john

Hi and welcome to Songstuff TK. Liking your cat.

Hey Will, good to see you back! How’s biz as a full-time pro?

Hey gang I thought it would be a bit of fun to post up old pics… namely, photos of you, aged 20! Are you game? So here I am in 1987, rehearsing with my band, The Outside Edge… That’s me on the guitar. Cheers John

Hey Abstract Mouse Good to meet you, welcome to Songstuff! Hopefully we can help you on your musical journey (wherever you plan to go). Loving your name. Looking forward to hearing your tunes! As ever, (the same goes for you, @TheGarageJump, and any other members), please consider inviting your musical and lyrical friends to come and join us! At the end of the day, referrals and invites are a hugely important aspect of community building. To be honest, the more people there are involved, the better our community works. Personal invites tend to bring in some great quality members. That said, I absolutely encourage you to entice social media connected musicians and writers by invitation and by sharing interesting topics from our boards, articles from our libraries, on to social media. We all help shape our community, by contributing, bringing others on board and making suggestions. So, don’t be shy. We’re a pretty friendly bunch. Cheers John

If you have recorded the song and it is still a work in progress then post the recording in the song critique board. You can post finished works for general promo to members into the Musician’s Lounge, and post into the Showcase board tracks you would like to be considered for being featured by the staff on and off-site.

Sure. It helps keep it interesting. Challenging. Add to that, songs have different characters. It is a great pity to just treat them in all the same way. I look forward to hearing your tracks!

Hey Blue, welcome to Songstuff! What sort of music are you recording?

I am puzzled. I already know all that you spell out (though for others who maybe don’t know it is always good to have it restated) I didn’t say anything that disagreed with any of it. Not one word. So why you feel you have to jump up and down on me and put words in my mouth, I do not know. I repeat. There is nothing in the article, and I will now add, nothing that I said, that mentions that NFTs are a rival to US Copyright. Nothing that says it is an either/or scenario. Nothing that says you cannot or should not register for copyright. Nothing that says “don’t join a PRO”. That aside, registration of copyright does not prevent lawsuits. You start off correctly in stating that you register a claim of ownership. Claim being the operative word. There are other ways to verify claims… and still they only verify the claim, not the ownership. The details of the claim establish that on an established date you had access to the asset. You still have to back up that claim with any details of proof of creation and or ownership. If someone comes forward with a claim that predates your claim, that is verifiable by other plausible means, a court will still decide on the legitimacy of both claims. All that does not mean it is not worth registration. Better, stronger verification is just that. Better. Stronger. Just not infallible.

As you alluded to earlier… don’t ruin the magic, just perform the trick and give me that moment of wonderment. We care about the process. It’s funny. I see artists posting on Twitter and other social media sites, desperate to provide content to get followers. They’ve heard that they have to give fans a behind the scenes view of what they do. They interpret that as an almost warts and all, unflattering view of their unfinished material and their process believing that that will impress potential listeners. All the while, without understanding how to engage potential fans, the unplanned relentless drip, drip robs the artist of any big splash and the ripples that might have been caused. Even more, they rob potential fans of that wonderment they might have enjoyed. Instead, whatever reaction they might have had is damped down, lesser. Diminished. They have chased the wrong rabbit down the wrong rabbit hole. I do hope they realise it soon.

It is more level in some ways. It is actually easier for an artist to carve out a basic living than it used to be…. In that lower echelon artists have access to tools. If they get themselves together They can also work around some elements of restricted budget by working together. Unfortunately they often lack quality contacts and knowledge. They often approach marketing in a piecemeal, fragmented fashion when they need to have coordinated campaigns across multiple platforms. Everybody having access to the same tools has the effect of drowning out good acts amongst poorer quality acts. At the other end labels do drown out new artists by re-releases, freeze independents out of the physical marketplace by block ordering pressing plants, freeze out new songwriters with charts dominated by cover versions, the dominance of private fame schools in supplying artists and writers from within certain groups in society and multigenerational fame dynasties keeping larger scale success within the hands of a chosen few. Yet still, for artists willing to learn, work hard and work together a level of success is much more realistic. Top level status remains just as out of reach as it ever was, if not further…

Hey Chris What you say is largely true from the perspective of indie artists. There’s a smaller pool of current upper echelon artists. Obvious income streams have vastly changed. Don’t you think how the public views music in general has changed? The space occupied by musicians and artists has been greatly eroded and replaced to a degree by gamers and social influencers. Artists are somewhat diminished in the public eye. What you say about work is very true. It always has been. It is aptly named an industry. The artists that achieved great success were often the hardest working, or at least they had at some members who worked damn hard. The biggest mistake by unknowns was always to wait to be discovered, quickly followed by leaving the business of music to someone else. Today’s artists find themselves on a much more level playing field but there are still plenty who believe someone else should do the hard work, while they and their art should remain untainted, unsullied by business. Weirdly they will happily spend the money made but at the same time try to distance themselves from the making of that money, as if they are better than such base needs. That said, it is a perspective often held by those with the luxury of another means of income making music naturally more hobby than profession. Cheers John

Hey there Estiward, welcome to Songstuff. Do you have many music releases available online? What do you hope to get from your membership of Songstuff and the Songstuff Community?

Hey Hot on the heels of the unparalleled success of New Music Friday #24 it’s……… New Music Friday #25! Post up your current music projects. Anything from a simple melody, a 1+1, beat boxing, through to a full production. Be as experimental as you want. I’ll post up another of my 1 take songs I recorded on my phone a little later. Post up your tracks! Cheers John

Hey Reggie welcome to Songstuff! Good to meet you.

Hey there Elliot. Great to meet you. Welcome to Songstuff! Great ambition to have. I’m looking forward to reading your lyrics. Do you also write melodies too? If not often a learning step for writers is learning how to write words in a way that they work with melody to be more than a sum of the parts, and how melody and often spoken phrasing shapes the words.

Tik tok may be micro videos, but almost the entirety’s of videos use samples of longer songs. All it takes is a play to generate a royalty fee. It is of course possible that a creator also happens to like your music. It is allowed! The fact that you are unknown also means it is likely to be unique. hey, it’s good news anyway.

As instrumentals, could your music have been used as backing tracks?

Interesting Greg. What kind of content are we talking? Did you do anything more than upload it? Can you account for the upsurge?

From what I read, there is nothing claiming to be a rival to US copyright, or copyright in any territory for that matter. It does talk of division of royalties, and that unless explicitly specified, the buyer doesn’t gain any kind of copyright claim. At no point does it appear to be claiming it is a substitute. That aside, there is no legal requirement to register a song in the USA (last I looked). What there is, is a very strong incentive to register as you don’t get full rights protection and compensation if you don’t register. What the article does talk about is different routes being explored to exploit your asset. Mostly because NFT are focused on selling unique items based on a single transaction. implementing a royalty model based on crypto currency is relatively new. Without entering into a political debate, and purely to add to this topic, what I understand the G7 is currently looking at central bank based digital currency, though my understanding is that it will be “programmable” currency, making it more akin to vouchers. That is very scary, because then central government or even your employer could dictate what you can or can’t spend your digital currency on! Eeek!

Hey gang I was thinking about how things have changed. People’s attitude to music and musicians has changed. Tools and services have changed availability and price. How music is valued is definitely different. The attitude of musicians is different too. We are conditioned to accept these changes. How have these changes affected you? How has your outlook changed? Cheers John

Hey Cameron. Good to meet you what plans do you have, if any, for your music?

Hey Patricia, Good to meet you. Welcome to Songstuff! I hope you find someone to work with. cheers John

Hey It’s……… New Music Friday! Post up your current music projects. Anything from a simple melody, a 1+1, beat boxing, through to a full production. Be as experimental as you want. I’ll post up another of my 1 take songs I recorded on my phone a little later. Post up your tracks! Cheers John

no worries Chris.

Hey It is interesting to me, just how few singer-songwriters work on their voice. They write songs, learn chords, improve their guitar or piano playing, work on their ability to sing and play at the same time, but… do nothing, or next to nothing, to work on their voice. A few questions: What do you think you could do to improve your voice right now? What do you currently do to improve your singing voice? Do you have plans to do anything to improve your voice? Cheers John