Articles

My Ultimately Alternative Relationship with PJ Harvey – Part 3

16 January 2021

I slip out of bed, stagger in the dark, bounce off the door frame to my office, power-up my laptop, stumble to the kitchen, turn on the coffee machine, quickly turn it off, grab a mug from the cupboard, try again.

As much as I’d love to be the kind of person who wakes up beating my chest and singing PJ Harvey’s “Me Jane” to start the day, all I’ve got to motivate me this morning is, “Ahh, coffee.” Which is more than most mornings, at least.

My Ultimately Alternative Relationship with PJ Harvey – Part 2

24 November 2020

“Alternative music is a bit vague,” Adam says.

“Embodies the spirit of alternative?” I ask. This is the first time I’ve been able to meet up with both of my fellow expat friends since the pandemic began.

“Grunge?” Lauren pulls a duck face.

Ghosts of music past aside, genres in almost any media are easy to define, but alternative? Even the Grammy organization has changed the definition a half dozen times since 1991, “as recently as last year,”…

My Ultimately Alternative Relationship with PJ Harvey – Part 1

10 November 2020

“4-Track Demos,” my friend Adam — who used to be semi-obsessed with PJ Harvey — says.

“Yep,” Lauren agrees. “4-Track.”

I’m trying to remember the first PJ Harvey album I ever owned and make the mistake of saying it only included three or four tracks, but 4-Track Demos was released in 1993 and this isn’t it…

Top 5 Reasons Every Band Should Have a Discord Server – CelticWolfTV

21 May 2020

What if I were to tell you about an app that can effectively marry all of your online identities and streamline the way you communicate with your audience – or better yet – how your audience communicates with you?

5 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started My Music Career

17 January 2020

We live in a truly unique time to be musicians. The internet has so dramatically altered the landscape that those who dominated the horizon as recently as a decade ago barely recognise it anymore. I cut my teeth on the music scene back when the social utility of the internet was barely more than a few MySpace pages and MSN screen names, and it was common knowledge that the only way to ‘make it’ in this business was to land a major record deal. To put it simply, it was the kind of pursuit that was regarded as little more than an airy pipe dream, and to believe otherwise was to be very foolish indeed…

5 Things I’ve Learned From Being A Music Curator + One More Thing

20 December 2019

We can learn a lot from every experience we live, sometimes from a good one, other times from a bad one, from stuff we hear or see, from old and new experiences we can understand better or simply get more confused.

This is what I have learned in my small time as a music curator…

Why Be A Music Curator?

7 December 2019

Let’s just start by reminding you that this is just a very personal view on a topic that can embark millions of different perspectives, humans are complex and we’re all moved by different things, but having said that, I thought this was a proper moment to share why I think being a music curator is a great thing to do…

Love Thy Music Curator As Thyself

18 November 2019

Picture this, you are a young aspiring artist and you’ve just gotten your song back from mastering. Now, it’s time to unleash your music to the world so millions can hear it and be dazzled by it. You upload your tune on Spotify and Apple Music through TuneCore, CD Baby or some other aggregator. There’s only one problem. Nobody knows it’s there…

5 Reasons Why I Love Being a Music Curator

13 November 2019

Have you ever gotten praise for your song selections when you blast your playlist through the speakers at a barbecue or in a car full of people?

Isn’t that one of the best feelings ever?

7 Reasons to Hate Music Curators

7 November 2019

I get it.

You have a strong dislike towards Music Curators.

But is it justified?

You notice your eyes twitch every time you check musicto.com for the Track of the Week. Have Music Curators somehow become both the kid you hate – the one who sits like a right angle in front of the class, raising their hand before the question is asked, AND the kid you hate – the one who sits like a protractor in the back of the class, talking noise with their crew about how no one uses geometry in real life?

Fab Four And The Russian Pirates Of Sound

18 May 2019

Did you ever visit St. Petersburg in the early nineties?

If you did, my next question to you is: How many pirate CDs/DVDs did you bring home with you?

Quite a few, no doubt. A box set of the sitcom Friends perhaps? Or Sting’s entire catalog? Or maybe you just bought a few famous CDs like The Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd and Born In The U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen…

From Tin Pan Alley To Spotify: Music And Its Many Formats

10 June 2018

My ten-year-old son asked me the other day which Spotify playlists I listened to when I was a kid. I started laughing and told him that we didn’t have Spotify back then. And since I had just told him a few days before that none of the games he is playing on his iPhone existed when I was younger, he looked at me long and hard and finally asked, “If you didn’t have any of this stuff, what did you guys have on your iPhones then?” I looked at him equally long and finally said, “We didn’t have iPhones.”