Woven Wheat Whispers Shuts Down

July 10th, 2008 | music

Woven Wheat Whispers, a music download service for broadly-defined folk music, appears to have shut itself down while I’ve been away. I discovered them via the excellent double CD of "dark folk," JOHN BARLEYCORN REBORN. There was all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff on that site, and not all of it fit the classic definition of British folk (a bloke with a pewter tankard hanging off his belt and his little finger stuck in his ear). Co-founder Mark Coyle, commenting on Mudcat, doesn’t have the expected explanation for an indie music download service closing:

We didn’t have to close WWW, it was paying it’s way and no money was lost. It was just a decision about the future taken calmly at a point where we had time to think… It was meant to be fun and would have turned into slog at some point in the near future.

As for the site closing, it’s not an issue about downloads per se. sales were soaring last year, but as the catalogue got bigger it got more daunting to search around it. There was a huge amount of traditional, folk-rock, Ceilidh, nautical folk that people here probably didn’t realise sat alongside the other material. But if people aren’t looking then there’s little we can do…

Folk music fans often seem to follow artists they already know. As has been observed there are lots of factors. However don’t think the site was a failure, we achieved what we aimed to do. It’s just that taking it on further required a step change it wasn’t worth making.

We could have continued and would have done alright, but with Myspace starting to sell downloads, Amazon coming in and iTunes level of market dominance, there was little point. Even CDBaby now sell downloads alongside the CD. Exiting in a positive way seemed the best thing to do at the right time.

WWW didn’t collapse, we have all the money needed. It was a decision taken about how far to push what was a small home operation delivered in my spare time.

I know that’s a hefty set of quotes, but I wanted to capture exactly what’s happening. And I find it kind of interesting. Coyle seems to be saying that, to continue along its growth curve and fulfil its mandate to introduce interesting new musics to new audiences, it would have become a full-time job — and he wasn’t up for that. Especially with MySpace, shiTunes, Amazon and even CDBaby looming over him. He just quit while he was happy.

Someone at the top of the thread does say:

sales for May this year, for example, were considerably lower than sales for the
same month a year ago, despite there being an increase in the number of users
and a stronger catalogue

and while one assumes he’s affiliated with the site in some way, it goes against Coyle’s claim, and in any case could be partly explained away by the retail index being down all over. Online sales aren’t immune to petrol and food costing more than they did a year ago.

What’s interesting to me is that there’s a suggestion that Coyle was actually a little too effective with his part-time job. He created a community, a service, and a retail operation that paid its own costs, proved it could work, and only shut it down because taking on the bigger paid-download space was going to be a full-time job. That is, in its way, kind of heartening.

I imagine there’s a lot of people out there right now who have been wondering if they can put a successful online face on their scene, their music, their community, and actually grind out some space between the corporate monoliths. Woven Wheat Whispers says you can.

Now, of course, I have to find somewhere else to buy the Shibboleth albums I don’t yet have, and to track the work of Sedayne and Clive Powell.

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Miss Piggy?s Teaches of Peaches

Coilhouse - 20 Nov 09

Every time an issue of the magazine goes to print, things somehow turn Highly Inappropriate here at Coilhouse. This is apparent to anyone who was there on Twitter during the hours of our final revision deadline last night. And it’s only going to get worse before Issue 04’s out. So to celebrate, a video of Miss Piggy singing “Fuck the Pain Away” by Peaches. It’s that kind of day.

[via Shannon]


Post tags: Madness, Music, Puppetry

claytoncubitt: Will Blanche, ?The Newly Constructed Towers of...

Brian Wood - 20 Nov 09



claytoncubitt:

Will Blanche, ?The Newly Constructed Towers of the World Trade Center Seen From the South Side on West Street, May, 1973? (via These Americans)

See also: Mitch Epstein, ?West Side Highway, New York City? [looking towards World Trade Center] 1977

Percy Jackson trailer

Kung Fu Monkey - 20 Nov 09

Seriously, if I were 12, this would have melted my brain. I love this trailer.

JOURNAL: How to Break and Open Source Insurgency

John Robb - 20 Nov 09

Short Answer:  divide it.

It's long been my contention that Iraq was stabilized at an acceptable level of controlled chaos due to a happy accident by al Qaeda (in an attempt to expand/lead the loose insurgency in a new direction).  What did they do?   They blew up the Golden Mosque in Samara in 2006.  This act of symbolic terrorism did indeed disrupt social networks as anticipated, however the consequences were ultimately disastrous for the Iraqi open source insurgency.  

Baghdad_Ethnic_2007_late_smThe reason for this is it broke the dynamics of the open source insurgency in ways the US and Iraqi government's COIN efforts could not.  First, it created a permanent split between Sunni and Shiite insurgent groups/militias.  Coopetition ended.  Second, it motivated large Shiite militias to start an ethnic cleansing of Sunni areas.  This put acute pressure on Sunni guerrilla groups who were too small (by design to avoid US counter-pressure) to defend themselves against large militias operating in the open.  The result was an opening, very close to the one I described in my 2005 NYTimes OpEd, that allowed the US to convert Sunni guerrilla groups into militias that were not loyal to the central government (in direct contradiction to its COIN manual).   

It's a nice example of the dynamics of many to many conflict, social network disruption, and the development open source counterinsurgency.

See this excellent description at the blog, "Musings on Iraq" for more detail on the ethnic cleansing operations.  It also includes this money quote: "the majority of the Sunni insurgency gave up and switched sides to align with the Americans rather than face annihilation at the hands of the Shiite militias, Al Qaeda in Iraq, or the United States."

NOTE:  it's pretty clear from the above that social network disruption (either through attacks on symbolic targets or blood and guts terrorism) is like playing horseshoes with live hand grenades.  It's ultimately a losing strategy for advancing an open source insurgency.  Social network disruption is very likely to break standing order 6:  don't fork the insurgency.

Twitter Updates for 2009-11-20

Girl Farts - 20 Nov 09

LINKS: 20 NOV 09

John Robb - 20 Nov 09

Some random items of interest:

  • Vigilante militias in Rio are displacing the drug gangs -- favelas under the control of militias has grown from 108 in 2005 to 400 in 2008 (out of 965).  Why?  They have a better (albeit parasitic) conflict/business model than the drug gangs since they act as a substitute for missing public goods/services normally supplied by the government.  First, they provide a minimal level of security and conflict adjudication.  Second, they make more money than the drug gangs by "taxing" everything from propane to cable TV to the gray market.  
  • US gray economy estimated at $1 Trillion (not including criminal, outside of the evasion of taxes and regulation, activities) and growing faster than the "legal" economy.  
  • Proposal and wiki for an open source fabrication lab.
  • Somali pirates are expanding operations into the Indian ocean.  The combination of positive feedback loops (maritime insurance + rapid payoffs by crisis negotiators) and legal ambiguity (the biggest fear of a western navy and governments is that they might arrest a pirate -- prompting a massive/expensive legal tussle with few certain penalties and the forced extension of a visa to the former pirate once he is released from his short incarceration).  Is a franchise model for other locales possible?
  • Yes-we-can-secede
  • A business group in Ciudad Juarez asks for UN peacekeepers.  Hilarious. "Ciudad Juarez, population 1.5 million, has an average of seven homicides a day, with the total at 1,986 for this year through mid-October."
  • Seccession.net.  County based secession effort.  

Untitled Post

blissblog - 20 Nov 09

Yume no Byouin Project

Jean Snow - 20 Nov 09

Yume no Byouin Project

Beautiful (and simple) site design featuring the illustrative work of Yorifuji Bunpei. Via Paul Baron.

Kodai

Jean Snow - 20 Nov 09

Kodai

Coming up at the Kakitsubata gallery in Nakameguro is the show “Kodai,” running from November 25 until December 6.

Kodai

Kap Bambino

jwz - 20 Nov 09