Ted Gioia shares the latest installment in his series of essays on “Visionaries of Sound”, this time around about Leo Kofler, a man who Gioia says cured himself with music. At 23 years old, Kofler had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, a disease that killed most of his family. Kofler wasn't really much of singer, is appears, but what he did well was a breathing technique he developed. Kofler would live well into his seventies. Read the interesting story.

Music writer Ted Gioia remembers one essential bit of advice saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre gave him on organizational theory. "He explained that musicians played better when they were happier. Now that was a word I’d never heard in organizational theory class. Giuffre continued to spell it out for me—surprised that I couldn’t figure this out for myself. Didn’t I know that people are always happier when they were with their friends? So group productivity is an easy problem to solve. In other words, if my three best buddies played bongos, kazoo, and bagpipe, that should be my group."

A great video by the touring musician Adam Neely who brings out the pain and stress of having to give away a precious instrument to airline workers and just hope it'll come safe and sound to the destination. Neely gives advice on how to try and protect it, and how to talk to flight attendants in order to have the instrument treated as hand luggage.

"We are waving goodbye to the first 100 years of the music business (from music halls, to radio, MTV and download stores) and racing into what will drive the next 100" - Conrad Withey of the indie-artist service Instrumental, writes in his op-ed for the MBW. He also shares 9 ideas a "modern, data-driven record label founder may want to embrace to free them from the shackles of the past:

No more expensive music videos

No more risky deal

Lower music production costs

No more stressful playlist meetings or New Music Friday-obsession

No more wasted, speculative marketing spend

No expensive office space

No more A&R scouts on your payroll

Don’t worry about reviews

You don’t need to offer an artist tour support – and they certainly don’t need to sign a 360 deal"

Ticket prices for the Taylor Swoift and Bruce Springsteen tours caused an outrage as they went into the four digits. However, as it was investigated by the New York Times, you cas easily get those kind of tickets for $200 or much less. You just have to - be patient "If you want tickets to a big, highly promoted arena show, whether it’s Bruce or Beyoncé, set a budget and register for the sale. If there are tickets you can afford, buy them. If not, log off and bide your time. Decent seats may well be available at better prices when the concert date nears. (Demand is usually highest when tickets first go on sale.) If you register, you’ll generally be notified if more tickets go on sale. Or you can simply set a calendar reminder to check availability as the date approaches."

The Conversation offers a few pieces of advice "if you want to train your musical taste to extend beyond the old favourites of youth:

1. Cultivate different modes of listening including in formal (concerts), focused (solitary), casual (as an accompaniment to other activity) and social settings
2. Make listening habitual
3. Be curious about what you’re listening to. You can help your brain form new patterns by knowing something of the story behind the music
4. Be patient and persistent. Don’t assume because you don’t immediately like an unfamiliar piece that it’s not worth listening to. The more you listen, the better your brain will be at triggering a pleasure response
5. Find a friend to give you recommendations. There’s a good chance you’ll listen to music suggested to you by someone you like and admire
6. Keep listening to the music you love, but be willing to revisit long-held beliefs, particularly if you describe your musical taste in the negative (such as 'I hate jazz'); it’s likely these attitudes will stifle your joy
7. Don’t feel you have to keep up with new music trends. We’ve 1,000 years of music to explore."

Pitchfork suggests "several approaches that ticketing companies, public policy makers, and the music community could follow to make buying concert tickets a slightly less infuriating experience:

• Stagger the presales for big tours
• Abolish surprise fees
• Unwind Ticketmaster’s merger with Live Nation
• Keep resellers in check
• Give artists a choice on dynamic pricing
• Remember the Bandcamp model, and that small can be beautiful."

"Music is one of the most valuable forms of self-expression out there" - Trapital's Dan Runcie insists in his latest memo. He also shares his thoughts on what the music industry can learn from gaming and monetize its popularity:

• Do-it-yourself music sampling - make it easier for fans to remix their own versions of songs, separate the stems, upload their versions to the streaming or short-form video platform of their choice, and ensure that the original artists get paid for the underlying work

• A.I. as a service - I can see software like ChatGPT packaged up as a $10.99 monthly subscription service for songwriters and musicians. Users pay a monthly fee to access their royalty-free music for commercial use

• In-app purchases in digital environments - 23% of Gen Z gamers (and 16% of all gamers) wish they could purchase music they hear in a game or be able to add it to a playlist

Resident Advisor reached out to five web radio stations across the globe - Dublin Digital Radio (ddr.), Rádio Quântica, Oroko in Accra, Skylab in Melbourne and Threads in London - to provide some tips on how to start your own online radio.

A great new episode of How to Get Good at Music - Adam Neely and Elliott Klein discuss the legitimacy of writing your own solo. "Your ability to communicate an idea is based on your confidence in articulating it, and when you write stuff out ahead of time you fill a lot more confident... When you say things in your voice, you have to have your own way of saying things, and the way you develop that is by practicing and writing it out yourself" - Adam shares his advice. The two music experts also suggest you should sometimes fight to keep the imperfections in music.

"Dear, sweet tinnitus — the musician’s curse. Mine is actually pretty manageable most of the time, it comes and goes, and only really kicks off when I am playing live music, which now I come to think of it is most of the time" - Nick Cave answers a fan's question about tinnitus in his Red Hand Files blog. "An ear specialist once told me there was not much I could do other than to ‘love my tinnitus’ — and then charged me three hundred quid" - Cave continue "but, you know, I don’t love my tinnitus, I don’t love my tinnitus at all, it’s a pain in the arse. So, I feel for you, Denise, sitting there in your solitude, with your tinnitus for company, and I don’t really have any advice for you, other than to say, if it is any consolation, that not only my cricket choir is singing, loud and very clear, but Warren’s is too, and Larry’s and Colin’s (Greenwood), and Wendy’s and Janet’s and T Jae’s — all our dreary crickets singing their moronic and endless serenade back to you".

"Be uncompromising in what you’re doing with your music. If you really feel it, then go with that" - Pete ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember shared his career advice with The New Cue. Also, he believes you can't really plan to have a career in music: "Just do what you want to do and maybe later on in the rearview mirror you’ll see it as a career". Kember also says he doesn't really plan to reform Spacemen 3: "There is no reason why every band should reform just because people have gotten into them 30 years later. Careful what you wish for as well. I remember going to see The Velvet Underground when they reformed and I left halfway through. I’m a massive fan but I was just like, ‘Naaaa, I don’t think I need to do this to their memory'".

A fun new video post by Adam Neely with YouTubers giving musical advice to beginners in five words or less. Plenty of advice: listen to various music, practice a lot, love what you do and others will love it too, don't try to please somebody else, and plenty more...

1. STOP TRYING TO MAKE THINGS “GO VIRAL” 

2. ABSOLUTELY NO ONE WANTS YOUR TERRIBLE NFT

3. ARTISTS NEED TO STOP BEING OBSEQUIOUS AROUND DSPS

4. NO MORE THAN 5% OF YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA OUTPUT SHOULD BE SALES MESSAGES 

5. STOP PAYING LIP SERVICE TO “MENTAL HEALTH” 

6. EMPLOY MORE PEOPLE

7. RELEASING MUSIC IS NOT AN AUTOMATIC ENTITLEMENT TO MAKE MONEY

8. STOP CONFLATING A PASSIVE STREAMER WITH SOMEONE WHO WOULD, IN THE OLDEN DAYS, HAVE ACTUALLY BOUGHT YOUR MUSIC

9. PAY ARTISTS AND SONGWRITERS BETTER…

10. … BUT KNOW THAT AN INCREASE IN PAYMENTS IS STILL NOT GOING TO FIX DEEPER POPULARITY PROBLEMS

11. MOST OF YOU HAVE NO BUSINESS BEING IN THE METAVERSE

12. FINALLY HAVE THE GUTS TO INCREASE SUBSCRIPTION STREAMING PRICES 

13. STOP JACKING UP THE PRICE OF VINYL

14. WATCHING TIKTOK IS NOT THE SAME AS A&R

15. ACCEPT THAT NOT ALL MUSICIANS ARE MAKING GREAT ART AND THAT HUGE CLUMPS OF MUSIC RELEASED TODAY IS NOT GREAT ART

16. NO BOX SET SHOULD COST OVER £100

17. STOP SEEING RECORD LABELS AS SOLELY THE ENEMY

18. YOU FORFEIT THE RIGHT TO COMPLAIN ABOUT HOW LITTLE SONGWRITERS GET PAID IF YOU ARE COMPLICIT IN NORMALISING A WORLD WHERE 20 SONGWRITERS ARE BROUGHT IN TO CRAFT A HIT SINGLE

19. STOP MAKING VERBOSE EXCUSES FOR A LACK OF DIVERSITY ON YOUR CONFERENCE PANELS/FESTIVAL BILLS AND INSTEAD SPEND THAT TIME AND ENERGY DOING SOMETHING TO FIX IT

20. PAY FOR THINGS

21. GO TO CONCERTS WITH UNCYNICAL PEOPLE WHO DON’T “WORK IN MUSIC” AND CATCH THE SUPPORT ACT

22. KEEP DIGGING FOR THE THING THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE (AGAIN)

Mehdi Moussaïd, a research scientist in Berlin who studies crowd behavior at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, came up with tips to survive a dangerous crowd situation:

Keep your eyes open for danger signs

Leave as soon as you sense the crowd getting too dense

Stay standing, and don't put a backpack on the ground

Lack of oxygen is the killer in crowds, so preserve space around your chest

Don't push. Move with the crowd

Avoid walls and solid objects

Learn to detect crowd density

If a crowd gets unsafe, look out for others

Video games is a sector which targets fundamentally the same market as music, and has done so outrageously well over the past two decades, Music Business Worldwide argues and looks to find lessons for music. MBW picks out five potential areas:

1. Embracing technology -  every great new technology ultimately expands the market for entertainment

2. Diversity of channels - the increasingly overwhelming dominance of premium streaming means music is well on its way to being effectively a single format business again

3. Proactive marketing at all demographics - music may be universal but only a minority have an active commercial relationship with it

4. Deal with the limitations of exclusive rights - copyright needs to be used to facilitate new ideas, rather than to block them

5. View the consumers as an equal - more than ever, popular culture is about the fan as much as it is about the art itself

6. Music needs to embrace its future - the example of the games business shows the benefits of developing a portfolio of channels to market

Nick Cave shared some advice about aging in his latest blog post, with plenty of charm and wit: "Entering your sixties brings with it a warm and fuzzy feeling of freedom through redundancy, through obsolescence, through living outside of the conversation and forever existing on the wrong end of the stick. What a relief it is to be that mad, embarrassing uncle in the corner of the room, a product of his age, with his loopy ideas about free speech and freedom of expression, with his love of beauty, of humour, chaos, provocation and outrage, of conversation and debate, his adoration of art without dogma, his impatience with the morally obvious, his belief in universal compassion, forgiveness and mercy, in nuance and the shadows, in neutrality and in humanity — ah, beautiful humanity — and in God too, who he thanks for letting him, in these dementing times, be old".

"When you are working with bands, who have no concept of time, you have to have lots of patience. I usually describe my job as 90% sitting in hotels lobbies waiting for people to turn up and 10% photography" - photographer Kevin Cummins says in The New Cue interview. He talks about his 71-track 4CD compilation 'Caught Beneath The Landslide: The Other Side of Britpop and the ‘90s', accompanying his latest photo-book 'While We Were Getting High: Britpop and the ‘90s'. A bit of advice he would give his teenage self - "be confident. Always listen and learn".

To celebrate his 88th birthday, Willie Nelson has shared his 10 rules for life:

1. Stop looking for happiness - you won't find happiness until you stop looking for it
2. Don't blame others
3. Don't let your thought think you
4. Stay out of trees - the wisdom isn't in the whiskey or the smoke
5. You can't make a turd without grease - drink water
6. There's no such thing as normal
7. Know what you value
8. Don't be an asshole
9. You know what's right
10. Set yourself free

"If the Internet existed back when Slayer released their very first album, we would have been destroyed" - speed-metal icons' drummer Dave Lombardo says to Pit's MoshTalks Cover Stories (via Loudwire). "So, today, these days, you have to go with the approach of how we did it back then — we didn't care. We thought it was heavy, we thought it was brutal and evil. It was dark. It had a certain feel to it. And it made all of us happy. It had our stamp of approval" - the drummer continued. Lombardo urges bands to listen to themselves only - "and another thing is bands that feel, 'Oh, no. Our fans won't go for that, because our fans only like us to do this style'. Well, then there's no growth. You're gonna grow stagnant. It's just not gonna evolve if you don't venture out and try new things".

1. Find your first 50 fans - “For us, it’s about, ‘How do we build an authentic audience and grow it very, very organically?’ It’s slow bake versus the microwave”
2. Create inflection points - “It wasn’t one explosive thing that just happened. It was us planting seeds in every place”
3. Form a personal board of directors - the key is finding people who aren’t intimately invested in your journey and can give rational, level-headed advice
4. Remember that there is no shortcut to success - "whatever it is you do, you actually have to do the work. You can’t just talk about it. You can’t be philosophical about it. You have to get the physical work in”
5. Use failure to propel yourself forward - “Failure breeds fear, and fear paralyzes people, which makes you go into a downward spiral. But how can you use that same exact energy to propel your forward?”

When Lady Gaga fired him, Troy Carter turned to Silicon Valley where he invested in Uber, Lyft, Dropbox, Warby Parker, Spotify, Gimlet, and Slack, Trapital reminds.

Award-winning music journalist and analyst shared some advice with Compound Writing on how to stand out, in any business really:

1. You don’t need to beat the industry titans at their own game

2. Whatever the press release says the story is probably isn't - dig deeper

3. People are drowning in information - connect the dots for them

4. Record labels make most of their money from their back catalog of classics - writers should do the same

5. Avoid the temptation to reach everybody - you win by reaching the right people

There are 19 things Brassland label co-founder Alec Hanley would tell people contemplating starting a record label, after running Brassland for 19 years. The Creative Independent shared these.

A lovely interview with Robert Plant in the Spin about his anthology (out today), how his music evolved through time. He shared advice for aspiring musicians: "Keep it light. Keep growing. Keep moving. Keep listening all the time. There’s some spectacular music out and about, and these influences will definitely affect what these kids of the new generations will do. They’ll look back at me and they’ll say, wow… he must have been a musician, too”. 'Nothing Takes the Place of You' is a new song on the anthology - listen below.

"Reading history, literature, poetry, and economics is a pleasure and a necessity; learning how the world works and our relation to it, as banal as it sounds, is an essential component of the writing life" - music writer Alfred Soto shares a bit of advice to music journalists in MJI interview. He also believes blogging still helps, he keeps one - Humanizing the Vacuum.

MusicAlly invited several experts to discuss the business and cultural differences between China and the rest of the world, in order to give insight to foreign artists trying to make it China, or to prepare artists for changes that come afterward in the rest of the world. Plenty of advice: artist branding must hit different touch-points; building a long-term, diversified approach across multiple businesses is essential; music fans quickly – and in the tens of millions – adopt new technologies, new methods of supporting artists or ways of consuming music; the audience seeks a different experience from artists.

Members of the Locust, Slipknot, GWAR, Clinic, and the Residents have shared tips with Spin about getting around with masks in daily life. First advice: make it comfortable; general advice: you’re talking about a few moments of discomfort against the possibility of being dead, it sells itself.

Concerts in video games are more dynamic and immersive than 2D live streams of artists singing to front-facing iPhone cameras - Pitchfork argues in favor of video-game concerts, so they talked to Minecraft festival organizers for some advice. Open Pit is a volunteer-run collective of event organizers who’ve been making virtual festivals in Minecraft since 2018 - Coalchella, Fire Festival, Mine Gala, and Nether Meant. So, why Minecraft - "[it's] is super open—you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. It’s also the best-selling game of all time, so most people either have it or know someone who has it". On the software side - "there’s a lot of custom software that has to be written for the events we throw, but it’s not super difficult to just run your own Minecraft server with some friends". On Fortnite, an event like Travis Scott’s Astronomical has to be run by the developer of Fortnite - "whereas in Minecraft, there’s a lot of flexibility for the community to organize things".

Not all streamed or downloaded music needs to be of low quality - Rolling Stone offers advice on how to get the high-quality resolution. First, you need a good digital analog converter (DAC) - it’s the component that converts digital files into sound. It's there in computers, tablets, phones, TVs, and stereo receivers, but not all of them support high-resolution audio files. Rolling Stone also recommends a few high-resolution streaming services, and places to download high-resolution music.

Denis Ladegaillerie from one of the biggest players in the global record industry, Paris-based Believe shared some advice with Music Business Worldwide for artists waiting in the shadow of the big lockdown: "If you are an artist who is digitally-driven with a very strong fanbase, it’s actually in your interest to release rapidly right now. That’s especially true if you’re an independent artist because, as major labels are postponing a lot of big releases. With fewer new big releases, artists releasing music during a quiet time benefit. If they have strong and engaged fanbases, they benefit even more". Believe’s own, recently-released Creative Marketing Playbook is packed with further guidance for artists right now.