Birthday Blog or Something
I’ve been meaning to blog several times in the past couple of weeks. I just haven’t had it in me. It’s one of those things, you know, where you sometimes can’t seem to DO anything.
I had a lovely, small and intimate release party for my new single on the 30th of April. Everyone who showed up was absolutely amazing and we had a wonderful time. I even held a little mini-gig, accompanied by Sebastian and Ingrid, during which the following was recorded:
On May Day I went marching with the punks in the Labour Day parade. We had pizza in the park behind the jail after.
This is something I meant to blog about at length. Why the labour movement is still important and so on and so forth. But it’s a little late now, so it might have to wait until next year.
I’ve got a new job. Money’s tight at the moment, so when I was offered this gig I took it without hesitation, even though it doesn’t pay very well. I’m now a nanny, for a kid who doesn’t have a space in a nursery yet, but whose parents ran out of maternity/paternity leave. He’s adorable, but a handful. It’s completely different from working in a nursery, where you have many kids. I have just the one, but it’s so challenging, because I have to devote all my attention to him all the fucking time. He’s too little to really play on his own, and since there are no other kids to distract him, the task falls to me, and he doesn’t talk at all yet, so understanding what he wants is hard. I’m growing to love him, though, bit by bit, and I’m getting into the routines okay. I’m only doing this job until the end of June, but it’s a bit of cash in the coffers at least.
Amanda Palmer revealed a kickstarter for her upcoming album on the day I released my single, which incidentally was her birthday. There are a lot of excellent stuff you can get if you pledge, so if you’re a fan, you totally should. For just a dollar you’ll get a download of the album, and starting at $25 there are a whole bunch of awesome physical packages. Among them is a house party. As in, AFP comes to your house and you can invite your friends and party with her. You have to pledge $5000 to get it. So, I got together with a bunch of other people in Oslo that I found on the Shadowbox forums, and we’ve pledged for a house party and are raising the money. I’m so excited! It won’t happen for at least a year or so, but it’s going to be awesome! It’s about the only thing I’ve managed to be excited about since I put out the single.
This evening, I went with my friend Chris to see Tim Burton’s new movie, Dark Shadows. It was a press viewing, invite only, at Rockefeller in Oslo, the day before the real opening. It was great! It was like a good old Tim Burton movie. Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd were all excellent films, but somehow they didn’t feel like classic Burton. After all, I fell in love with Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Sleeply Hollow, and I’ve been wanting more of that. With Dark Shadows, I feel like I finally got it.
And now it’s just gone midnight, and it’s my birthday. I’m 24. Fuck me, that’s weird to think… Mostly because I haven’t had time to really realise that it’s my birthday yet, because I’ve been so busy. I’ve invited some people to a birthday party on Saturday, and I’ve arranged to have dinner at my parents’ place, but between the house party funding, being broke, getting a cold and working full time, it honestly hasn’t had time to sink in. I want to be happy that it’s my birthday. But I really just feel exhausted and empty.
I think, in the end, it all boils down to my single. I guess I’d hoped to have sold a little more of it, after nearly two weeks. But I’ve hardly sold any copies at all. 54 people were set to “attending” my single release event on Facebook. That’s 54 people I figured might buy it, minus the ten or so who came to my release party and were given a free CD each. (If you’re waiting for a free copy for yourself, you’ll be disappointed; only the people at my party got free CDs, and I’ve given away a couple of download codes to special cases. If you’d like to help promote me by writing a review on your blog or something, then I’ll send you a code too.) In reality, I’ve sold 6 downloads, and 4 CDs. I’ve made 10 sales, of a single I spent weeks on. And that just feels shitty, cause it’s not for lack of trying. It just feels like PEOPLE WON’T HELP ME.
I’ve heard people say, before, that you can’t rely on your friends to be your fans. What that means, I guess, is that you can’t rely on your friends alone to buy your records and come to your gigs. And, of course you can’t, not in the long run. But to all my friends who might be reading this, I want to tell you something important. At the point I’m at right now, you are all I have, and I need you. I don’t have a label. I don’t have funds for advertising and promoting this thing. All I have is you guys, Twitter and Facebook. I have 163 followers on Twitter, 110 likes on Facebook and 500 or so Facebook friends. If all of these people shared my single, I would reach thousands of people. Unfortunately, most of them haven’t, even though I have asked and begged and pretty much offered my soul in exchange.
It has to start somewhere. If you guys support me now, buy my single so I can spend the money I earn on equipment and instruments so I can make my music better, so I can take the time to write more songs, if you share my single with the world and go that extra mile by adding the words, “this is my friend’s new single, you should really listen to it, it’s about ME!!!” or something else enticing to your post, I promise, vow and GUARANTEE it will be worth the five minutes it took out of your busy life. If you order a CD, editions out of 100, signed and numbered, that thing will become fucking valuable one day, because I WILL do this. I WILL make it, I’ll find a way with or without you. But if I have you with me, you will be able to say, one day, “I helped make that happen.”
It’s a brave new world, my friends. A world of Internet, creative commons, independence. A world where musicians can earn their livings themselves, without having to rely on record labels that steal 90% of their profits and sue poor students for torrenting their albums. We are making history. We can BE the media, if we try.
So try.
It is Here!
Amazingly, incredibly, it is here, at last! After all the secrets, the anticipation and the general suspence, my single is being released RIGHT NOW! Available exclusively through Bandcamp, you can now experience the happy ukulele feeling, the strangeness and the proper fucked-upedness of “My Friends Are More Fucked Up than Me”!
You can stream and listen to it as much as you like from your browser, or you can download one track at a time for free, or you can name your price and buy the whole single, in which case you get a thank you video from me as well! If you’re up for it, you can even order a special edition CD from me, which I shall lovingly burn, decorate and sign, and then saunter off to the post office with to ship off to anywhere in the world.
If you’re the giving kind and you’d like to write a review on your own blog to help promote me, I’ll give YOU a code to download the single for free. And if you share the link on Twitter and Facebook and the like, you’ll have my heartfelt gratitude. I need your help to sell this thing!
And look! I made a t-shirt, too! Because everyoneknows their friends are more fucked up thanthey are, so why not show it off?
I think you should buy this shirt. It comes it lots of different colours and it would look awesome on you.
Now, all that remains is to thank everyone who’s been helpful, all the people who have supported me, and especially my boyfriend, who stands by me even though I’m pretty fucked up, and all my fucked up friends, without whom this song would not have been written.
Thank you all!
Happy Birthday, Dad.
My father was a very talented musician and a remarkable person. He has inspired me in so many ways, and has been an important factor in my decision to become a musician myself. He would have been fixty-four today.
My dad and I performing together at Särö in November of ‘97:
Last year, when I was at university, I had a module called Untold Stories. It was a popular music history module. Our assessment in this module consisted of researching and writing about something or someone that had not been written about extensively before. It could be a band or an artist or a musical style or period, preferably something that we had experienced for ourselves or had a close connection to.
I chose to write about my dad. In the occasion of his birthday, I now choose to share with you this narrative.
Tore Haraldsen – A Legacy in Song
I loved my dad. I still do. I don’t know much about what I really believe about much of anything, but I know this: I miss you, and I hope and believe that from somewhere, somehow you’re looking out for me. Happy birthday.
New tune for International Women’s Day 2012. Run, Little Girl!
Source: SoundCloud / Maia Jern
Café Press Store Launch and a Few Other Things
So I need to blog more often… It’s been hard to do much of anything lately, as I haven’t been sleeping very well, or very much. I’ve been staying up way too late doing basically nothing but play Skyrim and completely shirking any kind of responsibility. As a result, the kitchen is a mess and I’m getting more and more nervous about my upcoming gig.
I booked this thing thinking it might jump start me. I managed to get a date that was close enough to get me going, yet far enough in the future that I wouldn’t have to stress. The stress part will come anyway, though, given how little I’m getting done. My gig is on the 20th of February, at Skuret in Oslo. Assuming I actually get to practicing at some point, it should be pretty awesome, so if you happen to be in the area, please drop by!
I went to One From the Heart on Monday, for the first time since the first time I was there, which is more than three years ago now. Crowd seems younger than it was then. I played two of my tunes to fairly roaring success, which should motivate me but for some reason doesn’t. It felt good being on stage and singing to people, though. I should get back to those Sunday jam nights at Skuret, too, they tend to get me in a creative mood.
Not that creativity is really the problem… I’m being very creative, actually, and have written lots of new songs in the past couple of weeks. But there’s no real joy in it. Still, it’ll come back, I hope.
While I haven’t been blogging at all, I’ve still been working, though. I’ve made some changes to my website, with the help of a friend. I’ve made this my default blog, turning it into a subdomain and putting the link in the menu of the website. I’ve done the same to my Bandcamp store, so if you click music in my website menu now, you’ll be brought to music.maiamadness.com.
The biggest thing I’ve done is I’ve opened up a Café Press store. There’s not that much there yet, but there are two t-shirt designs (well, the same design but in two colours) on a bunch of different types of shirts that you can get in lots of different colours. You can also buy the cover art for Winter Rose as a poster or print. I don’t expect to get rich from this or anything (haven’t sold anything yet, but then again I haven’t shown anyone the store either), but I figured it was a fun thing to do. So, you know, now you can get a t-shirt and show your support! They’re made on demand, so we literally never run out of any design or size.
I run away to Walsall (where I went to university last year) on Sunday. Only staying for a few days, just to hang out with some of my friends there, but it’s gonna be nice. The weather will be warmer there, too. It’s ridiculously cold here in Oslo at the moment.
My best friend KayKay is home from Japan! Woo! She got home on Tuesday night, and she’s off on holiday with her grandparents to, like, Lanzarote or something tomorrow, but she will be in town on and off until mid-March. Yesterday Morten and I had her over for dinner (I made a weird but really tasty pot roast) and made plans for when we’re going to Japan for Easter. So, we now have hotel bookings and some plans for where to go and what to see. So, yay!
Last but not least, I cut my hair (!!!) (myself, with kitchen scissors) and today I dyed it magenta again, as I’m doing a shoot with a friend tomorrow to get some good pics for gig posters.
So, that’s it for now. Have a good weekend, folks!
On SOPA and Publishing and the Music Business
So, I guess it’s time for my very own SOPA rant. Today is SOPA black-out day. All across the Interwebs, people are getting black screens when they visit their favourite websites and services, such as Wikipedia and Reddit.
Here in Norway, it would appear as though our Parliament is getting ready to vote on a similar law (no link, sorry, I read it in a physical newspaper, le gasp!), which would allow ISPs to give information about their users’ filesharing to the government, and to cut off websites that provide p2p downloads, much like SOPA will do, though on a smaller scale.
Which means that, soon, I might be a criminal.
Yay!
Because there is no way I’m giving up my torrents. Not happening. I’m not stealing, I’m borrowing.
I follow a lot of TV shows from other countries. Most of the time, I don’t know when they will air here, or even if they will air at all, and in the meantime, the web is bursting with spoilers. I would absolutely love to pay to download the episodes from Amazon, but I keep getting that pesky “not available in your area” thing, and no amount of tunnelbear or hidden proxies is going to fix that, cause they check what country your credit card is registered in when you log in. So, I torrent. Don’t worry, I’ll buy the box set when it comes out.
And it’s the same with eBooks and Audiobooks. In 2011, a new Audio version of American Gods was released, to accompany the 10th anniversary edition, recorded with a full cast. I was so excited when I heard about it, and was ready to buy it immediately when it came out. But, lo and behold, it’s only available as a download from Audible, and it’s not available in my area. There’s no CD version.
(The really sad part of this story is, of course, that no one seems to have pirated it, either…)
I attended a panel at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego on copyright vs. the free web, and was given a fascinating insight into the deranged mind of the publishing industry. A publisher in the audience stood up and explained why he couldn’t make his digital content available in other countries. It was, he said, because if he let people in other countries buy and download the American version of something, it would saturate the market, and he wouldn’t be able to sell the lisence. And, of course, if there’s a lot of piracy, the market is already saturated and there’s no point in selling to it. He seemed completely oblivious to the fact that, by not making his content available, the market is instead being saturated by pirates, culminating in the kind of circular logic common in folk who are stuck in a bygone age and unable to see the forest for all the trees.
And then there is music.
How’s a person with eclectic music taste supposed to sample new tunes these days, anyhow? The radio is no good anymore. Pretty much all radio stations have pre-approved playlists, which means that DJs can’t play whatever they want. Services like Spotify are useful up to a point, but not all labels make their music available on streaming services (and with good reason; the royalties are shit, and they’re even more shit for the artists). You can still find most things on Youtube, I suppose, though countless lawyers work tirelessly to remove as many infringing videos as they can (they must be working on commission, paid per video they get taken down), and even when you do find things, usually it’s shit audio quality and you can’t listen on the go, which is how I like to discover new music I like these days.
That leaves filesharing. I don’t see downloading an album as any different from borrowing it from a friend and ripping it to your iTunes. But when your friends don’t have the CD you’re looking for, when you’ve only heard of this band because they played at some festival you were at, and you only heard them play three songs and you want to know if you really like them, but they’re not on Spotify and their MySpace page only has the same three songs… Well, then filesharing saves the day. And when it turns out you really like them, that’s when you buy their album, get tickets to see them play, buy merchendise by the bucketload and make them rich.
Most recording artists see so little royalties it’s ridiculous. In fact, if you buy a song on iTunes for $.99, the band only sees about $.09 of that money, and then that needs to be split between the members of the band. It’s a great deal for you, but it’s a terrible deal for them. You might as well get it for free, for all the good it does them.
The fact is that the world is changing, and the music business needs to keep up. (I could go into a long rant on copyright and patents in general at this point, but I think this post is getting long enough.) We need to stop obsessing over copyright and royalties. As artists, fans are our most precious commodity now. This article expresses this sentiment perfectly. We need to focus on selling experiences, not recordings. A gig is an experience. A tour t-shirt is an experience. A CD-signing is an experience. Meeting your heroes is definitely an experience. And through use of social media, artists can get up close and personal with fans on a daily basis. When you follow a musician you love on Twitter, you get insights into their lives, their thoughts, how they are privately, if only a little bit. You get to hear them complain about being uninspired. You get to watch as they write their songs, as they prepare for a tour, as they record a new album, and you get to feel like you’re part of that process.
And once a fan is at that stage, they will want to support you. They will want to pay you for your music, for your gigs, for your merchendise, and just for existing. This is the kind of culture we want to promote. The music business needs to make allowances for this.
And of course there are still people who like it on a standard record deal, who are happy with their 10%, and there are songwriters who write for those artists who are dependent on the royalties they get for their tunes being performed, and I guess that’s fine too. But the business needs to stop resisting every motion of change, it needs to stop fighting everyone who tries to do things differently, and it needs to stop trying to turn its users, its customers, its fans, into criminals.
The results of the evening’s ukulele escapades. The song is called Waking Memories. Enjoy!
I picked up a copy of a picture book called Melinda when I was at the World Fantasy Convention. It was a short story or poem, depending on your perspective, by Neil Gaiman, and while reading it, this melody just came into my head. So, here it is. Lyrics by Neil Gaiman and music by me.
Source: soundcloud.com
Merry Christmas, happy peoples of the Interwebs! And if you’re not happy, here’s some music to make you so!
So, quick update. Since Friday, I’ve had over 350 plays of my EP, I’ve sold seven copies and three people have downloaded it for free. To me, this is an immense success! That said, I hope there’s more to come, so if you haven’t shared the link, please do!
http://maiamadness.bandcamp.com
I also made this gif, for advertising:
If you’ve got a website and feel like giving an artist just starting out a little bit of a plug, feel free to use it to link to my EP. :)
