Here comes awesome… (Steve arrives to meet Dubber in London)
As you may have come to know, these days New Music Strategies is a loose collective of five individuals in three countries who team up in different capacities according to what we jokingly refer to as our various ‘superpowers’ – and work on projects we find interesting.
Ian and I went to India to work on a recording project with an organisation called Music Basti and you’ll be seeing the fruits of that project in the next month or so, with any luck. We are working with an organisation called Heart n Soul on an international project about participation, inclusion, vocoders and heavy, heavy funk – which aims to bring 72 artists together under the banner of The Dean Rodney Singers, an offshoot of the brilliant Fish Police.
And we thought we’d make something of our own as well. At the moment, we’re just calling it the event. But perhaps “The Event” would have more impact… we’ll get back to you on the name. But here’s what we’re thinking.
It must have seemed quiet here at New Music Strategies for quite a while. We haven’t been blogging, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy. In fact – kind of the opposite.
We’ve got some big news coming up, and some really exciting projects that we’d like to get you involved in… and we’re going to tell you about all that stuff really soon – but first there’s something we’d like to do.
We want to start the NEW New Music Strategies with a bit of a clean slate. This website already has a lot of stuff on it. There’s a free e-book, and about four years worth of advice for independent musicians, observations about the digital environment and general discussion about all sorts of related topics. But that’s all from the OLD New Music Strategies.
New Music Strategies is now no longer one man’s website where he writes what he thinks about music online. It’s a home for the activities of a team of five people who do interesting stuff with music in the digital age. And we wanted to make that a significant change – so we’re going to do something that might appear a bit radical (it’s actually not – but some people seem to think it is).
We’re releasing OLD New Music Strategies into the wild. It’s public domain. Free culture. No rights reserved.
When people ask me about my favourite music video, I’m going to be tempted to point them towards this clip. It’s not a famous band singing a popular song, and nor does it have any amazing special effects.
This was filmed as we were setting up to record a song at a home for girls in Delhi. Suhail from the band Advaita leads a clapping and counting exercise that, on the face of it, is a very simple warmup exercise for a bunch of kids.
But when you see the faces on these street kids, all of whom have had a life of poverty, deprivation and cruelty – you start to see how meaningful this simple activity really is, and why Music Basti is such an important project.
Recently, after speaking to the Head of Music for Myspace, I wrote another blog post explaining that Myspace is not just ugly, frustrating and riddled with spam – but actually compromises the ethics of its users while exploiting your music and your audiences… and why it can and will never be what it should be.
Myspace is not simply irrelevant, it’s utterly poisonous.
When I wrote that first blog post, I suggested that Sunday October 24th 2010 should be declared ‘Quit Myspace Day’. Nothing has happened in the intervening year to change my mind about that. In fact, if anything, I’m more convinced than ever that we’re all better off without it.
So now it’s time to just close our accounts and enjoy a Myspace-free life. Tell everyone you know. If you’re on Twitter, it’d be great to see the tag #quitmyspace trending.
You deserve much better. Happy Quit Myspace Day, everyone.
