I have memories, clouded by sorrow

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.

Over the last few years, we've seen the rise of Facebook, allowing people to connect with their friends in a fairly effective way. This has come at the expense of various other online networks - individual web forums are losing traffic, MySpace has obviously been cannibalised by people moving to Facebook, older haunts like Yahoo and MSN Groups have become deserted and closed down respectively, ICQ and Yahoo Messengers have lost favour, postings to Livejournal have dried up a lot, and so on.

All these other sites and services were a bit more anonymous. You could find interesting people and join their community or subscribe to their page and get to know them that way. Because they were mostly anonymous there weren't so many concerns about privacy and so you'd make new friends quite easily, by searching based on interests or whatever.

Now, we have Facebook which is big on having your real identity. In itself I don't think that's a bad thing, as there's definitely a place for networking with your real life friends and having a web site dedicated to facilitating that. But with real identity comes a need for privacy, which in turn means it's actually quite hard to find new friends on Facebook based on what they do or like. If you don't already have a mutual friend, you may never come across them, and even if you do, chances are high that their profile will be mostly closed off to you so contacting them is just a stab in the dark really. So as people have abandoned other services for Facebook, they've disappeared off the public web into a more private area.

I used to meet lots of people through online gaming. There was something really cool about going onto an online game and ending up on these make-believe adventures with people from England, the USA, Holland, Canada, none of whom you'd met before, but who you would get to know. But games things aren't the same any more either - it seems like most of the online games these days are carefully set up so that you can enter what is nominally a 'massively multiplayer world' and yet have as little to do with anybody else as possible, except for meeting up with your real life friends to go and play in a dungeon reserved especially for you.

I don't think any of this is a particularly good thing. It feels like the internet has lost some of its appeal in letting people form communities that ignore geographical distance, in favour of becoming something that just makes real world communities a little more efficient. It's a bit of a shame, I think. A lost opportunity.

After a long and tedious day at work, I got home and expected - and wanted - just to relax for the evening. Instead, that started off as the oh-so-typical web-based procrastination, and then switched to me writing a 2000-word post for my game development blog. It's funny to think that I remember students struggling to reach 2000 words for their essays, but I was struggling to get the post below 2000 words, which is too many as it is. 1000 words per hour is a decent rate to be writing at, at least. It totally depends on whether I know enough about the subject matter, but my mind picks up so many assorted connections these days that it seems easy to get that far. So it bodes reasonably well for any future writing I might try to do.

I'm sure there's also something witty or insightful to be said about the fact that I'm writing a blog post about writing a blog post. (And of this sentence, writing about writing a blog post about writing a blog post. Ad infinitum...)

However it all reminds me that relaxation is not particularly easy when in front of the computer. Although I have more games than I can ever hope to complete, I often end up feeling the need to do something useful, or at least attempt it. As much as I rely on my PC and the internet at home and at work, some of the best times I've had were when I was away from computers and the web and email for several days, such as at Wacken last year or Matlock Bath the summer before. I thought I'd feel the need to get online and check journals and emails and the like... but no. Having a short but enforced isolation from technology is definitely liberating in its own way.

Apparently monster.co.uk got hacked (although the bar for what qualifies as 'hacking' has seriously lowered these days) and everybody's passwords on there are considered compromised. So if you have an account on there, and you use that password anywhere else of importance, time to change it.

(At this point I expect some smart-ass to comment about how you should use a different password for every site. I can only imagine you'd have to be autistic or something to remember a different password for each of the sites you could end up on.)

Anyway, they decided not to tell everybody about this, but instead have left a message buried on the right hand side of their front page, assuming everybody will visit their site regularly. Because, obviously, nobody actually GETS A JOB USING THEIR SERVICE and therefore no longer needs to visit the site, do they?

On the letter they've put up about this issue, they boast, "Monster has made, and will continue to make, a significant investment in enhancing data security, and we believe that Monster’s security measures are as, or more, robust than other sites in our industry." So, they think that not a single job-site online has considered storing encrypted or hashed passwords instead of plain-text ones? Imbeciles.

They also say, "no company can completely prevent unauthorized access to data" which is also very misleading, albeit no more misleading than many other statements that the computing industry likes to put out to excuse the failings in process and product that they inflict on the world. I wonder why software developers seem to rush out flawed products and services more often than other industries? When will it change?

I bought a mixer online from Dolphin Music last month. I bought it online because Millennium Music in town are too technologically-retarded to have a website that actually shows their stock levels, instead always claiming things are in stock when they are not. So I bought from someone who does actually have stock when they say they do.

The item arrived, and worked well. For a month. Then one of the meters broke, and I needed to send it back. "Ok, we'll arrange to collect it and have it sent back directly to the distributor for you", Dolphin said. I was pleased.

Then I noticed they charged me the £10 courier charge for this collection. Not impressed. But ok, I figure that until it's proven to be defective, it's understandable. I'll just claim it back at the end. I printed off the return label emailed to me, packaged it back up, and the courier duly collected it on time.

It's a week later today and I'd heard nothing more about this, so I contacted the distributor to see if they got my package. Apparently, they know nothing about the package, since Dolphin don't appear to have cleared a return with them. If they had tried, they would have been told not to have it sent to them, as the mixer manufacturers handle repairs and replacements themselves. The guy at the distributor is now going down to his 'Goods In' department to try and see if my mixer is sat neglected in a WTF-area somewhere and then attempt to forward it on to the manufacturer. Maybe I'll even get it back one day.

Fucking retarded. How hard can this stuff all be?

Not much news from me. Christmas didn't exist, but I did spend a few hours on the 29th visiting the family, or at least a subset of it, which I'll probably talk about in a separate post later. On New Year's Eve I went to Chris and Allan's, sans Allan, then ended up in the Salutation Inn, which was ok for the single reason that it's about the only place I could go that night where I'd be one of the younger ones rather than one of the older ones. I might have gone to Nick's, except he lives in Outer Mongolia which makes walking back impractical. I spent most of the rest of my holiday time sat at home playing Oblivion or Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.

Now I've been back at work for 1 and a half days and already I'm annoyed at the incompetence in one department holding me back. Verrrrry annoying. Imagine an architect telling the construction people to build an elaborately decorated wall in a certain place, and then later saying, "can't we have it 60cm to the left, please? Surely it can't be that hard... it's not like I want to change the actual wall or anything, just move it."

I finally got my CD that I ordered from Fuckers Online Caiman. When I remember, they're getting zero-rated feedback on Amazon. No sign of the book I ordered on the 15th of November though. I have a guitar pedal on order from somewhere else and hopefully that will arrive tomorrow, but we'll see.

Currently this year is looking much like last year, which was a poor version of the year before that really. Rather crap.

Yay, a thousand email delivery failure notifications in my inbox when I get home from work, all because some spammer decided to use a variation on my address in his forgeries. Conclusive proof that the POP3 email system is completely broken.

Anybody know who cpc2-stap3-0-0-cust697.nott.cable.ntl.com (82.5.62.186) is, or is likely to be?

I got my Korg PadKontrol today - I asked SoundControl for one, and they had one box left... which was empty... so apparently they sold one without the box. Ace. So I wandered down to Millennium Music instead, which I found was rammed with musical goodness. I could have spent hundreds there, but I managed to escape with just the PadKontrol and a cheap Behringer graphic equaliser guitar pedal. Anyway, the PadKontrol seems to work just fine, although several parts of the software supplied with it just don't work properly. Does nobody test anything any more?

After that, I started trying to practise some of the songs I wrote, because me and Allan are going to rehearse, in the practice rooms next door to Millennium Music no less. I can't remember how to play most of these songs, but then Allan can't remember how to play his drums either. This obviously bodes well for future practices. Chris can't come and play guitar because he's injured his hand and/or got to go to his parents, supposedly.

The other day, I was reminded that the way in which people use the Internet seems to have changed a lot over the last 6 or 7 years. Back in 2000 or so, people on the Internet tended meet people from different places, often through a common interest. But now, it seems to be used more as a way to keep in contact with your existing friends. Hardly anybody instant-messages random people to chat any more. Sites like Facebook are designed to reflect real-life networks of friends and facilitate communication between them. MySpace has no such bias, but is too technically poor to feasibly allow you to meet interesting people (unless 'interesting' is defined as 'looks hot in that user photo'). LiveJournal provides communities but supplies very little information about each one, making finding the good ones a bit hit and miss. Even online games, where you'd once meet many people from around the world and participate together, seem to have moved towards becoming places where people often play mostly with their real-world friends. This seems a bit of a shame to me.


And, it's still raining.