Is This Thing On? A Soapbox Announcement.

Hello, can you hear me down the back? Ong, tsu, check, ong, tsu.

Just a quick post to give a big shout out to youtuber, Mary Spender. Gotta love what she is doing for independent musicians! The education, training and advocacy, just as much as her music, is awesome!

Mary's album, Super Sexy Heartbreak

If you're not already, sign up to her newsletter/blog and likewise her toobz. Oh, and buy her album, Super Sexy Heartbreak, too.

WTF am I talkin' about? Being an independent musician. No booker, no bouncer, no A&R/record label tosspot. Dig?

Mary has independently picked up a baton I took up in 2004, after Apple had released Garageband and Rich "iFingers" Senior founded MacIDOL.com. All those Garageband music sites, like MacJams, MacIdol, Sir George Martin's Garageband.com and several others all showed that music could be truly independent! Mary pushes this message hard. She is out front, head and shoulders, on this issues. I used to call it "owning the whole widget." I wasn't very good at it, and had too many life responsibilities to spare the time to get better at it. Mary is running with it like the queen of Pamplona! And she is 100% right - her success at it is proof of it.

This is the 1970s punk DIY model, only the internet makes it easier and cheaper. Services like Distrokid puts you in the virtual stores and streamers, Shopify and others lets you sell music hardcopy and merch. You can perform live from your rehearsal space. You only need 1000 people, with a hundred bucks to spend in a year to make a living wage as a soloist. The only reason to "sign up with Satan" (take a record deal) is greed or stupidity. Or both.

Mary tells it better than me. Follow her, she's the new generation, I'm an aging genX and retired from music. Really, I'm beyond it now, a dicky ticker and adult onset type 1 diabetes leave me active enough to walk a few km and make bodged engineering stuff for my rehearsal space. I love playing live but I can't put the energy into a live show any more, to do so would probably, literally kill me. So I hand over to Mary, queen of owning your own show, with my favourite line from the film, White Men Can't Jump, "Listen to da woman!" She's wise, she's very wise and right on the money!"

But wait, I've got one more thing. This may not be here for much longer, depending on how bandcamp's new owners turn out. This my stuff, Secrets of The Hand's #ImminentFlood. Also, my toobz, too. Be a musical tradie, own your own business, you no longer need patrons, just loyal fans and inventive songwriting. Isn't that all we ever needed?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Removing Ollama From My Mac

The AI experiment in my "laboratory" is over. I've been running Ollama locally on my laptop, as in:- an 8G, local, offline language model, running on local, offline command line software. Don't get me started about the carbon pollution environmental disaster being created by serverside queries to AI like, "Does my partner really love me." The local-only model seemed like an affordable and accountable approach and my M1 Mac is energy efficient fast enough that even really tricky queries were sorted way under 2 minutes. The thing is, I never got a single, useful response to a query. Not one, that was fit for purpose, anyway, out of Ollama's "mouth." I figured that between my ability to describe a problem, and its probable solution, architecturally and simply, might result in useful code fragments for my various microcontroller coding and OpenSCAD design tasks. Not one. The work required to make anything useful was at least as much as designing i...
Read more

Bike Porn

Image
I'm a sucker for shiny metal. Polished aluminium, stylishly painted steel, a leather saddle, spoked wheels - just love it! So this BBC 4 "doco" ("reality tv"?), wherein Rob Penn, the global cycle tourist and media personality, had me at the first mention of a "dream bicycle." BBC 4's "Ride of My Life." (Not sure why Youtube has given Portland's "tits out" artist the thumbnail... Apart from the fact that Rob was, when this was made, clearly better paid than I was working for Australia's national broadcaster, he places just a little too much emphasis on the machine rather than what makes a great ride, great people with you and great locations. Thankfully, we meet some people in his quest for parts for his custom built bicycle, that are people I'd happily ride with, not least, Rob himself! He's a velo-obsessed tragic to make me look "normal." It's not a new show, it's from Boris Johnson's er...
Read more

ALWAYS read the PDS

Image
I'm quite open about my health in public. I'm also a bit of a "helicopter pilot*" when it comes to my cycling, too. So, when I saw my cadiologist last week for an annual followup since my poofer went futt back in 2020, a new doc every year (I'm public, not private), I made sure Doc knew the back story, the front story, the story behind the story and the cover story. I told Doc that my diabetes had been formally retyped, that my "endo" had officially determined that my 2005 type 2 diagnosis was wrong, I'm a type 1. Probably late onset, but things about my childhood and youth health... you know... Maybe I'm latent Type 1, maybe I was a sort of slow burn juvee Type 1. Anyway, Doc acknowledged it, "Ah yes, late onset." I told Doc I've used a bicycle for transport all my life, was a big advocate for cycling for environmental, urban and personal health and that was acknowledged with an enthusiastic, "Very good." Then Doc pre...
Read more