Courtney Love on "The Biz"

Out of the many musicians on the planet, Courtney Love is not who I expected to write such a brilliant article on the current state of the music business. It's a brilliant macro-level view of what's been going on in the last decade. Most importantly, she gets to the heart of the issue. Record labels are distributors. That's it.

And this was written back in 2000.

Without further ado:
http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2000/06/14/love

Of Unicycles and Songwriting

Unicycles seem magic. Somehow a stick with a wheel on it being used as a means of transportation seems inefficient. But it works. A good friend of mine decided to take up unicycling as a hobby (?) a year back and now regularly commutes to work on it. He wants to start a unicycle crew and roll around town clowning on those with two or more wheels.

Yeah.

To an outsider, unicycles seem magic. But really it doesn't take anything more than practice and strong knee pads. It's a skill. Sure, you can read articles on unicycling, watch youtube videos of professionals in action, or purchase "super high-quality" unicycle accessories to try and get better. But it's a skill. You get better at unicycling by unicycling

The same goes for songwriting.

Is it any surprise that the great songwriters of our generation have massive song catalogs? Sure, there's trash in all vast archives, but that doesn't matter when you create songs that become cultural touchstones. 

Let's get down and nerdy.

Think of song writing skill as a percentage of good songs, similar to a free throw percentage. Assume you've got a songwriting skill of 7%, meaning whenever you write a song you've got a 7% chance of it being "good" as determined by your audience. If you only write five songs a year, what are your chances of putting out a decent album? What if you write five songs a month? A week? 

What matters is both your songwriting skill percentage AND the number of attempts you make. There are limits to how good you can make your songwriting skill through laboring over a single song, studying, or otherwise avoiding writing songs. If you want to be good at a skill, practice it! This should not be hard for musicians to understand.

And as you increase the number of songs you write, you'll get better too. Going from five songs a year to ten songs a year gives you more practice writing, performing and editing these pieces, giving you a stronger idea of what a good song is and is not. You'll understand your strengths and weaknesses, and how best to leverage the talent you've got to create a memorable piece.

If you want to write good songs, write more songs. 

Being in a Band is Marriage

I was talking with another musician about dealing with band issues, and he let slip this little gem:

"Pfft, that's not bad. The only time my band gets along on stage. We're always fighting!" Then he smiled and laughed.

Wow. Isn't that appalling? Only on stage?

A few months back I watched as a strong, decent-pulling band imploded.  All the sweat, callouses, and brilliance poured into the band evaporated in a flash. It was band dynamics; corrosive personalities ate the band alive. It was terrifying.

This can happen to any band at any time... You can lose everything at any moment. This is a truth. 

A band is an artistic vessel that requires the strong cooperation of personalities. But creativity is disruptive by its nature. There will be conflict. And it is how you handle these conflicts that will determine your success or failure as a band. It's about relationships.

When you join a band, you're married. Instead of a wedding ring you get cheap beer, but it's a full-on wedding. You must understand your partner to have a successful marriage. Does your bassist have trouble with directions no matter where he's going? Does your guitarist get touchy when you talk badly of a band he likes? Does your singer smell really bad and scare off fans? Every person has their own personality quirks and habits that range from mildly irksome to a full on terror. Your decisions and actions must take these issues into account. The only security you have against a band breakup is how well you manage your relationships to keep everyone happy.

How do you get better at this?

1. Outside Learning

Start reading relationship advice and management columns/blogs. Study books on keeping your marriage strong (I'm not kidding!). Take a class at a community college on organizational behavior to learn the psychology of how people behave in groups. Anything to help you decode the dynamics of people interacting with one another can help you learn how best to handle drama when it shows up for a visit.

2. Inside Learning

Every issue you have is an experiment. You respond according to your hypothesis, and the result either confirms or disproves your hypothesis. Take notes on band issues, how you handle them, and the results of your actions. This is a fantastic opportunity to learn how to best manage your band mates, but it's sooooooo easy to ignore. If your bassist doesn't respond well to a direct criticism during practice, you now know you'll have to adjust how to talk about issues with them. Keep tinkering until you get the response you want, then take note of what works for future purposes.

A band is a marriage. If you want it to last, learn everything you can about your spouse and your relationship. It's all you've got keeping the ship afloat. 

Side Project: The Great Nothing

To blow off some creative steam while the The Golden Vine slowly coalesced, I decided to buy a bare bones copy of protools and put together an ambient / doom side project to give my OWM writing skills a rest. Sometimes the best way to get fire up your creative energy is to do something new and totally unrelated to what you're accustomed to do.

I'm very pleased with the result of this project, and I feel very revitalized to start writing for our next album already.

The Great Nothing is a 20 minute, four movement piece about the creeping of nihilism that haunts our steps towards improving the world. Time coldly erases all. It is about facing the part of ourselves that wants us to fail at any cost. It is a scary piece, for sure, but ends with hope. The fight can never be won but we must fight regardless, for all we have is our actions. We must be good.

We must be good.

In this song, I play using only guitars I've built (a doubleneck bass/guitar and a p bass), my voice droning, and sound effects from objects in my reach including a squeaky chair and a computer keyboard. I avoided doing multiple passes on each track to correct mistakes, it felt better with chopped and chipped notes. The musical lines are threads of thought, attempting to make sense of The Great Nothing, with imperfect results. No matter, minute details are of little importance. It's about the journey, and it's about the cause.

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This EP/really-long-song is best administered in a quiet room with headphones. I made the track downloadable so you can carry it to wherever would be best to listen to it.
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It's a personal journey.

I won't name the movements. I won't explain the stories behind each section. I won't impose any more meaning beyond what I've said.

Like all of life's experience, it's only you who can imbue it with ultimate meaning.

It's a personal journey.
====

http://soundcloud.com/derekowm/great-nothing

How NOT To Social Network

Myspace, as a medium for social networking, is useless. The signal to noise ratio has plummeted so low that there is essentially no point in trying to reach fans through MySpace. It's all comment spam, automatic "friending" programs, and bots. Most myspace comment boards look like this:

Do your fans really want to be spoken to in this way? What does it say about you as an artist if you use the same tactics that mass junk mail operations to reach them? Does ANYONE ever have meaningful conversations through this medium that lead to a minor fan to becoming a superfan?

Let's think about this. You are a musician, and you have limited time. Presumably, you are much better at music than most other things and should be spending most of your time on it if that's how you intend to create a career. As such, you should always be conscious of the return on your investments (ROI), whether you're spending time, money, trust, or fan attention (yes, it IS a currency). If you put in x amount of time putting up myspace comments, how do you expect this time spent to pay you back? If you're sending out spammed messages, you're spending time, attention, and trust.

Would it take 10 of these comment posting to lead to someone buying a song? Probably not. How about 100? A 1000? Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw a comment posted on a MySpace page and thought "Hmm, I should give these guys ten bucks" ?

Think on it.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

When you are choosing how you're going to market your music and talk to your fans, be very conscious of your ROI. You've got limited resources. When you spend, make sure that you'll be getting more back than you spent.

Unless, of course, you really want to get burned out and quit music forever. Then by all means spend frivolously!

"The Scene"

Grunge in Seattle during the 90s (now it's Indie Rock), Rap in Chicago and Atlanta in the mid 00s, Jazz in New Orleans since always, these are some of the famous scenes and sounds that define them. 


This didn't happen by accident. A "scene" is more often than not consciously created by similar bands who decided they wanted to make a difference.

"Power" in any industry comes from like-minded people helping each other out. Like it or not, humans are social creatures. Friends of friends are the primary engines of progress.

Why are you ignoring your community?

Communication

We compose our songs initially using tab writing software so we can write parts for everyone and play with more complicated ideas. Plus, it's fun to write parts you can't even play without massive amounts of practice.

In the process of passing around ideas, I noticed that some (what I thought were) seriously good ideas were flopping. It was frustrating, especially when I had that feeling of knowing this song was good.

So I began to ruminate, and after many cups of tea I realized something. We all saw the same music file, but only I got the full picture. I was hearing a different song than everyone else. Every time.

Although I wrote in a guitar part or a bass part, the rest of the instrumentation I didn't transcribe. Even though they were an integral part of the song, I assumed that the drum parts were obviously implied complements to the melody I wrote down. "Why bother writing them down? Everyone knows what I mean!" And another song would flop.

Bad assumptions kill communication. By not completely transcribing the music I heard in my head to the software program, I was effectively "spking n brkn st n o ne cld ndrstn me." Talking like that is not persuasive. Hearing incomplete, stuttering music tracks is not moving. It is not fair to your song to improperly communicate it.

Effective communication is clear. Don't mumble. Don't make assumptions. Spell it out.