My Name is Kate

Discover Some Forgotten Gems in Your iTunes Collection

OK, this first Discover post isn't about something new, it's about REdiscovery.

And it isn't my idea, but the brilliant Rob Cottingham's.

But I have so much unrated and forgotten music on my iTunes that I just had to share his tips.

Rob has two great ideas for finding new and old favourites in your iTunes library: 

• Routine Listening - making sure you cycle through some of your least played, highest rated 
• Discovery - cycling through your unrated music to find great songs you may have forgotten

I'm doing the second one (Discovery .. see the connection?), RIGHT NOW:

Create a Smart Playlist that includes following criteria:

• Rating is < 1 star (i.e. unrated)
• Media is Music (I've never used this criteria - I had just never rated my videos - thanks, Rob!)
• Genre is not Holiday, Holiday - Spoken Word (yeah!), Comedy, Voiceover or Voice Memo (Rob has other genre exclusions - always interesting to see what genres people use)

So smart!

Thanks, Rob! Make sure you swing by his blog and read the full post!! And while you're there, stop by Noise to Signal, Rob's amazing cartoon about social media, business and how we live in the digital world.

Anyone else have any iTunes tips?

 

 

 

Music Discovery - The Darwin Song Project

My father-in-law is the source of many of the tunes playing on my iPod. This holiday season, he delighted me with another find: a live recording of The Darwin Song Project which includes one of my favourite artists, Karine Polwart.

Among the celebrations taking place around the world in honour of Darwin Year 2009, the Shrewsbury Folk Festival organized the Darwin Song Project, a songwriting retreat in rural Shropshire. The Darwin Song Project invited 8 artists from the UK and US to come together for a week to write songs which have a resonance and relevance to the life of Darwin.  The artists include Chris Wood, Karine Polwart, Jez Lowe, Mark Erelli, Emily Smith, Rachael McShane, Krista Detor and Stu Hanna.  

They were tasked with creating new songs that had a ‘resonance and relevance to Darwin’. Following the retreat, they performed their 17 new songs for a live audience at the new Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury. The project was the feature of a BBC Radio 4 documentary and a feature on Mike Harding’s BBC Radio 2 show.

All of the Darwin Song Project performances are also on YouTube.  Two that really speak to me are the powerful full-ensemble acapella piece, You May Stand Mute as well as the lyrical Clock of the World song. I've included those videos below.

The music is really wonderful - all of these artists are extremely talented - but I was singularly impressed with the quality of the lyrics.  They are all listed in the accompanying booklet along with a story or reference to Darwin's life to explain the impetus behind the song. One of the things I appreciate most of all about the collection is that the artists wrestle both with Darwin's theories of evolution as well as his (and his wife's) faith - and with the faith of the people at the time. Evolution is certainly something I take for granted, but imagine being alive at the time when Darwin's theories were first published. 

This issue  is addressed in a number of the songs.  My favourite is The Merchant's Question:

Dear Sir, dear Sir could you tell me//How the grains from the ground can grow//To the breath of a man, to the muscle of a hand//And all that a mind can know.

Dear Sir, fine Sir could you tell me//Is it true what's written in your books?//That a soul will yield to the furrows of the field//Like a tree with the branches struck.

Dear Sir, please Sir, could you tell me//Are the words of the lord all wrong?//Are our eyes just the eyes of the birds in the sky//And our bodies to a beast's belong?

Dear Sir, dear Sir, could you tell me//Will I still go to heaven when I die?// Cause I've worked too hard to be caught off guard//And just rot in the ground when I die.

You can listen to snippets of all the songs over on eMusic (or, of course, over on the Project's own site).

Side note: I tried a couple of options to try to embed the playlist with snippets here - but simply could not figure it out.  Is there any music service that you know about that lets you embed album snippet playlists?  

Dear Independent Musician - Why Isn't Your Music Available in Digital Form?

Most of my music discovery is serendipitous.  Often a recommendation from a friend or family member, a stray tweet via blip.fm, something catches my eye on "Friends Listening Now" on last.fm.  Or, I see a mention of a musician on another musician's blog.  That's what happened today.  I just found out that Katherine Wheatley (one of my fav Canadian artists) is releasing a new CD on Sept 25, 2009 at Hugh's Room in Toronto.  Because I'm a fangirl of Katherine, I read the back story. It turns out that her producer, Lynn Miles, recently produced an album of songs by women in the Yukon.  Cool! This is something I want to check out.

Since Katherine didn't provide a link (Dear Musicians: when you tell us about cool projects that your friends are doing - please link!), I searched for it and discovered the CD Tethers, Hooks and Velcro that features 12 women singer/songwriters from the Yukon.

As I write this, I'm sitting in a cabin on the beach - no where near a physical music store.  But it's 2009 - that shouldn't matter.  Most music is digital now, right?  So I'll just click on their CDBaby "Buy This CD" link ... oh. I can only buy the physical CD. And it's out of stock.  If I were in the Yukon I apparently could visit any number of retailers that they list on their site to purchase the CD.  But that's the thing.  I'm NOT in the Yukon.  And I hate to say it but in this digital instant on-demand world, especially regarding entertainment, I find it really frustrating that you wouldn't want to make your music available in digital format. 

I know CDBaby does digital downloads.  I've purchased a number from there, including the Good Lovelies, Paula Toledo and Pawnshop Diamond.  I like CDBaby because they do non-DRM'd MP3.  Ditto with eMusic.  iTunes is an easy option; some artists complain about the royalty cut, but there are alternatives to iTunes.  I've even had a musician email me a zip file of MP3s from an "out of print" album after I sent her a PayPal payment - I found her and the old band, Open Mind, via MySpace.

Now, I'm not an independent musician, so I'm not familiar with the issues.  Is the fear of piracy that big that they won't publish their songs in digital format?  Is it that they lack the know-how?  Is it a huge pain in the butt to get the digital files? How 'bout it, musicians?

In my naive mind, it seems that if you're an up-and-coming musician, you'd want to use every means possible and every distribution channel available to get your music out there.  There is this great diagram circulating about musicians using (I know, I know - here she goes again) social media to get the word out.  I've seen it a couple of times, but never with the original attribution.  Lex sent it to me.  If you know the original creator, please leave a comment!

 

And I think the places listed here are just a start - there are a few others where I would ensure that I created an artists profile and uploaded my music too - just so people could stream it.  THEN I would put it somewhere where fans could pay me and download it RIGHT NOW because while it is beautiful here in this isolated beach cabin, the ocean is getting a little loud and I could use some new music.

Oh, I should mention this project from Makeda Taylor that lead me to check out Katherine's website in the first place - she's created a YouTube playlist of Canadian Singer/Songwriters (currently over 190) to call attention to the depth of Canadian artistic talent and why it is important for musicians (and all of us really) to participate in the call for input from the government about Canadian copyright law. And if you need a little refresher on why it is important, check out this video from Michael Geist as well as his site Speak Out on Copyright - consultations are on until September 13, 2009.

Photo Credit: maxw