#sousvoice

When you establish your personal brand as a musician, here are a couple of things to keep in mind. 1. More is not always better - Do not overload your audience's newsfeed by feeding irrelevant content that can potentially harm your brand. “Human behavior tells us that this is a more permanent effect than we realize. Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn’t free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit.” 2. The single best way to maintain your reputation is to do things you're proud of - Your reputation is something that you will have to live with in the long term. Therefore, live the life you have taught people to expect from you. “The most important step you can take when entering a new circle, a new field or a new network is to take vivid steps to establish a reputation. This is the new kid who stands up to bully the first day of school or a musician who holds off on a first single until she’s got something to say.” [UPDATE] So, what exactly constitutes a brand value and what does not? “A brand is expectations and promises, That’s what’s of value. When somebody stands for something or an organization stands for something, we expect something. They have a brand value. So the way a human does that is not by social grooming, updating their Twitter account, making sure their Linkedin page is accurate. Your Linkedin page is a signpost, it’s not a brand. Your brand is when you walk into the room, what should people expect? The root of sales is removing fear, social network grooming is hiding, and everybody should blog daily.”

I came across this article on Medium that talks about the evolution of our relationship with music. I was able to resonate with many aspects mentioned including how music always had context and function. While the traditional functions of music such as spiritual, social, and identity building still exist, there is also, another useful function that music is serving us at the moment due to its ubiquitous nature and that is, the activity we are engaged in. “The introduction of the iPod started transforming music consumption into a private experience which allowed people to try out new music genres without worrying about their social image. We are living the age of “I love this music, but at the right moment,” we see the creation of a generation of eclectics that use music in very practical ways, a generation where the mood related to an activity is more important than genre. Need to study? Downtempo or classical. Going to the gym? EDM or hip-hop. Time for cooking? Indie folk or jazz. Going to a party? Techno or trap. In other words, the experience is not in the music itself, but in what we do while-while listening to it. No, it is not music that creates the experience. Music is the background that helps to set the mood. The activity which people are engaging in is what connects people (with themselves or others).” From a personal standpoint, I will have to agree with this new function of music. I choose my playlists mindfully, and that includes both music and podcasts. For example, if I am working out in the gym, I usually listen to new songs, podcasts, and audiobooks as I can pay attention to what I am hearing amidst a monotonous yet significant activity. If I am writing, blogging, or working, I listen to music and podcasts that are already familiar to me. In this case, I don't want to pay too much attention to what I am hearing so I can focus on my work. “For music fans, it’s an essential part of how they live their day-to-day lives. Finding the songs and melodies that speak to them directly and reflect their unique personas isn’t so much a desire, but a need. Music for new generations is not about reflecting their individual personas, but a mirror of the activity he or she is performing. Music was once a question of loyalty and identity. Today it’s a good consumed according to moments. So the musical preferences of these listeners are much more flexible and no longer the reflection of their identities.” Here's how some music businesses have leveraged this idea. “If the tasks we perform during the day are what are going to define what we will listen, and not our musical preference for a particular genre, then we can say that today, Last.fm does not present the musical preferences of its users, but a list of the activities they engage the most in. Spotify’s user experience is built around these two elements because the company understood that its users do not solely use the service for contemplation, but use music as a fuel for another activity.” What does this mean for the future of music? “Whether this new perspective is something wrong or right for music is not up to me (or especially to this article) to say. What is important here is that this revolution cannot be stopped. It is a continuous process of gradual transformation where the individual is in charge. We should analyze it from an evolutionary standpoint where the listener is the conversion agent in a radical change in the human consumption relations. Technology can change people’s behavior, but only if it is the right time for it, in the right context. When technology changes people, it is often not in the ways one might expect. Technology changed the way we listen to music and as a result, we changed the way we feel about it. We should start considering that people are no longer loving music, but that they just like it. Or are even just using it. But what is more important is that only when we understand these changes, will the music industry be able to create services, products and business models that are in tune with this new listener.”

Ever since I got introduced to the idea of minimalism, my perspective on life has changed. That's why the lyrics of the song, Every Little Thing by Peter Doran resonated with me completely. Here're the song's video and lyrics. Hope it resonates with you as well. “Every little thing, you think that you need Every little thing, you think that you need Every little thing that’s just feeding your greed Oh, I bet that you’d be fine without it Every little thing that you’ve gotta have Every little thing that you’ve gotta have That you’ve got to reach for and you’ve got to grab Oh, I bet that you’d be fine without it So tear your eyes away, oh tear your eyes away Every little thing that sparkles and shines Every little thing that sparkles and shines It’s driving you sweetly out of your mind But I bet that you’d be fine without it So tear your eyes away, oh tear your eyes away Every little thing that you’re lusting for Every little thing that you’re lusting for How did you ever get along before Oh, I bet that you were fine without it So tear your eyes away, oh tear your eyes away Before you’re tripping over junk that’s lying scattered on your floor The dusty and discarded toys that don’t shine any more Every one you had to have, every one you swore Would satisfy your greedy heart for now and evermore Every little thing that catches your eye Every little thing that catches your eye Gets under your skin and it won’t be denied Oh, I bet that you’d be fine without it Oh, I bet that you’d be fine without it” — Peter Doran

Doli Sajake Rakhna (DSR) was the first cassette I bought with my pocket money. I must have listened to that entire album around zillion times. I guess I was in the 9th grade then. This album influenced my musical tastes significantly. During those days I used to live in a rented house in Trivandrum with my family. I still remember the then me wearing the brown salwar uniform of Chinmaya Vidyalaya who used to look forward to coming home from school just to listen to the DSR album again. Adolescence is when we slowly start developing our own character, perception, and opinions on certain things in life. The parents' influence start getting less. As I look back, I realize that the kind of music we classify as 'evergreen,' 'old is gold,' and 'timeless' were because we heard them during our formative years. Several beautiful friendships and teenage love lives had developed around these songs. There is definitely a correlation between our inherent music tastes and the music we grew up listening to in our formative years. That could be a reason why many bands go play at college fests in India. It's easier to influence the younger minds with a new type of music. On that note, here is DSR jukebox for you. If you find any value in this blog post, please share this post with ten friends you care about. You can subscribe to the mailing list below. *Email Address Website

We can rephrase the above question as 'how to derive the maximum out of your music listening experience in the digital era.' I came up with this question when I realized how often I have been listening to songs from the 80s and 90s lately, despite the fact that there are plenty of musicians bringing out their original compositions and unique covers these days. So, why this urge to go back in time and listen to those old pieces? Initially, I thought it could be because the old ones were better than today’s songs. That was silly and too easy a conclusion to form. But, the actual reason was that I was seeking for familiarity as it cajoles and comforts me and I am sure many of us seek that from the songs we listen to. Going by this logic, we can derive a few facts about music industry and music listening experience in general: “1. The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now. Soon, the new thing will be better than the old thing will be. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late. Feel free to wax nostalgic about the old thing, but don’t fool yourself into believing it’s going to be here forever. It won’t.” — Seth Godin 2. When we listen to a particular song, our brains are wired to seek for familiarity first. 3. Repetitive listening is the key to understanding a song and derive the maximum out of it. I want to emphasize point no: 3 in this blog post. In this era of music abundance, when we are busy discovering new songs every minute of our online life, how do we actually get to listen to a particular piece of music repetitively. To get hooked on a song we need to introduce a constraint deliberately to our listening experience. One proven limitation is to create a mixtape . That is the primary reason we still go back to songs in the 80s and the 90s. There was a constraint in discovering new songs in the analog era regarding cost, availability, and access. But, not anymore. Here is a mixtape I tried to create for some of my own songs for your repetitive listening experience. If you find any value in this blog post, please share this post with any ten people you care about. You can subscribe to the mailing list below. *Email Address Website

One of my favorite artists in the internet world, Amanda Palmer wrote an article on guardian the other day about how artists and musicians can process grief in today’s age of perfectly filtered selfies. “How, in the age of all this perfect-image-posturing, do we process and grieve? But fundamentally this is what we – as artists – have always done. We take our pain and we transform it into some kind of narrative, some show or story, something … else. We frame our trauma as best we can, and we offer it up. At best, it’s a gift; at worst, it’s a product. And the amount of enduring respect we bestow on our artists seems to be directly proportionate to how well, how authentically, how selflessly, they can take and deliver an emotional selfie like this.” One way musicians can express authentically is through writing songs about human conditions from their own personal experiences and ignoring critics. That is how the songwriting process becomes more meaningful. “I’ve left my most painful experiences untouched in songwriting. The death of my college boyfriend. My brother dying for no good reason when I was 21. The difficulties with bearing children, the deep-dark bloody-womb moments. These things haven’t got songs yet. Maybe I haven’t felt authorized to write them. To be a useful artist, I’m going to simply have to to dig deeper if I want to add anything meaningful to the conversation. And it’s terrifying. All I have to do is close my eyes and see a few YouTube comments ( …flaming narcissist … who fucking cares … how totally tasteless … pure wankery …),but then again, look at Nick. He ignores all that and simply puts it out there, too preoccupied with being authentically in the moment of expression to give a single fuck. We cannot “make sense” of anything, really, although we can plod forth with our stupid little notebooks and paints and guitars, with our pathetically small little mirror-shards of offered reflections to one another, showing the poetic debris we’ve managed to harvest from our suffering.” After all, great works of art serve as reminders about our life. “Art reminds us. That our plans are meaningless. That help is not on the way. That our children can die in our lifetimes. The choice to make art is, indeed, an act of blistering revenge against the nonsensical, cold unfairness of this world. Tragedy strikes. We can close down, or we can keep working on finding a frame in which to house all of this confusion. A black frame, or a white one … any frame at all. We have a choice.” Also, check out a related blog post - Why make art out of pain? If you find any value in this blog post, please share the post with any ten people you care about. You can subscribe to the mailing list below. *Email Address Website