A PSA: under current as of now license, anything you post to Pinterest belongs to Pinterest, including for resale and licensing, forever. I haven’t seen a license this broad since CompuServe tried this in the late 80s. Be aware.

Scientific American outlines the license.

This is going around: Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins thinks everything sucks. Here’s a YouTube embed:

Basically he agrees the major label system sucks, but not for the same reasons we do; being one of that tiny percent to actually make money in it, he thinks that part is just fine. He just thinks the people who do manage this feat are the “winners.” What he hates is what he calls the “singles mentality” and homogenisation, combined with the death of the album form, which he sees as removing the connection between little indie band (j0) and MEGASUPERSTARDOM RAR!

And he also spends a lot of time crying for the mass cultural experience.

But at the same time, he also hates on the indie scene, mostly on his exposure to it through alternative rock, declaring it eternally “precocious” and incapable of sustaining an audience or band, dismissing it entirely as, “What’re you going to do, sell albums to the same 10,000 people every year?” and saying bands that go that route are just going to be working back at Burger King in ten years.

As opposed to almost all major label artists who end up back working lousy day jobs and bankrupted.

Personally, if I can sell 10,000 albums a year, I’ll be totally psyched. I’d also be making more money than most major label artists. But to him you don’t count unless, as he puts it, grandmothers know about you. You have to CHANGE THE WORLD, MAN. Like he, um, didn’t. (Sorry, guy, got news.)

I don’t actually want to spend this entire post hating on this interview, because he has a bunch of things to say in there which are varying degrees of legitimate, like how goddamn behind the technology curve the major labels have been and continue to be. But god damn, dude – do some fucking math. The label-and-album system that did work for you (and for about 10-15 other artists a year) didn’t work for anybody else. Except the labels, of course.

You’re so concerned about all this, about the “little” and “indie” bands who are so “precocious?” How about floating some goddamn ideas instead? Because the album as an art form may come and go – Dick Tracy Must Die isn’t just an album, it’s a goddamn concept album – but changing fashion of forms isn’t going to save anybody. Not even the labels.

Meanwhile we, the eternally “precocious,” will be over here, trying to get some work done. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll figure some shit out.

I haven’t played bass guitar much since finishing the bass parts on Dick Tracy Must Die (and particularly the bass solo on Stars). And that’s sad, because I really like bass. So I’m practicing again, with scales, exercises… and Irish jigs. Which I personally think is hilarious. Not tuba hilarious, I grant you. But hilarious nonetheless.

Here, I put up a video from the show at the B-Side!

The camera tripod was too low for the stage, so it’s all lol-hiding-behind-music-stand, but the sound quality is pretty good. I think I’m getting a handle on the sound part of this live-recording business – more than the video so far, anyway.

Next show I’ll have new and much taller tripod, and actual video camera! It’s very exciting. PORTLANDERS! The show’s on the 26th! Contact me if you want an invitation! ^_^

Oh good, something’s beeping in the server room. I hope it’s not on fire!

i see smoke signals coming from them
they say “we are out of furniture”

Hey, you guys think it’s worth posting new videos of the same songs to the YouTube channel, from different shows? Honest question. I’m leaning towards no but thought I’d ask.

Oh, also, I’ve heard some confusion: I +am not charging the host for playing their house+ for these house concert shows. I need venues and exposure liek woah; guests get asked for the $5-$10 donation, hosts do not. I usually bring a little thank-you trinket, even. Tho’ if you’re far I might need crash space.

Also, I have a show in Portland on the 26th! It’s a semi-private event but I can get you in. Email if you’re in Portlandia!

I want to talk about kitting out on the cheap, but first, an update: I’ve heard from Meg Davis, and the fundraiser has met its goals! She has an iPad and is already working with it, learning about software. When she wrote, she was having what had been a bad day – the kind that would keep her from doing anything – but thanks to this device, she was catching up on business and email, and seeing how Garage Band works. Seriously, way to go, you guys. o/ Well done.

Now, on to cheap equipment!

I’ve been pawn-and-thrift-store spelunking again, this time for good camera tripods. I started at UW Surplus (no), then hit Goodwill and a local pawn store near Goodwill, and came up with two tripods – one that just needed cleaning and its camera pad re-glued, and one – a Slik U-210 – that needed a bit more work. I talked about that a little on Thursday here, if you’re curious, but the details aren’t really important. The U-210 is a heavy-duty no-fucking-around professional’s tripod; the successor is the U-212, which isn’t as tall. It’ll hold up a small building.

U210 on the left

I don’t need that much; to be honest, I’m probably fine with a generic $40 “prosumer” model made in China, with a 10% junk/return rate. But I hate doing that, and mostly just won’t. So if you don’t do that either, and you’re trying to kit out, here are a few key things I’ve found important to know.

1. Learn to judge quality in a general sense. That’s not easy to teach, frankly, but you can avoid loose fittings, cheap rivets, overly-thin aluminium, flimsy or brittle plastics. Heft is no guarantee, but it generally doesn’t hurt, either. Similarly, learn to identify excessive wear. If there’s a moving part, make sure it still fits well with the parts it’s moving against. Broken is almost always easier to fix than worn out.

   If you have no idea where to start here, try watching a bunch of back episodes of the old late-90s BBC show, Bargain Hunt. Pay attention to the experts on that show and try to pick up on how they think.

2. Talking of broken, be willing to fiddle with things and take them apart. If you’re not at least a bit of a DIYer, or interested in being one, don’t waste your time on this approach. But if you are, and are prepared to apply it, you can make off like a bandit. Recommended reading: The Readers Digest Fix-It-Yourself Manual. Not for any one repair, tho’ it’s good for that, but for a general idea about how you approach these kinds of problems.
    
3. Be willing to see past dirt. Thrift stores in particular get a lot of estate-sale leftovers and storeroom cleanouts. Great grandmother finally passed on, and the kids aren’t photographers, and now I have a serious business tripod – a tripod that sat in a crawlspace by the furnace for 20 years, getting coated with grime. Now? Cleaned and lubricated, it’s ready to go.
    
4. Recognise what’s out of place. If a pawn shop has a lot of something, it’s probably not that good a deal; they know it, they recognise it, they go through a lot of it, and they can price it with confidence rather than searching the internet and hoping. Guitar amps are a perfect example of that; they know crummy guitar amps, and they move well. DJ equipment, too, to a lesser degree. But if they have only one of something, and it doesn’t look like the other things? That’s the interesting item. Particularly if it’s dusty.
    

   (There are exceptions, of course. If you need an SM-57 or SM-58 microphone, those don’t stand out, and they know what they are, but they’re such commodities that the price will be good, and the damn things are nearly indestructible. Knowing when it doesn’t matter is a lesser skill, but a skill nonetheless.)

5. Play with stuff in the store. Plug it in, bring in your equipment and use it. If they won’t let you, go somewhere else.
    
6. Pawn shops always negotiate. Never pay what’s on the label, always bring cash, and if you get it out, make sure you don’t have enough to pay the label price anyway.

Examples: A: My PA’s board/amplifier unit met rules 4 and rule 1, spectacularly. The pawn shouldn’t ever have taken it. It’s not DJ equipment, it’s not a guitar amp, it’s not a car stereo. Few of their customers know what it is, and almost none of them know how to use it, or are even interested. It was missing a knob, which I replaced easily without even taking the unit apart, so I’m not counting it as rule 2, but that didn’t hurt, either. B: My speaker main, an old-school Crate, met rules 4, 3, 2, and 1. It was some arena-band-wanna-be’s stage monitor, and a total monster, and more than I’ll ever need for primary PA. It was dirty but would clean up well; it had a bad coil in the tweeter horn ($26 total repair cost), reeked of quality despite that, and it was totally out of place.

I got them both for dirt – seriously, like 90% off new retail – and for about 60% of the pawn’s asking price in both cases, because they didn’t want them around anymore. They stood out, saying, “this doesn’t belong here,” and were idle too long on the floor.

You can even find instruments that way, occasionally. They know guitars of all kinds, but they’re much less sure about anything else. I have a student violin for which I paid $40, including tax. It’s not a good violin, but it holds tune just fine, is complete with bow and case and all parts, and the screwed-up part wasn’t even broken, just, you know, screwed up. I put it back together correctly and saved it from a junk pile. Now I have my viLOLin. Tremendously useful? Eh, probably not. Fun to play around with and maybe even learn on? Oh yeah.

When the turret says, “I’m different!” – sometimes it is.

You got any suggestions for putting together a kit? Leave them in comments!

We didn’t talk about indie film this past Monday, even on Livejournal, but Richard Pini over on Facebook pointed out that Ted Hope certainly is. It’s worth a look over, because some of the problems are quite different, as are some of his ideas about approaches, so the compare-and-contrast might generate some ideas.

But the big thing: today is SHOW DAY! I have a nice dark set between Leannan Sidhe’s subtlety – if you haven’t heard her, she’s kind of the opposite of me – and Kräken-Röhl’s frothy steampunk-sing-a-long goodness. Come! And bring a friend – you, too, can be a minion! And who doesn’t want that? B-Side Music, 214 Stewart, Seattle, across from the Bon Marché parking garage, next to where the late and lamented Night Kitchen used to be. Shows start 7pm.

See you there!

nwcMUSIC is a geekmusic festival that I’m building at the Norwescon Science Fiction Convention. We have chiptunes, nerdcore, geek rock, elfmetal, filk, nightly concerts, daytime workshops, panel programming, late-night open mics, filkcircles, the whole deal.

Our programming includes “business of being an independent artist” panels. Going indie – not wanting a record deal – has become more and more common as the technology to record competently on your own has become more and more accessible. As my mastering engineer for Dick Tracy Must Die said, there used to be a time when you recorded your demo on a four track and recorded your studio album in a professional studio, and demos sounded like demos and label releases sounded like real albums – but now people like me walk in with recordings they made in studios they built at home, and sound real.

It kind of freaks him out.

So now, doing your own album is considered not just valid, but important. It’s a positive. It shows the ability to complete a project and the talent necessary to produce something listenable. Labels now tell bands who want labels to “bring tribe with you.” (And a lot of smarter bands are replying, “if we have our own tribe, why the fuck do we need you?” The RIAA are desperate for good reason.)

Writing isn’t like that, yet; just finish the damned manuscript. Self-pubbing through a vanity press? Folly, reserved for rampaging ego muppets with too much money.

But the technologies are changing, and the economics of book publishing are in flux.

Now, there are cheap eReaders. Companies sensing opportunity have jumped in with distribution models: CD Baby has BookBaby, Amazon has its Kindle-only programme, etc. These all let you not just produce your own eBooks, but make them widely accessible, in a variety of formats. And having done both, the technology of taking a manuscript and laying it out into eBook form is dramatically easier to grasp than that of recording.

So some midlist authors are starting to reissue their out-of-print backlists in eBook form. Some for free, but others are apparently making enough money at it that imprints are trying to claim eBook rights from contacts written before eReaders even existed. And with examples like Amanda Hocking out there, you’re seeing some re-evaluation of self-publication, as well.

So this year, I floated multidisciplinary versions of our business panels, specifically calling out artists and writers. I had one sign up, a well-respected writer/artist of graphic novels. I’m really pleased to have her! But I had no interest from any traditional-book authors.

In part, this shows how a lot of musicians know the recording industry exists substantially to screw you. It also implies that publishing houses do not currently have this reputation. From here, that difference looks legitimate; if you go through a major label and sell 20,000 copies of an album, you’re bankrupted and you won’t even own your recordings; if a writer goes through a major print publisher and sells 2,000 copies of a paperback book, they’re earning royalties.

It’s probably also relevant that record labels haven’t traditionally added much, artistically. They’d bring you people who could and often did, but you’re paying for it, not the label, in the form of advances against earnings. By contrast, book imprints – by which I mean a good editor under the employ of that imprint – historically could add a lot, and they paid that bill.

But cutbacks in publishing have had visible effects. Editors are hugely overworked and understaffed, and it absolutely shows. What if that added value continues to decline?

Do writers need to be looking at us indie musicians, for their own sakes? Do they need to take some notes?

I’m wondering about it both as a future necessity and as a future reasonable – at least, non-embarassing – option.

Hopefully it won’t become a necessity. Me, I’m in this for the music, and the recording part is fun because it gives me opportunities to work with other musicians and play with sound toys. I am not in it for the marketing, management, distribution, product design, advertising, packaging, shipping, and on and on and on. But as an indie musician, I have to do all of that too.

An indie writer would find themselves in the same boat.

I have writers in my audience; what do you think? Are we living in your future? And if so, does that sound cool, or do you look at this whole scene and want to run like hell?

PS: Happy birthday to my favourite writer, Angela Korra’ti. Smoochies! ^_^

While everyone is on SOPA/ProtectIP/PIPA and the just-as-much-fun international-treaty version known as ACTA: when you read this article on how the DMCA is already abusive enough, you might want to also keep this in mind: I’ve had three of my own videos flagged as DMCA violations.

That’s right, my own videos, me, doing my own music, or trad, live, flagged for DMCA, three times. Under SOPA, PIPA, or any variant thereof, I’d’ve had to sue to get back online.

Tell me this won’t be used to smash independent artists. Go ahead, tell me that, while I laugh in your face.

And yes, I had content go offline thanks to the Megauploads takedown, too. Fanac stuff, and of course I have copies, but nonetheless.

There’s talk of Black March: buy no music, books, movies, etc, download no music, books, movies, etc. Guys, I’m not the problem? People like me aren’t the problem? Please try to stay focused. Even with major publishers, I’m divided; I really do see the point, but you’re going to hurt starting authors and midlisters far more than you’re going to hurt any publishing house. At least, in books. (If they’re in music and on a label, they’re already screwed.) I know someone who has a series starting in March. The first book’s March sales will determine whether she gets Book 2.

To with: nngh.

But, of course, I gave my rather extensive opinion about what to do that will work on Wednesday. I know, I know, it’s TL;DR – I wish I’d been able to make it shorter, but I wasn’t.

Show with Leannan Sidhe and Kräken-Röhl next Friday! I’ve been rehearsing my set, looking forward to it. Please grab and print and post posters? Thanks!

Other than that, I’ll be one-daying Rustycon as soon as weather permits, which probably means Saturday. Given the TOTALLY AWESOME snowstorms we’ve had this week (photos at link), I admit I kind of do not envy their transportation department. Good luck, guys! And everyone else, too.

Have a good weekend! Say hi if you see me at Rusty. ^_^

It’s Blackout Day. A lot of sites are dark, to protest SOPA and PIPA (a.k.a. PROTECT-IP), the two worst revisions to US copyright law since the original DMCA. They’re irreparably terrible, and should absolutely be discarded, and I say that as a copyright holder who has seen her music pirated in front of her very eyes. I support Blackout Day.

But I am not going dark. I am Solarbird, the Lightbringer, so instead, I will talk about where we are, where such a blatantly unconstituional corporate power grab can be so close to passage, and how we got here.

The US is an authoritarian police state. If you’re not of a sufficiently suspect class, and you keep out of unapproved politics, it’s not a particularly oppressive police state, but it is one nonetheless. No country with torture and extrajudicial imprisonment and execution can be called anything else.

SOPA and PIPA trigger reactions because they expand the suspect class pool. They bring the surveillance state Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama have created more obviously closer to home.

Unlike many, I have not been disappointed by Mr. Obama in this. He has lived down to my expectations, which is why I did not and will not vote for him. He is of his class – the American political class – and they are quite united on the need for a police state, with restricted speech, restricted political rights, omnipresent surveillance, and the ability to disappear a few hundred people if it’s necessary for national security, by which one of course means looking bad or having to admit a mistake.

They’re also quite united on doing whatever their corporate donors ask. Where there is disagreement within those donors, or where the donors don’t really care, the popular voice can matter; some of these areas of disagreement are very important to me personally. But where there isn’t disagreement, the popular voice doesn’t matter at all, except insofar as is necessary to keep up the pretence of representation.

There is some disagreement amongst those donors; this is why the SOPA/PIPA fight can be won.

This is where we are; exploiting frissions between corporate and polite-state blocs, trying to keep the last daylight visible. This, in turn, is because when push comes to shove, all that matters is power. This is true in any empire; other things matter only after matters of power have been settled.

This should be obvious, but most Americans pretend it’s not true. That pretence is part of the problem.

Sure, Democrats and Republicans compete for seats – there are matters of prestige, of money, and of individual allocation of power to be settled. All of these are important to any empire’s political class. And there are still elections – highly restricted ones, but elections nonetheless, constrained and limited via money, gatekeeping, and the endless repetition of critical memes such as, “the other side is worse,” “third parties can never win,” “a vote for a loser is a wasted vote,” and “this election is the Most Important Election Ever, you can’t let Them Win.”

All these memes are appeals to tribalism. They all shut down reason and rational thought in preference for the Tribe. They’re needed to keep you playing the game. They’re used to keep you from changing anything.

And as such, their active propagation illustrates the one critical weakness left in this system: that all-but-titular vote. It is exploitable, but not in the way you assume. I will illustrate, with a story from another empire.

Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, the USSR held elections on a regular schedule. The Communist Party always reported getting 98% or 99% of the vote, and everyone outside the Soviet sphere laughed – who else can you vote for? – but they didn’t understand how Soviet elections worked.

The Party would nominate candidates. The Proletariat would go vote “Yes” or “No” on their local candidate. It was very easy to vote “yes” – there was a queue, you got checked off, you got some vodka and snacks. It was more difficult to vote “no” – you had to get out of the queue, go to another table. It took more time. It was visible. I don’t know whether you got snacks.

And most elections, even before the late reforms, some local party unit somewhere would nominate some apparatchik so disliked, so repulsive, so unacceptable that the people would vote no, and that nominee would lose. It was a humiliation. The party would nominate someone else, someone less bad, who would win. And the local party would be shifted, and the loser’s career would be over.

Which brings us to the single most important lesson, and the only lever of influence you have over either major party:

Pick the party closer to you and cost them power and money by costing them elections.

Travesties such as SOPA and PIPA shouldn’t even be politically possible. Neither should most of the major changes in government of the US from the last decade. Any victory against these initiatives are temporary at best, as long as the current framework remains unchallenged.

And to that end, money and power are the only things that really count. Deprive someone you “should” support of either one or the other, in a meaningful and trackable way. Demonstrate your willingness and ability to do that, and you will get a response. It will be angry. But it will be a response.

Don’t do it by voting for the other major party; that’s idiotic, as well as futile. That’s staying in the political class’s game. Similarly, don’t do it by not voting at all; that allows you to be discounted as “apathetic.” And finally, don’t do it by expecting the small party or independent for which you vote to win; the system as it stands is far too rigged against such outliers. Taking that party to victory isn’t even the goal; your goal is to deny victory to your “own team,” and to make sure they know you did it.

If you lack substantial money, it’s the only lever you have. I will illustrate, again, by example:

Mr. Obama was going to let Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell float along until his expected second term. All of the groundwork had been laid; the apologies and excuses had been set up; absolutely no meaningful work on ending DADT had been done; party operatives were all about ‘the midterms are Too Important, we have to wait ’till it’s safe’ line. People were already touting the ‘let’s wait and win in 2012, then repeal’ line.

And queers said NO, FUCK YOU and shut off the money spigot, all at once, major donors included. The Democratic Party machine recoiled and went into full spin mode, trying all of the usual intimidations and arguments, and they, at long last, fell on deaf ears. Even with stooges like the Human Rights Campaign, which is no mean feat.

And when that happened, when the big-money GBLT people said, no, fuck you, we meant it – only then did the administration actually start planning the repeal. Only then.

They also cut back on the vicious fundamentalist-sourced rhetoric and arguments they’d been using in defences of DADT and DOMA in court. That was nice.

It still took losing a court case to make the DADT repeal happen. But the fight got a lot shorter, and the court cases a lot quicker, and also importantly, they were prepared.

This is winning. Cost them money, make not appeasing you risk them their power, and you get a response. It will first be rage, then it may just be accommodation.

A second example, even more relevant:

The American left had a tremendous opportunity in 2000. Mr. Nader won close to three percent of the vote, and absolutely cost Mr. Gore the election. The Democratic party establishment frothed with rage.

The American left could have taken this opportunity. It could have collectively said:

Fuck right we did. We fucking cost you the election. We have that power, and we used it. Now appease us, or we’ll do it again.

And mean it, because that is how you play power politics. The opportunity was right there. Appease us, or die.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the American left ran screaming back home, flagellating themselves for their sins, piteously crying, ‘We’ll be good! We swear, we’ll never leave and never ever ever be bad ever again!’ It was pathetic. And they were scolded and contritely made their apologies and occasionally get reminded of the “Nader betrayal,” to help keep them in line, and nothing they want matters.

And why all that Party rage? Simple: because the left had created a window of opportunity, and that window had to be closed. They demonstrated power, costing the Democratic wing of the political class both power and money; and that shit had to be put the fuck down.

And it was. They threw it away.

This is called losing.

Variations of this cycle have been on wash-rinse-repeat since the 1980s, with the left somehow thinking it’ll be different this time. It never is.

That’s how we have Members of Congress talking about how the Internet is great, but there’s intellectual property to protect, and corporate IP rights holders need to be able to shut you down just like that – and the Great Firewall of China shows just how it can be done.

That’s how we already have people being extradited from other countries for linking to things, and other people going to jail for making YouTube videos.

That’s how we now we have a Democratic Chief Executive who can order anyone, anywhere, tried in various degrees of show trial with secret evidence to reach a prearranged verdict, or not tried at all.

That’s how the Executive can order anyone jailed forever, or just outright executed, in secret, without so much as a hearing.

That’s how members of the political class have become above the law, answerable to no one.

That’s how losing the right to a trial can have useful idiots of the left dismissing it as a “fringe issue,” as the neoconservative worshippers of power cheer on Mr. Obama’s embrace-and-extend of Mr. Bush’s “unitary executive.”

It’s all part of the same context. It’s all part of the same theme. It’s all how the window of acceptable politics has been shoved this far to the authoritarian right, and become this normalised, with everyone in the Democratic tribe spending another endless election year rationalising it all away, telling themselves – and anyone who dares disagree – that this election is just Too Critical, and It Can Wait, and Other Issues are Just More Important…

…all as the Republic burns.

It’s Blackout Day. Things are pretty damned dark. What’re you gonna do about it?

A couple of updates! First, I had some bad data, so I’ve revised the poster for the January 27th show at B-Side Music. Nothing critical has changed, but if you’re downloading/forwarding/posting, please re-download the latest. (Revised PDF here, big-ass JPEG here, more here, Facebook event here.)

Second: the Portland show has a Facebook event page! But only on Facebook. And it’s invitation-only, so please tell me if you’re on Facebook and you want invited!

Third: I still want more house concerts! If you’re willing to host one, please please contact me! I’ve also been applying to festivals and stuff; if you have a good venue, tell them you want me to play there. Then tell me and I’ll conveniently apply. It’ll be perfect!

Fourth:

it snowed a little

so instead of going out, I made

buttons.

These aren’t merch; you can’t buy these. You have to host a show, or bring someone other than yourself to a show, or something like that. Then you can get one. BUT NOT BEFORE! It’s a plan, see. I planned it. Muah ha ha.