Guest Blogger - The Quietus

As anyone who has ever tried to rent or buy a house well knows, you get things done a lot quicker without the middle man. The same goes for music, too. While many of the people who work in the record labels and PR offices that we at the Quietus deal with every day are massively helpful, noble souls, it's often handy to be able to circumvent the "proper" way of working.

Twitter has been invaluable for this.



Being curmudgeons, we were at first cynical about the use or otherwise of this service - as a website that likes to print 10,000 word interviews with Adam Ant, what use a measly 140 characters? Then, one day, our servers tottered sideways like a tramp on a gallon of cider, and the site crashed. It turned out that the reason was journalist Ben Goldacre (@bengoldacre) tweeting a link to our interview with Sir Patrick Moore when we grilled him on space rock and astronomy, saying words to the effect of "best thing on the internet, turn it off now".



We immediately got more engaged with Twitter, posting not only links to articles, but competitions, musical recommendations, and pictures of our ploughman's lunches, all of which seemed to go down a treat with an increasing army of followers.



When I wrote a feature saying that closing 6 Music would be a disaster for independent music it was retweeted thousands of times.



As we saw with the Save 6 Music movement, the power of Twitter as a campaigning tool works brilliantly for music - and thankfully doesn't come with the tedious thing that happened with MySpace - there'll surely be now crap major label acts foisted on us with the lie that they're a ‘Twitter sensation’.



One genuine Twitter sensation we did get involved with was the brilliant @DrSamuelJohnson and his brilliant 18th century definitions. And indeed, this is where the medium came into its own. It was easy to tweet at the good Dr asking him to define various themes in modern music, which he duly did.



We've also used to twitter to get Alec Empire (@ALEC_EMPIRE) and Mogwai's Stuart Braithwate (@plasmatron) to do Quietus mixes, and book Anika (@anikainvada) to play a brilliant gig. Oh, and I'm still trying to tempt writer Ian Rankin (@beathigh) to do album reviews for us.



Musicians whose tweets are a pleasure to read include the musical and domestic goings on of @chris_carter_ and @coseyfannitutti formerly of Throbbing Gristle, along with the always-amusing Aidan Moffat (@aidanjohnmoffat), and the righteous ranting of Portishead and Invada Records Geoff Barrow (@jetfury).



Some artists are also cottoning on to the fact that twittering @theQuietus is a very good way of getting us to listen to their music, though we haven't been flooded just yet.



Whether you're a musician, writer, blogger, label boss or a fan, Twitter is a brilliant tool for discovering, sharing and discussing new sounds, and a brilliant way of making the world keep talking.