Ground To Zero

Freedom and music

To those people who were shocked by last Thursday’s announcement, rest assured that it was all an April fool’s joke.  To clarify:

• This project is still kicking around and certainly not dead.  Sorry.
• I will not be deleting any unpublished content, in fact I’ve just set up a shiny new QNAP TS-410 Turbo NAS decked out with four WD10EVDS hard drives to handle my storage needs, which should free up space on the iMac for some serious iMovie action.  In non-geek terms: more Ground To Zero jam videos coming eventually, stay tuned.

There were, however, some truths sprinkled amongst my April goofs:

• My gratitude to everyone who has contributed to this project and all of you for following.  Your positive energy is what drives this thing, so for that I thank you all.
• I am focusing on so called “paid endeavours” because the rent doesn’t pay itself, however it is not at the expense of this project, which has always been about the music and never been about the money.
• I do encourage everyone to support artists who embrace the digital culture and not those who make you a criminal for sharing and promoting their music.  Luckily there are a lot of good artists out there to choose from.

So to make up for my bad joke and to share a little positive energy, here’s an interview with Damian Kulash of OK Go, a favourite of Ground To Zero, talking about the band leaving EMI, finding success in the digital age and a look at their latest video clip that has become another internet sensation.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s totally worth watching!

Video courtesy of TWiT.tv

It was an interesting experiment, but sadly it was also a failed experiment and so I regret to announce that the Ground To Zero project is no more. I no longer have the time or the motivation to continue its development and will hereby divert my attention to income-generating activities, including my day job and my cover band.

I would like to thank everyone who participated and contributed their considerable musical talents to make this project so much fun over the last year and a bit. I’m sorry I was only able to make available a small portion of what we created. I will need to delete the rest to make space on my hard drive for afore mentioned paid endeavours, so if there are any videos or songs you want a copy of, please contact me directly in the next few days.

Thanks also to all of you who followed this project’s exploits from the beginning. Your kind words were an immeasurable source of encouragement and I could not have gone on this long without you. I only hope that you continue to support artists who embrace the digital culture and not those who make you a criminal for sharing and promoting their music.

This has been a hard decision, but the fact is that everyone needs to make a living and creating music is not a viable way to do so in this millennium. To those who believe otherwise, I wish you the best of luck and if you find a business model that works for you, let me know.

So long, and all the best.

As a general rule, all news items posted on 1^st of April should always be considered suspect. If you haven’t guessed yet, this was an April fool’s joke. Tune in next time for a better post.

Today we fight back against the Australian government!  What have they done this time?  How about systematically killing live music venues in Victoria!

Here’s a little background from S.L.A.M. (Save Live Australia’s Music), a “non-politically aligned, independent entity made up of musicians and music-lovers”:

In a bid to address street violence, Liquor Licensing Victoria (LLV) has introduced sweeping changes with unintended consequences for the local music scene.

LLV should admit its mistake and make simple changes immediately, acknowledging that there is no link between live music and high risk. The Tote is gone, who’s next?

On 23 February, coinciding with the 34th anniversary of AC/DC’s famous ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top’ film clip shoot down Swanston Street, S.L.A.M. is protesting in support and celebration of Victoria’s music scene, where new liquor licensing laws threaten to pull the plug on live music.

Today is the day people!  If you’re in Melbourne this afternoon and want to show your support (or just hang out with your favourite local musicians), head over to the State Library at 4pm, where they’ll be marching to Parliament House and being generally disgruntled until 7pm 6pm.

I work in the city, so I’m hoping to stop by later on.  I’ll be sure to take some of my usual low-quality Blackberry photos.  Come say hi if you’re there, I’m the one in the brown jumper (because stupid me forgot to bring one of my many local band t-shirts).

Update: as promised, my happy snaps…

You can find more photos from the rally under the “slam” tag on Flickr.

OK, I’ve had my rant about the internet censorship filter and the iiTrial, now it’s time for an update on the Ground To Zero project itself.

Here it is in a nutshell:

We’re back baby, yeah!!

Here it is again in slightly more words:

A sixth jam session was intended for mid 2009, but other commitments demanded attention at the time and unfortunately Ground To Zero lost momentum. The media landscape of course continued to change and I did my best to capture the highlights on our FriendFeed. Lessons were learned, the Ground To Zero concept evolved and pretty soon another decade passed into history. I was keen to get this project rolling again, and so were a lot of people apparently, so it’s about time we break the silence… and by that I mean make some serious noise!

To be more specific:

• Demos from the 2009 jam sessions will finally be released. For real this time. Seriously, I’m editing them right now. Stay tuned.
• There’ll be more rants coming. You’ve been warned.
• A new round of jam sessions have been scheduled, starting this Saturday! We’ll let you know how it goes.

So there it is, lots of stuff happening. Probably a good time to subscribe to our news feed if you haven’t already.  Not into RSS or newsletters?  Fine, we’ll come to you.  We’re on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Myspace, plus I have just carved out territories on Flickr, Vimeo and thesixtyone as well, so friend us up on your favourite sites.

That’s enough words from me, I’ve got videos to edit and jam sessions to organise. Ciao.

As you’ve probably noticed, I’m a bit erratic with the frequency of my blog posts here on Ground To Zero, though hopefully this will change in the new year.  One thing that I am frequently doing though is collecting articles about copyright, record labels, digital media, piracy and all the chaos that has swept over the music industry.  Most of these will likely be the basis for future articles on Ground To Zero.

So why wait for me to concoct another ramble when you can go straight to the source?

Jump into the Ground To Zero room right now on FriendFeed where I’m sharing all the good stuff I find online.  This is as raw as it gets folks!  If you’re not yet a FriendFeed user, it’s free to sign-up and it pulls together all the social networks you already have into one easy location.  There’s already plenty of crazy stuff there, so come share your thoughts and get a taste of what’s to come on Ground To Zero.

Get more of the good stuff in the Ground To Zero room on FriendFeed.

I’ve been sitting back watching the debates over digital piracy for a long time now.  I’ve read the flood of news stories that go by as the RIAA and MPAA fight to keep control over how we “the consumers” can access their products by crippling DVDs, CDs and purchased MP3s with DRM and suing college students in America for sharing copyrighted media.  I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that there is something seriously wrong with this picture.

We live in interesting times.  Artists and corporations that made their fortunes on the decades-old practices of the music industry are scrambling to keep the gravy train flowing, while others take bold leaps into the unknown.  Meanwhile the rest of us are left caught up in the middle… when all we really want is to enjoy good music and movies without the bullshit!

Are you sick of the bullshit too?

Then welcome to Ground To Zero, a site dedicated to cutting through the noise to get to the signal.  I’ve had this idea kicking around in my head for a while, so I’m glad to finally let it out into the wild, for better or worse.  I hope this website can show that, for all the problems digital media has caused for the industry, it also brings a world of exciting new possibilities for artists who are willing to embrace it.  Change can be a scary thing, but the early adapters are already reaping the benefits.  I’ve been particularly fascinated by artists like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails for their experiments into using online distribution in a positive way.  This is a great start, but I think we can take it a lot further.

I’m probably making little sense right now, but I’ll try to expand my thoughts on digital media through this website, as well as bring in your feedback and ideas on this heated subject.  If you like what you read, or even if you disagree, I’d love to read your comments.

Tune in next time for probably a more interesting post.