I wanted to continue posting some of my own music, however niche it may be, so here's one more piece of mine called "Too Early".
This track is about the hassle of waking up in the morning. I'm one of those who like my morning to start late, and preferably with a large bucket of very black coffee to go with it. Until I've had my coffee, anything is too early.
This features one of the most amazing and musical drummers I've ever played with, Carsten "Calle" Mathiesen, as well as the fantastic Gunnar Halle on trumpet. I believe we captured the mixed emotions of waking up in the morning, as well as having fun at the same time. A friend of mine very lovingly said once, "Calle, you sound like a sack of potatoes poured out over a drum set." He was not wrong. You be the judge though.
If you want to read a bit about where the inspiration for this particular setting came from, you can take a look at my previous post here. I also wanted to make a slight commentary on the wholly Utopian illusion (yes, I use that term quite deliberately) of "releasing music onto any blockchain will immortalize it". Hopefully, it can spark a bit of discussion if nothing else, so that is below the link. Enjoy!
https://soundcloud.com/johan_norberg/pandoras-box-pandoras-box-03-too-early
When it comes to releasing music into the wild, I quickly came to think that blockchain technology would be "the thing". That, unfortunately, is not the case.
At least, not yet.
Since I posted last time, a surprising number of people got in touch and asked me what alternatives I would be using instead of dsound.
The answer - unfortunately - is centralised options for the time being. Dsound seems, by any stretch of the imagination, abandoned and the owner @prc appears to be MIA. @dsound.team takes a whopping 25% of your beneficiary rewards, which is 15% more than the usual suspects such as dtube, 3speak and other dapps with more or less questionable user-voting practices. Dsound takes it's cut in a similar manner to the other dapps, without telling you (try to find an FAQ) unless you want to trawl at least 6 months back into the blockchain history. Dsound fucks up all your tags, cannot play content older than 6 months or so, does absolutely nothing to deserve those 25% and then conveniently cashes out. A brief investigation on steemd.com or similar is all you need. If the owner is indeed still on this platform, I challenge him to come forth and prove me wrong. I will happily modify any statement here and amend any mistakes and/or misconceptions. I'm more than happy to give dsound the benefit of the doubt, but as things stand, it's on my avoid-at-all-costs-list. An alternative which I had some genuine hopes for was a different platform called #musiccoin, but similar issues seems to plague that.
Until something better shows up, here's my advice.
Go with a centralised option for now, where you can get your exposure the way you want to. Where you can market your music the way you want to, with or without publishers or partners. Even if that means dealing with copyright issues and some company taking a percentage. The decentralised market is full of "post your content here and it's on the blockchain forever"-promises. At least with a centralised platform, you would have a contract and someone covering your back.
Another thing that makes sharing musical content on this platform (or any creative content, really) very difficult, is the inept (yes, inept is the correct word) Steem development and marketing team, which clearly focuses on economics and "advanced" financial mathematics. User-friendliness and promotion of this platform's most obvious advantages, seems so far down the priority list that it surpasses even Facebook when it comes to obtuse fluffy marketing-speak. Here's a newsflash for ya Steem; snarky twitter commentary in the style of "we-already-did-that-on-our-platform-ha-ha" by the official team does not help the platform grow. It only makes you look like ass-hats who are bitter try-hards because someone else is vying for your piece of the cake.
When was the last time the "I did it first"-argument convince you of anything...?
Personell:
Gunnar Halle - trumpet
Anders Banke - tenor saxophone
Johan Norberg - trombone
Johan Segerberg - double bass
Carsten "Calle" Mathiesen - drums
Source notes: Pictures/designs/photographs/music/etc. in this post are by me unless stated otherwise.