After the crunch

A little while back, I was invited to write a piece for a book that was released this week, called ‘After The Crunch’ – about the ways in which creativity might help Britain emerge from the current economic recession.

My copy of the book arrived in the post today, but the whole thing is free to download. Some really great writers in there, and some of my favourite thinkers about this stuff. It was a real honour to be asked.

They asked for a short essay on the theme, and after a bit of thought, I came up with this:

Special weekend

Owen proudly displays his ‘Other radio stations are shit’ bFM t-shirt

This weekend was quite a treat. A kiwi friend from mine who lives in Chicago came over to Birmingham, in large part to go and see The Specials play in Birmingham.

Owen Harris and I both worked at bFM in the late 80s, and know an awful lot of the same people, but it’s only been in the last year or so, through our mutual appreciation of the Humphreys and Keen record ‘The Overflow’ that we’ve really got to know each other at all – and that’s been all online.

Owen organised the release of the H&K vinyl, and I’m endeavouring to be helpful on the online strategy stuff, though his input has been infinitely more extensive and tangible to date.

He stayed at our place, and I did my best to show him around some of the nicer bits of Birmingham, before we headed off to the Specials (30th anniversary!) gig.

Unpopular in Helsinki

River of ice outside the hotel

I’ve spent the last few days in Helsinki at a music industry conference called Is This It.

Since I’m not that great at mingling (or at least, slow to start), I brought my laptop down to the first networking breakfast session on Friday. Coffee and email, while people settled in around me.

Since the breakfast merged into the keynote presentations, I thought I’d just post interesting bits and pieces from the sessions up to Twitter. I was the only one doing it, by all accounts, and I thought it might be useful.

But very quickly, it became clear that the messages were not those I tend to talk about on my New Music Strategies blog. This was old school stuff, entrenched. And while they were looking for new models, it was like they were looking for different ways to do more or less exactly the same things. And I started to say so.