What follows is my reaction to a post by David Kusek entitled Searching for Salvation on the subject of the future of recorded music, and the problems the music industry faces today. He’s running a contest for new business models..   I wrote this in the comment section of his blog, and realized I should probably post it on my blog to.. cause I have this crazy habit of writing comments like this.

I don’t know entirely if I agree that recorded music is dead.. I think what’s dead is the old business models. I also think there’s a lot gong on in the evolution of the kind of technological ecology.. of like.. how people find new music, filters, financing, and whatever.. that needs to happen.. and once it does, the picture will shift a bit more.

I guess I’ve been posting some crazy ass posts while sick, ha? It’s good to post! I encountered this bit of inspiration over at Pluperfecter.. this interview of Steven aka Vaspers the Grate from some 5 years ago.. On the subject of what a blog is.. Steven quoted Doc Searls… a blog post being like an email to the world.. and this thought just sorta inspired me.. should I blog like that? Should I blog as if this were a personal email to the world? Me to you? And you over there as well? 

You know.. I can dig that kinda idea.. like.. I don’t know.. so often there’s all this “how to blog” crap.. smart crap though it can be.. it’s the game of it.. everything from your SEO / SEM / Copywriting, key working, whatever ing..  top 10 lists.. and God knows what else. I mean sure.. it can all be good.. but um.. I don’t know.. I never feel totally comfortable with it.. just as I’ve never felt totally comfortable with best practices.. I’m not trying to refute there utility.. and it’s not that I want to sabotage my own plight.. It’s just that sometimes it feels like just a lot of rubbish to get in the way… You know?

I don’t know.. I feel as if.. on some level.. if I blog there should be some sorta strategery about it.. or some purpose.. some excuse to poor energy into it.. I wonder if I’m adding any value to the world or to anything.. Why am I doing this again? If strategical.. shit, my spell checker didn’t underline that word.. is that a real wold?.. err.. strategical tactical al-tick-al whatever..  el.. Salvador of dolly.. parton.. pardons.. I don’t fucking know.. but just the.. 

Ok.. so there’s an ecosystem that works a certain way.. which causes somethings to rise, somethings to fall.. blah blah blah.. and the el strategic-o tacktic-o is in part born out of a close observation of how all this works and “How you to can be a social media rock star” or at least.. well.. whatever.. and I think all this is important.. and if you have a goal.. and that goal is your success metric.. well.. you ought to adopt all that…

But then I think.. and I think real deeply.. so deeply.. it-id scare your mofo ass.. you know.. like “what’s this life for” deep? Well screw that line of questioning as that make you walk around like a head without a body.. lol, which is to say not walk all that well at all. . No what I’m thinking more is like.. look inward.. Who is you, what is you about? Like really on the super deep levels. Deep enough that you eventually get to darkness and must confess incomplete knowledge on the subject.. and here, if nothing else.. aren’t you supposed to be the supreme grand-poo-bah expert on the subject of who and what you is? And you don’t fucking know? If  you hit rock star big.. good luck to you’re F’n biographers right? 

Yeah, I’d bitch at those vicarious-ism addicts to… which would bring me to this crazy existential question I’ve been pondering lately.. but.. we’ll skip that for now..

I’m thinking about mind mapping the subject.. kinda mandala esk action for yeah.. like what’s all the crap on your mind.. not just consciously.. what are the things you are after.. what’s up with these obsessions of yours.. looking at all the aims you gotz in your life.. map that shit out.. see the cross relationships.. 

So like each thing you do is like a piece of puzzle of a bigger you… a Nietzschean super man quest.. err.. well maybe you’re not that bad ass but.. to one extent or another we are always in a process of waking up to our selves.. and we have.. lets say it is a part of the soul.. a kind of destiny.. that we are always driving towards.. with all our pathology stuff.. conscious or not.. this is what all our impulses are doing.. even if we are tangled in knots and.. our lives a mess.. and whatever else..

So if  you view a blog inside of these terms.. if it, in the biggest of all pictures, is about your becoming.. then it’s success has to do with your becoming’s success.. and that is an utterly different thing from all SEO / SEM, top 10 lists of whatever strategical tactical al-ical of the smart sort… or that is just a part of this larger thing..

A few latter:

Well I gotta work out what I’m going to do with this whole blogging thing.. or it’s on the to do list of stuff to work out.. but I like this idea of the personal email to the world.. and I like the idea of being an anarchist in the writing..  

I’ve been sitting on this name for a good.. I don’t know, maybe 7 years? And so haven’t really mentioned it to anyone.. or not much anyway… and finally I’ve bought the URL, and posted a trailer to the site.. or the site is now a trailer for the future of the site.. or better yet, its a work in progress version of the trailer of the site..  and by work in progress what I really mean is that it’s like.. I’m sitting on my computer in the studio.. working on it, and you come over, peer over my shoulder, and see what’s going on.. and now I’m asking you for feed back.. and I really want it!

So, the site is… drum roll please Bad Sphincter Oedipus. It may take you a moment to decode.. so I’ll help you out.. Bad Sphincter Oedipus, of course, translates to Bad Ass Mother Fucker.. It is somewhat of an homage to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.. The mother’s used to be called just mothers.. for mother fucker, but the label made them change it.. It’s an old term you’ll find in blues meaning someone who can really play “like a mother fucker”.. 

The basic idea of the trailer is that the real site I want to put together will be a lot of work, and its not clear to me exactly when I’ll get through it.. particular as my attention is often on other things.. I wanted to post some content around the Bad Sphincter Oedipus project.. and I felt like I needed to put up the site before I could start posting content.. and then the content would link back to the site.

Ok, lets talk about Matt’s Self Criticism / where I think it needs to go.

1. The Flash movie just loops.. and um.. plays sound, and the user doesn’t really have control over the sound.. this is bad.. though less bad for a band / music site then a conventional site.. but still not good. I’m not quite sure what to do about this.. should I give you youtube like controls where it plays  through once, pauses, and you can replay if you like? Should you have to press a button to make it start?
2. The design really isn’t thought out well. If you don’t watch the Flash movie, you wouldn’t know what the site was, or anything. To this I should add that I think the only way you’d come to this site is from a profile link on ether twitter or Youtube, or from a facebook fan page.. (once they let me set up such a thing, seems like they don’t like the name Sphincter) or whatever it is I set up.. you could see it in other ways, but that’s really what its  there for.
3. It is REALLY just thrown together, not really well designed at all.. as I say, its just a place holder for a site.. but depending on how long I keep it up there, before I get onto replacing it with an actual site… it might not be a bad idea to design it well.

And so, I’m looking for your feed back

What do you think? Do you think it’s bad to throw up a site like this as an interim solution? If I were to make an effort to not just finish this work in progress, but bother to design it right, what do you think I should be thinking about as I design it? Any other thoughts or feedback? Would love and appreciate any feedback anyone might have. 

I don’t know how realistic my video ideas are, or what.. my feeling at this particular moment is.. probably the most important thing is simply to commit to them.. in a long term sorta way.

Ok, here’s the basic deal.. Video is like.. big these days on the internet.. you may have noticed? I’m basically looking at video as packaging for my music.. or as an extension of the experience of my music.. as a part of the art object. I’m really approaching video from a unique sorta aesthetic perspective… 99.9% of all video production today is produced inside of a certain set of conventions that don’t really get pushed all that much. Sure, there’s great video and film work made this way.. This isn’t a giant value judgement about that.. but its also not what I’m seeking to do.. What I’m seeking to do is approach video from a very ART perspective.

At the moment this means.. screwing around.. It’s a combination of exploring certain ideas as they come to you, and trying to learn the tools… At the moment the tool I’m working with is Apple’s Motion… which is a part of Final Cut Studio.. as an aside, its breaking news that a new version has just come out.. but we shant speak about that.

The project started on a sorta doodling branding adventure a few months back.. I was working in Photoshop and Illustrator.. trying to craft out a logo.. based on some sketches I had done.. This also included messing around with photography.. what follows is a part of that project.. as it looked at one moment in time…

 Motion is a motion graphics / animation program.. and one of the things you can do is import photoshop files.. complete with there individual layers.. I did some funky things.. and placed the different layers at different places in space.. to basically turn something like the above image into a 3D image that I could fly the camera around.. and play with various.. well.. ideas.

I’ve been working steadily on this for the last 3 or 4 days; creating these various little psychedelic video clips. The resulting clips seems to be about some kind of exploration of identity and personal branding… or at least that’s what they made me think of.

The idea originally was to simply put out a sorta complicated screen cast of my DAW.. put it on Youtube.. so that I could sorta share what I do in a certain way..  and I figured if I did that.. I’d at least need some sorta titling / motion graphic sequences.. to sorta.. make it look serious.. I may still do this.. I don’t know.. but now I’m thinking of it more like music video elements.. to be sorta remixed together latter on.

There’s a whole sorta visual language.. set of icons.. symbols.. whatever.. that make up the visual identity I plan on making for myself. [editors note: Matt has been working on this language since at least college] It’s something you are much more inclined to read as Fine Art then.. well communications / graphic design.. Though as I elluded to earlier.. I am thinking about this from something of a design perspective.

My kinda goal is to try and produce something that looks like a million bucks.. something that makes you go “wow, that’s fucking cool.” Make something that would seem to have the sorta production values you could expect from the music video of a major label artist.. way back when they had big budgets…. But something totally different.

The hard fact of the matter is I’m early in on learning to do this stuff.. and a great distance from where my ambition is aiming.. and it is not totally clear that I’ll be able to realize these goals I’ve set for myself…

Well.. whatever.. I actually don’t think those kinds of production values are all that important.. I mean they are for my vision.. but I also think if you just do good story telling.. and put together a number of good pieces… I think you really can have something.. so that’s really kinda what its about.. but.. why not aim high?

Are Celebrities Killing Twitter? @repecor of RebeccaCoriliss.com and HubSpot, posed this question on twitter today, with a link to an Advertising Age article: Twitter is Peaking: Get Ready to Follow Geeks Onward, by Steve Rubel.

The article I have problems with on many levels, but the question of how Twitter and Social Media are changing / might be changing.. in light of the explosive growth of Twitter, along with business swarming into social media more generally.. is something I’ve been thinking of a great deal lately.

So.. first off…

Are Celebrities Killing Twitter? 

Steve Rubel asserts… well a number of things. Basically.. there’s a kind of course that online communities follow.. where you have these early adopter folks.. geekdom in technology land, if you will.. whom bring the community to its tipping point.. that, once reached.. community becomes less fashionable, at least.. and so the geek hip move on.. 

But I think twitter is different: It’s different because how communities on twitter work is different.. Each of us follows, and is followed by, a different group of people..  a group we define.. so that the only way my experience of twitter is really changed, by the twitter explosion, is in the character of folks whom start following me.. whom I may or may not choose to follow back.. 

So I guess my point is.. My experience of twitter doesn’t necessarily degrade in anyway as a result of celebrities on Twitter.. or the only way it degrades is as a result of Twitter’s technological problems keeping up with the massive growth.. 

So it’s really a question of substance versus fashion…

I do confess that it’s a very surreal thing to find celebrities, and “old media” folk talking about twitter so much.. not quite “getting it,” and all the rest..  ..and there is something about “old media” talking about twitter that makes twitter seem less cool.. 

I joked on twitter, at some point, that maybe digital natives.. or social media natives.. need better immigration policies.. sorta suggesting that.. the rate of growth is such that the culture we’ve had can’t really assimilate the influx.. that this will likely change the culture. And this is the real thing of why the early adopter / “geek folks” would want to move on.

Still.. there’s something structurally different about twitter and social media then anything we’ve seen in the past.. and I feel a little like Allan Green Span, in the heat of the tech bubble saying “no, the productivity increases we see as a result of the technological revolution is not merely bubble talk.” He was right of course, but many people blame him for not removing the cool-aid..

The structure of social media is still one where, in rather Thomas Friedman esk language, flattens the playing field.. we see huge power diffusion.. the relationship between business and consumer is shifting.. Who knows what the future of journalism and the entertainment industries might look like? Ultimately.. I think we all think that a mass behavioral shift in peoples media consumption patterns.. is a good thing.. The question is just how will all of this play out. 

So will the Geeks leave Twitter?

I think.. the nature of the web 2.0 type technology is such that it’s very low hanging fruit to get started.. a do it in you’re basement while still having a day job kinda thing.. which creates a serious issue of asymmetric competition challenges for the MySpaces, FaceBooks, and Twitters of the world, whom want to maintain there dominance. And.. in a down economy.. more and more developers have more and more basement time.. All of which is good for the evolution of the space.. and difficult for the business of change management..  

In marketing.. there is this sorta metaphorical relationship between.. sex and relations.. with.. trying to get that quick one off sale.. versus building long term customer relationships..

And so it is that I think Mr. Marilyn Manson might have said it best when he said “I’m not in love, but I’m going to fuck you, till someone better comes along.”

Conclusion 

I don’t think Twitter is necessarily really peaking as we speak.. it’s just a new tipping point.. and the real question is how with the structure of the Twitter user experience relate to the tipping. There is a certain level where the “Web 2.0″ technologies aren’t really as Web 2.0 as is generally believed.. which creates an opening for next generation of web apps to come along.

So, we’ll see.