This is the audio recording of the panel session I chaired at Un-Convention in Manchester last month. It was about music that falls outside the indie rock band tradition you’d normally expect represented at these sorts of events. I wanted to know if there were any lessons that could be drawn from outside the margins.
I actually posted this on my personal blog first, which is kind of telling. I think of these people as my friends, so that’s where it seemed to make sense. But then, of course, I realised (duh…) that it might be of interest to the sort of people who read New Music Strategies.
Hope you find it helpful and interesting.
You can listen to all of the panel sessions at the Un-Convention Soundcloud page… and you can follow the panellists (other than Abi, who I can’t find) on Twitter:
Martin Atkins, drummer from Public Image, Killing Joke and Nine Inch Nails wrote a book called Tour Smart. He does a good bit of public speaking, and we’re on the same wavelength about a lot of stuff. In fact, people have described him to me as “New Music Strategies with swearing.”
He was on a panel at Un-Convention and I grabbed him for a quick moment for a chat. I put him on the spot a bit, but got him to do a top 5 Tour Smart tips.
Un-Convention Salford was, of course, a great experience. All the more so because it brought together some of my favourite people from all over.
In fact – there were so many cool people at Un-Convention, it was hard to get around them all and spend as much time as I’d like to with each of them.
One of the people I was lucky enough to get to spend a reasonable amount of time with was Steve Lawson (otherwise known as SoloBassSteve). He’d been on my ‘Outside the Box‘ panel – which was amazing, entirely because of the brilliant insight of the amazing people on the panel (I was merely moderating – they provided all the awesome).
After lunch today, he grabbed my Flip camera and turned it on me for my impromptu roundup of the weekend.
I’m in Manchester at a music industry conference called Un-Convention. It’s one of those events where you know quite a few of the people involved, and the ones you don’t, you get to know quite quickly.
After the last band played last night, a bunch of us went across to the pizzeria / chip shop across the road for a bite to eat. My Belfast cousin Tracy, and Brad from Bolton band Merchandise were talking about Brad’s album and how that was coming along.
‘Nearly done – just have some mastering to do. Finished a video for the first single, but we’re not going to do any more. Don’t have the budget for it.’
‘Let’s make one right now,’ I said.
So, armed with my digital camera (a still camera, actually, but with a video setting) and with the song on Brad’s ipod, we just did a one-take shot. No rehearsal. Not even any discussion about what the two of them would do.
The only real shame was that it’s hard to see what Tracy wrote on the base of the pizza box at the end of the video. It reads ‘You suck.’
An hour later, I went to bed while this was uploading to Vimeo.
Music video budget? We don’t need no music video budget…
Andrew Dubber's New Music Strategies attempts to unpick and explain what’s going on in the online music environment - and from that, develop strategies to help independent musicians and music businesses cope and thrive in a changing media environment.
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