million paying, subscriber-revenue-driven). They’re about to close another $100 million round of investments led by Goldman Sachs, who knows a good investment when they see one, right? Why is Spotify such a good investment when they are bleeding green? Because it reportedly has licensing agreements with the major labels that guarantee it will make a 25% margin, while handing over 75% of its revenue to the labels. Some view this as a millstone around Spotify’s neck, but if Spotify can hold on long enough to dominate the market and achieve some kind of workable cost model, they become a utility: an entity with a guaranteed margin and guaranteed income.

Conferences, Music

TAXI Road Rally 2012 Flashback

November 11, 2012 No Comments

For those of you not familiar with TAXI, it’s a 17-year-old company that helps unsigned songwriters and composers submit their music for a variety of opportunities in film, TV, movies, and with labels. This is very helpful for aspiring artists like me who do not have deals with publishing houses or music supervisors. It’s also a great way for music supervisors to license new music cheaply from unknown artists. I’m just too old to be a rock star, frankly, but I’d love to create a revenue stream from my music via TAXI.

Membership in TAXI costs $300 a year (discounted if you bring others to the service), and there are small per-song submission fees as well. The Road Rally is TAXI’s annual member conference. Michael Laskow, who runs TAXI, said that they have about 10,000 members, and that 2700 of them registered for the conference this year. I have heard others say that the Road Rally conference is one of the best things about being a TAXI member, and I tend to agree. Although free to attend (members can bring one free guest, also), it’s certainly not free when you count travel expenses and your time. There are so many music conferences these days, it’s important to budget for them and to ask yourself if they are really worth attending. We spent a about $1100 per person in real money, as well as the time away from our clients and our own music creation. I always come home with some new information and insights from the TAXI Road Rally, though. Sitting in LAX thinking about the last three days I spent at the Rally, I thought I’d share why I feel it was well worth both my time and money.

Music

How To Collaborate Musically Across The Miles

October 30, 2012 18 Comments

For me, music is the richest form of self-expression. I find one of the most fulfilling things about being a musician is working with other musicians. I love making things with other people: I love working on school projects, working in teams in the world of business – actually I really love serving on juries. Yes, I love jury duty. I enjoy the process of creative collaboration. Making art with others is thrilling, and emotionally and technically challenging. It requires focus, passion, discipline, vulnerability – and clear communication of goals, expectations, roles and boundaries. Sometimes the excitement of creative collaborative can overshadow attention to the business details like defining process, expectations and roles. That is the stuff of hard feelings that can last a lifetime between musicians.

I’ve discovered that my collaborators need not be limited to musicians who are physically local. Stevie and I embarked recently on two separate collaborative music projects with other artist/producers who are located in LA and England. We just finished a hip hop piece with my stepson, Danny James, a successful musician and producer in LA. Danny took our original song, wrote and recorded three totally new verses sung by another (hip hop) vocalist he has worked with in LA, and then sent us back the project electronically (more on the logistics below). Stevie made a few musical and production changes, and a new song was born (you can watch the lyrics video here, the audio is available for free download on Soundcloud). To have been able to collaborate on a song with a family member who I both love and respect has meant so much to me, I was willing to wait the 6 months it took to complete!

Music

StageIt 101: Creating An Intimate Experience

October 25, 2012 10 Comments

It’s hard to tour – expensive, time consuming, and pretty much out of the question if you have kids or a full time job outside the music industry. But what’s an indie musician to do – you have to get out and promote your music, right?

I liken it to live internet porn for musicians, albeit generally G-rated and a much better value for the audience. Streaming your live music shows over the internet is one of the hottest ways musicians can boost their visibility, grow their fan base, and make a few dollars in the process, all from the relative comfort of their own living rooms. And neither they nor their fans have to pay a babysitter either. I’ve met quite a few musicians now who are putting on regular live performances via a streaming music service. There are several different platforms out there including StageIt, Ustream, LiveStream, Google+ Hangouts On Air, Skype, YouNow, Broadcast for Friends for Facebook, and Second Life Music. What are the relative advantages and disadvantages of each? I couldn’t find any articles that compared all the services, so I decided to try researching them myself and sharing what I’ve learned. In this article I’m going to cover the basics of StageIt.

My partner and I experimented last spring a bit with StageIt. We streamed two of our house concerts using it, and I found it quite fun. You start out by joining as a StageIt audience member, which is free. You can join by using your Facebook page, or by entering a StageIt name, email address and password. One advantage of StageIt is it’s dead simple to join. Once you are signed up as a member, you can sign up as a performer, which is a one-click action. To view a show, you purchase “notes,” a StageIt currency that translates 10 Notes = $1 US. To view a show, you purchase Notes in a minimum of 50 increments ($5 US). Notes are used to pay for tickets and to tip performers during the show (more on that later).

Music

Stealing Stardom: Macklemore’s DIY Success with “The Heist”

October 12, 2012 4 Comments

Rap artist and Seattle native Ben Haggerty, better known as Macklemore (profile by Andrew Matson of the Seattle Times here), and his creative partner, producer Ryan Lewis, are performing tonight to a sold out crowd at Seattle’s 7500 seat WaMu theater. He might be wearing thrift store fur, I’m not sure. I won’t be attending, but both my daughters are big fans, and they bought tickets months ago. I eagerly await their post-concert report – maybe even a text from the show or some iPhone pics (see below). Even though I’m a white woman in my 40s, and not a huge rap fan, I’ve been following 29-year-old Macklemore for almost a year since I first saw him perform on Chase Jarvis Live in November 2011. I was riveted on several levels: from carefully choreographed performance, to intelligent lyrics, to a masterful DIY social media presence and devoted fanbase. This guy was not just another young musician wanna-be – he was intelligent, articulate, positive, and inspiring. He wasn’t a rainy-day, depressing-lyrics singer-songwriter strumming his suburban-bought Martin guitar. This was a Seattle musician on the rise, I thought. Because I’m a musician myself, I was also interested to know more about how he was cultivating success without a record label.

As an unsigned DIY artist, Macklemore embodies a peculiarly early 21^st century musician success story, like Amanda Palmer’s, one that gives hope to millions of aspiring amateur artists around the world. It’s important to note that his success hasn’t been overnight, he released his first album 12 years ago. Through hard work and persistence, Macklemore has gradually created a devoted fan base that numbers in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions worldwide, with his socially conscious lyrics, artistic and sartorial creativity, and his considerable social media savvy. He’s even getting radio airplay – a seemingly impossible feat for an indie artist.

Music

Riding the Demon: Music, Love and Addiction

October 2, 2012 9 Comments

“Backstage he threw part of the guitar at me, and it whizzed by, just missing my head.” Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day in 2012? Nope. Roger Fisher in 1979, as described by Nancy Wilson of Heart.

The relationship between love, madness, addiction, self-destruction and creativity is always a complex one. Passion is the fuel, whether it comes from love or pain – or both.

I’ve been reading the new Ann and Nancy Wilson biography, Kicking and Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul and Rock & Roll. Fascinated and horrified at turns, I am nonetheless appreciative of the matter-of-fact way Ann and Nancy talk about their love relationships, their music, and the role of addiction throughout the book. The narrative switches back and forth between the two sisters’ viewpoints, although at times it seems to almost come from the same person. The book touches on so many issues that I can identify with – from Roger Fisher’s narcissistic drug-fueled sexual excesses in the band’s early days (as told by Nancy) to the melancholy admission of alcohol problems and body image issues at the end (by Ann). The love story between the two sisters and the two brothers (the “Wil-shers”) breathes like a sleeping dragon throughout the book. In one of the last chapters, Ann tells of the last time she saw Michael Fisher. Never married, it’s clear she never quite got over him. If you watch footage of Roger Fisher talking about Nancy (in VH1’s Behind the Music), it seems he took a long time getting over her as well.

Music

The Un-Virtuous Music Industry Business Cycle

September 1, 2012 2 Comments

***UPDATE: Apple announced a streaming music service on September 7, 2012, causing Pandora’s stock to fall precipitously. The impact of this service, which was also reported by the Wall Street Journal, is likely to be profound, although EricA Ogg of GigaOM speculates on whether Apple will succeed in this space given the relative lack of visibility of iMatch.***

It’s fall, the season when fruit ripens and leaves let loose and tumble to the ground. As I was walking my dog this morning, I was reminded of the stark difference between fruit and leaves. One is sweet and ripe, heavy with the burden and promise of life. The other, cast off like snakeskin, is the detritus of the season, dry and lifeless.

It’s the fall season in the music software industry as well. Every software business has predictable cycles for startups, and the music industry software startup cycle is no exception. The clock is ticking, and some music software businesses seem on the road to becoming lifeless, a step from being cast off from their investors like so many drying leaves. It’s not clear if any will bear the fruit – the financial returns – their investors were hoping for. It’s hard not to take as a warning the fact that projected 2012 Facebook revenues were downsized by $1B . Even this relatively successful consumer software platform continues to struggle to generate return on investment. Also in news this week, TuneCore founders Peter Wells and Jeff Price were ousted by the Board (read: major investors in the company take the reins, looking to change company direction to increase profitability). Slightly older news is that Spotify and Pandora are not yet close to profitable as of mid year 2012, and in fact, Spotify profitability appears to be moving in the wrong direction. Rhapsody was revived by absorbing Napster in a buy-in from Best Buy, and they are still owned almost 50% by RealNetworks, so theoretically they have deeper investor pockets. They are supposedly close to profitability, but their revenue and cost structures are less well understood. I’ll believe it when I see the numbers.

Music

5 Things To Expect From A Great Music Producer

June 30, 2012 4 Comments

(From a guest blog post I made on my producer and partner Stevie Adamek’s website on 1/08/2012).

You’ve been a musician for a while, maybe been in a few garage or cover bands, and perhaps performed live around town. Recently you’ve begun trying your hand at writing your own original music. Now, you’re ready to take the next step and get your original material out there. A set of high quality demo tracks is the first step to getting visibility for your songwriting talents and musical capabilities. Most bands just get themselves recorded – not produced. I think that’s a mistake. There are many talented producers out there, and your original music can go from ho-hum to off-the-hook-competitive with good production. I’m going to cover what to look for in a producer, because in my experience, there are many people out there who call themselves producers, but don’t really provide the 360 degrees of services that a great producer does.

Marketing, Music

How About Standardizing The Technologies That Enable Artist Compensation?

June 20, 2012 8 Comments

Update July 6, 2012: I found a great article by Eliot Van Buskirk (@listeningpost) from January 2012 entitled “One Big Database Could Save The Music Industry” that outlines at least one proposed technical solution. Another solution would certainly be a set of standardized APIs across the software platforms involved, which would facilitate the passing of attribution data more seamlessly. This would certainly speed up payment to artists, and would make it easier for audits of labels and other middlemen to show exactly how many digital plays have been consumed.

Opportunity Out Of Chaos

I am concerned that the music licensing/compensation issue has created a polarized debate, but I don’t see a lot of discussion of how to fix the model. I think we all agree musicians (and producers and engineers, for that matter) should be fairly compensated for creating music. We also all agree that there is an increasing amount of music available to consumers for cheap or free, and that is unlikely to change. How do we reconcile these conflicting ideas? Because my business background is in software marketing, I always see things in terms of the opportunities created by technology advancements, bounded by the disorganized nature of the marketplace, especially in new or changing businesses. The music industry is certainly in flux – both in terms of production and compensation. That makes it both frustrating and exhilarating.

One thing I find interesting is how the opinion of the musicians (producers) differs from that of music consumers, and also from that of industry commentators (who are not creating music themselves, but make money indirectly from musicians and the creation of music.). We all have different points of view because they are informed by where we make our living. I think there is money to be made in nascent and confused markets, more than in organized ones, and that factor, to some extent, is preventing a model that is more streamlined and thus fairer to the musician/producer.

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