Bundle Update

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I’ve been lost in opera/thesis land for a while, hiding out in my parents’ jungle-like garden home. I haven’t been keeping up with the outside world all that well (the vegetation is thick!), but I bring you a few updates on older stuff and a peek at a new initiative to promote experimental music.

A couple of weeks ago, in The Power of Bundles, I talked about a nifty site selling indie music as a pay-what-you-want bundle. With only 10 hours left to go, I went to check out its progress. It seems the sales slowed down a little after the initial spurt and the total now sits around $400,000. It’s a healthy $66,000 per album minus charity and the website’s share. More importantly, this music reached an audience of almost 50,000 people. Definitely an idea worth exploring for contemporary art music.

I’d like to point out a new experimental music company braving the web frontier. Soundcarrier Music Network* is a new site founded by Halifax musicians Norman Adams and Alex Kall active in the Atlantic improv scene. The site distributes “improvised, experimental, new and free music” selling both studio albums and high quality live recordings. The approach recognizes the value of distributing rougher concert recordings, which is especially appropriate for the more improv-based scene they cater to. The site also charges more for individual tracks longer than 10 minutes. Soundcarrier’s catalogue is still quite small and I’m not sure how they are promoting themselves, but it’s worth keeping an eye on them if you are into that sort of thing.

In Explores of New Frontiers I talked about a somewhat misguided use of crowdfunding platforms. I hoped to be wrong because they seem like a lovely organization, but a month in, that particular campaign is sitting at only $380. But they still have 27 days to go. Maybe their fans will come through in the end.

In other news, I finally bought my plane tickets to Kyiv (Kiev) and will have the pleasure of spending the night on a bench at the Frederic Chopin airport in Warsaw. I am expecting a piano at every gate featuring skillful renditions of mazurkas and nocturnes by the flight attendants. It should set me up nicely for my work in Ukraine (see Village Crawl in Ukraine).

* University-trained musicians love long names and ‘networks.’ Perhaps they felt the need to expand it out because there are already quite a few things named ‘soundcarrier’ floating around on the web, including a maker of amplifiers and a band.

The Power of Bundles

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There’s a nifty idea being explored on a website that sells video games, both commercial and indie, for instant download. Steam occasionally bundles several games into a little package that contains a combination of popular and more obscure games. These bundles are often pay-what-want, but despite the fact that most people only dish out a few bucks, Steam manages to collect several million dollars in sales because of the sheer volume of bundles sold worldwide. I don’t know exactly how the earnings divide between the game developers and the site, but each developer has a chance to make hundreds of thousands of dollars from this bundling. And since all this takes place in the digital sphere, the distribution costs are minimal.

The first time I heard of this concept, I thought, “wouldn’t it be interesting to bundle contemporary music that way?” Pick a couple of well-known composers and bundle them with some emerging artists. Sell the bundle as pay-what-you-want or maybe as a subscription service. But lo and behold, it seems there is already a site exploring this idea with music, though in the more ‘popular’ sphere.

The Humble Bundle is bundling five albums from indie artists of different genres and giving customers control over pricing and even distribution of their money. Once you’ve picked the amount you are willing to part with, there are three sliders that let you distribute that sum between three possible beneficiaries: the artists, charity and the website itself.

The genius of the site’s design is the real time statistics. The site shows the total bundles purchased and the total amount earned, and it calculates averages. Your contribution makes the figures grow in real time making you feel like you are making an impact. It’s immediate gratification. The averages also help you decide on a ‘fair’ payment and make you feel generous if you pay more. The site lists the highest ‘bidders’ so you can proudly put your alias on display if you pay over $100.

The other nifty feature is the bonus sixth album, which can be unlocked by paying more than the current average. Since the average is calculated in real time, this feature is designed to automatically drive the average price up. Its seems, however, that at some point the average levels out and goes up very, very slowly since most people probably only pay a penny more each time. In the last 10 hours the average has only risen by three cents, from $8.08 to $8.11, but considering volume, it’s probably still making a difference.

That might seem like a measly price for six full albums, but when you consider the potential volume and the very low cost of distribution, it makes economic sense. In the last 10 hours, the bundle has made about $36,000 bringing the total to over $227,000 with almost 28,000 bundles sold. That’s almost $38,000 per album minus charity and contribution to the website. The bundle will be available for the next 13 days. I will update you on its success towards the end.

I would love to see someone do this with contemporary art music. Or maybe bundling contemporary music with classics to foster that sense of discovery. Of course, the big question is whether a platform like this can be sustainable or if it only works once, as a kind of sensation of the moment.

Misplaced power

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I live a very nomadic lifestyle, changing addresses every four to six months, like a criminal on the run. I leave a trail of forgotten and abandoned items all over the country, a residue of my activity. Having to account for the last two years of my places of residence on my recent passport application was quite a memory exercise.* My most recent exodus, conducted in the middle of intense thesis writing, has been a particularly disorganized affaire. While chanting to myself it-does-not-have-to-be-perfect-or-particularly-good-it-just-has-to-be-done as a kind of mantra, I flew away leaving an explosion of half packed boxes for my poor boyfriend to sort through.**

There is nothing quite like getting off the plane in a new city, weighed down like a pack mule with your fancy laptop, large midi-keyboard, audio interface, USB-charging camera and eReader, and realizing that you left the laptop power adapter on the other side of the continent. Suddenly all these interconnected items completely lose their meaning and function. They turn from great instruments of power, vessels for your fountain of creativity, into heavy hulls of useless plastic and metal. It is even worse when you are in the midst of a mad dash to finish your rather belated thesis: the moment of realization is accompanied by a sinking feeling as the world collapses around you into a vacuum of despair. In that moment, you know with absolute certainty that you would give your firstborn to whatever person or supernatural power able to deliver that funny little box with two cables sticking out of either end into your trembling hands.

And now that the adapter is safely back in my loving embrace***, I can go back to my routine of procrastination through blogging. Ironically, having to work on an old, slow PC, which I stole from my sister, while waiting for the adapter to show up, forced a kind of surge in productivity. The computer was simply too slow to get too distracted. It wasn’t worth going to Facebook or checking email when not absolutely necessary. So what does that say about the power of all this technology?

I’d rather blog about it than think on that too deeply. Back to the opera!

* Does the Banff Centre count if, lacking another address, you can technically be classified as homeless while you are there?
** Please forgive me, dearest! I love you!
*** Since it was the above-mentioned boyfriend who delivered the adapter through express post, I guess he’ll be the one who’ll have to deal with any firstborns who might appear in the future. Thank you and you are welcome!

Explorers of new frontiers

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Thursday is blog day so I’ll tear myself away from the sacred rites of thesis worship to bring you a couple of examples to connect to my previous writing.

Facebook fan pages

Last week in “Why should I ‘like’ you?” I discussed Facebook fan pages and organization profiles. The question was, how does an organization go from simply asking for your ‘like’ to actually engaging you in their little online community. Take a look at Carnegie Hall’s page. It’s an iconic institution so it’s not a surprise that they have over 60,000 ‘likes.’

They are also trying very hard to go beyond that and to give their ‘likers’ a way to get involved. They are currently running a campaign called “30 Day Summer Challenge” where each day they ask you to supply a piece of music that fits some criteria. I missed the beginning of this, but it seems to be a contest. I think the person who answers the most questions will get some sort of prize. This is not the sort of thing to attract a user like me, but I’m probably not the target. The targets are engaging.

Carnegie Hall also posts various bits of archival material to give people glimpses of its past and all the iconic figures who have a history there. Some of their posts are meant to be inspirational in the lofty sense or the cute sense (for example, posting pictures of loving fathers bringing their kids to Carnegie Hall events).

Aided by Facebook’s Timeline layout, this page looks like a scrapbook that users are invited to expand with their own little signatures (as if saying “I’ve been here” on some tree or rock). And while people are browsing this fairly trivial material, reliving their own experiences, they also come across reminders about upcoming events and special programs. Carnegie Hall’s agenda is pushed through quietly, without too much yelling.

Crowdfunding

In “Crowdfunding as a leveraging tool” I touched on the idea of harnessing the power of sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to finance your projects. I recently came across an Indiegogo project started by a Halifax non-profit, Centre for Art Tapes. I am really curious to see how this campaign will do because everything about it tells me that it’s all wrong. It’s missing the point.

  1. It’s not raising money for any particular project. Where is my money going exactly? I am selfish and I want my name to be attached to something more glamorous than ‘operational funding.’
  2. The perks don’t get you anything that you can’t get outside this campaign: memberships and rental credits. There are only two perks, which might be worth getting through the campaign because they save you about $2.50 from the full price. Every other perk is simply an overpriced membership.
  3. When all the perks are handed out, I wonder how much money the campaign will actually bring the organization. They are giving away things that people would pay them for anyway as a regular part of using the Centre. If everyone claims the “Associate” or “Individual Member” perks, the Centre will actually be losing money. Have they done the math? Yes, you will probably always have to use some of the campaign money to pay for the perks, but the trick is to make them something that will naturally come out of the project without costing you extra.

In short, this whole campaign is nothing more than a regular membership and donation drive aimed at people who already use the centre. The whole thing is a perfect example of applying an old mode of thinking to a new tool in the belief that the glamour of the tool itself will bring better results.

Why should I ‘like’ you?

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I was recently asked by an arts organization if I visited/became a fan of their Facebook page. The question painfully reminded me of all the sad looking signs I see outside bars and gas stations demanding that I ‘like’ them on Facebook. My first and only question is always, “Why?”

What does ‘liking’ you get me? Why should I expose myself and give you more clout? Why should I engage?

In this particular case, I had in fact visited and ‘liked’ that page and I had to evaluate my motives. I also asked myself if I engaged with that page since ‘liking’ it. The answer was selfishly simple. I ‘liked’ it because I knew there would be content about ME posted on this page. After this happened, I had no other reason to go there. All the other info, which appears on this page, can be found elsewhere much more quickly and efficiently. Ultimately, the page is simply a bulletin board for reposting content which already appears on the organization’s website. It was yet another channel for their marketing department to deliver their story in a one-way direction, which did not invite interaction. My personal engagement with the page ended right there.

This got me thinking about the idea of fan pages in general. There is a huge difference between a fan page created by the fans and one originating from the object of affection itself. The first might loosely revolve around the idea of this object or person, but it’s ultimately about the fans themselves and their relationship to this entity. It’s about the community created through this common fixation, a platform designed to connect and validate its users. The object of affection might occasionally engage in this community to give it further encouragement for existing, but as an individual person or idea, they are quite secondary to its purpose.

The second type of fan page is ultimately a megaphone designed to tell a particular story to what it hopes is a captive audience. The problem is that it’s never captive.

Facebook is an online community designed to engage users in each other’s stories. When a single individual’s stream of status updates becomes a megaphone for every detail in his over-glorified life, people simply ‘unsubscribe’ and this person ceases to exist in their world. The same can be said about a business or organization page. If it’s only about them, it’s of no interest to most of us because we have no room to weave ourselves into their narrative. And the scariest thing is that once someone took the trouble to mute you out, you are very unlikely to engage with her again. She no longer acknowledges your existence.

So it seems that to design a successful fan page or organization profile page, you need to step back and allow your users to tell their own story. The page needs to be a comfortable platform that encourages sharing and inspires user-generated content. The organization’s agenda is promoted through this gently directed conversation.

How does one go about building that? I’m going to cop out at this point and say that there’s probably not a single correct model for this. The right approach probably depends on the nature of the community one desires to engage. I would love to hear thoughts on this and see successful examples if anyone has them.

NAC Workshop: My Ottawa Debut

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I am writing this on the train to Montreal, the first leg of my epic 29-hour journey back to Halifax (still not sure how a train can take longer than a Greyhound bus). Last night was the final concert of the NAC Composers Program featuring five premieres by workshop participants (Lesley Hinger, Adam Scime, Patrick Giguère, Nicholas Omiccioli and me). The concert finished with a piece by Chen Yi, something with ‘Happy Rain’ in the title and the sound of a heavy metal band transcribed to Pierrot ensemble (it was extremely disorienting coming from a composer with such a bubbly and motherly personality).

The concert took place in a 2,000-person auditorium at the National Arts Centre. To avoid the awkwardness of spreading a tiny new music audience through such a grand space, they did the whole concert right on stage, audience included. The ensemble faced backwards with the audience looking past them at the empty multi-tiered hall. I was expecting the whole arrangement to be really sad, only highlighting the fact that this sort of show attracts so few people. But, it was actually surprisingly intimate. The audience and performers were very connected, while at the same time the empty hall added a kind of surreal grandeur to the whole event.

Gary Kulesha put on his filtered, public face and did a fantastic job running the pre-concert chat and leading the concert itself. The composing fellows were perched on stools facing the audience and Gary asked questions that were meant to draw the audience into the whole process of composing making us seem more human. During the show, he asked each of us one or two questions specifically designed to inform the audience about the single most important thing driving the piece. It was very educational, but personal at the same time. I think it helped the audience to connect with the composer and appreciate their intent, even if they didn’t get the soundworld of the piece.

The ensemble lead by Jean-Philippe Tremblay was fantastic. By that point they knew the pieces well enough that it felt like they were really performing them rather then just fingering the notes and counting rhythms. There was more of them in the music, more drive, more intention. It was very satisfying.

We were also fortunate to have all these well-known composers from all over the country at the concert and to have a chance to chat with them at the closing reception. It was interesting to hear the perspective of people who never heard anything from me before and also those, like Alan Bell, who have been watching me grow for some years. We were lucky that they happened to be in the city.

Most of us were leaving early in the morning so the sad hour of 3 am saw all of our drunkenly sentimental goodbyes. It is always devastating to leave such experiences. You are thrown together for this intense week seeped with creative and personal sharing. What in the ordinary course of life might have been months of social and professional interaction is super-concentrated into almost countable hours. You come out feeling like you’ve known these people for years, you are invested in them. Then the group suddenly breaks up and scatters all over the world, and all you are left with is a fattened Facebook friends list. Till next time, everyone!!

NAC Workshop: Day of Truth

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Tonight is the climax of the NAC Composers Program with performances of five premieres at the Southam Hall of the National Arts Centre. There will also be a piece by Chen Yi. After a week of sweating, correcting and second-guessing, we have to release our babies into the world. The info for the “Future classics” event can be found here.

Last night was the penultimate and ultimately more ‘important’ event of this whole summer institute – the conductors’ concert. The five conducting students got their big break to conduct the NAC Orchestra through some favorite classics. This is the event that attracts all the donors.

Because it’s the 10th anniversary of the composers’ program, I was asked to represent all the summer institute participants with a ‘thank you to the donors’ speech. Naturally, since few of these people actually come to the composers’ concert, they had me speak at this event instead. It was a bit of a funny concept, but I’m happy that the composers were at least present in some form in the donors’ consciousness. Public speaking is also a kind of performance outlet for me so it was pretty cool to address about 1,500 people. Maybe some of them will even be curious and come out tonight to see what this being alive and composing thing is all about.

The pieces are all sounding great. The ensemble has done a fantastic job. I feel that they’ve really invested themselves. My piece has improved astronomically from the first read through. Once the players realized that they could be much more expressive with my material, it just turned into a different piece. It sounds much more like what I hoped to hear in terms of the intensity of the individual sounds and gestures. The all-too-typical structural problems endemic to young composers are still there, of course, but the piece seems to be standing and continuing to generate a barrage of earworms with dirty legato flavour.

There is also some sort of composers’ panel happening in the city today. It’s not open to the public and no one, not even the participants, seem to know what it’s about. There are representatives from all over the country and they are supposed to be at the show tonight. I finally get to meet a few names I hear everywhere and they’ll add a few bodies to the audience.

Speaking of the audience, apparently they do this concert ‘differently.’ Instead of spreading a 10-person crowd through a 2000 person hall, they just put everyone right on stage with the performers. I am really curious to see how that will work.

Dirty legato and musical parenting

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I’ve been in beautiful Ottawa since Friday afternoon. After three intense days with the NAC Composers Program, I am enjoying a semi-day off. I have an interview with the CBC Radio 1 this afternoon (tune in around 4:45 EST). I also did an interview for the NAC blog earlier. You can check it out here in English or en français.

The last three days have been very emotionally conflicted. We spend our mornings in readthroughs and rehearsals, and in the afternoon the composers hide away in a little hot cave in the dungeons of the NAC to discuss matters great and small. Our mentors are Gary Kulesha and Chen Yi. Gary tends to be very provocative and blunt, while Chen Yi is always laughing and gesticulating excitedly. It’s a very contradictory dynamic.

There is a very talented bunch of young composers gathered here with different issues and strengths. Some pieces are very colourful and energetic, full of shimmering and juicy orchestration. In sharp contrast to that, there’s a piece that explores the idea of urban blight and the stark, decaying landscapes it generates. My piece seems to be a mishmash of earworms, which were plaguing people for hours yesterday. I’m also responsible for a new musical term – dirty legato.

We get to work with a dedicated ensemble drawn from the Orchestre de la francophonie conducted by Jean-Philippe Tremblay. The musicians are great, eager to make things work and try new things. They ask lots of questions and offer suggestions. Jean-Philippe jokes around all the time producing a welcome calming effect. They are playing new music from 10:30 to 4:30 every day. It’s quite a physical and intellectual marathon.

I was very depressed after the first two rehearsals, through no fault of the musicians. I am apparently not very good at communicating my intentions through the score. My markings are too classical and when executed with the precision with which performers tend to approach contemporary music, things just sound flat and shapeless.

After spending two days wallowing in self pity and berating myself for writing and awful piece, I decided to kick it into shape. I was a lot more vocal in the last rehearsal and tried to explain what kind of sound I was going for. That’s how we ended up with dirty legato. I really needed them to play more harshly and aggressively with more glissando and bow pressure, less like Mozart and more like Ukrainian folk singers. We all had a good laugh and it worked. I am really looking forward to the next rehearsal.

I think it can be much easier, emotionally, to simply throw away a creation you are not immediately happy with, to distance yourself from it, to disown it, to forget it ever happened. It’s harder to force yourself to really look at it, accept its faults and figure out how to highlight the strengths. Maybe it’s like being a parent and giving your work unconditional love while still seeing it for what it is. You made it and you are responsible for giving it a fighting chance. I’ll call it musical parenting.

The highlight of the week so far has been a visit from Ana Sokolovic. She spent the day with us yesterday sitting in on rehearsals and joining us for discussion in the afternoon. She talked about her own approach and gave us little private sessions. I love her music and she seems like an amazing teacher, combining very astute critique with a kind of excitement that is extremely encouraging. With some teachers, you come out of this kind of session feeling like you have so much to learn still that it is almost insurmountable and you will never measure up to whatever ideal they set up. Ana has a way of delivering critique that makes you excited about what you are doing and eager to improve.

Off to Ottawa!

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I am at this very moment on the last leg of my 24 hour train journey from Halifax to Ottawa, where I will be participating in the National Arts Centre’s Composers Program with Gary Kulesha and Chen Yi. I will be workshoping a brand new piece, The Unanswered, for an 11-part chamber ensemble. I am super excited to meet the performers and the other participating composers. Check back for regular updates about my adventures.

This is also my very first North American train journey. Growing up in Ukraine, trains were a big part of my life. That is still the main mode of transportation out there and I often find myself feeling a little nostalgic when I see passenger trains pass me by. The experience has been quite pleasant (much more so than the bus), but a little cold. They are sure not stingy on the air conditioning.

Crowdfunding as a leveraging tool

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Crowdfunding is a platform that allows many people to contribute varying amounts of money towards a project. It is the idea of patronage broken up into small pieces allowing a multitude of dedicated and curious people to participate in the creation process. The idea has been very successfully implemented digitally through websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, where the creator can offer various rewards for different levels of support. I am seeing many successful examples of this fundraising tactic in the art music world for things like commissioning, concert production, tours and recording projects. I recently came across a project initiated by the Kronos Quartet to raise money for their next Under 30 commissioning project. It’s something that I’m itching to try myself.

Seth Godin, a marketer and non-fiction author who fearlessly navigates the turbulent terrain of the modern world, just launched a project that uses crowdfunding as something more than a purely fundraising tool. Through The Icarus Deception project, he is harnessing the power of Kickstarter to blend new and old media for the dissemination of ideas: the internet with its ebook and blog, and traditional paper publishing.

The project was set up to essentially presell his new book in various forms to dedicated fans, giving them rewards for jumping on the bandwagon early. If the project reached its goal of $40,000 by a set date, the new book would be published in paper form and distributed through traditional channels. The genius of the idea is that he is not really using Kickstarter to fund the publishing process, but rather to simultaneously gage and create interest in his new book before he writes a single word. It becomes a kind of leveraging tool in the risky and costly world of paper publishing.

What if you were to apply this idea to the risky and very expensive process of producing a new orchestral work? An opera? These require huge investments in time and money with extremely uncertain payoffs (and I don’t even mean “payoffs” in terms of profit, but rather audience interest).

What if, as a composers, you took matters into your own hands rather than waiting for a giant behemoth of an orchestra or opera company to warm up to such a risk? You fundraise your own commission fee while simultaneously measuring and generating excitement about the work before it’s even on paper, before you’ve invested so much of yourself into it. Now you are coming to the producer with something more tangible, you have leverage. You are bringing a ‘tribe’ of dedicated followers who have already invested money and curiosity into your idea. No, you haven’t taken away all the risk, but maybe you’ve made that leap a little more appealing.

Crowdfunding can seem magical. Godin’s project reached its goal within the first two hours and 24 hours later it was sitting at almost $190,000, nearly five times its goal. But he has a huge tribe of dedicated readers already.

The success of such a venture really depends on how hard you’ve worked building up your following. You can’t pop out of nothing and expect explosive results. First, you need to take the time to build up a trusting network of supporters. Second, you need to offer valuable* rewards for their faith. This kind of initiative, if done right, can help you reach out beyond that close circle. It’s about using the fast, low-cost digital platforms to encourage the slow and expensive institutions to bring your art to life. You also get to really connect with your fans in the process, which is priceless.

* Your followers should really be getting something unique for their bravery and dedication, be it an unforgettable experience, a limited-edition object or an exclusive peek inside the creation process. It’s not worth thinking about this as a pity donation with a token trinket attached.