The Last Damn Time - new single out today

New single out today. If you like early Billy Bragg or Max Garcia Conover's solo stuff, this might be up your street.

Jailbreak! Revenge! Angry guitar!

Bandcamp: https://drewstephenson.bandcamp.com/track/the-last-damn-time

Streaming: https://ditto.fm/the-last-damn-time

Also rude word warning.

This is a standalone release and won't be part of the next album.

Celebrating indie* music

 Regular visitors to this site, both of you, might have noticed a couple of tweaks to site layout.

Firstly, at the top of the right-hand column you'll see a little widget called We Bring The Music.

This is an old-fashioned Web Ring. Click on the forward or back arrow and you'll be taken to another musician's website. Somewhere on that page you'll find another instance of this widget when you can step on to the next site in the ring. Or hit random and jump to some cool new music at the touch of a button.

Which brings me onto the next feature, directly below the Web Ring: The Indienet.

This is simply a list of websites or linktrees for a whole bunch of great musicians, mostly folks I've met on threads but there's some IRL friends in there too.

So next time someone bemoans the lack of new music, or that they just can't find it, point them to this page and let that do the heavy listening.

And in the meantime, just click a link and see where you end up.

* And by 'Indie' I mean really independent, not some post-brit-pop guitar-based sad boy pop.

Not that there's anything wrong with that of course.

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 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 Tom McRae 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 looking at any of the musicians in the Indienet list on the right of this page).

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