Return of the Superhero

 Well, I appear to be out of Spotify-bot-jail and my stuff is being shared again so it's time to for Superhero to be re-released on all the streamers.

Smart link thingy: https://ditto.fm/superhero_b25dc403

Get yourself some politically-relevant orchestral funk in your life.

You know you want to.

Further thoughts on AI and being a DIY songwriter

This started as a post on Threads but as usual I rambled on a bit so I've consolidated it all here:



A couple of things happened over the last couple of days that got me thinking about AI and music in a slightly different way. 

Firstly, I dropped into my free Spotify account to check a couple of things and left it running for a bit. Track after track of AI music. Utterly predictable, utterly forgettable, mindless background noise. All relevant to my genre and preferences but as interesting as a plate of boiled white rice.

Then yesterday I opened Tidal while I was at work and put on a new release playlist. Again, mostly in my genre or area of interest, no AI content that I could immediately recognise but, with a couple of honourable exceptions, equally uninspiring.

The voices all sound similar. The guitar sounds are all generic. The rhythm never varies from its grid-aligned 4/4 tempo. The subject matter is always the same.

Polished to a perfectly smooth grain of boiled white rice.

And sure, on some of these tracks the chord progressions might have a bit more variety, and on an individual level the there might be a bit more variety in the song structure. But as a collective it was as bland as the AI stuff. 

Music by numbers.

Written by a committee.

Aimed at a playlist.

Finished in a factory.

Sold as a commodity.

Before I go any further, I'm not one of these folks who thinks that good music stopped in the 70s or that there are no great artists and performers out there nowadays.

There absolutely are across the whole range and scale of music spectrum. But we know them because of their humanity, their personality, their genuine attitude...

And this is, for all of us, good news I think.

It's good news because all of us have these things. We are all unique individuals with personality, attitude and humanity. We have our own experiences, tragedies and triumphs. We have our own stories to tell.

Which means the solution to a diet of anodyne, factory fresh, noise-masquerading-as-music is simple, and available to everyone. 

You don't have to change platform or pay extra.

Just find an indie / DIY act and put their music on. It might not be as polished, maybe not be as perfectly performed, it might not make you part of a social movement, but it will provide that honest human connection.

Music, as @tommcraemusic has said, is an emotion transfer machine. But that can only work if it starts with emotion in the first place. Otherwise we're filling our bellies with the all nutritional content of a bowl of boiled white rice.

Stuffed full and starving to death.

The good music is out there. Honest, human, flawed, and overflowing with real emotion and experience. It's on your favourite platforms, just waiting to be found, just waiting for the story to be told. (You could start by searching for any of the musicians in my Threads following list).

This turned into an essay, sorry about that but the TL:DR is that AI isn't a threat, not really. No more than the major labels have been for the last 20 years. 

The only threat is getting sucked in. 

Don't. 

Go be you.

P.S.1 Someone commented on Threads that a lot of people think that a 'professional' production is one that is polished or perfect. But if you try this approach you'll often end up with something sterile and plasticised. A real pro takes all those rough edges and highlights just enough of them to let the magic come through.

P.S.2 The corollary to this is about who your real audience is. It can be easy to think that if, like me, you make very middle-of-the-road music then AI might be stealing away your listeners / royalties.

I posit that it isn't.

Because much as we songwriters, musicians and composers would love that it wasn't so, most people just don't care that much about music. They really don't.

Which means the folks who are happy with AI music chugging along in the background were never going to be your fans.

They were never going to sign up to the mailing list of an unknown artist. They were never going to head out to a toilet-circuit venue on a rainy night to see you play. They were never the people you should be focusing on. Sure if you have some success they'll come along for the ride. Until the ride stops, and then they'll find the next thing. 

So don't worry about them. 

Not one bit.

A milestone and a few thoughts on streaming

Music streaming gets a lot of shit. And a big helping of that is very fairly earned.

But it's important not to forget that there is a positive side to the new paradigm as well.

As someone who teetered on the brink of getting into the old world, and failed (twice), I have a bit of perspective.

A few years ago, couple of decades maybe, we talked hopefully about 'the democratisation of music'. And a lot of what we hoped for has come true.

Capable hardware and software is cheaper than ever, and a website and Bandcamp page are all you need to share your message and sell your music.

But the biggest challenge remains the same now as it was then: how to get your music in front of potential fans?

And obviously this is the bit where we've effectively built up the same systems of gatekeeping, twisted incentives and dubious companies with unethical practices.

Who'd have thought?

But this is about the positive side of things.

This week one of my songs tipped over the 10,000 plays threshold on Spotify.

Small numbers for some, but for a DIY artist on the wrong side of 50, with zero marketing budget, this is actually quite a big deal.

That's thousands of plays, to over a thousand listeners, that simply never would have happened in the old model.

That song might, maybe, with a lot of luck, made it into and out of a studio as a demo track.

But then it would have withered away on a batch of unsold CDs in a gig bag somewhere.

Instead it's been out in the world, living its best life, slowly racking up plays over the last 10 months. And hopefully giving a few of those people one of those special moments only music can provide.

Yes, the streaming model has serious flaws, but sometimes something is better than nothing.

And here's a link if you want to make it 10,001

https://open.spotify.com/track/5Jc22YCGEGxMx9H3lNcEVP

New Single - The Vessel

 Well, after the distributor shenanigans mentioned in the last update I can now confirm that The Vessel is on track to be released to all streaming services on 27 November.

Superhero will probably follow in the new year, but for now, here's a little bit about how The Vessel came to be...

I was at a songwriting retreat a few years ago and one of the exercises we were given was to write a song about our identity.
As a middle-class, educated, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical, white male who grew up all over the place I realised that I didn't identify as anything.
Basically I'm so vanilla I'm beige. Average height, average weight, average male-pattern hair loss...
I am the default and the western world is designed for and around me.
This is the song I wrote about that...
My good friends Martin Walker and Eddy Deegan join me on this one to add some actual talent, and Martin took on the mixing duties.

EDIT: And here's the smart-link thingy for the streaming platform of your choice: https://ditto.fm/the-vessel

Of bots and takedowns and unbalanced connections...

 If any of  you have jumped onto your favourite streaming service over the last week or so, hell bent on streaming Superhero, then you'll probably have wondered where the track has disappeared to.

Well on 30 October I received a message from my distributor* saying that some suspicious streaming activity had been detected and giving me three days to provide an explanation whilst they investigated.

I replied saying that I had no extra insight and that appeared to be sufficient for their investigation as the next day the track was taken down.

Now I'm going to go ahead and guess that the platform that was affected by the dodgy streams** (almost certainly bot-related) was Spotify as that's where almost all of my listeners are. However my distributor has removed the track from all platforms.

The whole process is draconian and punishes third parties (the creators) but removing the track from other services seems particularly unnecessary.

This is, by the way, not in the least bit unusual. Music communities on social media are full of stories just like this and by now I would suggest that this has probably happened to more artists than not.

But right now, not only has Superhero been taken down, but my account has also been suspended. So The Vessel is unlikely to be released on 13 November. And that brings me to the crux of my bitching today.

And that's the fact that my distributor took less than 24 hours to take my music down but has so far taken 5 days to completely fail to respond to my questions or my support ticket. 

Fairly basic questions like:

How long with the track be blocked?

Will my next (in progress release) be blocked? And if so for how long?

When will my account be un-suspended?

And so far... 

::: crickets :::

This is vexing. The distributors (for there are a few that engage in this behaviour) are so keen on maintaining the relationship with their partners (Spotify et al.) that they've forgotten who their actual paying customers are.

And this is the unbalanced connection (pun very much intended). They can forget this relationship because, as in so many cases in the creative industries, the power equation is fundamentally imbalanced.

Just as literary agents can ignore their inboxes and never reply to the bulk of their applicants (who would become their source of income) because they control access to the publishers, so too can the distributors ignore their paying customers because they control access to the platforms.

Which leaves us, the creators, with only one option. Remove our content from those distributors and try and find an alternative that better understands the importance of serving their customers.

So expect to find certain tracks unavailable at various points over the next couple of months as I go about trying to find a distributor with a more balanced operation.

I'll provide an updated release date for The Vessel when I have one.

* You can't go direct to companies like Spotify and Tidal to add your music to their platforms, you have go through this wonderful gatekeeping mechanism called a distributor. 

** A dodgy actor loads up some of their own tracks (probably AI generated these days) sticks them in a playlist and then randomly adds some other tunes as 'filler' to make it look a bit less suss, then they point a load of bot accounts at the playlist to goose their royalties. I find it hard to believe that this actually makes any money but there seems to be enough people doing it that it must pay back in some form.