Nice work Livejournal, give the site an 'upgrade' which makes the comments invisible. Unless I'm lucky enough to click the right order of events that shows me the old version of the page. Ridiculous.

I am in San Diego for work. I've been here since just over a week ago, after getting summoned here at short notice, and I fly back to England in a couple of days. It's my first time in America so it's been quite an interesting experience, although I can't make too many judgements about the country as a whole having only seen the southwestern tip of it.

• Apart from the body scanner, American airport security was no more troublesome than UK airport security. Having to see me naked on their security screens is a punishment for them more than for me so I can't say that bothered me too much.


• Years ago, I was told by American friends I met online that everybody makes eye contact and says hi when you pass, which I found unusual because in the UK that's a lot rarer because people are more reserved. The vibe I actually got from people here in San Diego, is that they all do make eye contact and say hi, but somewhat reluctantly. It's as if it's done not because they want to, but because the other person is going to do it and they don't want to be the rude one by not reciprocating. Perhaps the 2 cultures are very similar but they resolved the same social dilemma in 2 opposite ways.


• Pretty much every road out of town and in the suburbs is as wide or wider than a UK motorway. 6 lanes in each direction is common for the big roads, 3 or 4 in each direction is common for the smaller ones.


• Their traffic lights change much less frequently than UK ones do. You can typically expect to wait 2 or 3 minutes to get through.


• The 'Fresh and Easy' shops here are owned by Tesco, which I knew. What I didn't know is that they have exactly the same software on the self-checkouts, except for a dollar sign here and there and an American voice giving you the instructions.


• There is a common policy to ID anybody buying alcohol if they look under the age of 50. This is a country where beers are sometimes denied to 49 year olds but rifles are marketed at children.


• It's hot - but not universally so. Mornings have been typically 15C, it goes up to 25-30C for the early afternoon, and it's back down to 15C by early evening. The days are shorter here than in England at this time of year due to the latitude so if you're in work all day you actually miss most of the blistering heat.


• Food prices are weird. Not high, not low, just weird. You can get a large piece of good steak for $2.00. But then their cheapest loaf of bread is also $2.00.


• Microwave meals here have less sauce than their British equivalents. I do not know why.


• They're more into ale than the English are. Most of it is pretty poor, but I've been to about 10 different food establishments over the last week and I think the only one that didn't serve an ale of some sort was the Thai place. Most offer several. I wonder if this just reflects a British failure to promote its own products adequately, given that we have hundreds of good breweries yet they often only seem to stock local pubs. The few English ales that are actually bottled seem to fill the shelves here.


• No generic pharmaceuticals available in the supermarkets. You want painkillers, you're buying the named brands at the typical high prices.


• Prefabricated pavements. They don't lay down strips of tarmac, but instead put down square blocks of concrete and arrange them in a line.


• They have 2 kinds of music here; stuff from the 80s, and stuff from this year. Nothing in between. (A slight exaggeration: I heard a couple of early 90s tracks on the radio, but that's it.)


• The stereotype of the brash, outgoing American doesn't extend as far as their tech industry; for the most part, programmers here are the same as programmers back in England.


• On the other hand, some stereotypes hold true. I've seen middle-aged men with serious paunches wearing t-shirts espousing some sort of "armed and ready to defend our rights" slogan.


• I finally got to try root beer, and it's like Fisherman's Friend in liquid form. (But not the alcoholic equivalent which we had at Wacken a few years back.)

I would post some pictures, but apparently Livejournal still doesn't have a way for me to upload and include pictures in one action, so I can't be bothered. This would be a good jumping-off point for talking about why the business model for internet companies inevitably ends up with site development slowing to a crawl and users deserting in droves, but I'll save that for next time. If I remember.

Yesterday I asked, "How do you discover new music?" because of some advice I have seen given out to musicians over the last year - advice which is rarely questioned. The advice is basically that the main and first route to growing your band's fan base is just to play more gigs, building up a local fanbase, then broadening out to other cities across the country.

One example is this post on Reddit on "how to help your band grow" where the 2 key points are "Play local gigs, and get more fans." and "Branch out to shows beyond your hometown." Barely anybody there questioned this, and when it was questioned, the original poster said "It's about creating a network of support, and nothing beats the live experience". Is this true? Is the live experience the best way to build that network of support? (Let's ignore how inappropriate it is for many genres of music that don't lend themselves to live gigs, too.)

Another is this video on YouTube which suggests that if a band has $10,000 and wants to spend that on promoting itself, the best approach is to spend it on travel costs so that you can get out on the road, show you're not a local band, and get out in front of new fans and other professionals. At this suggestion my mild scepticism turned to outright disbelief. To my mind, that way will result in you playing gig after gig to empty or near-empty rooms, because who's going to come and see an unknown band from out of town?

More anecdotally, I've often heard it suggested that bands need to be gigging regularly to get anywhere. Some bands play tirelessly up and down the country, seemingly getting nowhere while their fans and advocates lament how odd it is that such a hard-working band is still overlooked by the musical powers that be. But I don't actually think it's surprising.

Basically, I believe that playing lots of small gigs has little to no bearing on whether you make and keep new fans, in 2013. In past decades, local gigs might have been the main way fans got into new music, once you filter out pop bands appearing on TV and radio, and already-established acts appearing in specialist press. Smaller acts played the pub and club circuit hoping to catch the eye of the right person and get signed, which would give them access to bigger tours, magazine coverage, etc. But I don't think that is how it works any more. I don't get the impression that label A&R men are still prowling tiny gigs looking for a gem in the rough, and I certainly don't think that as many people go to underground gigs as was the case in the past, because they have a more compelling alternative in the form of The Internet™. Sites like Last.fm, YouTube, and Spotify let people discover new bands based on their existing taste, at zero monetary cost and in very little time, without needing to leave their own home or put up with substandard gig sound in the local dive bar, drinking semi-poisonous draught beer to try and make the evening more palatable. And based on my own experiences as an occasional live performer, I don't think most live gigs translate into a significant number of new fans at all.

In short, my hypothesis was that today, most people do not discover the music they listen to through live performances; they are most likely to discover it via internet-based promotion of some sort.

So, I did a small informal experiment, and asked my Facebook and Livejournal friends to pick 5 artists at random and tell me how they discovered that artist. The mechanism of selection was supposed to be a media player of some sort, to remove human bias from the selection and to weight the results towards the music people are actually listening to.

I got about 20 responses, although not all did the whole 5 bands, and some provided more than 5 bands - in the latter cases, I'll choose the group of 5 which most strongly contradicts my hypothesis to minimise my own bias here.

In total I got 86 results, and here's where we (claim to have) discovered these bands:

• Recommendations from a friend: 27


• Last.fm: 10


• Seen on TV or in a film: 6


• By association with another band that is already known and liked (eg. shared members, side-project): 5


• Magazine review or article: 4


• Heard on radio: 4


• Heard at a club night: 3


• Seen at a festival: 3


• On a label or magazine compilation CD: 2


• Based on packaging or artwork seen in shop: 2


• Web forum: 2


• Heard on podcast: 2


• Seen at a gig (presumably not a festival, but not specified): 1


• Rateyourmusic.com: 2


• eBay 'similar items' list: 1


• Based on photo seen online: 1


• Assigned to review for print media: 1


• Review (no explanation of where): 1


• Newspaper review or article: 1


• Checked out due to name similarity to other band: 1


• Part of (presumably unauthorised) download of several items: 1


• Same label as another band already known and liked: 1


• Appearing at a future festival I will attend: 1


• "Internet" (no explanation of where): 1


• Looked up "after internet-stalking someone I rather fancied at the time": 1


• Bought due to cool name: 1


• Worked with band as a sound engineer/producer: 1

So, out of 86 bands, 27 of them (31.3%) came to us via recommendations from friends. 21 of them (24.4%) came via various internet sites or through methods that require the internet. Only 5 of them, a mere 5.8% of the total, made their way onto our playlists directly as a result of us seeing the band live, or expecting to see the band live.

In my opinion, this result is strong enough to refute the suggestion that live gigs are the primary way to get new fans. It seems clear that, as I suspected, people are getting into new music via other means. However, I don't think the evidence is clear that the internet plays as large a part in this as I had expected. If we take out friend recommendations and leave only the independent discoveries, 35.6% of the bands we discover come from internet-based promotion and exposure, but almost twice that figure come from a variety of other sources. But then a lot of the friend recommendations might only be happening due to the ease of sharing YouTube videos and Spotify playlists on Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, etc. It would be interesting to dig into that further.

I was surprised at how overwhelming the value of recommendations by friends was. Our group of acquaintances are either sharing a lot of music, or know our tastes extremely well, or both. It would seem that bands need to make it easy for their fans to share their music and convert new fans as a result.

I was also surprised to see so few people citing podcasts (2) or internet radio (0) as sources of new music - although this tallies with my gut feeling that there aren't many listeners to these shows. Is this an attention span issue, where people would rather check out individual songs via YouTube than listen to a show that may go on for several hours?

I was not surprised to see that magazine cover cds didn't make much of an impression. My band was on such a cd, and we didn't notice any increase in listening habits, purchases, downloads, or Facebook fan count. It's common for magazines to charge aspiring bands for the privilege of being featured on these cds, and given the data here, I'm even more inclined than before to declare it a bit of a scam, exploiting bands who feel they should be investing in their act but who don't realise how little effect this particular route will have.

Although I think this is quite negative regarding the value of gigs as promotion, there are obviously second-order effects to consider. How many of the recommendations came from friends who had seen the band live, for example? And perhaps playing live significantly increases a band's chances of getting onto TV, or into a magazine, or to be played at a club night. These are possibilities - but I think that if live bands were making much of an impression on our friends, we'd have seen a higher showing of them making an impression on us directly. I think it's also significant that more people got into bands through seeing them at festivals than at individual gigs. This supports my hunch that simply playing small gigs across the country is not much use - ideally you play at festivals where you get in front of more people. But obviously this is easier said than done.

Final notes on demographics etc: obviously my friends skew towards being fairly technical, and more so since I asked people via internet sites, so there is likely to be an overrepresentation of internet use here. But I think I also have a larger proportion of gig-going friends than the average person, so either the chances of getting discovered via a gig are even worse than these very pessimistic results suggest, or I have friends who are suckers for punishment and attend awful gigs. I suspect a little of both.

Comments welcomed.

Not much to report right now - but I would like to point out to those with plenty of spare time on their hands that I've recently started uploading a load of Skyrim pictures to Tumblr with my usual silly captions, at this address: http://anordandhissword.tumblr.com/tagged/skyrim/chrono

Tumblr's a good choice for such things as you reach random people much more easily on there, which I think is cool when you're just posting silly stuff like screenshots from video games. Plus, the uploading interface and all-round presentation is a thousand times better, despite it being a relatively new service. I wish Livejournal had kept pace with all the developments in social media and blogging, but alas, it did not. The downside of Tumblr is that it's too anonymous - people see your stuff and 'like' it or 'reblog' it - but you will never know much about those people, because there are no profile pages, and nobody goes on Tumblr to talk about themselves, just to repost other people's pictures. It's a bit lonely really, like being in a room of people where nobody speaks anybody else's language. Another symptom of the modern internet I guess, making money from your existing associations rather than caring if you can form new ones.

Wow, over 40 entries since I last checked here 3 days ago. I guess people still use LJ, hmm? Good, good.

A proper update will come along either tonight or tomorrow.

Here's an unusual thing: a Guardian article that almost entirely mirrors things I've been saying for ages.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-liberal-right-parent

"Why aren't the parents calling up their children and saying, 'Come back here at once'? They can't. Those days are gone, that authority has gone. A lot of parents are not able to stop their child from going out."

""What's going on here today? Children are making children. They are not old enough and haven't got the education to raise those children. So the children become just like them. They wind up with no education, no future. If the parents aren't there to give discipline that child will run like a wild fox until the day he dies."

In particular much of what was said by David Lammy, Tottenham's Labour MP, is exactly what I've said to people too.

"In areas like mine, we know that 59% of black Caribbean children are looked after by a lone parent. There is none of the basic starting presumption of two adults who want to start a family, raise children together, love them, nourish them and lead them to full independence. [...] We are seeing huge consequences of the lack of male role models in young men's lives."

"How do you find your masculinity in the absence of role models? Through hip-hop, through gang culture, through peer groups. It is hugely problematic. Teenagers are in school until 3.30, and then MTV, Facebook, the internet, kicks in with a set of values that comes with it. It is not clear to me that parents are equipped to deal with that."

"The right have a lot to say about parenting, but no one on the left wants to talk about this. A void has emerged around it. It's a profound problem."

"I've opened so many adventure playgrounds for under fives, but what about the teenagers? Sure Start is fine, but you need it to continue until the age of 18."

It's rather annoying to not be able to watch Game of Thrones.  I won't download it illegally as I think that's the wrong thing to do, but that's the only way I could watch it. It's frustrating to be in a position where I'm willing to pay for something but I still can't be supplied with it.

I have book 5 here though, 'A Dance With Dragons'. Only problem is, I've long since forgotten all the details of the previous books, it being 5 years since the last one came out. Maybe I should find some sort of website that gives a brief chapter by chapter run-down. I'd pay for that, too!

Wow... it's 11 years since they were filming the Lord of the Rings movies. Where did the time go? It's quite scary, really.

Ah, government cuts. Is there a more divisive issue?

Local cuts to the budget that covers shelters for the homeless appears to have become a massive issue, but with a few interesting nuances. The BBC's Mark Easton covered some of the argument between Nottingham City Council and the Government in his blog entry here, which gets straight to the point, saying that "Framework has initiated judicial review proceedings against Nottingham City Council and the Department for Local Government and Communities claiming it is "caught in the middle" of a blame game between local and national politicians." And indeed, dig a little further and this seems to be exactly what you see. The Government claim the cut to the budget was 10.7% - the council claim it was 45%. Who is right?

This has raged for a few weeks now with councillors and ministers trading barbs and insults, with the occasional interesting tidbit showing up. The other day saw this: "The Communities Secretary Eric Pickles fired a salvo over the Labour-council's reluctance to publish all spending over £500. For starters, [Housing Minister] Grant Shapps singles out the £250,000 spent on lamp post banners, which promote the council's ambitions for the city. There was criticism over sending six officers to Cannes for a Europe-wide property fair."

One local drop-in centre, Emmanuel House, was the subject of a short article on the BBC the other day (sorry for all the BBC links), which highlighted the risks to the service users and also the potential for increased anti-social behaviour, etc. But buried at the bottom was this little gem of a statement: "[...] we have assessed the service provided by Emmanuel House and don't believe the outcomes meet the level of funding we provide. Services for rough sleepers and other homeless people have changed substantially over the past decade with a greater emphasis placed on prevention. As a result of the Government cuts, we need to accelerate the restructuring of the services we provide for these vulnerable citizens." This looks remarkably like an implicit admission that the Council wanted to cut this particular service anyway, considering that it wasn't good value for money, but has now got the opportunity to do so while blaming national government for it. Intriguing!

(Interesting technological aside: Mark Easton's blog entry doesn't show up if you search for the content in it, eg. http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/?q=%22Nottingham%20City%20Council%22 . I clicked the 'Contact us' link at the bottom of the BBC website to report this problem, which took me to www.bbc.co.uk/feedback/. On there is a link for 'Website technical faults', and if you follow that, it tells you to use the 'Contact us' link on the page. Er, how do you think I got there? So now I have two problems to report to them, if I can ever find a way.)


Library cuts are also big news, with there being a national day of action taking place right now, It says "We want everyone who cares about reading, literacy and libraries to use their public library on the 5th February and tell as many people as they can to do the same.", which is a great sentiment, but I can't help but feel that if these libraries were getting used as much as they should be that councils wouldn't have earmarked so many for closure. A similiar thing happened here when the local council started closing down leisure centres (long before this Government's cuts, I should add) - lots of people were sad at losing a local amenity, but it was one few ever used.

Maybe part of this is just cultural change. A lot of the things I would once have gone to a library to do, I no longer need to do. I can use Google and Wikipedia for most of my basic research, and the collapse/banning of the Net Book Agreement, the resulting plethora of discount book shops, and sites like Amazon, have meant that I now buy a lot of books that once I might have borrowed. And the type of books I want to read have changed too, with that having an impact on the usefulness of libraries to me. Both my previous university's library and the public library were awful, bordering on useless, when it came to having computing books that were even remotely up to date. This isn't too surprising really, since an institution that is dedicated to preserving knowledge for long periods of time is always going to struggle when faced with subjects that are often antiquated and indeed bordering on obsolete by the time that a book on the matter hits the shelves. And do you need a physical book anyway, when looking at reference material? Even the best index is a poor match for an electronic search.

At this point I'd suggest that perhaps libraries need to modernise and change their offerings to the public, but I am almost entirely sure that my librarian friends would call me out on my ignorance and point out that, if I ever went to a library, I would already see such diverse offerings and modernisation. :) But I guess these things just aren't made very clear to the public. Are we making the most of the services that our taxes pay for? Do we even know they exist? That is at least one thing that this day of action might solve; people might go along for the first time in months or years and notice something useful that they didn't know was there.

How many people should benefit from a service for it to justify getting significant public funding? I'm reminded of the parallel argument over Educational Maintenance Allowance, where many 16 to 18 year olds were paid an extra £30 to encourage them to stay in education or training, but where the increase in participation as a result only rose by 10%, and where it's reported that the majority of those being paid said they would have gone anyway.

Difficult questions, in these times when money is tight.

I hate Christmas. Apart from the fact that it follows hot on the heels of my birthday which I also hate, it's a time when I feel I should be buying presents for my close family, absolutely none of whom I know what to get, at all. I remember how disappointing it was as a kid to open a crap present so I would rather get them nothing than something they don't like, but this just means added pressure. Mostly it's my nephew and niece I want to buy things for but have been given no help from the family as to what they would like. When I was that age I had a long Christmas list, but no, not now apparently.

It's just a load of hassle for no reward. Fed up of it.