Whelp, it’s official: Bone Walker has now outsold all other work combined on Bandcamp.

I was going to post today that we were really close to doing that, that Bone Walker was going to outsell everything else its first month of release, but then I didn’t even have time and it’s already happened! So thanks to all of you who’ve bought it, and if you haven’t, go give it a listen already.

And then last night The Dead Kennedys linked to the band blog from their facebook page (no, really), which is pretty much in my top ten of “things I never anticipated saying.” That was kind of neat by itself, and then I was all, “Wait, this means the Dead Kennedys have heard of me” and wow that is also not a thing I expected to happen. Thanks, whoever did that!

Oh, and last Sunday, Anna and I went out to the Seattle Geekly studios and recorded an interview for their last podcast. That might go up tomorrow, I think. Fun!

Anyway, so, yeah! Exciting week!

I’ve made a new landing page for people who specifically click on little trade ads I have with a few places. What do you think?

Remember, this isn’t the ad – it’d be hopeless as an ad. It’s what people who have already clicked on an ad see. So we can assume they have some interest out the gate. I’m also kind of assuming they’re readers, since that’s where these ads generally are anyway.

I feel like it’s certainly too wordy but I’m not seeing how to chip it down at the moment. I’d like to lose at least one line.

We’re getting the mailing list back together!

We have a mailing list. It’s a monthly newsletter, and sometimes we give away list-only things, like we seriously just did today. In this case it’s a fan remix of Kaiju Meat that Russ Birch did, and it’s even crunchier and stompier than ever, and list subscribers get it.

I’m going to work harder on getting and keeping that thing together, too. Plans are afoot, and hopefully there will not be any further interruptions on that front, and we’ll have things to talk about. So, yeah, be a minion, get prizes, everybody wins.

PS: Vancouver was fun, as always. HI OLIVIER!

I printed up a short run of special Bone Walker editions which include a “radio edit” version of “Anarchy Now!” It’s FCC-safe (via dropping out lyrics), for places where that matters. Otherwise there’s no difference.

All of those are going out today. Mostly they’re going to Cascadian stations; however, I only made one package type, and there are a few stations in the US and one in Canada getting it, so everybody gets the radio edit. Hey, why not? Dick Tracy Must Die got some airplay in London and Auckland, maybe Bone Walker could too.

But! I have a couple left over. So if you have a personal in of some sort at a local, actually independent radio station that you think might play something from Bone Walker – a college station, something noncommercial, things like that – throw me some mail with details. We’ll co-ordinate, and I’ll get them a copy of the one-sheet and the CD.

I’ve been thinking more about Google/YouTube’s new music streaming service terms – the ones that require your whole library, that require 320bps source, that require five year terms, and so on. I wrote about it last week, talking about how Google is letting the old labels dictate away crowdfunding rewards and the like.

But I’ve been doing more thinking since that. It’s been churning in my brain. And I’ve realised the five-year term, the 320bps requirement, and whole library thing have a combined intent.

And that intent is to take away literally every last music sale you might make. As in, every last music sale.

It’s not presented as such, of course. I think they want artists to think of it as radio that pays. But two of the big streaming service problems have been 1. quality (smaller concern) and 2. stability of material (huge concern). All the television streaming services, for example, have been plagued by shows getting yanked on and off and moving around. Customers find that annoying.

Meanwhile, you have the label involvement, discussed before. They were, from all reports, pretty tightly into this new set of terms. And one of the big problems for the labels the last several years has been the rise of indie artists. The crowdfunding/long-tail model has given indie artists something more to live on, ways to make money outside of the label ecosystem.

This solves both sets of “problems.” Think about it:

Google will have everything you do for five years, listen-anytime, at functionally CD quality. They’ll have everything, and they’ll have it first, at optimal quality. What’s that mean?

It means Google/YouTube Music service members will have no reason to buy any goddamn thing from any artist which is on the service. No more early-access advantages to entice crowdfunding backers. No more deep tracks on albums to discover. No more alt-takes, no more remixes, no more mailing-list exclusives – Google will have it all. Not exclusively, of course! But they’ll have it.

If I’m reading this right, then even if you hold out on them – you don’t upload some tracks, in violation of the agreement – if and when somebody else does, and they identify it as yours, they’ll add it to the service automatically. Tell me I’m wrong (even though I’m not) because that’s what this sounds like:

So even if you don’t explicitly deliver us every single song in your catalog if we have assets and they are fingerprinted by content ID to contain that music then it will be included to the subscription service…
        — Zoë Keating’s Google rep., in conversation with Zoë

Which means there’s no more reason to buy anything from you. No reason for anyone to deal with you at all.

Five years is a long time. There will be no long tail – at least, not for you. It’s all going to them. Five years is also plenty long enough to keep you locked in once you figure all this out. And five years is more than long enough to try to make this the new standard.

That’s the point of this whole contract. To take everything else away, and thereby, to reinstate a kind of 1971, one managed by making both unlimited internet distribution and piracy completely irrelevant.

I have to say – it’s brilliant. It end-runs around the post-scarcity environment entirely, by co-opting it. The pirates and illegal uploaders will make sure your entire catalogue is up there, even if you hold out, and it’ll be included whether you like it or not – it’s genius!

Meanwhile, they’re “giving the music away” so you can’t make any money on it, stopping you from being able to reward patrons and backers so you can’t make any money there either, and tossing you a sharecropper’s pittance in ad revenue as a reward. And even that is a pittance you can never hope to make on your own. You don’t – and can’t – have the numbers.

It’s a plan that takes away the entire internet/indie route as they understand it. It’s to make them – both the old labels and Google, in alliance – the only viable path. It’s a plan to make it so that once again, you have to go through them.

And we all know what that has always meant, don’t we?

Run. Run like hell.
 
 
Additional Reading:

• We Believe the Cellist: Google’s Smear Campaign against Zoë Keating and All Independent Artists
• Zoë Keating Fights YouTube to Control Her Music and Reputation
• #WeBelieveTheCellist

This is Part Eleven of Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, a series of essays about, well, what it says on the tin. In the digital era, duplication is essentially free and there are no natural supply constraints which support scarcity, and therefore, prices. What the hell does a recording musician do then?

Hey, you, with the Amazon account! Yeah, you! Take a moment to drop some stars on Bone Walker, would you? It’d be really nice of you. You don’t have to write a review if you don’t want to, just toss us a rating.

Thanks!

The old record label system isn’t stupid. It’s surviving only on artificial scarcity at this point, but it isn’t stupid. Never forget that.

They’ve been working with Google/YouTube over their new music streaming service. It’s a big change, and there’s a lot going on – and it was negotiated with the Big Four labels on their terms. That’s never good. Zoë Keating‘s post is going around, and is well worth reading. SJ Tucker – in our release show on Sunday – is looking for ideas. Hell, so am I.

But for now, what you need to know is that Google is telling indie musicians that they have one of two options:

1. Take their new deal, which includes things like “ads always on every video,” “YouTube is a required point of first release” (not exclusive first release, but no more crowdfunding rewards going out first), “complete catalogue required,” “five year contract,” and so on, or
2. Have your channel blocked and all your music deleted from the service.

Now, there is a caveat here: this refers to artists who participate in the ContentID programme, which gets them a share of royalties for uses of their music, as is more or less required by law. If you want to forfeit that money, then you can continue to be Some Random Youtuber, but at that point you’re just handing YouTube all that money that’s owed to you, and none of the infrastructure that’s built up around YouTube music will work for you. That’s not really a bonus.

For the record, even with all those downsides, that’s how I’m currently set up. I have been thinking of changing that, however. But to do that, I have to deal with this new ring of hell, and it’s a pretty good strike against crowdfunding and indie/self-funded artists. And against anyone who wants control over their how their work is released and to whom.

One thing I’m seeing is a lot of people commenting with variations on, “Fuck ’em! They aren’t worth your time!” Except that the last numbers I saw had YouTube at about 70% of online music plays. That data is a few years old now, but Pandora was already huge, and even with that, it was still All About YouTube.

I’m sure that number has moved around a bit. Soundcloud wasn’t as big then, for example. But I don’t imagine it’s an overwhelming shift – and there are all these newer music streaming and DJ systems which use YouTube as their infrastructure, to balance it. It’s why Google are pushing this new system: to make money off of all of that.

So yes, you absolutely can ignore 70% of the online market or whatever it is. But that’s a serious decision, and not even a little bit the “no-brainer” that people seem to think. It’s just not.

Honestly, I don’t have a good answer. There’s a suggested hack floating around in comment sections – starting a little company that is separate to but controlled by the artist, having that company sign up for the service, and only leasing some of your work to that company, and then that company leases all of its music to YouTube. It’s clever. It might be legally viable. It’s certainly an extra layer of expense, trouble, and time, and having to do that kind of hack is certainly yet another barrier to entry to new musicians.

Which is, of course, exactly what the labels want.
 
 

This is Part Ten of Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, a series of essays about, well, what it says on the tin. In the digital era, duplication is essentially free and there are no natural supply constraints which support scarcity, and therefore, prices. What the hell does a recording musician do then?

I finally realised: books are merch. And while Anna’s books are mostly ebooks, Faerie Blood and Bone Walker both have print editions, and they’re hard to find and mostly have to be ordered directly from her. And she can’t take credit cards and stuff like that.

But I can take credit cards and PayPal and all that, through Bandcamp. And Bandcamp lets you sell merchandise, as long as it’s related to your music. Which these are. So now BOOKS ARE OFFICIALLY MERCH, and Faerie Blood and Bone Walker finally have places you can actually buy the paper copies.

Yay, fixed! I like it when longstanding problems finally get sorted out. ^_^

holy hell, check out what’s up to number 80 on the weekly Alternative chart on Bandcamp.

Yeah, that’s right. Bone Walker.

I know it’s not a huge pond but it is the pond we are in and it is a chart we are on and with a nontrival number, and we’re still in pre-orders mode. o/

Talking of, if you prefer AmazonMP3 to Bandcamp for some reason, Bone Walker is up for pre-orders on Amazon now, too.

i’m just like “what?” at number 80. we entered the weekly chart yesterday at 129. today we’re number 80. at least as I type this. I guess I need a @wilw flail gif or something now because that’s what it feels like. 😀

It’s been a problematic year, in a lot of ways; started out with the third round of eye surgery and recovery from all three initial rounds, and ended on a fourth round which will hopefully be the last. In between, despite everything, we managed to produce a new album (which I certainly hope you will preorder) and even tour a little.

But in terms of public exposure, it’s mostly been… about the blog. And that’s really not how to do things as a musician. I haven’t even started booking much for 2015 yet, because I’ve been waiting for this last go-round with the eye, afraid it’d explode again making me cancel anything I set up.

Hopefully we can move past that now.

Still, most of the visible action has been at the blog! So here’re the 2014 Top Ten Posts. Four of them are actually posts from 2013, so I’ll also add on the four that would’ve made it without those holdovers.

1. Gatekeeping and Recourse: something only men can do about sexism in geek culture. (A perennial favourite, from 2013)
2. Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, part 8: The Intrinsic Fraud of the Prestigious Internship. See above. Also 2013.
3. An Embarrassing Stumble Towards Irrelevancy – comments on the SFWA petition flap and sexism.
4. Mozilla and Firefox Careen Into a Ditch – comments on The Open Standard’s endorsement of Gamergate. This got me mentioned in The Daily Dot, so that was pretty cool.
5. A Horrible Group of People – more on the SFWA petitioners, and specifically, on petition author Dave Truesdale’s “five furry pussies on the ballot” comment.
6. What is Being Lost – the SFWA petitioners and failure to envision the present, much less the future. I sense a theme here; lots on sexism.
7. Pushback and Misandry – sexism in geek culture and two case studies of sexist pushback against science. Another 2013 post in this year’s top 10.
8. A Friday of Followups – Sarah Kellington of Pinniped comes in for recording, and more on the SFWA flap. Yay, something about music!
9. Ribbon Mic Buildout – I built a ribbon microphone, and took pictures. The last of the 2013 posts in the top 10.
10. Way Too Much to Dislike: my highly critical review of Doctor Who: The Caretaker. This was before “Kill the Moon” and my breakup of Moffat’s Who.

It reflects the controversies of 2014 geek culture pretty solidly, I’m afraid. But that’s not the whole story.

The difficult thing about this blog is that it’s echoed a lot of places. Some places, in entirety. Some comments come back here, and others are linked, but I’m not making any attempt to include views on those other sites in my numbers. I still have three-digits worth of views per post on Livejournal, and this year, Tumblr started mattering. In some cases, mattering a lot.

And by “a lot,” well – the biggest post in this list got over 17,000 views at the home site this year. That is a lot for me, and it’s totally awesome. Most of them aren’t nearly that popular, at least, not here.

Let’s take a look 2014’s 7, 8, 9, and 10th most popular posts, because one of them is a Tumblr example:

7. Insects of the Writing World – on the contempt for the new shown by the SFWA old guard. Essentially tied are:

8. A Quiet Night at the Lair: Korrasami is Canon and Nothing Hurts, and,

8. GamerGate True Believes are the Anti-Vaxxers of the Online World, and finally:

10. If One of the Bottles Should Happen to Fall – more SFWA sexism, specifically, Sean Fodera’s arguably questionable apology to Mary Robinette Kowal

Number eight there? A Quiet Night at the Lair: Korrasami is Canon and Nothing Hurts? Here, it has a couple of hundred views. Plus another couple of hundred at Livejournal, and a few other places. All combined, over 400 views, which actually isn’t all that far above average.

On Tumblr, though? It rocketshot. I can only get an estimate of the views, but the data I have puts it at around 35,000-45,000, mostly for the addendum commentary at the end. It nearly triples the number one post’s total count actually on crimeandtheforcesofevil.com.

That’s not the only post I’ve had do that. Rock candy geode did that too. And a post I made of some of the Kitsune at War sheet music (a bass-clef transposition actually left labelled “flute”) is nearing six digits.

In the past, I’ve questioned my “echo everything everywhere” strategy, of letting people read whatever they want wherever they want. It didn’t seem to have been getting me much, and certainly, things like Facebook are a total bust. (And given how Facebook Destroys Everything, I’m kind of okay with that.)

But having had a year which has, by necessity, been mostly about being online… it may have started to catch. This strategy may vindicate itself after all. That would be nice.

An addendum: None of these lists include compilation posts, which are nexus posts for specific topics, like, the sexism and racism in geek culture collection, the studio buildout series on how to build your own recording space, and Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment. Those would all be in the top ten, but obviously shouldn’t count.