The Playground
The Simply Music blog
Songwriters – Promoting & Releasing Your Songs
Written by: Katie Knipp So, you’ve just spent hundreds of “man hours” writing, recording, mixing, mastering, and stressing! Now what? Now, my friends, the real work begins. There is a certain order to releasing a song, and having released 5 CDs myself, there are…
You & Your Piano: Caring for Your Piano
For a machine, a piano can sometimes be almost like a living thing. It can seem to have behaviours that change with the seasons and the years and the places it lives. Like a family member, it can behave differently depending on the way it…
You & Your Piano: New or Second-Hand?
Previously we’ve talked about the choice between digital or acoustic pianos, and, if you go acoustic, what kind of piano you might choose. If you’ve come this far, you might be ready for the next question – new or second-hand? Those new beauties look shiny…
You & Your Instrument: Acoustic Pianos
In the first article in this series, we discussed the choice between digital and acoustic pianos. For those considering a digital piano, we included some advice, but as to the purchase of an acoustic piano, we decided that dark art needed its own post. Are…
Discover New Music in the Streaming Era
If you’re as old as I am, you might remember a now largely vanished delight: walking into a record store and being instantly struck by something fantastic being played over the speakers, or seeing a cool-looking album beckoning to you from the new release racks.…
The World of Music in a Few Clicks
I previously wrote an article for the playground discussing how the way you listen to music compensates the artists that create it. But putting aside that issue, streaming music services are worth exploring if only for the huge selection of music they offer you, the…
How to Listen to Music that Supports the Musicians You Love
The 21st century is a great time to be a music lover. But it’s not such a great time for musicians. Not all of the new ways of finding and listening to music pay the artist well. If you care about the people actually creating…
Social Media – 10 Tips on Making Your Musical Mark
Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all the rest – is a fact of life these days, and you might be surprised how many ways it can be of value to you, even if you barely dip your toes in it yourself. For example, if your…
Sharing Your Music in the Real World
We’ve talked in this blog about sharing your music online; how to take the tentative steps to “put ourselves out there” in a digital world, whilst safely tucked up in the comfort of our homes with our bunny slippers on! While this offers amazing opportunities these days, we…
Sharing Your Music and Connecting with Networks
New Ways of Sharing Music A couple of blog entries ago, I talked about how sharing music has changed in the digital age, in some ways for the worse, but in many ways for the better. I’d like to highlight some of those ‘betters’ and give…