The Villin Interview with Mark Rushton
And the Thermal Ribbon Printer Arrives
I had an interview published last week at Villin, a very impressive site that curates playlists by Iowa artists and features interviews with them.
If you go through the web site, you can tell it’s a total labor of love. It reminds me of a very-updated and mature-looking presentation of the photocopied “zines” and homemade “cassette compilations” (mixtapes) produced in the 1980s - something that I did back then.
To focus specifically on Iowa-based artists is quite the dedication. It is similar in the dedication that Marc Weidenbaum has to Disquiet.
It’s also the modern-day version of crate digging.
For artists, it’s relatively easy to produce, release, and distribute a recording today, but getting attention continues to be difficult.
Spotify regularly talks in their artist promo materials about how to try to get “fans”, but that’s the wrong word to use. What new artists need are “listeners”. Listeners are different from fans. Listeners are way way way upstream from fans.
As I say in the interview, Spotify neutered “natural discovery” around 2020, and that Apple Music and Amazon Music have never had it. Those companies want you listening to the music that they’re paid to push: “the music you’re told to like”. Because the modern-day "music news” business model is all about producing manufactured controversy for clickbait purposes - it has nothing to do with helping artists, curating their music and promoting it. Or informing the public that the Next Great Thing might only have 12 monthly listeners on Spotify and is playing on Wednesday in the basement of the Unitarian Church on the other side of town.
I’ve rambled here a bit, but I tip my hat to anybody who tries to do identify, help promote, and curate local and regional recording artists. That’s what Bob Dorr did on KUNI Radio for many decades. Bob played me in 2004 after I mailed him a CD. Thanks, Bob!
The Villin interview was tough for me. I spent a lot of time thinking about and crafting the answers. I try to be humorous here and there, but I am very serious about what recording artists should be doing to promote their catalogs, including ignoring things like the “music news”, the manufactured controversy over “per stream rates”, and to block out all the “AI” hype. Modern-day tech is command and control, or is “pay for play”, and has run out of original ideas. Tech does have a proven track record of scams. “Billionaires always need more money…” - that’s a good one. I didn’t come up with that one. Billionaires did. Heh heh…
This week, the thermal ribbon printer I ordered a couple of weeks ago arrived from the other side of the planet.
To say it’s a game-changer for my art is putting it mildly.
Being able to print on my beloved spun-bonded olefin is great! Because I’m able to take photos and render them as low-fi line drawings in software, that expands my subject matter. I can do multiple variations of the same image. It’s not far removed from Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, but just updated to “the way things are done today” (as Andy says in his book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol”), which includes being able to scan and reproduce the artwork in a larger size or to sublimate it on metal.
I am also in the process of modifying the Mark Rushton Gallery. I’ll announce gallery changes in a future email. Teaser: my artwork will become “more affordable” and also “more expensive”.
This week, over at my Playlisting Substack, I published a new playlist called Blurred Life.
What I didn’t say in the post is that these 25 tracks were some of my worst performing music on Spotify. A couple of them only had three or four listens in years. I don’t want my music on Forgetify, so I have to dig into the data and identify these tracks and figure out another way to present them.
Thanks for paying attention, and I’ll be back next week!