Music 2.0 and why it’s filling the world with platitudes

Why are so many bands filling their social network feeds with cliches and wooly new-age platitudes? It seems to be impossible to open up a musician’s webpage without having some inane quote from Sartori, Lao Tzu or Sting being shoved in your face. In a way, it’s not that surprising. Musicians are looked upon to express what is usually inexpressible in words, through their music. A lot of them are quite good at doing so, but asking them to be as eloquent in written language, and things fall apart quicker than an orderly queue at a Ryanair check-in desk. The music business, and more specifically, the part of it that is devoted to presenting a public, interactive face for the musicians that populate it, is somewhat devoid of a vocabulary or symbology to fall back upon. That’s a pity, because it’s going to be demanded of them more and more as we get sucked into the great false hope that is known as music 2.0. It is my firm belief that the further continuation of music as a viable, self-sustaining activity will depend upon the music business employing techniques of persuasion and proselytising that were previously only used by shamen, priests and preachers. It’s the next step. Right now, the sale of a musical recording depends upon the buyer making a choice to spend their hard-earned cash to purchase a product that is available elsewhere for free (often in a transaction that is more easily performed via the illegal, immoral route than via the legitimate channels). At the moment, I see the music industry as depending upon the same impulses as charities. When music is available for free, without consequence for those who steal it, the hope that people will pay for it is dependent upon a sense of obligation or morality within those consumers. As anyone who reads this blog regularly will attest – I put a lot of effort into awakening and exercising that sense of obligation and morality. Enter the ‘Superfan’. The superfan attends every concert that is given by his chosen act. The superfan subscribes to the act’s blog, tweetfeed, MySpace account and Facebook page. The superfan is the wet dream of the faltering music industry: he is the tastemaking uber-consumer who will drag his mates along to gigs; purchase overpriced box-sets packed with ‘limited-edition’ crapola; hassle music critics on twitter to do features on his beloved band; rant viciously on genre-related forums about how his chosen act is the only authentic artefact in a slagheap of fakes and h8rs; will do the type of street-team PR for an act that fills gigs; and will pre-order albums that have yet to be written. There are music 2.0 ‘gurus’ who claim that an act needs only 1000 superfans to maintain a self-perpetuating level of success. The superfan is an entity that cannot be created by plucking at the charitable heartstrings of the average consumer. Awakening and exercising the sense of obligation and morality in the consumer, as described above, will never create a superfan, and this is precisely why the lumbering mechanics of major labels and superbands will never be efficient at creating them. A massive, massive amount of effort is being expended right now by departments of corporations devoted to ‘strategy’ and ‘demographics’ and ‘market trending’ on finding ways to create superfans. Most of that effort is stymied by an assumption that this level of devotion to an act can be created or manipulated by marketing techniques. Essentially, there are a bunch of goons in thick-rimmed square glasses and skinny jeans desperately trying to recreate Beatlemania, without acknowledging that even the most turnip-witted music consumer in 2010 has levels of media, PR and marketing savvy that would have won them the cold war, Eurovision song contest and Pulitzer prize if they’d had it in 1965. The superfan, if he exists at all, is too clever to be swayed by the hype that surrounds an act – he is driven to devotion by qualities that cannot be bought or faked. If I am to indulge in a rare moment of optimism for the music industry, it is this: that if the future of music depends upon the creation of superfans, then at least acts will become successful depending on whether or not they can move something within the souls of those they are heard by, rather than because they had the backing or budget simply to be heard by more people than anyone else. Don’t make the mistake of completely writing off the major labels in this either. It’s comforting to all of us who care about music to cast the majors in the role of dim-witted dinosaurs: too slow and unwieldy to dig themselves out of the mire they find themselves in. Comforting, but a false assumption. Major labels have A&R departments staffed by people who are devoted to new music, who love it and nurture it and tear their own hair out trying to convince the bean-counters and cheque-signers that the music they have found is worthy of investment. Right now, the A&R guys are under a lot of pressure to somehow fix everything that has gone wrong in music by finding the next U2 or Coldplay, thus reversing the demise of the label in question. Impossible pressure on the A&R departments, and the reason why freelance A&R is such a growing sector within the industry at the moment – they’re all getting fired. Yet if anyone knows how to find superfans, it is the A&R guys. Why? Because they are superfans. If major labels can shift a bit more of the decision-making from the rigid and empirical realm of the bean-counters to the intuitive, emotional arena of the A&R guys, they might get somewhere. Fucking hell, my blog’s just turned into Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Anyhoo, where was I? Wooly platitudes. Yes indeed. Anyone notice how many band pages and twitter-feeds spout fatuous philosophical floor-sweepings these days? The ‘Worry is a destructive force in our lives, open your heart to difference and embrace every ‘failure’as an opportunity to grow and evolve’ school of heartwarming drivel? I actually just made that one up, but I’m sure it’s on the Facebook live feed of some band or other, if not in those exact words. Pick ‘n’ Mix spirituality. What you do is take a very cursory scan through the major faith systems of the world, discard all the bits that actually demand anything difficult from the believer, and pick out the touchy-feely quotes that offer solace. Either that or copy them out from The Little Book of Calm. Tough luck though, the snippets don’t work. Well, they do work, actually, but only when combined with the discipline and rigour of the demanding bits that go with them. Tucking into Easter eggs doen’t really have the same emotional kickback when you haven’t actually given up chocolate for lent. (Non-Christian readers – remove references to Easter and lent and replace with the appropriate substitutes from your chosen faith’s version of delayed-gratification/ascetic-enlightenment ritual. They all have one.) What I’m getting at, obliquely, is that musical acts which were previously called upon for nothing more spiritual than a heartfelt lyric or a thumping power chord, are now peppering their public personae with (admittedly facile) nuggets of text that endeavour to bring emotional succour to their fans. Now, in my ideal world, their music alone should be enough to do that. Frankly, in my ideal world a good piece of music will soothe the soul more effectively than all the sacred texts combined, even if the Dalai Lama were to juggle them whilst sitting on a blue whale and chanting ‘ommmm’. However, if we lived in my ideal world I wouldn’t be sitting on my kitchen floor writing blogs in the futile hopes that you lot might get your bloody PayPal details out and buy some of our flippin’ music, I would instead be having this discusion with Paul Gaugin in 19th century Tahiti, whilst I waited for the nubile island-girls to finish lovingly waxing my surfboard. Alright, alright, that was a digression. Well, why shouldn’t musicians throw some cod-philosophy into their social network profiles? After all, music has been used the other way round for centuries. When Johann Sebastian Bach sat down to compose organ fugues, he did so with the express intention of inducing the experience of the sublime in the assembled congregation of the church where he played. Depending on your level of paranoia about the workings of the Christanity, you can choose whether you wish to believe that he was a) accentuating their receptivity to the majestic power of creation through the medium of music or b) befuddling their simple sensibilities with disturbing sonic stimuli so as to render them emotionally vulnerable to dogmatic propaganda. Either way, it’s an effective trick. A good musician can use music to develop emotion in the listener; we’ve all heard it done on movie soundtracks. That’s their trade. Providing emotional solace via the medium of twitter-length snippets of ‘eternal wisdom’ though? Frankly, I’d rather base my emotional stability upon interpreting the shape of dogturds in my local park. At least it wouldn’t stink so badly. Are we offering them an alternative though? Music 2.0 is dependent upon a level of connection with the act, through social media, that is incredibly time-consuming to maintain. I’m not talking about established acts who log into MySpace once a month, posting details of their hilarious antics in the backstage jacuzzi at Glastonbury. Truly, there are attempts at fan interaction on major acts’ webspaces that read more like the golfcourse adventures of Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Tarbuck than the annals of rock and roll excess that we ought to be seeing. Anyway, that’s not music 2.0. No act which existed before 2002 has any claim to being music 2.0 anyway. I am heartily sick of having acts pointed out to me as examples of how the web can be made to work for musicians when their profile, reputation and career were established in a period when paying for music was not seen as the act of an eccentric. For an act to develop any sort of fanbase through social media, gigs, radio-play, low-budget promotion and digital distribution, the amount of time spent updating their online profiles with original material is astounding. The absolute bare minimum, just to retain the attention of an increasingly fickle fanbase, is daily updates. Unfortunately, musicians often have no more interesting experiences to share with the world than computer programmers, traffic wardens or civil engineers. There are only so many times you can update your Facebook profile with variations on ‘did some scales today, tried making them a bit trickier by adding a random note each time I played them.’ So eventually the lure of the Little Book of Calm proves too strong to resist, and their profile fills up with ‘Smiles are the currency of the truly affluent’ and ‘The more people I meet, the more I am struck by how very similar we all are’-type shite. Apart from folk music, which has at its heart the obligation to express and celebrate that which is universal to us all, musicians have no responsibility to console, succour or soothe their listeners. Once again, the hoops we are forcing musicians to jump through are destroying the very qualities that we need them to maintain, in order to function as artists. This breaking down of the barriers between the artist and the fan, demanded by music 2.0, is steering music towards a bland and populist approachability that is counter-productive to their craft. If you give people what they think they want, we all end up with U2 and Coldplay and landfill indie. It’s not supposed to be democratic, it’s supposed to be messianic. Music should be capable of shocking us, challenging us, disturbing us and making us uncomfortable. This is why the death of the album is such a tragedy – cherrypicking individual tracks on iTunes that instantly appeal to us robs musicians of the platform through which their more complex and rewarding creations can be heard. Is there an alternative? I think there must be. For a new act, with great music and ability to perform it, the internet must now look like as restrictive and imposing an edifice as major-labels ever did. The weight of expectation is immense – the outrage from the online population to any decision that twists the norms is swift and savage. Watch what happens when a new act announces that it doesn’t wish to make full-length track previews available, or that it won’t sign up to streaming sites, or that is won’t even release mp3s. Conformity, demanded of acts by the attention economy in which they find themselves fighting for recognition, is becoming the price that is expected for a decent level of visibility on the web. The real creative types will recognise this soon enough, and reject it. I’m not sure what the alternative will be, because I’m not one of the creative types referred to, but it will happen. I wrote about one man’s rejection of what is now the monolithic establishent last week, I’d be interested to hear about any other acts or labels who are beginning to see the internet as an unappealing place for their music. Comments?

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.

YouTube

Midi controller, powerbook and keyboard. Sometimes two hands just won’t do it. The morning was spent rearranging furniture and trying to make sense of the kilometers of cables in BlancoMusic HQ. Piano Segundo and SubMachena both use some complicated setups, especially with the dub element of SubMachena. Now at least Robin can get some practise at the art of playing three keyboards at once. All that Czerny and Chopin over the last few months will have helped.

Robin’s got something of a busy time ahead.  Later this month he’s off to Ibiza to record the next Nightmares on Wax album with bandmates George Evelyn and Chris Dawkins. Between now and then there’s the production and recording of Vanito Brown’s album Cambios, plus continuing remixes of BudNubac and SubMachena work. Every once in a while he turns up with a silly grin and a USB stick with a new Piano Segundo track all recorded and ready. Clearly the man has a well-compartmentalized mind.

I’ve been putting music up on YouTube this week, although, to be honest, I haven’t done any today. Previously I’d been reluctant to do so, mainly because it seemed counter-productive to be making music available to listen to on the site without having a decent video to go with it. I’ve changed that approach mainly because it seems ridiculous to have a body of work here on my hard-drive stretching into three-figures’ worth of tracks, and not anywhere else. We are developing a fanbase, and it’s clear that in the new economics of the music business, fans are not likely to wait around indefinitely for new material from the acts they choose to spend their attention on. That seems reasonable fair to me, actually. Artists have rarely had much to do with the ‘lead time’ concept that applied to releases in the old music industry model. Frankly, having an album sitting around gathering dust on a record label’s hard-drive is the last thing that most artists and acts want, and the practice was developed more out of a wish to maximise profitability and returns than anything to do with ‘gauging the zeitgeist’ . Mainly, lead times were about making sure the album you released wasn’t competing with another similar release that might be more tempting to the kind of listeners who only ever buy one or two albums a year anyway. That, plus making sure that all the publicity and advance promotional effort could be co-ordinated to the same date. Doesn’t apply to us, what little promo effort we make for our music, is done on a rolling basis anyway.

So why YouTube? Well, Soundcloud would seem like the obvious option in our position – putting the tracks up there and making them public links for people to hear when they want to. What bothers me about Soundcloud is that it’s a pay-to-listen arrangement. Users get a limited amount of time on their account before they have to buy a membership. It’s a bit of an impediment when you’re hoping people will take a chance on listening to something they’ve not heard before – to expect them to pay for the privilege. This isn’t some huge about-face on our part here at BlancoMusic. We’re still as stubborn as we ever were in our belief that music is a valuable luxury, and that expecting it for free is an insult to the very artists whose efforts go into creating something that will resonate within you. That doesn’t mean that those artists, and us, the label, should have no chance to let people hear the music without committing to a purchase. We’re not entirely without self-awareness here – we can accept that there are some poor misguided, cloth-eared types out there who, gasp, might not actually like our music! And we will endeavour to hunt them down and destroy them, obviously (joke). No, seriously, of course everyone should have the opportunity to hear a record before deciding they want to buy it, it never worked any other way. Still, it just seems that streaming sites, or any other site that charges people a subscription fee to listen to music whilst letting artists and their labels go unpaid for that music (or as near as dammit), break a bond of trust between artist and listener. Both listener and artist feel they are being short-changed, and in fact, they are. For the moment, even though we have no videos made for any of the newer tracks, YouTube seems like a good place to put the music. It’s free for everyone, it demands a certain interaction from the user rather than being something that just goes on in the background and gets ignored, it can be linked to from other sites, embedded into blogs and has a comments facility. Who knows, maybe we’ll even consider going back onto MySpace next!

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.