john

Funky but mellow

I filled out your form though I think you missed a couple of questions you could have asked. It also holds very little for those who do not formally study music, and from experience many in the music industry have informal training or on the job experience that is a job, not work experience.

Hi and welcome to Songstuff Aleena Good to have you aboard.

Hi and welcome to Songstuff

It's a good point on general popularity and fan loyalty... and goes along with the biased presentation of Rock music. What would be really interesting would be to know what the new fan recruitment levels are. Rock fans are very loyal. There are 3 main areas of measurement and they don't produce public charts for one of them... sync rights, use in productions... then obviously tour receipts and record sales. The other dimension is of course geographic. For live and record sales there would be new fans and existing fans and just out of interest I would love to see media figures for airtime for genres. I don't think it exists, though there are a lot of industry specific charts you can access if you have the money.

What? No Songstuff? lol

Hi Gang Together we are stronger. It is a simple concept. In a world full of individuals, groups are easier to notice. They are more powerful. In fact, it is a big reason that mainstream music dominates Indieland so easily. Money of course helps, but often money just buys bums on seats... people to help. So here we have an opportunity. We work together. We already pool knowledge and share experience. It’s about time we worked together on marketing and promotion, on getting our music out there, on building fans and much more. To that end I want Songstuff to act as a hub and catalyst, and to contribute knowledge, processes and tools to help support our community efforts. I will be creating a Songstuff Street Team in the next week or so. Please apply to join. Only the most motivated 15 - 20 people will be accepted. I will then be helping artists to create and manage their street teams. The advantage of being on the Songstuff street team is shared experience and early access to knowledge and tools, plus working in coordination with our Music Marketing Research Group and the MMRG Street Team. Additionally with the Songstuff it will tend to be more regularly active, ad although focused on music, it isn’t simple band music related. This means you would gain a broader experience than other street teams. Additionally, of course, this helps the community. In a big, meaningful way. Talking of which, if you want to be involved in the MMRG Street Team, please contact @Mahesh stating MMRG Street Team in the topic. Street teams are just one way for us to work together from a variety of ways that we could... so lease, dive in and take part. It’s a great way to gain experience.

Hi Gang Facebook has been becoming less and less useful to musicians. Individual accounts have a friend limit. Pages, such as musician pages or business pages have become a complete pain in the ass. 3 years ago if a post was made on the Songstuff page, it would be seen by a minimum of 1000 people. Now, a post is shown to 20 people, and depending how they respond it will be shown to some more. Of course if the 20 it is shown to happen to be busy and don’t interact with the post (like, comment or share) you=our post goes nowhere. I run 3 other Facebook pages and know many other page owners, so believe me when I tell you this is a common issue. The reason is because Facebook want pages to pay them for advertising. All the years pages spent building followers was in effect a complete waste of time. Twitter doesn’t distinguish between users in this way. Yes businesses can advertise... but they don’t limit their users experience in the way Facebook does. Twitter user lists can extend to millions. For top artists, that can be 100 million. Not that I am suggesting anyone here can reach that, though I believe anything is possible. But it is a social network that allows you to grow your list to as many as you can get. I will be starting a topic about Songstuffers working together, and the group benefits to be had. It will be a general topic. However, I strongly believe that together we can make a good dent in Twitter. Please follow @Songstuff and @john_moxey. If you can make a post mentioning these two accounts I will follow you back. Please then take part in following other people who make similar posts. Look back through the Songstuff time line and follow people making similar posts too. If you follow another Songstuffers, use the tag #SongstuffMusic. That way people get the connection. I suggest the same on YouTube, Google+ and Facebook. Together we are stronger. Cheers John

Hi Chris! Welcome aboard!

Hi JohnDoe. Welcome to Songstuff!

Oh and Jenn, I completely agree. People seem to to look for literal restatements of what went before and are eternally disappointed not to find it. Hell, if Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix were still playing, they would not be just playin* the same old same old. No one is. There is some fantastic new music out there. Some wonderful innovation and creativity, some with a hard edge. If you aren’t seeing it, it’s because either you aren’t looking, or you are looking in the wrong places.

OMDs such as Soundcloud, or Reverbnation, focus on musicians as the audience. If they wanted to cater to general listeners then they must integrate mainstream music. The trouble is none of them do. Sites that have remotely gone in that direction have ended up as just general music sites, with indie music becoming non-existent on those sites or so buried it might as well be. It is an int wresting topic, one which there are some interesting answers to.... but it isn’t the original topic, “Is Rock music dead”. There are a lot more cross over genres these days. Indeed, much like Socialism in politics (not diving into that swamp), Rock seemed to divide and sub-divide in endless genres until the trend seemed to be towards creating a genre for every band, every album, every song. Rock music was going so far up itself it was ridiculous. A bit like the snake that eats itself in an endless exercise in self-destruction. Rock, along with every other genre, was killed by the pop scene bias of the music industry. Everything from labels to media outlets. Rock survived much longer than many of the others, and it it still clings on today... but that misses the point. Once upon a time, so the story goes, Rock WAS Pop. At some point so was Jazz. In fact, Since Rock was pop, it maintained an off-Pop presence under “Alternative”,or “Indie”,as well as dying previous forms like Punk or the myriad of Metal genres. What is popular ALWAYS reinvents. It isn’t stagnant. New influences come along and get mixed into pre-existing genres and something new is born. They evolve. Pop has always done that most vigorously. It draws influence from a load of different genres... including Rock. For pure Rock heads, they may not have recognised the influence of Rock recently... but it was there. As was Jazz. Now it is Latin. Big time. Meanwhile the various alt-Pop genres of Jazz, Rock etc continue to be reinvented as well.... but perhaps the biggest change in young people is the change in their listening habits. They are far, far less genre specific listeners. For most, other genres are something to be dipped into, forays from Pop music. I saw in previous posts EDM mentioned? And yet EDM is as much a sub-genre as Rock. It is an alternate music hub of yesteryear. Slowly corrupting and repeating itself. Same goes for Hip-hop. They are more recent, more vibrant, but none of them reaches the masses like they did at their height until they cross over with Pop. Yes there are electronica purists, just as there are death metal purists, but my point is that all sub-genres are dying, slowly. Once upon a time kids defined themselves by the sub-genres they listened to.. but that notion, that way of life is fading. Goths, Punks, Metalists, Hip-hop... it doesn’t matter. Fewer and fewer kids are devotees of anything in it’s pure form. Larger numbers belong to those who more recently were involved in Pop.... and that is something that is almost entirely about money, and the pursuit of money. It is easy to point the finger at record labels and say they are to blame, or at media companies... but the truth is that not only the kids are consumed by the pursuit of money for nothing, and fame for nothing (no skills needed), with NO SHAME. Yes there are still musicians. yes there are still people working away. But fewer, and fewer. It is all instant results. What do I get now for minimum effort, minus cost. That seems to dominate life. People don’t want the toils and torment of Blues, except as a wee holiday to see how people used to think and feel... or for certain moments in life. They don’t want the constant promise of rebellion that Rock in it’s various genres promised, or the intellectualism of Jazz. These are, to most, just moods, and they pass. To the “normal” listener, sub-genres exist only as places of curiosity, to dip into.... not really for serious exploration. Because that requires effort. It requires sacrifice. And much like ripped jeans, the view is “why buy good jeans and wear them until they rip and beyond, when I can just go and buy ripped jeans?”. Consumerism. That is what dictates everything else. People are slaves to the idea. They don’t fight it, because that is how they see themselves. Quite happily. They don’t want to rebel or fight it. When they do, it is a token gesture. A holiday. A sojourn. And that just doesn’t fit with Rock anymore. Most people seem to want diluted flavours. The appearance of something, with no real substance. They don’t seem to need that degree of interest and devotion in order to be satisfied and content. I tend to think that was always the case, anyway. The apparent devotion people seemed to have, was simply their attachment to that which was fashionable, only. It was only ever paper thin. The truth is, what was past will never be again. Perhaps, some new version of it, but that is it. Rock is ever evolving, and for old diehards, the fact is that when fashion revisits their genre, they might just not recognise it. I get that feeling with recent commercialised Punk and Goth trends. Everything now is manufactured. Not that it wasn’t before, but at least there used to be a veneer of self-participation in fashion. Home made clothing and accessories are as out of fashion as the music genres themselves. Everything is pre-made, off-the-shelf, commercialism on tap. Music is no different. So, is Rock music dead? No, but it may as well be. We are discussing switching it’s life support machines off. Sad but true. What mattered to old rockers, just isn’t as important to kids. It isn’t as important to the old rockers either. Maybe still significant... but less important in the grand scheme. Rock music will hang on, on life support, until it can find a way to be commercial, to work with commercial entities, with older and older back room musicians playing it... much like the blues. One day, it might just resurface, or at least a version of it ... but will we recognise it? That is the question. Just my tuppence worth!

Hi Lavina, welcome to Songstuff!

Hi and welcome to Songstuff Barnicle! Good to have you aboard

If it is successful we could perhaps start a club. that gives some advantages

Thanks Mike. I will be taking part. Just a couple of busy days!

Hey Tracy, welcome to Songstuff!

I like it Mike. Seems pretty straight forward. Would it always be the same member providing the loops / challenge, or would it rotate? Perhaps based on the winner? If we could find someone willing to do it regualrly, i think it would be more stable and consitent.

Hi Michael, welcome to Songstuff

Importantly, use #songstuff, like, comment, quote and retweet... try and do this for all Songstuffers. Using @Songstuff OR #songstuff helps tag Songstuffer posts and it ultimately makes it easier for us to help cross promoting each other. Remember to follow other Songstuffers too!

Thanks Jenn. As a group, Songstuff members should be working together to help promote each other. That... is a powerful use of community. Cheers John

Hi Gang If you are releasing some music and using your Twitter account to promote your music, remember to tag Songstuff using @Songstuff in your tweet and we will like and comment on your post. If you say something nice about Songstuff, we will also quote your post to our stream and make comment. We try to support our members at all times, just include us! Cheers John

Hey Artur, welcome to Songstuff where are you based?

Hi and welcome to Songstuff Joett!