Spiti Songs: our latest release has that crazy Himalayan sound

The Spiti Sound: Himalayan tune masters.In 2008 my wife, son and I spent three weeks living amongst a little Tibetan community in the Himalayan village of Tabo, in the Spiti Valley region of India. While there I was approached by a local guesthouse owner, Sonam Tsering, who was active in preserving the traditional and modern music of the Spiti region.

A few years previously, Sonam had ventured down through the high mountain passes with some musical instruments and with two of his friends, Phuntsok Baba and Yashe Phuntsok. They went to a town large enough to have some recording equipment and laid down some tracks — modern Spiti music celebrating some of the cultural and spiritual values of their community.

However, they didn’t have the money to get very many copies of their CD made, and by the time I arrived, Sonam only had one copy left. He was depressed about it because he didn’t know how he would be able to make more copies, and he was worried that the Spiti style of music was threatened with extinction.

Enter Littoral Records!

I made a copy of Sonam’s last CD on my MacBook and took notes while Sonam translated the lyrics and gave me enough background information for some liner notes.

Back in Sydney I created an album cover, an ISBN number and set the album up for sale on Bandcamp at http://thespitisound.bandcamp.com

Bandcamp is a great way to release music that might be of interest to a worldwide audience, but which is never likely to be a Top 20 blockbuster. Bandcamp costs nothing to set up, you get all the proceeds of each sale, and you get to set your own pricing. It takes very little time to set a page up, and Bandcamp scores well on Google searches.

I’ve spent no time marketing the Spiti Sound album but today I’m very happy to announce that Bandcamp has sold the first copy of the album online. Sonam, Phuntsok and Yashe will be receiving 100% of the proceeds and the money will go towards bringing musicians and artists together from all over the Spiti region to share, collaborate and record more Spiti music.

Billboard.com sets 51 years of music charts free! ...sorta.

As the old saying (kinda) goes, “If you love something, set it free. If there’s enough advertising revenue to sustain it, it’ll love you back.” Billboard.com, the originator of the music industry behemoth which is the Hot 100 and Billboard 200 charts, has got-with-the-program and is now offering free access to its complete archive of charts, reports PaidContent.org.

Billboard is betting that its chart archives, free streaming/paid download music from Lala.com and ticketing integration with Ticketmaster will be a big enough draw to keep advertising revenue high. Personally, I doubt it.

First: you’ve got to be global to succeed and Billboard has ignored its substantial global audience and brand by signing up partner services that are geographically restricted to the US domestic marketplace.

Second: to leverage the power and the brand of the Billboard Hot 100 and extend them across the broader interweb, we need to see those rich data archives addressable through an API. Billboard has to get more open and more free, or I predict it will soon drop off its own charts.

Prince’s interactive chart history on Billboard.com. Pretty, and you can link to it or embed it, but you can’t infer anything from it in Excel.