Last Wednesday, I was speaking at a conference at Leeds Metropolitan University. I gave a keynote talk – the usual stuff about how great the changes in the music industry are for musicians etc. – then I did a workshop/brainstorming session on ‘recording and marketing music on zero budget’, which produced some pretty creative thinking from the assembled group.

But it was the last session I want to address here, a panel discussion on ‘how many graduates can the music business accomodate?’. (more…)

I have certain pre-arranged responses to some of the questions and comments I get about my music.

One of my favourites to throw out is to comments like “hey, Steve, you should do a whole ambient record” or “I really like the funky tunes, you should do more of that“, or any other ‘you should‘-type comments. My response is invariably “no, YOU should, cos it’s you that wants to hear it!”
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For a week or so now, it seems like everyone has been talking about Susan Boyle. She’s a 40-something year old woman from lowland Scotland, who went on Britain’s Got Talent – the latest Simon Cowell vehicle – and ‘wowed’ everyone with her unexpectedly amazing voice. (more…)

The title of this post is taken from a book by American futurist and Christian writer , Tom Sine. The thrust of his book is that by chasing ‘stuff’ – bigger/better/faster/more – we end up missing the magic in life, that which we were born to do.

As musicians, the parallels are many – I know so many musicians who are downcast not because their music is in any way ‘bad’ but because in the pursuit of someone else’s idea of what music needs to be in order to succeed, they’ve ended up playing music they have no belief in, love for, or commitment to. (more…)

I asked a question the other day on Twitter, whether or not people thought that music education (in Britain specifically, but Twitter has no national boundaries) was complicit in peddling the myths of fame and superstardom, in collusion with ‘Big Music’ (a few people asked what ‘Big Music‘ meant – I used it in the lineage of terms like ‘Big Tobacco‘, ‘Big Food‘ and ‘Big Pharma‘ to refer to the multinational corporations who operate businesses on an international level making millions and, generally, caring little for much beyond profit margins.)

The reason I asked it is that my own answer to that is very definitely yes. Having been around music schools a lot, and having studied in one, there’s a heck of a lot of talk about ‘the music business’… I’ve even got ScotVec modules in it to tell me that I know all about the workings of the PRS/MCPS/Record Deals/Lawyers etc. (more…)