My Before and After Photo

So I decided that being and feeling overweight for the past 15 years is enough and I want to make a change. I have the funny, overly specific goal of seeing my jaw line again. Last Friday night I saw Dr. Deepak Chopra live at the Hyatt in San Francisco. He is an amazing speaker and fuses science with spirituality in his teachings. Many topics he touched on all revolve around our potential to be fully immersed in the unified field. I’ve been meditating for 27 years twice a day, which I enjoy fully, but I haven’t meditated away the fat. I try to eat healthy, but I’ve lacked going to the gym,  just out of laziness about getting there and making the time (“Boo” “Hiss”). The most exercise I get is to walk every day about 30 minutes per day.

Last year I did a 30 day program from Isagenix that really worked and I  lost 10 pounds. But I didn’t follow it with a healthy lifestyle and ‘found‘ the weight  over the following year. This year I’m trying the Isagenix 9-day cleanse program and want to stay more conscious of it and maintain or improve upon the result. This time I don’t want to only lose the weight, I really want to release it, never to be found again.

As Dorian Darie wrote, as I was writing this:

“Any amount of energy a soul puts in the creation of a correct energetic pattern is not in vain, even if it takes a long time and you have to do it on and off, eventually there is a breakthrough in the reality field which allows for that energetic pattern to be crystallized and maintained in the world by that soul!”

The first two days of this 9 day program were so consciousness raising  that I realized that we (some of us on this planet, not everyone) must be unconsciously over eating to muffle and block our full consciousness. Almost as if subconsciously our soul knows that we have access to much greater spiritual energies and information, but recognize our fear of the greatness so we easily block it by eating food, more than we need, unconsciously. My wife also told me that I could use this low/no food time to pray for those who don’t have food. Very purposeful. I embrace that and am praying for all the truly hungry people on earth.

Here’s what I’m willing to do: I’ll post my before and after photo after my 9 day weight loss experiment if enough people share this article via Facebook.  I won’t take it personally if it’s TMI and no one wants to share the article or see the photos.

Steven Cravis

Where did 50% of their income go?

Recently I was advising a friend on how she could submit her music for consideration on Pandora, and when searching her music on Amazon, including the Audio CD (a physical CD on Amazon is required first before being able to submit to Pandora radio), I noticed her label was listed as CD Baby/INDYS. Well a big current plus of getting on Pandora is that Pandora is one of the many entities who pay soundexchange. It’s my understanding that 92% of that pay goes to featured artist and the sound recording copyright owner/i.e. ‘Label’ (Soundexchange), and the other 8% goes to the publisher, composer and songwriter (BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, etc.. – PROs). Recently many independent artists who basically ARE their own label had been sharing with each other about how some of the best income they receive is from Pandora, via Soundexchange, while many other artists who get paid by Soundexchange weren’t receiving such big payments from Pandora. Now, of course there could be many factors such as how many actual plays did each artist really receive, and therefore they got paid less or more based on that. But my question are;1. Is the label CD Baby/INDYS receiving from Soundexchange the label portion of payment for all those artists who have their label listed that way on their album distribution? and 2.  If so, has CD Baby kept this ‘label’ earnings or paid it out to the independent artists to whom it was due?  Whether true, intentional, or not intentional, these are just questions at this point, something to be explored.

Soundcloud & Getty Images – Music Licensing Feature From a Composer’s Point of View

By Steven Cravis

Soundcloud’s new partnership with Getty Images music licensing is good news.

The convenience for submitting new music has greatly improved. Via the Pumpaudio portal, the content provider has had to submit a full length CD and wait for approximately 6 months, in some cases a year, before finding out if any of the tracks were approved and added into their database. Those tracks which did make it, made it onto http://www.gettyimages.com/music  (and the ones previously accepted by Pumpaudio and currently available through GettyImages must not be duplicated onto Soundcloud licensing through GettyImages). There was no way to simply upload new music, one track at a time, for the GettyImages licensing this way. The Soundcloud alliance with GettyImages has solved that problem.

With Soundcloud’s new partnership, the soundcloud composer need only do the following few steps:

1. Go to this link and connect their soundcloud with a gettyimages account: http://soundcloud.gettyimages.com/ and follow the directions for giving licensing permissions for only the tunes you select from a list of your tunes that will show up there from within a private view. This will, behind the scenes, create a new ‘buy link’ within each song you’ve permitted to be licensed, and the links it creates will appear on your music player as ‘License’ with a few more tweaks, see step two.

2. Go back within their soundcloud account and edit each track to make the little ‘g’ (GettyImages logo) license button appear on top of each song’s player. In order for this to work, the composer has to, in soundcloud admin, click on Show More Options link within that song’s edit-details view. Then if there is any text such as ‘Buy’ under the Custom Link Title, remove it, leaving it blank and SAVE changes with the big button at bottom of the display.  Now the player will have a ‘License’ button that goes to a page like this example http://soundcloud.gettyimages.com/license-request/61772978-olympian-dreams  Note: near the bottom of this page, it specifies the track, that was of interest before the person interested in buying the license submits their information, above a simple form.

My question for GettyImages is: When will they have the soundcloud submitted song titles searchable via http://www.gettyimages.com/music ? At this point it seems that people have to somehow find our music by searching through Soundcloud.com

Wondering about the percentage paid to content creators? Be sure to reference this link for further questions: http://soundcloud.gettyimages.com/faq

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Steven Cravis is a soundtracks composer who’s placed music on NBC, CBS, Animal Planet, Matchroom Sport (Sky Sport 3, United Kingdom), has a top charting album Healing Piano on Amazon, and composes the soundtracks for the award winning app Quell by http://www.fallentreegames.com

3D Printer

Today I was fortunate to talk to Gabe and Virginia, at a BART station, about the unusual box they were carrying. It’s a 3D Printer , (yes, a device that can actual render your digital 3D design STL file into a physical 3D object!) created by TypeAMachines. The experience was a little surreal (like talking to someone about a time machine they’re carting through BART). I asked Gabe if he had invented it, and he explained, no, his friend had created this one, and that the technology has been around for 25 years, but a patent was keeping others from making it. Finally the patent has expired and these are being created, for about $1,200 each. Materials are about $34 per kilo.

A Money Generating Paradigm For The Digital Musician

by Steven Cravis

Recently CDbaby announced it’s partnership and automatic send of CDbaby music to Soundcloud. All it takes is for each CDbaby musician interested in this feature to log in to CDbaby and opt into having all, or most of their music appearing on Soundcloud.

The only problem is: They are available as full length streaming tracks. By this I mean, if it is a 4 minute song, the full 4 minutes will be displayed as a streaming track to any listener. The reason I call this a ‘problem’ is that full length streaming in the digital age is similar to giving away the file. I’ve had fans of my music write politely to tell me they could ‘grab’ mp3s from the streaming audio on my web site. Since then, I’ve replaced them with either short audio clips, or audio watermarked tracks.The only scenario I can see this being useful for is if your doing your own direct licensing deal for someone’s film, or tv, or other media project, and you want specifically them to be able to listen through the tracks streaming online, but not everyone else. In this case, CDbaby has an interesting option; checkmark ‘Private’

See Cdbaby’s own wording:

“SoundCloud Private Tracks

When you upload a track to SoundCloud, you have two options for how you want to share it with other users:

Public sharing means that anyone can listen to your track.

Private sharing is exclusive and means you have complete control over who has access to your tracks and who doesn’t.”

But if you’re not using this for private purposes, I don’t think it’s going to help your music income if you publicly give away your full length streams of all the tracks that you also are attempting to sell elsewhere. People can just listen to the whole song online without buying it. Plus, at least in services like Spotify, Rhapsody and Pandora, the full stream plays generate money for the artists who own the content. But I don’t see anywhere that Soundcloud will pay anything for all the streams that will occur on a Soundcloud or CDbaby/Soundcloud account.

So, what will generate money for artists? It’s very simple. Make sure that:

1. Your music displayed on sites (which you could upload directly to Soundcloud and many other sites) is either 30, 60 or 90 second clips of audio, or is watermarked audio. ONLY stream full tracks of audio that you intentionally give away. For example: http://www.TheGiftMP3.com

2. Your music is iOS compatible. This means that it has code, such as Soundcloud or Bandcamp embedding code which works/displays well on Apple mobile devices; iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch. All Flash-only music players appear as a blank, functionless rectangle. Millions of people are using these devices to view web sites and check out music. It will take a while for all musicians, including myself, to transition our sites to this HTML5 code which is compatible with Apple devices.

3. Put iTunes and Amazonmp3 and/or your own shopping cart mp3 buy links close on the web page to your HTML5 music player.

4. View these music marketing tutorial videos in full screen high definition regarding increasing selling on iTunes, Amazonmp3 and Gumroad: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL598CA58D55016315

Also, please take a second to vote YES or NO, anonymously HERE about an OPTIONAL feature I’ve been asking Bandcamp to add to it’s service for years.

Leave your comments and share this post please. The link to this post that you can copy is:

2012 BC

My name is Steven Cravis. Daniel C. Bianchino and I met back in 1991 on the Boston Greenline. I was holding a salad. Bianchino said “That looks like a healthy meal”. I added “You must not be from around here – you notice nobody talks?” The tram was packed…That began our conversation…I told Daniel I compose music but don’t write lyrics and he told me he is a poet and lyricist. We exchanged numbers and the rest is history….formed the band 2012 BC recently and have released our first single on iTunes “I Need a Second Look”.

2012 BC (The Rough Draft Album) is our latest ten song release and includes ‘I Need a Second Look’.

I’m a pianist and instrumental composer, but I am not a singer. I was so ashamed of the vocal flaws in my recording attempts with this album that I hid the recordings from everyone, even from my co-writer Daniel. Daniel was infinitely patient with me about this, and recently I realized 3 main things:

1. The message in D.C. Bianchino’s lyrics are cosmic and good and the songs might help get his messages out.

2. Even if people (especially people who know me well) laugh when they hear the flawed sound of my singing voice, at least they are being entertained, and that kind of joy has some value being that laughter itself can be healing.

3. It was ultimately selfish of me to hold back these unusual recordings from the universe and the benefit of exposing the songs to the universe probably highly outweighs the benefit of protecting myself from whatever criticism will result.

JUNE 21, 2012 UPDATE! I’ve gotten some great singers to re-record 5 of our songs. We’re selling them as singles at iTunes, Amazonmp3 and more. So far we have 5 completed. Check it out at
http://www.2012bc.com

Promenade Sentimentale by Vladimir Cosma

Promenade Sentimentale

The first time I saw the movie Diva was when I was a teenager. It’s a romantic thriller directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix. The visuals and audio are unique and highly artistic.

One scene featured the piano piece ‘Promenade Sentimentale’ (Sentimental Walk) by Romanian born composer Vladimir Cosma. This piece always intrigued me, I bought the soundtrack and learned the piece on piano.

Today my newly released version has made it’s way onto iTunes. It’s available on four different pianos:

For Bosendorfer click HERE
For Fazioli click HERE
For Steinway click HERE
For Yamaha click HERE

To compare 90 second samples of all four to each other to see which piano sound you like the best, click HERE for iTunes or HERE for AmazonMP3

Enjoy.

-Steven Cravis

Steven Cravis is a pianist and multi track synth composer for TV, Film and Games. He recently scored the exclusive soundtrack for -one of the top 100 games studios in the world – Fallen Tree Games zen style puzzle app ‘Quell‘ for iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad.