ORWELLIAN MAGIC

The surrealism of the recent “everyday magic” continues. Yesterday on our dear F.a.c.e.b.o.o.k I posted a video sent to me by a friend. It was a live interview of a nobel prize laureate Dr. Luc Antoine Montagnier on French TV. He was a recipient of the prestigious (or what I still believe is prestigious, although after what happened I may be wrong according to the “higher experts”). It was subtitled in Serbian.

I watched the whole thing as this was closely related to a video called P.l.a.n.d.e.m.i.c. I posted a day earlier, and which got deleted a few hours later. I spell it this way hoping it will escape the automatic censorship that keeps cutting it off. In the latter video Dr. Judy Mikovits was mentioning Dr. Montagnier, who in his live appearance was explaining exactly what Dr. Judy was talking in her interview.

A few hours later, I saw that my post was edited and the result you see at the top of this writing.

To say the least, this was a shock. Although I’m aware of the existence of censorship and self censorship on every level of society, I was left choked.

And I still am writing this.

Look at it, please.

It says:

"False information.

Checked by independent fact-checkers.

See why."

There was a flood of questions in my head seeing this.

Who can possibly think that they can judge what facts are right and wrong? Only extremely arrogant people, or people who are well paid to follow the ruling agenda.

This nobel prize winner was born in 1932. He is basically at the end of his life. Do they really think that someone of that age and reputation would risk sitting in front of a live audience and lie about his experiments and findings? What can he gain by this? If anything, he can only gain notoriety. Which is obviously already happening. Yet, he is still standing behind his words.

Who dares to call it false? He was not talking about abstract ideas, but his research, experiments, and findings that led him to certain conclusions that contradict mainstream science. Why is this something that shouldn’t be shown to everybody?

Why is a different opinion not allowed today?

They asked me to “See why”. How arrogant! How disrespectful! How demining!

They really think that they know better than others what is correct and what is not. Are we all deplorables if we dare to search for some other truth? Looks like we are. We are incapable of making our own decisions and conclusions!

We need to be told what to believe.

Just a thought of this makes me desperate. It’s maddening. It’s mad. It’s insane.

Let’s put the content of this video aside. Whether you believe it or not it’s your business and it should be your choice. But not being able to voice another opinion is frightening.

Not being allowed to see another side is beyond controlling.

It's a dictatorship.

And that’s what it seems we live in. All wrapped in smiles, fake pretence, empty flatterings.

This is just another example of blatant bullying people into submission of believing what “They” want you to believe. No wonder people are afraid to voice their opinions if they are even remotely different from the mainstream. All those self proclaimed sophisticated, yet brain washed, individuals who don’t even realise that’s what they are.

That’s what’s most frightening in all of this.

If I was talking about pot and getting high, people would jump on it like there is no tomorrow. Because it’s one of the safest, politically correct, concepts in today’s world. Hardly anybody would bully you into believing it’s not right.

You dare to go against the grain, to try to show another side - God help you!.

Bad boy! You are stupid. You are not supposed to do that. Be good. Submit. That’s what I feel reading that text in the image.

How can anybody feel that this is in any way right? This is the most disheartening question I have about this topic. Where did we lose a sense of objectivity?

We need the opposite side to be objective.

However, the world is becoming one sided.

Extremist leftist pretending they know it all.

Passive aggressives who want to impose it upon you.

Self destructive, blind, non-commonsensical political correctness.

Accusational.

Arrogant.

Lost.

But they can never silence the music from the balconies.

Never.

No matter how hard they try.

CONTROLLING THE CORRONATIVE

My blog says it’s about everyday magic.

These days the magic is so extreme that it’s turned surreal!

Controlling the narrative was a concept I thought I brought with me from the former communist Yugoslavia. We all know how heavily the communist machine works. Turns out, every system works supported by that same machine.

Only here, it’s wrapped in shinier paper.

The package is quite simple. You have a ruling party that over the decades has developed a support system of acceptable rules disseminated by a web of media and judiciary. Basically. Their competition / opposition is so weak and, no matter what promises they make, they always turn pretty much the same way as their predecessors.

So this keeps going on and on. Eventually, people lose sense of what the real differences are and start believing what the majority believes. Add to that a constant campaign about political correctness, plus a natural need for people to flow down the stream and feel they belong to the same main group, you get a perfect soil to plant ever so subtle control.

I met a stranger today, and after a couple sentences, he says he is beginning to get tired of this isolation and quarantine. He is meeting with his extended family after work, no matter what.

“This is way too fishy what’s going on”, he says.

And I realised, I’m not the only one who feels the same.

It was almost too easy to get us all locked up.

As if somebody just screamed “Virus!”, and we all ducked and froze.

The whole world froze!

At first, it was kind of making sense. Protect the elderly, The invisible threat of people not having symptoms overnight became so intense that we forgot that only yesterday we were walking and dealing with the same people we now avoid so fearfully! We stopped visiting with our family members the next morning, although we were hanging with them every day before that and nobody was in a senior’s home or even travelling recently.

The idea of not overwhelming our healthcare system with predictions that EVERYONE will be infected very soon seemed very real. And kept being repeated day after day. Nobody was even wondering how it is that we, as one of the top ten richest countries in the world, have to depend on China for protective face masks. Put aside the surreal fact that we didn’t make them, but we didn’t even have enough!

And then the respirators. We needed hundreds of thousands, even millions, as predictions kept coming about millions who will need them. But none of that materialized. And, I know, you will say because we all followed the rules, and we are all in this together.

That may be true, but still, a question remains, why were we not ready?

Are we going to be not ready for the next one that is just around the corner? Inevitably.

Today I had to go to the Saint Paul’s hospital in Vancouver for a heart test that was postponed because of the pandemic. The hospital was eerily empty. The medical staff had only me to deal with. There were empty beds everywhere. There were only four of us I counted walking the hallways.

It just didn't make sense to me.

As I am, obviously if you’ve just read this far, one of those who don’t slide down the stream with everybody, at least not all the time, I tend to look for other information, for other points of view, so I can make the most sense of everything. These days it’s extremely hard to even have a different opinion! And control of information is becoming surreal too.

There was a video on u t.u.b.e a few days ago with two doctors from California who own seven medical practices. The local media was interviewing them, and if you were patient enough to watch the whole thing, you’d be at least puzzled, if not shocked by the amount of facts these guys were presenting and questioning. The data they were presenting was completely opposite from the main narrative. The video got viral and in a day got over a million and a half views.

It got deleted!

Because it was presenting an “alternative” view of reality that didn’t fit the acceptable narrative.

Now, you can think whatever you wish about the video if you have watched it, agree or disagree, but you have to be suspicious about this kind of control. To me, it was clear that somebody didn’t like the truth they were exposing, but even if you don’t believe it, don’t you think it’s too much to remove the freedom of deciding what YOU want to believe?

There was another example, even more blatant. A video about a woman, a doctor, who is exposing, fact after fact, from her own experience that included a five day jail time just because she was having a different point of view and exposing the corruption of the leading medical expert who has been all over the news on a daily basis since this started. The video keeps getting deleted although people keep reposting it!

You may say it’s conspiracy theory, it’s lies, it’s this and that, and that’s ok. But we should all agree that it’s not ok to censor different points of view. This is scary. You are not allowed to say anything that contravenes what the majority thinks.

You will be bullied into submission.

You will be forced to go into the closet with your ideas.

What’s even scarier to me is how willingly people accept all of that control.

One of the most recent examples of controlling the narrative was with our Premier who openly supported a corrupted corporation, and after some short time he started refusing to talk about it and answer questions that kept coming. This was very strategically done so the talk about it all had subsided just in time with the election.

Which he won again!

The machine knows exactly what to do and how much. They perfectly know how busy everybody is so not many people have time nor desire to dig deeper then the newspaper titles. They know how to manipulate the interpretations of whatever their opposition does. They serve their agenda, and they are ready to accuse anybody of exactly what they are actually doing behind the curtain.

And I don’t know what the solution for this is. Are we all lost? Is there a way out? Can we actually get out of all of this? Not just the pandemic, but the subtle control that keeps gripping.

I just know it’s not right.

It’s way beyond magical.

It’s getting grotesque.

And I pray people will wake up.

Wake up with the music I still hear.

From the balconies of the better world.

OCCUPY YOUR MUSIC FINAL CHAPTER - or whatever!

My last post was almost full five years ago.

Silence in my head.

Where did the years go?

In questioning this topic.

In pondering beyond it.

In dissapointments about it.

In further disilllusionment.

In persistant optimism.

In love, inspite of everything.

I'm not jaded, to my own surprise. I understand that the "Change is the only constant", and I truly think I swim in those waters quite well. Every once in a while I get reminded about the absurdity of things, especially about the music industry, but now I just shake my head and keep going.

Today I realise it took years to get to that!

I ask myself often what the point of all of this is? Is it likes, is it comments, is it the number of people who will read it (or not)?

None of it.

The point is simply writing. If it was ever anything else, now it's clear that writing is an essential part of what I need to do to feel alive. To dig deeper. To come to conclusions and understandings.

To feel.

I just finished rewriting (digitizing) two notebooks of diaries I was taking throughout the 90s, back in Serbia and very shortly after I moved to Canada. In this process I went through organizing chronologically all the letters I have from my closest friends, family - present and past. They will all be a part of the book I have been working on in the last years.

What a revelation that was! I think everybody should write. All the time. Everything. There is something magical about catching the moment, the feel, the emotion, the ever seemingly insignificant events, and re-experiencing them with your new age years after.

Back to the music.

Recently I have been approached by yet another desperate music service company that works on organizing gigs. Quite big, throughout Canada. Perhaps in the USA as well. The owner wanted to talk with me personally over the phone. Over the years I've learnt not to be overly surprised, but this left me quite curious, I must say.

He asks if I still write music. We have been in touch once some years ago. Am I planing to release something soon? He wants to talk about what my plans are, and what I'm looking for at this time of my (non existent) music career. I go into details about what I work on, how many projects are on the go and such.

What exactly my needs are at the moment. He really wants to know.

I tell him that it's extremely hard at my age to attract musicians if there is no paid gigs lined up. It's true. When you are in your twenties things happen with love and enthusiasm around the common cause, you are living your school years, life is less structured, dreams are way huge, there is way more opportunities and time to connect with similar souls.

Not when you are 55!

He listens intently. I can see him nodding behind the wireless tower.

I tell him if I had a lineup of gigs I can present to the pro musicians I have access to, I could get a very good band ready in a few days, and he seems to have the exact opportunity for that.

It would work perfectly. I get the musicians the paid gigs, he gets a good, reliable band, with almost unlimited access to original songs.

At least for my life span.

In a couple days I received an email from him.

It contains a proposal of a promo package he offers for my new projects.

$3500

It includes articles in two magazines he advertises in his website to the sky and back.

With a bit of online digging, it turns out that the two "prominent" magazines are only online, and administered by his former employee.

At this point I'm not even surprised.

I laugh it off.

The music industry today (or most of it, and most major players in it) is not there for you, the musician. And I don't care anymore if I piss anybody off with this or not. My time in this music industry realm is over, and I will only continue to make music because I have to by my creative nature and love, no matter where it happens to end up.

The major players for the most part are predators. I've been approached by several. They will stream your music for close to nothing, they will even encourage you to give your music for free.

They will make you do everything just so they can come and scoop the honey after all your hard work. If you are lucky you will be one of the handfull of those who make money with your songs, but even then you will get peanuts from millions and millions of streams. You may be lucky to get a bit more with gigs.

With all of that, they will want to mold you into a scheme that fits what they think it works.

I learnt that billboard positions can be paid with packages of $20-$25k, I was promised all american distribution in stores just to be told it didn't work, but asked to pay another $3,000 for the

two small remaining stores somewhere who knows where, while at the same time designing myself the promo sheet! I was tempted to give a song to an american library only to see the agreement I was sent to sign that says they can do whatever they want with the song! No way. And so on. And so on.

And, even though this sounds very harsh, I'm ok with it. They figured it out. Great for them.

I'm even ok with musicians, creators, accepting it and submitting to it.

Change is inevitable. Perhaps, I only had more belief in the power of creators, their pride, their potential fight with the way things were going. But, I was wrong.

And that's ok.

I still have so much love in me that it will never run out. I also still have music, and writing, and so many creative things to keep me happy and alive.
Whether it was approved or not.

The point is creating. 

That's all that matters.

OCCUPY YOUR MUSIC - Part 8a

Reverbnation conclusion - and kudos to Taylor Swift!

First of all, Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!

Before I conclude my experience with Reverbnation, I have to, again, give HUGE kudos to Taylor Swift who in recent battle for us all with Itune Music won a historic battle.

She proved exactly what I've been talking about in this series of my blogs called - Occupy Your Music. She, in case you didn't know, took her last album off the Spotify because she refused to have them use it without the right remuneration, and her CD sales broke all the records! She also refused to give her music to Itune Music for their 30 day free trial without the proper royalties to all the artists. They listened, and at the end changed their initial plan! Now all the artists are receiving the royalties, not only her. This is nothing but revolutionary. And she deserves all respect for her integrity and fight for the importance of music in general.

Now the time will show what the further changes are coming. For this, all of us should step in and start respecting our music more and fight for the right treatment. I can't wait to see what happens next!

Back to the Reverbnation story, as I tried to explain in my last post, my general experience with Reverbnation was positive. For truly free service you really get a lot, tailored to artist needs. However, for anything more substantial (and this is not the fame or fortune! Only a little more listens and comments, fans, and ranking) you still need to spend a lot of time working on your profile.

This work brings me to the main point I want to make about Reverbnation. The ranking system, the way it's working to date, is only based on your hard work. They even state that in their promo. The more you work on your profile, communicate with other fans and artists, send emails, etc - basically the more you bother people in your network, the higher your ranking will be. This is unfortunately NOT a reflection of your music and profile popularity.

Everybody there is working for the same purpose - to bring their ranking higher. Most of the artists there are hardly listening to others, unless you beg them or drag them to your profile to do it, which is in my view not the way. You can, for example, get ten followers from twitter in a day, and if it's linked to your profile it will directly influence your ranking to put it to #1 in your category, although those people never even check your profile, not to mention listen to your music! This should somehow change, but given that most people online are there for their own self promotion, I don't really believe much can be done to change it.

Another thing that I have to add that I'm noticing is that slowly what once was completely free, now has a price! This seems to be the direction where most of similar services are targeted to. First they start truly free, and then it all changes. On Reverbnation, submitting to the opportunities was free, now you have to pay the basic plan for that! I am curious to see how much the public will be patient to sustain that and remain on their sites.

Over time, it has become the least of my concern how high my profile in their ranking is. What is good though is the opportunity to connect with people, promote your gigs, share songs and videos, and if you really have time, to listen to other artist's music. It is mind boggling how much good music is out there, unfortunately, music that will never have a chance to get to a place it really deserves. Why? I will try to explain that in my next post...

Thanks for reading...

OCCUPY YOUR MUSIC - Part 8: REVERBNATION

Reverbnation has been a bit of a different story. The PR company I was involved with at the beginning of my CD promotion effort had created my profile on there. It still took some work on my part to add the images, logos, and customize the profile. For the basic service free of charge one gets what appears to be more than from any other online service in terms of exposure, connections, gig opportunities, song submission opportunities of various kinds, promotion tools, distribution etc. 

This is the only website that keeps working for you even if you are not making direct presence. As long as your site, Facebook profile, blog, and Twitter profile you are working on even somewhat regularly are synced to your Reverbnation profile, you will see the number of visitors, fans, song listens slowly and steadily growing. But don’t get your hopes too high: this will not make you famous. And Reverbnation will still make way more money off of your free music than yourself. However, your odds are a bit better with this service.

The Reverbnation team appears to work pretty hard on creating opportunities for every musician. You get regular opportunity emails and you can apply to them right from your phone, most of them for free. The odds are very slim something will actually work, but it’s better than nothing right? From their free app you can keep your profile up to date and do the most of what the service offers where ever you are. Check and reply to emails, fan back your new fans, listen to other artist’s music, add shows, add songs, photos, videos, check the stats, and much more. 

From your home computer you can use their free gadgets like player, mailing list signup, video player, shows, free download etc. and place them on your main website, blog, Facebook profile etc. It’s quite smooth and slick and worth a try. Be careful what songs you are posting though. My suggestion is to post experiments, demos, songs that are not too important to you, especially not songs that you published on CDs! It’s proven that giving your published music for free will reduce the number of sales – if you at all have them already! Don’t get the U2 full you. They can give away a whole album through Apple – for a limited time, but be sure that they will make up for it in concert sales and later in CD sales because of the enormity of their popularity. The concert prices are now getting ridiculously high. In Vancouver, the biggest names in the music industry are selling regular tickets from $300 and up! Gone are the days of $40, $50, or even $90. Of course people don’t want to buy CDs anymore when they can stream the same music for almost nothing if they are doing it legally. The only way the music industry figures it can still make money is through inflating the ticket prices.

For us mortals, the only way we can retain some respect for our music is if we are not giving it away. At least we need to make a real careful selection of what we are going to give away. 

OCCUPY YOUR MUSIC – Part 7: ONLINE PUBLIC RELATION COMPANIES

One good thing that MySpace had brought about was getting me in touch with a Canadian fellow artist from Toronto who recommended CyberPR Public Relations  company from New York. The artist had told me that since he hired them, his online presence had flourished to the point he couldn’t believe the difference. That immediately caught my attention. I checked their website, and soon I was in their hands. Only later did I recognized some major differences between me and that particular artist, and about the real reasons for his success. However, I still feel the move to hire the CYBERPR was very beneficial.

The company works on your social media presence, promotion of your music, and overall your product branding. They create your profile on their server that is available to all of their professional contacts including other artists, bloggers, podcasters etc. They also create your RPK that you can link to your website so it’s available to interested parties. After an interview over the phone, they create your artist bio. For this you will have to be available at the agreed time to conduct an interview. For the RPK you need to provide photos for the album and yourself, basic info about your music and CD and the pitch, some digital recordings for podcasters and internet radio stations, and to provide as many songs as possible. I’m glad I provided only 6 as initially I considered providing all! If I was doing this now, I would have provided only partial songs, but I will explain this later.

If you haven’t done it already, they would make your Facebook, MySpace, LastFm, Soundcloud, and Flicker (or similar) profiles and they will keep them pretty active for you. They will also keep pushing you to start and maintain your own blog. Your involvement is obviously constantly required. So, pretty soon, my initial 1.5 hours a day turned into whole evenings of doing online promo! For a while it was interesting as it was bringing some results, but later it became obvious that this kind of involvement will not be able to last.

In any case, it was very beneficial. Soon I started getting more Facebook likes, requests for podcasts, an internet radio station had contacted me to present my song “Sonny” with a live interview, one podcast selected my song “You and I instrumental” as the best in 2010, and as the culmination of it all, a UK blog “For Folk’s Sake” had reviewed my CD and selected it in top 10 discoveries of 2010.

This whole experience of course brought some interesting twists. Very quickly after I joined CyberPR, a podcaster has contacted me complimenting me on my music and requesting a song to be placed on his podcast. I naturally accepted. A few days later he contacted me telling me that he liked my music so much that he hacked into CD Baby site and my page there, and downloaded all my songs! His excuse was that since he was in South Korea or something like that, CD Baby was not allowing him to purchase anything – so he hacked into it! I was shocked. The fact that he liked my music so much he wanted to have it didn’t impress me. I told him he could have asked me to send him a copy (and I wouldn’t even charge him) would be much more flattering than having him steal it. It didn’t seem to faze him at all. 

Another episode was with a podcaster who selected my song as one of the best that year. This was flattering, however, I found his podcasts on sale on ITunes with no remuneration to the artists or even mention about them!

The third episode was with my song “Sonny” that was posted on a website and offered for free without even consulting me about it! After I had a talk with the CyberPR team, they had removed the song, but couldn’t understand why I’m at all upset about it! No, I don’t believe in giving the art for free. It takes a lot of talent and sweat to produce it, and regardless of personal taste, it deserves respect and recognition. In a way, by artists accepting this disrespect as a new reality, we ourselves are creating this massive exploitation of music and art in general, where everybody else is benefiting and making money, in some cases billions – but artists! Read the latest case of Taylor Swift and google about how much artists get from online streaming. You will be shocked, and probably disgusted about it as well… 

The last thing was about the bio. I only got really bad reviews about it. My feeling was that it had been done too quickly, with not much thought, with the structure that was not fitting the accepted norm as I had learnt after my research, but I went with it thinking they should know what works. It didin’t  work, and finally after too many complaints I had to abandon it and create my own. 

While I was with CyberPR, I was at the same time with CTW Promotions, and the Cyber team couldn’t understand how come my number of friends keeps growing so rapidly in comparison to their other clients. This proved to me that only if you have someone or some company working on it daily, you will get more significant results. Even with that, the success rate is very much under question. As I got laid off, I had to discontinue not only CTW Promotions but CyberPR services as well, and eventually it all stopped. After the initial contract, you are offered a monthly service that was at the time about $250. From this perspective I’m not sure that would be money best spent, as all in all, the online promotion could be useful, but is not crucial. For real success, it still seems, the old fashioned leg work still works the best. 

I would like to give you latest example from my experience: Since the backup vocals are very important in my music, realizing that hiring them every time is not feasible, I came across a choir which performed at a concert I was attending with the bass player in my band. I’ve always been interested in singing in choirs but to that point none triggered my attention. The ones that did were usually requiring reading notes which I don’t - so naturally I never attempted trying to get into those. This one was more relaxed, yet still with some serious repertoire that would give me both training for my vocal chords and keep me educated about music in general. So I eventually joined them. I’ve already got not only interest from fellow singers to help me with the backup vocals, but to attend my every performance. The first one happened just before the holidays, and just by sending one email to everybody (about 25 people in total), I got 4 showing up (4 more stopped by to pick up more people and they ended up drinking too much so couldn’t drive… but that’s another story…). That’s still a pretty good percentage (6.25%). Out of 800 plus people I invited on Facebook, only one had actually shown up! By word of mouth I also invited a few of my closest friends probably about 15 or so, and 5 showed up! About 33%!

When you think about online involvement, you got to consider how much time you are spending on there and what you are actually getting. The more I’ve been doing it, the less I’m convinced it actually helps much.

Back to the artist from the beginning of this Online Public Relations Company story: He was and is a professional musician probably at least in his 50s with at least 30 years of experience in the industry. He has worked with some big names in the industry; he does music and everything around it full time, he has real time connections and fans already. In his case, the online promotion makes sense just to boost his brand, to add to what he already has. Without the real time involvement in his music business, the online presence would do very little for him and for anybody for that matter. The time will come when more and more artist will be waking up to this realization and we will see a decline in artists’ online involvement. Unfortunately, there seam to be a limitless pool of wannabe musicians out there desperate to get their music out so I don’t foresee a disappearance of online music services. I’m only hoping that we will all put the respect of our own music it deserves back, and stop giving it away.

OCCUPY YOUR MUSIC – Part 6: CTW PROMOTION SERVICE

One benefit of joining the Music BC Association was getting a contact of the Conquer The World Promotion Service recommended by them. The service was online promotion on social media like Facebook, Twitter, and such. It’s sad to see that they don’t exist anymore as I can’t find them online. Although the service was pricy, it did work as promised. One of the issues with similar companies is that most don’t really work with real people, don’t create personal contacts, the Likes on Facebook are not real etc. The recommendation by the Music BC proved true, and very soon I started seeing the benefits. The number of MySpace friends started growing very fast. That was very encouraging, especially as the price for the weekly service was $50. I believe I was paying those $200 a month for at least a year if not longer. It was worth it as at the end of that year I had about 60,000 friends on MySpace! And all of them were actually legit. The CTW team had a clear and productive strategy, and I could see them working daily on promoting my music. This reflected on the number of people who accepted the friend request, listened to the music, and liked my Facebook page. If I had not been laid off from my day job at the time, I would have probably continued using their services. I’ve learnt that most artists who used similar services got way better results than the ones who were trying on their own. It requires a lot of work, and a very specific promotion strategy with some automated message generation processes that one is very unlikely to master on their own, unless they focus on that full time.

One relatively minor problem with this was coming from constant changes on social media sites. I figured they make the changes not only to improve on service, but even more so to get people back to their sites to hang there for longer periods of time. Even though I was paying for the service, I still had to spend every once in a while updating my profiles, changing security settings etc, etc. This was at times very frustrating, but not because of the CTW Promotion, only for the strategic changes in social media sites.

For a while after I got laid off I reduced their service to a less expensive package of $20 a week, but I couldn’t sustain that for longer than 6 month so eventually I had to stop. However, I highly recommend similar services, only if they work with real people and not artificially generated numbers. To figure out who is legit and who is not requires some time to research, test, and look for trusting sources of recommendation.

To be continued...