Frome and away
Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:01:24

Ian, Saskia and I went to Frome in Somerset for the Being Human Weekend. Lovely town, and we met some fantastic people and listened to some great electronic and experimental music. And for the record, you actually say “Froom”, so the pun in the title of this post doesn’t really work. But you can be [...
Unconvention Factory: all kinds of awesome
Mon, 10 May 2010 23:53:43

Ian, Saskia and Andrea at the Unconvention venue as the bands set up The New Music Strategies team was delighted to be invited to Unconvention Factory in Macclesfield this past weekend. For a start, it looked like it was going to mean an opportunity for us all to be in the same city in the world [...
Un-Convention Factory
Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:02:51

Calling the UKs best creative talent. Get involved in a music first… As part of a larger event called Unknown Pleasures, celebrating the life of Ian Curtis on the 30th anniversary of his death, Un-Convention has been commissioned to develop a very special version of the event. Un-Convention have teamed up with the creators of iconic indie-rock [...
Mind the furniture
Sun, 14 Feb 2010 21:03:21

Photo by theothegrey We’re doing a bit of remodelling around here at New Music Strategies. In fact, remodelling is the wrong word. This is the online equivalent of moving into new premises, getting new desks and phones, ordering new stationery, and setting up for business. It’s all a bit new: we’ve just expanded from a sole trader [...
Brian Eno on records and blubber
Mon, 18 Jan 2010 23:02:03

This coincides nicely with a lecture I gave this evening at Westminster University to a group of MA Music Business Management students. In an interview with Paul Morley, Brian Eno says: “I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no [...
Introducing… New Music Strategies
Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:17:06

The team at New Music Strategies For the past few years, New Music Strategies has been a blog about music on the internet. And the need for me to do that has changed as time has gone on. As I’ve hinted over the past couple of months, it’s time for a transformation – and New Music Strategies [...
Just checking in to say hi
Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:20:38

Hi. How’s it going? I’ve been getting some emails recently from worried New Music Strategies readers. Some of them asking after my health (there’s nothing wrong with my health – but people assume the worst), and others prompting for a return to the blog so they can read more content. It’s been a good couple of [...
This Is Islet: The making of a fan site
Sat, 05 Sep 2009 16:07:00

Islet live. Photo by @edhombre I’m at Un-Convention in Swansea this weekend. Lots of talk with lots of interesting people about the independent and grassroots DIY music sector. It’s held in a cafe/bar called Monkey in the central city, and in the evening, bands play. I’m here with a bunch of people I know from these sorts [...
The Broken Record series
Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:39:28

Goldsmith University MA students Nicolle Smith and Stefan Peters have just finished work on a short web-documentary series called Broken Record. They interviewed me for the series, and there’s a lot of stuff in here that is pertains to my Music As Culture interests and the Deleting Music book as much as it does to the [...
You’re looking at it wrong
Mon, 17 Aug 2009 09:23:28

This great data visualisation from the NY Times comes to us via a really fascinating website called Information is Beautiful. It represents the sales in billions of today’s dollars of the various music formats over time. They claim it represents the dwindling death knell of the music industry. That’s not quite right (even leaving aside the [...