¡Mi libro ‘La Música en la Era Digital’ está disponible en español!
Paga lo que creas que vale. Descargá tu copia ahora.
Este libro es una obra en proceso. Una especie de documento vivo. Comienza a leer ahora, y crecerá mes a mes.
La mùsica es tanto cultura como negocio. Ambos están intrìnsecamente ligados con el otro. En diferentes momentos de la historia, la cultura de la música y el negocio de la música han sido profundamente disímiles.
En la era de la imprenta, el modo principal en que la música se producía, distribuía y consumía era sobre el papel. La música era puntos sobre una hoja. La era eléctrica, con la introducción de grabaciones y transmisiones, transformó radicalmente el significado de la música para las personas y, en consecuencia, transformó su rentabilidad.
Y al igual que en un primer momento la era eléctrica fue profundamente perturbadora para músicos, empresas y fanáticos, lo mismo ocurre con la era digital.
La forma de atravesar dichos cambios es comprenderlos. Para adaptarse al nuevo contexto y prosperar. Es importante reaccionar en forma informada, deliberada y progresiva, conforme a las oportunidades del nuevo contexto – en vez de responder temerosa, reactiva y conservadoramente, considerando que el nuevo contexto es una amenaza y un caos.
Este libro aspira a ser una guía para enfrentar esos cambios – no un instructivo de qué se debe hacer – sino una ayuda para realizar elecciones inteligentes, racionales y estratégicas respecto de tu propia empresa musical, y puedas comprender los cambios en el modo en que la música se utiliza y comprende como parte de nuestra nueva cultura musical crecientemente dominante.
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Tagged: Spanish
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- April 18, 2012 – 8:53 pm
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- By dubber
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The Caracas crew in the barrio
I’ve been in Caracas since Friday with my friends Jez, Ruth, Alex, Rich, Will and Leo… and I’m at a bit of a loss to describe my experience to date. Amazing, inspiring, and occasionally terrifying would about cover it.
We’re here as part of an Un-Convention event being held at Tiuna el Fuerte – a ‘cultural park’ celebrating it’s 7th year.
As part of our time here we’ve been up in some of the most dangerous barrios in the world, meeting rappers and music producers working within poor, excluded and isolated communities in Venezuela.
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Tagged: Caracas, Tiuna el Fuerte, Un-Convention
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- April 18, 2012 – 12:01 am
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- By dubber
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I reached a bit of a milestone last night. 1000 people (actually, now it’s 1019 1020…) have downloaded my book, Music in the Digital Age. I’ve let people decide what they want to pay for it, and have moved the ‘recommended price’ around to see what works.
Having hit the thousand mark, I thought it might be interesting to post some numbers and see what’s happened. So here’s how it breaks down.
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Tagged: pricing
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- April 11, 2012 – 10:57 pm
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- By dubber
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I was interviewed by Scott Bliss for his internet-only radio-show-without-a-radio-station. It was a fun interview to do. We Skyped, but each of us recorded his own audio. After we spoke, I sent my recording to him for editing.
Might use that trick for something myself one day. Sounds pretty good – and after a while you forget that the two people talking are on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
Of course, along the way, I say some stuff about that book I’m writing…
Tagged: Interview
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- April 10, 2012 – 6:39 pm
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- By dubber
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This week, it’s been ten years since I started blogging. Lots of people I know have been blogging for at least that long – but when it actually happens to you, it’s nice to pause and think about what that means.
As I recall, I was teaching a 3rd year radio class at AUT, and had asked Russell Brown along as a guest speaker. He mentioned that he had started blogging and was, if I remember correctly, just about to stop doing his ‘Hard News’ segment on the wireless to devote his attention to Public Address, which means that’s ten years old too.
My first blog post was about the voluntary music targets for radio stations in New Zealand. The Minister of Broadcasting at the time was Marian Hobbs (not to be confused with a certain UK DJ) and she was in the process of negotiating herself into a corner with respect to kiwi music.
A lot’s happened since then – some of it good – and some of it not so good. That’s can be another blog post some other time. But plus ça change and all that, yeah?
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Tagged: blogging
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- April 6, 2012 – 10:08 pm
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- By dubber
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I started drawing pictures of cats in the last couple of days, using Paper on the iPad. Cats are pretty much the only things that I can draw that people can correctly identify without prompting. For some reason, they always come out looking a bit sad.
For a half-hearted April Fools thing, I joked that I was going to quit my day job and become a cartoonist – and linked to a couple of the pictures. That led my friend Craig to say “it’s not even worth starting a Tumblr for” – which, for various complicated reasons, means that I had to. It’s known as the Rock & Roll Tedium Law.
Weirdly – for someone who has NEVER been able to draw – I’ve had nothing but compliments. In fact, several people have asked if they can buy prints. Which is, of course, absurd.
But it’s encouraged me to continue – at least for a while. If you’d like to see my pictures of sad cats, they’re now available at a Tumblr blog called The Saddest Cats.
The internet is weird.
Tagged: cartoon, cats
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- April 1, 2012 – 11:31 am
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- By dubber
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Let’s get this out of the way right up front: I like living in Birmingham. I moved here from New Zealand with a job to return to, phoned them after 6 months and said “sorry – I’m not coming back”. That was nearly eight years ago.
But I am sick of this city competing for greatness.
Any time Birmingham has the opportunity to enter something in which we might emerge being considered ‘the best’, we’ll spend millions on our bid for selection. And guess what? Those other people we’re in competition with like their home town too. We pin so much on winning, and we fool ourselves into thinking that the outcome is anything other than arbitrary.
The empty rhetoric of ‘Birmingham is amazing’, ‘Birmingham is full of inspiring people’ and ‘Look how great Birmingham is’ is worse than unhelpful. It places us in a pointless competition with other places and centres our sense of self-worth around, on the one hand, what others think of us and, on the other, a series of vacuous mantras that if we repeat often enough, perhaps we’ll come to believe.
Meanwhile, our leaders are considered to be our champions and representatives to the outside world, rather than in charge of making things better. If there’s anything that Birmingham is the most amazing at, it’s putting faith in marketing as the solution to all things.
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- March 31, 2012 – 3:58 pm
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- By dubber
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One of the great things about being a researcher for a living is that simply ‘finding things out’ is the successful conclusion of an experiment.
If I attempt something, and it’s a complete failure, then I have found out that it didn’t work, and that’s a win.
In the case of my iPad experiment – I didn’t just find out that I can’t spend a week without using my laptop for work purposes (or rather, I can – but it’s just incredibly impractical) – I also found out that there’s a lot I can use my iPad for that I might not ordinarily have considered.
Those video blog posts, for instance, would never have happened if I hadn’t been kicking at the edges of what’s possible to accomplish in convenient tablet form.
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Tagged: experimental
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- March 29, 2012 – 11:18 am
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- By dubber
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Another quick video using iMovie on the iPad – this time with a few of the more advanced features (not that the video itself is any more sophisticated than before, particularly). I think this is something I’ll probably get better at with time. But it’s fun playing with new toys.
The point is, the movie itself is not the main thing. Making it was.
But I feel like being able to blog, edit, publish, write and just generally do stuff (including serious work stuff) using the iPad makes the device more useful and less of an expensive toy.
Tagged: iPad
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- March 25, 2012 – 7:17 pm
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- By dubber
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So I messed around with the iPad some more. I recorded things and I blogged. I also did a bit of editing.
Here’s a link to a video of the class I gave to my Music Programming students today – recorded on a Flip camera, and edited on the iPad. It’s nothing special, but it’s probably not something I would have done had I not been using different equipment than usual.
Above is another video experiment. Not a very good one, I’ll admit, but it’s something I can perhaps improve of.
Note to self: do video recordings in daylight. Grainy is not a good look. Also – get longer arms.
Tagged: Video
- Published:
- March 23, 2012 – 10:09 pm
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- By dubber
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