The Twigetticast
After making some new music discoveries of outstanding independent artists from around Europe and the US we’ve put together the podcast of some of the best of what we’ve found. February’s podcast features a rich mixture of ambient, folk, alt-classical and electronic sounds. Most of these artists are independent from b&t. If you like what you hear in the podcast, click on the links below and listen to some more. Maybe even buy a track or two, to help them all buy some new shirts and ties, as looking at most of them they could do with some nice smart clothing;)
Subscribe to the Twigetticast (iTunes)
Edgar Curtis
Edgar Curtis
Download Cloud Horse
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Jim Perkins
Jim Perkins - Feed
Download Feed
Stream Feed
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Oliver Blank
Oliver Blank
Download Lumi Karhu
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Izae
Izae
Listen to Tijelo
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Joanne Gabriel
Joanne Gabriel
Download Daybreak
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Stéphane Horeczko
Stéphane Horeczko
Listen to Fugaces
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Ranger3
Ranger3
Listen to Seventeen Miles Upside Down Umbrella
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Upside Down Umbrella
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Lloyd Rodgers
lloyd Rodgers - Draw me a sheep
Download Draw Me a Sheep
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Paul Bailey
Paul Bailey Ensemble
Download Obsessive Love
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Top albums of 2009
Ok well this is a tough one and technically not all these albums were released in 2009 but that’s the year I found them, so there we go:
I’ve attached and Itunes and spotify link to some of the best tracks from these albums, plus a few that almost made the top 10.
10. Fever Ray - Fever Ray
9. Andrew Bird - Noble Beast
8. Dan Deacon - Bromst
7. The XX - XX
6. Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
5. Bat for lashes - Two Suns
4. The Unthanks - Here’s the Tender coming
3. Florence and The Machine - Lungs
2. Hauschka - Ferndorf
1. Nico Muhly - Mothertongue
Thank you
Ok, so the gig on Saturday at The Crypt went really well, a really incredible audience response and we managed to land a couple of other gigs off the back of it, more about those later. I’ll post some video clips and photos over the next couple of days. Thanks to everyone who came, it was a really great night and we really enjoyed performing (despite being slightly stressed about it;))…
b&t live @ the Crypt
Ok, the bigo & twigetti gig on the 31st October is confirmed. You can buy tickets here or on the door, incense, sparklers and bohemian technological middle class oddness abound.
b&t live @ the Crypt
Ok so finally we have a date for our first gig. Bigo and twigetti will be performing at The Crypt in Camberwell on 31st October. We seem to have inadvertently set ourselves up for a halloween party but the set is kind of appropriate for that anyway.
Full details haven’t yet been finalised, but the program will feature performances from Ed Cohen, Arianna Palin, Bigo & Twigetti and The Raw and the Cooked, finishing with a dark tale for halloween, for voice and electronics. There will be DJs afterwards so if anyone wants to stay around and have a drink, you’ll be more than welcome. Tickets will go on sale in the next couple of weeks. Details will be posted here and on our main site
The Crypt, St Giles Church Camberwell
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Selling CDs on Amazon - How not to do it
So, yes selling your music or the administration of it is definitely not the most fun part of making an album, but unless you can find some lovely piece of human gold-dust to do it for you for very little or no money, then you’re gonna have to do it yourself.
Ok, we’ve had our album up on Amazon for about 8 months and we’ve sold a few, well, in fact, more copies than I expected. However, we have a couple of tips for independent artists which could increase the amount of CDs which you actually get paid for. If you’re going to give out promo CDs (you’re going to have to do this) remember to mark them with promo not for re-sale in big bold black letters on the front (include a Jpeg for artwork) so that if you don’t request it back from the reviewer (I personally wouldn’t spend the time chasing them) they won’t be able to make their way into the hands of re-sellers who can then sell your album for £3 or so on Amazon.
The other tip we would suggest is read the small print on your Amazon Associates membership agreement…Originally we put our CD up on Amazon UK for for £8.79. When the £3 versions from re-sellers started to appear we decided to lower the price hoping more people would buy the CDs we supplied. So we contacted Amazon and lowered our price. We received confirmation that it had gone through, however when we checked it was still up for £8.79. It turns out that asking them to lower the price to £4.79 meant that they lowered the price we sold it to them at, but retained the price of £8.79 for our listeners. Having looked at the membership agreement this is as it is written and we were a bit lazy in not reading it properly. The crux of it is that Amazon decide how much your listeners pay for the CD, irrespective of the price at which you sell to them and you have no influence over it. They are perfectly within their rights to price you out of competition with the re-sellers and there is nothing you can do to lower the price to try and compete.
The combination of sending out too many loose promo CDs, the option to rip it on to your hard drive and re-sell it + not being able to lower the price means that we actually make much less money from our CD sales than Amazon even though we continue to sell CDs through them. Perhaps this is an argument for moving exclusively to downloads or distributing exclusively through your own online store????
Sense of Direction out 6th July
Ranger3’s new single and video is out 6th July (yeah I know it’s a little later than planned).
Sense of Direction
New ranger 3 single & Video out mid june
We’ve been working with Eric Power to create a new video for ’Sense of Direction’ Ranger3’s forthcoming single. Well when I say working with, Eric is creating the entire video and occasionally he shows us clips and we go ‘hey that’s great,’ which fortunately, so far, it always is ;). Here’s a link to some of his other videos and a couple of stills from Sense of Direction.
Image 1
Image 2
We start promoting the video in the next couple of weeks so for anyone else in a similar situation trying to promote their own music with a small budget, we’ll let you know what works for us and what doesn’t.
Make your living from music???
Well apparently these days it’s harder and harder to due to downloads or it’s really easy to do now because we can make albums in our bedrooms and then just post them on a website and then we have our own record label, which makes us feel like a fantastic little entrepreneur. No No No what you really need to do is have a my space, a facebook, a twitter, an ‘i like’, a last FM page, then get linked in and finally find a talking potato which will wander around the streets of England or wherever you happen to live telling everyone to listen to your music whilst adding my space friends on his little potato blackberry which is made of chips. Finally badger everyone to death for their email address and then send them 40 emails a week about your fabulous new demo which you made which doesn’t sound like anyone else oh no ………….etc
Ok well, there is my marketing plan, and so far it’s cost me and others a bit of cash, not a fortune, but a bit and to date has helped me/us to move a small no. of CDs and downloads, achieved some good reviews from a select few charitable individuals and got us a little bit of radio play. All this from an album ‘Old Simplicity’ which we ‘bigo & twigetti’ and ’Ranger3′ released in December 2008 (great timing, you’re not doing it right if you don’t try to compete with the Christmas singles with a non christmassy album for your first release). Anyway over the next few weeks and months we will continue to try out various ‘marketing ideas’ and report on the successes and failures of these schemes. To date we’ve had a go at powerplays on last FM, nagging people we know, trying to make influential friends, annoying people with emails, using all the myspace,facebook,twitter,linked in etc (we’ve been better at some of these than others) sending CDs into oblivion. Going to ‘Networking events’. We’ll try and give you some useful findings on what has worked for us and what hasn’t. However there is no substitute for writing bloody good music. Ok some people have managed to be quite successful with awful music, but that’s not the point or at least not my point and if you read this blog then probably you concur with this opinion???
Ok to start off here are some current articles on what people are doing right now in regard to marketing of independent music on little or no budget.
Considering Last FM powerplays as promotion? We’ve done this in smaller numbers than the bands in this article and had more success than they seemed to, didn’t listen to their music and unlike a couple of the guys in this article, I don’t think powerplays should pay for themselves and turn a profit, what they do is to get people to listen to you and some of these people do come back and listen again. At £13 per campaign you can afford to have a bit of experimentation with them without going bankrupt. Check out the rest of the music think tank site for other promotion info. You can also find jango somewhere on here which is the cheap bastard brother of Last FM, though we haven’t used it yet.
David Byrne likes to have a rant about the future of the music Industry and to be honest he’s pretty good at it, check out his Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists
Piano and Electronics at the De La Warr Pavilion
On Friday night (13.03.09) at 8:00 In Bexhill On Sea there will be a performance by 2 artists using prepared piano and electronics. Performances of experimental piano with electronics seem to be gradually rising out of their traditional home of academia and venturing into the public domain. I’ve noticed this because I’ve been writing pieces using these forces for the past 3 years. When I first started there were very few other artists doing this, outside of academia, and I had trouble finding similar artists to perform with.
As more accessible artists have emerged there seem to be a whole host of interesting approaches to performing with piano and electronics, very few of them are the same. They variously combine tonality, atonality, fixed electronic events synchronised with the pianist via a metronome, improvised pieces created on the night, improvised electronic responses, re-built pianos and eccentric home made gadgetry. The performers themselves are from a range of backgrounds, from the traditional conservatoire eccentrics, to the more quirky self-made composers, technologists and performers.
As piano and electronic performers poke their head out of the trenches of academia it will be interesting to see whether or not these performers find a place in popular culture.
Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto
To take a listen to my pieces and view my scores please visit our main website and click on the composition page
If you really want to get explore the academic side of piano and electronics you might want to take a look at this comprehensive catalogue of pieces complied by Pianist Xenia Pestova