john

Hey guys I wanted to get an idea how you release your songs. I could guess from previous discussions, but the sands change as time passes so, it’s best to ask. A few questions to help prompt you: So you plan to release a song, what do you do? Do you just drop the single by making it available and then put some posts on social media and some forums? Do you have a pre-release and release plan? Do you have a budget? Do you contact music bloggers? If so, why? Do you contact radio shows? If so, why? What would you do but you don’t know how to do it? Do you leverage previously released material? Do you release a video or videos for the song? If so, what kind? Do you run advertisements? Do you have a team or people to help you? Do you collaborate on promotion with others? Cheers John

Hey Wes, great to meet you! Welcome to Songstuff!

Hey gang Creativity can be wonderful, elusive, addictive, even painful. As writers, performers artists we all face an endless conveyer belt of creative challenges, some more enjoyable than others, some more satisfying than others. I thought it would be interesting to explore creativity and our experiences of creativity, starting with looking at what each of us view as our personal greatest creative challenge. For me I have a never ending flow of ideas, but it can be easy to get sucked into repeating the same creative directions when facing similar creative problems. “That worked last time so let’s do that again”. That was one of the things I liked about the album format. It made it easy to draw a definitive line in the sand. It encouraged me to fundamentally do things differently. I am a creature of comfort, but comfort is the enemy of creativity. I love trying new things. Learning new techniques. They encourage new direction by a spark rather than a process step. So as long as I keep experimenting, keep pushing to learn, and try to remind myself to keep checking in, I find I avoid ruts sucking at my feet. Its is perhaps the least glamorous of creative challenges, and not perhaps the most satisfying, but the fact that it is repetitively overcome, even if it is by a simple principle, I think it is my greatest creative challenge. What about you? Cheers John

Awesome! Working collectively hand having champions is essential. Obviously that means outreach on social media and the blogosphere too. So think about creating a Twitter account for your new site, Instagram, Pinterest and a Facebook page, a YouTube Channel and a Spotify and Soundcloud account, with your site being where you drive people too. Often than means creating content, such as a playlist (the playlist has a cover image) on Spotify/Soundcloud/YouTube, you then create a blog post that embeds the playlist and also links to the Channel to host for the playlist account. The blog post is then shared onto Twitter and Facebook, the cover image for the playlist goes to Pinterest which links back to the blog entry. Instagram is different until you get to 10k followers. Building this, if you want to do it justice, means being consistent. Just like being an artist, progress is about momentum, and that requires you to regularly inject activity just to keep momentum, but to very actively post to grow momentum. There are ways to do this. It takes time to get into the flow. Initially effort is high and results will, after an initial burst, slow. As long as you expect this it will be ok... but importantly, if you never get consistent with activity (or someone else in your behalf) you will stay stuck at the very slow growth that you drop to after that initial burst. In fact, if you don’t at least post once a week, expect to see your engaged numbers drop off. Quoted followers means nothing. Active followers is everything. If they are not engaged they don’t amount to much. Good to see you are doing this. If I can help, just ask.

Hey Great that you will be championing the genre! A few points for consideration from an old hand.... Ask yourself why you are doing this. I have heard from many people who have followed similar missions, before, during and after their project. The answer will inform your decisions as you look at the options that present yourself. For example: If you simply want to support and promote the genre, you should consider the easiest way to sustainably achieve your goals and to best leverage connections and free (to you) assets. How can you make the biggest impact with your resources? Firstly, why host audio? It’s expensive and there all sorts of rights issues. Better to use Soundcloud / Reverbnation / Soundcloud / YouTube. Also Spotify and Apple Music for that matter. Let’s face it none of us can compete with such sites, especially in niches. Second, running community forums is time consuming, gets expensive and takes a lot of skills. Instead, why not find a friendly existing forum (cough cough cough) that you can set up a club or just help build the electronic community in? Or, set up a Facebook Group. There are pros and cons to both approaches, I am happy to talk through both. Existing communities have reach. You can put your message in front of more people when you leverage existing communities. Not just the people who are there but the people that can be reached, the quality of people, how you can filter them, the help you can get etc. In this scenario, use your domain to run a pro electronic music blog, and curate playlists on Spotify, Soundcloud and Youtube. Playlists are excellent for promotion and as discussion point, and simply as music collections. Yet again you can do the playlists under your own accounts, or contribute to playlists run by a collective music blog (run by a group of contributors), or even a friendly neighbourhood music community (cough cough cough). I started Songstuff with the mission to help educate musicians, songwriters, artists, to facilitate conversation and promote indie music. My primary motivation was to help. That to me is quite fulfilling. Particularly educating. The trouble is, back then there were very few music forums, very little good information available online. When I started working on the project Google was under a year old. I could already write software and was interested in learning web tech. My second motivation was to learn. I had no interest in building an empire (a common motivation for some). There simply were a lot less options. A lot. Now my motivations are similar, though I also want to help drive change in indie music to address the various issues I see that face indie musicians, but that is an extension of helping. If you go the route where your website supports everything, including audio upload, you really need to put the legals in place, you need to consider the costs of hosting including data bandwidth, you will need a software platform that can cope. In facilitating discussion you could go a few routes. Hosting a forum takes a lot of work and can take an age to grow activity from nothing. Especially after initial support / interest from friends fades as it always does... just like music. It’s worth having a think about how you plan to engage the electronic community. What will the hook be? Playlists is a good one, but there are other options. I was talking to Steve Mueske recently about helping to rebuild the electronic music community within Songstuff. We used to have a really active Electronica community. I get there is a need for something. A few are active on Twitter, but while that might be an ideal platform to promote music, it’s a really, really, really bad idea to be using it to float experiments, works in progress and to give and get critiques. It mixes the world of fans/listeners with behind the scenes of music makers. Where a music maker hears an incomplete piece and thinks potential, non musicians just hear incomplete, not as good as a finished idea. When you look at the Electronica Twitter community it is 80% music makers and only a small core are active. Listeners are largely disengaged. Really, they should take the music making aspect out of Twitter, into a closed Facebook group, a dedicated forum or similar. Meanwhile they should use Twitter to build their fanbase. Genuine fans. Too many musicians like you so that you like them. It’s about bragging rights on numbers. That is why their audiences are largely disengaged. Anyway, if you do build something I am happy to help to bounce ideas off. If you like the idea of my first option just say. If you want to be actively involved in reigniting electronic music on Songstuff, also give me a shout. Just some food for thought. :)

Hey gang The idea is simple, take a song title, and twist/change one word only, to make the title more mundane (if it is interesting), more extreme (if it is is calm), or just plain silly. Enter Sandbag - Metallica The Sound of Sausages - Simon and Garfunkel Highway to Walmart - AC/DC

No great surprise I suppose. Just imagining the socially distanced footprint! All the New Ager’s in Glastonbury village will be lighting incense and humming “Almost cut my hair”.

I was planning on writing an article about it.... there are a few parts. I’ll try and draft some basics and post up ASAP .

Just checking it out just now James. Have you tried livestreams?

Hey Wojciech! Welcome to Songstuff!

Welcome to Songstuff Werners! Great to have you with us. Looking forward to hearing your music

Hey Haris A big welcome to Songstuff! Good to have you aboard. You mention Producer, which has an old school interpretation of working with musicians of all kinds in a studio and being responsible for getting the best performance from the musicians and engineer while helping shape the finished sound, and a more recent interpretation which is more inline with being a beat creator. I just wondered if you identify with one or other more? Handy to know Good to know you are studying the Music Business. Looking forward to some chats about the where the old business and new business meet Cheers John

Oh and btw, I completely get making money from other purists. It’s just that you have to accept they are a small pool of people. Also that a percentage of the general populous will be interested in what you do.... but you have to accept that it will be a trickle of people. It’s not personal. Disagree? Can I interest you in pushing this mountain?

And yet you sometimes get pretty annoyed about your lack of income. I can understand the stress, believe me, but I think it’s unfair to blame the audience. To believe your taste is sanctified while other people’s taste is dross is not exactly constructive or fair. What is music? An elite experience for the chosen few? Something only smart, informed people deserve to get and screw the rest? Music is entertainment. It is communication. Importantly, the classics were the pop of their day. The composer and the performer communicated with, and entertained the masses, talking the musical language of the day. Times changed and that language moved on. Indeed, the Great American Songbook evolved from something too. Ability, understanding, sophistication, education... all come and go. As do topics, genres, styles, instrumentation etc. When you entrench yourself, by choice, and find yourself complaining that you talk to fewer people, only make a few bucks, you are recounting a transition that is as inevitable as the tide coming in and going out. It happens. It’s going to keep happening. Being even the remotest bit bitter about a predictable, direct consequence of your own choice just seems like a self fulfilling prophecy of negativity. No fun. An analogy. You love my analogies So this architect specialised in building bridges. He loved them, revelled in their Engineering. Yet every time he designed and built a bridge he would get upset. Not enough people stopped to appreciate his bridge. A bunch of people did cross them, but in general the bridges were quieter than expected. The fact us, bridges help people cross water, railways roads etc. They all bypass something, allowing you to cross from A to B. That is the fundamental function of the bridge. The public only care so much about how the bridge achieves that. From time to time a bridge demands their attention briefly, but then it’s straight back to the usual. Bridges need to be where people want to cross. If you build bridges where people don’t want to cross, they don’t use them. Simple. It doesn’t matter enough that the bridge is build by this technique or using a specific material. If the bridge isn’t built in the right place, it isn’t used. Going and standing where the traffic is, pointing at your bridge, still won’t elicit much traffic if your bridge isn’t in the right place. Insulting people as they go by doesn’t change the result. The fact is, like it or not, if you want your bridge to be used, it has to be in the right place, first and foremost. There are so many factors in where exactly that is, to waste time being annoyed is futile. So, many designers try to build their bridges in the right place, with the right materials in a design people can appreciate, while building in their own taste, educating people in the background, introducing them to unexpected things, interesting things. Music is the same. Culture, environment, history and a whole lot more impact trends. Those trends are bigger than us. As writers we can chose to ignore them, only to encounter consequences we can anticipate. In making that choice, we can generally guess that consequence or close to it. We can hardly bemoan, grumble, complain. We knew this was likely and it was entirely our choice. There is no right or wrong. Your taste. My taste. Anyone’s taste. It is largely about where the music takes us. Of course many songwriters and artists blend current tastes with other sounds, genres and styles they like and are influenced by, therefor introducing their listeners to those genres. Indeed, the gentle resurgence of interest in Jazz a couple of years ago was due to this. Artists and writers who blend have a good chance of making a living because they work within the current trend. Other Artists and writers choose separation. There is what they do for work, to earn money, and what they do for private pleasure. They too have a good chance of making a living because they work within the current trend. Other artists again simply revel in what is “on trend”. Often this comes from a place of ignorance. Such people have always existed, in every trend. These people too have a good chance of making a living because they work within the current trend. Some choose to do one of the above until they get to a position where they have a following, and then gradually bring in the music they love. They are in a position of influence. They can reach people. As long as they move over thoughtfully there is a possibility they can use that influence and keep making a living while they re-educate their listeners. These artists too have a good chance of making a living because they work within the current trend. The artists and writers who ignore trend, and make no concessions to trend really, really struggle. Often they seem to get angry because they thought that they would make a difference, but with little influence and little thought to growing their influence they will keep talking to small, if not smaller audiences. That is just the way it is. Chances are they already know all this, but for some reason hoped it would be different. That bitterness often comes from the realisation that it isn’t different for them, or their music. Luckily, they can change any old time. If they choose to. If they choose not to, they can hardly complain. If you happen to make this choice, to ignore trend, to think it doesn’t apply to you and your music, or that somehow by having learned a bunch of off-trend stuff because of personal preference that you are somehow owed a living by on-trend people, perhaps you can help me? I have some mountains near my house that I feel are in the wrong place. I just need a few willing volunteers to push them to better positions. That sounds like an ideal match of character to task! Please drop me a line to apply. Cheers John

Ok... so plans for 2020 didn’t go so well. No need to dwell on it. Time for a new plan! 2021 Songstuff plans aside, I want to plan for my music, as John Moxey, and as Deep Red Sea. That means trying to plan releases, pull together budget for these releases as well as any other people/assets needed to make it happen. John Moxey At this stage I am planning on 2 EPs at a minimum. I have plenty tracks and I can now record them, but to release them takes budget and time. We’ll see how that goes. I’ve been writing a few new tracks, using a different guitar tuning. It’s been quite an interesting vibe, taking me back to earlier folk interests, but now with elements of Americana as an influence. I am considering releasing those together. The other EP will be some of my existing songs. A selection of songs I think compliment each other in some way. I haven’t decided on what songs to record for this but should decide very soon. That leaves quite a large number of songs to record. My plan at this stage is to record as many as I can ASAP, get them in the bank, so to speak. Deep Red Sea A single EP, possibly two. I use a different approach to writing for Deep Red Sea, which I enjoy but it’s just a bit less of a priority just now.

Hey Gang What are your musical plans for 2021? Do you have set goals? I plan to write mine up in a blog post on Songstuff, but in 2021 I hope to release a couple of EPs, as myself, at least and one or two as Deep Red Sea. I finally have my Recording set up more or less sorted out, but plan to upgrade video creation and sort out a decent live stream set up. It should be fun. So, what’s in your sights? Cheers John P.S. I know there is a lot of important stuff going on atm, Pandemic, Brexit, possible US revolution to name a few... but I wanted to post this to focus on some personal positives fir each of us, and give our brains and hearts a break from all that crap.