Mar 11, 2012 |
For the past week or so, I’ve been enjoying having Jake back home after his five months living in Mumbai. We’ve been hanging out together, watching some movies, listening to music, making websites and just catching up and telling stories.
He had an amazing time – running a stage at a music festival, writing for an online independent music magazine, interviewing his music heroes, going to gigs and generally being a music industry worker. Lots of challenges and lots of new experiences. India will tend to do that for you.
A month from now, he’ll be on his way to Brazil for three months. More music festivals, a film festival, working in a recording studio, touring bands and learning lots more about the music business from the grassroots.
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Jan 26, 2012 |
I thought I’d try out the brand new Soundcloud HTML-5 widget on one of Jake’s new tunes. Soundcloud is a tool that’s been invaluable to him as an independent electronic musician just starting out, and he’s had to upgrade a couple of levels (from Free to Lite to Solo) to accommodate his fairly prolific output.
I really like what they’ve done with the new player, and how the artwork displays. Listen loud.
Jan 3, 2012 |
Jake has just released the fourth of his series of albums from 2011. That’s it there. Have a listen.
It’s a bit of a landmark, because it marks the end of a major project for him. The idea was that he would just collect together everything that he’d finished at the end of every three-month period, compile it in a pleasing order, and put it up for free download (or pay, if you prefer) on Bandcamp.
His intention was simply to get better at making electronic music. He calls it ‘growing up in public’. It works.
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Jun 30, 2011 |
The excitement in our house this week is the release of (my son) Jake’s album ‘June’. He started on a project at the beginning of this year to make music, and release whatever he’d finished at the end of every three months. So the first of these was a sort of extended EP called ‘March‘, which has some great tunes on it.
The new one is a full album – with five bonus tracks, no less.
The third and fourth in the series – September and December – will follow, and after that – well, perhaps he’ll get to work on something else.
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Aug 17, 2010 |
There was a three-page article in GQ Magazine recently, in which U2’s manager Paul McGuinness makes the case for artists needing to make money from their music in a world where people are downloading it for free.
He called it “How To Save The Music Industry“.
In it, he asks that the sort of clever, innovative people that you might find at Google, Apple and Facebook put their mind to solving the problem. The presupposition, of course, is that we all agree on both the diagnosis of the problem and the need for a solution.
Now, this is the sort of thing that I talk about a lot. It’s my job. I’m Reader in Music Industries Innovation at BCU. And McGuinness does have a very good point, which is that innovation is really important when it comes to the music industries these days. Can’t argue with that, at least.
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