This blog is a round up of the various creative, design and content based work I have a part in, opinion and analysis of music and media issues, plus extra bits of writing that do not have a home.
Sounds awfully professional, doesn't it? It isn't.
This Is Fake DIY // This Is Fake DIY Records // Sonic New Media //
Getting to work with people you really respect on design stuff is great. It almost makes this multi stranded existence of writing-and-designing-and-building-and-geeking-and-stuff seem sensible. Which it obviously isn’t. The image above is a very very rough first sketch of a slight logo beef up. Need to curve the corners off a bit more and look at the overall spacing, but it’s feeling more robust and iconic, which is the brief. For the next few days, I can con myself that I have a ‘proper’ job.
Still need to fix a few bits and pieces; get some DIY TV footage on there, add more news, probably a few more tracks too, but at least it’s live now! Pointless Apple related toys that are probably more expensive than they’re worth are my favourite.
A still from the new Victorian English Gentlemen’s Club video. Which is brilliant.
This is going to a b-side. I shall probably take it down soonish because of this, but it is BLOODY ACE. I’ve turned it into a rubbish MP3 just in case. It is called Polish Man and most certainly needs a top secret video consisting of strung together ‘point of view’ still shots taken on Cricklewood Broadway and in Willesden Green. These must include the drinking of several old style glass bottle pints of milk, buying smokes and the consuming of some kind of Polish food that I cannot spell.
This is taking a bit of reading. 245 pages. Paranoid that the summaries have missed a few bits and pieces that may be useful knowledge though. I’d print it out, but several woodland animals would end up homeless.
This is probably my favourite piece of DIY records related press to date. Just because opening up NME and seeing something so sizable at the business end of a magazine makes you feel that the hours and sacks of cash spent plugging a record aren’t a total waste.
By my wonky reasoning (I asked on Twitter, which is pretty much the worlds most legitimate source of information after Wikipedia. Ahem) this week I came up with an idea that resulted in us (This Is Fake DIY Records / SNM) being the first in the world to do something.
This is amazing, partly because the idea of that is utterly ridiculous, but also because it was hardly first at something that’s especially hard to conceptualise. Instead, it was being the first to stream an entire album, pre release, via a dedicated iPhone app.
Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me now that it had been done before. Snow Patrol did some booklet effort, NIN are streaming tracks of back catalogue - a couple of bands seem to be streaming everything they’ve ever done. Nobody seems to have spaffed the lot exclusively in this way though.
I wish there was some super smart plan to it all. In truth, there wasn’t. We’d been setting up that iPhone app for weeks before hand. It’d been in Apple’s ludicorusly long approval queue for a good couple at least. It went live on Wednesday night, on Friday I thought “has anyone done this before” - a few quick emails later and a check with a few people who would know first thing on Monday, and by the end of the day it was live.
We used Mobile Roadie to power the whole thing. It’s a pretty ace system - a template app you can deploy for a comparatively small sum of money compared to the thousands you’d have to pay for something bespoke. Due to our digital distribution deal with The Orchard, we got it even cheaper - the whole thing coming in at the kind of cost that fits into a constantly bankrupt indie label’s marketing budget of 27p and a button. I was doing an interview for the Independent on all of this (CLANG! Did I drop something? I doubt it’ll see the light of day anyway) when I realised; when you can do something smart like that for such a small amount of cash, it’s no wonder that justifying spends on ad space in magazines and all that jazz becomes near impossible. Sure, we’ve not had as many downloads as a major print publication would command eyeballs, but how many people pay attention to a quater page? This cost us less, and every download is listening to the album in a specifically designed environment with, crucially, links to buy already available music. I can already see the difference in the sales figures for the download only single which came out the same day. While it may not have many of the tertiary benefits spreading the net wide has, that kind of stuff simply is out of our budgets. We learnt that lesson last year.
The truth is, all this technology isn’t so difficult to understand. Certainly I feel that putting together a truly cross platform, tech heavy campaign on the kind of cost basis that actually seems surprisingly affordable isn’t any kind of rocket science. The issue is getting people to actually use it - and in that respect it’s chicken and egg. Getting the fans without the spend to create the buzz if you’re not one of the select few who command it by default. At the end of the day it’s always going to be about the money in a lot of cases, but at least this is one area where, genuinely, the nuts and bolts aren’t locked away behind a door that needs a golden key to open.
