I just started my subscription to Emusic again. Emusic is one of the biggest site for indie music download sales, and works on a subscription model, so you pay for a certain number of tracks a month. I get 50 tracks for £11.99, I think. My music’s been up on Emusic for quite a while, and a fa...

This blog post was triggered by a twitter conversation with two lovely women that Lo and I finally met in person on our US jaunt, Annie Boccio and Tracy Apps - Annie and Tracy are both people we’ve been chatting to online, in both text and video formats, for months. We know loads about them, a...

So, as I outlined in Pt 1, Social networks can be a really tough place to inhabit as a musician, because you’re going to get a LOT of artists sending you friend requests expecting you to check out their music. The idea for the artist, in that case, is that numbers mean everything. If I have 80...

It’s been an amazing year for me - a proper round-up of the year will be coming soon. But I thought that first I’d pull together some of the things I’ve blogged about this year. So this is part 1 of a compilation of links to my blog posts for musicians this year - Back in May/June,...

Finally… part 3! The timing is prescient for two reasons. Firstly, last Monday I was invited to be a panelist at a discussion hosted by Mobile Mondays (MoMo) on the whole area of Mobile tech and Social Media. Secondly, it’s because today I’m heading to Leicester to De Montfort Univ...

Weeks and weeks ago, I was ‘tagged’ by the very lovely and talented Ben Ellis of RedCatCo, in a blog-meme about best practices in social media. It’s a great subject, because with social media stuff being as young as it is, we’re not as clued up on how to ‘use’ it ...

There’s been a whole load of talk in the last few days, following on from the financial crash, saying that ‘Web 2.0 is dead‘. Q #1 - what’s Web 2.0? Well, here’s the wikipedia page for it. For our purposes as musicians, it describes the use of the web for collaboration,...

One of the things I most like about teaching electric bass is that very few kids are ever told by their parents to play it. ‘You need to learn piano/violin/clarinet because I never had the chance’ is the bane of so many teacher’s lives and one of the main driving forces behind kids...

In the last post, I mentioned that my main aim when teaching is to instill in my students a love of learning. A huge part of me having a right to teach them anything is me respecting the music they listen to. Nothing is a bigger turn off for a student that a dismissive teacher. At one college I used...

The state of contemporary music teaching in the UK is terrible. Actually, the state of music teaching across the board is pretty awful. But at least with the classical stuff, the method makes sense, even if so many of the teachers are failing to inspire the students (do a straw poll of the people yo...