Archive for April, 2009
Tweeview
I’ve been mulling a new record review concept for the people I know on Twitter.
The ‘release date’ for Pain Is A Reliable Signal is May 19th which is in some amount of days. I think it’s three weeks from tomorrow. Team Clermont is already doing press for the record (ed note: and doing a damn good job of it, I might add). But I wanted to open up the record to a bunch more people and give away some digital copies in exchange for a little coverage in the Twitterverse.
So here’s the idea:
1. Email me or Direct Message me or just reply to me on Twitter and let me know you’re interested in a free copy of the record
2. I’ll give you the password to Media Kit section of the website which has all the press information you’ll ever need
3. In exchange, you’ll agree to write a review on your blog of the album or, at the barest minimum, just listen and then, on May 19th …
4. We’ll all tweet something about the record and use the hashtag #painisareliablesignal
Or something like that. Basically, the bottom line is that I’ll give a free copy of the record in exchange for a tweet the day of the release or a post on your blog. Let me know what you think.
Harsh Language
Honestly, I’ve never seen a National Hockey League team complain about harsh language from an oppposing team’s fans. This is hockey, right? None of these guys have teeth. And, yet, this is what we get from the Rangers as they’re being skated off the ice by the resurgent and resplendent Washington Capitals. A letter to the league saying the fans were very mean and loud and it wasn’t fair:
The letter charges that Washington fans yelled too loud, and that they made remarks about players being homosexuals — remarks no doubt bruising to the tender ears of New York hockey players. “Because of the way the glass is installed, the patron sitting behind Coach Tortorella (the gray-haired, bearded man in the white T-Shirt) could literally scream into the coach’s ear. According to Rangers trainer Jim Ramsay, one patron was screaming at the team, in graphic language, about whether Dan Girardi and Marc Staal have a sexual relationship. This was within earshot of several children seated nearby. Several other fans also made repeated homophobic remarks. Moreover, Mr. Ramsay reported that he and other bench personnel were spit on by one or more ‘fans’ as they yelled through the gaps in the glass.”
Listen, homophobia is disgusting. That’s pure, plain and simple. But, dude, seriously? Really? We’re sorry if the your team’s feelings were hurt. It is a tough game and sometimes the fans can be a little rude. We’ll try and clean it up when we Rock the Red on Tuesday. Geez.
The Benefits of Friction
For a long time there, the assumption was that the business models of the future required you to give everything you made away and hope that you could generate revenue tangentially by making what you gave away so compelling that people wanted to near you just because of how great it was (i.e. advertising). So many things became free.
Google led the way and stumbled into a model that was so profitable that they could give almost everything away all because they could sell ads next to the world’s best search engine. Google’s stock price seemed to indicate that if you weren’t giving it all away for free, you didn’t get it. You could never get the users and the eyeballs and the traffic you needed to truly scale.
One of the problems with giving things away for free but trying to make it up on volume is that you need truly enormous volume to really see the efficiencies of that kind of approach. So you’re compelled to seek out absolutely as much content as you can, index it, archive it, and then plead ignorance or fait accompli after the fact. Blow up the industry then say it was going to happen anyway. So Google has begun indexing most of the world’s books, already indexes the world’s newspapers, etc. Hype Machine skims illegally posted blogs on small websites and aggregates content never legally licensed. The necessity of the free model is that you have to feed the beast to drive the traffic you need and that beast wants good content. Wants to devour it.
My Own Little Sweatshop
Last night, Jeremy and Andy and I got together to help me put together press kits for the college radio campaign that is about to go into full swing. Putting these things together, especially the way I choose to do it, is a labor intensive process. Doing it without the assistance of some friends is a Kafka-esque process that sucks the soul out of you and instills a sense of despair and hopelessness that nobody should be forced to feel. (I tried on Wednesday. That plus the Caps loss was horrible. I almost had a nervous breakdown.) We’re talking usually 300-400 different kits either for a radio or a press campaign.
How Far We Could Go
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Follow-On EPs
Brian Hazard, of the Color Theory, wrote a pretty good recap of reasons to release follow-on EPs to traditional albums over at Music Think Tank. The biggest thing to come out of the article for me was the sites that he references to host remix contests Acid Planet and Remix Comps.
I’m really interested in having a lot of PIARS remixed to some dance and beat-heavy things so we’ll see if I can use some of those tools to accomplish just that.
I tend to think the biggest reason to release follow-on EPs is because the nature of digital technology will put more of an emphasis around episodic, segment-driven storytelling, like Steven Johnson talks about, and that necessarily will extend the concept of the album from one discrete moment in time (like a book) to a serial that unveils itself over a period of time, kind of like those monthly EPs that Bishop Allen released two years ago (or was it last year? ed note: it was three years ago actually).
