I’ve hardly had any time to write music the last few days, been really busy with work and I had food poisoning over the weekend. That was fucking boring.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time reading “new music strategies”-type sites, mainly Music Think Tank and, uh, New Music Strategies, which is rssed below. These sites generally involve interesting and usually knowledgable people trying to answer the question of how people make money from music.

This is real behind the curtain shit, now. It’s no secret that the industry is in transition and teh kidz assume free downloads are the norm. What’s a depressing trend in the discussion seems to be that while the tools of productions, distribution and aggregation of music are in the hands of musicians to an unprecedented level, the filtering stage happens post-production which places certain onerous but very important tasks to the musician. In the past, the filtering of music would happen at the production and distribution level too (by record labels, retailers and so on). While it’s undoubtedly a better state of affairs, it puts pressure on the musician to draw their own audience. So, musicians become machines of self-promotion too.

I can’t be the only person to whom that whole thing is alien. Self-promotion seems to a be a peculiarly un-British pastime. It’s always a bad idea to invoke a genius (and hence someone who’s an exception to a rule) to support one’s argument, but you wonder how well Nick Drake would have fared in the carnival barker’s world of the musical internets.

Promotion has always been necessary -  but now there are so many other voices shouting to be heard. What’s your USP? What’s your gimmick? I just want to write good music, and people to hear it and enjoy. There’s my non-unique selling point. Now I just need to find the time to write some music between spamming email/facebook/twitter/myspace/last.fm….. oh. And a full-time job. Sleepy now.