Simon Little

Hello folks

I thought this would be a good time to drop a quick post to let you all know that I have recently made all my solo recordings “pay what you want” on Bandcamp. This means that you can pay whatever you think the music is worth to you. If you want to grab an album for free you can. If you want to make a contribution you can pay whatever you like. A good guide would be around 50p per track but it is entirely up to you.

I currently have three solo records out there and one EP. Many of you will be familiar with my first record Mandala which I put out in 2010. This was the result of my early experiments with live-looping and the culmination of a good few years tinkering with the technology. There are still CDs of Mandala available via Bandcamp for the bargain price of five pounds. If you want one signed, just let me know when you buy the record!

The Rejectamenta EP followed in 2011 as a teaser for the next album. That was always available as PWYW, so I’m guessing if you’ve been following my music you’ll have that one already! This was followed by The Knowledge Of Things To Come later in the year. This record was a lot more glitchy and in your face than Mandala and was a bit more progressive in the use of live looping as a compositional device. No CDs of that one I’m afraid…

And finally we have the ‘acoustic’ album [un]plugged, recorded on that rare breed of instruments; the acoustic bass guitar. I really like this record and whatever shape the next record takes I can imagine it will be along these lines. I went for a far purer sound his time with fewer bells and whistles sonically to let the sound of the instrument shine through. It was pretty well-received when it came out in 2012.

So there you have it. A whole bunch of music for whatever you want to pay for it. About three and a half hours of bassy goodness to rattle your speakers. If you do feel like making a contribution for the records you can rest assured that it all goes back into making more music. Although it doesn’t cost me much financially to put an album together the way I work, the gear is frankly bloody expensive!

So why have I decided to switch to PWYW on Bandcamp at this stage? you may ask. Well a number of artists that I have a lot of respect for have been using this payment model for a number of years now and it’s something I’ve been meaning to try out. It gives  listeners the opportunity to consider the value of the music they listen to and take a punt on something new. All these records are on Spotify too.

So tell your friends that this music is out there. Bandcamp has a plethora of sharing options for you to shout about the music you love so it’s all very easy. And if you do pay something for the music you’ll appear in the ‘supported by’ section directly under the album artwork. If you add a review that’ll pop up too. Bandcamp has become such a fantastic site for artists and fans alike over the last couple of years. In fact I wrote a blog post about the new Fan Pages a little while ago which is worth a quick read if you’re unfamiliar with all the new features. I’m rather proud of how my fan page is coming along!

So go forth people! If you really want to support this music why not buy a CD of Mandala? Christmas will be upon us before you know it! I shall start thinking about the next record. If you have any requests or suggestions, let me know.

Until then…

Whether you’re a music fan or an artist, the brand new fan pages from Bandcamp are really rather exciting.

Now anyone that has bought music via Bandcamp can sign up for a free fan page where they can showcase their music collection and browse the collections of other like-minded music lovers to discover new records. Yet again Bandcamp has come up with a clean, simple and effective system where iTunes has failed. The ill-fated iTunes Ping service lasted all of five minutes with it’s fussy interface and attempt at creating a social network, and now Bandcamp has managed to achieve a fully integrated music recommendation system without detracting from its core values or functionality. Here’s what my fan page looks like today (you can click on the link if you want to follow me!):

As you can see, you get a really straightforward page showcasing the music you’ve bought on Bandcamp. You can show or hide whatever you like on your page, add reviews/comments to albums and select your favourite track for the player. You can follow both artists (which automatically signs you up to their mailing lists and lets you know when they release new records) as well as your friends and other fans so you get notified when they buy new music. And once you’re signed up as a fan, a little thumbnail of your profile picture will appear beneath any album you’ve recently bought on the artist’s page in the ‘supported by‘ section, as will any comments you’ve added as a recommendation.

This new feature has benefits for both fans and artists…

Fans now have access to a great music recommendation and discovery system for all the excellent independent music available via Bandcamp. Since they introduced the Discover feature last June, Bandcamp has steadily improved the way in which new music can be discovered in it’s vast library. Artists have been able to add up to three albums in their recommended section, which now features on their band page:

Fans can now be notified immediately when their favourite artists release new music or their friends buy a new record. And now you can show off your impeccable taste in your own personal corner of Bandcamp, and publicly show your support for your favourite artists. You can see who else has bought a particular record and explore the rest of their collection. There is also now a wishlist which enables you to save albums you’ve found that you might like to come back to and purchase at a later date. All of these functions are presented in the most straightforward way with an excellent UI. Marvellous…

Artists can now engage more with their fans and other artists alike. Fans are incentivised to pay for your music so they feature on your page as supporters and showcase your music in their collection (free downloads don’t offer these possibilities). Your music can now be found via genre and tag searches, artist recommendations and fan pages. You can expand your mailing list as people start following you and automatically gain access to your fanbase when you really need to; when you release new music.

Bandcamp describes the fan accounts as “a social music discovery system based on the high-friction concept of ownership“. The idea being to involve fans at a level greater than simply pressing a ‘Like’ button or scrobbling plays on last.fm, and thus engage more with a sense of community and support for the artists they love.

So in a nutshell, You Need This!!! If you’ve ever bought music via Bandcamp (and hopefully most of you reading this will have bought one of my records at least!) you should sign up for a fan page immediately. It’s dead easy and it gives you instant access to a whole world of music discovery. I’ve already found a few little gems purely through browsing my friend’s collections and the recommended pages of my favourite artists. The worst thing that could happen is that you end up blowing loads of money on some great new music…

If you have yet to use Bandcamp to purchase music, I shall of course suggest checking out my latest solo release [un]plugged and our new trio recording Foreground Music, Vol. I with Jez Carr and Mike Haughton. Of course. What better way to start your collection and connect with other music lovers? Enjoy…

Hello folks,

I had a rather fraught evening last night when I discovered that my lovingly-crafted website front page, with all it’s cunningly placed Bandcamp players, did not display properly on certain mobile devices. Now I am a bit of an Apple fan and thus only tested the page on my iPhone and iPad 2. I have no way of testing it on an Android phone or Opera etc, but seeing as though a huge proportion of us use various “iDevices” to browse the internet I thought this was issue enough to take immediate action.

Yes, I am a big geek and this post might not be of interest to many of you; but if like me you use Bandcamp as the major distributor for your music then this issue may well affect you too. The embeddable players are one of the best features offered by Bandcamp and one of the many reasons I chose to go down that route to distribute my music.

After a bit of digging around and a call for help to the lovely people of Twitter (@basdriver, @solobasssteve and @alunvaughan were all very helpful) I think I discovered the root of the problem. I was using the original Bandcamp embed code, which looks like this:

<object width=”400″ height=”100″ classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0″><param name=”quality” value=”high” /><param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always” /><param name=”allowNetworking” value=”always” /><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent” /><param name=”src” value=”http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer.swf/album=&lt;iframe width=” /><param name=”allownetworking” value=”always” /><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always” /><embed width=”400″ height=”100″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” src=”http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer.swf/album=&lt;iframe width=” quality=”high” allowScriptAccess=”always” allowNetworking=”always” wmode=”transparent” allownetworking=”always” allowscriptaccess=”always” /></object>

Now it looks to me like this contains a Flash player link, which iDevices do not support. Plenty of people have Flash-based websites which simply do not display on iPhones, iPads etc. That would drive me round the bend by the way…

The newer embed codes (and the default code when you click the “Share” button on Bandcamp these days) does not contain a Flash link. They look like this:

<iframe width=”400″ height=”100″ style=”position: relative; display: block; width: 400px; height: 100px;” src=”http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/album=2386594114/size=venti/bgcol=FFFFFF/linkcol=4a4a4a/” allowtransparency=”true” frameborder=”0″><a href=”http://music.simonlittlebass.com/album/the-knowledge-of-things-to-come”>The Knowledge of Things To Come by Simon Little</a></iframe>

So all you need to do is go through your site and replace any old embed codes with the new version. Simple as that really.

Also, in case you wanted to center the player on your page like I did, you’ll need to wrap the embed code with <p align=”center”>code</p>. In case you were wondering…

Sorry for the geekfest, but my previous post on Bandcamp image maps proved rather popular and if I can save you the hour or two of frantic Googling that I experienced last night, my job is done.

Good luck 😉

ps. If you haven’t heard my latest solo album The Knowledge of Things To Come (shame on you), then here is said Bandcamp player in all it’s glory (cunningly centered too by the way!). Feel free to embed it somewhere for your friends and help spread the word. You have instructions now so no excuses…