Longing for the day ...

More awesome stuff

Also via the Digital Music Weblog, found Andy McKee - accoustic finger-style guitarist beyond belief. Check out this, for example:

These are the kinds of amazing artists that ought to be receiving major publicity and airplay from the major labels ... should be more of it!

Amazing stuff

On the Digital Music Weblog, they give props to this performance:

Awesome, yeah? Not a new idea but an excellent way to use it. Must have a go at something similar myself. I wonder what the words are??

Season's greetings ...

... to all. Whatever your location, creed or beliefs, may this time of year bring you peace, happiness and joy. May the New Year bring you success as well ...

Welcome back, Ashes

Well done, boys. Superb effort, not just in winning the Urn but in the way you did it: three from three and some awesome, electrifying results among them!

Now, there's still two games to go in the series - give the Poms nothing!

Comparison of digital distributors

Just found this comparison via a roundabout way. It's a table of the costs, processes and other aspects of some digital distribution companies that I knew nothing about. In fact, I knew nothing about some of these companies! But that's not really a surprise on the web.

Not sure I agree with the assessment - for example, it doesn't mention the amount that the artists receives frm each sale, nor the extent of the distribution - just iTunes, or 65 other companies as well?? However, I'll have a good look at it in time and think a lot about the approach.

Gotta gig!

Went to see Jess at Bar Soma last night and she tentatively booked me for a 45 minute set, Wednesday, Feb 14 2007. Valentine's day. All originals - the beginning of something? Let's hope so.

Think I'll play my standard list, which will need a little dusting off ... lots of practice needed.

Check the gig guide for more. Book early ... :-)

This is cool ...

Just found this via MySpace this morning. A woman called Mary wanted to b a friend of Bun' Ber E and she had it playing on her site. TSO describe themselves as "classical" but this is a very heavy-metal version of classical. I love it! Would sound great in a game environment ... I hope they've got more.

While I'm on the novel, this is pretty funny: the 90 most redundant cliches in music.

Is MySpace dying?

There's an interesting assessment in the Washington Post, which argues that MySpace may be yesterday's place to meet and therefore a business in trouble.

Now, I've argued before that MySpace was "dead in the water" but for different reasons. I've only ever viewed it as part of an ecology of promotional devices that musos can/should use to further their interests. I have three MySpace sites, one for me, personally, one for Bun' Ber E and one for The Genre Benders. I've got to say though, that apart from MySpace being the single largest referrer of traffic to this site, I've not experienced a lot of joy with it. Too much spam, too many un-friends and not enough genuine activity is how I'd describe it.

Nonetheless, it's a big animal to kill and its death will take some time, if it goes ahead. Something to watch for in my spare moments ...

Well done, the cricketers ...

What an incredible win! What an incredible game! Who would have picked any result, let alone THAT result with a day to play.

I guess this demonstrates the power of positivity. After the Poms were unable to bowl Australia out much short of their imposing first-innings total, they seemed to assume a draw was inevitable and started to play conservatively. On the other hand, Ricky Ponting was sure a result could be gained and pursued an Australian win ... vigorously. The positive approach was again triumphant ...

I think there's something in that for all of us, don't you?? (Or perhaps it was just the homeground advantage)

The Amazon Advantage?

A question was posted to the Musicthoughts list about Amazon and how to best get sales through it. I have kept my eye on this for some time but have never considered it viable. The perfect solution for Bun' Ber E would be the Marketplace option, in which anything listed in Amazon (which we are) can be sold by anyone else - as long as they have a US postcode ...

However, I have reconsidered the Advantage option, in which we pay US$29.95 a year and Amazon takes a 55% commission on sales. I had always considered this unviable, but crunched some numbers this morning. In order to break even on this selling the CDs for $10 (same as CDBaby - Amazon.com has Unplugged listed at US$14.99), we would have to sell $29.95/$4.50 - 6.7 CDs. Call it 7. Add to that the cost of posting 20 CDs to the USA (estimate AUS$25) and we would need to sell 13 CDS a year to break even.

Now, so far in 2006 we have sold 5 hard-copy CDs through CDBaby. Most of these sales have come from previous CDBaby customers searching the site and most of the traffic to our sales pages has come from people searching CDBaby by genre. This means that people are finding us by searching for music of the kind they like - not by searching for us. This amounts to "background radiation" sales. If we assume that the Amazon.com marketplace is 4 times the size of the CDBaby marketplace (and I have no idea of the relative volumes but this sounds reasonable), if it not beyond possibility that we could sell 20 copies a year from "background radiation". Since the outlay is

However, since Unplugged has been listed for ??? long and has no sales rank at all, I might just save the money until I'm sure something has sold ...I'm not sure how Unplugged came to be listed but we have an arrangement with a distrutor through CDBaby that is supposed to place our stuff in Amazon ... I'll wait ... until the Marketplace option is extended to non-US postcodes.

Dungiggin'

Bun' Ber E played our last gig for 2006 yesterday at Dicey Reilly's. It was a load of fun but I'm sort of glad the playing commitments are over for the year. Frees me up to concentrate on The Genre Benders, which is coming along ... slowly. the survey is not receiving teh response I would have liked ...

Still, there's plety of activity in front of me and a lot of joy to be had from rcording the music. The stuff that I have gotten down and clean I really like, so I guess it's just a matter of persisting ...

Don't often agree with the Pope but ...

I read this morning that on his visit to Turkey he called on all religious leaders to "utterly refuse to support any form of violence in the name of faith". That's a great leap forward and long overdue - especially if the world's religious leaders heed this call.

I read the other day that Israel had been attacked by rockets from Gaza and did not respond in kind - that's an even greater leap forward. Someone has to draw a line and say "no more" to violence. I applaud the Islaeli restraint and share their pain in doing so.

Of course, the organised religions do not have a monopoly on faith-inspired violence. There's a few people all over the world who would do well to heed the Pope's advice as well ....