Russell Davies

Bleep notes

Here is some news from the music hobby industrial complex.

Song two from what-can-you-do-in-an-afternoon, take-less-time-and-spend-less-money-than-if-your-hobby-was-angling, dance-music-experimentalists Elite Panic was released to all major streaming services on February 1st. 

According to DistroKid, this has now brought us to a mighty 58 streams on Spotify - broken down like this:

And the Spotify app now reports this:

Most thrillingly, Elite Panic has now dipped it's toe in algorithmic curation and has been served up to Phil like it's a real piece of music you might listen to. This gives me the same little buzz I got when I saw Egg Bacon Chips and Beans in an actual bookshop:

 

Over on Apple Music the story is purer, with a total of 1 stream in the last 365 days, broken down like this:

(I think, to be honest, that was probably me.)

While at bandcamp, well-known to be a significant element of any future monetisation model for modern musicians, the commerce wheels are starting to turn with sales for this period now totalling £2.83. (Thanks Iain!) 

Once again, I seem to be the lone follower.

The marketing department has not been resting on its laurels though and, this week, Specialist Equipment rolled out its first Above The Line advertising campaign with this 'box ad' in The Wire. £130. Again, a tiny chill to be inside something I've read for so long. It's not a big ad, right at the back of the magazine, but I suspect that people who read The Wire read all of it. Thus far any effect on sales, visits, streams, conversions, brand awareness or image attribute shift has been undetectable but, hey, it's early. ZTT wasn't built in a day.

Because that ad points at Bandcamp I thought maybe there should be more than two tracks there so I rushed out a new one and put it up. Therefore, Bosses Time made it's debut yesterday. Here's the instagram video: (Keynote + iMovie is all anyone needs for modern music promotion.)

(Yes, I know it should probably have an apostrophe, but I didn't like how that looked. I'm an artist.)

Bosses Time won't be on streaming services until March 1st so that's an exciting exclusive for all my Bandcamp followers (i.e. me)

Finally, and most excitingly, Mark honoured me with a 'dub edit' of Shaky Debut. It's far superior to the original. Mark can do modern music rhythms in a way I just can't figure. I tried to upload it to Spotify and Bandcamp but the algos rejected it. Soundcloud appears to be more tolerant, however.

January 2020

January 2020 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

Music 'Alan' by Elite Panic available on Bandcamp, Spotify, Soundcloud.

Adventures in modern musicing

Work was pretty intense in 2019, I didn't get to do much else, so when resolution season for this year rolled around I wanted to make sure I carved out some time for hobbying.

And the designated hobby is music. My plan is to make one piece of music per month. And because I'm the opposite of a completer-finisher I gave myself the additional rule that I have to put that piece of music out in public. It has to be available for public listening and purchasing. That means something has to be finished.

That's led me down all sorts of interesting rabbit holes because making music public is different.

And on with the music

First, the actual music. The point here is not for it to be brilliant. It's for it to be done. I'm thinking of it as a bit like blogging. I'm going to make stuff quickly, put it out in the world and see what I learn from it. Consequently I set myself a strict constraint for making the first piece. I wrote it on the M1 one Friday evening, while driving to Derbyshire. (I wasn't driving). I did it all on a Volca Sample and then added a bit of delay and did some mixing in Ableton Live. 

To further prevent myself procrastinating I vowed not to tinker too much with mixing and mastering. So once it was all in the right order I just uploaded it to Landr for mastering and did whatever they said.

The finished track is well minimal. Very little happens. But I like to tell myself it fails to happen in a slightly charming way. You decide. I've decided that the 'record company' is Specialist Equipment, the band/artist will be called Elite Panic and the first track is called Shaky Debut. Here it is on bandcamp/soundcloud/spotify.

Right now I have 2 monthly listeners on Spotify. And they're both me. Add me to your playlists!

And on with the promotion

As well as making the music I also want to understand more about how the modern music business works. So I'm keen to try different promotional ideas and for this month I've been playing with instagram. This has been fascinating. I spent £28.20 on promoting this post to a UK audience, 13-65, interested in electronic dance music. Instagram make this very easy to do (once you get past the data-doubt of connecting things to your Facebook page). The audience I reached looked like this:

Instagram clearly have a lot of kids they can serve you.

All that resulted in 778 likes, 5 bookmarks, 0 comments, 0 follows, 0 visits to bandcamp, 0 sales. That's a lot of barren likes. Interesting!

Next month I'm going to try something more old fashioned. I'm going to put an ad in The Wire.

Anyway.