Strategies and tactics

Yes, it has come to that. Strategies and tactics. It was always our hope at BlancoMusic that the business would be a bit of fun. Of course, there was always going to be an element of administration and organisation involved in recording and selling music, be we’d hoped that it would be minimal. Making music is fun, doing a&r is a blast, coming up with funky graphics and ideas for the website and album covers is creatively satisfying. Unfortunately though, it seems that the time is coming when we’re going to have to put away the fun and get out the spreadsheets. New business strategies appear, somehow, to be the way forward for the music industry. Actually, more the t-shirt and box-sets industry, as it seems to be becoming right now. The strategies proposed by new-media gurus (who very rarely seem to be musicians themselves, but often consider their experience in unrelated, non-creative sectors is perfectly applicable to the quite unconventional realities of music-making) are very time consuming and dull as a barrel full of school socks. What they boil down to, is creating an attractive entity out of an act – one which is so cool and lovable that the gullible public will happily part with their cash to own a piece of (hard, non-downloadable) merchandise that is somehow associated with that entity. Music should be seen as a part of the mechanism by which that magic attractant ‘cool’ element be constructed, and should be considered as an expendable pawn in the larger game of monetizing that cool element. Pity, because music is the only bit of the whole thing that’s actually worth anything.

Fighting the devaluation of music in our culture is becoming exhausting. It is truly astounding to us that such an important cultural element of our lives be relegated to the status of a peripheral attractant in the fight to sell pencil cases. Can we keep fighting against this overwhelming sense that music is absolutely brilliant, totally important, great for having in every moment of our lives, but not worth paying for? Who knows? I’m not even mad at consumers here, it’s the insulting profiteering by the streaming sites that riles me most. There is a point at which even the most righteous disgust becomes difficult to maintain. I’ve put the front cover graphic of BudNubac’s Que Se Yo up here today, because if we do decide to do an about-turn on our ‘dignity for musicians and downfall to the freetards’ policy, it’s the album that is likely to be first sacrificed to the tactics and strategies of the new music industry model. We haven’t yet decided on this. I’m actually discussing it on here as part of the openness and transparency that I hoped would be a part of the allure of BlancoMusic when we started the label. We’d always hoped to involve fans of the music with some of the running of the label, at least keep them informed. Properly informed, with real, honest interaction, not the self-aggrandising nonsense that makes up the majority of artist and label sites. One critical part of that came months ago, in a post I wrote about a Mil i Maria song that I don’t actually like much. One of the stipulations I made before getting onboard with BlancoMusic was about that very post. Would I be allowed say that there was material available to purchase on our label that I didn’t personally like? Would I be allowed a platform where honesty and candid opinions were allowed to be expressed, or would it just be a ‘this is how we roll at BlancoMusic’ PR rubbish? To me, that sort of transparency was the kind of unique selling point that would make us interesting, worthy of loyalty, and would bring people to our site to listen to our music, form an opinion, buy the tracks. It works well for the first two, but buying music just seems to be too much for people to get their heads around, now that they can pick it up for free whenever they wish. I wish that weren’t the case, because I really don’t want to go into the screen-printed t-shirts business. We’ll see, there’s a whole weekend to think about things. Hope you have an enjoyable one.

Sometimes you just have to bend.

Some of the rage at mog.com has died a little, giving way to some pretty serious re-thinking here at BlancoMusic. If you missed yesterday’s blogpost, I’ll explain. BlancoMusic made a decision some time ago to withdraw our music from streaming sites, feeling that the scant financial reward recouped from even the most artist-friendly of the services (currently We7) was not worth the dilution of demand that comes from having the product you hope to sell available on demand elsewhere. There are lots of pro-streaming arguments too – it was always a debate. Streaming sites can be used as a means to publicise an act and bring its music to the attention of an audience who might otherwise have missed it. That’s about the crux of it. Fair point. Can’t eat publicity though, and I’ve yet to come across a single act who managed to actually make any revenue from all the whizzbang monetization schemes that are bandied about who hadn’t already built a large following either through gigging relentlessly and expensively; or who hadn’t already established their fanbase before 2001 or so. I’m happy to be proven wrong on this, purely because if there is an example, I’d like to copy exactly what they did. Most of the music 2.0 success stories involve some pretty hefty major label investment at some point in their breakthrough; or some industry-insider stringpulling; or heavyweight pr contacts. Hang on, where was I? Mog.com, yes indeed. Well, after a bit of moaning by me about how Last.fm were ignoring my requests to them to remove our music from their site, someone asked me if I’d checked if the music was on mog.com. I checked, it was, we have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting it off without engaging a California lawyer. It’s annoying.

Anyway, moan moan. I suppose what this post is going to be is the inevitable crumble of our will in the face of reality. If we can’t actually keep our music off streaming sites, it may be time that we abandoned our stubborn policy of trying to do so. We were trying to retain some dignity for our artists by pulling them back from the overactive attention-seeking shoutfest that is the online music marketplace. It seems like a shift in policy is inevitable. Thing is, if we are to do this, it won’t be just a case of letting mog.com and last.fm have he music and hope no-one notices. If we decide to embrace the music.20 models, we’ll do it with as much energy as we can muster, and on as many fronts as possible. Fan funding, pre-release auctions, box-sets full of worthless crap that somehow ‘connects’ us with the fans better than the music can do so alone. Oh yep, we’ll go for all the cliches and invent a couple of our own. Who knows, we may get to the point where it works. We may even get to the point where we don’t feel like a bunch of cynical exploitative hacks, whoring out the beauty and integrity of music for the sake of selling a few thousand ‘limited edition’ polo shirts. Who knows? Who knows?

Here’s a BlancoMusic tune to start with. Topical, if a little dated: http://bit.ly/9aiFDo

Arg, thieving scum!

Bit of a rough day at the office today, trying to limit the damage caused by Robin’s jacket getting nicked whilst out at a Warner records showcase event last night. The jacket wasn’t so important – most of his clothes come from photoshoots back in the Olive days anyway – but the keys, wallet, money, passport and credit cards contained therein, were a bit more difficult to replace. It’s felt a bit like this lately. It’s only been a couple of months since Robin’s house was burgled, and theft is starting to feel like the natural way of things at the moment. Funny that last night’s event was a Warner promotional do, seeing as Warner Music were the first of the notable entities in the music business to decide that, actually, streaming sites were not actually that great a deal after all. I wrote about their decision to withdraw their catalogue from on-demand streaming sites some months ago. At the time it was considered a radical act by a record label – people still believed that their subscription fees to streaming services were benefiting labels and artists in some meaningful way back then. Now we’ve all seen the Lady GaGa $167 headline, and if nothing else, a healthy doubt about whether or not streaming sites have any benefit for artists is now part of the informed consumer’s mindset. Doubt that has been made public now, as in a discussion BlancoMusic had yesterday via the Guardian comments thread on Helienne Lindvall’s ‘Behind the Music’ piece in the paper. Lindvall asked an interesting question about LAst.fm, and our continued efforts to have our music removed from their servers. Last.fm’s official line on this is that the music is placed there by the fans, as in the YouTube model. Our requests to AWAL – our digital distributor – to remove the material meets with the same answer. Lindvall asked the question – if AWAL no longer administer the material up there, who gets paid for the plays? And the truth is, I have no idea.

That was just the start of a day of feeling like the world exists just to rip us off. She also mentioned a friend of hers who found out from a third party that his music was being featured on Mog.com. She advised that we check to see whether ours was too. Unsurprisingly, everything we have ever released is there, on mog.com, free to be listened to on a fee-paying basis, on-demand, as often as the listener wishes. Why would anyone in that situation feel compelled to go and pay yet more money to buy our music direct from us? They can hear it anytime they like on mog.com. We did not give mog permission, we receive nothing from them for the privilege of distributing our music for their gain, and without a California-based lawyer, we have precious little chance of getting the music taken down.

Some thieves just steal your jacket. Others take your whole livelihood.