Muckspout - Punk Rock Podcast Eric Cockrell, Ben Cook, John MacLeod

Episode Notes
We're talking about Mental Health & Art with Lawrence Lindell (Couldn’t Afford Therapy, So I Made This)

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The guys chat about the effects of gatekeeping in punk/indie music, DIY, art and comics.

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The guys sit down with Chicago dummer, Rob Kellenberger to discuss his career.

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Jon Westhoff and Dan Dougherty, co-creators of the comic book Drumsticks of Doom, join the Muckspout podcast to discuss their project and its musical origins. They talk about how music and comics are intertwined, the Kickstarter campaign for their third issue, and how their book is. They explain the plot of their comic, which follows two misfit characters, and emphasize how it's different from other comics. They close out by encouraging listeners to check out their Kickstarter campaign.

Episode Notes
Eric and Ben discuss community building and how marketing fits with DIY culture with Jason Hebert of Rebel Force. Jason is from Sudbury, Ontario, a small town with a legendary reputation for punk rock and local music. They compare it to Seattle in the 90s, noting that it lacks media attention but is full of undiscovered gems. They also mention the Townhouse, a legendary venue for bands traveling through Sudbury. In general, the conversation is focused on punk culture, music, and DIY. The speaker got involved with the local punk rock scene when they were 14 years old. The speaker's first goal was to play one show and eventually they started meeting people and putting on shows. As they got more involved, they passed the torch on to the next generation. They don't remember exactly who passed the torch to them, but they remember the big names in the scene at the time that were organizing everything. The conversation is about two friends, Kevin Mason and the speaker, who used to organize punk rock shows in the late 90s and early 2000s in Sudbury. They would put up posters to advertise, using letters cut out from magazines since they didn't have a computer or printer. They also organized an annual event they called the Fuck School Show, which caused a lot of trouble with school administrators. The conversation also mentions a girl named Amy who was in the same room as the two friends for some of the shows. The conversation is about how to organize a show in a local scene. The speaker talks about how they used to coordinate shows in Sudbury before social media was a thing. They had a network of contacts and venues that they worked with to put together shows. They also mentioned how they did design, marketing and promotion for the shows. They also talk about how punk rock has a bit of a secret attitude towards it and the speaker mentions how guerrilla marketing and street teams were used to promote shows.

Episode Notes
Ben and Eric discuss corporate greed's affect on the arts and what can be done to correct it.

Ben started by sharing some good news – his band’s song had reached 25,000 streams on Spotify. Eric mentioned that it may have earned them about $0.20 and Ben decided to do some math to see how much that was. He calculated that 25,000 streams was equivalent to 800 streams per day for 30 days, which was the equivalent to almost two packed Lee’s Palace concerts in Toronto. 
Then we moved onto the issue of not getting very much of the money from ticket sales anyhow. The conversation ended with a discussion about how ad revenue goes a long way and is a major source of income for many people. The talk highlighted the importance of understanding the complexities of the music industry and the potential for exploitation.

The record companies negotiated with Spotify in the early 2000s to get a cut of the profits and have privileged access to playlists. The record industry is compared to a cartel that controls the resource of music, and we discussed the recent Wizards of the Coast debacle and how the community responded to this, showing that they are not willing to put up with such restrictions.

The updated Wizards of the Coast (WotC) license for Dungeons and Dragons-related content had people up in arms about WotC tightening their license, which could have impacted many businesses that had been built up around D&D content. We also tackled the recent developments with YouTube’s monetization system, which has been used to silence independent media organizations under the guise of misinformation. Ben shared his experience with Napster and how it gave him access to music that he wouldn’t have had otherwise, which he believes led him to become a musician.