Friday Music: Aaaand We’re Back!

Style: "fever ray 2"From February 2005 until January 2011, I did a weekly blog entry, presenting what I called “a Mixtape of the Interwebs” — a handful of tracks that I’d discovered via various music blogs, etc., presented for your listening pleasure on a Friday. A lot of people enjoyed that series (and so did I), but as 2011 continued, and I got busier, the stretches between entries got longer and longer. 2012 saw entries that were literally months apart, and then I stopped doing them altogether. I had too much other stuff to do — not just for the blog entries, but for the time taken to find tracks during the week. So I got out of the habit.

I’m starting the habit again, because I realize that I need to make time to do the things I enjoy, purely for the enjoyment’s sake. So here we go. More Friday Music!

This track from 2010 has been getting more notice recently, as the theme tune for The History Channel’s excellent drama series, Vikings. Appropriately enough, it’s by Swedish artist Karin Dreijer Andersson, half of the electronic music duo The Knife, who records solo under the name Fever Ray, pictured above. Fever Ray – “If I Had A Heart.”

I discovered this track after it’s use in a Bacardi commercial — it’s the work of Parov Stelar, an Austrian DJ who specializes in electro, acid jazz, breakbeat and house. This track is a perfect mixture of booty-shaking electro and the retro swing sound of the 1930s. Parov Stelar – “Chambermaid Swing.”

I heard a track via the soundtrack to EA Sport’s FIFA 13, and tracked down the band, who sounded to me a lot like Duran Duran. Young Empires are a Canadian group who describe their music as “World Beat Haute Rock” — World Beat referring to the Latin and African percussion they use, and “Haute Rock” being, in the words of bassist Jacob Palahnuk, “tracks that make you feel wealthy, attractive, powerful; a soundtrack to your haute life.” Which pretty much describes Rio-era Duran Duran pretty well, too. I mean, listen to this — it’s not just me, right? Young Empires – “Rain of Gold.”

From the neo-80s to the actual 80s: I’ve been listening a lot recently to The Ultimate Collection, a Best-Of collection from The Fixx, who were a group whose songs I always really liked, yet I somehow never managed to buy an album. I’ve picked two tracks for your Friday listening — one pretty well-known, one slightly less so (at least in the US).

The well-known track: The Fixx – “Red Skies.”

…and the lesser-known earlier track, a slice of Cold War pessimism: The Fixx – “Stand or Fall.”

Long-time readers will be aware that I’m big fan of hip-hop — and have a special interest in international varieties, where the idea of DIY music, using samples, is filtered through the local culture of the underclass specific to a region (French hip-hop that mixes North African music, for example). Here’s an example of Romanian hip-hop, from Bucharest: Skizzo Skillz – “BINIDITAT (feat. Karie).”

Lastly this week, for no other reason than it’s been noodling around my head a bit, I’ll leave you with a track from perhaps the best Canadian singer-songwriter in the history of Ever. Gordon Lightfoot – “Sundown.”

Enjoy, kids. Back here for more next week. (F’reals, yo.)
 
 

Insurgent Creative: A Marathon, Not A Sprint

Insurgent CreativeOne of the most important things to remember about making a living as an independent creator is that you have to play the “long game.” You need to be strategizing and planning for how things develop over time. To do this successfully, you need as much data as you can gather, which is why I’ve always made sure to recommend those services that give creatives as much information as possible regarding their sales, trending information and more. The more information you have, the better you’re able to plan.

Long-term planning will often mean that you need to have faith in your plan even when it appears not to be working in the short term. This is difficult. Long-time readers will remember that two years ago, I nearly buried my company by shifting to an “app-pricing” model, which completely torpedoed my income. I stuck with it for almost four months, but had to stop because this is my sole income, and I simply could not afford to risk sticking to it in the hope that my plan panned out. If I’d been able to continue would the trend have reversed? I don’t know. I wish I’d been more financially secure and able to continue down that road a bit further, just to see if the data indicated an upward swing.

Jim_ZubJim Zub, creator of the independently-owned comic book series SKULLKICKERS (published by Image) had a similar risk to take. As he details in this excellent blog post, his title amassed a massive amount of debt in the first two quarters of 2011, about which he writes:

We dug into the red aggressively overprinting the first trade paperback to keep it in stock and profits gained from the issues, trade and minuscule digital sales didn’t cover the difference that early into its sales cycle. All in all, we dug down 27% more than we made in the first half of 2011.

For most creators that would’ve been the end of it and that’s totally reasonable. Even with Image covering costs so we didn’t have to spend our own money to print or distribute, the complete lack of profits for 6 months would have sealed the series’ fate. Thankfully, Edwin, Misty and I all have day job income and stuck it out for the long haul.

He and his fellow creators didn’t have to depend on that for their sole income, so they stuck to their plan. The result can be seen in the rest of his post, which should be required reading for any prospective Insurgent Creative: He digs down deep into profitability, costs, trends in physical vs. digital sales and more.

He and his fellow creators treated their efforts as a marathon, not a sprint. And the trends are paying off in the long run — and, in a edit to the post made yesterday, he added a note which indicated that the losses he was seeing in the data weren’t as bad as he had original thought, because more information came in that showed that the numbers didn’t include direct sales via conventions. (Again: More data is a good thing.)

Make your plans. Figure out your long game. Start running your marathon.
 
 

BoardGameGeek Interview

bgg_cornerlogoI didn’t spot this when it went up at the end of March: Steve Donohue (The Other Other Steve) at BoardGameGeek did an interview with me for the site:

Click here to read.

An excerpt:

What was the first project you worked on? What was that like?

My first game design was a “war game” — or rather what I thought was a wargame based on looking at advertisements for Avalon Hill and other publishers in various SF magazines and comics. Using a bunch of Avery labels, I created a “game board” out of the only real-world map I could find at my Grandmother’s house — a map of Canada from an issue of pic535712_tNational Geographic. I came up with a scenario where we’d discovered the Canadians had been tapping into the Alaska pipeline, and so we invaded (naturally). I called the game “Conquer Canada.” I was around 11 or 12. Obviously, it never saw print.

My first commercial release was in 1993 — a small-press science fiction RPG called PERIPHERY: SCIENCE FICTION ROLEPLAYING ON THE EDGE, which was a percentile-based generic space-opera game that I designed and published with several college friends. We only had a print run of about 500 or so copies, but I still occasionally come across one at the GenCon auction.

Check out the rest over at BoardGameGeek.com