Last Post D: [here]

Hey guys, this Blog is now dead. I have now moved everything over to my new website at jonnydark.com

My Blog will now be situated here: http://www.jonnydark.com/wordpress

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Jonny

We interrupt this transmission

This is going to be very brief seeing as I need to wake up 3 hours from now. I am going away on Holiday tomorrow and I will be for a while cutting my ties with the internet for the next two weeks. However there are some important announcements to make.

The Album – it’s done. Some physical releases were sold at Summer in the City and they were a great success. I just need to find a way to make them more economically. I also need to make some videos to go with the songs.

I’ll release it online when I get back from Holiday.

Summer in the City – It was awesome. Had so much fun and made some new friends. Sadly I couldn’t make it today as I was packing and getting ready but the first two days were a blast.

The website – I’ll finish it up when I get back from holiday and make it coincide with the album release.

This is probably one of the last blog posts I’ll have on this site as I’ll be moving my blog over to jonnydark.com when I’ve built it. You can expect lots to be happening around the end of August. Now to interrupt this transmission. I need a break.

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Jonny

My Absence from blogging is excusable on the grounds that I was very busy :P

So yeah.

The reason I didn’t update last Sunday was because I was so wound up in producing this damn album thing that I didn’t realised I’d forgotten till Tuesday.

I suppose I should probably say what’s been going on then. Well, as of now the music for the album is almost entirely done. 5 of the 6 essential tracks have been recorded and Stephen is fixing up the sixth. I’ll do two more tracks over Monday and Tuesday; one will be a cleared up version of the love song that I improvised on blogtv, and the other will be an experimental instrumental.

This makes the lineup of tracks (roughly in this order):

Travelling Song

Blue

I Follow my Leader

I Like The Rain

Twenty

Pride & Envy

Sketches

I love you, yes I do

Sketches being the instrumental and Twenty being the new title of what was originally ‘Going on Twenty’. What I’m not sure of is what to call it. ‘How to Be’, ‘Pride & Envy’ and ‘Twenty’ are all options though I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Right now I’m working on the presentation of the album thing. It’s going to be in a small A5 book, instead of the classic jewel case, with pages with lyrics, notes and artwork about each of the songs. Should be cool if I can do it. I’m going to run off about twenty copies to take with me to SiTC, all of which will be hand made. Probably be collectors items one day if I’m ever famous

I had some promo shots done today by an old school friend, he had some impressive kit. I would love to show you but he said he wouldn’t have them available until Tuesday; this is the problem of working with  analogue film.

There was likely more to say but I’m feeling so tired that my brain is steadily ceasing to function. I’ll probs post a quick video at some point this week informing those who don’t stalk me as much about what’s going on (lol jk guys ).

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Oh yeah, every SUNDAY

Yeah, kinda slipped my mind. This is why I’m posting at 4am on Monday

Two things to say really. Firstly that the blogtv show was freaking awesome, thankyou to those who came and watched and chatted with me. My fans are awesome. Also I was featured very briefly until my internet cut out, which was sad but hey ho. Also, I am never doing a 7hour show again. I felt incredibly drained afterwards, in future, probably only three hours at the most but probably more regularly than once every month. Also, definitely want to use the piano again in future, that was a lot of fun

Second thing, now I remember why the hell I said I would post here regularly. I would make sure I was doing something so I had something to talk about. Well this week I started rerecording Going on 20 now called 20 for obvious reasons ;D. I used my new SM57 as well as the condenser mic this time. I was dubious on how much of an improvement it was until I compared it directly to the recording first time round that now seems really boomy, aswell as having shocking vocals. I’m hoping to have that done for the end of this week as well as most of the recording for Pride & Envy

Afterwards that only leaves Travelling Song and another 7th and maybe 8th track. Maybe I’ll do the improvised blogtv love song up properly and shove that on, as well as my version of You Are My Sunshine, even if that is a bit sappy

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Jonny

Back Again (No, really)

I’m pretty much turning into that guy. You know the one who has a blog but every entry seems to be all like ‘I’m sorry I haven’t updated in a while, I’ve been super busy, etc, etc.’ I’ll try to keep better to schedule in future.

Glastonbury

So I went to Glastonbury Festival which was pretty damn awesome actually. Saw a shit-ton of music though unfortunately I was on shift with Oxfam when Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood did their secret acoustic set, kinda gutted about that.

One of the advantages of volunteering a festival is that you arrive earlier and instead of staying in the Oxfam site we went and camped on Big Ground. Here is a photo taken on Tuesday from the campsite the day before the general public were allowed in.So quiet….

You can see the pyramid stage in the distance and there’s hardly anyone around. The next picture was taken less than two hours of the festival being made open to the public.

BAM! Sea of Tents!

I enjoyed Glastonbury a lot more than I did Reading festival last year. The atmosphere was a lot more ‘feel good’ and not nearly as hostile and somewhat hedonistic as at Reading.

I’ve set myself the goal of playing there at some point within the next three years. I think it’s achievable but it’s going to be hard work and I’m going to need the support of my fans to pull it off. However that’s for once the album is finished; speaking of which.

Album

Progress on this has been hindered recently due to me losing my voice and all my gear failing on me at once. However this is now back on track, especially as I now have a brand spanking new Shure SM57; it does the business, it was a worthy investment. Dolphin Music were incredibly helpful and were ever so kind as to send me a new mic stand the next day free of charge when I told them the one they sent me arrived damaged. They’ve consistently given me excellent service and I highly recommend them to anyone looking to purchase music supplies online.

The next post should have more information on how that’s progressing. I’m hoping to have it done before Summer in the City so I can give some physical copies to people who find me. I reckon that’d be a nice idea

Website

Currently paused as I need some more content to go on it first, photos/music etc. Some features I was originally hoping to have are likely going to be scrapped or put on hold for a while due to my own technical limitations, namely the member based social network system. I was kinda biting more than I could chew with the hope that I would be able to learn to chew it, but I think I have to draw the line a bit here. I’ll make a video when that’s all launched.

Videos

With the album steadily shaping up, I’ve been conceiving videos that could go with the songs. Initially I was planning on having a video for every song, but I don’t know how worth it that would be. Perhaps you could let me know what you think? Leave a comment/email me

Other stuff

I saw Air at the HMV Forum this weekend. They were pretty damn awesome but all I could think through the whole set was ‘Damn, I really really want a synthesizer and vocoder.’

I think the next big purchase for me is something like a micoKORG. They look like a barrel of fun. I could then go all Ratatat and industrial rock like. That’d be awesome…

Also I’m going to be doing a blogtv show this Saturday at 12pm. Hopefully I’ll see you all there

Hiatus is over

It’s been a month since I last updated and quite frankly, that is shocking. Let’s bring everything up to date.

My recent lack of posts has been entirely due to having exams, post exam parties and there being nothing else especially interesting to write about. Currently I have a few days of not very much going on until I go to Glastonbury Festival next Tuesday (very very exciting ), after which I will be returning to recording and making videos proper.

Recently I haven’t been able to record stuff due to having a  cold of sorts, shortly followed by hay-fever. As a result my voice is pretty tattered and not really fit for recording. I am still working on the website which I will launch when I’ve finished this record and most recently I’ve been giving my MySpace page a much needed redesign so check back there soon to see what I’ve done with the place.

I will possibly post again this  Sunday but don’t expect anything from me here next week as I won’t be able to get to a computer with me being at a festival and all. I will most likely be tweeting though so feel free to follow me there @jonnydarkmusic

until then

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Thoughts on the album

Hey you know I said that I’d update at some point midweek last Sunday? Yeah turned out that was a big fat lie :/

Sadly right now it’s exam season and I’m finding it hard to get anything music related done. I have however been thinking about how I’m going to release the album/collection of songs that I’m working on, specifically the physical release.

I was thinking about the other day why I don’t buy CDs any more, and the reason was quite obvious. CDs are boring and the first thing I do with them is I rip the music off them and pop it on my iPod and have a flick through the artwork while it’s doing that. However, after it’s on my iPod, I don’t pay much attention to the CD and it usually just sits on my shelf gathering dust.

It makes more sense to buy the digital download and skip the middleman usually because CDs are ultimately boring. This is a stark contrast to vinyl LPs, which regardless of what audiophiles say about their superior sound, feel a lot more special. Even though there isn’t a huge difference in the presentation of vinyl and CDs, they’re both effectively sound storage devices wrapped in artwork, something is lost in translation.

With my release, I want the physical copy to be something special, something unique; it needs to be something that’d you’d be intrigued by and go back to regardless of the music.

I had the idea of maybe presenting the CD in a paperback book, the pages filled with lyrics scribblings, and maybe like a graphic novel of how the album came together and was made. Probably a page aswell that I’d leave blank and just fill in with a personalised drawing or message for whoever bought it so it would be special for them. Buying it would be more like buying an experience than just a collection of music.

It’s all fairly pie in the sky, I don’t know how I’d get the book bound, and I’m not great at drawing comics but I’ll work something out.

Just be patient with me until I finish my exams on the 9th June. After that, my music is getting my full attention

Also I’m 20 in two days, scarey

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Jonny

1000 True Fans

Before I start rambling on about this week’s particular topic, I’d like to apologise for not updating last weekend. Lab report got in the way and before I knew it it was Monday morning. I meant to update throughout the week but never got around to it, however I did do a blogtv show and if you were there, thank you, you made it brilliant.

As for the title, the concept of 1000 true fans is an idea that has been circulating for a while in the collective minds of online music enthusiasts. The basic principle is that in order for a musician to make a living out of their music, they have to have 1000 true fans. A true fan is someone who not only buys all the artist’s music, but also buys the shirts, the special edition CDs, travels from out of town to see you play etc. If you can acquire that many fans then it is possible to make a decent living on their support.

If you look at the maths of this it makes sense. If each of your 1000 fans spends £30 on you a year, that’s a fairly liveable salary of £30,000 , definitely enough to quit your day job over. The tricky part is acquiring those fans. This requires a pretty damn good grasp of social media, and while this is a chore for many, right now I’m quite enjoying it. As of writing I have 1400 subscribers on youtube, though out of those I think only a marginal amount are proper fans, whilst the others are just passive listeners.

This however is what makes blogtv shows so much fun, it’s direct to fan interaction and I’m getting to know my fans as people rather than statistics and it’s an incredibly warming experience. So far I have a handful of true fans; taramaddison, WrongturnRobin, Crubba, FunkiPigeon to name a few. Even so 1000, even 2000 seems like a very achievable number of fans.

The only problem is, I would quite like to be world famous and have 1000-2000 of fans isn’t nearly as glamorous as having hundreds of thousands. That said I think having a small dedicated fanbase is incredibly rewarding, especially in these early stages, and the feedback I get from them is excellent. I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, it really makes what I’m doing feel worthwhile.

I’ll do another post later this week to make up for not posting last Sunday and the brevity of this one.

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Jonny

The Economics of Independent Music

My knowledge of economics isn’t necessarily the best, I am hardly a scholar of it or even a university student of economics. The only qualification I have in the field is my A-level that I got two years ago. However the economics of independent music is something that is both interesting and confusing.

With the album/volume of songs steadily approaching completion I’ve been thinking about how I want market and distribute it but also how to monetise it. Monetise is one of those dirty words around music but as I hope to make a career out of making music, the question has to be dealt with some day.

Music is currently in a transition phase between the old electronic age and the new digital age, moving music online isn’t like the simple format change of vinyl to CD but more like the change from the sheet music printing press to recorded mediums. As a result the economics have completely changed and so I have to change with it.

Zero Scarcity

Economics is the study of the scarcity of resources and how best to use them. The interesting thing is that unlike CDs there is no scarcity at all with on-line music. What is often talked about in economics is the term marginal cost which is simply put ‘how much it would cost to produce one extra unit of the product’

Traditionally a marginal cost curve looks like the figure above. There is the initial cost of producing the first unit, though the next few subsequent units will cost less due to economies of scale hence the dip. If output increases further then the marginal cost will increase due to economic inefficiencies. Output is most efficient at the quantity where the marginal cost is lowest. Almost no company can do this though, as their output is determined by how much the consumer demands. What is interesting though is that the online music marginal cost curve looks nothing like this.

Assuming you put your music online to download, after the cost of the initial production, the marginal cost of any subsequent downloads of the music are zero.  It is for this reason that when people pirate music, it doesn’t feel like stealing, it costs the original artist nothing.

The digital age has resulted in an economics of abundance and so traditional business models need to be rethought. However even though scarcity in recorded music has disappeared, the relative scarcity of good music has increased which is something that I’ll probably talk about later.

Bit of a departure from what I normally blog about but it was something that’s been going round my head. I’ll probably do a few more of these posts, possibly turn it into a youtube video at some point. Let me know what you think though, either leave me a comment or drop me an email at

jonnydarkmusic@googlemail.com

I now have twitter too:

@jonnydarkmusic

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Jonny

Back in Manchester and Recording stuff

I’m now back in Manchester and after about three weeks of mostly working on music and my website, getting back to the grind is proving thoroughly uninspiring. Unfortunately with the end of year exams coming up it’s proving unlikely that I’ll get anything produced over the next few weeks or so. However I was back in London for a few weeks and during those weeks I was able to rerecord blue and I think it sounds pretty spiffy.

Thanks loads to my friend Clare Meyerscough for playing the violins for me, added alot of depth to track. That track is how it will appear on the album thingy, and it’s only up there so I can play with the widget so it might disappear in a week or so. My bandcamp page is fairly secret at the moment, I haven’t announced it on my youtube channel but as you’re cool and read my blog, you get a preview

On a side note, I’m not hugely comfortable calling it an ‘album’ any more. An album implies a single flowing feel and what the artist is currently musing with, not just a collection of songs. Maybe that’s just me.

I finished my side of I Follow my Leader (Previously Follow Your Leader) and sent the tracks over to sherbethead to be made into a fusion masterpiece of sorts. Hopefully that’ll be good in a few weeks.

Currently there are only two tracks left that have no work on them at all so far, so this whole project is nearing completion.

In other news I passed my driving test, go me

See you next week

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Jonny x