It Wouldn't Be Christmas Without S&M

Why do people torment themselves so at this time of year? In the north, days are short, nights are cold and long. In the south, the globe heats to unbearable levels; and capitalists everywhere capitalise on our misery by relentlessly prodding us to spend our way into new year debt in an insane, herd-instinct sado-masochist orgy of panic.

My family and friends know well that I tend to remember birthdays but send no Christmas cards.

Instead, I buy presents at random throughout the year, absent myself from stress and observe the soltice. I urge you to do the same.

Remember: no shopping, no presents, no guilt.

House Warming

I'm considering multi-fuel options - it's the green way to go, so long as I look after the particulates.

I've been to-ing and fro-ing but finally, the Clean Air Act smokeless zone DEFRA-certificated Aga Little Wenlock Classic SE looks like it could be the one.



Never thought I'd get an AGA.

The History of the Internet

Here's a rather neat timeline of the internet published on the Guardian website, which has been put together by Simon Jeffery.

After who encouraging user input, Simon responded to my addition of the birth of podcasting, called up and interviewed me.



Click 2004 to listen to my nostalgic recollection of those pioneering glory days.

Let's Not Miss September

I love the Autumn, it's my favourite time of year.

I've written a monthly post since Jun 2004 but last month I didn't feel much like doing anything, so I didn't. This is one of the great benefits of being one's own editor.

Nothing like pausing to allow new things to come along.

UK Podcasters Find New Home

This very nice welcome page from the Open Rights Group ushers in an interesting next phase for the UK podcasting fraternity.

Activities around the making and consuming of media have evolved hugely in three and a half years, and the digital media scene is set for more growth, with forces such as governments and media empires vieing for control. Never more important a time to stand up for citizens' basic rights, and to ensure a level playing field for businesses sandwiched between the BBC and Rupert Murdoch. The UKPA was frankly too small to be effective, and so has found a new home with its close ally.

So, big thanks to Michael and Jim from ORG. This is a good move. It is my hope that we we will be able to add to ORG, and that in the time to come, the alliance will be a good one.

Podcasting as a word may be less prominent than it was, but the culture of download is incredibly strong. Anyone who is interested in online media's future prospects should get involved in the Media Makers Group which is set to have its first meeting on September 26th in London.

Friend Feed

I have come to really like FriendFeed. It's a great way to follow someone and keep in touch with their activities and interests. It's a good surface level browser, with an easy to navigate interface. It also does what it says on the tin - it's an RSS Feed reader. But like Facebook and Twitter, it enables conversations and comment threads.

I read my own feed to catch up with my own thoughts and think twice about things. Using it can be like keeping a kind of public notebook.

Dean Whitbread's Friend Feed.

New Music Releases

I'm very pleased to be working with a couple of fellow Pisceans on remixes of one of the most popular pieces of music from the Rise and Shine show, Water on the Moon, released today on dPulse.

Just to increase the fish connection, Tom Sparks who is featured in the track is also Piscean. Coincidence? Well, obviously.

Andrew's two mixes are intense, deep and sonically scupltural, and my own remix did the logical thing and extended the fast techno-funk groove into danceability.



I also decided to use the excellent DIY site Bandcamp to publish a disco synth tune I wrote for Jack Cheese's new video trailer, which I dubbed Tasty Disco Slice.

It's just like Christmas and New Year have come at once! Which is what normally happens, in fact.

The End of an April

Dedicating more and more time to my music projects I have been considering the much changed online media landscape I now inhabit.

Podcasting has changed, and the practises of media makers have evolved out of recognition.

I seriously doubt that the core community of podcasting per se that once existed still exists. It's been diluted, members have drifted away into other activities, media making habits have changed. With widespread broadband, non-linear delivery is less important, and with streaming services such Mogulus, UStream, Bambuser and Qik, and ever more efficient computers, self-powered live broadcast is now normal.

The content has changed, too. PR, marketing and mainstream media types now enforce old-style, predictable conformity upon this once free, wild and hugely entertaining frontier. Old style Blogging, which kicked off this social media revolution, has been largely replaced by mich lighter, less time-intensive, less literary forms such as Twitter and Tumblr, at least among the large community of non-writers. Carefully produced programmes by passionate amateurs with normal sounding voices are now made by media corporations. Not only do BBC announcers no longer speak the Queen's English, they make the same kinds of pronunciation gaffes as the ill-educated public.



But all is not lost. Though I hereby pronounce the online media revolution phase one to be finished, revolution phase two began a while back, and its results will be upon us before we even notice. I do have some clear ideas about how this next phase will manifest, but I'm not in a position to share them here. Instead, look for clues in your sock drawer, which as everyone knows, is where lost things gather.

Strike for Free Music

In full sympathy with the workers of France who are giving Sarkozy's government such a hard time, I'm celebrating the Vernal Equinox by working to rule.

March 20th 2008 saw the writing of the song "Strike!" in the Rise and Shine show.

It's just been released along with 25 other songs and this is a blatant plug.

You can listen and download MP3 versions of the song free.

Funky Fruit

I have been logical.

I set up a website for my songwriting and composition, dubbed "Funky Fruit" in which I write about the joys and travails of song.

Help Gaza Victims - Four Easy Things To Do

Whatever your views on the causes of this conflict, it is largely a massacre of unarmed civilians, including 265 children as of today.

Write to your MP: I wrote this:

http://theothersideofeverything.com/flip/2009/01/letter-to-emily-thornberry-mp/

Use this as a template if you like, but make sure you change the wording.

Petition Downing Street:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Israel-Sanctions/

Petition the UN:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/gaza_time_for_peace/

Donate to Medical Aid for Palestine:

http://www.map-uk.org/

"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke.

An Experiment in Provocation - Stealing Gaza by Brian Eno

From The Daily Swarm. My own response to the war is here.

It’s a tragedy that the Israelis – a people who must understand better than almost anybody the horrors of oppression – are now acting as oppressors. As the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once remarked “Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it’s the Palestinians”. By creating a middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they’ve forgotten it. And by trying to paint an equivalence between the Palestinians – with their homemade rockets and stone-throwing teenagers – and themselves – with one of the most sophisticated military machines in the world – they sacrifice all credibility.

The Israelis are a gifted and resourceful people who fully deserve the right to live in peace, but who seem intent on squandering every chance to allow that to happen. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that this conflict serves the political and economic purposes of Israel so well that they have every interest in maintaining it. While there is fighting they can continue to build illegal settlements. While there is fighting they continue to receive huge quantities of military aid from the United States. And while there is fighting they can avoid looking candidly at themselves and the ruthlessness into which they are descending.

Gaza is now an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate them regularly…and, surprise, surprise – they turn hostile. Now why would you want to make that experiment?

Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now ‘under attack’ you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfit to govern itself, a terrorist state, a state with which you couldn’t possibly reach an accommodation.

And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing their homeland.

Rise and Shine, Yuletide Edition

You can't keep a good idea down, and despite the fact we're still putting the finishing touches to the Daily Song Limited business plan (yes, we have one) we thought we'd better produce a holiday edition of our original songwriting show, Rise and Shine.

Get this widget!

Here's the widget - put it on your website, why don't you - and please donate to our good cause fund - see the ChipIn box top right column of this blog.

Punk Omelette: A Fist Full of Eggshells

Back in 2003 I began formulating a series of surreal video ideas, born out of frustration at the crop of identikit television programmes that were coming out of Britain at the time, and my naturally warped sense of humour. I made a series of monologues called Punk Omelette - the phrase deriving from my slapping music styles together with TV content, in this case, cooking.

By doing so I invented an entire genre of media-bending formats. Now that I've helped put podcasting on the map and it's accepted as proper grown up media, and now that I don't have to be so damn serious all the time, I think it's time to pick that particular pantyhose up off the floor once more, and get moving with the eggs and the nails.

After all, as I often say - what is the point, except the sharp bit at the end?

Profiles

I've been very cautious about adding new "social media" (or as I call them, so-called media) to my life, but being experimental and also to a certain extent sentimental, I've added a few this year, and I'm seeing how well served I am by this proliferation of profiles.

Seesmic seems to be part of the furniture now. The original video conversation network, I keep returning to Seesmic for social reasons, much as others use Facebook, which I completely neglect. I find it's one-to-one video messaging invaluable for both private messaging and business.

12seconds.tv I quite enjoy for it's quickfire nonsense. I have the domain 12hours.tv ready to go - need a backer to help me build a website for 12 hour-long Warhol-style (or not) webcam videos "because anything less is superficial".

Vimeo is a totally splendid video site, very useful for work, with a great and talented community. HD quality, fast uploads, fast conversion to flash, passwords, and the free version gives you 500MB a week upload. Great package.

I already mentioned Blip.FM, from which I take teenage delight - I should also add I love any site which allows me my first name as a user ID. I carefully update the professional network LinkedIn because it's so very sensible.

I've just added Behance to see what will happen. I'm also a member of Discogs.com, in order to reclaim my musical past in the name of my future, as I return once again to the path of inner truth.

John Cleese on Sarah Palin

Quite proud of this video, executively produced by myself and my fellow Small Pictures director Garry Scott-Irvine, which appeared absolutely everywhere and seems set for one million YouTube views. From Seesmic, Vinvin presents and interviews, and Whit videoed and Jeremy edited.

Applause all round.

Open Rights Group Video

Who's Watching Who? from Dean Whitbread on Vimeo.

Just completed this video for the Open Rights Group, the first of a few that in the pipeline from video production company Small Pictures. One of our "actors" dropped out for the second shoot, I had to step in last minute and pick up the baton. Thankfully the team did a lot better than the UK olympic relay teams...

Bliptastic: Blip.FM Social Radio

I try not to be too faddist. It helps that I am not a gamer. Every so often however, along comes a website which combines function with form in delightful way, and such is Blip.FM which in a nutshell is no more than community DJing. I haven't found anything so immediate and addictive since Seesmic, the video conversation site, came along almost a year ago.

Its simplicity is very effective. Whilst in all other social networks I add my friends with some level of caution, on Blip I am happy to add DJ buddies purely on the basis of shared music likes. Leaving the page on autoplay, I am happy to let my friends and DJs play music for me all day long, and when I want to join in, I provide the same experience for them.

I don't know quite how the music industry will respond to this - they don't seem to have taken on board Seeqpod as yet which does a similar thing, scraping the web for MP3 files, millions of which are out there "in the wild" - but it treats the whole experience very differently because it has understood the crucial aspect of modernity which is that we are not alone. Like Last.FM it offers music streams easily shared and personalised according to taste, but unlike Last it offers a more genuinely live experience, with more in common with micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter. For me it beats Last.FM hands down on the basis of sheer ease of use.

You'd hope that labels and artists will see Blip.FM as a positive thing, as it unleashes a veritable army of amateur pundits and tastemakers.

Blip.FM also sensibly includes a "buy this" button prominently in its interface. This currently only searches Amazon, which is a bit useless, but the concept is sound. It works: in a few short days, I have had my ears opened and found many new artists via Blip, as well as been reminded of gaps in my own library which I have forked out cash to plug. There is an upload function (complete with cautionary copyright warning) which I have used to place free downloads from my MySpace music friends, CC-licensed podcasts and my own unreleased tracks in the Blip catalogue.

One word of warning: if you join, make sure you don't let Blip.FM spam your friends with invites! There is an "uncheck all" option when you get to the "invite your friends" page which should prevent this happening.

If this takes off as I think it might, traditional music radio will soon be quaking in its boots. Of course, if I were running a station, I'd be uploading shows to Blip on a daily basis with a link to my internet stream in the accompanying text. As my friend and colleague Brian Greene says, radio is about to get social.

I've added the Blip widget to the right column of this blog.

Video

I'm going back to my art roots...



I started a Vimeo account for some HD experimentation.

Wordle

I can' resist Wordle. You can even learn something about yourself by using this random replay of your writing (demands chicken?)



Meanwhile, back to making videos - four coming up in August and September, three to direct, shoot and edit, and a soundtrack to compose.

July

Honestly, I was really busy in July.

Creativity and Business: Priceless

Creativity is inherently revolutionary. Business is inherently exploitative.Is creativity inherently anti-business?

These thoughts have been rolling around my mind like a marble in a sweet jar for some time now, as I ponder my own paths in creativity and in business.

Business requires predictability, results and judges by the balance sheet. It demands efficiency, proof and reports. Business exploits ideas for profit. Business people have a platform, a position, and a salary. Creatives on the other hand have a trajectory, a vocation and a journey. Creativity generates ideas, celebrates strangeness, and messes with your head. Business makes money, maintains the market and will sell you whatever you will buy. Creativity wastes time, disrupts the market, and even if you can own it, it's probably worthless.

The art business is the most conflicted in the world.

Creative people alight upon something new and invest it with form and meaning, showing the way forward and lighting the path. Business people seek financial gain, and will gladly steal the patent for the lighting system.

Not being able to sell your idea means nothing to the truly creative person. Ignoring trends is essential if you are to follow the thread of your inspiration, wherever it might lead, even to your personal extinction - although that is not essential. Creativity reinvents itself just by continuing - change is its only constant. Creativity demands the pointless. Blind alleys are the stuff of life. Purpose is a necessary sacrifice along the path of enlightenment. The search for enlightenment is packaged and sold as weekend breaks in the picturesque Cotswolds, £400 per person including organic meals.

Thanks to television, radio and the internet, there is now little left of undivided attention, lingering examination, or even careful re-reading. All is subservient to the immediately useful, the entertaining or the alarmist. The timelines speed past like landscapes viewed from a train, remote, unvisited, unless robot search alert takes you back there. The windows of attention are shrinking as we stare more and more at screens, and less and less at the faces of individuals.

"Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" - T. S. Eliot

"Finding a businessman interested in the Arts is like finding chicken shit in your chicken salad" - Alice Neel

Gore Vidal - American Hero

What I love about the United States is that they have produced people of the stature of Gore Vidal. I wonder how many more sharp, fiercely intelligent, independent thinkers will arise from that nation.

I'm Voting For Aled Fisher, Green Party

Aled Fisher (LSE SU General Secretary-Elect) at 21 is the youngest candidate in this year's London Assembly elections, which are to be held tomorrow, so I thought I'd check him out. He seems to have good values, has succeeded in raising standards of pay for poorly paid college cleaners, and has been involved in twinning the LSE SU with An-Najah University, in Nablus, north of Ramallah, so he gets my vote.

Whatever Happened to March?

Rise and Shine happened to March... I was so involved in making this show, that I completely forgot my once-a-month post to this, the driest of all my blogs. And I've only just remembered that this is the last day of April... but then, I've been on holiday, so that's a permissable exception.

After one hectic month, I was very happy with our pilot show. We proved that the concept of a live, news-based songwriting show works really well. It generated the interest we thought it would, raising over $1000 US in sponsorship and song downloads. Plus, we have a whole series of songs presented in a brand new context - more about that later. Most importantly, we have a road-tested original show format, and people to who want to franchise it, which is a really nice thing to return to...

Rise and Shine: My Triple Challenge

I've set myself a triple challenge.

• Write a song (with assistance wherever possible) every weekday for a month;


• Broadcast the whole event as a breakfast show from 7am to 10am;


• Raise money for a good cause - BuskAid

I've dubbed the project Rise and Shine, and I've every intention of making this pilot show into a robust vehicle, combining creativity, commerce and charity, capable of traversing mighty landscapes.

Media moguls, commissioners, patrons, sponsors, and all-round nice people, feel free to contact songs [at] riseandshine [dot] tv to learn more.

Work Changes Everything

The year 2007 was a sometimes astonishing journey into places I had never been, which changed what I'm working on, where I work, with whom I work, and how I work, and for simplicity's sake, I'm outlining these changes here.

What I'm Working On

I'm still working on podcast production, notably for John Cleese, Rob da Bank, JM Soul and others, but also now working on live radio and video projects, with music, art, performance and comedy. I will also be producing a brand new live radio format, which pilots end of February 2008, and I continue to write regularly.

Where I Work

Thanks to Michael Franklin, we've moved the centre of our operations to a new office / studio right in the heart of London's West End - 4 Denmark Street, London, WC2H 8LP.

With Whom I Work

Talking Voices Ltd., the company which Funk started in 2006, is still going strong with some personnel changes. Mark Crook, Paul Carey and myself have been joined by radio industry stalwart Michael Franklin, and we're pleased that our Irish colleagues Brian Greene and Sinead Murnane have come centrally into the business. I'll post more about that soon on the Talking Voices blog.

How I Work

Those of you who want to engage my services either to speak, write, or to consult for very reasonable fees, please contact me direct by leaving a comment here. All podcast-related business is channeled through Talking Voices. For music production, contact me via Funk.

And Finally...

I'm really pleased to report that the Cinema du Lyon album I completed at the end of 2007 with Mark Crook is on sale and has some really nice reviews (see below).

I'm also still very much involved in the UK Podcasters Association - will be attending an interesting session on January 15th at Channel 4, held by the Radio Academy.

CINEMA DU LYON: The Particle Zoo

Buy from iTunes Plus (NO DRM!)

ABOUT CINEMA DU LYON: Cinema du Lyon are a European art/music group with the self-avowed intent of being "as pretentious as possible". Amoral rather than immoral, they shun publicity at all times, with the intention of creating a more ego-less space for their consummate artifice to construct within the imagination of their unprepared audience. They constantly collaborate, and release very little of their compositions, preferring to infiltrate the real world and non-music spaces in unexpected ways via guerilla methods.

Their first public performance was at the Hanbury Ballroom, Brighton, April 2004. They played cards, smoked Gauloises, read Le Monde, and treated the astonished audience to art. By the end of the performance, with the venue resounding to avant-garde beats and fabulous visuals, they were celebrating with flowers and champagne at the bar.

Cinema du Lyon – "The Particle Zoo"

"If you would be a real seeker after truth,
it is necessary that at least once in your life
you doubt, as far as possible, all things." - René Descartes

Full of shifting possibilities, alive with a seething miasma of portent, a fiercesome force of nature - "The Particle Zoo" is a place for the uncaged.

Shredding all previous works to relay an absolute truth about the new environmental sonic landscape that escaped from the laboratory and found its way into the world, full of awe, a measurement in the strength of the aural message, given that this is not a pipe, but a maze, lies in the unwavering conviction of the artists themselves to achieve excess in the name of truth itself.

"The Particle Zoo" is Cinema du Lyon's twelfth audio collection, but the first to be made publicly available, the previous eleven having been private commissions and art events.

For more information and a beautiful audio-visual podcast, visit http://cinema-du-lyon.eu

Bear A Grudge This Christmas

I managed to avoid November entirely this year, but now we're at the period of festive fun, I've decided to add my scrooge-like tuppence to the holiday season with a reading from my favourite author, Deek.

PodCamp Boston

As if I can't get enough of the Open Learning experience, I'm scheduled to visit the USA this coming weekend to attend PodCamp Boston where I am speaking on "International Dimensions - The Wonderful Wide World of Podcasting - Dean Whitbread from UK Podcasters http://ukpa.info shares his experience in the online rights field, explains why belonging to a podcast group is more than just tribalism, and why it’s important to make sure that your right to podcast is protected." - it says here.

Appropriate for everyone, apparently.

PodCamp Ireland

As if I haven't had enough exposure to the podcasting, blogging and social media community recently, I'm off to this one, which is conveniently being held in the country next door.

Hurricane Dean

How odd to share a name with a mighty force of nature. Hurricane Dean is a big one, apparently, but thankfully just missed directly hitting Jamaica, passing a few miles to the south.

Pods and Blogs Ident

Pleased to see that the UK's definitive radio programme on podcasting and blogging, Pods and Blogs on BBC Radio 5 Live, has chosen to use the programme ident I recorded for them at the weekend in their very first podcast.

I'm now blushingly proud...

Can You Give Me More Traffic Reports?

Robert Scoble on Facebook Talks About Twitter, Etc.
Uploaded by deanwhitbread

I really liked this muse on Twitter and Facebook by the insightful Robert Scoble. So much so, that I stole this video from Facebook. Am I wrong? They claim to own everything. I'm not sure who I even stole this from. Anyway, it's a great rap.

Robert, I hope you're not offended that I posted this here. I will give you the traffic reports. Thank you for letting me share this.

Funk Social Media Experiment

The Funk Social Media Experiment: One Dollar

History is being made - I just made my first dollar from the blog I started writing in June 2004, shortly after starting this one. This didn't take long, I'm happy to report, just few days to reach a whole US dollar or 50 pence as we like to call it.

Funk had 57,525 visits and 252,435 page impressions in June 2007, using 16GB bandwidth.

Save The Planet: 1987 - 2007

I have to admit to being a little bit cynical about Live Earth. Global warming is at best a misnomer, at worst, a false doctrine. For starters, climate change is probably caused by sun spot activity, which is reaching a 1,000 year high; and anyway, it's rampant industrialisation, pollution, human over-population and mass species extinction which are the real dangers facing life on earth.

I wasn't always so jaded. My very first single, twenty years ago, raised money for Greenpeace and the Women's Environmental Network, and it was called, Save The Planet. Save some for me, will you?

George Melly RIP

Goodbye George. Still don't know quite what you died of, but whatever it was, enjoy Valhallah, which with your surrealist tendencies should be a more colourful place.

My Heritage

Facial Comparisons courtesy of http://www.myheritage.com

New Frontiers In Blogging

The BBC website gives me hours of pleasure. Today I found an article entitled, "New frontiers in journalism" which was about using social media. I'm not certain that my rather cynical comment will be appearing any time soon though:

"YouTube, Flickr, Del.icio.us and Twitter." Why stop there? And, why choose these four? Why not, Digg (which is much more directly related to news - although people might not vote you to the front page), Facebook, MySpace and Slashdot, to name but four more ?

These "social media" sites attract (and are the venue for) many different, only slightly overlapping groups; by choosing the few you mention, and not using others, you are weighting your internet content towards certain constituencies and away from others equally valid.

Admit it: your choice of networks is not made just on popularity, is it? You've gone for YouTube fair enough because the BBC have a deal with them, but the others all tend to be favoured by the new media "Twitterati" currently in broadcast jobs.

Until news media actually engages with the great internet unwashed on their own terms, it's just playing at internet for the sake of appearing relevant, IMHO.

PodCamp Europe

The PodCamp / BarCamp phenomenon is a grassroots movement which is dedicated to the concept of Unconferences - i.e. they are free to attend and you don't have to remain in any seminar / conversation which you find pointless or boring.

Since this is exactly what I always wished school was like, I am attending PodCamp Europe, June 12th - 13th in Stockholm, Sweden and offering a session on Creativity. Because I am demonstrating creativity, not merely explaining, I keep on changing the name of the session. It will be interesting seeing who turns up and what they expect.

PodCampUK arrives September 1st.

Assimilated? You Decide...

Let Me Entertain Me
Video sent by deanwhitbread

Steady, AIM, Fire!

A good news day.

Back in 2006 when we started the UK Podcasters Association, we asked all the people who joined what we should be doing, and sorting out podcast music licensing was top of the list. I'm really pleased the music industry is starting to recognise the role podcasting plays in supporting and championing music.

Funk Publishing: Art, Music, Words

Funk Publishing: we set this up a month or two ago.

Gregarius is a nice way of combining the feeds of all the different creative projects I'm working on, including collaborations and work for clients.

My current favourites are the Anglo-Irish podcast and deekdeekster.com which afford me a lot of enjoyment and maximum editorial freedom.

Podcast User Magazine Has A Competitor

The podcast magazine space has just changed with the advent of Blogger and Podcaster magazine.

The much-employed aphorism about imitation being flattery is fairly easy to employ, with much similarity to existing and well-established online podcasting publication Podcast User Magazine clearly evident - but B&P could be flattering to deceive. The first issue isn't bad, and it can definitely improve.

This new kid on the block looks like it's doing a few things PUM aren't, including having a sharp eye on revenue. They seem to be well organised, spending money and selling themselves as the first professional podcast magazine. They are also offering in multiple formats, and it could be said that this throws a gauntlet down to PUM, which has remained staunchly written-not-spoken since launch.

All of which leads me to take a long hard look at this unique, podcaster-centred project. Despite a good-sized audience, a developed sense of self, and a brand both smart and obvious, PUM is still not widely recognised outside of podcasting. PUM has not been marketed aggressively since it's birth, and this is no criticism. It can easily be argued that this relaxed, semi-commercial, blog-based, collegiate attitude is the online magazine's charm, and the team of intelligent, enthusiastic practitioner-contributor podcaster-writers a major reason for it's widespread appeal among podcast afficionados, producers, viewers and listeners.

More seriously, although the magazine carries regular, high quality, niche content, PUM has not been anywhere near monetized to it's potential, and despite a lot of drumming up advertising revenue, no inroads have yet been made into lucrative pastures such as Real Life publishing syndication, which surely holds the promise of greater reward to the writers and editors for their thousands of hours of unpaid work.

Can Bloggers and Podcasters keep the content coming? If they can, then they will inevitably grow their readership. Is this likely to impact upon PUM's ever-increasing readership? Probably, and possibly that won't be negative. There are many more potential readers out there than are currently reached by PUM's marketing, and some of these will be alerted by B&P's launch.

But until the recent launch of B&P, having seen off early opposition, PUM had no serious competitors. Will another podcast magazine crowd PUM and make it difficult for them to achieve wider visibility and cross over into mainstream media? This is more threatening to the ultimate scale of the success of PUM, if not to the magazine's continued existence. They are unlikely to lose their currently loyal readership, but as new people come into podcasting, without increasing promotion and adopting more aggressive marketing, they could lose their position as the main contender for the podcast consumer / industry crown.

PUM's recently reorganised management will now have to look soberly and hard at this new publication as it attempts to differentiate itself and sell itself to businesses, the professional end of the scene.

PUM may be the current "market leader" but their respectable online success does not guarantee it a place in the future. There is competition, and it will be fascinating to see how this shapes the new PUM.

Probably The Least Frequent Podcast In The World

I am referring of course to the UKPA podcast, which is designed to bring members of the UK national organisation for podcasters closer to the action. Recently I've been doing a lot of standing up and talking about podcasting among other media professionals, and although sometimes it can be scary (for them) most of the time, I've received a warm and interested welcome.

The UKPA podcast feed is here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/UKPAPodcast



The Official Radio Academy podcast is here.

UGC, BBC, 23

I've been speaking on UGC. When I was at art school, we called this engagement. Is the work complete without it's audience's response?

I'll compost your corpse - Number 23.

Dublin

Or treblin', even.

Off to see Brian Greene tomorrow in Dublin. Aside from the appallingly early start, I'm really looking forward to it - haven't been there since 2004.

Old Planet Earth

It was inevitable I suppose. At some point, YouTube would make it's presence felt in this humble blog. I've been waiting 70 million years or so for this.

Reviewed By A USAer

The video I made for Feedburner was kindly reviewed by John C. Havens:

One of my recent faves is Episode #10, "Creativity in Podcasting" which is a videocast by UKer Dean Whitbread. Watching other people wax philosophical about the podcast medium (especially when they have cool accents) is a lot of fun and helpful to see that it's caught on in other countries.

I've never been called a UKer before.

Metropolis Gloria Cycles Podcast

Pleased to report in the finale of the enhanced podcast I recently produced for the Metropolis Studio Group to promote their online mastering (iMastering) service, that up-and-coming Brighton band Gloria Cycles are signing a record deal.

Gloria Cycles play the Dublin Castle, Camden, this coming Feb 17th 2007.

International Podcast Group

Formed an umbrella organisation for podcast groups.

Moved To Blog

Finally managed to move some of my blogs over to the New Googlified Blogger. I'm just too prolific, it seems - too many posts and comments - so I've not been able to do it until now.

A BBC Christmas

Here's my contribution to Radio 5's festive frolics.

Prayer

I'm not the most religious person in the world, but today I was inspired to pray. According to Muslim tradition, Prophet Mohammed said that a single prayer in Jerusalem is worth 1,000 anywhere else.

Bargain!

Looking forward to 2007.

Adventures East

Decided to make a travel podcast about my trip to the middle east.

Like Five this will be an experiment, since I've not podcast on the move before, although I have photoblogged from Norway.

Growing Up And Being British: My Two Pence

Chris Vallance at the BBC covering the changes in UK podcasting.

Creativity In Podcasting Video

Creativity in Podcasting

Made this video - "Creativity In Podcasting" - for the FeedBurner podcast. Great to do some work for a company which is universally liked.

PODCAST CULTURE - MADE BY PODCASTERS

This is taken from the text of the presentation I made at the AOP Conference, Oct 4th 2006, now "printed" in Podcast User Magazine.

With newspapers using podcasting to occupy broadcast territory and seizing their chance to use the internet to reverse their falling readership and declining advertising revenue, and with broadcasters following the internet example set by the BBC, moving ever more confidently into on-demand content, there is a growing interest from the commercial sector in podcasting; but while Ricky Gervais, Baddeil and Skinner, Chris Moyle may (or may not!) be the household names which the general British public associates with podcasts, there exists a distinctive and established podcast culture out there, which stands out markedly from traditional offerings.

Typically low-budget, relatively low-tech, podcast content is sometimes derided as shoddy, said to inhabit geek niches, and to be entirely irrelevant to your average viewer or listener, but this is far from the truth.

Most podcasts, in fact, are made by untrained people, speaking in their own voices, without editorial interference, and although they may not appear in the iTunes top ten, these non-commercial podcasts make up the vast majority of podcast culture.

Podcast producers tend to operate locally, and they work comfortably within content niches, from situations that television and radio cannot reach. But that being said, a lot of podcasts conform to normal program-making rules, and generally production standards are high, especially in the UK.

The widespread appeal of this home-produce is precisely that it is by and large stripped of the excess packaging and mindless repetition that weighs down television and radio and offers non-standardised content, uncensored views and unique perspectives... and because it's being self-produced and largely un-edited, it often has a freshness and a naturalness that is missing from corporately derived content.

We first saw the attraction of this sort of content in Britain in the successful and influential BBC series, Video Nation, born in 1993, where people were given support to make their own short videos.

Video Nation came from a Community Programmes initiative and distributed cameras in homes across Britain for filming everyday lives. The Guardian said of the first series,

"The immediacy of these programmes is entirely different to anything shot by a crew. There seems to be nothing between you, not even the glass..."

This immediacy came as a blast of fresh air, and it has been a significant driver of audio-visual culture since that time. The result was many awards and a format that was extended and widely copied.

Podcasting is full of the kind of home-produced priceless gems that Video Nation gave us, and its appeal is precisely that it often gives us a more real version of reality than TV or radio can offer.

As J.G. Ballard said,

"There's been a huge surge in popularity of so-called Reality TV shows. I think this reflects a tremendous hunger among people for "reality" - for ordinary reality. IT'S VERY DIFFICULT TO FIND THE 'REAL' because the environment is totally manufactured. Even one's own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentation techniques... we're living inside commercials. I think people realise this, and they're desperate for reality..." *

I think it is no accident that this upsurge in dis-intermediated culture - where the middleman of broadcaster or publisher has been removed - comes at a time when tabloid-driven reality TV is becoming stylised, garish and spiteful in order to maintain its audience.

UK PODCASTER COMMUNITY

Most of the 250 or so independent UK podcasters consider themselves program makers. Yet, among podcasters as much as podcast users, there is a recognition across the board that podcast culture, as made by podcasters, is quite different from podcasts which are merely extensions of conventional broadcast or publishing into the medium. Repurposed TV or radio programs are especially deemed not to be REAL podcasts, and music programs with the music removed are a prime example of mainstream media insanity, as far as they are concerned. This generalisation represents a fairly typical attitude, but it is an attitude that stems from knowledge about the breadth, depth and variety of podcasting, rather than from ignorance.

Podcasting is less than two years old, and among the early adopters, there is a certain amount of peer pressure; but this pressure is mainly non-conformist - in other words, the desire is to remain original and not to ape the out-dated structures of the old media, which are seen by the most passionate proponents of the new medium to have practically exhausted themselves and to be blindly stuck in a self-serving, dead-end loop.

So, morale among podcasters is high, and there is a lot of insight by practitioners about their practice. Nonetheless, podcasters do aspire to achieve the audiences that traditional media enjoy, and this effectively creates an environment of competitive invention and generally drives standards higher.

Conrad Slater is a video podcaster, from Spainful Films, who has produced many hours of character-based scripted comedy; this is part of Conrad's response in a forum to a certain hard-working podcaster who started to adopt some traditional radio formats for his show in his search for a bigger audience, a move that attracted a certain amount of derision in the podcast community. Conrad explained the psychology and went on to illuminate the appeal of the alternative approach:

"What has made podcasting so popular has been honesty. Honesty often at the expense of ego which challenges all previous media that has gone before it; the packaged and prepared DJ radio voice, the hidden agendas and political bias of news media, and an otherwise marketing driven corporate sponsored popular culture.

With no financial incentive but driven by a desire simply to communicate honestly, podcasters, at their best have created compelling content that at times successfully showcased a genuine indifference to personal validation or success and instead have been honest, human personal records chronically (sic) ones self at any given time.

And it is these shows that I personally like as do many other listeners."

Most podcasters are not frustrated just because they don't have a radio or television transmitter, since podcast audiences are growing fast. And in fact, several UKPA podcasters simultaneously make content for broadcast.

Founder-member "Podcast" Paul Nicholls will this month podcast for the BBC from Swaziland, Markettiers4DC makes brand-sponsored podcasts (for example, for Vodafone) alongside conventional radio and TV. In 2006, my own work with John Cleese led to my company Funk, producing content destined for radio and television and using podcasting to get it there.

So we are entering the phase where as traditional industries start to use podcasting, podcast culture as made by podcasters starts to feed back into and change these industries.

TECHNOLOGY & CONTENT

The new podcast industry is vibrant and energetic. There are over 60,000 podcasts out there, and there is a podcast audience population of many millions worldwide. New businesses are being built up on the basis of podcast activity - Podbridge, PodTrac, Kiptronic, Feedburner - all with their sights set on capturing the advertising revenue from podcasts. Venture capitalists are providing millions to fuel the commercialisation of podcasting - Adam Curry's PodShow announced recently that it's just received another 15 million dollars.

Feedburner.com: 68,465 podcasts including feeds with video reaching 5,105,602 aggregate subscribers (as of 9/26/06) - and that's an estimate based on just one of several widely used services.

But this commercial drive stems from a real internet phenomenon - the social web, of which podcasting is a major strand - and it's all based on the unpaid activities of many thousands of enthusiasts who are putting out thousands of hours a week of programming, innovating with formats and technology and constructing new business models as they significantly develop this new industry.

The UK is at the hub of global podcasting. There is a lot of grassroots energy in this country, and there are several hives of community activity which attract the more gregarious podcasters, with regular meet-ups being organised across the country. This helps to create a self-informed, technology-, business- and culture-savvy community that directly affects podcasting, and it is influencing its current shape and future direction.

The relatively easy availability of high-quality audio and video hardware combined with decently powerful personal computers and broadband is also fuelling this particular boom, and converging media standards across platforms makes interoperability the norm.

It would be entirely wrong to suggest that there isn't a lot of technical innovation going on in podcasting, containing as it does endless variations of format, including enhanced podcasts, mobile podcasting, gaming, dating and so forth.

But it is because it uses RSS, the innovation that also powers blogs, that podcasting is changing society, by affecting personal content usage and by providing new options for personal content production, especially in the area of group collaborations.

RSS is essentially used by podcasters as an effective, low-cost means of international distribution; but it also fundamentally changes the one-to-many publishing / broadcast paradigm that we are all used to, because it is such a simple technology that it enables a whole new way of participating in culture.

RSS was identified by Tim O'Reilly in 2005 as a key component of Web 2.0, and Tim makes the point that this is not just a technical change but also offers a new business model. He says,

The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls "we, the media," a world in which "the former audience", not a few people in a back room, decides what's important.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=1

Brian Greene, from Doop Design, founder of PodRepBod, the Irish equivalent to UKPA, says:

"As a podcaster with a decent-sized audience, people do ask me, how many people listen to my podcast. But it's not about how many people listen to my podcast; it's about how many podcasts I can listen to..."

This understanding really does show up the difference between podcasters who perceive the medium holistically and podcasters who think it is just another branch of their particular industry. As a podcaster, you are not operating in a vacuum; you are not apart from your audience; you are in the middle of, and adding to, an ongoing many-threaded conversation.

Podcasting, powered by RSS, evolves content production into a many-to-many, dialogue / commentary / community-based paradigm, where the producer is also a consumer, and we can see this working in the way podcasters cooperate, aggregate and combine their feeds.

For example, the Britcaster site is a website which does two things: it combines feeds from a group of UK podcasters into one, and it provides a podcast community forum.

The benefits are that the podcast audiences grow as people subscribe to the combined feed and find new programs they like. In the forum, podcasters share skills, give production and technical tips, solve problems, argue pros and cons, and alert one another to pitfalls and scams. Britcaster has also been the place where several new social and business organisations have found form, including the UKPA and the annual PodCastCon.

So, this kind of collective podcasting allows an organic sharing of experience, and it provides a straightforward way to combine multiple intelligences; and this creates a hothouse for development very effectively. Good ideas are born and flourish, bad ideas shot to pieces and dropped. RSS allows national and international enterprises to be enabled overnight and cuts the development curve of a new idea down from months to weeks, or even days.

UKPA - BEST OF BRITISH PODCASTING

Whether they produce their shows commercially or privately, most podcasters tend not to employ excessive production tricks, clever editing or special effects, but instead rely on original turns of phrase, quirky accents, insight, ambient noise and genuine passion to make their shows authentic and compelling.

And this approach seems to work. UK podcasters punch far above their weight in terms of audience numbers - podcasting is something we Brits seem to be very good at.

Within the UKPA, we are involved in every aspect of podcast creation and production, including audio, video, film-making, live performance, citizen journalism, websites of every flavour, search, hosting and traditional format magazines.

Within that astonishingly broad range of production activities, topics vary from comedy to cold-calling, photography to football, poetry to pornography, technology to travel, knitting to nightlife. And of course, there's a huge amount of music - artists, labels, managers, promoters and retailers, all selling music via podcasting, the vast majority using legitimately licensed material outside the mainstream.

SUMMARY

Everybody I meet who is involved in media has a different take on podcasting. I've heard it described as radio, publishing, web tv, journalism... usually by people working in these established industries, but in reality, it's none of these.

Given that podcasting is following the blogging pattern, using the same technology, and looking at the huge success of sites that allow the easy sharing of user-generated content, such as YouTube and MySpace, and the coming of sites such as BT PodShow to the UK, we can see that podcasting is likely to affect in a major way broadcast media in the very near future. But alongside the obvious changes, something much more subtle and far-reaching will be happening.

If blogging is about the collective mind, the chattering echo chamber, moderated and filtered by collective intelligence, then podcasting is about the collective voice.

Podcasters make content for each other as much as for you out there; and the distance from the outside to the inside is growing ever smaller.

Andy Warhol's famous quote, "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" came true - he was talking about the cult of celebrity, the victory of the superficial, the "homogenised self-imitating landscape of programs where nothing new ever really appears."

But now, to quote JG Ballard once again, our modern-day HG Wells, with the public starting to despair, switch off, and look for alternatives, Ballard's future prediction seems much more relevant:

"In the future, everyone will be living inside their own TV studio." *

Podcasting will be a key part of this; and now that podcasting is on school curriculae, we can expect to see further uptake and more daring and diverse uses of podcasting than we have so far dreamed.

* JG Ballard - Conversations - ReSearch Publications http://www.researchpubs.com/features/jgbqu.php

In The City (If I Can Get There)

I'm on a panel called "Podbashing - A New British Sport" this Sunday at the annual music industry shindig. Oh, how I am looking forward to the journey (inject note of irony).

The tube network which should take me to Euston is down; the train network which should take me to Manchester is down as far as Milton Keynes. So I'll be getting up at 6.30am to catch a bus, to catch a bus, to catch a train, to get a cab, which hopefully will get me to the Midland Hotel for 1pm in time for the panel at 1.30pm.

Joy.

AOP Podcast

I've broken out, but not into a sweat, you'll be glad to hear. In the past very interesting few days, I've contributed to three podcasts:

The UKPA Podcast

The AOP Podcast

and

The Podcast of Pointless Singing.

I know which one makes me laugh the most (sorry, Celine!)

Looking Forward To Breaking Out

For my sins, I am going to break out into an afternoon session at the upcoming AOP Conference on October 4th:

Delegates will break out in to parallel afternoon sessions:

Innovation showcase part 1:

A series of case studies showcasing the latest technologies and trends publishers can take advantage of to build revenue and maintain cut-through in the new digital economy.
Dean Whitbread, chairman
UK Podcasters Association

Sture Udd, managing director
UpCode Limited
Willem Endhoven, new business development manager
iRex Technologies

Lagowski Gig, Innit

My old chum Andrew Lagowski is doing interesting audio things with Paul Wilson, and Baz G Nichols in a piece called Hyperlanguage Live Installation on September 16th 2006.

Netaudio 06, Angel, North London.

Cognitive ecology, innit.

New Mac

I bought a new mac with the coolest screen...

England Cushion

UK Retailers report sales of England-branded tat up 20%...

Goodbyeeee Iain Dowieeeee

Time to say farewell to my favourite of Crystal Palace's managers of the past ten years, Iain Dowie, who did wonders for the players' morale and fitness, and gave a brief burst of Premiership glory. At least the split wasn't mid-season leaving the team adrift. Still, it will be hard to hold onto the better players now, and I'd be surprised to see Andy Johnson still at the club this September.

What Future For Podcasting?

My personal situation is a good illustration of the complexities of podcasting.

1. I am a long standing MCPS and PRS member
2. I own my own label
3. I own my own publishing company
4. I write and perform my own music.

Despite all these facts, as it currently stands, strictly speaking, according to the Music Alliance, I am expected to pay their license fee for podcasting my own music. When I said to them "Only notified works" they replied "All works by members are covered".

In practise, they would have a devil of a time enforcing this, but quite seriously, this is their position, stated to me on the phone last month.

Re: Podsafe music. In a word - it's unsafe. The Podsafe concept can only continue to exist in a consistently minor way, which means that as a band succeeds, they move out of bounds so podcasters following this path will be forever condemned to dwell in the margins. The reason for this is that the existing collection agencies (Music Alliance and it's global affiliates) operate a practical monopoly between them. Ergo, to collect money from radio and tv and pubs and hairdressers, you must join. But, I don't want to be later penalised for having played my valuable part in promoting artists and helping to achieve their success by having this repertoire removed from my programs - it's totally unfair.

My understanding is that even podcasts dated from a "podsafe" era will possibly not remain podsafe and protected at the point the band moves into the mainstream and accepts the restrictions attached to the collection of royalties by the MA agencies. I know this seems incredible, but retrospective changes to licenses can and probably will be applied. Even the best kept records won't be of any use, should some stroppy record company decide to exercise it's rights on somebody's back catalogue. Yes, you can fight them, but it will be a very expensive battle, and you are not guaranteed to win it. In UK Law, everything in intellectual property can be bought and sold.

If I release music into the mainstream, I can only collect my royalties through the MA. This is fair enough - they do a decent job, they pay themselves around 2% for doing it. However, I also want the right to issue licenses as I see fit, to use Creative Commons if I want, to invent any kind of license for myself in the manner of my own choosing, and for that to be binding and respected and legal, so long as it breaks no laws. And we might yet find that the MA are amenable to this - but the WIPO are busy undermining Creative Commons with the new Broadcast Treaty, and a new EU Directive threatens to make copyright infringements subject to criminal instead of civil law, so there are more unjust and potentially podcast-lethal restrictions brewing internationally that we should be aware of and lobbying to change.

And why are people accepting this artificial distinction between "safe" and "unsafe" anyway? I am a writer, not a DJ. I want to be able to play (as I am doing) breaking artists alongside established ones, for reasons of contrast and review. If I like an new or unknown artist, I want to be able to play their music alongside the greats, to show that they deserve the same recognition. I reject outright any system that prevents me doing this.

Re: podcasting licensed music. I want to make commercial podcasts which use the same repertoire as radio and tv; I want to pay a fair fee for this. But I will not accept any artistic or creative restrictions in my usage, and this includes my right to quote, mix, make parodies, mashup, collage, and generally mess about creatively with music. Why? Because it is a perfectly legitimate form of creative expression, enjoyed by fine artists, classical composers, street DJs, broadcasters, film-makers, my 13 year old nephew, and creative people everywhere on the planet. Without it, culture is stultified, and music, art, film, doesn't move on.

I refer the reader to the famous case of Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes. http://www.artquest.org.uk/artlaw/copyright/dearimages.htm

Permutations of existing forms are crucial to cultural enrichment, and making pirates out of honest artists has a long history of failure. So, it's to be hoped that dialogue between podcasters, legislators and royalty collectors finds the balance necessary to allow experimentation and innovation in this new cultural space.

Gutted And Chuffed

Not surprised, but unhappy at the beating Watford dished out to Palace at the weekend. I wouldn't bet on my team to go up this year - and before the 3-0 defeat I did tip Watford to those who would listen.

Chuffed though that Sven has included Andy Johnson in his stand-by list, a place he thoroughly deserves.

Provisional squad:

Robinson (Tottenham), James (Manchester City), Green (Norwich); G Neville (Manchester United), Ferdinand (Manchester United), Terry (Chelsea), Cole (Arsenal), Campbell (Arsenal), Carragher (Liverpool), Bridge (Chelsea), Beckham (Real Madrid), Carrick (Tottenham), Lampard (Chelsea), Gerrard (Liverpool), Hargreaves (Bayern Munich), Jenas (Tottenham), Downing (Middlesbrough), J Cole (Chelsea), Lennon (Tottenham), Rooney (Manchester United), Owen (Newcastle), Crouch (Liverpool), Walcott (Arsenal).

Standby:

Carson (Liverpool), Young (Charlton), Reo-Coker (West Ham), Defoe (Tottenham), Johnson (Crystal Palace).

Two Organisations Merge, One Forms

Just as I help set up one organisation, two of which I am a member are merging...

PAMRA  Notes 4.5.2006

OFT Clears Merger

The Office of Fair Trading has, in their announcement of 2 May 2006, given the green light to a merger between PAMRA, AURA and PPL, following their  joint submission as reported in our newsletter of 28 February 2006. The full text of the decision had not been made public at the time of writing but is expected to be posted to the OFT's website within the next day or so, at the following location:

http://www.oft.gov.uk/Business/Mergers+EA02/Decisions/Clearances+and+referrals/AURA.htm


Membership to Vote

PAMRA will inform the membership about the next constitutional steps in due course, which are likely to include the calling of an EGM where members will be invited to vote on resolutions concerning PAMRA's future. Final details are still to be confirmed and written notice will be given to PAMRA members in accordance with the Association's Memorandum and Articles.


Business as Usual

For the present it's business as usual at PAMRA and members should not experience any disruption to the service they receive. Any further information and significant developments will be announced by email newsletter and posted to our website.

21st Century Creativity in Second Life

Nic Suzor organised a really interesting seminar entitled "21st Century Creativity in a Copyright World: How Can the Potential be Realised?" and I was very pleased to be invited by my old friend Professor Mark Perry to add my contribution. I was the sole UK person in this international forum of rights expertise. Fascinating stuff and well worth getting up at 4.45am. That's me with the blue spiky hair.

Listen to the MP3 file here (40MB)

Here is Axel Brun's blog about the event.

Come On, Jordan, If You Think You're Hard Enough

Hilariously bad-tempered Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan slags off practically everyone in this BBC interview but his heart at least is firmly in South London:

I've been in football for six years, I find it ultimately to be a disingenuous and dishonest game.

I'm certainly not in it for the money. If we are promoted it will cost £5m before we start in players' bonuses. Even if we make it to the play-offs and get no further, it will cost me personally £200,000.

I'll get out when I've stabilised Palace in the Premiership, in a new stadium and when somebody comes along who can take it further.

But there's never going to be a queue for that.

Premiership stability? New stadium? Dreams, glorious, foolish dreams... the stuff that hope is made of.

My Space

I already blog, podcast and just plain write. I don't have lots of time to spare. Plus, MySpace = too many annoying ads, owned by Rupert Murdoch, chock full of Americans... so many reasons not to bother, but, in the end, it was the audio delights of WakeIUp and my old chum Ashley Slater who convinced me to follow ten zillion people into this cosy but highly dynamic world of instant frenz....

Country Cliff and the Cans: Chimbley Wind

I'm having a proud, March moon moment. My new release. Country Cliff and the Cans: Chimbley Wind. Buy it now from Funk Warehouse.

It's a download only at the moment - I'll make it a mail order CD once I've uploaded some more files. But you can hear it in glorious lo fi using the flash audio player we've installed.

Ambient Chav

I want to recommend three excellent albums, two of them on the ambient chav tip: Tracey Eno's excellent "Music for Argos" and Sharon Budd's "The Pill" and "A Basket of Chicken".

Also, "Hard Buddha" by The Zen Nutters - it's on the futuristic East End barrow boy two-fisted enlightenment-or-death tip.

Bill Hicks

Bill Hicks, satirist and greatest dead comedian of modern times, died on this day, 1994.

May he rust in pieces.

Eighteen Days To Save...

... for my 44th birthday present!

Meanwhile here's a good link for bloggers - the EFF blogging page.

Moral Rights For Performers

I've been going through the immense pile of magazines and flyers from 2005 prior to recycling. Found this interesting article by John Smith, the Musician's Union Gen. Sec., about upcoming EU legislation which directly affects performers. Seems the UK Government is typically complicating this very straightforward issue and placing obstacles between creators and the exercise of their "inalienable" rights.

Music Revenue: My Share

I have been waxing lyrical at the BBC about the amount musicians and composers don't make and the amount record companies still take, even in this age of digital downloads devoid of packaging.



In fact I wrote more, most of it expertly snaffled (for political reasons) from the MCPS-PRS Alliance magazine, M. I particularly like David Stopps article - I'd like to get to know him, though I am not yet sure quite how well... <--- obscure Howard Jones reference

Here's the full text of my BBC comment:

"The creators of the music upon which this industry is based are very poorly treated with regard to revenue share, and it is getting worse.

The advent of digital downloads presents an opportunity to redress this erosion of revenue for the creators of music, but in fact, the largest, Apple with an 80%+ share of the market, have maintained the inequity on behalf of the record companies.

Apple's iTunes site was forced to remove the claim that it was 'fairer to artists' from its website.

There is a history to this steady reduction in payment to the actual originators of the music which the entire industry relies upon. When the CD was introduced, the record companies decided that it was a new technology and that packaging deductions should increase to 25% of Published Price to dealer and that the artist's royalty rate should be cut to 75% of that for vinyl and cassettes. After all, record companies had to pay development and introductions costs. 20 years later most contracts ensure that these rates are still in place - and yet, digital dowloads do not have packaging!

Writers/performers only get 9% of CD sales and currently receive even less from downloads, typically around 8%. Record company share of download revenue increases to 68% as opposed to 46% share of revenue from a CD.

Future royalty earnings will HALVE if action being taken at the UK Copyright Tribunal by the British Phonographic Industry and a consortium of Digital Service Providers and Mobile Network Operators is successful. They propose further reducing the amount the creator receives to 4% or less. In real terms, this delivers only 2-3p per download in contrast to for e.g. the credit card company which gets average 6-7p per download, or 9%.

What share of revenue do the panel think the creators of music should receive?"

Some reading for you:
MCPS-PRS v BPI
David Stopps on music revenue

And finally, here's Richard Thompson on songwriting from a nice interview in the Musician's Union mag. I found myself going mmm... yes... indeed...

Richard Thompson

Deekster Publishes Ozzie

My old friend Deek has published a book at Lulu.com



Meanwhile I have got myself an internet hit. The audio linked from my blog profile got 1502 hits last month, and 499 already this month! It's a song called Ozone.

Nood Concert MP3

160kbps, 91Mb (1 hr, 20 min), funky net sound.

"Some great harmonica in there towards the end :), and bass of course and a harmonica picture of you as well on the c6 sold-out site

Pepe"

It was great fun to play this gig with three of my favourite artists, Per, Ulf and Amanda.

Nood Sell Out

Taking part in this event tonight - playing bass.

John Cleese Podcast

Producing a series of podcasts with John Cleese.

Nih!

I Have Been Waiting Eighteen Years For This

Celebrating a summer-long sporting contest, the final match of five days that ended in a draw, giving England victory over the mighty Australians in the series, I have experienced rare contentment.

Next?

Not Here

Just a quick post to say I am not walking around or complaining about things (in a creative way) as per normal. I am elsewhere.

Still Here

Just a quick post to say I am still walking around and complaining about things (in a creative way) as per normal.

Old Comfort

Found this proof of my art existence in 1983.

New Wallpaper

After Crystal Palace's 8 minutes of doom last weekend, I needed to cheer myself up. Thanks to spring rain, this is my new wallpaper on my mobile phone.

Knife Edge

Ref: H Webb
Att: 26066

Crystal Palace Beat Liverpool 1-0

"The win - Palace's first since 26 February - was no less than the Eagles deserved for a tenacious, committed performance from the first whistle." - 26th February, notice...

Done Thinking

I wrote a poem about politics - it just didn't seem to fit my main poetry section. So for some reason including that one, I have started a new blog here, in honour of Colin Short.

Philippe and Moritz came the weekend before last weekend from Switzerland, and they were Swiss.

Things Continue to Switzerland

It could be the start of a long hot summer.

St Margaret of Antioch

The two Tsunami Benefit Gigs I took part in January raised 5k between them, which pleased me. The money will get quickly to the stricken areas, as it's not going through DEC.

I just discovered this image from my childhood, a stained glass window by Francis Stephen, 1968, in St Margaret of Antioch Church, Upper Norwood. I used to sing in the choir there and play the organ. Fnaar.

BENEFIT GIG FRIDAY 7th Jan 2005

BENEFIT GIG FRIDAY 7th Jan 2005

Friday 7th January at The Infinity Club, 10 Old Burlington Street, Mayfair, W1S 3AG. Nearest Tube Picadilly Circus. Full Details to be Announced Here. 8pm until 4am.

Proud

It's worth the pain, sometimes.

Andy, you goal-hungry footballing genius.

Compliments of the Poisson

Here is my Christmas list.

Blog Reunites Old Chums Shock

I am delighted to say that the Tag Board has helped me find Iain my old friend from school who I have not seen in a decade.

Merriam-Webster definition: BLOG noun [short for Weblog] (1999): a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer

ISP Deleted Our Website !

Exactly what happened: the server died and they could only get a back up from November 22nd. This means we now have to go through all the work we have done the past 3 weeks and re-upload everything. How very boring.

Today was improved by Iain Graham who posted a hello to the Tag Board (right hand column). I have not seen him in many years, and I am really chuffed.

So Busy It Hurts

It doesn't hurt that much really. But I have been pretty busy.

The FUNK stuff is starting to get results:



Click the picture for more detail.

I decided to finish a track I'm writing using G major, E minor and D major to be the 4th track on my four track CD. Which I will probably get to finish while everyone else goes mad with exhaustion this Christmas.

Wicklow Tour

Back from Wicklow. It was great fun.

Philippe & Moritz

Glad that these two cool Swiss guys are up for writing and producing with Mark and myself. It will be an interesting collaboration I am sure.

For it is written,
Blessed be the Funky.
And the less Funky,
They shall also be Blessed.
Just less Funky.

Audience on the Turn

The gig at the 100 Club was a great success. Dan Britain said, "When you came on, they were an audience on the turn.. but you managed to turn them other way!"

Thanks to Chas, Dave and the very nice drummer who let Jake use his kit.

Alien Tone Video

At last... one of the funniest short videos I've seen in a long time is online at www.alientone.com and I can sleep again... Directed (and Post-Production Visual Effects) by Mark Crook, Sound Design by Dan Powell, Produced and Edited by Dean Whitbread. Yawn... zzzz etc.

Commercials

Finally sorted out a "work" blog - by which I mean the work I do for other people, with other people.

I'm A Moth

Mark has come to London to rehearse for Friday, bringing this joke: A man goes into a dentists, and keeps running in circles, flapping his arms. The dentist says, excuse me, what are you doing ? The man says, I'm a moth, I'm a moth. The dentist says, but this is a dental surgery. The man keeps on running in circles, flapping his arms, saying, I'm a moth, I'm a moth. The dentist says, do you have any problems with your teeth ? I'm a moth, I'm a moth, says the man. The dentist says, then why are you here ? The man replies, you left your light on... It's Full Moon Fever.

100 Club Gig Sold Out

Sold Out indeed. Once people heard that the Cheeky Cockernee Geezahs we're back in Taan, they snapped up the last remaining tickets. Also, Chas and Dave are playing... We have written a song in tribute called, The Hare. Very middle class, very Keats, very Vaughan Williams.

Creative Commons & Feedburner

Have decided to publish some of my art, music writing and videos under the Creative Commons License, which provides a legal basis for the kind of sharing that goes on web-wide whilst retaining whatever creative rights we want to keep as artists. Cool as fuck IMHO.

Also sorted out the site feed using Atom (Blogger) and Feedburner.

Works great, except one item on the poetry feed displays perfectly as HTML but buggers up on the XML. Something to do with BR's. Have to come back to that.

Poems

I created a new section for this site and started publishing some of my poems. Mostly recent, mostly about aspects of London life. Published in no particular order.

Revised Release Date for CD

The video is taking longer to edit than we hoped (they always do don't they?) so I've decided to push the release date back to November 1st (which may turn out to be November 1st 2005...) it's nice when the company agrees such matters with the artist so easily !

Co-Writing with Andy Carroll and Mark Crook

Working on a wonderful song which has been inspired by some music loops and chords Andy gave us.. it sounds like a soulful hybrid between Blue Nile and Royksopp to me.. but what do I know ?

New Videos

I made a new 30 sec short called "Mirror". I have no idea where this one came from. I dedicated it the the Russian filmaker Andrei Tarkovksy.

Also went down to Sussex with Mark Crook and shot "Alien Tone", a 'viral' ad, starring James Boston and Rohini Drury, now in post-production. It was a fun (if dark and cold) night.





Some snaps here.

International Talk Like A Pirate Day

Shiver me timbers !! Why, 'tis a marvellous idea !

BBC News Feed

Check out the bottom right of the page...

4 TRACKS AVAILABLE ON CD OCTOBER 1ST 2006

These will be: Figure Skating, Why Deny, Life's Many Colours and The Dawn, co-produced with Mark Crook

Contact

I am building an email database to let people know where and when we are playing next. While I set up nice webforms, email me if you are interested.

New Tracks

I am re-recording The Dawn and Life's Many Colours and rehearsing with Jake Carter (drums) Mark Crook (keyboards and guitar) and Sjur Opsal (bass) for the 100 Club gig.


I will post these here as MP3 files prior to release.

Vinegar

New band Vinegar: previewing new material. October 1st, 100 Club, Oxford Street. Details coming soon.

Backstreet backbeat

Today was characterised by much drum editing and post-production after recording Jake in Backstreet Studios, Holloway Road, using a nice Roland digital multitrack, six microphones and lots of perseverance. Jake surpassed himself, drumming 5 tracks (3 or 4 takes each) in 8 hours, which is very good going by any stretch of the imagination.

Claire Smith

Yesterday was my second session with Claire Smith, a promising songwriter with a very good voice. She manages to sound soulful without any of the artifice and olympian vocal gymnastics that bedevil modern "soul" music and has a freshness about her melodic writing which is infectious.

I'm looking forward to adding bass, strings and a gentle backbeat to her new song and I predict that if she perseveres and grabs her cubic centimetre of chance when it comes along, she'll do very well.

Nazi Coca-Cola Ad Exhibition

Last night attended the Nazi Coca-Cola Ad Exhibition at the Foundry, Old Street, London, which features several of our images. Mark Crook did a great job - the picture of Hitler driving the Coke Truck went down a storm with Mark Thomas. Sadly for Mr T, he supports Wimbledon AFC, but he was man enough to shake my hand and congratulate me on Crystal Palace FC's promotion.