Now here's a weird anniversary to observe: twenty years ago, I graduated from college.
May 1992. I graduated from the University of Akron with a degree in English that took me five years to complete. I wish I could say that I spent most of that time partying and engaging in illicit activities, but the truth is I was just an undiciplined so-so student with no idea what I wanted to do with my life upon graduation.
I remember graduation day. A gorgeous early summer morning in northeast Ohio. Walking around the campus as it slowly emptied of students. Filled with more than a little dread. I had no job lined up, certainly nothing that would lead to a career. My first job out of college was a porter at a nearby Holiday Inn. After five years in school I'd spend that summer running clean linen and pillowcases to the housekeeping staff and extra toothpaste and bathrobes to guests.
Sometimes I wonder where I'd be now if I'd taken a different path. Like a year off to just work, or a few years in the military, or Peace Corps, or whatever. I don't regret my college experience, but there's plenty of evidence that I was just going through the motions.
Who could have seen then that the things that led me to my career now, my life now, would be the things that most consumed me when I was fourteen? All those lovely summer days spent indoors pouring over issues of COMPUTE! and typing BASIC programs into an Atari 800. More summer days spent indoors learning every note of David Gilmour's guitar solos on The Final Cut. Who would I be now if I weren't such an indoor kid?
But I didn't study computers or music in college. For the people who are still making up their minds, college years are over and done before you figure out what to do with yourself.
A new Kin to Stars single. We recorded the base tracks way back in January, before the ice storm, but we're just now closing in on the final mixdown. I'm still very much enjoying working with Garageband and its constraints. I haven't found it lacking anything I could make do without anyway.
This track will also be the first to have a drum part that I played, not programmed. By "drums" I actually mean the DM6Kit I wrote about last year. It took an evening to come up with the part, another evening to rehearse and record. The final take that made it into the recording was the best take of at least ten or twelve with a few glitches fixed by hand. I was pretty tired at the end of that day. Still, it's way more fun to do drum parts that way.
I'm excited for this track to be finished so we can get it into your ears. Until then, if you haven't heard the first two Kin to Stars tracks we've released, you can find them here on Bandcamp.
I filed my taxes this week. As always, I have to include all music-related income. Here are my lifetime earnings from Spotify:
$2.58! Those numbers are lousy, but I'm not really bothered by this. I've only been on Spotify since 2010, I don't really promote it at all, and I'm still of the mindset that up-and-coming artists should choose ubiquity over cash. We need to be in these popular music services -- otherwise we're just hiding in plain sight. Make your money elsewhere.
Low payouts aren't what's bothering me about Spotify these days. This week Spotify rolled out its new Play Button, which enables people to embed Spotify-powered music widgets on websites. Now, there's nothing inherently evil or wrong about this, and I'd argue that it's an advantage Spotify sorely needed. Even the biggest chest-thumpiest gorillas of the digital music space, iTunes and Amazon, don't allow you to create an embeddable widget that plays whole songs and albums.
The catch: for the Play Button to work, the user must have Spotify installed. Fair enough, gotta get paid somehow. Users without Spotify are asked to create a free account. And to create a free Spotify account, you have to have a Facebook account. This is where I start feeling itchy.
Last week, Facebook famously purchased Instagram, the super-popular photo-sharing app for a kersnillion dollars. A lot has been written about the purchase and what it all means, but I don't think its reaching to think Instagram could become the photo sharing experience on Facebook.
Meanwhile, what's the Facebook music experience? Trick question: there isn't any. Facebook doesn't have a built-in way to share or listen to music.
When you consider that, Spotify's Play Button starts to look an awful lot like Facebook's web-wide Like Button rollout of a few years ago. Facebook understood that sharing -- photos, music, YouTube clips, articles, blog posts, thoughts, ideas, whatever -- was a key activity of ordinary-person usage of the the web. So they rolled their Like Button out to the entire web, making it easy to share cool, you-gotta-see-this content into Facebook's data-gobbling doom vortex. To join in the fun, you needed a Facebook account, of course.
The heated debate over Facebook's intentions with Instagram has reawakened the larger conversation over Facebook's overall business of providing a shiny funhouse that hoovers up your habits and profile data while you play and spits it back at you as advertisements. Some have compared Facebook to a "company town," and while others have taken issue with this characterization, it doesn't seem too off the mark. Working in the chocolate mines might sound great -- and hey, free chocolate! -- but you're still a miner working for Wonka.
So I wonder about Spotify. It's not hard to imagine that in their quest to become the music player for the web, they could easily become the music player for Facebook, which would give Facebook a pass to use my music (and any other artists' music) to feed their massive ad machine, while continuing to provide those depressing fraction-of-a-cent payouts that has better musicians than I up in arms.
If that happened, musicians would surely grumble, but would it lead to a mass exodus from Spotify? I guess that depends if you see any value in Facebook's 850 million users suddenly having an easy way to share and listen to music within Facebook itself.
Kirby Krackle's KRACKLEFEST gig last Friday was almost a disaster. Lucky for us, we had an arrow in our quill that ultimately saved the day: the best fans ever.
They knew every word. Every word! So when after a full day of chatting it up with folks on the ECCC tradeshow floor Kyle's voice was suddenly reduced to a croak by the second song, the crowd totally had his back. We had pre-sold nearly 200 tickets, and having a full house of nerd-rock fans taking the lead, shouting the verses to "Ring Capacity" and "Great Lakes Avengers" and more, was amazing to experience from the stage. We surfed that wave all the way to shore.
We had a lot riding on this show. We were all set up to do a live recording and were filming the whole thing in hopes of putting together a live DVD. That plan went out the window, which is disappointing, but in a lot of ways it turned into one of our best-ever shows. When people sang along, they sang loudly and enthusiastically. When we went back onstage for the encore, it was real, not some pre-planned B.S., we were very literally summoned back by the crowd. What an evening. Endless thanks to KK fans everywhere for saving our butts, and kudos to Kyle, for being the kind of frontman every band secretly covets.
"It’s a weird place to be, feeling like you have succeeded, only to get to the point where you literally have zero idea what to do anymore."
I felt exactly like this in 2008, although my definition of "success" was getting SYFY out the door.
Stargate and Ester Dean, Making Music Hits : The New Yorker. Oh na-na, what's my name? I knew that most pop hits were constructed like this these days, but it's fascinating to read a play-by-play like this article. Also, never heard of a "top-liner" until now.
When you hear somebody go "well of course he could do it, he's Kevin Smith"—those same assholes, before I did it, were like "it's never gonna work, it's dumb, he crazy". And then when it worked, they didn't go like "you know what? we were wrong"—instead they say "well only he could do it because he's Kevin Smith" and I say horseshit.
It's always tempting to attribute someone's success to where they are right now, as if the previous 10-20 years of taking risks and doing the scary hard work didn't count for anything.
The web is all about self-expression. Choose your words from the dropdowns and you're on your way to cranky punditry:
Ever since came along there are way too many cluttering up with their .
Um, just because technology makes something doesn't mean everyone should do it. How is the actual "good" stuff going to be among all this garbage anyway?
Whatever happened to good old-fashioned ?
I'm .
Please, the internet is full of too many things! STOP ENABLING ALL THE THINGS, INTERNET
The 2nd-annual KRACKLEFEST is soon upon us! Below is the email I sent to friends, family and co-workers -- it pretty much tells you all you need to know. If you're coming to Seattle for ECCC, come let us rock you.
As part of the upcoming Emerald City Comic Con, my nerd-rock band Kirby Krackle is throwing the 2nd annual KRACKLEFEST at the Hard Rock Cafe on Friday, March 30th.
Last year's KRACKLEFEST was off the chain, off the hook, um, off its meds, etc. with a full house of fans singing along and getting their faces rocked off with totally not-lame songs about comics and video games, executed with enough energy and precision to power the next Mars mission. This year we're upping the ante with guest performances by nerdcore rapper Adam WarRock (The Parks & Rec EP, the Browncoats EP) and traveling nerdy songwriter Marian Call.
Come watch our singer Kyle lead the crowd in a sing-along to the Konami Code while avoiding sprained ankles during his patented stage jumps. If you're planning on attending ECCC this year you won't want to miss out!
KRACKLEFEST 2012
Kirby Krackle w/ Adam Warrock & Marian Call
Hard Rock Cafe Seattle
Friday, Mar 30, 2012 9:00 PM (8:00 PM Doors)
$8 advance / $10 at the door, 21 and over
I forgot to mention that last week Kirby Krackle released a "story cut" version of our "World Full Of Heroes" video (see the original video here). This version features some "real-life" superheroes and fans who volunteered to be in the video. Pretty sweet!
I only ask you, friends of the Internet, as a creator and consumer of culture, to not confuse your enthusiasm for a thing—expressed in tweets and tumbls and comments and torrents and downloads and upthumbs and gifs—with actual support for a thing that you want to last.
And if you want that thing to last, that means supporting it in the way that, for better or for worse, it makes its money: watching it as it airs, buying tickets to it when it comes out, buying it when it is available, seeing it when it comes to town.
I agree. But something nags: is it our fault that TV networks insist on using metrics that are so out of alignment with how people choose to watch shows today? Is it our fault that we now express our appreciation for quality entertainment through clicks, likes, tweets and pins? The snarky gremlin on my shoulder wants to say "well, what did you expect would happen when you put your television show on television?"
I'd never even heard of Community until I heard it mentioned in this interview with Bill Murray. Even then, another year passed before my wife put it in our Netflix queue. We gobbled up the first two seasons and I bought a Season 3 pass on iTunes so we could catch up to the season currently airing. It's a brilliant, brilliant show.
There eventually has to be a better way to help shows like Community survive than to watch them with full commercials during its time slot. That doesn't feel like supporting the show -- that feels like supporting television watching. We just don't roll like that anymore.
