From The Guardian’s ‘Behind the Music’ blog

As always, I recommend Helliene Lindvall’s blog on The Guardian as a place to get the inside scoop on how the music industry actually works. The comments section is always a firepit – a true congregation of twisted souls clothing their rabidly-held, self-serving personal opinions in the jargon of the pseudo-intellectual, ‘academic’. I’m not being unfair here – my own replies do the exact same thing. You know the sort of approach: nobody ever actually calls you a cunt, but they might say ‘your argument shows that you have marked tendency to the vaginal’. Nevertheless, it’s a good gauge of how trends move, how the pro- and anti-filesharing arguments are developing. If you think that the comments section of the BlancoMusic blog gets heated on occasion, you ain’t seen nuthin’ til you’ve seen Helienne’s blog. Anyway, not that I want to drive traffic away from my little corner of the internet particularly, but I do recommend it. Here’s my comment for the day, in response to the side-them in the comments of whether filesharing can ever be curtailed:

@Helienne
Thanks for writing this piece, I’ve been looking forward to it.

With regard to whether filesharing can be stopped, and whether western governments will apply the draconian measures it would necessitate to do so, I believe we’re all guilty of the sin that the filesharers accuse the record labels of committing – backward thinking. Google will almost certainly enter the music market as either a streaming or untethered download retailer before Christmas (or so hums the grapevine). I do not for a moment believe that Google will tolerate unlimited access to the same product they are selling, via PirateBay or Rapidshare etc. Techie and legal types will butt in at this point and say: ‘they only control a search function, not the internet; darknet and swapped hard-drives will continue; they don’t have the legal means to stamp out providers’. To which I would say – you’re dealing with multi-billionaires who have proved (with their attitude to copyrighted literary works) that the legal and technical restrictions which apply to the rest of us, have no bearing whatsoever on their actions. If it suits Google to stop filesharing, Google will doubtless stop it. At the very least, they will make music-filesharing the province of only the very IT-savvy elite, or those passing physical material from hand to hand. If that’s what they choose to do at this point. They may well wish to see their competition further weakened before they act.

As I wrote in a previous blog (to which you linked, thank you) – Google entering the music industry is somewhat scary. Maybe I’m paranoid, but I think it should be looked upon as a hostile takeover, and that their timing on the move will be chosen to coincide with the point at which they consider the industry to be at its weakest. Their previous dealings with the concept of copyright-protected product doesn’t speak well for them, and I don’t believe they will be content to pay any publishing society’s mandatory minimum royalty rates. Expect to see some serious shafting done in the next few months.

The speculation is my own, nothing more than a (jaded and jaundiced) reaction to a piece of news I have been expecting for some time. As a mere piece of speculation it is not robust enough to withstand the kind of aggressive peer-review that comments on your blog often receive, and I’m not going to bother defending it if that happens. Apologies for that in advance – I’m a bit busy right now. It’s just an interpretation of a rumour, make of it what you will.

A career in live music, possible?

My last post started to examine the value of record labels in the Music 2.0 industry, but was left somewhat unfinished. Well, I won’t be finishing it today either, because there’s far too much to examine to do so in one go. I do think that labels have a continued value to artists, but it is the responsibility of labels, and musicians, to figure out exactly what each one of us can do, and what our new roles ought to be. Some things are now easier for musicians than ever. Making a recording, getting it onto iTunes, creating an awareness of their music online, all far simpler than it ever was. So simple, that a band really doesn’t need to go mortgaging their careers to a major label deal just to get those things done. Labels now have the responsibility not of making the product, but of getting it heard, sold, loved. Again, the musician also has responsibility for that, in the Music 2.0 industry, where fans demand levels of interaction with their musical idols that were unthinkable twenty years ago, it’s actually pretty demanding for the band to achieve. It’s another moment where the whole series of demands that consumers make in the Music 2.0 model seem more difficult than they should be, and are stacked in the favour of the consumer rather than the providers. Since writing my last post, I attended a really enjoyable live gig by Rob Sawyer and his band, and was well impressed by both the quality of musicianship and the stagecraft of the act. At the end of the gig, there were CDs for sale, and a healthy queue of people lining up to buy them. Clearly, there is still demand for recorded music, on CD. I’d say that some thirty or so people bought an album, at ten euros each, myself included. Quite a good result for a Wednesday night gig. Looking at the CD itself, it’s in a simple cardboard cover, the type that costs about a euro eighty or so per unit to manufacture. The gig itself was at a venue that pays around two-hundred euros per gig. There were three members of the band, plus one selling merchandise. Sawyer seems to have based himself on this stretch of French Atlantic coastline during the European summer months, and then tours his native Australia during the southern hemisphere summer. It’s a great strategy, aided by the fact that his music fits very nicely into an acoustic/roots/rock mileu that is now the soundtrack to the surf lifestyle. He’s seen his audience and he’s chasing it hard. Nevertheless, the next morning I saw him and his bassplayer emerging from a pretty ratty campervan, so it’s not a life of immense luxury. The problem is that the approach Sawyer is taking is textbook Music 2.0. Every discussion I have read about music, and how difficult it is becoming for musicians to make a decent living now that there is so much music, so little attention, and so many ways of getting it for free, includes at least one petulant voice saying that ‘recorded music is not real music anyway. Playing live and selling your merchandise to a loyal fanbase is the new way forward’. Well, it might pay for a few campervan summers for a singer in his twenties, but it won’t put food on the table when the sheer inconvenience of endless touring becomes intolerable. There is an invisible wall that can keep a band playing pubs and small festivals for its entire career. Usually it ends with one or all of the band’s members deciding that, seriously, they’re not going to be able to do this forever. That wall is based on the fact that, if you have to actually perform live to make sales, your income is restricted to the amount of punters you can physically put yourself in front of. Fine if you’re playing three stadium gigs a week to fifty-thousand or more fans, but not fine if you’re pulling in a very respectable three-hundred or so. Even filling a hall with three-hundred people is beyond the capability of most bands or acts, unless they have some sort of a professional promotional platform. The ‘buzz’ created by a live performance is not enough to deliver any significant fanbase growth without some serious legwork on social web, radio play, print media and television. This is the flaw in that other great hope of Music 2.0 – the fan-funded revenue model. If you consider for a moment the Slicethepie or PledgeMusic models of generating revenue, the invisible wall becomes more obvious. Say you need ten grand to record an album, and you have a thousand fans willing to split that cost, you’d feel pretty happy about that. Unfortunately, once the album is recorded, and your thousand loyal fans have their copy (which they were loyal enough to pay for up front, and wait for), who do you sell the rest to? Your loyal fanbase already has its product, and quite possibly does not want you to become so successful that you move beyond the small venues where they can chat to you after the gig. You have the CDs to sell at gigs, but the fans already have them. You could go back onto PledgeMusic and ask that the fans come up with the cash to help you promote and distribute the album, but, frankly, what’s in it for them? So your big hope is to make enough money out of live performances to live on. How many live performances can you do a week? How many can you actually get? How much can you charge for each? How many people at each gig will be new fans who might buy a CD? How do you get the time to compose and record new work when you’re gigging all the time? Without the additional revenue of record sales (sales that take place around the world, without you actually having to be at the point of purchase), fanbase generation from gigs is a closed circuit. Truly, if we condemn our musicians to a life where sales of recorded music are only realistically to be expected at gigs, the rate at which our favourite artists start giving up on music as a career will be astounding.

Love ukulele cover versions of Radiohead songs? Better not read this then.

Time was when it looked like music 2.0 was going to work. Cheap recording equipment and free access to worldwide digital distribution was going to free musicians from the tyranny of major label deals and allow them to market and sell their own music, to their own fans, without middlemen taking a cut or controlling content. Unfortunately, what musicians failed to figure into the equation was that, given the opportunity to get music for nothing, many so-called fans would actually just take the music, unconcerned by whether the musician got paid for it or not. Musicians got screwed again, but some of them decided that they could build an aura around their act, and use it to sell stuff that wasn’t music. Keep making the music, let it go for nothing, but make a ton of cash out of t-shirts and box-sets. It was their music, their decision to let it be perceived as a worthless byproduct of the t-shirt and pink-vinyl novelty-record trade. It’s a revolting development, in my eyes at least, but it’s a decision that’s been forced upon musicians who want to eat. If their music has become equal in importance to the design of a promotional flyer, so be it. It’s their music. If it creates the impression on the public that music is no more than a disposable means of attracting them to a glorified clothes shop, and if that impression has a knock-on effect on other musicians, tough. So far, so good. But what if it’s not even their music they use as the livebait? What if it’s someone else’s? In yet another of my attempts to change the music industry with extreme grouchiness and foul language, it’s time we had a look at this. I promise an upbeat and optimistic blogpost soon. Soon, but not today.

I always feel that the 1990s were bracketed, musically, by Nirvana’s Smells like teen spirit and the Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony. It’s quite possible that neither of those songs were actually released in the 90s, I’m not great at hard data and pure facts. If you want hard data and pure facts, just fuck off to Wikipedia or Google. I predate both, and one thing I do know is that facts aren’t worth a damn without the ability to build something out of them.

When you were here before, couldn’t look you in the eye

You’re just like an angel, your skin makes me cry

If you were born any time after 1980, you can’t begin to understand the imapact that Smells like teen spirit had. I’m sorry about that, I truly am. I’m not saying that to dismiss you, or to underplay the importance of your own music scenes and songs. Music is now so fragmented and specific; so specialised and niche-dwelling, that there is a song to express the trials and joys of anyone’s life within just a few keyboard taps. If you’re a Wyoming farmer’s daughter with an unseemingly crush on your father’s tractor, there’ll be a song out there for you, and you’ll find it on Google. There’s so much music out there that everyone can find something that rings true to their experience. But who do you share it with? How can your worldview feel properly endorsed when the only art that expresses it is acknowledged by a few hundred others and no more? Honestly, if you had the fortune to have been an alienated teenager when Smells like teen spirit was a hit, it was like your life was expressed in those four minutes, and there was an army of others who felt the same way. It put the us in ‘us against them’. It radiated hate and anger and energy and if you didn’t have the album there was something odd about you.

I don’t care if it hurts

I want to have control

I want a perfect body

I want a perfect soul

And Bitter Sweet Symphony? Tacked on to the end of a political era (in the UK) that chewed its youth into a grey pulpy mass that was stripped of everything but the need to work harder than its parents to maintain a shittier lifestyle. The Criminal Justice Bill took away their right to protest. The student loan destroyed their ability to become anything other than lifelong indebted wageslaves addicted to a meagre affluence and so cowed by the threat of losing it that stolid conformity was the only option. ‘Try to make ends meet/You’re a slave to money/Then you die’

I’m just trying to put some context in here. I know I get all angry and ranty in this blog, and I’m guilty of a lot of ‘back in the day’ nostalgia. Let’s get this clear. I wouldn’t go back to the 90s for all the money in the world. They’re gone. The world has changed, music has changed, the people who listen to it have changed. I just want you to know that there was once a time when a song could have IMPACT. Worldwide, instant, impact. Smells like teen spirit had impact, just the same way that Blueberry Hill; Hard Day’s Night; Bohemian Rhapsody or Thriller did to their respective generations. If you think that Telephone or Born Free are your generation’s version of those songs then I’m really, really sorry for you. You’ve been cheated out of something very special.

I want you to notice

When I’m not around

You’re so fucking special

Why the Radiohead quotes?

Just last week the music industry’s saliva glands started secreting drool with the lustful intensity of a junkie dropped into an Afghan poppyfield. The reason being that Amanda Palmer (no, me neither) released a record via Bandcamp, that sold $20,000′s worth of product in the first FIFTEEN SECONDS of availability. The internet loves a headline and this was a beauty. The freetards could point at it to show that they’re not killing music; the major labels could point their bankers to it as proof that the industry’s not dead yet (and could they please borrow some more money now?); the denizens and doyennes of the Music 2.0 model could point, laughing heartily, and say ‘See! All you need to do is INNOVATE, and the money’s just there for the taking’. And me? The voice of BlancoMusic? Did I whoop for joy and start flicking through yacht catalogues, breathing a well-earned sigh of relief that the music industry is finally through the darkness? Did I fuck. Because I am a twisted and cynical naysayer whose first reaction to a piece of good news is always to find a downside. It’s a talent.

I wish I was special, but I’m a creep.

Palmer’s record is an EP of seven songs, all by Radiohead. She’s put two versions of Creep on there, so in fact it’s really six songs. She’s charging 84 cents (US) for the download. After she’s paid the 9.1 cent statutory royalty rate to Radiohead, and Bandcamp’s 15% service charge, she stands to make 1.1 cents per song. The record was mixed and mastered in a studio costing 450 dollars per day, so we can assume she has overheads to cover. Obviously there are ‘premium bundles’ for sale on the site, I’ll come to those later.

Cover versions were always a double-edged sword for musicians, both financially and artistically. The advantage was that traditionally, the cover was always the song that sold best. The disadvantage – it could cost you a lot of money. The royalties due to the performers of a song can be negotiated with – usually as collateral against an artists’ advance. Songwriters’ royalties, however, are non-negotiable, and the performers are obliged to pay the full rate to the songwriter on every sale, even if they have mortgaged their own performance rights for an advance.

Another difficulty with cover versions is the artistic side. Does your version bring anything new or valuable to the song? Some covers are great. Soft Cell’s version of Tainted Love is a cracker. Gwen Stefani arguably brings something to It’s My Life that was missing in the original. Other cover versions just expose the new performer as having significantly less talent than the original. The early careers of Boyzone and Westlife are testament. Still, sheer force of recognition can often be enough to make a cover-version a success. There is also the fact that, having already been hits, the songs are proven to have mass appeal.

What the hell am I doing here?

I don’t belong here.

Sometimes songs are covered in a spirit of contempt. Think of The Ramones’ version of What a wonderful world or Sid Vicious singing his take on My Way. The original is a vehicle for their own sneering message. I cannot quite figure whether Amanda Palmer, recording two versions of Creep, is doing so out of a sense of reverence, or of contempt. Radiohead’s version came to an audience already alerted to the self-destructive nihilism of angst-ridden youth. We’d just heard that in Smells like teen spirit. But where teen spirit was a sledgehammer, a blunt instrument of angst and frustration, Radiohead’s Creep was the precise, eviscerating scalpel that exposed and created the pain portrayed. Both bands used a counterpoint between emotive vocals and raw guitars to create tension in their narratives. Nirvana pushed that tension into aggression, Radiohead develop theirs into a warped passive-aggressive narcissism. The menace in Yorke’s whining vocal is serial-killer dark, it has the wheedling, cajoling nature of the date-rapist, suicide-threatener: ‘I wish I was special, you’re so fucking special’. Strange how much more dangerous he makes it sound than Sting singing ‘you’ll be sorry when I’m dead/And all this guilt will be on your head’. It’s a similar ethos though: that vain, wheedling power of the pitiful, passive voice. It’s used by subjects as various as the tied submissives in S&M clubs (you can’t hurt me without making me the centre of attention) to manipulative maiden aunts (oh don’t put yourself out for me dear, I’ll be fine on my own this Christmas). Yorke’s voice on Creep is enough in itself to make the point clear – this is self-pity used as an offensive weapon. However, for anyone who hasn’t picked it up by the first chorus, the mood is forced onto the listener by the crunching, broken-glass guitar figure just as the vocal comes to a crescendo. I’ll confess, I never much liked the song, it was always uncomfortable listening. For that alone, I’ll happily consider it a work of art.

It loses something though, in being transferred to the medium of kooky, ‘ironic’ Lolita-voice. The ukulele doesn’t bring quite the same nuance to the piece either. I wonder what Amanda Palmer feels she brings to the song. Clearly her recordings are seen as a method to establish herself as a brand, out of which she can build an allegiance and devotion in her fans which she can mercilessly exploit via t-shirt and premium bundle sales. How lovely. What concerns me is the signals she is sending to the public, the ones who so desperately want to believe that filesharing helps artists. It’s always hard to convince people that the creation and recording of music is valuable and worthy of compensation. It’s harder still when musicians, in their pursuit of fame, are willing to undervalue their own works with 84 cent EPs or free giveaways. But whose voice is the loudest, and whose opinion sits most neatly in the consciences of those who want thier music for free? The one that tells them what they want to hear. Palmer though, is not just devaluing her own music, she is doing it to someone else’s.

One of the merchandise bundles she offers is a second-hand iPhone (worth $350). It comes with a DVD of out-takes and studio footage (value unknown, but not enough to be worth selling as a standalone product) plus a copy of the EP (value, 84 cents). Oh, she’ll call you up on the phone and sing you a song from the album too. How much? $1000. Can we just get this straight? Amanda Palmer considers a Radiohead song to be worth 9.1 cents. Her performance of it, down a phoneline, with a FUCKING UKULELE, she considers to be worth $649.16.

It astounds me that egos of this magnitude are not ridiculed into oblivion. Freetards will happily spout nonsense about how badly they were treated by the old music model because they were ‘forced’ to pay $15 for a CD. Well, it’s in your hands now, guys. This is the future of the music industry if you insist that Music 2.0 must prevail. T-shirts, hand-painted ukuleles and phonecalls that cost $649.16.

Or we could keep it simple. If you want a t-shirt go to a clothes shop. They have lots, made by people who know about making t-shirts. If you want some music, go to a band’s website and buy some music from them. They have lots, made by people who know about making music.

I’ll make it sweeter for you if you like. Buy three albums a year, every year. That way you’ll keep music alive. What’s more, the artists will get paid (which they don’t if you spend the money on Spotify or Pandora).

Here’s the kicker: if you buy three albums every year, we won’t care how much you fileshare! It won’t matter.

Sick of sugar-voiced Lolitas singing ditsy little cover versions? Want to hear a woman with a full-sized voice and a full-sized guitar? Try this:

http://blancomusic.com/node/168

P.S. I’ll be doing a post dedicated to reviews sometime in the next couple of weeks. If you’ve got some music you think I should review, get in touch.

Keeping music (a)live

Who’s the better musician – Kylie Minogue or Miles Davis?

It looks like a particularly stupid question, but it’s one I’d like to ask anyway. It’s not a trick question, or not in the way that you might think. I’ll come clean and say that I think Kylie makes perfectly innocuous and pleasant pop, and that she is very good at what she does, but that in terms of musical ability, Miles is superior. No great surprises there then.

So why the disingenuous questioning? Last week’s post got a number of replies, most of them healthy and informed. I was encouraged by all of them, even when they took a position contrary to my own. That said, I noticed one of the comments came with a coda attached that I’ve seen quite often in the music 2.0 debate – that the only really legitimate music is live. I’ve got a couple of issues with that, and this gives me the opportunity to get a couple of them off my chest.

Well, the first one is that Miles Davis is, unfortunately, dead. Kylie is alive, so if only live music, or the ability to play well live is of value, Kylie’s got a bit of an edge on poor old Miles.

What brought us to this belief that live music is of such value? A good gig is a great experience, but usually it is just that – an experience. Quite often the quality of the music: how well it is played and reproduced, becomes secondary to the surrounding aspects of the experience. Was the booze cheap? Were there attractive people to look at in the audience? Could you hear every word the vocalist sang, or did you hear more of the drunk squawking girl to your left? Did you get close enough to the band that you could feel you had some sort of interaction with them, or were you wedgded behind a huge rugby player with his girlfriend on his shoulders? Were the band note-perfect on every song, or was there an endearing croak to the vocalist’s voice when he went for the high notes? Did the songs sound exactly like they did on the album, or was there some digression from the recorded material that made you feel that you were witness to something magical and unique to that moment, that place?

A number of those questions are not even anything to do with music. The random factors which go into the individual’s perception of whether an act is ‘good live’ are so numerous that they can never be taken as anything other than the wooliest of value-judgements. We can certainly define whether a guitarist was playing an instrument which needed its strings changed; we can discern when a bassplayer is not quite in time with the drummer. Either example should lead an audience to decide that the gig was a bad one, that the band were ‘not good live’, but it’s not even that simple. If the energy and style of a live act is sufficient, an audience will often forgive and forget any such paltry technical details. Punk acts have revelled in musical incompetence for decades, often to the point that they have to disguise the fact that, by virtue of playing live regularly, they have reached a level of musical ability that their audience would reject if they were to play as well as they are able. Joe Strummer was famous for breaking guitar strings onstage with the Clash, and for continuing to perform with the damaged instrument. It used to irritate his guitar technician, because there were always spare guitars tuned and ready in the wings for such an eventuality. The Clash’s gigs are legendary amongst those who were there, and those who say they were, for their energy and atmosphere. Again, that’s so often said of the Clash that it’s clearly true, but the question remains, is that good music, or is it a good ‘performance’?

I’m writing on this subject today because it happens that tonight one of BlancoMusic.com’s acts – Piano Segundo – plays its debut gig. Piano Segundo is a keyboard-centered dance act, featuring Robin Taylor-Firth. Robin’s my business partner here at BlancoMusic, he’s been in the music business for twenty-odd years and has piano skills that genuinely set him apart from most musicians in the non-classical music world. By that I mean he’s good. He’s the keyboardist with Nightmares on Wax, he wrote the music on Olive’s 90s dance anthem ‘You’re Not Alone’. Apologies to my regular readers, who know this already – I’m just bringing the noobs up to speed . Anyway, Piano Segundo is something of an indulgence of Robin’s – an act in which he can let his keyboard mayhem take centrestage. Over the last couple of months I’ve sat working in the same room as his keyboard setup, and have pottered away doing my BlancoMusic things whilst he’s been practising his keyboard skills. I’ve heard the Piano Segundo tunes take shape, get honed into songs, get polished and buffed into something that I genuinely believe will fill dancefloors with heaving bodies whilst simultaneously feeding souls and spirits with the full-on nourishment that quality music gives. People will be astounded, honestly. For all the camraderie and air-punching of stadium indie; for all the chin-stroking righteousness of acoustic nu-folk; for all the vacuous abandon of pop, this is something entrely different: it’s virtuosity, dexterity, lucidity. People will leave that club tonight clutching their heads and trying desperately to keep hold of the little snatches of melody that they can still remember. I have every confidence in this, but there are still issues to look at.

One issue is that if the future of music is to be restricted to live-only, the price per gig that an artist needs to demand will become exorbitant. In a world where the tools to make music, promote music and distribute music are available to everyone, the competition for gigs makes things difficult on all sides. Promotors need to be sure the band they book will bring in a crowd. For the act – proving that they will do so is doubly difficult when the music 2.0 hype machine makes and destroys stars in a cyclical churn that becomes faster every year. If an artist is to make a living from live-only, and is to do so in a way that guarantees an income that allows them the simple benefits of even the most basic of careers (sick pay, maternity benefits, holiday entitlement, health insurance, pension contributions, etc), what kind of fee per gig is necessary? Let’s take this to the extreme that has been suggested by the people out there who believe that recorded music is worthless as a revenue stream, and is only of value as a promotional tool for the real thing (by which they mean live performance). For a simple four-piece band to make 25,000 euros a year, each, with two week’s holiday over the course of the year, we’re looking at a round 100k. Twenty-five thousand euros per year is a pretty grim existence, but let’s be romantic and imagine that they love playing gigs, a lot. Let’s say they’re really good at getting gigs and don’t need a promoter, they’ve got connections. Two gigs a week at a thousand euros each, they’re sorted! Well, we haven’t paid for transport or broken equipment or roadies yet, but let’s forget about that – they’re strong but delicate types, they’ll be fine. What we’re starting to see here is that, to make a living from live music, that and need to be playing two gigs a week, to more than 500 people per gig, fifty weeks a year. It’s not impossible, not by any means is it impossible, but what does it do to the creative output of the very band those people have paid to see? Where does the new material come from?

I mentioned Kylie for a reason. I saw her play live last week. It was clinical and perfect and impersonal. It was also fun and silly and exhilirating in a way, but it was a show, the music meant nothing. Yet she was note-perfect and on-time. Her live act was flawless.  By the definition of the commentators who wrote here last week, this ability to perform live is the only true way of evaluating whether a musician is of worth or not. Funny that, because I’ve never managed to see Bach play live, or Miles Davis, or Django Reinhardt or Jimi Hendrix. I have no idea of their merit as live performers whatsoever. But I value their music. See, I am suspicious that this whole argument about how musicians need to turn their back on recorded music and concentrate on their live act is another one of those seductive little voices in the heads of people who are doing something (filesharing) that they know is morally wrong and is killing the creativity and freedom of musicians, but which offers them a little soundbyte to cling to and repeat in the face of the ugly truth that they are actually destroying the music they claim to love. ‘Look’, they say, ‘recorded music isn’t really music, it’s live music that counts, I’ve been to loads of gigs this year, I support music that way’. Well, recorded music is music, and it’s often a more pure musical experience than any gig you’re likely to attend. Let me illustrate this with a couple of live performances I’ve been to which were musically brilliant:

Paul Lewis, playing piano concertos by Mozart, Beethoven and Ligeti. Auditorio Nacional de Espana.
Salisbury Cathedral Choir, various works for choir. Salisbury Cathedral.
Mil i Maria, Nadie es Nadie, The Covent Garden Cafe.

The first two ‘gigs’ took place in venues where acoustics were a priority, where the audience was motionless and silent, and without any kind of amplification. The Mil i Maria gig was also unamplified, although there was more crowd noise. Musically, each event was sublime and soul-moving.

Here’s some gigs I went to which were great experiences:
Kylie Minogue, Plaza de Espana, Madrid.
Iggy Pop, Queima das Fitas, Coimbra.
Foo Fighters, Slane Castle, Ireland.

In all these gigs I got my feet trampled and had to endure the stinky breath of stumbling drunks; at Iggy Pop’s I got kicked in the face by a stagediver and lost some eyelashes; at the Foos I got splattered by a bottle full of piss; at Kylie’s I was too far back to hear anything much but speaker reverb. However, they were all great experiences. Am I making this clear enough yet? The experience, good or bad, of most live performances by musicians, has very, very little to do with the musical quality of the act in question. As a model for the continued existence of the music industry it has serious, serious flaws. We can’t all just sit here and allow the opportunity to compose and make music to belong, in the future, to only those musicians who have the ability to move us in a live performance. Even Queen, considered by many to have been an incredible live band, could not play Bohemian Rhapsody live. The ‘operatic’ section had to be truncated or skipped entirely. But live music as the mainstay of the music economy? Apart from anything else, have you thought about how restrictive that would be? You might be twenty years old and financially irresponsible, and if you are, I am happy for you. However, a lot of the world have night-jobs, kids, commitments, or don’t live close to where any bands play. A live-only music industry model deprives them the chance to hear new music. I realise that no-one actually suggested that recorded music be discontinued entirely, or radio play. However, markets have a tendency to react to what is lucrative, and if we all push musicians into accepting the live circuit as their only viable route to a steady income, and force them to look upon recorded music as nothing but a revenue-free way of destroying the exclusivity of their product (the songs they play live), then this could happen whether we want it to or not.

And as to the idea of live performance being the only way to prove that an act has any musical value or not, I started this post with Miles Davis for a reason. Davis’s Kind of Blue is accepted as being one of the greatest pieces of jazz/blues ever put onto vinyl/cassette/cd/mp3. That’s incontrovertible. Unfortunately, when the album was recorded there was a technical mishap in the studio, and the recording tapes ran at the wrong speed. The consequence was that the pitch at which the music is reproduced is beyond the range of the actual instruments. Physically, it could not be played live, not the way it sounded on the record. So, if Miles Davis could not play a live version of the record that sounded the same as on disc, did that mean he was a less competent musician than Kylie, who could?

Apologies to anyone who was expecting this post to be of a similar level to the one about Prince. I’ve been doing a lot of travelling and logistics this week and BlancoMusic’s online presence has had to take a bit less priority than usual. Despite what I’ve written above, we’re committed to live music as a massive part of our operation, and summer’s when most of the gigs take place. That means a lot of organisation, and not much time for thinking or writing provocative thoughts about the future of music.
Oh, and if you’re interested…. BlancoMusic’s recorded music is available to BUY at http://blancomusic.com

Why Prince is right

By now you’ll have had a good laugh at Prince, chortled righteously in disbelief at the latest mad-hatter outburst from his Purple Highness. In a statement that raised some interesting points, the most commonly snorted at was the Minneapolis Midget’s assertion that the ‘internet is dead’. This, to the social web-savvy twittering classes was the equivalent of the ‘you don’t sweat a lot for a fat lass’ chat-up line. The type of gambit that, even before the victim has stopped sneering indignantly, has done its job. It grabs the attention.  Hard to ignore something and hope it dies of neglect when you’ve just re-tweeted it to all your followers. Savvy play by Prince, and, my word, this is a savvy man. In the social media world of blogs, forums, comment boxes and twitter, the cheapest way to garner an aura of authority is to affect a world-weary cynicism. There are scores of web-users, whose ‘critically astute’ online reputations have been gained by eternally criticising the efforts of creative experimenters with the ‘oh, he’s so yesterday’ line. On this occasion, Prince got there just a touch before them, and their overexaggerated stage-shock reactions of ‘oh, we’ll all have to stop tweeting now, Prince says the internet is dead. Har har, what a loser’ are a secure a way of marking them out as the type of person whose defence mechanism is to sneer rather than to think. If these were the primordial plains of human evolution, they are the apes who would still be sneering at the other tribe’s gimmicky use of ‘tools’, right up to the point where the arrow went through their head.

So shall we laugh at Prince? Or shall we stop for a moment and ask ourselves whether this is a man worthy of having his points listened to? This is the man who gave us Sign o’ the Times; the multi-tasker who played every instrument on the Batman soundtrack; the man who knows enough about how the popular mind works to have penned Purple Rain, 1999, Nothing Compares 2 U, Alphabet Street. An artist who, when not composing the crowd-pleasing pop of the Bangles’ Manic Monday, can come up with works of musical erudition such as When Doves Cry. I am not in the slightest bit interested in whether you LIKE any of his work, or whether you think his creative peak has passed. What I would like you to do is ask yourself the question: ‘is someone of this calibre really someone whose opinions I should dismiss with a sneer?’ Because if you think that your opinion on the validity of the internet as a distribution and marketing tool for musicians is worth more than Prince’s, so much so that you’re not willing to even think about it, you shouldn’t really be reading this.

Because, after making the one statement that he knew would get him some viral attention, Prince went on to make some pretty good points. But perhaps you’re still not interested in those. Perhaps you’re still laughing at the idea that the internet is dead. Well, for some purposes it is. What do you do to differentiate yourself from the musical dross in 2010? Let’s say you are a disciplined and proven musical virtuoso, with the resources to make a professional-sounding record. Not only that, but you also have the cash, and respect, for a producer to come in and give your music a searingly critical once-over. To point out the flaws, the weaknesses and – far more importantly – tell you how to fix them? You’ve honed your act over the decades, put in the time. Well then, you have your record. Would you fling it out onto the web – to iTunes, MySpace, YouTube, Spotify, LastFm and Facebook? To flounder there under the same lousy, useless, chickenfeed conditions as the offerings of everything from some spotty d’n'b dj with a couple of tracks he ‘laid down on BandCamp, man’ to the most recent ditsy stageschool ‘chick with a stick’ acoustic singer-songwriter? Put it into an arena where every listener who gets that nagging earworm feeling when they hear something they love… can just go and hear it, at will, for free, until that nagging need is assuaged and replaced by whatever next draws at their capital in the information economy? If you’re about to say ‘well, BlancoMusic have music online, why do YOU do it if it’s so awful?’, the answer is that we’re forced to. We don’t have the resources or the profile to do anything than to bend over and let the internet shaft us where it stings. And it does sting. Believe me, when you know that every word you write, every note that Robin lays down in the studio, every re-tweet from a major newspaper critic is gathering you ‘valuable’ PR, it seems wonderful at first. But the truth is, internet PR is about as useful to making a living as a ‘Boycott Israel’ twibbon is to a West Bank school under mortar fire. For every hundred people who are moved by an online mention to check out BlancoMusic, ninety-nine will check out a song or two, or read the blog, or add it to their LastFm playlist or think, ‘cool, I must see if I can find that on Pirate Bay’. And on THIS, readers, I know of what I speak. Website visits to sales ratio? Somewhere in the region of 8,000 to 1. Oh, I hear the sneers now ‘but that’s just because your music’s shit, mate’. Grow up. It’s not shit.

What Prince has figured out is that the proportion of effort/return on pushing the internet user to actually BUY music, is not worth the resources it takes to do so. When 80 – 90% of your PR effort disappears into non-revenue online areas (piracy, Spotify), the PR needs to be 8-9 times as ubiquitous as in the pre-internet era to make the same gains. He’s done the sums, and has figured out that even if he only stands to make a penny profit on each CD that goes out on the cover of various European newspapers, that it’s worth more to him than a hundred million people retweeting a video clip of his track on YouTube. Newspapers are an established physical distribution platform, to make them the sole legal source of your music is a mark of genius thinking. Why SHOULD Prince make his music available to be listened to at will, for nothing (or as close as dammit) on YouTube, Spotify or Mog.com? For YOUR convenience? So that you can enjoy his work and display your musical credibility to your dinnerparty guests without the painful business of compensating the artist in question? Oh how RUDE of dear little Prince to deny you the opportunity. He’s an artist. Artists reserve the right, in fact, would not be worthy of the name if they didn’t do so, to piss from a height on the money-grubbing mores of the chattering classes. Don’t give me the ‘democratisation of music’ argument. If it were something we could do ourselves, what would be the value in that?! If you want free music, go and get free music from the many, many fame-scrabbling halfwits with guitars and laptops out there who are willing to give it away. That’s how much free music is WORTH.

Bitter? Moi? Yes. Exceedingly so actually. Because long before (and who can say, possibly long after) BlancoMusic existed, I was a music lover. And even if there comes a point where music no longer provides me with an income, I will still hate this period in music’s lifespan – when even the types of people who buy eggs from farmers’ markets and FairTrade coffee are somehow too eager to blame the decline of music on the malpractice of the music industry and spout fatuous self-serving nonsense about how filesharing is ‘free pr for the artists’. I can make a living without music, that’s not an issue. The issue is that the internet is making music shit. There, I’ve said it. It’s putting the actual making of music secondary to the complicated business of trying to find a way of sustaining a living from doing so. Genius, forced to figure out ways to tour without having to incur excess baggage costs. Virtuosos, giving up music because they refuse to take the whore’s option of product placement or naked dancers in their videos. Music lovers have CD collections, not hard-drives full of shit they never listen to. This all happened before, we call it the dark ages. Yep, the internet is over, it’s killed my first love.

Don’t tell me you can’t afford to buy CDs. My entire collection is worth less than your phone and laptop.

The reason why you’re pissed off about what Prince said is because you know what it really means is that Prince does not give a shit about you. He doesn’t want you to have his record. Not unless you’re willing to get off your arse and pay for it. Nothing Compares 2 U. You remember the track? Baldy Irish girl took it to number one for about a hundred weeks? Prince wrote that, it was on the Black album. The Black Album was never released because Prince wasn’t happy with it. It became an underground hit, just having heard the recordings was a mark of credibility throughout the era. Word-of-mouth buzz, in an age before textmessages or social networks; when teenagers went Inter-Railing for a whole month WITHOUT MOBILE PHONES OR E-MAIL!!!, and civil protest was a rite of passage involving tear-gas and baton-charges (as opposed to Facebook groups and twibbons). Back when ‘the kids’ weren’t actually better behaved than their parents. There’s the insult, because what Prince is really saying, and what’s really pissing everyone off, is that being ‘on it’, musically, in an era where everyone’s desperately pleading for your attention, ain’t exactly the same as when you had to work a bit for your record collection. He knows damned well that there are DubStep clubs in Bow that were hip two years ago, where nothing of the setlist got heard on anything but vinyl and that by the time the webmob got to hear of it, were over. His biggest-selling hit came off a record that only ever got released on bootleg! What does this man want with a social network buzz! Get real, that’s for desperate little girls with stage-school mockney accents and rich dads.

And why shouldn’t he ask for an advance from iTunes? Right now, the iTunes service is this:

YOU put in the energy and time and money to make a record.
WE will host that on our clunky-as-shite server/shop.
YOU will have only three pricing options per track.
WE will take 30% of the retail price.
YOU will pay all recording, promo, pr, touring and living costs.
WE will take no significant financial risk in digitally distributing your product, but will still ask for a comparable commission to the bricks-and-mortar shops, manufacturers and distributors who actually always lost money if your physical record bombed.
YOU might, by your reputation and PR efforts, bring a great deal of filthy lucre to our operation, however YOU can FUCK OFF if you think we’re ever likely to risk advancing you some MONEY, recoupable against sales, on the likelihood that you DO.
WE, after the traditional major label business-model has been well and truly fucked by piracy and the iPhone: ‘whaddaya mean I have to PAY for music!’ generation, reserve the right (seeing as we already control the majority of digital music content AND the devices used to listen to it) to team up with another entity (let’s say Sony or Google Music, for example) to completely dominate the music content and delivery market.
YOU, being to all intents and purposes, bereft of any other way to significantly distribute your music, will be obliged to conform to our directives regarding royalties, content, style etc.
WE, at that point, might actually get involved in the filesharing issue, which WE have the resources, connections and legal gravity to hammer into atoms with high-profile lawsuits and political lobbying, were WE to have a financial interest in doing so.

UNLESS you happen to be Prince, or anyone else who actually has the BALLS to stand up to a music distribution and sales model that does nothing whatsoever for the continuation and propagation of great music other than to say something along the lines of ‘yeah baby, you can make all the movies you like, but I own all the movie halls and I ain’t gonna show ‘em unless you bend over, darlin”

Look, I’m aware that I’ve ranted a bit in this post.  I’m also aware that I’m not going to change anything. I just want you to know that, no matter how evil or corrupt you think the major labels have acted over the past five decades, they always offered the musician something of value up front. Most of the whining about major labels comes from acts who would never have been signed, even in the 80s/90s heyday of music. Majors exploited bands, sure. Bands exploited them back. There were ways and means, and a lot of people got to make a living out of making music, and a lot of us got to hear music that made out lives fuller and better because of that system. Prince hates the majors too. They really screwed him over. No system is perfect, but the argument that digital distribution benefits the artist, and that it therefore has moral superiority over the major label system rests on a misconception. It assumes that the transition of recorded music from being a privilege based on merit to a democratically available option will somehow advance the artistic value of our society. If anything it does the opposite. It does for music what replacing pub bands with karaoke machines did.

The responsibility of the future of quality music does not lie with the artists or the industry. It lies with you. The patron. The BUYER.

Video

SubMachena are not always as dark as this, but when they do dark, they do it right. It astounds me that this video was made without a single professional actor, cameraman, director, gaffer, bestboy or keygrip. History is an ever-turning wheel, fashions and trends are as accurate an indicator of what stage of the cycle we’re at as any. I write this sub-Matrix rot mainly because I was drinking coffee in a bar yesterday which had VH1 playing on a telly in the background, and I couldn’t help but have my eye drawn by the music videos that were playing thereon. There was a decent gamut of them, mainly from the 80s and early 90s. One that stood out was Nena’s 99 Red Balloons. If you’re as old as I am, you’ll have no problem remembering the song – it was number one in the singles chart for so long that Top of the Pops actually played the original German-language version of the song just to break the monotony of the song’s seemingly unbreakable run as the chart-topping final track played on the show. The song had an unforgettable bassline and a manically energetic performance on vocals by a girl who made up for any lack of raw talent with her sheer enthusiasm for the task in hand. Pure pop, it also caught the Reagan-era zeitgeist by choosing the scenario of mutually-assured nuclear destruction as its subject matter. What was interesting, seeing the promo video again for the first time in about twenty years, was the sheer cheapo amateurishness of the whole thing. The budget, which can’t have been more than a hundred deutchmarks, was mostly spent on filling a field with smoke and plopping a few balloons (multi-coloured, there didn’t even seem to be enough cash to pick just the red ones out of a big bag) around the place. The singer and band wander around the scene, attempting to be picturesque. That’s about it. This song sold MILLIONS of copies, more than Lady GaGa’s entire catalogue. And it sold them on the strength of the SONG, not the controversy surrounding the promo video, not on the cut of the bikini that the singer might have worn or the strength of their live following or how innovative their social web presence was. It was a good song, people bought it. That was all.

Another standout on the VH1 show was Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Sweet Child of Mine. Again, the video cost about tenpence to make. This time it was made in a studio, just the band making a video about, making a video. Cool-looking people hanging around in the background, a cheap cloth backdrop behind the drummer, but essentially – long haired blokes posing about with their instruments. But the song, oh my, the song! It matters not an atom whether you like rock or not, the opening guitar figure of that song burns itself into the memory like a cattlebrand, and it just builds up from there. Another song that sold millions. Can you IMAGINE a metal track selling units in the mainstream market now? Can you remember the last UK number-one that wasn’t marketed predominantly at the under-15s? (Rage Against the Machine was a protest, so doesn’t count.)

See, what’s gone wrong is that the video is now becoming more important than the song, and that’s screwed. The last time that happened we ended up with Duran Duran’s lame Reflex, then Peter Gabriel’s pretty-forgettable Sledgehammer and a spate of mediocre songs tied to the monthly press-release describing the promo video as ‘the most expensive ever made’. It took grunge and acid-house and US punk to clear that dross out of the system, and it’s still not fully purged. The problem now is that, because streaming sites and P2P servers and YouTube and blogs divert so much of the attention an act gains into non-revenue areas, the amount of hype it takes to deliver a revenue from music is triple what it was in the 80s. Any act releasing a record now has to factor into its equations the effect that all those lost sales, whether they be lost to streaming or P2P; or to other entities such as phone credit, video gaming, reduced discretionary spending. That means that only the most sickeningly over-hyped products have any chance of making the kind of economic returns that need to be made by the entities that create the hype. In a nutshell – the amount of publicity  and promo needed to propel Lady GaGa to number one costs millions. It brings in millions too, but the investments are enormous. The only bodies with that kind of investment capital are the major labels, so anyone who feels that they are helping bring about the demise of the majors by filesharing have got the wrong end of the stick altogether. They’re actually doing the very opposite – bringing the majors to the point where they are only willing to invest in a reduced number of acts which they know can be monetised. Right now, a couple of million invested in a GaGa video makes a whole lot more economic sense than spreading that money over five acts. Five acts will need just as much effort each to break through the audience apathy surrounding new acts. There is no easy way to break this cycle. If people really want the major labels to go away, for whatever reason they see fit, the only way for that to happen is by buying music by non-major acts. No low-budget act or label can afford to take the kind of losses to non-revenue music sources that the majors can soak up. Put your faith back in the power of a great piece of music and try to bear in mind that it doesn’t matter if it’s GaGa schlock or even if it’s highly-aware MIA killing redheads – in the end, these are just promotional videos, their job is just to promote the tune, not replace it.

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

Surfing the net? Forget it, try Skating the Social Web

Quote of the day comes from Sean Adams, the figure behind the Drowned in Sound musicblog. Writing for The Times, Adams creates a beautiful new soundbyte in this:

‘when musicians view social networks the way skateboarders view architecture, a whole new creative process begins’ (article here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7110757.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=6861918)

Now, some of you may know that I am a skateboarder, so obviously, this quotation appeals to me. I should point out that the mainstay of my riding is in the discipline of downhill, or speedboarding. For anyone who isn’t familiar with speedboarding – it’s quite simple. You get a big, stable board, put on some protective gear, get to the top of a big hill and go down it as fast as you can. Ideally, in that kind of skateboarding, architecture is something you avoid. That notwithstanding, I understand what Adams means. Social networking, and its application to selling records, is not very well-understood by bands, indie labels, or the majors. It’s all very fine telling a band that they need to maintain a social web profile to remain or become competitive in the music market, but the truth is that even in the case of our own label – BlancoMusic.com – the weekly 40 hours I put into maintaining a social presence on the internet is not enough. At the moment attention is demanded from the social web on a constant basis, globally, incessantly. The downfall of the argument that social media would allow bands and labels to reach a bigger audience and fanbase than they ever could have done through traditional media is that, to do it properly, there is no time left to tour, write, record, practise or play. Let alone party.

Adams makes the case that it is now time that bands make a decision about how they wish to pursue the publicity and goodwill that can clearly be gathered from social media use. I’ve written here before about how my critical comments about the band Hot Chip led to a member of the band getting in touch with me via twitter. Over the course of the dialogue, the band’s spokesman convinced me that they were truly motivated by making music and that the hype surrounding them at the time was as much an irritation to them as it was to me. I bought the album. Social media used, and used well. But then when I think about it, it starts to look really daunting. Do Hot Chip reply personally to every harsh word said of them? Where do they find the time? Is it really fair to expect this kind of attentiveness form the musicians we love, or even the ones we don’t? Again and again I come across the misguided efforts of freetards trying to justify their actions in illegally downloading music for their own consumption. A recurrent argument is that musicians have no right to expect to be paid handsomely for what is, in the eyes of the freetard, a hobby. OK, we’re all more sophisticated in our understanding of the value and circumstances of artistic creation on here, but that aside, even the most understanding of listeners now demands some level of personal interaction between themselves and the acts whose music they purchase. Gone, it seems, are the days when we considered ourselves privileged to get to drink a pint at the bar with the band after a show. What Adams hints at is that it is this sense of privilege, of ‘being with the band’ that is being eroded by the access granted and demanded by social media interaction with artists. Hot Chip’s attention to the social media is, far from what the freetards would claim, more demanding than most peoples’ dayjobs. Maintaining FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace, Reverbnation, band blogs and e-mail relationships for one act alone, can become a full-time occupation. And it may just be more destructive than beneficial. Hence using the social web in the way skaters look at architecture. Let’s rewind, and think of a skater as one of those rangy kids with a clackitty-hop board, doing nosegrinds on park benches. Park benches are designed to be sat upon, and the majority of people use them that way. Skaters look at them differently, often to the consternation of those who wish to sit, but to the great applause of the skater’s peers. Perhaps therein lies the key of how bands should approach new media – with the aim of appealing to their peers and their chosen elite. Put some of the mystique back into the equation, and make it something to be earned and cherished.