I started a Spotify playlist to try and keep track of some of my favourite music from 2013 + releases from 2013 that I intend to come back to and spend a bit more time with. I’ll be updating / tweaking it throughout the year, so if you use Spotify and are interested in keeping tabs on this evolving playlist of tunes from the year 2013… maybe subscribe to it?
Because I had to make some painful (painful to me) cuts when making my ‘100 Favourite Tracks From 2012’ post, I decided that maybe a list with a little more leg room for all the great music that came out last year was necessary. And that thought led to the making of this list of 212 tracks, a number that I settled upon because it kind of looks like 2012 while at the same time acknowledging the fact that a playlist of 2012 tracks would be ridiculous.
So, if you are spending your New Years Eve at home, or even if you’d just like a 2012 atmosphere for while you get ready to go out on the town to ring in 2013, you could do worse than pressing play on this playlist.
Let it play from the start or throw it on shuffle. It’s your call.
Seriously, why are you still in this post? Oh… you’re still listening to this song because I didn’t write enough words to fill up 3:26. Fair enough. But after you’re done listening, head over to his Bandcamp page and get the whole thing.
A few days ago, Sean Adams (from Drowned In Sound) shared a link on Facebook to an A-Trak article on Huffington Post about what was good and missed from Myspace. And everything he listed in that article were all things that hit home with me (and probably anyone who once experienced the excitement and community that existed on Myspace back before it lost its way). But one thing that he didn’t mention that I miss (and probably because he couldn’t of known) was how everytime A Singer Of Songs would post a new song on his Myspace page, he would accompany it with a great little blog post about the story behind the song.
But once Myspace died and we all left, those A Singer Of Songs stories were one of the things that died with it. Until recently that is. We may have lost the ability for an artist to easily have everything about their music conveniently in one place… but with a little extra work (and with a few different services) it is still possible. So now, A Singer Of Songs can post a new track on his Soundcloud page and do a blog post on his Tumblr (and add upcoming shows to Songkick), and then all of these things can be pulled into his Facebook BandPage tab. I guess when you type that out loud, it is quite a bit more complicated than it should be.
But at least it means we can still read the back stories behind his music, because the one behind ‘Into The Storm’ is one of the more touching ones. It involves a son and a father and a trumpet. Here’s a snippet:
“Five months later, this is the first aSoS recording with my new best brass friend. In the meanwhile my father has gotten himself a new trumpet and has started playing again after more than fifty years of silence. Circles should be closed. If not, they are just crooked lines.”
But go read the full thing on his Tumblr (or on the ‘Blog’ tab of his Facebook BandPage). It’s a lovely song on its own, but the story behind it makes it lovelier.
Yesterday, yvynyl posted about how Spotify is now ‘integrated’ into Tumblr, which was the first time I heard about that (‘integrated’ being in quotations for reasons I’m sure anyone from a non-Spotify country or even just not logged into Spotify will surely have experienced). Perhaps it just happened, although I have been vacant from the internet for the past little while, so maybe this is old news. Either way, today I started to see a few people doing audio posts where the track was being pulled from Spotify and I’m not a big fan.
I don’t have any major issues with what Spotify does. It can be a handy service for checking out an album you’ve heard about, whether that be a brand new release or something from before you were born (or more accurately, a handy way to listen to albums from artists who don’t use Bandcamp). And I have found Spotify to be a nice way for me to create a personal ‘radio station’ for my own listening pleasures while at work (you know, where you want to have music you enjoy on while you go about your day, even though your mostly preoccupied with working and not ‘really’ listening). And Spotify has a very good selection of music and the interface is pretty intuitive. And since I am currently living in England, I reside in one of the chosen countries.
But I’m originally from Canada. So not only do I know what it is like to only know about a product like Spotify existing, but most of my friends still live there and still only know about Spotify. So Spotify linking up with a worldwide sharing platform like Tumblr (and Facebook before) sort of misses the point of worldwide sharing. A lot of people get a music player or link to music they can’t listen to. Which is kind of dicky and exactly the reason why I don’t bother sharing Spotify tracks on Facebook, and the same reason why I don’t see myself using this new Spotify & Tumblr integration.
Sharing Spotify music outside of the Spotify platform is the equivalent of a group people talking about an upcoming party… and one person in that group was never invited to the party. And then they’re like “I didn’t know Tom was having a party” and everybody else is like “Oh shit, I forgot that Terry wasn’t invited”. Just last week, Spotify tried to tell me that I should send some music to my Canadian Facebook friend. Which seemed like a mildly cruel joke to play on him.
On a side note… why doesn’t Tumblr integrate with Bandcamp already? That’s something I could get behind (and seems like something that should exist already).
“When people are just spreading things that have been heavily marketed, they seem more like pawns than fans. Not that I’m saying people are thoughtless, but I never see music as a popularity contest… I hate mobs, and I’ve never believed that the most popular thing and the best thing ever correlate. I think that we’re losing something. Perhaps it’s the idea that music should challenge people a little bit, every now and then.”
This is a great piece on somewhat of an over-played topic. Personally, I think we’re living in the Golden Age of music blogging. Sean has a lot of great points in this piece, and I don’t think he’s as negative as the title of the piece implies. But what’s so exciting about this is that we ARE seeing a whole new paradigm emerge, and that we’re all invited to play around in the space. Most innovative ideas win. It’s fun!
I agree with the points that both Sean and Mark make. We are in a golden age… but at the same time music has such a high turnover rate that it often feels like an album gets only about a week of attention (a week is probably being a bit generous… a day or two might be more accurate). I think the tweet that Sean mentions in his interview sums things up quite aptly:
Here is a video of good ol’ boy Bruce, talking about Woody and sharing his wisdom with all us young ‘uns. The video above is just a snippet of him dropping knowledge. He dropped more and sang more, and he can see the full thing over on NPR.
I had this video saved in my drafts folder for quite some time. I’ve since forgotten what I was going to say about it, but I don’t have anything else ready to post for today… so watch this if you haven’t already.
As the 90s came to a close, the business of music began to change profoundly. New technology allowed artists to record and produce their own music and music videos, and the internet became a free-for-all distribution platform for musicians to promote themselves to audiences across the world. The result was a massive influx of artists onto the cultural scene, and audiences were left wondering how to sort through them all. In this episode we discuss these massive changes, and reveal how music blogs and websites have arisen as the new arbiters of quality.
If you can’t afford that plane / bus / train / ticket to get to Austin for South by Southwest (not to mention a week off of work), perhaps Couch by Couchwest is more up your alley. Bands can submit videos of them performing and fans can sit at home and watch. Not quite as good as what the atmosphere is like in Texas, but beats sitting at home twiddling your thumbs.
Bands, check out their submission rules (they started accepting videos yesterday and will continue to accept until the 17th) and then set the video camera up in front of the couch and get in on the festivities.
As you probably already know, Facebook has introduced their new ‘Timeline’ look. At first, it was just popping up on different friends profile pages and I didn’t really pay it any mind. But last week they started to introduce that same look to Pages. So I paid it some mind. At the moment, you can still keep the old Pages look, but on March 30th the ‘Timeline’ look will be forced on all Pages. So whether you like the change or not, there is no avoiding it.
Like a lot of people, my original feeling was “just leave it how it is”. I wasn’t a huge fan of how Facebook Pages looked, but I had a good grasp of how they worked and looked, and I was fine with it. After playing around with the new look for a bit… I think it will be an improvement (once we all get used to how it works and looks, I don’t think the learning curve will be too steep to climb). Of course, I imagine there will be a bunch of ‘Petition Facebook To Go Back To The Old Pages Look’ groups springing up, but I think your time will be best spent adapting. So this post is an attempt to help you get your page setup and ready for the new look with a focus on a few of the important things:
1. Cover Photo - This is the big photo that will now be at the top of your page. I like this change. The look of Facebook pages has always been the opposite of visually appealing, so this is a nice touch. The important thing you need to know about the cover photo is the dimensions of the picture, and those are 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels high. With the right picture for your band, your Facebook page increases in sexiness tenfold. So find a picture that you think best represents you and crop it to the right size. You can see what we’ve done on our page, and you can also check out what we’ve done so far on Patrick Porters and A Singer of Songs page (we’re still in the process of getting fully setup, as well as other artists setup). Personally, I don’t see how anyone can look at those new ‘timeline’ looks and compare them to the old looks and say that it is not an improvement.
2. Apps - These are now shown at the top of your page, as opposed to down the left hand side. The other big change is that you can only show 3 main ones (you always have to show the ‘Photos’ app) and the rest of your apps are now ‘hidden’ under a drop down menu. They have also removed the option of choosing an app to be your default landing page (which, a lot of bands would normally of had set to have people automatically land on their BandPage or Bandcamp). At first, I didn’t like this at all, as the option of listening to ones music lives away from your wall (or ‘timeline’ as it is known now). It is kind of annoying that people now have to do a little exploring before they can find where to listen to music, but I suspect this is something that we’ll all just get used to.
What I imagine Facebook is creating is a way to turn your Facebook page into something that works a bit like your own website, and apps are now acting like the different menu options a website would have. At the moment, the makers of these apps have not had time to update / implement changes that are specifically designed for the new ‘timeline’ look (i.e. there is a lot of white / wasted space in the tabs at the moment, as they were originally created for a width of 520 px and not 851). But when they do, I think it might be able to look / work quite nice… but you’ll definitely need to be selective with your apps and make sure you’re using the best ones. BandPage and Bandcamp are still tops on my list and I eagerly await them to adapt their Apps to better suit the new layout, as right now they don’t look right on the wider page.
I’m still not decided on who my ‘number three’ app will be, but for now, I’ve gone with something to show our tweets (at the moment, I use Tweets To Pages for that). If you are band that plays gigs, I would reccomend checking out Songkick’s app. The main reason for this is — as there are more than a few options for sharing your gigs — Songkick also works with Bandcamp, Soundcloud and BandPage, so by adding a gig date once, you can have it show up automatically in all those other places.
To make up for the loss of being able to set an app as your default landing page, Facebook has at least added the nice touch of being able to create custom pictures to represent the apps (and you can name them however you like). So instead of having your app named BandPage and showing the Roots Music logo (which may be recognizable to you… it might not be that obvious to other people as to why they should click it), you can call it something like Music Player and use a picture that more intuitively tells someone that there is music to be listened to there. The image size for these ‘app pictures’ is 115 pixels wide by 74 pixels high (so, pretty small; don’t use something that requires too much detail). To make those changes you just click on the drop down arrow to the right of your ‘top’ apps, which will then show all of your apps. When in this mode, hovering your mouse over an app will show a ‘pencil icon’ on the top right corner of each app. Click that and then just choose ‘Edit Settings’. I’ve done it for our current top 3 apps, and I think it looks a lot nicer than the original images that were shown.
3. Let’s get visual, visual - The new look is definitely geared around being more visually pleasing. This is especially noticeable with the new option of ‘highlighting’ a post. When you click the ‘star icon’ on the right corner of a wall post, it makes that post stretch the full width of the screen. It works really well if you have a nice picture or video posted to your wall and really makes it stand out. Which means you should probably start thinking about posting more nice pictures and videos.
4. Use it differently - The main thing that this new look will force upon you (besides the look itself) is how you use Facebook. This will mostly come with time, but here are a few things that come to mind:
Change your ‘About’ section so that it is only a sentence or two, or rather, so that you have room to add a link to wherever you would most ideally want someone to go to. For us, I’ve put our website link. For you, it may be your Bandcamp page, or just the link to that app you would have preferred to be your landing page (i.e. like the ‘listen.to’ link for your Roots Music BandPage). You can’t count on people to actually go into your ‘About’ section and find your website link, so make it available from the moment they arrive on your page.
You can now pin a post to the top of your timeline, and it will stay there for 7 days. Meaning, if you have a gig that week or a new album out or a new video, you can have that be the first thing people see when they arrive on your Facebook for 7 days, which is a good thing.
You may not be able to set your BandPage or Bandcamp app as your defaul landing page anymore, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be posting tracks from either directly on your ‘timeline’. And those tracks play directly within your ‘timeline’, so you can still get people listening to your music without a default landing page, you might just need to be a bit more proactive about it instead of assuming that they are just automatically showing up on a page with a music player and pressing play. Also, it’s important to remember that a lot of people will be interacting with you on Facebook directly from their newsfeed. So maybe a default landing page just gave bands a false idea of how much people were being exposed to their music. Anybody showing up to your Facebook page for the first time is probably coming there because they want to check you out, so I think they’ll be able to find your music (especially if you have tracks on your ‘timeline’ as well as in your BandPage and Bandcamp apps).
Well, that is about all for now. There is definitely more that could be talked about — things like ‘Milestones’ and going back and documenting your bands entire existence— but I think that the above stuff is enough to get you prepared for when your pages look will change at the end of the month (also, I haven’t done any of that other stuff yet). If you want to know more, or do more homework on the matter, some other people have posted on the new ‘timeline’ look and they were what I referred to when getting our page setup (those articels: Roots Music slide show and Hubspot’s Guide to Facebook’s New Page Design).
But I think the main thing you need to do is just start using and getting used to it. And you should also ‘like’ us on Facebook.
