Seminar

Welcome to the first ever AmpNMS event

Here at New Music Strategies, we’re bored with the same old conversations about whether or not the internet is a good thing for musicians and for music. It’s a brilliant thing for music. Best thing that’s happened to music since microphones. So now what?

Well, for the next two days here at New Music Strategies we’re teaming up with the Amplified crew to bring you an online music industry knowledge event unlike any you’ve experienced before. We call it AmpNMS.

It’s about music entrepreneurship. It’s about your relationship with fans. It’s about underground music scenes. It’s about technology.

It’s live, it’s online, it’s totally free, and it’s completely interactive.

We’re not going to talk at you and expect you to sit there and just listen. We want to talk with you. We want to hear your ideas. And we’re not just going to retread the same old territory. It’ll be fresh, intelligent, interesting and challenging.

It’s New Music Strategies, Amplified.

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NMS Meets Amplified, To Talk About Things That Matter

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Photo by Tracy Apps

I love it when I get to combine different parts my life. Whether it’s playing music combined with teaching it, or doing fun online conversation things a la Amplified and at the same time helping musicians understand what the web makes possible for them…

Bringing together New Music Strategies with Amplified always makes me very happy.

Last year, we did a transatlantic round table discussion – I and 3 musicians were in Nashville, while Dubber, Ian and Saskia headed up a room full of NMS-types in Somerset, England. We threw ideas back and forward, answered questions, and had a great chat about how life is for independent musicians, and how it could be.

This year, we’re taking it all a step further.

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How the Awesome works

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I mentioned last week that we’ve been planning some awesome, and that it will be coming soon. Essentially, it will be built around a very simple system, allowing us to have a really collaborative and very involving online event, that will capture lots of really useful knowledge and archive it for future reference.

In principle, it will work in three stages:

1) The provocation

It starts with someone clever who has something to say. They will speak for 10 minutes and we will stream it online. It will be about music. It will be helpful. It will be interesting. It will be challenging. It will make you think. It will last for no more than ten minutes.

Like a TED talk, only snappy – and not just interesting, but directly relevant to you personally.

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Impending awesomeness

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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.

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