I was asked this weekend by someone teaching a course in Digital Musicianship to explain my music distribution strategy and how it developed. Here's the text I just finished for anybody who's interested. Please pardon the informal nature of it...

My strategy... is basically to get my music into as many people's hands as possible without expectations of renumeration. What happened to my wife and I in the early 80's informed the process where I invented the free culture system.

We'd both had to drop out of college, me from Juilliard and Elsie from Pratt because of money problems. We were quite angry about this and started a street art project. This was 1982. At the same time we started showing Elsie's paintings on the street in the West Village, right on Spring Street to be exact in the heart of Soho. We showed these huge paintings with a sign saying, "Not for Sale."

This was pretty shocking to people and we started getting more and more interested in seeing where that could take us. We created series of non-destructive art works in chalk and with rubber stamps and displayed them all over NYC. Eventually, we became so famous (or infamous) that we started a whole mini-art movement in NYC and started receiving death threats... we ended up having to flee NYC, broke and regroup in New Orleans.

In New Orleans we continued giving our art away through the mail art networks. These were exchanges where you'd send a piece of art to somebody and then they'd send you something back. These turned into zines eventually, and from there into multiples and even gallery shows. When the computer networks started up in the early 80's with BBS's it was a natural progression to take our art give-away there.

I was probably the first serious artist to use the BBS system to distribute art, although I'm sure there were a few more; nobody at the time seemed to have come from the street art/mail art networks. I uploaded the score (as a set of GIF images) to my Variations for String Quartet onto a BBS in 1987 which is probably the earliest music give away. I started distributing MIDI files of my pieces around this time. It was very interesting to upload a MIDI file or a graphic and then watch it get uploaded by a fan to another site. At about the same time I started embedding my music into synthesizer patch downloads. I first distributed my Acid Bach series as a component of a synthesizer patch library I created for the purpose of having a compelling download. That is, I designed the patch library so that people would want it and coincidentally listen to my music. This way they'd have a high quality musical experience akin to the MP3 playback today through the use of the same synthesizer.

In the early 90's I started using FTP sites to distribute Postscript files and MP2 and later MP3 files. The first IRCAM website actually distributed for a short time the MIDI file to my piano piece BlueStrider. In 1995, the LA Times, wrote an article saying that David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet had set up a website where he was engaging in guerrilla action to freely distribute contemporary music. I called them up and corrected them - it was me they were writing about and I was only distributing my music that way.

Since then, of course the whole music world is used to free downloads. My strategy has always been that I'd love to sell my music, but I'm more interested in getting new listeners than I am in making a few thousand dollars. I've told people that there is a greater risk that you'll miss 1000 listeners by selling your work than there is a chance of you making $1,000.00. As far as my scores go, I have a few pieces that are published, but I am not that interested in pursuing publishers especially with the risk that they might stymie the discovery of my music or even have them get locked up in limbo. I distribute my PDF files at several different locations and get hundreds of downloads of them a day.

This has still been a fairly risky proposition, but in no way as risky as being unpublished, unheard and ignored. I have to constantly run searches on Google to find performances. I only recently learned of a premiere in New Jersey of my big piano piece BlueStrider last October. I find that some of my MP3 files have lost their indicators of authorship. My quartertone electronic piece, Acid Bach is found all over the web, and is often found without my name. People believe because you give your music away that they can perform it without notifying you.

I keep my music copyrighted with reserved rights and non-derivative rights because I don't want my music to be used in commercials or in any commercial activities. I also sell my scores through Lulu.com and I accept donations. I believe it helps create a more professional appearance in that it suggests supporting the artist and slightly obviates the appearance of being a cultural anarchist.

When you look at the consequences of self-publishing the costs can be quite huge for a successful composer to give their pieces away. When I dropped out of college however, I effectively destroyed any hope of becoming a truly successful composer in America. Without the network of college affiliation, a composer is at a very serious disadvantage. In effect, my pricing is a discount into the advantage my competitors have, that is, I have to compete with well-networked, famous people, thus I have to discount my work in order to garner attention.

Regarding social networks, I was also the first composer to set up online communities in order to promote my new music in general and my work. I helped establish the newsgroup, rec.music.compose in 1991 and was the moderator for comp.music.research for its first 5 years. I established an online community for new music NetNewMusic in 1994, which was basically a links list with forums. I added news feeds and publishing in 2000 and it later became the hugely successful Ning group, NetNewMusic which I was forced to destroy because of trolling and harassment in 2010. I also set up the first websites for the American Music Center, and was webmaster of Sequenza21 between 2005-2009. I set up these networks and participated in them to draw attention to my music. My idea was that if you established yourself as an interesting or provocative person you could draw attention to your music. Today one can use Twitter or Facebook in the same manner.

In the end my philosophy is that my main problem is lack of exposure. I believe that if people knew my music that they'd like to play it. The biggest consequence now is something that everybody suffers from - the lack of both serious criticism and the lack of curation. I get performed between 20-60 times a year all over the world and composers much more famous than I get less performances and more exposure. The network which supports them either through academia or through affiliations with famous composers such as Philip Glass, etc. enable their careers to have a stronger referral and promotional network. It's very hard to generate a 'buzz' without being mentioned in magazines or NPR. I don't know what the answer is except more exposure.

I was lucky enough to get in on this early and make a certain reputation. I recently attended a workshop put on by the American Music Center where representatives from a well known orchestra gave a presentation about developing an online presence. They went on and on about having compelling graphics, about how to submit professional materials - it was all very ordinary and expected. Finally I raised my hands and asked them, "When was the last time your orchestra played a piece that was submitted by email or that you discovered through their website or through social networks?" They looked surprised and honestly confessed, "We have never played a piece that was submitted by email or that we discovered from a composer's website."

From a forum topic at NetNewMusic:

Let's see what they did for us...

1. They destroyed the classical music audience, scaring them away from concert life.
2. They created animosity between performers and us, depriving us of the natural interest performers have in the music of their time.
3. They entrenched themselves into academia, creating a network which now controls, throughout the world, access to performance resources, grants, etc.
4. They created a progressivist attitude which seemingly labels any type of music which comes after them as anti-progressivist, naive, and sentimental.

I'm sure I'm leaving out a few of their great contributions to the world of composing.

So, Cacophonous.org is taking off, getting a few postings and a few downloads. It's being used in ways I didn't at first think was kosher, but have decided, usage is more important than policing abuse. It's weird how setting up these new systems/communities without completely developing expectations about how they'll be used changes their basic concept. I've decided to announce it at various active new music scenes, the microtonal community, the Csound community, Sequenza21. I guess it'll shortly be out of my hands.

If you do use it, please don't abuse it! Thanks!

Cacophonous.org is really getting into shape now. There's a Cacophonous.org Podcast RSS Feed and when you add notes to your del.icio.us entry it now turns links into valid HTML. This will let composers add program style notes to their announcements with links to scores and parts and commentary. The coolest thing about setting up something like this is watching how usage generates new ideas about how the service should be run.

Please visit, listen and add your comments. Unfortunately for the few comments that were there I accidentally deleted them in part of my code tweak. This won't happen too often, I hope! And please, lets keep it down to only new MP3's and not overburden the system. I'm still approving by hand, so they won't get through anyway, hehe... but it's a pain for me. This means, write lots of new music people, so we can aggregate it into oblivion!

Oh yeah, I've also added a XSPF Flash MP3 Streaming Player at the top of the page. If you'd like your MP3's to stream well, of course, keep them encoded 128K or below. And I'm going to try and add those cute little play buttons that Fabricio uses in his GreaseMonkey script next to the MP3 URL's. Any more ideas, please cough them up... Cya at cacophonous.org

Got the parsing and generation of blog entries working this afternoon. Cacophonous.org now periodically grabs and parses the mp3_classical_contemporary tag RSS feed from del.iciou.us and, using the Movable Type reBlog plugin generates blog entries for every new MP3 that is announced over the service. I'll be adding playlist creation and a player shortly. Comments are open, but moderated, so feel free to praise or diss any of the first few announced works.

My provider, doesn't give subdomains except to full packages, so I went ahead and got the cacophonous.org domain too.

The basic principals of the service:

Use del.icio.us to tag URL's for deep-linked (or not so deep-linked) MP3's. You'll need to set up a del.icio.us account which takes approximately 2 seconds. I propose 2 tags for our community, but can envisage a few more:

mp3_classical_contemporary

Whenever a new work is tagged in this fashion, it'll show up for anybody who has subscribed to mp3_classical_contemporary tag in their inbox. You 'post' your MP3 URL and tag it with one of those tags. I'd suggest we begin using it for new works and not for our entire catalogs. Users that want to see these new works can subscribe to these tags in their inbox or the RSS feed at cacophonous.org or by visiting the cacophonous.org website.

Cacophonous.org is basically going to be a addon service provider to the del.icio.us tag feed, for adding comments, and getting the service into full blown activity.

Also, please ignore that default bloggy look at the site. Will be spiffing it up into coolness this weekend.

Full of color and utterly boring... haha your comment, Ian Moss (in a comment at S21), reminded me of the NY Times article this morning about movie flops:

Where Have all the Howlers Gone

But the very worst films achieve a special distinction, soliciting membership in a kind of negative canon, an empyrean of anti-masterpieces. It is this kind of bad movie - the train wreck, the catastrophe, the utter and absolute artistic disaster - that seems to be in short supply.

And this is very bad news. Disasters and masterpieces, after all, often arise from the same impulses: extravagant ambition, irrational risk, pure chutzpah, a synergistic blend of vanity, vision and self-delusion. The tiniest miscalculation on the part of the artist - or of the audience - can mean the
difference between adulation and derision. So in the realm of creative achievement, the worst is not just the opposite of the best, but also
its neighbor.

And another comment Elsie made a few weeks ago, after listening to too much Murail and Hurel, that 'spectralists aren't bungee jumpers.'

And something I say all the time on my blog and in the newsgroups for years it that it is mediocrity that is recognized today, and has always been recognized in the day. Trying to write something different is dangerous and if you depend on your reputation for your $$$, such as most academics do, or even most careerists do, then it is problematic to say, 'ah fuck iit' and write something totally off the wall, disgusting, dirty, or even perfect and clean, but totally true to yourself. That was a decision I made after a family incident... to just go ahead and risk it. Even if it was horrible, eventually something awesome would come out or else I would prove that I do in fact suck. Anything is better than sticking with the tried and true, the muddling middle, the competent and forgettable.

So, I'm starting to see how there's a real need for all types of musicians to have this service. I'm not sure if I want to create a community for commenting on all types of new music, but I think it would be interesting to have hundreds of genre-specific RSS feeds representing announcements of new MP3's as they come online.

I've got a XML-RPC server up and running and am getting to the API. It'll be like a blog ping server where an artist or an OMD or a rep can do a XML submit of the info I need, or a full blown XSPF playlist or fill out a form DIY style.

Comments?

OK, the Cac.ophono.us site is up and I've wired up the del.icio.us feed to one of the columns. This is not even a pre-alpha site yet. Initial ideas are in the previous article, A Proposal for Announcing New Music Recordings on the Net. At the moment, I'm still experimenting with how to auto-generate blog entries from the del.icio.us mp3_classical_contemporary RSS feed. Once that's done and I settle on a look, this should get rolling.

Current plans are:

1. Auto-generate blog entries from new items in the del.icio.us RSS feed.
2. Auto-modify a playlist at Webjay.org which can also serve as a podcast for people that just want to subscribe and watch the new MP3's just drop in.
3. More as I remember/think them up and digest your comments.

What I could really use a hand in is how to make it so that when we do start promoting the service (especially the use of del.icio.us tags) it gets some traction. Am I forgetting anything that would make it more compelling as a new music announcement service? Is requiring a del.icio.us account going to stymie this service? I can certainly use the post to generate new tagged entries, by way of the Cac.ophono.us site or an email list, but I'm afraid that's just inviting spam. Also, there's a real advantage in slowly identifying composers who use the list through their announcements. Del.icio.us allows for subscription to a tag by tagger and that could pave the way for a privileging that could be helpful in maintaing this micro-community service.

I'm thinking of ways to invite the electronic music community, also. That's a can of worm for sure, since every kid with a computer now is a composer. Requiring a del.icio.us account identifier might be key here in keeping the list maintainable and interesting.

I'm leaving comments open here and in the announcement below for the moment, until it gets googled and blog-spammed. Please help me out with your thoughts and ideas. If you're reading this through the New Music ReBlog site, please comment at beepSNORT.

I've got an idea, and I'm working on an implementation, of a generalized way to announce new MP3's on the net. Been thinking for a while, about what a loss of community, the demise of MP3.com was. We've experienced a diaspora of sorts, spread out all over from Ampcast to Download.com. We no longer have any site that welcomes comments or even just pointers to new recordings.

And it's not just the community that's been lost, its the mechanism for attracting the release of new net-distributed recordings. So, a modest proposal is in order.

I'm setting up a new site, which is now up and empty, called Cacophonus. I don't intend to re-create Sequenza21 or even the MP3.com Classical Forum. It's main purpose will be to aggregate new music announcements and at some point, possibly critiques and commentaries in an informal way.

But the first step, that we can all begin doing, so that we can find each other's new recordings is to use del.icio.us to tag URL's for deep-linked (or not so deep-linked) MP3's. You'll need to set up a del.icio.us account which takes approximately 2 seconds. I propose 2 tags for our community, but can envisage a few more:

mp3_classical
mp3_classical_contemporary

Whenever a new work is tagged in this fashion, it'll show up for anybody who has subscribed to mp3_classical_contemporary tag in their inbox. You 'post' your MP3 URL and tag it with one of those tags. I'd suggest we begin using it for new works and not for our entire catalogs. Users that want to see these new works can subscribe to these tags in their inbox.

Example:

del.icio.us mp3_classical_contemporary

Now when, somebody posts a new MP3 URL in this manner, I will see it in my inbox, because I have subscribed to that tag. Notice there is an RSS feed to that page. You can subscribe to that almost as a podcast and that'll play into some of my plans on how to aggregate these announcements and at some point create a comments system.

Nick Didkovsky on the JMSL list reminds us all of Webhamster Henry's Top 10 Imaginary Recordings of 2005. a brilliant spoof/sendup/ideafarm of conceptual possibilities in sonic design.

My favorite...
Return To Sender (Mail Ops, 2005)
Experimental sound artist Holga Becker modded up her Mp3 recorder to run extra slowly, stuck it in a package and mailed it to her self. Hear the sounds of travel, other packages (what's that ticking noise?), sorting machines, mutterings of the postal employees and lots of bumps.