join in the buzz-creation experiments and win CDs...
Current mood: mellow
Category: Music

I'm doing a bit of fun research into how people find new music, and how fans and friends can best help spread the word and introduce people to the music they love.

the first two experiments are outlined on my blog if you want to join in:

the first is The Great Twitter-Buzz experiment, which clearly only works if you're on twitter. But if you are, join in, you might win something...

and the 2nd is The Great Last.fm-Buzz experiment. If you're on last.fm, you're help would be MUCH appreciated...

...so much so that there are lots of CDs to be won for those who help out the most, including advanced copies of stuff yet-to-be released, and live recordings that NO-ONE ELSE HAS GOT.

Yup, lots of very cool stuff, so join the fun, and I'll be publishing all the findings, so if you're a musician, follow the blog for tips and advice on how to spread the word.

cheers!

Currently listening : Burial By Burial Release date: 2006-09-12

3:53 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

3 Fab new Blog Posts Over at SteveLawson.net
Current mood: mellow
Category: Music

Been blogging lots over on my site - here are the last three that you might like to read:

:: Design Museum Gig Last Friday (posted 27/5/08)
:: Social Media Thoughts Pt 4: The Podcast (posted 27/5/08)
:: The Foolishness OF Copying Radiohead (or 'why poor people vote for lower taxes') (posted 5/6/08)

Enjoy - the podcast is well worth listening to, should you have a spare half hour, but do go and read about it on the blog too :)

I've been rather busy with non-musical things of late... if you were following me on Twitter, you'd know all about that!

ta ta xx

Currently listening : Third World By Dominic Miller Release date: 2005-03-22

8:36 AM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Social Media thoughts Pt 3 - the ongoing conversation...
Current mood: sleepy
Category: Music

So, from my own ill-formed thoughts on how to use Social Media as a way of connecting with an audience, I started reading more about the way other people were doing the same thing, and watching what other musicians did. There's been a lot of cross-pollenation, as musicians who've taken some of my ideas have gone further with them in a much shorter space of time than I ever have - Jeff Schmidt is a good example of this.

Jeff's got a pretty huge profile given the very short space of time in which he's been doing this solo bass stuff. He went from exploring solo bass ideas at a masterclass I was giving to winning international competitions and building an online fanbase in just a few months. A lot of his spread was via the social media of Myspace, his blog, bass forums and videos. His playing is at times really immediately impressive which got a lot of people embedding clips of his music in a 'wow, check this dude out!' kind of way, and word spread fast. A lot faster than it ever has for me online... And from his thinking about this stuff, I've picked up all kinds of great ideas and thoughts. Our ongoing conversations on how all this works, via blog comments, twitter and sporadic podcasting - as well as chatting whenever we get to meet up - are a vital part in how I process all this stuff.

Again, the information flow is non-linear - it's back and forth, it involves a lot of tributaries and cul-de-sacs and hours of mucking about and exploring what's happening. Both Jeff and I are having conversations with other people, and bring those to the table when we get together. His thinking on it is very much shaped by him having a pretty demanding day job, which frees him up in terms of making money from his music, but ties him down in terms of time spent on music-related stuff... And around us, we've built a growing community of musicians - many of them, not surprisingly, solo bassists - who are talking about and using this stuff.

Recently, something fundamentally shifted for me. I started to discuss my ideas on this with non-musicians. Twitter was a big catalyst in the beginning of this, starting to have mini-discussions with people who were actively integrating social media into their daily public dialogue. From there, I discovered about the London Social Media Cafe, and started to have weekly conversations with people from other businesses and artistic disciplines about how the conversation enables us to do what we do, and find an audience, clients, business partners, inspiration and resources.

The format of the Social Media Cafe is so simple, a room is booked upstairs in a pub, a load of curious people turn up, drink coffee, eat croissants and chat about social media stuff. Sometimes it's about making friends and feeling less isolated. Sometimes it's about getting work. Sometimes it's about helping other people process their thoughts on a particular subject. Sometimes it's about giving and receiving encouragement. Or having a sounding board. And it's all about the Moo Cards. :)

The founder, Lloyd Davis, is very much the personality archetype for the SMC - he's curious, creative, tech-savvy, self employed as a social media consultant and enabler... and loves a good natter!

What is clear from the SMC (and the spin-off gatherings, like the fantastic Creative Coffee Club) is that the level of thinking and dialogue that goes on is pretty much the leading edge of thinking on the subject of social media and it's relationship to work, innovation, entrepreneurship, the arts, creativity etc. - certainly that I've ever come across. I've listened to keynote speeches from expos and new media gatherings around the world and often things that are presented as revolutionary and new in those settings are just taken as read at the SMC and are part of the way we daily live. If I worked for a media agency or corporation, I'd be biting Lloyd's hand off to pay for access to the collective minds of the SMC! I can't imagine a better group to bounce ideas off, or get feedback from. The various sponsors of the Friday morning get togethers understand this.

The other key part of it for me has been about reinvention - a lot of my geek friends that I've known for years have watched me go from a website with scrolling text and animated gifs with a blog just written in HTML, through all of my new media mistakes and false starts, and so are less likely to be invigorated by my take on Social Media. They've heard all of my thoughts in their ill-formed half-baked state and as such, hear what I'm saying now in that light. That's a useful thing, in that it stops me from thinking I'm the business when in fact I'm just writing up here what happens in my life, but it does mean that taking the more refined, nuanced, considered version of it into an environment where the tall bloke with the big hair and furry coats is a new face on the geek-scene is a good testing ground for it as a body of thought.

I'm getting to abstract from a musical context the principles behind the social media interaction discussion and instead of solo bass, to talk about film or books, computer games or education, and see how those scenarios throw light on the process, on the concept, on the whole area of looking at the failure of broadcast media to engage an audience, and the need for pathways of interaction between 'content providers' and consumers.

Another key piece in my thinking on this over the last 6 weeks or so has been David Jennings brilliant book Net, Blog And Rock 'n' Roll, which is a wonderful look at the way that people find information and how that plays out on the web in relation to music. I'll not write a full review yet, as I still haven't finished it, but suffice to say it is utterly vital reading for anyone thinking about this stuff, from any field.

So, what's the value in the SMC/CCC/Social Media Geek-world for me then? Well, it works on many many levels. It's a test-bed for ideas, it's a place where I get to contribute to other people's conversations, as well as starting my own. My, uhm, esoteric place as a musician makes for a great perspective provider, in that I'm clearly never looking to make millions, but am fiercely protective of my own creative space. I'm a good foil for conversations about the place that 'meeting the needs of a market' takes in any business/marketing plan, and maybe that will spill over into some consulting work on that.

I'm also able to collect stories and info from all these various worlds that are hugely useful for talking to music students about this stuff. I'm really looking forward to doing more university sessions on this, and helping music students plan a strategy of engagement, of interaction, of story telling and 'real' buzz-building around their music. I'm getting enquiries now from people wanting me to go and talk to their bands about this, which will be a lot of fun too!

And on top of all that, I've met a load of really amazing people, who inspire and energise me, who challenge me to up my game, and who encourage me. As well as a whole new load of listeners to my music - that last bit alone makes a lot of this worthwhile, but is actually just an added bonus!

So where do I go from here? I keep talking, keep sharing stories, keep helping musicians, keep learning from the mega-minds at the SMC/CCC/London geek world community, and carry on making the best music I can!

Currently listening : Cure for Pain By Morphine Release date: 1993-09-14

11:54 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Social Media Thoughts Pt 2 - The Playground Of The Curious.
Current mood: sleepy
Category: Music

I wrote off the idea of chasing a record deal before I even put out my first album. After a series of pretty uninspiring encounters with labels via artists I was working with in the 90s, and the simple fact that as far as I could see, no-one was making any money via a label playing solo bass, I decided before my first album that I'd do it all myself.

Back then, there was a lot of nebulous, unfocussed talk about how the internet was going to change everything, but so much of the traffic that musicians were getting back then was as a result of there being precious little about music online. As an example, I was the only bass teacher in Europe with a website for over a year when I first set my site up, and would get student enquiries from all over the continent, from bassists wanting to fly to england for lessons!

The bass-stuff on the web was pretty limited, and as I had a site, was teaching at a London music college, was involved with The Bottom Line (by far the biggest bass-related web-thing around in the 90s) I had a profile. So when I put up some real audio files (real audio!!) of my first solo gig, it got a surprising amount of traffic and interest. Not because it was the greatest thing ever (only some of it was ;) ), but just because of the huge amount of novelty-driven, bass-related web traffic that was passing through my site. If I gave people something to do online for half an hour that felt vaguely worthwhile, then my site validated the time they were spending on this great new toy of theirs.

But the tools weren't really in place to build a career online, just a reputation. However, it was a great environment in which to forge a model for dealing with promoting hard-to-pigeonhole music online - the model being one of curious play - whenever I came across something new, I jumped in and had a play. I chatted to the current users of a particular forum or chatroom, I posted music clips on MP3.com (where unbeknownst to me, Lobelia was racking up over a million plays!) and splashed around in the web-pool, looking for interesting things to happen...

So as social media evolved, my play-approach helped me - along with a whole load of other musicians disillusioned with 'the mainstream' - fairly unconsciously develop a way of engaging with my audience via conversation, interaction and availability, rather than broadcast, spam and rock-star seclusion. Again, web forums had been doing this for a while, and I had hosted a forum at talkbass.com in their 'ask the pros' section for ages, but Myspace, commentable blogs and self-hosted forums started to make that kind of conversation portable to our own branded space via the comments option.

I remember in the early days of MySpace hearing the rumours that some big name musicians were actually running their own myspace pages, and being nonplussed by everyone's surprise. Why wouldn't David Byrne or Robert Smith or Peter Hook or whoever want to communicate direct with their audience? The problem for them was that Myspace got so big that the interaction become meaningless when they received thousands of comments a day. The smart ones started blogging on Myspace, and eventually (years after the novelty value had passed) myspace started promoting celeb blogs... (even then, a lot of musicians kept writing their blogs in the third person, as though a PA was doing it for them, not getting how important it is for audiences these days to hear your story in your voice...) Blog comment threads became a great way for big name artists to 'host' the discussion about their thoughts and writing without having to answer individual queries and comments.

The big mistake that so many musicians make with Social Media is to see it as a stop-gap, as what you do 'until you make it', as the thing that bands do who can't get 'a proper deal'. The lure of becoming a millionaire rock star is still so inexplicably strong that it blinds most pop and rock musicians to the opportunity staring them in the face to bypass all that other BS altogether.

The bit they've got lost in is the feeling that broadcast is where its at, is the measure of success, rather than grasping that all but the most refined of broadcast media have an incredibly low recognition ratio for stuff that's played in the people listening. The simple fact is that I've sold WAY more CDs to the coupla hundred people who've seen me play in, say, Petersfield in Hampshire, than I have to the hundreds of thousands who've heard me on The Late Junction on Radio 3 - a show that's been playing my music pretty regularly over the last however many years.

What Social Media allows artists to do is have the kind of in-depth conversations that previously could only happen at live events, with their audience in their own homes. If I post here on the blog, the people who are interested in what I do can read it and understand what I do in a way they're never going to get from the lovely Verity and Fiona giving it a 15 second intro at midnight on the radio. And with so much music the story around the music is what gives it context, and provides and entry point for the audience, an understanding of where the artist sees their music. painters, photographers and sculptors have been contextualising their work within narratives for years, but for any music that is assumed to be in some way 'pop' music, it's tough to get people to do the digging. Social media allows us to place the conversation about what we do right alongside the art itself, inviting responses, questions and discussion.

The future for musicians is in the artist/audience conversation and interaction that social media facilitates. And this is a concept that is now spilling over into business and PR and Marketing and even politics... but that's Pt III. :)

12:28 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Social Media thoughts Pt 1 - my background and history.
Current mood: tired
Category: Music

The last couple of months have been a really interesting time for me in terms of getting to experiment with, understand and conceptualise about the world of interactive web tools refered to as 'Social Media'. Next week is the first London Social Media Cafe Musicians get together (we need a new title!) - so I thought I'd throw in some thoughts on social media and music over the next few days:

It's not as if the idea is new - I've been interacting, networking and building knowledge about what I do as a musician on the web since the late 90s via email discussion lists (I joined The Bottom Line in early '98, I think), forums (been on talkbass since early 2000, IM and music chatrooms. But two things have changed drastically since then - firstly an understanding, both academically and amongst users, of 'social networking' as an enterprise in its own right, and secondly the range of tools and web resources to make it happen.

A lot of what's happening now was happening in a secondary way ages ago - your profile page on a web forum wasn't that different, conceptually, from your Myspace page, but no-one thought of it in that way. Very few people sought to build an identity there and promote it as a site to visit to find out what they were into. There was no social capital in directing people to your talkbass.com profile page, for example.

Myspace was one of the first to really go huge with the whole Social Networking thing, and invert it from the web forum thing - they made it possible (in a hideously clunky way) for people to build their own page as a shop front for the world, and then to promote that via the various groups on the site, which all had message boards and discussion sections. The groups and forums on myspace have been a relative failure, for a number of reasons - firstly, the design is horrible, but more importantly, Myspace has always been about branded space: people customising their page to make it say something about them. The hook-up with music and bands was what sent them over the edge - they weren't the best by any stretch, and are no hopelessly behind the game in every conceivable way, they just have 150 million registered users. That helps!

So I got a myspace page in late 2005, and started to search for people who were listening to people I liked, and add them as friends. I did this with about 3-4000 people, over a period of almost a year, with fairly diminished returns. I sold a few CDs as a result, and the general level of awareness of what I do in the bass community was certainly heightened, but it was a scattershot approach, and crucially, when I finally realised that MySpace worked best as an interactive media, not a broadcast one, I was left with a completely unmanageable, uncategorisable list of people I knew very little about, with no way of grouping them geographically, or by their level of interest (I couldn't tell who'd added me and who I'd added). So my Myspace page, en masse, is still a pool of hideously underused potential, thanks to the completely rubbish way the site itself makes data available. I did a fairly major purge at one point, deleting a couple of thousand 'friends' who weren't interacting and appeared to have nothing in common with what I was doing, but the numbers are now back up close to 8000...

The other social network I joined before Myspace was Last.fm - a much more focussed site, infinitely better designed, MUCH harder to spam, and built to slowly proliferate music that is considered 'good' by the regular users. Thanks to me getting in early on last.fm, my music is heavily tagged and associated with some fairly well-listened artists, so my music crops up on a relatively high number of people's personal radio stations there.

Fast forward 3 years, and I now have a 'portfolio' of social networks, including Myspace, Last.fm, ReverbNation, Facebook and Twitter. I'm still involved in a few discussion forums, but largely, I prefer the friend/contact culture of social networks to the bear-pit/lowest common denominator world of most web forums.

For musicians, the onset of the 'Social Media Age' has meant an end to the tyranny of broadcast media, to our potential career and audience being in the hands of record execs, radio and TV programmers and big concert agents. We can build relationships with our audience, talk to them, ask for their help spreading the word about music they love, and also help out the musicians we love. The traffic is now moving in every direction, from us to fans, from fan to fan, from fan to us, and even via facebook from our non-music friends and family, to their friends as they use their connection with 'real musicians' as social capital on their facebook profile. The flow of information has been somewhat democratised, and the potential for us is huge.

I've been talking about this in universities and colleges for a couple of years now, and in the last few months have had the chance to start to conceptualise about Social Media with curious participants and thinkers from other worlds - from the mainstream media, from business, from hi tech industries, from marketing companies - via the various networks of geeks, primarily the weekly marvels that are the London Social Media Cafe and Creative Coffee Club - but that's part 2...

6:11 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

"Nobody owes you their attention" - thoughts on multi-act gigs and audiences...
Current mood: mellow
Category: Music

Miriam and Jez again


Originally uploaded by solobasssteve

Currently listening : High By The Blue Nile Release date: 2004-08-31

7:14 AM - 7 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment

A new review... of ’And Nothing But The Bass’??
Current mood: mellow
Category: Music

It's amazing what you can find looking at your web-stats - I was browsing through mine, seeing who had linked back to this site, and found a review just posted on a blog in January of this year, of And Nothing But The Bass (my first album, for those of you a little late to the party).

A little browsing round the blog in question - jamscience.blogspot.com - showed that it was a review that the writer, Ian Peel, had written for Record Collector magazine!

So those of you that have the CD of And Nothing But The Bass - whether you paid for it, or picked up a free copy at the Social Media Cafe on Friday - have a genuine collectors item in your possession! :)

Anyway, you can click here to read the full review. The choice quote from it, that will be appearing on a poster near you soon, is "one of the most gifted solo bass players on the planet" which is always a useful thing to have for a press release. :)

If you want to listen to And Nothing But The Bass, you can do so at last.fm, or you can buy the download version with the extra tracks mentioned in the review, from the online shop here, or from Amazon, or from Cdbaby...

10:15 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

MAJOR website overhaul... phew!
Current mood: accomplished
Category: Music

Hello lovely MySpacelets,

I have much to blog about (in all likelihood it'll appear there before it appears here), but the delay has come because I've been doing a MASSIVE remodeling job on my website and blog...

If you head over to stevelawson.net, you see a complete redesign - much cleaner and easier to navigate - and integrated into it is my blog, now at stevelawson.net/blog. It was hosted externally for years but a wonderful and marvellous geek-buddy, but it seemed to make sense to bring everything in under one roof and manage it all myself - there's only so many hours a geek can be expected to spend fixing my blog design disasters in exchange for curry...

But anyway, I'm v. happy with it, and stevelawson.net is now the true hub of all things Stevelicious on the interwebs. The Shop over there has had a new lick of paint too, and again is much easier to get around (and provides links to the other places you can get my stuff as well), and the stevelawson.net forum has also been upgraded, ready for lots more fascinating threads and discussions... it's been a little quiet of late, largely due to neglect from me, so feel free to call in and blow away the cobwebs :)

And, as you already know, Twitter is still at the heart of so much of my online interaction with lovely interesting people - there's even a Crowd Status Solo Bassists page so you can find out at a glance what all the solo bass monkeys on there are up to... Though it'd make more sense to just sign up and follow us all, then you can join the conversation...

So please, head over and have a look at the new website, let me know if you find any bugs (it took me two days to iron out the problems with viewing it in Internet Explore - if you're using IE, STOP!! FFS, get Flock instead, it's fabulous, it works, and it does ruin the lives of web designers like IE does... please, just, stop...)

2:48 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Gig news and New track!
Current mood: mellow
Category: Music

I've added a bunch of gig dates to my Reverb Nation page (sorry, I will add them to MySpace ASAP!)

Anyway, the first of the gig is THIS SUNDAY in London, with Patrick Wood and Roy Dodds. We've jjust finished an album together, which will be out ASAP, and I've added one of the tracks to my Reverb Nation page too!

If you're already on my mailing list, you'll be able to just click play (you might have to log in first). If you're not, join the mailing list, and you can hear it!

If you join the mailing list, you can also download the free album there.

Hope to see you at one of the gigs! Happy listening!

5:31 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Etiquette for soliciting press-quotes from people...
Current mood: mellow
Category: Music

I've been asked a few times lately to give quotes to people to use for promo purposes, so I thought it would be a good time to offer some thoughts on the process. Largely because it's something I've done myself from time to time, and continue to do when the conditions are right...

Firstly, it's worth thinking about why we do this, and what value it carries as a promotional tool. Like most promo ideas, it has nowhere near as much influence as we'd like to think, but it can provide context for people who have found our websites or press-packs via other routes, and can also be good for putting on posters and flyers. The value lies in a few different areas -

• firstly in the quote itself; having anyone say that you're a badass is helpful, especially if it provides some context as to how they think you're a badass - some kind of stylistic reference, a particular skill they are into etc.
  
  
• Secondly, there's the association with that artist - if fans of artist [a] see that they are a fan of you, they may well be inspired to check you out. More often than not they won't, unless artist [a] is actively promoting what you do, but a few will...
  
  
• and Thirdly, quotes are most useful en masse - have a body of evidence from different sources provides people with a framework for understanding your place in the scheme of things.

• I never ask anyone for a quote who hasn't already expressed - privately or publicly - a positive opinion about what I do. Cold-calling someone you've never had any contact with is not only bad manners, it's a recipe for getting either criticism or worse, a lame half-quote that will ultimately make you look like an amateur (no one wants to read a lame quote about you, no matter who said it - you'd be better off getting one from your high-school music teacher or your mum than that).
  
• I never quote anything said to me in a conversation, without getting permission in writing, and offering the person a chance to write something else instead.
  
• if I'm re-quoting what someone has said about me elsewhere, I try and give context for it.
  
• When asking someone who has previously liked what I do for a quote about a new product, I explicitly let them know that I'm totally fine with them not saying anything if they don't like it, or don't want to say anything about it.
  
• My default is to expect to not get a quote. If I do, and all the conditions are right I'll use it.
  
• I never push people on it - I have a fair few musician friends who've expressed a liking for what I do in person, some of whom have offered to give me a quote, who I never pressure for them. They may happen in time, but if they don't, my career isn't built or crushed on whether or not some bassist or whatever says what I do is cool....
  

• If I really like what you do, I've probably sent you one already - I spend a large amount of my online time putting the word out about music I love. And by love I mean 'love', not 'music by people who might be able to do favours or who are just mates of mine but aren't very good'.
  
• As a recommender of music, I'm building a brand, a brand that I actively protect from the accusation that I'll give a quote to anything. So my default for people who ask is 'no', just because I only push things I think are fantastic. It's like my policy for inviting people to play at Recycle Collective gigs - only my most favouritest musicians are in there. I might like what you do, but just not be into it enough to put my weight behind it (and, to be honest, a quote from me REALLY isn't worth that much...)
  
• That said, I'm very much aware that there are a growing number of people who DO buy albums that I recommend (most of my recommendations are made either here, on my forum or via my Twitter music recommendation feed, To The Left Of The Mainstream - if you find your music on TTLOTM, I REALLY like it, and am willing to put whatever reputation and credibility I may have behind it.
  
• Getting a random email out of the blue asking me 'for a quote' that you can use, without having any idea whether I'm remotely into what you do puts me in an awkward position. I'm left with four options - I can lie and say I love it, I can give you a weedy quote that means nothing, I can email you and tell you I don't like it, or I can ignore it and not reply. None of those are ideal, and certainly none of those are likely to get me to do what you want, even if I like what you're doing. A little interaction first, and maybe even asking for my honest opinion privately might make more sense than a 'hey' gimme a quote. I'm well aware that a lot of people aren't going to like what I do. Same goes for what you do. I may not like it. That doesn't mean I don't like you, and it doesn't mean you're rubbish, it just means it's not my kind of thing, and would be misleading for me to be pointing people towards what you do.
  

10:22 AM - 2 Comments - 5 Kudos - Add Comment