Matthew Wayne Selznick

In the first half of 2007, I had a short-lived podcast called “Five Minute Memoir.” This show was almost entirely listener-generated: people contributed short vignettes, recollections, formative memories and confessions that were under five minutes in length.

2007 was a busy, hectic year. I didn’t give Five Minute Memoir the attention it deserved, and without promotion, submissions waned. I let the show fade when I took my hiatus from podcasting in late 2007 / early 2008.

Today, I’m open to playing Five Minute Memoir segments on my occasional personal podcast, Sonitotum. For those of you who would like to go back in time and enjoy the original series, each episode of “Five Minute Memoir” is available once again.

I’m not Jewish; all of my grandparents are dead and none of them ever lived in Florida. All the same, I want Barack Obama to win in November. And I would clean the grout from the floor tiles of a freeway rest stop bathroom with my toothbrush if Sarah Silverman asked me to. So, I post this here in the hopes that you will watch.

There are swear words. Be advised.

Listener / reader Marcus Noble was kind enough to include a review of my book, “Brave Men Run — A Novel of the Sovereign Era” in his video blog! Check it out:

Marcus also has a podcast, “Skunk Smells,” and a podcast novel of his own, “The Aurora Hunter,” so you should check that out.

And can we get a little survey going here? Is Marcus Noble the long lost younger brother of Steve Eley? Am I right?

Discuss!

I’ve been on a non-fiction jag lately while I try to work extra-hard on writing fiction. I’m not sure if the two are related or not; it certainly wasn’t intentional.

After reading “Content” by Cory Doctorow, which I reviewed here, I dug into “The Indie Band Survival Guide” by Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan. These two guys are members of Beatnik Turtle, who I met at Dragon*Con in 2007 — so yes, I know and like the authors, and I’m reviewing their book. Disclaimer claimed.

“The Indie Band Survival Guide” covers nearly every angle of being an independent musician in the Information Age, including why your best bet is to be independent. This, as you can imagine, is a viewpoint I share and support. At over three hundred pages and supplemented by a website, the book is chock-full of good advice and pointers to same. Irritatingly, it doesn’t include an index, which is almost inexcusable in a book of this type. “The Indie band Survival Guide” should be the kind of book you refer back to again and again… but who wants to spend time fruitlessly flipping pages for something? If they get a second edition, I really, really hope they include an index.

Despite that shortcoming, I do recommend the book, even if I don’t agree with everything in it. The authors recommend performance rights organizations (with caveats) if an artist wants to take advantage of all possible revenue streams, and I have serious issues with these organizations’ aggressive support of overzealous copyright legislation and market-strangling licensing fees. There’s a tension between profit and innovation, and every musician must decide for themselves what they’re comfortable with.

Right on the heels of “The Indie Band Survival Guide,” I took in “Unmarketable” by Anne Elizabeth Moore. This book, by the founder of Punk Planet and the editor of two volumes of “The Best American Comics,” examines how Big Marketing makes a concerted effort to co-opt the DIY ethic… and how some independent creative people have succumbed willingly and not.

I re-read “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson before I started my non-fiction run. Moore’s book is the real-world mirror of Gibson’s work of marketpunk. Many of the things in Gibson’s book that seemed so plausible to me… well, Moore’s book showed me that was because cutting-edge marketing agencies are already there, doing it all.

Moore details the struggle the independent artist has between maintaining integrity and artistic vision and putting food in their bellies. She also uses examples of campaigns that, to one degree or another, undermined the integrity of independent creative people.

In particular, it was fascinating to read an account of Nike’s unauthorized infringement of Dischord Records‘ iconic Minor Threat album artwork for their “Major Threat” skateboard tour campaign. I remember this debacle… in fact, I was one of thousands of people who wrote nasty letters to Nike and caused the company to withdraw the campaign. Back then, it was a clear-cut case of Big Bad Media running wild over the rights of a small record label with strong ideals and very limited resources. While Nike was, without question, in the wrong, the real story is much more nuanced and complicated.

This, along with examples of “mocketing,” “graffitads,” and “brandalism,” made for a compelling and disturbing read. Though a little dry at times, “Unmarketable” is essential reading.

I got sidetracked this morning, just now, and dug into the download and listening statistics for the music I have available on a pay-what-it’s-worth-to-you model.

Here’s the Top Ten, in order by total streaming listens and downloads:

1. At This Moment: 329
2. Icarus Wises Up: 318
3. In The Afternoon: 271
4. Second “Sister”: 245
5. China Bay: 240
6. Children’s Day: 207
7. It Just Goes To Show: 194
8. 1991 (PIGBAT version): 175
9. Elvis C. (Running Erin version): 171
10. Triple Bind Knot: 170

That’s a total of 2,244 downloads — and this is just the top ten! The number of times these songs were streamed is a tiny 76 — so almost thirty times as many people download the songs as stream them.

On the page for each song, I ask that people “consider contributing an amount proportional to how much you like these songs.” The recommended amount is a dollar. To date, since September of 2006, I have received contributions from three people totaling $60.00 ($57.35 net.) Thank you, Christopher Miller, Andrea Gideon, and Mur Lafferty.

Average income per song from 5,314 total downloads = a fraction over $0.01.

I should probably make clear that I’m not whining! My music, and especially making money from my music, is not the primary focus of this web site or my creative endeavors. I think this stuff is interesting because I like to play with numbers sometimes, and I also try to keep you guys in the loop when it comes to how close I am to being supported by my art. I’ll be doing the same thing with “Brave Men Run” income when I have something interesting to report on that front.

This is a sample of what one can expect if one, very casually and with little fanfare, gradually posts songs from an archive of music of variable fidelity and subjective quality. Honestly, the main reason I post my songs is so they’ll be someplace more or less safe… so it’s pretty awesome that all the songs I’ve posted so far exist on at least 30 and as many as 329 other hard drives!

What I’d like to know, and what is less easy to quantify, is how many people came to my site for the music and found other things, like “Brave Men Run.” I know that the 9th most popular song, “Elvis C.,” was featured on a couple of podcasts, most notably in a pivotal episode of Mur Lafferty’s “Heaven: Earth” podcast novel. I’ve played a couple of these on my own Sonitotum podcast, too. That’s a question for the peanut gallery: how many of you heard my music on a podcast, found it on a website or file-sharing network, and it led you here?