Groove Armada embrace Social Media

Groove Armada reveals sharing plans for Bacardi digital EP

Groove Armada announced its plans for digital distribution of its upcoming EP, which is being released through a partnership with Bacardi. And it definitely is a new idea. The EP will be sold on regular download stores from March 2, but there is also be a dedicated website, B-LIVE Share, which is up and running now.

You can download the EP’s first track for free, but to get the second one you have to share it with 20 friends, via email or a Facebook widget. To get the third track, you have to reach 200 shares of track one, and to get track four, you need 2,000 shares - although downloads from friends of your friends (and friends of your friends of your friends) count towards your total too.

We love the idea and the implementation. we’re just hoping we love the tunes now. The promotion only runs for 40 days, though - it ends when the EP goes on proper sale, and people with the highest share-counts locally and globally will get prizes. If you want to give it a try (while giving our share-count a bump), click here. Meanwhile, B-LIVE appears to be a Bacardi thing rather than just a Groove Armada thing, raising the prospect that other artists could distribute music through it too.

Oh, there’s also an embeddable widget too, see below:

stu has shared an exclusive Groove Armada track with 0 people on B-Live Share

Get the track for yourself and start sharing

London goes 'Cosmic Disco' crazy

It came from outer space

Take a recession, add the freedom of the internet, and get a DJ to stir at varying speeds. Jude Rogers finds the recipe for cosmic disco

• 
• • Jude Rogers
  • The Guardian, Friday 23 January 2009
  • Article history

Down a dark road in the south London district of Vauxhall stands the Eagle, a gay pub with blackened windows, where a bearded bouncer bares his teeth at the door. "This is Horse Meat Disco, love," he grins, ushering me inside, and suddenly my world turns from black-and-white to Technicolor. Here are giant glitterballs, smily faces dusted with sparkles, and a dancefloor full of men, women and transsexuals dancing to Ennio Morricone's theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is being slowed down to a trudge, then speeded up until it's a series of shimmering sounds. The Eagle may not be Studio 54, but what is happening here is an illustration of what is happening to disco in the 21st century.

Thirty years ago, club culture was all about disco. In 2009, an offshoot of the genre is spiking in popularity. This is "cosmic disco", a slower, more eclectic style of music named after a cult Italian nightclub, called Cosmic, which was open from 1979 to 1984. The DJs who pioneered it - among them Daniele Baldelli, Beppe Loda and Claudio "Mozart" Rispoli - played whatever took their fancy, mixing up melodies from soundtracks, Krautrock, funk, reggae, African pop, electronic and modern classical records over a disco beat. And they did so however it took their fancy, often deliberately playing records at the wrong speed. In the 1980s, the cosmic style barely left Italy, but today it is growing in popularity in both gay and straight clubs in Britain, inspiring new DJs here and abroad, and producing a wealth of compilation albums and mixes.

But why is cosmic disco hitting a nerve now? Bill Brewster, founder of DJHistory.com and author of Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: A History of the DJ, has a theory. He has watched cosmic disco grow in popularity over the last decade, since turntablists such as DJ Harvey started making new, cosmic-inspired mixes and artists such as Lindstrøm started making new music inspired by its eclecticism. Having seen virtual communities set up forums and mp3 blogs about it, Brewster believes it is the first real internet dance phenomenon.

"Crate-digging for new tracks is done virtually now, by DJs, amateurs and clubbers themselves," he says. "And as cosmic disco is all about mixing together strange tracks over a disco beat, the internet provides a massive pool of resources. It also makes it much easier to find music released in other countries outside the UK and the US, and cast your net wider."

The eclectic nature of cosmic disco also reflects the way mp3 players have changed our relationship with music and made us more open minded, says Simon Ashton, one of the Manchester-based DJs behind the mp3 blog and website CosmicDisco.co.uk. He refers to this development as an effect of shuffle culture: "I really believe that the iPod shuffle feature had a huge effect on listening habits, and people no longer accept a programmed playlist. This has enabled DJs such as ourselves to navigate through different styles, and open people's ears to unfamiliar music."

But in the last decade, the popularity of mash-ups, bootlegs and Balearic music could also be said to be an effect of this shuffle culture, so what makes cosmic disco different? Firstly, there is the way it relies on the futuristic gleam of synthesiser melodies, but more important is the four-on-the-floor kick drum that dictates its rhythm, giving DJs a solid base upon which they can experiment.

Brewster has another theory, this time concerning why disco becomes popular in particular times. "Cosmic disco is popular now because of the recession, definitely. Disco originally exploded during a recession, and escapist music really flourishes when people want to go out and forget about things."

He also believes minimal house and techno, the stripped-down, cerebral music that has dominated club culture in the last decade, has alienated people who want their nights out to be full of fun and joy rather than elitist one-upmanship. That's reflected, too, in the way people are also turning away from big name DJs in state-of-the art clubs and returning to small venues, and looking at club culture's roots in the late 1970s for new inspirations.

Lindstrøm, the Norwegian DJ, producer and composer whose first solo album, Where I Go You Too, was released in 2007, also believes DJs and clubbers are less hung up about fashions that they used to be, especially when he considers how unfashionable disco was when he started making music. "Five years ago, people told me that disco was a no-word. Now, there is far less worry about cool, and DJs care far less about how they are perceived." He refers to his sometime collaborator, Prins Thomas, and artists such as DiskJokke, and suggests they make music inspired by the original disco period because it was all about sounds that were weird, wonderful and fun.

This is where clubbing fits into a wider trend for old-fashioned fun. Look at the TV listings: the biggest hit shows, the likes of Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor, are versions of old variety formats that used to dominate Saturday night TV. "Look at the world we live in now," says the cultural commentator Jon Savage. "Light entertainment is king again, and rock music has become incredibly static. Looking back 25 years could just be about the cyclical nature of pop nostalgia, but I think it's about people looking back to a brilliantly hedonistic, fusion moment for music, and wanting to be part of that. The more stuff they find, the better things will be."

And so the 21st-century incarnation of cosmic disco is slowly moving towards the mainstream from its original home in gay clubs. The Horse Meat Disco DJs brought together mixed crowds at The Big Chill and Bestival, for instance, and many fashionable clubs are incorporating cosmic disco into their nights, and including the word "cosmic" in the names to gather in the punters.

But what do the original Cosmic DJs think of the revival? Daniele Baldelli, who headlined Horse Meat Disco's New Years Eve and New Year's Day parties, and last year released the mix album Cosmic Disco? Cosmic Rock! with Marco Dionigi, is boggled by it all. Still, he has one idea: that people might be interested in the original Cosmic DJs because of their naivety, as well as their playfulness.

Italy, he says, is the forgotten part of this story. "Because in Italy, our music has no roots in rock or funk - it is all about opera and lyrics. So DJs like me only listened to music from other countries in terms of sounds, rather than words." This, he explains, is why DJs like him never worried about changing the pitch and speed of records. As they couldn't understand what was being sung, they simply considered the voice to be another instrument, and played with its timbres and textures to make exciting new sounds.

He also thinks cosmic disco has risen again because people are bored of the compartmentalisation of dance music. "Dance music has become so split into tiny little things and cultures: house DJs, techno DJs, progressive DJs." He exhales with disdain, adding that DJs were a new a concept to him at the time, so he just played whatever records he wanted to. Perhaps, he concludes, people are fascinated today by the enthusiastic and innocent love of sounds that cosmic disco stands for, as well as the willingness of the original cosmic DJs to do anything to make people think, as well as dance.

And so 25 years after the original Cosmic club closed, is Baldelli happy that the spirit of such a long-forgotten place has survived? "I am because I am having my second life! The joy of mixing strange and wonderful tracks together, for everyone, is having its second life. And Cosmic is having its second life, too."

Diet Coke and Menthos - still the best viral ever!

Diet Coke + Mentos

I'm seriously having second thoughts about swimming with dolphins

Swimming with dolphins is shit

Ever since editing a piece about Dave Navarro swimming nude with dolphins in the Worst Issue Ever, I’ve always wondered what would it be like to rub my lithe, naked torso against the rubbery skin of the sea’s friendliest mammals. Last week I met a guy called Farik on a beach in Mauritius and he sold me a package tour that promised “Swimming with dolphins and barbecued lobster on an island,” so I signed up to it without thinking twice. Here’s what fucking happened.

Call me a total naïve idiot, but from Farik’s description of the package tour, I imagined I would be ferried effortlessly via limousine to a nearby exclusive cove whereupon I would dive into the crystal clear waters then be tossed aloft into the air by the thrust of a dolphin’s beak. The beast would make that clicking sound and we’d laugh and joke around while also developing a deeper understanding of ocean life. But it was nothing like that. In fact it was one of the most tawdry experiences of 2008.

Nasty dolphin mural

Let this act as a warning to anybody foolish enough to sign up for one of these things. What happens when you sign up (which costs about £250), is that you have to be in the lobby of your hotel for 7.30AM then wait for 30 minutes for a monosyllabic Mauritian guy to bundle you into the back of a mini-bus that smelled of whatever the bus driver had eaten for dinner the night before (quite spicy), along with 16 half-asleep strangers. They ranged from a South African family, to some French old age pensioners, to a really grumpy rotund English woman and her boyfriend.

On arrival at our destination were shunted onto a beach where we had to hand over more money (£50) to a gang of shady looking guys who had a catamaran that was connected to the beach by a rusted, broken gangway that had almost completely collapsed in the middle. There were flies everywhere. Eventually we took our place on a catarman that smelled strongly of piss and had more files buzzing around it than the beach.

My girlfriend Maggie and I took our places, squashed up against the rear of the boat next to two 60 year-old-ginger haired twin sisters from France and their husband. A South African family with two small children joined us and then a gang of five drunken French gentlemen in their mid-20s wearing cowboy hats turned up with two black girls wearing thongs and cowboy hats. It soon transpired that the girls were hookers, hired by the French guys for their friend’s birthday, which I thought was a very nice gesture, even if it sat a little uncomfortably among the toddlers, old age pensioners and “swimming with dolphins” vibes that we’d gone in for.

Spot the hooker

The French guys looked like they’d been doing coke all night, all jittery and chain smoking. One of the hookers could barely stand up and so spent the whole time alternating between rubbing the French guy’s thigh while lying down and listening to Mauritian R&B on her mobile phone. It sounded very tinny. Very tinny and very fucking soul destroying and so I begged the small kid who was working the bar to give me beer upon beer and when he was distracted I stole a bottle of rum and put it in Maggie’s bag. I must have drunk half of it in 30 minutes.

After our fellow passengers had finished eating the cut up baguettes covered with cheap jam that was our “all inclusive breakfast” we set off, very slowly to go and swim with dolphins. About an hour into it, and with a very loud soundtrack CD of Crazy Frog and Mauritiun R&B we slowed down and were told that “Here are ze dolphins” by our captain, a jheri-curled man with blue contact lenses in that gave him the appearance of somebody who plays in a Prodigy tribute act.

The Banquet

The Sound System

For ten minutes we saw some dolphins 800 metres away before sailing for what seemed like three hours aimlessly around an island while the captain played, very loudly, songs by Christina Milian, 50 Cent and, again, Crazy Frog. Staggering to the downstairs toilet, which naturally was full to the brim with other people’s piss and was surrounded by a halo of flies, I cut my foot open on a broken wine glass, slipped over and cut my head open on the metal rigging.

By now I was too drunk to care any more. I wasn’t even that upset about the fact that there was no “Island visit with lobster dinner” as promised. Instead a small child brought a plastic bucket of chicken out from a cupboard by the toilet and the captian cooked it until burned to a crisp on a portable barbecue. The French guys and the hookers loved it and managed to polish it most of it themselves.

During the chicken dinner, we stopped for a while so I jumped off the side of the boat for a swim, cutting my chest open on a jagged lump of coral. I pulled myself back up onto the boat and sat there, bleeding from chest, head and foot while downing a half pint of warm rum and Sprit.

It would be three more hours of this shit before we made it back to shore.

'Made In Queens' Trailer

MADE IN QUEENS - OFFICIAL FILM TRAILER

Fundable

Thinking that Fundable is a really unique idea: http://www.fundable.com/

Great article on true fans!

1,000 True Fans

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly. Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.

The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.

The technologies of connection and small-time manufacturing make this circle possible. Blogs and RSS feeds trickle out news, and upcoming appearances or new works. Web sites host galleries of your past work, archives of biographical information, and catalogs of paraphernalia. Diskmakers, Blurb, rapid prototyping shops, Myspace, Facebook, and the entire digital domain all conspire to make duplication and dissemination in small quantities fast, cheap and easy. You don't need a million fans to justify producing something new. A mere one thousand is sufficient.

This small circle of diehard fans, which can provide you with a living, is surrounded by concentric circles of Lesser Fans. These folks will not purchase everything you do, and may not seek out direct contact, but they will buy much of what you produce. The processes you develop to feed your True Fans will also nurture Lesser Fans. As you acquire new True Fans, you can also add many more Lesser Fans. If you keep going, you may indeed end up with millions of fans and reach a hit. I don't know of any creator who is not interested in having a million fans.

But the point of this strategy is to say that you don't need a hit to survive. You don't need to aim for the short head of best-sellerdom to escape the long tail. There is a place in the middle, that is not very far away from the tail, where you can at least make a living. That mid-way haven is called 1,000 True Fans. It is an alternate destination for an artist to aim for.

Young artists starting out in this digitally mediated world have another path other than stardom, a path made possible by the very technology that creates the long tail. Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum hits, bestseller blockbusters, and celebrity status, they can aim for direct connection with 1,000 True Fans. It's a much saner destination to hope for. You make a living instead of a fortune. You are surrounded not by fad and fashionable infatuation, but by True Fans. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.

A few caveats. This formula - one thousand direct True Fans -- is crafted for one person, the solo artist. What happens in a duet, or quartet, or movie crew? Obviously, you'll need more fans. But the additional fans you'll need are in direct geometric proportion to the increase of your creative group. In other words, if you increase your group size by 33%, you need add only 33% more fans. This linear growth is in contrast to the exponential growth by which many things in the digital domain inflate. I would not be surprise to find that the value of your True Fans network follows the standard network effects rule, and increases as the square of the number of Fans. As your True Fans connect with each other, they will more readily increase their average spending on your works. So while increasing the numbers of artists involved in creation increases the number of True Fans needed, the increase does not explode, but rises gently and in proportion.

A more important caution: Not every artist is cut out, or willing, to be a nurturer of fans. Many musicians just want to play music, or photographers just want to shoot, or painters paint, and they temperamentally don't want to deal with fans, especially True Fans. For these creatives, they need a mediator, a manager, a handler, an agent, a galleryist -- someone to manage their fans. Nonetheless, they can still aim for the same middle destination of 1,000 True Fans. They are just working in a duet.

Third distinction. Direct fans are best. The number of True Fans needed to make a living indirectly inflates fast, but not infinitely. Take blogging as an example. Because fan support for a blogger routes through advertising clicks (except in the occasional tip-jar), more fans are needed for a blogger to make a living. But while this moves the destination towards the left on the long tail curve, it is still far short of blockbuster territory. Same is true in book publishing. When you have corporations involved in taking the majority of the revenue for your work, then it takes many times more True Fans to support you. To the degree an author cultivates direct contact with his/her fans, the smaller the number needed.

Lastly, the actual number may vary depending on the media. Maybe it is 500 True Fans for a painter and 5,000 True Fans for a videomaker. The numbers must surely vary around the world. But in fact the actual number is not critical, because it cannot be determined except by attempting it. Once you are in that mode, the actual number will become evident. That will be the True Fan number that works for you. My formula may be off by an order of magnitude, but even so, its far less than a million.

I've been scouring the literature for any references to the True Fan number. Suck.com co-founder Carl Steadman had theory about microcelebrities. By his count, a microcelebrity was someone famous to 1,500 people. So those fifteen hundred would rave about you. As quoted by Danny O'Brien, "One person in every town in Britain likes your dumb online comic. That's enough to keep you in beers (or T-shirt sales) all year."

Others call this microcelebrity support micro-patronage, or distributed patronage.

In 1999 John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier published a model for this in First Monday, an online journal. They called it the Street Performer Protocol.

Using the logic of a street performer, the author goes directly to the readers before the book is published; perhaps even before the book is written. The author bypasses the publisher and makes a public statement on the order of: "When I get $100,000 in donations, I will release the next novel in this series." Readers can go to the author's Web site, see how much money has already been donated, and donate money to the cause of getting his novel out. Note that the author doesn't care who pays to get the next chapter out; nor does he care how many people read the book that didn't pay for it. He just cares that his $100,000 pot gets filled. When it does, he publishes the next book. In this case "publish" simply means "make available," not "bind and distribute through bookstores." The book is made available, free of charge, to everyone: those who paid for it and those who did not.

In 2004 author Lawrence Watt-Evans used this model to publish his newest novel. He asked his True Fans to collectively pay $100 per month. When he got $100 he posted the next chapter of the novel. The entire book was published online for his True Fans, and then later in paper for all his fans. He is now writing a second novel this way. He gets by on an estimated 200 True Fans because he also publishes in the traditional manner -- with advances from a publisher supported by thousands of Lesser Fans. Other authors who use fans to directly support their work are Diane Duane, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, and Don Sakers. Game designer Greg Stolze employed a similar True Fan model to launch two pre-financed games. Fifty of his True Fans contributed seed money for his development costs.

The genius of the True Fan model is that the fans are able to move an artist away from the edges of the long tail to a degree larger than their numbers indicate. They can do this in three ways: by purchasing more per person, by spending directly so the creator keeps more per sale, and by enabling new models of support.

New models of support include micro-patronage. Another model is pre-financing the startup costs. Digital technology enables this fan support to take many shapes. Fundable is a web-based enterprise which allows anyone to raise a fixed amount of money for a project, while reassuring the backers the project will happen. Fundable withholds the money until the full amount is collected. They return the money if the minimum is not reached.

Here's an example from Fundable's site;

Amelia, a twenty-year-old classical soprano singer, pre-sold her first CD before entering a recording studio. "If I get $400 in pre-orders, I will be able to afford the rest [of the studio costs]," she told potential contributors. Fundable's all-or-nothing model ensured that none of her customers would lose money if she fell short of her goal. Amelia sold over $940 in albums.

A thousand dollars won't keep even a starving artist alive long, but with serious attention, a dedicated artist can do better with their True Fans. Jill Sobule, a musician who has nurtured a sizable following over many years of touring and recording, is doing well relying on her True Fans. Recently she decided to go to her fans to finance the $75,000 professional recording fees she needed for her next album. She has raised close to $50,000 so far. By directly supporting her via their patronage, the fans gain intimacy with their artist. According to the Associated Press:

Contributors can choose a level of pledges ranging from the $10 "unpolished rock," which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it's made, to the $10,000 "weapons-grade plutonium level," where she promises "you get to come and sing on my CD. Don't worry if you can't sing - we can fix that on our end." For a $5,000 contribution, Sobule said she'll perform a concert in the donor's house. The lower levels are more popular, where donors can earn things like an advanced copy of the CD, a mention in the liner notes and a T-shirt identifying them as a "junior executive producer" of the CD.

The usual alternative to making a living based on True Fans is poverty. A study as recently as 1995 showed that the accepted price of being an artist was large. Sociologist Ruth Towse surveyed artists in Britian and determined that on average they earned below poverty subsistence levels.

I am suggesting there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. Somewhere lower than stratospheric bestsellerdom, but higher than the obscurity of the long tail. I don't know the actual true number, but I think a dedicated artist could cultivate 1,000 True Fans, and by their direct support using new technology, make an honest living. I'd love to hear from anyone who might have settled on such a path.