Usually, we don’t like to plug specific artists on our blog. Our blog and website is really a place for music fans to hang out and find about the upcoming gigs from various different artists and choose the ones that take their fancy.

However, there are artists who are just awesome, and still resist the urge to join the labels and sign their life away. It’s an uphill road, but one worth taking. Tess Henley and her brother Carson Henley are just two such artists. I have had the pleasure of seeing Tess and Carson perform live myself, and couldn’t believe that they were not signed by a label. Their music is soulful, passionate and vivacious. Their stage presence is fantastic and it’s a real joy to see them live. The BGP and Maggy Ferguson will be performing there as well.

They are performing on October 20th at the famous The Crocodile in Seattle. Rock bands, punk bands, dance bands, jam bands and bands from nearly every other genre you can invent have played at The Croc. I can go on and on about their performance, but why not watch one of Tess’s videos for yourself? You can buy tickets here.

Usually, we tend to write music focussed posts on this blog. But every once in a while, we also write about things that are of interest to us, as well as to the community at large. We have been running gigzee on Ruby on Rails, and like everyone else, we upgraded to Rails 2.3 a few weeks ago. We also use a customized version of the acts_as_favorite plugin internally to track which artists, gigs and venues people like. So, it was very disconcerting when after the upgrade the acts_as_favorite plugin stopped working for us. Worse, since user favorites is a central theme of our website, it pretty much brought down our entire system.

After lot of looking around the web, and poking around on our servers, we figured out the problem, and are posting our solution so that other people can find it useful. The problem, as we found, is that the acts_as_favorite overloads method_missing to extend the methods for the base class, say the User model. This way, it is able to provide new methods to that class, for example user.favorite_blogs.

Unfortunately, in rails 2.3.4, the file /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.4/lib/active_record/associations/association_proxy.rb got changed, to include the highlighted lines. These end up raising a NoMethodError before the overloaded method_missing is called for the @target.


def method_missing(method, *args)
if load_target
unless @target.respond_to?(method)
message = "undefined method `#{method.to_s}' for \"#{@target}\":#{@target.class.to_s}"
raise NoMethodError, message
end

if block_given?
@target.send(method, *args)  { |*block_args| yield(*block_args) }
else
@target.send(method, *args)
end
end
end

Instead of messing with the gem itself, and breaking who-knows-what-else, we decided to simply overload the respond_to? method for the user class.

Our code (in app/models/user.rb):


def respond_to?(method_sym)
if method_sym.to_s =~ Regexp.new("^favorite_(\\w+)")
return true
elsif method_sym.to_s =~ Regexp.new("^old_favorite_(\\w+)")
return true
elsif method_sym.to_s =~ Regexp.new("^has_favorite_(\\w+)\\?")
return true
elsif method_sym.to_s =~ Regexp.new("^has_old_favorite_(\\w+)\\?")
return true
else
super
end
rescue
super
end


This essentially goes around the problem by telling ActiveRecord that these methods do exist for the User model, and then the method_missing from the acts_as_favorite plugin is called.

Simple fix, and I hope it can save other people a lot of headache too.

Cheers,

Anu

The Roots

I was super psyched when I got tickets to see The Roots at the Hollywood Bowl last Sunday night. Personally, I would say The Roots are easily one of my favorite bands.  The genius of Questlove’s beats, and their jazzy, innovative approach to hip hop with live instrumentals makes them one of the best bands to see live these days in my opinion. Needless to say, I was looking forward to getting that actual experience that I could almost feel the moment I got those tickets.

However when I got to the Bowl, the concert was not anything near the sick bass lines, jamming beats that I expected from The Roots.  The performance was inspired by the late poet Langston Hughes’ poems, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz.  The concert featured a opera singer paired with jazz from the Roots, and classical music from the LA Philharmonic, and other singers, which did not mix well for the summer jam I expected.  Although, Questlove love stole the show in one movement where he had a 5 minute solo.  In the twelve movements, you could also hear Hughes speak many of his poems which went well with the music. Composer Laura Karpman explains, it’s ”Creating a piece of music that crosses genres, Jazz, Classical, Hip-Hop — to see all of them interact together in a meaningful way, is transformative.”  The concert was more educational, and metaphorical than jammable, with lyrics centered around race, the black movement, and struggles in America.  Although I found the concert interesting and artistically successful in portraying poetry through the sounds of the music, it was not what I wanted to see.

One thing I learned Sunday night is to not be so quick to go to a concert based on preconceived notions. (Not to dismiss that The Roots are great live, they are).  Some of the best concerts I have seen have been at small, lowkey venues with unknown artists, who perform amazing live. I think The Roots still honor this concept of playing small close venues as well, however.  The Roots play in “jam” style setting, every so often in NYC, for a small audience of about 100, for a 10 dollar cover charge.  They still understand and appreciate the concept of a small gig atmosphere.

But the larger point is that just going to familiar, mainstream shows is not always a winner.  Often, you will come to hear a certain song, and the artist won’t even end up playing it, leaving you disappointed.  Some of the best live music experiences are from new small artists you know not much about.

I am not saying that I won’t be going to those big concerts with huge expectations in the future, but I think we all need to remind ourselves of discovering those raw unadulterated shows every now and again.

- Will

Promoting your new album is hard, especially in this turbulent world of the music industry. Fans have so many choices, and there are so many artists that even the top ones are finding it difficult to find mass appeal. So how do you stand out?

Promoting your album

1. Prolong the release date of the album as long as possible to get more hype. This technique has been used a lot lately, especially in the rap industry. Artists claim their album will come out a certain date, and just prolong the album to get more attention and coverage. Eminem did this, and it worked great for his album, Relapse, which debuted at #1 Billboard chart after selling 608,000 copies in the first week.
2. Get your music on itunes. Putting your name on itunes for many fans will make you appear more official, or legitimate. Even if you don’t think you will sell a lot, appearing on itunes is a great marketing strategy for yourself to get your name, and sound out there. Here is a guide of how to get your music on itunes - http://bit.ly/2mr80M.
3. Give people an incentive to buy your album, other than the music. If you plant prizes in your album (i.e. concert tickets, money, autographs, etc.), that will add to more album sales and exposure for your new album. Also, including other parties for your prizes, like giving away a gift card to Guitar Center, will possibly open up more doors and connections with those companies. Chamillionaire is a pro at additional incentives for his fans. You can see this with his new album, where he is giving away select albums with special artwork, and $100 to those that win his contest.
4. Appeal to a wider variety of crowds. If you limit your crowd base to one type people, you will get much less exposure and fans, thus, less album sales. If you can appeal to many types of people, from all kinds of backgrounds, you will get a much larger fan base and album sales. MJ was a master at this, as he broke nearly all the boundaries of genres and crowds and still to this day has the #1 selling album of all time.
5. Your music needs to be catchy. You can’t have sales without a good product. Thriller is one of the best sounding albums as well. No matter how much hype, or marketing you have, you must have a good sounding album to get sales.
6. Overall look and theme of the album can draw fans. Your album’s theme, cover and the overall look of you (or your group/band) can have a influence on whether or not someone buys the album- especially at stores. If you, the name, or the album look cool people may buy it for that reason alone.
7. Be able to rock live performances. A great live performance will not only give a greater appreciation for your music, but it can also be the birthplace for more fans to appreciate your music and check you out. If I ever see a band that is amazing live, I always want to see what they can do in a recording studio.

Are there other ideas that we have missed out? Let us know in the comments!

-Will

So here it is, the continuation of our own summer music awards (Parody).

Most Overplayed Song of the Summer: Black Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling

Black Eyed Peas

The first 50 times I heard it, I liked it, pretty catchy. About 2,000 playtimes later on the radio, internet, and my little sister’s bedroom, I got a feeling that if I hear it again I am going to go crazy! If you want to see the video, you can catch it here on youtube.

Best cover released this summer: The Fray - Heartless
Genius cover of Kanye’s story about his heartbreak. The Fray twisted Kanye’s self proclaimed “Pop Art” genre to a deeper, slower, acoustic version. Basically more emo = better for this song.

Best tribute to Michael: Michael Jackson - Smile

Not only is this the King of Pop’s favorite song of all time, but is also has an amazing message, and the quintessential ‘perfect’ Michael Jackson voice we all love.

Check out the video here on youtube


The best musician to follow on Twitter -  @thesonicyouth (Sonic Youth)

The band gives insight to their recording process, and is quick to reply to most. Straight twitterholic. Must follow!

Any other ideas of great awards? Let us know in the comments!

-Will

Hi there! I am glad to introduce the newest addition to our team - Will Dickinson! Will joins us from Los Angeles, and you probably already see his zany tweets and posts on our twitter page, as well as our facebook fan page.

Here is Will in his own words:

An avid music listener, I really like all kinds of music.  You can honestly name a genre of music, and I’ll tell you an artist I like in it.  I am mainly  into old school hip-hop, modern day indie, reggae pop, and Bob Dylan (Dylan is a genre of his own to me).  I play guitar, saxophone, and sing, and love to jam anytime with my friends.  In my spare time I like any activity associated with the beach, traveling, meeting new people, and finding new music on the internet.

We are glad to have Will join our team. He brings with him a passion for music of all kinds, and a further passion to spread the love of music amongst the world! We couldn’t have asked for a better person to help us in our mission.

-Anu

Live gig - up close and personal

Ultimately, choose concerts that you know you will enjoy, but also take a chance on the ones that you don’t know much about, but they look or sound cool. Some of my best experiences have been new bands. I like smaller venues where I can get up and close with the band, and not have to spend a bomb and give oodles of money to the big corporations who are only interested in selling me more stuff. I like the raw energy of the band before they have hit it big. I like it when I can approach the band after the show, just to say “great job, I love your sound”, and not have to go through lines and security flashing badges to get a formal calculated response.

How do you choose gigs you wanna attend? Add your own experiences in the comments.

-Will & Anu

Congratulations to the winners of the SlightlyStoopid contest.

• @argam - Concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA
• @Malpractice24 - Concert at Miami, FL
• @OregonSlacker - Concert at Gorge, WA

We had great response, and very exciting comments from the community at large. We are greatly looking forward to the next contest. Keep tuned!!

The Slightly Stoopid and Snoop Dogg ticket giveaway contest is over!!

Thanks to everyone who participated, we got a lot of entries.We will be contacting the winners today and tomorrow through twitter, so keep an eye out.

Contact us at @gigzee if you have any questions.

Rock On!