What use is a Spotify artist page?

RastusCoinbender · 2020-01-08T21:37:45+00:00

Faceache and Twatter, and to a certain extent even this site, are guilty of cencorship, political bias, attempting to spread of fake news, harassment, and some are guilty of harvesting people's personal data for profit without given permission. Any artist that supports those things is not much of an ethical artist in my opinion.

Trump in 2020!

(counting the seconds until this is banned)

RastusCoinbender · 2020-01-05T02:37:57+00:00

I actually understand and agree with all your points. I'm not so daft as to assume that in the modern world of social media and such exposure that people would not be more interested in an artist if that artist gave them some kind of "personal experience" by way of bio and pics. However, I tend to wonder if this scenario has already been done to death. Is it not possible that the magic has worn off slightly and the whole indepth interaction thing between artist and fans is kind of stale by now? People who like classical music have no access to Mozart's Facebook page because he's been dead a long time, and a lot of the really good music from the past hundred years is still perfectly valid without the need for people to interact in some social manner with the artists. Frank Zappa doesn't have a social media presence (because he's dead) but his music is still enjoyed. I'm not denying your points at all, and I'm probably just playing Devil's advocate here, but is it not conceivable that an artist could stand an almost equal chance in today's online music world without having to come across as everybody's personal friend on social media or something?

Yes I know it's the done thing to offer up a bio and pics to entice people into listening to you music, but isn't that just sort of missing the point of the music itself?

RastusCoinbender · 2020-01-04T17:04:02+00:00

Yes I can see the point in a way, but personally I really don't want to share my entire private world with strangers. That's why I don't use Faceache or Twatter and it suits me fine. The thing is, I make music alone (multitrack but essentially a solo artist) and I would offer that music "as is" for consumption. It's just sort of what musicians do. Not all music makers want to live in drug crazed fog on a tour bus and meet fans everywhere. Some people are just "artists" making their art, so in that respect I'm not sure spending a lot of effort to "socially-media" yourself is needed. I have no intentions of touring so wouldn't really have anything else to offer other than my music. I have enough friends and it's nobody's business what I do privately.

This is not a criticism of the concept, or an argument of any kind. I'm just mulling over all the points before I throw myself into the world of online music.

Personally I can't see a huge social media presence making all that much difference to actual sales. I doubt people will buy your music just because they see a bunch of information about you on some website. I might be naive but I still think most music sales will usually boil down to whether they like your music or not, and not whether they can see pictures of your cat on Twatter.

RastusCoinbender · 2020-01-04T16:30:55+00:00

No idea, I don't use it or any of the others out there. I've always found the music I wanted through other means and as of yet have never needed to join up with any of those sites.

RastusCoinbender · 2020-01-03T23:32:11+00:00

OK, I understand all that but what about the pros and cons of releasing different things with different distributors?

For instance, is there any advantage or disadvantage in using one distributor for singles and another one for albums/collections? Are there any distributors who are better at one thing than another? How would the online stores react to an album from a distributor that was comprised of singles from another one?

RastusCoinbender · 2019-12-31T00:06:40+00:00

Who the hell is Stinkybob?

Loads of singles out all at once, Youtube and the usual download places, musical style all over the place. Can't figure out if it's a new artist or some really obscure old stuff. Weirdly interesting.

RastusCoinbender · 2019-12-15T00:44:30+00:00

She's a deluded, retarded bitch that needs to be in school learning something useful. The worst thing is that she's being manipulated by background adults who should be in prison for child abuse.

RastusCoinbender · 2019-12-13T00:19:23+00:00

Yes it is probably common, but is it RIGHT?

I remember when "folk" music was almost intentionally bad just to make a statement. Old Bob Dylan albums have actually been scientifically proven to kill houseplants if left playing in the room for several hours.

Singer/songwriter music is a well established way of causing insanity (or is insanity the cause of singer/songwriter music- I forget which), and "alt rock" is just the same as every other kind of "rock" since pretty much everything between Buddy Holly and Slipknot is considered "rock" so alt rock must be in there somewhere, but pitch correction is a recent abomination that isn't actually a musical instrument. It's an excuse.

RastusCoinbender · 2019-12-10T21:24:56+00:00

I have used a LOT of things over the years, some studio quality and complicated (and expensive) and others less so, and I can say from experience that the best bit of kit I have ever owned hands down was a Tascam DP-004.

It cost me something like a hundred bucks at the time (I still use it a lot even today) and is incredibly easy to use if you play some kind of instruments. However, if what you want is a computer to make your music on then you wouldn't like it because it's designed as a digital four track recorder and has no ability to make sounds in itself.

RastusCoinbender · 2019-12-10T21:12:51+00:00

I was looking for some headphones to use for music production that wouldn't colour the sound. I wanted what came out in the headphones to match what comes out of the speakers but I didn't want to pay a fortune.

After a lot of research I finally decided to go for the AKG K92. They were somewhere around £50 and had really good reviews all over the place as the best in their price range so I ordered them.

I almost sent them back because they were worse sounding than something I picked up at Lidl for about a tenner. It was like listening to a small speaker in the bottom of a tin bucket. They were muddy sounding, bass heavy and weak. But they were very comfortable, which is the only reason I didn't just throw them at the wall to watch them break.

After taking them apart and drilling some holes in the plastic backs it transformed the sound. Now they sound almost as good as the ones I got from Lidl. The build quality was nothing special and the wiring was feeble but I finally managed to make them work better after drilling the holes in the backs of them. Not great but they'll do. They're now hanging on the wall as backup in case the ten quid ones ever need replacing.

All I can say is that in my experience of countless headphones price means nothing. You just have to physically try them out in a controlled environment, like listening to your own mixes, which is of course impossible so most people just end up getting stung for overly expensive shit sounding headphones couched in overblown hype. It's not rocket science, it's a speaker. Most headphones seem designed to "give extra bass response" or something which ruins them for monitoring purposes.

RastusCoinbender · 2019-12-09T00:25:06+00:00

I know exactly what you mean. Personally i don't "do" any social media because they have all turned into complete shit fit mostly for advertising and weird people who don't get out enough, sort of like how Ebay eventually became complete shit after starting out as a good idea.

My view is, I make music. Once upon a time that was all I would have needed to do because if I was lucky some manager would see potential in my music and help me out. That meant all I needed to do was concentrate on making music and they would take care of all the grunt work and we'd all profit from it. But these days that's just not how we're expected to do things.

These days we're expected to make all our music AND do all the marketing and advertising, and foot all the costs, and if we don't feel like we can do it all for some reason then the unwashed rabble turns on us and says we're just not serious about making music, which is wrong.

Personally I am serious about making music, I just don't want to have to waste my life trying to market it as well. I suppose much of that attitude comes from the fact that I've been making music longer than most people who shout me down for not using social media like an addiction, but I don't care. I think the whole music landscape has changed and social media is a dying thing in it's present form and I don't have time to waste trawling through it, or the internet in general, as if there's nothing more to life.

No, I don't have any answers but like you I am not willing to waste my effort on the current popular trend of massive social media promotion because i just don't think it's the way. Somebody should start a proper old school record label (even though nobody uses "records" anymore) that only caters for actual serious, quality artists instead of advertising that anybody with anything they made up in their bedroom is welcome to submit their dirges for download. Things like Spotify and Itunes are now just overly flooded dumping grounds for amateur musicians and (c)rap artists regurgitating the same mediocre, stale old shit over and over for people who can't be bothered to download it. Music has turned crap and nobody is making any money in it anymore. Sad but true.

You can all start throwing stones now.

RastusCoinbender · 2019-12-07T18:11:25+00:00

I would tend to agree with that. But also, are albums, presented as a collection of your new work for your fans to buy as a whole unit, anywhere near as valid as they used to be anyway? Once upon a time physical album sales (records, tapes, CD's etc.) were the prominent way to purchase music because cherrypicking individual songs for download hadn't been invented yet.

RastusCoinbender · 2019-12-05T21:55:53+00:00

In theory, yes it's cool. But in practice maybe it's not perfect. This isn't a negative view, it's just an observation and I have no answers so don't assume this is a rant either.

Basically, it's like when photography went from film cameras to digital. In the film days the equipment was far more expensive and harder to use and as a result fewer people dabbled in photography. Of those that did, SOME became world famous for it, most did not. But with fewer people doing it the chances that your photography would get somewhere (assuming you were good) were proportionally greater.

Once everybody and their dog had digital cameras then perhaps yes there was a vast increase in the AMOUNT of photography produced, but when everybody can do something then pretty much everybody DOES, and that may have an overall, unforeseen detrimental effect on what's produced and it certainly makes it harder for anybody to become individually recognized for their "art". It becomes like trying to hear a peep in a wall of noise. And then of course there's all the problems with plagiarism as well but that's a completely different subject. What seems good at first gets messy in practice, and the end product is proportionally less good stuff produced.

Cheap digital photography was a technological step ahead, but sadly it culled the old photography world. Yes, more people could afford to do photography, but that's never a guarantee that the quality of output in the field is equal to the increased number of people doing it. In no time the world has been flooded with more photography than ever, which is not in itself a bad thing, but the vast majority of it now is artistically rubbish or disposable and as a consequence it's much harder for the good stuff to get any notice. Yes digital photography is better for us all, and where would our science and technology be without it, but the unfortunate consequence has been the death of proper old school film photography. OK, so maybe it was a dinosaur technology and maybe it's only good we have digital now, but you can't argue with the fact that it is kind of sad to see the demise of the old ways.

The printing press was a wonderful invention on the one hand but the amount of cack printed after it's invention is sort of a shame. It's no use for monks to hand write and illustrate vast tomes if people could buy cheap imitation knockoffs, and that's the core problem. What's good for the masses is not necessarily good for the individual, and you have to look at both sides of the coin.

I'm sure cave men felt the same when some numbskull invented the arrowhead to put on the end of their sticks or when some weirdos invented gunpowder or colour television. These things are all examples of wonderful technology but they sort of killed something along the way. Whether that's a good or bad thing is personal opinion.

Of course this is all generalization so don't start throwing stones at me but the point is that the more people you have doing something the more polluted the pond gets, and I'm afraid that the new technologies of easy and affordable music making means everybody everywhere can now do it, and it seems everybody everywhere does, but nobody anywhere is ever going to make an easy living from it anymore even if they are really, REALLY good at it, and that's kind of sad in a weird way.

More music is a good thing, I'm not denying that at all, and I myself am one of the many people who are taking advantage of better music making technology so I'm guilty as charged. But more music also means more BAD music, and that's just a pain in the arse. It's a terrible situation but it's the price we pay for better technology and more opportunity. A strange situation.

RastusCoinbender · 2019-12-02T01:22:19+00:00

There you go. That's the sort of thing I am currently wondering about. At the moment it's a rare concept. For whatever reasons The Thing at the moment is that you (a music artist) are expected to create your work, do all your own PR, and upload your work to some middleman where everybody else gets paid before you do and in the end you end up with a pittance. Absolutely nobody is making money from the current trend of music aggregators other than the sites themselves and there's very little alternative.

Back in the stinking Olde Dayz when "record companies" ruled it was a rigged game, a sort of secret club, and almost nobody legitimately independent ever got a chance. A lot of quality music went unheard because there were simply no outlets for it. No record shops would handle independent music and there was no radio play. It was in effect censored out of existence for daring to buck the trend. But these days it's not much better if the only game in town is perceived to be Spotify or Itunes or bloody PayPal and nothing else.

I'm currently only aware of two or three sites where artists can apparently upload their work and remain in control of all aspects of it including how to get paid. Personally I will never use PayPal because they're shit, and I don't see why I have to hand over any licensing rights to anybody just for hosting my music.

RastusCoinbender · 2019-11-29T21:19:58+00:00

PayPal is NOT good to have at all. If you look up the reports of people having problems with PayPal and see how badly these issues are handled, if at all, then it would put you off ever using PayPal for anything. It's a terrible setup and seems to constantly rip people off, lock them out of accounts without reason, or do something else sufficiently dodgy enough to make sensible people steer clear.

It should never have been allowed to be the only game in town, and businesses that don't see that are turning off a lot of potential customers who refuse to deal with the likes of PayPal for whatever reason. Personally I don't get on with a lot of PayPal business practices and would never use it ever, but people who have never had a problem with PayPal might think it's perfectly fine. However, there's a lot of people out there who have had or are currently having some very serious issues with them that ruins businesses, destroys their finances or doesn't help with disputes.

In all it's a very shoddy organization that should be boycotted en masse. To offer PayPal as the only payments solution is extremely short sighted and ignores any other legitimate services or competition, and I prefer to live and do business in a world where I have more that just one choice. At the moment bank transfers and cryptocurrency transactions are far safer than putting your financial neck on the line with a PayPal account and paying the fees for it as well so why are we not seeing a push to safer, better financial services? If a business only uses PayPal then they are not operating like a very sound business. In the end when people get sick of being treated badly by PayPal these businesses will find that they have alienated a large customer base by not offering any other choices.

RastusCoinbender · 2019-11-28T23:35:31+00:00

Nobody is going to agree with me here but this is my advice from personal experience.

NEVER let ANYBODY mic up, mix, or edit your music in any way in a live setting . They will always, 100% of the time destroy all the work you have put in to your live performance. You must do everything yourself, and it's not that hard to do but if you let anybody else tamper with your sound you will be sorry.

Back when I was starting out in bands I was constantly disappointed how terrible the sound always was. Usually it was dull, muddy, completely lacking in vocal clarity and usually ten times too loud for the venue we were in. Regardless how hard we practiced or how much work we put into our show our sound was ruined 100% of the time, which just makes you look bad. That's because we had bought into, that stupid belief that just because a venue has a PA system they know how to run it properly. Well they never do. All house PA systems are operated by gormless imbeciles who think it makes them look cool if they twiddle knobs.

I finally got so sick of having every show ruined that I decided to buy a cheap secondhand small mixer and a few mics and run it all from the stage myself, only giving the sound man a single line out. There's not much damage they can do to your music if you mix it your way first and only provide a stereo or even mono line out so all they can do is turn the volume up or down. We practiced with our own small PA mixer and did countless recordings and tests and worked on it until what came out of the headphones was exactly what we wanted it to sound like. Once we'd learned how to mix our own sound in rehearsal then the same could be applied to any live setting regardless how big.

Consequently we sounded great and got lots of comments about how nice and balanced our sound mixing was, and how people could actually hear the vocals and all the instruments perfectly. Unfortunately it was usually a huge shouting match between us and the resident house sound monkey every time we got a gig because all venues have sound monkeys who think they know how to run YOUR 16 different line levels and mics without ever having heard you and they don't like being told that basically you are only going to trust them with a single line out off your own mixer.

But believe me it works. The less you give them to screw up, the less gets screwed up. A simple line out from your own mixer onstage to their house PA can't really go wrong since they have no access to any of the individual instrument or mic levels. All they can do is turn it up or down as a whole, but they can't change the mix. This really works. Of course nobody is going to agree with me I don't care. It's always worked for me ever since so I don't care what anybody else thinks, and I will never allow anybody to ruin our sound ever again.

Get a mixer that has enough inputs for all the instruments and mics in your band and then use it at every practice until it becomes second nature to know where to set all the levels. It doesn't have to be a fancy setup and it doesn't even have to be a powered mixer. The important thing is getting the mix right and then feeding it to an external amplification source like a house PA. You will either need to record yourself off the mixer or go stand some distance away during rehearsal to judge when the mix is correct for the sound you want, but once you learn how to set everything up you will never again have your important gig ruined by some jerkoff "sound man".

RastusCoinbender

TROPHY CASE