The following does not apply to these people

I know what’s on your website. It’s all that great stuff your fans like so much, right? Music, videos, photos, blog posts and so on. It’s a veritable goldmine of information, images and media. Anything they want to know about you, they can find out. Anytime they want to see you, that’s where they can go. Any desire to hear your recordings can be instantly gratified.

But y’know, there’s one thing your fans want from your website – perhaps even more than you and your music, incredible as that may seem. And I bet you’re not giving it to them. In fact, I bet they don’t even realise they want it.

It’s themselves.

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I thought I’d try the Bandcamp ’share’ widget right here on my New Music Strategies page for a few reasons.

First, I’m doing some advisory work for Bandcamp (Disclaimer!), and I feel like I need to push this thing to its limits – and tell you all how insanely great it really is (and I’d genuinely say that even if I wasn’t helping them out).

Second, I really love the new Sola Rosa record and thought you might like to hear it.

And third, I wanted to actually get a bit of music onto New Music Strategies for a change. Hope that’s not too competitive or too much of a change of gear for you. I figured you probably like music just as much as I do.

Enjoy. And go get your own music up on Bandcamp too.

By the way – let me know how you get on listening to a whole album from within a blog page. Does it work for you?

A quick tour around Real Groovy Records, Auckland

Record stores have interested me quite a lot recently.

My local independent record store here in Birmingham closed down last weekend while I was away in New Zealand, so to commemorate that fact, I visited a couple of Auckland record stores – Conch in Ponsonby, which is the spiritual equivalent of what Jibbering was (part cafe, part meeting spot, and a hub for local funk, hip hop and reggae DJs); and Real Groovy Records – a massive emporium of new and second hand vinyl and CDs, books, DVDs, computer games and so on.

Real Groovy is particularly interesting, because it went into liquidation last year and was closed down – but was rescued by an injection of capital (as I understand it) and was a thriving hive of activity when I visited.

It got me thinking about what music retailers can and should do to survive – and also about the extent to which the closure of record shops is quite the tragedy it’s generally portrayed as.

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I went to the Open Music Media meeting in London last night, and thought you might be interested in a chat I had with Ian Hogarth from Songkick, which more or less summarises the presentation he gave on the night.

Kind of impressed with my new Flip Ultra video camera too – audible sound in a really noisy environment. Having some codec trouble playing the clips back in VLC on the macbook – but I’ve figured out the Quicktime problem I was having…