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!
TODAY IS THE RELEASE DAY FOR BONE WALKER, THE NOVEL! Book Two of The Free Court of Seattle, the thing this album before, is out today. Anna has posted about it in detail here, and here all the places you can buy it – Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, Smashwords, Kobo, Google Play, etc., in eBook form.
But! If you want the physical copy, and you don’t know Anna personally, there’s one place: right here, via our page, because reasons. Faerie Blood, the first book, is also available in print format here. You don’t need PayPal, even.
Anna is taking questions for characters and answering them in character, over at her blog. So if you’ve ever wanted to interrogate the world’s only unseelie Elvis impersonator, now is your chance. XD
But seriously, both books are good, go read them, you’ll like it. Maybe listen to the soundtrack while you’re reading, too. It’ll be fun. 😀
Since it’s been announced, I can confirm: I have accepted an invitation to be Toastmaster at Conflikt 9, January 29-31, 2016. It’s my first GoH position at any convention, and as I’ve been saying, I am confused but honoured to have been selected and I will do my best to be a good one.
Conflikt Chair Jen Kilmer asked me to pick my personal Toast title, as is tradition; previous officeholders have been Toastmistresses, Toastmaster both standard and burnt, and Toastmonsters; I have chosen Toastmuppet. Expect inordinate amounts of Kermitflail, starting right now:
The release concert on Sunday was pretty much amazing, at least from our end. We never did manage to have a rehearsal with everyone at once, but it didn’t seem to hurt us too badly on stage. A lot of people stayed through Sunday afternoon to hear us, and I cannot thank all of you enough for that.
And hoo, I will never complain about setup time for other bands again. Okay, well, I will. But not as much. We took over an hour, and that was as simplified as I could make it, and with all the advance material I could hand over handed over, and nobody screwing around.
And, of course, once again, thanks to everyone: Alexander James Adams (drums, vocals, backing fiddle), Paul Campbell (hammer dulcimer), Jeri Lynn Cornish (cello, bones, chorus), Angela Korra’ti (flute, readings), Leannan Sidhe (vocals), Skellington (lead fiddle), Betsy Tinney (drums), and S.J. Tucker (bass, chorus). It would quite literally have been impossible without you.
OH at #Conflikt8 "was everyone on stage either a Pixie or a Criminal?" @solarbirdy @ConfliktFrog @TrickyPixieBand
— SJ Tucker (@s00j) February 2, 2015
Highlights of the convention – hoo, I dunno, it’s hard to pick. Alec’s show was great, and not in that “as always” way, there was something extra in the energy that night. Having the rest of Tricky Pixie on for a few songs probably didn’t hurt anything. The PDX Broadsides won Saturday’s concert set, no doubt – they’re much better live than in their older recordings. (I haven’t heard the new album yet tho’ – I only heard old demos.) I’m so glad I’m having them in for nwcMUSIC this year. Oh wait, that’s still technically embargoed, lol. Regardless, they’re really good live. And Stringapalooza’s set on Sunday was the tightest thing I’ve ever heard at a convention, they were amazing.
I stayed through the near-very-end of the dead dog/smoked salmon; I like leaving while there are one or two holdouts still holding out, so I don’t feel like it’s really over even though it is. And there were two, and a couple of others who were just there to listen, at around 1am Monday morning, so I packed out before they could change their minds. Sunday night is particularly good as far as I’m concerned, because I’ll do any damn thing, and that includes the relevant-for-20-minutes-thanks-a-lot-guys Doctor Who song I wrote in 2013* and have performed live never, a cappella DEVO tracks, and pretty much anything anyone asks me for, rehearsed or not. I will just do the thing. And it’s great.
S00j wrote a really relevant post about Conflikt and Filk in general, particularly as its position in the geek hierarchy, and you should go read it. She touches quite directly on some of the things I’m trying to address indirectly through the way I feature filk as the founding pillar of geekmusic, and the way I talk about the punk nature of their hands-on/DIY aesthetic, and the participatory culture foundation underlying all of that.
Definitely worth reading. Give it a little thought.
*: it was pretty good, too.
Do I know anyone with working (or semi-working – appearing to work is fine) versions of:
If this is you, and you can shoot video reasonably stably (horizontal phone video will do), and are interested in a mildly silly project this week, contact me via the contact page.
The times on the webstreaming site are a little confusing, so: we are being livestreamed 2pm Cascadian/Pacific on Sunday, barring the usual things-running-lateness. And! There are several other shows and events also being livestreamed both today and tomorrow, so drop in for any and all of those, too!
Also Bone Walker is now live on iTunes and CD Baby! We are officially in general release. Yay!
That of course includes Amazon, so if you preordered from there, you should be getting things. And if you wouldn’t mind dropping a review, we’d love that, ’cause they really do help. You don’t have to have bought it there to review it there.
Of course, Bandcamp is where you can stream the whole album uncut (and also where we get the largest share of the purchase price, yay? economics?) and that’s also the best place to get the physical disc.
Yay! We’re official!
Can’t make it to the release concert this Sunday at Conflikt? They have quite reasonable single-day event passes, by the way – not sure I’ve mentioned that. But! If you can’t, they’re livestreaming a lot of the convention on fansupported.tv, and if it’s at all like last year, it’ll mostly be main stage events. Which includes us.
So, yeah! Give it a peek, eh? We should start at 2pm Eastern on Sunday. There will be other concerts too so you can watch them as well. ^_^
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:
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. ^_^
Anna posted photos of her contributor’s copy of the CD today. The first contributor copies are going out and this really is your last chance to get a pre-order of Bone Walker, the CD – at this point it’s really closer to just an “order” – and have a chance at owning the test disc, too. 😀
Long show rehearsal today. Very productive. We have a mini-rehearsal on Thursday and then one at the event and then it’s showtime on Sunday at 2pm! Come see us on Sunday! It doesn’t conflict with the Superbowl, you can do both!
Hey, it’s a Bone Walker review! Spoiler: they like it. 😀
THE NEW SINGLE
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