Direct Marketing

Two or three interesting blog entries in the last 24 hrs on the subject of connecting creative types directly with their audience. The first, from Amanda Palmer, is a stand-making shout out to the effect that she is pioneering a new model, combining her effervescent web presence with paypal to make money that goes directly into her pocket…and almost as quickly into that of her landlord and the woman who owns the grocery store, etc. Because when it comes down to it, creative people need a roof and they need to eat and can’t always wait til the money from CD sales or tours filters through the record company, the management company, etc.

I like AFP’s stance on this and indeed, since I am a Fan, have bought one or two of the items announced on her twitter feed (the LOFNOTC t-shirt, for example, is the ideal garment for its stated purpose, and I would not be seen alone in the house on my computer on any night of the week in anything else). She’s built herself up a fanbase who are into what she does and she’s got every right to benefit from that.

But Ms Palmer, she’s brazen, she’s shameless, she’s realistic and fearless. Not everyone is like that.

Take another example, but from a slightly less affirmative stance. This post by Agent Ribbons describes a heartfelt tale of woe that should not happen to any band. They’re nowhere near the stage of profitting from their income and the tone of their post is sweetly prideful and apologetic for asking fans to help them out of a hole, but there should be no need for apologies. Fans who love their music will find a way to help out, because it’s an investment in the future promise that the band will then be able to make more wonderful music in the future.

Music’s custom made for internet sales. It’s immediate, it’s ubiquitous, it costs nothing to send to people (eg “Everything Pomplamoose Has Ever Made for $9“). It should be easy to directly market to people who know where to go to get it. But what about fiction?

For the last ten years people have been experimenting with delivery methods of short fiction over the internet. They’ve had to because the steady decline of paper magazine sales indicates that at some point it may well be e-zine or nothing. The difficulty has been getting punters to pay realistic (or in fact any!) money for an ezine, and in turn making such venues realistic propositions for professional writers to submit work to. Unlike the music industry I’ve not been aware of much of an attempt by established writers to market their own fiction direct from their own websites. Some have had a “support your struggling author” Paypal button, but anecdotal evidence suggests  that these are ineffective. People will pay money for a product, or for a cause, but not just because there happens to be a Paypal button.

So, that makes this post by Hal Duncan interesting. Like Amanda Palmer, Hal’s got a fan base (and he needs to eat) so I’m hoping (in fact expecting) him to raise the total he requires to release the rest of the story to the public rather quickly. I love Hal’s fiction (and I’m kicking myself for not being able to make the reading at the weekend where this particular tale was unveiled), and if I came across a publication with one of his stories in it I’d buy it, irrespective of the rest of the contents. So, I’ve chucked a few quid – about the price of a magazine – into his Paypal pot in the hope that I get to read the rest of the story soon. Again, I see nothing to apologise for in this context – he’s a creator, I’m a consumer, where’s the shame in conducting a reasonable transaction?

In all of the cases here, we have artists appealling to their fanbase. And since fans tend to be loyal, these attempts at direct marketing, I have no doubt, will pay off to a greater or lesser degree. But this kind of model only works once you have those fans.  For the rest of us, we watch our myspace visitor stats and track plays creep up and scratch our heads at what to do next to garner those few fans into a nucleus.

And the answer to that?

Make better products. Catch a break. Work hard – REALLY hard. Continually. Just like the artists above did. Just like it’s always been.

No NAF but Pomplamoose

No NAF today, cos I didn’t get out at lunchtime. But that’s okay because it allows me to drop in quick plug for a band I discovered via Chris Roberson’s twitter feed.

They’re called Pomplamoose, they’re from California and when I get home I’m going to buy everything they’ve recorded for $9.

It’s not just the songs. Which are excellent.

But I’m kinda hooked on the videos too.

NAF: FOL CHEN / Part I: John Shade, Your Fortune’s Made

I like Thursday night gigs. If you’re lucky and the bands are good and there’s a merch table, it means new music to listen to on a Friday while the live performance, the personality of the band is still fresh in your mind.

Last night found me at Sleazies to watch the always excellent 2storeys. It was one of those lucky bag nights with four eclectically chosen bands each bringing something different to the evening’s entertainment, and the last band on stage were a touring outfit from Los Angeles by the name of Fol Chen. The six piece line up including synths, guitars, occasional trumpet and as many as five vocals suffered a little from a weak live vocal mix but their songs, musicianship and self-deprecating sense of humour won the crowd over.

Thus it was that Friday morning’s been all about “Part I: John Shade, Your Future’s Made”. In short, I’m loving it. It’s a hugely varied album with notes of clashy introspection in songs such as You And Your Sister In Jericho and The Believers alongside genuinely hooky slices of radio friendly electro such as The Idiot and Cable TV. A lot of thought and effort has gone into the sound design. It’s reminiscent for me Grizzly Bear’s Veckitamest, more synthy but still blending the electronica with natural percussion, strings and brass in interesting ways. At it’s best this gives us the superb stomp of Winter, That’s All and SergeantPepper-esque maelstrom of Red Skies Over Garden City. And it’s best is very good indeed.

Don’t think I’m ever going to get bored of listening to this one.

NAF : TESCO CHAINSTORE MASCARA / Good Foundations

After a bit of a break – small fanfare on a child’s plastic trumpet – the return of  New Album Friday!

Feeling a bit jaded this morning after two nights out in a row. A little  crusty, a little crunchy, can’t quite get rid of the aftertaste of bubblegum and beer. Generally out of sorts.

Thankfully, then, that one of the CD’s I picked up from last night’s Bubblegum Records launch was the irrepressibly cheerful “Good Foundations” by Tesco Chainstore Mascara. A proper, bona fide slice of Twop, reminiscent of B&S’s Trevor Horn-produced Dear Catastrophe Waitress, but if Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne had snuck into the studio when everyone had gone home and fiddled with the masters.

I was promised, as I made my purchase, that five or six of the 11 tracks would become instant favourites. On first listen, I’d say three or four really stand-out and, of those, top marks go to opener, Writer’s Block, with its timpani roll and Spektorish stomp, and Just The Weight You Are, which has the Beach Boys tucket snuggly in its hip pocket (actually, for me that track, and a few of the others, are closer to the songs Paul Williams wrote for The Juicy Fruits in dePalma’s Phantom Of The Paradise – which is meant as a compliment, honest).

So, overall, the kind of music that puts a smile on my face. Thank fuck.

This is staying on for the rest of the day.

NAF: WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS / These Four Walls

I had to buy this album because of the band name. I’ve seen it on gig listings around town for a while, and love it for it’s simple truth. Where’s our future? it says. The one with personal jetpacks and flying cars and cool simple space age stuff, instead of all this complicated, contemporary shit we have to live through instead.

There’s a sense of frustration about the tracks on this album too. There’s a lot of crescendo going on, a jitter of guitars and thrashing of cymbals.  That makes it sound like there’s a lack of sensitivity, and that’s not true, the tracks are cleverly assembled with special attention paid to dynamics and there some moments of real beauty, but it’s just that the crash and slash seems to dominate.

Might be a grower though, so it’ll stay on the MP3 player, and I certainly want to see them in the flesh at some point soon.

NAF: BROKEN RECORDS / Until The Earth Begins To Part

Broken Records are a band I’ve heard snippets of recently and have been looking forward to checking out.  They were on my Hinterland shortlist, but I ended up being somewhere else during their timeslot, and it turns out the played Tut’s just two days ago, so it seems I’ve missed them again. Never mind, to tide me over until the next opportunity comes around I’ve picked up their debut release as this week’s New Album Friday album.

First impressions (and first impressions are what NAF is all about after all): This is a big sound, but then it is a seven piece band. In a manner reminiscent of last week’s NAF band, Grizzly Bear, the strings, brass and piano are used here to sculpt dynamics on an epic scale. There are soaring walls of sound and there are moments of beautiful intimacy too.  Not a band for hooky, catchy songs, rather (and again reminiscent of Grizzly Bear, and also The Decemberists) this is an album intended to be heard as an album. Everything from the concretised typography of the tracklisting to eschewing of intra-track gaps tells you this is constructed musical entity. And it’s a gorgeous, richly textured one.

I hope to catch them live soon, but until then, as an added bonus, I have a free live CD recorded at a session in Avalanche Records to mark Record Store Day.

Yay for proper record stores, and the bands that frequent them!

NAF: GRIZZLY BEAR / Veckatimest

Bloody Nora!  How’d you sum your first impressions of an album like this? It’s just so full of music that I don’t know where to start. In fact, if the vague impetus behind NAF was initially to convey that first-listen feeling of your newly purchased piece of plastic, this particular entry is going to suck. It’s an impossible task (in fact if you want a genuine metaphor for what your first listen of this album does to your head, skip on down to the video below, that’s all you really need to know).

Possibly best begin with what’s not, eh? After hearing single, Two Weeks, on the radio and catching their performance on Later… I was expecting something a bit poppy, left field, sure, maybe a tad on the eccentric side, but – without going anywhere near the kinder-egg encapsulation of something like The Hoosiers – definitely poppy.

It’s not. Or rather Two Weeks is about as pop-song oriented as it gets. Without wishing to denigrate the single – I think it’s a great wee song – the rest of album is simply less interested in melodic hooks, concerning itself instead with exploring what can be done by four guys with some guitars, drums, pianos, strings and, most of all, the human voice.  I could listen to this for the next month (and believe me, I will be) and still not run out of new textures to appreciate, new facets to wonder over. If you’re looking for reference points I’d toss up Fleet Foxes, Brian Wilson, The Decemberists, Bon Iver, but that just reflects my recent listening and doesn’t even scratch how varied, knowledgable, self-confident and adventurous this collection of music is.

And that final song, Foreground, might actually be genius.

Bona Fide.

And incandescent.

NAF: CAMERA OBSCURA / My Maudlin Career

It’s the Friday afternoon before the late May bank holiday. The sun’s shinin’. And we’re in the mood for something light and breezy to while away the last few working hours before the long weekend. Just as well the new Camera Obscura’s new release is on the feature rack in FOPP.

My Maudlin Career carries on where Let’s Get Out Of This Country left off. Sweet songs in an old fashioned vein, lush arrangements and that deep reverb vocal sound that they’ve made iconically their own. There’s the occasional Western Swing, er swing, going on among the Dusty moments and the more contemporary-indie tunes, which make for a very pleasant listen experience all in all. Perfect whiling music in fact. If only we could arrange a pool to dangle our feet in and a supply of cold beers, we’d be sorted.

Also worth checking out is their recent BBC session in which they made Sprinsteen’s Tougher Than The Rest into a genuine thing of beauty.

NAF: ZOEY VAN GOEY / The Cage Was Unlocked All Along

Okay, this week’s New Album Friday album is a bit of a cheat because I’ve had the album in question for almost a week, but it’s simply so good that it deserves to be featured.

The thing about Zoey van Goey, as anyone who has seen their live performances can tell you, is that whatever they attempt they deliver with effortless versatility, a warm likeability and great musicianship. So, when I heard six or seven months ago that they were recording their first album my reaction was not a guarded “Well, good luck“; it was “Bloody great, can’t wait. It’ll be fab!“.

And, of course, it is.

Zoey Van Goey - The Cage Was Unlocked All Along

I like lots of things about The Cage Was Unlocked All Along. I like the variety of song styles, the flow of moods that drifts through the selection like the weather outside a Glasgow tenement window. I love the production, the soft clarity of the interleaved vocals, the gentle tug of the rhythms, the weird background noises that don’t overwhelm, just colour. I adore the speech sample in the awesome, and sad, Nae Wonder, a song that manages to be uplifting and heartbreaking at the same time.

But what I like most about Zoey Van Goey is that they are a band who love to tell stories. Everything about this album reflects that. The album’s title is a last line that demands reverse extrapolation. The gorgeous fold-out artwork is packed with untold tales of youthful adventure, improbable escapes, cargo cults and much more. And the songs, the songs, the songs. Every single one of them a capsule of character, mood and situation. Opener, The Best Treasure Stays Buried, introduces us to a pair of criminal lovers (or is that lover criminals?), hiding their loot and going their separate ways until the heat dies down, only neither seems to be sure that they’ll see the other one – or the money – again. Following up bounces in We Don’t Have That Kind Of Bread, a litany of fanciful fears about what can happen when you leave the house (and no-one wants their loved one to be kidnapped, held in a cage with skeleton bones and held to ransom), but perhaps also a plea from someone in the early days of love to extend your precious time together when outside pressures are forcing you to part, however briefly. And that’s only the start of an album that delivers  tableau after tableau like miniature toys encased glittering coloured beads, all the way to the quiet, perfect jewel at the end, City Is Exploding. These stories have heart. They can tend towards a certain twindie wistfulness, but there’s real humour here too and a healthy sense of the absurd.

Zoey Van Goey are already great authentic songwriters. This is already one of my favourite albums in years. And what’s exciting – what’s really, skin-tingling, fucking exciting – is the anticipation of What Zoey Did Next.

NAF: DREVER, McCUSKER, WOOMBLE / Before The Ruin

No “new” album today, but this one is new to me and comes recommended by Mike Gallagher, a man who knows his contemporary folk/rock crossovery kinda stuff.

Like it a lot. The folk elements shining through in the instrumentation and voicing of the songs bring the album a mellow, chilling with a whisky in front of a peat fire while the locals entertain themselves and anyone else who happens to be listening in feel.

For me it has all the qualities (evenness of tone, lack of catchiness (but in a good way), ungrabby lyrics) that make for a good writing album.