Production Archives - New Music Strategies

Lies Like These

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, … Read more

This is not an ad. Well, yes – obviously it’s an ad, but Microsoft have not paid me to place this here. I bring you this just to spark a discussion about the endgame of music performance and production in the digital age.

Because although this is absolutely excruciating (I struggled to make it right through the video) – and it might just be the FrontPage of music making (and you have no idea how much I detest FrontPage) – there’s certainly something to be said about the idea of Garageband or Logic in every home. Isn’t there?

This is not a discussion about Apple versus Microsoft (unless that’s what you’d like it to be). It’s a discussion about the place of music professionalism in the face of technologically-enabled amateurism. If it’s cheap and easy for everyone to make music, then what?

What's a Netlabel?

There seem to be three main approaches that independent artists take to the idea of record labels these days.

The first is that record labels are the best way to get your music out to the public. The internet is all well and good, and we are in favour of it, but people in record labels know what they are doing, they understand marketing, they have things like connections, promotion strategies, radio pluggers, PR, graphic design, branding, distribution, chart registration, barcodes, licensing, finance, and deals on pressing all sorted out. We’re going with them. 20% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

The second is that we live in a post-label world. We are all about DIY. There may be artists signed to record labels and that’s fine for them, I suppose… but this is a brave new era and we’re going to self-release. We’re not unsigned – we’re independent. We have all of the tools at our disposal to record, release, distribute, promote and make money from our music on our own terms, beholden to nobody, keeping all of the intellectual property and making all of the profits ourselves. We’ll do it on a tight budget, but we’ll do it because we are empowered to do so.

The third can be broadly categorised thus: We’re going to release through a Netlabel. As soon as we can figure out what a Netlabel is, that’s what we’re going to do.

Radar Music Videos

Radar Music Videos is a clearing house to connect artists with video makers. There’s a recommendation system and a showcase of prior work. Filmmakers can … Read more

MixMatchMusic

With over 2500 guitar, bass, keys, drum and other music stems and works-in-progress added to its catalog since it debuted in mid-September, MixMatchMusic is a … Read more