Want to make a living a musician? Then make great music, press your own cd’s and sell them online. If you sell about 150 of them each month, you might make minimum wage. Any other road will mean you shouldn’t quite your day job. That’s the quick answer provided by graphs made by Information is Beautiful.

Of course, this might be excluding any other amount of investments you need to make (recording the music, buying instruments), but still the picture painted is quite realistic. And it explains why record companies only seem to care about big artists who sell a lot. Their entire system is not only set up on making big artists even bigger, it’s their only tactic for survival and why they are shitting their pants about what’s happening on the internet.This is why they are using bogus arguments that even the US government is no longer buying.

You may say Freeloaders are ruining entertainment, but let’s face it, copying is not theft. If you’re a self-respecting artist, be realistic. Make music because you love it, not because you have to make a living out of it. It’s nice if you can or at least make an extra buck, but never corner yourself in a position where you accuse your own fans of ripping you off. I know plenty of artists who don’t make an income off their art, but make an income to be able to make art. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

iNudge is a simple, but brilliant sequencing toy to play with, with just your browser. You can select a number of pre-programmed synth sounds, sketch a few patterns and get a simple but pretty, looped tune.

It’s learning curve is virtually non-existant, but even more experienced musicians might enjoying tinkering with it. Ideal to kill the weekend with.

Over at Drowned in Sound, there’s an interesting article by/about the Blood Red Shoes and their top 10 list of advices to start DIY and become ‘professional’, although from their story, you start doubting how professional the supposed professionals are.

The single is dead. At least so decided an unoriginal, tiresome band from Den Haag that makes uninspired music (source in Dutch). I talked about them in my personal blog and Retecool too often, so I’ll just stick to the facts. Physical singles are hardly being sold in the Netherlands. According to the article, a major chain of music stores decided to drop it as a product completely. Which is odd, cause I thought they had already dropped them years ago. Rightfully so, because it’s hardly worth going to a store for one track plus two remixes these days. Meanwhile the band bombastically announces that it has decided to say goodbye to the single. Like this is noteworthy news or some major decision. Anything for a press moment I guess.

Pendulum has done something original, they’ve made a 360 music video where you can look around while the video rolls:

You can see the whole video here.

While I do like the idea, I think they could’ve done something more elaborate with it. Right now, it’s just a video where you tag along with a few characters. When you look around, there’s nothing more to see than the surroundings. It would’ve been more interesting if you actually had to play the video multiple times to look at every angle and see different stories unfold. Still, it is a first and as such it’s certainly generated the attention they hoped for.

I don’t like the song, I don’t like Whitney Houston (or Dolly Parton for that matter) that much and I definitely don’t like Idols-styled tv programs, but damn … that’s pretty impressive Lin Yu Chun! Hats off.

(link from EHPO)

Aviary is a website that builds webbased tools. They’re best known for their free ‘online Photoshop clone’ Phoenix. They recently launched a pretty basic online audio editor and composer named Myna that just requires a browser to run.

Myna audio editor

You can record audio tracks, upload them or take them from a database and assemble them together to form a track. For more experienced musicians already working with tools like Cubase, it’s much too basic and nothing more than a handy ‘sketch’ tool when on holiday with just a laptop and an internet connection.  But for someone just starting out or just doing it for the love of music and not having a budget to buy expensive, complicated software, Myna is a good and easy way to start.

There’s a lot of fuss about pirated music on the internet, but there’s also the original pirates of music: pirate radio stations. There’s still a lot of them around in the London area, apparently. And like internet pirates they don’t see it as illegal, but as a community service, for the people, by the people. Here’s an interesting documentary by Palladium Boots about the perhaps dying phenomena:

See the documentary here.

Meet Florence Foster Jenkins. The no-longer living proof that with enough money passion and persistence you can become famous despite having no talent at all. She really, REALLY wanted to become a classical singer, but her rich dad would not let her. However, when he father died and she inherited all her fathers money, she could kick off her singing career.  How little talent she had can be heard in this YouTube video. Despite all this, she went on to perform for audiences even in Carnegie Hall, deaf to the critics’ laughter.

She may have been really awful, but she loved making music. You can’t blame her that. And in the end her lack of talent did bring her fame. Realistically though maybe she should have stuck with singing in the shower and spent her money otherwise. In that sense, not much has changed.