Category: Music

CULTIVATE COMMUNITY

How do you make it as a musician in 2024? Have fans that you can reach.

On Spotify, I can’t reach the people who follow me—I have no idea who those people are, and I can’t communicate with them. I’m just on a playlist or an algorithm. But here on Substack, I’m cultivating a community.

Fog Chaser

Without fans, you don’t have a career.

OAVETTE LP

Glad I emailed an old bud the other day, because they sent me a link to this amazing album and I’ve been listening to it every day since.

I’ve been listening to a lot of electronic music the last few years, and I’ve always been a sucker for bands that do the repetitive loop stuff, and wow, Oavette hits a nerve for me.

It’s like I could watch this band play at an art gallery, you know?

DON’T GO BACK TO THE CRAP

I love this so much from “How Tiny Desk Concerts Became a pop culture phenomenon.”

Folk artist Laura Gibson felt deflated after her 2008 South by Southwest show in Austin, Texas. The Thirsty Nickel bar allowed noisy 6th Street revelers who didn’t purchase tickets to enter, and they had no interest in listening to the soft-spoken artist.

“Mid-set, I was like, ’Why did I drive all the way down to Texas … What am I doing with my life?” Gibson remembered. “I felt like ‘I really just want to go hide somewhere and cry.’”

Two folks from NPR were in attendance and offered Larua to come to their office and perform, and it became the first Tiny Desk Concert.

Laura had to go out and do something and it sucked. Yet she did, plowed through it, and it led to something else.

I think a lot of us had some great fun and success with social media back in the day, but then it sucked.

Laura (I hope) didn’t have to go back to play another shitty venue to keep her career going. She just moved forward, like I see a lot of other artists doing, leaving behind social media.

Yes, we made our connections, had some wins, but “going back to a shitty venue” isn’t how we’ll get to the next level.

(via Kottke)

SPACEPORT

Travel through space and futuristic dimensions while working from your computer terminal with this excellent release from Martin Stürtzer.

BLOGS AND MP3S

Here I am in 2024, reading a post linked from Kottke.org, and listening to my music files using an app called Swinsian.

Back in my music blog days I got a lot of samplers, pre-release CDs to check out before anyone else.

One of them was rough cuts and demos of ‘De-Loused In The Comatorium’ from The Mars Volta. I remember this on a CDR, shipped in a padded mailer. That was in 2003, before I moved to NYC. My goodness, this is a gem.

Bands used to post demo MP3s on their websites, too. I have a handful of those, too.

I’ve also got some files that don’t play, which I think maybe are tied to the iTunes store? Thankfully I don’t have too many of those.

THE OLD MUSIC WEB

We need to get back to this.

The site is still active, and some of the links still work, but wow, remember when local scenes used to have websites like this?

I also found this page called Escape. There are lots of broken links, but it is still a reminder of what old websites used to look like.

I love how innocent and pure this bit of text is:

“An amazing unofficial Mudhoney page. It has everything about them, their side projects, and other sordid details.”

Like, there was a time when you couldn’t read every interview a band ever did online, or see all the photos they posted on Instagram.

Makes me think I should start an un-official band page or two!

We are the creative professionals who base our entire careers on making things look interesting.

Why would we stop with our branding, our collateral material, and – for the love of God – our website?

We are in the world of visual excellence. We should make visual excellence the priority feature of our brand.

Don Giannatti