Archive for the ‘Arts & Business’ Category
! ZAPPED ! – a graphic novel in need of artwork
Got some nice cover art from Erik Evans of Bottle Rocket Productions. Now, need artist(s) interested in illustrating thee body of the story. Check out the info. below then get in touch.
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! ZAPPED !
! Zapped ! is the story of a man called to a quest by the sudden (or as he discovers not-so-sudden) onset of a serious and disturbing disease. Unbeknownst to him, he is called not to recover what he has lost but to transform his life and himself. His journey takes him into unknown territories of alternative healing, spiritual practice, interspecies relationships, spirit possession, and the hidden depths of his own internal life.
The story is told through three intertwining narrative threads:
- Cleo’s story –- told from the point of view of the protagonist’s wife’s dog.
- The protagonist’s story.
- The running commentary of two members of the Watcher Bureau, keepers of the collective unconscious, charged with recording stories of the human condition
Author Bio: Jeffrey Callen is a writer based in San Francisco whose work is rooted in the belief that an authentic story opens up a space of connection that creates the basis for understanding, communication and effective action. He is also a creative writer, published poet and cultural analyst. His writing on popular culture appears in scholarly and popular publications. He received an MA in Music from UC Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from UCLA.
CALL FOR ARTISTS: I am looking for one or more artists to work with on this project. Each narrative thread is intended to have a distinct visual image. I have imagined Cleo’s story as having a manga look; the protagonist’s story with the look of a Hernandez brothers (Love & Rockets) story; and, a film noir presentation of the Watcher Bureau. However, I am more interested in ideas that occur to potential collaborators. If you are interested in learning more about this project, please contact me at jeffreycallenphd@gmail.com or here at Deciphering Culture.
Short Takes: Tracking Musical Taste — Trendsetting Cities
Earlier this year, I prepared a literature review on changes in musical taste for a study commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony so the ephemeral subject of how musical tastes develop, shift, morph (choose a verb) is a little higher on my radar than usual. Discover Magazine recently published a quick summary of a research paper that maps the geographic flow of music on the social-networking music site Last.fm. There’s more to it than this but the researchers found that among American Last.fm users, Atlanta is the trendsetting city. There are some quibbles I have with how grand a conclusion you can make based on info. gathered from a single social media site but it’s interesting and they created some cool info graphics so I’d recommend checking it out: Which City Is the Musical Tastemaker for the US? Hint: Not NY or LA.
Short Takes: anti-marketing in the music industry
Thanks to Derek Miller of Music Think Tank for turning me on to an interesting short article in the Atlantic: For Indie Bands, the New Publicity Is No Publicity.
It usually starts the same way. Some band posts a song to a music sharing site like Bandcamp or SoundClick. One person sends it to two people, who each send it to four, and so on, until it gets picked up by a music blog like Gorilla vs. Bear or Brooklyn Vegan and then aggregated on the Hype Machine. A week later, the band has caught the attention of record labels, tastemakers, and promoters.
But everyone wants to know, who is this act? They won’t do interviews, so all anyone has to go on is two MP3s and a low-resolution profile picture where they’re too far away from the camera to make out anyone’s face. And still, Pitchfork just gave their song the Best New Music designation. They’re booked for a South by Southwest showcase. Fifteen days have passed, and the band is now the blogosphere’s next big thing—even though the blogosphere couldn’t recognize the band on the street.
This is how underground bands come of age in 2011. (for the rest)
It’s all about creating interest through creating mystery.
Short takes: different types of “creative metropoles”
Interesting project winding up in September 2011 looks at the different strategies taken by eleven European cities to develop and support their creative industries. The Creative Metropoles project is based on a premise I share and would like to see shared in the U.S.: “a facilitator of innovation, creative industries are essential for the development of other sectors.” The cities (as different as Berlin and Riga, Amsterdam & Warsaw) will each identify their own best practices and learn from each other’s experiences — “the ambition is not only to present the good practices but also deal with current problem issues and generate new knowledge and approaches.” The project is working in 5 policy areas:
1. structure of the public support for creative industries
2. business capacity and internationalisation of creative industries
3. space for activities by creative industries and creative city districts as creative incubators
4. funding schemes for creative industries
5. demand for the outputs of creative industries, including municipalities in the role of consumers.
The final report, particularly the appendices (Good Practices from European Cities) offers an interesting view of the diversity of approaches to developing creative industries that have had significant success and point to the need to both localize (i.e., collaboration for mutual benefit among Berlin) and reach across national boundaries (i.e., relationship building between artisans and designers in Fes, Morocco and Amsterdam). There’s a lot of material and I’ve just been browsing but my first impression is there’s a lot to learn.c
Short takes: Music industry trends in “recommendation & discovery”
I spent a good portion of Monday at the latest edition of the SF Music Tech Summit. My name tag this time said “SF Weekly” instead of “Deciphering Culture” (I asked for dual identification) so a lot of people buttonholed me to get coverage for a new service. Not surprisingly, most of them fell into the “recommendation and discovery” segment although none of the pitches left me convinced of the efficacy of any of the new spins on the work of the established players. Also, not surprisingly my blog post for SF Weekly’s All Shook Down blog focused on a SRO panel that featured some of the heavy hitters in R & D. The relevant excerpt below.
Flickr/aquababe
S.F. MusicTech Summit: How Do Listeners Want to Discover New Music?@ All Shook Down
- by Jeffrey Callen on 5/10/11 @ 7:29 pm
….The standing-room-only “Recommendation & Discovery” panel offered one of the more interesting glimpses into the internal logic of the music industry machine. Chaired by Kevin Arnold of IODA (also creator of S.F.’s annual Noise Pop festival), the panel brought together some of the heavy hitters in the music search business, including MOG, Rovi Corporation, The Filter (a Peter Gabriel brainchild), and Slacker.
An interesting discussion on the nuts-and-bolts of music recommendation and discovery services offered some contradictory food for thought. Music consumers looking for recommendations “prefer a man-to-machine to a man-to-man relationship” (David Hyman of MOG), and if you focus on personalized user specs, you get information that is increasingly “granular” (David Roberts of The Filter). Yet R & D is a “human-centric task,” said Adam Powers of Rovi. Powers also asserted that when Rovi, a giant in the R&D world, was looking at other companies to acquire, it found 250 that thought they had R&D nailed. But from the number of R&D company reps in attendance at the SF Music Tech Summit, it seems that either that news hasn’t gotten out, or nobody’s actually nailed it.
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- by Jeffrey Callen on 5/10/11 @ 7:29 pm
Related articles
- Latest Rovi Moves Establish Consumer Presence (paidcontent.org)
- MOG To Go Freemium as Streaming Music From Apple & Google Looms (fakeiitian.com)
- Google tweaks Android Market to make app discovery easier (reviews.cnet.com)
- Google Retools Android Market for Better App Discovery (phonescoop.com)
- Headliner.fm + SoundCloud = artists reaching new fans (news.cnet.com)
- Music Hunter: Intelligent Music Discovery For iPad (macstories.net)
- Internet Radio’s MOG to Add Free Tier to Service (siriusbuzz.com)
- How We Got 150k Users In 3 Days (discovrmusic.com)
One for the archives:”Yoga-Tainment for the BlackBerry Generation” (@ East Bay Express)
I keep an archive of all my published writings (with a few exceptions — encyclopedia entries for example) but somehow this piece from 2010 got overlooked.
Yoga-Tainment for the BlackBerry Generation
A plethora of events highlights music’s growing role in yoga.
Late night in the Mission, the class begins with the sound of kirtans accompanied by slowly pumped chords on the harmonium. The class members respond hesitantly, repeating back the unfamiliar sounds chanted by the teacher. The call-and-response chanting subsides and the teacher announces the first asana as tinkling sounds from a kora replace the languid chords of the harmonium. For the next two hours, the class moves forward with the musical accompaniment of the kora and manipulations of its sounds through a small array of electronic devices. It’s not the background music typically heard in an American yoga studio, but it’s not quite foreground either. Solidly in the middle, it works sometimes, fitting perfectly with the slow movements; other times, it seems distracting, an extraneous element unconnected to the physical activity.
Every Friday night since October 2007, the Midnight Yoga class at Laughing Lotus Yoga Center in San Francisco’s Mission district has offered live music as accompaniment to yoga. Developed by the yoga center’s parent studio in New York City, the class features various genres and musical configurations: kora and electronics; freestyle guitar, bass, and keys; cello, voice, loops, and percussion toys. Yael Kievsky, who has taught the class since December, says that live music to accompany yoga is simply an extension of the use of taped music as background that has been a part of yoga classes in the United States for decades.
But the addition of live music changes things: The class becomes an event — a “full-on experience”… (to read more go to East Bay Express)
SF MusicTech: Has Over-Tweeting Killed the Mystery Around Musicians? (SF Weekly)
My first contribution to SF Weekly‘s All Shook Down blog:
SF MusicTech: Has Over-Tweeting Killed the Mystery Around Musicians?
By Jeffrey Callen, Tue., Dec. 7 2010 @ 8:09AMThe only discernable displays of emotion at yesterday’s S.F. MusicTech Summit — the seventh such gathering of musicians, techies, and industry types — came during the artist panel at the end of the day. Moderator Tamara Conniff (founder of The Comet and former editor-in-chief of Billboard) set the stage for a discussion of how the artists on the panel used social media to build their careers — but the panel took this subject and ran with it.
Related Articles
- Tamara Conniff: Artist Evan Lowenstein Helps Acts Monetize Performances with StageIt (huffingtonpost.com)
Short takes — The changing face of social media (3)
Image via Wikipedia
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PING, I-Tunes leap into social networking starts off with a tiny hop:
An email sent to iTunes users this morning touted its Ping music social network which “lets you follow your favorite artists and friends to discover the music they’re talking about, listening to, and downloading.” Unfortunately many independent artists are still left out of the conversation. That same email from Apple stated that just over 2000 artists were on Ping. This low level of artist participation is not, however, usually by choice. (from Hypebot.com)
Related Articles
- Apple’s “Ping” Social Network Is Doing So Badly Apple Is Sending Emails To Remind People It Exists (AAPL) (businessinsider.com)
- Apple Throws the Rule Book at Music Stars [Ping] (gizmodo.com)
- Apple Introduces iTunes 10 with Ping (apple.com)
- iTunes Ping: The missing thing (cnn.com)
- What is Apple’s Ping? and What Does it Mean for Musicians? (themusiciansguide.co.uk)
- Apple Publishes a Band’s Guide to Ping (mashable.com)
- Apple Updates Ping, Makes Its New Social Network More Useful (readwriteweb.com)
- Ping? Is Anyone There? (capturetheconversation.com)
Short takes — The changing face of social media (2)
Image via CrunchBase
The much-hyped inevitable demise of MySpace may not be the done deal that many commentators are presuming. MySpace has carved out a niche for musicians that may not be easily replaced. Contradicting much of what has been written on the site lately, Bruce Houghton of Hypebot offers 6 Reasons Not To Quit MySpace:
1. Eyeballs
Nearly 60 million unique visitors viewed 500 million pages on MySpace last month. Those numbers may be smaller than a year ago, but they are are still significant. And I don’t buy the argument that most of them are other musicians.
2. Search Rank
Search for most bands and MySpace will usually appear as one of the top 5 results. Can you afford to have fans click on that link and find a dead or out of date MySpace page?
3. MySpace Is Still Mostly About Music
There are some good music add-ons for Facebook, but MySpace is still about music at its core. A place about music attracts fans and bands should want to be where fans are.
4. It’s Easy
MySpace not be pretty, but it is easy. Services like Hoote Sutie to Sonicbid’s ArtistData make it simple to keep multiple social networks up to date simultaneously.
5. If Other’s Aren’t There…
Be a contrarian. If some artists are quiting MySpace or leaving pages unattended, that decreases the competition for those 60 million pairs of eyes.
6. The Makeover
MySpace is in the middle of a major makeover. I’m as skeptical as you are that it won’t help. (Check out their absurd new logo). But is it smart to delete your account before we find out?
And David Harrell of Music Think Tank offers a nuts-and-bolts analysis of #2 — why MySpace has and will probably maintain its high search result rank for music acts: MySpace Still Rules Google Search Results for Music Acts
- ‘New MySpace’ takes cue from MTV (theglobeandmail.com)
- Steve Rosenbaum: MySpace is Reborn as Social Curation (huffingtonpost.com)
- MySpace Abandons Social Networking (socialtimes.com)
- MySpace Launches Massive Overhaul (dailyfinance.com)
- MySpace Admits Defeat, Goes Niche (businesspundit.com)
- 6 Lessons Learned From the Demise of MySpace (convinceandconvert.com)
- The MySpace redesign: Voice of a generation – or dressed up to sell? (guardian.co.uk)
Deciphering Culture
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