Tagged: survival for artists

Facebook Censorship: Who owns your online presence?

Facebook censorship errorAs artists nowadays many of us spend a lot of time updating social sites, building our followerships and driving traffic to them. A few events recently have given me reason to think twice about this practice. The first was when Masalacism, friends of Dutty Artz, had their free blog shut down by Google. The second was this recent article by online marketer Glen Gabe whose stuff I like. In short he was trying to talk about a similar event on Facebook where a guy’s page with 47k fans was shut down due to a trademark dispute. Gabe was trying to post a link to a story talking about it on a blog to Facebook and Facebook blocked him from doing so saying there was a technical error (see image above). Welcome to the world of social media censorship.

One of the main reasons this is possible is that in fact, as much work as we invest in promoting our profiles and their sites at the end of the day legally we don’t own them. They do. And if they decide they don’t like how you’re using their site, they can zap you. The defense against this is not avoiding these sites but instead creating your own piece of space on the web that you actually own. In my case, you’re looking at it. I use my social sites, mainly Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic back here and if I lose both those profiles this is still a place for people to come find me that I actually own.

I setup this site for about $6.00 US a month in hosting costs and am enjoying running it. Its running the free blog hosting software WordPress which I like because it’s designed to be easy to update often. If you’re interested in doing the same I wrote a how-to post here that has step by step instructions.

Has anything like this happened to you? Have you had a profile deleted? What was your response?

Creativity: How To Turn Lack Of Time & Resources Into An Asset

Banksy Smiley Face Grim Reaper

“creativity was the ability to bring to life an image or idea regardless of resources”

- Chief Boima, Interviewed by Eddie Stats

Eddie Stats has a great interview with Dutty Artz familia Chief Boima and Vamanos from Ghetto Bassquake over at his blog Ghetto Palms for the Fader (linked below). In it came the above quote which Boima mentions in the context of film theory.

I love this idea and it brings me back to a concept that I try to bash my friends and students over the head with all the time.

Creativity is what happens IN SPITE of things like equipment, time and resources. A lot of people I know cling to the idea that as soon as they get this next plug-in, keyboard, piece of software, money, time or whatever it is that they don’t currently have that they’ll be able to accomplish their creative goals.

I am sorry to report that this is absolutely not the case.

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How To Make Money In The Post Recording-Business Environment

Record executive stereotype.

Redmonk, a person I’ve been acquainted with through the music scene for a while made a comment on my post ‘I’m Doing It For The Scene Maaaan’ which was relevant to the thesis he’s working on. He posted a few thoughts and links in the comments to that post and rather than type out my reaction as a super long comment that people might not see I decided to do a post about it.

Generally the thoughts are all circling around how artists will make money after the business of selling recorded music, what I call the recording business, finally dies. I use the term recording business rather than music business because there are plenty of businesses about or around music which are making lots of money including gear manufacturers, educational institutions, makers of music listening devices etc. The biggest casualties I see in all this are the labels and at some level the artists. Redmonk is italicized below, my thoughts are interspersed.

Hey Matt, you might have seen this:

http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2009/11/12/do-music-artists-do-better-in-a-world-with-illegal-file-sharing/

Predicts that artists will supposedly soon be making more from gigs than selling physical copies of their music.

There are more and more theorists (including Gerd Loenhard – http://www.mediafuturist.com/) essentially arguing that we should be heard first, build an audience and then once the trust is there, they’ll pay to see our gigs, buy our merch etc. So give the music away for free (cos if people want to, they’ll get it for free somehow) and make money through other streams.

Firstly I don’t think giving all your music away for free is a valid model for first time artists. It creates the perception that that music has no value and makes it look like un-filtered amateur spew (which it often is) and makes people not think of it as professional. People still place great respect in the idea of ‘getting signed’ or ‘having a record deal’ even if it is just to some bedroom label putting out 12″s or digital singles. There is still an important role for the record label to play as a creative force, and it’s important to know that MOST labels are run by enthusiasts who are contributing to the dialogue about style and sound (like for example my label with Rupture Dutty Artz) by picking cool emerging artists and giving them a platform and helping to filter their output, not by guys in pin-striped suits sniffing coke in some big office trying to make money. Using ‘the record industry’ as a blanket term for some kind of exploitative boogie man is stupid.

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