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.

Another ‘video’

I can’t remember if I already put this one up, but if not, here it is. If so, here it is again.

I’m suddenly quite taken with the idea of putting music on YouTube. Discussed it last week, came to the conclusion that it represented a good way of making SubMachena (or other BlancoMusic material) available to listen to, without having to get into the complicated realm of streaming sites and whether or not they represent a net benefit to artists or not. The only downpoint I can see to YouTube as a promotional platform is that, well, it’s visual. The music is there, but apart from Nachete, the SubMachena songs up there so far, have a bit of artwork providing the visual content, and that’s it. What’s more, the image, as cobbled together by me on iMovie, does wobble around a bit in a manner that makes people a little queasy. Can’t be helped, let’s remember that these ‘videos’ are only supposed to be a promotional tool for the music, not an artistic statement in themselves. I’m still a bit annoyed actually, by the MIA Born Free video, specifically by it’s romanticization of a particular terrorist group whose actions destroyed the cultural, economic, and political landscape of the town and country where I grew up. If you saw the video and recognise what I’m referring to, you’ll know what I mean. If you didn’t catch the bit I’m referring to, or if you can’t figure out what I’m going on about, don’t worry. I’d prefer not to draw any more attention to it anyway. The issue is something to be thought about though. It’s a problem when self-appointed ‘artists’ assign political importance to their ‘statements’ when they don’t take the time or make the effort to educate themselves in the realities of the artistic references they choose to make. It’s truly time that music became the most important part of music videos, if only to avoid ‘event videos’ like MIA’s, which with a single shot trivialise and make illegitimate the sufferings of a very real people – not imaginary ginger-tops being hunted down by imaginary forces, but real people who lost their loved ones.

I am very sorry if this post means absolutely NOTHING to you, reading it. I am clearly a bit pissed off by this, and shouldn’t be putting it on here. Not wanting to identify the bit of the video that’s annoyed me so much doesn’t help either. Look, the point I’m making is that art should be left in the hands of artists, and if it is to have any genuine impact, other than shock-effect, should be left pure and undiluted by extra concerns such as shifting units (of the art in question, or of the music attached to it). To do anything less is to leave complex and sensitive subjects in the muddle-handed grip of people who do not have the intelligence or integrity to treat them with any sort of responsibility. And that’s not good for anyone, least of all the musicians involved.

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.